i lost $1.5m with Tai Lopez... $112m ponzi scheme accusation explained.

i lost $1.5m with Tai Lopez... $112m ponzi scheme accusation explained. Speaker 1: I lost $1.5 million investing with Tai Lopez. Recently, it came out that the SEC is investigating his company for ponzi-like activity. In this video, I'm going to share with you why I invested. I'll tell you what the terms were. I'll tell you when I realized that something was wrong. I'll tell you when things started to fall apart, and ultimately, I'll answer the question, is Tai Lopez going to jail? I don't want to make this video. I already know that people are going to tell me that I'm an idiot for investing in Tai Lopez's company. My friends have already told me that I'm an idiot for making these investments. It also brings me no joy to throw shade at someone that I have known for a long time. It brings me no pleasure to tell you about the dark times that I went through as a result of losing my largest ever investment. But as a result of this very dark chapter of my entrepreneurial career, I learned What not to do when evaluating a deal. I learned that I too can get caught up in hype. I learned that I too can get blinded by short-term interests at the expense of what makes sense long-term. I learned that I can ignore red flags. And I hope that as a result of making this video for you, I help you avoid some dumb decisions in your future. Let me start with what might be the most controversial part of this entire video. I think that Tai Lopez is a kind person. Even after losing my entire investment in his business, I still think that he has a good heart and has good intentions. I met Tai Lopez way back in 2011, back before he was famous, back before here in my garage. I met him at a diner in Los Angeles in 2011, and I did not like him at first. I thought he was brash and kind of arrogant and did not like him. But over time, he won me over. He was present with me. He was genuinely curious. He genuinely went out of his way to help me. He took an interest in me. He was supportive of my businesses. He made introductions for me. Over time, I just saw the kind intent that he had towards me, and there was no ask. There was no pitch. There was no promise. I just genuinely developed a bit of a friendship with him and I grew to like him. And then over the next decade, I watched his meteoric rise to fame. I watched him interact with some of the most famous people in the world. I saw him build an audience faster than I have ever seen anyone in our space do. And I saw that there was a skill set there. There was something about his approach to business that I wanted to learn. That was something that I wanted to get better at doing. And I wanted to place myself in more opportunities to learn about that skill set. So when he started to buy up bankrupt businesses and turn them into e-commerce plays, I looked at this and I thought, This actually makes sense. So in 2019, Tai and his partner, Alex, had the opportunity to buy Dressborne, which was a multi-decade established brand that had hundreds of thousands of customers. And they were going bankrupt. And they had the opportunity to buy that entire business for $5 million. And the thing that stood out to me was when I was on the phone with his partner, Alex, and he said, Ryan, These people can't even send an email without it being this crazy bureaucratic process. We're going to clear all that out and we're going to start talking to our customers again. I was like, I so understand what you mean. I work with some big companies that can barely send an email and I know how much money they're leaving on the table. On paper, this made a lot of sense. I asked Tai while I was thinking about investing in the deal, I said, Would you stake your reputation on this deal? And his answer was, I already have. So I invested $500,000, the largest check I had ever written. The reason I did that was because the terms were really favorable. Basically, what they offered me was 20% interest on my money and that my principal, my $500,000, would be returned to me after one year. I also got an equity kicker. That meant that I got a small amount of equity, so if the business performed really well, I could participate in that upside. It made a lot of sense to me. For the first year, turned out to be a really good investment. My interest payments arrived on time. The business was growing. They were sending emails to the customer list. They turned over the business in record time. I've never seen anything like this. They took a bureaucratic bloated company and they made it a lean e-commerce startup. In a matter of months, it was actually really impressive what they did. They brought in a CEO who had a really good track record, and that CEO's job was to run DressBarn. Tai and Alex were free to raise capital, to cast a vision, and to pursue additional acquisitions. This is exactly what I wanted to see as an investor, a good management team, good operations, and my interest payments were coming in on time. So, after one year of being invested in the business, they offered me the opportunity to renew the investment. Basically, that means that I didn't have to put any additional money in. I could just keep my money in the business and continue to receive 20% on my money. That seemed pretty good. And they also offered me an additional equity kicker. And they told me that the business was performing really well and that the value of the business was increasing. So, on paper, that tiny little equity kicker that I had, was worth almost as much as my original investment. So, this was looking