Tai Lopez: Why Most Entrepreneurs Suck... PLUS... How To Build A Huge Audience, Solve Problems, And Get Paid To Do What You Love

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Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. This is Ryan Daniel Moran. Today I'm going to be joined by Tai Lopez. Tai and I met about three and a half years ago and we did not like each other one bit. It took us about three days to navigate around each other's egos and each other's personalities in order to even have fun together. But once we let our egos out of the way, we were able to connect and learn from one another. And I wanted to reconnect with Tai because Ty now has about a billion views on YouTube. He has individual videos that have 100 million views. Plus he has an enormous rabid following. And we started our followings, our audience building processes. At the same time. He's gone into the Trumposphere and I have built a considerably smaller audience. So I wanted to find out what he's doing differently than me and, and I wanted to find out what his long term plan behind all of this audience building is and he opens up about what that looks like. In this interview, we talk about the different types of brands you can build, the four areas that you need to line up before you start a business. We go into Ty's long term plan behind why he does what he does, and we unpack the strategies that he used to to build his massive audience and have a host of viral videos. Please note that this interview contains plenty of colorful language. So if you're driving around with kids, this might not want to be the episode to listen to. Ty is a little bit rough around the edges. He comes across as a little bit egocentric. But if you look past that, I know in my life when I was able to look past that, I learned a heck of a lot from Ty, but while listening to him and I think you will really enjoy this chat with Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Hey, Ty. So the last time we hang out, we had about seven people in your Maserati. Both of us were not as didn't have the audiences we know now. And then I just about turn around and you have a Trump sized audience.

So.

So I know your normal talking points. What I'm really interested in diving into, Ty, is how so quickly you seem to have almost out of nowhere have built such a large audience and have such a rabid following so quickly. So would you walk us through those beginning stages before the Here are my garage video? Before you were, before you were a Grand Theft Auto character, before people were dressing up for you for Halloween, what did it look like to start putting your Persona out there and start growing that, because I know it didn't happen overnight, but it sure felt like it.

Yeah. Well, I think when you look at your brand, everybody listening, whether you want to or not, you have a brand first. I call it a Persona brand. You as a person, like Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook, and then you have the traditional brand, which is whatever, you're selling your product and you have to make a decision. And most people don't realize they do this kind of subconsciously or even without thinking. You have to make that decision. Which way are you going to go? Now? The ultimate is to blend both and the big companies. When you look at an Apple $700 billion market cap company, they have the Persona, which was obviously Steve Jobs, and then they have the product brands, the iPhone. And so the blending is where you hit the big time. What most entrepreneurs do, because they follow most other entrepreneurs, is they do the product brand. Now it has become more popular in the last years to do the Persona brand, obviously with things like this podcast here and you can have a YouTube channel and social media.

I've been an entrepreneur since I was 19 and different stages of my life, you kind of make that decision that you're going to have a brand around the product. So most of the time. My first business started 19 was a cattle farm with Joel Salatman. That was obviously not a Persona business. You were selling the cows as commodity prices at the stockyard. So they don't care who's selling the cow, they just care how much the cow weighs those business. Commodity businesses are rarely brands built around a Persona. In the late, I would say around 2010, I was kind of bored. A little bit later, maybe 2012, that's probably when you came, I would say, because I was at that house too. Yeah, that was 2012.

That's when I met you, was in 2012?

Yeah, 2012, maybe 2013. So at that point, I'd kind of done the product brand and I was like.

I'll start focusing a little more on Persona brands. So I scoped it out. Usually when I do a new business, I'll scope it out for about 18 months. Peter Drucker.

Business professor, he liked that time frame. It's a realistic time frame, 18 months. So about 2012, 2013-14ish. I was scoping out how to go about the Persona brand. Then late 2013, early 2014 is when I really focused. That's when I did a tedx talk. A lot of that stuff. I've been asked to do before. But everything as you know, you're a smart guy, you have opportunity costs. So whenever you do one, something always is sacrificed like stock. Pick your poison. What poison do you want? Do you want the poison of nobody knowing who you are? Which makes it a little bit harder to sell your product, but you have the anonymity and it's a little bit. Sometimes the lifestyle is a little bit nicer or you want to get build a Persona brand. You're out there especially you put your face out there and enough people see you, you can get hate. You're going to get thought about. Most people can't handle that stuff. So most people. And that's why a lot of entrepreneurs are introverts. Believe it or not, most entrepreneurs. There's that book the power of quiet, the power of introvert. Bill Gates was an introvert. Zuckerberg an introvert. Jobs was an introvert. So in the entrepreneur world, you find a lot of people that want to stay there and live a good life and just be able to go to the grocery store and it's all normal. So I'm kind of a. I see my life as kind of a man scientist life. It's just been that way for whatever reason my whole life. So I just figured well continue the trend. And I just pushed the Persona and the same things that I know worked when I was just building product brand. The same thing pretty much works for Persona. It's a little different. There's probably like the old Pareto 80, 20, 80% of it's the same. 20% takes specialized skills to really do so. The long answer is it was a decision that I made around 2012, mapped it out about 18 months, then kind of launched it and here we are today.

