Jeff Hoffman On Saying Yes to Everything & Traveling the World | Digital Social Hour #146

So, what does retirement look like?

Well, I mean, I said yes, but I'm not sure.

Yeah, what is the meaning of

the two times I tried that?

It lasted about two months.

Two days.

No, two days?

Unlike day two, I was bored.

I wanted to have dinner with 50 families in their homes in 50 cultures, 50 countries.

I was like, if I can do that, I might turn out to be a halfway decent person.

When you have a lot of big dreams, I was the commencement speaker at a college graduation.

Sorry, this was at a high school.

And the principal came up, pulled me aside, and said, Stop telling these kids to pursue their dreams.

It's irresponsible.

They just need to get a job.

And I was like, whoa, you're their principal?

The principal.

All All right, welcome back to the digital social hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

You're my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, what up?

And we got an amazing guest for you guys today, Jeff Hoffman.

How's it going?

Thanks for having me today.

How you doing?

No problem, man.

So for those who don't know, could you give a quick intro on your story?

Yeah, a long time

tech entrepreneur.

I'm actually a software engineer by trade, but I sucked at it, which I didn't know until I hired real software engineers.

I had a brief engineering job in corporate America.

Lasted a couple of years.

I hated it.

I couldn't spend my life dying in a a cubicle, so I quit.

And I've been doing startups ever since.

Been part of eight of them since then.

Which ones stand out to you out of those?

Well, our biggest success, well,

there's probably four things that

which include, out of those eight, two failed miserably.

Horribly stupid ideas that I just plain failed at.

But our successful ones, my first startup ever was, I was 20-something years old, broke, unemployed, quit that engineering job.

Didn't have a dime in the bank, missed a flight waiting in the airport to check in.

So, you know, when you go to the airport today and you check yourself in at a kiosk,

that was my first invention.

And they're in airports all over the world now.

So

created those

when I was 20-something and,

like I said, broke and unemployed.

And we managed to,

it worked.

It worked.

Obviously.

Airports all over the world.

It worked.

But then I was able to.

The story of being 20-something and unemployed is no longer valid.

We later sold the company company four years and actually sold it twice.

Sold the software company, then I sold all the technology and patents.

How much did you sell it for?

Well, we started it with literally nothing.

I just, with a pencil and a paper saying there's got to be a better way to check in and drawing a kiosk.

And four years later, we sold it for over $100 million.

Nice.

It ain't internet money, but when you're 20-something years old,

back then, that's a lot.

Yeah, no, that was.

So how did you have to check in before those?

You just had to stand in line, show them your ID, right?

And then they would just hit print, and I stood in line for over an hour.

Whoa.

And a Friday afternoon, and I missed a flight.

And when you're broke and unemployed.

Those self-check-ins are new, right?

We're talking about four years.

No, no, no.

These were a long time ago.

Those are all those.

Yeah, they were a lot longer.

Yeah, we did that before we did Priceline, even the big ones.

When did airports started integrating those?

Like a long time ago?

Yeah.

Yeah, because I've never had a check-in in line, so at least 20 years.

Yeah, it's been a long time.

That was my first startup.

But yeah, we sold that company for over $100 million.

That was my first startup, which is interesting because today, when they tell entrepreneurs, you got to fail first, like it's a requirement, I can't stand that.

You don't believe in that.

No, when people tell me, I was on stage

in a big audience, and they were talking about, this is a story I told, because I was out in Silicon Valley and they were talking about how important it is that you got to go out there and fail, right?

And so I told this story, the famous story of the Brazilian soccer team.

It's in the locker room before the World Cup final, right?

So they're about to play for the World Cup final and the captain of the Brazilian team says to his team, honestly, guys, I hope we lose tonight because it will make us better people.

And everyone in the audience said, really?

I said, hell no.

Said, no one ever.

No one ever went into the locker room before the game and said, let's go out there and hope we fail because it'll make us better people.

You play to win every day.

Absolutely.

You accept failure.

But I don't like this culture now where they have failure parties to celebrate it.

