#103 with Tai Lopez - Tai Lopez Opens Up About His Past and Addresses Critics

What's up everybody? Alright, this episode's gonna be a doozy. We had Tai Lopez, the guy who's sort of internet famous for being a marketer. Some people think he's a scam artist. He basically built this super viral YouTube campaign that started off with him in his garage with a Lamborghini that, you know, he said he owned, he said he leased, some people think he rented it. You know, there's all kinds of controversy around it. So we brought Tai on and we had a conversation about 3 things. First, we kind of press him on a little bit of his history and the criticism that he gets and how he responds to it. The second thing we did was we talk about what he's doing now where he's buying out old brands like Pier 1 and Dress Barn and taking them, you know, turning them from brick and mortar to e-commerce ventures, which I actually think is really smart, but you know, some of the things that he was saying, you know, we wanted to understand his model. And then at the end, you know, the conversation gets all over the place. We talked about, you know, Sam started asking him if he smokes weed or does LSD, and he started quoting a bunch of things from books that he's read, and the conversation wandered a little bit. And at the end, the very end, if you can make it there, it's a long podcast, but at the very end, he asked us, he's like, "What will your listeners think of this?" And we said, "Well, it's going to be a mixed reaction. Some people are going to be mad we even had you on the podcast." Some people are gonna love it and they're gonna think it was interesting. And a lot of people are gonna say, oh, you guys were too easy on him. You didn't ask him about X. And so he, he just told us, he said, all right, what's the hardest hitting question you got? Ask me. Um, and he wanted us to press him. And so we, we, we pressed him a little bit on, on some things. Um, and so I think you're gonna like it. It's a long podcast with Tai Lopez. All right. Enjoy. I'm here in my garage. I got my Lambo. I got Ty Lopez on the podcast. I had to do it.

Ty, and by the way, we're gonna be respectful for you. I mean, we're all— we're respectful to everyone. We're definitely gonna like be as honest.

I have my record on for you guys so that in case the backup audio—

good. We don't hold back, and it always comes from a respectful place though, so we try to be pretty straight shooters here.

So yeah, Yeah. And we're not journalists, like, you know, I'm not like some researcher or journalist. We're both founders. We're both entrepreneurs and we just like talking to interesting people. And, you know, today when we tweeted out, hey, we got Tai Lopez coming on the podcast. I knew that people have like mixed feelings about you or whatever, but man, my Twitter blew up and it seems like tech slash the Silicon Valley Twitter, which is kind of our audiences, at least that's my audience. They don't like you. And a lot of people there were like very— I thought there was two reactions that one I expected, one I didn't expect. The one I expected was sort of like, oh, Tai Lopez, eye roll, I've seen the guy's ads, isn't he kind of like one of those internet marketer dudes, whatever. I thought that would be the kind of the reaction. Well, and we've had a bunch of different type people on this podcast, right? We've had some people that are super successful entrepreneurs, billionaire types, we've had investors, we've had you know, social impact entrepreneurs, poker players, whatever. So we've had a wide variety. I didn't think people would really get too hot and bothered, um, but they got— some people got hot and bothered. Some people were really passionate about it. And so for me, this was an unusual day on Twitter. I try to be controversial, but I can't get this kind of reaction. For you, this has to be like the norm. Is this a normal day on Twitter for you where you get this type of polarized "I love them" or "I hate them" reaction?

Uh, a lot of that's Silicon Valley. I'm popular. I always say I have a friend, he's from Staten Island. He said, "Ty, you're popular in the streets." I actually kind of grew up a little bit ghetto. I grew up in a mobile home and things like that. And so, you know, Silicon Valley, a lot of virtue signaling. There's a lot of people sure that what they're doing is ethical and what I'm doing isn't, and that's fine. Look, you know, at the end of the day, people who actually get to know me are always surprised, 100% of the time. Every single hater, you know, people— because I think of it this way. One, I'm a big fan of evolutionary psychology. What bothers most people is displays of things. Now, Silicon Valley is all full of people who want to accumulate wealth, but they realize in their own way, in that bubble, you have to virtue signal that that's not really why you're doing it. I always say if somebody's wealthy, says they don't care about money, at any point in time you can write a check to a homeless person and go from the richest person in the world to, you know, a truly virtuous Gandhi, Mother Teresa, people who truly give. You know, I lived with the Amish for 2 and a half years. They're truly non-materialistic. It's against their religion to accumulate a lot of money. Sometimes they do a little bit with land. But Silicon Valley is a place, and why I get that reaction is because it's a place that doesn't want to admit that they're more like me than they think. And so not everybody, that's vast generalizations. Also, number 2, there's a big misunderstanding. For example, people say Tai sells get-rich-quick schemes. The biggest thing I ever sold was 2 different programs. One was called the 67 Steps It was literally 67 things that a mentor taught me, an hour apiece. I charged a dollar each. Now, it was mindset. Anybody who's ever been through that program— I mean, I got at like the first video has about 75,000 positive comments out of about 150,000 people who went through. So it's pretty good rate. Word-of-mouth traffic was massive on that. And it didn't really talk about how to build a business or anything. It was just what my mentors taught me about how to think through life. You know, like the first principle of the 67 Steps is from Charlie Munger: 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. Meaning the mindset Charlie Munger brings with Berkshire is that in general, when you see people successful, they deserved it much more than you think, as opposed to the proverbial, this person stole to get what they want, person had an unfair advantage, this person was just lucky. So that was the first course. And the second one was called SMMA, Social Media Marketing Agency. I told people, you know, you see all kinds of people out there like Gary Vee, they have a social media marketing agency that does $100 million revenue. And I showed everyday ordinary people how to start their own agency. 40,000 people went through that program. It was a 4-month certification. Taught by myself and 20 people who own profitable agencies. The testimonial and success rate that I would put it against any university, anyone. I, I know a girl going to NYU, bachelor degree, 3 years in, and I said to her, we were talking about digital marketing degree. I don't know, I'm— I just memorize stuff. I have no idea what I'm learning. I said, well, how much you paying for this? It was a $30,000, $30,000. I said, wow, $30,000 in 4 years of your life, it's a lot of money and time. She said, no, that's annually. So $120,000 is a lot of money and much more close to a scam than a program that taught you from legitimate agency owners. I mean, it'll cost $500 or something like that. So I think—

how much did that course cost when it first came out?

We had— it was always under $1,000. There was a—

we've done promos where it was like $497, and it was between $497 and $997. One-time payment, no recurring, nothing like that. So I think what happens is Silicon Valley types, they see ostentatiousness, which is like, okay, a Lamborghini, living in Beverly Hills, having an enjoyable life. It bothers them because you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to virtue signal, even though you're just as ruthless and materialistic as anybody. There ain't nobody on the top of the Forbes list— I know 5 of the top Forbes list people personally. They all love money. Love money. They don't like to say it because they realize there's a power in virtue signaling, which makes you less of a target for the world. But they love money. From J.D. Rockefeller to Jeff Bezos, people who make money are ruthless. Average person makes $50,000 to $80,000 a year. Silicon Valley is above average. It's full of ruthless people. But like I said, maybe they're smarter than me. Maybe I should virtue signal more. I could never do it, you know. I got my first nice car, first exotic car, in 2006. Now, I didn't put a car on social media until 2014, so I had Ferrari, Maserati, 8 years before. So once social media got big, I'm like, I'm just gonna show my life. I was already living in the Hollywood Hills from 2009, didn't post that on social media. And when I posted that at 20, it really, in like 2015, it really like evoked a visceral thing, like How dare this guy like these things? But I think it's a misunderstanding. Like, I own some of the biggest organic farms in America. One of them I still farm with horses. Like, I'm not as materialistic as people think, but certainly sometimes that came off because those are the videos that did well. I can tell you all my videos weren't Lamborghinis and girls and that, but those are the ones that get a lot of views. So inherently they become controversial, but nothing was ever fake. The house that I was in, I moved out of California 2 years ago. Where you at now? Miami. Miami, London, Puerto Rico, New York. Now I kind of live on a jet right now, but doing a lot of deals. But I think in hindsight, would I do it differently? I mean, I had this, I don't know if I would. I don't know if I would. Seeing the results from the people who actually went through the programs, there's no negativity there. Almost all this negativity comes from people who just got a visceral reaction. Dr. David Buss, an evolutionary psychology professor, one of my mentors, he told me, Tai, men have always been bothered by conspicuous status of other men. It's a classic. In Australia, they call it tall poppy. In Sweden, They call it fjanteloven in Scandinavia. You're not supposed to show, yet Sweden has the most billionaires per capita.

