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

what's up everybody alright this episode is gonna be do we had ty lopez the guy who's sort of internet famous for being a marketer some people think he's a scam artist he basically built a 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 tay on and we had a conversation about three things first we we kinda pressed 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 is we talk about what he's doing now where he's buying out old brands like pier one and dress barn and taking them you know turning them from brick and mortar to e commerce of ventures i actually think it's 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 conversation wandered a little bit and at the end the very end if you can make it there is a long podcast but at the very end he asked us he's like what were your listeners think of this and we said well it's gonna be a mixed reaction some people are gonna be mad we even had you on the podcast some people are gonna love and they're gonna think it was interesting and a lot of people are gonna say oh you guys were too easy on them he didn't ask him about x and so he's he just told us he said alright what's the hardest hitting question you got asked me and he wanted us to press them and so we we pressed them a little bit on on some things and so i think you're gonna like it as a long podcast with ty lopez alright enjoy i'm here in my garage i got my lamb but 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 all we're respectful everyone we're we're definitely gonna like be as i i record on for you guys so that in case the the back of audio good we we don't hold back and it always comes from a a respectful place though so we try to be pretty straight shooters here so yeah and we're not journalists like you know i'm not like some researcher or journalists we're both founders we're both entrepreneurs and we just like talking to interesting people and you know today when we tweeted it out hey we got ty 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 text slash the silicon valley twitter which just kind of our audiences at least that's as my audience they don't like you and the 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 ty lopez ir roll i've seen the guy's ads isn't he kinda like one of those internet marketer dudes whatever i thought that would be the kind of the reaction what 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 i think 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 is this a normal day on twitter for you where you get this type of polarized i love them or a hate reaction no a lot of that silicone valley i'm popular i always say have a friend be from staten out and said tell popular in the streets i i actually kinda grew up a little bit ghetto i grew up in a mobile home and and things like that and so you know silicon valley a lot of vi signaling there's a lot of people sure that what they're doing is ethical and what i'm doing is in that's fine look you know at the end of the day people who actually get to know me right are always surprised one hundred percent of the time every single hate you know people because i think of it this way the 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 signal that that's not really what you're doing it i always say if somebody's wealthy fee 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 live with the amish for two and a half years they're truly non materialistic it's against our 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 wanna admit that they're more like me than they think and so not everybody that's vast general rationalization also number two a big misunderstanding for example people say tide sells get rich quick seats the biggest thing i ever sold is two different programs almost called the sixty seven steps who's literally sixty seven things that a mentor taught me an hour of piece i charged it a dollar each now it was mindset anybody who's ever been through that program i mean i i got at like the first video has about seventy five thousand positive comments out of about a hundred and fifty thousand people who went through so it's pretty good rate word 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 mentor is talking about how to think through life you know like the first principle the sixty seven steps is from charlie mu 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 un people meaning the mindset charlie mu 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 this person had an unfair advantage this person was just lucky so that was the first course and the second one was called mma social media marketing agency i told people you see all kinds of people out there like gary b they have a social media marketing agency that does a hundred million in revenue and i showed every day ordinary married people how to start their own agency forty thousand people went through that program was a four month certification taught by myself and you know twenty people who own profitable agencies the testimony and success rate that i would put it against any university anyone i i know a growth going to nyu bachelor degree three years in and i said to her we were talking about the interested get a digital marketing degree i don't know i'm i just memorized stuff i have no idea when learning i said well how much you paying for this it was a thirty thousand thirty thousand i said wow thirty thousand and four years of your life it's a lot of money in time she said no that's annually so hundred and twenty thousand dollars there's a lot of money and much more close to a scam than a program that taught you from legitimate agency owners and anyhow know cost five hundred bucks or something like that so i think just did that course cost when it first came out when we had it it was always under a thousand bucks there was a there were we've done promos where it was like four ninety seven and was between four ninety seven not ninety seven one time payment no recurring nothing like that so i think what happens is silicon valley types they see os which is like okay at 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 because anyway there ain't nobody on the top of the forbes list i know five of the top forbes less people personally they all love money love money they don't like to say hey because they realize there's a power and vi signaling which makes you less of a target for the world that they love money forbes from jd d rockefeller to jeff bezos people who make money are ruthless average person makes fifty to eighty thousand dollars a year silicon valley is above average is full of ruthless people but like i said maybe there's smarter than me maybe i should her signal i can never do it you know i got my first nice car first exotic car in two thousand six now i didn't put a car on social media until two thousand fourteen so i had ferrari maserati eight years before so one social media out bit i'm like i'm just gonna show my life i was already living in the hollywood hills from two thousand nine didn't post that on social media and when i posted that at twenty it really in like twenty fifteen it really like a evo of visceral thing like how dare this guy like these things but i 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 i did well i can tell you all my videos weren't at lamborghini and girls in 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 i was in i moved out to of california two years ago where are you now miami miami miami london puerto rico new york now i kinda 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 doctor david bus an evolutionary psychology professor one i'm mentors who told me tit men have always been bothered by cons status a leather it's a class day in australia they call it tall poppy in sweden they call it y in scandinavia you're not supposed to show yet sweden has the most billionaires per capita let me ask a quick question but tie what year were you born everybody's trying to figure out my age i've left that as a i've left that as a controversy for a long time just to be because i'm like it's good it's good i i know your people i have no idea i don't know what 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 like owning farms something 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 you've experienced a whole lot for someone who doesn't look very old i'm not young and i'm not old and you know i've been an adventure secret for my whole life there's like three things that have been true from my whole life one i like cars from two years old my grandma just died sadly she was a hundred and two and i was like grandma you a lot of people talking about my i'm like did i always was like cars because i was like as long as i remember i was love a car was like yeah you always love car number two i love travel and number three 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 prison my model 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 seven hundred fifty acres in shen valley all an organic farm i live with joel sal for two years that i went who's kind the pioneer here of like grass fed beef and pastor chicken pastor raised chicken i live with the amish for two years actually longer and i still have one of my main farms that i post on my social media is in the middle of the amish community the amish actually run my form 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 buy like adventure you know so it makes me more controversial people wanna a pigeon hole you they wanna be like that's the lamb guy i'm like what about the farm was 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 counter points like for example hey look i sold a sixty seven dollar 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 university the university system where people walk out with fifty thousand a hundred thousand dollars of debt and why don't why name 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 oh you know rather than being on the defensive like you know something that somebody says you so say you know what that's a fair criticism there's always two sides of store everything people say has an element i mean some things are blatantly wrong like people say i rented a house for a day or a car those are factual incorrect but to the main points certainly everybody has a point and i see them you know but in fact like going back to charlie among or warm up but you should not hate you know i believe in their concept of you should never hold a belief unless you can argue both sides better than the other side so i think i could argue that go side against me which is you know look high if you show a lamborghini to kids or teenager