How to Sell with Confidence That Changes Everything!

People always ask, you know, what do I need to know to be successful? If you can't sell, you know, you're SOL because you're always selling. And when I say that, you have to understand what sales means. Selling is not about convincing somebody to give you money for something they don't want. Selling is about knowing in your heart, your mind, and your soul that the product or service you have can help anybody in your potential customer universe, your prospect universe.

Any innovation, any Success came from the security of being able to make decisions that felt right to me in the moment. And as I was saying earlier, every mistake I've made has been either a choice that I made from my head where I didn't get silent or didn't get still or did get still and then still listen to what my head said instead of what my heart said.

Anything you set your mind to, you can do. Von Braun said after the lunar landing, I have learned to use the word impossible with great caution. And I hope you guys take that attitude about your lives.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days, and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's get 50 years of priceless business knowledge in just 3 hours.

Believe.

People always ask, you know, what do I need to know to be successful? If you can't sell, you're, you know, you're SOL, you know, because you're always selling. And when I say that, you have to understand what sales means. Selling is not about convincing somebody to give you money for something they don't want. Selling is about knowing in your heart and your mind and your soul that the product or service you have can help anybody in your potential customer universe, your prospect universe. And so, you know, whether I was selling baseball cards, whether I was selling stamps, whether I was selling you this new vodka drink I just invented to try to get you trashed at my bar, whatever it was, this was the best thing you could ever possibly have for your life. And the same thing applies to all my businesses now. You know, I'm always selling because I believe in my products, and I believe they can help. And if I have something that I don't believe will help you, then it's not a good product. And so when people say, well, I'm not into sales, well, you know, are you into helping your customers? Are you into, you know, telling people why your product or service is good? Because if you can't do that, You're in the wrong spot. You know, when people say, well, I don't know if my business is working, how do you know when to keep going or stop, you know, stop selling or do or end your business? If you don't believe you can sell your product, if you don't know this is a great product and you can convey that to anybody who might have an interest, then it's time to close the doors. Because if you're not— again, I go back to what I say earlier, there's never been a company that survived without sales. Ever.

Ever.

Did I say ever?

Yeah, ever.

And so you have to know how to sell or you're wasting your time.

For a long time, many— I mean, hundreds of years, thousands of years, the idea of going to the moon was so impossible that people actually used it as a metaphor for impossibility. And then in the 1960s, we humans did it. And what I would hope you would take away from that is that anything you set your mind to, you can do. Von Braun said after the lunar landing, "I have learned to use the word impossible with great caution." And I hope you guys take that attitude about your lives.

Any innovation, any success came from the security of being able to make decisions that felt right to me in the moment. And as I was saying earlier, every mistake I've made has been either a choice that I made from my ego head, my head, where I didn't get silent or didn't get still or did get still and then still listen to what my head said instead of what my heart said. Because when you allow the voice of God, which is what your true— what your nature is, that's your true nature. Since that's where you come from, is the Creator, that voice will speak through you if you allow it to. It cannot speak to you if you allow the voices of the world to drown that out.

I think in general, if you want to recruit people that are really talented and driven, you have to state what's the mission, what's the problem we're trying to solve, and just be clearly willing to pour a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it and have a convincing argument for why it matters. There's, I'd say, like, there's 3 major things for, in terms of motivation. It's like, first of all, somebody's got to look forward to coming to work in the morning. Like, if they're, like, are they enjoying the work itself intrinsically? That's very important. And the right work environment can really make a big difference there. I think the ideal is that they also feel like that their rewards will receive fair financial compensation, like that the financial rewards are good and fair. And then third, for the really, for the best people in the world, they want to know, are they, is what they're doing going to matter?

Yeah.

Like, so If they spend 10 years doing this, will it make a difference to the world? Or, you know, will people notice? Will it matter?

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business.

I'll see you there. I want you all to go into one of our retail stores in the next 8, 10 weeks and just give one of the Apple retail store employees a hug.

A candid Steve Jobs.

My theme My favorite theory of management is the Beatles.

Deflecting credit for Apple's success by citing his favorite band.

Together, they helped amplify each other's really good tendencies, and that's true of any team. And we got a really great team here at Apple.

Thanking them for their work on the iPhone the day before its release.

And I think everybody who's worked on iPhone and made those sacrifices is gonna feel that it's been worth it.

What are the keys to success?

Couple things.

One, the easiest way to be successful is find something you love to do and be great at it. Because when you're great at something, things get really, really easy. You know, I've realized that I got to be really, really good at business, really good at tech, and it made it easy when I started a company. That's one. Number two, let's say you can't get there. Be prepared. Understand, put yourselves in the shoes of the people or the businesses that you're working with. The message that I just got on Cyber Dust is a perfect example. If he were to put himself in my shoes, it would be obvious that Cyber Dust is important to me. I'm trying to push everybody to message using it. I volunteered, and Dave mentioned that, hey, I'm gonna be answering questions long after this is over from you people, from everybody sending me messages. So Cyber Dust is obviously important to me. And so if you're able to do something that reflects something that's important to me, or whoever it is that you're working or trying to get a job with, or trying to get an internship with, or trying to get an investment from, if you can put yourself in their shoes and put yourself in context of what's important to them, your chances of being successful increase 99%. It's a thousandfold, right? And one other point I'll leave with you.

Right?

If you're working for somebody, the best way to be successful is by reducing the stress of those around you. It's not about you. I mean, it's always about me, but that's a different point. But it's not about you. It's about the people around you. If you're reducing the stress of the people around you, those are the people— those people start to gravitate towards you. They want to work with you. Because you make going to work easier, more pleasant. You help them accomplish their goals. You help put them in a position to succeed by reducing their stress. So if you remember those 3 things, and plus some of the other things we said today— selling, etc.— you will be successful.

Then you just got to go out and do the work.

I think success is always a bit dangerous, you know, and you can think that whatever your success was, was because you know, you are magically gifted in understanding things, whereas of course any success, particularly a gigantic success, is a huge number of factors, including hard work and understanding, but timing, you know, other people who came to work with you, other people who might have done the same thing who somehow messed up in doing it. And so often you'll, you'll have too much confidence about what you understand. You know, in science, as Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. And so you have to force yourself to go through, you know, again and again and think through, is this the right thing to be doing? You know, will this work? Am I doing it because it would be exciting if it succeeded? Am I really looking at these factors? In fact, in polio, several times we had to say to ourselves, Was it time to give up, or really did we think there was a prospect of being able to move forward?

What are the greatest risks of being successful?

Losing yourself in that is what I was saying earlier, is like believing your own publicity. You know, I work really consciously at staying conscious. I work consciously at not being led by my ego. I work consciously at not losing sight of what is the real truth versus what everybody is saying and what people want. And listen, I have great empathy for you all living in the Instagram social media world because it is a lot tougher than it was when I was your age, having to try to measure yourself against people you don't even know who are posting things that are not even real, and then you all interpreting that and judging yourself against that. So I have regard for what you're up against, but will say, because you are up against a world that is judging you under false premises, that is putting out things that are not real, that it is more essential now than ever to understand the spirit and value of who you really are. So your own personal identity is going to mean so much more to you in this world than even when I was coming up.

You don't necessarily get it exactly right the first time. I mean, the car leasing business, basically you were competing on the cost of money to finance cars, and it's very hard to delight a customer when you just give them the car and tell them to send you a monthly check for 5 years and you'll be back at that time. So his talents were being wasted basically in that business, but at the age of 40, with all of that experience behind him, he found, The Golden Key, and he, he took a very ordinary business and turned it into an absolutely extraordinary operation. And just like Mrs. B, or Rose Blumkin, did with furniture.

And the—

he didn't worry about whether the Federal Reserve was going to tighten or ease. He didn't worry about whether the stock market was up or down yesterday. He didn't worry about the things he couldn't change, but he did worry, he did focus on the one thing he could change, and that was the customer's experience. And I have seen the one I didn't, the one that got away, Enterprise. I went down to Florida and tried to talk him into selling to Berkshire, and he was smart enough not to do it. Probably the value of the company has quadrupled since I made that visit. But he was smart enough to see that he would find that business. Henry Ford, as you may know, failed twice before he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903. I mean, the test isn't whether you get the greatest business idea in the world the first time out. The test is whether you keep learning as you go along what your strengths are and what you can do for your customers, what you can bring especially to the party. And to do that, you need the education that I know you've received through 10,000 small businesses. But you need a genuine, genuine desire day in, day out to delight the customer. I've never, I've never seen a business, and I've seen a lot of businesses, but I've never seen one that delights the customer that doesn't succeed. I mean, what you want is that customer the next day when they think, do I want to rent a car, or do I want to buy some furniture, what goes through their mind? It's the place where they've had a great experience. I don't know what I paid for this tie, actually probably somebody gave it to me, but for the purposes of this speech I will say I have no idea, or the shirt I'm wearing, but I do know I will remember how I was treated when I bought it. I mean, you long forget about the price, but you never forget whether you had a good experience or a poor experience, uh, with the purchase experience.

Recently you shared in a press conference that one of Facebook's focuses for the next decade is that it is more important to be understood than be liked. Will you just share what you meant by that?

Yeah, I mean, look, it's— let's be real here. I'm not—

I'm not like—

communicating is not my best thing, right? You know, I came out here, I've been planning for this, I'm excited about it, and then I messed up the name of our data center within 30 seconds. I mean, look, when, when I got started with Facebook, I was 19. And, um, and there were so many parts about building a company that I didn't know, right? I didn't, I didn't know anything about hiring or managing or building a company. And I certainly didn't really know that much about, you know, how to communicate about what we were doing with the world. I mean, I'm an engineer by training, right? I, I, I love coding. I like building products. That's, that's kind of the background. And, you know, my experience, you know, kind of growing up and running the company is, you know, went out, talked about what we did, say some stupid things, get called out for it and get like kind of go into a shell, right? And end up being really cautious about how we communicate. So, you know, it kind of, it worked out okay for a while for the company because We built products that a lot of people really like, and we weren't winning because we were communicating well. We were winning because the products were working well, I think in spite of the fact that we were communicating quite poorly about what we were doing. But broadly speaking, for a long time, the basic approach was, okay, let's try to not like do anything that's going to be too offensive, right? And we'll kind of explain what we're doing in broad strokes and talk about the mission of what we're doing, which is something that I really believe in, helping to build community and bring people closer together. But, you know, I think we just shied away for a long time talking about some of the things that— some of the principles that we believe in that, that are increasingly controversial in the world. And I just think that we, for one, don't have that luxury anymore. For two, I think that that kind of led And that led for a while to a sentiment towards the company that was positive but fairly shallow. Because if people, if you're not kind of out there standing for things that people care about, then it's not possible for people to feel that strongly about what you're doing. But so now, you know, I've just, I've tried to change our approach more recently. You know, I went out and I, in Georgetown last year, I gave this speech around our principles around free expression. And, you know, that's just one of the areas that I really feel like is under attack right now.

10x has made my life better.

Yeah.

Not harder. 2x is difficult. How do you 2x? Like, how do you actually double something? And then, and then when do you pull it back? So the 10x concept is this: I'm here and I'm going to go up here, and it's going to be so impossible that it causes you to think different. It's not that you achieve this. It causes you to think different, strategize different, look at different assets, look at different mechanisms, change your way of thinking. See, most people try to do this. They're trying to go from something from here to something logical. And the problem with that is only logic can be used in this evaluation. But when you start thinking about 10 times your income, let's say, let's say you're making £100,000 a year and you're like, and £100,000 is hard. And you're like, man, I just hit the $100,000 level. And you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm doing $100,000. This is amazing. My parents think I'm the shit and I've cracked the code. Right? So what the individual does now is he's like, man, if I could just do that again next year. Okay. And he's trying to maintain what he did. There's no creating that. There's no new solutions. There's no new ideas in that. So you start thinking about 10X, it makes you, forces you to think different than what got you right here.

You gotta study, man. You've got to study, okay? I studied. You can ask my friends. I study constantly.

You study constantly?

Constantly.

Every day?

I'm on YouTube every day, all day, okay? I'm reading books, studying this. I'm talking to— talk to my friends and all this, okay? I'm not looking for a job. I'm not working for money. That's why the one book is Rich Dad Poor Dad. Second book is Cashflow Quadrant. Third book is "Rich Dad's Guide to Investing." I put it all in there. You can read that. Then I created the Cashflow board game. And if you play the Cashflow board game, the reason it's better than going to school, it's about a financial statement. You see, my bankers never once asked me what my grades were. My bankers never asked me what college I went to. My banker wants to see my financial statement. My financial statement's my report card. When I grow up.

That's right.

Most college professionals never grow up. They're little kids yet. I got a PhD, I got a PhD, I got a PhD.

Yeah.

I got a financial statement. So what happened in 2008 when the markets crashed, I borrowed $300 million. Okay. You know why? 'Cause all the real estate had crashed.

Okay.

So we took my financial statement and showed it to the banks. So how much money do you want? Tax-free money. We bought almost $1 billion worth of real estate because it crashed. So when I tell people the market's crashing, I get excited. 'Cause everything goes on sale. You know, that's like Ferrari saying, we'll put our cars at half price. Oh no, no, I don't wanna pay half price for a Ferrari. That's how stupid people are. You know, they could be a soccer player, make millions of dollars, and they want to pay full price for a Ferrari.

That's right.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Poor man with nice car. You kind of feed this.

