Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Gary Vee Audio Experience. Today's episode is all about AI, what it means for your job, your business, and your long-term success. If you've been wondering how to actually use AI to stay competitive, this episode will shift your perspective fast. You'll walk away with real framework for how to stay relevant, scale your output, and think more strategically in a world that's evolving by the day.
Whether you're just getting started or already deep in it, this episode is going to give you clarity. Let's get right into it. Right now, the majority of this room is demonizing AI. They are scared of what AI is going to do and how it's going to take their money.
I've just spent 15 years building the largest independent advertising agency in the world. From zero to $350 million a year, we'll do. I don't want this to happen either. I just realized I have no choice.
It's not about how many people I'm going to fire and replace. It's can I get the $600 million in revenue with roughly the same overhead? Now, where I'm at with this nanosecond is, I don't think this is a cost-cutting, headcount-cutting thing for my company. I think it's me speaking to the company and saying, okay, here's what's up.
We're not going to be hiring going forward and we need to do a lot more because all of you need to make your eight-hour day dramatically more impactful and productive because you are going to be using AI and what used to take you an hour and a half task might be 15 minutes, which will then open up our ability to double our revenue without a substantial headcount. All of us, me included, are grossly underestimating how much this thing can do. People are hesitant for this very aggressive new technology, but it is a tremendous equalizer. Are you starting to use some AI tools?
Absolutely, yeah. AI did to chop up long-form videos. I read all my scripts, all my posts, hashtags. Good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good.
That part, if you're not spending an hour a day on it, that's the problem. And it starts with using ChatGPT or perplexity. When you type into a search engine, I'm a graphic designer that predominantly uses Adobe and I'm on an agency team and I'm scared I'm going to lose my job on AI. What should I be learning about?
And you hit enter on Google, you get nothing. You're going to get some bullshit. You type that exact thing into ChatGPT, you're going to get something. I do my search on voice.
Hey, so I am the admin for a gentleman who makes $10 million a year, very busy. And to be frank, I'm a little bit concerned that you, AI, are going to take my job and be his admin. What are the steps I can take to make myself more foolproof against you, ChatGPT, you, from taking my job eventually as an admin? Because obviously, as you can imagine, I've worked for 20 years being an admin.
I finally got to the top and now I'm concerned that you exist and eventually will be able to, through agents, do my job, booking flights, booking calendar, all that stuff. What are four to five apps I should be using? Four to five things I should be developing. Self-development.
How should I be really thinking about this next decade? I have two kids who are 11-year-old twins and I need to at least have this job for another 10 years because I want to put them through college. So you can see, everybody, what I'm doing is I'm getting a lot more context. So once you learn how to prompt engineer, once you learn how to ask the right questions, once you learn that you're actually not using ChatGPT as a search engine, you're using it more like you would dialogue with somebody who's an expert in anything.
The key for you is to move from task executor to strategic partner. Right? This is my overall theme. You must become architect.
You cannot become carpenter and mason. And if you're currently a carpenter and mason, you need to start challenging yourself to become architect or GC. It should be friend and character. You only choose one.
Do they need a different body in this next season? The adaptable alien. It's all adaptability. Like, life is about adaptability.
You know, the reason most people are actually unhappy is they're rigid. They're rigid emotionally. They're rigid ideologically. They're rigid physically.
I'm ready to adjust anything. You know how often I talk about going to zero, selling hot dogs on that corner. I am always prepared for the worst mentally because I'm adaptable and I'm prepared. I'm a realist.
I'm so ready for every punch because I think about it every day. Guys like you, gals like you, shouldn't be fearing it because it will take a full decade for everybody to fully calibrate this. In that decade, you need to go on the offense and you should be able to have 50 projects. You know, it's like Team Barry.
I talk all the time famously about 30, 40 people. I'm now thinking about seven or eight. Instead of replacing, I'll be able to use AI as a partner to those seven or eight. But here's the cool part.
Those seven to ten people are going to get more of the economics. So instead of having a 50-person team, it's not like all that money falls to the bottom line for me. The ten people at the top get more money because they're the architects, not the masons. If you use just the architect and a mason, the top, the architect, is going to get more because he's not sharing or she's not sharing with that.
She's sharing with the AI. But what's cool, so people aren't like, oh wait, the top person's getting all the money. No, no. In fact, the bottom people are also getting more of the money.
There's just less of that. Now, what I think will happen, though, is new jobs and new things will be created so that across the board, the economic impact is going to be greater. And so now it gets spread out wide. And so now you used to be the number 17 person on a team that did a task that AI is about to take place.
Your job is to be good enough to be a number six somewhere else. You're making actually more. As long as there's more creation going wide, all those number 10 through 20s that are losing their jobs, they become one through fives in other organizations. And the economics work out.
That's the bullish, don't be scared reason this should work. It's the thinker versus the doer. The doer is going to be the AI. And so if you know that you only take commands from people and then you do it, you're in trouble.
If you're a coder and someone tells you what to code, you're in trouble. But if you're the one that tells the coders what to code, you're not in trouble. You're going to win more. Who deserves credit?
Like the people that put the rocks on there or the person that designed it and engineered it and figured out how to build it. Who had more impact? The thinker, the creative, the brains, the spirit, the soul is going to get more of the value exchange in life. In a lot of ways, AI is giving the value to the person that always deserved it.