- Nothing great should be easy.
I'm gonna tweet that.
Right, like why should anything great be easy?
Fuck man, honestly, like, you know this is where
the most of the money I've made in my life
is been between the delta of my marketing talent,
and the person's stake of their product.
I'm playing the arbitrage of the gray,
not of the black and white math.
This is a $215 million company.
As the offspring of me, the human,
being the top of the funnel.
Now I'm both.
Ya know, I'm both.
Meaning I could be the front man
and I'm the COO, not just the CEO
I'm operational, I'm in it.
But so are you.
(inspirational music)
- The process that we create is a three prong process.
Education might be the only entry
where we don't listen to the user, the end user.
Everybody else is obsessed with the end user.
You are obsessed with your clients,
and how they experiencin'
your product - My man, I got,
I got real news for you man,
people out here aren't listening to the end user, either.
- Really? - Yeah, man.
I sit in, like, that's what marketing is.
Like, Coca-Cola sits in a room and they're deciding,
and they have all this information from the end user,
and they're not using it.
To your point, when somebody listens to the end user,
and is obsessed with the end user, they become Amazon.
But, ya know, I become me
when I'm just listening to the end user.
But, man, listen, education's got not chance.
Government's got no chance, you know, like,
but in business, ideologically, it's supposed to do better,
unfortunately, it's not how humans roll.
Empathy is a rare trait.
It's a rare trait.
I think way too many people doing good right now,
are scared to show any part of what they need
because they're worried that people are gonna
be cynical to them.
I needed to do a lot of things
before I started putting out a lotta content,
and on my cost, and so I don't judge
people getting to a place.
So, I think that's number one.
You, You're number one, you're the engine.
- And then, everything else is secondary.
(gentle contemporary music)
- Let me tell you one of my super, macro points of view
of why we're dealing with a lot of things
that we're dealing with corporately and socially.
We didn't pay the piper, in 2009, when we were supposed to.
I believe accountability,
and I believe in those kinda things.
And so, this is a sneaker collaboration I did with K-Swiss,
clouds and dirt.
It's the framework of my life.
My clouds are my why.
What am I trying to do?
What's my aspirations?
The silly ones, like the chase of buying the jets
or being the most inspirational, impactful
entrepreneur of a generation.
And the dirt is the reason I have respect from the people
that work for me, because I'm in my shit.
I love the dirt, I respect.
Ya know, people ask me, a lot of times, who inspires you?
Or, who inspired you?
And they always want, like, the Steve Jobs
and, fuckin', horseshit answer.
The person that inspires me is the emails I get
from the single parent who's holding down three jobs
and gets value out of my flipping content
and is literally emailing me from picking up something
at a curb at 12:30 in the morning
'cause they're gonna sell it for 27 dollars, tomorrow,
on Facebook, and marketplace,
and they're thanking me for making that video
because the extra hundred bucks a month
is meaningful to their family.
Like that's real life.
The dirt is grossly underestimated.
People wanna leave the dirt, get out of it.
And, I wanna, as good things are happening to me,
I'm trying to go deeper in the fuckin' dirt.
(upbeat inspirational music)
(applauding)
Thanks for having me.
Take care.
- That was awesome, thank you so much.
- Thank you for having me.
Such a pleasure. - Thank you, yeah, awesome.
- There is no situation
that I'm not prepared for emotionally,
and I keep building leverage to be able to
bring more value to the other person than I require of them.
That's it, in life.
Let alone running my business.
(upbeat inspirational music)
I come from the dirt.
Ya know, I came from zero.
I lived in a studio apartment with nine family members.
We lived real humble real long.
My entire college friendship network,
half of'em are on welfare, like, I come from a dirt place.
I value that dirt, and I think
one of the vulnerabilities of corporations
is they get fat, and countries, they get fat.
(upbeat inspirational music)
- Ya know, maybe it was thousands.
Like, maybe, 30 to $40,000 before someone says,
"What are you, what are you doing with?"--
- Sure thing, well, Big Dog's here, so that's all my time.
So if you have any questions,
please don't hesitate to email me.
- Oh, thanks Jordan. - Thanks brother.
Appreciate it, bud, - Thank you.
thank you. - Hello guys.
How are you? - Good.
- Good.
(upbeat music)
- The way that your grand pappy blindly believed
in radio and television, I believe in Facebook,
for the top of the funnel, period, end of story.
It's why most of you are probably here.
I got you with top of the funnel branding.
I surely didn't get you here
on fate of fuckin' radio and television,
or direct mailing. (laughing)
That's what's so meta about this, right?
Like, sometimes people come in here and they're like "Nah."
I'm like, "Why'd you pay ten thousand?"
Top of the funnel branding.
