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If you're here and you want something to happen, the fastest and most significant way to grow a business, besides the operational part, to grow a business, it's called social media. I don't know if you heard. It's free. Everyone's always mad at it. The fucking thing is free. This is the GaryVee audio experience. All right, let's get into it. So much to talk about. When I think about talks on the way to them, I try to think about, like, what today, as I'm sure actually by some noise, how many of you consume some of my content. So you can imagine the thing I think a lot about when I speak is if I'm putting out so much and I'm putting it out every day, what can I actually bring in? Value that might be a little bit different. And so it's why I really love Q and A. But what is also interesting about what I do for a living is, like the sign said earlier, I think a lot about day trading attention, because I think when I look at a room like this, the reality is that no matter what you do in here, whether that's B2B, B2C, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're an employee, fitness industry, wine industry, sneakers, it really is not any difference to me because the reality is if I talk about attention, it is relevant to everyone in here, including people that are running for local office, for people that are trying to raise money for their favorite charity, for people that are trying to impact their school. The thing that I've been obsessed with since I was selling lemonade at 7 years old and on a stage like this, maybe 10 years ago, I realized, man, I don't even really remember pouring the lemonade. And I had an epiphany that when I had lemonade stands, my friends would hold down the lemonade stand, and I would walk around the streets of New Jersey and try to figure out where to put my signs. I've been chasing attention my whole life. And so baseball cards went well for me because I gave thought to how my table looked at the show. My dad's liquor store was real easy for me. I would watch people walk in the store and. And I would pay attention to how they would move. And I changed the way our setup was, and I made sure the stuff we wanted to sell was in front of them instead of somewhere they couldn't find. As you can imagine, when I launched winelibrary.com, a website, it's crazy, the fact that I launched winelibrary.com in 1990. How many people here were not born in 1997? Make some noise. Getting fucking old. Getting old up here. The fact that I launched a website in 1997, and there was something about YouTube. We were talking about YouTube, and I made a reference in there of when I started. And in reference, it said that I started Wine Library TV five months after YouTube came out. And I thought that was too soon, so we looked it up and it was actually wrong. But the other direction, YouTube came out, I think. December 15, 2005. I launched Wine Library TV February 21, 2006. And it's probably the thing that what I'm setting up here for you is it's kind of scary how big the opportunity is for everybody in this room, regardless of where you're at, if you actually make a commitment to. What I now recognize is the commitment that I've made my whole life and very aggressively for the last 20 years, which is if you actually understand where people's attention is and then you actually figure out how to storytell on those platforms, whether in the written word, video, or in audio. And most of all, which I think fucks up most people, you stay patient and try to actually bring value, not extract value. When, you know, it takes me two seconds when I go to the airport, somebody rolls up, they're like, gary Vee, I'm not fucking growing. Like, it takes me 100th of a second to know why. Because they're only about themselves. They care about how many followers they get. They care about how many likes they get. They care about how many fucking things they sell. There's just, like, literally no relationship with the audience. I know I get to stand up here. I know why I get this love for you. It matters to me to provide value. I'm not scared to be a businessman. I got sneakers to sell and books to sell and wine to sell and be friends. Like, I'm not scared. But I don't understand how people don't understand what's happening. The whole world's competing now. Every single person is competing with every single person, every business. And how are you going to break through? You're not going to break through by showing the same shit. A billion people are posting a fucking flexi watch. That shit's not going to break through. I think that most of us in general need to understand that the science behind the game and the game is attention on this device. There's eight or nine platforms that dominate this thing. And the question to me that I always think about when I look around the. By the way, that lime sweatshirt you're wearing is fire. Fire. Can we clap it up for. Can you stand up? It's nice. Attention. Shit caught my fucking eye. Look, listen. It's the same shit for the last 20 years. Like marketing is how you grow business, right? Obviously the product has to be good, but you have to get out there and create demand for your business, right? You can do it