Serial Entrepreneur, Chairman of VaynerX and 5x New York Times Best Selling Author Gary Vaynerchuk

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Goal Digger Podcast. Today, we'll be breaking down the serial entrepreneur, chairman of VaynerX, and five-time New York Times bestselling author, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, also known as Gary V, is a leading global mind on what's next in culture, relevance, and the internet. Gary possesses an uncanny ability to recognize trends and patterns early to help others understand how these shifts impact consumer behavior.

0:36He is one of the most forward thinkers in business. Gary's approach sits at the intersection of business and culture. He keenly understands how to bring brand relevance to the forefront. In today's foundation, we'll talk about attention, we'll talk about the science of storytelling, TikTokification of social media, and staying ahead of the curve, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Gary and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by my friend Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversation on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

1:16In a recent episode, Scott brings Kate Bradley on the show, founder and CEO of Lately.ai, to discuss the best ways to use AI to create content. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. NetSuite by Oracle brings accounting, finance, inventory, and HR into one proven platform, helping you reduce costs everywhere. Backed by popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com slash fire. Gary, you've always said that attention is a major focus of yours. The problem with getting attention is it can be quite, shall we say, expensive.

1:56So can you share the ways that we can get underpriced attention in today's landscape? I can. First of all, John, I just want to give you some flowers. Podcasting is obviously an incredibly important medium in the world today. And I think it's potentially lost in history that you were one of the dozens that was moving first and hard on it. And I just want you to have that because you built on underpriced attention. You went all in on podcasting as it was emerging. And I feel as though you deserve credit on that. So I wanted to say that. And to that point, that's the game. This is why I'm obsessed with social media marketing.

2:34The most underpriced attention in the world right now is sitting on social media organic creative, right? The way the algorithms work now, social media is not the one that you, JLD, and I grew up with. That one was based on email marketing. Get as many people to follow you as possible. and then a percentage of those people would see your content when you posted it, right? If I had a million followers on Twitter, I would consistently get more views on my videos than you if you had 50 ,000, and I would stay within a general pocket. Now, the way it works is the content itself is the variable. And so I may have 15 million followers on TikTok like I do.

3:13How many do you have, JLD? 175 ,000. The fact that you can make a better piece of content than me tomorrow that has the best practices, first, second, thumbnail, copy, understands the culture of the slang of TikTok. I love that all your videos can get more views than my videos because the merit of the creative is the game. And that level of underpriced attention where there is no cost for distribution, and there are some costs for creative depending on how you do it, is by far the reason I'm obsessed with social media marketing and for both brand and sales. And I think more businesses, creators, influencers, podcasters, small businesses, SaaS, B2B, B2C, companies need to get, professionals need to get way more serious at being remarkable at day-to-day social because that's the organic thing.

4:01For big brands listening, Super Bowl is underpriced media. It's underpriced attention. For 7 million, 8 million, 9 million dollars, you could buy 110 million people watching a 30-second video. That's impossible anywhere else. There's influencers that you can do deals with that are grossly underpriced. There's overpriced influencers. A Super Bowl ad becomes overpriced when the creative 30-second video stinks and nobody acted on it. Now you just wasted all that money. So there's a lot of ways to get it, but my favorite underpriced attention games right now are event marketing and sponsorship, when done right, Super Bowl, influencers and creators, and at the tippy top, perfect organic social media.

4:47What I love about this personally is that this gives hope to the listeners who are like, you know what? I have this passion. I have this micro niche I'm willing to go into and dominate and create the number one solution to a real problem in this niche. Create remarkable, consistent content around that, and I can win as a result. And solving a problem, if I may just jump in because I love the way you framed that, but I want someone to hear this. Solving the problem is I might just be the best communicator on Zelda video games. And I'm entertaining and informing. When people hear solving problems, they think about things like what I do.

