"IF YOU'RE 20-30 Years Old & Not Doing This YOU WILL FAIL!"| Gary Vee & Lewis Howes

You can't run away from who you are. You can't. Please do not get wrapped up in likes. That is such a death game. You will lose that game. You will start pandering to those results versus actual results.

By creating a great product consistently.

I don't fear because I don't value things and money. My biggest fear is like somebody getting sick and dying, nothing else.

If you're an entrepreneur, then you know that your mindset plays a crucial role in your success. And in this video, my good friend Gary Vaynerchuk breaks down the mindset strategies to help you unlock your success in business and life. How does that affect you emotionally when you see the aging of the hair or the skin or the wrinkles?

Not much actually. You know, it's weird. Like, I'm pretty vain and like all that stuff. Like I'm into that. It should affect me more. Here's the punchline. It's like, what the are you gonna do about it?

Right.

Like, I guess I can debate hair implants, which once in a weird moon, like when I see like an angle from like a Babin video or DRock, like I'm like, my hair's going, like I'm, I've got 18 to 36 months before I have to shave my head. Like it's just going enough back here. But then I'm always like, or should I like get an afro? Like should I just get like a huge implant like situation like Matthew McConaughey or whatever, I'm sure he did something. Like, or like Jeremy Piven, like you look at the old or Elon Musk.

Like you look at some of that.

Content, you're like, There's something. Elon, you didn't just magically grow hair, like. Exactly. So, I mean, so if anybody's listening who does shit really well, I could be sold. I could, you know, looking at Nick's hair, like, I could rock some long.

Right, exactly. One last rodeo before I'm finished.

Does any of that affect you though, in terms of like your confidence in business? No, no, not in, you know, that's what's so great about business. You know, I'm not an Instagram model, I'm not an actor. I'm not looked at or liked or my return on investment has nothing to do with my physical appearance. So what's great about being a business person, it's so much, it's a mind game and an execution game. I also think that's why a lot of entrepreneurs and business people don't maybe take care of themselves as much as they should and things of that nature. No, I think it's more of just like being a guy or being somebody that's transitioning into their early 40s and you kind of know what the next chapters look like. I think you think about it much more from like, oh, I'm getting older or mortality. No, I don't feel less confident because of my physical, because I never also, unlike you who's like a physical specimen, there was never a time in my life that I ever looked at my looks or physical status as a self-esteem builder.

You look at results in your business.

Yeah, to me, I was cool even though nobody else thought I was cool because I made $4,000 selling 8,000 Ken Griffey Jr. Rookie cards this weekend in the Phillipsburg mall. And so for me, it's interesting. I had so much self-esteem around business results when that was not a thing. Now that's a thing. It's really interesting to get these DMs. I love the 15-year-old guys that slide into my DM and telling me stories of like why they look up to me because it really is actually very funny. The entrepreneur is cool now and so like they're, you know, when you're a 15-year-old guy, you want a girlfriend. You want to be popular. And like, you look at the, I look at their photos and these are not like 15-year-old Lewis's, these are like some nerdy kids, but they've got like ridiculously cool girlfriends. And I'm like, oh, this entrepreneur thing has really hit high school. Like this is real now. Wow, if you're a cryptocurrency millionaire, you know, as a kid, like, you know, it's really fun for me that the thing I love the most, entrepreneurship, has become cool. That boggle, like, I know that somebody who's listening to me who's over 40 and loves entrepreneurship the way I do, They also know what I'm saying and that anybody under 30 has no idea of how I'm actually describing it and then there's that middle 30 to 40 which is in between but if you're over 40 you know that when you were in high school being a businessman or woman had zero street cred zero 0.00 Right zero yeah being just for the kids that are listening I know there's a lot like being an awesome violinist right now that's not gonna necessarily crush it in the halls of like Draymond High That was equally the same thing that I was going through, which was nobody gave up that I was making $10,000 at a flea market in a weekend. That meant zero status, like having a starter jacket or the music you were.

Listening to or the jeans you were wearing.

Correct. Or scoring 13 for the team that night or being in a band, the cliche move, all the guys did. There was 90% or being good at skateboard. There was nine Thousand other things and it's crazy to think right because money has always been the cliche thing like you know that has helped like some people close the gap of coolness, but not in high school and definitely not in 1990 to 1990 now if you.

Have 50,000 followers on Instagram in high school you're like the hottest thing or.

I mean like talk about like society wrapped up in vanity like of social if you are a high school guy who's a nerd but you get a blue check from Instagram your life changed Change.

You get any girl you want.

The amount of people that send me things like, I will rip my arm off if you can help me get verified on Instagram. Literally things like, I will sell you my children if you get me verified on, like, I give you my home.

That's crazy.

And live in a cardboard box, and I'm just like, this is the saddest ever. And a lot of my content in the last six months has been like, please do not get wrapped up in likes and you know, your rank in the podcast list or checks, like that is such a death game. You will lose that game, you will start pandering to those results versus actual results.

By creating a great product consistently.

New York Times best seller list. I don't pander to that, I don't wanna hire the companies that get me on the list. I wanna sell more books, that's the KPI, impact more people, that's even the bigger KPI, But look, I mean, the world has always traded on, I mean, do you know how sad at this point I am when I'm on these 30, well, I'm not 30, excuse me, like top 40 influencers or 50 under 50 now, which is the only thing I can do. How old are you now, 42? So, you know, I think that, you know, I hate it because my feed gets filled up with like, congratulations or the other people that are on it trying to get me into a conversation. Not because I, kudos to them because I was the most pumped too when I was like 10 most important people in the wine business under 40. Like amazing, I get it. But it's as you get older, you realize how those awards or those like just completely arbitrary things of like an editor liked one of your podcasts and decided, and we all get excited.

Yeah.

Like six best podcasts to listen in 2018, you wanna be a part of that, you want awareness. Here's what I would say. We've overcorrected a lot of people into caring about that more than the actual results. And so we care more about the facade than we care more about like, look how nice my room. Like this, we're in a beautiful room right now, right? You've really done a nice job of this. Nice. I like how you put like the more important people on their own, like wall over here.

Well, they were just bigger photos.

No, you made them bigger. I know you. But here's what's interesting to me. What's interesting is, If the concrete and steel under this building is, well, this whole thing falls. It didn't matter that you put something.

How pretty it is, yeah.

Exactly. And I think right now, too many entrepreneurs and personalities and people, 98% of the people that are listening to this podcast right now are caring about the decorations and the curtains and the painting in the room, not the steel and the concrete holding up the room. And I think that that's an important conversation to be had. I think a lot of what makes me happy and worked for me has been the steel and the concrete.

When you were in high school, college, and in your 20s, and you were dating.

Yes.

I don't think you ever talked about this and it just came up for me now.

Yeah.

Were you driven by dating a lot of girls or were you trying to like impress them through the business you were building in the wine space?

And, you know what's funny? Keep going. And?

And did business get better for you when you got married and started having kids or did something, or did it hurt you? Did it help?

I was so one-track minded in my 20s, from 15 to 25, 15 to 27. From 15 to 27 in 12 prime years where a boy then a young man cares about dating and hooking up and having a girlfriend. The level of me giving a about that was Stunningly low.

Really? Did you have a bunch of girlfriends or no?

In high school, not at all. In college, I had girlfriends. But from my junior year of college until I got married, I pretty much always had a girlfriend except when we would break up and I would have a couple of months in between. But it was literally because I almost weirdly thought I had to. And because look, I mean, you'd like to have a companion, fine. But My business was more important than my girlfriend by a magnitude of a thousand to one. In those four relationships I had, five relationships I had in between my first serious girlfriend in college and marrying my wife, my wife is such an enabler of my entrepreneurship.

She wants you to go out and do what you want, right?

She came in eyes wide open and is so independent and wants to run the household and the kids the way she wants to. She wants to be-- that's her business. Dictator and CEO of our home life that she likes that we're in a divide and conquer dynamic. Like Lizzie's aspiration is not to co-parent. She doesn't want my two cents. She'll take it once in a while, but she wants me supporting her on her vision and execution and I have empathy for that because that's what I want on what I do for a living and so we're a good pair. I think if you have somebody No entrepreneur can be successful with somebody who is not independent. None. There's no entrepreneur. That's right. No Sally, if her husband Rick is not independent and can't keep himself busy and isn't about his life, she can't do what she needs to do because he's gonna be pulling her at all times and making her feel guilty for taking that extra business trip, for looking at the phone, during dinner. And so you need, if you're a true bread entrepreneur, an obsessed entrepreneur, and what I mean by that is, I believe, I know your audience, I know mine, I believe 87% of the people listening right now are in it for the money. They're in it for the short term, get the money, go on a nice vacations, right? Buy the nice car. If you're part of the 13% that I'm a part of, which is you would die tomorrow if somebody said you couldn't play. I, would much rather make $100,000 a year, and I proved this, this is what I did in my, from 22 to 34, I made $150,000, $130,000, $67,000, $49,000 a year building my dad's business for him. I never got upset that I got no equity. I don't have resentment that I left that business at 34 with nothing. Even when people say to me, don't listen to Gary, his daddy put him on or gave him the business, when I know the true story is, I didn't get anything. I just built a monster business for my dad in my best years of my youth and then left and started over. Right? I mean, VaynerMedia started with me getting a client to pay, 'cause I had no money to pay me and AJ or anybody else. I had no money. Yeah. So, and I was there in the beginning.

You were. I went to your first office when it was four of you and a ping pong table. That's right.

And you crushed me in ping pong. I was pissed. Lewis is awfully good at sports. It really makes me upset. Yeah.

Well, when you're a lonely kid your whole life and you have all day.

