- On this episode, I talk about what I'd do if I started
VaynerMedia today, I talk about the quality of video,
and I struggle with talking about what I don't like
about myself.
(laughing)
(upbeat music)
- [Voiceover] You ask questions
and I answer them.
This is The #AskGaryVee Show.
Hey everybody, this is Gary Vay-ner-chuk, and this
is episode 120 of the #AskGaryVee show.
I'm super excited.
We've just been sitting here pounding the pavement
on our 1000 plus submissions to join my crew next Friday.
I know that we've been mentioning, Steve rightfully
said, "Hey we said we were going to announce the winners"
"today, please mention that."
We were gonna pick the winners, we were gonna contact the
winners today.
We will announce the winners on tomorrow's show,
episode 121, so that's what we're gonna do,
that's the utility part of the show,
I have no idea what this baseball crap is,
but fine, I think Sid, the intern,
why don't you show white space Sid
to the Vayner Nation.
I'm excited, I'm feeling good,
I feel like I've got a good episode in me.
I'm happy to be back on the East coast.
I love the west coast.
I enjoyed the talk that I gave in L.A., I appreciate all of
you that came out for that.
That was a lot of fun, but I think it is time to
get into the episode.
Is there anything else I want to talk about?
I don't think so.
Nothing really in pop culture that's got
me too excited.
Anything for you Steve?
- I mean you're not excited about Taylor Swift and
Nikki Manaj yelling at each other on Twitter?
- You know Taylor and Nikki's beef is intriguing but not
hitting the radar at the highest level, sorry Steve.
- [Steve] You never know with you, you know.
- That's a good point.
India, Let's get in to the
- [Both] Show.
- Not bad, not bad.
Not bad at all.
(beeping) I wanted to go,
(mumbles)
Going completely straight gives me a vulnerability of
you catching me, so
let's get into the show.
- [Voiceover] Kyle asks, "If you were to start VaynerMedia
"today, without anyone knowing who you were, "
"how would you find talent?"
- Kyle, first of all I'm gonna answer the real answer,
and then the question I think you're actually asking.
The real answer is, I would never,
and this is going to give a lot of people a lot of insight,
I'm always trying to provide value, Sid, as you go through
your career, you wanna provide value, so I'm going
to answer twice.
The answer is I would not start VaynerMedia, I actually
will never in my career start a business, or be in a
business that I don't have disproportional leverage
from the beginning to affect the outcome of
the business, so the thought of starting a social media
agency, where I am not a known entity, and I don't
have leverage with brands already, VaynerMedia
started much like the networking video that
Sid, was taught by DRock, actually link that up DRock,
let's give Sid, this is like a Sid episode.
It's a Sid explosion guys.
Let's have a little ding, ding, ding right here,
if you haven't seen it check out the video.
I talked about networking, and somewhere in that
thing I said, let it come to you, have the leverage.
When I started Vayner, I had the leverage.
I was already a known entity, in this space, at that point
probably for about 3 or 4 years, 2 or 3 years, brands were
coming to me.
I scratched the itch, I reverse engineered.
I had a business because it came to me.
A talent came to me, because I was known as a thought
leader already in the space.
To start a business without leverage, either having the
pure talent, I'm great at cooking, you know, baking,
and thus I have a chance.
Maybe I don't need to be known for my baking
skills, but I have the skill, or I have the disproportional
known factor.
Now to answer your question, you need to go out and
network, ironically.
If you are somebody who's inspired by me, listen,
I see a ton of you 23 year olds starting your social media
agency because it feels easy, right.
Like, I'm a kid, I know what Vine is.
You know, remember these businesses, need business
results, so just because you use SnapChat to hook up, or
whatever you're doing, right, just cause you know how to
swipe to the right,
doesn't mean you know how to sell cups of coffee.
So, I think what's really important is
do you have the skills first,
second, you gotta go out and network.
If you're starting an agency, if you're asking that question
selfishly for yourself, to what should you do,
I think you need to go to meetup.com, go to every social
media meet up in your general area, go to 5-15
conferences, big ones, around social media, you know
Social Media Examiner does a big one in San Diego,
like scrounge up the dollars and go, network, network,
network, learn, learn, learn, follow people, multiple
people, because they're all bringing different values.
Learn, learn, learn, engage on Twitter, it's the open
cocktail party of the internet.
Engage with people that are engaging on comments
within my Facebook posts.
Become parts of communities, leverage,
remember jab, jab, jab, right hook, don't go in there
and be like, "Hey, do you wanna work for me?"
Like, become part of a community, then leverage the
aspects of being part of that community.
- [India] Nice.
- But it starts, India, with becoming part of the community.
Like I don't wanna glaze over that.
I appreciate your nice, but I want to make sure
we really get it here, like you've got to become
part of the community, and then you can leverage it.
Don't tactically be, don't fake the,
don't go into the reddit and your first post is spam,
right Steve? - That's --
- Because you get fleem to death, and I think a lot
of people try to do that, and they think they're clever
because they're patient for a month and acting like they're
part of the,
People can sense shit.
If your intent was to become part of the community
just to extract value out of the community,
people can sense it.
