A (5:09)
If there's any confusion to the following statement, there's a very significant chance that you won't go to the place you want to, which is this thing right here should fuck with your mind. Like you can't imagine. This computer that I'm holding in my hand is literally more powerful than the computer that President Reagan had to run the free world. This computer in my hand is connected to an Internet that doesn't know who you are, where you came from or what you're up to, the platforms on it. Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and podcasting and YouTube, they don't care where you came from or who your grandpappy was, what you did yesterday. They're unemotional platforms that every person in this room can go on and start building something for themselves. And the cost is zero. One of the reasons I like to remind people that the cost is zero is that I don't know if you know, but when Facebook's reach started to decline or when Instagram changes its algorithm, people actually complain and are fucking pissed. And I try to remind them that the platform is free. They're like, Facebook's fucking me up. I'm like, it's free dick. Why did Instagram. I lost followers. Instagram cleaned up their shit. It's free, asshole. We whether you have too much and there's plenty of people who have too much, and whether you have too little and everybody in between, especially in America, we are in full complain mode. And that is the opportunity. If I can do anything in this room today, get one person of the 9,000 that came in here dwelling and complaining and, and thinking shit's fucked up and actually get them to realize that is 100% the framework of how they see the world. And literally, if they just change that and start actually doing. If I can accomplish that waking up at 3 fucking 45 in the morning, this morning was worth it. And that is my agenda. Because what I'm about to talk about for the next 25, 30 minutes is execution. I'm going to talk to you about why I think Instagram ads are so underpriced that whether you're selling real estate or you're a financial advisor or you want to sell T shirts or you want to sell yogurt or you want to be a comedian, a rapper, like, it's so underpriced. Instagram has the collective attention of the far majority of our country. Instagram story ads are so underpriced that even if you put content that's average in it, it's over performing. This is exactly what happened on Google in 2001-2005. This is exactly what happened on Facebook from 2009 to 2012. When our collective attention is in one place at scale and we're actually consuming. And the ads haven't gotten money yet from BMW and Nike and Pepsi and Coca Cola. And to make the ad prices go up, us entrepreneurs and individuals have to strike. Just like buying beachfront property In Malibu before people realized it was Malibu. I day trade attention. That's what I do for a living. I spend all my time trying to figure out where there's attention and then I try to figure out how to run media ads and how to create content for those channels. I am agnostic. I do not care about social media. I don't care about Facebook. I don't care about Instagram. I don't care about Twitter. I care about your collective attention, whether it's on this stage right now, whether it's the content that I make, whether it's getting ridiculous seats at WrestleMania. So I show up on every fucking 15 minutes. Whatever it is. I'm interested in where the attention is and how do I penetrate it. Understand, what happens next is the most important part. I've got your attention for these 40 minutes. But if this keynote sucks, I lose. I've got your attention on LinkedIn. I'm posting on LinkedIn, guys. My last book. It's not up here. My last book, crushing it. I wrote about the most important platforms in the world to produce content on. I didn't even put LinkedIn in it. Literally only 24 months ago, when I was writing the book, I didn't even put LinkedIn in the book to talk about the value of LinkedIn for US entrepreneurs and individuals. Today, as I stand here right now, I would argue that LinkedIn might be the platform that I'm most excited for everybody here to go home and go produce content for. And I don't mean go spam people and send them messages. I mean posting content. And it could be about fitness, it could be about orange juice. It could be about anything. LinkedIn today, on this day, is acting more like Facebook did four years ago than Facebook does today. The amount of organic reach you get without paying for it is so remarkable, it's unbelievable. Yet we live in a world of headline readers versus practitioners. I produce content daily. I just replied to a comment to somebody that's in the audience here. Cause they were pumped. Not you, because it was a lady and you're a dude. But. But you might have been an hour ago. Or you were. Oh, you were 20. I DMed you back. I DMed you back. But there's some lady in here. Like, I'm in the trenches. I'm not sitting in an ivory tower. I talk about this content daily. Cause I do it and I live it. You're talking to somebody. I wanna remind everybody, everybody starts with zero followers. I want to remind everybody that Everybody starts with zero followers in 2007 when Twitter hit the scene, I spent six, seven, eight hours a day between 7pm and 2 in the morning going on Twitter and replying to every single person that mentioned anything about wine for six hours a day for four years and still nobody knew who the fuck I was. So when I hear People put out three posts on LinkedIn after a keynote like this, and then email me and say, hey, Gary, Vee, loved you in Chicago, great talk, but gotta tell you, you're wrong. And I reply, what happened? Well, I posted on LinkedIn and nothing good is happening. And then I ask, how long you been doing it? And they're like, well, I've posted twice for the last two weeks. And I reply, you're a fucking asshole. I just looked at this dude and like, you know when you can feel like how is anybody confused that it