4 Harsh Truths for Men That I Wish I Knew In My 20s

Four harsh truths for men that I wish I knew in my 20s.

Number one: This world is cruel to men who can't earn. So no matter what the people tell you, and they'll say money is not important, just remember they'll say that out of one side of their mouth. But out of the other, they'll criticize you more if you can't provide. For the last 10,000 generations of our ancestors, the men who have been respected, the men who have gotten the best mates, who've been able to raise their children, were the men who knew how to hunt for resources. And so you must go deep down the rabbit hole of acquiring practical money-making skills. It's great to get a wide education on philosophy, history, art, but never forget that you've got to go even harder on making money.

What is money? Why is it in the hands of so few? And that's not a new capitalistic thing. Why has it always been in the hands of so few? And how do you get out of the 80% into the 20%? In many ways, there's a cultural paranoia. There's a bipolar element to the world. They will tell you that if you focus too hard on making money, that you should be ashamed of your greed. But in the same breath, we all know the man who can't provide for his family, like The Godfather says, isn't a man at all.

So you're going to have to stop listening to so many people and just listen to this simple thing: you, instead of playing video games, instead of just hanging out with your friends, you set aside one to three hours a day to only think money. Only think money. One to three hours. If you do it any more than that, you might become obsessive. But one to three hours a day, especially when you're in your teens and 20s.

One of the tragedies of the modern school system is that the time where people have the most free time is full of things that will never benefit you again. Sports, ah, they rarely benefit people besides physical fitness. But people take their whole teenage years and just do sports with their dreams of being a pro-athlete, and almost nobody becomes a pro-athlete. You have a better chance of winning the lottery. But you have a high probability of making a million dollars.

When I was with, uh, my my second mentor was a guy named Alan Nation. Wisest guy I've ever met. And, um, I was thinking about getting a college degree. I was at NC State. I had taken my first quarter, but I didn't have enough money. I had, I don't know, $500 in my bank account. And it was two grand for all the textbooks. And I was like, I'm going to have to drop out. And I felt bad about that. And I was going to just have to go make money. So I called Nation. I said, "Alan, what do you think, man?" And he goes, "Well, why do you want a degree?" And I said, "Well, you know, for one, people will respect you. People will hire you. People want to work with you." And he said, "No, this is America. Make a million dollars. Nobody cares about pieces of paper anymore. It's not the 1950s."

That was one of the first clues where I was like, wait a second. Society tells you, but if you cut, you cut through the BS. We're just like we were 10,000 generations ago. Some men couldn't bring home any meat for the children, and his woman left him and went into another man's hut. The rest of the tribe ostracized him. Nothing's really changed. We still have that primal brain. Humans may have changed, but not as much as you think.

For the next three harsh truths, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to write them out so you can follow along. Whatever you do, don't forget the first harsh truth: the world's a cruel place to men who can't make money.

Number two: Harsh truth I wish I had known as a man in my 20s was that at the end of the day, it's all just confidence. You might think that the person born in the right place, or the person who works the hardest, or the person who's most skilled. No, it will be confidence that's the core predictor of your total success. So your big regrets when you're 60 years old, 80 years old, if you don't watch this video, your biggest regret, you will look back and you will say, "If only I had been more confident about my business ideas. If only I had been more confident about my social skills. If only I had been more confident about my looks, about my height, about my appearance."

Men nowadays are getting thrown off because you're seeing on social media the best-looking dudes all over the feed, theoretically getting all the best-looking women. But I will tell you, when it comes to making money, confidence wins. When it comes to women, confidence wins. I remember I used to do a party up in the Hollywood Hills, and there was the prettiest woman who ever came in six years of me throwing parties. She was with a guy. At first, I was like, "This must be her gay agent or something," because he was six inches shorter than her. He was like a blonde Swedish natural beauty, and he was like this little Latino guy. And I remember at some point realizing, no, this woman likes him. And he didn't have money. Confidence beats even money.

