Transcription
I woke up in a city that I consider the heartbeat of hustle, New York. Conversations with Gary Vee, PBD, and doing Tony Robbins business mastery all in 48 hours. For you to create your dream business. It requires a level of obsession that everybody else thinks is too much. When I look at all my decisions, it's always about like what's the lifestyle I want to design and does the decision get me closer to it or further away? And I'd rather give up short-term gain for long-term alignment. Like what's the point of making money if you don't do that? Some people keep going to work for hoping someday maybe. I mean, in retirement, what's that idea about? That's weird. You should enjoy life.
I don't know. It's good to see you, man. How you been? Good, dude. Question for you, please. You're obviously a big dreamer. The bee friends. Yeah. Cuz I've heard you talk a lot about selfless and selfish. Yes. Tell me about like how does somebody think through that because like it's counterintuitive to want to give so much but at the same time protect yourself.
I would argue that that framework of me communicating that is only me capturing what has always been real. For example, we met when the Gary Vee brand was a a pimple to what it is now. But you know that the way I'm even talking right now about V friends is exactly how I talked about Gary Vee. I can feel it. That's what's wild. V friends is how uncomfortably creative I can get if I'm in that spot. So you're willing to overinvest on the machine. Correct. Knowing where you want to go, which is how resi happened, which is how Empathy Wines happened, which is how my brand got built, which is how Vfriends happened, right? Like all of the companies I just mentioned, two of which exited very significantly, were built on the backbone of the operating system of the Vayner machine.
When it comes to the dream side, and we'll leave you with that, like people that are still sitting on their hands, they're not going for the dream. What's the current language you're saying? It's the simplicity of like self-esteem versus insecurity. That's it. The other thing I do a lot, I'm like, why is this working? What what am I? And even critically, like, why is this a problem for me? Oh, you know, my dad is this way and I always try to make it better. So, I'm always looking for like to help and like sometimes to a fall like what's my strengths? What's my weaknesses? One of the things that's very obvious to me is my relationship with me is very healthy and I think it has a lot to do with me not judging others either. 100%.
Anyway, dude, appreciate it. Love you. Take care of yourself. Means a lot. You're living your dream business basically, right? Put it this way. People ask me all the time, they're like, "Travel much?" I guess, but there's nothing about my day today that feels like work to me, but it looks like work to everybody else. Gary was a huge influence on that. Most people thought he was a keynote speaker and they don't know that he runs four $500 million a year business. How important is it to actually double down on something for 20 years plus now? 28 years building software. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just realizing there's more to do. More to do. Do more. You know, the whole like what are you pretending not to know? I think a lot of people are pretending not to know they have more in them to give. I'm just brutally honest with myself. Like are you holding back? Are you under indexing? That's something that I learned being around you and other people is you don't wait for permission. I think a lot of CEOs and founders, we're like waiting for someone else to give us permission to go do something. We can all do this. We don't have to wait for anyone to give us permission. Most people have the intuition that that's what they should do. They just don't listen. You know what sentence I've never said out loud? I wish I wouldn't have listened to my gut. I honestly believe most of us have the answer to live our life, but it's clouded with the fears and the judgments and the scarcity and all that stuff. that we actually know inherently what we should be doing next. It's just we just and luckily I've done enough work to just be like look I'd rather be wrong and aligned with my intent than not and live a life for somebody else's approval. I can live with I made this decision cuz I thought it was right, but I would have a hard time living with I made this decision cuz I thought you thought it was right.
Dan, thank you so much. Thanks, Cassie. [Music] So, you guys came up quick. You guys are killing it on YouTube right now. I'm excited to get into AI software. Yeah. You want to rip it? Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. A long time ago, I realized business was kind of like, and I'm not a music guy or anything, but you know like those mixer boards. If there's a hundred moves that you can make as an entrepreneur and they're all dials, the entrepreneur that wins is the one to know which dial and how much to move it cuz you don't go 0 to 10 cuz it might take a while to do that. You go 0 to three. Okay, now I got to do this. Now I got to do that. I always say sequencing equals success. And thank you. Yes. And we can look at life around us. Like if I gave you a recipe to make a cake and you took all the same ingredients that the guy to your left has and you follow the recipe backwards, you won't have a beautiful birthday cake. You'll have a pile of mush. So the sequence you do something in is actually the dictator of success. Not did you do it? It's did you do it at the right time? Did you do it with the right level of effort? You know, one of my philosophies this thing called vector leadership. It's called vector leisure because if you know what a vector is, it's a direction and a magnitude of force. So the idea with sequencing is direction. What do we do? And then what level of effort is appropriate based on the size of the business. Mhm. And I find that's like my favorite part to argue. I like having those kind of discussions. It's like do you have a strong opinion on that? If so, what data did you look at to come to that conclusion? Sell me on it. And if you can't, well, I think I have a different perspective. Here's the way I look at it. And I feel like that is the mental gymnastic that makes entrepreneurship so much fun.