To just hit a ball back and forth. And you're shaped like an Adonis. Yeah, that part too. Anyway, nonetheless, for the 13% who are listening, they get it, which is like, look, no question, I think a lot of people are like bullshit if they don't know me, but if you know me, make $14 million a year, right? And not be able to play anymore, passive income. Make 200,000 a year and get able to play, I'm not even close, it's 200,000 in play. I'll suffocate, I'll suffocate. I'm like a fish out of water if I'm not building a business. Every moment of my life since 1987 has been unbelievably passionately 98% of my human energy against the notion of either my family or building the business that's in my hands at the time, baseball cards, liquor store, you know, my personal brand, VaynerMedia, the investments I've made, selling a book, I'm always in project mode operating. You know, from the day I started working, I've been running a company. Becoming Gary Vee and all that stuff, there's never been a day where where Gary Vee has been my business. Every day since May of 1998, I've been running Wine Library or VaynerMedia, all of them, every single day in Continuum. So yeah, I mean, to me, if you're that, if you're one of those 13% for all the 13% that are listening, if you're still not married, or by the way, if you're married, you may want to consider divorce. I'm being really serious here, because you're not doing yourself a favor and you're not doing your partner a favor. If you are not blindly supported, you will suffocate and die. It will not work. It just will not work. It's the same reason I give kids advice to tell them to go to their parents to go f*ck themselves when they want to tell them what to do in their 20s. Not because I'm like rogue or I'm trying to be popular or create a viral piece of content. It's because when they're 47, they're gonna hate their parents. And so if you're doing what your parents want you to do because you love them, you're just appeasing the short term because you're gonna end up having no relationship.

When you started having kids, did the obsession for business stay the same?

No.

Or did it increase?

Probably.

Or did it go down?

It definitely didn't go down.

So the obsession has stayed the same since you were whatever, 12, 13, 15, to getting married, to having kids, it stayed the same, or has it gotten stronger?

I think the greatest way to be selfless is to be selfish. I mean, I just don't care about political correctness on what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't know what else to tell you. I know who I am and I know how I can bring the most value to the 12 people I care the most about. That means me being day in and day out, second and second happy, and that comes in the form of caring about my craft.

What's been the biggest challenge for you since starting Vayner and just the transition out of Wine Library? What's been the biggest thing you've had to overcome?

You know, it's been pretty good. I think VaynerMedia and VaynerX, the holding company that owns PureWow and VaynerMedia and the other things I'm about to do, has been a pretty good run. I think the one thing that sucks is having clients, not being, you know, when I owned my own business, you know, owned, when I ran my dad's business, I was the boss. People were trying to sell wine to me to sell to other people, thus I had the leverage in the B2B environment. VaynerMedia on the reverse, like, you know, Chase is my client, Budweiser is my client. I'm on their time and I'm fancy now. Like, I shouldn't be in a place in my career at 42 with my net worth and like all this stuff where I'm at, where I'm like at the begging call and like have to be late for something that I don't want to be late for because a client's yelling at me about being mad about something, but I chose the profession and I have the humility in the prime of my career to be in it. So the biggest challenge is like, I'm over myself and I have the humility to run a client service business, I'd be lying if I didn't say like when I'm dealing with something like that, I'm like, what the f***? You know, I'm like making fun of myself to myself. I'm like, you, like the fact like when I have the anxiety that I have to call a client tomorrow for them to yell at me and say, I suck s*** when they're a f***ing idiot and I'm gonna be the greatest of all time, that's a little weird. Like you have that conversation with yourself of like, Why am I savage? Like, what am I doing here? Like, you know, like when I can make more money just being Gary Vaynerchuk than I can running VaynerX and I'm dealing with seven meetings in a row where people are complaining about other people within the building and I'm like, you know, playing, you know, guidance counselor. I like that 'cause I wanna make people's lives better within my company. But there are days, and I eat for a living, but there are days where I'm like, why am I doing this when I have a million options not to? So then you start asking yourself, so why aren't you doing it? Because I think I'm holding my breath for the bigger win. I think that I'm gonna build the greatest communications holding company of all time. I think I'm gonna then buy brands, and I think I'm gonna run them through this machine, this Death Star, and I think I'm going to buy vans for $874 million one day when it's on the downside, 'cause right now it's not, it's in the prime spot, but again, when it's on the downside, seven years where none of the kids care or people care. I'm gonna buy it and I'm gonna flip it for four billion and it's gonna be because I ate for 20 years. My plan is to build a platform that is there for me to help pencils a promise, something we're both passionate about. Help, you know, Crohn's disease with AJ, help what takes my parents' lives, help if you decide to run for governor, of California in 30 years help that, whatever I'm passionate about, and also sell sneakers and hats and hoodies and books. I needed to build this machine for myself for the rest of my life and so I'm willing to eat right now to build it because it will make the 50 next years really exciting.

Hey, it's Louis here and I would love to connect directly with you. Text me the word YouTube to my number 614-350-3960 to receive weekly inspirational messages from me. The recent video that you posted on entrepreneurship where you said it can't be taught.

Yes.

What do you mean by that?

So I need to be smart about it. I have to go look back and how we titled it. But I know what I said, which is it can be taught, but you can only go so far because of natural talent. You know, it's fun to have this conversation with you because you're such an athletic freak. You know, most people don't lay on the couch and say, I'm going to be an Olympic team and then pull it off. You know, look, I think that I could play basketball every day, every day of my life from the time I was 15 and put in 15 hours a day. And I think I'd be really good. I'd have a much better handle. I'd shoot better. I would have been more competitive with you on the boat that day. But would I've been good enough to be in the NBA? Absolutely not.

Maybe D3. Maybe college.

Maybe, yeah. And I do think right now that everybody thinks they can be an entrepreneur. And so my point was, it's much more talent than the current conversation. I don't think you can read the School of Greatness and my books and all these other books and watch Skillshare's and watch Chase Jarvis and listen to Ferriss and read Branson and and even go to business school and have mentors and go to Y Combinator and then all of a sudden just because of that you become a great entrepreneur. I think of it like the music industry. Think about all the kids that are born into, you know, your Clive Davis's grandson or your Whitney Houston's daughter or you have nothing but access, you're in the studio all the time, you learn the business, but if you don't have the chops, if you don't have the vocals, you're only gonna go so far.

Same thing with football players or like in athletics too. You see some children of former NBA or NFL stars who excel but then others who don't do anything.

Here's the punchline. It's much more talent than people realize. I see it every day and the video I made was like, look, you have to be okay that by pouring in 18 hours a day and learning everything might only allow you to build a business that makes $100,000 a year. There is an absolute misconception that the American dream is entrepreneurship and everybody can do it. The difference between entrepreneurship and football is everybody who's listening right now or watching can start a business. Not everybody can go work out for the New York Yankees. There's a system. There's no system in place for entrepreneurship.

Anyone can do it.

Yeah, 16 or 22 stops you and says, Hey man, you're gonna lose money and be miserable and literally, you know, I'll be honest with you, I'm starting this conversation for quite a noble reason. This is not me to impose my will and say, look how special I am. As a matter of fact, I'd rather think it's been the hard work than the talent. You know, I'd rather think it was something I did versus mom and dad had sex at the right moment. I'd much rather think that. The reason I'm going down this path is there's a recent phenomenon that's not being talked enough about in our culture and specifically in our world, which is what failure is doing to the young men and women in our space. And, you know, we're sweeping under the rug a couple of the suicides in our space. We're sweeping under the rug the heavy depression and alcohol use. We're sweeping things under the rug. We want to show all the hoopla. I hate what's going on in Instagram right now. Everybody living their fake life, putting up pictures of, like, baby giraffes and, like, hot chicks and, and, $50,000 cash on a bed and a boat and painting a lifestyle that is not realistic. And I want to have this conversation because I think that I have a big enough voice to start the conversation about, look, there is a level of talent here and what we need to all be doing is figuring out what we're best at and going all in on that. And by the way, do you know how much Do you know how much more money the number two, seven, 15, 44th person at Facebook has than you and I?

Billions.

Billions.

Yeah.

So I'm a little bit disappointed in a lot of ways. One, people that are bottom feeding and like signing up for every ebook and mastermind and course and they're not talented enough and they're chasing a lottery ticket and they're gonna get depressed and get sick. Or great kids that have tons of talent who would have been great number fours and made tens of millions of dollars and had work life balance who are being pressured into becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and are gonna fail multiple times in a startup and not really start becoming that executive until they're 32, 33, 34 and learn some things, but be behind the ball in a world that they could have been successful for. There's absolutely a ton of kids right now that would have been better off being kids that were in their 20s and 30s and 80s and 90s because they would have been consultants and COOs and CFOs and had an incredible life. And instead, they're only gonna get really started at 32, 33 and they'll win a lot of experience and they'll have hopefully a lot of fun. But unfortunately, I know a lot of Bs and I know a lot of 2s and that's not for their makeup either. So for me, like, you know, I have to do this. Yeah. I've been, you know, it's why I was failed school. It's why I sold baseball cards when I was 14. So for me, I'm okay with the failures, the losses along the way. It's my natural state. I just want people who are listening to find their natural state and not.

Force into the current narrative. So how does someone find out what.

They'Re best at and what are you best at? You know, I'm best at selling. I'm best at using my words to make things happen, whether that's selling me, whether that's selling my agency, whether that's selling a bottle of wine, whether that's selling a book, I'm good at that. I'm good at storytelling to make a transaction happen. How one finds it, you know, I don't know. And I think about this a lot. I think about self-awareness. I think about EQ. I think about finding that. I've been talking more about finding the five people that are closest to you to tell you the truth. You know, to tell you, have you done that?

Have I done it for myself or for other people?

You found five people. I don't feel like I needed it, but I could be wrong. But I feel like, you know, the truth with me, especially, you know, meditation's about to explode, right? I'm probably saying this.

It's already been exploding.

Yeah. But it's about to become Starbucks and SoulCycle. And I'm probably saying this just because I need a recall in three years to say I told you so. So you're gonna get some traffic to this episode from me in four years. Meditation is gonna go very mainstream right like everybody will go to meditation there's already a studio here in LA that's of course just LA New York it's just happening. It's it's four years from now It will be just like working out headspace all the time 100% 100% where was it going? Oh, I'm scared to get into it because I'm so damn happy that I'm scared that if I meditate it's gonna open up another path in my brain that may lead to something that isn't what I have right now that's why I'm also not trying to explore more self-awareness I don't need it like I'm so damn happy.

I'm scared to like with it You don't want to mess with it. Yeah, it's already working for you. So let's talk about work-life balance.

