The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Office Hours: eBay’s NFT Marketplace, Leaving the U.S., and Advice to a Teenager

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Scott takes a question about how established brands can leverage their platforms and identities in a Web3 world. He then shares why he’s moving to the U.K. and offers advice to a progressive who’s tired of America and wants to do the same. Scott also takes a question from a 16-year-old about what he would have done differently in his teenage years. Music: https://www.davidcuttermusic.com / @dcuttermusic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Welcome to the Prof G Pod's Office Hours. This is the part of the show where we answer questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question, please visit officehours.profgmedia.com. Again, that's officehours.profgmedia.com. First question. Hi, Prof G and team. Tom here from Cambridge, UK. Love the show. It's helping me keep up with the outside world whilst looking after a toddler and a newborn

on paternity leave. My question is about traditional companies getting involved in virtual and digital assets. For example, eBay could potentially support an NFT marketplace, or financial institutions could become security stores for data or digital identities. Interested in your thoughts on these opportunities and the companies that could use their brand trust and audience loyalty to benefit from this changing landscape. Thanks. Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Tom from Cambridge, thanks for the question. And congrats on the new one. And just take it from me, it gets better.

By the way, I think babies are awful. I did not enjoy having babies. I think men pretend to enjoy it. I think there is no reason for us to be in the birth room. Can't wait for the email on that one. Anyways, you will get through it. Zero to one awful. One to three semi-awful. And then then from three on, it just becomes wonderful.

So hang in there. And if you're enjoying it, good for you. Anyways, eBay, remember them? eBay was considered at one point one of the big five. At the turn of the millennium, they were considered, it was like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo. They were a juggernaut. And then eBay spun PayPal. And I believe PayPal is worth literally like 10 to 20 times what eBay is worth. Remember that? When eBay used to own PayPal, the PayPal was the internal payments functionality for eBay. Anyway, it's kind of like when Dayton

Hudson spun Target. Dayton Hudson was this tired Midwestern department store retailer that started this little company called Target, which ended up growing up to be much bigger and stronger than that. And they spun it. Anyways, I think this is an amazing idea for eBay because what would you want? You'd want a marketplace. You'd want trust. You'd want an organization that had credibility around incorporating a group of sellers and helping them make livings. I think the most extraordinary thing about eBay is that it provides a living for half a million people. eBay is brand identity.

In my brand strategy class, we have something called a brand identity or a core identity. And that is the very net, the very core of the brand, what you were supposed to feel or think when you see the visual metaphor for the company, which is a pedantic way of saying the logo. And for eBay, it was joy and boundless opportunity. Now, the joy part. The joy is it's fun to bid. They were in gamification before gamification became really ugly on Robin Hood or on Instagram. And that is it was fun to bid on that cool Pez dispenser and beat out surfer dude 313 and get it for the great price of $81, a Pez dispenser that was going to be worth nothing about the time it got to your house. But anyways, it was fun. And then the boundless opportunity part was there are half a million people, or at least there were, making their living by finding weird shit that people wanted and selling it on eBay, which brought together a critical mass of people and created a marketplace of buyers and sellers. Marketplaces are incredibly difficult to establish. Marketplace is Latin for lose billions of dollars to try and establish enough critical mass to have enough buyers and sellers where people consistently go back to one place, knowing there will be liquidity in that market.

Every retailer I've been on the board of talks about using their platform as a marketplace for other merchants, right? Urban Outfitters wants to bring in all these little merchants and create a marketplace. And what they fail to realize is unless they have access to billions of dollars to sustain that build of getting people to the marketplace, offering them such a great deal, driving so much traffic until there's a critical mass, that they just don't have the cheap capital. And eBay did. So eBay has, one, a marketplace. They have a history of transactions done digitally. They have a trust. And they also have the ability or credibility around incorporating people into the ecosystem who could potentially make a living, the quote-unquote creator community, selling NFTs. than the other two legs of the Web3 stool, being crypto and tokens and DAOs. I think NFTs are going to be the new signaling. And what do I mean by that? Number one instinct is survival.

