This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.
Well, it's a really fun podcast for me because it's a little bit of a role reversal.
Usually Jason is on the other side of interviewing me.
Jason is a force in the business content world and he has a new book.
When I saw that I said, look, you know, as editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, I think it'd be a good use for my podcast to to see what you wrote about and why and kind of shoot the shit on the current state of entrepreneurship.
So did all of you listeners that I think between that which feels like a year ago and now the, you know, potential recession or maybe we're in it.
A lot of things are changing in marketing.
The world's changing rapidly.
So no better time to, welcome my friend Jason to the show.
This is really fun to be on the other side of this.
I I I don't even know how it's gonna go.
Why don't you tell everybody the name of your book and, and what it's about, and then we'll get into it.
So the book is called Build for Tomorrow, and it is a guide to adaptability.
The the the thinking here is that everyone is going through massive change.
We, as a society, are going through big changes.
Anyone in business is going through a big change.
People's careers are changing.
Their lives are changing.
So how can we see opportunity at that?
How can we navigate it in a way in which we don't just always see loss, which is I think what people tend to see when they when they experience change, but instead find gain.
And this comes out of me having access to the world's greatest entrepreneurs.
I mean, you know, Gary, you and I have spoken so many times, and no matter what we're talking about, this is really the core of it, is adaptability, is is having a mindset in which new things are growth opportunities rather than simply a scary replacement for what came before.
And I wanted to know how people are doing that, how they are finding ways to grow despite uncertainty because I know that that's not something people are born with.
It's a skill that you can learn and I wanted to teach it to others.
You know, that's an interesting question.
You know, so much of it's predicated on fear.
How do you feel people can be taught how to fear, insecurity, the judgment of others?
It's always been interesting to me.
Yes versus no DNA and versus or DNA.
What, what, what out of all these years, you know, obviously people are going to read the book.
One thing I'm proud of is the Vayner nation that listens to this podcast shows up on the books.
It makes me happy because I have reading issues.
So I don't crush books, but so many of this audience does and get so much value out of it.
That's why I keep writing them.
So I know a lot of people are gonna get value out of it, but for the people that are just going to be able to catch this insight from the podcast, if you had to synthesize it, what stands out the most?
So let me tell you a quick story.
I I when I started my career, I started my career as a newspaper reporter, small town newspaper reporter.
Gardner, Massachusetts, 6000 circulation in the 2,002.
I don't know what it is now.
And, and I I I I gotta tell you, I loved being a newspaper reporter because I had aspired to it.
But and so people come up to me at a party, and they say, what do you do?
I saw my newspaper report.
But a couple years in, I realized, man, this is a tough industry.
I don't really like the work.
I I I feel like I can do something different here.
But you know why I stayed in that job too long?
It was because I identified as a newspaper reporter.
And if I was a newspaper reporter and I didn't have a newspaper job, then what am I?
And this is something we all do, where we we identify with the output of our work, with the thing that we're doing, which is fine.
But the problem is that it leaves us subject to feeling completely destabilized whenever change happens.
I made I made the same mistake when I got into magazines.
Every time I ran into a big speed bump in this in this industry, and I've run into many, I I would be afraid because I'd feel like, well, if I if I lost being a magazine editor, then I'm nothing.
Entrepreneurs, boy, they talk differently.
Would would they often I I was having a conversation with this guy, Greg.
He's the CEO of Foodsters, which is a baking, mix, you know, baking company.
And, and we were talking about a major change that the company was going through.
It was it was it was unpredictable.
I asked him if he was freaked out, and he said no.
Because here's what he said.
Our mission is to bring joy to people through upgraded sweet baked goods.
He just casually tossed that off, but I realized, you know what?
We need a mission statement in which every word is not subject to easy change, in which every word is core to us so that no matter what changes, we have something that does not change.
We identify the thing about us that is always forward facing, that is always value oriented despite whatever happens around us.
So I came up with this phrase for myself.
I I actually be Gary, if you've I'd love to know what you think is, like, the kind of core essence of you, but I'll tell you what I came up with myself is I tell stories in my own voice.
I tell stories, not magazine stories, not newspaper stories, not podcast, not books.
In my own voice, now I'm setting the terms for how I work.
And I find that having that orientation means that, Gary, if if you and I, if we're done talking today and I check my email, an entrepreneur has fired me Yep.
I don't lose the ability to tell stories in my own voice.