5:24I'll make you better at wine tasting. I'll make you better at marketing tactics. I'll make you better at having a good relationship with yourself and perspective. I'm proud of those three things. But there are many other problems to be solved. escapism, entertainment, many other things to learn in detail, like landscaping and cooking and makeup tutorials. So when JLD says solving a problem, I just want to make sure people understand that Eddie Murphy solved problems in the 1980s. He was entertaining and a comedian. And for three hours, if you went to his stand up or went to watch one of his movies or two hours, He was solving the problem of life is hard, and he was taking you out of your day-to-day struggles and putting you in a world where you laughed and smiled, and that brings incredible value to you as a human.

6:17So solving problems comes in entertainment and education and information and pondering and fantasizing. There's a lot of ways to quote-unquote solve a problem. And to give flowers to a mutual friend of ours, Pat Flynn was also a major pioneer in the podcasting space. And guess what? Four years ago, he's playing Pokemon with his son who was obsessed with it. And Pat's like, wow, there's something here. I'm into this. And I'm a creator. I know how to do certain things video-wise, content creation-wise that other people can't do in this specific space. And he went on, created this YouTube channel, Big Pocket Monster, or Deep Pocket Monster, I think it is.

6:54And it blew up. He has almost a million subscribers. He's throwing a huge event in San Diego. He has way more knowledge and information and followers around that space now, even though he's only four or five years in, than he does around Smart Passive Income, which he launched back in 2008. So I mean, this is just an exciting time that we're in right now. And one thing, Gary, that I always talk about on this show is story. I love to say there's a reason why history is his story, her story. We're built around story. So share with us the science of storytelling. That's a great question. Look, I think there's a lot of different ways to build a story.

7:33The hero versus the villain. Things are going to be okay at the end of the day. The shocking surprise ending. What's amazing about stories is all of us can relate with different characters like you think about star wars there's people that relate with han solo more than luke skyward yeah princess leia more than darth vader with darth vader more than obi-wan or yoda or chewbacca and you can go on and on like you know for example i um i'll give you a good one one of the people i most relate to is rocky balboa oh and the reason i really relate to rocky balboa is because he lost to mr t in rocky 3 because he did lose everything and went back to the slums of Philadelphia and Rocky five or six or whatever that one was.

8:20You know, I like a story that has not only in a part of a film, but in the actual whole film that talks about adversity or starting from zero again, or dealing with death, right? And in the, in the many Rocky films, we watched him lose his mentor. We lost, we watched him struggle with his relationship with his son. We watched him, you know, we watched him lose his wife who is like, yeah, Rocky, Rocky one's a love story. Adrian, I'm getting goosebumps. Adrian, Adrian to me is like, you know, especially like someone who like desperately loves their mom and like always kind of put like female, um, you know, tenderness and strength on a pedestal, even before it became fashionable to some.

9:11You know, Adrian is so big for me. And yet she dies, right? Lion King, when I saw him, I was on a high school date with a girl. And I cried in the middle of, you know, crying in the 1994 in the middle of the theater, as a senior in high school, around a Disney animation, is not necessarily the coolest thing to do. But like, the story captivated me so much, because I loved my parents so much. And I was able to put myself in the story. And then all of a sudden my dad dies, that hurts my feelings. Stories are amazing. I tend to associate with a story where the lead character is not only dealing with adversity, but I would say is enjoying adversity, but is coping and dealing with discomfort and navigating and fighting and moving forward.

10:02I also associate with the superhero that gets punched in the face by the villain, like spits out his tooth, and then looks back at the villain says, now you're in trouble. Because I have that gear in me, right? Like when I'm pushed to the edge, my greatest luck from DNA and parenting and circumstances, I fight back. I don't fold like a cheap chair. So I associate with that person. But my mother may associate more with somebody in a story like, you know, Steel Magnolias and the mother figure like, you know, like, and so the elements of a story is, is it relevant? Does it associate? Does it make you connect?

10:42Do you see yourself in them? And are you a concise communicator? Stories come in different ways. When you review products like I did when I came out the gate, and this is when you first saw I mean, I talked about wine in such a different slang than anyone else did before. Rap and hip hop is a storytelling medium that they did it. The pioneers in the late 70s into the early 80s when it was really being formed. They did it differently than music had been done before. They talked about different stuff than we had heard before. And so, you know, there's the communication style there. you know as you also know because me you pat flynn and others we grew up in that 2005 6 7 oh yeah you're up you remember this is gonna land with you i was like an interesting character because i was a little bit more jersey than like the business world had accepted i dressed casual and i cursed and as you know if you think back that really worked for a lot of people but for a lot of people, it was a turnoff.

