ANDY SERWER: When technology shatters an industry, it takes moxie and imagination to put the wreckage back together. Gary Vaynerchuk has made a habit of it. First, a pioneer of e-commerce, Vaynerchuk transformed his family's wine business from a $3 million startup into a $60 million online operation.

Then in 2009, he co-founded VaynerMedia, a digital ad agency that has grown to over 800 employees and works with companies like Pepsi and JP Morgan Chase. He also puts out a daily video series and regular podcast, in which he offers advice for success in business and life. He's here to talk about sectors ripe for disruption and how to capitalize when it happens.

Hello, everyone. I'm Andy Serwer. Welcome to Influencers, and welcome to our guest, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, great to see you.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Great to see you.

ANDY SERWER: Although I should say our host because we're here in your building in Long Island City. So thank you for having us here.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Thrilled to have you.

ANDY SERWER: So let me ask you this very basic question.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Sure.

ANDY SERWER: How would you describe yourself, say, my six-year-old nephew. What do you do?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I'm an entrepreneur. At its most pure sense, I am an operating entrepreneur who happens to put out a lot of personal content of that journey. So there is some awareness of who I am as a human. But at the end of the day, I'm an executive of several companies that I run.

VaynerMedia and the VaynerX holding company of agencies and service providing companies is really, really, really what I do. And that's it. It's not super complicated, other than the fact that I decided that it was in our business interest and in my own curiosity of, what would it be like if you documented and produced content at a scale that had never been seen before around an executive?

ANDY SERWER: Right, right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: What would it looked like if Arianna Huffington, when she started the "Huffington Post," what if she put out five to 10 pieces of content a day, in podcast blog, and content across all the social platforms every day of the first six years of that journey? What would that look like? And that's what I decided to do.

ANDY SERWER: I mean, in a way, it's kind of timeless, like the entrepreneur part. On the other hand, you couldn't do what you do today, say, 20 years ago.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Not only that, I didn't do what I do today when I ran my first company.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: When I kind of took the reins at my dad's liquor store in 1998. The cynical part of being so out and about is the showmanship, the narcissism, the self-promotion. I try to remind people. I'm like, look, a lot of times the accolades that I get in business today, people pass off as, well, he's internet famous and that's why it's happening, so it undermines my operational and executive skills.

And when I get sad about that in a debate or conversation with a friend or a foe, I try to remind them, look, I was a 22-year-old kid who, from 22 to 28, grew a business from $3 to $60 million a year, and I didn't make content. I wasn't on the internet. I was an operator. I was a marketer. And so yes, you're absolutely right. Not only could other people have not done it in the past, I already lived an entire chapter of building an entire business that had nothing to do with having a personality attached to it. I was just the operator of.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, it's pre-internet. And yeah, you need your social skills, but you were running an operating business, as you said. But let me ask. You've got 5.5 million followers on Instagram, 1.8 million on Twitter. How do you do that? I mean, I always hear people, oh, you just create content and you sit there. But it couldn't possibly be that easy.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Well, it's definitely not that easy. That would be like saying, how do you become a professional basketball player? You just play basketball. How do you become--

ANDY SERWER: So you need talent then?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yes.

ANDY SERWER: So what's the talent?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: By the way, let's stay here for four seconds, because it's a huge platform and I think we're about to help a lot of people. The number one non-conversation going on in today's society around influencers and other things is the talent part.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Now, talent comes in all shapes and sizes. Your talent may be that you're a model. You're just very attractive.

ANDY SERWER: That's me. No, that's not me.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Right?

ANDY SERWER: Yes.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Or a comedian, or an athlete, or a thought leader. I do believe that education and entertainment are the two pillars. But yes, I mean, back in 2006, I started making wine videos on YouTube. In 2007, I aggressively put out content on Twitter. Had the things coming out of my mouth not been interesting to people, I would not be sitting here with you right now.

It's not super complicated. Most people have taken some version of the attempt to become somebody people know on the internet. Most people. There's a set that's very private. Most people have taken a dabble into a LinkedIn article, into a nice photograph they posted on Instagram, into a single YouTube video, a couple clever tweets. Most people have tried.

ANDY SERWER: Right. So what's the secret of making people engage with your content? I mean, is it just smarts?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Empathy.

