Why I'm Building the Next Pokemon

0:00I'm calling my shot. I'm going to build a very substantial intellectual property. There will be movies and pajamas and video games and cartoons and every motherfucker that fades this, I'm going to stick it to him. Could you comprehend watching vlogs of Jim Henson building Sesame Street right now? I would watch the shit out of that. We're excited about people discovering our world. We're proud of what the characters stand for, helping parents really parent out there. But we have humility. We know we have a long way to go. Look, I'm trying to build the next Pokemon, the next Marvel, the next Disney.

0:29IP is one of the things that is gonna be the big winner. It's a huge moment for us. Befriend's number one mission is to bring more positivity, accountability, kindness, warmth into the world. You think I'm fucking naive? I'm not fucking naive. I know people think it's a Gary V money grab. I listen, but they're fucking wrong. The biggest thing I wish for you is to dream big as fuck and then watch it unfold because you actually worked for it, not because you hit the lottery.

0:59This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. Hey, so everyone, I'm a genie from the future. And let me tell you what's gonna happen. One, the Jets are gonna win a Super Bowl in 2055. Two, V Friends is gonna surpass Disney in 2063.

1:20Three, I'm incredibly nervous about the Knicks game tonight. So tell me about what are the origins of the V Friends? The origins are just a series of many, many different little moments in my life. A, the origins are definitely the fact that I grew up in the 80s where Transformers, GoBots, Thundercats, He-Man, Max Hedrum. And then I have an 11-year younger brother, so he was very affected by Pokemon. So I grew up at a time where an extraordinary amount of intellectual property was invented from scratch. and whether it was video games or cartoons after school or trading cards like Garbage Pail Kids I'm sure had an impact on me.

2:00It was a very big thing I collected. So I think the actual answer is 1980s childhood was probably a big origin. Two, my personal brand getting bigger in my life. Me as Gary Vee becoming popular. The fact that I was spreading love and accountability and just kind of like the stuff I talk about was very impactful on me because I realized when I started VFriends back in 2021, I realized that at that point, I had enough popularity and awareness. Oh, I'm not gonna be everyone's cup of tea. I, as a white male in my 40s, late 40s at the time, I'm not the vehicle of spreading love to every person. I've been able to get 50 million people to care, but there's 8 billion people and I don't speak their language.

2:52I curse so maybe people don't like that. I knew that I couldn't spread the positivity and accountability to the world at the level that I wanted to just through me. So patient pig and patient panda allow me to spread patient's virtues at a level that I can't just by myself. And then just my own entrepreneurial ambitions, right? looking at AI and blockchain, the trend of collectability, I believe there was an opportunity to build something very meaningful. At first, I thought I was going more Disney Pokemon, but as I went through my journey, I realized I was building more of a Jim Henson-like business, which was, yes, I'd like it to be commercially successful like the Muppets or like Sesame Street, but I do wanna make a positive impact and help parents navigate this challenging parenting ecosystem.

3:50And so those are all the emotional historical things that went into probably me having that early 2021 Eureka moment of wait a minute, I can start a world, a universe. Let me get to doodling because I've always done that. And here we are. How do you balance those teaching kids lessons while also making the game fun so they're not necessarily, or the collecting fun so that they don't necessarily feel like they're being taught a lesson? It's a really good question. I mean, it comes in a lot of shapes and sizes, right? So the TCG game that we released in 2022, that collectible, that was just, hey, you gotta make a good game because if it's not a good game, no one's gonna care.

4:30When I write the kid's book, Meet Me in the Middle for Six-Year-Olds and Five-Year-Olds, well, that's just about marketing to the parents to read them the book, right? The kid's not making that buying decision. Sure. When you're doing the trading cards that just came out today, you're making the inserts really cool so that a 16 year old is like oh this is badass I want to collect this so there's a lot of different ways in right and so I would say that I would say there's a lot of different kind of I just pulled one here it's not hard for this to get pulled in a pack by a kid and them being like oh this is cool I care about that so you know it just depends On the flip side, you know, it's around the social media content.

