Will Lucas

Two days ago, I minted my first NFT. I’ve been increasingly enamored with the idea of both, collecting digital art, and the concept and implications of smart contracts over this past year. After doing a ton of research over the last couple of months, I decided I wasn’t going to really learn by sitting on the sidelines, I needed to get in. Either I was going to buy some NFTs, or I was going to make some. I could even do both! What kept me apprehensive about buying NFTs was the hype surrounding some of the ones we’ve all probably heard of, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club . While learning, I found it difficult to decipher signal from noise as I both explored what I wanted to invest in, and learned how to actually buy something I wanted. I knew the Punks and Apes had value, but they were also tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure. There were cool things I found in price ranges I didn’t mind investing in, but being a newbie, I didn’t feel comfortable yet...

I SPENT HALF A DAY with Alex Wolf, the award-winning tech speaker, brand strategist, and author of “ Resonate: For Anyone Who Wants To Build An Audience ,” in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York and I left with more questions than answers. Wolf was open and gracious, and we shared ideas about everything from which kinds of gentrification are welcomed events, to early starts in tech as designers of our own Myspace pages. Wolf is a respected tech philosopher who doesn’t require or seem to need your institutional credentialing; her regalia is her ideas. She has an unusual understanding about human nature and our insatiable march toward singularity that, ironically, compels you to enthusiastically join the parade as you tread down her networked rabbit-hole of iMovie powered YouTube videos and newsletter releases. If you watch her lecture on why millennials feel unaligned with their age , you will then watch her sermon on the science of attention and hyper-stimulation . Then, you’re...

Charlamagne Tha God is as wide awake as most others won’t be for another two to three hours as he power walks into the lower Manhattan towers where Power 105.1 studios reside. “Peace, King,” he says in his greeting to me. “Good morning,” he says to my melanin-deficient associate. He guides us both, along with his assistant Paige, to the elevators and up several levels to the iHeartRadio floors. Before either of us realizes it, he’s already provided salutations to the planet of listeners who religiously tune in to “The Breakfast Club” morning show. It would be a long morning, much longer than I’d planned for, but I came with a self-imposed mission to get as clear a sense of who Charlamagne really is — as best as I could in the span of a sunrise. I planned to explore the ideas and philosophies of the businessman who resides behind the prickly character and to understand the weight of responsibility it must be to represent Black culture on one of the world’s largest stages. About an...