Hard Work Won't Make You Rich! - Brutally Honest Advice To My Younger Poorer Self | Tai Lopez

Everybody doesn't win. And the sooner you wake up to that, that biology is ruthless, man, then you get a little fear in you. And when you get a little fear in you, you start listening. Cuz if you're truly afraid, you listen. Let a little fear come in and drive you and motivate you. Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. You were here, my friends, because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it. So, our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right. Today's guest has founded, invested in, advised, or mentored more than 20 multi-million-dollar companies, but that's about as far from where he started as you're going to get. In the beginning, he was just another college dropout living on his mother's couch, but this guy was not a slacker, and ultimately, he managed to convince not one or two, but five ultra-successful people to mentor him. And armed with their knowledge and a deep willingness to learn, he turned the 47 bucks he had in his bank account into arguably the most famous garage full of exotic cars on the planet. His secret? An insatiable curiosity. He says he cares far more about adventure than money, and he's got the resume to back it up. He's worked shearing sheep in New Zealand, lived with the Amish for 2 and 1/2 years, worked in a leper colony in India, worked as a certified financial planner, and as a mentee, helped Joel Salatin pioneer grass-fed sustainable agriculture. He's also a social media pioneer with millions of followers and hundreds of millions of views. He now lives his life in front of the camera essentially around the clock, pumping out entertaining educational content, and giving away an insane amount of prizes, including at last count 10 cars. He is the capital D Don of the rich and famous entrepreneurial lifestyle for the millennial generation. But to be blinded by the glitz and glamour of his life would be to miss the point entirely. If you look beyond the hype and the conspiracy theories about this guy, his one consistent message is develop your mind. Love him or hate him, nothing was handed to him, and his earliest mentor, even all these years later, is still quick to point out that he's never seen another apprentice with the drive and determination that today's guest has. So, please, help me in welcoming the man who has read over 5,000 books and has a book club and podcast that now reaches 1.4 million people in 40 countries, the new media mogul and serial entrepreneur, Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez is here. Thank you. Good to have you on. It was a lot of fun being on your show earlier today, so to now get to flip the tables Yeah. Dude, I'm super stoked. I want to get into some of the stuff that I found just incredibly intriguing. Starting with what you said about the Amish being some of the happiest people that you've ever met. In fact, your quote was "The happiest I've ever been in my life was with the Amish. It's been downhill since then." Which you said like tongue-in-cheek, but walk us through that. How did you end up there, and what is it about them that makes them so happy? So, how did I end up there? You know, I I think one of my business partners now got a PhD in multi-objective optimization. Basically, how to do lots of things at once. And he told me a couple years ago, he goes, "You know what my conclusion is after 12 years of study Berkeley? It's all BS. You can only optimize for one thing at a time." So, as I look back at my life, I think without knowing it, now I'm a little more clear, I've optimized for like adventure. And so, there was a point in my life I I did I had an okay upbringing, but my dad was in prison when I was born. My mom was married and divorced a few times and and a lot of conflict. And at some point in my life, I picked up this book called Amish Society by Hostetler, this professor. And I was fascinated. I was like, these people, these Amish people, have something that no one else in the United States and really the world has. And I was like, I'm going to try an adventure. So, I went I got on a bus, went to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I went to this little town called Bird-in-Hand. I'll never forget. I got off the bus, walked to this farm, this guy Daniel Stoltzfus. I'd written him a letter and he said, "You can come visit me." So, I go and it was instantly like being in a time machine back in the 1800s. I walked in the barn and he was shoveling apple pomace, which is when you make apple juice, you get the the byproduct is this little fruit stuff. He's feeding his cows and and it was him and his two sons, barefoot. That was my introduction to a new adventure in my life, which I've pretty much tried to keep replicated. I mean, people see me doing social media and cars and all that, but it's still the same thing. I'm I'm a little bit like you, like if you think about life, you can be nihilistic about life. Like, what's the purpose? At the end of the day, you can dissect anything and go, "What's the purpose?" Some people go, "You know, I want to make a billion dollars." And you can say to them, "What's the purpose? We all die. We all end up in the same small grave at the end of the day." And you can say, "I want to become super intelligent." Or I want to have get married and have kids. At the end of the day, all flesh is grass and you disappear just like the grass eventually. So, for me, the best guess I had and maybe other you know, what, some people have spiritual things and all that and the best guess I've ever come up with is like, if every day you wake up and you go, "I don't have it all figured out. Let's jump into something crazy and see what happened." And that's how I got started on social media. I started really dabbling with it in 2012, 2013. And then in 2014, someone was like, "You should do YouTube. It's going to be big." So, I was like, "Let's try a new adventure." And I just started shooting my first videos in January 25th, 2016. Uh 2015, sorry. I put out this video and it it's ended up cumulatively, different versions have like 600 million views. It's gotten a lot of views. And so, my garage. Here in my garage and some other similar garage-themed ones. Everybody should try to be rich and famous at least once and should get it just to realize it's not as good as you think. But, the adventure part's cool. And also, when I say adventure, I also mean gaining insight into life. The biggest thing I've learned, if I could be 18 again, I wish somebody had told me basically nobody knows what they're doing. Even the adults you think, you know, everybody's lost and the world's the blind leading the blind. So, the ultimate adventure to me is not just like bungee jumping or something like that or going to the Amish. It's trying to get insight and see life as a puzzle and your goal in life is to seek the adventures that piece the puzzle together. So, that at the end of your life, you like kind of get get it. You kind of get it. I feel like most people don't get what life is. Like, think about it. It's like, what is life? Like, why do are we driven with some basic instincts? What's the purpose, you know? I like evolutionary psychology. So, all these things have kind of led me down this bizarre place and here I am with you. All right. So, I know that you actually have a definition of the good life around the four pillars. What are the four pillars and how does it play into everything? So, yeah. I always say health, wealth, love, happiness. Like, kind of in that order. If you're not healthy, you won't care about anything. So, I figured health is the trump card. and then the thing The reason I put money second over love, it doesn't mean like you should try to get rich before love. