Why Mindset Is Everything: Tom Bilyeu | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] good to see you my friend good good to see you I've been looking forward to this for a while yeah you and me both yeah man thanks for making the trip all the way out here appreciate it that is a pleasure for sure I have to say that I had an extraordinary experience doing your show everything from top to bottom was amazing and of course there's the production value side of it I mean you've got like this staff of people and you've got like 2,000 cameras going in a sweeping crane and it's all very impressive you're running it like a legitimate Network daytime television show like at the highest highest level so that's impressive but I think what what really stuck with me and has really pushed me and and made me think more deeply about what I do is the intentionality that you put into the conversations that you have like there is a lot of time and deep thought that goes into what you want to accomplish when you sit down with people yeah for sure so elaborate on that a little bit yeah that one started with if I was gonna enter the space and start doing something there were two things that had to be true one I really had to deliver value and this started for me as an exercise of creating something that would be valuable for my employees and at the time that I started the show I had 3,000 employees about 1,400 full-time in the rest part-time but I had a lot of people and I had written saying called the impact Theory belief system and it was the 25 things anybody needs to do to their mindset in order to empower themselves to do whatever they want and I had one overarching fear when I wrote it that people would memorize it but they wouldn't live by it and so people would come up to me and they would say oh like bullet point 14 is my favorite or whatever and I'd be like I don't even know what bullet point 14 is I don't have it memorized and I'm living by it but it isn't something that I memorized and that was beginning to become apparent that people could they could remember the concepts but they weren't necessarily putting them into practice in their lives and so part of it was they're only hearing it from one person they're only hearing it in one way and I think that people oftentimes have to be hit from multiple angles until the analogy or whatever that really clicks with them or they hear it at just the right moment where they hear it from somebody who just talks in a different way and so really resonates and changes their lives and that was always my goal to change people and so I thought I'm gonna start bringing people on this this whole podcasting thing is really taking off it's becoming something pretty extraordinary so let me enter that in a way that's gonna bring value to my employees and that was sort of the thought at the beginning and then I thought well if we're gonna go to all this trouble let's really do something that will reach a broad audience and then I thought okay well if I'm gonna do that there are a lot of people doing this but I just have a fundamental belief that there's always room for the best and so I wanted to come in and bring something new and what was that new thing that I could bring to the table and I thought people go on and they give the same interview over and over and over and it's it's really dictated one because they've got talking points that they want to get across so that's you know can be difficult to get around but two people ask the same question and so I thought what if I could go watch essentially everything that they've put out listen to every podcast read their book do all of that which would admittedly take an extraordinary amount of time but could I learn something new in that which hopefully will improve my life could that allow me to package this interview up better for my employees and the people listening to this and then could I honor the guests with that so that they really saw that I took their knowledge very seriously I really wanted to learn from them and then that I could get them out of what I call their loop so they're used to saying all these things they've already given those interviews probably certainly in the beginning by the time they got to me they probably already done ten other interviews so I had to know their loop so that I could build and this is where the intros came from I could build an intro that with all the love respect in the world took that story away from them so it had already been told at the top of the yeah and that's not easy to do I mean you have to there's certain people come in and they're they have their talking points and that's their goal right they they want to communicate those talking points and my strategy has always been that's fine I will give them that bandwidth but we need to exhaust and move beyond it right and so that's why mine tend to go longer and you don't get into it until the later stages of it because because people have to go through that exercise right to get to the other side but I mean you've done a masterful job of that and I think there's a lot packed into what you just said but at a very high level top level what you're doing is an exemplary example of this incredible moment that we're experiencing right now this democratization of not just education but you know powerful information that holds the you know the potential to be transformative for sure and it's cool to be a part of that movement I often think about you know what I what would I've done when I was 18 years old or 16 years old and I was struggling with who I wanted to be and what I wanted to express and what I wanted to invest my time in and there just weren't the resources that there are now so I don't think that we can overestimate the impact of this movement on what future generations you know are gonna look like which is cool dude I agree aggressively and I think that we're still in the beginning stages of what this is going to become but this is really pretty extraordinary one that people are embracing long form and I remember when I started I don't know if you got the same feedback but everyone was like Tom you cannot do an hour-long interview that's crazy like no one is gonna listen to that and I was like that's not true for me certainly and I actually seek things out that are longer and so we did like the original episode that I did with Tim Ferriss we broke it up into four parts even though it was only an hour long which now seems just ridiculous but my team was just convinced that it would never work and my thing is like you were saying part of this is you have to build rapport now thankfully you and I have already done an interview so dude when I sit down ready you can take me as deep as you want as fast as you want I will go there but often times you have to like first build that trust build the rapport live in the interview as you're going and so then the ends of the interviews tend to be better because it's longer and you've gotten to build a little rapport so that just felt all true to me so we stayed with the long format he though at the time everything seemed to run contrary to well the format lends itself to being long-form and it's an antidote to our short attention span soundbite culture and I think there is a deep you know you speak a lot about mythology and I think it taps into this thing that we all have within us to hear a great story or you know or tell a great story and if it is being well told then there shouldn't be some kind of finite time limit on it and I know for myself when I'm listening to an amazing podcast I'm frustrated if it if it's short like I I'm I'm ready for it to go as long as it needs to go to play itself out and it's the one medium that you can enjoy while you're doing something else and it's not on television once and then you miss it you can you can if you feel like it's too long you can break it up and enjoy it over time and yeah I got that same feedback early on but I just knew for a Maitai I just tried to I try to have conversations that I would want to hear and that I would enjoy and I knew as a fan of the medium early on as an early adopter that those were the conversations that impacted me the most and stayed with me over time yeah for sure you know so in the another thing you said is you were talking about these fundamental principles that that you divined and how people would point out one or the other and yet there was this gap between call it inspiration or motivation and actual implementation and that's where I really like to dig deep into because I think there's a ton of motivational content out there we can look at an Instagram post and feel inspired and it lures us into this false sense that we've actually accomplished something right yeah it's very different to put that idea into action and I think people you know sort of fall into this place where they think they've implemented it when they actually haven't right and I know you're somebody who said you know motivation is I don't know what you said exactly overrated or it's [ __ ] so how do you think about traversing that divide I think that everything in life comes down to what your own value system is so what's your identity what are your beliefs what are your values what are your haves with your routines when you figure those out that like if you just gave me a sheet that told me what those were about somebody I would tell you what the outcome of their life is gonna be and for me implementation being willing to face the fears the anxieties the unknown the need to stare at my inadequacies so I can figure out what skills I actually need in order to go and do something coz implementation is really a question of skill set so it that's why motivation ultimately is going to let you down it's like you may be motivated to go do something but let me walk you through exactly what will happen you're motivated to try this thing which you don't know how to do and you suck at it and so you go do that thing you suck it hurts your ego because your ego is tied up in being right being good being talented worthy all those like permanent set states that people don't realize are malleable and so they get stuck in that it damages their self-esteem so they want to run in the opposite direction psychological immune system kicks in reminds them that that was stupid anyway why were they worried about even trying that and so they back off and any one time doing that's not a big deal it's just that people do that over and over and over and over and over and my thing is that such a predictable pattern in humanity it's like what do you have to do to counteract that and the thing you have to do is emotionally reward yourself for being willing to take the steps so okay I know I'm gonna do this I'm gonna suck at it it's gonna hurt it's gonna hurt my self-esteem and so what do I need to do to make sure that I don't trip up over that in a way that makes me turn and run in the opposite direction number one stop valuing myself for being good at something and start valuing myself for being willing to learn so that's just a poor part of my value system is I am a learner that's my identity being willing to put in the energy to learn and get better as a part of my not only my belief system that people can do it but part of my values that that is important to do as a human you should do that so when I see something that I want to accomplish then I know that I'm gonna have the fortitude and the stamina to see that through because it taps into my identity of the learner and my value system of this is important and should done so then I just keep going down so I hit the the wall of my inadequacy and I don't meet that with stopping I meet that with cool now I know what I have to get better at I'm now aware of what the skillset is and so now that I know what skillset I need to develop and I believe that it can be developed then I just put the work into developing the skill now the one thing that I think it's lost in all of that is people lose desire and they think that that means that oh it wasn't as important as I thought it was or I didn't want it as much as I thought I did the reality is that even desire is something that you have to learn to cultivate to turn into a raging inferno like your wants have to become needs and I think there's some weird pushback that people think that like if it's real if it's love then there's no energy that's put into building that up and I think that's BS so you think that that desire is a teachable concept desire is definitely a teachable concept the real question is building that desire will that actually work and so I think people have something in their mind of something they were forced to do that they didn't enjoy and there was no natural inclination towards that and I'll say yeah you're probably never gonna be able to build something there so that's like trying to start a fire with wet moss it probably is not yet happen but if you have something where it really is a spark of real interest it's not a love it's not a passion but it's a spark of real interest now that's something that you can work with and really turn into something by building it because there is a process that goes along with building that desire there is a process that takes something from interest to full-blown passion and if people are willing to go along that process then you really can evolve that initial just sort of oh it's a spark of interest to the very thing that I'm willing to give my life over to completely and your mindset for entering into that is is this is this idea that you're a learner right that you've cultivated some level of self awareness around around this concept so how did you arrive at that and how can other people do the internal work to figure out what it is that is they're kind of internal barometer for approaching personal growth so I'll give people the the answer to the second question first because it'll be more usable and then because it's entertaining I'll tell you how I came to it which is unfortunately grotesquely clumsy but what they should do is read the book mindset by Carol Dweck I think it's the most important book in the English language bar none it is old statement it is and I keep waiting for flak on this but certainly nobody that's read it pushes back they may not agree but they don't think I'm crazy right and the reason that I say that that it is that important is I can't think of anything more foundational so in terms of how to structure your belief system in order to then leapfrog and learn stuff and get out of your own way so at a very simple level the book says this there are some people who think that their talent and intelligence are fixed traits that's a fixed mindset then there are other people who believe that their talent and intelligence are malleable traits that can be developed and they're developed through challenge and those are people the growth mindset so people that believe they can grow into basically whatever they want to become do humans have limits yeah almost certainly but there are such a gap between where you are and the upper bounds of human limitation that to even worry about limitation just doesn't make sense we put people on the moon so like once you accept that we could figure that out it's like you're not aiming at anything crazier than that so it's going to fall within the limits of what humans can do so going after that and developing that mindset and being aware of what Carol Dweck calls the false growth mindset which you alluded to earlier where people think they're thinking in the right way they think they're implementing something but they're really not so once you have that so I wish I had read that book so it would have made that all clear unfortunately for me I had the like king of all fixed mindsets and I was convinced that my talent and intelligence were fixed that it was just about you know not what hand life dealt me but playing that hand well and so to play my hand well and even then I wouldn't have understood what well meant but I know how is acting and well in those days for me meant feeling good about myself okay so what age are we talking about early 20s and balloon so I'm wondering whether that's entirely intellectually honest because I do know that you were a young person you had this goal of going to film school and everybody told you that was not going to happen and you were intent on making it happen and you made it happen so on some level if you were if you were if the messaging that you were on the receiving end of was you don't have the talent you don't have the resume whatever it is you had enough of a growth mindset to decide to overcome that signaling or was that just pure competitive I'm gonna show them it wasn't a growth mindset at all but it was that I believed that I was talented so I believed in myself enough to think oh I have the talent to do this now I deep fears that I was wrong about that and that plays itself out and you see it in people's lives where they're really going for something but you can see when they're not making it they're like in panic mode because they think that means something about themselves other than they're just still more skills to gain so at the time I had the belief that I was a that I had god-given talent and so I believed that a word about belief come from my dad made an offhanded comment when I was 12 that I ran with for the next like 10 years which was he and knowing my dad may have actually just been trying to save me from embarrassing myself so what he said was his actual words now that I play them back were I think you're actually better behind the camera than you are in front of the camera now he may have meant hey you should stop trying to act or any should get behind the camera but the way I interpreted it in my twelve-year-old mind was you're really talented behind the camera now admittedly in the little movies that I was making with my friends with a VHS camcorder which I mean when I think about what it is compared to today it was crazy but I knew where to put the camera to make it funny and funny was my only goal back then and I was legitimately funny so you take the the initial wins that I got excited I don't think we're blank slates so and I think that some people think that's my mentality Oh Rob blank sites you can be whatever you want I think that the degree to which you can change is so profound it's probably better just to think of yourself like that even though it's not actually true so I have predilections and I've always gotten disproportionate gains anytime I put energy into verbal skills or written skills I would get disproportionate response so me and the next person could spend the same amount of time the same amount of intention and ferocity and I would just get a little bit better than they did at anything related to verbal or words or writing