So, what's the biggest myth about Gary Vee?
I think people think I'm stressed and I'm hustle and I'm hardcore. They'd be shocked to realize how detached I am from my professional success. I could give a...
Gary Vaynerchuk is the man behind VaynerX, a $400 million media company and one of the most misunderstood personalities on the internet today.
I compete with every creator on earth every day. I'm trying to put out a thousand pieces of content a day across 10 platforms, across 100 handles. I'm going to build such a monster.
Most people don't know what Gary actually does. And for the first time ever, we walk through all of his businesses, discuss the one rule he'll never break with his audience, and confront what most people get wrong about him.
Crush It told the world in 2009 that you can make $100,000 a year on the internet, and everyone laughed at me. The people that are making a million a year right now can actually make a billion a year. Everyone's confused. Everyone...
Everybody knows Gary Vee as an iconic voice on the internet, 50 million plus followers, but he is an operator, not a content creator. He runs VaynerX, a $400 million plus media company, and is involved with six to seven other eight to nine figure companies. Stay to the end, and we'll tell you how it's all possible.
So, you're saving my phone as Yoda. That's amazing.
And I think it's especially because I like green. I'm a big Jets fan, so it's double humbling. But yeah, because I think one of your superpowers is the ability to get very little bit of context and then give granular prescriptive advice to someone. That's very, very impactful. So I want to kind of glaze over some of your companies and just talk about kind of what those companies do, general trends, and if somebody is in that space, just kind of how you see that space evolving over time given the amount of time that you've been in the market. So let's give people value.
Yeah. Let's start with VaynerMedia.
So let's just talk about what is that actual business and how are you involved in that company.
So VaynerMedia is a contemporary ad agency. What that means for everybody who's watching, especially this kind of audience, is my brother AJ and I were the guys in 2009 who were like, hey, social media is going to win, not television, not print, not radio, not direct mail. Like over this next decade, this new format of marketing, YouTube, podcasting, but mainly social media, it's the winner. And it is just literally a Madison Avenue ad firm.
Now, there's VaynerX, which is the holding company that holds VaynerMedia, Tracer, the rest of my last name, a new brand that I rebranded, the Sasha Group, named after my father, which was an agency for small businesses. We now have Tracer Media that's just like VaynerMedia, really just a conflict shop so that if JetBlue and American Airlines want to work with me, which is very common at this point, everyone kind of wants to work with us, which is humbling. I needed a way to do more business. And I even stood up a third agency that's similar with subtle differences called the Tamera Group, named after my mother, and that stands for the Attention and Media and Relevance Agency.
And so those are three agencies. Then we also have our speaking bureau, you know, VaynerSpeakers, and those four companies are VaynerX, and that's the one that will do 385, 390, we'll see how this year. So I want to be real with everyone, it's almost 400.
And that's, I am the active CEO of that holding company, VaynerX. So Ryan Harwood, who does Gallery Media Group and PureWow and Coveteur and Tomorrow Group, reports into me. Mark Rovine, who runs Tracer Media, reports to me, and I am the active CEO of VaynerMedia and the active CEO and chairman of VaynerMedia, the biggest of those agencies, and that is that business and what I do for it.
And what does it look like if JetBlue comes in the door? What does that engagement look like? Is it like what are your core KPIs and you back into it and deploy to a specific department?
Yeah, we are a, you know, we're very unique. This we're about to get loud about this. I'm glad I'm giving you the exclusive. This might help a bunch of kids build bigger agencies than they might. We're a production company that happens to do creative, media, and strategy. For the kids under us that are all doing this, that makes sense. They don't even know how to live without making. But for kids under 35 that are doing all the good stuff, let me tell you about what's actually happening in advertising land.
There are creative agencies that charge huge retainers, 3 to 20 million a year, just to come up with ideas and decks. And when the client says, 'Yes, I want to do that big idea,' you then pay a production company to make a 30-second video. You then spend 30 million in media to make everyone see the video. And everybody that watches this podcast or is listening knows all that is dumb stuff from yesteryear.
We were the ones that came and said social first. Make content at scale at social. Extract the insights, the quant and the qual. When something does well, send it down to performance to create CAC and LTV and conversion, or send it up to be the brief to the bigger idea because we know that the grandma-granddaughter content is crushing. Now, let's go make a tearjerker video that's a minute 20 seconds and let's put that on YouTube and Amazon Prime and social, not buy cable TV 30-second spots. And that's why we built a monster.
So we're a production company that does production of social content, long-form video. We do Super Bowl ads. We did William Shatner's 'Shat My Pants' Super Bowl spot last year for Raisin Bran, but we also do live shopping, which is a new thing we do because I'm a beast in that.
Oh, we're going to get into this. I know. I know you're deeply passionate.
Oh, I'm deeply passionate. Experiential. So, you know, some of our brands are going to show up at the Super Bowl or NBA All-Star with like a booth and doing stuff. We're going to do that for them. We're also going to film it, make social content. Podcasting, you know, I've been in this game forever. Our spine is social content, but we do experiential, premium video, podcasting, filming, sampling. I love for CPGs to give out stuff, film it, then it's content, but you're also getting trial. We're really progressive in that world.
Like many kids that were inspired by my content have built epic stuff. I always get the flowers on DM in real life. 'Hey, I built an $8 million agency because of you, a $7 million agency because of you.' We were the ones that did that for the Fortune 100. What direct-to-consumer brands are doing and what influencers and humans and you're doing right here. Like we were, I was Crush It. That book was it.
