Transcription
Today's a really special day for us. One getting you here as an investor into Superordinary.
Yes, I'm being very selfish here. I think I get to uh put this in the notch of another win hopefully in the next decade to come. And you all have been at Superordinary executing on one of the pillars that I think is most important in contemporary marketing and business. Attention leads everything. If you can boil that down to anyone who's trying to sell a product or service and saying it's all about attention, everything else is distribution. And if you don't get those two things right, you're left in the dust.
It's very deep-rooted. This is why I'm even before I decided to invest in your incredible company, I wanted your company to do well. I do not think they understand how high the stakes are. Gary, amazing to have you on the podcast together. Happy it's been a while and you know, huge fan and I think both of our universes are in parallel all the time and and I think it's today's a really special day for us. One being getting you here as an investor into Superordinary.
Yes, I'm very humbled. I uh I, you know, I brag a lot about my good wins. I don't talk about my losses as much publicly, so I'm being very selfish here. I think I get to uh put this in the notch of another win hopefully in the next decade to come. And so, thank you for having me. And you know, obviously you all have been at Superordinary, executing on one of the pillars that I think is most important in contemporary marketing and business. And so, uh, it's a pleasure to be on board.
No, it's great, Gary. I think there's very few people out there in the world today that bang on the table as much as you do about live commerce and what's going on and I think you know coming from the other side on the West Coast and you're on the East Coast and hearing you know people talk continuously about it. But I still think people are misunderstood about live commerce. I still think that social commerce confuses people and I think e-commerce and social commerce is one of the big confusions. So I automatically revert to TikTok. And I think that's sometimes what we should lean into about how to explain what social commerce is. Why do you think TikTok and live commerce is so misunderstood by brands today?
Because Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 5000 companies are run by a lot of corporate animals that have no idea what they're doing.
Thanks for having me on the show. See you later.
I mean, I mean, you know, I say that with incredible love because many of them are this is real. Some of my best friends in the world. Now, let me be more real. A lot of smart people are in the biggest companies in the world and are unable to move their money around to do the things they know are happening because the scoring system within the corporate inertia does not allow them to do it.
What do you mean by that?
I'll explain. If a company like uh Coca-Cola, not a client, so I'll use them. If if they don't if they have an internal mechanism to score the value of television commercials and your bonus is tied up into that, you will spend on television even though you're Sally and you're smart and you know that is the stupidest thing to do in 2026 if you're trying to reach stick with me here, Gen Z. So what we have is we have corporate inertia eating up marketing and misalignment. And the misalignment is extraordinary. Yep. And you have smart people making bad decisions because they have mortgages to pay and they don't want to get fired.
That's right.
And then you have other people who just don't know. I I do believe I'm giving too much flowers to a lot of marketers. I think a lot of marketers don't actually know how profound even with an exit like yesterday to Unilever, they'll still be like, "What's going on? How did that happen?"
Let's do a green gummy ourselves.
Yeah. Like it there's an incredible misunderstanding of the sheer amount of attention.
Yeah. That is being allocated by the human race to the social networks. And then when you have TikTok that is actually using its UI and UX to help us billions of users discover live shopping channels in real time through its FYP. You're talking about one of the great opportunities of all time where we didn't even get into the affiliates that make the content. Obviously Meta is now trying to catch up. You're either in the traffic that you know we when we started talking from afar, I saw what was going on, but it didn't take me long. I'm like, oh, he knows. You know, he's not a finance. Who's the CEO? He knows enough of what's happening in the traffic that I feel comfortable taking the next meeting because the reason Vayner dominated is because I am a practitioner of the craft.
That's right.
As the CEO. And so, you know, look, I think there's a lot of marketers that still don't understand that making content through affiliates in a TikTok environment and standing up the production of a live show that sells is mission critical to a consumer brand in 2026. Many of them still think it's a nice to have. We'll get to it when it matters.
It's been mattering. It really matters. And just like social media and just like mobile and just like everything that has ever come along that's mattered, big companies will be three to five years away and they will overspend on M&A.
Thank you.
To close the gap.
