I believe in the next 10 years. There's currently a hairdresser in her little salon. Six seats in a small town right now in a nice business. She's a killer.
If she puts a laptop or a camera in her salon and starts screaming back, literally, I believe that that person is going to become famous and make a lot of money by not playing to the camera. By literally living their life on their core activity. Attention is the number one asset. Gary Vaynerchu.
Welcome to my rehab. Thanks for having me. Have you any other crown for dozen years? I was thinking about it the other day.
I think it was south by southwest 2006 or 7. Amazing memory family. That was the first interactive that they had. Do you remember Mark de Chino?
I sure do. We were on like a panel about the Internet, web 2.0, the search. We haven't even been coined yet. That's actually not the first time we met.
That's the first time we met in person. We had an amazing research team. I want to show you what we found. Oh, my God.
I'm excited. Okay. This was circa 2000, love. It was the first time.
You're on CNN.com, oh, my God. I remember this. And it was wines for Valentine's Day. Oh, my God.
I fully remember this. I still remember that. That is so good. Look at us.
How cool is that? I was like 24. You literally live up your high school. Oh, my God.
That's still true. It's still crazy to me how much value there is in wine because there's so much of it and it changes year to year. And most people are so undereducated on it. The amount of.
It's funny. The book that I wrote, Hoa Attention, talks about overpriced and underpriced marketing behavior. And that's. I think I learned it in wine.
The amount of people overspending online and the amount of deals in wine is pretty extreme for you in a little bit. But this was hilarious. I can't believe we found this. Your research team deserves a raise.
That is really good stuff. So when you see this guy. Yes. What do you think?
I think that that dude knew what was happening. Which was he intuitively. He was. You know, even though I looked fairly young there, I'd already been through a real decade of business building.
Right. That's 10 years into my career. Gary. I'm probably 32 there or something like that.
If it's 2009, I'm 34 there. So what I really understood there. Look at us. This Slip one.
What I really understood there was, oh, shit. This is what I saw in 95 and 96 of my launch. YY.com, but at that point, we were a small local liquor store giving back to money. Look at that book.
That's my first book. You know, I'm looking crushed it by first. This is 2008 or seven. Yeah, it's earlier.
I think it's 2008. Anyway, what that dude knew was, oh, I'm seeing the same movie again. It was only the second time I'd seen that movie. Now probably a fourth time seeing that movie, which is there's a substantial shift going on.
And holy crap, this is so cool that I'm doing CNN. But I have a feeling that this Twitter, YouTube, Middler, all these things at the time that this is going to become the thing. Tumblr. Tumblr.
I was. And so that was a fun time for me because it was the first time I felt like I was sitting on information and I had a little bit that I could do with it in a way that I couldn't do anything. The first time. The first time, it was like, back to money.
We're doing $3.8 million a year revenue as a liquor store on 10% gross profit. So $380,000 before actual expenses of electricity, payroll. My father was living his American dream by paying to own his own property and building like many immigrants. So that's what he was focused on, and that made sense.
And coming to this country with 100 bucks, that is a massive accomplishment. I obviously was next gen and had a lot of big dreams there. Back to being an investor in Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter. Twitter was the first time I was able to take advantage from a money standpoint.
That's the theme of this show. And. And knew that I was gonna build a lot of personal brand, and I didn't know that that's what it was called back then. I just knew that I was gonna be known in the wine business, in the wine world, in a way that I could never dreamed of even two, three years earlier, because it's just how the world worked.
Now you're on your seventh business book, so eight altogether. You mentioned your dad as I was reading your book. There's a very early call to action, and you're big on call to actions. So I did it, and I emailed Sasha.
I wanted to check and make sure Sasha didn't write me back. That's very highly likely. Sasha doesn't like to write back because you Know like many immigrants, Sasha is insecure about his spelling, which I keep telling him and my mom, your son is atrocious at spelling. My team, I love when I send company blog emails because I was thinking about the first.
The person that's their first week and now we're like this thing and like I always wonder if they see the disaster of my grammar and say am I at the right place or should I quit now? But it is unlikely Sasha will reply to you. But nonetheless, when do you write about. Oh, it's long.
I didn't fuck around. Gary, that's very sweet. What do you think? The figure's so sweet.
It's gonna make his day. So I'm first generation American too. And I remember that spelling insecurity like when I was applying to college, I had to figure out for the time, first time. Do you think a lot of your hustle comes from not just like you being here, but this immigrant mentality that we all share no matter where your parents came from?
