How Gary Vee Predicts The Next Facebook (Every Time)

0:00All right, we got Gary V in the house. Everyone knows Gary V because he's all over Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn. And he's invested in Twitter and Slack and Facebook before they IPO'd. Gary's fun. We brought him on. Our goal was, let's ask him a bunch of questions that we're genuinely curious about. Which of those investments actually paid off the most? And it was a very, very surprising number. We also talked about what he's excited about now. And we asked him about the mindset and what he noticed hanging out with people like Zuck or Logan Paul or different characters like that. So enjoy this episode with Gary V.

0:31It's a good one.

0:40Gary, what's going on, man? How are you? I think Sean saw something recently that you'd posted that I thought everyone knew about you. Sean, what was that thing, the report card? Most podcasts start with an intro. We start with a little ball busting. So I have here Gary's high school report card, which you tweeted out to be fair. So I'm not putting it out there you didn't already do. But I thought this is kind of amazing. So you tweeted out a picture of your high school report card. I'm just going to read off a few of your achievements. Gary got a C in ceramics, a D in English, an F in German, a PE, you got an A.

1:15That's the only A you have on this report card, I think. Algebra, D. This one's kind of amazing. Speech, which you are known for speech. You got a D, driver's ed D. Gary, you were, what a turnaround. What a turnaround. What's your reaction when you see this? That a lot of data in the world is dirty. It's fake data. And I think school grades are just not a tremendous indicator of what's going to happen. The speech one is crazy. The report card I tweeted out was the recap of all four years of high school. So little fun facts to build on top of what you just said. I got an F in all four marking periods of German one freshman year.

1:57I retook it sophomore year. I got a D in the first marking period and then proceeded to get all Fs. Failed language my freshman and sophomore year. And in the state of New Jersey in 1994, if you did not pass two years of language, you could not graduate high school. So I'm walking to junior year high school and took Spanish one with all these ninth graders as a junior. And I had the pressure on and luckily I got Mrs. Senora Kennedy saw something in me and forced me through the system. Otherwise it was over for me. But yeah, I mean, the speech one really stands out to your point, Sean, right? Like to think that I got a D in speech, which was give a speech in class, right?

2:42Which I did well. It's just that I told my mom and I talked about this this weekend. I literally did not open a book in four years of high school and did zero homework. Everyone who's listening went through school, I think. They would assign a book report. And it's not that I did it poorly. It's that I didn't do it. just like didn't ever I literally in four years of high school did zero homework zero like I something happened where I just knew that you know at that point high school I was already working my dad's like restore and selling a lot of baseball cards at shows and just kind of and it was look this is pre-internet the world was different I grew up in an immigrant family We just moved to rural New Jersey.

3:32When I tell you we lived in our own little four or five person cocoon, my family, we really did. It was very, very, very, in hindsight, deeply immigrant. You know what I mean? My parents didn't have American parent friends. My mom wasn't friends with any of my high school friends' parents. My mom asked me about what I'm doing for college February of my senior year. I was like mom it's over I'm not going to college she lost her mind and forced me to like go and I got like a postcard in the mail from Mount Ida college filled it out and that's literally how I went to college like so you know I think if I was growing up today my intuition is that it would have been okay for me not to go to college and it would have just all been handled differently.

4:22And honestly, I think my teachers would have said to me, I have a bright future instead of saying what they did back then, which was, you're a loser. You're going to be a garbage man. That was the big thing, Sean, Sam, in the 90s. Your teachers would tell you you're going to be a garbage man, which I think is really crazy because actually it's a very good living with a high pace. It has a high pace now. Our friend just started a garbage business and he's doing like 300 grand a year of it. Joke's on you, Miss Kennedy. Yeah. One of the things we do is always just, what are you excited about? Like, what products are you seeing?

4:56What people are you seeing? What cool stories are you seeing that are kind of, that you're genuinely excited about? Have you guys seen Break the Web? No, what's that? Dude, they got a great tagline. So it's breaktheweb.co, the internet's official scoreboard. This app's got my attention. Trending topics on Twitter was so big for me back in the day when it was desktop only. Break the Web is an app. It's just what's trending right now. And it seems like the underlining tech is pretty damn strong. You know how everybody loves to throw around AI or this and that. And you're like, if you're smart, you're like, this is just a collection of APIs or anything like this one's a little bit better.

