I paid $10,000 for dinner with Gary Vee.. Here's what I learned.

Everybody, welcome back to the channel. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I just completed a three week sabbatical in which I had no screens, no slack, no email. It was glorious. It turns out that there's a whole world out there outside of my email inbox. Who would have thought? And I started my sabbatical with a trip to New York City to have dinner with Gary Vaynerchuk. I finally met Gary in 2015 when I booked him to speak at one of our events. And I was really impressed with the man who was behind the sc. I hadn't seen Gary since before the pandemic, so he had just launched Empathy Wines and obviously the world hadn't shut down. And a lot's changed since then. And Gary has changed a lot since then too. First of all, he spent a lot of time talking about what he thinks is gonna happen in the crypto and NFT marketplace. Obviously that's what he's super hot on right now. But what he shared privately that I haven't heard him say publicly, is that he fully expects there to be a massive, massive NFT crash. He even said that he thinks that some of the big projects like Bored Apes and the other really mainstays in the NFT space are going to fall 50, 60, 70, even 80%. And that will coincide with a lot of the projects just completely going out of business. It was interesting to hear him talk about that because publicly he is so bullish on NFTs. And he shared that long term he's just as bullish as he says, but that he expects there to be a major correction because most creators are not treating NFTs like businesses, they're treating them like cash grabs. And if you don't have operations, if you don't have an operator thinking about how this is going to become a business, then there's a very high likelihood that this is going to crash. It was also really interesting to hear Gary share about what his business model was for Veefriends, his NFT project. I did not see this part coming. Gary told me that he believes that Veefriends is going to be the project that gets him the New York Jets. What? This did not compute when he said it to me. And then he explained a little bit about how he plans to leverage Veefriends in order to buy a football team that's gonna cost several billion dollars. In the example of a dinner deer, he was saying, maybe I'll start a venison jerky line and I'll call it the Dinner Deer. And Everybody who owns the Dinner Deer have equity or profit shares in that business. And as a result, I'll have a built in community of people who want to buy my jerky and I'll be able to reward my NFT holders. When he said that, I finally understood what he meant when he said that Veefriends is going to be the project that gets him the New York Jets. What Gary shared is that each of these different characters could theoretically have their own business. And as they each have their own business, one of those could take off and become a multibillion dollar company. So what he's really doing with Veefriends is building a community of buyers and supporters. If you follow Gary's work, you know he just launched Veefriends 2, which I think had 40,000 new people coming into the community. Each one of those are incentivized to promote anything that drives up the value of the nft. Are you starting to see where this is going? So four years from now, if Gary decides to start a Zoom competitor called the Hangout Hawk, everyone who owns a Veefriends token is now financially incentivized to use that platform and to promote that platform over something like Zoom or Google Meet. So now he has 50 to 100,000 raving fans who are financially incentivized to use every product that he launches and drive up the value of that nft. That is a built in marketing machine for every single product or every project that Gary launches to the Veefriends community. That's when I went, oh my goodness, this dude is so next level. Now I teach something similar. I talk about how if you have even a small community, when you go and launch a product, you'll get to that 20%, 25 sales a day really quickly. And it only takes four products doing 25 sales a day at a $30 price point to have a million dollar business. And you can do that with a Facebook group or an Instagram or TikTok or an email list. There's lots of ways to do it and we talk about that in depth in our community. So if you have a small group of people who care about what you have to say, then it's, it's really a slam dunk to get product off the ground. Gary is just using NFTs to be the thing that aligns that community behind whatever it is that he's going to launch. I mean, if you think about the fact that he's going to have 10,000 people at VCon who are all drinking the Garyvee Kool Aid and talking about how much they're going to drive up the value of this. And then he goes and launches a business to those 10,000 people, it will take off immediately. And if you look at his track record, this is exactly what he did with the company Empathy Wines. Empathy Wines sold for. For over $100 million despite being only two years old. And Empathy Wines was built off the back of Gary's audience. He talked about it publicly. He drove up sales for it. He even has one of his tokens being about Empathy Wine. So he's the marketing machine behind that. And a private equity group came in and bought it for $100 million. That's power. That is real influence. So when