That’s a very detailed transcript! Annotating this for logical fallacies, arguments, and data is a great way to break down its persuasive and informational components. I have processed the transcript, focusing on the speaker’s main claims, justifications, and the presentation of verifiable facts (data) from the complaint.
Annotated Transcript (Fallacy/Argument/Data)
Tai Lopez, my business advisor, my mentor, and the guy who taught me how to buy a Ferrari so I could flex it on social media just to get some views, is getting sued, and it’s really bad. I think my mentor might be going to prison.
It’s a sad, sad day. I feel like it’s appropriate to start with a Facebook ad, considering Tai and his business partner are the kings of social media ads. Congratulations are in order. Alex, my business partner, if you saw the news last uh month, he just sold his company for 255 million. 250 255. You can Google Alex Mayer. I found this Techrunch article about Zusk showing that they had raised $60 million.
And I found the S1 filing for Zusk showing that Alex Mayer had a 12.4% equity stake.
The reason why I know this is because many years ago when they first started raising money, my buddy Tom Nash, he’s a fellow YouTuber, and I, we made a video together jumping on that call. I’ll show you that video at the end. And we figured out, we did some math. Tom Nash more than I did. He was, he’s really good at this. He kind of figured out that after, you know, venture capital was paid off, after they paid off debt, Alex had a 50-50 split between cash and equity, we found out that it might have been five or 10 million.
While very successful, not taking anything away from him, if you watch these ads that Tai and Alex were running, it was all about he sold this company for 300 million and that is what enticed investors to invest.
If you found out that he only maybe kept 5 or 10 million, it’s a little different than the claims of 300 million.
I’m gonna show you this ad real quick because this is how investors found out about this investment offering. It’s interesting. I’ve been telling people to co-invest with me in deals for the last 12 months. Some people have listened to me, some haven’t. So, the news is out. Last week, Tai and I bought a um major American clothing brand called Dressorn brand with over $740 million of annual sales. I’m taking it online. Closing down 650 department store. Hopefully you guys remember what they did. Basically, they took on some of these companies that were going bankrupt and it sounded good. This was March of 2020. And so, they were going to raise money, go and buy these distressed businesses, build them up using their expertise in digital ads, and then eventually sell them for a massive profit. One thing I really don’t like is when Tai Lopez was posting that you could invest 300,000 and they’d pay you $60,000 a year in monthly payments.
For those without a calculator, that would be 20%.
I really dislike this. And I remember at the time seeing this and I started going, “Oh, this isn’t good.” My my spidey senses were saying, “This isn’t good. Only for credit investors. Return not guaranteed.” I love the claims at the bottom. Invest at your own risk. I absolutely love these because they mean absolutely nothing in court.
Please, all of you understand out there when you hear someone say, “This isn’t financial advice. Invest at your own risk. Return guaranteed. It means absolutely nothing.”
As Tai’s about to find out, he still got served with the complaint by the SEC.
In March of 2023, I found this New York Post article and there was a statement about Alex Mayer.
He was sending emails saying the same thing. 300K invested will send you up to $60,000 a year.
He also made the claim that they’ve paid out over $25 million to investors.
He forgot the important second sentence, which is that wasn’t from profit. That was from other 259 investor money.
The complaint alleges that they raised a total of 230 million.
Approximately 112 million went to their eight Rev retailer brand.
So Rev is the company, the the fund essentially. That was the company that went out and bought these distress brands. Alex and Tai raised money for each specific brand in order to essentially buy it. The green dollar figure you see is the amount they raised for each brand.
The bodybuilding.com does not have a number that was not listed in the complaint, but I very strongly believe that they bought that brand as well.
You can see that this is a lot of money that they were able to raise.
Charts like this definitely make you a little squeamish. Annual interest rates, they were promising 12 to 25%.
monthly dividends of one to one and a half percent up to 2%.
You may ask why were they promising this? Tai claimed he was acquiring the businesses so cheaply as the reason that they were paying such high returns. What’s confusing to me is the equity should come at the sale, not from the cash flow.
The cash flow should be from profits.
Take note of these dates. September 2022, there was a news article Tuesday morning. A big brand gets a lifeline from Pier 1 owners.
This is Rev, Tai, and Alex. They buy Tuesday morning, September 2022. I get this article sent to me February 15th, 2023. I remember seeing this. I still remember the day there was someone I know who had actually been in litigation who had sued Tai Lopez before. He sent it to me and said, “Hey, this is alarming.” And I remember seeing this going, “Oh, this is this doesn’t sound good.” 5 months later, that company’s already filing for bankruptcy.