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the classic kind of way to be happy, there's five levels to Maslow. So, the bottom one is physiological or physical needs have to be met, food, shelter, water. The second one is safety. You have to feel safe. The third one is love. And because if you don't have physical and safety right, you don't care about love. And if you don't believe me, look up the number one reason people get divorced, it's financial issues. So, I just figured money doesn't bring happiness, but the absence of money brings unhappiness. This has been proven all over and over. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner, he said, you know, if you make less than 72 grand in America, he's found your happiness suffers cuz your stress goes up. So, I figured you don't have to be wealthy. When I say wealth, it doesn't necessarily mean like Forbes list. It means you have to have your physical needs met, and you have to have a margin of safety, some money in the bank account. If every paycheck you're freaked out, your love life is going to suffer. And then the the top two of Maslow's hierarchy of needs then become, you know, respect, and then the the last one, the highest pinnacle, is like a higher purpose, or people call it spiritual. So, health, wealth, and then love. And then if you get those three, that's how you get happiness. Like happiness, there's so many books now about happiness. There's a good one called Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. But at the core thing to me, happiness is like soup. It's like if you make chicken noodle soup, but you forget the chicken, it's not chicken noodle soup. If you forget to put the broth in, it's just chicken and noodles. If you forget the noodles. So, that's what I mean. Like, happiness is a compilation of a whole bunch of stuff you do right. So, I think I I haven't found a better way to think about it. So, how do you go about like give us some tactics. How do you tactically optimize for them? Do you attack them sequentially? Uh do you call make real-time calls about like, "Oh, I'm a little low on happiness or love or whatever." Like, how do you play that? Yeah, well, like I said, I don't optimize for the last one. I try to get the first three right. Steve Jobs said he didn't want to be the richest man in the graveyard. You know, do you want to be the richest man in the graveyard? I want to be the happiest man on the way to the graveyard. And some of that you have to postpone pleasure. A good investor is somebody who postpone present pleasure for future gain. And you can do that you work hard in the day. It's some stuff's a pain in the butt. You're built I built lots of, you know, businesses. I know what it is to be an entrepreneur. I'm saying I know that chess move, and what I'm telling you is two chess moves past that chess move. Optimizing your life for hustling and grinding is like optimizing your life around going pee. No, pee is something you have to do. It's not the goal. You don't go, "Woo! You know my goal is hit the toilet seven times a day." No, but you have to do it to survive. So, grinding and working hard and hustling is not what you optimize for. It's pain. Why would you optimize for pain? But as an it is a necessity. And if you look at the actual scientific explanation of what makes you successful, it is not just hard work. If that's true, construction workers would be the wealthiest people in the world. Waiters and busboys, they work harder than the owner. The most scientific psychometric personality test is called HEXACO. It's more accurate than Big Five, which used to be. It's much more accurate than Myers-Briggs INFJ, ENTP, all that stuff. So, HEXACO tests you on 26 facets of your personality. And one of them's called conscientiousness. And it's been proven over and over by scientists, conscientiousness is the most correlated with business success. Define conscientiousness in this case. then it divides into four sub facets. Organization, perfectionism, diligence, and prudence. So, the real truth is hard work is 25% of the formula. Because diligence is known in the common language as hard work, okay? So, if you just think diligence alone will get you success, you're like a basketball player that thinks you'll play in the NBA cuz you can shoot free throws. Ah, there's You ever seen the best free throw shooters in the world? They're old, 70-year-old men who shoot underhanded, but they don't play in the NBA because the NBA's not all about free throws. So, NBA is scoring, defense, free throws maybe is the one component, rebounding, assists, there's a lot of components. So, the other three you have to get good at. The first one is perfectionism. People You have to know how to double-check your work. It's that simple. Only It doesn't mean you're always a perfectionist, but it means when it's important, when you're a pilot of an airplane, double-check before you go. They If you get on a plane, you hear the pilots double-checking, the co-pilot going, you know, "Hydraulics." And the guy goes, "Hydraulics." And And that's why planes don't crash. And it's called six sigma. It's three defects per million. Your goal in business and in life, on the important things, is to make three mistakes per million transactions. And the only way you do that is by being a perfectionist in terms of double-checking. So, that's 25%. The next one is organization. I can't tell you how much better my life is and anybody watching this will be if you wake up every single day and you take 10 minutes. I have yellow notepads sitting all around my house. I got that from Bill Gates. Bill Gates built Microsoft at 17 by locking himself in a hotel room with six yellow notepads and he wrote out the whole basic code for DOS and things like built Microsoft, okay? Became the richest man in the world 18 years straight because he was organized enough to lock himself in a room and think through his day. And so what I try to do and whenever I do this, I have a great day. Whenever I don't, I notice it. Be organized a little bit, 10 minutes. I actually have this little couch thing outside of my shower and I put a notepad by it. I take a shower when I wake up. I walk over to that. I kind of sit there and I just write out, I mean, it can be