Let me ask you a question, but Ty, what year were you born?

Everybody's trying to figure out my age. I've left that as a controversy for a long time just because I'm like, yeah, it's good.

It's a good thing to have. Well, I don't know.

I didn't know your people—

I have no idea. I don't know that people are trying to guess that. The reason I'm trying to wonder is because you've lived— you keep telling these stories of owning farms, living with the Amish. I'm like, that's a full-ass life. Yeah, you got a big old full head of hair. I mean, like, like what, uh, you've experienced a whole lot for someone who doesn't look very old.

I'm not young and I'm not old. And, um, you know, I've been an adventure seeker my whole life. There's like 3 things that have been true through my whole life. One, I like cars from 2 years old. My grandma just died, sadly. She was 102. And I was like, Grandma, a lot of people talk about my cars. I'm like, did I always like cars? Because I was like, as long as I remember, I was in love with cars. She's like, yeah, you always love cars. Number 2, I love travel. And number 3, as soon as I really experienced getting out of a city— I was born kind of in the ghetto, Long Beach, California. My dad was in prison, my mom was a single mom. Right when I saw that, I was like truly connected. Like, most of this year I lived on my farms. So one of them, I have about 750 acres in Shenandoah Valley, all an organic farm. I lived with Joel Salatin for 2 years, then I went who's kind of the pioneer of like grass-fed beef and pasture chicken, pasture-raised chicken. Then I lived with the Amish for 2 years, actually longer, and I still have one of my main farms that I post on my social media is in the middle of Amish community. The Amish actually run my farm. Believe it or not, they're the best people I've ever met, and I go there a lot, and I have a relatively simple life there. But I like adventure, you know, so it makes me more controversial. People want to pigeonhole you. They want to be like, that's the Lambo guy. I'm like, what about the farm with horses guy? I just planted, you know, massive amount of land with horses, no tractor. Ultimate, ultimate fuel efficient, ultimate save the world.

I can tell that you get the same sort of criticism a lot, and I think you have good counterpoints. Like for example, hey, look, I sold a $67 course. You can say I'm, you know, not providing value or whatever, I'm scamming people, but like, the hypocrisy of, let's say, you know, the university system where people walk out with $50,000, $100,000 of debt, and, uh, why don't— why doesn't anyone question the value that they drive? I think you have good points. I'm curious, do you think there's a fair criticism of you? Like, you know, rather than being on the defensive, the, you know, something that somebody says, you say, you know what, that's a fair criticism.

There's always two sides of the story. Everything people say has an element of true. I mean, some things are blatantly wrong, like people say I rented a house for a day or a car. Those are factually incorrect. But to the main points, certainly everybody has a point and I see them, you know. In fact, like going back to Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, you should not— he, you know, I believe in their concept of you should never hold a belief unless you're going to argue both sides better than the other side. So I think I could argue the side against me, which is, you know, look, Ty, if you show a Lamborghini to kids, or teenagers or adults, some of them actually think that's the end game that you have. And, um, I think it's not as simple as that. I think if you look at personality types are very fixed. There's greedy people that'll latch on to greedy things no matter what. So I'm not sure that we— I'm not sure that I can manipulate people as much as people think. They're like, ah, Ty's a great marketer and he's manipulative. And I see the angle because all good marketing is manipulative. For example, Apple, which I get the biggest kick out of San Francisco, you know, really esteemed Steve Jobs and Apple, largest company in history and makes great products. But it's certainly— well, I mean, it's the largest corporation in history that was built with blood and tears like an empire. It's built with child labor in Asia too. Then they charged $1,000, $2,000 for a phone that cost them $300. They're one of the most profitable companies. Very ruthless. And so I guess what I'm saying is, my thing is, yes, I can argue against myself, but I can rip apart every company. Name somebody. Zuckerberg, ruthless in the monopolistic way. Let's take somebody that's not so well known, an everyday ordinary person just driving their car to a 9-to-5 job, you know, living the life, putting their kids into college. Drinking Coca-Cola, giving their 6-year-olds Coca-Cola. I mean, this thing of trying to pick people apart— I'm not diminishing people's arguments to me, but I'm saying I've never held myself as an angel, and I never will, and I— as a saint or anything like that. But unethical?

No, I don't believe that.

I do not. And I'll tell you again, ethics is a hard one. Some people think Joe Biden is unethical, some people love him. Some people think Donald Trump is great. It's Betty Doan and same Clinton and Obama, and it goes all the way through. When you become well known, people put their fears and their traumas into you, right? And often people who are most mad about something, it's because it's an inner reflection of them. The greediest people in the world are those that often say, well, Ty, you're being greedy. But I will tell you this, look at the substance of what I do. No one's gotten more teens to read books than me. You don't— what do you think gets a teenager to read a business book? Show it. Telling them to read it, put it in front of them as homework, or saying the truth? Hey guys, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Peter Drucker, me reading these books took a poor kid born to a single mom, and they are causative, not correlated, those books. Like Warren Buffett says, the more you learn, the more you earn. If I show a Lamborghini for that and that pisses off some snowflakes or virtue signaling Silicon Valley. I, I— it doesn't even bother me.

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Number 2, you know, I have businesses. Farmer's Cart now in a business doing organic food to the masses. I think that's not so bad of a business. So when MentorBox has 60,000 members, paying members, I built a business with my partner Alex. And what do we do? We do, we put books and book summaries, got hundreds of millions of minutes watched across my platform. I'm actually in the billions. A lot of it's about great books. Drucker, Munger, I mean, these are just like titans. And so I think you should look at the substance of people, because if you try to pick apart people's motivations, I can pick apart any person. Bring me somebody, bring me one of my critics. I was looking at some of those tweets. I was looking, I was like, are you important to the world? Are you important to the world? Sure, you built some SaaS stuff. Are you important? I think it's important to make people read. I think it's important to save the environment. We farm an entirely— I'm growing non-genetically engineered corn and soybeans right now on my farm in Staunton, Virginia, with yields that are approaching genetically engineered corn. And they say you have to use genetic engineering herbicides, uh, for round up in order to feed the world, and we're disproving it piece by piece. I think that's important. I do think there's entrepreneurs that are important. I think Elon Musk is important in the sense that, you know, you can get rid of fossil fuel and still have a cool car that people want to buy. But you think Elon Musk is always virtuous? You know, right?

Let's talk about, uh, you're on one, man. Yeah, that tweet, it got under your skin a little, uh, Which one? There was like 4. Yeah, you know what I mean, that my thing. I want to come back to that. I want to talk about, uh, business right now because you have a lot of cool shit going on. Look, like, even if people disagree with you, there's something interesting here. So can you give any type of scale as to how big your empire is right now?

So let me ask you, so we talked a little bit about this on the podcast. We said, hey, I think this guy Alex Meyer and Ty Lopez, they've created this thing called Retail— Rev— what is it?

Retail something— Ecommerce Ventures.

Retail Ecommerce Ventures. And what they're doing is they're buying up well-known but kind of outdated business models. So brands like Pier 1 or Dress Barn And it seems like you're not buying the company, but you're buying, you know, the rights to do e-commerce. What are you actually buying?

