Episode 5: Tom Bilyeu – Importance Of Mindset, His Routines And Habits, and More!

so today we have tom bill you who I've been so I've been wanting to meet for a long time now because I'm a huge fan of what you've done and what you've accomplished from quest impact theory just also how you live your life and and how you've your mind stand how you structured everything I find to be not just inspirational and motivational but I think very practical and ways of how people can take those and and kind of live more productively and more authentically I guess and I'm so happy to have you here so thank you for coming super excited to be here thanks for having me of course I don't even know where to start with you is like number one I was saying when you walked in I feel like we have two things in common right we have quest bars which is my favorite protein bar and I'm not getting paid to say it it's always been I end that and of course the whole matrix red pale blue pill situation but we'll get to that in a minute I guess a good place to start is just how I really love your morning rituals and I think I think they're I think that really kind of keeps people on point when they have routines and good habits and I read that you wake up at 4 or 5 o'clock every morning you don't ever use an alarm clock is that true it is I'll say that I'll set emergency alarms if I have a flight or something like that that's really early and I can't afford to miss but ninety eight point nine percent of the times I don't wake up to an alarm Wow so your body just kind of just automatically you're bought yeah it's just your your body rhythm yeah there's a couple things one I try to get as much sleep as I need so I'm not trying to pull a fancy tricks like I just prioritize sleep and then on top of that you can actually give yourself the like intention of waking up at a certain time it's pretty scandalous how often I'll wake up within say five or ten minutes of when I told myself to wake up so if you I mean that's not like an hour and a half later you know I'm giving myself plenty time to sleep but if I give myself at least six hour to sleep and I tell myself wake up at you know 3:30 or wake up at 4:30 like I'll wake up within minutes of that time which is pretty crazy unless I'm really tired so if I've been doing that for let's say five or six days in a row and I've been shortchanging myself a little bit then I might have a hard time hitting that right I mean I think everyone has like their body clock I mean me too like I I'm so used to waking up at the same time it's usually a varies within 10-15 minutes maybe but I think you just become part of your you know you become habitual in life right when you do something over and over again that's just part of it and then let's just say on your morning routine cuz I love it because then you do meditation you're a big fan of meditation and then the was it called fee think of Taoiseach think it a yes so let's talk about that so why meditation and then think it asian which i think is kind of a unique one yeah so I think that I was just talking to my mom about meditation last night and I was saying it's really like sometimes you'll say something changed my life and you're being a little hyperbolic right for real with meditation it changed my life and I it really can give me anxiety just to think about what would have happened if I hadn't discovered meditation when I finally did because in the most stressful times in my life thankfully I had meditation and the way that I think about it is we all have background radiation so it's like you're worried about this that or the other I've heard it explained is like a computer with too many windows open even if they're minimized like they're just taking resources and so because I'm so obsessed with like cosmology and stuff I think of it as the background radiation in the universe it's just sort of there and you have this sense of unease about something generalized anxiety will often manifest it's just a sense of dread and you have no idea what it's related to right and so that had really developed in my life over you know a 15 year journey of becoming an entrepreneur starting from absolutely no entrepreneurial instincts whatsoever and having to like literally train myself from the ground up to think in a radically different way to act in a different way to create momentum all this stuff and in constantly being in over my head I just got to the point where I was like this sense of background radiate is so insane I'm anxious all the time like this is crazy and so I didn't want to meditate Kasumi it felt really soft it felt like totally weak and just what I had had to learn as an entrepreneur because by nature I am I'm weak I mean that's just the truth and so to give you one quick example playing soccer as a kid in Tacoma Washington it's cold the ball hits your leg it'll leave the imprint of the soccer ball and it hurts and I just wanted to be taken off the field so that I could whine about it and nobody taught me like look you have an objective that objective is to get good at soccer you're gonna have to push the pain or you're never going to get good so I had no sense of like oh yeah I have a goal and oh yeah I'm gonna have to push this and there's something that I want that's on the other side of this pain for me it was just like my parents were making me be here this hurts this sucks and I want to cry about it and so getting into business and starting with that pathetic attitude it was like I had to beat that out of myself and I had to get to the point where I'd toughened up and so for me getting tough is really powerful now being emotional and being in touch with yourself that also is powerful but I started there I was plenty in touch with myself and so for me it was really learning to harden up and so getting going through all of that and then people telling me that oh meditation is this way to like really regulate yourself I just thought that's whoo-hoo man that's like really soft that feels like me going backwards I'm not interested and so I just kept saying no no no like hey I get it it works for some people's not for me and then I met a Navy SEAL mark Devine and he said Tom stop being an [ __ ] and meditate and I thought coming from this guy like this guy is tough as nails and so if he's telling me that this is one of the most powerful things that the Navy SEAL could do then I have you know no reason not to at least try it and it was one of those from the first breath I was like this is different now I won't even say I'm a good meditator now but I would just say when you learn to diaphragm breathe properly and you feel yourself shift out of the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic which for anybody there's never heard those terms the sympathetic nervous system is fight flight or freeze the parasympathetic is rest and digest it there are two different parts of your body and they're basically on a teeter totter so as one goes down the other one necessarily goes this one goes up the other necessarily goes down so as you ramp up your parasympathetic you're going into rest and digest you will feel more calm and one of the physiological hooks and this is always big to me like what's the physiological way into this and thank you for saying practical that my mindset is practical which definitely is what I've tried to build something that actually has utility right diaphragm breathing is a a physiological way to change the neurochemical state of your brain and so you will instantly begin to feel better just by breathing from your diaphragm and so as somebody who grew up a little bit chubby I was always sucking my gut yeah well so first of all I come from a morbidly obese family hence why you did the quest bars in the first place relax and so by today's standards I wasn't chubby but by the standards of when I was growing up I was chubby which I actually didn't realize but that's a whole nother story about this woman going when I had lost weight saying oh my god always thought of you as the chubby kid and I had to play my whole life in Reverse like in sixth sense and realize oh my god people knew I was sucking in my gut like the whole thing so but anyway for decades I just walked around sucking in my gut so I'm never diaphragm breathing so the first time I take a real diaphragm breath and I feel this like wave of calm I was like wow there's really something to this so I started meditating every day and it was transformational got rid of