and so because of that I was really focused in the early years on things were verbal so I wanted to be a stand-up comic I did stand-up comedy for a long time I've been in like young author programs in Speech and Debate since I was you know 11 or somehow so for sure I got very extroverted for somebody who characterizes themself as an introvert will now help me process through this so then I for sure would have told you I am the extrovert of extroverts now either i misidentified that or I have changed over time and I honestly don't know what the truthful answer is but now for sure I I am not in any way shape or form drawn to social situations I want to retreat I am a terrible networker so people mistake a persona that I use the ability to speak onstage because it's a skill that allows me to do what my truest deepest desires which is to help people so I want to impact people I want to see them go on the same kind of transformational journey that I went on but when I think about what gives me massive anxiety it's getting up and speaking in front of people even doing a podcast like this like these are things I've had to learn to manage and myself I'm just not drawn to them I like to be alone when you said you'd like to be hermetically sealed in your space dude that resonates with me emotionally in a way that you can't imagine right well let's take it back paint me the picture of young Tom so young Tom found my space in the family was to be the peacemaker and to be the comedian so that was the way that I could have a unique voice it was the youngest in my family I remember asking my mom one time I was I was funny when I was a kid right and she said you were busy and I was like that's not funny that's not the same thing and so as a kid I definitely my identity was being funny making people laugh that very much carried through my high school years and in high school I basically did like an impromptu comedy routine five days a week around my lunch table with the 9 or 10 other guys that and I did that every day and what was there a driver behind that was that he's here yeah a lot of a lot of comics say you know it was a it was their way of distinguishing themselves or overcoming some sense of awkwardness or trying to find a way to fit in to the social circle 1,000% so I was emotionally weak so and I found that being funny stop me from getting picked on by bullies so that was rad I could make them laugh and I would defuse it and I remember there's this really gigantic guy in my school like pituitary tumor big I mean just crazy big and he said one time don't pick on Bill you he's funny so it that became my defense mechanism so if somebody wanted to fight or the typical teenage things I would just defuse it by being funny because I was terrified absolutely terrified that I was just gonna get beaten up and because I didn't know how to fight and was too emotionally weak to deal with pain that I didn't learn to fight or anything like that so that sort of insecurity about how to navigate my way through that I did with humor it matched up with my value system I didn't think less of myself I thought wow this is a great strategy I can talk my way out of things and so by being funny I got left alone which was great and so none of that was like an issue for me I didn't grow up as the kid that was picked on or anything like that that wasn't part of my identity so and I loved being able to make people laugh made me feel good about myself so and part of that was driven by the people that I was really close to growing up I believed they were much smarter than me so I always felt dumb because I felt dumb I needed something to be better than them at so I could feel good about myself and I was just funnier than mm-hmm and this this you mentioned that that you were the Peacekeeper or the peacemaker was there strife or conflict in the house or it didn't seem like that at the time I mean looking back three weeks after I left my dad moved out so clearly there was something going on and when he left he said that he had been unhappy for 10 years so that puts me at 8 years old so from the time that I made there's something going on I certainly didn't understand it when he left it took me by surprise but is it possible there was that my dad was very distant for me emotionally so was that and I considered him to be funny so was that me trying to emulate him to get his attention I honestly don't know it's never been like a real pain point for me so I've never done the hard sort of emotional work to figure out why I ended up doing that stuff to me that the more interesting questions why did I stop so when I left for college I said I'm not gonna be funny anymore I'm going to take myself seriously as an artist and that became really important to me and so I didn't do comedy or anything until after I graduated college had failed at film school which is a whole another framing because there's two ways you could look at my film school careers being this tale of you can do anything you set your mind to or you can look at at it as it failed and it really changed me and that is the perspective that I use because I think it's more powerful but when I got out and I was sliding towards depression then I returned to comedy because that was like okay well I failed as a serious artist but I'm gonna go back to being funny which is a whole story because I got back into it I performed at the Laugh Factory and do you know who Mitch Hedberg is yeah okay so imagine this I've never heard of Mitch Hedberg have no idea who he is I'm in this really dark place in my life I think I failed as a filmmaker I have no idea how to get back into film none and it's paralyzing and I'm like okay what do I do what am I good at comedy great I'm gonna get back into comedy I start practicing again I can feel my mind almost speeding up I see the opportunities for jokes everywhere this is great I feel good I feel like my old self like I did back in high school it's amazing and I go to the Laugh Factory and it's open mic night now in an open mic night major comedians will come but they're trying out new material so they're they're terrible even though they're famous and after all the open mic night or my people most of the audience is already gone because they all came to see their friend try their hand at comedy and then more famous people come up their materials terrible so by the time we get to the last person there's only I'm not joking like 15 out of 300 people left and so I'm like I don't think I can do another one of these but I wanted to learn right like I've been listening or how they try material all that and I get up to leave my friend and I and Mitch Hedberg manager comes on stations like guys guys before you go the next man coming is the funniest man in America you are not gonna want to miss this and I thought you got it with that kind of build-up you got to give it a shot right what could it hurt so we sit back down and this guy had never heard it before ever in my life walks out and he is so funny rich that actually during his bit I'm laughing so hard I thought to myself can you die from laughing because I could not catch my breath it was that funny and I thought if he keeps going I'm actually going to die here in the theater and so at the end of that I thought okay that's funny that's how good you can get and I thought to get that good I would have to dedicate my entire life to it and I'm not prepared to do that so that became this moment where I was like okay I closed the door on that and it's not as clean as it's gonna sound in the story but I closed the door on being a comic and that only left filmmaking and so I was like how am I gonna get good at this and so I started researching the brain I came across brain plasticity and it was hotly debated in the late 90s is the brain plastic can you learn as you get older or is it sort of done at eleven twelve thirteen and I thought well some people are taking it seriously that you can change your brain that you can learn new things you can push yourself and people now can't remember that this was actually credible scientist saying you can't what it's locked what you have is what you have there's no way to change it you're losing brain cells every day and there's a reason that you can't learn any language without an accent it's just it's done but I chose to believe that the people who are saying no no no the brain is plastic until the day you die I choose to believe that they were right even though I wasn't sure and that led me down this path of thinking about cuz I started teaching filmmaking and I was like I'm able to make their films better if the brain is plastic and I can learn something new and I'm able to make their films better why can't I make my own better and so that became the thing that ended up putting me down the path of actually developing what we now call the growth mindset but back then didn't have a name right and so why then did you not pursue filmmaking to the hilt with this newfound you know understanding of blame path brain plasticity or at least this belief that you could develop your skill why didn't that not be the path I did it was so yeah yeah so what happened was I was teaching film and looking for any way to have the time to write to put together a screenplay that I could go out and basically pull an M night Shyamalan where the script is so good that I know that somebody's gonna let me direct it so that was the path that was on I was teaching meet these two guys very successful entrepreneurs there were two things I promised myself when I was a kid one one day I'm gonna be rich - I'm gonna have six-pack abs now I legitimately went through this thing in high school where I was like I like poetry and I like filmmaking which am I gonna pursue and the reason I ended up pursuing film was you couldn't get rich being a poet so I was like cool I love film and it was in the 80s it was just cranking out millionaires so I was like this is rad I'm gonna go do that something I love and it's something that can make me rich so they come across my life they're yoked these guys were like bodybuilder types they had six-pack abs they were successful entrepreneurs and they were like look man you're coming to the world with your hand out if you want to control your art you're gonna have to control the resources so stop being a teacher stop trying to work your way up come with us be a part of this startup work your ass off become a true entrepreneur get a piece of the company when we sell you'll be rich and you'll be able to finance your own films I thought oh my god this is perfect we thought it would take about 18 months to build this technology company up and sell it and of course it ended up taking 15 years took multiple companies a not a nervous breakdown but a spiritual crisis and all of that to realize I was never gonna chase money again because chasing money the struggle is guaranteed the success is not so I needed to love what I was doing that's a whole nother story but in there I also actually had a screenplay produced and a movie starring Michael Madsen who's famous from Tarantino films and I thought this is this is my break this is the beginning and it was atrocious and I was so heartbroken with how the movie came out that I was like I have to stay on this path I have to control the money and so I buckled down I did it for 15 years built a billion-dollar company and exited that with a whole lot of cash and am now building my own studio so you finally arrived at this place where you can get back to storytelling correct yeah do you still have you have aspirations of doing of content well you know like feature films aggressively so yeah well you would you just went through the whole timeline of everything to like back it up a little bit it's interesting that you jumped into this startup situation because I'm not getting from you that business was a driving force for you as a kid it was about an art and expression yes 1,000% I am NOT a born entrepreneur yeah not in the slightest and I part of the reason that my philosophies are what they are is because I have lived them so when I talk about the you know having a negative voice it's because I have one and it is aggressive I want to talk about anxieties because I had anxiety when I talk about being able to become an entrepreneur it's because I had to so I didn't have the instincts in fact from an instinct perspective I didn't have any and I had to learn all of that now I would say I do have good business instincts because I've trained them over time but I certainly didn't have them in the beginning and in the beginning of my business career the and this is real and I really want people to feel what I feel when I say this the only contributions that I would make for probably the first two years of being in business the only contributions I would make to a conference call were to say goodbye and I remember looking forward to that I was finally gonna get to say something but because at least I knew enough to keep my mouth shut when I didn't know and I didn't understand I didn't want to look stupid so I would just be quiet I would listen and learn I'm very grateful to the guys that gave me the opportunity they would let me on the call so I was often in rooms that I probably would never have been allowed to be in if I'd been in a traditional company but because it was a startup they just kept letting me listen in on phone calls and stuff so that ended up being really really extraordinary for me but yeah I had to learn to be an entrepreneur so why did these two yoked dudes want to invite you in to this startup play like what was it about you that it that attracted them to you so they have what words would they use so they thought that I was bright they thought that I could write and they thought we need a copywriter so let's bring this guy in we're basically going to get underpriced talent and because as a teacher you know much money so they didn't have to fight very hard to pay me what I was making as a teacher so they could they moved me over they said look this is our whole vision and they were very very compelling and this is our vision 18 months sell the company come over be a part of this you're gonna have what you need to finance your own films so I thought this is amazing and I remember asking them guys this all seems too good to be true everyone I've talked to about the job offer you guys have made me is telling me that don't do it like there's no civility these guys are crazy if it sounds too good to be true it is too good to be true and so of course cuz no one in my family knows startups or anything like that and I said this isn't a trick to get me into business is it because you know I want to be a filmmaker and they were like laughing and they're like Tom don't be so ridiculous like there are easier ways to just get a traditional employee mm-hmm and I was like okay yeah that makes sense and then and in all sincerity I think what they saw was a kid they understood this dream they really thought they could make it happen and they really didn't think it would take 15 years so while I ended up getting sucked into business I really don't think that was I just think they saw somebody that they could get more out of than they were gonna be right that's there and so you had an exit from this technology play and it's the same dudes that you started quest with yeah yeah so I ended up working with him for 14 years life so what started the technology company was rapidly turning into an I don't know what's this is gonna be so at about six and a half years I went in and quit I said I can't do this anymore I'm moving to Greece my wife happens to be Greek I'm gonna move to Greece because I speak Greek but I won't say that I'm truly fluent so I'm gonna go there get truly fluent cut my expenses to nothing live some meager existence and right and I'm gonna come back being fluent in Greek and having you know a couple screenplays that'll just be bulletproof and they were like whoa whoa whoa and I said here's your coup because by then I had earned 10% of the company through sweat equity and I said here's your equity back if you sell the company tomorrow for a billion dollars I'm you're never gonna hear from me I get it I'm not crossing the finish line I shouldn't get anything for this and that was huge for me because I really believed at that moment I was walking away forever and I knew no matter what I would never because they had been sued by other people who felt in previous companies and they were always ah so gross you create opportunity for people and I was like they created opportunity for me I'm walking away so I was like yeah there it is and I'm going to go do my thing and they said look we could do this without you but we don't want to and that's what I needed to hear to reconnect and to the Brotherhood and be about something other than the money and so I said look I've already done the hard thing which is quit so now let me tell you who I really am what I'm really about what drives me and I I thought that my primary driver was getting wealthy and I realize now that it's not and my primary driver is fulfillment and chasing money does not fulfill me and so hey I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness so you had that realization before the money came in oh yes well yes so on paper I was technically a multimillionaire but let me tell you there's a huge difference between paper money and real life money so what when I gave back the equity I was giving back about two million dollars mmm but it was just paper money it's not real right so I don't expect some like oh my god that's so amazing right it was you know maybe one day it'll be worth something maybe one but you didn't go to Greece I did not right I didn't even make it home and I was pulling into my driveway when they called me and said come out to dinner with us and then that changed the course of my life because then I could finally say like look I want to create value in people's lives I don't just want to sell them something I didn't use the words authentic at the time it's a buzzword now but back then it nobody was saying it but what I said was I want the company to reflect our real personalities who we are what we want to do in life the things that were passionate about I wanted to just pour through an everything that we do and so we moved away from really boring security software to something that we were gonna be passionate about and the phrase that I used was we need to ask ourselves what would we do and love every day even if we're failing because the struggle has guaranteed the success is not so for three very different reasons we end up launching quest nutrition but it was born out of that misery it was born out of I'm never gonna be this unhappy again I want to feel alive I know about myself I like community I like connection