I understand, I run into it every day. – Your conundrum is deciding at what price point your customer’s actually gonna pay for your stuff. – Well, that’s part of it. – But you can also segment those audiences, right? Those two audiences are looking for very distinct things. – They are but they cross over in what they see. So how do you keep ’em both? – What are you guys talking about? – Ben’s an artist. Prints versus original pieces. Original pieces obviously go for much higher value than the prints do but they’re both sold on his website. – But I just started an online gallery where you can go on and buy a print for any size frame, dadada.
But they’re fundamentally different products. – They are. – The only vulnerability you have is if you don’t have secondary market dynamics on the originals. The reason they’re fundamentally different things is not necessarily, to your point, if you’re physically in love with the picture– – That’s all that counts. – Well not really because in my perspective, well, let me rephrase, in one man’s point of view, I would argue it’s not because for example, I don’t care what a baseball card looks like. I care about what I believe its secondary market value will be over time. If I cared what a baseball card looked like, I wouldn’t have just paid $17,000 for a Bill Russell rookie card. I would’ve bought the replica for 18 bucks off of Ebay. The real business you’re in when you’re in that business is having the potential to create investment growth on the original because that’s the variable difference of the product, not the print or the original. – Agreed. So do I take down my site? – No. – What happens when Judy Monitz from the Aramark Art Festival goes on my site and she’s like, we’re not gonna accept this guy? – Well, I assume that the same thing that happens, it all depends on where your leverage is on that KPI.
If you believe you’re the kind of artist that doesn’t have the leverage because there’s print versions, as you can imagine, you know this, every single great painting in the history of time has had print versions. So if your worry is actually B2B, which it is in that environment where somebody’s making a judgment call, you need to attack that in a conversation with that person, not make a macro business decision. If that is the thing you’re debating, then you go in and actually have that convo and say, do you Jenny, Judy, do you value this or does this skew you in any way for considering me because I value the awareness that you create? And then she gets to decide.
She goes, no, I don’t give a fuck, everybody does that or she goes, yes, and then you make a decision. That’s how I see that. All right, getting right into it. This portion is like with me. So I think this is when you need to get selfish. Like you need to ask your question. Hiring is guessing, firing is knowing. Like you gotta go fast. That’s how you get shit done, that’s how you figure shit out. This is the television. And the television is the radio. So 4Ds, mother fuckers. Would love for you guys to do intros and tell me about your business and then we’ll go right into hardcore Q&A. – Sounds good. Great to meet you, Gary. Wesley Bowl, Civil Resource Group. We’re a security risk management firm headquartered in San Francisco, office in LA, about to be in New York and great to be here. – Great to see you. – [Ben] Ben Bonehart, artist, just started an online gallery.
– Where are you from? – Nyack, New York. – Nyack, New York. Pleasure. – [Will] Hi, Will McCoy, I’m the CEO for NoBully, which is an international nonprofit antibullying, anticyberbullying based in San Francisco but we do work worldwide. – Understood. – [Ken] Hi again. How are you? – Hey brother. Good. – Ken Maskowitz, Spanky as my friends call me, CEO of Ad Zombies. We write words that sell anything. We are an at scale copywriting service. – Yep. – I’m French, I’m David Larocz. So I’m obsessed by why the best are the best.
So I travel the world to meet top performers, athletes, entrepreneurs to deconstruct how they think and then I provide a lot of free content on what I learn from them and it gives me a lot of credibility. I’m 30 and now I’m lucky to have Olympic champions and entrepreneurs to help them to grow what they do faster and also be more fruitful because I love psychology and we have the biggest following in France right now. But the most important thing for me is that we change lives. I receive like letters from 15-year-old kids who didn’t commit suicide because what we do and it’s amazing for me to see that. My next step, and it’s why I’m here, I want to go global.
I want to have that kind of impact worldwide and I would love to have your advice and tips on how I can liberate my accent and who I am in order to reach more people. And just for you to know, it’s not, for sure I love the business part, but it’s a mission for me. I’m playing for the next 50 years. I want to create a legacy and I want to impact the lives of millions of people. I say that because sometimes I hear you saying that young life and business coaches are full of shit, and it’s true, but for me, I work so hard in the last 10 years and I make differences.
– It’s very easy not to be full of shit if you’re playing for legacy versus signing people up to masterminds to buy watches and skis. So I’m with you. – I wanted to commit suicide so I do what I am doing because it changed my life. – That’s great. – Yes. – Good. With a small group, hopefully we can go around a couple times, very specific questions like we did with Ben. I’m ready to go. – Super. So little bit of context, we got to chat recently, so I’ll dive right in. Four legs to our stool, consulting, training, research, solutions, shifted from a hybrid government and corporate focus to just companies now.
That’s interesting from a content and digital perspective ’cause now we can lean out a bit more and talk about who we’re working with, the type of work we’re doing, those types of things. One of the challenges we’ve found specifically has been now that we’re in that space and can kind of develop content, start to do more in the digital space, is thinking about audience. So in the corporate space, our prospective client or point of contact is very disparate. So could be a chief HR officer, could be a chief security officer, could be the CEO, could be the COO.
