There are 2 Ways to Build Confidence.

0:00This is for everyone who's listening who wants to push the envelope. I believe that you have the courage to be creative in two very extreme places. One, nothing to lose. There's just nothing to lose, so why not invent punk rock or be a modern contemporary artist in Manhattan when you're living in a shithole and you're just splashing stuff. And then on the other side, which was where I came from, was incredible depth of knowledge and conviction. By the time I did my first episode of Wine Library TV on YouTube in February 21st, 2006, I was 31 years old. I had spent pretty much my entire life since I was 15, which at that point meant more than half my life on studying wine.

0:41Even though I was going to be silly and do this stuff, there was no one who was going to walk up on me and outclass me in knowledge. Even though I was silly, no one, not the poshest sommelier in England or France or Italy was going to be able to come in and expose me for not having substance. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. I'm going to go straight into it. Please, Gary. The thing I love is I got to know you obviously through when you were doing wine. Yes. And it went like wildfire all of a sudden. And I thought about it. Because obviously, I am one of those incredibly stupid people who owns a vineyard.

1:25You're one of the smart people who sell the wine. Yes. Well, actually, the people in between are the smartest. They're the smartest. The retailer and the producer take the biggest risks. The biggest risk. The distributors make the most margin. And they're just peeing out. You know, they're fulfillment people. But what I thought was brilliant about what you did is that you changed the way people thought about wine. and I've always thought that's a sort of fundamental in driving great ideas is that you don't operate in the world that's there you change the way people see it and feel about it and that way you gain huge attention and then you decided I've done that but I think you're going back to it aren't you?

2:12Yeah I mean it's always around the reason I was four minutes late which I apologize to everyone I was literally talking to my best friend, Brandon Warnicke, who's kind of taken the reign of running the wine business, my family wine business, since I started Vayner years ago. But I've literally secretly run that wine business every day since I've left. And then obviously I had the direct-to-consumer wine brand. I got a little more into your world of being a producer. I didn't own the vineyards, but I bought the grapes. And so that was a very successful venture. In less than three years, we sold it to Constellation.

2:49It was a substantial exit. And then over the last four years, I've been in the restaurant business in a significant way, which has dragged me a little bit into the wine world, which has been fun. And then several years ago, I innovated for my father's business something called Wine Text, which is a daily text for a really good wine deal that has really revolutionized my dad's business again. So wine is always very near and dear to me. Yeah. In fact, one of the things I'm spending a lot of time right now is on non-alcoholic wine. Oh, yeah. That's a huge growing market, isn't it? And for gentlemen like you and guys like me, it's getting scary.

3:28And I use scary as a great term, as a slang term for, oh, my God, I think we're within the next five years going to see really high quality non-alcoholic wine, which I think will be very attractive to many consumers. So, yes, it's definitely one of the pillars. So you're still there, you're still doing it, you're still engaged with it. And, of course, it was your background. Your family had a wine shop. Yeah, I mean, it was a liquor store. A liquor store, I love that. It really was. It was a liquor store. My dad's store was called Shoppers Discount Liquors. But we had a very interesting location in New Jersey.

4:06One side was, like, very blue-collar. one side was very white collar my dad had a liquor store before the one that I grew up in smaller in Clark, New Jersey very blue collar so my father was a blue collar you know, merchant beer, liquor, pints, cigarettes you know, wrapping papers when I didn't even know what the hell that was but I noticed as a teenager that people were asking for wine and I was a collector in trading cards and comic books and toys and when I realized people collected wine when I was 15. That changed everything for me and that's what I wanted to build. But it was funny when you were talking about creativity, breaking the rules.

4:49You have an incredible career in that. I'm building one. I was thinking as you were talking, what allowed me to do what I did in the wine world when I was so entrenched for being a very posh? I remember when Jancis Robinson flew from England to be on my wine show in New Jersey. I gotta go watch the clip it was a very watershed moment even Robert Parker even though he was American it was definitely an upper brow play the answer, and this is for everyone who's listening who wants to push the envelope I believe that you have the courage to be creative in two very extreme places one, nothing to lose there's nothing to lose so why not invent punk rock or you know or be a modern contemporary artist in Manhattan when you're living in a shithole and you're just splashing stuff and then on the other side which is where I came from was incredible depth of knowledge and conviction by the time I did my first episode of Wine Library TV on YouTube in February 21st 2006 I was 31 years old I had spent pretty much my entire life since I was 15 which at that point meant more than half my life on studying life even though I was going to be silly and do this stuff there was no one who was going to walk up on me and outclass me in knowledge even though I was silly no one not the poshest sommelier in England or France or Italy was going to be able to come in and expose me for not having substance.