like a really good deal. So, I renewed the investment. It was a two-year term, and that meant that I would get my $500,000 original investment two years from the renewal, and I would have all these interest payments, and I would have additional equity in the company. Honestly, it was a really sweet deal. Within that two-year period, there was this event called COVID-19. During that time, there were a lot of bankruptcies. There were a lot of retail businesses that started to go bankrupt. This was a great opportunity for a team that was buying up bankrupt retail businesses. They made the acquisition in Pier 1, and it was the same terms that I was offered for DressBarn. I personally decided not to invest in Pier 1 because the valuation that they put on the company was just richer than what I thought was reasonable. They also bought Models and SteinMart and a host of other retail companies. I passed on all of those deals. Somewhere in that time, I was told that DressBarn was EBITDA profitable. That meant that it was making money before they paid taxes and interest. Depreciation, that the business itself was profitable and that they were valuing it on additional capital raises at $100 million valuation. My equity kicker was worth millions of dollars at that point. This deal worked out tremendously well from everything that I was hearing and everything that I was seeing on the surface. The fact that they were making all these other acquisitions was A really good, healthy sign to me that this overall vision was heading in a direction that seemed like it could become something really big. However, during that time, there was something that stood out to me that gave me reason for pause, and this is really important to note. Because I think this is one of the reasons why things started to fall apart. In addition to raising capital for DressBarn and PierOne and these other businesses, Tai and the operational team started some other projects. And these other projects were tech plays. They started deploying a lot of capital into a Slack competitor. And it was called Bulldozer. I don't know what the thought process was there. And this was also during the time, you remember that app that was big during COVID, the audio app called Clubhouse? And this was going to be like the new revolutionary social network. And it just blew up during COVID. Well, they started a competitor to that too. It was called Speakeasy. And they started Putting all these resources and this capital and this focus into these tech plays that seemed very outside of the focus of DressBarn and Pier One. And at that time, they started raising money at the holding company level. And what that means is instead of just investing in one of the brands, you could invest in the whole business, everything that they did. And this is the important point to note about this. I wanted nothing to do with the holding company. I intentionally never invested in the holding company. In fact, I was kind of grossed out by the idea of investing in the holding company because I wanted nothing to do with a Slack competitor. I wanted nothing to do with Speakeasy, the social network. I wanted nothing to do with those. I saw them as high-risk plays that had a pretty good chance of going to zero. Now, if they worked out, they could have been multibillion-dollar deals. I just didn't think it made sense for them to be doing that while also making acquisitions in DressBarn and PierOne. So I never invested in the holding company. I only had money in one deal, and that deal was DressBarn. And what I was told was that that deal was going great. And I had every reason to think that that was true. There was one other deal that was just odd, and it was when they bought RadioShack. And RadioShack was probably the most known brand of anything that they had bought. And within a couple of weeks of them buying RadioShack, RadioShack was one of the top trending topics on Twitter. And it was because, you may remember this, there was some very bizarre tweeting happening from the RadioShack account. It was vulgar and crass and rude, and it just got so much attention. And I was like, I don't think this is such a good idea. So I reached out to Tai, and I was like, is everything okay over here? And he's like, dude, we're the number three trending topic on Twitter. This is amazing. And I was like, okay. Maybe this guy's a genius. Maybe this is actually just a really smart play. But instead of selling, I don't know, iPhone chargers at RadioShack, they turned it into a crypto project. What are we doing here, guys? But then Tai had the opportunity to make another acquisition, and it was an acquisition That really called my name. Tai had the opportunity to buy bodybuilding.com. Bodybuilding.com was like the name in supplements. Before Amazon took over everything, bodybuilding was the brand. And still to this day, when I go to the gym, there are people with bodybuilding.com water bottles. And gym bags, like bodybuilding.com is just such a classic nostalgic name in the supplement space. And I am in the supplement space. I built a company starting in 2013 that I sold in 2017 for $16 million. I know the supplement world. I know the background of bodybuilding.com. I know Amazon FBA. I know that world so well. I love the supplement space. And honestly, I thought, There's really no one better to buy bodybuilding.com than Tai Lopez because he also was familiar with that space. His father was a bodybuilder, and this is the perfect person to take an old legacy brand and modernize it for an e-commerce play. And so I invested another $500,000 into