You're not buying—

we get the whole thing. We just don't assume— I try to buy the whole thing. I started buying— I bought small business back like 2012, tried to buy American Apparel. All of these, in general, if you're buying distressed, you want to buy the intellectual property. You don't want to do an asset purchase. You don't want to do an entity purchase. You want to do asset purchase. So in effect, you're getting the whole thing. I could do—

I could recreate You own the 500 retail stores of Pier 1?

I could do it. No, we did not assume leases. Hell no, that's why they went broke. But I can close right now. In fact, I have a real estate guy that's going out and we're going back to landlords and we're saying, can we rent on variable leases? You can't do fixed leases anymore. That was the way— you got to adapt. So we can put Pier 1 back to precisely what it used to be. We own the whole thing, all the rights, all the trademark, the whole kit and caboodle. But most likely we'll switch it to an 80/20 model, 80% being e-com, 20% being stores. And so also educate me a little bit. I build big organizations. People think I'm not a good businessman.

I love it.

You know, it's funny, my business partner has much more credentials than me, Dr. Alex Mehr. He's, he's just exited last July for $300 million exit for a business he co-founded, Zoosk. It was the second largest dating network in the world after Match Group and Tinder. Um, he has a PhD, and we became friends many years ago because same kind of thing. At first he thought I was this party guy, and then he got to know me and was like, wait a second, this guy's sharp. And, um, not to toot my own horn, but what I was saying, because I hear the surprise in your voice, I haven't responded much. I haven't responded much to haters. It's just hard.

It's just hard to find people to run shit. It's not you. I'm just saying in general, buying a company and installing operators, that is hard no matter who you are.

That's right.

I—

hey, if it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. But we have— you know, so I have Pier 1 Linens and Things I bought. That was sold to Apollo in 2006 for $1.3 billion cash. I own Linens and Things now. It's a massive— at its peak, it was doing $2.7 billion. Got run down by the last private equity people that had it. I own Franklin Mint, which used to be the largest direct marketing collectibles company. It was the largest direct marketing company in the world.

Wait, you bought Franklin Mint?

Yeah, I own Franklin Mint. Google Tai Lopez Franklin Mint.

I own— I know the original founders of that are the founders of Wonderful Brand, right?

That wasn't the founder, but that was— they owned it. The Resniks owned it for many years. It was founded by the guy who started the Home Shopping Network. I forget his name. He started in the, I believe, the '60s.

So, Pier 1.

You know how to time to buy stuff. Takes business skill to do the things that we're doing. And some of it's luck and some of it's skill, and some of it's the hair on it, and some of it's if you can convince the bankers, and some of it if you can act very quickly like during COVID I mean, it's a skilled game.

That's not a convincing answer, right? Like, just the—

So, you've had dozens of companies before this. How much capital have you allocated of your own money to like, before you decided to take this on? I mean, were you like, I'm gonna throw, I mean, I have no idea. Like, are you saying you're gonna throw $20 million of your own money at these projects? Did you have like $100 million saved?

I have no idea. Well, I'll tell you this. My lawyer is always like, don't say— one time I said something about net worth. I was on Jake Paul's podcast, somebody more controversial than— no, Paul, uh, Logan Paul.

And I, I said something about my net worth, and my lawyers afterwards are like, don't talk about that, it just causes trouble. But I will say this, we use— me and Alex use our own money. And in 2015, I saw the writing on the wall. I said I'm going to build an accredited investor base. I started using— 2013, Obama changed the law that you can generally solicit for accredited investors. I was the first guy to use social media. First people— while I was doing those YouTube ads, I was also running investor ads. I got my first investors in 2015, literally within a month of the Here in My Garage video. I was leveraging that into other things behind the scenes, much less seen videos targeted at people with high net worth. Now I've built an investor pool. All these deals I've done, fuck 2 and 20 funds. Me and Alex own almost all of these deals. Why? Because we build an investor base that trusted us. That's not institutional. All these guys raising in Silicon Valley, look at the founders of Lyft. These dudes have sub-4% of their business left. So yeah, I mean, maybe Silicon Valley is full of brilliant people, but you also have to maintain equity in what you own.

So me and Alex, yeah, but If you're raising an investor base, then you're not going to own 100%, right? That's the definition.

If an investor's coming on, we use debt and warrants. No, we use debt and warrants.

So these are not equity investors?

We have just occasionally, we do that. We'll do some equity kicker.

No, we'll do—

I like that better. And then we'll either refi the debt or we'll let people convert. We'll convert into equity at higher valuations. I can tell you this, like a fund to buy in Pier 1, those fund managers are going to work. They're going to have 20% on their carry. I told Alex, fuck that. I'm like, the first rule if you really want to build something— and it's not just about being greedy and wealthy. If you look at companies that do well, the founders maintain a large percentage of the business so they stay motivated. Bill Gates owned about 65% of Microsoft. If you look at Zuckerberg, if you look at Jeff Bezos, if you look at Elon Musk, even You got to maintain that. So you have to have foresight. There's the old saying, do what's difficult when it's easy. So I raised capital, I started building a pool in 2015. I would just do a little bit. I'd be like, hey, do $100,000 note with me. I want to build a relationship with you so that when bigger deals come— 2016, I didn't see deals, I saw overpriced deals. 2015, I tried to buy American Apparel. It sold for too high of a price at that point. It was about $82 million. Gildan bought it. Then Barnes Noble came up, $500 million cash, and I thought MentorBox, the company me and Alex built, was already doing more e-com book-related revenue than all of Barnes Noble. We have built it in 18 months. So I said to Alex, we should buy Barnes Noble. It's too high. You have to buy, you know, sometimes people are like, Ty, memorize this formula. And what's this? I'll tell you this: buy low, sell high will make you rich, my friend. And it's a very unsophisticated strategy that few people fall— most of Silicon Valley is predicated on the greater fool. I'm going to exit to someone stupider than me. Well, the businesses we're buying, they have real value. Pier 1 is a monster brand. You're talking 30, 40 million Americans have bought there. That's 1/10 of the largest GDP country in the world. So going back to our original question, I could just virtue signal and say, I'm not that smart, and it's just luck, and you just show up at auctions. But it's not. It takes foresight years ahead. It takes practice. I tried deals. Like I said, I tried American Apparel and I couldn't pull it off. And I took my practice for 5 years.

I got—

I practiced my, my craft a little bit, you know. And there's luck. All of life is luck. We're lucky to be healthy and in America, man. Could be born in North Korea and then you don't have a chance.

How big is the fund now?

I don't think you could say that when the, you know, sort of the most valuable companies in the world are all from Silicon Valley right now. Technology companies are making up the vast majority. If you look at the S&P 500 right now, S&P 500, the top 5 tech companies, the FAANG companies, essentially, not really Netflix, but if you put Microsoft in there, they generated all of the returns in the past 6 to 8 months, where they're like this and the other 495 companies of the S&P 500 are below. If you look at the most valuable companies in the world, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Apple, whether it's Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, I don't think you can quite say that it doesn't work. Clearly, it works, but it's a very different game and it's a very different model.

You have to look at capital allocated, my friend. If you allocate enough capital You move capital to Raleigh, North Carolina, you will produce.

People will move there.

Jeff Bezos right now is the greatest capital allocator.

Jeff Bezos is not Silicon Valley.

Maybe by definition of technology. Maybe by geography, but yeah.

I mean, well, is Elon Musk Silicon Valley? Is Warren Buffett?

Look at the top. Of course he is. How is Elon Musk not?

So, what we're saying, I separate that out. If you're going to throw anything that's tech-related and call that Silicon Valley, then you are—

Tesla raised venture capital, and Elon Musk is from PayPal. He's from the PayPal days. That's purebred Silicon Valley. But of course, that doesn't mean that's the only way to make money. I just think, just like people would knock you for making money in a different way that they don't understand or that's not their playbook, I think it would be not right to do it the other way either.