Despite investors repeated requests around February 2021 for the financial statements for Dress Barn, one of the brands that they invested in, Tai Lopez said the company was cash flow strong and not operating at heavy losses.
This was false and misleading because Dress Barn, listen to this everyone, they were experiencing losses of nearly 13.7 million and 10.7 million for the two years 2020 and 2021.
That is significant. But even worse is that the internal financial statements for Steinmart, another brand, show that they were experiencing net losses of nearly 1.7 million and 5.7 million for the same two years.
So Tai was not showing the financial statements to investors who gave him money.
He was saying that they were cash flow strong. Clearly a lie. Not operating at heavy losses. Uh my friends, $14 million a year, $11 million a year. That is a huge financial loss.
Alex and Tai boasted to investors of Rev that they had never missed a payment to a single investor.
In particular, during a May 2022 investor Zoom call, Tai stated that Rev never missed a cash payment or preferred payment since inception.
Notice the date, May 2022. Here’s the most important part of complaints like this. Defendants were aware.
Those three words are incredibly important. They were aware that neither Rev nor any of their brands were generating sufficient revenue to cover costs, yet failed to disclose that to investors until mid December 2022.
So investors up until that point, that sounds like it was possibly 2 years of being in the dark.
They were being lied to.
Lied to the defendants were aware that things were not going well and they did not disclose that to investors.
That, my friends, is the heart of this complaint.
On October 31, 2022, keep in mind these dates. The 12 months preceding that, the Rev retailer brands incurred monthly net losses ranging from 3.8 million to 12 million.
Over a full year, that’s roughly what? $45 million to $144 million.
They raised 112 for these brands.
And we’re incurring monthly net losses annualized up to 100 million. How in the world were they this incompetent?
What am I missing? They raised a bunch of money. Did Wait, did they take some money for themselves? We’ll find out in a minute. Defendants knew that the retailer brands were in financial trouble.
That, my friends, is when everything turns for me.
When I read these complaints, I come from an objective point of view, try to figure out what is going on. What’s the story here? Whenever defendants know that something is going wrong, they know that an investment is going wrong. They know that the business is cash flow negative. And they still promote that it’s going well. They lie to investors and they still raise money. That is where, in my eyes, the DOJ should step in and turn this into a criminal complaint.
This is just a civil complaint, everyone. I think the DOJ should turn this into a criminal complaint.
So the three defendants, Burkenro, we’ll we’ll see talk about her in a second. Maya Burkenro, Tai, and Alex, they discussed the overall financial situation with themselves. They believe that they needed to raise additional capital, prioritize vendor payments, and triage investor payments.
Despite these financial struggles, they continued to promote new offerings by touting the success of the brands.
That is where everything changes for me.
That is when I think it needs to go from civil to criminal.
I don’t know the exact law on this, so someone can help me out in the comments. In my opinion, this is where everything should go criminal.
You know, things aren’t going well. You’ve lied to investors. And the worst part about it is you try to go raise new money from new investors in order to pay off old investors and try to make these floundering businesses look successful on social media to keep raising new money. That is criminal in my eyes.
And it kept getting worse. That is what what was really interesting about reading this complaint is in my eyes it just kept getting worse. Like up to that point, I’m like, “Oh, it needs to be criminal.” But it got worse. November 2022. I hope you guys are keeping the dates in mind. So, they held an investor conference in Las Vegas. And I’ll show you a post. This is from Baller Busters, but they saved it. Tai Lopez had a post. This is a September 30th conference in Las Vegas. I don’t know if they’re exactly the same ones. This is November 2022, but for all intents and purposes, probably similar. Okay, so despite making statements about the financial success of their business strategy, they failed to disclose the financial struggles.
They failed to disclose that the brands had in fact missed some investor payments.
So a picture of this Tai Alex apparently are probably on the stage. He can he can run a lot of ads. I imagine there’s a lot of people that attend these conferences. He’s a very popular guy on social media. So in front of big crowds he’s lying to these people. They did not disclose that these brands were losing what 30 to$100 million a year.
So instead of disclosing that they said hey times are good. if you want to invest with us. Uh I imagine as the next paragraph alludes to they got their email address and they immediately sent in no right after the conference November 2022 they solicited investment via email.
Remember during the middle of that year they were already aware they were made aware that the brands were struggling that there was no cash flow to pay off investors and in November 2022 they held a conference and lied to investors again by not disclosing the struggles of the companies and then tried to raise money via email.
But my friends, it gets even worse. However, immediately after the conference and postconference emails, defendants stop making investor payments and hosting investor calls all together.