Yeah.

Because you mentioned that with the twos and the Bs and everything. A bunch of people asked this question. I'll just kind of paraphrase.

Yeah.

And I'm sure you've been answering this a lot, but how does work-life balance work for you? And essentially when you're doing all these daily V's now from 5 a.m. working out till 12:30 a.m. 15-20 hour days.

This daily Vlog has been an interesting thing in my life for two reasons. Number one, the ego part of me. I'm so pumped that I'm finally establishing that nobody's outworking me.

Like people like you, you're documenting it now.

People like you, like people that were either in my inner circle or really knew who I was or have spent some time with me, you know, you know because you would email Matt DeMello or Nate back in the day or Phil Toronto and they would say, Cool, can you meet from 11:15 to 11:19 on what, you know? And so my friends or people that I was closer to or businesses, They kind of over the last four or five years figured it out. I'm so pumped that the market is starting to understand on the flip side, it has brought up a lot of questions about my work-life balance because what's happened in parallel is like, wait a minute, this guy really is working 6 to 11:30 every day. When the hell does he have time for his family? I couldn't do that. This seems extreme. Is this healthy? Like, how does this end up? twofold. Number one, my work-life balance is the way everyone's work-life balance is, which is everybody has their own version. I feel like it's very similar to parenting. I would never give people parenting advice. You can see in my book, I talk about parenting, but I hedge every answer, which is like, you do you. By the way, this is what I'm doing. You do you. Like, the thought of telling people how to parent is insane. You have no context. You know, listen, I have empathy that most people don't have context for Lizzie and I's relationship. They don't understand her Independence. They don't understand that she also is emphatic that she and the kids are not involved in any of my public domain. So, you know, if you watch, I mean, we'll talk about that. That's right. If you watch Snap and my Snapchat stories and my DailyVee carefully, and by the way, I recommend this for nobody because nobody should watch me that carefully, but you can see where there's hours of blocks of time. You know, there is nothing going on on the weekends. The, you know, there's these, you know, I was thinking about it the other day, two Fridays ago, I was gone at noon with the kids and spending a ton of time all day. We went away together a little bit. There was no content. But because of that, I'm painting a picture, I'm controlling my story.

You're showing that you're with your family.

I'm not showing it. And I'd love to in some ways, because I think it'd be cool to document it for the kids one day. But I don't want to make the decision for them to be public. And so, look, my warf-like balances More extreme than 99% of people. I recognize that. For now, and that's the important part, for now, it's working for my wife and I and family. I don't think it's sustainable. I don't even want it. My kids are six and three now. They're starting to become real.

Six and three, man. I remember when the first one was born.

We're getting old, brother. That's crazy. You know, I don't want to miss stuff. I haven't. Anytime I'm in New York, I'm not missing any recital or things that nature, but if there's one today, I'm missing it. I'm in LA, right? And it's a constant process. But yes, I'm working a lot.

What would you say percentage-wise of spending time with family every week versus work is 80-20?

Let's see. So two days a week is seven, so that's 30. I mean, it's probably 65, 35, 70, 30 work. Yeah. But that's only because I'm all in on the weekends and over this next kind of six, seven week period, because I'm doing a lot of stuff for the book, there's some Saturdays that I'll miss here and there. So, you know, it can be 70, 30, 75, 25 during a normal week, but I'm also taking about six to seven weeks vacation. That's 100% family. Two weeks in August, two weeks in December when everybody shut down. And then usually a week, in, you know, March for spring break and a week in June or July. So I'm taking a lot more vacation time than I used to. I'm up from two weeks. So listen, I'm like everybody who's listening right now. I'm doing the best that I can. I need everybody to understand this. If I didn't do what came naturally to me, there'd be much bigger problems.

You'd be miserable. That's right. You'd be miserable.

You wouldn't be present when you're there with your family either. And I challenge a lot of people to understand that when they're there with their family, a lot of you are coming home at five o'clock, but you're also going to the bowling team. You're also playing Halo. You're also like watching TV. You're watching TV and the kids are on the iPad. So what I'm trying to do is maximize the attention time when I'm there, not only just the physical time. And so, look, I don't think I'm crushing it. I don't think I, I don't think I'm right for most people. You know, I think I'm very affected by the fact that my dad wasn't around until I was 14. And that meant I worked at the store and got to see him. So I lived in an extreme work-life balance scenario that I grew up with, which probably gives me comfort. I was talking to one of my buddies whose dad was home at five o'clock every night and. It's foreign to him and so I have empathy for that. My wife also grew up with a dad that was constantly away and was building his career, so she's used to it. So I know that we mix that way. That works. If I married a woman whose dad was home at five, I'm sure there'd be more tension. If I had a dad that was home at five every day or mom, you know, if they were working, then I'm sure I wouldn't be comfortable with it. But I think the circumstances of our lives have created our situation and I think that we're dramatically happier than a.

Lot of people that spend 80% of.

Their time Together and so you know you fight for it and when you're.

With your family are you ever on your phone? Are you thinking about business or do you allow yourself to shut off?

I mean I would be I'm desperately trying for 100% attention. Yeah, I'm probably achieving 80. Yeah which is better than 50 which is where I was probably three years ago so Chipping away and on vacation. I've gotten to a hundred which is why those have become very special things. We also bought a summer home now and I'm hoping that I can hack into more time that way. Was that upstate New York or something? In the Hamptons. Oh, nice. And so it's a little bougie, but yeah, it's super cliche. So, but that's a great story.

Yeah.

We tried not to buy in the Hamptons because I was worried that I'd be in the work zone. Last year, we went on a kind of four year tour, different places. Last year, first day, we're in the Hamptons. First day, I walked to the market with my little guy. I run into the guy that runs Pinterest in New York. Four minute conversation leads to business. It was only four minutes. I walk back home and I go to Lizzie, let's buy here. And because it's, you know, in that whole summer, I probably spent 6% of my time on work, a couple breakfasts, a couple, you know, dinner, a couple things. So I'll call that a 50-50, but I'd call 6% as the net score, and I needed that 6%. Look, my friends, you can't run away from who you are. You can try to mold yourself into a politically correct world, and luckily we're way beyond, well, not way beyond, this is unfair, but I'm glad the world is now focusing on other variables. We'll always have race and religion, and sex and those things, but now we're leveling up even into like, what's a modern dad and like, you know, fit work-life balance and things of that nature. Look, I know the optics. I know I'm living a public persona. I know I have to answer these questions. Look how many work-life questions you got. I'd like to be politically correct. I'd like to be perfect. I'd like to make it easy on myself to not have to deal with the stress of the optics on the outside. Here is the punchline problem. You can't run away from who you are. You can't. And so I'm ambitious. Like I want it and I want it real bad.

Why?

I'm not sure. You know, I was born an immigrant. I'm not super tall. You know, I like losing. I like what happens to my testosterone and my energy when I take a loss. It gets me more motivated.

I love- you- should play ping pong more often.

I love my legacy. You know, I want to be remembered as a good dude and somebody who did it right. I feel the pressure of my talent. I know I have something and I feel like equal gratitude as I do pressure to execute against it. I'm aware that I'm different and it would be such a... Look, I lived 22 to 30 building a big business but I wasn't doing outrageously special things and I felt it. I knew it.

You're consistently growing something.

I was building a business. I'm super proud of that. I'm pumped that I didn't come out and become a pundit and a talking head at 22 and all these 18-year-old life coaches on Instagram. Like, I'm not into that. So I'm glad I had that meat and potatoes to come out and say, Look, I built this. This had nothing to do with books or speeches or personal brand. This was a business I built. I was 32 years old before I said anything about business to the world. I have a lot of pride in that. At the same token, while I was in it, I knew there was more. I knew there was this Gary Vee thing. I knew that there was bigger and better and all time stuff. And so, you know, it's a seesaw of trying to find your cadence. And I think one of the things that I would tell a lot of people who are listening, and I know you have a young crew, I see a lot of, you know, and when I say young, I mean under 40. It's stunning. And not, look, I'm 40. You could be 46. It's a mindset, but I, here's where I'm going with it. It's stunning how much time you have to pull it off. Yeah. You know? Yeah. When were you on the couch and your sister's how old?

24.

You know what I mean? A lot of, there's a lot of 24 year olds listening right now.

And I have nothing, you know?

Right. And they're confused, they're like, well, you know, I need to do it and this and that. And so I think, I think that, I think I love life and I think that I don't want to die. And I think the only way that I know how not to die is to leave a big time legacy.

This is interesting, Jerick Robbins, I think you know, he said, But what if he got to the end of the journey in life and on the very last day figured out he was dead wrong? Just makes you put things in perspective. Truth is, no one actually knows. I'd be curious to hear what his response is.

It's a great question. I will tell you that if my DNA continues to go the way it goes, I'm not capable of crying about spilled milk. And if I'm laying on my deathbed one day to go and I say, Fuck, You know, I should have been a stay-at-home dad or shit, I should have invested in Uber in the angel round when I said no. Did you have two opportunities for that? Let's not talk about it. And, and you know, what are those things? Oh, I got a picture to show you. Check out this picture of Travis at the Super Bowl with Woody Johnson.

Let's see, Travis who?

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.

Gotcha.

One of my best buds. This is a picture of him with Woody Johnson and it says you're out of the deal.

Oh man.

And the scary part is my homie Travis can actually buy the Jets.

Wow.

So that kind of motivates me, right? Travis is my buddy in Crush It. Travis is like traveling around with me to my keynotes, just hanging out in between his gigs, angel investing. Right? And now he's like one of the four or five most prominent technology CEOs and one of the wealthiest on paper.

What'S he worth now? Well, what's Uber?

80 billion. So he's probably. I mean, he's got to be 10, 12, 7, 9. I mean, something just mind-boggling and, you know, that's motivating. This is my homie who, you know, who I acknowledge and crush it. The only person I acknowledge besides my family. Wow. And asked me to invest in this company, and I'm an investor, and I passed twice an angel at 4 million. Why? Stupid stuff. I just bought a new apartment. I was super not liquid. I was using my own money back then. And Travis and Garrett. who found it weren't gonna run it. And I was doing a lot of side projects that weren't working at the time. And so just one of those things, right? Like I just missed it. Anyway, yeah, I'm just living life like everybody else. I just want to squeeze that orange harder than most people.