Provide value at scale, right?
TV companies in 1987 priced commercials,
at midnight to five in the morning,
not enough for what it was worth and people exploited that.
It's why it worked.
Got it? Facebook.
Let me give you an example.
Being in business since 1979 has one incredible advantage
and one incredible disadvantage.
It's called being in business since 1979.
So the disadvantage is you're holding on to radio
and television based on whoever's older than you
in the family or you grew up in the propaganda
of believing it 'cause it's what got us there.
Right? - Right.
The advantage is you have a lot of satisfied costumers.
Literally, if I was your partner, I'd be like,
"Okay, cool, nice trip to New York,
"we go back home, we call, email,
"or reach out to the last 500 customers that were pumped,
"and we literally demographically break them down."
I wanna see a white family.
I wanna see an Asian family.
I wanna see a Latino family.
I wanna see an African American family.
Male, a female, 80 years old,
60 year olds, 40 year old, 20 year old.
I break them all down.
I go film them with with my fuckin' phone,
and go tell us, did you like us?
"I like 'em."
I go back home, I run the ad,
and I run an Indian family against Indian Americans.
This is so absurdly effective.
That's way better than the bullshit,
thirty second commercial you're running
on fuckin' remnant inventory, on fucking cable.
When did we get these pens?
- They're cool. - They been,
that's day one stuff, bro.
- We've had this day one?
I don't think so, Orsini.
I've never seen this pen.
Did we pay for it? - We'll getcha.
- I bartered'em out. - Go 'head.
- We better bartered these.
I need to see the barter list.
(gentle piano music)
When I produce content,
I'm not looking for what's happening
on the back end of that content.
I know admiration and awareness will happen.
And if you make that switch
and know what you actually want to happen, will happen.
Listen, life is, it gets so
amazingly, simply, interesting.
Like, if you give,
karma is the most practical thing on Earth.
(piano music)
Do you know who loses when the internet comes along?
Everybody in the middle.
So either you understand that and adjust,
or you feel the ramifications.
Hello?
How are ya, brother?
Of course, let's rock 'n roll.
I'm just very solution oriented.
Like, complaining and dwelling
never leads to anything I believe in.
It never does.
You don't fuckin' know what's going on
behind somebody's closed doors.
I've not been able to get rid of that.
That's how I live my life.
Ya know, Kate Spade looked super pumped, to me.
Anthony Bourdain was a super rich, white dude.
Super famous, rich, white dude.
Ya know, so, there's obvious unfairness
and then there's the scalable hidden unfairness.
And I just don't judge, I'm just not in the mood of judging.
So, when I talk about stop crying and hustling,
I feel like anything somebody's complaining about,
somebody else could also complain about something.
And, I don't know why we have so much judgment in the air
that somebody has it better or worse.
And I feel like there's a lot of things one can control.
I'm a big believer that if you don't like the game
you're playing, leave it.
(upbeat music)
Rockin'?
Hello, hello, hello, hello.
- How are you? James. Good to see you.
James how are you?
- Salvatore. - Salvatore.
- Sup, man, Trenton. - Trenton.
- Nice to meet ya. - Michael.
- Michael.
- Gary, this is my brother Dylan,
he can't hear you so-- - Dylan,
such a pleasure.
- Yeah, awesome. - How was your day?
- [Gary] It's goin' super well.
- Awesome.
So, we're here.
- Yes. - Came out
all the way from Miami.
Spoke to you on the podcast--
- Yep. - a year ago.
You remember, we talked about social media marketing?
If you don't mind, I just have,
- Yeah, yeah. - I'm just gonna
look off this.
First off, I want to thank you so much
for letting us come, it's crazy.
I envisioned this ever since we talked on the podcast.
Like, seriously, ask him-- - Like, he's serious, man.
- We all talked about this. - We wrote it down.
- It was on our bathroom wall,
every day. - That's awesome,
I'm glad you guys are here. - That's one of our goals
this year.
I like admiration more than I like money.
I don't want your money.
I want you guys to think I'm the best.
- [James] You're doing a good job at it.
- You know what I mean?
- Do you ever-- - And I don't mind you
not thinking I'm the best, at first.
I wanna be cheered when the buzzer goes triple zero.
I don't mind being booed in the first quarter.
Everybody else wants to be admired
being up 41 to nothing at halftime, but they're gonna loose.
My leverage comes from, I want less.
I want less money.
- [James] Was there a point when you did it for the money?
- Not really.
The money was a scoring mechanism
to being good at entrepreneurship,
something I thought was cool.
But then it transformed when I realized,
oh, getting the most doesn't mean,
like, you could just raise capital
and take money off the board, but your company dies.
And then, so it transformed into something of an ambition
of having real, long term, right?
