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The GaryVee Audio Experience
The End of Google Search — And What Comes Next | GaryVee South Park Commons Fireside Chat
00:48:37
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- [00:00]
Interviewer
Where do you think technology is going? So what is AI going to mean on a practical sense?
- [00:05]
Gary Vaynerchuk
I mean, I think it means that the robots will kill our children and that's fine because the dinosaurs lost. I think this is as big as it gets. This one's really again, because I went through one web one, web two web three, and now we're, whatever we're going to call this every other time. When I understood what email was and I understood what search engines were, and that's how I built my daddy's liquor store to a big company with no money, I had time. I was plotting in 96, I was plotting and executing in 97, I was plotting and executing in 98, 99, 2000. And then somewhere in 2003, people caught up. Technology caught up when Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Today's YouTube's 20th birthday right now. So it's April, what, 20, what, three. So April 23, 2005. I started Wine Library TV, a five day a week, 20 minute wine show on YouTube on February 21, 2006. So less than a year of its even existence, I was already full pledge all in. And technology was different back then. New apps adoption now is fast back, you know, like that was crazy fast to go all in. And I thought that YouTube was gonna change my life. And it did. I had time. 2006, 7, 8, I'm in rooms in 2009, I'm like, this YouTube thing and people are like, what? That's three years. The technology barely changed in those three years. This fucking game. I'm like fucking down, like playing with a new AI thing. And they're like, this is the craziest LLM ever. And I'm like, and I'm like, this is fucking amazing. And an hour later, like, that's shit. This just came out. And I'm like, fuck, this is fast. The general nature of the technology means like almost anything that gets created immediately gets commoditized. That's insanity. Like we're in some real shit. Like no matter who's most bullish and thinks this is crazy as fuck in the room right now, it's crazier than that. So what do I think? I think we've never seen the landscape of the tech change so fast, which makes it very hard. The reason I haven't even started investing or signing big deals for my advertising agency, like the second you think it's this, I mean, I'd be petrified to sign a one year deal with an AI platform that locked me in because I literally know an hour later there might be something that's better and cheaper. It's like real shit. So where do I think it plays out? I think even the best thinkers I've won on pattern recognition, on my natural skills. I know a lot of other people that have as well. And I'm just watching all of them and myself struggle with making the right key decisions because of the speed in which things get commoditized. And I would argue that is the punchline of the whole thing. I think the nature of the tech commoditizes everything, including critical thinking. And so what the fuck does that mean? I have no idea. But I'm excited to find out. I'm not scared of it. I believe more than I believe in how powerful the technology of AI is. I believe in the human spirit. I believe in that in a way that would make your head spin. I believe that human beings are the single most underrated thing in the world. And I also think it's happening at a time where the last 15 years of propaganda has made most of the people in this room, in the world believe the counter. And I think that's the actual arbitrage. And so that's what I'm going to spend my time on. Fun fact.
- [04:00]
Interviewer
Actually Gary and I met because he was using one of SPC's companies that helps people understand how they appear in AI search. So you want to be first as we move from Google Search to AI search. And Gary's one of the first people using the product.
- [04:13]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Yeah, and that goes back to pattern recognition. I won because I decided that Ask Jeeves and Dogpile and Yahoo and Google were more important than the Yellow Pages. When every small local business thought the Yellow Pages was life to me in my brain as I sit Here today, Google, AdWords and Google Search is dead. It's not fully dead cause it's alive right now, but it's fucking dead. The fact that already in my search bar, in my little laptop, I no longer by default go to Google. But even more interesting, fuck me, I use things fast. The fact that I'm speaking at conferences. Dustin, where are you? Dustin, who travels the world with me in films, Dustin, you've seen this play out the last year. About 15 months ago I would go to a crowd, especially if it was 40, 50, 60 year olds, I'd be like, stand up in this audience right now. If you are now using ChatGPT or whatever, I would spit out instead of what you would use Google for. And as you know, dust 15 months ago, more people than the crowd Thought a lot more like 10% would stand up and it would shock people because 15 months ago, that crowd hadn't even really heard about it all the way yet. We were just in Vegas or Atlanta, I don't know where we were, but I asked the same question. The whole fucking room stood up, by the way. In advertising land, Ben Allison, one of our main, most important media executives in our 2000 person company. Google fucking search is foundational to every Fortune 5000 company in the world, let alone the long tail. It's dead. If Google perfectly executes Gemini perfectly, they're still going to lose an extraordinary amount of market share for that behavior. Intent based sales. So think