– Or the spouse of those people. – 100%, 100%. So as I think about kind of how we go about our content development, what are your thoughts with respect to targeting strategy? – If you have a limited resources, you pick one. – Got it. Start there, make that deliver. – The lever is, all of this is built on, it’s gonna be your answer as well, all of this is built on context. Everyone’s infatuated with the content ’cause it’s important, it’s the output, your world, my world.
However, all the upside from a strategy standpoint is understanding context because then you’re able to create content contextually, which disproportionally creates relevance, which relevance and meaning something to somebody is why every person in this room is wearing what they’re wearing or what they’re gonna eat is what they’re gonna eat. So to answer your question in a world where like, hey Gary, I’m crippled, it could be the CFO, could be the CEO, could be the CHO, I’m like cool, pick one. It’s really as simple as that. My argument is you can get to a lot of them by understanding copy. There is no question to me that a PDF, a deck, an audio file, a video can be made and if you rant on it as first person or if you create something amazing, it can actually touch on all three of the demos.
I can talk about the financial impact of something and the retention of employees because of that decision and the top line revenue growth probably within two minutes and then if I change the copy on a LinkedIn post that expands on that and targets a CFO and really just narrows in on the financial ramifications, I’ve now actually made one piece of content with an additional five minutes of post copy that did make it seem as if I made three. – Right, okay, great, super. – That’s how I think about it. And I know we got a lot done with fear and not fear and stuff like that. So I’ll just keep going around. This is all about investment. I spend an ungodly amount of time on investment for things that drive my CFO crazy. You know what’s so funny about me? Is people say I don’t listen, I interrupt people, this and that, I just have so much pattern recognition of being an entrepreneur my whole literal life and I spend so much time listening when I’m not in front of a camera that I gave you the answer within the first four seconds.
We’re gonna go through it ’cause I want to make sure you got the T’s and the I’s but we’ll go right back to it. This is a 100% investment. What’s your appetite for lack of margin? Because there’s no other way. Which also speaks to having to be able to be in a place where you’re growing the offense while you’re spending more time on the defense. Knicks last night were within three and decided to put a defensive unit off a time out, which made sense, except that the Bulls scored five points in two seconds and we were back down by eight and had to call another time out and put back out the offense.
That’s the decision Couch Fizdell made. Luckily the Knicks rallied and won but that would’ve been the critical point where he lost ’cause he decided at that point it was time to invest in defense and unfortunately, the market, AKA the Bulls said go fuck yourself. That’s your game. All the top line revenue you’re gonna give up because there’s only so much, entrepreneurs like you and me think we can do 280%, not 100%.
It’s just not true. There is a number. Some can do 280 but that doesn’t mean you can do 390. And so that’s the game. The only other variable in your life to play this out is what you’re willing to give up in leisure or time efficiency. Most of what I’m successful at is completely predicated on actually having four minute meetings when it’s a four minute meeting instead of a 30 minute meeting. If I’m really starting to understand myself, I’m like oh right, zero waste. Creates vulnerability because you have a meeting and you leave and nobody knew what the fuck you just said, but I’d still rather do that for four minutes than 29 minutes because then once I realize a week later nobody knew what I said you have another eight minute meeting with the context of them not knowing and you get it done and so now you’re in for 12 instead of 30.
– I’m a little dizzy. (laughing) – That was a good one. I know, that was a good one, that was a good one. That was a little nerdy. – Mine’s a little more, not as complex. So I did my 10,000 hours on the creative side of branding and advertising and– – Did Malcolm Gladwell give you a bow? – Pardon? – Did Malcolm Gladwell give you a bow? – No. Unforgiving, and about five years ago I decided after, well just to go back a little bit, I got divorced and started thinking what can I do versus what I can’t do ’cause I can’t do it. – Good for you. – So I started painting and I realized that five hours would go by, it seemed like 10 seconds. And so I started doing that as therapeutic exercise and people started asking me how many I’d sold and I ugh, so I started selling ’em, I’d done about five years of doing art shows and 15, 20 art shows a year, showing my work, selling it and that’s a lot of lugging, it’s a lot of insight from the marketplace, what people like, what they don’t like, I loved that, I loved interacting with people, I love selling the art work.
– Yep. – Then I decided, okay, how do I monetize this beyond selling original artwork because everybody’s an artist. So I just recently started this online gallery on this platform artstorefronts.com which is set up for artists, you don’t have to do a lot of the development work, and I sat down and started to figure out to myself, okay, I put a lot of brands on the map, how do I do it for myself and that’s why I’m here because I’m not quite sure how to position and package myself to appeal to the two markets that I’m trying to appeal to, which is the person that’s going into Homegoods and buying a $40 piece of shit and to the person that’s gonna buy a $3,500, $4,500 piece of original art work. – Well, as you can imagine, you need to be in different places and you need to show up different. But the good news is there’s only 10, 12, 15 places on top of something called the internet that are good places for people that don’t have millions of dollars to spend on media.
And the reason every word out of my mouth has been TikTok and LinkedIn over the last four months is my expertise over the last 25 years as a marketer is to understand where there’s attention for a good price. Zero’s the best price. The fact that you can post a one minute video of you painting on TikTok right now and get 800,000 views for zero dollars is not available to you, sir, anywhere else.
