(audience cheers)

- Thank you. - Yeah, man.

(audience cheers)

- Thank you, Philly, sit, let's do this.

(audience murmurs)

What up, what up?

What up?

(audience cheers)

Good to see you, Philly.

First of all, before we get this started,

the amount of gratitude that I have for this city

for beating the fucking Patriots in the Super Bowl.

(audience cheers wildly)

Let's fucking go!

Thank you for that.

Man, I hate those fuckers.

Today's an extremely special day for me

because today is my mother's birthday.

(audience cheers)

And I thought I would use that as a framework

of the opening dialogue, giving a sense of

who's speaking today.

I won't go too much into mindset and motivation

and those kind of things 'cause I think we have a lot

of people covering it, I'm actually going to go

pretty practical on the back half of this

about why I think most of you are massively missing the mark

and I include myself in that.

That we're missing the mark in this enormous gold rush

of Facebook ads and Instagram ads, LinkedIn, YouTube.

No matter how much content you're producing for whatever

you're trying to achieve, whether that's to raise money

for the PTA or sell sneakers or build your real estate firm,

whatever you do, the one thing, for all the people

here in the front and all those homies that I love so much

in the back-- (audience cheers)

Man, it takes a while for noise to get the fuck up here.

Shit is crazy. (audience laughs)

The one thing I know for fact that connects

every person here, that cameraman right there,

myself, you, all of you, is that attention is the asset.

That before you can tell me how great you are,

why I should buy your thing, why I should do the thing

that you want me to do, vote for me, buy my thing,

do this, help that,

that attention is the asset and I have spent the last

20 years of my business career becoming a practitioner

in what I call under-priced attention.

Whether it's email, or websites, or Google AdWords,

or YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter,

the reason I have the great luxury of standing up here,

at least for the merit of what I've been able to accomplish

in my professional career, is I've been able to execute

within real estate that has been under-priced by the market,

I've been able to storytell and execute in there

and that has led to the results that I have.

As I got older, I got smarter and started investing

in the platforms that became the most important real estate

and those are the foundations of the things,

and when I buy the New York Jets and win by Super Bowls...

(audience cheers)

It will, 100%, be on the back

of the things that I'm going to talk to you

on the second half which is how all of you need to start

buying and creating on these platforms

and why so many of you have failed.

How many people here by show of hands have run Facebook

or Instagram ads and it hasn't worked?

'Cause I think it's a lot of people, raise them high.

There's a very specific reason.

It's because it's not that easy, it's not just, you know,

it's like me saying I'm going to put a ball in the hoop.

That's great, but it doesn't mean I'm going to be

a professional basketball player.

It takes a skill set, and I'll get into that,

and that's the thing, if you want to ask me what I'm trying

to accomplish here today, every person in here is

under-spending and under-creating on Facebook,

LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, podcasting, email,

everybody, me too.

And I have 22 full time people, I'm spending three to four

million dollars a year between advertising dollars

and people and I'm under-doing it.

So, I really need to deliver that, that's part two.

Part one is a little bit more interesting to me.

Over the last year, it's become obvious to me that optimism

is actually a strategy.

That I'm fascinated by what I was gifted.

I was gifted, through my mom's DNA and by the way

that she parented me, to be fundamentally in a place

where I just am incapable of seeing the negative.

I don't really, it's not that I'm delusional.

Basically, my life for the last 27 years

has been pretty basic.

If I wake up and me and the seven or eight people

that I love the most didn't die, I'm fucking pumped.

(audience laughs)

(audience applauds)

Now I really, really need you to understand what I'm saying.

I mean it, it's super basic.

I have a happy life not because of my success.

Seeing my dear high school friend, Jess, right there,

one, two, three, in the fifth row...

It was super fun, I ran into her in the hotel last night

and I was there with her husband and friend

and it was fun for me, it was emotional for me

because she's one of a very, you know, we only went to

a high school of 254 kids, I know it's 254 in our class now.

I don't know how many of you follow me on Instagram

but the happiest day I've had in the last month

was when I posted my report card a month ago

because I was ranked 243 out of 254 in my high school.

(audience laughs)

But there's not a lot of people, because I was very insular,

what she can tell you is that for the first three

and seven eighths year of my high school career,

because I worked in my dad's liquor store

and because I worked after school,

I didn't do after school sports,

I didn't hang out, I didn't have much of a social life,

I sold baseball cards in the malls of New Jersey

and I worked at my dad's store, I was in my own shit.

