[Transcript] – Tai Lopez On Morning Routines, Laziness, Unschooling, Investing, Owning Nice Things & More.

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Transcripts

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/09/tai-lopez-morning-routine/

[00:00] Introduction/Kimera Koffee

[02:57] About the Speaker – Tai Lopez

[06:47] Periscope Live

[08:37] Tai’s Take on Morning Routines

[15:46] Chunking Your Time & Rewarding Yourself

[38:00] Investing

[49:59] How To Educate Your Children

[1:05:33] End of the Podcast

Ben:  Do you hear that sound? That is the sound that's been greeting me every morning. It is me crinkling a bag of this new kind of Dominican coffee grown at high altitudes called Kimera Koffee.  It's KIMERA Koffee, KOFFEE, Kimera Koffee.  This coffee is not just coffee, it's coffee that's been blended with nootropic, brain enhancing compounds.  Specifically Alpha-GPC, Taurine, L-Theanine and DMEA meaning that compared to a regular cup of coffee, that does indeed kind of get you going.  This coffee is like coffee on steroids, gives you clean, focused energy, and frankly, I'm kind of addicted to this stuff right now, so check it out.  You can go to kimerakoffee.com.  That's KIMERAKOFFEE.com, and you can save when you go to kimerakoffee.com by using the discount code “Ben10”.  It's kimerakoffee.com, discount code “Ben10”. Enjoy.

And now onto today's episode with Tai Lopez.

In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show:

“When you break a routine that you have in your mind as unbreakable, it makes it very easy to break it again, and the next thing you know, you're not following it at all.”  “And I'll just give it to you real simple, do the hard thing in the second chunk of your day.  The “Chunk 2″ makes or breaks your day”  “Strategies only go so far without execution, and the biggest problem of execution in modern world is adherence.”  “Procrastinators have not learned how to reward themselves.  Instead procrastinators beat themselves up.”

Ben:  Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I'm back with Tai Lopez.  Now if you are a long time listener to the podcast, then you're already familiar with Tai, and he's no stranger to you.  He's actually been on the show three different times.  In part one, we talk about everything from multitasking to reprogramming your genetics, to checking your e-mail less.  In part two, we talked more about life and love and happiness, and we really focused on how to strike an ideal balance between being like over-ambitious and under-ambitious.  And then in part three, we kind of focused in on Tony Robbins new book “Money” on personal finances, on how Tai feels that we should protect and grow our wealth and his own investment philosophies.  So, we cover a ton whenever Tai comes on the show, and today will be no different because one of the things that Tai offers to me is mentorship, wisdom, insights and kind of direction on random topics in life, and the cool thing is that you get to listen in as Tai does that.  That's kind of how this podcast with Tai go.  It's a little bit different than some of the other podcasts that we do in that respect.  So I will put a link to all of the other podcasts that I've done with Tai over in the show notes which you can access at bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai4.  That's bengreenfieldfitness, TAI, the number 4.  So in the meantime, Tai, welcome back for the fourth time to The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Tai:  Awesome, thanks for having me.  We got to make sure we do this more often, I always like talking to you and your audience, a lot of good people.

Ben:  Yeah, and you always have a very interesting take on things.  You know one thing that I subscribed to, I don't subscribe to a lot of newsletters, like I subscribed to my friend Ryan Lee's newsletter, and I subscribed to like a few kind of geeky science and health newsletters like the Examine newsletter, to the Sweat Science newsletter and Mark Divine's SealFit newsletter, like not many.  Like there's like six or seven newsletters that I subscribed to.  One is yours, and particularly your Book-of the-Day newsletter.  You have a huge library, I've been down there and seen your library at your house in Hollywood Hills, and you've got books literally like not even on the shelves, just like lying all over the place 'cause you have so many of them, and that's one of the things that I really enjoy about you is you've always got kind of like a book that you recommend that's associated with pretty much any topic under the sun.  And before we started recording today, you mentioned that on your podcast which folks can find on iTunes that you also plan on doing a little bit more kind of Book-of-the-Day type of stuff on your podcast.

Tai:  Yeah, I basically need a way to get all these, a little format to get all these book interviews I do, authors and that kind of stuff.  I've decided to use my podcast, I've neglected my podcast, but I'm trying to not neglect it.  There's so many channels now to distribute the things that we do, so you know, you've got obviously your own website.  We're big on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram.  Now there's Periscope Live and Twitter.  It's like in Podcast words, all of them are important 'cause different people want to be reached in different ways.  Some people love Twitter.  Some people love YouTube.  Some love podcasts, so.

Ben:  What do you think about that concept of like Periscope where you are broadcasting something that no one's ever going to see again, that is not recorded in perpetuity and that may not offer anyone value other than for that brief amount of time that they get to see it right then?  What's your take on it?

Tai:  Well so Periscope now added, they added a replay feature, so you can replay it if you want, but they didn't always have that.  I don't think, but most of the people you're right.  Like almost all the people watch it live.  If you look at the replay views, they're not that many.  You can't fast forward the replays, so they make the replays kind of hard.  So you're right, it's pretty much a live format, and I think it's great.  I mean, I think it's a powerful tool, people want it.  If you look at the way entrepreneurial business is going is people want to interact with the entrepreneur, and it's actually not new.  Steve Jobs realized this in the late 70s and early 80s.  So did Bill Gates.  That's why they were doing their conferences or stuff like that, so I think you're going to see that via continual trend in the future, so I bought into the Periscope vibe.  I think it's for real.

Ben:  I haven't yet, I have people on, you know whatever you want to call it, my social media team who like, oh Ben, you have to start broadcasting on Periscope and doing like short videos and insights into your life, and I'm just like.  It's one more platform, and for me when I create content I'm always cognizant of whether or not it's going to be able to be accessed at a future date, but the fact that Periscope has a replay.  That's good to know.

Tai:  Yeah, and you can download it to your phone, and then you can upload it to YouTube, and of course it's not quite the same specs but it's not as bad now, they've increased some of the feature set, you know.

Ben:  Yeah, well I know you're a busy guy Tai, and you're on phone calls and podcasts and interviews and all sorts of stuff already today.  One thing that I wanted to ask you about today is this concept that everybody seems to be somewhat infatuated with.  Maybe it's because there's popular podcasters out there like Tim Ferriss asking, you know, folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger this question.  Maybe it's because there's this growing idea that the way that you start off your day kind of access the standard for the rest of your day, but it's this idea of morning routines.  You know what, I have a morning routine that I rarely stray from, even when I'm travelling, and I'm curious what your take on morning routines is, or do you think they're necessary? Do you have one? Do you think it's just like a fad, this concept that you got to wake up and do the same thing every morning? What's your take on morning routines?

