How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live From The HIBT Summit: Gary Vaynerchuk

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

We have another episode from the 2021 How I Built This Virtual Summit, and it's Guy's interview with internet content guru Gary Vaynerchuk. In this live conversation, Gary talks about his innovative approaches to marketing and branding, and his belief that you can make money from pretty much anything online, as long as you're passionate about it, and put in the work. We'll be releasing more episodes from the Summit throughout the month of August, so keep checking your podcast feed. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.com. Hello everyone and welcome to a very special edition of how I built this from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So back in May, we held our first ever live virtual how I built this summit. And most the time we do it in person, but for obvious reasons, we had to go virtual this year. But still, more than 3,000 people from around the world attended. So throughout this summer, we're going to release a bunch of our conversations from the summit right here on the podcast. And today, we've got my interview with entrepreneur, author, and social media guru, Gary Vaynerchuk. And before we dive in, I should point out that in your podcast queue right now is my other interview with Gary. It's a full studio interview. And it's this whole life story. And it's so interesting and amazing. And if you

haven't listened to it already, you definitely should, and it'll make this conversation you're about to hear even better. And if you've already listened and you're thinking, wait, aren't they just going to go over what they talked about in the other interview? I promise you the answer is no. There is so much more great stuff I talked about with Gary at our virtual summit, all focused on his innovative approaches to marketing and branding. So I'm probably not the first person to describe Gary as a content-making machine. Years ago, he saw the early potential of YouTube, and he launched a very funny and irreverent show about wine,

which gained him a huge following, and sparked dozens of other ventures. And today, he's got millions of followers on pretty much every possible platform. Gary built an industry around the idea that you can pretty much sell almost anything online as long as you're passionate about it, and you put in the work.

Gary, to say the least, makes a ton of content and not just content, but compelling content about how to, well, make compelling content. So here's my conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk from the 2021 How I Built This Virtual Summit. Enjoy. Gary, normally I wouldn't take the time to ask you about the lemonade stand.

You ran as a kid. This was, I believe, in New Jersey, but apparently yours wasn't just a stand. It was an entire franchise. How did you franchise your lemonade stand as a kid? By being so nice to my friends every other day of the week that they felt compelled that when I asked to stand behind the table, that they would say yes.

So I learned very early on that it wasn't bribery or money. It was that my friends liked me for all the other variable things. So when I would go in for the ask, they felt compelled or guilted into doing it. And so I had multiple kids in the neighborhood that were pretty signed up for, hey, this is your location. This is not a joke. I would actually ride a big wheels.

I didn't even have an actual bike yet. The old, like, big wheels. Oh, yeah. And I would go around to my stands like I was Tony Sopranos. For me to be that young, six, seven, eight, and for it to come so natural to me. I think about sports or musicians. You see those videos of Beyonce or LeBron, and you're just like, right, of course. That's me in business.

You know, we didn't film those things. But, you know, I just kind of always knew what I loved and what was interesting to me and what came natural to me and what was it. And I refined those skills in my youth. And I think that gave me a head start in what I do today. All right. I want to push back for a second because I think that's true. I do think that you are a gifted and natural entrepreneur, but most of us aren't. Most of us don't have those gifts and we have to build them up, right?

You had, I remember in our conversation, you talked about working your dad's liquor store and your dad, and you were like, dad, you got to sell wine. And he's like, wine? You're like, yeah. And you've got to position it like this. So when people come in, you know, and you figured out how to get people to linger and chat and then buy wine. So you had an instinct.

So this may be hard for you to deconstruct this. Well, but how... But let me deconstruct it. I'm sorry to interrupt. But like, you know, by the time I was 15 saying that to my dad, I had done a hundred baseball cards shows. And me moving around my table and understanding locations in the mall or like, you know, it was, yes, I agree. But it was reps, right? It was shooting baskets.

Like some people are born with better hand. eye coordination, but you shoot 10,000 baskets, you're going to be a little bit better than the one who's not. And so, yeah, I think for, you know, one of the things I'm fascinated by is I know right now I could be better at skiing, music, singing, tennis, and pretty much most things. Do I think I could be at a Hall of Fame level on a lot of those? Probably not. Do I think every one of those things can be dramatically better? I do. And then the question becomes, you know, why do people become much better at golf? Because they genuinely enjoy it. It's what they want to do for recreation. And they get better at it. To me, I've always thought of that in the context

of professionalism. You know, what if you didn't do what you were supposed to do or what your parents wanted you to do or what you thought you could make the most money with the quickest? What if you kind of focused on the things that were intriguing to you, which inherently would make you put in the What would that look like in a 20-year window? I still am incredibly fascinated by that thesis. But I didn't know you sing. Do you sing, really? I can't sing for crap.

