← The GaryVee Audio Experience
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- [00:00]
A
Podcast nation. Before I get you into today's podcast, big announcement. As you probably heard at this point, because I had John from Stan on the show, I am an investor advisor to an incredible startup called Stan. Stan Store. I'm sending you right now to GaryVee.com, garyVee.com Stan, go check this out. We've done a GaryVee Stan store challenge, which actually has a weekly call with me. This is built for everyone who's been affected honestly by my overall content. The tech stack, all these features, and the minimal costs per month that Stan Store has built is really the tool that was needed for this world that I envisioned when I wrote Crush it, when I wrote Crushing It. And this overall thing I'm thinking a lot about lately, which is the individual empire, right? This creator entrepreneur slash entrepreneur creator economy that I think is gonna eat up the oxygen. Very honestly. The thing that so many of you want in your life and the reason so many of you are not there yet, is you've got the strategy for me. You've got the ambition within yourself, but you don't have the tools for you to fully maximize it. And I believe you can find that at Stan Store. Stan Store. But specifically, I want you to sign up for it through my challenge because I want to get access with you. And plus, there's a bunch of cool things. So if you want to go see those cool things, go to garyvee.com Stan S T A N Now to the podcast. This is the GaryVee audio experience. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for having me. It's funny, I was just sitting, seeing that video for the millionth time, and I was thinking, this is gonna be a speech that I'm excited to look back on in five to seven years. I think that brings me to my first kind of statement, which is, I guess congratulations. I think it's really interesting when I look back at that video. I launched the E Commerce website in 1997. It was one of the first three to four E commerce wine retail sites in America. And where I was in my life matched up with technology, making a big change in our society. I was in a place where I was about to go full time into my family liquor store business. And I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in New York and New Jersey. Really dreamed since I was about 14 to have a big impact on my dad's liquor store. Was very grateful and continue to be very grateful for having great parents. And basically at 18, 19, 20, I was obsessed with helping them and what I thought at 18, 19 and 20 was that meant that I was gonna build the Toys R Us of wine, as I called it, which was I planned on for seven, eight years. I studied Walmart and Target and 7 11. I really thought my destiny was going to be to open up 100 or 200 physical wine superstores around the country. And that's how I was gonna do it. And then I walked into a dorm room in college and heard coo cooch crrrr. And and for the kids in the room that don't know what that is, that was dialed up Internet. And really that afternoon I knew my life had changed. Truly, I didn't know how, but I literally, and this is really gonna be funny for the kids, the Internet was so crazy in 94, 95 that I literally stood behind somebody on a desk on the Internet and watched people take one hour turns to be on the Internet and we would watch them be on the Internet. And I literally stood there that first night, starting at like 9pm and at like 1 in the morning it was my turn and I got on the Internet and in about five minutes I found a bulletin board selling baseball cards. And I just, you know, my commerce and entrepreneurial DNA took over and I just kind of never was, quote unquote, the same. And there's been different smaller versions of that throughout my career. When I realized that email was free and I could send sales material through it, or when Google AdWords came out, that was an unbelievably big moment in my career. And then when I saw YouTube and MySpace and Facebook and blah blah blah, I was at a Raiders Rams football game in LA on a business meeting and the game ended and I'm walking back to the car a couple years ago and my brother calls me and I had never heard that tone in his voice and he had just played with ChatGPT and obviously being an early stage investor, whether it's been blockchain or crypto or AI or even currently, as I sit here today with you thinking about what's about to happen with AR and VR, as I truly believe the glasses will become the primary device over the phone a decade from today. And what will that mean? And all of a sudden what does that all mean to the apps and what does it mean to the space I see here and to society? I like spending a lot of time thinking about tomorrow, but I don't like wasting my time on tomorrow, which is what I think a lot of people make a mistake about. And I definitely don't like Being excited about yesterday. We all sit here today in this room right now in a pretty unbelievable moment. Moment. I was fortunate that I was in retail when the Internet thing happened. That was one of the sectors you could really do something with early, right? It would be a long time before the Internet would impact dating or Uber, this or other sectors. But not lost on anyone here, is Amazon and eBay were two of the biggest winners of the late 90s in Internet 1.0. I wish you had cameras that were strong enough. Maybe the front row can confirm this. I'm literally getting goosebumps right now because I genuinely believe. This is why I said yes to this talk. I genuinely believe that anyone who is in customer service and customer experience in this exact second, is uncomfortably fortunate, has found themselves in a sector and industry that is first, potentially first, very clearly one of the industries that is going to move first, hardest, fastest in integrating AI. Out of all the things in the world that one could be doing for a living right now, this is one of the most meaningful sectors that will most taste the impact of this extraordinary technology. I have no clue if you're thrilled you're in this business or you really