There are 2 Ways to Build Confidence.

In this episode of The GaryVee Audio Experience, I break down the two extreme places the courage to be creative actually comes from — having nothing to lose, or having incredible depth of knowledge and conviction. I go back to the first episode of Wine Library TV in February 2006, when I was 31 years old and had already spent more than half my life studying wine, and I explain why no sommelier in England or France or Italy was ever going to walk up on me and expose me for not knowing my sh*t. You'll learn about: • The Two Extremes That Produce Creative Courage • Depth of Knowledge as the Other Path • Why Silly Works When the Substance Is Real • How to Build Conviction Before You Press Record

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is for everyone who's listening, who wants to push the envelope. I believe that you have the courage to be creative in two very extreme places. One, nothing to lose. Like, there's just nothing to lose, so why not? Invent punk rock, or, you know, or be a modern contemporary artist in Manhattan, when you're living in a shithole and you're just splashing stuff. And then on the other side, which was where I came from, was incredible depth of knowledge and conviction. By the time I did my first episode of Wine Library TV on YouTube, on February 21st, 2006, I was 31 years old. I had spent pretty much my entire life, since I was 15, which at that point meant more than half my life, on studying wine. Even though I was gonna be silly and do this stuff,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  there was no one who was going to walk up on me and outclass me in knowledge. Even though I was silly, no one, not the poshest sommelier in England, or France, or Italy, was gonna be able to come in and expose me for not having substance. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go straight into it.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Please, Gary.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  The thing I loved is I got to know you, obviously, through when you were doing wine.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  And it went like wildfire, all of a sudden. And I thought about it. Because, obviously, I am one of those incredibly stupid people, the owners of vineyards. You're one of the smart people who sell the wine.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Yes, well, actually, the people in between are the smartest.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  They are.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  The retailer and the producer, they take the biggest risks.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  The biggest risks.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  The distributors make the most margin.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  They do.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  And they're just peeing out, you know, they're fulfillment people.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  But what I thought was brilliant about what you did is that you changed the way people thought about wine.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  And I've always thought that's a sort of fundamental in driving great ideas, is that you don't... Operate in the world that's there, you change the way people see it and feel about it. In that way, you gain huge attention and that was hugely successful. And then you decided, I've done that.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  But I think you're going back to it, aren't you?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's always a route. I mean, geez, the reason I was four minutes late, which I apologize to everyone, I was literally talking to my best friend, Brandon Hornicki, who's kind of taken the reign of running the wine business, my family wine business, since I started Vayner years ago. But I've literally secretly run that wine business every day since I've left.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  You know, and then obviously I had the direct to consumer wine brand. I got a little more into your world of being a producer. I didn't own the vineyards, but I bought grapes.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  But they were like a, yeah.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  And so that was a very successful venture. In less than three years, we sold it to Constellation. There was a substantial exit. And then over the last four years, I've been in the restaurant business in a significant way, which has dragged me a little bit into the wine world, which has been fun. And then several years ago, I innovated for my father's business, something called Wine Text, which is a daily text for a really good wine deal that has really revolutionized my dad's business again. So wine is always very near and dear to me.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  In fact, one of the things I'm spending a lot of time right now is on non-alcoholic wine.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's a huge growing market, isn't it?

• 3:21Speaker 00

  And, and what, you know, for gentlemen like you and guys like me,

• 3:27Speaker 00

  it's getting scary, like, and I use scary as a great term, as a slang term for, oh, my God, I think we're within the next five years gonna see really high quality, non-alcoholic wine, which I think will be very attractive to many consumers. So, yes, it's definitely one of the, you know.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  So you're still there, you're still doing it, still engaged with it.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  And of course, it was your background, your family had a wine shop.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it was a liquor store.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Liquor store.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  You know, it really was, it was a liquor store. My dad's store was called Shopper's Discount Liquors. But we had a very interesting location in New Jersey. One side was like, very blue collar, one side was very white collar. My dad had a liquor store before, the one that I grew up in, smaller, in Clark, New Jersey, very blue collar. So my father was a blue collar, you know, merchant, beer, liquor, pints, cigarettes, Yes. you know, wrapping papers when I didn't even know what the hell that was. Um, and, and, but I noticed as a teenager that people were asking for wine, and I was a collector, in trading cards, in comic books, in toys. And when I realized people collected wine, when I was fifteen, that changed everything for me,

• 4:41Speaker 00

  and that's what I wanted to build. But it was funny when you were talking about, you know, creativity, breaking the rules, you have an incredible career in that, I'm building one. I, I was thinking as you were talking, I said, what, what allowed me to do what I did in the wine world? When it was so entrenched for being a very posh, you know, I remember when Chances Robinson flew from England to be on my wine show in New Jersey, I gotta go watch the clip, it, you know, it was a very watershed moment. Even Robert Parker, even though he was American, it was definitely an upper brow play. The answer, and this is for everyone who's listening, who wants to push the envelope,