about what Google's thinking about. If everything goes remarkable for the next five years, they're going to lose a ton of market share in their biggest financial driver. I don't know how to short stocks, but there's nothing they can do. So to your point, for me, what I learned in 1998 and 99 and when you, you know, I bought Google AdWords the day it came out. But that's SEM, that's marketing, SEO. All the shit we did in the H1 and all the shit I was learning back there in the title and like I gotta show up first when people type in wine. Well, that's playing out again, isn't it? In a different way. And so for me, I'm not romantic or emotional about yesterday. I'm obsessed with today. I think another mistake I know a lot of you will make is you're going to over bet on tomorrow. A lot of you are so sharp in the tech. You're going to do things that the human consumer is not going to catch up to fast enough and you're going to be too out in front. So keep that in mind. You're too smart, you too get it. But your timings are going to be wrong. From a business lens, it will happen. Uber happened before. It was called Magic Cab. It just came out six years earlier. It was too early. The iPhone wasn't there yet. So one thing I would definitely recommend all of you as you build out your stuff is think about, is the consumer there? A lot of you will build B2B, so the consumer will be there. But if you're building out B2B, ask yourself why they won't buy it. Because you're going to get real ideological and you're going to be like, it's a better product that has nothing to do with anything. Salesforce is not the best product. So I think these are Things I think about.
- [07:47]
Interviewer
You speak so much about humans and kindness. The AI influencer, the AI person, that's not real. How does that intersect with that?
- [07:58]
Gary Vaynerchuk
AI influencers are real, that's how. I don't know if you heard, but we can't tell the difference. Obviously we can still tell Ish. Exactly right? There's ones we can tell and there's already ones we can't tell. 18 months ago, you could tell every time. 18 months from now, you won't be able to tell anytime. And so we're in this middle transition where everyone is consuming AI influencers right now without knowing it. There's still enough average tech that we're seeing the bad versions of it, but fuck, we're already here. And so everyone in this room has probably consumed an AI influencer and we're like looking for it because we're in it and still didn't know. And so the brain will consume it as real. Thus it's real. AI influencers are gonna do to influencers what influencers did to Hollywood. All the influencers that are like, oh, man, I'm more famous than actors on Netflix. This is awesome. They're about to be really sad because they're about to be way less famous than people that don't even exist, owned by people in this room. There's people here who are going to build the next Disney, but it's just going to be 7,000 human beings. It's unprecedented times. But what do I think about it? I think about it as human itself evolves. I would argue that a caveman would look at all of us right now and be like, this isn't fucking humans. Shit changes. We just happen to be alive when this change is happening. So to answer your first question, because I deviated, I genuinely believe that nice guys finish first. I think the reason that kindness is the pillar to my business is why wouldn't it be? If you're trying to build something meaningful and long term, the number one way to win is continuity in relationships. I think most people are transactional. I think people want short term wins. My life is a marathon, hopefully. Actually, I had a full four hour checkup today at Atria. Looks like I'm gonna live for quite a while, you know, like, you know, and by the way, everybody who shits on AI, the number one thing I would say is, do you even understand what this is gonna do to modern medicine? Like, you're crying about, like a designer losing its job. Your fucking mother's gonna live for 17 years longer because of this. Shit like this is profound. So the nicest thing I just think is logical. I think if, you know, look, by the way, the only time I've ever been aggressively booed on stage in my career was when I started a South by Southwest keynote with Fuck Steve Jobs at the height of his popularity. And the point I was trying to make was Steve's all time incredible, especially for someone like me, because Steve's a lot more me than he is you. You know, product, human. Like that's what he brought to the table, right? But he was a dick face, so fuck him. And that's how I see life. It's literally how I see life. That is not what I admire. I respect the living shit out of what he accomplished professionally, but that's just not how I see life. I do not believe that not being nice is a good idea. And so that's not what I respect. And I can tell you right now, one of my great goals is to be wildly professionally successful so that other people copy my behavior. Because what bothered me about Steve, what led me to say that was I watched a lot of kids like this at Y Combinator at all these places force themselves to be mean to their team, even though it wasn't in their spirit because they thought that was cool, because everyone was looking up to Steve. And so I was trying to make a bigger point. It's not even about Steve. It's about that humanity and humility and graciousness, these are strengths. It's easy to be a dick. It really is. It's hard to be the bigger person when confronted with bad behavior. Torchna in Russian superstition. If someone sneezes after you say something, it means it's true. So I thank you, sir. So that's the answer to the first.