Let's zoom out and expand because clearly you're 360. You're doing everything and you're going to keep iterating and probably creating new companies underneath this whole...
To just feed what the market wants. That's right.
What do you think is just like, what's your macro thesis on just marketing period right now?
That the haves versus have-nots have never been more divided.
What do you mean by that?
That everyone that gets social and podcasting and YouTubing and streaming and live shopping and influencer is crushing, and that big companies are getting their asses kicked without realizing it's going to get much worse.
What blows my mind is a lot of the people that are the haves that are winning, they can do it on a shoestring budget. And then you have these companies that have a billion dollars on their balance sheet. Why are they not just... I would imagine that you're telling them, why are they not just signing with 200,000 creators and just being more efficient with their dollars? What's stopping them?
Inertia, corporate behavior, how things are scored inside a Fortune 500 company, comfort. We're about to lose a client. I'm not going to call out names. We're about to lose a client because the guy that became the new CMO, who we've worked with in the past, he just does not believe in social because he doesn't understand it, and he'd rather hire an agency to do a television campaign, and he'll hide behind academia of brand equity versus living in real life.
Let's flip it. Who's a client that you've had that gets it?
Michael Rubin. You know, our impact on Fanatics has been enormous. Outside of Wilkos, who I think has made Rubin a cultural public icon through, you know, the White Party and all that. Like, I'm very proud of what we helped Fanatics build internally. Much of Fanatics' internal agency right now is former VaynerMedia employees, ones that actually were only one key person was at Vayner through this transition.
But, you know, Pepsi, Mark Kirkham, the CMO there, deserves a lot of credit over the last two years. We were there for 12 years. Greg Lyons before him and Mark Kirkham, they intuitively like, 'Fuck, Gary's right. Like, we got to get there.' Some of the stuff we've been able to do with Mug Root Beer, we're just cooking. Soon to be Scotts Miracle-Gro, because Nick Mora was our chief client officer, just went to become the CMO there. Of course, he's going to bring that talent and he's going to bring us along and we're going to crush for that gardening company.
I mean, there's a lot. Jim Malachowski at Bose, you know, I think really, really Carla Hassan at Chase is pushing, but Chase is a monster. So I'm empathetic. Like almost most of my clients get it. They have a lot of stuff and red tape to get us to be the big dog in the company because the big holding companies, the Publicis, the Omnicoms, the WPP, if people look that up right now, the people that are billion-dollar public companies that do marketing, they're selling these people fake reports, fake technology, principal ad buying, which is fraud, all this stuff.
But it works for 60, 70, 80-year-old board members and CEOs in these companies because they're comfortable with that. And that is why you've seen things like Graza and Liquid Death and all the rise of the individual empires that are being built around creators and all these CPGs, is because Fortune 500 companies are lost and are playing school and corporate, and we are playing real life.
Let's divide the haves and have-nots. And what's that one piece of first prescriptive advice you would give to the haves, for people that aren't in the game and they should be in the game?
Stop being a coward. Like, live in real life. And it's funny, I'm obviously going at it because I've got clearly a lot of pent-up tension on, you know, I care, bro. You know me.
Bro, you know me different than a lot of people. I care. So if somebody pays me money, I want them to win. You think I like watching kids that follow my stuff carefully and prescriptively for free, because what I put out publicly are starting to take market share from companies that are paying me because they listen better than people that pay me? It pisses me off.
The advice is like, 'Hey man, do you... Hey, lady, do you live in 2026? Do you actually believe a 30-second video that looks like a commercial is going to get any human being to buy anything?' Like, who the... bro, who the believes that? Could you comprehend being...
I just can't understand. I mean, we're on the same boat that we think that you get the asymmetric benefit from like a Super Bowl ad, but anything that's right below that or down to the volume play, it makes absolutely no sense.
Yeah. And they just keep, you know, the creative directors, the Cannes Lions awards is a whole racket. And that's why for a lot of kids watching, come in, listen, I'm winning. I'm going to build a massive company, but you can come in too. And like, the industry needs it. But on the flip side, if you're good enough, you'd rather just build your own CPG or media company because client services sucks.
I would love to know, just to double-click on just like that flywheel. So is the flywheel kind of you at the top as a social content machine, they come in to VaynerMedia? No, it's not. What does that flywheel...
9, 10, 11, 12? The flywheel is word-of-mouth results at this point. We're grown. We're 15 years old.
So you don't think there's a key man risk anymore?
There's always... I always think there's a key man risk.
Like when you're the greatest player on a team, like losing you, like that's going to be a problem. Like how could we possibly be as good with me? Wine Library has not done as well with me not being there, even though I'm literally running that company through my friend Brandon Warlick, best friend since 14.
Contextually, people don't even know that too. You brought that from 4 to 60.
Yeah. And by the way, it also went all the way down to 30 and I brought it back to 60 because of Wine Text. Everybody sign up for winetext.com. Like, you know, I'm, you know, back to my 15 minutes. Like it was literally my dad for the first time ever being like, 'So let me get this straight. You help all these other companies and you won't help your dad.' I'm like, 'I'll help you now that you recognize that I'm the guy that built the company.'
Your dad's funny. I want to go into more of these companies. I've never even heard of some of them. And I'm a big barter guy. My friends call me Barter Simpson, a big arb guy. Tingly Lane Trading, what is that?
It's, you know, Josh Smith, I'm sorry. It's actually one of the companies in VaynerX that I didn't name. It's small. Like it's actually probably a function that should be brought into the other three companies.