So let me ask you a question. What's the returns on Sequoia and these VCs? What's been the actual return for investors?

I'd have to look it up. The top percentiles of VCs like the Sequoias, do you have the numbers at the top of your head?

Last I've seen is 12.5%. Bill Warren Buffett—

That's not correct.

I've seen— That's why I'm just saying, you look, Google it. It's not public. There's quite a bit of info. Buffett's done 19.5%. From the '60s. Now, you can say it's a different business model and Buffett's is not as important in Silicon Valley. What I call Silicon Valley, to clarify, is— would you consider SoftBank Silicon Valley?

No, I mean, it's a foreign company, but it is a technology holding company.

Yeah. I mean, you know, if we're not going by geography, then I think there's a mindset there. I think you should look at the numbers. I think, for example, why does it have a strong feeling? But you should know what the returns are. You're sure they're better than 12%?

Well, I'm talking from, I'm talking about from an entrepreneurial perspective. I'm not saying start a fund. That's not my—

no, no, but I'm saying, are you sure that that model— because we have media bias, we only show the people who succeed— are we sure that that model is producing better than any other given model? You did— I mean, that's a tough question, man. Causation and correlation is one that stumps even the greatest.

I'll give you my two cents, which is just that there's a million ways to win. I know rich real estate guys, I know rich private equity guys, you know, rich stock traders, I know rich technologists, and I know rich entrepreneurs, I know rich people who own gas stations, right? There's a million ways to win. I don't think the Forbes list is necessarily the best way to look at it if you're that, you know, average person trying to figure out what's right for me, or what are my goals and whatnot, because that's usually about an accumulation over time. And the internet is 30 years old. So it's not going to stack up against something that's an industry that's 200 years old or wealth that's been compounding for 100, 200 years. So I think there's many ways to win, and I think you're right that you do have to look at the numbers before you sort of just assume that this is a good path. But I think the numbers would back up that technology companies and internet companies do phenomenally well, and including yours. You are buying big brands, you're buying big brands and you're bringing them online. You're trying to take an old failed business model, brick and mortar, and you're going to do e-commerce. That's internet, that's technology. You may not be using venture capital to fund it, but I think we're on the same page that, hey, the area of opportunity right now, one huge area of opportunity is the internet.

Some of this is semantics, but yes, there— I guess what I'm saying past the semantics is those things that the institutions that get venerated inevitably become the institutions that are outdated. And so as Silicon Valley, everything creates its opposite. I find there's many inefficiencies there. I was bringing up some of them with the structure, some of them with the somewhat of a Ponzi scheme to the reason that WeWork floats is because you can convince SoftBank to put money in at that valuation. There's certainly tremendous, there's a tremendous amount of people leaving San Francisco and there's various reasons why they're leaving that go beyond political. Some of them are structural. So I think if we say all tech is Silicon Valley, yes, and tech has changed the world. But I guess I had a different definition.

Can we talk about what was your cash cow to fund all this? Was it MentorBox? I mean, you said you sold 40,000 courses at $500 apiece. I mean, that's $20 million over a couple years. That had to be incredibly profitable. But what has been your cash cow? Was it MentorBox?

You know, I've always had multiple streams of income. I actually learned that from the Amish. Every Amish guy's like a farmer. He milks some cows. He does woodwork. He does carpentry on the weekend. I don't know, I like that because adventure. So yes, certainly courses made money, but I was making big money before I ever posted one video on YouTube.

So, so the name of the podcast is My First Million, and actually the way it started, before we started brainstorming, I would just bring on interesting people and I would ask— I would start at the top, you know, how'd you make your first million bucks? Because I remember as a kid, I was a kid and I thought a million dollars was fucking all the dollars, and I was like Man, if I was a millionaire, and we used to play what-if games, would you cut off your pinky for a million dollars? And so, a million dollars was always this mythical thing and then, you know, so I always thought that was good. I'm sure there's a whole generation of people who still dream like that and I think it's great. I'm like you. We get knocked also for being money-minded even though we talk about a whole bunch of different things but hey, we love making money. It fuels freedom in our lifestyles and we enjoy that. So, money is freedom to me. The question I asked all the guests was, you know, how'd you make your first million? And often it's not their big win that everybody knows them for. It's like, actually, I did this thing beforehand. I was an affiliate marketer and I did this other thing. So for you, what was your first million? Was it before everybody even knew you?

I should have been more materialistic and been like, well, why not just release a tax return from 2005 and just shut everybody up?

I don't know, nobody ever asked me that. It's not been a controversial thing. What's been controversial is, do you own these cars or lease them? That's been like H3H3 made this video who we've kind of become friends, and I was like, that was a good-ass video.

That was a great video.

Which one? The one where he came to my house?

Yeah, that was funny.

I played with it.

People actually thought that I had my lawyers following him around. I'm like, dude, this is Hollywood, baby. I know how to hype stuff up. Because I was like, you know what, he had this first video that knocked me a lot, and I was like When he comes to the second video, let me make sure it goes viral. So I did little funny stuff. People to this day are still like, do you have lawyers following around our house? I'm like, what do you think? Use your brain. But I, I showed them the title to the cars. Now I leased them because I don't know anybody who actually buys Lamborghinis and Ferraris. I had 6 exotic cars. You lease them so you can turn them in and tax them. But that was a big controversy. The very— the world's very illiterate, so they're like, haha. Ty's a fraud because he leases and not buys, where any wealthy person is like, well, who the fuck would buy a depreciating asset? So I haven't returned my tax returns because literally the first person ever to ask me that question. That's it. People are much more fixated on bizarre things like, okay, you know, let's talk about that ad for a second because that ad's fucking iconic.

I think I've seen that ad a bunch of times. People don't know it's the ad where, you know, he starts in his garage with the Lamborghini behind him and he starts— but you start talking about books It's not like you're sitting there saying, I know, get rich, but like, I think, you know, whatever, it caught people's attention. So I wanted two things. First, from a marketing point of view, you know, was that ad like very well thought through, or did you just grab your phone that day and shoot it? You didn't really realize what you were doing, or were you calculated and thinking, okay, how am I going to grab people's attention and how am I going to transition this and let's light this room? Tell me about the making of that ad.

Yeah, good question. So in 2012, 2012, I was living in the Hollywood Hills. I had a Maserati, I think, and a Ferrari then. And I was like, I'm getting too materialistic. This is the ironic thing. So I sold my cars, and for 2 years, from 2011 or 2012 to 2014, I had no car. That, by the way, is when I realized Uber was a good service, because I used to have to walk down my hill because sometimes taxis wouldn't come.

So I did.

Then 2014, dating this girl, and I was like, it's time to get a car. And so I went and got a Lamborghini for Halloween because she wanted to dress up like Batman—

a Batwoman.

And I was like, let me get a black Lambo. It wasn't until 6 months later that I actually— this, or 3 months later, sorry, that I was like, wait a sec, this is a great prop. So one of the things marketing people should always realize, you need props in there. And a prop can be anything from a book to a person. In the 1984 Steve Jobs commercial, he has like these mannequin cyborg-looking robot things. And so I had been on the street of Sunset Plaza eating sushi. I was with two guys and beautiful women walked by, and at the same time a Lamborghini had driven by. The only thing that got those guys to not look at the women was the Lamborghini. So fast forward to January 2015, and I was like, prop, I need a prop for this. And I was like, let me shoot a video. I shot a video in December, it's still on my social media.

It didn't do that well.