that background radiation and at first it just gets rid of it while you're meditating and then it will wash back in really fast and then the more you meditate the longer that pause then the more you meditate the quicker you can get into that calm state and so it just really really became amazing can I ask you a question do you do a particular kind I know a lot of people have a particular kind that they're really really passionate about is that with you or and I am I'm the world's most clumsy meditator and for anybody who thinks meditations about doing it right or clearing your mind that that's not what meditation is so I will say for me meditation is really the simple act of breathing from your diaphragm in a comfortable position and bringing your mind back to the breath once you realize that you're thinking about something which will happen frequently like your mind is going to constantly go to something the grocery is something you're stressed about whatever and you just gently bring it back to your breath so I use a variation of what's called box breathing which is a breath of for equal cycles so you've got the inhale the inhale hold the exhale and the exhale hold in traditional box breathing all four of those take the same amount of time and I found that when I tried to do that I felt out of breath so I was like okay I'm doing this wrong and I go through all the normal gyrations but I'm just arrogant enough to be like then there's a better way to do this and I'm gonna figure it out and I just started changing the breath cycle for me to maximize the pleasure so I'm gonna inhale for the exact amount of time that it's deeply pleasurable to inhale I'm gonna hold the inhale for the exact amount of time is deeply pleasurable so on and so forth and what I found was a sort of normal inhale I just take a breath in through my nose I hold it very briefly at the top which just doesn't feel natural for me for some reason and then my exhale is entirely I just let the oxygen out I don't try to control it I don't try to double its length some people do your exhale should be twice as long as your inhale I just found if I just let it out that in no way trying to control it the Daath felt good and then my exhale hold it just felt awesome and the best part of the breath for me oddly enough was just sitting in that space where I had just exhaled but I wasn't yet taking in a breath so I might hold the inhale for I don't know call it two seconds and then on the exhale hold I might hold that for fifteen seconds and it just feels awesome and so if I'm tired and I'm meditating I'll fall asleep on the breath hold on the exhale it's it's the part of the cycle that's most relaxing the most like where I feel my heart rate slowing down and I feel that real deep sense of calm but I don't know that may not work for other people so I always tell people just maximize each part of the breath cycle but the pleasure of it and once you're doing that and you're into a rhythm that makes you like gives you a sense of well-being that's the breast cycle for you so how long are you doing this for in the morning you wake up you exercise first though right I do yeah okay I forgot to ask you what kind of exercise are you doing running are you doing yoga was super super lame really the minimum amount that I need to optimize cognitively and I've just found that I resent that body needs as much attention as it does because like my wife when she works out it's really funny so my wife is is a beast yeah and she would I heard that's why I I heard and I I mean this sincerely my wife could do something like Navy SEAL hell week a hundred percent like she just physically she'd get something out of taxing her body in a way and so she used to train with this woman who I will say borders on the sadistic like she liked to break people she liked it I'm not joking she ran a boot camp and they were all of the women there would be crying by the end of it except my wife it would just be like let's go let's go let's go let's do it again yeah but I would have been with the other women crying yeah like I'd be like this sucks I have no interest in doing this my why is not big enough so working out for me right is truly about cognitively optimizing I only do it for that that and longevity so those are compelling enough that I go in I do my five days a week I paid in cardio usually it's mostly lifting and I lift because it makes me feel strong and tough and I dig that right like most guys yeah and it shapes my body like I have changed the way that my body looks from lifting and so there there is enough of like I enjoy certain aspects of that to keep reigning it but if you told me you could look the way that you look now for the rest of your life which is a sub-optimal physique by the way like I'm not stepping up on the Arnold stage anytime I'm not competing in a physique competition let alone a bodybuilding competition so and I know that but if you said that hey you could maintain this physique forever you don't need to do anything other than eat right but it means you'll never be in better shape would you do it yes like I would never set foot in a gym ever again if I could avoid it so you're doing it for maintenance and for for some cognitive it's it really is cognitive optimization in longevity those are the big ones and then yes I like looking good naked those are but like in in descending order they go cognitive optimization of longevity and then a fairly distant third would be the aesthetics of it yeah exactly and then what are you eating them because if you were as you call yourself a chubby kid what did you do a cat what is your diet so my diet now is on point my diet did not used to be on point my like I remember I had a tub of Red Vine licorice and well it's fat-free so it literally doesn't count I can eat as much red vines as I want this is how I remember like I remembered that like it was all about the calories not about anything else calories and make sure that there's no fat right and so I remember my roommate going did I think if you don't use the sugar it turns to fat and I was like that doesn't even make sense like how could sugar become fat that's absurd yeah and so that shows you where I started right and then now it's I aimed wherever I can you know what I mean like even at Qwest if you'd called I can't swear to it now but when I was there if you'd called and said hey I want to get healthy what should I eat the answer was going to be chicken breast and broccoli right and not because we were incentivized to say that we weren't we didn't sell chicken breast or broccoli we said that because it's true and we wanted people to know that you could trust us and so while I still AM I probably consume too many quest products me too by the way and this is you know I mean look I'm beyond biased but like we made the stuff that we want to eat but whole food is the right answer at all times right and the only time you should deviate away from that is when it's for like just I need something that tastes like a potato chip or a cookie I don't mean it's like you're going to have something so you might as well have the thing that's at least the healthy version of that right like that cookies and cream one as a dessert yeah you know I'm sure most people I'm not most but a lot of people I'm sure did that as well for sure so then you kind of because it's all about Whole Foods but you're not following a keto diet intermittent fasting not well so I do both of those pretty pretty intensely so intermittent fasting is like a religion for me so I do a 16 hour fast almost seven days a week in fact I'm aiming for it seven days a week sometimes schedule will just mess it up a little bit right I can't tell you the last time that I went less than 14 hours and then once a year I do a five-day fast and then there are times we're all do 18 to 24 hour fast throughout the yeah which I have found helps not only with body composition but certainly helps you be metabolically flexible which i think is huge changes your relationship to food and hunger for sure yeah and then again longevity which is an obsession of mine right and so that's like the the on eating portion and then the eating portion I definitely am ultra high fat moderate protein low to no carbohydrate the only carbs I take in unless I'm cheating come from vegetables green leafy and that has served me well because I struggled with inflammation for about 15 years of the most ungodly proportions I had burn marks on the back of