• 5:24Speaker 00

  I believe that you have the courage to be creative in two very extreme places. One, nothing to lose. Like, there's just nothing to lose, so why not invent punk rock? Or, you know, or be a, a modern, a contemporary artist in Manhattan, when you're living in a shithole and just splashing stuff. And then on the other side, which is where I came from, was incredible, um, depth of knowledge and conviction. By the time I did my first episode of Wine Library TV on YouTube, in February 21st, 2006.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  I was thirty-one years old. I had spent pretty much my entire life since I was fifteen, which at that point meant more than half my life, on studying wine. Even though I was gonna be silly and do this stuff, there was no one who was going to walk up on me and outclass me in knowledge. Even though I was silly, no one, not the poshest sommelier in England or France or Italy, was gonna be able to come in and expose me for not having substance.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Because that's what was great about it, because you had that depth, you really did connect with that, that depth of knowledge.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  But you talked about it in a kind of, such a different way, that it actually, not only did you enjoy watching it, it was fun watching it. It was like, it was like some entertainment. It was entertainment, wasn't it?

• 6:57Speaker 00

  You know this, and I think this translated well for me in the advertising industry. I wanted to create net new drinkers. I wanted more people to like wine. I was thirty-one years old and I had no friends in their twenties and thirties that liked it because it wasn't cool. And even if someone stumbled into it because they went on like a trip to Napa with their girlfriend, they're like, "Oh, I like this." As soon as they came back to New York or New Jersey or Chicago and started to try to go on a journey, everybody in the wine world made them feel like crap. Everyone's intimidated by wine. You know, when we go out to eat a nice meal, we're not...

• 8:05Speaker 02

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• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't got this.

• 8:09Speaker 02

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• 8:11Speaker 03

  Undo your flu symptoms with Nyquil Intense Flu. The nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever best sleep with a flu medicine. You do got this. Uses directed, keep out of reach of children.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Scared to order salmon. We don't feel lesser than to order pork chops or scallops. But when the wine list gets handed, everyone shivers as if there's something you're supposed to know. And my point of view there then and today is you need to know what you like. And if you get into it, then you start studying a little bit and you learn stuff. Yeah, I wanted to tear down the establishment. That has been a consistent theme.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And that's a kind of consistency is it to everything that you've done. You take this, there you are, hugely successful. I mean, literally, I mean, I had people, several people said, John, you've got to watch Gary Vaynerchuk. You've got to watch, which obviously I did. I always remember the wood monster.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  The wood monster.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  The oak monster.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  The oak monster.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Thank you for remembering that. By the way, I'm getting goosebumps, I'm humbled, but you know that.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  The earth monster was a great one.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  You'll love this because you're from Europe. America, you know, we sometimes like things too big, too ridiculous. And our wines in Napa got way out of control in that era. Everything had way too much oak. You could barely even taste a wine at some point. And so, yes, I needed to make a point about that and I created the, ah, the oak monster. And so I would taste the wine, it would get 96 points Parker and be $150 a bottle and everyone loves it. And I would say, yeah, but like you could replicate this flavor for 30 bucks if you put enough oak in it.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Enough oak in it.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  And so, and so, yes, I made a big point about that.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  That was great, I always remember that. But, but anyway, so there you are, you have this phenomenal success. You say, right, I'm going to take that and I'm going to transfer that over into thinking about how the media works.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  So, which you could have gone to another industry. You could have gone to...

