AI, Social Shopping, and the Future of Media | GaryVee Q&A with New York Post

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience.

0:30HSN are doing billions in revenue. I think retail is about to convert into QVC in a very big way. So there's billions of dollars of stuff being bought in America on QVC and Home Shopping Network. And as you know this, because you're in the media, we're just trying to figure out like what TV is going to look like. That's like the oldest school of TV. When I say that to people, they're like, what? And then they look it up. They're like, how is this possible? I couldn't implore all of you more to go look at what's going on on TikTok shop. There are people, I was in this room actually, a couple days ago last week, TikTok had an event here for 100 people that are doing live shopping at scale, making hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars a year in selling live on TikTok.

1:19Stuff. Hundreds in here. They knew everything. As a matter of fact, I was yelling right up there to all of them, like, please understand you're in your moment. You have to go hard right now because the masses don't know yet. And in three years, everyone's gonna know. And you're gonna be sad that you didn't go hard right now because this is your moment to land grab. It's like buying up real estate. Like, if you know Malibu's gonna be Malibu and you're just sitting there and the beachfront property's available for cheap, you were sad that you only bought one house instead of three. I think of attention the way I think about real estate.

1:52if you know you need to go all in. So they knew. They're already doing it. So I think live social shopping is gonna be a big deal. And so that's why I tend not to be surprised because I didn't want social shopping to happen. I've known about it for a long time because I pay attention to what goes on in China and social. But when it happened, I was prepared for it to happen. And then I knew that this now required me to spend 50 hours of really being deep so I could be the strategist of the death star and then pour it on everything and I think social shopping is gonna be a monster. What factors do you think have led to that?

2:33That the attention sits on social. I don't think people really understand how many hours of human attention social has compared to everybody else. I think people are holding on and don't want it to be that. I think most people make emotional decisions. sometimes they make a decision based on where they make their money. Right? Like if you're a hamburger joint and all of a sudden 50 years ago, everybody falls in love with hot dogs, but you were the hamburger king, instead of what I would do, which is like add hot dogs to your menu, most people just keep trying to tell you why hot dogs are a fad.

3:10Yeah, you try and dig in your heels. That's right. That's what humans do. And the ones that don't tend to do quite well commercially. I don't care what consumers care about. I just care to know it as quickly as possible and figure out what I'm gonna do with it. So today, actually, someone sent me a new Google AI program where you can upload an article. Yes. And it turns it into a 15, 20, however long podcast you want it to become. Yes. And that was so wild because it was such an impressive, interesting podcast that I enjoyed listening to. Yes. I'm sure you're familiar with that. That just struck me, though, is the most recent example of how AI could essentially replace so many creators.

3:52What is your take on that and other AI? There's a lot to that. AI replacing creators. So the podcaster that that would replace also replaced a drive-time radio host or a midday TV host. the midday TV host and the radio host potentially replaced the network TV personality because cable came along and that became you go further back there was no television and when television came along that replaced the radio man or the print and so like these things have been flow like at the end of the day someone still wrote that article yeah so the way my brain goes is that just sounds like actually the people that were sad 10 years ago, you know, the people that wrote articles because they were getting replaced by podcaster.

4:44It just sounded like the person that writes articles is now back in the game. This is the thing with AI. It's kind of like the tractor. When the tractor came out, there was a lot of conversation in society many, many years ago that this was bad because 83 % of people in the world worked on farms. What people didn't understand was the tractor was gonna allow people to do bigger and better things. this hysteria at worst or curiosity at best of what is this going to mean is this bad are people going to be replaced the answer is yes ish you know don't forget somebody that feels like they're about to get replaced by ai to make creative works in photoshop the people that got good at photoshop replaced the people that used to draw on paper but the person that drew on paper was allowed to learn Photoshop.

5:33And so this concept that robots are going to replace everyone here, that also could be in play. But the current state of what AI tools are being built and what they're going to do is they're going to rejigger the field much more than they're just going to outright replace everyone. Everyone's going to be looking at each other and we have a major problem. Could there be certain things? Of course there can. When Amazon innovated, that really hurt local bookstore owners. When Uber came along, that changed the game for people that own medallions in New York City, right? There will be certain things that happen that are really a big deal.

