Gary Vaynerchuk joins Sam and Shaan to discuss how he identifies underpriced attention — the framework he used to get into Facebook, Twitter, and Slack before they IPO’d. The conversation covers his investing philosophy, his take on Zuckerberg, Logan Paul, and Prime, and a candid discussion on risk tolerance, gratitude, and what he admires in people who play through adversity.
Speakers: Gary Vaynerchuk (founder, VaynerMedia), Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Introduction and Gary’s High School Report Card [00:00:00]
Sam: All right, we got Gary Vee in the house. Everybody knows Gary Vee — he’s all over Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn. He’s invested in Twitter, Slack, and Facebook before they IPO’d. Gary’s fun. We brought him on and our goal was: let’s ask him a bunch of questions that we’re genuinely curious about. Like, which of those investments actually paid off the most? And it was a very, very surprising number, I thought. We asked him about the mindset, and what he noticed hanging out with people like Zuck or Logan Paul or different characters like that. So enjoy this episode with Gary Vee. It’s a good one.
Shaan: Gary, what’s going on, man? How are you?
Shaan: I think Sam saw something recently that you posted that I thought everyone knew about you. Sam, what was that thing?
Sam: The report card. Most podcasts start with an intro — we start with a little ball-busting. So I have here Gary’s high school report card, which you tweeted out. To be fair, I’m not putting anything out there you didn’t already do. But I thought this is kind of amazing. So you tweeted out a picture of your high school report card — I’m just going to read off a few of your achievements.
Gary got a C in Ceramics, a D in English, an F in German. PE, you got an A — that’s the only A you have on this report card. Algebra: D. This one’s kind of amazing — Speech, which you are known for — you got a D. Driver’s Ed: D. Gary, what a turnaround. What’s your reaction when you see this?
Gary: A lot of data in the world is dirty — it’s fake data. And I think school grades are just not a tremendous indicator of what’s going to happen.
The speech one is crazy. The report card I tweeted out was the recap of all four years of high school. Little fun facts to build on what you just said: I got an F in all four marking periods of German One, freshman year. I retook it sophomore year, got a D in the first marking period, and then proceeded to get all F’s. Failed language my freshman and sophomore year.
The state of New Jersey, in 1994, if you did not pass two years of language, you could not graduate high school. So I walked into junior year having to take Spanish One with all these ninth-graders as a junior. I had the pressure on, and luckily Señora Kennedy saw something in me and forced me through the system. Otherwise it was over for me.
But yeah, the speech one really stands out — to think that I got a D in Speech, which was just “give a speech in class.” I told my mom — I talked about this just this weekend — I literally did not open a book in four years of high school. Did zero homework.
You know how they would assign a book report? It’s not that I did it poorly — it’s that I didn’t do it. I literally, in four years of high school, did zero homework. Zero.
Something happened where I just knew that — at that point, I was already working in my dad’s liquor store and selling a lot of baseball cards at shows. And look, this is pre-internet. The world was different. I grew up in an immigrant family, we just moved to rural New Jersey. When I tell you we lived in our own little four- or five-person cocoon — we really did. Very deeply immigrant. My parents didn’t have American friends. My mom wasn’t friends with any of my high school friends’ parents.
My mom asked me about what I’m doing for college in February of my senior year. I was like, “Mom, it’s over. I’m not going to college.” She lost her mind, forced me to apply. I got a postcard in the mail from Mount Ida College, filled it out, and that’s literally how I went to college.
I think if I was growing up today, it would have been okay for me not to go to college and it all would have been handled differently. Honestly, I think my teachers would have said, “He’s got a bright future,” instead of what they said back then, which was, “You’re a loser. You’re going to be a garbage man.” That was the big thing, Sam. In the 90s, your teachers would tell you you’re going to be a garbage man. Which is actually a very good living — a friend of ours just started a garbage business and he’s doing like $300K a year in income.
Sam: Joke’s on you, Mrs. Kennedy.
What Gary Is Excited About: Break the Web and Attention Trends [00:05:30]
Shaan: One of the things we do is always just ask — what are you excited about? What products are you seeing, what people are you seeing, what cool stories are you seeing that you’re genuinely excited about?
Gary: Have you guys seen Break the Web?
Sam: No. What’s that?