- [Voiceover] Tyler asks, "In a Snapchat/Instagram world, is
video quality more essential than in years' past?
- [India] (mumbles) more essential than in years' past?
- No.
Eat it DRock.
Best question ever.
Well, let me go into it.
India, I feel like I have some depth in this episode.
Look, at the end of the day, creative is subjective
and we all like different things.
Plenty of people, 20 years ago, most of our
parents, even mine, for an old guy, told us that
rap wasn't music, like can we get over,
like that reality TV wasn't entertainment,
that YouTube wasn't real stars.
I mean this always happens guys, so you know like
plenty of people like content that doesn't have the
perfect mic or the perfect lighting,
that being said, a lot of people made comments that
my last video, the networking video, was different
than the others.
Hmm, makes sense, Sid did it instead of DRock,
you know, and they didn't say they liked it better
or hated it worse, or this was,
it's just different, but that doesn't mean that there's
one that's right or wrong.
Clearly there is enormous upside to great editing,
and lighting, and mics, you know, like clearly,
there's value to that, but there's also,
listen, Wine Library TV worked, and Steve, I looked like a
hostage in Iraq.
Alright India, go ahead.
- [India] Alright, uh--
- Right, I mean, have you seen some of those Andrew,
I know you didn't know who I was when you
started here dick, but did you go look back at
some of those?
- I saw them.
- [Gary] Looked like a hostage.
- [Steve] We should cut in episode one right now.
- Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode
of Wine Library TV.
I'm Gary Vaynerchuk, director of operations here at
Wine Library and winelibrary.com.
God, I love that, I love that,
you know, I'll tell you one thing I like about editing,
you can snap and something happens.
- Twitter, and I have a question for the show.
Recently I've heard.
- Hold on, I want to hear--
- Hey Gary, how's it going Dylan Sellberg here,
@DylSell on Twitter, and I have a question for the show.
- DylSell.
- Recently I've heard plenty of social media experts,
mainly spurred by Mark Cuban and Evan Speigal.
- Oh okay, they're real people.
- Are you for deleting the history of their tweets and
other past social media posts, because they say that the
context is out of play 8 to 10 months in the past.
I was curious what your thoughts are on this, and if you
have a counter punch.
Thanks Gary, love your show.
- Thanks brother.
I don't think I have a counter punch.
I actually agree with both.
I think, first of all, I do think that Snapchat is the
closest thing to real life communication,
like everything you say to your friends doesn't
get recorded for life.
I think that's why Snapchat exploded.
When I finally made that realization,
I'm like, wait a minute, this is actually the real way
we communicate, that's when it started getting exciting
to me, that's why I started in late 2013, mid 2013
starting to get really bullish on it.
You know Cuban with Cyberdust, Evan with Snapchat,
I know where you're going DylSell, I think that,
I think that it has a place, and I do believe that a
disproportion amount of the content deserves to be
in a place where it disappears forever,
however, I think there's enormous value,
as a matter of fact, yesterday was one of my favorite
moments in a long time in my career.
Somebody tweeted, sweet red wine is starting
to explode in the U.S.
I made that prediction on a Wine Library TV
episode, seven years ago, and he linked towards it
and it was fun to see a younger, less fit Gary,
make a tremendous prediction about where the
wine market was going, and so I think that there's
content that I think,
Is anybody here devastated about the fact that they
have these great pictures, or videos, or comments from
three, four, five, six years ago? No.
Both, the answer is both.
But it's not an all or nothing.
And definitely the Twitters and the Facebooks created
this kind of all, forever, and I think the reason Snapchats
working, the reason Cyberdust has value and is working,
is because they play in the ying to the yang and this
and that, and so, that's that.
I think they both work.
I think they both have a place at the table, and I think
there's probably, you know, this is why Beme, and
Meerkat, and Periscope, live and real time
content has a place at the table,
and there's probably some sort of fourth
thing I haven't even thought about yet
that has a place of the table.
There's a lot of seats at the table
my friends, and I think people get way too all or nothing,
and they don't realize how many chairs there
really are.
- [India] That was beautiful.
- Thanks India.
- You don't know how many chairs there are.
- [Steve] I'm bemeing this episode right now.
- Are you, are you?
- [Steve] Yea.
- Nice.
- [India] This is the guy.
- Oh, this is incredible, yes.
- Vincent, changing his baby's diaper with
an #AskGaryVee shirt on.
- Yes.
- He wants to know--
- [Voiceover] Vincent asks, "What's the number one"
"characteristic that you'd like to pass down to Misha and"
"Xander, and what's the number one characteristic you"
"hope they don't get from you?"
- Great question.
The number one characteristic I want my children to
get from me, boy there's a lot, because I think I'm
really fucking awesome, so if they can be a complete
replication that'd be great, sorry Lizzy.
I'm just kidding, I'm kidding.
Let's go with first thoughts.
The first two thoughts that came to were
and this may seem interesting to you, depends on
how well you know me, number one, the first thing that I
thought of, it's sad that this was first over the second
one, but maybe that's an insight that I need to deal with.