wish you were a fucking doctor right now. I have no idea how you got into this room tonight, but I can promise you, I feel confident when I say this, you will look back at this moment with either phenomenal joy of the serendipity or. Or with regret that you did not squeeze the opportunity harder. I say that because, knowing the makeup of this room, there's a lot of people here who are already in it. You know, like, for a lot of you, you're in it. You wouldn't be at this conference if you're not in it or like on the cusp of being in it. But the reality is, I think you all know this. The term is out there. The technology is out there. People are flirting, people are demonizing, People are scared, rightfully so. I understand. You should read the articles that were written when the tractor was invented and 85% of society worked on farms. But this is, you know, when I thought about this talk. And by the way, I'm gonna do some Q and A. So I'll talk a bunch, but it was very gracious. They're gonna do some Q and A. So keep in mind, if anything pops up, you can ask me a left field question. Happy to tell you what wine goes with fish, whatever you're interested in. But you find yourself in an industry that has already been affected, clearly has been affected. It makes me Think about a couple things. I was really a merchant and a salesman who really dedicated his life to really becoming educated about wine. And that was great. And I really, really helped my dad build a big business. But I was a wine connoisseur and a merchant. But that technology came along and I committed myself to that technology and that allowed me to really ride that wave, to create unparalleled opportunities in my life that had the Internet not come along, would have been different. I, I kind of feel as I was driving here that there's a lot of people sitting in this audience that are in the same place I was at that moment, which is, I'm curious if people understand in this room how big of an advantage you have within your organizations and within society at large. If you actually take note knowing how to use these tools more seriously, the fact that this is fully integrated already into your actual day to day is a pretty big deal. Just, you know, for context, currently I'm the CEO of almost 3,000 person global holding company agency firm that works with pretty much Fortune 500, but we've got some in the Fortune 5000. I do a lot of investors and so I work with a lot of late stage 50 to $250 million revenue businesses. I try to pay attention to culture quite a bit. So I feel comfortable in this sentence. Most people that work at companies are still debating the concept of this. You know, figuring it out, flirting with it, fearing it. It's still in the mockery, it's still in the haziness, it's still in the grass. Probably right this second, a lot of people are having their big 2026. How are we going to integrate AI into our business meetings right this second? And you're all already running. And I remind all of you that in business like sports, speed is a big advantage. And so the biggest thing on my mind coming in here today is this isn't like my normal talks or podcasts that I have to do right now where I have to convince people like you better stop fucking around. This is here, right? You know that this is a very weird one that I was excited about, which is, are you squeezing this opportunity hard enough? Do you realize the serendipity of your career put you in a place where you can understand this stuff more and more importantly, do people in this organization know that the customer service CX leaders in this room actually could become one of the loudest voices within the organization alongside a CTO or CIO around the effectiveness or the realities of these tools? Because you're Coming from a place of practitionership and practicality, not academia and thesis. Understand? Let's clap it up for each other on that. Like, there's a reason I asked for that clap. I need to like reset everyone here in a very. Like, I'm gonna break it down nice and slow one more time for the kids in the back. There are very few individuals within organizations that are actually already at the forefront of this being implemented and they can place and taste it. This is a substantial advantage for all of you. And not knowing one's ambition in this room, you look back to the history of time. Let me give you a historical comp. In the 80s when home computers and yet developers. If I sat here and this was 1985 and you were all coders, I could say things like, I believe in 4, 40 years some of you could end up being the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. That wasn't obvious then. An Internet developer didn't, you know. Or a computer developer didn't go to the CEO suite. But over time it became so important that that became real. I personally believe. Oh, there it is. The second book I ever wrote. This is actually a good visual if you bear with me. The first book I wrote in my life, Crush It, I wrote in 2008. I basically said that you could make money on the Internet on YouTube and Facebook. I basically talked about being a creator or influencer. The first 50 reviews on Amazon, I got one star. And everyone said I was a snake oil salesman because nobody would ever make $100,000 a year on YouTube. That book changed my life because it was really the book that went most viral in the culture around the concept of Internet personal brand, where it all was. It came out in 2009. A lot of you know this. It wasn't on everyone's radar. Now it seems like it is the conversation. But the second book, out of all the things I could have ever written about in my life, the second book I ever wrote on the back of a massive New York Times best selling book with a lot of pressure on me and a lot of opportunity on me. The second book I ever wrote was the thank youk Economy. Basically the thank youk Economy is a book if you've ever skimmed it or if you want to AI the summary of it. I have a funny feeling that the AI and the LLM would come back and say, basically it talks about humanity and business. It talks about scaling the unscalable. It