The #1 Tool Businesses are Underestimating in 2026

0:00Do you know how many people here, brother, have become the grandma they made fun of? Let me explain. Let me explain, Jimmy. There are people in here that used to make fun of their grandma for not knowing how to use AOL instant message. Or they made fun of their dad for being on the Blackberry because he liked his fucking buttons when they were on the iPhone. But now that they're 40, 42, 52, 57, 37, 59, they've become the person they made fun of. by deciding that AI is bad for society as a front that they don't want to put in the 50 hours of work to understand how to use it. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.

0:38So I'm actually from Cleveland and you know what you did to us. You know I love Cleveland fans. You guys have it tough. I'm a Jets and Knicks fan so I associate very deeply with Cleveland. Yeah. A lot of people feel sorry for us. So we're going to do some kind of questions that people are interested in asking that are written down here, and then we'll take some time to ask questions from the audience as well. So, Gary, you've made a career out of seeing things before the rest of the world. What's one thing you think business leaders are underestimating right now? I think I touched on the speech.

1:14I think, again, you know, having the luxury of seeing everyone who's, I got to see the attendance list before I spoke here. And I'm empathetic that it might not be your exact lane, but I will tell you the live shopping thing is a big deal. Every brand here is going to be very effective. The fact that we have a mix of CPGs and retailers, I do believe, and this is the same old game, you know this, you said something in your opening about you did a little test and then people want it at scale. The majority of people in this room are in big companies. And so they may not think, I'm on the board of Spin Master, which is a toy company, Paw Patrol, a lot of great brands.

1:51gunned stuffed animals. I'm on the board. You actually have say when you're on the board in these companies. And yet there was still like, not only hesitation, but then even when we sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of product in a day, they want to compare it against how much they sell at Walmart. And I'm like, it's not about that. Like when I invested in e-commerce, when we spent$25 ,000 to build a website in 1996, that was like our savings. We bit the farm on that. And when the sales first started, coming in, my dad was upset with me. He's like,$800? I'm like, Dad, it's not about today.

2:26It's about today, next week, the next month. Now it's 85 % of his business. So I would say live shopping is a big underestimation. And then the thing I think I ended with, I continue to believe the world completely misunderstands how utterly powerful social networks are and what they mean. They can change the entire calculus for brands in this room with one post, with one post. I mean, Walgreens sold out of every single pack of their mango gummies because of one TikTok post nationally and it was selling on eBay for three times the price. There's no campaign that we're going to come up with. There's no app incentive program that was going to sell that product.

3:08Marketing works. Marketing is the most important part of a business because it's the offense, but I think it's misunderstood right now. Okay. All right. So we talked about board meetings and Every board meeting seems to have an AI on the agenda. I know my board meetings, that's what we talk about. I actually think my board members use AI to think of questions they're going to ask me, which, of course, I am already responding with AI to think about what I'm going to answer, so no one's talking to anybody. I'm glad you asked that, John. So, five years from now, it always says the hard truth is. But five years from now, what's the AI assumption we're all making today that's going to prove wrong?

3:49If I had a bet on it, I don't like to predict. I just like to act fast when I see something. But in my tummy, you remember when everyone talked about big data and everyone thought that was going to be a moat? When in reality what ended up happening was there were so many sources of big data, it actually became a commodity. My intuition is that the models are going to be so good from so many places that the models are not going to be the boat. I also think this whole, like, you know, I keep laughing about this thing. In the short term, as you know, Fortune 500 CEOs and predominantly CFOs are using AI as a good excuse to cut costs and have record earnings.

4:30But if you're competing, like everyone, if you're competing, you have 300 employees and they have 300 employees and they get rid of 200 people and are using AI but you still have 300 people but they're all using AI that company's going to be in trouble I don't think we've wrapped our head around that it makes one human act like 13 or 7 or 45 or whatever it is at some level there's the short term of what everyone's doing right now which is using it as a front for some other things they want to happen. But long term, AI is not taking anyone's job in here. It's humans that use AI in a world where humans here refuse to use AI that are going to take their jobs and their opportunity.

