Grat

Jordan Belfort finally explained what “Sell me this pen” really tests, and most salespeople fail it in 1 sentence. The moment they hear the line, they start pitching. The pen is great, it writes upside down, it’s the best value for the money. To Belfort, that’s the clearest sign someone doesn’t understand selling. The right answer doesn’t mention the pen at all, at least not at first. A fan in the audience asks Belfort to sell the pen. He jokes that no one has ever asked him that before, then explains what the test is really for: before you pitch anything, you ask questions. How long have you been in the market for a pen? What have you used before? Is it for business or personal? How much do you usually spend? Pitching without asking, Belfort says, tells the buyer you don’t give a shit about them. You’re just ramming the product down their throat. The questions also tell Belfort who to walk away from. If someone says they’re not looking for a pen, he says “Great, have a nice day” and moves on. To him, the biggest rookie mistake is trying to sell to everybody. Only then does Belfort pitch: “Based on what you said to me, this pen is perfect. Let me tell you why.” And the pen, he says, is just a stand-in for any product. Rookies sell the pen. Pros sell what you just told them. Be honest: would you have pitched the pen, or asked the first question?

Jordan Belfort finally explained what really closes a sale, and most salespeople spend their whole career working on the wrong 10%. A buyer rarely remembers your exact words. What stays is a feeling about you: sure or nervous, sharp or sloppy, worth trusting or not. Belfort says that feeling comes from your tonality, and it carries 45% of everything you communicat.e On the phone, it carries even more, and the buyer starts picturing you before you’ve made a single point. Here’s Belfort’s full split: words are about 10% of human communication, tonality is 45%, body language is the other 45%. On a call, the buyer can’t see you, so your body language vanishes and everything collapses into your voice. People literally build a mental image of what you look like based on how you sound. Words still matter, Belfort says. They carry the logic, the part the buyer consciously weighs. And 1 of his rules for charisma is simple: don’t say stupid shit. But whether you come across as an expert, sharp, on the ball and enthusiastic is decided by your tonality. That’s what lets you take control of the conversation. By the time a buyer hears your price, they’ve already decided whether you sound like someone worth buying from, and no script can fix a voice that sounds unsure. What’s the last thing you bought just because the seller sounded certain?

In 1987, Howard Schultz was weeks away from losing Starbucks to one of his own investors. The man who saved the deal was Bill Gates' father, and Schultz says he literally changed his life. Schultz had no money. Starbucks founder Jerry Baldwin was selling the company, 6 stores at the time, for $3.8M, and gave Schultz 60 to 90 days to raise it. About a month in, Schultz had a third. Then Baldwin called with bad news: an all-cash offer with no due diligence, from one of Schultz's own investors, a titan of Seattle. Schultz had never met Bill Gates Sr. The next day, Gates Sr. fixed the whole thing with 1 walk across the street. The door opened through a basketball league. Schultz told the story to a teammate, Scott Greenberg, a young lawyer at Gates Sr.'s firm, who got him a meeting the next day. Back then, Microsoft was still a small startup. "No one knew Bill Gates, but everyone knew Bill Gates Senior." Gates Sr., about 6 foot 7, asked Schultz 2 questions. Was everything he'd said true? Had he left anything out? Then he stood up. "We're going to take a walk." They crossed the street, rode to the top floor and walked straight into the other man's office. Gates Sr. stood over his desk. "I'm going to walk out of this office and you are going to stand down. And Howard Schultz and Starbucks Coffee are going to never hear from you again." The man wilted: "I understand." Outside, Schultz asked what had just happened. "You're going to own Starbucks Coffee Company. And my son and I are going to help you." The son was building Microsoft. The father was saving Starbucks.

