Money is the end result of what we get after serving the world. So instead of focusing on what you get, you have to really focus on what you give. There are people who are successful who come from wealthy families, but mega, mega wealthy families, the wealthiest families in the country, in any given country, in any given time. Generally, they don't produce the superstars.
We grew up with these things I call invisible scripts, and these are the scripts that are beliefs that are so powerful. We don't even realize they're around us. That's why they're invisible. Everybody should always ask themselves if they want to grow, and they just don't want to just whatever is say, where can I be in five years?
If I can't be at this position in five years, then this isn't a good career path. The fascinating opportunity that we have now is that the ability to define new values, to distribute goods, to make decisions has never been greater. Western people tend to think that I need more money to be happy, but instead Zen approach is how can you find satisfaction in what you have? So it's not a matter of how much money you make or how much money you have.
It's more about your attitude toward money, and the relationship you have with money gives you happiness or miserable life. So you really have to be careful with what you have. What are some of the tenets of Zen? So I studied Zen, I got really hardcore into Taoism when I was younger, like way hardcore, which led me then to studying Buddhism.
I would definitely never claim to say that I practiced it, but study Buddhism a fair amount. Zen I found maybe the most intriguing but confusing. What are some of the core tenets of Zen? So I had this opportunity to meet my mentor later on his name is Waihe Takedo.
So when I asked him to teach about money, he said his first lesson is forget about money. So I was so confused. Yeah, one of the things that I found super confusing and people, so that where I was going is the notion of Zen Cohen. And this is something that people probably in the US anyway be tangentially familiar with.
The most famous one we talk about is what is the sound of one hand clapping. And there are many Zen Cohen's which are beyond confusing. And of course, the idea is once you understand the absurdity of the question itself, and of course I'm doing this from a logical perspective in Zen, I think meant to be very different than that. But just to get people an anchor point, once you understand the absurdity of the question, then it's like you're a step closer to enlightenment.
So when he said forget about money, what was he trying to get you to? Like what does that mean? Because obviously it's not truly forget that it exists. Yes.
So what does he mean? So I think he meant about where I focus. Because if you want money, you have to forget about money. You have to forget about what you can give to other people, how much service you can give out to the world, and then you receive money.
So he was telling me not to focus on money, because money is the end result of what we get after serving the world. So instead of focusing on what you get, you have to really focus on what you give. And our life is in the middle of giving and receiving. So unless we receive well, unless we give well, we can receive.
So we are in the cycle of appreciation or resentment. Either cycle you're in, your life exists. So if you start appreciating your life about everything, including money, your life will be filled with money and appreciation. If your life will be filled with resentment, anger, and fear, around money, and also around life, your life will be also surrounded by fear and resentment and anxiety.
So he taught me how to focus instead of just getting the end result of money. And he was very well respected because he was talking about philanthropy. So I'm teaching about happiness and money ever since. Yeah, the idea that he's been so incredibly successful obviously lends a lot of credence to the things that he says.
And one of the things that I wanted to understand better about his teachings to you and your teachings, you've written so prolifically. What is it like, how does it get that big? How does the topic sort of expand so far? What is it that people are getting wrong?
And what are some of the universal principles that are going to lead people to, I'll say wealth and it's probably worth defining. How would you define wealth? And then we'll go back to those two questions. In my mind, wealth is an emotion.
It doesn't really matter how much you have, how much you make. Because I've interviewed over the course of my career, I've interviewed many millionaires and billionaires. And some of them are very unhappy and very upset with everything. I'm sure you've met some happy ones and very unhappy ones.
So and also among the people who are struggling with life, they're also happy people and unhappy people. So I think wealth is an attitude. If you feel like you're so happy and so content with what you have, you're already wealthy. But if you have to struggle every day and you cannot find happiness either in your business or in personal life, I think you're not wealthy, even if you have billions in your bank account.
But that doesn't mean that you don't have to have money. That's what I like about your approaches. There is a recognition. So part of the reason that I think that people continue to strive for money, I lived the nightmare of money, I had heard a thousand people tell me that money wasn't going to buy me happiness, that pursuing money outright was going to end up being a problem.