So, one month before they’re trying to raise money at a conference, they’re soliciting via email. And then a month later, when this whole time they’ve known that these brands are underwater and they’re not able to pay investor returns, they just shut it down and walk away. On December 15th, Tai finally showed up to an investor call that he had missed for several weeks. and he disclosed for the first time to investors that Rev and the retailer brands and the portfolio companies were in financial trouble.
So, he’s finally letting everyone know, not in February 2021, not in middle of 2022, not in all the months where apparently maybe every several weeks they had a call. Not during that entire time, but finally on December 15th. My guess is he believed he finally raised the final amount of money he could raise.
He finally disclosed they were in financial trouble. They were unable to make investor payments and that Rev’s management was exploring restructuring or selling one or more of the portfolio companies.
The scheme is finally toppling.
Here’s Mentor Box’s website, a company that Alex and Ty were running. I don’t know the success of that company, but I think they were bringing in pretty legitimate revenue. And Maya Burkenro, we’re going to talk about her next. She’s on the executive team. She was the chief content and process officer for Mentor Box. She’s also Tai’s cousin. They dedicated an entire section just to Maya because it’s important to note that she was listed as Rev’s president, COO, chief risk, funny word, chief risk officer, who also served in an executive capacity for two companies. She was described on the website as having over 10 years of experience managing multi-million dollar companies.
The problem here is that there was no proof.
Paragraph 58. The years before working as Rev’s president and COO, Maya worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a promoter at a radio station, as an assistant to her cousin Tai in his online education company.
Uh, it doesn’t sound like she was managing multi-million dollar companies.
It sounds like she was just an assistant.
I think some of you know what’s coming next. The defendants improperly commingled investor funds to perpetuate the illusion that they were huge financial successes.
How much? How much, Spencer? How much were they taking? $16.1 million for themselves.
I think this argument, this complaint changes a little bit.
If the defendants never take any money from themselves, if they don’t enrich themselves, they never take money uh for personal use, they never comingle funds, I think that changes the argument a little bit and I think the punishment is less severe.
But once you find out that they take one or more dollars, I think it changes when you have these companies that were sounds like they were struggling massively, massive financial losses, massive negative cash flow every month from the beginning. within a year or two they these companies were darn near bankrupt and yet they took $16.1 million uh by my basic calculations that’s what 15% of the money raised 15% companies that were negative cash flow that were going bankrupt heading to bankruptcy they took around 15% of the money raised not of cash flow of the entire money raised 15% they did it for themselves what to fly private to have the fa have the nice car Spencer duh who doesn’t want a Ferrari
that my friends that my friends is fraud and uh that’s where everything turns for me. That is where this absolutely becomes criminal.
This next ad is something that Tai was running recently. He’s throwing a mansion party. Tell me if this is LA to its core. At the new house, I’ll put a link below. Mansion party, pool party, business mastermind, allin-one. I’ll see you here. I’m going to put a link below. Got three different type of tickets. You want to come talk business? There’s a ton of high rollers flying in, entrepreneurs, big personal brands. Not just to have a lot of beautiful women. There weren’t uh there weren’t many men pictured in that, were there? There’s a big mansion, hundred million dollar house, beautiful women, and then tie. You know what’s funny is I used to house hack this thing where you uh buy a house and then you rent out all the rooms and you essentially live for free. Very good uh form of investing. Co-living is another word for it. What’s ironic is Tai is house hacking his mansion, but just in a different way. Instead of having roommates, he throws parties. Do I think he can afford it on his own? Maybe. Probably. He sold like $100 million when he was a course selling guru and he’s obviously stolen like $16 million from investors.
So h 100 grand a month in rent is can be affordable if you take $16 million.
I just find it funny that in LA, this is a party in Beverly Hills, $100 million house that he’s paying 100 grand a month for, but it’s all from like investor money selling courses and it’s all about business success and I’m going to teach you how to run your business. But this guy’s getting sued for $12 million by the SEC.
It’s a bunch of beautiful women. come out and pay me to join my mastermind. Is there anything more LA than this? But it gets even worse. The complaint just kept going. Now we’re into paragraph 69 and 70. This is where it explains that Rev was sharing money in between the companies.
So paragraph 69 is that they in February of 2022, remember that date. Remember everyone, in May of 2022, he was saying, “No, no, no. Everything’s good. Everything’s good.” November 2022, he was trying to raise more money through emails. In uh February 2022, they made five transfers. Essentially, they had money in Radio Shack’s bank account, $1.41 $41 million. They transferred it to the parent company, the Rev uh I’m guessing just the single bank account, the Rev bank account, and then they needed to total out a million dollars to these five other brands.
