NFTs will become 'the asset version of social media': Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk is launching a new NFT collection called VeeFriends. He joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.

Video transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. Non-fungible tokens have already had a hell of a year, and it's only May. From Beeple's $669 million Christie's auction to the Golden State Warriors selling digital championship memorabilia over the weekend for more than $2 million, NFTs have enabled brands and companies and artists to interact with fans in completely new and monetize both ways. And our next guest has been watching that space closely and is finally making his move into the NFT space.

Early investor in Coinbase, Uber, and Facebook, Gary Vaynerchuk finally announcing VeeFriends, a collection of more than 10,000 character NFT tokens. It will also give people access to future events, business conferences, and other access with Gary. And for more on that, happy to bring VaynerMedia CEO, now VeeFriends CEO and creator, Gary Vaynerchuk on with us. And Gary, you know, we've seen a lot of NFT projects. This one is kind of interesting in the way that you pair everything together. But talk to me about how much thought went into this and why this is the decision you came down with.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Thanks for having me. Yes, you know, I've been paying attention for quite a while. I in the winter decided to go heavy into CryptoPunks, the OG NFT project. Got very educated reading, thinking, and then kind of had that eureka moment and remembered and kind of went into default behavior. When I saw the internet eureka moment, I launched an e-commerce wine business before anybody was doing that. When I saw the social media content thing, I launched a long form YouTube show and stood up an account on Facebook and Twitter very early on.

I know this NFT thing is long-term. I think a lot of the projects, to your point, are short-term, and there'll be money lost. Much like internet stocks in '99 and 2000, I think we get greed and short-term and quick buck mentality, unfortunately, you know, gold rush. But the macro NFT thing is real. And so I decided to start up my own project.

For me, in order, it was about building intellectual property. I'm an '80s kid, Transformers, ThunderCats, but Pokemon, Harry Potter. I even built VaynerMedia mainly to buy nostalgic IP and refurbish it. I see NFT as a gateway to create IP. And then underneath it, I'm using the smart contract. Most people are just putting out art. All 10,255 tokens are a ticket to an annual three-year contract for everybody who buys one. A conference called VCon, which is looking to be like a Davos meets South by Southwest meets Rolling Loud and Coachella. So, what people are missing is, it's a smart contract. And real life things can happen, not just the digital aspect.

AKIKO FUJITA: Gary, it's good to talk to you. When you say you think-- you know that NFTs are long-term, there's a lot of those who are watching this say, you know, I'm not so sure. Walk me through what it is that you see. What's that potential that tells you this is here to stay?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Human behavior. We need social currency to communicate with each other-- the clothes we wear, the watches we wear, the homes we buy, the photos we take on vacation, the blue checkmark on Instagram, the "Fortnite" skins and NBA 2K plus-ups. This is already happening. Once people understand the scale of what's going to happen when we start having public wallets that show our tokens, it's going to become the asset version of social media. And so, for me, it's the human psychology that I've traded on in web one and web two that has me very confident about web three.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about the human psychology behind all this, too, because I've been watching this space blow up. And you think about behavioral finance and the fact that you're transacting in a lot of these cases with Ether, not necessarily US dollar, that kind of, in a similar way to credit cards and the way that we spend differently when we spend with cash versus credit cards, detaches people from what exactly they're spending on. I'd be curious to get your take on maybe where we're at in terms of speculation, perhaps greed, when you see--

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Ugh.

ZACK GUZMAN: --Dogecoin up more than 10,000% in the year, where you put us at. Which crypto projects have you worried?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Most. I mean, this is internet 95, '6, '7, '8, '9. Like, there is an absolute NFT winter coming. There's too many projects that are completely built with no intent other than, I'm a celebrity. I'm an intellectual property. I want money as fast as possible. The same way I'm going to print T-shirts, the same way I'm going to do this. I just want it.

For me, you know, look what's behind me. I have ThunderCats. I collect cards. I am a pop culture collectible trader. This is the most native thing to me, which is why, for me, the characters you just saw on screen, I'm thinking about how I'm going to spend the next 45 years of my life getting them on backpacks, sneakers, into consumer packaged goods, on a Netflix television show, kids' books, video games. That-- and that will inherently impact the people that bought that collectability.

And in the short-term, the conference, the gift goats that give you surprise gift six times a year, people are just going to short-term. So I think-- and then there's just supply and demand issues, everybody. Every single intellectual property and every single influencer and famous person that any person with any kind of expertise or size of audience will launch an NFT project because there's no reason not to.

