Pod Insights The GaryVee Audio Experience Optimism Fueled by Practicality Is Unstoppable About this episode In today's episode of the GaryVee Audio Experience, we revisit the Forward Keynote that I gave in Jakarta, Indonesia back in March 2019. Remember to ALWAYS stay patient; Oh and hit me up to let me know what you thought 😉
Enjoy! Let me know what you thought.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Please, understand how lucky, that's the only word I have for it, how lucky you are that you get to live during this era. Right now, anything that comes out of your mouth that is complaining makes your grandfather want to punch you in the fucking face.
0:20 Speaker 00 How we doing, Jakarta?
0:26 Speaker 00 I just flew 24 hours. Took a quick shower. Plan on delivering this keynote, couple of meetings, and I'm heading to the airport at 4pm. So, a very quick trip, unfortunately this time, but I'm very excited about it. And there's a whole lot I want to cover, so... Let me, let me create some context for some of the people in the room who don't know as much about me, and then I'll go into the reason why I genuinely believe, as we all sit here today together, that because of this device that many of you are holding, we are living in the most opportunistic time ever to put yourself into a place of happiness.
1:10 Speaker 00 And happiness comes in all forms, and I, I, I think a lot of business and entrepreneurship, but I definitely want to articulate today a framework that speaks to how to get happy because of how much opportunity there actually is. Let me take a step back. I was born in the Soviet Union, in 1975, a little ways ago. I came to America when I was 3 years old. It was a very challenging upbringing in the first couple of years. You know, 6 family members in a studio apartment. We struggled, we had to learn a new language. We started from the bottom, no question.
1:52 Speaker 00 As you can imagine, my parents are very much my heroes. My mom stayed home and raised the kids. My dad worked every day, many, many, many hours a day. First as a stock boy, putting bottles on the shelf in a liquor store in New Jersey for only $2. ...an hour, so very humble beginnings where the Vaynerchucks come from. But entrepreneurship was definitely foundational in the happiness that we were able to create over that period of time. My dad worked quite a bit, eventually he became the manager of that liquor store. And that's when we moved to New Jersey, outside of New York City.
2:32 Speaker 00 And that's where I mainly grew up, and that is where my entrepreneurial career began. I, um, I always wanted to work. You know, it came natural to me, it's what I wanted to do. When the summer days happened and all the kids wanted to play, I wanted to go wash people's cars, I wanted to sell lemonade, I wanted to do business. It was always in me, it's what made me happy. When I was five, six, seven years old, I convinced all my friends to stand behind booths from the lemonade that I made. And I would make signs and try to think about how to market, long before the internet. I cared about one core thing, which was the attention of the person that I was trying
3:17 Speaker 00 to reach, and how I could get them excited to buy my thing. Eventually, after lemonade, I started my first kind of real business. In America, in the eighties, baseball cards, sports cards that people could trade became very, very big. And I rode that wave, I got very involved, I loved sports, and I loved even more buying packs of cards, getting good cards, and reselling them. And that's really where I learned much, I mean, to think that, sitting here today and having so many people clap for you on the complete other side of the world, and so much of that...
4:00 Speaker 00 Was what I learned in the malls and conventions in New Jersey selling these cards. It's remarkable, I'm very humbled, I very much appreciate the warm welcome when I came out here. And I'm setting up this framework, because I think, you know, as I was getting ready for this conference, and I looked at so much of the chatter about the conference, and obviously the phenomenal Instagram account of our hosts, and kind of just looked. The thing that I've become fascinated about, and the thing that I want to talk about today, is really two things. Literally, right before I came out here with the organizers, they're like, "Talk about the how." And I asked them, I said, "The how here, or the how here?"
4:48 Speaker 00 What's interesting to me, now that I've been a little older and had my career, and I'll go back to it in a minute to frame it up, but as I'm segueing, what's interesting to me is every wonderful person that I'm looking at right now, for them to get what they want, happiness. Forget about money for a minute, happiness. For them to get what they want, it actually is only one of two things. Here, or here. And here represents doing the work, knowing what to do. My whole career, as I got more known on the internet, I did not want to be a motivational speaker, and I spent many years not talking about this. I mainly talked about this.
5:32 Speaker 00 But after a while, what started happening was, I started reading enough comments, because I read all my comments, and I just started realizing so much of why people can't get there has to do with this, that I started talking about it more over the last four or five years. But I think they both matter. You could be the most optimistic, happy person up here, but if you don't put in the work, and if you don't know what work to put in, it's not gonna happen. Optimism is very close to delusion.
6:09 Speaker 00 However, I believe that optimism is the fuel to practicality. Right? If you don't believe you're doing it for a reason, or it's exciting, you're not gonna wanna put in the hours of the work. And so, that's who I've always been. I've always been ambitious and happy. I was very fortunate. I had a tremendous mother, who loved me very, very much, so I felt good. However, she did not create entitlement. When I lost, or when I was doing bad, she told me. She didn't make a fake environment, which is a huge factor. And to be honest, my biggest concern about the last 20 years of parenting, too much fake environments, too much entitlement. Which is why so many people struggle when they go into the real world, because the real world doesn't care.
6:53 Speaker 00 The real world is not your mama anymore. And so, I think about those things. Fast forward, I was very good at selling baseball cards. When you're making $3,000 or $4,000 a weekend when you're 14 years old, you've got it. I was good, fine. But then my dad eventually bought a liquor store, and he dragged me into the liquor store when I was 14. I started making $2 an hour, bagging ice. This was huge for me. If I didn't have that transition, all the money I was making as a young kid, it came so easy, because I was naturally talented. I think not having that struggle of losing all that, because my dad forced me to work in the store, and making $20 a day, that really helped me. And I learned a lot in that liquor store.