ANDY SERWER: Empathy? OK.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Empathy is the secret. I believe I sit at where I am in the lexicon, which is, I think, a winning player in today's new environment, because I'm empathetic to my audience. I put out content that brings them value, not makes me feel good about myself.

ANDY SERWER: Right. How many posts do you put up a day on Insta and Twitter? And those are your two main platforms?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Those are the two main platforms that I myself completely control. LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, I've, over the last three to four years, amassed a team of content creators, media amplifiers, strategists around my content. But I fully control Instagram and Twitter. And I put out, for Instagram, regular posts, and probably anywhere between three and 25 tweets a day.

ANDY SERWER: So that's a lot.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: A big shout out to you and your team, because the train going by now, the fact that you guys didn't stop it-- I'm so pumped right now. I'm fired up.

ANDY SERWER: We wouldn't have stopped for that. If my phone rang, we wouldn't stop.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I love that.

ANDY SERWER: That's like old people, old-school stuff.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: But it is an evolution in content creation. Like, it literally just took note of like, oh, I like these. Good job. Go.

ANDY SERWER: And that's empathetic. So how does the business model work? So explain your company to me. Is it VaynerMedia? Is that the entire business?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: VaynerMedia was the first company for about six or seven years.

ANDY SERWER: But look, this is Vayner Water, or something.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yeah, I mean, that's just inside stuff.

ANDY SERWER: Oh, that's just the branding.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: That's inside stuff for us. We have fun with that. But VaynerMedia was the first company. After building up Wine Library, and then after being an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and having kind of Silicon Valley success, I decided to start the agency with a premise that, eventually, I would want to buy nostalgic and historic brands. And I would run them through my progressive consumer-centric marketing model.

So I started an agency. It grew very quickly. Now there's something called VaynerX because two years ago, I bought purewow.com, a women's lifestyle brand. We started a men's brand recently called ONE37pm. Then we started a speaking bureau six months ago called VaynerSpeakers. We started a company in January to service small businesses-- because VaynerMedia's made for fortune 500s-- called the Sasha Group, named after my dad, which is fun. We have a tech platform called Tracer. That is evolving in a separate company.

So now there's a VaynerX holding company. And very honestly, it's really no different than Publicist or Omnicom or WPP, or for people who are watching, just Madmen 20/20. Obviously, a hell of a lot-- I haven't watched the show, but I assume what they've had in the show, it's a heck of a lot culturally better.

ANDY SERWER: Right, right, right, right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: It's an advertising agency.

ANDY SERWER: Right. So the business model works, you have fortune 500 clients. Give me some names.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Chase, Budweiser, Pepsi, Hulu.

ANDY SERWER: OK. And they pay you money to--

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Service fees to make the pictures and videos on the internet and on television. Planter's Super Bowl spot this year was made by this production company that we're in, ideated creatively by VaynerMedia. We are paid to make pictures, videos, written words, marketing collateral.

What's unique about VaynerMedia in today's world is, under the same roof, we also then are the media agency that places the media. We buy the ads on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo. We do the execution. That was the way it was done in the '60s and '70s. The same people that made it also bought the television. Then they separated them.

And now, most agencies either do creative or media. VaynerMedia does both.

ANDY SERWER: Mean, a lot of people say that ad businesses, the legacy companies, I mean, certainly, they're under a lot of pressure. Is this sort of a new model, a new way to do things?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yeah. I agree with the street and the business pontificators, that the old model's in trouble. But I don't think it's necessarily because they didn't have media and creative under one roof. I believe it's because they were publicly traded companies and they had to make their own numbers.

And when you're a service provider, if you only care about your EBITDA and your stock price, your clients, eventually, are going to feel that. And when they feel that and they feel the negative effects-- I actually believe there is an incredible book to be written, similar to like "Barbarians at the Gate," of what the four or five biggest holding companies in the world have accomplished in the last 25 years, which is through consolidation. They have basically extracted the value out of the biggest brands in the world.

If you look at the biggest brands in the world that have used the publicly traded agency model over the last 20 years, they've declined, while the agencies have grown. Only now, are they starting to decline because the cat's out of the bag, because the biggest brands in the world are starting to look at Vayner and other independent alternatives, and that's bad for the holding companies.