What is the thesis underneath that?
Barter Media. You take bad goods like expiring inventory, like Tropicana has an orange farm that they want to get rid of and they trade it. They give it to you. It's all financial arbitrage and you give them media credits. It's historically been a shitty black box bad business in Madison Avenue. We wanted to do like the white-hat version of it. And Josh Smith's like a dear friend, does a good job.
And basically it's like you've got 10,000 units of bad electronics and you're like, we can't sell this and if we sell it, it's going to mess up our brand. Let's give this to a barter company. They'll give us media credits in return. What used to happen is you'd get 2 a.m. television. So it wasn't good for the people. What we do is we do creator content, social content, good media. So it's a strategic liquidator.
That's right. I like that. We'll dive more into the whole entire ecosystem. I want to go all in on just the individual empire, your personal brand, Gary Vee. What's the team and how are you involved? There's a lot of people out here that are early-stage operators that are seeing the arbitrage of creating content as a founder-first company. And I think the biggest thing, I'm seeing it, I had done it formerly with Iconic and obviously now with Open Residency, it is hard to navigate like who do you hire? What does that kind of feedback back and forth look like? How do you keep your eyes on the prize of maybe the other company and also build a media company? What does it look like today? Like the Gary Vee business, the personal media business. What do you think, 30 people? Sid obviously ran it for a decade. Right now Rav and Rhea run it. Sid's still kind of involved because he's like almost in special ops. We're just doing a ton of things. What do you think, they have 30 right now?
20.
Yeah. And that used to be 50 because we were using so much AI internally. OpenClaw, Claude, like so it's a 20-30 person team, ebbs and flows, with two co-leaders at the top who are really the executive producers and are making sure my content is being produced and distributed at a scale that is pretty different than almost anybody in the game.
And what is the thesis on that? And I would be under the assumption that like I feel like the tweets have to be you. I'm like more new to Twitter and I feel like you have to be tweeting all day long and that's something very hard.
Tweets are extra. So this is why I'm doing this podcast for only two reasons. I with you and I love you and I want you to keep... I know you're on the precipice of exploding and I know that this episode will do good for you. And two, I need content.
You need long-form content that you can chop up down to a zillion different others.
So the tweets are me, but now it used to really be me. Now it's just extracting something I'm going to say out of here and timing it.
So why don't you give us that machine underneath now? Is it let's create as much content as possible, as many actual minutes of dense value, and then it's just how do we chop this into words and videos and optimize them?
That's right. And by the way, I've given everybody the secret for 15 years.
Like, I put out a... the whole industry runs on a deck I put out a decade ago called the Gary Vee pyramid thing where make long-form, chop it up. Everyone's like clipping agencies. I'm like, 'Motherfucker, I'm the first clipping.' Like, that's what I did. That was my innovation. I did YouTube. I did DailyVee and D-Rock for the content, not for the vlog.
I speak and spoke publicly for years for the content, not for the speech. I went on podcasts. I went on Rogan and every other, not to be on Rogan, though that was a big platform, obviously.
I'm not here to siphon brand equity out of your audience. At this point, a lot of them know me. Now, they might like me a little bit more if they realize who the I am in a deep interview, but it's more about this is a production day for my content. If you're not streaming, if you're not live shopping, selling, if you're not vlogging, if you're not podcasting, you're not giving yourself a production day for the amount of content you need to dominate. I'm trying to put out a thousand pieces of content a day across 10 platforms across a hundred handles.
And you know this, I was the post, you know, 10 to 15 times a day guy and everybody was like going crazy five years ago. Like 30 pieces of content a day, that's up. I'm looking to do a thousand right now.
You know what's so crazy is I would never charge for a guest to come on. We've had people actually offer money to come on. But what we do now is we offer extended production days where if a team and or a founder wants organic content, paid content for the website, and then we can line up specific questions and they can chop it up for whitelisting or anything like that.
There's so many mutations of the game.
Yeah.
So with that being said, I would just love your thoughts on just quality versus quantity because I find...
Quantity is non-debatable. Quality is debatable. The end.
What's your thought? What's your thoughts? You make, if you make 900 pieces of content a day...
You can't debate that you made 900. Quantity is not debatable.
Subjective to...
And on that realm, are you just looking at just views? Basically on that side...
When it's organic, you can only get views if it's relevant. Now, you may not want something to be relevant. Like, that's not how you see yourself, but this is...
How do you look at deep and narrow versus kind of a bit more wide? Like I would...
So you do some sort of split between... because that's like probably like...
Probably the biggest question I was going to wait till later to kind of ask you is like, dude, I feel like so much of your content is kind of happiness and motivation and you have that effect on people, but people don't know about how deep you can go on the business side. Is that by design?
So much of my hours are spent on things I can't share. You know, like when you and I, through the years of your company, like when we're having like real conversations about like people letting you down or like we're strategizing how to grow your business, like I can't put that out. That's your business. You know, when I'm in a room with the CEO of eBay or Rubin or like 90% of my life I can't show.
And I feel like those conversations too are very native to that individual situation versus kind of this macro...
And it's secretive to them and it's strategic and it's like the different... like people make lots of money talking to me and like if everyone saw it, their competitor could... like most of my day is spent not on things I can talk about. I'm also not interested in impressing anyone. Bro, anyone that needs to know knows who the I am.
I think you're underrated. We already know about that.