Uh, it did, but I mean, it didn't have any ROI. So I said, let me do some permutations. And I went in the garage. The reason all those books were in my garage is because I own so many books. I was in France for 2014 New Year's. My assistant Nathan Ramos calls me, 'Ty, you got a whole bunch of new books in.' And where do I put them? There's no more bookshelves space in the entire house. I said, 'Buy bookshelves and put it in the garage.' So when I came back in January and thought about this prop, at first it was just about the Lambo, and I forgot that I had those bookshelves in there. They were just to hold extra books. So I grabbed that and I shot about 4 takes and the 4th one was all took and it went viral. Like, I mean, in 24 hours it was nuts. It was. And back then, if you get in early, you got to catch things ahead of the curve. Cost per impressions on Google, on YouTube was insanely low.

How much money did you spend on that ad?

Ah, that's a good question. Probably not 8 figures, but I would say, you know, upper 7 figures maybe. Oh, that's a surprise. And that's why— I mean, that—

I would have thought way more. I would have thought way more.

You rented that Lambo. You rented it. Some guy's going to come up to you about a rental.

No, not that. Just negative, I'm just saying. And maybe the negative people just don't come up to me. So, it could be biased.

And at this point, like you had— Okay. So, you did the nightclub and financial thing. Then you— There's a gap. And then you like came up with this idea for this book, the 67 Step book. And then you promoted the shit out of that and that kind of was like a pretty big win. Before that you were doing like some dating sites.

Yeah, I was doing dating, but I was also doing— I had a consulting business. I was doing masterminds. That's when I really started testing kind of the educational stuff. I started doing more public speaking in 2007, '08. I did affiliate stuff. I messed around with affiliates for a while. I bought a company. I bought a dating education company from two partners who were fighting. I bought— one of the partners had done ayahuasca and decided he didn't care about money anymore. And the other partner's like, no, I want to make money. And they asked me to mediate and I bought half of it. And, you know, that made— I flipped that thing for 7 figures in like 8 months. So I became from between— I like to do a lot of stuff. So I was in the dating world, social networking, I was doing a lot of consulting and I became pretty well known. You know what's funny? Until 2015, I did a podcast starting like 2011, kind of like what you guys have, like a serious business one. I was super respected. It was pretty funny. And because I didn't show anything, it was kind of like a Tim Ferriss thing, like, yo, I'm Zen and I don't care about money and blah blah blah. And it was great. I had a cult following. I remember at one point I was like, Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek is blah blah blah. And Tim Ferriss was responding to me, and it was just when I was starting out in social. So I dipped my hands in a lot of stuff. I started buying real estate in 2006, so I had passive income from that. I still own the wealth management company and the nightclub business. I still got passive income from that for many years. So yeah, there was a period of time where it's not like I was doing one thing. I started really to branch and experiment a lot, right? And that led into the education side, right?

And so we told you at the beginning what we do on the podcast. Typically when we bring somebody on, uh, even when a guest comes on, we actually don't usually interview them about their life and litigate it and all that. We just brainstorm about what's cool, what's interesting, what opportunities they're seeing. Um, that's why people like it, right? Because me and Sam are just idea machines. I think you're probably the same way where you have a little notes app in your phone and it's just full of half-baked ideas. Sam's got his company to run. I have my thing to do already. So we just give away the rest of the ideas for free. Yeah. And, um, that's why people like the podcast is it gets the wheels turning on, okay, I already know what I want out of my life, but I don't have that first kind of idea to hook onto. And I don't have that muscle in my brain to spot opportunities to break down businesses and understand where, oh wow, this business you never heard of has a ton of value. So I'd love—

and it's fun.

And it's fun.

Fun. You guys got a paid version of your program or your podcast?

We're working on stuff.

We're working on it. Yeah. With Supercast. To have like a paid—

So yeah, so we have some stuff coming, but, but I would love for you to to try to, you know, become one of us for the last 5 minutes here. And I'd love to brainstorm a little bit about what opportunities do you see that you may not be pursuing, or you see adjacent to what you're doing. I'd love— I don't know if you've, if you're prepared for this, if you have anything off top of your head, but spit out a couple of half-baked ideas of things, you know, if you're a young entrepreneur, what you would be looking at. What would you be going and doing?

What's that called? Like Misfits Fruit or Ugly Fruit?

Vegetables, right? It's produce. It's something produce.

Yeah.

Imperfect.

Yeah. I'm not familiar with them, but I like where they're going with that.

The whole shtick is like shit that wasn't pretty enough to sell. The pepper that was not pretty enough because it's misshaped to sell at the grocery store, they put in the box. In reality, it's perfectly good looking, but that's the shtick. And there's two of those companies, and I believe they're between $50 to $100 million a year in sales. It's a box that you get with vegetables.

Can you name the 12?

That's a good question. Okay, so you have in the US GDP, finance is number 1. So finance related. Me and Alex are trying to buy a bank. There's distressed banks. People don't realize there's 100 banks at any given time for sale in America. We almost bought a bank. God bless you. Bank of Louisa in Kentucky. Too much regulation. So finance. Um, food, clothes, fashion is about $1.5 trillion, uh, globally. Then construct— real estate, obviously, but real estate breaks into multi— so you can have real estate and then you can have construction. I think mining is in there. Um, and then you start getting into the commodity side of things. Some of those 12 break out there. The ones that I think I— and then service-based, there is a service-based trillion-dollar barely trillion dollars, but it's so fragmented. I don't like that. So on the 12, which I wish I could remember all 12, I only focus on like the top 6 because as you move down that stack, it becomes very fragmented. Like I was saying, like, do you really want to— like hospitality, it's, it's harder. It's fine if that's your passion and you've always wanted to run a hotel. That changes the game. But I tell people, start on Maslow's hierarchy at the bottom. Like, what do people really need? And in the top, which is this kind of, you know, enlightenment phase on the Maslow where you really— that part is what loses money in COVID. All this stuff here, and people ain't going to nightclubs up here because that's where you like express your wealth. You know, Karl Marx would be angry. But at the top of the—

30 years, where are you going to be? I mean, are you going to be this old gray-haired guy who's got all these CEOs reporting to you? Are you going to be running shit? Are you going to have sold out and you're just going to be reading and being an Amish? What are you going to do?

Nothing. Great question, man. You know, it's hard to predict the future. I would say I think there's 4 M's to motivation and I'm M number 3. So I hope I'll be in that money, mating, movement/freedom, Mastery, status— that drives most humans, one of those four. And I'm strong on the third one. So I hope in 30 years that I'm kind of a mad scientist. And I always tell people, you should reverse engineer your life, what you want on your tombstone. And I hope my tombstone says— so you're—

you're—

you want to be Howard Hughes?

I don't know if I'm— it could be in his category. I hope I'm not peeing in bottles and keeping them next to me or whatever he did weird.

You want to be— you want to be a wild guy?

I think I already am. You know what, if people can figure you out, you're— I think it's too boring for me. That's what I would say. So I'm hard to figure out, and maybe I'll get harder to figure out. I don't know. What do you want to do? This is a good question. What's your 30 years from now, man?

I maybe— do you have— you don't have kids, do you? Okay. I want to maybe have some kids. Um, I wanna, um, I, uh, you know, similar to you, I think me and Sean are similar to you in that we want— we, we like to have our hands in lots of different things.

I own my own company now.

And it's a similar business maybe than what you had. We have 1.5 million daily users. I just want to make cool shit for them and invest in the cool companies and buy cool companies. The same thing as you.

