The End of Google Search — And What Comes Next | GaryVee South Park Commons Fireside Chat

0:00Where do you think technology is going? So what is AI going to mean on a practical sense? I mean, I think it means that the robots will kill our children. And that's fine because the dinosaurs lost. I think this is as big as it gets. This one's really, again, because I went through one, web one, web two, web three, and now we're whatever we're going to call this. every other time when I understood what email was and I understood what search engines were. And that's how I built my daddy's liquor store to a big company with no money. I had time. I was plotting in 96. I was plotting and executing in 97.

0:44I was plotting and executing in 98, 99, 2000. And then somewhere in 2003, like people caught up, technology caught up. when Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, today's YouTube's 20th birthday right now. So it's April what, 20 what? Three. Three. So April 23, 2005. I started Wine Library TV, a five day a week, 20 minute wine show on YouTube on February 21st, 2006. So less than a year of its even existence, I was already full pledge all in and technology was different back then. new apps adoption now is fast. Back then, you know, like that was crazy fast to go all in and I thought that YouTube was gonna change my life and it did.

1:33I had time, 2006, seven, eight. I'm in rooms in 2009, I'm like this YouTube thing and people are like, what? That's three years. The technology barely changed in those three years. This fucking game, I'm like fucking down, playing with a new AI thing and they're like, this is the craziest LLM ever and I'm like, this is fucking amazing and like an hour later, like that's shit, this just came out and I'm like, fuck, this is fast. The general nature of the technology means like almost anything that gets created immediately gets commoditized. That's insanity. Like we're in some real shit. Like no matter who's most bullish and thinks this is crazy as fuck in the room right now, it's crazier than that.

2:20So what do I think? I think we've never seen the landscape of the tech change so fast, which makes it very hard. The reason I haven't even started investing or signing big deals for my advertising agency, like the second you think it's this, I mean, I'd be petrified to sign a one-year deal with an AI platform that locked me in because I literally know an hour later there might be something that's better and cheaper. It's like real shit. So where do I think it plays out? I think even the best thinkers, I've won on pattern recognition on my natural skills. I know a lot of other people that have as well.

3:00And I'm just watching all of them and myself struggle with making the right key decisions because of the speed in which things get commoditized. And I would argue that is the punchline of the whole thing. I think the nature of the tech commoditizes everything, including critical thinking. And so what the fuck does that mean? I have no idea, but I'm excited to find out. You know, I'm not scared of it. Like I believe, more than I believe in how powerful the technology of AI is, I believe in the human spirit. I believe in that in a way that would make your head spin. I believe that human beings are the single most underrated thing in the world.

3:44And I also think it's happening at a time where the last 15 years of propaganda has made most of the people in this room in the world believe the counter. And I think that's the actual arbitrage. And so that's what I'm going to spend my time on. Fun fact, actually, Gary and I met because he was using one of SPC's companies that helps people understand how they appear in AI search. So you want to be first as we move from Google search to AI search. And Gary is one of the first people using the product. Yeah. And that goes back to patent recognition. I won because I decided that Ask Jeeves and Dogpile and Yahoo and Google were more important than the Yellow Pages when every small local business thought the Yellow Pages was life.

4:27To me in my brain, as I sit here today, Google AdWords and Google Search is dead. It's not fully dead because it's alive right now, but it's fucking dead. The fact that already in my search bar, in my little laptop, I no longer by default go to Google. But even more interesting, fuck me, I use things fast. The fact that I'm speaking at conferences, Dustin, where are you? Dustin, who travels the world with me and films, Dustin, you've seen this play out the last year. About 15 months ago, I would go to a crowd, especially if it was 40, 50, 60 year olds. I'd be like, stand up in this audience right now.

