Tai Lopez details his unconventional path from a Virginia farm and Amish community to entrepreneurship, citing the "Law of 33%" on mentorship and the "Four Ms" of motivation rooted in evolutionary psychology. He critiques modern education for ignoring practical skills while advocating for strategic reading and addressing rising mental health issues through restored community structures. Ultimately, Lopez argues that genetic traits and demographic shifts drive societal changes, urging listeners to prioritize health, wealth, love, and happiness over trivial academic facts. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, here we are on the Ben Shapiro Sunday special, and we are here with Tai Lopez.
You can check out all of his stuff at tailopez.com.
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And one of them is openness to new experience and unconventionality.
And Dr. David Buss, a mentor of mine, he is, he says it's genetic.
So my mom is a super hippie.
So I think I became unconventional maybe in the womb.
Maybe it's something like that.
But 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.
So I went through the regular kind of education system.
But 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?
I'm doing a six-month apprenticeship.
He had a farm in Virginia.
It's like completely different because I grew up, I was born in LA.
And I said, I wonder if I should do this with my stepdad.
I had kind of a rough childhood, but one piece of good advice my stepdad gave me, he said, you can always go to college later.
You might not get a chance to do a mentorship with this guy.
And so I went up there for six months.
I lived in a little cabin in his backyard.
It's a 500 acre farm.
I worked 12 hours a day for, I ended up being there for about two years.
And it changed my life because instead of being In 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.
And 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%.
33%.
So you spend 33% of your time around people with less accomplishment with you.
Those are people maybe you mentor, you help, right?
Then you spend 33% of your time around people who are on your level.
Those become your friends, people you smoke cigars with or bubble cigars or whatever it is.
But the last 33% is what's missing in education and society.
It's where you spend 33% of your time around people 20 years ahead of you, shadowing them.
And I once in a few years ago, I made a list, like everybody that you think of as great people, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett.
And I was like, difference, Some of them went to college, but I was like, what's a common thread that they all have?
And found out that Albert Einstein bumped into this guy, I think his name was Max Levinson, who was a mathematician, an older mathematician.
Every Thursday, he would go to lunch and talk math with this guy from age 16 on.
Alexander 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.
And he's a pretty good mentor.
His name was Aristotle.
And Warren Buffett got a guy named Benjamin Graham.
And as I went through the list, I found in the top 40 people that you could say have done big things in our time, I think 39 of them.
attribute a lot of their success to mentors.
They don't attribute it to, oh, I took a social studies class.
Oh, I memorized things in seventh grade.
They attribute it to somebody who kind of held their hand and they shadowed through the education process.
So that's what I kind of did it, and I'm thankful that I tried that approach, I guess you could say.
But I would say, for me, my number one is this thing, movement, freedom.
And I've kind of been a free spirit.
The 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.
And the average person in America, I read, is saving about $2 for every $100 they make.
And that's a great way to create a feudal society.
Charlie Munger says, don't try to think of how to have a good life.
He says, use the principle of inversion.
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Try to think of how to have a bad life and then don't do that.
We teach you calculus, which will help you if you become an engineer.
I remember I was in a class, I remember learning in seventh grade, they made me memorize what the California state bird was.
I think it's the California condor, if I remember correctly.
That's right.
But I was thinking, then when I was like 25, I learned how to invest in real estate in the stock market, and I was thinking, I could have waited on the California state bird.
I feel like you can learn that at 60 and you'll still have an enriched life.
But you may want to teach kids before they're 18 how to do their taxes, how to invest, how to do real estate, how to sign a contract.
There's zero of that in school.
Even in college, I hire PhDs that are just morons.
Or actually, don't hire them.
I interview them.
And I'm thinking, get your money back, son.
Depending on who you ask, there's $1.2 trillion of recorded debt for college in the United States.
And they think if you count untracked loans from parents, we're talking $2 trillion in debt.
And people are coming out knowing nothing.
Common sense is no longer common.
Yeah, and so how does a society survive that doesn't know how to take care of themselves?
It ends up in a government state.
That becomes a solution.
