From growing up in a one bedroom apartment with his entire extended family, to running a multi-million dollar company and starting a family of his own, Gary Vaynerchuk had a plan, and made it his purpose. In this episode, Gary reveals to Dr. Oz how he learned to control his own destiny…and how you can too. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| So what do you attribute your emotional slash energy success to? | |
| Gratitude. | |
| And then I guess it would just be perspective. | |
| I was brainwashed into thinking, you know, health is everything. | |
| I mean, every time we toasted to health, health, health, health. | |
| It's really funny to say this to you. | |
| I never really realized it because I'm also Eastern European hardcore in the way that like I don't want to go to the doctor. | |
| Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz podcast. | |
| All right, Gary Vaynerchuk's with me, one of the most successful people I know, and I can say that having known you for 15 years now, don't answer, started playing basketball, and despite what you might think is diminutive size, he's a big force on the basketball court. | |
| Fast, he's got a good outside shot, he moves to his left well, all the usual things. | |
| AJ, his brother, has suffered this, but he, in the meantime, built up a multi-million dollar empire from a one-bedroom apartment. | |
| And when I first met you, Gary, you had just started a small little wine Internet play, coming out of a family wine business. | |
| So what I want to do today is cover three things. | |
| One, how the heck did you get to where you are now? | |
| Number two, your predictions on where media is headed because you've got your finger on the pulse of it. | |
| And thirdly, I want to talk about your health and how you maintain the level of intensity that allows you to achieve what you have been able to enjoy with a reputation for being able to go a mile a minute and never seem to be down, never seem to be tired. | |
| So there's a deeper philosophical and health secret you probably are carrying with you. | |
| All right, start number one issue. | |
| Yes. | |
| Just to get people to understand how powerful you are. | |
| Everyone knows about Facebook and Snap and Twitter. | |
| What's the next thing out there, as you sit here in your beautiful offices overlooking Manhattan, that you think is predictive of where we're headed? | |
| I think that voice as a platform is going to be the next thing. | |
| So you just mentioned three winners in the social revolution. | |
| And so, you know, we're in my office. | |
| So when I look up at Twitter and Tumblr and Uber and Facebook, a lot of my bets... | |
| These are stock certificates from their public offering, by the way. | |
| This is all their pre... | |
| This was my stocks pre their IPO. So here's what I did really well in 2007. I said, holy cow, social media is going to win. | |
| And so whatever I think is good in that game is interesting. | |
| So Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and later Snapchat and Pinterest, I invested in all those companies before they went public. | |
| That was a win. | |
| My answer to your question is actually even more fun for the audience because they can win even more so than just saying one specific company. | |
| My answer is voice is going to win. | |
| So the apps that are built on top of the Alexa, right? | |
| Yep. | |
| So eventually we're going to say, Alexa, play Jumanji. | |
| Right? | |
| Just making that up. | |
| She's thinking right now, she has no idea what I just said. | |
| But what is really... | |
| 74 degrees. | |
| Right. | |
| It's nice. | |
| They'll have to prove it. | |
| I get the point. | |
| No, no. | |
| It's an interesting point because I think what people need to understand is Spotify and Instagram and Waze and all these companies were built on top of the iPhone. | |
| Right? | |
| They were apps. | |
| They're apps. | |
| The biggest companies in the world that we talk about are... | |
| Facebook is an app. | |
| Instagram's an app at this point. | |
| Yes, they have desktop plays, but they're apps. | |
| If anybody's really paying attention, trying to win the 2020 to 2030 world, and I think everyone should think that way, at least in the macro, I don't know what the apps are I don't know what they're going to be, but I know that there are a ton of entrepreneurs. | |
| I know a 13-year-old girl in Tennessee right now has an idea in her head and she's going to execute a company over the next three to five years. | |
| It's going to be an app on top of the Alexa and that is going to be the next place. | |
| I suspect it would be voiced around still social issues connecting us. | |
| Because, iconically, that's what we seem to desire. | |