And I still had to do it. And when I ran into the wall of, oh, really, truly, money cannot buy you happiness, how is it that I ended up here when all the people told me that this was going to be the outcome? Why did I have to walk this path? Like, why couldn't I just accept their wisdom?
And I realized that one of the things that people don't talk about is that money really is powerful. Money is, you call it energy. I'll call it power. Money gives you the ability to close your eyes.
Imagine something that you want to create and then open your eyes and actually be able to do it. And if you have the skill set, of course. And so there's real utility in money. And when people talk about, and I've heard you say before, I don't want to get too spiritual, I want to keep this grounded.
And I think that that's really important because if you tell people, hey, forget about money, because money doesn't matter, there's going to be a turnoff. But if you tell people, hey, forget about money, because it's going to reorient your mindset, it's going to change your behaviors. It's going to align your behaviors to something that's actually going to allow you to generate actual money. Then I think that it draws people in a little bit more.
So with that context, I want to go back to the two questions. So what are the mistakes that people make, and what are some universal things people need to understand if they actually want to be wealthy in the way that you just defined? So I think most of us, the biggest problem, I think, especially today is that we are so afraid of money. And so as much as we want money, we are so scared of it.
So why do you say that? I think that hit me as very counterintuitive. Why do you think people are scared of money? It's because of a money trauma.
I call it money-oons that we've had since our childhood. We used to have some unless your parents are perfect. And unfortunately, it's not the case in any culture. So we've been scolded about money.
We spent too much. We wasted the money where we denied a correct lesson or a second lesson or a ballet lesson or a piano lessons because it's expensive. Some of my friends will talk, you are not worth it. Let's take.
That's a big blow. So we've been denied so many times around money. So that's why as much as we want money, because we feel money can buy happiness or money can buy at least freedom. But at the same time, money have been abused as for so many ways.
So as much as we want to get close to it, but if we get too close to it, we get burns or they hurt. So for a lot of people, money is a mystery person. I attribute a lot of my success to luck and a lot of that to also coming from modest means. If you grow up in an extremely wealthy family, if your father is worth $10 billion, you might not have the drive to do the kind of things you need to do to win a Nobel Prize or Pulitzer Prize or something else.
If you grow up in a modest family, you know, if you're going to get anywhere in life, you've got to do it on your own. And so when you're growing up in an amount of wealthy family, you might not think it's an advantage, but actually is a big advantage. Because you know, if you're going to get anywhere, you've got to do it on your own. And when you get to do it on your own and you do succeed, people are going to say, well, you did it on your own, not because your father or your mother.
I'd love to push on that a little bit. So I've heard you in interviews, talk about that before. And what is it about growing up wealthy that placates people? And what is it growing up?
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This is a paid advertisement. So you had that, which I'm sure would have been incredibly beautiful. What was missing that made you so hungry? And if money isn't the end all be all, it doesn't deliver happiness.
Why aren't people hungry when they have wealth? Well, on that question, I think if you know that you are not going to starve or you're not going to be on the street because your father and mother is very wealthy, I don't think you have quite the drive. Now, obviously, they're exceptions. There are people who are successful who come from wealthy families, but mega, mega wealthy families, the wealthiest families in the country, any given country, any given time, generally they don't produce the superstars.
So look at the people who are the most successful people today in our society, in politics or business, athletics, whatever it might be. Usually they didn't come from a Forbes 400 family as a general rule of thumb. So in my own case, I came from modest means, as you alluded to, my father wasn't a high school graduate or nor was my mother. Bill Gates has three children.
They all seem to be well-adjusted. They all seem to be doing well. Whether they can produce the kind of great success that he produced, who knows. But if they do, people will say, well, sure, his father was Bill Gates.
So my own case, I have three children. They're all extremely well-educated and the best school is Harvard, Duke, Stanford, and so forth. But whatever they achieve, sometimes people will say, well, maybe it's because their father was helpful, your father was wealthy. Now, they wouldn't say that's really fair and maybe they're right, but there's no doubt that people will think that.
Do you think that deflates them? Because I would think, well, now they have something to push back on to achieve it a level to show people I got out from under my dad's shadow. Why doesn't that drive them to do even more? Well, I think it's less complicated for a girl than a boy.
