Interview: Tom Bilyeu on the London Real with Brian Rose (Replay)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu (Replay of London Real with Brian Rose)
Episode Date: May 11, 2024
Host: Brian Rose (London Real)
Guest: Tom Bilyeu (Co-founder of Quest Nutrition, Creator of Impact Theory)
Main Theme:
A deep dive into the mindsets behind extraordinary personal and entrepreneurial success, the mechanics of transformation, company culture, broadcasting, and the future of media and narrative in shaping society.

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1. Introduction and Background: Who is Tom Bilyeu?

• [01:54] Brian Rose introduces Tom as the co-founder of Quest Nutrition, a company that revolutionized health foods, and as the force behind the transformational interview series Impact Theory.
• Tom’s personal journey: from being broke in London 15 years ago to building a billion-dollar company.
• His key principles: growth mindset, extreme ownership ("It's all your fault"), and the importance of using money to create value.

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2. Tom’s Early Struggles and Mindset Shift

• [06:18] Tom recounts his difficult early days in London, describing himself as "profoundly lazy" and lacking a growth mindset.
  • "I was so mentally weak I couldn't get out of bed just because I was cold." (Tom, [06:14])
• The transformation began with exposure to the world, art, and architecture in London, which inspired him and planted seeds for a mindset shift.
• Tom distinguishes between being a “born entrepreneur” vs. “hand-constructed” through deliberate self-improvement.

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3. The Power of Mindset and The Quest Story

• [10:25] Tom explains that Quest Nutrition was built in Compton, CA, hiring from underprivileged backgrounds, and recounts offering jobs to people even with criminal records.
• His epiphany: generational poverty is about mindset (“fixed” vs. “growth”) more than money.
  • “All I want to know is, who do you want to become? And what's the price you're willing to pay to get there?” (Tom, [11:34])
• Tom’s mission became pulling people “out of the matrix”—destroying limiting beliefs through story and narrative.

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4. The Genesis of Broadcasting and Impact Theory

• [14:28] Tom is heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth”: “If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.”
• Realized that humans best receive disruptive information through narrative (books, movies, comic books).
• Original “Inside Quest” was for Quest employees, based on Tom’s 25-point “Quest Belief System”—the pillars for mental transformation and success.
  • “The 25 bullet points…are the most foundational things that I could think of given the anatomical structure of our brain.” (Tom, [18:37])

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5. Company Culture: Quest’s 25 Bullet Points & Developing People

• [20:28] The unique Quest culture was built to develop people, not just pay them.
  • Example belief: “Making food products is just how you pay your tuition beyond your job description to the opportunity of becoming the best version of yourself.”
• Shows and media were created so employees could absorb these values by example (not just memorize slogans).
• Tom equated the company to a dojo or university: “Making protein bars is just your tuition.”

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6. Building a Brand Ethos (Disney as Model Studio)

• [28:54] Deep analysis of why Disney succeeded: discipline, brand ethos, and total merchandising strategy.
  • “If I say I’m going to see a Disney movie, you already know something about it.”
• Disney’s echo model: the film is the “shout,” and merchandise is the “echo”—where the real money and cultural impact happen.
• Tom’s ambition: Impact Theory as a media company bigger than Disney, rooted in positive mindset transformation.

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7. Narrative, Virality & Future of Media

• [33:56] “Total transparency, total authenticity”—inviting the community into the creative and business process.
  • The importance of physical product even for digital creators: “Ten years from now…if you don’t start thinking [physical product] today, it will be a death knell.” (Tom, [41:13])
• Discusses George Lucas’ visionary decision to keep Star Wars merchandising rights.

Notable Quote:

“People signal loudest to themselves.” (Tom, [39:17])

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8. Execution over Ideas

• [69:02] “Execution’s the only thing that matters,” says Tom, explaining his focus on open strategy, sharing everything because so few will actually out-execute.
• On mastery: “Bruce Lee said, ‘Don’t think, kick. Kick until you just kick.’”

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9. Society’s True Problems: Delayed Gratification, Suffering & Growth

• [49:52] Tom on the real challenge for humans: an outdated brain programmed for survival, not fulfillment.
• Analogy to marshmallow test: Delayed gratification is more predictive of life success than intelligence or talent.
• On suffering: “The suffering isn’t something to be avoided. The suffering is something to conquer.”
• “Your brain is playing a game on you. Which I call the Matrix.” (Tom, [51:42])
• Viktor Frankl and finding your “why” through suffering.

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10. Extreme Ownership: “It’s All Your Fault”

• [59:08] Tom’s philosophy of total responsibility—from rain to catastrophic accidents.
  • “I use the word fault to get people’s attention…Once you accept that level of control, anything becomes possible.”
• It’s not about blame, but taking back control and agency.

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11. Filtering the Audience and Lessons from Virality

• [63:57] Tom accepts that not everyone wants this level of change; creates a “filter” by speaking plainly and compassionately.
• Empathy for those with a fixed mindset and using both love and the drive to “prove doubters wrong” (the 80/20 balance: 80% love, 20% dissatisfaction).

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12. Company Culture & Outperforming the Market

• [89:06] How an elite company culture, focused on mindset and execution, allowed Quest to grow fast in a “saturated” market.
  • “Company culture is absolutely critical, and it needs to be a filtering mechanism.” (Tom, [89:06])
• Culture built on principles that set expectations for hard, smart, and long work—but only in service to personal transformation and fulfillment.

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13. Personal Journey: From Chasing Money to Adding Value

• [96:11–100:29] Tom’s journey: six years in a company chasing profit led to profound unhappiness; only when value and authenticity became core did true success (and huge financial gains) arrive.
  • “When we stopped prioritizing money and started prioritizing value and community, we ended up making, at Quest, more in a day than our previous company made annually.” (Tom, [100:05])

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14. On Money, Fulfillment, and Authenticity

• [77:53] Money is a facilitator but doesn’t change self-worth:
  • “Money is never going to touch how you feel about yourself…if you’re insecure, you will remain insecure.”
  • “Money facilitates. With enough money, there’s virtually nothing you can’t buy from someone.”
• Future entrepreneurship will require openness and authenticity, especially as Gen Z demands transparency.

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15. Broadcasting Details: Format, Audience, & Strategy

• [44:56] Tom’s “no celebrity rule” for guests and long-form, deep interviews—prioritizing transformation stories over fame.
• Studio audiences were meant for employees but became a strategic differentiator.
• The importance of going deep and why some of the most life-changing episodes are often overlooked.

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16. The Viral Simon Sinek Millennial Clip

• [106:41] Tom reveals how Simon Sinek’s clip on millennials, which went viral (~160 million views), originated on his show but became famous via a third-party Facebook page.
  • “It was a moment where a truly great artist had the performance of his lifetime.” (Tom, [106:58])
• Lessons learned: recognizing the importance of having help to spot/share viral content, and the power of divisive, but meaningful, perspective.

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17. Mastery, Humility, and Advising the Next Generation

• [117:16] Advice to his 20-year-old self: Embrace a growth mindset and cultivate skills through work.
• Best advice received: “No more about any meeting, deal, or topic than anyone else in the room.” (from his father-in-law)
• For Gen Z: “Do and believe that which moves you towards your goals.” Challenge self-esteem that is built around being right/smart rather than growth and discovery.

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18. Closing Wisdom:

• Success is built on learning, humility, and relentless execution.
  • “My thing was, get really good at sitting at [others’] feet and learning.”
• Real IP (intellectual property) is expressing what’s authentically yours, not conforming to expectation or chasing trends.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “I didn't have a job and my then-girlfriend and now wife was bringing home the money. It was just a very weird time for me…but it was the beginning of my transformation.” (Tom, [06:18])
• “People don’t really dare to dream big because they don’t think it’s possible.” (Tom, [13:00])
• “If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.” (Joseph Campbell, paraphrased by Tom, [14:28])
• “Company culture is a filtering mechanism.” (Tom, [89:06])
• “Your life is 100% exactly a reflection of the choices you make.” (Tom, [61:49])
• “Execution’s the only thing that matters.” (Tom, [69:02])
• “Do and believe that which moves you towards your goals.” (Tom, [120:14])
• “Once I switched my self-esteem [to] being the learner and identifying the right answer and being willing to admit when I was wrong—that changed everything.” (Tom, [122:57])

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Key Timestamps

• [06:18] Tom’s transformation and early struggles in London
• [10:25] Hiring in Compton, fixed vs. growth mindset, “pulling people from the Matrix”
• [14:28] Joseph Campbell’s influence, narrative as a tool for change
• [20:28] 25 bullet points and Inside Quest for employee culture
• [28:54] Why Disney’s model matters; lessons for modern media
• [39:17] Merchandising, signal-to-self philosophy
• [49:52] Brain’s limitations, suffering, and neuropsychology
• [59:08] “It’s all your fault”—the philosophy of total ownership
• [69:02] Execution, mastery, and company vision
• [77:53] Money: what it is, isn’t, and should be used for
• [89:06] Company culture as a competitive advantage
• [100:05] From profit-focused to value-creation and exponential growth
• [106:41] The Simon Sinek millennial clip and virality lessons
• [117:16] Life and career advice for young people

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Tone & Language

Throughout the conversation, Tom maintains an honest, direct, sometimes controversial but always constructive tone—mixing humility with drive and practical wisdom. The exchange is friendly, authentic, and occasionally witty, characterized by Brian’s insightful but relaxed interview style and Tom’s willingness to probe his own ideas (and doubts) publicly.

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Final Takeaway

Tom Bilyeu’s story is a living blueprint for transformation—from mindset and suffering, through deliberate self-cultivation, to building brands and media that challenge fixed ideas and inspire action. Extreme ownership, relentless execution, and a genuine desire to serve others are the bedrock not just of his business, but his life.

Transcript

[Brian Rose]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Hey everybody, Be sure to check out this recent podcast that I did with none other than Brian Rose over at London Real. London Real is without question one of the best podcasts out there and it was an absolute honor to be on the show. We go deep on this one. This guy is an amazing interviewer and it was a lot of fun to have him turn the tables on me. I think you're going to love it, so be sure to check it out and and until next time, my friends, be legendary.

[Brian Rose]

This week on the show I have Tom Bilyeu, who's one of the founders of Quest Nutrition. This is a billion dollar company he created with two friends of his. It's all about creating protein and protein supplements. But that's not what Tom really wanted to do. He really wanted to broadcast. So he created a show called Inside Quest. Now it's called Impact Theory, where he interviews some of the most fascinating people on the planet, including a lot of people we spoke to like Simon Sinek, Tim Ferriss, Wyclef John. And he's got an amazing way he thinks about the world. The most important concept that he has is something going from a fixed mindset as a human to a growth mindset. And it's funny because 15 years ago he was in London with his girlfriend, at the time, now his wife, and he was broke as a joke sitting on a sofa. And he said it was the change in his brain that allowed him to accomplish so many things like making the billion dollar company and creating the media empire. I know you can learn a lot from Tom. One of his favorite expressions is it's all your fault. Which is another way of looking at extreme ownership. And he also says money is wonderful if used in the right way. It can do incredible things as long as you're not just hoarding it. And so I think you're really gonna enjoy your time with Tom. So sit back, relax for that. And if you wanna broadcast yourself like Tom and me, you, you're in luck because we have just created our broadcast yourself eight week course where I teach you how to create a world class podcast in eight weeks. Everything is included. How to book guests, how to have great conversations, how to put it out there so you can connect with the world, have deep conversations, maybe find your purpose and your passion the way I did and maybe turn it into a seven figure media business. Why not? So go to LondonReal TV broadcast, the course is probably almost expired now. And jump in there, it's going to be an amazing thing. And now I leave you with Mr. Tom Bill, you. Sa. Foreign. This is London real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Tom Bilyeu, the American broadcaster, entrepreneur and co founder of Quest Nutrition, the billion dollar company known for its revolutionary corporate culture and mission. Most people know you as the host of Inside Quest and now Impact Theory, the business and mindset focused interview show featuring conversations from some of the world's most amazing people including Wyclef, John, Simon Sinek and Tim Ferriss. Tom, welcome to London Real Dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you for having me on man. I am a huge fan of the show and I use it in my research routinely. So first of all I have a debt of gratitude to you, so thank you. Thanks.

[Brian Rose]

I mean it's great hearing that. You know we're over here broadcasting, we never know who's watching where.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, so true.

[Brian Rose]

You know you came in and you're like I know this set so you know it's great for us to hear.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, it's very cool.

[Brian Rose]

Love what you're doing. And you have a crazy story as well. So I don't know where to jump in. But first let's talk about London. What are you doing here?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, my wife is British so we, we were actually coming to Europe for the Cannes Lion. So the festival that's going on over there and we could not come all the way to France and not stop in and see her family. So came here staying with the in laws who were just beautiful human beings and yeah, so was coming over and this worked out perfectly.

[Brian Rose]

You lived here 15 years ago.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I did.

[Brian Rose]

What? I mean like I don't want to go too deep, too Quick. But what was Tom 15 years ago, like? Because, like, you land in Heathrow and you're like, you take the Piccadilly line up to wherever you must be thinking, you know, I did this in 2001, 2002. Do you get weird flashbacks or not?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't. So we come here a lot. So I've now spent, I mean, cumulatively, quite a bit of time in London. We, like I was saying before we lived here for a year, I was a very different human being, to actually answer your question. And the first time I flew in, I felt like I was landing on the set of Mary Poppins and I was freaking out. So I didn't even have a passport until the first time I came. So met this girl, she's British, and invites me to come see her, And I had to scramble and get my passport, and I come and land, and I was just flipping out and just so excited. And was that kid that always wanted to see the world but never really got a chance. But that's sort of the bright side. When I lived here, I had a fixed mindset. And so it was a very dark time in my life where I had trouble getting out of bed in the morning and. And I had trouble getting out of bed not because I was depressed or anything, because I was lazy. Like, profoundly lazy. And as you know, in the winter here, it's cold, and it's not like in America where you, you know, you can sort of make the house a nice even temperature. It's like you either sleep with the heat on, you sleep with the heat off, and we slept with it off. So I'd wake up in a cold room, and I just. I was so mentally weak that I couldn't get out of bed just because I was cold. It's pretty ridiculous looking back now, it. It hurts to think about, well, look,

[Brian Rose]

this can be a big culture shock. And, you know, I got here in 97, then I went back to 99, to New York City, but I came back again in 02, right around when you did, right after. I was in New York City for 9, 11. And then my whole life pretty much just. Just almost blew apart in 2001. And so me coming here was like my rebirth, my cleansing. And I kind of built myself back up from January 2002. But, you know, London, at first, to an American, it's just sometimes it's weird. It'. It didn't have a lot of the conveniences of home that sometimes you expected. And I used to remember hearing all my banker American friends And their wives complain they couldn't get a pizza past midnight. The cable wouldn't get installed on Sunday. High quality problems. But it took me years to get used to London and now I love it. And London's matured so much now to where I think it's like one of the most avant garde cities in the world. So now it's got great restaurants and entertainment. But back then it still was rough around the edges.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

Which probably didn't make it any easier for you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It didn't. I mean that wasn't like a big struggle point for me, honestly. It really was. So I'm not a born entrepreneur. All right. So a lot of people talk about, oh, entrepreneurs are not made. That is not my case. I am a hand constructed entrepreneur. And so that time in my life was really before I had developed a growth mindset. So I just, yeah, I didn't have control of my own mind. And so that makes you do a lot of really dumb and sad things. And at the time like I didn't have a job and my then girlfriend and now wife was like bringing home the money. It was just a very weird time for me but actually didn't color negatively for me. London, my in laws are incredible. The city is amazing and breathtaking. As somebody who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, like coming here was legitimately like it was my first real experience with a big city. So LA is a sprawling metropolis but it doesn't feel like a big city. New York feels like a big city. London feels like a big city. At the time, I hadn't been to New York since I was 13, so I didn't really have a sense of it. So coming here was really, really magical. And so art is like my first love and there's something about the architecture here that really draws you in. And it was the beginning of my transformation, quite frankly.

