When I'm not hosting this podcast, I am writing books, but it is really hard for me to write when I'm at home, so I like to find remote cabins in the middle of nowhere to just hang out and write. But I hate the idea of my house just sitting empty, doing nothing but collecting dust and definitely not collecting checks. And that's why I'm an Airbnb host. It's one of my all-time favorite side hustles. Other popular side hustles are awesome, too, don't get me wrong, but they often involve big startup costs. By hosting your space, you're monetizing what you already have access to. It It doesn't get easier than that. And if you're new to the side hustle game and you're anxious about getting started, don't worry, because you're not in this alone. Airbnb makes it super easy to host. I mean, if I could do it, you could do it. And your home might be worth a lot more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb. Com/host. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. I have a problem with my business, and my problem is social media.

I do not love it, and I don't understand how I am supposed to both run my business and find time to take super clicky, sticky, shareable videos. But today, I'm getting advice from the pro, Gary Vahnercheck. You know Gary Vee, he really needs no introduction. But just to remind you of some of his accolades, he's the chairman of VahnerX, a collection of businesses that includes Vahner Media, the creative agency that has worked with some of the brands out there: Pepsi, Burger King, Zoom, TikTok, and many more. Gary also co-founded Vahner Sports, Resi, and Empathy Wines. He is also a five-time New York Times bestselling author, and he is about to be a six-time New York Times bestselling author because his newest book, Day Trading Attention, is so good, and it comes out May 21st. His book is all about helping people navigate the ever-evolving landscape of social media. It is such a helpful and powerful resource for brands and really anyone hoping to build a social following for business or for pleasure. He tells me which platform he's bullish on now, why you haven't missed TikTok, and how to get through social media anxiety. There were so many lessons that I had to split the episode into two parts.

So stay tuned for the second episode where Gary talks about his relationship with money. We also play a game of financial never have I ever that I have to say really surprised me. And I have known Gary forever. But let's start with part one.

Gary Vanochek.

Welcome to Money Rehab.

Thanks for having me.

Have we known each other for 100,000 years?

I was thinking about that the other day. I think it was South by Southwest, 2006 or 2007.

You have amazing memory. We were on a panel about the Internet.

Web 2.0. Social media hadn't even been coined yet.

That's actually not the first time we met. That's the first time we met in person, but we have an amazing research team, and I want to show you what we found. Oh, my God.

I'm excited.

Okay. This was circa 2009.

Love.

It was the first time you were on CNN. Valentine.

Com Live. Oh, my God. I remember this.

Valentine's Day is just a few days away. Can you feel the love in the air? Well, if you can, you probably made some big plans with that special guy or that special girl of yours. Dinner, maybe some vino. Well, if wine is in the plans, but you're a little overwhelmed, trying to pick the right perfect one for Valentine's Day, we brought in some help.

The wine guy is back. Gary Vanochek is here to steer us in the right direction.

Gary, we are cramming here.

We only have a couple of days left, so let's get to it because this is like a big wine test on Valentine's Day.

This is like the Super Bowl of wine.

It's huge. Yeah, so help us. Well, let's talk about one thing. I'm huge on bubbles this season, so definitely look for sparkling wines from Spain, Cava, C-A-V-A. I was just watching all the economic news. No reason to overpay for champagne. Look at Cava for $12 to $15 a bottle. A great, great play. Look at us. How cool is that?

I was like 24, maybe 23.

You literally look like you're in high school.

You look like a baby. So when you see this guy, what do you think?

I think that that dude knew what was happening, which was he intuitively... Even though I look fairly young there, I'd already been through a real decade of business building. That's 10 years into my career, Gary. How old are you? I'm probably 32 there or something like that. What I really understood there was, Oh, shit. This is what I saw in '95 and '96 and why I launched winelibrary. Com. But at that point, we were a small local liquor store doing back to money. What that dude knew was I'm seeing the same movie again. It was only the second time I'd seen that movie. Now I'm probably at four times seeing that movie, which is there's a substantial shift going on. And holy crap, this is so cool that I'm doing CNN. But I have a feeling that this Twitter, YouTube, Viddler, all these things at the time, that this is going to become the thing on a tumbler. Tumbler.

You were an investor, right?

I was. And so that was a funny time for me because it was the first time I felt like I was sitting on information, and I had a little bit that I could do with it in a way that I couldn't do I think the first time. The first time, it was like, back to money, we were doing $3.8 million a year in revenue as a liquor store on 10% gross profit. So $380,000 before actual expenses of electricity, payroll. My father was living his American dream by paying to own his own property and building, like many immigrants. So that's what he was focused on, and that made sense. And coming to this country with $100, that is a massive accomplishment. I obviously was next Gen and had a lot of big dreams. There, back to being an investor in tumbler and Facebook and Twitter, was the first time I was able to take advantage from a money standpoint, back to the theme of this show, and knew that I was going to build a lot of personal brand. I didn't know that that's what it was called back then. I just knew that I was going to be known in the wine business, in the wine world, in a way that I could have never dreamed of even two, three years earlier because it's just not how the world worked.

Now you're on your seventh business book, so eight altogether. I called you when I was launching Rich Bitch. That was my first book 10 years ago. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. And you were on, I don't know, number three at that point. And you said to me, you were so, so generous with your time. I came in in New York and you said, Do podcasts. And at that time, I was like, okay. And I told my publishers, and they were like, Where do you find podcasts?

It was a different era.