Well, I think what you said a lot there that I think is really interesting to to pull apart because I've never seen a moment in time where corporate America, especially brands today who are used to be selling into retailers at 50% off or 60% off. You know, Instagram was always being like this discovery system for them where, you know, you you go to a creator with the most followers and now this, you know, it's not working and the LTV to CAC ratios are completely off.
I'm going to jump in. I'm sorry. You were progressive if you went to an influencer. There's still people that are barely spending on influencers and Instagram, but keep going.
Well, I think the the thing that's really and the word attention, and you've written a book about this, is really, you know, attention leads everything. You know, if you don't have attention, if they're not watching your podcast, they're not watching Netflix, they're not watching TV.
It's limited.
And it's so limited. And I think if you can boil that down to anyone who's trying to sell a product or service and saying it's all about attention, everything else is distribution. And if you don't get those two things right, you're left in the dust. And you know, I had a brand call me the other day who's put a brand in, you know, in Target and he's saying, "I can't move this product off the shelf anymore. Before I could, it was super easy. I just need to put it there and the traffic would convert. But now they don't know what to do and it's almost a little too late because they don't want to spend the money on the platforms that where the consumer is spending their time." And that's why I think what you're saying is just really important like it's very deep-rooted. Again, this is why I'm even before I decided to invest in your incredible company, I wanted your company to do well. Is I need any I It's funny how I just said I need. It's funny what my brain just did. I so wish my clients and not even my clients, the people in the industries that I play in to figure this out because I do not think they understand how high the stakes are.
Yeah. Well, exactly. Because I started the business in China in 2018 when TikTok first started and TikTok was doing less than a billion of revenue in China.
GMV.
GMV. Today, $700 billion. I mean, just take a step back for a second. And that to me is the thing that even when I say it today to people, they're like, "Yeah, that's a big number." No, that's bigger than Meta. Like it's almost like crazy that people don't understand that this is the we're at the bleeding edge of what's about to happen in the US. You know how people have been like, "Huh?" I asked them to go look at how much revenue QVC does.
Exactly. You know, like if you talk to anyone on this radio, they're not even sure QVC is still around, let alone, you know, and and that's actually being disrespectful to QVC, but I don't think people understand how big that platform is. And think of the friction.
You have to go on television.
I know.
Like that's already friction. You have to find it.
Yeah.
Then you have to call in. I guess I'm sure they have an app, but like.
And do they have a call center that picks up?
Yes. But um there's so much friction compared to grabbing your phone and being in the normal environ. And this is what I say. The brilliance of QVC is the format works.
Yeah.
Humans buy from humans.
And the entertainment works.
That's right. And humans buy from humans. Would you rather like this is a very basic question. Do you think it's more likely that you will buy something from a human that is live and explaining it.
Mhm.
On video or a picture that you get in your feed? Explain that to me.
I know. Exactly. When you know the other thing is the other day we saw this retailer that went online on TikTok and the first thing they did was just put up a PDP page of a product. And I just looked at them and I was like, these guys do billions of dollars a year in revenue and that's the limitation. No one is going to purchase. But then you flip three down on your FYP page and you see someone selling a fragrance and it's entertaining because someone's talking to you and you can comment to them, they can talk back to you and they're doing probably two million a month. Well, it's even deeper than that. One of the great things about social selling is when you watch QVC, somebody's selling to you. When you buy on TikTok or whatnot or some other platform, there's a community watching together and you're entertaining each other.
Yeah.
And it's that that that level of communal commerce.
That's right.
Is profound. And you know when I'm live, cuz I'm a host as well. When I'm answering someone's customer service question live, well, that also is affecting all the other people that are watching and then they become I mean, people become friends in these rooms. People that go to a consistent show and are both watching me, they become friends with each other. And I mean that is a beautiful. I mean, even in real life, a retail store, which I think will continue to have value because the whole analog explosion when digital continues to go extreme with AI is real, but it is unlike, you know, it happens once in a blue moon, but most people aren't becoming wildly friendly with the other people in the shoe store. You might say nice shoes, you might get into a combo. People have met that way, people have gotten married that way, I get it, but it's not common. Whereas on a live shopping show, everyone's interacting with everyone.
Well, it's true. And there's an incentive for them to come back.
