I believe being silent on the internet is a very bad strategic move. I started realizing, oh, I did a lot of things well in my 20s and 30s, both on the mindset and on the execution part. I'm going to just start talking to the world. I saw YouTube come out and three months after YouTube came out, I started making videos about wine. And then six months later, I'm like, I'm going to start making videos about business and mindset and leadership. And that obviously changed the course of my career and created unparalleled opportunities. Whether you want to talk about salesmanship, whether you want to talk about being a good partner when you're busy, whether you want to talk about how to build up managers, how to properly sell, how to create lifetime value, not a one-off sale, or whatever else you think you're good at, I cannot push you harder to start considering to make videos. I believe being silent on the internet is a very bad strategic move.
I actually am not doing a whole lot of public speaking these days, but when this one came across my desk, even though it was such a tricky weekend, I was like, I want to do this one because really ultimately when I looked under the hood, I feel a very real association with all of you in this audience. Like if life had a different twist or turn, I feel like I could be sitting in this group. When I think about both being an auctioneer and selling something with energy and then also managing a team to sell in retail, I would argue that's what my life's about. As you might have saw there, or if you know anything about me, I ran a high-end wine retail business for 20 years. And if you've seen any of my content recently, I am completely obsessed with what's going on with live social shopping and the QVC of social media, which is a trillion-dollar GMV industry in China that is about to completely revolutionize America and Europe and the West, and actually probably has a pretty big impact on this business as a third potential stool to what you already do.
And so I was thinking about, you know, obviously we have a lot of time for Q&A, so John could steer me in what will bring all of you the most value. And I did ask for a lot of Q&A, because I don't love to pontificate when it's out of context. I'd like to make it as direct as possible. But there were a couple themes that I thought about when I thought about like what's the best thing that I could talk about that might bring a group like this of winning players some value. And the first thing I thought about was when I was 34 years old, 16 years ago, I was a full-fledged workaholic and building a huge business for my father, and I thought I was uncomfortably busy and wildly impactful and like just making it happen. And it like shakes me to the bone of what kind of loser that 34-year-old is compared to who I am now. And I think about that a lot actually. And I think about the dangers of being successful.
Like, you know, you're the ones that got flown out here. This is the elite within the org, right? And I'm always like, huh, is the gift the curse, right? Oh, there we go. For me it's like if one or two people in this audience are in the same place I was at 35, this might be a good thing to talk about, which is you could probably not understand how much more capacity and impact you actually have, and it's just changing the frameworks. For me there was a lot of things that went into it. I was building a business for my family. I was, you know, I was born in the Soviet Union. We came here when I was three. I lived in a studio apartment in Queens with seven family members. So I am the textbook American dream story. And I was like psychotically passionate about building a big business for my parents, who I continue to be obsessed with and love. Most people's journey is not to spend 22 to 34 working 120 hours a week, building a business from 3 million to 60 million, and never making more than $50,000 a year and waking up at 34 with literally no money and then having to figure out their life. So I know I'm an edge case.
But I've watched over the last 15 years, and I have the luxury of being an early investor in Facebook and Twitter and Uber and Snapchat and Venmo. I've been up close and personal with some of the people that have built the biggest companies in the world in the last 15 years. I sit on multiple Fortune 500 boards, and my agency is the agency that works with Chase and Fanatics and Pepsi and on and on and on. So between entrepreneurship and Fortune 500 and private equity and VC, I've thoughtfully and strategically put myself in a place where I could get unlimited context of every angle that I could go to any dinner meeting with anyone here. Your biggest customers, whatever they do, I know a lot about what they do. That has been my obsession. Now with AI, I'm completely unstoppable, you know? And so I'm a human anthropologist. I'm a consumer-centric savant kind of human. It comes intuitive, but then I put in a lot of work. And I'm telling all of you right here, right now, being in this group, being at the top of your game within this is your biggest vulnerability.