5:30And like, I don't know, I've put on my home screen, which is not something I've done in a long time. Why? Why do I like it? Well, yeah, I mean, it's like, I'm looking at it now. You just showed it to me. It was all the new stuff. I don't really pay attention. I saw the word Gaza, Trump, and five other words where they're important. But I'm not going to read news. First of all, great observation, brother. For me as well, honestly, something that's on my mind is everyone needs to consume less news because all it does is push fear and negativity. And it's just so scary how fucked up that is. So it's funny saying, brother, I don't really click into that stuff.

6:08So right now, it's brand new. when I met with the founders, I only met with them for like 10 or 15 minutes. I asked them real quick. I'm like, can we get this categorized out? And they're like, yeah, that's on the roadmap. I need pop culture and consumer trends. So to me, when I look at Madonna fan, I'm like, what is that? Madonna mistakenly scolded a fan. Again, right now, what's interesting though, is that it's a great indication of where we are in society. Back to when Twitter trending topics, It was less political and it was really valuable. Like the reason I like it or the potential of it, and obviously we're in an election season, so now this will get eaten up to your point, Sam, on this stuff.

6:51But it is an indication of the pulse. Like I'm always looking for what's the indication of the pulse of what people give a fuck about. Dude, so these guys, it looks like it only has 90 reviews. Oddly, both of these guys used to work at a bakery. The CEO worked at Pete's Coffee. The other guy used to work at Specialties Cafe. and Bakery. So they're both lovers of baked goods. Then they decided to launch this. It's three years old, though, but it's not popular yet. So what's your prediction? This thing's going to be huge? There's no prediction. Back to shooting the shit, to your point, Sean. I'm not overly like, oh, Break the Web's going to be the best.

7:26The concept of date... So I have a new book coming out soon this year, right? I finally feel like I've synthesized what I actually do. Like, long form Twitter. I think literally have a meeting today where I'm going to post my 100 most successful YouTube videos on Twitter here over the course of the next couple of months. Try to stagger it a little bit because it's just very clear that Twitter is going to push it, right? I don't know if that's going to work. I agree they're pushing it, but I just don't find myself using it that way. Yeah, that's a great call, Sam. What I know is that I never have an interest in guessing if something's going to work.

8:05I have an interest in executing on anything that might work and then dealing with the ramifications of the upside. Why guess when you can test for cheaper than it's almost cost to guess, right? Like it's not expensive to take your best YouTube videos and have somebody repost. That's an easy way to learn. Because you talk about day trading attention, right? All trading is mispriced assets. That's right. And I would argue that attention is the most mispriced asset right now that most impacts everyone. So why is that? There is nobody that will ever listen to this that doesn't need attention as a currency to achieve what's in their stomach.

8:39Whether they want to raise money for their PTA, be president of the United States, get more listeners to their podcast, sell their sneakers. The only asset class that I think is universal is attention. Even a parent trying to home parent two children need their kids to listen to them to be able to get the message across. The currency of listening or consuming is profound. And we're living through the mass fragmentation of that, right? If you think about, let's use parenting. It was a lot easier to get your kids to listen when in 1954, 80 % of families sat down and had dinner together for like an hour and a half and you did it.

9:23right? And like, so those parents were able to message in a very interesting way. Whereas now, they still can. And we have technology, you can send a text or a Sam and Sean clip to your kids to get them to think of something. But there's also so much supply, right? With the demand side being the same, there's only so many hours in a day. Now the human brain, I think, has capacity to keep a lot more information than we think. Nonetheless, for me, more narrowly, as someone who loves business and loves to think about it, it doesn't matter what you're selling, and it doesn't even matter what you're saying until you first get their attention.

10:02And then everything is about what you're saying. What's interesting to me is I think of it, the acronym I use internally at VaynerX, VaynerMedia is PAC, platforms and culture. And so break the web plays in culture. There's two different currencies that I think about constantly or two different frameworks. One is platforms. What are the top 25 platforms that have people's attention doing? What do they care about? From Snap to Pinterest, to LinkedIn, to YouTube, even within themselves, YouTube Shorts differently than YouTube. It's a collective of 15, 20 places that really have, quote unquote, the attention.

10:38What are they up to? How do their algorithms work? What are their features doing? I think about them on a day-to-day basis. right and then and then i think about culture like what is the slang what is what is the things of interest the people of interest right um and and then it becomes a framework of like what's overpriced and underpriced execution so for example i think super bowl is the most underpriced media in the world it's very hard to get 130 million people to watch 30 seconds of a video and actually want to and pay attention to it, right? So that$7,$8 million vig I think is great. The problem is the creative is the variable of success, right?