Tai:  So here's how I take a morning routines.  Number one, I'm a big believer in Aristotle, talked about the balance.  So I've tried both extremes, no, no little morning routine.  And I've tried like where you do like what's the tallying guy there said where you do like 18 minutes on and all time and then you're just moving.

Ben:  The Pomodoro?

Tai:  The Pomodoro, yeah.  So it's like this whole structure, and what I found I think is a mindset that will take you through your whole life because your daily routine will change with your lifestyle.  You know, The Rock, who's kind of a modern-day Arnold Schwarzenegger.  If you read, they've got some articles you know, he wakes up at four in the morning, and he does cardio for about 45 minutes to an hour.  Then he eats, then he lifts weights til 7, but if you read the articles, it says he generally does that because when you're doing movies.  I actually just did a movie.  I'm in a big movie that's coming out next year with Andy Samberg, and all of these big stars.  I've got a little role in the movie, and I was on a set.  There was 800 people on the set.  You're not always going to be able to wake up at four 'cause sometimes you're filming at three in the morning, so The Rock doesn't always have this exact schedule, but here's the principle that I find works very well, and so it's the principle and it doesn't just apply to morning routine.  It applies to routines in general.  It's called Chunking, so what I do is I divide my day into chunks, and it allows for some variability that, you know, somebody has kids listening in.  I don't have kids, but if you do have kids, sometimes kids are going to be sick at five in the morning or they're going to be runny noses and stuff like that, so if you don't have the chunk and you're just down to the minute, you're going to break with your routine, and there's an interesting, I was actually reading a book. I can't, I'll try to remember the name of the book.

It's the book “Willpower”, it's a New York Times best seller.  Basically when you break a routine that you have in your mind as unbreakable, it makes it very easy to break it again, and the next thing you know, you're not following it at all.  And you're a pretty disciplined person, but you know, not everyone has that level of discipline.  So by using chunking where you designate regions of your day.  So think of it this way.  You have the beginning of your day, let's assume you wake up in the morning, not every day but so.  You got the beginning of the day which is early morning.  You got mid-morning, you got early afternoon, late afternoon, early evening, late evening.  So let's say depending on how you chunk up your day, 3, 4, 5, 6 chunks.  So the general principle that I like to do is in the early, number one or number two chunk of the day, section of the day you can call them, regions of the day.

The first one I tend to kind of catch up with stuff because, I'm an entrepreneur, investor.  I've got lots of things. Sometimes in the first five minutes, I wake up, I got to kind of like check.  Make sure nothing's emergency level, so that early chunk when I wake up.  Take a shower, I get on a treadmill and do a little exercise.  The second chunk is the most important part of your day in my opinion.  And I'll just give it to you real simple, do the hard thing in the second chunk of your day.  Whatever is the hardest, do, not immediately 'cause you can’t do it right when you wake up.  I mean, most people can't.  If you wake up at, I've been testing a routine where I wake up at four in the morning.  I read a book, Michael Milken, these guys that almost became the richest people in the world.  Michael Milken, he was up at four.  If you want an appointment with Michael Milken, they're usually at 4:15 in the morning, and he worked ‘til eight at night and he took 15 minutes for lunch, and he pretty much…  I ended up getting in trouble later, but he's now one of the most respected in Milken Institute, multibillionaire, friends with presidents and, you know, Nobel Prize winners and so on.

So he had this general chunk where he was up very early even at the first chunk, but that chunk number two, so let's say that's an hour or two after you wake up or when you first get into work.  Do the hard stuff first.  The “Chunk Two” makes or breaks your day because there's a lot of science to back this, willpower peaks.  That book “Willpower” talks about this.  Varying books talk about willpower now, there's lots coming out.  And what they find is, your brain pretty much leaves off glucose, that's the driving sugar that pushes your brain forward from the food you eat.  That's the biggest part of your metabolism in some ways.  It's about 25, 30 percent of the food you eat goes towards that.  And then for example, somebody who's racist is more racist at night because if you're racist, it takes willpower of a racist person to not express it.  So in the morning, people are nicer.  Even horrible people like a racist person has more sugar in their brain to do what they need to do and fit in to society, and at the end of the day, you just don't.  So where you get in trouble with this chunking and this routine concept is where your routine has the hardest thing like towards the end of the day or even in the fourth region chunk of your day.  That's where you get in trouble, but if you knock it out, and there's an Amish saying.  When I went to the Amish, there was a guy named Jake Martin, and I won't try to say it in German, but it's one of the greatest sayings I've ever heard about procrastination and getting things done, and Amish are the least procrastinating people on the planet.  If you wake up at five in the morning at the Amish, you're kind of a slack.  So what the saying, roughly translated into English says, “when you have something hard to do, just throw yourself into it and the next thing you know, it's almost done.”  And it rhymes in German, so it sounds better.

Ben:  I was going to say, it's kind of a mouthful in English, but it makes sense.  And you know one of the things that you'll find for me because, you know, I'm in fitness.  I'm an exercise physiologist, that's what I do.  This whole concept of when in doubt, take action.  It works for exercise, and to me what you've just said kind of like when in doubt, take action, right? It's like if you walk into a gym or you walk into whatever, room in your house where you exercise and you don't even know what to do, just start doing jumping jacks.  Like and then while you're doing jumping jacks, she'll be looking around, and you'll see something else you want to do, and you'll go do that before, you know, maybe you've done 5 things that make your body better and then you repeat.  You know you rinse, wash and repeat.  Before you know it, you've been in there 25 minutes, and you're working out.

So yeah, I love that concept and it's curious because you hear almost everybody say wake up and do the hard thing first, right? Like get that big thing, that big thing that scares you done with first but it sound to me like what you're saying is eliminate distractions first, and then in the second, like make that elimination of distraction and maybe taking care of your body a little bit that first chunk, and in the second chunk when creativity peaks like mid-morning, that's when you take on the biggest task.

Tai:  Well yeah, you know, I was talking to Lieberman.  You were referring back to this podcast I did with the guy who wrote the story of the human body, the Harvard professor who spent 40 years studying our background, not just from a nutrition standpoint but really I think he's a Paleobiologist, so it's the actual hard wiring all the way back hundreds of thousands, millions of years.  And he says, think about your ancestors, and he didn't think about a gym.  You as a trainer, is your advice to somebody walk in the gym, no stretching, no warm up, no jumping jacks, and put on the squat rack your max.  No that's a good way to pull a muscle and hurt yourself.  So if you just use common sense, it's not common sense that the second you get in to an environment, you do the exact hardest thing which my say though is don't save the heavy squats for the last 5 minutes of your workout because by then, you can't max out the weight that you really need to do which you kind of want to do in a gym.

