Tai Lopez - Live the Good Life

Full transcript: Tai Lopez on London Real

7:36 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr Tai Lopez, who is an aspiring renaissance man and entrepreneur who started 12 multi-million dollar companies that are all still running successfully. You’ve traveled to 51 countries seeking out genius mentors and investing in the world’s top entrepreneurs. You read a book a day and write a summary for your 1.2 million strong book club.

8:02 I want to talk about that later. You live with the Amish for 2 and a half years. You’re a member of Mensa, so am I. I don’t know where my dues go or where they go. You train Brazilian jiu-jitsu, as do I.

8:13 You live in the Hollywood Hills. Tai, welcome to London Real. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. You know, you travel all over the world.

8:19 I know you talk to a lot of different people, and before we dive into a bunch of your knowledge and your theories, how does it feel to be in London? What’s the vibe like of the people? I know you gave some talks over the weekend, and when it comes to kind of an entrepreneurial meter, you know, where do we rank that? That’s an interesting question. You know, I just a couple years ago I decided to really do a worldwide business tour.

8:41 You know, we, I invest around the world, but mostly it’s been domestic in the US. So on my last trip, I was like, you know, I had higher hopes for Europe. I thought it was more entrepreneurial. Europe does a lot of things better than the US, such as, and probably environmental stuff, health stuff, some quality of life kind of, yeah, fashion, not being fat, things like that. Not but America is just dominating in the entrepreneur space.

9:13 Although I will say, from that, Canada may be the place. I’ve always said Canada is like a blend. It’s part, it’s taking the best of Europe and the best of the US. So can I see, you know, I, of course, in London you see big glimmers of hope Scandinavia. Yeah, you see it a lot.

9:32 You’ve got Spotify up there. Yeah, I was just a, it’s for me, what I’m looking for everywhere you go. You see talent and you see morons, whether it be in the US or wherever, but it’s the zeitgeist. It’s the spirit of the people, and I think the UK and London still is not as merit-based and whenever you start making rewards not completely tied to merit, I think you run it into trouble. So is that a hangover from our classes?

10:01 Society, you think, some kind of class, but it’s not as bad as, say, France, where there’s no, like the tax laws and everything just stunts entrepreneurs. If you look at, you know, if you look at some of the great social scientists, whether it be Richard Dawkins, Daniel Pink, these guys, you’ve got social memes, which are really genes, you know, genes you and I inherit. If you’re Black or African-American, you’re more likely to have sickle cell anemia.

10:26 If you’re Jewish, you get certain diseases. If you’re from Scandinavia and you go down to the sun, in Brazil, you don’t have enough melanin, you can get skin cancer. So we all have genetic weaknesses, wherever you’re born, in the same way, and so we’re almost passed on these inherent weaknesses that we have. I think social memes, which are not genetic but almost are as powerful. They transfer the same way they transfer.

10:51 You have that Exactly. And so how do you change genes? Well, generally very slowly. There’s things you can do. I think genes on our DNA, we change at the rate of like 1% for 10,000 years.

11:02 Obviously, social memes can change, and more faster. So UK is growing, and hey, if you are here and entrepreneurial, there’s big rewards. As Elon Musk says, you know, you get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems that you solve. So you come into an environment, maybe even France. So you’re talking about that’s not entrepreneurial.

11:25 If you can pull it off, you will be paid in direct proportion, and I think people do. So I don’t look at it like black and white. That’s one of my big things. It’s like a rat. That’s a social meme that’s very parasitic.

11:36 Black and white, you know, thinking of things black and white, like he’s good or bad, or is the UK good to do entrepreneurial ventures? It’s never good or bad. It’s just different. So if you want to come into London and thrive, I think you can figure out the formula, and it’s going to be a different formula than I have in Hollywood, California. Right?

11:53 I’m, I’m reading, I don’t read as much as you do, but I’m reading Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and you know it’s a book about his whole time in Silicon Valley and his ups and downs, and now the way they run their, you know, very successful venture capital fund. But when I heard you say hard things, it’s, it’s a good reminder to everyone that there’s a reason it’s hard, because there’s rewards at the end. When people complain about the weather in London, I’m like, yeah, and it keeps the suckers out.

12:17 Right? Because if you want to go, weather, you go to Miami. Okay, fine. There’s no opportunity in Miami. So if you want to be in London and play with the big boys, you’re going to have to deal with some bad weather sometimes, and then, you know, then you’re going to have to go.

12:26 I mean, that’s a very general way of looking at it, but, you know, a good book on that is Landes. He’s a Harvard professor. Why some nations are wealthy and some, I forget what it’s called. It’s not The Wealth of Nations, like Adam Smith, but it’s a fascinating book on how geography affects people. So the good news is you can be global now.

12:45 You know, I have a base in Hollywood, setting up here in London, so once the rain starts to get to you, you can just leave, go to Miami. You know, so, right, yeah. You know, we run another show called Silicon Reel. We’ve had like 65 episodes, but one thing that everyone’s saying: London’s finally kind of coming into its own in certain tech plays, and one of them is fintech, which is the financial technology, because we have the banking right next to the tech, and it’s just kind of, it does swim with each other, and they’re actually making some companies that look like they could compete globally.

13:14 So it’ll be interesting to see, you know, kind of what plays out, you know, and what doesn’t. You mentioned something in one of your videos, and you said there were three types of people, you know, those that make things happen, those that watch what happens, and those that wonder what happened. I thought that was really interesting. Also, you live up in the hills of Hollywood, and you said when you look down on LA, it’s, it’s got some of the highest turnover when it comes to, like, people coming through the city, and you said it’s where dreams are broken.

13:36 Is that what you said? I mean, it’s funny, ’cause everyone comes to LA, I guess, trying to make something happen, but maybe they end up watching it or wondering what happened. Well, all the big cities, I say the big three that are running the world right now, LA, New York, London. Is London top three? Are we top three?

13:52 I think so. Okay, for sure. All right. I mean, you’re the hub of Europe, so, and the bridge to Asia. You, to a certain, yeah, for sure.

13:59 I mean, the capital markets. I think, yeah. An Amish guy, an old Amish guy, told me. He said three types of people in the world, you know, make things happen, watch things happen, and most people wonder what happened. And I think that corresponds, interestingly enough, if you read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, organisms, human and non-human, break out into about three types, which are cheaters, suckers, and grudges.

14:23 So I think that corresponds a little bit with the three, you know, old Amish is saying. And I think, you know, I said this in my TED Talk. It’s like everybody comes. Hollywood’s supposed to be the land of dreams, but for most people you got a turnover of almost a half million people a year coming into Hollywood and being, going home, you know, with the dreams broken. It really comes down to how good are you at actualizing.

14:51 So I was reading Will Durant. I think, probably, the why, you know, it’s funny, there’s a huge misweighting bias. We’ll get into that later on, what people read, ’cause it’s not enough to read you know. I’ve got, I think I have the second biggest book club in the review club after Oprah Winfrey in the world now, and the biggest thing that I tell people: it’s not how fast you read, it’s what you read. 130 million books have been published.

15:13 Is it how well you read them too? It’s not how well not necessarily. I mean, I think that what trumps everything is what you’re reading. You know, if I have a quality 10 minutes with Warren Buffett, or a haphazard 10 minutes with Warren Buffett, may be worth more than a three-hour intensely amazing well-organized conversation with an a**hole. So I think that the person trumps everything.

15:42 But anyway, what I was saying is, what was I saying? The book club. So people need to be reading more, or it’s not, it’s what you read. Yeah, it’s what you read, but I had a point, but anyway. The suckers, the grudges, all this kind of stuff.

15:59 I think that when you give out these understandings, we don’t like to think of ourselves that way. So what happens? Oh, self-actualization, or not even goal actualization, I should say. You know, I call it the good life. At the end of the day, everybody wants the good life.

16:16 Freud broke it out. He said, you know, in what one of the great books of all time that nobody reads, along with Will Durant, because of the cognitive bias I call misweighting. There are 25 to 30 biases that cause us to make mistakes. So the misweighting bias says I walk into Barnes & Noble, what’s staring me in the face, that’s the book I’m going to buy. Whether it’s, you know, I saw the books that you have here, which are by a lot of smart people, but they don’t trump the great thinkers.

16:45 Okay, the classics, or the, well, look at Will Durant. You got a Pulitzer Prize-winning guy of such immense knowledge that if you only read Will Durant, you would do better than literally the last 500 New York Times best sellers. I mean, he’s a man of not only immense intelligence, but I would say he’s the wisest person to live in the last thousand years. And I don’t say that haphazardly. Last 500 years, I don’t think he’s had his even, no one’s even come close.

17:13 But one of the things he says is you can measure the progress in your life by your ability to control the environment in which you live. So when people come to Hollywood, they have an endgame goal. I’m going to be famous. If you’re listening to this, you have an endgame goal. For some people, it’s making a million dollars.

17:32 For some people it’s six-pack abs, bestselling author, blah, blah, blah, find love, whatever it is. You know, Freud broke it out: we try to move towards things of intense pleasure and move away from pain and discomfort. So that’s the good life. You define it however you want to define it, but to realize it is harder. So as I said, everybody wants the good life, but not everybody gets the good life.

17:56 So what I’m interested in, it’s not about whether I make a million dollars or not. Many people make a million dollars and many people don’t. What’s more interesting of a problem is how do you get what you want. So, you know, someone, if you’re listening to this, you have that thing that you want, or that progression of things you want. I think that the first step to getting what you want is realize, you know.

18:23 I live with Joel Salatin, who I don’t know if you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s one of the guys who kind of started organic agriculture in the world. I think he’ll be remembered, when he dies, as one of the top 100 people of our time. He, one of your five mentors, right? One, my first mentor, and I was 18 years old.

18:38 Lived with him 2 and a half years. We were walking, I got there as one of these guys that’s just insanely focused and, I would say, powerful in impact in the world. And there was a, the farm had a bridge off a dirt road, where all the, he had about 10,000 animals on the farm, so we’d have to buy and feed and they’d bring in trucks, and one day the biggest storm in 200 years hit Southwest Virginia, and that bridge was gone. And that was the only time I ever saw Joel Salatin depressed in two and a half years.

19:09 It don’t, he snapped out of it in about an hour. But he looked at me and he said, ‘You know, Tai, nature laughs last. The best-laid plans that you and I have are at the whim of somewhat of fate, but even more importantly, of these natural laws.’ So when you look at guys like Will Durant, making observations, or the Amish guys saying, you know, suckers, grudges, cheaters, Richard Dawkins, or however you want to put it, or people coming to Hollywood, the real thing is how do you fit into the cog?

19:37 How are you, the cog, fitting into this universe? If you can figure that out, you will find the good life. If you can’t, you may be able to do what I call flurries of activity. For some people here in London, that’s being finance and make a million bucks, but end up blowing your brains out. You may be Robin Williams, you know, reach the pinnacles of success in Hollywood, but you may, you know, take your own life.

20:05 Now that’s not who knows the reason. I just use that example, not to disparage him, but life can throw tremendous blows at you. You know, Charlie Munger, self-made billionaire, he says life will throw tremendous blows at you: betrayal of friends, betrayal of business partners, death of loved ones, things that we consider unfair. If you can overcome those, you can actualize the good life. You can get it.

20:34 And so people in Hollywood come much too egocentrically. You know, I posted on my Twitter. I have a pretty big Twitter following, and I said sometimes I post things that I know will stir up a little strife, but one of them I said, you know, karma is probably the most egocentric thought humans have ever had. I said ask the Neanderthals what happens to karma. There’s probably not karma in the sense that someone does bad to me and the universe responds specifically to me.

