← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Proven Millionaire Habits to Start Practicing Today | Bedros Keullian (Archived Episode)
01:46:53
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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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Tom Bilyeu
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Commercial Narrator
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Tom Bilyeu
predictions and saving lenders billions. Better predictions, better for your business with VantageScore. What's up guys? I am so excited to bring you today's episode with a powerful rags to riches story with a self made millionaire. Bedros Kulian is a mastermind entrepreneur with a savage mindset for success. And he's behind multiple brands and businesses, including his own Fit Body Bootcamp. Today we're exposing how hyper successful people get their morning routine and habits right, how to set yourself up to win the battle of business, and the rules and rituals you need around your social media use. I hope you guys love listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. And if you do, please leave a review of our podcast. It really is the best way to support what we're doing so that we can get the show out to more people so that they can develop an unbeatable mindset for business and success. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Bedroom. Welcome back to the show, Tom.
- [01:38]
Bedros Keuilian
Thank you for having me again.
- [01:39]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm stoked, man. So why is it that people that are hyper successful are so obsessed with getting their morning routine right? And what should everybody watching this right now do to make theirs crispy?
- [01:51]
Bedros Keuilian
That's a really good question. I think the morning routine is something that will set anybody up for success, right? Because when you wake up and I wake up and the next guy wakes up, we all have about the same number of time. About the same, actually. Exactly the same number of time. And so since we know that that means what you do versus what I do matters. And so if I'm screen sucking the moment I get up, I'm looking at social media, what's going on Facebook, who's talking about what on Instagram. And. And you're like, hey, I've got this GSD list. I call it the get shit done list. And the GSD list is you're just gonna wake up and dominate your day. Like my Morning routine is wake up, never hit the snooze button. We've talked about this on your show previously, drink my 30 ounces of water. Cause Sean Stephenson said so. And then take a shower and then end up downstairs with my protein shake and my coffee and more water and work off my GSD list. Like that sets me up to win. Checking in on social media is not part of my morning routine. Because all of a sudden, something on social media might trigger me to feel like I'm missing out. Might trigger me to feel like I should have been at an event. Might trigger me to feel like a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, a sense of whatever. And any of those things, any of those feelings and emotions are not things that I would take into the battle of business. And I'm in the battle of business because when I make money, I can have a greater sense of meaning with it. And. And so I cannot take emotions and feelings and thoughts that I got from social media, especially in the morning, to the battlefield of business where I do most of my heavy work in the morning. So that morning routine sets me up to win. And soon as I'm done with my GSD list by about 9am like, you can set your clock to me, I go right to the gym workout, intentionally put my phone in my cubby at the gym. And because again, I'm susceptible to looking at the screen. And if I'm doing that, all of a sudden my workout is less than stellar, which means I feel like a failure. And now I'm more likely to compound failure throughout the day. So that's how I look at it. So conversely, if I slept in, hit the snooze button, didn't drink 30 ounces of water, just took a sip of water. Now I'm going to be late to work. I feel rushed. The subconscious mind is telling me that I'm a loser, I'm a failure, I'm an imposter. How are you going to go lead a international franchise or a supplement company or a. Or write another book when you're a loser? Dude, right? The subconscious mind speaks to us. That's the inner critic. And so to shut down the inner critic and give voice to the inner advocate, a strong morning routine sets you up to win the day, you win the day, you win the week, and then off you go. You've won a year and then a decade.
- [04:28]
Tom Bilyeu
It's so crazy to me how much that matters. Like, you can get off by just a little, and your efficiency starts to be off. And then the day Just isn't as useful as it could have been. And it really does start with the morning, like getting people to understand. If you get the morning right, then the rest of your day, you're going to be able to be far more productive. And when you start stacking those things, that really is the difference between somebody that accomplishes a lot and somebody that doesn't. Look, I don't want to deny that intellect plays a big role. Education plays a big role. But if you are inefficient, to your point about, okay, we all have the same number of hours, so it comes down to how are you spending your time. But there's something like, I find myself wanting to say more words because there's something ineffable that I'm not capturing yet, which is there is a really subtle difference between a high performance day and a mediocre day. And when I think about, certainly the thing that has been my superpower is I'm able to generate momentum so I can go from standing still. Nobody knows who I am. Nobody believes in what I'm trying to do. We don't have a company incorporated, all of that. And then, you know, those first, like, getting the machine moving is so hard. That's what I can do. And whether that's a new project, whether that's a whole company, whatever, I can get those early things going. Every day feels like that. And on the days where I am battered and beaten psychologically and what I call hiding in bed, and I'm hiding in bed, and you just. Even if I just miss getting out of bed because I give myself 10 minutes, if I get out of bed in 11 minutes, I'm like, ugh, I know where this goes. There's something I'm pushing against that is, stop. Either I didn't go to bed on time, I didn't sleep well, I'm stressed, whatever. But there's something going on that made getting up unusually hard that day. And then it just spirals. And so getting people to understand how important it is to do the most important things first, do them efficiently, get the psychological momentum going so that you can believe in yourself. You have that credibility. You get going. It really makes a big difference. But it's hard to explain.
