Gary Vaynerchuk bets on analog revival: drive-ins, vinyl, and physical retail as the counterweight to AI

Gary Vaynerchuk: The analog counter-wave

Gary Vaynerchuk's central argument is that extreme AI acceleration doesn't just digitize everything — it creates an equally extreme pull in the opposite direction. He calls it a barbell: the more AI dominates digital life, the more valuable physical, tangible experiences become.

“Everybody who's watching is highly invested in big companies that spend a lot of money on marketing. Your marketing department is wasting 93 cents of every dollar they spend. Every Fortune 5,000 company is still doing guessing on the upper funnel, sponsorships, ridiculous shit — when the mid funnel ate up the whole world. I think extreme AI is creating extreme analog. I really do think it's a barbell.”

Vinyl, drive-ins, and physical retail

Vinyl sales crossing $1 billion in a calendar year — and up roughly 10% in 2025, with sales now larger than CDs — is the data point Vaynerchuk reaches for first. He reads it as three overlapping forces: decorative appeal, collectibles culture, and a subconscious consumer push against total digitalization. The pattern he describes is familiar: Brooklyn early adopters, Manhattan followers, then national diffusion.

His investable thesis runs well beyond vinyl. He's been putting money into pickleball, Padel, three-on-three basketball (Unrivaled), the Wiffle Ball League, the Sailing League, and Slam Ball — alternative sports he argues are immune to AI disruption and benefit from the same decentralized distribution infrastructure that's replaced the old gatekeepers. He's also pushing his restaurant partners toward phone-check-in dining and communal seating.

The drive-in movie theater gets the most developed pitch. He sketches a roll-up of 39 locations, built and operated with AI on the back end for customer service and operations, then eventually showing AI-generated original films through its own physical distribution network. The analog venue as the distribution layer for AI-native content.

Marketing budgets and the mid-funnel

His claim about Fortune 500 marketing is direct: 93 cents of every dollar is wasted. The argument is that brands are still allocating budgets toward upper-funnel guesswork — sponsorships, big campaigns — and outdated lower-funnel AB testing, while the mid-funnel (organic social content, the "TikTokification" of attention) has consumed the entire market. His prescription is that companies should be spending 20% of their total marketing budget on organic social production, using organic performance as the filter before committing media dollars to any creative.

Live commerce

He flags this as the most underestimated near-term commercial shift. China is on track for $1 trillion in GMV through live social shopping in 2026. TikTok Shop is generating real numbers in the US already, and he expects Meta to move aggressively, which will pull YouTube along. He argues TikTok Shop doesn't need subsidizing — it works on merit — and the ownership transition hasn't changed his read on the platform.

The broader frame

Vaynerchuk's bet is that humans consistently self-correct in ways that markets underestimate. The entrepreneur who was scrappy enough to find a friend for product photography before AI democratized it will redeploy that scrappiness somewhere else. The photographer who feels threatened by AI image generation may find more demand, not less, precisely because authenticity becomes scarcer. He doesn't frame this as nostalgia — he frames it as the next arbitrage.