6:37Because that's what was great about it, because you had that depth. You really did connect with that depth of knowledge. Yes. But you talked about it in a kind of such a different way that it actually, not only did you enjoy watching it, it was fun watching it. It was like a sort of entertainment. It was entertainment, wasn't it? You know this, and I think this translated well for me in the advertising industry. I wanted to create net new drinkers. I wanted more people to like wine. I was 31 years old and I had no friends in their 20s and 30s that liked it because it wasn't cool. And even if someone stumbled into it because they went on like a trip to Napa with their girlfriend, they're like, oh, I like this.

7:20As soon as they came back to New York or New Jersey or Chicago and started to try to go on a journey, everybody in the wine world made them feel like crap. Everyone's intimidated by wine. You know, when we go out to eat a nice meal, we're not scared to order salmon. We don't feel lesser than to order pork chops or scallops. But when the wine list gets handed, everyone shivers as if there's something you're supposed to know. And my point of view there, then and today, is you need to know what you like. And if you get into it, then you start studying a little bit and you learn stuff. Yeah, I wanted to tear down the establishment.

7:57man. That has been a consistent deal. And that's a kind of consistency, isn't it, to everything that you've done. You take this, there you are, hugely successful. I mean, literally, I mean, I had people, several people said, John, you've got to watch Gary Vaynerchuk, you've got to watch, which obviously I did. I always remember the wood monster. Yes. The wood monster. The oak monster. The oak monster. Thank you for remembering that. By the way, I'm getting goosebumps. I'm humbled by you knowing that. The oak monster was a great one. You'll love this because you're from Europe. America, you know, we sometimes like things too big, too ridiculous.

8:29And our wines in Napa got way out of control in that era. Everything had way too much oak. You could barely even taste the wine at some point. And so, yes, I needed to make a point about that, and I created the oak monster. And so I would taste the wine that would get a 96 points Parker and be$150 a bottle, and everyone loves it. And I would say, yeah, but, like, you could replicate this flavor for 30 bucks if you put enough oak in it. Enough oak in it, yeah. And so, yes, I made a big point about that. That was great. I always remember that. But anyway, so there you are. You have this phenomenal success.

9:03You say, right, I'm going to take that and I'm going to transfer that over into thinking about how the media works. Yes. So you could have gone to another industry. You could have gone to anything to sort of say I'm going to apply that. I think you'll appreciate this, Skiddy, your background. I knew even when I was doing White Library TV, and again, I was 31 years old. It was about eight years after I'd run the business truly day-to-day. Started running it in 98. I knew that at that point in my life that I was a marketer that happened to be a businessman and salesman. And that what had really transpired between 2006 and 2009 before I started VaynerMedia was in that 11 years that I was running my daddy's business, I was innovating marketing-wise in a way that was profound, not only by the liquor store and wine industry, but by the general population of 8 billion people.

10:02And I started to realize that the biggest companies in the world were underestimating aggressively what was about to happen, which was, and you definitely know what I'm about to say, we had this incredible era when the world transferred from the radio to the television and I was a really poor student but I was pretty good at history and I was interested in it at the time I didn't realize why now I do understand turning 50 you know another 15 years of my career I do use history to tell me the future I love pattern recognition I understand human you know trends. And so my sense in 2009 when I started VaynerMedia was that social, that Amazon, that Netflix, that these were going to have profound impacts on the biggest companies in the world from a marketing standpoint.

10:56And I wanted to go learn. I knew nothing. When I started the firm, I didn't know about legends like you. But the other thing, first of all, you didn't do a marketing course, did you? And I think that's interesting, but you You saw yourself as a marketeer. You kind of had a sense of what was going on. Well, I had something better than a sense. I had results. Yes. You've done it. Yes. It's much better to be a great football player than to go to university and learn how to become a good football player. So taking that learning. There was something else there that you said, which is look at the history of things and you see patterns.

11:34You see patterns. and I do think we're in a kind of world where people don't try and look back to learn I always say, I went to art school and when I went to art school we were told there's a Rubens exhibition, you've got to go and see it, not that they expected us to paint pictures like Rubens but they said just look at it, have a kind of and I feel so much today, people have lost that context so they don't reflect on something and then understand how to push it forward, so there you are So you look at that and you go, this is going to really change. And I grabbed that moment. Yeah, I just, I had a sense that, you know, again, let's take a step back for the listener.

