This is the Gary V audio experience. I've been innovating my whole career. I was a bad student, so from day one, I was told I would never be anything by the establishment outside of my mom. So that was good, because I'm maybe not scared.
By the time I became a grownup, I was told. But the one place I was never told that was at the consumer level. At the lemonade stand, at the baseball card show, at my dad's liquor store, I was shining. The consumer always said yes to me.
But humans, who had judgment of what I was up to, always said no. I'm going through it right now. Last two weeks, I've been explaining to everybody what I'm doing at FTS. Now I have some reputation, so people are a little bit more thoughtful with their nose.
They can hedge their bets. My dad was told by all these uncles of mine, other liquor store owners that I grew up knowing. They all told my dad he was crazy for letting me build a website. The internet was a fat.
1996, it's a fat. How could you spend $25,000, $15 on the site, and then a little to kick it on, that was a lot of money for a small business, that was 300,000 in profit a year. And buildingwindlibrary.com was crazy. Moving all the money from print and direct mail to Google AdWords was crazy.
Now I built this $40 million company for four, and now I'm spending all my time in this thing called YouTube and making videos who I think I am. When is this? That's crazy. Then my financial advisor said it was crazy that I put all my money that I'd saved into Facebook and Twitter stock.
That was crazy. Starting an advertising agency by being a wine merchant. That was crazy. You know, buying Bitcoin in 2014 was crazy.
You know, I mean, nothing. I don't really remember anything I was excited about. That wasn't met with blind. You can do it for my mom.
And then probably not from everybody else. That's a story of my life. I've kind of learned that my wife is almost a reverse indicator. She goes, what?
I go, I am onto something. Yeah, it's true. I mean, gosh, it's such a huge piece of knowledge for anyone to gather, which is that no one else knows anything. They're all just kind of using these patterns they've learned from other things and trying to handicap whether something new is actually going to work or not.
And so it's so much easier to go. That'll never work because they're probably going to be right more times than not. It's happening to me right now. As I explained to people that NFT is going to be the ultimate arbitrage for influencers that have built real communities, the way that artists are going to get their actual economics, the fact that people will care about social currency at scale, virtual goods.
You know, these are all things that I believe in and it's hard for people to understand. I have to say things to them like, how much do you think three years ago at the height of it, two years ago at the height of it, somebody would pay for a blue check on Instagram? And, you know, however I story tell that, a lot of people are like, oh, a lot. I'm like, well, that's what NFT is going to be.
They're like, well, wait a minute. I can take a screenshot of it. I'm like, you can also have a fake Prada bag. You're allowed to buy a fake Rolex.
You know, people struggle with new things. They don't understand the blockchain. They don't understand, you know, these things. And so, I mean, this is why I love having a relationship with you.
I used to go crazy with people about Netflix versus blockbuster. Me too. Yes, but you had a lot more financial and emotional reasons too. I saw it from a hundred miles away.
It just was obvious to me. And listen, and not to be not to be kissing here, but seriously, I was a wine person a long time ago and I was a direct marketing guy. And when I saw what you were doing, I was going, oh, Jesus, this is, I can't believe he's the first person he's kind of building this out. So, it's so evident to me and not just that same with Jeff Bezos.
I'll go, they're not not so so sensitive. I don't know if you can see this. You're about to see some good. I literally, literally, there have been three companies that I've ever bought public stock of ever in my entire life over the counters.
It's just, you know what's funny about me? I don't want the money. I want the happiness. I don't get great joy in buying stock.
One of the reasons I love NFT is I love to do it all. And people don't know this about me. So, this speaks to me. I've always been obsessed with Walt Disney and Vince McMahon.
Why? IP creation. The Macho Man and Hogan are goofy and Mickey Mouse. I get it.
And so, this is going to be a great space for me. But the reason you just said Bezos and I got goosebumps is Amazon, Netflix and Shopify are the three companies that I bought. Every other public share I own is because I invested in a lot of private companies that went public. Like, I'm a big one with Coinbase.