My guess is those brands needed to pay out investors. You got to got to keep them quiet. So, you take money from RadioShack’s account to pay out investors over here for those five other brands.
Paragraph 70 gets even worse. In November 20 November 2020, when I’m reading this, I I keep getting thrown off by the date. of November 2020, 1.7 million investor proceeds was transferred from RadioShack directly to Steinmart.
The defendants transferred at least 5.9 million in investor proceeds directly between portfolio companies.
That was as early as November 2020.
So they started raising money March 2020 and just five or 6 months later they were they were already running a fraudulent business. So the reason why this matters is because these individual companies they raised money on the individual companies. Ideally, those companies had cash flow in the investors who gave them money. They make their returns through the cash flow. But as you guys are probably, you know, figuring out if you’re reading between the lines here, they’re raising money for all these different businesses. And in order to pay out investor money, they needed new money. What does that sound like, everyone?
Then we get to the section titled Ponziike payments to investors.
I just explained it to you, but this lays it out perfectly. In order for the older investors to be paid out, they needed money from new investors.
They share that all three defendants approved these payments to early investors.
Tai, Alex, and Maya, they should have been knowledgeable enough to know that you can’t pay out investor funds with new investor money. They need to be cash flow from the businesses.
This is about as clear-cut as it can get. In my eyes, this is a this is a criminal complaint. This should be criminal and the defendants should serve jail time.
Again, lawyers, please comment in the section below if I am off here, but I don’t know how you can only get hit with a civil fine. This is criminal.
In another lawsuit, I was able to find the list of creditors here.
And uh I’m under the impression that they’re all accredited investors, and we know the amount, 112 million, but it just it’s different when you see a name and a number.
So, I’m going to scroll here on the screen. Some of these people put a million dollars in. Some of them as low as just a couple grand, some of them 50, 100, 250,000.
And it’s just really sad because uh to my knowledge, these people lost everything. This is a lot of money. You can only hope that they lost money that they could lose that hopefully all these people are multi multi multi-millionaires and this was just fun money that they give to that social media clown and maybe it’ll turn into 20% returns but these people lost a significant amount of interest of note. Tyino Tai Lopez actually put in over a million dollars which I thought was interesting.
But here’s the list. My buddy Tom Nash, one of my closest YouTube friends, uh we made this video I can’t remember maybe early 2021 and I’ll kind of skim through. It’s older video. It’s no longer on his channel cuz he’s pivoted and he took down some of these older videos, but we ended up jumping on these investor calls. Now, it’s a little longer video, so I won’t play it for you, but uh it was really interesting. So, we jumped on the call and I’ll show you here in just a second. And we were messaging Alex. He was doing these live streams and we kept messaging him and wouldn’t have even thought of. And Alex kept getting triggered and he kept kicking us off the call. And so we would then change our names and after two or three times of getting kicked off then we started ultra trolling because we realized like this is not good. What was really fascinating at this time was probably early to mid 2021. What was really fascinating is everything seemed good. They were running all these big ads about he sold a company for 300 million and it’s Tai Lopez and they can generate these uh great returns for these businesses. But I remember getting off the call and and Tom and I had a had a discuss discussion. We chatted on the phone after we kept getting kicked off. We looked at each other. were like, “Hey man, this doesn’t sound good. This is really odd. Like, we don’t have a good feeling about this.” And to his credit, Tom did a really good job explaining at the end of the video all the reasons. He spent about four minutes disclosing, “Hey guys, you should really be skeptical of this investment. I would highly advise you not to invest in this company.”
That’s when he looked into Alex’s background. We found that, you know, the 300 million not quite as successful as he claimed.
And our ultimate conclusion was stay away.
I’ve certainly been more right than wrong in this YouTube career, but I can’t deny that it kind of feels good to be really right on this.
Uh this is certainly not the place to be like I told you so because that’s not the intention. But uh looking back, it was really fascinating to have this experience and and in real time feel like this was a really bad investment and that I was really skeptical. And then you start seeing the the bankruptcy news articles on CNN, uh oh wow, the Pier One guys, Alex and Tai, wow, that company’s going bankrupt over the years to see it uh each going bankrupt. And then I ultimately made a video in 2023 uh about this scheme and saying like, “Dude, I’m skeptical, a little skeptical. I don’t like the investment.” And then here we are in what, September, late September 2025 to see an SEC complaint be the result of this. Really fascinating to see. Hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks so much for watching.