7:38 Speaker 00 Most of all, what I learned was to watch people. Today, after this talk, I will go to the airport, and on my flight, I will literally read most of the comments on Twitter, on Instagram, your DMs. I will read them. And I'll read them to understand, was there anything I said in this hour that stood out? That didn't hit, that did hit? I learned that watching people, and more importantly, understanding people, and most importantly, being empathetic to people, was the best way to build a real business, to build something meaningful. The biggest problem, I'll tell you right now, one of the biggest reasons most people in this room, if they did... Decide to start an entrepreneurial venture, a side hustle.
8:22 Speaker 00 Whether you try to sell something in your home on Facebook Marketplace, which, oh by the way, I'm gonna bring up later. My biggest belief, that the quickest way for many people here to start is to sell stuff on Facebook Marketplace. But I'll talk about that later. Whether it's that, whether you're finally ready to start your podcast on Spotify, whether you're gonna build your Instagram profile or meme page because you want brand dollars. Whatever you're up to in this room, the reality is that if you have to put in so much work, but so much of what comes out of people's mouth or what they post is selfish, not selfless. It's what you want.
9:07 Speaker 00 You want them to buy it. You want them to like your post. You want them to follow you. The biggest reason I have the luxury of standing here today is from the wine business to the content I made on YouTube when it first came out, to everything I've done over the last eight to nine years in my books, in all my free content. I've always thought, "How do I bring more value to you than I get in return?" It's very simple. Karma, or doing the right thing, always works. The problem is, most people are impatient. The reason most people are impatient, especially in cultures like mine, Eastern European, in cultures like here,
9:51 Speaker 00 there's too many people in here that are trying to get successful too fast because they wanna prove it to their parents. And in that impatience is a very important point. My friends, the number one thing I fear, period, is that people live their lives based on other people's opinions.
10:16 Speaker 00 The number one thing that I have seen, as I've gotten older, that has been very obvious to me, is that most of the people here today do many of the things they do because of one to five people's opinions in their lives, whether their parents, their spouse, their older sibling, their neighbor. Living your life predicated on the judgment of somebody else is the great weakness of the human being. The biggest reason... Do you know how many people are here today just to get affirmation from me to go and do something? I mean it. I mean it, and it's fascinating to me, and I'm empathetic. I understand.
11:01 Speaker 00 And I want to talk about it a lot, because no matter how I tell you how to leave 500 comments on Instagram posts, or what time to post your posts, or why you should start a Spotify podcast tomorrow, or how you actually list an item on Facebook Marketplace, no matter what I tell you, if you post the first day and the person that you're worried about has a bad opinion of it, it's already game over. And so I flew all the way here, 24 hours, to put pressure on what is the most obvious conversation, which is, are you prepared to finally
11:44 Speaker 00 get quiet in your head and not allow the opinions of others to dictate your behaviors? Every person here knows what they want to do. If you're here today, there's something running through your mind that you want to do. There is no reason for you to be here today unless there's something running through your mind that you want to do. How many people here are over 40 years old? Raise your hands. Raise them high, raise high. Don't be scared, raise high. There's not... Jesus Christ, this is a young crowd.
12:26 Speaker 00 For the very small percentage of us here that are over 40... Thanks, brother.
12:35 Speaker 00 There's like 8 of us, bro.
12:39 Speaker 00 For like the 11 of us...
12:42 Speaker 00 Look, here's... This is a lot of fun. For the 11 of us, we lived life before this. We were grown. We were grown-ups already before the internet came. I was 18 years old. I'd lived my life, at least the childhood part of my life, without the internet. The biggest thing that excites me, especially in a mature internet market like here, WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Spotify, like, there's so much opportunity and you don't even have to leave your home. There was no building your life, you know, after hours when I was growing up. When you had a job and you had to take care of something,
13:25 Speaker 00 you didn't then start another job because it was late. But now, this allows it. The biggest thing that I want to get across in this little moment of this speech is everybody in here is taking this for granted. Your grandparents, your great-grandparents, your great-great-grandparents, they didn't have this. If you aren't succeeding or attacking your success with this in your hand, then what are you doing?
13:54 Speaker 00 Every single person here has the opportunity to create a profile and a presence online, whether it's yourself, or your business, or your idea, and the cost is zero. I love when people get mad when Facebook or Instagram's organic reach goes down. I keep reminding them, it's free.
14:23 Speaker 00 How many people here are on Instagram? Raise your hand.
14:28 Speaker 00 Jesus.
14:32 Speaker 00 Over the next year or two, Instagram's reach is gonna go down, because more ads are gonna go in. So as you can imagine, I'm so passionate to get you to post three or four times a day, not once a day, yet, everybody overthinks their posts so much because they're so scared not to get as many likes as they did last time.
14:58 Speaker 00 It's true. It's 100% true. The amount of people here who want to post something, but retake it 53 times,
15:09 Speaker 00 or change the filter, or things of that nature, or, my favorite move, you post it, but in the first 83 seconds, you don't get enough likes, and you remove it.
15:22 Speaker 00 It's a fascinating thing for me to watch, because what it speaks to is, in my opinion, people being confused about the game. I view the game macro. I watch most people play micro. You're not in the business of getting likes on Instagram, yet you're pandering to the machine of that. You're in the business of creating awareness for whatever you want. You want people to know what you want them to know. Whatever that may be. Business, raise money for a charity, sell something, become a personal brand, you know, whatever it might be. Whatever it might be, that's what you want, yet, people get so caught up in the semantics. Listen. What I can tell you for my career
16:06 Speaker 00 is this repeats over and over and over again. In 2006, I started one of the first YouTube shows, period. It was the longest show on YouTube when I launched it. YouTube wasn't even a year old. I sat in front of a camera, and I drank wine for 30 minutes, and a lot of people watched it.
