“What advice would you give
to a high school student “struggling to decide what to
pursue as a future career?” – I’ve got an answer. Get busy. Do something, do anything. And one of my favorite pieces of advice as to exactly what you should do, is do something you hate. Like, I didn’t find my
passion for entrepreneuralship and filmmaking and everything
that I’ve done in my career. I didn’t find that by doing it. I found that by scrubbing pots in a really terrible seafood restaurant. Because when you spend 50
hours a week scrubbing pots, it’s 50 hours a week you’re obsessing about what you wish you were doing. Sitting around playing video games in your parents’ sweet house is the worst way to find
your mission in life. Do something, staying busy
is a really, really easy path to find something you truly
wanna invest yourself in. – I would also then say to recognize that playing video games in
your parents’ sweet house is probably your outlet
to success in your career. I would say that your
ultimate strengths and wants are the quickest gateway drug to upside once you recognize that there’s
something to be done there. Too many of you, in the world don’t believe that the thing
they like doing the most has financial upside. We’ve drawn a line in the sand, that the thing we like is what we do when we have time to do it like. And the other places to
either make money or get by. So many people are in the other bucket are driven by, I’m gonna go into finance ’cause that’s where the money is. Or I just need enough money and then I’m gonna have
good work-life balance, I’ll be on the softball
team, I’ll play video games. I really believe– I really believe that somebody
who’s watching this right now who obsesses on being on six
soft ball teams right now, literally can make 127,000
dollars a year in ad revenue and live events and a
couple other sponsorships and selling a couple t-shirts by literally becoming
the authority on softball in America. – My son who is a junior in high school is spending a good piece of his summer, including right now, today at a university in
Connecticut studying computer, computer science, specifically
focused on video game design. – Yeah. – Just to back up video playing. – Video game culture in 19– When we were kids. To think it was a mass industry. I mean E-Sport’s gonna
be bigger than baseball in this country in 20 years. E-Sport’s is gonna be a bigger business than major league baseball
in 20, 30 years from now. I’ll go 30, I’m gonna hedge a little bit. In 30 years from now. I mean, that is incredible to me. India. – [Voiceover] Atiyya asks, “If you could swap out
one quality of your won

“and ask for work experience?” – Wait–
– Ask for an internship? – You ask for work?
Don’t you just ask for work? – [India] I guess because a lot people come to companies and it says like you need this many years of experience. – Oh, I see.
– [Gary] I see. – [India] But how do
you get that experience if nobody wants to hire
you because everybody– – When you’re 18. – [India] Yeah. – I got an answer to this, I mean I think that we now live in a world– Casey, how many people, how many people hit you
up on Twitter, email, other platforms, comments and YouTube, you must have a gadrillion. How many times have you in your career– When would you say that
you started really building into a place where people
were really pinging you? Is this now a two, three,
four year phenomenon for you? – For work? – Yes. Not for work, more like
people that are fans of you, clearly at this point. – It’s been a long time. – How long, do you think? – I mean, I think since the
first video I made went viral over 10 years ago. – Got it. So, it’s been pretty
consistent since then? – Yeah.
– Good, how many times have you
randomly done stuff? Yes, met someone, got on a phone. How many times? – Now, if I could count that, Gary. More than I could ever keep track of. – That’s your answer. Who was the question?
– [India] Lucy. – Lucy that’s your answer. I also– The majority of this entire team is based on random shit. Like so, I think you just ask
as many times as possible. There are unlimited companies
in a world you can get to almost anybody because of Twitter, again, a true social network. More so than comments on content which a lot of other platforms are. Email, at this point, I
think has been played out. It’s harder to get to
people through email. But that will still work too. I think it’s stunning that you can get to most people in the world today. I don’t think people, as many people are as wired as you and I. I think people have drawn the line to no but there’s plenty. We’re not the only two nice guys believing in serendipity. There are tens of thousands
wildly accomplished CEOs, co-founders, that
will absolutely hire you on spec from one
request to get experience whether they give you an internship or pay you minimum wage
or even give you a salary. It is a wide open field. It’s about asking. – Yeah, I mean, I would
even complement what, everything Gary just said,
I’d complement that, Lucy by saying, you also have an
opportunity via these myriad social outlets and the
internet as a whole. Not just to reach out and contact people but to actually prove yourself. Like, if you need to show this experience that these people are seeking after, just do it. You don’t need someone’s
permission to do that. If you wanna work in
construction, build something. If you wanna work in
an automotive factory, work on cars. If you wanna be a filmmaker, make videos. You now have these multitude
of options in front of you to show that you’re capable. If you wanna be a writer, write something. – You know what happens
in that environment? If you actually have it, not everybody has it. But if you actually have it, you start getting into
a place very quickly that you realize, oh wait, I don’t need to have a job
in the first place. (laughs) – That’s right, no longer do you need the
runway to prove your worth on. You don’t need someone else’s approval, you just do it yourself. Scary and very hard to do, it’s not to be underestimated
just how challenging that is but it doesn’t mean that
the opportunity isn’t there and that opportunity wasn’t
there 10, 15 years ago. But it’s uniquely there now. – We’re byproducts of that game. – My entire career is
product of that game. – I had a liquor store
in New Jersey and got 300 dollar camera at Best Buy and decided to make wine videos because I wanted to be like Emeril. – Wine videos.