I like seeing people being able to help them I want to add value I don't want to steer by money look money is important and don't get me wrong I want to make even more money in my life but there's a certain way I want to make it I want to make it by creating things that people value tremendously and they would rather have them the money I don't do hard sales tactics it just doesn't make me feel good so there are ways to generate tremendous wealth in your life that are all value add humanity plus and so that was the driver now part of the reason that we ended up being so successful is while that's now and vogue at the time everyone thought we were crazy we come out talking about authenticity about passion about community that there wasn't social media as a phrase didn't exist but using today's language we're gonna do all of the socially all of our marketing is gonna be social media we I'm gonna do storytelling I'm gonna go back to stories I'm gonna tell people what it means to support this company to buy this product what does it say about them who are they who are we and then we're gonna step forward as people as individuals we want people to know who we are and we're gonna put employees first so its employees first then customer and when you do that you're building this like tight ecosystem of people that you believe in the believe in you it's just meant it's really extraordinary and now it's a movement but we were early just early enough using social media just early enough that we just broke and it just went crazy yeah what's interesting is that I I guess I thought oh you you exited the technology play and then we're sitting on some cash and then had the idea like okay well what's next but it wasn't like that right it was more of a pivot midstream for sure so walk me through the pain moment of of making that decision and how you come to this realization that you want to be involved in a more purposeful fulfilling service-oriented kind of endeavor I was for the first three years I I felt so amazing I was on fire so I leave teaching and I go into this place where I know nothing but now I'm thinking about brain plasticity I'm thinking about learning and now I'm around guys they believe in that to their core and they were all like what do you want to be you could be anything but you've got a like bust yourself in half to figure who are these dude it's like you just stumbled into quite a partnership a thousand percent life-changing in a million ways and the fact that they were so growth minded now put me when they say you're the average of the will you spend the most time with the five people so now I have my wife totally growth mindset and I have my two business partners who at the time were just my employers but they were totally growth mindset and they helped me to a crazy high standard and so they kept telling me stop thinking like an employee start thinking like an owner if you act like an owner and deliver results will make you an owner but you have to actually live up to that and they're like you can have any job in this company you want but you have to become the right person for the job I thought whoa like what if that's real what if that's not a gimmick and so I put it to the test and I remember one day deciding okay cool if this is real I'm gonna show up everyday acting like I'm the only person here and that if I don't do it it's not gonna get done which means I don't have a job description anymore there's just [ __ ] that needs to get done and I'm going to do said things and that changed everything it changed our relationship changed dynamics so for the first three years it was empowering me I was learning lessons and even though I was in a pretty intense sort of almost like Marshall Rd environment where I was like you just get kicked in the face and knocked down and nobody is helping you back up part of it is they want to see if you'll get back up and so it was it was intense to say the least but for me what I needed I needed to toughen up it's not what everybody needs but that was precisely what I needed and I was a kid that I remember one time getting hit in the leg with a soccer ball in the middle of a game and it's cold in Washington but got hit in the leg and it left an imprint of the soccer ball and I just walked off the field because it hurt and so to me it's like it hurt why would I keep doing this and so that was like a pattern in my life like if it hurt emotionally or physically I would just quit and so this was the first time where I was around these like tough mofos they did not play around they expected you to rise to their level they led by example they were all in busting ass and I just thought this is rad man this is what I need I need to go hard and the harder I went the better I got and I saw like and I started working out which this is huge you'll get this more than anybody so never really worked out my entire life I'd started probably a year before I met them working out and I was like whoa you can actually change your body goes into this whole brain plasticity thing and then I met them and they were yoked so I was like just tell me what to do and for the first year they wouldn't they were like you're never gonna stick you're never gonna see it wouldn't even tell you no so I started working out basically to prove them wrong to be like no no no I'll stick with this and then the more I worked out the more they started giving me advice I chose to listen to just them and so all the sudden all the noise of the world of like do this don't do that like people giving you conflicting information I just had one ideology to listen to maybe it's not the best ideology but once you're focused you have at least one thing you'll optimize for that and so it just changed my life and I ended up putting on like 60 pounds largely fat but also muscle and that showed me that whoa you can transform your body and that really made me believe in just how far I could transform my mind yeah and you grew up like as an overweight kid right here's the problem so I was a chubby kid but I did not think of myself as chubby and I was only chubby by the standards of the 1980s and early 1990s which if you saw a picture of me now you be like you weren't chubby compared to today I was shredded but back then to give you an idea so I grew up my family is morbidly obese by any standard even back then and I thought okay I'm the skinny one in a heavyset family and then I go to college and because I'm working so hard now which is a whole nother story working my ass off I lose like 30 35 pounds my freshman Wow so it's just crucial without thinking without trying I was just working too much and I'd have any money so I couldn't afford junk food so I go home and or no sorry the next year's at the beginning of my freshman year I met a girl I knew in high school and she takes one look at me she's like oh my god I didn't recognize you I was used to think of you as the chubby kid and so at 19 all of a sudden it in like a sixth sense moment my whole life played back as me as the fat kid and I was like how is this possible and so I realized that like even though I would suck in my gut so it wouldn't push out my shirt too much people could tell it wasn't exactly svelte yeah so it is very unfair of me to say that like oh I was obese or anything like that I didn't get heavy until I was in my mid-20s then I got heavy mmm and so why the it's it seems like a strange pivot to go from security software to nutrition and bars a you know it's completely unrelated business and B it's also a crowded marketplace everyone told us we were crazy they're like what are you doing you make money in technology you lose money in food what are you doing and in 2009 when we first started planning on launching the company there were 1600 flavors of bars and combinations of companies on the market system bars 1600 I can't imagine what it's now Oh even worse and we went to a distributor and he said I need another protein bar like I need another hole in that and we thought whoa okay but there isn't a single bar in the market that myself and my partners would eat so we like we know there's at least a market of three and our whole thing is steer by what's metabolically true so we were just like man you can take your blood sugar and figure out if you should be eating those bars or not and they they I mean they had like thirty and forty grams of sugar in our competitors bars so we're like this is crazy they either have no sugar and tastes terrible or they have all kinds of sugar and tastes good but your blood Sugar's gonna spike you might as well eat a Snickers bar no joke so we were like we're gonna make the first bar that tastes like it has sugar but doesn't now needless to say that was infinitely harder than we thought it was going to be but because we had such aggressive growth mindsets and by this point even I and I was the new kid on the block had eight and a half years by the time we founded that company of just diehard entrepreneurial experience so you've got three seasoned entrepreneurs coming into this company not knowing anything about it but having the will to win and so what ended up happening was I'm sure a thousand people before us had formulated a bar that tasted just like ours and had no sugar and the reason they never went to market is the second we went in because equipment has developed in lockstep with use of high fructose corn syrup as soon as you take the high fructose corn syrup out your bar may taste amazing but it won't mass-produce because all of the equipment is counting on the existence of that because of the texture that it gives it so all of the pressure tolerances and all that are designed to have high fructose corn syrup so everybody else hits that roadblock and they just start adding high fructose corn syrup they try to add as little as possible but they do it to make it run we said oh I guess we're gonna have to develop our own equipment and become her own manufacturers so when every manufacturer told us you can't make this bar not profitably any way no way we said okay well then we'll have to do it ourselves we bought equipment learn very quickly that people were right you can't produce it on standard equipment but it just so happened that one of my partners is a literal Iowa farm boy and could fix anything so he's looking at the equipment he's like I know how to cut this apart and put it back together and it'll work without if we do that and you're wrong we're now in real trouble because all of our money will be tied up in this whereas before we could have at least resold the equipment and he does it and it works and it was just like holy hell what was it that had to be changed about the equipment to allow you to produce its scale without that ingredient we had to be able to put more pressure on the product because it ours wasn't like liquidy like high fructose corn syrup is ours is more like Kevlar really soft until you put it under pressure and then it would get hard so we had to put enough pressure that it would form the bar and that it would stick through as it was cut but not so much pressure that the bar itself to the end consumer would be hard so that was a big thing and then also in traditional manufacturing you cool it before you cut it but if we did that our product became too brittle so there were just all kinds of changing equipment and reordering things and all that but yeah so did you have your own facility manufacturing facility yeah I was manufacturing so for the first year I was the only one that was there full-time other two partners were still running the tech company and so I'm in a hairnet everyday lab coats gloves and making protein bars Wow and what is the the secret to go I mean it's trying to think about how to articulate this so you have this bar but that's still very different from the ubiquity with that bar you know has today I mean you can't go anywhere without seeing it the thing is everywhere how did you penetrate the market so completely well that's a very long road but it starts with social so we're like all we care about is community man we just maybe this is a big business maybe it's not but I'm gonna go speak to people that I know and understand that no one understand me so we're gonna go after other people that are lifting weights every day like we were and so we went after bodybuilders and figure competitors and just said look this is the first protein bar that isn't a candy bar in disguise we hit him up on social we you know it wasn't called DMing back then but like you build this relationship on social and connect with these people from all over the place well this is a model that's repeated time on now now it's standard then it was like what are you doing like people actually did not understand it so but because we knew like our marketing messages that were good people we're not trying to sell something and we're living through a time now where the most powerful marketing message you can have is to actually be a good person to lead with value creation to try to give more value than you get like it's just powerful marketing stuff but no one was doing it back then so you want to talk about cutting through the noise we cut through the noise like this hey rich calls quest and he says hey guys look I'm really trying to get in shape what should I do you should eat chicken breast and broccoli do you guys sell chicken breast broccoli no we don't then why is that your answer because it's true and you should only eat our product and those times where you're on the run or you need something that just tastes like a cookie and you can't have any more boiled vegetables or whatever and so people like whoa like these guys aren't trying to sell hard we would send out a newsletter and it would just be recipes that you could make with our product so never said go buy our product nothing just like hey here's cool stuff that people are doing and we developed what we called mirror marketing so we wanted to reflect the consumer back so we told people hey if you put the bar in the microwave it makes it really soft so people nuts for that but then they started telling us oh by the way if you do this and this and mix it with this and chop it up you can make ice cream you can make cookies yeah we're like whoa so we started saying hey so-and-so told us you can do this look at this isn't this amazing so people like wow that's rad like if I submit stuff they might like call me out and hype my stuff and so it just became them seeing themselves exactly mm-hmm yeah that's amazing so you go over like a four five year period you well from 2010 to 2013 you become one of the fastest growing companies in North America it's crazy right I'm he must I had to staff up like crazy ah dude this is I wish people could see this now because people think of growth like that as being like a digital product or something where it's like what did Instagram got to a billion dollar valuation with like eight employees or something that is not how things went for us so we were a manufacturing business so we had to buy equipment which has like six eight twelve monthly times we had so imagine you're growing your month-over-month and you've got a project out 12 months think about how terrifying that is from a capital perspective because you're only making the money you're making today but you've got to spend the money that you're gonna need to be spending for 12 months routes absolutely bananas you do a crazy capital raise no we did literate we had one mezzanine debt round very small but it gave us enough that we were able to get to the point where we could borrow against accounts receivable so we could get the line of credit and again Madol up to my partner who managed all that stuff which is absolutely a genius with building those relationships we had a belief make friends before you need them so it was like we were very proactive in that stuff but even just getting the the square footage that we needed to be manufacturing out of was pure insanity and you would move into a space and think that we're good here for the next three years and I'm not joking you'd be out in six months it was so crazy it was just happening so fast and we had to staff up the way the way the staff was crazy it led to one of the most beautiful periods of my life though which was we put we needed people so we put out on the street that we would hire people even if they had felony convictions so we had people lined up around the building just to get an interview and that was extraordinary and introduced me to just some beautiful beautiful humans that completely shaped my belief system is why I launched impact theory because when you see enough lives where it's like these are extraordinary people who will do nothing with their life because they don't believe they can like that yet that really shade Wow so by 2050 it was around 2015 that you're at the billion dollar point but yeah by 2015 we had already like cashed out a little bit and had just tremendous financial success that was is that when you exit it I left at the end of 2016 okay and when did you start impact Theory dot next day oh you did okay so there was a clean break in between the two for you well yeah it was transitioning from one to the next right so most people who would come into obscene wealth like this you know would think about buying an island or you know go going off and living some crazy life of luxury or traveling the world for the next five or ten years essentially doing nothing and you decide to invest in this new endeavor seemingly immediately like why did you make that decision well that was thankfully a reaction to I went through the pain of living the cliche of money can't buy happiness early so that was the very thing that gave birth to my true financial success so walk me through that though so as most people will never experience what it's like to come into crazy wealth yeah it is it is a really funny moment and funny is the right word it's it's fun but it's also funny in that when I was growing up part of the reason I wanted to get rich was I looked at those people with admiration and I did not look at myself with admiration so I thought oh well if I can get wealthy then I will look at myself with admiration this would be amazing and then when I got the money by then I had changed myself fundamentally as a person and I had earned so much self-respect and so much self-worth that by the time I got the money I didn't I wasn't looking for anything from the money other than it is dog great facilitator it will let you do extraordinary things but it won't make you an extraordinary person and won't make you feel any differently about yourself and because the money came literally like that because we had paper wealth so I was a worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper but I just cannot stress enough that's meaningless in