was a story basically based on the fact that I believed there was a Quote in there that I used a lot on stage back then, which said, the more we become like the Jetsons, my belief is those who act like the Flintstones will win. And to break that down for the kids that have no idea what the fuck those two cartoons are, in the 70s and 80s, 60s, there was two cartoons that were quite popular. One was in outer space and one was prehistoric. And my belief was in 2011 that technology would do what it's done. It would commoditize much. It would commoditize much. But it was the humans that knew how to be the most human that would actually win by weaponizing or understanding those tools. Now, I have heard of AI concepts back then, but that's not really what I was alluding to. It was more that I was alluding to. If you treated Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, not to just post stuff with the hope that you get something, but you get into the comments and the DMs and you actually care about people and you listen to what they say and you actually engage with them, you could win. I can tell you that the only reason I have personal brand and I am known is because from 2007 to 2011, I literally spent seven to 11 hours a day replying to every person on Twitter that ever engaged with me and or even referenced anything about wine. As you can imagine thinking back, that that took me five years of my life. Where I now can have an AI agent do that for me is interesting to think about, but I think the point is taken. I'm sure it's not lost on all of you. Everything that you know right now is going to become standard. The point I was making with the engineer in 1985 is the point I'm making with all of you. I genuinely believe a CX customer service mindset, human within an organization that does 5 to $500 million in revenue. That is being very thoughtful of how to get very smart about everything to do with AI because they are in the serendipitous position to be interacting with it in real life, not in decks and theory have the biggest upside professionally in a lot of organizations over the next 25 years. And so I come here today out of joy and really my belief and I could be wrong, you might all, maybe I'm naive. My belief is I do not believe that this audience understands the upside in front of them. And I was interested in coming and telling you that it is. That's what I have to say. All right, now what do we do about that? What does that Mean, couple things. I think it starts with execution. I think the biggest thing I'm actually asking and the biggest thing that I would implore all of you to do, not knowing how senior some of you are or where you are in the organization, you must become a practitioner of these tools. This is very important. This cannot be where you're the architect and everybody knows it in detail. For example, back to a comp. In my social media world, I still write the copy for every post I post on Instagram. Everybody 100th of the size of my audience has outsourced that to their internal, to their this, to their that. I implore you. The luxury of having the ability to have your hands on the steering wheel of these tools right now is one of the great opportunities of your career. This is really pretty historically true over the last 30, 40 years of technology, it is the ones that are practitioners and understand the tools and the craft that wins every growth opportunity in front. This one's so intimidating. And you know this many of you started off, geez, many of you, the second you heard about this for your thing, got scared it was going to fuck you up. You know that people are hesitant to this thing. People are concerned, CFOs like it, but a lot of other people are quite concerned about it. And I think you take that as an advantage. What I mean by that is of course you should inspire. Especially you have teams, they have to do their thing. But I think in practicality, this is the time to really get deep on these tools. If you're using this tool or other tools, this is not something you should know on paper. This is something you should know deeply because that knowledge shows up to the next thing I want you to do. My hope is that over the next six to 18 months, you get deep enough that you actually, actually understand it. You understand the logic of how it works, you understand how to maximize it. I'm sure not lost on any of you, including the incumbent tools that you grew up with or the old ones. Tools are only as good as the mechanic using them, right? The ROI of a basketball for LeBron James is billions of dollars. The ROI of basketball for me is two torn meniscuses and probably a negative $50,000 dollars. This tool doesn't do the work for you, you do the work. In fact, even at hyperscale, in a decade with AI, this is going to be the game now. It's going to get consolidated. There's going to be a lot of things and you're going to have to be better and all these things. But ironically, I actually think the spirit of this industry is the winning spirit of the day. As we become more aied out and more teched out and more VR'd out and all that, it is the people that are most human that will win. And I think we need to think about that. And so I implore you, one, to not be in your ivory tower if you have that senior of a position to not be a manager of. This is 100% the time to get your hands dirty. Humility is often the gateway to success and happiness. This would be a really good time to be professionally humble and get your hands very dirty on every AI tool you possibly can. Here's why the next thing happens. My belief is the way this is going to play out is there's going to be the tech energy in companies around this, but then there's going to be the consumer, the B2B, the humanity part of it all. And I believe the people that, that have the most experience with it have the potential to have the biggest voices in the room in it. Obviously, I'm not aware of how all your organizations work, and I do not know how open your organization is to having you contribute to a conversation that might not be in your department or in your lane. However, thank