Because the community factor of what you're getting from being in these live channels is so exciting. I remember on the subway in Shanghai on the way home from the office, you see everyone on the live shopping, everyone's talking and everyone's purchasing. And people used to, you know, kind of poo-poo the whole live shopping business in the US because they said, you know, it would never work. And my my thought was it was always because the platforms weren't here.
Period.
And that's it. And every.
By the way, my maybe my favorite entrepreneur of the last 25 years, it's because Mark Zuckerberg does not have retail DNA. It's because Jeff Bezos did not have social DNA in America. The leadersh did not combine the two.
That's true. That's so true.
By the way, if I was good enough to be one of those people, it would have existed in America. The reason I'm good at it, the reason I'm the pied piper is I am both social and retail.
Yeah.
Right. My whole career is actually that I built an e-commerce business in the 90s and I've been a social. Like so we didn't have the serendipity of the right founders. Interesting. I mean, what I really love about what you just said is that if you can pull from the online to the offline model and have people come and convert and also buy the same products in the store as well.
Oh.
Like it just it gets mind-blowing because the retail experience is also has got boring too, right? You know, so.
Very. I I actually apologize. I don't want to interrupt you, but.
What I just said actually got me to my curious question that I want you to pontificate on. Why did you start this company? What is the origin of Superordinary? Give me the 411.
So I moved to Shanghai one year and I was just walking down the street and I saw everyone on their phone.
And what were you doing there?
So I was just curious. I was living in Hong Kong at the time and I was, you know, very curious about what was going on in China because there were no websites there. And I went to Shanghai and everyone on the there was a bridge and everyone on the bridge was holding up talking into a phone and holding products. And this was the day when 2018 when TikTok first went live and I was just so curious and I just went on online when I got back to the hotel and like, this is crazy that this is how live shopping is really taking place and people did that because, you know, the community is very insular there. They don't go and congregate. They don't. And they found they found solace about other people online. And I think that nuance about human behavior in a in a in a country that's with over a billion people and this is how they found each other. So I went back and I started saying, well, the only way for me to learn about social commerce and about TikTok is to start selling products online, which is very much like what you did too. So I started bringing beauty products from the US, from New York, flew them to Hong Kong and did a cross-border trade where I was selling products into China. Within two years, we built one of the largest cross-border um beauty brands called Pharmacy. We're doing tens of millions of dollars and and all of a sudden, you know, one day we met this big um influencer called Austin Li and Austin Li, who anyone can Google and read about him, and he's does billions and billions of dollars of sales. One person. He has a team of 80 people that's around him. And I've never ever seen anything like this in my life. And to me, we're still living in the dark ages here in the US. And we're and we can bang the table as many times as we want and people won't listen. It's like deaf ears. But I do believe in five years' time, we are going to have multiple Austin Lees in the US.
I'm writing a book actively right now called Your Individual Empire. It it is going to break down many things besides live shopping. But that the human being.
Yeah.
Is going to be the next billion-dollar empires. And live shopping, blockchain, AI, social, it's very obvious. I could not agree with you more.
Yeah. And your own IP that you have yourself that no one can take away from you. You've got no reason. You don't have to go wide. You can be very.
The actual only moat in this AI world. Hear anything that they can't take away from your as long as your IP law and copyright is upheld in the country you navigate and we'll see how that all plays out over time, but that's exactly right. So okay, so that so you met him. What happens?
So anyway, so very quickly, we started bringing more and more brands into the Chinese market and this was just before COVID happened. And we hit, you know, several hundred million of revenue in GMV. And um, then we got shut down because, you know, the whole market, unlike the US, when consumer confidence gets stamped upon, everything goes to zero pretty much. So we pivoted the business and brought it to the US armed with all this information in the head about what is going to happen. And the one thing that stood with me is that we have to build infrastructure and infrastructure, what I mean by that is creative infrastructure. So when people think about infrastructure, they usually think about roads, cement, logistics, payments. But what I think is the the real moat or the real monopoly is if we can build infrastructure around the three, four million creators that we service every day on TikTok and help them distribute, create content, and sell more products and make it more efficient. Brands will have to come and find people like us to help them sell products. So the opportunity what we see right now is, you know, we have tons of creators that we work with and we had to automate all of that service to these creators and affiliates and it's just been just beginning and I we're so, so bullish about what's about to happen in the US but really as Superordinary, I really want to bring creators into our into our universe and what I've been doing by that is allowing them to become shareholders of the company as well, which I really am bullish about because I think if we have a product, we send it to them, and they own it, they're going to be more motivated to help us work and sell it.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, you know, it's, you know, it's fun. We're both 50 now. And, you know, I always had a very good understanding of history. I was an atrocious student, but I actually got B's in history instead of the normal D's and F's that I got in high school. And I never understood why actually until I got into my late 30s when I started to understand myself more as an entrepreneur that I was very conditioned, natural DNA, luck of the draw to be very good at pattern recognition.