Now, yes, money to get the girl is a powerful tool, but not as much as confidence. I know a guy, I have my private client program. I work with people anywhere from $50 million to $500 million and beyond net worth. And I can think of multiple guys that have money. One's making a million a week net in his pocket after taxes. He's like, "Ty, I can't get a woman. I'm not confident enough." So even money can't make up for a lack of confidence.

So what you have to know is, know your strengths. And then in those areas you're strong in, have infinite confidence. Not just confidence, but infinite. Assume you're right. But I want to give a disclaimer: this is not an excuse to become a know-it-all. You should not become confident in areas that are not your strength. I like what Warren Buffett says. He says, "I have a small circle of confidence, and I stay in that circle." So you should only have massive confidence in those areas that you can ascertain are your areas of expertise. For me, marketing, I know I can make things go viral. Business, I know I can do those things. There's some things. I played basketball at one of the top high schools in the US, EN Low in Raleigh, North Carolina. But I don't have infinite confidence in basketball because it's not my circle of competence. But I know what mine is.

And you might say, "But what if I don't have a circle of confidence?" Create one. You better create one, my brother. It's the confident that end up winning. And if you look at the last election, what do you see? Some people say, "Well, this person has more skill in government." And this. Yeah, but that's not how this world works. Humans are hardwired at the genetic level to look for somebody who can get them out of the darkness, who can lead them into the light. Whether it's military, whether it's business, whether it's family, everybody's looking for a confident leader. You can be a quiet, confident leader, an introverted, confident leader. You can be a loudmouth, you can talk all the time and yap all the time. None of those factors matter. Those are just modalities. Modalities don't really matter. It's the core substance underneath. On a one to 100, what's the confidence level you project?

And I will tell you, the thing that's throwing men off is the comparative chart to extreme outliers that you see on social media. So dudes are no longer confident in their looks because as they scroll, they see, you know, supermodel dudes. But I'm going to tell you something. Once again, as a man, it's different than if you were a woman. But as a man, women have slightly bizarre brains when it comes to attraction. They can lose attraction for the greatest supermodel guy if he projects low confidence. Men are like that. If men meet a very beautiful woman who's shockingly beautiful, they go to their friends, "You know what? Little low self-esteem. I just, I'm not going to go out with her again." That's rarely come out of any man's mouth. If the woman's truly beautiful, men will stick with a beautiful woman, if she's confident or not confident. So it's a much more of a binary modality for women. But for men, there's all these shades of gray. All you need to do is be decent looking, decently dressed, but be a nine or a 10 out of 10 on confidence, and you cover all your mistakes and all your flaws.

Now, I just want to give you one disclaimer. I'm not saying all problems will be solved. I'm not saying that all women will love you if you're confident. No. There is a section of women that only like the best-looking men. Those are not on the table for you. Your genetics, my genetics, we didn't get that card. But there are still the other at least 50% of the world where women don't think that way. So when it comes to love, when it comes to money, when it comes to social skills, fake it till you make it. When it comes to confidence, just fake it. Just fake it. Because humans crave congruency. If you begin to fake a confident person, eventually you hardwire your mind to be more confident. Eventually, practice not only makes perfect in sports, but it also makes perfect when you're becoming more confident. Think about it. Do we say, "Fake it till you make it" when you're playing sports? If you're practicing football, football, soccer, basketball, and you're not that good, do people go, "Oh, look at that dude faking it till he makes it"? Yeah, that's what practice is. You're faking it. Kobe Bryant, I got to interview him before he sadly died. And you know, he was telling me about how he had mentors and how he would practice shooting with no ball. He was faking it because he was rewiring the underlying apparatus of the brain. So confidence, the antidote is eventually faking it, and eventually it'll be real. Eventually, it'll be real.