God, when there's times of change, oftentimes of fear and innovation, things open up a little bit more than they used to. And again, I believe it is your advantage of knowing how to use these tools or have been in it, that allows you to start voicing that and bringing that to the table, both on very selfish career growth within what you do, but also very honestly. I'm sure it's not lost on anybody. By the way, this room is beautiful. I'm sure it's not lost on any of you. But this is about life now, too. Like, everyone's life is going to be completely engulfed by this technology. This technology sits in the Mount Rushmore of human innovations. This is electricity. This is like when the plane was invented. Like, this is going to change the calculus in a very substantial way. So I think that is a very, very big deal. And then I would tell you what probably comes natural to a lot of you. If you love what you're doing in this room. It's almost like, do not play in the middle. We just spent a lot of time on, like, go all in, get dirty, and then all the way over here. Start strategizing. Start playing in your minds that these tools and this reality is fully real. So what do you do with your Time. Then one thing I'm just spending a lot more time on is going back to the thank you economy and thinking a lot about what do you do to make depth happen in a world where width is going to a scale we've never seen before. In fact, when I put my investor's hat on, the companies I'm investing in are like restaurants and concert companies. And I literally about to help someone start a business that charges people to take walks with other people. Like literally paying someone 50 bucks to take a walk with you around the block. And I have a funny feeling when I say that, as you can imagine, like when bottled water came out, can you imagine how that landed? Someone's like, I'm gonna sell bottled water. They were like, it's for. And then it became. I think if I was here 10 years ago and said, I'm gonna start a company that charges people to take a walk with another human, it wouldn't have landed. But I think we all know the world is getting far more digital. Loneliness on the rise. It's not like so crazy that that could be. Whether it is or not, I do not know. It's a hypothesis, a curiosity. But I think that little side thing that's going on over there really matters here. I think about what do we do? Because I think in this, I think in CX and customer service, pretty much every moment of my life, hence why I wrote that book. What do we do? What do our departments do? We can have such meaningful impact with our human part while the AI part continues to grow. And I think that's where I get really excited. That's what I was hoping to kind of accomplish here. I'm like, man, if I could get some of the people in the room to realize you got to go really hard on both opposites, become psycho expert on AI, and then become remarkably good at understanding what becomes double offense on human capabilities that are not replicatable in the next five years in an AI world. Now you're talking about a department that I think can make significant impact. So look, I mean, this is stuff that I'm so excited about. I'm excited for all of you to be at it. I think you should really, really go hard at it in both places that I'm going. And I think most of all, I'm very grateful. Cause I'm super well parented and got very fortunate in a lot of ways that I've been able to take advantage of big technology shifts over the last 25 years pretty well as an entrepreneur. But I will be Incredibly transparent here. And by the way, I'm probably gonna go to Q and A soon, so I don't know how you're planning on doing the runners on each side, so we should get that going. But thank you. But I stand here today, and if I'm being incredibly honest with myself, I've done a really nice job squeezing web 1.0, web 2.0 crypto. I bought Bitcoin in 2014, but I bought $4,000 worth, and I could have bought $400,000 worth, even for someone like me, where it comes natural to live around corners, to be fully high risk, to do all that stuff. I myself have not squeezed every moment of when I saw it first or best hard enough. And every time, five years later, I'm like, damn, why didn't I make more TikToks in 2018? You know, damn, why didn't I continue my podcast in 2014, 15, 16? Because it went like. There's unbelievable amounts of me stopping short because I was too early or not squeezing hard enough because I didn't let it play fully out. I will tell you that all of you in this theater find yourself in the perfect spot. You really do. You're ready using it. You're already in it. And I could not recommend more. You not live with regret and let this moment pass. You're in the right spot. Squeeze it, take advantage of it. And I hope that makes someone go harder. I wanted to go macro because what I just shared with you, I genuinely believe is the punchline, right? The two edges go all in on both. This is the opportunity. Understand how that gives you leverage. Start to be a communication of what you know in your personal, professional life, your side hustle within the organization. That is the big punchline here. But I wanted to do Q and A because I'm incredibly comfortable going in the weeds on anything that anybody here has within this genre or ecosystem. So that's why I wanted to do it. So, yeah, I think raise your hands or stand up and we'll get rocking and rolling.
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B
If you are starting a company today and you don't have any customers yet, so customer experience is like, not relevant. Where do you think is the most important area to focus? Like taking advantage of AI today.
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A
So just in general, do you have the business? Are you building the business? Are you debating the business?
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B
The business is being built. It's direct to consumer.
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A
It's a direct to consumer brand.
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B
It's an app.