The fact that people sit around and say things like, well I can’t do that, that’s where my 14-year-old granddaughter lives, there’s only kids there, people say no instead of yes. Has anybody heard of a granddaughter, first of all, that’s not true, it’s getting older by the second but let’s just say it was. Let’s just say it was capped. It is only 12 to 16-year-old females in America for TikTok, which it is not, but let’s just say it was. Has anybody heard of a granddaughter taking a phone and showing their grandmother this cool painting? People are so funny. They’re in the business of no instead of yes. So whether it’s TikTok or LinkedIn, those are two very important platforms for you because you have to make content for those platforms because you’re probably not gonna pour $10,000 a month in ads. You may, I have no idea of anything about you, you’re not, so those you have to take very seriously.
That is the context that I need to do a better job to my audience of why I talk about it. I just did it, I’m glad I did, I hope Jason caught it, that is the punchline. Forever, it was email, it was organic Google search. The reason I would sit and spend seven hours a day in 1999 looking at the ASP code of my website was I was getting educated on how to show up first on Google without buying Google Adwords, before there were Google Adwords, for the word pinot noir, because if I know I did, 147 people would go to winelibrary.com in 2000 for no reason other than they searched pinot noir and I showed up first. And then I bought ads because they were five cents and that was a good deal for me and I could afford to buy $10,000 a month. And on and on and on. I’m not throwing around my phone number, 212-931-5731, for my community text platform for my health. It’s because text messaging my audience converts better than anything else I can do and is the only thing that I’ve seen, including Twitter and Facebook that looks like email looked like to me in 1997 where 90% of the audience that signed up actually saw it.
You need to produce content in written, audio or visual, clearly video form for what you do, across the 10 platforms that matter. We have that, I don’t know if we’ve done that, I don’t know if we do that later, did we do it already? – [Male] Zach just came in. – You need to do that. You need to deploy self awareness and figure out which one of those you can do.
Your business is highly visual. So we’re gonna kind of need you to be in picture and video form. Even if you were in video form and people only saw your back of your head, it could be a fucking tool time Home Improvement gag if you were so insecure, and I don’t say that in a razz way, I say it in a compassionate way, if you were so insecure that you couldn’t show your face. Great, let’s film you back to canvas to audience. But you need to produce pictures and videos on the internet. It’s more important than making the art. It’s more important than making the art. If nobody knows, you can’t sell shit. – Right. – When I tell you that I started this company 10 years ago, which got made fun of by every one of my friends ’cause building a client service business is not a smart business for where I was at in my professional career, it’s because my belief was there was nothing left except communication.
If tomorrow, I decided to pick a random artist, I would make them be the kind of artist that can sell $5,000 paintings because I would outcommunicate everybody and that would create demand. The end. – Got it. Thank you. – Now it becomes, now what I just said to you is oh, you want to get healthier? You have to eat well and exercise. And you’re like, not Botox? I’m like no. You’re like not ass implants? I’m like no. You’re like not detox tea? No. Not steroids? No. And you’re like got it. Now you have to do it. And the way I best learned that people will do it is how I got to you have to be self aware. You might love to write. And that may sound crazy to a lot of people, like he’s a fucking artist that writes, I think it’s kinda rad. If you wrote a crazy manifesto, and I’m glad to hear you’re a good writer, on LinkedIn, with no visual support that you just magically enamored all of us with the written words of how you came up with the painting idea, and then there was a click out to the painting, that might be intrigued.
Less people would see it ’cause of the friction of clicking out, more people may convert because of the way you did it. You’ve got to play. The thing I’m most proud of is I play. I’m okay with not doing well in likes and shares or what’s best practices because I know I have to figure it out. Yesterday, doesn’t mean anything to me. Let me rephrase, yesterday means slightly less to me than trying to figure out today. I love the context of yesterday. I’d like not to repeat the same mistakes, and I’d like to use what I’ve learned to deploy in the context but today’s the game. Not three years from now, I know VR’s coming, not interested, not three years ago. Everyone’s so scared that they massively overvalue yesterday. – Yeah, so I’m struggling with myself about turning the table from being behind the camera to being in front of it. In other words– – There’s a way to do it, maybe not be in front of the camera, right back to the back.
– Well I’m using that as a metaphor but just– – Yes, that’s exactly right. – Selling your product and now I’m the product. – Correct. That’s just insecurity of the product you’re selling. – Well yeah. – I’m aware, I know you know it. That’s just you casting your own judgment of like, I don’t have permission to do this, I just started. Guess what? LeBron was good his rookie year. Maybe you’re just fucking naturally talented. – I am, I’m incredible. – I believe it. But honestly, honestly, that’s it. That makes much sense based on the narrative. You’re like, fuck, I just took this up, who am I to charge 5,000? – No, it’s not that, it’s not that. It’s the entering into the marketing myself as the product versus marketing this gentleman’s business as the product. – That goes to the insecurity of the product, my friend. I’m telling you, whether it’s the version of who am I or you’ve overvalued being understated or you philosophically have put being behind the scenes on a pedestal as a more proper way to go and you’re not a charlatan or a fame whore, whatever you’ve decided in your brains, that’s what we have to break down.
