Gary Vee: The Inconvenient Truth About Winning in the Interest Media Era

Mick Hunt (0:00)

Are you struggling with your social media likes, clicks, engagement?

It's probably because you're thinking about social media, and you should be thinking about it as interest media. In this podcast episode, I sit down with the GOAT. He's gonna break down literally every single thing that you need to know about interest media. But we're gonna go further, we're gonna go deeper, we're gonna talk about some things that you've never heard Gary Vee talk about. This podcast is the one you wanna listen to.

Buckle up, it's live. Gary, how are you doing today, brother?

Gary Vaynerchuk (0:30)

That's very kind, my man. Thank you so much, I'm doing quite well and I'm glad to be here.

Mick Hunt (0:34)

I'm the honored one. Man, you don't know how much you mean to me, to my life, to my businesses, most importantly to my podcast, man. I started this podcast 18 months ago. So well before it became the number one self-improvement podcast, before it started doing crazy numbers, you were in my ear. And you said, Mick, if you're gonna do a podcast, do it with purpose and do it like a business. Because so many people play.

If you want to make impact, do it for real. So I owe you that man. And no one knows that I've never told you that, but that's why I do what I do. Because in my ear, you said, run it like a freaking business or don't do it at all.

Gary Vaynerchuk (1:13)

Thank you, my man. Thank you so much. I mean, you know, I'm in this great point in my career where it's, you know, it's, I'm detached from it. Cause you know, as the great poet once said, never get high in your own supply, right? Like I'm detached from what I know I've been able to accomplish.

The humility comes very natural to me cause I was well mothered. But, God, it feels really nice, man. Like to really know that I'm putting out stuff there for the last 15 years, that people that have amassed more wealth, more fame, more happiness than I have on the backs of the content and the words that I've put out over this last decade and a half.

It feels like a life worth living. And I hope God blesses me with another 50 years to keep building on it because it really is intoxicating to me. Those compliments, those words are dramatically more delicious to me than any of the fruits of my labor. There's no private flight. There's no car or watch or vaca- Well, vacation because it's family life. But there's very few things outside of my family that bring me more joy than those words. And I'll tell you why. Because I actually think it's a bigger cosign, hat tip, flower to my parents, to New Jersey, to America, to good parenting than it is to- I'm the by-product, my man.

Mick Hunt (2:42)

Yeah.

Gary Vaynerchuk (2:43)

You know, I'm the by-product of humble beginnings.

You know, so thank you. And I will pass those words on to my parents.

Mick Hunt (2:51)

I love that, brother. Tell him I said hello. And speaking of your parents and your journey and all the generosity that you do, man, like you do so much for free, like so much, just here's some tips, here's how you can do it.

I always wanted to ask you, like, what's your because? What's your purpose, that thing that's deeper than your why for doing the things that you do?

Gary Vaynerchuk (3:13)

Because I'm good.

You know, it's, you know, when you're full, you're not really eating everyone's food. You're not, you know, like, when you're full, you're handing out food.

You know, that's the real answer. I talk about this concept of gratitude and guilt sometimes to that question, because I do feel unbelievably grateful for, again, I started with it, impromptu. The parents I had, especially my mom, the way she raised me, being born in the Soviet Union, coming to America, living in a household full of love with no money. By the time I was 10, it was ingrained in me that money had no impact on happiness.

I'm so happy I grew up in the early 80s, 80s, 90s, in Edison, New Jersey. I'm happy I went to Martin Luther King Elementary School. I'm sure for everyone listening knows that means I knew how to scrap, I knew how to play spades and CeeLo. I grew up with such humble beginnings and such diversity back to MLK. MLK was not just black kids, black, white, Indian, Asian. I just, I have so much love in my heart. I grew up with all kinds of people. You know, I've, now that I'm 49, I've lived and been in the muck when I first came to America in a studio apartment in Queens. I've been poor. I've been in the poor rooms. I've been rich. I'm in the richest rooms. And when you live a coast to coast life, whether you go from rich to poor, which is obviously incredibly challenging or from poor to rich, when you've seen happiness and you've seen despair, when you've seen light and you've seen darkness, you have clarity. And I do the things I do because when I started giving away all my information, my wisdom, my hope, my happiness and my best practices, I was already good, my man. I was financially less successful than I am today at 31, 32 when this started happening.