as little as three main projects you want to get done that day. So organization is the other 25%. So now and then you have diligence which is hard work, hustle, and and perseverance. But the last one is the kicker. And this is what I was talking about, the rewiring that has to happen. The last one is something called prudence. Scientists call this prudence. Prudence is the ability to make the right decision. And I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs, even me at times, too. I'm not special. I'm I'm lumping all of us in this because of our upbringing in society, our goal is let's say our goal is like that camera right there. So let's assume that's north. So I have this compass in my brain. And my goal is to go right there. Let's say it's a mile away, so north. What happens if society, my upbringing in school wired my compass exactly backwards? So I think, let's say I can't see that camera, but I know I want to go north, so I pull out my my compass and it points that way. So I just take off walking and I do it in an organized fashion. I do it in a perfectionist manner. I'm perfecting my steps and my posture. I'm also working on, you know, hard work and hustle. Keep walking towards your goal. Well, the truth is, if you go south when you should go north, you could have gone 1 mile, but the earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference. So, you get to walk 24,000 miles, and you'll come up on the backside, and you will get your goal. That's most entrepreneurs. The average person takes 20 years to become a millionaire. 90% of businesses fail within the first 5 years, 80 to 90 depending on what statistic. Most people, I did the math once, the average American has $60,000 saved by the time they're about 60 years old. So, my answer, I did the math, you can do this with the simple financial calculator, everybody in America, your parents, everybody you know, will be a millionaire if they live to 160. At 160 years old, you take 60 grand at age 60, and you give it a decent return on investment, 8%, 10%, you'll be a millionaire at 160. But, the problem is the great philosopher, I think it was Aristotle or Socrates said, "The problem is art is long, but life is short." The art of living and getting to your objective is long, but it doesn't have to be. It's long if your compass is backwards. So, the whole point of what I was saying about adventure at the beginning is I'm trying to take myself and point it to the true north. And you have to learn that from books and mentors and it life experience and listening and finding in-person mentors and all those things, they help adjust your compass. And most people are going to get what they want just about 40 years longer. And that I live in Beverly Hills, trust me. You go downtown Beverly Hills, there's other people like I have I like to collect cars. It's not so much I've always liked cars. It's not a materialistic show-off thing like a lot of people think. My grandma said I loved cars when I was one. I used to try to turn the car on in the garage. You go to downtown Beverly Hills, full of Ferraris, the most Ferraris per capita in anywhere in the world. Every one of the guys is 80 or 90. Why do you want a Ferrari at 80 or 90? You want a walker. You get old, somebody's going to walk you into your And then you're going to get in a Ferrari. You know how dumb you look? To me, at 90, you want to be playing with your grandkids. And I've wondered like why the heck is everybody 90 in this town, excluding people who inherit their money from their dad, but and I realized we're set up for failure cuz we think we're going north, but we're going south. That's why 50% of people who get married are divorced. 80% of businesses fail. That's why 30% of Americans are on some form of antidepressant medication. That's why 60-70% of people are overweight. I mean, in a way, we're kind of [ __ ] but Are there like key principles though that you can use to turn that compass so north actually points north? Yes. First one is just like Alcoholics Anonymous, admit you're lost. And that one's hard for people. You tell people, even for me sometimes, I want to think I'm smart and I got it all figured out and sometimes I'm like, wait a sec, I'm still lost. And that that the acquiescence, the the admittance of the fact that you're still lost, it gets you on track a lot faster. So, if you're watching this and you feel lost, it's better to just sit down and be like, I'm lost. Because the day you would admit you're lost is the day you allow yourself to be found by people who can give you a tip. And but what's the what's the equivalent of that? Cuz obviously, if you're an entrepreneur, nobody's looking for you. So, that's the one catch there. Who is? They are. They're You go to Barnes & Noble. People selling their books. They're looking for you as a customer. So, read. Read. I mean, the fact that people argue with me on this reading thing. And people argue with me me mentors. No, just use your own gut feeling. Is that how you learn English? When you were 2 years old, you use your gut feeling to start conjugating verbs? No, you learn from other people. You learn manners, you learn language, you learn all things valuable. You learn to drive from another person. So, doesn't it make sense you learn life? So, books are just the mentors who maybe are dead now. You want to learn about Steve Jobs? He ain't alive to teach you, but you can learn through accumulated wisdom. And that's why Trust me. I meet I Very few powerful businessmen I've ever met um don't read a lot. Warren Buffett, who I think is the best businessman by far in the world, he has done He has 75 companies that he pretty much runs, 200 billion in revenue. He reads 8 hours a day. He reads 600 He said he slowed down in his old age, he only reads 500 pages a day. Bill Gates goes on reading vacations. Mark Zuckerberg just start started a reading once a week book club on Facebook. It already got a couple million uh followers. And now with audiobooks, there's no excuse. You got YouTube videos. Let this thing run in the background. And it's better if you can find it. I mean, better than books is in-person mentoring. That's why I do a podcast. Tom was on my podcast, you're a smart dude, I learn from you. Like I learned from you today. I liked your angle on how to get in physical locations. If you launch a physical product, you want to get it in stores, don't be thirsty. Like I said, Casanova said, be the flame, not the moth. Let them come to you. And that's what you did with Quest. And now you sell 1.5 million bars a day, that's good. So, if you can pick up one gold nugget, whether it's from an in-person mentor, whether it's from a book, you become very wealthy in knowledge very quickly. One nugget a day. One nugget a day. It's like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, said, "Step by step, you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts." But you have to prepare for the fast spurts by learning step by step. So, when the day comes and I launch a physical