my hands from icing my wrists so I would ice him twice a day just I would probably o'clock close to two hours a day icing my wrists and that was just a function Wow yeah that that was really gnarly and I thought that was forever and then so I lived in what I'll call a rabbit starvation diet it was basically about 80% of my calories came from protein I tried to keep fat to basically zero and my carbohydrates were almost zero and I took a little bit of carbohydrate from vegetable B even back then I would tell people you don't need to eat vegetables like those are totally optional and so I lived like that for years and by the way got shredded is the leanest I've ever been it was amazing I'm not gonna lie but it hurt and I my wife and my business partners pulled me aside and said you no longer have a personality and it was like my calories or just I had no fat in my system and really really gnarly and I definitely would not go back can't function your brain your brain needs fat to even think and to focus and to be alert I mean and being an entrepreneur I mean you know that's you have to have you have to have that ability no question right so that that was a stupid yeah but then for when we started working with Peter attea and Dom D'Agostino they came in and said guys you have to be eating fat like this is crazy you can't do this and ketogenic smait have anti-cancer properties so going back to my obsession with longevity I said cool I'm gonna try this but I'm gonna do it at a therapeutic dose so I did a four to one so for every combined gram of protein and carbohydrate I hate four grams of fat that is so hard and so gross and of course I'd Quito flukes I was doing this like being a sugar burner hardcore and then switching into that was disgusting I hated it so much but my wrists were perfect and I went from 15 years of pain to pain-free and I was like this is bananas and I haven't had to ice my wrist since I started doing high fat and that was four years ago Wow four years of five six years so you've been doing that gekido diet for four years I won't say a keto diet but I've been doing - a carb kind of like that could also be called Atkins I can also be called and yeah Atkins is probably a little more tolerant of non Whole Foods and I right right but yeah wow that's so you so your wife Lisa is she also does she do intermittent does she also do you she does now my wife has a whole host of problems with her microbiome some self-inflicted and then some because she just had four years chronic chest infections so she was taking antibiotics three and four times a year for years and like she she used to get sick so much that when we first met okay I actually before I proposed to her I had to ask myself am I really prepared to deal with somebody who's sick this often she was sick a lot so that decimated her microbiome so now she eats not just for physique and longevity she's for like I have two reregulate my microbiome if I eat she has massive debilitating pain so that's been an incredible journey and anybody listening if you're struggling with that follow her at at least a billion on Instagram she is so raw about what she's going through and what she does to like address it and I went from the arrogant [ __ ] who thought he knew everything about diet I mean I built a billion-dollar company in the food industry I really thought I knew some and this whole process has been insanely humbling and now man like I you can talk the craziest about energy healing and I'm like let's try it like it is I'll try anything so help her because a lot of the things that I thought I knew I'm just like gone back and said nope it just wasn't right nope it wasn't right it wasn't right it wasn't right and so now really being of the mindset of I have strong convictions very loosely held and so I'm always looking for the next right answer and somebody who knows something that will actually help her and work you know and just going back to practicality right what works right and so file an air or two you have to be okay with that right because not everything works for the same person right what works for you may not work for me and vice versa so but then we kind of okay so then we know your exercise we know your diet let's go back to that Finca tation yeah so then you basically meditate and then you write out everything like tell I mean you know more than I do but you then write your thoughts yes oh thank you thank you was like many things in my life born out of frustration so I was meditating and I found so you get into what's called an alpha wave state when you're meditating it's the same thing you feel I think the closest thing is when you're in a hot shower you take a long relaxing hot shower that space that you get into where you just have you feel like more creative somehow and an alpha wave state is oftenly referred to as calm and creative so you have the the calmness that you have sort of as you're winding down and about to go to sleep so people will often say oh it's like that moment right as you're falling asleep but when you're doing it through meditation you're not sleepy you're calm but you're not sleepy and so I'm getting into this thing I'm gently bringing myself back to the breath I'm breathing in a way that is insanely pleasurable and calming it's just crazy it feels so good and I would start having these really creative ideas business problems story things cuz I don't know how much you know about that side of my life but we're trying to build the next Disney you know I think about movies and storytelling all that I know I was gonna get to them well we're jumping ahead so in research so getting into that state I was having like all these super creative ideas and so I started to get frustrated with that the part of meditation was I have to come back to the breath when what I wanted to do was start writing down these amazing ideas and so I found that if I carved out time and I said well after you're done meditating you stay in that state and you can take notes and so it was just giving myself permission to leverage that state to then take advantage of the creative ideas so I really only meditate to get into that calm and creative state so some days may take me 45 minutes to get into that some days it may take me seven right so once I'm in that state I'm feeling good my background radiation is at zero I feel completely calm I can feel my brain going into calm and creative then I just put my computer on my lap and if I have an idea cuz I'll set an intention before I begin meditating so it's like this is the problem that I want to work on when we get to the thinka tating part and so you just find that some part of your subconscious is mulling that over and then once it starts kicking up ideas and I feel myself completely calm and relaxed then I'll start taking down the ideas and 70% of the time it's sort of nothing and you're just meditating it was great it was a rad meditation session and then 30% of the times like holy hell like these ideas are amazing I can't believe that this problem that's plagued me for so long now seems so self-evident so basically how long is this whole routine take between the exercise and meditation and a syncopation everything comes down to how much time I have so if I wake up super early so let's say that I have been sleeping well I go to bed at 9:00 and I wake up after six hours okay that's three a.m. it's not that all the time in the world I don't let anyone take up my time before 10 a.m. so the email will be the downfall of Western civilization turn off all of your alarms and notifications like you could be texting me like mad and I'm holding my phone and looking at it and I'll never know because I don't allow badge icons alerts nothing do that to me is a mental Jurek that is that would take so much discipline yeah or someone not to do that because of it's impossible you hear a ding ding ding we're all psychological we gotta go look at that yeah how did you train your brain not to do that you ready yes I have the answer but you're gonna have to lean in you can have to be ready for this I'm ready because most people are not like they they miss what this trick is really about you have to want something so badly that you would burn Rome to the ground to get it once you're there then I'll sense like we don't have to burn Rome to the ground all I have to do is shut off all my notifications that's a pretty easy ask the problem is most people don't want anything and they think that you're born with a want