And here we are, a podcast network later. And you were absolutely right. That was where the conversion was happening. You also told me to write a list of everybody I knew, go off the grid for two weeks, contact them.

It is still advice I give to anyone who's selling books. If you're selling books, you've lived a life where you've done a lot of good things for a lot of people. And asking is okay as long as you don't judge them if they don't deliver. The reason people struggle with my advice in selling books is their feelings get hurt when someone doesn't buy a bunch when they know they've done great by them. I have one example that I will never forget the day I die, and it does not bother me one bit, but I use it all the time, and I'll use it right now because it's an opportunity to teach people a lesson of what happens when you have expectations and how happy you can be if you don't. So you're right. When someone's selling a book, I really think it's a good idea to go off the grid for a week, which is nice. You get some rest before you go hard. It's a lot easier to just lay on the beach and go literally A through Z in your phone and your inbox and say, Hey, this means something to me. I've gone really serious about this.

I feel proud of it. It would mean the world to me if you could buy a bunch, one or a bunch.

Or something else, right? Or be really specific. Can you send out this tweet, whatever platform, maybe they have more people.

But it's funny. To your point, I believe that if, and I'm saying this out loud, so I expect friends to reach out to me in the future, I think I make a bigger impact. I have a very big platform. I still believe Me buying 300 books for a friend that I really know, that really asked, and put them in the lobbies of all 10 of our Vaneerex offices is going to sell more books potentially than a single tweet of like, Hey, Johnny's book is awesome, or Sally's book is awesome. Now, it could be the other way, but really, actually asking. The problem is, when I used to tell that advice, and I've been telling it for a long time, I didn't realize how many people were so grounded in insecurity and envy and resentment. Early on, the first three or four people that I told to do that, they would reach out to me and be like, This was horrible. I was like, What happened? They're like, Well, I did get on the... It did work. But now I'm really mad at Rick. I'm like, Why? Rick didn't buy the plan. Yeah, Rick didn't buy anything.

I've been so nice to Rick. And it made me think about the most impactful story I have on this, which is I asked someone who I reopened. Reopened. Meaning an investment was closed. It was done. I went to bat for this person to the founder to reopen around and let them put $50,000 in or $100, I don't remember, an investment. The company went on to have a massive exit. This person made heavy eight figures. And when I went and asked for a book buy, they bought none and ghosted me. I remembered that being a really exciting moment for me because it was when I was able call my bluff on myself. I genuinely mean what I'm about to say. I've continued to have a relationship with this person, like later on. I genuinely don't judge the person because my brain goes to, maybe they were busy. I asked, by the way, I asked four times because I knew I made this person lots of money. I was like, This guy could buy 500 copy. I really knew. I'm so grateful and thankful for my parenting, my DNA, my circumstance. The fact that I have no I feel feelings against that.

I just only know how to deploy optimistic compassion. Maybe he was in a bad place. I don't know. Who am I to judge? And don't forget, here's the big key to this, Nicole, and I hope this lands for people. I was asking. When you ask, you're not allowed to judge.

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth or whatever the saying is.

I just believe there's something very powerful around expectation. If you're able to get into in a place where you're just not expecting, you're only in control of yourself.

You were pissed.

Honestly, I'm being dead serious with you. When I realized, Oh, my God, this person is not going to buy it, I was in order, baffled because he just made tens of millions of dollars. B, I'm being just very vulnerable and transparent, baffled. B, quickly to, Hope he's okay. To C, I really don't give a shit about this. This is epic. I actually eat my own dog food. I talk about no expectation. I literally know every detail about what's happening here, and I'm not that upset about it. Fuck it. Let's move on.

It's like real-life jab, jab, jab. Is it jab, jab, jab? It's three or four jabs.

Jab, jab, jab, right hook.

Ironically- Because it's like give, give, give, and then ask.

By the way, day trading attention was originally, literally up until the final hour, called Jab, Jab, Jab, Left Hook. It's literally the follow-up to that book. Part two. Part two, but it got so nerdy, and it's the most detailed marketing book I've put out that it just felt like it was different. It was more of what now I realize I've been doing for 20 years, which is day trading attention.

And what does that mean? And first of all, I love the day trading part, obviously. I would love to know what long term attention investing is. But explain to me what the concept of day trading attention.

Well, listen to what just happened in the meta right before this part. You told the audience in our relationship through the years, I've had an ability to be like, I think this is happening. I think this is happening. And obviously, you also know because you've been in the game, there's many examples of that with me, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or TikTok or just a lot. It's been the story of my life. Day trading attention is the core asset in the world is attention for governments, for parents, for businesses, for media companies, it's attention. The history of the world, attention platform distribution evolves. If you wanted to sell something way back when, you probably had to draw something in a cave and other cavemen walk by it and we're like, I need that club. Then obviously, newspaper and radio. I think a lot about that. I studied newspaper and radio, transition to television a lot and have a lot in the last 20 years. I think a lot about this classic political story where JFK loses the debate on radio to Nixon but wins the debate on television, which was a new medium. He goes on to win the election.

He was sweating. That Nixon was sweating. Correct. Nixon looked like crap. Jfk was fucking- A stud. A fucking stud. Then I was also born in the Soviet Union, so I'm growing up in the '80s during the Cold War, the end of it. I'm thinking about propaganda. I've always been fascinated by even weird things like coup de tas, like when you're overthrowing a government, why they would always go to the newspaper and radio station at the same time they would go after the palace. Somewhere at a very young age, I understood communication mattered. Then obviously, I was very affected by I had a small family liquor store business that I was coming into that I was very, very, and I mean, very hyper-focused on building a very big business for my parents. I was like, I'm going to do this for a while, and then I'll do my own thing. I got very fortunate. The internet was just emerging. So all of a sudden, I launched winelibrary. Com in 1997. There's not a liquor store that has a website in America. There's literally three or four at the time. There was three or four of us.