So what is your you do a 1,000,000 things.
What what what is what's the sentence that you use to define yourself?
Because there's always a need for that.
I mean, I I just I think I'm an operator.
You know, I'm very aware of Gary Vee and all that and aware of why I do it.
I actually think it's an exercise in operations, creating brand and awareness leads to opportunity.
But I also think that I'm deeply optimistic.
I'm stunned by it was kind of how I started this, right?
Which is like, there's a major elimination of fear for me, which is like everything solvable.
If you have a simple life, if you've got simple needs, never die in your own supply, you know, just, you know, you know, I'm not fancy.
I like it in the dirt and then back to practical.
I think too many people that are optimistic or delusional.
They go into, they go into the reason so many entrepreneurs lose is they are artists, not operators.
They just they're like, I'm gonna make this peanut butter and jelly sandwich that nobody else has ever made.
And I'm gonna sell a 1000000 of them without thinking about bread costs, you know, without thinking about location, marketing, how to hire HR, like people are incredibly not practical, not operational.
And so mine's not even a sentence.
It's 2 words together that paint a very clear picture of what's worked for me as a human being, let alone as a businessman and an entrepreneur.
And you know what's really interesting about that is that now that I now that I know that, I can I can think about how that protects you against both ups and downs?
The the ups being that you buy in too much on anyone up and the down feeling like you've lost too much.
Because we've That's right.
We've talked about things that you've tried, that you've invested in that didn't work out and you just treat it like a piece of data.
But I don't I don't I don't want to, but I you know, this may be why I love sports.
Like, in life of sports, it's impossible to not lose.
It's almost impossible not to lose within seasons.
There are really the 72 Dolphins in a football season that doesn't have that many games.
Like it's just not reality.
And, you know, I think with entrepreneurship, if you don't have the stomach for judgment of others, it's almost impossible to be in the game in a meaningful way because entrepreneurship is around risk and too many people are scared of that.
Thus, they cast judgment on those who are doing it sometimes over accolades, oftentimes envy and jealousy leading to under accolades.
And so I'm just very realistic about it.
Let's go back to your book.
What, the book process, what was the coolest?
Because there's a lot of aspiring authors on this, on this other side of this audio and video.
If I asked you what the coolest moment was so far of having a book, just like fanboy, 16 year old Jason, like what, like, what, like an email from somebody, an English teacher, a famous person posting it that that you think is famous or cool.
Like for me that would be a Jets offensive lineman versus somebody in Hollywood.
Like like, what's the coolest thing so far?
So I've had really cool moments.
The book was up on the NASDAQ billboard.
Michelle Pfeiffer, just yesterday, posted a photo of herself with the book.
But, but I gotta tell you that the coolest moment, like, straight up was I I was in the airport last week, flying to a to a speaking event.
And I I swung into the bookstore, and I saw my book for the first time out in the wild.
I took a I took a selfie with it.
And then somebody like a customer was, like, is that your book?
And so I was, like, yeah.
And I started to tell her about it and she bought it.
Like, she bought it, and I signed it for her, for a random stranger.
And I and I realized, like, I I am I am feeling exhausted by the by the, like, the business of this book.
Like, just the the dealing with the dealing with everything that is involved in selling it at mass scale.
I love the individual, like, 1 on 1.
I could go out and sell a book by hand to individuals all day.
I mean, I just I just did it yesterday.
I walk into another bookstore.
The same exact thing happened.
Somebody came up, asked me about it.
I I can't get enough of that.
What, what was the most surprising thing for you as you went to level 2, level 3, level 4 of your understanding of entrepreneurship?
What surprised you personally the most?
And then with Entrepreneur Magazine and just your craft and your skill set in this, what do you think most people still miss about entrepreneurs in a world where 10 years ago they were the coolest, they got cool.
25 years ago, it wasn't a conversation.
10 years ago, they got cool.
And now it's kind of almost like such a normal part of life.
Some of the cool is worn off.
It just kind of normalized.
Like what do you think the masses are still missing?
Comma, what surprised you the most when you started to get your degree in really knowing entrepreneurs?
So the thing that surprised me the most was that I had a I had a a a mode of thinking that was limiting my abilities to grow.
So I I had this is this Build for Tomorrow is my first book by myself.
But back in 2018, I I co wrote a romantic comedy, like, so off of the way.
Like, my I co wrote a a romantic comedy with my wife, and it came out on Saint Martin's Press.