| Although, paradoxically, it does seem to do the opposite to a lot of young people, especially. | |
| And young women and young men react differently. | |
| Young men go off on their own and play video games. | |
| Young women will actually get tougher and meaner sometimes. | |
| Aggression lives in both genders. | |
| They just express themselves differently. | |
| And girls will torture each other with story. | |
| So how does the next generation of social... | |
| Is it bringing us together, or does it not? | |
| Even if it's on voice, does it pull us further apart? | |
| So I think that's a really interesting question. | |
| I think that technology is exposing our truths, not changing our behaviors. | |
| So I think that what you're referring to is super interesting to me. | |
| So first of all, I would argue that the things that so many of us in society fear right now has a lot more to do with the way we're parenting Right now you have parents, specifically and elders, who will look at a Facebook or Instagram and look at bullying or things of that nature. | |
| And I think that we have to become much more thoughtful about this than just say, oh, technology is making us more introverted or, to your point, guys will go play video games but women will tease or rag on each other. | |
| I think that we need to take it way further back We live in a society right now that is really struggling with putting its two to seven year olds in a position to deal with adversity or consequence. | |
| One of the reasons a 13 to 19-year-old may struggle with negative feedback is that their parents have spent the first 8 to 10 years of their lives trying to eliminate all negative feedback loops, aka nobody wins, everybody gets a trophy, and a million other manipulations that modern parenting has done. | |
| And so my answer is very simple. | |
| As we go through Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and the fear-mongering we do around social media, I would ask everybody to be thoughtful. | |
| Is Instagram making those girls tease each other? | |
| Is Twitch making guys not interact with each other the way that the elders are trying to look at this? | |
| Or is it something far more interesting, which is, I think technology is just a place that... | |
| It gives us an ability to see what we're actually doing. | |
| When people teased each other or today, when somebody teases each other, makes fun of or bullies each other in the hallway, it's still happening even though it's not happening on Instagram. | |
| Instagram and these platforms allow us to see it. | |
| I think that we have to be far more critical about what we're doing in preparing our children for the inevitable feedback loop that society is. | |
| I'll cede you that. | |
| I'm optimistic about voice, not just being able to perpetuate what we're doing right now, which is allowing... | |
| The deeper secrets of our lives to be revealed because of how we behave in private to revealing ways of maybe bringing us together. | |
| And I'll give you an example. | |
| People are much harder on each other in print than they are in voice. | |
| Couldn't agree more. | |
| When I do a television program, if I get into a fight with somebody, I'm looking at you in the eyes. | |
| It's hard to hate up close. | |
| So true. | |
| I'll connect with you. | |
| If someone's tweeting something that I said, they can say the most vicious stuff because I have no idea who they are. | |
| So does voice... | |
| Take some of that out or does it make it even more dangerous because I can camouflage my voice, I can add sarcasm or harshness into it? | |
| You're asking an interesting question. | |
| I think you're taking this to a very smart place. | |
| Look, I think every medium has its own nuances. | |
| I think that voice is going to scale. | |
| I do think that there's an element that print allows more hiding than voice, and voice allows more hiding than video. | |
| So I do think that you're onto something there. | |
| But I think it goes just far, far deeper than that. | |
| I think that we're living through an era where we're being exposed at a level we've never had before. | |
| Many people are super uncomfortable with it. | |
| And I think philosophically, this goes to a far more interesting place, which is my point of view, is that we are far too judgmental. | |
| And we lack enormous empathy. | |
| And that what this era is going to do is going to force us to face a lot of things, which actually is going to result in a 100-year macro for us to have far more empathy towards everybody. | |
| In a world where everybody has always had skeletons, everybody has some level of skeletons. | |
| Once we go through a full process where everybody's skeletons are exposed at scale... | |
