No More Excuses: The Playbook for the Next 5 Years | GaryVee Aspire Q&A

0:00On today's episode of the Gary V Audio Experience, we're sharing Gary's full keynote and Q &A from the Aspire event in Florida, a major gathering of ambitious entrepreneurs, real estate pros and business, all focused on the Gary V. Gary sits down with Andrew Cordell, founder of the Aspire Tour, and they discuss the importance of AI in 2025, why live social shopping has already blown up and you haven't even noticed yet, and how to reprogram your mindset by changing your social feed. This conversation starts off with Andrew saying he has a bone to pick with Gary, about a conversation they had earlier in the year.

0:33Let's dive right in and hear what Andrew has to say. I got a little bit of a bone to pick with you. Please. Okay, we're going to pick a bone. Okay. Okay, so about maybe seven months ago, you were at an event. Me and you were backstage. I was talking to you. I said, okay, Gary, you see what we do? It's like your second or third event. I was like, what piece of advice would you give me of what we could do for marketing? Different we are now. I don't know if you remember this yet or not. And you thought there for a second, about like that. You're like, hmm. And you said, I tell you what I would do.

1:03I would take part of your marketing budget, and I would, instead of running ads, I would hire a full-time TikTok-only person. And you said, all I would have that guy or girl do is just TikTok, TikTok, TikTok. And you said, you don't understand. You're like, you have no idea what would go viral. Like, the thing you think will go viral won't. And this stupid shit of like, it's Magic Johnson dropping a cup goes viral. Remember this horrible story you told me? So I did that shit. Okay. Okay. The dude's right here. We hired him from California. He moved to Florida to do TikToks. Okay. We're gonna fire him today.

1:39Now listen. I need you to fire him. So check this out, bro. So he's a great, he's doing great. And we've had some, it's shoved, hit, bang, bang, whatever. He does a spire. He's doing something for me. Listen to this, bro.

1:55He had this video they wanted to shoot. I shoot this video for him. Four days ago, this fucking thing, it finally hit. 2.2 million views, like 200 ,000 comments on this one stupid ass TikTok video that we shot. Then, then People Magazine reached out and said, we're going to do an interview. Newsweek reached out, we're going to do an interview. Today Show reached out and said, we're going to do an interview inside of this. so my issue is I should have done this like 20 years ago where the fuck were you 20 years ago in my life because that's all free like you know how hard it is to get on people to get interviewed for that shit and it worked it fucking worked bro yeah I mean look I think for everyone here I need to say this very clearly this era that we're in right now where you can post something on a social network and it's free.

3:05I just need everyone to wrap their head around what I'm saying here. It's free when you post it. Of course you can run ads, but the story he's telling right now, it's free. This era that we're in is going to go away. And everybody here who's been listening, you know, when you just said, where were you? I was fucking here. You were there. I don't know what the fuck you were doing, But I think a lot of people know I've been on this shit for 20 years. And I've been very consistent. I wrote Crush It! in 2008. Right? It came out in 2009. We're talking about 17 years ago. Wow. I've been, you know, if that made some of you feel old, trust me, I get it.

3:46So I've been here. This era will go away. The phone that a lot of you are holding right now is going to look ancient in a decade. We are literally within the decade of glasses or something else circumventing the phone. Once the phone does not become the primary device, the social networks and the feeds don't work the same. When the printing press was the most important, the people that wrote books and newspapers won. When the radio became the most important, the people that spoke in it and were listened to became the device. Then a television came along and completely changed our society. This social network moment is incredibly important for us.

4:32Unlike every other medium, there were gatekeepers and very heavy expenses to have big moments. Now all of us with our phone in there for free can change the course of our life, our business, our passions. You know, I could literally end this talk right now on this rant. And I mean this from the bottom of my heart. The only agenda I have to get across to everybody here, regardless if you're the biggest fan of me and have consumed me for 15 years, or you have no idea who I am right now as you sit here, is for all of you to understand how significant the opportunity is in front of us to take advantage of the last five or six years of this window that has created a level of democracy and meritocracy around opportunity that has never in the history of the world been accessible to a human being.