bodybuilding.com. Basically, the same terms that I invested in DressBarn. I got an interest payment, I was going to get my principal back, and I got a small equity piece if the company did very well. Now, this was a brand, a business that I wanted to be involved in. I said, introduce me to the CEO of bodybuilding.com. I want to help. Get me involved. I was really excited to be a part of such a big acquisition. And no one ever called. No one ever reached out. Multiple times I asked, hey, who's the CEO? Who's running the business? And I never got a clear answer. And that should have been a red flag, like that should have told me something. But the interest payment checks kept coming in on time. And let me just be honest, the payments between those two investments were really healthy. I was getting passive income from two different businesses at a 20% interest rate, and they were hitting the bank every single month. It was enough money to where I would sort of ignore some red flags, because for them to continue making interest payments to me and all of the other investors, Something must be working. And in my casual conversations with some members of the team, they would say things like, you'll never believe it, but we started emailing the customers and they started buying more product. Which is exactly what I would say if I had taken over a big brand and was doing the stuff that I know how to grow the company. Just email your customers, put out good products, get reviews, make good connections, do good work, and you grow the business. It made sense to me. It was a satisfactory answer for me to say, it sounds like the businesses are growing. And to this day, I do think the businesses were growing. To this day, I think the two investments that I made, one in bodybuilding.com and one in DressBarn, I think that those were good investments and that those businesses were growing. But once again, there were all of these other activities going on in these tech plays and other brands that weren't performing as well that were getting focus from the team. And that started to make me a little bit nervous. It didn't really become clear to me until I went to one of the investor meetups in Puerto Rico. During my time as an investor, I attended three different investor meetups for the holding company, which was called REV, Retail Ecommerce Ventures. And these mastermind meetups were fantastic. I met some really great people there, people that I'm still close with and friends with to this day. During these meetups, it was common for the CEO of each project to come up and explain the vision, share the numbers, share the operations. And again, this is exactly what I would have liked to see as an investor. Got to meet the CEOs, meet the team, see the progress. It looked great. But the last mastermind that I went to was in Puerto Rico. And at this meetup, there were fewer CEOs there. The CEO that was running DressBarn was nowhere to be seen, and no one really had a good answer for what had happened. There was no CEO for bodybuilding.com, and it looked like Tai's friends and relatives were running most of the businesses. It was just weird. But still, all the interest payments were coming in. They had a really good vision for where they wanted to go. And then they introduced a real estate play. They were going to buy up real estate in Puerto Rico. And Tai actually walked us down the beach and we toured some of the real estate that they were buying. And people were excited about this. It made sense to buy up fancy real estate in an emerging part of the world. But I'm sitting here going, what in the world does this have to do with buying up distressed e-commerce brands? Again, I want nothing to do. With this side of the business, I'm happy with my dress barn investment. I'm happy with my bodybuilding.com investment. Keep those checks a fly in. Looks like the value of these businesses has gone up. At this point, those two investments By my calculations, made up at least half of my net worth. I mean, I felt like I made some really good decisions, but keep me out of Puerto Rico real estate. I know nothing about this. I want nothing to do with it. You go build your Slack competitor. Keep me out of it. That's all at the holding company level. I'm invested on the individual deals. At this mastermind, I saw the real estate. I'm kind of questioning the team that's running around. I met a couple of people who had invested in other projects that I had nothing to do with. One of those projects was a company called The Franklin Mint. Now, I'm told that The Franklin Mint was a big deal several decades ago. I was too young to remember it. But apparently, this had some brand value with people from a different generation. I knew nothing about it. I wasn't part of the deal. It was shared to me by some people who were invested in that. Their checks had gone way down, almost to zero. They had royalty deals on these businesses. Basically, as the business sold more, their checks went up, and their checks had basically gone to nothing. And they were concerned, obviously. They felt like the brand wasn't getting attention. They felt like the team was really stretched thin and that the Franklin Mint just wasn't getting attention. It had been kind of neglected, and it had sort of gone to nothing. Once again, I was not involved in that deal, so I didn't really care. And I know that if you're going to buy a lot of businesses, some of them are not going to work out. But it was just another piece of information that I paid attention to at this mastermind, where there's fewer executive talent, there's