When are the moments that you doubt yourself the most because I know you're extremely confident in yourself, but are there moments and what are they and how do you get through it when you have that doubt in anything you're doing?

One of the weird things I do is I'm in a funny place now where I'm not putting myself in a place where I doubt myself. And so I always wonder is that like not challenging myself or is that like staying in my lane? But like I will tell you like the only thing I think about being like when you ask me like what's scary, here's Reading in public is scary.

It's terrifying.

Because I can't read. Even like, the last time I did the Ask GaryVee book, like for the audiobook, you just kind of riff. You know what's funny, I always do that. Because I get bored, because that's why I got F'd. So I'm like, I don't want to read my own. Like, you know, I'm like this, I know what's in here. Like, okay, you know. That's why people buy the book and the audiobook, because they're like basically not even the same. It was fun actually for me, because I'm like, oh, I'm a better reader than I've gotten, you know, I think I've been forced to read so much over the last 10 years, as we became a computer-based, email-based, text-based world. But I don't like to, like, I would be, if you were like, hey, read my notes here right now to the podcast, I'd be like, you could literally ask me to get naked. I'm like, all right, well, it. But if you said read this right now, verbatim, I'm like, because I don't like that. But man, then it's things like throw me in a pit of snakes. I'm like, I don't want that. Like jump off this building, that.

But there's nothing in business that makes you doubt yourself. Is there a situation that you could see, like you've spoken in front of 50,000 people. That's not scary at all.

At this point in my career, I've been in the room with everybody. And that means I have not been in a room with a ton of.

People, but like, everybody.

All the big leaders, all the billionaires, all the CEOs. I'm of the cloth. I belong. You're confident too, yeah. I'll be very frank with you, I think I'm better. I think when it's all said and done, I win this generation. I think Elon and Zuck and the Uber guys, I think a ton of people make more money. I'm convinced. now that nobody will make more money, nobody will make more money and help people make more money than me in this generation.

I will win-- In that game, yeah.

In the game that I like, which is winning personally and willing helping other people, I don't think I'm gonna be touched. I think I will be the guy. I think they will go back and be like, Look, here were the people that were entrepreneurs during a time when entrepreneurship was cool. And here are all the different things. Elon invented the crazy and Mark Zuckerberg created the greatest and Bezos created the best companies and made the most money. And then Gary He did the best job of making the most money and he bought the Jets and that became symbolic, but he also created millions of hundred thousand heirs and millionaires. That's what Crush It's about. That's why Crushing it's about. I think that's really cool. I spend an enormous amount of time trying to make my audience awesome out of the selfishness of the legacy, not to get him into a top of the funnel to buy my book. or my sneaker. I ask for it, but I have zero vulnerability or expectation. Listen, you have a great business on Roundy Brand. A lot of other people do. I think that's great and think it's cool. I just like that I make my economics in other places, but I'm paying the price. I'm eating the s***. Like, one could argue what's better, but I absolutely think I'm gonna win the game as made most because it's keeping score. I mean, it's part of the equation, but I'm not driven by that. I'm driven by, you know, I mean, look, dude, you are crushing it. You are winning. You're doing so many great things. Do you know how amazing, like when I read, because you know, Stephanie Land, my ghostwriter interviewed you for it, and then I'm going through it, just reading your story about the book Crush It, and then of course I remember like getting picked up and going to the cost plus and all that.

I picked you up in a beater car, you know, no way.

But it's fun, right? First of all, one thing I know is everybody's got it in them, it's not like I'm manufacturing. You were doing the LinkedIn party stuff. That's not crush it. But man, I have definitely suffocated excuses better than a lot of people, which is really the biggest reason so many people who are listening right now are not winning. They are surrounded by people that are willing to accept their excuses. on one very interesting insight. It's because those people don't give a. Your friends and your family are letting you get away with your excuses because they don't care. I weirdly don't know you and I care and let me tell you how to fix this. Get your excuses out of your mouth. And so like I think between that and then showing people this whole $80 strategy, I don't know if you've seen this, this has been great for me. You know, once in a blue moon I come up with very tangible advice. So I've been talking a lot about leaving comments in people's Instagram posts but not like follow me or like just to game it. No, take the out. Everyone's like, how do I grow? I'm like, there's a way. It's called the thank you economy. Quietly go in like nice and calmly. Like if you're a photographer, go to Nick's page. He's got legit. He takes a photo of some pretty person, boy or girl, he's very good at that, and some beautiful setting, and like look at it, and then leave a comment that's meaningful. Like, hey Nick, you know, are you using this filter or I noticed what you did with the light there? Like something that means something, not like, cool or lit. You're not leaving the comment for the sake of leaving the comment. You're taking the actual hour and a half to look, add something of value. You do that on 90 different, the way I came up with it was leave your two cents in a comment, leaving your two cents. Go take nine hashtags that are relevant to your business and then go to 10 accounts or 10 hashtags, top nine. It used to be the top nine. Now it's just random nine. So, pick 10 hashtags, the random nine, that's 90, leave two cents, now you've left a dollar 80 for the day. Watching the last two, three, four, five, six weeks of people like, you know, 'cause it's funny, right? People are buying f*cking likes and comments, people are like trying to do dumb f*cking giveaways f*cking iPads or Yeezys or Off-Whites to get followers, or you can.

Actually work for an hour, add value.

Know your craft, and like, Nick, I'm actually looking at it, Do you know what would happen? 'Cause he actually knows his craft if he actually spent three hours a day. Three hours is a lot of time. A lot of time. But if he gave a f*** and I don't think he should or shouldn't. But if he gave a f***, the fact that if he spent three hours looking at 20 hashtags in photography 'cause he's crafted and skilled and gifted and went to those people's photos and said that I would never understand. I'd just be like, Nice thong or like nice muscles or like cool coconuts. If he said like, oh, I see what you did there off the reflection horizon, you know? Well, that matters because people see that you're leaving something meaningful, right?

Mm-.

Anyway, nonetheless, I don't even remember why the f*** I'm talking about that. Basically, I'm thinking about bringing the most value. I think it's mindset and strategy. I used to not like the motivational version of me. I've gotten much more comfortable in the last 18 months because I'm like, if I didn't think of it as motivational and I thought of it as strategy. Because mindset strategy, right? Like being insecure is a mindset. It was put into you for a million different reasons. Figuring out how to get out of that hole by who you surround with, how you think, what you do, if you insecurity is the biggest poison in our lives. Like insecurity scares the out of me. Lack of self-esteem is why people do everything bad. buy dumb to make themselves feel better, do dumb, like take dumb and put into their body, it's all insecurity. I still remember in high school back to dating now, I'm gonna tie these stories together. I remember when I realized, oh, my friends drink alcohol to get courage. But they don't even that drunk, they just use it as an excuse to do stupid stuff. That they wanted to do anyway. It's just all insecurity, man. Yeah. I don't know.

What's your insecurity?

What is my insecurity? My insecurity is probably my insecurity. I don't know if this is insecurity. This is gonna be very weird for a lot of people who don't know me. I hate being disliked. Which is a really funny insight because the way I act in public and in my content shows a huge willingness to be disliked. But I only think of it simply as if you really break down my content and my ethos and who I am, I'm willing to be disliked in the micro. I'm willing for you to not like me because I'm suffocating you and you don't like that I've put you into a corner, but you're gonna love me in three years. I hate being disliked.

Why?

Because I think I should be nice and I think I like people. I think it's a bad idea. Like, I don't, like I'm very, I don't know if it's an insecurity, like, man, the thought that there's, like, I think, I don't know if you saw, like, I had Tim Ferriss on my podcast and I apologized to him at the end because in my early part of my career, I got on a tangent in one speech at Blogs with Balls where I was like, four hours of working, like, go all in, and it just, I didn't like the way it came out. I knew what my intent was, which is why I'm kind of fine. But I've been apologizing to Tim for a decade.

Because I don't want Tim-- From that one speech.

Yeah, because it hurt Tim's feelings, rightfully so. Like if you go and find Blogs with Balls 2009, I went on a good three, four minute tangent. I didn't talk about-- I never read-- I've never read anything. I don't even-- from what I know, four hour work week is about efficiency, not about working four hours. So I just don't like being this-- I look at Ray Lewis on your wall, right? You know, in the right circumstance at a Jets-Ravens game, there is no question that, you know, Ray would never remember, and this didn't happen, but like, Tom Brady, I hate Tom Brady, but do I? Like, I hate him, right?

But you love him. But I would appreciate him.

No, no, I don't even appreciate him. I know how great he is. I have zero appreciation for him being great. None.

I know it's there, I don't appreciate it.

If he was on your team, you would.

No.

And I hate him, and I say it in public, you and this and that and at games and if like if he was on the sideline, I flat out like you, you suck, like mean it, right? But in like kind of like in real life, like if I cross paths with him and I feel like, you know what scares me now is I'm like oh, I'm definitely gonna cross paths with like the Kobe's and Tom, like all these guys want to be entrepreneurs and will be entrepreneurs. So I'm like, eh, the sports thing's weird now, like I'm gonna see him at some like, you know, like, Alan and Co. are like, exactly. And I'm like, eh. I don't want to be disliked because I think there's no reason to. I hate cynicism and hate. I hate it so much and being associated with it would really upset me. So I'm insecure at, I don't know if it's insecure is the right word, but I'm aware that I'm awfully peacocky on stage. in a podcast. Like you can ask me questions here and I could say that I believe, but I don't want to deal with the ramifications of my truth. And more importantly, it's a great time to say it and Babin, I hope you're filming. There is something that's really interesting to me which is I really know that I mean nothing. I think the biggest reason I'm willing to spit authentic is because I don't think so highly of myself. Meaning I'm not insecure. It's just that like me thinking Nick is not good at something like business. Forget about photography where who gives a f***? Me saying your business stinks even with all my business things I still think is just one f***ing dude's opinion. I understand it's a solid opinion. I understand that it comes with some heritage and value but it's still too many great people who've won so much in things have told me I'm not gonna win and then I've won, that I know I'm the same. And so I think one of the reasons I'm willing to spit is like my opinion is still my opinion and like, you know, take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, yeah. What do you think? You talk a lot about, you know, delayed gratification, there's time and everyone has a lot of time and people are wanting things right now. What do you think? Even with that mentality, I know that you would love to get results, bigger results all the time with what you're doing. if you sell 100,000 books, you would like to sell 200,000 books right now.