Okay, I was just, I was taking aback for a moment. But if I did go to singing lessons, I have a funny feeling. I'd be much better than I am today in four years. I have a funny feeling I'm not Beyonce, but I definitely think it would be better than I am today. All right. You were very early on with your dad's liquor business. You got into Google AdWords and in a website when nobody was doing it.

And then eventually, you know, YouTube, using YouTube as a marketing tool for Wine Library TV, which really kind of transformed you into a brand. Gary V. became a brand through this and you began to write books and talk about how people could make money. on the internet, in part by making content. Yes. Is that still part of your message today? Yes. I mean, I think the right, if you read Crush It today, 13 years after I wrote it, you know, I'm talking about influencer marketing.

I'm talking about podcasts. I'm talking about everything that ended up happening. You know, the book when you deconstruct it is, you know, if you're not knowledgeable about wine or jiu-jitsu or, you know, harvesting honey, you know, that's going to hurt you. If you're not deeply interested in the community around those interests, you're not going to be able to cultivate lifetime value. It's very hard to put in that community time and that and have content that hits unless that layer of making content money comes from a place where you're bringing so much value to the audience that things start to happen, right?

People want to do things with you. Your audience wants to buy things from you. So it's a really interesting game of selflessness that drives selfishness. But yes, I don't think 13 years ago people realized how much democracy would be coming to content consumption, that it was not relegated to television, print, radio, NPR, ABC, and that the internet was going to be distributed. and if you found your way of communication, whether through video, audio, written word, there was going to be opportunity on the other side of it.

Gary, there are people who are attending the summit who are many startup founders who are doing things from like a flower business to people who are providing services for consulting services, to people who are creating products. Do you believe that anything can be, turned into an interesting content story.

Do you think that if somebody cares enough about their thing, even if it might seem a little boring on the face of it, you can turn it into something interesting through content? I think that niches are a much longer tale than people think.

But I don't believe all of them have the size of macro intrigue that make it something that we would all who are listening say, oh, that's like a very lucrative opportunity. You know, Frisbee, right?

Do I think that you can amass 150,000, 500,000, 4 million people into a group on Facebook and I start a podcast? And I really do, Frisbee golf. Like, I really, really do. And I continue to believe this. A person who's obsessed with Frisbee golf or Frisbee or what have you, is she or he more excited about the,

notion of making $86,000 a year and living that lifestyle, doing Frisbee every day because they were able to get a $25,000 sponsorship from the biggest thing, Frisbee and YouTube apps this and that, versus a buck 30 being a director at a company that makes them miserable. That to me is the centerpiece of this argument because if it's wine, you could build a multi-million dollar company because there's enough interest in wine, even as a niche. If it's professional basketball, you could go on to create a seven-figure business easily for yourself. If it's the Red Power Ranger, not even Power Rangers,

the Red Power Ranger, you know, you're now starting to look at a five-figure monetization at scale strategy or maybe six if, you know, Comic-Con this and this and that. So, you know, I wanted to break that down since we had time together. I do think almost everything. It's stunning what people collect or interested in to sit and say, you can then make a career out of it. Believe it or not, I probably go way further down to long tail than most people because I know about affiliate deals on eBay. I know that if you really grind it and work hard and reach out to certain companies, there's branding deals to be had.

But obviously, if you're talking about music, there's going to be a lot more. general intrigue as you go down. If you go to Christian Rock, it might even be more lucrative because it's narrow, but it's still big enough. So those are the things I think through when I think about that question. All right. So some of this obviously applies to creators or content creators or what about somebody who has a product or a service that they're offering? Let's say, you know, somebody watching now who has a business, how central in your view is creating a content strategy around their business if they want to scale? grow. For me, it's top three things in 2021 because I think about growth, Guy. Do I think that there's

millions of businesses that are chugging along doing just fine without content? Of course I do. I just know them to be true. Do I look at every one of those businesses and say to myself, if she knew that if she put $55,000 into an employee and some ads, that her top line revenue would go up by 200k, thus paying, like, I believe that. So the answer is for me, I have no idea why somebody would leave the growth on the table in a world now where the cost of creative and ad arbitrage on Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn is so extreme that there's a land grab of opportunity. I don't know why somebody would leave that on the table. What I see is some people are philosophically just against it because they're content.

which is incredible. Yeah. I'm thrilled for them. And then there's another group that tried it, failed because of lack of patience or because they weren't educated enough of how to judge the people that were doing it for them. And have decided this doesn't work without realizing it was they that were the reason that didn't work. It's kind of like exercising for two weeks, not getting a six-pack and being like, well, this doesn't work. Yeah.