[Brian Rose]

Wow. Well, I want to talk about that as we get on because you know for you to just say that shocks people, you know, because they see how successful you are and whether it's in monetary terms with Quest Nutrition or whether the latest stuff in the broadcasting in your mindset. But it's nice for to plug in right now and know that 15 years ago, you know, you could have a hard time getting out of bed and that it's just your mindset that's changed. So if people are listening maybe they should just stay tuned a little bit more because I want to get into that. But I guess we should start maybe at the end and we'll go back to the Beginning because you're a broadcaster now, and most people probably know you for that first now. But why did you decide to start broadcasting?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, the honest answer is a game that I play called no Bullshit. What would it take? And so I've worked in the inner cities a lot, and I've seen the just absolutely dramatic negative impact that growing up in a certain environment has. So I refer to it as generational poverty. It has nothing to do with money, has everything to do with mindset and going in there. So at Quest, we were meant, literally manufacturing in Compton, California, so nice and famous for being very underprivileged. And so going into that area hiring local people. And I was really. It was really important to me to let people know whether you have criminal record. You know, you were in gangs. Like, I don't care about any of that. So what I would tell people is, I don't care who you are today. All I want to know is, who do you want to become? And what's the price you're willing to pay to get there? And so we'll give you that chance. And once we put out into the neighborhood that you could apply for a job even if you had a criminal record, we literally had people like, out and around the door, down the parking lot waiting just to be interviewed, because no one will give you a shot once you have a criminal record. Like, getting back into the system is next to impossible. So we brought these people in, really gave them a chance to do something special with their life. And in that process, I begin to realize the mindset that these people are walking in the door with is so detrimental to a path of success. And it just planted a seed in my mind that at. At my most, like, honest with who I am and what do I want to accomplish? I want to pull people out of the matrix. Now, what I mean by that is to get them out of that generational poverty. That mindset of it's just a whole bunch of limiting beliefs. It's. Well, my parents told me that nobody wants to see me succeed. My parents told me that nobody and my entire community, quite frankly, tell me that nobody ever escapes. Where I grew up, while, you know, success may be possible for other people, it's just not possible for someone like me. And so you would hear that all the time, all the time, all the time. And I used to ask the magic genie question, and I would say, hey, because I'm trying to find out who these people are, right? A magic genie shows up, is going to grant you one wish and one Wish only. You can't wish for anything for anybody else. Got to be totally selfish. Got to be something for you. Can't cure cancer, Bring somebody back from the dead. None of that. What do you do universally? The answer was, I want a job now. Okay, fair enough. They're just saying that because I'm interviewing, you know, them, for a job, not money. So I'm like, not money. So that's total bs, which is what they secretly want, by the way. Okay, but they're not going to say that in a job interview, so I would push, you know, Is it. You really want a job? Yeah, I really want a job. Isn't what you really want money? Like, that's the whole thing that you're going to get out of this exchange? Yeah, actually, you're right. Okay, fine. I do want money. All right, fantastic. Brian, drumroll. How much money do you want? There's only one answer I ever got. You. Have a guess.

[Brian Rose]

$1 million.

[Tom Bilyeu]

$1 million, baby. Now, $1 million didn't buy you a nice house. So that to me, was like, this is a magic genie. I've had to talk you into being honest about the fact that you want money. And then once we actually get to money, the number you come up with is a million dollars. Which, by the way, asking for money from a magic genie is a travesty to end all travesties. Don't ask for that. But not even getting into that, like, the fact that they couldn't think beyond a million dollars was crazy. And it just shows, like, people don't really dare to dream big because they don't think it's possible. So for them, I'm sure the whole exercise was just absurd anyway, but, like, not allowing yourself to dream about what's really possible and then backing into the execution step. So that became my obsession. Like, how do you get mindset? Because that's all it is, right? Because I went from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car. That's a real story. To building a billion dollar business, making myself fantastically wealthy in the process. So I know what that looks like. I know you don't. At least for me, I didn't start anywhere amazing. It was about having to shape myself into becoming capable of that. So seeing this mindset that's holding them back and asking the question, no bullshit, what would it take to give everyone a mindset that at least gives them the chance to succeed? They won't all succeed, but it'll at least give them the Chance. And the answer was to build a media company. The reason for that. Do you know Joseph Campbell?

[Brian Rose]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Brian Rose]

Of course.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I read the Power of Myth when I was like, I don't know, 21 or something. It totally changed my life in ways maybe we'll get into later, but in very deep and profound ways. And in that he said, if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And what it made me realize, at the end of the day, there's only one way that humans assimilate truly disruptive information. And I needed them to totally disrupt the way that they were thinking. And the way that people assimilate that information is through narrative. So you got books, comic books, TV shows, movies, and video games. Those are the five dominant forms of narrative that we have now that we could give somebody an empowering mindset. So pair that with the timing, and you've got the opportunity to build a social following as a broadcaster. And then on the other side, for us, we're building traditional narrative content. But all. And this all feeds into my obsession with a total merchandising strategy from a financial standpoint and why Disney is different than everybody else, and what they did right that every studio in their wake has done wrong, and why we think we'll be the ones to do it the right way.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. And this is the guy with the Hero's Journey concept as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. Which is, again, I guess, kind of a metaphor and a narrative. Kind of. And a whole idea of that rolled into one, which is very powerful as well. And it's everywhere I use it. I've even used it in my TED Talk without thinking I used it. And we actually encourage a lot of our Academy members to tell their own Hero's Journey as an exercise in reframing their failures. And so you can use them as these huge assets that you kind of bring back to the world, you know, of all your learned lessons. So I love this idea. Weren't you too busy building a billion dollar company, or were you now, was it time for you to mentally transition as well? Was it a timing thing too?

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, not at all. So for me, it really was looking at what is the best thing that I could do to build Quest. So Quest was meant to be my forever company, so I never intended to leave it and started. The reason that the show originally was called Inside Quest was I had written these 25 bullet points called the Quest Belief System. And they were the things that I had to do to my mind in order to go from, you know, staying in bed because I'm cold to being able to actually execute at the highest level of business and doing the hard things and suffering and all of that.

[Brian Rose]

Right. I'm going to read some of those later. You created those in 2017, like, back in the day, or was it more recent?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that was probably 2011. Okay. But, yeah, it was right around there. And so the reason that I had written those was I was really terrified that I was going to be taking something from people. And when you look at the hierarchy of a business, the way that people get rubbed the wrong way is they come in and they, like, work their asses off. And making protein bars is physically very demanding. So it was a very hard job, especially in the beginning. And I wanted, like, I wanted to bring these people on. Right. I don't care who you are now. I want to know who you want to become and all that. But I needed to make good on that promise, so I needed to help them become the person that they wanted to become. You talked about our unique culture. The unique culture was all about, you can do anything you set your mind to, so that may take you away from me. So making protein bars is just your tuition. I want to help you become the person that you want to become. Don't lie. Like, really tell me where you want to go, and if that's to create a competing company, fine. I'll teach you everything I know if that's to go and do something totally different. But you're going to give me two years of your life and really commit. I'm all for it, but there had to be reciprocation on my side other than a paycheck. I just couldn't feel good about it Otherwise. So the 25 bullet points were me saying, here, this is really what you're trying to learn here, but it's not about memorizing. So the show became my reaction to people could memorize them, and they would come up and say, hey, bullet 12 is this. And I'd be like, I literally don't know if that's true or not because I don't have the bullet points memorized. I'm living them, but I'm not gonna waste time memorizing them. People were doing the reverse. They were memorizing them, but they weren't living them. So I wanted to create the show, bring on the most successful people I could get my hands on, because I knew you're gonna see over and over and over without them knowing what the 25 bullet points are. They're gonna talk about the 25 bullet

[Brian Rose]

points because you selected the guests or cause you asked the questions or how would every episode.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They are the most fundamental truths of the human condition.

[Brian Rose]

Really? That's it?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's it. They are the most foundational things that I could think of given the anatomical structures of our brain. Like we are a certain way human animals. Like for all of our differences, our similarities are infinitely more striking.

[Brian Rose]

Okay, but you're. But pulling out those points is something that I would say you uniquely do by having guests on, like, say, a Simon Sinek. Because otherwise CNN and Fox would be pulling these 25 points out on a regular basis. I mean, it takes a talent to show people those. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

You have to be going down a certain path. So the path in my interviews that I'm going down is all about mindset. And whenever possible, how did you shape your mindset to get where you are? Right. That my favorite narrative, because I think it's the most empowering, is an authentic, true story about how somebody goes from not believing in themselves, having a fixed mindset, to believing anything is possible and actually executing against that and being able to articulate the steps along the way. So my fundamental belief, and I don't think anybody could convince me otherwise, is that like Darwin said, it's not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. So humans become the apex predator, not because they're stronger, smarter, faster, because they're more adaptive. So if we are the ultimate adaptation machine, then we need to get rid of all these old notions about what we're capable of by the time that, you know, we hit. I mean, people think that by the time you're like 19, your life is over, right? And you've learned what you're going to learn and that's it. And I mean, there's just so much neuroscience around the fact that that's just not tr. So getting people to show that, like how they did it to tell stories, I mean, you know, you talked about it in the beginning. I make no attempts to be cool because I don't think that pulls people out of the Matrix. Me saying I'm a born entrepreneur when I'm clearly not. Like that doesn't help the millions, hundreds of millions of people that are struggling in the way that I struggled that really can become an entrepreneur or whatever else they want if they put their mind to it.

[Brian Rose]

So your employees are coming up, by the way. This is rule number eight. And I love it. And I just wanted to pick out a few because it's very poignant here. This is Quest University. Making food products is just how you pay your tuition beyond your job description to the opportunity of becoming the best version of yourself. So I love that concept, you know, and again, that's like the ultimate mission. So, you know, the work here is just so you can become better, educate yourself, build the best you and all that other stuff, which is really interesting. But my point is, is that people would come to you and say, Tom, what's number seven? What's number 13? And you're like, tell you what, I'm going to create media and narratives that's going to constantly instill these values into your head.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Brian Rose]

So it was internal first, or you thought, I want to tell the world this as well?

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, literally, it was called Inside Quest because it was meant for the people Inside Quest. And as we were doing it, it was like, man, this social thing. So we were early adopters of social media. So we were planning out our Facebook Strategy back in 2009 when other people thought, like, that's just a distraction. We could really see how it had potential. But as things were migrating towards the personal side, like, finally me stepping out front, which I never wanted to do, which I get. People are never going to believe that that's true because now I'm so out front, like, aggressively. But. But really didn't. And my chief marketing officer, literally, for years kept saying, dude, we need to do a show around you. We need to do a show around you. And that felt so icky to me. And I had lied on Facebook about my birthday, which is still fake on my Facebook page, because I was convinced someone's gonna steal my identity. Right. So that's where I start.

[Brian Rose]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I've really had to, like, evolve here with social media. Yeah, exactly.

[Brian Rose]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that's where I start. And finally realizing I think this is starting to get away from me, and that personal branding is gonna be a thing that stepping up front would be very advantageous. People have a natural inclination to grav towards an individual, not a company. So let me start doing this. I think I have a viewpoint that would be useful to people. So then we did Inside Quest as an opportunity outbound, as an opportunity for the world to learn. What does Quest stand for? And this goes back to my obsession with Disney. At one point in the 30s and 40s, Disney was probably the most famous person alive. And he really lived the ethos of his brand. And look, post, sort of post his death, like, there's some controversy around that, but that's what he stood for and represented and really went out of his way to craft that when he was alive. And obviously that fed into the brand narrative, which is just incredibly important now. We live in a world where you can't fake it anymore. Social media is too ubiquitous. You're going to get caught out at some point. So I think the only way forward is to really be authentic. But in being authentic and stepping out front, in putting out a message that is actually useful and advantageous to the people that listen to it, you can tell people, this is what my brand stands for, this is what we're doing. Come look behind the scenes, get to know me as a human being, look me in the eye on a weekly basis, certainly possibly on a daily basis. Follow me around, see what I do. And then you'll know what the why. So we've talked about Simon Sinek. You'll know the why of my company, right? You'll get that. You'll understand what I'm driven by, what I'm trying to accomplish. And then also, I'm sure, in fact, I will prognosticate here every day. Tell me if this is true. Every day someone writes to you and says, you, Brian Rose, have changed my life. Is that true?

[Brian Rose]

Oh, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, it must be amazing, right? You're putting out all this. I have the chills. You put out all this amazing content with good intentions, which you said off camera. So cool. I wish we'd been recording. You said, God, with a bad setup and good intentions, you can still do amazing things. I love that. So when you have good intentions, you're really trying to do amazing stuff for people. They can feel that. And so I feel like we're living through sort of the second wave of the social revolution now, where it's about, who are you as a person? How does that feed into your brand? What is all of this and what do I get out of it as a consumer? Right. So in your case, you're changing people's lives, the same thing I'm trying to do. I actually want to change people's lives. So this is me at Quest going. Quest is a company about transformation. It's not about protein bars. Right. We wanted to impact people's lives positively. So how do we push that to the next level? And InsideQuest, to me, was the obvious answer. Now, the reason I spun it out, it's really hard to get people to see a brand that's. So we sold protein bars. There's no way around that, that sells protein bars to become this media company that's all about mindset and all that. So it was. There was. We were building two separate audiences and so that was becoming weird. And I just had to be honest. Like, there are two things that I have to do in my life and that's to address the two pandemics that we face. The pandemic of the body and the pandemic of the mind. And I felt the pandemic, the body, it's now moving. I've got two partners. They're going to keep running with it. They'll make that magic happen. But no one's doing this. And so transitioned out, took the studio that we had built there and turned it into a literal standalone media company with aspirations of being bigger than Disney one day. So that's our plan.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. And do you think a company can only do one thing? I mean, do you think if you get big enough and the public knows you as that, is that the conclusion that you kind of made is that Quest is going to be the protein bar company and the media company has to be a separate entity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think you have two paths before you. You've got the Virgin path where he had, I mean, what he started something like 300 companies under the Virgin brand. It's nuts. Eight of them or whatever have become billion dollar, equally crazy.