through word of mouth. You could be great at what you do and people talk about it, that's great. But if you want to accelerate and I have no idea, I mean, there's no reason anyone's in this auditorium right now on this Thursday unless they're trying to grow. So I'm just defaulting into thinking everybody here has ambition and, and hunger and trying to do shit. So I know everyone here is trying to do something. What I'm always confused by is why we keep looking for some sort of shortcut. My favorite entrepreneurs are fitness entrepreneurs. Fitness entrepreneurs make me laugh so much because unless they cheat, which I know a lot of fucking people do, they know the way to do it is the discipline. Like you gotta do the exercise properly. You gotta, you've gotta do it every fuckin day or often and you've gotta eat properly. Like people know how to get into better shape. There's no fucking secret. I mean, there's no benzig or whatever the fuck that shit is now. But you know, like the right way to do it is pretty simple with the gym and with your fork and spoon. But it's hard to do. But fitness entrepreneurs are always like rolling up. They're like, yo, but yeah, but how do I do it fast? And I'm like, you spend your day, every day teaching people that there is no fast physically, but you're looking for fast business wise. The reason I pound patience and I know, I watch the data. I know how many of you are tired and have no interest in me telling you. It takes time. I get why everybody wants it fast. Everybody wants it fast because the world's insecure. Everybody wants to win fast because they want to show everybody else that they won. I understand you want to prove it to the girl that didn't fuck with you in high school. I get that you want to prove it to your dad who never said you had it. I understand all this shit, all this business stuff. It's all this, it's always this. I understand. Fake it till you make it. I understand. I'm watching it all. It's all I do. All I do for life is watch People. Nothing confused me about people. I understand you all. I get it. The problem is, it's the same shit every time. For example, the thing that breaks my heart is that people actually think money makes you happy. I know what people say when they don't have it. They're like, cool, give it to me and I'll figure it out. I get it. How many people here have rich friends? Make some noise of the people that just made noise. How many of you have rich friends that you know right now are super fucked up, super unhappy. Drugs, alcohol, all sorts of shit. Make some noise that you're right, bro. Bro. Honestly, on some real shit. One of the advantages of growing up in the dirt and coming up a certain way is you have lots of friends and a lot of family that, you know, live not in a millionaire lifestyle. And you watch. I wish some of my millionaire friends could have the lifestyle of some of my high school friends that are deeply happy, but don't make the same level of paper. Money doesn't make you happier. Money exposes you. Money and fame expose. They don't change. He changed. He didn't change. You didn't know him. Now you know, you understand. So that's a whole separate thing. But on this business front, I'll give you maybe I had it right with my first book. My first book, subtitle of Crush. It was cashing in on your passion. Maybe. What was clear to me in my early 30s has become again, very clear to me as I get closer to 50. I don't know how you can work hard enough to beat your competition if you don't like the thing you're doing. I watch every day for the last 20 years. People chase whatever current trend they think they can make money in real estate every eight years. Crypto, cannabis, like social media influencer. Like, I've watched people's profile on Twitter over the last 15 years change nine times of what expert they are. You can't win if you don't like it because somebody else likes it and they're gonna outwork you. You can't. It's not sustainable unless you love the fucking process. It's too hard to be an entrepreneur. I know it got cool because I'm 47. I remember when it wasn't cool. I'm a direct beneficiary of it becoming cool. This is like a different. This is not the life I expected. Businessmen were just behind the scenes and you lived and you built businesses. I understand that it's pop culture now. I'm. I understand that people aspire toward it. But if I could wish anything for everybody in this room as I look corner to corner, besides health, I would wish you self awareness. There's a lot of people sitting in here wanting or are delusional that they're a great entrepreneur. And what they really are is a great number two and a great number three. The number four at Facebook and Tesla made a lot more money than 99.9% of the number ones that started companies. Please. Thanks, Mom. Self awareness. Everybody's so focused on what they wish they could be that they're not paying attention to who they are. So I thank you, seriously. Let me tell you why I understand all my spiel to be true. Because I've been putting out and millions of other people have been putting out the direct black and white content to make it work. There's unlimited content on how to build a business, what the right tactics are, how to use