Midweek Update: Celebrity Endorsements and Crypto

There's a difference between selling sandwiches and selling financial advice.

November 16, 2022

At this past year’s Super Bowl, crypto exchange FTX aired a memorable ad featuring Larry David:

The message of the ad was, “This is the future and you don’t want to miss out.” The main problem with the ad is that cryptocurrency is not the wheel, a fork, coffee, or any other simple idea. It’s kind of difficult to explain what cryptocurrency is, and to understand why it has value means understanding the blockchain, minting new coins, wallets, and other tech and economic stuff. In essence, it’s a bit of a gold rush except that gold’s value is finite and easily explained. A large part of crypto is that its worth was about perceived value—people agreed it was worth something so it was. You may argue that the same holds true for all currency, but fiat currency is backed by central banks and governments. Crypto, in essence, has the same value as Beanie Babies or tulips. There’s supply and demand, but their value is ultimately illusory. The only way to keep that bubble filled is with perception. Once that perception pops, crypto and its exchanges can vanish overnight, which is apparently what happened to FTX.

There’s a lot to unpack with the fall of FTX (in particular the “altruism” of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried), but I’m more concerned with the celebrities who took to backing crypto when it was clearly a bubble that could pop at any time. Larry David wasn’t the only celebrity promoting FTX. Tom Brady and Steph Curry were also notable endorsers of FTX. Matt Damon encouraged audiences to go with crypto because “Fortune favors the brave.”

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new, and we passively accept them all the time. I want to argue that folks like David, Brady, et al. aren’t malevolent actors in the crypto space, seeking to swindle fans out of their money. Instead, I’d argue that they were careless. I imagine they had a conversation with their agent who said something like, “Look, cryptocurrencies are the future and this company will pay you handsomely to promote their product. It’s no different than Jennifer Garner promoting Capital One or, at worst, comedians encouraging people to gamble on sports.”

Also, aren't consumers supposed to be savvy? We know elite athletes don’t actually eat at Subway, but no one raises a fuss about that. But if I eat at Subway, the worst thing that will probably happen is I’ll have a tummy ache or accidentally have eaten something that said it was tuna and was not tuna. If I invest an indeterminate amount of money into crypto, an instrument that’s unregulated and not fully understood by the average consumer, I could lose money and have nothing to show for it. At least if I dump money into Caesars Sportsbook, Caesars doesn’t try to convince me that I’m forging a path into a bold new future.

Some will scoff at those who would listen to such an ad. “You’re taking financial advice from Larry David?” But the issue isn’t simply about buying a product. It’s about normalizing something that was unpredictable and risky. What the crypto firms were buying wasn’t customers, but a stab at legitimacy without the actual legwork. Real legitimacy for cryptocurrencies will involve regulations and protections for consumers. That’s not to say that major banks are bastions of integrity, but at least they’re FDIC insured up to $250,000 per depositor. Meanwhile, people can’t get their money out of FTX right now. They’re just out of luck.

Again, I don’t think these celebrities are laughing all the way to the bank (Brady himself had an equity stake in FTX, which means that money is now likely gone). But agents, managers, and clients need to be more clear-eyed in what they’re selling to consumers. Sure, this is a black-eye now for Damon and company, but they’ll inevitably bounce back. I just hope that when they do, they’ll decide it’s wiser to pitch products that aren’t based on smoke and mirrors.

On a somewhat related note, I’m no celebrity, but I’ve now set up Amazon Affiliate linking because it’s very important to me that if I recommend a book or movie to you and you buy it, I get a penny kickback. I need that $10 Amazon gift card to buy yet another Blu-ray.

What I’m Watching

I had a blast watching Glass Onion. While we can debate whether or not it’s better, worse, or about the same level of quality as Knives Out, I feel like the argument is merely a matter of degrees. Writer/director Rian Johnson is in full command of these mysteries, and even though it’s a sequel featuring the same lead detective (Daniel Craig clearly having the time of his life playing Benoit Blanc, a role that’s far less physically demanding than James Bond and doesn’t automatically invite comparisons to other actors), there’s something immensely liberating at play here. There’s no previous source material that has to be honored or honed. There’s no grand mythology to be serviced. It is a terrific mystery yarn that’s well told. While the ground is a bit familiar to Knives Out (a strong “eat the rich” vibe as well as some other comparisons I won’t spoil here), I had a lot of fun walking on it. My biggest complaint is that we’ll probably have to wait another three years for the next installment.