5:17It's about incredible interviews like this. There's just like 40 different ways of getting in. And really, I've already brought it up. No matter how successful I had been in my career up to five years ago, no matter how many followers I had, I knew I was signing up for a 20 to 30 year journey, not a 20 to 30 week journey. And so it will be everything. It'll be video games, it'll be animated films, it'll be social media content. And then sometimes God just smiles down on you. Like, it's not lost on me that at this moment when I was prepared to go on the biggest journey of my career, AI was invented, or not invented, but has finally hit critical mass where I can leverage that level of technology that lets me compete with some of the biggest Hollywood studios in the world.

6:05You know, and so like, you know, it's just kind of like navigating the game of entrepreneurship, Joe. Sure. You use that word compete. Yes. And you brought up Pokemon earlier. What do the VFriends cards do that, say, Pokemon don't do? Well, first of all, I don't have the audacity to even, you know, I aspire one day to have people care about VFriends even half of how much they care about Pokemon. Pokemon is a$100 billion intellectual property. It is the biggest intellectual property in the world. I would say this. I would say that almost everything Pokemon does better it's obviously had a 30 year 40 year head start I will say the one thing that I do feel over time will become obvious is there's more meaning in VFriends I'll give you an example this is the reliable rat right as you know being a rat is not a good thing right like that means you're stabbing someone in the back you're doing the wrong thing by them I also know that you know that reliable is one of the most admirable words.

7:10And so, for example, in VFriends land, I'm desperate to change perception. Right? So I think there's a lot more meaning in, you know, when, here's a good one. When a kid falls in love with authentic anaconda, when a seven-year-old goes up to their mom and says, what's authentic mean? I'm providing emotional value to a family. You can close this door. to a family that allows a mother or father to have a conversation around authenticity and why it's important. So I think the one advantage VFriends will have and will become much more clear over the next decade is its purpose, my intent, and this is why I bring up Jim Henson.

7:55As I started going through this journey, I became a lot more aware of the depths of Jim. Do you know what Fraggle Rock is? Oh yeah, of course. So do you know that the brief, the brief to create Fraggle Rock, like the written documentation that was given to the creative team of what they're trying to figure out. And as you may know this, Joe, normally these things are 10 pages, 15 pages, 5 pages. This was literally two words. Jim Henson wrote two words to his creative team. It said, end war. Hey everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded.

8:34I appreciate your attention and thanks for being part of this journey. See you later. It's a little ambitious. It's incredibly ambitious and it inspires me tremendously. For me, VFriends brief is bring balance to the world, right? which is why yes we have you know empathy elephant and compassionate catfish but we also have tenacious termite competitive clown kind warrior you know a character that probably sums up our world quite a bit kind warrior you know and so I'm really excited about trying to accomplish this mission to get a lot of people to fall in love with these characters both selfishly I'd like to build an incredibly big empire business around it.

9:24But definitely, it's nice to sell something that you know has, I'll give you my biggest takeaway so far. I get three to five to 10 messages a day via DM or email from girl dads that thank me for creating a brand that allows them, you know, it's the same email every time, just written differently. Hey, I've got a son and daughter, I've got two sons and a daughter, or I got three daughters and a son and I'm really into card collecting and me and my son every Saturday go to the shows or the card store and my poor daughter has to like get dragged along with us because we're letting mom do X, Y, and Z.

10:02Thank you for creating VFriends and especially thank you Gary for creating Ambitious Angel and Fearless Fairy. It's given me something to start collecting with my daughter and so, you know, these are, it feels good to be a part of something like that. All new drinks are now at McDonald's. With refreshers like the strawberry watermelon refresher. And the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba. To crafted sodas like the Sprite Berry Blast with berry flavors and cold foam. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all now at McDonald's. Refreshers contain caffeine. Copyright 2026, The Coca-Cola Company.