Shopify, how to use WordPress, how to use eBay, how to use TikTok. There's unlimited content. The reason I started to, over time, evolve into like, I gotta figure this out. Because why hasn't everyone figured it out? You start realizing it has nothing to do with the tactics. Literally. Literally. There's nothing from a knowledge standpoint when it comes to business that isn't available for free. I don't know if you've heard about Google or ChatGPT or YouTube. Use those three free products and you can get the direct answer. I don't know what the fuck you're doing with your notebooks out here. There's nothing to write down. It's all here. It's not the tactics. Right? Look, there's a lot to the tactics. Let me segue to the tactics for a second. Do I believe, and I look at like a lot of times when I come out to a talk, I'll look on social to see who's here, what you're talking about. Then I'll look at the profiles, try to get a sense of the feeling. Do I believe that most people here don't understand the science of social media? The answer is yes. Do I believe when I look at all of the accounts I looked at over the last couple of days, hyped for this event or here or what have you, that when I look at your profile I'm like, oh, they don't understand that the thumbnail has no shot or oh, fuck, they're one of those people that think on Instagram you just, it's all about the picture of the video. And they put no effort into the copy, which is why it's not happening for them. Do. Do I look at TikTok and be like, oh, they just posted their Instagram reel on TikTok. Or vice versa. That's why they don't get it. Do I think that there's extraordinary science behind the art? I do. The thumbnail matters. The first three seconds matter, the style matters. If you're still doing what you did for, like, how many people here are stagnant in their growth on Instagram? And don't be full of shit, raise your hand. Cause I want everybody to see this. Actually, stand up, please, on some real shit. What was the question? Are you stagnant on your growth on Instagram? Put on the lights. No, no, no, no. This is good. By the way. I'm standing. I'm standing. So thank you, everybody. I wanted everybody to visualize it, actually. If you can keep those lights on, that'd be epic. Because the dark freaks me out. It really. It doesn't. I just like seeing the faces for reaction. Listen to me. The reason everybody stood up is all that social media is is supply and demand. My favorite thing is like, gary, you need to help me. I've been shadow banned. No, you haven't, Don. You just suck. Nobody here is shadowbanned. You're not shadow banned. You just haven't changed up your game in the last three years. And there's more people posting on the platform than ever. And some of the attention is now fully just on TikTok. It's called fucking supply and demand. You remember when I was yelling and going crazy five years ago, telling you to get on TikTok, and you were like, nah, fuck that shit. That's girls that dance that are 14. You fucked up. This game is simple but hard. Just like getting into better shape. There are core platforms that have the world's attention. Almost everybody here does not post three times a day on LinkedIn. Everybody here should post three times a day on LinkedIn. I don't care if you sell T shirts. I don't care. I don't care if you sell peach ice cream. LinkedIn is not what it was when we all came out the gate. It's no longer a recruiting tool. It is a social network that has crazy organic reach, that has very high value customers that are usually at work when they're in it, so they're paying attention even more because they don't want to work. And so I can go around the world and speak and I can put out the content, but when I was thinking about this, I'm like, look, I can go into the tactics, you know, I can tell you right now that on Instagram, if you post an image first and a second carousel video instead of just a reels video like we've all been doing, it will do better. There you go. Go good. Go write that shit down on your fucking pad. But what I know is that when you do it seven times or 12 times and it doesn't go cause the quality of the content wasn't good enough that you stop. And so I guess for me at this point, I'm just trying to figure out what are people worried about, what's stopping people? And it's all the same cliche shit. Some people don't like the way they look on camera, but you don't like the way you look on camera because for some reason you've decided to value a stranger's bullshit comment on you coming from their own hurt instead of the way you feel about your own self. Like the thought of how many people here don't want someone from their high school or college or a neighbor or co worker or even worse. The thing that kills me that you literally are not building your future because you're worried about johnnypants67 coming on your account and shitting on you. Do you understand how sad of a life it is to spend your time at night laying in your bed, going around your feed, seeing someone's bright light and you're in such a bad place that you want to say you suck or you're wrong or you, you shouldn't be feeling bad for yourself. You need to feel bad for these people. We need more empathy. Like, this