or adults some of them actually think that's the end game that you have and 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 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 oh drives a great marketer and he is manipulative and i see the angle because all good marketing manipulative for example apple which i get the biggest kick out of san francisco you know really a esteem steve jobs and apple largest company in history it makes great products but it's certainly well i mean the largest corporation history that was built with blood in tears like an empire it's built with child labor in asia to that and they charged a thousand two thousand dollar for a phone that cost them three hundred dollars 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 named somebody zuckerberg ruthless in the mono way let's take somebody that's not so well known an everyday ordinary person just driving their car to a nine to five jaw you know living the i put their kids into college drinking coca cola giving their six 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 but i don't believe that i do not and i'll tell you again ethics is a hard one some people think joe biden unethical some people love them the people they donald trump is great it's betty don't and same clinton obama and 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 a inner reflection of them the greed people in the world are those that often say well tell 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 what do you think it's a teenager to read a business book so it telling them to read it put it in front of them as homework or saying the truth hey guys charlie mon warren buffett peter dr me reading these books took a orc kid born to a single mom and they are closet not cor those books like warren buffett says the more you learn the more you earn i show a lamborghini for that and that pisses off some snowflakes or signaling got silicon valley i i it doesn't even bother alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website i actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this three d sensor and what it does is they give you weights it's like a hundred and fifteen pounds in weights and it's for strength training so what it is is it measures your body and it sees how 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fit is the url and tempo hustle one word you'll get a hundred dollars off so check it out i use it if you look me up on twitter so you'll see i'm always filming videos where i'm talking to that company say i'm trying to crush their employees on the leader board because i actually love this thing and i and i use it all the time so check it out number two you know i have businesses farmers cart now and a business doing organic food to the masses i think that's not so bad of a business so when have mentor box has sixty thousand members paying members i've built a business with my partner alex and what do we do we do we put books and books 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 drop or mon 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 farming entirely i'm growing non genetically engineered corn and soybeans right now on my form in stan virginia with yields that are approaching genetically engineered corn and they say you have to use genetic engineering herbicides roundup up in order to feed the world and we're dis proving it piece by piece i think that's important i do think there's entrepreneurs that 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 buy which ethan think elon musk is always virtuous you know right just let's talk about you're on one man yeah i that sw it i got under your skin a little and which one there was a lot that we're talking about yeah you know what i mean my thing well i wanna come back to that i wanna talk about 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 i don't really wanna i'm adventure man i mean i own five major american brands and when i say major american brands the smallest of it did five hundred million of revenue the now these are before i bought them i'm just saying the scope of how many customers these businesses have that i'm acquiring pier one last year one point five billion in revenue too many stores too many leases got them in trouble but tremendous amount of cash flow below huge customer base in eight figure significant eight figure customer base i pier one sure so let let me ask you so we we talked a little bit about this on the podcast and we said hey i think this guy alex mayer and ty lopez they've created this thing called retail as rev what is it retail something e commerce ventures retail commerce ventures and what they're doing is they're buying up well known but kinda outdated business model so brands like pier one or dress barn and it seems like you're not buying the company but you're buying you know the the rights to do e ecommerce so what are you actually buying you're not buying you we get the whole thing we just don't assume i try to buy the whole thing i started buying my butt small business back like twenty twelve try to buy american apparel all of these in general if you're buying the distressed you wanna buy the intellectual pop property you don't wanna do asset purchase i you don't wanna do entity purchase you wanna do asset purchase so in effect you're getting the whole thing i can do i can recreate you on the five hundred retail stores of pier one i could do no we did not assume leases hell no you that's why they went broke so i think right now in fact i have a real estate guide 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 out of the way you gotta to adapt so we can put pier one back to precisely what it used to be we own the whole thing all the rights all the trademark the whole getting cabo brutal but most likely we'll switch it to an eighty twenty model eighty percent being e comm twenty percent being stored and so also educate on that i built big organizations people think i'm not a good business man i love it you know it's funny of my business partner has much more credentials than me doctor alex mayer he's he's just exited last july for three hundred million dollar exit for business he c founded zeus it was the second largest dating network in the world after a match group in tinder he has phd and we became friends many years ago because the same kind of thing at first he thought i was this party guy when he got to know me and i was like wait a second this guy's sharp and not to toot my horn but what i was saying because i hear the surprise in your voice i if i am running on in much haters it's just hard hard it's just hard that find people to run shit that's not you i'm just like 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 be doing it but we have you know so i have pier one linen and things i bought that was sold apollo in two thousand six for one point three billion cash i own linen and things now is a massive that its peak was doing two point seven 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 collectible company it was the largest direct marketing company in the world bill you bought franklin mint yeah i franklin google title lopez franklin i owe i know the original founders of that or the founders of wonderful brand right that wasn't the founder but that was they owned it the res owned it for many years it was founded by a guy who started the home shopping network i forget his name he started in the believe the sixties so peter so tyler let me ask you a real great question you're i'm talking about pier one they did over a billion dollars in revenue explain to a listener who's like wait how are you buying this business for thirty one million so what is the hair on the business why is a business that's a well known brand that has all this data that has this ip that has this brand that did a billion dollars in revenue last year why is it selling for thirty one million dollars you had a time to buy stuff takes business skill to do the things that we're doing and some of its luck and some of its 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 it's a skilled game that's not a accordance answer right like just to that answer though well got this per if you're talking about pier one specifically that one came into a chapter eleven scenario pre covid i was involved in a pre covid post covid it collapse the auction disappeared the bankruptcy court in delaware no longer existed all other bidder disappeared they begin to do a liquidation there was plenty of inventory but the liquid was gordon brothers was doing well i came into the banker guggenheim i don't know if you know guggenheim whatever eight billion dollars fund bank in new york i negotiated way down from the original price got it all the way down was declared became the stocking horse bidder negotiated a crafty apa asset purchase agreement using a lot i mean you have to have the right lawyers you have to know how to structure it in your head i know how to do that i'm the deal maker alex does other stuff i'm the deal maker he's done more on the capital side raising capital when we we use our own money and investors so what i'm telling you is a it's tar that one was public but i bought franklin mint and linen and things directly off market convinced a publicly traded company to sell it to me so when i say it takes scale i'm serious and go out and try it i've got other deals going right now that's what i sometimes since you say i'm defensive i'll be defensive for this i'll use this podcast as a defensive talk because i rarely am defensive so i'm like i should be more definitive i was actually talking my right hand man today i was like i think i should be more defensive i was too i never cared that much but part war when strong appear weak i never thought i never bothered me that silicon and valley valley people thought i was an uni unintelligible hugs it's great in fact the problem that's beginning to sale me as we speak talking to a couple investment bankers people are pouring in to these deals because they're like wait a second i watch ty lopez some people like me and some people don't and they wanna get in the deal so i wish i could appear more weak i probably shouldn't be on this podcast i should probably be like yeah it's just luck and you just kinda go there and you'd win an auction against sick more partners a fifteen billion dollar fund it's like super easy guys just go for it man i'm just tied ty lopez could do it you can do it you guys are brilliant silicon valley people i'm a call drop mean i don't know right so you 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 are you like i'm gonna throw i mean i have no idea like are you saying