11:47It was too aggressive. And I always understood that. But I always felt that if you speak your truth, you'll be in a better place than trying to conform to something you're not. And so the art of a story to me, and the art of stories is, are you authentic to yourself first? You know, Julie, again, I think this will make sense because we grew up in that era together. A lot of people, CA speakers, a lot of our friends at different events, they told me like, Gary, if you just take it 20 % down, if you just took it down a notch, you'll be so much bigger. And these are people you respect. These are people that like at CAA, they're like showing me emails exchanges with people that say, we'll pay him$20 ,000 more.

12:28We'll pay him$40 ,000 instead of 20 ,000 for a speech. But can he do a couple of speeches not cursing? And can you wear a suit? Can you tweak him a little bit? And you have to respect that. That's the market talking. But for me, it was more important for me to be authentic to me and to myself. And it allowed me to feel more comfortable to tell the stories. For me, when I spoke, it was less about me wanting to make as much money as possible. It was more that when I was on stage, I was obsessed with being historically correct. That what I talked about, about Twitter or Facebook or YouTube would become true because then I could trade on that reputation and that matters to me.

13:04Gary, as always, so many value bombs being dropped and Fire Nation more are coming as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. You know your customers want fast, personalized support, but how do you find a customer service solution that actually delivers? Most solutions leave reps struggling to stay productive and customers frustrated by the lack of support. But with the new AI-powered Service Hub from HubSpot, you've now got a better way to do service and success. Service Hub helps you fly through the service queues and lighten the load on your reps with AI-powered self-service chat and knowledge-based articles.

13:36It also helps you grow your customer base with tools that helps reps anticipate customer needs before they ever become issues. With HubSpot Service Hub, reps are resolving tickets 13 times faster, helping them close 42 % more tickets per day. And that means increasing retention by more than 80%. Plus, with Service Hub, you get a full 360 view of your customers on one smart CRM that brings marketing, sales, service, and success teams together to work smarter while you watch your business grow. So visit HubSpot.com slash service to learn how this all new solution can help you deliver for your customers.

14:11Okay, quick math. The less your business spends on operations, running multiple systems, and on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money you keep. Obvious, right? But with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing, everything costs more. So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NestSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth. With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required, accessed from anywhere.

14:46You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you've got one unified business management suite and you're improving efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37 ,000 companies have already made the move, So do the math. See how you'll profit with NetSuite. Back by popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com slash fire, netsuite.com slash fire, netsuite.com slash fire. Time and time again, you've been proven correct over the years, which brings up TikTokification.

15:23What is it and what is its impact on both content creation and brand building? Everybody should be inspired on this call because what we talked about earlier with my 15 million followers and your 175 ,000 and Pat Flynn going to Pokemon versus profiting and me going to business instead of wine and all the other things we'll see through the years. The fact that it was harder to amass a million followers on YouTube subscribers for Pat than every single person listening now in this new TikTokification. What does it mean? Actually, let's play a game. what have you not shared with your audience that is a hobby or like a mic or an emerging new passion of yours that you've picked up in the last three years give me anything pickleball okay first of all thank you for saying that because i own a pickleball i know uh so the fact that you right now should forget about could yeah should make a pickleball video maybe a green screen from an article where you add your two cents or literally go outside and just like film yourself hitting it and then come over and be like, is anybody else like making new friendships and like, whatever it is, whatever it is that you should post that on your TikTok tomorrow, because that content will find the pickleball audience, not the business podcast audience.

16:43Now it may get 40 views, but it also may get 43 ,000. But more interesting, if your profile is set up properly with a link to your podcast, and who you actually quote unquote are professionally besides pickleball. Somebody may see a pickleball video and agree with you that pickleball paddles should be better or that the best thing about pickleball is exercising with your grandfather or whatever it might be. But then they're going to be like, oh, I like this. I agree with this guy. And they're just going to look at your profile and be like, what's this podcast? Like you will literally more likely, this is real talk.

