Struggles at Dispo, Trump's own social media network, and the 411 on NFTs

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Oh, you're very slow today.

You're low.

Hello, Slow.

You weren't on Bill Maher this weekend, were you?

Go on.

Is he having you back?

He hasn't invited me.

No, I didn't even get so much as a, hey, thanks, pal.

Yeah, not a box of flowers.

William, I thought he'd want to grab Mexican food the next time he's in New York.

I imagined we were going to become friends.

Maybe he's.

He needed to stick with Ando.

I'm sorry.

Anderson Cooper really is your true one.

What we have, what Ando and I have is hard to, is hard to do.

I would like that to come.

You bring Ando onto the show.

That's why I want to see what you would do.

our friendship is so precious i don't like to lean on for these types of things

speaking of precious elon musk is sparring with bernie sanders yeah

have never been at greater odds in one corner bernie sanders used elon musk's outsize wealth along with jeff bezes and others to highlight wealth inequality in the u.s which is pretty easy to do for mr san senator sanders on the other hand elon musk said he's using his fortune for good that he's going to bring it to move us to other planets that's what he's spending his honestly and then the bros went no first he's going to invest in edibles yeah um anyways i'm sorry go ahead kara what do we what do we think i think it's ridiculous bernie sanders is making a very good point and like and he like is like no my money will be used for good he's like what is he andrew carnegie and he's giving everybody a library i don't

okay

i mean

okay he's right he's right uh elon musk has added the GDP of hungary he's going to peace out and move to Texas so he doesn't have to pay state state income taxes which he's been an enormous beneficiary of We shouldn't, capitalism is just not about having someone worth $170 billion and paying the lowest tax rate.

But here's the problem.

And I believe Senators Sanders and

Senators Warren are inspiring, and I think they're right, and I think they are totally ineffective.

Because here's the thing, Senator Sanders, is you jones for any camera.

or mic and make these indignant speeches about income inequality.

You've been senator while we Democrats controlled all three houses and you weren't able to get minimum wage up beyond $725.

While you are right that in the 60s, billionaires paid or the top 1% paid an average of 60% of taxes and in the 80s it went to 40%.

Three or four years ago, it became common knowledge that billionaires now pay the lowest tax rate.

And who is in the Senate?

Senators Sanders and Warren.

So I'm kind of, you're right.

You're right.

Well, they have been going on for a while about it.

They weren't in power to be able to do anything about it before, before, really.

Okay.

Well, I don't know.

The Republicans always seem to be in power to hold back change.

Yeah.

We controlled, while they were senators, we controlled all three houses.

And they like these big, bold jonesing for the camera and the lights ideas.

Let's make college free.

Just saying is your new word today, jonesing.

Let's make college free.

That's not going to happen.

And any sophomoric analysis leads to a basic conclusion that the majority of people in college are middle or upper income.

So that is nothing but a transfer of wealth from poor households that never apply to college to people in college.

Let's cancel off food.

What's effective?

What would be effective then for Bernie Sanders to be able to do that?

You know what would be effective?

Because you call attention to this, this GDP of Hungary thing you say all the time, which I do too.

Eliminate capital gains tax deduction.

Just eliminate it.

Why is Elon Musk paying 22.8%, but a person working on the factory floor, Tesla, is paying 34%?

Regular income.

You know what's effective?

Is Senator Michael Bennett, who is terrible at jonesing for the campus?

Jonesing again.

Yeah.

The day work.

But meanwhile, for the last five years, he has been behind the scenes pushing for earned income tax credit for children, saying for $40 billion, not $4 trillion, we can take 40 to 60% of child poverty and eliminate it.

Yeah.

Effectively.

And all that hard work and good legislation

has resulted in a bailout bill that is the least, or the bailout package, the most recent one, is the least bad of its kind because almost half of it is going to people versus just only 50, 60, or 70% going to fucking Delta or some restaurant that we make a cartoon over.

He's effective.

You know who's effective?

Senator Amy Klobuchar, who's doing the work around antitrust.

You know who's effective?

Representative Cicillini, who spends less time dronesing for the fucking camera.

Of which, let me just switch to Representative David Cicillini, who runs the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, says he and fellow Democrats are preparing to bombard big tech with a series of small antitrust lawsuits through May just so they don't have to do this big honking one.

What do you think of this strategy?

So Perry Mason, what do you think of Perry Mason?

I think it makes a lot of sense.

What they're trying to do is they're trying to atomize the defense.

And that is they're saying, okay, if we have one big effort

and we let this massive army known as the lobbyists, the PR spin machine, the billions of dollars, the legal, every spare lawyer in America that will Jones or line up, I'm sorry, I'm almost used Jones again, that will line up behind Facebook

or line up behind the Facebook and Google and big tech army.

they've decided it's going to be better to try and do an assault from the air from the sea and from the land oh a lot to go after different problems

what do you think i think it's a great idea actually i hadn't even thought about it yeah because these things like the wheels go slowly you know it's like

like they move very slowly and this is kind of an interesting strategy i like it i like the strategy i like i i'm not a lawyer so i'm gonna have to consult with some lawyers but i do think that it makes sense to try to get things done more quickly and more strategically just like you were talking about with michael bent like there's a lot of like big talk that never happens.

But that's exactly the point is Representatives Cicely and Senators Bennett and Klobuchar have decided, you know what?

It's more important that we have a better America than I get my name in fucking lights all the time.

Yeah.

I'm reading her book.

I read her book this weekend, Antitrust.

It's very big.

It's very thick.

She's fantastic.

She is.

I'm talking to her this week.

I'm talking to her after the hearings for Sway.

I think it'll be really good.

I think she's really.

That's a shocker.

She's a really

someone I admire and constantly, constantly build up and highlight her effectiveness.

We've talked for an hour about antitrust.

We're talking about her giant book, The Kadillipu.

Oh, but we're bringing your brother on.

I got to get news.

Who do you want?

Who do you want?

Who do you want?

It's such sloppy slack.

No, you do not get sloppy.

Are you kidding?

This show is killing it.

I will find you a good name.

You were supposed to bring on Ando.