Gary: They’ve got a great tagline. It’s breaktheweb.co. “The internet’s official scoreboard.” This app has my attention. Trending topics on Twitter was so big for me back in the day when it was desktop-only. Break the Web is an app that shows you what’s trending right now, and the underlying tech seems pretty damn strong — not just a collection of APIs. I’ve put it on my home screen, which is not something I’ve done in a long time.
Sam: Why? Why do you like it? I’m looking at it now — you just showed it to me. I see Gaza, Trump, and a few other words. They’re important, but I’m not going to click into that stuff.
Gary: Great observation. Something that’s on my mind: everyone needs to consume less news, because all it does is push fear and negativity. That’s how it works.
Right now it’s brand new for me, and when I met with the founders — I only met with them for 10 or 15 minutes — I asked them straight away: can we get this categorized? They said, “Yeah, that’s on the roadmap.” I just need Pop Culture and Consumer Trends. Like, when I look at “Madonna fan” trending, I want to understand that.
But it’s a great indication of where we are in society. Back when Twitter’s trending topics were less political, they were really valuable. The reason I like it — the potential of it — is it’s an indication of the pulse. I’m always looking for what’s the indication of the pulse of what people give a damn about.
Sam: So these guys — it only has 90 reviews. Oddly, both of them used to work at a bakery. The CEO worked at Peet’s Coffee, the other guy worked at Specialties Café and Bakery. They’re both lovers of baked goods, then decided to launch this. It’s three years old, but it’s not popular yet. What’s your prediction — is this thing going to be huge?
Gary: There’s no prediction. Back to shooting the shit — I’m not going around saying “Break the Web’s going to be the best.” But I have a new book coming out soon this year, and I finally feel like I’ve synthesized what I actually do.
Day Trading Attention and Platform Strategy [00:09:00]
Gary: What I know is that I never have an interest in guessing if something’s going to work. I have an interest in executing on anything that might work and then dealing with the ramifications. Why guess when you can test for cheaper than it almost costs to guess?
I have a meeting today where I’m going to post my 100 most successful YouTube videos on Twitter over the next couple months, staggered out. It’s very clear that Twitter is going to push it.
Sam: I agree they’re pushing it, but I just don’t find myself using it that way.
Gary: That’s a great call, Sam. What I know is — I never have interest in guessing if something’s going to work. I have interest in executing on anything that might work and then dealing with the ramifications of the ups and downs. Taking your best YouTube videos and re-posting them on Twitter is a cheap way to learn. And you know, you talk about day trading attention, but all trading is about mispriced assets.
Sam: That’s right.
Gary: I would argue that attention is the most mispriced asset right now that impacts everyone. There is nobody that will ever listen to this that doesn’t need attention as a currency to achieve what’s in their stomach — whether they want to raise money for their PTA, be president of the United States, get more listeners for their podcast, sell their sneakers. The only asset class I think is universal is attention. Even a parent trying to raise children needs their kids to listen to them to get the message across.
The currency of consuming is profound, and we’re living through the mass fragmentation of that. If you think about it — parenting was a lot easier to get your kids to listen when in 1954, 80% of families sat down and had dinner together for an hour and a half. Those parents were able to message in a very interesting way. Whereas now, there’s so much supply with the demand side being the same — there’s only so many hours in the day.
For me personally, as someone who loves business — it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, and it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying, until you first get their attention.
The acronym I use internally at VaynerX and Vayner Media is PACK — Platforms and Culture. Break the Web plays in culture. There are two different currencies I think about constantly. One is platforms: what are the top 25 platforms that have people’s attention, what do they care about, from Snap to Pinterest to LinkedIn to YouTube — even within YouTube, YouTube Shorts operates differently than YouTube longform. This collective of 15-20 places that really have the attention — what are they up to, how do their algorithms work, what are their features doing? I think about them on a day-to-day basis.
Then I think about culture: what is the slang, what are the things and people of interest? And then it becomes a framework of what’s overpriced and underpriced in execution.
For example, I think the Super Bowl is the most underpriced media in the world. It’s very hard to get 130 million people to watch 30 seconds of a video and actually want to. That $7-8 million price tag — I think it’s a great deal. The problem is the creative is the variable of success. The media might be a great deal, but if your 30-second video is forgettable or stinks, that’s the issue. That is basically how my brain works, and how I think about communication, marketing, brand building, perception — the whole world.