I play basketball a lot, really competitively, and basketball's the same thing.  You go out there, what does the coach have you do? You do just a little bit of sprinting, you do a little bit of dribbling, and you do a little passing, out of Phil Jackson.  I had Michael Jordan's coach, his psychologist, that famous George Mumford who wrote a great book called “The Mindful Athlete”.  I don't know if you've read it, but you'll like it.  He was that mind, and we were talking for a while.

Ben:  What's it called, “The Mindful Athlete”?

Tai:  “The Mindful Athlete”, I think it's a New York Times bestseller.

Ben: I always take notes when I interview, so if you're listening in and if Tai mentions a book, don't worry.  I will link to it in the show notes, so go ahead Tai.

Tai: Well he worked with Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson in the same things.  Like Phil Jackson started every practice with bounce passes, so that's fourth-grade basketball with the grade of basketball players were or it was just let's get some fundamentals, let's get you warmed up, and let's get into the hard stuff.  So I think it's more common sense.  I also think it's more practical.  There are some people listening that are just hardwired to pop out of bed and do 500-pound squats, and they're not going to pull a muscle, but for most of us mortals, I find you're going to have to chunk up your day, and that first chunk can be 5 minutes.  It can be 15 minutes.  For me, it's about an hour, you know.  I need about an hour to get the juices flowing, so if I wake up at four, around five ‘o clock, I can start knocking out the hardest thing.  My office, I'm an investor, so we're incubating a new company.  So I'm hiring a hundred and fifty people, and I got the officers for that company.  They come in, they're there by five in the morning, and by six ‘o clock, I want them knocking out the heavy stuff, so that by nine when the rest of the main shift comes in, they've already been 3 hours, you know.  They're already worked up into a lab or a mental exercise and they're rocking and roll.  And I'll tell you a cool thing about this technique.

That part, what I said, do the stuff relatively into the second shift of the day, here's where it gets interesting.  Because it's not the plan you make that helps your life, like people ask me how do you make a million bucks? I'm like, well you need an insanely good strategy, so this chunking idea is a strategy, but strategies only go so far without execution, and the biggest problem of execution in modern world is adherence.  You know, you build this in fitness.  You can give somebody the greatest fit diet plan.  You can lay out step-by-step what to eat, how to work out.  If people don't adhere and execute, it's just mind games that we play with our self. We feel satisfied.  I made a strategy, I made a plan.

So what makes this whole thing work for me is you chunk the end of the day to massive reward.  So let's say somebody listening, avid person wakes up at six or seven.  So you wake up at six or seven, you wake up for an hour.  A lot of people go to work, so you go to work.  When by then, by the time you get to work at eight or nine, you should be warmed up.  You maybe read a book, you walked on a treadmill, you've played with your kids.  Now right when you get into work at nine, do all the hard stuff before lunch, nine to twelve.  That's what I tell people.  Do the hard stuff, so by the time you get to work, you don't need a work warm up.  Most people do the opposite.  They come in, they check some e-mails, and they dink around.  No, knock it out.  And here's if you're an entrepreneur, it's a little easy to reward yourself 'cause you can say you're on a [22:00] ______ then you take your lunch break, then, and this kind of ties into what you were asking me about, laziness.

What you do is by the time you get to that late afternoon, at like three to six chunk of the day, now you start doing fun stuff.  Like in my office, we have ping pong, we have chess, connect four, basketball hoops in the office.  So like all of a sudden, my office starts being playful, but it's still like we're collaborating.  That's the time to casually talk about what we're going to do tomorrow, then when you're done working, let's say you're done working as an entrepreneur or as an employee, you know, but from between three to six, you kind of wind down.  Now it’s time to massively do the rewarding things. Let's say you like movies, okay? Watch a movie every night.  Now some people would say, isn't this a waste of time? No, you can't go on hyper drive.  You know, I don't know if you saw my Instagram where I was at the movies with Elon Musk, you know.  This is the hundredth richest man in the world, and he's at the movies.  Now he is a hard, hard worker.  I was, you know, [23:09] ______ scenes of Elon Musk is not all going in movies, but he does do stuff like that.  So use the night because the night sees social stuff, assuming you're around trusted friends.  You don't have to have your guard up very much, so you don't need as much glucose in your brain.  You can just be yourself.

When you need a lot of glucose is at nine ‘o clock when you're calling a belligerent client or you're dealing with a sales situation or firing an employee or whatever you're doing, but by six or seven o’clock, now what you have to do is dump on the rewards.  So if you like to spend time, game night with your kids, do it a lot.

Ben:  Yeah, you know, it's interesting, if I can interrupt for a second.  It's interesting how you're timing into fuel for the brain because I'm a firm believer in once you have that first chunk done, and I do that first chunk fasted.  Like I wake up and I do a little bit of exercise, the mindfulness, a little bit of meditation, some sunshine exposure and then like the little busy tasks, right? Like the e-mail.  All of that I do without any food in my stomach, it just fast.  It's not that cognitively demanding, and then I have my big breakfast, and then I jump into the huge podcast interview or the chapters in the book or the article or whatever while I have nutrients pouring into my bloodstream.  And at that point, most of the rest of the day, there isn't a huge emphasis on food, and as I get towards the end of the day, I can feel like, you know, especially after I've done like an afternoon or an evening workout, blood glucose has dropped a little bit.  My energy levels are down a little bit, but it doesn't matter that much because for me, that's the time of day where I'm sitting around, playing guitar, hanging out with my kids and basically doing some parallels to what you're doing like at your office or going to the movie.

Now one exception though is after dinner, so I have a big dinner, and part of that is because I'm doing like a late afternoon, early evening workout, and when you do that, you have a big dinner.  You get a big increase in anabolism and post-workout protein synthesis, and a big amount of those nutrients get partitioned in the muscle and in the liver for the next day's activities.  I get a big surge in energy, about an hour or two after dinner, and I have this second huge surge in productivity.  It almost parallels the morning surge on productivity from about 8:30 PM until around 10 PM in the evening.  And so I’ve personally found that I have like this period of time in the evening from like 6 PM until 8:30 that's kind of like relaxation and play time, kind of like you're talking about, and then when that second bout of nutrients hits my system and potentially it's a little bit based of like circadian rhythm and creativity as well.  I have another bout, another surge of productivity kind of like before bed, so it is interesting how some of this can tie into like meals and feedings and circadian rhythm.

Tai:  We're all creatures of DNA and flesh and blood in cells.  It's like we almost, you know, anthropomorphizing is when you take something that's not real like a tree or something and you give it a name or a car or something, and humans tend to anthropomorphize things to understand them.  It's like the thunder is somebody mad in heaven, but we also in a sense, even though this is kind of not grammatically correct, we anthropomorphize our self into thinking that we are more than we are.  It's even, no matter what religion you are, they all kind of end up with from dust you will return.  You know, from dust you came, and dust you'll return, so when people start going no, I'm superhuman.  I can maintain powers equal at all moments of time.  It's just like you got to come back to planet Earth, my friend.  Goodbye time and night hits.  Even if you're a night owl, I'm naturally a night owl person, but this thing of, you know, the reward at night, 'cause here's what happens, and I'll tell you what's going to happen if someone tries this.  You're going to go out, and let's say you're a chronic procrastinator, you're listening to this so, in whatever way, in work, making money, health.

