TRANSCRIPT
slava (00:01.488)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Smart Humans. I am so excited about today's guest. I met him about a dozen years ago when he was just Gary the wine guy already doing great. Now there's so many words behind it. It's Gary the angel, the sports cards guy, the speaker, the influencer, the founder of V Friends or Flyfish Club or Sports Media or VaynerMedia or the list goes on. I'm sure there's many more things I could do. Gary Vaynerchuk, thank you very much for joining. Welcome.
gary_vaynerchuk (00:30.018)
Thanks for having me Slavo, really.
slava (00:32.284)
So how did you even get into ALTs?
gary_vaynerchuk (00:37.302)
I've been joking with a lot of my friends that alts got into me. And what I mean by that is, 20 years ago, I'm 46, 20 years ago.
If my friend Brandon Warnocki was here right now, he would tell you that I 20 years ago said, I'm not gonna be a Wall Street real estate guy when I do these things that I think I'm gonna do. When I start winning to a place where I can actually spend money to invest instead of pay for my rent and save a little bit.
I don't see myself buying stock on Wall Street. I don't see myself buying real estate. These are the two established things. I'm gonna buy rare comic books. I'm gonna buy rare sports cards. I bet you I'll get into art maybe or other things. And then quickly, that's why I became an angel investor in startups. I'm not sure if you can use video or audio, but like my back shelf here, rare wrestling figures, Thundercats, sports cards, and then even way up here, Twitter and Tumblr.
stock when it made almost no sense. I mean, I had a little bit of savings and put it all into Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. That was wild in 2006, seven. So I've always been about alternative investments. I've always been about enjoying it more than maximizing money. And the reason I never got excited about real estate and Wall Street stocks was that didn't get me going. But alternative investment, high risk, high reward.
leaning on my intuition about people behavior and consumerism Felt like a good place for me. That's turned out to be true
slava (02:13.404)
That's awesome. And one of the things we have similarities is we're huge sports fans, specifically football fans. But more interesting is that we're from the same town, which is Minsk, Belarus. What do you think that does or does not have to do with how you got passionate about alternative investments? What is being an immigrant coming over and taking those risks? Does that have any factor in it?
gary_vaynerchuk (02:35.654)
It's yes, you know what's funny? And this will make sense to you. And by the way, I was born in Babrusque, which is about 30 minutes outside of it. I think yes and no. I think your question's right the way you're leading it. When you come from zero and you're an entrepreneur, and I've thought a lot about this lately. When you don't have a lot as a kid, but you have a happy house, then you're really dangerous because you realize money isn't happiness. And so.
I was incredibly built for high risk, but on the flip side, and you may know this, most of us immigrants of that era, 70s, 80s, especially 90s, changing a little bit now, education was the only way out. I was a really poor student, and so I was a little bit of an enigma. I find that a lot of people that grow up with no money,
that are less fortunate than I was where school or getting money, you gotta get it because that's how you get out of unhappiness when you don't have, I didn't have that but a lot of people do and I actually think that makes them very skeptical about alt because they wanna stay and go to a good college, invest in real estate or you know like something safer and so I think it depends on your, I think immigrant DNA enables something
that enables two extremes, wildly high risk, high reward like me, or wildly conservative college, safe job, safe investment. So I think it could go either way based on where we come from.
slava (04:09.264)
Yeah, I mean, I guess it probably also depends who the parents are.
gary_vaynerchuk (04:12.606)
Yeah, right, it makes sense. Like you and I ended up being pretty entrepreneurial, but I can't imagine you're not in the same spot I am that a lot of people went to doctor, lawyer, and NYU being like the lowest, like NYU to Harvard, right? Whereas I was like Mount Itacal. Like I was so off the reservation. I think that modern parenting is gonna be more open to entrepreneurship because there's so much success out there now that people can point to. How old are you? Perfect, so I'm 46. When you and I were coming up the game,
slava (04:37.031)
43.
gary_vaynerchuk (04:42.122)
that didn't seem like a viable option. As you know, entrepreneurship wasn't even really a word. In high school, I was like, I'm gonna be a businessman. Never did I say the word entrepreneur. That's only 20 years ago, 25 years ago. So things have evolved very quickly and the internet obviously was profound in that change. And I think the blockchain is gonna, the consumer blockchain is gonna have a profound change on society, especially for the creative set, which I'm excited for.
slava (04:52.668)
Absolutely.
slava (05:08.176)
So you mentioned blockchain. These are things about you spotting trends. How is it that you spot these trends, whether you're talking about Thundercats or blockchain, or what is it that you want to get into next? Because a lot of people know or some don't know, I mean, you've been on the cutting edge of sports cards. You've been on the cutting edge of investing in cool companies, on the cutting edge of NFTs, on the cutting edge of using social. You're regularly on the cutting edge of things that become huge. So how is it that you spot those trends?