And I and I used and I used history all the time to navigate.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's and that's when I was a kid, it was intuitive and I would use history that I did not live to make decisions. Now at 50, I lived in a world where I, me as a child, 20, launched an e-commerce website in wine in 1997 when no one knew what the hell that was. When I would tell people we were selling wine through the internet, this is real what I'm about to say. One liquor salesman that was my dad's friend who was 50 at the time, ironically, thought that when we sold something through the computer, we would take a bottle and put it into a pipe and shoot the bottle up and be delivered because he thought that was the worldwide web and the information superhighway. Then I lived through YouTube. I started my wine show early and then the real social media revolution that I was so at the forefront, Facebook, Twitter, investing in those companies. There is 0.0 zero doubt in my mind that we will look fondly back at these videos in nine years and be like, "We told them."
We told you so.
Yeah.
And this is why.
Cuz we're not geniuses. We're from the future. This is happening every day.
I don't understand how we're having this conversation every day. There's millions and millions of dollars being sold on live shopping in America. We don't have to be like, "It's coming from China." It's happening every day.
I mean, how big is the market right now? Like 15, 20, 30, 40 billion?
Oh, it's got to be bigger. I'll tell you why. I don't know their number. Yeah.
But I know that Whatnot.
Yeah.
Definitely has somewhere between five to seven.
In GMV.
Yeah.
Whatnot. Not TikTok. Whatnot. And big shout out to Grant and team. They deserve it. They've crushed in collectibles. But like that's an independent.
And that's one.
Correct. And an independent. TikTok's obviously crushing. Obviously, their numbers always blurred because we haven't touched on it yet. But when they talk about they they blend affiliate in there, so you don't really know how much of the affiliate and actually we do know. We know a lot of it's the affiliate and more and more every day it's coming from the live video.
But Meta is going to be an entrance. When Meta gets going, what do you think? YouTube's just going to sit around be like, "Let them beat our face in." So YouTube will do it.
You know, Snapchat will do it. Twitch is already doing it. It's not a priority yet, but as they start like it's not complicated. This is real.
Yeah. Well, that's the that's the thing I think, you know, when we look at the market and let's assume and I really believe we're going to get to, you know, ByteDance will do a trillion dollars in a couple of years and and the US market's going to get a everybody a trillion in GMV. So, they get a rake of that. They're not doing a trillion in revenue. There's a trillion dollars worth of stuff being sold. They're getting 8, 10, 7% of that. We just think about that. That's that that's just, yeah, that's a commission. That's insane.
But I also think like now with the US and every day when you go on TikTok, like they they're they're learning every single day. They're doing this whole auction process now which is very similar to Whatnot. And now look at look how fast it's, you know, you go to one one little room, they got 700, 800 people just sitting in there and it's someone in Miami selling random perfume brands and they're making 20, 30 grand a month for one person. I mean, we we had a comic book show for VRs, my Pokemon Marvel brand I'm building right there in that studio, but like did $114,000 in comic sales in three hours.
That's amazing.
Like these are real and like we're just getting I know it's me and all that, but like we're just getting going. It's like we're small at be friends.
Well, it's, you know, the other thing was like we were we're looking at it the other day. Um, when we first launched Superordinary in in um China, we did Supergoop, the sunscreen.
We did $7 million in 20 seconds. That's right. And and when it first happened, I was like, everyone in the office was just like, "That's good." I was like, "That's good. That's insane. That's what a brand does in a whole 18-month period in the US."