5:31I could not implore you, and for most of you, if not all of you, social has been around for long enough that you're taking it for granted. You're taking it for granted and just like what you just felt, a lot of you've been posting for a long time and the thing hasn't happened. And that's because you just might suck at it. But what's cool about being sucky at something is all of you sucked at walking. Like you couldn't walk and then you learned. And so the reason I've been doing what I'm doing and continue to be passionate about this is I know that once people in this audience get over their insecurities of worrying about people leaving negative comments or being insecure that they only get seven views and they think that that's bad or all the normal things that humans go through in their journey of getting to actual self-esteem and comfort and self-love, once they get over that hump, which more than half of this room has not gotten over yet, then you get into the second part, which is the tactics.

6:43The reason I wrote my last book, Day Trading Attention, was I went very deep into the tactics. Thank you. And so, you know, look, I really don't know how else to say this other than if you do not attack the free social network, and I mean all of them. Another issue here is for some of the people that are winning, they're only winning on TikTok or Instagram. And I will tell you right now, the most important platform for me of the last month for me and my team is Facebook proper. Classic Facebook. So I think most people here are not on enough platforms. And definitely most people here don't take the thumbnail, the first three seconds, the copy, the strategies, the real skills of actually getting your video to get 500 ,000 views instead of 49.

7:37but all roads politically, socially, and definitely in business and marketing, all roads, what's today's date? The 13th, 17th, what's the date? 12th, 12th. All roads on March 12th, 2025 lead to social media organic content. Organic, not paid. All roads lead there and regardless of what you want to accomplish in this room, Every person sells something, get clients, become famous, or something much more noble. Raise a couple bucks for your PTA, win local office because you want to fix the pothole on Main Street, be a better father or mother. All roads lead to this distribution platform, and I could not implore all of you to get more fucking serious about it.

8:30Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so you just said something that's very unique. So obviously platforms have been around for, we're coming on 20, 25 years. They've really been around. You just said that in the last, let's say the next, you know, the next crystal ball, but within 10 years that you think this whole thing is going to change on its face basically. I do. So we're on the, you're saying we're on the back half and on the way down of the hill on social media. Not the growth of it, but it going away and changing something else. Look, I get a lot of credit for predicting things. I don't predict things.

9:08I just am always on it, and then I talk about it. For example, right now, how many people here sell something physical? Can you make some noise? Just make some noise so I can send? So every person that raised their hand and made some noise, every one of them should be paying attention to live social shopping. TikTok shop, whatnot, Fanatics Live, eBay Live. Like that is not me predicting. Whatnot's doing 3 billion in gross sales on the platform. Most people here have no idea who the fuck whatnot or whatnot is. 3 billion. So I'm not predicting that live social shopping is happening. It's already happened.

9:49It's been happened in China for 10 years. And whether you sell t-shirts or vitamins or bikinis or sneakers or banana chips, you should be really focusing on live social shopping because it's the next frontier of opportunity over the next 36 to 48 months and first mover advantage really matters. I can promise you, like you, a lot of people here wish they got more serious about TikTok when I was yelling at the top of my lungs in 2017, I'm sure of it. I don't like to predict, I like to move fast when shit's happening. But it is very clear to me that Meta, Facebook Inc., has a major agenda to get us off the phone and onto their device.

10:34And they are hot committed to these glasses. I also have the luxury to have witnessed future forms of the glasses by going out there and playing with it. It is very clear to me that whether it's them or Apple or Google or Microsoft or a Chinese company that we are only going in one direction in technology. Innovation continues to happen. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about how AI might hurt you. Let me just remind you, technology is undefeated. It's undefeated. When the car was being made, the guy that owned 30 ,000 horses made fun of the car and said it wouldn't work. not because he was dumb but because he had financial vested interest in the car not winning a lot of people here are making decisions about things because it isn't what they want to be happening the only reason I think I've been successful in business is I know that business doesn't give a fuck about my feelings zero concern so I don't want to predict but I think it's unlikely that in 10 years that the mobile device, the way we know it, is as primary as it is right this nanosecond.

11:54And if that's true, the way social plays is going to be different. And that's where AR and VR and other things that are looming that we've heard about for a long time start to become serious. So yeah, I mean, I guess for me, none of us know, but what we all know is that every day businesses and humans are going viral at scale and it's changing their outcomes. Or if you don't even go viral, if you're just good at it, your business or your financial impact goes up by 20 or 30 % because you're good at it and that's good too. So I just want people to take it more serious. When I was watching recently a video you were making on content, imagine that, and you talked about something that I said, man, I want to ask you about this.