I think if you're a man and you have a son, the son probably is going to be seen as more in the shadow of a very prominent father. I think it's a little bit different for daughters for lots of reasons I could explain. So maybe it's not quite as challenging. But, you know, of course, you've seen many times where famous men have children who say, or sons and daughters who when I say, I don't want anything about the family business, I want to be on my own, I don't want anything to do with other families well.
And sometimes these people have nice lives. They don't generally don't change the world in quite the way that maybe the father or the mother did. Did you think about when you were raising your kids? This is one of the reasons I don't have kids, by the way, was so growing up, my parents couldn't give me all the things that I wanted, but I always had food.
My parents loved me to death, so I'm beyond fortunate with how I grew up. But there was something about not being able to have the things that I wanted that really pushed me to achieve more than anybody in my family had achieved. And so when I generated wealth in my own life and thought about raising kids that grew up in a family that would have been affluent, I really worried about having to artificially create an environment that was difficult for them in order for them to succeed. I wasn't sure that I had the fortitude, if I'm honest, to create hardships for them where I didn't need to.
Did you think about that? Like have you done things to sort of make it quote-unquote difficult on your kids? Well, I wasn't quite as wealthy as I later became when I was having my children. I was reasonably wealthy by normal human standards, but not by the standards of today.
So I tried very much to shield them from the wealth, but eventually they figured it out. And they kind of accepted it. I wasn't giving them gigantic trust funds or buying them lots of things that they really didn't need. So I think they got a good education and that's probably the best you can do.
But as you suggested, raising children is complicated. As you may have heard, raising children is a complicated thing. And if you mess up raising your children, nothing else in life really matters. And it's true.
Your ultimate legacy is not a building named after you or a scholarship named after you, but it's your children in many ways. And so they're going to be around a lot longer than you are in most cases. And raising children is challenging for wealthy people. As we have seen, many people, you live in California, many people are very famous Hollywood types.
They have famously had some, let's say, less successful children than they might have wanted in some cases because they have a lot of wealth, a lot of things that are not necessarily conducive to great success. How curiosity, what are the things that are conducive to great success beyond money? Because you've talked very eloquently about billionaires being some of the most tortured people that you've met. What are those things that lead somebody to be quote-unquote successful?
Well, in my view, success is happiness. The most elusive thing in life is personal happiness. Thomas Jefferson wrote about the pursuit of happiness. He never told us how to actually get it.
But finding somebody that's happy with their life is really good. So if you have a poor person, and they are very happy with what they're doing, why should you say your life isn't successful? They're very happy with what they're doing. If you meet a very wealthy person and he or she is tortured with their money and they don't know what to do with their children, hey, don't everybody hate some, is that person successful?
I don't really think so. I think success comes about when you are happy, because that's the point of life to some extent is being happy. That's why we're all here. I guess to some extent, we want to make the like better for other people.
But to some extent, if you are making life better for other people, you're going to be happy, in my view. How do you deal with the transient nature of happiness? And do you distinguish between happiness and say fulfillment? Well, sure.
Happiness can be a momentary thing in some cases. You're happy that something happened, big success happened here. You did something you got an award or something. Your children call you up and say they're proud of you.
What that ever happens, but fulfillment means that you're content. And contentment really is a more long lasting kind of thing. To be fulfilled, I think it's something that goes on for quite some time. Happiness can be more transitory.
You're happy one day. You're unhappy the next day. But when you're fulfilled, I think it's a more long-lasting and probably a better thing. So how did you craft that message for your kids?
One thing that seems like you've really established yourself as in your career is somebody who's deeply persuasive, able to, like you said, a good leader, get people to go somewhere that's going to be good for them. How did you set your kids up for that for pursuing happiness or fulfillment? There was a famous book that was written called Presidential Power. And in it, it was written by a man who introduced that.
And he said, look, President doesn't have that much power. He only has the power to persuade. And as I thought about it, that's what life is all about persuading somebody to do something. Go on your show, read your book, read your theories.