are born with the desire which you are not and you cultivate that you're into your life so you have to decide do I want that like I've become obsessed with building the next Disney I think about that morning noon and night now the reason that I think about is because of the result that I'm trying to get there's a reason this is called impact theory because this is my theory of how the impact people at scale but I'm really obsessed with that that's a for-real thing in my life I think about it all the time and that level of above session of obsession is something that I've cultivated in my life like I what I'm doing right now by stating at this emphatically in a podcast publicly to the world is to reinforce to me of how meaningful it is how obsessed I am with it and that makes me more obsessed and it was this self reading process that made it real in my life right absolutely at the beginning of impact theory it was like impact Theory now it's like impact Theory like right you know to me are you just keep building that into your life reinforce reinforce reinforce and so because I want something so badly I'm constantly on the hunt for what in my life is stopping me from getting that well you're very you have a very single goal in mind and you just work you're doing everything possible to get to that goal I think a lot of people don't have a goal and they're like they're they're kind of wavering maybe a little bit of this maybe a little bit that I read and you said something I watched one of your videos and I was like oh my god I love that quote it wasn't your quote but you said it which was don't compromise which you want now for what you want for what your big dream what you really want later on I think I screwed it up but yeah I'm you've got the sentiment don't get optimized what you want most for what you want right now right and it's the truth though right but I think people a people want short-term gratification or they don't have a clear concise goal so your mental trick is basically just shut off notifications and just kind of want something bad enough I'd be obsessed about it to then want it to work towards it yeah and then to keep this super practical and then your schedule needs to reflect that so right it's like they're just certain times like just today I was i pinged my my ei because she put for me to get a haircut on I have two sacred days during the week okay Wednesday and Friday Wednesday and Friday if there's anything on my schedule like we have a problem why what do you do on Wednesday Friday right so and I need to get into the zone and I write and I think so all of my strategy that stuff that's all gonna be happening on those days and one thing that I found you want to talk about what works for me may not work for anybody else I journal to myself and I found that is insanely powerful and so I will type exactly what I'm thinking so if I'm thinking well comma man what should we be doing today question mark I will write all of those things out and there's something about the way that that actually slows me down and bifurcates my mind so it takes me into what I'm writing and then I can write at one speed but I can think at another speed and the the sort of weird friction between those two speeds allow me to sort of think something at an almost feeling subconscious level but then have to process it in my conscious mind and it slows me down enough that I'm you know the act of actually having to type it out and make word choices and spell and all of that stuff right it creates this really interesting synergy where I feel like I'm actually talking to somebody else and so it becomes this really powerful like well what if we did this yeah if we did that this would be a problem but we'd get this it is so weird it's the only thing that I've found for me other than actually talking to somebody else that has this effect the problem with talking with somebody else is they keep interjecting their own agenda and so not not even necessarily intending to and so you and the social dynamic want to give them a win sometimes with their ideas and so you end up ending up somewhere that isn't where you would have ended up if you'd been just with your own thoughts now the problem is at least for me I'm a very slow processor it's ridiculous now when I process something I process it deeply but it takes me a long time to get there right and so when I'm with other people the speed of it becomes intoxicating but you end up somewhere that may not be as interesting or true to where you were trying to get as if you'd had your alone time and when I heard that Warren Buffett spends a d80 percent of his time thinking and reading I thought yeah I'm doing something wrong so I carved those two days out so when I see something on my schedule that doesn't reflect what those two days were meant to be I address it immediately you know I really like it but I really love what you're saying you seem to be very self-aware knowing you're like pitfalls and what because of that what you do is you struck you you're big on structure you structure your week your days so you eliminate those pitfalls for yourself right and you know do you want you have so many things you want to accomplish you know that you need to have things written down and have a structure and know that this Wednesday I'm only doing this that's like that to me is an art also right like people have to add me as well or anyone like it's it's good to have like be realistic and be self aware or work on that because it does further you and what your what your goals are as well like you did you learn we always self-aware like this and always this kind of knowing yourself or did you have to let work on that just with through trial and error or as you got more successful you kind of had to figure out ways to kind of get so much done basically none of us are born blank slates I wish that we were that would be far more interesting to me from what my sort of life philosophy is okay so we all do have predilections nice things like for me any amount of time that I spend investing in my verbal ability I get a let's call a one point three return on my investment so if you put me next to somebody else and they're putting the same time and energy into verbal skills I will most likely be farther ahead of them right now if I don't put the energy in then I stay flat I stay where I'm at and so the other person could outwork me and win and I think we all have something that gives us that sort of 1.3 X return on our time but take being an entrepreneur for instance I didn't I get maybe 0.8 return on my time it's ridiculous but I could still learn it and because I kept going and day after day and I faced all of my inadequacies inadequacies and all that like over time I really did get pretty extraordinary at it but that took me a long time that was a lot of gut checks and that but to give you an idea of how unselfish wedding from high school and another kid came up to me from high school I didn't like I remembered his name but like only barely and he was like man I just need to apologize to you I was so mean to you in high school and I was like bro I almost don't remember your name and I had no literally no idea that you were ever mean I literally had no idea and I just thought well like I was really a Livius in high school and that served me really well yeah I started to become more self-aware in my 20s because I could see that I had certain personality deficits that were causing me problems in college and so I thought which ones besides being not self-aware you said but well when you're not self-aware you can really get lost in what you think is interesting with no like input from other people that they're actually finding it interesting right right and so exactly that was definitely like my downfall what other personality issues would you say you had that was the one that I'm most aware of well then I was super lazy but in terms of what connected other people but you you this gets weird so yes I've come very far and people tend to look at the after picture and think that's just how you were and my thing is you should be working so hard that people look at you and they have to believe that you're naturally talented because they're not willing to believe that you can just work that hard and become that different right and so that's where I am and people dismiss me and say oh well you're naturally this side or the other and just isn't true and so when I first started in the world of entrepreneurship