And 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.
And so now it's the replacement of common sense with the replacement of a big government.
That's going to be the common sense for you, but it's not.
In fact, the government's designing the school curriculum that says, let's focus on the California state bird and forget the rest.
So I want to ask you about, you mentioned these four M's, the big motivating factors.
So I'm going to kind of softly positive fifth M, which I think, and I want to ask you about this, which is meaning.
So 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.
But where do you get your meaning?
What gets you up every day?
We can have all these things, and we do.
We 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.
Where are people missing the meaning in life?
Because, 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.
We'll get back to all that in a second.
But what gets you up in the morning?
And it can't just be money, because you've got a lot of it.
Otherwise, you would just retire, right?
And it can't just be freedom, because the truth is that you've got enough money to provide for you that freedom.
What makes you think, okay, I'm going to get up today and I'm going to go do some work?
I'll give you what I think is the greatest answer to this question.
And maybe the greatest book that nobody reads.
There's a book called Civilization is Discontents by Sigmund Freud.
And Sigmund Freud's been discredited in some ways.
But the man may be the smartest person you'll ever read if you read Civilization is Discontents.
And he says this question of what the meaning of life is has been asked time without end.
And nobody can give a satisfactory answer.
And he says maybe because there is no answer.
But he says, "I can tell you by the actions of we humans what our meaning is, and that is to be happy and to avoid pain." So it depends how deep you want to go.
I'm probably searching for happiness, and at the core of every human action of those four M's, people perceive, "If I get money, I'll be happier." If I get freedom, I'll be happier.
So I used to have a more complex answer, but now I give a cliche answer.
I'm probably searching for happiness and avoidance of unhappiness.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
Are we humans so differentiated that meaning is different for everybody?
I don't know, I think Sigmund Freud might be right.
Al Capone was seeking happiness in a distorted way, and so was, I just read the book of El Chapo.
This dude wanted to be happy.
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He did it, you know, by selling meth and all this stuff.
So 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.
And so that's their meaning.
So they don't take themselves maybe as seriously on planet Earth.
So I would say I'm not as religious as the, as the Amish.
But that's a good answer, too, if you can pull it off.
I 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?
And some people think it's literal, and some people think it's allegorical, but the story is that they were in this innocent bliss, Then they eat an apple.
And the apple was from the tree of knowledge, right?
Also, they knew lots of stuff.
And because they knew lots of stuff, they were kicked out forever and the flaming sword was there.
And I kind of feel like for me, since if I had been born Amish and never seen the outside world, I could just be happy with that.
But because I've been out in the modern world.
There's like a flame.
I see the happiness that they have, but I can't get past the sword.
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Okay, so speaking of entrepreneurship, let's get started with that video that has 600 million views.
You're a big reader, obviously.
You've talked about how you read a book a day.
What's your technique for reading?
First of all, I see you're really busy, right?
You walk around here, you got a big crew, and you've got people following you with cameras all the time.
Where do you find the time to read a book a day?
How long does it take you to read a book?
And how in-depth are you reading it versus skimming it?
So you don't need to read as many books as you think.
So in a book a day, I often read some of the great books over and over.
Maybe once a year.
I read Civilization is Discontents by Sigmund Freud probably 10 times a year.
It's that good.
So 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, I don't finish it, and people think that's controversial.
Oh, Ty, you don't really finish a book a day.
I'm like, yes, I did.
I got the only good, the rest of the book is just, they couldn't sell.
They 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.
I'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.
I really, for business, I think the greatest business people of all time were Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
And, you know, they're not the richest right now.
Jeff Bezos is, but they own a hundred brands.
They're the most diversified people.
They got $400 billion company, keep $150 billion in cash.
These guys are insanely smart.
And what Charlie Munger says is most smart people he meet understand the concept of opportunity cost, right?
People get it.
Okay.
But he said, but no one implements it.
So 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.
You know, if you're playing poker and after 30 minutes you can't figure out who the sucker in the room is, you're the sucker.
They put you there to make money from you.
When you walk in Barnes & Noble and you're like, oh, this book appeals to me that they Paid to have in the front.