Life is all about persuading people. Even Albert Einstein couldn't come up with equals MC squared. Everybody said, you're right. He had to go persuade people that he was correct about that.
So persuasion is very important. So there's three ways to persuade and communicate. One, orally, you're a good talker, you're Martin Luther King, you're Abraham Lincoln, a good writer, you're Mark Twain, you write very well. But the most powerful way is by leading by example, persuading by example.
So with my kids, I was a hard worker and I try to educate them about the value of hard work. I read a lot. I try to educate them about the value of reading, treating other people well. I try to educate them.
But children learn by seeing what their parents do. If your parents are doing certain things and they're telling kids to do the opposite, that's probably not going to work. So you have to kind of do what you're trying to get your kids to do and lead by example. Now, nobody's a perfect parent, I'm certainly not.
But I'm trying to lead by example is probably what I tried to do. And in some extent, it worked and my kids are not perfect. I'm not perfect and everybody has their flaws. But I think generally they're reasonably happy and generally they're reasonably successful by normal human standards at this stage in their life.
We grew up with these things I call invisible scripts and these are the scripts that are beliefs that are so powerful. We don't even realize that they're around us. That's why they're invisible. So a classic one in America is the American dream is buying house.
Where did that come from? And in fact, there's all these phrases that people use like, you're throwing money away on rent. They don't make more land, you know, and on and on. If you really deconstruct that and you actually run the numbers, you might discover that actually buying houses is often not the best investment.
And this is super counter-entry. People get really mad because real estate is religion in America. But if you actually dive in deep, you might discover, wow, there's a lot of parties who want me to spend a ton of money. That's why, for example, I could buy today, but I rent.
And when people hit it, they're like, wait, I thought that I will teach you to be rich guys rich, so why is he ready? They get very confused because real estate is religion. You know, another thing that is really common today for people is there's no way to get ahead, right? Especially for young people.
Social security won't be around, etc. And I just don't believe in that. I think if you go on to Reddit or you go on to these places where it's a lot of people who are disaffected young people, they create an echo chamber of other people who want to victimize themselves, then you have a choice. Do you want to be reading those threads or like I was reading the comments on your YouTube videos?
I was like, these are the best YouTube comments I've ever seen. People are positive, constructive. They're pointing out things they saw in the 30 second minute of the video. I mean, I actually watched the whole thing.
Those are the kind of people that want people to be willing to. So it's not impossible to make money. There's actually a lot of people making money. It's not impossible to get ahead, pay off debt, even invest and grow.
There's a lot of people doing it. But if you're surrounded by people who constantly complain about how difficult it is and it's impossible, guess what? You're going to absorb those invisible scripts. Dude, that should really terrifies me.
And when I think about, so I'm a child of the 80s, and I was just talking to a good friend of mine who I grew up with, and he was like, oh, I knew you'd be rich one day. And I grew up teetering white-colored blue colors. So I was definitely not set up to be wealthy. I didn't know anybody was wealthy.
Didn't know anybody had been successful. And he was like, oh, I knew you're going to be rich. And I was like, why? And he said, because you get what you believe in.
And he said, you believed money was like a thing that it was super powerful. He said, you used to talk about all the fucking time. And of course, anybody that knows my story knows for decades. I chased money.
It was my stated goal. I wasn't that didn't feel weird to me. I was just like, yeah, I want to be rich. And I was pursuing that doggedly.
And of course, only end up getting rich once I let go of understanding that that wasn't going to make me happy. So I set that aside. But because I had all these positive beliefs about that, it was possible that it could happen to anybody. I never fought to not chase it.
And so the company that my partners and I built that ended up being the billion dollar success and just like crazy, we started it in 2009 at like the height of the recession. And so it's like, it just never occurred to me to think that way. And you said something when you're talking in the book, I can't remember which place, but it was like, even in those moments, people can be successful. But if you're telling yourself that you're not going to be successful, then you don't take the actions.
Walk me through like, how do you get through to people who have these scripts, they're shutting down, they're not taking those steps. Like, do you have sort of entry level movements for them? For sure. Many of us, if you take somebody and you just do this a lot, they'll be at one of my talks or they are on my newsletter or following me on Instagram.