you're you're gonna throw twenty million of your own money at these projects did you have like a hundred million safe i have no idea well i'll tell you i'll tell you this my lawyers always like don't say one time i said something about network that was on jake paul's podcast so more controversial they no paul not logan paul yeah and i i said something about my net worth and my lawyers afterwards are like don't talk about that it just cause the trouble but i will say this we use me and alex use our own money and in twenty fifteen i saw the writing on the wall i said i'm gonna build in the accredited investor base i started using twenty thirteen obama changed a law that you can generally solicit for a credit investor i was the first guy to use social media first people while was doing those youtube ads i was also running investor ads i got my first investors in twenty fifteen literally within a months 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 two and twenty 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 raised in in silicon valley look at the founders of lyft these dudes have sub four percent 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 alec but if you're raising a investor based then you're not gonna own a hundred percent right that's the definition if if an investment coming we use debt warrants no we use debt warrants so these are not equity investors we have just occasionally we do that we'll do some equity kicker no we have do we i like debt better and then we'll either ref refine the debt or will let people convert will convert into equity at higher valuations i can tell you this like a fund to buy and pier one those fund managers are gonna work they're gonna have twenty percent on the they're carry i told alex fuck that i don't like the first rule if you really wanna build something and it's not just about being greedy wealthy if you look at companies that do well the founders maintain a large percentage of the business so they stay motivated bill gates own about sixty five percent of microsoft if you look at zuckerberg if you look at jeff bezos if you look at elon musk even you gotta 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 twenty fifteen i would just do a little bit i'd be like hey do a hundred thousand dollar note with me i wanna build a relationship with you so that when bigger deals come twenty sixteen i didn't see deals i saw over overpriced deals twenty fifteen i tried to buy american apparel it's sold for too high of a price at that point it was by eighty two million gil dan bought it then barnes and noble came up five hundred million cash and i thought mentor box the company me and alex built was already doing more e comm book related revenue than all of barnes and noble we have built it in eighteen months so i said to alex we should buy barnes and noble it's too high you have to buy you know sometimes people are like time memorize this formula what's this i'll tell you this by sell hi high will make you rich my friend and it's a very un strategy that few people fall most of silicon valley is predicated on the greater fool i'm gonna exit to someone stupid than me well the businesses were buying they have real value pier one is a monster brand you're talking thirty forty million americans have bought there that's one tenth of the largest gdp country in the world so going back to original question i could just vi virtue signal and say i'm not that smart it's just luck and you just shop 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 five years i got i had practiced my my craft a little bit you know and there's luck all of life is luck we're lucky to be healthy in america and could be born in north korea and then you don't have a chance how big is the fun now how don't have a fund i don't like fun we may form a fund to do land acquisitions farmland two and twenty for anybody listen who actually admits that they like money i'll tell you this if you ever stare at the forbes list it will revolutionize your life the nobody makes money on the top of the forbes list from real estate number one the first american that shows up on the forbes list from real estate number one hundred and two number are a hundred and two in fact the most correlated activity with building well is brand acquisition or brand founding but brand acquisitions massive if you look at z k has really been an acquire and without instagram and he would been whatsapp facebook would be worth a third at best and so fund managers are all on the bottom if you wanna make money don't fucking start a fund name one guy that's mid to high forbes list from a fund you don't have enough equity even larry fit black cross eight billion dollar fund these guys are sub ten billion and that's great let me like i said this is for the part of you of your podcast that doesn't virtue signal and would admit that they care about wealth creation so i'm a buffet guy man i've been going to berkshire hathaway meetings for many many years i've actually my mentor when i was a teenager manager nineteen years old he's the one who got me on berkshire i've been following berkshire since i was a teen and no no fund a holding company man it's so anti i love warren buffett anti silicone valley he does up and by the way he smoked the returns of all the silicon valley with less risk risk adjusted return and absolute returns at nineteen and half percent silicon valley is an underrated overrated place if you allocate enough capital i don't think he could say that when the you know sort of the most valuable companies in the world are all from silicon valley right technology companies are making for vast majority the if you look at the s and p five hundred right now s and p five hundred all the top five tech companies a fang companies essentially not really netflix but if you put microsoft in there they generated all of the returns in the past you know six six to eight months where they're like this and the other you know four hundred ninety five companies at s and p five hundred or 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 you know 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 way to look at capital allocated my friend if you allocated enough capital to raleigh north carolina you will produce people will move there jeff bezos is jeff bezos right now is the greatest capital allocated bezos is not silicon valley maybe by definition an knowledge geography but yeah i well is elon musk silicon valley is warren but look at the top of course he is how is elon what we're saying i separate that out i mean if you're gonna throw anything that's tech related and call that silicon valley then you i mean tesla tesla raised venture capital right and elon musk is you know he's from paypal he's from the paypal days right that's pure bread silicon valley but of course you know that that doesn't mean that's the only way to make money i just think it just like people would knock you for for making money in a different way that they don't sort of understand or that's not their playbook i think it would be not right let me ask you a question do it the other way either so let let me ask you a question what's the returns on sequoia and these vcs what's been the actual return for share for investors i'd have to look it up the top percentile of vcs like the sequoia do you have the numbers that's top of your head last i've seen is twelve point a half percent built warren buffett that's not that's not correct i i've understand that's i'm just understand you look google it did that it's not public there's quite a bit of info buffett done nineteen and a half percent from the sixties now you can say it's a different business model and buffett is not as important in silicon valley what i call silicon valley to clarify is would you consider soft bank silicon valley no i mean it's a it's a foreign company but it is a technology holding company yeah got me you know i is that we're not going by geography then well i look the there's a mindset there i think you should look at the number i think why they're example why does it have better own feeling but you should know what the returns are you're sure they're better than twelve percent well i i'm talking from i'm talking about from entrepreneurial perspective i'm not saying start of fund that's not my 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 do i mean that's a tough question man equalization and correlation is one that stump even the great 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 thirty years old so it's not gonna stack up against something that's a industry that's two hundred years old or wealth that's been compounding for for a hundred two hundred 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 that big brands you're buying big brands and you're bringing them online you're you're trying to take a old failed business model brick and mortar and you're doing gonna do e commerce that's internet that's technology that you may not be using venture capital to fund it but i think we're on the same page that hey the the area of opportunity right now one huge area of opportunity is the internet i 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 v inevitably become the institutions that are outdated and so as silicon valley it 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 the somewhat of a po z skiing to the reason that we workflow is because you can convince soft bank 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 be on 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 count to fund all this was it mentor box i mean you said you sold forty thousand courses that five hundred bucks a piece i mean that's twenty million dollars over a couple years is that had to be incredibly profitable but what has been your cash count was it mentor box you know i've always had multiple streams of income i actually learned that from the amish every amish guy like a farmer he milk some cows he he he does wood work he does carp tree on the weekend i don't know i like that because of 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 by first million and actually the way it's started before we start brainstorming i would just bring on interesting people and i would ask i start at the top you know how'd do 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 for your pink 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 do 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 a affiliate marketer and i did this other thing so for you what was your first million was it before everybody even knew you yeah for sure i mean i started my first business in two thousand one i went to work for ge capital g