The #1 Secret Weapon Every Business Owner Needs in 2026

0:00I believe lack of love or extreme love leads to insecurity or extreme confidence, pure confidence, which is grounded in humility as well. So it's not ego. You just don't need outside validation because it was all formed inside of you. I believe those two things are literally the fuel of what gets people to the top. The problem is when you get to the top and you were fueled by lack of love and insecurity, you have a problem. Because once you get there, it's not what you think it is. What do you mean? Financial success is not love. Fame is not love. Notoriety is not love. winning does not cure love.

0:32And so when you get there and you thought that that would create it, that you would force the world or others to love you because of what you did, it gets double only and sometimes becomes even a bigger vulnerability than even what got you there. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. When we talk about treating love like a business, what does that look like? Or how does that look like for you? It's an interesting question. I mean, I think it's almost like, It's funny what's going through my head. It's the reverse. It's I think I treat my businesses like love. I think the reason things have worked for me over the last 30 years is I don't think business is business.

1:12You know, I think business is incredibly personal. And I think business is built on relationships. And I believe that the ultimate level of a relationship is love. And so I think I've gone against a lot of conventional wisdom in building my businesses around like how my relationships go there deeper now that's led me to struggle with certain firings and you know candor and it's definitely had some collateral micro negative impacts that I've gotten so personal trying to achieve love with my teammates and my partners and my investors and my employees um but I I don't treat love like business I treat business like love.

1:59And so when we, in general, in your, I feel like this, what do you think is the biggest thing that you've learned about love from business? Or specifically romantic love? Romantic love. Well, I've definitely learned through my life now that I'm 50 that in both those arenas, if you do not have candor, you're in trouble. That, you know, every, you know, vulnerability I've had on my path to love has been a lack of candor. And I used to think of that as a high form of love. Like, my love language was like not being negative, like not giving feedback, making it cozy and awesome, you know? So I've definitely learned that.

2:46You know, listen, I am the byproduct of the ultimate love. You know, I run on that currency because my mom instilled it so deeply in me. But business teaching me about love is hard, even the second time around of you asking it, because I came to business loved and loving that I never knew business without the energy of love first. I knew business second, and it trumped the way I thought about business. What do you mean by that? I appreciate you asking that. Well, the way I like to do business is for it to be warm. Like, you know, for it to be caring about the feelings. Like, I don't, I'm not like detached from my emotions when I do business.

3:47You know, how do I love my employees? so much that I can love my customers even more. And then if I do that, well then they'll love me back. And then that will work. I've always been weirded out by people thinking that business is cutthroat or sharp elbows. I say this a lot publicly. I've thought about starting a fashion brand called Nice Guys Finish First because one of the things I hate the most is that Nice Guys Finish Last is a mentality in business. and so what do I mean by that is I've been selling lemonade since I was six and baseball cards when I was 11 and wine when I was 16 to 20 to 30 you know I've been in business and selling and marketing and operating my whole life but I've always treated it from a very warm center the way I view love like a very positive energy you know, very accountable framework.

4:55I think when a lot of people hear Gary Vee, they know the business side. One of the things that I'm really wondering about is like, how did your family really start instilling that form of love in you that transferred over to business? I mean, it's 100 % my mom. I love my father with all my heart, but like, you know, the man held down the responsibility of like working every minute to start our American dream. So, you know, just the sheer unconventional, and I say unconventional, not just unconditional love that I got for my mom. My mom had a very challenging upbringing. She lost her mother when she was five.

5:31My grandma died when my mom was five. And then her father spent significant time in jail in Russia because the USSR was a fucked up place. And so she had just so much adversity. and you know she had a brother that she loved so much she had my father, her husband that she's still with after 50 years so she loves him but my mom often describes when I was born and she was 20 so she was still young that it was the first time she really felt like unconditional love and she made me feel that the whole way and you know I just I feel so heartbroken for people that don't feel loved when they're a child.

6:15I think it becomes the soundtrack of their lives. I think it is incredibly binary that if you feel incredible love or if you don't as a child that it has an extreme impact on your life. And for me I felt extreme love. Just full support, full safety, full joy, positive reinforcement, accountability. You know, love doesn't mean that you create entitlement or nepo, you know, means caring and giving and I just felt it so much that, and then it was naturally in me. I feel like I share my mother's DNA and then I was reinforced by her energy and so I just became that person for everyone around me long before I, you know, that's how I felt about Robbie Turnick and Eric Godfrey and my sister, you know, like those first two people were the friends I grew up with in the streets of Edison, New Jersey.