Sylvester Stallone sold his dog because he was broke. Not long after, he turned down $360,000 for a script nobody knew yet. He had $106 in the bank. His $40 car had just blown up, so he was taking the bus to work. The script was Rocky, a boxing story he wrote in a 3-day frenzy after watching a nobody named Chuck Wepner knock down Muhammad Ali. The producers loved it. They just didn’t want Stallone anywhere near the lead. He only got the script in front of them by accident. Producers Irwin Winkler and Bob Chartoff had called him in for a casting call, and he wasn’t right for the part. On his way out, he mentioned he did a little writing. “Well, bring it around.” They wanted a star in the lead: Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford or James Caan. So the offers came for the script alone. First $25,000, then $100,000, a number Stallone had never even heard of. By the end, the offer was around $360,000. He said no, and his reason was strange. “You’ve really managed poverty very well. You’ve got this down to a science.” The money scared him less than watching Rocky become a hit with someone else in the ring. “I may be totally wrong. And I’m going to be taking a lot of people down with me, but I just believe in it.” The producers gave in. Rocky was shot for about $950,000, often in 1 take, with Butkus, the same dog Stallone had tried to sell, in the cast. In 1977, it won Best Picture. Everyone wanted Rocky. Only Stallone wanted Stallone.

Anyone who bought every new iPhone since 2007 has spent about $22,000. Tony Robbins checked what the same money would be worth in Apple stock, and the answer is hard to look at. Robbins matched the retail price of every model to Apple's stock price on the day it came out. Put the same amount into shares each time, and today you'd have $326,000. One version of you has a drawer full of old phones. The other owns a piece of the company that made them. The world’s best investors don’t focus on making money. They focus on not losing it. Lose 50% of $100,000, and you need a 100% gain just to break even. That’s why they never bet everything in 1 place. Most people sink it all into their business or their house, and to these investors that’s “the kiss of death.” Your iPhone money is a perfect example: it went into the one thing that loses value fastest. The rule Robbins calls the most valuable is asymmetric risk and reward. Paul Tudor Jones wanted 5 to 1 on every bet: risk $1, make $5. While most people hope for a 12% or 20% year, a 5-to-1 trader can be wrong 4 times out of 5 and still finish ahead. Giant risks make a few people billionaires. “They don’t usually stay billionaires doing that.” $22,000 bought the phones. $326,000 would have bought a piece of the company. Smart lesson, or just hindsight math?

The Vanderbilts once controlled $1 of every $20 in circulation, and Anderson Cooper knew no pot of gold was waiting for him. At about 15, he overheard his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, on the phone with a friend: "Well, I'll always be able to make money." He froze on the stairs and thought: we are doomed. When 120 Vanderbilt descendants gathered in 1973, not 1 of them was a millionaire. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 with $100M, more money than the US Treasury. By 1885, his son William Henry had more than doubled it, to about $230M. That's close to $6.5B today. Then the next generation decided the Vanderbilts would take over New York society. The spending began. Cooper calls the money "a kind of a pathology." Every generation grew up thinking it would always be there, so no one needed to work. By the time Gloria was born in 1924, there was far less left, and no one taught her how to keep it. Cooper's father died when he was 10. By 13, he was the one telling his mother to open a bank account. "Saving money is making money." Around then, he got a job as a child model. He's glad nothing was handed to him. "That kind of money infects and changes who you are." Gloria Vanderbilt inherited a fortune. Her son got a job at 13. Should rich parents leave their kids everything, or nothing?

Warren Buffett is worth $150B, and his breakfast budget tops out at $3.17 every morning. He pulls his 2014 Cadillac XTS into a McDonald’s drive-thru and orders a Sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese. “That’s it. Thank you.” The money is already counted out in a little cup next to him. How much is in it depends on the stock market. Every morning while shaving, Buffett tells his wife 1 of 3 numbers: $2.61, $2.95 or $3.17. She puts that exact amount in the cup. Today it’s $2.95. “The market’s down this morning, so I think I’ll pass up the 3.17 and go with the 2.95.” The Cadillac came with hail damage. His daughter had to decide it was time to replace his old 2006 Cadillac, which had about 19,000 miles on it after 8 years. He drives about 3,500 miles a year. He drives it home to the same Omaha house he bought in 1958 for $31,500. Berkshire Hathaway pays him a salary of $100,000 a year. It has for decades. On a trip with Bill Gates, he once offered to pay for their McDonald’s lunch with coupons. Worth $150B. Still saves 22 cents when the market’s down. Genius habit or billionaire theater?