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Anything.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Anything to sort of say, I'm going to apply that thing.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  I think you'll appreciate this, given your background. I knew even when I was doing Y Y Re TV, and I get, I was 31 years old. It was about eight years after I'd run the business truly day to day. Started running at 98. I knew that at that point in my life that I was a marketer. That happened to be a businessman and salesman. And that what had really transpired. Between 2006 and 2009 before I started VaynerMedia. Was in that 11 years that I was running my daddy's business. I was innovating marketing wise in a way that was profound. Not only by the liquor store and wine industry. But by the general population of 8 billion people.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  And I started to realize that the biggest companies in the world. Were underestimating aggressively what was about to happen. Which was.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  And you definitely know what I'm about to say. We had this incredible era when the world transferred from the radio to the television. And I was a really poor student, but I was pretty good at history and I was interested in it. At the time, I didn't realize why. Now I do understand. Turning 50, you know, another 15 years of my career. I do use history to tell me the future. I love pattern recognition. I understand human, you know, trends. And so, my sense in 2009, when I started VaynerMedia was. That social, that Amazon, that Netflix. That these were gonna have profound impacts on the biggest companies in the world from a marketing standpoint.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  And I wanted to go learn. I knew nothing. When I started the firm. I didn't know about legends like you.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  But the other thing, first of all, you didn't do a marketing course. Did you? And I think that's interesting, but you saw yourself as a marketer. You kind of had a sense of what was going on.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Well, I had something better than a sense. I had results.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yes, and you've done it.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yes, it's much better to be a great football player. Than to go to university and learn how to become a good football player.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  So taking that learning, there was something else there that you said, which is. Look at the history of things and you see patterns. You see patterns of motion. And I do think we're in a kind of world where people don't, don't try and look back to learn.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  You know, I always say, I, you know, I went to art school and we were, when I went to art school, we were told, there's a Rubens exhibition, you've got to go and see it. Not that they expected us to paint pictures like Rubens, but they said, just, just look at it.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Have the context.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Have a kind of, and I feel with so much today, people have lost that context. So they don't, they don't reflect on something and then understand how to push it forward. So there you are, so you look at that and you go, this is going to really change. And I grabbed that moment.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just, I had a sense that, you know, again, let's take a step back for the listener. I'd launched an e-commerce website for my dad's store in nineteen ninety-seven. And that was just so wild, you know, a liquor store in New Jersey launching the first e-commerce wine businesses in America. That was just so left field. And I had felt the effects of email marketing. You may know this, it was happening in the UK with Barry Brothers and others. Catalogues ruled the day in the wine business and print. Full-page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in America. Um, catalogues. And I was able to outflank the Sherry Lehman's, the Morelles, the Zacky's, the premier wine shops in America

• 13:37Speaker 00

  by sending emails in the late nineties instead of building catalogues. And I built this big web business and this big email business for my father. And then Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube came along in this three-year window. And I just sensed that these platforms were going to have equally a huge paradigm shift in consumer behaviour the same way that email and websites did. So I already had my own. Experienced pattern recognition of like paradigm shift. I'm gonna do this again. And this one was different because this was about brand building.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Not about selling, right?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  This was, you know, again, I'm getting goosebumps. This was about brand. I was building my brand. I was building the business's brand. This wasn't sales, you know, pamphlets. This was information. This was education. This was affinity. This was entertainment. And the economic impact was enormous. So, yes, I had a feeling it was happening again.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  But I think the other thing about that, which I love, is that it wasn't just about brand movement. You were, we talk about this. You were making it into a movement. You know, it was bigger than, you know, because a brand is great.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Well, that's, yes.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  And you've actually kind of changed the way people approach it. Because I don't think, I think people kind of like brands, but they like them when they have a profound impact and they show people a different way of doing something. If you look at the history of a great brand, so that's what they did.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have a great product a lot of times.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Great product.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  I think product sometimes gets forgotten.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  You know, I had a meeting last week, you'll love this as an admin, where we had this meeting and I really, I looked at the CMO directly in the face and said, "Look, I think we're in our prime. We're as good as, you know, like, we're in our prime right now. We're a really good firm. I have bad news for you. I think we can do a really good job in marketing this. The problem is, we're gonna speed up everyone knowing about this and I think your product stinks."

• 15:35Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  And what I was saying, and I said it tongue in cheek.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, good.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  But I did say it. And then I kind of jumped in and said, "Listen, what I'm saying by that is not that your product stinks. I think you're 24 months away from people actually buying this. And I also think you need to fix this and this and at least debate this." And they were stunned, because, you know, we're, you know, we're getting clients. But they heavily appreciated it. But I do think you're right. I think great brands also ride on the back of a great product.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  But then the point you're talking to, which I very much agree with you, is when you build a community... Around where the brand is taking you. Well, now you're going to Nirvana.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where you've made it a part of culture. But just to go back to that again, but I think it is such an important point you're making. And I sat in so many meetings with the creative person, I had to sell the work and stay in the meetings. And they'd be talking about problems in the northwest or northeast and pack promotions. And I'd always be sitting there going, you ever thought about making a better product? And it was very interesting. I was talking to Joe Frazer at Mammoth Brands. And that's the first thing they do. Can we make it better? And then at least, and that's in our control.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Correct, and it gives you a chance.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that gives you a better chance. Other things are going to affect what you do. But nobody, they don't really sit down and think about, is this really, really better? Do I genuinely believe in it?