is someone who's hurt anyone. The thought of spending a second of my time to hurt someone else's feelings is fucking insane to me. So I'm just gonna, you know, I'm trying to systematically think about, like, why won't you post 33? Like if you're here and you want something to happen, the fastest and most significant way to grow a business, besides the operational part, besides the fact that it has to be able to operate to grow a business. It's called social media. I don't know if you heard, it's free. Everyone's always mad at it. The fucking thing is free. I built my daddy's liquor store. Not with social media. I built it with newspaper ads. Shit cost money. Television commercials that were local. We didn't have that kind of money. That cost money. Fucking billboards. Those motherfuckers took my money. Google adwords killed for me, but it was still fucking money. This shit's free. And I don't know if you paid attention. What happened the last two years in social? It changed. Social for the first 10 years was based on the social graph. Now it's based on the interest graph. Let me explain. The first 10, 12 years of social media was more like email marketing. You amass people to follow you, you post. And a percentage of them opened, right? They saw it. Now the algorithms are taking over and it's around interest. There are people in this room who've never been on TikTok who can leave this conference and say, fuck it, Gary got me, I'll do it. Let me go. And their first post with 0 followers can get 8,000, 20,000, 100,000. A million views. That's real. That happens every day. That's insane. Not only is it free, it actually is being seen. Unlike all my clients who continue to buy TV commercials. Who here seen a fucking TV commercial ever? Besides the super bowl, we don't even watch regular TV and cable TV anymore. Every one of you fuckers have four subscriptions. You complain about money, but you have six subscriptions to every streaming service. You haven't been on fucking HBO Max in 100 years. YouTube, social streaming, we don't even watch those things. So look, there's such an outrageous level of opportunity right now. And it's a game of the haves and have nots, meaning either you see it, AKA either you decide the world sucks and everything's hard and there's a lot going on, I get it, or you decide not. Like sometimes when someone's complaining and is my homie, I give them my phone and I'm like, look at my stream. My stream is like fucking kittens kissing each other like the fucking sun coming out. My stream's positive as fuck because I protect my fucking sanity. No shit, you're gonna be upset if you only consume negativity. No shit, you're gonna be upset if the core people in your life spend 100% of their time complaining. And it's hard. Almost all of us have either a negative mom or dad. That's already hard. And that shit's hard. But I remind my friends, I'm like, you're 40. You're gonna still complain and blame mommy and daddy for everything. Instead of buying a fucking Maserati, go get therapy, dick. And I get not everybody can afford therapy, but exercise free meditation apps, like just genuinely putting positivity in your ears instead of negativity. The number one thing the world lost was accountability. We've gotten so good at telling everybody else in the world what they should be doing. We love pointing fingers, right? How about thumbs? Where the fuck have thumbs gone? Let me give you the biggest indication that you're a fucking loser entrepreneur. Gonna give it to you right now. You blame the current president for your shit. I love that. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. And then you're blaming the president. You fucking suck. As if. I've made plenty of money as an entrepreneur with Republicans and plenty with Democrats. Give me an independent and I'll crush. I don't give a fuck. That's right. People make me laugh. People talk real shit. But then we just aren't accountable. Here's another one. How many people have more than 10 employees? Raise your hands. Good. Let me tell you the funniest thing about running a company. 100% of the shit that's wrong is your fault. It's crazy. I sat like, I sit with my homies. I read all the DMs. I'm in it. You guys know, you get responses sometimes like, I'm in it. Gary, you don't get it. My CFO sucks. I'm like, no, you don't get it. Fire him. You hired him. Every single thing in your business that is broken is 100% your fault. You don't like the taxes in California? Move to Texas. We found the Texas dude. Like, people, people are just so interesting. We're just such. We're in a really challenging spot. You know who I blame? 