And so, for me, it's fun to see her right here

because you could say, you know, I have empathy.

One could say, well, you're happy 'cause you've made it.

I was fucking super happy when I wasn't making it

and doing the shit that nobody wanted to do.

You know, a lot of people are very confused

with my narrative, when people want to troll me,

they're like, easy for you, you were handed

three million dollars or this, that, the other thing.

I spent the first 12 years of my career, 15 hours a day,

paying myself less than $100,000 a year, every year,

building my family liquor store business for my parents.

I left at 34 years old with zero equity in Wine Library,

no money to my name, and no equity on paper.

I basically started over seven years ago.

But I checked, thanks Dad, but I checked--

(audience laughs)

But I checked a very important box for me.

I don't know how many of you are immigrants,

or the children of immigrants, or how many of you,

in the same way that I am (audience cheers)

that have the great, great fortune to have their parents

be their heroes, but there's no greater feeling in life

than feeling that you've settled the score with your parents

and gave them as much as they gave you.

And that feels incredible for me of what I did

in the first part of my career but here's what I will

tell you on my mom's birthday.

My mom did some crazy ass parenting on me.

First of all, the number one thing that my mom did for me

and the number one issue for the far majority of this room,

and I'm just lucky of good parenting and DNA,

I don't think I'm better than you, I'm just telling you

because I see it every day and because I've read a lot

of tweets in the last 24 hours of people that are

in this audience, and I look at not just the tweet

that you said you're excited to see me, I look at all

the shit you post 'cause I'm trying to get a sense

of you fuckers. (audience laughs)

The number one gift my mom gave me is a lack of entitlement.

If you want to talk-- (audience applauds)

For all the good shit that's going on with me,

I literally think I mean nothing.

I'm being dead serious with you.

I think I'm the greatest of all time,

with my confidence, bravado, and ego, and excitement,

and the things I see are happening, but I equally know

that if I disappeared tomorrow, cool,

I'd have a good social media day and then,

everybody would move, I'm telling you,

when Prince and David Bowie died in that little window,

and I watched those icons of culture get about 24 hours

of love and then everybody forgot, I was like, fuck.

Right, I mean it.

I mean it, and so, what's really empowering

and what's holding so many people back here is entitlement.

You feel like somebody owes you something because something

went wrong somewhere along the way and I don't.

I actually thing whatever went wrong for you

is the best shit that ever happened to you

because adversity is absolutely the foundation of success.

(audience applauds)

The other thing I know is I have bad news,

nobody gives a fuck about your problems.

(audience laughs)

And this is super important to understand,

the second you actually understand that nobody actually

gives a shit, the only people that listen to you complaining

are your loser fucking friends.

(audience laughs)

If you like complaining, just take a step back,

look around the next time you're complaining about

the government, or racial, or feminine.

I had a guy sit in front of me the other day crying that

his life was bad 'cause he was a white male.

(audience murmurs)

Rich, white male.

I was like, oh shit, we've gone everywhere now.

(audience laughs)

You're either on the offense or defense.

I just want you to know something, one of the things

that's been really on my mind is I think a lot of people

think they're in the middle, they're like at trans.

You're only on the offense or the defense.

And I've realized that I've been on the offense

my whole life because I never felt entitled to anything.

An incredible thing happens when you're born

with very little.

I was born in the Soviet Union, we come to America,

I live in a studio apartment in Queens.

My parents bought me six toys in my entire life

kind of thing, we took one, one family vacation

in my entire life, right.

When I wanted a Nintendo, my mom looked me dead in the face

and said, good, go buy it.

And that was huge, on the flip side, what she also did

was she instilled...

Let me rephrase, she reinforced things that came natural

to me and made them the most important things.

While I was getting D's and F's and every other

immigrant parent was making their kids get A's and B's

'cause they thought that's what mattered,

my mom was accelerating and going out of her mind

any time that I showed compassion,

any time that I showed empathy,

any time that I showed gratitude.

I once opened a door for a woman, this is an amazingly

interesting story to me.

I remember after losing a little league baseball game,

which I'm extremely competitive, so basically, if I lost

at anything, from the ages of five to 13,

I cried on the spot.

Like some straight fucking real tears shit.

So we had a devastating loss in the little league

baseball game that we lost, I mean, I remember we lost

to the cougars, three to two, those fucking--