And that's how everyone that's a player thinks that has spent time with me. I haven't spent time with every player, but there are very few people on earth that spend actual time with me that leave and say, 'Ah, damn, that was a disappointment.' It's completely the other way because to your point, so much of my content has to be more general, has to go in different directions.
I don't have... That's why 4Ds was so good for me. 4Ds when I was doing those sessions when I could really go deep. I mean, that's where the clip from Savannah Bananas giving him the playbook. Look what the Savannah Bananas came and became. That's why Caleb, you before we started, you say he knows he was there. He knows that when he was filming me, 90% of it has never seen the face of Earth. When I die and that goes out, people would be like, 'Damn, that motherfucker.'
You were early on a lot of people as well, too. Something you said to me that has resonated to me over the years, and I think it's one of the reasons among others why this podcast has been successful. I think it has to do down to kind of guest selection. Backing into something that you told me a very long time ago that's always stuck with me is you shouldn't give a about the 99%. You only should care about what the 1% think about you because like you said, the real ones know that you have it. But doing tactics that appease the 99% will basically annex you out of that 1% forever.
That's right. I'm glad you remember. I remember where we were, not only that. So like... Yeah.
And like let's deep into that because people need to know I'm a human. Like I don't love being underrated. I don't like being misunderstood. I don't like when people think like VeeFriends is a scam or like, you know, like I don't like those things. I don't like when people try to build themselves up by tearing me down because I've got a big platform. I don't like it, but I don't not like it. You know what I mean? Like replies will pop up. A couple tweet replies. They're funny. You just kill them with kindness. It's funny. Really?
I don't really kill them with kindness.
It's you again, you know me. I'm just genuinely kind. Like if you need to on me because you're that small and you need my big to give you a little bump...
You're not good.
I agree. Anyone that's bashing in the comments has a pathetic existence. I feel bad for you. I don't know. Like to me, they have something wrong internally where that energy is the normal energy.
You know this, I don't view it that way. I'm like damn, like really in my head it's like straight up, 'Gary Vee, you. You suck. You're bad for that.'
Literally, I'm like literally I'm like that suck, man. I couldn't imagine...
Seeing you like when I started seeing this going...
To live like the joy. Forget about that. We know each other. Even when I see people starting to pop off when I don't know them, the joy I have, I'm like, 'Yeah, you know, now you don't want there to be bad people and then use their platform and people up, but like the thought that you winning or someone else winning is taking away from me winning, man, that's a shitty way to live. If you when you live in scarcity, when you think the world is not abundant, when you are that insecure...
Almost nothing is a zero-sum game.
Correct. Yeah. I want to tie a bow on just the content machine under the notion that you're just like lightly saying that you want to post a thousand times a day. What is that one thing that you can't outsource and then what is that one key hire that's the glue to everything content on your side?
I mean, there's a lot of key hires, post-production editors that understand how to take all this content and build it in a manner that allows it to organically win and understand how to post it on LinkedIn and know how that will win there versus what you do on Shorts. There are very few people that have millions of followers on every single platform besides me on Earth. There's almost no one that has over a million followers on Snapchat and LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter like me. And there's a reason I'm in post-production per platform at scale.
I think there's an epidemic for those actual practitioners that natively know the platforms. I think there's an epidemic of the actual editors on that side.
There's not enough. I can't tell you how many people are hitting me up like, 'Give me an editor. Give me an editor. Give me a creative strategist that can understand.'
That's right. And then to me, it's the people at the top who did it in their careers. All of us, me, Sid, Andy K, Ragoff, you know, Nara, anyone that ascends to a senior leader on my team did it so they know how to manage it.
You have to do it. I'm like fairly new on Twitter. I'm like 10 days in of just being posting every single day, all day, engaging with stuff. That's like a full-time job. That one above.
That's how I built Gary Vee. The lost story of me is 2007 to 2011, Gary Vee on Twitter is how I'm here and all I did was engage. I didn't even post that much.
I wish I got in early there. I'm happy that we got into YouTube because YouTube I think actually is the most valuable platform, which guys will get into.
They're all valuable. By the way, Substack could be the most valuable if you're good, like Beehiiv. Ken, what? It's not...
I'm a Beehiiv. I'm a Beehiiv guy.
And you might like Beehiiv because you have a deal with them or an investment. I love the founder and you both love, so no. But that's another thing that I think has made me me. I was an investor in Foursquare which was a competitor of Foursquare. I told every client in the world to use Foursquare because Foursquare wasn't innovating. I'd rather be right than co-sign my investments.
In this case, I do think Beehiiv is iterating very, very fast.
By the way, they're both going to win.
You better wake up. Are you pushing through or are you natively posting natively? I imagine...
Natively everything. No reconditioning to everywhere. I mean, I'm willing to if it makes sense, but it is what works on this platform. If the same thing happens to work on Threads and Twitter for 3 months, then I don't mind doing the same thing. But it's always what will work on this platform, not what makes it easier for me to post.
If all these dick faces took some of the money they spent on jewelry and Lamborghinis and put it into more team and more process, they'd win everywhere.
Yeah, we're aggressive behind. Just on the editor side, we just hired two more editors just to understand native to the platforms.
Thinkers, producers, editors.
When you look at all this, you can just say at face value, you're a great personal brand. How would you filter like the characteristics of a great personal brand right now? Because I know that you've seen it.
The truth to them at that moment. I think the thing I've done well and others do well when they're doing it well is like you're just honest to your self. Like I started making garage sale videos at the height of my heat when I was really exploding.
