How To Use Social Media To Get Millions Of People To Notice You

Alright, the magic number, a million.

How can you get a million people to pay attention to whatever is your next big idea? Everybody’s got a big idea that I meet. And the problem is, like the saying goes, if a tree falls in the middle of the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise? And I always say, who cares? Right? So if you have the greatest idea in the world and nobody ever hears about it, you might as well, like Joel Salta, my first mentor said, better to do nothing for nothing than something for nothing. So you come up with this good idea and it’s all for nothing, it’s really a waste.

And most people don’t understand the psychological aspect of marketing. They say they do. They read a little book here, a little book there, but when it comes down to understanding heuristical patterns and understanding the 25 cognitive biases and really getting into those things, there’s 103 logical fallacies in the average person’s brain. So you add all that together, it’s all about studying and knowledge.

So I’m going to give you guys a few little hacks here. I’ve been putting out this video series, people text me a lot. So this year, using this stuff, I just checked some of the stats. We just passed a billion views, like a hundred million people watching stuff, watching these videos. So this stuff works, and I can tell you just straight off the Google Analytics counter that this stuff is the real deal.

So some of you want like more advanced stuff, because people are like oh, some of the stuff you say I’ve heard before. And my answer, if that’s you that says that kind of stuff, it’s not what you know, it’s what you do. So if you think you’re too smart, I’m just going to be like show me how you put it into action.

But for those of you who genuinely are already on your way, I’ll kind of show you some stuff that I think is more advanced. So we’ll call this one mil. You could also call it one billion if you’re really ambitious. How do you get a billion? And so I was alluding to this earlier. You got, let’s try to, I’ll draw like a little mind map, you know? So like here’s you. You’ve got the next big idea. You’ve got the next Snapchat, you’ve got the next Netflix. There’s a good book called “The Self-Made Billionaire” by this Cohen guy, and he calls it the blockbuster idea, so an idea that can break out, like Zuckerberg went from four people on the Facebook to then he dominated 60 percent of his school, Harvard. Then he jumped to all universities and he had about 60 percent market share, and then he went up to, now they just passed a billion customers and almost everybody, Facebook is like definitely an example of a blockbuster idea.

So here’s you now, and it’s like most people don’t understand that it’s this progression, but it’s not that linear, and that’s the problem. Like the progression that most people think, this, by the way, is the difference between a plan and a strategy. Most people don’t, most people have a plan at best, but they don’t have a strategy. I was just reading this book, “The Liberator,” by Kershaw, about General Felix. And these guys, he had 75,000 of his men killed in one battle in Italy, and this dude was a tough dude. And even though he had this high casualty rate, as we know, the Allies won the war, and it’s because the Allies had out-strategized Adolph Hitler. So Hitler and the Germans were good at strategy, but a plan is like linear. We’re going to take this, we’re going to do this, this and this. And the best laid plans of men, as the famous poem goes, you know? They don’t work out. So a strategy is like AB plans. This happens. If it doesn’t work, you move to this subset. You’ve got these reinforcements come in.

And I was talking about the real deal is not linear like this, where you go from your idea to a million people being your customer. If you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re an artist, maybe you want to have a million people download your single. Maybe you are somebody that’s breaking out a franchise idea, you’re a coach or a consultant, whatever it might be. Or, by the way, this is the progression if you have a 9 to 5 job and you want to get a raise, this is the progression up the chain if you’re what I call an intrepreneur. The entrepreneurs start new things, intrepreneurs work with them. You can make money both ways. Not everybody’s an entrepreneur.

So wherever you are, the real deal, it’s going to be more like branching. So heuristics is more this way. The real way humans decide things is a branching chain of events. And so good strategists are like chess players, you know? There’s trillions of permutations. And so whether it’s your business plan or understanding the psychology of how people decide things. I always say humans are smart and stupid at the same time. Let me not fall in my pool, that would be an interesting dealio. It’s a beautiful day today and sun in my eyes.

So when you look at this branching, so let’s say here’s you and here’s one million. Because like I said, it won’t happen this way. There’s a good book on this by, it’s called “Crossing the Chasm,” it’s a famous business book where he talks about how most people with ideas, you get a little bit of traction at the beginning and then it dies in this chasm where pragmatists. And most people are pragmatists. So let me show you what I mean by that.

