- Thank you so much.

First thing I wanna say is I love you back.

(crowd cheering)

Sit, sit, sit.

First thing I wanna say is clearly my mother snuck in here,

because that fucking intro was ridiculous.

I'm sorry you had to sit through that.

Fuck.

Jesus.

I'll get to it.

I'll get to it.

I don't have unlimited time, so I wanna get right into it.

A couple things I wanna talk about.

First and foremost, I am so fired up to be here.

I've never spoken in this market,

so thank you so much for the warm welcome.

(crowd cheering)

To be very frank, the thing that I'm thinking most about,

when I think about the lineup of speakers,

is why are you here.

To me, when you speak, what matters most

is can you bring value to the audience.

So I've been thinking quite a bit about this speech

of like what can I really touch on

that isn't available for free online,

that isn't something you've seen or heard before

and the reality is

is that's a difficult challenge

in a world where, very honestly,

there's not a lot that I believe in.

There's only four to six to nine things

that I really trade on

and those are the things that I wanna really reinforce.

First and foremost, the biggest thing

that I wanna make sure that everybody understands

more than anything ...

I just had a really fun strategy session

with a bunch of people

and when I think about what it was

that we just talked about for the last couple hours

is the fact of the matter is I truly believe

that every single person here today,

including myself, are grossly underestimating

how special today is,

how special this era of the internet at maturity is,

how special the opportunity is.

What is remarkable to me this morning

is that there is never ...

And I mean this.

Now, if you are somebody who watches

cable news all day, you may not agree with me,

but it is my absolute deep belief

that this is the absolute greatest era

to be alive in the human race.

(crowd cheering)

And I'll tell you why.

This internet thing,

it's bigger than you think.

This internet thing,

when you're older,

when our great, great grandkids judge us

and how we navigated through this era,

this internet thing is a much bigger deal

than we've been able to comprehend.

The internet, not Facebook, not social media,

not Instagram, not podcasting,

the internet is the single biggest invention

that has ever happened to the human race

and we, being in it

in the first couple decades of it,

are struggling to understand how big of a deal it is.

What I am completely fucking blown away by

is that there is nobody

and I mean nobody

who is a gatekeeper to the game anymore.

What is amazing to me

is that our great, great grandparents;

our great grandparents and our grandparents would laugh

at the shit that we cry about.

The amount of people

that get upset that Instagram and Facebook

changed their algorithm and cry about is fucking ludicrous.

It's free.

Facebook and Instagram are free

and we sit and cry about the change in the algorithm.

Here's where I'm at.

For this entire room,

the one thing that connects all of us,

whether you're an entrepreneur,

whether you work somewhere,

whether you're fucking thrilled,

whether you're devastated,

the one thing that connects all of us

is that for us to take the step

in what we're trying to achieve,

whether it's financial, whether it's legacy,

whatever it may be, the one thing

that connects us is we have to trade on attention.

The thing that I desperately want everybody

to leave this talk with

is understanding that attention

is just like real estate

and that attention

is the gateway drug to everything you want, period.

Before you can tell me how great you are,

how awesome what you're selling is,

you need my attention.

Before you can tell me anything,

you need my attention.

What everybody in this room needs to wrap their head around

is that this device owns the attention of our society.

You may be upset about it;

you might be sad that when you go out,

people aren't talking to each other;

you can do whatever the fuck you want,

it doesn't change the fact that this

has the attention

and if you are sitting in this room today

and you have not figured out how to put written words,

audio or video into the platforms that sit on top of this,

you are fundamentally irrelevant.

(audience cheering)

So

when you think about sitting here and standing here,

look, I have no interest in inspiring you for an hour

and getting you pumped and then next Thursday

you don't do shit about it.

That's not interesting to me.

I'll be very frank,

even with all these faces in the audience,

I'm looking for one person

who understands that this is such a remarkable time

and that you need to go harder at it.

