Tips to Grow Your Business in the Age of AI and TikTok | Interview with Forbes Maggie McGrath

The GaryVee Audio Experience

Gary Vaynerchuk

Business, Marketing, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 18.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What’s up, everyone! In this episode, I sit down with Forbes for one of the most complete convos I’ve had in a long time—seriously, we go all the way back to my childhood in Edison, New Jersey, and trace the path from shoveling snow to building VeeFriends. If you’re navigating your own entrepreneurial journey or trying to understand what’s actually happening in marketing right now, this one's for you.

We talk about how my obsession with consumer attention has shaped every move I've made—from launching Wine Library TV to writing Day Trading Attention, to building IP with trading cards and animated characters. I open up about why the education system didn’t work for me, how I’m thinking about AI and fake influencers, and why humility and empathy still dominate everything I do.

💥 Whether you’re a corporate exec clinging to outdated media buys or a hungry entrepreneur trying to break through—this is the wake-up call.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can we start at the beginning?
0:01.2	What sparked your entrepreneurial drive?
0:04.0	Probably DNA.
0:05.0	You know, the truth is it was so early.
0:08.3	It's almost hard for me to recall a time in my life where it wasn't a foundational currency,
0:16.3	a backdrop.
0:18.2	I think about Wonder Years, the TV show,, like, talks about, like, music and
0:22.5	the 60s being a backdrop of Kevin Arnold's life. Entrepreneurship was the backdrop. You know,
0:29.2	basically, as soon as I moved to Edison, New Jersey in August of 1982, I was born in the Soviet
0:34.7	Union. I came to the U.S. when I was three, four.
0:38.3	We lived in Queens for a couple years, and then Dover, New Jersey for a year.
0:42.3	But then we moved to Edison, which is where I grew up.
0:45.3	And that was August of 82, right before school started first grade.
0:50.3	Pretty much at that point, meeting friends in the neighborhood, you know, shoveling snow,
0:59.3	you know, when it snowed and we had a snow day, washing cars, lemonade stands, seven, eight,
1:07.9	nine, ten years old. Literally, just as I was rolling into this interview, I was doing a
1:14.7	podcast with Dr. Beckett who invented the Beckett baseball card guide. This was the price guide,
1:21.8	the monthly price guide that dominated the 80s and 90s around trading cards. That was my Bible at 11 years old.
1:29.3	So I went from lemonade stands and shoveling snow and, you know, those kind of things to baseball cards.
1:38.3	And then I went from baseball cards to working my father's liquor store and becoming weirdly obsessed with building a huge
1:45.9	business for my dad and mom, which I feel very proud of. And so it's always been there.
1:51.5	I was a poor student from probably many different reasons, but at the top of the list was
	...

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