Welcome to Impact Theory.

You are here, my friends, because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless,

but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with

it.

So our goal, with this show and company, is to introduce you to the people and ideas that

are going to help you actually execute on your dreams.

All right.

Today's guest is one of the world's leading marketing experts and living proof that the

American Dream is alive and well, if you're willing to work your face off.

He was born in Belarus in the former Soviet Union, didn't speak a word of English when

he arrived.

His entire extended family lived together in a tiny-ass apartment in Queens, and as

the foreign kid, he was once bullied into drinking urine from a soda can.

He was a D and F student, and pretty much everyone thought he would fail in life.

Despite all of that, though, this guy not only refuses to complain about anything ever,

he is wildly optimistic, upbeat, and freakishly driven.

A born entrepreneur, he began by ripping flowers out of people's yards and selling them back

to them.

He had an entire lemonade franchise system while he was still riding a big wheel, and

in his teens, he was routinely making thousands of dollars a weekend selling baseball cards,

until his father forced him to go to work in the family business for $2 an hour.

But he didn't waste time whining about it.

He just got to work, and just out of college, by being an early adopter of the internet.

He took his father's discount liquor store from being a local store doing $4 million

a year in revenue to an internet phenomenon doing $45 million in revenue in just five

years.

Now, leveraging his unique ability to identify where consumer attention is going next, he

founded the pioneering digital agency VaynerMedia, which serves some of the largest companies

on the planet, and along the way, he's also built a massive social following of his own

that rings in at around 3.5 million devoted followers.

He is a people first kind of guy, and you can see it in everything that he does, from

his employees to his fans and partnerships.

As such, he's greeted like a rock star.

His business is growing crazy fast, and it'll soon be starring in Apple's original series

Planet of the Apps with Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, and will.i.am.

On top of all that, he's also a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist who was an

early investor in such juggernauts as Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber, so please, dearest

of friends, help me in welcoming the four-time New York Times best-selling author and future

owner of the New York Jets, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Gary: Thank you, bro.

Tom: Welcome to the show.

Gary: Dude, that was super impressive.

Tom: Thank you, sir.

You [crosstalk 00:02:52] Gary: There's no shot I could have pulled

that off, and also, after listening to all that, I'm really glad my mom sent you the

memo.

Tom: Right?

Gary: That was very nice.

Tom: I got it all from her, just yeah, straight out.

Gary: It's good to be here.

Thanks.

Tom: Yeah, it's good to have you, man.

Gary: Nice to have some peeps in the audience.

I always like that a little bit better, so ...

Tom: You and me both, yeah.

Gary: Yeah.

Tom: So play right to them.

I mean, in many ways, this is for them.

This all started originally back with Inside Quest.

It was all about doing something for the employees.

Gary: Yep.

Tom: And I had this unending terror, because I have these 25 bullet points that I think

anybody should be living by, and I was terrified people would memorize them but not actually

live by them.

Gary: Sure.

Tom: Which is like the death sentence, because you think you're doing something right.

You pacify yourself by memorizing it.

So yeah, I love having people here and getting feedback.

Gary: It's funny you just said that.

I think so many people are keyboard activists, right?

Everybody's good at sending a tweet about how the world should be, and nobody's doing

anything about it, and that is just very much human nature.

Tom: I was just going to ask if you think that's human nature, or if you think that

we've gotten soft as a culture?

Gary: Yes.

I mean, of course we've gotten soft as a culture in the U.S., because the U.S. has had an incredible

200-year run.

Right?

This is just what happens, so as a culture, I can't speak for people that live in the

Amazon River, and I can't speak for people that still live in Belarus, but the American

culture is soft, and that's a great thing.

That means there's been enormous amounts of prosperity, but let's not be naïve.

I mean, people literally complain when somebody gives them the wrong amount of extra cream

in a Starbucks $6 coffee.

We've gotten to a place where we complain ... Out of all those lovely things you said,

as I stood there getting ready to come, the part that, and I'm glad you pick up on this

and not a lot of people have said it before, so thank you, my lack of interest in complaining

is so high.

And when I watch what people complain about, it breaks my heart, because they completely

lack perspective, and I genuinely believe my happiness and optimism comes from my perspective.

Even in political unrest times like right now, a lot of people very bent out of shape,

but the reality is, is that it's just never been better to be a human being.

That's just the truth.

That's just data.

That's reality, and yeah, I mean, it's just a very fun time to be alive.

So much going on.

The internet is starting to hit maturity.

Look at what we're doing right now.

Tom: It's crazy.

Gary: This way now, right?

Would have cost millions of dollars in production and distribution to have the amount of people

who watch this just 15 years ago.

I just think it's very interesting times, and I was saying something to a friend the

other day.

I was like, "Could you imagine if you told a parent 15 years ago, 'Hey, parent.

What you're going to want to do in 15 years, instead of buying a kid, your 16-year-old,

a car, you're going to convince your 16-year-old daughter to go into a stranger's car every

single day.