– Yeah, probably all the above. – I believe it. They’re the cliche reasons. – Right. – People are like, Gary, personal brand, that’s so yucky. I’m like, cool, call it reputation. Is that better? I got to step out for two minutes. I’ll be right back. Yes sir. – Ready? – Yes sir. – So for us as a nonprofit, we do great work, nobody is probully. So the argument is easy. But when it comes to converting to donations, converting to new partnerships, getting that, going from awareness to active leaning in. – Yeah, I’m super excited we’re talking about this ’cause I’m going to a Raised By Us event tonight, which I’m on the board of, and I’m on the board of Pencils of Promise and Charity Water.
I would argue that some of the best marketing work in my, I’m very funny, I’m very comfortable in promoting my business ventures ’cause I like capitalism, but I’m very, very quiet with my altruism, but I spend a lot of time on it. I’m gonna give you a really interesting insight. The number one vulnerability to nonprofits is audacity. If you macro analyze the communication of nonprofits, they speak to us as if we should donate to this and it completely fundamentally turns us off. Why should I? – [David] You mean like to educate people on their interests? – If you look carefully, and I’m very passionate, it’s funny to have Spanky here, it’s funny, I’m so bad at grammar, forget about I was, just ’cause the way I learned and probably because I’m probably dyslexic and because I’m an immigrant, there’s a lot of reasons probably but nonetheless, I’m deeply passionate about words, I’m good at it as a human.
They matter and when I got into nonprofit work, I wanted to be effective. It was like here comes the whiz kid in marketing. I’m like fuck, I better, I rarely do work but I did some work on this. And I’m also very intuitive, back to quick answers, I’m like oh fuck, these guys are terrible at marketing because they’re entitled and audacious. And then when I started really getting into the world, and I’m not speaking for you, but I was stunned by how many people are nonoperational in the nonprofit world.
You have a lot of people, it makes sense, right, both my kids could go that route, you go away from the wealth creation and you’re like I’m gonna give back but you’ve never done anything. So not only was it audacious and condescending, it was ideological and not practical. So that is the huge vulnerability to why nonprofits, in the macro, without knowing anything, I think you need to really think about that. How is that manifesting in what you’re creating? The answer is, listen, it’s so fun to have the prime of my life’s work being built this communications framework that made no sense when I did it, is starting to make sense to people right now but they’re still grossly underestimating what I’m actually doing.
There’s nothing left but what I’m doing. Everything’s a commodity except the awareness and communication ’cause of how life actually works. Of course that camera’s a higher quality, of course, print and original is different, of course, bullying’s different than cancer but it’s more commoditized than people think. What’s not commoditized is the ability to get somebody to know and care. To getting somebody to know and care, you first have to deploy empathy, not audacity. It’s the reason we have such a problem socially in our country. There’s no empathy from either direction. Literally yesterday morning on the way to work, I had a 15 minute conversation with a woman who told me that I was a very bad guy when I spoke at a company last week because I was using white privilege because I was cursing and if I wasn’t a white male, I wouldn’t be able to do that. 99.999% of people would’ve deleted that email ’cause it was pretty left field. I spent 15 minutes talking to her. I didn’t find anything new but I appreciated the conversation.
You need to be really smart. You’re right, nobody is against bullying. More importantly, nobody actually cares. And once you get to that realization, and here’s why, you know who cares? The person who’s kid becomes presuicidal because of bullying. The same person that cares about heart disease the second their dad dies of a heart attack. We have to get more empathetic. But we deploy too much ideology. I’m spending my life giving. I don’t need somebody yelling at me like, Gary, you don’t care about fucking the turtles? You can’t drink out of that fucking straw. I’m like, I get it, but you’re wearing a Gucci bag and textiles are destroying our environment. We’re in hypocrisy, audacity mode in nonprofit land. What we have to do is go into contextual creative at scale to create relevance. There’s a video that I want you to watch.
It was done by Sandy Hook. It was really good. Remember that? I don’t know if you guys saw this but I was actually talking to Katie, ’cause it was a big piece of contention, not contention, it was a big conversation at VaynerMedia ’cause I believe in long form videos instead of commercials and this was one of the best I’d ever seen. It was a video of what it looked to be is like a high school love story, you remember? – [Male] It’s a great one. – But it ended up being in every scene while you were paying attention to the sweethearts, the mass shooter was in the background and you only figure that out at the end. – [David] See the data. – I mean I got crazy goosebumps. It’s a three, four minute video on YouTube. It crushed. – Sandy Hook Promise. – [David] Can you write it? – Yeah, you know what, we’ll have Nick send an email to all of you.
He’s probably looking it up right now if he’s not eating and he’ll find it. The point is, what’s amazing about bullying is it’s a subconscious knowledge that it’s a problem. And what you need to do is make a two minute, 14 second video that is entertainment or information that captures the national, Coney, nobody fucking cared about that dictator in Africa until everybody saw it on YouTube.
Got it? – [Male] Yeah, thank you. – How I think about it is the Gary Vee model, which is the Vayner model, which again, Zach probably spoke to and with Nick here and others here we can go deeper into, I think your organization needs to put out 100 pieces of content a day. I think that’s what you have to figure out. I’d rather you spend two hours less painting, I’d rather you fire three executives who actually aren’t doing shit but being in meetings. You have to make. This is about ideas and making and nothing else. When you make that your religion, you start actually figuring out, everyone’s like, Gary, I had an employee who’s been here for seven years say to me on the phone the other day when I said we have this huge Proctor & Gamble conversation and she’s like, “Gary, this is the staff we have.