| I think we're gonna start being a little less judgmental because the hypocrisy of it all is not gonna have any place to fester. | |
| Hypocrisy could fester in the shadows of society, in a big media world. | |
| On this internet platform that we're gonna live on for a very long time, it's gonna get a hell of a lot harder. | |
| Let's talk about artificial intelligence and augmented reality. | |
| Please. | |
| Both of which are sort of critical, I think, to the evolution. | |
| We're seeing with AR a lot of health applications. | |
| I can take someone who's got macular degeneration, which means the fovea, the middle part of your eye, loses its vision. | |
| Yes. | |
| And I can train your eye to use a different part of the retina. | |
| Interesting. | |
| I can get folks who have paralysis, who can't move their limbs, remember the muscle memory, so to speak, of what it takes, which means they can actually begin to move in artificial devices that are controlling their limbs more effectively. | |
| Where do you see AR playing a role in changing our lives? | |
| I'll give you one last tip. | |
| Please. | |
| AR could change how our most fundamental... | |
| Default mode of the brain works, which is what causes the ruminations, the continuous lack of awareness of consciousness. | |
| And it could actually wake us up to that because it can take us places we can't go on our own. | |
| Yeah, I think that's right. | |
| I think AR is an incredibly game-changing technology that is unbelievably early in its application. | |
| So the internet was around in the 60s and 70s and 80s. | |
| It was just being used by the government and then in the 80s and 90s by nerds. | |
| Let's just call it what it is. | |
| I think AR is very early in its process but here's my two cents and my guess but educated. | |
| I think that We will live in an environment where we are wearing, I think it's going to be contact lenses by the time we get the scale. | |
| So I don't think it's necessarily glasses or some other product. | |
| But you and I are talking right now, the ability for, just like right now on Snapchat, I can create in its studio a 3D image. | |
| Me and my team here who surrounds me right now are talking a lot about creating cartoon characters to interact with myself in Snapchat and other social media platforms. | |
| That will play out and we are going to do that. | |
| And that will be really great for my content through a phone. | |
| I believe that that same interaction is going to happen in real life. | |
| And so I do think that all of us are going to wear contact lenses and live life through a mixed reality world. | |
| We will toggle between real, real, real life. | |
| Augmented reality and virtual reality. | |
| And for everybody listening, real life is easy, you know it. | |
| Augmented reality is a fictional character or image or thing will appear in your eyesight, but it's not actually there physically. | |
| But you're still seeing the real world. | |
| You're walking down Fifth Avenue and you literally see a rhinoceros, a cartoon rhinoceros that over time will get more and more real. | |
| Walking down Fifth Avenue. | |
| And then finally, you know, virtual reality. | |
| The entire scope of what you're seeing is virtual. | |
| So I think AR is coming. | |
| We saw it with Pokemon Go. | |
| We got the very, very, very early preview. | |
| We had Americans and, excuse me, people around the world Running through woods, walking down the street, walking their dogs to capture virtual characters through the lens of their phone. | |
| And so that in itself gave me all I needed to see. | |
| It was no longer theory. | |
| That was the preview. | |
| And I think over the course of time, I think that was the friendster. | |
| And I think there'll be a Facebook one day. | |
| Just to stay on that topic, of the health companies that you follow or know of, who's doing the best job taking advantage of where AR may be in the future, voice technology, or just social media in general? | |
| Anyone stand up? | |
| Nobody in the first two because it's early, early, early. | |
| As far as social, it's startup brands. | |
| The brands that are doing best on social, especially taking advantage of Instagram, which is really the heartbeat of social at this moment, with obviously many others being important, Tend to be startup brands, direct to consumer, healthy products. | |
| Everybody who's innovating and winning on Amazon or Shopify in the e-commerce world, call it. | |
| Dried pomegranate fruits. | |
| Every single healthy snack company that's doing anything interesting is far more a startup than it is Kraft or Kellogg's or Mondelez. | |
| You're seeing the innovation happen where people have no option and have no money. | |