• 17:08Speaker 00

  I think most Fortune 500 executives disrespect the consumer.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I really do. I say that.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  No, I don't even say it humbly. I say it actually angrily. I believe that most Fortune 500 executives disrespect the end consumer. You know what I mean?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I absolutely agree.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  They just sit around and they're like, we're just gonna pound this message into their head. And they're gonna go to Saint's Ferry and buy it. We're just gonna, we're just gonna spend so much media dollars against this big idea. Listen, you and I, when it's all said and done and we're hanging out in heaven, we will be looked fondly upon in the history of advertising. You and I, on our best day, are trying our damnedest to come up with the idea, right? But we're human beings. And the industry has not accepted that that is calculated guessing, grounded in talent and history, but it's still a high-risk maneuver. And everyone in Fortune 500 land just thinks we're gonna push it and out a product.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  I mean, I think a lot about with food.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Like, people are getting more educated of what's in their products. People are being much more thoughtful, back to the non-alcoholic wine, the chemicals in food. I mean, you guys have a veteran Europe than we do in the US. But like, I don't, I just sit in meeting after meeting and I'm like, you know that people are not stupid, right? And I think, I think we need more humility in ad land and Fortune 500 land. And by the way, this is more broad. Every entrepreneur and creative person that's thinking, listening right now, please think about this. Please do not have audacity that the world should like your stuff because it's your stuff. It's like the analogy I use all the time is everyone thinks their child's the cutest.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  On the record, most people's child is not the cutest child on earth. Because there's somebody else that's cute, you know. We go very subjective and our subjectivity is often grabbed at selfishness.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Well, also the other thing too is corporations often, the first thing is profit. So if I can, if I can make this cheaper.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Then that is better, rather than could I make this better and in the long term, that will be better for me.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  You know, I will say I do believe we're in the early stages of people starting to feel it. There's a, there's a supermarket, if you call it, there's a store in L.A. called Air One. Are you familiar with it?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  It's a very bougie supermarket. They call it like a Whole Foods, but like 10 times more expensive, 10 times cooler. I mean, they're charging $40 for a shake. And they're, they're selling the cleanest bread in America for $22 when you can go buy bread for $4. And it's highly successful. You look at LVMH, right?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  You know, I think that in the business world, I'm starting to think that people are starting to see, you know what? Maybe if I make it $2 more, but it's better and I communicate that. That's actually a better business than this era that we had to drive everything to the lowest possible cost. This Tesco, Saint's Barry, Walmart era that I think is fine and I'm a capitalist, I'm all about it.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Money is magic.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I get it, but I do think the consumer evolution is real. I think unfortunately there's separation of wealth in a lot of parts of the world that are probably leading to some of this. But I do think there's, for everyone who's listening, there's huge optionality on price and quality. There's a lot of ways to win now. It's not just the lowest price, it's not just the highest price. It might be a unique value proposition to the left or to the right, not just to the up and the down. It's given more optionality for entrepreneurs and creatives.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  I did, it's interesting that because I mean, virtually everybody we've talked, has talked about, I mean, James Dyson was fantastic about how I wanted to make a vacuum cleaner that really was better.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Technology, engineering, and then it had to look better.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  It had to look like it.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  And charges.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  A hundred dollars more than his competitor. And we all know has a hugely successful business because he has not only put quality into it, he's put engineering into it, and he's actually made it look great. And suddenly goes, have that completed, normally in a, in a, in a cupboard, I'll pay a bit more for that. So that value is something I think a lot of corporations miss.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  There's also something else that I think Dyson does that I think is wildly not talked about, which is it saves time. I think when you sell time, you win. And I will tell you that my belief of why Dyson has done both incredibly well in vacuuming, but also in hair, in blow drying, is subconsciously, I don't know if a lot of women slash men that are listening right now even realize why they love Dyson, but I'm about to point to something that they might be like, oh my God, that's why I love it, because it saves her seven minutes in getting ready. Because it saves her or him four minutes in cleaning the floor. Time is an incredibly important.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  I must go back, must give that, because that's a very, very, it's a really fantastic.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  I mean, I agree with you, the engineering.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, all those things.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  But I'm telling you, for many of us, I, you know, I was an early investor in Uber, but I really blew it. I could have been the first investor in Uber. Travis, the founder, well, not the, Garrett Camp actually invented Uber, they were co-founders, but Travis and I were very friendly at that time, I could have invested. I do not invest, I was actually, I, I, I went against one of my biggest principles, skip, you know, scared money doesn't make money. I had less savings than I was accustomed to because I just bought my first big boy apartment in Manhattan, bad timing. Because in hindsight, if I had the liquid, it would have ended up being the greatest investment of my career. So I don't invest in Uber, but it's being run by one of my best buds. And they come to New York City, in fact.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  In fact, in my office next door is an email from Uber thanking my brother AJ for taking the first Uber in Manhattan. We were right there. And in fact, in that first day that Uber was here, I watched, like the first day it launched was about a week after AJ took the drive, and I watched people taking Ubers in Manhattan, and I would watch cabs drive by people with the light on, and they were still waiting for their Uber. And I realized that Uber was gonna be massive, because Uber was selling time, it was also selling the perception of time. The fact that, you know, now it seems mundane, but the fact that somebody could sit in a

• 23:50Speaker 00

  skyscraper like this, order an Uber, go downstairs and have the Uber there, in 2011, whatever that time was, 14, whatever year it was, was profound.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Was profound, and so, yes, I think time's a big one.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Time, time is...