- [06:52]
Bedros Keuilian
It is hard to explain, but sometimes you don't need an explanation. For example, if you just watch what winners do and do what they do, odds are you will eventually have a similar outcome. Great example is, I believed. I believe you may have shared this at either Fleischman's elevator nights when we all Spoke there, or it might have been on when you were kind enough to come and do my podcast. But you said, if I wake up within. Correct me if I'm wrong. If I wake up within 20 minutes of my alarm going off, I don't go back to sleep. I just get up. I'm like, I'm adopting that. I'm adopting that. Now, if it was some crackhead who robs banks, says that, I may not adopt that, but you're someone I respect that I want to be like and emulate. You know what? I'm going to add that to my repertoire. Like, I don't know why Sean wrote in his book that you need to drink 30 ounces of water in the morning. I don't care why. I trust him, and I trust that he's a great scientist and he's all about human optimization. I'm going to do that. I trust you. As an entrepreneur and someone I look up to in this category of life, I'm going to do that. And so I just started adopting things. And I think there's a gift to just being, for lack of a better term, ignorant. Like, you know, ignorance is bliss.
- [08:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
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Bedros Keuilian
So much of my success has just been because no one told me that I couldn't fly. No one said those. You don't have wings. And so I was like, watch this. And I flew. You know, I mean, I created a software company with no software background, a franchise without any. Well, that dropped out of college in 32 days, bro. Out of junior college. Right? They're like, well, you don't have a lot of green.
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Tom Bilyeu
Let's pause on that. Why did you drop out?
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Bedros Keuilian
I just felt like I didn't belong. I was constantly. Just like high school, I felt constantly behind, and I figured, all right, I'm going to go to junior college and see if I can get on track. Because, you know, they say, go to college, you're new to. Like, I would be the first family member to graduate college because, remember, we escaped Soviet Union, came here when I was 6, and so it was a big deal. And I felt that pressure on me, and I truly wanted to have a college degree just to say, I've done this right? But just like high school, it felt like I didn't belong. It felt like I would have to study three or four or five times harder than everyone else. And I remember in high school, the foil method. Remember foil first inner outer last.
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Tom Bilyeu
Nope.
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Bedros Keuilian
See that? No one does.
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Tom Bilyeu
Never heard that.
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Bedros Keuilian
But it was part of algebra or something.
- [09:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, God, I cheated my way through all of mathematics. I have no idea.
- [09:10]
Bedros Keuilian
God bless you. I was so bad at it that I remember showing my answer and the teacher going, but that's. You're not going to get credit because you didn't do foil. And this is the only thing I remember about high school because she, like chastised me so much. She says, you didn't do the first inner outer last. You didn't show your work, yet you got the answer. I remember thinking, I'm going to be an entrepreneur, man. I'm going to produce the results. I knew that I was going to be my own boss. I'm going to be my own boss. I need to produce an outcome, and people are going to produce outcomes for me. I don't care how they produce it, don't produce it unethically, don't produce it by cheating someone, killing someone, but produce the outcome I want and I will actually reward you for producing it faster instead of doing this amount of work. If you can do this amount of work and produce the outcome, our industry rewards that the education system doesn't. And so the same thing happened in College. So like 31, 32 days in, I'm like, all right, I'm out. I'm falling behind. I feel like a dumb ass. I'm having a study three, four times as much to remember things that I feel are irrelevant to where my path in life. And so I moved on. Was like, all right, full in entrepreneurship.
- [10:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Did any of that chip away at your belief that you could do the entrepreneurship thing? Or you just knew this isn't going to matter?