more rookie-level people running the show. There's more random deals happening in real estate and other things that I don't want to be a part of, and now one or two of the projects that they invested in is not performing so well. Still, I was happy with my investments, and I wasn't that concerned. At some point after the mastermind, I had breakfast with the COO of REV. I've watched her and Tai build an empire together. She's gracious, kind, sweet, on top of things. I had my son with me when I had breakfast. She was playful with him. She's just a good person. And I asked her point blank. Has REV lost any of the deals? Has REV not had any successes? And she thought for a moment and she said, no. And I knew that was a lie. Because I knew what other investors had told me about some of the businesses that they had invested in. And that's when I started to get a little bit concerned. That's when I started to wonder if something bad was going to happen. Around this time, I started hearing rumors that REV's finances were being treated all as one company. In other words, I heard that bodybuilding.com's bank account might be being used for DressBarn's expenses and vice versa. Now, I didn't know if that was true, but that was exactly what I had feared. And that's why I decided that I wasn't going to invest in any further acquisitions with Tai's company. So, I thought one more thing had to happen for me to really get it. And it was when they had the opportunity to buy a company called Late 2022, Tai and his team had the opportunity to acquire Tuesday Morning, which was a publicly traded company that had existed for decades. And at the time, their parent company, Retail Ecommerce Ventures, was raising capital at a valuation of $600 million. That means that if you invested in the parent company, You were investing in a company that was worth $600 million, and they were trending towards a billion-dollar valuation. That was good for all of us, because if they had a billion-dollar valuation, that would bring up the value of all of the holdings within this portfolio. So, they had the opportunity to buy this company called Tuesday Morning, which had 500 retail locations across the country. They were publicly traded, and they had a very interesting management team. The vision of Tai's holding company had always been to go public and be Tai's version of Berkshire Hathaway. And this deal had the potential to make that a reality. So, I was invited to go meet The executive team of Tuesday Morning and to walk the flagship store of this company and hear about the vision of the turnaround. Tuesday Morning was facing some financial challenges and REV was being brought in as the potential financial partner that could help Tuesday Morning get back on track. And the vision that they cast was actually quite compelling. Basically, we have 500 retail stores across the country. So let's do a pop-up Pier 1 location. In these Tuesday morning shops, let's do a bodybuilding.com feature over here. Let's do a Models Sporting Goods in this corner of Tuesday morning. We could keep the spirit that was Tuesday morning and had this loyal fan base, but we could bring in all of these other shopping opportunities into the store. It made a lot of sense. It also made financial sense, I thought, because this was a publicly traded company, and this was during the time of the SPAC. This SPAC was when you could basically take this organization over here that was publicly traded and fold in other entities, other businesses, so that you could attract institutional capital and retail investors and get better press. It made a lot of sense to acquire a publicly traded company and bring in all of these other businesses into the fold. It actually looked like the thesis that Tai and Alex had set out to do was finally about to happen. This is a next level of business that challenged me to think bigger and to be more aggressive. I was inspired. I would even say that I was proud to be a part of it. So I invested another $500,000 into Tuesday morning. And to this day, I don't know what happened after that. While we were sitting with the executive team, we met the CEO. And this was the guy that really sold us on the deal because it wasn't just me. There were about 20, maybe even 30 potential investors who were vetting this deal. And we all agreed. We were like, that CEO is awesome. He really makes this deal possible. And we were learning that potentially he was putting in money and maybe there were other capital partners. This seemed like a real team effort. And then I saw the press release like two months later that the CEO had exited the company. Again, to this day, I don't know what happened. But the next year, I was at my son's three-year-old t-ball game. And I locked eyes with somebody in the stands. And I said, Hey, are you? He said, Yeah. And he looked at me. And I looked at him. And it was the CEO. And I shook his hand. And he said, Did you get screwed? And I said, yeah. He said, me too. To this day, I don't know what happened. All I know is that people stopped answering texts, stopped answering phone calls. The regular investor meetings just stopped happening. I had recorded a podcast with Tai Lopez talking about REV and what they were doing and going in this direction. And I never aired it because between the time that we recorded and the time that it was supposed to be published, things just went dark. And it looked like something was happening. It has been told to me that during this time, Some federal agency got involved, and they started investigating. I don't know for sure that that's