Perplexity’s AI Podcast and Multilingual Content [00:15:00]
Gary: Have you guys seen this — let me ask — Perplexity is awesome. But they have this new thing: they’ve come out with a daily podcast that’s 5 to 10 minutes long, written by Perplexity. It has beautiful background music, and they’ve got this British guy — you know those Planet Earth videos? “Now we see the mother cheetah go after…” — they’ve got that voice reading the script, and it sounds awesome. The voice is powered by ElevenLabs.
Sam: Dude, I went to ElevenLabs. I uploaded a ton of our voice and I was like, let’s just see if I can make a podcast. It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.
Gary: Have you guys seen them come out with this podcast? ElevenLabs made a clip — they just translated the podcast, auto-dubbed it using AI into Hindi, and it’s phenomenal. It’s something we’ve been working on for about a year. I think next year is the full year where literally everything I do — every video, every language — we’re there.
Sam: I haven’t seen the podcast, but I can’t wait to listen to it. It sounds so good. And they haven’t made a big announcement — I randomly came across it, and I’m like, I’m going to listen to this every day. It’s David Attenborough telling me about the news. It sounds awesome.
Gary: Which language are you going to do?
Sam: Should we do Hindi?
Gary: Everything. If you’re going to do one, you might as well do all. I also think — everyone’s going to go after the big ones. Mandarin, Hindi, the big numbers. Me, I’m like, I’m just going to own Portugal and Brazil. But tongue-in-cheek — I think the reality is over the next three years, all of it’s going to drop so much in cost that the US in seven years will laugh that we ever did it in just one language.
Facebook’s Growth Secret: Language Localization [00:18:00]
Gary: You know that talk Alex Schultz gave about Facebook’s growth? He was the top growth guy early on. When they created the growth team, it was him, Chamath, and Javier — who now runs it. He put a chart up and it was a Weissy-Weissy talk, with a bunch of dots on a screen. He says, “You know, all these dots are feature releases, and you can see one dot where everything starts growing right after that.” Then he goes, “Anyone want to guess what that dot is?”
People in the audience guessed — photos, photo tagging. It was language translation. Local language translation. He said the biggest growth driver in Facebook’s growth, bar none, was when they localized the service.
What was not easy: Facebook had to do a Wikipedia-type thing because there were 186 countries to deal with. So they needed users to basically re-translate the site for their local region — they incentivized people to do it. That’s how they mass-translated overnight. No other social network did this.
The second time I heard about this was when we did our basketball camp with Mr. Beast. He did this presentation: “Here’s one thing I’m doing that nobody else is really doing — every video I do, I now create channels in Portuguese and everywhere else.” Jimmy told me that whole thing several years ago. Such a good bet.
Camp MFM and the Basketball Competition [00:21:00]
Gary: Tell me about this basketball camp, because I’m playing basketball tomorrow at 6 AM. I’m 48.
Sam: You’ll fit right in. There’s plenty of ice bags.
Sam: We do this thing called Camp MFM — My First Million. We were like: we like the idea of getting together, but I have this dread of “oh, yet another conference.” I just have a resistance to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. So we thought — how do we get the benefits of networking without ever calling it networking?
We created an adult summer camp. We rent a house — in this case, we stay at Mr. Beast’s house, because he ended up wanting to come. We bring in a trainer from the NBA who treats us like washed-up NBA players, and we just play ball all day.
Gary: When is it?
Sam: One just happened, but it was big. The founder of Airbnb, Mr. Beast, all these guys.
Gary: Joe — I have an email from Joe that says, “Gary, we’re fans. We want you to look at our company.” And it was Joe at bedandbreakfast.com. I never replied. Or maybe I did and just didn’t act on it. But I look at that email — I have a separate laptop — and I look at it once in a while just to appreciate it.
Shaan: I love it. This is actually a fun segue — if it was just us three and nobody was listening — where do you guys sit on losing?
Gary: We just talked about basketball. My favorite thing in pickup is to lose the first game. It is my favorite. I talked about this on Steve Bartlett’s podcast and got a billion emails about it. There’s something that just — the blood in my head, everything transforms, my chemicals go, and then everything in life stops. The only thing that matters to me in the world is that we have to win game two.