Yeah, I think like, you know, for the people that are listening, I think the immigrant mentality slang for like some sort of mix of ambition and really almost like a form of lack of complaining and or a mix of gratitude. There's incredible advantages of being an immigrant in a place of opportunity like America. And what I mean by that is there are plenty of seventh generation Americans listening right now that have full accountability, don't complain, tremendous ambition, incredible tenacity. But there's one very big truth in human life which is it's hard to be hungry when you're fed.
And most of me most very clear. It's not hard to analyze. When I was 12 and I wanted things and I already at the age of 12, entered the zone where my mother felt that she didn't need to buy things for me, that if I wanted them, I should go get it. You can imagine selling eliminated baseball cards or whatever I had to do.
Shoveling snow was a big activity. Washing cars was a big activity. Makes you rest in peace. I lost a friend that I grew up with, Marissa Bird.
Makes me a little emotional but like we fucking Robin Turner, you're watching too right now. Andy Greco, my little sister lives. We fucking hoses on our like real hoses. Not like back in the day.
We're like wrapping our shoulders like bucket of water like we grinded because we grew up in an environment. We're like mommy and daddy. We're not going to buy you they that Toys R Us. Like if we wanted Bazooka from Krausers like, we need to find that 5 cents.
And of course, that became a humongous advantage. And how did that change the way you dealt with money? Like, my family just used cash. I also have found that regardless of where your family's from, nobody used a dishwasher.
We didn't even have one. Like, I grew up very. Like, just to remind everybody, because there was a lot of people who watch don't have a lot of context on me. Like, I was born in the Soviet Union.
When we moved to Queens to immigrate to America, we lived in a studio apartment with multiple family members. 5, 6, 7, depending on what's going on. Because we studios, like, we were really poor, not like, we weren't lower. Like, a lot of people talk about humbling and what they're saying.
Thank God this is a wonderful thing. We're in a prosperous country. They grow no class. Like, they didn't have BMW.
Like, we grew up. Like, I now, to my dad's credit, we weren't dirt poor for very long. We were dirt poor. Then we moved to Dover in like a little bit.
Then we grew up in a townhouse in Edison, New Jersey, which was a blue collar, lower middle class neighborhood. And so we didn't have a dishwasher. Like, I remember thinking the dishwasher was like, that was status. I remember thinking as old as 14 years old, which would be 1989.
I remember thinking that if you had a BMW or Mercedes, that would be equivalent to the way we look at the Kardashians today, like private plane, yachts, Elon Musk Bezos. To me, if you had a Mercedes or BMW, you were filthy, filthy rich. So I got. So my relationship with money, though, was very fascinating in hindsight, which I think.
And you're probably gonna spend a night. So I'm also asking you this question. I got really lucky and fortunate that I don't have a relationship with money, where I view it as validation. I don't hoard it.
I definitely don't weaponize it. I view it as a byproduct of the thing I really love, which is the game. Winning, winning. But I also love losing.
Well, I think entrepreneurship's interesting to me. Like, I think about this a lot. I love winning, but I equally get great joy in losing. Another great podcast like yours I did, where I finally broke it down with Steve Bartlett's podcast.
And I wanted to know about this. I talked about this thing that happened to me. It actually just happened a couple weeks ago where I'm still at 48, play pickup basketball. And you shoot for teams.
And sometimes if you shoot for teams, instead of just mixing up teams, if there's 10 guys, you're like, okay, let's take this kind of even. You're tall, you're tall. You guys split. You're good, you're good.
You stink, you stink. But, you know, which is common. We always shoot for teams. And sometimes when we shoot for teams, the teams are obnoxiously lopsided.
And I especially get excited when my team is much worse. And I really weirdly, like, when we lose the first game 11 to 2, something chemically triggers into me where I get really excited about it. It's kind of like the. It's nothing like too wild other than like, can we have the intestinal fortitude?
Can we have the chemistry amongst ourselves? Can we be clever or figure something out to somehow now win the next game? And sometimes it seems a very boss and you ask kick again and again. And I just talked about this podcast, like, how I can enjoy it out of that.
And it's similar to business. I don't get devastated when agendas, investments, concepts, strategies, or even companies I start fail. I view it as that's the price of admission. I don't feel entitled that because I have been historically successful that I'm allowed to be successful the next thing I do.
And really, I like when I fail because it allows me to talk to myself of like, this one relationship of like, see, big shot, like, this game doesn't give a fuck about you. This is real merit shit. And you weren't good enough. I like that.
It's kind of like the podcast readings. I've been doing it for a long time and ebbs and flows right when. When I heard there's an opportunity to do the show with EO's Pong because we haven't seen each other in a while. And then, you know, during the process, I was like, oh.