finance financial i didn't have a college degree i believe it or not i started on nine eleven i'll always remember the first day i started i went into the office and it they're like a plane has crashed it was literally september eleventh two thousand one and i got thrown in like a wealth management company it was through i i tell that store in sixty seven steps i wasn't homeless but i was sleeping on a couch in a mobile home with nothing i mean i had like no harm no no no bathroom i just shared a bathroom with other people and i would go to sleep on this couch and i remember what changed my life and started this question to my first million my mom who always like books said you should read this book by tony robbins another controversial person but blake and the giant within i don't remember everything but i remember one sentence when you succeed you party but when you fail you ponder and all greatness come from pondering and so i began to go wait a second okay i'm stuck on a couch i got nothing i had come from living with the amish i literally was milk cow by hand so i had nothing no i had given up my driver's license it was a great event greatest time in my life in hindsight but i'm back on this couch couldn't get a job because i didn't have a degree and my uncle said hey todd do you don't have any money you should go either sell cars or work in finance like sell insurance or selling investments so i was like like i don't wanna sell cars so i went in the yellow pages of that mobile home and i flip through and i saw the largest ad in raleigh north carolina and i called the guy i made an appointment with the secretary and i showed up and it was mike stain back and i walked in and i said hey you don't know me but if you teach me you must be successful you got this ad in this office i'd never met somebody who even made a hundred rand a year growing up i said if you teach me what you know i'll work for you for free and i remember got this big like tom ce mustache he turned around and he said i've been looking for somebody like you for twenty years said show up in the morning and i give you a job and he got me in with at that time ge was the largest company in the world and they had ge capital g financial so september eleventh i start from this job he put me in a little room with file cabinets and at that time i was making i had whatever less than fifty bucks in my bank account and this is gonna be a funny for people don't know this for i put a little bit but i couldn't get any customers i was super young in a business where the average guys fifty or sixty years old hey you wanna invest wealth with my like i couldn't do that so i was flipping through an ad google google was just starting it's two thousand one two thousand two and i see an ad of a picture of a guy laying on a couch on a chair in hawaii and he said i made twenty eight thousand dollars click here and i'll tell you how i did that laying on the beach in hawaii and i clicked it in there was guy named corey ru and he sold courses he died tragically i was wanted to think the guy he died in like two thousand eight in a car crash he had black all these nice cars like a portion stuff he died in san diego but i bought that course i remember it was like three hundred bucks so working for this mike staying back guy i got like my first paycheck was two hundred dollars i drove all the money that i bought that course and it came in a three ring binder to weeks later and again i don't remember much of it but it said there's this new thing out called google adwords use it for lead generation and i'll show you how to make a single landing page so i was one the first people to ever make i have bought a domain name the simplest thing for me to sell in before i got into investments which i eventually got into was life insurance so i made a website life insurance twelve secrets to buy life insurance something like that and all of a sudden google adwords i was buying clicks on the on the keyword life insurance for fifteen cents and i remember being like that is so high right now those clicks are eighteen bucks you gotta get in early man i've always been lucky at getting in early i got in early for facebook i was in their beta ads youtube i was one of the first people to use it but and now i'm one of the first people to see the opportunity of buying distressed brands and flipping them in and put it them an eco comm so two thousand one two i buy that and i went so quickly my income went to six figures that the ceo of ge financial they was divided in four companies john mc called me up and he said todd you don't know me but i'm the ceo of this division and or would i think he was a ceo and he said ty are you doing something illegal because you're submitting about sixty to eighty thousand dollars worth the commission's potential not all deals closed per week and we got guys been here twenty years and know everybody that do like thirty forty thousand a week and i didn't wanna tell him what i was doing because i thought other people would steal it so i just said no not been having illegal i just got a way to get leads and all my thing did was add value it was like a book online it was twenty eight pages that i copied wrote in two thousand one so i got to six figures in under a year and so that was the beginning of making whatever you call it you're your first million then i always like to do two things at the same time i had gotten into like becoming a professional salsa answer i went to a night so i was from the amish i went to a night club for the first time in my life in my early twenties because i had basically checked out a planet earth for five years i lived didn't see one movie i lived in a twelve by twenty there was no running water and it was an out house i put it on my social media i went back there two months ago with amish and so i went to a nightclub and i bought a drink it was like fifteen bucks and i was like wait a sec i'm on the wrong side of this bar here you know one of my mentors had told me a farm mentors at tight if after twenty minutes you're in a room and you don't know who the sucker and the room is you're this sucker so i was like wait a sec i gotta get in the night nightclub business and i built a company called triangle fiesta at the same time i was doing ge and financial stuff and so i spilled two streams of income that were so they weren't seven figure combined but they were pushing and i did that after for many years then i moved back to california sold those businesses to my best friend and and the founder on the wealth management company and so by then i had was pretty much you could call a million i don't i didn't record it as much as i i should have been more materialistic and been like well why not just release a tax return from two thousand and five and just shut everybody up i you know nobody ever asked me that it's not been a controversial thing must been controversial is do you own these cars or least them that's been like h three h tree made this video who we kind become friends and i was like that was a good ass video that that was a great video which one the one where we came into my house yeah yeah too funny the way 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 you brain but i i showed him the title to the cars now i leased them because i don't know anybody who actually buys lamborghini in ferrari i had six exotic car you lease them so you could turn them in and tax the but that was a big controversy the very the world's very illiterate so they're like ties a fraud because he leases and not buys where any wealthy person is like well who the fuck would buy a depreciate asset so i haven't returned my time 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 look let's talk about that ad for a second because that adds fucking iconic i think i've seen that at a bunch of times people don't know it's the ad where you know he starts in his garage with the lamborghini behind them him and they starts but you touched start talking about books it's not like you're sitting here 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 add 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 gonna grab people's attention and how am i gonna transition this and let's like this room it tell me about the making of the ad yeah good question so in two thousand twelve i was living in the hollywood hills i had a maserati i think at a ferrari then and i was like i'm getting too materialistic this is the ironic thing so i sold my cars and for two years from twenty eleven or twenty twelve to twenty fourteen 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 income so i did then twenty fourteen stayed this girl and i was like it's time to get a car and so i went and i got a lamborghini for halloween because she wanted to dress up like batman a bat woman and i was like let me get a black lamb it wasn't until six months later that i actually just or three 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 nineteen eighty four steve jobs commercial he has like these mannequin cy border looking robot things and so i had been on the street of sunset plaza eating sushi i was with two guys and beautiful women walk 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 twenty fifteen 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 it was hooked my friend jeremy we drove around and just talked in the lamborghini january twenty fourth twenty fifteen and i spent like thirty thousand dollars and made like one thousand dollars back on that first december ad you have to iterate so to answer your question our first attempt was not amazing it did but i mean i didn't have any roi so i said let me do some perm i went in the garage the reason all those books were my garage is because i own so many books i was in france for twenty fourteen new years my assistant nathan ramos has calls me hi you got a whole bunch of new books in and where do i put them there's no more books shelves space in the entire house i said buy books shelves 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 lamb and i forgot that i had those books shelves in there there were just a whole extra books so i grabbed that and had shot about four takes and the fourth one was all took and it went viral like you i mean in twenty four hours it was nuts it was and back then if you get in early you gotta catch things ahead of the t curb cost per impressions on google on youtube was insanely low how much money did you spend on that that's a good question probably not eight figures but i would say you know upper seven figures maybe oh that's not surprised and i i mean that i would've thought way more i would've thought way more