And I'll give you an amazing example that just happened recently. I had a woman who wrote me and she said, Remit, can you help me convince my husband not to waste money? And I go, okay, what's going on? She goes, he spends so much money on iced tea.
And I was like, here we go. I go, how much money? And she goes, he buys iced tea 20 times a month, like almost every day. I said, how much is this iced tea?
She said, it's a dollar 50 each time. So in my head, I'm like, this is insane. Like, why are we even talking about this? But I knew there's something here, so I want to unpack it.
I said, out of curiosity, what's your household income? No response for 20 minutes. Okay. And then finally, she comes back, she goes, I'm not comfortable sharing that.
I said, just give me a range. Okay, what do you think her, her and her husband's household income is? I know the story. I would have guessed otherwise.
80,000 and 100,000. Like a nice 600,000. And this is a perfect example. Like rationally and logically, we should literally not be talking about this because it's a rounding error.
But there's something going on in her belief system that made her fixate on iced tea. And so for anybody, whether it's iced tea or whether it's, you know, lattes is a classic example, everybody tells you not spending money. I'm like, that's the worst advice ever. Buy as many lattes as you want.
Or some people, they just love, for example, clothes, right? I like clothes. They love it. But everybody around has told them things like, that's shallow.
That's a waste of money. You should invest in your Roth IRA. And so what do they do? All of us were torn apart because we live in a paradoxical society that is both pure, botanical, telling us we should retreat into a cave and do nothing.
But then we go on Instagram and everyone's in Bora Bora, we're in ridiculous. And so what do we do? We just buy everything and then we feel guilty. It's the worst possible response.
So what I do is, first I say, what do you love spending money? Love. And nobody talks about this. They always say, oh, let me see your budget.
You're overspending. And everyone's just like, ah, forget this. I'll never come on here and berate someone for their spending. Because I've seen it all.
When they talk about what they love, then I say, what would it feel like to be able to spend two times or four times as much on them? People have never thought like that. Then once we start from a place of aspiration of what do we want, let's work through the mechanics of how to get there. I love that so much.
And in your book, you talk about like starting with what you want, so that what you don't want. You also talk about like what's that money down, what's the thing like for you that you really get amped up about. And I was like, the funny thing is, I'm doing this research, you have to imagine this. I'm doing this research in a room that I like don't usually let people go into.
And it's known as the comic room. Okay. And if you go in the comic book room, you will see there, it's just like stacked. And that's my, my iced tea.
Like if my wife are going to complain about what this Tom spends his money on outside of the business, of course, it's that like, I love those comic books. Well, that's, that's a very involved story. But I will say that there's something unique about comic books that give you these really big ideas very rapidly. Okay, love it.
And then let me, let me show this story that just happened a couple of years ago here in LA. I was giving a talk and I asked somebody what they love spending on it. And she said, close. She said she loves buying clothes.
I said, she was so excited. I love just, whenever you ask people their eyes light up. And I asked her, what would it look like if you quadrupled your spending? And she said, I would have clothes everywhere.
Like all day long, I'd be ordering online, I'd be sending half of them back. And I said, where do you shop? And she said, top shop. And I said, okay, so you quadrupled your spending, where would you shop?
She said, top shop, I just have a lot more. And it was fascinating because when you ask people what they love spending on, what if they could spend more, what would they do? Most people have never thought about it. She had limited herself into the box of top shop.
Now, I don't know, top shops perfectly fine. That's fine. But I guarantee you, if you quadrupled 10x or spending on the thing you love your money dial, you might shop at a different brand. You might even fly to the factory that makes them and get a behind the scenes tour, as I did when we went on our honeymoon.
So why I'm sharing this is that so many of us operate in a linear way. Oh, if I have this thing, I like, I like coffee. I might get two coffees a day. But what if you actually truly love it?
You might go to the coffee factory and bring your family with you. So there's this whole idea of what you can do with a rich life. And it doesn't just mean more stuff. It could be experiences.
It could be security, like buying a house in a place that keeps you safe, staying in a hotel where you're around things that are comfortable for you. There's so many different ways to look at a rich life. And most people, I want to challenge them to really think what it would feel like to spend more on the thing they love. Of course, if they cut cost mercilessly on the things they don't.