16:27 Speaker 00 A year later Twitter came out and I was one of the first people to move on that. I invested because I got smarter at that point. But I also was one of the first people to amass a million followers on that platform. Before I did Youtube and Twitter, a year or two earlier in America and many other parts of the world, MySpace had won and dominated and there were people that won on that platform. If you pay attention to what happened on MySpace, if you pay attention to what happened on Youtube, if you pay attention to what happened on Twitter and then Facebook and then Vine and on and on and on, it's all the same game. In the beginning, if you move quickly, you can get more attention.
17:09 Speaker 00 Most people get frustrated that they aren't first and then they don't go all in because they think they missed it. However, winning on these platforms is a game of being better, not first. Being better comes in two ways. This is where it gets very important, my friends. Being better on putting out content only comes out in two ways. Either entertainment, right? Or information. If you are putting out content on these websites and trying to grow and you want to succeed and build an audience, you either do information,
17:49 Speaker 00 you know what you're talking about, whether it's painting nails, business, wine, sneakers, hair care, I don't care what it is. You either know or you entertain. Entertainment comes in a lot of ways. This is playing out on Instagram. Entertainment comes in being funny. Entertainment comes in being musical. Entertainment and escapism comes in being attractive, being a model. It all plays. If you're lucky enough to have both, it gets really crazy. But if you do not do one or the other, you lose. If you go look at your Instagram account right now and look at the last 10 posts, my question to you is very simple.
18:32 Speaker 00 Did you post those posts for your audience so they could be entertained or informed? Or did you post it for yourself? For your own self-esteem or insecurities?
18:46 Speaker 00 Let me save you time. You posted it for yourself.
18:53 Speaker 00 The biggest takeaway that you could have from here, in my opinion, is a couple of things. Number one, you are very fortunate to live in a country with disproportionate advances on these platforms. When I look at the data of how much attention is on this device and those six platforms in this country, and the size of this country, it is staggering. This is one of the best places in the world to produce content for YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. It's one of the best places in the world.
19:28 Speaker 00 See, you did it again. You clapped for yourself.
19:33 Speaker 00 Oh, actually, fun fact. Actually, back to this amazing place and the internet and apps. I don't know if a lot of you know this, but I was actually one of the first five investors in Path, which was a huge app here for a long period of time before it shut down a year ago. So because I was an early investor in Path and because this became the biggest market for Path four or five years ago, I spent a lot of time paying attention to this market from far away. And what I can tell you is this. The beauty of the people that live here, and there's so much, you know, it's funny. There's so much amazingness, you know, in the world that I see. And how many people here consume my content? Raise your hands. Thank you. So, thank you.
20:17 Speaker 00 So if you do, you have a good sense of me. You can imagine why I love Indonesia so much. All the love and optimism and warmth plays out here. But the biggest thing that I'm passionate about is getting people to be less insecure and care less about what people think, especially their parents, plays out here too. And so for me, it's a really interesting market to look at with trends and how people do things and what they respond to and who they follow and why. And so what I can tell you is, if you are capable, if you are capable to be strong enough internally to start posting on these platforms more truth, more your truth, you, your truth,
21:02 Speaker 00 you will see a remarkable return on that investment in this market.
21:08 Speaker 00 Sekarang, mari kita bicara tentang konten. Karena tidak peduli apa yang kamu lakukan di ruangan ini, kamu harus memproduksi untuk mencapai apa yang kamu inginkan. Problemanya adalah, ada banyak cara untuk memproduksi konten. Salah satu masalah terbesar yang saya senang menghadapi di sini adalah di dunia di mana Instagram melakukan sangat baik atau YouTube, orang-orang berpikir gambar dan video adalah cara terbesar untuk pergi. Saya di sini untuk memberi tahu Anda bahwa dua tempat yang saya terhibur terbaik adalah kata yang ditulis dan audio. Semuanya, semoga Anda menikmati podcast sekarang. Pastikan Anda memandu podcast, itulah mengapa saya menghentikan. Mari terus berjalan di show ini, tetapi memandu podcast. Itu akan membuat ibu saya sangat senang.
21:50 Speaker 00 Jika Anda tidak nyaman mengambil banyak gambar dan video, Anda harus mengambil keputusan di sini hari ini. Apakah Anda seorang penulis yang baik? Dan jika Anda adalah, saya memiliki banyak informasi bagus untuk Anda, saya akan pergi di sana sebentar. Atau dua, jika Anda suka berbicara, tetapi Anda tidak nyaman dengan video, saya tidak bisa, kembali ke klaim Anda, lebih senang tentang enam bulan terakhir di Indonesia, konsumsi podcast di negara ini memperluas.
22:24 Speaker 00 Saya sangat merekomendasikan jika Anda memiliki sesuatu untuk katakan tentang kategori tertentu, saya sangat merekomendasikan sangat serius tentang podcast, karena saya percaya bahwa audio di depan dekade depannya akan menjadi salah satu cara terbesar yang kita konsumsi, karena kita tidak menyukai menghabiskan waktu. Manusia menyukai efisiensi, dan audio membiayakan waktu. Audio memperluas dan akan terus memperluas, dan saya sangat merekomendasikan Anda memperhatikan itu dengan serius. Satu hal yang menarik untuk saya adalah sebenarnya sedikit tindakan yang saya tidak berbagi sangat sering, tetapi saya selalu mengatakan, "lihat apa yang saya lakukan, bukan apa yang saya katakan." Ketika saya melihat hashtag atau komentar untuk konferensi ini, saya melihat banyak akun,
23:07 Speaker 00 salah satu kesalahan yang saya percaya orang-orang melakukan di Instagram sekarang adalah tidak meninggalkan kopi yang cukup yang ditulis.
