(swooshing sound) - YouTube what's up, so so grateful that you clicked and you're about to watch a new YouTube video but before you do, 212-931-5731, that is my
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engagement in there and also access opportunity first looks in that environment. 212-931-5731 join it now and now, to the video you've
been wanting to watch. In today's climate, in society,
I promise you the following: You wanna find a lot of negativity? It's very easy, on the flip side a much more unpopular opinion, is if you wanna find a lot
of happiness and opportunity, you can find it very easily. You decide. (dramatic music) You've got your perspective. I just wanna be happy,
don't you wanna be happy? - Gary, why don't we start
off by, why don't you tell us a little bit about what VaynerMedia is? - You know, obviously
you saw in the video, I try to make it as simple as possible. All we really are is a agency. I think what makes us different is, because I didn't come
from the agency landscape and more importantly,
because I built VaynerMedia with the intent to be a platform for buying businesses and brands during the next economic downturn, it's been built very differently. The first thing that was different was that we have media and
creative under one house. Not part of a holding company
where it's separate companies but from day one, it was
built where both media and creative sit together and the context and the end consumer is
truly, not through reporting, not through data but
truly at the forefront and we think about math
and art as friction to create diamonds, not one is
more valuable than the other. And then really, the only
other big variable difference is it's a dictatorship, you know? (audience laughs) and what I mean by that
is, I don't have a board, I don't have a holding
co, everything wrong at Vayner is 100% my fault
and when something's run by an entrepreneurial operator a lot of good can happen in growth and a lot of growing pains
and silly young things happen and I definitely think we're
dramatically more contemporary than every alternative
at the global scale. We have Singapore, London,
we have a thousand people. It's not a small company. I spent a lot of time
actually, strategically making it about me, look over
here, look at this crazy guy, so that I can operate
something that I think is quite disruptive over
here and I'm proud of that. But I think it's a very different shop because it comes from a
very different agenda. We're not held accountable
to every 90 day finance goals and I think that has
been a massive advantage. - Yeah, no quarterly earnings, huh? - No and no getting on
a call with analysts and appeasing some short-term narrative that's an inside vigged game. (audience laughs) - I remember a meeting
that we had at one point where you came to us and said, you would bring new
channels to us, for example and with Pinterest and you
talked to us about Pinterest and one time you came and you said, "You guys gotta figure out Snapchat. "You gotta be on
Snapchat, it's the future" and at that point, it was just something that my kids did and I
couldn't figure it out. What's next and what's new in that space that we should be looking at? - It's interesting Trish, even in that, it's very rare, very
rare though I'm a human, I'm sure I slip up but I would argue if we had film of me
bringing up Snap in time that it was more likely
that I didn't refer to it as the future and I never predict. I'm just completely
obsessed with right now. What I know right this
second, as we sit here and everybody watching around the world, that LinkedIn and TikTok
are the two platforms that give you organic reach. If you do not pay media,
if you're a nobody and you post on either one
of those two platforms, something great can
happen that cannot happen outside of a miracle 0.00001% chance on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram and YouTube. Those things always fascinate me because I love under-priced real estate. If I came to somebody 25 years ago and said there's an island
called Turks and Caicos that I genuinely believed
more people will go to it over the next 25 years
and we bought up property, everybody would be happy. So I spend all my time on two core things. One, under-priced organic reach, which often is more at a small,
entrepreneurial SMB level. At the corporate level they're important because I want companies to get the reps of understanding the nuances that are making this platform pop and understanding LinkedIn
today is very different than all of us understanding
it four years ago. It's a completely different beast. LinkedIn today acts much more like Facebook did six years ago than the LinkedIn that
we all grew up using, which was a tool, not a content platform. The things I'm learning on TikTok now will matter because those
are getting instilled into 12 and 19 year olds right now and those will become
nuances that quite matter in communication in three,
five, seven, nine years. Obviously, Chase is less
likely to be obsessed with understanding TikTok,
in comparison to Vans or in comparison to Mattel, right? So you think about all those things but I don't know what's next. What I do know is that I'm incredibly good at understanding, as a human,
subjectively, intuitively, of what seems to be current and then I put a ton of
discipline and work ethic and dollars and effort into
proving those hypotheses to be true or false. - So shifting a little,
if you think about, since it's in the news - Okay. - Interested in your thoughts on Twitter's recent announcement about
banning political ads, without getting political
in our discussion but-- - I think the platforms
are making a ridiculously, personally, I think it's smart. I think that platform's
revenue from political ads is not significant enough in return for what the headlining
and positioning means to it and all the vulnerabilities of it. We are in a fully on-tilt,
headline reading society. The amount of opinions in this room, from the two of us to
everybody in this room, to everybody who's watching, where we have deep
convictions and thoughts, predicated on one or two
headlines is laughable. So A, I think it was a smart move by Jack. I think it helps Twitter but I think they the platforms have done