ANDY SERWER: So you wouldn't necessarily look to go public?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I am incapable of being a CEO of a publicly traded company, so no. We will not.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah. Maybe Elon Musk should have said something like that at one point.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I don't know Elon well enough, but I know he's a character. I'm not incapable because I want to curse on video, I'm incapable because I don't know how to run a business that needs to perform financially every 90 days, because I'm a marathon runner, not a sprinter.

ANDY SERWER: Right. That's kind of refreshing to hear that you don't necessarily need this payoff. But you don't need that for your employees. I mean, there are a lot of private companies that have been around for decades and decades, right?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: That's exactly right.

ANDY SERWER: They don't have to go public, right?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: No, I don't need-- I don't want the cash infusion to buy a boat. I want to enjoy running a company and I need independence as an entrepreneur. And so I'm not willing to give up my independence for $400 million upfront.

ANDY SERWER: So you were running a liquor store and the internet happens. I mean, how and when did you realize that the internet was going to revolutionize, let's just say, the business of communication?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: October 1994.

ANDY SERWER: You have a date?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I do. I'll tell you why. October 1994 was the October of my freshman year of college. And in 1991, when I was in high school, that's when I started becoming passion about my dad's liquor store, and I said, I'm going to open 150 of these. I'm going to open the Toys 'R Us of liquor stores. I remember being a high school kid thinking.

And then in October of 1994, I went into my friend's dorm room and discovered the internet. And within 10 minutes, I found myself on a baseball card bulletin board on AOL and I saw that people were selling. And actually--

ANDY SERWER: What have we got here?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: They're not going to see it, but you're going to see it. These are literally goosebumps.

ANDY SERWER: Goosebumps. That's goosebumps.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: This is real goosebumps, I'll tell you why. It changed my life. I mean, I'm really getting them right now.

ANDY SERWER: I feel them. That's legit. That's legit goosebumps.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: So I'm excited about this because it was a really transcending moment. I'm a weird kid, meaning I was a true entrepreneur.

ANDY SERWER: '94 was early. That was before Netscape, way before Netscape.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I'm not sure the timing.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, yeah, it was. 'Cause you were on an AOL bulletin board.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yup.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: And I just remember thinking, this is it. I don't know what to say. I was like, this is it. Two years later, because it took a little bit of time, I launched winelibrary.com, one of the first e-commerce wine businesses in America, and it changed the course of my family's wine business.

ANDY SERWER: So how do you build an online brand?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Easily. You produce content on the seventh 25 places where people pay attention. And you produce it around things you know. And you amass awareness. I mean, how did Nike build the brand? They ran commercials. They did sponsorship. It's just attention arbitrage.

ANDY SERWER: What does that mean?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: For me, it means my career-- oftentimes, I reference Mariano Rivera when I talk about my career.

ANDY SERWER: Mo?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Mo. Mo was one of the great closers in baseball history.

ANDY SERWER: Robbie knows that. He's a big Yankee fan over there.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: And so you'll appreciate this. He had one pitch. He was solid at everything else, but he had this one pitch, and besides Edgar Martinez, literally nobody could hit it. And that's who I think I am. I'm good at other things. I'm a good COO. I can operate. That's why I have businesses.

I'm very good at HR. I'm good at PR. I'm good at other things. This is now me talking about myself. But if you ask me, I think I'm remarkable at understanding what humans are actually doing before the masses understand they're doing it.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Right. I understood that online dating, in 2001, was going to be mainstream. That wasn't obvious until 2011, or 13, or whenever Tinder really took hold. What I mean by that is I built Wine Library on the back of email and Google AdWords. In 1997, no liquor store in America thought it was a good idea to build up an email newsletter versus the catalog that they could send in the mail.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Got it?

ANDY SERWER: Right. Yeah.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: In 2001, I bought every Google AdWord for every wine term, and nobody was bidding me up.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Got it.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Got it?

ANDY SERWER: Yup.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: In 2006-- this is now documented, thank God. In 2006, I started a wine show on YouTube in February 2006. I was one of the first people to move fast on Twitter. I have a podcast and Linked In. Like, I'm consistently first and that skill has allowed me to be good at real estate.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Somebody bought up all of Dumbo. Somebody once bought up most of Malibu. Some people see it.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I see human behavior.

ANDY SERWER: OK, so what do you see right now?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Voice.

ANDY SERWER: What does that mean?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: That means that everybody in this room, and everybody who's watching this video, is going to do a lot more things with Alexa and Google Home and Apple Pod than they think today.