11:17So the media might be a great deal, but if your 30-second video is forgettable or stinks or you overpaid for making it, right? Verizon paid Beyonce to be in that commercial. If they paid her$500 ,000, I think they stole her. If they paid$40 million, I think they overpaid for her. I don't know what the number is. My guess is it somewhere in between. But that is basically how my brain works and how I think about communication and marketing and brand building and perception changing and just the whole world. It's how I think about the world. Have you guys seen, let me ask if you guys have seen this in terms of cool shit.

11:51So Perplexity is awesome. But they have this new thing. I didn't see them talk about it a lot. It's called Perplexity AI slash podcast. They've come out with a daily podcast that's five to 10 minutes long that's written by Perplexity. and it has beautiful background music and they've got this British guy. Have you ever seen those Planet Earth videos where it's like, now we see the mother cheetah go after them. Yeah, they've got this voice that sounds exactly like him reading the script and it sounds awesome. The voice is powered by this thing called Eleven Labs. Dude, I went to Eleven Labs, Sean.

12:27I uploaded a ton of our voice and I was like, fuck it. Let's just see if I can make a podcast. It's the best thing I've ever heard. Have you guys seen them come out with this podcast? Gary, if you ever want to see Sam speak Hindi, Eleven Labs made a clip. They just translated the podcast, auto-dubbed it using AI into Hindi, and it's phenomenal. By the way, it's something we've been working on for about a year. I think next year is the full year where every single thing I do, every video, every language, we're there. Dude. Sam, I haven't seen the podcast, but I just took note. I can't wait to listen to it.

13:00It's so good. And they've not made a big... This has not been a big hoopla. I randomly came across it I was listening to it, I'm like, I'm going to listen to this every day This is great, it's David Adborough telling me about the news, it sounds awesome Which language are you going to do? Should we do Hindi? Is that the one? I'm doing everything If you're going to do one, you might as well do all I just think that I also think everyone's going to go after For example, I get excited about Portuguese I'm like, fuck it, everyone's going to go to Mandarin and Hindi and the big number I'm like, I'm just going to own Portugal and Brazil like you know just like but but that's tongue-in-cheek i think the reality is over the next three years all of it's going to go down and cost so much that it won't even like the the us in seven years are going to laugh that we ever had it just in one language if they won't even understand they're like dude have you ever seen that talk that this guy alex schultz gave about facebook's growth he was the he was the top facebook growth guy like early on he was when they created the growth team as him chamath and uh the guy i think javier who now runs it and he's like, he put a chart up and it was a YC talk and he puts a chart up on the screen.

14:07There's a bunch of dots. He's like, you know, all these dots are feature releases and you can see one dot where everything starts growing right after that. He goes, anyone want to take a guess what that dot is? People in the audience like photos, photo tagging. It's when you release mobile, you know, what is it? We don't know. And he's like, language translation, local language translation. He goes, the biggest growth driver in Facebook's growth, bar none was when we, when we localized the service, which he's like, was not easy. They actually, I don't know if you know this Facebook had to do like a Wikipedia thing because there was, you know, there's 186 countries that they had to deal with.

14:41And so they were like, we need users to basically re-translate the site for their local region. And they incentivized people to do that. And that's how they mass translated overnight. No other social network did this and it took off. So that was the first time I heard about this. The second was when we did, um, our basketball camp with Mr. Beast, which Gary, I invited you to. You got to come next time. Mr. Beast basically, we host a basketball camp at his house and he did this presentation. He's like, here's one thing I'm doing that nobody else is really doing, which is every video I do, I now created channels in Portuguese and everywhere else.

15:13He told me, Jimmy told me that whole thing several years ago. Like such a good bet. By the way, tell me about this basketball camp because I'm playing basketball tomorrow at 6 a.m. Like this is how much I love it. I'm 48. Like you'll fit right in. There's plenty of wheelchairs and ice bags of ice. Dude, it's hilarious. But I'm a 90s Knicks fan, so no easy layups. Is that politically correct in this basketball camp? Yeah, yeah. You can hack your heart away. It's all good. Actually, I wonder if you do anything like this. So we do this thing where it's called Camp MFM. It was my first million MFM.

15:48So we were like, we like the idea of getting together. like you know when you go to a conference you end up having a good time if you go speak somewhere you end up having a good time but there's kind of this dread in my stomach of like fuck you had another conference like i just don't want to do the boring i just i guess have a resistance of doing the same thing everyone else is doing in general and so we were like how do we get the benefits of going and networking without ever calling it networking or a conference or anything else and so we created basically an adult summer camp it was like what if for a weekend we just rented a house and in this case we actually just stay at mr beast house now because he ended up wanting to come.

