Tai Lopez - How To Become Great

Full transcript: Tai Lopez on London Real

5:18 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr Tai Lopez, who is a millionaire mentor, you’re the entrepreneur, power influencer. You’re an author, you’re a keynote speaker uh, you’re, I think, a messenger of knowledge, and maybe a reluctant guru of some sorts. I don’t know.

5:36 I was watching you yesterday at the Ace Hotel, and, uh, it was fantastic to be there and listen to you talking to everybody you love books. You surround yourself with books. Your book club, I think, is second only to Oprah’s in size. You live with the Amish for two and a half years. Um, it was really interesting being at the Ace Hotel yesterday, where you had packed out the house.

5:57 I want to talk about that stuff. More people are still talking about your episode when you were here four months ago, so, uh, Tai, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having me. It was good seeing you yesterday too. Yeah, no, it was really impressive, and it was just, you know, it was just nice to see you get up there and talk to people you know, in a day where it feels like everyone is trying to kind of be a self-help guru.

6:17 You seem like the guy that doesn’t want to be that guy, and you just want to get information out there, and so I think people really relate to that. And like, I sat back there for two and a half hours, and I was just I was taking notes, um, but I was really getting ready for this talk, but I was also, like, taking notes into everything you said. So, um, it was good stuff. I’d love to talk about all of this stuff, so I’m going to jump in here. You, you like to quote Seneca a lot.

6:40 Who’s the Roman Stoic philosopher and you were talking yesterday about how he was saying that, you know, he had some thoughts about if you focus too much on wealth, and you were talking about your credo, which is the good life, which is health, wealth, love, and happiness, and Seneca said some things about that, and I know you mentor some people, and you were, me, men, how you mentor some guys that are, you know, billionaires, and some guys in London, and one, one guy said he looked at wealth as a scorecard, and you were like, that might not be the healthiest thing, and I was wondering if you could talk about that, and then why you think Seneca is still relevant, and are we too obsessed with wealth? Well, I would say yes and no. I would say so.

7:20 You know, I was talking yesterday about the 25 cognitive biases. Uh, so our brain, when especially when it comes to the conversation about money, one of, of the cognitive biases that really kicks in is either pain avoidance, which is the second most powerful cognitive bias, the scientists say, and then another one is delusion bias. So that’s another, it’s called pain avoiding. Charlie Munger calls it pain avoiding delusion. So when you bring up the subject of money, people generally go from one extreme to the other.

7:53 You know, Aristotle talked about the mean, the middle. That’s where you find the answer. So I don’t know that the world overemphasizes money. I think the world might overemphasize conspicuous consumption, which, you know, the latest research is that money can make you happier. You can buy happiness with money.

8:13 Daniel Kahneman, Princeton, Nobel Prize-winning guys. This isn’t pseudo science saying there’s a marginal, you know, reaction in our brain to wealth. So I talk about this kind of pyramid of, uh, wealth in the world. You have, at the very bottom, Donald Trump debt. Donald Trump said at one point, “I was $9.2 billion in debt.

8:36 I walked past a homeless man and realized that homeless man was $9.2 billion wealthier than me.” So then it goes from there into scarcity. So Kahneman says under $75,000 a year, right? That’s the point, that’s the inflection point, right? And then there’s a marginal return, but it keeps going up between a million, even at 10 million, you will get a bigger return in the happiness zone of your brain than 1 million.

8:58 The thing is, though, and what the researching people sometimes forget, this is, on the way to creating wealth, if you ostracize friends, if you end up lonely, that’s a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward situation. So, uh, when you talk to people, people want to always point to some anecdotal thing. Well, what about this guy that made a lot of money and hurt a lot of people? Well, what does that have to do with anything? There’s a lot of poor people that hurt people too.

9:29 So, you know, in addition to the 25 cognitive biases I talk about, I’m starting to talk a lot about logical fallacies, and so in these logical fallacies, we, it’s called a straw, one of the fallacies is the straw man fallacy, where we make a very poor argument for the opposition, and then we beat it up. So, go, well, you know, oh, you’re just saying money is all that matters, and yeah, nobody’s arguing that. I don’t know one wealthy person that would say, well, my health doesn’t matter.

9:56 I, I could just die uh, and I wouldn’t care. Of course people care about physical health. The problem that each of us face, that you face, that I face, is life is a juggling act, and you can only juggle so many balls. Like Confucius says, the man who chases two rabbits, you know, ends up with none. Uh, but we really have to chase four rabbits.

10:17 You have to chase physical health at the same time as you chase physical, uh, wealth at the same time that you balance, you know, Dunbar’s number. This 150 social connection, 150. The reason our brain, uh, is tuned to this 15 number, this size of a village 75,000 years ago, or 50,000 years ago, is that, uh, and Matt Lieberman talks about this in Social. He… to connect with 150 people. It’s not just you connecting to 150.

10:50 You have to balance and modulate and understand the 150 uh, relationships between each. So your relationship with Brian, but I also have to know how you’re getting along with Maya, and what Maya thinks of you. So 150 relationships is actually 10,000. Okay, you do the permut… yeah, okay. All right, so we got to juggle that act, and then you have to juggle this, pulling together into some level of feeling of fulfillment.

11:19 So, uh, when people oversimplify, I always think of Albert Einstein: you should make things simple, but not simpler than they are. Whenever somebody says, well, the answer is, you know, wealth doesn’t make you happy, well, sorry, that’s too simple of an answer. Right? Right, cuz it will, to a certain extent. So are you a logical guy?

11:39 Because, you know, yesterday you were talking about, you know, things that I remember from my science fair project, and I’m a, I’m a trained engineer, you know, uh, not to drop names, but from MIT, and so I was drilled down this whole research, hypothesize, experiment, analyze results, and rinse and repeat. But you don’t come, like, come off as like a tech guy, but that’s something that you see, as humans, we usually go the other way, which is anecdotal evidence and make decisions based on that. Yeah, because another, another of the cognitive biases is our tendency, as there’s a good article in Tilson Funds, uh, by, it’s a speech I think Munger did at Harvard, where, it’s our superpower, reaction to solving cognitive dissonance.

12:22 So whenever we see, for example, somebody more successful than us, our brain immediately wants to resolve the dissonance. We don’t want to say, maybe I have no idea why they get… we want to resolve it. So how do people resolve it? They go, well, that person cheated, right? Oh, no, no, that person had a lucky break.

12:41 That I… so we’re always solving dis… that’s why uh, religion is such a powerful force, because it resolves cognitive distance. It’s the greatest question of all: what happens after we experience dissolution of the body, as you know, Freud says our pain comes from three areas. First is the dissolution and decay of the body physically. The second one is our, uh, battle with nature, hurricanes, physics, getting hit by a car, and the third is our inner relationships with other other people.

13:17 But we want to solve all the dissonance. When we see somebody that we don’t know, we want to snap judge them. We see someone taller or shorter, or a different amount of melanin in the skin, what do we want to do? We want to go, ah, let me use, let me solve the cognitive distance. What we don’t want to say, and what you must do, and what you learned at MIT is, you have to go, well, let me say it this way.

13:42 When I meet people, I generally know if I would invest in them or not, and this is, I can’t even say it in words. I meet people who, when they are exposed to something they don’t understand, their attitude is… and then I meet other people that go, ah, meaning curiosity. Okay, the world is better now because of a handful of curious people. Some of them are scientists. Some of them are, aren’t.

14:10 Some of them are Martin Luther King Jr. Some of them are people who go, something’s wrong. That’s the first of the seven steps in the scientific method, which is you ask a question. Right, the second one is they’re willing to go, uh, which means the humility to research and ask questions. Then don’t even do that. A lot of people just generalize and go on.

14:31 Most people ask the people, only really do number one. They ask a question, and then they skip past hypothesis, which is number three. They skip to one that doesn’t even exist. I mean, you conclusion. What can we really know?

14:48 I don’t even, I, I talk about this in the 67 steps. I say one of the big problems in the world, in my own brain, let’s not even talk about other people, let’s talk about one of my problems, and I think it’s shared with everybody, is that we, the other way to say this cognitive dissonance is I have a black and white mind. I want to resolve things in a black and white way. If you bring up politics, I want to go, oh no, no, it’s not the liberals. No, that I want to resolve it.

15:16 What I don’t want to say is I have no idea, and I’m willing to spend 18 months open-mindedly trying to figure it out. That, that’s such a, you know, people want to be enlightened. I’m like, that is enlightenment, and it’s provable. Every great thing that we experience, every technology, everything that makes us live longer, all comes out of that mindset, the non-black-and-white mindset. So the word I use now is accurate.

15:45 So if someone comes to me, you know, I know last time I was on the show I got some flak for talking about ayahuasca whether it’s healthy to not use. So what I would say to people is, my opinion is not, you shouldn’t think of it whether it was right or wrong. It’s, am I more accurately describing what makes humans achieve what they want to achieve? My opinion was, and still is, that even if mind-altering things like LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, or any kind of biohacking, uh, is effective, my opinion about what about opportunity cost, when you’re doing that, is there something you could be doing that’s more efficient at getting you what you want?

16:34 So if you want to lose weight, is the place to start with a biohacking idea? Is the best place to start with kettlebells, doing three, or you know, a FitBit or whatever biohacking tool? If you want to biohack your brain, what really works, what’s efficient? because one of the cognitive biases that causes us to make mistakes is Mis waiting, meaning doing the wrong thing, the right thing in the wrong order. For example, you, what makes humans healthy, what could I take away from you right now that would cause instant death?

17:08 We know oxygen. So when you’re trying to be healthy, you have to start at the top. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy, so you start there. What about sleep? Sleep certainly is in the top three or four things.

17:23 Taking a multivitamin is number 98 or 19, but people want to sell you multivitamins cuz it’s harder to sell sleep. So the whole world is mised. Sure, ayahuasca may give you a level of uh enlightenment that you might not. I, I decided I always like to read disconfirming evidence, right? So I TR.

17:44 I was reading uh, I’ve been reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, or one where he talks about, um, this, you know, psychedelics, but I would still contend by evidence who are the people whose ideas changed the world? It’s PE. It’s Stephen Hawking sitting in a wheelchair writing books with his eye starting with first things first, and I think first things first is what messes up, and I think it’s primarily from a consumer world that can make money on multivitamins but can’t make money on telling you go to bed earlier.

18:25 Right, sleep eight or n hours, is see, if I mean, what percentage of human health care cost would go away if people started at the top? Make sure you get enough air. One of the things you got to be doing, enough cardio that you’re breathing enough to breathe in enough air. I mean, I’m no expert on each of these things, but I think every doctor would agree taking a multivitamin will do nothing if you aren’t sleeping eight hours a day. You know, I learned this being on a farm for 10 years under Joel Salatin, uh, for two and a half of those years, then traveling, 51, studying sustainable agriculture and the soil.

19:02 This is a lot of parallels between us and the soil. So if you take the soil to grow anything, the most important thing would be photosynthesis, meaning you need the sun. You take away the sun, doesn’t matter how much compost you put on the soil. No, how much irrigation and fertilizer you put on, no matter how much fish emulsion, nothing grows. So the first thing is, don’t put your plants in the shade.

19:27 Almost nothing grows in the middle of a forest. So there’s an echelon and so what happens, and this is the same thing with health, wealth, love, and happiness. The reason I talk about wealth is wealth is the fuel. In fact, I stopped using the word money. I call them fuel units, and this you can show statistically: people who have more fuel units have more impact on the world, sometimes negatively, but they have the power.

19:52 Their kids are healthier. They’re healthier. They live longer. They have the ability to do more good. You need fuel units.

19:59 Without those fuel units, love will be affected, you know. Read, you know, why you focus on wealth? Because you think it’s a key ingredient to get the others. Yes, okay, but like for example, this guy that was looking at wealth as a scorecard, you immediately identified that that that could be a long-term unhealthy thing to do. Is that because he’s putting all of his eggs in that one, in that one basket, and he needs to look at the other three?

20:24 I think it’s more just about science. So conspicuous consumption, the, if you, so you know, I just started this little Lamborghini. I know. I was about to ask you, you’re the walking paradox and walking conundrum, cuz you talk about the dangerous conspicuous consumption, and Tai just launched a great series by the way, where he’s driving around in his Lamborghini in LA talking about some of your teachings. Yeah.

20:45 Um, so where does that come in? So I’ve had all kinds of cars. I was sleeping on a couch with $47 in my bank account, and I, I started as an entrepreneur years ago, and I saved up enough, and the happiest I’ve ever been on a car when I bought a used Mitsubishi Galant. I remember driving it over to my girlfriend at the time, and going, look at this. It was like a $6,000 car.

21:06 First car, first first car that I bought, really. I had a junky car given to me when I was a little younger, but so I’ve lived with the Amish for two and a half years with a horse and buggy. Right, and you were saying yesterday you learned a lot from those people. Oh yeah, the Amish, or maybe the, the best people I’ve ever met at all. You said you learned something fascinating.

21:26 I was listening to yesterday, and you said that these people value work, as in that is something that’s just like air to them, as in it’s something to be proud of, it’s something to look forward to. You said they punished a little boy by not allowing him to come to the fields, and he was just like, oh man. Yeah, we, you, Joel Salatin used to say, you know, what’s wrong in the world? People punish their kids. While you have to do the dishes for a week.

21:47 What did you just once again, what neural pathways have being rewired by that one discipline? Work equals pain. You know why education system doesn’t work? Now it has nothing to do with the points that people bring up. In my opinion, the reason education system doesn’t work, they forgot about the 25 cognitive biases.

22:09 They lead instead of leading with reward, they lead with pain. Tests. Oh, come back to school after summer’s a lot of reward. You do whatever you want. All the kids then come to school, and we’re going to force you to sit in classes you don’t care about.

22:26 We’re going to take those classes and take all the fun out of them by having exams and quizzes and tests. You can’t lead with pain. The average person, once they leave high school or college, doesn’t read a book. I forget, I read the stat, doesn’t read a book again for 12 months. Now, if you show somebody, let’s say this Lamborghini.

22:46 If I pull up somewhere, you know, so once in a while kids will come up and say, oh, how’d you get this car? If I go read this book, and I pull out Peter Drucker’s book, man, they’re going to read that book because I led with reward. Right, so you reward, as in, look at what you can get potentially. You can do, be like, lead with the endgame, right? All of life, and you know, you have to be persuasive, not only with other humans.

23:11 I sometimes wonder, what’s the greatest social skill? I would say it’s to be persuasive, not to be manipulative, cuz persuasion, taken for negative purposes, obviously, manipulation. But that’s why I’m so big on understanding the 25 cognitive biases, because the first person you must persuade is yourself. You know, people, it’s a New Year’s, so the average person, what is it, quits their New Year’s resolution within 18 days or something, days. Okay, I, you read different.

23:37 I’ve seen it in the gym cuz they, most people stop for 3 weeks, four weeks. Yeah, yeah, so why? Well, most people, you’re leading with the pain. I’m going to do more crunches. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dad, the genius dad of all dads, son Arnold’s 5 years old, before you can eat breakfast, every day, three push-ups.

23:55 Arnold’s brain is not the brain that you and I have when it comes to, uh, physical, you know, working out, and that’s why we don’t look as good as him when, is prime so his dad led with the reward. His brain now associates, and for years and decades and maybe even his whole life, has led with, every time workout is the greatest thing I can ever do. And so the Amish, uh, the greatest compliment you even hear the word shafa which in German, the Amish speak German, means worker.

24:24 So if a boy goes to wants to marry a girl, and you know he asked the dad permission. You don’t really have to ask permission all much, but they kind of do sometimes. First thing that dad’s going to talk about among his family is, well, you’ll know if you’re the girl that your, your dad gives you the blessing, or your parents give you the blessing. If they go, oh yeah, he’s a shafa. It’s like that, the worker, the man that’s the pinnacle of success.

24:48 So it’s in the language, which is the most subconscious in the language. It’s powerful. So for us, uh, you know, the greatest quote of last year, I collect quotes. I’ve been collecting quotes since I was 2016. Maybe the best quote I’ve ever heard in my life it’s not as fancy, it’s not as catchy.

25:05 It’s based, I’ve kind of refined it a little bit, my own, but Steven Pinker, the Harvard, yeah, uh, professor. We had him here. He was a fascinating guy. Yeah, and, and he, and my modified version is, you and I, Brian, have a perfect brain. Everything fires perfectly, the only problem, it fires perfectly for a world that hasn’t existed for 75,000 years.

25:32 So all our fears make sense when there’s, you know, saber-tooth tigers outside, when there’s no electricity, when there’s scarcity in the world, right? And the same with our eating habits. All our eating if you could design your own children now, you would remove the hunter-gatherer first urge in food, which is to seek out honey. You know, Dr David Buss says, what’s from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Aché in Paraguay, to any tribe that he studied, they look for honey because it’s a quick source of carbohydrate, you know, energy.

26:09 So we have a perfect brain for a world where you only can find honey every six months, cuz it’s so scarce. So if you could make your children, you would rewire every part of their brain. Right? And the core of what you really do is you try to deconstruct the human brain and just try to figure out what we’re dealing with, and then try to, uh, try to understand it. What it is, right?

26:29 That’s kind of what the cognitive biases are about. Well, what I try to do, because I’m not as smart as Steven Pinker or Charlie Munger, I, if I would be remembered for anything, it’s just a person that got people thinking about great ideas from experts. I’m no expert in everything, and in many ways I’m not an expert in that much, but I do know how to read. I do have the ability, maybe, to boil things down a little bit, easy, but really I want to be a catalyst.

26:56 Go read, you know. Sometimes people argue with me. I’m like, great, go read Steven Pinker yourself, man. Go read Charlie Munger. I didn’t make a billion dollars, Charlie.

27:06 I made some money in my day, but I didn’t make a billion dollars. Let me ask you about another Tai Lopez paradox. Um, Joel Salatin, one of your mentors, said those who can’t do, teach. Yes, and now you’re teaching. Yes, but I’m not really a teacher.

27:17 Still, what? So what are you? That’s what’s fascinating about your I’m a businessman. I like being in the trenches. I bought two companies this year.

27:24 I like direct response. I like subscription- based business online. I’ve always been a B2C guy, so most of the businesses I have my hand in, various businesses, some as, you know, the primary lead, maybe the CEO, but other times now just as a, um, board member, advisor. Putting, so, yeah, Joel Salatin used to say, he, the reason, you know, sometimes people like, I haven’t heard of you, Tai, that’s because I was in the trenches for a long time, and I never, and I also came from a group of mentors that poo-pooed people that were just, um, teachers.

