In this special episode of The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special, Ben sits down with Tai Lopez, founder and CEO of Knowledge Society, a new program that focuses on mentoring entrepreneurs across the country. They talk about how he got started in his career, why he didn t go to college, and how he built a business that helps hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. learn how to be a better entrepreneur. You can see all of Tai's programs over at TaiLopez.com. You can also check out all of his stuff at taylopez.co/knowledgesociety, where he has a brand new program called Knowledge Society where he helps people create a community of likeminded entrepreneurs and mentors them to help them build a better life. The Knowledge Society is a program where you can get a free 3-month trial of the Knowledge Society program, where you'll get access to all of the program's programs, including Knowledge Society's programs and all of its resources, as well as access to Tai Lopez's mentorship program. Learn more about Knowledge Society and how you can apply it to your life, your career, and everything else on earth, including money, health, relationships, and anything else you want to know. Thanks to our sponsor, ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is rated the number 1 VPN service by TechRadar, and it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you ever use public Wi-Fi, you'll want to keep your data safe and secure online, and if you don't want to hand over your data to a third party, Express VPN is the answer to protect your online activity today! Find out how to get 3 months for free with ExpressVPN, visit expressvpn.com slash ben.com/ ben.That's E-X-P-R-E-S-VPN for 3 months FREE with a one-year package! For three months free with a One-Year Package! visit expressVPN.COMING SO MUCH MORE! and learn more about Express VPN, visit ben.me/KnowledgeSociety.COMEDY.COM/BenShaperson and find out more about the program called "Knowledge Society. Ben Shapiro's new program, Knowledge Society on the Ben Shapiro Show, where we're going to talk about all things else on Earth, including the Law of 33% and the Law Of 33% and much more.
00:00:16.000Well, here we are on the Ben Shapiro Sunday special, and we are here with Tai Lopez.
00:00:20.000You can check out all of his stuff at tailopez.com.
00:00:23.000Ben Shapiro has a brand new program called Knowledge Society we're going to talk about, plus everything else on earth.
00:00:27.000But first, let's talk about your internet security.
00:00:30.000With all the recent news about online security breaches, it's hard not to worry about where my data goes.
00:00:34.000Making an online purchase, simply accessing your email could put your private information at risk.
00:00:38.000You are being tracked online by social media sites and marketing companies and your mobile or internet provider.
00:00:42.000Not only can they record your browsing history, they often will sell it to other corporations who want to profit from that information, which is why I've decided to take back my privacy.
00:01:41.000And so for folks who don't know, Tai Lopez is kind of the entrepreneurial guru for probably hundreds of thousands of people across the United States.
00:01:49.000You can see all of his programs over at TaiLopez.com.
00:01:52.000He has a brand new one called Knowledge Society we're going to talk about.
00:01:54.000But Tai, how did you get started in this business?
00:01:56.000Because your career path, shall we say, is somewhat unconventional.
00:02:30.000But yeah, I mean, I think that at some point in my life, the most unconventional part has been my education and how I use the education system.
00:02:39.000So I went through the regular kind of education system.
00:02:42.000But then I was 18, graduated high school, was going to go to college, and a guy called me up, a guy named Joel Salatin, and said, do you want me to mentor you?
00:03:19.000I worked 12 hours a day for, I ended up being there for about two years.
00:03:23.000And it changed my life because instead of being
00:03:26.000In a system where I had lectures and professors talking to me and you're partying and all that, I was 16 hours a day with somebody 20 years ahead of me.
00:03:38.000And I did a TEDx talk and it kind of went viral and I think the reason was, I told people, if you want to do big things in life, you have to follow this thing I call the law of 33%.
00:03:49.000So you spend 33% of your time around people
00:04:33.000Some of them went to college, but I was like, what's a common thread that they all have?
00:04:38.000And found out that Albert Einstein bumped into this guy, I think his name was Max Levinson, who was a mathematician, an older mathematician.
00:04:46.000Every Thursday, he would go to lunch and talk math with this guy from age 16 on.
00:04:52.000Alexander the Great, who maybe was the greatest conqueror of all time, his dad hired a mentor for him at age, I think, 14 to 16.
00:05:46.000How did you wind up moving from two years with the Amish to, you know, multi-million dollars a year with 500 acres over in Virginia?
00:05:54.000Yeah, people often say, they're like, because I did a video in 2014, 2015.
00:06:00.000I had bought a Lamborghini, and I posted it, and it ended up, I think the total views, there's a few versions of it, is 600 million views on YouTube.
00:06:08.000It's one of the most viewed things besides music videos, right?
00:06:12.000So people are like, how'd you end up from no electricity, living like that for two years, to Beverly Hills?
00:06:20.000And I'm like, I have no idea actually, but life leads you down a path that you don't always understand, except in hindsight.