- [12:12]
Interviewer
Question I've heard you talk about how like recommendation engines have made your followers less important and any good content can get picked up. So yes, these people probably have never posted before. How does a technical person in today's world get started?
- [12:29]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Well, first they have to decide if they even want to like. I do not believe that building a personal brand is a prerequisite for business success because the data's black and white. There's a drillion businesses that are crushing that has no face to it. I do believe that if you are interested in it or capable of it, that it is a moat. I would actually argue if we're talking about AI, intellectual property is going to be the only thing left. One could argue if you play out the chess moves of all the Shit, you're all thinking about that. The only thing left is ip, both intellectual property property, hence why I've been building veefriends, my Pokemon, my marvel, and then ultimately you, the human. Like I don't know, you guys know this shit better than I do. Sounds like all this shit's gonna do everything. So what's left? And as long as the laws are in place the way they're in place, the only thing left is nil and ip name, image and likeness, intellectual property. So if you're one of these people that believes you want to because you think there's value in it, you think it'll help you raise money, you think it'll help you get good employees, these are all real things. If you're teched the fuck out, I think you get started on LinkedIn. If it's this crew, I think LinkedIn Google Shorts. Because don't forget YouTube is still the second YouTube Shorts. Excuse me. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. So you get a lot of long tail and you can go very nerdy. You can make a video that is like as nerdy as you want to go, title it. That way as you know, there's gonna be a small group of people that are gonna search that too and they're gonna find you. So I think I'm a big fan of YouTube shorts and LinkedIn for this audience. If their objectives are to create demand for venture raising, create demand for talent. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking every day of like you're in an arms race for the best talent. How are you going to outpace a top 10 tech company that is willing to pay a hell of a lot more? You will get lucky slash. It will work. Because some people are ready to own their own thing. That's what you're trading on. But the other way is somebody just going to want to work with you because you said something they liked. So those would be places I would go. The other thing I would say, I think people, even when you said most of these people probably didn't post, I think we overgeneralize around tech individuals not being charismatic, not having gifted gab. Look, I've worked with a lot of engineers. We can all agree this room right now doesn't look like the TikTok Creator Summit that's going on right now. So yes, there's generalizations that. But what I also know is a lot of people here are incredibly capable of making videos. I would also say for the ones here who are most self deprecating or even not kind to yourself. You do not have to be gift of gab fucking the words flow. You definitely don't have to be attractive. This is a game of the value. If you put a camera down and just spit your fucking game of the shit, you really know. Even if it's not dynamically done, it will find the audience that needs it or wants it. There are plenty of other fucking nerds who are really excited about your 18 sentences in a row that are grounded in truth of the depths of technology, who are gonna be like, that's my fucking dude. You understand? It's really important to understand, like, you don't need to be Logan Paul and Charli d' Amelio and Alex Earl. But when you talk, not charismatically, not dynamically, you're gonna have to fucking rely on the weight of the strength of the words that are coming out of your mouth. So if you're not dynamic and your fucking knowledge is surface level now, you're fucking dead. But if you've got it like that, in the same way that I made a statement earlier, because I've spent thousands of hours thinking about AI the last two years. And I can say to a room that is deep in it, nothing has any weight. If this plays out, besides IP and nil, my whole career has been going to y Combinator and TechCrunch Disrupt and all these things where I'm the least qualified tech person in the room. But I end up being the most historically correct. Because tech is the cost of entry to be in the game, right? Like, what is always, like, for all the people that didn't understand how the wiring of social networks was gonna work, they were in trouble already. But I spent enough time understanding the basic needs of things you need to understand. But I then play on a different place, which is the human behavior, the multiple steps. And the other thing I do well that I would implore all of you to give thought to is the second your tunnel vision on just the technology, you're dead. The second you're tunnel vision on just the consumer, you're dead. You have to blend 7 to 12 different dynamics that are playing out, including government. I've got lots of thoughts on this shit, but it could all be upheld if China, Russia and the US are like, fuck that shit. Even though we fucking hate each other, we gotta align on this shit. Cause this shit's too big. So there's just a lot to think through. But what do I think? I think half this room can easily crush on making content on the Internet. My argument is that the way the algorithms are working, we no longer even live in social media. We now live in interest media. The things you're interested in are coming to you, not who you follow and what they post. So I would argue social media is fully dead. We're fully in interest media. And I would say the way that the AI algorithms are working is it's transcribing the words that are coming out of your mouth and putting in front of people who are likely to be interested in what you're talking about. So the deeper you go, it's really. This is a good one. It's really no different than prompt engineering. If you fucking put out shit, you're gonna fucking not attract anything. But if you really go there in depth, and it is not based on the surface level part. It's the words. It's the words. And so I would recommend everyone do it because there's fundamentally little to no downside. The downside of making content on the Internet is that 99% of the people in this room are insecure. And people don't like to post when they're insecure, because people don't like three views. People don't like you're ugly as a comment from an anonymous person on the Internet. And so most of the people here will not achieve their upside in this medium because of their insecurities. And I ask them to stop being insecure because every other person on earth sucks in a lot of things too. Thank you.
