 Does money bring happiness? Does money make you happy? The eternal question people have asked since the beginning of money and even before. Let's talk about it, give you my opinion. Welcome to the show. I'm Tai Lopez and I divide my episodes and kind of my life focus up during the week, six days a week into the four pillars of the good life. So Monday I read books about health, record content about health, physical health and Tuesday's wealth, Wednesday's love social and then today, Thursday, things about happiness then Monday go back to health. I'm sorry, Friday go back to health, Saturday, wealth. So some subjects I hit twice a week but this is an important one, you know. Like Freud said in his book, civilization is discontent as to the, you know, somebody said to him, what's the purpose of life? And he said this question's been asked without end and nobody's been able to come up with a sufficient answer maybe because it's an unanswerable question but he said the behavior of men and women shows you what they seek, which is different than what's the purpose and what they seek, he says is happiness. They seek pleasure and to avoid pain, right? Pain comes in three main forms, he says, but that's for another episode. Let's talk about does money really bring happiness? So I'll give you what I call, I like the short long version. So I'm gonna get short answer and the short answer is up to a point and there's a lot of science on this, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner has written about this, you know, extensively economist slash, you know, delves into evolutionary psychology, biology, basically says, look, you know, if you graph happiness based on income, you see kind of diminishing returns at some point. I think at one point, the science was or some science was showing that in the United States, you know, if you have less than $80, $90,000 a year income for the average person, your happiness plummets and then, you know, between whatever, 80 and 120 or 150,000, it goes up dramatically and then after that, you don't get much bang for the buck. Now there's been some subsequent follow-up studies, you can just Google it, Google Daniel Kahneman, Google, you know, the science of money making you happy and there's been some, you know, it's like all science. They refuse itself and it's supposed to. I mean, that's the purpose of science, right? Continually challenge the hypotheses with new studies and so some other studies found, no, people continue to be happier and happier and happier as they go up from 150,000 to 500,000 to a million a year and beyond. I think everything shows that the curve begins to the steepness, right? The huge reward for more income kind of diminishes. One of my friends is a pro basketball player. I won't say his name, but he's been on my social and you know, I remember in, forget what year, I don't know, a few years ago, he was at my house and he's like, you know what, Ty, I got a contract to play at a different team. If I stay at my current basketball team, he's an NBA player. If I stay at my current basketball team, I'll make, I forget what it was, some craze, one of the biggest contracts of all time, over a $150 million contract, might have been $200 million. If I go to this other team where I have a chance of winning a championship, you know, I'll make half the money. And I said, well, what are you gonna do? And he said, well, I talked to my rapper friend who's at that time was almost a billionaire and he's like, the guy said, after a certain amount of money, you can't tell the difference. So my basketball friend decided to go play at a different team to have a chance for a championship because he felt like that would make him happier at that stage in his life. He'd already made it more than $100 million playing basketball. So you can see right there an actual decision by somebody hyper wealthy, okay, that he was choosing happiness that would come in a different form, in that case, from accomplishment of winning a NBA championship over money. So there's practical applications where you can see this. Now the tricky thing, and as I've learned from Dr. Buss and other scientists, you know, the problem is there's intense or immense variability among humans, right? So part of the problem with these studies and even this question, does money make you happy? Is there's tremendous variability? If you look at the Hexaco score, which is probably the most accurate, it's currently scientifically validated personality tests. Tests for 25 different, they're called facets of personality. It's kind of an upgrade on the big five personality tests or the Myers-Briggs 16 personality, some people call it. And you know, the 25 facets, Hexaco stands for the A chance for honesty, the E for emotionality, the X for extroversion, the A for agreeableness, the C for conscientiousness and the O for openness and new experience and each of those break down into three or four subsets, right? So one of those subsets, sub facets of human personality is it's under the H, it's called greed avoidance. And it basically measures your individual interest and appetite in material wealth, okay? And I've, you know, I build a quiz based on these various scientific tests. It's at lifecompass.com, you should try it out. And