So the first heuristical decision kind of branching, the average person who’s watching their stuff is going to decide by, is fear. So this is one that people know. Freudian type psychologists, you could call this pain. Now it branches here into a tremendous amount of things, you know? It could be reciprocity is one of these. Liking bias. These are the biases. You have Kantian fairness here. Some of these are more advanced, I’m not going to talk about all these right now. You have senescence bias. You have social proof, urgency, association, availability. And each of these branches are, if you can maneuver them, and I put 25 here, then there’s, if you really want to get ninja, which I don’t tend to do on a YouTube video because people need to ask me back and forth questions, if you really want to get ninja you then break this down. There’s 103 patterns. There’s things, logical fallacies like red herring and ad hominem and all these kinds of things, although ad hominem is related to that bias. So those are different. So if you add 103 plus 25 you have at least 120, 130, you could call them landmines. You could call them biases, whatever you want to call them.

So let me tackle the first and most important one. When you come up and hit up an investor, let’s say, let’s say you get on Shark Tank. My buddy’s here, and he was working with a guy just got on Shark Tank. I won’t say who it is. The show’s not out, so it’s confidential. But so you get one there. I don’t care if you’re working with Mark Cuban and billionaires. The default response of almost all humans is built into our DNA, which is a fear response. So we fear what we don’t know. And the reason brands, by the way, you know, you hear a lot about branding. This is like a buzz word. Coca-Cola, number one brand in the world. Disney, Playboy. These are nationally and internationally recognized brands. That’s a bullshit word, because what the hell does it mean? To me it means status, and what status does, so status is an overarching one on all of these.

So for example, there’s a scientist, I forget what his name was. He said, if the President of the United States, let’s say you’re married or you have a girlfriend. So you got your girlfriend in the house. President Obama rolls in. He says to you, and he comes in, I met Bill Clinton once, was at my friend’s house, not too far from where I live now in Beverly Hills. And Bill Clinton had, I think he had nine Secret Service guys. And underneath here they have Uzis and high powered machine guns. Actually an interesting side note, nothing to do with this. True story, Bill Clinton was, when he was the President was walking out of the White House and there was, it was like down a corridor where people are allowed to say hello to the President, the public. And he was going to get in his car and he had his Secret Service guy with him, and Bill Clinton whispered, he said to the Secret Service, he goes, “I can’t get in the car. Somebody’s grabbing me.” And he said his security guard, like a ninja, turned around and broke the guy’s arm that was grabbing the President and the President got away. So don’t fuck with the Secret Service dudes, they’re pretty bad ass.

So going back to this whole thing when I met Bill Clinton, I had a point to that but I got distracted. I’ll think of it in a second. Oh, the President comes into your house. Obama, Clinton, whoever your favorite president. And he says, “Get out and leave your wife here.” Now maybe you’re a bad ass dude and you’d be like, no way. Mark my words, you would get out of the house. Why? High status. Oh, Dr. David Buss, a friend of mine, he’s the one who.

So status is one way to overcome fear, because if a regular dude walks into your house and goes, get out and leave your girlfriend, what are you going to do? You’re probably going to smash him in the face, right? But status supersedes fear and pain. So branding is a powerful tool. And so the problem with branding, I’ll give you a little practical tip. Every newbie that I know starts with a logo. This is their big question, like oh dude, I just had some joker send me a thing, he wanted me to invest in his business and he’s like here’s my logo. And I automatically wrote him off. I wasn’t trying to be a dick, I didn’t say anything to him, but I’m going, this guy doesn’t get it. He thinks that the heuristical pattern is like logo, and then you proceed to the next step. No one cares about logos for the most part. Some of you are going to argue with me. So as Richard Dawkins, the famous scientist told me the other day, I was talking to him, he said, best advice he ever got, believe with evidence. Only believe with evidence.

So I’m going to give you evidence so you don’t have to believe what I’m saying, you can believe the evidence. Google this website: Berkshire Hathaway. OK? This name, right here. You might have or might not have heard this name. So just Google that name. It’ll come up, the first result, and click on their website and show me what their logo is. There’s no logo. It just says Berkshire Hathaway. Now you might say, who cares? I say, this is a $300B company, billion. That’s Warren Buffett’s company. That’s the parent company, the only thing bigger than this is Walmart and Apple. I don’t even think Amazon. $300 billion market cap. No logo. You know why? Because Warren Buffett has status. He doesn’t need a logo.

So a logo is something you need, I heard a guy talking about before the fight with Mayweather and Pacquiao, somebody was going, Mayweather is a bitch. And this was just, I saw it on some random website. And somebody’s like, why do you say that? And he goes, do you think Mike Tyson needed bodyguards to pick up his kids at elementary school? He was like no, he didn’t need that. Now I don’t think that’s true, but Mike Tyson had status, physically. Not many people are stupid enough to mess with Mike Tyson. And Berkshire Hathaway, that company doesn’t need a logo because they’re already overcome human propensity to fear.