You know, at different times of my life, the old tap dancing rule— do you tap dance out of bed? Where I'm at right now is fun, man. It's fun because a lot of it's high level. If you look at Myers-Briggs, if you believe in personality types, I'm an ENTP. Which they call the visionary, whatever. I don't know if that— I wouldn't necessarily call myself a visionary, but I like high-level architecture. I like cracking the code on, okay, we're buying company brands at the pace of one a month. How do we build a C-suite in 30 days? Every 30 days, it's a tough one to do, but you know, I've built an algorithm that uses— actually, I built it with Dr. David Buss, a complex personality algorithm that uses very advanced psychometric testing, things that they call like the HEXACO score. You look at NPI, you look at the Mach 4, all these little-known academic ways of quantifying talent. And then of course, how do you structure it where you can test people? There's a good book on this by Laszlo Bock called Work Rules. It's how he was the chief hiring officer going through 3 million applications for Google. So I think there's— I hope I'll be reading a lot, by the way. That was a good thing you brought up, man. I get to read now more. I will tell you that if I could talk to my 22-year-old self, it's not just working hard, it's working smart. And I think you should look to the titans. There's a lot to learn. Even people that people think are unethical, like Rockefeller and the Rothschilds, you read their biographies and all of a sudden you go, well, there was a method to their madness. They weren't, you know, if it wasn't for Rockefeller, you wouldn't have the modern-day interstate commerce system. You used to not be able to do businesses across state lines. He retooled the United States into what we benefit, our benefit. But if you break Rockefeller down, he was a, you know, trust. Not only was he breaking every modern antitrust law, but he called himself, he believed in the trust like it was God. So I think that for every person listening and for my 22-year-old self, it's like, man, do lots of stuff. If 10% of people ain't mad at what you're doing, you're probably doing something wrong.

And what about the opposite? What would the 22-year-old self tell the 40-whatever-you-are-year-old Tai Lopez? He walked in through the door, was like, yo, this is my life. This is what you do. Okay, interesting. What would 22-year-old you tell you?

So, so, well, look, I appreciate you coming on this Silicon Valley podcast.

Hey, you guys gotta come on my podcast. I had a podcast. I got so busy doing these acquisitions that I've like hadn't recorded one in a year. But will you guys come on?

But yeah, we'll come. We'll do a brainstorm session on your podcast.

So look, this, this wasn't a normal episode, by the way. Typically we have this big-ass sheet and like we research like crazy and we come on and we just fucking bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. We bang it out.

Do it. Give me my bank. Give me the things you didn't get me. Come on, let's, let's just knock this out. Cause so many people are gonna be like, what's the hard nose questions you want to ask me?

No, no, we got to, I, what Sam's saying is usually we come on and we have idea, idea, opportunity, opportunity.

Oh, okay.

Oh, here's a business you never heard of. Uh, or hey, these guys are buying, you know, old school brands and flipping them for e-commerce. That's what we usually do on the podcast. This is more like, you know, hey, look, uh, you know, I wanted to do 3 things. I wanted to know your perspective on people's opinions, um, about, about you and what the criticisms are and address, you know, those. I had my own just curiosities of like, yeah, why doesn't he just say this, or why doesn't he do this, or how is he doing that? Um, and then the other side was, look, I wanted to talk about what you guys doing with Rev because I actually think that's a really good idea. Like, there was an investor today in the Twitter thread, this guy named Gary Tan. He's you know, comes from Y Combinator, which is like our Harvard out here. You know, he's, he's done some interesting things. You know, he built Postgres, which kind of failed, but he's invested in some good companies. He had his pitchfork out right away and was like, look, yeah, these guys, you know, this guy's never built anything. I think the fundamental thing for Silicon Valley is they respect builders. And for all the delusions around pretending that they don't want wealth, that's absolutely true. We're totally guilty of that. Virtue signaling, totally guilty of that. But the one thing I think is true is, um, Silicon Valley respects builders who make something. I think that the problem is that overlooks people who teach, like fundamentally you were teaching and it's like, oh, he didn't, he didn't, you know, why is he telling other people how to be successful? That's not a valid way to make your money. And it's like, well, first of all, you don't know if he's built anything before this. I didn't know a lot of your background. You shared some of it here. But the second thing is even if you had done none of those things, but you were teaching the right information to people and you were actually helping people read more books and think about how to build a little business, why is that a bad thing, right? So I think that is a genuine flaw of Silicon Valley. And I think what I replied to Gary was, look, whether you love him or you hate him, he's doing some interesting shit with Rev right now. And, uh, you gotta acknowledge that. Like, I don't care what you think about the guy, but good idea is a good idea.

Bias. Once the— there's 25 cognitive biases. Once humans decide this guy is something wrong— that's why politics— most people don't like Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Who are you persuading? All the hate on Twitter is just everybody who hates Donald Trump follows each other and everybody— it's the echo chamber, boy. It's like, right. And people don't like black. They like black or white.

And by the way, smart people.

Can I do one thing?

Yeah.

What's up? Okay. So I'm not going to mention anybody's names, but I was like, you know what? I never have done this before. Let me respond.

Let me bring up some of the people. So Andrew Wilkinson was a criticized you. He's a great friend of mine. He's a great friend of Sean. He's a good guy. And I would actually say, this is what I gotta say, by the way, I live in San Francisco. I'm from Missouri. This is where I am now. So like, I, and I bootstrapped my company, so did Sean.

People strike out at those things they subconsciously see in themselves. I have a friend who loves attention. We went to a party. There was a guy, life of the party, in the middle of the party. My friend, we walk in, 2 minutes in, he looks at me and goes, look at this guy. Fucking wants all the attention himself. I said, that's you, bitch. You wish you were him. Like me, I don't have to be that guy. So I don't criticize them. People criticize what is some sort of reflection.

Pull up what you want to pull up. So you know, Andrew says the same shit you say.

He buys, he buys profitable internet companies. So he bought like Dribbble, which is the largest, you know, designer web design websites, like a top 1000 website. Yeah, but he bought— he owns like 20 of these.

And so there's a builder. No, buyer. Just so I know. He's—

oh, well, listen, here's why it's funnier. He started because he had a— he has an agency that does service in sales, a service business in Canada. His whole group does about $100 million in sales. It's a lot of software, but some agency. But it's a— it's called Meta Lab. They make apps and stuff for people.

So he started with a service business. He then bought a bunch of brands that he thought were undervalued and grew them.. And then he did it with his own money and didn't use it. He doesn't have a— no fund backing him, and he owns most of it himself and with his one partner. And he sits in Canada and he laughs at a lot of the stupid stuff that Silicon Valley does. And so it's so funny that you guys are—

But it's like Tolstoy, or was it Dostoevsky, that said, you know, all unhappy families are unhappy— all happy families are happy in the same way, and all unhappy families are unhappy in a million different ways. Meaning to succeed, y'all, y'all doing about the same thing. It's like everybody's more similar. To fail, there's infinite permutations on there. I wasn't even going to bring up it.

I mean, he was going to tweet at Andrew. I think that's what he was going to do.

Okay, so here was it. How do you sleep at night duping poor people with a get-rich-quick scheme? So what I would tell him is, how much does his agency make?

$30 to $50 million.

So it is $30 to $50 million. I took that money that concentrates in his hands and I showed people how to do it, the everyday ordinary man and woman. So don't get on your high horse with me. If you want to talk about what benefits society, is it concentrating $30 to $50 million or helping a whole bunch of business, everyday ordinary people across the world have an agency and make $100,000 a year? I got it. Then Gary Vee at one point was banging on me for don't buy Quest. You got $150 million. Let everyday ordinary people, man. That's why I never get hate from everyday ordinary people, people on the street, people from the ghetto, people from, you know, service busboys. They're like, hey man, these other people in this scenario, they call it a get-rich-quick scheme, but the reality is they're the ones who got rich on something, and I break it down and let other people do. That wasn't even the main one I wanted to talk about, but I'm glad. Thank you for bringing that up.

Yeah, it's funny, like, you know, Warren Buffett, uh, would shit on, let's say, Bitcoin, which Bitcoin has been, you know, in the last 10 years, it would be the absolute best investment you could have made, better than any Silicon Valley startup. Uh, if you had just bought Bitcoin 10 years ago, you would have done better. Um, you know, he doesn't understand it and he kind of knocks it. Elon Musk knocks Warren Buffett. He says, oh, that's kind of boring, he's just a capital allocator. I'm out here building rockets and, and, uh, you know, uh, electric cars that are going to clean up the earth. And so he knocks Warren Buffett. And then, you know, the next person comes in and shits on somebody else. And I think there's this sort of really toxic idea of judging other people's businesses in this way. I'm guilty of it too. But it's kind of like you said, if you spot it, you got it. The thing you resent in other people is a part of yourself that you don't quite like. And, and I don't think most people would agree with that. I think a lot of people listening to this will disagree. But from my life experience, that has turned out to be true. The things that really annoy you in other people, things that really bother you, it's because there's a part of you that is guilty of some of those same things. Maybe it's suppressed, maybe you don't act on it, but that's why you're noticing it in that same way.