I'm getting ready to add a whole bunch more tests as well because there's some really interesting ways and people sometimes say, Ty, why so many personality tests? Well, you know, why wouldn't you? It was a real question. Why does the school system not have extensive testing? You go to the doctor and they test you, you know, annual physical test you for 20, 30 different markers of your blood and so on. Why don't we do the same for personality? It's because the modern world still is not scientific and logical enough about personality and thinks that personality is just this mumbo jumbo thing that everybody's totally different and can't be classified and everybody's a unique snowflake which isn't true at all. Humans are mammals, you know, so anyway. But greed avoidance, your appetite and interest in material wealth is highly variable from one to 100. My test is tested over, I think now it's approaching a million people in more than 60 countries around the world and I've seen tremendous variability in that greed avoidance score. Just tremendous, meaning, you know, some people get a 20 or 30 out of 100. The lower the number means the less you care about money and some people get, you know, an 80 to 100, meaning they're just absolutely obsessed with material things and it's specifically around material things, not wealth as in, you know, non-monetary wealth. And so if you think about that and you might say, well, that's weird and nobody should be, you know, nobody should really be greedy and love money and well, if you think about, there's something called ESS which is evolutionary stable systems and the real way the world works is a lot different than when being taught. We're kind of taught this kind of moralistic understanding, religions-based understanding of human behavior, which if you just look around you isn't really the rule of the jungle or the rule of planet earth or Homo sapiens. The real rule is there's this ESS, evolutionary stable system, by the way. If you're not in my 67 steps program I built in 2015, it's one of the most, I don't know. It's probably almost the biggest self-development course ever done on planet earth in terms of how many people got into it and have gone through it. So go to tylopis.com slash 67 steps podcast and it'll redirect you to a discounted price on the 67 steps if you haven't gone through it. So tylopis.com slash the number six, the number seven steps, S-T-E-P-S podcast. If you put that in it'll take you to a discount. But I talk about this ESS, I have a whole hour on evolutionary stable systems as one of the 67 lessons in the 67 steps, but a quick understanding of it is think of it, there's a concept called hawks and doves in biology, which basically means hawks are considered like predators and doves are considered innocent birds in this metaphor, right? And so what hawks and doves means is that in a system, take a ecosystem in a forest or a rainforest or a savannah in Africa or Asia or one of the Americas, right? So if you have too many hawks, right, that are predators, there's no doves left. They eat them. And if you have too many doves without enough hawks the doves over multiply, reproduce to a point where they starved to death. You see that with deer populations. So you need the predator and the prey in the right ratio. So you see there's a certain amount of wolves for how many buffalo there were in the ESS of the plains, the Dakotas in the 16, 17, 18 hundreds before, you know, Buffalo, Bill Cody and American Hunter shot them all to drive the Sioux Indians and the various plains Indians onto reservations. So there couldn't be too many buffalo per wolf because then they would become weakened because there wasn't enough grass. So there was a certain amount of wolves per buffalo. And I don't know what that ESS was. I'm not sure anybody knows exactly, but maybe it's 1,000 buffalo per one wolf or something like this, right? There was millions of buffalo in herds. So point being in it, when it comes to money in a society you're gonna have some people that are hyper quote unquote greedy materialistic, but they accomplish certain things that benefit the entire system. That's why it's called evolutionary stable systems. Now, I don't know if there's been extensive study it'd be a fascinating piece of research to do to try to find what's this ratio. But one thing I have to tell you, you know I've met no multiple billionaires on the Forbes list. I've never, I don't think you can become a billionaire without being pretty greedy. Always be suspicious to people who are hyper wealthy that say they don't love money. It's just, unless they inherited it. I have a friend in Europe, she's a billionaire but inherited the money from her, not just her dad, but her grandparents. So in that case, she's not particularly greedy. But the first generation that makes the money don't ever let, I mean, I have a tweet I posted a while ago, don't trust anybody who's ultra wealthy that tells you they're not doing it for the money. And I don't even know why they have to say that because it's okay in the evolutionary stable system to have a small ratio of people be hyper greedy and then you have a larger percentage of the poor population be somewhat greedy. Then you'll have the average person will have average