21:06 Right. So I think that one of the 25 cognitive biases is excessive self-regard. That’s one of them, which is this egocentricity misweighting bias. To the extent you can remove these 25 from your brain, you probably can find the good life, and that’s what I’m interested in. That’s why I care about books.

21:25 So ultimately we’re limiting ourselves mentally, and that keeps us from achieving these pieces. Well, what happens is it’s evolutionary mismatch. If there’s a good book by Daniel Lieberman, the Harvard professor, the paleontologist, I think he is, or anthropologist. It’s called The Story of the Human Body, which I think is the best book out now if you want to understand physical health. Of course nobody reads it, ’cause there’s other books more well marketed than that one.

21:49 And he says, you know, at the core, and I think this extends beyond your physical body but into happiness, which is interesting. Freud calls his book Civilization and Its Discontents. What the premise of both of those books, Freud and Lieberman, is that it’s evolutionary mismatches. So what that means is brain evolved 100, 150,000 years ago. Homo sapiens, you and I, popped in our great-great-great great grandmother and father.

22:16 We live, they lived, in a world of African savannah, 150 people in a village. Now you pop you and I into a world of 10 million people, massive specialization of economics, you know, you don’t grow up in the same place that you live now. You, the loss of friends, the changing of romance around the world. I’m an investor in some of the biggest dating sites in the world. We see these massive trends, and so what happens is what we’re uniquely suited to do.

22:47 For example, seek out sugar, worked very great, very effectively in a world where maybe at best you’d find a beehive once a month, you’d be able to take in all this honey, give you some extra reserves of fat, which made you survive 10,000 years ago. But now, evolutionary mismatch. Every convenience store, everywhere you turn, I was looking at a bottle of Sprite, talking 60 grams of sugar in one bottle. You were probably evolved to handle 20 to 25. So you got people drinking, you know, 10 times.

23:20 National Geographic puts on the cover, sugar last year. This is what’s probably at the root of half of our degenerative diseases. But it extends beyond physical things. It’s how we learn, it’s how we pursue careers, it’s how we pursue, obviously, our body, how we pursue social friends, family, romance, and ultimately how we feel fulfilled. So if you read any book, some of the authors that you’ve had on your show, Barnes & Noble, walking, or whatever the bookstore is here, I forget what it’s called.

23:52 Waterstones. Waterstones. You go there, you’re just full of people misdiagnosing the problem, giving smart answers to the wrong diagnosis. Is it survivorship bias as well for these people? Or, I mean, okay, you’re a big consumer of books.

24:07 You got this book club. Do you think Amazon’s the worst thing that ever happened? Do you think we’re marketed books in the wrong way? We’re not choosing these authors that you say, or the old school, the Freuds, these other guys? Well, I wouldn’t blame Amazon at all.

24:18 I mean, I think Amazon’s great, and you got the best distributor in the history of the world. Can I get people on the book list in Albania, Romania? How can I get them the books now? It’s boom. Amazon’s got the robots to distribute the book, running the warehouses.

24:34 So no, I think it’s, I’m much, you know, I’m not political, but at the end of the day, you know, Joel Salatin was very libertarian. I probably got those ideas put into my head young. I, I’m a big, I’m like, look, a couple thousand years ago, a Jewish, what was his name, Rabbi Hillel said, ‘If I don’t love me, who will? And if I only love me, what am I?’ So what he was saying is, you’ve got to love yourself, in the sense that you can’t look for.

25:01 What do you think Amazon’s going to do? They’re going to market whatever, sell whatever is for sale at the highest margins for them. Can’t blame them. The good news is all the good books I want, they are on Amazon. So you and I, you’ve got to take control of your own destiny.

25:18 There’s one thing I know for sure: everybody loves themselves. And that, you know, 1976, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, in many ways, you know, you I’ve listed on my website the 150 most important books. Robin Dunbar was a sociologist here, and he said our brains acclimated to groups of 150, right? That’s 150 people. You think 150 books is, I think, ’cause they’re like, keep your head like, most people are just going, I’m just like, look man, you read these top 150 books I’ve listed.

25:48 In my opinion, what I think the top 150 books are, it all morphs and changes over time, but generally the top 10 doesn’t change much. And, you know, Richard Dawkins is in there, and The Selfish Gene. At the end of the day, people love themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what Rabbi Hillel was saying. You must love yourself, meaning you must take care of yourself.

26:09 You must realize, if you’re at a room playing poker and after 30 minutes you don’t know who the sucker is, you’re the sucker. So if you’re being turned into a sucker by consumerism, who’re you going to blame? They’re looking out for theirs, which they’re supposed to do. You must look out for yours. So control your own biases.

26:26 It’s not that hard. Can you tell a lot about a person by the last 10 books they’ve read? Sure. And most of them is for me, it’s just how susceptible they are to the cognitive biases. Okay.

26:36 You know, I gave a talk in LA the other day at Convention Center, 5,600 people there, all these entrepreneurs. And I said, how many here, people, I forget what book I said. 4-Hour Work Week, or Lean Startup, or one of Jim Collins, you know, kind of a pop culture business book. I said, how many people read this book? And 500 people out of 600 raised their hand.

26:56 I said, how many people here read, and I held up a book I brought with me, a little $5 paperback by Sam Walton called Made in America. Good book. And I said, how many people here read that? Like five people. And I said, but you’re then, they said later, they told me, yeah, we’re on your book list, that’s why I knew.

27:14 So basically zero. And I said, let me get this straight: Tim Ferriss or Jim Collins or whatever, Lean Startup, Eric Ries, they’re smart guys, but did either of them make $160,000 million personally? ‘Cause only one man in history, that I know of, ever made more money than Warren Buffett, Zuckerberg, Jobs, everybody combined. This man made, and how did he do it? Well, on his deathbed, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote a book to pass on the top 10 things he thinks about business and his life story.

27:55 Yet nobody reads it. Now, who’s the sucker there? It’s a $5 book. You can go to the library. So this is called the misweighting bias.

28:04 It’s not always doing the right thing. It’s doing the, as Aristotle said, to be angry is easy, but to be angry at the right person for the right reason, at the right time, for the right, with the right intensity, for the right duration. That’s difficult to read. Is easy to read the right book for your situation, you know, at the right speed, the right amount of times, Jeff Bezos. If you read The Everything Store, he’s read that.

28:28 I would say Jeff Bezos is probably the second best businessman of all time. Hard to guess, but I would say, you know, you’ve grown a company in a decade, $38 billion, $40 billion net worth, and may become Walmart, Amazon. These are trillion-dollar potential revenue companies here in the next five, seven years. So I’m listening to The Everything Store right now. Does that count if I listen to books or not?

28:52 Yeah, I tell people, you know, I wrote this, I built this thing called the 67 Steps, which about 67 videos. I read University College London said it takes 66 days to form a new habit, so I added one, and I call it 67 Steps. So in the 67 Steps I try to lay out new frameworks of thought from the world’s greatest people. Forget me, I’m just one little pawn in life, but did these include 67 books? Necessarily no.

29:19 There’s not. Most of them are built around somebody. But one of the 67 Steps, pertaining to your question is, you know, avoid flurries of activity. So reading in and of itself is actually less effective than in-person mentorships with Sam Walton, but he’s dead. Right.

29:38 So whether a physical book, people ask me, ‘Should I read Kindle? Should I read audio?’ I’m like, look man, what’s the endgame goal? Be war-oriented, not battle. The endgame goal is what would happen to you today if you’re listening to this and you woke up, bam, and you are an entrepreneur in business, 50/50 with Bill Gates.

30:03 What, what, what do you project over the next 18 months? Your bank account would look like? Bam. I say, what if you woke up this morning and you go down and you got a little home gym, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is there waiting for you. He’s your workout buddy, and he’s like, buddy, I’m going to get you in shape.

30:22 What would your body look like in 18 months? I said, you’re not feeling so good. If you woke up and you go and you do a little private meditation or thought or reflection on the day, and the Dalai Lama is sitting there waiting for you, and he’s going to show you how to find contentment in the little things in life, or you want to change the world, and you wake up today and Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi are there going, ‘Let’s make your cause happen,’ right?

30:46 So people say to me, yeah, Tai, that’d be great, and I’m like, that can happen. It comes from downloading the wisdom the knowledge, the experience, the intelligence of the world’s greatest people, and I measure greatness by impact. So sometimes it’s billionaires, sometimes it’s Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa with no money. But to the extent that you, so to answer your question with audiobooks, it’s that’s the war. To be one, is the audiobook fulfilling that war?

31:18 Well, it’s like Peter F. Drucker says in Managing Oneself. How do you learn? Do you learn audio? Right?

31:25 Some people do, some people learn by taking notes. I take notes, but I learn nothing from it. I only use notes to be able to teach from later. So I’ve learned, I know, you know, Socrates, the Socratic understanding, know thyself. For me, I am not a kinesthetic learner.

31:40 By writing it out, it doesn’t help me. So ideally you’re mentoring with the person you’re with Sam Walton when he’s building these stores. Second best, in your opinion, is the book, listening, or hearing about it exactly how they did it? YouTube videos can be very powerful too. Right?

31:56 I, again, it’s the, it’s the man it’s the woman more than the medium. So I mean, podcast could be effective. That was a really good long-form interview with Sam Walton that can be pretty fascinating. I exist again. It’s the war, it’s the war, it’s how do I put it.

32:12 Look, why do we have the brains that are the size we have now? They’re very ineffective. They make us extremely vulnerable for the F, you know. You see a little kid, looks like Mr Potato Head. Babies, their head’s too big.

32:24 Women most dangerous things that’s happened to women in history is having to give birth to you and I, have big heads. Caused a lot of death in childbirth. So why anything that still exists is probably, for the most part, functional. What’s the positive function of big brains? Well, people get this wrong.

32:42 You know, there’s a lot of theories on why we have big brains. Dr David Buss talks about some of them, and why do we have vocal cords, gossip, all this kind of stuff. But probably the best answer is what Richard Dawkins says: your brain, and the evolution of your brain, allows you to simulate, and one of the big social memes out there that’s parasitic and negative is that you only learn through mistakes. That is true, but like Warren Buffett says, they don’t have to be yours.

33:10 So if we got on an airplane today, we’re flying back to Hollywood, and the pilot gets on the loudspeaker and says, hey everybody, good news, exciting news, this is my first flight, and I hope we get there. You would be exiting that plane in a matter of moments. You want the pilot who’s first gone through the flight simulator, then been a co-pilot for a decade. But when we look at success, what’s being put out there is, I think, very inefficient. Very, it’s a bunch of gobbledegook.

33:42 The way, if you’re listening, you want to be successful, you’re going to start with simulations. Best way to simulate the future is use someone else’s life. Biographies: Sam Walton, Bezos. You can get trem, you can shave decades off, ’cause, as Dawkins says, what’s the problem with trial and error? Trial is time consuming, and like Stephen Hawking, a UK native, says, look, time, the only thing we probably know for sure about you and I, is we are organisms moving through time.

34:15 That’s it. And so, he said, I was wrong. I thought at the end, in his book Theory of Everything, he says I was wrong. At the end of the world universe, I thought the universe would contract, and it would be like Benjamin Button. You’d be old and then young.

34:30 But he said, I, when I did those computations 20 years earlier, 20 years ago, I was mistaken. Time continually moves forward thermodynamically, cosmologically, and psychologically. So I can promise you, if you’re listening to this, you are on time’s time frame, and to the extent that you tempt time by going, oh, I’m going to waste a lot of time by making mistakes that other people are already made, you will live an inefficient life and you will not get the good life.

35:03 So learn from those mistakes. If we, if you, if entrepreneur comes to you, do you sit him down and you’re like, look, read these 20 books and then come back to me? That’s part of it. Yeah, because the other part, trial and error is the second part. What happens with too many errors?