12:16I'd launched an e-commerce website for my dad's store in 1997. And that was just so wild. You know, a liquor store in New Jersey launching the first e-commerce wine businesses in America. That was just so left field. And I felt the effects of email marketing. You may know this. it was happening in the UK with Berry Brothers and others catalogs ruled the day in the wine business and print full page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in America catalogs and I was able to outflank the Sherry Lehmans the Morels, the Zachies the premier wine shops in America by sending emails in the late 90s instead of building catalogs and I built this big web business and this big email business for my father and then Facebook, MySpace Twitter and YouTube came along in this three-year window.

13:06And I just sensed that these platforms were going to have equally a huge paradigm shift in consumer behavior the same way that email and websites did. So I already had my own experienced pattern recognition of like paradigm shift. I'm going to do this again. And this one was different because this was about brand building, not about selling. right? This was, you know, again, I'm getting the goosebumps. This was about brand. I was building my brand. I was building the business's brand. This wasn't sales, you know, pamphlets. This was information. This was education. This was affinity. This was entertainment.

13:47And the economic impact was enormous. So yes, I had a feeling it was happening again. And I think the other thing about that, which I love, is that it wasn't just about brand movement, we talk about this. You were making it into a movement. It was bigger than, because the brand is great, absolutely. You've actually changed the way people approach it. I think people like brands, but they like them when they have a profound impact and they show people a different way of doing something. If you look at the history of the great brands, that's what they did. They have a great product a lot of times.

14:25I think product sometimes gets forgotten. I had a meeting last week, you'll love this as an ad man, where we had this meeting and I looked at the CMO directly in the face and said, look, I think we're in our prime. We're in our prime right now. We're a really good firm. I have bad news for you. I think we can do a really good job in marketing this. The problem is we're going to speed up everyone knowing about this and I think your product sticks. I love that. What I was saying, and I said it tongue in cheek, but I did say it. and then I kind of jumped in and said listen what I'm saying by that is not that your product stinks I think you're 24 months away from people actually buying this and I also think you need to fix this and this and at least debate this and they were stunned because you know we're in the business of getting clients but they heavily appreciated it but I do think you're right I think great brands also ride on the back of a great product but then the point you're talking to which I very much agree with you is when you build a community around where the brand is taking you, well, now you're going to Nirvana.

15:37Yeah, that's where they be. You've made it a part of culture, but just to go back to that again, but I think it's such an important point you're making. And I sat in so many meetings, who's the creative person, I had to sell the work and stay in the meeting. And they'd be talking about problems in the Northwest or Northeast and pack promotions. and I'd always be sitting there going, have you ever thought about making a better product? And it was very interesting. I was talking to Jeff Rayner at Mammoth Brands and that's the first thing they do. Can we make it better? And then at least, and that's in our control.

16:11Correct, and gives you a chance. Yeah, that gives you a better chance. Other things are going to affect what you do, but nobody, they don't really sit down and think about, is this really, really better? Do I genuinely believe in it? I think most Fortune 500 executives disrespect the consumer. Yeah. I really do. I say that. No, I don't even say it humbly. I say it actually angrily. I believe that most Fortune 500 executives disrespect the end consumer. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. They just sit around and they're like, we're just going to pound this message into their head and they're going to go to Saintsbury and buy it.

16:48We're just going to spend so much media dollars against this big idea. Listen, you and I, when it's all said and done and we're hanging out in heaven, we will be looked fondly upon in the history of advertising. You and I, on our best day, are trying our damnedest to come up with the idea, right? But we're human beings, and the industry has not accepted that that is calculated guessing, grounded in talent and history, but it's still a high-risk maneuver. and everyone in Fortune 500 land just thinks we're going to push it and on a product, I mean, I think a lot about with food, like people are getting more educated of what's in their products people are being much more thoughtful back to the non-alcoholic wine, the chemicals in food, I mean you guys have it better in Europe than we do in the US but like, I don't, I just sit in meeting after meeting and I'm like you know that people are not stupid, right?