It is scary how much capacity the human being has. And it requires a couple of things. Self-awareness, like everybody here is different, even though you're all collectively winning in different ways. I think humility is a word that's just not talked about enough. I think a lot about what's worked for me, and kind of like when I really look around, I think people would be very surprised by the people that are on covers of business magazines or the articles you've read of people with the biggest exits or the highest wealth. There are really two very extremely different people that get to that level: the completely insecure, and the depths of their insecurity make them Darth Vader-like, and they get to the top on some real dark stuff, and they get there and it's hard to sustain, and their real lives are not that great. And then there's people that are extremely humble, even though it may not look like it because they're out and about and they're talking with bravado, and it is humility that is their foundation of dramatically bigger success.
For example, one of the things I think about with this is knowing you almost have a double-sided world where you are actively an auctioneer and selling, and then you're also a manager of team and retail. Those are very different. It's inconceivable to me when I look at here that there isn't a wide range of individuals in here who either dominate over here and are okay over here, good over here and great over here. Remarkable selling the stuff out of stuff because you got the gift of gab and it's just in you. I share that with you. I know what it is. That's a superpower, but you're kind of a dick as a manager, or indifferent, or don't care, or you're solid as a seller, but you're so damn good as a manager that the people that you bring in go on to be remarkable auctioneers. There's just a lot in here. There's a lot of different versions in here. And I think the question becomes, how much self-awareness and how much humility do you have to understand where the growth is starting tomorrow? I think about that every day. Like I'm really winning out here, and like every day I'm like, where am I? Like what is this? Like where can I go? And not really for like paper, more for just like day-to-day joy, impact, legacy, you know?
And again, looking at this crew, I get to speak to many different audiences of all shapes and sizes. You know, everyone here has lived a little bit now. You're not a child, right? And I think self-awareness and humility are really soft skills, but I will tell you they are the skills that are going to dictate the financial impact of your life, especially as AI and technology continue to commoditize. If you knew how easy it is for me to build an AI human that shows up in robotic form that will outsell you every day of the week in an auction environment in five years, that's like real stuff. Like if this company can buy robots that are more charismatic than you and out-AOV you, they will.
And so I think about the next 20 years about where technology is going, something I've been very good at predicting, and what's very clear to me is that emotional intelligence is about to skyrocket to the top of the list. Now let me get into something that is incredibly for you all. Not the company. Sorry, company. How you start navigating this next decade about building up your own personal brand and who you are in the world is very important. There will be two things that will be able to combat and create growth for a human and a family. I know a lot of spouses here. There are two things that will be able to combat what I think is about to happen in the next 20 years of technology. One, I just spoke about, which is real deep emotional intelligence, like where empathy and kindness and compassion — it's crazy, this crazy technology of AI that's scaring everyone is actually going to create way more humanity. It's a brain, but I'm excited about it. And two, personal brand, your reputation, who knows you for what and how and where.
As you sit here and go through the journey that I'm hoping that I'm pushing you a little bit towards of like, where do I sit? Am I salesmanship, and where do I sit as a leader that can build teams and make things happen? Who am I in live and selling, and who am I in making an operation sell more product when somebody comes into the shop on a Wednesday in the morning after they've had three good days on the cruise and they bought something? As you go through that journey deciding if you're ready to start talking about — and that's what happened to me. I started realizing, oh, I did a lot of things well in my 20s and 30s, both on the mindset and on the execution part. I'm going to just start talking to the world. I saw YouTube come out and three months after YouTube came out, I started making videos about wine. And then six months later, I'm like, I'm going to start making videos about business and mindset and leadership. And that obviously changed the course of my career and created unparalleled opportunities.