well i had other perm i did one with another car and then i moved from the hollywood hills down into this big house in beverly hills i shot a commercial there that one got a lot of views you know when that here my garage went viral on like everything my friend called me who i think is the best marketer in the world but he's just super secret of guy nobody knows him he does all any kind of business you see where you can't figure out who owns it on the internet it's this guy he was making six million a month at one point anyway he called me i think i'm his only friend he's like this hermit in new york he goes did you do this controversy on per he's like you did his controversy on purpose right i was like not really i didn't realize so many people will be butt hurt that i had a lamborghini and he's like whatever you do stop the fire of this shit you're gonna become a fucking household name two years later by google reps i have google rep for youtube they fly down sometime for sensitive they said tie we did a poll for you we have inner mechanism and seventy five percent of men in america between eighteen and thirty five if we show your picture they know your name and i was like they man stoke a little controversy so that's why by the way you see hate because i never really defended it that much so there was a right away it was like there was on the key chain there's plastic and people think that that proves it's a rental so that was the first controversy for like six months but the more people posted that on reddit and stuff the more people went and watch and intelligent people correct watched the four minute video it's like this fucking guy talking about warren buffett this there's actually substance to this and so it became that sixty seven step pro program in terms of people coming up to me on the street that in the social media marketing there's not one place in the world i can go and walk without people being like to change my life so remember negativity bias on twitter and other places it seems that a lot of people hate me but i've had at least ten thousand people come up to me in around the world walking around in the last six years i mean i'm meant some i've never had somebody come up and say you ruined in my life so i think it's just a you rented that lamb you rented yeah some guys gonna come up to you about a rental no i'm not that just negative i'm just saying and maybe the negative people just don't come up to so it could be biased and at this point like you had you okay so you did a nightclub and financial thing mh and you there's a gap and then you like came up with this idea for this book the sixty seven step book and then you promoted the shit out of that and that kinda was like a pretty big win before that you're doing like some dating sites yeah dating but i was also doing i had a consulting business i was doing mastermind that's when i really started testing kinda of the educational stuff i started doing more public speaking in two thousand seven eight 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 partners like no i wanna make money and they asked me to media and i bought half of it and you know that made i flipped that thing for seven figures in like eight months so i became from between i like to do a lot of stuff so i was in the dating world social networking and i was doing a lot of consulting and i became pretty well known it was funny until twenty fifteen i did a podcast starting like two thousand eleven kinda 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 kinda like a tim ferris thing like y i'm zen and i don't care about money and blah blah and it was great i had a cult following i remember at one point i was like tim ferris is four hour work week could blah blah blah and tim ferris was responding to me and it was just when i was starting out in social so i dip my hands in a lot of stuff i started buying real estate in two thousand six so i had passive the income from that i still own the wealth management company and the night 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 when we when we bring somebody on even when a guest comes on we actually don't usually interview them about their life and lit it and all that we just brainstorm about what's cool what's interesting what opportunities they're seeing 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 a little notes app in your phone and it's just full of half baked ideas sam got his company to run i i think to do already so we just give away the rest of the ideas for free yeah and 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 to 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 ton of value so i'd love them it's on and it's fun fun and not a version of your program or your pocket we're at working on stuff we're working on it yeah super cast to have like like a paid go i'll just say this i mean people if you bring value charge money there's so much stupid stuff mcdonald's makes twenty five billion selling diabetes to people in coca cola so it's like hey man one thing my mentor told me if you have value never be afraid to charge and the people who get charlie mu says if ten percent of people don't complain about your prices you're too cheap so yeah was it so we have some stuff coming but i i would love for you to to try to you know become one of us for the last five minutes here and i'd love to brainstorm a little bit about what opportunities do you see that you you may not be pursuing or you you see adjacent to what you're doing i'd love i don't know if you if you prepare for this if you have anything off top of your head but spit out a couple of half baked ideas if things you you know if you're a young entrepreneur what you would be looking at what would you be going and doing if i will two year old tie if if i twenty two you can go straight service space to start out if you can after if you're a tech whiz you can build saas and things like that you're i'm gonna talk to everyday ordinary people like what i grew up with you go service based business i think the simplest one is still social media marketing agency it's obviously a little bit different with covid but you can pivot into for example e com agency where you manage people get help all these restaurants help all these brands and mom and pop transition to a shopify store and so on and you can charge them one to ten thousand dollars a month based on what you do for them and you have four or five clients and you're in six figures that's a no brainer for most people again mh the the mark zuckerberg listening you can bypass what i'm saying from there you always want to move into product based at some point so half baked ideas that i see for myself i think i look at the tam of things you know what's the tam of verticals there's about twelve verticals me and my business partner alex have identified we wanna go into and all of them are have to be trillion dollar tam so the food eight point seven billion a trillion in global food consumption everybody needs it i think there's a real opportunity for more entrepreneurs whether it be to start a small urban farm and do a csa delivering healthy food to people i think that's a great that's a badass ass business what's i called like mis fits fruit from or ugly fruit no vegetables right it's produce it's something produce yeah perfect yeah i'm not familiar with them but it's i like where they're going with that the whole stick is like shit that wasn't pretty enough to set the pepper that was not pretty enough because it's miss shaped to sell the grocery store they put the box in in reality it's perfectly good looking but that's so s and there's two of those companies and i believe they're between fifty million to hundred million year in sales it's a box that you give with vegetables i love that business so food is a great vertical i think another vertical that people neglect a a little bit is simple things like building houses like construction is a i saw you had on your twitter some roofing company yeah that was worth ability like a lot of boring things don't be afraid i started with life insurance my first time out of the i saw a milk and cow in my hand which is people think is boring but it builds if there's a lot that happens there and i think that so things that people really need food shelter walk full food shelter right now is the place to be i think because of covid all the brands were buying whether and i didn't even talk much about this but pier one and dress porn i bought another company that did seven hundred forty million revenue here dress porn that's a brand that you know women need still clothes at home i bought model scoring but people want soccer balls at home so you really gotta think if people are trapped in home for prolonged periods of time what did they want they want food they want home improvement and they want those basic i would stay away and from a lot of the things that people envision hospitality business rusty these are crushed businesses that have a permanent shift on the curve and i don't know how they were a travel a lot of stuff that people get into but you know what keep that service business going and put a ceo in place so that it continues to run there's much too much talk about exiting i'm not an exit guy like i said buffet says the exact time you should hold a an a good brand is forever that's the ideal time so i would also encourage my twenty two year old self to build things that lasted and a real a great food based business with a product there's the products you can go tangent are huge you can come now with like carbonated waters you can come out with so we we launched a beef jerky line with grass fed beef and there's so many paleo people and so and then you can go vegan we have a hemp protein line on farmers cards so it i think you go into these huge tam simple markets that are home based and then you can just shoot off for the rest of your life can you name the twelve that's a good question okay so you have in the us gdp finances is number one so finance were related me and alex if for trying to buy a bank but there's distressed banks people don't realize there's a hundred banks at any given time for sale in america we almost bought a bank bank of louisa and conduct too much regularly so finance food quote fashion is about one and a half trillion globally then construct real estate obviously but real estate breaks into malta so you can have real estate and then you can have construction i think mining is in there and then you start getting so a commodity side of things some of those twelve breakout there the ones that i think i and then service based there is a service based trillion are barely