16:21And so we go to his house and then we bring in a trainer from the NBA. He treats us like we're washed up NBA players, basically puts us through their program and we just play ball all day. When is it? One just happened, but it was big. It was like the founder of Airbnb, Mr. Beast, all these guys. Joe's the best. I have an email from Joe that says, Gary, we're fans. We want you to look at our company. And it was Joe at airbedandbreakfast.com. and I never saw it, you know, or maybe I did and just like, but I look at that email. I haven't owned a separate laptop and I look at it once in a while just to like, I love it.

17:02I'd like, this is actually a fun segue back to chopping it up. If it was just us three and everyone's this, where we're going, where do you guys sit on losing? So we just talked about basketball. So I was just thinking about me going to this basketball thing. And like my favorite thing in basketball in pickup is to lose the first game it is my favorite and i talked about this on steve bartlett's podcast i got a billion fucking emails about this there's something that just like the blood in my head like everything transforms in my chemicals and then everything in life like everything stops and the only thing that matters to me in the world is that we have to win game two that's so funny he said that when we did the camp the same thing happened uh the very first game i'm trying to be the host of the event so i'm like okay yeah yeah you guys play i'll sit out first no problem we get in i'm like i'm passing the ball i'm like oh that's joe gabia let me not let him drive i'm not gonna try to hurt the founder of airbnb or mr beast oh that was cool man you know i see someone taking a video i'm like that's cool that's gonna be a cool clip it's gonna go viral then i'm like wait fuck that i'm in the clip he's scoring on me and i was like he's no longer mr beast that's jimmy and that's joe and now we're competing to win and then the whole event got a lot more fun when it equalized everybody all the job titles dropped and it's basically who's here to win, who's here to play.

18:17And that's when it got real. It's why I love entrepreneurship. Where I'm going with this is that email excites me. I'm like, yeah, eat it, Gary. Dude, that one would have been a bigger one for you than Uber too. No, it wouldn't have. Maybe, but no, because they both probably, believe it or not, this is how much startups were back then. They both would have been priced between four and eight million. That's crazy, right? I know, bro. I got into Tumblr's B round. B, series B, not angel, not seed, not series A. I got into Tumblr's series B. This is actually it right here. This is my Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook stock.

18:57I got into Tumblr's series B at a$14 million valuation. That's like, you know, pre-seed now. that was literally 2007 or eight right we're only talking 16 years ago so like you guys are young dudes so think 16 years ahead how old will you be in 16 years sean dude i don't even want to know 52 50 i don't know what sam how old am i right honestly no bullshit i don't know if you guys hang out with like 60 70 80 year old business people like i do a lot of that because it's the best i mean to me the two extremes are the best right hang out with the 17 year olds that are like shitting listening right now shitting on all of us saying these fuckers are gonna wait till they see what i'm gonna do and then 73 year olds who are like just like the amount of 67 of 60 forget i think it's like literally children 70 and 80 70 and 80 to me just it's stunning to me how many 73 75 77 year old businessmen and women i know that go at it because they love it it's still what they do and it gets me excited because at 48 it's like man i'm still like i'm in halftime right like i'm in like you know i get excited about that i wanted to ask you about that so i think you and i kind of have similar backgrounds where it was like raised around like like kind of a rough crowd every once in a while yes and still kind of have a little bit of that where like i enjoy like doing like hood rat shit every once in a while same and uh gary sam's nickname on the pod is hose water because he's just no water fountains baby just drink it straight out the hose So you used Sam Hosewater Park.

20:31Dude, I loved it. Man, Hosewater was the best. It's the best, dude. Summer Hosewater. I drank out of the hose literally from 1982 to 1989. Dude, I peed in the backyard more than I peed in the toilet. Oh, 100%. Yeah. They used to call me Lickmon No Hands like every day. So listen, I had a question. So look, we're all three probably a little bit similar where it's like we kind of did a bunch of crappy stuff. And now, Gary, you're older and a little further along in your career in terms of success than we are. But we've both done some interesting or we've all done interesting things where we're able to hang out with some of these guys who are like legitimate billionaires.

21:07I'm sure you're I don't know if you are or not, but you're in that ballpark. And I see with Michael Rubin and whatever, you know, you hang out with some of the shot callers of the world. What do you think is the difference between the store owner who's doing like, you know, a retail guy doing half a million or a million dollars a year? the$10 million a year business, the$100 million net worth person, and the billion dollar net worth person. Do they all have similar-ish mindsets? Just maybe luck or industry? They picked a different industry. Yeah. Two things. It's 1234. I still don't know why 1111 has everyone's attention and 1234 doesn't.