A lot of people here are incredibly focused on selling, so they like Google AdWords because it converts better. Lower funnel, conversion-based marketing, right? The The reality is that's great. Selling is important. That's how a business grooms. But when you are building brand, when people care about you or your business, that is the ultimate form of selling. There is no affiliate, there's no portal, there's no Google Ads that are more powerful than building a brand. Apple does not sell, Nike does not sell most of their product. Through Google AdWords or affiliate marketing. They sell most of their products because they built brand. The number one goal from every single person here and every business here is to build brand. When you build brand, you don't have to sell. It comes to you.

One time, you know, as you know, I went to Indiana, and in Dallas in the mid-'90s, you know, when we had a good basketball team, We literally would, when we wanted to listen to our big games like Indiana-Purdue, go Hoosiers, we would call somebody in Bloomington who would put a radio next to a speakerphone and dial us, and we'd sit on the other side listening over a speakerphone, drinking our beer and whipping it up or doing whatever. And the internet was just starting to happen, and now I'm a tech geek, and I'm like into all of it. And we're like, there's got to be a better way to do this. And so, one of my buddies from Indiana, Todd Wagner, was like, look, we've been thinking about this. And I'm like, no, I'll figure it out. I'm a networking guy now. And so, we looked for ways to stream Indiana basketball. We called it netcasting back then over the brand new internet. And so, I went out and bought a Packard Bell 90 MHz computer and an ISDN line and downloaded all the this software, and I said, you know what, I'm going to figure it out. And lo and behold, by, oh golly, early 1995, we had figured out a way to— we would— we took these 8-hour VCRs and connected it to a local radio station, record them. We'd bring them back, go through this process called encoding, and put it up on this website we called AudioNet. And then I'd go to any online Forum, AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, UUNET, whatever it was, or Usenet. And I like, if you're interested in Dallas sports at all, because we hadn't gotten to Indiana yet, if you're interested in Dallas sports, go to this website, AudioNet. And back then you had a dial-up modem, you had to download this software called TCP/IP, and you had to have software from your internet provider, which meant that so few people knew how to use it. We had no idea if it would work or not, but all of a sudden, AudioNet went from 10 people a day to 100 people to 1,000 people a day. And as we added radio stations, they're getting calls from all over the world from people who are listening to their shows on demand, not even live. And then we worked with a company that put together live software, a company called Zing, and we made it live, and then everything changed. And that's really when streaming was born, and we just grew that. And then in 1998, we got into video, changed the name to Broadcast.com, went public, and it was the biggest IPO in the history of the stock market at the time. And then we sold it to Yahoo.

My approach to criticism and what I teach and preach inside Amazon is when you're criticized, first look in a mirror and decide, are your critics right? If they're right, change. There are two kinds of critics. There are well-meaning critics who, you know, they're worried it's not going to work, but they do want it to work. And so it could be— I can give you an example. Customer reviews would be one of those. When we first did customer reviews 20 years ago, publishers were— some book publishers were not happy about it because some of them were negative. And so it was a very controversial practice at that time, but we thought it was right, and so we stuck to our guns and had a deep heel on that and didn't change. But there's a second kind of critic, which is the self-interested critic, and they come in all shapes and sizes. You know, they're— so they can be any kind of institution, competitors, of course. And so when you are doing something in a new way, And if customers embrace the new way, what's going to happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not going to like you. And they're going to be self-interested critics. And so you do need, as you're looking yourself in the mirror, to try and tease those two things apart.

You need to work— depending on how well you want to do, and particularly if you're starting a company, you need to work super hard. So what does super hard mean? When my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch. And we showered at the YMCA. And we were so hard up, we had just one computer. So the website was up during the day and I was coding at night. 7 days a week, all the time. I sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period, and in order to be with me, she had to sleep in the office. So work hard, like, I mean, every waking hour. That's the thing I would say, particularly if you're starting a company. And I mean, if you do the simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.

We've also had a lot of requests from companies to port NeXTstep to other platforms. And we're talking to some of those companies right now. Now, Sun— we got a lot of requests from Sun customers to port NeXTstep to Sun. So a lot of them are saying, look, we may not want to buy them anymore, but we already bought 500, and we don't want to throw them in the bay. So can we put your software on them? Because Sun's falling behind in software. Now, Sun says they'd rather stick needles in their eyes than help us do this. That's a quote. And, um, so we're evaluating right now which will be worse for Sun, if we port it or if we don't port it. And since we're fairly— since we're fairly customer-driven, we'll probably end up doing what the customers ask us to do, because we want to make them happy.

I think having some self-confidence is different than finding your passion. From a young age, ideally you'll have adults in your life, preferably your parents as part of that, some of your teachers, people around you who, who like you, and they're behind you, and they'll back you no matter what goes on. And that gives you enough confidence to go off on a quest. And during that quest, you try different things out. If you're lucky, when you're very young, you find something you're passionate about. I did when I was 13 years old. I found computers and software. It took me another 5 years to figure out that was my life's primary work. But that's a lucky thing. Other people get out into their 20s or even later before they find what they're passionate about. But proceeding with a certain set of self-confidence that there are people who care for you, you care for them, that you succeed in their eyes by how you treat them, I think that's, that's pretty basic. And it gives you the platform on which to try out new things, to fail. You know, at first you're not going to succeed in various things. So self-confidence is primary. And then finding your passion is an adventure, a quest that may take time and it may switch over the time, time of your life. But those deep relationships will let you pursue it with vigor. You have over $100 billion of cash.

Berkshire does.

Berkshire has over $100 billion in cash, and you say that you always want this company to be a fortress. So how much cash should an ordinary investor have on a percentage basis, do you think?

It depends on their personal situation. If you're working in some something where you're living off your paycheck from week to week, you want to have a little cash around, and you certainly don't want to have a credit card that's maxed out or anything like that. But if your house is paid off, if you don't have big living expenses, you got a portfolio of decent diversified businesses, I don't really need any cash.

There's probably stuff you can say about some insight that you had early on and you thought to yourself, ahaha, nobody else knows this except us, but we have this, we have this great, this great trick. Do you remember any of them?

Well, Peter Thiel was really focused on network effects, and he had this model that I think is right for making decisions, that as the complexity of the company grows, every day you're going to be faced with 100 things that you could potentially go do, and your job is to pick the one thing that actually matters, because out of those 100 things, it's really only actually going to be 1 or 2 things that actually matter. And that was pretty informative to me at the time because I had intuitively— like, I had a lot of some self-direction intuitively. But as soon as I started getting all these people around me who all had reasonable perspectives on things. It was very hard for me to balance that. And Peter was always very useful for that. We really focused—

he was good at saying, here's the one thing that matters, like focus on the one thing that matters.

Well, partially that and partially just the meta lesson of figure out the one thing that matters and do that.

But do you remember what the one thing that mattered?

Like, if someone had to— everyone as quickly as possible, because I mean, network effects were a massively important part of this.

One of the stories—

when you say connecting everyone as quickly as possible, you don't mean specifically getting more signups, you mean getting people to friend one another faster.

Yeah.

How did you do that?

Well, we built a lot of tools to enable people to do what they already wanted to. You can't push uphill on this stuff, right? We were solving a problem that people had and we just needed to remove as much friction as possible.

Dude, saving money is stupid. It is ridiculous. The only thing that ever happens to people that save money is they end up losing it, it ends up getting lost, it ends up getting stolen, it ends ends up getting burnt or it ends up going down in value, but it's never going to get bigger. You save money at the bank, it ain't getting bigger, period. Who does that benefit? We've all been told save your money, save your money, save your money. Who does that really benefit? I remember I read the blackjack book, How to Play Blackjack, right? I knew that book. I knew every card to hit. And then I realized everybody at the table had read the same damn book. Everybody's staying on 16s. Then this Chinese dude comes in and this freaking guy's banging 16s against 9s, or 16s against 7s, 6s and 5s and 4s. Everything he shouldn't do, he's doing. He's splitting 10s. And I'm like, and he's making all the money. He was the only one not playing by the book. And so I just think that there's, Everybody should buy a house. Maybe not. Maybe not, okay? Because the wealthy guys never talk about the house they bought. Warren Buffett owns one house. So I got a lot of those little things that, you know, that I have just observed in my own life that are just, They're just not true, man. Period.

In order to be complete, and that's when you really have a 100% chance at being successful. When you have a complete situation, that means that you have developed your body, meaning your health, your strength, your energy, and all of that makes you much more positive, right? Because that's when you wake up. And you feel strong and you feel fit and you ride the bicycle in the morning, ah, you know, the whole world looks much more bright. So the training of the body, extremely important. The training of the mind, extremely important. This is what I say to people. I say you got to educate yourself. You got to read something every day. You got to learn a new language. You got to just always improve and look at what can you do to improve your business or your life in general. To develop the mind and then to develop the spiritual side and the soul, extremely important also. So if we put those 3 things together, we have total completion. And this is why the physical training, and I'm not talking about wanting to win Mr. Olympia, no. We're talking about just take some light weights and do your reps. Pump up the body and get some blood in it. In there, then go and run. Go and run the stairs. Go and exercise. Go to a yoga class. Do some weight training. Or when you have kids, go out and play sports. You know, just go football playing and go soccer playing and tennis playing and this and that. Whatever you can, that is what creates kind of life in you and therefore more enthusiasm and you have a much more positive outlook in life.

My advice to young Indians is this is the best investment in the world today. It's called silver. Okay. And the reason I say that is because I study history a lot. This here is fake money. I would never work for this stuff. It's good as toilet paper. So the biggest investment today is this. This is $35 US. And I think everybody in the world can afford this today. And I tell people every day, you should buy this. No, I'll save this. You see, they don't know the difference between this is fake money, this is real money. And this here is gold. Real money, fake money. So the yen, the rupee, the dollar, the peso, all fake. So when I was 9 or 10 years old, I started finding that out. I said, how come they don't teach us money at school? Well, they don't want you to know it's fake.

The one reason that most people don't do entrepreneurship is they do fear failure. And I think a lot about fear and failure. I think one of the great things that happened to me was I did love sports, which meant I lost a lot. And then with school, I was losing so much in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th grade that by the time I was 14, I was used to losing. I would argue I loved losing. I think it's why I love being a Jets fan. I'm being serious. I'm being serious. I think that is a characteristic of an entrepreneur, and that was a huge characteristic of mine. I think a lot about the kids that I see now that run away from playing something because they're scared to lose. For me, I was the reverse. I would play and play and I would cry. I cried a lot when I was a kid, if you want to know about me. I cried a lot at 9, 10, 11, 12, but I would just get up again and play and get up again and play. And I think we've done a terrible job in our society on demonizing losing. When we give kids 8th place trophies, we, we confuse them. You understand? We start to tell them as parents losing is bad, so we have— because they know. I promise all the parents in here, when your kids are 8 and they get an 8th place trophy, they know it's weird. And when we give them that trophy, we're telling them losing is so bad, we need to coddle your feelings, and we're going to give you this bullshit trophy. And what ends up happening is it doesn't set them up for real life, because real life happens and it doesn't work that way.

The winner in AI controls the world. China puts together a future plan saying, you know, whoever dominates in AI, and they're subsidizing, you know, Tencent, Alibaba, et cetera, right? And that's the struggle.

They know it's a race.

It is a race.

We cut our Office of Technology and Science to one person who was an assistant to Peter Thiel. That's where we stand. So when we talk about infrastructure jobs, you know, robots are built in Germany. And they're getting bought by Chinese companies in some respects. And I think some Japanese companies bought as well. We don't build robots here very well. I just invested in my first robotics company, Hirebotics, that puts robots into companies. They're in Kansas City, I think it is now. But they lease and rent and sell robots into all these different types of circumstances to replace people. But I had to learn. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's going to happen with or without me. But I wanted to learn what was going on. Building up a robotics industry here, investing in our AI industry here, that's the new infrastructure. Because if we don't do it and China or Russia win those wars, we're SOL. We're out of luck, right? And so, when we talk about the price of assets going up, if you're hiring, if you're talking about intellectual assets, if you're hiring like we were just saying, The price is skyrocketing. People are— Montreal has become the center of the universe for computer vision. It's not US-based schools that are dominating any longer in those areas. We've got a lot of smart kids at MIT, all different schools, right? And kids are starting to realize it's a place for them to go. And I'm out there telling people the first trillionaire is going to come from somebody who comes up with something really unique in AI.

I picked books because there were more items in the book category than any other category, and so you could build universal selection. There were 3 million in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together. The 3 million different books active and in print at any given time, and the largest physical bookstores only had about 150,000 different titles. And so I could see how you could make a bookstore online with universal selection. Every book ever printed, even the out-of-print ones, was the original vision for the company. And so that's why books. And when did you know that Amazon is going to be something way bigger than just a bookstore? Well, I knew that the books— strangely, because I was very prepared for this to take a really long time— I knew that the books business was going to be successful in the first 30 days. I was shocked at how many books we sold. Ill-prepared, you know, I had, we had all the, we had only 10 people in the company at that time, and most of them were software engineers, and so everybody, including me and the software engineers, were all like packing boxes. We didn't even have packing tables, and down, we were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes, and at about, you know, 1 or 2 in the morning, I said to one of my software engineering colleagues, I said, I said, you know, Paul, we— this is killing my knees. We need to get knee pads. And Paul looked at me and he's like, Jeff, we need to get packing tables. And I was like, oh my God, that is such a good idea. The next day I bought packing tables and it doubled our productivity and probably saved our backs and our knees too.