takes, let me say it very slowly, an obnoxious amount of work to create any level of success. There is so much confusion in the system about the amount of work ethic that needs to be ployed to actually have success. Let me tell you this. Anybody you've ever met that made it worked their fucking face off. You know, people that are rich, that didn't, they inherited it, but they didn't make it. And the confusion of the one or two stories you hear about when it happened fast, like Instagram or Facebook, has confused everybody. And the amount of excuses we put into the system so that we don't have to do that work is remarkable. What's interesting is the reason I have such a good framework on this is because I am one of the great all time worst students in the history of this country. I mean it. I literally never opened a book in high school, did all my scantron tests, cbcba, cba. If there's any kids in the crowds, I'm gonna give you a real good secret. If you're in public schools, they just push you through. The reason I watch people live for the weekend and love Friday like it's the greatest shit ever because they hate their Monday through Friday so fuckin much. The reason I hear the system's broke, my boss is a dick. It doesn't work for me. I'm not from that. It's just excuses not to do. It's the same shit I did from first grade to 12th grade because I didn't want to do that bullshit homework that meant nothing in real fucking life. The problem is that shit ended when I was 18. You've got the rest of your life. Which gets me back to this. This Thing freaks me out so much. You can't imagine, because the one thing this thing is, is actual opportunity that our grandparents didn't grow up with. This thing allows you to still be practical and maintain the job that you hate. So you can pay off your student loans and your mortgage, but create your side hustle on here around the shit that you actually love. Whether that's the fucking Chicago Bears, whether that's fucking sneakers, whether that's doing comedy skits, whether that's reincarnating the formula that your grandmother had for soup from your country that you're now gonna sell direct to consumer on the back of Uber Eats. I don't give a fuck what ridiculous thing comes out of your mouth. This thing, if you make content on it and understand where people actually pay attention, actually gives you a prayer for that to happen, as long as you do a couple of core things. And that's what I'm gonna talk about. Core thing number one. The single biggest thing, in my opinion, that the majority of these people in this room are doing wrong, this is number one. I believe that 98% of the people in this arena right now buy too much dumb shit. I have become crazy fascinated as I've lived my life of trying to understand why the fuck so many of my parents, immigrants, friends, other immigrants, and just immigrants in general have a disproportionate success rate in the framework of America. And I finally figured it out. They're not smarter. It's not even necessarily that they work harder. It's that they come to America and they buy nothing stupid for 15 fucking years. They just live like shit. Buy nothing, save money, buy a business and move on. The level of insecurity that is permeating this country so that people end up buying cars and houses and clothes that they can't afford to impress people that they don't even like is the great epidemic in our society. I get to say this from truth. I lived my 20s, all my 20s, 22 to 29 my 20s, in a shitty fucking apartment in Springfield, New Jersey. I didn't buy any fucking clothes. I didn't have swag fucking sneakers. I went on no fucking vacations. I just fucking worked and saved money. And I was building a business for my parents, not even for myself. So when I tell people to be patient, it's easy. Cause I lived it. I don't stand up here ever talking about shit that I didn't actually do first. And so if you're not pumped, if you're not like, loving life before, you try to figure out the hook or the secret. Or if you think Tony's gonna rejigger your fucking brain, or I'm gonna give you. Or I'm gonna give you some fucking secret to do on fucking Instagram that's gonna change everything. Before you think about that, go home and look at your fucking credit card bill and stop buying buying dumb. Because when you don't buy dumb, that money stays in the fucking bank and you can do something with your fucking life instead of having a new pair of fucking off whites. Who the fuck you flossing for, Chicago? You think somebody's gonna like you better cause you're fucking got a new Audi, you dick. Jesus. And that is what is most interesting about this place. Because if you want to look at this place in a negative way, it's super easy. Because everybody's fucking fake lifing on Instagram. You know how many people here are gonna go hiking this weekend for the fucking stupid picture? They don't want to go hiking. They just want to get a couple more likes on Instagram. I got fucking. I know people who jump the fence at night at private plane airports to take a photo, to make pretend they fly private. Do you fucking understand what's going on? And then it gets deeper. There are people in bullshit relationships right now posting photos of themselves on vacation, acting like they're fucking happy. My friends, this is a manifesto in Chicago this morning about executing on truths that shit. And let me give you very basic truths. If you spend money on shit you don't need, you're gonna lose. If you buy those things to impress other people, you've already lost. You need to take a step back and understand. What are you doing? This is not a conversation today about making more money. Success means being happy, not how much money you have. We are in the middle stages of. Of mental unhappiness. Mental issues in our country predicated on a lot of different things. Not paying the Piper in 2009 like we should have. We should just be getting out of a depression. But we all got bailed out. Let's start there on