You said something interesting in there that I'm curious to hear you elaborate on. You said that the buttons to push are often similar in a Persona brand as they are in a traditional brand. And what comes to mind is if you think of Dollar Shave Club for example, videos go viral. Companies put on the map. Similar, similar process with Poo Pourri. You know, you have these viral videos blow up these brands and it's a commodity item, but it blows up kind of through modern marketing. You've taken that same approach and you did it and you. And you took those levers and you pulled them on a Persona brand. So would you, would you talk a little bit about the process of. Of how that that audience build started to roll out and what lessons you took from the traditional branding while applying to A Persona brand.

Well, here's the thing. It's interesting. You bring up the Dollar Shave club. I was at Google invited me to speak at this thing recently, two months ago when I was there, and all the CMOs of all these big companies were there, and I sat next to the Dollar Shave club guy. Interesting to hear their story.

And I think that, yeah, they're kind of a hybrid, although they're more of a product brand. I would advise them. I think the future will be Persona product brands blended, like I thought.

Now the process. So the process is there's an old archaic business formula that I follow that I've kind of revived it. Harvard had it back in the 1960s, an old one. It's called brinscore.

And it's been interesting. I've been teaching. I got this little. It's not that little anymore, but I have this online business school thing, this accelerator. And I've been showing people if you do wren pretty much you can extrapolate it into any area you're trying to conquer, especially when it comes to marketing and branding. So V stands for value, R stands for rarity, I stands for inimitable, and N stands for non substitutable.

Anything you're trying to do, particularly around marketing, if it has a low score, I can predict you're going to waste your money and not only your marketing, but your product too, because your product, whatever you're selling, the best products sell themselves. An iPhone basically sells itself. You hand it to someone. Very few people when they get an iPhone, go, how much RAM is in there? I mean, a few computer geeks do, but the thing sells itself. The rin score is high. What's the value of an iPhone to the average consumer? How valuable is it on a 1 to 10 scale for you to have something with more computing power than.

A rocket ship had in the 1960s? The modern computer, this modern iPhone, is very valuable. So people really value it at probably a 9 or a 10 to have this powerful thing that fits sleepily in your hand. Next, R. Rare. How rare is what you're doing?

Not just the perception, but really, how rare is it? I'll come back to that in a second. Inimitable is a fancy word for how easy can you be copied? Let's say you're the first to market with an idea product. You got a new app or something. Being first doesn't mean shit if other people can just copy and come behind you. In fact, some of the most famous businesses and devices take the TiVo. The idea to be able to fast forward past commercials, the company that came up with that didn't make a penny on it because another company came right behind and really scooped up the idea and took it further. MySpace, Friendster. These are social networks that Friendster. MySpace capitalized a little bit but Facebook came behind. It wasn't very inimitable, it was easy to compete with. And then the last is non substitutable what already exists that people can just go, well I do like watching basketball, but I can just change the channel and I like football just as much. So you have to give yourself a 1 to 10 in all four of those. And when you are doing Persona branding or product branding or marketing or developing any product now I look long and hard with a very critical, non delusional eye. What's my RIN score here? If you get a 10, 10, 10, 10, you're going to be rich. Trust me. You're going to make an eight figure business your first year easy.

And if you score a 3 on all of them.

You'Re going to struggle to make six figures. You might struggle to even make five.

Figures and you'll be really busy and hate your life.

Yeah, I can pretty much predict things real quick what they're going to do other people that I see. And so when I looked at what I wanted to do, I made sure I injected, I go, what's the. My buddy was just here, spent the night the other day. He comes down every quarter trying to use his LA as his relaxation spot. He lives in Silicon Valley. His first business he ever built, he's doing a million bucks a day right now, a little under. He's making 2 to 300 million a year gross in his business. And his big thing. Whenever you talk about ideas, he's always cynical of ideas from entrepreneurs. He always goes, well, what's the value prop? And he'll always stop businesses right there. There's no value prop there like any app. People are like oh I got an app for this. No value prop. You know, value proposition is a Silicon Valley ish type word. So most people struggle at that first one through 10 there. I look at most entrepreneurs, I'm getting ready to launch a show that's kind of like Shark Tank. And.