“You have to make a choice between LinkedIn and Facebook.” I’m like no I don’t. You have to stop being in dumb fucking meetings for two hours a day and make it 41 so I can have both. Figure it out. You have to make and you have to have African Americans in it and Asian Americans in it and Latino Americans in it and Latino Americans in Spanglish ’cause then you might see, whoa, why is this resonating? We didn’t even now that this was an underlining issue in the Latam community in San Antonio but by making, when you make 100 pieces of content, you start making a San Antonio Spurs piece of content, you see where I’m going? That then gives you an insight because you’re getting feedback and now you’re like, now we know what two minute video to make.
Let’s make a video of an 84-year-old and what bullying actually meant and how it transpired and what it actually meant. This is not about suicide and mass shootings. This is about an 84-year-old who’s had 75 years of unhappiness, has four divorces that were ugly, not good, has a drug, you see where I’m going? And that’s just one, I just went into hypothesis mode. There’s 700 other things you could go with. But for you and for you and for you and for you and for me and for every single person this is a game of contextual creative at scale deployed against the platforms that actually have the attention of people which then compels people to do something.
And it is not one vanilla piece of content seen by everyone. It is contextual creative at scale. As you can imagine, now we’re going very farfetched, but if you’re making a video of a make pretend grandma that had a painting in her kitchen for that kid’s whole life and that’s why you need to buy one of my paintings for your kitchen, that’s gonna strike a chord. – It’s funny you say that because I tell people when they buy my art that it’s touching their lives. They’re gonna be looking at that all their life and their kids are gonna be looking at it and you can’t put a price on that.
– Yeah, it’s why I don’t buy art because that doesn’t do that for me but I want photos of my family everywhere ’cause that does do that for me. But to your point, many, many people, most people actually do do that with art. – I remember everything in my parents home. – I get it. – I’m actually regurgitating that onto canvas. – No, I totally get it. – I’m not an art follower. My grandfather’s has a Rosco and I love it. – That is your requirement. It’s awareness. But it’s not just awareness, it’s compelling somebody to do something. Compelling somebody to do something is based on them, not on us. So we talk down and we need to talk up. Got it? – Got it, thank you. – That tone, if you go through, just every communication you do, comes from that filter, you’d be stunned by how much more money you’ll get.
– [Male] That’s very helpful, thank you. – You got it. – So as my brand has grown and as we have developed kind of a global awareness now, we have clients all over the world that use us, the opportunities for me to speak and take bigger stages is occurring more often. And so looking at growing the business further, I realized and recognized very quickly that every time we document those moments, every time we film those moments, that then turns into more content. But it’s not necessarily content directed at the brand. It’s content around my brand, my personal brand. So in looking at growing the brand further, we’re trying to figure out should we leverage the opportunities of me speaking on more stages and of me coaching or working with other companies? Because it’s interesting, the questions that I was asked a year ago, year and a half ago were, hey, how do I write effective ad copy? Now the question is, can you tell me again how you grew a business from zero to seven figure business in like less than two years? – Do you always answer I listen to Gary Vee? – I do.
– I know you do, that’s why I’m making that joke. – But it’s funny, I had this really surreal moment in the Nashville Airport. I was speaking at a conference and this guy comes running up to me and I shared that, I sent you an email about it, I said, “This guy came running up to me “and he like, can you sign my book?” And I’m like, “Sure.” And he said, “Your book changed my life.” I’m like, “How?” Because I was kind of in the mindset of Ben. – I get it, on the receiving end. – Right, but now that’s happened a few times and I’m like– – The answer is both, to your question.
– Both. – Of course. – So it’s okay to diversify in terms of the– – Do you have any partners? – My filmmaker today is my business partner. When you said get an ops guy, my video guy couldn’t be here today so Brandon came along. So he is a blessing to my business that came directly from my conversation with you two years ago. – I remember, I remember.
So financially, you share the business? – [Male] Yes. – That’s the only vulnerability. The only vulnerability to building a personal brand as a top of the funnel is who are the other stakeholders who fear that you’re getting disproportionate leverage and can leave and they’re the commodity? – [Male] I don’t think Brandon has an issue with that. – Well I can’t speak for Brandon but I can promise you that’s the answer to the question. The only reason anybody on Earth should not build personal brand at scale is because somebody else who has financial vested interest subconsciously or consciously doesn’t like it. Nothing else should stop anybody. Because it brings business in. It’s top of the funnel. – And by the way, your LinkedIn strategy, holy shit. And it’s not even just weekdays. – Brother, I know. Listen, eventually people are gonna understand. I’m really great at what I do and I’m very quite unusual for giving it away for free at scale.
And then if you want it deeply more contextual, sure, there’s things like VaynerMedia, there’s 4D’s, there’s other things but like, it’s going to be like that forever. By the way, if there was documenting and video and YouTube when I was 22, I would already be there because I would’ve done the same thing and everybody would’ve gotten email and e-commerce and search and YouTube. You would’ve seen me make a YouTube video four months after YouTube came out and said, this is gonna be the biggest thing.