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A
It's an app. So, you know, I think, look, look, for me, for example, the Number one thing I use AI for by a country mile is to think with me. So if I'm you, you're trying to figure out what's about to happen. And that could literally be hiring your number two. It could be literally how to get awareness in the App Store. It could be how to fundamentally get a arbitrage with influencer cosigns, how to get, you know, personal brand investors to get involved. There could be so many things. So, for example, when I prompt, I prompt only in voice. Let me rephrase. I prompt 90, 80% of the time if it's important to me in voice. Because I am a much better communicator in voice than I can write. I did a 39 minute prompt yesterday. I'm serious. I did a 30. I looked. I was like, Because I've got. It's so crazy. In just six months, I've gone from, like, using it. I'm sure all of you felt this in the last three, four years, two years, whatever it's been for you. At first you're like, oh, I'm gonna treat this like Google search, right? We had to go through that. You had to go, like, learn that this is not search. Then I went into, like, more basic, and now I'm just like, ChatGPT is my friend. Like, you know, like, like Perplexity, Gemini are like my homies. Like, they're my thinking partners. I do strategy. So for me, it's like literally talking, like you talk like a 3 1/2 minute as if you know who I am and as if we were having coffee, you, like for A minute and 47 seconds ask that question. It's sad for me that their answer's gonna be pretty fucking good, you know, like, this is real life. So I think you have to think through. You have to get unbelievably curious and unbelievably detailed and unbelievably human to get the answers. That's how I would use it. I think it's the thinking. All the other shit, you know, like, you can make your deck in it in one second. You can build your fucking app in it, in Vibe coding. And we're in such a crazy time, but I think it's the thinking. The winners are gonna be the most creative and the smartest, not the people that know how to press the fucking buttons. Thank you.
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B
Thank you so much.
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A
Yes. Hi. Hey there.
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B
I'm Erica.
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A
Hi, Erica.
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C
Thanks for being here.
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A
Thanks for being here.
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C
So as AI evolves and we're all excited and doing all the things. What are some tips that you have for ensuring job security?
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A
Because.
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C
I work with fin, I program fin. But eventually there will be nothing else that I can do for it. So what are some things that I can do to ensure that I still have a job in the next three to five years?
- [29:56]
A
So it's the most fun question. So a couple things. I think the most practical answer was what I ended with. I think you need to be great at thin and everything else because that knowledge of how to be a good mechanic will matter next. On the other side, you need to decide. There used to not be cx. It was just customer service. Then it became customer experience. I see some shaking heads. They lived it. They know the history. My friends. Humanity and human shit is about to become uncomfortably valuable. So Eric, I need everyone to go into their spirit way more than into their tactics. So if like for example, let's talk about my company. In my 3,000 person company, our head of HR is called our Chief Heart Officer. I made that up because I came from small business family land and entrepreneur land. And when I got into corporate land, I thought HR was the homies. I swear to God, I like, like I am who I am. Like I was a bad student. I was in my own bubble. I didn't know a lot about the world. I was in my shit. And so when I got to corporate only 15 years ago, like I thought everybody loved the HR department because they were the friends. Then I was like, oh fuck, the HR department is the KGB of the cfo. So I. So as we were getting bigger, when we had 100 in place, I was just fucking Santa Claus and grandpa. It was all good. But I was like, fuck, we're about to get big and we're gonna go into HR and everyone's gonna think it's bad, I gotta break the brand. I'm like, fuck hr. We call it People and Experience Team, the pet team. And the head of it is the Chief Heart Officer. I spoke to her the other day. I want her to use and the company use AI to make sure we're keeping up on people's birthdays and all these things, right? But literally I spoke to her yesterday, I was like, I want you to have breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, drinks. I want you to be with humans at scale. I don't care about anything else. All the operations stuff is going to get commoditized. I need you to be a human. I think a lot of people here got into something like this because of this and then you get into it and you're doing a lot