| If you have money, a lot of them are wasting it. | |
| It's not that I hate traditional marketing. | |
| It's just a lot of it tends to be overpriced. | |
| For me, you look at Gym wear. | |
| You look at mental health, right? | |
| You look at Calm or, you know, Headspace, some of the meditation apps. | |
| The winners are startup brands with a little bit of funding. | |
| Just back to all levels of health. | |
| Lola, right? | |
| A very clean tampon company. | |
| You know, What an incredible positioning, and full disclosure, I invested in it, but I put 25,000 bucks into it, so it's a very, not a big deal in my financial life, but I'm aware of it because of that investment I made four years ago, and I haven't stayed that close to it, but they've just had a big fundraising round, and it was interesting, their position was so simple. | |
| All these modern women spend so much time thinking about what they consume And meanwhile, something we consume every month, the biggest brands were not necessarily healthy for our body. | |
| And so I think you're seeing enormous innovation with startup brands across the board. | |
| When I think about big companies You know what? | |
| The truth is, I don't spend enough time, even why I'm going to the well, I would hate to mention Lola, under normal circumstances, I don't stay close to enough businesses. | |
| I focus on me and the companies we work for. | |
| I don't need to brag on anybody that's working with us at VaynerMedia, and then I don't really know what the competition's doing from a detailed standpoint. | |
| Here's what I mean by that. | |
| I see the same posts, and it might be clever, but to me, success comes in the results. | |
| When I see Taco Bell doing great work on social content, that is true. | |
| I just don't know if it's actually driving people to their restaurants. | |
| I think too many people are pandering in digital for the wrong things. | |
| I don't care how many likes I get on a post. | |
| I understand that it's one of the metrics. | |
| I understand that it's a metric that everybody sees. | |
| But I'm sure if you talk to everybody right now who has business aspirations on Instagram, if they could have 10 more sales or 10,000 more likes, you know, you're going to have a lot more people that lean towards the sales. | |
| There's a purpose. | |
| And when I say sales, maybe it's selling something. | |
| Maybe it's getting donations for your charity. | |
| Maybe it's getting voted for for, you know, mayor of your town. | |
| Whatever your ask is, does your ask convert better is a true KPI. And that's why sometimes I struggle with that question. | |
| We have a lot more questions to go, but first, let's take a quick break. | |
| Artificial intelligence is going to change the face of medicine because it's going to allow me to have a coach in my pocket. | |
| Everyone can hear our voices who likewise have the option if they desire it. | |
| But artificial intelligence is controlled by a few people and it is so expensive. | |
| There's an endeavor that I'm involved with Oprah called ShareCare where we have to go overseas to find information. | |
| AI expertise. | |
| So what happens in a world where you have a lot of good companies that want to do great things, transform the way we deliver health, but you don't have enough people who understand the key operating system that AI is going to represent? | |
| The same exact thing that happened with web developers in the early 90s. | |
| They were expensive and far and few between, and then everybody trained up. | |
| Every single 13-year-old in America who has engineering ambitions is going to be a beast in AI in 11 years. | |
| I kept yelling, and I have videos out there. | |
| In 2009, 10, everyone's like, make your kid an engineer. | |
| It's a great job. | |
| They'll go to Google and Facebook. | |
| I'm like, guys, if everybody becomes an engineer, it becomes commoditized. | |
| To your point, right now, finding great people in AI, true AI, not, you know, kind of, I think people get confused with AI, you know, a simple algorithm versus true artificial intelligence versus semantics is a skill set that the biggest company, the reason you're struggling to find it Four or five companies are trying to snatch up every single developer and expert in that space. | |
| But over time, the expertise flows. | |
| And just like it was super hard to find Ruby on Rails developers when I was building in 2008, and PHP developers, you find that skill. | |
| In the same way that audio engineers for the podcast environment were harder, a lot of people that grew up in radio and every kid that you can think of is getting better at it. | |