I bring on everybody.

You could bring on it.

I will bring on Ando.

We're spending so much time together recently that we're a little bit sick of each other.

It's springtime.

It's summer.

You're getting ready for your summer.

We have spent no.

By the way, I just feel like I need to disclose.

We have absolutely no relationship outside of CNC.

None.

None.

I'm going to get Andro to come on.

I'm going to like pummel him on the Twitter and say,

Scott says you're his friend and you're Jonesing to come on to the show.

I'm intimidated by him.

I don't think I could handle that.

I'm getting him to come on.

He'll be funny.

He'll do his little cute laugh.

It'll be great.

It'll be fantastic.

Listen.

I want to talk to you about Florida, though, Florida, man, Miami.

What the hell is going?

What is wrong with Florida?

Like they're facing new emergency lockdowns to help stop the spread of COVID-19 as Fox head to Miami Beach for spring.

Like, what in the living hell was going on down there?

I've never seen anything like it.

And I thought last year was bad.

It's just a shocker.

We have it in a state where people eat each other's faces.

Old people bump into each other in their overly long cars from the 60s.

We have alligators being eaten by African pythons released by pet owners that seem to only.

All I want to know about is Miami Beach.

I mean, I read Edna Buchanan's book, The Corpse Out of Familiar Face.

I am aware of the situation in Florida, but what, what?

Where are the police?

What happened?

They had like to like, like gas these people.

They had like little pepper bombs or whatever.

Look, you know, people, there's so much pent-up energy.

Yeah.

They feel like Florida.

Look, words matter and actions matter.

And I do think that a lot of the horrendous things that have happened in the news recently are a function of that when our leaders don't take more resolute stands against certain types of behavior or crime, it leads to bad places.

And this is a smaller example of that.

And that is when Governor DeSantis wasn't aggressive about closing the beaches last year.

Yeah, he wasn't.

When we've adopted this attitude of, well, you know, we're going to let we're going to.

It's sort of over, but it's not.

It's sort of over, but it's not.

And, oh, look at us, where's our apology?

Florida's definitely taken sort of a Trumpian stand on COVID.

And to their credit, some of the data supports

what they've been evangelizing.

But where it leads to is it leads to this notion that come to Florida where there's no COVID and behave irresponsibly.

So we kind of invited this.

Our leadership invited this.

And then you end up with mayors overwhelmed.

They can't control it.

DeSantis is popular, I believe.

DeSantis is popular.

Yeah.

He is popular in Florida.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Governors can fall from grace really fast.

Yes, I noticed that with the Cuomo

and the Newsome.

They can.

They can go up and down.

But look, it's just,

I find it really discouraging and upsetting because there's still a lot of people who are very vulnerable.

Yeah.

We're seeing 5% infection rates.

Yeah, they're up again.

They're up again.

I don't know.

What do you think?

I don't have a lot to say.

I don't even know what to say.

If my child was there, I'd be furious at him.

That's all I, you know, I was just thinking, where are the parents here?

Like, with these kids partying?

Like, I guess, like, when parents are like, what the hell?

I'm so sick of this.

It is sort of, but they did it last year.

If they hadn't done it last year when things were bad, it's just, I don't know.

I don't know what to say.

The pictures are really bad.

But, you know, we'll see what happens.

I guess maybe.

You know, it's YOLO.

It's YOLO is what's happening.

Like YOLO times 50.

I don't think there's anything we can do at this point.

I think everyone's sort of had it with COVID.

Done.

Next.

Yeah, people are reaching.

There's just no doubt about it.

People are reaching the limits, which makes it even more important that everyone get a job.

Yep.

100%.

Okay, on to big stories.

There's so many stories around, Scott, but this is a big story.

This is a big story.

Dispo, the once-promising photo-sharing app, it still is promising.

It was quite high on the Apple App Store, is facing challenges after its founder, David Dobrik, faced allegations of sexual assault.

It's actually allegations in the group that he's

accused of.

It was somewhere.

No, David gained popularity on Vine and then on YouTube has been facing allegations.

The group around him,

I forget what the name of the group is, but it's a little group around him that does like things.

They do, they, you know, they do sort of stunts and things like that, facing lots of different allegations.

Racism, now he's, there's the new racist stuff, anti-Asian stuff.

They just, they're just surfacing all the sort of antics that he did, which are all juvenile and some of which are racist, some of which are, a lot of which are sexist.

And then, of course, behaviors by his gang around him.

I think it's called the Vlog Gang or something like that.

He started a photo sharing app also called Dispo, which had gained a lot of traction.

But following these investigations of

these sexual assaults and other issues, the app's rating dropped below two stars in Apple's App Store.

The venture capital firm Spark Capital, which led its startups $20 million Series A financing in February, announced it would sever all ties with Dispo, which means it's pretty bad.

And then Dobrik said, Since Eddie's maybe stepping back from the company, wow, this is a fast one.

This is kind of a cool app, I actually have to say.

He is sort of a funny character and super popular.

And it's sort of in that, there's a whole gang of those YouTube people

that have had problems, and he's the latest.

Yeah.

So I've come to my view is that media interprets things based 49% of it is the content of what you say and 51% is who says it.

So you go first.

Well, okay.

It's really interesting because it comes at the same time.

You know, there's this controversy around Teen Bogue and some racist tweets that and Hamfogue tweets that Alexi McCommond, I think sometimes she was made editor of Team Vogue and then they unmade her before she started.

You know, sometimes, you know, in that case, actually Elizabeth Spears wrote, I think, the best piece about it.

You know, you immediately have to veer into this stupid cancel culture thing when, in fact, in this case, it's accountability.

In the case of

Dobrik, I mean, he just decided to be an asshole.

It's sort of like the other guy on YouTube that was standing in front of all those dead bodies.

And once again, I'm blanking on his name.

And another YouTube star.

But, you know, he did a lot of these things.

And then there is controversy around Dispo, too, that he took the idea from someone.

There was someone alleging that.

Probably Spark Capital's like, I don't know.

Although it was gaining, it's a really interesting app where you take pictures and then they show up the next day in these disposable camera look.

And Teens really liked it.

