Name: Gary Vee! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley
Uploaded: 2025-09-14T21:00:34.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gary Vee! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley' from AreYouGarbage? Comedy Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gary Vee! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley' from AreYouGarbage? Comedy Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-14. Transcript available.

Gary Vee! | Are You Garbage Comedy Podcast w/ Kevin Ryan & H. Foley

Calling Seattle, Portland, San Fran, Brea, California.
The boys are coming west, baby.
We're taking the Oregon Trail out to the left coast,
and we're coming to see you.
Grab the squad and come on out.
Yeah, if you're a dirtbag, we need you there, baby.
All tickets available at RUGarbage.com.
See you there.
Welcome to another exciting edition of Are You Garbage?
The show where you find out if your favorite comedians
are classy individuals or absolute trash.
Now, here are your hosts, Kevin Ryan and H. Foley.
Hey, everybody out there, and welcome back
to everybody's favorite podcast.
This is RUGarbage.
Oh, yeah.
It's that little show we sit down with your favorite comedians,
and we find that they're going to be classy.
Yeah.
After just a big old piece of trash.
Trash, trash, trash.
I'm your host, H. Foley, coming at you on a beautiful day.
We're out back here with Tootie's in a new edition.
She's upstairs on the computer doing a little catfishing.
All right.
Good for her.
Mike Coase is coming at you from right next to me.
He is the CEO of RUGarbage.
He's an international businessman and my best pal
in the whole wide world, and I love him.
Give it up for KJ, Kevin James Ryan.
You can't call me an international businessman
in front of the only international businessman
we've ever had in here.
What's up, gang?
Shout out to you.
Make sure you rate, view, subscribe on iTunes.
Full video available on YouTube.
Full video available over there on Spotify.
Then the greatest website of all time,
www.patreon.com slash RUGarbage.
Go over there and get all that bonus content, gang.
Yes, sir, gang.
And we couldn't be more excited to have our incredibly,
and I mean incredibly special guest,
here with us today for the first time.
You can hear him every week on his amazing podcast,
The Gary V. Audio Experience.
He is a very successful entrepreneur,
CEO, investor, content creator,
podcaster, public speaker.
Let's not forget multi-millionaire.
How you doing?
And Hot Wheels aficionado.
Give it up for Gary Vaynerchuk, everybody.
Let's go.
Gary V.
God, I feel so uncomfortably comfortable in this setting.
Literally, for everybody who's listening,
me and my team said,
hey, we got this hard out
because I actually run businesses.
But I'm already in my brain like,
fuck, man, I think I'm going to go over.
The vibe is so right.
We'll get you in and out, baby.
Honestly, I'm humbled to be here.
Thank you, boys.
Congrats on everything you've been doing.
Thank you, bro.
And I'm ready to rock and roll.
Congrats on everything you've been doing.
Thank you.
Unbelievable.
We're so happy to have you here.
Give us the origin story.
Give us the backstory of Gary V.
Start from childhood.
Jersey roots.
Moved here, yeah.
Jersey roots after the pre-roots
of being born in the Soviet Union.
Okay.
So real immigrant shit.
Born in the USSR in 1975.
Damn.
Moved here in 78 to Queens.
Uh-huh.
I mean, real.
How'd you just get out?
We got out because I got out as a political asylum refugee.
No shit.
What happened was the Soviet Union hated Jews and just were like, fuck these
people.
Let's get the fuck out of here.
And we're hearing that America's willing to give us some wheat.
The dirty secret of why the USSR failed was they spent so much money on bombs.
They had no fucking bread.
Damn.
Like literally the Soviet Union collapsed because they overspent on military
trying to keep
up with the U.S.
That literally my parents tell me stories about waiting nine years in line for
a phone, nine
hours in line for a loaf of bread.
It really fucking fell apart.
Damn, that's how we did it.
Overbed him.
Let's go.
Literally, literally, our arms raced up.
There you go.
Reagan was right.
He's like, let's just make more bombs.