That's exactly right.

Right? What?

Micro, micro, macro.

Yes, exactly.

That's it.

But what do you think you're gonna need to do to step into getting faster results in the micro and the macro? What would take you to the next level?

I think what takes everybody to the next level is cutting out dumb. Like, if you really look at anything, It's always cutting, that's why Jack Welch had such a great career. He was so right in like when it was a revolutionary thought of like cut your bottom 10% of your staff each year. But it's right. I mean like no question whether in your training, in your business, in your friendships, do you understand that if every person who's listening right now started to weed off the friend that is bringing the least value, and I mean they're a bad influence, they're bad mojo. They're bad. Like, bad. I mean, they're just negative. They're a negative person, so they're dragging you down. They're selfish. They have bad habits, like a drug addiction or something. And you don't want to leave them. I want to make sure people, people, when they hear me say this, oh, you get rid of your friend. No, just if you audit your circle of who you spend time with, if you just spent less time with something that is broken and you added one person that was incredibly valuable, your life would be a lot better. That's just real. And so I think the thing that I'm not good at, but I will never give it up, so I don't know if it's a strength or weakness. I do a lot of meetings on spec when people ask me to.

Some of those pay off long term and some of them you're just like, am I wasting my time?

You're like, can I, even this was back in the day, can I drive you to the cost plus. I'm glad I did it. Now we know each other for a long time. But yeah, I mean, I think at this point, no question my time has become remarkably valuable and I still do 20% of my time this year will be highly questionable in somebody was auditing my life. But you know, you're gonna have to, at some level, you gotta accept some of your humanity aspects. But I think that is the thing that would take me to the next level, getting even more disciplined on every single thing I do, debating every single idea. I'll give you a good one. This is super funny. If Tyler was in a room right now, he would argue that I've made a mistake by being here today for an hour.

Your assistant, Tyler? Yeah, yeah.

We've got a lot of things going on. I'll break it down. This is going to be interesting for people listening. We had a bunch of new business meetings, new people I could have met. Hi, big, good. Would have been on your biggest wall, right? And Tyler gave me a list of things. He's like, you can do one of these four things. And I did this. I would argue somebody analyzing me would say, this is the wrong move. Couple reasons. Number one, the new book Crushing It is selling so well that I'm not even trading for speaking or Doing podcasts or I'm not, I mean, I've never been this passive two weeks away from a book release. I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm like, I'm like, this is like, I'm weirded out myself. I almost like, weirdly want it to collapse and everybody returns the pre-sales so I get punched in the mouth for being so passive. This audience that is listening right now has heavy crossover. I've been on a show not too long ago, a lot of people that like you, like me, vice versa. So, you know, I get somebody analyzing how do you get better, that this was the wrong choice for the hour. And I just like you. I just wanted to see you. So, like, I think, you know, that's a human thing. Like, sometimes you just have to do those things. But, so that's why I say I won't change what would make me better, but what would make me better is to analyze my time more fruitfully. for micro results. But for macro results, friendship, whose funeral are you gonna show up to, and why I think this is the better decision. And so I will always make a macro decision and I will take 100% of the macro results and only 60% of the micro results. And I think everybody who's listening, man, do I think 99% of the people are trying to maximize Micro. Every person, I'm blown away by people literally analyzing what's in it for me in this micro second of this thing. Everybody, it's so awesome for me to watch because I'm like, you've lost. And people do that, and people do it when they don't mean. I love people getting put on just a little bit and they think they're fancy and they just start valuing. Anyway, Bavin, you're smiling because that's a big thing you've learned, right? That's huge. That's somebody who really gets to see everything I do in every minute. That's the one, right? This lasts seven, eight minutes. If we can deconstruct this in a meaningful way, it's the one. I genuinely think that people are in the business of thinking what's in it for me, and I only think what's in it for me is my legacy.

I saw a stat out there about a bunch of different companies that launched from 2008 to 2010. Right around the time I met you when I was on my sister's couch and I had no money and I was like, what's happening? It's kind of a similar feeling of the economy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some of the startups that founded back then, Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Square, Venmo, which you're an investor in, and they have blown up in the last decade. I'm curious, what are the ideas or businesses that should be created today moving forward, that in 10 years we'll be looking back at the next, you know, crisis and say, this is the companies that were started in 2020. What are those industries? What are those topics? What do you think?

Practical direct to consumer brands, you know, ones that are like DTC for brands is an incredible business. Overfunding and trying to go public or sell to somebody is why a lot of them are going to go out of business. I think that you're going to see some really fascinating innovations. I've been thinking a ton about co-working, obviously we had WeWork and obviously they have their challenges for overvaluations and over. But I do think business as usual, I mean, geez, talk about, like, I've been thinking about things like, for just small entrepreneurs, like create a business about renovating home offices to be epic, because the amount of people that are going to work one to two times a week from home is going to be, so just like, think about if you're a carpenter, right? you just put up all the, you know, billion dollar things. And honestly, those, there's never a bad time to start a great business. And the Travis's and the, all the other people that you, the companies you just mentioned, those, those are individuals that had that talent. The reality is that's the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. The reality is you and I have audiences that listen to, will listen to this and watch this, that are really great entrepreneurs that are destined to build $500,000 a year businesses. If you're a general contractor, or a handy man or woman, positioning yourself as a home office specialist right now, I couldn't even imagine. You probably could go from being a 35 to $50,000 a year person with one or two projects to like a million dollar person because that is clearly coming. So that's on my mind. You know, little things like I saw AJ bought for our entire family some sort of like keychain ring that helps you, you know, ring doorbells. and put keys into, like, I do think, you know, like people are about to be germaphobed out in perpetuity, similar to 9/11, which sucks for me because I'm a very other way, like hug, kiss, like, you know, slobber on someone's face. Slobber, yeah, I'm very, like, you know, like don't wipe down anything when I get on a plane, like, Let's share.

Drinks and eat hot dogs together.

No, honestly, eat off people's food. I'm a little bit worried that I'm about to be shunned from society. But I think cleanse, clean, safe, those are gonna be great. I mean, talk, create, somebody should create a high-end hand sanitizer business. True, that's true. So I think there'll be some trends. And then back to the point I made, a good business is always a good business. For example, opening a restaurant immediately after this, sounds insane except if you're opening up a great restaurant. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. I'm in LA near Beverly Hills and I'll drive down this side street with Sprinkles Cupcakes. I don't know if you've heard of Sprinkles. Of course, I know it well. Amazing. Well, all these restaurants are shut down or they're like doing their own version of delivery or whatever it may be. Sprinkles Cupcakes had an ATM machine four years ago, five years ago before its time, where you can go at any time of the day and get a cupcake out of the ATM machine fresh made that day, I tell you, I kid you not, there's a line down the street in Little Santa Monica of people who have sprinkles all day long just getting out of this ATM machine and people are in there all night working because they can't supply the demand fast enough. So something innovative like that.

Listen, my dad a year ago said, hey, you're helping all these companies. What about helping old dad out? And I launched WineText, which I've been promoting very heavily. and it's an innovation, you know, it's you get a text, you reply with a number, anybody who's listening that's into wine, if you really buy wine on the internet, you have to go check out winetext.com, you sign up, you put your credit card in, it takes two minutes, and then you get a text every day and you reply with 4, 5, 2, 1, 12, and it's like, Brandon hired nine people today for Wine Library because, you know, obviously alcohol sales.

Are exploding, but on top of that, this is above and beyond because the innovation is so strong. what is the direct result from you guys implementing that for this new kind of business for Wine Library? How is that?

It is. I'll tell you exactly. I don't have the exact math. I actually have a P&L meeting tomorrow. Roughly, it's going to grow the business by 30 to 40%.

From last year, just one initiative.

One initiative. Wow.

And that's a, do you guys use community for that?

You know what we don't, because the way we structured it, community wasn't far enough along. Obviously, I'm an advisor and use community for my personal brand. We built A middleware between our platform and broadband.com and it's like it was custom built with our dev team at Wine Library, but it's just working and innovation. And by the way, let's call Spade to Spade. VaynerMeat Wine Library, excuse me, has been declining for a decade because I'm not there.

And then one idea is going down 5-10% a year, whatever. And now, boom, let's get back to.

Where it was 10 years ago. I think there's a chance next year if this keeps going the way it's going, we'll be at heights we've never been. One idea, one execution. And what is it? It was my observation 18 months ago that people are willing to get marketed to on text more in America than they were five years ago.

It's brilliant. Now, you have been teaching this for years about shifting your perspective, shifting your mindset, having self-awareness. You've been teaching this for years and people don't listen when times are good. They stay stuck in their mindset or their fears. I'm afraid to launch this, put this out there. How do people shift their mindset even in a horrible time for most people when they can't even do it during a great time?

Easy. My stuff does better during bad times.

They have to.

Right. You and I hung out during the Crush It! book signing. That's when you drove me. Crush It! hit a nerve because people needed it.

2009, right? Right.

And that's when hustle was good. And then hustle during good times becomes manipulated into burnout. But I promise you right now, I don't use hustle anymore because I understand how the word got mutated into leading to anxiety. And so I don't want that. So I changed it. Even in Crush It, I talk about nine to five making forty thousand a year being happy. But I promise you hard work is about to be put on a pedestal again.

Huge pedestal. I'm always at 20, 30 million people unemployed. Like, people are gonna be grateful just.

To have an opportunity. That's right. I don't think people, I think people are still in a little bit of a shock slash fake environment. If we get back to normal in September, I'm just gonna be, and I know that we won't be back to normal. Let's just talk about January. If, God willing, we're back to real kind of normal in January, I think by February, by Valentine's Day, people are gonna walk around be like, oh, wait a minute, there's some real lasting ramifications.