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Time's a big one.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's only so much of it.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  So then you decide, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna start VaynerMedia, I'm just gonna take that thinking of how, into a kind of world that is dominated by being, you know, skyscrapers the size of whatever. And, but you went in with this view of, I'm gonna change the way people feel or think, and you focused on this new thing, social media, social media. So you start that, pitch it, how did you get to the clients? How did you get to people?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  I had a lot of Twitter followers.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  You know, because of the blind business. And again, back to what I said earlier about football, one of the things that makes me very unique in the history of advertising is I'm truly the practitioner of the craft that my agency sells. Think about that.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  You know, again, it's so fun to talk to you about this. Today!

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Today! Forget about when I started the company. Today, I... Well, do more social media marketing myself. I write the copy to the team. I write the copy to the team that I post on my Instagram content. I'm a practitioner of the craft. So, anyway, I had a lot of followers on Twitter and Twitter was starting to get important. It was starting to be known, right? It started to make it into BBHs and BBG. People had heard of it at least, which was much better than it was two years earlier when I started on it. And it was very interesting, actually. I got a cold email from ESPN and they said, "We've been doing our homework. We're thinking about getting on Twitter.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  You have like 500,000 followers. Like, can you come in and consult us about Twitter?" I'm like, "I didn't get paid for this?" And so I came in and like, I knew nothing, no deck, no presentation. I just showed up and started talking and all these fancy executives in ESPN, I'm such a sports fan. They were like, "Wow, ESPN executives in the C-suite." And I, you know, I do have the gift of gab, so I walk in and I go one hour straight of just insane knowledge. And at the time, again, it would be like somebody walking in two years ago talking about AI. Like, nobody knew what the hell I was talking about in the room.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  But I also, from my wine days, I'm very good at being, breaking down complex things in an average Joe way. And I think that's helped my career as a communicator. And even though they didn't really know what I was saying, they did know what I was saying because I was making it potential. And, you know, at the end, brother, I didn't even ask how much they were going to pay me. At the end, they're like, "Okay, thank you so much." And they're like, "The check is going to be in the mail." I was like, "How much?" And they're like, "Five thousand dollars." Brother, I thought I made 40 million. I go downstairs, I'm like, "I can't believe I just got paid five thousand dollars for that." You know, I grew up very humbly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not going to be that.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  I grew up very, in a studio apartment the size of this room we're in right now with family members. You know, even though I'm building my dad's business to a big business, he doesn't pay me shit, so I'm making no money. So this five thousand dollars was like, I like, I hit the... So I call my brother, who's still in college but about to graduate, and we're debating starting all these different businesses. One would have looked like Groupon. Ironically, one would have been about fantasy sports. Um, and I called him and I said, hey, I think we should start a company consulting the Fortune 500. So I just started making content more and more about marketing, not wine. And that just was all lead biz debt. Bob and Val, who went on to have a pretty big career in advertising, was at PepsiCo at the time, had us stand up their PepsiCo account.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  The NHL became aware of some of the work I did for ESPN. We started the company in a conference room like this in Columbus Circle, at another company that got famous in Europe called Buddy Media, that's sort of the Salesforce. They had some clients they introduced us to and kind of the way we went.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think the other thing there is that because you were engaging with it, you were opening doors. And I think that's, I was trying to say to you, do interesting things and interesting things will happen.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  I think that's right.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And that not enough people are out there engaging, you know, bringing the outside world in, affecting what you're doing, and then people suddenly go, who would need to talk to you?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  I also knew that something most people didn't know, that seems common sense now, but I knew I didn't have to go through that age or the New York Times or the, or the industry, or, you know, I knew that I didn't have to go to Cannes. I could make content and it would come to me.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  I was living my thesis.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  What I wanted my clients to do, I was doing for my own business.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  And that's the power of creativity, isn't it? Because there you were creating content that people were connecting to, and that gave you power.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  You're, you're talking to people and they're responding.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny, I, I'm a businessman, but when I get into like long evenings or deep discussions, I always associate much more to my curiosity and creativity than I do to my salesmanship or operational capability. I agree with you. I think it's been the beacon of things that have worked for me and the others that I admire. I think it's a very big gift when you can see things differently. And if you then on top of that have the ability to execute. Because you know this, we've met a lot of creative people. But they can't execute themselves into their own pants.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I've always thought, which you were. I've always thought being an outsider gives you greater perception. And I think if you look a lot of great creative people throughout history. They've been outsiders and it's that sense of outside looking in. Gives you a perspective as opposed to being part of the group.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  The very senior executive at Publisus who's gone out to do something else. Ran into me literally at Madison Square Garden ironically right there. And grabbed me and said, hey, you don't know me. I'm like, hey, John, nice to meet you. His name was John. So I just want to say something to you. He said, you know, like we used to really make fun of you. And we really thought you were kooky and an idiot and all this. And he goes, I had dinner with a bunch of my old pals, you know, many in the C streets of the biggest companies. Well, many outside the industry now. And somehow it got brought up, he got brought up. And the punchline of that little 10 minute chat we all had was. It makes sense in hindsight that it took a complete outsider to actually disrupt our industry.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And that again, a great lesson for you. If you're an outsider, you have an advantage. Use that advantage.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Can I say one thing on that?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  But you must deploy common sense. Here's what I mean by that. When you're an outsider, you can break things if you're right. What I worry about is like, oh, I'm an outsider and you're just kooky about it. And you just think you're going to win because you're different and you're forcing the different. The reason it worked for me in this scenario in Adland was. I knew the truth. It was that the industry was putting something on a pedestal. That was subjective, not objective. And in business life, things have to get objective. So if you're an outsider and you can see that there's a flaw. Or a something that's put on a pedestal or a romance from the industry that is not grounded in truth.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Wine, I knew that the wine industry, you know this. Would complain about wanting more people to be into wine. But then yet, they would spend all their time being douchebags to anyone who wanted to get into wine.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  I, I, I gave a talk at the Bordeaux Symposium, saying, lose the, lose the mystery and keep the magic.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, I, I always said, you know, no industry grows by making people look stupid. Uh, which of course, the wine industry did.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Is number one.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Number one.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Make you look stupid. So there we are.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  And unlike high fa- how high fashion.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  No one aspires. Like, high fashion are also a bunch of douchebags. But people still wanna wear Prada, or, you know, Louis Vuitton. Like, nobody really... You know, you wanna look cool with a bottle of wine, but it's a different thing. And so like, you can't have audacity when your addressable market isn't big enough.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, the difference between arrogance and confidence, isn't it? You have to understand, have to understand.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  You know what the difference is? Humility.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Humility. Well, the other thing that you said there too, which I thought was good, about it's not enough to be an outsider, but also to trust your own judgment, to, to, to be able to relate to things. And then say, I think this could be better. I think, I believe genuinely this could be better.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  In fact, you're talking about something I love to think about, don't talk about often, so I'm glad you got us there. Do you know that I don't guess?