I already have people born in ideas that they want me to invest in. I just look at most of them like man, the value. It's like underwater basket weaving. If you bring that product, how many people in the world? And I'll give you a real simple test. If nobody's ever said the phrase then don't launch the business. So here's what I mean. You decide you like underwater basket weaving. So you go, I'm going to create an ebook course called how to be Good at Underwater Basket Week. What you've got to do is ask yourself, has any human in the world ever woken up and said this phrase, I wish I knew underwater basket weaving. If you can't imagine Anyone out of 7.3 billion people, then you have a zero value problem. Now if you say, I've been lucky the last six months, I got to hang out with Elon Musk two or three times. The last time I was talking to him, we were talking about SpaceX and Tesla and stuff. And you imagine value prop. Has anybody ever said, man, I wish there was a car that didn't use so much gas. And the answer is yes. People say that every day. Every time they're pumping gas and it's four bucks a gallon, people go, oh. So the value prop. When Elon Musk decided to go after an electric car or hybrid ish type car company, the value prop was there. And most entrepreneurs, they're just done right there. And even businesses, if you're listening and I've made this mistake in launch businesses that don't have enough value proposition for people. And you just.

Alan Nation, my second mentor, said, ty, don't push on a string. What he meant is you lay a string on the ground and you push on one end, it doesn't move the other end. You have to pull it. It has to come to you. And with businesses, good businesses now I look for things that the value proposition is already there. Millions of people are already saying, oh I wish so my value proposition, I'm an investor in different businesses. But the one you're talking about, the one that's kind of more front facing and more people know about it, the value prop is I want to share everything I wish they had taught us at school. And that's a tremendous value prop. There's hundreds of millions of people who go through public school, age 1 to graduate high school and even into college who come out and go, I didn't learn anything. And then they I wish I knew how to invest in the stock market. I wish I knew how to. I wish I knew how to do some public speaking. I wish I knew Spanish. I wish I so my value prop or the business is a very strong one. And when you so I'm not, I don't necessarily have to be. People think I'm smart. I'm like, well, I don't know if I'm so smart, I just picked something that I would say, sell to the willing. Sell the willing. You know, it's funny, last night, I don't know if you. Are you on Snapchat?

I'm not. I'm an old 28 year old, apparently, that doesn't use Snapchat.

You got to get on Snapchat. You gotta be one of the bigger Snapchats out there. So I went to the Laker game yesterday and so I had courtside seats, but you know who to is. I don't know if you like football.

Yeah.

But Terrell, Terrell Owens, he went, me and, me and him, we've become friends. So we won a game and when Kobe was leaving, we kind of walked up and I'm like, yo, Kobe, can we come talk? And so Kobe waved us back. You got to get this amazing wave from Kobe Bryant. That's the only way to get back. It helps me up. Terrell Owens, too. So we went back there and Kobe, I did a little interview with him back in Walker, but he had to first do his treatment. He had to do his treatment, ice and all that after the game. So while I'm waiting, John Starks comes and I don't know if you know old school basketball from the Jazz.

Yeah. And he also played the Knicks. He was kind of the best defender against Michael Jordan. They had these epic.

And he was sweet in NBA Jam in 1996.

Was he?

Oh, yeah. Three points for days.

Oh, that's hilarious. But I, I was talking to him and he was saying, I said, john, man, what's the number one thing you learned from being with Michael Jordan? He said, do not wake the sleeping giant, meaning do not piss off Michael Jordan. And so what he was really saying is the way he played against Jordan and had some epic battles. Was he at a leverage point? He had one point. He knew he couldn't beat on raw strength. He couldn't beat Michael Jordan in raw strength. So he had to use his brain and go, my leverage point is xyz. In this case, it was, don't get in Michael Jordan's face after you score and go, this bitch. So then Michael Jordan going to score 80 on him. So when you're an entrepreneur, a lot of people are playing against Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan is the economy. It's the other. There's about 20 million entrepreneurs in America, roughly if you count small business owners. Most of them aren't very good, but a handful of them are very good. And whatever you want to do, there's competitors Some of those competitors are very smart and they're established.

If you study economics, established businesses, if you have no different value prop, you always lose because they already have momentum.

You got to be like John Starks playing against Michael Jordan. You got to have mental leverage point that allows you to compete. So the leverage point I'm suggesting people can try is having a very strong value proposition. So that, like I said, if, you know, millions of people wake up and go blank, blank, blank, and they say that phrase, then there's a strong value prop. The other day I had you ever heard of P90X?

Tony Horton?