I watched our family business go from a three to a $40 million business in a nanosecond, AKA five years, with no money. I didn't raise VC. We didn't even have a credit line on the business. This was all using its own cash flow. I did that through email marketing, while every other wine store in the country was doing catalogs. So day trading attention. I was getting attention in 1997, '98, '99 from people that worked on Wall Street that were early to email, signing them up and sending them a daily email about Opus One and Chateau Lafitte. I was outflanking the biggest stores in the country at the time, Zacky's and Sam's and Hey, Anel out here in California, these iconic wine stores that I looked up to as a teenager that I would use to buy the New York Times when I was 15, the Wednesday Dining In section and look at their full-page ads. One day I'm going to be like them. They're spending 4-6 months making catalogs, spending lots of money making the catalogs. They were spending more money and they were slower than I was. I was spending no money on email or the distribution, and I was doing it daily.

I was getting to the customer the biggest wine customers in the country, and selling them Insignia and Camus and Silver Oak and Chateau Lafitte. Then two months later, they would get a catalog for Morels or Sherry Lehman's with that same stuff for more expensive. They'd already bought it for me. I was able to outflank the entire industry with a new medium, which was email and having a website. Then later, when we met, that was starting to happen because I saw this thing called YouTube. A couple of months after it came out, I started a wine show. Then obviously, social- Will you change the name rate of the store? Yes, the store was originally called Shoppers Discount Lickers, and then we rebranded it to Wine Library. I was very affected by day trading attention, which I define as right this second, as we sit here, there is overpriced and underpriced ways to get attention. You could run a Super Bowl ad for this podcast. It would cost you $20 million between the media, the production. Cbs would force you to buy other inventory in their ecosystem that is bullshit inventory. It might cost you more than that.

So that would be a bad idea. Even though the Super Bowl is my favorite ad, Good.

You say, though, in your book that it's still undervalued.

I agree with that.

With all those millions of dollars. I agree with that. And remnant as you have to pay.

I agree with that. I think if you're Nike or Coca-Cola, then that is going to be a good idea because their marketing budgets are enormous. The only reason that's not a good idea for you is my intuition is you're not spending $20 million a year promoting this. Not yet. That's right. But if you are spending $1,000 or $100,000 or $500,000, you want to spend it as wisely as possible. To me, right as we sit here and record today, the number one thing that has happened in marketing is that organic reach in social has changed in the last couple of years compared to what we grew up with. When we were growing up with social media, it was more like email marketing. You would get as many people to follow you as possible, and then when you would post, a percentage of them would see it. Today, one clip from this show has the ability to get 10 million views on TikTok, and another clip from this exact show might get 4,000. The creative is the distribution now with these algorithms. That is a substantial, massive, massive land grab that I want people to know about.

And there's a million others, whether it's influence or marketing or Hulu pre-roll, something you should be doing is running ads, a video of this on what is now modern television. You can buy Hulu ads now for If you have $100. And if you put that in front of other financial content, that's awareness, just like pre-roll YouTube has been established. So these are all the things running through my mind all the time.

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It's one of my all-time favorite side hustles. By hosting your space, you are monetizing what you already own. It doesn't get easier than that. For me, hosting on Airbnb has always been a no-brainer. When I first signed up, I remember thinking to myself, Self, you pay a lot of money for your house. It is time that house return the favor. And to get real with you for a sec, I felt so much guilt before treating myself on vacation because traveling can be so expensive. But since hosting on Airbnb, I feel zero stress for treating myself to a much-needed vacation because having Airbnb guests stay at my house when I'm traveling, helps offset the cost of my travel. So it's such a win-win. I mean, if I could do it, you could do it. And your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb. Com/host. And now for some more money rehab.

What is undervalued and what's overvalued right now? Because when you were also promoting Wine Library, you bought AdWords, and you thought that they were overvalued, but they were really undervalued at the time.

The clarity on that, let me jump in, is I bought them so cheap, like they came out at 5 and 10 cents a click, that when they went up a year or two later to 40 and 50 because other people were doing it, cents, 40 and 50 cents. I was like, It's over. Because I was like, Damn, it used to be so cheap. I didn't really know at the time what CAC and LTV was. I didn't think in terms or never thought about customer acquisition versus lifetime value. I inherently did. I was like, If I invest in my business and we're good at what we do, we'll keep these customers. It'll work out in the long term. But I didn't have the math down yet. So to your point, what you're referencing is, I wish that I spent more money on Google AdWords in 2001, 2000, 2000, 2000, 2000, It was that I was so goddamn early that I got confused and tricked my own self. It was like, it's over now. I should have still been buying those things at 50 cents a dollar, even $2, because they were worth it to the business.

When you bought the word wine for 10 cents on Google and were the first result, you can imagine when that word went to $16 a couple of years later per click, you were like, Fuck this shit. What I didn't know yet was it was still worth for my company to pay $16 because the client was worth more.

Or that could go up to $100. You don't know where you are. Correct. And so I think people think of TikTok right now and say, I've missed it. It's too late. I can't put my stick in the ground anymore. In the same way as maybe you thought that you were at the peak of AdWords, but it was just in the middle. You don't know until you zoom out.