Big time. Big time.

I can't get a raise. I can't get a job.

I mean, I'm just hearing people who are in key positions are getting 20, 30% cuts, even if they are the key player and they're irreplaceable.

It's kind of like this. I said, Gary's like, somebody said to Gary, that's not fair. I'm like, let me give you an analogy. You are in a forest, a tree falls on you and it's on your leg and you sleep there for a day and you're in big trouble and a ranger comes along tries to help you and she says to you, listen, you're gonna have to cut off your leg. To live, you're cutting off your leg. We don't, business owners and, you know, funds and banks, they don't want to, and companies, they don't want to lay these people off. They're their legs. They love them. If everything was okay, they wouldn't have. They don't want to ask all their executives to take a 30% decrease, but that's cutting off your leg. Otherwise, you die. Yeah. People are just so funny with this kind of like ideology, like, okay, or the business goes out of business.

Yeah, you don't have no money. Yeah. What's been your biggest fear in all of this? Or do you feel like you're pretty fear proof at this moment with everything you've been through?

I'm fear proof because I'm willing to go to zero. Yeah.

You live on a small apartment and, you know, live at your parents house.

I really can, man. I don't know what else to say. Like this has proven it to me even more, you know, any 0.0001% of me that thought, while I've been saying for the last two years, am I full of sh*t? Has completely gone away. Yeah. Like, I just, I don't fear because I don't value things and money. My biggest fear is my parents getting sick. Like, my biggest fear is like somebody getting sick and dying, nothing else. Like business, I can always, like, I'm too capable, right? Like, you know, back to the thing you brought up, back to why you were an Olympian, back to like, why you beat me everything, anything, when we were on Summit at Sea, think about it. Big car. You aren't worried when it comes to sport, your mind just goes into, this is gonna be a good situation for me. Yeah. And for me, you're comfortable. Yeah, and for me that's business. I know for a fact that if I became a 100% full-time garage sale, thrift store, Amazon Flipper, that I'd make a million dollars a year. I know that for a fact. So what the hell am I? And that doesn't take into account that I built a brand. And sure, my brand would take a hit if All my businesses went to zero. But the reality is America's funny, man. Like there's people following and helping OJ Simpson. There's, you know, Wolf of Wall Street. Like this is a country that gives second, third, fourth chances regardless. And so like I'm already at a place right now where between brand and capability and humility, I'm bulletproof. Let me say something about you that's nice because I'd like your audience to hear it, but more importantly, it will help so many people. When you started trying to care towards me as your career evolved over the last nine years, the first four times that you cared, I thought this is the setup for the other thing.

The ask or something, right?

Because that's what we as humans think. That is the environment we live in. I'm sure that's what people feel about me. The fact that you look, I think here's the thing. Here's actually lett me say this about you as well. There's this is a good topic. I want to pay forward at all costs. I want to give, give, give, give, give, give get, right,jbj jb, hook Like if I had in my way, that book would have beendedj j,jb j j,jb,jb jbj, jb, right hook. I think the thing that you have that I have, and this is our kinship and no question speaks to our success, is we're very willing to give. We're not as scared to ask for something in return, but we are not crippled. We don't overreact to somebody coming through and we're not crippled when they don't. I'll give you a great example for everybody. Listen, when School of Greatness came out, you know, like, you know, you emailed, you reached out, I was able to buy a bunch of books, we did all the right things. When Mask came out, this feels like, what, three months ago? I remember this clearly because I kept like getting scared that I was f ing up because you reached out, you're like this is coming, but I had some going on just like business stuff.

You were really busy too.

I was just having a good time. No, but I was just really like between personal life and business and I just remember like, because I remember this because I was like oh, I gotta like, you know, it wasn't like notes, I'm like oh, I gotta reach out to him, I gotta and then I like hit you up and I was like dude, where are you? Like you're like dude, I was in New York four days ago. Like, but you know what's interesting to me? That, because that's how I play. Like sometimes people will come through, sometimes they don't. Giving with expectation is a devastatingly bad idea that 99% of people do. And somewhere after the fourth time you ask to do something or this, I'm like, oh, he figured it out. So now I look forward to the asks. I want to support the asks.

I'm always-- and I don't really ever ask.

It's like-- you- ask the same way I ask.

Yeah, it's like one moon.

Oh dude, do you know how pumped I am that Crushing is selling so well so I don't have to ask? Exactly. Because I also have the next 2K Swiss sneakers coming out and they sold.

Out so fast that we've produced so many, so I'm like, I need that.

Do you want to wear a fresh new pair of K Swissses every day for the whole year?

Yes, please buy 365 pairs of my next shoe. My mentality is also, and I think people listening can take a page out of that. this and my mentality with you is like, I'm thinking of how can I give to you without you even having to ask? I'm thinking like I made a couple, I don't even know if you saw them on the email, but I made a couple introductions where guys were like.

I want to buy a couple thousand books from Gary. And I said, Let me tell you how I do. I apologize. I saw. So let me explain that. Yeah, like making intros and like, hey, this guy, you know who buys four or five or ten thousand of yours? You made intros of people that and you're winning, right? Because I'm not not as easy to get to these days. So you won twice and that's so smart, right? You're getting these people, a lot of them have told you this, I'm sure, because if you intro, I'm saying yes.

Well, I say the only way I'm.

Gonna intro if you buy a 2,000 books. But even more interestingly, these are people that have reached out 10 times that say, I'll buy 3,000 and I don't reply. And then you do it and I do, which I know makes you go, but for me, the best part is now that I'm in a different kind of like, as my brand grows, as my career as my reputation rose, that's reputation. You know, 'cause when I say brand, I know a lot of people are like, reputation, that's what it is. What's been fun for me is when real senior people, not people with like 10,000 Instagram followers, I mean like the 74 year old lady that's running the world that you haven't heard of, what's been fun for me, and this is the thing that, back to Nick, what he says behind my back, when real power players, $80 billion hedge fund people that want to invest in something or somebody deciding, even when you've got somebody as incredible as Scooter behind you, when you're looking at TV stuff, when there's people that are on the board level of a network saying, hey, this guy's coming through the path. We're trying to, you know this, anybody that's growing up in our era, everyone's trying to figure out, is this real or is this fake? Is this a real dude? Nothing is more fun now. Buying 500 books is the easy part. Me putting my reputation on the line for somebody else is the thing that scares the out of me. And I think the thing that's a lot of fun, and this is the hidden thing that all the kids and even the 70 year olds that are in kid mentality don't get it. The amount, I had a meeting, I was with Scooter today. We talked about the game. We talked about multiple people that we're fine with, we like, but deep down, Everybody knows this. There are plenty of people that feel that you have relationships with that that person will feel like you guys are fine, but if I had to put my, I will never say, why would I say something bad about somebody? Like when there's no benefit. But if somebody said, you, reputations on the line, is this, and this happens in real life, guys, this is what's happening. Just so you know what happens as you continue to try to build your game, there's always this moment. There's so many huckster kids running around right now who claim to be friends with all of us.

Say they know someone. That's right.

Who, all of us are nice people. I'm like, yeah, hi, whatever. But behind the scenes, if you're a huckster and you're doing it just for you and you're name collecting to get selfish short-term shit for you, let me tell you what's happening. At dinner, four of the people that are really winning are having dinner. Your name gets brought up because maybe the fourth person's like, hey, this kid's been reaching out to me and says he's homies with all three of you Ironically, what's the story? You were getting on.

Yeah.

You think you're winning. You know, and again, on a micro level. On a micro level you are. Like that person's commenting on your Instagram post, you're at a conference and they high five you and give you a hug.

I'm gonna selfie with that.

I'll wrap it up perfectly. The curtains look good. Yeah. The painting looks good.

The foundation.

But the foundation's broken. And here's the punchline. The four Titans that are winning, they're not wrong because they're just being polite. You're wrong because you're doing behavior to gain those Titans for your selfish needs and you look like a idiot to the 1% and you look cool to the 60% that don't matter and the 39% in the middle are trying to figure it out. Too many people winning with the 60%. Yeah.

What advice would you have for me over the next 10 years. You've seen the first 10 years from crush it to crushing it now in my career evolving. This isn't for selfish reasons.

I think it's going to help everyone. Here's my thing. I think you're at the point now where you need to decide if you want to build a business for yourself that isn't around you as a human. Do you have that ambition or not? If you do, you should start getting serious about it. if you don't, you need to quadruple down on the Lewis Howes business. That's the only decision you have, in my opinion. It's actually binary. Do I, Lewis, have the ambition to... Should I buy Prince, the tennis racket company? And do I want to buy a company? Do I want to start a company? Or do I want to triple down? For you to have this much brand awareness around a human, you've got to decide if you want, if you look at all these pictures, a lot of those people make the majority of their money being that human. But if you look at the CEO of Spanx or if you look at some of the other, I'm in that category, they're making their money other places and happen to also have that, you need to decide are you gonna still just only be Superman or is there a Clark Kent in your repertoire? And that doesn't mean that you have like You know, I'm looking at Logan Paul, he's obviously going through his own stuff and like what right now, but like he sells hoodies and makes millions of dollars, but that's 100% still on his brand. That's different than VaynerMedia, that's different than Spanx, that's different than my ambition to buy K Swiss and be the CEO of K Swiss. And it's not because I'm the face of, I'm the operator. Do you want to be the operator of a business that 90% of it, the customers don't care you're this person, Or do you want to continue there? That's, I think, the most interesting thing for you to think about, right? Yeah, that's good advice. You know, there haven't been, you know, Phil Knight and obviously I'm looking at books around here, they didn't have that. There was no way for Phil Knight to make $4 million a year being Phil Knight in 1984. All these youngsters now can do that, you're a youngster. What's interesting is, like our mutual friend Adam Braun, there was no kids building huge nonprofits. Right? So like him, when he wanted to go on and do build a business, there was like this weird dynamic of like, wait, you're not allowed, you're a nonprofit. Of course he's allowed, but he's a first of generation where kids started nonprofits from the get and then go private, same for you. You're part of the generation that can make a great living just being the person. Now your question is, do you want to build a business that is scalable outside of yourself, or do you want to quadruple down And truth is both work, that's just up to you.