Yeah, you know, the little workout program? So Tony, when Horton came over and we worked out together, he's a beast. He's like 60 and he's in such good shape, it's embarrassing. I thought I was in good shape. I'm not in good shape. He can do this, you know those little balls, little balance medicine type balls. He can take four balls. You can try this. Don't try this at home unless you're coordinated. Put four balls on the ground, put two of your feet on it, two of your hands in a push up position. You can do, I think 78 of them. It's hard to even do one while the balls are bouncing. But he sold 8 million copies of P90X and now Beachbody, that company that owns P90X, did about $900 million of revenue. Why? Simple. The value proposition is very strong. When people wake up in the morning, how many people say, I wish my body looked different, man. I wish I lost weight. I wish I was skinnier. So he's tapped into that. Beachbody, P90X, it solves the first. Now, we don't have time in the podcast to get through the whole thing, but it at least solves the first V. Just remember, if you're in the Brin score, If you're a 10 in V and you suck in RIN, you'll still lose. But I was just suggesting for this kind of intro to Bryn, if you go through your value prop, it's hard to get a 10. Hard as shit, man, to get a 10. That's what I do. I try to go, what the hell is the 10? I want to sell to the willing, man. What do people already want? What problems are already there? So many entrepreneurs are just inventing problems. I had a guy here for an app. Now I get all these people rolled through my house. Actually pretty interesting every day. There's some wackiness down here. He was just telling me as that and I was Thinking, nobody wants this. It's super cool. He spent a million bucks on it before he launched it, which is red flag number one. But I'm going, there's no one on the planet that if you announce this in a loud stadium.

I always imagine myself in a loud stadium. I'm at the Staples center, a whole 18,000 people. I get a microphone. I have time with a Lakers game. I walk up and I have one sentence to say or two sentences. And I call this, by the way, my accelerator. I teach this thing called the parking lot test. Say your idea in a crowded area. It could be a bar, it could be a house party. Then walk out. If nobody followed you to the parking lot when you're going to your car says, hey, is that for sale? You have no value. So for example, if I go to a stadium and I go, 18,000 people, I get my 12 minutes to talk and I say, listen. I built a program that will teach you everything you wish your parents and teachers had taught you growing up about health, wealth, love and happiness. I traveled to 51 countries, I got five mentors.

And now 100 mentors. And I wrote it all down in 67 steps. These are the 67 steps you need to make up for what they didn't teach you. And then I dropped the mic and walk out. Mark my words, people will follow me. I've tested it many, many, many, many, many times.

So ty, let me.

So it sounds like if I were to break down what I'm hearing. You say your model is you kind of take a hybrid approach between the two brands where you have a Persona that's very front facing. And as you talk about this, you invest in the best deals that come your way that meet your criteria according to Vrin score. And you talk about a lot of this both because you create a lot of value and it also brings you a certain amount of deal flow that you're going to invest, invest in. And that's kind of the billion dollar plan. Am I interpreting your long term plan correctly?

There's some somewhat. I mean, you know, look.

Lot of people try to figure out what I'm doing sometimes hard to predict myself. So it's hard to know exactly. But I will tell you this, you can. My friend has a PhD in something called multi objective optimization, which is how to juggle multiple goals at once. And I asked him, you know, he's smart guy with NASA and Berkeley and all that. I said, what'd you learn from having a PhD in goal setting and being able to juggle Multiple goals. He goes, ty, it's all bullshit. That's what I learned. You can't do it. You can't juggle multiple goals. One thing that I'm a little different than entrepreneur world out there, the podcast world and stuff. To me, entrepreneur is only a means to an end. It's not my goal. Now. I am kind of an entrepreneur just by my constitution. I've always. I think some people are a little more entrepreneurial, but you got to pick one goal and for some people it's money. For some people, this and mine is pretty easy. I can tell you one little sentence here. Mine is heaven on earth, less hell on earth. I'm not a spiritual expert, so I'll leave all the spiritual experts. What happens when they die? I don't know. I've never died. I never met someone who died, so I don't know what happens after. But I know a lot of people have hell on earth and a few people have heaven on earth. When I look at what I'm going to do, whether I'm going to invest in shark tank businesses and build a billion dollar company or I'm going to do what I'm doing now, it's always through that lens. People think I'm materialistic. Sometimes they're like, oh, this guy's got, you know, video. One of my videos on Lamborghini got total about 600 million views. Most watched videos. So there's that Persona of me. But you know, people forget I live with Amish for two and a half years. I live seven years with no indoor toilet. I don't really care. I'm more experiment, trying to find what I think brings me my version, what it feels like to be heaven on earth. So when it comes to the business I'm doing, it's pretty much this. I'll tell you my internal value prop to myself. Because everyone listening, you not only want to have a value proposition, you bring to the world because I say I call it the 5050 life.