It's quite a creative photo app.

But, you know, you have to decide what's accountability and what's unfair.

In the case of Alexi McCommon, it's very complicated.

I think it's Anna Winter is at fault for hiring her as someone who wasn't particularly, she didn't have any experience running a magazine, but she sort of has the buzz as a political reporter covering the the Trump White House and this and that.

She also got pulled into another scandal over at the White House, which I won't go into.

But I think they just used the opportunity in this case to deal with it because Condi Nass is under such pressure around diversity issues justifiably

and has had, you know, from the Kamala Harris thing to previous.

people,

books that have been written about it, about the company,

including someone who was with him for her for a really long time, Anna Winter, calling her a colonial dame, which was not very nice, but that's what he said.

And so it's, you know, it's hard to take apart what's accountability.

Before, you just used to get into trouble and then you'd leave.

Now you call cancel culture out.

And at the same time, what David Dobrik was doing was pretty icky.

And I can't believe people invested him in the first place, but, you know, they were looking for money.

What do you think?

I think the two are totally different.

They both have lessons.

And one's a lesson for young people.

And another, I think, is a cautionary tale for all of us, and especially for parents.

With respect to Dispo,

look, and there's a lesson here.

There's wonderful things about being an innovator and being young and understanding technology.

You get unfair or unwarranted idolatry.

People think you're cooler than you are.

You have the opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars by the time you're, you know, 25 or 30.

Right.

But boss, nothing's for free.

Yeah.

And one of the things you have to pay, or one of the things you have to do, is that you cannot in any way

have your corporation or yourself personally, when you reach a certain level of seniority in an organization, put yourself in a position to have credible accusations levied against you of this sort.

And through due process, we'll find out hopefully what happened here and if there was a crime here, if it was just terribly poor judgment.

But you don't, if you want to be.

If you want to be a player in our capitalist society and grab its and

appreciate its fruits and its incredible spoils for innovators, you can't put yourself in a stupid fucking position like this.

You don't let this shit happen.

You don't let three people in any way associated with your firm go into a room to have sex when they're drunk.

Yeah, this is called the vlog squad, just so people don't know.

Setting yourself up.

24 years old.

He's 24 years old.

Yeah, I mean, if a 24-year-old is old enough to make millions of dollars or raise 20 million, then he needs to be old enough to make it.

I'm not giving him the age excuse.

I'm just saying he, what happened is this had these allegations happen, and then everyone's sort of reassessing his previous work.

And this, and this is where it got

the media mob takes it.

And by the way, there was another incident.

One of their posse

was pranked.

They dressed up a guy as a woman.

They convinced him to kiss her.

And then post his embarrassment, he has categorized this as a sexual assault.

So now the media is saying that Dispo and these individuals are associated with multiple plural sexual assaults.

Is that fair?

Maybe, maybe not.

But when you're the CEO of a company, when you're the principal of a company, nothing's for free.

And if you want the opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars at a young age, it means, boss, you got to be clean as a fucking whistle.

You got to be the adult in the room.

And I remember when I first started my company, my first-term profit, we used to go to Mexico every year.

Everyone would get ridiculously fucked up.

And I've decided in today's age, I wouldn't do that.

I just wouldn't wouldn't want to

put the firm and people's economic livelihoods at risk.

So this is just capitalism.

And Spark is doing the right thing.

They're like, look, we just can't be a solution.

Well, should they have checked it before?

How much due diligence can you do?

Like, and then talk about the electoral

common thing.

Like, what do you think?

Well,

that's the right question.

Now, in terms of condonast, I think this is frightening.

And let's come up with a different word for cancel culture because now council culture is being thrown back in our faces and say, no, it's just an excuse for people that don't want to be held held accountable.

When you are 17,

I mean,

everyone who hasn't done something stupid or said something stupid and offensive at the age of 17, raise your hand.

All right.

And

way to go for you, but the majority of us have, but we didn't live in an era where there was a hot mic following us around our entire lives.

And the notion that we are now the woke mob.

I don't know.

To a certain extent, Conan Ass was put in a terrible position because actually, I think the thing that caused it was Anna Winter initially supported her, but then the advertisers started withdrawing from Teen Voge.

And at what point, okay, just keep in mind, folks, and there's an entire generation of people, and I've been trying to more cognizant of my behavior that online have decided they have a certain standard of purity, which, by the way, they have no intention of upholding personally.

Yep, yep, yep.

And okay, just be clear, this mentality, this lack of forgiveness is coming for your children.

And guess what?

If she had committed manslaughter and gone to jail for two or three years and then been released released from prison and gone on to be a reporter for Axios and gone on to become appointed for teen vote, the woke mob would have found that an inspiring story of renewal.

The statute of limitations.

This is Condé Nass.

I'm going to put it right on Condé Nas.

But it was the woke mob that came out to the advertising.

They didn't care about,

they care.

This happens a million times with advertisers.

This is the Condé NAS.

Let's put the blame where it belongs, which is on Condé NAS management and directly on Anna Winter.

I'm sorry.

That's where it is.

She hired her and then

got spooked and decided not to do it by these advertiser things.

That's where it is.

And advertiser pressure happens all the time.

This is not a new and fresh thing for different people.

Okay, so I think Con and Ash should have said, I think they should have been

without us.

They should have stuck with her.

But there's a bigger point here, though.

And that is

we can't continue to, we shouldn't try children as adults.

That is a completely fair thing.

I don't think that had anything to do with it.

I thought that they decided they made a mistake in hiring someone without any actual

experience.

If you commit manslaughter and they can't find enough evidence against you, there's a statute of limitations for five years.

But racist tweets don't have a statute of limitations.

You know, of course, then people that insulted her, they found they did tweets that were problematic too, the people that were sort of putting leader on.

I'm still going to place it directly on Connie Nask and Anna Winter.

Either stick with her or,

you know, they could care less about the staff and what they think.

They care about the advertisers and then they can't take another.

They have previously had so many racially based incidents, like

problems there, that that's what they're throwing this woman under the bus for their own problems.

That's my feeling.