product, I will hopefully be smart enough and humble enough to be like I got to sit down. I've never launched a company that did 1.5 million bars. I can download in one conversation with you. Like you want to become like a supercomputer where you just download smart crap from smart people. And you pick and choose. Like some people are like, "Ty, I don't agree with everything you say." I'm like, "Good, I don't agree with everything I say." Like a year later I'm like, "Wait, I was wrong." I actually saw a um very intriguing piece of content that you did where somebody was trolling you on Twitter and in in a move that confused the [ __ ] out of me, you decided to call him on Skype or whatever. "Let's let's debate live right now." And you did and you kept asking him a question that I thought was so spot on which he kept refusing to answer, but it was, "Hey, you're engaging with me. I'm creating all this content about how I've done what I've done and instead of going, 'Huh, you actually have done something that's pretty interesting.' you're heckling me instead of being intrigued by my results." Yes. And that to me was very interesting. And that that like switch in people's minds that's either on or off. Either they look at somebody else and they go, "Whoa, this guy is doing something right. Like holy hell." Um or they try to find a reason to um shut you down, not listen to you, discredit you, whatever the case may be. I thought that was pretty interesting. Um talk to us a little bit about that. How often do you see that in people and do you ever see that mentality in people who are successful? Like Drake says, if you don't have haters you ain't popping. So, welcome to the world. You want to pop? You going to get hate. Um it's interesting. This is fascinates me. The more successful beyond my wildest dreams of my success, the more they ask me questions. Last time I saw Elon Musk, I've had some very interesting conversations with this guy. He's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Elon Musk uh we've talked I'm not a close friend of his by any means, but we've talked at he goes to the same things. He loves Hollywood. He's always at red carpet things I go to. So, we're in the bathroom and he comes in I said, "Hey, you know, Elon uh we talked about books last time." He goes, "Oh, yeah. I remember you. You're the social media guy." He goes, "I got a question for you, man. Do you think I should use Snapchat to grow Tesla?" So, I was like, "Okay." He goes, "I know you know about Snapchat. Tell me." So, I start talking to him. 20 minutes later the it was a Game of Thrones premiere six and I go, "What do you think?" After I gave my long diatribe. He goes, "I think you're wrong, but thank you." And then he walked off. And I was like, "This guy is so smart." I realized you talk about checkmate. I was an idiot because I should have flipped the conversation to get him to teach me for 20 minutes. He walked in the room knowing what he knew, I knew what I knew, but he I gave him all my jewels and he walked away with them like a smart guy. I see people making fun of the Kardashians. I'm like, "You're going to make fun of the Kardashians?" Look, Kylie Jenner, the youngest Kardashian, in the last 18 months has done $400 million in revenue on lipstick kits and various makeup things with Kylie Cosmetics. Put that in perspective. L'Oréal, Maybelline, massive brands. It took them 50 years Wow. as an organization with thousands of employees to do what Kylie Jenner did by herself at 20 at 18. You're going to laugh at the Kardashians? Do you have to agree with everything the Kardashians? No. But like Abraham Lincoln said, "I learn from everybody, even if sometimes it's what not to do." So, you can just go into the Kardashians, reverse engineer their success, go, I like this, I like this, I like this. I don't like that. Then leave out what you don't like. I've never met a person who's a deity. You You dissect anybody. And we all are just It's like Mark Twain said, all humans are like the moon. You got your light side and you have the dark side. If anybody watching wants their whole life projected up on a screen for the whole world to watch from birth to today, and you think that it'll be You wouldn't be embarrassed of a few things? You would be. And I'm sure the Kardashians would be. And I'm sure there's things that I look back on my life and I'm like, you were an idiot, Ty. But welcome to the idiot place called planet Earth. There's just two kinds of idiots, people who know it and people who don't. And if you're lost, just sit down. If you're an entrepreneur, sit down. And then reach out from where you're sitting. Grab a book here, grab this, listen to Tom, listen There's so many source And now we're the most spoiled generation in the world because when you and I got started, I started Google AdWords in 2001. Okay, I was I got lucky. I just stumbled and I was one of the first people to ever use online advertising. I was in, I think, the second month Google AdWords launched. Wow. And there was no YouTube videos, there was no Perry Marshall books, there was There was nothing. You just kind of wasted money to learn. Now, we're the most spoiled generation. Everything This computer on this phone, iPhone 7, is more powerful than the first rocket that put man on the moon. That cost billions of dollars. Now, we get that for under a thousand bucks. And people are still like, I'm lost. Yes, you're lost. Sit down and then open up Safari and go, how to do Google Ads. And you're going to come up Let's see what I come up with. AdWords, they have their own tutorial. WordStream, JumpFly, you got some paid stuff. Then you have some free stuff on HubSpot. If you sit in a chair, Charlie Munger calls it assiduity. Put your ass in a chair. Sit there and focus without being You know the average American right now, the average person in the world, our attention span has dropped to 5 seconds. The sad news is the average goldfish has 6 seconds. We're now competing with goldfish and the goldfish are winning. So, if you don't have assiduity to sit down, read, um there is no solution for you. You will always be poor because you'll always be beat by somebody who's willing to sit in the chair. Is there a way for people to build that discipline? Yes. Pain. And that's why I'm not a big believer in delusion. You know, you asked me one of the re-wiring things we have to do in this world. I'll tell you one. You ever heard this myth? Everything happens for a reason, so just accept it. Well, there's kind of truth to that. If I jump off a building and break my legs, yes, everything happened for a reason. The reason was gravity. Like, that's why you broke your legs and physics. Legs brittle, concrete not brittle. So, that but people interpret everything happens for a reason be like, "Well, I was meant to learn from that thing." And then BS. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene, one of the most important books written in the last century. He says organisms that only learn through trial and error lose to organisms that can learn through other people's and trial and error. Is anybody here We've got a little live audience. Anybody here ever had to be hit by a car to learn to look both ways? I didn't. I kind of learned from just somebody telling me big car, two tons, velocity, smash, dead. And I now always look both ways. So, if your myth is that the only way you're going to learn is just through massive mistakes and trials and error, you haven't read Richard Dawkins' book. If you believe in evolution, or even you don't, you believe in creationism or whatever, why do we have big brains? Because we do have the biggest brains on on planet Earth. Not always use them, but we got the biggest potential. It's to be able to what Richard Dawkins called project. So, you can literally sit in this chair and predict outcomes without having to do them. Like so, I can predict if I don't listen to Tom's advice on how to do a physical snack bar and get it into stores or a physical product by by playing hard to get for a year like you did, then I can predict most likely it's going to not go well for me. But I can predict that if I download what you did, it's going to go better for me statistically. And that skill makes you a powerful person, very powerful. though how how does pain allow somebody to get more disciplined? Okay. So, going back to that myth of when you see your life and anytime there should be pain, you go, "No, no, no, no. It was just how it was meant to be." No. Look yourself in the mirror sometimes and go, "You know why I'm not happy? It's because I didn't listen 10 years ago and I got in the wrong career. You know I'm not happy? Because I married the wrong damn person. It wasn't meant to happen. Yes, everything happens for a reason. You made a bad choice, but it didn't have to be that way. And the second you build up pain. And this, by the way, is not my opinion. If you talk to guys like Dr. David Buss, top 10 most cited psychologist in history. Okay? He's one of my main mentors. He told me, I said, "Do adults change? Like we do all these self-help videos and podcasts." I said, "Am I wasting my time?" He goes, "Yeah, kind of." I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, after 25, it's very hard to teach old dogs new tricks." By the way, that's why I've changed most of my stuff targets people 18 to 25. That's why I do Snapchat and all that cuz there's hope for 18 to 25 year old. Now, if you're over 25, before you get depressed, he told me, "But, I have good news for you, Ty." I said, "What?" He said, "Adults learn through massive trauma." So, you will learn. You have to let in some trauma into your life. And that's rough, but no pain, no gain. Like if you are 100 lbs overweight, and you want to be able to play basketball, here's my news for you. Everything happened for a reason. You got fat cuz you ate too much and you didn't exercise. So, welcome to the gym. In the first year is going to be hell, but that pain, hopefully, will reprogram your brain and every time you want to eat that nasty thing, go, "Wait, I don't want to go through that pain again." So, I think one of the myths of societies we won't let pain in. We just excuse it all the way. Like, "No, that was meant to happen. Oh, you wasted 20 years of life married the wrong person in the wrong career?" No, Tom, it was meant to happen. Where is the people who go, "You [ __ ] up, dude. You wasted 20 years and you will never get it back. You better go in your room and cry." And the truth is, you only learn as an adult, unfortunately, most people can only change with massive trauma. And it was funny, I heard this from Dr. Buss a couple years ago and I was lucky enough to sit next to Kobe Bryant for the last like three games of his career. Not the very last one, but the three ones. So, I sat at the end of the Lakers bench, right next to him. One of his players, I won't say who, was having a bad game. Free throws, they're lined up, the whole stadium's quiet. Kobe Bryant yells out at him, he goes, "Dude, you suck." And he wasn't joking, okay? It was shocking to me. No one could hear it unless you're right there. But Kobe turned to um Metta World Peace, Ron Artest, who was sitting next to him, and he goes, "This positive reinforcement thing is way overrated. People need to hear the truth. Ryan Kelly He turned around and looked at Kobe and I was so impressed. He said, "I know." He literally sat down and said, "Yep, I've lost this game." And I kid you not, the rest of the game he had an e-excelled. He scored like 10, 12 points off the bench after that. And I was I was like, "See, this Kobe guy gets it. He's a winner. You can't always just bring pleasure and pat everybody He didn't say, "Yo, Kelly. You're kind of not playing well, but you know, it's all happening for a reason, buddy. Relax, no pressure." He just said, "Dude, you suck." It was like that and I'm just going Okay. This is the real Kobe. Can I tell you a fantasy of mine? And and I say this knowing full well that my employees are listening right now. My fantasy, so I've asked them all to give me aggressive feedback in real time to my face in front of the entire team. Okay. And the reason that I want that, one is I want to know the truth cuz it's the only way I'm going to get better, so I'm never afraid to look stupid and I'm certainly not afraid to admit when I'm lost. Um two, I want to set the standard. I want people to see that you should be able to emotionally deal with somebody telling you that you suck when you suck. My fantasy is to have that kind of environment here at Impact Theory where if you're sucking, like I you don't need to go out of your way to be mean, but the pain needs to be felt because I really believe what you were saying, that certainly as adults and it's probably true for kids as well, you will learn when it hurts. Yes. And the only like it breaks most people and this is why people don't use the strategy. Most people at the free throw line, Kobe says you suck. That ends their [ __ ] basketball career, dude. Like and if they were a 14-year-old kid and Kobe came and said you suck, 999 out of 1,000 kids break. The other one kid goes on to be the next Kobe Bryant, right? So, it but I want to be in that world because it's made me sharper. Now, I came up in the in the business world, not So, in the business world I came up hard. I had mentors that were ruthlessly mean to me. And in that process I thought, there are times I [ __ ] hate them so much I can't see straight, but I know they're making me better. And so I went back every day, every day, every day. And I developed this notion that the entrepreneurs that do the best are the ones that can self-soothe the fastest. Because I needed to hear it. I needed to know that I sucked. Then I needed to go very quickly, get my head back on, take that information, and improve. So, one of the things I was talking about Dr. David Buss, there's this test called the Dark Triad test, which again, anything important like this, nobody ever learned it in school, cuz schools are too stupid