And um and I still think that that's the misunderstanding that we're still trying to figure out.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, you know, it was at scale of China at the time. Gwyneth's American DNA stardom mattered at that point. It was a different West and East relationship then.
Absolutely. But again, you don't have to look here very far. And those stories are profound and they continue to be even more and more profound. But we I agree with you. Within the next 24 to 36 months, there's going to be a lot of stories running around in the world. I see it in collectibles. The trading card guys and gals, they're doing real numbers.
Yeah.
They're doing real numbers on these shows and it's day zero still. We're not even in day one. And so for every consumable business and you know the other thing the Americans don't know or the Europeans is this is about selling homes and cars. Right now, everyone thinks it's a trinket and a hat. When he's selling live crabs and seafood.
By the way, that's happening. Actually, there's a show on Whatnot where the guy's selling koi now. I made a video about it and everyone was stunned and they didn't believe me. I'm like, go and look. He's selling fish. He's selling koi live on Whatnot.
Yeah, you can do it. I mean, in China, people are buying seafood and they're pointing at the fish and they'll be at your house within two days. Like, it's so efficient. And I think the other thing that we're seeing is services being sold too. You can buy park tickets. You can buy coupons to, you know, geolocate them at Starbucks or Jersey Mike's. And that's all coming. Let me explain this. I as a as a public speaker who sells my time, you put me on video and I'm auctioning off me coming to your company and speaking for an hour, I'm gonna sell that better than it being listed on my website.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's so dormant. Like that's why I think right now we're in the US and sometimes I look at US versus China and see where we're sitting where everyone's on their D2C websites over here and in China there's no D2C website. They're just a super app. So almost if you took away the D2C sites in the US and we said we're all on TikTok, all of a sudden then we're truly all competing for attention and that's what's going to happen. So in every single company that it's almost like they should be hiring like a chief attention officer.
Yeah, I mean, I would argue that that's what a chief marketing officer should be thinking about. That's right. I think it's a good framework.
We have chief brand officers, which is delusion and ideology um when it's in practicality, but a chief attention officer would be a much smarter way to think about it and I I give you a hat tip for that. That's exactly right. But I would I would argue that that's what every actual marketer should be doing and that's what they used to do. Like they understood that attention was on television.
And they tried to make the best commercial they could.
Right? The the issue now is that the attention has shifted to mobile device and apps, but the marketers continue to market in other arenas. But it's not complicated. You know, you were talking and I was thinking, man, this is just this is 1996 all over again. I had this website. I told everybody that over the next 20 years, the amount of things that people would buy on the internet were going to blow your mind. And literally, everyone looked me in the face and say, "Why would I, this is, this is now funny, especially for some of the youngsters in here, I want you to pay attention." People literally said to me to my face, "But why would I go to my computer to buy wine when I could just go to the store and buy it?" And I would say because it's more convenient, because you would have more options, because it would be cheaper. Like, don't you understand? And and people couldn't understand right now me and you saying, which I could be a buyer of, hey, like you shouldn't really have an e-commerce site. It's all going to happen on commerce. They'd be like, what are you talking about? Because they accept today that we go to websites and buy stuff. I know unequivocally that live shopping is a more entertaining, more fruitful, more enjoyable shopping experience and is easier.
And you swipe.
Exactly.
You swipe and they put in front of you. But if you don't want that, you just hit the bottom right corner and go into their store. You shop while you're being entertained.
Exactly.
I don't understand how people are missing this.
Well, this is the other thing. You know, live shopping and entertainment to me is the one thing that will never get taken away. The reason is that I don't think you can take the human right away from someone to shop and send an agent to go out and buy something that you care about.
That part I will take the counter a little bit.
Let's hear it.
You said the most important part that you care about. I am I can't wait for my agentic agents to reorder my deodorant because I don't care. And so I will set it and say I want the lowest cost and and because of the way my wife is, I need the it to be a clean product and not have chemicals. But what I care about, I will it will be live shopping and AI agents. There's a everybody in this room and everybody at home that's watching or listening right now, there are categories you care about and there's categories that you don't.