It's okay to laugh about it and to get over it, but don't celebrate it.

It almost makes it sound seriously.

I hear people tell tell these young entrepreneurs, you got to go through some failures.

So I'm glad I didn't hear that advice.

Well, I understand

the concept, but

I don't understand the literal sense.

I understand them saying, like, you know, because most businesses, as you and I both know, all of us in this room, they fail within the first,

you know, six months to five years.

Yeah, they don't make it a year.

Right.

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Dust yourself off.

But I also agree with how you think about it too, because it's kind of like, why are you promoting failure?

Yeah, right.

What if like takes off?

Yeah, here's the thing.

Because, you know, I'm a firm believer in mindset and intent, right?

Absolutely.

And so if you're already making failure acceptable, you're already paving a path to fail.

It's already like you got the mindset.

Well, everyone expects me to fail.

It's okay to fail.

That's bad to have that in your mindset, right?

Accepting failure, the fact that it hurts, it sucks, everybody laughs at you, you got to shake it off.

That's all fine.

But don't start at the beginning thinking, I already know it's okay if I fail.

Because I think that affects, you know, that literally affects that mindset.

It affects that law of attraction.

For sure.

It affects the mindset, but then it also affects the tenacity towards the goal.

Right.

I think you'll give up easier if you think it's okay to fail.

There you go.

for sure.

I don't, you know, I never, ever played that way.

We failed.

We failed miserably for two of them.

So that company was

out of the eight,

you failed.

Two of them failed.

That's still a pretty good ratio.

That's six out of eight that were fired there.

I think in hindsight now, we kind of figured out what we did right, right?

Which is my commitment now.

I spend my time trying to, I made a commitment.

to share everything I learned, but by the way, it wasn't smart enough to know this stuff then.

It's looking back and saying what works.

So after that, the other ones, you just asked what were the notable ones,

did a deal with Bill Gates and Microsoft back then, and we built Expedia, my team and his team.

Travel.

Yeah, that was Expedia still out there, but we built that with Bill Gates.

And then after that, is when I was part of, we launched Priceline.com.

Which is Travel.

Right, which is, and also Booking.com.

That's the same company.

Okay.

And those,

and I know the numbers are silly today, but the company today, it was a scratch startup, a small startup with a small group of people, you know, in a small office in Connecticut before there was any funding.

And today,

it's a $100 billion company doing business in 190 different countries.

And you're not a part of any of them anymore.

No, I'm retired from it all.

Sold them all.

So after Expedia and then Priceline slash booking, I did another one later called ubid.com.

UBID.

And UBID was the fifth largest auction site on the internet.

UBID.

Yeah, U-Bid.

You make a bid on stuff.

I think I might have seen it, never played it.

It was big.

That one became a multi-billion dollar.

I've seen it before.

I never played it before.

We also did an IPO.

We took that one public as well.

Wow, nice.

That was the last.

In between, I did some stuff in media.

Launched a music company, a film and a television company.

I took a break from tech.

Pardon?

What was the music company?

The music company, we did tours.

And our entertainment company, not that you'd heard of it, because everything, nothing was branded in our name.

It was branded with what we were doing, the tour or the concert.

But

when we did that, we did tours and concerts.

This is the pop time.

This was post-internet, right after Priceline when I took a break.

We did stuff with NSYNC, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Elton John.

Wow.

A little bit of Beyoncé.

So I took some time off and I went on tour.

I got out of the tech business and I was on the tour bus and I had a blast, especially traveling with NSYNC at the time.

So you're retired currently, right?

Yes.

So what does retirement look like for a person with this many

creations and accolades?

Like, how do you retire?

Well, I mean, I said yes, but I

mean,

yeah.

What is the meaning of that?

How do you retire?

I made this commitment.

How do you just stop working?

The two times I tried that, it lasted about two months.

Two days.

No, two days?

Unlike day two, I was bored.

For real?

And I was like, well, this ain't going to work either.

Yeah.

I got to do something.

But the driving thing was, I was

blessed beyond my wildest dreams by the decision to be an entrepreneur, right?