12:43You were talking about, you were having a conversation about AI. Yes. And you said people are going to regret not building their brand as AI is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And you were tying AI and what it's going to do into you needing to make sure you have built your brand. What's the connection between those two? The connection there is AI is – I'm going to stand up for this because I got excited.

13:11AI is so fucking big that it's like almost hard to like break it down. Like, whatever the fuck you think it is, it's crazier. The speed in which AI is gonna really affect our lives is substantial, let me give you an example. AI getting really strong and voice devices are gonna really confuse people. For example, the Alexa in your home, and I know a lot of people like shut it off because when it gets spying on me, I'm like that's fine. Like Jeff Bezos doesn't give that much fucks about you, by the way. But I think that when you come home, and this is the world I see, when you walk into your kitchen and you're like, Alexa, my son is having a sleepover tonight.

13:58Three friends are coming over. One's lactose intolerant, one's gluten free. Two of them love spicy food and one kid is Persian and I'd love for him to feel at home. Can you please order dinner for all of us? We're gonna eat at 7.30 tonight. Thanks. when that then takes that and orders from four different places and delivers you a perfect meal in what I just said, for real, you have to understand, then in that scenario, Amazon has all the leverage because it's going to decide where that sale is going to go. That's called not having brand. Alexa, can you send me a pizza tonight? I have 20 people over.

14:41That's different than Alexa, send me Pizza Hut tonight. I've got 20 people. Got it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are going into a place where all that's been happening over the last forever but accelerating the last 30, 40 years is we choose convenience over everything. There are people here that are fucking broke ordering fucking$28 bagels on fucking Seamless. Right. That's how much we give a shit about convenience. even when we can't afford stuff, we'll pay for time. AI is going to make everything convenient. You're going to have AI agents shop for you in the background. Like you have no idea how big this is going to be.

15:23And so if you're not a brand, the human is not going to choose you. You're going to choose it generically. You're going to talk and make decisions based on general principles. I need sneakers versus I need Reeboks. I need pizza versus Pizza Hut. I need business advice versus I need business advice from Gary Vee. Brand is the only thing left in a world of technology at scale. And that's what's going to happen. Wow. So in that example there, what you're saying is because when you hit that example of AI, if they don't know your brand, you're basically leaving it up to whoever, let's example, Amazon, to decide where that comes from.

16:04Whoever sits in the middle, whoever's the toll booth wins, right? Seamless comes in and now it has leverage. Uber Eats has leverage. You're not ordering direct from the restaurant because we all remember, if you're over 40, you remember like literally having a menu in your fucking kitchen drawer, getting the phone number, calling the fucking place. Kids, it was wild. Now we love an Uber Eats or a Seamless that's so much faster. That's gonna feel in 15 years the way it felt to call a restaurant and stay on hold because AI is going to do it for you in a way that's good. We're going to be so connected.

16:45You're going to be wearing devices of your health. The fucking device is going to order you food based on how you're feeling that minute. Friends, you're fucking robots. You just don't realize it yet. I'm being dead serious, brother. In 15 years, I believe most of us will be wearing some form of health device and that device is gonna order us dinner, not us. And we're gonna love it. Wow. So what happens in that sense? You're not making the fucking choice. You're not deciding to go to fucking Luigi's tonight and get pasta. But if you love Luigi's enough or you give a fuck enough, you will override.

17:25We still are not like completely helpless to this technology. But I don't think people realize how few things they give a shit about. and that is going to play out, and that is where all the opportunity and all the vulnerability is, as all of you game plan for the next 10 years. So on that note, I mean, the crowd is like dead silence. Well, people are like, fuck, what the fuck? They're like, Gary, are the robots gonna kill my kids? Yeah, motherfucker. You better be ready. So in that example there, can you bring it a little bit into what someone should be doing then whether this is 5 years off, 10 years off I'm sick and tired of you fucking being right and me like I don't fucking know maybe and then I'm getting my ass handed to me 5 years later on some shit it's a big deal let me give you an example who's in real estate here?