my only contributions to conference calls were to say goodbye and I remember getting so excited I could tell the calls wrapping up there we go like I'm ready goodbye and like that was the literal sum total of my contribution to a conference call in the beginning and I just had to learn and learn and learn but that's where I started and so I started there I started with lack of self awareness and out of pain basically anything is possible and if you suffer enough you'll begin to ask yourself like where am I going wrong what am I doing wrong what are my personality deficits but the one like key to all of this is realizing that what you build yourself a steam around matters and so there's a great movie called Amadeus of course so Li Aires yes as a character really changed my life because it made me stop and think about like I identify with soly area a little too much and so Li re lamented to God why have you made me just talented enough to recognize how much more talented Mozart is if I could be ignorant like everybody else and just appreciate his music that would be phenomenal I would be fine with that right or make me as good as Mozart but don't make me just good enough to want it to want to be as good as him and yet recognize that I never will be that's a great yep and I was haunted by that for a very long time because I thought I'm just smart enough to realize how not smart I am and that that really tortured me and so one day I realized all right if I'm really gonna do this entrepreneurship thing I have to it's very real you need to be in a room with people that are smarter than you but if you're in a room with people who are smarter than you and your self-esteem is built around being smart you're gonna self-destruct and most people do and they can't be around it and they go in rooms where they're the smartest person and ego all right it's 1000% but here's the great news about ego it can be built on anything I have a raging ego I'm an egomaniac you've never met somebody more self-obsessed and would just driven by their ego than me but here's the great news my ego is built entirely around one thing I'm the learner I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong and because I'm just obsessed with being a better learner than anyone else the more I indulge in my egotistical fantasies and obsessions I'm more open to other people's opinions I'm more open to being wrong I'm willing to stare naked Liat my inadequacies I don't fight against it when somebody says you're really at this I go wow what if they're right this could be amazing if I can really see that they're right and then improve upon that then I can get even better right and so you just get this obsession with self-improvement it's true and that's why that's one of your 25 bullet points of how would have how to change your impact your life or what have you the belief system belief system at 25 and that's on there a lot of these things are and I think that's very valuable on impact Theory comm which I thought was very valuable so then let me ask you a question so when you when you did impact theory it was all about your brain and your mind right and quest was more about that I saw this it is all about the physical and then now impact Theory was all about the mental so I would curious when you are kind of growing up or when you're even doing quest was it just like did you ever think number one that quest won't ever be what it was no ever yes you did for sure because the growth of that I mean is number two an ink across every industry number two we're now number two most fastest growing company in North America not just health not just fitness but overall grew like fifty-seven thousand percent like that's crazy it was crazy crazy and I'm fairness I didn't expect it to grow that fast okay but I fully expected it to become one of the biggest food companies on the planet you did yes and that because of what more the social impact well as you were I thought more you're saying about initially it was about like you making a profit in your life and then you switched and you pivoted into now making a social making an impact and like helping people and you said that when and correct me and this is just a very bad you know misquote but I saw that when you changed your priority that's when things really shifted is that correct uh a hundred percent so I chased money for almost a decade just literally I'm here today to get rich right and that sucked and that was not a fun way to live my life and there are five things that motivate people money is one of them but I'll say for most people while it's in the top five it's usually the last of the fun and for most people it's about purpose it's about meaning and though I was driven by that I was also driven massively by gaining mastery and in chasing money and putting that as sort of a false number one it just eroded my sense of self it eroded my enjoyment I I just couldn't show up every day and love what I was doing I wasn't passionate about it and care it was just what I thought was the opportunity that would most rapidly take me to well and so it was just a bundle of misery and so there I was living the cliche of money can't buy happiness I thought this is stupid it like how many people have to tell you the money can't buy happiness before you go PS it actually can't buy happiness do something else figure out a way to be happy in the moment doesn't mean that you can't pursue something that can generate wealth but when wealth generation is you're like just you're all in focus you will make dumb decisions in terms of actually enjoying your life so I went in and I quit this was back at awareness technologies the same guys by the way the three of us that ended up founding quest but I just was so miserable I was like I have to go do something that makes me feel alive so I went in this was like in the retelling my story it ends up being cool but at the time it was it was shameful and I was deeply ashamed of going in and quitting and so I went in told my partners look I can't do this anymore I'm so unhappy I'm gonna go do something that makes me feel alive I've been lying to myself I've been lying to you about money being my highest priority I realized it just isn't and so the thing that I value far more than money is camaraderie connection community like being passionate all that stuff and so very long story short they said they felt the same and so we decided to build a new company that was going to be predicated entirely on adding value to the consumer and so we're not dumb like we understand that profits are the only way to create a self-sustaining business so you're gonna have to be profitable but it doesn't have to be your number one priority so we started talking about you know building community adding value like what could we do that we'd be passionate about every day and so even if we were losing by the way so for three very different reasons we decided to start quest right and for me it was growing up in a morbidly obese family I wanted to help my mom and my sister and so I could think about them every day and when it got hard I could think about them and how it would help them and my sister ended up losing 125 pounds it was just crazy amazing and so that became my obsession were those other intangibles so what was that tipping point in quite with quest that went from being just going along doing well to - then just becoming so massive and so successful besides of course we said like having a purpose and social impact was do you remember that exact there was never like one day it was when when you have something growing this fast it is both right product right marketing at the right time opportunity time do you think luck had anything if you're gonna call timing luck than definitively yeah and since we didn't do anything to make the timing happen sure right right so the best example or a best explanation I've ever heard of luck is luck is like a bus there's always another one coming along right questions do you have the fare to get on the bus absent so we had the fare to get on the bus and so we were able to capitalize on something that nobody else was at that time which was we had broken our obsession with money right we were focusing entirely on value creation we knew that we were gonna have to steer by metabolic reality that that was going to be the life and death of our company and that just made us make different decisions and everyone else's making and then I was obsessed with content