I don't care about my socks. For some people, that's the most important. And we will all be in this framework. But here's what gets really interesting.
Let me give you another reason live shopping matters. We will all be in live shopping atmosphere because of community. And I just know it.
Yeah. You've I Gary have set my deodorant to reorder the same one over and over. I do not care. I go on live shopping and I see a founder that entertains me and she's got a deodorant that she's selling and because she entertained me and because I like the vibe and look, I don't know if you see this. I'm getting goosebumps right now because I know I'm talking about the future. I'm going to be like, you know what, I'm going to switch out my default agentic and I'm going to reset this to be the one. So live commerce is going to be the way to be able to break through and create new consideration through relevance because I appreciated what she was doing in that scenario. That is profoundly important. Why I think that's so profound in the sense like even when I think about restaurants, how many times do you go through um TikTok and someone's eating at this new restaurant, you're like, I would love to go there and then tomorrow you go around and there's a queue out the door and 10 years ago you would never be able to drum up a queue unless you like and this is where I think, you know, bringing that together and that's what I love about live shopping right now and live entertainment is that you and I could figure out a way to get a coffee shop over there, bringing the best creators into that store, will create a live program and I guarantee you next week there'll be a queue of people standing outside.
You know, obviously you know this. I have so many relationships with the Fortune 500 CMO. If if you and I went to drinks after this, which I wish we could, but I got to go to a basketball game with my son, which is way cooler for me. And I brought one of my CMO friends who let's play this game out, who's in apparel.
Yeah.
And is like not interested. What would if and I said, let me tee up my friend Julian here. Like tell them why should they do apparel and live shopping? What are your go-tos?
Yeah. So, first of all, the consumer today is on TikTok. That's where they're not servicing that customer. They're sitting in the retail mall. People are walking by and they don't see it. The one thing I would say is when you work with affiliates and they're coming in and they're motivated to help sell those products in your store online, you're going to get a whole fresh new set of customers. The one thing that I would say is that it is expensive. People think that TikTok's cheap, but when you have to pay out commissions to your affiliates, but there's a reason why it is because the halo of impact to all the other channels.
I I I want to interrupt you. I because it's important. You're paying more because it's comes with sales.
Exactly.
It's not just branding.
It's CPS.
Yes. You're Yes. It's sales.
Comes with sales.
Yeah. I mean, you're getting what you want. You're guessing when you do a commercial that you hope that it makes the thing that you're paying for an affiliate.
Exactly.
Yes. Yeah. So I think the number one thing I would say is that you know once they if they don't join and most of them are very hesitant, it's sort of like almost like 10 years ago when no one wanted to go on Amazon because people were scared that it was brand degradation, but today it's so different.
So I think brands the sooner that that they adopt, but the other thing that the brands have to do is they have to look at their margin profile too now because you're paying out 20% 30% to these affiliates. But good news for any CPG, they're paying so much in slotting fees, retail media, it's actually cheaper.
It's Yeah. Yeah. Well, look at what's happened.
Hold on. Yeah.
I want you to sit on this. It is cheaper.
If you look at it on surface, you're like, "Oh, I have to pay out this." But what about all the retail media you're buying from Walmart and Amazon just to be in their store? Like, people don't get it.
And all the associates that you have to send in the the education and all the brother, the retail media. the slotting fees and the retail media just by themselves already advertises out and arbs you to be more profitable on the affiliate.
The end.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. The other day I was talking to a guy who's setting up a brand. He's got two people in his whole branding company that for his CPG product, just two. He's got and they're both doing content on AI and on Instagram and on TikTok. That's all everything else is outsourced. So now you know the ability for him to extend gross margin on these products is so much higher. Of course, but you know all these brands that have been created on TikTok today, whether it's we saw Goop and all these other brands, you know, these things came out of.
Did Goop's number get? I saw the headline. Any is there numbers floating around?
I didn't see the number, but I'm I'm assuming it's probably a billion number. It's got to be a real number. They were doing real revenue. Yeah. I mean, Goop is not an anomaly. It's the preview. And Mary was organic before that and on and on and on.
I have a question for you about brand. So when you think about brand that you know, you and I could spin up a brand today on pet food or something like that. What do you think of the value of brand in this new day and age?