I have always known this about celebrity. Power of being somebody that somebody knows. And I really think that the only difference between being famous and not is that more people know your name. So the only difference between understanding that is understanding that what Selma has done, what Susan has done, what Anna has done, Rebecca has done, what Jim has done, what I've done, you too can do. Because true philanthropy comes from living from the heart of yourself and giving what you have been given. How will you do that? How will you use your personality, the energy of your personality, to serve that which is your soul's calling? I know this for sure. Any life No matter how fantastic it is, how glorious it seems, how much attention you receive, how much square footage you have, any life and every life is enhanced by the sharing and the giving and the opening up of the heart space. Your life gets better when you can find a way to share it with someone else. So what we've done, you can do. The real empowerment comes when every person leaves this room and makes a decision, makes a decision. Maybe that decision is that you will write a check and support some of the wonderful organizations you've heard here today. But the true decision is, how will you use yourself? How will you use everything that you have been given to serve that which is greater than yourself? How will you use that to become truly, authentically empowered? Now, it is a beautiful thing to receive an award and to be on the COVID of Variety. Thank you very much. It's a beautiful thing. But the true reward is in the lives that you are able to touch and the people who you know you have impacted.

When trying different things, you've got to have some acceptance of failure, as you were alluding to earlier. Failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely conservative choices, and you may get something even worse than lack of innovation. Things may go backwards. So, if— what you really want is risk— you want reward and punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek. So if, if what you're seeking is innovation, then you should reward success in innovation. And only there should be minor consequences for lack of— minor consequences for trying and failing. There should be minor, significant rewards for trying and succeeding. Minor consequences for trying and not succeeding and big and major negative consequences for not trying.

Treating people equally is not, is not the same, is not recognizing who they truly are and taking advantage of their skills, you know. And I've learned that through Sint. I've learned that through all this. And, you know, like Sint and I talk, we'll be a much better organization I'll be a better exec, I'll be a better investor, I'll be a better Shark, because I recognize that treating people equally is not the same as treating them, recognizing their skills and their differences. For this audience, it's critically important. I think there's an opportunity now, and hopefully people like me will recognize that the old white guys, now newly old white guys, that are in positions of power that there are things that you can do that I can't do.

That I—

there are things you see that I don't see. There are opportunities that you can create that I can't create. You know, we were trying to sell to the black community through the Mavs with multiple white men. We were trying to sell to moms with multiple white men. It's not that they're not capable, it's not that they're not skilled, it's just everybody brings something different to the table. And as an entrepreneur, you have to recognize what the differences are that you bring to the table, and you have to be brutally honest with yourself, right? You can't lie to yourself. Like, we all lie to ourselves as entrepreneurs, but those differences can be part of your unique skill set that, like I talked about earlier. And now I'm finally starting to recognize those things. And you know the one thing I know? It's going to make me a shitload more money.

Things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so different people make different choices. And if the market tells us we're making the wrong choices, we We listen to the market. We're just people running this company. We're trying to make great products for people. And so we have at least the courage of our convictions to say, we don't think this is part of what makes a great product. We're going to leave it out. Some people are going to not like that. They're going to call us names. It's not going to be in certain companies' vested interests that we do that, but we're going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers. We're going to instead focus our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendancy and we think are going to be the right technologies for customers. And you know what? They're paying us to make those choices. That's what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to try to make the best products we can. And if we succeed, they'll buy them. And if we don't, they won't. And it'll all work itself out.

Yeah, certainly during the time I was at Harvard, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. The idea that software was this field that was— the opportunity was unbelievable. That became more obvious during the 3-year period I was here. But my dad had been a lawyer. I thought of mathematics, like doing well in the Putnam. That was the coolest thing. And the computer software— I didn't think those people were as smart as the math people. So it's like, well, am I gonna go into the easy field or this really hard field? But anyway, math was fantastic. When I finally picked and decided to go to Microsoft, then I got into a period from age 19 to about 40 where I wasn't able to look at the latest on how tornadoes work or how mitochondria work. I was pretty monomaniacal. And when I was able to ask Steve, this is the year 2000, Steve Ballmer, he mistakenly graduated, but then he started at Stanford. But I was trying to hire him, but his parents told him you're supposed to graduate, which was fine. But then he started at Stanford Business School, and he was in his first year, and I thought, well, this is perfect. I'll get him to drop out of Stanford Business School. So in a certain sense, he is a dropout. And he was very key to the success of Microsoft. I mean, he knew a lot of things. But during that period, I didn't get to do much. At Harvard, I took all these courses because it was just so amazing. People were interested in talking about them. And I have to say, I never went to a lecture during reading period or anything because the courses that I was actually signed up for, I finally started to work on those. So I was in Hillel the minute it would open to the minute it would close during reading period trying to catch up on that other set of courses. So people say I'm a dropout, which is literally true, But because I like college courses, the online college courses, there's a company called The Learning Company that I buy tons and tons of their stuff, and I do at least 4 or 5 courses a year. In a sense, I like going to college more than anyone. So I've sort of made sure my job, certainly post-Microsoft, that I get to I spend my time meeting with scientists, learning new things, you know, seeing what the hard problems are, and in some cases giving money to people to take on those very, very hard problems. I was wondering how you define success personally.

Well, I can certainly define happiness because that's what I am. I mean, I get to do what I like to do. I get to do it with people I like. I get to— I don't have to associate with anybody who causes my stomach to churn. And the only thing in my job I don't like, and this only happens about every 3 or 4 years, occasionally I have to fire somebody, and I don't like that. That's the only thing. Other than that, I tap dance to work, and I get down there and I think I'm supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling, you know, or something like that. I mean, that's the way I feel. And it doesn't diminish. It's tremendous fun. So they say that success is getting what you want, and happiness is wanting what you get. Well, I don't know which one applies in this case. But I do know that I wouldn't be doing anything else. I mean, I do advise you— You know, when you go out to work, go to work for an organization that you admire, people you admire, because it'll turn you on. And you ought to be happy where you are working. And I always worry about people who say, you know, I'm going to do this for 10 years, I really don't like it very well, but I'll do 10 more years of this. I mean, that's a little like saving up sex for your old age. I mean, not a very good idea. So get right in.

You recommend that?

Get right into what you enjoy, you know, and you'll be successful at it. You really will. I mean, you won't be able to miss. And, you know, that's— I don't regard what I do as the most important thing in the world at all, but it's right for me. I mean, I happen to be wired in a certain way that that what I do works in this. If I had to do what, you know, Bill does, I mean, it'd last about 10 minutes. And that's true of a lot of things, but I luckily, I kind of stumbled into the thing that I do best, and that, you know, that it's worked out well.

In running a company for almost 20 years now, one of the things that's been pretty clear is when you have a team that's cohesive, you can get almost anything done. And, you know, you can, you can run through super hard challenges, um, you can make hard decisions and push really hard to, to do the best work, even, you know, and kind of optimize something super well. But when, when there's that tension, I mean, that's, that's when, when things get really tough. And, you know, when I talk to other friends who run other companies and things like that, I think one of the things that I actually spend a disproportionate amount of time on in running this company is just fostering a pretty tight core group of people who are running the company, uh, with me. And that to me is, is kind of the thing that both makes it fun, right? Having, having, you know, friends and people you've worked with for a while and new people and new perspectives, but like a pretty tight group who can, who you can go work on some of these crazy things with. Um, but to me, that's also the most stressful thing is when, when there are, when when there's tension, um, you know, that's— that, that weighs on me. I think the, you know, just— it's, it's, it's maybe not surprising. I mean, we're like a very people-focused company, and it's the, the people is the, the part of it that, that, um, you know, weighs on me the most to make sure that we get right. But yeah, that, that, that I'd say across everything that we do is probably the, the big thing.

Some things— look, I am very financially motivated. I've never denied it. I say it probably one time a day, extremely financially motivated. I love the idea of measuring things based on financial windfalls. When we did the Miami Marlins Stadium, it had nothing to do with money. It was 34,000 people. They're like, dude, that's a lot of damn people. How are you going to do that? Nobody thought about it. Damn, he's going to make a bunch of money. People actually did not think about how much money I was going to make at the deal. They're thinking, how's he going to do that? How the hell you put 34,000? Marlins Stadium has never ever had 34,000 people in it, maybe not in an entire baseball season. So Derek Jeter, when I told the owner I was going to do this, he was like, the story goes like this. I said, I walked in, I see the place. I said, Derek, how many people What's the most people have ever been here? 26,000. Who did that? Joel Osteen. I said, fuck it then. How many people? How many people? Every seat in the house? 26,000. I said, good. How many on the field? He's like, another 6,000 or 7,000. He's like, we never loaded up the field. I said, bro, that field is bigger than, what is it, 11 players, 10 players, whatever, 9 players, whatever. I'm like, I want the whole place. I'm going to put 34,000 people in this place. We put 35,000 people in there. He's like, what weekend you want it? I said, just give me a price. I know it's available the weekend I want it. And he's like, but what weekend? I said, just give me a price. I said, I guarantee you it's available the weekend I want it. And then I told him Super Bowl weekend. He's like, what are you, crazy? I told Steve Harvey, Steve, come speak at this deal for a couple hours. When is it, Grant? I said, you available? I said, you're gonna fly from Atlanta 'cause I know you're at the Super Bowl. You're gonna come down to Miami. I'm gonna pay for the jet. I'm gonna send you back for the game. He's like, what? Are you crazy, dude? You cannot do this on Super Bowl weekend. And so the reason we did that, and the reason it was so important for me to pull that off is because everyone I knew that weekend, you could hate my guts, like despise me, and you had to take your hat off to me. 'Cause you can't say, You know, the haters came out and said the sound was bad. Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

You know, but every seat was packed. So, you know, some things you do because it might not have a financial return. But trust me, it made it easier to sell out every event we did after that.

The kind of printing that they've been doing over the last 1 or 2 years of excessive cash into the economy. What do you think is going to happen if they continue doing this in terms of the inflation?

Just be careful. Be careful whose money you use, either the dollar or the yuan. So that's why I've been saying it's commodities, silver and gold.

Right.

This today is about $35 US. Okay.

Okay.

That's a lot of money here. I don't—

$35 or—

this is $35 US.

$35.

This is about 2,000. Okay.

Okay.

Is that real?

No, they're fake.

Okay.

This is real, the silver. But anyway, so being a capitalist, I own gold mines.

Okay.

And I own silver mines.

Okay.

So when the dollar crashes, I get richer.

Right.

And that happens time and time again.

It's going to happen now.

When do you think it will happen?

It's happening right now. America is sliding into a depression right now. I said it's Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, but it's Russia, China versus America right now. It's the biggest battle in history going on today. And the dollar is going to lose. So if you read "Rich Dad Poor Dad," I said, I don't work for money. I work for gold and silver. I do not save dollars.

Okay.

I use debt to buy real estate.

Right.

I pay no taxes legally.

Yeah.

And I save gold and silver. And since I was a little boy, I've been saving so much gold and silver. I now own the richest gold mine in America.

Which is?

It's called the Trixie, but it's on the New York Stock Exchange. It's OCD, call sign. So, I only work for real money, which is gold and silver.

My conviction and confidence and bravado is very high. I believe in myself. I don't even think I'm comfortable expressing how much I believe in myself. That's luck of DNA. That's my mother. There's a lot of things that went into it, but it's the truth. I truly believe that I am special. And ultra-capable in a world with 8 billion people. On the flip side, the reason it works is 'cause I think humility is the other thing that makes me work. As much as I think I'm special, I think there's been many special people. I think there's many special people right now. I think there's been millions of special people through the years of life. And I know that if God forbid I pass away tomorrow, that I will probably get a good 20% more hours on social media, everybody will share their favorite video and if they met me and this and that, oh, shit, he was just in Brazil and we know— and then everybody will move on. So I believe in being competitive but being a sportsman. I believe in a lot of things that seemingly look opposite. The biggest one I believe in is in ambition and patience. Almost everybody Anybody who consumes my content, when they hear patience, hears complacency, not patience. Right, so I go so hard every day. I mean, look at me, what I'm doing now. Midnight flight from New York, fly here. I'm literally going to the airport right now, back to New York, banging up my body, going hard. But I believe in patience. Slow, it will all come.

If you want to be successful, learn from the other people's mistakes. Don't learn from the successful stories. Successful stories, they may— don't listen to that. There are a lot of reasons behind it. Just like I remember the first time Harvard Business School came to us, say, Jack, we want to write a case study for you. That's year 2001 or 2000. They came, they spent one week and they write a report and I read, no, no, I said this is not me. And they said this is you. I said no, this is not us. He said this is you. So they make me sign and the case study go up and they start to teach in a lot of universities. The next 5 years they invited me to go to the case study and they always find a competitor of my company. And after every case study, Alibaba will die, that company will succeed. All the students agree. And actually, every 5 years, all the competitors die, we still survive. So how can you study this kind of a successful story? Learn from the mistakes, the other people. No matter how smart you are, you will encounter these mistakes. You learn from mistakes not because you will be able to avoid mistakes. You are able to— when these mistakes come, this suffer comes, you know how to deal with it, how to face it. The book I want to write, if I want, if I can, is Alibaba 1001 Mistakes. This is the most treasurable things in my life. In my life, it's It's not how much we achieved, it's how much we go through the tough days and mistakes. And this is what is— if you start to think now, it'll be good. When you're an entrepreneur, get used to failure. Today, say Alibaba, you succeed. Well, our company won't last 102 years. Why 102 years? Because every Every target, every goal we give to our team should be very accurate. We were born in 1999, last century we had 1 year. We want to spend 100 years and plus 1 year, 1 or 2, cross 3 centuries. So very accurate. We never see we are successful because we are only 19 years old. There's 83 years to go. So we will never see we're successful. We just Survived 19 years. We are lucky. But in the past 19 years, we have made thousands of mistakes. As an entrepreneur, don't learn from other people how they succeed. Learn from how these people fail. Because a lot of MBA schools, they teach you success, successful case studies. When you read too many successful, you think you can be successful.