And I got to see how well the show's doing. And that makes me so happy for you. What I like about that was when I looked at it, that was just how I'd look at a long time. And I got to see a lot of people that have been doing it for a long time, and a lot of people are emerging.
And you see, and you know this because you're still living. Over the last 10 years, there's been just a lot of ebbs and flows and years, multiple years when my podcast was in the top 100 consistently overall. That is not where I am now. And I think I Deserve that because I know that I'm not putting everything into my podcast right now because I'm putting into other things.
I like that. I just. I feel like you do deserve to be where you are because you're doing it. And I'm obsessed with notes.
I love sports. Like, you can talk anything you want, but they're gonna play tonight. The tennis match is happening and everybody can talk, but the game's gonna fall out and games gonna be the game, and business is the closest thing to that. I like that there's merit in it, and I don't want to only like the game for what I get out of it.
I gotta love the game for the game. And then, because that's my obsession. Yes, I got fortunate. My passion wasn't painting.
It wasn't singing. It wasn't gardening or golfing. My passion was entrepreneurship. The byproduct, if you're good at that is there is economic upside, by the way, that if you're a remarkable athlete or actress or things of that nature.
But I find a lot of people that grow up with little, become overly obsessive, and have a very unhealthy relationship with money. They use it as a makeup or a band aid to close up feelings that they have in that era. I grew up in a very fortunate environment, which was we didn't have a lot of money, but I was happy all the time because my mother was such a supernova. So I was one of those lucky people who learned that money isn't the anecdote to happiness.
And I actually believe the people that are most happy in the world are the ones who don't grow up with a lot and grow up with extreme happiness because they're taught from day one there is no correlation to happiness and money. And I'm very grateful for that. Well, thank you for the kind words for the show. I mean, it's.
I've always thought from that moment to this second and every moment in between, because I love watching the game, the world, people, things. You're very tenacious, you're very talented. It always makes sense to me why you would have wins. I gotcha.
And you're just a good dude. You answer all your emails. I called you when I was launching Rich Bitch. That was my first book.
10 years ago. I didn't know what the fuck I am doing. And you were on, I don't know, number three. Three at that point.
And you said to me, you were so, so generous with your time. I came in New York and you said, do podcasts and at that time I was like, okay. I told my publishers and they're like, where do you find podcasts? And here we are, like a podcast network later.
And you're absolutely right. That was where the conversion was happening. You also told me to write a list of everybody I knew, go off the grid for two weeks, contact them. Right.
It is still advice I give to anyone who's selling books. If you're selling books, you've lived a life where you've done a lot of good things for a lot of people and asking is okay as long as you don't judge them if they don't deliver. The reason people struggle with my license selling books is their feelings get hurt when someone doesn't buy a bunch when they know they've done great by them. I.
That's an extreme. I mean, I have one example that I will never forget the day I die, and it does not bother me one bit. But I use it all the time. I'll use it right now because it's an opportunity to teach people a lesson of what happens when you have expectations and how happy you can be if you don't.
So you're right. When someone sells a book, I really think it's a bad idea to go off the win for a week, which is nice to get some rest before you go hard. It's a lot easier to stay on the beach and go literally A through Z in your phone and your inbox and say, hey, this means something to me. I got really serious about this.
I feel proud of it. It would mean the world to me if you could buy a bunch. One or a bunch or something else. Right.
Or something specifically. Can you send out this tweet, whatever platform, maybe they have more people. That's funny. I to your point, I think it's.
I believe that if I'm saying this out loud. So I expect them to be gentlemen in the future. I think it's more important. I think I make a bigger impact.
I have a very big. I have a very big platform. I still believe me, buying 300 books for a friend that I really know that really asked and put them in the lobbies of all kind of our regular ex offices is going to sell more books potentially than a single tweet of like, oh, Johnny's book is awesome. Or Sally's book is awesome.
Now, it could be the other way, but like really actually asking. The problem is, when I used to tell that advice at the public a long time, I didn't realize how many people were so Grounded in insecurity and envy and resentment. Early on, the first group of four people that I pulled to do that, they reach out to me and be like, this was horrible. I was like, what happened?
They're like, well, I did it on. Like, it didn't work. But like, now I'm really mad at Rick. I'm like, why?
Well, I buy anything. I've been so nice to Rick. I was like. And it made me think about the most impactful story I have on this, which is I have someone who I reopened.
Reopened meaning an investment was closed. It was done. I went to bat for this person to the founder to reopen around and let them put $50,000 in it investment. The company went on to have a massive exit.
