- You know I'm concerned a little bit with the culture of
celebrating the fundraise.
My dad taught me that when you borrow money it's
the worst day of your life.
(xylophone music)
Starting my morning with a talk at Twitter
which is a lot of fun.
Often talk how that's my first love even though I was on
YouTube before that.
It was Twitter that really kind of changed the course of my
career in a lot of ways.
Obviously, I've got my concerns on where
Twitter is at this day and age.
But optimistic with Jack back in the fold and
we'll see what he's up to.
Excited to see Joel, major executive there.
Good to see a man.
- How you doing?
- [DRock] Good, how are you?
- Old friend. Big fan. I'm a big fan of Joel.
It should be a good morning and I'm excited to see how goes.
- We have this coffee bar.
- This is gorgeous. - We could get coffee.
Maybe we should do that.
(siren wailing)
- [DRock] What's wrong? - [Joel] Make a run for it.
- The biggest thing that I think went wrong in my opinion is just
no product changes forever.
- Forever, yeah.
- This is really fucking unbelievable.
Yeah. This is unbelievable.
I think it can help. - I know.
- I truly feel like no joke what did we just,
listen this is important.
I did it on Snapchat.
Oh no, I did to the camera for my vlog today.
Often talk about how that's my first love, I talked about
coming here and I said Twitter's my first love.
- [Joel] Yeah.
- But I do think, and I'll say this later,
I think there's a firehose problem.
I'm a believer that an algori, but there's video me in 2011
saying Twitter need to do this.
People on the false sense of reaching mass audience in
Twitter right now because of this enormous firehose of data.
When you put out a tweet not everyone is going to see it,
so that to you and it's up to Twitter to figure out how to
break through the noise.
If I was a product person all the way through and through
that's the opportunity.
- [Joel] Build another.
- America, excuse me, the world needs a water cooler.
You can't use Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat
during the NBA finals.
- [Joel] You just can't. - You just can't.
Not the way Twitter works.
I thought yesterday was a super interesting day in
the history of social media.
Yesterday, Snapchat made a huge change, Instagram went from
15 seconds to a minute on their video for everybody not just
advertisers and you guys created captions
on top of your pictures.
This is cool. This is important.
Three of the five major, six major platforms all had
significant changes I think we need to see a lot more of that.
- [Joel] I'm going to open questions in one second.
- Come sit here.
DRock, you're going to have to pick up your camera.
Sorry buddy. Eat it. Come on in, guys.
Get in. They block the pathway.
What Mark has done better than anybody, and I met Mark in 2008
and I was a crazy wine guy and Mark asked me to speak and off
of one speech we became friends for a very long period of time
during the early days of Facebook because we agreed on
consumer behavior and the one North Star, attention.
There's only one thing, attention.
You can monetize your ads when you have the attention.
When you have the number one show on television and you have
the attention, you make money.
That's just the way it is.
That's what we agreed on even way back then and that's why he
bought Instagram in 500 days and that's why he offered $3 Billion
18 months ago for Snapchat.
Everyone's confused where they'd come from.
He understood that and offered to $3 billion for it 18 months
ago because he understands attention's the asset and
I think that's the thing that has been waning. I've seen it.
Listen, as a user every day for 9 1/2 years, every day.
I know that eight years ago if I said follow my friend Joel he's
awesome 2,000 people would do that when I had 7,000 followers
and now 37 will do that when I have 1.2 million followers.
That's going to be a problem for people.
Thank you. Thank you guys.
(applause)
Good talk at Twitter.
Amazing executives, great team there I'm a big believer that
the hyperbole of Twitter is dead is well overstated however I've
been talking about it since 2011 and '12 so I believe that there's
a vulnerability there's a massive decline of attention you
guys know I care about attention.
But much like a network when they pick two or three great
shows that bring back the network like ABC did with "Lost"
or CBS with "Big Bang Theory" and "Two and a Half Men" or
like NBC did with "Seinfeld" and "Friends" years ago.
Networks have shows to revive them,
I think products have features that can revive them.
And comms, communication to the world about how they're
different and evolve, it'll be interesting to see if
Twitter can pull off a revival.
(relaxed easy listening music)
- [Man on phone] Sup man? Watching your DailyVees,
I have one question, how do you get other businessmen
to notice you and your--?
- Getting other business men and women to notice you is easy when
you actually build big businesses.