And like a lot of real like Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, private equity, Wall Street, very like elitist people were starting to kind of accept me and they hated the garage sale stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. They were confused. They're like, 'Why the are you doing this? You're just cracking into our elite world. We respect you finally after thinking you're an idiot. You're making garage sale video.' I'm like, 'Yeah, that helps people.'
That was what was real to me.
Yeah. I like garage selling. What do you want from me? you.
I do have questions on like pickleball and whiffle ball and stuff.
Pickleball. I bought a team for 500,000 and they're selling for 20 million now. It was a good deal.
Did not know that was the case. I was... Damn. Yeah, bro.
I will forever be underrated.
So was it an OG team that started? Was the league already started or was it a team?
It was super early. No, the league was like... No, it wasn't. They were just starting to sell their teams, which is why I got in for 500K.
Can you make me a promise on camera? He was just on last episode. He's a gangster. Paul Rabel, PLL.
When he sells teams, let me get a little sliver.
A little sliver. I know. I know you're getting in on that.
That could be a big four, I think, over time.
He's an absolute gangster.
Where do you think the kind of the biggest arbitrage is for operators now with kind of this new attention economy?
AI. The operators are about to win everything.
In what sense? Just because they're more resourceful.
Damn. Shots fired, boys. I'm going to keep them because we're going to go to the moon together.
But the person that does has won. And if you're, god forbid, me, you're the thinker and the doer, it's a wrap.
So I would agree that you're getting extra benefit because you've already built the lead on the personal brand side. Do you still think there's a window for people to...
Bro, you're five minutes in.
I was in for like 5 to 7 years and then I stopped, which was the biggest...
So you're in five minutes again because once you were gone, you had to reset.
This... This... No, it doesn't suck, bro. You're 40 seconds in.
You didn't have hair the last time you were doing it.
Oh, that's right. They're right. That's right. So like, what are we talking about, bro? You get a hair transplant yet or...
No, but you were good enough. I would just wear a hat, bro. In two seconds, you've made some real noise. I'm proud as of you.
For people out there listening, it's they always say like consistently good versus occasionally great for content. Find a way to not quit and not burn out because when you get off that wheel, it's out of sight, out of mind.
Yeah. And there's good years and bad years. Last year was a bad year for me. We talked about that a lot. Like I was just busy as with Vayner Sports, VeeFriends, VaynerX, VCR of the restaurant group. Like everything was popping and I had to be a CEO and COO and Brand Gary took a back seat in 2025 and a lot of people took up that oxygen and that made me happy because that's the merit of the game. But like 2027, I'm coming out so guns blazing and we've been working all year for that. Like, you know, I'm going to eat up a ton of oxygen in 27.
How do you juggle all this? I think you are... there's some people that have come on here and they are absolute psychos and they're the focus guy. I feel like you're a juggler a bit more like how I am. What do you say to those operators out there that... this is what happened with me is we had the web series, we had the podcast. I remember when we cleared 10 million in revenue, I'm like amazing doing the podcast and then we hit a pretty bad spot with the business and I'm like...
I have to stop creating content. I need to focus on the business. I'm a CEO now.
Actually was the biggest mistake. So what advice do you give to operators out there that kind of want to do more...
More hiring. You didn't have enough players on the field. I'm very good at overhiring to not have that moment, make less money.
That is what's great about this business is the margin profiles are so big that like right now we could just go on like we're going to run this business on like an ecom EBITDA on this kind of scale phase to gain market share and then we could always kind of scale up or scale back. But that's kind of where my brain is at.
You're either investing in your business or you're investing in your toys to try to impress people that don't like you.
Do you know what I mean? Like toys come in all shapes and sizes. The toys that we all think about are Lamborghinis and watches and houses, but there's other toys, right? You're just taking money to do something.
Yeah. Like my proudest thing is that like I don't think I took a salary that even looked like 200,000 a year till I was well into my 40s. That's how Wine Library and VaynerMedia got built. It all went back into the business. I was patient. The I say online is real. That I was patient. I was kind. I was good enough.
Yeah. I feel like not enough people wait long enough. I mean, it was the same with me. I was probably seven or eight years in where I was always like leaders eat last. I think at some time, you know, at some point you have to cross the chasm and start yourself.
Sure. Of course, you start family, you get married, like there's different things that happen, little things like you get, you start to get resentful. Like I was definitely like, wait a minute, maybe I should like why is every like wait a minute, you know, like there's definitely things, but I think too many people think the business is there to give you money to do the other things. And I do think it's the reverse.
Like the longer you hold your breath, the more you get to win the game.
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What about original content? So this VaynerWatt and I saw you just greenlit this limited time offer. I feel like everyone is running away from kind of broadcast TV and you're obviously running towards broadcast, right?
Like yes, I mean that one is ABC, but like it's also going to be Hulu. Like there is no broadcast TV. It's just every, you know, everything's streaming.
Yeah. Everything's streaming and broadcast. And so like if you can get both, like why not? Yeah. We have I have a TV production company that no one on earth knows about called VaynerWatt.
