Hey guys, it's Gary Vay, Nerd Chuck, and this is the GaryVee audio experience.

Wait, we're real quick. I'm not getting paid for this.

Tyler, let's get the fuck out of here.

Good morning. I am Emma Grant. I was born in Belarus in the former Soviet Union.

I came here when I was three. I lived in Queens and Rego Park for two years in a studio apartment with five, six, seven, eight family members.

So I can relate to that grime and that hustle. I literally didn't even know my dad for the first 14 years of my life,

because he would leave before I would wake up and get home after I fell asleep, first as a stockboy in a liquor store, making two bucks an hour, and then eventually a manager.

And then immigrants, and I'm sure some of you know this, immigrants have really figured out the secret of American business, which is don't spend any money on dumb shit for 10 years, save it all, and then buy something.

And so that's what my dad did. He bought a small liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey.

I grew up in Edison, New Jersey. Lemonade stands, shoveling snow, baseball cards.

It's so crazy for me that I get to live through the era where an entrepreneur is cool.

You know, like this is like the fact that I take 10 selfies a day blows my fucking mind. You know the fact that like hip-hop artists that I love DM me, you know, like it's just so crazy.

And it's happened, right? It's happened for sports. I think a lot of people forget. In the 1950s, baseball players and football players had jobs during the summer at like hardware stores, right?

Like everything gets it's day, and I think there's nothing more Americana than the entrepreneur than the business person. And so I'm just fortunate, you know, when I was your age, I was a loser by a lot of people's POV because I was a terrible student.

And the narrative 25 years ago was that entrepreneurship was not a feasible way out. That the only way out was Yale and Harvard and Cornell, like school was the only benchmark that created opportunity. And so for me, I'm excited about this entrepreneurial thing, but at the same token to be very frank.

One of the things that I want to try to dissect in our Q&A now is I also think it's gone a little bit too far in the other direction. I think everybody thinks they're going to be a winning entrepreneur. You know, it's funny. Everybody says they're an entrepreneur. That's like me saying I'm a basketball player. That's cool. Like it's fun that I get to run at the YMCA a couple of times, but I don't get paid, right? I'm not an MBA all-star. And I think what's happening right now is people are putting the word entrepreneur in their Instagram profile. And they think it's a rap, right?

They think they're going to make it and this and that. And it's extremely hard. It's extremely lonely. It's an incredible, listen, if you want this, you need to understand that there's a lot of stuff that people are not talking about. Nobody in my tech startup world is talking about the suicides that are happening when kids fail, you know, maple, the food service that was supposed to be so big, folded yesterday. Like this is happening every day, right? And everybody thinks, you know, it's so easy.

And the reason they think it's so easy is I grew up when I was your age. Like you couldn't roll up on people and say here's my idea and they give you a million dollars and a four million dollar valuation, right? Like that was insane. That's not how it was. And I think the other thing that I'm fearful of, especially when I look around, and there's a couple of us, you know, but for the majority of you, you know, we've had a good economy now for the last seven or eight years, right? And for a lot of you, seven or eight years ago, you're a real youngster. And so you haven't got to be a real youngster.

And so you haven't lived through when the world melts, you know, I lived through the collapse of dot com 2000 and then right behind it 9 11 and then 2007 and eight and I've navigated my businesses through that. That's hard. Everybody's a peacetime general, but who's a wartime general? Everybody's really great when people like, you know, everybody's a hero when you can like print a logo on a t-shirt and say I've got a fashion brand, right?

But what about actually building something sustainable that you can eat on things that nature? And so for me, I'm not trying to discourage. I'm just trying to paint a very real picture. This is a long game. Like from 22 to 30, I did nothing. I worked 15 hours a day, Monday through Saturday. You know, it's funny. I was talking at a talk the other day. I was like, like, it was a Friday go tomorrow. More of you are going to have a set more Saturdays off in your 20s than I did in my entire 20s.

Tomorrow, you know, I because Saturday is the biggest day of retail and like that's when we sold the most wine. So I just was there every single Saturday of every 20 to 30 to 30 years old 10 years, every fucking Saturday.

And so when people, you know, all the cliché shit that we all talk, I'm grinding, I'm hustling, you know, like I'm doing this. I laugh because I look at people's instant. They're fucking, you know, at Coachella.

...