| As hard as it was to find video people that really understood YouTube in 2012, 13, 14, these two guys sitting here right now were in their bedroom learning those skills. | |
| So I have no fear. | |
| It's like when farming was emerging, In the earliest of early days, who the hell knows how far back, right? | |
| There was only so many people that knew how to farm and then everybody knew how to farm and then nobody wanted to know how to farm. | |
| It just evolves. | |
| Cycles, cycles. | |
| Humans are incredible at this, Mehmet. | |
| Incredible at this. | |
| Right now it's emerging and so what you have is you have people Who are grooming to be that. | |
| But to your point, there are these moments. | |
| And so if you ask me, what does it look like in 2019, 2021? | |
| Well, fewer companies will do it. | |
| It'll be expensive. | |
| But if you ask me, how does it play out in 2022, 2024, 2026? | |
| I'm like, there'll be plenty of supply of talent. | |
| By the way, the first forming community was in Çatalhöyük, which is in Turkey, which I thought you'd pick up on that. | |
| I love that. | |
| 10,000 BC. And the reason they figured it out is because they could identify lice in the clothing. | |
| So they figured people were living in close proximity. | |
| That's why the lice could thrive. | |
| You never know what you learn on a podcast. | |
| That is a fun fact. | |
| Gary Vaynerchuk. | |
| Yes. | |
| I'm sitting in an office full of lots of things. | |
| Lots of Jets memorabilia. | |
| I should admit that his main goal in life is to own the Jets. | |
| The journey to try to buy the Jets is my great love in life. | |
| That is the clarification as I've gotten older. | |
| You know, yes, I want to buy the Jets, but probably five or six years ago, I was like, wait a minute. | |
| It's the chase. | |
| The chase, the journey is my addiction. | |
| Woody Johnson's preoccupied now in his ambassadorial role. | |
| Yes, but his brother Chris is running the team and he's doing a great job, by the way. | |
| Yeah, and listen, good news. | |
| The Johnsons are a good 25 years older than me and so, you know, if the cycles of life play out, I should be in a position to strike at some point. | |
| So let's go back to how a kid who grew up in a one-bedroom... | |
| Yes. | |
| Home could rise to where you are now. | |
| What are the life lessons that came along on that trip? | |
| So when we first met, again, this was at least 15 years ago, we were playing basketball. | |
| You started this wine company. | |
| Give us a little bit of background of where you thought yourself of yourself back then and where you thought you were going to be headed. | |
| Two questions. | |
| So let me really give fast, fast context. | |
| I was born in Belarus in the former Soviet Union, and I grew up in that one bedroom in Queens, New York when we first came to America for a couple years. | |
| And then we moved out to Edison, New Jersey, where I lived in a townhouse. | |
| And that's where really I became me, meaning lemonade stands, shoveling snow. | |
| I'm Jewish, but nobody could sing better Christmas carols than me because I can make a buck. | |
| Like, literally ring the doorbell, sing, give me a dollar. | |
| Like, was always entrepreneurial. | |
| I'm 42, which means baseball cards became a big, big deal. | |
| That was the culturally big, that was the iPhone of 1987 if you were a guy. | |
| Everybody collected. | |
| I started making a lot of money in the scheme of things. | |
| When you're 11, 12, 13 and making $2,000, $3,000 a weekend selling baseball cards, you're rich. | |
| Even more rich than I am now in some way. | |
| That was insane. | |
| My dad saved every dollar, bought a liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey. | |
| Which is surrounded by Summit and Milburn and, you know, Short Hills, really affluent areas. | |
| It was called Shoppers Discount Liquors, but there was a wine demand that was palpable. | |
| I sniffed it out as a 14-year-old and just decided to become a wine expert. | |
| I thought I was going to build the Toys R Us of wine. | |
| So I thought I was going to build 8,000 wine stores and sell it and buy the Jets. | |
| The Jets thing happened around fourth or fifth grade. | |
| I don't remember exactly why or how, but there's a part of me that has romanticized that it was probably around then that I realized I was more likely to own them than to play for them. | |
| To your point, you gave me a nice compliment. | |
| I have really good hand-eye coordination. | |
| That's the punchline. | |
| And in second and third grade, fourth grade, that made me an incredibly good athlete. | |
| I was dominant. | |
| Unfortunately, you also made the point of, I'm not 6'2", 210, right? | |