an incredibly bad job in distinguishing what a platform is. People are way on tilt on believing that they're manipulating something. Mark's opportunity when AOC asks him, will you police this truth? Is easily rebuttaled with, can we have CNN and Fox do that too? We are at a very funny place where ask modern technologies to do things that we don't hold traditional
technologies accountable for. So great but I think in the
macro, they're doing a poor job. I'm very curious what
the variable difference is between not fact checking an ad in a Facebook feed,
versus not checking a fact coming out of a news anchor's
mouth on a news platform. - Well let me push back just a little bit. - Please, I love pushing back a bit. - So we do a lot of work right now looking at the impact of bots. On escalating news on social media in a way that if you just saw an article in the New York Times that it might not move at the same pace. And how do you see bots
impacting the spread of news and the spread of fake news, for example? - I don't view technology any different than I look at humans. This is one big game of communication. Do we have data that
shows what Carson Tucker or Don Lemon mean when they say something? That's my pushback, my pushback is when are we gonna hold ourselves accountable for the information? Whether a bot is run to run
more ads or more potential awareness against a headline, or a newscaster uses an adjective in a way that pushes that information, I genuinely do not see the variable
difference to the end consumer. I would argue people are
hearing what they want to hear. I don't know, I see plenty
of things coming on Facebook and CNN and Fox and Twitter
that I'm a big enough boy to decipher what I want to
believe or tend to believe or I'm curious about. This notion that we're so helpless that the second that we see something, we believe it to be true,
I think it's the reverse. I think we're justifying
what we want to be true through the propaganda. - So how should we then consume news as an educated consumer and be discerning. - By putting in the work. You know how many people here
are gonna be keyboard warriors about politics and not
even register to vote? How should we do it? The same way we do everything. Remember when you blindly
believed everything out of your parents mouth? You grew up, it's time
we do that with media. (audience applauds) - So last year you published
the book "Crushing it" which is a bit of an evolution
from the 2009 "Crush it" - Thank you. (audience laughs) - And so, tell us about what has evolved from a trend perspective of branding. What's new and different now, what's stayed the same and what has died? - When I wrote "Crush it" in 2008 and then the book came out in '09, the thought of building a
viable business or lifestyle on the back of YouTube or
Twitter was a laughable event. If you go to amazon right
now and look at the first 500 reviews of "Crush it"
that were published in 2009, basically it's a mix of "this guy's completely
"a snake oil salesman" to "social media will be gone next year". There was not a belief that
enough scale could happen on these platforms to
create something meaningful. So what's evolved is the
acceptance from the masses that there is power
behind these platforms. We've gone from 2009, where
people didn't believe me that these platforms were powerful enough for you to be able to make $80,000 a year to us now feeling like we have
to break up these companies 'cause they're so powerful
in dictating our minds. So that's changed, the
perception of the power of social networks, which oh by the way, are just the current state of where our tension is
on the internet itself. Whether this goes to AR or VR, or voice all this is is where are
we paying attention to? So that's the biggest change. The things that are the same are my belief that there's a lot of people
here in this room watching who have a certain perspective on how they're gonna live their life and what is gonna bring
the most happiness to them and I wanna continue to beat a drum of do not underestimate
the power of this platform. Do not underestimate what it feels like to be desperately happy
making $103,000 a year doing something you love,
versus being unhappy making $197,000 a year
spending it on things to disguise your unhappiness. - And you do talk a lot
on your social channels about hating your job and while obviously, everyone here loves their job. (audience laughs) I mean we all go through points, whether you're on a
non-traditional career path like some of the influencers
that you work with that are entrepreneurs or even a more traditional path like the ones here. What advice, what could we learn, for those of us on a more traditional path from the non-traditional
folks that you work with? - You know it's funny, it's really hard to ask a giraffe to be
a penguin or vice versa and so one thing that's
become much more obvious to me as I've gotten older is like wow, DNA is powerful, I'm so
comfortable with "no" and losing and fear but I'm so empathetic to people that aren't. I and this will surprise a lot
of you that maybe follow me, I'm unbelievably comfortable
with aggressiveness and candor and binary talk on stage but one-on-one, I've really struggled over the last 25 years as an executive with radical candor and
shooting it straight because I'm so optimistic and
I'm always trying to fix it and so that's taken me a lot of work and through that work, I'm like okay, there's the things that come
natural and things that aren't. If you grew up in a framework with parents or customs that really,
desperately over valued outside affirmation, the
opinions of your parents' parents or siblings,
because you come from, let's call it what it is,
an immigrant background where there's a huge commonality there. School, you were so
deeply bought into school that the short term
affirmation of every 90 days with grades and report
cards made you comfortable. It's very hard to then go into hey, this is what you should
learn from entrepreneur land. Don't worry about it,
it's all gonna be fine. That's very hard, you've
fully built yourself as an animal to completely
value outside judgment that is not based on the market but based on another human being. That's what I'd like people to learn, which is like hey, what are we doing here? You've won the four hundred
trillion to one lottery of being a human being, do you really wanna live with regret? Do you not understand that the internet is the greatest optionality
in the history of mankind? That our grandparents
and everybody behind them had nowhere close to the
