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

So growing up and growing up in a liquor business, I've always learned that it's super hard to compete with alcohol

So everybody back there do your thing. You're not hurting feelings. So thank you so much for having me.

I think you're to be very honest, especially as I've been walking around the room and seeing so many familiar faces.

I don't think this would necessarily need me to sit up here and pontificate.

Now it's a little dark and I was hoping to convert this a little bit into Q&A, so maybe at some point we'll turn on the lights or I'll just roll with it.

But I guess the thing that I want to be able to talk about is the thing that I've realized that I've been spending the last 20 years in my life on, which is attention.

I think if I synthesize what I've been up to, what gives me the honor of sitting up here in front of all of you is that at a very young age, and I'm going back to Lemonade Stands, when I was 7 years old, I had a 3 Lemonade Stand franchise.

And my friends worked at Lemonade Stand, and I was literally, this is real, and now thinking back to it, it's so, so crazy.

I would literally think it was fun at 7 years old to walk up and down the streets of Edison and Jersey, sit on the grass and the corners of streets, and try to figure out which poles, which trees were the most interesting to put signs on,

based on watching human beings drive and try to follow their eyes and figure out the spots.

And as sit can fucked up, as that sounds to me, it's interesting that that was literally the blueprint for the rest of my life.

When I did baseball card shows, and I was making $3,000 a weekend when I was 12, I now remember, oh, it's weird, I would actually spend the first four hours of baseball card show walking the entire show, watching the market, coming back, and then setting up my table,

based on how mine was different than everybody else. And that ultimately manifested, we're arguing, that ultimately manifested somewhere way out there in Short Hill Springfield, New Jersey, when my dad had a liquor store, and I dragged him when I was 14, and I basically spent all my days, 16 hours a day, Saturday and Sunday, and every weekend of my teenage and high school years, watching how people walk through that liquor store.

Ultimately, the internet came around, and in 1996, I launched one of the first e-commerce wine businesses in America called WineLibrary.com, and I went on to build that business from a $3 to a $60 million business on the same thesis, which is, where is overpriced attention, and where is underpriced attention?

When I look around this room, startups, consultants, VCs, business leaders, I'm curious, because this is a smart room, I'm curious if even all of us are actually stunningly and grossly underestimating what's about to happen.

So, for example, shooting the shit here a little bit, retail, like, retail is about to get way worse. It's been interesting the meetings I'm in, like, if people think what's going to happen in retail, one little prediction, this is a flat out guess, but this has been running through my mind the last hundred days, which is, there's a lot of retailers that are going out of business, and all of us look at them and go, yeah, that makes sense, yeah, that makes sense.

If we, God forbid, have a retailer that seemingly is healthy, go out of business in the next six months, it really just collapses that whole infrastructure, and every day everybody knows here what's happening with their behavior, right?

And so, we see this happen in different sectors, but then I was like, okay, retail is in a really scary place, because if you care about big data and analytics, we're starting to get to that threshold where there's enough direct consumer business happening online,

that basically the infrastructure releases and really gets scary, and we'll clearly play out. It's not going backwards. You know, every trend that we're living through, it's not coming back.

You know, I'm in a ton of fucking meetings with trillion dollar companies whose new game plan is tried and true, which is always a tale to, it's fucking over, right?

Because they're hoping, and so retail, cool, next, a place where I'm far more confident of what I'm talking about, which is media.

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