[Brian Rose]

So the rest fail.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, sure.

[Brian Rose]

Like, there was a whole story the other day about all these Virgin brands. You've never heard of that? Just like crazy Virgin Brides. I don't know if everyone remembers that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Virgin condom.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. All these failures too, which is weird. Beautiful thing. But you were saying. Sorry, there's two. Two.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that's path one is. Yeah. You find a way to. To detach the brand identity from the product.

[Brian Rose]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which we were not able to do at Quest.

[Brian Rose]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So. And maybe we could have, like if. If my partners and I had really shared that vision and they were willing to go with me. But that's a lot of risk. So when you look back at Virgin, he had to buy his Virgin Music co founder out because he didn't see the transatlantic, you know, airline that Richard wanted to do.

[Brian Rose]

So why would he.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. So, hey, let me make this easy.

[Brian Rose]

Bottom out the company.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Exactly. So it takes. You've got to have a very strong vision. Oftentimes it's counterintuitive. Oftentimes it's deeply personal and you're the only one that's going to see that through. So we didn't share the vision for that. That. And so rather than try to like force that, make them uncomfortable, like we had such an amazing run for 14 years. We were partners. Utterly transformative in my life and. And still technically am. I'm just not there in a day to day role, but still I'm a partner in the company, really believe in it, think it's going to crush. I evangelize for the brand, but this gave me an opportunity to, you know, we had been so successful financially. It gave me an opportunity to start something new. I co founded IT with my wife, who's just amazing. And we've not only worked together, but we've been married now for 15 years. So we know how to work together, we know how to build something. So that was why we spun it out into a standalone. But hopefully we'll be a little more strategic in how we place the brand. It can be more flexible. And then option two to go back to the brand thing. So if option one is virgin, option two is, you know, essentially what Quest is doing. Quest makes protein bars and it's known for that and it wants you to know it for that and it's going to double down on that. And I think they're both very sound strategies. One may require a little more tolerance for risk than the other. But you've seen Company, Apple. Right. Another one that's. It may seem obvious what they're doing now, but Apple TV from Apple computers, the ipod, all of it. The iPhone was very counterintuitive.

[Brian Rose]

Very much so, yeah. And so you were. InsideQuest was around for a year or two.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It was about 18 months.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. And it was internal first. And then you opened it up or it was always something that other people. People could consume.

[Tom Bilyeu]

By the time we actually went live, we went out to everybody, but like, at first it was just a YouTube channel and we weren't really doing other socials. And then we started really getting more strategic because I didn't worry about whether it caught on with the world at large, was really just focus. As long as the employees are watching and digging it, we're good. But then it was just like, well, if we're going to do it, let's really do it. And so we did about, I think just shy of 100 episodes of Inside

[Brian Rose]

Quest with guests on each episode. Yeah, that was always the way it was.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Always. We did a couple clip shows, but yeah.

[Brian Rose]

So how many episodes have you filmed with, like different guests?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, now we've done. It's gotta be 135 somewhere around there.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. All right. And before we get into the next iteration, Disney. What do you see in Disney? Why do most People sleep on Disney or they don't see the beautiful things they did in the past.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I, I literally can't actually. I know exactly why people aren't disciplined. So I'll walk. If I say to you, hey, I'm gonna go see a Warner Brothers movie, you know nothing about it. Could be uplifting, could be tragic, could be heartbreaking. A horror film, who knows, right? Could be anything. But if I say I'm gonna go see a Disney movie, you know something about it, I don't have to tell you anything else. I'm gonna go see a Disney movie, you already know something. So he, he being Walt Disney, understood that they had to stand for something, that the brand Disney in and of itself had to stand for something. And it can't just be quality, right? So everybody's going to say that, well, it stands for quality. Quality. What? So he really understood that it needed to be. And this isn't the language he would use, I don't think, but the magic of childhood, right? Just capturing that thing that we all feel as kids, whether you're a child or an adult, you can all relate to that magic of those, like simple, beautiful moments in life. And they captured that in the brand ethos, maintained that for a very long time. Then buying Pixar was a no brainer. There was so much, you know, connection between the two in terms of their ethos and the way that they work and the type of product that they put out, that was a no brainer. But then the other thing that they do is they're looking at all the culturally relevant intellectual property out there that can be merchandised and they buy it. So buying Marvel was one of the smartest things they've ever done. Buying Star wars was amazingly smart. And they've been using since the 1930s, they've been using a total merchandising strategy, which means Disney sees their primary sources of revenue not the piece of art that you create, but the merchandising that you sell, sell around it. So it's the what I'll call the shout and echo model. So the movie is the shout, the merchandising is the echo, and it's the echo that makes the money. So looking at that and knowing that from a technological standpoint, we're now moving into an era where things can be made on demand, you don't have to have the inventory risk. So here I am thinking, how do you build a studio in the modern era? You've got social media, it can be done essentially for free. Certainly the distribution of it can be done for free. You've got the opportunity to merchandise, which you can do for basically you don't pay until you make it. So it's perfect. You're paying out of cash flows, which is just an incredible place to be. And I think that that's going to happen to more and more pieces of the industry as 3D printing comes down and cost becomes more ubiquitous, can print in more materials. Like that's just going to get more and more interesting. So now, because what I wanted was when I look at, okay, if I'm going to compete with Disney or I'm going to compete with Sony, Warner Brothers, all that, they're willing to throw $200 million at a tentpole film. Like, that's crazy. Like, how do you compete with that? So, and I think in the next seven years, one of the major studios is going to go on because you miss two or three times in a row and you're done. Like that's it. You just go out of business. So I think they're making way too big of risks in a time where. Do you know who E.L. james is?

[Brian Rose]

That's familiar.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fifty shades of gray.

[Brian Rose]

Okay, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The author.

[Brian Rose]

The author, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

She had 5 million readers before she published the book. Think about that for a second. 5 million readers before she ever published the book. That's insane. Like this never happened before you. There's no way to do it. So she went on a website, wrote it all on this fan fiction website, got a huge following and then she went to a publisher and said, would you like to publish my book that has 5 million followers? The. The only answer is yes, of course we would. Right. And that book has sold some just ungodly number of copies. So that puts us in a position where as content creators, if, if you're trying to be a studio, if you're trying to be something bigger than a multi level or a multi channel network, I think you're just looking for virality. You need to give your community an ethos. So going back to Disney, understanding that the brand ethos has to stand for something. So my new company, Impact Theory, it stands for something. Something, right? It's going from pulling someone out of the Matrix, going from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. And it's Hero's journey from a thousand different directions. Right. I can tell a thousand different stories, but it's all that same uplifting transition of going from that fixed mindset to the growth mindset. So that's how we want to feed into that. But we want to do it by going out to the community with that ethos, asking them to submit ideas. We then filter the ideas, make sure that they make sense of the brand ethos, give them back to the community for them to actually create real properties which then come back to us, and we look for the virality in that. So there's a technology layer that we're working on now that hopefully in the next year we'll have ready that'll allow us to gamify that sort of interaction back and forth with the different ideas and properties and things like that. And right now we're working on securing the life rights to people whose stories, I think are just unbelievable.

[Brian Rose]

Some of whom famous people or not famous.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Some of them we'll call have a very low level of celebrity for their. Their specific life. Life. A couple of them have been guests on our show. So I know how good their stories are and how much our audience resonates.

[Brian Rose]

What is a life, Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you would go and say, for a dollar option, Brian, I'm gonna pay you a dollar. And now I control the rights to your life for the next, let's say two years, okay? And I have two years to get it turned into something either a comic book, a TV show, a movie, whatever we agree on, okay? And then from there, like every time we hit a hurdle, you make money. So if you know the dollar is obviously nothing. But let's say when the first comet goes into production, then you get a bump. When it gets picked up as a TV show, then you would get a bigger bump. But if you're really smart, Brian, and I know you are, then I'm in. What you really want is a piece of the merchandising rights, right?

[Brian Rose]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. So and that's our thing, total transparency, total authenticity. Letting people know, like. And I'm telling people exactly how we're building modern studio because I know no one else has the discipline to follow me, okay?

[Brian Rose]

Merchandising. When I hear that, and based on this narrative, I'm thinking Star wars action figures. And I'm in the media business, and honestly, most media people, unless you're Disney, they don't even think about physical products. I mean, sure they do, I guess, if they're selling them later. But what does that look like?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, it looks exactly like that. The shirt that I'm wearing right now is one of our shirts that, you know, buy it and it gets printed at that moment. And I hold no inventory, risk or anything like that. And we can routinely put them up. We get Stand for Toughen the fuck up, Buttercup.

[Brian Rose]

So it's going to be the title of this episode.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And literally, it was one of those things where in the middle of a Q and a. A live Q and A on Facebook, somebody said like, hey, this sit. What should we do? And I was just like, look, sometimes you just got to toughen the fuck up, Buttercup. And then people started writing, oh, my God, please make that a T shirt, right? That's the world that we live in. So then we made it as a T shirt, goes live. People can buy it. So but that's, like, totally minor. The real play is to make a property that resonates with people like a Disney film. And now it becomes a part of your identity. So think about Star wars, right? This is. This story changed the world. Didn't change it as much as you'd think. But George Lucas makes this film that nobody thinks is going to be a success. Okay? So he had just directed THX 1138. Totally avant garde, sort of weird.

[Brian Rose]

It is weird.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Didn't make a lot of money. But then he makes American Graffiti. American Graffiti hasn't released yet, and he gets Star Wars. He makes Star Wars. American Graffiti still hasn't come out okay. When he makes Star wars, the crew's walking off set. They all think it's this ridiculously stupid children's film that's never going to amount to anything, and nobody believes in it but him. And finally, when he's ready to go make it, he realizes they're not gonna promote this movie. Like, the studio now doesn't believe in it. There's been so much, like, kerfuffle on the set with the cinematographer and everybody saying, like, this movie's a joke. They're not gonna promote it. They're just gonna let it die. So then American Graffiti comes out. So Star wars in the can. He knows no one's gonna do anything with it. American Graffiti comes out and I think becomes the first movie to cross $100 million. If it wasn't the first, it was one of, like, the rarest few. Becomes absolutely massive. And the studio realizes, oh, we've got to keep this kid happy. So they go back to him and they want to, like, triple quintuple, whatever, what they had paid him to do Star Wars. And he says, don't pay me any more money. Let me maintain the merchandising rights so that I can make sure that I can market this film. He's not thinking like, oh, the merchandising rights are going to be worth Something he wants to make T shirts and posters just to get the word out. And he knows that the studio can stop him if he doesn't have the merchandise rights. So he retains the merchandising rights for that reason and that reason alone. And then when the movie comes out and it becomes the astronomical hit that it is now, all of a sudden he realizes, oh, dear God, I've. What I made on actually making the movie is a pittance compared to what I'm making over here. And, I mean, he's made billions of dollars on the merch. So it's going to be rare that you have a hit like that, right? Most of them aren't going to be that. Most of them are going to be BASE hits. But the problem is this, where everybody else falls down. If you think about a Warner Brothers or you, a Sony, they have to reinvent themselves every time because there's no, like, continuation from the last movie. It's why they like sequels, because at least then there's some merchandising carryover. All the relationships that you've established with the merch and the manufacturers and knowing, like, what hair color, Jack Sparrow's, you know, beard should be, like, all of that stuff has already been decided, so it's way easier. So now they try to stay in that ecosystem as long as they can, but that's not their studio model, right? Their studio model is a breadth, everything. Make any good story, we make good stories, right? It doesn't feed into a brand ethos. Without that, there's this constant need to reinvent, which is why they're always pulling back on the merchandise. Because from a technical standpoint, do you know how many decisions you have to make? Think about every decision you made. We were talking about it before, right? The chairs face each other. You had to actually argue that with your team. So now multiply that across a thousand pieces of merchandise for a single film property. Everybody's exhausted and taxed, so it's just never being maximized except by Disney, because they're still selling Mickey Mouse. Dude, Mickey Mouse came out in the 1930s, and they still sell Mickey Mouse. So it's like they. They stumbled upon something. Walt was a genius. I don't care how or why, but they stumbled on it, but nobody's copying it. So. But when I find myself slipping out of the rhythm every time, it's because of lack of discipline. It's. I see another story that I'm moved by and I want to tell it, but it's like, if it doesn't Fit the brand ethos. You can't because you devalue the top level brand, which means you devalue your ability to do merch. So. And at the end of the day, the merch and it comes. I mean, we can get really complicated here. It comes down to what's called self signal signaling. Right. So I wear this shirt to an interview. You're wearing the suit, right? Oh, I love your stories about the suit because you used to be wearing, like, oh, God, like the. It wasn't Ed Hardy, but it was like G Star jeans. You had such a different vibe. And then you switch it over to the suit. Makes you feel differently. Makes me feel differently about you. And your goal was largely to tell me who you are. But I know you use affirmations a lot, so it's like you're sort of dressing in a way that's sort of physical affirmation, if you will. So me wearing a shirt reminding me to toughen the fucking up is important to me. So it's. It's meant to say something to you, but when we signal, we signal loudest to ourselves.

[Brian Rose]

Interesting. So self signaling. Okay. Because it's huge for it. And so most studios don't have the discipline to stay on brand to make that Disney merchandise model work. And they'll. They'll just go to the fair weather. Okay. We got to do this because they're desperate for those quarterly earnings. Okay. And just to finish up the merch question, in 10 years from now, what other merch might you sell me, Man?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's a great question. I'd love to see a lot of physical merch. That would be like, the most exciting thing for me would be to be in a world where we're 3D printing on demand, or I mean, quite frankly, getting to the point where we just know, like, this unit sells. And so, like, when a T shirt hits and has true virality, then we do the screen printing and we hold inventory and all that because we can get better margins and do special things for the customer because we're the ones shipping it. So, I mean, there's reasons to do that stuff, but it will be so dependent on the property that it's really hard to prognosticate. But we'll win when we've got bed sheets, socks, watches, lampshades, sleeping bags, you know, apps, like it apps as well.

[Brian Rose]

So digital products as well. Okay. But kind of less than $100 type things there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It depends, man.

[Brian Rose]

If you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you want to buy a custom Tesla that's in one of Our properties like the impact theory, Tesla, and they want a partner. I'm all for it.

