WARNING: Gary may drop F-Bombs & use foul language.

Maybe I’ve been under a rock, but I just came across Gary Vee ( Vaynerchuk ) today. He currently has 2.64M subscribers on one of his YouTube channels and 289K subscribers on another YouTube channel.

Most of the transcript from the video above is on this post for those who like to read. WARNING: Gary drops F-Bombs which I’m not a fan of and none are included below:

[Gary V] This is all I know, I’m blindly consumer-centric, and as long as you’re blindly consumer-centric…

[Becky] What do you mean by that?

[Gary V] All I do is pay attention to what people are doing, nothing else, nothing else. You can punch me in the face 8,000 times, I’m here to get punched.

[Becky] He’s a best-selling author, motivational speaker, and marketing guru.

[Gary V] Hustle would be putting all your effort into achieving the goal at hand, and for me, that means, making every minute count.

[Becky] Gary Vaynerchuk, simply Gary Vee to his legions of followers on social media, is a consummate communicator, dishing out advice on everything from best business practices to how to live a happy life with a heavy dose of F-bombs.

[Becky] I recently caught up with the lively New Yorker in Dubai to get to know the man behind the brand and find out how he keeps one step ahead of the competition.

[Becky] What does being a contemporary communicator mean?

[Gary V] It means that you are blindly religious around this. It means that you understand where people are paying attention, whether that’s Twitch or TikTok or believe it or not, organic reach on LinkedIn or pre-roll on OTT, it’s understanding that modern television commercials and modern print ads and modern radio ads are overpriced, outside of the Super Bowl, and it means that, the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Instagrams and the YouTubes and the pre-roll Spotifys are grossly underpriced, and then are you capable of creating the creative, the videos, the pictures, the written words that are contextual to those platforms, not taking a commercial and putting it on YouTube, to make the agenda successful.

[Becky] You are a pain in the ass to the industry who ought to know all of this. Nothing you are telling me actually is brand new. This has been around for time, so what makes you different from the rest of the industry?

[Gary V] I’m all about where is the media underpriced, where is it overpriced. I would obviously wanna buy underpriced, so for me, social media, not all of them, the current state of certain media products within certain media platforms is so wildly underpriced, Faceboook, Instagram Stories, LinkedIn, pre-roll YouTube when you tie it into the Google search. So I’m all about underpriced attention, quite a bit of that is happening on social media today, in 10 years, it might on Voice or something else. I’m completely unemotional of the platform, I’m completely emotional about consumers’ attention.

[Gary V] I think I have single, I’d literally think that I have one of the best ideas for a social network.

[Gary] You got your perspective.

[Betty] So you said, I think 30-second spots on TV are bad, I think five-second pictures, eight-second videos on TikTok are good, and I think three-minute and 19-second little docuseries on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram are good

because they’re being deployed against places where people are actually watching it.

[Gary V] I love that sentence. I don’t know what else to say,

it sounded exactly right. I mean that reality is it’s like, it’s so funny I have no interest in holding up the past. I ask people, why is it that writing with a pen, on a piece of paper, a message, and then sending it in the mail is heralded as this noble act, but a text is demonized as not warm or great communication.

The reality is it’s the message, not the medium. And so, for me, I’m just super focused on, if a client gives me $10 million to make something happen,

I want that to be successful, and requires being a day trader

of where communication is, not a mutual fund buyer based on past performance.

Striking a platform while it’s hot matters way more than if that platform actually exists in a decade.

[Betty] You have first mover advantage, still just. The business is built on the fact that you had first mover advantage. Gary, how do you stay relevant?

You scale your own business. How do you avoid becoming that traditional media agency?

[Gary V] There’s several ways. One, I will never take my company public,

that’s how I avoid it. Two, this is all I’ve ever done. You know, in 1996, I launched one of the first three e-commerce wine businesses in America,

and by 1997, I had one of the most meaningful email newsletters. I bought Google Ads the day it came out. I started the first long-form YouTube show

or one of the five first long-form YouTube shows in 2006. I invested in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber before they became what they were. This is all I know, I’m blindly consumer-centric and as long as you’re blindly consumer-centric…

[Betty] What do you mean by that?

[Gary V] All I do is pay attention to what people are doing, nothing else, nothing else, I do nothing else, and as long as you do that and behave towards that, well then, what everybody else does, which is actually try to figure out how to work in the B2B world, how to make margin in the short term, are always vulnerable to that. That is probably the thing that I’m most confident about, which is that this has been written, and I will continue to rinse and repeat this model at 55, at 66, at 77, at 88, and I mean, and here’s the good part, and if I don’t because I got stale or tired or complacent, I deserve to lose.

[Betty] You say you are completely platform-agnostic.

[Gary V] I am.

[Betty] You’ve talked about those in the business of marketing strategies being a full day behind the curve.