ANDY SERWER: Like what?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Order every single food that they eat, all of it. In 13 years, you will mouth in your office, in your home. You will say, send me a burger, or can you get me a Shake Shack, or I want a watchamacallit bar, get me my Sprite.

ANDY SERWER: Quinoa.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: That's right. I want a quinoa salad. And this is where branding comes in. I want a quinoa salad. If you say that to Alexa, Amazon now has a lot of leverage. What quinoa salad are they going to send you? Their own private label? Is some brand going to pay $500 to be the affiliate?

So you better say, I want sweetgreens quinoa was salad, which is why brand is about to become so much more-- brand has always been the most important. Brand's about to become even more important because we're going to an audio-centric lead gen world, not a visual-centric. It's going to be very big.

ANDY SERWER: Sounds like you think Amazon has a lot of upside here.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I sure do.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Unless the government gets involved-- which I don't know that stuff, that's above my pay grade-- I would buy Amazon stock in perpetuity until Jeff Bezos no longer runs the company.

ANDY SERWER: But Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, they have a lot of advertising power. Does that concern you that they've got so much of that pie?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Of course not, because CBS, ABC, and NBC had that whole pie, because "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" had all that pie, and Yahoo at one point. There's always somebody that controls the pie.

ANDY SERWER: And always people whining about it.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: That's right. Microsoft should have been broken up. IBM should have been broken up. Google should be broken now. It's the same old game.

ANDY SERWER: But should they be broken up, Facebook?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I don't think so, mainly because I think that there's always another young Turk coming up, and she or he is going to destroy Mark Zuckerberg, because Mark Zuckerberg becomes passive, because Jeff Bezos becomes passive, because Bill Gates becomes passive, because people become passive.

ANDY SERWER: Right. They become content. They become--

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Content, old, curious, and other things, different parts of their life, sick, die. This is run by people.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah. Yeah. So we're in Long Island City. We just talked about Amazon.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yes.

ANDY SERWER: What did you think about that? Was the city right to like, boot them out, or activists right to boot them out?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I'm so pumped you asked this question.

ANDY SERWER: Good. Let's talk about it.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I have no idea.

ANDY SERWER: Come on, man. You said you wanted to talk about that and you're punting.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I'm not punting.

ANDY SERWER: OK.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: The reason I just got so excited is, as a guy who speaks with heavy conviction, which could come across as audacity or ego or overconfidence, nothing excites me more than, when I'm interviewed, when I actually don't know the answer to something and I can say, I don't know.

ANDY SERWER: But that's just it. So why don't you know? That's the follow-up question.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Because I'm not willing to do the homework of the collateral things that happened after the fact. Right? I don't understand the actual math around-- my intuitive nature is one of the greatest company in the world, or definitely in America, wants to set up shop, that that has trickled down value prop.

What I don't know is the concessions that the state or the city does, and the arguments on both sides of the equation possibly have actual value to them. I just haven't taken the time to dissect it. Let me give you an example. I believe the TV advertising is grossly overpriced. I also think that the Super Bowl is the number one best buy in marketing. So that's a contradiction within the micro of the macro. That's why I can't answer the LIC. I don't know.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Right. Well, what do you think about politicians, like Alexandria, or Casey, here Cortez, who says that we should have more government involved, in terms of people making higher wages?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: It's an interesting question. I was born in the Soviet Union, so I laugh when Americans try to paint liberals as socialists or communists, because that's Americans that haven't lived in communism.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: So here's what I would say. I am stunningly socially liberal. At the same token, I'm an alpha entrepreneur and believe in many of the things of capitalism. What I don't like is when capitalism gets old, a.k.a. an alpha gets old and then she or he tries to use their money to change the rules of merit. I'm disgusted by that. At the same token, I many 20-year-old kids hitting me up and saying, Gary, you're rich. You should give me your money. So I'm very scared of the slippery slope of massive entitlement.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: So more government involvement doesn't hit me well in my alpha, player on the field, I'm an entrepreneur. It hits me tremendously well as I'm the human being and I want everybody to be healthy and happy to the best of our abilities. I think the answer is always somewhere in between. The biggest problem I have-- listen, I'm willing to give up 95% of my earning. I really am. Let's go to taxes.