5:12It's a tool. It's a profound tool. Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. again looking at the makeup of the room if again i talked earlier about my dream for you is to show up on geo answers on an individual level my dream on you is to not demonize ai to use this summer to spend 30 to 50 hours deeply going into it and having you being capable of whatever your sector is i mean i can tell you my consumer insights strategists in my company are dramatically better than they were a year ago.

5:51That's because we've powered them to do it instead of scaring them out of it. Yeah, I know we're seeing already that people who are using it well or are talented at this, the price of talent is going through the roof at the upper end. There's a short-term arbitrage. And by the way, this is historic. The secretaries that used the typewriter when it was invented had a three - to five-year moat where they became better earners, and then the market, you know, equalized. I mean, again, I'm fascinated by humans' inability to take their own fears and selfish needs in deciding what's actually happening.

6:32I'm empathetic to why someone would be concerned. That's exactly what they should do. You have mortgages, you have things you have to do. But this one's an easy one. Like, a lot of you, like, we're very fortunate as I look around the room. You've watched what's happened the last 20 years. 15 years, 10 years. Like you've seen some other big technologies, the mobile device, the web, the internet itself. You've seen what's happened. Do you know how many people here, brother, have become the grandma they made fun of? Let me explain. Let me explain, Jimmy. There are people in here that used to make fun of their grandma for not knowing how to use AOL instant message.

7:09Or they made fun of their dad for being on the Blackberry because he liked his fucking buttons when they were on the iPhone. but now that they're 40 42 52 57 37 59 they've become the person they made fun of by deciding that ai is bad for society as a front that they don't want to put in the 50 hours of work to understand how to use it do you hear that sounds like breakfast is ready because quakers coming in hot with morning nutrition 100 whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day. And that sounds absolutely delicious. Fuel to start whatever's next.

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8:02I think that's important. I called an old colleague and he told me about this AI coach he got. And it just made me, this was about a year ago. and I was like, why am I not doing this? The guy helped me see the light. That's good. We all need that. Listen, I come to talks like this. Like what I just did for two minutes is a desperate hope that three people just, as I poke at their zit, decide, you know, they decide, you know what, that's true. Because you know what's funny? No one, you know, first of all, incredible admiration. No one in this room got here by accident. There's a lot of hard work and a lot of smarts that led to you being able to be at this event.

8:45A lot of you outflanked other people by understanding how to use your natural talents or the modern tools of the day. Don't get caught on the same thing that got you here just because you're at this part of your life cycle. So this is a little different. Every leader today navigates some combination of economic uncertainty, geopolitical change, technologies of disruption, and shifting consumer expectations. How do you stay decisive when the environment keeps changing? And I'll add a little more. I feel like I said it in my little comments, but I feel like I've got to go fast, and I've got to go now, because things are happening so fast.

9:25So have you felt that same way? Yes, but again, I want to tread lightly here. I'm an entrepreneur. I own all my own businesses. I have no meaningful boards in any of them. I'm not publicly traded. I can sit up here and be a big shot because let me tell you what happens when I make catastrophic mistakes. I wake up in the morning, look myself in the mirror while I'm brushing my teeth and say, you're an idiot. You know, that is not what the... So what I would tell everyone here that's dealing with this is I touched on it lightly about the fake reports if they believe the same thing I believed. everyone here has to find a way to tell the world their truth whether you're doing that in board meetings or whether you have enough freedom to even write your thoughts on LinkedIn in a long form blog post you must put down where you stand on in your anything you can share legally or culturally within your four walls this room in that reality need to speak what they actually believe in.