[Brian Rose]

That's fascinating. I'm really glad we had this discussion. I've never heard this idea talked about when it comes to like digital media. And it's fascinating. Maybe that's because you come from a physical product side that you don't try to ignore it like so many quote unquote media people do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so you're about to live in a world where people are going to ask the question, why should I pay for this thing that feels like it should be free?

[Brian Rose]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, and I am telling you, we are all at the tip of a very large iceberg where people are going to be compelled to give away. And you've got an awesome model because you give as much away as anybody might need to really make a transformation, but invite them into a deeper world if that's what they want. And that to me is sort of the only sustainable model. But like so much more is going to be given away for free. Right. Think about a singer who just is, they need the attention. Right. So if you think about, don't worry about selling your music. That would be my biggest tip. Don't sell your music, go on tour, build a following, make people feel touched by your music and they will take care of you for forever. If they don't feel touched by your music now, you're in trouble. So that's where I think the music industry got a little bit lazy there for a while because there was so much money to be made in record sales. You didn't have to worry so much about touring. Now as it's touring, it becomes touring and being an influencer. So working with a brand to tell people, hey, go buy this because I rep it, that becomes the way that people really monetize. But I think for people like us that are putting out this content to ignore physical product, product will 10 years from now be a death knell if you don't start thinking about it today. But because you'll have a good, I mean it'll be a sliding scale of decreasing returns, but you'll have a good run for the next five to 10 years, but it will dry up.

[Brian Rose]

Okay, interesting. Let's talk about our good friend Simon Sinek. Yeah. Start with why. It's interesting to look at your show and maybe even our show and a bunch of shows out there and say what was their why? You know, and you started it to kind of reflect those internal corporate values that you felt so passionate about that were really human values. But you didn't start it to necessarily make money. You didn't start it to be a YouTube Internet famous. Like you can see the why in every brand out there. And whether it's Joe Rogan or Marc Maron or you or Fox News, like the why is down in there. You don't have to look that hard to find it. Whether it's me in the chair placements or all that stuff. I mean, for London real, like this wasn't even a company for three years, you know, and like it was just me broadcasting to get my demons out and try to connect with the world and. Cause it was so much goddamn fun and connecting. But you know, when you think about your why and what, you know, what your media brand is, you know, do you think about how yours is different than everything else and does it change? And do you look back to those first 10 episodes and are those similar to your last 10 episodes?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, they are actually somewhat similar. I think what you'd find is I talked a lot more in the early episodes and I don't talk as much now. Why is that? Maturity as an interviewer, understanding how to get better answers. Dancers needing to put less of myself out there to create the energy on set, like doing some of that sort of pre producing on the way in. And then quite honestly, like I was beginning to realize I needed to establish myself because I was so asking the question, why should anybody care about me? And so I felt I had to establish myself. So yeah, just as I've gained more confidence, I've, you know, the guy that shows up the lowest dressed is usually the most successful person in the room. Like that's, you know. So I've just gotten to the point now where I know I'm doing a good job so I don't have to be so loud.

[Brian Rose]

Right. I think that was a line in American Gangster or something like that quietest guy in the room is the. Yeah, the kind of the biggest guy in the room.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

And when you went to design your show, so it was like the hour long piece and they're kind of the four parts and I know I'm geeking a little about and broadcasting on you, but it's okay. My show, how did you make those choices? Studio audience, you know, your first 10 guests. I'm gonna do it this way because, you know, you could have done anything, you could have kept it open, you could have kept it shorter format. Just wondering why you made those decisions because those are, those are really important decisions in my opinion. They say so much about you and the brand and they sub communicate to the audience and most likely you won't change it for the next 10 years or for the rest of your life. So I was just wondering if you thought about why you made this decisions.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh yeah, very much so. So long format was because I wanted to go deep. So I'm looking at all the other people doing shows out there and with precious few exceptions, it's like pretty surface. It's mostly celebrity driven. And I just thought that's not interesting to me. So I had like a hard and fast no celebrity rule when we started and my team freaked out because they were like, how are we ever going to build an audience like if you don't bring on celebrities? But I was like, I want people with amazing stories that have really transformed. They've done some. Something incredible. Like I want those people. And so we brought on, it was a little more cerebral, as you know, at my request. And long form gave us that chance to really sink in and get to some things that other people might not be able to get to. And then in front of the audience was because I wanted my employees to be able to watch it and then that. So that was why the audience. But then that took on a life of its own. And I find that people are certain people. So certain people react poorly to the audience and they get a little nervous and maybe they clam up a bit and other people come alive. So like Gary V, right? Gary Vee loves having an audience. Amazing. And so it was a lot of fun.

[Brian Rose]

He doesn't talk to you anymore? He just talks to the audience.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Which, hey man, for me, the show at the end of the day is for the crowd. So like if the crowd is able to engage with him in real time and that brings something beautiful out of him, then I love it and I like it because I think very few people in doing what I do can perform in front of of a crowd. So this was me saying, okay, how do I also position myself to shine? Like I want to put myself in a light where I can get better at something, where I can do something that other people can't do. Like it's. It's got to be like you playing a unique game, otherwise why watch it? So I thought that that brought an interesting dynamics. I know most people are trying to sort of keep it on the DL, way more intimate. And I thought, God, if we could open this up to an audio audience, which creates a different vibe, a different energy and I know not many people will be able to follow me into that space, then we've got something.

[Brian Rose]

Okay, so you're doing audience now for every show. You had a few without you. Like Ferris. You did without.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, so Ferris was right. Well, so I've done Ferris twice. Once with a big audience and then once with like three people. Okay. And so we, we don't go out of our way to have an audience now. We. So it, it fluctuates with the guests. So when we have a big guest, a lot of people show. Show up when we don't have a big guest and we don't. And before it was like, we would fill the audience no matter what.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But now it's just like, that's not sustainable. I'm not worried about that. So, like, when Gary was there, I mean, we probably had 20 people in the audience. And then, you know, the average guest, we may have six or seven. So. Okay, it's.

[Brian Rose]

And it's in la, you shoot.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, we literally shoot at my house.

[Brian Rose]

Okay, your house. Okay. Wow. Okay, that's cool. And so you invite them over and then they come and. Yeah, and that's how you roll. But you like having the audience there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it because it pushes you

[Brian Rose]

and it most times brings out something good in the guest.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And if I could, I would do everyone in front of 150 people. I mean, that would. That, that would be the fantasy. But what you find is crowd management is one of the most difficult things you're ever going to do because getting people there, like, you have to have somebody out there on the street, like, handing out tickets, hey, come see the show. And I thought, wow, that's a lot of work.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, just. Just doing the live event thing. It's interesting you say that because I've done a couple shows with Crow, and I'm also used to hear. And I'm used to going deep and, you know, I get these professional boxers that are, you know, cry after two hours. And I just love these moments that I know wouldn't happen in an audience situation. And sometimes people play the audience and they want to get the laughs. And sometimes, like you said, some people get it charged by the audience, but sometimes they turn into someone that maybe they're not because they're always worried if people are approving with the claps and the laughs. So sometimes, yeah, I go the other way. But I understand why you're doing it

[Tom Bilyeu]

with the audience and I totally get why you do what you do, because you're absolutely right, it is. You're going to get a different A dramatically different interview. If you have real intimacy, like right now, you and I have real intimacy than if we had a big crowd here. So, yeah, it. It is purely a question of what show are you trying to make.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. Talk to me about your vision for the media you're creating and the change you want it to have on these people. Whether it's these. These kids in Compton that you used to employ and you saw this mindset, or I'm sure when you look at the world or maybe just watch mainstream media for a little while, you're like, okay, guys, there's something wrong here. Okay. I worked at Quest and we worked on this body problem, but we got this serious. What did you say? This other pandemic. Right. What is it that you see at its base level that is just completely out of whack in your mind? And what do we need to change? And I think some of it maybe follows your own journey from the guy that was here 15 years ago in 02 to the guy you are now. Hard for me to believe it would be hard for you to get out of bed in the morning, but I know those are kind of two questions, but maybe they're kind of one.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what is it that's off about the media or.

[Brian Rose]

No, no. What do you see as the biggest problem you're trying to solve right now in the brains of our fellow humans? And I guess I'm kind of asserting that the media is not helping us solve that problem now and its current form, I would probably argue it makes it maybe worse. But you obviously are trying to do something different.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So the biggest problem that we face as a species is you have a brain that is essentially outdated. The algorithms that you're running are meant to keep you safe from a lion jumping out of a bush. And the scarcity mindset when it comes to food. And you are neurochemically rewarded when you find something with a lot of salt and fat. So you go crazy and eat as much as you can. And gorging made a lot of sense. Whatever. 50,000 years ago when. When you never knew where your next meal was going to come. So you should take on as much caloric density as humanly possible. Now, when there's a store around every corner, that really becomes a problem. And we're seeing that problem play out now. So it's understanding that your brain is this magical organ that lives in total darkness, in total silence, and yet by transforming the inputs that it gets into electrochemical impulses, it creates. Creates a very realistic representation of the world. But once I realized that it's a representation, it is not the real world. And so the great example where your optic fiber connects to your eye, you actually have a dime sized blank spot in your field of vision and yet you don't perceive it at all. That's crazy. And that's your brain going, ah, this is what I think would be there. And it just slots it in.

[Brian Rose]

If anyone ever wants to test that, you can put like two X's on a piece of white paper and like maybe 10 centimeters apart and move it and it just disappears and it fills it in with whatever the background is. It's like it's playing this game on you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is you have said it so well. Your brain is playing a game on you, which I call the matrix. And you're in the matrix. Have you ever heard the David Foster Wallace speech? This is water.

[Brian Rose]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, dude, you got a great one coming for you. Listen to it. It's amazing. And the whole speech is about how a fish is the last one to realize that he's in water. It's so ubiquitous. It's so a part of his life life that he totally takes for granted. Like us with air, right? Moving through it all the time, but yet it had to be actually discovered at one point. So there are things in your belief system that are that ubiquitous that ever present that much of a foundational building block of who you are that you don't even question it. Like I'll give you an example. Suffering is meant to be avoided. That doesn't seem controversial, right? Saying it to you because of your mixed martial arts like background, you're like, I'm not so sure.

[Brian Rose]

Go Buddhist as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But yeah, yeah, average person is going to be like, yeah, yeah, obviously suffering, move away from suffering, move towards pleasure.

[Brian Rose]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm here to tell you if you do that, your whole life, your life will be a misery. So you've got to find a way to better understand from a neurological perspective how you respond to suffering. So suffering will break many people. So for many people it is because they don't know how to cognitively deal with it, it will just break them. But for some people, it will supercharge them. Right? And so if you man, search for meaning. Have you read that?

[Brian Rose]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Long story short, Viktor Frankl, incredibly powerful book. You have a neuroscient, I can't remember if he's actually a neurosurgeon, but certainly a neuroscientist who goes into Auschwitz and starts taking a clinical look around and he realizes he can predict within 72 hours who's going to die. And he said you'd see them give up. And he said the moment they gave up, they'd be dead in 72 hours. And I thought that is insane. And he said the whole thing is when somebody knew why they were fighting. And I think it's Nietzsche that says once you know your why, you can suffer. And anyhow, like when you know what, what you're trying to get to the why, why you're existing, why you're going through the suffering, all of that, you'll push through even Auschwitz. And so he said when he could hold on to that thing, like it was worth fighting for and he would keep going and that would drive him. And in that you grow and you become stronger. So when you put yourself in a position of suffering, that is when your body responds to stressors. And somehow people understand this. In bodybuilding, nobody thinks I'm going to pick up a bag of groceries and look like Dorian Yates, right? Like nobody thinks that. So you've got to go in, you've got to put your muscles under massive stress, routinely tear the tissue, build it back up like it's a process, but people get it. It starts with a stressor. But when it comes to the mind, for whatever reason, people try to optimize for ease and they don't try to put themselves. So like I did a three day fast not too long ago. A three day fast sucks. And the whole point of doing it is to suffer. Because in the suffering you will be forced to either give up and quit and recognize I am a creative quitter, which is at least honest. If people are willing to accept it, they probably won't. They'll come up with all kinds of excuses, but you quit or you made it through. And to make it through you've got to come up with a tactic. And this is fascinating. And they've done this with the. Do you know the marshmallow test?

[Brian Rose]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the Stanford experiment put a kid with a marshmallow, say you can eat it anytime you want. I'm going to step out for a minute, I'm going to come back. If you wait to eat it till I come back, I'll give you a second marshmallow. They're never coming back when they walk out of the room. Just going to wait and see how long it takes to you to eat it. Right? Fascinating. And kids like come up, oh, they sing to themselves, they cover their eyes, they do all kinds of stuff to not be distracted by it. Some of them, like bite the underside and try to hide that they've bitten some of it. I mean, they like try to come up with all these incredible little tactics and tricks to make it seem like. Or to actually have waited and delayed their gratification. And then the scores later, because they followed these kids for like 25 years and the scores later were so correlated to their ability to put it off longer. So the kids that waited the longest to eat the Marshal marshmallow do the best in school, get the best, high, highest paying jobs. I mean, it's nuts. And so what I'm saying is you can get better at not eating the marshmallow. And so that's really the goal is teaching people, learning the tactics through suffering, how to not eat the marshmallow for longer and longer and longer. Whatever your marshmallow is, for me to get out of bed, even if it's cold, and to understand like, the suffering isn't something to be avoided. The suffering is something to conquer. So forcing myself through a three day fast to go through the. The suffering, showing up at the gym every day. I hate the gym. Let's just call a spade a spade. Whatever. Like endorphin rush my wife gets and she does. Clearly I don't like. There's no joy in it for me whatsoever. But I love proving something to myself every day and showing up and pushing through the pain and lifting something, even when it hurts, going through that process, all of it, the self discipline, all of that is pushing through the suffering. So that's just one example of a whole host. Host of examples of these beliefs that are holding people back, that stop them from becoming who they could become and if they could just fight through those beliefs. So that from a neurological perspective, I just understand the battle that we're really fighting, that the brain is working to keep you small and safe. It's trying to keep you from being ostracized from the group. But you can overcome all of that. The brain is insanely malleable.

[Brian Rose]

Right. But that old brain, it just wants to keep you alive long enough to be safe and reproduce and die.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Brian Rose]

Which it leads for a very probably unfulfilling life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, fulfillment's not necessary for raising children. So. And since its job is to pass on progeny, it doesn't really matter.