- [10:20]
Bedros Keuilian
I felt that I was so unemployable in terms of, like, every job I had gotten fired from also, right? Except for Disneyland. I worked at Disneyland for six and a half years. I didn't get fired. I quit every other job. I got fired from the bagel store on Balboa Island, Adventure City, you name it, every place. And so I was like, I'm unemployable. No one wants to employ me. I know I can be a better boss, like, and have people like me who are, I don't know, maybe a bit of misfits, free thinkers, outcome producers, without showing the work. Work for me and I'll create my own little tribe. I've always known I was a black sheep. And so school and not doing well in school did not deter me from being an entrepreneur. In fact, all it did was say, this is your only path, dude. No one's going to employ you. You're unemployable. You're going to lose every job you have. And it was because of the conflict that I have. I always questioned authority and I think that's a great behavior to have. But know that if you constantly question authority, you're probably not employable. Right. The whole idea of having a boss is they're your source of authority. And so I always questioned authority, I questioned education system. And so I knew that I had to beat my own path. So all it did is solidify my resolve.
- [11:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting, the idea of questioning authority. So that's always been my problem. I've always had a problem with authority. I'm not even sure. So I mean, look, 50% of us is hardwired. So I'll say that for whatever reason, I've just always had an issue with that. So yeah, that's definitely. But I'm very employable. I was an amazing employee. So it's weird, it's like this bizarre conflict of. I hate it. I hate people being able to tell me what to do, which is why I was so hell bent to become my own boss, but I would silently conform. So it's really interesting. And bucking out of that is difficult. I actually want to talk about that. There's going to. I think a huge part of this conversation will end up being about that. But first I want to talk about imperfect action.
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Bedros Keuilian
Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
So we've got our morning routine. We know we need to be hyper efficient. I still think I failed to convey that real subtle nuance of what a big difference. But if people can just like you said, model the behavior, great. So people have that on lock. But they're going to. Most people are diminished by the failures, by not being good at school, by whatever. They've been kicked in the teeth enough in life so they convince themselves they're not gonna be able to do it. And the number of people, no matter how many times I say, cause I talk a lot about, you need to learn, right? So whatever you're gonna do, you're gonna learn about it. But then people end up in the death loop of like, oh, I'm gonna learn for nine years because I don't think I understand. And I'm like, no, no, no. If you learn something in the morning, you start using it in the afternoon. So like you have to go right away. Otherwise it's all going to be book knowledge is not going to be practical, it's going to be theoretical, it's not going to be applied. So what is imperfect action? And how have you mustered the courage to actually do it when you know that failure is so possible.
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Bedros Keuilian
So I'll start with the idea of failure first. And I learned from Napoleon Hill's book Outwitting the Devil that there is no such thing as failure. I have reframed it in my head, as I will experience temporary defeat many times in my life, but I will never experience failure. And once you accept that, why?
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Tom Bilyeu
What's failure? Why won't you experience?
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Bedros Keuilian
Failure is a choice. And so if you choose not to, like, if you choose not to drink any more water from that cup, no matter how much I make you, you choose not to drink it, it's not going to happen.
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Tom Bilyeu
So is failure when you actually stop trying.
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Bedros Keuilian
It's when you stop trying, it's a choice to stay down, right? And it's okay to stay down and gather your wits and then get back up, hence making it temporary defeat. The moment you choose to stay down because of not trying, you have given up. So let's just say giving up instead of failure. Failure shouldn't even exist. It's temporary defeat. So once I know that, then I'm like, well, there's no such thing as failure because I choose not to accept it or acknowledge it. Therefore, I will only see temporary defeats in life. And the more things that I attempt to do that are new, the more the higher the probability of having temporary defeats. However, each one of those defeats are a lesson that I could learn from and improve because the human mind and psyche and body are very adaptable. Playing ping pong against one of your guys here was different than playing against Lisa, your wife, who's a beast at it. And so I had to adopt. The body is so adaptable, so knowing that if I learn something first thing in the morning, I want to be able to use it as soon as possible. I don't want to wait till it's perfect. I don't want to wait till we have the trademark or the copyright. Like, I was the one out the gate launching Fit Body Bootcamp before it was trademark, and my attorney was like, stop. I will always lean into imperfect action because I do know that the universe will collude with me, will conspire with me. When I am leaning into imperfect action, I can always course correct as I go. See people, always. We're so black and white, bro. We are so black and white. And I was the king of black and white. Like, if I do this and if it doesn't work out, then I will fail well with that mindset. And if that's the only outcome you choose to accept that's scary, that it's either going to be a win or a fail. What if it's somewhere in the middle that there's a temporary defeat, and therefore you can back up the car and go down the next road. And then temporary defeat, back up the car again, go down the next road. So imperfect action tells me that the person, the universe, will reward the person who acts the quickest. That's just how the universal collective consciousness works. If we know that to be true, then I will take an idea that I learned, I will launch it immediately, and I will course correct as I go, and the universe will reward me because of that. And again, what do you mean when
- [15:50]
Tom Bilyeu
you say the universe?