23:15 Speaker 00 If you look at my posts, when I post a picture or video on Instagram, I write a lot of copy. I don't do that for my health. I don't like wasting 3 minutes. I do it because it matters. So, I know a lot of you are trying to build your Instagram. One of the best tidbits I can give you is, please, start adding 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sentences to your post. Add context, add clarity, add a little story. You will see substantial returns. Speaking of written, how many people here are on LinkedIn? Raise your hands. Quite a few. If you're paying attention to me, you might have noticed, literally, I've talked about LinkedIn more in the last 4 months
24:00 Speaker 00 than I have in the last 7 years. LinkedIn's content, business. It's business. And even if you're a fitness influencer, there's a way to do business content. Write an article, 6 things a traveling businesswoman and man can do when they're in a hotel room. So you can always make your content fit. LinkedIn organic reach on content is very high. Very high. I highly recommend everybody here, get serious about their LinkedIn. I know a lot of you haven't signed in in 3 years, 4 years. The LinkedIn that many of us grew up with was just to get a job. It is now about business content. And I believe whether, again, you sell rugs, or sneakers, or wine, there's a way to write content for LinkedIn.
24:45 Speaker 00 Remember, the mindset of the person on LinkedIn is business. So you have to consider that. It's different than Instagram, right? LinkedIn is your office. Instagram is the club, you know? So you have to act differently. You have to act differently. But, I'm telling you right now, LinkedIn and Spotify podcasts for a lot of this room that hasn't been making is a very big opportunity. Posting 3, 4 times a day on Instagram is a very big opportunity. All this content that I want you to write is a very big opportunity. Content is how you... You will make your happiness happen. Putting out content is how you will make your happiness.
25:29 Speaker 00 Whether that's build a big business, whether that's get a dream job, a collaboration. Content, talking, content is how you'll make your happiness happen. The problem is, I need you to look inside yourself and tell me why you're not doing it.
25:46 Speaker 00 To me, what I've learned in the last five or seven years, I can sit here for half an hour and give you every detail. I can tell you right now that if you go into your explore page on Instagram and click on every one of those videos and then go leave a comment on that post, a thoughtful comment. Watch the video or picture, not just hey or an emoji, look at it and spend two minutes and leave a comment. That if you do that 30, 40, 60, 100 times a day, if you're hungry, if you're ambitious, if you want something, if you do that, I know that will work. It will work, you will grow, you will get more attention. You will get more attention to your business, to yourself. My question is, why won't you do it?
26:29 Speaker 00 My question is, why won't you do it? Will you not leave a comment because you're nervous to leave a comment on somebody who's famous's page? Will you not leave a comment because you think somebody's gonna judge your comment? Will you not leave a comment because you don't want to spend an hour leaving comments? Why? For me, everything is about reverse engineering. What do you want to happen? Like what? What do you want to happen? And then understanding in 2019 that written words, audio and video on seven platforms can get you there is remarkable. It's just remarkable. It's so crazy to me. I'm sitting here listening as I'm talking and I'm literally blown away that I believe it.
27:15 Speaker 00 I mean it. I'm shocked that we are now living at a time where the internet is at scale. The apps that dominate the culture are free.
27:29 Speaker 00 You could literally walk out of here right now and start the process of changing the course of your life if you want. And literally the only thing left now, because the excuse of money and time is over. That's amazing. The fact that money and time have been subsidized by the internet because you can lay in bed and do it at 11pm if you want, and the cost is zero. You don't have to buy a store and open it, like, zero. It eliminates all your excuses. And now the question is, why not? Why are you not? And so, I'm very passionate of getting this room today to start thinking about what they
28:11 Speaker 00 want to be doing, and how, and where, and why. I'm breaking it down into audio, written word, videos, and pictures. You know what the five or six platforms are. Now, it just becomes the match to get it started. And more importantly, and the biggest thing that I fear, will the group have enough patience to see the results? I was on Twitter from 2007 to 2011, and I replied to every single person that tweeted at me, and, in the beginning, because nobody knew who I was, I went to Twitter search, and I searched the word "wine" and other wine terms, found people talking about it,
28:56 Speaker 00 jumped into the conversation, and left good information. I did that for seven to eight hours a day, for four years, before anybody gave a fuck about who I was. Let me say that slowly one more time. For seven to eight hours a day, for four years, I would go to Twitter search, search wine terms, jump into them, and give information, for four years, before anybody gave a fuck who I was.
29:37 Speaker 00 Now I get DMs from people saying, "In three weeks, I'll get a DM from somebody here saying, 'Gary, saw you in Jakarta, it was awesome.' I started doing stuff, I'm not getting any traction." I reply, "That's nice, Mario, you've been doing it for three fucking weeks."
29:59 Speaker 00 Let me take a real step back. If you're sitting in this chair and you want to do something that makes you happy and makes you money, let's just say that. I have no idea what people want in here, but fine. How many people happy money? Raise your hands if you want happy money. Raise it, don't be scared. Great. Let me ask you a question. If you have the audacity to be happy and have money, which by the way, the amount of people that have lots of money and are very happy is very small.
30:32 Speaker 00 It just is. If you want to be happy and have money, don't you think it should take a long time and it should be hard?
30:43 Speaker 00 Right? That to me has been the most interesting thing. In this world that everything's so fast, and this world where one or two people look like Mark Zuckerberg, or travel, like where you can point to one or two people. You know, I don't know if you heard, there's 7.7 billion of us. But because you can point to one or two people that got it fast and a lot, all of a sudden, everybody thinks it should be fast and a lot. At 34 years old, after working for 12 years, helping build my family business, I left my family business and I had no money.