And so that's what I'm talking about, you're going very, I get it, you're going very tactical to the situation.

This represents

a more serious disease in our society.

And it is out of control when we decide.

to take notes and go back and start fucking up people's lives and livelihoods because of stupid things they did at the age of 17.

That is, I think, true.

But in this case, I think there's a whole lot more going on here than that.

And I think it's Condé Nast.

Condé Nass

has suffered from things they deservedly have been criticized for, and they don't want to take another one.

So they're going to toss this woman out the door before she got there.

I think that's where it begins and ends.

Anna Winter can't make one more mistake.

So instead of stepping aside herself, she pulls someone else down.

We're not going to discuss.

Oh, come on.

She wasn't going to step aside.

No, but she's had so many.

Look at, look, she had the Kamala Harris cover before that.

Like, there were dozens of incidents.

The Kamala Harris cover?

I wouldn't describe that.

I know that, but I'm saying it just was like, that was the most recent one.

There were like dozens and dozens of things at Condé Nasty.

This isn't a Conda Nast problem.

It's a societal problem.

I don't think so.

I think Condé Nast is like just, they had misbehaved before, and this woman's paying for it.

But I don't think they care anything about what their staff thinks.

I really don't.

I don't think they don't seem to have done that in general.

And they throw their staff under the bus all the time.

And that's what they did here.

Let me just say the person who had the problem before, David Derby, who's Logan Paul, who remember he took the video in the Japanese suicide forest, and then YouTube dealt with him.

Anyway, this is not a new thing.

That behavior, you absolutely should be thrown off for.

And then David Dobrik, absolutely.

I feel like that's perfectly fine.

Anyway, Scott, we're going to go on a quick break.

We'll be back to talk about Trump's new social media platform and a friend of Pivot on NFTs.

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Okay, we're back.

And so is former President Donald Trump.

Apparently, he'll be returning to social media this time with his own social network.

This weekend, longtime Trump advisor Jason Miller told Fox News that Trump will be, quote, returning to social media in probably in the next two to three months

on his own platform that will attract apparently tens of millions of new users and, quote, completely redefine the game.

Reminder, Trump was permanently banned from Twitter after inciting riots at the Capitol in January.

Scott, and he might or might not be off of Facebook.

That's going to be

TBD.

What do you think, Scott?

Look, I think greatness is in the agency of others.

Donald Trump built a brand sort of greatness is in the agency of PR and self-promotion and then calling on our kind of worst instincts, I think.

And the reputation that Donald Trump and the Trump organization has always had is that they're terrible operators.

Yep.

That the way they make money is by taking their brand and making it famous, whatever it's famous for, and then licensing it.

But they're not.

And look, building technology, unless somebody, if he were to say, I've partnered with

the guys who ran, I don't know, Friendster, or I've got a team of 200 engineers lined up, then maybe.

But but this stuff, this stuff is difficult.

He's not an operator.

No.

Anyways, I would not go long this.

What do you think?

I think it's ridiculous.

I think beyond that, if they can't do it, you can't do it is my number one thing is that he won't do it.

It's like Trump stakes would be an easier lift for this guy.

And yet that failed and Trump water, all of them.

They're just, he's like trying to put his name on these things.

And also social networks really are network effects.

And that means everybody's there.

And the reason he was popular on Twitter is because not just his fans were there, but all the politicians, all the media, all the detractors, all the bots.

And you need all of it.

They were just as important.

I'm not joining the Trump network just to listen to him.

I didn't join Parlor, right?

I just, I mean, I know what's on it.

So

he would be better off like helping revive Parlor again or something like that.

Maybe he is.

Maybe that's where he's.

My guess is he ends up on Clubhouse.

Yeah, that's where he should go, don't you think?

Just go to Clubhouse and take it over.

Take over a section of it.

Take over one that he hasn't shit all over and stay there until he shits all over it and they kick him off really i think that's that's what he should do why wouldn't he why wouldn't he i think this is just destined for failure destiny just doesn't have everybody everyone's not at the party and these social networks needs every need everybody at the party and then other thing is you know everyone was talking about twitter and i love your comment on this

going down after trump left well it's up 20 bucks since he left office 25 down yeah remember everyone said oh he's not going to be on it it's going to hurt trump's i mean uh twitter's business if if management and the board had more of a backbone and

their words foot to

their actions, and they actually gave a good goddamn about the Commonwealth, there's a movement to purity here.

Their immunities are kicking in.

There's a citizen effect taking place.

And that is Snap and Pinterest have been more vigilant about trying to keep their platforms less toxic.

And guess what?

They have appreciated faster over the last 18 months.

That's right.

Twitter's moving, Twitter's move to purity here.

It has resulted in a massive accretion in shareholder value plus some threatening subscription also.

There's some very hopeful things here.

The companies are being rewarded public.

And again, I'm an investor.

Public is the immunity to Robinhood.

And guess what?

It went from $100 million in valuation to $1.2 billion.

There is a citizen accretive effect here that is very healthy.

And

you can do well by doing good.

And Twitter's just starting to figure out that being, again, a handmade dissedition was not a good business strategy.

And neither is anything Donald Trump does that requires execution.

And this requires a lot of execution.

It's all a lot so much bullshit.

And they won't.

And by the way, you don't see them leaving Twitter either.

So they stay.

That's where politicians are.

Okay, next up, friend of Pivot.

Here to clarify all things cryptocurrency and NFT, we have Scott's colleague, chairman of the Department of Finance at NYU, Stern, David Yermak.

David, thank you for, or Professor Yermak, thank you for coming.

Thank you for the invitation.

No problem.

So can you just give us an explanation?

I've written about it recently and I had people on today on my podcast, but give us a blanket explanation of how these

NFTs work.

An NFT is a collectible and they reside on a blockchain, which means that they can't be replicated.

And if you own one, you own the only one.

And so the market for NFTs resembles the market for comic books, baseball cards, rare coins and stamps, all sorts of other things where the intrinsic value of the object is really not so high, but the fact that you have the only one or one of a very small set is what confers the bragging rights and the prestige.

And in this case, the scarcity is assured by cryptography, which arguably is something that would defeat counterfeiting and other ways of forging and replicating these assets.