options that you sit with today? And really, what are you valuing that's making you conform
into doing something that doesn't make you happy,
your current overhead? So sell your home and rent. That sounds crazy, you know when I started talking about hey, in
the pursuit of happiness, would you consider selling
your home and renting? I got destroyed in the comments sections and a lot of the places like
that I'm some horrible person. Like, how is living your
life to pay the bills that you've created for yourself, all that humans do are
create their own jails and then live within it. That's all we do, so knowing
that that's very hard in a human way, the situation that you have with your parents, all that stuff, the professional one feels like I have a prayer
of communicating that and here's my point, if you
wanna be a professional skier or you wanna start a blog
or podcast around cooking, my big thing is, if you
jump and start swimming, this is riding a bike, kissing
a boy or girl or swimming. It seems super scary until you do it and then you just laugh
about why it felt so scary. If you go do that thing
and live more humble, live with judgment, you
could always get a job again. I don't know, my great fear is regret because it is the obvious
thing I see in people that are 80 to 100 years
old that seems super scary. Nobody was thrilled that
they played it safe. It's just, you don't see
it and I think people should spend more time with
the 80 to 100 year olds that aren't their grandparents. (audience laughs) I mean it, I mean it, people need context on life a little bit. I think people have a horrible
relationship with time. Do you know how many people in this room are scared shitless of 30, like
it's some, it means nothing. But our society's decided to tell you that you have to figure it out and marry and children and what
are you talking about? 98% of the 59 year olds I know
don't have it figured out. The hell are we supposed to
have it all figured at 30? 25, like people are
making terrible decisions, getting married because they think they're supposed to by this age. Buying homes because they
think they're supposed to. The rules of modern society have lead to, everybody wants to blame technology and drug companies for all our problems. We need to blame our
norms, our expectations our ridiculous north
stars that make no sense. When I look at this young of a crowd, they're living to 110. There's an enormous
amount of people in here that are gonna live to
110 and are freaking out that they don't have it figured out by 30. You're not even a fucking
quarter of the way there yet. (audience laughs) what are we talking about? So, that's very heady stuff
in its practical layer of business and life and jobs and career, I think everybody owes it to themselves to start something on the side around something that
they're really, desperately. The reason a lot of entrepreneurs
are alco, workaholics (audience laughs) there's a whole different
reason they're alcoholics. Honestly, I'll just go
to that for a minute. Entrepreneurship is super lonely, I hate that entrepreneurship is cool now 'cause people that are not
entrepreneurs are jumping in and it is a dangerous, lonely game. If you're not a purebred,
you will get eaten up. If you don't love losing
and love the struggle and love the pushback, you will lose, you will be unhappy but the reason that a lot of entrepreneurs
are workaholics is 'cause they love it, they got lucky. They like literally love,
I remember not loving it. Being in school, looking at the clock from first period on,
one day in high school feels longer than the
last decade of my life. I mean that and I know
there's an enormous amount of people here, at this right exact moment that are already counting down Friday and that's not good and
that's not good for Chase and that's not good
for them and so we need a better debate and it starts with what we spend our money on. A lot of people are "Gary but how am I "supposed to live in New York City?" I'm like, "Don't." (audience laughs) Like don't, we have to get
more binary around happiness. I really believe that. (ringtone) Hey guys, sorry to interrupt your video. I'm just giving you
this call from my number to let you know that you have
to join my text community. 212-931-5731, hit me up with a text. - I had the real pleasure
of getting to talk to a lot of young people in
my job, here at this company and I feel, even from
a entrepreneurial level within the company that people
are afraid to take risks. "Well I was a communications major, "so therefore I have to go
on the communications path and then I have to be a
more senior communicator". We have a place name, JP Morgan Chase. You can, like Mary said,
you can move to London, you can move to Dubai and take a risk but people are terrified,
how do you get that-- - Trish, people are in the business of no. People are in the business of saying, "no" before they asked. People prefer to blame the machine. I'm aware, I have it at Vayner. I have a full, hardcore open-door policy but some people would
rather go to the bathroom and vent than actually talk to me, when I've proven over the last half decade how unbelievably safe it is to talk to me. - So how do you do it? How do you push yourself to take a risk? - Practice. - Hmm, what do you mean? - I've been thinking a
lot about this lately. I think you have to challenge yourself. Listen, careers are, the
reason I talk so much about work is, it's a scary
percentage of our entire life. The amount of time you spend working in comparison to everything else you do, when you add sleeping into the equation, it gets really intense. So I really push people
here and how do you do it? If it's too hard to do here because you're a student
and you're in a machine and now you're this, you have
to try to do things outside. I actually think somebody
here, off of this talk, who then goes and tries
skiing, I don't know why I'm stuck on that today,
for the first time and never was a skier, or
cooking, or going to an opera, doing something completely uncomfortable may start the process of them doing something uncomfortable here. I think it's practice,
I think you need to, by the way, I like to go
literal once in a while. I'm hoping one person does this. Go volunteer at a nursing
home for one day in your life. A, I think you'll get a lot of value of what I talked about earlier, 'cause perspective is the game and you can get it real quick
if you go into that jungle. And B, that's you doing