35:17 It’s fatal death, and it might be the death of you physically but more likely it’s the death of your dreams. We’re so egocentric. We always think we have a second chance, but you don’t always get a say. I think most of us get about three big chances in life, like Charlie Munger’s grandfather said, Charlie, it’s a rare life that’s just bathed in opportunity all the way. Most of us just get a few chances, you know, to carpe diem, seize the moment.

35:46 I’d call it carpe manum, which means seize the minute, right? ‘Cause you don’t even know if you have the day. And you’ve got three of those. You think I, my guess, and that’s off the top of my head. I, the main point is not infinite.

35:59 And if you look through your life, you will find, and Jim Collins backs this up in one of his books. I forget what it is. Built to Last or one of those. He says, in his study of great business success, primarily, there are luck events that happen that are, he calls them ‘who’ events, who you bumped into. Bill Gates wrote one letter when he was about 18, and that letter turned into a mentorship, turned into partnership with guys like Paul Allen, which allowed Bill Gates to be the man he is today.

36:31 Benjamin Graham was the mentor of Buffett bumped into him. Boom. Steve Jobs had mentors. Oprah had two mentors. Mahatma Gandhi had a mentor.

36:40 The Dalai Lama says he was mentored in part by Bill Gates, uh, by, uh, not Bill Gates, uh, Mahatma Gandhi. You get these times when you bump into the time, and if you’re not prepared, and how do you prepare? Through simulation, right? But not necessarily trying trial and error, other people’s trial and error. You will have plenty of trial and error.

37:01 It’s like Munger. I love his line. He goes, I’ve made a hell of a lot of mistakes, just a lot less than most people, right? So Charlie Munger is the right-hand man to Warren Buffett, right? He’s a huge fan of compound interest.

37:12 Is what I know about Charlie. He’s still alive. I was checking him up today. Yeah, I was just with him. I’m a shareholder.

37:17 I was in really? Omaha, Nebraska. Oh, for their annual party. Oh, that’s fantastic. And he has something called the concept of inversion, which I never heard about before, and I talk about that a lot.

37:26 Yeah, could you explain it? It’s not his. That’s a classic logical tool. One of the sad things in modern education, among freaking 10,000 sad things, is you know what makes us human is our ability to think, but thought is never taught explicitly. You get math and stuff, but most people, cognitive biases all the way.

37:46 So you have logical fallacies. There’s a lot of those. There’s the cognitive biases, and then there’s methods of proofing your ideas. So how do you know? That’s called epistemology.

37:56 How do you know that you know? Everyone walking down the street here in London, where you know, East London, they think they know something, but my question is, why do you have shity that what you believe is right? You know, when I was a little kid, I remember I was watching Bugs Bunny with my mom. I was like eight, and I said, Mom, come sit down here and watch this with me, it’s so funny. You know, I was Ro, it was Woody Woodpecker.

38:21 I remember now. I said, Mom, come sit. She goes, Tai, I don’t really like cartoons. And I was like, What do you mean? They’re so funny.

38:28 And she said to me, Tai, one day you won’t like cartoons anymore. And I remember thinking, as an 8-year-old, I will always love cartoons, and of course she was right. I haven’t watched a cartoon, you know, whatever, and, but I was sure of myself. So most people are sure of themselves. They come to Hollywood, they’re sure.

38:48 It’s like, here is how I, and even if they act humble, it’s what I call non-Michael Jordan humility. If you read the Michael Jordan: The Life, it’s amazing. It’s the best sports book I’ve ever read, and I become I know the author, Roland Lazenby, and I was talking to him on the phone, and he said there’s never been a man with more humility in sports than Michael Jordan, although he was the cockiest. External, like, if you met him, he was talking trash, but I call it humility of action, like he every coach, Dean Smith, Phil Jackson, they said if you said something, even when he didn’t think it made sense, Jordan actually did it.

39:25 You know, there’s, I’m not religious, but, uh, Jesus. I look for good ideas everywhere, and Jesus Christ said there was two men. There was a man with two sons, and the father said, go do this, and the first son said, yes, Father, I will, and didn’t do it, and the second son said, I won’t do it, but then did. And then Jesus asked the crowd which one obeyed. So which one is the one who humbles, the one who said he did, wouldn’t do it, but then he did it.

39:53 So people come to Hollywood, they either act cocky, like they don’t need to simulate, or they act humble, but actually they know it’s like I know, and I’m like, no, you don’t really know. Knowing is hard, and one of the tools is what you’re talking about, inversion. So you go, what is it going to take me to live the good life? What’s it going to take me to find health, wealth, love, and happiness? And I say, well, start much simpler question: what will make you not get the good life?

40:22 Munger says sloth and unreliability. Uh, and that’s, you know, I wouldn’t. Those are his top two. Top two laziness, and that’s what all he says. We don’t have a lot of writing by Munger.

40:34 I think there are other things that you could add to that list, not that I, such as unfocused, lack of focus, being unfocused. I think lack of simulation for sure, lack of humility. In my TED Talk, I gave three. You know, not everybody’s humble enough. I, I would say humility is very high, and, uh, you look at you know, my favorite Sam Walton story.

41:01 He goes, he’s the richest man basically in the world at the time, and these Brazilian group of businessmen had bought a grocery store chain in Brazil. They wrote letters to all the CEOs in the US, and they say, can we take you to dinner? We want to get your advice on what we should do here in Brazil. The only man who answered, you know, the CEO of Kmart. This series, and all, no one answered.

41:22 One man. It was Sam Walton, and he said, sure, come on up. They flew to Bentonville, Arkansas, saw they got picked up at the airport by a pickup truck with an old man and a dog, and they said, oh, you going to take us to meet Sam Walton? He said, no, I am Sam Walton, and he said, get in the truck. And he took him to his house with his wife.

41:40 They had dinner, and the whole time they were having dinner he was asking them a whole bunch of questions, almost to the point they couldn’t get any questions. And then they realized they had been tricked. Sam Walton had said yes because he wanted to know if they knew something that he didn’t know. The best businessman in the world and he then later went to Brazil, and they got a phone call. He was visiting them, and that was the police department.

42:03 They said, come get Sam Walton, we have him in jail. They rush down, ’cause if you’ve ever seen the inside of a Brazilian jail, you don’t want an old man there, especially not an old billionaire. And they showed up there in Sam Walton, open. I mean, they got him out of prison. They asked the police, why would you arrest this man?

42:20 And they said, we thought we didn’t know who he was. We thought he was insane. We found him crawling on his hands and knees through different department stores, and we figured he was insane, and they asked, turn to Sam, and said, what were you doing? He said, oh, I was taking a measuring, uh, tape, and I was seeing how wide the aisles were. And he said, I just want to see if these Brazilians knew something that I didn’t know.

42:39 So the depth of humility most business people I know, they’re not crawling around on hands and knees on the nearest competitor. So I for sure would say lack of humility, and usually evidenced by the fact that they’re not simulating enough. I think if you read, you can tell you were asking me about books. How many books have you read tells me how humble you are. And if it’s not books, it’s how many mentors, right?

43:01 Or how many good books you’ve read about people’s life stories, because if you don’t read, then you don’t give a s***, or because you’re not willing to learn or learn from their story. Is that it. And if you’re reading fiction all the time, then that says fiction has its place, but if you’re, you know, can you, can you? It seems like it’s a hard quality to teach someone humility unless you give them an ayahuasca trip, or you know, they have real suffering.

43:23 Ayahuasca. I tell you, you could tell you bit with Joe Rogan. I’m not a big fan of ayahuasca kind of stuff. I know that makes me controversial. This is one of these social memes, all the drug stuff.

43:35 Look, I’ll touch on that briefly. My best friend is one of the top neurobiologists, spent his life studying the brain, and he’s like, the blood-brain barrier, man, that thing exists for a reason. Be careful when you bypass the blood-brain barrier. Heroin, cocaine, sugar bypasses it. Yeah, but what about these dangerous cognitive biases picked up?

43:57 Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s, people, people are trying to use ayahuasca to get. I’m like, you don’t need ayahuasca to do these. In fact, this will not help you with the stuff. You know, I’m not going to get into a long argument about it, because most people are already sure it’s good for them.

44:15 I would just say, mother nature laughs last, my friend. You bypass the human blood-brain barrier too often, you are playing with fire, of the ultimate, of the ultimate order, and one day when you dance around the fire too much, you will trip and fall in the fire, and, uh, then the fire goes from being your friend to being the worst way to die. Okay, that’s a fair enough observation. I would assert that people go there because these cognitive biases have weighed them down so heavy that they just don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing anymore.

44:48 They don’t know why they’re buying the thing on TV that shown to us with the girl. They don’t know why they’re going to the job, and so they use that to just shake themselves up. Yeah, but the problem is the answers are not within you. You know, I record one of the most controversial things I’ve ever talked about is that concept. This is again height of egocentricity.

45:05 Why are the answers are all within you? And I don’t have, didn’t have, E equals mc squared in this. No matter how much we did the dispensation of knowledge is not equal, and there are things that I know that you don’t know, and things you know that I don’t know. And ultimately, every 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci’s, Einstein’s, great people come along. You’re better to tap into their consciousness.

45:29 There’s nothing the average person going inward. It’s the blind going deeper within their blindness. And so I don’t, obviously there’s some innate knowledge in humans, but not really. I mean, just look at the evidence. What do you think moves the world forward?

45:45 It’s like Will Durant says, when we study the history of France, we’re not studying the history of the common person. We’re studying the history of Voltaire. You know, the great thinkers are what move forward. And that’s hard for a lot of us to deal with, and I get a lot of pushback because we’re egocentric. We’re like, no, no, I need place and meaning in life, and I’m like, well okay, then you can succumb to delusion bias, which is another one of the ones where we try to, I don’t like that story, tie, so I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist, but I’m like hey, great, then you can go into a delusional stupor.

46:19 I mean, if a lot of people need to feel that the answers are within, but I don’t think you have to go without, and so yeah, people are caught up in the cognitive biases, but there’s other ways out. I mean, I think ayahuasca falls you know, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud breaks out how humans try to find happiness or move away from pain, and I do about eight ways. Some people seek to, um, chemical bias, alcohol, ayahuasca, whatever it is. Some people use love.

46:56 Love is all you need. Some people withdraw. Eastern thoughts, but he goes through the pros and cons. Each have pros and cons so I think again, black and white. People are looking for black and white, which is one of the cognitive biases called certainty bias.

47:10 We want the answers. If you look at the internet websites that make the most money, I think Upworthy is the fastest growing, or BuzzFeed. It’s ’cause it’s like 27 things, 22 things, three things, 4-Hour Work Week, like, and you know with a picture as well. That’s right. 27 pictures, and we love that.

47:30 We gravitate towards, like, oh, that is the answer, like it’s that black and white. Thank you. So you know, people want that. They want to be like, no, it’s ayahuasca. I will tell you, at best, at best.

47:45 I just talked to Dr Sharon Moalem, who wrote the book Inheritance. At best, ayahuasca works for a small percentage of people, and the bad news is everything that’s good for a certain segment of population let’s take fruit. Very few people would argue that fruit is bad for you, but Dr Sharon Moalem says he’s got client patients who are fructose intolerant. You’re talking death from one grape. So where’s the black and white about fruit?

48:14 He says the USDA food chart. This is all we will look back on our modern understanding the world, and it will be so, it will be as medieval as we look back at people before Copernicus or whatever, saying that the universe, we were the center of the universe or the world’s flat. You’re in the future with health, you’re going to swab your mouth. We already almost have this capability, but not really. There’s some companies trying it, but the interpretation isn’t there.