creation storytelling getting away from fear-based marketing and all that and just really uplifting people using community and this is alright as the world is waking up to Super Size Me and all that stuff and how detrimental food could be and also how food could be thy medicine right at that time as people are waking up to that as people are getting more health-conscious and right as social media hits and because we're creating content because I loved content not because oh I see how this is gonna work it was just like content is rad it's great way to serve people a great way to add value instead I'm just trying to market or sell right as the world was waking up and the tools were coming online it's a great segue because I was gonna say to you were you always someone who wanted to tell stories and and be or is it an evolution of your career like where you you know you love storytelling content creation and obviously that's what you're doing now so such a beautiful big degree with it like I said an evolution like as you were kind of doing what you were doing your your priorities were shifting your your passions we're kind of growing and then boom you know you quest is now you know one project and now you went to the next one like is that something like talk about that a little bit yeah so I think the biggest misconception that people have about passion or purpose meaning is that it is innate within you and it's merely a question of going back to your childhood and covering something and then realizing this is what I was always meant to live for and it just does not work like that nothing in the human mind does like if you grow up this is the easy way to explain it if you grow up and certainly back in the 80s be even cleaner if in the 80s you grew up in England the sport you were going to want to play is sucker it's that simple and if you grew up in the 80s in America the sport you were gonna want to play was football and so in Canada hockey yeah exactly so it's like was that innate to those kids or was that it it was born of the culture and because the culture celebrates it then you as a member of that culture begin to celebrate that thing and you want to do it all that so it was it was inculcated into you it was reinforced it became an obsession because he had the poster of the person they were on the nightly news your parents are talking about he friends were talking about it school and so it's the rare person who grows up in you know Bristol UK and you know supports the you know an NFL team right doesn't not that it never happens but that is the outlier among outliers because we all want to be a part of that social grape and so what you have to realize though is you can take control of that process like you can decide as I did marrying a Brit that to bond with her family I was going to connect with the the soccer team that they supported and so I started doing anything and everything I could I asked for if somebody wanted to give me a gift give me one of their t-shirts or take me to one of their games like all these things so that I can vest in that and then I tied its time with my family who I want to bond with and I'm going to associate like knowingly associate the the warmth that I have for them and the celebrating the wins with them and suffering the defeats like them with this team and so now you know almost twenty years later like you could put me in an fMRI machine scan my brain and show me their logo versus some some other soccer teams logo and I'm gonna light up on that logo because I have invested in it so much and intentionally tied it so now it's like I really have an affinity for that mm-hmm now you can do the same thing the reason the real infinity is important is you need a neurochemical reward for that thing that's your passion that's your mission whatever so when I was at Quest I fed into all day every day I'm gonna end metabolic disease that's what I was about morning noon and night I thought about my mom and my sister I was just obsessed obsessed obsessed and then as I realized that I was helping people with their body but I wasn't helping them with their mind and that really the transformation began with the mind that I started going back to okay well storytelling was my first love I cultivated that passion over a very long period of time invested invested invested in that so I have that real neurological reward for that and now I see that the people that I want to help that I have this deep connection with it's my new theory of how to impact them is evolving and it can't be just the body and I have to also address issues of the mind and so I began investing in that and so then it became okay well now my purpose is to impact people at scale to pull them out of the matrix by giving them an empowering mindset and I'm gonna repeat that I'm gonna tell other people about that I'm gonna invest in it I'm going to put all the social pressure on myself and I'm just emotionally going to tie myself my identity to that now the question I actually get asked very and frequently is but wait how could you go from I'm gonna end metabolic disease to I'm going to pull people out of the matrix by giving them an empowering mindset and the answer is because there is no one real purpose in your life there is simply what are you dedicating yourself to in that moment what are you calling your focus what are you going all-in after and if it's based on like a real spark of interest then you can fan the flames of that spark into a raging inferno and if you feed that raging inferno it will rage forever and it's only when you begin to you know have dereliction of duty you're not feeding the fire you're not going after it you're not doing the psychological tricks that you have to do to keep that burning so that you are obsessed that it begins to fade away but it does not have to fade away and so but you can switch it at any time like tomorrow I could decide I'm gonna begin building a new fire on I'm gonna go in a new direction and because I understand the mechanisms of that psychologically and from a neurochemical mentum going in the area if it's serving me so now it's they're all into impact theory and you have like different pro-q have impact their relationship theory women theory we're talking like a little bit over before but how are they all intersected and how are you like what is your grand plan to be the next well to be the Disney of content of impactful content so the the grand plan I'll start with that and I think that will help make sense of the content that we're creating now so what made Disney interesting is that actually I'll back up even farther so I'm looking at the real problem of how do you impact people at scale and this was something that I've had two big experiences in my life that really made me obsessed with this notion one I sort of Big Brother in when I was 18 for a kid named Rashawn he was 8 and 1/2 years old and he grew up in the inner cities of South Central Los Angeles so just grew up as hard as you can imagine and like working with him and realizing that I didn't actually know how to help him and so I showed him that somebody loved him and I'd like to believe that that had real I tried to show him that there were beautiful things in the world it wasn't just the sort of cement jungle that he was used to that there you know since movies cost the same no matter where you go to see them I would take him to see movies in Beverly Hills even though I was dirt poor at the time and we would go there just to see there's something beautiful I would drive around in the most beat-up car you can imagine I would drive around the big houses in Beverly Hills and be like hey you could have this one day I'm dreaming of this this is what I'm chasing and I just tried to show him all that but I end up failing and I don't end up changing his mindset okay so that haunts me right and and I iced I worked with him for for about eight and a half years and he very long story but it was meant to be an eight-week program it turned into over eight years because I made him a promise that if he would just do his homework that as long as I lived in Los Angeles I would help him and so I stayed true to that and it became just an incredibly beautiful and transformative thing certainly for me and where is he now so I lost contact with him so he was being abused by his adoptive mother which unfortunately I was too stupid to realize and so when he got taken away by the the courts I became his guardian to help him into