| So, as everybody started getting bigger, some of those advantages were going away. | |
| But I always wanted to buy the Jets. | |
| I always wanted to strive for something big. | |
| It was subconscious. | |
| I never thought about having a big goal. | |
| I didn't realize it was going to be about the journey, not necessarily it. | |
| In 1996, I launched one of the first e-commerce wine businesses. | |
| The wine thing evolved. | |
| I became an expert on paper. | |
| I knew everything about wine. | |
| I read The Wine Spectator in every book. | |
| And then the internet came along. | |
| And I first sniffed it out in 94. I was like, what is this? | |
| It quickly evolved into me selling on eBay. | |
| And that quickly got me to, wait a minute, I can build a big internet wine company. | |
| And in a very quick period from 1998 to 2003, I built my dad's business from a three to a $60 million a year retailer. | |
| That kind of put me on the map. | |
| Star Ledger, Jersey fame, all that. | |
| And then... | |
| My brother graduated college. | |
| We started VaynerMedia, the company we're sitting in now, which is now an 800-person company doing marketing for the biggest brands in the world. | |
| But my big goal is to buy brands. | |
| I referenced earlier all these startup brands. | |
| I think Tootsie Rolls and Head& Shoulders and Puma sneakers, some of these iconic brands that so many of us above 35 grew up with are in trouble. | |
| And my ambition and why I built VaynerMedia was to buy those brands and then resurrect them and then flip them. | |
| So very basically, I want to buy... | |
| Junior mints for $100 million and then sell it for a billion dollars after my company, my machine, my process, my team remarkets it in a contemporary way. | |
| And you've had the benefit of knowing me for a while. | |
| I'm right a lot about what's about to happen with consumer behavior. | |
| That is my intuition. | |
| And so that's kind of, you know... | |
| I had a dream as a kid. | |
| I had no clue how I was gonna get there. | |
| Both of our loves of basketball is my perfect story. | |
| I always and continue to believe that I'm gonna buy the New York Jets, but when I got courtside seats for the Knicks for the season, I turned to AJ our first time we sat there and said, can you believe this? | |
| The things along the way are more remarkable to me than the fact that I'm going to buy the Jets because I feel like that's a foregone conclusion. | |
| So 90% of the major consumer brands, from what I can tell, are either stagnant or slightly declining. | |
| Correct. | |
| So it's not just one or two companies that are struggling. | |
| Across the board, this is happening. | |
| And part of it is being replaced by small brands that seem to feel a little niched out. | |
| But real quick on that. | |
| Because I want to make sure everybody's educated back to getting value out of this podcast. | |
| RX Bar sold for $680 million to Kellogg. | |
| These small brands are dramatically bigger than people think. | |
| You know, these brands that are only marketing on Facebook and Instagram, aka television, and are selling on Amazon and Shopify, aka Walmart, And I gave everybody the picture of why I think this is happening. | |
| I think TV and big box retail is the foundation for these brands. | |
| CVS, Walgreens, Costco, Albertsons, Walmart is now, to me, Amazon and Shopify. | |
| Television and billboards and radio, to me, now are podcasts, Facebook, Instagram. | |
| So that's why this is happening. | |
| But these small brands, by comparison to Kellogg's or Coca-Cola, I've never seen what I've been seeing, which is the following. | |
| These brands are now going from zero to $10 million in sales in a year, in 18 months, and there's thousands of them. | |
| And so the death of a thousand cuts, Mehmet. | |
| But when you do that math, then large companies, to stay large, aggregated companies, have to continue to acquire these, not as small as we thought of companies, but still relatively small. | |
| So take, as an example, a great brand like Procter& Gamble. | |
| They don't actually put P&G front and center. | |
| They let their individual brands be known for who they are. | |
| Most do. | |
| In the health space, for me to trust that something's being done right, I sort of have to and want to know the bigger brand. | |
| It's not like I'm buying a new shaving cream. | |
| Are we talking about Tylenol? | |
| I'm just trying to get a sense of what... | |
| Are you talking over the counter? | |
| Yeah, I think that's right. | |
| But what's interesting about OTC is that it has to get FDA approved and the rigor in the U.S. is what gives people confidence. | |
| You know, like if you look at, you know, look, I mean, even if you look at the adoption, you know, one of the things I've looked at was Viagra. | |
