#AskGaryVee Episode 155: Slack, Serendipity, & YouTube Red

On this episode, I sneak up on Joanna. Oh my god. Cuz she was trying to duck it. Hi. Don't ever try to duck it. I won't do that ever again. Good. That's what I do on this episode. You ask questions and I answer them. This is the Ask Gary B Show. I've literally lost the intro to this show in my brain. Hello everybody. This is Gary. Thank you guys. It's unbelievable. 155. 155. Ready. Yep. Hey everybody, this is Gary V. Nerdchuck and this is episode 155 of the Ask Garyve Show. Hey everyone. Sorry. Do your thing. Sorry guys. Uh oh, look at the Matts jersey in the background. I like that. Uh Buck 55 double nickels. Super happy to be on 15 which I think is a really you know some nice number plays ones and fives India ones and fives on this Friday. I will give my Jets official prediction at the end. I know a lot of you have been waiting now that I'm five for five. People have really been building up. Stefan's going to bet is what I hear. That's what I heard. India, let's get into the show. Manaki asks, "What do you think of Slack

as a productivity environment for startups? " I have not used Slack yet, though Veayner has used it at scale. How you guys liking Slack so far? Anybody using it? Good. Solid. Good. Yeah, people love it. Like, it's an incredible, incredible product. I'm a huge fan of Stuart Butterfield um who's behind the product uh built Flickr and uh was a very much a web 2. 0 hero of mine because Flickr was one of the first sites that got me aware of this revolution that got me into the world. So I have a lot of emotional heart for Slack. I haven't used it yet because I've been running around so much. So I don't think I can necessarily answer this question India. Uh my lack of practitionership. Uh, what I do though is by that quick little reaction. I don't know if you caught it on camera, but did you Drock a little bit or kind of So people are obsessed with this goddamn product. I don't know how much you guys I know some team and we love it. Yeah. I mean, so what do you think, India? Less emails because it kind of just like ping in Slack and it's easier to just ask for something really offhand to the whole team instead of having to like send an email and compose it and all that. Yeah. It's kind of like the uh love child of like email and like group me, right? And so I think there's some real value behind it. I haven't jammed yet, so I don't want to necessarily go deep into this. And one of the things I adore about this show is I talk about [ __ ] I know. Um, and so I've got my feelings as you can tell. I can give analogies like the group me email thing and I know what's going on. I see the feedback loop. I have a lot of context from a lot of other people, but I'm not a dead user of it. But my two cents on it is um uh I'm Yeah, I'm bullish on it. I think there's something there. You're reading the next question. No, I was I was trying to see the but I say it was the next question so I phased it out. From Lyanna. I can sit down here. Lyanna. Yeah, Lyanna. Cool.

Cool. Lyanna asks, "You talk a lot about serendipity. Was there one event that made you a believer or a series of occurrences? " Lyanna, there's no one event, Lyanna. Serendipity is life. It's how things work. There was no singular event. I'm like, "Oh, this was so serendipitous. " I'm such a big believer in serendipity now. Serendipity is just a structural aspect of the way our world works. I mean, chance is an absolute uh part of it. Uh it's the way it is. And so, no, there was no event. Uh it was clearly a series of events that all probably started happening when I was five or six years old when I started paying attention to things. And so, it's uh it's more of a collective uh belief. It's like I almost think of it as like my belief in oxygen. Like it's just there, right? It's just real. It's just serendipity is real. India [ __ ] is real. What about your answer yesterday about timing and talent? Do you think timing is something to do with serendipity? You know, I I definitely believe in serendipity and luck, right? Like I believe in those things. Like those are real things too, but I don't think everything is one thing or the other. Um I definitely think you can prep for opportunity. I mean, these are all semantics, you know? I mean, now we're nitpicking like clearly doing the right thing and getting yourself in the right places and educating yourself and testing things and setting yourself up for victory. Clearly, those are real things, but clearly other things factor into it, right? So, I it's just a combination of like science and art I always think about or just, you know, that the black and white and the gray. I mean, this is literally the thesis of everything. And I and it's funny. It's like, you know, taste great, less feeling. People feel like they have to like pick a spot. I mean, they're both right. And so for me, the question becomes actually is if you're lucky enough to self-awareness, can you bet on one or the other? Like that's what the reason I love gray so much or talk about all the things I believe in is because it's what comes natural to me. It's where my upside lies. I believe in like taking notes and studying and all that [ __ ] It's just not for me. I wouldn't have the maximum upside for it. There you go. Thank you, India. Um, from Destin. Dustin. Destin. Destin. Like Destiny without the Y. Yeah, I like that. Destin. Destin Vaynerchuk. I would have dominated as a Destin. You're going to adopt a fan. I don't want to adopt. I was making pretend if my name was Destin. What's the India?

India? Destin asks, "What's the best way to start a business in a space that you're unfamiliar with but see massive opportunity in? " Become educated. You know, I hear that. You know what? This is a great question. I'm glad you asked that. It was a question that was asked a lot of me in 2006, seven, eight, nine that I haven't heard in a while. Maybe because India's doing the picking. And so, uh, you know, I, uh, I think that if you see a huge opportunity, if you think esports is going to be a huge space like I believe, well, then maybe you go intern for an esports company, maybe you get a job at an e esports company, maybe you read absolutely everything about it. That was one of my few chapters in life. This whole web 2. 0 know thing back to Flickr like I read everything on Techrunch. I read you know people tweets I there was one time when I actually consumed because I needed to get educated and then once I found I had the base then I rolled back to where I normally go but you put in the work you know if you see a space you become massively educated you network in it tremendously. I believed in online video in 2006 I went to three meetups in the video 2. 0 or the video what was it called? Yeah web 2. 0 video meetup group. Trock you would have been so proud. And I went to these damn thing and people talked about [ __ ] cameras and lighting that it's the content mother, you know, but like it was, you know, it was really you like that. It was uh an interesting time for me where I was soaking up information. If you see an opportunity, go soak up the information. Go become a practitioner. Go work in a company in it. Go to all the events around it. Read about it. Go to conferences and listen about it. Listen to the podcasts. like learn about it. I like that you're getting feisty here. Learn about it and then you can do but you know if you believe in something you have to become educated in it and then become a practitioner execute in it and then adjust to the realities of it. Ready, Destin? From Jake. And then you've got No, just kidding.