17:14This is like crazy. This is like we're having a consulting I would say to you, brother, once a week, minimum five times a week, pickleball content on TikTok and YouTube shorts, because they have, you know, Instagram's harder. I'll get into that in a minute. But I think you would pick up more subscribers for this podcast because you started adding pickleball content to your content than the reverse. I do garage sale content, New York Jets content, wine content, business content, branding content, parenting content, now a ton of VFriends content, which is my Pokemon meets Sesame Street. And for some people, it's too much.

17:54And they're like, Gary, he's all over the place. What is this? But the way that world actually now works is it's finding its different cohorts and audiences. And that's because of the TikTokification, what we talked about earlier. Anyone listening right now can post something on these platforms and get 100 ,000 views. Whereas for 15 years, if you only had 49 followers on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube, well, you got seven or nine or 11 views. Now, everybody listening right now can create an Instagram, Facebook, YouTube Shorts, Snap, Spotlight, TikTok. And I recommend all of them and posting these algorithm-based feeds.

18:35LinkedIn just announced theirs. People that have never posted anything about business on their LinkedIn write one article or you take a clip from an audio clip from your podcast from this episode, post it in your LinkedIn, and you may find 20 ,000 new people that consume it, of which 147 sign up for your podcast. This is how your podcast would grow. Fire Nation, I hope these are spinning the wheels in your own mind about your brand, your building, your attention, which brings us to day trading attention, Gary, because we have five minutes left. I want to make the most of it. When you write a book, it is the first thing that's on my Audible wishlist, the first thing that's on my Amazon wishlist.

19:15I read it. I listen to it. I do it at the same time because it's just always entertaining, great, meaningful content. So talk to us about day trading attention. Thank you. First of all, we have 10 minutes because I want to milk every single of you. Two. Thank you. And I think the reason you do that and the reason of people that haven't heard about me in a while or hear me for the first time or have heard of me and they're like, who is that guy anyway? Like, I think the reason JLD does that is I have enough of a track record 15 years in of I'm of the moment. And then I'll write a book every three, four years of the moment.

19:48This is really the follow up to jab, jab, jab, right hook JLD. So like day trading attention is so okay, we've established that organic social media is definitely the answer for everyone here. but now the question becomes which platform so for example I know most people that are advanced in social media content that are listening right now are are doing either a podcast and then chopping up some clips doing YouTube long form or most likely have Instagram and TikTok as their core with a little bit of with Twitter and Facebook potentially being the next year with almost nobody taking LinkedIn as a social network or Snapchat spotlight as serious alternatives to these feeds.

20:31YouTube shorts, different than long form, also mailed in by too many. Yet I know every person here, whether they're trying to build their podcast, sell more roses at their flower store, get more people to use their auto body shop, get more people to consume them as a thought leader and buy their courses or programs, that three or four of those seven platforms will come more native to them. Everybody should be marketing on more platforms. And what content you put where and how do you do it in what I call pack platforms and culture, when you make content, is the variable of their success. Plain English.

21:07There's a dog walking business listener right now. She wants or he wants more clients. I know that Facebook organic, if I can get them to start allocating another hour to five per day per week to just making content that's organic. but when they make it, they think about the different cohorts, people that have more money than others, gender, race, what side of the tracks do they live on this neighborhood? Some people are parents of kids with athletes. So they'll make a video like, I'm just gonna go very detailed for this. Hey, are you a parent of a kid that plays soccer or basketball or some other sport every weekend?

21:41I'm the dog walker for you. Now all of a sudden you're posting that. Now that the algorithm is gonna find people more likely like that. Then if it does well, now you start running ad dollars on it, not upfront, I go into very deep, deep, deep detail. JLD, remind me, did we send you the galley or you don't have it yet? Don't have it yet. When I, when I tell you, when you get it, right, when you listen to me reading it on Audible or you, you, you get one. And I think a lot of people are going to end up because they like when I read it and I go off script are going to get the Audible, but then they're going to realize how many times I'm referring to the book with the charts.