your real life I was driving you know at one point a beat-up Ford Focus my wife and I had to share it had a leaky exhaust and yet I'm worth at that point I was worth tens of millions of dollars but there were employees that were living far better lives and I was from the financial standpoint so that's paper money now bank account money came in an instant and so it was about I don't know six years into our journey and we decided to take a small investment to diversify so it was a pure founder liquidity moment and because the valuation of the company was over a billion dollars you can imagine even at a small percentage just the raw number of dollars is in sanity so all the sudden I was fantastically wealthy but I was like it is so in fact this this was how that day went so everyone I said earlier you beliefs values identity habits routines right these are the things that make people up and I just have a value system that says it's not about the money it's about building something you believe in it's about serving other people it's about work ethic it's about showing up and working and I value myself for that so on the day that the money hit it hit it like I know 8:00 a.m. in the morning or something and my wife were both in the gym and she's like what are we gonna do today and I was like what do you mean I'm going to work and she like couldn't wrap her head around aha she's like whoa we're gonna go to the Lamborghini dealer yeah she's like come on we've got to like go do something we've got to celebrate and I'm like there's no universe in which I don't show up for work today none under no circumstances so if you were to ask my employees when did the money hit the he'll be like I have no idea they knew that it did hit but they didn't know what day because I acted completely the same and the things I want people to understand is I feel the same so all of the like things that I believe about myself to be good I still believe to be good I earned them I earned them by doing the hard thing time and time and time and time again I know how much I'm willing to serve people and my family and myself and all I just know I've done it for years and years and years so when it came to do I buy an island and retire or do I double down it came down to what will make me love my life the most and the reality is the thing that would make me love my life the most because it would still be fun to just go home be with my wife but the thing that make me love my life the most is to do the things that are fulfilling and I think fulfillment has a very specific universal formula and that formula is work your ass off to get very good at something that you care deeply about that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people that's it you got to have all of it technique literally yes perhaps it is literally technique yeah and people they don't like what that is for people that don't know so it's this ancient Greek notion of fulfillment basically and the fact that it's coming from that word techne like to get good at something and something that's hard so the way that I explain it to people is people think of like doing some of that going and ladling soup at a soup kitchen which may be the right place to start but ultimately you're gonna realize anyone can do this and so I haven't earned something special that allows me to serve myself in humanity so it's part of it is working your ass off to get a set of skills have real value and my whole thing here's this may be the biggest problem we face as a society people don't remember that skills have utility they let you do something you don't learn to build a house to impress your parents you learn to build a house so people can live in the house you build and once people understand that like holy [ __ ] you're building this house so somebody can live in it build a home in it have a family be sheltered from storms like [ __ ] it's a real thing man and so all of that effort and energy went into I have the chills right now is so you can create that moment for yourself for other people it is it is something so much more than going to architecture school which maybe you went to because your parents wanted that and they they were architects and so you do that thing for that and you forget the whole reason you became an architect was to build houses and so once people realize oh I'm putting all of this time and energy to build these things because they let me do something what do I want to do what do I want to give what do I want to create when you look at skills from that perspective it is like it is being a superhero it is being a superhero you're going to collect these abilities these abilities actually let you do something the fact that Superman can fly allows him to save people allows him to do things other people can't do we all have this opportunity to become capable of the extraordinary to be able to do things other people can't do and that feels so good the thing is though most the thing that's unique about you is that you were able to come to this realization and develop a level of maturity and self-awareness without having to go to the you know play it out at the Lamborghini dealership right because most people who would come into that kind of wealth would go and have that experience for a period of time only to discover you know what you just expressed but on the other side of it so why were you able to do that why were you able to avoid that experience and circumvent it they say a fool never learns a smart man learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others far too often I've been a fool and have repeated mistakes over and over and over and but I really do try to be smart I'm not usually as wise as I would like to be and just find that I I learned things the hard way but I really do learn them so pain for me is a tremendous instructor maybe because I hate it so much and just want to move away from it but thankfully I don't run from it I figure out what I did that made me feel that pain whether it's what I value myself for or whether it's just hey bad skill set you need to address it and then actually addressing it so in the time where I was chasing money and I like I said the first three years gave to me and then the next three years chipped away at my my ability to enjoy my life so it's actually in the founding of quests that you learned that lesson it was in the it was in building awareness technologies so building awareness technologies I did not enjoy the process and so at the end of that I had spent about three and a half years being profoundly unhappy profoundly where it's like it was hurting my marriage my wife would want to talk about work and I wouldn't want to talk about it I would get this like sense of dread as I approached the office it was just gnarly man and it was in that period that I developed really crushing anxiety because AI was always in over my head because I didn't know anything about business and it was just really hard to learn I was in a very intense environment where it's just like you'd hear things like only an idiot would do that like all day every day I feel like oh my god this is exhausting and so you put that all together and I'm doing all of that for a product I don't believe in I'm not building community I'm not connected to people like community all that's of it none of it existed so I was just like I am so unhappy and so talking to my wife I was like anything would be better than this and somebody wrote an article unfortunately only read the headline but I know the feeling that it resonated and it was the joy of quitting and there's that moment when you first quit and it's like the lift the burden lifted off you is so profound because that that particular frame of reference is just in an instant that's gone and that's amazing and that's what I was thinking about when I went in and quit I was like I just need the change of circumstance badly and so my solution was going to be to go do the only thing that ever made me feel awesome and that is creating film so and I didn't have the finances to make my actual films but I could write them which is essentially just your time and I remember there was a time before I quit where I had directed a feature film and I direct this feature film over a few weekends and then I edited myself nights and weekends and there was a time I was if I could finish it before Christmas I'd be able to play it for my family because it was never gonna go theatrical and I was so excited to do that that I was sleeping between 45 minutes in two hours a night without setting an alarm for like 10 days and I thought this is inhuman how is it possible I'm waking up with this little sleep and it was because I was so excited I wanted to like get this film done and show it to everybody and the actual act of cutting it together which for anybody who messes with film here off camera they know it is so fun when you see it like come together and you're creating this moment you feel something and you give yourself the chills it's like that for me makes me feel alive I was like I want to feel like that all the time so that was all I knew I was no smarter than that I just knew feeling dead inside hating my life hating my job was so miserable I'd rather be poor doing something that I loved then rich doing something that I hated and so now I knew that about myself then building quest really taught me about technique fulfillment all the things that mattered meeting these former drug dealers and gangbangers and like really connecting with them as a human in Washington blossom gave me something that I never could have predicted and then I haven't talked about I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to you I Big Brother 4 18 half years oh wow and that ended up planting is he it didn't unfortunate was too young this is one of those moments where I was definitely not being wise and I was probably being a fool I was being changed by this relationship but I didn't really understand I was too young so I started Big Brother when I was 18 and I he was eight and I stayed with him until he was 16 it was a crazy experience he was very had massive developmental problems and was just a great kid man he was just a great kid and it started as an extra-credit assignment and it was only supposed to be eight weeks and at the six week mark they tell you to warn them I warned him that I was only coming for two more weeks and he went nuclear what's going on and I'm like is this because I said I'm only coming for two more weeks and he says yes and I'm like all right look as long as I live in Los Angeles I will help you with your homework but you have to stop freaking out all the time because he was really problematic I was like you have to do your homework when were together you have to do your homework is it a deal he says yes and that turns into the eight and a half year relationship and he end up finding out that he was being beaten by his adoptive mother and he gets taken out of the home I get made the Guardian I help him into foster care he is really really crazy but I was too young and stupid to really know what to do with that or what to make of it and unfortunately I will say I probably didn't I gave him somebody he knew loved him but I didn't change his life and that makes me sad mmm do you know what he's doing now I touched base them like through somebody else once briefly about four years ago and I've tried to get in touch with him again but he didn't have a phone and so yeah but it's the point of that story that that experience informed how you would then create bonds with these ex felons that came to work that was part of it it what that the reason that I was so open to hiring ex convicts was one I just have a belief that it doesn't matter what you've done it only matters who you want to be and the price you're willing to pay to become that person so it's like yeah yeah we all have pasts we've all either done stupid things or had stupid things happen to us and so being stuck there doesn't make any sense you get to choose what you do tomorrow so that just being in my ethos and then rashon who was the little kid he was a beautiful human and everybody thought he was a piece of [ __ ] and I just thought that sucks because he has misbehaved that is for sure but he's a beautiful human and they're just too overwhelmed to have the time to stop and see the person and so that sort of made me fall in love with him and I just thought this kid is so like amazing and I thought of him like my own little brother and I was just like dude I love this kid I won't get things for him and so it just showed me that like there or there's a whole swath of humanity that people just sort of brush aside and through him they spoke to me and so that made me want to create this opportunity for other people that I knew were in similar situations that it had rough upbringing x' of the most extraordinary kind and i knew some percentage of them not all but some percentage of them are going to be the most beautiful kind loving compassionate human beings ever who are capable of these amazing things but somebody has to introduce the mindset to them yeah and so that became my mission yeah it's interesting because the more predictable route for you once you exited quest would be to get an office in Hollywood hang a shingle out higher development exec and start reading scripts and getting involved as a producer right I mean nobody would have batted an eye lots of people do that that's kind of the tried-and-true route for the the newly-minted rich guy who wants to get into film yeah that is for sure and I think think about that or no no I'm not not even momentarily to me it was it was very clear that I want to stay and control the project and that if you so whenever you're doing something ask who's living my idealized life and looking at that it was very clear the person living my idealized life in terms of their ability to impact was Walt Disney and so okay I'm like I'm looking at this guy and I'm like what made him so different why is the Walt Disney Company still the most powerful studio and it became very clear to me that they had done something that had never been replicated and that I was the right person to replicate it again and that was they told one story from a thousand different angles and because of that the brand began became to mean something and keep in mind the world's changed so much social media all that so that's in the back of my mind as well I've I've already had luck at this social thing people are resonating with my message I'm able to touch people it's real what I'm putting out there if you follow the advice it will change your life for the better would you universally I believe that so I thought okay well I can have the discipline to only tell one kind of story so that the brand itself begins to mean something so that the ultimate marketing vehicle becomes to just leverage the brand to say this is an impact Theory thing and once you know oh wow this is an impact Theory thing then it's like you don't have to do all the legwork and the way I explain it to people is if I say I'm gonna go see a paramount movie or Warner Brothers movie you don't know anything about it but if I say I'm gonna go see a Disney movie you already know something so I have one belief and that is a the 25 point belief system that's it like that encompasses my whole ethos so I want to tell stories that empower people period simple-ass so my thing is if Disney can create the most magical place on earth could we create the most empowering place on earth I don't mean physically like a Disneyland but by telling stories both nonfiction through social media and fiction through comic books movies TV shows could I create an ethos that was as clear and easy to recognize as Walt Disney's magic that was about empowerment and so that's we're about so there will be some element of we're reading scripts and being producers and attaching things and just getting things produced but the the real thing is if Disney were founded today I think there'd be a huge social component and there there's it's not a mistake that Walt Disney at one point was considered the most famous man in the world and the US government literally would send them on goodwill missions to other countries so there's just something about when you have an ethos that people can believe in when there's a face to the company and it's not just a corporation there's someone to believe in there's someone to get value from even if you're not consuming their product like there's just people gravitate towards that now in the era of social media and I have the same feeling I have now that I had a quest which was it's the right message at the right time and so given where everything is going so we started two years ago the word impact now is like everywhere and it's because that was we could see like emotionally because that's where I was I wanted to make impact and I could see that that's where the world is going like people just want to make impact and Millennials feel that but gen Z is obsessed by it and so I think that there's just I'm on a collision course right now to make content that Gen Z is gonna be changed by and so that that is really what I'm about is is creating the content that is going to define culture and what is the long-term vision is Disney I mean that's the easiest way to sum it up the reality is it will take roughly 75 years to mimic a Disney I get that in terms today theme park I don't think so and this is where it gets into any 75 year time horizon is absolutely laughable so I used Disney as a shorthand things will change so much technologically in the next 75 years we may be uploading our consciousness like I get it it's gonna be so different it is quite literally impossible to predict where we're going so I don't even bother trying I just so people understand the sort of gravitas of what we're trying to build is to say we're building the next Disney so then you understand that I'm gonna be in comic books I'm gonna be in movies I'm gonna be in TV show I'm gonna be in distribution we're gonna be in video games we're gonna be in VR we're just not going to do it all at once we're gonna start with an area of core competency right now our area of core competency is the social stuff we make an awesome show I'll vouch for that beyond that we're completely untested we've put out a comic book we're getting the traction key thing and I think that it's amazing and that's why that we give it away because I just want people to read it I want people to see that the quality will speak for itself but we did get picked up we are gonna be in stores so starting in March of 2019 we'll be in your local comic book shop you can also order it online but that I think is gonna show people that we can really tell a story at the absolute highest level we're already working