5:04If you are now using an A, chat GPT or whatever, I would spit out instead of what you would use Google for. and as you know, Dust, 15 months ago, more people than the crowd thought. A lot more, like 10 % would stand up and it would shock people because 15 months ago, that crowd hadn't even really heard about it all the way yet. We were just in Vegas or Orlando. I don't know where we were, but I asked the same question. The whole fucking room stood up. By the way, in advertising land, Ben Allison, one of our main, most important media executives in our 2000 person company, Google fucking surge is foundational to every Fortune 5000 company in the world, let alone the long tail.

5:46It's dead. If Google perfectly executes Gemini, perfectly, they're still gonna lose an extraordinary amount of market share for that behavior. Intent-based sales. So like, think about what Google's thinking about. Like if everything goes remarkable for the next five years, they're gonna lose a ton of market share in their biggest financial driver. I don't know how to short stocks. But like these are like, there's nothing they can do. So to your point, for me, what I learned in 1998 and 99, and when you, you know, I bought Google AdWords the day it came out, but that's SEM, that's marketing. SEO, all the shit we did in the H1 and all the shit I was learning back there in the title and like I gotta show up first when people type in wine.

6:33Well, that's playing out again, isn't it? In a different way. and so for me, I'm not romantic or emotional about yesterday. I'm obsessed with today. I think another mistake I know a lot of you will make is you're gonna over bet on tomorrow. A lot of you are so sharp in the tech, you're going to do things that the human consumer is not gonna catch up to fast enough and you're gonna be too out in front. So keep that in mind. You're too smart. You too get it. But your timings are gonna be wrong. from a business lens. It will happen. Uber happened before. It was called Magic Cab. It just came out six years earlier.

7:13It was too early. The iPhone wasn't there yet. So one thing I would definitely recommend to all of you as you build out your stuff is think about is the consumer there? A lot of you will build B2B. So the consumer will be there. But if you're building out B2B, ask yourself why they won't buy it. Because you're going to get real ideological and you're going to be like, it's a better product that has nothing to do with anything.

7:40Salesforce is not the best product. So I think, you know, these are the things I think about. You speak so much about humans and kindness. The AI influencer, the AI person that's not real, how does that intersect with that? AI influencers are real. That's how. I don't know if you heard but we can't tell the difference obviously we can still tell ish exactly right there's ones we can tell and there's already ones we can't tell 18 months ago you could tell every time 18 months from now you won't be able to tell any time and so we're in this middle transition where everyone is consuming AI influencers right now without knowing it there's still enough average tech that we're seeing the bad versions of it but fuck we're already here And so everyone in this room has probably consumed an AI influencer and we're like looking for it because we're in it and still didn't know.

8:38And so the brain will consume it as real. Thus it's real. AI influencers are gonna do to influencers what influencers did to Hollywood. All the influencers that are like, oh man, I'm more famous than actors on Netflix. This is awesome. They're about to be really sad because they're about to be way less famous than people that don't even exist. owned by people in this room. There's people here who are gonna build the next Disney, but it's just gonna be 7 ,000 human beings. It's unprecedented times. But what do I think about it? I think about it as human itself evolves. I would argue that a caveman would look at all of us right now and be like, this isn't fucking humans.

9:23Shit changes. We just happen to be alive when this change is happening. So to answer your first question, because I deviated. I genuinely believe that nice guys finish first. I think the reason that kindness is the pillar to my business is, why wouldn't it be? If you're trying to build something meaningful and long-term, the number one way to win is continuity in relationships. I think most people are transactional. I think people want short-term wins. My life is a marathon, hopefully. Actually, I had a full four-hour checkup today at Atria. Looks like I'm gonna live for quite a while. You know, like, you know, and by the way, everybody who shits on AI, the number one thing I would say is, do you even understand what this is gonna do to modern medicine?

10:05Like you're crying about like a designer losing its job. Your fucking mother's gonna live for 17 years longer because of this shit. Like this is profound. So the nicest thing I just think is logical. I think if, you know, look, this is, by the way, the only time I've ever been aggressively booed on stage in my career was when I started a South by Southwest keynote with fuck Steve Jobs at the height of his popularity. And the point I was trying to make was Steve's all time incredible. Especially for someone like me because Steve's a lot more me than he is you. You know, product, human. That's what he brought to the table, right?