31:18 Speaker 00 34, no money. How many people here younger than 34, raise your hands? D-Rock, where are you?
31:27 Speaker 00 Hold on, keep them up. D-Rock, where are you? Yo, right here, come here, look at this. Put the lights on. Hands up.
31:35 Speaker 00 Look at this. Every hand here, stand up, actually, if you raised your hand. Stand up.
31:45 Speaker 00 Every person here standing is under 34 years old. When I left Wine Library day to day at 34 years old, I had nothing. When I started VaynerMedia, we started it in Buddy Media's conference room because I didn't have dollars to spend on rent.
32:03 Speaker 00 Imagine how early I think you are in your life. You can sit. Thank you.
32:12 Speaker 00 Si tu peux garder les lumières, j'aime.
32:15 Speaker 00 Merci. Très beau, merci. Mes amis, il est tôt. Il est tôt pour 90... Il est tôt pour 100% des gens dans cette pièce. C'est ridiculement tôt pour 95% de cette pièce. Cette chose sur Internet, c'est gros. C'est vraiment gros. Nous n'avons même pas commencé. S'il vous plaît, comprenez à quel point vous êtes heureux. C'est la seule parole que j'ai pour ça. À quel point vous êtes heureux que vous puissiez vivre dans cette ère. En ce moment, tout ce qui sort de votre bouche, qui se plaint, fait que votre grand-père veut vous frapper dans la face.
32:52 Speaker 00 Tu comprends? Tu comprends à quel point vous en avez mieux? Quand chaque génération avant vous? C'est une période tellement ridiculement spéciale. Et littéralement, la grande majorité de cette pièce ne va pas en profiter parce que de l'insécurité, de se soucier de quelqu'un qui, ils ne savent même pas, laissant un commentaire que c'est mauvais.
33:16 Speaker 00 Vous ne allez littéralement pas en profiter de la capacité réelle de être heureux et de réussir parce que quelqu'un vient sur votre compte et vous dit que vous êtes stupide.
33:27 Speaker 00 Mais c'est ce qui se passe. C'est ce qui se passe. Je veux dire, regardez les cultures différentes. Sur la route ici, savais-tu que l'une des choses les plus importantes qui ont été DMées ici? C'est qu'il y a beaucoup de gens qui viennent ici par eux-mêmes et qu'ils voulaient des conseils pour dire bonjour à quelqu'un qu'ils ne connaissaient pas? Qu'est-ce que tu as peur de? Ils vont te manger?
33:47 Speaker 00 Nous vivons dans une période très fascinante. Une période très fascinante. Ça me rappelle quand des pays nouveaux sont nés et les gens achètent de la realité. L'attention. L'attention de cette pièce est de la realité. Vous essayez de l'obtenir.
34:07 Speaker 00 Tout le monde vit sur ces choses. Ça va arriver plus, pas moins. Tu peux juger, c'est bien, mais c'est ce qui va arriver. Et donc, si vous ne produisez pas de mots, de vidéos et de sons pour ces sept plateformes, vous presque n'existe pas.
34:24 Speaker 00 Now, what you say though matters very much. And let me give you a couple of advice points from somebody who's really won. The number one thing you have to always do is talk about what you know. I watch people try to talk about stuff they don't know every single day because it's hot. Whether it's cannabis, or sports betting, or blockchain, or social media. People start talking about things they don't know anything about because they're trying to grab. They think they're gonna get a fast score. Everybody wants a fast score. Do you know how many people have emailed me crying about buying Bitcoin at 10,000 a coin? Because it was gonna be 100,000 in a year. People are looking for fast scores.
35:05 Speaker 00 You know how many people here spent $800 on a course because it was gonna happen fast? Fast is bad. Fast is bad. Fast if you have talent and the right intent is amazing. Fast if you want cash immediately? So, please, please, please understand the world you're living in. Take it into context. Understand how remarkable this era is. Next, this is the most important word. You have to deploy self-awareness. My friends, self-awareness is the most important word. If you don't know who you are, you have no shot. But do not be embarrassed of who you are.
35:49 Speaker 00 When I knew that I was an entrepreneur in the 80s, I got D's and F's in school and that was not acceptable in the 80s and 90s in America. If you were a bad student in America in the 80s and 90s, you were a loser. My friends' parents looked at me, looked at me as I was a loser. But I knew who I was. I was self-aware. I knew that I was an entrepreneur. I wanted to go and sell things on the weekend. I wanted to study the prices of wine and baseball cards instead of studying for school. I knew who I was. Playing video games seemed like a waste of time 20 years ago. Now there are people who make 50 million dollars a year playing video games.
36:31 Speaker 00 If there is something you know and you like and you're passionate about, but it's not cool right now or important, do not deviate away from your thing. Triple down on your thing. The other thing is, be self-aware. How many people here are an entrepreneur or want to be? Raise your hands. I'm just curious. It's a lot of hands. The reality is, most of you can't be successful. I mean that. I'm not saying it to Raz. It's rare to be a successful entrepreneur. It's hard. It's a real talent. We don't think it's a talent now because it's so easy to say you're one. One of the most important things about being self-aware is knowing,
37:13 Speaker 00 do you have the stomach to be an entrepreneur? Putting entrepreneur in your Instagram account, easy. Living the life of an entrepreneur where nobody else is on the line except you, hard. Lonely, scary, difficult. If you do it because it's cool, or you think it's right, or you're not self-aware, it leads to depression and loss of money. If you deploy self-awareness and realize you're a number two, a number three, a number four, you find an entrepreneur and you win. Self-awareness. You have to understand who you are. Without it, you are massively vulnerable in society.