greed materialistically and then it'll go all the way down on the spectrum to where you'll have a small percentage of population that doesn't care about money at all. But you couldn't have too many people that don't care about money because you gotta ask yourself and I've done some talks on this. I've asked many smart people rarely get the correct answer in my opinion of what is money, right? So what is money in three words or less? And if you've heard my answer, I'll give you the answer. It's scarce in demand resources. Three words, because in demand's hyphenated there. So that's what money represents now. Nobody cares about the cotton that US dollars are printed on, right? That's an unimportant party. It represents something. Some people say, oh, it represents time and freedom. No, it represents, that's too broad. It's scarce in demand resources. If you print too much money of the hyperinflation of South Africa or, you know, the 1920s Germany, Weimar Republic, my grandma lived through that. She remembers people running with wheelbarrows of money trying to get it to the bank before it became worthless in a matter of an afternoon, right? So it's scarce. It has to be in demand. Like some things are scarce, but no one cares about them, right? You could have a painting you did, but if nobody likes it, you have one of a kind, it's scarce but it's not in demand. And the reason I say resources, it has to be tangible. It has to be an asset. It has to be tradable, right? You can't say, well, I have an idea in my head that's scarce and in demand. Like, if you think about a podcast, I'm, hopefully you perceive that my podcast, this episode as something, you know, that's a valuable resource that's tangible for you. If it was just in my head, it might be scarce. You know, this subject of, does money make you happy? Might be in demand by the population, but I haven't turned it into a resource slash asset as defined as something you can, I can trade with you. Here, using this audio or video, I'm put it into a format that's an actual resource slash asset that I'm handing to you, you know, through however you're listening right now. So, if you had going back to evolutionary stable systems and does money make you happy? And the answer being up to a point and it depends on the person. That's kind of the, remember I said, I'll give you a short and long answer. So the short answer I gave at the beginning was like up to a point, but the more in-depth, you know, 15 minute explanation is that money makes you happier up to a point and depending on your personality. There are somebody listening, there are some people who would continue to feel intense happiness and pleasure, no matter how much money they keep making. Millions, the second billion will feel just as good as the first billion or the second million will make, right, that's a personality variable. There's variable humans in a system, personality type. So the real question is, know thyself, right? The first, the Oracle of Delphi in Greece, the first piece of self-help advice from V.C. Times was know thyself. So I think there's very few people that receive unending happiness from unending amount of monies. Okay, I think there's all, for most 99.9% of the population, unless you happen to be the lowest on greed of white and ever known to mankind, you're probably gonna reach diminishing returns. I've found for myself, you know, I kind of know in my head how much money I need to make and of course it depends on inflation and stuff, but I don't need, I would never even wanna be the richest person in the world. In fact, in my opinion, not only are there personality variables with diminishing returns on making more money, making you happy, but there's also the societal pressure. There's an old, I'm not sure if it's Shakespeare, there's an old saying, you know, heavy hangs the head of he who wears the crown. I think I misquoted it, but it's basically saying the king always has people trying to attack them, right? So do you really wanna be that wealthy? Does it open you up to attacks? Absolutely, you know, in Dr. David Buss' book, Evolutionary Psychology, one of the interesting, or it might have been a different book by a different author, but recently I was just reading and it was talking about the trade-offs of an increase in power and or wealth. And one of those is you become a focus of an attack by other ambitious people that would tear you down to take your spot. So I think not only is there personality variables to wealth and money making you happy, but there's also societal pressure when you reach, and that's why you see a lot of billionaires have to do a lot of virtue signaling, kind of fake virtue signaling, being like, oh, I don't care about the money, I just made all these billions because I wanna help the world and they have to do that. And it's not, I mean, maybe it's genuine sometimes, but I told you, I highly doubt it. One of the prerequisites to be good at anything, if you wanna have huge muscles, there's no pro bodybuilder who wins Mr. Olympia, that's not pretty high on vanity. To be a pro bodybuilder, it necessitates you stare at yourself in the mirror a lot to get every muscle in ratio with the other muscles to create the golden, you know, they call it the golden ratio 