Sam: That’s so funny — when we did the camp, the same thing happened. The very first game, I’m trying to be a good host. I’m like, “Okay yeah, you guys play, I’ll sit out first.” We get in, I’m passing, I’m like, “Oh that’s Joe Gebbia, let me not let him drive, I’m not going to try to hurt the founder of Airbnb.” I see someone taking a video, I’m like, “That’s cool, that’s going to be a great clip.” Then I’m like — wait, I’m in the clip, he’s scoring on me. And I was like: he’s no longer Mr. Beast. That’s Jimmy. That’s Joe. And now we’re competing to win.
Gary: Then the whole event got a lot more fun when it equalized. All the job titles dropped. It’s basically: who’s here to win?
Early Tech Investments and the Tumblr Story [00:26:00]
Gary: That email excites me. I’m like, “Yeah, eat it, Gary.” Would that have been bigger than Uber for me? Maybe. Maybe not. You know what’s crazy? This is how much startups were priced back then — both would have been priced between four and eight million dollars. That’s insane.
I got into Tumblr’s Series B. Not Angel, not Seed, not Series A — Series B. At a $14 million valuation. That’s like pre-Seed now. This is 2007 or 2008 — only 16 years ago.
You guys are young, so think 16 years ahead. How old will you be in 16 years, Shaan?
Shaan: I don’t even want to know. 52, 50… I don’t know.
Gary: Do you guys hang out with 60-, 70-, 80-year-old business people? I do a lot of that, because it’s the best. The two extremes are the best — hang out with the 17-year-olds who are like, “Screw all of us, wait till they see what I’m going to do.” And then 73-year-olds who are just — the number of 73-, 75-, 77-year-old businessmen and women I know who still go at it because they love it — it gets me excited. At 48, I’m like, man, I’m at halftime.
Risk Tolerance, Mindset, and the Billionaire Mindset Question [00:29:30]
Sam: So I think you and I have similarish backgrounds — raised around a rough crowd every once in a while, and you still kind of have a little bit of that.
Shaan: Gary — Sam’s nickname on the pod is Hose Water. Because he’s just — no water fountains, baby. Drinking straight out the hose.
Gary: I love that man. Hose Water is the best. Summer, hose water straight out of the hose, literally from 1982 to 1988. I peed in the backyard more than I peed in the toilet.
Sam: Look, no hands. Every day.
Sam: Okay listen — we kind of all probably grew up a little similar. We’ve all done interesting things. We’re able to hang out with some of these guys who are legitimate millionaires. I’m sure you’re in or near that ballpark. You hang out with Michael Rubin, you know the shot-callers.
What do you think is the difference between the store owner doing half a million or a million dollars a year, the $10M business, the $100M net worth person, and the billion-dollar net worth person? Do they all have similar mindsets? Is it just luck or industry?
Gary: Two things. It’s — hold on, it’s 12:34. Should we make a wish real quick?
Sam: I’ve always thought 12:34 is interesting. It has no pop culture relevance.
Gary: I just had an idea. 12:34 should be when you shoot your shot. When you see 12:34, that’s when you send that text, send the tweet, send the email. That’s the idea for 12:34 — we can make this a thing.
Sam: Can you get somebody to register 1234.org?
Gary: I never think you should overpay for names, because I think names are made.
Sam: Do you know who disagrees? Dharmesh Shah. I’ve known him — HubSpot bought my company and I’ve gotten close with him. He bought chat.com. I’m like, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was available.” I was like, “What are you going to do with it?” He goes, “I’m not sure, but I’ll figure something out.” And he paid eight figures for it.
Gary: Look, he’s smart enough to know he could probably flip that. But there is a little concern for me — what happens when the phone is no longer the remote control of our society? I’m very fascinated: 16 years from now, if we live in a predominant VR world? I can see that possibility. I don’t think it’s going to end up being the Apple Vision Pro or Google Glass or Quest. My intuition is it’s going to have to be much more lightweight. But I never underestimate the human being — I’m positive somebody’s going to make contact lenses that work like this, and then we’re off to the races. Because now attention is no longer housed here. Whoever controls that paradigm wins big.