The Watt part is Eric Wattenberg. I met him when I was repped for speaking at CAA and I just loved him from day one. I'm like, "This guy gets where TV is going this 20 years ago." And I was just like, "TV should be a marketing tool for business. It's going to be more like YouTube, not more like TV." And I just kept courting him. And then I made a real hard pitch to have him join me 11 years ago, and he went with someone else, which I will forever remember. And then that worked, but didn't work as awesome. And then I kept ascending. And then there was an opportunity for him to come with me and we started the company with Matt Higgins from RSE Ventures who's always a partner in a lot of things I do. And we're off to a good start. We did a Jets show which was the home team was on Amazon. Well, the Jets season did not work out the way we thought it was going to work out. So, not as many people watched that as much, but we've got a bunch of shows. We got a Kevin Bacon history show coming out. We have a ton of shows coming. Like everyone listening here in 3 years is going to be watching Netflix, Hulu, Prime Network, and they're just going to see the VaynerWatt logo pop up and they're going to be like, "This..." We have a ton of shows hitting next year.
What does a deal like that look like? I mean, you just said right there, it's about the flywheel and probably it's driving some other initiative, i.e. licensing or maybe a consumer product company, but what does a deal like that actually look like? Because all I see is just some of the numbers on the podcast side, but I'm not really familiar on like the TV and studio side.
Well, you either own it or the distributor pays you for it, right? They buy it from you outright. Now, they own it. They're paying you as a production company to produce the episodes. You're trying to make some margin on that. You've got talent deals. You got backend deals. Sometimes you fund it and then the Hulu or Prime distributes it.
Mix. You have co-production. You work with others. It's a really fast... It's actually a very dealmaking world as far as you can just skin it a million different ways.
As far as you can just skin it a million different ways.
Yeah. And it just depends on who has the leverage, right? Sometimes the celebrity has the leverage. Kevin Hart and The Rock's deals got better for themselves and their production companies as they got more famous, right? So just that's kind of the deal.
Under the notion that that could drive another, it could be an offline initiative, it could be in-store consumer products. Where do you just think like the future of media and TV is going on whether it be like the content medium and the content structure? Like where do you think it's going?
I think it's going great. Like people want to watch long form content for the rest of time and whether that's on YouTube or YouTube TV or on Netflix or on... I mean there's not a lot of people watch cable but people watch cable like, you know, people watch network. I think long form and short form and mid form and content content content. Like everybody wants to always say the death of something when it's always the iteration of something. It's a podcast, it's radio, bro. There's a radio show from 1930... Visually, visually radio.
Yes. When you film it, but like that's the 1950s television when they brought radio shows to television. This is a 1957 television show with Mike Wallace.
Makes sense.
History repeats itself over and over. People make decisions on where things are going based on their financial interests, not on the reality of the marketplace. And that is where I really shine.
I mean, I'm with you as well, too, that if at any point in time I don't believe in a product, I'll actually try and get my equity out and or I'm not going to keep promoting it. I'm with you on that for sure.
Yeah. And to me, it's more like I, Gary Vee, is like completely separate from Gary Vaynerchuk. Nothing I ever say publicly has anything to do with the vested interest I have in my businesses. I need to be historically correct and bring value and nothing else matters. Now, if that works, if I'm like alternative sports are going to like that, I feel comfortable with. I believe alternative sports leagues is a good idea. I do invest in them, but I'm thrilled to talk about volleyball and softball leagues that I think are great that I have no equity in.
Why do you think those are going to blow up? I mean, you just mentioned 500,000 to 20 million. I had no idea it could be a 40x multiplier. Like, why do you think these alternative sports are going to blow up?
In what context? Just anybody can really.
There used to be 13 channels and if you had a sports league and the 13 channels didn't want to put you on, you didn't have a sports league. And then there was 36 channels. And if you had a sports league and none of the 36 channels wanted to put you on, then you didn't have a sports league. And then there was pay-per-view and Dish Network. And there was a thousand channels. And if nobody wanted to put you on, you didn't have a sports league. Now there's unlimited real estate. Now there's social. Now, a clip from Slamball or volleyball or pickleball can be the gateway drug to people tuning in on DAZN or CBS Sports or CBS or Peacock or there's just unlimited inventory. So, now it's merit. There's no gatekeeper saying, "I like your Slamball or your Unrivaled or your 3-on-3." There's unlimited inventory. Now, we're on merit. Do you know why I'm proud? I compete with every creator on Earth every day.
Do you know why it's so much more fun to be a creator that wins than to be an actor that wins? Actors, Hollywood gatekeepers, gave you a chance. They said no to somebody who was better than Brad Pitt. No gatekeepers. We're on merit now.
What's the decision-making rubric though on that sports side, though? Like, you're talking about merit. I would argue that, you know, it could just as much be about attention or entertainment versus the actual...
Yes. But how do you get it? Like, is Vince McMahon great because wrestling's great or because he figured out how to make wrestling great to millions?
So, you're just arbing everything towards...
No. And I don't know. I don't know what tricks look like.
Millions think you're wrong. Is golf entertaining on TV for you?
Well, AJ Vaynerchuk thinks you're a dick.
Yeah, he loves it. It's all subjective and everybody has a ego and doesn't understand their opinion doesn't matter. So is a decision-making rubric just all things lead to who can get the most amount of attention, i.e. the most amount of views and how...
Pickleball can have a moment, can pickleball be massive is how I think, or it doesn't need to be massive. When you put 500k in and you can afford it being a double is good enough. I've already won on pickleball, but now I'm like, "Oh, this," you know, like, you know, it can get bigger than you think.
What are some of those... You're involved in tons of sports. I'd love for you to just rattle off what are all the sports teams.
So, I just won a... I've had a crazy summer World Series.
I won the first World Series this year, the New York Green Apples. By the way, naming sports teams, the best part. I called them the Green Apples because we're the New York team, the Big Apple. But I called them the Green Apples because of my Jets obsession.