Whether you want to talk about salesmanship, whether you want to talk about being a good partner when you're busy, whether you want to talk about how to build up managers, how to properly sell, how to create lifetime value, not a one-off sale, or whatever else you think you're good at, I cannot push you harder to start considering to make videos. Or if you're — which I wouldn't think should be the case for this crowd, but if for some weird reason you don't like being on video, the written word. How many people here by show of hands read Substack? A Substack of any kind? Raise your hands. So this excites the stuff out of me. The fact that like two people kind of raised their hand, like the fact that no one here is consuming Substacks when Substack is growing so quickly as a newsletter written platform that is building enormous levels of fame similar to what I saw on YouTube in '06 or Instagram in '11 or TikTok in '16. Some of you here are dramatic. Actually, here's a good question though. This is a heavy gift-of-gab crowd, but let's just see who here would deem themselves a better writer than talker. Raise your hands.
Yeah, I figured it wasn't going to be too much. Let's go to talking. Obviously, that makes sense given the context of this room. Some people might not like the video thing. They might think it's cringe. Then you go podcast and you just do audio. I will push you very hard, and maybe in the Q&A. I believe being silent on the internet is a very bad strategic move, including like things that you're not even thinking about now. If you have a platform maybe for auctioneering and you have 50,000 people that follow you, maybe it won't be for a business reason. Maybe having an audience to raise money for a nonprofit around a disease that affected your family is now something you're able to achieve because you have a platform versus not because you don't.
Maybe getting it — let me tell you my life. I mean, I'm literally, I don't know if you can, the front row might see it. I'm getting goosebumps. Maybe getting five to 10 emails a day of how you changed someone's life is actually the thing that you're missing in your soul right now. Right? And so people are very one-dimensional on how they see having a personal brand online when it is very multi-dimensional. So I think those are kind of the biggest things I want to talk about. One, as the great poet once said, never get high on your own supply. And so like you're probably feeling good and you're going to go to town tonight and drink and dance and we're the best. We're better than everybody else. We came here to New York. You've got a lot more in you.
And like what does that mean? Does that mean within this industry? Does it mean somewhere else? Like I'm incredibly passionate about this. I think people seal themselves. For example, these little characters — after everything I've done, and I've done plenty, I just decided six years ago that I'm Walt Disney. I'm being dead serious. Like I genuinely stand in front of you here and I'm like, oh, what Jim Henson and Walt Disney and Stan Lee did for Marvel and Muppets and Disney, I know how to do too. And I created a whole world, back to my passion of emotional intelligence, of Common Sense Cow and Gratitude Gorilla and Genuine Giraffe and 230 others. And I am building a blend between Pokémon — because there's a lot of collectible stuff I do in here — between Pokémon and Disney. And I am actively building in front of the whole world a multi-trillion-dollar intellectual property. And 90% of the comments in social media are making fun of me that I've lost my life and my mind and I'm in a midlife crisis.
That's because people create ceilings for themselves. That's because when I say that, they think that's outlandish. As if Walt Disney, Stan Lee, and Jim Henson are so remarkable, they're not replicatable. Right? And so that's — wow, that one hit. Thank you, everyone. Like yeah, I've never said that, but that's what I feel. And so it's like, why not you? And like there's just so much more. And now every human is about to be remarkably more productive. I said it earlier. I do a whole lot of yapping on the internet and in real life. But what people most don't know is mostly because I do so much listening when you can't see me. I watch. I learn. And now with Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini and Grok, like my research, like I mean I can't even comprehend how much I've learned in the last year about building an intellectual property that would have taken me 800 hours that took me eight.
So the capacity of what you're able to accomplish. Wait till all of you start building your OpenClaw and your harness and your computer and it's doing all the mundane things for you day-to-day, which opens up time for you to spend time with your family or do this work to grow. Like this is an unbelievable decade in front of us. And you know what the best part is? The world, the mainstream media and social media are demonizing it like it's all up. This is the best. I'm so pumped that everyone thinks everything's because when you believe everything's you don't do. Which means for people like me that are doing, we're going to get more. I'm telling everyone to not let me get it all every day. But they'd rather believe a politician or some random podcaster that everything's when this is the greatest era to be alive in the history of the world.