true or that's what happened. If it is what happened, then it explains a lot. Because now if the federal government is involved, you can't continue to raise capital. And if you can't continue to raise capital, then you can't continue to fund bulldozer, the slack competitor, which is losing a ton of money. You can't continue to pay a big team of developers. You can't continue to order inventory. I mean, it's gonna be hard if you don't have capital, especially when you're still paying out these big interest payments to all these investors like myself. But you should have said something. This is the time when some transparency and some clarity would have gone a long way. Four months later, Tuesday morning, announced that they were going bankrupt. They were being delisted from the stock exchange. They would no longer be a publicly traded company, and that they were closing all 500 of their stores. Just like that. Within six months of that deal happening, it was nothing. Checks stopped arriving. There was no communication. And I know I've said this multiple times, to this day, I am unclear on what happened. I do know that during this time, Tai started working with some advisors over at Piper Sandler. That is a really big investment bank similar to Goldman Sachs. I know that there was a very large retainer for their services to basically help them restructure the company and I assume raise capital from other people. No capital ever came in. What that says to me is that whatever Piper Sandler saw in the numbers and the books said, we can't raise capital on this. There's nothing that we can do here. And so once again, it all just kind of went quiet. Tai never addressed it. And this is what bothered me. Because for the next year and a half, I'm completely in the dark about what happened to my investment. I'm completely in the dark about, was I an idiot? Should I have seen this the whole time? During this time, I had to make different financial arrangements. I have two kids. I'm successful, but I don't care who you are, losing $1.5 million hurts. During this time, I'm actually afraid to make any other investments because now I feel like Everything I touch is turning to poop. Things fell apart real quick. And before I go into the part that really bothered me, I'm just going to be really honest. That year and a half was one of the darkest periods of my life. I had panic attacks. I couldn't sleep at night. I went on antidepressant medication. I lost half my net worth. So I thought. I had to change my life and lifestyle in order to adjust for the income that I thought would be coming in that wasn't coming in. I cried in the middle of the night to the mother of my children and apologized to her for losing all of our money. These are first world problems, but man, did they hurt. And I felt like someone that I knew and liked had kind of used me. And there was no communication from that person. To be fair, he probably couldn't. He probably wasn't legally allowed to say anything. He probably had to be quiet. I don't know. Maybe I'm giving him too much benefit of the doubt, but there's a non-zero chance that he just couldn't say anything to investors and he needed to let the process be the process. But that's why it bothered me so much when about a year ago, Tai just came back onto the podcast scene. And I remember watching him on the iced coffee hour with Graham Stephan, a two-hour interview. And it just never came up that he had recently lost over $200 million in investor money. Just never came up. I saw him give another long-form interview. With someone who I wasn't familiar with their content, but I was watching it to see if it got addressed that he had just lost all this money. Two hours go by and it never came up. And just ironically, I was having dinner with Gary Vaynerchuk about four weeks later, and that interviewer was at the dinner. And about an hour into the dinner, I turned to him and I said, Hey, I have a question for you. How do you interview Tai Lopez for two hours and never ask him about the $200 million of investor capital that he had just lost? And he looked at me like, why does it ghost? Like, I had no idea. You never thought to ask? And basically, what he told me is that before a show, it's kind of a nice, kind thing to say, is there anything that you don't want to talk about? And again, I'm told that one of Tai's things was, I don't want to talk about the current state of the holding company. It's just not something I want to talk about right now. Okay, fine, but at least call a brother. At least reach out and say, hey, I know you trusted me. I know that you backed my vision, and I'm doing everything that I can to make it right. I actually would have been satisfied with that. I actually would have owned, you know what? I made the investment. It was my decision. We'll get the next one. I can be an adult when it comes to losing money. But to have it never addressed really bothered me. And six months after Tai is appearing on podcasts, he starts to launch programs again and launch parties and masterminds at his house with all of his celebrity friends. And man, that really bothered me. I'm starting to see ads for his programs that he's selling about whatever the hot topic is. And that to me was like, That wasn't right. You should at least address it. At least go to the people who backed you and say something. So what was going on behind the scenes with all of these brands while Tai is out there doing the podcast tour? Well, again, during this time, basically the group of investors foreclosed on the assets and they were doing everything