The experiences we had, the money we made, which was never a driver for me, but it was the freedom was, and the money is what bought freedom, right?

The ability to do what you want.

But I did make a commitment.

And I said, for all the blessings I've received from being a successful entrepreneur, I need to repay that debt.

And I will repay that debt of entrepreneurship by committing the second half of my life, the rest of my life, to teaching other people how to go achieve whatever their dream is.

My original dream, by the way, when I grew up in the Arizona desert, right?

And with a single mom who, you know, four kids, three jobs, we never had anything.

And all I wanted to do was go see the world.

In fact, I'll just share with you guys.

We were like seventh grade or something.

We had to do a book report.

And the book I picked was Mark Twain.

When I opened up the Mark Twain book in like seventh grade, I'm in this little desert town where no one ever leaves.

And I'm not judging anybody.

It's not my place.

But I would talk to the people I grew up with and all of them still live in the same five square mile area.

And that's okay for them.

But no one ever left and no one ever wanted to.

And I had big goals and dreams.

And everyone's like, no, we good.

And that wasn't working for me.

But my big dream was in this Mark Twain book.

Inside the cover of the book was a quote.

And it was a quote that drove a lot of my life.

Mark Twain said that travel is the fatal enemy of prejudice.

And I remember being like rocked by that.

And I went home and I went to my mom and I said, I just read something that I know is for me.

I just don't know what it means.

And my mom explained it.

My mom's like, it means that, here's what my mom told me, that ignorance, excuse me, hate comes from ignorance.

Ignorance comes from lack of understanding.

And lack of understanding comes from never spending time with people that don't look like you.

And I said, I get it.

And I said, now I know what I want to do.

And my mom said, what?

And I said, for my life to be a success, I need to one day look back at the end of my life.

And if I have traveled to 50 different countries,

then I will finally become the man I want to be, right?

Become a person.

If I go to 50 different countries and get to know people, then maybe I'll be the person I want to be one day.

So that was the goal.

But when I would tell everybody that, all my friends would say, dude, you're broke and your mom's broker, right?

You just need to go get a job and forget the dream.

There's no job that's going to pay you to fly around the world, right?

And you don't have the money to.

So, well, at the time,

I remember thinking when everyone's like, there's no job that's going to pay you to fly around the world.

What I was thinking is, okay, that's fine, but can't I just make that job?

That's the whole point of being an entrepreneur.

It's while everyone else is waiting to see what the future might be.

Why don't you just design it?

I remember thinking, why don't I just create the future I want?

So I guess, you know, you should be less surprised now that my companies were travel companies because I wanted to go see the world, but I didn't need to pay my bills.

So, you want to get paid for it.

So, literally, when the kiosk company, I would get a call.

The first one I ever got was KLM Royal Dutch Airline.

I didn't even know what country that was.

Right?

And they're like, anyway, you could come to our country to show us these kiosks to put in our airport.

Wow.

And then it was on.

And so the real part of my goal, which I never told anybody because they were already laughing at me, was I had this super secret plan.

I wanted to have dinner with 50 families in their homes in 50 cultures, 50 countries.

I was like, if I can do that across my entire life, I might turn out to be a halfway decent person.

Nice.

If I have literally broken bread with you in your house and your family, in your country, in your culture.

What number are you on?

102.

So 102 countries that

you sat down with 102.

Across Africa, across all the Muslim countries, everywhere I could go.

I've gone and talked my way into a family to spend the day with their family so I can understand them better.

Interesting.

So did you document any of it?

Yes, but not well.

Everybody keeps telling me, one time I have a book of that.

I would have been at Netflix.

I have

videos, I have photos, but it's not organized, to be honest.

Because I wasn't doing it for that reason, but then I realized all these people were like, you know, I heard you guys earlier say something about Pakistan.

Yeah.

When I went there.

Well, you got to do it over.

So

you got to document it.

To go back.

You got to do it over and document it.