1.6. Fibonacci kind of thing, your arms, your calves should mask, sure, whatever. What is it, your calves should mask, your biceps or something, your waist should be 1.6, or your shoulder should be 1.6 larger than your waist, all these ratios. So there's a vanity component that comes to being a champion bodybuilder. Just, any bodybuilder says, oh, you know, I don't care about looking at myself in the mirror, well then you would never get to be Mr. Olympia. In the same way, a billionaire that says, oh, I don't care about money, never would get that money because you have to be very focused on anything you want. You want muscles, you gotta focus on it. You want wealth, you gotta over focus comparatively to the rest of the population. Really, what a billionaire is, is just someone who has an outsized proportion of scarce in demand resources. So anyway, back to what I was saying, there's societal pressure on you, the wealthier you get. Lawsuits, gold diggers, fake friends, betrayal, public criticism, right? Attacks on your status, attacks false attacks, marriage issues, kids, people have issues with their kids, raising them correctly. So I think for the average person, if you want a practical takeaway from today's episode, it's like, find your minimum number. Everybody talks about like, okay, so I'm going to talk about how much money do you want to make, net worth or income wise, it's like, oh, my maximum. I'm like, oh, what's your minimum? Interestingly, I saw a survey where they asked a pretty broad set of people, like what net worth would you be happy? People said 10 million, which I think is interesting. We had a 10 million dollar net worth. Realistically, if you run a Monte Carlo simulation, you can maybe do 3% a year without ever touching principal. So you could have 300, 400 thousand dollars a year. You could do more, but my point is, I think most people, you're going to find diminishing returns after $300,000 net worth income annual and 10 million net worth, say 300 to a million, I think. And I've seen some of that in my own life too. And maybe 300 is low for some of you or it's high for some of you. But my point is, there's other things to life. That's why I'm so big on the four pillars. By the way, if you're not in my new four pillars program, it's a little different than 67 steps. It's more, it talks about everything I've learned from mentors and my life experience about health, wealth, love and happiness. So you should go to tileobus.com slash the number four pillars with an S podcast. That'll get you right to the right page, tileobus.com slash four pillars podcast. And you should get in that program, listen to those videos, because I think the real answer is yes, money brings a level of happiness, but so do other things. So you have to look at them in proportion because as you do more of one, say money, you sacrifice others. It's just the necessity of, that's what economics means by the way. How do you distribute and balance the various demands on your resources and your greatest resource? And most scarce in demand resource is time. That is the scarce in demand resource. I just had a close friend die and it's like just brings it all home, man. So ultimately the time you spend on one of the four pillars, physical health, wealth, love and happiness is taking away from one of the other three pillars. And that's okay, but you got to get the ratios right. That's more important than all the money in the world, all the physical health you could have. You know, people say, oh, if you just have love, no, you need to have things besides love. You know, you can be in love and not happy. You can be in love and not in good physical health. You know, so there is no one thing. People are always trying to deconstruct and oversimplify, become a reductionist and say, oh, you need to this. The greatest reductionist theory I've ever come up with is the four pillars. So does money make you happy? Yes, to a point, depending on your personality, depending on the penalization of various societal norms that will come with excess wealth, okay? And in proportion to the sacrifices making that money cause, you know, in the diminishment of the other three pillars, physical health, love, friends, family, romance and happiness. So money's just one pillar. So I highly recommend you come up with your minimum goal. Put that as a comment below. If there's a comment box or message me, go to Talibahs.com. I've got a, you can just email me, join the email list and then reply. I don't read them all, but I read through. Or you can comment on my Instagram or TikTok. What's your minimum number? As I said, in recent surveys for Americans, it was 10 million net worth, which equates to three to 500,000 a year income. Is that your minimum? And after that, you'll start to lose the bang for the buck, you know? Anyway, good talk, everyone. Go to Talibahs.com slash 67stepspodcast or go to Talibahs.com slash four pillars podcast or, and really important, just go to Talibahs.com and join my email list where I'm dropping links to things like this, which I think can help you, you know? All right, see you on tomorrow's episode. We'll be back talking on physical health, body hacks. I'm actually walking and jogging right now in the park, getting some vitamin D.