| Just kind of trying to under... | |
| Is it for personal use or for acquisition? | |
| This is for... | |
| No, not personally yet, but I'm sure I'll get to that point. | |
| It's going to let it grow at him a little bit. | |
| So far, no, but honestly, one way or the other. | |
| I was about to say thank God, but I actually wouldn't care. | |
| I mean, to me, it is what it is. | |
| Meaning it is what it is, right? | |
| No, to me, it was when that came out, what was the appetite for adoption? | |
| When you think about something that extreme to the male psyche, it's super interesting for me to see How quickly it was adopted. | |
| I'll give you another one. | |
| Social norms. | |
| Online dating. | |
| Online dating has been around, but it took before it was socially accepted for it to actually explode. | |
| Or Uber. | |
| Watching people send their 15 year olds into Ubers, it took some time for Uber to be trusted. | |
| But if I told a parent 15 years ago, That in 15 years, you're going to think the right thing to do is put your 14-year-old daughter into a stranger's car and get unlimited Uber instead of having them drive. | |
| You would have laughed me out of the room. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| I'm going to pay to put my child in a stranger's car. | |
| But that's what we're doing. | |
| So, on the OTC front, as long as the FDA is involved, if Tyler here got it past the FDA, I feel like people are going to be comfortable buying those things. | |
| There's last more to come after the break. | |
| Let's finish up talking about you personally. | |
| Okay. | |
| So you've done things that most people can only hope to be able to do, but it didn't happen by accident. | |
| And I've seen you close up when you're under pressure. | |
| You have a way of harvesting energy and obviously confidence is part of this, but some of it's just basic human hacking. | |
| So what do you attribute your emotional slash energy success to? | |
| Gratitude. | |
| And then I guess it would just be perspective. | |
| I don't know what happened. | |
| And I think it's a mix between my mother, and I actually haven't said this out loud, I know my team's gonna react here, I actually think a little bit to do with my grandmother and great-grandmother, who I never really talk about. | |
| Everything, and maybe it's because everybody died in their 50s in the Soviet Union because everybody was miserable in communism, right? | |
| I was brainwashed into thinking, you know, health is everything. | |
| I mean, every time we toasted to health, health, health, health, it's really funny to say this to you. | |
| I never really realized it because I'm also Eastern European hardcore in the way that, like, I don't want to go to the doctor. | |
| And, like, I don't take medicine. | |
| Like, it's funny where I am on this scale, but I'm starting to understand it. | |
| And it's actually the answer to your question. | |
| Both my parents lost a parent very early. | |
| My mom lost her mom at five. | |
| My dad lost his dad at 15. My mom also lost her dad before we just came to America. | |
| He was gonna come a year later. | |
| He died during that process, so I don't even remember him. | |
| I grew up in an environment where we didn't have much and I only had one grandparent and like every story from the old country because we're the first generation was very heavy predicated on shitty times and lack of health. | |
| So somewhere along the way between my mom being unbelievably optimistic and half glass full and my grandma and great grandma just always talking about health over everything Even though success mattered because we came from nothing. | |
| It was like wealth. | |
| It was part of it. | |
| I can give you the answer to my question. | |
| It's the same reason, as you know, four years ago I started getting my health in order for myself. | |
| Meaning I lost a lot of weight. | |
| I started gaining muscle. | |
| I started eating differently. | |
| I hired a full-time trainer who travels with me. | |
| I... Live a very basic life, Mehmet. | |
| I wake up every morning and literally, if the eight people that I care about in the most, 12, 15, my core family, me and my wife's family, and like all our siblings and our parents and our kids, of course, most of all, if they're alive and not dead slash terminally ill, I'm super fired up. | |
| And I have the great fortune now of being 42 years old and not having to deal with a whole lot of death or terminal illness because unfortunately for me I lost everybody pretty early on or even before I had a chance. | |
| So my energy comes from gratitude. | |
| I'm so grateful. | |
| I'm unbelievably grateful. | |