So you're going to hear this podcast, you go out at nine in the morning, you get to work and on the first day look, I'm going to hit the hard stuff first.  Well it's not that easy because the human brain tries to avoid pain, so you're going to try to avoid pain.  Now there's only one thing.  There's twenty five cognitive biases, impulses that cause us to take action or do things, sometimes the right things, sometimes the wrong things.  And pain is number two, the number two most powerful thing.  Then there's only one thing that will beat pain, you know.  You can try social proof, you can try writing down a routine in a journal.  Those are not high enough to overcome pain.  There's literally almost nothing that overcomes pain except for one thing, reward.  So procrastinators have not learned how to reward themselves.  Instead procrastinators beat themselves up.  You can't do it.  You know, you take a kid.  You name the kid, the laziest, fattest kid who just sits and watches, plays video games.  Whatever he does, that kid can be motivated.  I have seen it.

You put Megan Fox in the room, and it's like, hey, she wants to go jogging.  That fat kid's going to put on his clothes and go there.  You go, you take the laziest person, and there's been a lot of science on this, very interesting.  A lot of the things, let's say in ghettos.  There's a lot of stereotypes of people who grew up in poverty and go, well, they're lazy that's why.  No, people don't want to work hard.  You're born in Compton.  I was born in Long Beach which is kind of like Compton.  It's a bad part of L.A., my dad was in prison when I was a little kid.  If I'd grown up to continually live in that environment where no matter how hard you work, you're not rewarded.  Society won't hire you, then you stop working.  So a lot of the problems in the world are one's of not properly incentivising, and if you want to change the world, start with changing yourself and become a reward king. So go into this question, I know you were telling me a little bit earlier about like what was it, kind of laziness?

Ben:  Well yeah, but before we started recording, you know, I mentioned to you that I recently read this essay called “Laziness: A Manifesto”, and it's specifically about this idea that we need to plan for plenty of free time.  We need to not have this pressure to constantly produce and learn, and that being lazy and just like, kind of like hanging out with your feet up is a good thing.  What's your take on that?

Tai:  So I think, again, trying to find what Aristotle said, this middle ground.  The truth is almost always middle ground, and listen to Charlie Munger and he said avoid extreme ideologies in everything, politics, religion, life philosophies.  So you can definitely be too lazy, and to me, what laziness means to me, it's not about total hours’ worth.  It's about am I motivated? And I recently did a thing on the Four Ends of Motivation, and so if you are not focused on those four ends of motivation which are material things, mating, mastery and momentum.  If you don't, then that's bad laziness, so if you're going, “nah, nothing matters. Nah, I'm just going to sit here.”  That's a lot different than purposeful arrest and purposeful like letting the mind just like, there's nothing to do, and great creators, I think it was Leonardo Da Vinci, I read an interesting thing.

It was one of the great artists, I think it was Michelangelo actually.  He was almost fired, he got commissioned to do a piece of art.  Let me see if I have, I'll read you this quote.  It's such a great, great quote if you like to argue for laziness.  Yes you'll love this quote, let me see if I have it.  But the flip side, okay here it is.  It is Leonardo Da Vinci, willed to rant in his book “The Renaissance”.  “The prior or the abet complained of Leonardo Da Vinci's apparent laziness, and wondered why Leonardo sometimes would sit before the wall for hours without painting a stroke.  Leonardo had no trouble explaining to the duke that an artist most important work lies in conception rather than in execution.  And men of genius do most when they work least.”  So, let me just put a caveat.  Leonardo Da Vinci was staring at the wall, trying to make a painting, and he was strategizing, and so it wasn't that he was listlessly, with no purpose and intention at all just lying there.

So I think, you know, going back to Lieberman.  Humans, our ancestral makeup of our DNA has a lot of time for just shelling out, and you have to do that, but think about it this way.  Life comes in phases, and this is a much healthier way, and I learned this from my first mentor Joel Salatin, he said, “Tai, we're out on this farm in Virginia.  You know how this farm works? It works by not crossing Mother Nature.”  He told me, “Mother Nature laughs last, and we see that in the world.  Mother Nature says, do not have 100 grams of sugar every day, so you drink 2 Sprites a day, guess who's going to laugh last? Mother Nature is going to give you diabetes, that's how this thing goes down.”  Mother Nature's like, don't go 90 miles an hour and hit the pavement, so what happens if you drive a motorcycle a lot without a helmet.  Mother Nature laughs last, and the world is full of Mother Nature laughing last, and all the things I don't like in my life is Mother Nature laughing last, and when it comes to this kind of concept of seasons is the way to think about laziness.

It's by far the most, so on a farm, I arrived at Joel Salatin's in the winter.  It was literally a February, I think, or a December, and I got there and it's snow on the ground, and he has this house that he lives in that was built before the US was a country.  It's like 1750, it's an old log house and he's down in the basement.  I'm sitting with him and his wife and his kids, Daniel and Rachel, and he has the chainsaw out and a fire going, and he's just sharpening the chainsaw, laughing and telling jokes with his family.  Then he would get up sometimes and go to his desk, and you'd see him with a notepad and he'd be writing some stuff out.  Then he would go and read some books, and he had chores to do.  He had a couple of chores.  He had animals, he still had a couple hundred cows and pigs and sheep and chickens, so he'd probably spend an hour in the morning doing chores 'cause they were inside.  He has pastured animals, but in the winter there's snow.  So you bring them inside a box, and so he said, “Tai, this is the winter.  This is when we catch up, this is when you get extra sleep, this is when you plot and plan, this is when you learn from your mistakes.  This is when you socialize, rebond with your family, then the spring comes.”  What do you do in the spring of your life? Same thing you do in the spring of your farm.  You begin to plant, and to me, that's the experimentation mode.  You begin to experiment.  Maybe you're starting a new business or trying a new exercise program.  Don't skip the spring because the spring is experimenting.  What you do on a farm is you plant, let's say you're planting corn.  You plant more corn than you're actually going to harvest because you're going to cut away the corn that's not growing so well.