48:39 The diagnosis of, you know, Bulletproof Coffee people, there’s the coffee camp, there’s the, there’s a good book called Diet Cults. There’s the Paleo thing. None of these are true. They all bounce around the truth. The truth is at a DNA level, we will find people that are lactose intolerant and lactose tolerant.

49:00 We already know that, that’s the one decoded. Fructose, you know, I have a brother who swears that fruitarian is the way, but he’s looking for the, he’s succumbing to the bias of that certainty, and there isn’t much certainty, especially around food. Ayahuasca, marijuana. We’re going to find some people. I’ve, you know, if I, I rarely smoke weed, but absolutely makes me dumber.

49:24 At the high, I mean it to, I, I got real high a couple years ago. One month my brain operated at such a low level. I remember going, holy crap, this is what the world is like if you’re dumb like, I could not process three steps deep. I was like, holy crap, that’s a bold thing for a Californian to say, because it’s very popular in LA, isn’t it? Popular, but so popular, I, I know ayahuasca is trendy, and I’m not going to spend the episode defending it.

49:50 I have had a few experiences and I did find that it was a, it was good for clarity to keep me holding myself back on certain things, um, and it’s good for you, but I know people. I got when I said this, these guys wrote in who are like, ayahuasca former shaman guys, and they’re like, dude, we’ve almost killed some people. So I think at the end of the day, what Freud concluded is you find the recipe that works for you. Just make sure you’re doing it with no delusion.

50:17 There are people whose recipe includes paleo, includes ayahuasca. Just be careful when you extrapolate out truths. This is another, you know, you’re talking about inversion. There’s, you can also argue ad absurdum, which is the extrapolation out of a concept. So for fruit to be a self-evident and black and white truth, okay, I would must be able to extrapolate it to all the population, and it hold.

50:42 And so since we know it doesn’t hold everywhere, we can never say that fruit is a universal thing. Water is much closer. Oxygen. So I like to, when I’m looking for universal truths, it’s like, are there any humans who suffer from oxygen? I think there’s a, like, a very small one in a billion, and I think you’re right if we look at, like, you said, the pre-Copernican times, and we look at us now, and in years, I mean, yeah, we’re going to be looking back like, what the f*** were we thinking?

51:10 So I agree. You probably want to look for it, some of the truth. Now, you Joe Rogan fans, Tim Ferriss, Bulletproof, don’t, don’t send me hate mail. Send it to Dr Sharon Moalem, or to whatever TaiLopez.com. Let me ask you a question.

51:24 You know, I’ve met a bunch of. We had a bunch of people that been on here and been successful entrepreneurs, and now they feel like they want to spend their time talking to people and kind of teaching people, whether it’s Dan Peña, or whether it’s, uh, anyone who came in here, and, and you obviously feel kind of drawn to the same kind of thing. I mean, you’re still in business. You still invest, but does part of you feel like you want to teach a bit, and why do you find that calling in yourself?

51:47 Well, I think for me, because Munger doesn’t do that. He’s, he’s about the business, right? Yeah. You know, like Mike Murphy, one of my, say, it’s horses for courses. You try to find that thing, try to find the right racehorse, race course matchup.

52:04 I think for me in terms of teaching, I don’t know that I consider myself a teacher, just because there’s so many better sources of knowledge than me. I haven’t stood the test of time. So if you’re listening to this, you’re way better to listen to Will Durant than me. But what happens in the modern world is you respond to demand, a lot of people ask me stuff, so I like, what’s the most efficient way to answer questions? And for me, it was just like, I’m going to record a whole bunch of stuff and lay it out.

52:35 A lot of the stuff that I talk about are things that I did to train people in my companies. Okay, like the 67 Steps was part of that that got created. Okay, I mean, it’s been a little more refined now that I put it out publicly somewhat. But this stuff started probably back 2004. I really was like, look, I can either hire talent, raw talent or refined talent.

52:58 Refined talent is hard to find, very expensive, usually off doing their own thing already, or I can take raw talent and train it around these great people’s ideas. So really most of what I’m talking about now, and I’ve only really been publicly out there for like, a lot of people like, how come I haven’t heard from you? I’m like, well, ’cause I haven’t put anything public, except the last six or eight months, you know, and then it kind of took, like, the book club.

53:25 Like I’ve been reading in, for since I was, I mean, hardcore, probably since I was 15 and then I put that out there, and you test the water, and all of a sudden it’s like, whoosh, it’s like such a vacuum in the world. I think some, I serve maybe, to be a contrarian in certain things. I’m so contrarian to most of the stuff being put out there. I have a complete different understanding, and I think mine’s more evidence-based, although that’s a, you know, people would argue with me.

53:54 I would disagree with, with, you know, causation versus correlation is insanely horrible thing to try to figure out. And, uh, most of the success self-help stuff is just correlate, correlation, correlation, correlation, like, oh, I did this, and that’s why I’m writing this business book, but I’m like, well you could have just been lucky. You know, there are immense amounts of wealth made lucky. I could be lucky, right? So you try to see that.

54:23 I try to see what, yeah, what is positive, and the books that you see, you try to see what, see through that, and see if you can find. Well, I’ve used a simple heuristic. So heuristics are how we decide things. So for me, heuristic is what have people said throughout time, whether you start 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, and consistently the wisest people of every generation have agreed on. So I think there are those are more likely to be causative, and that’s why what’s happening in the modern world, the real problem with teaching now, and the internet and YouTube and podcast is, now everybody is teaching, and it’s probably hypocritical for me to say, because you could point, I could point the finger myself and say I’m, I’m just as guilty.

55:11 It’s like, what’s the qualifications to teach? Now nothing. It’s a webcam, my phone, right? Exactly. So it’s a dangerous world.

55:19 So now what you’re living in is a world of, and you see that there, the book The Shallows, you know, the shallows of our brain, The Paradox of Choice, kind of thing. So now more than ever, the reward is extremely high if you’re listening to this. So I don’t want to sound too pessimistic. You’re living in a world now where there’s never been wealth created, much with people under 50 years old, right? That’s now the world we live in.

55:47 Under 20, the kid, Sully here, you know, that people are too young to sign the contracts. That’s never happened. So no matter what age you are, you have immense ET, you got knowledge at your fingertips. nobody’s using it, though, and it’s because it’s probably consumerism. It’s that whatever is marketed the best.

56:06 Like if I own Barnes & Noble, and it depends on what my goal is. Maximum profit. If I own Amazon, I would just put the 150 books, be like, you can’t buy any other books till you finished all these. Right? Too much choice.

56:17 Right? It would hurt the bottom line. Although I think, you know, I’ve been experimenting with it. I like what’s, I’m not a big Steve Jobs fan, but one thing I liked is he created mark. He told the consumer no.

56:28 You think you want that. You want what I, and I’ve been experimenting with that, obviously not on the Steve Jobs level, but I’m like no, read these books. I’m not going to tell you what you want. People are like, what do you think of you know, blah, and I’m like, forget that. That’s all noise, man.

56:45 That’s all static interference. Let me get this one thought into your brain. Watch what happens. And it’s pretty cool. I was just at dinner with a lunch right before I came here with this big London investment banker kid making God knows how much money.

56:58 We’re just talking, and he’s like, dude, this stuff works. I just closed a billion dollar deal using something you know, your stuff. Yeah, okay. He came. I did a talk here.

57:09 I did a 10-hour talk the other day. I scheduled for like three hours. I did the, spoke at London Business School. I did the keynote at the entrepreneur conference this year, and I spoke from 11:00 to 12:00 in the morning, then I was like, I’ll take questions outside, and I, 12 hours, people ask me questions again. I don’t think it’s ’cause I’m anything special about me.

57:28 I think it’s because the world is like this. Everybody’s following, it’s, it’s the elephants. I mean, it’s the, what is it, the Emperor’s clothes. Okay, everybody’s naked. But everyone’s following an idea that’s naked, weak ideas.

57:45 And so when people get a hold of, like, strong ideas, I think it resonates real quickly with your INT, you know, intuitive sidetrack. Yeah, that it’s like, for example, where’s my phone? I should read something. You know, there’s this idea that 4-Hour Work Week or something like this, and, uh, can I grab this on my phone? Wait, I won’t need the internet.

58:09 I, I, I got it stored. No, let me come back. So so when you give a talk to these entrepreneurs, these guys that are looking to you to teach them something, first of all, do you like doing that? Do you find that sometimes they’re coming for the wrong reasons, or they have to get over some things in themselves, or do you find that you can give them a few, like, concrete things to look for to try to do? I think, you know, I, it’s funny.

58:30 I think people, I think it’s an awesome time to live. I think people, I think all of us, myself included, we’re smart and dumb at the same time, so when you tap, and when you get rid of the dumb, all of a sudden people get smart very fast. Now, so I think people come in, they latch on to a handful of these concepts from great people, and it just goes like, they see, I, I can’t tell you how many people are like, man, in a week I see a difference, in two weeks I see a difference.

59:03 I think it’s contrast. The world is so blind to these things that when they kick in, you stand out so far. You know, like I said, this guy that I had lunch with like, yeah, I closed the deal with the billionaire. I guarantee you, he said, the, you know, the deal was getting ready to fall apart. Huge deals, immense deals.

59:21 And what’s some the things you tell them? Read these books, check your cognitive, he was, yeah, he, I, I do some stuff on persuasion, ’cause I think persuasion is one of the most powerful things. So he uses some persuasion tools, because the persuasion tools work on the cognitive biases. So the cognitive biases go two ways. You don’t want them operating on it.

59:43 It’s kind of like the Snoop Dogg. It’s like, don’t get high off your own supply, which he’s basically saying, be a drug dealer but not a drug taker. So some of these, and I tell people, don’t be manipulative with them. It’s, they’re strong enough. You mean the cognitive biases are so strong that, uh, you can use them to move people, and that’s what he did.

1:00:03 Now, hopefully I told people do not use this for bad, ’cause you know Ray Kroc used the cognitive biases to make billions and billions of people eat crappy McDonald’s food. So hopefully they’re not being used to that. Hopefully you’re doing positive stuff, but that was a, that particular case was tools of persuasion, which is, that one is strong. I’ve got huge response from people from that. When you put those together, it, it’s, it’s, they call it the Lollapalooza effect.

1:00:29 It’s very hard for people to not be persuaded. You see, like, in Silicon Valley, you get this whole kind of a groupthink where you were talking about, where everyone’s read the latest book, and everyone’s trying to be the, the Airbnb and the Uber of this and that. Like, how do you tell people, not, how do you teach people not to get caught up in that? Well, saying, I love is, there is no great tragedy in other people making money. So a lot of opportunistic, I’m a big, I’m, you know, I think there’s two schools of thought.

1:00:57 School of thought in entrepreneurship today, one is opportunistic approach. So it’s like, you’re looking, what’s the next WhatsApp? I think that is such a low probability, such a lottery ticket approach. It’s like, if you came to me and I was like, dude, I’m so excited, I’m going to be rich, and you’re like, how? Like, I got the plan.

1:01:15 I’m going to go buy lottery tickets. In fact, when I was 10 years old, I was, uh, going through the Ralphs in San Diego, I know where you’re from, and my grand. I said, Grandma, we got a, I got a feeling about, let’s go buy a lottery ticket, one of those $1 ones, and we did, and I won a hundred bucks. At this time, my income was $10 a month for chores. Growing up, I didn’t grow up with bothy parrots or anything.

1:01:36 Where’d you grow up? Virginia? Southern California. Oh, you grew up in Southern California? I was born in Long Beach, Compton area, but I lived in I was raised somewhat in San Diego.