[Brian Rose]

Have you had Ryan Holiday on Obstacle is the Way?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very much.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. It spoke to him. So this is a lot of those same things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

So go to where that hardship is again. Jocko Willink comes up. You know, discipline equals freedom. This Whole idea of going into this hard stuff. And so, look, that's one of the fundamental messages you want to get into people's heads. Right. Which is hard because it's the opposite of kind of everything that technology is about and everything we sell to humans, which is take a break, relax.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

Don't go there. Yeah. Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I was somebody that succumbed to it the most.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. Which gives you the blueprint, maybe to help other people out of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Exactly. My thing is, instruction manuals should only ever be created by people that didn't know how to put something together at the beginning, had to figure it out, and then can go back and write all the stuff that's counterintuitive. Because when you know how to do it, you forget, like, how weird and misleading some things are.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. And are you constantly trying to put yourself in these various different uncomfortable situations?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I do it a lot. I could do it more. I won't say that I'm some perfect bastion of, like, hey, I'm gonna leave and just go suffer today. But I do, like, simple things like restrict my calories massively. Do cardio. When I don't want to do cardio, I use a bright lines technique. So let's say I'm starving, but my bright line says I don't eat before 11:30. And you bring my. This actually happened one time. I was prepping for an episode. I was so hungry, my wife brought me my food accidentally 30 minutes early, and she brought it in. I was like, oh, my gosh, thank you so much. It's so sweet. And then I thought, okay, wait, this sucks. It smells so nice. And Now I have 30 minutes until I can eat it. And then I thought, wait a second. This is perfect. It's a great opportunity to practice bright lines. Discipline, suffering. All of it's right here. So I was literally sitting over, and I'm breathing it in and feeling cocky because I knew I wouldn't. Right. Discipline equals freedom. I knew I was never going to eat that before 11:30 because I have a bright line.

[Brian Rose]

So when the bright line is like a fixed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. There's no way, shape or form.

[Brian Rose]

Like, it's like a rule that is never broken. A bright line.

[Tom Bilyeu]

100%.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. You have a phrase. It's your fault.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's all your fault.

[Brian Rose]

It's all your fault.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Brian Rose]

What does that mean?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, I heard a very wise man. His name is Brian Rose. He has a show called London Real, and he was talking about, even if it rains, you should say, this is what my fault. And I At that moment, I knew you and I are kindred. Spears, my friend. The story that I always tell people is. It's funny because normally I'm telling this from America. I say my wife is British, and let's say that she were at home in London with her mom in the bedroom that she grew up in. The door's locked, the alarm is on, she's safe and sound. And right at that moment, a meteorite comes screaming through the atmosphere, smashes through the bedroom and kills her. Whose fault is that? Unless you're trying to guess what you think I'm going to say. People say it's dumb luck, divine providence. It's nobody's fault. It's, you know, just the way that it is. And my answer in no uncertain terms is that's all my fault. And I'll tell you why. There actually is an organization right now, this is all real, that tracks what are called near Earth objects. They're looking for the ones that are on a collision course with Earth. They're trying to figure out how they could knock it off course if they need to. A planted nuclear explosion, laser beams, whatever the case is going to be. But something make sure that nothing ever collides with the Earth. I know they exist. I've never called them to give them encouraging words. I've never sent them an email with ideas. I've never sent them a dime of my money. Nothing. Now, I think that's smart because I think the odds of my wife being killed by a meteorite are virtually zero. So spending my time thinking along those lines doesn't make a lot of sense. But if she were killed by a meteorite, I wouldn't waste time saying there was nothing I could have done. I chose not to do something plain and simple. So. So if you're always making choices, then everything in your life is a result of the choices that you've made. If you're hit by a drunk driver, at a minimum, this is really going to piss people off. So brace yourself. You're going to get ugly comments for this.

[Brian Rose]

That's right. We're like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you're hit by a drunk driver, you have been victimized, there's no question. But you choose whether to play the role of the victim. And you can remember that you didn't have to get in the car that day, that you made that choice. Maybe you put yourself into an odd situation, whatever. And the moment that you're willing to accept this is my fault, you're back. Control and my only thing. And I use the Word fault. To get people's attention because otherwise you just can't wake them up. Yeah, I don't want you to blame yourself. That would be just as useless as playing the role of the victim. So don't victimize yourself. Just own, this is my fault. I could have done something different. I will do something different next time. I will take better precautions, whatever the case may be. But now you're back in control. And once you accept that level of control in your life now, anything becomes possible because you're going to look for the path. Right? You're going to look what could happen. I have done. And that was really where the, the game. No, what would it take was born out of. So, no, what would it take to stop my wife from being hit by a meteorite, really? And then realizing, oh, my God, there's actually an organization and all this stuff that you could do. And so that is probably one of the most important things anybody could realize. Your life is 100% exactly a reflection of the choices you make. So abused by your parents as a kid, nothing you could do about that, but you can certainly do something about how you think about. About it now.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, it's the way to escape any possibility of jumping into victim mode by taking again, as Jocko would say, extreme ownership. Whereas, like you said, everything is your fault. So, yeah, it rains, it's your fault Trump got elected. It's your fault. Just own it. And once you just have that as a default mechanism, you're kind of ready and armed for now. You can live your life as you choose it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And isn't that awesome?

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, it is awesome.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's awesome.

[Brian Rose]

It is awesome to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To know that anything, if I had made different choices, I could have gotten a different outcome. It's very powerful. Looking forward.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. You know, when Jocko came on, we really started talking a lot about that in this office. And for a while, a few people were owning things like, oh, yeah, that is my fault, that's my fault. And then it was just like, well, actually, you can't just own it as your fault. You now have to be responsible and take proactive action. So either if something happens, you want to own it. Okay, now what are you going to do, you know, to make sure it doesn't happen again and then just take all these proactive issues. But it's an amazing way to kind of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To grab life that way, and that's really important. The steps to execution, what are they? Like, how do we make sure this doesn't happen again?

[Brian Rose]

You have a tough job getting these messages across. And there's limitations between two guys in leather chairs talking. And I'm sure you feel them sometimes, you know, as you've been broadcasting for the last year and a half. And I feel them sometimes, too. And, you know, we're having an amazing discussion, and we will continue to. And I've had amazing discussions, discussions with, you know, Simon and other people where I'm like, that is just the ultimate amount of science, and everyone's gonna get it right. And yet they don't. They pick up on Simon talking about millennials, or in my case, Simon talking about Trump, and it goes viral. And it's a great clip, but there were so many of the things that were so important. How do you continue to get the message through to people that don't want to watch two guys talking?

[Tom Bilyeu]

My thing is I'm a filter, so I'm not out there trying to get a hold of everybody. Only certain people want to make change at the level that will allow them to achieve whatever want in their life. And my thing is empathy and compassion. Meet people with empathy and compassion wherever they are. And I get asked that question a lot. Hey, Tom. It's like my mom. I love her so much, but she's got a fixed mindset, and she keeps telling me I can't do things and that I'm never going to be able to accomplish my dreams, and what do I do? And the answer is, meet your mom with empathy and compassion. Understand that she has a fixed mindset. That's how she views the world for you, because that's how she views the world for herself. So she's forever going to hold herself back. Because the first step is belief, right? People think the belief comes when you've done it. You won't even take the first step if you don't believe that you can accomplish it. So we lead with belief as a species. So you have to find a way to believe in it, to move. So your mom is giving you an awesome challenge. Can you believe in the face of her doubt? Right? And to me, when people doubt me, Brian, it's a gift. I love that because I believe in beauty and rage, and you need both. I need people to love me. I need to want beautiful things for myself and for others. I want to create something amazing. I want to help a lot of people. I also want to prove a lot of people wrong who don't think that I can do this. I want to crush the enemies that want to see me fail, that want to do anything they can to Ensure that I fail. I spend 80% of my time here and I spend 20% of my time here. And the irony is, as Darth Vader will tell you, there's power in the dark side. And once you learn to balance those, then you really get something interesting. And here's another way to say it. You have to know when to love yourself and know when to hate yourself. I think it's 80, 20 again, you want to spend 80% of the time loving you and being proud of who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what part of your journey you're in. Really loving that you're showing up, that you're playing. Maybe you're not yet satisfied with the level that you play, but no worries, like you're there, you're doing it, you're showing up. And then 20% of the time being wildly disappointed by yourself, being horrified, terrified by the fact that you were so lazy and so afraid of being cold that you wouldn't get out of bed. Like, that's terrifying. And that that's not acceptable. That's not a person that you're prepared to continue to be and that you find that so disgusting in yourself that you're going to make an immediate change. And if you don't do that, you'll never grow. You'll spend all your time over here. You'll be pacified. So let's really go deep on Ryan Holiday. Ego's the enemy. Talk about being pacified by the dream. Merely having the dream. I want to do good things for people. Have you heard a lot of people say that? Yeah, yeah, people say that all day. I want to do great things. I want to help the world. In what way? Like they don't get specific. So they're pacified by the dream. So you've got this person who's really not living up to their potential, being pacified by the vision of what they could do and who they could become. But they never, to your earlier point, they never find the path to execution. So I find without kicking myself in the ass, without being deeply dissatisfied with, with myself 20% of the time. Because if it's more than 20% of the time, you begin to erode yourself and it gets very corrosive. You'll chip away at your own self esteem and that's a total waste. But you do have to be willing to kick your ass.

[Brian Rose]

What does Tom hate about himself these days?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I always struggle with profound laziness. So that is, people look at my work ethic and they think it's Because I'm not lazy. And what they don't understand is my work ethic is. Is my. My routines and my habits to make sure that I don't fall back into laziness. But lazy is my default mode. So lazy just comes into conflict with my ambition. So my ambition is stronger than my laziness. But it does require me to do that. I think that I'm a great leader. I think I'm a terrible manager. And I really. Right now I'm. I feel like it's not a skill set that I want to develop, but when I say that, I feel a little icky. So I have. Have to, like, search within myself to find out. Like, am I just being lazy about that? Then if I put in the work, I could be a great leader and a great manager. Or is it really better left to other people with a different personality? I don't know yet. But those are two areas that I'm deeply unsatisfied and I could go on.

[Brian Rose]

I assure you I like this 8020 concept. Are you going to write a book soon?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I am writing a book now that we hope in 2018. Yes.

[Brian Rose]

Yes. Okay. And I haven't heard some of these ideas before, but it's nice to kind of see who wants to see you fail.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I can picture them so clearly, but I will never say their names. I won't do them.

[Brian Rose]

So there are specific people or archetypes. They're specific people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, yeah.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. And you use that to channel that dark side.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, yeah.

[Brian Rose]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. To profound effect.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. You mentioned excellent execution when you were talking there. Tell me about execution. What does it mean? How do you feel about it? You've built a company, and a lot of people that talk about building companies, I'm sure someone said, tom, I had that idea to do that over the years, but you take it a step further. So tell me your read on it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Execution's the only thing that matters. And so one of the reasons I talk so much about the total merchandising strategy and all that and really explain to people what we're doing. Doing. I do it for two reasons. One, I want people to understand I'm. I'm not. I do social influence, and you could call me a social influencer, but I'm building a media company. That's. This is how I view myself. This is how other people view me. So I want people to understand. And the game is over here. I need you to understand that because I'm going to be asking you to come participate in this over Here. So we're very open and honest and I laid people out on the website. You can go see our three phases of execution and how we plan to do where we are in phase one, one and all that, why we're doing all that stuff. So one, just so that they understand it, so that the brand doesn't catch people off guard. I'm very sensitive to that. You need to be who you are from day one. And then two, I want a gun to my head to know now that all the secrets are out, anyone can ask me any question about anything we do. And I will tell them because I want to win against people who are not handicapped. And I think that. And look, there might be something where I'd hold the timing or whatever if we're trying to do something cool that requires a bit of timing and stuff like that. But, man, for the most part, like, I will just go in and tell people, this is how you would do it. If you want to out execute me, do this. Because I am so confident that they'll never do it, that even if they've got the discipline, they don't love it like I love it. So they're not going to have the passion to be counterintuitive. And that I find is interesting. When you're so passionate, you gain so many skills that you get to the point where, like Bruce Lee said, don't think, kick, kick until you just kick. And that to me is incredibly important. You need to get so good at something that you can be counterintuitive because, you know, five or six moves down the road where this ends up. And that's where I'm at with that, with media.

[Brian Rose]

What's an example of that where you could be counterintuitive in the short term, knowing that it's going to come full circle.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the social content, right? So if you're trying to be Disney, why are you doing social content? It doesn't make sense. The social content, though, is building the brand ethos. So impact theory as a brand will stand for it already does. So people write to me every day and tell me, you've changed my life. Like, imagine, just imagine for a second. We live in a world where you can build an audience of millions of people and some percentage, even if I say it's 10%, that 10% of the people believe their life is fundamentally different and better because of you, 10% of millions of people, that's huge. Hundreds of thousands of people believe because of the you, their life is fundamentally different and better, that they talk to their spouse about you. Maybe they tattoo your brand on their body somewhere that their friends have to tell them to shut up because they talk about London real so much. Right. That's a thing. Okay, so we're living in that era, and I'm living in that era where my whole idea is to build a brand ethos. So what is the fastest, the no BS way to build that ethos, to stand out front and talk about it, to actually impact people's lives, to put content out that does that all the time, the while marrying that to traditional content, which is. And I'm not sure where people disconnect more, that traditional content actually is the only scalable way on a global level to give people the mindset that they need. Have you read Sapiens or Homo Deus?

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, I've been listening to Sapiens audible. I haven't gone into Homo Deus yet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right. Sapiens is awesome. Homo Deus will change you fundamentally as a human being. That book, when I was reading, I was like, oh, my God. Like, it's so crazy and powerful. And he talks about how the most important force, the most important force humanity is going to encounter in our future is fiction and narrative. And he backs it up so powerfully. And the example that he gives, that I think is just beyond incredible, is think about the Crusade for a second. The Crusades happened and were such a collision of cultures because you had two people that believed exactly the same thing but mirrors of each other. So you had the Christians saying, one true God telling us to reclaim the Holy Land, we're willing to fight to the death for it. You had the Muslims saying, one true God telling us to reclaim the Holy Land, willingness to die for it. But they believed in different one true gods. And so when they collided, the matchup was so, so perfect that they annihilated each other. If one had said one true God were meant to reclaim the Holy Land, but all of life is sacred and nothing else matters, then as they collided, they would just back off and they would realize that the Holy Land was not as important as the sacred of human life. And they would, you know, migrate somewhere else where they could build a peaceful colony there, you wouldn't have had the clues. You just wouldn't. So you need that fiction, right? Because back in the village, if you were growing up in England and you're about to go off on the Crusades and the young woman whose attention you were trying to get when she hears you're about to rush off to the Crusade, she's batting her eyelashes and swooning. And your parents are like, oh my gosh, you're being a good Christian and a good son. We're so proud of you. So everybody's reinforcing this fiction in your head. And the easier way for people to think of it is so this. It's called intersubjective truth. It's only true as long as everybody believes it, right? Because we all now look back at the Crusades and go, what were you doing? Like, they didn't make any sense. It was so much unnecessary bloodshed. So from our perspective, seems patently ridiculous, but from their perspective, it was like the greatest thing you could do, but great in a way where everyone is like responding to you like you've done something great. So it wasn't like just in your own head. Everything in your society and culture was telling you that it was amazing. The church felt grateful your parents were over the moon. I mean, everything just reinforced it. So the perfect struggle. Exactly.