So you plant maybe a hundred seeds of corn in a row knowing that you're going to come, and they call that thinning, and they're going to thin out.  Usually for everyone that you let go, they're going to thin away two or three, so you're maybe only left with, you know, fifteen stalks of corn on that row.  So this is when you do the same thing to your life, and it's not a super hectic time that you're starting to get active.  You're starting to work real hard, then the summer comes.  And what do you do in the summer? In the summer is when it's just relentless activity, Joel Salatin's wife used to tell me.  Work more, sleep less.  Burn the candle at both ends of the stick, you know.  You're might on a farm then? You'd be making hay, you'd be butchering chickens there, and you’d be planting, so maybe we wake up, on average then, you're waking at about 4:30 in the morning.  Eat breakfast, out at five.  You go to bed at nine, but you know what, you feel good in that time because you know what's coming?  What's coming, and this is where I got the chunking.  Chunking is kind of like the season.

The fall is coming, and the fall is the greatest time.  It's when you get pay.  It's when the crops, all the apple trees got lot of apples, so you’re walking down and eating.  When it starts to get cool, there's not as much to do, and you're reaping what you've sowed.  You're rewarded for the goodness of the last three seasons, and then guess what happens? It starts over.  And this never ending cycle, this is what you want.  I'd promise you, I was born in the city.  I've been to 51 countries.  I've been around billionaires, and I've lived with the Amish and people like Joel Salatin.  You'll want a season life, and even if you look at geography, the study of locations, around the world where there are seasons, almost always.  Our humans have thrived the most.  Where it is continually hot or continually cold, like if you lived in Antarctica.  I'm just reading a book about the Eskimo, various tribes, tribal groups there.  Now they live great lives, but it's not quite as productive as those areas where you have four seasons, and obviously, I'm not inditing people for where they live.  I'm saying a general principle of not always working super hard, but not always lounging like you do in the winter is very, very healthy in my experience and there’s a tremendous amount of science.  So this is my very long answer to your question.

Ben:  Yeah, no, I completely agree and I remember when you mentioned that on a podcast about this idea that there are periods of time that we sleep along time and periods of time where we might short ourselves on sleep, and that's one thing that's really stuck with me.  I've been okay with having those periods of life where I might sleep six or seven hours just because I know I got to put my nose to the grindstone and keep my fingers crossed that I might squeeze in a 30-minute nap after lunch, then there's some days where I wake up at six AM and over all over, and use like a little passion flower or put some lavender on the pillow, and put some binaural beats on, and fall back to sleep until 7:30 or 8 because it's that time of season that my body needs that rest, and I give myself that permission.  So I love that take on things on how you don't have to have the same routine, day in and day out, 365 days a year when it comes to this concept of laziness.

Now, Tai, you mentioned that you are starting a new company and I know that you do a great deal of investing.  One question that I have for you, because I am based on previous conversations that we've had on these episodes that you and I do and conversations that I've had with others is I'm looking to invest more in those areas that I'm passionate about, health and fitness and longevity, and so based on what you know, connections and conversations that you've had, if you were to invest right now in a company or a product or an idea specifically focused on human health or human longevity, what would you invest in?

Tai:  That's a great question, I did a talk recently.  Someone wanted me to make a talk on how to make a million dollars, and I said people who make a million dollars traditionally are people who catch trends, so you must be a trend.  You know, Netflix, every single one of you listening to this podcast, including me and Ben.  We have the IQ to have come up with the idea of Netflix.  It's pretty simple, and you could've seen the writing on the wall.  Would you rather have to go to a video store all the time, or just have the videos delivered to you?  And one man, Reed Hastings, he came up with this idea of Netflix, and he was ahead of his time and it's such a good idea that about 30% of the internet at peak times in the United States is running through Netflix.  That's how good of an idea that is.  10% of all the internet in the US is running through their servers at any given time, and surge times 30%.  It's insane.

So how do we catch trend like this in general? You're asking about fitness and health, so what I'd like to think of [40:49] ______ stacking.  And the way stacking works is you go alright, if one sit up works, two sit ups is going to work better than one, and you keep stacking until you reach this point of marginal reaction, not being it's good.  So you want to stack trends, so what are some big trends we see, and you've already done this in your business, so now I think it's just that you need to stack a few more trends.  So there's a trend, the internet.  That's obviously the biggest trend of the last 10, 15, and it really kicked in I'd say about ten years ago.  Kind of a Facebook, MySpace fight, and Facebook won around 2005, 6, 7, 8.  Okay.  So that's one trend you want to stack, what we're doing.  Make sure you keep that in mind in your ideas.

Number two, another trend according to the Milken Institute, this very smart think tank, is education, online education, and online education last year grew 54 billion dollar industries, so a very big industry, online education, and it now grew in one year, from 14 to 15, 2015, it grew over a hundred billion, it doubles in a year.  Any time you [42:07] ______ at that scale, not like one billion to two billion.  Like fifty billion to a hundred billion, you want to stack that trend, and so education in some form.  What's another trend? People, and this is not a new trend, but it's accelerating.  People want to live longer.  People want to be healthy.  So those are three trends, and you're kind of doing that, so now the question is, what's the next trend? There’s got a few at the top of my head.  You know, you're measuring yourself in health.  The concept wearables and things like this.  And this is not new to you, but I'm just kind of brainstorming here.  MyFitnessPal was started, I just read an interesting, and their story and they start MyFitnessPal as an app where you can put in your diet, what you're eating, what you're exercising in kind of track.  It's a little bit of social network.  They just sold it to Under Armour, bought them for 475 million dollars, so almost the half a billion dollars.  So another thing to stack is social, okay? Apps, so you've got a social element where people interact.  I think we've seen this for the last ten years.  It's something to add into the ingredients of your future investment.  Apps, certainly a dedicated environment on people's phones.

For sure, another thing, Mobile.  Mobile's going to run the future.  People are not going to be using desktop computers much anymore, even if you think about yourself.  Where do you check your e-mail when you're not at work? You're always basically checking it on your phone, so you just stack, stack, stack, stack and other trends.  I think longevity stuff is going to be big, there's a change in there.

Ben:  When it comes to longevity, what are you specifically, just with what you've been exposed to, 'cause I know you're aware of your own health and you're aware of this concept of wanting to live as long and as high quality of life as possible while you're doing it.  When it comes to pills, self-quantification devices, companies, tests, stuff like that, are you personally doing anything for yourself when it comes to longevity actively? Like are you using astragalus root or are you doing a specific form of self-quantification or blood testing that you think everybody should be doing or you think is highly beneficial and gives you a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to longevity?

Tai:  I've done the research, it seems to me by far the most science around reversing aging is lifting weights, so try to lift weights every day.  I saw that with my dad, he was one of the first bodybuilders in America.  My dad always looked 20 years, now he's about 80 so he doesn't quite look as young or he's not quite 80, but what that reason he's 77.  And so now, finally age caught up to him, but my dad at 65, he could literally trick girls, and they're like 30 years old.  Not trick them, but he could go on a date, and just be like, I'm 40, and girls could not figure it out until later.  Then he's like they'll get mad at me like when they'd figure out I'm 60.