Simon Sinek explains how Apple, Amazon and Netflix took trillions from 3 industries, and none of it came from better technology. Publishers didn't build the Kindle. Hollywood didn't build streaming. Record labels didn't build iTunes. Outsiders did, and Sinek calls it embarrassing. The music industry is the worst case, because it lost to 1 word. People had moved from an album culture to a song culture, and the labels never noticed. They were still trying to get everyone to buy whole albums at Tower Records. Apple saw it differently. "No, no, no, songs. People want to buy songs." Then came Spotify and playlists built from single tracks. "Great album is not a thing," Sinek says. "Great song is a thing." That's the 1 thing. Apple, Amazon and Netflix paid attention to the culture first, then asked how technology could fit into it. The old industries were so hell-bent on protecting what got them there that they missed how the world had changed. Forget about the technology, Sinek says. They missed the people. Tower Records sold albums. Apple sold songs. Which industry is still selling albums right now?

Patrick Bet-David breaks down who really holds the most power in the world. You might expect presidents, world leaders, or even billionaires at the top of the list. But some of his picks might surprise you, and his reasoning reveals a different way to look at power. Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. The people behind Google. Jeff Bezos. Then come the financial and media power players, including Larry Fink, Alex Soros, and Rupert Murdoch. Different industries. Different roles. But one thing connects them: influence that extends far beyond a single company or position. Presidents have political power. But the people who control major platforms, capital, and media can influence what millions of people see, what they pay attention to, and how they understand the world. Bet-David even brings up Ted Turner, arguing that if Turner had continued running CNN, he could have become one of the most powerful men in America. The bigger question isn't just who holds the highest office. It's who has the power to shape what everyone else sees. So who do you think is the most powerful person in the world today?

IBM needed an operating system for its first PC, and the company that already had one wouldn't sign 1 non-disclosure agreement. So the job went to Bill Gates. Microsoft didn't have an operating system. It didn't even write the first one itself. Gates tells the story himself. IBM came to Microsoft because Microsoft had written the software for nearly every personal computer. Gates told them to put a disk in. IBM wanted to ship fast. Digital Research already had an operating system for 8-bit machines and was starting a version for the new 16-bit ones. But Digital Research hadn't finished the work. And it wouldn't sign IBM's non-disclosure agreement. IBM was getting frustrated. Inside Microsoft, Paul Allen and Kazuhiko Nishi, a colleague from Japan, pushed back: "No, no, no, we should just do that ourselves." There was no time to build it from scratch. Microsoft licensed code from another company and turned it into MS-DOS. Then MS-DOS went head to head with Digital Research's CP/M. Within 2 or 3 years, MS-DOS was "far, far more popular." Microsoft later added graphics on top of MS-DOS. Windows still carries all of it inside. Digital Research had the head start. Microsoft said yes.

IBM paid Bill Gates a flat fee for the software that ran its first PC, and walked away thinking it had won. No royalties. No cut of every machine sold. Just a fixed payment. But the money was never in the fee. It was in 1 restriction Gates and Steve Ballmer wrote into the contract. IBM couldn’t sell the software to other hardware makers. That didn’t sound like much at the time. Then IBM PC-compatible machines started showing up, and every one of those companies had to come to Microsoft directly. Gates explained it in 2010. The deal was very complicated, and he and Ballmer had thought about it a lot. On the other side of the table, IBM sent a fairly junior team. Microsoft believed personal computers were going to be hyper popular. So they built the deal to make sure Microsoft would get a lot of that upside. IBM thought it got a very good deal, Gates says. And it did. But the industry kept growing, and every new PC maker was another deal for Microsoft. IBM won the contract. Microsoft won the industry.