This person made heavy eight figures. And when I went and asked for a book by and ghosted me. And I remember that being a really exciting moment for me because it was when I was able to call my bluff on myself. I genuinely knew what I'm about to say.
I continue to have a relationship with this person. Like, you know, later on, I genuinely don't judge the person because my mind goes to make me a little busy. I asked, by the way, I asked for times I really knew. I'm so grateful and thankful for my parenting, my DNA, my circumstance, the fact that I have no real feelings against that.
I just only know how to deploy optimistic, compassion. Right. Maybe it was a bad place. Maybe.
I don't know. Who am I to judge? And don't forget, here's the key to this. Going over this for people.
I was asking. When you ask, you're not allowed to judge. It's horrible. But.
But here's my thing. When you're asking, you're the one asking. When people get mad at people for not reciprocating their ask, I remind them what you're asking. Like, don't look a gift horse in the mouth or whatever the saying is.
I just believe there's something very powerful around expectation. If you're able to get into a place where you're just not expecting, you only control yourself. And so anyway, I don't know how we got there, but that's. Oh, your book.
Yes. Look, I think you're a piss. Honestly, I'm being serious with you. When I realized, oh my God, this person's not going to buy it, I was in order baffled because he just made tens of millions of dollars.
B, B, I'm being just very vulnerable, baffled. B, quickly to hope it's okay to see. Oh, I really don't give a shit about this. This is epic.
I actually eat my own dog food. I talk about their expectation. I really don't care about what's happening here. It's kind of like real life.
Jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, right hook. Ironically, attention was originally, literally up until final hour, called Jab, jab, left hook. It's literally the follow up to that book Part two, Part two. But it got so nerdy and it's the most detailed marketing book I put out that it just felt like it was different.
It was more of what now I realize I've been doing for 20 years, which is day trading attention. And what does that mean? First of all, I love the day trading part. Obviously I would love to know what long term attention investing is, but explain to me what the concept of day trading attention.
Well, listen to what just happened in the meta right before this part. You, you called the audience. In our relationship three years I've had an ability to be like, I think this is happening, I think this is happening. And obviously you also know this is the ending game.
There's many examples of that with me. Whether it's YouTube or Twitter or TikTok or just a lot. It's been the story of my life. Day trade Attention is the core asset in the world is attention for governments, for parents, for businesses, for media companies is attention and the history of the world attention platform distribution evolves.
So if you wanted to sell something way back then you probably had to draw something in a cave and other cavemen want by it. And like I need that club, you know. And then obviously newspaper and radio, right? I think a lot about that.
I studied newspaper radio, transition to television a lot and have a lot in the last 20 years. I think a lot about this classic political story where JFK loses the debate on radio to Nixon, but wins the debate on television, which was a medium. He goes on to win the election sweating. Correct.
Nixon look like crap. JFK was fucking a fucking stud. And so. And then I was also born in the Soviet Union.
So I'm growing up in the 80s, during the cold War, the end of it. And I'm thinking about propaganda. And I've always been fascinated by even weird things like coup d', etats, like when they're overthrowing a government, why they would always go to the newspaper radio station at the same time they would go after Paris somewhere. At a very young age, I understood communication mattered, so.
And then obviously I was very affected by it. I had a small family that explored business that I was coming into, that I was very, very, very, and I mean very hyper focused on building a very big business for my parents. And I was like, I'll do this for a while and then I'll do my own thing. And I got very fortunate.
The Internet was just emerging. So all of a sudden I launched wineliver.com in 1997. There's not a liquor store on that has a website in America. There's literally three or four at the time.
There's three or four of us. And. And I watched Arthur New business open a three to $40 million business in a nanosecond, aka five years with no money. I didn't see a credit line on the business.
This was all using its own cash flow. And I did that through email marketing while every other wine store in the country was doing catalogs. So they traded attention. I was getting attention in 1997 and 98, 99 from people that worked on Wall street that were early to email, sign them up and sending them a daily email about Opus 1 and Chateau Lafitte.
And I was outflanking the biggest stores in the country at the time, Zakis and Sam's and K and L out here in California. These iconic wine stores that I looked up to as a teenager that I would use to buy the New York Times when I was 15, the Wednesday dining in Session and look at their full page ads. One day I'm like that. They're spending four to six months making catalogs, spending lots of money making the catalogs.
So they're spending more money. And they were slower than I was. I was spending no money on email or the distribution and I was doing it daily. So I was getting to the customers, the biggest wine customers in the country and selling them insignia and Camus and Silver Oak and Chateau Lafitte.