Jake asks, "Why did you go to college? Jake, that's such a good question because my parents peer pressured me into that [ __ ] They're like there was just no option. It was back in '92 34, you know, like they expected it. It would have been embarrassing had I not gone. That was just the truth. Like I had, by the way, I had the reason I ended up in Mount Ida College is because I had no plans of going to college. Like there was no I didn't go to see my guidance counselor. I don't even know my guidance counselor's name. I don't I think I saw her once in four years, right? So like I went because uh my parents wanted me to go. Like it's really my mom just didn't I don't think she would have known how to answer the question of like why didn't he? There was so much social peer pressure at that point that if you did not go you were such a fundamental loser and it's so different now. It's probably why I have so much passion for it because if you don't think that I would be further along and happier not just and look I made some great friends and had some great times but like four years damn it 94 five and six like during that web 1. 0 bubble

a video from Richard. Richard I see Richard a lot. Hey Gary, it's Richard Loland here and I'm developing a short film about you as a child and your entrepreneurial chops. Okay. Mhm. And my question for you is at what age did you decide that you want to buy the New York Jets? Richard, great question. I think the age when I really decided I wanted to buy the Jets was somewhere around I don't know exactly, Richard, to be honest with you. So I think it's somewhere around fourth, fifth, sixth grade when I realized that I was more likely to buy them than to play for them. And I started seeing other kids growing a little bit faster than I was growing, being a little bit faster. Wa Shaw, fifth grade. Wa Shaw, I think, gave me one of my first uh my first previews into being owner, not player, because he was a beast and he ran over me in backyard football. Um, so, uh, making a lot of old school references. By the way, I made that O dead Weintock reference with Peter yesterday. A friend of mine from middle school hit me up and he's like, "Oh my god, O dead Weintock. " So, like that was kind of fun. Uh, Wel, anybody won Martin Luther King 1982 to 85 Edison, New Jersey, Martin Luther King Elementary School knows the name Welsh Shaw. If you know Wiel Shaw, h find him and say what's actually. It's so easy. Just search on Facebook. So ridiculous. He moved, I think, to Baltimore area. Anyway, um yeah, Richard, that's the answer. And I think uh to make this more of an interesting answer for everybody who's watching, which I'm going to start doing more of. Uh that's one thing I'm going to start doing India is when these answers are fun, the fun question or what have you, I'm going to try to go a little bit broad. If you were lucky enough right now to have a younger sibling, a niece or nephew, a cousin, uh or if you're the parent of a child of that is as early as 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, really starts talking about what they want to do for a living, please, please think about how to put them in the best position to succeed. The kids, the children are our future, India. I mean, these are they're our future. And so, um, I think, you know, and that's sure, I want to be a baseball player, and you may not think they're athletic enough, and I get that. And then so the question becomes do you send them to baseball camp or do you actually look at them and say look you know me and mom are 5'4 you're not going to become a baseball player one day but can you start showing them other parts of baseball right can they become a future amazing GM or manager things of that nature I think we need to do better jobs at uh really reverse engineering the child that overindexes in disproportionate passion not the flavor of the month but has shown two three four years of consistent conversation around a hobby or a subject matter. There's so much we could be doing with them in those years where they have a lot of time impressionable, moldable, um that can be very powerful. So, please take it on yourself to be responsible to sniff out the young knees of the world who really never wavered, were all in, didn't pivot, didn't change their passions, and uh and and try to put them in that position. Thank you. That's it. A lot of people were asking about YouTube Red, but we kind of addressed YouTube Red. Yeah, we kind of talked about it yesterday. Yeah. I mean, look, the YouTube Red thing is super interesting. YouTube needs to make money. Here's what I think about YouTube Red. I think that tons of humans and thousands and hundreds of thousands of businesses have made a shitload of money on the YouTube ecosystem and YouTube hasn't. I think it's broken for YouTube. So, I think they need to fix it and that's why we're seeing it. and you can cry about it and you can have your panties in a bunch and you can do whatever you want but the bottom line is they've got to do that because if YouTube doesn't make money then it shuts down India and then where are you going to go with you know where India not over here you're not yeah you're not going to you can't go through the wall and you can't go on YouTube if they go out of business so you can w but that's the bottom line that's what I think it's not noble and it's not the zen thing. But like if they go out of business, where are you going? Nowhere. Well, you're going to go somewhere else. Someone else that's going to make money cuz they're going to be like, "Well, it I'm not going to do it YouTube's way. " We lost money that way. Where's everything? Okay, prediction time. So, I will say this, and you've watched five episodes, so all of you I don't want to hear like uh I don't hedge. I don't hedge, but I'm hedging. Meaning, this is clearly the game I'm least I'm most confused about. The reason I think I drilled the last five was I was completely confident. I know the matchups. I know what's going on and I felt confident. That's why I went five for five. This one I'm not as confident about. I don't know exactly what's going to happen. I heard amazing news that Buster Screen's going to play. That's huge because he's our best slot receiver coverage man and I'm pumped because I love Bust the Bust. Um, so with Buster in mind, I'm changing the prediction a little bit, but I'm going to still unfortunately go 20716 Patriots. If you keep asking questions, I'll keep answering them.