they could to try and turn these businesses around. And some of that process is still in motion. And most of the conversations that I would have with other investors was, hey, the best thing we can do right now is support the efforts of seeing that these businesses are successful. But also, it might be a good idea for there to be a class action lawsuit against Tai and the company in the future. But nobody wants to take that on. Nobody wants to lead that charge. I've never done that before. I remember having many late night thoughts of like, can I sue somebody? Does it make sense? How do you sue somebody? I know I live in America and anyone can sue anyone for anything, but how expensive is that? I'm not going to throw good money after bad money. It was just this. In between uncomfortable place of like, what do we do? What do we do to try and get some of our capital back? And not having it be addressed just made it all the worse. It was a hard time for all of us. People were really hurting. And that's why when Tai is doing a video about his $100,000 a month mansion and these parties that he's throwing, while I know that the people who really believed in him are hurting, that's where I felt like a line was crossed. That's where it felt like this is no longer okay. So in September of 2025, I was texted the link to the New York Post article that said that the SEC was investigating Tai Lopez and Alex and Maya for ponzi-like activity. Now, here's what the SEC filing actually said. Quote, defendants transferred at least $5.9 million in investor proceeds directly between portfolio companies, end quote. That's exactly what I had feared most. The report continues, quote, at least $5.9 million of the returns to investors were, in reality, Ponzi-like payments funded by other investors, and that defendants misappropriated approximately $16.1 million in investor funds for Lopez's and Mayer's personal use, end quote. When I saw this article, I did not experience glee. I was not happy that someone else was going down. I was not feeling the vindication of I'm right and you're wrong. The only emotion that I felt was relief. The fact that the SEC is involved is good for a number of reasons. First of all, There is something called the Safe Harbor Rule, and this is a rule that was introduced after the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme that basically says that if something is ruled to be a ponzi scheme, that loss can now be credited against ordinary income, which you couldn't do before. When you just make an investment, it goes to zero. You don't get to claim that against ordinary income, but if it's fraud, then you're getting a big tax deduction. And that is a huge financial relief. I put a sizable amount of money into these deals. So the fact that I could get Some tax relief from that, either now or in the future, that helps. Also, the SEC being involved takes the burden away from the investors of pursuing any penalties or lawsuits against the company or the individuals. Now, it's actually the SEC's responsibility to try and get as much money back as possible by going after whatever they can go after, and when the SEC gets involved, They try to go after everything. They claw back every dollar they can to try and return it back to the victims. And so there's some relief there as well. And there's also the chance that the operating company that is running those assets is successful, and there's some recovery in that direction too. So when the news broke that Tai was being investigated by the SEC, It was actually really good news for the investors who have been hurt, because there's financial relief that is now very possible as a result of the federal government getting involved. According to the SEC filing, they have been investigating REV for years, which means that There is a chance that they got involved way back before the Tuesday morning deal, and that may have been the incident that made everything come crashing down. So I've been asked, is Tai Lopez going to jail? I'm no legal expert. I don't play one on the internet. And so I want to make it clear that this is me commenting as an individual, not any sort of expert on this topic. But this is not my first ponzi scheme. I have made other bad investments too. And I was a witness in a criminal trial for a very similar situation where something started as a good business. And then when things got hard, money started being moved from different bank accounts in order to cover up other bad decisions. And this is my personal opinion, but the person that I was testifying against in the trial was a good man. A good man who did things that you can't do. He made dumb decisions. There's just a line that you're not allowed to cross, and one of those lines is when you take money from one entity and you use it to pay back investors in another entity. You can't do it. It doesn't matter what your intentions were. You cannot do that. And so if that man is in jail serving a seven-year sentence, and he is, it doesn't look good for Tai. Now, the SEC filings say that as of right now, they're only going after penalties. They're not pursuing any criminal charges. And I hope that remains the case. I don't want Tai to go to jail. I wish him no ill will. I hope that he has an even better career in his future. I hope he has way bigger successes than anything he's done in his past, and I hope that he works out a deal like Jordan Belfort had or Kevin Trudeau had where He can make as much money as he wants, but a certain percentage of that is going into a pool of victim relief to make people whole. And for the rest of