I didn't grow up with my dad, but I saw him, met him later in life, and he had this picture of this very famous girl.  I won't say who it is, but it's an A-list actress on TV.  Everybody knows who she is, and she was like 28 and my dad was like 60, and I was like what happened? He's like yeah, we went out for a while, then when my friends said, you know, Ernie's 65, and she freaked out, got mad at me for not telling her that he had told her he was 40.  So weightlifting, and there's a lot of science, University I think of Utah or New Mexico did a study about your telomeres changing size.  Weights is one thing that reversed that, so I think that.  Now a lot of people don't like that answer 'cause it entails work.

Ben:  Right, and if I can throw this in here before you move on to your next point, something that I recently brought up on a podcast was that you can actually take that one step farther.  With weightlifting, and they've done some really interesting study in of all things, guinea pigs, they've shown that it's not actually like what's called hypertrophy or satellite-cell proliferation  or like an increase in your muscle fiber number or size that is what imparts those longevity benefits, and it's actually potentially deleterious to longevity to have what's called Cardiomegaly or like a bunch of hypertrophy in your heart or to  have a lot of muscle that you got to carry around and cool.  And what is more important and lends you even more longevity is to do the type of weightlifting that gives you like wiry, powerful muscles that are very strong related to their size.  And so the idea is that you want to not just lift, but lift specifically for strength and power, not for mass.

Tai:  Yes, and I'll tell you this, I read a great book. It's called, forget the name I'll try to get it to you.  Don't sit.  Basically I have eliminated sitting.  There's a head of a male clinic, wrote a book.  I think it's called, it's on my Instagram.  I did a Book-of-the-Day.  Basically don't sit more than 3 hours a day.  This is the thing, he says this is the number one thing killing people, it's sitting.  Everything that you don't want to have happen in your body, so that's hard to turn up in a business.  He's the guy who kind of came up with these treadmill deaths that I use, these lifespan ones.  There's a good one, I don't make any money of it so that's my unbiased recommendation.  The ones, I've tested a few.  So going back to how you can productize this as business in turn as business, online education is a great one, but a specific niche ones like creating one around longevity, creating one for sixty-year-olds that want, you know.  There's different broad categories, I think another thing.  I do thing supplements are big and can be grown into.

If you look at P90X, they are doing something I like, they just passed up billion dollars in revenue.  They're doing online education with their P90X.  In addition to that, they've got this shakeology and this and that, and so there's so much power to just a simple product you sell over and over like shakeology.  I think that's their big seller, and you end up with a billion dollar company.  So I think things that produce stress get people [48:38] ______ to move some supplements that are around 'cause some supplements are almost like a placebo effect.  Sure they help, but you just can't take a supplement and sit on your butt all day.  So the supplement business I think will be huge in health because what it'll do, it's kind of like Dumbo's feather.  Either Dumbo needed the feather in the Disney movie, so he could fly.  He thought, but it wasn't the feather, right?

So the supplement adds some value to people.  There's no doubt a good supplement worth its weight in cost, but the supplement drives, gives them a physical thing in their hand.  Then you bring the education behind it, and you change mindset.  I'm all about, you know, my parent company of all my businesses is called knowledge society, and I believe we're ushering in the time.  We've been in the information society where you can google anything you want to get information, but businesses that show people how to go from information to knowledge, and all knowledge is information and action.  So if it takes a supplement to give people, if it takes a wearable, that's great.  I think those are not the core business that I'm interested in to grasp of my trend.  I'm interested in changing how people think, and if you can change how people think, this is what will revolutionize fitness, and you use the Wearable, you use the app, you use the supplement as the vehicle to get something.  People generally need something tangible on their hand to get excited about it, so that's my take on that.

Ben:  Yeah, makes sense.  In changing the way people think, I mean one of the things that you brought up as far as rapidly growing categories is this online education.  I mean, we have everything from Khan Academy to Udemy to iTunes University out there now that allow you to digest a great deal of information and even educate yourself online in a way.  If you had children, how would you educate them?

Tai:  Massive reward, I mean, I can answer this question.  Our education system is not only not that effective.  It's anti-science.  It is just so non-scientific that it boggles my mind because teachers are smart, the academics, right, and the text books are smart.  But they're forgetting one thing.  It's called behavioral economics.  There's a great book called “Misbehaving” by a guy named Thaler, and these are all Nobel Prize winning guys, and people don't react like you think.  So you can't say to a student, a kid, “Hey.  This is going to be good for you in 30 years, learn Calculus.”  I mean, this experiment had been run.  You can just think back to your own education, unless you're an engineer or a rocket scientist.  What do you remember of Seventh grade? I'll tell you what you remember, you had a crush on, or the guy, the kids.  You know, you being popular or you being bullied.  You remember one great teacher that had an impact by what they did.  So this antiquated way of raising kids, I hope it goes, and it's not just raising kids.  It's all humans, so what you want to do is remember the twenty five ways your kids will decide on every path in their life.  They come in a hierarchy, and the second one is pain.  So schools now use number two.  They go, “summer's over, back to exams, having to wake up early.”  Pain, pain, pain, pain, oh, you know why you should learn this? So you do good on a painful exam.  It doesn't work, so what works is lead through reward.

I did a video on YouTube which is now almost the most watched video in human history.  It passed 500 million views this year, and that's a mix of us.   We advertised it, it went viral, and blah, blah, and it's me in my garage with a Lamborghini that I bought.  I really, sometimes people think I rented it.  I didn't rent it for the shoot, I actually had a Lamborghini and Ferrari and Maserati and all these cars that I collect off, but I had just bought all these book shelves.  The video was an afterthought.  I didn't set this up.  I was literally in London, and one of my assistants is like, “Tai, we have about two thousand books here that you've ordered.  New ones, we have nowhere to put them at your house”, and I said put bookshelves in my garage.  That's some empty space 'cause I already have three other libraries now.  So I said, do it there, and then I had the Lamborghini.  I was just in there one day, so I'm going to shoot a little selfie on my iPhone, and I shot it and it said basically people watch it and go, Lamborghini? I want that, obviously a lot of young guys like this.  And then they see, I go but what I like more than my Lamborghini is these books, and these books are what's shown me how to create an income that would [53;21] ______ allow me if I wanted to, to buy a Lamborghini.  And so it lead with reward, and there's not a video on YouTube beside Justin Bieber and some of these ones that's been more viewed.  And so it's not because I'm special, I'm not.  It's not because I'm a master marketer.  I know a thing or two about marketing, but it's because when you lead with reward.  Big things happen.