to take real powerful science and apply it to life. But the Dark Triad is a worldview barometer for everybody watching. You can take it. There's a different dark free Dark Triad test online. It tests for three main traits, negative qualities, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and being psychotic. And I personally tested thousands and thousands of people. It's the most accurate test. And what happens, narcissism, okay? One of the symptoms of a narcissist, it's not just like, "Ooh, I like to look in the mirror," right? That's what we think a narcissist One of the classic symptoms is very thin-skinned. They're always offended. If you have a friend that anything you say constructively, they fall apart, it's almost always narcissism. Even if they're introverted, there's multiple forms, there's introverted narcissism, extroverted, exploitative, all these different sub-facets of narcissism. But we live in a society that's very narcissistic. You're told like, "Oh, everybody's a winner." No, not everybody's a winner. That's like saying everybody's blonde. There's a definition of what blonde is. Blonde is like this yellowish hair. So, you lose meaning when you start going, "Everybody's blonde." Well, everybody doesn't win. And the sooner you wake up to that that biology is ruthless, man. Then you get a little fear in you. And when you get a little fear in you you start listening. Cuz if you're truly afraid, you listen. Let a little fear come in and drive you and motivate you. Now, what when I was about, I don't know, early 20s, I was in Mississippi with these five mentors, a guy Alan Nation, Gary Townson, Dr. Gordon Hazard. All these guys I really looked up to. They were like 60 years old. And they were the people, like the only millionaires I'd ever met. I didn't grow up. I was born in Long Beach, Compton kind of area and never was around anybody who would ever make 100 grand a year. So, I meet these guys. I'm They're like, "Come, we're going on a hunting trip in Mississippi." I go down there and, you know, we're in these lodges, cabins, and then we're having hot dogs over the fire. And they start drinking a little bit. They were normally nice, you know, kind of southerners. And they kind of got me. They're like, "So, what do you want to do, man?" And I was like, "I want to be an entrepreneur." And they're like, "Oh, really?" And they go, "What does IRR mean?" And I was like, "I have no idea. It means er." Like, I didn't know that it meant internal rate of return, right? So, one of them just goes, "You know, you're never going to amount to anything. There's zero chance you'll ever be a successful entrepreneur." They all laughed. And I was like, I don't cry. I probably The last time I got close to crying was that I was just like devastated. But, you know what? I I remember laying in bed that night going, "No one will ever make fun of me again for not knowing about finance." So, I became a CFP, certified financial planner. And to this day, I can hold my own around the most powerful businessmen in the world. They might know more than me, but I don't come off as a fool. So, that was a turning point pain moment, that Mississippi moment for me. I've sought those out. And the one problem is the more successful you are, the less people that can say that to you that you respect them. But I'm always trying to fill myself you know that old cliche never be the smartest person in the room and all that. It's I have a better way to say it. Be around people who make you uncomfortable at the ego level. When you feel uncomfortable in settings that is when the learning it's not just who's smarter because sometimes smarter people don't help you. There's many forms of IQ there's emotional you know, but get around someone where you're like I kind of don't fit in. And because we're all narcissists because of society and Instagram and all this and I'm guilty of that too. We don't like to be uncomfortable because a narcissist story to themselves is you're the best. And so you don't you you your worldview is messed up. That's a wiring issue. Um Let me put it this way. I meet people who think they're smart, okay? What it really tells me is they've never been around actual smart people. If you're really smart watching this Let's say you have a 155 IQ. That's what Bill Gates has and Albert Einstein were up there. My step grandfather had a 155 IQ. He speaks 14 language fluently. He can write Chinese. He's a chess master. He can play three other chess masters without looking at the board while they look at the board and beat all of them. If you're smart you can do that. If you're not I got good news for you. Warren Buffett says you only need about a 125 IQ to be very successful. But it's better to stay in your lane and just go I'm not that smart but you can hire 155 IQs. But that's an example of what I'm talking about of this rewiring. So these practical things will change your life. All right. Since you have a concept called never be the [ __ ] of your own mind what do you mean by that? Your mind is driven by deep evolutionary um drives. So, for example, narcissism is a protection mechanism, right? So, your mind wants to tell you you're amazing. It makes you its [ __ ] You have to override that and go, "You know what? I'm not that amazing. So, let me go learn from amazing people." Do you have methods for people to do that? Cuz I think that's so important. So, I tell people, "Don't trust everything that your mind says. Certainly don't buy into all of your emotions. Just because you have an emotion doesn't mean you have to act in accordance with that." Um but how do you help people get over that? How do they overcome that? I think humans for the most part learn by osmosis. So, it's hard to to lecture people into success, but what you could do is you could inspire people to understand this. So, for example, if you could if school system could find all the 14-year-olds and find out what they admire in people, right? So, the reason I show Lamborghinis, Ferraris, is I got a lot of young followers. And you know what 19-year-old guys like? Lamborghinis and Ferraris. So, I show that part of my life because then they listen to the other stuff. So, first you got to lead by inspiration. This has been proven over. You cannot pound stuff into people's brain. People actually do the opposite. When parents tell their kids, "You got to read." Mhm. Nobody reads. But if I show a Lamborghini and Ferrari, which is the reward that people want, and then people go, "How do you get it?" I said, "See all these books? I read them and put it." Then people Uh I have more school kids reading books, I think, than anyone in history. I don't say that cocky. I'm telling you it astounds me cuz all I had to do was put up a video with Lamborghinis. All right. And so, being the [ __ ] of your own brain, the way you learn not to be the easiest way is to be around people who aren't the [ __ ] of their own brain. Like Joel Salatin, my first mentor, I was lucky enough right out of high instead of going to college, I was