27:57 You know, he used to say, if you can’t teach, I mean, if you can’t do, teach. If you can’t teach, administrate. That was his, uh, line. So I don’t know if I want to be a teacher, but you’re producing lots of content. I mean, I look, now you got webinars every day.

28:09 You do videos from your, from your home with your books. You got the book club. I mean, you produce a lot of content, because I’ll tell you why, and you know, we live in an abundant world, and this is one of the big things. We have a brain that still lives in a scarce world. Right?

28:25 Okay. By the way, going back to your very first question, and the reason most people have such an abrasive topic to talk about money, it’s because people have the perfect brain to be skeptical about money, because money represents, in some level, scarcity. Right? The definition of money is scarce resources in demand. Scarce resources okay.

28:46 Yeah, I’ve asked every professor that I’ve ever met, and that’s the best I could get a common agreement on: in demand, scarce resources. That’s why gold is more valuable than iron, because there’s much less of it in the world, and it’s in demand for its somewhat unnecessary reasons, but uh, when it comes to money, at its core, if you printed too much money and made it not scarce, you would have mass inflation. Like when my grandma was young, she was born in 1918, Germany, post World War I, and, uh, they used to get, her dad was a doctor, would be paid in wheelbarrows of money that weren’t worth anything.

29:24 You could burn them in the fireplace, she said. So we always going to have… scarce. Whenever you talk about something scarce, the 75,000-year-old primal brain in us gets angry. Why does that person… but it’s not that way anymore. There’s more wealth being created now.

29:41 It’s unbelievable, right? Cuz our concept with wealth has changed. I mean, we were talking about Jared Diamond’s book, and I had him on the show. You know, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and he was saying in Papua New Guinea, when you get a lot of money, he said everyone comes over and moves in with you. And so he’s like, that’s the last still happens sometimes.

29:58 That still happens. He was saying that’s the last thing people want, because everyone comes over and wants it and you have to share. So, well, now what I think happens is you can go out and make your own. You know, I tell people, if you want to listen to one thing I have to say about money, the bar is so low, the skill level is so low in the world right now. Even from those, you know, I’m lucky enough now to spend a lot of time, either as friends or business partners, with some of the most successful business people.

30:28 In fact, right before I came here, I was with a guy who, just in his 30s, just sold his company for 400 million, or something, or, actually, more, but he cashed out that much, so far. Uh, he’s sharp. There’s not that many sharp people, and even the sharpest of the sharp are still tricked and duded by their own brain. It’s almost impossible, but I, I think of it this way. There’s a huge stallion horse running around a room.

30:57 If you ever been around a stallion horse, they will kill you. They are violent. If you stay in that room long enough, in the corner, cowering, that horse will eventually come around and kick you, pick you up. Horses will pick you up by the mouth and throw you on the ground. You, there’s only one safe place.

31:14 That’s to throw a harness or a bridle and jump on that horse and harness it. So each of the cognitive biases, and instead of having pain and anger and delusion about wealth, when you see somebody wealthy, that guy did something wrong. Oh, why is that guy talking about why? Not go look yourself straight in the eye. Look yourself in the mirror and go, I did something wrong in my life.

31:40 That person did something I wasn’t willing to do. Then you take the pain, instead of pain turning into delusion or anger. You go, never again. You know, when I was sleeping on a couch with 47 bucks in my bank account. I remember $47.

31:58 I had no college degree, uh, I had lost touch with almost all of my friends. I had a few skills: milking cows, riding horses from the Amish. I read a book, Tony Robbins’ line, and he says, when you fail, when you succeed, you party, and when you fail, you ponder. But all great things come from pondering, winter, spring, summer, fall. That’s all life is, I think.

32:25 Life, I use the, drer time frame, 18-month cycles. I think when you look yourself straight in the eye, honestly, and you never come out a winner until, honestly, you face the pain, you jump on the back of the horse instead of it kicking you in the corner. You ride that horse right up the triangle, right out of debt into scarcity and right into financial independence, maybe to prosperity. And some people, not everybody needs to be a millionaire, a billionaire, but everybody can have enough in the world.

32:55 Everybody can have enough. And the problem is, and the message to get there, people don’t believe, cuz it sounds fishy. You have to spend your way wealthy. Right? That’s what people don’t get.

33:07 Let’s talk about that. This is the abundance versus scarcity. It doesn’t get talked about that much, but it’s a concept that’s been thrown out there before, but not in this way. There’s one, you know, there’s various religions that talk about tithing, your way rich, and things like this. And uh, I’ll put it this way.

33:25 I believe you should just run everything, experience. You know, I read a book a day, and I tell people read more. People sometimes argue with me, and I say, before you argue with me, did you ever try this as an experiment? You’re coming from the black and white mind. You’re sure I’m wrong.

33:38 You’re trying to solve the cognitive dissonance. Why don’t you try what I’m saying? Worst case, you’ll have a few books on your bookshelf, unread, and what will happen when you run enough experiments, you’ll be like Thomas Edison, who died one of the most important people in history with a thousand patents, that we, some of which are the basis of all the things we’re using right now, the video camera. Right? He said, sometimes it took me a thousand experiments to get a patent.

34:05 A thousand experiments times a thousand patents is a million experiments. You, Brian, you run a million experiments in your business, you will be a wealthy man. Tai, you run a million, you’ll have all the money you need. You don’t need everything. So I’ve run this experiment.

34:23 Now, my experience alone isn’t enough to prove something. It’s too anecdotal, but one thing you can start with is, proceed with logic. We have a, everybody, even the dumbest person, has an incredibly powerful brain, more powerful than supercomputers. so what can you do with money? The average person in the United States, I read, saves about $2 out of every hundred they make.

34:48 So they’re spending. So there’s only a couple things you can spend money on. Most people I know spend more than they make. Yeah, but even then, they’re spending on, they’re spending on credit cards, so there’s still a SP, there’s, it’s a postponed spending of someone else’s money. Obviously the payback’s postponed.

35:06 So you can save your money to find abundance. What’s the problem with saving? Well, if you put your money under a mattress, the economy spends your money for you in the form of inflation and devaluation of your currency at the rate of 3 to 4%. That’s why Will Durant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, says no wise person ever saves to be wealthy. Now let me put a big caveat, a big disclaimer: you must save, because you must save, as John Wooden says, for the rainy day.

35:39 There is a purpose for just saving, either under a mattress, probably not the safe place, but if you put it in a bank. When you put your money in the bank, what do they pay you now? 1%. Then they spend your money in the form of using your cash and they lend it out at seven or 8%, or whatever. When you put your money and get 1% in savings, the economy is still spending that 3%, let’s say, in inflation.

36:03 You’re still losing 2%. So you still, money’s being spent. So the unarguable fact is that only spending creates wealth, but it doesn’t always create wealth for you. Right? So when you put it in the bank, it doesn’t create wealth for you.

36:19 Your wealth is devalued. Now you could then say, I’ll invest in the stock market, and there’s some level there. The average return of the average investor is probably about 6%. When you subtract fees and, SE, on over time, your, that, back down to 5%. You don’t invest in the stock market?

36:40 I take, oh, I don’t. It’s not that I don’t think of it black and white like that, right? Okay, people black and white. I say, think about it this way. Every hammer you have is great as long as you’re only confronted with nails.

36:53 Second you get confronted with screws or bolts, that hammer will become your worst ally. So when people, black and white, say no, it’s the stock market that creates wealth. Well, I say, does it really? Anyone on the Forbes list from trading stocks? The answer is nobody, not at the top.

37:08 There’s people that take controlling interest of stocks. There’s occasional arbitrage. George Soros, people, but there’s no people getting wealthy in their 401(k). You can save, but there’s not wealth created. There’s not prosperity, and how do you live in abundance?

37:24 Then, well, then you move to the second thing people do with your money, or you can do with your money, is you can spend it on RRD spending, I call it, okay, which is restaurant and depreciating things. So people pay rent, so you’re spending, and wealth is being created, but it’s for the landlord. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have rent, because sometimes it makes sense mathematically, but never get it twisted up in your mind in delusion that you’re creating wealth for somebody.

37:50 It might be a bank or the landowner. Or, so you can do RRD. You can spend on food. Is RRD, even though it’s a necessary restaurant. Appreciate the value of the food you buy drops the second you walk out of the grocery store, and cars, and, uh, even though I got the Lamborghini, the value goes up because it’s used for a business purpose.

38:12 It will create much more value than so what. Everybody should be looking for in life is what a good investor looks for: 10x on their money, you know, 10x in 7 to 10 years. Food obviously keeps you alive, but again, you’re making, I just read a book on Tyson Foods creating wealth for other people. Tyson’s, a well, Monsanto, IBP, these big food packers, and big, they’re make. So that leaves us with the final question.

38:41 If savings doesn’t work and RRD, wealth spending, I mean, spending only creates wealth for others, you’re only left with one. I believe, and this is not black and white, this is statistical. Do the odds. What if you invest in yourself? Now you spoke of Seneca in his book On the Shortness of Life.

39:03 This is the resolution, the conclusion of that book. Most people never finish the whole book, but in the last chapter he says you can annex the wisdom and knowledge and experience of the world’s greatest people. Annex, meaning suck it like a vacuum into you, he said. And this is the great… this is a, a, miss, a missed saying in that book. I’ve never heard anyone quote it.

39:26 He said it’s as if they lived for you. So I heard a Bill Gates talk. Bill Gates said, sometimes I like to imagine that the whole world exists for me, and then he goes, and if it does, it’s going pretty good so far. See, that’s an abundant man. He realized abundance, and what he did is what Seneca said: annex the world for you.

39:51 So you’re watching this, if I have any good point, annex it for yourself. That’s doubling down, investing in yourself, and all wealth comes from men and women who annexed the knowledge, wisdom, and experience of the ages of this world’s most influential, intelligent, uh, uh, whatever adjective you want to use, right, into their own brain. So I tell people, if you make a 100 grand, drop $30,000 into your own brain. Now everybody wants stuff for free. YouTube’s good, it’s for free, but sometimes you get what you pay for.

40:38 So when I made the first business I ever did was with Joel Salatin, 50 uh, I don’t think it was 50/50. I owned 20% or something. He put up the cash. I put up the work. I said, I’ll work a farm came for sale near Joel’s, Duff Brown, and Joel, I overheard him talking to Duff, who said, I’ll rent you my farm for free.

40:57 I just want cattle and your sustainable agriculture and grass-fed beef cows there. And Joel said, sorry, Duff, I don’t have anyone to do it. I don’t have any time. And I said that night at dinner, I live with Joel for two years. I said, Joel, I’ll do it.

41:10 I was 18, I think. I’ll do it. And he said, well, Tai, you work for me from 5:00 in the morning, and you don’t finish until 6:00 at night. I said, don’t worry, I’ll keep doing that, 7 days a week for you, and then I’ll get in my car, drive 45 minutes to that farm, and I’ll put a flashlight helmet on and I’ll take care of the cows. Now, Joel is a man who bootstrapped and came from nothing, so he likes it.

41:35 By the way, if you’re looking for a mentor, I got the best advice for you. People ask me how to get to a mentor. You have to invite and remind the mentor of what they were like when they were your age. People love themselves, the greatest reward. So Joel Salatin, you know, I’m not as great of a person as Joel, but he saw a twinkle in my eye and he said, okay, deal.

41:56 And for nine months I did that, and we sold the cattle at a profit, and my cut, I, for, I used to think it was 15 grand, but I just saw, I was just at Jes for Thanksgiving, and he said no to 12 grand. I took that 12 grand, and I spent it traveling. I’ve been to 51 countries. I went all around the world. I went to Australia.

42:15 I met a famous guy who had been in permaculture named Bill Mollison, on a small island of Tasmania, and I drove, I spent all my money. I ran out of money in New Zealand. But there’s two things I’ve learned, that in my experiments, that you can’t go poor doing one. I don’t think you can go poor giving to charity. I’ve tried it.

42:34 I just, I, I tell my CFO, I’m like, let’s give a little bit more. You know, I never tell people the amount. I think you should do it inconspicuously. You should hide it, and you can’t get poor giving to charity. I’ve tested it.

42:45 The more I put the percentage up, the more you get back. It’s, I don’t know why. I think, I don’t know if it’s some esoteric thing. I think it could just be in a world of 7.3 billion people with tremendous social connection that eventually the word gets out and doors open up for you. But my CFO was like, ah, we shouldn’t do this much, and then the next month I’m like, the best month we ever had.

43:08 So that’s one, but second, I am convinced you could make a 100 grand, go live at your parents’ and take 60 grand and invest it in your own brain, in the form of books, traveling, to mentors, courses, seminars, every, everything, anything. Oh, you have a seminar? Do you, Donald Trump, you do a real estate seminar? Oh, the upgraded version is 50 grand. See, most people go, he’s trying to sell me on something.

43:40 I’ve bought everything. I’ve spent, I have not totaled it up, but I’m sure it’s millions, not once have I felt ripped off, because if you have the ability, there’s a great book by Steven Johnson called Where Good Ideas Come From. He talks about why Bill Gates goes on a reading vacation. The mass accumulation of knowledge in your brain creates what I call… he doesn’t call this a pinball effect. The ideas start bouncing off each other, so the difference between one book, reading one book in a month, and reading 10 in a day would not be, or one in a day and 10 in a day, is not 10 times more knowledge.

44:19 It’s an exponential number, right? In fact, James Altucher calls it idea sex. He calls it idea sex. Okay, well, there, where good ideas come from, there’s actual science. A city that’s, uh, uh, 10 times larger than another city will have 50 times more innovation, right?

44:36 It’s, I think it’s called the, not the 1010 R. There’s, there’s a, there’s a, there’s actual mathematical algorithm that someone came up with, so uh, I don’t think it’s possible, but people won’t do it. Okay, so they won’t invest in themselves, and they’ll save. How does that tie into abundance? Does that tie into the saving versus, that’s the third one?

44:55 Okay, so you, the only person on planet Earth that has 100% of your DNA is either your identical twin, which most of us don’t have. Even if you have an identical twin, as you age, like Dr Chiron, mm, talks about, identical twins usually look identical when they’re young, but when they’re 40 they don’t look as, uh, as similar anymore, because your DNA changes with environmental stressors. So even, I nobody has 100% of your genes but you. Okay. That means who else is going to create wealth for you?

45:29 People are still waiting for the government. They’re waiting for a university. Beware of perverse incentives, as Charlie Munger says. The only person completely invested in your own wealth or in health, wealth, love, and… is you, right? And you’re saying invest in yourself in every way, and you’re not going to waste that money.

45:50 Even I don’t think you can go, you can, cuz something will happen for you by that knowledge, or taking that course, or you give SP, all $12,000. I run out of money. I’m in New Zealand. Okay. I have to shear sheep, by the way.

46:04 I’ve done many jobs, from milking cows. Nothing is harder than shear sheep. There’s a saying in Australia: never mess with a sheep. She, you’ll always end up on the bottom in a fight. They will throw you on.

46:16 They’re strongest guys you’ve ever met. So I get there. You, I just lived with the Amish for two years, I thought I could, and Joel Salatin’s a work beast. I’m like, I can handle anything. I go sheep shearing.

46:25 It was a nightmare. Hardest job I’ve ever got. You’ve got to wrestle those sheep, and you start at 5 in the morning. I’ve seen fast… I was with some of the best, fastest guys in the world, and, uh, they work 50 minutes straight, take 10-minute breaks, and they do these sets, not, and then they go out and drink all night, and then they they sleep three hours.

46:44 And it’s weird, but I saved up enough money to get out of New Zealand. But before I did, one of the farms we were shearing on, there’s a farmer introducing me to a guy who had probably one of the wealthier guys in New Zealand, named uh, Gary Towns, Harvard MBA. And I somehow bump into this guy, and I say, he said, what are you doing down here? I said, I spent all my money trying to find answers around the world, and I was in Australia, and then Bill Mollison and I ended up here, and I ran out of money, and he said, come to dinner with me and my wife.

47:13 So I end up at his house, stay with me, because I believe he was a man who had risen from nothing. He saw a twinkle and said, that guy reminds me of me. Gary Towns, and I end up going back to the US. Next company I was going, I took one semester, one quarter of college, NC State. So I’m there and I’m struggling.

47:34 I’m going, how do people go to college? I had a job at a coffee shop or something. You make $8 an hour. You know, your paychecks every two weeks, $200, after, I’m like, woo. So I started a little consulting company, and, uh, somehow Gary Towns heard about it, and he wrote me an email: hey, Tai, I want to come buy land in the United States.

47:54 Will you do a, we do a little report for me, where I should buy land, you’ve been around? I said okay. One day I wrote it. He said, I’ll pay you my normal consultant fee. I sent him an email.

48:05 He wired me $10,000. See, that’s abundance. I don’t believe you have to think of it in some hippie, some karmic way. I, it’s, there’s 7.3 billion people. How can the world not be impressed by you doing something out of the ordinary?

48:23 What is the difference when you live your life within scarcity or abundance? Is it just a mentality of you expecting things were going to happen, so you weren’t worried when you run out of money in New Zealand? Or, well, you shouldn’t be. Again, don’t be extreme. You, you look, I was just speaking at USC.

48:38 I did a UN talk there for their entrepreneurs. 80 kids came up to me when I was done. You know, I was a big group come up to me. I did an informal poll: how many of you are sure? I had given my talk on the Oian destiny, the five hints, how to find out what you should be doing.

48:56 Of the 80 kids, one kid, as I kind of probed, I felt, and he felt actually knew what he was doing. He said, I want to be a lobbyist, so I’m going to law degree. Like it was all mapped out. It was a fixed path. The quickest way between two points is a straight line.

49:13 He was going on a straight line. He was efficient. I was like, this guy is doing it right. The other 79 kids, no idea. One kid came up, the worst of them, said, I’ve changed majors three times in my first two months there.

49:24 I said, this is going to be an expensive mistake. He said, yeah, my parents couldn’t get, I didn’t get a scholarship. It’s 260, not 3,000. So here’s the thing: that’s not investing in your, you can go broke getting a four-year degree in something you’ll never use. No, I don’t use the word education anymore.

49:43 I said, double down on your brain. For some people it’ll be a college degree, and for other people it’ll be a trip to New Zealand, and for other people it’ll be a stack of books. I spend 30, 40, 50,000 bucks a year on books. I buy every book now. People might go, well, you can’t read them all.