| So what gets you down? | |
| In the micro, tons of things. | |
| Losing an account. | |
| The Knicks lose Porzingis out for the year. | |
| I'll give you one. | |
| When my senior leaders in my company don't have the ability to be the bigger person, I hate conflict. | |
| Conflict's a part of life, but I hate unnecessary conflict when it's manifested from insecurity or ego. | |
| That was a really, I really tapped into, that crushes me. | |
| When somebody's not doing the right thing, when I've created a framework for it to be so good, hurts my feelings, tons of stuff. | |
| I'm so devastated in the current state of our political society. | |
| I'm very down... | |
| Let me rephrase. | |
| It's funny. | |
| I'm so optimistic. | |
| I referenced it earlier, so I'm glad I get to do the recall. | |
| I'm weirdly excited we're going through all this crap because I think it's one step backwards, two steps forward. | |
| I really do. | |
| Black Lives Matter, Me Too, all the things we have to go through, I swear on my children's health, I'm excited about it because I think now we're really going to deal with it because you've got to get to the core. | |
| But listen, I'm a human being. | |
| Every single day, there's things that potentially get me down. | |
| But I, now, especially as I've been paying attention, I have not garnered into the area of depression or things of that nature. | |
| My perspective currently and my life circumstances have not allowed me to. | |
| I am unbelievably aware of the following two places that I'm vulnerable to. | |
| Number one, If somebody in my family dies or is terminally ill, I'm going to be in a bad place. | |
| I know that for a fact. | |
| It's the only thing I care about. | |
| I don't know what else to say. | |
| I will disappear off the ranch as somebody who's always out and about if I have to deal with that. | |
| This is just being very authentic. | |
| I'm such an optimist. | |
| Time is my asset. | |
| I do believe I have a potential in my 70s, 80s, 90s, whenever I deem, depending on how modern medicine goes and how I go, I'm a little bit worried that I'm going to resent, because I'm a marathon rider. | |
| I'm very patient. | |
| You know me enough to know that I'm also not cashing in on all my opportunities. | |
| So I'm a little bit worried slash already training myself to not be resentful because I love giving. | |
| I'm selfish. | |
| I like the leverage of giving more than I ask for. | |
| Which is great and makes me unbelievably optimistic and happy now. | |
| I am aware that in my older years I may look back. | |
| Because when you're giving and not asking, it's not that you're being taken advantage of. | |
| It's just that's the way the relationships play out. | |
| And I am absolutely a financial and emotional center for pretty much all my relationships. | |
| And I have to be thoughtful about that. | |
| I'll give you one little bit of advice and I'll thank you for joining us. | |
| I was told this by a very wise guy. | |
| He said every time you give your kids something you did not have growing up, you take from them something you did have. | |
| Oh, I believe in that. | |
| And your upbringing and the loss of three of your grandparents and all the other trials and tribulations having to deal with your brother AJ, they're all contributed. | |
| Oh, you're preaching. | |
| I actually know it's interesting. | |
| With that rant, the kids tend to not be in the place where I'm most worried about. | |
| I'm more worried about business associates Even my parents, my contemporaries, my other even relative siblings. | |
| But you're right. | |
| And my big thing with kids, and listen, both of us have... | |
| You and I are both going to deal with a similar thing in our lives, which is our and our partner, our wives, hard work and things of that nature are going to create scenarios for our kids that are unique, which is both... | |
| Achievement, financially, and for you, and I'm starting to feel it as well because of the way the internet's evolving, a level of fame and notoriety, which are collateral that our kids deal with. | |
| I will say this, you can't fake environment. | |
| And so, one thing that, knowing you a little bit and knowing some of your kids in various degrees, I think the thing that you guys have done well from afar, my two cents, is... | |
| You've made them kind and respectful people, first and foremost. | |
| And, you know, I don't know enough details. | |
| We're not close enough for me to know enough details, but that is my KPI number one. | |
| Yeah, that's the one to focus on without question. | |
| Kindness. | |
| And to that degree, thank you for being kind, both in your time, but also the folks you've touched in your life. | |
| Thanks, Matt. |