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Do you know that in my entire 30-year career, I've never guessed once? And yet, I've innovated so much, done things that people are like, how did you see that? I just stay very narrow. I don't have the audacity to jump into things that I don't understand. You know, again, this one seemed left field. I remember the first article ever written, or mentioned ever written about VaynerMedia and me in the ad world. It was some blog host that said, "Wine Boy Thinks He Can Win In Madison Avenue." It was a real razz.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Oh, that was...

• 33:28Speaker 00

  But I, I enjoyed it, first of all.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, cool. What a challenge.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Deep down, I'm an athlete in my mind, meaning I like getting booed on the road. You know, like, I, I'm the kind of athlete that like, wants the opposing team to hate, that gets me going. So I enjoyed that, but I remember laughing at it to myself. I snickered, like that. Two seconds to myself. I'm like, oh, they don't realize my whole life has been marketing. I sold wine by being the best wine marketer of a generation. So it was interesting and so I don't guess. I trust myself because I don't guess. I don't go into real estate being like, oh, like you need to know stuff. It's a lot easier to trust your judgment or your intuition. When it's grounded in some truth of knowledge or experience.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Instead of like having reverse audacity and being like. I can just randomly do something better because I like golf. And I can run this golf company better. But what do you know about the golf business?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Well, there's a great lesson there too. So many businesses have been started by people who care. Who obviously who actually care about what they're doing and what they're making. It isn't just I'm going to start a business. I really care about this and I think I could do it better. So again, it's bringing yourself into what you're doing. Express yourself, this is what it's about. So this is, you know, we're now, you know. Seeing another big change with AI coming along and so. You know, you now have to constantly innovate. That's going to be crucial to your success. And how do you, how do you do that? How do you, do you have a process? Do you have a kind of a way that you're approaching that?

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yes, my process is I want to put myself out of business before someone else does it. That's my north star. You know, I can't have this great run in this last decade of disrupting the ad world. On this social first approach. And then just because now I'm big. Be like, well, this AI thinks of that. I don't, I don't have the hypocrisy. Thank God my parents don't have that in their body and then to pass it on. I don't have the hypocrisy to do it. So yes, I have a very big approach, which is. The only thing I really do, brother, in life is pay attention to the consumer. I don't do anything besides pay attention to what's going on in the world. What are people thinking about? What's the temperament? What's trending? Why are people wearing baggy jeans again like the nineties versus tight jeans?