I don't worry about getting them to notice me
I just go and fucking execute.
Caroline's also working on custom pop-ups so that might be
able to help us but then again if we have too many pop-ups
competing with each other, right, so.
- Real quick, stay in touch with me here is replicated here.
- Mhmmm.
- Could be an interesting debate?
- Hi, Sean Lyons. - Hey, Gary.
- I'm sorry I'm overdressed. - Dude. You look great.
You look absolutely great. You're not overdressed.
- [Both] Hi, nice to meet you. - [Gary] How are you?
- I'm well and yourself? - Good.
The vlog. Yeah, the vlog.
Thank you so much. We cut stuff of all the time.
If you don't want anything-- - It's good.
- If you want to do B-roll because it's fun to see it on
the show then we'll do that.
- So are going to be on your show?
- I do a daily vlog multiple times a week--
- Yes.
- where this meeting clearly will not be.
- Okay.
- But B-roll throughout the day or potentially not.
That's totally up to you guys.
Talk about Giants a lot. New York Giants, big Giants fan.
No, not that.
I'm wearing my Jets sneakers today.
I do like the Yankees but the Yankees had won in my life so
that means that I don't like them anymore.
- Oh really?
You always root for the underdog?
- I don't shoot for any underdog but once my teams win,
I kind of check out.
So the Rangers, yeah, the Rangers and Yankees are gone.
- [Man] What happens if the Jets start winning?
- [Gary] Well they have to win a Super Bowl.
- Yeah.
- [Gary] Let's start with that. I don't know.
That's literally one of the most popular
conversations in my family.
- Then you'll become a Bills fan?
- Definitely not.
- Not going to follow Rex? - No, I hate him.
I only like the people on my team.
- Yeah.
- The second they switch, they're out.
I would become the biggest Knicks fan in the world.
They'd be last one.
- So the reason why I know you video tape is a good friend of
mine met with you probably three or four weeks ago Todd Sawyer.
- Yes.
- "Ferraris and Watches" - Yes. That was a good episode.
- I look out my back window and I look at his house.
- So what is that Mendon?
- Randolph. - Randolph.
- Yeah. Close enough.
- That's very cool. That's awesome. Nice guy.
- He was pretty jazzed after--
(slow paced trance music)
- Trucking along on my day.
Just had a bunch of employee meetings
had a potential client meeting,
couple of phone calls.
Brand workshop.
Just typical operation stuff.
No fancy interviews, no TV, no just operating like a
CEO of a 650 person company.
Super boring.
Super fun to catch up with my team.
I probably don't do those meetings often enough.
But just good to recap with them on what were doing with the
brand where we're putting out the content, what the strategies
are as we now transition off of right hook mode for the book we
go into a two-year cycle of straight jabs.
So where can I produce the best and most valuable content.
Which channels should I focus on to increase
distribution to create awareness?
The other this I want to be smart.
I don't think last night's video was smart.
Let me explain why.
I want to use these meetings to get more IP exchange.
We just had a 5 million organic video that had the same visual,
I promise you one of things that hurt today's video was people
thought it was the same one.
If you're talking into a room when nobody is you lose.
That would become a much bigger focus point.
Hello India. - Hi.
- What are you doing here? - I'm coming with you.
- 'Cause you're excited about this?
- [India] I'm super excited.
- [Em] I'm coming too. - I know you're excited.
No DRock. (India and Em laughing)
I'm in the comments.
I'm in my zone.
Why don't you film that?
- [DRock] I am.
I'm just wondering where we're going?
You know?
- We're going to Huffington Post.
Right Em? - Yes.
Hey.
- [Man] How are you? - How are you?
- [Man] Thanks for coming down. - [Gary] Thanks for having me.
- Hey Gary, nice to meet you. Lauren.
- I'm going to have you sort of switch cameras to the steady and
we're just going to walk out here and we can show you the
route where we want to go. - Let's do it.
- Gary, seriously, I'm such a huge fan.
- Thank you, brother. What is your name?
- I'm so exited to see you. Vincent.
- Vincent. - I'm from France.
- Thank you so much that if he so happy.
- So glad to see you. - No.
- I didn't know you're coming in.
- Well, thank you so much. - Thank you.
You want take a picture? - Yeah, sure.
- Let's do it. - That'd be awesome.
- Yeah.
Oh my gosh. Thank you.
- Listen, thanks for saying hello.