A lot of people live too much for themselves and other people live too much for others. Some of you listening, you're always doing what's good for other people and you get taken advantage of yourself. That's a mistake. Some of you listening are too selfish. You're just, you know, wolf of Wall Street. Greed is good. What I found is 50. 50 is a good formula. It's just even, it's fair. So I live 50% of my life for myself and 50% of my life for something bigger than me. For something bigger than me. It's kind of what I'm doing now and stuff. And when you trip, when I try to guess what I'm going to do in a year, I hope it'll stay on that formula. But part of that formula is selfish. 50% is for me. And you hope that the fact that I have Ferraris and Lamborghinis and I know they burn a lot of gaps and they're kind of selfish. I hope the other stuff I'm doing offsets it. And if you become too unselfish, you'll lose motivation. Mark my words. There's only one way to beat procrastination. You can beat procrastination by math. Motivation. That's a whole other thing. I talk about the forums, but in summary, I put everything through the lens I want to get when it comes to business, I want to get paid to do shit I would do anyway. Like, yesterday on Friday, I went and sat next to Kobe on the bench during the week. See, I would do that anyway. Like, if there was no money in it, I would do it. Now. I happened to be up on Facebook while I was doing. I bought my Facebook Live and I Snapchatted about it. And it translates into a branding campaign to make money. And also, I probably have more people reading books in the ghetto than anyone has ever had in the history of planet Earth. In fact, I'm short by a factor of 1000. And if it takes me sitting on the bench next to Kobe and then I Snapchat that and put that on social media and people go, oh, my God, what did you do? To go from sleeping on the couch to that? And I say, well, you got to have knowledge, you got to read, you got to become a lifelong learning machine. And I would do that anyway. So it passes the 50, 50. That's where I'm at now. You know, I'm not a Tim Ferriss, I'm not a Tony Robbins. I'm not. And I like those guys. I respect many people that I respect most. People that are at the top of anything. Maybe not Pablo Escobar, he was on the top. But, you know, there's three things you can learn from Pablo Escobar bar, not the ethics of it. But I'm not. I'm not an entrepreneur coach, man. I looked at that and it doesn't bring me heaven on earth. I'm more of a lifestyle dude, you know, so I'm more about, I want to look cool life and a little bit of a mad scientist life, a little bit of a fun life. And then if Other people want to peek in and take what's good. You know, some of what I do, applicable, take the gold. Be a gold miner, man. Just one nugget. That's what I do. When I read a book, they're like, how do you read a book a day? I'm like, easy, man. Just look for the nugget. Most books don't have many nuggets. There's not many books full of a vein of gold with, you know, billions of dollars of value. But if I can offer one gold nugget in my lifestyle that's good, then it passes the 50, 50 test. I'm doing what I want. Yes. It's not just selfishly all about me. There's rabbi Hillel in 1300. He said, if I only love. He said, if I don't love me, who will? But if I only love me, what am I? He was saying, if you don't take care of yourself, if you don't make money, who's going to pay your bills? Nobody. But if you only live to grow your own life and your own family, then what are you? You're missing out on human experience. Humans are social. We're like honeybee man. We're part of a hive. And so I try to be both. I don't always do it right, but that's the answer. If you're asking what I'll be doing in a year, there'll be some experiment. I hope that gets me closer to that 50, 50 goal.

Ty, walk me behind the scenes. And the thought process behind that famous video that has hundreds of millions of views, because that really. I mean, I remember a few years ago being on the phone with you a couple of times, and neither one of us had much of an audience. I think we both started building our audience at the same time. Yours is about a thousand times the size of mine. Tell me about that process of really blowing up the audience from nothing. Because you didn't have one four years ago. Now you have videos that have hundreds of millions of views. Was it because it was kind of controversial and because there were a bunch of parodies that. That shot up? Was it because of the amount of money you spent advertising? What was the secret sauce behind the audience that rallied behind you seemingly so quickly?

Well.

So all good business tricks, secrets are like soup. You know, they got a lot of ingredients to them. You can't just put salt or chicken in chicken noodle soup. You need like 10 ingredients when it comes to making video like that one.