Yeah, cool. Final two questions. This is called the Three Truths and I don't remember if I asked you last time, but if you did, maybe it'll be different now. If this was the last day for you many years from now, you've done everything you've wanted to achieve, you've created it all, you've said everything. But for whatever reason, all your books and shoes and businesses have been erased. And so there's nothing left that people have to remember of you. But you got a piece of paper and a pen. to write down three lessons or three truths that that's all they would have that you would share with the world.

What would those three things be? 5149. I would draw that first and then I would like in parentheses explain it and would say give more than you take. And then we talked a lot about that the last 15 minutes. It just works. And the reason 5149 works is it painted a picture for everybody right now who's been listening for the last 20 minutes and like that's an interesting insight of like why Gary Vaynerchuk and Louis are winning, that's the right number to me. And I've debated, should it be 50.1 to 49.1, but if you just give, then you can still be selfish in the power of your selflessness. So 51.49, I would say legacy over currency. How many people show up to your funeral is the KPI. Because if you're great at that, you're gonna have money. There's, you know, like occasionally you have somebody who was a teacher or sat on the porch of a town and everybody loved them, but like most people that have 10,000 people or 5,000 people show up to their funeral. And by the way, just being loved is better than having money. How much money do you need? So anyway, legacy over currency and then the third one would be patience. It is the disease of our society. The lack of patience, bro. I mean it's crazy to me that literally patience and insecurity is 90% of the unlock for everybody listening right now. Their mom on them their whole life and said they're gonna be a loser so they believe it because that's what parenting is and they just want to have a Maserati now and they'll do whatever it takes to do it and so they'll take they did something like, do you know how many kids are doing something smart like doing making a good retail arbitrage on Amazon right now and making $100,000 by buying on Alibaba and selling on Amazon. Took a year and a half, three years to get good at it. But now we're taking every profit and buying some rando cryptocurrency because they're playing the lotto. That's just, this is what's going on in our society.

We have to have these conversations.

You're saying big gains fast. Like, let me jump in. There's a kid who spent three years being disciplined and getting good at retail arbitrage. It's a real skill. to have an eye for like what to buy in China, how to set up on Amazon properly, how to run ad, like it's a skill. Yeah. They did it for three years meticulously. They made 13,000 and 47,000. Now they finally are making 300,000 and they could be on their way to 10 million. Yet they've chosen to kind of stop, jump on the short term bandwagon of buying some weird cryptocurrency hoping it's the next Bitcoin or Ethereum. I'm just seeing that every day. and I'm just like, it's being predicated on short term. You hear one story, Zucks did it. Instagram sold in 550 days for a billion. That's why everybody started an app company. To follow the leader. Completely predicated on short term. I went the other way. While everybody was blowing up, I decided to build an agency in the prime of my career when everything was going for me in Silicon Valley. I'm proud of that. I think I'll be historically correct. So those are the three things I would say.

How does Gary eliminate self-sabotage when it seems like there's so many wins that you hit, but also people don't see all the big losses that you have as well, and the risks and the-- yeah.

I've loved myself the whole time. Thank God, most don't. Uh, but I haven't allowed me to get high on my own supply. My humility is my great offset to my confidence. And I think that manifests. And I think one of the things you were saying when you were saying it, I knew what you were saying, which is you have the luxury of seeing really behind the scenes. Truly. And I think what you know is forget about like giving to a non-profit. It's just the genuine kindness of replying to somebody's request or doing something for somebody with no ask, no expectation, and nobody knows. And you know this because you run an entrepreneurial circles like I do. and you know when you stumble on somebody who knows me as well, they're gonna bring up something that I did that was nice and nobody knows about it. And that is only one thing. That is called humility. That is not reading your press clippings. That is not thinking you're somebody. And I think I have deep love for myself, which leads to huge confidence, but I'm practical. So I don't try to overextend myself, which should keep me away from being losses, but there is no doubt. Like I think things through and if I lose, I lost. But I'm never doing anything for any other reason than I think it's right. And that leads me to a place where I'm not very vulnerable because when you start doing things to impress the girl or to keep up with the Joneses or you're jealous of somebody else's success and you want to close the gap on their net worth on their Google search or all the dumb shit that people are thinking about, you become vulnerable. I mean, so many people are overexposed. I mean, listen, there's some big personalities that are gonna get smoked out. over the next 12 months that like have played the part on Instagram, they're gonna lose. They just are.

I also think if you're focused on like chasing the money game of competing against someone financially, and you make the wrong decisions, then you start to take things personally, get defensive, get angry at people that aren't making you money or whatever. It just everything becomes an attack.

So if you lost a, if you.

Let'S hypothetically say, if you lost a million dollar bet on a business or an investment or whatever, and I've got.

I've got one that's gonna happen soon. So go ahead.

And it went to zero.

It's going to how do you tell.

Yourself I still love myself this doesn't.

You know affect myself because I knew the vulnerability was other people I did the most I can I was stretched in more than I wanted to be which didn't allow me to really fix it along the way I just didn't have you have too many plates in the air and I focused my energy on things that are so fruitful that are gonna offset that million loss. It's an L. I don't want it but it's real Wow.

I think also, do you go into the mindset of knowing like this could be 100 million or it could be zero and you're okay if it's zero.

Or do you still go into everything thinking it's going to be zero? Yeah. It really makes it, why do you think notice, does that make sense? Now all of a sudden, I go in with no hope, no expectation, no expectation. I don't do it for my kicks and giggles. I think it's going to work. Yeah. if I'm running it, it's gonna work because that's what I'm good at. But almost everything I don't run. I don't run PureWow 137, Harwood does. I don't run VaynerSports, AJ does. I don't run VaynerSpeakers, Zach Nadler does. I'm impacting the living shit out of those people. You're influencing them, yeah. Oh, in a real way.

Yeah.

But, you know, push comes to shove, I don't make those decisions. And so, and I support my partners in crime. and so that's kind of how it is.

Yeah. Over the last, I think you start, when did you start VaynerMedia? Was it 2010? 2011?

2009.

So I was in the office, I think it was Soho when there was like six people in there and a ping-pong table.

Yeah, Sunshine Suites.

And I remember at one point it must have been 2011 or 12.

That's right.

When you said somewhere in an interview, maybe it was with me or somewhere a speech, you said, you know what? We were okay as an agency the first couple of years. We actually were not that good. I think you even said we were okay, we weren't great, but now we're really great after three, four, five years of in the business. What would you feel like is the thing that you regret the most over the last decade or one of the hardest challenges within the agency that you had to face? Maybe that's two questions there.

There's several things there. The biggest challenge I had to face was about year six, seven, six. I was creating entitlement because I was putting too much on my own shoulders.

What do you mean by entitlement?

I was making it too easy for everybody and people got entitled.

Within the company?

Yep.

So you were saying, I'll take this on, I'll take this on.

In the macro, I was creating so much top line revenue and everybody was getting raises like crazy and I was creating such a great culture. that I made a soft. Which is wild.

Because you were doing the sales and the pitching and everything yourself.

I was impacting so much that 300, 400, 500 people had it too easy and we had to do a 35 person layoff because I just kind of cut the fat. And I didn't need to do it financially. I needed to do it to just culturally get everybody understand. these people that were just like, oh, weren't good at their job. They were nice people, but if we keep carrying this, this will die.

They weren't great at their job. They weren't even close.

They weren't even close. Yeah. Like, it was nice people over everything and that was it. If you weren't nice, you were getting fired. But if you were nice, like it was, and it was tough. And it was tough for me to realize, wow, on Tea with Gary Vee, on keynotes and interviews on the stage, I have great candor and accountability. but in my own shop I wasn't candorous enough, and I created entitlement 'cause I love happiness and la la and all that.

And everyone Loving you and you But.

I but I went too far with it. So that was tough. That was a that was a moment because I never got to that level with wininee Library because it was still happening there, but it was a small enough business and a family business and it was real family cousins and best friends that it had a different dynamic, so I didn't see it coming, so that was that was interesting. AJ leaving was tough. I was gonna say that was, that's.

What I thought you'd say there.

Yeah. That was a big blow. I didn't see it coming.

You guys built this together. This was 50 50. This was. Yep. We're gonna grow this as a Empire with a family.

Yep. Yep. And, like, being with my bro and all that. And. And so that was rough. He left for anybody who doesn't know, because he has Crohn's disease, and he just wasn't feeling great, to be frank. He just didn't like the business enough. Clients. Client service business suck. and he just said, I'm out. I don't feel well. And so that was rough. And that whole process was rough, like buying him out. And, like, you know, we were 50 50. But I, I, you know, what I love about my brother is I'm sure if he sat here, he would say that wasn't how it played out. We didn't know how it was going to play out. So those are Dynamics of, like, you know, like, that was rough. That's just real talk, you know? But, like, we're obviously in an incredible place, thank God, because we genuinely love each other more than money. But it's still, you know, you have your true, it's not even egos. You have your own merit, you know, radars that kind of feel like, what is the situation? So unwinding that is always tricky. I'm so grateful that we're in such a great place with each other. And we, by the way, for the record, we were never in a tough spot. Me and my dad were in tough spots all the time because of the two cooks in the kitchen. Me and AJ, like, really figured it out and we really leaned into each other. So that was good, but that was challenging. this, this two months has been really challenging because, you know, I structured for economy break, but not one that was the whole world had liquidation issues and speaking went to zero.

Oh, man.