– Wine videos. India, let’s move it.

“today and didn’t have your family business “how would you handle the job market?” – Natalie thank you so much. Big shout out to
everybody who’s out in LA. That was a really phenomenal
night for me as well. A lot of peeps came out, I appreciate it. Well, first of all, I wouldn’t
attack the job market, because even at the age of nine or ten, long before I even realized
my parents had a liquor store as my dad managed that store and was buying into a business I was already slinging, as
you heard in episode 118, you know blue curtains and alarm clocks. And clearly you’ve heard
the stories of lemonade and baseball cards. There is no attacking the
job market from my DNA because I would try to start a business especially right now. I would completely take
advantage of the fact that there is an enormous
amount of dumb money trying to become
investors in start-ups. Meaning, unlike the
generation where I became an angel investor in
2009, 2008, 2010, 2011. Right now every dentist,
every real estate agent, every trust fund baby in
their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties anybody who had a good
career on Wall Street is now an investor looking
for their Mark Zuckerberg. I would take advantage of that. I would network. I assume if I was in college
I would ask professors. I would ask friends and family. I would just ask. I think when you’re at the bottom, asking is quite important. And so I would ask for at bats, try to network. I would use the incredible
tool that is known as Twitter and I would be replying
to people that I aspire to get in touch with. I don’t, you know it’s funny
to me to see the people that give up after asking to meet with me for a few minutes, after three or four nos. And I know that I’m inducing
now a ton of Twitter chatter to meet with me. And I hope you saw the
video I made for myself, the advice I’ve given myself. DRock, give them a two second clip. I need to get my shit together so I apologize I’m letting you down. But the truth is I need
to heed to this advice I’m giving myself. You know, so I won’t see you but I would have saw you six months ago and Cuban, or Jack Welsh,
or Zucks, or Elon Musk, you just never know when they’ll
actually sit down with you. And then there’s a
million people that maybe you don’t know who’ve been successful, who’ve got leverage, who’ve got money. And so I would attack the
reality of the marketplace. And the reality of the
marketplace right this second is tons of cash, looking
for young people with ideas. I think it’s a broken bubble. I think that gets exposed. I think 99% of people
are not going to deliver on that investment. I think I’d be one of the 1% that would deliver on that investment. So I’d be looking for while in college and like I did in college instead of looking to
hook-up and do keg stands I’d be looking for business partners and business opportunities. I think for anybody else
that is not wired like me which I think is a far majority
of this show’s audience I would tell you this piece of advice. If you were 22 years old, if you were the amount of people that settle for the first paying job versus living with 19 friends on the floor and eating 99 cent meals blows my mind in lieu of trying to get your dream job versus what you’ve settled for. Please from 22 to 24 don’t settle. Go for your dream job. Pound for it. And if you can’t get
into VaynerMedia (ping) then go for the second
best, or third best, or fourth best on your list. Please start with the
moon and go backwards. The amount of you that start at a hilltop and just settle there
is an enormous mistake because 22 to 24 is when you should live really, really humble, ghetto, dirt. Like that’s it,
that’s the time. To settle in in the
middle only lends itself to so much upside. So aspire for as high as you possibly can and be patient. it sucks not having a job in September when all your friends do. Or your friends that were
juniors the year before are going back to school
and the pressure is on and maybe your parents don’t
like that you don’t have a job but that’s exactly when you
should be buying random stuff at Goodwill and selling it
on eBay to pay your $80.00 worth of rent because you
have 94 roommates in a studio. That’s it, get dirty. Cause, and I know a paused there, cause getting dirty is the price to having what you want. The dramatic misunderstanding that amazing things come with a price. A lot of people talk about rich kids. I really negatively look at rich kids because I look negatively at my kids because they’re about to be rich kids. That’s just real. Sorry Xander and Misha, eat it. But you know what comes with the price of being a rich kid? People completely do,
you’ve basically lost in the game of winners. You’ve basically from day
one you were born into money. You actually aren’t
good, you were handed it. You suck.
