Social Media Is Hard | Puerto Rico Keynote

first and foremost the number one thing as you think about how you're spending your money to make more money aka marketing you have to take your personal opinions off the table the number one reason so many people struggle is because they say dumb [ __ ] like well i don't like tick tock who gives a [ __ ] carl do you like money the biggest vulnerability in this room is not being smart enough or being hungry enough it's just actually not knowing how to dominate when it comes to people relationships you know i think most people that would be in a room like this if you're here you're doing [ __ ] let there be no confusion right you know for especially for somebody if you're 24 hours into feeling like oh carl's really crushing it or susan's doing it if you feel any level of like that you're completely confused because if you're here you're doing it right the question is how big is doing it and what do you actually want and i think the thing that i would really try to land first before i go into other subject matters is you'd be stunned how much your personal upside is being capped if you aren't profoundly kind to the people that work for you it is a very grandma statement it's a very kind of like the world is kind [ __ ] but it is profoundly impactful and so i would bet the farm that many dozens of people in here are dicks to their team i would bet the farm on it is just the way the business world is it's the way society is and i beg for the people in here as i'm going on this subject matter if it gives you any thoughts or feelings if you want it for you for you i promise you that what's happening underneath you and how you're setting the tone and what you're doing is a huge impact on your zeros this is not about entitlement and letting people get lazy and like silly non-results things this is about building empires big empires but you would be stunned i believe and the reason this is an important subject matter is i'm sure at this point plenty of people have heard about the great resignation right because of kobit the thing that i'm way more worried about as all of you go on your journey to build the things that you want to build is the great never applying in the first place the amount of options 17 19 22 year olds have going into the world and they're aware of it of how easy that will be the word i use it is to make 60 000 a year flipping on ebay making content on tick tock dabbling in nft land there are so many more options than what we grew up with if you're over 35 here that it's profound and people are missing what's actually happening and this is an absolute subject matter that i hope you take very seriously if you are not focused on retention people actually wanting to stay first you will lose and when i say lose you'll still win but you'll lose upside that you can't even see so it's incredibly important since we have time together on this day that we nail this subject matter which is first and foremost the number one thing as you think about how you're spending your money to make more money aka marketing you have to take your personal opinions off the table the number one reason so many people struggle is because they say dumb [ __ ] like well i don't like tick tock who gives a [ __ ] carl do you like money this is the profoundly most fundamentally silly thing that i hear every day of my life gary i don't get youtube but trillions of people do i don't like it you probably don't like a lot of things you do every day if you're here you know my favorite thing about a group here is that you eat a lot of [ __ ] every day to make it happen there's plenty of things you don't like this is not about what you like or what your opinion is of a platform or you don't like technology i mean some people try to go so lofty with me gary i'm not doing it because it's bad for the kids right like or they go political it's like looking for any excuse not to put in the work to something they don't understand yet and so for me when i look at the landscape of what's happening in the world the speed in which attention is shifting is profound facebook and and google twitter and youtube tick tock these things are moving so fast you know it you know tick tock came out of nowhere for most of you in the last 24 months elon bought twitter yesterday this stuff is just moving it's moving and it's moving fast and you have to understand that even more importantly than balancing your checkbook is your ability to understand where your customers attention is and how to make pictures videos the written word audio to get in front of them and do business and for a lot of people that are winning the quickest way they lose market share is by being outflanked by competitors doing contemporary work when they got cozy because they were winning this today is about business you can do it however you want to do it when i start this conversation with the first 10 minutes around culture and how

you treat people i'm not joking about what i said i know a lot of people struggle with that here they don't work hard enough to your standards they shouldn't they don't make as much money as you do like if you like people you know how do i get my employees to work as hard as me i'm like help them start their own business i appreciate that these are the important conversations because when you win this when you figure out how to build an actual team you can scale i could do a lot of things but you can only do so much so many of you are carrying way too much stuff because you're not building teams you're a micro manager you're insecure you're not building up retention you can't create scale it's only people it's people and so that's a huge combo and then the second part and then that is i think we should get up here and do some q a the second part is something we really need to spend time on while i'm still here if you do not have a contemporary marketing plan you are losing market share you are losing growth if you don't have people around you that want to be there and you're constantly having to retrain and find different people you're losing growth the blueprint's simple the execution's hard so why don't we do a bunch of q a around that i'm really happy to be here thanks for having me