gary_vaynerchuk (05:34.686)
I do a lot of listening, you know, a lot of people, especially people listening right now who've maybe seen a video or two on social, they might be like, oh, this guy's just over the top, a yapper, always talk, you know, the reality is I spend 90% of my behavior consuming. I'm just very prolific and passionate when I, and get a lot of distribution when I decide to speak, but like sports cards, for example, I watched that for a year.
quietly looking at eBay, looking at quant, looking at qual, reading comments on social, looking at Instagram. Then I went to the Cleveland National Sports Card Convention in 2017 before I even uttered one word that I think there's something there there. So I'm proud of kind of, I think I'm a human anthropologist. I do a lot of psychology stuff. And then more importantly, I don't really predict Slava. What I'm very good at is I'm fast.
when it becomes obvious. For example, when you did Indiegogo, for a lot of people that was profoundly smart, but I was in it in Web2, like you were, if you were really in it, the chess moves to why crowdfunding was gonna work, wasn't like, it wasn't impossible to see, hence why you saw it. It's just that most people are not deep.
Right, most people are not actually deep. I go with intuition of where to go deep. Sometimes you dig a hole and there's no treasure there. You know, one thing I'm very proud of is I never force it. People are like, what's next? You know, people think my currency is predicting things. My currency is reacting to what I see, which also means you're not in control. Meaning, I could go five years right now and not have a TikTok or an NFT. Those are my two last things that I would say I got loud about that most people didn't see.
cynicism that are gonna end up being right. TikTok already, I still think there's a ton of cynicism on NFT land, which I agree with. I think 98% of projects are bad and do have all the DNA of a scam or a gold rush. But the macro technology is obvious.
slava (07:41.936)
So you already mentioned NFT a couple times, and you're one of the smartest people in the space. Not everybody knows exactly what NFTs are that are listening. Can you just start with the beginning? What's an NFT and why should people be investing into it?
gary_vaynerchuk (07:55.658)
An NFT is a non-fudgeable token, which really breaks down to owning a digital asset on the back of decentralized servers and protocols and technology that allows you to actually own it digitally. Kind of agnostic, no different than if you own a Fortnite skin in a centralized server like Fortnite, well, you own it and you could trade it and sell it and redeem it.
slava (08:19.76)
Fortnite being the video game, just for everybody.
gary_vaynerchuk (08:21.15)
Correct. Yeah, and for everybody listening, whether it's Fortnite or if you go way back, the first time I really knew this was gonna happen was Farmville. There's videos of me that I found talking about digital goods.
Because I saw in Farmville closed environment, centralized servers, Facebook owned those servers, Zingo was the execution of this. Farmville, I'm like, wow, people are spending real money to buy a digital sheep, right, we're living more digital, a blue check mark is actually valuable. How many followers you have is actually valuable to people. It's a digital asset.
Why are they buying $10 sheep? Oh my God, they care, candy crush. Video game culture really showed me that people would pay for leverage within a world they played in already. So I always thought it was a thing, and then once it became a real thing, because the blockchain was invented and you could actually own it. And so it's an ownership. Now what everybody needs to understand is there's a contract that is attached to that digital ownership. No different than a ticket to a sporting event, if you turn it over,
a contract there and that gives you access. I think the exploitation of the contract is gonna be the most interesting part of NFTs. Right now we're in the collectible with a hint of utility. I think over the next decade we're gonna go into utility with a hint of collectibility at scale and then like the QR code now is integrated at every restaurant even though seven years ago people made fun of me when I was into QR codes. I saw the technology utility nature. It was working in South Korea. It just took the pandemic.
and then people not using it and the iOS update for QR codes to become real to people. NFTs will become real to people every day because it's a profound technology. You own a digital asset. Some of that stuff will be Andy Warhol. Some of that stuff will be a ticket to a famous sporting event. All of which have the potential for you to do something with it once you own it. And that is why it's going to matter. The reason why everybody should invest in it
gary_vaynerchuk (10:24.596)
A, they should be very careful if they want to invest in NFTs right now because 98% are going to zero, no different than 98% of startups in internet 1.0 in 1997 went to zero.
slava (10:36.208)
How do I know what the 2% are?
gary_vaynerchuk (10:38.174)
Homework, like if you read and consumed interviews on CNBC with Jeff Bezos in it, it's how I knew. I was a kid, I was 22 years old and I'm like, this guy. Like, you know, this guy's right. Like, we are gonna buy things on the internet. Obviously I thought that because I launched Ylibrary.com earlier that year. This guy, oh, I like the way he answered those challenging questions on CNBC. I think this guy's good. I wasn't investing at the time, I wish I did. I would have made a fucking fortune. But you don't know.