21:43The 1234 is just so cool. Should we make a wish real quick? I don't know if we should make a wish, but we should start a trend and try to make 1234 matter for entrepreneurs.

21:54That's a really fucking fun question, Sam. My brain, as you were asking it, goes in me. Well, it's focused on one, two, three, four. Yeah, I just happened to look over and see it. I've always thought about 1234. I've always thought it was interesting that it has no pop culture relevance. I believe the first thing that goes through my mind on this question is risk tolerance and fear, right? So I think it's fear. I just had an idea. 1234, I get it. I got to use it. 1234 should be where you shoot your shot. I love that. When you see 1234, that's when you got to send that text. You got to send the tweet.

22:30You got to send the email right there. That's the idea for 1234. We can make this a thing. Can you get somebody to register like 1234.org? I feel like, you know, I don't want these hustler kids, like the 13 year old me would listen to this and immediately register 1234.com. I think it's fear. I think about my dad a lot. My dad, I think it's how people view their ability to go backwards. So I think there's something very scary about my chemicals. And Sam, I've always felt this in you as well. It's funny that you brought it up. I don't know you well enough to know this. And I'm not even sure you're going to believe me when I say it.

23:16But I do think you have a good shot of understanding what I'm about to say. My favorite Rocky is Rocky VI when he goes back to Philly with nothing. Yeah. Sean, there's something so weird in me. And it's almost like, am I sandbagging myself? I'm going to be very vulnerable here. I don't view it as I'm cool. I actually view it as I'm potentially flawed. There's something in me that romanticizes being okay with it all falling down. I'm back in like queens in a you know four hundred dollar a month apartment the entire internet is like see he was fucking overrated I told you know all the people that love me all the friends they have that don't love me are like see your fucking guy was a loser he fucked it up he sucks that I don't know why I like that but I believe Sam to answer your question it's something to do with that chemical I believe the people that I think you brought up some good stuff I think a lot about if my dad had a supermarket instead of a liquor store, I would have taken that to way bigger heights because liquor was, you couldn't ship it.

24:25Sure. That's like the luck component. Yeah. There's a ton of serendipity. Honestly, I think a lot about if my dad didn't want me to work in his store, I would have went to, because I fell in love with tech, I might've went to California and who the fuck knows what I've created in 95, 670, could have had one of those Mark Cuban moment. So I think about that or, you know, like I think when you can sell. When you can for all of everyone who's listening and if you have kids like this, if you can sell, you're in the game, right? Like if you can sell, you'll never be like zero. Right. And so what do you got here?

25:01Is one two three four dot com available? No, dude. One two three four is owned by like a telecom. Yeah, that's what I figured. That's impossible. I like the one like the one 37 yeah do that um are you kidding me dude i love that that was so i'm so pumped about this bro the funny thing by the way ben my guy he he texted us a screenshot of godaddy one it's one two three four dot org 15 000 he just said pull the trigger question mark no no don't don't don't pull that one we're good actually it's a good one i never think you should overpay for names because i think names are made dude i agree i agree right sam but do you know who disagrees fucking uh dharmesh dharmesh at uh i know dude i've been with them multiple times so dharmesh founded hubspot which bought my company and i've gotten close with him he's like he's like dude i bought chat.com or chat chat.com today i'm like why he goes because it was available i was like what are you gonna do with it he's like i'm not sure i'm gonna figure something out but i paid eight figures for it yeah look he's smart he knows like that you know look as long as dot com i mean And to me, the scary thing for, let me take a step back, not go too fast.

26:09He's smart enough to know he could probably flip that because it's a very, very, very big deal. On the flip side, there is a little concern for me of what happens when this no longer becomes the remote control of our society, right? Like I'm very fascinated by 20 years from now, talk about 16 years ago on Tumblr, 16 years from now, if you told me that 16 years from now, we live in a predominant VR world, I would be like, maybe. I can see that possibility. You could see that it's pushing in a direction. I don't think it's going to end up being these Apple Pro, Google Glass, Snap, the Facebook thing, Quest.

26:54My intuition is that it's going to have to be much more lightweight, but I never underestimate the human being. I'm positive somebody's going to make the contact lenses that work like this. And then we're off to the races. Because now, back to the way I think about day trading attention, this no longer houses the attention. Now it's housed here. Whoever controls that paradigm wins big. And then all of a sudden, does.com even matter, Nat? Is that how the UI UX works? Because.com didn't matter at all in 1990. Dude, that's how I feel about SEO businesses right now. Well, that's exactly what happened.