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Like, why are mustaches doing well versus not? Like, what's going on? Like, what are people wearing? Why did hats grow up? Like, you know, why are people traveling to Portugal versus, you know, France? Like, I watch every, why is this music working? What's going on with Korean and Latino culture and not just black culture in America? And then you go into Europe and different parts and Asia because we have offices everywhere. And so, you know, obviously about three years ago, I'm like, uh oh. Here goes AI. You know, and I was aware of machine learning and I have some very nerdy friends because I do a lot of Silicon Valley investing. It's been in the air, but I was like, oh, it's here.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I think from my standpoint, if I'll tell you what I'm doing in black and white. VaynerX, my company, we've gone very big into analog. So I think that the rise of AI is creating this barbell effect, extreme digital, like extreme digital. Like there's like extreme digital, right?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  And then on the other side, the rise of extreme analog, music festivals, sporting events, going to restaurants and checking in your phone, detoxing, Shabbat on Friday from digital, like just the extremes, a very bullish real life. I believe over the next five to 10 years, let's use 10 years, it's 2026. I believe in 10 years, it's obviously 2036, but I think the world will look more like 2050.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  I think it's going to speed up very aggressively. However, I think that's going to create the rise of 1950. I think you're already seeing vinyl sales are up, kids are asking for non-smartphones for their first phone. They're asking, not their parents. Gen Alpha sees the anxiety of Gen Z, blames digital, which I don't think is fully true. It's modern parenting, but we'll talk about that in another show. And so I'm, so for us, for example, I don't know if you know this, but Vayner's very unique. We are a creative and media and stretch, like we're more old school, what you do. Everything under one roof, right? In addition, we are a fully integrated experiential agency.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Live shopping production, a big wave that I'm obsessed with. Podcast production. So I had a meeting two days ago with all 2,000 plus global employees and said, we are no longer an agency. We're a production company that happens to do AGC work.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  All under one roof.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  So you've changed the way people approach it.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  I want everyone in my company, you'll, you'll find this fascinating, given what you did for a living. Everyone in the company has to make.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  So even someone who has great ideas, like if you were you, me and you were together back in the day and I did this, yes, I need your great ideas and then you need to tell me what you can physically make. Can you sing? Do you wanna draw? Cause we make five dollar ads, like sometimes it's just a five dollar production to put on social, sometimes it's a five hundred thousand, but just ideas to a deck to present is over.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're saying that actually unless you can actually implement what you're doing.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  And I, I keep talking about AI, people keep saying it's a tool. I say it's not a tool. It's something you collaborate with and if you collaborate with it and then everybody in a sense is now a creative director.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Cause you've got this, you've got this thing there that can help you, really, really help.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Now, what's, what's gonna be exposed in that is that not everyone is creative? Everyone has to.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  I, I say everybody's creative, but not everybody can do it. Like I can sing. Everybody can sing, but you really, I would not be a man of this very kind.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  That's right. That's exact, and by the way, even more optimistic, everyone can get better at singing if they put in effort. I fully believe that. When I say not everyone's creative, a caveat, especially for this kind of audience, ev, you're, you're more right than I. Everyone is creative. Not everyone has the ability to be creative and execute in a manner that is commercially successful.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  And that is important to understand. There's a very different thing inherently, you know, there's so many people I know that, I mean, my mother comes to mind, what a wildly creative person in, in fashion, in home design, architecture, she can draw, she does a lot of things well. She does not come from a commercial lens. It's for her insular bubble.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  But she's doing what she loves and then, and in a way, that's the, I think that's the first step. Cause if you don't love it, why should somebody else love it?

• 40:46Speaker 00

  I agree with that completely.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  So you know, you've got.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  In fact, let me say something pretty, might seem counter to what I've just been saying. I don't, I personally, me, which is gonna, may seem wild, but stick with me here. I do not put creative commercial capabilities on a pedestal. I just think it is.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  In fact, I find, and I'm sure everyone who's listening will agree with me, often the things we most loved is creative and has no commercial essence to it.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  But I think the important thing is to get people to understand that they are inherently creative. And actually, setting up a business is a creative act.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Well, that's where you're more right.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  You know, you have to have an idea, you have to have a product, you have to have a service, whatever, what are you going to call it? What's it going to look like? All these things are creative acts. And getting people to kind of understand that, and then to keep it going. Because obviously, innovation is core to the success of, continuing success of a business. And creativity is at its core.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  And now, to your point even more so, I believe emotional intelligence and resilience is my favorite form of creativity.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  I would argue, my greatest accomplishment creatively has been the creative conversation I've had myself around my optimism and world perspective.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think creative people have to be optimists. Pessimism destroys creativity.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  There's nothing I hate more on earth than pessimism. Truly, I mean it.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  You've got to get out of rooms where people are being like that. It will destroy you. So, this is, there's so many. What, you've talked about, what's the biggest lie in marketing?

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Oh, so many. Oh, jeez.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Have you got enough time for that?