You're the sucker in the room.
Go 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.
In 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.
If you want to read a book that will blow your mind, it's his textbook called Evolutionary Psychology by Dr. David Buss.
It's what's used at Harvard and Yale and all this.
It's insanely insightful.
Basically everything you've never understood in life, why people act the way they do, you'll be like, that makes sense.
So I like psychology because one of the biggest things they didn't teach us in school that they should have, is how to read people.
Because almost every trial, tribulation, traumatic event you have in life, it's not from an inanimate object.
Most people don't look back at their life and be like, you know what sucked in my life?
I stubbed my toe, I broke my foot on a rock falling.
Most people's thing is like, I married the wrong... They say the three biggest regrets of people.
Who they married, the career they chose, and the education they had.
Like 80% of people regret those three.
And to the extent you regret only one of them, you'll be happier than people who regret two of them.
Most people regret all three.
And the reason you regret all three, especially career and who you marry, is no one teaches you how to read people.
Most important thing that can happen in school is learn how to read people.
All the good things and all the bad things will come from filtering out the bad people before they get in your social circle.
And bringing in the good people.
I think of it like, you know those hamster balls?
You put a little hamster in a plastic ball and you roll him around.
The reason you put him in a plastic ball, I didn't know as a little kid, I thought it was supposed to be fun.
And then I had a friend who had a hamster and didn't put it in a ball and he stepped on it one time.
And I realized, wait a second, the plastic ball is to keep the hamster from dying.
We're the hamster.
And so you need to have a thick plastic ball around your life Because 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.
And no one talks about how to read people.
I mean, I created this personality quiz.
This is another little thing.
I don't charge for it yet.
It's at tylopez.com slash quiz.
I don't know if I'm supposed to plug these, but I don't care anyway.
I think about three, four, 500,000 people have taken it.
Um, and without me advertising it, this is one of the first times I've mentioned it on somebody else's show, but...
I took the top six scientific tests that nobody talks about except in the back halls of psychology departments at Harvard and Yale.
And I made them public.
And it will, and I tell people, before you have somebody be your business partner, have them take tyloquest.com slash quiz.
Before you go on a date with somebody, be like, hey, will you take this quiz?
It's insane, the mental health problems in the world right now.
To speak to politics, since that's a big subject of yours, almost everything people talk about in politics is related to personality traits.
For example, being a Republican.
is something you can test for, and it's probably genetic, being conservative.
There's a genetic component.
I'm not saying that people don't choose, I'm just saying in general.
They call it RWA, right-wing authoritarianism.
It's an association, and it's an evolutionary reason.
You want a society where some people say, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and go out and forge your own path in the world.
That's more of the conservative approach to life.
Now, a democratic, more liberal approach is, no, we need Meals on Wheels.
We need this safety net for people.
But that's a personality trait.
That's why people choose that.
It's more of a nurturing, estrogen type of response.
I'm not saying everyone who's a liberal is estrogen response, but there is something to that.
And I didn't realize that until Dr. David Buss is like, oh yeah, we can ask people a series of questions.
And I already know their political stance before I ask it.
Well, there are certainly biological components to politics.
There are certain studies that tend to be a little bit biased with regard to self-quizzing.
For 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.
When 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.
There 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.
Yeah.
And it's quite fascinating that way.
So 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.
What's the best way for somebody who doesn't have a mentor to find one?
Like for me, it was very easy.
My dad was my mentor.
I think for a lot of young men, particularly, having a very involved father is a key to success, obviously.
Not having a father in the home, you're an exception.
Yeah, 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.
I 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.
But there are certain areas of knowledge where I feel like I lack.
And so there, I'm trying to constantly reach out to people who know more than I do.
And knowing what you don't know is obviously a major area of being able to find the right guy to teach you, I think.
It's also confusing, which is why four out of 10 people don't have it.
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Okay, so let's talk about your politics a little bit.
You're a very driven guy, obviously, and you're somebody who's trying to encourage people on an individual level to go out and better their lives.