37:54 Speaker 00 And the fact that we now live in a world where you're more than welcome to be what you are, so much more. Maybe not in your family because your parents want you to be a doctor and a lawyer and an engineer. But in the world, yes. And so I highly recommend self-awareness. It is easily, in my opinion. I believe that self-awareness and the ability to actually give without expectation are the two bricks of happiness. And it's been a big factor for me. Which has allowed me to go fast. When you're stable, you can go fast because you're not worried about judgment. I've been able to do a lot of things because I'm not scared to lose. Because if I lose, it's my loss.
38:38 Speaker 00 If I lose money or time, it's my loss, not yours. I don't care what you say in the comments.
38:45 Speaker 00 That lack of fear is what gives an entrepreneur an advantage. That lack of fear is what lets somebody live life in happiness. We have to start having more important conversations of the operating system of your life. There are people here that work more on upgrading their phones than upgrading their minds. I mean it. I mean it. I am desperate. Listen, to come here all this way to talk about tactics is a waste of time. To come all this way and have one person in here gain actual courage to do something is super worth it.
39:30 Speaker 00 And for me, it's a very simple game. Let me give a very big secret to all the kids here who are living their lives for their parents, or based on their parents' judgment. There's a very big secret that parents never tell you.
39:45 Speaker 00 If you go the other direction of where they want you to go, and you become really successful, they are really proud and make pretend they never pushed you in the other direction.
40:09 Speaker 00 The number one thing I fear, and the number one thing I learned, and this is very interesting to me. I'm gonna tell you a story I don't tell a lot. When I was a little kid in Edison, New Jersey, when grandparents came over, I would go play with the grandparents a lot, a lot. Maybe it was because I lost three of my four grandparents as a kid. But even as I get goosebumps right here on stage, it's because I think I've always been filled with a lot of wisdom and old soul. It's just DNA. It's nothing I did. It's just been in me. But I was always gravitating towards old people, my whole life. I mean really old. You know, I'm seven, eight years old. I see an 80-year-old, I run over, sit next to them, and talk. My whole life, I loved it. My whole life.
40:52 Speaker 00 And the number one thing I learned in the first 20 years of my life, spending more time with old people than most kids, is the biggest thing I fear is regret.
41:03 Speaker 00 Regret is scary. Resentment is very scary. The biggest reason I push kids to do what they want versus what their parents want is because I'd rather them and their parents have five or six or seven years of bad than eighty.
41:22 Speaker 00 Because it gets very ugly when you're sixty and they're eighty and you lived your life based on what they wanted and now you resent them. It gets real ugly, real fast. I would rather you have the pain for the next five or six years of fighting and then have one of two things happen which I think both are amazing. Number one, you were right. You were right and you are an amazing fashion designer, not an engineer, and you built a real company and your parents are gonna be very, very proud. Or, you were wrong. You suck at fashion design. Nobody liked it.
42:04 Speaker 00 But at least for yourself, you never have to live the rest of your life asking yourself, "What if?" You win both ways. You live in a culture, I know, I watch, you live in a culture with a lot of expectations. You live in a culture where parents treat their kids as a property that indicates who they are. So does most of the world. This is not a Southeast Asia thing. This is not a Indonesia thing. This is a world thing. Parents are insecure too.
42:45 Speaker 00 And they like their kids closing their gap. We have to start talking about this. Because now that it costs zero to start a Spotify podcast, now that you can do that at 9pm, now there's nothing left. In 1974, not having money and time was an excuse. In 2019, it is not. And so the only thing left is this. Not this, this. And so I come here today begging.
43:21 Speaker 00 Not pleading, not asking, begging you to look yourself in the mirror tonight and ask yourself if you're happy. And people always say, "I don't know what my passion is. I don't know what I would do." Yes, you do. You do. You just don't think it would work. You think it's too small. You think it's too silly. You think people would judge you. You know. You're just scared to say it. You know exactly what you would do if you could do it every minute of your life. You may not right now, as I'm saying this, you're like, "No, I don't." "Gary, I don't." It's because you haven't even allowed yourself to look.
44:01 Speaker 00 This is the time
44:06 Speaker 00 to build businesses and profiles and content around what you enjoy. This is the time. This is the time. And waiting one more day makes no sense to me. So whether you use the momentum of the energy we created today or something else, please don't get older and regret. Please don't watch this exact video on whatever YouTube is in 35 years.
44:33 Speaker 00 You want to hear something weird? Everybody in here right now is actually watching this right now in 35 years.
44:42 Speaker 00 Everybody here right now is actually going to watch this exact talk on video, on the internet, in 35 years. And I'm going to ask you, "Did you fuck up or no?"
44:56 Speaker 00 I mean it. I mean it because what I'm interested in is, "Did you understand what I was saying here today and do something about it? Or do you do what so many people do?" Do you know what I watch every day? I watch people see a video clip of mine on Instagram, or YouTube, or Facebook, or what have you, leave a comment that that was the clip that was changed their life, right? It feels very nice. "Oh my God, this just changed my life. I'm going to do it." But I'm weird. You know what I do? I follow them.
45:31 Speaker 00 And sometimes, especially on trips like this, when I'm in the air for 24 fucking hours,
45:37 Speaker 00 I will go and look and see 6 months, 9 months, a year later, if they did anything about it. And 99% don't.
45:48 Speaker 00 There's a lot of people in this room right now that said, "This is it. I'm going to."
45:56 Speaker 00 "I see you."
45:58 Speaker 00 And then in 2 and 1/2 weeks, all the energy's gonna be gone.
46:05 Speaker 00 And I spend every day thinking about that.