Correct. And then there's a game of best. There's not only is it underpriced, but then are you good at the creative? So is it harder to quote, unquote, go viral on TikTok today than it was four years ago when I was yelling about it on every platform. You were yelling.

I know. It was pre-pandemic and you wanted everybody to go on musically first.

That's right. It had already happened. So the The thing that has worked for me is I don't predict because I want to keep good reputation. Anytime I'm yelling about something, it has happened. I'm just there early enough that it doesn't feel like it's happened. But to your point, what's really fascinating now that everyone needs to hear is you've missed nothing. Today, somebody will start a YouTube channel. Youtube has been rocking and rolling since 2005. For the last 19 years, today, as we're doing this right now, somebody will start a YouTube channel, and they will go on to fucking crush it because they were better. That'd be like saying, well, there was no room for Billy Eilish because Madonna and Cindy Lauper and Whitney Houston in where pop stars, and all the pop star opportunities are done. It's a merit-based game on the creative. And so no medium, not podcasting, not YouTube, not Twitter, not Facebook. Every one of them is fertile ground for best, but best takes creativity once things get overpopulated. What skillset creatively it took to go crazy on TikTok four years ago, today is the mundane. That doesn't mean you have to be crazy.

It means that you have to provide something new and different that has depth. The other thing I vote back to... We're giving flowers here. The other thing that I always thought was going to work for you was the depth of what you were talking about. You were talking about substantive stuff. The stuff you were saying was right. Financial literacy continues on this day as we sit here to be still way under-penetrated from what I wish the world knew. So the other thing that people need to hear that I think has been very substantial for both of us is you can have sizzle, and we both have sizzle. That matters. Charisma, ability, all the character, that happen. But if you do not have stake, you have no chance of longevity. Back to that South by Southwest, I remember the keynote I gave that year. I remember because I used to read every single tweet after every talk I gave. I remember many people during that era thinking that I'd be gone in a year or two because they thought my over-the-topness was just sticky and all sizzle, no steak. I remember enjoying that back to... Because I knew that, No, I'm doing this forever.

I'm a real businessman. At that point already, I had already accomplished things. I wasn't guessing. I knew I had the work ethic and the talent. I really think that people need to hear, if you're thinking about starting a podcast or you think you miss TikTok or you want to do a YouTube channel, there's nothing stopping you. Do I believe that the next big platform that comes out, if you move fastest on it, that you'll get even more upside if you're good? Of course. It's just supply and demand of attention. But there's never a bad time to go on a big platform if if you're good enough.

Well, I say that about investing, too. You're never as young as you are today. Some people say they're too old. Today is as good a day as any.

Or you missed something, right? To that same point, if you missed investing in a good business and you're like, damn, I should have bought it at $18 a share. Now it's 42. Well, guess what? If it's actually a good business. I remember people telling me that they missed out on Apple stock in 2011. Really? Facebook. I invest in Facebook 40 years before the IPO, I've never sold a share. It opened at 42, went to 19. A lot of the people that worked on Facebook at the time at the six-month lockout sold at 19. It's 500.

That's where it because you don't know where you are in that chart, right?

That part.

What are you yelling about now? Twitch?

I do love live streaming, but I'm yelling about Twitch for a different reason. I don't need to yell about Twitch. Twitch has clearly long established published that it's important. Ninja popped on Twitch seven, eight years ago. This is nothing new. Clicks, Aiden Rock, all this stuff. I know Aiden is on kick or something, but streamers have won. What I'm yelling about with live streaming is I see something really interesting. I think there's a new genre coming that's going to blow people away, which is what I will call the mundane. People that are streaming almost like an ASMR of something. I said something the other day, I'll say it again. I believe someone... I'll use an example. I believe in the next 10 years, there's currently a hairdresser in her little salon, six seats in a small town right now. She's got her nice business. She's a killer. I admire that entrepreneur a lot. The fact that she is on the... Maybe she's listening right now. If she puts a laptop or a camera in her salon and starts to stream the day, literally, I believe that that person is going to become famous and make a lot of money by not playing to the camera, by literally living their life on their core activity.

Like Truman show style.

That's right. Now, I also use an analogy in a recent podcast that I'm really excited about. I believe a stay-at-home mom and dad is going to stream their 6:00 AM to 8:30 of cooking, cleaning up the kitchen, and getting the family ready for the day, that that will be the stream, and that person will go on to make seven figures. What I wrote about and crushed it, which has come to be true, I didn't call it influencers, that humans would be able to make money on what they were passionate about, I believe is about to happen with streaming. But I am encouraging people that are listening right now that if you can stream the mundane-whatever. The mundane. I used another analogy. If you mow your massive lawn for three hours, there's going to be a big movement in the next three to four years where live streaming of what seemingly is not interesting. Because don't forget, you were there. You remember what everyone said about Twitter? Everyone was like, I'll never forget this. When I was yelling in 2006 and 2007 about Twitter, and when we were at these conferences, everyone was like, This is so stupid.