something uncomfortable. I think people have to break patterns. I think you do something different or build courage to do something different by getting used to it. The great fortune of my
life was I was an immigrant who got picked on for not
being able to speak English. I was a terrible student,
I was not good at sports. I basically lived the
first 18 years of my life telling me that I was a losing player. So I got real cozy with losing. I loved losing, it's why I associate so much more with people that
don't come from privilege. Whether they look that part and look, I view privilege first and foremost, we don't have, we can see a
white male looks privileged. We can see somebody who's well
off financially as privilege. The real privilege game in our society is what's going on in everybody's dome. Mental privilege is number one. This is why I talk so
much about parenting. We're living through the worst execution of parenting in our society because we're living through
such enormous success, abundance and prosperity in
America for the last 67 years and so now parents are
getting into things. You know, parents during
the great depression struggled with going to school
and yelling at the teacher for not doing this,
that or the other thing. So we're living in eighth place trophies, fake environments, entitlement. There are kids in this room right now who take money from their parents and are over the age of 22. I believe that that is the
number one poison in our society. I believe it creates
enormous fake environments. It subconsciously tells children that they're not capable and
they need their parents help and fake environments are bad and it leads to bad behavior. Do you know that our society doesn't talk about saving money at all? We don't talk about saving money at all. We don't talk about borrowing
money from our parents and paying them back, that's what two generations ago used to do. Now we just, we're so fucking
entitled, we just expect. Everybody always asks me, "Hey, how do I manage these millennials?" I'm like, "With empathy." they were parented in an environment where if you came in ninth,
they clapped for you. (audience laughs) listen, I think this is a
super important subject matter. I'm not saying boo somebody
and make them feel like, I'm a product of self-esteem. My Mom did the greatest job of self-esteem but she also created accountability. And we really need to debate that. - So you have kids. - Yup. - A little bit older. - 10 and seven. - 10 and seven, okay,
so I know so many kids as a Mom of teenagers who are struggling with the existing classroom
format of you have to go class for 45 minutes and take
English and then math and then science and they're struggling and it feels like it's a
broken education system, relative to where the world is moving and this entrepreneurial spirit, yet they still have no
choice but to go through it. So what advice do you give your kids? - Listen, I'm a hardcore D and F student, so I'm not interested in hypocrisy. My daughter who's 10 looks
like she's a big time student. I think she studied more yesterday than I did in my entire career. (audience laughs) And that's awesome, I have no
interest in frowning on that. I think that's great and as
long as that makes her happy and we have proper
conversations around that, I don't think my son's
gonna go exactly that route but for me, it's not about
demonizing the system. It's about having a 360 conversation. I have no interest in my
children being entrepreneurs. If they happen to have that DNA and that makes them, the only thing I want my kids to do is be as
happy as I am in what they do. If they look at my and look,
now there's a new variable. Things with me continue to
grow, I'm very empathetic but they may look at it and be like, "I don't want any part of that". And I'm gonna go to Peru and
give away all his money, right? And I'm good with that. (audience laughs) I really am, I'm really good with that. I really, really just want
them to find their thing and if their thing is something that I am maybe not as passionate about, which is be more within the system, create less risk, my kids could say, "You know what, I hate entrepreneurship, "it made Dad travel a lot, I hate it." that makes sense to me
and so my communication with my children is more about them truly looking for their happiness and understanding the world will evolve quite a bit by the time
they hit the real world and leaning into the
happiness but practically. You wanna go paint with tomatoes in Peru? That's amazing, just FYI, I'm
not giving you one dollar. And that's amazing, like
to me if they're gonna live with four friends in a commune, that's tremendous, that's awesome. To me, it's just about
merit and happiness. Practical optimism. - So this is a early in career audience that you've got here. What is some practical actual advice that they could take away and
how are they gonna advance themselves, advance their careers from a personal branding perspective? Something they'd walk out of
the room and do immediately. - So my number, number
one thing that I think may be very unique and
couldn't be more passionate in delivering to this
audience is the following. I really highly recommend that
you die on your own sword. Let me explain what I mean by that. Every day, a lot of you are in meetings where things are being talked about that you may have some insights, opinions and actual knowledge about and you are not communicating an opposing view because you know that it won't be accepted by the managers above you and you think it's a
vulnerability by communicating it. And I think it's the reverse. I think there's an incredibly soft and respectful way for
you to create a data point to the conversation and that I believe this is what I see a lot happening, where people don't say anything, 'cause they're appeasing how to move up, manager to manager to manager. The world actually changes
and then the company resets and the executive, by
not saying something, gets viewed upon as, that
was their point of view and they get hurt by
pandering to the machine, versus by being historically
correct in the room. When all those executives either grow within the organization or
disperse to other organizations, they become an interesting
prospect to bring along, because they were historically correct. I'm giving advice that I