6:06But that's just the ebb and flow of everything. I mean, when supermarkets came along, they disrupted local markets in Main Street. And then you had Walmart come and disrupt the Kmarts and the ShopRites. Like, stuff's always changing. Creative destruction, yeah. It's what humans do. It's how the game is played. And so, the question becomes, the real question is, are you gonna grab a surfboard and ride this wave or are you gonna put your head in the sand and let the surf, the wave kill you? And so I think it's pretty amazing because I think people are much more capable than they sometimes think of themselves.

6:42And I hope people see the AI thing as an opportunity versus the end. So what is the surfboard in this scenario? How do you ride the AI wave as a creator or as anyone? By creating your own AI libraries, by using the products to be more efficient. like today there are people right this second as we're filming this who are being paid as a designer and they're being paid in their normal rate and the client on the other side is accustomed to them needing four hours to make something and they're paying them that way that person is capable as a creator to actually learn and use ai and get it done in seven minutes and then you know get the same fee for at least now until the market adjusts yeah and then spend three hours and 53 three minutes with their family or get 70 more clients.

7:29Like the answer is to weaponize the opportunity instead of crying about it. 15 years ago, I was doing this same interview about social media and that people were saying what was gonna be good about it and bad about it. And what transpired over the last 15 years was either people used it for whatever they were trying to achieve or they made fun of it and got disrupted by people that used it to achieve what they achieved. I just think that's what's gonna happen here. Okay, okay. What ways has AI already changed what you're doing? Would you see using that tool for yourself? Yeah, I'm, so what's interesting.

8:04What's interesting? A digital podcast, what you're doing now? Yeah, I mean, those are all things we're looking at for sure. But I'll give you one that's maybe kind of more interesting and might bring value to the other people on the other side. I, to a lot of people, seem like I'm always talking because I do a lot of stuff like this and I make a lot of content. You can't post a video where you're just silent either. No. Though, by the way, silent content does extremely well on TikTok. The most followed person on TikTok in the world doesn't talk. Kamile does like, so silent ironically works because it goes to every language.

8:35So there's actually some value in not talking and social media content. I did not know that. But that was a very nerdy fact, but I figured I'd throw it out there. Pretty cool, right? Probably make a lot of money. So I am seemingly talking all the time. In reality, the reason I produce so much content is a lot of what I do is actually listen. So I do a lot of consumer insight work. So I'm constantly, I mean, just at scale, thinking, pondering different things. Why have corduroyed hats come into style? What is going on with this food trend? Politics, sport, like literally I'm just curious why. You know, why are hats being worn more than they were 10 years ago, but then you go back 20 years it was?

9:16Hoodies, again, food trends, movies. Why is the rabbi show on Netflix doing so well? What's the deeper meaning of that relationship? Why, why, why? So I have for the last 15 years spent a lot of time reading Twitter, reading social and using Google. AI is saving me a ton of time of thinking. My co-pilot in thinking now is chat, GBT, perplexing. I can ask much more distinct questions, prompt engineering. so I can ask a much more detailed question off the election the other day. It would have taken me longer to figure out when's the last time we've gone back to back with four years, four years, four years not involving Nixon, Ford.

10:04But it took me a second in asking it directly to chat GPT back in the late 1800s with Cleveland and all that. That would have taken me four minutes, I think, on Google. that's a wildly big deal to get to have something that i really needed to know used to take me four minutes that took me 15 seconds that adds up a bunch of times that's just information search can do that what search doesn't do as well as what ai will do in this scenario is when i go very detailed of here's an example hey chat gpt every parent right now is freaking about the phone because they don't like their kids don't make eye contact.

10:45I am aware that the kaleidoscope had that same issue in the late 1800s. Can you give me the articles or the information that changed the trend where people realized that that is literally something I did? That is not something I can do in Google search to get me something good. So currently the way AI has changed my life is it is now my co-pilot. It is my partner in my strategy anthropology work and I'm even sharper and more effective with clearer data and faster than I was a year ago. Wow. That's pretty compelling. Cool, right? I'm inspired. It's cool, right? Totally. For you especially, it's monstrous.