Who gives a shit if you're having a pizza? Nobody cares that you're walking the dog. I remember in a Q&A session at Southby, somebody went really hard on me, said, This is actually idiotic. She said, Gary, you seem like something was clever in how she posed it. You seem like a smart guy. Do you actually... Who gives a shit about what you're having for dinner? And my answer was everyone. I remember the oxygen coming out of the room. That moment, when you're just like a mic drop. And it was fun because half the room was like, couldn't to comprehend what I was saying. I just remember looking at certain eyes and energy and obviously people I talked to after I got off stage, it clicked for a lot of people. My belief at the time was what has now transpired. It's how human communication works. When somebody was listening right now, probably breathing to themselves while they're on the treadmill or driving listening right now or walking their dog and hearing me saying that I think somebody who owns a small salon will make millions of dollars through ad revenue, subscriptions, and merch and books and speaking after she accomplishes what I'm saying, that someone's going to make millions of dollars a year only by livestreaming what she's doing Monday through Sunday now, which is just running her business.

I think people struggle with that leap, but it's fucking crystal clear to me.

So how would you start doing that?

There's only one issue at hand in this entire conversation, which is, is it okay for privacy of the other people that happen to cross paths with what you're doing? So if you're a person that works at home all day, a painter, if you paint, if you fucking paint, put a fucking camera and go live and paint. Obviously, for the salon woman, the thing that's a concern that everyone's going to have to figure out is a salon is like a therapy session. So if she's streaming her day and a woman's coming in and she's doing what she normally does with the person who's been her stylist for 11 years, that's now her therapist. If she's now complaining about her husband to that person, obviously that's live on the internet. That could cause some... So a lot of people are listening. You're going to have to figure out the privacy thing. A lot of people are going to be fine with it. They'll adjust. They're like, I can't talk shit about my husband here because it's being filmed.

Can we do a little game?

I'm always up for a game.

I'd love to do a bullish and bearish game.

Bullish and bearish.

Meta.

Bullish.

Reddit.

Bullish.

Alphab.

Bullish.

Waymo.

I'm not educated enough to give an answer on that, to be honest.

Nvidia.

I feel like, again, not educated. It feels like... I'm just not educating enough, but it definitely feels like it's so hyper big that I'm like, I feel like if I spend 10 hours educating myself, I'm like, Okay, this is not sustainable to be this crazy.

Disney.

Disney? Very bullish. I know Disney gets dragged into politics a little bit, but I think intellectual property is one of the most underrated businesses of the future of VR and everything. I don't think people understand how big owning IP is going to be. Tesla. Tesla. Bullish.

Microsoft.

Very bullish. I've been very impressed with what they've done the last five years.

Amazon.

Very bullish.

Zoom.

Bullish.

Bytedance, TikTok's parent company. Bullish. Even though it might be banned?

A pimple in the ass of the overall thing.

Not a company, but NFTs.

Bullish. But I understand Actually, this will be a good pause because I know that one probably caught people off guard, given where the brand of NFTs are. Everything I just said bullish to is you've asked about very contemporary, front-facing, going-forward businesses. Is. Some of those people may have changes. I was thinking very heavily when you said those companies, who's running them right now? But every one of those companies is on the right side of history right now. The world is only going more teched-out advancement. It's not going backwards. What's really fascinating about that is if you're a legacy media company, you can only win if you make very smart decisions. Liberty Media, buying Formula One. You need to make that level of brilliant decisions to stay ahead of the curve because your business models are getting crushed. Being a cable network. Tough business right now. No more free money from bundled subscriptions. So far, the ones you've talked about are all going in the right direction. They may not have the same stock value. They may have bumps in the road. They may get lapped, but they're all right now heading that way. And NFTs is different.

The reason I said that I'm bullish on it is because NFTs have just gone through the recalibration of short-term greed. Just like internet stocks had to do that in the '90s. Late '90s internet stocks, pets. Com was worth billions of dollars with zero sales. The market was right that the internet was going to be big. It was just everybody got ahead of their skis. The reason they said bullish on NFTs is I'm going to clip this in 20 years because Because there's going to be 5-10 NFT projects that are going to be the Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol and Pokémon and Hello Kitty of this generation. I work every day feverishly to make sure VeeFriends is one of those things. I want it to be the Sesame Street meets Pokémon of this era. I know right now, even though I don't know who she or he is, I don't know who they are, but I know for damn sure there are two artists right now making NFTs that in 20 years, everyone's going to collect and they're going to be the most sought after. What People got confused with NFTs. Were they? I don't know.

And fuck, if I did, I promise you I'd be buying them. And you know what's cool about NFTs? It's on a blockchain. People would see that I'm buying them. So it's like a cool world. But I would say this, where everyone has NFTs wrong is the following. Nfts are stuffed animals. Nft projects are Beanie Babies. So NFTs is a macro genre. And so everybody got caught up in the up and the down. But at the height of NFTs, I was making content saying 99% of these are going to zero. I did it because I wanted to be, again, historically correct, and I wanted people to hear what I was saying about why I'm bullish on NFTs. But do I think NFTs as collectibles, just like trading cards? 99% of trading cards are worthless. Michael Jordan's rookie card is worth hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. 99% of trading cards are worthless, but Charzard, the best Pokémon from the first time, is worth tons of money. Sneakers, 99% of sneakers don't sell on StockX, but the 1%, watches. 99% of watches are not worth something in secondary market, but 1% is. And art. 99% of art that's made is not Rashe Johnson, it's not Jackson Pollack, it's not Monet.

Same with NFTs. 99% of collectible NFTs will be worth zero. But the 1% for the next generation will be the collectible of choice because of the way digital work. And that's I'm bullshit it.

It'll be the Lafitte.