I'm going to have those shares, but it's not because I'm buying them on the open market. And by the way, I probably should because I've been very right about a lot of companies. And I just, it's just not where I get my excitement, but I get it. It's very obvious to me.
People are in the business of no. People are in the business of saying no before they asked. People prefer to blame the machine. I'm aware I have it at Vayner.
I have a full hardcore open door policy. But some people would rather go to the bathroom and vent than actually talk to me when I've proven over the last half decade how unbelievably safe it is to talk to me. How do you do it? How do you push yourself to take a risk?
Practice. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I think you have to challenge yourself. Listen, careers are a big person.
The reason I talk so much about work is it's a scary percentage of our entire life. The amount of time you spend working in comparison to everything else you do is when you add sleeping into the equation, it gets really intense. So I really push people here and how do you do it? If it's too hard to do here because you're a student and you're in a machine and now you're this and you have to try to do things outside.
I actually think somebody here off of this talk who then goes and tries skiing. I don't know why I'm stuck in that thing. For the first time I never was a skier or cooking or going to an opera. Doing something completely uncomfortable may start the process of doing something uncomfortable here.
I think it's practice. I think you need to, by the way, let me give you a little one. I like to go little once in a while. I'm hoping one person does this.
Go volunteer at a nursing home for one day in your life. A, I think you'll get a lot of value when I talked about earlier because perspective is the game and you can get it real quick if you go into that jungle. And B, that's you doing something uncomfortable. I think people have to break patterns.
I think you do something different or build courage to do something different by getting used to it. The great fortune of my life was I was an immigrant who got picked on for not being able to speak English. I was a terrible student. I was not good at sports.
I basically lived the first 18 years of my life telling me that I was a losing platter. So I got real cozy with losing. I love losing. It's why I associate so much more with people that don't come from privilege.
You know, whether they look that part and I look, I view privilege first and foremost. We don't have the date. We can see a white male looks privileged. We can see somebody who's well off financially as privileged.
The real privilege game in our society is what's going on in everybody's dome. Mental privilege is number one. Right? I wish, this is why I'm talking so much about parenting.
We are living through the worst execution of parenting in our society because we're living through such enormous success, abundance, and prosperity in America for the last 60, 70 years. And so now parents are getting into things. You know, parents during the Great Depression struggled with going to school and yelling at the teacher for not doing this, that or the other thing. So we're living in eighth place trophies, fake environments, entitlement.
There are kids in this room right now who take money from their parents and are over at the age of 22. I believe that that is the number one poison in our society. I believe it creates enormous fake environments. It subconsciously tells children that they're not capable and they need their parents help.
And fake environments are bad and it leads to bad behavior. We don't, do you know that our society doesn't talk about saving money at all? We don't talk about saving money at all. We don't talk about borrowing money from our parents and paying them back.
That's what two generations ago used to do. Now we're so entitled. We just expect. This is what, you know, everybody always asks me like, hey, how do I manage, you know, these millennials?
Unlike with empathy. They've reparented an environment where if you came in ninth, they clapped for you. Listen, I think this is a super important subject matter. I'm not saying boo somebody and make them feel like I'm a product of self-esteem.
My mom did the greatest job of self-esteem, but she also created accountability. Like, and we really need to debate that. You have so much going on. And I hear you say the balance is so important.
Do you have any certain trick you use to try and keep your hedge from exploding from making sure you have time for the other stuff? Not judgment. Not what? Not judging myself.
Yeah. That's a good one. A lack of judgment on yourself allows you to not judge others, which is healthy. And it also makes you not well, which allows you to drop 33 plates while you got 86 in the air and you're still thrilled with your net positive outcome.
In that looking back at historical correctness, people only remember that one plate you managed to keep going. And they forget about the other 79 that- Well, 1,000%. And if you get- And if you have the humility to respect your craft, I love entrepreneurship because it's money, but because it's fair. When I lose, I deserve it.
And I like it. I like that I passed up over twice. I like that I bought some Bitcoin in 14, but not enough. I like my losses.