50:02 Well, I’ll tell you what. If an investor ever walks in your house and he sees 700 books on business, what do, who thinks going to have the easiest conversation? You want to invest in my business? I mean, who would you want to invest in? So even if you don’t read all the books, that’s why I say it’s this never-ending upward spiral.

50:20 When you invest in yourself, it’s new social connections, it’s new neural connections in your brain, and it’s some level of, uh, telling the world, socially, I’m going places. People want to attach. It’s one of the most cognitive reward biases. We want to attach ourselves with people that have the twinkle in the eye. So I can tell people, I’m like, look, everything.

50:44 Now, when people hear this, they go, no, Tai, you’re trying to sell something. Let’s say they’re right. What if what I sell you is worth 10 times what I sell it at? Then you’d be a fool to say no. You know, I’m, I’m high.

51:03 I’m one of the higher-paid consultants in the world for stuff. You know, I, I don’t like to do it that much, cuz I don’t. If I charge someone a million bucks, but I make them $10 million more that they wouldn’t have made. And someone’s going to bring up that I’m selling something. Who cares if I’m selling something?

51:22 You know, there’s four types, three types of people, according to Richard Dawkins. There’s, uh, and this is not just humans, this is all, by most mammals or in birds, you have uh, cheaters, suckers. But then you have grudges. Okay, see, grudges exist for an evolutionary purpose. So all those people listening that are always suspicious, I, I’m actually trademarking my own personality typing system.

51:50 It’s a real simple one that I use. It’s called Pace, P-A-C-E: practical, action, social, emotional. So I think about 25% of all people are suspicious of everything. They’re very fear-based, because in the last 100,000 years Homo sapiens have been on the planet approximately, it served a purpose during the bubonic plague to have somebody who was neurotic about germs and kept to themselves. They survived.

52:13 We all have what I call the whisper of 10,000 generations of our great great great great great great grandparents, who some of them adopted a strategy of being a… doesn’t mean it works in the world. Now, what are you scared of? People are like, I’m scared to quit my job. Well, so with Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, though, had harnessed the stallion in his brain and gotten on the horse, and wasn’t kicked around.

52:39 And he did the math. Descartes said the only thing we can know. He did that thought experiment. He threw out anything that he could possibly be in doubt, and he said the only thing I was left with was math. This is what I can know for sure.

52:51 So Jeff Bezos was a smart guy. He had a cushy job making a couple hundred grand, a book, The Everything Store. He says, yeah, I’m listening to it right now. He was at D.E. Shaw, which is, you know, Shaw, making a couple hundred grand, I think, in the ’90s.

53:05 Yeah, there’s a lot of money. He does it. He says, what do I really have to fear? See, most people, that’s, if you lose that job, it’s the end of the world, because they’re living in a world where there’s saber-tooth tigers and no refrigeration, right? And scarcity mentality too.

53:20 Well, that’s the scarcity. So our scarce brain is perfect, but not perfect for a world we live in now. So he said he did the math, and he said, well, what if I just quit my job? Potentially I lose the 200 grand. I can always come back to a job.

53:34 I, I think he borrowed 70 grand from his parents, yeah, something like that. So I’m 270 in, but what’s the upside? It’s, I call it the RR formula of making decisions: risk, return. So the R, the reward side was, well, we know now $38 billion net worth, but even if he failed, he said, I would eliminate the, the fear of regret that I’d have for the rest of my life if I never. So is a man out of abundance right, abundance.

53:59 He said there’s no way I can lose. If I lose, I’ve gotten rid of regret. If the company fails, if I win, I have $38 billion. How can a man lose? You know, five years old, you would have bet on Jeff Bezos.

54:12 You read that when he was five. That kid stood out. So everybody watching, speaking to myself, preaching to myself, be the person you’d want to invest in. I want to meet, you know, I don’t want to change. I teach, but I don’t really care if I influence a billion people.

54:31 I’m happy. I like the movie 300. You give me 300 people that think like Jeff Bezos, will take over the world. That’s the only solution. You think government’s going to solve no hund.

54:43 There’s only two people that really care about you in life. Number one is yourself. Number two is your allies. You have two types of allies. You have genetic allies.

54:53 Your mom would jump in front of a car for you, not because she loves you, and this people get mad about this. Sure, she feels, at a conscious level, love, but as Freud says, the mind is like an iceberg, 90% is below the subconscious. Your mom sees 50% of her DNA at stake, and if she can make a better bet, cuz she’s old and you’re younger, she’ll bet on that 50% DNA that’s young, better than her 100%. So you have the genetic allies, family. But you also have, it’s not love, it’s, it’s self-interest.

55:25 They’re doing I, me. It’s a semantical point, right? So I, some people want to argue, no, no, no, that’s real love. Okay, semantics. You know, like Wittgenstein talked about words, if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand what he’d say, right?

55:39 So semantics, I hate semantic conversations, but when it comes to, uh, your other allies, who in many ways will be better allies for you than family. My grandfather was a psychoanalyst, came from Germany, fled world to it. He said, used to tell my grandma, parents are often the worst thing for their children, and there’s a lot of conflict of interest if you have siblings, and so on. We all experienced it, maybe some haven’t, uh, but the other type of allies are people who are just that allied with your interest.

56:12 So for me, you give me 300 people that are allies with my type of mentality, that’s all I need. That’s all anybody needs. You need allies, and I’d rather have abundant allies, like Alexander the Great says. There’s only two types of people in the world: one conquers their fear, and the second doesn’t and suffers and dies. We all die, but one suffers along the way.

56:34 I like the Jeff Bezos. I like the Oprah. Oprah said, yeah, I grew up with people that didn’t have my… even though they were family, sexually abused, tremendous, pro-poverty. Of course the government didn’t care about her. The government’s run by humans that don’t care.

56:50 They care about themselves and their allies. She rose up out of that. She found two mentors, two allies, eyes. She grew into one of the most influential people in history. Abundant.

57:02 Tell her, try to tell her the world’s scarce now. You might say the pain avoiding delusion in us all. So, well, just Oprah could do that. She got lucky. Well, like, uh, Jim Collins says, you know, the great researcher here, Good to Great, and all these books.

57:17 He says he did the math on the companies that have made it. He doesn’t find luck except for one area. The one area the successful people find luck in, according to Jim Collins, is who you bump into. Social interactions. Luckiest thing ever happened to me.

57:38 Instead of going to college, 1819, Joel Salatin bumps in. But how do you increase your luck? Because people go, well, then how do I find a mentor? How do I find a billionaire mentor? Multi, be abundant, live abundantly, go do things.

57:51 You have to remind them of them at your age. And then one of the cognitive biases is called, and fairness. This is one of the 25 biases. Not many people know what con and fairness means. Is it’s the reason we stand in line.

58:03 If you’re watching this and you’re a 6’4″ guy, you’re a big strong guy, and you go to a Starbucks, and there’s a little old grandma in front of you. You don’t cut in front of her. You could, you’re stronger, but Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, talked about this ethics that’s within us, and what that says is it’s not fair for me to jump in front of her. So the reason mentors, and there’s multiple reasons that you’ll find key people that’ll be allies with you at the mentor level, and one of them is con and fairness.

58:33 Well, I got some breaks. That person reminds me of what I was like before I had a break. Let me lend a hand, and that’s a powerful cog of bias that will allow you to gain access. Yeah, I didn’t realize it until I got a little bit older, and then I saw the younger guys that kind of gave me that twinkle, and I was like, I got it now. I understand, cuz I didn’t realize when I was younger, I didn’t understand the cognitive bias.

58:55 I was like, why would this big media mogul take time out of his day to help me? There’s no obvious, you know, impact for him, but it’s that, but you had to be, you know, in the 67 steps. It’s this 67. It takes, University College London says it takes 66 days to change a habit. I added one for good luck, and I recorded 67 videos, one a day, for IED.

59:16 I started these all. I always, these start these all to train the CEOs of the companies that I buy. I want to install my own CEOs and staff and stuff, so I built this for them, cuz I’ve seen 67 steps and I’m always curious about it, cuz you, you can’t get a lot of information about, like, I don’t even know what it’s about. I mean, I didn’t know it was 67 days until you told me, and I didn’t know that was one more than the number of days to, I, like, I didn’t.

59:38 Like one of my CEOs was like, don’t call it 66, it sounds too much like the devil, 666. So okay, I’ll do six, my superstitious CEO. So I did six. So one of them, the first one is the worth a damn factor. You know, you want to know why you don’t have what you, you have it’s because, as Charlie Munger says, to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.

1:00:04 The world’s not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people, or as Jim Rohn says, the world doesn’t respond to need, the world responds to seed. If you’re a farmer standing in the field in October, waiting, looking, and going, I’m hungry, there’s no corn here, and you ask him, did you plant a seed in April? And he’s like, no, but I am hungry now. You go, Mother Nature is the teacher of last resort. She is the [expletive] you don’t want to learn from.

1:00:32 Mother Nature will leave you to starve and eradicate your genes if you don’t believe that, and you believe in karma. Explain the Neanderthals. They’re all gone. There was no karma. So what you have to do, nature is the horse in your head.

1:00:46 You have to get on the horse, harness the horse, and when you’re on the horse, you are safe, and nature will work on your behalf. So the man who plants a thousand experiments dies with a thousand patents, Thomas Edison, right? You tweeted something recently, and you said the reason most people are broke is they aren’t really good at anything in demand, and you said, yeah, I get a lot of stick for that. Is that kind of what you’re saying here, as in, you’re not providing value, so you shouldn’t reap the value?

1:01:14 Yeah, well, this is a controversial one. It’s nuanced. I won’t have time to talk about it completely here, but when people lament somebody’s wealth and point, pointed out as a flaw, let’s say Bill Gates, he’s a controversial person. I say, well, what is money really to me? Money, as I said, met, represents scarce and demand resources, but it’s also reciprocal altruism.

1:01:39 That’s what Richard Dawkins talks about, right? So maybe Bill Gates just helped more people, and in reciprocal, they gave him what they had, was their money, right? So he’s, I, somebody who’s poor it, dep, Mother Teresa was poor, cuz she took a vow of poverty, and she certainly was wealthy in life and successful, so that, but she did raise what, $50 to $100 million. She did create reciprocal value. So when I meet people who don’t create reciprocal value, usually they don’t have any money either.

1:02:17 Now, there’s exceptions. There’s people who cheat to get their money, and they didn’t create. People that inherit the money, but, you know, for the first time in history, Forbes list has more self-made people than inheritance. See, the world’s getting more abundant. We’re still stuck, and, you know, we’re, we’re stuck in a cave, and it’s, and the world’s even progressing, going, not that many cheaters are at the top.

1:02:42 Mark Zuckerberg didn’t cheat. Oprah didn’t cheat. It’s, it’s like, what world are we still dragged back into? Let’s talk about Zuckerberg really quick, cuz you mentioned him yesterday, and a lot of people hear the Zuckerberg phenomenon, they hear his network worth. What is it that’s something, 33 billion?

1:02:58 Um, and they say, oh, well, if I’m going to do something, it’s got to be that idea. And you told everyone in the audience last night, you’re like, who started a business here? And who wants to, people raising their hand, and you’re like, start one today. Start something. Do something.

1:03:11 You know it. And so you said, don’t try to start the Facebook idea. Start something else first. Well, you could even follow. Well, so there’s two types of people, uh, when it comes to this question.

1:03:23 There’s two modalities that I find. There’s pis and IPS. I want to talk about this. Yeah, so Mark Zuckerberg is an IP. What are those?

1:03:32 What do those stand for, those initials? So Pi is a patiently impatient person, patiently impatient. You don’t want to be a pi. The whole world’s full of pis. Here’s what a pi does Yeah, they tell you about their 10-year goals, but as Seneca the philosopher says, in your fears you act as if you’re mortal, but in your desires you act immortal.

1:03:53 So are you a mortal? How do you know you have 10 years? Now, that’s not to say you can’t think for the long haul. There’s certainly, but I’m saying if you’re fat in August, lose weight in August. Don’t tell me about your New Year’s resolutions.

1:04:08 In fact, you know, I meet a lot. I’m thinking of, I’m always tempted to start a talent agency. I live in Hollywood, and a girl came the other day and came with some people, and she saw I have a Steinway piano, and she walked over to it and said, “You mind if I play, Tai? I want to show you something.” She sat down.

1:04:24 One of the most talented people I’ve ever been around, on the piano, young, 1920 saying, I was like, this girl could be a rock star. And I asked her, do you take piano? How many hours I say, how many hours a day did you already practice? Cuz it was like 2:00 in the afternoon. She said, I I didn’t today.

1:04:40 And I wrote her off. I don’t, it’s bad odds for me. She may be the next lady go I don’t want to bet on her, right? I think it’s bad. Your life is too short to PI, right?

1:04:49 So she’s patiently impatient. She’s waiting. She’s patiently waiting and setting a goal out here and then what happens is when someone like that starts, think about a New Year’s resolution: okay, okay, it’s December, I’m fat no, I’m gonna wait till January. So you’re, you’re patient on the goal. Then when you finally get to it, you only stick to it for 18 days.

1:05:09 Okay, so you’re impatient. I don’t, I did three push-ups. Where, why, why am I still fat? My mom used to always say people spend 20 years getting unhealthy and then in 20 days they expect to be healthy. Your metabolism doesn’t adjust that fast, so they’re impatient.

1:05:23 They won’t stick but now you take conquerors, both good ones and bad ones. Let’s Alexander the Great, right? We don’t live in that world anymore, of, of physical, you know, war. But boy, he attacked that city, Tyre. That was one of his big campaigns.

1:05:41 He showed up and he said, uh, surrender or I will conquer you. He set a goal, and he showed up at the door that day, and it took him three years of continual battles, but once he realized and ran the experiments and knew this was the one, he was then patient. He was IP, so he was impatient to set the goal, but once he said it, he was patient to set to. From 19 years old to 30, he started at 19. By 32, or I think he died at 31, he conquered the known world.

1:06:16 Zuckerberg hasn’t done that. Now Zuckerberg is on the way. Has a billion C, but think of how Zuckerberg did it. He had the idea, he had the question. I think it was, how can I meet more girls?

1:06:26 Is how it started. Many times for dudes that’s how. And then he did a little research. He probably saw Myspace, he probably saw Friendster, and then he formed the hypothesis. I’ll make something called, I think it was called the Facebook.

1:06:38 Yeah, he started it right away. It wasn’t when I’m done graduating and when I’m done with all the homework. He was, he was at an Ivy League school working away. He could have said, okay, for no. He started now.

1:06:51 He was impatient, but once he saw the experiment, cuz the next steps are observe, analyze, peer review. Once he saw he had traction, he’s never stopped. When he was offered a billion dollars to stop, said no. I’m patient, right? And now we know the end of that.

1:07:08 He’s, he’s really the wealthiest person alive if you do the time value of money, to have $33 billion at uh 28 or 30 or whatever is more than Carlos Slim at 60 or 70, having, you know, 50 or 60 billion or whatever. So, right. This is the recipe that works, and most of us are just pis. We always, you can smell it right away when people start talking, cuz they’ll start telling you about why they’re not doing something, or I’m waiting for this, or no one’s called me, or I mean, you can even tell in the tone of the voice sometimes, right?

1:07:40 So it’s fear and body language, yet is, it’s usually fear. You know, a great story of Alexander the Great: he climbed up a wall uh, with the, with the war tower with his whole army, his bodyguard, his army. He gets to the top of the, the castle. Uh, he jumps out. He always led with his four, I think four bodyguards, and the scaffolding, the tower collapsed behind him, all of the army coming with him fell to the bottom.

1:08:08 So he jumped over the castle expecting to have an army behind him. He’s there, confronting the whole enemy. He turns around, it’s three guys with him now. What would most of us do? Most of us would, was better at that time to be captured was to be torturous, crucified, skinned alive, burned.

1:08:26 So most people would have just jumped off of the castle and just committed suicide. Alexander the Great did something, uh, he has conquered his fear. He said, charge. He and three people charge the whole city, uh, defense. Now it happened to work because they thought I was probably a trick.

1:08:48 If you saw four people running at you, and you’re 200, uh, you would think it’s a decoy. So he went in, SL flashing. Now his three, three men were killed, bodyguards, but he survived, and they fought long enough that his army brought a new war tower, and he came over and he conquered that city. You must conquer your fear, and the thing is, in an abundant world, what do you fear? You ever seen someone in the Western world die of starvation?

1:09:13 I’ve seen it in India. I went to India once. I went in where I was staying. There’s all these beggars. I didn’t give one money, cuz I’m like, it’ll be fine in the morning.

1:09:21 He had died to starvation. But that’s India. If you live in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and even India is not as much like that anymore. What’s your fear? Right?

1:09:32 So think abundantly. I always see when I meet someone that’s super conservative and ultra conservative, and doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to do that. I’m like, you know, that works out for you great today, but you’re slowly killing yourself, and then you will wake up in 10 years and realize you never took any risks, and then by then your brain won’t know how to take risks. Well, and the other thing, some people, so in the personality type system, the P the E and the P’s, okay, generally are more risk-averse, the practical and the emotional.

1:10:03 Okay, so just remember there is a function for that. It’s not completely a worthless skill to have. Fear, at some level, is very functional. Um, the A’s and the S’s, the S’s are the social. They usually are so kind of in the sky.

1:10:19 They forget, they don’t even care. They walk across the street without looking, not because they’re cre, but because they forgot. The A’s are foolhardy. So Aristotle talked about this. You would not want to be a coward or foolhardy.

1:10:32 You don’t always want to go where angels fear to tread. But for example, let’s say I was just speaking in Florida at a conference, and a guy said, you know, I’m going to all these entrepreneur conferences. I have a wife and kids. I want to quit my job, but I’m afraid. I’ve got a one-year-old baby, and all these entrepreneurs are telling me, no fear, just quit, just quit.

1:10:53 And he said, in my family, my parents are like, don’t, it’s, you’ve got to play the safe bet. And I said, you’re not abundant. Even black and white is not abundant. Think of it this way: set an 18-month goal that you’ll quit in 18 months, but start something today. He said, well, what business did I do?

1:11:12 I, I, he said, uh, he was been, uh, approached by a multi-level marketing company. Now, those are not my favorite companies. Uh, I know Dick Marone started Herbalife and definitely made money in MLM, but most people don’t. But I said, how much does it cost to get into the MLM? He said $100 or $200.