- [19:28]
Interviewer
My last question before we let you all be insecure is, spoke to a bunch of people that have worked with you, and they said the most important value that you hold is kindness and business. Why is that the case?
- [19:41]
Gary Vaynerchuk
I think if you're. For many reasons. I mean, look, because I was parented well and I got lucky with DNA, that's probably, like, real to me. Like, why am I nice? Because Tamara Vaynerchuk is nice and she molded me perfectly. I also happened to share her DNA, so it was an easier thing for her to mold. But what also worked out for me is I love business a lot. And what that means is I'm gonna be one of those individuals who will not retire. And what I mean by that is, of course, as I continue to get older and my family dynamics change and things, you know, life, there'll be times where I'm not working 15, 16 hours a day. But at 89, if I'm not doing that, I promise you, I wish I was. This is my joy. This is my craft. I would rather Be in the office, than ski, than surf, than Cook. Probably outside watching the New York Jets. There's not many things. Maybe the Knicks, but I'm a little bit pissed right now. There's just not many things I'd rather do than building companies. It is truly my hobby. It is the currency of my brain, my hopes, my dreams. It's enjoyable because. Because I like building them. 360. There are many people in here who will not achieve their business goals because the main goal is the financial output of the business. And that will be directly the reason it doesn't happen. Because what will happen is they will take shortcuts, they will take investment, they will find partners, they will even decide their product based on what they think will maximize the financial impact. And that is why they will lose. This is a lot of fun for me because I've been in this room before and this is a really incredible era. The reason I'm here, selfishly, what I just talked about is this is next. There's no confusion. I've seen this movie before. There's a lot of kids in here. One of the few things that's fun about getting older is you've seen the movie before and if you're smart about pattern recognition, you know what to do. And this is 1997, Internet 1.0. I was really there. The reason I did so well in Web 2.0 was I watched the whole movie of Web 1.0 and I'm like, oh, shit, this is 96 all over again. It's just 2006. I know what to do this time. I'm not just gonna use AOL and PayPal and Amazon. I'm gonna invest in these things. That's what you just rattled off. Web3 is also real. The NFT thing, similar to Web1. The greed in NFT land confused people to the importance of the technology. In fact, it's inconceivable to me that the smartest of the group here that thinks about AI doesn't also understand that the blockchain itself is one of the most important components of how the chess moves will play out. If AI does all the things it promises to do, back to how important intellectual property will be, how important verifying deepfake videos is going to be. Like, if AI accomplishes everything we all know it will, it only increases the importance of the technology known as blockchain. So there's like, you know, so it's just. It's a really fun thing to be here and I'm just really grateful to Be here.
- [23:10]
Interviewer
We're all grateful, too. Thank you. Let's open it up to some questions.
- [23:23]
Gary Vaynerchuk
What's your name?
- [23:24]
Nick
My name's Nick.
- [23:25]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Nick, pleasure.
- [23:27]
Nick
You're in a room of, like, founders, builders, entrepreneurs. How do you know when you're directionally correct and when you want to drop something? Because, yeah, there's so many. Like, how do you. You don't want to invest too much time and money, Runway resources. When do you know when you're correct and drop something? And how. Yeah. How do you judge that? Perseverance.