take as an entrepreneur. My businesses are always much slower and smaller upfront because I'm often talking about and executing on something that hasn't been accepted
in the macro yet. And all the upside is on the back end. I think people in here are sitting on their words and they
shouldn't and everybody knows it. This entire room is in meetings every day where we talk about things
that they don't agree with and they don't say a single word. I don't think you should
say 'em the way I do (audience laughs) I say them aggressively in my Jersey style because I have nobody who can fire me. (audience laughs) I mean that, the client can fire me and that would be my
fault but I understand why executives can't do what I do. But if I was a senior executive or my first day intern, knowing my communication style of DNA, I would just do it very politely and soft but I would say look, I
don't think banner ads, even though the data shows
that it's doing well, I think we're only looking
at short term conversions and not factoring in LTV
and it has decline in CAC and what's the value of that customer. I would share my thoughts. The key that I notice is, but you have to know what
you're talking about. Where a lot of people get caught is they think they know
what they're talking about and then they say something
and they're wrong. One of the things that's
super interesting to me is I talk about a very narrow thing. I stay very narrow, I'm just
not interested in being wrong. So I actually stay quiet
for all the talking I do, I'm quiet around 99.9% of things. It's why I don't get involved in a lot of other subject matters. I could talk about marketing, I could talk about the Jet's offense line woes (audience laughs) I could talk about wine
but I keep it narrow 'cause I don't know about healthcare. - But you probably have an opinion. - That's for sure, every one of us does but that's not the kind of thing that I would stake in the
ground for career advancement. - So you do know a lot about wine, so tell us, what's your
favorite Sauvignon Blanc and your favorite cab? - My favorite Sauvignon Blancs tend to be from the Sancerre region in France, because I tend to like
stoney, flinty flavors more than the grass that
you get from New Zealand and I think California
Sauvignon Blanc sucks. (audience laughs) So, Sancerre, Lucien
Crochet is a great producer, so I would say that and then on cab, I think cab is the most
overpriced wine in the world. It became very popular,
I think Napa Valley cabs are wildly overpriced, so for Cabernet, maybe a Bordeaux based cab from the Medoc because I tend to like a little more vegetal and nuanced flavors. And by the way, it's similar to media. It's not that I hate
television commercials, I just think there's better alternatives. If you love Cabernet and
I'm sure 90% of the people that like red wine like
to some degree to love it, I just know that there's
alternatives in Portugal, alternatives in Argentina that can appease your big fruit, silky,
creamy, oaky flavors for a third of the price. It's never about anything
other than arbitrage for me. So it's not that Napa cabs
suck or Cabernet sucks, it's that you're paying for the brand of Napa cab and you're
not educated to know that you can get that fulfillment
from the Priorat in Spain. (audience laughs) - Okay, one more question-- - And by the way, on that note, just to make a segue to some
of the stuff I talk about, that is absolutely my thesis in marketing. I don't hate direct mail, you can show me direct mail that works, I just don't know that you've perfectly
executed one mile radius Facebook ads with contextual creative to the person that's seeing it. That's all. - How did your wine business
lead to VaynerMedia. - That, when I had the
awakening at 34 of like, wait a minute, I'm not a great retailer, I'm a great communicator,
I built this business from three to 60 million
dollars with no money because I was right about
eCommerce, I was right about email, I was right
about Google AdWords. I was right about YouTube,
I was right about Twitter. All five things I just told
you, you guys are youngsters. When I started winelibrary.com in 1996, people told me the internet
was a fad, the whole thing. Forget about Snapchat or Vine
or TikTok, the whole thing. People that sold the Yellow Pages in a chamber of commerce
event made fun of me, like, this kid's, he's gonna be wrong. Like he doesn't know, he's a child. And I was like, "The
consumer's always right". I don't even feel like I'm a human being. All I think I am is a pass-through to what humans are actually doing. I'm not right about TikTok,
humans are doing it. There's hundreds of
millions of people using it. This is not prediction
time, this happened. I love people like, what's next, you're Nostradamus, you predict. I'm like, I'm a post-game newscaster. (audience laughs) I'm not Nostradamus,
I'm like Howard Cosell. This happened, podcasting happened. - He was a newscaster. (audience laughs) - LinkedIn happened, I've never predicted a thing in my life, I'm just not scared to execute
on what's actually happening, 'cause I'm not in the
business of making reports or politics my north star. - Why don't we open it up to the crowd? - Let's go. - You probably need a mic so that the people watching
the webcast can hear you. - And there's one over there for next. - How are you? - [Audience Member] Hey
Gary I'm doing well. My name's Dave Davis, how you doin' man. I have a question, so I'm
a father, I'm 29 years old. I have a four year old and my question pertains to, I want her to be safe, I wanna try to some degree help make sure she doesn't really get off track and provide her best school,
best things like that. But I know that you
mentioned your philosophy on your children and just
wanna get your advice from a parent perspective, right? When do you kinda say-- - I got it, look, first of all. My interest in giving any specific person parenting advice, is 0.0, I
think everybody needs to parent the way they decide to parent. I like communicating the alternatives to what I think is being accepted, especially no different
than TikTok happened. I, Gary Vaynerchuk, get
over a thousand DMs a week on Instagram from kids
that are deeply resentful of their parents for
over-manipulating their lives. I'm talking about, I hate my parents 'cause they pay for my Equinox and Uber. (audience laughs) I reply and say, "Then stop
taking the money, dick". (audience laughs) But I also know what's
going on at a higher level. Which is parents are using their children as products to impress