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, again, knowing that a lot of ad people listen, this is more inside baseball, so I apologize to the general public that's listening to this. Let me just get out my soapbox here, because, boy, there's a lot of them. I would say a couple of things. The biggest lie in marketing, very nerdy, is, on the media side, is that reach. That we talk about, like, oh, this has reach, when you buy it.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  It's not being actualized. Like, when you buy a GRP, or you buy all these impressions, people aren't actually seeing it. So the biggest lie is on the media side, principal ad buying, there's real fraud in adland. It's really, it's kinda disgusting. I would say now, the other side of the equation, creativity, I think the biggest lie is the lie that the senior creative director tells themselves, that their creative skills subjectively are better than others. I think there's an extraordinary lack of humility at the creative director level in adland.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Well, I've said this a number of times, but I have a theory, and I said this to people at BBH, that most companies are triangles, so the boss sits at the top and he details. I said, "If you come to BBH, the triangle is inverted. I'm at the bottom, you're at the top, because you can have an idea that could transform the fortunes of our clients, our business and everything. My job is to sort of recognize that and make sure nobody gets in the way."

• 43:56Speaker 00

  That's right, on paper.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  And that, you've got to put that in practice.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Correct, and in the ad world, fifteen years in now, I will tell you, in the same way that people love to say in every ad for, "Great ideas can come from everywhere, or anywhere." That's kinda, have you ever read Marxism?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  No, I haven't, actually.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Okay, but you know the-

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, obviously know who-

• 44:17Speaker 00

  If you read Marxism, if you read the concept of socialism and communism, what I was born in, it reads beautifully. But in practical execution, it's been disastrous. I will say that great ideas can come from anywhere, being written on the walls of ad firms is similar to Marxism.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the other thing you have to do there, then you have to kind of select the kind of people you've got there, you just don't let anybody in.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Of course, but again, you know this better than I do. I'm a newbie to this truth. The amount of times, you know, and I'm empathetic, you start as a junior copywriter, you eat shit for twenty-five years to finally get to the place to be the person that decides- It's kind of hard to have the humility and the patience to let the ideas come from elsewhere. You like, listen, of course you did it well, that's why you're a fucking legend.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  But ninety-nine percent of people don't. And I remind all my creative directors in every ad firm, if you're so goddamn creative, go do it in the real world.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Well, I was lucky, I I I got to work with Charles Sartre very early in in our first year in advertising. And Charlie has all kinds of issues, but one thing he was genius at is that he loved the idea more than anything else. And if somebody else had had it, he would move aside and go with that. Because in the end, he worked out it would make him more famous.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  By the way, sounds like.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And it was a great lesson.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Makes sense to why he pulled off what he pulled off.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's good, so this is.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  But again, that's a rarity, I see now.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  So we we've got this, the the future is kind of, I'm being told here.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Understood. We can go for like four hours, it feels like, but no, thank you, because I do have a meeting. Go ahead, sir.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I'm I'm just sorry, the the the thing that really fascinates me, and I, because I think people get AI wrong because they look at it, they go, it can take cost out, rather than this creates opportunity.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And I think that the somebody said something very smart the other day, he said, you know, AI really needs humans. Because with humans, it can really do some amazing things, and I think that is is the future of it. And.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  That's the current.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  But I I I think it it it's such a lovely observation, again, it inverts the way people are thinking.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Well, listen, it's the way people think on anything new and big is fear. Have you ever read the history of what people felt about electricity?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  It's profoundly interesting. The the term demonization got popularized, the reason we all know what the word demonized is is because of how popular that term became, it happened before the the electricity. But it got really into the culture when electricity hit this town. And JP Morgan had it down there, but almost everyone else was scared of it. Because the word in the street was if you let electricity into your home, you would also be bringing in demons.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  People are scared.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  People, let's call a spade a spade. The reason that everyone's up in arms about AI is they're scared it's gonna take their job. There is nothing else. There's nothing else.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  And so, to your point, when people realize you're not gonna lose your job to AI, you're gonna lose your job to humans that use AI if you are not one of them. The second that happens, then they start thinking about like the typewriter, or a computer, or the internet, or a cellphone. And so I hope people get there soon.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that's a, a wonderful observation. And I think, Gary, that's a great way to end that. I think this actually should be series one. Because obviously we've got about another three series we could go on about.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Listen, anytime you ask, I'm interested. I'm gonna just sneak in some flowers. Anyone, you know, I have a lot of, I have a good feeling a lot of people are gonna listen and watch this because they come from my audience. Please, please, take an hour to understand this man's career, what he did publicly, how he did it privately. Give yourself an hour. It's a north star that many of you should aspire to. And anytime you ask, the answer's yes.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Oh, Gary, well, I'm now feeling embarrassed, but that is just wonderful. Thank you very much. What a great conversation. And let's hope the oak monster doesn't come back. The oak monster, I remember that. Thank you very much. That was so good.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention and thanks for being part of this.

• 48:50Speaker 04

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• 49:18Speaker 00

  Journey. See you later.