1:01:45 So I had this dollar, and I went out and I bought a mountain bike a Huffy mountain bike. It was like, I doubled my income on this one thing of course, the bike got stolen three days later, which the Amish always say, a fence that goes up fast falls down fast. So I got the quick wealth, and I lost it. But then the problem was my brain had been tweaked, so reward bias, like, and I had this new idea, which was Christmas. My parents said we have $200, we’ll spend on you what do you want?

1:02:15 I said, just send me, buy me $200 worth of $1 tickets. And I had the math all figured out. You know, 20 of them would win. I’d win 2,000 bucks, and I remember I was counting my chickens before they hatch, and I had those tickets, and I remember scratching off, and I won like eight bucks, and that’s where I learned opportunistic approach is a fool’s game. So there is no tragedy in that.

1:02:39 You didn’t start WhatsApp. There is no tragedy. The consistent pattern of success is you know, I got invited. I went to a little private thing with Steven Spielberg in Hollywood, to watch the 30th year anniversary of Indiana Jones, and what’s the pattern for Steven Spielberg? Seven years old, knew what he wanted to do.

1:03:01 Went on a clear path to making movies. Went through the 10 or 15 dark years. You don’t hear about him till he’s in his 20s, and then he pops out. Media bias makes us think that he just randomly got an idea. No.

1:03:12 Buffett started at 7 years old reading the valuation of bonds by Benjamin Graham. I don’t think he was a billionaire till 57. 50 hard years in. By a guy with 155, 160 IQ, Bill Gates started at 12, 31 he’s a billionaire. So that is just, if you don’t know who’s the sucker in the room you’re the sucker.

1:03:36 And even if the wealth is created, which it is, it doesn’t necessarily. Wealth is only one component of the good life. I can tell you that I have 12 business partners, all the way from, you know, most of them well, all of them are multi-millionaires, but a couple of them are at the billion dollar level, and it’s not correlated with happiness. I think it’s Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, economist. You know, you get some marginal reaction from increased money, but not as much as you think.

1:04:02 70 grand apparently. Yeah, it’s that financial, 70 to 120,000 or so. You do continue to get a rise. Someone at 100 mil has more than 10 mil in terms of happiness, but what often happens is, along the path, you do other things that negate. So like, you cut off relationships that you shouldn’t cut off.

1:04:22 So the end game, three steps forward, four steps back. So who cares if wealth is made in the next WhatsApp, and you’re not the guy? You find the thing that’s your, I call it oian destiny. It’s a mathematical term. Where’s the intersection of five major areas in your life?

1:04:42 Where those intersect, you will find your destiny, and I don’t mean that in a cheesy way. I mean, look. As Peter F. Drucker says in Managing Oneself, he says you can only build on strength. You can’t build on weakness.

1:04:58 So I don’t care, the ancient saying said, see a man skilled in what he does, he will stand before kings, not in front of average men. So you got to go, what could I stand in front of a king for? It could be something little, or it could be something big, but in a world of 7 billion people, massive competition, and it’s going to get bigger as the internet comes. Tens of thousands of people a day come online for the first time. What do you think kids in Pakistan, homeless kids, once they realize they can make money and compete with you online?

1:05:28 You don’t want to compete with somebody who grew up hungry. Right? When you’re working 4 hours, they’ll be working 100-hour weeks like Elon Musk. And like Elon Musk says, if you work 100 hours when everyone else works 40, you’ll do in 3 months what takes people years. So as that world gets more and more competitive, what you want to do is go, am I building on strength?

1:05:51 And when you do that, then you tap down to work. Then, as you know, Joel Salatin used to say, if you ever have to take a vacation from what you do, never come back. You shouldn’t need a vacation. I met an Amish guy who was about 65 years old, old dairy farmer. So dairy farmer with Amish, this guy’s milking cows by hand since he was 20, or what, 18?

1:06:13 And I said, at 4 in the morning every day, 4 at night, 7 days a week, and I said, when was the last time you took a vacation? And the Amish don’t even have a word for vacation in their German language. But he said, when I got married when I was 22. Now he said, I’ve been sick a few times, but you’re talking 40 straight years of work. Now when I looked at his face, happiness.

1:06:38 He was surrounded by kids, grandchildren, his wife, surrounded by friends, community. He had his hands in the ground. He was connected to some goal, making the world a better place, Earth a better place, community. He, what you lot, they become wealthy from that slow grind. And then I see my friends.

1:07:02 One of my buddies just got outed as a billionaire, he’s the 36, 37. There’s no comparison. Who you want to be? You don’t want to be the billionaire friend of life, you know, ’cause you know, I know him, problems, problems, miserable. Well, he’s, he hasn’t built he could, doesn’t have to be miserable.

1:07:20 I never figure out, I mean, try to, I, the law of 33%. You should surround yourself with 33% of your time with people below you. Those are people you can help, and they help boost your self-esteem by realizing someone’s worse off than you. Then you need 33% of your time around people on the same level as you. Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography says, you know, on your rise to the top, it’ll get lonely.

1:07:42 You need peers, those are your friends. But then you need the last 33%, which is people 20 years ahead of you, and these are your mentors. You learn through osmosis. So with this guy, I’m like, man, you know, why do you do this? I don’t know why.

1:07:59 I don’t know why. Almost every hyper wealthy friend, like ultra wealthy, I’m like, you have all the tools at your disposal to live the good life, and I think it’s as simple as education, like just me saying it to them. They’re like, oh, okay, and then they do it, and then they’re happier, right? So they can read about it, ’cause the four things are health, wealth, love, and happiness. They got the wealth.

1:08:21 Yeah, they have the wealth, maybe the health at 36, maybe, maybe they’re not doing the healthy things. I’m like, look man, you could hire Arnold Schwarzenegger to come in my home, and that metaphor could be, you know, you just, as Machiavelli says, the wise Prince deploys money for the thing. That’s not an exact quote, but I’m putting in modern terms. You deploy capital, you win cities. You win the war.

1:08:46 The real war to win is, like I said, the war of time at the endgame goal. Like Buffett says, where do you want to be at 80, and figure out, okay, I wanted to be there. Then what I got to be at 70, all the way back to the present day. You are, you live, I think, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about, live with the end in mind. You got, you said build on your strengths, and take those five points to intersect.

1:09:10 Is that five things that you think you are good at, and no, no. So the five things. Uh, the first one is what did you want to do at 14 years old? That’s generally when your IQ peaks. Like you said, one of the Mensa bulletins, you’re in Mensa that I saw.

1:09:26 Your IQ peaks many ways around 14, 15. Okay, not wisdom, but IQ number. And you’re also have low levels of fear at that time. You’re still under the protection of your parents, you know. So you see clearly in many ways.

1:09:39 That’s number one. You draw a circle. What did I want to do around 14 years old? Next one, what do, what have strangers complimented me on since I was a child? The next one, what did you grow up around?

1:09:52 ‘Cause Dr Helen Fisher talks about this mental map that we use to see the world, and it’s generally based on your environment. First, 10 memes, right? You’re meme-ing everything, yeah. Meme grandparents, parents, close friends, school environment. Then you look at what you’ve been doing the last 10 years, ’cause it’s great if you can build somewhat around that.

1:10:11 Most people throw the baby out with the bath water. Like, I don’t like what I’m doing now, and I’m like, fresh now, yeah, starting fresh is like Ogie said, a man can maybe have two careers in life. That’s it. It takes too many years to build up knowledge. And one.

1:10:25 So, and then the last one is, uh, on a Saturday night when you’re just out with friends, not working, what can you talk about effortlessly? What do you end up talking about all night? If you can find the intersection of all of those, or at least some of those, so for me, you know, I grew up. My mom was a single mom. Ended up taking me.

1:10:44 My grandma, help, grandparents helped raise me. They were professors, very book oriented, very teach education. So I was around books from a little kid. What if strangers complimented me on, probably stuff like books. Oh, you’re smart, that kind of thing, especially reading.

1:10:59 I’ve been reading so like two. My grandma said or year, uh, third thing. What have, uh, I been doing the last 10 years? A lot of business. I’ve invested, even without knowing, have been kind of educational based.

1:11:13 So the fourth one, what can I talk about effortlessly on a Saturday night? I talk about stuff like this. You know, controversial stuff, complex stuff, psychology, how the brain works. Yeah, just anything. Just idea is okay.

1:11:25 So, uh, and then the fifth one, uh, which one did I not cover? The 10 what you’ve been doing the last 10 years. 10 years, uh, strangers. Oh, at 14 years old, one of my first business plans basically was, I wanted to make a conference where all the smartest people came together, and on all the important questions of life, they would have a debate. So you could hear, like, diet.

1:11:47 You could put the Paleo guys against the vegan, and I was like, I’m going to let these guys duke it out, and probably somewhere in the middle you’ll find the answers. ‘Cause like the old saying goes, everyone’s ideas sound good till you hear the other side. You know, you ever watch like People’s Court. Judge, you hear the, the plaintiff or the defender, you’re like, oh, this other person’s horrible. Then they get up and go, well, what I did, I hit that person, but that’s after they, you know, slapped my baby in the face.

1:12:17 And then you’re like, oh, okay, well, that guy deserves the punch. Then it goes back to the other side, and you’re like, well, I didn’t actually slap the baby in the face. This guy tripped me, and I fell on top of, you know, in the whole story. It’s like, wow. When you really, so it’s really like TED Talks.

1:12:31 That was my first kind of idea. Sounds like a TED talk. So where am I at now? It’s like, so your, or laran, I called your business Destiny plan. It should be like under 15 words, quick definitions.

1:12:41 I got this from Mike Murphy, one of my mentors, one of the top venture capital guys in Ireland. He said, look, people come to me with 30 deals a day on average. He said, if they can’t define it in one sentence, might be a good idea, but they’re not ready. So you need to have it distilled. So mine is, you know, now what I look at investing, what I’m trying to do with my life is spread good ideas using mass media, six words.

1:13:07 So mass media, uh, TV, movies, Hollywood stuff radio, books, magazines. So when I, when people come to me like, hey Tai, you want to do this restaurant idea, my friend just made a billion dollars. I’ll be like, there’s no great tragedy on me losing out, and the odds I will never stand in front of Kings in the restaurant business. I’m a crappy cook. You know, I, well, not so.

1:13:30 Why build for every hundred units of energy I could teach myself how to be a good cook, but for 100 units of energy I’ll only get five units of cooking increase, whereas a competitor puts 100 units in, they get 300. I’ll never be able to catch up. As you know, funny thing that I heard at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting this year. I walked up there it was funny. It was like Bill Gates, Munger, Buffett, all sitting around.

1:13:55 There’s no security. I know they were waiting a pic to shoot you if you ran and grabbed these guys. Bill Gates is like the most casual dressed guy I’ve ever seen. I think that’s what happens after you’re the wealthiest man in the world for 16 years straight. Probably you can dress however you want, but you know, Munger said, what I was in college, I went for, I think, uh, aeronautical design, and he said there was one kid, Harry or something, he said he was always smarter than me, and I realized I’ll never be smarter than that kid, so I switched to finance, and they said, what you really, competence is relative.

1:14:29 What you really want to do is compete with a whole bunch of idiots, and luckily they are in large supply. So for me, this area of books and stuff, I don’t know if I’m the fastest reader in the world, but not many people read a book a day. I can read more than a book a day. I just don’t say that because it sounds too weird. People hardly believe one book a day.

1:14:49 It’s not as hard as people think. By the way, you don’t have to be a super genius to read, and you don’t have to speed read either, or a little. I don’t speed read much. It’s like, I have a, I, I do big parties at my house, and I had like 550 people at my house couple months ago, and, uh, sometimes so many people, I go out to the front. I have security guys there and Kim Kardashian’s former bodyguard.