Dude, every person that's won in life, you ask them who is the person that mentored you and they will say this person. Everyone from Michael Jordan to Bill Gates to whoever. A lot of my mentors today started off as coaches. How does having a mentor help you build your dream life? because I turn to them for the big decisions I got to make in my life that I wouldn't be able to ask other people. Every time I start a company, I make a list of essentially 100 people, people that have been there, mentors. So like Martell Ventures, I made a list of people. I talked to those people. I went and visited their operations. I asked them how their economics work. And then there's like the adviserss, right? Like on the finance or the legal side, people that like live in that world that can give advice. And then there's the peers, the people that are also inspired to create something similar. They might be two or three years ahead of them. I think those are the most valuable because they're testing stuff while you're testing stuff and then you get to share notes. I don't know what's happened. The last 12 months, your name never was brought up 18 months ago at all. Now you're here. I'm like, whoa, good for him. So, who do you follow? Danto. Danto. Danto. Dan Mart. Danto. No, but this is good for you to know that because our clients are your audience and they're consuming your content. So, what book are you reading? I'm reading D Martels. So, that's that's happening. It's kind of crazy when I think about not even a year ago, our first conversation of what we've built at Martell Ventures and the media stuff. So, you can look, we're we're doing pretty good. I know you're doing pretty good. You're not doing fire. You know, there's very few people in the world that dream like that and that also execute. And I'm always trying to learn from people that are 3, four, five, 6 years ahead of me. I mean, Sam, that's what we got as a calibration. It's like, here's what we were thinking. We've never been there. You've been there. What did you see when you got there? Oh, good. We were thinking of it that way. Didn't consider that. Oh, that's a good thing. So, like, that's where people don't understand when it comes to coaching. Like, what's the ROI? I don't know. What's the cost of either missing an opportunity that could have made you 100 million, could have cost you 15 million? The motivation, the insights. I don't know. It was I'm I'm a big fan of being in proximity to people that inspire me. I'm an easy cat, man. I'll do the work. Just point me in the right direction. you know the reason we came in the first place which is business mastery Tony Robbins one of the biggest events for entrepreneurs and I am the AI guy no pressure Jared you're going on before me and then Cohen I'm going to put you on to close the deal okay sounds good no pressure so what's crazy is the way I got introduced to Tony was supporting an X-P prize with Peter Diamandis he did an X- prize for education. I supported it. Came with two tickets, Diego Destiny. And it was CIS seating. Yep. CIS seating is chairman invited seats. So I show up and the woman looks at me. Oh, Mr. Martell, come with me. She's like, how do you know Tony? I said, oh, I don't know Tony. She's like, hm, okay. And I was like, I don't I don't want to get in trouble. Like, I'm sorry. I don't like what happened. I didn't I don't Why do you think I know Tony? And she's like, uh, well, you have CIS seats. And I'm like, what's that? She's like, that's where Tony invites his friends to participate in the event. and they walk us right to the front. Yeah. So, I started there and then then we did business mastery cuz Renee bought tickets to this event and is that 7 years ago? That's where I wrote down the goal at the end of this event to speak on this stage. Isn't that wild? And this is my fifth fifth time speaking here. [Applause] [Music] [Music] Brother, [Music] wild.
I truly believe life's about going through the hurt, healing from the hurt, and helping other people get through their hurt. You're going to detention center, and there's inherent risk to like going too, right? There's 100% inherent risk. Why do you take that risk? Like, while we're there, essentially, we're under the care of the guards and we don't know what could happen. I mean, there could be a riot, there could be a situation. So that's the math I do is the upside potential of helping these kids versus the downside potential of something bad happen. I'll take that risk all day long. Why is it so important to have stuff like this make your trips to build your dream business? If you think of life as like a tapestry of different experiences, if you just work out all the time, that's cool, but it probably gets boring. If you just work all the time, cool probably gets annoying. And to me, it's always about like crafting and curating the experience and like having a component of your life that's that's 100% give back to help other people. I think it just adds to the color. It's like full spectrum. It's like, you know, it's like 4K. Um, everybody has an ID. Uh, no, but mine's in the back. Luckily, I brought my back. Do I leave everything in the car now? Yeah. All right. We're just coming back from the detention center. That was uh that was my favorite one. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Cuz I know I got through. It's really cool. It's cool is what it is. You got to understand there's a lot of like there's a lot of fear in asking certain questions. There's a lot of fear in acknowledging the speaker. There's, you know what I mean? because they they then have to go back and have to deal with what the other kids are going to say. So there's a lot of like mass. So when I see them like being willing to put themselves out there and ask questions that they might be made fun of later, you know, it's pretty cool. Yeah, that was really special. I love that you guys were there. Yeah. Thanks. I really enjoyed that, man. That was nice. Yeah.
Wait. Okay. 3 2 1 If you're blessed to get to a place where you feel like you've achieved something, I personally believe it's your responsibility to light the path for other people. Does that make sense? Hurt we all go through. Remember I said pain, it's inevitable. Nobody gets out alive. Then we heal. We go on the journey. We figure it out. We process it. We get through it. We get better. We have success. We heal. The last part to close the loop is help. If you don't use the hurt that you went through to learn how to heal, to help other people, you did not complete the process. You will integrate and really truly learn things. If you take every pain you ever go through to learn how to get through it and share it with other people, your mess that you're ashamed of, that you hope nobody finds out about, can become your message. If you do that, you will build a dream life.
How is these last four days an example of your dream life? I can only summarize it this way. If everybody thinks it's work and it feels like play, that's your dream life. There's no part of my life, the people I'm hanging out with, being on stage, you can literally do it. Everybody, I'm not special. I just made a decision. Make the decision. It's possible. It's possible.