SEO, Search, and the Multi-Platform Imperative [00:34:00]
Gary: That’s how I feel about SEO businesses right now, with ChatGPT and Google trying to just give you the answer. That’s why Vayner Media never did search when I started the company 14 years ago. Everyone was like, “What the hell, why don’t you do search?” I was like, first of all, I thought if I built a big enough company, I could M&A search if I ever wanted to add it. I grew up on search the 15 years before. And here’s a good one for the kids: if you’re building toward the future, remember that you can always buy the current. I was going to master social in 2009, and I felt like social was going to eat up search anyway. And I think it’s starting to happen now. Google’s in a weird spot.
I actually spoke to somebody Thursday who is really getting hurt because he was one-dimensional on search. That is such a fear of mine. If you sell your stuff via email, via your podcast, via social media content, via search — you must develop into a Swiss army knife. If you’re just a fork, if you’re one-dimensional, you’re going to get caught.
Gary’s Safety Net: The $1M Floor Philosophy [00:36:30]
Sam: Hey Gary, you were saying a second ago — you’re not afraid to go back. The way I run my personal finances is I’ve got a safety net — an account that has enough money that I’m good forever. It’s in Vanguard and bonds, I’ve never touched it. Anything above that amount I’ll bet. So you’re talking about going back, but it sounds like that’s not exactly how you’d run your finances. Do you have a safety nut, and then anything above that you’re like, “Bet it”? Or do you use profits from Vayner to make bets?
Gary: I’m going to be comfortably transparent. My zero is a million dollars. But that’s it.
Sam: Wait — so you only keep a million in your liquid portfolio? That’s your safety net?
Gary: No, no. I have money in all sorts of places. But I have this one place that has a million dollars, and literally everything else is in play.
Shaan: Now I want to paint a very clear picture here, because I don’t want to create hyperbole. I haven’t bet everything on everything. But if I ever feel the way I felt about Facebook in 2007 — when I put my $236,000 in savings, I put $200,000 into Facebook — if that ever happens again, I’m willing to bet very large. That feeling is similar to the feeling I felt about the internet when I saw it in ‘95. Similar to the feeling I felt about Friendster and MySpace — that little “oh, the internet’s changing.” I look for those moments.
The Romance of Going Backwards and Billionaire Psychology [00:39:30]
Shaan: What you said reminds me of two things. First, it’s super interesting that your answer to “what’s the difference in mindset at the top levels?” was: who’s willing to go backwards. You almost crave it. There’s a romantic idea about going back.
Gary: It’s almost like there are TV shows I wish I could go watch again for the first time. There’s no greater feeling than going from not making it to making it. Once you’ve made it and you try to make more — it doesn’t have the same thrill, adventure, satisfaction, self-respect. You have to go into different games.
I worry about that — I don’t let me — I sense there’s a day where I actually wake up at 79 and say, “You know what, I’m just going to focus on my grandkids.” I have like… I think we underestimate how long life is. We underestimate our capacity to make hard decisions in different directions we can’t see along the way.
And back to luck — we lived through a lot of prosperity. The three of us have gotten very fortunate in terms of what era we lived through. There were people in the Roaring 20s talking like this over dinner, and then a very challenging 30 years punched them in the face.
Gratitude: Micro vs. Macro [00:43:00]
Gary: I’m going to ask you guys — what is your personal relationship with gratitude versus taking things for granted?
I changed on that once I actually sold my company and was financially free. Two weeks after the sale, the CEO got into a life-threatening accident, and I was like, “Oh, that could have ruined my deal.” Like, all of this could have been ruined. And I hit this threshold — I did not work any harder than anyone else who has done similar things and failed. This is 100% luck. And I’m so grateful. It’s just worked in my way, and I’m so gracious for the luck that I have.
Sam: I have a different take. I think people make a mistake being grateful in the macro. If you ask somebody what they’re grateful for, almost everybody says, “My family, my health.” And that’s not wrong, obviously those are great things. But it’s like when a company says their values are “integrity and excellence” — it’s true but not useful. It leaves no register.
So I try to practice gratitude in the micro. Can I be grateful in an elevator, in that moment? Can I get a practice rep of gratitude right there? Because that actually shifts me. If I take a breath, be grateful for fresh air — look at what my kid is doing and how silly they are — just find something in that moment. If I could do that 10-15 times a day, that is the antidote.