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Bedros Keuilian
A.
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Tom Bilyeu
You're a man of faith, right?
- [15:55]
Bedros Keuilian
I am a man of faith that there's a God, a higher power. The book that you gave me, my friend, the Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell, really talks about consciousness and our human animal. We are consciousness riding in this meat sack. That's a human animal that has impulsively wants to eat and lean into comfort and convenience and greed. And, you know, if this was the only cup of water left and a few hours went by, one of us are going to want to attack it. That's what the human animal wants to do. Consciousness goes, I'm just going to look through these windows called the eyes. I'm going to control my human animal. Most people are their light. Their inner radiance is so stifled, the way I show it at the project, and we'll probably get into the project later, but imagine this light bulb, and it glows bright within. That's our radiance. We are connected to the source, to God, and all of our consciousness together is the universe. And so if I take that bulb and I put a black blanket over it, and another layer of black blanket and another black blanket, soon you barely see the glow. Most people, their radiance has been stifled because they put food, drugs, alcohol, infidelity, pornography, laziness, binge, watching television, all these layers of distraction over their radiance that's supposed to glow so bright that if you were able to remove all that, everyone's got that great consciousness. But all those blankets on top of your light stifles it. And therefore you become more of a human animal because you've stifled consciousness. And so the greatest work we can ever do in our life is the work we do on ourselves, which is really removing all of those layers of blankets so that the light can shine bright. And then you know this. You walk into somewhere and People are magnetically attracted to you. It's not for any other reason other than you've done the self work. Your Tom 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. Just like I'm Bedros 2.0, 3.0,.4.0. And therefore people are like man. There's something about this person that's the universal connection. We all have consciousness. Their human animal can see that this person is glowing brighter and they're attracted to that. And it's our job then to go. Let me help you expose your radiance as well.
- [18:15]
Tom Bilyeu
So the. How do you. How do you start pulling those napkins? The black cloth. How do you peel those off?
- [18:21]
Bedros Keuilian
Self awareness. Right? Self awareness first.
- [18:24]
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- [18:34]
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- [19:14]
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- [19:24]
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- [19:43]
Bedros Keuilian
So.
- [19:43]
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- [19:56]
Bedros Keuilian
Until you realize that you are a human animal. I realized that I was a human animal a lot. Meaning you have impulses impulsive, that you're emotional, that you react on emotion and not logic. That you make decisions on feelings. And sometimes those are somewhat permanent decisions based on temporary feelings. And we've all made those. I'm not pointing fingers. I was the king of making bad decisions on temporary feelings that later led to regret. But 11 years ago, I had this massive panic attack. And I talked about that in my book. And thank God, man, for that panic attack. Because I was 37 years old, I thought I was having a heart attack. I'm like, I'm at the peak of my prime fit Body bootcamp starting to thrive, like just blowing up. It's becoming this international brand. We got recognition from Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur magazine. Yet my marriage was starting to fall apart. My babies at the time, they're 14 or 15 and 17 now, they wouldn't come running to me when I'd come into the house because I gave off this tense energy, right? And I would impulsively just emotionally eat when I'd get home, bagels and cream cheese because I needed a dopamine hit. Yet I was running a fitness franchise. So I was incongruent with the fitness industry that I'm supposed to be in. I'm making videos at the time on YouTube from the chin up because I didn't really want to show the poor and out of shape that I was in. And so I share all this with you because that panic attack led me to realize, okay, one, it wasn't a heart attack. Thankfully, the doctor did the EKG test and was like, hey, you're good, but how's your life? I'm like, well, I'm stressed. I'm like drinking NyQuil to fall asleep every night and taking Vicodin to fall asleep. And I would wake up and take Adderall and drink a whole bunch of coffee to then kick that foggy headedness from the drugs the night before. And so I was always behind on schedule. Felt like an imposter because I would expect something from my employees that I wouldn't even do myself. I share all this with you because that panic attack, which felt like a heart attack, led me to start doing some self work. The self work started with a therapist because I re. I didn't want to take. They gave me Xanax, dude. I was on Xanax for four days. I don't know if you've ever taken Xanax, but for me, it felt like someone turned off my creativity switch. Like if we have all these different switches, someone just like a dimmer switch brought it down to like one. And so, all right, I don't feel anxious, but I also don't feel like trying anything. So I just chill out at home. Like four days in, I'm like, this is how I lose it all. So I went back to the doctor. I'm like, dude, I. I can't take this stuff. He goes, well, to manage your. Your stress and anxiety, have you thought about talking to a therapist? Like, oh, that's for crazy people, right? But reluctantly, I found a good therapist. Dr. Kevin Downing in Brea, California. And, you know, we