11:22Yeah. Like you could literally on election night you're doing your thing literally during commercial break I don't know without Amazon I don't know how the stream was but you literally could be like what's the historical reference when I that is wild. It's like a research assistant that you would normally have. That's better than and the best research kids right now, that like whoever the 25 best research kids that came out of the best schools, and they are the ones, they can't beat you saying, these are just insanely deep questions. Give me a historical reference when Iowa went Republican after my board, like you know, like you can't do that.

11:57You know, I love, yes, I'm in the wine business in my family, like Sancerre is exploding. On the back of Rosé, When's the last time that white wine and rosé had, these are questions you can't ask anyone. And it's popping out. Like in the late 1940s in London, the Grenache rosés got hot that led to Bordeaux white. Like it's insane. And it's just starting. Like a lot of times I just said a bunch of nerdy stuff. Sometimes it doesn't deliver. Because you can see what I'm doing just for everybody behind camera and everybody on camera. I'm doing prompt engineering. If you go back 20 years ago, if you go back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, there's a lot of kids in the room right now.

12:37But brother, remember when we had to learn? Remember when we had to learn how to use a search engine? Like I didn't know. Like when I first saw a search engine, my only context before was the yellow pages in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Like typing in like wine regions, enter. And you're like, what is, you know, again, this may sound silly to people under 35, but for everybody over 45, they might remember it took us a minute to like know how to use it. Again, why I love doing stuff like this, whether it's just with you or the people in the room or all the people watching at home, I'm excited that I know somebody was like, oh, wait a minute, I can use it like that?

13:16And if you're like me and you use history to predict the future and you use pattern recognition, I mean, there's not been a better tool ever created. So I'm very excited about it. Okay, I love that. I love to hear a little bit more optimism about AI because you're right, there's been so much fear around it. Anytime there's something foreign, people react and they worry it's gonna take a job. I mean, look, we, even going back 25 years ago, anything new is always met with, and when the iPhone came out, every BlackBerry head was like, no way. And I was like, you will all be on iPhones. It's the internet in your pocket.

13:51Now we live in a world, as you know, there's just much more, fear is a very popular currency right now. so you take the overarching thing that's going on society and you plug it into new technology which is always demonized and feared and you have what we have right now with ai there are these waves and people get really exuberant about it and you know they always say too you know technology is um overestimated in the short term underestimated in the long term there's but you know you're talking about it's ai this year so how do you think about capitalizing on something you see that time that you don't go overboard?

14:25Well, first of all, that's a great question. That's just good investing advice. First of all, please, if you're watching, please do not invest in high-risk assets with money that you cannot afford to lose. That's real estate, that's art, that's startups, that's your buddy's barber shop that is likely not gonna work out. Like, you know, what happened three, four years ago was greed just ate up the oxygen. and it reminded me of internet stocks 2000. And pets.com was worth$6 billion. It had no revenue. But they were right. The internet was gonna be big. And by the way, in there, Amazon and PayPal and eBay, if you bought those for$3 a share in 2000 before all the splits and everything, you did really well.

15:11And in the height of NFT summer, I made videos that were 99 % of these things are going to zero. But people didn't want to hear it because they were in euphoria. Now, Bitcoin sits in a place by its own. Bitcoin is literally out there as a potential monetary thing that we have not seen since the American dollar. It's wild. Like, since gold. Like, if enough people tip and believe in it, it's just because it becomes. It's how the world works with money. You just have to look at history. The way things get value is everyone agrees. And so Bitcoin, you know, when we say crypto, there's a lot going on.

15:50Bitcoin sits over here by itself. NFTs are non-fungible tokens. They're contracts that you can't fuck with. They can't burn down in a building. They can't disappear off the face of the earth if a country disappeared. You know, when the Bolsheviks came in 1917 and took over the USSR, my great-grandmother used to tell me this story all the time. Her grandparents had a fucking 500-acre farm that was taken by the Bolsheviks and it was gone. Wow. If that deed sat on the blockchain, my great-grandkids could take claim to that land one day. That's not how it worked. So the blockchain's incredible, and NFTs are incredible.