Like for every Facebook and Twitter I have, I invested a boatload of my own money when I didn't have a lot in a company called Yo Bongo, where Caleb was amazing, but it was too early. But four years later, Tinder came out and the thesis I had for Yo Bongo became real. It just wasn't Yo Bongo. So you have to do your homework. You have to go into the discords. You have to go on Twitter. You have to click the names. You have to find out who the founders are. You have to read. You have to understand. You have to look at the roadmap and say, do you believe they can execute it? Because everyone has a pitch deck. Work. I keep telling my friends, I'm like,
would you buy a stock for $9,000? Would you buy it, if your friend said there's a stock at 90 bucks that I love and I want you to buy 100 shares of it for $9,000, would you just do that in a whim? No, well why the fuck did you just buy that turtle with a cigar in its mouth for $9,000 because somebody told you. We're in a gold rush right now and people are making very non-logical decisions. The way you make decisions is you do homework and you make a call.
slava (12:06.224)
So you mentioned CNBC listening to Jeff Bezos, like very specifically, you know, beyond just the generic Discord or Twitter, are there specific things that you like to listen to, people that you're following, specific podcasts, specific blogs? I would love to share those with the listener.
gary_vaynerchuk (12:19.658)
Not me, yeah. Not me because I'm in a unique place. My advice is not good for everyone else, here's why. I'm in a place within NFT land that the second I see a project that I'm intrigued by, I direct message the founder and I sit down and talk to her or him. That's not real life for everyone else. So what I see working for my friends who don't have that access point is there's unlimited podcasts.
There's unlimited YouTube videos. There's unlimited Twitter like spaces. It's actually, Slava, it's putting it, you know, this is one thing that, do the fucking work, right? Slava, like you and I have a huge advantage. Immigrant roots definitely create work ethic, that's for sure. So for, you know, for me, I'm not scared to waste seven hours following this artist and making a decision. Sometimes it's just subjective. And that might work for you too. World of Women, I minted on day one. Why?
slava (12:52.721)
Do the work. Right.
gary_vaynerchuk (13:13.554)
I believe that there would be a monster female, thank you, correct, that's right. My intuition, that there was gonna be a monster female project in the world, I was looking for it. There will be a female-centric project that will dominate. And then subjectively, I thought the art was phenomenal. But like, I don't like to pick based on my subjective opinion, but it was so inexpensive, and the timing felt right, I'm very intuitive.
slava (13:14.773)
World of Women is an NFT. That's one of the top tier NFTs right now in the market.
gary_vaynerchuk (13:42.506)
That's something that's hard to teach. That's a blessing. It's like asking, LeBron, how do I get better at basketball? There's things you can do, but that doesn't mean you can be LeBron. Beyonce, how do I get better at singing? You can do things, but not that I'm those people, but I'm very aware that my track record of the last 20 years has a whole lot to do with some DNA that was just lucked into my body. But the way I've been able to mitigate it, make it scalable, and why I think it's valuable for others is...
Just because I have intuition doesn't mean I don't put in 40 hours. Maybe it's allowed me not to waste 40 hours as much as everyone else. But yeah, I just, maybe I'm intuitively right more often, so when I do the homework, I'm like, yes, this is it, and I go, but there's been plenty of times I felt something intuitively and you look under the hood and it's a fraud or it's not great or they're full of shit and you gotta just put in the hours.
slava (14:17.02)
Peace, Marga.
slava (14:34.576)
So some folks might have heard of a board ape. That's kind of one of the things that people might have heard of it exactly in the NFT space. And the team behind board apes, they just raised like hundreds of millions of dollars at a multi-billion dollar valuation. What does that mean to the NFT space? Is this as big as it gets? Is that the beginning? Is this kind of... What is this? What's that statement?
gary_vaynerchuk (14:36.99)
Yes, the biggest. Yep, yes.
gary_vaynerchuk (14:45.888)
Yes.
gary_vaynerchuk (14:56.85)
The statement is normal course of action. Let me explain what I mean by that. When Facebook got all that money from Microsoft, what did it mean? Well, in hindsight, Mark Zuckerberg and Sherrilyn, they were capable and it meant a watershed moment for a social network that was on its way to become one of the profound entities of society.