8th place trophies. Can somebody ask AI who the fuck invented that? Cause I want to kick them in the dick. 8th place trophies fucked everything up. We taught kids that losing was bad. We need to teach kids that losing is good. This is the mistake. Because what happens is, Listen, I have 2000 employees now at VaynerX, globally, and a lot of them are under 28. About seven years ago, before this even became obvious and kind of talked about even before the whole like. And by the way, enough of bashing Gen Z. The people that bash Gen Z made them bash yourself. Like, you're mad at your. Like, I get all these conversations like, Gary, my son, he's a real mess. I'm like, Hell 25. I'm like, we start talking cause this is interesting to me and I care and I want to help. And then you find out that their parents paying for their 25 year old's life. I'm like, you want. And they're complaining that their kid's not on like, it's impossible. It's impossible to be hungry when you're fed, you know? And listen, everyone's got different circumstances. I'm talking general and everybody's got their own shit. I get that. But the eighth place trophy thing killed us. We made people scared. I don't know if you're paying attention. That's all that's going on here in business and life. It's just one game of fear versus love. And fear's got a lot of momentum. How many people here are happy? Make noise. I definitely do not believe that. By the way, that was some loud as. Like, not everyone's fucking happy, but I'll take it. So let me. Given that everyone here is happy, I don't know why the fuck you're here then. But thank you. I love you back for that. But listen, if you're happy, one thing, if you're following of what I'm doing and I think this is an issue and I'd like to actually challenge it, especially because I feel the vibes and I'm happy. So many people are happy. If you're happy, you have a responsibility. What's happening is negativity is so loud and so on the offense and happiness is content. Happiness is chilling with their eight friends and staying away from it. The reason I'm so in and willing to deal with the ridicule and the judgment and all the shit that comes along with being out there like that is because I feel like I have a sense of responsibility. My mom really built me like that, and I feel guilt even sometimes, let alone gratitude. And that's why I take on the responsibility to put out the shit I do. If there's that many people in this room that are so happy, please change up your content a little bit and add a post about happiness. How to find it, how you found it, how you see other things. Start posting more happy shit. You into that? Seriously? Cause since this whole room's happy, we're getting drained the fuck out. We're drowned out. And so we really, really like. It's so good to contribute to society. And there's so many ways people have different resources. Some people use money and they do that. That's amazing. Some people do it through service. But like, if you're happy, start showing more people that you could be successful and happy. There's so much shit that fucks me up. Like, nice guys finish last. Do you know how fucked up that is? That's another person we need to find who invented that shit. We taught an entire generation Multiple generations, that you can't be successful and nice. Do you know how crazy that is? That's insane. I'm not worried about other people. I'm not talking about other people. I understand what people are doing. I focus on you. Fuck what everyone else is doing. I know what everyone's doing. I'm asking you all, what are you doing? What do you want to do to me? If you want to grow, there is an incredible, obvious historical framework to this. The only way you can grow is you have to have energy. If, for example, if you spend one minute of energy on envy and jealousy of someone who's winning in your space, you're losing. When I see other people in my space win, I'm happy for them. The world is abundant. They're not my friends. Nobody's taking yours. No one's. Yeah, you might lose a deal to someone. Somebody else might sell a shirt to someone. You sell shirts. Listen to me. No one is taking yours. You're taking yours. I will. Cause there's plenty in the back. You're taking yours. This goes back to accountability. You want to grow. It's just energy. Go into your cocoon. Make it fucking flowery and sunshiny and happy. Start limiting your negativity. Listen, I have a family. Listen. My family's from the ussr. The majority of my family is fairly negative. And that's because that was the world we lived in. We lived in a 70 year jail. It was a bad place. Of course, Russians drink vodka to the face. It was fucking horrible. All my family, most of my family died before I met them. I have a very small family. It was fucked up. I started looking at family photos when I was a kid at like 13. I finally realized, like, we didn't have that many pictures, but we look, you know, family gathers. I'm like, wait a minute. There's not one fucking person smiling in any of these fucking pictures. It was that fucked up. I got real lucky because out of that whole crew, the most important one was the reverse. My mom. Pure positivity. But not the 8th place trophy shit. When I got out of line, she punched me in the face. That's another thing. I think kids should be fighting again. When I think about why, you know, why everyone's so nasty to each other on social media because not enough people have been punched in the fucking mouth. The na. Because I promise you, I don't talk shit. Mainly because of the neighborhoods I grew up in. And if you went too far, you got a fucking punch in the fucking face. These eight place Trophies, these cod. Everyone's a zoo animal. We're over coddling. Of course people have anxiety. By the time they go to the real world, they're like, what's this shit? My friends, that's