- Thank you, Gary.
- Thank you for those kind words.
I will.
- Thank you. - Take care, brother, thank you.
You see before it wasn't practical to actually quit your
job and go start a flower shop or go start something about the
Rolling Stones or something here, there or everywhere.
It's now, for the first time ever, practical to go and start
a blog or a video blog or a podcast around Alf or
the Smurfs or college football.
This is real. You can make money. It's 2016.
- One more time, Gary.
Done.
- Wait one more.
Go ahead. - Beautiful.
- Literally, that's the most takes I've ever taken.
DRock, most takes I've ever done.
Thank you.
- Thank you so much. - Pleasure.
- Gary, thanks so much. - Thank you so much.
Thank you.
I'm a real New Yorker.
Those three not so much. Scared to cross.
Alright, safety pants. Let's go safety pants.
- [India] Gary, do you want to have a team?
- This is unbelievable content. - [India] What?
- Besides the health and wellness of people that I admire
and adore and most importantly love, wasting time is the
thing I'm most scared of.
Do you have any interest in doing, you talked about,
dirty little secret of the entrepreneur world?
Like mental health, depression and that sort of thing.
Do you want to talk about that at all?
- Yeah, I think I do. I do. I do.
And here's what I want to frame it.
Again ask questions or frame it or take this
for what it's worth.
The overpromise of what success looks like is
what's causing people to lose.
No different than the way teenage girls who are pounded
with what pretty is and then when it's not achievable,
it leads to bad behavior like being bulimic
or really being down on yourself.
There's exactly the same thing happening right now in
entrepreneurship which is if you don't build a $10 million
business then you're a loser.
Or the other thing that I've railed on and you can pull of
the old Bloomberg clip.
I'm concerned a little bit with the culture of
celebrating the fundraise.
My dad taught me that when you borrow money
it's the worst day of your life.
So I'm very interested in the entrepreneurs, we didn't clap
for Red Rover because it didn't raise $6 trillion but I was
sitting here like good stuff. I just filtered myself.
(audience laughter)
What I'm looking for is people that are not
caught up in the excitement.
Even though I'm a hype man myself,
I like the practicality of it all.
People that understand how to turn a profit I mean at the end
of the day this is still business right so I'm looking
for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money
not necessarily raise it.
Success is raising the value of your company instead of actually
building a company which is why nobodys building companies,
they're building financial arbitrage machines
which I talk a lot about.
If the bottom 1%, if the bottom of the top 1% is $400,000 a year
because of the clarification I've gotten, right?
Well then that's unbelievable.
If you take home $400,000 a year as an entrepreneur and so here
we go how close are you one to the top 1%?
And you can link to this it's CNN/calculator/PF/income-rank.
Here we go.
If you make $100,000 you're in the top 24%.
$155,000 a year means in your in the top 10% earners.
You've hit the level of top 10%.
I think that needs, there's a lot of people that can use
YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and WordPress I think there's a
lot of people right now that can build a design firm I keep
pounding my designers here of Snapchat filters.
They'll go away but you can build $155,000 year business one
person shop on Snapchat filters right now.
And then you're in the top 10% earners and I don't think
somebody who makes $155,000 as their income, post expenses which
a la if you're in the service business, sitting in your house,
I don't think they feel like they're in
the top 10% in America.
And that's why were leading to depression and even,
in extreme cases, suicide which makes me upset which is
why I'm willing to become unpopular and
have this conversation because
I think it's my responsibility as a fan of entrepreneurship to
reframe the conversation of what success looks like.
And making a million-dollar year as an entrepreneur is,
in real data form, just not real.
The reason the good part is it's true which is why I'm
comfortable with that I believe is my responsibility and every
other purebred entrepreneur to give back to entrepreneurship
and I think reframing the conversation of success and
within it because I do think entrepreneurship success
is in everybody cards.
When I say not everybody's an entrepreneur and people have
entrepreneurial tendencies what I mean is not everybody is
supposed to build a billion-dollar company.
There's a lot of people that can have entrepreneurial tendencies
that bring them top 1% happiness financially.
Super great day.
Got a lot accomplished.
Was fun to be at HuffPo.
Was fun to be at Vayner.
Was fun to be at Twitter.
Fun to be with AJ.
It was fun. I love the game.
Day in and day out. I love the game.
See you at 5:30 in the morning. Yep.
(light piano music)