They'll follow us.
They did.
And it was even happening before there.
Nonetheless, thank God, got the fuck out of there and we lived in a shitty
studio apartment
in Queens with my great-grandparents, my grandmother, my parents and I.
Is this everybody came over at the same time?
My great-grandparents, on my father's side, my great-grandparents, my
grandmother, his mom,
and then me and my mom, and then his cousin.
So my dad's on my mom's side.
My mom lost her mom at five.
Okay.
My dad lost his dad at 15.
Okay.
Very big foundation of my childhood.
Gotcha.
The fear of my parents dying was the soundtrack of my life.
Oh, yeah.
Like, real talk.
I gotcha.
Nightmares, like, which is why I am who I am, because I'm so grateful they didn't,
that I literally feel for the last 30 years I've been in full house money.
Like, you've won.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, I've won.
Like, I'm so glad so many people can't associate with me when I say this, and I
don't talk about
it often, so I'm giving you an exclusive.
There you go.
There we go.
That's Gary Vee exclusive, okay?
Sweep, squeak.
I'm happy that a lot of people can't understand what I'm saying.
Uh-huh.
You know, they didn't live in an environment.
Plus, we were immigrants.
Everything was like, we're gonna, like, immigrants, especially from that Soviet
era, like, if
you live to 50, you fucking made it.
That's, yeah, that's playing with house money, 50.
What Americans especially don't realize is those Russians were miserable.
The reason everybody fucking was an alcoholic drinking vodka was you lived in
jail.
Here's a fun fact.
Most people don't realize the USSR was more North Korea than it was Iran,
meaning we weren't
allowed to leave.
If you, when I was born, I was born into a country that is more similar to
North Korea
than it is to Iran.
If you're, if you're born in Iran, you can go to places, they just don't allow
you to
go there, you know, but you can go to Turkey, you can go to the UAE, you can go
to places.
You guys are locked up.
You can get a visa to Canada.
We were locked the fuck up.
People were miserable.
And it wasn't a good time.
And it wasn't a good time.
And everybody went to jail, and it was KGB, and it was fucked.
Anyway, I grew up.
How old were you when you made this move to Queens?
It was me, it was 78, and so, you know, I was in America in 78, but my
household, even
when we moved to Jersey in 82, was fucking Soviet, was fucking Soviet.
KGB was at the door of that motherfucker.
Bro, like, I love talking to, and I grew up in, it was-
Which is such a culture shock to then, like, go to public school in Jersey or
whatever.
Bro, it's-
Your dad's KBG and you.
Bro, bro, it's so obvious why I'm unstoppable.
Like, between the Soviet shit-
This guy charges me up.
He does, he really does.
But it's really real.
Like, growing up in a Soviet household, and then outside your door, is lower
middle class
New Jersey in the 80s.
That's a tough-
Like, I don't know.
And I, by the way, let's drop it even further.
I went to Martin Luther King Elementary School.
I was laughing on the way here.
I'm like, these fuckers are gonna be like, are you garbage?
I'm like, what's below garbage?
Sure, yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, what's the thing?
Like, it was such adversity, but here's the point.
Just like your auntie upstairs that you love so much, my mother was such a
fucking monster.
Yeah.
She was so loving.
It was so good.
So even though I didn't have shit, I had everything.
Yeah.
Which was complete validation, real love, but not this new modern over-coddling
bullshit.
Yeah.
Like, my mom was-
Still a Belarus mom, dude.
Correct.
I don't teach you that.
But she, honestly, fucking angel, except if you thought about being
disrespectful to her.
So I got super fortunate.
I had all the love.
You're the best.
You're a star.
You're gonna be everything.
I think that I want to tell my mom, like, no, I want to do this.
Splap in the face.
Like, it was perfect.
So I had perfect mom and perfect environment.
You can't be hungry when you're fed.
I had to fend for myself from the get.
I knew my parents were not buying me toys.
It's just not part of the equation.
We only cared about food and shelter.