16:29The NFTs that everybody knows were only about collectibles and art. That's only 1 % of it. And just like collectibles, 99 % of sports cards are worthless. Michael Jordan's rookie card is worth a lot. So people were just confused. It was COVID. There was greed. There was a lot of muckery. But look, I think the blockchain, let me take it up a level. Forget about crypto, the blockchain. A decentralized server. These are servers that not a company like Facebook and Google or even a country like America, Russia or China can control. It becomes a ledger. When you buy a house, you get a deed. The ledger, this is a ledger that is built on technology that nobody can fuck with.

17:14It is a profound technology. It's just early. And so I think when we look back in 30 years, we'll laugh about and cry and judge around all the different behaviors. But I think the blockchain is profound. And I think currency on it is seemingly one of the early use cases. I do think assets, digital assets, will also find their way there. But when people were like, Gary, this is so stupid. Like that's money. like I want my I want to have my money and I was like where's your money I'm like where's your money right now and and this is why people don't study history enough a great thing you can ask your chat GPT is tell me the history of the credit card because I promise you these credit cards I'll pull one out for fun these credit cards were super not accepted huh in 1964 when I said that's my money in 1964, everybody laughed at me and every alpha dude was like, I'm never going to give the fucking government access to my information.

18:18I need my cash. People don't get it. Technology is undefeated. Reading your bio, it's a little overwhelming. Think about you have your hand in so many different pies. Yes. But when you talk about it, it does seem like it's all interrelated. And so in a way, when you're thinking about consumers that has myriad applications, that has applications for content, investing. Tell me more about how you started layering on the - It's a really good observation. It's why the marketing company is the center. It's the operating system. If VaynerX is the best at understanding consumers and knowing how to make music, make videos, make pictures, make content, and how to spend media to amplify it, if it is the best global company in the world at that, and I've always thought about Vayner as like a death star.

19:04Like if I'm a little bit of a Star Wars nerd, I was like, I don't know what that means. It's a Star Wars term. The emperor, the bad guy, which I'd rather think of a good guy, but nonetheless, he had this thing called the Death Star and like it was so powerful it could like shoot a planet and blow up the whole planet. Very sci-fi. But really it was just this most powerful thing and to me 15 years ago, what became very clear to me was whoever can communicate in a contemporary way of the moment at scale was the winner. Yeah. A lot of what happens in politics and in business and in pop culture has played out the way I thought it might.

19:43So I went about building an operating system for it. My operating system was I will build a human infrastructure, not a technology, not a SaaS product, not a social network. I know me. I like humans. I like team. I knew that that's what I could build. I'm gonna build a human infrastructure of the best practitioners in being the best contemporary marketers. How does that show up? It shows up with, then I'm able to then deploy that against, do you know Resi, the restaurant app? Yes, of course. I incubated that with the founder, Ben Leventhal, inside the Vayner machine. I started a direct-to-consumer wine brand called Empathy Wines.

20:20That was done by people that were trained at Vayner, and then that was a very big exit. VeeFriends, my Pokemon that I'm building, it comes from the essence of this. my personal brand. Yeah. Built from the essence of this. Also, it built this. And so, now I sit in a place where no matter what I do, my pickleball team, right? My investments. No matter what I do, I have an infrastructure that can create demand. Most things fail because they can't create demand. Or they're created in a vacuum, like Quibi. Where it's like all these people sitting in an ivory tower who think, oh, this is a great idea and they don't actually test it in a way.

20:59So you're able to sort of test things in real time. Yeah, I mean, Quibi's just like, that was funny you brought that up. Quibi was, I'll never forget the first time I was pitched it. I was, it was done and I was like, you mean YouTube? Like they weren't solving a problem. Okay. Quibi got caught in thinking that there was something in this short form video that was worth it. But the reality was they didn't recognize that you, it's kind of like dating apps. Dating apps are like, oh, I'm competing. I'm gonna go after Tinder. I'm like, what about Instagram DM? They're like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, where do you think dating is actually happening?