And then two months later, they didn't get a cap from Morels or Sherry Lumens with that same stuff for more expensive. And they already bought it for me. And so I was able to outflank the entire industry with a new medium, which was email and having a website. And then later when we met, that was starting to happen because I saw this thing called YouTube and a couple months after came out, I started Wine Show.
Right. And then obviously social change the name. Right? Yeah.
So social shoppers and Scout liquors and then we ran into Wine Library and. And so I was very affected by day trading attention, which I define as right this second as we sit here. There's overpriced and underpriced ways to get attention. You could run a Super bowl ad for this podcast.
It would cost you $20 million. Between the media, the production, CBS were pushed by other inventory in their ecosystem that has bullshit inventory. It might cost you more than that. So that would be a bad idea.
Even though the super bowl is my favorite ad, you say though, in your book that it's still undervalued. I agree with that. I agree with that. I agree with that.
And I think if you're Nike or Coca Cola, then that is going to be a good idea because marketing budgets are enormous. The only reason that's not a good idea is my intuition. You're not spending $20 million a year promoting this. That's right.
And so but if you are spending $1,000 or $100,000 or $500,000, you want to spend it as wisely as possible, right? And so to me, right, as we sit here in the quote today, the number one thing that has happened in marketing is that organic reach in social has changed in the last couple years compared to what we grew up with. When we were growing up with social media, it was more like email marketing. You get as many people follow you as possible, and then when you post, a percentage of them would see it.
Today, one clip from this show has the ability to get 10 million views on TikTok and another clip from this exact show might get 4,000. The creative is a distribution now with these algorithms. And that is a substantial, massive, massive land grab that I want people to know about. And there's others.
Whether it's influencer marketing or Hulu pre roll, something you should be doing is running ads of video of this on what is now modern television. You can buy Hulu ads now for $1,500. And if you put that in front of other financial content, that's awareness. Just like preorder YouTube has been established.
So these are all the things that I've been like all time. But what is undervalued and what's over overvalued right now? Because when you were also promoting Wine library, you bought AdWords and you thought that they were overvalued, but they were really undervalued at the time. The clarity on that is I bought them so cheap the day they came out at 5 and 10 cents a click.
Then when they went up a year, two later, like 3 and 50, because other people are doing it, cents, 50 cents. I was like, oh, it's over, right? Because I was like, damn, it used to be so cheap. I didn't really know at the time what CAC and LTD was.
I didn't think in terms or never thought about customer acquisition versus lifetime value. I inherently did. I was like, if I buy the best of my business, we be able to keep these customers it work out in the long term. But I didn't have a math down yet.
So to your point, what you're referencing is I wish that I spent more Money on Google AdWords in 2001, 2, 3, 4, 5. It was. I was so goddam early that I got, I got confused and tricked my own self that it was like, oh, it's over now. Like I should have still been buying those things at 50 cents a dollar, even $2 because they were worth it to the business.
They were just too like when you bought the word wine for 10 cents on Google and when the first result, you can imagine when that word went to 16 a couple years later per click, you had this shit. What I didn't know yet was it was still worth for my company to pay $16 because the client was worth more or that could go up to $100. So you don't know where you are in the correct answer. I think people think of TikTok right now and say like I've missed it.
It's too late. Like I can't put my stick in the ground anymore. In the same way as like, you know, maybe you thought that you were at the peak of AdWords but it was just in the middle. You don't know until you see amount correct.
And then there's a game of best. There's. Not only is it underpriced, but then are you good at the creative? So is it harder to quote unquote, go viral on TikTok today than it was four years ago when I was yelling about it on every platform.
I know, it was just. That's right, it had already happened. So I mean like the thing that has worked with this I don't predict because I want to keep good reputation. Anytime I'm yelling about something, it has happened.
I'm just there early enough that it doesn't feel like it's happened. But to your point, like, what's really fascinating now that everyone needs to hear is you missed nothing today. Somebody was starting a YouTube channel. YouTube has been rocking and rolling since 2005, right?
The last 19 years. Today as we're doing this right now, somebody will start a YouTube channel and they will go on to fucking crush it because they were better. That'd be like saying, well, there was no room for Billie Eilish because Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and Whitney Houston were pop stars and all the pop star opportunities are done. It's a merit based game on the creative.
And so no media. Not podcasting, not YouTube, not Twitter, not Facebook. Every one of them is fertile ground. The best, the best takes creativity.
Once things get overpopulated, what skill set creatively it took to go crazy on TikTok three years ago? Today is the mundane. That doesn't mean you have to be crazy. It means that you have to provide something new and different that has depth.