A guy, my brother did his birthday party at my house.  That was about a month ago, and there was a lot of people I didn't know at my house, and there was a kid walking out of my house.  I mean a guy walking out of my house and said, “Hey Tai.  I want to tell you a story.  You don't know me but I'm a school teacher in here, in the rough part of LA, in like South Central LA”, and he said a kid the other day was walking around with a textbook, and he said you got to know something about this kid.  He's been in and out of juvenile hall his whole junior high in high school.  He's a trouble maker.  You know, Fs in everything, and he had a book.  And it wasn't a book I had assigned him, and I say, what's going on?  You reading now.  He said yeah, saw this commercial.  I saw this YouTube video where this guy said I could get a Lamborghini if I read a book.  Now I don't say that, but that was the association that this guy took, and he said this kid, nobodies been able to get him to read.  And what got him to read the thought of, wait a second.  There's something better out there for me.  All those big dreams I have, I want to focus on those, and then the rest is just to get to it.

So you tell your kid, hey, you take your kid.  I'll give you an example.  Take your kids to Beverly Hills.  Take him to a mansion.  Let's say you have a kid who loves that.  Take your kid, let's say your kid loves music.  Take him to a Justin Bieber concert, whatever your thing is, then say, let me tell you the backstory of Justin Bieber.  This guy, Scooter Braun, out of Atlanta with a twenty-something year old kid.  He knew about business, he had been a nightclub promoter, and he knew business, and so he saw Justin Bieber on a YouTube video at 12 years old, and he said, I'm going to sign that kid.  And he signed Justin Bieber, and now Scooter Braun sits on an empire of about 300 million dollars.  He's business partners with Justin Bieber, and he runs music.  He runs Ariana Grande and all these big names.  You want to be like that guy? Let's get you like Scooter Braun.  Now one little thing, Scooter Braun knew a thing or two about math 'cause he needed to know business math.  And your kid will do the business math when you'll lead with reward, trust me.  The kids in juvenile hall will read texts, and that's not, I get 3 to 5,000 e-mails a day.  A lot of them from parents, from people in and out of prison, and they're saying the same thing.  They're going, this new approach where you lead with the reward, don't force your kids to do stuff.  The Amish are the masters.  I'll tell you the funniest, I got to go in a few minutes, I know you got to go.  I'm going to tell you something, the greatest parenting lesson I ever learned.

I lived with this Amish guy named Sam Chuck, one of the greatest people I've ever met on the planet.  Lived with him two years in Virginia at an Amish community, and he had six kids.  He had a small family for the Amish, very small.  Six is teeny.  But his youngest son, David, did something wrong.  I forget what it was.  The Amish very rarely use physical spanking.  Once or twice maybe in the kid's lifetime, they'll get spanked.  So they're not completely anti-spanking but basically they think it's kind of like training horses.  If you hit a horse a lot to train it, it's going to get gunshot and not be a good horse.  But once in a while you got to give a little pop to a horse, so his son did something wrong.  I think his son didn't get the eggs, so, no, didn't milk the cow.  That's what it was.  So David came in for breakfast and Sam said, how'd the morning go and did you milk the cow? Your mom said there's no milk here in the bucket.  The kid says, I was too tired, I forgot.  And Sam said, you know, that cow, it hurts it when you don't milk it and you got to do that, and he said, you know what? Because you did that, you’re not going to get to come on the work crew with me and your brothers.  We're going to build a log house, and you're not going to be able to come with us, and David wept.  That was the greatest punishment, was you can't do work with us because David perceived working with his brothers and dad as the ultimate reward.  I'm working with big guys, and Joel Salatin said, “Tai, 'cause he's kind of from that Amish mentality even though he's not Amish.  I met parents who punish their kids”, and he goes, “Oh my.”  They hugged in at that moment.  The second you punish your kids with, “You got to do the dishes”, you've rewired that work is bad, and he's like you might as well brainwash your kids to be the worst people on the planet the moment you do that.  You want to do it Sam Chuck's way.  The reward, and then the next thing you know, kids are doing what they need to be doing without you pushing them.  Like what Voltaire said, it's not enough to conquer.  You have to seduce, and that's what it is.

Ben:  So in terms of, and I know you need to go pretty soon, and so this will be kind of the last little poking question, prodding question I have for you but, the concept of reward seems like more of a model, but as far as like unschooling versus private schooling versus home schooling versus Waldorf versus Montessori, et cetera.  Do you like any of those models in particular?

Tai:  I know Montessori produces a tremendous amount of amazing kids.  Jeff Bezos is Montessori.  I know that, here's what I would do.  I would use DNA stuff, so what's our DNA built to learn in the first, let's say seven years? Language? Social skills? Music stuff? So I would go heavy on that stuff.  I mean, is there a human alive that would be mad at their parents if their parents made sure you know six languages? No, it's kind of common sense.  What's the stuff you wish people had done to you when you were young? The golden rule of parenting, do that, I wish.  I'll tell you what I wish.  I taught myself piano at sixteen.  I'm a decent piano player, I'm no concert pianist.  But had I started at six, I'd probably be a concert pianist, and I'm like mom.  You know my mom was a single mom, so she had a lot on her plate.  But I'm like mom, wait ‘til you're six? If you had made the piano, like something that I couldn't play that much, or like Tai the pianos only for awesome time when you do really well.  She would have tricked me into playing the piano.

My mom tricked me into eating, I love pretty much healthy food.  I don't have a super problem with that.  I remember as a five year old, I saw the movie “The Hulk”, or the TV show, my mom's like avocado will turn you green like The Hulk.  I remembered going nuts eating avocado my whole life.  I still love avocado.  At an early age, 0 to 7, rewire the brain of your children.  If it's Montessori school or home schooling, I don't like to get into that framework because there's so many different varieties.  Like some home schooling is horrible because the parents don't know how to teach, and it's a bad environment.  It's definitely better to be in a private school.  Well at a private school, it depends on the teacher and the philosophy, but the end game that you should never deviate from is make them excited to learn and then follow the natural cycles.

Very young is a very good time to be active, do a lot of active stuff.  You learn social skills at a very young age, and you also learn language and music quick.  So I would go heavy on that, and then as you get older.  You know, math and things like that start to become easier, so and then I'll tell you this.  By the time the kids are twelve, fourteen is when your IQ peaks, and people argue with me.  I don't know why because it's been proven over and over by Alfred Binet.  He started it, the guy who invented the modern IQ test, and it's been confirmed.  Here's two types of IQ.  You have the Static IQ which is the like raw brain power.  It peaks at fourteen, so when your kid's twelve, treat him like an adult.  You know the Amish kids at twelve.  I often say with these employees I hire, I wish, I don't say this out loud 'cause I don't want to insult them, a twelve year old Amish kid is more responsible than any thirty year old I've ever hired in the modern world because the Amish are like, you're twelve, you're basically an adult.  You look back George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, all these people are going to Yale at twelve.  So by the time the kid's twelve or thirteen, keep in mind their DNA.  They're peaking at their IQ.  Be like Steven Spielberg's parents at seven.  They're like, you like film? They gave him lenses and this, and he was making his first movie before he was ten.  Warren Buffet liked finance? By seven, they had him taught reading finance books.  Bill Gates liked computer software at twelve, his parents gave him that, and 19 years later, he became the richest man in the world.  Sixteen years straight, okay? He dominated the world because [1:02:19] ______ and he went to private school.  So you have examples of private school.  I think Warren Buffet went to public school.  It's not that as much in my, that’s the form.  It's the substance, and the substance is reward, reward, reward.  That's it.  You ask yourself, is that rewarding? When you were six, was that rewarding? If the answer's no, then don't do it that way.  So when I was six, my mom would have forced me to have a piano lesson.  I would not have done it, but I'll tell you what, or she would have forced me to eat guacamole when I didn't, but just showing me one Hulk movie got me hooked on guacamole the rest of my life.  She was a genius on that, you know?

