This is the Gary V. Audio Experience.

Can you talk about your family where you grew up and how you grew up?

I grew up really lucky in the fact that I had disproportionate adversity in the first decade of my life.

You know, I was born in Belarus. We came to the US when I was three.

I lived in a studio apartment with eight family members.

You know, it was super immigrant, right? We didn't speak English.

I didn't even know my dad until I was 14 years old and started working in his liquor store because he woke up to go to work before I woke up.

He got home after I fell asleep. I went on one family vacation in my entire life.

Or two, excuse me, two in my entire high school life, both the Disney World and Orlando stayed in the holiday in.

We kept it humble. We didn't buy dumb shit.

You know, I basically wore liquor t-shirts my whole life through high school because they were free from liquor store.

Like the level of humility and a lot of my ability to not worry about others was predicated on circumstance.

Like, you know, I really think that I'm the beneficiary of very good parenting and very lucky circumstances.

And those lucky circumstances in my mind was I was never handed anything ever, ever.

And I genuinely, when I hear stories and culture of people thinking people that are trust fund babies are lucky, I just don't see the world that way.

I actually think they're disproportionately unlucky. It would be my great devastation to end up being my children or my grandchildren.

I mean it. That's just the way I'm wired. If this means they're wrong or I'm right, it just means that for me, the way I turned out, the chemicals in my body,

the thought of being handed something or starting with that kind of thing where my achievements would always be undermined because everybody would say that it was handed to me would be devastating.

That's the challenge of your next part of your life is raising affluent kids and keeping them on the ground.

Oh, it's going to be a piece of cake. I'm not giving them any fucking money.

I grew up judging Bill Gates and Warren Buffett when I was younger of giving away their money because I grew up in an immigrant family where you help each other and I judged them heavily and I was super wrong because I had no context.

I was like, that's crazy to a charity. Like what? And now I understand. I want my kids to be happy.

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