with him at 19. And he has not a [ __ ] of his brain. He's a man of he wakes up and he his life's more like of duty. He knows his duty and whether it's hard or easy, he plows through it. So, every day for example, when you have breakfast at 6:00 in the morning on a farm, he writes out an organized thing on what he wants to do for the day. When you're the [ __ ] of your brain, you go, "I'm just going to freewheel this day." It's very it's very hard to be organized. We're not Dogs aren't organized. Do you ever see your dog organizing day? So, if you want to You can either act on the animal side, which is just a wing life, or you can operate from a sense of logic and duty. And so, I learned somewhat, I'm not even as good as Joel, to not be the [ __ ] of my mind by just being around him for a while. And so, that's the best way. Find somebody that you look at them and you go, "This is a person of discipline, of motivation, self-motivation. They don't need external motivation. They're motivated from within. And spend all the time you can around them. You know, like someone wants to learn from you, I tell people, "Go walk up to Tom or a company like this and say, 'Yo, I'll work for you for free for years if it need be.'" Because I need to be around It's cumulative hours. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his book, one of the great autobiographies in my opinion, Total Recall, he has this principle, it's called reps and sets. He said, "If you want muscles, it's reps and sets. Hours in the gym." And some people, you know, there's a lot of books and Alan, here's how you can work out 15 minutes a day. No, you can't. You're never going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger if you were a 50 I don't care what biohacking crap you do Please, spare us. Let's return to common sense. You want to be Arnold? You got to do what Arnold did. In the same way, if you want to learn from mentors, if you think 5 minutes with a mentor will be enough, you don't understand how deeply rooted your wire circuitry is. You got to rewire it and it takes reps instead of reps and sets, it takes hours and days or days and years. And so I think that if you're young watching this, don't try to become a millionaire too young. Because what you should do when you're young is work on the circuitry part. And then the money will come. Alan Nation told me that. He said, "Ty, don't try to become a millionaire in your 20s." And I didn't listen to him and I wish I had. And luckily I kind of listened to him, but I should have listened more. And so if you could take those formative years and just go on the adventure of life. That's why I went to India and a leper colony and went and lived with the Amish cuz I was like, "Amish, all the good stuff you have? Reprogram my brain." I'm sure on the narcissism score now I score around 40 to 50, which isn't horrific but isn't the best. Like I'm kind and I guarantee you if I hadn't gone to the Amish, I'd have been an 80 narcissist. And my life would have sucked. But now at 40 is kind of an acceptable 42 is last test. So it took me 2 and 1/2 years with them. You know? And so I think even as an older person, man, my dream in life, even today, is to find some badass and trick them into spending like 8 hours a day with me for 3 days a week. And whenever I do like I said, 45 minutes with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I was so motivated. It like 45 minutes with Arnold Schwarzenegger lasted me like 7 days. And nothing I'm not I'm not big in self-help like I watch people to motivate me. That guy's a monster. That's why I'm a big believer in going to conferences. Berkshire Hathaway conference, it's the first week of May of every year. These dudes are going to die soon. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, you can buy a B share for under 500 bucks. Buy a B share, you get a free ticket. It's insane. You sit there with two men on stage in a stadium of 18,000 of the top investors in the world. Wow. Cost you under 500 bucks. You sit there it's only one day. I fly into Omaha and fly back out almost the same day. And you walk out just motivated. You're with the guy that their business, you know, we meet businesses and they're like I'm doing a 100 million a year. They did 200 billion in revenue last year. And they're two jolly guys that just kind of have fun with life. And I'm like, wow. And last time first year I went I sat next to a guy the whole time. Didn't pay attention to him. And then I on the way out I talked to him and I found out he's basically one of the richest guys in Europe. And we became friends and he flew me to Germany to speak to he has 17 CEOs who work for his different companies. Wow. He said come meet. And then he walked me from the hotel to do the speech and back. And I talked to this guy, his name is Norman Rentrop. And um he in 2 hours walking to and from the thing, he explained how he built a media empire starting at age 12 to now he's in his 60s. He let me download 40 years of experience. I think he's a billionaire, I'm not sure. He's maybe not quite a billionaire, but 40 years. And that was I think it's not coincidental that the next year I grew on social media. Cuz he was he did old school media like magazines and newsletters. And he told me like here's how you do it. And it just absorbed and within 6 months I was doing all the big stuff that people see on social media. But that hinged on me getting Some people you got you know a good thing for activity all you hard workers, get out of the house. You will not grind it in front of your laptop 14 hours a day to success. Go to conferences, go to seminars. They are great ways in the modern world to just meet people. You never know who you're sitting next to. I've probably gone to 20 events in 20 days. Now that's a little much. I go in bursts, okay? It's I'm a little bit burned out as you can hear my voice. But it was insane. The the data I I'm in looking at cryptocurrency stuff like Bitcoin. If you'd put $100 in Bitcoin in 2010, you would have $75 million today in your bank account. $100. Wow. Is that working hard, or is that making good decisions? And so, for all of you who are really big on the hustle your ass off, hustle in the networking side. It will help you because then you learn what to do from them. And the sad thing is, if you start a business and your first business doesn't succeed, uh the way your brain works, you have dopamine receptors. They Now, scientists have found that dopamine receptors add or subtract. So, dopamine is the hormone or the chemical in your brain that is the reward chemical. There's multiple ones, norepinephrine, oxytocin, all these, but way dopamine works is like when you go shopping and you buy cool shoes and you feel good, that's a dopamine release. And dopamine drives us. And what happens is, when you fail, your body They're like little hairs, they're not actually hairs, but we'll pretend they are in your brain. They fall off. You get less of them. And the penalty for having less dopamine receptors is you