- [23:48]
Gary Vaynerchuk
You don't. Once you understand that truth, you go, I spend no time thinking about that question. You just don't know. The amount of people that literally gave up one day before everything was about to turn in the history of the last hundred years on projects is stunningly high. Only equaled by the amount of people that should have stopped a long time ago. You don't. One thing I've already referenced. One of the great things about experience is you do get pattern recognition. But pattern recognition is also not natural to a lot of people. The truth is, brother, you don't know. What I rely on is feeling comfortable with laying in the bed that I made. I make decisions and I move. There's been many things that I jumped too early, and I was like, fuck. Or didn't see all the way through or my biggest thing, I'm so early on a lot of stuff that I do a really good job. I'm like, oh, shit, it's gonna be this orange. And I'm right, It's a big ass fucking orange. And then I squeeze the fuck out of it. I'm getting a ton of juice, but then I'm like, okay, let me go find a grapefruit. When meanwhile, that orange still had a fuckload in it. But I was so early. So I make that mistake a lot. Jumping too soon while the orange is still getting squeezed. I do it all the time. You don't. But the fact that I can even explain to you that orange analogy right now means that I've figured myself out in the last 30 years playing the game. So I'm trying to be better at that. So what I would say is, don't be crippled by that and feel comfortable in your intuition. Here's a good one. Here's something I'm pretty positive on that is kind of blurry, but I would like. I genuinely believe that when I'm chilling in heaven and we all figure it out down here, I'm gonna be like, I fucking told you. Remember when we did that thing in 2000 when we did that fire, like, in the 100 years I'm gonna find you in heaven. Be like, remember I said this? I was right. That's how much I believe what I'm about to say. I believe if you look at the human race that AI is going to accelerate this dramatically. There's so much shit that we know today that humans had no fucking clue about. 50 years in health and wellness, different things. I mean, like, do you understand 500 years ago, they just found this fucking place. That's like, two minutes ago. You know that, right? Like, literally everyone was just chilling in Europe and had no fucking idea New York City was fucking here. That's 500 years ago. That's nothing. So what do I most believe that we have no clue about right now or don't believe that is in it? I could feel it is. I believe that intuition is the primary brain of a human being and that the brain is secondary, but that we've been conditioned to believe this is primary. And I would argue many people sitting here have not even thought about this. And we finally are starting to understand gut health from a health and wellness standpoint. But I believe gut actual as an operating system is the fucking game. And I would argue that that is why I'm comfortable with your question. Because I'm just willing to bet on my gut. And if it's wrong, maybe it wasn't wrong. Maybe it was wrong that I should have done that and that would have done better, but that would have changed the course of my life. And maybe it was actually right. I think the second you get into that place, you go fast. And business, my friends, is sports, Speed matters. And when you go fast, you can make up for a lot of fucking mistakes.
- [27:15]
Sam
Hey, I'm Sam. Nice to meet you.
- [27:17]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Pleasure.
- [27:18]
Sam
One of the things I admire about you or the thing I admire about you is your humanity. Frankly, I don't even know what your businesses do, but, like, honestly, I just know you're a really cool guy. So I wonder, like, how do you think about preserving your humanity in a world where I can just go and scrape all your YouTube videos and create a version of you? And, like, what is, like, what is unique about your humanity that isn't possible with AI? If anything, maybe the answer is maybe.
- [27:51]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Nothing other than it playing out in environments like this, right? I think probably in my lifetime, I think. But, fuck, this shit's moving fast. Sam, to your answer. It's something I think a lot about because truly, again, I was saying earlier, I've been in all these rooms where the firepower intellectually on the tech was so advanced to mine. But I've been able to win so much because the emotional intelligence and consumer truth. I was in such a different place. It's why I bet the farm on Zucks. Zucks was the first person I'd met that had firepower and tech. That when we had dinner in 2007, like, I literally called my mom the second I walked out of dinner. I'm like, holy fuck. And literally invested every dollar I had into Facebook, which was a big deal because I had no money. And it was because I'm like, fuck. And this was so funny to watch how he was portrayed over the last. Like, when the whole AOC thing in Congress and he's a fucking robot. Before he like, became cool again. That shit made me laugh because I'm like, everyone's like, this guy's a robot. I'm like, he's the only non robot I've met. Mark's understanding of humanity is real. Real. He deployed that into a much more scalable and interesting business than I have. But I never, you know, it's almost like Star Wars. You're like, fuck. I feel the force around me. It was the only time I'm like, fuck. I think this person gets what I get. And so I think online, nothing. I think that's where this is all going. But I think that that's why what we're doing all together right now actually becomes an incredibly interesting business. Literally, my favorite businesses to look at this nanosecond are experiential in real life businesses. Because I think as we continue to scale the mapping of humanity digitally, I think it's just the pendulums. The opportunity for real life is actually gonna become remarkably valuable. There's gonna be businesses in 20 years where people are gonna charge you to take a walk with them and you're gonna pay real fucking money for it. So I get excited about those things, but that's what I think. But it's a really interesting question because for me, my processing power is real. Like, what I've got is my humanity, which is all my mom. And that's why when people are like, when you say that, that feels so nice. But I wish you knew why it feels nice to me. Cause I feel like you're giving my mom a compliment. You know, I'm just a byproduct. I'm the product. When people are like, gary Vee, you're the greatest. I'm like, you know, so it's easy to stay humble when you know it's not you. But what I actually have is processing power, which was blind to me because I was such a poor student that I grew up in the 80s and 90s where you're like told, every teacher told me I was gonna be a garbage man. Which was like the fucking loser job of choice for teachers in the 80s. I don't know why they actually make a ton of money. But what I've learned later in my life, I'm like, fuck. I process so fast and I process differently. But to your point, there are very few people that have put out more logic and thinking online than I have. And the mapping of my LMM is really easy, so everyone might be able to think like me. And that's where this shit gets real interesting real fast.