There's markets for art where sometimes you see forgeries of Rembrandts and so forth.

With NFTs, those kinds of concerns are go by the books because or by the board because you don't have to worry about people replicating.

The blockchain gives a degree of uniqueness and security that no other registry system ever has in history.

Right.

So why are we suddenly hearing about them?

And

are they a fag?

Because I think everybody's super.

I was like, don't worry, it'll sort itself out.

It's just a way to do transactions, essentially.

But talk about why you're suddenly hearing about them and if you think they will go away.

I don't, but go ahead.

No, I don't think they'll go away either.

And we have had booms and busts in the collectibles markets.

You may remember the big bubble in comic books around the year 2000 and so forth.

But there have been markets in fine art for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And there's a whole network of auction houses and galleries and appraisers that feed that market.

And one of the enduring questions about why is a Rembrandt so valuable, is it because it's so exquisite to look at that people get so much pleasure?

Or is it simply the bragging rights, the prestige of being rich enough to be able to afford one?

And I think NFTs answer that question very much on the side of the second argument that you can brag that you have the only copy of Jack Dorsey's first tweet.

And if it's authenticated by a blockchain, even though other people could replicate and look at the exact copy, so anyone could copy Beeple's file and have a perfect rendering of it, but there's only one first edition.

And

collecting is partly about pleasure and partly about money laundering and wealth storage and so forth, but it's really about showing off and bragging.

And I think that's what's dragging, that's what's driving the NFT market.

And these are rather timeless human emotions that I think will always be with us.

Scott?

David,

does the original, does the person who owns the asset or owns the IP, does that ownership transfer or have power in this new medium?

Or does it make sense to just raise $100 million and start creating NFTs of every valuable piece of IP ever and claim that you own it?

We don't know the answer to that yet.

and you're seeing people rushing supply onto the market you know just today time magazine created three new covers that they were going to auction off in nft form and they did this simultaneously with the publication of a series of articles about nfts now will anyone bid for these i'm not sure i think um

in any kind of fad where asset pricings are rising quickly, whether it's on Wall Street or a market like this, you will see more supply emerge emerge to the point that the market becomes flooded and probably drops.

That's right.

But my question is, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

My question is, what if Time put out NFTs for covers of National Geographic?

Could National Geographic?

I think National Geographic could sue them because they have a copyright.

So, you know, you do have property rights for people who

could be held accountable in court who infringe on them.

You have interesting questions of jurisdiction, like in what court would you bring such a case and under exactly what statute but i think many of the laws or many of the laws that have been around for a long time that apply to ownership rights of intellectual property would transfer very easily to nfts right would they make them more ironclad these copyright laws i would think so if you could transparently see who owns it and it's a very clear ownership path Yeah, certainly the proof that you can offer in court may be a lot simpler on a blockchain because you can show an uninterrupted chain of custody and so forth.

There have been real disputes about who owns a certain painting or who owns the royalties to a piece of music that has been sold and resold through many hands.

Often it's very difficult to tell, but the promise of a blockchain is to fix those rights very unambiguously.

that clarifies the ownership and the property rights for sharing of royalties and profits in a much better way.

And then artists can continue to hold them, right?

Because in some of these contracts, for example, with people, he's going to be, if it sells again, he gets a portion of that.

You can write anything into these smart contracts.

Yeah.

In fact, it's a very popular proposal.

And I think it's even mandatory in Europe that an artist holds a residual royalty to resale.

So it's a little bit like having a call option on the value of your work that is perpetual.

If the thing gets sold and resold at auction, there are 10% of the profits filtering back to you.

I think this is an interesting contract, but on the other hand, if the artist is retaining that residual right, the work should sell for a lower price in the first instance, that you know you're only getting 90% of the upside and Beeple is keeping 10%, so you should only pay 90 cents on the dollar.

And to the extent that Beeple may think the market's overheated, people would be better off selling the whole 100% instead of holding that residual option.

Right.

But who knows?

This is

what makes a market.

And if artists want to retain 10% or even 50% residual,

it's something that technology very easily.

Look at Jeff Koons.

He should have held on.

You know what I mean?

Like a lot of people, they don't know.

You know, it's very easy to look backward and identify people who should have hung on to their work.

You know, Caravaggio should never have sold his supply until 400 years later.

But if you look at all of the art that's correct, is being produced at a moment in time, most of it turns out to be worthless and has has very little value in the future.

And the studies that tend to encourage these kinds of things don't take account of the very high failure rate.

And it can be very hard to tell in the moment that a canvas or a digital piece that you've just produced really will be popular in 50 or 100 years.

But certainly for the ones where that turns out, yeah, you wish you had retained more of the value for yourself.

Yeah, 100%.

So let's try and project what might happen here.

When you think of traditional IP film media,

they don't pay to star in the movie, they pay to market it, right?

And I've always felt art is

the most successful artists are not only the best

artisans, they're the best marketers.

And this feels like it's literally 99.9% your marketing acumen versus 0.0001 intrinsic value, right?

Other than the scarcity component you talked about.

Aren't the natural players here the ones that could really make bank, the social media platforms that could create their own marketplace and then promote and market the NFTs that they own and just kind of just make crazy bank?

I think that this is an interesting point.

I'm not sure that they have the advantages in security that you get from the decentralized platforms.

But one of the things about the work of Beeple and many of the other popular NFTs is that they are on the Ethereum platform where there's really no gatekeeper and nobody who can censor or take down or change the rules because it's a decentralized, essentially a self-enforcing set of algorithms that governs this.

If you put it on Google, you're working for Larry and Sergei or Amazon, you're working for Jeff Bezos.

And so I'm not sure that people in the end will trust the social media platforms.

to protect the integrity of the property rights the same way that you see on the decentralized blockchains.

So the lack of a so-called trusted third party or a gatekeeper is part of the value proposition of the NFT.

So, what else could be made into NFTs?

Like, it's not just someone, I think someone I was talking to is saying you can put a house on it, you can put other things.

Does it have to be a collectible?

Well, I think you're making a more general point about fractional ownership.