1:15:09 He runs the door. He is a massive man. He’s about 67 he weighs 305 lbs, and he has no muscle, I mean no fat on him, all muscle. He, 22 in biceps, if you know what, that’s the same size as Arnold, and I, his name is Rome, and I was like, what you start out bench pressing? I, what do you bench press?

1:15:29 He’s like, you know, Tai, I used to be about 550. Now I’m down to like 480. I’m slacking, I’m getting old. And, uh, and I asked him what’d you start with and he said, the bar, a push-up. The bar.

1:15:40 So when people are like, how do you read fast? I’m like, people want the gimmick. They want the lottery ticket versus sculpture. Make your life a sculpture every day. You chip away.

1:15:50 So you figure out your oian destiny that gives you the industry to be in. Then from there, your products can change, but don’t be, people are way too opportunistic. Who cares if these guys made money with WhatsApp? So it’s when you say it’s, it’s not a great tragedy if I miss out on that, because it’s not a great tragedy, because your effort should be doing something else. Yeah, stick to the life’s about, to the odds, man.

1:16:12 What are the odds you’ll be able to do for every WhatsApp story. That’s media bias. It’s called availability bias. The news only shows the two guys who made it. What about the 10,000 smart guys, guys and women, that didn’t?

1:16:27 So what works consistently? There is only one thing that works consistently in business, that is tremendous skill built around something that’s it, man. You want to put up your stack. You know, there’s so many potential shortcuts. Are you’re going to do a Lean Startup, and you’re going to, you’re going to offshore.

1:16:45 None of that stuff works consistently. It’s not, it’s so it’s correlated with success, but it’s not the cause. There’s a cool book on that by that guy Bono, or there’s a weird, not Sunny Bono, or the YouTube guy, I forget his name. It’s called, it’s a weird book, but it’s a famous, Surti. I’ll try to remember later, but he says, you know, when we look at the things you have to do to be successful, we get confused as to what’s causative.

1:17:16 It’s not causative to be super efficient in business. What’s the real cause of business? It’s that, still, Bill Gates built on an inherent skill he already had. He had massive curiosity. He was built to be a tech guy.

1:17:32 Buffett says, I was built, man. My brain is hardwired to do math, and be able to, at 7 years old, he was doing bond valuation calculation. People can’t do that at 67 years old. He was so, Steve, uh, Spielberg was in, you know, built for this thing. Mother Teresa 12, 13 years old, decided she wanted to devote her life to charity and the work of other people.

1:17:55 Gandhi was doing this. If you read, he was helping people as a lawyer. You know, want to be a lawyer and help people at a young age. I rewatched that movie the other night. It’s a good movie, man.

1:18:04 Yeah. I put, I also have the best movies of all time, I think, on my website, along with the books you said. Uh, whoever wins has is the one with the biggest funeral at the end. Do you mean that? And what do you mean, and what do you mean by that?

1:18:16 Gandhi had the biggest funeral ever. Right? Well, it’s like frameworks of thought is you take invert. Who lost? Adolf Hitler, on his death, the whole world knew about it.

1:18:27 He shot himself in Eva Braun, the basement of, you know, of a bunker in Berlin, Germany. What was it? 44, something like that. He blows his brains out. The whole world knows about it.

1:18:39 So that’s the first part of the test, but he failed the part where they’re sad. Everybody was happy, right? It was the end. You know, World War II, World War I, you’re talking 200 million people died. Countries just, you know, my grandma’s German.

1:18:55 There’s no boys left in her family. It’s whole wiped out of a generation. So by that framework, in the one that I’m proposing, you try on yourself he failed. Who won? Nelson Mandela died last year, or whatever, and he, uh, the world wept.

1:19:13 So you got to have impact. Not all of us. I’m certainly not, no, Mahatma Gandhi or, or, or, uh, Nelson Mandela. To the extent that I have impact with, with the gifts that I’ve been given and the strengths that I built on, then you pulled off the right thing. And it’s not about, it’s not about death.

1:19:34 You don’t want to fixate on death. Right? What you want to fixate on is when you do things right, and I’m defining right as effectively. When you do things effectively, the straightest, uh, the quickest point, uh, the quickest way between two points is what? Straight line.

1:19:50 The more straight line you are, I call that right, because it’s efficient, and if you want impact, you will be happier. You will be healthier. Be a hell of a lot wealthier. You will find love and social connection within that. I, I was, gave this talk in Las Vegas last month, this self-help talk.

1:20:10 I mean, to this self-help conference, and this guy came up and I said, he said, Tai, oh, this Destiny thing, I got to figure it out. I’m 44, and he’s like, and I’m, I’m not really finding the women I want to date. I’m not finding the money. I said, man, what do you want to do at 14? And he said, I want to play tennis.

1:20:27 So what do you do now? He said, I sell shoes. 44. I said, well, I asked him some of the other questions. I said, well, salesman, you should be in sales.

1:20:36 But I said, you’ve got the industry right, but why not go work at a tennis place? Like, surround, build on strength. I said, were you good at tennis? He’s like, yeah, I was a college pro or a college player. And I said, you know, if you focus down like Gary Keller talks in that book, The One Thing, which is a great, great modern book.

1:20:57 Um, that’s who you’re going to date. As you focus down on tennis, you’re going to date other girls who like tennis. It’s going to start rounding out. You’re going to be happier. You’re going to be wealthier, because you’ll have a, you, there’s no way you have any drive to sell shoes.

1:21:10 You’re not going to stand before Kings. You don’t care about shoes. You care about tennis. So I’m like, slight tweaks in people’s lives is the difference between going, and, and then when you do that, so now you’re happier. You date the right women or men.

1:21:25 If you’re, you know, whoever you are, you, uh, make more money. Now that leads, I say, there’s four financial levels. You got scarcity, which is most in America. The average person makes 51 grand. I think here, average person makes 25 or 30 pounds.

1:21:40 That’s below. That’s still in scarcity mode. You will experience low levels of happiness, which will spill over into your physical body. Cortisol, all these things change. Epigenetics.

1:21:52 Your environment. Like, Dr Sh says, this isn’t hippie stuff. This is like how you think affects your genes. We know that now. So your physical goes down, social life goes down, and fulfilment, impact goes down.

1:22:06 So this one guy makes this one change, the dominoes start to fall. It’s like wealth goes up, boom, and then you go into the second level, which is financial independence, and once you can hit that, a time you can hit the third level, which is prosperity. That’s like, you know, 100 grand to a million a year. And then above that you start to hit impact wealth and impact, which is Bill Gates. One man didn’t make a trillion bucks, made 60 billion dollar, put together a fund, Bill Gates Foundation.

1:22:36 Now you got to understand, put this in perspective. The whole world economy, US economy 15 trillion. UK is about, I mean, Europe’s about 15 trillion. Globally, let’s say the net worth of the world is 300 trillion, something like that. I think, uh, one guy with way less money has had more impact.

1:22:55 He’s almost eradicated small pox, almost. He’s working on malaria, HIV. So you can be a guy like that, or a woman like that, but it comes from tremendous focus. He said from age 20 to age 30, I never took one day off, not even one. 3,650 days.

1:23:12 Where is that message being taught in the modern books? It’s not everybody thinks they’re going to efficiently delegate, outsource stuff to India. That doesn’t work. What happens when everybody outsources it? India, then the competitive advantage is off.

1:23:26 It’s a weak, ill it’s not a very well thought out. So focus and hard work isn’t talked about enough. No, no. Where’s those who want to hear that story? Couple more questions.

1:23:36 Uh, you throw some big parties in Hollywood, five or 600 people there. I saw one of your videos. You had, uh, Owen, formerly known as Tyler Durden, of social dynamics. I’m a big fan of his stuff obviously. And a bunch of people, that, oh, why do you throw him?

1:23:48 What do you, is it fun? Do you like connecting people? And what’s that evening like for you? Is it totally fry your brain? Like, can you talk to everyone there?

1:23:56 Well. You know, one of my first businesses when I was young was nightclubs. So I’ve been in that business, you know, entertainment, promotion stuff. So, uh, you know, it’s that’s an interesting question. So I developed, I’m working on trademarking this personality profiling system.

1:24:15 I called PACE P. So practical, action, social, emotional. I believe you kind of put your letters in order which are the strongest to weak. So I’m a, a P, E, E, S, APEs. So action, practical are my two strong ones, emotional and social, even though most people think I’m super social, but not my definition of social for this personality test.

1:24:38 Is like you like to be around people for no other reason than their people. Like, not trying to network or anything. So it’s important for me, like Arnold Schwarzenegger had really weak calves. So he had to lift extra. If you read Total Recall, by the way, which is an amazing book, listen to it.

1:24:55 It’s like he says, reps and sets, you want to dominate whoever does the most reps and sets. That’s the message the world needs to hear, and that says that’s hard work, then, ’cause he was talking about, it won’t feel like hard work when you do it around your oian destiny. Bill Gates, time flew. He wasn’t thinking about vacation. Whenever people try to tell me about maximizing vacation and minimizing work, I’m like, oh, I actually know the real problem.

1:25:19 My friend, you’re doing the wrong thing. Right? I always said, me, Tim Ferriss came in on my Twitter the other day, today, and we had a little friendly debate. I think he’s a very smart guy, by the way. I’m not anti-Tim Ferriss.

1:25:29 Sometimes people think I am. I’m like, that is not true. Uh, uh, but I said, you know, if I came to you and I was like, hey man, you’re not going to believe this. Met the girl in my dreams here in London. Okay, we’ve been hanging out, and we’re going to get married.

1:25:44 You’d be like, oh, congratulations, Tai. I’m like, dude, I got even better news. I have figured out how long I’m going to have to be with her. 4 hours a week. That’s it.

1:25:53 It’s so greatest. I think you’re answer me. People be like, Tai, you sure you’re marrying the right girl? You want to be a, you don’t want to go into a marriage going, the most exciting part about this marriage is I don’t have to spend time with her. And Pablo Picasso said avoid the dichotomy.

1:26:09 The dichotomy is doing what you don’t like in order to make money, so that you can do in your spare time what you do like. He said make, figure it out, so that what you do in your main life is what want to do. It’s the same. There’s no, I call it the integrated life. I learned that at the Amish.

1:26:28 There’s no delineation. There’s no social. There’s no church on Sunday, vers. It’s all one life. I had a little debate with this.

1:26:36 Here is, that’s why you were debating Tim about the 4-Hour thing. Were you kind of doing that? Well, I was saying, you know, the 4-Hour Work Week book name is a very catchy title, and I think people don’t listen to what his main purpose, which is be efficient. Yeah, um, and it’s not just I just use that, ’cause a very popular book. I’m telling you this, that what the world doesn’t need is 50,000 more people trying to figure out luxury, Louis Vuitton, and how to salsa dance across Argentina and lay on the beach in Bermuda all day, or Miami.

1:27:07 You know what we need? Give me 300 Spartans. Nations are born stoic and die Epicurean. Stoics were people who said uh, they put off present pleasure to invest. They’re the original investors.

1:27:23 Epicurus said no, live for today, maximize vacation time. And, uh, nations are born with stoics, and they die. They disappear when a more hearty race of people or a hearty mindset comes. So I’m interested in the people, uh who think like stoics. And I, if you want to, you know, the Prince says, Machiavelli says, the Prince, not that I’m I know I’ve quoted him a few times.

1:27:50 I’m not. I just happen to be reading his book today, that’s why it’s on my mind. But he says, you know, the Prince, you have, I say you have to go aggressively towards your goals. In The Prince, he says the Prince that wins focuses on war, and what I mean by that is I think he means being effective at going after what you want. So the good news is, in a world full of people just trying to live luxuriously, if you can focus down, you’re going to be way happier.