There’s a famous Nobel Prize winning researcher who discovered this concept, OK? So he didn’t call it fear, obviously, but there is all kinds of things that people want to do. And you end up, by the way, sorry, my R, with adverse selection in life, which is a whole ‘nother conversation. But people are risk averse. This is Nobel Prize science 101. And so brands alleviate that.

Let’s say MacDonald’s. Crappiest food in the world. You ever seen “Supersize Me?” Right? The guy goes in, he tells his doctor, I’m going to each supersized MacDonald’s food every single day. What do you think the outcome? And the doctor does his blood test at the beginning and the doctor says, you know what? I think this is going to negatively affect your cholesterol a little bit, da da da, you won’t, but it’ll be OK. You can reverse it. If you watch the movie, Morgan Spurlock’s his name. A month into it, he goes back to his doctor. He’s been eating three times a day, supersized food. And the doctor comes out, it’s the funniest scene in the movie. And it’s all reality, it’s like not scripted. The doctor goes, you have to stop. You’re going to die. You have already done irreversible damage to your liver and all this. And so MacDonald’s, though, still sells billions and billions of burgers. You know why? Because they, it’s not just branding, it’s status.

Now let’s just take MacDonald’s, because I’m talking about it. What does the MacDonald’s sign say? Billions and billions served. And I’m not just picking on MacDonald’s. This goes for, there’s all kinds of crappy food. I’m not anti, I feel like one day MacDonald’s big corporate hitman is going to come for me. So let me spread the lack of love across Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy’s and blah blah blah. So but billions and billions, that’s a psychological mind fuck on you. When you drive by that store and you see billions and billions, boom, what heuristic is that? Well, it’s right here, social proof. It’s also, so they’re showing, if billions of people have eaten it, then you shouldn’t be risk averse. So they move you down the chain, and they move you babababa. You can do all kinds of things. Remember MacDonald’s has the MacDonald’s House, which is the charity. What’s that? Kantian fairness. Emanuel Kant, one of the greatest philosophers centuries ago said that humans have an innate sense of fairness, which goes along with reciprocity. So you go, MacDonald’s, sure, 70 percent of kids are fat in the world, but MacDonald’s makes hospitals to treat them. So I guess that that makes up for getting them fat to start with. So that’s a reciprocity play and a liking play.

And you can move through all of these things. Like I said, I don’t have time, because I actually have to go in a second and I’ve got some guests here. Thank you for, they’re bored listening to me babble. But I’m going to do a talk, I decided to do one, and I’ll show you how you can move things down the chain in a lot more advanced way.

And maybe I’ll have time in that talk, so there should be a little link here above, below, click the link.

It’s a free talk, don’t worry. You can watch it on your good old, on your phone, on computer, you can watch it in forty different countries.

So if you have an idea, I’m going to go through some practical things, and I’ll also, this is the ninja stuff. And I definitely won’t have time to go through the 103, but I’ll do a few. It’s a live talk, so you can ask me questions. Last time it was interesting, we started blowing up my chat like it would take down my site because too many people were asking. And so we put on this third party like enterprise chat, and we blew that up. So we had to take that one off. So if you ask too many questions, so submit a smart question. Maybe rewatch this video and see something. I’ll take a handful of questions.

These ones I’ve never talked about, the logical fallacies. But man, if you break this down, listen. Most people are the bitch of their own brain. And it’s because not only do they get mind fucked by brands that are trying to push false status on them, but they also don’t understand these logical fallacies. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody you know. Ask them what ad hominem is. Ask them what a red herring argument. By the way, this is the problem in the school system. What’s the best thing a school could teach you to do? Not social studies. I remember social studies. It’s just like, what a waste. And here’s the, you know the problem with traffic? So this is L.A., this is Beverly Hills. The problem in traffic, economists say, is that if you’re driving and it takes you an extra fifteen minutes because the roads were laid out stupidly, OK? That wasted fifteen minutes of your time, but there’s 13 million people in L.A. times 15 million, you end up with an economy, everybody is like what’s wrong with the economy? I’m like, because we waste what we’ve been given. Seneca, the great stoic philosopher, said it’s not that we don’t have enough time in life, it’s just that we don’t use it right.