7:09I just love naturally and easily. Talk to me about it for a second because what I think is really interesting is when I talk to business leaders, oftentimes they'll cite the absence of love leading them to create these crazy, extravagant things in life. Like building the same business. But for you, it's the opposite. That's right. I just said it. I think it's a very smart observation as such a young dude. I believe lack of love or extreme love leads to insecurity or extreme confidence, pure confidence, right? Like the purest form, which is grounded in humility as well. So it's not ego. It's just confidence.

7:50You just don't need outside validation because it was all formed inside of you. I believe those two things are literally the fuel of what gets people to the top. The problem is when you get to the top and you were fueled by lack of love and insecurity, you have a problem. Because once you get there, it's not what you think it is. Financial success is not love. Fame is not love. Notoriety is not love. Winning does not cure love. And so when you get there and you thought that that would create it, that you would force the world or others to love you because of what you did, it gets double only. and sometimes becomes even a bigger vulnerability than even what got you there.

8:37I think that's really interesting. I feel like as a society, we often conflate desirability and vulnerability. And so when we are at the top and we have the status, we have the money, we have the fame, it's almost like there's this implicit promise that therefore we will be loved. Therefore you will be desired. Therefore you will be chased after. Therefore certain people will want to be around you both from a romantic standpoint or from a friendship standpoint or a business standpoint. The problem is humans are animals and they know. Deep down, when we're all by ourselves and are quiet, we know.

9:10And those people in those circumstances know those people don't love them. That's hard. It is hard, but I also tell those people nicely, deeply, empathetically, sympathetically, compassionately, that love is earned. Love is earned? Love is earned. How does that work with unconditional love? like we were talking about before. Well, love is earned from outsiders. You can walk into unconditional love, but that comes from very few people. Primary a parent and a sibling, right? Once you get to us status, we're grown now. What I think a lot of people that are successful don't realize is the way to get love is to love someone first.

9:51The way to get love is to love someone first. I'm not sure I understand. Well, it's a lot easier to be loved because you've been so loving and caring and emotionally there and actually gave a fuck about someone else and then they love you back, then you made$40 million and now they love you. It's grounded in something real. When you build wealth or success for yourself, the fuck does that have to do with the pretty girl or that buddy that now wants to be best friends? But when you're actually a human being and you're there for them in some manner, whether, you know this, because you do this, people have different love languages.

10:27Sometimes it's financial, sometimes it's emotional, Sometimes there's the rare breed that does both and they're put into pedestals by families. What are you doing for the other person? Just because your mom or your daddy didn't love you doesn't mean that the world owes to love you. You get to a place where you have the capacity to flip the script. And it's hard because you're empty and so there's this chip and this struggle, right? But the reality is to ask a stranger to love you just because it didn't work out for you and the luck of the draw of how you were born is audacious. And so the way that you love is giving first.

11:10Yeah, and giving, and this is very important, I think. One man's point of view, all of us are trying to figure this shit out so there's no expert shit here. My belief is that giving is based on what the person actually needs, not what you want to give them. you know through my years I watched a lot of people who had siblings children friends who wanted emotional support and they threw money at it and they thought they were giving yeah right make sense I think that's the biggest tragedy like you can try all you want to give someone love but if you're just two ships passing the night it doesn't count correct so yes I think that is what works but you have to actually deliver on what the person needs and almost always the person needs emotional.

11:54Emotional. A lot of us think we need financial. But there are incredible amounts of people that live incredibly humbly that are incredibly at peace and are enjoying their lives. But those people have the emotional thing figured out. And then there's a staggering amount of people in this big bad city that have all the resources in the world and are living dark ass lives. Last question. Because I don't take too much time. Um, if you could go on a rant, if you, if you forgot, I'll frame it like this. If you forgot everything that you knew about love, and the only thing that you understood was this guiding principle that love is about giving, like you said before.

12:39Um, can you just like go on a rant for a second? Like, can you like, like, sell me, like, why is this so important to understand? What is it about giving that makes loving so much easier afterwards? I guess especially for the lines of like, once you have wealth and money. Entitlement is the single way to be most unhappy. To be the least fulfilled. The audacity and the entitlement to think people should love you without you giving first is a framework I do not understand. You know, why are you allowed to be in a place where you're supposed to be getting something and the other person isn't. The sheer lack of empathy and people confuse compassion and sympathy with empathy all the time.