But the only thing I go back to for getting flowers here, the other thing that I always thought was going to work for you was the depth of what you were talking about. You were talking about substantive stuff. The stuff you were saying was right. Financial literacy continues on this day as we sit here to be still way underpenetrated from what I wish the world knew.
So the other thing that people need to hear I think has been very substantial for both of us is you can have sizzle, and we both have sizzle. That matters. Charisma, ability, character, that happens. But if you do not have steak, you have no chance of longevity.
Back to south by Southwest. I remember that year. I remember because I used to read every single tweet after every talk I gave. And I remember many people during that era thinking that I'd be gone in a year or two because they thought my over the topness was just shticky and like all says a no stake.
And I remember enjoying that back to like, because I knew that, you know, I'm doing this forever. Like I'm a real businessman. Like I think I like at that point I accomplished things I wasn't guessing. Like I knew I had the work ethic and the talent and.
And so I really think that people need to hear, like if you're thinking about podcast or you're thinking this tick tock or you want to do a YouTube channel, like there's nothing stopping you. Do I believe that the next big platform that comes out, if you fastest on it, that you'll get even more upside if you do it? Of course it just applied the amount of attention. But there's never a bad time to go on a big platform if you're good enough.
Well, I say that about investing too. I can never res today. Some people say they're too old today. Well, you miss something, right?
So that same point, if you missed investment in a good business and you're like damn, I should have bought $18 a share. Now it's 42. Well, guess what? It's actually the business.
I mean I remember people telling me that they missed out on Apple stock in 2011. Really? I mean Facebook, I, I invested Facebook four years before the IPL. I never sold a share.
It's 19. A lot of people that work at Facebook at the time of the six month lockout sold at 19. It's 500. That's hard because you don't know where you are in that chart.
Right. That part. And what are you yelling about now? I do my blind streaming but I'm yelling about Twitch for a different reason.
I don't need to yell about Twitch. Twitch has clearly long established. Since Ninja popped on Twitch 70 years ago. This is nothing new.
Click Save rock. All the Saturday streamers have won. What I'm yelling about with live streaming is I see something really interesting. I think there's a new genre coming that's going to blow people away.
Which is what I would call the mundane. People that are screaming. Almost like an ASMR of something. I.
I said something the other day. I'll say it again. I believe someone. I'll use an example.
I believe in the next 10 years. There's currently a hairdresser in her little salon. Six seats in a small town right now. So nice business.
She's a killer. I admire that entrepreneur a lot. The fact that she is on the. Maybe she's listening right now.
If she puts a laptop or a camera in her salon and starts to scream the day literally I believe that that person is going to become famous and make a lot of money by not playing for the camera. By literally living their life on their core activity. That's right now. Now I also use an analogy in recent podcasts that I'm really excited about.
I think the stay at home mom and dad is going to scream their 6am to 8:30 of cooking, cleaning up the kitchen and getting the family ready for the day. The dad will be scream and that person will go on to make sense of theaters what I wrote about in Crush it which is coming true. I didn't call it influencers that humans were doing to make money on what they were passionate about. I believe it's about to happen with screaming that I'm encouraging people that are listening right now that if you can stream the mundane.
I used another analogy. If you mow your massive lawn for three hours there's going to be a big movement in the next three to four years where live streaming of what seemingly is not interesting. Because look at that. You were there.
You remember what everyone said about Twitter? Everyone was like, I'll never forget this. When Twitter. When I was yelling in 2006 and 7 about Twitter, when we were at these kind of conferences, everyone was like, this is so stupid.
Who gives a shit if you're having a pizza? Nobody cares that you're walking the dog. And I remember the Q and A session at South By. Somebody went really Hardy, said, this is actually idiotic.
And she said, gary, you see, like, something was kind of, like, clever in how she posed it. You seem like a smart guy. Do you actually like, who gives a shit about what you're having for dinner? And my answer was everyone.
And the whole. I remember the oxygen coming out of the room, like that moment, you know, where you're just like a mic drop. And it was fun because half the room, like, couldn't comprehend what I was saying. And I just remember looking at certain eyes and energy and obviously people I talked about.
I got off stage, it clicked. For a lot of people, my belief at the time was what has now transpired. It's how human communication works. And when somebody was listening right now, probably breathing to themselves while they're on the treadmill or driving.