That was a great example because when I went to Pakistan, I went when some magazine

ran this cover cover that said Iraq or Afghanistan, whatever it was, is no longer the world's most dangerous country, Pakistan is.

That's what they had announced then because of terrorism.

So when I went there, everybody, friends around the world were all texting me.

I was in a family's home and having dinner, and everyone's texting me, well, what's it like?

What's it like?

And the point is the expectation.

right for some reason was so negative because of the media so i you get a kick out of this i texted back they said how's it going and i texted back i said i don't know Everybody's just sitting around the table nervously with one hand on their gun.

And my friends are like, Really?

And I said, No, I'm on the floor with their kids, with a family that's just like yours, having a wonderful evening.

Wow.

So that's when people have started saying, Why don't you share some of these experiences?

And I have the raw content, I just haven't done anything with it.

Nice.

Yeah, you got to get with a producer and make that happen.

Yeah, that is a good idea.

Well, so that led me to

deciding that I was able to achieve that dream, right?

Because that's something I wanted to do.

I love music, right?

And when I started the music company for a chance to be around creative people, like you guys, right?

I like being around creators.

And so I started the music company to give myself a chance to be around that and learn from creative people because I was very much in a left brain business, tech, right?

And I was like, I want to get a little more of the right brain exercise and be around creators and musicians.

And I'll skip all the details, but that ended

with me on the red carpet at the Grammys and we won a Grammy.

We produced a jazz album.

Wow.

And so there I am standing at the Grammys.

We were nominees and then we actually won jazz album of the year at the Grammys.

And all that made me say,

whatever we did to get to the places we wanted to be, I need to share that with as many people as I can.

What did we do right?

Because we must have done something right.

Despite making every mistake you can make three times, we got something right.

Multiple of these companies became multi-billion dollar companies and And our music company won a Grammy.

We have a TV company.

Last year we won our second Emmy.

So I was like, whatever I have figured out, my commitment was to find a way to share it.

So today, I said retired, but not really.

Today we have a, I'm the chairman of a nonprofit.

Our non-profit's called the Global Entrepreneurship Network.

We made a commitment to teach anybody anywhere how to launch and grow their business.

But it's not about money.

It's not about business.

It's about self-determination.

You live in an...

This is a real story.

A kid in an West African village sent me an email one day.

Really?

I have a TED talk that's out there called The Power of Childlike Wonder, right?

You should never stop behaving like a kid.

And somebody on the TED talk.

In what aspect?

Curiosity.

Wonder about everything.

Be amazed by the world.

Celebrate it.

Go over and literally go explore something if it catches your attention.

You have to allow your creativity to roam instead of saying, I have a job, I'm an adult now, and I got a mortgage and I got to stay free.

Yeah, the Bible says, remain child.

Like, I just wanted to know what your definition is.

Yeah,

I think it's with that respect,

that awe of the world, that wonder, that curiosity.

Kids don't lose that.

Adults seem to think they're not supposed to do that.

People tell me all the time, Jeff, when are you going to grow up?

And my answer is, hopefully, never affect your definition.

Yeah, like I'm rich.

You should have grown up.

I do hear that a lot, man.

When are you going to grow up?

But anyway, I can't.

Well, what do they mean when they say that?

Like,

what concept are they using?

Like, what, and what aspects?

I wish I knew.

I'll tell you what I think.

You don't appear to child.

Like, I don't understand it.

It's, it's, uh, when you have a lot of big dreams, right?

And even crazy dreams, like having dinner with 50 families in 50 countries, people always tell me it's irresponsible.

Man, don't tell people that stuff.

Tell them, I was the commencement speaker at a college graduation.

Sorry, this was at a high school.

And the principal came up, pulled me aside, and said, stop telling these kids to pursue their dreams.

It's irresponsible.

They just need to get a job.

And I was like, whoa, you're their principal?

The principal.

I want to smoke.

So that's what I'm talking about.

They're saying it's irresponsible, right?

They got to grow up and be adults and they got to go get jobs.

No one's arguing that.

The point is, you don't have to get a job you hate and do it your whole life.