spent the next like 15 months. Every Monday after work, I'd drive to Brea and I'd sit on his couch. And some Mondays, I was like, kevin, could I just. Can I just curl up on the couch? Pay you to just let me sleep here, just take a nap. I'm just drained. And he would just have lighter conversations with me. Those days still charge me, but lighter conversation. And then there was days where we did the heavy work, where I just felt like I was just walking to my car in this parking lot. Like I was just walking through molasses. Like, we peeled away a lot of scars from childhood trauma, like being molested as a kid in Armenia by two older boys to just being bullied when we came here. But all this to say, Kevin, brought to surface self awareness for me. And I realized that, dude, I shield and I soothe. The ego is a real thing, and it is there to protect us, but the ego will help us shield and soothe. So if I make a lot of money, I can surround myself with yes people, and yes people are going to be good to me. They're going to. They're going to do it. So of course I wanted to make a lot of money. All this to say self awareness comes from self work. Once you do the self work, you become self aware. You're like, oh, my God, I am flawed, Tom. I'm a horrible friend. When you're like, hey, how's it going? And I'm like, what do you mean by that? That's because I'm reacting to some weird feelings that I haven't processed through that may have happened as a kid, Man. Just because the way you said something gets triggered, it triggers me, right? And so I started to do the self work. It was ugly. It was not fun. I had weeks at a time where I had a process about what happened to me as a kid, man. Do I tell my parents who are in their 80s? No, there's no point in telling them. They're just going to. Going to feel this guilt and why don't you tell us sooner? And they're going to die with that memory. Like, so why keep it to yourself, you know? So those are real things I have to process. Do I Share this publicly. Well, I feel like I'm supposed to serve humanity. And the self is most selfish thing I do is each time I serve humanity, I serve myself. So, all right, I'm going to try and talk about this on stage one time. And one day it came out on stage, and I could see the whole audience squirming in their seats because who the hell wants to hear that? Hey, look, if you've been molested or sexually or physically emotionally abused, you probably have trauma, and you carry this shield. And you're either shielding or soothing. Soothing with drugs, alcohol, infidelity, whatever, or shielding as in not letting people in. And so how is that? Showing up with your kids, with your friendships, business partnerships, your wife, your husband. And so the more I talk about it, and so I very quickly realized that, oh, my God, Talking about this allows me to have more aha moments. More aha moments lead me to taking off yet another layer of that blanket. And the light gets brighter and brighter. And the brighter the light gets, the more people want to hear from me and talk to me and do business with me and stay around me. And I realized this is how we make impact. We all want to serve humanity. We all know that we're on this planet for a reason. We have a higher level of purpose. And so we feel the gnawing in our gut. Like, I want to impact lives. I want to change lives. I want to inspire people.
- [25:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Cool.
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Bedros Keuilian
Start with fixing victim number one before you go fix everybody else. You know, talk to me about the light.
- [25:54]
Tom Bilyeu
So there's two ideas in here. There's the universe is conspiring with you, and I'd definitely love to know more about that. And then there's the idea of the light is sort of already on, but you've covered it up and you just have to peel it away. How much of it is the light itself? Even if you didn't have it covered up, is there a way to make that brighter? Like whatever that thing is? Or do you feel like, no, we're born perfect and life diminishes us?
- [26:20]
Bedros Keuilian
I do believe. And again, I've got no science to back this up. You've probably had far smarter people sitting here at this table who could back this up with some kind of science. But again, I'm so convicted in my beliefs. And how about this? Maybe I'm absolutely all wrong, but just because I believe in this so much that I make it so, if that alone makes me successful and happy in life and feeling like I've had some sense of meaning, and significance. I'm good to go, man.
- [26:48]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. You actually said something earlier and I wanted to say, you know how crazy you sound right now, right? But it's so effective that. So here's another idea. I don't know how to get people to embody this, but so what you said, that made you sound crazy. But to me, I am totally with you is you were talking about the failure and you're like, I refuse to acknowledge it.
- [27:11]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah,
- [27:14]
Tom Bilyeu
you both, and you talked about this, but you both have to look at it, assess what went wrong, look at the data, learn from it so that you can do something more effective next time. And at the same time, you have to completely ignore whatever temptation you have to believe that that means that you're not going to succeed in the future and that this is somehow a commentary on your capabilities. It's this really weird schism of you have to look at both things. So, yeah, you're right. And I think that it's true what you're saying. So I'm not a believer in the universe is conspiring. I think the universe could give a shit. Like, it just. It is. There's obviously something that we don't understand. So whatever. There is some sort of God ish thing. There's something I don't understand. Right. Why is there something instead of nothing? It's arguably the most profound question that you can ever ask. I won't derail us on that.