That's right. Thank you for that. I'm sad at myself and way to pick me up. 99% of wine is not collectible. It's drank fucking within the year that it's made and people drink it this weekend for Easter, at the time of this recording. But 1% of wine is collectible, and that's where people got the NFT thing wrong. But it's really interesting what you asked. I love having a mix of bullish and bearish, but I struggle to not be excited about the companies that are at the forefront of technology. Most of the companies you just mentioned have such an obnoxious advantage on AI. Then I'm even scared a little bit back to government involvement. Because people are so scared of AI, a lot of these biggest tech companies might really get lucky where the government is going to pass certain laws around AI, and they're going to be sitting there nice and pretty because they're going to be the ones that control it, not the open market. I'm concerned about that.

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From a business owner's perspective, this is what I struggle with. And I remember being on CNBC, we'd have analysts come on who are always available to come on TV. And we were like, If you're always available to come on TV, what the fuck are you doing? Are you really a big fund manager? Because how do you have time to leave whatever you're doing and come on TV? I think about the same thing with social because I'm running a business, and so I'm supposed to be on all the time, but I'm knee-deep running a business.

And so how- Well, it's why I suck at streaming. Right now, my I'm streaming because I always want to... If I'm going to talk the way I'm talking right now, I need to taste. I'm not talking from thesis or hypothesis or professor land. I'm streaming my office right now. My problem is, I'm in such operations mode between VeeFriends and VeynerX right now that my day-to-day is so goddamn boring. I'm literally sitting at my desk, literally doing 12 straight hours every minute on minute of meetings. I'm operating. And the entire stream is on mute because the meetings I'm having are sensitive information. And so I unmute for a second. I'm like, Thanks for hanging out, guys. To answer your question, a couple of things. One, And there's ways to be clever. When I started realizing that I wanted to vlog, and I was like, Oh, Casey nice. That's so amazing. But I was like, I can't do that. And you probably remember this, I took a crazy step and hired D-Rock. And that became a term. I need a D-Rock. That was very early. I was one of the first people that had a human being following me around 24/7.

I remember first before that, didn't you have a human trainer following you around and taking us out of your hand.

Yes, that was the same time. That's exactly right.

And first class.

I literally started. This is true. I literally started vlogging D-Rock following me and Mike Vacante, who I worked out with this morning, virtually. That was 10 years ago when I started getting serious about my health. It happened the same time. I had two human beings following me around. One was filming me and one was making sure that I wasn't putting non-needed carbs into my fucking body.

But then how do you run a business successfully and also make sure you're doing content all the time? Because you're like, content, content, content.

Well, I was going to answer why those analysts were probably either one of two extremes, either very smart or what you think, which is faking the funk. This goes back to the premise of the book. If you're one of the top hedge fund operators, managers, or whoever you had in private equity people or public CEOs, they were extracting the attention from CNBC. Listen, I am very busy. But if I am given the opportunity to have 30 or 40 minutes or 17 minutes, especially with Zoom, 10 minutes, that I allocate to that level of awareness of what I'm doing, that's ROI positive. So CNBC is a no-brainer. The ones I'm more skeptical about is they're on every little thing that has 19 viewers. But even that, they might be smart about. One of One of the main reasons I do podcasts is, A, for the attention of the audience, which is happening right now, but B, for the recordings of it for my own content. I like doing two for once. I love public speaking because I enjoy it. It's lucrative for me, but luckily for me, it's become not ROI positive to the amount of time that I need to allocate for it.

One of the main reasons I still do it, there's only two reasons I still do it. I genuinely enjoy it, and I want to do it occasionally One, it's still fun for me. Two, I need content. I have a problem. To your point, I'm so operating right now that I don't have enough content. I need to actually allocate time for podcasts or keynotes or other things just to have content creation because my life is my production facility.

I love a twofer.

I love a twofer.

I love a deal.

What does that look like? And what about the people that are maybe faking the funk on on social media that are like, I'm making millions of dollars in one day, and this and that.

You know that.

I mean, I think if you're rich, you don't have to say you're rich. But it's become more of a trend to say- Look, honestly, I don't even think about that because this goes back to what we talked about earlier.

That just plays itself out. You and I have been around the block at this point a little bit. We've seen people come and go. And so look, as long as no one's massively hurting someone, really bad stuff, then it's It just becomes... I have no feelings towards anything that someone's doing that might be faking the funk because from my perspective, honestly, I go to compassion. I'm like, I hope they get into a good place where they don't have to do it this way.

So explain to me who's on the team now. What's happening for this twofer? What are we doing?

Dustin's recording. We have about a 25-person team at this point, I think. Bunch of international people. The content goes into a hub and we go through the content now more than ever starting to use AI tools to go through the content and pick out the moments that we think have validity or upside to be meaningful short form content. And away we go. And I distribute through every platform. I think what's unique about me still is there's not a lot of people who go Coast to Coast from Snapchat to LinkedIn and everything in between. I post on every single platform at scale every day. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram, all of them, Twitter, all of them.

And you have that distribution plan that goes out automatically. Somebody's doing it. What tools are you using? Is it on Asana? What AI? Yes.

Are we just switching from Asana? Yeah, I think so. Everything you just said. And again, literally human beings with tools, project management tools, editing tools, whether it's CapCut Adobe or whatever it is. Honestly, I'm not even close enough to it anymore because it's really those things are agnostic. What the key is, is creating scenarios where you can capture content and then putting as much talent or science against the ability to extract those individual creative pieces. Then what I wrote about in the book, this concept of what I call pack, platforms and culture. One of the reasons I love, let's go very nerdy and deep into details. One of the reasons I love the green, this is I think you could crush. I apologize. I'm not sure if you're doing this or not. Green screens. You would crush green screen. It never takes so long. No, it doesn't. That's so weird you say that because green screen is one of the biggest reasons I... On TikTok? Well, I do mine on Instagram, but I Let me rephrase. I reacted the way I reacted because it's one of the few things that I can do fast. Get a headline of something I have an opinion on, put it in the green screen filter, flip the camera, look at it, speak my piece for 60 to 90 seconds and send it to the team with copy and we're done.