Listening right now or walking their dog and hearing me saying that, I think somebody who owns a small salon will make millions of dollars through ad revenue, subscriptions and merch and books. And speaking after she accomplishes what I'm saying, that someone's gonna make millions of dollars a year only by live streaming what she's doing Monday through Sunday now, which is just one business. I think people struggle with that leap, but it's fucking crystal clear to me. So how do you start doing that?
You know, there's only one issue at hand in this entire conversation, which is, is it okay for privacy of the other people that happen to cross paths with what you're doing? So if you're a person that works at home all day, a painter. If you paint, if you fucking paint, put a fucking camera and go lie and paint. Obviously, for the salon woman, the thing that's a concern that everyone's about to figure out is, you know, a salon is like a therapy session.
So if she's streaming her day and a woman's coming in and she's doing what she normally does with her, with this salon person who's been here, salon hairstylist for 11 years, that's now her therapist. If she's now complaining about her husband, than that person, obviously that's live on the Internet at any costume. So. So a lot of people listening here, they have to figure out the privacy thing.
Two things on that. One, a lot of people are gonna be fine with it. They'll adjust. They're like, I can't talk about it because it's being filmed.
Number two, a lot of people doing solo life. But again, I'm gonna say nice and slow. I don't think a lot of people. I'll give you one.
One of the biggest, most important, really admirable jobs in my opinion, when people come to first world countries is they clean homes. A lot of them lives in that, right? It's something you can control. You can do that job without speaking English or Chinese or whatever place you're going to, man.
Obviously, again, very challenging. I listen to this. I'm an immigrant. I.
I'm like, I'm gonna do this. Tap the live stream from the home that you're cleaning for someone. Cause you're showing someone else's home. But do I believe that if you were able to go to that home, which might be too surmountable in this scenario, that somebody could go from getting paid some sort of hourly wage there to becoming famous?
Yes, I do. And I think that's the next frontier of what's gonna happen. It's almost like a boomerang though. Because didn't Lonely Girl try to do this?
Lonely Girl was. And I was there on their YouTube. I'll never forget when that popped. Lonely Girl was weird because it was a show, but we didn't know for the first couple weeks if it was real or not.
So it's like Blair Witch reality, Real world. They did such a good job that company. Because you thought she was a real person. Because that was the base of Zay Frank, remember?
And Renato and like, and Rocket Boom. And that was just a very. I mean, for everybody who's listening, first two years of YouTube was bananas. It was, it was like 90% pirated content right from the late night shows in the Simpsons.
And then a bunch of fucking people like me all trying to figure out like this might be something. But I guess from a business owner's perspective, this is what I struggle with. And I remember being on cnbc, we'd have analysts come on who are always available to come on tv. And they were like, if you're always available to come on tv, like, what the heck are you doing?
Like, are you really a big fund manager? Because like, how do you have time to leave whatever you're doing and come on tv. I think it's the same thing with social because I'm running a business as I'm supposed to be on all the time but like I'm knee deep running business and so that's why I suck at streaming right now. My streaming.
Cuz I always want to. If I'm going to talk the way I'm talking about I need to taste. I'm not talking from thesis or hypothesis or Professor Land. I'm streaming my office right now.
My problem is is I'm in such operations mode between Be Friends and BX right now that my day to day is so goddamn boring. I'm literally sitting on my desk literally doing 12 straight hours. Every minute on minute of meetings I'm operating and the entire stream is on mute because the meetings I'm having are sensitive information. And so I.
Thanks right now guys but like so to answer your question, a couple things. One, there's ways to be clever. When I started realizing that I wanted to vlog and I was like oh Casey, nice. That's so amazing.
But I was like I can't do that. So I took, you probably remember, I took a crazy step and hired a drock, right? And that became a term like I need a drock. Like that was very early.
One of. I was one of the first people that had a human being following me around 24 7. You have a human trainer following you around? Yes.
At the same time. That's exactly right. I literally started. This is true.
I literally started vlogging Drock follow me and Mike Lakatu who I worked out with this morning virtually. That was 10 years ago when I started getting suicidal. My health, it's happening. Same kind of two humans following around.
One was filming me and one was making sure that I wasn't putting non needed carbs into my body. So explain to me like let's double click and take you behind the scenes of this operation. You're live streaming on you. How does that look?
Where are you streaming? How is it working? Tell me about it. Twitch tv, garyvee Everyone go see it.
It's. It's literally a camera. I'm looking at the camera bus right now. There's a camera.
I'm living my life again. I'm not doing it well. I'm doing it to really taste it. Right?
I think there's in Twitch you can raid someone's channel. That means when you're done live streaming you can send all your viewers to someone else. The team found this woman. Is it the pizza lady that we Sent Is that a husband and wife or what's their scene?