- [28:07]
Bedros Keuilian
But.
- [28:07]
Tom Bilyeu
So there's obviously some. Yeah, there's obviously something that I don't understand, but I don't think it's working for me. I think that there are a set of rules, the world works a certain way. And so when you were talking about human as animal, that resonates with me. I have told the people in Impact Theory University like a dozen times, if there's going to be an epitaph on my tombstone, I would like it to read, you're having a biological experience, meaning even if there is a God, that God has given you a set of physics, chemistry, biology, and they work a certain way. And if you try to fight them, your life will be miserable because you will be unable to predict the outcome of your behaviors. If you can't predict the outcome of your behaviors, you won't be able to take risks.
- [28:54]
Bedros Keuilian
Right.
- [28:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Action, meaning the action that moves you most efficiently towards your goals. So I don't think it's working with me, but I still think everything you said is true in that if I align myself with the way things actually work, I'LL make rapid progress. So why does the world. I think the exact word you said, where the universe will conspire with the person who acts fastest. I think that's true. I just don't think the universe is. It's not the language I would use. Sure. So. But it is so in alignment with. The first person to act will learn faster than the next person. They're obviously not afraid to fail. If they can lower their ego enough to take in the lesson of whatever failure they get by moving first, then they can improve and keep going. It's the action improvement and continuing to move that's the conspiring. But whether you believe that it's God that's going to work with you, the universe is going to work with you. Because you do it or you just fucking do it, whatever. As long as you're on that path, you're going to win.
- [29:55]
Bedros Keuilian
So I think we might be saying the same thing, bro.
- [29:57]
Tom Bilyeu
A hundred percent.
- [29:58]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah. There's no doubt because you just said that on your tombstone. If there's going to be anything, it's going to say that you're having a biological experience. And this biological experience set by God or whoever else. Whatever else. Right? There's rules to the game is kind of what you're implied. And that if you play by the rules that you're going to win. If you don't play by the rules, if you don't understand the game, you're. It's going to be a painful life, a painful human experience. Right? We can agree to that. And so the way I look at it is, is just that the source universe, all of our collective consciousness together is like we've all agreed subconsciously these are the rules. Every person knows that they got to lean into imperfect action.
- [30:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Do they? I don't know that they do.
- [30:40]
Bedros Keuilian
If you take out the layers, bro. Take out the layers. It is a lot of work. This is why we all start off as some level of radiance. Like you look at a child so pure. Going back to the question you asked, like, is that light just on? I believe we all have. I don't know anything about electricity, so I'm going to say whatever. Let's say this is a 20 watt light. Light bulb, right? We're all born with a 20 watt light bulb. And it's. Nothing's covering it. This is beautiful, baby. And we hold it and ah, there it is. And then mom and dad are like, oh, you're chunky. Oh, you're clumsy now that you're starting to walk. Around these are layers being put on. Now they plant you in front of the TV a lot. And now because mom and dad want to go on date nights and they don't, they can't afford a nanny, they're going to slap the iPad in front of you on date night. So now you're screen sucking. And now you're just seeing all this. More blankets are being put on. This light, the light, the source. Your radiance is being stifled. Soon you become addicted to watching television. It becomes your thing. And you don't connect and you don't know how to build rapport. Now you're a teenager, and you're awkward and you're strange and you don't know. And you're now playing video games instead of socializing. And I share all this with you because that radiance, layer by layer, from food to names like, oh, you're clumsy, you're chunky. We're all our family. Everyone in our family is fat. You know how many times I heard that in my life? So I was like, okay, I'm going to be fat strong. And so when I made this, like, big proclamation in 2010, like, fuck it, I'm going to train for six weeks and run a marathon. Like, my inner voice was like, bro, you're a fat dude that just lifts weights. You power lift, like, but now I'm going to run a marathon. You just watch. So literally, inner critic and the inner advocate are fighting within me. And that was the first time I allowed the inner advocate to win. And I hired a running coach and I. And I said, make me a running program. I'm going to run the San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon. My wife at the time time ran marathons, like, three a year. And look what a freaking hypocrite I was here. Tom, jokingly, I told my wife, many years before we got married, we're still dating. I was like, hey, you know, if you marry me, I'll run a marathon, right? Just jokingly, but again, subconsciously, deep down inside, there's some truth to this. That was me testing whether she's going to say yes or no, right? We're