You could possibly create the company you wish you worked for and create the job you wish you had and make money doing the things that you love doing.

And that's what I hate.

I always tell people this, man,

your business, your job, your career, that should be the vehicle that takes you to the life you want to live, not the obstacle that's preventing you from living it.

Because people accept that, right?

I said someday I'm going to see the world and they're like, you need to go get a job and stop dreaming.

I said, well, maybe I'll create a job where my job is to go to a different country to install kiosan airports, whatever it is.

And so people accept that your job and your dreams are mutually exclusive.

And I hate that people are willing to accept that.

Yeah, I think when they say when

are you going to grow up, I think it's more so them basically saying, when are you going to be like me?

Boring.

I think

they're projecting.

Yeah, yeah.

It is.

I tell people that about haters.

Yeah.

Right.

When you have haters, they don't take it personal because they don't hate you.

It's themselves.

They hate themselves.

Right.

They want you to fail because then it makes them feel better for not trying.

100%.

They don't really want you to fail.

They don't even care about you.

They care about them.

But if you fail, they can sit back and say, see, that's why you shouldn't try, because it never works out anyway.

I have to tell people, way more people want to see you fail than want to see you succeed, which is sad, but it's true.

You just can't let that stop you.

You know, really does have to come from within.

I was telling these people the story from the music biz

that you're always going to have haters.

And you just have to look past them.

But I was telling them the story that when I was telling people I was going to start a music company, Everybody tells you Jeff you're a software engineer You're a big dreamer.

You always have another stupid idea.

It's not gonna work.

Why are you wasting your time?

All that crap that I heard all the negativity and

Then we were doing a tour at the time we were doing a tour with Beyoncé my phone's ringing off the hook because everybody wants tickets and they all want I'm talking telling this at the University of Florida that's a student's in the auditorium there and said all those people call again and they're like hey can we get tickets to the show and you're on the phone and you're like wait a minute Let me be clear.

You want tickets to the concert that will never happen, created by the company that's never going to work, started by the stupid dreamer who doesn't know what he's doing?

You want those tickets?

But

that's what they told me.

And they're like, wait, we never said that.

And I was like, yeah, whatever.

And the college kids yelled out to me, they said, I hope you didn't give them tickets.

And I said, I have this wall at home where I write down things I believe.

And on my wall, it says, upgrade your haters to VIP.

So the kids are like, I hope you didn't give them tickets.

And I said, no, not only give them tickets, but I upgraded all of them to VIP.

Wow.

Because they have to go backstage, call their friends, say, we're backstage at Beyoncé.

And their friends are like, wait, how'd you get backstage?

And they have to say, Jeff gave it to us.

Wait, isn't that the Jeff you said was the big, stupid dreamer who's never going to succeed?

Let him have that.

So you basically give them the gun so they can shoot them.

Yeah, you shoot themselves in the foot.

You never lower yourself to their level.

You don't say, no, you can't have tickets.

You say, you know what, here, VIP on me.

And that's what I was trying to teach those kids.

You live your life.

It's hard for me to do.

You take the high road.

It's hard for everybody to live.

I don't like doubters.

I don't like doubters.

Yeah, but the best revenge is success.

No, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

But I don't want to invite them to my success.

Oh, I didn't invite them.

They all called me.

To be clear, I didn't invite them.

But you accommodated them.

I did accommodate them because you always have to take the high road.

Not the high road.

You won.

They'll figure that out when they're standing in your backstage.

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

Wow.

So the commitment was to teach everything we knew.

So when we started Global Entrepreneurship Network, our goal was to teach people.

It's my personal commitment for the rest of my life to help as many people as I can get wherever it is they want to go.

What is their dream?

I actually have a term for it.

When I was in L.A., when we won the Grammy,

afterwards, I was walked off the red carpet and I was standing there and I looked down.

I know this is going to sound silly, but I was like, I don't think my feet are actually touching the ground.

I'm like on some kind of natural hot.

Right?

Because how did this little kid from the desert, the poor kid from the desert of Arizona, now I'm all dressed up and I'm at the Grammys and we just won one.