18:25Hans? Have you guys seen what happened to the company in Portugal that created an AI bot and did 100 million in sales? Anybody aware of that? Make some noise. Yeah. Wow. Exactly. Wow. My friends, this isn't coming. This is here. Yeah. I really need you. Listen, this is super important. We are, by nature as humans, hypocrites. You're going to go home tonight and scold your children about get educated. It's important to have knowledge. This and the other thing. And meanwhile, this AI thing is happening and you're putting your head in the sand. What should everyone do tonight? They should go home and start the journey of spending 50 to 100 hours of research time on what's going on in AI and what does it mean for their business.

19:14And how do you do that? You do that by actually using AI. Download ChatGPT and be like, ChatGPT, what does AI mean to real estate? You know, like we've got to put in the work. This is coming and it's coming fast and it's disrupting everything. and it's just gonna be the same old movie. Some people here are winning on social, but they don't wanna learn a whole new thing like AI. Again, this is just the way it is, and so I think people are very naive to what's going on out there. Let me give you another one. Everybody now wants to be a fucking influencer, right? Well, bad news. Virtual influencers are coming, and they're gonna win.

19:53There's a lot of people here already following someone who's not actually a human being. They don't even realize it. That's how good the tech is. I've dated seven of them online. It's like, wait, you're not real? And by the way, on that joke, in Japan, this is very advanced. VTubers, there are people in Japan that are married to virtual people. Married. Forget about getting tricked and it's like an only dance thing. No, no, no. All the way. I am married to a person that doesn't exist. Most of the people in this room will have a grandchild who will date a non-human. Thank you. See you next time.

20:34But you know what's funny about that moment? Like when you're like, you know what my favorite moment is when I say something like that? Right now, so many people in the audience were like, no way, Gary, no. And then I remind them that you do understand that if we went to your great-great-grandparents grave right now because there's some new technology and we can rebirth them by putting a little pill in it and sprayed the fucking thing and they popped up. And let's say that existed. If we all went to our great, great grandparents' grave right now, sprayed it, they popped up, they're alive, they would fucking want to go back into the ground.

21:10Because the shit that we're living blows their mind. Listen, I was an atrocious student, but I was good at history. And I never understood why I liked it until I got older where I realized how much I rely on it. to make my decisions. The reason I end up being right when I do predict-ish is because I ground myself in history. Let me give you an example. I know a lot of you don't know this, but it would help you understand why I see the world the way I do. When electricity was invented, do you know that most people were scared to put it into their home and continue to use candles because the word on the street was there were demons in the electricity?

21:53and do i have to remind some of the 40 and over crowd here who said they would never give up their blackberry because it had buttons on it that one hurt that one stung i did that one and and again over 40 year old crowd let these 20 year olds know the stigma of online dating in 2003 4 5 6 people met on match.com and lied how they met because it was so embarrassing now it's the only way people do it. My friends, shit changes whether you like it or not. And when I think about coming to things like this, I always think about like, how do I bring value? Like why do people want to continue to listen to me?

22:36People paid, people stayed to the end. How do I bring value? If I can bring you any value, it's that if you say the word no in business, you're already in trouble. The only word, if you're a no person, that you're allowed to change that to is maybe. Because so many of you are going to lose or limit your upside because you're addicted to the word no. And that is the most dangerous word in business. with technology, you must, with consumer trends, with the way the world moves, you must be committed to maybe. Not yes, that's where you get in trouble the other way too. You get too ahead of yourselves and no has value in other places, protecting your time, keeping you away from things.

23:31But when it comes to what's happening in the world, you can't use no and so many of you love to use excuses to not do new shit you know what was the big one last year two years ago everyone's like oh gary tiktok i can't do it fucking china yeah china you know people love to do some usa american fucking pride to disguise you're fucking lazy yeah it's a crutch yeah that's a true american trait right now we're lazy yeah we're fucking soft because we've had too much prosperity. You must go do your 50 to 100 hours of AI research or it will fuck you.

24:23Maybe think of this. I was interviewing Mark Cuban a while back and I was in Dallas and I asked about AI. He said, what's your thoughts on AI? And his answer was, he's like, how often do you use apps on a daily basis? And if you stop and think about it, it's like nonstop. You're constantly, when you open your phone, it then goes to an app immediately, right? And his answer was, he said, as much as you use an app on a daily basis of your life, AI is 10 times more powerful and will be bigger than all those apps combined. That was his viewpoint of AI. I'm sure he knows this, you know, it's 10 ,000 times.