still dating. We're new at this, the whole relationship. So she's like, fine, I will, right? So then let's say three years later or four years later, we got married. Ro was nine years in, and she ran three marathons a year. So almost 30 marathons later, I had yet. Whoa, what a liar I was. What a hypocrite I was. Now one could say, well, I just jokingly said that I didn't really mean it at the time. I'm like, lifting all these weights. I'm deadlifting. I'm squatting, I'm benching. I'm a big boy lifting big weights. God's made me to lift weights. You can justify it any way you want, then you can always find evidence to back it up, right? Look at my traps. Look at my shoulders at the time, right? So I share this with you because one day she's like, hey, I'm going to run the rock and roll marathon. And I was like, cool, awesome. Have a great time. I then left on a trip that day to run one of my masterminds at the time. I used to run my masterminds in Miami, San Diego, Las Vegas. We're in Las Vegas, and there's like 40, 50 of my coaching clients. And Craig Ballantyne is there as well. I invited Craig to help coach this group with me. He was the guest speaker. And Craig's telling one of the people who was complaining about procrastinating, Yeah, I just keep procrastinating, and I just keep doing all these things because I don't want to launch my products. I don't want to face the rejection of it, potentially. Whatever, right? New entrepreneur. And so Craig very curmudgeonly goes, you know what you need to do? You need to cut that deadline. You need to cut your deadline in half again. And then he just starts lacing into this person.
- [34:21]
GoFundMe User
And.
- [34:21]
Bedros Keuilian
And I'm sitting here, I'm like, oh, my God. He's speaking to me right now. Here I am nine years later, almost 30 marathons. I've yet to make good on my promise. So I text my wife under the table. I'm like, when did you say that marathon was? She goes, in, like, eight weeks. I'm like, great, sign me up for it, right? So she goes, I'll sign you up for the half. Every marathon has a half marathon. I'm like, that's bullshit. Sign me up for the full marathon. Because I'm also all in on everything I do, which is a great thing, unless you're, like, going to do cocaine or heroin. But I always make sure my addictions are good these days.
- [34:52]
Tom Bilyeu
These days.
- [34:53]
Bedros Keuilian
These days. Full disclosure. These days. I am pretty obsessive, and I think that is a gift, but it could also be very damaging. Under the right circumstances, you would find me dead in a gutter. And so I have to be vigilant and militant in my schedule. And the people that I surround myself with, my thought Patterns, all of it.
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- [36:43]
Bedros Keuilian
Going back to Diana and the marathon. So she books me for the rock and roll marathon. I find a running coach and how the universe colludes with us, my friend. You ready for this? In that group, in that coaching group was a woman named Jill Brewer. Her website, I shit you notice runwithjill.com she's a running coach. So at lunch I'm telling her about it, not even connecting the dots. Like, hey, I just signed up for a marathon. I'm a bit nervous because I could deadlift, I could squat, I could bench. But run, I've never had to run, right? She goes, do you need a running program? I'm like, oh yeah, I'm going to find me a running coach. She goes, that's what I do. Runwithjill.com, like, oh my God, she makes me a running program. Lo and behold, I train for six weeks, run the marathon, everything's fine. I broke through some glass ceiling, some limiting belief that I was only made to do this. And so when we were born, we have this radiance, this light. And families mean well. Your aunts Your uncles, your moms, your dads. But soon they call you chunky and fat and clumsy and all this. And you begin to buy all those things and your radiance goes away. Your light dims and you're just like this robot living other people's stories or narrative that they put on you. Until one day you decide to do the self work and peel back painfully the layers to expose your radiance of your whopping 20 watts. Then you could do even deeper work and raise the wattage like a dimmer switch to whatever. I don't know what the level is because I'm still a work in progress. If you ever have me back 10 years from now, there might be a higher version of myself, but that's where I am today, is raising that wattage.
- [38:20]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really, it's a very interesting metaphor. And I think that as people learn about the way the mind works and they realize that you have to be really thoughtful about what you allow yourself to think. I'm a big believer that you are what you repeat. And so whatever you allow yourself to repeat, you're going to become so the negative stuff, no matter how absurd, if you repeat it enough, you'll actually start to believe it. And the positive stuff, no matter how absurd at first it seems, you'll start to believe it if you allow yourself to repeat it. There's a really great book called Feeling Great by David D. Burns. And in it he talks about pattern interrupting. Like you have to pattern interrupt your negative thoughts. And that was something that really served me in the beginning. I was so prone to believe negative things about myself that I just had to learn, I had to make a rule in my life. I don't allow myself to repeat negative things about myself, even if I think they're true, because it's not going to serve me.