To me, this smacks, obviously, the libertarian slash conservative perspective.
Is that where you are, and what do you make of where we are politically in the country right now?
Because everything seems so fragmented, so divided, and yet it seems like I've talked to a wide variety of people across a variety of political viewpoints right here on this show.
I 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?
Just a bunch of people from right to middle to left.
And they're all very successful people.
They all seem to have this very individualistic perspective.
Even if they are Democrats, where do you think policy and politics and sort of perspective on individual responsibility, where do those line up?
Well, 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.
They're probably not going to be good people.
I'm always, like, amazed that people are like, you're not going to believe this.
I found out that This about Bill Clinton or Donald Trump or Hillary.
I'm like, welcome to planet Earth, my friend.
Have you read a book?
This has been going on 2,000 years ago, 1,800 years ago, 1,700.
So what happens is, going back to reading people, politics attracts narcissistic people.
example of a narcissist i would say hillary clinton's a classic example of a high machiavellian person possibly i'm not sure about psycho i i interviewed hillary once uh about books i kept about books yeah very smart woman but you know she smacks of that machiavellian and all these people go from nixon all of i just read a book about uh woodrow wilson i mean the guy one of the worst presidents ever.
To some, but the Sami, some love them, My grandpa said Calvin Coolidge was the worst, the most corrupt.
But anyway, so my take is nobody cares about you as much as you, and definitely not a bunch of narcissistic politicians.
So if you have much faith in the system at all, I think you're the sucker in the room.
Does that mean you should ignore politics?
No, because it's a necessary evil is how I look at it.
Do I put, you know, the law of Pareto principle 80-20?
I think if you put 20% of your focus on politics and big system, the system and policy, and 80% in doing what you can control, You'll be good.
Why do you think people are putting so much focus on the 20%?
I mean, it's pretty clear right now people are distracting themselves to an enormous extent with the give and take of politics.
People are engaged like they've never been, which is great for my business, but it's not necessarily great for theirs.
I 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.
Why do you think people are so interested in engaging with politics, particularly now?
You 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.
And it's much easier to do that.
Humans are like water.
They always move downhill.
Whatever is easiest.
You don't see much water going.
I'm going to go uphill.
And so because people procrastinate, they've been looking for external reasons to blame forever.
And there are external things.
Look, bad childhood.
That is an externality.
You had no control over who your parents were if you had a traumatic childhood.
But at some point, you just grow up and you go, well, I cannot redo that.
There is no time machine.
So I'm going to pull my pants up, my big boy pants, take the diapers off, and go out and do what I can.
And what politics allows you to kind of revert As an adult, you're not blaming your parents.
You're blaming Donald Trump.
I promise you this.
Presidents are less important than people think.
They are massively less important.
On an individual's life, even more.
You 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.
Study demographics.
You're going to be able to predict everything.
You can predict America's aging.
Africa isn't.
Africa has a massive growth rate.
I went to India when I only had 600 million people.
Now India has 1.1 or 2 billion.
Two Americas have grown inside India in our lifetime.
America, the world by 2030 projected to maybe be at 8.5 billion people.
It was at 7 billion.
What, last year?
You're going to grow five Americas on the same set of continents?
Man, Will Durant says nations are born Stoic and die epicurean.
Maybe we become epicurean, maybe we will die out in something.
I believe in humans in the long run.
I think America is still strong.
This is not my area of expertise, so I'm going to give you an amateur answer.
My amateur answer is we'll survive.
The media will focus on a crap load of drama.
But there'll be millions of individuals living nice, normal lives with happy families.
The main concern I have, I think mental health issues is going up.
And if, let's say it's always been bad.
Well, my grandma's a hundred, by the way.
She was born in Germany.
You'll like this story.
My grandma was 19 years old.
Her friend said, you've got to come hear this guy.
He's a great speaker.
Her name was Melita Mishman, who wrote a book about this now.
It's kind of a famous book.
My grandma goes, OK, I'll go see him.
They go down to the park.
Car pulls up.
The top's down.
A man stands up, starts yelling.
It was Adolf Hitler.