of this. I think a lot of you are going to find yourselves being able to be back into this. I actually think a of lot, a lot of you, this industry is actually gonna get into an incredibly good place, a very happy place. And so, like I said, Erica, get gnarly, good at fin and everything else too. And then start thinking about things you can start implementing that are inherently human programs. Executions, real human shit. Surprise and delight. Knowing, like, knowing and doing things for people on their birthday. A, no, then B, do. And I think, like, all those kind of things internally, externally. Let me tell you a story. Actually, this is a fun story I haven't told in 10 years. Thank you, Economy. The reason that book went viral, one story inside of it. So Twitter came out. I'm obsessed with it. Because people are just telling you shit. Like, again, for the kids in here, this is norm. But for us over 45, like, that's like. When I invested in Twitter in 2007, every person I knew made fun of me. Because literally the joke was, that has no chance. Who cares if you're walking the dog or eating a pizza? And back then, in my mind, I was like, everyone. And that's what ended up happening. Cause you're all a bunch of fucking yentas, you know? The story I used in this book is what I want to tell you, where I see us doing our thing. There was this thesis I had that because people were saying things on Twitter, you could know more about them, right? And because you knew more about them, you could do things. So I instilled my staff at Wine Library to literally look up every order of a new customer we ever got during this period where I was trying to get this case study and see if you could find them on Twitter. And it had to be like, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk was a good name because it was unique. No, Josh Smith. You can't be wrong. It's gotta be right. So they finally, finally, like, it's going, like, weeks and months, and, like, nothing's happening. My best friend runs the business at the time, so I talk to him every day. I'm like, brandon, where's my. Thank you. Economy thing? And finally, I'm boarding a plane to LA and I get a phone call from Brandon. He goes, we got something. I'm saying, so pumped. I was like, tell me. He's like, you're not gonna believe this. I was like, huh? So here's what happened. A gentleman from Chicago bought a case of Pinot Grigio that was like 200 bucks. Very inexpensive. I think we made, like, $8 on the order. I instilled and told the team to send that gentleman. They found him on Twitter, and his whole Twitter feed was, Jay Cutler. I love you, Jay Cutler. You're the best. Jay Cutler. You're gonna be the best quarterback in football. This was a Chicago Bears quarterback, some of you know, because he was married to Kristen the whole night. Jay Cutler. I tell the team to buy a $300 signed Jay Cutler jersey and send it to him in the mail and say thank you. $7 in profit, $300. Surprise and delight. Customer thing. Thinking that what would happen? Because I believe it, and we do this all the time in that company that that would make his appearance infinity high for us, and his LTV would be much greater. Brandon calls me, goes, you'll never believe what happened. I'm like, the Chicago guy bought, like, an expensive case of wine. He goes, nope. He goes, we just got a $4,000 burgundy order from Plano, Texas. I'm like, okay. He goes, I'm like, did the guy move? He goes, no, no, no. He goes, bear with me. I'm like, go ahead. He goes, wait till you hear this note in the customer notes field. Like, go ahead. He goes, hey, first of all, wine lovers, this is my first order. Your Burgundy prices are amazing. Do you have this Armand Rousseau, blah, blah, blah. Like, all this wine talk. And then he goes, P.S. i found out about your website from my friend in Chicago who you sent a Jay Cutler jersey to. Pss. I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, Eric. I think what can be done is we can do the things with AI that are gonna get commoditized, whether we like it or not. The things that you think are gonna be eaten up by your job that you used to do, we could see that as bad, or we could see that as remarkable, because you can now do things with your heart and brain instead of the mundane that was eating up the time. I believe the people in this room that get remarkably epic at the tool, understanding how to do it, to free up all the time, to use their heart and brain, will be the biggest winners in customer experience. Hello. How are you?
- [37:02]
B
How you doing, buddy?
- [37:03]
A
Oh, my God. How have you been?
- [37:05]
D
Good, good.
- [37:06]
A
It's been on a floor. Hi, Laura. We met on Twitter in 2007. I haven't seen you in forever. How you been, sir? Did she almost fall? Sorry about that.
- [37:19]
D
Gary loves to knock people over with love. I spend a lot of time thinking about people like your dad, okay?
- [37:26]
A
Right, Yep.
- [37:27]
D
How do we bring the non technical SMBs into AI? I convened a group in August in Boston. We have 59 restaurants represented. We're trying to tell these chefs, these, these owners, these operators, like, you can do this, you can do that. What would you say to that end of the market to help them get it?