And then we’d be sitting here, you’d be like, how the fuck did he know that? – Yeah. Based on what you’ve been preaching with the LinkedIn strategy, I’ve been doing that aggressively and I’ll see on an average day 150 to 300 new followers. I’ll see on a weekend, 2,000 new followers. And I posted– – LinkedIn is Facebook. – It’s crazy. – 2012. – It’s crazy. Solid platform. – I’ve said it a billion times. Nobody’s doing, very few people are doing anything about it. What’s ironic is my advice actually leads to my own downfall.
If everybody listened to me and made content, then the organic reach would go down ’cause it’s just supply and demand. That’s how much I know people don’t do anything. I’m literally giving advice every single day that is at my own detriment. – So you are coming from an immigrant family and I would love to have your point of view about that. So the French business is growing. – It’s a family business? – No, it’s my business.
We are making four millions that’s here in France. You say a lot about publishing out a lot of content. So we did 500 videos in Nice. And the only thing that work is when I do videos with other English-speaking well known entrepreneurs. But when it’s just me myself, it sucks and I would love to have your vision– – What’s the definition of sucks? It doesn’t get as many views? – Yes, a lot less of what I can do when I do videos with I don’t know, a well known entrepreneur in some field or the producer of Lord of the Rings. It makes a lot of views. – But that would happen if it wasn’t just English. That’s not a French/English thing or accent thing. That’s a you’re leveraging brand equity from somebody who’s famous thing.
– But in France right now, I make more views if it’s me speaking. – Because you have more brand equity in that market. – Yes for sure, but also I can see that, so my question is, if you were coming right now in the USA or your father with not perfect English, how you would leverage– – By recognizing I can’t change my accent. – I do, even if I improve it. – [Ben] I wish I had his accent. – I’m sure. We’re not talking about getting girls here now.
– It’s not about my accent. It’s more like– – I understand what you’re saying. – How do I, I’m sure that I can leverage who I am as a strength but it’s more– – By having more patience and just putting out more content and by understanding that Americans are naturally deeply rooted in America. More than 50% of Americans don’t have a passport. So what you have to do is accept the truth and execute on the truth. – Because it’s like, I can see the growth of doing more interviews, I can see it’s growing, but me doing, after 200 videos, it’s like the same views at the beginning.
I don’t see improvement. – I understand. And that’s frustrating. I think there’s a couple things. One, just continue to interview. – Yes, for sure, and I love to do that. I do it even in French as a kind of researcher. – It’s similar to some of the stuff that we talked about, I’m very, blogging. So I’m right about email, I’m right about Google, I’m right about e-commerce, I’m right about search and here comes this thing that I think’s about to be big called blogging and I look at it, 2002 and I’m like fuck.
I can’t write. – [David] Me too. – So I’m looking at it in the history of my career, from May 1998 to right this second, there’s only been one macro trend that I didn’t dominate, blogging. You’re gonna have your accent. – Yeah, yeah— – Americans are never going to accept an accent more than an American accent. You just now have to decide what your strategy is. There’s two moves. One, continue to interview at scale and do no independent solo English videos and then after three more years or a year or every year on fucking July 7th, try one and see what happens or go the other way and beat them into it.
Believe so much in your message that you can be an outlier. Look, no different, I will tell you that when I hit the scene in 2009, wildly high energy, cursing, I was wildly not accepted. I had a lot of pushback. I just made everybody succumb. It’s really your only two options. – And I have one question about, you say a lot about being yourself when you do things like videos and things like that. What is like the line, the balance between staying yourself in the video but yourself can, for example, I would not say that I’m an extrovert, I’m more introvert, so I learn to speak because I do a lot of speaking engagement but– – There’s a lot of people that do extremely well that are quite, Tim Ferriss is not extroverted. – Yes, for sure, and I love what he’s doing. – Good, there’s your answer. What’s right is that Tim’s Tim and I’m me.
I hate when people try to be like me. I’m wildly entertaining. That’s hard. That’s a talent. I give a keynote like a standup gives a performance. That’s not going to be replicated. – [Ben] And you happen to be very insightful as well. – Yes, I’m other things, to your point, thank you for, what I think people get confused with me, and the other way is they just think I’m sizzle. I would argue that I’m underrated intellectually because I’m sizzle. Introverts are always like, ah, I’m not like you. I’m like, bro, I get fucking completely disrespected for my intellect and insights because I am. Your gift is your curse. So I’m okay with that and everybody think I’m dumb, I’m a charlatan, I’m full of shit, I’m not smart, that’s fine. That’s the point. I think leaning into your truth is the best because it’s the fastest and the easiest once you get over the hump.
You gotta get over the hump of judgment but once you’re over the hump, then you’re fast. I’m so fast because I have no time to dwell on the judgment. You know what’s so fun about these things, it’s so funny, analyzing, the reason I thought that this would be good and I would be good was how I started looking at Wine Library the first full year after I left it. It’s amazingly interesting when you can look at something looking down on it versus when you’re in it. It was crazy. That first, I stepped away for a little while, but then the holidays came and like I wasn’t fully removed and I was like, this sucks, this blows, this is shit, this is fucked up, I’m like, fuck, those are all my favorite moves. But I’m looking at it like this versus being there every day. Your thing is so easy. You have two moves. If you want America, you have two moves.