You know, like just a lot of things that, you know, production, which is a big part of us, went to zero, you know, and clients aren't paying like, you know, so it was You know, I was super prepared for 2008. I was not prepared for something that looked like this. We got lucky and I hate using that word, but this is the truth. If Hilton and JetBlue and, you know, Morton Steakhouse were my biggest clients, we would be in real trouble. Like luckily for us, food and like the serendipity of like financial services, food, beverage, being our biggest clients is gonna let us get through this in a good way when it's all said and done. But we could have gotten, like honestly, I sit here and say, my God, if Marriott, Hilton, if American Airlines, if, yeah, I'm trying to think of other people, clothing, if Neiman Marcus, you know, retail, like, if our product, if our client mix was different, this would have been maybe it. Really? Really? I mean, if you, if all your clients go to zero and you're in client Services, you're not selling wine, you're not selling, you know, subscription business, you know, if you, there are agencies that have gone out of business because of this, because because, you know, yes, I mean, you know, nobody could ever think of zero, zero. But by the way, I've always thought about war. This is the closest thing to war. I've always thought about like, what if World War III happens? But what my mind would always go is like, well, you don't care about business then, you're actually genuinely scared of a bomb or dying or whatever it is. So this is like war without war. Real life. Now, what's really cool about that is that happened, let's say Hilton and American Airlines and, Chuck E. Cheese. I'm trying to think of a million different things and sports. What about that? The Jets and the NBA, all these, the serendipity that's like we just got the perfect wrong hand, 3-7 off suit. I would have been super, I'd be doing this video and be like, that's what happened. And I couldn't see it coming and I deserved to lose.

Like literally that would be like my reaction to it. Yeah, and you'd almost be excited to start from. Oh, you always talk about, I wish something happened so I could build it back up again. how much has your business been affected? Have you lost, you know, half of your business?

We've lost 10% or maybe we're definitely 12% down in like top line revenue expectations. We've had, we have, I still don't think this is over. I think there's gonna be, you know, relapse and that would trigger things. We pay liquidity more than revenue. People are stretching terms. They don't have the money. Like there's, you know, that's, What are you doing? And I'm paying my employees.

Yeah. And I'm paying rent. Exactly. That's tricky, man. You got to get a Higgins to give you a little break on that rental.

Yeah. The problem is, even Ross, like he has partners and banks and it's crazy. It doesn't work that way. And so, and by the way, my business is too big for the little bailouts and too small for the big bailouts. So I'm in that perfect middle. Like us, us 50 to $300 million businesses are the ones that are going to go out of business.

What are you doing personally to supplement the speaking fees?

Nothing.

Nothing. Are you innovating anything to launch or.

Create or... No, I'm massively tripling down on, you know, empathy is doing really well. Yep, empathy wines doing well. So my wine business and my dad gets all the income from the family business. So that's, I'm doing wine texts because I love them and it's fun, but that's not hitting my pocket. And I'm focused on VaynerMedia. I gotta make sure VaynerMedia gets through this properly because when it does, it'll be two times bigger because we're built for this kind of world. So this is why savings matter.

It's so important why savings matter. It's something I remember in 2008 when I was on my sister's couch. I remember saying to myself, never again do I want to feel broke. Like I need to go back to my sister's couch. Hopefully there's enough time where I can be smart enough to not buy I wear the same $20 shirt probably like you every day. I'm not out buying stuff. Like, I like to feel good, but I don't need to buy fancy things. I'd rather have money or investments or something that I could use for a time like this.

Yeah, but a lot of, you know, most of my, most of my net worth is tied up in non-liquid investments, right? It's true. So, you know, investments is fine, but like, the one thing that made me feel good from day one is I have a certain amount of money in the bank that like, that is just to me like, Do not touch and like I feel I can live on. And again, if everything went to zero, that's not the case and that's why I'm focused on this. But if everything went to zero, I would start looking at that and like literally sell homes and like rent a little apartment and use that capital to start my flipping empire. 'Cause that's what I would do on the record. If that ever happens, I'm gonna buy and sell shit 'cause that's my core basic skill set that is liquid on the transaction. I mean, you know this. I've been yelling for a year and a half about sports cards.

They've gone through the roof. I know. I feel pissed that I didn't get any MJ cards after this. You told me a year ago, you're like, get LeBron, give Jordan, get all this. And now it's going up because of this stuff.

I'm curious. Jordan rookie cards went from 20 to 100, 000. It's crazy, man. Like, everyone's, like, getting into startups. I was like, I put my, you know, like, LeBron rookies I bought for.

1100 or 7, 000. Oh, man.

And when you buy 55 of them, that's money.

Oh, that's money. I'm curious, we talked about how you overcome self-doubt. How would you inspire other people's or educate them on how to eliminate self-doubt in their life?

It's completely predicated on valuing other people's opinions. If you actually make pretend nobody else lives on Earth, nothing is scary.

Why is the opinions of others such a heavy thing for people to overcome?

I think it's humanly, like this is where I think like, this is truly my great gift. I'm so grateful for it. I think people got caught. I think they just get caught that everybody's in this framework of other people's opinions. Like just, it's how we're raised. How do we train ourselves to get out of it?

If it's something for 10, 20, 30 years, 50 years, we've been living that way.

The same way I trained a 30 and a half that I have no way taking care of my health. I don't like eating habits. I don't like exercising and just pounding, pounding, pounding, pounding every day. this is why I put out so much content. Maybe today's the day that I say it a different way that makes people realize their mom and their girlfriend and their boyfriend and their uncle and definitely anonymous people on social media and Lewis and Gary's opinions actually don't matter. Wow, the liberation to then actually do sh*t. And now you're doing full throttle because of whether you win or lose, it doesn't matter. You can't hear the cheering. This is why I'm trying to get people out of hearing the cheering. My newest thing in the last year or two, I'm like, wait a minute, right? Because everybody says you're so hot on Instagram that when they say you're not, you start doing plastic surgery, right? When everybody says, like, you're such a great business person, you start keeping up that facade instead of, like, it just makes so much sense. So to me, the biggest thing is the humility was such a factor. I didn't realize how big of a deal that was, how much that worked for me is like, I don't believe I'm as great as I know I am. I am. Like my logical side knows that I'm up to something, but I just don't internalize it. I won't let it penetrate my soul. I think I have the ability to be the biggest deal, but I will never believe it.

That's powerful. You mentioned earlier, you know, client work and agency work is.

It is.

Why put your life's attention into a business model essentially?

Because because I'm building the Death Star. I'm sure the Death Star was to build for, you know, Darth Vader and the Emperor and all that. But when it was done, it could press a button and blow up a planet. It wasn't fun for me to eat in the prime of my career, except here I am at 44, empathy being the first one, the rest of my life are going to be the next ones, including Lewis for governor in California, including let's cure Crohn's disease because AJ has it, including many other things. So I'm building a Death Star. I'm building a VaynerX now, right? It's got the publishing side, it's got a speaking bureau, it's got, you know, Tracer.tech, people should check out. It's a data analytics SaaS business. It's got, you know, the Sasha Group for small businesses. I'm building a literal machine. Machine. That's the scalable version of who I am as a human.

It's amazing.

Like if Vayner Publishing would be a top book publisher if I decide Vayner Real Estate, I would be a major broker, Vayner anything in perpetuity now that I've eaten dog for a decade.

If you could predict, what was your prediction 10 years ago when you launched Vayner Media? Was it to be where you're at with whatever 6, 7, 800 employees and.

Kind of- It was, I did think by now I would have one brand owned. And because I thought the economy would collapse earlier.

Like a shoe deal, because you were to buy like some type of shoe.

It's why I did the K Swiss thing, right? It gave me a chance to test it when I realized I wasn't going to be doing that just yet. And it came in front of me and I did it and it really worked. And they sold that car. You know, look at Resi. Resi had a big exit, right? Resi's my biggest exit. I never talk about it. I co-founded it.

Wasn't that a 200 million or what was it? Yes.

Plus. so like, like, I'm winning out here. Resi is kind of like the, like, I remember Resi and being like, it.

Came out hot and then it kind of like, you didn't hear about it for four years and then, oh, it just exited. It was the winner.

It beat Reserve and Reserve had all the Uber guys and gals behind it. We won. We, but we just built a business. It wasn't like, I'm not out here worried about making shorts in the headlines every minute.

Like, Vayner, why not talk about that, though? Why not talk about, like, the thing that you launched in It was a big hit.

It's just not on my mind. Plus, Ben Leventhal and Mike Montero, the CTO, deserve a lot more credit than me. I came up with the idea jointly with Ben. I found Mike Montero, who was a big time CTO that built the incredible product. I personally wrote a big check when the company was in trouble at one time. I did a lot of great things.

But I'm a fan of the operator.

They executed day in and day out. So I don't like to go out there because I think that's faking the funk a little bit. it, but I feel like my DNA is really in it. And I feel like in comparison to a lot of other people that have a lot of wins that they claim, I have plenty of my DNA in Resi, but that has been most, first and foremost, that's Ben's win.

So, okay, so you didn't reach that level of what you thought would happen within this decade, but it's 2020 now. Imagine 2030. What do you want to see happen by then?

I thought I was going to build like a, I thought I was going to build the millennial Falcon and buy you know, K Swiss, what ends up happening is building the Death Star. And so when I buy Puma and then flip it 12 years later, I buy Puma at 54, 10 years from now, I flip it at 64, and I buy the Jets and win six Super Bowls. Like this has been written, Louis.

Give me the year and the date and the time that you're gonna sign for the Jets. What is the exact time? Date?

November November 11th 9 A.M. November 11th 20. what do we mean 24 2048.

Wow I'm marking it down November 11th 9 A.M. 2048 what is it that day and time does that have any.

Meaning with you not necessarily just yeah.

You know amazing man what is the the final word you'd like to share.

With people about let's Sorry, I got excited.

Go ahead, go ahead.

Let's come out of this leaning into humility and gratitude and that will be the springboard to everything you want. If you can, just be grateful. Yes, you lost your job or your business is not as good, but your grandfather didn't die from corona. Just be grateful. Grateful for the time you're spending with family now, grateful for the innovation time, the thinking time. I'm sleeping more than ever. I put on a couple pounds, so I gotta be a little bit more careful, but I'm gaining real muscle. I'm starting to really do it.

Let's play some ball soon.

But I'm not going to dodge you on that. You're too good. But gratitude and humility. If you want to learn how to.

Become happier in your life, then make sure to check out this video right here.

Sky's the limit possibilities. But if it goes through the lens of who I am as this past story, this limitation, this person that tried to achieve it and failed, is someone who gets love by failing over and over, is someone who has to stay small.

Significance by failing, right?