So I was, what I felt at that moment was the same thing as when we were traveling the world selling the company, doing the priceline IPO on the, you know, on the stock market, whatever.

There are moments you look down at your life and that was one.

And I, standing on the red carpet at the Grammys, I thought, I can't believe this is my life.

And then I had a thought.

Every human being deserves their own red carpet moment.

My definition of a red carpet moment has nothing to do with awards or money or red carpets.

It's for you to have a moment where you look around and you say, I cannot believe that this is my life.

So that helped me visualize my goal.

My goal is to help as many people as I can get to the red carpet moment.

I want you to look around and nod and say, wow, I can't believe this is really my life.

Because you got somewhere that you, even if you didn't, I never dreamed of a Grammy, but you got to the place you always dreamed of getting.

So entrepreneurship isn't a job, it's a skill set and a mindset.

So we created Global Entrepreneurship Network to share the mindset and the skill set of entrepreneurship, of self-determination, so more people could get where they were going.

So that's why I was telling you that story of the kid in West Africa that wrote me on the TED site.

And he said, dear Mr.

Hoffman, things are tough in the villages, but I got ideas.

And he said, there's 20 families that live in huts made out of mud in our village in west africa and i want them all to have a home to live in food and income and he said i have an idea i just don't know where to start and so i at the time i didn't tell people this this was after my last company after we took ubid public when i re when i quote retired yeah i'd been a ceo since i was 24.

so i left that and i said now i'm gonna

start this give back of teaching people everything I learned

because I already my cup is already overflowing.

I'm good.

And so this, I, I, what I didn't tell people was I decided to do a year of yes.

I said, for one year, I am going to say yes to anybody that asked me for help anywhere in the world for a year.

I just didn't tell anybody that.

I won't go to work.

I won't go to the office.

I won't make a dime.

I won't do deals.

I'm just going to help people for a year.

So what if they asked you for money?

You would have said yes.

People did.

But that wasn't, the focus wasn't money.

It was people asking me for help.

Yeah, I gave away a lot of money.

It's like that movie.

Wow.

I did give away a lot of money.

But more people asked for help than money.

But that kid in that village, he was the second person.

He wrote me an email off through the TED website.

And it said, dear Mr.

Hoffman, I know you won't read this.

And if you do, I know you won't respond.

Wow.

And I was like, oh, it's on now.

I was like, who's to, you know, you don't know me like that.

And so I flew to the village.

It was in Senegal.

And I went and met with this kid.

And he was like, it took a while for him to believe I was really there.

And he said something interesting he said actually I don't want you to help me I said dude I just flew 30 freaking hours right don't tell me that and he said no I don't want you to help me he said I want you to teach me how to help myself right right out of the Bible so that I never need to call you again I was like that's what I'm here for right teach people how to help themselves so they can achieve he said I want to take care of the 20 families in my village so I'll skip the details, but about seven years later, by the way, I did my year of yes, stretched about about almost six years.

Wow.

I did another year and another year because it was the best thing I've ever done in my life, way more than running businesses.

He has 350 employees in seven West African nations, and he builds them houses with electricity and running water, and they pay for it through payroll deduction.

That's the ripple effect.

So why would you want to teach somebody the skill set of entrepreneurship?

Because that person will go out and change 350 families' lives.

And so we are now, our nonprofit Jen, is now in, we are now proud to say, proud of our team.

We're in 200 countries.

We're on the ground in 200 countries, which is why I'm usually not in this country, teaching people, like I just came back from the little kingdom of Bahrain.

Where's that?

It's off the, it's in the Middle East, near Saudi and Egypt.

But

I,

we...

We teach people how to start businesses.

The lesson when I got to that village in Africa, I had just given a huge speech in Silicon Valley on stage and at Stanford.

And then I go to this village in Africa and I'm listening to this kid and I was like, this kid's a freaking genius.

And so the realization, but seeing it firsthand really changes it, that intelligence is equally spread across the human race.

Opportunity is not.