So that's how I would answer that question. You know, it's interesting because we have an episode of how I built this about policy. genius, the insurance marketplace. It's like kayak or Expedia for insurance. And Jennifer Fitzgerald, she tried to raise a million dollars she couldn't. They ended up raising under $700,000 to start this business, which today has 30 million users, but they couldn't raise a whole lot of money. It was Jennifer and her co-founder of Francois. Their third hire was a content person to write articles about the insurance industry on their website. And I said to her, how were you able to measure success in that first year. And she said, we weren't. We didn't know if anybody was reading

these articles. But eventually, they started to rise up in search engine queries. And today, most people go to policy genius to learn about insurance. Some of them buy insurance. Some of them don't. But that's been central to their strategy. It's everything you just said is biggest things I believe in the world. And that is intent-based marketing because you're writing articles. to win the arbitrage of SCM, where people are typing things in in Google with intent, and then you show up, which I love intent-based marketing. I also, what I love about social media is that is more classic brand awareness marketing that used to be left for the biggest brands in the world.

Coca-Cola, Disney, Delta, because the way the society worked was television, print, and radio were the places we were consuming information. The costs of full-page ads in the New York Times and running commercials on television were so extraordinary that the attention sat at the top. And that's why you got the proctor and gambols and the Coca-Cola's and the deltas. Now we have awareness, discovery happening in Instagram and in TikTok, which has completely democratized the ability to brand. And so you could have something like, I'll give you a great example. the Ocean Spray viral video, right? That is the single most impactful ad in the history of Ocean Spray Cranberry done by a man that wasn't in the company nor hired by an agent as an agency.

There are things going on now because of TikTok's virality that are just extraordinary. And most of the world is not caught up to that. People are transactional in digital marketing. So they look for the CAQ and the LTV, the customer acquisition cost, the lifetime value. They're salespeople. The branding people still live in television and kind of like business school, how to build a brand and aren't contemporary in where they do creative brand building. And so what you have is this vacuum, this incredible situation currently guy in the world

where very few people actually understand that you can build brand, brand on social at very low cost. And I believe that that is where the opportunity sits today. So, Gary, if somebody watching today, and most of the attendees in our community, you know, they're not, they don't have a million dollar ad budgets or marketing budgets. They can't, you know, with all due respect, they can't afford VaynerMedia, you know, which is a, right, you work with Fortune 500 or not companies. But if you were to say to somebody, look, if somebody says, said to you, well, Gary, how do I start? How do I create content with limited resources and

limited time? Where do I even begin? What do you say? I say a couple of things. I say, look, if you want to grow and you have limited resources, your actual resources, your ability to be educated and you allocating the time. When people say to me, well, I don't have time, You know, when I audit, and I do that for my best friends, my acquaintances, distant relatives, randomly because I'm in the mood sometimes, guy, what people realize is they waste an extraordinary amount of time every day. If you talk to somebody who has six employees and has a business, she or he often is micromanaging, but they have no reason to be micromanaging. They have hour meetings that could be 15-minute meetings. And miraculously, every time I've done a CAT scan, an MRI and audit, we have found, three hours a day, miraculously, from people that have no time. Then what I say is now that we found three a day, and that gives me 15 for the week, I want the first two weeks to be completely education. It'll be 30 hours of education. Watch these YouTube videos, read these tutorials that are free on the internet. Here, you know, Google away. How do I make a LinkedIn post for a lawyer? How to, you know, make a podcast. How to write articles that succeed on LinkedIn. It's all there. It's all there.

30 hours. Then the next 30 hours, which is now obviously the first month's formula, so the next two weeks, 30 hours, belongs to you. You the proprietor, you make content for 30 hours. Let me tell you why. Whether it's writing, whether it's recording an audio clip on your iPhone, or whether you're comfortable in video, which is smaller, but obviously high impact. You can't have as a business owner, judge when you can finally afford to hire someone or use an agency, the work if you don't understand it. The greatest vacuum in the last decade, guys, that people have been hiring people to do social media work and they have no idea how to judge it. They have no clue. Yeah. So they're like, how is this?