1:11:32 I said, why not do it now? Join the MLM, because do you think you’ll cut your teeth and learn a little bit about entrepreneurialism by being around all these other entrepreneurs? Will you get a 10x in 10 years? Will that $200 you invest in this hokey MLM make you two grand worth of value? And doubling down in your brain, of course it will.

1:11:54 I’ll join every, any MLM, especially at the beginning, because it’s a momentum creator. Just don’t think you’re going to be wealthy from it, but do it to do it right. Do something. Yeah, Joel used to say, Tai, do something, even if it’s the wrong thing. Now there’s good science on this.

1:12:11 Uh, I think a scientist named Ferguson in the 1960s did the math. So there’s a concept called bounded rationality. So there was, uh, Poincaré, the famous mathematician, the French mathematician, the kind of the father of chaos theory so you know, chaos theory is otherwise known as a butterfly effect. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Indonesia, could cause a hurricane in whatever Florida. Well, the reason 10-year goals are rarely accurate, or the reason I’m reading Alan Greenspan’s new book, the map in the territory 2.0, the former Federal Reserve.

1:12:46 Yeah, I didn’t know he had a new book. He says, you know, our ability to predict long-term financial consequences is very poor, and it’s because of chaos theory. One thing exact leads to another, and you can’t predict the millions of permutations that’s why I say 10-year goals are weak, but you can predict what you’ll do today fairly accurately. You could get hit by a car on the way home, but I’m like, do something now, right? So, uh, this guy, I was saying, well, look, the reason you are risk-averse is because of this crazy inborn algorithm in our brain that just does all this math and sees everything spinning off.

1:13:30 But I said, you start this, you start this, uh, whatever MLM while you’re at the other job, an 18-month transition out of that job. You then remember you have to have bounded rationality. So the concept of bounded rationality is simple. Let’s say me and you, after this, you were talking about going to get something to eat or a drink, right? How many restaurants are in London?

1:13:53 Lots. So if we say, even sushi, we have to put bounds on our rationality, or else we’ll spend the rest of our life trying to make choices. There’s, let’s say, 500 sushi restaurants. So we put a bound on it. We, we only want to eat at a place one mile away.

1:14:06 So that’s one wall. The second, we only want to eat at a place that’s Yelp gave at least three stars. We only want to eat at a place that’s, we look at the prices, that’s reasonable, under 100 bucks. Fourth, we only want to eat at a place that a friend recommended. So our brain constantly tries to do bounded rationality.

1:14:23 That’s why we try to solve cognitive dissonance, but that’s another conversation. So we do this. The problem is we don’t always know when to stop. So a lot of people are like, there’s too many choices, Tai. I could, I’m good at this, and I’m good at this, and I’m good at this.

1:14:37 So this Ferguson guy said here’s the math: one divided by the constant e, which comes out to about 37, or 37%. Once you have a 37% hunch, then you should be impatient and begin. So if you have no… if you’re at 1%, whether you should quit your job, that’s not enough. If you’re 37% chance that the job you’re at isn’t the right place, then you should proceed. Once you hit 37, it’s in game theory.

1:15:05 It’s the optimal time to start, but you can use the Peter Drucker 18-month time frame. You don’t have to be foolhardy. You don’t always have to charge like Alexander the Great, cuz every, cuz if you’re one of the bodyguards, you got killed. Only he lived. Oh, the, he let me ask you a question.

1:15:20 You mentioned something yesterday in your talk, and you said 2011 wasn’t a good year for you, right? And I was just wondering if you could tell us why, as in, did you… you were, were you losing motivation in the businesses you were doing? You know, what turned around for you in 2011, and why was that a low point for you, and how did you get your mojo back? Well, it’s for me, it’s always the same thing.

1:15:41 It’s always that Dutch saying, we’re too soon old and too late smart, or the ancient philosophers said life is short, art is long. You know, to create a masterpiece takes a long time, but our life is short. So 2011 is just, you have to go up exponentially or else you’ll go down logarithmically. So, uh, you know, I was like, not doubling down enough on my brain. I don’t know if it was cocky.

1:16:10 I, it, some overload. You can get overload from other things, unrelated, dating somebody that kind of went weird. I mean, when we broke up, it was, it was so uh, the second, in a world of 7.3 billion people who want the same scarce resources as you, even though it’s abundant. I thought it was abundant. No, okay.

1:16:33 So here’s the good thing. I know somebody’s on the right track when their conversation is full of oxymorons, when they say to me, Tai, life is short, so I got to start today, but they also say to me, well, statistically, I’m probably going to live till 80, so I can invest in this investment and not make money today but make it a long run. See, that doesn’t make sense to the unsophisticated mind. That doesn’t make sense to the oversimplified mind. You don’t want to have a simplified mind.

1:17:02 You meet smart people, and this is what’s bad about politics. Politicians are, uh, uh, stonewalled or criticized for throwing out, well, I’m kind of this and kind of that. It’s like, no, stick to your point, cuz people want to embrace people who are delusional. The world’s not black and white. Do you honestly think that the world will be saved with pacifism?

1:17:26 Now, the Amish are pacifists. Mahatma Gandhi was a pacifist. Martin Luther King certainly accomplished something with nonviolence, but like Steven Pinker says, I used to be an anarchist, and my parents told me in Canada, no, you don’t want an, an, an anarchic society. And he said, no, no, you’re wrong. It’s that’s the way, that’s the black and white way.

1:17:46 And she, she said, then the police had a strike in Canada. I think it was in the ’60s, and it can’t went to hell in a handbasket. It went to like LA riots and Rodney King time. So he began to think, oh well, maybe the world’s not that simple. But yet, do you want a fully warmongering world?

1:18:04 No, you don’t want Adolf Hitler and Stalin storming the world. So where’s the answer? We can find it by downloading the wisdom and experience of one of the great thinkers of all time, Alexander the Great. I mean, Aristotle, by the way, who was the mentor of Alexander the Great, you know, that I didn’t know that. From 14 to 16 and 2, the personal mentor of Alexander the Great was Aristotle, and what was the reward?

1:18:27 Everything Alexander the Great wanted. So for each of us, imagine that each person on the planet lives for you. It’s okay to be egocentric at that level, as long as you also realize that it will only be through reciprocal value that you’ll create aund. So they live for me. So those people are all there that I can tap into.

1:18:45 I can sell them things, I can teach them. Okay, for all purposes they can. No, they can, they’re their, they’re your servants. Okay, that’s Albert Einstein lived for you. Stephen Hawking lives for you.

1:18:58 What do you think, this, the physics that got me here in an airplane, who you think that was? Somebody working for me. So all I have to do, it’s as that, there was an anonymous saying in the ’60s, um, that said, give the, uh, make yourself useful to the world, and she will always give you bread. People that don’t have enough bread, make yourself more useful to the world. Now the question is, how do we do that?

1:19:23 Well, I like what Peter Drucker says in Managing Oneself. He says most people think they know what they’re good at. Most people are wrong. Even more people think they know what they’re weak at. Even then, more people are wrong than right, yet you can only build on strength.

1:19:38 The problem is, to know your own strengths is nearly impossible, because as n said, the mind is like an inaccessible fortress, but he gives us a little light by saying you get revelation through friends and enemies. So you know, when I was on the show last time and some people didn’t like when I said no ayahuasca, think of me as an enemy. On that subject, you want enemies in your life, as the ancient proverb says, as iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend, and you could add, so an enemy sharpens an enemy.

1:20:14 So you want to read, if you are a Republican or conservative, you better be reading the liberal anti-thesis to you. You know, the great philosophers, thesis, antithesis, or antithesis. You want to find that, uh, middle way, synthesis. That’s what they called it. Thesis, anti.

1:20:39 So I try to read. I read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, right? I’m happy with that, because that is the mark of somebody going somewhere. You could say a refined mind. I don’t know if it’s that, but remember, to do that you have to overcome the fear that you might be wrong.

1:20:58 I like the saying that you should not, you’re Charlie Munger, you’re not allowed to hold any belief that you can’t argue better than the other side. And now people are opposed to this. No, Tai, the world has moved forward through men and women of conviction. No, it’s not, as n said, convictions are greater enemies of the truth than lies. You know, everybody who blew themselves up in 9/11, all the, all the terrorists, they had conviction.

1:21:28 In fact, they had more conviction than you and I about anything. If you’re willing to blow yourself up for something, now proof’s in the pudding. Talk is cheap. They had conviction, but who cares? We, I don’t value people’s convictions.

1:21:41 We should only value accuracy. I don’t even use the word truth. It’s hard to know what’s exactly true, and you value people who seem to constantly contradict themselves, cuz you think it means they have an active mind. They have a mind that’s constantly testing their own thesis, and going through this seven-step scientific process. They’re redoing the hypothesis.

1:21:57 They’re doing it in real time. So all you do is go back around. I mean, imagine going when you break your arm. I broke my ankle. You go to that doctor, you’re like, thank God this guy’s not proceeding from conviction.

1:22:12 What if his conviction was, mom has told him, put a ComFree leave herbal poultice on the leg? No, you want and, and medicine. When you break your leg, it’s continually refining and getting better and better through the seven-step process, right? What are the seven steps, quickly, so I know? Ask a question.

1:22:30 Research, uh, form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, observe, which is hard because humans are so biased, and yeah, we already have what we want the result to be. Then you analyze. Analyze is hard too, because you have to quantify mathematically. So I ask people, for you, let me ask you. I’ll do a little test, if you don’t mind.

1:22:47 Let’s do it, let’s do it. The good life test, I call it. Okay, when you woke up this morning, on a 1 to 10 tap dance factor, right? War says I’m 884. Yeah, you know, and I tap dance to work every day.

1:23:03 What’s your tap dance factor, I’m, I’m, I’m like an eight right now. There, there were people raising their hands at 10 yesterday. A few sometimes they’re the delusional, and so that’s all problem. I’m an eight right now, but I’ve definitely been at a two and uh, a lot of my life, probably been at a five or six. So on career, I was specifically talking about career, career money making.

1:23:22 Let’s start with that one. Oh, money making. I get from money-making, career, money making are different from me. Well, let’s, money, what you have to do to put bread on… you’re not going to build your own house, and you didn’t make that suit, and you didn’t pay, you don’t generate the electricity here, so you got to have freedom units to exchange with other people, so that whatever, let’s call it money making, I’m going to give it a six. Okay, six.

1:23:46 So that’s the pillar. The four pillars, that’s wealth, health. When you stand in front of the mirror naked, then you look at yourself. So a 10 would be, I’ve maxed out the best I could do for now. What are you, what do you feel?

1:23:59 I’m an eight. Okay, an eight when it comes to love, that’s friend, family, and romance, social connection, one through 10. I think it could be better, so I’m going to say seven. Okay, when it comes to just this feeling of, I’m fulfilled, I, I would say seven again. Okay, so if you add those up, what, two sevens, a six, and an eight?

1:24:24 Yeah, I’m an average seven. So that’s the quantify, analyze, the part of life. So that means if you average those, it’s about a seven. So that’s your life. How many people, though, want a seven, right?

1:24:41 So then you got to go to the last step, which is tough. Tough. That’s the peer review, right? That’s where n said your mind’s an inaccessible fortress, except for friends and enemies. So you must find your enemies.

1:24:55 That’s disconfirming evidence. The great, probably the greatest thinker, or the most influential, even though he’s controversial, is Charles Darwin. I read a book, a salon of the greatest Nobel Prize winners, and it was all everybody asking who’s been the most important person in humanity, and they generally agreed that Darwin, not even if you don’t believe in evolution. When you go to the hospital, agriculture, it’s all based on this theory of selection.

1:25:22 So Darwin was the king of trying to prove himself wrong. That’s all he did. I try to do that. I try to prove myself wrong. I want to, you know, book a day.

1:25:33 I’m reading a book right now that talks about, it’s another, Steven Johnson, one talking about why the world isn’t bad, why we’re better off because there’s TV and video games. You know, I rail against that, and uh, I read it, and, you know, I, it’s funny, I feel the fear come out of me. Oh well, then I’m gonna have to admit to everybody that I was wrong, but who cares? 100 years from now nobody will remember me. If I have to go back on my YouTube videos and say, no, it’s all wrong, we should all just be watching TV, play Grand Theft Auto.

1:26:03 Who cares, right? So this is when you have to go out of your head and go to your enemies and find out what they’re saying about you. Yes, because friends won’t always tell you the truth. Allies, but sometimes allies will. Right now, the reason going back to this, we have the perfect mind.

1:26:20 I have the perfect mind. You do, but for a world that doesn’t exist. We used to be in clans that were very small, 150 maybe, in a village. But even before then, you might have been some of these, if when you find archaeological remains, you read about, there was groups of six or eight or 10 people. So if you lost one friend, if one friend saw, oh, that guy, T, he’s kind of a a**hole, you lost one 18 or 17th of your allies.

1:26:45 So we’re hyper-attuned to anything that could lose us even one ally. Someone you’re driving, and someone gets mad, and they flick you off. Okay. You, I live in LA. There’s 13 million people.

1:26:58 I’ll never see that person again, but my cortisol goes up, my test, because my brain’s working perfect for the world where I had eight allies, and I now lost one. So that’s why, that could be the guy, that’s, and yeah, that’s why we have pride, and we stick to our beliefs all the way. You know, one of my family members, I won’t say who, he decided he was a pro athlete, top-ap boxer, great shape. Um, um, somehow he skipped all the steps of the scientific research and just went straight to, I am a fruitarian.

1:27:31 Now I was like, I’m just eating bananas and this and this. So he does it, and I didn’t see him for a month later. I see him, he looks like hell. He smells weird. His muscles were going, the tone was going away, and I’m thinking, are you observing this test now?

1:27:47 If he didn’t see it as a test, he was trying to resolve cognitive dissonance, bounded rationality. He didn’t want to think through all the health options there. So that’s why I read that great book, Diet Cults. Have you read Diet Cults? Oh, what a good book.

1:28:01 And he talks about it, so it was no longer a test, it was a cult. When you talk to him, you ever met a vegan or a paleo person, you’re sometimes not talking to a person, you’re talking to a cult. Now I’m not saying veganism is accurate and accurate, or paleo. I’m not attacking those, but I said, look, observe. Then he should have gone to quantify.

1:28:27 He should have measured his biceps. He was losing muscle tone. I could see it. Then the last one he forgot was peer review. I tried to do it for him.

1:28:34 I, I contact, I asked a doctor friend of mine, and he said, oh man, every fruitarian I’ve ever dealt with that stayed with fruitarian for a long time had serious dental problems and other health problems, but he didn’t want to hear, because the seven, his brain was working perfectly for a 75,000-year-old world. So he was going, if I admit I’m wrong, that makes me, I lose face. Dr David Buss, if you’ve ever read his textbook, Evolutionary Psychology, has, one of the most important sections for any human to ever read is Dr David Buss, uh, textbook, where he talks about the, the adaptation and evolution of our self-esteem, and it really goes back to the fear of being ostra…

1:29:16 Ostracized, and so instead of going, oh no, no, no, no, no one here is going to ostracize me, it was a cult. And now we’ve got, now that’s why I say most humans are zombies chasing mirages. To me, he was crossing, and I’ve done this. 2011, I think I became a zombie, cuz you weren’t doubling down on yourself, and I yeah, cuz I became too attached to my ideas, right? So you get caught up in your dogma, and you think I’m doing this, path is going to get me this happiness, and when you arrive there, you’re just like, what did I just do?

1:29:46 It’s usually, it’s usually not being humble enough. I think at the core for most of us, cuz the seven-step now, I don’t, conducting peer review, is that a symbol, or going through, or not seeing everything as a hypothesis? Look, if you want to know what you should do with your life, that’s a bad question. The only question should be, what should be the experiment that I start today? Right, you run a thousand experiments with your career.

1:30:11 Now, you don’t necessarily… I’m just using that from Thomas Edison. You don’t necessarily need a thousand experiments, but you sure as heck need 10. You need 10 this year. You can run them, se, you know, simultaneously or sequentially, doesn’t matter, but you should run them.

1:30:29 There is no question of should you start. I believe an experiment every human should run is how to cut your waistline. That’s probably the mo… if you had to narrow down health, the one you know, I always look. You want to have some… yeah, you want to have some KPI, some key performance so you got to run that experiment. Now, the problem is what happens with us, multiple cognitive biases kick in, especially mis- waiting, especially availability bias.

1:30:56 So availability bias means, and I talked a little bit about this on the last show, whatever you know, the average person marries from either two places. The Dr. Marina Adshade, she’s an economist that studies love. Now, uh, she wrote a book, Dollars and Sex, I think it’s called. So she ranks in there successful marriage sources. So the most successful place is a childhood friend.

1:31:20 So the Amish have very low divorce, and they almost always marry somebody they were in a one-room schoolroom since they were in first grade, or one degree or two degrees of separation from somebody, like somebody you’ve known for a long time, cuz then you don’t wake up after you’re married three years and go, I don’t even know this person, they’re totally different. If you’ve been with them 10, 15, 20 years, you know who they are. So the second common source of marriage is work.

1:31:42 Now that’s, according to her, is statistically fair. In fact, online dating has more successful marriages than meeting at work. Think about it. Availability bias means, I see the person all the time, okay, might as well, and you end up dating. Doesn’t mean they’re a personality, psychometric match with you, personality type.

1:32:02 No, we just do it cuz it’s more available, and that’s a bias, availability bias. You walk in. I always tell the story. You walk into Barnes & Noble. You go into Barnes & Noble, what books are on the front?

1:32:15 Well, two things: beware of perverse incentives, reward bias, media bias. They’re going to sell you the books that they think will sell and make them the most reward, the most freedom units, for Brookston or Barnes & Noble. And they’re paying to be in the front too. They put, if you’re a bus, I mean, I go, I use availability bias. I just say, I was doing a talk in London, um, in LA at the convention center.

1:32:39 I think there’s six or 700 entrepreneurs there. I said, how many people read, you know, Jim Collins, or Tim Ferriss, or Lean Startup, and those three books basically everyone I read? And I just, I always bring my little Sam Walton book, and I say, who, how many people read this $5 paperback made in America? Zero. I said, you know why?

1:33:00 Cuz Amazon hasn’t, and Barnes and Noble hadn’t figured out how to make money off a junky-looking book with a hat of Sam Walton for five bucks. There’s no money in it. So we written 30 years ago, so it’s not new. That’s probably some other bias. The man made $160,000 million.