- [31:20]
Audience Member
Thank you so much for coming. Super inspiring. Thank you. I think we just said it with Mark Zuckerberg and yourself is very interesting where some people are very good at technology and some people are very good at understanding consumer. I don't know to code a line of code, so I hope I'm good at the second one as well. But I'm curious. You saw Facebook, you saw Uber. It's kind of a consumer shift in how consumers engage with technology and think about things. Do you have any tactical advice for how we can get better at seeing where the consumer mind is going?
- [31:52]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Yes, I got one real tactical one. And what's fun is this room's young enough that you're going to watch probably two or three cycles. The reason I was so on was because of this. The first day I used this, which was the day it came out, I'm like, everything's different. Because it was just so obvious to me that the jump to distribution had changed forever. So the reason Facebook made sense to me was I understood. And in fact, I was one of the first investors in a startup called Path that was founded by Dave Morin, who was a top 50 executive at Facebook. And the reason I invested in it is a little dirty secret for all of Mark, who I think is truly and obviously one of the great generational entrepreneurs of all time. He was slow to mobile. Path was actually Instagram and Facebook Mobile before either one of them. Dave executionally didn't fully get there and Instagram came out pretty quickly after and won that game. But what I understood was distribution changes. What I'm good at is only trading attention. It's my greatest skill. So attention changes forever when the distribution changes. When the radio went to the television, everything changed. When the television was invented, everything changed. Geopolitics make sense, business leaders, fame. When we went from radio to television, what an incredible gift I'm giving the few that will take me up on what I'm saying, go spend 100 hours, 50 hours on understanding what happened in society when this society went from primary radio to primary television. And you will understand everything going forward. Distribution. That's why I understood the Internet. I'm like, fuck, the first time I heard that thing, I was like, wait a minute, people are going to be in here, not on tv. Then I saw this, I'm like, people are going to be in here. And then several months ago, I saw Project Orion, which is Facebook's glasses that are coming out in six years. And I said, oh shit, this is about to be the television. And right now everyone here is only thinking about life through this. And so one thing you can definitely do is always pay attention to distribution. Because when distribution, the printing press, the first million books printed, almost all of them were religious books. There is a direct correlation to why religion continues to be foundational in our society and that moment in printing press history. These are important things to understand. And so the stories around the campfires were much more about Zeus than they were about the Pope. But then the printing press came and that was much more about the Pope than it was about Zeus. Every fucker in here. And all 8 billion of us would be all about astrology. You know how people love that shit. They're like, blue moon and fucking, then rising moon. I'm like, I don't fucking know. They're like, you know, we would all do that if astrology books were first, not religious books. And so the one thing you should always pay attention to is distribution. There's macro distribution, this, that, radio, and then there's micro distribution. The reason I spend all my time on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter. It is distribution in our society. Whoever wins there, wins. That is why geopolitics has been completely rewritten. It's playing out there, not everywhere else. And most people don't get it.
- [35:40]
Interviewer
I actually read that you used to look at the top five most popular apps every single day in the App Store.
- [35:46]
Gary Vaynerchuk
It's still real. I don't understand how people don't understand. You literally go to the app Store, look at the top 100 free paid apps, and you have a very good read. What, what's going on in society? The answers are in front of us. We're just academics and we overthink shit too much. Project management, too much academia, not enough real shit and common sense.
- [36:12]
Audience Member
Thank you for coming. I have a question about distribution, please. So we haven't talked a ton about how this is going to impact business businesses. I'd love to hear your perspective on what happens to the office of the cmo, what happens to marketing agencies, what happens to distribution for businesses in the next 10 years.