It's just a black box. And so I believe that if you audit your days, everybody's listening right now. I don't have those three hours. You really do. It's stunning how much time people. spend on things that they're just accustomed to doing. This is what I do. Well, couldn't you have that person do?

Like, this is what I, like, and so once I get those 60 hours in that month and use that formula of 30 and 30, then you make decisions. And then, you know, what I've heard from people, and I've been doing this a long time, some people fall in love with it and they become the content producer that they never, ever dreamed of. And so that's a very practical answer. Like, you have that level of control as a small business owner. And that's what I think you should do.

Gary, you and we talk about this. And I apologize. This is final thought. Yeah, please. Everything I just said, I did for seven years. Yeah. For seven years before I hired anyone. Seven years I did my own content.

All of it. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk about which brands he thinks are doing some excellent marketing right now and why. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So as part of this year's How I Built the Summit back in May,

I spoke with social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk, and the topic was branding and marketing. Here's more of that conversation. You have a massive following today, and you built that up over time very methodically and very slowly. But if you are starting a business today and you want to do a version of the same, thing. It may not be quite the same. How do you advise people to create content that is meaningful

and not just a bunch of noise? Because earlier you mentioned passion and devotion, but passion and devotion is one thing. How do you actually create content that's half decent? The audience will decide, and I think if you look at it, value comes in a couple places. I think about two E's a lot guy, expertise or escapism? So if somebody's listening right now, two things that have always worked to guy's question is, do you have expertise in what you're talking about? And you have to have humility here and self-awareness. Like, you know, some people are like, I'm an expert and really you're just an enthusiast.

Do you have expertise? Or can you create escapism? Escapism comes in many shapes and forms. It's really entertainment or something that's of interest. For example, being funny is an incredible tool of escapism. You've made somebody laugh. They stop thinking about their day. But I think it requires someone saying, okay, I'm passionate about video games.

How am I going to build a big Twitch channel? It's going to come from that you're epic at Fortnite and people are just watching you out of awe of your skill set. expertise, or you might just be solid, but you're so damn compelling while you're playing and your storytelling, you're making people laugh, you've got a personality trait, charisma. You know, I tell everybody I meet in real life that just oozes charisma. I'm like, hey, have you considered this content thing? Like, if you translate the way you do in this room right now to that medium, it's going to be something that may lead to something. So I think the answer is, you know, for me, I think the reason I've been able to build to where I've been able to build to is I ended up having both without even truly understanding I have either when I started. I think I took for granted how much I knew about wine because it was my cocoon when I started the show. I definitely, Guy, didn't ever think of myself as a, I was 30 years old when I did my first episode. I never thought I would be known or have notoriety. I knew that I was a class clown and had a level of charisma.

that people are attracted to me, but I never anticipated me popping on video the way I ended up popping the video. Well, to this point about charisma, right? Some people have it naturally. Some people, many people, by the way, I believe can develop charisma. Charisma can come with things like leadership or responsibility. But some people don't, they just don't have it or they're more introverted or shy. Which I think leads to podcasting and writing.

I have a lot of friends and a lot of people who've sent me incredible. emails that are very emotional to me because, you know, I am so over the top, but I would argue that so much of the feedback I get are from people that are very different than me, because they hear me saying what I'm about to say, which is like, look, don't force the media. If you are incredibly awkward or non-charismatic in your own judgment and the judgment of others, this is not like a self-esteem issue, well, don't force trying to like carry a one-hour show on video. you know, I'll be very frank with you. I'm devastated that I'm not a better writer or have that skill set.

I would love to not have like kind of the on pressure that audio and video create. And then sometimes just being, sometimes guy, I'll give me a great example. I'm on flight sometimes where I just have massive ideas. But because of the, you know, I'm on a plane and it's not conducive to putting out a video, I wish I could bang out an incredible 16 sentence manifesto and posted on LinkedIn. It doesn't flow for me that way. My book writing is, you should see what's going on with my latest book. It's hilarious.