1:33:16 I read that book after I told you, no, no, like 10 years ago. I read it. Good. You’re well, that’s probably why you’re successful. The ability to not be manipulated by people who don’t have your best interest at heart.

1:33:29 That’s why I said, you know, I’m not ever worried about some people not agreeing with me. I only need 300 people, right? And that’s a lot of people if you can find those allies. 150, maybe. 150.

1:33:39 Yeah, even probably 30 would go pretty strong. Let’s talk about cognitive biases really quick. I know we can’t get into all 25. Last time you were here, you touched them, and I don’t even think I understood. But, you know, can we talk about the top five?

1:33:50 And some of them you talked about: reward, availability, reciprocity, a powerful one. But so people that don’t understand, I mean, these are ways that our brain is actually miswired to to give us things that aren’t… no, don’t say I used to say that. Okay, yeah, sorry, don’t say sry, sorry, it’s not making the rational decision. They’re perfect for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. But for this world, be rude at it, or okay, they don’t make a scientifically rational decision that a computer would make.

1:34:14 Yeah, or even not. I mean, some emotion is okay in a decision, okay, but it’s, it can be a hugely irrational thing. Just think about this. It’s inaccurate for the goal state. So let’s say, I ask people, look, if your goal is to be Hugh Hefner, there’s a different set of efficient, accurate decisions you need to make than if your goal is to be Muhammad Ali or, uh, you know, Charles Darwin.

1:34:40 So first you must define the goal. For me, I think a great default goal, if you don’t have one, is the one that I adopted from, you know, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle: eudaimonia, the good life, excellent life. So health, wealth, love, and happiness. I’ve presented that in peer review to some of the smartest people I know, whether it’s Dr David Buss, all, you know, I, these guys are friends of mine, and they go, that’s a pretty good one. It’s not mine.

1:35:06 I wish I could claim it, but let’s say you define that as your goal. Now, once you state your goal, is to fly from Los Angeles to New… is to go from Los Angeles to New York in as short a period of possible. If you get on a boat and you head south from Los Angeles, only then can I be like, that’s a inaccurate, inefficient decision. So what happens is everybody who’s in LA metaphorically wants to get to New York. New York represents the good life, and you got to go a little north and a lot east to get there.

1:35:38 For about 3,000 miles, um, most of us we’re the [expletive] of our brain because the old reward was in Australia, so we’re just headed across the Pacific going, I don’t understand why I wake up and I feel a seven. I don’t, I don’t understand why I wake up and tap dance to… don’t tap dance to work. I’m like, I do. There’s nothing wrong with you. You have a perfect homing, you’re like a homing pigeon for the wrong country.

1:36:05 So what you have to do, and it’s not have to do, it’s the most imperative thing you can do, this is what, 50 years from now, what I’m saying, people will watch this video and go, that Tai guy was the most elementary, moronic person spreading a message of take back control of your brain that we all know that we went through 18 years of school. Unfortunately, I think it was like 100 years, but, yeah, maybe faster. I think I, I’m optimistic. The world moves faster than you think.

1:36:33 It used to be the 10/10 rule: took 10 years to develop a new idea, and 10 years for it to proliferate enough, to, as Geoffrey Moore calls, or, um, yeah, Geoffrey Moore calls it crossing the chasm. Now the chasm gets crossed faster and faster, so I, I have good news. You know, Carl’s Jr. just put in grass-fed burgers. Joel Salatin was talking about that in 1978. All right, so we’re going there.

1:36:57 So with cognitive vises, like you said, that you’re going toward Australia, and you’re wanting to go to New York, and you don’t know why you’re not getting there. Yeah. So here’s where the rudder gets off, here, go where the compass goes off. This should be your number one priority, number one, PRI. So start with reward.

1:37:12 Always lead with reward. If you want to lose weight, pin up pictures. Let’s say you’re a single guy or a single woman. Pin up pictures on your refrigerator of all the people, or the quality of people, you could have dated but never got the chance because you let yourself go, because make no mistake, and don’t let any pain-avoiding delusion enter your into your brain: people care what you look like physically. I just read this amazing book, Compelling People, by the, the two Harvard guys.

1:37:48 They have a whole section on how the brain, and how humans, are definitely manipulated by how you look. So next time you, you can’t willpower your way. You know, the one thing Gary Keller, there’s a lot of research that willpower is a very finite tool. Some of us have more. You can train yourself to have more, but it’s definitely finite.

1:38:08 Reward is never, I can go into a room and look everybody in the eyes and say, I promise you, you can get everything you want, if you’re lucky enough to not get hit by a car, but if you do the things that the smartest people in the world say and don’t, and avoid the groupthink, you can be wealthy, to make a million-dollar business. Now it’s not the ’80s, where being a millionaire was hard. We’ve had deflation, 3 or 4%. It’s not that hard to be, people are like, millionaire, I can’t imagine.

1:38:42 So you said this yesterday in that room of 125 people, and then ties in the front, and he’s like, making a million dollars, it’s, it’s not hard, and it’s even easier than it was in the ’80s, and it echoed around the room, because people are there and thinking, that’s what I would really like to do for a short-term goal. Yeah, lead. You know what I say? People still find it hard. You you brought up the beginning.

1:39:00 You said, why, why, Tai, you’re not, you’re anti-conspicuous consumption, because that mitigates against your health? Well, I’d have the Lamborghini if I was the last person on the planet. I got the Lamborghini for non-conspicuous. So conspicuous is to show off. You know, I got a black Lamborghini, cuz it’s not as showy.

1:39:18 I’ve had a yellow Ferrari, and I realize that that’s a nightmare. You get pulled over by the police the whole time. So I, I asked myself the loneliness test before I bought that. Well, allowed myself to buy that car, and I went 2 years without a car. I had a Maserati and Ferrari before, and I was like, you know what, Tai, you’re getting too tied to conspicuous consumption.

1:39:35 I sold it two years ago for 2011 200 12. I, so in Halloween I was like, forget this, and I would go back to Amish. You know, take taxis, go with friends, walk, and, uh, in LA, and then finally I was like, I’m going to get a car. And so you should set two goals for yourself. Always have selfish goals.

1:39:55 I’ve done this experiment. Try it on yourself. When you eliminate all selfish goals and you just say, I’m going to be the next Mother Teresa, I’m going to be the next, you know, charitable person, you lose incentive, because rewards for your own DNA, Trump, all rewards for other people’s, dealing. So have selfish goals, right? But as Rabbi Hillel said, in the 1300s, if I don’t love me, who will?

1:40:22 That’s selfish. But if I only love me, what am I? Then you’re not human. So you must have also unselfish goals. So the reward bias must lead everything you do.

1:40:34 Give yourself a selfish reason to lose weight if you’re a guy, so I can date, you know, single, I can date up, supermodel, or whatever, uh, well, for wealth, lead with reward. Go, I can then take a year off and do nothing, whatever, whatever is your biggest reward. But then also have an unselfish goal, so you stay human, so you stay part of the human race. If you become wealthy and ostracize and isolate yourself, you will lose. You know, uh, Art of War, Sun Tzu says: if you know yourself, if you don’t know yourself or your enemy, you will lose every battle.

1:41:10 Then he goes on to say, if you know yourself but don’t know your enemy, for every battle you win, you will lose one. Then he goes on to say, if you know yourself and your enemy, you never have to be afraid. You’ll be fine. And so we must know ourselves. We got to know, these, both, these both polar opposites, selfish then the next cognitive bias, pain.

1:41:29 That’s why I said, feel the pain. I have gone, you know, what most of us do is they go, oh no, T, that crappy relationship I had for four years. No, no, that was fine, cuz I learned a lot of stuff. No, you could have learned that on two dates. You didn’t have to torture yourself.

1:41:45 People go, I needed to be bankrupt three times. I learned a lot. I needed to waste my… no, you didn’t. You’re avoiding pain. Make the pain your master.

1:41:55 It will wake you up out of bed every day and go, never again. will I stay four years in a horrible relationship? By the way, best book on relationships I read, but attached, by Heller and Levine, to researchers, it’s mind-blowing. It talks about the three types of people: you’re either secure, uh, anxious, or avoidant. It’s another, I could do a whole other, it’s, mind, you should get them on the show, Heller and Levine, two, two.

1:42:19 Anyway, so harness the pain. Do not cover it. Don’t forget it. Don’t cover it up. Don’t, I have no regret.

1:42:25 When I meet people, have no regrets, I’m like, then you have no future. Regret is a functional fool. So that’s the second cognitive bias. The third is liking and disliking. You know, a lot of people watch this YouTube, and they’ll judge whether they’re going to listen to me by whether they like or dislike me.

1:42:41 This book, Compelling People, says there’s two things you must do to be a compelling person. Martin Luther King Jr was one of the best. Oprah, Bill Clinton. Um, you must, there’s a scale of warmth and strength, and strength, right? You talked about this.

1:42:55 So Hillary Clinton often times is low on the warmth meter. A lot of people don’t feel warmth, but she’s too much strength, and so it can create envy, fear, Mavan-type fear. So some people are masters of doing both. So let’s say I come on here, and I’m not the absolute master. I’m not that fully warm.

1:43:14 Maybe I’m a little too authoritative for you. Who cares? Doesn’t mean that I’m inaccurate, right? If Adolf Hitler says 2 plus 2 is four, still, still four, even if the person you love the most says 2 plus 2 is five. That’s the top three bias.

1:43:28 That’s called liking and disliking. We’re too much, ATT, tuned to, I don’t really like that guy. You know, debates in the US are, yeah, we like, Get Away With Murder. Yeah, what’s that? That’s the Bill Clinton Factor.

1:43:38 What is that? Debates are won by people. Remember George Bush looked at his watch during the debate against Clinton, and that lost, in the, why should that matter? Who’s the best president? Nixon and Kennedy, classic debates, right?

1:43:49 Yeah, these are, these are fool’s decision making. These are called heuristics, by the way, how you decide, right? Okay, so liking and disliking. You have, uh, availability, association. So availability we talked about.

1:44:03 Association, association. What’s that? That’s why Coca-Cola pays billions of dollars to have a celebrity hold something, cuz we think we will get that. We, oh, I’ll be a celebrity if I drink Coke. No, you won’t.

1:44:16 Associations, mostly used in media. Availability is a big one. Uh, reciprocity, is that a big one? Reciprocity, I, I see that as much. I, I’ll focus on the ones I see the most.

1:44:26 So one of the big ones now is Pavlovian response. The average person’s checking their phone 150 times, cuz one of the most genius things of Facebook was the little blue bubble, or little red dot, showing you how many notifications and if you can create micro-actions in consumers. So if you’re a marketer, entrepreneur, you want to create many micro- actions. By the way, if you want to lose weight, it’s better to do six one-push-up sessions in a day than one session of six push-ups, because you form habits.

1:44:54 This book, Hooked, talks about that. So we get hooked by Pavlovian responses to check our phone 150 times. It pops off dopamine, that happens when we look. It’s all we’re built to want. We want to create dopamine responses.

1:45:09 Right? We want to. The problem is, once again, are those in our best interest? The that red pop-up dot made Facebook $1 billion, right? The question is, did it make you $100 billion?

1:45:25 The answer is no. So we’re controlled by Pavlovian… con and fairness. A lot of people won’t read a book a day and not read the whole book, believe it or not, cuz they’re kind of like, I feel like people say all the time, me, Tai, I try to follow the book of the day, but I, if I don’t read it all, I feel I’m kind of cheating the author, right? They feel like they have to finish. He’s not there, right?

1:45:46 Right, right. He does. He gave him the money for the book, right? Live your own life, double down on yourself, understand opportunity cost. Now, uh, I’ll tell you a scary one, uh, and this is also shared not just by Munger, not just by Chini, but also by, uh, Alan Greenspan in his new book, over optimism.

1:46:08 If you’re watching this and you’re over 14 and you haven’t gotten what you want, or over 18, the odds are against you, my friend. Now, people want to say, no, no, no, no, well, Ray Croc started at 52, and, uh, Colonel Sanders started at 65, and Norle Wilder didn’t publish, no, but the odds are against you. Most people do great things really young, really young. If you’re 18 and watching this, you think you have all the time in the world. You’re over-optimistic.

1:46:36 Now, I will tell you, I am a believer in optimism, but I’m also grounded. Optimism. If you are over 25, your brain seals up about 24, and you haven’t learned everything you need to know about health, wealth, you. I ask people, I, how easily can I stump you? People want to be wealthy.

1:46:56 I go, I tell them, you know, one of the wealthiest friends I have, he’s in his 30s, my age. He’s we were playing basketball, and I said to him, hey man, we have this partnership, and I asked him a question about accounting. I don’t know if it was a cruel vers, C, what should we do? And he was like, I don’t know what that means. Now, this is a guy who pays himself about a $900,000 a month salary and about $500,000 bonus a month.

1:47:20 1.4, 1.4 million a month. I know, I, I see the books, and, uh, he owns his own companies too. So I dropped the subject, cuz he was kind of embarrassed that he didn’t know. Smart guy. He left, came back three months later, and I said, man, we got to talk about this accounting question, and he knew everything.

1:47:42 I remember thinking, I said to him, how’d you learn so much? He said, oh, on the, pl, plane home, I ordered two textbooks on County and then I wrote them out in flashcards. And, uh, every time I brush my teeth for the last 3 months, I’ve been memorizing it all. That’s my wealthy friend. In the 67 steps I talk about my rich friends and my poor friends.

1:48:02 My poor friends, if you bring it up, no, it’s either they’re angry with you, they act dumb, learned helplessness. Martin Seligman talks about that. This guy realized life is short, patiently impatient or impatiently, he immediately bought it, and he listened to the peer review, so he took the input and did something. He took the input and was impatient. He bought those textbooks.

1:48:22 So if you’re watching this and there’s things that I’ve said you think of value, or some of these books I mentioned, read them today. Don’t even wait for them to come in. Amazon, go drive down to the library, read them today, because what happens is this is where you use Pavlovian response to your benefit. If you can create dopamine responses around learning stuff, you’ll learn. It’s not hard for me to read a book a day.

1:48:42 In fact, sometimes, you know, some people, when they don’t have their phone, they actually call it, like, a phantom yeah, phantom, a phantom buzz in your leg or something. So I was lucky, because remember, the lucky is the people you bumped into. I grew up with a single mom, and, uh, my grandma raised me when I was really young, and she was a professor, and she hated TV and everything, and she made me feel like books was the ultimate reward. So, I, she, luckily I was lucky.

1:49:10 She created a Pavlovian response to books, man. When I get a book, it’s, it’s weird. I’ve now understood my brain. So that’s harnessing. It’s like a present.

1:49:18 You’re like, oh wow. Arnold Schwarzenegger [expletive] said in that one interview, was it, stay hungry, where he was pumping, where he said, I feel like it’s, it’s better than an orgasm when I get the pump. Yeah, so that’s Pavlovian, right? So know that bias and harness it. Find ways to trick yourself into it.

1:49:34 And with over-optimism, just understand, do not think you have as big of a chance as you do. Now people say that’s a negative thought. No, because the second you realize that life is short, you don’t want to be like, Steve Jobs said, I didn’t want to be the richest man in the graveyard. But he was 2011. I forgot.

1:49:59 I was over-optimistic. I thought the world um cared about me. I thought I didn’t have to make myself useful to the world, and she would still give me bread. No, the world’s not yet a crazy enough place to reward an undeserving person in the 67 steps, the first one, the worth a damn factor. I can do it the second I meet somebody.

1:50:22 My mentor, one of them, was one of the top VCs, and he said, Tai, I was talking about somebody, and I was like, oh, this person, they went to this college. I was saying how much I, uh, liked them, looked up to them. Oh, they, they wrote a book, and he looked at me. I’ll never forget it. Stumped me for a while, what he meant.

1:50:37 He said, but are they worth the damn? He’s an investor. I’m now an investor. I can tell when people are worth the damn. How long does it take you?

1:50:47 Ten seconds. Well, some, like I said, you, you got to be careful of the black and white mind. There’s different personality types. That’s a huge thing that I’ve been on. I’ve been developing this system, and I think everyone should, you know, do the Myers-Briggs.

1:50:59 I’m an ENTP. You said you’re ENFJ, uh, I think, you know, the most modern science ones, called HEXACO. Did I say I was NFJ? I don’t know if I took it yet. Was that last time you said it earlier?

1:51:11 No, I don’t think I was. No, cuz Maya was asking me, but I haven’t taken it. Oh, you haven’t. A bunch of your people were, I’m sorry, I was at lunch with this guy before he was in NFJ. Uh, but you can take the HEXACO test.

1:51:22 You could take StrengthsFinder, and people are like, which one do I take? I’m like, are you scarcity-minded? They’re all free online. Why wouldn’t you take all four? People then become grudges.

1:51:32 I’ve heard the Myers-Briggs isn’t that accurate. Tai, risk-reward, the RR formula. What’s the risk of taking an inaccurate personality test? Well, if you don’t think with a black and white mind, you take the best from it and throw out the worst, and you balance it against the other ones. If HEXACO, which is more kind of reputable now, among, is completely in conflict to the Myers-Briggs, then you may ignore, but take them all.

1:51:55 Be abundant. It’s your life, doubled down. I don’t care about you as much as you care about you. And the thing is, you want a world like that. Very interesting.

1:52:06 My most favorite book in the world is Civilization and Its Discontents. It’s Freud’s book. If you get it, skip the first essay. It’s a little complicated, but the second one. And he says, you know, he says, I really struggle with the admonition of Judeo-Christian values, which says love your neighbor as yourself.

1:52:22 He said, why should I love my neighbor as myself? He said, first of all, I don’t think everybody’s worthy of my love. Second, if I give my love to everybody, that means necessarily, since my love is finite, that I could give less love to those people who are my allies. So I don’t know if he’s right, uh, but I would say what’s obvious is that if everybody takes care of their own, the whole world will be a better place. The solution for Africa or third-world countries is not just foreign aid, even though Bill Gates makes, I like to contradict myself, I read an interesting article where he makes the argument that 48 has done a lot of good, but I believe even he would concede if everybody cleans their whole neighborhood, if everybody, there’s a saying that says, let every man sweep his own house, and the whole world will be clean.

1:53:16 So take care of yourself, look out for yourself. It’s not capitalism, it’s not socialism. It’s saying, double down, sweep your own brain. That’s it. Everything you want, and I’ll lead with a reward.