[Brian Rose]

At the time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So his whole thing is a. What things are happening like that now, where it seems so obvious and real to us now, but we realize it's actually an intersubjective fiction. And another example of an inner subjective fiction is money. Money only has value as long as we agree that it does. Otherwise it's just paper that you could, I guess, light for heat energy. But when it's zeros and ones in a computer, it really has no value. So only has value because we agree it has value. So what are the inner subjective fictions that we're all believing in now? What problems are they causing us and what ways are they helping us? But as we move into the next generation human, which is essentially a cyborg, we're going to have to program those intersubjective fictions. We're going to have to decide what's real and make that a part of the AI to give it the same frame of reference. So we're going to be making these decisions as we evolve because we literally, at this point, we've evolved. We're rapidly evolving to past human as a purely biological entity because we're so connected with the computers that and like really think about things that are already interfaced. So cochlear implants, where you give people who are deaf hearing vision, where you can give people artificial, I don't know if it's retinas, lenses, something, but they're giving them literally essentially bionic parts in the eye to give them the ability to see, some of whom were blind either from birth or from Very, very young. So it's. We're already there. Elon Musk is now investing in a brain computer interface company. So it's like this stuff is going to happen. It's going to play out over the next 10 to 20 years. So his whole thing is that fiction is going to have to be solidified. We're going to have to decide like what are the inner subjective fictions that we allow the AI access to because a non biological entity doesn't have the millions of years of evolution to just pre program them for that.

[Brian Rose]

Right. Or do a reality check or a gut check or see if it really feels right or makes it sense in my physical body too. And you're excited because you're on the forefront of this narrative fiction creation that's going to have such an impact on the future of the world. Is that correct?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yes. I mean it, it interests me because it's going to be so important. If I'm really frank, I'm not thinking transhuman in the content that we're creating. Like I want to impact people today when we're still biological.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I do find that fascinating. I think it's, it's very interesting. I think it's important for us to, to you know, think through where this stuff is headed. But that's more just fascination than actually creating content around that.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. I think in the beginning of Sapience, in the first few chapters he kind of structures out that basically everything that we think is real is around some fictional narrative, whether it's money or a corporation or even our society. And he has a great way of breaking it down. I hope you're going to have him on your show soon.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh man, would be amazing.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. And so that's interesting. Interesting. You mentioned money. I had a great guest in here one time that we were actually in the studio and we had about 25 London realers in the room and he said what is your relationship with money? And he asked everybody to shout out a word and it was fascinating what people shouted out. I think I said something like a pain or something. It was like four years ago and I was still coming off the ex banker. I running away from money and capitalism into this other world. And now I've made a little more peace with that and I'm coming back. Back. But it is a bunch of zeros and ones. I was wondering if you could tell us about your relationship with money and how that maybe changed over the years and. Yeah. The way you see it now and the way you think other people should see it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Money is amazing. It is incredibly powerful, and it's not at all what you've been told. So I think we all have an intuitive understanding that money is going to make us feel about ourselves the way we feel when we look at somebody that succeeded at the highest level. So whether that's your favorite footballer, whether that's Bill Gates, whether that's Jay Z, doesn't matter. Like, you look at somebody that's achieved and they have the wealth, the big house, the fancy cars, the jewels, the clothes, all of that, and you admire them, and you think way better things about that person than you think about yourself. So I think people think, when I get money, I will feel that way about myself. And it just isn't true. So money is never going to touch how you feel about yourself. If you're insecure, you will remain insecure. You'll even remain insecure if you got the money for yourself, right? Unless in that process of becoming great at something, good enough at it to actually extract the money. If that process reduces your insecurity, great. But getting the money will not. So I remember when I finally had, like, real money, and I was like, wow, I feel like, exactly the same. The same person. Like, exactly the same person. And that was weird. And you kind of feel like things should be different. Like, shouldn't colors be different? I. This is maybe a little embarrassing. I felt the same way about sex. I remember thinking, once I have sex, like, somehow the world's just going to be different, right? And then you have sex, you're like, that was awesome. But everything is the same. And I still have to go to work, and I still have to do all this mundane shit. Like, none of that changed. That's exactly what money's like. But what people don't understand about money and the reason it will be chased forever, as long as we're in a physical world and we're not like in the Matrix somewhere, the reason people will forever chase it is money is real. Because money facilitates. You can go up to somebody, and with enough money, there's virtually nothing you can buy from them. You could buy their house, you could buy their car. You can start a business. You can. Bill Gates is going to use it to end disease. You can build infrastructure in a company. You can save lives. I mean, it's just the amount of power to create that money gives you. And what you create, it could be a hospital, it could be you fund researchers that are creating some new medical breakthrough. I mean, it's just money's ability to Create is so beautiful. And we have this narrative about the accumulation of wealth being really dangerous and nasty. It's absolutely not true. There are dangerous and nasty people, and if they have a lot of money, they will squander it. In my opinion, they will use it in ways that just is not necessarily uplifting to themselves or to society. And so I don't quite understand it, but, man, let me tell you, like, I have been poor and I have been rich, and rich is way better. It is. It is better in, like, every conceivable way if you understand what it is. So it's when people don't understand it that its real power is merely to facilitate. Facilitate your most beautiful dreams when you do that. And when your beautiful dreams serve other people, there's nothing better. Like, people don't feel weird about you having money because you're creating something of value. Like that. To me, if you're creating something of value. And I believe that we're moving into a new entrepreneurial era where because of social media, people are going to demand. Demand and authenticity and transparency. If you want to run a company, if you want the right to be my Internet service provider, if you want the right to own my favorite football team, if you want the right to own my grocery store, whatever, I need to know what you're doing with the money. Okay? That's it. I don't need to control it. I need to know what you're doing with money, because I want to know if I support that and if I dig who you are as a person and I like your product. Awesome. Got a great relationship, all will be well. I think that's so obvious coming, like, if millennials are starting to turn up the heat, Gen Z is gonna, like, crank it. So once Gen Z is the primary buyer, I don't. That would be the de facto mode. So when I think about, where have I gotten the timing right in my life? Where am I ahead of the curve? It's on that, like, I create so much content and my whole thing was. And you'll get this reference because you're into mma. When you see a guy in MMA get dazed, what does he do? He grabs legs, right? He may not know where he is. He's just been trained, man. If. If you're confused, grab legs. Grab legs. Sometimes they grab the referee's legs because they're really confused. But, like, that's your home base. You can kind of protect yourself there while you get your bearings. That is, like, I wanted to make sure that the content that I was Putting out was so fundamental to who I am as a human being that if you woke me up in the middle of the night, punched me in the head and I was dazed and confused, I am still going to give you the same answers because it's actually who I am, that there would be no way for you to secretly record me and like, catch me out saying something crazy. So that to me. And then that's going to be. I think for a certain type of person, it will be the most profoundly effective marketing tool that you could have, is to actually be yourself. To go out like, I'm wired to want good things for people. I love seeing other people win. Now, make no mistake, I want to win even more. But I actually enjoy seeing other people when that makes me happy, especially if I can care about them. So when you're wired like that and you can enjoy other people shining and you want to help them and do good things, but you're not afraid to compete and really go out there to win, people can get behind that day or night. VRBoCare is here 247 to help make

[Brian Rose]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Brian Rose]

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[Brian Rose]

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[Brian Rose]

by Grainger for the ones who get it done. You had a, I think a policy in quest where you would really openly talk about how you felt about stuff and kind of get vulnerable and bounce ideas. And if something felt funny, you would look around the room. Room. And it was a place where you could really be honest about ideas. I. I remember hearing you say one time, do you think that's why you're so in touch with who you really are? And because a lot of the things you're saying is like, it's. It's really fundamental IP that is Tom. A lot of people would take them five years to actually figure this out about themselves. And yet you feel like. I feel like you just Kind of saying the way it is, you know,

[Tom Bilyeu]

it's, it, it's interesting. And thank you for that, that's very kind. I see myself as, I am a mess and every day I'm just trying to be a little less of a mess. So what I mean by that is I think that the human mind is so malleable that it can be pushed in any direction and it can very easily get pushed in negative directions that don't serve you. And so people can struggle with depression and anxiety and not catch it early. And so it really spirals out of control and becomes a problem. And I learned early on that when I tried to be cool that it made me anxious. And so I just stopped trying to be cool because I didn't want to be anxious. But then, so you've got me now sort of being defenseless, not trying to be cool, never afraid to use self deprecating humor. And then I realize the very powerful lesson that at some point, no matter what you want to do, being so good that you can't be disappointed, denied is like in and of itself the ultimate defense. They say in, in the law, the truth is an absolute defense. And I'll say in life from a perspective of success, talent is an absolute defense. Like when you get so good that you can't be denied, like, you'll be fine. So I have no interest in trying to look cool because it makes me anxious because I'm not like fundamentally cool. And then the other is I am hell bent to actually be great. I want to actually be great. Like I want to be capable of things other people are not capable of. And then I've cultivated a hyper sense of self awareness. So when my motives are ugly, when they're petty, I'm aware of it. Okay? Right. And so like when, you know, like, oh God, I'm doing that because I'm insecure or like when I said that. One of the reasons I talked a lot in my earlier interviews when I was the interviewer, er, was because I needed, I felt like this sucking need to establish myself. So there was insecurity there. I was so worried people would be like, why am I listening to this guy? That I had to show like, hey, I'm well read too. So I had to like put that out into the universe. So it was only as I got more and more confident and actually got better that I needed to do that less and less.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, I always say when, when I do my job, the best is when I just shut the hell up and let the other guy Talk.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I. I get that. But I've actually enjoyed the times where you and I are back and forthing more. So. So it's a balance.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, it's a balance. Well, and that's for other people. You know, you might be a little bit different. One of the reasons Quest was so successful, you went into a market that looked like it was saturated, right? What you guys were making protein bars in 2010. I mean, so one thing I find interesting is that first of all, no market is ever purely saturated, but you went in with these 25 different values, or at least they became your values. But you went in there and the whole idea was, I'm going to out execute other people or my team's going to out execute other people. And. And I would be doing a horrible thing if I didn't get you to talk on that a little bit. Because it's fascinating to look at these values and think, okay, if you can get a team that feels this way about something like the Crusades, perhaps, then it's like this SEAL team that can go in and beats anything, no matter how much money you throw at a problem or an established industry or Bill Gates is the CEO. And it looks like you guys won because of this, this culture. And I was wondering if you could speak on that and if you knew you were doing it at the time. And some of these belief systems, and we'll post them in the show notes as well, but you know, you can do anything you set your mind to without limitation. And then the previous rule is a lie, but it's an empowering lie. We do and believe that which empowers us. Personal growth is the highest priority of all Team Quest members. I love that you're happy to train people if they want to go compete with you because it gives you someone to compete against. Quest University, we talked about it earlier. Great place, Safe place to make mistakes. Members of Team Quest do not make excuses ever. I love the one. Every member of Team Quest is expected to work hard, smart and long hours, which is controversial these days, especially for Gen Zed. They're not going to work long hours, but you were happy to say it. These kinds of things. I was wondering if you could just talk about the idea of a company culture and how the right set of ethos can get people the long way. And if some of those make you smile a little bit, if you kind of. Of remember them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So I think company culture is absolutely critical and it needs to be a filtering mechanism. So not everybody's going to like it, but the people that like it and get on board, that's when you can really do something spectacular. I think the company culture and certainly the belief system was me saying, what could these people learn while here that will empower them for the rest of their lives? And this is the answer. So none of these answers are self serving. They happen to also help me. By the way, these are the ideal kind of people that I want to work with, are people that really embody all 25 of the bullet points. But at the end of the day, these are things if you do like you're going to be employable anywhere. Like anybody wants to hire people like this. So that was really important to me to feel like these were, that I can push you on it, knowing I'm making your life better. That if I came in and I rode you hard and I pushed you and I made huge demands of you, demands that no other job would ever, ever make. Because I wasn't thinking about just making you good here. I'm trying to set you up for the rest of your life, wherever you want to go. And that was something that re people that worked directly for me. Got it. It was transformative. And they would do anything for me. And, and I mean quite literally. Some of the guys, keeping in mind these are former drug dealers, ex gang members, some of them literally would have killed for me. So it was, it was just an awesome time. We were all there, there. They got to see me working. So I was, for almost two years, I was making protein bars every day. And it's a physically demanding job. I mean, this was before we really had all the fancy equipment, so a lot of it was manual. And so I'd come in and I say, which, which job is the worst job? And people would say, like, oh, this job's the worst job today because whatever, it's like extra sticky. Cool. I would take that job and I would do it with a smile and I would get people amped up and I would make sure everyone was excited. And that way they could see me doing the worst jobs. And I remember there was one time the toilet overflowed and there was literal human feces, like on the floor. And I told the janitor, don't clean it up, I'll clean it up. Because I wanted everyone in the company to know, I'll never ask you to do something I wouldn't do myself. So. And when they see that now, people are like, they're galvanized around that because my energy was always up, I was always excited. And they could tell I'm pushing you not for me, I'm pushing you for you. Like, because it was very open. If you only want to be here for two years, whatever, like, I'm totally fine with that. But while you're here, you're going to be striving to be the best version version of yourself. And now let's get really controversial. If Gen Z is not going to work long hours, they're going to get their lunch eaten. Because I promise some percentage of Gen Z, 100%, I guarantee this, I will put my life on it. Some percentage will work long hours. And the reason they'll do it is because it's the only way to win. And so I don't say it because like there's some glory in working long hours. Actually I say it because there's glory working in long hours. Like only the people that do all three win. Because if you're going to work hard and smart, and I'm going to work hard and smart, how do I beat you harder and smarter. But then what happens when the hardest working guy, the smartest working guy, is also the longest working guy? He's going to win. So there are only three things that you have in your control in that might as well do all three. So here's why people push back on that. Because they don't yet realize that you can make the demand that you make a living doing what you you love. Once they realize that, once they realize what is most true to them in the universe, whatever that is, for me, it's pulling people out of the matrix that sits at the core of my being. I'm going to do that whether I make money or not. So at the core of my being is a desire to help other people free themselves from their own limitations and to see them execute on their potential at the absolute highest level. So I've made the demand that that's how I generate wealth. Okay, fantastic. So now even if I'm losing, I'm going to be having a great, great time. And I know that for me to win and execute and beat all the other people trying to play the same game that I'm playing, I've got to work harder, work smarter and work longer, period. So it's only when you hate your job, you feel like you're doing it in service to somebody else and all of that, that it's like, well, why would I do all three? Because their, their mentality is already so skewed. They already believe that they're in a job where they're being taken Advantage of nobody that works for me feels like that. At least that's my goal. Inevitably someone will, but my goal is to make, make sure that people don't feel that way. And if they do, I have failed.