Let me tell you ...

Let me tell you ...

Let me tell you the thing that upset me most in my intro.

I'm extremely proud, maybe more than anything,

that I went into my family business

and built my family business for my family.

I'm proud.

I love when people try to raz on me,

easy for you, you were handed three million dollars,

when they don't know my story.

What I was handed was my dad had a liquor store

doing 3 million dollars a year on 10% profit.

What I did was worked my face off 17 hours a day,

from 22 to 34, building my dad's business for my dad

and my mom and at 34 years old,

I left Wine Library day to day

with 0% equity in Wine Library

and no money in my bank.

That's what I did.

(audience cheering)

I'm proud.

If you're a child of an immigrant or great parents,

nothing is better than settling the score with your parents.

You can't zoom in, but the goosebumps,

can you just confirm this.

Real fucking goosebumps.

The best.

Meanwhile, when the intro came up,

the gentleman said, "He grew his dad's business

"from 4 to 60 million."

True.

Nice solid accomplishment,

also my greatest regret.

If I could do it again, businesswise,

I would have built Wine Library

from a 4 to a 250 million dollar business,

in that same time.

Let me tell you why and let me tell you

why it's the only thing you need to pay attention to

in my entire talk.

Let me break this down.

Get your fucking attention up right now.

I don't know if you like taking notes.

I don't know how you like to consume it,

but I promise you what I'm going to explain

for the next three minutes is the fucking game right now.

I

built my dad's business from 4 to 60 million dollars

with no money.

The business was doing 4 million dollars,

400,000 in profit before expenses.

We literally had no money.

You pay people, you pay your rent,

like nothing.

My first year marketing budget

in building Wine Library was $14,000

for the year

in marketing.

I was able to build it

in such a big way for three core reasons.

In 1996, nobody had a website.

That was a good idea.

Number two: I started an email newsletter.

For the youngsters in here, it's hard to understand,

but you have to understand people didn't even know

their own email when they would come into the wine store.

I'd ask them, "You wanna be in the email list?"

They'd be like, "Yeah."

I'm like, "What's your email?"

They're like, "aol@yahoo.com".

I'm like, "No fucker."

(audience laughing)

This was early.

This was early.

But I started and email newsletter.

How many people here have done

email marketing in their career.

Raise your hand.

I had 91% open rates on my newsletter in 1997 and 8.

Why?

Not because it was such good content.

All it said was buy this fucking Merlot.

It was because nobody else was emailing

and I bought that real estate cheap,

because nobody else was doing it.

And then the final point of

why I really exploded my business

was the day that Google AdWords came out,

I bought Google AdWords for my dad's business,

so I was the first result for wine

and cabernet and Napa Valley.

And while everyone else was doing direct mail

and advertising in magazines and radio,

I was winning Google, which went on to become Google.

Got it?

Let me now explain to you the number one mistake

every person in this audience is making right now,

including me, who's supposed to be fancy at this.

Every person in this place

is not producing enough content for social media

and is not spending enough money on social media ads.

Every person in here is not producing enough content

and not spending enough ad money on social media.

Because you have to understand what's about to happen.

Let me explain it real simple.

Right now, buying ads on Instagram and Facebook,

which is something everybody in here should be doing

at scale ...

And please

don't be that person who has run Facebook and Instagram ads

and not gotten results and deemed it not working.

The ROI of a basketball, to me, is zero.

The ROI of a basketball to Lebron is billions of dollars.

Let's be honest with each other.

How many people here have run

Facebook or Instagram ads and it hasn't worked.

Raise you hand.

Actually stand up.

I want everybody to see this.

Don't be lazy.

Do this for everybody.

Watch this.

Keep going.

Don't sit down yet.

Everybody look around.

All these people suck.

(audience laughing)

I'm kidding; I'm kidding.

Sit down; sit down.

Guys,

please understand this truth.

Everybody that stood up,

and I'm not joking,