- [Man] I got a date with Star Wars this evening.
- Oh, amazing.
- What Star Wars?
- The one that's coming out at midnight.
- Holy fuckface, it's December 15th already?
(laughing)
That was the most crazy thing that has ever happened.
Can we go see Star Wars?
(industrial music)
What up, vlog?
Lando is here now, guest starring here.
- What's up?
- In Chattanooga, flew into Atlanta this morning
on a six A.M. flight,
did a bunch of meetings with one of our clients.
Mickey and I did a two hour drive, did a bunch of calls.
Now we're here at the Westin,
the new fancy hotel here in Chattanooga
for a bunch of meetings,
and the Chattanooga Holiday Party is tonight.
(industrial music)
- Yep, doing a podcast.
- What up, what up?
- Good to see you.
- Welcome, how ya doing? - Good, man, how are you?
Voice, bro, like I don't think people get it.
It's oxygen, it's all-encompassing.
I want to interact with,
we all love interacting with a computer.
The passive nature of the consumption,
which means it equates into time savings,
and my belief that time is the number one variable
asset that we continue to gravitate towards
even more than money.
Probably other than health,
the most important thing to us.
And the fact that the voice written
and video consumption in our society
are the three pillars of how we consume content.
The consumer entrepreneurs that I want to spend time with
are people developing on top of voice platforms,
period, end of story.
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One of our guys from over there
went into an innovation role.
You built an event around that theme.
- [Man] Yes.
- It's called, if you're in innovation roles,
come see Gary Vee.
- [Man] Corporate innovation roles, yeah.
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- How you doing? - Good, man, how are you?
- I'm good, man.
I'm in real estate in this area,
I have my own real estate company
and I also do development.
So what I bring is something completely different,
which is the design is just different
than what Chattanooga's used to.
And so I'm hitting that wall.
- The conservative nature of it?
- Yeah, hardcore.
As far as, for example, roof lines, in general.
Like my roofs do this versus this.
And so that's hard for them to grasp that.
- Well, that's a far more interesting conversation.
So I'll go maybe in a different direction
that you may not want to hear.
One of my biggest thesises is
whenever you fight the market, you lose.
Pushing is imperative, right?
But if you push to a place that doesn't
map the practicality wants and needs
and you create too much friction?
What I think I've done really well in my career
when I look at other things
and why I admire Amazon or others is it's all about,
by the way, back to Nicky, I'll appease you here,
innovation, things of that nature.
There's a level of practicality that has to be part of it.
Otherwise you're just too far ahead of it.
I think you have a timing slash appetite friction.
One thing I would definitely not do
is try to convince people.
So if you're hitting a wall and they're selling,
I would profile the nos and the yeses
and spend a lot more time with people
that look the part of yeses.
I'd rather convince Jesse,
open-mindness, grew up in Jersey,
East Coast flavor,
okay, let me see if I can get him to
spend a little bit more than he wanted to
to come into this thing that he's open to,
than going to somebody who's super conservative,
may have the finances
but literally has made a religious line in the sand
of like, this funky junky stuff.
I'm projecting a little here,
but I think the key when you're doing something new
is two things:
one, not being so far out that it's not consumable,
and I don't sense that that's necessarily it,
two, everybody wastes time selling the unsellable.
- It's not profit-driven, so that's my problem.
- It's artistic-driven.
That scares me, it scares me.
- [Man] Can you go down the rabbit
trail where it would work?
- It would work if, here's how
things like this theoretically tend to work.
I would lose a lot of money on
the most alpha influencer in this market to take one.
I'd like give one of these
historic families that live in the hills
one of the houses.
Where you see it happen
is when a tastemaker on a macro or a micro
goes onto the other side.
- [Man] Okay.
- When Hip Hop, I'm just gonna use music.
When P. Diddy and Biggie started talking about lifestyle,
and it's about champagne and living good,
hip hop changed from who's the toughest
to who's the richest?
And it changed the whole genre.
But it needed to be someone who was that popular
to change the conversation.
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Nick, I'm excited about this, I want to make this work.
- [Nick] Yeah, fire it up.
- What should we do?
We're thinking like a brand and a salesman.
Obviously, it's the restaurant thing
with a (bleep) every 90, not a,
with a (bleep) in Chattanooga every 90 days
for the group that came in during that time.
If you come in, right?
So what's this packaged (bleep) dollar thing
that we can build a well-oiled machine.
That he can go find out three more of him.