10:48But he was a dick face. So fuck him. And that's how I see the life. It's literally how I see life. That is not what I admire. I respect the living shit out of what he accomplished professionally. But that's just not how I see life. I do not believe that not being nice is a good idea. And so that's not what I respect. And I can tell you right now, one of my great goals is to be wildly professionally successful so that other people copy my behavior. Because what bothered me about Steve, what led me to say that, was I watched a lot of kids like this at Y Combinator at all these places force themselves to be mean to their team even though it wasn't in their spirit because they thought that was cool because everyone was looking up to Steve.

11:40And so I was trying to make a bigger point. It's not even about Steve. It's about that humanity and humility and graciousness. These are strengths. It's easy to be a dick. It really is. it's hard to be the bigger person when confronted with bad behavior. In Russian superstition, if someone sneezes after you say something, it means it's true. So I thank you, sir. So that's the answer to the first question. I've heard you talk about how like recommendation engines have made your followers less important. And any good content can get picked up. So these people probably have never posted before. How does a technical person in today's world get started?

12:28Well, first they have to decide if they even want to. Like, I do not believe that building a personal brand is a prerequisite for business success because the data is black and white. There's a trillion businesses that are crushing that has no face to it. I do believe that if you are interested in it or capable of it, that it is a moat. I would actually argue if we're talking about AI, intellectual property is gonna be the only thing left. One could argue if you play out the chess moves of all the shit you're all thinking about, that the only thing left is IP. Both intellectual property, property, hence why I've been building VFriends, my Pokemon, my Marvel, and then ultimately you the human.

13:14Like, I don't know, you guys know this shit better than I do. Sounds like all this shit's gonna do everything. So what's left? And as long as the laws are in place the way they're in place, the only thing left is NIL and IP. Name, origin, likeness, intellectual property. So if you're one of these people that believes you want to because you think there's value in it, you think it'll help you raise money, you think it'll help you get good employees, these are all real things if you're teched the fuck out. I think you get started on LinkedIn if it's this crew. I think LinkedIn, Google Shorts, because don't forget, YouTube is still the second, YouTube Shorts, excuse me.

13:53YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. So you get a lot of long tail and you can go very nerdy. You can make a video that is like as nerdy as you wanna go, title it that way. As you know, there's gonna be a small group of people that are gonna search that too and they're gonna find you. So I think I'm a big fan of YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn for this audience if their objectives are to create demand for venture raising. create demand for talent. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking every day of like, you're in an arms race for the best talent. How are you going to outpace a top 10 tech company that is willing to pay a hell of a lot more?

14:31You will get lucky slash it will work because some people are ready to own their own thing and that's what you're trading on. But the other way is somebody's just gonna wanna work with you because you said something they liked. So those would be places I would go. the other thing I would say, I think people, even when you said most of these people probably didn't post, I think we overgeneralize around tech individuals not being charismatic, not having gifted gab. Look, I've worked with a lot of engineers. We can all agree this room right now doesn't look like the TikTok creator summit that's going on right now.

15:07So yes, there's generalizations that are true. But what I also know is a lot of people here are incredibly capable of making videos. I would also say for the ones here who are most self-deprecating or even not kind to yourself, you do not have to be gift of gab, fucking the words flow. You definitely don't have to be attractive. This is a game of the value. If you put a camera down and just spit your fucking game of the shit you really know, even if it's not dynamically done, it will find the audience that needs it or wants it. There are plenty of other fucking nerds who are really excited about your 18 sentences in a row that are grounded in truth of the depths of technology who are gonna be like, that's my fucking dude.

15:57You understand? It's really important to understand. Like, you don't need to be Logan Paul and Charlie D 'Amelio and Alex Earl. But when you talk, not charismatically, not dynamically, you're gonna have to fucking rely on the weight of the strength of the words that are coming out of your mouth. So if you're not dynamic and your fucking knowledge is surface level, now you're fucking dead. But if you've got it like that, in the same way that I made a statement earlier, because I've spent thousands of hours thinking about AI the last two years, and I can say to a room that is deep in it, nothing has any weight if this plays out besides IP and NIL.