so what drives you a level of gratitude and guilt that i have such a natural talent to communicate and execute that i can have a profound impact and i feel a sense of obligation to kind of leave it on the field it's not wasted yeah it's kind of a curiosity of like how good can i do it you know like it's like what when you know again for the people that raise their hands and don't know me well like my big thesis is you have to cut out the

noise all of it especially the positive noise when everybody tells you you're great and you're awesome you become addicted to that now you're completely vulnerable to the negativity the reason i'm so out there on social is because it's hard to be so out there and social most people can't deal with the heat they don't like when somebody says they're ugly or stupid or full of [ __ ] or a scam artist or they suck or they're overrated people don't like that i don't care not because i'm so cool it's because that person doesn't know me how can i possibly be upset when sallypants47 is having a bad day and decides to take it out on me because i look too happy i meant but i'm not mad at hate i'm compassionate to hate but at the same token knock on wood for me 90 of my comments are just little goat emojis and that and that requires even more tune out because when you get high in your own supply it's a wrap so i know that you're i know i've heard you talk a lot about well like you said from you know switching it you know when you said i was thinking of my mom because she was in school and they said oh we're going to email and she's like why the heck will you use email i can just walk down to the other classroom and just you know give you know teacher so-and-so a message i know i've heard you see people do you know i apologize do you know that when canvas came out all the artists said that wasn't real art that if you didn't put it on buildings it wasn't real art you should go read what they said about the television like we always demonize new technology humans are incredible at romanticizing yesterday and demonizing today so i get it good so i know you're bullish on tick-tock what do you what are you most bullish on in terms of if someone had to pick one form of communication marketing channel etc this is why q a is so fun because it's a game of self-awareness if for example if you're incredibly insecure of your visual exp appearance you can't do video it's a mental block right so now you might have to do audio which all of a sudden becomes should you do twitter and do audio posts and post there right like for example i am even though i'm a five or six time new york times best-selling author i can't put two sentences together i like i that's why i have to record all my books everyone i love when people come to my when i do books and i have book settings man the book sounds just like you and i'm always laughing i'm like because i [ __ ] recorded it and somebody put it into a sentence form you know um you know so for me i i'm not gonna go to linkedin and write four paragraphs over you know while i have a cigar or a glass of wine or on the tread like we're walking you know but for me as many of you know video comes very natural so i think first you have to know yourself of what format allows you to communicate for a lot of people here being an independent little a little scary maybe having a sidekick or a friend now all of a sudden you got a podcast right so you have to know yourself first after that to be very frank if you actually know how they all work they can all be great you can dominate on twitter you can dominate maybe you're a great host or hostness all of a sudden maybe it's a facebook group that you should be building right so there's a lot of ways to win now there are always moments of time where there's so much attention on a platform that if you post you get more organic reach without paying everybody always gets mad at the algorithms that's just supply and demand you weren't there early enough instagram [ __ ] me it's free thinking like a billion dms from influencers gary instagram [ __ ] me i'm like it was free you made millions it was free so the algorithm doesn't change not because you're a conservative it's because they're running a [ __ ] business and more content means less and less consumption means supply and demand more kids went from instagram to tick-tock more people are posting to instagram than they did two years ago what the thing what do you think is gonna happen of course your video is not gonna get a hundred thousand views anymore it's gonna have forty thousand it's called supply and demand of attention that's what i trade that has been the foundation of my career i had email newsletter in the 90s that had 95 open rates i bought every wine term in the world on google adwords the day google adwords started i started a youtube show long form was one of the first five humans on earth to do it i was one of the first 30 people to have a million followers on twitter like this is my career and so i understand it and so the answer is figure out your form of communication if you're capable of doing tick tock you go all in and tick tock is not you know three years ago i'm like tick tock tick tock and everyone's like it's 14 year old girls dancing i'm like for now facebook used to be just college kids now it's just grandmas it changes [ __ ] changes it evolves and so you're on facebook quite a bit no worries me too listen i just got done saying it's my favorite platform right now because like no emotion complete detachment like complete detachment it's just whatever the market wants and so many people make judgments subjectively in their mind about things and it's a mistake this is very important you have to ask yourself what your relationship is with money it's imperative so much of my luck is because i don't like it enough all my friends are like you know all my friends have like i have so many friends that have moved to puerto rico and miami and texas it's like [ __ ] out of control right and they love to like razz me they're like you're in [ __ ] you know like you're not only are you in new york you're in new york city you're paying city tax like they'll go on a whole 13 [ __ ] and i make real money that's real money and they'll like go on a 13-minute [ __ ] rant and then i'm like i don't care and they're just like baffled i'm like i like new york i need the action i don't want to [ __ ] live in l. a or miami or puerto rico or [ __ ] ecuador i want to live in [ __ ] manhattan and so like but for other people they love money and guess what zero judgment who the [ __ ] am i [ __ ] me i don't care if if they want to move from la to [ __ ] austin texas knock yourself out if you want to move from [ __ ] connecticut to [ __ ] the outskirts of miami have a [ __ ] ball the thing that i love is my mom has no idea who gary is i have some real hopes and dreams i actually have no expectations of anybody or anything which is why i'm always happy but i have real expectations about heaven i've got some big hopes and dreams for heaven there's two core things i'm really hoping about heaven one that everyone's there and i can have some real talks i got a lot of questions from the people that are not around anymore and two which is really cool i think you'll like this i think that heaven has some weird version of google where this is like i dream about this where you go up there and you can type in anything and heaven will show you what would have happened for example first thing i'm doing when i get to heaven first query heaven show me the time i came closest to dying without knowing it enter and i have these two core scenarios one if i would have eaten that peanut i would have choked on it and died or two my favorite one the time i forgot my keys in the house ran out forgot ran back in and grabbed them but had i grabbed them i would have got hit by a bus and died so i've got big hopes for heaven i'm gonna be super pissed if it's not there and so uh i'm excited about that question if someone that you see people that they buy the shoes the watches the starbucks but they're not willing to invest in themselves and they say think oh my gosh poor what was me how do you