00:07:46.000The reason I went from living with no electricity, focused on, you know, living in the country, close to the land, nature, to the city, was I realized I needed to make money to have freedom.
00:07:59.000And the average person in America, I read, is saving about $2 for every $100 they make.
00:08:05.000And that's a great way to create a feudal society.
00:08:09.000Charlie Munger says, don't try to think of how to have a good life.
00:08:14.000He says, use the principle of inversion.
00:08:17.000Try to think of how to have a bad life and then don't do that.
00:08:20.000So he goes, you want to have a bad life?
00:08:22.000For every hundred dollars you make, save one or two of them and spend 98.
00:08:26.000And so I grew up, you know, I was born to a single mom.
00:08:29.000My dad was actually in prison when I was born.
00:08:31.000I was born kind of in the inner city in Long Beach.
00:10:19.000And you know, Joel Salatin, I'm not as political as you or even my first mentor, Joel Salatin, but he's libertarian and I tend to be more libertarian, probably partly because of that, but partly because it makes sense.
00:10:29.000And so now it's the replacement of common sense with the replacement of a big government.
00:10:35.000That's going to be the common sense for you, but it's not.
00:10:38.000In fact, the government's designing the school curriculum that says, let's focus on the California state bird and forget the rest.
00:10:45.000So I want to ask you about, you mentioned these four M's, the big motivating factors.
00:10:49.000So I'm going to kind of softly positive fifth M, which I think, and I want to ask you about this, which is meaning.
00:10:56.000So you talked about, you know, the idea of mastery and you talked about money and you talked about mating and you talked about freedom, essentially.
00:11:08.000We can have all these things, and we do.
00:11:10.000We live in the richest society in the history of the world, the freest society in the history of the world, and yet rates of depression are rising, rates of suicide are rising.
00:11:17.000Where are people missing the meaning in life?
00:11:19.000Because, you know, as somebody who's also very libertarian-minded, I'm very much in favor of free markets, and I'm very much in favor of earning and entrepreneurship.
00:11:26.000We'll get back to all that in a second.
00:13:56.000It's like a Jewish Sabbath with some work, yeah.
00:13:58.000So maybe better than, so my humanistic answer is I'm seeking to be a happy, but you know, the Amish are, their thing is like there's going to be another life after death.
00:14:11.000So they don't take themselves maybe as seriously on planet Earth.
00:14:14.000So I would say I'm not as religious as the, as the Amish.
00:14:20.000But that's a good answer, too, if you can pull it off.
00:14:22.000I don't know that, when I live at the Amish, I went after Joel Soutz, and I ended up at the Amish for over two years, and I actually own a ranch in the middle of an Amish community now, and I sometimes think that, you know the Bible story, the Garden of Eden, right?
00:14:40.000And some people think it's literal, and some people think it's allegorical, but the story is that they were in this innocent bliss,
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00:17:21.000So I think you have to weigh, and when you pick up a book that someone recommends, and it's the book of the day for me, and I realize it's not that good,
00:17:31.000I don't finish it, and people think that's controversial.
00:17:34.000Oh, Ty, you don't really finish a book a day.
00:17:36.000I got the only good, the rest of the book is just, they couldn't sell.
00:17:40.000They had one good premise that was eight pages, but the publisher's like, we can't sell an eight-page book for 25 bucks, so fill it up with anecdotal stories.
00:17:51.000It's like when I read these books now.
00:17:56.000I'm going, once I find out their premise in the chapter, I just move on because I know they're only going to put stories in there supporting what they say.
00:18:58.000But he said, but no one implements it.
00:19:01.000So when you're reading a book and you're 350 pages in and you realize it's garbage, but there might be a little bit of nuggets in the last 150, but the last 150 is three hours of reading.
00:19:16.000You've reached the marginal, like, you're done.
00:20:46.000Go to the back of Barnes & Noble in the little psychology sections and history sections and you find these books that you're like, this is the greatest thing I've ever read.
00:20:56.000The kind of social psychology history?
00:20:59.000If you have to pick topics, just for fun to read, what's your topic?
00:21:02.000I mean, I love history, but I love psychology.
00:21:05.000In the last, I'd say, last five years, one of the most critical mentors I ever had, and a lot of people associate me with making money in entrepreneurship, but this guy named Dr. David Buss.
00:21:17.000If you want to read a book that will blow your mind, it's his textbook called Evolutionary Psychology by Dr. David Buss.
00:21:23.000It's what's used at Harvard and Yale and all this.
00:22:54.000And so you need to have a thick plastic ball around your life
00:22:58.000Because if the wrong people get inside that, you will have, again, if I wanted to curse my enemy, I'm like, may horrible people befriend you, become your business partners, because each of them will cause a self-destruction in your life.