Anyway, so it came out, and I got these 2 totally different reactions to it.
From my writer friends, they all said, that's awesome.
From my entrepreneurs, they all said, oh, that's interesting.
What are you gonna do with it?
Because to them, the only reason to have written a romantic comedy was because I was gonna build something on top of it.
I was gonna I was gonna start teaching courses.
And and I realized that entrepreneurs and almost everybody else have a different way of thinking.
Everybody else, including the world that I came from, has what I like to now call horizontal thinking, which is to say, you do something, you put it out in the world, you move along, you do something else, you put it out, and you're building horizontally.
Entrepreneurs think vertically.
A about how every effort is driving future effort.
That is not a natural way of thinking.
But once you start absorbing that, it completely changes the decisions that you make and the way in which you conduct yourself.
And so now I filter myself through, is this building is this building towards something bigger?
And I'm constantly revising my idea of what that is.
I think we all make a mistake if we say, I've got one place that I'm moving towards, and I gotta make decisions that only move me there.
But I do think that we should have a plan and then a plan to abandon the plan.
So you you need somewhere to go.
You need to feel like you're moving towards something.
But these other ideas, these other opportunities are gonna come along, and you need to remain open to them.
It's it's Malcolm Gladwell once told me, self conceptions are powerfully limiting, and I I I just couldn't agree with that more.
If you define yourself too narrowly, you will turn down
All these amazing opportunities.
So so I wanna I wanna have an idea of what I'm building, but I also wanna program into myself the freedom to abandon that idea and replace it with another idea, but I always wanna be building.
So that's what surprised me the most.
The difference between horizontal thinking and vertical thinking.
And then the thing that I think people misunderstand and then the thing that I think people misunderstand is that, if you're on the outside and you watch an entrepreneur and they are out there and they're they're selling, they're building, they're really focused on something, I think, you know, I think a lot of people, they they can appreciate that, But in a way, they also find it a little dirty.
They I think a lot of people see sales as dirty.
You know, I I I was just on an Instagram live last week, and I was talking about my book.
And, and there was one guy in the comments who was, like, don't forget, he's getting paid to do this.
And I and I stopped and I was like, dude, okay.
First of all, I'm I'm actually not getting paid per book because if you know how books work, you go, like, yeah, you sell a mountain of books before you make any additional money off.
And I got an advance, but then so, but but here's the number.
Here's the thing here's the thing that I think people misunderstand.
Just because you're selling something doesn't mean that it's bad.
actually I actually think it's the reverse.
I I believe the reason my career has gone well is and that I'm a good salesman and marketer is I only sell stuff I believe in.
When I was selling empathy wines, I just knew it was a better $20 wine, right?
When Vayner Media is a better agency than anybody else could hire for.
I really believe that in my soul and it's not delusional because the results have spoken to it.
And that's that's the thing that I said on that thing because I said, look, if you believe that you have created something of great value and it's a value to other people, then it is your responsibility to make sure they know about it and have access to it and use it.
A friend, I I saw some there was a really funny conversation I have with a group of friends where that exact theme came up and said, Gary, you're selling that?
And I'm I said, brother, you're asking to get paid to work a job.
why don't you do it for free?
Like, I don't understand.
Like, like, there's this very like funny conversation amongst entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs.
I also think that entrepreneurs have done a very poor job in not communicating that people that are not entrepreneurs are equally as lucky to entrepreneurs because if they have found something that works for them, like I'll be honest with you, there are many days when I'm like, man, it would have been really cool if the luck of the DNA draw made me be passionate about being a number 4 in a company because the delta even between being a number 1 and a number 2 is just the sheer amount of responsibility.
For everybody who's listening, if you're not an entrepreneur but you have kids, remember what it was like to be the kid and judge everything your parents did and not think about anything.
And now know what it feels like to be the parent.
Like, it's just a totally different world when it's on you.
And what people say about entrepreneurship is if you could do anything else, then go do it.
Which which frankly is the same thing that people say in media, the world that I have come from.
If you could do anything else, then go do it because it's easier.
But when you take a path that's challenging, but it is also immensely satisfying, then those challenges become part of the part of the validation.
Like, they're they're part of the reason why you're you're doing it.
And and and I think what you need most is you need to orient yourself towards that you are going to be able to deliver value to people no matter how.