13:28Are you able to feel the other person or not? And if you do get blessed with empathy, everyone, if you get blessed with empathy, if you get blessed with empathy, no worries, but I see the camera. But if you get blessed with empathy, you are a rare breed that can actually feel others and then you will know immediately on the spot in a second that you should give love first. Please, so many of you are in the business of band-aids when you have cancer. If you are here and you are ambitious and you want something big you have to understand it starts here. Here. Here.

14:15You will burn out you will give up you must get good and good is based on a couple of very simple things one gratitude

14:32let me promise you one thing way too many of you are sad or worried or jealous or envious of what you don't have and you take for granted what you have everybody here who's trying to achieve money, fame, success I promise you if you achieved it but the person you loved the most was sick you would not be happy we must in our lives simplify the reason I am unstoppable in business is because I don't care about it

15:16Detach your self-esteem from your financial and professional success and watch your financial and professional success grow. We must simplify, we must lean into gratitude, and we must start to fall in love, first of all, with ourselves. If you don't love yourself, who the fuck is gonna love you?

15:48in three and a half years I'm going to be flying like I did for 12 hours today we're back and one of you in this room are going to email me I know this because I get 20 of them a day and one of you are going to email me and say hey Gary I just want you to know I saw you speak in Dubai in December of 2024 and I did X. I today at this point in my life live for that email. I am at the mercy of you doing something about what I just talked about. I ask you to do something about what I just talked about. Unfortunately, in these last 15 years, I have learned that a lot of you feel like you're doing something by just being here this isn't the game what you do tomorrow is the game so i ask you to execute hey everybody uh hope you're enjoying the podcast right now make sure you follow the podcast that's why i'm interrupting let's keep going on this show but follow the podcast it'll make my mom super happy since at a very young age i've been playing in the the two extremes of having a North Star, a perspective, a mindset that has allowed me to be happy, and then all the way on the other extreme, be wildly and deeply in practitionership and actually making and doing.

17:15And even seeing this gentleman wearing the clouds and dirt sneaker, like that was, I'm not sure I'm ever gonna position anything or any product in a more honest place from where I play because really I am a complete byproduct of somebody who lives in the clouds and plays in the dirt. And in the analogy I started this with, which is the middle sucks, I genuinely watch people play in the middle. They don't fully have a strategy or when I say strategy, they lack self-awareness of who they actually are. They're deeply dependent on other people's judgment. There's a whole lot of hopes and wants versus realities.

17:57and they're just genuinely not structured to be happy because of the circumstances of DNA, parenting, environment and that's the clouds. It's just so fun to live a life where you're not worried about other people's opinions when you're not dwelling on the past when you lack the ability to expect things from others because what it leads to is just a whole lot of happiness. It also leads to all the stuff I talk about. When you genuinely are happy about your process, you're really enjoying what you do, you've really tuned out both the cheering and the booing, all of a sudden, so much good behavior comes from that.

18:37You don't buy dumb shit to impress people because you're not worried if they're impressed or they're not. You do make content or start things because if it fails, you're not worried about them booing you. You're not worried about the judgment. It's just such an interesting place and I will probably spend the majority of my next 60 years trying to get to a place where I figure out different ways how to communicate this clouds thing because it's extremely obvious to me that my mentality, the way I was raised, the serendipity, and this is completely driven by gratitude. I get to stand up here because of the luck of the moment that my parents decided to have sex, right?

19:18Because this is a DNA thing. I mean that. I genuinely mean it like my perspective on life, my complete and utter obsession with not having any expectations from any other human being, having no expectations, having zero entitlement, genuinely not thinking I deserve anything, still being in a place where, and I was at the airport just now. I took like seven selfies before I boarded it. Some guy slides in. I saw him watching the whole time. Slides in and he's like, you ever tired of them? Like, never. Never.

19:57How in the world can a human being be tired of admiration? Like it's too humbling. I live a life where people think it's cool to take a picture with me, that's ludicrous, that's incredible, I will never figure out how not to lean into my humility. But that humility comes from a mindset that starts with deep self-esteem and deep understanding that other people's judgments actually have zero, zero impact on your life. And I get to be the byproduct of tremendous parenting to have that mindset. Not everybody had that. My father didn't. I know how my grandmother raised him and I watch how his actions go based on that.