00:23:12.000And no one talks about how to read people.
00:23:14.000I mean, I created this personality quiz.
00:23:45.000And it will, and I tell people, before you have somebody be your business partner, have them take tyloquest.com slash quiz.
00:23:51.000Before you go on a date with somebody, be like, hey, will you take this quiz?
00:23:55.000It's insane, the mental health problems in the world right now.
00:24:02.000To speak to politics, since that's a big subject of yours, almost everything people talk about in politics is related to personality traits.
00:25:13.000Well, there are certainly biological components to politics.
00:25:16.000There are certain studies that tend to be a little bit biased with regard to self-quizzing.
00:25:22.000For example, if you look at these tests that suggest that authoritarianism is a more right-wing trait, that very much is tied to the questions that are being asked.
00:25:30.000When you ask, for example, do you think that people should be shut down because they don't believe in climate change, you'll see that the left suddenly looks a lot more authoritarian than the right does.
00:25:39.000There are certain biological studies that are really fascinating about, for example, if you smell something dirty and then you, this is for everybody, if you smell something dirty and then you ask people how they would vote on certain questions, they suddenly become more conservative because they're trying to avoid the dirty.
00:25:55.000So let's talk a little bit about the mentorship stuff, because obviously you have MentorBox and you have all these programs that are, you're obviously talking a lot about mentorship.
00:26:00.000What's the best way for somebody who doesn't have a mentor to find one?
00:28:18.000Abraham Lincoln or something like that.
00:28:20.000Yeah, and I think that it's changed for me a little bit, too, in terms of the stuff that I envy is knowledge in certain areas, not even effectiveness in certain areas.
00:28:27.000I feel like we're pretty effective at reaching people, and I'm not sure who I'd look to in the space who is better than we are at it.
00:28:34.000But there are certain areas of knowledge where I feel like I lack.
00:28:36.000And so there, I'm trying to constantly reach out to people who know more than I do.
00:28:39.000And knowing what you don't know is obviously a major area of being able to find the right guy to teach you, I think.
00:28:44.000Well, I would say this is my simple answer.
00:28:47.000Talk to 10 people with potential, one will say yes.
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00:31:47.000And yet, it seems like I've talked to a wide variety of people across a variety of political viewpoints right here on this show.
00:31:52.000I mean, I've talked to you, and I've talked to Jordan Peterson, I've talked to Joe Rogan, I've talked to Eric Weinstein, right?
00:31:59.000Just a bunch of people from right to middle to left.
00:32:02.000And they're all very successful people.
00:32:04.000They all seem to have this very individualistic perspective.
00:32:07.000Even if they are Democrats, where do you think policy and politics and sort of perspective on individual responsibility, where do those line up?
00:32:16.000Well, I think the first thing to know about politics, if you study history at all, even at a minor level, politicians haven't been good people for a long time.
00:32:23.000They're probably not going to be good people.
00:32:25.000I'm always, like, amazed that people are like, you're not going to believe this.
00:34:23.000Why do you think people are putting so much focus on the 20%?
00:34:26.000I mean, it's pretty clear right now people are distracting themselves to an enormous extent with the give and take of politics.
00:34:32.000People are engaged like they've never been, which is great for my business, but it's not necessarily great for theirs.
00:34:36.000I mean, if you're spending all your time on Twitter agonizing over whether nuclear war with North Korea is imminent when it clearly is not, then you might be wasting your time.
00:34:43.000Why do you think people are so interested in engaging with politics, particularly now?
00:34:52.000I think it's a well-veiled procrastination.
00:34:56.000It's a well-veiled attempt at procrastination.
00:34:58.000You just go, well, I could focus on building skills so I can make more money, or I could whine about this person not doing something for me.
00:36:01.000You could even argue that I think the biggest thing that people should talk about, what interests me in politics and what really moves the needle is demographics.
00:36:48.000So what do you think the future of politics looks like then?
00:36:50.000I mean, given the fact that our replacement rates in the United States are low, we're actually higher than most of the industrialized world.
00:36:56.000The rest of the industrialized world is kind of screwed, which is why they're bringing in tremendous numbers of immigrants.
00:37:00.000Where do you think we go here, given the burgeoning debt, the aging population, all the rest of it?
00:37:05.000Man, Will Durant says nations are born
00:40:04.000Now, what if also mental health rates, because of the disintegration of role models, family, communities, the Amish have community, now we're, there's too much urban life.
00:40:15.000Urban life is not as healthy as you think.
00:42:17.000How do you resolve the tension between
00:42:34.000The need for freedom that you talked about earlier, this individualistic society that we've created where we want to do what we want without any consequences, and the fact that we do actually need to embed ourselves in social structures that allow for us to thrive because it feels restrictive, but it's also what allows you to thrive in a lot of cases.