slava (15:16.284)
when it was worth like a few billion dollars and now it's worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
gary_vaynerchuk (15:18.514)
Yep, right. But when Bebo was bought by AOL for $850 million, it meant that it was gonna go down as one of the bad M&A deals of the Web 2 era. So what will happen on Yuga Labs, which is the holding company that owns Bordeap, on their, I think, reported, right, four billion valuation, 450 million raised, mm-hmm, four or five bit late post.
slava (15:41.616)
4.5 I think yeah for yeah, exactly like 90% margin like crazy
gary_vaynerchuk (15:47.842)
they're gonna have to execute into that valuation. We're gonna find out what it means in seven years. We may look back and look at it as the moment like Microsoft going into Facebook, or we may look at it on a Bebo moment. It's gonna come down to execution. Web2 taught you and I in the prime of our youth careers that a big valuation and a lot of money didn't always mean that they were gonna be successful.
And you know, I'm cheering like crazy for Board Ape. By the way, full disclosure, my fund invested in, I just, I want to, I invested in it because I think they have such a head start as the Alpha Mega Best Brand Board Ape that if they're able to continue that over the next decade, that's huge. You know, Louis Vuitton and Nike and many other brands that had early lead or early cultural moments were able to over 20, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years,
to be something, right? Others failed. You'd like to think if you put money like I did and others did into board ape, Yuga labs, that they're on their way to become Cartier, Tiffany, right? Other things only, Zcavaricis that maybe you remember because we're on the same age range, or Jams, remember those shorts, or Ocean Pacific, or British Nights, they were hot? Correct.
slava (17:09.297)
for a moment.
gary_vaynerchuk (17:11.206)
So I try to use fashion to educate people on this moment. Board Ape is a brand, VFriends is a brand. Like who is able to execute and have sustained interest in their brand will be the ones that justify these outrageously big numbers that are people like what the heck? And the ones that don't, won't.
slava (17:29.82)
What do you think of the macro influences right now? Like where will NFT sit in all of this? And I'm referring to the geopolitical issues, inflation, the market having challenged, people are talking about potential recession coming in H2Q1 next year. Where does this fit in the next couple of years? Obviously it's easy to say, hey, buy and hold NFTs for 10, 20 years from now like Amazon, but what do you think about the impact on alts and specifically NFTs in the next six months to two years?
gary_vaynerchuk (17:59.31)
To your point, if shit gets tough for a micro moment, like we saw in 2001 after 9-11, like we saw in 2008, there was even that moment, I keep forgetting when, but you might know this, there was that moment like January of like four or five years ago, or five years ago, that it was like really rough for a second, everybody thought it was gonna get bad, and then kind of quickly by March it got out of there, little bit on Wall Street and stuff like that. If we have a sustained six to 24 month tightening,
I don't know, I'll tell you why. There's so much money printed. You know, like, and I think that it'll be interesting to see what narrative emerges when it's tightened. Now.
slava (18:42.256)
It'd be interesting to see if it goes to paying for the food, which is why commodities are going up, or if it's going into the NFTs, which is why the floor prices might go up.
gary_vaynerchuk (18:49.854)
Well look, you can't eat an NFT. So my intuition is food will be fine. The question though is not food versus NFTs. The question is real estate, Wall Street, and alt. Right, because nobody is gonna buy a house in Boca 50 shares of Tesla instead of food either.
slava (19:13.904)
Sure, sure, sure.
gary_vaynerchuk (19:14.602)
That's like, right? Like, when the question becomes, no, I think you're right. No, you're right, you're right. I'm thinking about this shit every second. When things get tight, for whatever's left in investing, my question is, is real estate and Wall Street stocks actually more vulnerable than people realize because when shit gets tight, with the small amount that's left, I believe on the under 35-year-old set.
slava (19:16.932)
I was just referring to the prices going up.
gary_vaynerchuk (19:43.718)
NFTs and alt comics, all this other stuff, I actually think has a chance to be more interesting and here's why and this is a profound insight that I think is true. We now live in a social media world. When you buy a Michael Jordan rookie card or a board ape or a Hulk 181 first appearance Wolverine, instead of a one family that you're gonna rent out.
or 100 shares of AT&T, you get social communication equity for that purchase on the alt side that you don't. Nobody thinks it's cool that you bought 100 shares of Tesla, and that's Tesla. Everyone thinks it's cool if you bought a rare pair of Michael Jordans or a, and that phenomenon is grossly underestimated by the world right now.
And so I believe the thing that people need to think about is if shit hits the fan, does the historic places that people invest in get affected more than people realize? At the high institutional value, it'll stay there. But the over the counter, the over the counter, which is a long fucking tail slava with a lot of money in it, that human shift is now happening and...