ANDY SERWER: Maybe you're getting close to that in this state.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I'm willing to, I just want the one who gives it away.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Wait a minute, I'm going to work my face off, bleed in perpetuity, and I'm going to give it to you, and you're going to decide, who got 36,000 votes, and you've never operated anything in your life, and you're third generation wealthy, or your ideology, and you have no practical skills?

This is not about giving away money. It's about giving away money to people that have no idea what to do with it. That starts where it gets a little complicated. So I want everybody to be awesome and happy and healthy, and I'm willing to pay unbelievable amounts for it. I just want to see how you're going to spend it.

ANDY SERWER: Right, right, right. Shifting gears a little bit.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Please.

ANDY SERWER: Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Well, maybe not everybody, but a lot of people do. But very few people actually pull the trigger, and even fewer succeed. What are the barriers there?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Talent.

ANDY SERWER: But that's disheartening. That means you're born-- you can either play in the NBA or you can't.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: No. That's a very good point. I think it's the following. My brother A.J. is a better basketball player than me because he's put in more work on his left hand and his jumper, so he deserves it. He's not in the NBA. You can be an entrepreneur.

The problem is we've lost sight of being an entrepreneur who makes $137,000 a year doing what she or he loves is an amazing life. But right now, everybody thinks they're going to be Mark Zuckerberg. So we've become audacious and ludicrous and delusional in our entrepreneurial ambitions.

And so I think we need a level of self-awareness. I think people are trying to be entrepreneurs at a level we've never seen before because the cost of entry of saying that you're an entrepreneur in your Instagram account is very easy. It's also cool right now.

I'm actually quite scared about that because I don't want to be the face of that, because I think 95% of people are going to fail, especially when the economy fails. Let me say something straight to camera. If you're not a successful entrepreneur right now in the easiest time to be a successful entrepreneur, because there's so much money in the system and the internet is at scale, you suck.

ANDY SERWER: All right. That's some tough love right there.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: It's the truth. This is the easiest time in the history of life to be a successful entrepreneur, and if you're not and you're struggling, then you're not an entrepreneur. Listen, I'd love to be playing for the Jets and the Knicks or be opening the Grammys. It's fun. Sounds rad. I'm just not capable.

Doesn't mean I can't sing better. Doesn't mean I can't be a better football player, backyard in Central Park. You got to put in the work and you have to be self-aware of your upside. The other thing is we have too many students who now think that entrepreneurship is cool.

If you weren't selling lemonade and baseball cards or pogs or burning seeds and flipping them in school, if you don't have sales DNA or operational DNA, or it wasn't fun to play store when you were five, you didn't gravitate towards it naturally, you're gravitating towards it now because it's cool.

ANDY SERWER: Right. And I take it you did all those things.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: All those things. And so did so many of the people that are successful as entrepreneurs.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Yeah.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: The same as singers went to choir. The same as actors signed up for the thesbian club freshman year. It matters. The work matters. The talent matters. You don't get to wake up one day and just say, I'm going to start the Uber of bananas. It's just crazy what's going on out there. Just the greatest generation of fake entrepreneurship we've ever seen.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, and that's because of the internet.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yeah, it's so easy.

ANDY SERWER: And it's cool.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Because it's cool.

ANDY SERWER: It's cultural.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: If us said, we're going to be rappers. That's cool, too, but very quickly, we have to prove if we can rap. I mean, like, cool. Rap. And then you can't and you're like, you're not a rapper. I can say I'm going to be a professional basketball player. Well I say, I'm going to be a basketball player. Like, cool. Show me. You can't prove to somebody in one second that you're not an entrepreneur.

ANDY SERWER: Right, right. So let me ask you about speaking.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: OK.

ANDY SERWER: You do speaking, right?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I do.

ANDY SERWER: Motivational speaking, you could call it. I mean, are you concerned, Gary, that it's manipulative?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Of course. Of course. But I don't think I'm manipulative. I think that people want to make me a motivational speaker, but I'm not. If you go watch one hour keynote on YouTube, listen to what I'm saying. I'm not talking about the secret. Just listen to the words. I'm motivational in my DNA. I'm a rah-rah guy. I'd be a great high school coach. I know how I come off.

But I ask anybody who wants to throw that cynicism at me to go read the transcript of what I'm saying. I am the most practical immigrant operating person you will find. There is no delusion in my optimism. There is no delusion in my optimism.