Can we get Cole to whip up a little style guy for one of these teams? Let him be the creative director for one of them. He'll do the...
I wish Cole could do all of it. He's the most talented creative I know. He's definitely going to clip that. New York, the wiffleball league I'm very into. There's a lot of great owners, too. Lasry, who used to own the Bucks, Blitzer, who owns all these teams. Logan and Jordan Rose, the mother-son combo that run the league. That league has a real shot, bro. And people with wiffleball, bro.
Yeah. And everybody feels and these games that you can play but then also watch. I love when people are like pickleball's so stupid. I know everyone's playing it, but who would watch it? I'm like, do you know the history of tennis and golf becoming big? People played it and then they watched it when everyone said they wouldn't watch it. How much, how important do you think it is to have underlying partners or owners that have distribution arbitrage to bring eyes to it?
I wish my partners in every league were the Ellisons. They just put on Paramount and we won. If it's good. Again, like some of these leagues are not going to work. The USFL, the World League, like there's been a ton of leagues that have failed that did have television. Vince McMahon, one of the best in my opinion. XFL, The Rock, you know, like it's hard. Like these are high-risk, high-reward opportunities, but I like going slow. A lot of things I just mentioned, they went big fast. They had big TV deals from Fox and CBS, the USFL. Like, I know my history of sports leagues. They went... it's kind of like startups. We talked about it before we went on air. People raise too much money and then lose. Instead of making money, they raise money and then burn money and lose instead of slowly making money and win. Same with leagues. Pickleball's just now getting... like we just had a great weekend. Big ratings on CBS. Like it's starting, but we're like five, six years into this. It's like still a little pimple.
We're going to pop up right here a bunch of videos. Those were the best videos when the Knicks were winning. Have you just middle of the night going crazy with your hair all nuts, dude?
Dude, I mean, when you're a diehard...
Like anyone who's listening right now, when you're a diehard and you've sucked forever, I mean, Knicks were bad for 20 years. You know, those Wednesday nights staying up at 10:30 while I'm working watching us get destroyed by the Clippers were not enjoyable.
And you were in Poland for Tyler's wedding, too, right? It was like the middle of...
Tyler me up. Tyler Schmidt, you're a took me away from that Knicks Spurs game, but I love him so much I had to go to Poland for his wedding.
We're going to get into that. My wife's in Poland right now, actually. She's Polish as well, too. We got, we got, we got the Pol.
You and Ty have got that thing.
And by the way, I'm Belarusian. That's Poland. Same vibe.
It'd be remiss if we didn't talk about live shopping. So many eight, nine, even 10 figure operators have been on here and not one person outside a little bit of True Classic is cracking this live shopping. I have no clue what goes on. I don't know how to arbit. I don't know how you pay the creator and or you do it. Can you just tell us like what is it?
The term breaks up into two things. I use the term live shopping to describe the QVC elements on social, right? There's also the way TikTok refers to live shopping, which is both that part. You're in your FYP and then there's just a guy, sometimes me, saying buy this, buy that. And then there's an affiliate version where people are making content and there's an affiliate deal. So they're making a content piece for Graza or for Magic Spoon and then if it leads to a sale, they're getting a cut.
So is this just streaming with an affiliate layer labeled on?
No, that's like the bad version of it. The good version is what TikTok and Whatnot and eBay are doing, which is you're watching and it's one little swipe on the screen, you bought, no friction.
And how does that go from a frequency and cadence perspective? I know it works well kind of in the collectible world where people are like breaking cards and such, but how does it work? Like do you have...
I mean the biggest items that are selling besides collectibles are makeup.
There's a woman on here and being like, it's bro, it's QVC.
Like I love when people are like, nah. I'm like, what do you mean nah? There's billions of dollars being sold on network on cable television. Like, who knows anyone that goes on Home Shopping Network on QVC and buys a little...
Maybe my mom. Maybe my mom.
Billions. By the way, I love when people debate me on this one. Do you know what? In China this year, in China this year, live shopping, not the affiliate... Live shopping. Person on screen is live and selling something and people are watching, talking to each other, and buying. This year we'll do $1 trillion in GMV, gross merchandise value. $1 trillion worth of goods. China's advanced. They're selling homes, cars, yachts, watches, trinkets. How do you think Shein happened?
I know there's whole office buildings where some content creators like live out of these places and they're just churning. There's like hundreds and hundreds of them going on.
I wish I was in a point in my career where I could be live 24/7 selling. That's how fun it is for me. There's a bunch of people that are meant to be content creators who can't sell. Will never do it. But this is going to be a huge era of people who are going to make fortunes because they were never good enough to be Alex Earle or Logan Paul, but they're going to be the Alex Earle and Logan Paul of live shopping because they're a salesman.
This is one of the, I believe...
And or it's the lowest lift type of content as well, too. You literally pop it on. It's just all about authenticity. It could be kind of low production value.
Yeah, it's definitely... But it's going to be high production value, too. It's going to be both. It's like the internet. What's social? There's high and there's low. It's bro, once you get obsessed with and the whole world opens up to you. Every question you're going to ask me, the actual answer to your question is and.
What's your thoughts? We're debating on upping our frequency and adding into our content mix a little bit more low-fi content, but we think it's going to affect the brand value and our partners and advertisers are paying for the premium positioning. And we actually hired someone, started doing it, and then we nixed it. I'd love to know what your thoughts are on.
You nixed it because you thought it was diluting.