16:44My whole career has been going to Y Combinator and TechCrunch Disrupt and all these things where I'm the least qualified tech person in the room, but I end up being the most historically correct because tech is the cost of entry to be in the game. Right? Like what is always, like for all the people that didn't understand how the wiring of social networks was gonna work, they were in trouble already. But I spend enough time understanding the basic needs of things you need to understand. But I then play on a different place, which is the human behavior, the multiple steps. And the other thing I do well that I would implore all of you to give thought to is the second your tunnel vision on just the technology, you're dead.

17:30The second your tunnel vision on just the consumer, you're dead. You have to blend seven to 12 different dynamics that are playing out, including government. I've got lots of thoughts on this shit. but it could all be upheld if China, Russia and the US are like, fuck that shit. Even though we fucking hate each other, we got to align on this shit because this shit's too big. So there's just a lot to think through but what do I think? I think half this room can easily crush on making content on the internet. My argument is that the way the algorithms are working, we no longer even live in social media.

18:02We now live in interest media. The things you're interested in are coming to you, not who you follow and what they post. So I would argue social media is fully dead. We're fully in interest media. And I would say the way that the AI algorithms are working is it's transcribing the words that are coming out of your mouth and putting in front of people who are likely to be interested in what you're talking about. So the deeper you go, it's really, this is a good one. It's really no different than prompt engineering. If you fucking put out shit, you're gonna fucking not attract anything. But if you really go there in depth and it is not based on the surface level part, it's the words.

18:47It's the words. And so I would recommend everyone do it because there's fundamentally little to no downside. The downside of making content on the internet is that 99 % of the people in this room are insecure. And people don't like to post when they're insecure because people don't like three views. People don't like you're ugly. as a comment from an anonymous person on the internet. And so most of the people here will not achieve their upside in this medium because of their insecurities. And I asked them to stop being insecure because every other person on earth sucks at a lot of things too. Thank you.

19:27My last question before we let you all be insecure is I spoke to a bunch of people that have worked with you and they said the most important value that you hold is kindness and business. Why is that the case? I think if you're, for many reasons, I mean, look, because I was parented well and I got lucky with DNA, that's probably like real to me. Like, why am I nice? Because Tamara Vaynerchuk is nice and she molded me perfectly. I also happen to share her DNA, so it was an easier thing for her to mold. But what also worked out for me is I love business a lot. And what that means is I'm gonna be one of those individuals who will not retire.

20:15And what I mean by that is, of course, as I continue to get older and my family dynamics change in life, there'll be times where I'm not working 15, 16 hours a day. But at 89, if I'm not doing that, I promise you, I wish I was. This is my joy. This is my craft. I would rather be in the office than ski, than surf, than cook, probably outside watching the New York Jets. You know, there's not many things, maybe the Knicks, but I'm a little bit pissed right now. There's just not many things I'd rather do than building companies. It is truly my hobby. I, it is the currency of my brain, my hopes, my dreams.

20:58It's enjoyable because, because I like building them 360. There are many people in here who will not achieve their business goals because the main goal is the financial output of the business. And that will be directly the reason it doesn't happen. Because what will happen is they will take shortcuts, they will take investment, they will find partners, they will even decide their product based on what they think will maximize the financial impact. And that is why they will lose. This is a lot of fun for me because I've been in this room before. And this is a really incredible era. The reason I'm here selfishly, what I just talked about is this is next.

21:41Like it's, there's no confusion. Like I've seen this movie before. You know, there's a lot of kids in here. One of the few things that's fun about getting older is you've seen the movie before. And if you're smart about pattern recognition, you know what to do. And this is 1997 internet 1.0. I was really there. The reason I did so well in web 2.0 was I watched the whole movie of web 1.0 and I'm like, oh shit, this is 96 all over again. It's just 2006. I know what to do this time. I'm not just going to use AOL and PayPal and Amazon. I'm going to invest in these things. That's what you just rattled off.