Everybody should always ask themselves if they want to grow and they just don't want to just whatever is say, where can I be in five years? If I can't be at this position in five years, then this isn't a good career path for me. I think everything is career path. I'd love to talk about that.
So your career path is crazy and awe inspiring. So how much of that was mapped out? Like when you had that single restaurant in Texas, how big were you dreaming? We already think in aquariums.
Like how much of this is you're just going and you're taking a deal as it comes? How much of it is you discovered as you went? Let's do it another way. Let's go back to 10 years old.
I walk around with my business, my briefcase, full of business. There was no business in it, but I wanted to be a business guy. But you really didn't know what it was. By junior high, I was buying candy and reselling it at school.
By high school, I was already trading on the stock market. So let's take this one at a time. So the candy sale, who gave you that idea? Did you just understand if I can buy it for less than I sell it, then I can make money?
That's just doing whatever it took to make money. I always wanted to make money. I always had money. Even when I was a kid, because I always worked.
Whatever job I could find, whether it was mowing somebody's yard or washing cars or selling lemonade to the construction workers. It was just always about making money. What made you good at selling? That is a very particular skill.
Even today, it's all about somebody said, why are you so successful? Because I sell. And even when you go out and you raise billions of dollars in debt and you're meeting with debt holders, you're still selling yourself. That's what it's all about.
You're not just selling the deal. When I was public for 18 years and you're selling equity, I did five follow-on offerings. The most a restaurant company ever did when I was public. And you are selling yourself.
You know your numbers. You know your business. And you make yourself let you know more than everybody else, even if you don't. To dig beyond the mythology of just the kid carrying the briefcase and others comes naturally, at some point, this becomes somewhat systematic.
So if you're going to be a sponge, you have to put yourself in a position to be a sponge. If you know who to listen to, who to ignore, how did you begin to formulate that and what does that process look like now? Well, I knew how to make money. And so at 21, I sold bottoms.
I started building homes, building shopping centers. By the time I was 26, I built my first hotel. By the time I was 25, I told myself I had my first jet at 35 and I did. So I was an investor in a restaurant and then when the world collapsed in the late 80s, you couldn't develop anything in Texas for the next 10 years.
That's when every SNL fell, like I said, every bank failed. And I just started opening restaurants and did that between like 86 and 92 and then 93. I said, well, you know what, I'll just build a restaurant because I understand this business. But since you can't develop anymore and I'll take it public because that's when the whole big thing of restaurant chains going public did that for the next 17 years.
And then was an opportunist, which I always talk about is that my stock crashed with everybody else in 08, 09, when I took it public, I went to 100%, 93, you wake up, you were at $100 million. I took it private in 09 and you're worth $500 million. I was very successful, bought it right. And then I could really grow then because I didn't have the handcuffs of being a public company.
And when you think about the fundamentals of a business, when you're going into evaluate a deal or whatever, what like key things do you look for? Well, everything is occupancy cost, term of lease to the only real estate. What are their margins? I'm not real smart, but I know how to do that.
Okay, I can analyze the numbers of any business and tell you what your margin should be or whatever because my production cost is this. I have this many subscribers. You should be doing this or that. And I don't care what the business is.
So that's what I know how to do. And so if I try to make the right deal and I do heavy due diligence and then hopefully you can continue to grow your net worth. And if somebody wanted to get good at what you're good at, what would you recommend they do? You know, I think you know, if you know business or not, and people ask me, should I go get my MBA?
And you know what I usually tell them? You know if you need to go get your MBA. If you don't have it inside of you and you understand economics and finance and operations of business, then you need to go get it. I knew that I didn't need it.
It was just a God-given gift. But also remember, I didn't get a lot of those other gifts. Don't ask me to play that guitar. Don't ask me to sing you a song and don't ask me to draw you anything.
But you've got to know your God-given gifts. And everybody has it. Everybody in this room has it right here. So do what you know with your God-given gift and find a way to use that as your path.