[Brian Rose]

It's almost like they're in a martial arts academy. And again, like you said, it's like the, the, you know, making protein bars is just how you pay the tuition and we're building. You're forging human beings.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

And if you get people to buy into that, and again, it's self fulfilling, if they buy into it, then they actually are becoming those people. I haven't really heard of that kind of ethos before. I mean, that's pretty unique, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I certainly hadn't seen it.

[Brian Rose]

And this, you slowly kind of identified based on your values and how you wanted to work in your own personality. And kind of echo these, these 25 steps.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It really was me going, what are the things that I did to my own mindset to, you know, go from being broke to being actually able to execute on a business? And then the other was, I don't want to feel parasitic like I could feel. So, you know, whatever. Almost 10 years ago now, Jen, or sorry, millennials are really starting to be felt in the workforce and there was like this disconnect at a stereotype level of what a millennial was, you know, the lazy, entitled, all that and myself and what I believed were necessary for success. So. And if you take it from that, you might really understand it. This isn't me placing a value judgment. This is me going. Success is one human convincing another human to buy something in the traditional business sense.

[Brian Rose]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's not the only form of success. But in a traditional business form of success, it's one human being convincing another human being. And even broader than that, let's throw sports in there. Like, there's going to be so many things that fall into this category that if you're going to have success at the highest level, you've got to convince another human being to be dazzled. The only way to dazzle people is to set the bar ridiculously high and then surpass all expectations. It is not to manage expectations, to set the bar low under promise and over deliver. That's what people normally want to do. But that doesn't dazzle anybody. That may make you a consistent player. Like, okay, cool, you're great off the bench. You come in, you play your seven minutes. Awesome, well done. That's very different than being winning the Ballon d'. Or. Right. So two different universes so if you want to win the Ballon d', or, you're going to be at out there. Rain, sleet, hail, shine, snow, doesn't matter. You're going to be out there doing your thousand shots on goal a day. A thousand shots. A thousand shots. A thousand shots. Like it's just. That's it. You have to become capable of the extraordinary

[Brian Rose]

strong. I was, I was thinking about something else. These values of Team Quest came from eight and a half years that you had wasted in your mind at a previous company. Although you might argue that these values came from doing all the wrong things, things for the wrong time. Can you just speak on that briefly because at one point, well, we might not be talking, you might be writing copy in an island in Greece right now if you had chose to walk away from that job. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So my journey goes something like this. I go to film school, think that I'm going to graduate film, top my class, get a three picture deal and be off to the races. And it does not quite work like that. And my senior year I crashed and burned our two artistically and got out. I'm teaching film. I'm desperately trying to figure out how I'm going to break into the industry. And I meet these two guys who would later become my partners in Quest. But first I meet them as these two successful entrepreneurs and they say, hey, we're starting a company. You're coming to the world with your handout. Right now you want to be an artist, you need to be able to control the art. You're never going to be able to control the art until you control the resources. So why don't you come learn about business, become a copywriter. That was the job they had available in this technology company called Awareness Tech and come, come be the copywriter for us. But don't think of yourself as a copywriter. Think of yourself as a potential partner in the company. And you really could become a partner in the company if you are performing at that level. So you can have any job in the company you want, but you have to become the right person for the job. So I knew that I was going to have the blood, sweat and tears and get new skills and all of that. And I'm definitely shortening the story, but that was my mentality coming in long story short, I do that. I take them very seriously. I claw them my way up. By the time we exited the company, I was an equity owner in the company and I was the chief marketing officer. So I'd gone from copywriter to partner. But about the six year mark, even though I had done that and even though I was making more money than I'd ever made in my life, I was profoundly unhappy and I had decided that I just couldn't do this anymore. And my wife and I were going to move to Greece. And my wife is Greek. We're going to move to, to Greece. And I was going to learn, really learn the language. Like I speak it a bit, but like I was really going to learn the language. We're going to be in a beautiful location somewhere where we could live inexpensively and that was it. I was going to do what made me feel alive. So it was that notion of if you do what you love, if you make the demand that you earn your living doing something you love, even if you're failing, you're having a great time. And so that was my thing, going to do that, go into my partners. And I said, look guys, here's your equity back. If I don't cross the finish line, I don't think I should get anything for it. Thank you. It's been amazing, but I'm so unhappy. I just can't keep doing this. They were shocked. I'm driving home, I'm literally pulling into my driveway and my phone rings and they're like, come out to dinner with us. So I'm like, I was actually on the phone with my wife saying, I did it. Like, we're going, it's all over. It's amazing. I'm gonna be happy again. And I said, they just invited me out to dinner. You know, out of respect for these guys, I'm gonna go. So go to dinner. And they say the now famous words, we could do this without you, but we, we don't want to. And that let me reconnect to the brotherhood and think about something other than the money. It had so been about the money and gaining access to resources and all that, that just. I didn't have any passion, any interest. I had sort of lost that sense of real deep. I mean, it really was more than friendship, it really was brotherhood and had lost that sense of it and wanted to reconnect to that and put that back at the center. So I said, look, I'll come, come back. But under one stipulation, we never do anything again to chase money. And if we put at the center of our brand ethos that we're going to build something that creates value, that it's going to be us, like authentically us, that I'm not hiding behind a corporate veil, but it's really going to be us as people building this and make it a unique fingerprint of the three of us, hence the belief system and all that, to filter the world and find the people who think like we think, then I'm in. But that's the only way that I'll ever do it again. And they were like, we actually agree. We felt the same way for a long time. And it's just nobody had really, like, planted a flag and said, enough is enough. So over the next two and a half years, we sold that company. We began thinking about what the next thing would be, and for three very different reasons, that answer ended up being Quest, which we really did found on principles of value community building. And when I say value, meaning adding value to the customer, so you can ask two questions. What adds more value and what brings more profit? And sometimes they're not the same. And so whenever those two were in conflict, we would go with whatever added more value. And it. The irony of all ironies is once we stopped prioritizing money and we started prioritizing value and community, we ended up making at Quest more in a day than we made at our previous technology company annually. So it was crazy.

[Brian Rose]

I'm getting. Can you. Can you speak on that a little bit further? Because it sounds like some fairy tale where if you try to pump value out. And I had Alex Icahn on here and his wife Mimi. They're a great couple here in London. And he said one point, he said, Brian, he's like, if you want to be rich, no one cares that you want to be rich. What they care about is if you can give them value and if you can provide enough value, then maybe that other thing will happen. But, you know, it's one thing to say it, but, you know, you kind of lived it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. And the important thing to remember is I lived it not because I'm smart. I lived it because I was so dumb that I got so angry and upset with myself that I just rebelled in the opposite direction. So I chased money so hard, and I wasn't like a greed is good guy, but, like, I was literally just thinking, like, how do we get more profit out of every customer? Right? And that's how you think of them. It's like, all right, I've got, you know, 250,000 customers, and what could we do to get an extra $2 out of. Of each one of them? Like, that's so gross. Like, when you think like that, it makes you. It puts you in a weird head space because I don't think animals are wired like that. Certainly I'm not. So it didn't make me feel good about myself. And then it's hard. So I wasn't even, like. Not like we were having big wins. So it was like, yes, we were making money, but it's like. Like, it just wasn't that impressive. Right? So you're working your ass off because we're working hard, smart, and very long at hours, making good money, but not like that windfall, you know, that we were hoping for. And you're not feeling great about yourself, and you're not passionate about the product, and, like, you don't get the connection of, like, wow, I did something amazing for these people, and they're writing in to thank me. Like, I feel really good about that. We had none of it. So it was like, after doing that for six years, I was just like, this. I can't do it anymore. I am. I'm literally at a neurochemical state of like. Like, not being willing to stay here. Like, I. Yeah, I understand neurochemistry enough to know what was going on. It was just like, dude, I'm just in a bad zone. Like, this sucks. Every day sucks. Monday sucks, Tuesday sucks. Thursday sucks. Like, it all sucked. So I was like, this is dumb. I need to shake out of this. I need to change something radically. So, you know, and. And really going beyond that, because it isn't a Pollyanna tale of, like, all you have to do is add value, because you have to add value in a way that's financially sound. You have to be empowered financially to keep this all going, to push things forward. Like, if you're not. If you don't know how to build a business, like, none of the wanting to be nice works and this. And we. I talked about it a little bit earlier, but now let's really go deep. I want to bite people's eyes out when they tell. When I say, what would you like to know? I'll teach you anything about business that I know. What do you want to know? They're like, I just want to help people, man. What am I supposed to do with that? Awesome. Go ladle at a soup kitchen. Right? But that's not what they want, rightfully. So if you want fulfillment, and if that's what you mean by you want to help people, you want to feel fulfilled, you want to feel good, you want to add value to other people, the key ingredient to that is what's called techni. Getting good at something and then applying that skill. Right? Think about all this stuff Bill Gates has learned and now he's going to use it to cure malaria. His ability to organize large disparate groups of people to get them focused on one task, to, you know, amass the resources that he's amassed and point that at it, and to work with governments and non governmental agencies alike and get them all focused on this one problem. He's going to feel really good about that when he can run the numbers on how many children he saved because he took a skill that he'd gotten good at. And what really drives me nuts is today people just want to skip to feeling good about having helped, but they don't even know in what way. Like, what are you fucking good at? What are you best in class? Class it. What is that thing that you're willing to dedicate the next 15 or 20 years of your life just to getting good once you know that once you are ungodly talented at something. Once people around the world point and go, that guy knows his shit. Like that guy knows what he's talking about. And let me tell you, long before I stepped out front and people started talking about me in the media, people were talking about me behind closed doors, like wanting to come and like sit with me to get counseling on marketing and community building and how to understand social media, media and all that. And it was like all invisible and, and there are hundreds of thousands of people like this right now. There's just no visibility. But because social media is changing the way that people think about their career path. And what they want is the visibility, they want the attention, they want the accolades. But they don't understand all of that stuff is a byproduct of having spent decades, heads down getting really good. And here's the best part. Nothing, none of these, the accolades, none of it, not the money, nothing is nearly as intoxicating, is how good you will feel about yourself. Knowing I'm better than everyone on this planet at this thing. No one can touch me. I'll outperform you like six ways a Sunday. You can't intimidate me, you can't make me nervous. Nothing, because this is what I know, this is what I do. But like, that scares me. The way that as a culture we're trying to make move past that. But it only scares me a little bit because I the people that allow themselves to fall prey to that, my heart breaks for them. Some percentage won't. Whether you're a millennial, a gen Z, a baby boomer, doesn't matter. Some percentage gets to win in a game with humans, you have to dazzle. And to dazzle, you have to be the best. And as long as people understand that those people, the people that get that however small or large that percentage. Percentage is, they will win. They will be the ones that take things over. They will be the ones that find a way. They don't make excuses. They don't blame. They don't say it's the government's fault. They don't say it's bad regulations, bad birth, I was abused by my parents. They don't waste time with that bullshit. They just go, okay, the only way to win is to be better than everyone else. Awesome. I'm gonna go get better than everyone else. Those people will always rule the world.

[Brian Rose]

Which is why you have Robert Greene on your show talking about mastery.

[Tom Bilyeu]

100% right?

[Brian Rose]

Because he says it all right there. Go master something. Take your 10 years or your 10,000 hours. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's the only way.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, Right. Yeah. You mentioned millennials there. Tell me about the famous Simon Sinek millennial clip. What do you make of it in retrospect? And why the hell was it on someone else's YouTube channel?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So you want to talk about wanting to punch myself in the face it. So the millennial clip was amazing because he really touched on a nerve. And Simon's ability to articulate an idea is phenomenal. And so he really. And it was one of those where

[Brian Rose]

you're not too bad yourself.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, thank you, sir. It was one of those moments where a truly great artist. I don't know that's the right word for him, but we'll use that. A truly great artist having the performance of his lifetime. And I've seen him give that talk a bit little other times, and somehow, like, it's still a plus by anybody else's standards. But on when he gave it with me, it was flawless. He didn't stumble on a word. He didn't. I mean, it just. It was perfect. And so it allowed it with none of the, like, awkwardness that can happen whenever somebody's talking. That was all gone. It was just delivered perfectly at a moment where it's divisive, so some people just agree with him and can't believe it, and heads nodding and, oh, my God, this guy's amazing. And then other people, like, hate following it and watching it, thinking, like, what does he know? And he's stereotyping us all. And not everybody's like that. And so there was just enough friction to get it passed around. Some were passing it because they loved it. Some were passing it because they hated it. But to me, no matter how you shake it or bake it, it is the insight on millennials, the stereotype of millennials, for sure. So I think it gave a lot of people the framework with which to understand. It got over 160 million views. The reason it got picked up by somebody else is the reason that I now work with vaynertalent. Because sometimes looking at your own content, it becomes hard to understand, like, all the pieces to pull and put out there. And I think that those guys are uniquely gifted at that. They're like, the way that they handle the back end is just unbelievable. So that kind of thing is really, really important. If there are any content creators watching this show, you create a piece of content, you're about 10% of the way done. The other 90% is going in and understanding, like, what movements within this piece are worth pulling out, putting out organically paid. Like, how do we then push that all out? What platform does it go out on? Some bites are going to perform on Facebook, some are going to perform on Instagram. So somebody else watching our content saw that because I was still in the mode of I'm doing this for my employees and sure, if it happens to get out, great. But I wasn't thinking about maximizing my following now seeing how obvious that clip was with my new perspective. Yeah, I want to punch myself.

[Brian Rose]

But again, you use that pain point to take an action step for sure, which was to hire a Vayner talent. And now you've got someone else perspective that can look at your content and say, well, wait a second. This right here will work over here. And if I talk to this person here, they're gonna. Something will happen. Okay. And that's what they specialize in.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Brian Rose]

Okay. Wow. And again, still, regardless, even though if it was 7 million views on this YouTube channel, you know, it was your

[Tom Bilyeu]

show, it didn't hurt.

[Brian Rose]

So that's another way of looking at

[Tom Bilyeu]

it definitely didn't hurt.

[Brian Rose]

But it was shared on Facebook. That's where it got the hundred million.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So it got 160 on Facebook, but we were also on places like Australian mtv, played the clip and all kinds of news outlets, and it was insanity. And it was one of those. I got a phone or a text from one of my employees back at Quest and he goes, hey, congrats on the video hitting 10 million. Text him back. You mean 1 million? He's like, no, it's at 10 million. Go to our webpage. I'm like, it's not at 10 million, man. And he was like, no, no, no, let me show you a screenshot. And then it was the other page. And by the time I checked so in. In the span like, of an hour of when he first texted me to, when I realized where it was, it was at 14 million and then 20 million and then 40 million and then a hun. It was insanity. Never seen anything, like, until you experience real virality, it's like, it's dizzying.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. It's a weird thing. And did you ever try to claim that content back or do anything?