1:28:17 Read Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism, that the pro, you know, Jonathan Haidt, Martin Seligman, these guys have devoted their life to human happiness. Happiness. What makes you happy? Three levels of happiness. Seligman says number one, you have, you know, the Hollywood momentary pleasure.

1:28:31 That’s what Hollywood pitches on us, where you basically say over a 24-hour period, how many moments did I feel good versus didn’t feel good? The problem with that approach, and why is the least effective of all, uh, happiness modes, is what Freud says is that happiness is the fulfillment of pent-up desires. If I fed you food all the time, it’s actually a torture. I read somewhere they would kill people. You just got to eat till you die.

1:29:01 What you need is a period of not eating, so that the hunger can build. Okay, and then when you eat, you appreciate the food, so in life, in the same way, what you want is you want the grind. John Kapari put that book out, the NCAA basketball coach you want, or as Ray Kroc called it, uh, grinding it out. You want the grind, ’cause then when you get it, you will experience dopamine release, right? It means something to you, and then you get the dopamine.

1:29:30 Otherwise, you don’t get it. So I’m saying even if this formula, even if the other formula worked, you wouldn’t like it, right? So it’s a horrible approach to, you know, the game of life. That’s what I’m saying. It’s like, back to the party really quick.

1:29:44 So is that part of you working on the social side of you, which you think, yes, is the weaker of the, of the, flor. Yeah, it’s a weakness thing. Uh, so and I like to do it. It’s good for lots of stuff. It’s fun.

1:29:55 You meet all kinds. I meet a tremendous amount of cool people, and, uh, yeah, it’s kind of, you know, I’m part Puerto Rican, maybe the Puerto Rican parts, social likes big parties. So do you push yourself to do one of those a year? No, I do more than that, but what happened is my friends down at LAPD, I got a couple. You always got to have, uh, friends in high places, they were like, dude, ’cause I was doing them once a month, and he’s like, man, they got you.

1:30:20 They have you as a number one party house in Hollywood. So soon, you know, the DA is going to come and put a clamp on. I’ve had the hell, I did the MTV afterparty, and all these, you know, Lil Wayne, all these guys, and then when they roll in, it’s a nightmare. So the white, these are white boy problems, high quality problems. These are, yeah, but, uh, you know, it’s Hollywood.

1:30:42 It’s fun. You, I think you have to balance. I try to balance every day, do something short-term fun, because you never know if you’re going to live too long, but then you also have to be an investor at the same time. So I’ve kind of found the balance. Now I do them.

1:30:54 I’ll probably do one here in a month or so. That’s like an epic balance. Yeah, I’d love to come. I’d love to come. Couple more questions.

1:31:00 You’re meeting with some entrepreneurs while you’re here in London, uh, what are those few things that you’re looking for when you meet these guys, and will you decide in the first 20 seconds whether you want to do business with them? Oh, that’s a good question. I’d like to think I’m that intuitive. I’m probably not as smart as I would like to be. So in a sense, you can read people quick, but what I look for now I look for the frameworks.

1:31:29 Like, I now it’s becoming quicker and quicker to see how much cognitive bias loading people have in their brain, little things. So I look for that. Look for a lot of curiosity. Do you, do you invert that? Do you say, if someone’s got the bias, I want to stay away?

1:31:43 And people that are, are challenging their own biases, you want to do business with them? Yeah, yeah. And for me now, man, you know, you put in that bio you know 12 businesses, and some of them started from scratch. Some I’ve invested in or, you know, grown. I like to be around people I want to be around, so some of it’s just a style thing.

1:32:05 I think, you know, in the PACE system, I, whatever, personal, if you use INTJ, Myers-Briggs, all that, I think you only really blend with like 25% of people, even at best. You know, Myers-Briggs. I think it’s one out of 16 is your hyper good match, whether it’s dating, friendship, business. So for me, it’s not just about, like, is this guy smart? Because he could be way smarter than me, way more successful, but do I want to be around them on a moment-by-moment basis?

1:32:34 You got to find that for you. You got to find that in dating. You got to find that in love. You got to find that everywhere. You think that’s crucial for a good business, is to having that match.

1:32:43 Okay, even if it’s a great idea, there’s no tragedy in losing out on money. Who would you want to be? The guy who, there’s no tragedy on losing that. On Mon, yeah. So it’s like, I could have partnered with Bob, right?

1:32:55 But I feel slightly comfortable around him all the time, so cortisol is up. My body, I’m feeling stress. This guy George, I’m going to make less money, but I’m going to enjoy the thing the whole time. I’m going with George. And the cool thing in the world now, there’s such 7 billion people.

1:33:11 You don’t have to make that choice. There’s such a large pool of amazing. There’s still, even if you say a world, only 1% is truly amazing. 7 billion, 1%? That’s a heck of a, that’s 70 million people.

1:33:24 Yeah, so it’s a cool, so then you take the 25%, you naturally, ’cause the way I think we break out, you know, we break out in like two primary personality ways. So it’s how you see the world, the E, emotionally, and the, the story you tell yourself. So the ego. So my ego works a certain way. My ego, I tell myself that I’m an adventurer, that I’m sharp, that I’m smart, do, and that fits well with a certain type of ego.

1:33:55 My emotional, I’m a pretty practical, logical person, so I need to be around, there’s complementary ones. So either another practical person or, uh, kind of an emotional one works well with me. So I break down this PACE system gets more advanced, so I kind of, it’s called psychometrics, which is the science of profiling psychologically personality types. So I’ve got, that’s something I’m really focused on now because I see huge bang for the buck, whether it be in business, closing deal.

1:34:23 I think it’s the future of the internet too. E-commerce, you’ll hit a website, it’ll be perfect, you know? Deep data will have, they’ll have cookies, your last 500 visits to site, put together a psychological profile. Every site will look different, and they serve you up. I’m trying, we’re trying to pioneer some of that stuff that makes a lot of sense, but like, even the internet now, like I tell people, man, we’re in the Stone Age.

1:34:45 Look, 10 years from now, websites are just going to be these, ’cause that we’re still bringing the black and white store mentality to internet. It’s like, what’s the most optimized website? Well, I can promise you this: there is no optimized diet. There is no optimized website. It’s horses for courses.

1:35:04 If you have a long racetrack, you want a slow and steady horse, right? If you have a sprinting one, you want a fast horse. Yeah, we should be thinking about the long tail, the way we serve things up. I mean, serve it up for every person. It’s going that way.

1:35:17 It’s just whoever cracks that code maybe will be one of them. We’re trying to figure that out, man. You will be a, you will be a titan. Exciting times. Uh, Tai, I ask everyone here a few questions at the end.

1:35:28 I’m gonna hit you with them. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old, uh, Tai Lopez, give that young man a bit of advice. I don’t know if you were hanging with the Amish at that point. I was probably what would you tell him now? What advice would you give him on the phone?

1:35:42 I’d be like, simulate more, be more humble, realizing that trial and error is a, that nature should be the teacher of last resort, ’cause she’s a bit M, and she will kill you. She will kill your dreams if there’s a circle. There’s like a wheel, and you and I are like little mice running along, and most of us we dart in and out, ’cause we’re like, we’re doing pretty good. We don’t have to follow the natural rules of cycles of nature, all this stuff, but when you play around with fire too much, one day you’re going to trip and fall and that wheel will just run you over.

1:36:22 It’s better to get inside the wheel, and you’re safe in the wheel, and you’re moving forward. So figure out how does this world work, not how you want it to work. I want karma to exist. I want it to be, if someone does me wrong, that it will work out, that it, get they, but what how does it really work? With no delusion.

1:36:43 And the best way would be just more smart people, more people with impact, get their knowledge into your head. Be humble enough to go, I don’t know, good advice. What you doing with the Amish anyways? You know, it’s different things, but one of them, I want to see what the world was like 200 years ago before electricity. I want to see what, you know, community was like, and I learned a lot.

1:37:06 Best time of my life. Biggest question I asked myself: why did I ever leave? 2 and a half years you spent there. It never got better. I’ve done every, I’ve gone from no electricity to, you’ve had House of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Ferraris, you name it, and all that stuff.

1:37:20 It, it’s Ferrari, is fun, but, uh, I don’t think it gets better than, uh, and Jonathan Haidt told me the same thing. He’s like, we’re hive creatures fitting in, and, uh, Freud said the same thing. What makes us happy is getting two things right. I think, it, my germ is not good, but Leva and shafa, which is work and love, social. You got to perfect those.

1:37:42 Your body too. I think he missed out on that one. Work and love. So get the social right, get social right, and get your career right, get your oian destiny figured out. That’s the best thing in my life now.

1:37:55 I feel like I’ve gotten more clarity, and so I don’t even work anymore, man. Life is just life. That’s what I say. The second you bring up the word work I’m like, that’s what I learned at the Amish. There’s just life, man.

1:38:08 It’s just you moving through time. I promise you this is the youngest you will ever be. There is no reversal. So move through time, well, move through time efficiently, and you miss the simplicity. You miss the fact that every meal was earned and everything you see was earned.

1:38:24 Good people, man. good people. Okay, never found people like that again. We’ve become more sophisticated, myself included, but probably characters weaker, more anxious, more distrustful, more, less humble, less, you know, what they had. That’s, I was going to just record something.

1:38:42 I’m always doing this stuff where I get people riled up. I was like, most of us were raised by wolves, man. So you know, there’s this myth that parents are so good. I’m like, where are the good parents? I, I mean, I know good guardians.

1:38:55 They keep their kids from, and most of us, I don’t know if you had good parents or not. I didn’t have you know. But did you come out of life 18 years old fully equipped with everything you need to know about life? You knew how to deal with people socially, conflict, dating, love, marriage, all the tools you need. You knew how to be happy.

1:39:16 You knew how to make money. You knew every, no parents. What’s the requirement for being a parent? Sexual activity, which every organism, even earthworms, have. So what happens at the Amish is you have real parents who, by the time these kids are 18, they’re like fully equipped.

1:39:35 They’re like Aristotle. They know when to be angry and not how to be, you know, not be angry. They know you can leave them with responsibility. I hire people now. I don’t care if they have a degree or not.

1:39:47 Everyone of us for the most part has been turned into the sucker, has been turned into the [expletive]. So uh Amish is the most refreshing thing. If I take people to the Amish without 100% of the time, people go can we just stay here, man? Why are we going back? Yeah.

1:40:01 Do you stay in touch? Do you ever go back? Yeah. I get every once in a while. They have, they don’t have electricity, but they’ll walk into a pay phone and this one guy, Jerry Miller, once twice a year leaves me a voicemail.

1:40:11 I just got one. He’s like, he leaves like an hour-long one. They don’t really know. They’re just like, hey D, and he’s like, come visit me. I’m in Missouri, and he’s like, I’m on the corner.

1:40:22 He doesn’t realize there’s GPS, so he gives me full directions. Okay, he’s like, you want to go, you going to go here, and it’s like a 10-minute direction. I’m like, I don’t, I, they don’t get GPS. But, uh, it’s refreshing, man. Good people.

1:40:34 So now I, I, I, I there are lots of good people. You just you got to be. I’ve lucky enough to find good people. You know, so I’m optimistic about life. It’s good.

1:40:44 You have that to compare to. Um, second part of that question is, to the, to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us around the world, could be in China somewhere or South America, you know who wants to be successful, who wants to make some of these changes. Like, what do you tell them? I mean, you must have kids ask you all the time, what do I do? Or do you hate that question?

1:41:00 No, no, it’s a good question. Okay, it’s a question I asked myself. I still ask myself. I’m not sure I have the exact answer, but Jack Simplot, uh, one of the great billionaires of our time, he said, grab a hold of one thing and never let go. Hold on.