I audio the whole thing with a ghost writer, and now we're going through it. And I'm literally, it's being read back to me because I'm audio and I'm adjusting to it. And then sometimes I'm making edits. And then the original time I just said it two lines later, it's like an inefficient process. So just to not be too long-winded, find your medium. If you're not incredibly charismatic, you might have the luxury of being a compelling writer. And that's okay. You don't have to be on video and audio. Writing is still crushing on the internet. But if it sounds to me that, I mean, I think this is sort of self-evident that if you have ambitions to scale,

to create something much bigger than where you are right now. It's hard work. You have to be in all of these places or in some or in many of these places. Or I don't think of it as hard work. I genuinely think of it as fitness, right? So Seth, who's part of my team right now, came in to set up this. When he walked this at Seth, you look great. He's just like in really good shape.

He's always been in great shape. But I know that Seth puts in the work. Of course, he has some natural, you know, DNA gifts. I have put in a lot of work over the last seven years physically, and I look at my old videos, and now I'm like, man, I'm really, I'm really proud, but I'm not Mr. Olympia, right? And I also am now 45. If I did this at 27, it might have been interesting, but like this 45-year-old little gut is never going to, and that's how I think about what we're talking about here. Look, you don't have to go to the Hall of Fame like Kobe and be in the gym every minute of your life.

Yes, this is not about like, if you. dream it, it will come. This is about, look, if you put in reps in the gym, you will start gaining muscle. But don't get to the place in the gym where you start hurting yourself and getting burned out, or you go so hard in the gym for three months, but then you eat like crap for a month because it wasn't sustainable. The way the gym and health and fitness is, that's how I think about business. For me, a lot of effort on work has been very easy. It is much. my hobby. Business is my golf, is my skiing, is my painting. It's my hobby. I also know for a lot of people, it is not. And it's beautiful to have a nine to five business. You know, you stay within

your means of what that does. But hey, if you go nine to six and you have your same talent, yes, you're going to be eking out results. So here's my question. And this is a bit of a digression, because we're talking about marketing. And I asked you a version of this in the podcast, but I'm really curious. What motivates you? I mean, if it's not, I mean, you're very wealthy. You've made a lot of smart investments. You've sold businesses. You go to garage sales on the weekend looking for bargains. What, you know, I mean, I love that, I love that, but what motivates you? Is it money? Is it, is it, what is it? It's three things. Let's bring down garage sailing. So I'm living life, putting out all this marketing stuff. And I'm, I listen for all my talking. So I get a lot.

of DMs and emails saying, cool, Gary, but I can't put $1,000 into Netflix stock. I can't put $5,000 into YouTube ads. I'm like, okay, that makes sense. I'm going to show people what I did when I was 17 to 24 to make some side money. I'm going to show them how I garage sale. You want to start with $11? I got something for you. And let me show you go from $11 to $4,000 in a summer by going to town sales of getting educated. The other part of that garage. So that's legacy. To answer your question three things, I want legacy.

I'm attracted to legacy. I'm genuinely curious, which is number one for me. When you said what drives you, curiosity. I'm wildly curious where I sit in my profession. I love sports.

Sports has an epic. There's a lot of data that supports a LeBron James versus Dominique Wilkins' conversation. In business, it's a little trickier because what's interesting is my relationship with money, I have a little bit of a different take with entrepreneurship. I think innovation matters. I also think how much you give back to, you know,

it's how I'm living my life, how much you give back to entrepreneurship, to the game is interesting. But I am curious, how strategic am I? How much can I squeeze out of the gifts I was given? So I think curiosity, legacy, the thrill of the hunt, you know, the best part about garage selling is you pull up to a house at 7.30 in the morning and you don't know if you're going to find a rare Nintendo game for a dollar. It's fun. You know, I've said this before. I've said it before publicly. I think curiosity is much more important than raw intelligence. I think actually people who are curious, because I think curiosity can be a developed, it's a choice. You could choose to be curious. And it's as simple as that. And it's actually much, much more important than

raw intelligence because in my experience, every founder who's been on how I built this is a person who follows their curiosity. So I think it's a super important point. I want to ask you about a brand. And you may not have one off the top of your head, but maybe you do. Which brand right now do you think is doing marketing very well right now? You know, believe it or not, we work with TikTok Vayner, but it's, It's not the work we're doing with them that's going to make me say TikTok. It's going to be the fact that I think Nick Tran is a very good operator as their CMO. I love what they're doing with their television commercials using content that, like, it's my favorite