It's funny that you ask me that question based on the last six minutes of this interview, if you think about it. It makes me happy the way it went. I don't think the last six minutes were like, hey, I'm going to manipulate it that it's so easy. I'm desperately trying to tell people this is super hard. I'm equally saying how lucky are we that we can even try? Our grandparents couldn't start a company after hours on a phone.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Yeah.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: This is the greatest era of the at bat. You're not guaranteed to hit a home run.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: This is the greatest era of the at bat. That's cool. That makes me happy. There's a lot of people struggling, paying for college loans, and they get home at 7:00 PM. And I'm saying to them, let me motivate you to not use Netflix and 2k and beer to escape your problems. Let me motivate you at 7:00 PM to spend the next five hours to build something for yourself on Shopify, or eBay, or Instagram, or YouTube to get you out of your situation. Got it?

ANDY SERWER: Yeah. I got.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: It's pretty practical. I actually believe that my natural showmanship DNA, my shtick that is my DNA, grossly undermines what I'm doing.

ANDY SERWER: Really?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: People think it's why I'm successful. I think it's undermining my upside.

ANDY SERWER: Oh, you mean because people just say you're all form and no content?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I literally threw up in my own mouth when you said I was a motivational speaker.

ANDY SERWER: OK. I'm sorry. I didn't want to do that to you.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: You didn't, but I'm telling you a very important truth.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, OK.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I get it and I understand it. I look that part, but I continue to push people to listen to what I'm saying.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I can't change who-- I'd love to be lower, but I'm pumped.

ANDY SERWER: That's who you are. So how do you prioritize? How do you choose what you do? How do you allocate your time, number one?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: My admins rule my life. I literally had no clue we were doing this just now.

ANDY SERWER: We're doing it.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I'm aware. She walked over, she was like, you ready? I'm like, OK. I didn't even know it was the Yahoo one. My calendar rules my life. Me and my team are thoughtful about what we book.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I spend the far majority of being the operator of Vayner, but I do use my personal brand as a top of the funnel awareness to drive my business, so bringing value. I'm filming this from my own content, bringing it value to your platform, and then the serendipity of somebody becoming aware of me, digging, then looking. So I do use my personal brand as a top of the funnel business development tool for my businesses.

ANDY SERWER: Where do you want to take this? I mean, it's the old, where do you see yourself 20 years from now, Gary? But I mean, it's important.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: It's a very important. I like being thoughtful of what I'm doing professionally.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: The two things that I'm most excited about are the continuous journey of the ambition of trying to buy the New York Jets, which is my absolute professional goal.

ANDY SERWER: Really?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: That's right.

ANDY SERWER: Are you serious about that?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: As a heart attack.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yeah, it's been my goal for my whole life.

ANDY SERWER: Do the current owners know this? Are they aware of this?

GARY VAYNERCHUK: You know what's funny? I'm not sure, and I have no interest in wasting their time because I'm not anywhere close yet to the financial level that I need to be. Probably do. I put it out there quite a bit. And my path to that is to build VaynerMedia, to build the greatest marketing engine in the world, to then buy historic brands when the economy collapses. So I want to buy Tootsie Rolls, or Reebok, and then I want to become the CEO of that.

So I want to buy something in the next decade for $200 to $500 million. Then I want to run it for a decade, and then flip it for $3 to $5 billion and buy the Jets. And then I want to make content that leaves a positive legacy in allowing people to at least use me as a context point. This is how I'm doing it. Take what works for you. And play some legacy on the content.

ANDY SERWER: Wow. That is well thought out and clearly defined.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I appreciate it.

ANDY SERWER: So last question, Gary.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Yes.

ANDY SERWER: How do you see yourself using your influence on the world? It's kind of at your core.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: I believe that in 40 years, people will realize during this period of time that I was one of the few unique individuals who had the ability to penetrate 15 to 25-year-old young men and was able to reframe their mind of not being as into watches and private jets and models and cash, but made them start respecting things like patience and gratitude and empathy and kindness, and that I will be far more revered after I'm gone for doing it than I'll ever be while I'm around doing it.

ANDY SERWER: Gary Vaynerchuk, thanks so much for talking with us today, and thanks for having us here.

GARY VAYNERCHUK: Thank you.

ANDY SERWER: I'm Andy Serwer. You've been watching Influencers. We'll see you next time.