20:41So I stand here, Orlando, today with deep gratitude for the way I was built when I hear the accolades, when those cheers come, it's so easy for me to default into your cheering me as a byproduct of a whole lot of great circumstances, a whole lot of good parenting, which doesn't allow me to get high or ever have an ego of not the humility. I'm the byproduct. I am desperate to figure out how to put sentences together to get you to understand how much that's the game. The reason I'm not interested in talking about becoming a millionaire is because I know thousands of millionaires who are miserable as fuck.

21:27What I'm interested in is trying to figure out how to get you to understand why it's so fun for me to play in the dirt. What I'm interested in is why does this work for me? Why did it work for me? Why does it work for other people that I see? Right. Because most people have no interest in putting in the deeply, deeply, deep hours of work required to actually be successful. Let me save you a whole lot of time. There is no shortcut or system or program or magic formula. If you want to build something that's meaningful and sustain it, it takes an obnoxious amount of hard work. In perpetuity, forever, bleeding out of your fucking mouth.

22:30That's just the truth. You know, are there maneuvers that borderline are illegal or at best wildly unethical that lead to short-term cash? Yes. Do 98 % of those people end up losing that money or going into a very dark mental place? Yes. And if you're interested in that, that's awesome. Do you, I don't give a fuck. You're not my sister. You know, you're not my kids. I don't care. What I care about is being historically correct selfishly and what I know is the following. We live in a time that is so opportunistic, it's wildly uncomfortable. How many people here are over the age of 40? Raise your hand.

23:18So for the people that have their hands up, we are fortunate to have the context of understanding a world pre-internet at scale that how many people under the age of 30? Raise your hands. You characters.

23:35First of all, in my opinion, deeply the most interesting and best generation. I hate watching old people fucking shit on you. I mean that. On the flip side, you have the unfortunate nature of what you don't control, which is you've never really been punched in the mouth because the economy's been too good since you've been a grownup. So you're fucking delusional.

24:03We live, let me say this. This is some real talk. How many people have been running their business for five years? Raise your hand. If you've raised your hand and you're not crushing it, you've got a problem. And let me tell you what that problem is. The last five years have been the single easiest years to build a successful business in the history of fucking time. So if you just raised your hand and you're not winning and you're not happy, you're in a fucking shit spot. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a take a step back and think maybe this isn't the right business. Maybe I'm chasing quick cash.

24:39The reason there's so many fucking crypto and cannabis and social media experts is people chase trends, not what they're good at or like.

24:50Not super complicated. People are chasing the next fast thing. If one more fucker rolls up on me in public and says they have a CBD brand, I'm gonna punch them in the fucking nuts. I know you do. Fuck.

25:11Bro, I have a CBD infused beef jerky. Great dick, now what? People think CBD is like the fucking magic formula. You're commoditized. Everybody's got one. It's now bad to be in that business. Same old shit, supply and demand, supply and demand. My friends, I come here this afternoon with one agenda to put pressure on the thing that has always been tried and true. Self-awareness and work ethic lead to happiness.

25:44We're living in a very dangerous time, even though it's great, because right now we are in the white hot moment of entrepreneurship being cool. I live the benefit of that every day, hence I feel a triple responsibility to remind people that it is an extremely lonely and difficult venture to be a successful entrepreneur. Most people fail and many will. And God forbid the economy softens. So many people are so over leveraged with raising capital or delusion that they're gonna get caught. And so it's just an important time right now while it's still good for everybody to truly, truly realize that it's so simple.

26:24The path to happiness is actually wanting to work 15 hours a day. Whether you work nine or 11 or two or 30, The key is you have to like it. Like you're talking to somebody who failed all his classes starting in fourth grade because I didn't like it. I was capable. I didn't like it. I have so much empathy for people trying to start businesses who don't like their business or are not meant to be entrepreneurs because I lived it for the majority of my life. The entire first chapter of my life was being forced to do something that wasn't naturally in me. I mean, every day of my life now, 15 hours goes like a blink.

27:05First period of eighth grade felt like a fucking eternity. How many people here hate at school? Just raise your hands. So for everybody who remembers, remember looking at the clock? That shit didn't move. I was like, haven't we been in science for an hour? No, four minutes, fuck me.