[Tom Bilyeu]

We asked them to tag us and stuff, which they did. Did. But by then it was like most of the virality was sort of over. So that wasn't like a huge windfall for us.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah, yeah. In retrospect, did people know Simon more than you guys?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, rightly so and infinitely more. They knew him. I mean, I. I think I say or something like that in the entire, like, 10 minute clip.

[Brian Rose]

You're doing me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Simon was shining. Like, let him do his thing. It was. It really was beautiful. And. And I was, as a leader, I was grateful to have that answer. So. So for me, the win there was. I thought it was the de facto answer on Millennials, period. And the one time that it came, like, background, I was at a burger restaurant in America called Shake Shack, and one of the guys working in the back comes running up and goes, aren't you the guy from YouTube? So I was like, yes.

[Brian Rose]

And that was it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that was my big Simon Sinek moment.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. No, that's cool. I think it was a game changer for Simon, though. I think a lot of people change.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very gracious about that.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. We came back to London. I think he was interviewed on stage, and they kind of led with that video, you know. But again, it's fascinating when you see something go viral or kind of viral. I mean, that's a super viral. But, like, you know, we've had clips that kind of just go off. And again, it's that perfect combination of something most likely they've said before. But they get it just right with you with the just right camera, it's clipped out, just the right timing. And then, of course, it hits the nerve. Divisive. Great word. Half against, half for. And then all of a sudden it just starts going and it's amazing. I always feel good about those things because, like, when the guest comes in, including you today, I always say, like, I want to put not the best version of Tom Ford, but I want everyone to understand this man as much as humanly possible. And so if part of you gets out there and someone's like, this is amazing, and it starts blowing up, I just. I don't know, I always feel great about it totally.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I get that very much.

[Brian Rose]

It's just like, who do you want to have on your show? I'm sure you get asked that all the time, but what do you say when people say that? Do you have, like, the wish list, the bucket list, that kind of thing?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I do. Jay Z would be amazing. I think he's the current quintessential American dream story. And I say American dream with, like, the. The way that it used to inspire people around the world. I really, truly believe, even in today's world, that you can do anything you set your mind mind to. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but that's what makes Jay Z's story so interesting is he grew up in a really rough neighborhood. Nothing was handed to him, felt like he had to deal drugs. He shot his own brother, which is a whole fascinating story, and then just rises up above that, not only to get famous as a very talented musician, but to become a legitimate and effective businessman. So that story inspires the living daylights out of me. So I think that a lot of people will be moved by that. And I think I could get an interview out of him that knows nobody else would. Barack Obama, right now. Every day that passes, I think people's vision of who he is changes. And I think they're very open to hearing him now in a way that they weren't. And I'm not political in the slightest. But I've really been interested to interview him again because I think I can take him somewhere that he's never gone in an interview before. And then there's a lot of people that, like, just do really inspiring stuff that we have in our bucket list. People like, we've already interviewed him, but he was a real bucket. Bucket Lister. David Goggins.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which. Oh, my God, that guy changed me in real time, like being on set with him. He's a Navy SEAL, but he's the Navy SEAL that other Navy SEALs go, no, no, this guy's hardcore. And he. There was a book called Living with a Seal written by Jesse Itzler. Okay, So I believe Jesse Itzler is a billionaire. His wife certainly is. I think together they're worth multi billions. Just very talented, entrepreneurial family. And he felt he could get tougher. And so he hired a Navy Seal to live with him for a month and wrote a book about it called Living with a Seal. He did not reveal who the seal was. Book comes out. My team pitches me on Jesse Itzler, and I was like, I'm sure Jesse's amazing, but give me the seal. Like, this guy sounds incredible. And they're like, well, they haven't announced who he is. And I'm like, come on, guys, we can find him. So. So they start trying to find him. And then three weeks into our mission to find him, they announced who he was for whatever reason. And so they then got a hold of him, got him on the show. He's. He changed me probably more than any other guest.

[Brian Rose]

I mean, just in real time on the show. Yeah, because you felt the energy behind the message, and you're like, wow, 100%. Yeah, that just changed me, is what you're thinking. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, yeah, definitely.

[Brian Rose]

Yeah. Then that's the greatest part of our jobs. You could argue that's why we're doing. Doing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, for sure.

[Brian Rose]

Because the same thing happens with me. And that's the beauty of doing a live show, because, let's be honest, most like, you know, conversations on YouTube between two people are. Are not in the same room.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Brian Rose]

So the beauty of doing this. And again, another barrier to entry, as you talked about. And, like, I've waited two years for a guest to come here, and then we just wait because it's got to be here. But, yeah, I. I get physically, mentally changed by the guests because they put these imprints on my brain. Like, you know, what would Jaco say? That kind of thing. I would argue, though, if you're gonna go and speak with Obama or Jay Z, this thought just came to me that you do it in a format like this because it's that one moment where you can go deep with Barack or deep with Jay, and if there's a hundred people watching, I'm just saying you might not get the version you want, and you're a deep dude. And I'm just saying maybe two hours in a room with the two of you, you might get something that, I mean, literally could be epic. Like, they'll play that footage when the they die.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Brian Rose]

And that's what I mean. I don't know. That's what I always think. I'm always thinking I'm getting a snapshot of this human that 400 years from now, they can look back and be like, that's what Tom was. That's who Tom is at the time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's just Interesting.

[Brian Rose]

I'm always open a couple questions about you, your personal kind of habits. Is there anything you changed about your game on a daily basis that when you did you were like okay, I'm just able to 10x whatever my happiness, my production, my value created to the world. There's any kind of habit you have or set of habits. These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events and amazing community. Community and much much more. Now back to the rest of the show. Tom, I always ask everybody a few questions at the end you might know they're coming but that's all right. If you could make a phone call. The 20 year old Tom, give that young man a bit of advice. I guess he's still in film school at the time, probably thinking about the three picture deal and the merchandising deal and all that stuff that's going to come afterwards. Give that young man a bit of advice. What would you tell them?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very easy. You have a fixed mindset. Right now you believe your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and they are not my friend. They can be developed. So right now be honest. You're not a very good filmmaker but you can become one if you're willing to put in the work. So get on a path of growing and developing and understand any skill or talent can be developed. Because my whole thing was I wanted to be naturally talented and I to wanted wasn't and it was very heartbreaking and very hard. And so until I discovered the whole notion of a growth mindset that I could work my way to that I was a lost cause. So if I could have come to that years and years earlier, that would be powerful.

[Brian Rose]

Best advice you ever received.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'll give you this one. My father in law once pulled me aside. He was at this time I was, I don't know even think I had a job when he told me this. And he has been very successful. His life story is incredible. Starts in this tiny town, tiny village in the mountains of Cyprus and works his way up to running one of the largest shipping companies here in London. I mean it's just an unbelievable story. So you would think I would listen to anything he said. And he pulled me aside and he said Tom, I'm going to tell you the secret to being successful. Yes, please Andreas, tell me. And. And he goes, no more about any meeting, deal, whatever it is, no more about it than anyone else in the room always. And I was like I get that, Andreas, but my boss doesn't really incentivize people to be like that. If I put ideas out there, he's really just going to shut me down. And so knowing now how I sounded to him, he just went quiet and I didn't really think anything of it. Three years later, I'm now in business trying to learn this entrepreneurial thing and I realized, you know what I need to do? I need every room I go into, I need to know more about it than the aha my father in law tried to tell me. And at that moment, literally the next time I saw him, I said, andreas, I have to apologize to you. You gave me what may be the single greatest piece of advice in my life three years ago and I've ignored you for the last three years. But now, like a blinding flash of insight, I now understand how genius that is. And if you look at impact theory and what I'm doing, my only game is to be the most well researched interviewer that's ever walked into an interview ever. Like that's my shtick, so. And all of that stems from that realization that you can get good at anything. The only way humans are dazzled is by being capable of the extraordinary. When you know more about a topic than anyone else in the room, you can put more deal pieces together, you know what to push on, what to give on all of that, you know, the personalities in the room, you can orchestrate.

[Brian Rose]

It's great advice. Lastly, to that 20 year old that's watching us, that used to be you anywhere in the world except for maybe China because I don't know if YouTube goes there yet. What advice do you give to them? Okay, they're the Gen Z, they're coming up. Everyone's discounting them, saying they're, you know, addicted to their phones. What advice do you give to them?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. That's it. So that to me is so core and fundamental and if someone had given me that advice then that would be my best piece of advice. But sadly I had to learn this one the hard way. So I find that self esteem everyone up and the reason it does is not because they have it, because I think you need self esteem and when you don't have self esteem, all hell breaks loose. That's when people truly become at risk for suicide. You need some self esteem, but what you build your self esteem around is a choice. But going back to that notion of this is water, when and where you made your choice may have been handed to you by your parents, they may have rewarded you emotionally for doing a certain thing. And so that became your identity, became the thing that you built your self esteem around, was just always that way for you. So you've never known anything else. So for me it was being smart and being right. That was how I had come to define myself and think positively about myself. And so because of that, I found myself arguing for stupid ide ideas because they were mine. And I so wanted to be right. I so wanted people to perceive me as smart that I would just keep pushing. And I remember one day in a business meeting, I convinced my business partners of an idea that I knew was a bad idea. There was a voice in my head screaming, you want to talk about being aware even when you can't stop yourself? I had this voice in my head screaming, this is the wrong idea. You know it's the wrong idea because it's going to move us away from our goals. So why, why on earth are you arguing for this? And I ended up winning the argument and they actually acquiesced and they said, fine, we'll do it your way. And I had this existential moment of panic where I was like, I just got what I wanted, but it's moving me away from my goals. So if this is my goal and supposedly I'm acting in accordance with my goals, what do I really want? Because I just did something that got. It made me feel good about myself. I've. It felt right, but it moved me away from my goals. So at that moment I realized, wait a second, I'm building my self esteem around something that's so fragile because I'm so routinely thankfully around people smarter than me. It makes me feel bad about myself. It makes me want to crawl away, spend less time around them. And then also I'm wrong a lot, but so be it. If you can look past that and then identify the right answer faster than anyone else, put the energy behind that right answer. Tell people, like, man, this was so and so's idea. It was incredible. Incredible. Never trying to steal their idea, but just trying to be the energy, get people excited, make sure that that crosses the finish line. Like once I switched my self esteem around that then I felt good. I could say, ryan, you're absolutely right. I'm totally wrong about that. Thank you for that insight. Like, that's incredible. In fact, I just said something to you a few minutes ago and you were like, no, please tell me. And there was like legitimate, like you actually wanted to know because you knew I'm going to be empowered by this piece of knowledge. Like when you think like, like that, that's when you really get empowered because everyone is better than you at something. And my thing was get really good at sitting at their feet and learning. Once you can do that, once you can humble yourself, once you're like, it's not even so much humbling yourself because I don't even like, it doesn't impact my ego. My ego's driven by getting that piece of knowledge. So I want to be empowered, I want to be stronger, I want to learn something, I want to grow. So I built my self esteem around being the learner and identifying the right right answer and being willing to admit when I was wrong. That changed everything in my life.

[Brian Rose]

Powerful stuff. Thank you, Tom. I still remember when someone sent me the first clip of Inside Quest and they were like, look at these guys, look what they're doing. They're doing what you're doing. They're the competition. And I just, right away I said to him, what are you talking about? Let's look at what they're doing. Look at this cool thing. Look at this pre roll they're taking pictures behind. Look, they're laughing. Look at the way he structures the questions. Look at the timeline along the bottom of the screen. Like, this is amazing stuff, what they're doing. And I never look at media as competition. And I don't know because I grew up on Joe Rogan and he inspired me to do this show and he invited me on the show and for him, it's like, we don't play this old media game of scarcity. It's like we all create, and when we all create, everyone wins. And so, like, even when I ever go back to my bank competition scarcity mindset, I always overcompensate and say, no, no, no, no, let's go out of our way and bring these people onto our show and talk about their content and promote their stuff and be like, well, let's look what they're doing different and how can we make this better? And why did he make that choice and what can we do? And so, and when your clip goes viral, well, how, how can we not miss that? Or maybe we want that to happen too, you know, that kind of thing. And so it was great seeing your stuff. I love watching you from a distance. I love the fact that you have, you know, somewhat similar tastes as we do, as in looking for people that necessarily aren't famous but have this message. And that means, and here's the real truth People that no one's going to want to hear is that nine out of 10 of your guests, they're a blip. And no one's like, eh, eh. And you're like, are you kidding me? And I know you've had this experience, Are you kidding me? There's gold in this episode and if you guys just watch this, it would be a game changer. And yet you choose to watch this here. But again, that's why very few people are in the long form content business because it's not about quick rewards, it's not about your ego, it's not even about people listening. What you think is important, you just gotta put it out honestly for the sake of just putting it out there, in my opinion. And if you put it out with that energy of, I'm not trying to make a short term profit, I'm not trying to turn it into this. I think people feel the purity and they feel the authenticity and that's what a success is. And if you look at the independent media that's become a success, it's usually, usually from men and women that are creating it in that way. And you're doing that and it's amazing to see. I love seeing it. You're much better in person, as in, it's great to get inside your head. You don't get a chance to answer questions much. I know you've done some episodes where you put yourself in the chair and I do that once a year too. And it's great. But it's nice to see you just talk about this stuff and you know, you have real ip, like real intellectual property that's your own. So. I can't wait for the book. I like the fact that you're very controversial about what you say because you have to be that these days it's the only way people get lessons and get information. So big honor having you here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you.

[Brian Rose]

I'm gonna probably pick your brain after the episode's over for your thoughts. I always want like constructive criticism on what we're doing too, but just super excited where you're going. Those 25 sets of beliefs really got me excited as I need to go further and articulate the London real vision. Because it starts off with a feeling in your gut about what's important, but sometimes you get so busy doing the thing and then you realize that people are like, what do you do? And you can't just say, go watch 25 episodes, because that's what you kind of have to do for a show to really understand what it's all about. So thanks for being here, dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you for having me, man. I. I really am a huge believer in your show and it's been just such a main staple in my research for so many of the guests. So I. I really am grateful.

[Brian Rose]

Cool, man. Awesome. Well, as we say on London Real, it's about the journey. I wish you well on yours and check back with us in a little while and let's do this again. Would love to. All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for that. Thank you. Everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to itunes, go to Stitcher Rate and review us. That helps us build this community and that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible. And you guys rating and reviewing really helps with that. Alright guys, thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Get that AMEX Gold card ready. I'm too tired to cook.

[Brian Rose]

We feeling Five Guys or the Cheesecake Factory? Both earn up to $120,20 a year in statement credits of participating partners. Up to $10 each month when you pay with the AMEX Gold card. Learn [e-mail] Explore Gold enrollment required terms apply.