46:09 Speaker 00 How do I... One of the biggest reasons I produce so much content is I used to speak a lot, but then there wasn't as much content. So I thought, "Okay, maybe if I put out content 8 times a day, it can get them going." I've come to learn, and I very much believe this, I was gifted and parented very well that allowed me to actually not care about other people's opinions. I respect them. I never think I'm always right. This is not about thinking you're right. This is not about me being delusional or audacious. This is me understanding that if you judge me, you don't have all the context. You don't know me. So how do I know you? I don't. Even the person closest to you,
46:53 Speaker 00 a spouse, a parent, they don't know. Nobody knows. So why would you take somebody else's opinion over your own? Please, my friends, don't live a life that gets you to 80, 90, 100 years old, where you're sitting there and saying, "I wish I did. I wonder if I did." Nobody at 90 years old, go find your oldest relative and go take them out to lunch. And ask them, just like this, "Talk to me about life." They will not talk to you about what they did. They will talk to you about what they did not do. They will talk to you about what they wish they did.
47:30 Speaker 00 Don't wish. They had an excuse, your grandparents, your great-grandparents. It wasn't practical. You couldn't do what we can do. This didn't exist.
47:45 Speaker 00 This did not exist. Please, take advantage. Please, take advantage of this existing. This is the greatest era to be alive. It is. There's plenty going on in the world, plenty going on in my country, plenty going on in the world. But when you look at the macro data, this is the greatest time to be alive. And you happen to be living in a great place for my thesis. You live in a place where this country lives its life here. And the cost for you to enter it and do something for yourself and your family? Zero.
48:30 Speaker 00 Zero dollars. I do not want to hear that you don't have money. I don't want to hear that somebody else is further along because nobody else's life matters. This is an inside game. Inside. Start making content. Start talking to the world about what you either like or you know. Do it every day. Close your eyes for five years. Not how are you doing in five days, not how you're doing in five months, five years. I come back here in five years, or I see you in an airport in five years, and you say every day I made five pieces of content and I went nowhere, I would say two things. Number one, I'm proud of you, that was a long time.
49:16 Speaker 00 Number two, you clearly suck because if you're putting out things for five years and nobody gives a shit, your stuff sucks.
49:25 Speaker 00 Please. Please, I hope Jakarta you heard me today. Everything on the platforms, you know. You know which ones people use, you use them, your friends use them, you don't need that information. What you do need to do is take a step back and don't think that video and pictures are the only way. I do think audio and written word for a lot of people here matters. By the amount of hands that went up for entrepreneurship, I think a lot of people here have to look themselves in the mirror and ask who they really are. Are you self-aware about your skills? But leaning into what you're interested in and producing content has never been more practical.
50:06 Speaker 00 And I implore you, I implore you to take advantage of this very special time. Because you have one life, you might as well live it. Thank you.
50:20 Speaker 00 Thank you.
50:24 Speaker 00 Thank you.
50:27 Speaker 00 Thank you.
50:29 Speaker 00 Q and A? I know we're gonna do some Q and A.
50:32 Speaker 01 Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Gary Vee!
50:37 Speaker 00 Thank you.
50:39 Speaker 01 Gary Vee?
50:40 Speaker 00 Yes, sir.
50:40 Speaker 01 Thank you for being here.
50:41 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me.
50:42 Speaker 01 It was really good.
50:43 Speaker 00 Thank you.
50:43 Speaker 01 We have a Q and A after this, so if you can just sit down to my right.
50:49 Speaker 00 Okay.
50:49 Speaker 01 We have a few questions from the audience member that we have chosen from our social media.
50:54 Speaker 00 I've heard of social media. Yes.
50:56 Speaker 01 So, without further ado, our first question comes from Alexander.
51:02 Speaker 01 Is Alexander here?
51:04 Speaker 02 Hello, hello.
51:05 Speaker 00 What up, Alexander?
51:07 Speaker 02 I'm good.
51:08 Speaker 00 Good.
51:10 Speaker 02 Thank you so much for the...
51:11 Speaker 00 Let's clap it up for Alexander!
51:19 Speaker 02 Thank you for the punch that you give me, that's so, uh, that's make me wakes up. And I run a small branding agency.
51:30 Speaker 00 You have one?
51:31 Speaker 02 Yes.
51:31 Speaker 00 Okay.
51:32 Speaker 02 That help a fashion, fashion brand designer, local, to get them the better logo, better brand identity, and better campaign.
51:42 Speaker 00 Understood.
51:44 Speaker 02 Uh, what I want to ask is, should I learn all the skill? I mean, be a generalist that so...
51:52 Speaker 00 Yes.
51:52 Speaker 02 So I can see the bigger picture?
51:54 Speaker 00 Yes.
51:55 Speaker 02 Or I focus on one skill?
51:59 Speaker 02 That make me a specialist or expert.
52:02 Speaker 00 No, I'll tell you why. You're too young and you... How will you know? If you decide right now to be an expert just on Instagram, organic, creative, let's say that. How do you know that you're not the most talented strategist around Spotify, growth of podcasts? Until you become a generalist, do you even know which thing to become an expert in?
52:30 Speaker 01 That left him speechless.
52:31 Speaker 00 I say...
52:32 Speaker 02 That's a lot.
52:33 Speaker 00 But you understand, Alexander?
52:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, I got it.
52:35 Speaker 00 Like, you're fucking a kid. No, that's good. You don't know yet what you're best at. Like, why are you picking your expertise if you haven't seen everything else? You should go in... It's like food. I love when people are like, "Gary, I like eating exotic food." So sometimes I'm in a meeting and I'll order oysters or sea urchin, whatever I order. And I go... And my dinner person will be like, "Well, I don't eat... I don't like oysters." I'm like, "Well, have you ever had an oyster?" "No."