My grandma's 19.
She was born in 1918, so I think this is 36 and 37 when he's like Time Magazine Man of the Year.
Media got it wrong there.
So my grandma goes, this guy's crazy.
I'm leaving.
She goes to her family, says, I think this guy's going to declare war.
He's just a madman.
I heard him talk in the park five feet away from him.
My grandma's family goes, no, no, he'll be fine.
He signed a peace with Russia and Poland.
He's not going to invade Poland.
My grandma goes, I'm leaving anyway.
She gets on a boat.
As she's on the boat, she comes to America and knows nobody.
He declares war and invades Poland as my grandma's crossing the Statue of Liberty.
She comes to America, knows nobody, pulls herself, gets a job as a waitress.
Ends up getting a scholarship for college.
Her life dream was to go to California.
Ends up in California.
I like my grandma's story.
She had foresight to see.
She was able to read people, first of all.
That's what I said, the core skill.
The man himself, Adolf Hitler, in person.
She read.
This guy's insane.
She had foresight, prudence.
She didn't procrastinate.
It's easy to procrastinate.
It's hard to leave your country.
And so she came here, and she had low anxiety.
She was able to overcome fear.
That's hard.
Fear drives people into the wrong corner.
And she overcame that, and I'm here because of that.
And so when my grandma was young there, there was maybe a billion people on the planet.
So let's say 1% of people are insane.
For sure, 1% of the population is psychotic.
So when you have a billion people, you're talking 10 million psychotic people spread over the whole planet.
What happens if the rate still stays at 1%, but you go to 8.5 billion?
Now there's 85 million psychopaths.
Now, 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.
Urban life is not as healthy as you think.
I think you come to this city, to exchange ideas, and then people should live in the country.
It should be like a nation-states like Greece or something like that, where it's like country, urban country, good blend.
That's what I try to do now.
Spend two weeks in Beverly Hills, New York City, all this, and two weeks in the middle of nowhere on a ranch.
And so because that's not happening, and it used to, when my grandma was born, 90% of the world lived in countryside villages.
10% in large cities.
It's inverted now.
It just, in about 2015, it went the other way.
I think mental health has gone up from 1% of people to be whack jobs to like 10%.
So, and I'm not even saying this in a judgmental way, like they're bad people.
I'm talking about just like diabetes is something you feel bad that someone has.
You don't go, haha, you have diabetes.
There's people with legitimate, massive amounts.
There's so much Anti-anxiety medication being taken.
I just read National Geographic.
The Great Lakes up Michigan, it's got made its way into the water through basically people peeing in the toilet.
Fish are so doped up.
They're like have low anxiety and they're not like searching for food anymore.
So they're just dying.
You got 15 to 30% of people clinically diagnosed with anxiety.
What's going to happen to a society?
I don't, I think, like I said, we'll survive, but I think that we should refocus on stuff.
Fix the education system.
Focus more on mental health.
Not at a governmental level, but you know, half the battle is just is people realizing they have a mental health issue.
They have high anxiety.
They have narcissism.
Just realizing it is literally proven to fix half of it.
How much do you think of this as the destruction of social standards?
So you talk about the strength of Amish communities.
Obviously, one of the strengths of Amish communities is the people are married, and they stay with each other, and then they have kids in them.
And same thing in the Jewish community where you have low rates of a lot of social problems that you see in other communities because people are expected.
You get married.
You stay married to that person.
You take care of your kids.
That's the way it is.
You take off every seventh day.
There's no electronics.
How do you resolve the tension between...
The 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.
I think the first thing for everybody that I follow, that everyone can read, is a great book by Gary Keller called The One Thing.
It's the power of focus.
First thing I try to do is go, okay, Tye, there's too much to do.
What's the one domino I push today that knocks down like a hundred dominoes?
Because I do not want to push down a hundred one at a time.
I got to hit one huge one that's real heavy and it knocks everyone down.
So I think you have to know what your superpower is and do that 80% of the day.
I 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.
But I started studying people.
I'm like, what does Warren Buffett do?