You know, now they study a lot of Things. It's funny, like, I think a lot of Ivy League schools are studying that video because why did it work? You know? And there's something called the 25 cognitive biases, which is something I'm a student of. I kind of pioneered it a little bit. Although Charlie Munger and Chow Dini and some of these people were the early advocates for understanding the 25 cognitive biases, I think I've taken it a little further now, made it more mainstream. When you understand the 25 cognitive biases and how you decide stuff, your marketing becomes very, very, very tough. In fact, you almost have to be careful not to manipulate. So a lot of times now in my marketing, I have to make sure most marketing people are trying to like, how do you make this catchy? Mine a lot of times is like, how do I make this less catchy? Because. And it's not because I'm smart. I don't mean that in an arrogant way. I'm just telling you it's so powerful, these cognitive biases and what the cognitive biases are. We don't have time to do all, but I'll give you a little preview. And there's no real book that explains Charlie Munger's. Poor Charlie Dominac explains some of them. But.

There'S things like conscience, fairness and senescence bias, association availability, social proof, reciprocity, Pavlovian research, response, liking, disliking, reward, pain, all these. And then there's something called the lollapalpalooza effect. So if you bring multiple cognitive biases to bear, it's almost impossible for a human to resist. You can think of it this way. This is an analogy. Warren Buffett and Charlie Muller say, if you go to an auction, you almost always lose. Why? Well, number one, and you send a little audience there, and there's the person auctioneering it. In fact, I've got a funny story about this. I'll tell you in a second. This cracks me up. This illustrates how genius Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are.

You go there, you sit in a chair. Well, first of all, there's authority because the auctioneer stands up on stage, so stages automatically for authority. So you're already a little bit being checkmated by the auctioneer. If he was sitting next to you, it wouldn't be such a bias on you. The second thing is they create urgency because they say, going once, going twice, going three times, all of a sudden, even something you don't even want, you're like, oh my God, I might lose it. Number three, they have social proof. You always go, and there's other people bidding against you. So they're like, oh, man, Other people like this. I should like it. Then you have a bias. And there's. But the other bias is reward bias. Usually you go to an auction for something you want to buy. So they're auctioning an auction antique or a piece of art. You're there because you like art. So there's reward bias, pain bias. When you don't bid correctly and someone else gets it, you're like, oh, this is painful. I lost. Anyway, there's probably about 8 to 10 of the 25 biases, which creates the Lollapalooza effect. So Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, instead of them saying, we're the smartest investors in the world, we can go to every auction. We'll be able to overcome this and make good choices. They go, hell, no. We don't ever step foot in an auction. You always lose. Even at that genius level that they have building 300 billion dollar company. So the other day, this is the funniest illustration of this that I saw firsthand. I went to this, okay, Rihanna had a dinner. So I go to this thing. It's crazy. I got to talk to Rihanna, very beautiful in person. And this auctioneer gets up, and Kevin Hart, the comedian, and this auctioneer, this really cool. He was like, the best auctioneer I've ever seen. He raised about 6 million bucks for charity then. But he auctioned off one of Rihanna's dresses. This is like a major dress. I'm talking a dress with like, a flowing gown kind of thing, you know, like almost like on a wedding with a train. So this two people are bidding on this dress. Like, it ended up going to this one dude for 47,000. 47 or $57,000. Okay? Kevin Hart gets up there and he goes, what are you doing, man? I know you and this guy, I won't say what, but he's the CEO of one of the major studios, like Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, okay? He goes, you're not married. You don't have a girlfriend, and you're gay, and you bought a dress. And Kevin Hart got up there and just roasted him, laughing. And you could see the guy's face was like, why did I just buy that? Like, the guy got the cognitive biases, tricked him. He's a dude. He's never going to wear it. He's gay, so he doesn't have a girlfriend. So this guy just wasted. I mean, it was for charity. But the point being, when you do your marketing. If you can create something that's so compelling, every once in a while people are going to buy it and be like, I'm not even sure why I just bought that. And that's when you know you're marketing it well. So when I made that video here in my garage or any of these videos that I've done, that I did about 450. You really don't want to look at views, by the way, on YouTube. It's all about minutes watched. People don't realize that you could have a million views, but they only watch one second. But I have one of the more most viewed channels because I did almost half a billion minutes viewed. So that's what you want. By the way, your metrics, when you have a YouTube channel, go into your YouTube store, YouTube analytics, go past the views and look at minutes played. I think I've done, I think now I just passed 500 million minutes. And those videos work because I'm always short to add in cognitive biases. And don't get me wrong, it's not a trick. You don't want to sell junk.

Don't try to polish a turd. That's what Charlie Munger said. So if you have a turd and then your business has no value, no brin score. But you just say I'm going to do great marketing, it won't really work for long. You'll just spend a crapload of money. You'll get a lot of people, come to your store, come to your website, but then when the value is not there, they'll walk away. So you got to have the marketing. But a lot of entrepreneurs have great. I see people with great value propositions, good businesses and I'm like, your marketing ain't going to net. I mean I can tell you one second now, if a marketing campaign has a chance, I can't always pick the winner, but I can sure as hell pick the losers. And almost everything you see out of 20 million entrepreneurs in America.