Okay, the third harsh truth: The world will tell you that the man who shows his emotion, who expresses his emotion, who's in touch with his emotions, is the man that you should look up to. But when you look at the behavior of society, it doesn't. It doesn't. It looks to the man who stoically endures the trials unflinchingly. It looks to the man who's not easily bothered. Doesn't matter what modern society thinks. I like what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, the billionaires, said. Charlie Munger said, "When life goes bad for you, something horrible, you lose a friend, a family member. He said, you take your time of grief, you cry about it for three days, and then you bury it deep within you and don't let it come out again."

Now, some people will try to argue and say, "No, suppressing never works." Well, I think if you look at the evidence at how a man's brain is built, men have a brain higher on psychopathy. It's hardwired that way. I have a company, 12 types. I've tested over 500,000 people in over 100 countries. And consistently, men on something called a Levenson Psychopathy Test score relatively high comparatively to women. So what happens is, with men and women as a unit raising a child, the woman is expressing the emotions generally more. They're much lower on Levenson. Often women get zero or a one on the Levenson Psychopathy Test, and most dudes get at least a baseline of 20 to 30. So one to 20, I mean, you're talking about 10x, 20x, 30x. Okay?

And so you might say, "But no, a baby, a child, a society needs people who are emotional." Yeah, that's why it's split. That's why we have evolved as a split-sex society, male-female. This happened. Sexual reproduction is a novel thing. Not all species have sexual reproduction. Ferns don't. Earthworms don't. But humans split the task of life. The woman would take the more empathetic activities. The man would take the more suppressive. The man doesn't talk as much. Testosterone makes a man speak less. Dr. Helen Fisher, she's actually the head chief scientist for Tinder and Match.com. It's interesting. She has more data on male-female interaction than any scientist in history. She's been a mentor of mine for nine years. And one of the things she said, she said, "You know, a classic symptom of high testosterone is less expression, less talking." She said, "The highest testosterone men in America are lumberjacks in Alaska. They're on oil rigs out in the middle of the ocean. They're not actors. They're not public speakers."

Now, does that mean you can't be good at speaking and have high testosterone? No, that's not what it means. It's a general pattern. Men are built on day one to suppress emotions more than women. Now, there are exceptions to this. Men who go to war in World War II, for example, before we really understood PTSD, men suffered, okay? But even with all that we have now, men who go to war still suffer. They're still PTSD. There's also though resiliency levels within men. So there's subgroups of men who have no PTSD. None. They're shocked. They come out. And like, I saw a video with a guy from World War I, and he's like, "They're like, how many people you shot?" He's like, "I don't know, I lost track at 100." And he said, "Do you ever lose sleep?" "Never lost sleep." He's like, "I was there to do a job. They were attacking us. They started it. I went to finish it. Never lost."

Now, you might think he's lying. I don't. Men, if you take 1,000 men versus 1,000 women, the amount of people affected by traumatic things in general is going to be lower for men. Dr. Buss has some interest if you want to see the science on this in his textbook, Evolutionary Psychology, where he talks about battle scenes. Women faint more than men. Women faint more than men. And part of the reason is, think about the evolution of genes. Men who fainted in battle because there was too many people, too much, you know, dying, too much brutality, well, when the enemy walked in, they just speared everybody to death. So the men who were overly expressive of their emotions, their gene pool's been eliminated. We know this now. The Y chromosome studies look and have found a shocking statistic that all the humans on Earth today, all 8 billion plus, descend from only 40% of men in our ancestral past. 40-60% of men did not reproduce successfully. That group of 40% was a lot of men who knew how to suppress their emotions when the time was right.

I don't want you though to take this and say you should always, always suppress your emotions. When my grandma died, she was 102. She died. I tried to, I've never in my entire life given a speech, even at other people's funerals, where I couldn't talk. My grandma was like a once-in-a-lifetime, you know, grief event. And I think it's fine, you know, that you're crying there. But so I'm saying the general pattern should be men should be more suppressive of emotions. Like Charlie Munger says, something life hits you hard, you cry about it for three days, and then you bury that deep within you. You lose all your money, you cry about it for three days, you write down everything, you let your emotions out, and then you suppress and you say, "Never again. Never again."