AKIKO FUJITA: Speaking of speculation, Gary, I'd love to get your thoughts on the rise of Dogecoin. Number one, what's the value in it? Do you see value in it? And if so, what is it?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: You know, I don't like to talk about things I don't know. So, big shout out to my brother who bought Doge the day it came out years ago. I got a ton of it given to me because Aaron Battalion, one of the great technologists I know, really educated me on crypto. And I was early into Bitcoin and Ethereum itself. And Doge was one of those things that popped up during that early time for me.

But look, like, what's the value of a Michael Jordan rookie card, which I will buy with quite a bit of the money I make with VeeFriends? It's a human on a piece of cardboard. It's human's belief. And so you get enough humans believing, things get very, very interesting. We weren't around when money was established. We weren't around when gold was established. We-- diamonds. We take that as it's always been that way. You know, we act as if innovation won't happen during our lifetime.

You know, I don't know anything about Doge, except for the enthusiasm on social and the fact that 400,000 people hit me up a day saying, tout it. And I will not talk about things I don't know. But I promise you that people are very naive to what the blockchain and the internet together at scale mean. And we will feel the impacts of that for the rest of our collective lives.

ZACK GUZMAN: Hey, listen, I always respect a guy who comes on here and says, look, I don't want to show things people are telling me to show. When it comes to the NFT space, though, I want to dig deeper into your warning about that because, you know, I've been watching the NFT space, too, and it seems like, this project aside, when we're talking about real use cases for a token that will give you access to something, there are a lot of worries that I have when it comes to maybe replicating-- you know, you can see the NFT in the way it's traded on the smart contract, but platform to platform, we could see replication across things that bring up questions and concerns there. So I mean, when you look at maybe the one thing people are overlooking when it comes to why they might be worried about other NFT projects, what are you seeing now?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Are you talking about fake projects in open sea where somebody thinks they're buying the wrong thing because people are undereducated? Or are you going in a different direction, my friend?

ZACK GUZMAN: That would be one of the directions or maybe even having something on open sea and shifting it over to a different platform. The on-ramp from taking an off-chain item in the memorabilia space and putting it on to the blockchain seems to me to where there might be issues.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: You mean people creating a digital representation of something and then claiming they'll give it to you, but don't deliver things, like that?

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, things like that.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: You know, look, I mean-- look, I was there for internet 96, '7, '8. Everybody was scared of credit cards on the computer. Remember when everybody said social media was bad because your daughter would get kidnapped at the mall? Humans are inherently scared of new things. I have been working for months now putting out educational content to my community around, here's what a non-custodial wallet is.

As a matter of fact, one of the biggest decisions I made with VeeFriends was to make it crypto native, not to take fiat. Because I think it's important to get people accustomed with new things. Unfortunately, when there's new things that happen, the bad guys come out just as much as the good guys come out. And so, yeah, I mean, I think everybody here, before you buy an NFT, spend 20, 30 hours. Don't go just blindly buying my NFT because I've been right about things in the past. Get educated. Understand what you're doing.

Like, people-- this fear of missing out is-- I mean, this is why I built VeeFriends. We have to teach people to be insular. Everyone is looking for so much outside validation. The fear of missing out of a party or not being an Doge is driving people into silliness.

AKIKO FUJITA: Gary, finally, we're talking a lot about content moderation today because of this decision that came down from the Facebook oversight board. But as somebody who very early on saw the potential in social media, who's expanded their brand as a result of that, I wonder what you think of the conversation that's happening right now around how much power these companies have to determine what's actually on the platform. It feels like more and more people are going into their own corners, instead of having this dialogue. I mean, what do you make of this evolution that's happened? And how much value do you see in those platforms right now?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Pendulum swings, right? You know, everything went open. Now everything's going fragmented. Then it will open again. Crypto wallets are about to become public. Social is getting more inherently private, to your point. You know, I think people are very naive of some of the platforms. I'm fascinated by when I talk to my finance friends, when they'll read a headline and say that about, let's say, Facebook, right, without looking at what Facebook is doing with Oculus. If you believe in NFTs and you believe in the metaverse, Facebook's advancements with Oculus in a 3D environment are staggering.

And so, you know, I don't know. People are funny to me. Like, everyone's so worried about a short-term headline without doing meaningful amounts of work. But to your point, if you don't have people's attention on your platform, you definitely can't monetize it through advertising. I think network television is going to feel that soon.

AKIKO FUJITA: Gary Vaynerchuk, always good to get your insights, VeeFriends creator and CEO, as well as CEO of VaynerMedia.