If you want to go down a real rabbit hole that will blow your mind, if you go down the evolutionary psychology route and you understand the Dark Triad score— so Dark Triad is the 3 most exploitative traits that humans share. So it's psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism. So I've administered a test across the internet, it's on my site, it's— I built a separate site, Life Compass it's called, it's free, I don't monetize it at all. And I've tested more people than any psychologist in the last 2 years in history. I tested like 500,000 people, just went through this free quiz. I can tell you entrepreneurs have some of the worst dark triad scores. The fact that they're angry— it's so Machiavellianism, is a complex psychological ailment. And it's basically if you were bullied and a kid who always kind of sucked and you didn't get the girl, when you finally get a little power, and especially with Twitter and YouTube comments, they did a study— Psychology, I think was Psychology Today, did a study. Most people who leave comments that are negative score extremely high on a dark dyad, worse than the dark triad. Sadistic score. There's lots of— that's why I never took— real people don't comment, man. So when people go, 'Ty, do people hate you?' I'm like, 'Not the real ones. These are people with actual psychological ailments.' Now, I'm not writing off anybody who criticizes me. I'm telling you, the most blatant people who make a living on YouTube on critiquing other people, if you do their Dyke Triad scores, these are people you should never have in your life. Exploitative at a level that's unreal. There's a good book on this called The H Factor of Personality by the guy who developed the HEXACO score, which is the most accurate personality test, psychometric test by far. So one of the things that I do—

uh, do you smoke a lot of weed?

You know what, I don't have super high anxiety, and anybody that I know that has anxiety and I don't have much, so I never do LSD because you're kind of like weird in an interesting way.

Like you go like—

that's what we call a Sam compliment. You do LSD, you're weird in an interesting way.

You know what? Well, so I'm completely sober. I'm completely sober. I don't do anything, but I would love to take LSD one day, but I'm a little nervous to do it. But you like talk about some weird-ass shit that I find incredibly fascinating and it seems like it's helpful. But is this coming from a sober place or do you like to get fucked up sometimes to get inspiration?

Last time I got high was in 2014. I remember my brothers smoke a lot. Two of my brothers have high anxiety. They smoke, they love it, they swear by it. My mom always— she's a hippie, she thinks I should smoke more and LSD. You know what, man? I have other ways that I think I stretch my brain. I'm not against weed, but I do acid or anything. No, man, my dad was like a big drug dealer that went to prison, and I guess I just like— and he was an alcoholic and all that, and he was like, yeah, I mean, I'll drink when I go out, but I don't have addicted to chemical. I never was. I got that from my mom thing. I thought I was gonna be like my dad. My grandma thought I'd be like my dad, addicted to everything. I think, as I told you, the videos that I'm known for are just the ones that the masses wanted to see so they got the viewed count. But the real me— that's why I said people used to follow my podcast are like, wait a second, this dude ain't who I thought he was. And it's not because I was projecting false, it's just a video with a Lamborghini, a girl, people gonna you know, 50 million views there. And a video of me talking about dark triad and dark dyad scores, which by the way should be mainstream. The educational system's so fucked, it doesn't teach you how to read people. One of my great superpowers, not that I was born with, but luckily I bumped into like Dr. David Buss is an active man, uh, mentor of mine. And like, it's insane the things that people think are weird that I talk about. Like, never go on a date with a girl without sending her to dark triad test. I've saved more dudes from debt. I have a friend who lives in Silicon Valley. I said, watch my 67 steps. At the end of the 67 steps, if that was worth a sushi dinner, $67, just ask yourself, see if the value was there. Because I developed the 67 steps in 2004 for an operating manual to run companies. I begin to realize I needed to be able to build CEOs, and I said, how do I get everything my mentors have taught me, and I built this manual. Back then it wasn't 67 steps, it was like 14 things. I still have the Word doc operating manual. So it's important to have frameworks. I can't tell you how I— I'll give you an example. How does it make sense— you don't talk about business— that I was the only one gonna buy Pier 1? Okay, if Sycamore hadn't come in in the last 2 weeks, I would have pulled that off for $20.5 million. This is a business doing $1.5 billion with 30 million customers. It has 99% brand awareness. Where's all the geniuses in Silicon Valley? And they say, well, we only build, we don't want to be asked— bullshit. Well, then build it into a better tech stack company. No, people with high IQ— there's a recent study and book that came out, I forget the name, why intelligent people make more mistakes. It's because They have these cognitive loads on their brain, and San Francisco has the most cognitive loads I've ever seen. I don't think the clear thinking is always there. There are some outliers, but I think why a lot of people— you read like Tim Ferriss, why did he leave? He's like, the mental— it's become a toxic mentality. And I could have told him, you stick a whole bunch of dark triad people in one city and give them money and a little clout, this ain't gonna be a place you want. This ain't gonna end well, my friend. We're going to end up in Austin and then Austin's not going to end well. The nicest people I've ever met with the lowest dark triad are people who live on a farm and things like that. But some of that's adverse selection. For example, what, 1 to 10, what do you think your followers will think of this podcast? Am I going to be a—

here's what's going to happen. They're going to say that we didn't press you enough and they're kind of right because I don't agree with everything you've ever done and I think we could have a respectful conversation about that, but I'm pleasantly— and I bet Sean's the same— I'm pleasantly surprised. And I think that you're a much— you're a much— I think that you are more ethical than I thought. I think that you are more badass than I thought. You're super weird, and I find that to be amazing and cool because I'm weird. I think so. I think what's going to happen is tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, are going to listen to this, and they're going to criticize me and Sean for not pushing you hard enough. But I think in general everyone's gonna like it, and I hope that you will come back on again so we can get into more business stuff. And, and we— I want us to come on there.

One thing you would push me on so I can make sure that this podcast, you don't get accused. You can say— I don't— do you do it in chronological order? Are you going to cut it where you can?

No, we usually do it in chronological order, but no, it's fine. Like, I, I don't ever think about this in terms of what are people going to say. Like, if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't even have done the podcast. I did this shit for fun.

And I did it because I need one.

Well, let me say that. Look, look, Ty, all great men are also bad men, right? Like everyone great has done something that people don't like. I think that some of the dating stuff was definitely scammy. Um, and you, I don't know, maybe like, I don't think that there was necessarily a victim, but it's, there's some blatant like fake profile shit.

The main knock on you is actually not about the dating site. The main knock is this guy was teaching people how to be rich and successful. He was showing a rich and successful life and he wasn't rich and successful. He only got that way because of his I'll teach you to do it. And that's how he got his money. That's the criticism, right? And I think we talked a little bit about, okay, how did you make your first million bucks? Was it that, or was it before then? Now, I don't know if all this is true, and I'm not even going to try to like go fact-check it because to me it's irrelevant.