1:53:28 I promise you, this, healthwise, you will live longer and healthier than you’ve ever lived if you read every disconfirming piece of evidence that if you’re a vegan disproves that, you should be a vegan. You should read paleo, because even if it doesn’t move you and stop you from being a vegan, maybe you’ll be, maybe you’ll add one little thing from paleo. Maybe you’ll add fermented foods. That’s, that’s still it. That one little philosophical change could mean an extra 10 years.

1:53:57 It could mean, you know, my grandfather chose to smoke. My grandmother didn’t, and my grandpa was a fascinating guy, worked with the Nobel Prize when he was a physicist, astrophysicist. Only person of all my brothers and sisters and cousins that got to meet him was me, cuz he died young. He robbed himself and his grandchildren of the feeling of, you know, holding your own grandchildren. He lost out.

1:54:24 Don’t lose out on that. Live long. Like Chief Tecumseh said, seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Chief Tecumseh, in the early 1800s, laid out the formula, you know, he said, so live your life that the fear of death can never enter into your heart. That’s the takeaway from this.

1:54:40 Uh, invest in yourself, and, uh, double down, and, uh, do something, I think, but I want people, so what I really, if I had to have my brothers and say, what you remember, remember this. This is what helped me last year. You have a perfect brain. So you can’t change your brain. You cannot become someone who is not driven by reward.

1:55:02 You can try. You know, even the best Tibetan monk who spent decades trying to detach, say they can only clear their mind for up to 30 seconds. That seems like a, I won’t say a wasteful effort, but if in my whole life I was 400 lb and in 30 years of working out I only lost 3 lbs, I’d consider it a waste of the workout. So what’s better? What’s better is harnessing.

1:55:32 So you have the perfect brain. Just remember every time you want to eat cake and donuts and every time you want to spend your money on conspicuous consumption, which of course worked 75,000 years ago when you were going to live to 30, every time you don’t want to save for retirement or invest in yourself, just remember that was a good strategy when you were going to live to 27. Every time you want to fear breaking off a relationship with a person, business partner, friend, family, love, romantic, because you fear being alone.

1:56:03 That’s a perfect world, but I mean, a perfect decision, but not in a world where there’s a 100 million people on an online dating site. You can find love. You can find love tomorrow. Match.com, where you can find it. Uh, in social groups.

1:56:19 The world’s bountiful and plentiful. The next time you want to be a fearful person and be a grudging and you want to, you want to go, I don’t know if I should do that MLM because I might lose money. Think this way: will I get 10x value in 10 years? Will it help me reprogram, even if I lose my 200 bucks? Now, by the way, I don’t own an MLM.

1:56:42 If you’re, I’m not, try this, but don’t be a grudging all the time. Try sometimes, if you’re a sucker, try to be a grudging. And if you’re a grudging, you’re always poo-pooing everything. Try to be a cheater. Try to make the system work for you.

1:56:58 I don’t mean unethical or legal cheating. A cheater is basically somebody who selfishly takes. Sometime, if you’re always unselfish, do the opposite. Experiment, experiment, experiment, until the hard wiring of the brain begins to work for you. Social, you know, Lieberman says he now realizes almost everything our brain does is for the group, not for our self.

1:57:22 Civilization discontents. He says we are unhappy because of civilization. It doesn’t mean you have to get rid of civilization, but you must learn and know in a world of 7.3 billion people, the only people who will be living the good life are the people who can juggle health. What really works healthwise? How can I come four things?

1:57:43 How do you stand on these things? Let me ask you, on a 1 to 10, oh, so you’re going to reverse the question. He, I got it. Work on a 1 to 10 tap dance into work. Where are you at right now?

1:57:52 Now. I’m pretty, that’s, I’m pretty high there. Uh, it goes up and down. I’d say eight or nine. Eight or nine.

1:58:00 Okay. Uhal health, naked in front of the mirror. This moment, probably seven. About 6 months ago I was like eight. I was really moving up.

1:58:12 Okay, you sometimes EB and flow, you know. Uh, what else? What else is there? Love. Love, that, that is, um, like friends, friends, family, and romance.

1:58:21 Yeah, love’s always the hardest one, man, because it moves, or it’s also my personality type, or when you’re happy here, it always decays down, because, you know, that is so. Remember, all social interaction is the hardest, because you’re dealing with other people interested in their own 100% DNA, right? Relationships will always be the hardest thing you do. Business, okay, you’re always generally allying yourself with your customers. That’s the big takeaway from Sam Walton, right?

1:58:52 So whenever, if you do that, well, right, um, it’s very easy to create reciprocal value. Save them money, and they want to do business. You know, an interesting thing, who was it, was it Steven Pinker? I was reading a fascinating book, um, and I think it was Pinker who said you’ll never have men and women equal, because men and women have at a biological, internal, women have internal gestation. He said, as you make, now this is controversial, I’m, I’m quoting directly.

1:59:24 I believe it’s Pinker, uh, that as you go up for women, it’s at the expense of men, somewhat. So for example, I don’t want that. That’s another conversation, but what I, let’s just take that as a talking point, that if that hypothesis is correct, up in love ranking, no, no, in what’s best? So what’s best, uh, for a woman, what’s best for any organism that only produces 400 eggs, versus another organism that creates 12 million eggs an hour? Right.

1:59:57 Okay, it will be conflicting at some point. Yeah. So social, is general family, will always be difficult for most people. So if your family life’s not perfect, you do not need to beat yourself up as much. In fact, Dr David Buss, one of his breakthroughs in science was realizing that family at odds with each other is not as bad as people think.

2:00:18 It can be extreme. There’s examples where it’s purely dysfunctional, but some level of dysfunctional is understandable, and does, you don’t have to fix everything. It’s kind of like being a bodybuilder and trying to stay at 5% body fat forever. You, it’s unsustainable. You got to put on a little buffering, and they’ll be a little, you know, uh, so social, I would say it goes, you know, each of those: family, friends.

2:00:44 I always have done really well with, uh, because friends are usually the same sex as you, so you don’t have the romantic component, being somewhat competitive. So that’s probably eight, or, uh, sometimes I feel like it’s, uh, nine or 10. Okay. Um, romance, right now I’m dating someone that I like, so you know, was better family. I go up and flow.

2:01:07 Sometimes their family’s been 10. Right now it’s complicated, a little more. All right, so what do you net net over all that? Let’s say seven. Okay, that’s fair, and there’s one more left: fulfillment.

2:01:19 Fulfillment, that’s actually happ… happiness. Happiness happiness. Uh, I do it cuz it sounds better: health, wealth, love, happiness than health, wealth, love, fulfillment. Yeah, man. Yeah, you asked tough questions on this, man.

2:01:32 I’d say right now an eight, but on this one particular one, just remember this. There’s a philosopher who did something called the hedonic experiment: if you could be in a tube and continually experience an orgasm, would you want to? And the answer for most humans is no. Right? I would think so.

2:01:50 Freud says you wouldn’t want to always be happy, because happiness is a contrast. See, everybody in the world can’t be beautiful, because the definition of beautiful is above-average symmetry. Not everybody can be tall, because then the word tall becomes meaningless. Your life, if you, so scientifically research shows the happiest group of people on the planet are people with Down syndrome. Okay, interesting.

2:02:18 Okay. Now that’s not a disparagement of people with Down syndrome. Does it? Just a fact. So sometimes happiness comes at the expense of the ability to have forward thinking.

2:02:31 So, uh, as you can look into the future, this is what scares us, and where fear comes from. So happiness sometimes evens and flows, and it’s okay, right? Maybe necessary. I mean, AB, you needed 2011 in order to double down on 2012. And if you meet someone that’s happy at 9 all the time, then, then maybe they have down central, nothing, nothing against that, but maybe they, yeah, or they’re just, or they’re delusional.

2:02:57 Maybe they’re not taking enough risks. So what, Maya, Maya’s favorite quote, one of the CEOs of my company, and she’s my cousin, too, uh, she says the favorite quote she’s ever heard me say is, a mistake is just an experiment run for too long. So true. Depression, but there’s also chemical reasons people have these, but sometimes, de, just means you let unhappiness run for too long. You should have taken the unhappiness as soon as you felt it, and before it reached this crescendo where you were overwhelmed.

2:03:34 It was your signal going, no, get out of there, get out of there. You, unhappy in a relationship, you can’t, don’t always ignore it. Take the hit. Oh, if, if you don’t like look, life is so short. That Seneca sums up this way.

2:03:52 He says, you meet people who are, fr, almost all people are frugal with their money. There is not a soul who, every person on the street begging for money, he says, just take my whole bank account. But he says, when it comes to our years, we act as if we have endless supply, and we’re just, oh, so we attach ourselves for years to the wrong people years. Yeah, that’s an experiment that you must run very quickly. I think the longest you should ever run an experiment for, for the most part, is 18 months, and a lot of experiments should be one day.

2:04:25 Okay, right, obviously some can’t kick in in one day. I mean, you can’t necessarily do a diet in one day, but you don’t need 18 months of being a fruitarian and lose all your teeth. Now, I’m not anti-fruitarian, cuz some people have run that experiment and it works well, right? but look for disconfirming evidence. I think the future of a lot of this, and I guess we’ll end, if I can end on this: the coolest thing in the world now is with the cutting-edge science out there.

2:04:56 The real Dr Shan Mullem said, tyght, here’s what’s going to happen with diet, in his opinion. He wrote the book Inheritance. Great book. We’re going to mouth-swab ourselves, and all this talk of, oh, you should be this, this is going to go away, and it’s going to be a completely customized diet for your DNA. What’s interesting is, go back to the Oracle at Delphi thousands of years ago.

2:05:21 What was the advice? You go to this wise up the mountain, and wise, and it says, know thyself. And here we are, 2014, we think we’re so wise, and we’re just saying that. That’s usually the answer. So that’s why I said the takeaway from today is know how your brain works.

2:05:36 It works perfect for the wrong world. So health, you’re going to swab our mouth. Wealth, it’ll be the same way. You know, you can look at your hand. If you look at your hand, uh, this is science, not palm reading.

2:05:49 This finger represents testosterone, and this one represents estrogen. So you can even see I have a very high testosterone finger. Me, look at my finger. So do you is it, uh huh? Now this, of course, is somewhat, this isn’t pseudo science, but you wouldn’t build your life around this, but it’s interesting.

2:06:09 ENTP, that’s what I am. That’s a signal often times that’s the visionary, the entrepreneur. So when it comes to wealth, I believe we’ll probably swab mouths and know, ah, that person is a support person. Interesting, that person is an accountant. When it comes to love, we now know that cutting-edge science, there’s, you can go to that Attached book website and take a test.

2:06:34 It’ll tell you if you’re secure, anxious, or avoiding. If you’re anxious, the answer is not to try to not become anxious. It’s to not date avoidance, but only to be with secure. If you’re an avoidant, it’s not, so avoidant is a strategy of independence. So some of us are not relationship people, and you think you have to change yourself, but you got to harness the horse in the right way.

2:06:59 You can’t fully change it. And happiness, I wouldn’t want everybody to be sunny, happy all the time. We need the people that are a little gruff. You want, when the robbers are in your house and you call the police, you don’t want a smiley man showing up or smiley woman. You want the one with the gun saving your life.

2:07:23 So what my mentor used to say, one of them, Mike, he used to say, it’s horses for courses. TI, you got to get the, he’s the, he’s pretty wealthy guy, to buy race horses. If it’s a long race course, sometimes you need a different horse than a short one. So figure out what horse you are, and when you can do that, that also tells you how you can harness your brain. Some people are going to always be more motivated by fear.

2:07:48 That’s why Drucker says in Managing Oneself, you got to know how you learn. Some people need audio books. Some people need to read. Some people, I don’t take notes anymore, cuz I ran that experiment, it doesn’t work. You know, all this school stuff, education telling everyone to take notes, it’s a fool’s game.

2:08:05 Not everybody’s the same, and most people don’t even learn well. I learn best by putting on an iPhone and recording a little summary of what I learn. I’m a verbal, when I verbalize things, and if you look at the Myers-Briggs, ENTP, extroverts generally gain energy from being in a social setting, where an introvert might do better with notes. All of these things are fascinating. You should become more curious.

2:08:28 The world, there’s a great book called Curious, and should I forget the author? But if you can up that, you will get everything. You can make million dollars, you can find love, your version of what that might be. It might be a 50-year marriage, or it might be, you know, celibacy. There are people that do all kinds of things, but the main thing is so live your life that the fear of death never enters into your heart.

2:08:56 When it comes your time to die, don’t be like those who weep and cry and ask for a little more time to live their life over again. You know, be like a hero going home. I read this book 13 and it’s about the Korean War, and there was a guy who won the, uh, he, he’s dead, but he received the Medal of Honor, and, uh, his, the North Koreans overran the base at night, and, uh, there was all these soldiers who got caught unaware, American soldiers, and this this one guy grabbed a machine gun, Redcloud was his name, and he started shooting to save his friends, and, uh, he strapped himself.

2:09:41 I mean, he was shooting, and he got wounded, and they said, come on, let’s go, and he said, no, I’m going to, uh, you guys go, and before he went, he said, come help me, cuz I’m wounded. I think his legs were shot out from under him, and he said, take this belt and tie me to the, to the pole. And the guy writing this said they, all other American troops were able to escape, and they could hear the machine gun slowly, as he was giving his life for other people, and they went back, and 300 dead enemies.

2:10:15 Of course he was dead, and he, he, that’s, there’s no greater love, right, than to give your life for other people. I don’t mean that in a violent way. That’s a symbol, that’s a metaphor. Uh, some of us will need to be more selfish. You need the capitalists in the world that move for greedy purposes, as long as their greed is modulated by some regulation.

2:10:37 Don’t be black and white about life. Life is complicated, but the goal is simple. What was your average, finally? Seven? No, I think it’s higher than that.

2:10:46 Seven and a half. I would say maybe, yeah, maybe eight. And so based on that own evaluation of yourself, then next year or this year you’ll be running new experiments to try to, are you trying to get each one to 10? Is it that simple of a goal that we all should be kind of going that way? So here’s what you do.

2:11:02 I thought on this. Okay, you want, if people ask me business advice, this is what I’m going to do, and I’ve been doing it better and better, because you know, you asked if I’m a guru. I’m not a guru. I’m just, you’re the reluctant guru, that’s what I called you. But I’m, so people want to look for gurus because they want to solve cognitive dissonance.

2:11:20 I, I wish I knew everything. That’s a bias, looking for gurus. Right? Exactly. We will always look for authority, and superheroes.

2:11:28 Yeah. Think, well, I just share what I’m doing, so if I can double down on what works, or let me take it even further. 10x what works, or 100x. You know, you’ve got this show. It’s working.

2:11:47 Do not start anything else. Quadruple down on this. Do quadruple the interviews I mean, that’s device to you, but device to myself is, take everything that I do, and it’s like, ah, and it’s amazing how stupid I am. 2011 was basically a year when I was doubling down on stuff that wasn’t working. We love it.

2:12:11 I mean, I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I meet like Tai, things are going downhill, business, and I go in there, and it always boils down to, they stopped. I was like, well, this made you half a million bucks. Why didn’t you do that? And you had three employees on it. Why don’t you take every employee and put him on that?

2:12:31 Sounds extreme, but then you get extreme result. Jack Welch, I just read his book Winning, fascinating. He says he took over GE, when he ended he had added in market cap value $400 billion. That’s a half a trillion. That’s the GDP of many countries.

2:12:50 And how did he do it? He’s like, everything, we can’t be number one or number two, and we stop, and we take that excess money and we double it down. So if you find one author that you like, read that. I read Civilization and Its Discontents probably every day. I read Will Durant, something by him, probably every day since I was 16.

2:13:12 It works for me. Double down. People, you don’t have to be egalitarian in what you do now. I do read new books every day, but I still read, those are the only ones on my phone that I really look at. So double down, and then anything that doesn’t work, just stop.

2:13:30 Forget economic sunk cost. I don’t care if you have 30 years into it. If your marriage is killing you and killing your kids, take a break. Right, so double down on that. So I’m in a per, and you do it through more experiments, but sometimes, like, you don’t necessarily need to have an experiment.

2:13:50 You already have a win. Eventually double down, but 10x down on it, 10x the winner. Right, man, what else are you going to do? Life’s a big blackjack game. You just like bet.

2:14:02 I just saw there in the news that guy in Paris, those people stormed the building, and yeah, I saw something, and the policeman was down on his hands and knees begging for his life, and they shot him anyway. Life was short, right? So for you, you’re going to 10x on what’s working great for you recently, which is your, you, media, online people. Yeah, so I’m, ten business, uh, spreading ideas. Right, book club.

2:14:29 It doesn’t always have to be, um, we’re launching this new uh publishing company called Mentor. Sounds cool. Sounds very cool. Yeah, so we’re going to, it’s, I, I don’t always want to double down on me being the person, cuz it’s kind of counter. If everybody begins, I don’t want people to focus on me.

2:14:45 Sometimes people write me critical things. I’m like, well, great, but that’s the opposite of most of these guys that are getting on stage, just self-help people. That is the opposite. They all wanted to be about them. Sometimes some of them, I mean, yeah, some are that way.

2:14:57 Some, you know, who knows? Maybe I’m that way deep down. I could be deluding myself, and it could be like, oh, I really need the attention. I doubt it. You could look at the evidence that I went a long time without doing anything.

2:15:09 So, but, but certainly new things can creep in. The good news is, so let me just say this about the self-help guys: don’t go by liking and disliking. So let’s say they’re up there for pure spectation. I mean, it’s being, to be, to gain spectators, and like, I need this. I just go, is it accurate?

2:15:30 Right? That’s all I care. And I found, you know what good news is, I don’t find as many people pushing bad ideas anymore. I find most of the stuff. There’s things I don’t agree with.

2:15:40 There’s general, subtle things. You know, I’ve had things with people that are pretty well known in this circle, like Len Reel, but in general, they’re kind of on the right track. Right, that’s interesting observation. So I interviewed, you were asking me earlier about interviewing Robert Kiyosaki. So I interviewed him, like, in the mid, he was literally finished his lunch, and I had 30 minutes in between his talk at the Excel Center.

2:16:04 It was a two-day event. His wife Kim was there, and like 10 other dudes in suits, and they were all going up, you know, for a few hours here, a few hours there. And afterwards they gave me a wristband, and I could walk around the place, and Robert got out there, and there was like 600 people there. Okay, and they broke out, and I was just like, you know, is this snake oil? Is this?