Guys, you think I've got something going on right now?
I'm telling you, wait 'til the economy collapses.
I'm gonna rise like a fuckin' phoenix.
'Cause everyone else is gonna get smoked out.
Tried and true wins.
(chattering office)
Next. - Ready for your next?
- Yup.
What are we doin' next? - Ready to rock next?
Let's do, we did the selfie?
It's FIFA.
- Selfie?
- No, you did it with Kwame, so playin' FIFA now.
- What's up, my guy.
- [Travis] Half ya know about the business.
- I love it, man, how you doin'?
- Good, good. - Good, you doing well?
- Yeah, thanks for having me. - Yeah, looking forward to it.
- I appreciate it. So, okay
- You're rockin' & rollin'. - FIFA?
- Yeah FIFA.
- My first game of FIFA, ever.
- Ever? - Ever.
No, I mean, I played FIFA '94.
But you guys weren't born yet.
- That was--
- The first one. - I know.
I played the first FIFA ever.
- Think we were just sayin' - Sega Genesis.
I got to put this on? - Yeah.
Are we going live on Twitch?
What's up, Twitch?
So I'm playing my first,
this is this FIFA 2018?
I'm playin' my first FIFA 2018 match, here.
I'm pretty exited about it.
You wanna give a one second bio of who you're about
and how you got here, bartered out the sneaker game.
I love people that-- - Absolutely.
- figure it out. Go ahead. - Absolutely,
so Brady Benzz on Twitch, two Zs.
I got the Gary V. 003s, I bought 45 pairs.
We struck a deal to get a game on my Twitch
and his Twitch, and make this happen.
So, here we are, boys.
(upbeat piano music)
- [Travis] This is the one that I started on the street
two for $1. (laughing) - So good.
Two spears, $1.
That's what I did out of a wooden pickle cart in 2008.
- I love you, so much.
So after not getting a job at Nike,
that's kind of how I started, right?
- I love you.
- You know what, you Tweeted something about a week ago,
you were saying cucumbers--
- Are underrated? - Are underrated.
- I thought you were pluggin' us for the episode.
- No, it's just a rant, no joke, this is what happened.
This is how my Twi, that's not how my,
my Twitter game is fuckin' fresh.
I ate, like four cucumbers at, like, 7 a.m.,
like, "These are delicious."
I'm like, you know what?
Cucumbers are fuckin' underrated.
People thought I meant the cucumber emoji.
(laughing) - Oh wow, really?
It's funny, they-- - Anyway man, honestly, bro,
for me, the biggest thing about this
is this is what I want kids to think
entrepreneurship is. - You just fuckin'
with my ideas. This is what I care about.
- Me too. Everybody want's to fuckin'
come up with the Uber of fucking waffles,
and I'm gonna build an app.
And, like, I'm build the next sneaker fuckin' marketplace,
and everybody's just so fuckin' impractical.
Like, know what you know, and fuckin',
put your fuckin' head down for a decade, and then look up.
- Yes sir. - But nobody wants to do that.
- That's why I wanted you to meet him
because, ya know, remember I told ya,
just the whole, like, selling pickles
out of a wooden pickle cart. - Yeah, I fuck with that.
- People laughed at him.
Right, you know what I mean?
- By the way, that, to me,
is the most important part of the story.
The reason these kids aren't doing anything
is 'cause they're worried about people's judgment.
They can't be bothered sellin' pickles outta a cart.
They're too busy trying to get to the Hamptons,
jump on a swan and put it on Instagram.
(laughing) - But to do that,
you gotta sell pickles for ten years.
Then you can go to the Hamptons
and sit on a swan - Then you can fuckin'
own a house in the Hamptons. - Exactly!
- You were executing. - But they're so lazy.
My god, I executed too,
nobody heard a peep from me for 12 years.
- Yeah, and then you go. (laughing)
- I, fuckin', put my head down, and was in a liquor store,
every, fucking, day.
Didn't have a word to say to nobody.
Everybody's tryin'-- - - Cryin'.
- to come out--
Everybody's tryin-- - Probably.
to come out--
the gate and say I'm an entrepreneur.
Like, cool, I'm a basketball player.
- Do you make money, entrepreneur?
(laughing) Like, literally, people go print 10 tee-shirts
with some word and decide that's their Supreme.
Right, and they're like, "Yo, I'm an entrepreneur."
I'm like, "Cool, I'm an actor."
(laughing)
Ya know, like, do you get paid?
Are you winning?
(piano music)
- This is how IG started.
- Story of life. - And the world's next.
- Stars life. - My brother Gary V.
- Pickles for life, eat 'em.
(laughing) Eat 'em.
Alright, fellas, have a good night.
Nothing great should be easy.