No.

There are a lot of things that you don't know. Because, you know, some business school came to Alibaba, write case studies. They say, yeah, this is Alibaba. And I said, no, this is not Alibaba. They wanted me to sign after one week study. They say, this is case study Alibaba. He said, no, this is not me. They say, Jack, you don't know you. And I said, all right, I signed. And next 5 years, every year there is a case study in Tsinghua University. I was invited to sitting at the back, listen to the MBA schools talk, learning about our case study. And they always put a competitor, competitor and Alibaba, who will succeed. For 5 years, all they always agree Alibaba would die, the competitor will win. But 5 years, all the competitors died. So how can you learn from the case study like that? Learn from the mistakes. Because the mistake— most of the companies I, I talk to, entrepreneurs, most of the mistakes they made are the same. Most of the success reasons, you don't know, they're different reasons. So when you learn from the mistakes, not because you want to avoid mistakes, because when you see the mistakes, when you have this kind of problems, you know how to face it. An entrepreneur have a strong heart towards the difficulties, mistakes, the troubles, the failures, but should it be a warm and soft heart to your colleagues and to the customers.

I had a Fiat X1/9 that had a hole in the floorboard. I mean, you could tell I was living the high life, right? I mean, and I was putting in oil every 60 miles and working as a bartender at night. What did I have to lose? And so it wasn't like, oh, man, I could lose all this. And so it was just like, you just go for it. Now, later on, after I'd had some success and we got back and we started AudioNet, which turned into Broadcast.com, the math was different. The equation, the calculus was different. It was like, OK, I'm investing a lot of my save money into this whole idea of netcasting, right, or internet broadcasting in early 1995 when people didn't even know what the internet was. That was all risk because I literally was putting everything that I had on the line for something people just laughed at me and said, wait, audio over the internet? You know, you can turn on the radio. You know, you can turn on a TV. Yeah, but you don't get it. Oh, that's just dumb.

All right.

You know, and so being able to overcome all that resistance, because remember back then, A, you had to have a PC, B, you had to know what a modem was and install it, C, you had to know what the internet was, and then you had to download a TCP/IP client that worked over a modem and then connected to a browser that you probably didn't even know what it was or how to download it. And we had to take it on faith that all this was going to grow?

We all have adversity in our lives. I doubt if you really, you know, if you know somebody, any friend or anybody that you talk to, there's no lack of adversity. And by the way, that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up. You fall down, you get back up. It always happens. And you know, you get get certain gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those. But you— I guess my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud not of your gifts but of your hard work and your choices. So, you know, you may be— the kinds of gifts you get in life, you know, you might be really good at math, you might be be really easy for you. That's a kind of gift. But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat. That's a choice. You can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. You can be grateful for them and thankful for them.

And—

but your choices, you choose to work hard. You choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of.

Let failure be your friend. There are going to be times, of course, where you're gonna win a lot. A lot of things are gonna go your way, and it's wonderful to bask in that adulation and to feel proud of your successes.

Successes.

But there are also going to be times— the satisfaction that those moments bring, nothing can compare to that. Those victories will feed you for years to come and help you stay committed when your tank is sometimes empty. Winning is great. It's fantastic. I love it. I love being number one. I love winning. But it's the times when things go wrong, when you fall, or fail that you're actually going to learn the most about yourself. You know, all those years on the Oprah Show, 25 years, we were the number one show for 25 years. And that's because I lived with the intention to serve the audience. The audience came first. Every show, I would sit with the producers and say, well, I can't do that because I can't find the truth of myself in I have to have a thread of truth to be able to hold on to. So I knew so well the audience. I felt like I was the audience, the audience was me, and I felt so connected. And then I ended that and started a new network. And I flailed for a while. And I was really upset with myself. But I will tell you that that when I was able to shift the paradigm to start looking at, wow, what I have instead of what I don't have, what I have instead of what I thought I'd lost, I was able to begin to turn things around. But it's those moments of being of uncertainty. It's the moments where, you know, all of my mistakes show up on the evening news. You can make a mistake. I can tell if I've done something wrong. It's on the CNN crawl. I can read about it. But learning from the moments where things weren't going so great, being able to get still, to connect with that which I know is God, the force, the power greater than myself, and to come back and realize that in order to move forward, you move forward by taking the next right step. You don't have to know everything to do. You don't have to know all the steps to make. Just what is the next right move?

As you look back on your career in the space industry, what has been the most surprising or unexpected challenge that you faced? And along those lines, if you were to go back in time and talk to your 20-year-old self, would you do anything differently?

Go back in time to your 20-year-old self.

I mean, I think I think I'd— if I get it, I think it would make far fewer mistakes, obviously, if I could go like, here's a list of all the dumb things you're about to do. Please do not do them.

Wouldn't we all?

It'd be a very long list. I'm like, here, let me write it down or something, you know? I mean, hindsight's 20/20, so it's hard to say. I mean, a number of— I've made so many foolish mistakes. Mistakes, I lost count, honestly. I mean, some of these things I just wish I'd, like, that's simple sort of mantra, management by rhyming. I mean, it worked for Homer, okay? Management by rhyming is, that thing I was saying, like if the, if the schedule is long, the design is wrong. We've overcomplicated the design many times. And I think we should have just gone with a simpler design with the acid test being how long will it take for this to fly? And if it's going to take a long time, don't do it. Do something else.

Education is essentially a social construct. It's not that the universities have secret knowledge that only they have available. Uh, you know, I took— these numbers won't make any sense anymore, but the hardest freshman math class was called Math 55. Uh, I assume it's not called that anymore, uh, but it was, it was a group of It was a group of 80 people whose personal positioning was they were the best person at math that they had ever met. So there were 79 frauds, one person who really was the best at math. I ended up, the guy who came in first in the class is a lawyer in New York now. The guy who came in second is a professor of chaos theory at Princeton. And then I came in third. So I knew, okay, math, geez, that's interesting. Anyway, I didn't take Physics 55, but I read the Feynman book. And so if you're motivated, seriously, you don't have to take a course. The Feynman book, if you're hardcore, just read the Feynman book, do the problems. You wanna learn to do software? Read The Art of Computer Programming. Good luck doing the problems. But anyone that's rated 30 or harder is like super hard to do. And so a MOOC, in a sense, doesn't change what counts. It's always been in the textbook. But the percentage of students who just buy textbooks and read them and know the subject is vanishingly small. You kind of have to have this thing where a bunch of kids all come at the same time. And, you know, if you don't study, you're gonna get a bad grade, and your parents may not like that. You have to create all these social things in order for people to get into this mode of hyper-concentrating and actually understanding why should I concentrate. You know, if I'm a high school student, they put Xs and Ys up on the board. How does that relate to my life? Now, if you understood that being good at math lets you get a good job, travel the world, you might say, okay, it does relate to me, but that's a very indirect thing, and the kind of discipline to care about that, to concentrate, that's what's missing. And so MOOCs, to the degree that it's easier to take a MOOC than it is to read a textbook, yeah, that's nice. It's a little bit interactive, there's a video. That's partly why I like The Learning Company, like all their economics, there's a guy named Timothy Taylor who has 5 courses on economics I super recommend. And you learn to like him and his way of explaining things. So a MOOC is a slightly more digestible form of learning, but it doesn't take, particularly for somebody at a young age, it in no way changes this question of why should people engage in that learning and how do you create the environment and the sense of achievement and the sense capability that sitting in there and looking at Xs and Ys and manipulating them seems like a smart thing to do.

If you buy a business, if you buy a farm, do you go up and look every couple of weeks to see how far the corn is up? And do you worry too much about whether somebody says this is going to be a year of low prices because exports are being affected or anything like that? You buy a farm, and you hold it for I've got one farm that I bought in the 1980s and my son runs it, but I've been there once. You know, I mean, it doesn't grow faster if I go and stare at it. You know, I can't cheer for it, you know, more effort, more effort or something like that. And I know there's gonna be some years when prices are gonna be good and some when the prices aren't gonna be good. I know there's years when yields will be better than others, but I bought the farm and if, It just doesn't— I don't care about economic predictions on it or anything of the sort. I do care that over the years it's well tended to in terms of rotating crops, and I hope yields get better, which they generally have. In fact, that farm 100 years ago would have probably produced 30 bushels, maybe 35 bushels of corn per acre. Now in a good year, you know, it'd be 200. I mean, We really made progress in this country. That's one reason commodity prices, if you go back a couple hundred years, they've moved so little is because we've just gotten better and better at whether it's cotton or whether it's corn or soybeans or all kinds of things. And you and I have benefited from that.

And so Apple is kind of like a farm.

Well, it's a long-term investment. And if you owned the the best auto dealership in town, the best brand, and had something good running it, you wouldn't drop by every day and say, you know, how many people have come in today, or, you know, I think interest rates are going up a little, maybe it'll slow down our sales or anything. No, you buy it knowing there's 365 days a year and you're gonna own it for 20 years, so that's 7,300 days, and you know, they're gonna— things are gonna be different from day to day and year to You shouldn't buy it if the day-to-day stuff is important.

I would like to tell you of two women that each sold a business to Berkshire Hathaway, to me actually, for many, many, many millions of dollars. Both of them started with $2,500. By coincidence, it was the exact same amount. It was everything they had in the world. One of them was a woman who landed in Seattle in 1917, couldn't speak a word of English, had a tag around her neck. The tag said Fort Dodge, Iowa. The Red Cross got her to Fort Dodge where she was reunited with her husband who had come to the country a couple of years earlier. And she lived in Fort Dodge for 2 years, and as she put it, she felt like a dummy. She couldn't pick up the language, she couldn't learn a word. And so she decided, she and her husband decided to move to Omaha. So they came to Omaha in 1919, and there she found a small colony of Russian Jews and so she started feeling more at home. And then as her oldest daughter went to school, she would come home, this daughter, Frances, and she would teach her mother the words she'd learned in school that day. And this woman, Rose Blomkin, spent 20 years saving money, bringing first her siblings over, her mother and father, $50 at a time. She sold used clothing to do it. She had 4 children during this period, and by 1937, after 20 years, she'd saved $2,500. She went to Chicago, and she bought what she could of furniture. Her dream had always been to open a furniture store. And this woman who had never gone to school one day in her life, with $2,500, but with the same spirit that the people in this room had about having a dream and working to accomplish that dream, she built a business which she sold to me in 1983 for $60 million approximately, and which— which did $1.5 billion worth of business last year. The fourth generation is working in that business. This woman, Rose Blumkin, lived— well, she worked for me until she was 103, and then she retired and she died the next year, which is a lesson to all of Berkshire's managers that Premature retirement, you know, nothing, you can't tell what's going to happen. But Mrs. B, with her $2,500, one further fact about her, she could not read or write. And she went into a furniture business, and she didn't bring anything unique in furniture, but she brought a determination to succeed. She knew She could outwork anyone else. She knew that she cared about her customers. She worked at very low gross margins, but she built this incredible business.

If we've given the world a voice, look at what's happened in the last year.

You've had elections in the last years, elections manipulated, hate speech that's gone viral and turned offline.

It certainly seems like this mission has been accomplished in many ways.

And there's a whole new set of problems that perhaps you guys didn't foresee.

And now we're in a very complicated place where there's not an easy solution.

Yeah, there's— these are complex issues that you can't fix. You manage them on an ongoing basis. But look, do you think that the world is better with everyone having a voice and having the ability to express their opinion and being able to connect to who they want? I don't think we're going back to a world where there were just a handful of gatekeepers who got to control what ideas get expressed. And even if we could, well, I'm trying to make it so that we're not. I mean, that's why making it so that we're building these independent governance mechanisms and things like that are really important. And that's work that I really care about. But I think that the world will keep on moving in this direction. More people will keep on getting a voice. I think that that's good, and I think There are certainly going to be issues that we need to work through over time. But I think that while we are doing that, we can't lose sight of all of the really positive things that are happening here as well. Not just in terms of communities and people being able to connect with groups that are really meaningful to them, whether it's around a disease or a community around veterans that they wouldn't be able to connect to otherwise. But even if you just think about the economic impact of what we're doing, We serve 80 million small businesses around the world. About half of them have told us that they're hiring people because of using our tools, and that without Facebook and the tools that we provide, that their business would be significantly smaller and they wouldn't be hiring as many people as they are. So a study came out, the US economy added about 4.5 million jobs over the last year. If you just look at what people are telling us, the small businesses who use our tools, We've directly been able to contribute to creating many more jobs than that across the world. So I think that this is the power of giving people a voice, giving small businesses, giving communities, giving everyone everywhere the ability to connect with the people who, who they care about and get their opinion across, and giving everyday people the power that previously only big companies would have had. So that's it. The world is going to go more in that direction. And I think by and large that's a good thing. So I'm really proud of the work that we're doing on this. And there are big issues, and I'm not trying to say that there aren't, that we need to work through. But I do think that sometimes you can get the flavor from a lot of this, from some of the coverage that that's all there is. And I don't think that that's right either. We need to make sure that we address these questions. These are really big and important things. Things for the future of our society and the future of the internet, but we also need to keep pushing in the direction of empowering more people because that's good.