The first one is competitiveness,
you know, it makes me
sad, because I know it's less noble than a lot,
the other one is humility, which I know, for so many of
you, especially if this like the sixth episode you watched,
or first, you think it's completely ego, but I'm telling
you, like I know how much my humility is the
engine of my success, and I have plenty of ego,
it's me pulling in those opposite directions,
but my competitive nature has been a very, very
positive impact on my life in a lot of ways.
It's just I associate that with myself.
I think my kids, no matter what they do, and I don't mean
competitive to like make money, competitive to write the
best song of all time, competitive to raise the most money
for this disease of all time, I think being competitive is a
very, very lucky attribute, and I think that my family
and me specifically, take it too far.
It can be very unhealthy at times, it causes friction,
but I would never give it up, I just wouldn't.
I think it's just too damn important.
It gets me through so much.
I want them to be kind, I like being kind.
I think kind is incredibly important.
I think the one thing that I think that a, that a,
you know it's funny, I really do think I'm a paradox,
I have ying and yangs to all my own feelings,
I'm trying to think about what I don't like about myself.
(laughing) God, I love myself.
What don't I want them to have?
- This is hard, by the way, you ever want to stump me,
try to have me talk negative about my own self.
(laughing)
Look, I think there's a ton of things I do wrong.
I think at times I wish I was a little more selfish.
At times I wish, I,
man my parents did a really good job.
I would say the number one thing that I don't want
them to take from me, is I think that I could have done
a much better job in my early years on work/life balance.
The only resemblance of a regret I have is the first
five to six years of my marriage with Lizzy,
I think that I left 2 weeks of real quality together time
per year on the table, and those are twelve weeks that
I can never get back and that I really wish I had,
and luckily I am way young enough to more than
make up for those 12 weeks, and so I will, and so I
think that would probably be it.
I mean, at the end of the day, I just, as you can tell,
my brain as a computer is not very capable
of looking at too many of the negatives.
- [India] I had a negative question here before, but
thought that you wouldn't know what to say.
- That I wouldn't know what to say?
- [India] Yea.
- Do it, bring it up.
Fine, give me the next one, while I'm answering that,
we'll do it as a bonus podcast only question.
- [India] This is the Caleb kid.
- Oh, Caleb, yea, I like this.
- Hey Gary Vee.
- Hey.
- My name is Caleb Maddix.
I'm 13 years old, and I just wrote my first book,
Keys to Success for Kids, you can get it
on Amazon.com, and my question is,
if you were in my shoes, what would be the
first step to promoting the book?
#AskGaryVee show
- Caleb, the first thing I would do is I would try
to find a thought leader, with a very big audience,
that had let's say either a blog or a podcast or a show, and I
would try to make a piece of content that would
catch his or his team's attention, so that then
that person would promote it to that enormously large
audience that probably has a lot of kids or younger
brother and siblings, and you would get
a disproportion, organic, awareness play that you
didn't have to pay for, and an instance what you did was
you hacked it by making very compelling content.
That would probably be what I would do.
- [India] I have the question.
- You found it, cool.
Alright, well that's for the bonus podcast thing,
that's if you download the podcast for your android, or
your iTunes device, and yes I know many of you in Facebook
and YouTube are about to like leave a complaint like,
"What the hell, why are you,"
"You always say don't make the customer do things that"
"they don't wanna do, and now I have to go and download"
"the podcast answers, no fair, I don't like that."
Tough sh--
(laughing)
- [Steve] Can we just cut that and make it an Instagram
video that says download my (mumbles) on iTunes.
- Good show, I feel good about, some good, there was
some good stuff in this episode.
Sid, you really kind of hit the map on this episode.
Andrew, where is my,
"Let's get into the show" t-shirts?
- [Andrew] As we speak.
- You have five designs?
- [Andrew] Close, I'm there.
- Show me a couple, show me couple.
Actually, let's actually capture my reaction to them
here live.
What do you mean oh God.
- [Andrew] (mumbles)
- Uh, huh, I see where you're going with this one,
I like where you're going with this one.
- [India] Is my face on it? - [Andrew] Yea.
- Uh, huh, your face, India, India, it's not only about you.
Imagine these people that think it's all about them.
(laughing)
- [India] That's so weird.
We were just talking about that.
- Question of the day: What's the one trait that you want
your kids to get from you?
You keep asking questions, I'll keep answering them.
I love that, I love that, I love that.
- [India] Stop.
- That's just gonna be the t-shirt.
You know, I'm gonna continue the question here,
well Steve, you're uninteresting to this podcast, you
don't have to look as great as you normally do.
I think it's interesting to drag you into this podcast
forum, I think this is an interesting question for you,
meaning, do you view the word ego, less cynically today
than you did 24 to 36 months ago, by seeing through my
eyes, how I contextualize that word?
Well that was some good stuff, you know what, that
felt like native pod,
by the way, that was the first time in the history of
podcast native content, that I felt like I was doing a
radio show versus for video.
I think we might have been,
I have a funny feeling we're about to get a
lot of social comments of like, "Hey wait a minute,"
"can you just do an after the show podcast?"
Because that felt like a podcast.
- [Steve] Spinoff.
(upbeat music)