Most of them underperform than if they had a regular employee job. The average entrepreneur makes less than the average employee. So marketing is bad, man. I mean good God, why tv? Look at car commercials. Who the hell came up with those boring ass commercials? It's just like geez. Then you see that young kid from Dollar Shave Club, he was an actor here, he makes one commercial, it gets 20 million views. Now it's a billion dollar company in two years.

So TY company would it be, would it be fair to say that your strategy overall for growing that audience has been been to craft your messages or craft the stuff that you put out there based around cognitive biases and then looking at the ones that win and pushing them really hard in order to develop the follower base that then comes back into the fold that's going to drive everything else moving forward. Would that be a fair analysis of how your audience stacked on top of one another?

That's certainly a big part of it. I mean there's, like I said, there's always, there's lots of tricks but that is a good.

50 mile high view of what I'm doing and you want to have remember. And one thing I'll add for people watching because I think I.

Well you're telling about your audience. There's two this like I said, is Persona brands and regular product brands. There are also two types of entrepreneurial adventures. There's what I call niche entrepreneurs and then there's what I call mainstream. And I've done both. At this point in the game, I'm much more mainstream. So I make different decisions. For those of you listening, especially if you've never built an eight figure business or whatever.

You should start with niche because niche you don't have to be as good honestly at these cognitive biases. For example, if you strike out a niche Star wars or something, there's a big enough a rabid fan base. Even if you have crappy marketing, if you have value to your product, they're going to buy when you have to. Now I've done different kind of businesses. Now I'm focused on things. Can this make 100 million bucks or a billion dollars? If it can't, I don't do it anymore. But when I was starting out in my first business, I made 12 grand profit in one year when I was 19. And you do that with niche. So if you're listening and you want to do and you're in the niche business because I always say people go, how do you become. What's the secret to becoming a legend like Kobe Bryant? Well, I say first, if you're below average, just try to become average. I know this goes against what you hear, but it's so logical, it's irrefutable.

If you're below average entrepreneur, just become an average entrepreneur for a little while. Once you become an average entrepreneur, try to become above average. Once you're above average, try to become great. Once you're great, then you try to become a legend. And it has to go in that order. Alan Nation used to tell me it's better to creep forward than to try to leap forward, most of which are on a leap forward with your marketing. If your marketing is below average, try to figure out an average campaign. I know this goes against everything here, but trust me, don't spend a billion dollars on an average campaign. But it's easier on your brain to make incremental change. What I'm talking about, some of this stuff is to try to make a legendary campaign. And the good news is you can make a great living.

For yourself and your family without making a legendary marketing campaign. You don't have to be the dollar Shave Club, instant hit, viral hit. You don't have to do my Lamborghini one. What you got to do is take some of these principles. If you just take 10% of what I've talked about to your earnings growth. You don't need a 10 value prop. You don't need a Elon Musk Tesla value prop to start. But make sure whatever you do don't have a zero. Don't be like this guy, like, dude, I got an underwater basket wheezing app. I'm like, nobody wants that in the world, man. Save the money, bro. This guy made an app. What was it?

It's amazing how people come up, you know, why people, you know, I come up with a bad idea. I'll tell you why. Wait, what was I just gonna say?

You are gonna tell us the reason why people come up with bad ideas as entrepreneurs.

The reason is because people are in love with them, dude. Narcissism. If I want to know who's narcissistic, it's not outward humility. And so the reason entrepreneurs suck, most of them is because they're very, very, very, very self centered. And so they see the world and they're like, I want to learn underwater basket weaving. No, you got to come in and you got to go, what's real problem that real people are dealing with every single day? And you solve those. And when you do that, you'd be amazed what will happen to your bank account. It will change. Maybe not overnight, but it will.

You made a really interesting point in there that I think is really true about how most people try to make this leap from I'm just going to go be great of going from starting from nothing to trying to be great rather than stacking some success on top of one another. And you can make a perfectly good living being an average entrepreneur or a better average than entrepreneur, but you have to be one of those before you can be a great entrepreneur, before you can be the best out There. And I've never thought of it like that, but I have noticed that a lot of entrepreneurs try to skip the middle and as a result they either burn out or they strike out because they haven't actually developed the foundation that they need in order to that greatness level. That's how I interpreted that point that you made.