So when you think about somebody stepping into a career and building something, obviously there's an element of, okay, you need to figure out what you're good at what you're not good at. Do you believe that people can improve the things that they're not good at? Should they just entirely not think about that and partner with people that have a different skill set? You've said, do not partner with somebody that has the same skill set.
You've read the book. You've read the book. Absolutely. But at the same time, I've made myself, you know, understand IT, information technology.
And if you talk to any CEO of any company, they'll tell you that's the one department that you do not want to, because no matter who you bring in, everybody has their own way of doing it. And I've just still made myself understand technology, even though I'm not a millennial. I try to at least know a little bit about every single department, even if I don't know it a lot. And so walk me through, you want to learn about IT, whether you're googling it or go sit down with the head of IT and say, teach me everything.
No, I want to know everything. I want to understand this, you know, malware, how people are getting into all of our systems and hackiness and what's your process for learning now? Sitting down and say, you got to make me smarter on this. You got to help me through these steps, because I don't get it.
Don't go into too much minutiae, because you'll lose me, because I'm not that smart, but you got to give me the steps of why this is happening or not happening. And that's something that everybody should do. You don't have to understand, you know, that I'm going to go and be able to program something or write something, but we should all, if we're running a company, understand some portion of it. When I'm shooting a billion dollar buyer, I know what all these different people do and exactly what they're doing and how important each person is.
And it's just trying to understand what you do, and it makes you appreciate that person and how smart they are at that job too, and how important they are to your company. Alright, let's say I'm one of your kids. I want to take over the business one day. How are you going to help me absorb the business fundamentals?
Does it just follow you around? Is it you're going to have me a list of tellinisms? What does that process like? This is a really great question that you just asked, because I've had people say to me, why don't you let your kids work for me for a while instead of just working for you?
And then other people say, you should put them in one department and let them learn that department. And you know what I've said, and I really think I'm doing it right, and we'll see, the only time we'll tell, there's so many departments. You're talking about a four billion dollar revenue company with 60,000 employees and 700 million in e-bitt that does everything from, you know, I have 25 biologists that work for me at Aquarium. So everything from aquariums to amusement parks to five casinos to restaurants to an NBA basketball team.
Just everything you can think of, I'm teaching them to make decisions, because that's really what it's all about, is learn how to make decisions, see how I make decisions every day about everything, whether it's a little decision or a big decision. And they've been doing that with me, and they're pretty smart. We don't know that we could run this so it's kind of interesting because it's them sitting in meetings and seeing how I make decisions, it's the best thing I can do for them. I think that over the last 50 years we've become obsessed with financial growth.
And it's a country or as a globe? I would say the West primarily, I would say the West and that has had a lot of power. It began in the US and this belief that all decisions, like I believe there's an implicit belief that the correct choice in any decision is whichever option makes the most money. And I've been in enough executive meetings, ex-kickstarters and other companies where routinely you face 50-50 decisions, where option A has a clear financial outcome and then there's some downsides that are hard to quantify, but like they're there.
And there's option B that has a lesser financial outcome and also less of those downsides. And nine times out of 10, they're going to choose option A, because it's justifiable. You can only defend option B in a crisis where you feel like you have to apologize. That's the only time you generally go for the one that's not maxing out for that.
And it sounds innocent enough, it sounds innocent enough. But when that happens repeatedly, you see a decay in other spaces. But I think our focus on financial value has been perfectly rational. There's a Kenzieh and economic argument, film-free argument for the rationality of financial value.
GDP does correlate to many positive things about society. There's a lot there for sure. It's not like we've been off the reals wrong. But it's gotten out of control.
And the fascinating opportunity that we have now is that the ability to define new values, to distribute goods, to make decisions has never been greater. Technology allows us to measure things in such more intricate ways. If you can imagine the past, someone says, let's make a decision other than money. It's like, OK, well, what are we looking at?
What are we counting here? It's hard to say. But in the book, I give an example of Adele, the pop star Adele. She goes on tour when her tickets go and say all the immediately get bought by scalpers and then people have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars more.