- [37:47]
A
I mean, this is so nostalgic. We did this for Twitter, but we gotta do it for AI Now, I'll tell you what that, what I'm saying. And you're seeing what's happening here. Everyone, this is why. And even then, when we met, I'd already lived it in 96, 7, 8 with web, like, hey, stores and barbers, like, you need a website. They're like, I don't use a computer. Like, this is 96, 97, 98. Hey, you need social media, like, right? It's always the same game. What do I say? The same thing I said to you 16 years ago. We're not gonna do shit. The technology is gonna suffocate the society we, you and I, are good at for the last 20 years, helping some people take full advantage of the truth. But getting people that want to say no to say yes normally comes when pain hits. SMBs will be here at scale when someone else is beating up their business using AI. And finally they give up. We literally just played this movie out with social media. Nobody got inspired by me in stages. I mean our crew, the entrepreneurs, but the companies, especially the big companies, they shifted when pain came. And that's what's gonna happen here. Like you're gonna do what you do. Cause you're remarkable at it. And we do it from a good place. We're trying to bring value, historically correct. And you and I are gonna do exactly what we did for the last 20 years. We're gonna tell the truth. We're gonna tell it, we're gonna tell it. You try to say different stories, different analogies. You go to different, different events. You hope the way you communicate, you know, I know this about myself. For some people in this audience, I'm the perfect type of communicator. Other people are like, when's this guy done? You know, it's so. It's different styles make different fights. We just try. But the reality is, when are they really gonna do it? Pain. My question is, as software becomes commoditized. Commoditized. As an entrepreneur, if you futurist, what do you recommend? Brand. To continue to build market share and not market share. Brand. Every smart person that was around me, and again, back to when Laura and I were coming up, like, literally, you're talking about the founders of Instagram and Uber and Twitter, like having dinners with Zucks and like a point in my career 15 years ago, I'm literally around the people that have gone on to become the wealthiest and most impactful people in our society. And technology. And When I created VaynerMedia, my dream to build the biggest communication and branding company in the world, they all shit on me so heavy, right? Cause it wasn't tech, it wasn't scalable, it didn't have a big multiplier. And I took those insults from very fancy people because I am very good. There's so many things I'm bad at. The one thing I'm great at is holding my breath. I understood even then, not with the clarity that this is all brought out. But I remember in marketing land, big data was the most important term 10 years ago, six years ago, nine years ago. And I kept saying, everybody. I'm like, it feels quite commoditized because the IRS and Visa and Facebook and Google, you end up with 40 different sources that have all the damn data. I hope you all know that you have zero privacy. Meaning you have privacy, but like your information is known, all of you promise. So it felt commoditized and to your point, brother, it's crazy, man. You're a young dude, like the generation before you, like, tech was the moat. Tech is not the moat. And it's humbling. It's like, geez, right? Like it's intense. Like you're no bozo. Even the way you do. Just answer that question. You're smart enough to realize, man, like, if someone just thinks we're doing a good job or wants to attack us, it doesn't take a long time to get the product up to speed. There's other things that happen. But I believe we are entering the era where it's brand over everything because everything else is a commodity. And that's why I've been screaming about it. And that's why who here, by show of hands, has seen Star Wars? The movies? Raise your hands. This is the best analogy I have. Fifteen years ago, even though I had all these opportunities to be in that Silicon Valley game, I decided that I was the marketing emperor, you know, the emperor in Star wars, and that I needed to spend time building the Death Star. That I needed to build the biggest machine that could point at a non profit, a political campaign, and definitely brands and businesses and blow it up. And that's what I've spent my Time on. And I believe I'm entering the era where that work is about to get very important to everyone. Every single person here, both for their companies and their personal reputation. I know some people, I love when people are like, personal brand's such an icky term. I'm like, cool. Call it reputation. I think everyone is going to realize how important it is. So what would I think? I think you need to start taking some of the money you're making or the capital you're raising and deploy it to build a brand, to make people subconsciously think about it. And even with, you know, it's not lost on me that agents are going to be making buying decisions. And all this stuff that's coming, the one thing that will stop you or change, don't forget you're still in charge. And you can change the milk brand you've been buying. Even though your agent reorders it for you or the car, you will still have that control. Human self will will prevail. It will be there much will be passive because we don't all agree on all the same things. I want to show you something, my show of hands. How many people here really, really, really give a crap about which deodorant brand they use, like it really matters and who doesn't? And they could use a bunch of differents. If you really, really give a fuck, raise your hands, raise it high. First of all, let's clap it up for these pioneers. So for everyone who did not raise their hand, our agent reordering our deodorant for us and really our deodorant as an Internet of things having a chip in it and understanding when it's time to reorder. And reordering for us will become real and that will change marketing. But for the people that raise their hands, that's really gonna matter. But for us, it's not. And that's where this becomes a interesting around everything. What airline you fly, what you do. Like all of it. And it will be brand. That will be the battleground, my friend, for all of us. You mentioned two things. You said how important speed is. Yes. And you mentioned how you are the one that's writing your Instagram copy. Correct. So how do you figure out it's only 24 hours in the day? Don't be in the middle. It's literally the theme of this talk. I don't play in the middle. I scale things that I believe are truly important, not scalable. And then I go very fast. And what I've noticed now that I'VE at this point in my career been around a lot of great executives that work for me. Other executives. This is where a creative entrepreneurial type person plays a different. I basically think almost nothing matters and everybody I interact with thinks all those things. Things matter and then it becomes efficiency. Right. For example, I think one of the biggest issues in this room professionally just taking a sidetrack is everyone in here is in way too many meetings that mean absolutely nothing for too long. So we're not like and notice that reaction. Right? Everyone knows that there are many one hour meetings that, that are really a seven minute meeting. I just have seven minute meetings which then allows me to find time to do the things I prioritize. And again, this will make sense. It's prioritization. There are people here who have huge ambitions, but they will not miss a dance recital or a baseball practice or a dinner with. That's amazing. That is their other people are just as good human beings and family people. They're okay. It's their circumstances. I didn't even see my father until I was 14. He left this house before I got up and he came home after I went. So for me, I wasn't crippled to miss a kid's event because I have the greatest relationship with my father and I got nothing. So I wasn't scared to miss something. For other people, they have the greatest relationship with their father or mother. They miss nothing. They think they that's the key. And so they leaned into it and that's all allowed. And that's how I think about all of this. It's just prioritization. But it's being smart of understanding what means nothing. And I will tell you, most things mean nothing. The customer means everything. Huge mistake by so many people. The customer is everything. There is nothing else. You know what's. And there's only one thing more important than the customer. Your team. Everything else is fucking bullshit. So my question is, you said that you're really good at identifying trends that.