trillion dollar but it's so fragmented i don't like that so on the twelve which i wish i could remember all twelve i only focus on like the top six because as you move down that stack it becomes very fragmented like i was saying like do you really wanna 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 mas hierarchy at the bottom like what do people but really need and in the top which is this kind of you know enlightenment phase on the mas where you really that part is what loses money in covid all this stuff here and people aren't ain't going to nightclubs clubs up here because that's where you like express your wealth you know called marx would be angry but at the top of the years here's where are you gonna be i mean are you gonna be this old gray haired guy who's got all these ceo's reporting to you are you gonna be running shit are you gonna have sold out and you're just gonna be reading and being ish what are you gonna do that's great question man you know it's hard to predict the future i would say i think there's four m's to motivation and i'm m number three so i hope i'll be in that money mating movement slash freedom mastery slash status that drives most humans one of those four and i'm strong on the third one so i hope in thirty years that i'm kind of a mad scientist then i i always tell people you should reverse engineer your life what you want on your tombstone and i hope my tombstone says so he as a match you gonna be how it is 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 gonna be you gonna be a wild guy i think i already up i you know what if people could figure you out you 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 wanna do that's a good question what's your thirty year for now man i maybe do you have you don't have kids do you okay i you have some kids i wanna i you know similar to you i think me and sean are similar to you and that we want we we like to have our hands and lots of different things i own my own company now and it's a similar business maybe than what you had we have one and a half million daily users right i just wanna make cool shit for them and invest in the cool companies and buy cool companies the same thing as you you know different times of my life the old tap dancing rule do tap bounce out of bed where i'm at right now is fun man it's fun because a lot of its it's high level if you look at myers briggs if you believe in personality types i'm an ent p which they call the visionary whatever i don't know if that i wouldn't or 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 thirty days every thirty days it's a tough one to do but you know i've built an algorithm that uses actually i built it with doctor david bus a complex personality algorithm that uses very advanced psycho testing things that they call like the hex score the you look at n mp you look at the mach four 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 la bach called work rules it's how he was the chief hiring officer going through three 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 twenty year two year 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 roth trials 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 long modern day interest states commerce system used to not be able to do businesses across state lines he re ruled 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 twenty two year old self it's like man do lots of stuff if ten percent of people ain't mad at what you're doing you're probably doing something wrong and what about the opposite what would the twenty two year old self tell the forty whatever your your old ty lopez if he walked in into through the door like oh this is my life this is what you do okay interesting what would twenty two year old you tell you that's a smart question never had someone asked that it's hard to answer this without sounding cliche respect the seasons of life when you're twenty two don't just lock yourself in a room your body strong and young get out there that's say build a dam construction company gets sweaty my mentor validation said also respect the phases so that's what i think could tell me like in your twenties is when you try a lot of stuff thirties is when you focus on something forties is when you profit fifties is when you begin to mentor so that sixties you can hand off so respect the seasons of life one of the reason i spent so much time on the farm it gives you a deeper understanding of patterns and you know we're all i think i'm in the summer of life approaching fall and it's not just chronological it's not just like at this age you hit that right like winter is when you plot in and ponder and springs when you plant seeds i think the last five years i've been planting a lot of seeds summer you go to work and the harvest comes in the fall and i'm kind of on that track and that's why i said went strong appear weak when i'm in the spring many people saw the spring and they go oh this guy's is not that telling well in many ways i'm not talented i mean the the game of business is so multifaceted that i've never met one person that has full encompassing body of knowledge but like tom watts the founder of ibm used to say i'm smart in spots and i like to spend a lot of time in those spots so i think another thing my twenty two year old self would say tie on certain things or a one and other things you have tightened potential stick more around the titan potential type you know and i think that's for everybody what's that damn super superpower you have and it should be very tangible my superpower or persuasion and the reason i got a lot of hate and why you asked me that question of okay is this tag guy i do you think any of the accusations against you have merit well yes when you're highly persuasive it's a strong tool it's like a pit bolt i mean does a pit good or bad well it depends if you're not careful the pit can buy you so i have to be careful with persuasion that i'm not doing it crossing the line but now my superpower when i flip it in i can buy i know how to talk people into selling me their brand if the numbers came out on some of the acquisitions i've done harvard would be doing a case study on it right now i don't say the numbers because i don't give a shit about that now some of them are public you know like i said pier one was thirty one million it was an auction against sick more i can't you know keep that private but find your superpower man in some people said to i don't even have a superpower well maybe your superpower is finding somebody with the superpower marry somebody with the superpower you know that's named out the superpower in and of itself self awareness to be like yeah i don't know if i'm a titan it anything it's okay to be an entrepreneur not everybody has to be entrepreneur rich richest guy ever had a long conversation in dinner with with steve balm he just shot up to like number seven wealthiest guy and and he's an he didn't drop out of college with bill gates he was more scared or more conservative he told me but you know he respected that superpower that he had to build off somebody else's vision and i think that's a another problem with what i call silicon valley is this thought that looks down on simple people starting social media marketing agents sees that that's a scam what's wrong with that business my dentist sucks at marketing and he's happy to have somebody do his email marketing he's sixty years old he don't wanna learn email marketing so epic think silicon valley should realize that there's this huge need for everyday ordinary people to be able to tow that entrepreneurial line without thinking they have to build a saas product and understand a stack and all these things you know so someone well look i appreciate you coming on the silicon valley podcast come dude like hey you guys gotta come on my podcast i had a podcast i got so busy doing these acquisitions that i've like had one quarter one in a year but will you guys come auto 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 tip we have this big ass sheet and like we research like crazy and we come on and we just fuck bang bang bang bang bang we bang it out do give me my bank give me the things you didn't get me come on this but let's just not miss out because nobody many people are gonna be what's the hard nose question you wanna ask me no no we got to i what sam i'm saying is usually we come out and we have idea idea opportunity opportunity okay oh here's a business you never heard of or hey these guys are buying you know old school brands and flipping for e commerce that's what we usually do on the podcast this is more like you know hey look you know i i wanted to do three things i wanted to know your perspective on people's opinions yeah about about you and what the criticisms are and address you know those i had my own just curiosity of like yeah why doesn't he just say this or why doesn't he do this or how is he doing that 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 a investor today in the twitter thread it's guy named gary tan you know comes from y comb which is like our harvard out here yeah you know he's he's done some interesting things you know he built pastors which kinda of failed but he's investing some good companies he had his pitch fork out right away and i was like look yeah these guy you know this guy's never built anything i think what the fundamental thing for silicon valley is they respect builders and for all delusions around pretending that they don't want wealth that's absolutely true we'd totally guilty of that virtue signaling totally guilty of that but the one thing i think is true is it silicon valley respects builders who make something i think the the problem is that overlook people who teach like fundamentally you were teaching and it's like he didn't he didn't you know why is he tell other people how to be successful that's on 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 something here the second thing is even if you had done none of those things but you were teaching the right information to people 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 that is a genuine flaw of silicon valley and i think what i replied to gary was look whether you love them me or you hate him he's doing some interesting shit with rev right now and you gotta acknowledge that like i don't care what you think about the guy what a good bias it what's the u there's twenty five cognitive advisors once humans decide this guy that they're wrong that's my politics what 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 echo chamber boy it's like right and people don't like black they like black or white