50 Cent saw 2 gallons of water in the same supermarket aisle, 1 for $2.89 and 1 for 59 cents, and it ended in a $4.1B sale. In the video below, he tells the story himself. A gallon of water costs $2.89. Further down the aisle, another gallon of spring water costs 59 cents. Pour them into 2 cups, he says, and he couldn’t tell you which spring either one came from. Poland Spring had just trained people to pay more for the name. He goes back and tells his manager, Chris Lighty. “I want to sell water.” “What?” “I want to sell water.” “To who?” “Everybody. Everybody need water.” It might have been easier, he says, if he’d told him he wanted to sell liquor. The bottle finds him later, at a gym on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He’s working out, sees a vitaminwater, and keeps the bottle. He doesn’t buy the company. He ends up with almost 10% of it. Then Coca-Cola buys vitaminwater for $4.1B. The interviewer guesses he made $100M. He won’t give a number. “But I could show you all my teeth.”

The man who drew Superman was almost blind and living near poverty in 1975, nearly 40 years after selling him for $135. His name was Joe Shuster. He lived in New York and couldn't make a living, even though his creation had made millions for other people. His partner, Jerry Siegel, was 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. He was supporting a wife and daughter on $7,000 a year as a mail clerk. It started in the middle of the Depression. The 2 of them, just out of high school, took a New York comic book publisher their idea: a red-caped hero from the planet Krypton. Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. The price was $135, and all rights went to the publisher. For 9 years they made a living writing and drawing him. Meanwhile, Superman became a star on radio, TV, movies and product endorsements. In 1947 they sued for royalties and to get their names back on the comics. They lost the case. Then they lost their jobs. "Our American dream then became an American tragedy." They never stopped fighting. After nationwide publicity, Warner Communications, Superman's new owner, gave in to public pressure. Both men were 61 when the deal was signed. Each got a $20,000-a-year pension, full medical care, provisions for their relatives, and their byline back. Superman cost $135. Getting their names back on him cost 28 years.

Al Gore told George W. Bush in 2000 that he was backing the drug companies’ bill, and pointed to his own 24 years of fighting them. “Alright, here we go again,” Gore started, and went straight at Bush. If you want someone who uses a lot of words on a convoluted process and ends up backing a bill the big drug companies support, Gore said, “this is your man.” For 24 years, he said, he had never been afraid to take on the big drug companies. He gave them credit first. They discover great new cures, and he wanted that to continue. Then came the charge. They were spending more on advertising and promotion than on research and development, and they were trying to extend their patent monopolies to keep prices high. His plan was a Medicare drug benefit for all seniors: You pick your own doctor. Your doctor picks the prescription, and nobody overrules it. You go to your own pharmacy, and Medicare pays half. If you’re poor, Medicare pays all of it. Medicare pays everything over $4,000 out of pocket. He also wanted faster approval of competing generics to bring prices down for everyone. Bush’s plan leaned more on private insurance and targeted help for low-income seniors. Bush won. In 2003 he signed Medicare Part D, a drug benefit run through private plans. The law also barred Medicare from negotiating drug prices directly. Supporters said competition between the plans would keep prices down. Critics said Medicare’s buying power was being left on the table. That ban held until 2022, when Congress gave Medicare the power to negotiate prices on some drugs. Both men promised lower prices. Medicare waited 22 years for the power to bargain.

25% up doubles the money and 25% down wipes it out, and that's the private equity model Stephen Schwarzman described in 2005. Charlie Rose asked the Blackstone CEO what private equity actually is. "Well, what we do is pretty simple." Raise large amounts of money, mostly from pension funds and endowments. Buy companies with it. Borrow about $3 for every $1 of equity in the deal. Control the company, improve it and own it for a while. Then sell it, "and hopefully make a lot of money for our investors." The $3 is where the 25% comes in. Put in $1 and borrow $3, and you control a $4 company. Grow its value 25% to $5. The debt is still $3, so your $1 is now $2. Now run it backwards. A 25% drop takes the company to $3. The debt is still $3, and your $1 is gone. Same company. Same 25%. 1 side doubles, the other goes to 0. That's why he said "hopefully"