Yeah, which is what happened to the Beatles.

The guy bought them, and now he's fractionalized the entire collection, and he's selling coins.

I think these B20 coins.

You You know, people have been talking for many years about applications like a young athlete who maybe is still in college selling shares to their future contracts.

You know, if you're an all-American football player about to enter the NFL draft, you could syndicate 15 years of future salaries and then share them out and get the money up front in a lump sum.

You could invest in all kinds of types of human capital of new MBA students, maybe a portfolio of 100 MBAs coming out of the top business schools and get a stream of their royalties.

There's really no limit to this, but there are also interesting incentive effects that the athlete who pre-sells their contract right obviously has less incentive to train and perform.

You know, they don't bear the risk.

And it's the same with a musician who pre-sells the royalties.

If Taylor Swift could sell forward future albums, you know, maybe they're not going to be as of high quality.

The songs won't be as well written and so forth.

So there's very interesting incentive effects that I think will figure in this market in the future.

And some of them are probably good, some are probably bad.

We're at a very early stage and don't fully understand these yet.

Yeah.

It's funny you say that because I don't think I would have ever written a book had someone not given me an advance and I felt like I had to.

The other question, and you kind of leaned into this a bit,

what,

if these are gold mines, who's selling the picks and the denim tents?

What technologies?

You mentioned Ethereum, but who makes money here?

What's the technology or the companies that benefit if there's a craze in NFTs?

You know, the people making money right now are the ones selling the mining hardware.

We have a very clear analog that in the old days, it was picks and shovels and pans.

Today, it's essentially specially designed computer chips and circuits that are programmed to mine cryptocurrency.

And some of these

are going public.

So there are now crypto mining companies that are being listed on the stock exchange because it's a fast-growing revenue, very traditional business, really, just catering to the crypto markets.

And there's all kinds of things like podcasts that are attracting viewers to listen to people talk about crypto and so forth.

You know, a whole industry is circling the technology, if you will.

And I think first and foremost, the hardware providers, but I'm teaching a university course and students are applying to go to NYU so that they can take this course.

We're all benefiting from second-order effects of people who are interested in this.

And that, of course, you have to locate.

And it's a lot of the activities in China where they locate them next to energy grids and things like that, which is somewhat really interesting how this is all playing out.

But what advice would you give for someone who's just looking on?

Because when they see this NFTs, it sort of starts, I think it's sort of a consumer gateway into cryptocurrency, what what these NFTs are in a lot of ways.

But what advice would you give for someone looking to invest in cryptocurrencies or NFTs?

Which I think NFTs is probably an easier way for them to do so.

You know, the timeless advice is to diversify.

Unless you find some special skill that you can recognize digital art better than the next person.

If you really feel that this needs to be in your portfolio, I would spread your money around and look for an overall rate of return and let the risks cancel themselves out rather than putting all your eggs in one basket.

Is there one area like art versus

the tweets of Jack Dorsey versus the videos of sports stars and things like that?

Very hard to say.

Again, you know, diversifying some of these things, like the Super Bowl highlights, it's hard for me to see that anyone can really fix a claim on that.

Yeah.

But we've had, you know, baseball cards.

I remember trading them in my youth, and I have a son now who is trading the

NFT equivalent of sports cards.

And,

you know, I think

I never put all of my allowance into baseball cards.

And I wouldn't recommend that he puts all of his

weekly meal money at college into the NFTs, but maybe 1% or 2%

and

also own real estate and equities and bonds and everything else.

But I think, you know, the market is small.

It's a very volatile, speculative market.

And I think most of the returns that people get are likely to be by chance as opposed to by skill.

Yeah.

But it does give cryptocurrency a little workout in something in the ways that it hasn't beyond a speculative instrument, essentially.

I don't know.

The cryptos are growing very quickly and many of them are specially designed to solve certain problems.

The main value of Ethereum seems to be connections to decentralized finance or DeFi, which essentially takes the insurance and risk management industries and makes it run run by robots without many of the moral hazard problems.

This is actually something very socially useful, but it's a rather subtle contribution that people don't really think too much about when they buy ether.

I think

the blockchain is a platform that can host many of the markets that up until now have resided on very primitive types of ledgers.

the double entry bookkeeping.

We have a lecture by a colleague at NYU, Amy Whitaker, who comes in every term and looks at art gallery ledgers, which are literally recipe boxes filled with index cards, where

forgeries and missing cards and so forth have been huge problems that have led to litigation.

And so the contribution here is better record keeping.

And this can add value to all kinds of markets and human endeavors.

in medicine and the arts and all kinds of things.

And so I don't think it's really about speculation in the long run.

It's about a very novel technology that has a lot of social utility.

Yep.

Scott, last question.

Do you think that, David, when you look at it, it feels as if, okay, Bitcoin at $60,000,

NFTs going for millions, it feels a lot of this is foam off the froth or froth off the foam of an economy that is just awas in cash.

But there's also a notion that these technologies are decentralization, disruptive, and protecting us from, or a way to kind of escape from the traditional norms, dangers of our central bank-driven economy, whatever you want to call it.

Do you think these assets are correlated?

And if and when we see a correction in the market, you'll just see a lot of the air come out of the balloon here?

Or do you think that they're actually inversely correlated?

Do you mean the crypto assets, the Bitcoins, the ether?

It feels like this.

Well, you tell me, but it feels like this whole genre or asset class somewhat trades together.

And so far, it seems somewhat correlated to the larger economy.

Bitcoin hit 5,000 bucks when the market crashed last year.

We all like to think it's not correlated, but it feels like everything's correlated right now.

Do you think this larger space of crypto, NFTs, the hardware,

do you think it becomes, is it inversely correlated or correlated to the general

economy?

I think it's probably positively correlated, but I can tell you there's a lot of high-level research among asset pricing experts beginning to look at this.

And we'll be able to answer that better in maybe a year or two.

But it's obviously important that the person who paid $69 million for the people,

they paid in Ether.

They didn't pay in real money.

And this was a person with a lot of Ether tokens that they had come into possession of by whatever means.