I think it's the value that brand always was, but we didn't have the technology or the understanding to face the truth. Brand has been a Madison Avenue Don Draper academic how brands grow academic exercise that is built in complete fantasy that you in a boardroom as four people are going to come up with a sentence that represents the brand and that everybody on earth is going to be like, "Got it. Coach stands for experienced luxury or Coca-Cola stands for escapism at best or BMW stands for powerful luxury." When in reality, what was happening was millions of people had a different relationship with what "Just Do It" meant. What does "Just Do It" mean?
I actually had a huge debate with my own team six years ago on a flight that's very famous in our company where all the OGs that work for me were battling me and saying, "You don't respect brand." I'm like, "I'm the only one that does respect brand. Let me keep explaining." I said, "We're going to do an exercise right now." I said, "All of you take out your pen." And here, it was actually their phones. And I said, "You need to just write yes or no, and then we're going to all share."
Yeah.
I said, "Just do it."
Yeah.
Does "Just Do It" as a brand stand for a student at home who's really a good student? And the Nike "Just Do It" brand represents she goes hard at homework. Yes or no? I asked all my people. Half of them said yes, half said no.
I said, "Let's not talk about this."
Yeah.
Because it is human interpretation of brand in a boardroom that is this mystical brand. In real life, let me tell you how it actually works. I can mention any brand to the six of us in this room right now and we would all answer slightly different because what does brand, what does McDonald's mean to me? To me, that brand means that was luxury for me when I moved to America because we were immigrants and we had no money and getting a Big Mac was like getting a Mercedes-Benz because I couldn't believe my mom splurged. So my emotional relationship with Ronald McDonald is like very deep. That's what that brand means to me. And the chicken nuggets I used to like when they were really bad for you and that, you know, and the brand means something different to everyone. That's like asking people what God means.
Yeah.
What does God like this? So we have this ideology that we can force-feed into Americans, Europeans, Asians, like the consumer, the 8 billion people that us, three people in a [ __ ] boardroom can come up with something we're going to shove it down people's throats and that's what the brand needs to represent when in real life, it's interpreted 40,000 different ways.
So I like living in real life.
And the way that marketers uphold brand is much more Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy than they'd like to admit. And it's grounded in their own insecurity and audacity for protection of their job. And I'm thrilled that you're pushing down your brand. But have you opened up Instagram? Because I could type in Chanel right now, search it, and have 87,000 different pieces of content because humans make it. And so the same look and feel that everyone has been trying to achieve has been dead for a decade.
That's how I feel about that.
I love it. I love it.
I believe in brand over everything. I believe the phoxa is the interpretation of it in boardrooms. I believe in brand over everything. It's all I do. I'm a brand. I built brand.
That's the only thing that can't be disintermediated.
I've built I love when people argue with me on this and like, "You don't get it." I'm like, "I don't get it. I've built a massive brand."
I get it because I Gary Vee mean many things to many different people, right? I have all sorts of versions of me. I am willing to be relevant with as many different people on many different reasons. That creates a large brand. What brand means in Fortune 500 land is let me pick one lane and push it down on people.
Exactly.
So I know what brand is. I've done it. In fact, I'm a living version of it.
I mean, one of the ambitions always is to build your own personal brand. You know, I I recently started doing this podcast and one of the things that I've, you know, personal mission outside of Superordinary is I really believe in bringing the affiliates along and bringing the creator community. And, you know, we've been put into an opportunity where we can help other people make money. And, you know, nothing makes me more happy when someone comes into our office at Superordinary and comes into a live streaming room and says, you know, "I made $7,000 last month and I last month I was unemployed. Had nothing to make." And we work with all different shapes and sizes of creators and and I honestly believe that if we fast forward a couple of years, there could be 50, 60, 70 million affiliates in this country and how can we help them?
Let me tell you how I think about this. I believe that many people, you know, when I wrote Crush It in 2009 and said that people were going to make money on the internet and social, people really ridiculed me. Like if you go look at the Amazon reviews, people called me a snake oil salesman because I said somebody could make $50,000 a year on YouTube. This is only 2009. I believe a lot of people right now, almost every 17-year-old wants to become an influencer when they grow up. We all know that.