How do we just do it?
'Cause it's there.
If I make a (bleep) for the hundred mile radius
of this location, and we pound it, we will sell.
Guys, think about this from business terms.
You know your P&L.
Next year 50 days in the year,
we will have seven to 14 people in our office paying
(bleep) a head for education.
Yeah.
(hip hop music)
- [Man] You ready, let's do it.
- Let's do it.
- How are you, sir, it is an honor.
- Happy holidays, thank you, brother.
If you're ever in Chattanooga, tell 'em.
- Come to 2 Son's Kitchen!
- I don't even know, I met one second
and I'm like, let's just give a shout-out!
I feel it, it's awesome, man.
Sometimes I just get in the mood to, like, give people love.
He's just a good dude.
This is an amazing spot.
(hip-hop music)
Shit, you guys got real wine.
I know, I can see it.
Dude, do you know how sick this wine is?
Who drinks pinot noir here, anybody?
You're gonna freak your shit.
This is big, I'm so pumped right now.
This is what I want to say for all of us,
from youngest to oldest.
A, everybody here is gonna live
a lot long longer than they think.
Let's project technology.
You know, you could get hit by a bus in an hour, I get it.
But a lot longer than we think.
The internet's maturity, which is what we're living in
right now, is the biggest culture shift
to our society since the printing press.
So it's very hard for us to actually grapple with
what we're going through right now,
cause it's so much bigger than anything we can point to.
So we have no reference, but it's happening.
And it's an incredible era, and I'm excited about it.
And I think if we take the offense out of it,
you know, it's funny, we default into demonizing technology.
We think writing a note is some miraculous feat,
but sending a text is kids don't talk to each other.
We are missing the point of the evolution of communication
and the power of it.
And I've never been more optimistic,
and I think in a micro, everybody's businesses
and ambitions to raise money for nonprofits
or get a mayor elected in this town,
or whatever the hell you care about,
it's all gonna happen here.
This is it.
You gotta wrap your head around it.
And becoming a communicator on this device
is not about a luxury,
it's a necessity over the next decade.
And I highly encourage all of you
to get a hell of a lot more serious about it.
I think to the point of net neutrality,
I think there's a lot of things that people
don't understand about the issue.
I don't want a toll booth.
Let me give you an example.
Who has Verizon here, anybody?
Great, Verizon, Verizon owns Yahoo!
Net neutrality is just like a news headline
you're hearing about,
until a year from now, Yahoo! is free
and Google is 25 dollar a month.
It's interesting.
You know, there's a lot that happens now,
if they let the service providers become the toll booth.
But I'm a big believer in capitalism.
Okay, so Comcast does this and Schmomcast does that.
Meanwhile, Google shoots a balloon in the air
and provides us all service for free
and no net neutrality issues.
So I think we, a lot of times.
Remember when Microsoft had to be regulated
for being a monopoly?
Remember when Walmart was too big?
We're very bad at understanding the greatness
of actual macrocapitalism and entrepreneurship.
There's always innovation because
people are incentivized by the openness of the upside.
(slow music)
I think we have a real shot to do something
that everybody will talk about forever.
I really believe that, I'm being dead serious.
And I think that I aspire to that,
and so I'm really excited, it's a really good feeling.
I really, really love the way you guys love each other,
and I think that foundation gives this office
unbelievable upside.
I've been thinking a lot more about the long-term
aspect of this office, and what we're up to here.
I really wanna go deep, I really do.
I really want a big, build a big, successful,
impactful, happy place.
And I think when I look around,
it became very obvious to me that.
I often use the analogy of like, okay,
this is a nice building and this is
a brand new nice building.
But the thing that makes this stick is
the steel that's behind that column
that we'll never think about
and the concrete that it's poured into,
the foundation's the fucking game.
And within a company that does what we do,
obviously you guys know
I'm disproportionately confident
that I'll know where to take us
with our products and services.
That's something I was gifted with.
We will never, ever lose that game.
I think the thing that will make us
ultimately special is empathy.
I will pound empathy down the throat of this company
next year, for you to be empathetic to each other,
to each other's disciplines,
to what might be happening at home
or what's going on with that client
or the history of how you got there,
why you got transferred on our team.
But I'm sold that this office deploys
the prime example of empathy across the board.
All right, vlog, it's been a great time.
Gonna spend some time with the Chattanooga crew.
Happy holidays to you guys.
Leave in the comments a story
about a holiday party in your company.
(hip-hop music)