their contemporaries. The reason parents pay is not necessarily because they wanna help
the kid, it's they want their friend, their sister, their parents or others to think little
Johnny and Sally are successful. So you need to do you but let me say this. I don't understand why people can't remember them being kids. I love parents that are
like, "I restrict my kids "time on their phone", I'm
like, "They've seen porn". Like this notion that we can
control life is laughable and more importantly, we're
giving indicators to kids that we don't trust them,
which creates self doubt which really leads to
a lot of unhappiness. So look, you get to pick your north star. My north star is self-esteem and accountability and happiness. Not Harvard, not entrepreneurship,
not winning, that. I want them to be happy, big time. I want them to be accountable. I'll never forget, I was a
really good baseball player in third and fourth grade,
before talent kicked in and this one kid, John
Longo was a real pitcher, big fat Italian kid,
if you're watching John (audience laughs) and because he was so
big, he could throw gas and he just overpowered me and I went 0-4 and struck out four
times, which is unheard of because I was really at my apex then. And I just remember my Mom coming in and I came in and starting
looking for excuses like I should've batted fourth today, it was sunny, she was like
"You struck out four times". Meanwhile, this is the woman
who, when I opened the door for an elderly woman at
McDonald's once, treated it as a Nobel Prize winning award behavior. So she created enormous self-esteem
but not delusion, right? Listen, if you're five foot four and your parents are telling you, "Yes, you can go to the
NBA, Abraham" that's fine (audience laughs) but it needs to be added
with "and you will be one "of the only three people
in the history of the sport" and oh by the way, Muggsy
Bogues and Spud Webb could do all these other things that you are showing that you cannot. (audience laughs) This, you can be anything delusion is what's leading to a lot of resentment and pushback and so I would just tell you that delusion and more importantly what you put on a north
star today will change. Look, college is under siege. There's gonna be seven or eight colleges with enough brand equity in fifteen years to maintain their spot
but the rest of them are in real trouble. I'm 43 and I was making $5,000 a weekend selling baseball cards
as 12, 13, 14 year old and was considered a loser. Today, I'm in the Wall Street Journal 'cause entrepreneurship is cool. Back then, if you didn't
go to a great college, you had no chance of happiness or success. By the time your kid in 14 years enters the time to go into school or in 18 years comes out of it, I have a funny feeling that
the rules will be different. So keep that in mind. - [Audience Member] Thank
you, hi, good afternoon. Thank you so much and I
just wanna say thank you for introducing over
and over and over again, happiness because I think people forget when you're supposed to
have this planned out, this school, all these things on paper, they forget what it is
to actually be happy. So I'm really-- - And, and I apologize and you decide. You decide what that is. Not me, not the game,
not your parents, you. Which is what gets me into process. Why do I want people to do what they love? Because if your chasing
something for affirmation, you're in trouble. I don't want the trophies, I don't want the
accolades, I want the game. - [Audience Member] So my
question to you is this. In the universe of
self-branding and social media, you produce a lot of
content and it's meaningful because I've been on binges
where I watched your videos. Okay, so that'll happen while we're here. So for me, I would like
to know your thoughts on if you're building your brand, what's a good starting
point to introduce yourself. - The truth, the truth. - [Audience Member] The truth? - The truth, the truth is undefeated. That's it and people
are scared of the truth. That's the only advantage you have. There's so much content
being produced today, the only way you actually
can break through is your unique truth, it's just true. There's just a volume of
creative and consumption that we've never seen before, so that to build, you've gotta
lean into your uniqueness. My truth of baseball
cards and flea marketing and root beer and the Jets and wine, those are the unique
things that make me feel a little bit different than others. It's also a lot easier to produce content when you don't have to think. My friends, it's a lot
easier to produce content when you don't have to think. - [Audience Member]
Document, don't create. - That's right and the reason I brought up document and don't create is
I'm not scared of my truth. My strengths, my weaknesses, it's not fun when you're actively the CEO
of a thousand person company to actively always constantly
talk about struggling with radical candor, knowing
your employee sees that and then they're sitting in front of you and you're dancing around. The last scene of Eminem,
"8 Mile" last scene, most important scene in
movie history, I believe it. (audience laughs) In that battle rap, by
him exposing himself, he left nothing for the opposing party. The most unhappiness you will ever have is the secret you're hiding,
because you don't want anybody to have that leverage. Once you let it go, you become
fundamentally unstoppable. - [Audience Member] Thank you so much. - You're welcome. Let's go to that lady first. We'll go to this gentleman next. - [Audience Member] Hi Gary,
I work closely with Trish supporting our thinking
and (speaks faintly) - Awesome. - [Audience Member] I'm
a huge fan of the Resy restaurant app, I know
you're one of the founders. - I am. - [Audience Member] So
I'm just interested in understanding better how do you decide which company you wanna
invest in, on support and how do you decide which
industry you wanna get into. I know you work with
wine, restaurants, media on social media, so just elaborate a little bit more about that. - Thank you, so it's really serendipity. I started a fund at the
same time that my friend Ben leventhal was just
leaving his current gig. We had dinner one night and he's like "I have good news, eater
just got sold to Vox" and I'm like, "I have good
news, I'm starting a fund". We're like, maybe we should
do something together and literally during that