his career, we're all cheering for Tai and Alex and the rest of the team to make gobs of money. Because some of that's going to come back to us as investors. I think that's the most ethical approach. It brings me no benefit if he goes to jail. I would be sad for him. I don't want him to suffer. I want him to go be deliriously successful, and I want that success to make all the investors whole. I think that's the right thing to do. But if you're looking at it objectively, there's plenty of precedent to say that if it's true that you took from one bank account and you used it to pay back investors from other bank accounts, that's criminal activity. And you can be a kind person and have a good heart and good intentions and still break the law and still have To pay the penalty of breaking the law. Now, this is important to note. These are allegations of wrongdoing, not proof of guilt. There is a non-zero chance that they were running a bad business operation, but not an illegal operation. The reality is if Tai had been successful in going public or raising sufficient capital, It's unlikely that anyone would have even noticed some questionable accounting practices. It's now come to light that it was an ex-employee that was the supposed whistleblower to the SEC. And any employee can say anything about places where they used to work, but guilty or not, the fact that it was never addressed and all communication went silent made me feel hung out to dry. There were some big lessons that I took away from this experience, and I hope to impart Some of the wisdom that I learned from this after losing millions of dollars to prevent and protect you from having to make the same painful mistakes. Once again, very dark time for me, very, very hard couple of years going through these losses. And I had only one choice, and it was to take responsibility for the decisions that I made. The blaming of Tai or blaming the government for interfering or blaming the marketplace, blaming the Federal Reserve for changing interest rates, making it harder to raise capital, I can't learn anything from that. So step one for me was, Recognizing that I made these investments, I made these decisions. It was my responsibility to do the due diligence. It was my responsibility to read the fine print. It was my responsibility to decide who I get into business with. And from there, I can ask the question, okay, if I did this, what do I want to do differently moving forward? And one of the things that I learned about myself is that I can be too trusting. It's a benefit, but it's also a curse. I do see the best in everyone. I really do believe that everyone has the best intentions at heart. And that may be true. I don't want to not have that belief, but I have to question it when making a financial decision or getting too involved with a person or getting too deep into a relationship. I do need to remind myself that human beings are flawed. And I do need to look at an investment from the perspective of, okay, even if this person is well-intentioned, What could go wrong? And I didn't have that pessimistic voice reminding my optimistic voice to be balanced in my analysis of these deals. And so that is something that moving forward, I have carried with me. I can be trusting of people, but I can also have boundaries. I can also be meticulously clear about what agreements I am making, either on paper or verbally. And I can be very mindful of watching other people and how they honor their agreements. If someone says something, do they actually do it? If someone says they're going to call me Monday at 2, do they call me at Monday at 2? And that's just evidence for me to remind myself that people are people. And that I should be careful about who I get too involved with. That was lesson number one. Lesson number two was that I too can be distracted by short-term returns. I was very blinded by a 20% interest rate. I was very blinded by the cachet and the presence and the speed at which Tai and this team operated, both building their own personal brands and turning these businesses around really quickly and casting big visions and raising a lot of capital. I got caught up in the excitement of things happening really quickly. As a result, I was prone to making short-term decisions versus long-term decisions. I definitely overinvested beyond what was financially responsible for me. Now, I had the money and I'm in a position where I can recoup that money. It took years for me to get back to that baseline. I could afford to lose it. This should have been allocated for long-term investments that I was never going to touch, and I should have put a small amount of money into my speculative things that were Tai Lopez's big vision. And so I had to create better rules for myself around the short-term investments I make, the long-term investments I make, and that ultimately gave me the biggest lesson of this experience, and that was this. I thought I was good with money. But if I was honest about the decisions that I was making, I was making really dumb decisions that went to zero. When I was honest with myself that I was not a good investor. I had to sit down and humbly do the work of learning how to invest. It went back to basics. It went from, hey, I think this deal is going to be really good and make me a lot of money, to what's the most boring way that I could achieve all of my financial goals? Running the scenarios on boring investments, like just putting money into the S&P 500 and waiting 30 years. Started to look a lot more attractive than taking risks that could lose me millions of dollars. And