I agree. I always say when I when I meet somebody and they're like, I'm really impatient. Don't ever say that to me. Because saying you're impatient or saying you're stubborn is like saying you're bad breath. You have bad breath. You would never walk around and tell a lot of people, oh, I'm that dude with bad breath. Hell no. You would fix that shit the second someone told you. So if you pride yourself on your stubbornness and your impatience.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Use an old hip hop term. I like people are like, I used to be impatient, then I fixed it just like I fixed bad breath. Nobody wants to be around inpatient. Impatience equals poverty. I'm actually I launched a T shirt line motivational clothing, apparel Life. This launched our beta launch couple months ago. Now we're going some full and I'm making a shirt says impatience equals poverty and so does stubbornness. Those two. So if you want a quick path and I'll tell you that in the cognitive biases, I'll share the cognitive biases because one of the cognitive biases pain. I'll show people the pain. The stuff that I'm talking about, it's not my opinion. This is the stuff. I'm more of an accumulator. I'm a hoarder people much greater than I ideas. And if you don't listen to these.

Joel Towson used to tell me on a farm ty, Mother Nature lasts last and mother nature is the most cruel and ruthless teacher you'll ever meet. She does it this way. She goes, you wasted a decade of your life. You waste the. You wasted the prime of your life. If you're one of those people who doesn't mind looking back and go, I wasted 10 years. Then ignore what I'm talking about. I'm telling you, I've tested that.

Regret is a bitch. Regret causes schizophrenia, mental disorders. The nasty thing. Listen to smart people, man. That's pretty much what my life is. I talk about going to meet Kobe Bryant, but I'm more interested, I meet Kobe Bryant, I'm talking basketball. Toby, you know, tell me mentors. He said, the more the better. I tell people that all the time. Now I'm like, okay, confirmed. I don't want to learn by mistakes. And Warren Buffett says the best way. He says you only learn by mistakes, but they don't have to be yours. This is the number one thing I wish they would taught me in school. You always hear all this about, oh, you learn through trial and error. Well, there's a better book by Richard Dawkins called the Selfish Gene. He says replication machines. He's talking about living organisms.

That learn through simulation always beat ones that learn through trial and error. People who have to eat poisonous berries and die never learn as fast as the person who watches someone else eat poisonous berries and diet die. You watch other people eat the poison, you don't eat them yourself, you know, so that's my advice. That's a good subway.

Don't. Don't eat poison berries.

Watch other people eat the poison and then learn what not to eat yourself. This is like greatest what I wish they taught me in school. The world full of a lot of nonsense. You'll learn that, man. As an entrepreneur, people, people are delusional. But there's a lot of good people out there. And you adapt your life. You can find the good ones. You know, you don't need that many. You can't have a million ways. So this secret, good one.

The secret to entrepreneurial success is to watch other people die from eating poison berries.

Direct quote from the secret is simulation. Simulation. That. That's what the Richard you can tell. You can bring that up with Richard Dawkins, but that's his. I have on my website, I have what I think are the top 100 books. So philopez.com books it's a free page, so I'm not pushing a product and I have Richard Dawkins books listed there in the top 10, I think. So it's a good little book.

Tai Lopez, thanks for hanging out with us on Freedom Fast lane. Keep doing what you're doing. Congratulations on what you've accomplished. Keeping. Keep on changing the world, buddy. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

One of the things that I have learned about success is that it comes really quickly when things are lined up properly, when you get your messaging, when you get your product, and when you are prepared for the success that you want to build. When all those things are in place, success comes really quickly. It's almost like building a full fire. If you build up the foundation right, and then you might add in a little bit of fire starter and you throw in the match, the thing can just explode. But what most people are looking for is they're just looking for the match. They're just looking for the kindling or they're looking for the fire starter. And that's not enough to build a really roaring fire. What I kind of learned from Ty has been all those foundational pieces. Where are the logs? Where is the foundation pieces that need to be in place? Because when they're in place, success happens really quickly. Would love to hear your thoughts over on the show notes@freedomfastlane.com and if you're not subscribed to the show, let's make this official. Head on over to freedomfastlane.com iTunes hit subscribe so you won't miss any of the goodness shared here at Freedom Fast Lane. As always, thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane. I believe that entrepreneurs hold the key to solving all the world's problems. And I believe the formula for freedom is three parts. To start a business, to invest the profits and to acquire cash producing assets over the long term. That's how you achieve long term freedom. And entrepreneurs, when they are free, can go and solve the world's problems. And that is how we will create the type of progress that we all want to see in the world. So as an entrepreneur, I thank you for being that change and as always, keep on changing the world. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fast Lane and I'll see you on the next show.