dinner, we were like, you know, maybe what Uber did for taxis, we can do for the supply and
demand of restaurant seats and that was our opening thesis, which was why don't restaurant
seats sell like airlines more than just like the same price. There was no supply and demand metric. Ultimately, that's not what Resy became. What we learned after 24 months was, open table's not that
good, so let's just go right at that, that's what we did and that's what eventually lead (coughs) excuse me, to it's great success and the enormous exit we had
recently and so, serendipity. I'm a counter puncher, I'm
much more Floyd Mayweather than Mike Tyson, I don't wake up and I'm like, I'm gonna go kill that. I'm more living, living,
listening, listening. I'm like oh, sports agency too. As much passion as I have to buy the Jets, I never viewed it as, I'm gonna start a Jerry Maguire like business
and then buy the Jets. But then when I started
looking and hearing, I'm like oh, this industry
could be disrupted. So I spent a lot of time listening. I always say that to people that follow me who are most hardcore, every second you don't see me, I'm listening. It's why I love Q&A,
it's why I read my DMs. It's why I started my text platform, because people feel even
more comfortable telling me. I want the truth, right? That's where the real stuff is. I would've never gotten into parenting, I came from my parents giving me nothing. Even when I said people complaining about their parents paying, you should've seen everybody's face here, like "Fuck, I wish my
parents paid for me", right? (audience laughs) I would've never known that,
I would have never known what kind of sadness
people that were getting subsidized would actually feel. We don't have empathy for
other people's problems. We think our problem is the problem. And so, a lot of listening and that's what my next
businesses will be, they'll be because I've listened, did a little homework, see the blood in the water, shark it up. (audience laughs) - [Audience Member] Hi Gary, thanks for being with us here today. - Thanks for having me. - [Audience Member] So I'm
here, I'm next to my wife today. She's an executive director of a nonprofit called CULIKID, available to children, teens,
adolescents with special needs and it's a culinary program. So during grassroots, she
about a year and a half ago she quit her job, founded
this organization, brought her program to
them and now she's in, she's become the executive director. It's a great opportunity,
she's very happy, how much she can talk about. So the problem that we're having and I say "We" because I support her is, how do we, when we apply for grants and foundations, things
like that and donations, how do we, without having
the right track record of five, 10 years, a lot
of these organizations already have, who will they donate to, things like that, how do
we grab their attention with meaningful content,
documenting things that we're doing and hopefully, we can
change the conversation around-- - By doing that, you listen
to the way you just said it. The fact that you know that
it's content, which it is. Communication is how everything happens. Documenting it, which you understand. It's kind of like you saying,
"How do I get healthier?" I know I have to eat better
and work out every day but how do I really do it Gary? I'm like, by eating better
and working out every day. You're talking about a lack of patience. No nonprofit that has no
awareness and didn't exist should be getting an
overflow of donations. That's not how it works,
you need to put out content. You need to devalue the production value and upvalue the output and that's it. Now the tactics of, do you want ads against high net worth individuals on the upper west side, yes. You fish where the fish are
but it's just making content and making sure it's seen. Whether you have no money
and have to go organic, LinkedIn and Tiktok or
whether you do have money and all of a sudden,
Facebook, pre-roll YouTube, Instagram story swipe up
ads become your framework? That's the game, rinse and repeat. - [Audience Member] Thank you. - You're welcome. Who's got questions, there's
two gentlemen up here, there's a young lady right there. Let's go right down. You'll go to her next? - [Host] Yeah. It's you bro, yeah, congrats. (audience laughs) How are you? - [Audience Member] I
just wanted to thank you for being raw, real and honest. I really appreciate that,
that's why I follow you. So my name's (speaker
coughs), I work in digital account opening I just graduated from Seton Hall, go Pirates. I'm in a lot of meetings every day. I mean six to eighteen a day and sometimes I'm not always the one that's effective in the meetings, like I don't need to be there. - Yes. - [Audience Member] Sometimes
I do get to run them. Now when I run meetings, I see two ways that people do it, one is to not distract and come in with an
agenda (speaks faintly). And second, is in
creating (speaks faintly). - Yes, yes, yes. - [Audience Member] So I was wondering, what is your favorite
thing about meetings? - To make them way less long. (audience laughs) But to answer your question, both. I think it's important to
have a Swiss army knife. To your point, sometimes
I'm going into the meeting because I need more context
and then I'll go creative. And sometimes I'm trying
to deliver something and I'll go more tactical. I think they both work, I just think they all run way too long,
there's not a single meeting that anybody in this room has been on that wasn't too long,
I fully believe that. - [Audience Member] Thank you. - You're welcome. - [Audience Member] Hey Gary. - How are you? - I'm good. - Good. - [Audience Member] I'm a big fan. So in creating all the
content that you create and speaking your truth,
have you ever thought about creating your own reality TV show? - No but I do think the vlog
has a little bit of that. Obviously, you probably know this. I'm quite private, I share nothing about my family or personal life. First of all, I would never let a network have that much control or economic upside, knowing the world that I live in but even then, I have too
much empathy for them, because they would want
all the other stuff and that's just a line
I'm not willing to cross. So no but I definitely think the vlog and what we do with DailyVee
gets into the nuances of it. That I enjoy the ability
to control the narrative and not do hellacious
things for Nielsen ratings. Listen, I am never, ever