become less ambitious. When you succeed, you actually grow more. It's a new science showing this. So, the point being, you should I'm not a believer in having people fail to in their first business. Forget that. Build a small business that you're sure you can pull off. Even Dean Smith, maybe the greatest basketball coach, college coach, him and John Wooden. He said he was never a believer in setting goal. You ever heard the thing, shoot for the stars cuz even if you only hit halfway, you go to the moon? He said people called BS on that. He said, make a realistic goal, hit it, and then make another one. You don't need So, I meet entrepreneurs who are like, "Ty, I'm grinding away." I'm like, "What are you doing?" "I'm building a billion-dollar business." A guy wrote me an email, "Dude, I'm building a billion-dollar business." So, I wrote him back cuz it was an email and I said, "Oh, really? Have you ever made a $100 million business?" No. "Have you ever made a $10 million business?" No. This was our email chain. I should have screenshotted it. Like, "No. Have you ever made a 100,000?" No. And I said, "So, let me get this straight. You're kind of like the dude there's a lot of stairs in front of you. There's like 20 stairs to the top. And you're going to do the jump from 1 to 30. You know what happens to people who jump too many steps? You can skip maybe two or three steps, but one of my school teachers, Randy Thompson, when we were growing up, he tried to jump up some stairs and he was holding books and he tripped on the third step and hit his nose on the concrete and he says the most painful surgery known to mankind to basically unplug your nose from He cracked all the bone up into his face. And that's what most entrepreneurs do. I they go, "No, Ty, I'm going from zero to 1 billion." No, man. As Warren Buffett said, today's the World Series game seven. The way to win a baseball game, it's safer to just hit base hits. And if you hit a lot of base hits, next thing you know, you hit a home run. And once you've done that a few times, you'll have so many dopamine receptors that you won't fail. And so, I highly recommend if you're watching and you're too By the way, narcissism is associated with over-ambition. There is such a thing about as being too ambitious. There is such a thing as being too ambitious. What I always tell people, you can have massive vision. So, one day your vision is Like, one of one of my vision thing, I'd love to own a pro basketball team, okay? But it's not in my annual goal. So, you have goals that are short-term. They're one day I like to set one day goals. Most of my goals are just one day. But I'll have a vision that's longer. So, don't separate don't confuse vision and goals. It's a big mistake. And especially now that the science is out about dopamine receptors, you have this huge vision, you jump up seven stairs, you trip, fall, hit your nose, and most people never come back. You know, win win when you can, even if it's small wins. It's better for the better for the brain. That makes a lot of sense. All right, before I ask my final question, where can these guys find you online? You can go to tailopez.com. You can do Instagram. Um it's my Snapchat if you want to see behind the scenes. It's all I I got at Tai Lopez at almost everything. All verified. Except I got a Facebook account. It's Tai Lopez official. Perfect. All right, final question. What is the impact that you want to have on the world? Oh, man. What's the impact? Okay, I'll give you two answers. One, it's probably narcissistic of me to think that I can really have an impact on the world. So, part of my answer is what the philosopher said, "Let every man sweep his own front porch and the whole world will be clean." So, I guess if I can figure out the puzzle of life for myself, and maybe a few people see something, then they sweep their own front porch, we have a clean world or a cool life. Um so, that's the non-narcissistic side. You want to hear the pre-Amish? Yeah. Pure narcissist? No, not pure narcissist. Um I try to suppress that part. I mean, you know, I call it the tombstone goal. I think you should think about your tombstone and just reverse engineer. So, you go, "What do I want my tombstone to say if I live to age 100?" In order to get that, what did my life have to look like at 90? And at age 90 to get that, what did it have to look like at 80? And you work yourself backwards to today. So, my obituary goal, my my tombstone, I'd like my I'd like my tombstone to say, "Here lies a mad scientist." The world needs more mad scientists. And that are trying new things? Yeah, like I said, check out Mahatma Gandhi, check out Martin Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. But, those were mad scientists. And go through the adventure of life with that little mad scientist twins in your eye. And that's all I got. That's all I got. It's pretty good. Ty, thanks so much for coming on the show. That was fantastic. Guys, this to me is the ultimate tale of somebody who was unhappy with his circumstances, but didn't want to sit around and do nothing about it. He knew exactly what he needed to do and that was to find out the answers. He reaches out to his grandfather and says, "Grandpa, tell me what is the one thing that I need to do, the one book I need to read, the one person I need to talk to that's going to give me the shortcut that I need to get ahead?" And his grandfather thankfully wrote him back and said, "There is no shortcut. You're going to need to find a lot of people to give you a lot of advice if you want to get where you're going to go." And so Ty put himself on a mission to get out and get mentors and long before he had any reason to be able to convince these guys to do it, he did by like he said earlier being willing to work for free, by being willing to do more than anybody else. And in the research, the thing that I found most fascinating is years and years and years after working with his first mentor, he is still singing his praises. And he said that Ty set the bar for every apprentice that he's ever had after and he's still never seen anybody that had the kind of drive and determination that Ty did. And I think that's what marks his cause. He may think of himself as a mad scientist, but what I see is somebody running systematic experiments to find out what works, always being willing to learn, always being willing to fail, learn from that, try something new, get the result, and ultimately you do that on a long enough timeline with a willingness to always learn, grow, and get better, and you get the man that is literally pioneered social media. So, it's really, really incredible. There's so much to learn from him, but you have to be willing to be humble and to look at what you can learn from it. So, that's it, guys. Thank you so much. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe, and until next time my friends, be legendary. Take care. Bye. Thank you so much, girl. Appreciate you coming on. 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