Resources aren't.

That kid was as smart as anybody I met in Silicon Valley.

The difference is they're at Stanford and he's in a dirt village.

He's just as smart as them.

But they have resources and they have opportunity and he doesn't.

So we built this organization to help people in all those spots in the world that they're just as smart, but they don't have any way to start.

I love that.

And we do that all over the world.

And so my joy now is I travel to these countries and teach entrepreneurship all over the world, teach people how to take their idea, turn it into a business, and people that already have a business, we teach them how to scale and get it to the next level.

That's powerful.

That's so cool.

So that's what I do now.

Never retired.

That's a lot of work.

I have one other thing.

I have my own youth charity called World Youth.

But that's a little different folks.

I like the way yours is more international-based.

It's the world.

It's global.

It's like

America's cool, but you're like, bro, the world is so much bigger than America.

It is.

And we do plenty of stuff here, right, in the inner cities in the U.S.,

but we treat the whole world equally.

We have a really simple rule.

There's no race, there's no ethnicity, there's no genders, there's no boundaries, borders, politics.

We just want every human being to get a chance to be judged on their merits.

What do you bring to the world?

What's your value as a person?

So we work really hard to treat everybody that way and give everybody a chance.

That's why we're in 200 countries because we just refuse to recognize any of those things.

They're real and you have to deal with them.

But we want to give everybody the same chance, regardless of what race or ethnicity or religion.

We just can't see that.

We need to see the value of you as a human and what you can contribute.

We need to give you a chance to contribute that.

That's powerful.

So

At our youth charity, that's a much simpler.

And I just started my own because every time I'd write a check to charity, where did the money go?

Yeah.

And I could never get a clear answer.

I buy Escalade in the Mansion and

Calabash is what it.

That's that?

So you probably.

Another car.

I just started my own so that

all the people that are on my staff that work for me at World Youth are 100% volunteer.

I pay all the expenses personally, so 100% of every donated dollar goes directly to children.

Wow.

I mean, we tell people, you want to video call the children, you want to go visit them?

I've had people go.

So we build, I'll give you an example, we just

are starting to break, getting ready to break ground on another youth home in Uganda.

We don't use the word orphanage, it just has an ugly connotation.

But

Uganda had a civil war.

and all the parents killed each other.

So all the children were just left abandoned in the jungle.

So we round them up and raise them.

So step one is they don't have a place to live.

We build homes for them.

And then we make sure they have food every day and medical care.

And then the most important step is we pay to put them all in school.

Their only chance out and up is through education.

And like in Ethiopia, when we did that, there was no school.

So we actually had to build the school.

But we work with kids in Chicago and Detroit and South Central.

We do this all over.

So my youth charity works with kids that need a better life and don't have a shot at a better life if someone doesn't help them.

Our goal is to just try to give them a better start.

Gotcha.

And it's the focus really is education.

Thanks.

Jeff, that was so inspiring, man, for real.

It was such a good episode.

Do you have any closing comments and where can people find out more about you?

JeffHoffman.com.

My email is easy enough, jeff at jeffhoffman.com.

People find me anyway or

speaker Jeff Hoffman on Instagram.

But we'd love to hear from people.

People want to volunteer.

Whether it's for the Entrepreneurship Network or the youth charity is world youthhorizons.com.

Time, treasure, talent.

You don't have to have money to make a difference.

You can donate your time.

You can mentor people.

All of it counts in changing somebody's life.

I just want to say that at the end because sometimes people say, well, someday when I get rich, I'll give back to you.

That's an excuse.

You don't need to have money to make a difference in someone's life.

In fact, most of the children we work with need a positive role model.

They need mentorship.

They need your time and your love as much as they need somebody else's money.

So if people want to volunteer time or make a donation, worldyouthhorizons.com.

Thank you guys so much for having me today.

Oh, for sure.

I'll put that link in the bio.

Wayne, you got anything?

Thank you guys for watching Digital Social Hour.

Thank you, Jeff, for coming by today.

See you guys next time.

Peace.

Peace.