Just boyfriend. And then a pizza shop in Rochester, New York. And the just there's a camera, just the kind of security camera, right? Like you just see them making pizzas all day.
We've sent some of our audience there, so likes her stuff and him and like, like it's what everyone is listening to is thinking it's that so but then how do you run business successfully and also make sure you drink content all the time? You're like content. Well, I was going to answer why. Those analysts were probably either one of two extremes, either very smart or what you think, which is faking the funk.
Right? Anybody? This goes back to the premise of the book. If you were one of the top hedge fund operators, managers or whoever had private equity people, public, public CEOs, they were attracting the attention to CNBC.
Listen, I am very busy, but if I am given the opportunity to have 30, 40 minutes or 17 minutes especially zoom 10 minutes that I allocate to that level of awareness of what I'm doing, that's all I positive. So CNBC is a no brainer. The ones I'm more skeptical about is like they're on every little thing that has like 19 viewers but even that they might be smart about. One of the main reasons I do podcasts is A, the attention of the audience, which is happening right now.
B, for the recordings of it. For my own content. I like to do two for once. You know, I love public speaking because I enjoy it.
Right? It's lucrative for me. But luckily for me, it's become not ROI positive to the amount of time I need to allocate for it. One of the main reasons I still do it, there's only two reasons I still do it.
I genuinely enjoy it. I want to do occasional stuff, fun for me. And two, I need content. I have a problem.
To your point. I'm so operating right now that I don't have enough content and so I need to actually allocate time for podcasts or keynotes for other things just to have content creation because my wife is my production facility. I love a twofer. I love a twofer deal.
So what does that look like? And what about the people that are maybe faking the funk on social media? They're like, I'm making millions of dollars in one day. Doesn't matter.
You know that like, I mean, if you're rich, you don't have to stay rich. But it's become more of a trend to say, look, honestly I don't even think about that because this goes back to what we talked about earlier. That just plays itself out. You know, I've been around the block at this point a little bit.
We've seen people come and go and so like, you know, as long as no one's massively hurting someone, you know, like really bad stuff, then it just becomes like I surely I have no feelings towards anything that someone's doing that might be faking the funk because they're, you know, from my perspective, you know, honestly, I get compassionate. I hope they get into a good place where they don't have to do it this way. So explain this on the team now meaning like for this two fer. What are we doing?
Dustin's recording. There's. We have about a 25 person team at this point. I think a bunch of international people.
The content goes into a hub and we go through the content now more than ever. Starting to use AI tools to go through the content and pick out the moments that we think have validity or upside to be meaningful. Short form content. And away we go.
And I distribute through every platform. I think what's unique about me still is there's not a lot of people who go coast to coast From Snapchat to LinkedIn and everything in between. I post on every single platform at scale every day. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Shorts, TikTok, Instagram, all of them.
Twitter, like all of that. And you have that distribution plan that goes out automatically. Somebody's doing it. What tools are you using?
Is it a asana? What kind of AI? Yes. Are we just switching from asana?
Yeah, I think so. Everything you said again, like. Like really human beings with tools, project management tools, editing tools. Whether it's Capcut or Adobe or whatever it is.
Honestly I don't even. I'm not even close enough to it anymore because it's really. Those things are agnostic. What the key is is creating scenarios where you can capture content and then put as much talent or science against the ability to extract those individual creative pieces.
And then the book is concept of pack. What I call pack platforms and culture. Right. So one of the reasons I love.
Let's go very nerdy and deep into details. One of the reasons I love the green screen. This is something you could crush. I apologize.
I'm not sure if you're doing this or not. Green screens. You would crush green screens. It takes so long.
No, it doesn't. That's what we say that. Because green screens is one of the biggest reasons I. Well, I do it on Instagram.
But I don't. I mean, let me rephrase. I reacted the way I reacted because it's one of the few things that I can do fast. Get a headline of something I don't opinion on, put it in the green screen filter, flip the camera, look at it, speak my piece for 60, 90 seconds and send it to the team with copy and we're done.
I see. But not like several cuts. Correct? Correct.
Got it. If you're talking about like the Alex. No, not. That's the.
I don't even know what the proper terminology. Stop cuts. Which is amazing. I've actually been talking shit for six months with my team.
I've been wanting to do a show like that with those hard cuts called Winding down where like I do my recap of the day while reviewing a bottle of wine club and. Right. But to your point that it's hard. I've been talking shit.
I've never done it. I'm doing it. I never do it because it is, you know, especially for me after 10, 11, 13 hour day to like then go and do another. That's how I feel.