Yes, there is many — like I'm not delusional. I watch everything. There's always tension and war and suppression. But did anybody go to history class? That's how it always is. Like when people say it's never been worse, I'm like, the Black Plague was up. You know, like it's just like people are incredibly entitled. You know, people want it easy and I get it. Why not? That's just not how the world works. And accountability and action are two very important words. And I get very inspired, and why I said yes to be here, is we really do share a lot of similarities, you and I. And I just think you could do a lot more.
And I will tell you, and I want to poke at this zit: if you are not a great manager to your team because you've decided fear, no matter how you package it up, will inspire or get the results you're looking for on the P&L or the numbers, give it a rethink. You know, and I don't make that assumption. I don't know any of you, but I do know that even my own company, where I'm psychotic and run a monarchy dictatorship, I have managers that come in that don't even see that they're doing fear because it's packaged nicely. It's like, you know, we don't make our numbers this month. It's not like they're yelling and cursing, but the weaponization of fear by parents and leaders is very subtle. And I ask you to go within and maybe cut out some of those cavities because you will see dramatically, dramatically bigger results if you understand how to weaponize hope and optimism and love, especially in the long term. Hate is very good at the first half, but love always wins when triple zeros hits the clock. And that is macro what's going on in the world. And it is incredibly micro in the way you feel about yourself and the way you manage your team. So, those are the themes I'm thinking about. John, I'm ready for Q&A. Thank you.
That's incred.
It is a great question. Thank you. Look, I think it's very individual. You know, the truth is, so for example, me, even though I made no money, literally, I made $50 to $60,000 a year through my entire 20s into my early 30s, but I had a big advantage. I was living an $11,000-a-year life. I literally lived in a shitty apartment by the liquor store and worked every minute and bought nothing. So, I was able to kind of like have a little money, which is like a foreign concept now, savings. Remember that?
Like, like that is not even like talked about. Um, I in my 20s and 30s had such a self-awareness that I was going to make plenty of money that I didn't invest my money. I just did random [__] with it when I wanted. In fact, what I mainly did, and this is insane, was I had one weekend a year that I like lived like a normal human and I would go with to Vegas with my friend Rob Moose from college and I would usually go and lose half of my net worth in Vegas over a weekend.
I mean, it's so [__] insane. But there was such a deep, deep understanding that this money, that this was the right thing for me to do to get some joy in this insane framework for this group. That's a lot. That's a really interesting schedule. Like I'm sure that like it sounds good, but I'm sure some of the people in here are like, are like, like that's like too much time. They're like, what the [__]? Like you could start another [__] whole side business on that. Like I think you need to really, you know, there's so many things. Paying off your family's debt,
that is incredibly noble cuz you know you're going to keep going. Investing in high risk, high upside. My life turned when after all those years at 32, I had about $213,000 in the bank even though I made no money my whole life. Back to my $11,000 year. And in three months, I wrote two checks that wiped out my bank account into two startups that I thought were going to be big. Facebook and Twitter.
My $46,000 investment in Twitter gave me when Elon bought it. And my $200,000 investment in Facebook is [__] I haven't sold a share. So you could go high risk, high reward, right? So you could spend your whole [__] month when you're not doing [__] researching robotic and AI stocks and make a good bet on some like I don't know, you could, or you could find a partner who's your best friend from high school and then, you know, give some of the money to him or her and you start a business on the side and you're there two months of the year but not the other 10 and they're your partner and you put up the capital in your two months and I mean you can do 9,000 [__] things.
I think you should buy comic books. I think they're about to explode. I'm obsessed with collectibles. The amount of money coming in is just... And now here come the index funds. Like that world's about to get crazy. So if you're a little bit knowledgeable about collectibles, I think coins are about to explode. They've been an old man's game. I can see because of what in TikTok youth culture is coming in. So what I saw in trading cards in '17, I think is about to happen in coins. Maybe you [__] know something about coins. I think you should go buy some good ones. I think they're going to 10x. Like I don't know. Like I could sit here for the rest of my life, John, and tell you what they should do with their money. Like
