This is the Gary V. Audio Experience.

Welcome everyone. I'm really excited to have the one and only Gary V.

Heard with me today talking about something that I don't think he talks about as often as he does about marketing, which is coming to America's story, his family is coming to America's story and what that's meant for him and his career and the way he looks at her and as well.

So I'm really excited to welcome you Gary and to hear your story today.

Thanks for having me. I'm really, really honored and love always working with you and not and our different ventures and super excited for this one because to your point, you know, I at this point, I I contextualize it quite a bit.

I think a lot of people do know I wasn't born in America and all that stuff, but not in depth as often as I as I probably wish I would or should or could.

And so I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well, let's start at the beginning. What's your coming to America's story?

So I was born in Belarus and the Bruce Belarus on a very snowy day in 1975 and November 14, 1975.

And and my dad had a my parents were very young. By the way, this will make sense. So a lot of immigrants. I was literally born one day after nine months and one day after my parents got married.

It was very, you know, it was very old country like if you didn't have a baby in that year, right?

Yeah.

And so I, you know, my parents were very young. They were 22 and 20 when they had me.

And my family, my dad had a great uncle in America. My dad's grandmother's a brother and he visited three or four years earlier and kind of planted in my dad's

head because he saw my dad had a little entrepreneurial kind of like vibe of like he needs to be in America, which, you know, for, you know, Soviet Russia was impossible to even dream.

But there was a organization by the name of highest.

The Jewish organization that had ties to Israel and America that was created to help persecuted Jews around the world get out of tough situations and Russia unbeknownst to many people at that point, but later as we look in history was the Soviet Union was in a very big pickle and their economy was collapsing from underneath them and being Jewish in the Soviet Union is not the greatest thing.

And so, I think Jews are persecuted heavy in that part of Europe at that point and still to underlining and some of the green. So let's put it this way, the Soviet Union was in the mood at that point to trade some Jews for some resources.

And I got very, very, very fortunate.

You know, I hate, you know, I don't love to use the word luck because I know how hard my parents work how hard I worked, but many things in life are actually luck or just very fortunate timing and then what do you do with them?

I was not lost on me how fortunate I was to be in my age at that time where we were able to get out. So the highest path which I've met a lot of Russian Jews through the years was a very cliche everyone went to Austria Austria got their you know game involved there Italy Italy got its little take I'm sure on this system and then you kind of went to different places Australia Israel was originally the destination for many America.

And so we had this great uncle we were going to come to America. It was the whole family, by the way, it was just me, it was me and my parents, then it was also.

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