the greatest generation of funny parenting I've ever seen in my life. My favorite thing going on in the world right now is. Is 40 to 60 year olds shitting on millennials when they were the fuckers that raised those people. That's my favorite shit. These kids are so soft. No shit, dick. You gave them an eighth place trophy. These kids don't take feedback well. No shit, dick. When their teacher yelled at them, you ran to the school and Fucking fought like an asshole. Fuck, that pisses me off guys. Let kids lose. Let's actually talk about losing. Micro losing is the greatest shit. I stand here in front of you today because the first 18 years of my life, the world told me I sucked and I lost at everything. And I sucked at school, I wasn't big enough for sports. Everything fucking sucked. That's right bro, but we're fucking here now. And we're here now because a singular person in my life, my mother, instilled such disproportionate self esteem in me without creating entitlement. When I was nice to people, she fucking praised the shit out of it. When I struck out in a game, she didn't make pretend some shit was rigged. She said the pitcher was better than you dick the fine line. How many people here consume my content? I'm gonna give you a secret I've never said. All I am is the puppet and the byproduct. Tamara Vaynerchuk, what I'm trying to do for you is what she did for me, what Tamara, my mom, Vaynerchuk, that's who I said did for me was she positively and optimistically gave me a framework of the world. But she didn't create entitlement because when I lost, I lost. And when I won, I won. And so when you look at my content you can see certain times when it feels fucking a little rough and a little edgy and other times when it's warm and fuzzy, it's because both exist and everybody thinks you have to pick sides. It's like the bullshit in our country right now, people think you have to pick sides. It fucking makes no sense. The reality is this, just like in our country, we're just one. Human life is binary in that some things are soft and some things are hard. And the reality is some things are very basic. And here they are, I believe the following, that we are so blessed to be in this room. Because for the first time in my life, I think it's practical, not ideological to actually build a business around the things you actually like to do, which will then mean that you'll actually work the 13 hours a day if you want to make a million dollars a year that it requires because there is no fucking passive income. Do you understand? You can make a good investment, I understand. But when you buy 30 homes properly and you think it's passive, what about when the tornado comes? What about when the fucking person that manages it quits? What about when somebody lights the fucking house on fire? The amount of Money you make is wildly correlated to the amount of anxiety and stress you're able to carry. People want it easy out here. There is no easy if you want to live a 1% life. People are so funny in the audacity of the words that come out of their mouth. My friends, the top 1% earners in America, one of the richest countries in the world, start at $420,000 a year. If you were in this room and you make $420,000 a year, that means you make in the top 1% in this country. Yet everybody's walking around like, if you don't make a milli, you haven't even started. We're delusional. And all the people that make 420 and above, they work their dick off. Guys, they work. It's so much work. It takes work. Now what I believe is what absolutely just drives me so happy and why I wanna be here is I can't believe that. That you can actually make funny videos on Instagram and get brands to pay you $10,000 for you to hold a bottle of Pepsi in your hand. I mean, it's crazy. What's crazy is you can literally go start a Shopify store and sell T shirts or makeup or bow ties because your grandfather wore bow ties. And you design it on the Internet and it gets shipped to you from China. And then you run Instagram ads and you like the level of prep. Guys, if this existed when I was a kid, fuck college, I wouldn't have graduated high school. I'm not sure I would have made it through fucking middle school. This is a mindset and execution game. You have to understand how ridiculously good it is. And I believe that's very hard. When there's so much negativity being pushed on social media, on mainstream media, everybody's trying to convince you it's bad. It's the greatest. It's the greatest. The problem is everybody can do it. And supply and demand then kicks in. Everybody can sell bow ties, everybody can make funny videos, everybody can show off their abs and get the right angle on their fucking ass and all that shit. Everybody can do that, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. And more importantly, and what I really want to leave you with is something you really need to understand, which is almost everybody fails because of their intentions. Almost everybody fails because of their intentions. They start businesses for themselves. Makes sense. We're humans. But everything that runs through their mind is what's in it for me? How do I maximize my profit? What's it gonna be like for me? How is it gonna be good for me? The only way to succeed in the world we live in is to actually be consumer centric. There's a very specific reason that Amazon is winning. It's because everything that happens at that company is trying to figure out how it's good for you. It's good for you to buy prime because you love the fact that all year that means everything you buy has free shipping. That's good for you. It comes quick because that's good for you. Because you value time. The singular reason that my content has worked, whether it was wine for the first six years of my career or it's been business over the last eight years, has worked, is because before I post any piece of content in my mind I think about how is this gonna be valuable to you? How is this singular piece of content going to bring any