I believe a lot of people that want to be content creators and make money like Charli D'Amelio and Logan Paul actually will be very good social sellers, but could never have been a content creator.
Y.
The skill set of being good on camera and selling is different than making content as a it's a different skill set. And again, I don't know if you see this camera, please catch it. I agree with you. The amount of people listen, this is important to say. There there will be many people that actually make a million dollars a year just being on camera all day selling that will happen. That will be many people, but that is clearly not everyone. We all know that. You know what I get excited about? I get excited about the person that's going to actually make $9,000 in a year, occasionally being on live selling, selling and affiliating. But that $9,000 means that their family is going to go on a nicer vacation that year. I'm excited about the long tail. Right. We're going to have the people that are going to get famous and make 40 million a year for being like the lady with the bat, right? Like I plan on being one of those people. But but I'm so happy for the people that are that instead of a television station getting the money to try to sell dog food in a 30-second video that nobody's going to watch, that all those little pennies that they're not going to waste, there are going to go into all these people. And I'm very excited about it.
All right. I mean, nothing brings me more joy when you come to LA next. When you come to see our affiliate different categories and you know, it really does make a difference if they make 300 bucks, that's $300 that matters.
Bro, I I I it's why I love eBay making an extra hundred bucks a week selling stuff in your house matters. In a world with AI, with in a world of everything that's happening, people are going to have to stand on their own two feet more and the long tail of independence and the gig economy is going to matter. And not everyone has the same skills. Some people are really good with their hands and they can use TaskRabbit and fix people's homes and I'll be good because it's going to take some time for robots. Other people are really good at creative and they can get brand deals.
That's right.
But there's a lot of people.
Yeah.
That their number one skill is the gift of gab and selling stuff and instead of working at Nordstrom's and selling clothes for Nordstrom, they're going to be online selling all sorts of things, figuring out where the higher affiliates are.
Yeah.
And winning.
So, you know, when you speak to a creator or an affiliate who's thinking about for the first time and you've I mean, you do all these great conventions speaking to people, like what's your number one thing for you to tell them to do first?
Like, please allow me the grace that over the last 30 years, I've had enough successes that you hear me when I say this. This is a huge opportunity for you. Please try. Just that's number one. Please don't sit in the crowd or listen right now on the podcast or if I clip this and and link Superordinary. Please don't be a cynic and be like, "That doesn't work. That's not for me. That's for one per." Like, he's wrong. That will never happen. Before you say no, say maybe and put in the work for 10 to 15 hours to educate yourself and then get on and then try.
That's exactly right.
That's it. That's right. I actually have nothing else to say because I know if they do 10 hours of work.
Studying.
Yeah.
And they give it 10 hours of being live.
I just am asking for 20 hours to potentially change your life.
You need 10 hours of research because you'll need to know a little something because then your 10 hours when you go live, you'll actually be further along. I believe in those 20 hours, you'll taste what we're talking about enough to decide if this is right for you or not.
And the great thing is the feedback loop is immediate and you're going to learn learn it. And once you get comfortable, it's just gonna happen like that.
It's a very special time. And I'm really proud of you, brother, because you've really executed in in a way ahead of the market. And you know this, like we're now close to the next chapter where people aren't doubting us, they're commending us. And I'm I'm just very excited to be on board.
It's exciting. Thanks, Gary. I really appreciate your time today.
Got one thing for you today. So to all my guests. Oh, you did some homework on me.
I gave them a record.
Wow.
We love vinyls. Um, more about our age group more than anything else.
So Hendrickson, I mean, this is amazing. But this this is the album that changed my life.
It's the best.
Like this was the album that changed my life because back to storytelling. And by the way, when we're gonna be in this QVC selling era and then we're going to go into commerce entertainment. You want to talk about a true storyteller? I had never listened to an album where after it was over, I had felt like I was his best friend in his room, saw the posters that he was hanging in his room, knew his life. I had never felt after listening to an album like I literally was friends with the person.
And is. Thank you very much.
You're welcome, buddy. No, it's awesome. Thanks, buddy. Cheers. Appreciate it.