2:16:20 It’s not, and then I looked at all these people, and like, they were excited, and they were breaking into their groups, and they were talking about ideas, and I’m like, these people are getting value here. So I can go and say, okay, uh, you know, passive income, blah, blah, blah, Kiyosaki is a brand, it’s all BS [expletive], or I could say these people are getting something out of it, and they’re, and they’re doing something. Or don’t think of it black and white, too.

2:16:42 Yeah, think of it this way: opportunity cost. Would you rather have a world you can play? So I haven’t, I, I, one day I’ll be back on the show, maybe, if you’ll have me, and I’ll talk on logical fallacies. So one of them is not knowing how to argue ad absurdum. This is a classic tool of thinking.

2:16:58 So arguing ad absurdum, we could just prove whether we like this Kiyosaki idea or whether it’s working or not by saying, what happens if everybody in the world was at that conference? 7.3 billion people. Would you like that world, or would you prefer the world we live in now, where there’s genocide in various countries, uh, half the people in the world go to bed hungry, uh, one in three women is AB are abused. I’m taking the Kiyosaki conference. Okay, at least people are putting on a facade of trying.

2:17:34 People go, well, self, I had a guy, right? Oh, self-help doesn’t work. I said, my friend, nothing works, cuz we all die. Diets don’t work. You can be nihilistic.

2:17:45 People, a, you know, people n said, when people get a little knowledge, or Alexander Pope wrote the poem where he said drink deeply at the fountain or not at all. It’s called the Pierian… well, he’s talking about knowledge. People think they’re so smart, cuz they go, hell, well, I, uh, some of these self-help people, you know, are doing it for the money. I don’t care. What’s the alternative?

2:18:11 You don’t know how to think. I want to say to them, AR, it’s still better now. You might argue, I have something even better. Then tell me about it. Don’t be a hater.

2:18:21 What’s better? You have a better thing than you do. That thing. Sometimes people, I see them criticizing people, and I say, I want to write back, I avoid, and I go, well, what are you doing? You do something better, then you can gain authority, and you can say, and you don’t have to say they’re bad.

2:18:40 You can just go, you know, Einstein didn’t say Newton was bad. Newton had Newtonian physics, and Einstein, you know, and all the quantum stuff, that kind of, but he doesn’t poo-poo and hate on Newton. If we’re great, it’s because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. Everyone exists for us. Kiyosaki is a stepping stone.

2:19:01 I guarantee you, in 50 years, me, maybe I’m some sort of a stepping stone too. Someone will come in, much more authentic, more, uh, selfless, more intelligent, and do it better, and maybe they’ll look and go, Tai was the not so good version of me. Who cares? I can be nihilistic, do well. I’ll be dead by then.

2:19:22 What can you do to me? Kill me. I’ll be dead. I’m going there anyway. But the good news is, and I sincerely believe, like Stephen Hawking said, and like Freud said, you know, Freud said people ask me the meaning of life, and he says, that’s too hard of a question.

2:19:40 You never ask your dog what the meaning of your dog’s life is. He said, if you ask me what the behavior of humans shows me, I can tell you that, but I can’t tell you the purpose. And Hawking agreed, and said we make our own purpose. That was, one of the smartest people on the planet, and so I defer to him, and I say, look, what’s your purpose? I can’t tell you it’s right or wrong, but I can tell you we’re hardwired for a certain amount of things that will get you feeling at least like you’re an 8, 9, 10.

2:20:09 Maybe it’s delusional. Maybe it’s not. Follow the map. We live in the best of times, because we can know. We can put our head under a brain scanner.

2:20:17 Now we never, you know, Lieberman talks about, we could not do this 20 years ago. We had to study vegetables that came in from car accidents. Couldn’t cut a people open like you can now. Now you can do it all behind the scenes with these scanners. So you got the best chance ever of living the good.

2:20:34 I’m, I’m optimistic, even though I’m a realist. I know I’m going the same place as everybody else. And so what are you doing next year for, uh, happiness, and the other three? Are you doing anything? Are you running any experiments?

2:20:48 So, health experiment. I’ve been doing a health experiment, of, I believe the reason most of us don’t work out as much as we like to is availability bias. Okay, whenever I travel, I always cut weight, and or 10 times healthier when I’m at home, cuz I have a maid who cooks for me and throws, I instructed her, anything not good, throw out of my house. It’s not available. I eat perfect.

2:21:09 When I travel, here to London, everything goes, cuz you’re in a, you know, hotel. I’m hungry, and you just, you eat what’s, so, uh, the reason I think most people don’t work out. The reason I hate gym memberships is, takes too long to go to a gym, so I’ve been oversimplified. What happens if I just do burpees all the time? That’s a good, burpees is one of the most whole-body exercises.

2:21:31 You see dudes in prison, they are in shape. And if you do one minute of burpees, I’m talking, this is an exercise people could do. I don’t care if you’re gym-work, uh, work in an office. So I’m doing a burpee exercise now. I’ll let you know how it goes.

2:21:44 They’re brutal. Burpees are love. I, it takes three days to start seeing your cardio improve, or at least for me. Uh, number two on wealth, I am, uh, experimenting with this. Well, I’ve been doing this Lamborghini experiment of doing recording in a Lamborghini.

2:22:11 I’ve been buying more companies that already have revenue. I like that experiment. Online companies, yeah, they don’t always have to be online, but everything’s going to be online eventually. So, and I’m finding out some things in that experiment that I don’t like. I don’t always like buying companies that have employees that don’t have my culture, right, because I end up having to fire a lot of them, and it’s hard to train old dogs.

2:22:34 You know, it’s like, ah. So I’m trying to figure, so that experiment leads to the next experiment: how can I buy companies that have very few employees, and maybe it’s implied, you just buy the owners out, and then I just drop my team into it. Okay, so that’s, but you have to be willing to do that. See, most people are afraid of mistakes. There are no mistakes.

2:22:54 I bought two companies this year in an industry I’ve never bought before, and even I like it overall, but I won’t do it again exactly like this. But it’s not a mistake, cuz I did it in a quick experiment, right? Uh, when it comes, so when it comes to love, I’ve been experimenting with something that is one of the greatest experiments I’ve ever done in terms of giving me the results that I want, and I highly recommend. So Jonathan Haidt, he wrote The Happiness Hypothesis.

2:23:25 Yeah, I know that book, and I was talking to him on the phone, kind of privately, and he said, and I haven’t heard him write about this as much, he talked about something called companion of love, and he said, cuz I told him, this Amish guy went and visited this Amish guy named William Yuty. I had seen him in a decade, and I go up to Wisconsin. He had moved from the place that I originally knew him. I walk in the door, and he looks at me, and he says he’s older than me.

2:23:49 He says, good to see you, Tai, because I realize now new friends are good, but old friends are better. And there’re, and, and I’d known them for a long time, and uh, Jonathan Haidt said that’s companion of love, and we know under a brain scanner that you can never recreate it with new friendships. A lot of the social books out there, you know, How to Win Friends and Influence People, they’re based on a false premise, um, or somewhat of a false premise, and that is that the accumulation of new friends is efficient.

2:24:22 So what I’ve done is I’ve searched for my old friends. You saw one of them here, Zach. We’ve been friends since I was 14. Yeah, I noticed that. And in my companies, I do whatever I have to do to get them to move to Los Angeles and work with me, even if they’re not perfectly qualified for the job I have.

2:24:38 Yeah, even if you overpay, cuz they, they are learning how to do the new. Man, that is an experiment. I tell people, go find your long- lost friends. You will. So it’s like Entourage.

2:24:48 Just get those guys you grew up with. I mean, in terms of dopamine response, of anything I have ever done, that is the biggest bang for the buck. I remember, as in, spending time with them, or he’s around me all the time, cuz we do, he had to travel with me. He’s running the cameras on stuff. I’m like, Tai, how is, you know, I did this, this latest Lamborghini talk, and I said, you know, three things I wish I’d known at 18.

2:25:12 One of them is nobody knows what they’re talking about in the world. I’m like, how, sometimes I, you know, people think, oh, Tai, does it make you feel good to say things that haven’t been said? I’m like, no, it makes me angry. I’m not that smart. How come nobody told, have you ever heard of companion of love?

2:25:31 No. Have you ever heard somebody tell you that we have a brain that works perfect but for the wrong world? Have you, did you hear that growing up in school? No, but it makes a lot of sense. No, we hear about sin, and we hear about D, and we hear about willpower.

2:25:45 It’s all wrong. It makes me angry because we’re too… suit life is short, and art is long. The Art of Living is taking me too long to figure out. Right? That is an experiment that I will tell you, I would bet money anybody watching, and you know what’s funny?

2:26:03 Here’s an example of not doubling down. Have you ever met, like, there’s an old friend in town, and you go out to dinner with them, you know, they, you connect with them on Facebook, they come into town, you meet, and it’s like you stay up all night talking about old times. It’s great. Night, yes, I’ve had those, and then we never double down on them. Go, well, if it was great one night, let’s take this experiment.

2:26:22 What have I spent, 10 days with them? Well, I’ve been running, now, I’ve kind of ran this experiment for years. It’s the best thing. I’ve known Maya, my cousin. I remember when she was born.

2:26:32 Wow. You’ll never re… who can I hire? So it’s not just dopamine. You trust them and everything you want in another human being. Okay, and are they the most efficient workers?

2:26:41 Are they the best workers? I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, cuz they make up in many other ways. If I could have made a billion dollars hiring someone else, I’d be happy making a million dollar… I mean, for, for sure there’s trump cards on money.

2:26:53 Okay, and social trumps money, for sure. If you had to be poor but have good social connections, take that one. Now, the good news is you don’t have to, but right? Oh yeah, social trump. And we know it.

2:27:06 Mo, we evolve this brain almost only for social connection, right? Voal cords, yeah, all for ability. I mean, everything. So no, that’s a great. So, and then with happiness experiment, I’ll tell you, that Happiness Hypothesis is an interesting book, that is a good book.

2:27:21 Freud’s is the best, though: Civilization and Its Discontents. So what I’ve been experimenting with there, uh, is getting very into psychometric tests, which is just the science of personality tests. So luckily I’m friends with Dr David Buss. We talk, you know, we text. He’s a genius guy.

2:27:41 Read all his stuff. He’s the most respected, really, in that field of evolutionary psychology. Um, so I’m doubling down on knowing myself. So, for example, exle, I’ve always had a vague understanding of myself. I’m a pretty social guy.

2:27:54 So I ran, I would do parties at my house. Social guy. But you said that you, something that you’re social, but you’re not completely social. No, my, in my ENTP, if that test is accurate, I’m only a 30, about 30%. So what happens is I see myself.

2:28:08 I’ve always been known as social, so I take other people’s word for it, right? But nobody loves me as much as I love me. So now I’m doubling down myself on learning. I’ve learned about the HEXACO, and I built my own personality test. I do well when I build my own thing.

2:28:23 It helps me learn and take the best. So what I’ve learned about myself, cuz I used to throw parties at my house once a month, and it’s funny, every morning the next day I wouldn’t tap dance out of bed. You would think I just made amazing connections, I just hung out with amazing people, but now I realize I have a level of introversion to me. So now I’m letting myself go. A sometimes, I’m like, I’ll just go till I feel like meeting people, and then I fully recharge.

2:28:50 It’s been a great one. So anything around knowing myself has just been like, whoa, I found out I don’t like interviewing people, right? People ask, my podcast. I ran that experiment. Every time I feel like other people do it better, right, and something’s missing, and you’re like, yeah, and people feel that energy right away.

2:29:09 Yeah, and exactly. So I’m like, cut, cut it out, double down. Now I’ll do, now I do four videos a day. Yeah, you do a lot of videos, and that’s, and that’s you doubling down. D, it works.

2:29:21 I have a friend, one of the top marketers, man. He’s like, that’s all I do. I come into companies, I take 50%, and he goes, this is all I do, I, me. He’s a rich guy. He has a marketing company, but he takes equity, usually 50%.

2:29:33 He goes, everybody thinks I’m such a genius. He goes, this is what I do. I come in, I found out what the founder was doing that was making most of the money, and I make him do it 8 hours a day, and the company triples in value. I’m like, this guy’s doing the scientific, the seven-step scientific theory, and doing the double-down theory. So if you could do, I found with books, man.

2:29:56 You know, uh, books, cool thing. So I read a book a day. Everybody’s flabbergasted by that. I don’t think it’s that hard, if you, if you’re willing. If you don’t consider yourself worth one hour of doubling down on your own DNA, I consider it weird.

2:30:12 So I was like, how far can I go with this? So one morning, you can see on my Instagram, I posted, I just bought five books, and I read them. I went, laid on my bed, and I read all five. Now, I didn’t finish them all. Some of them were less interesting, but I would say I read 30%, or half speed read.

2:30:33 Do you skim through? Do you try to get the ideas? I have a whole thing on smart reading. I just, a seven-video series. I think speed reading is incomplete, and I think reading too slow.

2:30:43 So it’s a whole methodology. Um, maybe you can put a link in there. It’s pretty cool. People love it. But uh, 67 steps, if anyone, to, if I do my little pitch, do the 67 steps.

2:30:53 I got, I’m on track to have a million positive comments. It’s, you know, what that seminar yesterday? Yeah, at that seminar yesterday. It was pretty, you let you know, you had to go early. Yeah, but a lot, I didn’t know most of the people in the room, and I, I have this business mentorship thing I did, and I was talking about it, and, uh, three people popped up, and we, like, I tripled my money in one week from taking it.

2:31:19 And it’s an 18-month thing, and they paid for it, and they’re like, in one week I’ve tripled my… and three people. It’s like, sometimes I second-guess myself. This is private mentoring, or something? No, no, it’s a business. Uh, it’s an online, well, it’s a combination.

2:31:32 It’s called it’s this, it’s kind of like a mini MBA. Instead of going to college, I didn’t go to college, but that’s how I decide to do more, because you got that feedback. Yeah, cuz I’ve done some things that don’t work as well, like my interviews. I never get an email from, so Jeff Bezos is a genius, cuz he created something that I call CDRs, he calls it, so customer-driven response. Remember, I said you learn from friends and enemies.

2:31:57 So Jeff Bezos, you know, checks, Jeff, Amazon.com. If everybody wants to write him, he checks that. He has four assistants, and he looks at him. He’ll change his whole business off one complaint. He understands, ni…

2:32:09 His mind is an inaccessible fortress. He doesn’t trust himself to make good decisions. So like, my, when I do uh interviews with people, I very rarely get, um, sometimes it’s good for me to have somebody there, but if I, they do most of the talking, I never get a positive comment. Right? Like, it’s good to have Zach in your Lamborghini videos, that’s important.

2:32:29 Yeah, he’s funny. He’s kind of, he lightens it up. But yeah, so you got to do a lot of that. It’s experiment, customer-driven response or enemy and friend-driven response. Right?

2:32:39 Okay, so uh, this book thing, I read five books at one time, and I was like, it was crazy, and until I read recently, read this, Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, the science of how innovation comes. He says that, he says when Bill Gates goes and brings a stack of books for one week, there’s a special, as you called it, James Altucher’s idea sex, or something, so he’s pairing them in, because he thinks he might get some. Yes. All right. So I did the five books, so then I did what I consider the correct next move.

2:33:13 I double down again, and I tried 10 books, and it, I didn’t. It didn’t work. It was overwhelming. Okay, so everybody, you find your thing, but most people never see. People go, I can’t read a book a day.

2:33:25 Well, what if you just try my thing, which is, try this: 15 minutes a day. Take a book. And this is, it’s a longer system than this, but and then when you’re done, swear to yourself you’ll put it on the bookshelf for later, and the next day you’ll have a new book, right? If you peruse 365 books in order, remember there’s 130 million books. Don’t follow miss-waiting in order.

2:33:48 You will hug my neck. That’s one of my mentors, Mike Standback. He told me, I came to him, I walked in, I was poor, sleeping on that couch, and I walked in, and I said, Mike, I saw you have a full page ad. I know this cost about 30 grand in the Yellow Pages. You don’t know me, I don’t know you, but if you teach me what you know about making money, I’ll work for you for free.

2:34:09 And he was sitting in a chair like this, he has his big mustache, and he just went, I’ve been looking for someone like you for 20 years. Show up in the morning, and I was walking out right after said that. He said, show up in the morning, and I’ll show you what I know. I was walking out the door. He said, Tai, if you listen to what I say, one day you’re going to hug my neck.

2:34:27 And he’s right. And I’m telling people, if you peruse ideas like that and don’t get attached to the book, and don’t, and understand you can come back to it, you’re not, but you’re getting that. So every day you pick up a book, and you, you’ll never be the same, right? And then the next day you do a new, different book, and a different book. You know why I know it’s working?

2:34:46 Because I have millions of people following, and I’ve never yet gotten one email that goes, this is a crap idea, but I get thousands at a time. I can’t even answer anymore. People going, you, this guy at LA, one of my neighbors, is a very wealthy guy. Makes about 20 million bucks a year, business guy. We met on a TV show years ago.

2:35:07 We were on this reality show, and, uh, he comes. I did this TEDx talk, right? So he comes, and I said, I need, I’m going to invite five business guys to critique it before I fly to Belgium, Luxembourg, to do it. So you come, and it was all about my talk, called Why I Read a Book a Day and Why You Should Too. So this guy for years has told me, he’s like, I make 20 million.

2:35:26 I never read. I hate books. They just confuse you. So he hears, he doesn’t talk, and he’s smart. He didn’t say anything, but apparently, without me knowing, he went and decided to experiment.

2:35:38 I think I talked about experiment about a month after I come back from giving my TEDx thing. I’m walking down on Sunset. He’s got a little baby. He runs up to me, he goes, you’re not going to believe this. Everything’s changed.

2:35:51 He goes, my wife is going to hug your neck. He goes, you won’t believe this. I think I’m going to, whatever, double how much money I make. He goes, I’m so happy now. I pop out of bed.

2:36:03 He’s like, now I have a phantom response if I don’t have a book. He’s like, I’m ordering, and I’m thinking, Seneca said this thousands of years ago, all those authors, they lived for you. You can annex all of their knowledge and download it. You’re the superhero standing on the shoulders of Gandhi, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Descartes. Who doesn’t want to stand on that shoulder?