And and and and when you're able to think that way, and this goes back to what I was talking about before, separating that, like, what you do and why you do it.
When you are oriented towards, I can deliver value, I can grow, I can build, it it it's gonna be difficult, but it is going to be the most satisfying thing that I do, then a lot of the a lot of the challenges, they make sense, I guess, is is the thing.
And and and I should say I I wanna echo what you say though though about the way that entrepreneurs maybe think that what they're doing is a is a a a a is some kind of unique path that, others who don't take it are are lesser for.
I think that we actually need to separate the the the mentality of entrepreneurship from, like, the the having started a business.
If people can people can think like an entrepreneur.
People can have a goal and set out to reach it.
They can try to build things for themselves.
You don't have to have started a business to do that.
It's one way to do it, but I'm not gonna go tell you that that's the only way in which you can create fulfillment or the only way in which you can create value.
I think the most important thing is that we are just aware of the value that we can provide, and we're pushing ourselves to constantly evolve and understand that newness creates opportunity.
That when there's new out there, when things change, that means that people need new things, and you can step up in whatever role you occupy.
And you can provide that thing that other people need, and people will love you for it.
That to me is core to what entrepreneurship really is whether you start a company or not.
Before we get out of here
I want to make sure I allow you the time to, like, talk about anything in the book that you think would bring this heavily entrepreneurial based audience some value?
What what what, what have we not talked about serendipitously in this conversation so far that might be worth mentioning and or even it's not in the book, the general concept of, you know, entrepreneurship.
I I I I'm gonna tell you, like, a kind of quick crazy story.
When the car first was brand new when the car was brand new, turn of the century, people didn't call it the car.
They called it the horseless carriage, And that was if they're being generous.
Otherwise, they called it the devil wagon.
And that was because they hated this thing.
People didn't understand this thing.
And, they threw rocks at it.
If a car went down on the by by the street, people would stand on the street corner.
They'd say, like, get a horse.
They'd yell at it the car.
And, now when we talk about why the car became the dominant form of transportation, the story we tell is Henry Ford.
We say, Henry Ford, he revolutionized manufacturing.
As a result, he, made cars more accessible and affordable to people.
You know, that that's true, but that's not the whole story.
I learned this fascinating thing from, from and and I'm not just telling you a history story.
I'm telling you a lesson that we're gonna all apply to ourselves.
So I'll get there in a second.
The the this woman who, had studied the history of automobile told me that the big mistake that automobile manufacturers made at the very beginning was that they started talking about the car as a replacement to the horse.
They said, get rid of Dobbin, your horse.
People found that offensive because they loved their horse.
Their horse is a member of the family.
For generations, their horse their their families had had horses.
And now here's somebody coming along and saying, I have a better way to do things.
Get rid of your old thing.
And it turns out and here's the thing that I think we all need to remember.
People don't like new things.
They like better versions of old things.
And and and they're and they're incredibly romantic of yesterday.
And incredibly, I mean, it's happening in NFT land right now.
Like the amount of happiness from so many people that NFT values are icy reminds me literally to the exact same feeling of March 2000 when internet stocks crashed and all my 45 year old friends, which seemed like a1000 when I was 22, 24.
They were like, see, you know, just open up another I mean, God, the amount of times I heard just open another liquor store, stop playing around with the computer.
You know, you'll sell a lot more wine if you open a second liquor store.
And, and it's just incredibly fascinating how much people fear new stuff.
But, but check this out because because, yes, they fear new stuff, but they love better versions of old stuff.
They love you to improve the thing that they want.
So the thing that we need to do Yeah.
Is that I just I just wanna I would no.
So the thing that we need to do is we need to build a bridge of familiarity.
Whenever we introduce something new to people or, frankly, whenever we are faced with something new ourselves, we cannot start with, here's the new thing and here's why it's better.
We have to start with, what are you already familiar with?
What do you already need in your life?
What is the core thing that you are looking for, whether that's comfort or growth or or or insight or whatever it is, and then build from there.
For the cars, what they did is they stopped talking about cars as a replacement to the horse.
They started talking about cars as a better horse.
They started talking about cars in terms of horses.
They named cars after horses, like Mustang and things we have today, started using words like horsepower, and they started to show people how this thing was a better version of what they already have.
And I think that as entrepreneurs, as innovators, as people who wanna bring new into the world, what we cannot forget is that people may not understand what we're up to.
They may not understand the value that we're able to bring.