I don't end up doing things that are destructive when I'm busy doing things that are constructive. The truth is I was never a drug addict. I just had too much free time and made bad choices. This planet is filled with bad choices. Pornography, strip joints, casinos. If you were filled filled up all day long with activities, if you were addicted to productivity, if you were junkied out on potential, you wouldn't have time for all the other garbage.

I wouldn't be—

I wouldn't spend money on stuff I don't need. When is that money spent? When do we waste most of our money on this planet? During the holidays, when we have free time. When do you spend your money? When do you go in debt? On the holidays, free time. So if I can just stay busy, if I can use time and create time, how do I create time? I have 24 hours and I'm like, I'm going to jam as much in those 24 hours as I can. And then I'll let you worry about me burning out because that's what I'll hear next. What about burnout? You're going to burn out? Look, I'm 60 years old. The more I do, the more I can do and the younger I get. The more I do, the younger I feel. The more I do, the younger I am. Stronger my body feels. I'm not going to burn out. I'm not a candle. I'm not wax. The counselor back in the treatment center said to me, "Dude, aren't you worried about—" because he's seen my success now, and he's like, "Aren't you worried about burning out?" I'm like, "Dude, you're the burnout, bro. You're the burnout. You're the one that said I was going to come back. You're the one that said I would never make it. You're the one that said don't write books." I've written 7 of them, man. Okay, you're the one that said don't be a star. I am. I have my own TV studio, right? You're the one that said, Grant, don't get rich, just be satisfied that you don't use drugs again. No, no, I got rich, okay? I did the Rich, I did the books, I did the TV. I'm going to be on a billboard. I'm going to be on a bus, bro. Look, look, what are you doing? I'm not worried about burnout. I am not a candle. Candles burn out. Spiritual beings don't.

I wrote this book here, it's called Fake. And the reason I wrote this book is because it says fake money. Our money is fake. We have fake teachers. So many teachers have no idea when it comes to money. But I'm not just talking about school teachers. You know, on YouTube and all this stuff, there's a lot of people saying, I can make you rich, I can do this and all this. But how do you know they know what they're doing? And then fake assets. So what I'm excited about going to India to talk about is you better know what's real. You have to start knowing what's real. So I love silver, I love gold, I love real estate, I love my businesses and all this. But as you guys know, because Indians are, I mean, you guys are the brains of the world. I mean, do you know what I mean? Indians are the brains of the world, but AI is coming. Yes. Yeah. And AI is going to wipe out millions and millions of intellectual workers. So like doctors will lose their jobs. Anybody just in their head, teachers will be wiped out because AI is going to be the better teacher. I've already seen the technology for that. That. Right. So we are the— this is the biggest change in world history, and we're still teaching kids to go to school and get a job, work hard, save money, and money is fake. And I've never seen such changes.

Differentiation is adjusting to the reality of the situation, meaning the answer is nobody's really fully sure sure what AI is going to do to all of this. We just know a lot of it's going to impact it. Then we're going to understand it, and then you have to adjust. I think of this like boxing or MMA, like fighting. You have a plan. You spend 4 months knowing you're going to fight each other. I watched every video of every fight. I know that he normally uses his left leg to do this. I also know that he knows I'm watching every single video of every one of his fights, and he might fake left and go right, and I may get knocked the fuck out. That's how this is going to work. I know that AI and new platforms and metaverse, it's all coming. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I'm going to have to adjust. And sometimes it changes everything. I'll give you an example. Influencers, influencers love that they become more famous famous people, right? They think it's so cool that they're more famous than actors and actresses and footballers. Meanwhile, right now, as we sit here today, AI-generated characters, virtual characters, are streaming in Asia and becoming more famous than people. Literally, robots, non-humans, are becoming more famous as streamers and content creators who are generating AI characters. They're going to take their money. So the influencers have taken the money from marketing from athletes and actresses, and they think they're the king and queen now. And as we sit here today, people are developing characters that are virtual who are vlogging and streaming, and they're going to take the money. The question becomes, someone like me me, something like him, when you have the ability as a human to do it, okay, but here comes a character that can do it better, maybe using AI. So I'm gonna have to adjust. What do I do? Maybe I start a company that has characters that I use my platform to build up the character. What's amazing about business and the way the world works is there's only one option: to be prepared for the fight, and then the fight happens. Now we have the first round, and he did different. Now I have 3 minutes or a minute before I go back out there to figure out what he was doing and why he was doing it, and then ding, ding, ding, and we got to fight. That's business. So I think what we— the number one rule is to be mentally prepared that what we all do is always in trouble to changing. And number two, as it's happening, put in the work to come up with a new thing to do.

Larry and Sergey almost got acquired. Can you tell us a little bit about this? And I always wonder what the world— how the world might be different if that had, in fact, happened.

Well, we had developed this technology we called PageRank, sadly not BrinRank. But anyway, it probably would have sold better that way. But we had developed this technology that we found was useful for for search. It by itself, you know, wasn't really a complete search engine. What we had kind of just searched titles of web pages and ranked them quite well. But we showed it to a bunch of the existing search companies back then. Some of you might remember them, you know, Infoseek, Excite, Lycos. And probably the greatest interest came from Excite, and actually came from Vinod. You were the investor in Excite, and we spent a while talking to them and talking to you, Vinod. Yeah. You remember that. In the end, I don't think the management team there was quite as excited about it, no pun intended. But I remember we were, you know, we were just, there were 4 of us at the time, 4 grad students at Stanford. And I remember we fired off a note to Vinod. It was just like a little email. We said like, you know, we don't really want to sell, but okay, for $1.6 million, you got a deal. And a few minutes later, we got a reply and said, that's a lot of dough, but okay, we'll do it. I know, that's characteristic of Node-RED. So then 10 minutes later, Scott, one of the 4 of us, comes running in laughing, huge grin on his face. He had faked the reply. And yeah, back then, you know, the ethics around faking it weren't quite the same. Anyway. So he had that big joke and the deal obviously never came to fruition and we went our own way to build Search.

So the way I remember it, we actually agreed on a deal around $350,000.

What? This is typical. Are you trying to renegotiate this now?

300.

But I had a hard time getting the management team to agree that they should acquire Google.

I think he's saying that they were having a hard time going to 350 and we were having a hard time changing our number.

Yeah, they felt they didn't need it.

But, you know, I start here for one very simple reason.

There are many, many instances where things could have gone either way, and I'm really glad they didn't acquire because the world might have been a very, very different place. Looking back in retrospect, I feel like it would have been really, really sad if, in fact, Larry and Sergey had sold the company and not pursued the vision and changed the way the world the way they have.

So, uh, iPhone—

it's actually kind of an interesting story because the reason we didn't sell it is not so much the money. I mean, like, I don't know, we were like grad students, you know, eating burritos or whatever. So like a million dollars was a fair amount. Um, the reason I think we really didn't sell the company was that we talked to all the search companies at the time and they just weren't interested in it. What we were doing. And so, and it was obviously like, didn't want to buy like, you know, this company that didn't really have anything without the people. So they wanted us, but like, we were like, well, why are we going to work at this place that doesn't believe in search? You know, it's not going to cause anything good to happen. So I think ultimately we didn't sell for that reason, which is that they weren't interested in it, which is the same reason they whatever had trouble getting to $1 million, which I guess which at the time was a lot of money. But I think ultimately for me, it was just about wanting to actually— search seemed pretty important. It was about actually wanting to do something in that area. And it didn't seem like that was going to happen in these organizations.

We all are entrepreneurs or wonder if we're entrepreneurs at heart. We all have that idea inside of us. We've all been through it. Oh, I got this idea. It's a great idea. You know, and you get all excited. You get that feeling in your stomach, right? And then you go to Google and you Google, "Oh, there's nobody else doing this. Ah!" Then you call your friends, you go, "What do you think? What do you think?" "Oh, that is really cool. I'd buy one." You know, and then most people stop, you know? "What's for dinner?" But some people, they found their way to turn those into companies and they found their way onto Shark Tank. And we got to see examples of people from any little town in any, you know, anywhere in the country with backgrounds that weren't from some big Ivy League school, maybe you didn't go to college at all, maybe it was their last dollar and they started it up and they were desperate to get an investment, but they started it. And we showed examples of people who were willing to take that first step and start that company and where it could go. And I think that really, and to this day, really excites people. People and encourages them and really shows them that there can be an upside. And on the flip side, you know, there can be failure too, and so you have to be realistic about what can happen.

If you want to be an inventor of any kind, inventing a new, you know, a new service offering for customers or a new product or anything, being an inventor requires, because the world is so complicated, you have to be a domain expert. I mean, in a way, even if even if you're not at the beginning, you have to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn enough so that you become a domain expert. But the danger is once you become a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge. And so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that, you know, 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind, have that look at it freshly, even though they know so much about the domain. And that's the key to inventing. You have to have both. And I think that is intentional. I think all of us have that inside of us and we can all do it, but you have to be intentional about it. You have to say, yeah, I am going to become an expert and I'm going to keep my beginner's mind.

What are the main keys to self-actualization?

Starting with believing in yourself.

And how does someone believe in themselves when all they do is doubt all the time?

—They find it.

—Okay, well, and that's the way I was. So it took me 20 years, and that's why we wrote this book to help it not take 20 years for people. So we need schools to be oriented, we need businesses to be oriented, and the way they do it is they have some success. Wow, if I— and they see other people, wow, who weren't doing well and they got in the right role, and with the right supervisor who's helping empower them. And so it's bottom-up empowerment. That's what social entrepreneurship is all about. Like Scott Strode, who was an addict for 10 years, and he found by going to the gym and others there who had the problem and they helped each other. And he says, well, I'm going to, set up an organization to do this. And it's called The Phoenix, I mean, which is rising for it. It's tremendous success rate. I think it's doubled the success rate of any other method that we're aware of. Wow. For healing addiction. And it's this combination of community and mutual support. And they go on hikes, they do rock climbing, together. They'll do boxing together, do gymnastics together, so that people can see they can do it. And then there are people there to help them, not just talk about it, but do it. That's the key. And do it in a community. And then you have a support community who's really supporting you to go out and live, not just exist.

And more than ever, I would have to say I miss The Oprah Winfrey Show. I chose to let it go. I felt that I'd said everything I needed to say after 25 years, and I wanted it to be my decision when I let it go. But I will say this past year, and now more than ever, I miss it because I miss the opportunity for the spirit of constructive engagement that that platform offered. So 2 weeks after the election last year, I went to a diner in Queens for Oprah Magazine with a group of women. Half of them were Trump supporters, half of them were Hillary supporters. Nobody wanted to come to breakfast. I was like, it's going to be some great, great, great croissants. We're going to have some nice jams, ladies. Nobody wanted to sit down and have the croissants. So everybody came in the room all tight and hardened. And so we were able to— I was able to— they were like, well, I've never been this close to these Hillary elitists. I've never been this close. And there are other people were saying, well, I never sat this close to Trump supporter before, but we're going to do it. I will tell you, after 2.5 hours, I had those women not only eating croissants, Sitting around the table, listening to each other's stories, hearing both sides, and by the end they were holding hands, exchanging emails and phone numbers, and singing Reach Out and Touch. We're all pretending to be Diana Ross, which means it's possible. It can happen. So I want you to work in your own way to change the world in respectful conversations with others at a rate and a rhythm that's in tune with the source from which you have come, your truth. And I want you to enter every situation aware of its context, open to hear the truths of others, and most important, open to letting the process of changing the world change you. That is the spirit of constructive engagement. So that's the goal, to be a compassionate woman of substance, to be committed, to have constructive engagement, to live this life of substance. Substance. What I know for sure is if you focus on the substance the success will come.

I think failure is bad. I don't think it's good. But if something's important enough, then you do it even though the risk of failure is high. And, and so I think my advice, if somebody wants to start a company, is they should bear in mind that the most likely outcome is, is that it's not going to work, and they should reconcile themselves to that possibility. Strong possibility, and they should only do it if they feel that they are really compelled to do it, you know? Because it's gonna— the way starting a company works is like, usually in the beginning, it's the very beginning, it's kind of fun, and then it's really hellish for a number of years. You talked about chewing glass. Yeah. There's a friend of mine who's a successful entrepreneur and started actually his career around the same time as I did. And he has a good phrase. His name's Bo Li. He said, yeah, starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. And you agree with that? Generally true, yeah. And if you don't eat the glass, you're not going to be successful.

A lot of people come to me and they say, well, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I go, oh, that's great, what's your idea? And they go, well, I don't have one yet. And I say, well, I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about, because it's a lot of work. And I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour So much of your life into this thing, and there are such rough moments in time that most people give up. I don't blame them. I mean, it's really tough, and it consumes your life. I mean, if you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, it's— I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure it's been done, but it's rough. I mean, because it's pretty much an 18-hour-a-day job, 7 days a week for a while. So unless you have a you're gonna not survive. You're gonna give it up. So you gotta have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about. Otherwise, you're not gonna have the perseverance to stick it through. And I think that's half the battle right there. It's hard to remember how bad it was, you know, in the early '80s with IBM taking over the world with the PC. With DOS out there. It was, it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they'd done a pretty bad job, and you needed to know a lot. And so things were kinda slipping backwards, and Macintosh was— you saw the 1984 commercial, I hope you have that in your archives. You know, Macintosh was basically this, this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the Goliath IBM and saying, "Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong, and we are going to show you the right way to do it. And here it is, it's called Macintosh, and this is so much better that it's going to beat you. And we are going to do it." Do it. And that's what Apple stood for. There's a lady called Dr.