But I know for some people, for some people, they're going to really care about this shit. I don't lie. Even if I wanted to lie, people will fact-check my stuff. My LOG Financial, which is now called Retirement Geeks, my business partner John DeWaar, he gets calls daily going, did Ty really start this business? Joel Salatin, who's been on Joe Rogan twice, probably the most famous agricultural food guy that wrote a book, Omnivore's Dilemma, in great part him. Joel Salatin's farm in Swope, Virginia gets calls where people are like, did Ty really spend 2 years living with you? Because they respect Joel and Joel respects me, but they don't— some of them don't like me. So, right, nothing I told you, I mean if a date was a little bit off, but there's nothing—

that's, it's— no, no, that's fine. So the two knocks are gonna be, well, some people are just gonna be like, I can't believe you gave this guy y'all's platform. I think that's fucking stupid. Like, I think, please, yeah, I would love to have Elizabeth Holmes on that. That would be a very interesting conversation. Yo, why'd you do that? And so, so my test is, if I was sitting next to this person, would I want to strike up a conversation? Do I have questions? Am I curious? Right. Would I want to form my own own opinion. Yes, absolutely I would. So I happened to record it here so other people can benefit from it. But that's— I do this with what conversation I want to have, right? So the second knock will be, oh, you didn't push them on this one factoid because they've done a bunch of, you know, sort of internet research about, you know, something you said that wasn't true or whatever. But I think we already kind of covered that. The third one, which is actually probably not what any of the audience says, but it's more of my own— what the thing I was most questioning of was I think you talk about, I bought this brand, I own this company, and there's something that doesn't quite add up there where it's like, you're telling me this is a company that, that's, you know, doing $70 million that quarter, um, you're buying these brands, it's publicly traded, it's publicly traded, you're making this point even further, right? So I guess my point is, uh, businesses in some ways, like, there's laws of physics, and of course there's outliers, but, you know, you're doing this repeatedly with brands And what you're trying— in a way, you're telling me that, you know, 2 2 1, meaning strong brand with huge revenues, or depositing $70 million in the bank account, meaning, you know, actual either, you know, profits or EBITDA or whatever. Um, and I'm buying these things for $3, $10, $20, $30 million. Um, something doesn't add up there, right? I, I, I believe that, you know, you might be one of the few people who are bidding on these things, or maybe one deal has this exception, but that's the only part where if I was really sitting down with you, I'd be like, all right, Ty, you know, okay, walk me through this because I know business and I know that there's no free lunch. If a business is really, really healthy, you're not getting it for cheap. And if a business has some hair and you gotta do some work, that's why you might get it for cheap. But I think you were kind of painting things as healthy that you wouldn't get for that price. And that was my, that's my perception. I might be wrong, but—

Oh, that's a good point. So is there free lunch? I will say there's one time where there's free lunch. It's where something's inefficient and not everybody sees it yet. So for example, when I got into Google AdWords in 2001, 2002, it was 15 to 20 cents a click. A lead cost me, let's call it, you know, whatever it took, 10. So you got leads for $2. And so it cost me $100. I remember doing the math. $100 to generate a deal that on average my commission was $1,500. So it's 15x. Now, you know, it was back then why I didn't know much about business and I didn't scale it as far, but there was free lunch there. When I launched with Google AdWords, YouTube AdWords, more than a decade later, anything I put up, not just here in my garage, you could sell anything.

Okay, let's use the one example you talked about, which was Dress Barn, I think, the healthy business. So good news, forget about the So one question here. So, um, let's say it's inefficient, nobody else is fishing where you're fishing, you, you recognized it, you go, but the business owner themself would not sell it for less than what they're making in a month. So the business owner, they're efficient, they know what they're getting in their bank account. Why would they sell their business?

I'm going to tell you something, and I shouldn't tell you this because it's going to—

I'm asking great questions, that's why.

But man, you should have got American Apparel.

Yeah, that was 2015. That was expansionary. That was where it wasn't deals. Right now is deals. So I think what happens and something even my critics realize about me.

American Apparel's worth $80. American Apparel's worth $80 now for sure.

Well, Ty, this has been a really good podcast. Um, what's gonna happen is it's gonna go live, and I think you're gonna get a lot of feedback from this. That's my prediction. I hope if you're listening, go, uh, tell me, Sean, and, uh, uh, Ty, give us feedback. I think you're gonna like this. Ty, I would love for you to come back, and if you want us on to yours, uh, we would love to do that. I'm speaking for Sean, but I imagine he'll say the same thing. Um, this was awesome.

Well, I appreciate— you guys are great. And, uh, your audience, even though I was on Twitter fighting back with them, I love it. I don't, I don't mind it. I was like in the doctor's and I was like, I don't got shit to do, I'm gonna reply 50 times. You can do— we could do another one if you get a whole bunch of response. You should have pressed them on dating. So I mean, the whole dating thing, we can talk about that. That. But so we can come back on the show, we can go down the dating thing, and we can go to it.

We want to do that. We won't—

I mean, yeah, tweet at us, uh, I'm SeanVP, that's TheSamPar, and then @TyLopez. Tweet us what you think. I'm actually curious about this. I don't know what people are gonna say. I know my opinion, uh, I know people are gonna hate us. They're gonna say, oh, you guys were light on them, or they're just gonna be like, you were defending them. But honestly, I've just told you what I think, and, um, I also know this, like, I have a poster of Conor McGregor here, you know, behind me. That guy's not fucking perfect. He punched an old guy in a bar. He's been accused of rape. He's also a UFC champion and has shared a lot of great wisdom and also contributed to martial arts in a great way. I actually love Tony Robbins. I've been to his events. People in Silicon Valley think this guy's a, you know, a complete cult leader slash, you know, con artist. I've met the, you know, famous tech CEOs. And I've hung out with them, I've gone to dinners with them, I've, I've been to parties with them. And yeah, they're not as great as you would think. Uh, you know, they, they do a whole lot of shit behind the scenes that, that just doesn't come out. And you know, I've just lived my life in a way where I'm curious and when I meet somebody I try to figure out what is this person? If you're remarkable enough for me to like take an interest in you, that means you know something about something and I'm gonna focus on that and not like focus all my fucking energy on the things I dislike about you or the things that you've done poorly, or the flaws of your character. And that just helped me a lot because then I don't worship people and think that they're flawless. You know, Elon Musk has had, you know, 3 wives. Let's go ask them, you know, how he is as a guy. Maybe they don't have the nicest things to say, but people totally respect him as a builder because he's fucking amazing at building. And I just encourage anybody who's like, you know, on hater mode, like, forget Tai Lopez, but just in general, much better way to live life is just to, you know, look at people and figure out what can I learn from this person? What's the goal that they have? Otherwise, you know, how they even get on your radar. And don't put so much energy into, you know, the flaws that they have because everybody's got them.

Yeah, it's like Nietzsche said, the mind is an impenetrable fortress. You only learn about yourself through friends and enemies. I always say these compliment me on a few things, like, I don't like that guy, but he's good at marketing. So I'm like, well, I can buy brands and turn around through marketing. You rarely learn from people who compliment you, you know. So that's why I never got bothered. I The amount of criticism I've got has truly allowed me to hone in on— yeah, they're like, I know a guy that was like, I don't like Ty, but that dude knows a lot about books. And I was like, well, thank you. I'll double down and read a little more books and see if I can leverage that into actual accomplishment. So, you know, at the end of the day, dude, well, I'm a big history fan. They're not one of us. Possibly that will be remembered in 100 years. In the scope of the blip, in 1,000 years, you won't bring up people. I was out on a date with a girl and I was like, uh, somehow I brought up like Elvis or something. She was like, who's that? And I was thinking, this is— she wasn't even that— she was in her 20s. I'm going, how quickly we forget the most popular man in the world. It hadn't even been, you know, 40 years, 50 years since the guy's dead. And I'm just like, at the end of the day, I hope it says he was a mad scientist. I hope it doesn't say he tried to say he was, you know, virtue man. Mark Twain said all men are like the moon, they got their dark side. Boy, imagine if you could take everybody's thoughts that are on your podcast and put them up on a projector. Shit, the people we steamed side. There will be stuff running through their mind, maybe they're too pussy to act on, that are the most demon-like, devilish things. So it's been good.

I gotta run, Ty. This is awesome. I appreciate you very much. We appreciate you. Have a good day.

I appreciate you guys, and we'll connect soon.

Thank you, man.