You keep going or you keep interviewing to build even more leverage to then cash in or you also start thinking about distribution differently. – [David] What do you mean? – Well, one could argue the psychology of the end consumer in America is different on LinkedIn than it is on YouTube and Facebook and thus your accent might allude to European intellect in LinkedIn that it may not play out on YouTube. – Yeah, for sure I can see that the more it’s about deep knowledge, the less my accent is important. – Everything’s less important once people see the truth. Every fucking email I get is like I started off hating you until I started really listening. I just would spend, no joke, if I was your brother and we were like hanging out for the weekend I’d be like, bro, not another minute ever in life, you are not allowed to say to me anything about an accent. You’re just wasting time. That’s what everybody does. You understand? I understand, I’m empathetic to it, that’s what people do. They spend all their time on the thing that they can’t control. – I don’t do that.
It’s like just I would like to have– – No, I understand that, less. – Less, okay. – Less, that’s all– – Like never now. – Correct. That’s right ’cause it’s a guaranteed variable. – But my question is more what could be the way to not only not speak about that but what I did in France, every people told me, ah, you are too young because I started when I was 20, and I used that as an advantage. So it’s not that I stopped to speak about it, I spoke a lot about it and people have to say, ah fuck, and in France at that time nobody was doing that. – You’re super smart. If you want to start your first video every time in America, be like, before you talk about my accent, it’s the Eminem Eight Mile thing, of course. If you take control of your shortcoming, it becomes your strength. – And I love that idea. It’s one of my message. Use who you are– – It’s like those weird actors that are super ugly but they were smart enough to be like, no, no, no, this is my look and they’re like, oh, I’m weirdly attracted to Adam Driver, why? – Yeah and I would love that for my audience to realize. – I really think that that’s the new hack that I need to make content about.
Hey, are you really not attractive? I have an idea. You need to lean in and reverse and weirdly the confidence of not being super attractive, weirdly then makes people think you are. I actually see it. It’s happened a couple times. – [Ben] It happens to me every day. (laughing) – Let’s get a couple more in. Little free form. We’ve got five to seven more minutes.
– Sounds good. Reconcile for me this notion of be the CNN for your segment but don’t be developing selfish content that’s intended to basically– – Interviewing, interviewing. – Who would you think of in my context for in the security space? What type of interviews would you see as interesting? – Well it makes me think of Fox News ’cause those guys are always scaring the fuck out of everyone. Look, I think this is what’s so great, you probably have a good sense of in a security landscape who has equity. What I always say is look at your B2B magazines and look at the conferences in your industry and look who is on the covers and look who are on the keynote speeches and then invite them to be on your podcast. And all those people, since I’m one of them, always want to do a podcast. Got it? – Right, got it. – That’s how you map it. And then you do some Google search, random shit like, top 50 people in security and privacy. It’s just random work. You’d be surprised how many people say yes.
Even if you had, again, everybody says no. Why would Sarah McGoo, the number three security person in the world go on my podcast? I don’t even have one yet. Don’t say no for the other person. It’s the first thing I’ve taught AJ about VaynerMedia ’cause AJ’s practical, which means he goes to no ’cause he thinks what would I do. And he would practically look through everything and say no. I’m like, that’s nice, most people make emotional decisions. Now you’re in a crapshoot.
Don’t say no for the other person. The greatest accomplishment of my life is I had a super duper overweight nerdy friend in college and I promised him that he would get a super pretty girl before the end of college and it was a simple game of volume. I finally got him by sophomore year to ask everybody and eventually somebody said yes. That’s life. – [Ben] I thought it was getting a puppy.
– That works too but it was a really interesting exercise of my thesis. There was nothing on paper that made what I saw happen happen for any logical way, in its most narrow, animalistic way of life and it happened because you can’t say no for the other person. And you have to be okay with a lot of no’s. And if you’re not okay with a lot of no’s, you never get to that miracle. – [Ben] Well as an artist, you get used to no. – Correct. Everybody’s used to no in certain things and not in others. I’m only used to no and love no in business but I also didn’t like asking girls out in high school. I didn’t like no in that context. So that’s the thing. You super can be fine in one thing but another thing, you’re not as fine with and it’s just recognizing that and just going to a yes culture. It’s just yes culture.
That’s all it is. It’s just making, I actually think it is practical. What the fuck is gonna happen if you email Colin Powell and he says no? God forbid he says yes, you’re off to the fucking races. Maybe he’s bored today. Maybe his niece said to him that he needs to get on podcasts and he doesn’t know better that yours doesn’t mean anything. – Right. – Don’t say no for the other person. You went through this. You probably were going wide at first, that’s what got you there.
Then you’re like, wait a minute, I always tell people I’m the easiest when I have something to sell. You want to get to me, I’m impossible. You want to get to me when I’m selling Empathy or K-Swiss sneakers, I’m easy. Everybody’s got an unlock. – [Male] Gary, the other day, I was pissed, I sent something to you as a little thank you and they fucked up the thank you note and I’m actually glad they fucked up the thank you note because I have been wanting to sit down with you, not for me, but to have a real contextual conversation about mentorship on my podcast and I would love to, if you have time, at some point, have you come on.