- [36:31]
Gary Vaynerchuk
I mean, I think every service business needs to be very, very thoughtful in the next 36 months because it's all getting commoditized. The only thing that's gonna be left is the thinking and the creativity. So I think there's a lot of things that will happen. I think most Fortune 500 companies will take a lot of their marketing in house. But I also think what I haven't seen yet is the clarity that humans are not fully needed. And as long as there's fully need for humans, humans will make bad decisions. And so a lot of things that seemingly look like they'll be dead soon will take a much longer time to be dead. But I think anybody in a service based business, if you're a media planner, that can be done. People are focusing on the creative, what about the planning? And don't forget the social networks that have the distribution, have the ability to have all the data, have the ability to do all the work. But deciding to even put the money into that platform is still going to require a human, at least for a period of time. And so I think strategy and creativity dramatically uptick. Unless back to what we were talking about, if everybody can just download thinking like me, well then I'm commoditized. Everyone's commoditized. So there's a lot to think through. But here's the problem. People are very quick to say, oh, especially a room like this, oh, the service agencies are dead. If that's true, you're all dead too. Because the bigger tech companies are gonna out tech you. So what are we talking about? So I have a lot of buddies who are like, my startup's gonna put your agency out. I'm like, google's gonna put you out. What the fuck are you talking about? So I think, you know, I think that I learned a lot in my 20s and 30s and even 40s about how fast I thought shit was gonna happen. And then you learn the real world of like, there's a lot of best, let's put it this way, there's a lot of political and financial reasons that everything being replaced by this technology is not going to happen as fast as all of us know the technology is capable of doing, right? And there's still people that fucking use fax machines. Aol, do you know which money AOL makes on dial up right now? Is that the number? Yeah. 50 million. I know it's a very large number. I don't, I didn't know it was that. I don't know how recently looked it up. I'm sure it declines daily, but let's say it's half of that just for fun for five seconds. AWOL's doing 25 million in revenue on dial up. Internet. We're fucking talking about AI robots eating children in this room and they're making 50 million on dial up. So I think for all of us especially we're sitting here under the guise of a commercial lens, right? We're talking businesses and startups, we're not talking societal. You know, obviously that's all blended in. But in the context of this room tonight, we're talking about business. I think couple things will stand out. One, I think in a 10 year window, fuck that should happen, right? But what's really interesting to me is I think the people that most are going to win are the thinkers. Unless the thinking gets commoditized, which I think is really in play too. That one's going to be interesting though because that's where government's going to get involved, right? Because Gary, in that sense, if I'm like, fuck, this is my livelihood, I'm like, where am I protected from a copyright and ip? And this goes back to my earlier point. There's a very strong argument that if this tech fully plays out, the only business anyone should be is an Nil and ip.
- [40:17]
Audience Member
Hello, I'm Sam.
- [40:18]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Hi Sam.
- [40:18]
Audience Member
Hi, how are you doing? Thanks for coming and joining us. You, you speak about IP and you speak about, you know, this notion of things getting commoditized. Could you talk a little bit more about creator owned brands? So the Mr. Beasts of the world, the Alex Earls of the world, yourself with the friends, right? Can you talk a little bit about like if, if IP is what is at the end, how are creator owned brands going to manifest in that? And how do people, young people, set themselves up to own their IP and have arms of businesses, arms of products. I'm curious how you think about that.