10:26You know this. No one here is confused. Many of you have sat on your words many times in your career. I would argue predominantly when you work in big companies, and I just don't think this is the era to do that because someone's listening in the boardroom, and definitely people are reading on LinkedIn if you have the freedom to share your thoughts, and I think being historically correct of where this is, your little part of the world is, can be incredibly fruitful to opportunity in case that they're in a pickle. And what I really worry about is that. I really, I talk about this often, so I get an extraordinary amount of emails and predominantly LinkedIn messages from people who didn't heed that call and wish they did.

11:08And so I would just say that people here have to share their actual thoughts in a respectful nature. That is their best weapon of choice, going this much change. And it's only getting faster. Well, yes, speed. I mean, you know, back to what we're wearing right now, my great love is sports. The reason I'm in business is because I was incapable of doing sports at the level that I wanted. But I can do business. And in sports, as you may know, speed kills. And in business, speed kills, and it really matters right now. Yep, yep. So you've said that empathy is the ultimate competitive advantage. What does that actually look like in practice for a large business?

11:55There's a lot to this. I mean, you know, a couple things. I would say that, you know, everybody gets a different luck of the draw with DNA. If you were fortunate enough that your mom or dad or grandparent gave you some real empathy genes, you should really rely on them. I know for sure that it's done two things for me professionally, and in the companies I've invested in, in the companies, in the leaders that I've launched, they show up often. The two things that I think empathy do the most for is, one, let's define empathy, because a lot of times people confuse it with compassion and sympathy.

12:29When you can feel another person, of course you're going to be good at sales and marketing. If you can feel the market, of course you know. But more importantly than that, which is a great gift and I use it quite a bit there, why I see things before others. I would say more importantly, it leads to one of the best events of my professional career happened 30 days ago. I had a little gathering, a little party for people that have been at VaynerMedia for more than 10 years. We're a 15-year-old company and there was 94 people at this 10-year-plus event. And I don't know if you know anything about advertising agencies, but the normal stay is 14 and a half months.

13:10And so I was incredibly proud and I will tell you that empathy is disproportionately the reason I got to have that nice day. The thing I want for everyone here to deploy empathy is for their actual employees, their teammates, even their bosses. Like why is your boss a jerk? Maybe something's going wrong in their home. Maybe they grew up with a mom that wasn't awesome. Empathy is an incredible emotional strength that of course if you over deploy it like anything you create entitlement. And I've actually struggled with creating entitlement, which is funny because I'm very to the point at events like this and in my social media content.

13:45But in real life, if I like you, it's harder for me to tell you you stink at your job. And so extreme empathy creates entitlement. Entitlement is the poison of society and will destroy a business. But I think empathy, knowing what the consumer wants versus what you want to sell them, Such a big one. And two, knowing how to manage people. Because if you have retention and you have continuity, it's like sports. You can beat another team that might be more talented. If my Knicks beat your Spurs, I promise you, the fact that Bridges and Hart and Brunson got all those hours of time together, it matters.

14:28And teams here are successful when they trust and know each other. And we live in this cutthroat financial world. where I think we are lacking the humanity needed to actually be a winning team.

14:44So are we still going to do questions from the audience? I don't... Someone say yes. Yes. Nice. Okay. I'll just follow you. I'm getting that done. I just want to ask one question. There's not that much time left, so if you're definitely wanting to ask a question, there's mics lined up here. I would highly recommend getting up now. Go ahead. Yeah. I do want to ask you, do you have anything you feel like, man, I know you said you make mistakes and you look yourself in the mirror and say, you idiot or whatever. Is there anything that you still think about when you put your head on your pillow at night and say, damn, why did I do that?

15:19I mean, on a micro level all the time. On a macro level, there's only two massive, like, ugh. One, my lack of candor in my 20s and 30s because I was so young. I wish I could go back because there's a lot of people I really cared for, friends. You know, my employees always become friends, where I just wish I had the emotional strength to tell them the truth of their shortcomings instead of the fumbling of their firing. So that sits with me emotionally. And then, you know, Uber.