the court system and I helped him into foster care and I was just too young and dumb to be useful to him but I helped him into that they kept moving him farther and farther away and so ultimately he was living like two hours away from me and I couldn't afford to drive that far and so we just lost contact this is all before the before social media it was like yeah it just wasn't as easy and so and I've tried to get back in contact with him but have been unable to so now flash-forward 15 years and I have roughly 3,000 full-time part-time employees and about a thousand of those employees group hard hard hard hard like my sister was shot to death in the heart with an ak-47 when I was 12 years old I held my stepfather while he bled to death from a gunshot wound to the head I hid under a car while my friend was about eight inches from my face was bleeding to death from a point-blank shotgun blast to the stomach I mean just like talking to people who've watched their friends hold their intestines and while they're dying like that's that's on a whole nother level and this is right here in Los Angeles like literally you drive seven miles in that direction and it sounds like people are describing Afghanistan or Iraq it's teen sanity crazy and so I was like okay wait a second I'm getting wealthy building this company these guys are getting a good paycheck but like I feel like I owe them to teach them how I went from being an employee to owning my own business and and to create what we called quest University to teach them like the mindset stuff this is where the 25 point belief system came from it was like here are the 25 things I had to do to my mind to go from being a good employee meaning I kept my head down I did as little work as possible and I avoided punishment at all cost that's where I started so I want to help you out of that so that you can think like an entrepreneur you'd have to want to start your own company but to think like an entrepreneur to solve problems to own your own life and in trying to do all of that I realized this is really interesting this works for about two to five percent of the people two to five percent of the people you can give them this podcast it will change their life but 95 to 98% of the people 1 they're not listening to this because they just don't think like that and their frame of reference is so skewed that the world is working against them that they're never going to be able to achieve anything that I thought okay no what would it take to give them an empowering mindset to pull them out of the matrix even though they don't realize they're in the matrix they don't want out there actively antagonistic to change how would I actually do that and talking to researchers and neuroscientists you'll hear one consistent message over and over and over the only way that human beings assimilate truly disruptive information is through narrative so you hear a story whether it's about yourself whether it's about your dad or someone that you a sports hero or someone in a fictional story you hear a narrative of how they changed and became who they are that makes you think you can do the same thing and that over and over and over throughout history for all millennia has been how humans have said okay I'm now gonna go do it and I'm gonna put myself on a track I can change my real superpower is the ability to adapt which is given to all humans at birth so cool you can change in any direction you want and so I thought all right no if I'm gonna do this that's actually what I would have to do now are there any examples of people swaying culture because what I realized was there's only three ways to impact somebody's mindset you can their parents are you can change where they grow up you can change who their friends are those are the three things and where they grow up all lump in with culture so I can't change who their parents are I can't change where they grow up but I can influence culture so I began to think okay who's influenced culture like really single-mindedly had a massive influence on culture so did you not this way yeah that's amazing so it's a game that that I play called no what would it take so whatever you want to do in your life ask yourself no what would it take so don't fool yourself don't stop at what seems like oh yeah that would work no like really go into it what would you have to do you may not like the answer you may not be willing to do the answer but if you're starting from a place of it would work then you can work your way backwards to where am I now what's the the chasm of skillset that I would have to cross to get there and my favorite example is Elon Musk that yeah I want to I want to colonize in the Mars yeah right so when I think about all right you got one dude who's trying to call in as Mars all I'm trying to do is build the next great film studio yeah compared to terraforming a planet it's all relative that sounds pretty easy yeah so he realized okay no I'm gonna have to build the rocket ships because they're too expensive right now so it is at our current rate of progress essentially is never going to happen yeah so I have to start there okay so he starts there and they're planning on like how do we deal with like you're probably gonna have to detonate nuclear weapons at the polar ice caps so that they release enough co2 gas like and he's sinking through so no maybe people won't be willing to do it but it would actually work and so I was like okay who's done this before and the answer is Disney Disney is the only film studio that's had the discipline to only tell one kind of story they tell from a thousand different angles but because of that the brand means something so if I say I'm gonna go see a paramount movie a Sony movie Warner Brothers no idea what that can mean no idea yeah but if I say I'm gonna go see a Disney movie and you already know something about it yeah there are brand identity is so on point and perfect exactly true but no one else does that no other studio has ever done that correct so then that's why you think impact Theory you want to do you basically want to emulate that that consistency so they picked an angle isn't our angles they're angling it's all about what created Americana that there's a simpler time that right always wins it was clearly especially in the beginning aimed exclusively at children so their their uh their actual approach is not our approach I'm not interested in creating the next Americana or anything like that but very credible historians credit Disney with helping America get out of the Great Depression by creating the song who's afraid of the big bad wolf and and this is the power of repetition and the power of narrative so in the story obviously somebody overcomes tremendous odds to beat these wolves and the song who's afraid of the big bad wolf became synonymous with the big bad wolf was the Great Depression and the more people saying that the more that that was their response the more reinforced in the culture that yet we don't need to be afraid of this thing we can actually rise up and of course depressions are largely about people's mindset about money in the scarcity and once people stop being afraid of that then the economic system starts to thaw and look I'm not an economist and so you can completely disregard my notions on that but just know that very credible historians credit that song like Believe It or Not from a Disney cartoon with helping America get out of the Great Depression so I thought cool I have my blueprint so now that I have my blueprint how do we do this when our end goal is to pull people out of the matrix by giving them an empowering mindset so to make them believe that they can do more than they previously thought they could do so every film show anything that we put out empowerment its empowerment it's one goal that at the end of whether you're watching this podcast whether you're watching one of the videos that we put out that at the end of that you believe you're capable of more than you did when you press play right and so that's our goal so films that we wish we had made the matrix would be the most perfect example Star Wars Shawshank Redemption rocky Karate Kid like all things were it's like at the end you feel like holy maybe I really can't do it so are you acquiring scripts right now are you right you said you're writing a lot of stuff I know you're doing a comic book or you did a comic book what is the comic about who is like who's like it's not an Archie it or maybe no no