[Gary] Yes.

[Betty] To remain relevant, you need to be, you know, on the say as it were, on the money. What’s happening tomorrow, Gary?

[Gary] I don’t know. See, that’s the beauty of being completely and utterly day-trading-focused, I don’t know. Look, I clearly see trends that make me believe that Voice, you know, Google Home, Alexa is going to be incredibly powerful as a front-facing framework, as an operating system.

[Alexa] Cancel anytime, terms in the Alexa…

[Gary] Yes.

[Alexa] Should I start your free trial and pay I’m Still Standing?

[Gary] Yes.

How dangerous is that?

Alexa sent me pizza, that’s powerful.

Google, tell me about the election. Think about how powerful what comes out of the Google Voice is at that moment. So I do see Voice as an interface brewing, but I have no passion, you know, when I get most heralded, people talk about me being a futurist or a Nostradum, I laugh, I’m like, I’m none of those things. What I’m very good at is when TikTok is happening right now, I’m very loud about it, and I see it, and more importantly, I make on it, and I test it, and I see the business results.

[Betty] Does it bother you that the medium, the media, the new media, or platforms that are, some will say, creating huge anxiety for their users? Does that worry? Are you in the business of anxiety-inducing content on platforms that are bad for the answers out there?

[Gary] No, I don’t believe that at all. I actually completely take a different take. First of all, people have always been consistent, people have always had anxiety, people are insecure, people are trying to keep up with the Joneses, people have parents that create entitlement, which leads to insecurity. If you look at a picture somebody in beautiful Dubai, and you have FOMO because you don’t, there is far more important things things going on there than you following things on Instagram. Magazines were creating anxiety ’cause all the models in it were tall and skinny for all the girls that went through Vogue in 1992. Television creates anxiety with its actors and movie stars. Everything has the potential of creating anxiety.

[Betty] So let’s talk about how you’re being judged at the moment. There are those who say, he is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about media, adding, and I quote, we get the gurus we deserve, and you could not invent a more suitable spokesperson for social media. A big guy in the traditional media landscape said that about you.

[Gary] Yeah, that’s probably the most exciting statement that I could get from somebody who’s an executive in the ad world. That comes from a gentlemen who’s never actually run a business. You know, I did marketing to put food on my family’s table because we were immigrants from the Soviet Union, and when I joined my family business, that’s how we lived. That gentleman went to business school and is been an executive his entire lifeat a holding company and has never had to earn a dollar that actually means something in merit. He’s only sold reports and PDFs to other corporations. I’m top on the field because I’m winning, I’m winning. They know media is the fastest-growing independent agency in the history of the industry. I’m winning, that’s why they’re upset.

[Betty] You are a die-hard Jets fan.

[Gary] Yes.

[Betty] They are not winning.

[Gary] They are not.

[Becky] At present. What do you do about that?

[Gary] First of all, I love the way you segue, what am I gonna do about that? I am, since the time I was, since I was seven, I’ve loved them. By the time I was in fourth, maybe by the time I was 10 or

11, I have been saying to anybody that was willing listen to me that I was gonna buy the New York Jets. So what am I gonna do about it? I’m going to amass the wealth and the opportunities to enable me to buy the Jets when they’re up for sale, and then I’m gonna win Super Bowls.

[Becky] I love your style, Gary Vee. There is a green knitted jersey that, as I understand it, will sit proudly above the name of the Jets at the stadium. Why, tell me about that jersey.

[Gary] I appreciate you bringing this up. I literally don’t like stuff, right? I don’t wanna buy anything other than the team. I don’t like stuff. But there is one item that rules my soul. When I was seven, I fell in love with the Jets. All the kids in the neighborhood had jerseys. I ran into the house, mom, I need a jersey. My mom laughed at me because that’s not what immigrants do, we don’t spend $25 on a football jersey. I would cry and I was sad, I continued to go outside for the next week not wearing a jersey while everybody else did, you know, it’s the 80s kids, we went outside every day. And then finally, like 10 or 11 days later, my mom, at night, had knitted me a Jets jersey with my name Gary on the back, and my favorite number five, and it’s the single most important item to me. It represents absolutely everything about my journey and about my parents and how much I appreciate them for, you know, it’s so crazy, with all the great things that are happening to me professionally and personally.

[Becky] I’ve heard your story before to a certain extent, you know, the pride that you clearly have in being an American.

[Gary] Yes.

[Becky] How does it feel to live in this era in America? Does it worry, are you proud of the country?

[Gary] Am I proud of the country, I’m proud of the country. I’m not proud of all the behaviors. I’m proud of my mother. Do I agree with everything she does, absolutely not. But, look, I think whatever your politics are, I believe that anything that looks like nationalism or us against them is always massively detrimental. It eliminates so much of the good that happens in the human spirit. And so, I very much dislike the tone of demonizing anything from the outside.