And a lot of the ownership of art through history has been done, you know, because it's a store of value and it's a way to take a monetary instrument issued by a government and to transform it into something that is probably more permanent and enduring.

And I think the person who bought the Beeple probably viewed it as less risky than a pile of Ether tokens.

Yep.

But on the other hand, if Ethereum collapses, I think the auction prices for NFT are probably going to go south too, because a lot of the clientele for this are people with crypto profits that are looking to park it somewhere a little bit safer.

And then do interesting financial instruments with them, which is what they're trying to do, at least in the case of people.

So I have a last question.

If Pivot were to make an episode into an NFT, what would be your advice?

Have me as the guest

to sell for billions, I'm sure.

No, if you could get someone like

Jack Dorsey or Satoshi Nakamoto to be the guest and then turn it into an NFT.

Oh, nice.

That's probably the one.

Get Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum.

There's all kinds of crypto celebrities who might lend their name on an experimental basis to a little test if you give them a 10% kickback of the royalty.

Scott was just going to say how important you are.

Correct, Scott, go right ahead.

Well, I was going to say this off my

professor, but David is chair of the finance department at NYU, which makes him the most powerful person at Stern because basically, Stern, let's be honest, David, is the finance department and the seven dwarves.

You guys roll your eyes every time the marketing department has anything to say.

David's the most powerful person at NYU.

no comments scott

he's rolling his eyes no my our dean would object to that except he's also a finance he's a finance yeah where did he come from the finance department so let me just but people's people get are getting very emotional about nfts for some reason i'm like just don't don't do them then what would you say to the average person with nfts just it's fine just it's just another financial instrument just relax or or beware

it it would really depend on what else they own you know the the The advice about what to do with an asset is always contingent on

other NFTs they should probably sell.

But if they have $100 million in equity and they just came into this,

see what happens.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who's sitting downstairs right now, and she actually does digital art.

She's been taking high school courses and so forth.

And I told her to drop all the other classes, calculus and all the other, you know, chemistry.

Just do the digital art for the time being.

That's good parenting.

Good parenting.

That's good parenting.

Good parenting.

She's skeptical and I said, I want you to Google people and figure out what this people is doing.

Do the same thing.

He's still making them.

They're still working on

her other courses.

And this I'm sorry, Professor, diversify your financial, but not your human capital.

Come on.

Diversify.

Only one is a digital artist.

I say, I like it.

I like how he thinks.

Anyway,

David Yermack is the chairman of the Department of Finance at NYU Stern.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks, David.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Okay, Scott, that was fascinating.

So, Kara, let me tell you something about Professor David Yermak.

Okay, I do know his name.

He's very famous.

And he's one of the reasons

I continue to want to be affiliated with Stern and why it's so rewarding.

That guy could make tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year working for a credit fund.

And what he chooses to do do is to try and figure out do research and and discover if there's a michelle effect and he tried to figure out the correlation between michelle obama's apparel and stock price movement he then found the tail numbers of every jet of every ceo and determined that when they left for holiday they planned to leave for holiday after the earnings call that means that there was about to be an earnings beat This guy is such a genius.

That was famous.

I remember that.

This guy is such a genius and so creative.

And he's decided my role.

I think he's a character on billions.

there's probably there's a character like that my role is to communicate that genius and that creativity to a new generation of finance people yeah he is i every time every time i speak to david i i learn something and i think okay that's that's like an economic wong

i like it don't but don't insult marketing people they're fine too don't

we get

literally no respect i know i mean literally just so you know speaking of nfts we need to take a quick break but first jonathan mann tweeted at us uh that he used my catchphrase fatuous poppin' J, which I use liberally among the people, mostly of the Trump administration, but many people are fatuous poppin' Jays.

Recently, it was Tucker Carlson.

He turned it into a song with the intention to sell it and is an NFT.

He's been writing a song a day for 13 years.

He sold the first 365 songs as NFTs.

They sold out in 30 minutes.

Let's play it.

Fatuous poppin' Jays.

These are the fatuous poppinjays.

They swapping squawk.

It hurts my ears.

Last name, Morgan.

First name Pierce.

Be creative.

Find a way to insult somebody like fatuous poppin' J's.

So, my question is: can I bid on an FT that'll make that shit go away?

No, I think it's gonna be brilliant.

And I am, I am the muse.

I am like Mona Friggin Lisa.

That who is, that's who I am.

Okay, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

Yep.

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Okay, Scott, wins and fails.

We are our own fail, apparently.

We've got a lot of feedback from listeners on how we missed the mark on our interview with Andrew.

We did miss it there.

We really did miss it there.

We should have been tougher on him on his company, Hims.

I still think it's an interesting company,

what it's been doing, and it could pivot into something else.

But here is our resident doctor, Jeff Swisher, my brother, and your biggest fan, Scott Galloway.

That's a brother?

That's a

Who knew?

Who knew?

He likes attention himself.

To tell us where we got that.

I wonder where he got that.

Unlike

his wilting flower

sister.

Listen, professor of marketing, look at me.

All right, let's listen to Jeff Swisher.

You know what?

That's not fair.

I've become much more self-actualized.

Just this morning, Kara, a bee landed on me, and I thought, I'm not scared.

I take it as a compliment that it mistook me for a flower.

That's what you are, a delicate flower.

All right, let's listen to Dr.

Jeff Swisher.

Rip us a new one and then sew it back up because he's an excellent doctor.

Go ahead, Jeff.

That's an image.

Hey, Karen, Scott.

You guys know I love you both and I'm your biggest fan.

But listen to me, as Kara says.

As your actual big brother and Scott, as your virtual one, you guys needed to do better with such a huge, complex, and promising topic as telehealth.

This is such an important paradigm-shifting field that it's really important to get it right.

Rather than a master of the universe, universe founder or CEO, personally I would have invited somebody with a more global analytic view.

Like for instance, the extremely knowledgeable beat journalist Chrissy Farr or the CIO of Kaiser Permanente, who's been at this game for a really long time, and they have been able to integrate virtual with in-person visits really quite well.

Telemedicine has so much promise.

It'll be awesome for pre-op screening and evaluation, some routine medical care, follow-up care, health promotion and wellness, but it's got to be done safely and intelligently as well as ethically.