The man who suppresses his emotions, the man who's confident in his skillset, and the man who realizes he has to make money, well, you're about 75% of the way there.

So the last one, the fourth harsh truth: Truth I wish I had been told as a man in my 20s is that it matters where you live. And you better pick it logically, methodically, and well. Good example: Jeff Bezos, when he was at the inception point building Amazon to eventually become a trillion-dollar company, he pulled out a spreadsheet and he analyzed every city in the United States. He analyzed what had the most non-stop flights, what had the lowest state income tax rate, what had the best other companies attracting talent so he could poach their best employees into his office down the street. And he triangulated at that time that it was Seattle, Washington. No tax, Microsoft, Bill Gates was already there, West Coast, decent weather, could attract. He had a long spreadsheet.

When I meet the average man, and even when I think back in my own life, I'm like, did I spend 50 hours analyzing and thinking about where I live, or did I just do it by chance because I had a friend here and this and I had a whim one day? Don't be that guy. Where you live will determine, in great part, your capacity. So what I mean, if you live in a place, let's say you determine that an average place to live, not your best place, but a decent place, is Raleigh, North Carolina. That's where I lived. But if you have thought a little deeper, let's say you would have determined that, you know, Los Angeles would actually meet the criteria of what you need, but you stay in Raleigh because you haven't learned this harsh truth and you've been taught that, you know, you can shine and wherever you are and, you know, the cream will rise to the top. What will happen in Raleigh, North Carolina? You'll put in the same units of life energy over the next 10, 20 years, but you're capped. You're capped. And so your results per unit of brain damage, per unit of work, is primarily capped by where you live.

By the way, included in this harsh truth, truth is, you better live in the right place if you want to find a woman. You better live in the right place because all cities are not created the same. All countries are not created the same. One of the parts of this harsh truth, this fourth one, has more layers to it than you realize. Cultures aren't the same. They're not the same. I'm not going to say which one's better and which one's worse, but they're different. You live in Brazil, you're going to live in a culture that values family. If you want a woman to raise a traditional family with, why are you in New York City? What are you doing? You can work hard and go on dates and, oh, but I can build a filter, I can build a funnel on Tinder, and I can filter it. No, you can't. That's not how the game works. That is too much confidence. Don't, don't, don't be delusional.

I want you to be confident on things that are realistic. You will not find the needle in the haystack. That's why it's called a needle in a haystack. Imagine you take a teeny needle that you sew with and you drop it in a big pile of hay. I got a barn that's 100 by 100. If I drop a needle in there, I'll give you $10,000. I give you a million dollars if you can find it. I'll give you all year to look for it. Saying you can't have a magnet. You're not going to be able to find it in a haystack. No.

So I meet men who go, "Well, it doesn't matter where I live. There's good women everywhere." I didn't say good. I said, forget good. You want a family woman? There's not a family woman in New York and LA in the dating market. It attracts highly ambitious women who have an agenda, and that agenda is specifically not settling down. So why are you there? Now, if you're a dude who never wants to have a family, never wants to have kids, maybe big cities move to the top of the food chain. You want to make money. You think every place has the same capacity? No, because your network will be weak.

I was talking to a dude who's like in Winnipeg, you know, Canada, or something. And he wants to make big money. Nothing wrong with being in Winnipeg, but this guy wants to make a billion dollars. I said, "What are you doing, bro? You're de-, you're not playing the probabilities. You're like a poker guy who says, 'Oh, I can win with any hand. I can win with a pair of sixes.'" No, because there's competition. People get so narcissistic that they think winning has nothing to do with the playing field. It does have to do with the playing field. You need sharp people. There's a reason Elon Musk moved to San Francisco. It had the most tech geniuses, and he found the PayPal Mafia, 20, he was one of 23 high IQ guys. So you need to go deep down the rabbit hole of the analysis of where to live.