Gary: I think micro and macro work together that way. I really do think of it as: I’m just alive. “Thank you for the fact that I didn’t die last night.” And to your point — I think when your macro is that, you’re just talking about how you apply it.
A nice sunny day in New York today, and I’m just like, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” Just choosing positivity. People have been so sucked into focusing on what they don’t have, or what’s not going well.
Naval has an amazing definition of happiness, by the way. He says happiness is what you feel when you don’t feel like anything’s missing in your life. People think happiness is something you have to achieve, something you have to go create. He says actually it’s just when you’re not focused on what’s missing.
Sam: That’s right.
Gary: I think simplicity is just so underrated. My professional life, the day-to-day is chaotic — meeting after meeting after meeting. But I like juggling 17 balls, and I’m not upset about the 13 that fell on the ground and broke. More importantly, I’m not worried about the people watching me juggle and booing when the ball breaks. That I think is massive.
Shaan: But when Theo Von makes fun of you, it’s pretty hilarious.
Gary: That is the ultimate. Because I love Theo. Back to where we came from, Sam — I’ve gotten to a place where someone as epic as Theo Von, or Tim Dillon, making fun of me — I’m always fascinated when people struggle with a comedian roasting them. I think that’s like flattery.
Sam: That was awesome. I saw that and I was like — oh, the guy I look up to has crossed over to mainstream. It’s awesome.
The Investment That Paid Off Most: Facebook [00:48:30]
Shaan: I want to ask — you showed those stock certificates on the wall. Speaking of winning — I saw you invested in Twitter in ‘09, Slack pre-IPO, I think the Liquid Death guy used to work for you. What investment was the best? What paid off most in terms of the bets you’ve made?
Gary: Facebook. And I haven’t sold one share yet.
Shaan: Oh damn. That’s insanely good.
Gary: That goes back to jockey over horse. I tell all my friends who get into investing — they ask, “What have you learned?” And what I’ve learned is: when I only invest in the person. I’ve hit this new state where I’m really trying to be obsessed with the person and the idea, and if either one isn’t an A+, I pause.
Sam: You said “and/or” — you mean both?
Gary: The person. If I fully believe in the person and not the idea, that works. But if I can’t get to A+ on the person, I stop.
Sam: What year did you do the Facebook deal?
Gary: 2007.
Sam: Oh my God. You’d be up 400x.
Gary: A lot. A lot. 100x at least.
Rapid Fire: Zuckerberg [00:51:00]
Shaan: I want to do rapid fire — you’ve bumped into or studied or have opinions on a lot of these people. Give me your read. Is this from outside observation or if you’ve met them?
Gary: Either one. Or if I have nothing, I’ll say pass.
Shaan: First one: Zuck.
Gary: I think he’s uncomfortably underrated. He’s the only person I met back in ‘07 — in this era, it’s getting more obvious — but he understood attention. He literally tried to buy Twitter. He bought Instagram. He bought WhatsApp. He tried to buy Snap. He just understood that attention was the only asset.
And he’s so nice. He’s a nice kid. I’m happy with the way things are going for him right now — like, people can see how dorky he is. You see him in the corner of a UFC thing and you’re like, this is just a nerdy kid. He doesn’t care. It’s not because he’s got abs now — it’s just that he’s a dentist’s son from Dobbs Ferry who’s a nerd, no bad intent, spent his childhood coding. He put in the hours. I’m a fan.
The reason I’ve never sold a share of Facebook is I’ve been committed for a long time — I’ll never sell until he’s gone.
Rapid Fire: Logan Paul [00:53:30]
Shaan: Logan Paul.
Gary: So when Vayner Media was doing a campaign for Virgin Mobile called “Finding the Next You,” Logan Paul was starting to emerge on Vine with like 15 or 18,000 followers. Full disclosure — Jerome Jar, one of the most-followed people on Vine, was my partner. Jerome and I launched the first influencer agency, Grape Story, back in 2013. He was the one who said, “Pick from these three people.” I think all three of them got big, but we went with Logan.
I think Logan grew up in the limelight. Think about child stars when we were growing up — we all knew they would be messed up. Now everyone’s going through that. The limelight is hard.