And it's got to work with doctors and other health professionals and not commodify us.

It should ideally be an adjunct to physician-patient in-person interaction and not a replacement for it.

Minor easily remedied problems with quick resolutions or the need for quick prescriptions, etc.

It's such a small part of medicine.

A lot of it is the experience and skill that a physician brings to the literal examining room table in an in-person interview and exam.

There's so much more to say on this topic and so little time.

But in general, you guys do great and I love listening to you.

Thanks.

Be well.

And maybe you guys can have me back as a guest on pivot again and we can have a more substantive conversation on the subject of telehealth because there's a lot to be said about it.

There's my brother.

He's right.

I mean, I feel bad.

I think we've been correctly shamed.

I think he's right.

I think he nailed it.

And by the way, since we did that interview a week ago, him's off 20% the stock.

I think that's largely

because of Jeff Swisher or Dr.

Swisher, but because Amazon's announced they're getting in.

But

he's absolutely right.

Direct-to-consumer ED drugs is not the same as offering.

No, but I think a lot.

I think one thing he fails, and I think doctors fail in general, is the experience with your doctor is broken.

Everybody who has, I'm talking about general stuff.

I think he gets that.

I do think he gets that.

And I don't think, but I don't think doctors do in general.

They think the system is fine the way it is for patients.

And I have to say, so much more innovation could go into this in health.

It just doesn't, in much more complex stuff, too.

Not just, not just

a patient, were you?

I was thinking about, I think anesthesiology is

the brightest pulse of our species.

Our example.

You got to know everything.

You got to keep people alive.

Well, if you think about it, our superpower as a species is cooperation that results in trust.

We trust that people will pull over to the side of the road when they hear a siren.

We trust that we drop our kids off at school.

They're not going to eat them.

Our species, our superpower is cooperation that results in trust.

And when you think about the ultimate example of our species superpower, it's deciding to let a skilled professional take care of you while you are

while you are unconscious.

And they will manage the nether netherland between consciousness and unconsciousness while people take pieces of you out of you.

And you trust that this person has your best interest at heart.

So you may not even not even know their name, but they're so skilled, they're so worried about your welfare.

And we've created a system of capitalism and empathy and attracting nice, smart people.

It really is kind of like, it's the helm of the bobsled of what our

I would agree with you 100%.

It's a most difficult job.

And I really, when it's done well, it's so great.

I had a procedure Jeff's not allowed to practice upon me because I'm his sister.

But man, the people he picks, they put me right out.

And then I woke right up.

It was fantastic.

I have to say.

And I didn't fear at all.

And it's true.

And you definitely can't do that online.

You cannot give someone profit.

What are your wins and fails, Kara?

I think that was enough.

I feel that was enough.

There's plenty to talk about this week.

We will see the continuing.

I think Florida's failing in terms of that and winning is the vaccinations continue apace.

I think that is a win.

My fail is there needs to be a statute of limitations.

We need to let kids screw up in a safe place and learn from it.

And their errors as children, we can't try them as adults.

And what happened at Condon Condonast,

whether it's your point to Condonast screwed up here, we just need to be mindful that there's a difference between actions at 17 and actions at 27.

This is true.

But I'm going to press.

Here we go.

No, my fails get.

My fails are unedited, Carol.

I don't know if you got the memo from our producer.

All right.

Then my fail, here's my fail.

I'm going to have my fail then.

My fail is that we do not take into account consequences of our actions and then try to act like we're a victim.

When we do bad things, we should pay for them.

Is she acting like she's a victim?

No, no, no, no, not her.

I'm just saying,

I'm not talking about this particular instance, but a lot of this cancel culture bullshit, like the Andrew Cuomo pulling it.

Stop like pawing women, sir.

Stop

feeling totally different.

I am conflating, but they people like dump it in the same thing, like fake news.

People dump it into the same thing.

These two are totally different.

They are, but people don't do that.

Cancel culture has become a thing, like fake news has become a thing.

And it's very, there is some fake news.

It's just not all of it.

And they tend to use it as a, as a okay, holding people to a standard you do not want to hold your own children to.

Let me just put it put it that way.

No, I got that.

Okay, so a win.

I like that children.

Rather than the grand standing,

rather than the grandstanding of Senators Sanders and Warren, there are senators and elected leaders just doing the hard work.

And so my wins are Representative Cicillini, Senators Bennett,

who's been pushing the earned income tax credit for children for years and didn't get any credit for it when it got into the bill in a huge size.

Do you realize that people under the age of people, the households with income less than $50,000 are going to see their income increase 20% this year?

That is a huge win for us and it's overdue.

It is a form of UBI, which I'm not entirely sure I agree with, but I think it's a worthwhile experiment.

We needed to level up

this group and also Senator Klobuchar, who again, rather than posing for the cameras, is doing the hard work around antitrust.

So those are my wins.

Good government.

Nice.

You know who my win is?

Go ahead.

Dr.

Jeffrey Swisher.

I knew you were going to say that.

I knew you were going to say that.

All the swishers.

Swishers in general.

There you go.

There you go.

Okay, Scott.

That's the show.

It's a little testy today.

I like it.

I like a little testy.

Spicy.

A little testy.

A little salt around the room of that.

Pivot margarita.

We'll be back Friday for more as soon as we sign up for Trump's social network.

And then we'll be back.

It's like a shot at tequila.

You don't really feel it until you walk away from the table.

So in about 30 minutes, you're going to think, I wish I'd been nicer to the dog.

That's true.

Someone just sent me a new bottle of tequila, so I will do that.

I will drink before every show.

Anyway,

go to the nymag.com/slash pivot to submit your question for a pivot podcast.

The link is also in our show notes.

Scott, read us out.

Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis.

Ernie Intra Totten engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burroughs.

Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or if you're an Android user.

Check us out on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Box Media.

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

The wonderful thing about our society and our species is that incredibly impressive people opt for teaching, not money.

Thank you, Professor David Yermack, and can be trusted, can be trusted when we are totally helpless.

Thank you, Dr.

Switzerland.