The majority of us woke up this morning and thought we had that box checked, and that's a good thing. And by the way, it hasn't been that way through most of history. A lot of times when you ran into someone else alone, one of you might not leave alive. But most of us are fairly secure we're

going to survive. So we go to our second instinct, which is propagation. In sum, we want to be more attractive to potential mates. And one of the ways we do this is through signaling, whether it's ordering 1942 tequila in a club, whether it's driving a Ferrari, whether it's within 30 seconds of meeting someone telling them that you're going to school in Boston, which is the douchebag way of saying you're at Harvard and are so fucking pretentious that you want to pretend that you're modest while being incredibly self-absorbed and pretentious. Little anger there. Little anger there. Anyways, signaling is moving online. Why? Because we're mating online, or specifically mating is starting online. So I think a lot of the signaling, if you will,

is going to move from Birkenbags and Chanel and Ray-Ban and Panerai's to skins. My sons buy skins on their video games to demonstrate how cool they are, different weapons, different beachfront real estate next to Snoop and the metaverse, whatever it might be. But I think if the luxury brands can get their arms around the IP, there's a lot of opportunities for incremental cash flow from not only luxury brands, but from media companies and sporting franchises to put NFTs

online. And if you think, well, it's ridiculous that people would pay for the digital rights to a piece of content, it's no more ridiculous than paying a lot of money for one of 300 signed pieces of art. So the CEO of eBay recognizes this and appears to be going all in on this. And the company recently purchased the NFT marketplace known to origin. This makes a ton of sense. eBay, 100% needs to do something. And this feels right as rain. Thanks for the question, Tom from Cambridge. Next question. Hey, Scott. Love your work, brother. Based on your family history, I think you are uniquely qualified to answer this question. Should a progressive consider leaving the US for the UK or Canada? This time it's for real.

Some background. I'm a relatively wealthy and happily married middle-aged man. We have a high school age daughter, interested in colleges in England or Scotland, many less expensive than top U.S. institutions. I work in machine learning for a huge tech firm, and relocation isn't an issue for me or likely my wife, who's also in tech, though the move would be on our dime or pound, as it were. As a group, we are three progressive atheists who are tired of the gun-crazed, federated, blue-state, red-state system in which we currently reside. Jody from Madison, Wisconsin, first off, congratulations. These are what you call high-class problems, and I'm not uniquely qualified to answer this question. I'm uniquely

qualified to give you an opinion because, one, it sounds like we are brothers from another mother in terms of our political beliefs, atheism, situation in life, blessings. And also, as luck would have it, I am moving to London in the fall. And I'll just give you some thoughts. It was sort of tempting. People ask me why I'm moving. And it's a little bit tempting to say, well, I just don't recognize this America anymore or to start complaining about America. But the reality is your blessings and my blessings are a function. The fact that we could move to London, the fact that you could move to Scotland, the fact that I am moving to London are a function of just how wonderful America is. And that is, and I don't know your background, but I was born to a single immigrant mother who was born in London and left school at the age of 13. And I can now move back to London and buy a nice home there and send my kids to these storybook-like schools and live what I

think is going to be a really interesting life and expose my kids to a different culture. We're moving because, one, I do want to give my kids the opportunity to experience something different. I think they'll really benefit from that. Two, just selfishly, I think it's going to be a great lifestyle decision. I have roamed the earth for the last 25 years as a consultant and strategist. And one of the observations I've made is that America is the best place in the world to make money, and Europe is the best place to spend it. And as I get older, I want to do more spending, which sounds kind of weird, but I just want to enjoy life more and I want to spend more time exploring Northern Europe and Italy and Greece and France and all those wonderful places. So it's a lifestyle thing. What also strikes me though, is that I feel actually a little bit of a

pull to stay given what's happened. And that is, I was very moved by so many of the Ukrainian citizens who stuck around to fight. And I don't want to, I don't, this isn't, this is a ideological war, a societal war, but it's not a military war, which is obviously a level of horror we can't imagine right now. But there is something very dangerous going on in America, and that is it has become minority rule, both on the far left and the far right. And I think as a result, neither side speaks to each other. Neither side is interested in any sort of moderate consideration or compromise. Our rule, our government no longer represents where America is. And to think that we're letting these mass shootings continue, to think that we're going to turn back women's rights and kind of return to sort of this old Spain-like mentality, and to think that daughters being born today have fewer rights than their mothers did, it is like you don't recognize America. I think we have an obligation to return

America to where it was and also to ensure that it continues to offer the same types of opportunities it's offered the two of us such that we could have these wonderful decisions around whether to move to London. So I'm not staying. I'm going to move, but I've decided I'm going to try and fight the fight. I'm going to get a little bit more involved in Planned Parenthood. And finally, I don't think there's anything wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with America. We have an obligation to stick around and fight. But again, congratulations on the opportunity. If you move like I do, I'm serious about this. Send me an email. We sound as if we're very simpatico, so to speak.