to get that translated into film and television so goal in 2019 is to get that place at a studio and being actively developed for production so I'm super excited about that with two other projects that are being developed but that just helps people understand like the the grand vision of where we want to be yeah that's a big vision I mean it's an audacious vision like where does this audacity come from man so everybody lean in if you're listening to this this is one of those things that audacity is is nothing don't don't worry about being audacious the reason people fear being audacious is they don't want to be me ten years from now when this all fails right they're thinking oh man what if this doesn't work this guy's gonna look like an [ __ ] and it's like yeah maybe other people will think that I'm a total dumbass it doesn't matter and why doesn't it matter because of techne because if I know how to build a house I can build a house so my thing is I'm not trying to posture or be cool I'm telling you I have a set of [ __ ] skills that set of skills lets me do things I'm just interested in doing those things so whether or not I hit my timelines does not matter I'm in the skill acquisition game skills let you do things I'm in the game of doing the things my skills allow me to do so I want to impact people's lives maybe I'm not able to pull it off at a film level I'll find another way or maybe it takes me a lot longer to pull it off okay fine as long as I love what I'm doing even when I'm failing there's nothing to lose no because you know on this idea of technique along the way you are fulfilled with every step on the journey right every time you upload a new you know conversation a new episode of your show it's a it's a it's a cool feeling to be able to put that out there and know that it is quote-unquote you know impacting people and it is it is and that's the thing you know this like you you say something into a microphone like right now the the feeling that I have well I know people are listening the feeling I have is it's just us in this room but one day somebody's gonna come up to you or me and say I heard that podcast you guys did and it really touched me and it changed me in this way that's all I need so I'm not I'm not afraid to be audacious cuz I know that you're never going to exceed what you're aiming at so you're only your hope is to hit some percentage of what you're aiming at so I might as well dream massive and one it excites me and then two I'm not afraid of the failure so once you have that like oh it's exciting for me to dream big and I'm hyper conscious of you break it down in small pieces like I'm gonna I'm not worried about building theme parks and all that stuff right now what I'm doing right now today is make a good comic put out a good interview show that's it that's what my life consists of stay in business be profitable like those are the things that I think about so I keep my you know my goals my immediate term goals very manageable but I make sure that they're feeding naturally into the grand vision but I don't get scared or lost and thinking oh my god I have to do all that nope right now today I need to read a script I need to make sure it's okay I need to authorize it to be drawn that's it that's today and as long as you're able to focus on that and get good at that and then just always push yourself to make your skillset better and better and better as long as it's leading towards that thing and you have clarity on where you're trying to go so they make sure the skills you're acquiring will actually lead you there you'd be fine yeah as you've all know a Harare famous says clarity is power indeed it is you you have you know a very distinctive profound degree of clarity about what you're doing and that drives this engine in large part and you also have very set kind of rules about how you regulate your time and live your life and these principles that you've you know divined about what drives success etc so I'm curious how or if the guests that you have had on your show have challenged that worldview how have you grown or changed as a result of doing the show that you do yeah I mean that that is one of the greatest gifts that doing a show like this can do I think you may be the one that said this like it gives you a chance to meet people that would otherwise not give you the time of day and I'm just like sure so true like people they just need that little excuse for like okay at very limited time why am i coming I don't know you so you know what I mean like why am I making it so once you have like oh I can help you reach an audience get your message out there give a thoughtful interview then it's like okay that brought us together now we may have real chemistry like I'll speak from my side I have real chemistry with you so you asked me to come out here I was like [ __ ] yes I was so excited to do it and hopefully that this will be one of many times we get to spend time together whether it's for sure on record or not so it's like that is super fun now because I'm a learner because that's my identity and because I really believe whatever skillset you have today it's already taking you as far as it's going to take you so unless this is where you want to be for the rest of your life you've got to be open to change you've got a hunger for it so hey I don't fear change I actually enjoy change because change has been the thing that's allowed me to improve my life consistently and so I'm always looking for ways in which I'm wrong because I don't value myself for being right and once people understand that that for me it wasn't in the beginning I was just telling myself to do that it wasn't at a limbic level now I've been telling myself to value myself only for my willingness to admit when I'm wrong and to learn that at a limbic level it's true so when somebody tells me I'm wrong I have this rush of like oh my god this is amazing because if they're right and I really am wrong and they're making me aware of this I'm gonna get more powerful so and that goes back to my real belief in skills having utility so it's like the ego doesn't have utility yeah maybe some but it's not when misplaced and and built around the wrong things can be super dangerous but because my ego is actually built around my willingness to stare at my inadequacies when somebody tells me that oh you're doing this bad wrong or whatever I don't spend time it does still sting I think that's just natural so it'll be like oh that sucks but or a reminder that this is going to give me something powerful and so I use it sort of as mental jujitsu and then I open myself up and I learned so what was Pacific so David Goggin so like I said the thing I've struggled with in my life is emotional weakness so being around people that are very very tough inspires me to rise to that challenge so really understanding his notion of like what it took him to break the world record for pull-ups and how many times he had to fail to go through it what he had to do to his mind to calais his mind the whole notion of like getting so tough things get easier over time because just like you'll callus your hands your collar mind that's been tremendously impactful give you as an example like everything that people know you for comes after this extraordinary battle with alcoholism which is like so red like you're so much more interesting to me because you went through that so you did they're like sage like quality which by the way you feel when you're near you and I know a lot of your guests probably never going to actually be in your vibe and like it's rad and there's it's so cool because it was born of somebody who had to go through like they went through the hero's journey and they've come back to teach right and so that makes that really profound so when I think about okay really having to go through something and wanting to be wise because I haven't had to go through that particular thing I can draw on your wisdom of having the tenacity to rebuild to not be afraid to rebuild to not be afraid to make amends to look at what you did and maybe most importantly to reach back to help others and that becomes a thing that really solidifies people in their journey so it's like all of that stuff and just like what you've done physically man it is crazy to me ahold you're like it seems impossible well I appreciate that thank you but what I what I what I think is interesting about that is in and we talked about this when I was on your show that for me pain has always been a great teacher it's it's what reminds me of the mistakes that I've made it's the thing that gets me to wake up and actually modify my behavior and I always couch out by saying that you know you don't have to be in pain to change the opportunity to change is always within your grasp but it is the rare individual who can grab onto that without having to suffer some kind of consequence that drives that decision change right and I look at you and I see somebody who whose trajectory skyward is not as linear as perhaps an Internet narrative might couch.you you've had your ups and your downs and you've battled with you know everything from self-confidence to depression and all kinds of things in there but you haven't had like some big bottom reckoning moment and I think it's that commitment to being a learner that's allowed you to short-circuit that and grab onto these lifelines as you see yourself moving in perhaps a negative trajectory to course-correct before having to pay that cost you know and that has you know created this kind of accelerated trajectory to bring you to where you are yeah it's funny I was thinking about this today people don't have enough rules in their life for themselves so for instance I get out of bed in ten minutes less doesn't matter and I don't want to that's why I have to rule because I went callous your mind literally I went through a period where I would lay in bed for three to four hours a wash and shame and my inability to get out of bed and it just embarrassed me and so I felt badly about myself so I wanted to make a change so I knew that I needed a bright line so bright line ten minutes or less you get out of bed as soon as you realize you're awake that's it so and the rule is more specific it's like I have to have had at least five hours of sleep but once you put the rule in place then you just live by and that's how you earn credibility like right now I don't feel the way telling you that that I want to feel this is a good moment he's on my team I'm pointing him this is a good moment so I'm saying this and I don't feel good about saying it why because today I don't know what happened I got out of bed in 11 minutes and I was so literally timet oh yeah waking up to actually physically getting out of the bed rekt my feet must be on the floor and I'm unless you're channeling up before six over into the 11th minute and today I don't know what happened I I was I was aware of the time I knew I needed to get up and for whatever reason one of the minutes just went faster than I thought when I look back I was like damn it and so I'm surprised you had made it here today then right so now this comes into like knowing how to handle something like that like if you totally fall apart because you don't live up 20 rules you're violating another one of my rules which is don't do anything that doesn't move you towards your goals so it's like yes I've I it is a part of my identity to confess this so because I'm talking about it I want to say it now to an audience it's the only thing that will allow me to reset and be able to feel good about it against because I don't lie when I miss it I own it well look if your biggest problem is it took you 11 minutes to get right yes very truly but my thing is people have the rules and so I have other rules for instance I wear a size 32 pad there's just that's it and so no matter what your waist is no no I won't let my waist get out of line with that so I used the pants as a way to guide now I would go down if I got so lean that I was you know 31 that's not a problem but I'm not gonna allow myself to go up and it's super tempting like especially around Christmas I don't try to hold ABS through the winter so during Christmas like right now I do not have abs so and I'm totally fine with that I switch a different part of my mentality I during the holidays my wife and I definitely celebrate with food and it's amazing and I love it the most so but if that celebration took me up to like 32 s don't fit anymore I gotta cut back because I have a rule so it's like that's how I keep myself in a lane I keep myself from getting into trouble I know the things that I accept for myself when I don't accept myself and it's all like stated it's very clear so is somebody who is in this world of self empowerment and and you know trying to address this poverty of mindset to use your phraseology what are the challenges that you have like where where is it where are your blind spots if we're in this zone of vulnerability and confession like what do you still need to work on um I think that like really doing things that scare me is something I believe in and don't want to do so for instance I got hired to speak at a freediving conference now I told my team that I would do anything within my code of ethics to help build the company so when I got the offer to do the free diving and he wanted me to free dive rich when I say my greatest fear in this world is open water I don't fear anything I can help me with that that's interesting and maybe you're the exact person to help me with it but I that is a gripping fear for me and so when the offer came in I said yes I have to do it and I didn't want to do it and I was [ __ ] dreading it and the guy ended up not getting enough people to sign up for it and I was happy about that all right and so he cancelled it and I was so ecstatic and I was like yeah this is my problem I was glad I got cancelled I should be traumatized because it was no here's what you should do here's what gave David Goggins never tell you what you should do is still go to whatever that location is and get a free driving instructor and follow through on that correct and I'm not going to do and that but this is this is a question you ask right so I don't value that in myself that that I think what you just said would be the best thing for me in terms of continuing to earn credibility with myself and I have no intention of doing it right and I excused it away because it doesn't lead me towards my bigger goal of building the company it would be time away that I'm not getting revenue that I can give back to the company so it's like I can they are excuses though the reality is I'm not doing that because I'm scared and I don't want to have to face up here so I have fears that I allowed to stay in my life that I don't respect that about myself mm-hmm I want to talk about your marriage a little bit yeah you have an amazing relationship with your wife and I'm curious as to how you make it work as life partners and as business partners because this is something that's personally you know interesting to me as somebody who does the same so part of it is that we're building the same company because it did not work like that when I hated my job she wasn't working at all she was a stay-at-home wife at the time and I'm working I hate my job I don't want to come home and talk about it I'm working around the clock around the clock and so I just wasn't spending time with her so it was a nightmare and so finally at 6:00 nap years she pulls me aside and says this is now damaging our marriage now going back to like your rules and all that it my highest value is my marriage that's the thing I value over the wealth over ambition everything so if ever I was doing something that's damaging my marriage I'm gonna correct course and so that was part of why I went in and quit and I started taking time off so you got married young right I did I did yeah I got married at 26 and so realizing that okay I'm now damaging the marriage and that the marriage is my highest priority then it's very clear I need to change something so one that I have that in the right order in my life so that when my wife says hey you need to make a change I actually make it and I'm not conflicted about it's very easy then my wife is very good at giving me all the rope in the world to be ambitious to pursue those things that matter to me so much but that she speaks up when it gets to the point where she is actually having a hard time now and she is very good at that on two levels one not saying it too soon and to actually protecting the marriage because I'm bad at that so I get so focused on what I'm doing and I'm so in love with trying to solve that puzzle and push it forward and all that that I would push things too far for sure and so it's an area where I always tell people though the one group that I think there is a tool that is underutilized by this community and that is an erect six and I totally get it it is truly a battle you're fighting for your life I'm not making light of this at all I just know about myself that that the intoxication of the willpower to not eat is something I feel very strongly it's how I ended up losing we ended up losing 60 pounds and eating really lean and the way that I did it was essentially by starving myself over extraordinarily long periods of time and I felt so good about myself and being able to do it I thought ah this is how people get themselves in trouble there's actually a positive side to this and the sense of control and power and all that is very self affirming and I thought okay well if I know that about myself and know that I have anorexic tendencies then I'm just gonna tell my wife you're in complete control of this the second you tell me that I'm acting in any way shape or form in a way that's edging up towards illness I will stop not because I want to but because I trust you and I'm empowering you with something I don't think I can trust myself on and so she did then so when I got to that point she said okay it's now you're starting to worry me I think they were edging up on it and I changed instantly not because I had reached my goals or because I thought she was right because in a moment of emotional sobriety I empowered her to know that I can't trust myself so getting into that space where you go I know this is an area that I have a blind spot I'm not the right person to make this decision even though it's actually about myself I'm going to empower somebody that I'd love and trust and then I'm actually going to follow through with that and so that that's a tool that serves our marriage very well I know I can trust her to be the guardian of the relationship in terms of that are we spending enough time on it and then it's you know just constantly looking for ways to better communicate defining terms there's