that people feel a sort of they feel an ability to do things they wouldn't do with regard to regular jobs you wouldn't auction off a regular job uh you wouldn't deploy connections as aggressively in connection with regular jobs as people do with withinternships um so this this this this this book that I've been that I that I've been working on and which is now
of being able to pay for your expenses while while you while you work for free uh of being able to pay at an internship auction of being able to afford the academic credit which might be necessary for whatever company it is you want to intern atuh but there's increasingly just a kind of negative power surrounding internships uh to not do one is
So over the next couple of decades here in the 20th and 21st century, it's not just GE and industrial diamond-making, new companies and new technologies auctioning off one of the premier 20th century collections of fakes that actually included a couple of Spanish Forgers as well, which brings up
Is it working? My sense is, not quite yet. at auction . Well, yeah.
collection, which achieved a record-breaking $832 million, the highest total ever for any single-owner collection at auction and the most significant charitable auction in history, as well as the reason that we are here today. So Jonathan-- well, first, let's welcome our presenters.
I was our only coffee buyer. The auction systems that in the coffee world, the niche insider world, started for the best of Panama auctions , these cup
the brewery he ended up uh going to auction and nobody else showed up for the auction so he had no choice but to actually bid on the brewery himself so he bid on the brewery and took it over and he ran it for a while after that but uh that was his only way to recourse at that point
Some homes are for a nonprofits. an auction . So if the person owes $400,000 on his house and this house is worth $600,000,
But if you read that chapter creatively, you can see the connection to what happened with the Google ad auction . So there's some hidden connections that I think most people aren't aware of. You probably would have never guessed that would be an application.
Stephen Levy: Well, well, stuff like that. No one understand ads, right? But I think it's great to explain it. People, people are fascinated because here's a system. You run these auctions . You're the biggest auctioneer in the world, but the highest bidder isn't necessarily the winning bid, right? And the -- yeah, somehow a big factor in the bid is how good an ad is. How's that work? Right? But that's a way to explain how ads fit in into the whole Google world there. And a lot of people, I guess they just don't get the
Barcelona at a prestigious sounding place so internships have become a kind of commodity now strangely uh there are internship auctions the the most absurd of these was a $42,500 paid for a week-long internship with Anna winter at Vogue uh so these things are offered up at you know sort of society events uh at
in Italian uh at an auction in California over the weekend, sold for $40 million US. Now that's the highest price ever at an auction for a brand new car. We've had higher prices of course for kind of vintage cars, but for a brand new car just off the production line, uh this was the highest price ever. Now, this luch had was designated
Is it working? My sense is, not quite yet. And the auction houses played a huge role in this.
Is it working? My sense is, not quite yet. Is it the last auction price?
a sense of things that can be done on stage to sort of liven up what can sometimes be a pretty mundane thing at a charity auction . So imagine, we're all a party.
$10,000. Excuse me. Hold on one second, because I have a new friend on my right who just yelled out the number, $10,000. Welcome to the auction , sir, and be sure to find me afterwards. You're coming to all my auctions moving forward.
I am so pleased to introduce the very special panel that we have with us today to discuss the results of the incredibly successful recent auction hosted by Christie's, as well as the continuing philanthropic legacy of the Rockefeller family. So to start, let me introduce our guests who will be speaking with us today.
So there are real consequences to these and breathing all the stuff. But having the auction online creates a huge power imbalance between people who are savvy with the internet and have
So there are real consequences to these and breathing all the stuff. And the auction was online.
And if you pick a random home in Palo Alto, that is not the fluctuation in the home price. And so auction -driven markets have this nuance where they kind of either get euphoric or they get pessimistic, and they might do both in the same year.
five. Five, six. Do I hear six? It's like an auction . Is there a panda?
simply look out his window here's the Town Square he would look out his window and if the auction produced no bitters he would walk down his stairs go to the courthouse steps and buy the farm for cents on the dollar and it was th witnessing this over and over again as a
They have to put down a deposit and come back within a certain amount of time to pay for the difference. The problem with the auction , a lot of the houses are underwater. They're upside down, which means that they're worth $400,000 but the mortgage balance is $500,000.
And the uni auction was super, super tight.
It's like an auction .
I think it might make us a little money. And the ad auction started in February of 2002. And I arrived in May of 2002 and looked at the ad auction .
The book went to auction .
The book went auction .
down the auction , and there was a time that it would end, and everyone would crowd around for the winning bid.
That they can do auction .
And we had an auction platform even then.
I do sometimes auction them for charity.
thing up for for auction and somebody would bid and say yeah I want it I'll take it whatever the price half million
and we had an auction a lot of friends donated various Goods like web server space web design bags things like that and we
And they have auctions and things like that.
And I used this as one of the first life lessons that I talk about when I talk about what I have learned on stage as an auctioneer. Don't ever cap yourself.
My next selling tip-- sell as yourself. I became a charity auctioneer for Christie's when I was 24 years old. Everyone I worked with at that point who was an auctioneer, for the most part, was at least 20 years older than me, and 90% of them were male.
So in my class, I was in a class, and it was basically me and a bunch of guys, many of whom were already art auctioneers. And that was the only type of auctioneering I had ever seen.
I was our only coffee buyer. of excellence auctions , where they started rewarding farmers based on cup quality blind, and having auctions for their coffee.
though rather than auctioning them to the highest bidder, we add up the total willingness of everyone to pay for different alternatives,
These are the country auctions and the yard sales of the investment world.
And now, they're being lost. And they're being auctioned off in the courthouse. If someone is buying the homes in the auction , the buyer goes to the auction and bids.
and my auctions were closing, which is just so cool.
worth of auctions and it was like $2,500 of stuff, which I probably paid like, who knows in total, $100
before the auctions were added.
and London auctions , in all likelihood 50%, maybe 75%, is
this thing where she auctioned off horse sperm from a very famous horse, and she raised $1 million.
We always had auctions .
But the online auctions have really helped us put things that we're not sure about on a bigger market that we can get
Your chairs are being auctioned off.