22:19Web3 is also real. The NFT thing, similar to Web1, the greed in NFT land confused people to the importance of the technology. In fact, it's inconceivable to me that the smartest of the group here that thinks about AI doesn't also understand that the blockchain itself is one of the most important components of how the chess moves will play out if AI does all the things it promises to do. Back to how important intellectual property will be, how important verifying deep fake videos is going to be. If AI accomplishes everything we all know it will, it only increases the importance of the technology known as blockchain.

22:59So there's like, you know, so it's just, it's a really fun thing to be here. And I'm just really grateful to be here. We're all grateful too.

23:14Thank you. let's open it up to some questions

23:22what's your name? my name is Nick Nick, pleasure you're in a room of founders, builders, entrepreneurs how do you know when you're directionally correct and when you want to drop something because yeah, there's so many you don't want to invest too much time and money, runway, resources when do you know when you're correct and drop something And how, yeah, how do you judge that perseverance? You don't. Once you understand that truth, you go. I spend no time thinking about that question. You just don't know. The amount of people that literally gave up one day before everything was about to turn in the history of the last 100 years of projects is stunningly high.

24:07Only equaled by the amount of people that should have stopped a long time ago. You don't. you know, one thing I've already referenced, one of the great things about experience is you do get pattern recognition. But pattern recognition is also not natural to a lot of people. You know, the truth is, brother, you don't know. What I rely on is feeling comfortable with laying in the bed that I made. I make decisions and I move. There's been many things that I jumped to early and I was like, fuck, or didn't see all the way through. Or my biggest thing, I'm so early on a lot of stuff that I do a really good job.

24:44I'm like, oh shit, it's gonna be this orange. And I'm right, it's a big ass fucking orange. And then I squeeze the fuck out of it. I'm getting a ton of juice. But then I'm like, okay, let me go find a grapefruit. When meanwhile, that orange still had a fuck load in it, but I was so early. So I make that mistake a lot. Jumping too soon while the orange is still getting squeezed. I do it all the time. You don't. But the fact that I can even explain to you that orange analogy right now means that I've figured myself out in the last 30 years playing the game. So I'm trying to be better at that. So what I would say is don't be crippled by that and feel comfortable in your intuition.

25:21Here's a good one. Here's something I'm pretty positive on that is kind of blurry but I genuinely believe that when I'm chilling in heaven and we all figure it out down here, I'm gonna be like, I fucking told you. Remember when we did that thing in 2000 when we did that fire? Like in the 100 years, I'm gonna find you in heaven and be like, remember I said this? I was right. That's how much I believe what I'm about to say. I believe, you know, if you look at the human race, that AI is gonna accelerate this dramatically. There's so much shit that we know today that humans had no fucking clue about 50 years in health and wellness, different things.

25:56I mean, like, do you understand 500 years ago they just found this fucking place? That's like two minutes ago. You know that, right? Like literally everyone was just chilling in Europe and had no fucking idea New York City was fucking here. That's 500 years ago. That's nothing. So what do I most believe that we have no clue about right now or don't believe that is like in it, like I can feel it, is I believe that intuition is the primary brain of a human being. And that the brain is secondary. But that we've been conditioned to believe this is primary. And I would argue many people sitting here have not even thought about this.

26:35And we finally are starting to understand gut health from a health and wellness standpoint. but I believe gut actual as an operating system is the fucking game. And I would argue that that is why I'm comfortable with your question because I'm just willing to bet on my gut. And if it's wrong, maybe it wasn't wrong. Maybe it was wrong that I should have done that and that would have done better but that would have changed the course of my life and maybe it was actually right. And I think the second you get into that place, you go fast. And business, my friends, is sports. Speed matters. and when you go fast, you can make up for a lot of fucking mistakes.