and by the way can smart people can i do one thing yeah what's up okay so i'm not gonna mention anybody's names but i was like you know what i never have done this before let me respond let let me bring up some of the people so andrew wilkinson was a yeah 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 was like i say by the way i i live in san francisco i'm from missouri this is where i am now so like i and and i bootstrap my company so sean people strike out at those things they subconsciously see themselves i have a friend who loves attention we went to a party there was a guy life of the party in the middle party my friend we walk in two minutes in and he looks at and goes look at this guy fucking wants all the attention himself i said that's you bitch you wish you in like me i don't have to be that guy so i don't criticized and people criticized work is some sort of reflection pull what you wanna pull up yes so you know andrew says the same shit you said he bought he buys he buys profitable internet company so he bought like dr which is the largest you know designer web design websites it's like a top one thousand website yeah but he bought he owns like twenty of these and so there's he a builder required just so i know oh well listen here's why it's funnier yeah he started because he had a he has an agency that just service in sales a service business in canada his whole group does about a hundred 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 so he 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 a no fun backing how many 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 name it's so funny guys but he it's like toy story or was at dos 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 all doing about the same thing it's like everybody's more similar to fail there's infinite perm on things bring i was gonna gonna bring up it i mean i he was not tweet he was gonna tweet at andrew i think that's what he was gonna do okay so here it was how do you sleep at night do poor people with a get rich quick scheme so what i would tell him is how much does his agency make thirty to fifty million dollars say this thirty and fifty 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 hard with me if you wanna talk about what benefits societies at concentrating thirty to fifty million or helping a whole bunch of business everyday ordinary people across the world have an agency to make a hundred thousand dollars a here i gotta think gary v at one point was banging on me for don't buy across you got a hundred fifty million let everyday ordinary people man that's why i i never get hate from everyday ordinary people people on the street people from a ghetto people from you know service bus boys they're like hey man you 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 it it's funny like you know warren buffett would shit on let's say bitcoin at which bitcoin has been you know in the last ten years it would it would be the absolute best investment you could have made better than any silicon valley startup up if you had just bought bitcoin ten years ago you would have done better you know he doesn't understand it and he kinda knocks it elon musk knocks warren buffett he says oh that's kinda boring he's just a capital all i'm out here building rockets and and you know electric cars that are gonna clean up the earth and so he he knocks warren buffett and then you know the next person comes in and shits on somebody else and i think there's a sort of really toxic idea of judging other people's business in this way i'm guilty of it too but it's kinda like you said if you spot it you got it the thing you resent in other people is a part of yourself that you you don't quite like and and i don't think most people would agree with that i think a lot of people listen to this will will disagree but from my life experience that has turned out to be true the things that really annoy you and other people things that really bother you it's because it'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 wanna go down a real rapid hole that will blow your mind if you go down the evolutionary psychology route and you understand the dark tri ads or so dark tri is the three most exploit traits that human share so it's psycho machiavelli and na system so i've administered a test across the internet it's on my site it's i build a separate site life compass it's called it's free i i don't monetize it at all and i've tested more people in any psychologist in the last two years in history i tested like five hundred thousand people just went through this free quiz i can tell you entrepreneurs have some of the worst dark trial scores the fact that they're angry is so machiavelli is a complex psychological ai and it's basically if you were bullied and a kid who always kinda 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 with psychology today did a study most people who leave comments that are negative score extremely high on dark diet worse than the dark tri sadistic score there's lots that's why i never took real people don't comment man so when people go tired to 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 criticize me i'm telling you the most blatant people who make a living on youtube on critique other people if you do their diet giant's course these are people you should never have in your life exploit at a level that's unreal there's a good book on this call called the h factor personality by the guy who developed the hex score which is the most accurate personality test psycho test by far so one of the things that i do do smoke a lot of weeds you know what i don't have super high anxiety and anybody that i know that load just has anxiety and i don't have much so i never you do lsd because you're you're not like weird in an interesting way like you go like that's what we call a sam compliment thank you do lsd you're weird in an interesting way you know what well i so i 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 helpful but is this coming from a sober place or do you like to get fucked up sometimes to get inspiration last time hi got was in twenty fourteen i remember my brothers spoke a lot two of my brothers have i anxiety they smoke they love it they swear by mike mom always she's a hippie she thinks so i should smoke more and 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 i'm man my dad was like a big drug dealer that went to prison and i guess i just like and he was 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 with my mom thinks thought i gonna be like my dad my grandma thought i'd be like my dad addicted 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 butte count but the real me that's i said people used to follow my podcast are like wait a second it doesn't do who i thought he was and it's not because i was projecting false it's just a video with a lamborghini and girl people are you know fifty million views there and a video of me talking about dark diet and dark tri ad scores which by the way should be mainstream the educational system so fuck it doesn't teach you how to read people one of my great superpower not that i was born with but luckily i'd bumped into like doctor david bus is an active man mentor 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 a dark tri test i've saved more dude from depth but yeah i a friend circle valley i sent him walk my sixty seven steps at the end of the sixty seven steps if that was worth a sushi dinner sixty seven dollars just ask yourself see if the value was there because i developed the sixty seven steps in two thousand four for an operating manual to run companies i begin to realize i needed to be able to build ceos and i've said how do i get everything my mentors have taught me and i built this manual back then it wasn't sixty seven steps it was like fourteen 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're gonna talk about business that i was the only one gonna buy pier one okay if second one hadn't come in in the last two weeks i would have pulled that offer twenty and a half million dollars this is a business doing one point five billion with thirty million customers it has ninety nine percent brand awareness what all the geniuses in silicon valley and they say well we only build we don't wanna be ass a can't bullshit will 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 in san francisco out 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 who read like tim ferris why did he leave he's like the mentality it's become a toxic mentality and i could have told them you should stick a whole bunch of dark tri add people in one city and give a money and a little clout this isn't ain't gonna be a place you one this ain't gonna end well my friend we're gonna end up in austin and then austin not gonna end well nicest people i've ever met with the lowest dark tri are people who live on a farm and things like that but some of that's adverse selection for example what one to ten what do you think your followers will think of this podcast am i gonna be awesome here's what's gonna happen they're gonna say that we didn't press you enough and they're kinda right because i don't agree with everything you've ever done and i think we could have a respectful conversation of 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 you're a much i think that you are more ethical than i thought i i think that you are more badass than i thought you're super weird and i find it to be amazing and cool because i'm weird i think so i think what's gonna happen is tens of thousands of people maybe hundreds of thousand people gonna listen to this and they're gonna 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 it's 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 gonna cut it where you can no we usually do it in chronological order but it's fine like the i i don't ever think about this in terms of what are people gonna say like if i wanted to do that i wouldn't even have done the podcast i i did the shit for fun and don't what's crazy question i need one well let me say that look look tight 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 scam 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 day say 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 in 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 yeah 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 the changes that's true and i'm not even gonna try to like go fact because to me is irrelevant but i know for some people for sky they're gonna really care about the shit i don't lie even if i wanted to lie people will fact check my stuff my g financial which is now called