22:13And I think people are going to buy this book and it's more of an evergreen book. what even if someone as advanced as you because i have a 2 000 person global agency the thing that has happened the last seven years with me that i think is under the radar as my notoriety and my awareness got bigger um is i the whole time i've been building vayner media i mean this you're gonna be impressed by this i think vayner x now is 2 000 people globally come on is is a 350 million dollar business i'm the active active ceo of the company so not only do i and as you know over the last five years, Gary Vee, the brand has gotten bigger, not smaller.

22:47So I'm personally a practitioner of this, but I also have the luxury of seeing my agency spend billions of dollars in media, you know, charge hundreds of millions of dollars to make pictures and videos and creative for it. And I watch how the Fortune 500 works versus the companies I invest in. I see how the emerging creator brands work like Poppy or Prime or Beastables. You know, I'm me and I'm watching. And I, so the level of detail I went into this book, when I think about somebody buying a book for$28 on Amazon, which will probably go down by the time this comes out in a month, or I don't know when you're going to air this, it's probably out now, but it's probably under, you know how Amazon works.

23:25It keeps going down in price until it finally hits its launch date. I'm obsessed with people getting value for 20 to 30 bucks. I'm so peace of mind in this book because every chapter, because I go into every platform or every thesis, post creative strategy, reading every comment after you post or all these things. Every page has$30 value. But the answer comes into that dog walker. Does she know that she's more comfortable in being in LinkedIn and talking professional versus being on TikTok and maybe being a little quote unquote cooler? Does she understand that Instagram is competitive now with day trading?

24:00Day trading is supply and demand. Instagram has so much content right now, posted on it every day. And some of the attention has fragmented to YouTube shorts and to TikTok. So now all of a sudden, like four years ago, it's harder to get reach because the attention has moved. Meanwhile, Elon, any moment now is gonna relaunch Vine, which was the original platform for short form video. And the people that go there first and go ham on it, especially people that look like me that already have audiences elsewhere, they're gonna get underpriced attention because there's not gonna be as much content made at first for the amount of people that are actually on it.

24:36That's what happened on Threads. but threads didn't really stay, right? So it was awesome for a month and that was great for me. I crushed underpriced attention on threads. Now it might be proper attention because there's not enough attention for the amount of work you put in. But for me, I'm going omni-channel. So every channel is something I'm gonna trade on. But I'm a psycho and I'm going for broke. For somebody who's got a small business and is trying to pick a platform or two, a couple of things. You should be on many more platforms. Use the same video, but in the book, I'll show you and I'll do it right now.

25:05Or if you can't afford it, but go to Pirate Bay. steal it. I don't care. But like, get the information in your head because the first second of a video on YouTube shorts should be different than the first second and thumbnail and copy on a video that you put out on, on, on Facebook. Because on Facebook, you know, it's going to skew older on Facebook. You know, it's going to skew a little bit more local family vibes. Whereas YouTube is more of a search engine where TikTok is more trending and cool, which is Instagram, which is more like the magazine and the establishment, which is Twitter, where it's a little bit more like, you know, contentious and political, like every room is different.

25:38Every, every platform has different things, carousels versus reels. Everything's got best practices per video, but you can court one video and get six posts out of it. But the copy on every post needs to be different. The first second, some of the hooks, some of the slang, even you might have to make two different videos, one for under 35, one for over 35, because you in the video want to use different terminology, different analogies. If I make a reference to the Cosby show in my video of why I'm trying to make a point. I'm going to do that for 45 and older. And that same thing I might make a, you know, if I'm going for 35 and under, I might make a Nickelodeon Hey Dude reference for Gen Z, I might make you know, a reference to 310 baby, or the or the rap battle between Drake and, and Kendrick and Rick Ross.

26:22So like context, the obsession with context, the obsession with distribution, what are the platforms caring about Tick Tock Live, they care. So they're giving you more awareness. This is real science, bro. I go really deep in a two hour podcast, let alone a 35 minute one. I can't get there. That's what often forces me to write the books when I write them. When I know I'm like, oh fuck, I need 300 pages to help fuckers on this. Fire Nation, you can hear the passion. You can hear the fire. And Gary, you're so kind to really squeeze out every minute that we have together because I've seen your schedule.