15:54If you don't know the story, wait for this one. I was a very active investor in 2006, 7, 8, 9, and obviously Facebook and Twitter were very big for me. But my single best bud in Silicon Valley was Travis, the CEO of Uber. I had just bought my first big boy apartment in Manhattan, so it was a little liquid pour. And he wanted me to invest in Uber. I said no. I had a speech in San Francisco. That might be him calling right now. I had a speech in San Francisco three weeks later. He met me to convince me to invest. That's how friendly we were. I passed again. If I wrote the normal$25 ,000 to$50 ,000 check that I was writing back then, I would have made$557 million.

16:38That's a big one. But the truth is I tell that story more to just make everyone feel good, meaning I don't really think about it. It's part of the game. The only things I struggle with is more of the emotional human stuff. That was my great kryptonite and scarlet letter of my career, my inability to tell people where they actually set. And I was so proud for years because I'm so sunshine and rainbows and that I was, my number one goal in life as a leader, as a parent, and definitely as a personal brand that puts out content is to eliminate fear. To have that moment in my early 40s when I realized there were people that were my direct reports that walked with fear because they didn't know where they actually stood with me was the low point of my career.

17:25And once I hit that low point, I branded something in a book I wrote called Kind Candor and it completely changed my life and my company's life and I'm happy I'm in that era now yeah, as we age we do figure things out the gray hairs are so valuable and here we are so we have questions from the audience yeah, let's sneak a couple in it's hard for us to see so we can't go ahead, in the middle there alright, this question comes from my open claw agent who I call Kim. I fed her all your books along with my problems. So he came up with this question. Before you ask the question, I'd like to know why you call her Kim.

18:07Just give her personality. So that was my original assistant when she quit her job. My agent does everything she does. I just called her Kim. That's awesome. Friends, real quick, because I saw how many, let's keep these lights on. It's amazing. Friends, out of all the things we talked about here this afternoon, I could not push you harder for three to five hours of research of what OpenClaw is. Everybody here, just like a cell phone 25 years ago, everyone here will have an equivalent to an OpenClaw in their lives in three to four years. And very honestly, the sooner you get on it, the better. And this is not even professional.

18:42This is like regular life, real life. So please, please, please go and use AI, or if you're still old school and use Google search or whatever your means of getting educated, go understand what OpenClaw is, what a harness and a personal computer is, what agentic agents are. For you, it's very interesting. Go ahead, brother. What does the team have for us? Babir Sultan. I operate a small chain of convenience stores in the Midwest. Through social media, YouTube shorts and everything, Facebook, we reach about 8 million peoples a month. So a lot of your content is around 25 years old that are starting at zero.

19:18So my question is, as somebody that's 43 and going upwards. What is one mistake a lot of operators do when they try to build a personal brand on top of an existing business that they already have? And the last thing I'll say, as a son of an immigrant, I could attest to my father didn't pay me for my first three years either when I ran the convenience store for him. But I'm glad he did it. And that's who I am today. We share that pain. So you want to build a personal brand? Yes. I think when people build a business and then they start on the journey of building a personal brand, they often don't know why they're building the personal brand.

19:54I'm building a personal brand not because I want people to know me. It's because I want to buy the New York Jets and win a Super Bowl. Because I know personal brands lead to opportunity for me, whether it's investing or starting new businesses. Do you have a good sense of why you want to do it? Do you want to speak? Do you want to start a business? Do you have a sense? I'm speaking actually tomorrow here too. Amazing. So I would say the biggest mistake that people make when they make content, building a personal brand, is they make the content for themselves, not for the audience. It is disproportionately why I've won in a world where a lot of people have struggled.

20:27I'm not making content to get more likes or more followers or to feel fancy when I walk through the San Antonio airport and take selfies. I'm doing it because I'm trying to think about why would you consume my content? As someone who's consumed it, I get excited that that's brought you value, and when I bring you value, that leads to you admiring me, not thinking I can shoot a basketball well. Or admiration is a different leverage point, right? When it's earned, it's profoundly important. So I would tell you, you've done something that most people really want to. You've seen my blueprint. You've seen others that you like versus you don't like.