21:32Sometimes things are happening that you can't see because a product that isn't seemingly doing the thing is actually doing the thing. It's not legal. Right. Quibi thought they were competing with Netflix. Huh. Quibi was competing with something that was doing it better than they were doing it for free with no cost to them. Yo, everybody, thank you so much. Just jumping in real quick in the middle of this podcast. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. It would mean the world to me if you could leave a review for this episode. And I'm gonna get you back to your pod right now because you don't need me talking about that.

22:02But I realize I'm lagging on getting the support of my podcast listeners. So reviewing this episode and overall would mean the world to me. Five star, four star, three star, fuck it, two star, one star. Honest feedback's fine. All right, back to the show. Why do you think YouTube was a competitor rather than Netflix? Because the concept of short form, high quality videos that are five to seven minutes long is what YouTube is. It's a lot of other things, but many of the shows that Quibi tried to do are the shows that Mr. Beast and the other great creators do for free on YouTube. I see. And do it better.

22:34Okay. And oh, by the way, YouTube doesn't pay Mr. Beast's production fees to do it. He gets subsidized by the advertising infrastructure because they're a platform. So nonetheless, yeah. You mentioned Rezi, which is interesting because when we were thinking about what we wanted to ask you for this interview, you've gotten in a lot of already very saturated spaces which is interesting so resi came after open table and seemingly a lot of people look at that and say oh well there's already an existing service that does this how could i possibly compete even with the club space we're in fly fish right now um which is gorgeous i was here a couple weeks ago and it was jammed yeah and obviously there's already a lot of clubs in new york good ones so how do you think about competing how do you decide which space to compete in and how do you get a toehold in such a saturated space?

23:29I believe the world is abundant. I think this is one of the great mistakes that people make in life. Nobody's winning is coming out of yours if you're good enough. So when I think about what's happened with Nike, look what's going on with footwear. like there was room for two new monster running shoes when seemingly it was nike right like i think there's unlimited examples of dominant players and then being more room i mean there was burger king mcdonald's wendy's and then shake shack's like we can do this now they slightly elevated but it was still burgers and fries totally right so like everyone here has seen something come along that is a cooler, better version of what seemingly is dominant.

24:20So one, I just think that if you're good enough, there's always an opportunity for you to come in. Literally nothing scares me. Walmart doesn't scare me. Amazon doesn't scare me. Tesla doesn't scare me. Apple definitely doesn't scare me. Like nothing's scary if you're good enough. That's one. As far as choosing, in both scenarios of Resi and Fly Fish Club, it was actually the passions, the deep passions of my partners that were a big part of it. Ben Leventhal, who, by the way, I talk about incubating at Vayner, but let there be no confusion. I'm not interested in being like BJ Armstrong. I'm not taking credit for championships I didn't build.

24:56I was a factor in Resi, but he was the driver. In Fly Fish, Chef Capon, Chef Connor, David Rodolitz, they're the active operating partners. They are restaurateurs. The timing with Fly Fish, look, ZZ's is incredible. Zero Bond is incredible. Cipriani is incredible. But this is New York City. Like honestly, a lot of them will fail, right? The ones I haven't mentioned are probably a little more vulnerable. Mentioning, yep. And are a little more vulnerable, potentially. That's subjective opinion. I've been wrong plenty of times. But I think there will be, like if you were like predict, then I'd be guessing this is not something.

25:34But this is a humongous, this is New York City. This place can handle 12 to 12. I mean, London is a private club market. I'm not educated on this, but I'm sure there's many, many private clubs in London that are doing well. So the other thing I think about is how big is an addressable market? I have a funny feeling that New York will have 20 successful private clubs in five years. I think so. I think so. I think in general, humans, there's just a lot to it. First of all, in a private club business model, because of the membership fees, you can really over deliver an experience. It's a different business model.

26:12Well, one would hope for paying that kind of money. That's exactly right. That's why when I look at this place, like I was blown away and then I had to remind myself, well, of course, like it should be better than like a place you don't pay a membership for, right? Yeah. Two, it's always high school. This is something people have to learn. Friends, it's always high school. Even if you go to a retirement home, it's fucking high school. It's always high school. And in high school, people wanna have, they wanna be cooler. They want to feel like they're better than. It's human psychology. And, you know, I think club culture will help people scratch that itch.