17:46and I think we need more humility in ad land and Fortune 500 land and by the way this is more broad every entrepreneur and creative person that's listening right now please think about this please do not have audacity that the world should like your stuff because it's your stuff it's like the analogy I use all the time is everyone thinks their child's the cutest on the record most people's child is not the cutest child on earth because there's somebody else that's cute you know we go very subjective and our subjectivity is often grounded in selfishness. Well, also the other thing, too, is corporations often, the first thing is profit.

18:28So if I can make this cheaper, then that is better, rather than, could I make this better? And in the long term, that will be better for me. You know, I will say, I do believe we're in the early stages of people starting to feel it. There's a supermarket, if you call it. There's a store in LA called Airwad. Are you familiar with it? No, no, no. It's a very bougie supermarket. They call it like a Whole Foods, but like 10 times more expensive, 10 times cooler. I mean, they're charging$40 for a shake. And they're selling the cleanest bread in America for$22 when you can go buy bread for$4. And it's highly successful.

19:10You look at LVMH, right? Yeah. You know, I think that in the business world, I'm starting to think that people are starting to see, you know what? maybe if I make it$2 more but it's better and I communicate that that's actually a better business than this era that we had to drive everything to the lowest possible cost this Tesco, Sainsbury, Walmart era that I think is fine and I'm a capitalist I'm all about it I get it but I do think the consumer evolution is real I think unfortunately there's separation of wealth in a lot of parts of the world that are probably leading to some of this But I do think there's huge, for everyone who's listening, there's huge optionality on price and quality.

19:53There's a lot of ways to win now. It's not just the lowest price. It's not just the highest price. It might be a unique value proposition to the left or to the right, not just to the up and the down. It's given more optionality for entrepreneurs and creatives. It's interesting that because, I mean, virtually everybody we've talked to has talked about, I mean, James Dyson was fantastic about how I wanted to make a vacuum cleaner. that really was better. Yes. Technology, engineering. And then it had to look better. Yes. It had to look like it. Yes. And charges$100 more than his competitor. And we all know it has a hugely successful business because he has not only put quality into it, he's put engineering into it, and he's actually made it look great.

20:40And suddenly he goes, if I can clean it normally in a cupboard, I'll pay a bit more for that. So that value is something I think a lot of corporations miss. There's also something else that I think Dyson does that I think is wildly not talked about, which is it saves time. I think when you sell time, you win. And I will tell you that my belief of why Dyson has done both incredibly well in vacuuming, but also in hair and blow drying, is subconsciously. I don't know if a lot of women slash men that are listening right now even realize why they love Dyson, but I'm about to point to something that they might be like, oh my God, that's why I love it.

21:20Because it saves her seven minutes in getting ready. Because it saves her or him four minutes in cleaning the floor. Time is an incredibly important one. I must go back. I must get back. It's a really fantastic one. I mean, I agree with you. The engineering. All those things. But I'm telling you, for many of us, you know, I was an early investor of Uber, but I really blew it. I could have been the first investor at Uber. Travis, the founder of, well, not the founder. Garrett Camp actually invented Uber. They were co-founders. But Travis and I were very friendly at that time. I could have invested.

21:55I do not invest. I was actually, I went against one of my biggest principles, you know, scared money doesn't make money. I had less savings than I was accustomed to because I just bought my first big boy apartment in Manhattan. Bad timing. Because in hindsight, if I had the liquid, it would have ended up being the greatest investment of my career. So I don't invest in Uber, but it's being run by one of my best buds. And they come to New York City. In fact, in my office next door is an email from Uber thanking my brother, AJ, for taking the first Uber in Manhattan. We were right there. And in fact, in that first day that Uber was here, I watched, like the first day it launched, which was about a week after AJ took the drive, and I watched people taking Ubers in Manhattan, and I would watch cabs drive by people with the light on.

22:50And they were still waiting for their Uber. And I realized that Uber was going to be massive because Uber was selling time. It was also selling the perception of time. Now it seems mundane, but the fact that somebody could sit in a skyscraper like this, order an Uber, go downstairs and have the Uber there, in 2011, whatever that time was, whatever year it was, was profound. It was profound. And so, yes, I think time's a big one. Yeah. There's only so much of it. Correct. So then you decide, I'm going to start VaynerMedia. I was going to take that thinking of how into a kind of world that is dominated by being, you know, skyscrapers the size of whatever.