21:06You don't need to show Lamborghinis or watches or all that bullshit. Put out content that can actually help a kid a 16-year-old girl in Jersey working in her dad's convenience store. Teach those lessons. Teach modern lessons. Educate people that have small businesses why you're able to reach that many people. Do what I did. Give away your best secrets for free. I have a funny feeling your personal brand will be strong. Awesome. Thank you. You got it, brother. Hi. Hi. Thank you for the inspiring all of us. Thank you. What's your name? Maha. Maha. Nice to meet you. But nothing to do with make America healthier again.

21:43No, I know. Mahalik. I'd like to make America healthier again. Are you Egyptian? I'm Moroccan. Very nice. Go ahead. So I work in the world of health and wellness. And one of the things that we've been saying to our clients recently is, in light of AI, R &D is the new marketing. We're not trying to pit marketing against R &D, but it is to the point of relevance and disruptive innovation. What's your point of view on that? I mean, if the R &D leads to a product, look, a great product, here's one. I would argue that Apple has not been very good at marketing for 15 years. They just had a much better product that we wanted.

22:24And so their campaigns and their marketing has not been profound. Their product was better. I had a meeting last week where a new company came in. We don't even do RFPs. We're a very funny company. We've got that leverage right now. We just take meetings. this gentleman wanted to write us a big fat check and I told him no because his products suck so bad and I told him brother you're not ready for us we're good at marketing what we're going to do is get everyone to know about this and try it and then they're all going to hate it and you're going to be out of business like the best marketing is the best product and so yes I believe in that however I'm also someone who believes some of the best products in the world were never known.

23:09I believe some of the best books ever written were never read. And so I do believe in creating awareness. If you document the journey of your R &D and put it out on social, that hits on both sides for me in a very big way. I agree. My point is that in a lot, and I have spent 22 years in corporate, the tension between R &D and marketing is that marketing is pushing and R &D is responding. I think we're in a world where maybe that needs to change a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think you know this, like, ish, right? I mean, like, at the end of the day, I think so many people here bring so much value to companies because I do think actual consumer insights of knowing what to make is just, like, an incredibly profound part of building an actual business.

24:00I just, my argument, again, looking at the list of the companies represented here, is I don't think we're close enough to the actual consumer from my humble point of view, and I think that there's a lot of ways to do it, and we can do more of it. And I think, and you know this, and everyone here knows this, both have worked. There's been marketing or brand briefs that asked R &D to make something that worked. There's been many that have failed. There's been many R &D units that have come up with something that they're passionate about that have worked. Many have failed. I just think that we just have access to consumer insights at a scale we've never had before, and I still think our industry doesn't take full advantage of it because I don't think we're accepting the consumer truth of what's happening in social and places like Reddit and 4chan and communities and things of that nature.

24:54I mean, the data in Facebook groups. How many people here are part of Facebook groups, like a 40-year-old mom's club or a neighborhood thing? Just raise your hand. Raise it. Raise it high. Please, if you don't mind, I want everyone to look around. You know how much real shit's going on in some of those groups. The insights are pure. They're real. And I just think that we have a disconnect between truth of human truth and just the way corporate likes to do stuff. And that, as you can tell, has been the theme of what I'm pressing on. Because what I've learned in 15 years being in this industry, is you guys do know.

25:28It's just hard to say it in the room sometimes, and I'm trying to encourage that. sir hey Gary um my name is Muhammad I recently just turned 17 and um this past couple of months like I've been trying to get into contact with you um I don't know if you remember over your whatnot lives but um I saw that you were actually going to be here so I live like in Houston three hours away so I was like I feel like this is the best opportunity to you know talk to you um I Can you first clap up this?