Susan Albers who's done a lot of research into luck. And her findings are that optimistic people are luckier. Optimistic leaders get more luck. What do you think of that? I think that's almost definitely true. I mean, I'm a born optimist. I always look at the positive side of anything and everybody. I always look for the best in people. If there's somebody who works for Virgin, I will never criticize, always praise, always look for what they've done in a positive way. If they've done something which is, you know, which I'm not happy with, they don't need to be told. They'll know that they've messed up or something, and they'll make sure they don't do it again. So I think just general optimism is a really positive trait. And I think you're much more likely to fulfill your dreams if you look for the positive in everything.

We also are big believers in United Way and what goes on there. And that's more at a business level. We sort of think every business ought to do that as a basic thing because social services we think have a— deserve particular priority in terms of drawing employees in to help the community. And there's ways to take those fundraising things within a company and have contests and comparisons and great stories, get the word out, make it fun, make it easy. You know, it's just a piece of email. The easiest thing to do is click and say you want to give your fair share, and then we send you no more email. Made it the easiest thing to do is participate. In terms of individuals, it's quite different. You know, you can take and give to groups like United Way who are really thinking about everything in the community, or you can find things— and most people mix this— you can find things that you're particularly interested in, that you know about, that a relative benefited from, or that you want to go and volunteer in. You know, my Microsoft does a thing now, for every hour that somebody volunteers, we actually make a grant to that organization because that says that they care about it and they think it's doing very good work. Now, for individuals at some levels, probably most of your giving is going to be in the community where you know what's going on. I'm a big believer that some of the greatest inequities are on a global basis. And so one of the things our foundation tries to get out is the names of a number of organizations like Save the Children or Global Fund or Vaccine Fund that we know are taking dollars in a very efficient way and saving lives and improving conditions. And I would hope that as people are able to be fairly generous, that this international component, that it be part of what they're doing. Obviously, if you get up to enough scale, then you can take on big projects. And I will get a chance with some of my extra time to go out and share with people who are lucky enough to have wealth and just tell them how much fun I'm having and that it can have impact and hopefully encourage it. I think when Warren Buffett gave his gift, it sent a message to people that, wow, we got— we this is the right thing to do, and, you know, he doesn't like to waste money. So, you know, a sense that there are causes out there that you can make a big difference with.

How do you turn failure into a plus? And it's true, when I was at the University of Nebraska, one day I was reading the Daily Nebraskan, and it said in room 300 or something, at 3 o'clock there will be this panel of 3 professors here at the university, and they're going to award the Nathan Gold Scholarship. I don't know whether you still— you still have that around? And at the time, it said it would give you $500 to go to the graduate school of your choice. I don't know whether it's changed in amount, but, but that, that was it. So I read this, and I went there to this room at 3 o'clock that day, or whatever it was, and I walked in the room, and And there were the professors, and I was the only student that showed up. I mean, it really got to them. I mean, they were stuck. They kept waiting and looking at their watch and hoping there'd be more candidates, but no one came in. So I won $500 by default. And those are usually my biggest triumphs when nobody else shows up. And so here I was, I had $500 to go toward It wasn't limited, it was any graduate school for a master's degree. So I applied to Harvard, my dad wanted me to, and I shortly heard from Harvard, and they said, "Go to Chicago and meet this fellow running, who interviews applicants from the Midwest." So I got on the train, and that's what you did in those days, and I spent 10 hours on the Burlington going to Chicago, then I transferred to another little interurban train to go up to this country day school where this fellow was the headmaster, and he was the big interviewer for Harvard. And I got there, and after about 10 minutes, he said, "Better think about something else." You know, he— "Come back later on." I was 19 at the time, and I looked about 12, you know, and I acted about 8. It was not a great combination. So he said forget it. So I took the little inner urban train back to Chicago, and I took the 10-hour train back to Omaha, and all the time I'm thinking, you know, what do I tell my parents? It's kind of embarrassing. But it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. Because if I'd gone to Harvard, I would have gone to a 2-year business school. I instead applied to Columbia. Where I could graduate in one year and get a master's degree. Luckily, that by the accident of it and being in the Nebraska National Guard, which did not get called up for the Korean War, I missed going in the Korean War. I, I got to meet Ben Graham, and which had an enormous effect on me subsequently, and I probably got my wife that way because she was going going to Northwestern. And I was able to put on sort of a full-court press because I got out in one year. And otherwise, she'd have met some other guy. I mean, I got her before the competition showed up. And so it worked out wonderfully. It couldn't have worked out better. And that's been my life, basically. I mean, things, you know, you will get some disappointments. But the future is what counts. It would not be fun if I knew every decision I was going to make was going to be perfect. It would not be as much fun. It would be like playing golf and knowing you're going to hit a hole-in-one on every hole. You wouldn't play golf if every time you got on a tee, you just took a swing and the ball ended up in the hole. It would be fun for a few days, you'd get on TV, but the game would not be any fun. So failure, you know, And I wouldn't even consider them failures, but they're mistakes or whatever you want to call it. They're part of the game, and in the end, you know, you go on and we've made plenty of mistakes in business, we'll make plenty more. And then, you know, Babe Ruth, and you know, for a long time subsequently got eclipsed by a few fellows, but he held the record for strikeouts, you know, so the record for home runs and was the highest baseball player until the modern era came along. So it's part of the game. If you take big swings, you know, you may— you're going to miss sometimes. Here's the thing.

It wasn't so long ago that I was a student and sitting in a seat in an auditorium like you guys are here today, listening to— I remember very specifically this time when Bill Gates came to talk at at Harvard, and I'm just like, "Wow, how do you do that?" And— but, you know, the trick is, is that the media likes to sensationalize this as if you have some eureka moment or you are some singular person who can build something on your own, and that's just not how the world works. You know, when I was in school, I built a lot of stuff that I just liked building. There was not a single moment when I had some revelation that Facebook was gonna be awesome. That's not maybe how the media or movies or whatever would like to portray things. It's not— it's much less exciting. But the reality is I think most— services in the world that reach the scale that Facebook has, you start off building something that you care about, and you don't necessarily think it's going to be that big. I didn't. I built Facebook, the first version of Facebook, for my college community because I wanted to be able to connect with the people at my school. And I remember very clearly talking to my friends at the time and saying, You know, it's— how cool is it that we have built this community for our school? You know, one day it's going to be awesome when somebody else builds this for the world, because something like this needs to exist for the world. But it didn't even occur to me that, you know, my friends and I might be able to play a role in doing that, right? Because we were college students, right? I mean, we didn't have any, you know, engineers to work with or servers or resources or anything like that. And, you know, there are these huge companies that deliver products for for hundreds of millions of people, right? There's— I always assumed that it was going to be like Microsoft or Google or someone would build this for the world. And what basically just happened is at each step along the way, we just kind of kept doing the next thing and growing from there. And, you know, there were teams inside these other companies that thought social media was important and were working on it. But, you know, there were all these different memes and narratives in the world. You know, people would say, oh, well, you know, this is just a fad. People are going to use it, but then they're going to stop. So, you know, so a lot of the teams who were working on it didn't take it that seriously, or, you know, the higher-ups in those companies didn't care, so they didn't get resources, and we just kept going and going. And then people would say, all right, well, all right, fine, so maybe people are using it, but it's never going to make any money, right? I mean, social media doesn't make any money. And we just kind of kept going, and going, and then pretty soon we had a service that was bigger than any of these other ones, and that kind of is how we are here where we are.

That word disruptive, what does it mean to you?

It means, you know, we live on a planet that is disruptive. Like, the whole disruptive thing is like people attempting to be disruptive. It's happening whether you want it to or not. Like, we're in disruption. The whole planet, you're in disruption, you're in transition, this is happening. There's a life cycle. Disruption is about a cycle. And products, like people, have cycles of life. And if it's not changing and altering, and if you're not growing and having fun doing that in the disruption, like if you're surprised by disruption, then you're not really very aware. You want to be a little more aware because it's happening everywhere. Retail is going to go through massive— this whole— you got to wonder what's going to happen down there. It's going to be mind-boggling. The next 6 or 8, 10 years are going to be probably the most disruptive we've had economically on this planet.

What is happiness, sir?

I love what I do. I really don't think about those things. Really? Yeah. I have work to do. You see these here? I was a pilot in Vietnam. I went to school to kill people. Okay. I killed a lot of people. Went to military school. We think differently. I fought for my country. I fought against communism. They killed us. We killed them. Now I fight with education, the same intensity. I fight for the freedom of people. So if you can understand this, I don't care if I live or die. I went down 3 times in Vietnam. My friends don't come back. I came back to America, this is in 1972. I lost so many friends. And the hippies, you know, the hippies and the peaceniks and all the Maharishi who the Beatles went to see, they were spitting on us and hitting us with eggs. So I don't play that game. I said, I treat everybody with respect. You do your job, I do my job. So when I came back from Vietnam, you can tell I'm still a little bitter about it. Eggs were hitting me, people were spitting on me, and I lost my friends. But we fought for our country. We fought for freedom. If we don't fight for freedom, we've lost our freedoms. That's why I don't like this guy Biden. Okay, so just here, I have my values, you have your values, but I fight for the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and none of this racial stuff.

As a visionary, visionaries are more extreme than business people. Because a visionary would do bad business for their vision. A business person will never do bad business. It's well put. Yeah, it's really well put. So when you say I don't care about money, it's like, yeah, I feel you. Like, I feel that I care in a way that I need that. But I care about the vision that I have to a Steve Jobs level, to the point of putting that above my regular human existence, meaning having to go and take all the arrows, that I become a soldier of the vision. Because Someone could say, a wife could say to, like, say like in the '60s, their husband's about to go to war. The wife may not want their husband to go to war because of their children, but he's going to war because of their children.

Definitely. Do you regret any aspect of just giving everything to your vision? I mean, you've spoken about that, saying like, I got fucked over in the business side.

I promise that I had to stop envying cool people at their current cool time. If anything, if someone's cool, and I say their name a lot, I'm gonna flash the light on them so much that it ages their coolness. It's actually a war technique. Showered in compliments. Yeah, you know, because that, that you, that to be able to stay at 45 years old to still be the bad kid in class. At 45, I'm still in the principal's office. Because if you look at like, say, fashion, right? If you think of something fashionable, it's probably gonna look like the kid in the principal's office. That's gonna be the fashion. And that's part of the reason why I'm the most influential person at fashion, in fashion, 'cause I refuse to leave the principal's office. If the substitute teacher comes in, I'm gonna say, "You got a big butt!" And I'm gonna get, and they gonna end up—

[Speaker] Right back, right back to the principal's office.

[Speaker] And people are gonna be like, "Yo," And that's what you keep on saying, like, "Who can we talk to?" 'Cause no one can talk to me. No one. I'm out of control, bro. It's just God, then me, and then fuck everybody. You know what I mean? That's how I— That's really how I live my life.

What are the weaknesses that you've kind of observed in yourself, or the things that you tend to delegate to other people? I actually read something which said— which was a quote of yours that said, "I once did an IQ test at 8 years old." I don't think I filled in anything. Going forward 30 or so years, I was running Europe's largest private group of companies, but I didn't know the difference between gross and net profit. But it didn't matter.

Yes, I was in a board meeting when I was about 50 years old, and the director said, and I think I said, is that good news or bad news? And one of the directors said, come outside, Richard, a minute. So came outside and he said, "You don't know the difference between net and gross, do you?" So I said, "No." He said, "I thought not. Anyway, I brought a sheet of paper." So he brings out this sheet of paper and he has some color pens and he colors it in blue and then he puts a fishing net in it and then he puts a little fish in the fishing net and he says, "So the fish that are in the net, that's your profit at the end of the year." And the rest of the ocean, that's your gross turnover. And I went, I got it. And I was, ever since then, I've been name dropping net and gross to people who obviously know full well what it is. And, but the point of the story is it really doesn't matter. I mean, it's a good idea most likely if you're your chief accountant knows. But, you know, for somebody who's running a company, what matters is, can you, you know, can you create the best company in its sector? You know, if you're going to create an airline, is it going to be palpably better than the rival airline? If you create a cruise company, is it going to be palpably better than the other cruise companies, if you're going to create a train company, is it going to be palpably better than what's gone before? And if it is, then at the end of the year, it's likely that more money that will come in than goes out. And then somebody, you know, somebody else can add up the figures. So I think, you know, to run a business, You know, yes, it helps to add up, it helps to subtract, it helps to multiply. I don't even think you need to worry about division. That's it. So, you know, so if you can do those 3 things, you can run a business. If you can't do those 3 things, I wouldn't worry too much. You find somebody else who can and just go out and create something that's gonna make a positive difference.