value to you? The single reason I've been able to build an audience is I don't put out content that's a top of the funnel piece of content that gets you into my database so I can sell you my product. It's a piece of content that I hope brings you value, which then creates a relationship with us. The end. Period. The end. And so if you're taking anything from this talk, number one, the opportunity is ridiculous. I need you to understand that if you don't know what Shopify is, Google it and learn about the platform that cost nothing to start a store on the Internet that works really well and and sell something on it. If you don't know how to run an Instagram story ad like I referenced it earlier, you wrote a note about it, but I didn't get to the detail. The reason I didn't get to the detail is cause the details are called google.com. go to fucking google.com, type in how do I run an Instagram ad? Enter and 8,000 trillion fucking billion results come back. Everybody wants people to come up here and fucking draw shit on a fucking white paper. Are you out of your fucking mind? Information is a commodity. Information is zero. It doesn't cost anything. Don't buy information. The Internet, it's free. Take a step back and understand what you're doing with yourself, what makes you happy. Are you trying to be rich because you want to stick it to your parents or, or everybody else that said that you couldn't? Or are you trying to do something cause you actually like it? Are you trying to be rich because you want to go buy shit to create A perception that you're happy or do you actually want to be happy? We live in remarkable times. The Internet is the single greatest and most complex and ridiculous invention in. In the history of the human being. We, luckily, for some unknown reason, happen to be living during the era of it finally hitting its scale. Thirty years in, and it is in its prime opportunity. The comp I would make is imagine we were living in Chicago hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and we could be buying up property for almost nothing because we just didn't understand what was actually happening. That's how I think about attention on the Internet today. It is so valuable and it is so underpriced, and literally the only thing that's stopping you is insecurity. The reason you're not posting is you're worried that nobody's gonna care what you have to say. The reason you're not posting is you don't like the way you look in the picture or the camera. All these different things that come down to what other people think, not what you think about yourself. The reason my man over there, I was clapping, and I love talking about losing for the first 18 years of my life is because it was easy as shit. Because I didn't give a fuck what you had to say. I was in my own cocoon, doing my own thing, making my own self happy. And I stand here today in the same goddamn place. Do I want my content to do well? Sure. Do I want my businesses to be successful? Yep. Do I want Empathy wine to do well? Sure. And the sneaker, do I want. Of course. That's like, I'm playing. I'm playing my game. I want to win, I'm playing my game. But when I lose, I'm grateful for the opportunity to play. What I learned about myself at a young age was that I see it, I gotta leave with this. Though I recently realized, oh, shit, this is all working. Because when I was 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, when it was a summer day in the 80s in Jersey and everybody went out to play, play, hoop, whatever, like I wanted to work. I rang doorbells and washed people's cars. I sold lemonade, baseball cars exploded, and I started buying them and flipping them. Then I turned 14 and wanted to work at my dad's liquor store for 14, 14 hours a day for 2 bucks an hour because I realized work was my passion. I like the game. It's why athletes being in this stadium, athletes that love their game, a lot of athletes don't. As I've gotten to know Athletes, they do it because that's where the money is. But they're not happy. They don't love it. It blows a lot of our minds because we'd love to play in the fucking league. But not everybody wants that. This is one big game of happiness. And the Internet allows you to. But are you patient enough and are you secure and have enough self esteem to go through the process of eating the fucking dirt to get to a place of happiness? Success, my friends, needs to stop being talked about how much money you have. It needs to be talked about how many fucking smiles you put on your face. It does. It does. And I love the cliche shit. Motherfuckers. I know you're in the crowd right now. They're like, easy for you, dick. You have money, motherfucker. I was happy before I had it. You didn't know me, dick. You didn't know me. You didn't know me. And I don't necessarily know you, but I know this because I read 10,000 fucking comments a day in my DM. We have a ridiculous opportunity. You just need to see it. Please try to build a business around the thing that you would do if you weren't getting paid for it. Because it's the only thing that you're gonna work hard enough at cause you actually like it. Go flip Thomas the trains on ebay. Start a blog about fucking Smurfs. Start a podcast about reviewing Whiskeys or the 85 Bears, my man. You could start a podcast and an Instagram account and a YouTube show about just the 85 bears and get $100,000 in sponsorship from car dealerships and pizza shops and all sorts of shit in this town. And to me, the fact that that's true and so many of those same people are making 87,000 being a lawyer or 90,000 being an executive and hating life. Or let me just play with this. And I'm gonna leave with this. Would you really rather make 212,000 a year and be unhappy or make 97,000 and do the thing that you love the most and the only thing you have to do is live a little more Humbly, Just a little. We have to fucking talk about this. That's the game. That's the game. Please wake up. I love you, Chicago. Big announcement.