us. Maybe not in everything, but all of us have a vulnerability, too. I had a real revelation about five, seven years ago. Everything that's been bad in my life, personal and professional, was because I didn't have candor. I wasn't able Gary Vee on stage, what I just did, that's fucking candor. I can talk candor when I'm talking wide. I can talk about parenting when I'm wide. I would never talk to any of you one on one about parenting. That's you and your family. You know, your dynamics. I'm talking generalities up here. And the more I liked you, the more it was unlikely for me to give you candor. I didn't care about the money enough. So it wasn't about, like, me paying someone who sucked shit, right? And it fucked me up. It was a huge gash. It was in a world where I think I got very fortunate with DNA and circumstance. It was my kryptonite, and I work on it. And I'm a four right now, and it's made a huge impact on my business the last three years. In my personal life, and I'm a four. And most things, I'm an eight, nine or 10, for real, if I'm scoring my own homework, you know, and I'm a four. But going from one to four has changed my life. And for a lot of you, it is patience. But that patience is grounded in insecurity. You need to figure out who you're trying to impress, who you understand. Once you understand who you're trying to impress, your life will change. And the problem is, for half of us, we're trying to impress someone who isn't emotionally strong enough to give us the flowers we're looking for, you know? And a lot of us have been conditioned. I've been conditioned as the oldest son of an immigrant family whose dad worked every minute, that I got to take care of everything. But that leads to resentment. Everything's always on my back. So I've had to work on that. Nobody's got it great or everyone has it great. 730 million people on Earth do not have access to clean water. I'm on the board of charity Water. We build wells in Africa, in parts of India. It's insane to me. 730 million people. Almost 10% of the humans on this Earth cannot get to a glass of clean water in 24 hours, and you're complaining that your wi fi is a little slow today. You know, like, what are we doing? Accountability. Somebody saw me the other day in the airport with, like, a Starbucks, like, an expensive coffee, and they were razzing me because I used to put out a lot of content of, like, don't buy $7 coffees. But he misheard it. Then I broke it down. We had a nice little chat. He's like, gary, Vee, what the fuck? And I was like, bro, no, no, no. Remember the videos? I said, if you complain about not having money, I don't complain about not having money. I'm like, if you complain about not having money and you're buying $7 coffees, you're fucking up. If you complain about not having money, you. And you're taking Uber four times a day, you're fucking up. If you complain about not having money and you got an $800 belt, that's a fucking problem. But I know why people do that. It's their little moments of joy. I get it. Right? It's how they want to project. I get it. But this goes back to the biggest theme that I hope you didn't gloss over. If I could get all of you to leave this and ask yourself, who are you trying to impress? I got real lucky. I just wanted to impress my mom, and the only thing she thought was cool is if you were nice. So I got real lucky. I know not everyone has that, but I promise you, you need to figure that out, because most of you are making almost every decision based on that. And the second you decode that and break that shit down and reframe it, it will change your fucking life. And then you can worry about the free tactics you can find on the Internet to build your fucking business. You don't need to buy any course or go anywhere. You don't need none of that shit. You need this and the free shit on the Internet. But this is the fucking problem. Thank you, Podcast nation. Big announcement, as you probably heard at this point, because I had John from Stan on the show. I am an investor advisor to an incredible startup called Stan Stan Store. I'm sending you right now to GaryVee.com, garyVee.com go check this out. We've done a GaryVee Stan store challenge, which actually has a weekly call with me. This is built for everyone who's been affected honestly by my overall content, the tech stack, all these features, and the minimal costs per month that Stan Store has built is really the tool that was needed for this world that I envisioned when I wrote crush it when I wrote crushing it. And this overall thing I'm thinking a lot about lately which is the individual empire, right, this creator entrepreneur, entrepreneur creator economy that I think is gonna eat up the oxygen very honestly. The thing that so many of you want in your life and the reason so many of you are not there yet is you've got the strategy for me. You've got the ambition within yourself but you don't have the tools for you to fully maximize it. And I believe you can find that at Stan's store. Stan Store. But, but specifically I want you to sign up for it through my challenge because I want to get access with you. And plus there's a bunch of cool things. So if you want to go see those cool things go to garyvee.com Stan S T A N.