Thought it was diluting. Yeah. Because we want to be, you know, the Rolex of podcasts and just it didn't have that premium aesthetic.
I mean, I think you're allowed... like LVMH works again and there's a lot of ways to win it. I'm a fan of both, but no question all low or all high can work as well. And to your point, if you're trying to be Rolex and Louis Vuitton and LVMH and highbrow, one could argue that low-fi could create some vulnerabilities.
I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit skewed on that. For example, LVMH, all these French and Italian fashion houses love to be like, "We're fancy." So why are you doing collabs with streetwear brands? They need relevance. They're going to do with Kith and Madhappy and Ciele and Stüssy and all these brands because they need... like you're going to get to a place where your relevance might be a vulnerability, but you might not care because you're making so much on the premium plane. You'll just decide how you do that or you create a whole another channel and another brand that can low-fi if you want to.
We're debating on doing low-fi at volume to test concepts that work and then iterating them with the premium visual identity. That's kind of, that's kind of where we ended out.
That is like a no-brainer.
I thought you were going to say that was too much work. No, I think that's, that's what she said.
There's... I will never say that's too much work to anything in the history of life. Work is, work is one of the most significant variables of success and everyone's trying to figure out how it not to be.
It's so funny, man. So many people are starting podcasts and they're all saying like, "How do I do this but only do it for four hours on Friday?" And I'm like, "Oh my god, good luck."
The same way you do four push-ups and ask yourself, "Why don't you look like an Adonis?"
The biggest learning lesson for me is when we started this, I was like, I didn't think this was kind of the means to the end. I thought this was a distribution channel that would feed into that...
And now you know it's the thing.
But now it is the thing. Like this is the product. This is a real business. And that's the kick I've been on the whole time.
The Gary Vee thing was a thing, but it was also a gateway drug to all the things because I knew I was psycho and I was going to do 13 real businesses, not one. Not because I thought that would make me the most money, because I knew that would bring me the most joy. In fact, it is not lost on me that if I went 100% on any of these things...
But it's not what you want.
Yeah. What about hiring and firing under the notion that you have, you know, you just have 13 companies. There may or may not even be more. Obviously, you can't be in 13 places at once. So, a, what are you looking for in these people? Because I would imagine outside of VaynerX, you have like acting CEOs that report to you. What does that kind of flywheel look like? And what are you looking for in these people?
Family. They're rather actually family. My brother Brandon Warick, who I've been best friends with for 36 years. I love him actually like my brother. Sid. Sid was an intern. Sid, how long we been together now? 12.
12. I do recognize that name from a long time ago.
Yeah, you were, you were with Andy and Todd, but Sid was always like really there actually. So, VaynerWatt, I just talked about it. I've known Watt for 20 years. VaynerSports is run by AJ, my actual brother.
Uncle Cranic, what's up, baby?
You know, Andy and John Troutman, who both started with me 15 years ago. Trouty worked with me and then was my partner in Empathy Wines. People don't even know about my exits at Resi.
Flex on them right now. Flex on both of them right now. Yeah, Resi is a massive exit. I knew Ben Leventhal forever. He was the act of like 10 years friendship and we were co-founders. We invented Resi together over dinner one day and we built a massive nine figure exit to Amex. Empathy Wines. Nate Scherotter and John Troutman both started with me as interns, became my minority co-founders in Empathy Wines and in 18 months we had a meaningful exit to Constellation Brands, one of the biggest three wine companies. Family. Trouty's now back and me, Trouty and Andy and Tyler Schmidt are all like all in on VeeFriends. These are people literally all three of them I've known for 15 years. I started with, they were started with me when they were children. All out of college, day one out of college. Family.
Outside of loyalty, what are those big things for why it works? Because we are...
Speed. I don't even care about the loyalty.
How much is it that they know how you operate? Because we...
Everything. That is literally what we're...
There is nothing else. That is what we're going through right now. He's like, "We're hiring a right-hand, like a chief of staff." And I'm just like, I know that there's a savage A-player out there. Yeah. That will know how my ADD brain works.
When you interview, tell that person the truth.
What about firing with all these companies? You have 2,000 plus employees on just the Vayner.
My biggest, my biggest weakness of my career. My kryptonite, my scarlet letter, my vulnerability, my missteps have all been on lack of candor when I cared. I'm a lover boy. You work for me for two minutes, you're family. Train, you've been with me now one year and a couple weeks, right?
I like him too much already. But he got lucky because I've given him some candor along the way. Like Train, potent, this is real talk. Train got me in my 30s, might not be with me right now, but I got better and was able to give him candor, was able to get Raghav to give him candor. I was even able to give him candor not through a passive-aggressive way. I just struggled to give negative feedback because my father was very good at giving negative feedback and doing it very not nicely and I think I was naturally not a good feedback person then that made me go even further to the left and I just couldn't... It took me a while to see that it was my vulnerability.
How do you keep this all going, this train going? Like what does a day look like for you? Let's, let's go there.
But I'll answer that. But I'll give you the real answer.
Yeah.
By not being scared for it to all fall apart. No judgment daily. When you're running truly this many businesses, there's never... I mean, my entire day is being a firefighter. There's just a problem everywhere, but I don't take it personal and I don't think it matters. And so I'm detached from my...
Detached from the outcome. And you're just living in the moment, non-emotionally to, you know, bad shit's going to happen.
I'm just detached from all of it, bro. It's deeper than that.
I just don't think my identity has anything to do with my professional career.