I see, but not several cuts.

Correct. Got it. If you're talking about the Alex Earle, like that. No, not that. That takes a long time. That's different. I don't even know what the proper terminology for those stop cuts, which is amazing. I've actually been talking shit for six months with my team. I've been wanting to do a show like that with those hard cuts called Winding Down, where I do my recap of the day while reviewing a bottle of wine. I love her name, right? But to your point that it's hard. I've been talking shit. I'm like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And I never do it because it is... Especially for me, after a 10, 11, 13-hour day to then go and do another- That's how I feel. That's hard. Green screen is different. And for me, I actually use a lot of mainstream media headlines and talk over it. That's been huge. I was about to say why that's huge, because that hits on the C in PAC. Pac stands for platforms and culture. Culture is pop culture, and timely pop culture matters. And so if you can speak on social commentating on what's going on, and then if you understand platforms, is a carousel ad better than a reels?

Should you post in text? Should you do Instagram over TikTok? Or the answer is always going to be both. But how does YouTube Shorts act differently than Facebook reels? There's a lot of science to this.

And there's a lot of AI that's changing the game. What are you guys using? Is it Opus or Minvo? Can you give us some nerdy blocking and tackling?

You know what's funny? I don't think we fully... We're just onboarding all... I'm thinking about editing tools. All the things you just brought up or ChatGPT or things of that nature are Midjourney and things of that nature. They're supporting tools for thinking. We haven't really fully... One of the big things I worried about, and the reason we have been slow to using all of them, was the terms of service. A lot of these AI companies were very spooky to me because if we ingested our content, it wasn't clear if they could use it for the overall platform, which, as you can imagine, was something I needed to think through. By the way, on the record, it's not like I'm scared of that because I think it's an inevitable outcome. I have unlimited content on the internet, so anyone can take it, ingest it into an AI tool and think like me or do me. I get all that. That doesn't scare me. It was more of when the laws are written by America, the EU, the world is going to have to address this issue when it's written, I just wanted to make sure that if I...

It's one thing if someone went on the internet and took my stuff and did it. If I self-deposited it in, I wanted to know the TOS, we're finally in a place where it seems like the AI tools are starting to write terms of services where they say, And we have no rights to this. You can use our tool, but it's not like we can ingest all that information and do something with it.

So what is scaring you with AI?

The same thing that scares me with anything in life. Nothing scares me per se, but the thing that everybody should always be vigilant on is what don't we know, right? That's all. The thing that scares me with AI is the same thing that scares me with sugar. There was a time when the world didn't understand sugar completely. Now, there's a lot of science and understanding that a lot of sugar leads to dementia or Alzheimer's or a lot of other things we want to happen. I'm not overtly scared of the robots killing our children, but I don't eliminate it as a possibility. Anything can happen. I just don't demonize new technologies. I look at the optimism. I don't think about all the jobs that AI is going to take out. I think about all the jobs that AI is going to create. When everyone cried about the car being invented, which was something people cried about, they said, Look at these people in the horse business that are going to go out of business. This is real stuff. God, I hate this. I always promise myself, Don't forget the number because then you can use it, and I can't remember it, so I'm not going to make it up.

There was a shocking amount of people in the United States of America, whose jobs were directly correlated to horse shit. I'm being dead serious. The amount of people in Manhattan, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Baltimore, that's job in life was to go around the city and clean He's eating up horse shit because horses is how we moved around. There was articles written about this car is terrible. What are all these people going to do? The tractor. When the tractor was invented, Nicole, the amount of people that worked on farms in this country and this world was insane. It put them all out of business. You know what that meant? They all went on to do more profound things. Everybody who's going to lose a job because of AI in the next decade, not maybe that exact person because they may be in a life cycle where they can't. But that person, represented as an 18-year-old, is going to do a different job. For example, let me give you one that is going to be a massive job. Prompt engineering. The ability to be good at asking AI questions is going to be a skillset. So for every kid that is going to be like, Oh, my God, I can't do Adobe design anymore.

That's not a job. I remind that kid, first of all, I'm old enough to know when that wasn't a job either. You took the job of the people that used to do it on paper when I was a kid. I think people get caught up in these things without realizing how the world has worked forever.

But how does that change? Like with Vanner Media, right?

It becomes a potential vulnerability.

So what's the balance between AI and people to manage this stuff.

Or do brands even want to work with agencies?

Do they?

I don't know, but I'm not scared of that. I'll put myself out of business before I let someone else do it, meaning I will adjust to the reality of the game. By the way, I can't cry about that. We've built one of the largest global independent agencies in the world by making videos and pictures and marketing and social media, and we've taken that money directly out of the Don Drapers of the world. Every dollar that Vaina Media has is a dollar that Biden and Kennedy or Chris Van Porter or Ogilvie or Leo Burnet or share or Starcom had. So if I'm taking from someone else, I can't be a hypocrite if something's coming along that might take from me. This goes back to the earlier energy. I don't think that I am entitled to benefit from entrepreneurship. I think I need to respect entrepreneurship and be a good entrepreneur, and then I will to keep the benefits of it. It's actually my biggest problem with fake entrepreneurs that make a lot of money and then go use their money in politics to try to change laws to keep their money. I don't respect it because I think that they're a loser.