- [40:54]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Yeah, so look, it's a space that I've been obsessed with. I started Empathy Wines and played that playbook out very quick. I sold too soon, but my partners wanted to get married and wanted money and they were two former interns at my company. So I want to do right by them. But the CPG of the personal brand is one of the great business opportunities as we sit here today. What's fun about the AI conversation for me personally is there's a lot of people here who do not have the ability as a human to be Alex, Earl or Logan, Paul or MrBeast or me. But all of them can create an influencer who can be bigger than all four of those people and then build a shampoo on top of that. So that to me is really cool. And really some people should debate in here, let's make as many famous people as possible and then let's create the businesses. I think the cat's very out of the bag. It's not a very complicated thing. I think everybody should do that because what has happened in consumer packaged goods is the more interesting part. The reason this is interesting is less about me or Beast or Earl or Charli d' Amelio. It's that distribution and media have been commoditized. If there's no Shopify, Amazon, TikTok and Instagram, from the way it works, forget about the fact that you had to be on it to get the fame. There was no opportunity to go into CPG because pre social and pre Amazon 3pls and Shopify, there was no way to get into Walmart. Right. The cost to run television commercials and to get into Walmart was tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars and you had no audience. Everything's been flipped. So the whole entire the poppy sale for 1.9 billion to Pepsi is the preview, not the anomaly. This is why I have an agency. I want to know everything about that world because that's the biggest world in the world economically, and they're dead. I think that for this group, if you're looking from the lens of that product testing, just like every variable that I love about social gets enhanced and is more efficient with AI infrastructure underneath it. You don't have to guess with creative anymore. You don't have to guess on packaging anymore. And back to the power of a human personal brand and the moat that it is. You don't even have to be that human anymore. You can create her. And by the way, beauty is mapped just so you all know, everything's mapped as you know. So if everything's mapped the way you know it, so is beauty like there is real data around attractiveness of what we're attracted to, which then creates the things I get excited about. Once everyone realizes everybody here can create 1000 attractive people, does that Then become not the attractive thing that's gonna be the most fun that you're all gonna go through given where you're at looking at the crowd age wise. I'm so happy that you're going to watch the whole thing. You're going to watch the thing that you most believe in right now because you're in a room fully take over the next 30 years and then you're going to watch the counter move $5,000 to take a walk with a human.
- [44:15]
Interviewer
All right, last question.
- [44:17]
Audience Member
I have two main questions. The first is you build one of the most successful personal brand and you know, media brand and everything. And so many people watch our content, but arguably Speaking you know, YouTube take like majority of that profit. And I've been crypto for like seven, eight years and I traded vee friends and made money on it. So I was curious, how do you think crypto can play into the whole like attention, tokenized attention and so you.
- [44:46]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Already know the answer. Yeah, that's why the blockchain is so important.
- [44:49]
Audience Member
Yeah, I agree.
- [44:50]
Gary Vaynerchuk
Like all the economics will be down to. It's just, it's 100%. Again Suki, if you know that question, if what you just did, you have to understand you're in a position right now where I was in 2003 and you need to understand what to do with it in 2003. I believe that the. I thought the Internet was the most important thing that had ever happened. But the world was shitting on the Internet. Cause Internet stocks had just collapsed in April 2000 cause the greed of Wall street made companies worth 5 billion doll though they had no revenue. Because we understood the promise of the Internet but the economics hadn't happened the NFT summer. The reason, since it sounds like you follow me, the reason thank God I did this in August of 21. I started after I was like NFTs, NFTs, NFTs. I was the one who started making videos saying 99% of NFTs are going to zero. Because I saw, thank God. Because the reason I'm able to maintain my personal brand is I would have been flushed out with that as well had I not hedged out of seeing the behavior. I'm like fuck, people are just doing bullshit scam. Like it was just so much bad behavior. Greed, short term, not nice. The reverse. Running a sprint for a million bucks and ruining your reputation in perpetuity versus building something meaningful. But it doesn't change what an NFT is. NFTS is going to be one of the most fun Things to watch play out. Non fungible tokens are so important because China, Russia and America, Amazon and Google can't control it. So for example, every piece of content I make going forward in the next decade will first go on the blockchain. My blockchain. So that when you guys see me on the Internet doing all sorts of things that I'm not actually doing, you're going to have a place to validate. Did I actually put that out or did somebody else make it? And as far as vee friends, I'm going to build the next Pokemon. So my Vee friend, NFTs are going to be valuable. But 99% of things won't be valuable. 99% of sneakers are not valuable, 1% are. 99% of watches are not valuable, 1% are. 99.9% of trading cards are worthless. But Pikachu's rookie card and Charizard and Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky's is worth a fucking four. Where people got confused with NFTs is they decided all NFTs were worth money. That would be like saying all art is worth money. No, no, 0.1% is. So it still takes execution and veefriends are gonna be worth nothing unless over the next 20 years I get everybody here to fall in love with the characters. And that's why I do trading cards and comic books and cartoons and all the traditional stuff, but capturing the economics of the value you create. But I've been happily giving YouTube and Facebook and everybody else their overcharging cut because without that distribution I would have had to pay for attention when everyone's like. When creators are like fuck Instagram, like motherfucker, you wouldn't exist without it and you didn't pay shit for it. You're not paying for Instagram, you're trading those economics for global scaled attention, the number one asset in the world. I would argue that I, oh, I owe meta and YouTube money, not the other way around because I understand the actual game. Because guess what? Now that the blockchain is here, I still have that equity IP and nil is the end state.