I think Scandinavia is, in many ways, a better place to live. The personality types, the hormonal, genetic propensities of people who live in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, they're more calm people. Dr. Helen Fisher told me, "Ty, they're the highest serotonin group. They like to be settled down." So dating is much better there. Much better. The harsh truth in my 20s, I'm like, you ain't going to find it in the big cities of America. In fact, a harsh truth about America is basically America doesn't have good big cities. It doesn't. But America has beautiful farmland, and America is a great place to make money in the cities. But in terms of overall good city where you get the good life, health, wealth, love, happiness, America doesn't have even one. Maybe San Diego. Maybe San Diego. If you want health, wealth, love, happiness, you got about one city in America where you could get wealth. Southern California. San Diego's a wealthy place. Health has got the best, is generally voted the best weather in the world by meteorologists. Love, uh, it's America. But maybe that one's. And happiness is a very chill place. People surf. So Miami is not it. LA is not it. New York's not it.

So for me, you can also split where you live. So like, I make money in the US big cities, Los, this is Beverly Hills. But I spend it in Scandinavia, I spend it in Brazil. So you're going to have to, most likely, as you make more money, you can split and get the best of different places. All three different homes. I have a farm in the United States, which is truly America's great strength. America has the most beautiful farmland, fertile, productive, scenic. You know, I got in the mountains. It's, there's no place that has larger swaths of large fertile land in the world with good weather than the United States. So I have a farm, that's my headquarters. Then large US cities are the highest GDP locations in the world. So if Southern California, a New York City was its own country, it's their 1.9, 1.5 to 1.9 trillion GDP in one little region. If California was its own country, it'd be the fifth largest economy in the world. So when you're in that hunt for money, a large US city is good. But when you're looking at love and happiness, unless you have a farm in the US, you want to be outside the US. You want to be in South America, Central America, some parts of Asia. I don't have as much experience in in Africa, but I've been told there's some good spots there. But Europe is underrated. You know, we're Americans, so we often make fun of Europeans, and they make fun of us. But make your money in America and spend it in Europe. Ain't a bad philosophy. It's not a bad. If I'd be 20 again, be like, yo, where you live matters. Split. Get the benefits of America, but do not spend 12 months a year in America. Never. America has a lot of strengths, but every place's strength has its weakness. I would also not spend 100% of my life in Scandinavia. There's some problems in Sweden, Denmark, or Norway too. Nobody's perfect. So perceive and act as if you're somebody who's trying to get their cake and eat it too. They're trying to get both. You won't find it in one city. I can guarantee you. The only way, if I had to be in one place, it'd be on my farm, but make less money. So depends on what phase you are in, right? Depends on the phase you're in.

Now, I want to give you one last. It's a little bonus. It's an unannounced bonus. By the way, if you want me to work with you, I have a private client program. Depending on your level, most people in my private client are doing $5 million plus. Okay? If you're not in that cohort category, I have another program where you work with me for one year in my community. So I have a program here, and I have a program. It just depends where you're at. If you can want to work with me private one-on-one, it's people that are doing $5 to $500 million. I built this program since 2013. But I don't want you to think I forgot about you. If you're just starting out, I have a separate system specifically for people on how to hit that first $1 million in revenue number, or that really up to that first $10 million. So if that's you, you live somewhere in the world, you're broke, you're poor, I'm going to put a phone number. And it's the same phone number if you're killing it in this world. If you want to work with me directly, I'm going to give you my phone number. I keep two phones with me. Keep two phones. One's personal, one's business. I actually bring it with me. I most likely will see this text. Text or WhatsApp me the phrase "Harsh Truths." Four harsh truths. And just tell me a little bit about you. I'll send you some stuff. You want to talk a little bit on, you know, any of these harsh truths? Text or WhatsApp me. Sometimes my assistant helps me, you know, check them, but I check them. I keep the phone with me everywhere in the world. I have that phone. Whenever I go through customs, they're like, "Why do you have different phones?" I'm like, "Well, this is my phone that I interact and talk with people." So I can't always respond to everybody, but put something in there about your life, and I'll see if I can't reach out to you. I spend like 10, 20 minutes a day checking that.