My mom was smoking.  My mom was like, you want to smoke? Go ahead.  She didn't try to conquer me.  I remember smoking one time, I was like seven.  I threw up.  So I've never been interested in cigarettes since then, versus parents who go can't. You can't do it if all the other kids smoke, if you can't do.  I'll just go like do it.  Do it, and then do like smoke ten.  And Tony Robbins has that thing where a guy was like, I'm addicted to chocolate.  Can you help me, and it was a three day conference, and Tony Robbins said great eat chocolate.  And he made the guy eat chocolate like every hour for three days, and the guy was like throwing up and then got all those visceral reaction, and the guy now associates reward with not eating chocolate.  The guy never ate chocolate again.

Ben:  Yeah, that's interesting.  That whole concept of using rewards, I like it though.  Both negative and positive rewards.  One thing I'm careful not to do is not to use exercise as punishment for my kids.  That's one thing I learned about from you is that you actually use something as a reward for exercise, but you don't use exercise as a punishment, so you know, you talked about Arnold Schwarzenegger, how he would do a bunch of pushups before breakfast, and breakfast was his reward for exercise, but if my kids get in trouble, I'm careful not to use exercise as a punishment.  Usually I'll use something like chores or even as you have alluded to taking away something that might be a chore or that might be, you know, for example, spending time with the family or maybe they got to eat dinner by themselves, you know.  Things like that, but yeah.  It's really interesting how these rewards can work for or against you depending how you use them.

Tai, you're always chock-full of really interesting takes on things and very, very good advice.  So if you are listening in to this episode with Tai, everything we've talked about, I've been taking notes.  I'll put them over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai4.  It's bengreenfieldfitness.com/TAI, the number 4.  I'll also link if you want to just tune in to previous episodes I've done with Tai.  You can listen to part one, part two, part three.  I'll link to all of those there as well as Tai's “67 Steps To Getting Anything You Want Out Of Life: Health, Wealth, Love & Happiness”.  I'll link to his “Millionaire Mentor Program” where he mentors you in business and also his retreats and his seminars that he does in Hollywood, London, New York, et cetera.  So Tai, thanks for your time today, and for coming on the show, man.

Tai:  Well thanks for having me, I always learn a lot from you, and hope to see you soon in person, my friend.

Ben:  Alright man, sounds good.  Take it easy.

Tai: Alright.  Talk to you soon.

 

 

Tai Lopez is an investor, partner, or advisor to over 20 multi-million dollar businesses. Through his book club and podcasts, Tai shares advice on how to achieve health, wealth, love, and happiness with 1.4 million people in 40 countries.

At age 16, Tai realized that life was too complex to figure out on his own.

So Tai wrote a letter to the wisest person he knew, his grandfather – a scientist – and asked for the answers to life’s hard questions.

Tai was disappointed with his grandfather’s reply. There was no “secret formula.” The letter simply said,

“Tai, the modern world is too complicated. You’ll never find all the answers from just one person. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a handful of people throughout your life who will point the way.”

But one week later his grandfather sent a package containing an old, dusty set of eleven books with a note,

“Start by reading these.”

That began Tai’s habit of reading on his search for what he calls the “Good Life”: the balance of the four major pillars of life – health, wealth, love, and happiness.

Over the years, Tai sought out the secrets to that “Good Life” by setting up his life as a series of experiments. He began by first reading thousands of books from the most impactful figures in history Freud, Aristotle, Gandhi, Charlie Munger, Sam Walton, Descartes, Darwin, Confucius, and countless others.

He spent two-and-a-half years living with the Amish, spent time working at a leper colony in India, and helped Joel Salatin pioneer grass-fed, sustainable agriculture on Polyface Farms.

He then joined the long list of entrepreneur college dropouts and ended up completely broke (sleeping on his mom’s couch) until he talked five, multi-millionaire entrepreneurs into mentoring him.

Tai went on to become a Certified Financial Planner and worked in the world of finance before becoming a founder, investor, advisor, or mentor to more than 20 multi-million dollar businesses while settling in the Hollywood Hills.

He appeared on various TV and radio shows, spoke at top global universities like The London Business School and the University of Southern California, and created one of the top downloaded podcasts and YouTube channels, called “The Grand Theory of Everything.”

In order to get feedback from an even larger audience, Tai started what is now one of the world’s largest book clubs that reaches 1.4 million people in 40 countries with his “Book-Of-The-Day” free email newsletter.

Tai recently summarized all he has learned from his mentors and compiled them into a series of ‘mentor shortcuts’ he calls, “The 67 Steps.

He also created an alternative to the traditional business school. This “Millionaire Mentor program” program combines the best of self-learning with the best of a University degree without all the downsides of burdensome costs and inefficient methods.

In this podcast episode with Tai, you'll discover:

-Tai's take on morning routines, and the concept of “chunking your day”…

-Which time of day is best to be lazy and take a break…

-If Tai could invest in anything right now that would make people healthier or live longer, what he would invest in…

-What kind of education Tai would give his kids if he had kids…

-And much more!

Want more of Tai?

You can listen to Part 1 of this series here, in which Tai and I talk about multi-tasking, reprogramming your genetics and checking your e-mail less.

You can listen to Part 2 here, in which Tai and I talk about how to know when you’re actually making enough money, and when you can stop focusing on income, start focusing more on life, love and happiness, and how to strike the ideal balance between being overambitious and underambitious.

You can listen to Part 3 here, in which Tai and I discuss personal finances – particularly in the wake Tony Robbins is leaving with his new book “Money”, and how Tai feels we should protect and grow our wealth, and exactly what Tai’s personal investment philosophy is.

Resources we discuss in this episode:

Tai’s retreats and public seminars in Hollywood, London and New York

-Tai’s Millionaire Mentor program

-Tai’s online video series: 67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness

The Mindful Athlete book

 

 

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