a whole host of very specific tools that we use and then we both have growth mindset so we want to get better mm-hmm yeah but you're on the same mission I think is that's my fundamental aspect of that and you know people ask me all the time like how do you work with your wife how do you make it work and it's a gift you know it's amazing to have a collaborative partner that's also your life partner it's also fraught with minefields you know you have to be more consciously aware of how you're navigating your relationship and also bifurcating the professional aspect of what you're doing from the personal because as you know what you do now doesn't feel like work even though it is work and it's very easy without erecting healthy boundaries and being consciously mindful of the relationship that all the conversations can suddenly become about what you're doing the the projects that you're working on and the you know the professional aspect of what you're doing and you have to really carve out that time to put that aside and focus on the relationship itself so true yeah but she gives you that hard feedback she she's very good about that she is equally excited about her own growth as an entrepreneur so it is very exciting for us but like you said we are very careful to carve out the time to just be husband and wife to play to do things that are fun to make sure that we're having sex that that's huge and I think that oftentimes people let bed death creep into their life and and keeping that passion and that physical connection has been a huge win for us and is something that look it doesn't take a lot of effort to want to do that but to make sure that we're cognizant of that that we have it's not something that we state but we're terrified of becoming roommates and so we're very conscious to keep that physical spark the passion very much alive exciting not routine so that that served us well yeah yeah I like to think of kind of what imperils humanity right now can be boiled down to well many things but essentially a crisis of consciousness so many people are living their lives reactively and I don't mean to be flippant about that you know life is hard and people are just trying to you know earn a living and put food on the table and get through the day in your experience with all the you know business experience that you've had the books you've read the people that you've spent time with what do you think is the biggest impediment to people waking up out of this matrix-like existence that's so easy for us to fall prey to so I've had a realization recently that I'm not an all lanes driver there are certain things I've spent so much time thinking about that I'm very good at answering questions and there are certain things that I'm not so I'll give you an answer that question from my very specific lens which is all about the person and so I think that if the things in the world that scare me the divisive nough scares me and when I think about what is the individuals creation of that divisive is one a desire to belong to a group intensely a fear of being ridiculed or emotionally ostracized and once we know that we have this like sucking need to belong to be respected to be liked you can really begin to decide what are the things that you want to be liked for respected for and when those are things that you respect yourself for then all of a sudden it becomes very easy to do two things to build something that is born of connection community kindness not that you're not self selfish I'm very selfish it just so happens that the more selfish I am the more I like to connect and help other people I am very much doing it for me but it manifests in a way that is humanity neutral worst case and I think humanity plus ultimately so that that starts with me having a growth mindset so that you you want to see how you're wrong that you can have these really ferocious ideas but hold them loosely because the moment that your identity is wrapped up in your ideas you are in real trouble man your identity should be wrapped up in your outcome what outcome do you want and are you actually getting that outcome and then as long as you're not a sociopath with an ugly outcome like people that get into identity politics and things like that I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and say no for real the the world they imagine is a beautiful world for the people that they love and care about okay fair enough so I'll just give them that they're trying to do something positive but when you look at the outcome in terms of how it affects everyone it starts to break down pretty fast like that's where it really starts to worry me so that to me says that your identity is based on something that isn't necessarily anti fragile it's probably based on something pretty fragile so to use in the seem to Lebs term something that is fragile that's easy to understand something that is anti fragile isn't something that's strong or resilient those are still defined by their breaking point it's just that their breaking point is far away but ultimately even something that's strong it's strong because you think wow it can take a lot before it breaks something that's anti fragile on the other hand actually grows stronger the more that it's attacked so and that doesn't mean you entrench in a position that clearly everybody is saying like this is crazy the only anti fragile position I can think of is to be that of the learner that is truly anti fragile so for instance if you come at me and say that I'm stupid be like amazing in what way and the reason that I say amazing is because I I know that skills make me more powerful so you've just said that I have a blind spot which means that I'm less powerful than I could be and I'll define powers I think it weird some people out to me powerful just means you can close your eyes imagine a world a better world than the one that we have today you can then open your eyes and actually create that world so that's the kind of power that I'm trying to amass in my life the ability to impact people at scale in a positive way so if you're telling me that I'm less powerful than I could be amazing I want to know in what way because once I'm aware of it then I can address it cuz I know about myself that I'm willing to accept that I'm inadequate because I know that it's a temporary state I'm not good at it yet if I decide that it really does match with my goals and what I want to do I can get good at it so it's not ego damaging for you to tell me that I've you know I'm not doing something in a way that I could be could be better cool tell me how when people don't want to hear that it's like oh it's they're in a very brittle place they're being backed into a corner and people lash out and they're backed into a corner so at an individual level I would say to everybody if you feel that your blood boiling when somebody challenges you if you feel like a caged animal or like you're being backed into a corner I promise you 100% it is not the truth of the world it is that you have a fragile something in fragile ego a fragile belief system something in there can break and because it can break you're trying to protect it and the more you try to protect it the more hardened and potentially violent vicious cruel whatever that you may become so when it isn't that and you're not afraid of that thing breaking because you want to take information in you want to assess it doesn't mean you're going to agree you may take that criticism ago I actually don't think that's accurate but I'm really grateful that you gave me that piece of information and look intention matters you can tell when someone's just trying to be a dick so it's like you've got to be cognizant enough of that but when you get to that point where you're you're leading with everything is my fault including the way this person's coming at me I've done something to make them want to come at me too hard or whatever so at the individual level I think that that ant the fragility versus antifragility is is where everyone should start well to be anti fragile you have to feel safe right so somebody's coming at you and they have a criticism or a critique and you feel yourself were coiling or having some kind of fear response chances are that there's some truth to it because if somebody lodges some completely outlandish accusation at you you can laugh it off right so there's a kernel of reality there that you're being forced to confront and on some level that challenges you know your membership in your tribe somehow you feel unsafe in being open to looking at that right so you have to feel secure in your self esteem or in your position in life on some level in order to receive that in an objective way and your self esteem has to be built on something that they can't attack that's the problem so if your self-esteem is I'm a good tribe a then this as soon as I say well tribe a sucks like you're in real trouble because your whole esteem is built around your identity to that group all the things that make you good are based on that so for instance in gang culture there's this notion of putting work in on the street and could be selling drugs could be murder could be whatever so if I now come and say well your gang sucks there's no way you're gonna take that so you may have killed for that gang or done you know things that put you a tremendous risk or you know you've been defending your brothers this whole time so you cannot take on board that that group isn't worthy right just amazing so it becomes this real emotional conflict so my thing is the the going back to what is anti fragile and you want to talk about something I'm open-minded to being wrong about I just keep coming back to being the learner right so your identity isn't group a politic this politic that tribe this tribe that it is I'm a learner first and foremost I'm somebody that wants to bring value to myself into the world first and foremost so it's like once you get to that then as people are assaulting you chances of them triggering a self-esteem like in like if somebody wanted to hurt my self-esteem they would need to call me out on are you really spending time learning or have you really improved I didn't give the same that you were two years ago like whoa like if I really like you said felt that that might be true then I would really that would call some [ __ ] into question for me because that's my identity right so if somebody came to you and said actually you're not a learner yeah and so that's one of those for me where my belief is now that's so absurdist that I would brush it off but if they were able to like compel me to see it the funny thing is being a learner than kicks in again and I'm like [ __ ] if they're really right then here's my chance to finally actually be a learner but so that's why I think that one's anti fragile but that's where it's like you can get yourself into trouble if they're hitting on the very thing that your identity and self-esteem are tied to right well these things can be at odds with each other if that ethos of being a learner starts to conflict with your identity within a certain tribe right so which is going to supersede the other and people have to make those decisions that's like I am ultra ambitious and I told my wife the only thing you can never ask me to give up his ambition and at the same time my marriage is my highest priority it's my highest value so I'm constantly balancing the is she asked me to give up my ambition or she just reminding me that we've hit a moment where I need to put it first and I need to stop working for a day or two days whatever and really just give her my undivided attention and as long as it doesn't feel like she's actually asking me to get rid of my ambition then it's like yeah of course because that that is what I want for myself it is the thing that's brought me the most value in my life is my marriage for sure what does that ambition come from that I don't know it's the one thing I wonder about in terms of like okay we're not blank slates was I just given ambition like at a neurological level maybe certainly possible I've made it bigger and more all-consuming throughout my life that is for sure I have just enough stubbornness in me that growing up when people told me I couldn't do something part of my like every time someone told me I couldn't do it I would say well I'm gonna do it bigger you you you can't even do this and let alone that then I'm gonna do this and you know we ultimately get to I'm building the nice Disney so it's like there's externally driven then some of it for sure but some of it is everything in my life is driven by how something makes me feel and I really believe all you have in this world is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself so in that dark quiet night when you're all alone do you feel good or not and so I steer by that and when I start losing sleep because something is stressing me out or I think I handled something poorly I have to correct that and what are the tactics so part of this is you have a belief system through which everything is filtered so my thing is okay belief system I can get good at anything I set my mind to belief system number two having your growth mindset is the absolute ideal so that means that just because I'm not good at something now doesn't mean I can't become good at it that I should only value myself with being a learner I shouldn't worry about being smart right good talented nothing just the willingness to stare naked Liat my inadequacies so if I've done something and it's making me feel badly about myself I start running through those filters also does this beating myself up is it moving me towards my goal or away from it now a little bit of beating yourself up actually probably does move you towards your goal because it kicks you in the ass gets you moving taking it seriously you're really thinking about it but then too much of it begins to erode yourself and so I have to balance like am I just beating myself up and now I've taken it too far and I'm losing sleep over something I just need to let go and focus on getting better instead of punishing myself like just get better at it so those those are the tactics that I use the word yet is a huge tactic for me Tom you suck oh I'm not good at that yet okay cool thank you got it I can get good at that and and just keep coming back to those very simple basic building blocks of my belief system what I value where my priorities lie well my goal is having total clarity am I actually moving towards it and then just really holding yourself accountable to that without damaging your self-esteem and how do you apply those tactics day to day like what is the actual process is it journaling is it meditation is well give you the one with well so I do meditate not every day but I try that makes it sound like I can't do it if I want to meditation falls in a certain order in my priority list and there are days where because sleep in terms of time allocation is my number one priority so I get as much sleep as I need I haven't used an alarm with any regularity in 15 years maybe a little more so that for me is number one so now if I sleep longer than I expected less I have an early morning meeting like today so I slept longer than I expected and I had an early morning meeting so now it's like oh I've got a truncate working out to me is more important than meditating so working out happens first then if I have time if I've worked out and have time I'll meditate so my order goes working out learning meditating so depending on what the order is and the order might flip if I'm like really in a stressful period in my life or something like that then I may make meditating the priority because I'm not feeling good so it's you got to have some you know flexibility but because I know the order that they go and like today I worked out and I wasn't able to learn or met I did a little bit of learning as I do in transitional moments but I didn't get it like sit down and really like clock some time and what is the learning look like almost reading in podcast but by reading shout-out to audible I mean listening but yeah I do almost exclusively all of my reading is audible you can speed it up to 3.5 X now that's so sexy I can't even tell you like I had lighted that I'd have to listen to it again really no you can I don't know that I could ridicu work your way yeah for sure and what is the meditation process specifically look like dead simple so I use a what I call just breathe so it was born of Mark Divine's box breathing at least he was the one that introduced it to me so he preaches do it for equal parts so you've got the inhale is the exact same length as the inhale hold exact same length is the exhale exact same length is the exhale hold and I'm doing that made me feel out of breath and just felt weird so what I started doing was I'm going to maximize the pleasure in each part of the breast cycle so for me it happens to be a sort of medium inhale a very short inhale hold a rapid exhale I just let the air out and then a very prolonged exhale home and that rhythm feels awesome and I do that for 10 or 15 minutes and I can get into an alpha wave stay to feel calm creative it just feels awesome that that's one of those things that people that haven't tried meditation or tried it but never got to the part where it feels awesome my heart breaks for them it is a tool I rejected for so many years because it felt will see to me and remember I'm the guy that had to learn to toughen up so I feared that that was like backwards momentum and so finally one marked divine looked at me and was basically like stop being an idiot and try this and he's like this tough ass Navy SEAL yeah I thought I'm gonna try and then it changed my life it's interesting that it took you that long given your interest in neuroplasticity and brain development and being open-minded and all that yeah I was as a learner I was more there's two ways about it right do you have a council of mentors like who do you look to for advice and guidance other than your wife it's really books man books and podcasts so you know like I have the very good fortune of bringing on essentially a mentor every week to come in and people think of it as the hour that I spend with them recording it's really the 12 hours I spend researching them that's where it's like 12 hours in rich roles world and then capping that with you know an hour hour and a half where we just get a talk get to know each other like that's on a whole nother planet so that that's really my mentorship these days you have a very interesting interest in longevity yes can you talk about that a little yeah I want to live forever I'm doing my best to plan to live forever but here's I find this very interesting and I'm way interested in the potential blind spot that I'm creating around how I should