That’s it, you’ve lost. That’s the price that comes along with it. And take it from somebody
who cried everyday because his dad had a
small family business and I was petrified because
I knew I had the talent that everybody would say
things were handed to me. Cried everyday with my mom on the phone I’m not coming into the family business even though I could help it, even though I want to, I don’t. Because then everybody is going to say, that it was handed to me. In the scheme of things I was an idiot I didn’t realize how
small it was to the world. But everything’s got a price. Everything’s got a price. You’re beautiful?! LIfe is much better when you’re beautiful. That’s what we all say.
I agree with that. But, more realistically, you
get completely disrespected. You get disrespected. You can’t be smart, you can’t be good, you’re just too beautiful. I’m serious. I’m really tired of people
thinking everybody’s got it better. Everybody has advantages. You know what the
advantages of being ghetto and on welfare and being
nothing and having nothing being a child of a homeless parent. You know what the advantage is? You’re (bleep) angry. You’ve got a ridiculous
chip on your shoulder. You want to stick it to everybody. All of ’em. Use what you’ve got.
Use what you’ve got.

– [Voiceover] Neil asks, “Looking
for a marketing job right out of college is tough,
especially finding one that’s not sketchy. How do you find a
job that’s the right fit?” – The answer– Who asked the question, again? – [India] Neil. – Neil, it sounds like, by
the way you’re asking the question, I’m glad we’re
getting to attack this, that you’re looking at what is deemed as “Internet Marketing”, right?
When you say that all marketing jobs are scummy out of school,
I think what you’re falling into, is kind of those
e-book, kind of landing page, the bad version of all these
great growth hackers out there, the bad version of that, right?
Lowest common denominator, playing arbitrage, internet
marketing, buy my e-book in the back room, and the discs, MLM. It sounds like you’re going down a funnel, and what you deem as marketing
is scummy, and I understand a lot of that gets into dark
marketing but 98% of the marketing jobs in the world are
like working at VaynerMedia, this is marketing. So
first of all, I recommend recalibrating how you’re
positioning marketing, and make sure that you’re not
going down the rabbit hole of “Internet Marketing”, and
I keep quoting it like this– First, I love air quotes and
we all know that but second, there is that term for just
copywriting, make landing pages of red and yellow, and buy
this, and whether you’re selling supplements, or an e-book, or information, play that game out, that’s
not the world of marketing that I believe in or think about. So I would tell you that there
are eight billion agencies marketing, digital,
social agencies out there, and I would immediately
go get an internship, if you can’t get a job, and
prove that you’ve got the chops. It’s unbelievable how high of
a percentage of the interns that we get here at VaynerMedia we offer a job to. One, we’re growing fast, so that makes sense, but they’ve
come in and they’ve hustled and so the lack of
internship, out of college, if the market is bad, blows me away. It seems like the market
is getting better, jobs are being created more at this scale, than say, 24-36 months ago.
But the famous DRock story, or any other story like,
the ability for you to go and work for somebody pro
bono to get a résumé– Look, to me, if you’re
struggling to get a job for two, three, four, five
months out of school, why in the world you wouldn’t
take a half of your day, each day, to then work
somewhere for free, or intern, whatever it is, to a) pick
up skills, b) network, c) learn your craft in
action and watch it, d) create the leverage and
almost guilt your employer into hiring you, or making
them tell somebody else to hire you. You know,
better than sitting around and moping about why it’s not working out. Unless you’re out there,
literally, in job interviews or sending résumés, you’ve
got 18 hours in a day to execute this. To me, you
could be doing that from seven p.m. to two in the morning, and then from nine to seven, you could go do it. Go work at a pro bono place, or a museum, put your skills into action
if you’re a marketer. – [Voiceover] Dana asks,
“How would you advise