get people to shift from the consumption to investing in themselves i have so many friends that like nice things they always get mad at me because i put out a lot of content about this and i don't do a good enough job so i'm gonna try to be better about it the reason i talk about buying things is because if you really know if like you grew up for 25 years 40 years like reading car books and going to it and it was your grandfather saying look like it makes all the sense in the world when you get to financial memes that you want a lamborghini what i'm worried about no different than buying an nft or anything else are the people who are buying it to disguise the actual truth they're using it as a proxy for their insecurity it's how i'm gonna get the girl because i'm insecure it's how i'm people going to think i'm successful because they don't it's all that stuff i get worried about that because i know that's not a sustainable model for happiness and i talk about that you know investing in yourself comes in a lot of forms you know it's one thing to say don't buy a starbucks for eight bucks or don't buy a lamborghini or rolex and put it into a content a mastermind like things to better yourself my personal belief is better yourself is a simple game of this i actually think most people need to downsize and simplify at scale maybe not as crazy as what your parents did but but that was an extreme version that actually has a ton of merit well they left l. a yeah it it was it was think about the time we were in america that led to a lot of that kind of behavior and i actually think there's a lot of truth in it like it's so funny because i because i'm so into business i'm into all this other stuff that i love so it's not obvious what's actually happening in my wiring but i just want more simplicity for people the more simplicity you have and for me simplicity comes in the form of judgment the thing that i'm trying to think as much about as possible is how do i have a conversation that might impact someone positively about the concept of judgment and it actually starts with yourself the thing that i'm really hot on right now is of course so many people are judging each other they start with themselves i just wish people wouldn't beat themselves up so much like i hate when people are like oh but gary you don't get it on me i'm just i'm so ambitious i'm like i'm the [ __ ] craziest ambitious person i've ever met my life that doesn't mean that if i don't win this year or this decade that i think i'm a piece of [ __ ] that's not healthy and i definitely don't have envy is a framework of conversation that has to be eliminated how can you envy someone when you don't know them you know a piece of headline of them you might like something that's going on with them how can you actually envy somebody that you know nothing about we just have to simplify simplify but like for me it's so simple to be content and hungry as [ __ ] at the same time i've come to know that that's confusing and sounds like a contradiction but i have to continue to unpack it because in that is [ __ ] everything it's the whole game when you like want it more like i want to be the greatest human that ever lived i genuinely swear on my children's health as i sit in front of you here right now that when i die in 55 years when i'm in heaven doing my google [ __ ] i'm gonna look down and i'm like okay good seven billion people came to my funeral that's how i wake up every day trying to navigate my life at the same token if it all ended tomorrow and nine people came that's fine too and finding that balance of extremities to make it balance not like something that's confusing is something we have to talk more about and so to answer your question in a very long-winded way what i would say to that person is break it down get simpler tune out the noise most of all tune out your own noise against yourself everybody else is gonna have judgment on you need to be your number one [ __ ] fan for real not kidding and i will remind you no matter who the [ __ ] you look up to they suck at a lot of things too thank you let's give it up