Adele found this startup that had built an algorithm that would measure how loyal a fan was to hers and artists, analyze their listening data, whatever, and allow her to invite the top 20 percentile Adele fans in each market, offer them a ticket for 50 bucks, they could resale the ticket if they want. And the show is still Adele made money. But the idea was that for maximizing for this loyal communal value set, that there would be a different kind of experience. One thing that I think is important to note about that story is that when you talk about this in the book, that artists can actually cooperate with Ticketmaster, maybe others, to actually get a portion of the scalp price.
So it's not like for Adele, it didn't matter. She actually could have benefited from that, which I found it made the argument even more compelling to me. Yeah. And so for Adele, Adele is just looking at this with a different value set, right?
She's still thinking of herself interests, like she's playing shows, she's like making money. But yet what she is optimizing for is not her own take, she's optimizing for a fan's experience. And again, it's not very basic, but like to do this in a way that's mathematical, that's replicable, that's scalable, to me suggests a different kind of transaction and a different kind of decision where it is building on top of that financial value. Like this wouldn't work for Adele, she was losing money every show, right?
Like it wouldn't work. She's satisfying a threshold. But the point is that she's only trying to satisfy that threshold, and the opportunity she sees a layer above that. Now what's interesting is that this is self-interested for Adele, right?
If she does this, she creates more loyalty. And that probably creates even longer term fans. And you could very easily argue, well, this works out better for Adele in the long run. And that's exactly it.
That's exactly it. If it worked out better for the long run for all of us too, right? The same kind of thinking and the same way of approaching our goals, of not just maximizing for now me, is that's the secret. That's the secret.
That's the secret to more meaningful success. That's the secret to being meaningful in culture. And so Adele's choice is, yes, it's easier for someone like her or Taylor Swift to give up some of the money, right? But we also all know that there are moments where you don't take the job of the higher salary because the commute's too long, basically requires too many other sacrifices, right?
We as individuals, I think, know how to navigate those kinds of situations. They're hard. They're hard. They're especially hard if we're in a place of desperation.
But collectively, it's like, we've given up, we aren't even trying to make decisions for anything other than financial outcomes, in part because we've lacked the language or the justification. And so I believe my book is a part of a, not, this is not the only person making this argument. But I think that this is the trend that's happening now. And I think again, in this idea of socialism, I think I have a practical way for us to get there.
Now brings us to bentoism, the bento box. But bang now, I'm dying. I need people to understand all that so that we can get into this. It's a really interesting concept.
Lay that out for people, and then know that I'm going to press you until I understand how I lose my bento box to get to decision making. Well, I, you know, I just, I'm a curious person I love to read. I love to understand. And I'm like, I'm very non-judgmental.
Like I really, I, there's a, I learned a phrase recently of metamodernism. After post-modernism is metamodernism, and metamodernism is to look at things without judgment and simply look for what's useful. And the idea is, this is, this is the current view, is that like you can hate Amazon while also reading like Bezos, the shareholder letter every year. It's like, really?
And you know what it's like, there's this, you're just simply looking for the utility of things. And this is like this emergent mindset. So I, again, I'm like, I'm not a bomb thrower. I'm a reformer.
I'm like, dude, I love that about your book. Honestly, I wasn't. I'm never sure when people have sort of this grand idea of where we're going to go, if it's just a reaction against what we have, or if it's like you said, finding the utility. And that comes across in every interview I've heard with you, certainly in the book.
It's very even handed, like you said, it's not like capitalism is some evil thing. It's just incomplete. And so, you know, where do we go? What do we take this working?
What do we discard that's not? I find that very useful. I started giving talks while I was CEO about this idea of like, there's this value system that's running away. I started talking about it when I saw my neighborhood in New York City, the Lower East Side flip from gentrification, and just like watching this insanity of every storefront around me turning into a bank and being like, what?
How does this make sense? And just started talking about this in a way that it was like, people could feel it. So I spent a couple years, or many years trying to understand this, reading a lot of philosophy, a lot of economics, like kind of going to the sources, like what is the argument for utilitarianism? Why is money the most utilitarian value?
What is the how have we defended other values? And my belief, my assumption was always that financial value is simply the first value we've learned to rationally express. That financial value is a proxy for goodness. That is mathematical, and that is tradable, and that is universal, and that process can be repeated for other values.
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