I thought She Said was a terrific book, and I loved that authors and journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey put Harvey Weinstein’s victims center stage (as opposed to Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, which is good, but positions himself as a protagonist in a tale of intrigue). One of the most striking elements of She Said the book was how Kantor and Twohey showed the infrastructure Weinstein had built around himself that allowed his abuse to continue for so long. The new movie turns more of its focus to the individual women and crafts a larger story about women fighting for other women, their daughters, and for the women they were before Weinstein’s abuse stole the futures they wanted. I think that’s equally valid, and I don’t want to fall into a common criticism mistake (one I’ve made in the past) where because the material didn’t do what I thought it should, it is therefore flawed. Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan are terrific as Kantor and Twohy, respectively, and people should definitely give the film a watch.

Where I wrestle is how Hollywood tells its own story and how complicity is somewhat evaded. Weinstein was a power player in Hollywood for decades. I don’t think everyone who ever crossed paths with Weinstein was guilty by association, but I also think the larger story is about a culture of abuse, which I think the book does a good job of exploring as Kantor and Twohy encounter various fixers trying to run damage control for Weinstein. Perhaps that’s not a story that’s possible to tell in two hours or maybe Hollywood isn’t able to tell about itself right now. I don’t want to tear down the story they end up telling because it’s still quite good. But I do think the reckoning hasn’t really arrived beyond rooting out a few bad actors.

I’m also caught up with Andor! It’s amazing that this show exists! After Rise of Skywalker, I was pretty pessimistic about the future of Star Wars, and nothing had really dissuaded me from that pessimism until, oddly enough, the bleakest thing Disney has done in the 21st century. For a show that is firmly PG-13, the material is bruising and forces the viewer to reassess everything you think you know about Star Wars. As someone on Twitter pointed out, imaging being Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), devoting your life to the nasty business of building a rebellion, and then Luke Skywalker comes along with his lightsaber and gets all the credit.

Anyway, I’ll have many more thoughts to share after the Season 1 finale next week, but for now all I’ll say is “Believe the hype.”

What I’m Reading

I finished Newsroom Confidential by Margaret Sullivan, and it was terrific. I think there’s a temptation, especially when we’re so inundated with content, to say that there is no truth or that everything is biased and so on and so forth. That’s why you need a journalistic professional like Sullivan to come in and tell you how major newsrooms work, the conflicts within them, and how the profession needs to move forward when we’ve reached a crisis point for our democracy. While it may be comforting to look back at last week’s midterms and note that all election deniers lost their bids for Secretary of State in battleground states, that feels to me like thinking the slasher is dead before he comes back for one last scare. You’ve got to be vigilant.

I’ve now moved on Underexposed! The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made (no affiliate link because I don’t know if I recommend it yet), and will let you know what I think, although I certainly can’t get enough of learning about movies that were never made (for example, check out David Hughes’ The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Tales from Development Hell).

Also, if you’re looking for quicker reads, I recommend these articles:

Substack Recommendation

As people start moving over from Twitter to Substack, I feel like I have an obligation to help guide folks to the Substacks I read, so I’ll start including one of these recommendations in every Midweek Update.

First up: Nepotism! My dad, Michael Goldberg, has a Substack, The Wicked Son Says. Obviously, I’m a little biased here, but I still think he has some valuable things to say about religion in general and Judaism in particular. A Yale graduate, an ordained rabbi, and a PhD in philosophy, Goldberg the Elder’s approach to religious thought it well worth hearing because he’s not really here to give you the warm and fuzzies. I think that’s appropriate, especially where Judaism is concerned (after all, “Israel” means “Wrestles with God”). We shouldn’t passively accept faith, but instead contend and engage with it. That’s what you’ll get on The Wicked Son Says, a Substack title that comes from the Passover seder about the need to question religious tenets.

I’d also recommend pre-ordering his upcoming (and first!) novel, Zieglitz’s Blessing, which is a story of complicated faith and how our relationship to God changes over the course of our lives.

What I’m Hearing

As someone who was enraptured by the work of Malcolm Gladwell in my 20s and disenchanted with it in my 30s, I immensely enjoyed the new episode of If Books Could Kill about Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers, which not only shines a light on Gladwell’s shoddy research and lazy arguments, but also explains his appeal. Essentially, Gladwell is an excellent storyteller. The problem is that he’s not one to let facts get in the way of a good story. He can’t really get away with that at The New Yorker, which has incredibly high standards of veracity for their reporting, but that lent legitimacy to his books, where there’s clearly not much fact-checking at all.

What I’m Playing

Not as much God of War: Ragnarok as I expected! I played about an hour or so, and then have filled a lot of my time watching movies and reading, but I’ll pick it back up this weekend.

And that’s it! Come back Sunday for my thoughts on Season 5 of The Crown!