Other people's lives. I felt many times that I'm not a disciplined person, but people always insist, they say, oh, it must take so much discipline every day to get up. And every day you were in the gym at 7 in the morning and you worked at 9:30 in the morning, and then you went to college after that, and then you went this and that, and you worked in construction. I was like looking forward to getting up in the morning. And looking forward, driving to the gym and working out 2 and a half hours and then going down to the beach and taking a run in the deep sand and getting some cardio work done and all that stuff. I say I was looking forward to it. It was not like, oh my God, I have to do another workout. Yes, you do that when, for instance, sometimes people go to the gym and the doctor says, you know, you should go to the gym and you should work out because otherwise I see some problems coming up, high cholesterol and body fat and this and that. And you're going to go and wipe out 10 years younger than you want to, if there's ever the right time to wipe out. But I mean, in any case, so that person you can see in the gym is there and they just, they do their reps and they do their sets and they're not really into it. You can see there's no life in their eyes. You know what I'm saying? Where it's like they're really, they grab the weight and they do their sets and they get the pump. And they feel good and they put the weights down and get the next heavier weight and they do the set. And so that's really fun. But that person is kind of like a vegetable in a way. They just cruise around in the gym. They sit on the life cycle and they just pedal away. And when you say to them, so why do you work out? They have no answer. Then eventually they say, well, to be honest with you, the doctor told me that I should get in shape. That's better for my health to bring my blood pressure down and my cholesterol down. And my body fat down and all this. So they're not really— so I say to them always, I said, you know what you should do is you should just pick a goal that you can chase. They will say, like, what? I said, well, how much do you weigh? I'm weighing 190 pounds and I want to lower my body fat, body weight. I said, well, why don't you pick a goal like you want to go down to 170? And it is now March. And by August, when you go to the beach, you're going to have a slimmer waist, less body fat, and you look leaner, and you can be proud of your body. I said, pick that goal. Oh, that's a good idea. I said, write it down and then write down the sets you have to do to get you there and the amount of reps you have to do and the amount of life cycle that you have to run. And regular bicycle and running that you have to do. Write all of this down and then you mark it off every day. You mark it off. That's what I did. To me, that was really that feedback that I see a line being crossed. That means one set was done. It was a satisfying kind of a thing. The line was crossed off. The next line was crossed off. And so I tell people that and then they just say, oh my God, this is— yeah, I'm going to do that. That is such a great idea. Then they come back to me like a few months later. And I said, this worked. It was unbelievable. It worked. It was fantastic. And it really gave me a purpose. She said, that's why it's important to have a purpose when you do things, have a clear vision when you do things, because then you don't have to look at it kind of like, I have to be really disciplined to do that, or I have to make certain sacrifices to do that, because then it just drags you into that direction and you just do the work.

We're going to get to, in my opinion, We're going to get to a point where decisions are made individually on arbitrage of time. Right? We'll value our time. You'll value your time. That's the whole Uber economy, right? Where people say, what's it worth? We do that now. We do. What's it worth for me versus I can hire somebody, right? And that somebody can be for 10 minutes. That somebody can be for 10 hours. It could be for 2 seconds. Like, a couple of my companies, we have scripts now. For Mechanical Turk on Amazon where it might cost us a penny to label things. Really? Oh, it's crazy, right? I invested in a company because the guy was a computer vision genius. All he does is hand puppets. So you do like this, hand puppets like you do with your kids when you were little, right? Only it digitizes it using AI because he has to write computer vision AI scripts that say, okay, this is a knuckle, here's a second knuckle, here's the thumb, right? And I'm going to recognize— Shows it spatially. Right. And all that stuff is advanced. Computer vision. But it all goes back to hiring people based off the value of their time. When I make decisions, build versus buy, robotics are now part of the decision. It's what's the most cost-effective way? What's going to give me the best return? What's going to be the path of least resistance for me effectively? And now it's not just, OK, who can I hire? It's what can I hire?

Now that you have about 600,000 employees, I calculated you're adding about 250 people a day. You've mentioned that you're trying to fend off day 2.

Yeah.

And you've said that day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciatingly painful decline, followed by death. That is why it is always day 1.

Yeah. Yeah. How's that work? Well, so day 1, and this is a phrase that we use at Amazon all the time. I've been using it in my first annual shareholder letter from 20 years ago. And we say it's always day one, and it needs to be day one for the reason that you just mentioned. And how do you— so the real question for me is, how do you go about maintaining a day one culture? You know, it's great to have the, the scale of Amazon. We have financial resources, we have lots of brilliant people. People, we can accomplish great things, we have global scope, we have operations all over the world. But the downside of that is that you can lose your nimbleness, you can lose your entrepreneurial spirit, you can lose your— that kind of heart that small companies often have. And so if you could have the best of both worlds, if you can have that entrepreneurial entrepreneurial spirit and heart while at the same time having all the advantages that come with scale and scope. Think, think of the things that you could do. And so how— the question is, how do you achieve that? The scale is good because it makes you robust. You know, a big boxer can take a punch to the head. The question is, you also want to dodge those punches. So you'd like to be nimble. You want to be big and nimble. And I find there are a lot of things that are protective of the day one mentality. I already spent some time on one of them, which is customer obsession. I think that's the most important thing. If you can— and it gets harder as you get bigger. When you're a little tiny company, say you're a 10-person startup company, every single person in the company is focused on the customer. When you get to be a bigger company, you've got all the middle— you've got middle managers, and you've got all these layers, and those people aren't on the front lines. They're not interacting with customers every day. They're insulated from customers, and they start to manage not the customer happiness directly, but they start to manage through proxies like metrics and processes. And some of those things can become bureaucratic. So it's very challenging. But one of the things that happens is the decision-making velocity slows slows down. And I think the reason, one of the reasons that that happens is that people, all, say, junior executives inside the big company start to model all decisions as if they are heavyweight, irreversible, highly consequential decisions. And so even two-way doors, you could make, you make a decision, it's the wrong decision, you can just back up, back through the door and try again. Even those reversible decisions start to be made with heavyweight processes. And so you can teach people that these pitfalls and traps, and then teach them to avoid those traps. And that's what we're trying to do at Amazon so that we can maintain our inventiveness and our heart and our kind of small company spirit, even as we have the scale and scope of a larger company.

Everybody works hard and everybody has their own dreams. There is— there was a time where I used to spend a lot of energy wanting things, wanting things. Of course, it's easy for me to say, oh, things don't define you because I got a lot of things. Things are nice, I like them. But this is what I learned: when you can surrender to the dream, you get to live in the space of the higher power. You get to live in the space that you purposefully have come to Earth to claim for yourself. So around 1984, I was sitting in bed one morning, Sunday morning, should have been in church, but I wasn't. I was reading the New York Times review of The Color Purple. And I thought, whoa, this sounds like a really great book. I got out of bed in my pajamas, put on my galoshes, and went to the store to get the copy of The Color Purple. I read The Color Purple in one afternoon, got— went back to the bookstore, bought every book of The Color Purple. I took the books to the office and I said to everybody, y'all got to read this book. Oh my God, you got to read this book, Color Purple. I needed a book club. I didn't have one. So I pass out the book to everybody I knew. Please read The Color Purple, read The Color Purple. Then I start to hear that somebody's gonna do a movie about The Color Purple. But I don't know anybody in the movie business. By this time I was on AM Chicago. I don't know anybody. I start praying to God. God, please help me find a way to get in The Color Purple. I say, Jesus, I don't even have to have a or speaking part, I will be, 'cause I went to the movies and I saw on the movie credits, at the last credit, there's something called best boy. So I said, Jesus, if you just let me be best girl, that'd be all right by me. I can be best girl. I can carry the script. I can help the people with the water. I can do whatever. So I start praying for The Color Purple. As divine law would have it, Quincy Jones comes to Chicago, and he is in Chicago for one half of a day because somebody has filed a suit against Michael Jackson claiming that Billie Jean was their lover and that's not his song. So Quincy had taken the red-eye to Chicago. He was in his hotel room. He was coming out of the shower, and the television in his hotel room is on AM Chicago. There sits little chubby me with my Jheri curl on AM Chicago. Quincy Jones tells Reuben Cannon the casting agent, "I think I found Sophia." So I get a call from Reuben Cannon who says, "I'm calling about a movie. It's called Moonsong. Would you be interested to come and audition?" And I say, "I have not been praying for Moonsong." I had not been playing for Moonsong. I've been praying for The Color Purple. He said, well, I think you should come and audition. So I go to audition. You know, movie people, they make everything all secret. Steven Spielberg didn't want anybody to know he was doing Color Purple. So on the outside of the script, it says Moonsong, but I know all the words by heart. So when I open the script, I know this is The Color Purple. The Color Purple, Jesus. This is The Color Purple. Yes. So I auditioned for The Color Purple. I can't even believe it. They don't just want me to be the water girl or the best girl. They are asking me, do I want a part in the movie? Oh, that— I'm thinking prayer. Prayer works. Prayer works. But listen to this. 3 months pass. 3 months is a long time. I audition in February, March, April, May comes. I haven't heard anything. So I call Reuben Cannon. I say, Mr. Cannon, I'm sorry, sir, I haven't heard anything. I expected to hear something by now. And Reuben Cannon, African-American man, Says to me, you don't call me, I call you, and I didn't call you. Do you understand that I have real actresses who have auditioned for this part? Real actresses. And he tells me who just left his office, and I went, well, okay, I'm not getting that part. So I hang up the phone and I start crying. I can't believe that God has played this trick on me. I think this is a trick. So I decide that this is because the fat has finally caught up with me. The fat has finally caught up with me, and now I must get rid of the fat in 2 weeks. I am going to go to a fat farm, and I'm going to lose 25 pounds. I'm gonna drink a lot of green juice. I'm gonna have some cleanses and colonics. So I also was trying to make peace with it. I said, God, I don't understand. I thought it was for me. You ever had that talk with God? I thought it was for me. I thought it was for me. God, you let me audition with somebody named Harpo. That's my name backwards. Jesus, that was a sign. Wasn't it a sign? And then 3 months passed, and then, then Reuben Cannon says real actresses have just left his office. So I start to pray on the track. I'm out on the track at the fat farm, and I am running around at the track at the fat farm. It starts to rain. Y'all know how that is. But I don't even care because I am praying to God to help me to let it go. Help me let it go because now I've become obsessed with it and it's now controlling my life. I start praying, running around the track. And I keep hearing this noise and I can't— there's nobody on the track but me and I'm running around the track. And I look around and it is my thighs rubbing together. It's my thighs. My thighs are rubbing together, causing this thunderous sound. There's nobody on the track, so then I really start to cry. "Oh, Lord, help me. Help me let it go. Help me let it go. Help me let it go, God. Help me let it go." And you ever did this prayer where you say, "Okay, Lord, okay, I'm gonna let it go." Then you get up and you go, "Well, I think I still got a little bit of it." I did. "Help me let it go." but I am not going to be able to see the other actress in my part. I won't be able to see it. Won't be able to see Color Purple. Just can't never see it the rest of my life. I won't be able to see it. So then I started— I don't know where it came from. I surrender all. I surrender all. All to thee, my Blessed Savior, I surrender all. I sang and I cried. I sang and I cried and I prayed some more until I could reach the point where not only, not only will I be able to go to the movie, but I can bless the other actress. I can bless her. I can say, I bless you, I bless you, I bless you with this. I surrender all, I surrender all, all to thee, my blessed Savior. I surrender all. And I tell you in my greatest testimony that the instant I laid that thing down— I'm telling you, when I laid it down, when I laid it down and it didn't have me anymore. It had no control over me anymore. I didn't feel anything about it anymore when I let it go, when I intentionally surrendered it to the power that was greater than I could ever know. The instant that happened, a woman comes running out out of the cafeteria screaming, "Oprah? Is your name Oprah?" For 10 years, nobody could pronounce my name. I said, "Yes." She says, "Somebody's on the telephone for you. He say his name Spielberg." I get to the phone. He says, "I hear you're at a fat farm." I said, "No, sir. This is a health retreat." He says, "I'd like to see you in my office in California tomorrow." This was in Wisconsin. I was like, "I'd like to see you in my office in California tomorrow." And if you lose a pound, you could lose this part. No problem do I have. I don't have No problem not losing a pound. So honey, I packed my bags and I stopped at the Dairy Queen. I got 3 scoops just in case I'd lost half a pound. And the next day I was in Steven Spielberg's office and he said, you're hired, you're hired.

One of the fun things for me is watching the cargo go into the crew vessel.

You know, all of a sudden we had Dragon 1, now we have Crew Dragon and it's substantially different but familiar. So tell us like what's been some of the hardest parts to transition from cargo into crew? Crew is a little more important than cargo.

[Speaker:JOSH FARLEY] Yes.

I mean, cargo can be replaced. Crew cannot. And so the level of scrutiny, the level of attention is, I mean, I don't know, order of magnitude greater. I mean, it was already high for cargo. I mean, we're— and— but it's just a whole other level for crew. So, you know, and after I told the SpaceX team that, you know, the, this mission reliability is not merely the top priority, it is the only priority right now. So we're just doing continuous engineering reviews from now nonstop 24 hours a day until launch. Just going over everything again and again and again. And I was out at the pad just recently just walking down the rocket. We've got a team That's just crawling over the rocket in the horizontal. Then we're going to rotate it vertical. Then we're going to crawl over in the vertical. And we're just looking for any, any possible action that can improve the probability of success, no matter how small, whether that comes from an intern or me or anyone. It doesn't matter.