- [46:48]
D
Are here to stay.
- [46:49]
A
Can you talk us through how are.
- [46:52]
D
You like doing research or asking yourself.
- [46:54]
A
Several questions to identify what juices are worth it to squeeze? That's a great question. So one of the reasons I have a lot of good videos of being historically correct is I try not to guess. And I sit on things for a long time. So what I really do, pretty much all of my work is within social, you know, social. When Laura and I met, everybody said everything what they actually meant because nobody really quantified yet that everybody was watching. And I watched it from 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 start to bleed a little bit. And now it's not lost to anyone. What's happened over the last eight to 10 years. Politics, this, that it's different. And yet there's no source of truth in our society even remotely close to social. I keep laughing at politicians. Everyone's stunned. There's a shocker in this mayor election or president election or governor election. I'm like, not if you live on the Internet. If you watch fucking Fox News and CNN and read the Times and the Post post, you're stunned. But real life is on social. So what do I do? I live in feeds. Here's an example. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people in this room and this world blame the algorithm, it is the great cop out and non accountability of human society. I'm going to say this very feverishly. The algorithm is you. If you think China or Zucks or somebody else is feeding you, you're a fucking idiot. Let me teach you in one day how I can prove that to you when you leave here, whatever social network of choice you have. And by the way, this is dangerous waters I'm walking on because people are very collectively. It's not lost on me that 90% of the people right now have the opposite take. But I'm going to show you how right I am. I'm going to ask you to leave this talk, walk out there, go into Instagram or TikTok, because I know that's platforms of choice, but you can use any one you want and go to the search function. I want you to search rainbows and hit enter. When rainbows show up in search, I'd like you to like three of them. I'd like you to go back to search. I'd like you to search puppies. I'm being dead serious right now. I need you to like three or four of the puppy posts and I'd like you to comment on one of the puppy posts. I want you to then go back to search. I would like you to type in GaryVee. I would like you to like and comment a couple of that and search six to seven other random things. I would like you to then close your app and would like you to DM me tomorrow of what your feed looks like in the morning. My friends, the algorithms have exposed you, they haven't changed you. And so what I do is I watch Culture and I search lots of different things and I'm trying to figure out what's cool, what's not. I look at every data set, top podcasts, fastest growing influencers. I just read social at scale every moment I have and can. And then when something strikes my fancy I start to think. I used to think on flights and showers. Now I think with AI speeds up. My observation gets me deeper. I was a DNF student but I got as and Bs in history. So I use history to tell me the future and then I really battle test my thesises. I'll give you one right now. This might be a good side gig for some of you. Live social shopping so the QVCification of social media TikTok shop. Like in your feed on TikTok people are live and selling stuff, whatnot. If you know what that app is. If you're into sports cards and comic books. The QVCIFICATION of social media will be one of the biggest industries in our country over the next decade. Everyone here can start a side hustle and sell beanies and a coat sneakers. Literally have a garage sale of the stuff in your house and download whatnot or TikTok shop and start selling stuff. It is massive. I watched China do it for seven or eight years. Then I watched whatnot and TikTok shop for a year. Then I did it for my vee friends thing and stuff and then they showed. Then I started making videos. It's funny. I'm chaotic. High energy. I have my energy so I get that. People might think I'm loose or I'm fun. Ironically, I'm fucking measured 30 times cut once. Cause I don't want to be wrong. My currency is being right. But I'm fast, right? When I saw one labu vu 11 months ago, I'm like, this is some beanie Baby shit, right? I studied and so that's what I do. Thank you for having me. Have a great night. This is the GaryVee audio experience.