I’ve always thought of him as a Marky Mark or a Fresh Prince or The Rock — as I got to know him, I was like, “Okay, this kid is Logan Paul today the way Marky Mark was Marky Mark before he was Mark Wahlberg.” I always thought Logan would cross over. And he has, obviously, with WWE. Think about the pivots — he’s got Impaulsive, he’s got the podcast where he’s super chill. He pivoted from crazy Vine prankster to being the inquisitive, curious interviewer. He’s got the popular podcast. Goes WWE. Becomes champion. Creates Prime, which is going to make him a billionaire.
Sam: He’s only 28 years old.
Gary: And think about what he’s done. Won in the social media game at 14. Now Prime — it’s probably going to be worth tens of billions. They did I think two billion in sales last year.
Sam: That high?
Gary: Prime is definitely a two-, three-, four-, five-, six-, seven-billion-dollar company depending on when they decide to exit. I talked to Mr. Beast and he said “20 billion is where Prime is going.”
Sam: That would be very, very…
Gary: I never underestimate Jimmy’s foresight. But just being in M&A at CPG levels — my intuition is that they won’t be patient enough to get to that big of a number. The beauty is they’re not operating it — the other guys are.
But everything’s ha-ha until it’s actually in front of you. It’s all “we’re going to 20 billion” until you fly to Atlanta and Coca-Cola actually offers you $5.9 billion and you’ve got to sit there as KSI and Logan and those guys and say — okay, if we say yes, because you know what they’re going to say. They’re going to say, “We could do this right now, and in 24 months you start a new thing. A shampoo, a deodorant.” So I think it’ll be interesting to see how long they hold their breath.
And don’t forget — one bad year takes a lot of leverage off the table in a negotiation. Prime is selling on cool, like Supreme. Kids are buying it literally for the status symbol, like a fashion brand. And that can only last so long.
Who Gary Admires [00:59:30]
Shaan: I asked you a bunch of names — basically people that people know. I’m curious who you think is dope. Who do you learn from? Who are you inspired by? Because a lot of people are inspired by Gary Vee — who is Gary Vee inspired by?
Gary: I’m a little weird on this one. I’m inspired by the collective more than an individual. I love the field. I spend almost all of my time on the collective, so I don’t even have the allocation of time for a single person.
I’m also very inspired by the following type of person: show me the person who’s currently living through massive adversity. Show me the kid listening right now whose father passed away from a stroke. He’s 16, he’s got three younger siblings, his mom has to work two jobs, and he’s holding it down for the family. He’s a sophomore in high school and he’s basically the father figure for three siblings. He had to quit the football team.
I’m the son of two parents who each lost a parent before they were 15. And back to gratitude — I think I got really affected by being scared that my parents were going to die my whole childhood. But it kind of converted into this gratitude framework. It makes me unstoppable.
So yeah — for me it’s less Bezos or Elon or Oprah. It’s much more that Bodega owner energy. That person who is in it, nobody knows them, and they just convert into leader instead of woe-is-me. That adversity-to-accountability pipeline. Show me the kid at 16 who says, “I got this. It’s on me. I’m going to put this on my shoulders and do this for my three siblings.” I admire the hell out of that.
Sam: I wrote down a quote when I was doing research for this. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. “Forget rags to riches — some people are just rags to rags, just so their kids have a shot at rags to riches.” And I respect the hell out of that.
Gary: I love that quote. I’m really affected by that. Sam really hit it on the head.
I hate the word luck because I think people weaponize it against people who have worked really hard. But I believe in serendipity and luck quite a bit, because it’s just the way. I was born in the Soviet Union. I got lucky to get out when I did. If I didn’t, I would have come to this country in 1991 when it fell — I’d have been 16 or 17 and I’d sound like Ivan Drago on these podcasts. It would have all been different.
I just really do admire people who play the other way. Entitlement and lack of accountability has become a disease in first-world countries. I really admire people who play against that.
Wrap-Up [01:04:00]
Sam: We appreciate you doing this, man. You’ve got Day Trading Attention coming out — I think on May 21, right?
Gary: That sounds right.
Sam: You’re the man. We appreciate you hanging out.
Gary: Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. I got to jump into a board meeting. I appreciate it.
Sam: All right, take care.
Gary: See you. Love you guys. Good luck.