00:44:38.000And then I go to the farm where it's kind of like, I need to wake up at five in the morning.
00:44:44.000I dress a certain, you know, it's more conservative.
00:44:46.000And all these boundaries actually make me feel better.
00:44:50.000Let's talk about how you structure your day because you have a lot of advice for folks on sort of how to live, what's the most successful way to live.
00:45:27.000First thing I try to do is go, okay, Tye, there's too much to do.
00:45:33.000What's the one domino I push today that knocks down like a hundred dominoes?
00:45:38.000Because I do not want to push down a hundred one at a time.
00:45:40.000I got to hit one huge one that's real heavy and it knocks everyone down.
00:45:44.000So I think you have to know what your superpower is and do that 80% of the day.
00:45:49.000I used to believe in, you know, task management systems and Excel spreadsheets and you prioritize and you flip and every 15 minutes you do a new thing and you do, there's a thing, you know, there's all these different tools that people put forward to be productive and successful.
00:47:46.000You know, I've gotten to know Arnold Schwarzenegger a little bit, not super well, but I was in his kitchen and did like a 45 minute talk with him and I went to Australia a couple months ago, give a talk with him and I asked him this and he goes, I wake up at four in the morning, Ty, I read for one hour, five in the morning I ride my bike to the gym, by seven I've read an hour and I've got, you know,
00:48:12.000I've got a two-hour workout in and eating breakfast.
00:48:15.000That's a productive guy by seven in the morning.
00:48:45.000I meet people that spend all day socializing with friends and they, you know, entrepreneurs, they put off their work or people who put health and they lift weights.
00:48:53.000Oh, I'm going to get it in before I go to bed.
00:49:02.000For me, the biggest thing that I've realized, and this is a real change from earlier in my career, is when I was a lot younger, the tendency was to say yes to everything.
00:49:10.000So people want to get together, people want to offer you something to do for a career, you always say yes.
00:49:15.000Because you're so eager to get going that you just say yes.
00:49:17.000And it turns out that if you want to do work for free, then there's lots of work to be done for free.
00:49:22.000And then I started to realize that the more I said no, the more successful I was becoming.
00:49:26.000Because number one, it creates scarcity in the market.
00:49:47.000Not because it takes 45 minutes, but because it takes you 15 minutes to get into it, 15 minutes to get out of it, and by the time you can get on to the next thing, you've wasted an hour.
00:49:54.000So when you talk about the day planner, the most productive days that I've had are days when basically I get my work done in the morning and then I've got all day to do the stuff that I really want to get done for sure.
00:50:05.000You know a good bonus tip I'd give if I was advising myself again at 18?
00:51:37.000I think it's hard for me to get married sometimes because I had half my foot in the Amish world and country world and half my foot in Los Angeles.
00:51:46.000So it's like every time I meet a girl in L.A.
00:51:47.000that fits in in L.A., I'm like, here, come to the farm.
00:51:50.000And they're like, uh-oh, I don't like this.
00:52:35.000I thought that for Christians, this is going to offend a lot of people, but they're real Christians.
00:52:41.000And I don't think I ever met that before, like people who actually, like Jesus Christ says, you know, if somebody slaps you on one cheek, turn the other.
00:53:06.000You're one of the only people I ever asked me this, that I let ask me this, so a lot of people are gonna go right to this part of the podcast.
00:53:14.000I would say that I think religion's good.
00:53:34.000And I do think it's okay to read Richard Dawkins and it doesn't have to make you lose your faith.
00:53:40.000Even the smartest people in the world, even Stephen Hawking level people believe in weird things like multi-level, I mean not multi-level, multi-universe theory.
00:53:53.000So the thought that there's this spiritual thing going on and there's a God, it's kind of scientific in a way.
00:54:04.000In order to make spirituality work, and I think why it doesn't work maybe from, it hasn't worked at certain times in my life and for friends that I watch, if you don't, remember that hamster bubble?
00:54:14.000If your religion lets too loose of a group into it, you will get disenfranchised, you will get disenchanted with the group.
00:54:24.000So if you can pick, maybe it's what you have, small group of people,
00:54:30.000that really do what they say they're gonna do, then you can stick with it for a long time.
00:54:35.000I think, you know, you look at big megachurches in America, in Christian churches, and people go there, and halfway through it, they're like, wait a second, I know this person out here, Monday through Friday, they're out drinking and, you know, carrying on, and then on Sunday I see them and they're very spiritual.
00:55:33.000And he gave a bunch of reasons why he believed what he believed.
00:55:35.000I said, well, probably it has more to do with the fact we grew up 10 miles from each other in Los Angeles after 3,000 years of common history.
01:00:16.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Caromina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
01:00:30.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.