I think that they used to be a young lion, but now they're an old lion. And instead of being honorable like obi-1 Kenobi and just letting yourself get killed, they go try to fucking do politics and change the level of cynicism and judgment, and I don't have a lot of that in me, but there's something so romantic of pure entrepreneurship to me that I really get disappointed when I see people start from little or people that start with a base and build it big. And then when they're done being in the arena because they don't have it anymore, they're tired. They didn't put in the energy that the young bucks are doing. They go try to change the laws in America to benefit them. That's a fucking loser. I can promise you right now, that will never be a chapter in my career. If AI is destined to come and kill me, I will obi-one Kenobi that shit.

I feel like you're never leaving the arena.

There's no chance. And by the way, I think that's right, comma, if I wake up one day at 81 and I'm like, You know what? Fuck it. I'm leaving the arena. This now has my attention, or this will bring me greater joy, then that's how I see it, not let me go fucking be an old dude who's going to use all my power and money to make it good for me to continue to make money when I don't deserve it. You don't see that with athletes. Wayne Gretsky is still not playing hockey. The merit of the game is respected, and too many people in modern capitalism... Good, you've got more money because you I figured it out. The cynical, let me phrase, the counterpoint to what I'm saying, which I've heard from people that I've said this right to their fucking faces, no, that becomes the game. I'm like, Cool, if you think so. But that's bringing no value to anybody but you.

Okay, so we're not going to see Senator Vanner.

No, that's different. That's being a politician. You probably won't see that either. But what you definitely won't see is a Vanner super pack that bans AI because I'm scared that it's going to fuck up Vanner Media. That you will not see.

How often are you on your phone? How often are you actually checking social media? Where are your boundaries?

Well, it's funny. Things have been flow. Because I'm so office-based and very meetings-based right now, I'm not on my phone a lot, believe it or not, because I'm so in meetings. I literally, Nicole, my normal Monday through Friday is is something like 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM, somewhere in that range, to minimally 07:00 PM, straight booked in meetings every minute. And then I have dinner meetings. It's hard for me to get a lot of phone time in on that. But when I'm traveling, definitely more. But I'm checking social media for what I talked about in the book, PCSing, post creative strategy. I'm looking for sentiment of I read the comments to the content I put out to help me inform what I'm going to put out next, or where is their value, or what didn't I see that people like. I am spending time on it, but less right now. I'm really in meeting life.

You talk a lot about your parents. You talk about your grandma. You don't talk a lot about your kids. No. You're a great dad, like I know in real life. But why is that?

I think too many parents are putting their kids on blast without their kids wanting it. I'm a very well-known person at this point in my life. I don't want to force my kids into notoriety if they don't want it. Period.

Some people think like, Oh, I have to be so authentic and transparent and show all the things. It's like, you don't show all the things.

I don't show shit. I think that's unfair to children. Now, I jumped in real hard here. I do not judge others. I love talking about parenting in the macro. I hate talking about it in the micro. I am not saying that every parent that's doing that is wrong. They might be 100% right. I don't know their children. I know for me that it's very important that I don't do it for them. I think it's not understood yet because we've never lived through an era where everyone has the potential to be known. I think that there's a lot of children that will end up resenting their parents for putting them on blast like that. There's other children that will learn so much from it and it will be awesome. I just don't know the outcome of mine, and I'm not willing to take that risk.

For someone who didn't get self-esteem and confidence from her parents just asking for a friend, what would you say to those types of feelings of depression and anxiety around checking social so much?

Well, that's incredibly normal. There was people who were older than us that had massive anxiety watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and massive envy watching MTV Cribs. And The reason I brought up those two things is I'm trying to get the parents that are listening to realize envying people of wealth or status or perceived happiness is not a new phenomenon. I would say That makes sense. I think for everyone who's listening right now who has envy or anxiety or things of that nature, that's a natural human trait that's part of almost everybody's journey. As someone who has the reverse, which is why I have such admiration for my parents and my circumstances, I would tell you that the quicker you get into a place of just loving yourself regardless, is how fast you're going to start being okay with it. Here's what I mean by that. I think the biggest issue in the world right now is that we put people on a pedestal that we don't know. I'm one of those people. I get my emails and my DMs, and I'm very grateful. I'm flattered. But what I want to remind everybody from me for damn sure, and anyone you could be thinking...

I actually want everyone to... I don't know if I want you to close your eyes, but I'd like for everyone to really think about this. I mean in the room. I want you to think about who you admire that you don't know. Like, real talk, Rihanna, LeBron. I don't know, right? Okay, let's do a dramatic pause for a second. Think about the person. Good. Do you know how many things they suck at? Do you realize that they have, right this second, a child, a brother, a sister, a parent that could sit with you for an hour and shit on that person so heavy for what they're not good at, what they don't do? This is human life. I think for the people that you're talking about, which is almost everyone who's listening, why are you putting someone else on a pedestal and shitting on yourself?

Stay tuned for the second episode where Gary talks about his relationship with money. We also play a game of financial never have I ever that I have to say really surprised me. And I have known Gary forever. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole lap in. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan LaVoy. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your moneyquestions, moneyrehab@moneynewsnetwork. Com, to potentially have your questions answered on the or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram at Money News and TikTok at Money News Network for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.