The question is about the personal qualities we look for in the executives we place at our various companies. The first thing is we don't usually place them. I mean, they come with them. We don't have anybody to place, so I have the problem occasionally if somebody dies or to replace a CEO, but most of our CEOs came with the deal. Clayton Homes, which we're buying, comes with Kevin Clayton running it. We will put no one in there. He will run the place just as before. But in terms of the personal quality, when a seller comes to me with a business, whether it's Clayton or any of the others— Ike Friedman at Borsheim's, Mrs. B at Nebraska Furniture Mart— when they come to me, the first question I have to ask myself, because I'm counting on them to run the place, I have to decide, what do they love, the money, or do they love the business? Now there's nothing wrong with liking the money. I mean, they all like money, but, but they've got to love the business. They got to have a passion for it, because if I give them a whole bunch bunch of money and they love the money and they don't love the business, no matter what they tell me, 6 months from now they'll be gone. You know, I mean, they'll just all of a sudden say, why am I getting up at 7 in the morning just so I can send a lot of money to Omaha? You know, I mean, it, it just, it won't work. So they have to love the business. I mean, I want people with a passion for the business. I used to say that I had a one-line employment form, one-question employment form. The question was, are you a fanatic? You know, if you answered yes, you got the job, because I want somebody who's fanatic about their business.

If you ask people across the United States, is the future going to be better than the past? Most say no, my kids will be worse off than I am. They think innovation won't make the world better for them or their children. So who's right? The people who say innovation will create create new possibilities and make the world better, or the people who see a trend toward inequality and a decline in opportunity and don't think innovation will change that. The pessimists are wrong, in my view, but they're not crazy. If innovation is purely market-driven and we don't focus on the big inequities, then we could have amazing advances and inventions that leave the world even more divided. We won't improve public schools. We won't cure malaria. We won't end poverty. We won't develop the innovations poor farmers need to grow food in a changing climate. If our optimism doesn't address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools. We will answer with our innovations, and we will surprise the pessimists. Over the next generation, you Stanford graduates will lead a new wave of innovation. Which problems will you decide to solve? If your world is wide, you can create the future we all want. If your world is narrow, you may create the future the pessimists fear. I started learning in Soweto that if we're going to make our optimism matter to everyone and empower people everywhere, we have to see the lives of those most in need. If we have optimism, optimism, without empathy, then it doesn't matter how much we master the secrets of science. We're not really solving problems, we're just working on puzzles. I think most of you have a broader worldview than I had at your age. You can do better at this than I did. If you put your hearts and minds to it, you can surprise the pessimists. We're eager to see it.

Your full potential is not revealed to you until you freaking sharpen the sword, till you're out there in battle and you go fix it and you, you back up and you have a loss or two and you're like, I gotta win. Like, my full potential is being realized right now. You find your potential by getting up every day, pushing, shoving, okay, challenging the status quo. Many of you are held back simply because you believe something to be true. You know it to be true. Truth is, it ain't true. You're the only one that doesn't know it's not true. And there's a lot of those things in life that people can't find their potential because they're so stuck in being right. So this is my question back to you, and you had a great question. Are you fortunate because you're able, or are you able because you're fortunate? There's a big difference. Some people are just able because they got the money and the resources. They were born rich. But some people, some people find their fortune because they're able. I'm able and I increase my abilities and I got better and better, and because of that I became more fortunate. It's like the old adage, the harder I work, the luckier I am.

I own 15,000 houses.

15,000 houses, okay, which you give it out for rent. Yeah, right.

So nothing wrong with buying a house. Yeah, difference is I use debt to buy it. Okay. And I pay no taxes. It's not the house, it's not the stock, it's not the bond, it's not the ETF, it's your brains. So I would rather use debt and pay no taxes. In 1971, this became debt. The only way it's created is somebody has to borrow money. So in your credit card, there's no money in your credit card. There's no money anywhere. So the moment you use your credit card, money is created. And the US dollar is debt, the rupee is debt, the yuan is debt, the peso, the yen is debt. They need people to borrow money. So when I go to a bank and I say, I wanna borrow $20 million, I get huge tax breaks because I'm creating money. But if I use my credit card, I get nothing. Okay, it's up here. Your greatest assets between this year and this year, this year. So that's why you have the Cashflow board game. There's not too many, not too many here. The board game was designed to teach you to think like a capitalist. Cashflow. Okay. And so I wrote a book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, same thing. It's all about accounting.

Growing up in my father's business, I saw how my dad thought about his relationship with his employees. The first time I went to the store to work, he told me to keep an eye on them because he thought some of them were trying to steal. It was an old-school mentality that he learned growing up in Russia, where I was born. Today, a lot of us business owners are worried about the reverse. We're worried about our employees being too entitled, not wanting to do stuff, wanting to get paid to do little. I understand COVID created new variables. There are people that don't even want to go into an office, literally asking someone want to go to an office 5 days a week now seems like you're crazy. The world changes, I get that. But following and finding your balance on being a leader to your people will get so much more value out of them, you would be shocked. VaynerMedia is now 2,000 people globally. VaynerX, because we have 6 or 7 companies. I hire someone new that's senior and they come into the company, they are shocked by how long a lot of the employees have been in the company. The company's only 14 years old. We have dozens and dozens and dozens of people that have been there for 9, 10, 11 years. For people here in marketing, they know advertising agencies, people last 2 years, maybe 3. The reason is because I live what I believe Evan, but there's a business reason. Not only does it feel well, not doesn't it feel good to do right by your people, it's good for your business. When people stay at a company for a long time, they have institutional knowledge. Sports. I know this country loves its sports. Sports. Do you know what one of the biggest variables in sports besides having competition in your soul is? Speed. Speed matters. Speed matters in sports, and speed matters in business so much. You know how many people here that have 3 or 4 or more employees, the number 1 hidden problem they have is they're in too many meetings? The number 1 poison for their company is meetings are too long and there's too many of them. When you have people that stay with you a long time, meetings can be 15 minutes instead of 1 hour because everyone's talking the same fucking language. I have meetings with people on the way to the bathroom and not even talking to them. When you work with somebody for 10 years, I could leave my desk, go to the bathroom, look them in the face, head nod, and we both know exactly what the fuck we need to do next. That is how you scale. That is how you build a bigger business. I implore everyone here, implore everybody here to get dramatically more serious of building a positive culture in this business.

I focus on things that are AI-driven, artificial intelligence-driven, whether it's machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, medical applications. But within AI, AI is a buzzword that everybody's using right now, you know, every— and And to that point, you know, we as old guys, we go back and it's like 1995, we talk about the internet. And I would say to people back in 1995, look, if you don't understand the internet, you're not going to be able to do business. And now that's just blocking and tackling, it seems obvious. Back then it wasn't. I could even take you further back to my first company. You know, what we did was a company called MicroSolutions, and we did local area networks and wide area networks. And I used to I used to walk into companies and say, you're going to have to hook these PCs together at some point. That'll make you more productive, more effective, you know, give you a competitive advantage. And people were like, no, I just carry this floppy from this PC to that PC. Yeah, okay. But today we're at the same type of inflection point with artificial intelligence. You don't have to be an expert and be able to put together your own neural network. You know, you don't have to know what weights and biases are, but, but you have to have more than just a cursory understanding. Just like you have to know the difference between, you know, different types of websites and you have to understand e-commerce if you're in e-commerce, you have to have a cursory understanding of how apps work. You're going to have to have at least, if not more, cursory understanding of artificial intelligence because it will change everything we do. And if the internet was 10x in terms of change to business, artificial intelligence will be 100x or more. There's going to be a disruption and change in the types of jobs that's going to impact your customers, that's going to impact your businesses, that's going to impact the future of business. And so I can't— I don't want to be, you know, I want to be as clear and as forceful as I possibly can. Because as fellow entrepreneurs, we always have to look for an edge. We always have to understand how our industry is changing. We always have to understand not only how we differentiate ourselves and our companies, but you always— I always want to know who can kick my ass, right? In all my businesses, who can kick my ass, and can I kick my own ass first? Because if you can disrupt yourself first, you're the person who could otherwise do it is not going to do it, and you can compete and be successful. So pay attention to AI. It's important. I mean, look, if you go to my house, right next to my bed, there's a book, Machine Learning for Dummies. If you go into my bathroom, there's Deep Neural Networks for Dummies, right? If you go in, there's a something for dummies in every room of my house, you know. That can go two ways, I know, but I'm just telling you, put the time. I mean, I've taken, you know, I can't even tell you how many hours now I spend every week, if not daily, working. Like, I'll go into Amazon AWS and go through their machine learning tutorials. Don't think to yourself, I'm not technical enough, or I'm not going to get this, or I don't get into this, or it's too much.

Try it.

Get as far as you can, because it's like doing a basic web website and a little bit of HTML. Just having done that, you feel smarter and you feel a little bit more confident about this. You know, I don't want to be an alarmist, but I'm trying to scare the hell out of you because it's important.

Ever since I was 5 years old, that's when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, I've been kind of passionate about space, rockets, rocket engines, space travel. I became a science fiction reader. And I've always known that I wanted to, you know, do something having to do with space. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about it for really almost my whole life. And that's one of the things you guys will find that you have passions. And having a passion is a gift. I think we all have passions. And you don't get to choose them. They pick you. But you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction, it gives you purpose. You can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling. And the best thing is to have a calling. And if you find your passion, you'll have that and all your work won't feel like work to you.

When you were in college and developing these skills, you wanted to do some things that were of benefit to humanity.

Why did you think that? Because not everyone does.

Yeah, no, I guess it was— I had sort of an existential crisis of like, what does it all mean? And what's the meaning of life?

Was this 3:00 AM over a beer? Or this was well more serious than that. It probably goes back to high school, I guess.

I don't want to give a laboriously long answer, but I was— Yeah, I had sort of a dark childhood. It wasn't good. Probably partially brought on by reading some of the philosophers. Don't ever read Schopenhauer or Nietzsche if you're 14. It's not good.

Or Ayn Rand either. Yeah.

Yeah, so I was just trying to figure out what does it all mean. And actually— When I read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which I think is a great work of philosophy, that sort of highlighted the point that very often the issue is understanding what questions to ask. And if you can properly frame the question, then the answer is the easy part. So I thought things that expand the scope and scale of human consciousness and allow us to better ask questions and, you know, and achieve greater enlightenment. Those are good things. And so that's sort of what can we do that's going to most likely lead to that outcome.

You know, when I was growing up, I didn't see a map of places where you could go and spend time in the ocean and the water's, you know, 65 degrees and blue and beautiful. You have your wife on jet skis and you can You can spend a night on this yacht, charter it, spend 2 weeks on it, or you can figure out how to buy it. Nobody was telling me that stuff. Now once I get out here, you know, they say we're creatures of our environment. You believe that, Posey? Yes, I am a creature of my environment. What kind of environment you want to be in? That's about 2,000 gross tons behind me. The boat I'm on is 1,170. And they're all over the place. Okay, it's not like there's one boat out here. It's not like there's one successful person out here. All these people did something to put this together. And when I see this, what I start thinking is, wow, if they can do this, then I can do this.

If you want to have impact, usually delegation's important. Although, you know, individual contributors in terms of inventing a drug or a new approach to things, That's phenomenal. So when Microsoft first got started, I wrote most of the code and everybody else's code I read and kind of rewrote. And that got us up to 10 people. And then I had to say to myself, okay, we're gonna ship code that I didn't edit. And that was hard for me. But I kind of got over that. Then I still said, okay, I'm gonna interview everyone and I'm gonna at least look at samples of their code. Well, that got us up to about 40 people, and that was at a point where I had sold way more software than we could write because everybody was so impressed. And I thought, well, I need to keep enough— collect enough money to, you know, keep hiring all these people. But the demand was so high that, you know, we were actually falling behind. That's when I hired Steve. And Steve figured out, A, how to control what promises I made to people, and B, how to hire lots of people and really good people and create organizations and teams. So I delegated to Steve that, and he was constantly saying to me, okay, we're gonna hire programmers that you've never met. And I'd say, no, we're not. And then he would show me numerically that the constraint wasn't gonna work. Then I said, okay, then I would know all the managers of the people. And so over time, and of course, I could say the quality per person was falling monotonically. According to me. But large problems, if you wanna write the most popular office productivity software, that one person absolutely can't do that. You can write pretty code. So everyone has to decide what scale of organization they want to work in. Eventually, you know, my role was very much as a leader and a reviewer of managers. But the top people, and I hired some super experienced people, I would make sure they were pursuing a common vision and they were well coordinated. But in terms of a lot of management stuff, stuff, they were way better than I was. Now I had to have the framework to know what mix of skills that we needed and when they were working well enough together, but a lot of my value added was picking, say, to do graphics user interface or to do an integrated office type thing or to go global and not use agents to have Microsoft be present all over the the world. And so yeah, picking what you're good at and how you find the other people to fill in those things, that's super important. And most founders aren't able to scale that up and kind of give up the hands-on things that they used to get a lot of pleasure and comfort from.

The reason there's Rich Dad World is my rich dad was my coach. I mean, he slapped me around the place, yelled at me, called me stupid. He was tough, but rich dads were all about it. Not that they're mean, but people like me needed a coach. And the other reason Kim and I created the Cashflow board game is the way my rich dad taught me about money was playing Monopoly. And as Maria Montessori says, or the Montessori school system says, what the hand does, The mind remembers. So if you're just getting words, it goes in left ear, comes out right ear. And so you have the Cashflow board game, you actually have to do something. So you have Rich Dad's World. I mean, I had a coach, you know, Kim and I had a fantastic coach, Frank Crary. And the reason Kim and I now own partners in one of the biggest, richest gold mines in the world, It's because of Frank. We had great coaches.

For some more incredible business knowledge, check out the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

We only have a few principles at Amazon, kind of core values that we go back to over and over again. And if you looked at each of the things that we do, you would see those run straight through everything. So the first one in