This guy owns 100 of the largest brands in the world, from Amex, Bank of America, you know.
I'm going, what is this guy, Geico, what is he doing?
And he says, simple, I spend eight hours a day reading about investment deals, 800 pages a day, that's it.
He goes, you wanna see my, he has a little day planner, he loves to show it, he's like 88.
He goes, you wanna see my day planner, what I have scheduled this month?
And he just laughs, because there's nothing for eight months on there.
So, I think the first thing is, read that book by Gary Keller.
The second thing, if I was advising my younger self, the second thing is, less is more.
Do not confuse flurries of activity with accomplishment.
Activity and accomplishment both start with an A, but they are unrelated.
I have friends that just, oh my God.
In fact, I've found the poorer my friend is, If I'm like, hey, can you come help me move?
I gotta move.
They're like, dude, I'm just so busy.
I'm like, you've been unemployed for six months.
You have nothing.
You're lying.
You have Game of Thrones to watch or whatever.
But the reason, and it's causation correlation.
I'm like, wait a second.
I think the reason they're in what they're in, no one ever taught them how to be productive.
And so they keep themselves busy with flurries of activity, but none of it moves the needle on life.
And life, you got only four things, I think.
I call them the four pillars of the good life.
Health, wealth, love, happiness.
Physical health.
So what I do, this is my third point of being productive.
I just think those are in order.
So I try to do workout first.
Health.
You 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, I've got a two-hour workout in and eating breakfast.
That's a productive guy by seven in the morning.
And so you do your health first.
Then wealth is usually people's career.
I like to do it in the day.
Then health, wealth, love.
To me, love is friends, family, romance.
Those three parts component of love.
So at night, I pretty much do something social every night.
And then I say, if you do the first three pillars, happiness comes automatically.
You got to balance those first three.
So do them in that order.
I 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.
Oh, I'm going to get it in before I go to bed.
No, do it first.
That's the order.
If you don't have health, you won't care about wealth, love or happiness.
For 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.
So people want to get together, people want to offer you something to do for a career, you always say yes.
Because you're so eager to get going that you just say yes.
And it turns out that if you want to do work for free, then there's lots of work to be done for free.
And then I started to realize that the more I said no, the more successful I was becoming.
Because number one, it creates scarcity in the market.
Number two, you actually need some time to yourself.
There's a great article in the Wall Street Journal about exactly this.
Somebody wrote a long piece in the review section about how nobody understands, but people will say, like, do you have time for a 15-minute phone call?
And they'll say no, and they don't want to be a jerk about it, but a 15-minute phone call is not a 15-minute phone call.
A 15-minute phone call is a 45-minute phone call.
Not 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.
So 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.
I thought that for Christians, this is going to offend a lot of people, but they're real Christians.
And 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.
So they're all pacifists.
Now, I'm not saying I'm not a pacifist, but I like respect people who... You fight MMA, I mean.
If I would be Christian, I would probably be some version of that.
Oh, this is a tough question.
You'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.
I would say that I think religion's good.
It's better than most people think.
So even though I have a complicated view, I don't think most people should have a complicated view.
I think it's good to believe stuff And I do think it's okay to read Richard Dawkins and it doesn't have to make you lose your faith.
Even 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.
So the thought that there's this spiritual thing going on and there's a God, it's kind of scientific in a way.
In 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?
If your religion lets too loose of a group into it, you will get disenfranchised, you will get disenchanted with the group.
So if you can pick, maybe it's what you have, small group of people, that really do what they say they're gonna do, then you can stick with it for a long time.
I 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.
That messes with people's brains.
So I think if you can find a non-hypocritical group of people, I mean, I grew up Judeo-Christian.
I'm more Judeo-Christian.
It's funny, even if you try to not be Judeo-Christian, if you grew up Judeo-Christian, you kind of are.
with me i appreciate it the ben shapiro show sunday special was produced by jonathan hay executive producer jeremy boring associate producers mathis lover and austin stevens edited by alex zingaro audio is mixed by mike caromina hair and makeup is by jesua alvera and title graphics by cynthia angulo The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.