25:00It's not 10. This is really big. Again, bringing it, we've gone pretty high level here today on the first couple things.

25:10If you decided to come to this, this is a good place to go. If you're here, my brain goes to like, what the fuck are you doing here? Yeah. Right? And where that goes next is, this is a room full of people who are hungry and ambitious to do something. Right? Like, you decided to fucking come. Like, I don't know. I don't, I mean, you didn't come here to fucking sit in dark and just hang out. Like, you fucking came because you're trying to make something happen, I assume. Yeah. What bothers me about something like that is just coming to consume this information isn't doing anything. Yes. Yeah. You could have laid in bed.

25:50Yep. Get it on YouTube. And consumed. please act. Please act. And so very simply, I'm going to make this simple. This is like a foolproof formula in my opinion. Pretty basic. And guess what? The cost of it is free 99. What I'm about to tell you is free. But you have to do something. Number one, you must have a comprehensive plan on making content for social networks. There's seven of them. There's LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts. Not just TikTok and Instagram, Facebook regular is exploding again. There's Twitter, it fucking matters. And number two, you must do 50 to 100 hours of research on AI, you must touch it.

26:35If you do not have chat GPT on your phone right now, the fuck are you doing? The fuck are you doing? And don't give me like, I don't believe in AI. No, you're fucking lazy. You're fucking entitled. or maybe you're of a certain age where you're just hoping that you could just ride it out before it takes you out. No, really, people do that. They're like, Gary, you don't get it. I'm 60. I'm like, what the, you're 60? Like, I'm like, are you retiring in the next three years? If they're like, yes, I'm like, okay, but even in the next 40 years of your life, when you're retired, you probably want to use these tools to just make your life better.

27:16but people use these noble political frameworks to actually use as full pledge disguises to the truth which is you're fucking lazy. Shit. Yeah, that's exactly right. Notice how the claps were not as strong on that? It's like, eh. We love to tell everybody else to do work but ourselves. This is work. this is work by the way on the record technology doesn't come natural to me either i don't like to do shit mean it i get pissed when new shit comes along like i get i do well with it but when i saw musically which became tiktok i was like oh fuck like another thing i have like i'm not pumped either like if the world would slow down i'd be chilling i'm winning but it's just not the way it is the game is not built that way and what's crazy is it's high stakes poker these new things that come along you either ride them and explode or you kind of put your head in the sand and they start to chip away and fuck you and so please do not underestimate what's happening here let me uh ask this question to you because this is something that i i i would think a lot of times back in the day when i would look at you uh and you say shit right and so probably maybe some of the crowd is saying this shit to themselves which was a hypothetical excuse for me to be lazy and that was uh i was like yeah but gary has a whole team right gary doesn't actually do social media like gary doesn't he's not actually doing he's got 25 people motherfucker he's out here doing uh and i just just to be clear i have seen you backstage on your phone posting shit i've seen you do it uh there was also the seven and a half years that i did it every single day before where I had one employee.

29:07By yourself. That's right. There's that part too, y 'all. Yeah, yeah. Like, people are just always so confused. Like, listen, work is part of the equation. I know that we got weird for 10 years where people trying to convince you like work wasn't part of the equation. I remember people got mad at me for using the word hustle. I was like, fine, I'll change it to hard work. Like, work is part of the equation. But yes, go ahead. No, it was an excuse that I came up with that I should... Or what people do, I apologize, is not in my industry. Gary, you're right, but not in restaurants. Or Gary, cool, but not...

29:53No, no, you. Technology is coming for you. You ever see Friday the 13th? Yeah. That motherfucker is coming for you. Like, I do not understand how people don't get it. And so one of the reasons I want you to use social is if you're doing social heavy, it doesn't make the jump to AI feel as hard. When you do AI, if you're staying on the sidelines, it just gets further and further away from you. It's hard to go to the glasses when you're still on a flip phone. You know, and so we just need practice. I'll use this analogy. I'm trying to get y 'all to do shit every day like you're training for a marathon so you can then run the marathon.