I think it would be very fascinating to see what gets affected how on liquid over-the-counter investing.
slava (21:16.048)
Yeah, I mean, my opinion at a high level is it's really going to be a matter of whether or not those folks have the paper hands or the diamond hands through the volatility on the downside, because some of these assets are going to have some serious volatility on the downside, whether they're willing to hold. And that'll be really interesting to see what that younger demographic does. What do you think about that?
gary_vaynerchuk (21:36.534)
I think that's right. I think they're all gonna have paper hands. I think everyone's way too overexposed, not sitting with enough savings. And so I think it's gonna be carnage. I think though the question becomes for people that have played it smarter, what are they gonna buy on the paper hands? Because I can tell you right now, if real estate goes down 7%, but blue chip NFTs go down 80%, not only am I gonna buy NFTs, but a lot of people who've never considered them are going to.
slava (21:51.545)
Absolutely.
slava (22:02.948)
Right, because that'll be kind of like the 17, 18 crypto, Bitcoin 20,000 to 3000 drop and potentially that huge opportunity for that next wave. We're coming towards the end here. I really want to ask you for a moment, Flyfish Club. I participated, super excited, I love food. Can you tell the audience about that? I mean, I don't think many folks have heard of an NFT for a restaurant. What is that all about?
gary_vaynerchuk (22:10.062)
Correct.
gary_vaynerchuk (22:14.847)
Yes.
gary_vaynerchuk (22:25.882)
We believe that the country club, you know, Soho House membership model is exactly what NFTs was built for. So we have an NFT project for a restaurant we're opening up next year in New York City called the Flyfish Club that follows the model of Zero Bond, which is an incredible restaurant club here in New York, Soho House, every country club in the last 50 years, where your membership is...
completely predicated on your ownership of the NFT, but unlike all the other places that I mentioned, you just pay a fee to be part of something, and then it becomes a scenario where you have to renew that fee. With this, you actually own the asset, and if after four months, you don't wanna come to Flyfish Club anymore.
Well, you just sell it on the open market. So you go from it being a cost of yours to being an asset that you own. And if me and my partners who are operating it, David Rodolitz.
Chef Connor, Chef K-Pon are good and have sustained demand in perpetuity. Well, that asset could become something that you've done well with. I mean, my dream is that everybody who bought it on Mint gets usage out of it and then turns it into a profit center for themselves. I'd be very happy. That feels incredible. Think about all the places and restaurants that you've gone to and you were hot on it for a couple years, but then not as much. Like, you know, you fall in love with something, but you don't fall in love forever sometimes with an establishment.
Maybe you're just hot on this place for two years. Maybe in two years, your life, what if you moved? What if you got tired of seafood? Like, you know, who knows? The fact that you can then just sell it, pretty cool. And I think you're gonna see, that was back to my earlier point, utility with a hint of collectability. I think that's how it's gonna play out.
slava (24:05.657)
Yeah, I-
slava (24:13.404)
And looking again at the future, if I could put you on the spot, what is one thing you would recommend people look to invest into now for three years out? And we do this with all of our guests.
gary_vaynerchuk (24:25.278)
I love it. My big one, I'm extremely hot on comic books, even though I haven't acted on it yet. I have one right behind me here. I think comics has a lot of room to grow. But I think I'm using it as a proxy to my real answer, which is show me what you're most interested in, and I'll show you where you can make your most money.
If you tell me that you're really nerdy and passionate about Star Trek and you go to Star Trek conventions and you know it, you know more about Spock than I know and every other person, well then I tell you to sit quietly and wait for the official Star Trek NFT and then be a trader of that because you're gonna know that. The reason I never invested in Wall Street and real estate is I wasn't interested and I didn't do enough homework.
But with social media, I knew it cold, so I knew how to bet. With sports cards, I knew sports cold, so I didn't know how to bet because people can get hurt. Derrick Rose would have been a great investment after year three. He got hurt, so did like, sports has that real danger. Wolverine, the Hulk, Spider-Man, they can't tear an ACL. Pikachu, I like 181. But I would say.
slava (25:34.94)
Is that 181? Is that 181? The one that you-
gary_vaynerchuk (25:41.186)
We are now at scale with alt investment, especially with NFTs. Find the subject matter you know best. Do a lot of homework. I think that could be the place you could do the best trading.
slava (25:51.9)
Amazing, let's close it out there. Thank you very much for your time. Everything from Thundercats, which really brings me back nostalgically, to the Money is in Happiness, the World of Women. Thank you for sharing that. And just do the work, which I think is amazing, amazing just guidance to all of our listeners. Thank you, Gary. We look forward to having you again.
gary_vaynerchuk (25:54.722)
Thanks a lot.