you tie in the NFT and all of this momentum that this group has, and he launches more businesses, who you could talk about there being 20 different Empathy wines that are much bigger than that project was, that's. That's where it really. It sunk in for me. Gary and I got into a really interesting conversation where he was talking about how most entrepreneurs are operating from a place of trying to get rather than to give. And I observed in Gary that what made him so different and made him so successful was that he had flipped the script. And the thing on his mind with veefriends is how do I give as much as possible to drive up the value of the token for every single one of my holders? And as a result of him having that mindset, he's going to effortlessly create businesses that become worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. And he and I went into this conversation about how most entrepreneurs are getting into this game because they don't have enough money, and therefore they're operating from a place of lack of. Gary got into the game because he didn't have enough money, but he was so grateful and thankful that he was giving as much as possible. And these were his words. He says he operates from a place of abundance first, that there's enough to go around that everybody's going to be able to get theirs, that he doesn't need to take anything. And that has resonated with me so much as somebody who can see the parts of me that are scared, the parts of me that operate in scarcity, the parts of me that grew up in, you know, with a single mom in Cleveland, on reduced lunch programs at school, worried that I was never going to be able to accomplish my dreams. Like that part of me is still in me, and I don't like that part of myself. And the part of me that that feels the most alive is the part that is effortlessly giving and moving forward without any attachment to the result. And I don't know what it is about Gary that is able to operate from that place most of the time, but he does and genuinely doesn't care about what he gets out of it. Part of the magic of Gary is that he gives other people permission to be themselves while also going after everything. They want to work hard, but also to do it from a place of true authenticity. And that's why I put out all the content that I do. This is my way of practicing that. This is my way of building that muscle. You know, I'm now at the age. I'm 34. I'm at the age when Gary started putting out content. And so there's something very poetic to me about following somebody who started over at 34. And it's given me permission to sort of start over at 34, to start over with a new level of authenticity, a new level of service, a new level of contribution. And this is my way of practicing that and giving as much as possible to the people who follow my work. If I can demystify the path to success that's worked for me and a bunch of people that I've worked with, then I've done a really good thing in the world, and I will get mine as a result. In the wake of everything that I create, it's why I try not to optimize everything. I try not to. I don't put a lot of focus into the ultimate best strategy. I just try to show up and create as much as possible. And I know, like, for me, where I'm at in my life, I know that the biggest thing I need to do is maintain that mindset and that level of joy that comes from things like going outside and getting enough sun and eating right and working out. And that allows me to be in a good place where I can give to other people, regardless of what's happening in my life. And honestly, I've had a lot of shit happen in the last couple years. I had some businesses not work out. I. I went through a separation. I had investments go down. I had employees not work out. Like, I had a. And, and. And the pandemic and, you know, making some bad investment decisions while the market is doing this. Like, I experienced all of that. Being around Gary reminded me that all of those things are really reflections of what's going on inside of you, and that the more that I can maintain or what really good place a really good mindset, a really good commitment to contribution. The more I'm able to show up and just give to other people, the more that I can invest in other people with my time and my attention, the more that good things will happen as a as a result of me just having that as the intent. And it was a beautiful reminder for me that if I do that and double down on you and if I can give value to you, if I can contribute to your life that whether it's from you or it's 10 years down the line or whatever, like, I'll be fine when I feel scared or when I feel insecure, when I worry about money. The solution is not to try and take from other people or even like to come up with a next new idea. It is to give selflessly to other people. Those are the seeds that get planted. And if you do that and you are genuine in your intent in doing that, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. And the irony is, it's the most fun way to build a business in the first place. My name is Ryan Moran. I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses that they can sell. We have hundreds of success stories. If you enjoyed this video, please consider giving me a like and a subscribe. I'd love to be of service to you on your journey. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.