concept. It's you're getting affirmation that human beings think this is interesting. And then you're taking it to another platform and giving it even more awareness. So I think TikTok has done a very solid job of, it's really, really funny. I think TikTok and Facebook, believe it or not, building awareness around groups, I'm blown away by how much under 30-year-olds are signing up for Facebook groups at scale right now. I think it's an effective marketing job by them. Elf cosmetics, I think, has been very native to TikTok to a demo that they need to win there. Those are some things like, you know, my brain went very fast

when you said that. Yeah. You know, the truth is, it's always a tough question for me because I'm, Because unless I know the business results, I think that marketing is very good at cheering for itself in a silo without asking if it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. You know, the ad world loves to clap and celebrate itself around work that isn't actually driving business results, which I've always found fascinating. What do you think about sort of, you know, kind of unusual approaches to content marketing? Like I think of Stakem's. You know, Stakem's? Yeah. Stakeums has a Twitter account that's gotten a lot of attention because it's just the person

writing the tweets is just really quirky and weighing in on all kinds of things that have nothing to do with Stakem's. But you go to their website. It's actually kind of funny and interesting. And they sell T-shirts and hats. And it's, you know, I haven't thought of Stakem since the 80s. I'm a huge fan of breaking patterns. If you think of, you know, it's funny, I have been willing as a human being to take on a

little crow, a little judgment out of my subconscious bias towards breaking patterns. I wouldn't call it shock jock, but I think, you know, when I, when I communicate, a lot of times I look at myself, it took me a long time. I'm like, oh, this is me being affected by Randy the Macho Man Savage and Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock. Like, I'm affected by that. And when I think about those three, they broke patterns in their craft in delivery. And I think what you're talking about with Stacombs or when these does very well or other brands, Popeyes, is breaking patterns.

I mean, it's what we did with planters, right? We killed Mr. Peanut. That stopped everybody. Guy, before Bainer won the planters business, when we started doing the work, we realized nobody cared about Mr. Peanut. That was a 1960s phenomenon. So how do you break the pattern?

you kill him. All of a sudden, miraculously, America really cared about it. And so, yeah, I mean, how do you break patterns? Like, that's what commercials were when they first hit television. What's unusual? That isn't annoying or disruptive. That's what commercials became. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of marketing that is different, catches you, quote, unquote, off guard, but values the other person's time. And that's where I think we, We've lost our way in marketing. A lot of marketing is disrupting people instead of catching them off guard. The content has to be worthwhile.

It goes back to that escapism. Like if instead of a pre-roll podcast ad, if out of nowhere, guy, you started singing, let's use you. One of the great shows. I have. I've sung before. But I mean the ad. Oh, yeah.

Right? Like if somebody, if I came to you and said, I really want wine text to explode and I think your audience. So would you sing? Yeah. I don't want to do a live read. I don't want to do a pre-roll. I don't want to do a mid-roll.

I want to pay you that in the middle of an interview out of nowhere for no reason, you start going whinedex.com. You know, like that would completely stop your entire audience. That's how my brain thinks. I think in creative ways that will completely get everybody to quote unquote pay attention, but not be something that is. bothering them because they want to actually hear the rest of it. There's a level of surprise, delight, integration.

It's why I fell love with social media. It was in the feed. It wasn't like you just got, I'm watching a show and it gets to the cliffhanger and that. Now I've got to watch a spin drift ad. Big shout of the spin drift. I'm drinking one right now. It's more integrated in a different silly way. You singing a wine text ad will make people chuckle more so than when you start reading it.

Hey, let's stop real quick this. I've got to give a shout out to one of our sponsors. It's already dead because it's intrusive instead of in addition to. Gary, I am going to explore that. And I hope our audience watching right now will forgive me if I break out in song in the middle of your podcast episode. Just in the middle of it, randomly. I love it. I'm in. That's Gary Vaynerchuk.

We talked back in May as part of the How I Built This 2021 Virtual Summit. More conversations like this one from the How I Built This Summit will be in your feed. soon, including my live interviews with Brne Brown, Adam Grant, and Rashad Robinson. You will not want to miss those. So please keep an eye on your podcast feed. This episode was edited by Casey Herman with music composed by Routin Arablewe. Our production staff for the summit includes Neva Grant, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Farah Safari, Liz Metzker, Janet Ujong Lee, Annalise Ober, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Ali Prescott, Joanna Palovska, and Jessica Goldstein.

Our intern is Harrison V.J. Choi, and Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.