IQ is a commodity, data is a commodity. I’m far more interested in watching people interact at a restaurant with their smartphone. We can all read ’Tech Crunch ’ ’Ad Age.’ I would rather be living in the trenches. I would rather be going to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to watch people shop with their smartphones.

The quote argues that raw intelligence (“IQ”) and information (“data”) are widely available and therefore less differentiating than lived, observational insight. Vaynerchuk suggests that competitive advantage comes from immersing oneself in everyday contexts—restaurants, grocery aisles—where technology meets human behavior. By watching people shop with smartphones, one can see friction, motivations, and social cues that dashboards and punditry miss. The “trenches” metaphor frames marketing and entrepreneurship as fieldwork: understanding culture as it is practiced, not merely reported. Implicitly, he’s advocating qualitative research and empathy as complements (or correctives) to quantitative analytics.