going to be part of a machine that I don't control, because
it doesn't sound interesting to me and that's why
I would never do that. Got two over here, one back there. - Mike? - Yeah, you two can, I have no preference of who gets the question,
just as many as possible. - [Audience Member] Hi Gary. - Hi. - [Noah] I'm Noah Banks. - Hey Noah. - [Noah] I wanna say first off, thank you for airing your content
coming up two years ago and I actually used to vlog
the stuff that you taught for us outside work hours
and then inside work. I suggested everybody follow
you, there's a lot of stuff you can actually apply to the job here. (Trish applauds) The question I do have is, the
one thing I do struggle with actually, I didn't talk about-- - Yes. - [Noah] Idea of focusing on
one thing, you know that book came out everyone was
like, focus on one thing, develop that one skill
versus also where I feel like I kind of am right,
have a lot of interests, where I wanna dive into
a lot of different things but sometimes I feel bad
about it because like hey, I don't know if that's the right path. So what is your opinion on
sticking to one thing, or-- - I'm fundamentally the byproduct of not sticking to one thing. I'm in the business of
trying to juggle 50 balls and knowing 13 of them will fall and being thrilled about that, because I have 37 balls in the air. Because if I had one ball in the air, I'd wanna call it quits and I think you should do what you wanna do. - [Audience Member] I put a lot of content on the Calvin Fitness on LinkedIn, I'd love for you to check
it out, see what you think. (audience laughs) - I will, Noah Banks. Such a good fucking name. (audience laughs) I will yeah but bro and
this is for everybody, this will always happen. There are fundamentally,
it's very historically true, there's the black and
white way and the gray way. And things that ebb and flow,
they have their moments. I don't even know what
book you're talking about, focus on one thing but it has its moment. And then next week, some young
lady's gonna put out a book called, "Do 64 things" and
it will have its moment. This is a self-awareness game. I'm not right, I'm just
comfortable doing me. I'm just hopeful you can do that too. There is no right, you wanna be type A, cross every T, make 700
lists a day, amazing. Just make sure that you're doing it because that's how you like it, right? That's it, there is only the way, you will always win when you
lean into your natural upside. Our society is built to
sell you on closing the gap on your weaknesses, all the upside is tripling down on your strengths. - [Audience Member] Hey Gary. - How are you? - [Audience Member] James. - James. - [Audience Member] (speaks faintly) - I love it. - [Audience Member] Just had a
quick question about failure. - Yes. - [Audience Member]
What would you consider is your biggest failure and
what did you learn from it? - Jeez, I think my biggest
failure was working every minute of my 20s and
when I say every minute, I mean all of them, like
no weekends, no friends. I was just too hungry, it's
why I've always liked Koby. It almost feels like it's a
little evil and dangerous. I'm like, I get that. I went too far, balance matters and I think I resent and
regret and I really don't, which is why I even took a pause but I think the biggest
thing I learned about that is it wouldn't have killed me to go out a couple of Friday nights. So I think I'm more balanced
at 43 than I was at 23 but bro, I'm gonna tell you something. I'm really trying to
manifest an answer for you. It's unbelievable how much practice I have on the inability to dwell. You know, I passed on Uber
twice on the angel round from one of the people that
I was best friends with while investing in a bunch of other things and that $50,000 investment would be worth $900 million dollars. That was a mistake. (audience laughs) you know, there's so many mistakes. I make a mistake every day of my life. Like a lot of them, especially now where I'm crippled by opportunity. Every day, I'm fundamentally
sure of the following sentence: every day I'm making pretty big mistakes because I'm saying no to something that could have lead to the big thing of happiness or success. I'm just not crippled by that. I just don't understand why
people spend time on that. Do you know any people
that are in college debt spend 80% of their
downtime being resentful that they took on debt for something they'd come to realize didn't bring them as much value in return? The problem is, it's over. If they took all that time, garage saling and going to TJ Maxx and flipping, they could start chipping
away at the debt. TJ Maxx is loaded with arbitrage. (audience laughs) It is, you got to TJ Maxx, spend $1,000 and make $4,000 on eBay and
Amazon every day of the week. But instead of making that
$3,000 of putting in work instead of watching Netflix
or going to do something else, people would rather sit and complain. People would rather sit in
a bar on a Friday afternoon buying $18 cocktail and complain that they're in college debt
than do what I just said. - [Audience Member]
You sound very eloquent and you deliver on what you
say, so appreciate that. - Nothing. (audience laughs) I've just lived, I actually
think that's the answer. I believe that a lot of people
over correct with tutoring. I believe that humans, especially today, are making mountains out of molehills. I'm sure my team that's
here will tell you, the company wide emails that I send or the things I read in Slack have no grammar structure whatsoever. I don't even think grammar
structure's a word. (audience laughs) Like nothing bro, you know why? I don't give a shit what they
think of how I'm talking. They're are people right
now that didn't like that I cursed four times during this talk and decided not to hear
everything I just talked about. I can't control that. (audience laughs) I can't and more importantly,
I bring this up now in the meta because if
you're one of those people on simulcast or in this room,
if that's what you're deciding to focus on, there's a real problem. There's a real problem. In life, you find what you're looking for. In today's climate, in society, I promise you the following. You wanna find a lot of negativity? It's very easy, on the flip side, a much more unpopular
opinion is if you wanna find a lot of happiness and opportunity, you can find it very easily, you decide. (audience applauds)