retirement geek my business partner john dew he gets calls daily going did todd really start this business joel sal who's been on joe rogan twice probably the most famous agricultural food guy that wrote a book omni dilemma in great party joel south in farm in slope virginia gets calls where people like did todd really spend two years limit 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 dirt nothing that's it's not that's funny so so the the two knocks are gonna be well some people should be like i can't believe you gave this guy y'all platform i think that's fucking stupid like i i think clean out how would i want i would that with homes on that that would be a very interesting conversation y why did you do have it and so so my test is if i sitting next to this person what i wanna strike up a conversation do i have questions am i curious right but i wanna form my own opinion yes absolutely i would i happen to record it here so other people can benefit from it but that's i do this with what conversation i wanna have right the so the the second knock will be oh you didn't push them on this one facto toy 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 but i think we already kinda cover that the third one which is actually probably not what any of the audience says but it's more of my own what the what the thing i was most questioning of was i think you talk about i bought this brand island 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 seventy million dollars that quarter but you're buying these brands month it's probably traded a month it's probably crazy you're making this point right so i guess my point is business is in 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 in in a way you're telling me that you know two plus two equals one meaning strong brand with huge revenues or depositing seventy million dollars in the bank account meaning you know actual either you know profits or eb or whatever and i'm buying these things for three ten twenty thirty million dollars someone done that up there right i and 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 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 kinda 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 then something's inefficient and not everybody sees it yet so for example when i got into google adwords in two thousand one two thousand two it was fifteen to twenty cents a click a lead cost me let's call it you know whatever it took ten dollars so you got leads for two dollars and so it it cost me one hundred dollars i remember doing the math a hundred dollars to generate a deal that on average my commission was fifteen hundreds it was fifteen x now you know it was back in why i know much about business and i didn't scale it as far but there was free lunch there when i launched with google adwords by youtube adwords more than a decade later anything i put up not just here in my garage you could sell anything okay let let's use the one example you you you talked about which was dress barnes i think the health of is so it's just good news forget about that that's one question here so let's say it's inefficient nobody else is efficient where you're efficient you you you recognize recognized it that you go but the business owner themselves 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 gonna tell you something and i shouldn't tell you this because it's gonna great questions that's why well no i'm gonna tell you something that i know that for a few people they may understand it but they don't fully long term leases that brick and mortar companies have have ten year horizons five to ten years so they signed these leases in twenty fifteen seventeen eighteen all of a sudden amazon had slowly been eating away plus covid it's so all of a sudden now the way the us bankruptcy law which is very sophisticated the best bankruptcy law in america i in the world is the the american bankruptcy really and it says no problem sin you're a publicly traded company you own address barn and taylor law all these brands we'll let you can get out of those leases with dress porn but you'll have to declare bankruptcy and somebody else gets your brand america has an outlet somebody else gets your brand now that was not a bankruptcy situation but it was similar dynamic so the reason you would sell because what the us bankruptcy court forces you to do now it trapped some of them are chapter seven summer chapter eleven even within chapter eleven you can do what's called a three sixty three sale which is what i've done on some days but man like i said i always go fish where nobody fishes and my business partners from silicon valley and he exited for three hundred million dollars and he thought dislike you even eight months ago and i said alex you'd be surprised i'm gonna put it in sam's words you be surprised what a weird framework of thought will end up handing to you and i'll tell you on pier one it was such a steel that we were what's called a stocking i don't know if you know what a talking horse is but some of your listeners will which mean basically we have protections and also nobody shows up the auction with the automatic winners and until one week before everyone was so scared of covid that only sick came even now twenty more people would show so the other thing that comes into play is just like up says when the world is scared you should be greedy and when the world's greedy you should be scared you asked me where i accumulated cash and how did i get ready for this i've been getting ready while everybody else was continually buying and flipping and selling in it what i call a greater full expansion error period i was waiting and so i think that great things come to people who wait sometimes and there was never a i'm the only thing i'm pissed out i mean i almost bought american apparel in january that was two point five billion dollar i'm sorry forever twenty one by simon ab g beat us but for a large amount but man you should got american apparel was point fifteen that was expansion that was where it wasn't deals right now is deal so i think what happens and something even my critics realized about me american apparel worth eighty american apparel worth eighty now for sure well i can't tell you there's something about that but yet i agree gil owns it and realizes it and they're smart but i've never been afraid to do stuff that other people thought was weird and anybody listening you know a lot of your listeners already know that but even weirder than people think my mentor validation said if you have a good idea and you tell your neighbor about it and they're not suspicious it's too late so the fat you're a smart guy and you're kind of suspicious dress it's beautiful in fact i'm like do i convince you because now i have a hundred thousand people that are smart businessman that i don't know that i wanna convince but i will tell you what i told you about dress barn is extremely accurate when we bought it and relaunch it its e com all the metrics are better than we thought not worse and i think that the window closed it may have already closed for the great deals but luckily we bought five and we did another one in the uk a smaller company called the book people it was like one of the largest book companies in europe and i bought that and so we pulled up six acquisitions in eight months and i'm not sure the window will be there more people are starting to show up at auctions on other things that i'm coming to so be quick maybe be quick see around corners well tie the this has been a really good podcast what's gonna happen is that'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 tell me sean and ty give us feedback i think you're gonna like this tie i would love for you to come back and if you want us on to yours we would love to do that i'm speaking for sean but i'm imagine i'll say the same thing this was awesome well i appreciate you guys are great and your audience even though i was on twitter fighting back with them i love i don't i don't mind it i i was like the doctors and i was like got shit to do i'm a reply fifty times we 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 the whole dating thing i we can talk about that that but so we can come back on the show we can go down to dating thing and we can go i we wanna do that we will i mean tweet tweet that you sean vp that's the sam and then at ty lopez tweet us what you think i'm actually curious about this i i don't know what people are gonna say i know my opinion 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 him but honestly i've just tell you what i think and i also know this like i have a poster of conor mcgregor here you know behind me that guy's not fucking perfectly punched an old guy and a bar he's been accused of rape he's also a u champion and has shared a lot of great wisdom and and also had 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 you know con artist they're 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 the yeah they're not as great as you would think 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 the things i dislike about you are the things that you've done poorly are the 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 have right you know three wives let's go ask them you know how 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 on hate mode like forget ty lopez but just in general much better way to live life it's 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 like niche ne nietzsche said the mine is an imp fortress you only learn about yourself through friends and enemies i always say he's compliment me on a few things like i don't like that guy but he's good at marketing so i'm like look well i can buy brands and turn around through marketing you really learned for people who compliment you you know so i that's why i never got bothered the amount of criticism i've god has truly allowed me to hone in on yeah they're like i know what 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 a hundred years in the scope of the blip in a thousand years you you won't bring people i i was out on a date with a girl and i was like somehow i brought up like elvis or something she was like who's that and i was thinking this is chewing even that choosing in her twenties i'm going how quickly we forget the most popular man in the world it had even been you know forty years fifty years if the guy 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 are esteem side they will be stuff running through their mind maybe they're too pushy to act on that of the most demon light to why devilish things so 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