1:41:14 That’s the pattern. Pablo Picasso started very young. He was still painting at 80 years old. Produced 50,000 works of art. B just did one thing, man.

1:41:26 One freaking thing. He made music. You be you. Build on your strength. Start young.

1:41:32 You will go through the cycle. Love the cycles and seasons. You will have the fall. You might be in the winter. If you’re listening, the winter of your life, things look dark out there.

1:41:42 But what I learned at Joel Salatin’s, man, we’d go down in the basement. We at his kitchen. They’d have a little fire, and he’s like, Tai, this is a time you read. This is a time you eat more food than you should. You put on a little a little bit of fat.

1:41:54 This is the time you sleep 10 or 12 hours. You take, get all your sleep in, and in Virginia, you got, you know, four 3-month kind of an even season thing, and snow outside. He’d sharpen the chainsaw, sharpen the tools. We’d make plans. We’d brainstorm.

1:42:07 So if you find now the down, that’s the upside, preparation. The downside of that is you look out there, and sometimes your brain is like, will it ever be sunny again? But Mother Nature, that wheel, even though it can work against you, it can work for you, ’cause it will bring the spring. So if you’re listening to this and you’re in that winter of life, be okay with it. Take the best out of it.

1:42:27 Then you will come to the spring, and in the spring you got to follow the seven, you know, I talk about the 67 Steps, the seven-step scientific method, which is basically a lot of experimenting. Thomas Edison, one of the most impactful people in the world, died one of the wealthiest men in the world. He said for every one, he had a thousand patents, and he said it took on average a thousand experiments to get that one. So spring is massive experimentation.

1:42:52 In the winter, though, you must figure out this oian general destiny. So what industry are you going to be? Where you where you going? You’re going to be in the food business. You’re going to be in the hotel business.

1:43:01 You’re going to be, for me, it’s education business, the tech business. In the spring, you test different products. Then you will come to the, and the downside of the spring is it’s messy. It’s mud on the ground. It’s, you know, it’s not, nothing’s quite growing.

1:43:15 Then you get to the summer, and you will reach the summer. And you might be in that now, and that’s where it’s just pure grind. You’re just cultivating, working, refining, but you know what you’re doing, and you’re just waking up and you’re not getting a lot of sleep. Now you’re burning the fat that you put on in the winter, and eventually you will get to the fall, and that’s the harvest, and the media only shows us the harvest, right? But that’s only one, for, you know, people want to rush to the harvest, and I’m like, you know what happens when you finish the harvest?

1:43:45 You’re like 84 and you die. Plus, there’s another winter coming. Well, I’m saying Warren Buffett, if you asked him, he’s 84, he would give all his buddy to be back in the spring of his life again. So don’t rush through it. You got to enjoy that moment, because that’s all you have, that you moving through time, day by day.

1:44:05 It’s good advice, my very good advice. Uh, best advice you’ve ever received? Can you pin pinpointed on one thing? Uh, to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world’s not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.

1:44:20 That’s Charlie Munger. That means whatever you want, man, if you don’t have money in your bank account, I bet you you don’t deserve it yet. So all you have to do is reverse engineer it. What is someone’s bank? What does someone’s brain look like who deserves a lot of money in their bank account?

1:44:36 Right? The world rarely, rarely, uh, is unfair. We think it’s unfair. There’s people who inherit money you don’t deserve, but the vast swath of people who have a six-pack, we’re not born with it. My friend is one of the top Ford models in the world, and you know when you hang out with him, he runs every day, he eats lean.

1:44:58 He, when we go to the movies, he’s the only dude not eating junk food. He deserves the six-pack, right? So to get what you want, you have to deserve it, and I would add on to that, the quickest way to deserve it is law 33%. Start spending the scariest thing you can ever ask yourself is, yesterday, how many hours did I spend with people with someone 20 years ahead of exactly where I want to be? Right?

1:45:22 Most people’s answer is like, one minute or zero. Zero. Yeah. So it to get the quickest way to deserve more is through osmosis. That’s how you learn.

1:45:31 Get around people. There was a time in my life, the most productive, early 20s, I was spending 12 hours a day with people. I was just like, apprenticing, interning with people. Go work for your competitors. Go knock, and the door will be open.

1:45:45 You know, seek, find, all those old phrases. All right, and then, boom, rubs off on you. It’s not so hard. What are they going to say at Tai Lopez’s funeral? What would they say about the man?

1:45:58 Well, I hope I live long enough to have some impact. I hope they’ll be like, uh, he spread good ideas. He made me think, you know, or he, maybe I don’t. I could consider myself more like a relay. I don’t think I have that good of ideas, except when I regurgitate other people’s ideas, maybe make them a little accessible, sometimes hard for people, people to read Freud, so made me think about something that I hadn’t heard about, made me turn my life into having impact.

1:46:32 Something like that. Maybe powerful. No, it’s fascinating to hear what people kind of would like to see go on. You know, it’s interesting. It’s not, it’s not the bank account, is it?

1:46:40 It’s some kind of impact you want. Money? Yeah. You know, my favorite thing, Warren Buffett, Charlie Rose, I was like, you know, do you like being rich and Warren Buffett said, well, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is a hell of a lot better. Now I’m not rich like Warren Buffett by any means, but uh, don’t buy into the lie that any of the four pillars, health, wealth, love, and happiness, is either more important or less important.

1:47:07 Okay, there’s a lot of neurosis around things that are, we, we value scarce resources. Gold is more, uh, rare, uh, more valued because it’s more rare. It took a hotter star exploding to make gold versus helium or steel, right, or hydrogen, or, or steel, or iron. I should say. Uh, in your life, being able to get health, wealth, love, and happiness, these things are so rare for people to pull off all four that we make up stories.

1:47:35 We go, ah, buddy’s not that important, ah, I love no, you can get the good life, just not everybody will be. But you can be, you know, my neighbors in Hollywood. I have all kinds of Cameron Diaz and Russell Brand and Katy Perry, Ben Stiller. These are Paris Hilton, and they’re all there, and you got to ask yourself why do they get it? And I’m telling you, I know these, not all of them, but these are talented people.

1:48:00 Increase your talent, increase your skill, and be patient enough, ’cause the world doesn’t instantly respond, just like if you do six situps, you don’t instantly get a six-pack. But you grind it out. Another great saying, Charlie Munger: go to bed a little bit wiser than you were. Before, step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. So it’s great advice.

1:48:23 Great advice. All right, uh, for people to find out even more about you, TaiLopez.com. The best, the best thing is go, I got a little free book of the day thing. I, I don’t always send an email out every day, but I, I try to send it pretty often. Uh, you’ll get little book review.

1:48:38 One and a half million people now are on it in 40 countries. so cool stuff. Uh, if you just go to types.com, you’ll see the, the little place to put your email in. It’s free. I have a podcast, YouTube, Twitter.

1:48:51 I’m pretty big on, so yeah, download your podcast, you’re pretty big on Twitter, you tweet a lot and some controversial stuff. Um, Tai, thanks so much. I didn’t know about you until this last week. I don’t feel bad about saying that, but uh, fascinating stuff. I love a contrarian.

1:49:05 You know, I love someone that says no, it’s this, it’s not that. I love a little bit of old school. I’m fascinating that Munger is your idol, and he’s 90, and uh, no, it’s, it’s great stuff, and fresh stuff. So hey, like they say, you know, the young doctor fattens the graveyard. So what you want to do, find people who have been around, man.

1:49:22 What you look for, your advisers, you want a little gray hair. No, no, I know Aristotle, lot of gray hair on him. He’s dead, been dead a couple thousand years. Ideas that last are good. And, uh, yeah, like I said, I, I stay under, I stay, a lot of people ask me for extensive bio stuff.

1:49:37 I’m like, you know, I’m kind of I’ve always been a little underground to myself. I’m not a huge bragging about what I done, or it, it’s really irrelevant. What I tell people, test the ideas that I say. If they don’t work for you, then you stop. But you’d be surprised, these aren’t my ideas.

1:49:58 Every, I would say, it’s, you know, I’ve started a lot of businesses. This thing that I’m doing in terms of books and ideas, I’ve never seen something with such an overwhelming response rate of people being like good ideas work, and I’m like, yeah, imagine that, good ideas work. Yeah, and people sense genuine energy. I think as well and they sense that you’re congruent in what you’re talking about and what you believe, and I think people are attracted to that.

1:50:24 The internet’s great about that. People are attracted to that, and that’s true about podcast and YouTube and stuff, because I think people sense real genuine thought and genuine interest and passion, and then they go to it. And the scary thing about this is, I’m like, man, 10 years, I’m probably going to look back at everything I’m saying and be like, I was a [expletive] back then, but it’s all documented now with the internet. So hopefully this stuff will be outdated, but you know, like I say, I’m like, literally look past me, because you know, one of the logical fallacies is arguing ad absurdum.

1:50:53 I’m sorry, ad hominem, where it’s like, you look, do I want to believe what Tai’s saying? Do I like him, do I like how he sits? Do I like how I’m like, forget that, man. I’m a blip on the timeline of history. Like, no matter what I pull off, we probably won’t remember.

1:51:09 How many people can you name from the 600s, 700, 800? No, nobody. We get all forgotten. And, uh, so you stay humble, and you go, you do, you build on the strength that you have, and hopefully it amplifies out. And I think, I think, uh, I think like I said, I’m an optimist.

1:51:31 I’ve never been a time that, uh, has been better to be alive. I can guarantee you that, when would you want to be alive, man? When, like, people used to die for, you know, 100 years ago, 150 years ago. Women’s number one cause of death was giving birth. Now who dies from that us to die?

1:51:50 I mean, 50 years ago, black people, my grandma came to America, German, she was going through, you know, they blonde hair people, she got accidentally, didn’t know there was colored bathrooms, went in the bathroom, got arrested. 50 years, 60 years ago, we still didn’t understand that there’s no difference to white people, black people, except melanin in your skin. That’s how outdated and stupid we were 60 years ago. You wouldn’t have wanted to. 50 years ago, they’ll Leave It to Beaver.

1:52:19 That was a myth. 100 years ago, you, World War I, one was going, a million people died in one battle of the Somme. in one battle. When would you want to be alive, man? Now you could basically pull off, you know, they say the rich are getting richer, but everybody’s getting richer.

1:52:37 The whole poor, the whole middle class has come up. Sure, it’s true that a handful of people control massive wealth, but look what the handful of people at the top do with it. You know, used to be wealthy people, there was a guy named Malik the bloodthirsty. They used to be the wealthiest people in the world, and take all the women and chop everybody else’s heads off. You, but now Bill Gates fights disease with all his money and drives a Prius.

1:53:03 Right? It’s not a bad time to be alive when you’re, Moguls are doing that. People like Durant says we spend much too much time in the last 24 hours and not in the last 6,000 years. Study history. This is a good time, so go out there, be encouraged.

1:53:19 Uh, reward and punishment. Realize the rewards are big, but also the punishment’s big of not listening to this stuff. Be scared just enough to motivate you to get what you want. Excellent. And read your books.

1:53:32 You heard it here, right from Tai. Read your books or listen to audio or YouTube, or listen to your audio books. Um, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can come see, uh, the extremely good-looking Tai Lopez on our YouTube channel. Wish London Real, as we say here, it’s about the journey. Um, thanks so much, Tai, for coming.

1:53:47 I wish you well on yours. Next time I’m LA, I’m going to hit up one of your parties. Yes, we’ll have Tyler there. Yeah, fantastic. Does he go by that name anymore?

1:53:54 Oh, he does. They all got their nicknames. But I call him by, I didn’t know about the nickname thing. So fantastic, thanks for the time, and I wish all the best, man. Be good.

1:54:05 Awesome, thanks. All right, man, take care. What we call reality