2:36:33 You will have the greatest life ever. And all I ask is, one day, I don’t even care. I don’t care about compliments. I do like people responding so I know what to do more of. But make your kids do it, because one of my friends, one of my best friends, makes about a million dollars a day in his business.

2:36:52 Very wealthy, going to make a billion dollars IPO. He told me, he said, you know, Tai, I don’t understand why you care about all this unselfish stuff. He’s very smart, PhD, worked for NASA. He’s like, it makes no sense. You make the world a better place, but you’ll be dead.

2:37:07 He said, let me tell you, and I’ve actually annexed his thinking, he’s much smarter. He said, don’t try to make the world a better place in 500 years. You’ll be gone and even after about 10 or 15 generations, your own kids will no longer really be related to you. You know, that you lose genes every time. So in 500 years, so he said, this is what you do, Tai.

2:37:30 Do stuff that will make the world better today. So when you walk out of your house, nobody stabs you to death to steal your wallet, cuz everybody’s prosperous. So all I ask for people is, if you experiment, and if anything, you know, books and these ideas, then make the world a better place. Sweep your own floor. Around you, I’m going to try to do it around me.

2:37:52 And then it’s an ultimate Pareto efficiency. Everybody talks about Pareto principle, 80/20. I’m like, Pareto said something that I like better, the Pareto efficiency. A Pareto inefficiency is either a lose-lose, so a lot of dating relationships are lose-lose. Both couples are unhappy, but they’re tied together by weird oxytocin response, you know, attachment.

2:38:17 Get out of lose-loses immediately. Other relationships or businesses are win-lose, like you’re making money but you’re taking advantage of people. Fast food industry, I consider it a level two. Level one is like lose-lose. That’s like a robber, you know, something, he’s stealing from people, which ruins their life, and almost always you end up in jail or die.

2:38:38 So lose-lose. Then you have fast food. It’s like, or most fast food, it’s a win-lose, right? They make $200 billion industry, and I read 50% of kids in America, by 2030, will be diabetic or pre-diabetic. You’re, you’re getting wealthy off your own kids.

2:38:57 I don’t know what happens to a society that does that to their own kids. So that’s a, but then the third, the pinnacle of life is the Pareto efficiency. Those bottom two are inefficient. That’s the Pareto efficiency, where your Oprah, she’s, I mean, Oprah is somebody people don’t study. Now, think about it.

2:39:17 Rises from the ashes, gets two mentors. We haven’t talked much about mentors, except, gets the mentors. She annexes their ideas, their experience. Doesn’t make her own. Become a newscaster or anchor anymore, but makes her own production company, makes $2.2 billion, while making, who doesn’t like Oprah?

2:39:43 Presidents like Oprah. Common people, you ever seen Oprah’s Facebook page? 8 million likes, and it’s the greatest life ever. I’m like, this is what every abundance, every win-win, that’s the Pareto efficiency. And people think they can’t get it, but she, she’s a black woman.

2:40:01 This is the most ostracized, discriminated-against group of people you could possibly be. Women have been discriminated against, and still are, and so have minorities. she pulled off the trump card. She’s, and nobody calls her a capitalist. I saw her Rolls-Royce stretch, driving down Hollywood the other day.

2:40:22 It’s a million dollar car, because she gives, she’s making the world a better place, creating reciprocal altruism. Do that, right? You can do it. You can become a millionaire and have the love and respect, and, as Charlie Munger said, the earned respect of your peers is one of the sweetest feelings on Earth. And that I’m going to end on.

2:40:47 Okay, because if you guys don’t understand, Tai, he spoke for 8 hours yesterday, and you said you were just getting warmed up. You might have to break this into two videos, right? And we still have to cover mentors, where there’s abundance of ideas, and you know what I’d say? Even though you and I could die, we build a friendship. I can come on here.

2:41:06 Maybe people care. Maybe people don’t want me on here, but be abundant. You can always be, be okay to close the book, cuz there’s always another book. There’s always another time to read, until we die, right? But if you do your burpees, maybe you’ll get an extra year.

2:41:23 So be abundant, as in, mean what be abundant. You know, that every, every, I, I honestly think spend your way wealthy. Take your material money, and you will end up spending your money on things that make you healthy. Buy every gadget, every shake machine, every mixer, every water filter. People are worried, like, what else you going to spend your money on?

2:41:45 Look, a Lamborghini will give me a 10x return, turn, because of the businesses I have, or, Russ, I wouldn’t have one. I, I like horses. I was just, I went to the Amish for Thanksgiving before Joel Salatin man. Nothing better than having a horse. As Amish always say, you know what’s good about a horse?

2:42:02 It doesn’t depreciate, cuz it has a baby and replaces itself. He said, an Amish guy told me, Tai, when your cars can have babies and replace themselves for free, that’s when I’ll get a car. But every time I get afraid to do that and I pass back into fear, my life goes down. My, my 1 to 10 score is a little bit lower. Man, you can’t, I’m, if you don’t believe me, just try this.

2:42:28 Everybody watching, give to charity double what you usually give, and watch what happens. You will not, I’m going to watch the cdrs. I’ll be honest, I’m going to be honest, if people write me and go, I get, now I think the key is, don’t do it too conspicuously. Okay, so it’s some strange force that’s happening? No, no, because I also, let’s just be logical.

2:42:49 Let’s say there could be a strange force. Logically, nobody likes somebody who shows off giving, their giving, so you create negative social connections. So try to do it inconspicuously. Give double of whatever you give. Some people don’t give at all.

2:43:04 I’ve gone through phases. I didn’t give it all. 2011, I bet you I didn’t give as much. I didn’t give much. I got all, you know, you get off a weird track.

2:43:12 So do that. Be abundant in learning. Do not cap yourself in scarcity and go, Tai, I can only read a book a month. Is that a law of physics? You know, one of the greatest things they say about Jeff Bezos is he is only bounded by the law of physics.

2:43:28 Everything else is up for discussion. So do not try to jump off the balcony and have a good life. You will end your life. But who says you can only read a book a month? The average person, the average CEO only reads 50 books a year.

2:43:42 Who says that’s the number? I get CEOs, I just was at lunch right before this with a kid. He came in. I have an inner circle, which is for pretty high-performing net worth guys. He said his net worth’s gone up a couple hundred million dollars since September when I was here last.

2:44:00 Now I can’t take credit. I said, what do you do? And it’s just all the stuff the smart people say that I regurgitate to him, not my own idea. It’s like, I double down, double down on certain things, cut out other things. I focus on one thing.

2:44:13 Man who chases two rabbits ends up with none. He’s like, you won’t believe this. I’m cutting billion, he’s not 30 yet. That’s crazy. So, so, uh, no, so just try it.

2:44:27 Try abundant knowledge. Try abundant amount of experiments. Try abundant uh social connections, specifically with people. Would you have companion of love? Interesting.

2:44:41 So rekindle some old friends and get them all back. If the average, see, wealth is lots of stuff, yeah, so. I’m not just trying to get Zach. He’s like, now there’s obviously a limit of diminishing returns. Like I said, I tried to read 10 books in a day, and it was weird.

2:44:59 And you can, and that’s where you get cdrs from friends and enemies. Your own brain is a customer-driven response, right? I feel boggled. For me, that is not so. But I guarantee you, man, if I was 14 again, your IQ peaks at 14.

2:45:12 If somebody had told me this at 14, I mean, my life will beat, and I don’t like to eliminate the pain by going, well, I’ve done pretty good. And no, I, you know, you see that stupid meme which is like, well, you know, this has gotten me to where I am. That’s I’ve been guilty of that in the past. Yeah, don’t do it. Cut it out, and just go, that was dumb.

2:45:34 So if I meet a 14-year-old, I’ll go, listen to me. Try 10 books. I bet you can. I just met this kid that came in, conference. He’s 19.

2:45:47 He went, he said, he, yeah, he’s making 6,000 a month. He lives in Lithuania. I mean, a day. He’s like, he came in, this business mentor, it’s already making money. Two grand a day.

2:45:58 He’s like, in 24 hours, I’m making six grand a day. It’s not because of me. He’s rewiring his brain to double down, and what happens is you start gulping. All of us have our throat where we like this, this is only this much water as normal. Then you go to a fraternity party, and you’re like, these dudes have retrained their, to just guzzle.

2:46:18 Right? Guzzle life, and that’s what we have to do. Don’t do too much, or you’ll drown. But you usually can guzzle a heck of a lot more than you have. Right?

2:46:27 All right, good. We’re going to put links here to the 67 steps and to the smart read. We’ll have them right here below. The business, we’ll have the the inner circle is invitation only, so I don’t put any links to that. If you’re already doing, making, uh, in business, I’ve got a business mentorship that is freaking, I pull just so people know.

2:46:46 There will, for my personal stuff, I put my own brand on. Nothing stays up that doesn’t work. Right? Oh, I will yank it out. So the stuff that’s up works, and especially on my own brand.

2:46:58 Like, I buy businesses. You allow a certain amount of complaint rate on my own brand, because this isn’t my main business, so I don’t want to tarnish my reputation. I don’t even, let, so, yeah, check it out. 67 steps, if you’re starting out. But the, do the entrepreneur stuff.

2:47:15 The world, you can make more money. That’s that NBA business mentorship level. I’m listening to your book thing, and I’m thinking, I’m going to line up maybe 30 days of books and just jump in. How do you feel about audio books? Just great.

2:47:27 It’s great. Modulate around, so do a, don’t, Lear, you can’t do an audio book in a day, cuz that’s a lot of hours, cuz that’s like audio books. You can’t skip. You can’t skip. Well, here’s what I would recommend for you.

2:47:38 I’ll give you a preview of The Thing. One minute. Set a timer. I’d rather you read uh, 2 minutes at breakfast, 2 minutes at lunch, and 2 minutes before you go to bed. Then try to sit down and read for an hour.

2:47:53 Try that. But here’s the rule: just get one book. Well, it will hook you more, right? Take one book, do that. I mean, you don’t have to read it three times a day, but read that one book, and then swear to yourself, no matter how captivating it is, that you will not let the 75,000-year-old brain kick in.

2:48:14 You’ll close it. Don’t throw it away. Put it on the bookshelf, and you’ll read a new one the next, next day, and go back to it someday. Okay, and then line up 365 books. Yeah, go.

2:48:24 One thing, I have a cool list on my website. Uh, it’s not my own books. It’s a, it’s the 150. I don’t know if I have, I have about 135 listed. Read them in order.

2:48:35 So read Dr David Buss before you read, you know, some modern, I mean, read them in order. You must read in order to get the effect. Do one more. So read Managing Oneself. I think that was number one.

2:48:48 Read, if you can afford it, the, David Buss. Read Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Read Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Sent me high. Read Contiki.

2:48:59 Read uh Jerry Wiro, when I stopped dying, uh, when I stopped talking. I read that a few years back. Don’t, so you don’t have to read exactly in the order, but don’t skip to my number 110 book. Okay, read them, read them at least one book per line in those order. There’s a method there.

2:49:13 Modulate around. So like, Monday, read a health book. Tuesday, read a wealth book. Thursday, Wednesday, read a love, social book. Thursday, read a book on flow, like happiness.

2:49:24 So I just, I spin around and around. She goes. The good news is all those of you who want mentorships, great mentors, all of you who want to raise investment money, you know how easy it is to raise investment money right now, but it’s also almost impossible, because if you’re impressive, if you walk up to people and you start talking about great ideas, there’s an association cognitive bias in their brain. They will associate you with Dr David Buss. You will rise to his IQ.

2:49:58 Trust it. We don’t. I don’t have the IQ of Dr David Buss. I think I gained that by interviewing people. I’m associated, exactly.

2:50:04 So you’re that’s why I say you need to do this daily. You’re probably right. Do it daily. Try. Well, how about this?

2:50:11 I shouldn’t say that. That’s too, see, I always fall, our language falls into black and white. Right? Try it for a week. The worst thing is, stop, and maybe you go to, once, three times a week.

2:50:22 Right, start gulping, but watch the customers telling you. People want people, want to consume content. The more I put out, the more views and subscribers and things. I don’t know. All I know is the average person watches 3 hours of TV a day, and the average 20-year-old plays 20 hours of video games.

2:50:41 People want to stare at content, right? That is, by the way, Dr Kip Thorne summarized Einstein’s law of time. Wars, by, by saying people want to, all things in the universe move to where they age the most slowly. The reason if I jump out of this window, what floor are we on? The third.

2:50:58 Third, gravity will pull me down, because time is slower on the first floor than the third. People don’t realize this is a law of physics, so we’re naturally procrastinate and lazy, cuz it’s easier to sit in a chair. It burns less fuel in our brain to watch content. So content creators have to just make more content. I, I think you could make a 24/7 reality show.

2:51:19 People are just, stare. They do that. You’re doing the right, you’re doing one that’s bringing the good life to people. Yeah, and you can tell by the people who watch it a lot. A lot of them were at your event yesterday, and they’re just these super positive, inquisitive, I mean, everybody was raised.

2:51:34 Thanks for having me on here. And I mean, I’m like, yeah, a lot of the best people there, in terms of the more experienced ones, are from London Real. Yeah, yeah. Well, you’re coming back in March, so we should do something together, or, you know, uh, whatever, do you know, whatever, because, yeah, we have a lot of synergies here, cuz people that listen here, they want to get better. So you know, hey, bet on yourself.

2:51:57 It’s the only one you could control. You cannot. My motivations for talking to you could be good or they could be bad, but I’ll tell you this, statistically, my motivation for talking to everybody here is more for me than for them. Even if I consciously say I want to be altruistic, I want to be altruistic, even altruism can be selfish. So that’s why I say take everything I say with a grain of salt, but use it as a catalyst to create experiments for yourself.

2:52:29 You see, I really am a catalyst, because even if I bristle the hair of some people, some people need a bristle, right? As Jesus Christ said, not, and I’m not comparing myself to you, you guys got to be careful, but I thought it’s interesting. You know, someone who’s considered a pacifist, and all these things, and he said, I came not to bring peace, but I came to bring a sword. The world, he said, I didn’t come to, he said, I came to divide families. That’s right, out of the Bible.

2:53:00 Now, doesn’t mean that we always have to be that way, but don’t always be afraid of conflict. I’m not afraid of conflict. Yet you must be strong but you must have warmth. Read that book, Compelling People. And I think I, I genuinely, at the deepest level, I like people.

2:53:18 I’m generally an optimist about people, and I think that it’s generally a better approach. Helen Keller, you know, Conrad Hilton, the great, started a Hilton hotel chain. He, there’s a good book about the Hilton. Paris Hilton’s great-grandfather. She’s my neighbor, uh, on my street, and he said uh, when he was 15 years old, he picked up a book on his mom’s table, and it was by, by Helen Keller.

2:53:44 He opened it up, and she talked about optimism. You know, she was born healthy, about 18, 19 months. I think she got spinal meningitis, high fever, lost her eyesight, lost her, her, uh, hearing, all senses besides touch, really, taken smell, I guess, taken away from her. Couldn’t really talk. Look at her author.

2:54:08 We’re still talking about her today. Changed the life of one of the wealthiest people. Conrad Hilton. We stay in his hotel. All emanates from one, Catal, who was, got, see, she had to get control of her brain.

2:54:23 She talks about that. She went crazy for a time, because the brain, the 75,000-year-old brain, was saying you’re useless. You’ve lost social access, but she got on the horse in her brain. She harnessed it, and she’s one of the greatest people to ever live. I know, and people are still talking about her with no s…

2:54:41 I look at myself. I’m like, I need to write a book, and I’m like, you know, I’m procrastinating. I’m like, she can’t see, and she wrote a better book than I’ll ever write in my life. It’s, it’s fairly humbling. Stay humble, but remember it’s okay to be a little cocky.

2:54:57 Michael Jordan had ex… you know, there’s that. Not to bring up Jesus Christ again, but there’s that great story. There’s a man with two sons. He told the sons to go do something. The first son said, I will, father, but he didn’t do it.

2:55:12 And the second son said, no, I won’t, but he did. And Jesus said, which one obeyed? So, so for you and I, talk is cheap. You know, proof’s in the pudding. Go do this stuff, and do not be a pi.

2:55:28 Do not do it tomorrow. So if you’re watching this and it’s 11:50, go read Civilization and Its Discontents. It’s, at 1151 there’s a PDF online. Go sign up for some business thing. Go post an ad on Craigslist.

2:55:44 I will walk your dog. What, what, saying, yeah, post on Facebook, so you get social proof working for you. That you don’t want to be embarrassed. Use your pride to harness your procrastination, or to ride past the procrastination. Then, though, once you start, go through.

2:56:03 If it takes a thousand experiments, right? Run. Make sure, numbers, you don’t skip step number two, which is research. Know thyself. Do the Myers-Briggs, do the HEXACO, do the StrengthsFinder, do the DISC test.

2:56:16 You can do the PACE test if you go through the 67 steps I talk about. I, I like the system I have. It’s real easy to learn, but it’s effective. The PACE one, you’re a, I think you’re a P. Yeah.

2:56:28 Uh, I think you’re probably a PA. I’m definitely not the social. No, you’re probably P-A, E-E-S. Okay, social. So that means always for you, you’ll get idea, but it’s a little bit hard to get off the ground, but not as hard as some piece.

2:56:43 Interesting. Okay, good. I’m going to take this test. Fantastic. All right, there you go.

2:56:47 Tai Lopez, you can, you.com, Twitter, you’re on Facebook, you’re all, subscribe to my YouTube, cuz I’m putting stuff up daily, and you get sometimes do deals, and I only do it for the day, so all the subscribers do the subscriber, right? Sub on YouTube as well. Okay, yeah, I like, I like YouTube. Okay, yeah, we love YouTube here. Yeah, while you’re at it, subscribe to our page, and, um, yeah, um, give us tons of comments.

2:57:08 If you love what Tai said, great. If you hate it, great. We love it. Share, like. Here’s the one rule: if you disagree with me, please state the evidence.

2:57:16 I try not to be, perfect at it. I try to quote accurate studies by reputable… when people say you’re wrong, I am wrong on lots of stuff, but show me why, right? Judge the argument, not the person. Yeah, my, I could be annoying sometimes. I can annoy myself.

2:57:37 Some, I’m very lucky to sit here and get you to drop this knowledge on me, so thanks so much. It’s our second time in three or four months. Definitely come back and see us when you come back next time. Uh, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you on yours, and that’s it.

2:57:49 We’re out of here. Thank you.