But I see it as we're not leaving the house. We're just going to go spend some time with a good mate down the street. The strongest alliance in the history of the modern world is the alliance between the United Kingdom and America. So I'd like to think that if you decide to do this, we're both just taking a break. But at our core, we're Americans and we're going to stick around and fight the good fight. We have one quick break before our final question. Stay with us. approach? What learnings have shifted their career trajectories? And how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hey, it's Scott Galloway. And on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series

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a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Question number three. Hey, Scott. I'm Charlie from Lawrence, Kansas. I'm 16 years old, and ever since finding your lectures at NYU and around the country over a year ago, I've become a huge fan of your work. You're someone who I really respect and admire, and I think you had a very similar mindset to mine in your later teenage years. I want to do something impactful with my career and go to a place I feel like I can become something. So my question is twofold.

Would you have any advice for a 16-year-old growing up in this digital age? And secondly, is there anything you wish you did differently in your later teenage years? Thanks so much. Wow, Charlie, your question just kind of stills me. I'm really flattered by that, that a 16-year-old would reach out to me. Oh my gosh, we're going to need a bigger boat. When I was 16, I was just, you know, lost. I didn't, not lost in a bad way, just nothing, just totally unremarkable. Not a very good student, didn't have a ton of friends. You know, my home life was okay, but not great. I wasn't, you know, I was a good athlete when I was young, but once I got to high school

and it became more competitive, I was no longer really a competitive athlete. I was just kind of literally kind of sleepwalking through life and invisible. So I can't give you advice from a success standpoint. What I can tell you, I wish I had done more of, I wish I had taken my academics a little bit more seriously and tried to demonstrate a little bit more discipline. I think if you are in any way academically minded, I still think college is a great way to create a lot of opportunities.

I think it would be unusual if you knew what you wanted to do with your life. When I was your age, I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician, despite the fact that I wasn't very good at the sciences and made absolutely no sense. And I just kind of grabbed it out of the air. And freshman chemistry at UCLA kind of dispelled me of that notion. But I think it would be very unusual if you knew what you wanted to do. So what you want to do is you want to create as much optionality as possible. And the way you do that is one, I believe, through education and through relationships. At your age, it's natural to believe that your parents aren't your enemy, but aren't your allies. And you need to dispel yourself of that notion. And there's some situations where they're not, but most of the time,

your parents are your allies. And a natural hormone release is that makes you not only recognize your parents aren't the heroes that you thought they were, but you seem pissed off that the charade has endured as long as it has, and you resent them and you don't want their advice. And the reality is there are very few people who are more engaged in your success. So one, if in fact, and you know this, if your parents are in fact your allies, make sure they're your allies. You're going to be leaving the house soon. Try and be a good son, if you will. I think getting into a good school, I hate to say this, I think we live in a caste system and getting into a good school is really important. Now,

if that's not an option for you, try and get certified, try to get into some sort of vocational program. But we live in a LinkedIn economy and people want, you want to be able to display your currency digitally. And that's with a degree from a good school or some sort of vocational certification. I would try and get to a city as soon as possible. Two-thirds of economic growth is going to be in cities. But more than anything, at the age of 16, I wish I'd invested a little bit more in my academics, and I'd wished I'd been a little kinder to my mom. I wasn't a bad person, but I was kind of a pain in the ass, and I was disrespectful, and I regret that now. But Charlie, I am scott at stern.nyu.edu. If you would like to reach out

directly, this stuff is so personal and is so individual, but if you reach out to me, we can set up a quick call. I can ask some questions and maybe give you more thoughtful advice. But the fact that you're even thinking this way, Charlie, the fact that you're even thinking about reaching out to people, the fact that you're even thoughtful enough to try and have role models and look to people for guidance, you are, my brother, a million light years ahead of where I was. Thanks for the question, Charlie. That's all for this episode. Again, if you'd like to submit a question,

please submit a voice recording by visiting officehours.propertymedia.com. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Thank you. Thursday. How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter

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