– All right, send me an email, I’m booking everything now for next year and we got a lot of stuff going on so I don’t want to bullshit you but I’m very open to it. – [Male] Cool. – I have one question, you say that we need to publish 100 piece of content per day. – “100,” right? To me– – Yeah, it’s not the exact number my question. I heard in one of your videos that right now you attract a lot of talented people but like what could be your advice to attract or to find talented people to do all the things when you are not at your position right now yet? – Colin Powell.
By making a video tomorrow and saying, I’m looking for people. Drock became the adjective or pronoun or noun or whatever the fuck you call when everybody calls themselves a Drock. I wasn’t who I was then. – So you mean like– – You’ve got a huge advantage, everybody here has a huge advantage. Every 17-year-old in America and in the world wants to be a creator. People don’t get it, this has nothing to do with leverage of the person. This has to do with the interest and supply of the makers. Every fucking 22-year-old hey, do you want to work at a shitty bank or do you want to work at a corporation or do you want to be a video blogger and postproduce for YouTube and Facebook? They’ll take fucking, 10% are rich enough to have their parents subsidize them not making money to do it, 40% of them are smart enough or ideological enough to choose happiness over more of a salary, and then 50% will say no.
Not to mention, there’s a lot of, my argument on creativity is about to go in another direction. I’m starting to spend a lot of time on 60 to 90. So I think copy’s super important and I have this wild ideology in my mind that there’s all these retired men and women from the Mad Men era sitting in Florida and New Jersey and New York, 72 years old, bored as fuck, so tired of everybody saying to them that they can’t do anything, that they don’t understand how to take a selfie, meanwhile, in the craft of wordmanship and putting together words, blow away 98.7% of the people ’cause they have 40 years of experience to go along with their talent and would rip their arm off to come to an environment like this and work for $15 an hour to be copywriter.
I’m completely convinced and I’m gonna execute on it. – [Ben] You’re correct. – I believe it. You can’t ’cause there’s too much scale. – [Male] Damn it. – There’s supply. No no, not damn it, awesome. The world is abundant. If I thought you could beat me to it, I wouldn’t have said it out loud. – I love the idea though because that’s a real challenge is finding good quality people who can write and we vet them. – You have the people, you have literally the people who wrote the greatest commercials and greatest print ads of all time sitting right now, again, let me say it one more time, being made fun of for not being technology advanced, made fun of, oh grandma, you don’t know how to take a selfie, you had it reversed and took a photo of you. Meanwhile, can literally write the greatest copy in the world. – [Male] See I tell people, I don’t want copywriters, I want people who are amazing storytellers. – Of course, that’s what a great copywriter is. I know what you’re saying.
You’re saying the literal interpretation, we jumped on, you mean the truth. By the way, it’s why I’m a great copywriter. I have no grammar skills and would never get hired by Jega Boutique Ray or Vayner for that matter ’cause I don’t know how to put it together, but I know how to put it together. – [Ben] Well, the secret of copywriting is write like you speak.
So there you go. – [Male] Instead of like a machine. – [Ben] Write like you speak. – Even better, the way I speak makes people do things. So thus, that’s why my shit works. – It’s a plus minus. – Yeah, 100%. – [Male] Gary, you said something about you believe in long form. More people are saying short form, short form, short form. I say long form too. What are you seeing for the future of that? – Both will work. If tomorrow, I found out that Star Wars, the next one is nine hours, I would go and watch it and if I watch a six second vine that’s shit I’m out in two seconds. – [Male] What do you think for brands when it comes to presentation? – Both, both, both. Here’s how it works, for long form, back where you’re at, and I got to run after this, I apologize but really good to see all of you guys, all you need, it’s like Dollar Shave Club, Dollar Shave Club makes a video and then everybody’s like, oh I got to make those, all you need is one 13 minute film about Fiji water that actually fucking works and all this is is a sheep world.
People don’t think independently, they need an example. Make one video and you’re off to the races. Our Dwayne Wade Budweiser video really mattered. Three minutes, 47, and that’s a long form ad, but I think where people get hurt, brands have spent, brands have been ripped off by fancy directors and producers– – [Ben] And ad agencies. – By every ad agency to make these kind of like documentaries. – [Male] That’s where we’ve had the competitive advantage because the agencies have– – You’ll appreciate this. All of it is based on merit. Nothing scares me. Make the best thing of something, and you will win.
The answer’s yes, just be good. Facebook and YouTube and all those people get mad at me for long form ’cause it’s against their algorithms, it’s against their best practices. My theory is make a video that somebody wants to watch, do you know how many people watched my eight hour vlog in fucking Dubai? It was eight fucking hours, they’re sitting watching me. This is not fucking Avatar. Make shit people want to watch, always works. Have the freedom to make something that people want to watch when you’re in client services is a different game, right? That’s where things get hurt. Lot of times, clients get what they deserve. People hire VaynerMedia and then try to make us Macaya. I’m like– – Everyone’s a designer. – It’s all subjective. That’s why, that’s why. All right, I got to run.