be acting today given that as of right now I am going to die so I'm very aware of that it does not cause me emotional distress to think that I'm dying so it's not I don't spend a lot of time struggling with it there are two types of people there's move away and there's move towards I'm not moving away from death I'm moving towards living forever so I don't have a fear of dying I think that when I'm dead I'm dead and that's it I don't think there's anything after that I think it is a light that has been turned off so now it's no spiritual perspective on you at all if that's how you define spiritual zero and I personally think that's amazing so I I think that the fact that life one of my favorite quotes came from Phil Jackson sounds very Buddhist to me things come together things fall apart now she's always so much right now my atoms are together one day they will fall apart and cool I dig that about life there's there's a sense of renewal that comes with that and that's one thing I struggle with we all start living forever what happens to ideas so because I think they will stagnate I don't think most people push themselves so I think there are there are problems with that but because I love life because I believe in a near infinite ability to change and grow and adapt and because I'm so excited about hard work and struggle and building and creating and connecting it's just it's just rad like I can't imagine ever unless my life became just pain then yeah I'd be like no this doesn't make sense like tap out well the idea of living forever as a pure thought experiment is fascinating because you would have to believe or imagine that a huge percentage of the population should this become an event in eventualities would suddenly be struck incredibly risk-averse because the cost of taking a risk is so high if you could perchance live forever why would you skydive why would you do any of these things that would put that prospect in peril and I think it would create mass paralysis for a lot of people so this is really fascinating and I think that would be true for the next 50 years and then after that will get to the point where you can upload your consciousness or you can and let's say you don't bind to 50 years 100 years a thousand years it will happen so yes we may go through a period of paralysis and and I think that is utterly fascinating I would be one of the paralyzed people every forever I don't want to go outside so until life became so mundane and it's it's intolerable right the idea that the prospect that you would live forever I mean we can't even I don't think our brains are plastic enough yeah to really feel well so now you comprehend really fascinating [ __ ] about like how much so when I think about living forever immediately assume I mean as a cyborg because I really believe that we're gonna begin augmenting our brains either just by uploading our consciousness or by augmenting our Wetworks to the point where we have brain computer interfaces Elon Musk says in the next God like six months he plans to make an announcement that he thinks is gonna shock people about the state of computer brain interfaces so it's it's not here today by any stretch of the imagination but it's not far away so it's it's certainly coming its measured in decades not you know hundreds of years so that's super trippy and super interesting to me and how much of these things can we mess with so like for instance you live forever but you're not afraid to take some amount of calculated risk and then we have to ask the question how much of the emotion that causes people to do such dumb and hurtful stuff do we want to get rid of any of it maybe none of it maybe we accept that you're gonna get mass shootings because some people go to such a dark place and that it's better off to have the mass shootings as tragic and horrifying as they are or no maybe we should get rid of those entirely and not tolerate that I don't know man I am not the person to answer those questions I just want to be there for the debate and this is what I find so interesting it never occurred to me until I was on Joe Rogan it never occurred to me that some people don't want to live through the apocalypse I always thought everybody wants to be the person on the other end and that was the first person that was like no no I don't want to be I don't want to make it through I was like wow that that mindset just never occurred to me that's interesting well I think the thing that is most appealing about that if I entertain that concept which I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the thing that appeals to me is the I mean it's I'm somebody who time is my most precious resource I'm always trying to get more time it's the one thing that I can't renew right and there just isn't enough time to do all the things I want to do what would life look like if suddenly time was the most available resource that one has there's a book that covers this it is amazing have you read Einstein's dreams no oh you'll love it you will love it dude I'm telling you so this whole book deals with like time just like it's it's a totally fiction book that just does a whole bunch of thought experiments in narrative form about different aspects of time and one of them is where everyone lives forever and the world bifurcates into two kinds of people I read this when I was like somewhere between 12 and 14 it left such a lasting impression on me it is why I'm obsessed with living forever so I read this story and he says the world bifurcates in these two kinds of people type a they do nothing because there's always time to do it tomorrow time is so infinite that they they never do anything and then type B does everything because they know there's time to get truly great at everything they've ever loved and I was like that's me that's my camp there's so many things in this world that I am absolutely in love with passionate about let alone just interested in but I don't have the time and so my life is a constant triage of having to say because they say 80% of business is knowing what not to do it's like I don't just want to build the next Disney dude there's so many more things that I find so interesting I want to travel to Mars but I'm never gonna do it because it's it takes me away from the one thing I've had to say this is my mission in life my mission in life is to influence culture to give everyone an empowering mindset what they do with the empowering mindset but it's driven by a sense of urgency if you remove that sense of urgency I don't know that you can really anticipate the downstream impact on your internal Drive absolutely true I'm willing to accept I'm completely ignorant to that but from my perspective today let me tell you how it feels these are words super intentionally so just doing the thought experiment for me and I I've this is a little cheeky to put it in this way but I've lived through the moment where I know what I would do when I have money and I have to give it up to do something and I choose the go do something that makes me feel alive I've had the moment where I've had all the money in the world and I know what I do do I retire and the answer is no I don't I keep going as if I had urgency for what though you could say oh to have the impact to leave your legacy but I don't think legacy at all in the slightest if you told me Tom you could spend the next 40 years building the sink but no one will ever know who you are I'd be like fine does it does the impact actually happen and carry on yes perfect it is that experiment of thinking like whoa we can actually make the world better and that people go on to do amazing things the only thing that matters to me is what I think about it it doesn't matter what other people think about me that's irrelevant I can't control it's gonna change throughout my life it just too many people have said if you stay in the game long enough you will see yourself become the villain so I know like right now people come up to me crying and thanking me for their help I'm one sentence away from saying something that really upsets people and then people come in are like [ __ ] you I hope you burn so it's like I get it I know how that plays out so I don't care about that it's beautiful when it's positive and I've helped somebody but I'm only worried about what I think about myself so I know about myself the thing that I'm moving towards is really thinking that I'm making impact and while it's possible that on a long enough time line I will stop being neurochemical II rewarded for that and not care anymore and dust that might slow down and not want to do anything but nothing in my 42 years of experience lead me to believe that that is true about me so I am there's nothing there's no shortage of things I'm so excited about that the thing that scares me I have two fears my wife dying because we have this beautiful shared experience and I don't want I don't want to try to recreate that and it can only be recreated in real time so it would take me 18 years to get back what I have with her and then the other thing is brain damage because if I can't process data the way that I process data now I worry it won't be as fun so like the struggle of everything the trying that's I value myself for that and that's what I really love and then just innately and I don't know that I did anything to earn this I love change so where other people are freaked out by change dude I welcome change aggressively the bigger the shake-up the better so well that fear of brain damage might have something to do with your aversion of freediving oh that is well the free diving is thalassemia phobia that was a phobia this others Alice Authority R of the the DIA so it is a completely irrational fear of being consumed by sharks or other gigantic creatures of the deep there is something that really freaks me out about how deep and dark it is below you and this may be as simple as I watch jaws and adjustment scared me that much right but dude you know that was something in the air you know how about where it's clear like in the Caribbean or Lalo I swim out to where I could get back within six seconds of where I can put my feet on the ground that's it that's it wow what a success mean to you how do you define that technique 1000% that's it that is all that matters so building a set of skills that was insanely hard to do but it meant something to you to build it that gave you the ability to do something you care deeply about that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people that feeling which will survive through moments of suffering hardship loss that is all that matters that that's when you feel good about yourself when you by yourself conversely how do you think about failure then I'm not trying for me like to not have the audacious goal to not really give it a real shot and I know I'm constantly gut checking myself for am I playing at building the next Disney or am I actually building the next Disney that means something to me so if I get to the end of this in the world is clapping for me and they're like oh my god you're so amazing and look how far you went but I know that I was only playing at trying to get there and then I kept dialing it back because I was getting too scared that that would be failure for me yeah and what about the difference between inspiration or motivation and real impact I love inspiration motivation but it is the neurological equivalent of candy it's rad it has its place but everyone because those just happen to be fleeting neurological States yeah you you just have to find something that's way more grounded you need a mission you need a grand why you need to know what it is and this is not a discovery it's a thing you decide I decided now because I tell it as a story people think oh it was unavoidable he meets this kid rashon and that coupled with all the people that he worked with a quest it's sort of inevitable that he decides that he's going to build impact theory and try to change culture to give everyone an empowering mindset yeah well literally a year before I decided to found impact Theory my mission in life was to end metabolic disease so it's like you decide and then you point yourself at something nothing is ever going to feel right like this is what I was put on earth to do it won't feel that way until about a year or two years after you've been saying that's what you're gonna do that that's where you're committed to and actually acting in accordance with that and then you'll be like yeah this actually is my mission so people just have to decide and start going - right so when someone comes to you and says oh my god look what you build it's so inspiring but I don't know what my purpose is I don't know what makes me passionate I'm not sure which direction to take like what is the counsel I'm sure you filled this question all the time like what is your counsel - that info first and foremost go play go discover like wander around go to a different country like encounter enough stuff that you see what actually gives you that spark of interest don't expect a spark of passion doesn't happen like that you're gonna be interested by something and that's something will be maybe a little more interesting than the next thing that thing now go down the process of really engaging with it they go full in so if you were traveling around India and you went and taught a you know a week-long math class and you were like I've never been this fulfilled in my life move to India and teaching the slums for a year and even that were how about just when you go back home maybe you know start tutoring kit like well you don't have to revolutionize your life overnight but if you start bringing greater expression to that impulse it will lead you in a trajectory that you can't foresee in that moment super powerful answer so I'm a thousand percent with that engaging with it whatever face that takes but really spending time is that really doing it then if it turns into a full-blown fascination we like I really dig this then we're gonna go down the process of gaining mastery only in the process of gaining mastery will you find passion so to me passion comes out of skylake love I don't believe that love it needs a different word unrequited love is a very different neurological state than reciprocal love so if you have unrequited love to me that's something you really like I love singing but I'm [ __ ] at it so I have unrequited love I love singing the singing does not love me back now I could go down the process of gaining mastery and then I may find that I've a real passion for it because part of its going to become oh I'm gaining the skill and this skill of singing allows me to have an emotional impact not only on myself but on other peope I can make them feel good I can change their mood I can tell a story whatever it is that you want to do with the music but when you're able to do with that and you're truly good at it and it has the outcome that you desire then it can become a passion but to get a passion you've got to fight through just ridiculous amounts of boredom fatigue everything to truly become good enough at it that it's a skill that has utility yeah people don't like that I mean two observations the first is people want the fast track superhighway to being where somebody like you is they don't see all the toil and the obstacles etc that got you to this place and I think secondary to that or perhaps the primary thing really is commitment to self understanding and self-knowledge such that your your level of awareness is adequately tuned so that when that impulse arises you can recognize it but if you're disconnected from your yourself from your this meatsuit that we're walking around in because you're eating [ __ ] food and you're watching too much television and you're just reacting to your your environment 24/7 then when that moment arises you're unlikely to recognize it so there is a there's an actualization process of commitment to self I think that is required and it's it's a it's an ephemeral concept but that I think is the key to being able to to act on that impulse when the moment occurs for sure yeah because otherwise I think we're all we are we're all visited by these moments so the difference is who is paying attention do you have like the Silver Bullet for self awareness I have a mechanism but I'm not sure that it's very good I don't have a silver bullet I think it's a long slog you know I think it's a daily it's a daily process and commitment to self connection and and that's gonna look different for for all different kinds of people it can be yoga it can be meditation it can be exercise it can be reading it can be journal can be any number of things but I think carving out that time in that space to focus inward in whatever way that resonates with you I think it's crucial to on that journey of self-discovery and self-actualization yeah would you agree I would and and as you were talking I was like god this is a book with writing and it's a book worth writing one because I get asked about it all the time - because you're right and it is so fundamental and three because I don't have the easy answer I'm not even sure how I did it so it's like if somebody gave you an easy answer I wouldn't trust that answer yeah either but I want that easy answer yeah of course we all do right but you're absolutely right you know but it would be fun to do that work of figuring out what did I do because I was me particulars very unselfish of college and it had its advantages for sure because there were like I had I was saying her that I didn't feel bullied growing up but there was one kid who came up to me after high school and apologized for bullying me and I was like bro I so like unselfie were making fun of me it just didn't make my radar I had a couple people I had those conversations as well which is nice which side were you on I was on that I was the bullied yeah but I've had people atone for that with me which essentially yeah I wish that I had been like more aware of it I was like wow how oblivious was I so that was pretty crazy yeah and are you gonna get back up and do more standup I don't think so I know it's not a driver for me so the thing is it it never came from a place of like oh I have some sucking wound that can only be saved by you know getting that adulation from people I loved it it was fun it was it was something I got very good at and I enjoyed making people laugh and but I the the truth of the matter is I'm living room funny I'm not staged funny and to get staged funny I'd really have to put work into it so when like it to me it's far more interesting and the funny thing is now so many years of like letting that so atrophy I it's not like a go-to thing for me I don't have the jokes like they're plus I only ever knew how to be self-deprecating so my funny came from when I was just a