so I sat down and did the work of learning Investment 101. And learning how to set 10, 20, and 30-year targets rather than what's going to make me money right now, because that mindset lost me millions of dollars. The mindset of long-term plans that I can stick to for the rest of my career, that gave me a sense of financial freedom that I had never had before. And this is the weird irony. Ever since I started following that slow and steady, consistent plan, I've made the money back. Isn't that weird? Two things happened. One, my money compounded way faster than I ever thought it would. And number two, since I had a plan and I wasn't thinking about the plan or worrying about the plan or worrying about what if it all goes to zero, I had more energy and focus to do a great job in my career. And not maximize every dollar possible, just do great work. Do a great job for my clients and my customers and my employees. And as a result of that, I had some of the best financial years that I ever had. And so I have made the money back, and I've gotten back to a good mental place, and I've come with scars that have lessons that cost me millions of dollars. I wish that no one has to go through that in order to learn the same lessons. It's funny. I learned a lesson from Tai many years ago. It was when he was on the podcast Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. A lesson that Tai said on that episode was, People don't really change until they experience trauma. Once they experience trauma, they're open to changing. This was my trauma. Now, I know we throw that word around a lot, but once again, many sleepless nights, panic attacks, antidepressants, crying on the bed with the mother of my children, apologizing that I lost all of our money, going to therapy, doing psychedelic retreats, getting to the root of this pain that I was experiencing that was triggered by this painful event. It caused me to change. It caused me to sit down and come up with an investment thesis that didn't require me taking absurd risks in people's big visions. I can still do that with a small part of my portfolio, but it's not my investing plan anymore. It forced me to be humble enough to do really good work for the people around me. It made me slow down because I realized that trying to get somewhere fast was making me really miserable. So I hope that someone can learn these lessons without having to go through the same experience that I did. But on the other side of this, I now actually am more optimistic about my career and my financial future than if I hadn't gone through this, because I overcame losing millions of dollars, and so I'm a better entrepreneur as a result. I learned how to invest for the long term, so I'm a better investor as a result. I couldn't have done that if I hadn't just gotten absolutely punched in the mouth. So now that we're at the end of this video, just a personal request. Don't use the comments of this video to throw shade at anyone, Tai or Alex or anyone on the team. If you want to share your experience, feel free, but this isn't the place to just Throw shade at somebody on the internet. I want nothing to do with that. The lessons that I hope you take away are that you too can get caught up in the hype. You too can be blinded by numbers and quick dopamine hits. I was too. All of us can get wrapped up in the short-term returns and excitement and the comparison of someone's making this much money and so I think I should be making that much money too. All of us can be persuaded by follower counts and the numbers that are reported on a headline that say nothing about what's really happening beneath the surface. All of us tend to envy the success of other people and see our own flaws. This was an experience in which all of that came up for me. And in your entrepreneurial career, you will have opportunities where people want something from you, and you want something from them. And that's healthy. That's okay. But if what you want from them is the status, or the ego metrics, or the fame that they seem to have, that can blind good decision making. Once again, it was my responsibility to do due diligence on these deals. It was my responsibility to ask for the numbers that I never got. That was all my responsibility. And because of that, I can learn from that and do something differently. And what I've learned is that if we do long-term things with people that we want to play long-term games with, we end up getting there faster anyway. And I hope that you don't have to lose millions of dollars to learn from my errors, because I learned that as successful as I was and people thought that I was, I can be an idiot too. And when you know that, then you can humbly do the work of actually getting good. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. I build online businesses. And up until recently, my financial strategy was I make my money on the internet and then I give it to ponzi schemes. In the last couple of years, my investment strategy has evolved into I make my money on the internet and then I put my money into long-term assets that I believe in and I'm going to stick to for decades. And sometimes I also invest in my students and clients when I really like their business and I want to be involved. That's how my strategy has evolved as a result of losing millions of dollars. So if you're an entrepreneur or you're an investor, And if you'd like to follow along for the journey, I'd be honored to mentor you to avoid the same mistakes that I've made. Subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you on the next episode. Take care.