23:36But you went in with this view of, I'm going to change the way people feel or think. And you focused on this new thing, social media, social media. So you start that, pitch it. How did you get to the clients? How did you get to people? I had a lot of Twitter followers. Yeah. You know, because of the blind business. And again, back to what I said earlier about football. One of the things that makes me very unique in the history of advertising is I'm truly the practitioner of the craft that my agency sells. Think about that. Yeah. You know, again, it's so fun to talk to you about this. Today. Yeah.

24:16Today. Forget about when I started the company. Today, I will do more social media marketing myself. I write the copy to the team I write the copy to the team that I post on my Instagram content I'm a practitioner of the craft so anyway I had a lot of followers on Twitter and Twitter was starting to get important it was starting to be known right it started to make it into the BBHs and BBDs people had heard of it at least which was much better than it was two years earlier when I started on it and I it was very interesting actually I got a cold email from ESPN. And they said, we've been doing our homework.

24:58We're thinking about getting on Twitter. You have like 500 ,000 followers. Like, can you come in and consult us about Twitter? I'm like, I didn't get paid for this. So I came in. Is it good? And like, I knew nothing. No deck, no presentation. I just showed up and started talking. And all these fancy executives in ESPN, I'm such a sports fan. And these were like, wow, ESPN executives in the C-suite. And I, you know, I do have the gift of gab. So I walk in and I go one hour straight of just insane knowledge. And at the time, again, it would be like somebody walking in two years ago talking about AI.

25:36Like nobody knew what the hell I was talking about in the room. But I also, for my wine days, I'm very good at being, breaking down complex things in an average Joe way. And I think that's helped my career as a communicator. and even though they didn't really know what I was saying they did know what I was saying because I was making it contextual and at the end I didn't even ask how much they were going to pay me at the end they were like okay thank you so much and the check is going to be in the mail I was like how much and they're like$5 ,000 brother I thought I made$40 million I go downstairs I'm like I can't believe I just got paid$5 ,000 for that you know I grew up very humbly I grew up in a studio apartment the size of this room we're in right now with family members.

26:26You don't even know I'm building my dad's business to a big business. He doesn't pay me shit, so I'm making no money. So this$5 ,000 was like, so I called my brother, who's still in college but about to graduate, and we're debating starting all these different businesses. One would have looked like Groupon. Ironically, one would have been about fantasy sports. and I called him and I said hey I think we should start a company consulting the Fortune 500 so I just started making content more and more about marketing not wine and that just was all lead biz dev Bon and Bao who went on to have a pretty big career in advertising was at PepsiCo at the time had us stand up their PepsiCo account the NHL became aware of some of the work I did for ESPN we started the company in a conference room like this in Columbus Circle at another company that got famous in that era called Buddy Media.

27:16That's sort of the sales force. They had some clients they introduced us to, and kind of away we went. But I think the other thing there is that because you were engaging with it, you were opening doors. And I think that's how I always kind of say to people, do interesting things, and interesting things will happen to you. I think that's right. And not enough people are out there engaging, bringing the outside world in, affecting what you're doing, and then people suddenly go, we need to talk to you. I also knew that something most people didn't know that seems common sense now, but I knew I didn't have to go through Ad Age or the New York Times or the industry.

27:52I knew that I didn't have to go to Cannes. I could make content and it would come to me. I was living my thesis. What I wanted my clients to do, I was doing for my own business. And that's the power of creativity, isn't it? Because there you were creating content that people were connecting to. and that gave you power. 100%. You're talking to people and they're responding. You know, it's funny. I'm a businessman, but when I get into long evenings or deep discussions, I always associate much more to my curiosity and creativity than I do to my salesmanship or operational capability. I agree with you.

28:31I think it's been the beacon of things that have worked for me and the others that I admire. I think it's a very big gift when you can see things differently. and if you then on top of that have the ability to execute, because you know this, we've met a lot of creative people, but they can't execute themselves into their own pants. I've always thought, which you were, I've always thought being an outsider gives you greater perception. And I think if you look at a lot of great creative people throughout history, they've been outsiders, and it's that sense of outside looking in gives you a perspective as opposed to being part of the group.

29:08The very senior executive at Publicis who's gone out to do something else ran into me literally at Madison Square Garden, ironically, right there, and grabbed me and said, hey, you don't know me. I'm like, hey, John, nice to meet you. His name was John as well. He said, I just want to say something to you. He said, you know, we used to really make fun of you. And we really thought you were kooky and an idiot and all this. And he goes, I had dinner with a bunch of my old pals, you know, many in the C-Streets of the biggest companies. Well, many outside the industry now. And somehow it got brought up.