Now, I'm going to give you a bonus. Remember this. Put this to memory. Never forget it. Get a tattoo. People get stupid tattoos. Get this as a tattoo. There are four decisions you will have to make as a man, and you can't get them wrong. So going back in time, I'm in my 20s as was a man, I'd want to come in a time machine and say, "Listen to me. I got four things you can never get wrong."

Number one is who you have kids with. Make sure it's a calm woman. Not the most beautiful, pretty, but don't go with calm as the most important. Women in general have much higher anxiety than men. And therefore, you want somebody on the lower spectrum. Doesn't mean they have no emotion, but if you want a good life, get a low-anxiety, calm woman. Okay? So who you have children with is a bonus.

B. And I talked about this with the money. Pick the career that matches your unique strengths. Man, I can speak well, so it makes sense that I'm on social media. If I was an introvert, I would need to pick a different industry. Don't listen to people that tell you you can do whatever you want to be. I like what Chris Rock said. He said he was at his kids' high school graduation, and they were up there saying, "You can be whatever you, you know, whatever you want to be." And he, Chris Rock said, "I don't know. I saw a lot of Uber drivers there. I saw a lot of future Uber drivers. Not everybody can be everything." So number two, pick your career industry. Which industry? You can move around within the industry. You can switch jobs, but don't switch industries.

To all. Number three, and I already said this, where you live. But the last and most important, who you listen to. And because of social media, the average person is listening to too many people simultaneously. If you like what I say, just listen to me and one or two other people. You don't need to follow 80 people. If you don't like me, find somebody that aligns with your values. But what I'm saying is the man who listens to too many people becomes utterly confused and executes on none. Just none. You just don't do anything. "Oh, this guy says drop shipping." And this guy says, "You need to hustle hard." And this guy says, "You don't need to work hard if you use AI." At some point, pick your army. I picked my army. I picked the mentors that I would listen to. I picked some like Joel Salatin, a farmer. I chose to pick somebody who's not like Elon Musk. Elon Musk picked tech people, wanted to listen to that, and it worked for him. He became the richest man in the world. I don't value money as the only thing. Therefore, I wanted to have some old ancient wisdom. I lived with the Amish for two and a half years. I listened to Sam Chupp, the Amish guy that I lived with. I learned the old ways, how you raise large families, how you live off the land, and so how you live in a community. So pick wisely who you listen to. And don't get too broad. Now, but you can have a group of mentors. In fact, it's better. It's not a cult. Avoid listening to 25 people, and avoid listening to only one. Pick anywhere you could say, you know, seven's a magic number, three to seven. Now, over time, you'll get more advisors and you get specialists and lawyers and accountants. But at the core philosophy of how you're going to execute on your life, you can't have too many voices in your head because it destroys number two. You lose your confidence in what you're doing. So if you're listening to somebody who says, "Man, you need to make money," and then you're simultaneously listening to 14 other voices that tell you money is evil and you're just being greedy, you will lose number two. And number two is the catalyst for everything I talked about in this video. You'll lose confidence because you'll be like, "Well, okay, yes, I I want to make money." But then you lose the single-mindedness. Men must be single-minded. That goes to number three. You become single-minded by suppressing emotions sometimes. You go, "I will get through this jungle." The fact that there's a leech biting me here, the fact that there's a snake chasing me, I'm not going to freak out because I have a single-minded purpose is to get through this jungle, and I'm going to absorb everything that's hitting me. It's what a man does. He's an absorption tool for society. And in some ways, that's unfair, but welcome to the game. No one ever said the jungle was fair.

Now, text me. Just put in "Four Harsh Truths." Text me a little bit about yourself. Put in your income level, revenue, what's working for you, and I'll try to shoot you a text back. Okay? Text or WhatsApp right here.