10:45Sprite is a registered trademark of The Coca-Cola Company. Yeah, you've mentioned a couple of specifics and you've shown me one of the chaser cards. Tell me about what went into the decision process to make this one a chaser card, this one this type. How did you decide which gets the premium? Me and a wonderful young man on my team named Adam Ripps and I spend months and months and months on these sets. This is obviously the second year we've done it. We did it last year with Topps Chrome. Much goes into it. so we have an entire universe of 250 characters that we've been creating, speaking about, people have been collecting for five years in digital form, in comic book coin, pin.

11:28We go to shows. So we have a very good sense of our small community, our 10 ,000 most avid collectors. We have a good sense of which characters are exciting, which ones are emerging. Last year, out of nowhere, Decisive Duck got really going, you know, and got real heat. And so when we go into, I mean, we're already making the 2027 set. Literally yesterday, I was flying from San Antonio back to New York, which is a long story. I was in the reverse place I was supposed to be. And me and Adam, even on the day before the 2026 drop, where we should be working on promotion and marketing and demand creation, we spent an hour on that flight working on the 2027 set.

12:11And the things that go into it is, one, we're working with tops directly to create very interesting collectibles, hits, rarities. But our responsibility is knowing which characters are gonna drive heat, right? For example, we have a one in every 10 case hit this year called Erupt. It's our kaboom, it's our big one, right? This year we put our top characters, Driven Dragon, you know, the very, very, very, very lucky black cat, which is our Charizard, Mickey Mouse, Rare Robot, Willful Wizard, We wanted to load the set this year because we knew we were in year two and we knew if this one really hit, well now we're on our way.

12:53So we're really, a lot goes into it actually. I would say thousands of hours in who's in this, because we have 250 characters. Last year only had 100 characters. This year has 200 characters. So who's in it? Who's not in it? Why? What variants? What inserts? Who has three inserts? Who has none? but I will tell you this, Joan this is probably the, as I wrap up I apologize, I gotta run but here's probably the thing that's most exciting to say I've never in my 30 year professional career and I've built multiple family businesses I've worked with my father, my brother my best friends there's nothing that I have more fun building than VFriends and for a kid that grew up on trading cards to have the ability to create a trading card set is a real blessing the one thing that I would also say is for all the new people you're about to join one of the greatest collectible groups of people you'll ever meet.

13:45You will be stunned by the kindness and warmth of your fellow collectors in here. They will tell you right now that some of them had made their best friends. They get their joy from this world. Everybody who's watching, who's new to vFriends cards? You've never bought a vFriends card or yesterday was the first time you got into vFriends or today's the first day of getting into vFriends. If you're new to vFriends, please say new. what's your first impressions of VFriends? What does it remind you of? What does it make you feel for the girl dads? Is it a new collectible for you dad? Have you been bored of other things?

14:20Do you like the virtues of the characters? Do you like the community? If you're new, would love to get a sentence on what you're taking away from it so far. First time ripping the product, is there anything just like in general that as someone kinda on the back end involved in the creation, like anything cool to look out for or just like any like general notes? I think the variations where you're expecting a certain color but there's a purple and green variant, the short print and the super short print, I think is really cool. I mean, look, I think it's a better set than last year. I think it's got huge inserts and I think the hard quality is through the roof this year.

14:58So I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm super stoked too. looking through what I've seen, the inserts look amazing. I love that there's kind of rare inserts. Any product I rip, football, baseball, basketball, it's always fun to chase rare inserts. Become as big of a chase as anything. I see some of the questions. There's a Stellar Haze, which is a case hit. There should be one in here. There's comic clipping. So we have thicker cards with relics of pieces of our comic books that are very sought after. What you're really looking for is The Erupt. One in every 10 cases. The Erupt, which was made by the original Kaboom artist, Gila Namath.

15:46So that's something you're looking for. And then you're looking for all these different variants. If you go to vfriends.com slash chrome, vfriends.com slash chrome, you can get an extraordinary amount of information. and so that should help a lot of you. Also, everybody who's new to vFriends, go to vFriends.com slash quiz. If you take that AI quiz, you can actually figure out which vFriend you most associate with, who you should collect, or who you're most like. So check that out, please. Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting.

16:23Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome. Columbia. Engineered for whatever. Thank you.