So think about school systems. Your education, I dropped out of college, maybe you went to college. Where the hell was this class? This is the class to have. There is nothing, if you have kids or you have employees, you get this down and they go literally from average status, and I’m not talking about just materialistic stuff. All this stuff is cool, you know? But remember, I’m still grounded. I grew up on a farm for ten years of my life. I lived for five years with bucket toilets, no electricity. So when people start saying oh, are you getting soft? Maybe I am, but I ain’t that soft. So for those of you, when I say status, what I’m going to be showing you is good, true status is, I was talking, some of you might have seen when I was talking to Tim Grover about his book, “Relentless.” And he has real status. Michael Jordan goes, the best trainer in the world. Kobe Bryant goes, the best, the best, the best. And it’s deserved status.

So I’m going to show you how to deserve more. As Charlie Monger says, who, by the way, is the business partner of Berkshire Hathaway, of Warren Buffett, he says to get what you want in life, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people. So this kind of stuff is how you deserve more. Like most people don’t even know who Emanuel Kant is. Maybe they have a vague recollection from Philosophy 101, if they got lucky. But the only reason you want to know who Kant is, in reality, unless you want to be just academic about it, is how can you utilize the great minds of all time? You know, people ask me why I read a book a day. Why I did a TEDX talk on that? I’m like well, I’ll put it better than I can put it. Will Smith.

Everybody knows who Will Smith is. By the way, he has real status. Billions of people have seen his movies. And somebody asked him, what do you need to do big things in life? He said two things. You have to be able to run and read. You have to be able to run because when your lungs are about to explode and you push through it anyway, he said that makes you a man or a woman. You can push through, and then you can push through in other situations. And he said you have to read, because a lot of smart people have done shit before you, and if you ignore them you’re too cocky. And by the way, one of the biggest biases, in fact, if you read the new book by, what was the head of the Federal Reserve for so long? Greenspan, Alan Greenspan’s new book. He says the number one bias of humans is over-optimism. So a lot of times I’ll do these free talks and people will be like, I don’t need to know that. Bullshit. Of course you need to know this. There’s not many people in the world that’ll ever share this with you, because there’s not that many people that know this. Because I’ve traveled to 51 countries trying to learn this from people, and I learn one or two from a mentor here and one or two, but people don’t pull them all together.

So if you want me to pull them all together, I’ll share with you. If you’re already doing some big things, you’re already making a million bucks or a hundred grand or you wish you had a million bucks but you’re broke now, I call those wanters and wishers. If you want to move from a wanter and wisher to somebody who actually does something, click the link and I’ll see you, it’ll translate into your local time, because we got people all over.

I quit putting the actual times because people are like, what is it in Albania, in Thailand?

So I’m like, click the link, we got these fancy things called computers that will figure out the time for you.

And then it’s free. The only thing I’ll ask for you, don’t show up not prepared.

I got to hang out with Arnold Schwarzenegger the other day at his movie premiere, the movie “Maggie,” and talked to him a little bit. And one of the things he said that cracks me up, he goes, because he still works out in Venice, right? He’s still a big dude. If you put your arm around Arnold, it’s still like a sheath of muscle, and he’s in his 60’s. And Arnold goes, you know, I see people working out at Gold’s Gym in Venice, and I see them texting. And I go, they ain’t never going to have muscles. He goes, you either work out or you text. You don’t do the same thing.

So when you click the link and you show up, either show up or you know, go like people’s pictures on Instagram.

Don’t try to do both, because this stuff’s too complicated. I already lose people when I have them in a room. I only really share this stuff with people who run companies for me. Over there today, I use my little outdoor porch sometimes as a, I bring all the, I call the chairman, the chairman’s little seat, and I had like fifteen of the people who run my different companies there. And this is the kind of stuff I talk about. So a little inside sneak peak into my life, my house.

But forget all this. This is not that important. What is important is moving through the chain. This, by the way, is heuristics. That’s how you decide everything.

So click the link and I got to run out.

Alright?

Talk to you, oh, eighteen minutes, just like a TEDX talk. Hitting it. They say this is the optimal time that people pay attention. So I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. You can subscribe to my channel too, if you want to not miss out on these.

But more importantly, click the link, show up.

If you don’t see the link, you can go to tailopez.com. There should be a link there too.

See? I’m not very good at branding, am I? I forgot to put my own domain name, tailopez. But you know what? Sometimes I say it’s good to make things hard to find, because then the only people who find it are the people who really are interested. So never sell yourself too short. Alright? Talk to you guys soon.