53:10 Speaker 00 And that's how I think about this. You need to understand ads and media and ads and creative and Spotify and Instagram and LinkedIn. You have to taste everything. You may think Instagram is delicious until you actually taste LinkedIn. You need to be a generalist first, then you can tell me what you're an expert in.
53:32 Speaker 02 Thank you.
53:32 Speaker 00 You're welcome.
53:36 Speaker 01 Should we go to the next question?
53:37 Speaker 00 Please.
53:38 Speaker 01 Alright, the next question comes from Mepi Astarina. Is she here? There she is.
53:44 Speaker 00 Okay, awesome.
53:45 Speaker 03 Hi, Gary.
53:46 Speaker 00 How are you?
53:47 Speaker 03 I'm fine. Thanks for the opportunity.
53:53 Speaker 03 I'm Maydi. Okay, so I, me and my spouse have a photography and videography agency. And my, both of our parents don't do business at all. They work from 8 to 5, so they're kind of not believing in us.
54:12 Speaker 00 Right.
54:12 Speaker 03 And then, after 2 or 3 years, we started to think that we may need an investor.
54:19 Speaker 00 After 2 or 3 years, you what?
54:21 Speaker 03 We might need an investor.
54:23 Speaker 00 Investor, okay.
54:24 Speaker 03 So I want to know from you, because you have already invested in many things. As an investor, what is the most crucial thing you see in the business you're going to invest in? What makes you invest in them?
54:37 Speaker 00 So for me, when I look at investing, there's only 2 things I care about. 1, do I generally believe in the idea or the concept? And then 2, and more importantly, do I believe in her or him and they're capable to drive it? I've lost a lot of money as an investor in the last 10 years, 15 years, when I loved the idea so much and I could figure out what I would do with it, but the person running the business wasn't capable. And I learned from that. So now it's 51%, 51% you, 49% the idea or the concept. That's what I look for.
55:22 Speaker 00 But I think more importantly, because I want you to be successful, you need to find what startups here need to do or businesses here. You have to find investors who are most likely to invest in you. I see so many people wanting to get money from the cool VC or a bank, and they're never gonna get it. You need to find the investor that's gonna invest in you. And a lot of times, that's somebody that did what you did before and they understand it. So, as a startup, look for investors that are most likely to invest in you. Don't be ideological about where the money's coming from. As long as you're getting the money, you know...
56:06 Speaker 00 Make sense?
56:07 Speaker 03 Okay, thank you.
56:08 Speaker 00 You're welcome.
56:09 Speaker 01 Alright. Our last question comes from Ben Arthur. Is Ben Arthur in the building? There he is.
56:18 Speaker 04 Hi Gary.
56:19 Speaker 00 What up Ben?
56:20 Speaker 04 Good. I'm a fan man.
56:22 Speaker 00 I'm a fan too Ben.
56:25 Speaker 04 So, um, I'm gonna ask, what is the best, the best financial decision that have made you and shaped you today?
56:38 Speaker 00 The best financial decision I ever made was never spending more money than I had.
56:49 Speaker 00 Go figure!
56:52 Speaker 00 And, and what I mean by that Ben, and I appreciate the reaction, because that means it's a very smart crowd. I am fascinated that people buy things they can't afford to impress people they don't like.
57:08 Speaker 04 Thanks man.
57:08 Speaker 00 Yeah man, like, from a practical standpoint, right? Back to your question. I think being aggressive is important. When I, when I met Mark Zuckerberg for a drink many years ago, it took me two seconds, and I mean two seconds, and I knew he was gonna win. And so when I went home and had an opportunity a year later to buy stock from his parents, right? I spent, I took 90% of the money that I had saved in the bank and I invested it. Right? And that was a great decision, obviously for me. But I didn't take 200%. I didn't go borrow money, things of that nature. I took a risk, but it was a risk I could afford, here's why.
57:53 Speaker 00 If I was wrong and it went to zero, all that would have meant was I couldn't eat as fancy or maybe go as fancy on a vacation. But it didn't mean I was going out of business. And too many people here take big risks that they can't afford without thinking about what happens when you go to zero. I'm very aggressive and I do a lot, but I never take myself below zero. I'm willing to go to zero because I'm not fancy, I don't need stuff. But I'm never willing to go below zero. Keep that in mind.
58:29 Speaker 01 We have time for one more question?
58:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
58:32 Speaker 01 So, this is open to everyone. If you have a question, raise your hand up.
58:39 Speaker 00 Who's got the mic?
58:40 Speaker 01 It's your...
58:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay, that crazy fucker.
58:49 Speaker 01 He's all hyped.
58:55 Speaker 00 What's your name? Let's start with that.
59:00 Speaker 05 Uh, I have two question. I have very... Uh, you are my idol since I was in college back in... When I was in school at University of Indonesia Faculty of Law. And I really want to take a photo with you, may I?
59:18 Speaker 00 What did he say? I didn't hear. I didn't hear. I couldn't hear it.
59:21 Speaker 01 You want to say it one more time?
59:23 Speaker 05 May I take photo with you?
59:25 Speaker 00 Oh, photo, yeah. Let's go.
59:48 Speaker 00 You're welcome, my friend. You're welcome.
59:53 Speaker 01 Everybody, give your...
59:53 Speaker 00 Shakoda!
59:54 Speaker 01 Give a round of applause for Gary Vee.
59:56 Speaker 00 I love you! Listen! Go do it! Please, don't let this energy go away. One fucking life. Live it. Please, live it. Go work. Thank you. Hey, everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention. And, uh, thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.
Previous 95 Seconds on How to Start Making 1,000 Pieces of Content a Day Next The #1 Business Trait to Improve on in 2026 Page updated November 9, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