story teller so I wasn't like like Mitch Hedberg told jokes I don't have jokes so it was just like let me tell you about my first prostate exam that was one of my best bits [ __ ] hilarious but that was it's just a story well that's incompatible with how you live your life now somebody who's very intent about the language that you use about yourself right very very very very yeah I've noticed you catching yourself a couple times even today throughout this conversation where there's a bit of negative self-talk creeping up and then you course-correct it yes so what is that relationship between language and manifestation I think it's I think it's massive I don't think that thinking something or saying something makes it true but I think that thinking something and saying something makes you believe it and the things you believe you will unintentionally guide yourself towards I think your belief about yourself and what you're capable of influences your accomplishments more than you can imagine just because you don't put in the extra mile of effort or whatever that it was going to take because you don't believe that you can or you don't even allow yourself to dream it and if you don't dream it you're never going to come up with a plan so it is wildly influential in terms of what happens just not in a mystical way in a very like tactical you just end up either doing or not doing the things you should yeah I mean if anybody doubts that I challenge you to take a week and write down all of your internal self-talk every thought that you have as it occurs and most people would be shocked at the internal dialog that we all have with ourselves I had to do so much work and it's still such a challenge to overcome a lot of that negative speak that goes on in my head can we dig into something fascinating yeah because I have the luxury of seeing you from the outside and not the inside that's so weird to me now I get it I believe you because I'm exactly the same so I have all this negative self-talk and it's like god what do I have to do and accomplish for that voice to fall silent and the answer is it will never fall silent I'm not even sure I wanted to but looking our program a thousand percent it's so interesting to me looking at you from the outside being around you makes me feel some kind of way and that some kind of way is more at ease spiritual is the wrong word but that's like the vibe like there's just like depth that like sort of hums off of you like somebody who's knows something that you want and it's it's people say that to me and I know there was some feedback from me doing your show on that level like oh he's so chill but I that's not how I feel that's the fascinating part and that's what the reason that I really stopped to put a finger on this is I want people to understand that you feel like rich but you may look like rich to other people where people are like whoa like you've really got stuff together and once you can come to terms with oh this is the nature of being a human the nature of being a human is the brain developed on mechanism over millions of years of evolution to pitch up this negative stuff and you don't have to believe it it is merely meant to keep you safe so you may hear it as one of the voices but when it's the only voice you're inherently in trouble and so people think they've done something wrong that they are a bad person because they have this negative voice that's beating the [ __ ] out of them but the reality is that voice is is a mechanism it's like being mad that you have a second arm it's like learn how to use it well it requires you to distinguish and I don't know how you feel about this with your perspective on spirituality but I look at it like the brain is bifurcated between the thinking brain and your higher consciousness or higher state of thinking your unconscious mind and this you know thinking mind can run rampant and run all of these narratives and we think we don't have control over that or we identify that with our higher consciousness and understanding that these are separate and distinct from each other and also understanding that you actually can control that thinking mind and you can decide whether you're going to pay attention to it or not is I think the first step and recalculating that story and taking greater control over how you think and behave mm yeah most I know and it's it's it's almost like you have to play a trick on yourself and for people that that have have trouble understanding that just imagine you're having an amazing dream and in that dream you're having a conversation with somebody and that person says something to you that you did not anticipate well your brain came up with that in the deep recesses of your unconscious mind that was conjured up without your awareness of it and I think that should give you a glimpse of the complexity of this thing and we're all walking around with stories stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and who we are and I think we vastly underestimate the power of those stories to shape the lives that we ultimately end up leading and if you can take control of that story and change that story as a storyteller your life will change more dramatically than people can imagine yeah all right well let's wrap this up with with one little final inquiry here for the person who's stuck for the guy or gal who's in the cubicle whose hates their job is in a dysfunctional relationship is in debt whatever the case may be desperately wants a way out a way forward a lifeline where does that process begin for you like what is the advice that you give that person so it begins with believing or acknowledging that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine so the the thing that has made us the apex predator is not that we're stronger it's not even that we're smarter in fact the the quote often attributed to Darwin is that oh it's a survival of the fittest he actually didn't say that what he did say was it's not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent but rather the most adaptive to change now the reason that humans are the apex of all apex is is because we are the most adaptive species to change so if you know that then it becomes infinitely less important who you or today and what matters is who do you want to become and what price and the price being the time and energy that you're gonna put into acquiring the skills to become that person so imagine the person that you want to be how would they act and then start acting like that if the person that you want to be would leave their job and you know regardless of whether they had a safety net burn the ships and go after something new then that's what you should do if the person that you want to be would start working nights and weekends because they very much value having a stable income that they can provide for their family or themselves whatever but are going to be disciplined and spend nights and weekends to get the skill set to go be more valuable somewhere else or to start their own company whatever then do that so there are a thousand ways to make your life what you want it to be without even changing your circumstance you could just like you were just talking about change the framing the perspective from which you tell your story in fact now I will tell you my film school story from both angles there too this is the facts of what happened I applied to USC but didn't realize you had to apply to USC film school separately so I get into USC but I have terrible SAT scores I took a nine ninety or I took it twice and I got a nine ninety combined score it's terrible they do it differently now so people realize just how bad at school sucks actually that was atrocious and so when I looked at the film school it required a 1,300 and so I was like whoa how am I supposed to get in I go see the school counselor at USC and they say listen Tom stop because I was taking film classes the general education classes they said immediately stop taking those classes you are not going to get into film school not words like that those words they said statistically speaking you're more likely to get into Harvard Law than you are to get into USC film school the number of people that apply is ungodly the number of slots are tiny you're not going to get in you're gonna end up spending a fifth year here because you will have wasted your time and I said okay I'm going to get in thank you very much the stubbornness in me so if you say I can't I'm going to and I said there's got to be a way to figure this out and I found out that one of the teachers that was on the admissions committee would let you join him for lunch so I joined him for lunch and as much as I can't believe this no one else did it was just me and so I'm sitting down with him and I'm like all right look dude here's the situation I want to get into film school but I got a 990 on my SATs he was like Tom what does SAT stand for and I said scholastic aptitude test he's like that's correct it's meant to tell me how well you're gonna do in college so there are two admissions periods one as you're coming into college in which case I care deeply about your SATs and then the other is as an incoming junior he said you've already missed the freshman window so your SATs don't matter anymore what I want to see is how good of grades can you get because that tells me how well you're actually doing in college he said I don't care if you're already a good filmmaker we want to make you a good filmmaker I just need to know you know how to learn so he said get good grades so I locked myself in my dorm for the next two years I didn't drink I didn't party I didn't date I didn't do anything but study and I studied like a beast and at the end of those two years either had a four point or like a 395 something crazy and so I got into film school so now I'm like alright [ __ ] I told you I was gonna get in I got in and I did it in a clever way I wouldn't ask the guy what I had to do he told me I did it for two years I was crazy disciplined and it worked man and I'm here there are three production classes that you have you've got a 290 a 310 and you crew a 480 which is a senior thesis film so I do my 290 they're pretty good I start getting attention for my filmmaking so in 290 people like wow this kid he's kind of one to watch because my two my two 90s were so good for 3:10 you have to partner with somebody now you have to either be a director or a cinematographer now needless to say everybody wants to be a director but then if you're not going to be a director or sorry if you're gonna be a director you want to get the best cinematographer and so what ends up happening is the people that can't get a cinematographer end up being cinematographers so a lot of times like people sort of make do I wanted to be a director and one of the other best directors wanted to be a cinematographer so now everybody wanted him as their cinematographer and he chose me so now I've been one to watch into 90 I get the ideal partner for 3:10 and we kill or how did you get that guy he thought I was talented fun to be around and that I was one to watch and so in terms of I would be a good person to partner with in order to get a good 480 so partners with me and we kill it and we don't make the classic mistake that most student filmmakers make which is to tell a feature-length film as a you know silent film so we told a very short moment in time as a silent baka web film where you wouldn't expect people to talk anyway so it didn't feel like a silent film so people love it does very well we both get top level crewing positions on a 480 we both crush that and both of us actually end up getting selected only four people get chosen for a 480 and we both got selected to direct to 480 so now I go from you're never getting into film school kid you're more likely to get into Harvard Law than USC film to being one of only four people to not only get in but direct the senior thesis film so right I'm killing it with Tom what are you talking about you failed at film school baby you did everything you were one to watch and I was like man I'm making it I'm gonna graduate I'm gonna get my three picture deal this is gonna be amazing I'm naturally talented I knew it everything has proven to me that I have natural talent as a filmmaker fixed mindset all day but who cares baby because I got the talent then I go into the 480 as a director and I [ __ ] it up and I crash and burn so spectacularly that people are taking snippets of my film and cutting them into what we would now call memes but at the time was just like mean to be funny and they would like screen it in front of the class people would be pissing their pants with laughter because it was so bad and I was having like basically an emotional breakdown and I called my mom from the middle of the school I'm laying on the ground on a payphone and I'm like my life is over and I'm gonna graduate now from film school with no senior thesis that I can show anybody and this is a point in filmmaking there's no like digital filmmaking no-one's ever made a film on digital before that doesn't exist if you want to shoot a film minimum for a no budget films a hundred thousand dollars that might as well been a hundred million dollars so I graduate I steal my master by the way which I still have because it is that bad I know when people hear this story they just think I'm being humble I'm telling you just like you over my [ __ ] dead body oh come on everybody slurring I've told the story many times I don't I think my wife has seen it but only once so yeah over my dead body the thing will never be seen although I have to admit like at some point maybe it'd be cool to show one once I have something that I'm that I've done that I'm proud of I might show it you could make that part when you give when you give presentations just show a clip of it yeah you're absolutely right anyway so no not at all so I steal the master because that bad and I never want people to see it and I graduate and now I feel lost and I'm like I'm never gonna break in my life is like I had one shot I actually made it and I totally mess it up and so it's over I'm never gonna be a filmmaker and that was my identity I was a filmmaker and so now that was gone and I was like wow I don't know what to do and so I was sliding towards depression I would lay on my the floor of my unfurnished apartment so I couldn't afford to furnish it and I remember the feeling of the vinyl carpet smashing into my face because I would just lay there for our two hours at a time and I was like yep my life is over I don't know what to do I'm sliding towards depression and thankfully I started reading about the brain to avoid sliding towards depression so now there are two ways to look at my film career one is dude against all odds you became through hard work and discipline not because anything was given to you people told you would never do it and you worked and worked and worked and you got it and you did it and you were one of the four people selected to do a 480 and the amount even though you're 40 wasn't good the amount that you learned from that 40 transformed you not just as a filmmaker as a human being and became one of the most transformative revolutionary things to set you up that's real that story is there and what you just heard the other story is you got arrogant you got cocky you believed you were the next John Woo that you could roll up on set that you were naturally gifted you didn't have to work so you hardly broke your script at all you like I wrote the script in like an hour before having to turn it in to be considered I never touched it again until the first day of shooting didn't storyboard nothing just welled up and thought I'll know where to put the camera it'll all just feel instinctive in intuitive and so I went and nothing was working it was all garbage my crew didn't believe in me the film was falling apart teachers try to save me but couldn't get through to me because I was so convinced I know what I'm doing and it just turned into a pile of garbage because I have no talent now both of those scenarios are true it is true that at that time I did not have Talent now it doesn't mean I couldn't develop skill but I didn't have talent so which do you which story do you repeat to yourself for the first probably two years after I graduated I repeated that I'm not talented story then I began reading about the brain and realized oh I just haven't developed skills yet and so then I began change the story and to focus on the discipline and all the things that I've learned and all that but both are true and so what I tell people is because you're more likely to believe something negative don't even worry about what's true worry about what empowers you when it comes to just yourself and not talking about you know a fake news or you know a post truth world I'm just saying for yourself there's both of those narratives are based on facts so the truth of one or the other doesn't matter one is empowering and one is disempowering act in accordance with the one that's empowering it's a great place to end it did powerful there it is boom awesome how do you feel feel great dude anytime I'm hanging out with you I'm a happy man yeah thanks for bringing the heat today my pleasure I loved it if you're digging on Tom and impact Theory he's a easy guy to find on the Internet if you just if probably if you type in Tom on Google it'll it'll pull up your stuff I don't know if I'm that cool yet but you type in Tom B I yeah so impact theory on youtube on itunes wherever you enjoy your narrative storytelling empowering content you can find him at tom bill you on twitter and instagram as well yes yes you have any good interviews you're excited about that are coming up well I will say if they haven't heard yours it's always cool to see the roles reversed so I highly recommend that episode which I think you know amazingly well that's good we've got our David Goggins episode - that one's gonna be huge I've already recorded that yeah yeah he's coming over here pretty soon - amazing good amazing so yeah he's he's evolved as a person he'll bring that it's just phenomenal exciting mom so yeah I'm super amped on that one cool all right man come back and talk to me again anytime cool peace [Music] you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 460,154

Rating: 4.8786316 out of 5

Keywords: athlete, business, Carol Dweck, depression, diet, Disney, entrepreneur, fitness, health, impact, Impact theory, inspiration, meditation, mindfullness, mindset, motivation, nutrition, plant-based, plantpower, podcast, Quest, Quest Nutrition, rich roll, self-help, spirituality, Tom Bilyeu, vegan, Walt Disney, wellness, career, growth mindset, matrix, relationships

Id: prlqWU54NME

Length: 142min 48sec (8568 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019