It was real rugged shit.
And then outside, none of my friends had shit either.
Everybody had nothing.
Like, I fucking lived in, like, a neighborhood where, like, my Eric Godfrey, my
best bud,
he lived in, like, a ranch that was much more a trailer.
This is in Jersey.
This is in Jersey.
Okay.
This is in Edison, New Jersey, 82.
Okay.
Okay?
Like, and, and by the way, like, every, every, every third day at Martin Luther
King Elementary
School, it's 315 flagpole Tyson versus fucking Lennox Lewis, Sugar Ray versus
Hagler.
Like, big fights.
You, I laugh how everyone's so disrespectful now on social media.
Like, the thought of, like, if you sit.
Oh, yeah, you get smacked around.
Bro.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And fucking, we fought constantly.
Sure.
And everybody was bigger than me.
And, and, and, and like, and you had all cultures.
I grew up so lucky.
In Martin Luther King Elementary School, black, Indian, Chinese, Asian,
American, white, like,
it was, it was perfect.
So, I never even thought about, like, I didn't grow up with all the kids being
like me.
Everybody was from all over the fucking place.
And then it was WWF 80s.
So, Nikolai fucking Volkov.
Everybody called me Nikolai fucking Volkov.
I'd assume you had to take some heat for the Russian thing back then.
It was actually the most heat I took was Russia in 82 shot down a commercial
plane.
It became like this crisis.
I'd be sick that day.
And like literally, yeah, everybody hated me.
I was like, fuck.
But you think they wouldn't.
You'd be like, boys, I got out.
What do you mean?
I'm on your side.
Yeah.
It was, it was, it was that.
So, anyway, that was kind of the environment I was growing up in.
And that led me to entrepreneurship.
Yeah.
Right.
It was like lemonade stands and shoveling.
Like, it snowed.
Yeah.
Snow day.
This is the best.
All my buddies are like, let's fucking throw snowballs at each other's faces.
I was like, fuck that.
Let's all get shovels, ring doorbells and make five bucks.
It was in me from, in the same way.
You got them all working for you.
And you guys know this.
It's not confusing you today.
You understand the comedy thing was in you and then cultivated.
In fact, I, in fact, some of the best compliments I've been given in my life
for me are actually
very successful comedians who like my content, who watch my keynotes and say to
me,
you do know that your keynote speeches have a comedic standup, you know,
context and style.
Oh yeah, we've, we've used them for years.
I swear to God, literally.
No, as far as like, I remember Kevin turned me on and be like, this guy gets it
and we
can apply this to our comedy career as far as hustling and working and, you
know.
Yeah, well it was, I mean, also too, a sense of humor is very valued in blue
collar, poor
neighborhoods, whatever.
That's like, that's what you have.
You're breaking balls, you're, you're busting chops.
It's like, it's also protecting you.
Yeah, of course.
Like the way I got my face not beat in a lot of times was having charisma and
self and
kind of making a joke.
And to your point, this is what I love about like modern, I'm like, when
bullying became
everyone's radar 15 years ago, I'm like, this is bullying?
Fuck, I was bullied every hour on the hour by my best friends.
Like, that was all we did.
I know.
I know.
It's what, so it's, uh, that's, it's very much in, you speak the language of a
comedian.
It's very, very much, uh, seen for sure.
All right, let's get into specifics.
We'll start in Jersey.
Okay, so what, what is, is it, no brothers and sisters, it's just you, only
child?
I was born in the old country.
Uh-huh.
We come to America.
Right.
And my sister is born pretty much right away.
Okay.
And we called her Garbage Baby.
This is not a joke.
I couldn't wait to share this with you.
My sister's nickname in our family is Garbage Baby, because everything she had,
because we,
I'm talking, forget about 82 Edison, 83, we were already like on our way to
upper, excuse
me, on our, we were in lower middle class.
1978, 79, Vaynerchuks in Queens, we were dirt fucking poor.
Okay.
My sister's, what do you, 