You're going to pay for your 16-year-old daughter to go into a stranger's car every single day,

and you will think that's normal and actually safer than buying that kid a car'?"

That's literally what we're living in now.

High-net-worth individuals in America are preferring to give their kids unlimited Uber

to buying a car, because they don't want them drinking and driving.

They don't trust their driving, and literally, they think it's safer for their 16, 17-year-old

to go into a stranger's car than to drive themselves.

That's sacrilege 15 years ago.

Online dating 20 years ago, the weirdest, nerdiest.

You're thinking 300-pound white dude in the basement of a kid's car.

Now it's just completely standard.

I mean, if you add in sliding into people's DM on Instagram, it's like 89% of relationships,

right?

So I think we're going through a huge transition, because all of us, even thought leaders, are

grossly underestimating the internet itself, and we're hitting scale.

Right?

We now all are on at all times, and this is now the beginning ... I was joking while I

was working out this morning, the DRock, I'm like, "DRock, you're going to get replaced

by like a Pokemon ball.

I'm going to throw it up ... People in 20 years are literally going to throw something

up.

It's just going to hover 360 and film everything they're doing."

I mean, it's just an incredible time, and I think the way people look at the world right

now, because it's such an incredible time, is actually the quickest tell to who they

are.

If you think it sucks, and it's bad, you have losing pessimistic DNA, and if you think it's

awesome and phenomenal, you have optimistic winning DNA, and I believe that to be true,

and so that's where we're at.

Tom: No, man, I'm with you on that.

So I've been involved in the XPRIZE now for a while.

Reason I got involved with the XPRIZE is largely for that reason.

I look at the future, it's so fucking exciting.

What's going on is crazy, and if you're the one that can see where the trends are going,

and you can ride those trends, be the early adopter, get into it before anybody else,

and there's obviously chances for huge wins there.

Gary: While you're practical.

Tom: Right.

Gary: Right?

Because I think a lot of my ... So I've had that career, but a lot of the reason is, I'm

not guessing or getting in too early.

Right?

It's like real estate.

There's a big difference between the people that bought beachfront property in Malibu

than people that are buying beachfront property in off-region, no infrastructure ...

Tom: Right.

Gary: ... islands in the Caribbean, which is right, in theory, but it could be an 80-year

theory, right?

And so it's about timing.

Like VR's coming, but consumer VR is very far away.

All my friends are spending millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, in consumer virtual

reality, VR, yet there's nobody here, nobody watching this, that knows a single person

that spends three hours a day on VR.

Tom: Right.

Gary: Right?

Like it's just, it's way far away.

I'm not sure there's people that know people that have spent three hours in their life

yet in VR, right?

And definitely not 10 people, outside of people in the business testing stuff, so I think

timing really matters on that, because I get worried that people jump way too far ahead,

and the reality is, the market's not there yet.

Tom: And what are the things that you look for in that?

I heard you tell a story in one of the interviews that you did, I thought, the follow-up question

there, which wasn't asked, you said, "I was talking to this woman.

She said she doesn't do Snapchat."

I think it was a woman cutting your hair.

Gary: Yes.

Tom: She doesn't do Snapchat, no social, and you said, "Tell me more, just in case this

is a trend that I need to be aware of."

How do you identify those trends?

Is it stuff like looking at what app is ... Gary: Yes.

Tom: ... on the front page of Apple ... Gary: I always do that.

Tom: ... and talking to the person cutting your hair, is it really sort of that ...

Gary: It's very ... Tom: ... brick and mortar?

Gary: ... very non-scalable.

Tom: Right.

Gary: But that's my talent, right?

Like I think Clive Davis, how does he do it?

I don't know.

He just sat there and heard people sing, and he's like, "You."

I'm careful to not give advice that I know is uniquely something that I was gifted with,

like how do I tell you that, "Oh, here's how it actually works, and it almost started happening.

It didn't happen"?

I actually get goosebumps, like actually, like real, heavy goosebumps when I hear something

that I know feels right.

What's the advice there?

"Hey, Johnny.

Start getting goosebumps."

There are certain things that I can't talk about, because I know they're not practical.

They're intuitive to me, right?

And so yes, for me, it's the balance of, I feel like something's happening, but it always

comes from seeing stuff, like it's going to the candy store with my little guy and hearing

four eight-year-old girls talk about slime, and then later go to Shake Shack and hear

another two eight-year-old boys talk about slime, and I'm like, "Slime?"

And then I search it, and this is a year ago, and I search it ... Maybe, actually, it's

18 months ago, and I search it on Instagram to see hashtags.

I search it on YouTube.

I search Google.

I'm like, "This is real.

There's something happening."

Spinners, right?

Fads are easy for me, and I think what I've been good at in business is trying to decide

what's a fad and what's an actual business, so something like Socialcam.

I downloaded it and got very serious about it in 2011.

I didn't know even the founders of Socialcam.

It wasn't that I knew if Socialcam was going to be big.

I didn't invest in it.

I didn't go after it, but I knew video on the mobile device was going to be big, so