it's so that one is we did in conjunction with steve aoki okay a DJ I know Steve yep so I try to use celebrities wherever I can because the the PR that they open for you insane and I kind of that well we actually had a real friendship so he was a guest on the show impact Theory we really hit it off when I was researching him I realized that he actually plans that himself cryogenically frozen when he dies in the hopes that they can solve whatever problem and bring him back and reanimate him and I thought that's my kind of guy so the longevity piece of exact I thought you should be that exactly yeah yeah I probably should I don't know that I have enough faith in in cryo yet yeah but I I definitely like the sentiment so we hit it off over that and I wanted to create a world in which reality is manipulatable and so the story takes place both in the real world and in a digital world and so the story is set thirty years in the future in a world where advanced technology has been outlawed which i think is really going to happen by the way and i think that's about the right time line and there's gonna be mass joblessness and what we wanted to do is show people that there's a hopeful path out of that and instead of being technophobic like there's a way and it's in many many ways it's our riff on Nelson Mandela's Third Way so whenever you're being oppressed there's three ways to handle it one you can continue to be oppressed two you can become the oppressor through force or three you can find a way to create Union and unity between the two groups and so there was a massive constituency that won and Nelson Mandela to authorized violence to be violent and he said that's not the way and to come out and simply oppress the people who oppressed us will be to lose our humanity and I just always thought that was so beautiful that if you haven't read the long walk to freedom by the way read that book before mindset no nothing should be read before mindset yes very very useful information they're so extraordinary and so we wanted to explore those same themes so we have our story takes place it opens on the most famous anti tech Crusader dies and is resurrected using the illegal technology that he tried to get rid of and so now he has to and his death or his resurrection really sparks a civil war between the people who've embedded technology in their bodies and the people who have not and so he has to decide what side of this war do I fight on and how do I fight is am I going to you know use violence to oppress or am I going to find this third way and so that the whole stories about that conflict and where was a when is this gonna where will this be distributed is it what what's your plan so you can you can buy it right now online at impact Theory calm or you can go to comic shop starting March 27 very excited it's a long time coming March 27th it's a weekly sorry it's a monthly book that will come out for at least the next six months and then we may be wrapping the series at the end of the six is your idea also to create the content and then get let's say Netflix or an Amazon to obviously be the distributor or 100 so that's the plan right yeah it's not just always gonna it's not going to only live on impact Theory your idea is legit to be like the next Disney where you're gonna be able to find this in mass mass off mass by oh no mainstream places right like all over in theaters or wherever else yep Wow and so are you gonna be this are you gonna start acquiring scripts and doing all that it would it would just have to be so OnPoint right now so yes if somebody had a script that was impact worthy from start to finish in terms of the ethos and what we're trying to put into the world and I believe that if people like oftentimes in these kinds of stories there's a Yoda character or a Morpheus character and it has to be true that if you took their advice in real life that your life would be better and that's true of Yoda that's true of Morpheus it's true of a lot of these great characters so if somebody can write that Ben sure we would buy it but so far I haven't seen anything that that hits the exact note that we want to do so we've been creating it in-house so like let's just touch on that you said morph you just said matrix like what is your fascination with the matrix is it Keanu Reeves is it just Morpheus is it the matrix like is it just because like the Ahmadiyya reference it just kind of symbolizes a bigger message for you yeah it is the perfect metaphor for the human condition so neo isn't actually the one until he believes he's the one and then once he believes he's one it doesn't matter if he was the one before not it just once he believes that then he can execute against it and that is so true of humans so true I love that I could go on I love the fact that you like but you actually like that to me is first of all so many things that you say even in this conversation when I was reading about everything and just knowing about you for a while it's just like it hits home and resonates so deeply and I feel like a lot I think that you do it with a lot of people because it really is no like this really is what it is right but with that being said like red pill blue pill like all of that stuff like what is it because like again do you feel most people want the blue pill like I was telling you my friend and I have this joke like he always wants the blue pill and I always want the red pill right and I find that like it's a it's a great analogy I just love it yeah you and me both so I have desperately tried to get in contact with the Wachowskis if for no other reason than to thank them but my initial move as impact Theory was to get the rights to the matrix it's gonna say so that would have been amazing it probably would have been a brand misstep just because it's not something that we created or would own but man I really wanted to revitalize that franchise I think that it is it should be the most important film franchise in history because of the message message I mean but sadly that I was unable to convince people to give me the rights really yeah so but but you can also make a I mean not not to rip off the moon oh right I mean you could I mean you can technically like you know how patents or whatever or licenses or whatever's he's just the tweak it just a little bit just a whole new thing and and I trust me I think about this a lot so George Lucas tried to get the rights to Flash Gordon when I wouldn't give him that he created Star Wars so it's like that could have been Gary Flash Gordon so yeah it's they wouldn't give me the matrix so I'm gonna have to make my own oh my gosh well I love that reference for obvious reasons so I'm not obvious but I was telling Tom earlier that this podcast would have been called the Keanu moment for the breakthrough moment because how impactful he was in my life so when I saw that I was like oh my god I love him too you know you I think we're kind of at a time I know you have like a hard out because have another meeting or somewhere to go so I don't want to keep you for the rest for much longer but I want to say thank you so much for coming on it really was a pleasure I learned a lot of how people also took some of this very good information practical tactile information and for them to apply to their own life and where can people find I mean tell everyone where to find you and your your comic and everything else about you at tom bill you is definitely the place to start so I'm super active socially on Instagram especially and YouTube and then impact Theory is the website you can find everything from our content to the comics to everything that we do and if there are any comic fans out there you can also follow us at at I T comics and don't forget March 27 that's right it becomes available or it is thank you so much thanks for having me this is wonderful next time we're coming up again we're talking about women's theory and all the other ones yeah so women of impact which is done by my wife Lisa is extraordinary so oh that is worth checking out women of impact and the other ones relationship relationship Theory right and health if also health health care it all can be found at youtube-dot-com forward-slash Tom Billy except for women of impact that's a women of impact thank you bye that's it thank you

Channel: The Habits & Hustle Podcast

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Id: zGwvCXuWeEA

Length: 63min 30sec (3810 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019