- [39:20]
Bedros Keuilian
How do you interrupt your patterns these days?
- [39:22]
Tom Bilyeu
I literally say, I don't allow myself to think that. No, stop. Like, whatever. I'll sometimes even say it out loud. Also, I have found if people ever find me making this face, that face breaks negativity. I can't hold that look on my face and feel negative. It puts me in an aggressive move forward posture. Now also I find that I'm going to have those lines etched into my face because I do that so often. But it really makes me feel powerful. And so doing little things like that, no, I don't do that. Overwhelm is one. I don't do Overwhelm. And so I say that to myself all the time because I Feel myself getting overwhelmed. And so I'm always trying to tell people, when I say I don't do overwhelm, I don't mean that in, like, a cool way that, like, oh, I'm so tough. I just don't allow myself to go down that path. And because to your point about self awareness, I've spent so much time identifying why I feel a certain way without judgment. Oh, that's insecurity. It's emotional weakness, Whatever. Not in any way, shape, or form, trying to be cool about it. Just, okay, I feel that way because I'm insecure about this thing. Cool. But because I have that level of self awareness, and because I force myself to do things that take my emotional awareness, I'm feeling a thing to being able to articulate what thing I am feeling and then why I'm feeling it. When I feel. To me, it feels like my brain is revving up. That's what overwhelm feels like. My brain is moving faster and faster and faster and faster to the point where it's not a level of efficiency. It's overwhelm. It's just. It's too much. It's revving too fast. It's like being in first gear and stamping on the gas.
- [41:00]
Bedros Keuilian
That's exactly what I pictured in my mind's eye to a car in park. Yet stepping on the gas, you hear all this rev, but it's not any place where it's gonna get momentum.
- [41:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Correct.
- [41:10]
Bedros Keuilian
That was a very interesting analogy.
- [41:11]
Tom Bilyeu
That is exactly what overwhelm feels like to me. So when I hear the, I'm like, nope, I don't do overwhelm. Stop. And just by saying that breathing from my diaphragm, it's like you can change the neurochemistry. You're having a biological experience. So I'm reminding myself, even going back to what you were saying, you're having a panic attack. You think you're having a heart attack. You go outside. I happen to. I've heard this story, so I know you feel the sunshine on your face. You get some fresh air. You take some deep breaths. Oh, whoa. Okay, it's passed. Even if it was a heart attack. And so changing your state, just stealing directly from Tony Robbins. The ability to change your state will change your life. But you have to get control of that. And so getting people. This all goes back to this. You have this glowing orb inside of you. You have to understand, I think, that your point about you can raise that up over time. That's the area to focus. Whether you have it or not, when you're born to me, whatever, our job is to uncover it and then to raise that dimmer so that it's really kicking off some wattage. But to do that, you have to
- [42:19]
Bedros Keuilian
think, right, bro, what if the whole meaning of life was like, we're all born with that orb, our light lit, fully covered with dozens of layers. Maybe you have 20, I have 18, he's got 32. Meaning of life is uncover it. And when you don't, you will suffer with depression, anxiety, stress, overwhelm, which is consciousness telling you you're not doing what you should be. You're shielding, you're soothing, you're distracting. You're doing all these things instead of working on self. Because when you take off that last layer, like, potential has been achieved. But well, before taking off that last layer, maybe five layers, six layers in, now you're hitting your stride in life. Like, I feel like the last, you know, the. So 11 years ago was when I had that panic attack, anxiety attack that led me to Dr. Kevin. That led me to so much self work, a decade of self work, but about. I'd say about five years years in. So I started feeling like this rhythm, like, all right, man, like, I'm really doing it, and fit body hockey sticks and more businesses and more opportunities, and I get in the best shape of my life. And it's not even like you have to take off that last layer to achieve bliss. Maybe that's like your peak state. And whether we all get there or not, I don't know. But I think, what if that was it? You just nailed it. All of the meaning of life is there's your orb. Congratulations, it's covered with a shit ton of gunk. Your job is to take the layers off. And in the process of taking those layers off, that's the self work. That's doing the deep work. How boring would life be if we're like, yeah, I'm not what I'm supposed to do?
- [44:01]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. So I think that that is so close to how I would define the meaning of life. The way I've always thought of it in my head is, first of all, life only has the meaning that you give it. I don't think there is any truly intrinsic meaning, but I think everybody should have an answer. My answer is the meaning of life. The reason we're all here is to see how much of your potential you can turn into skill set. And so if pushing the metaphor, and I'm not sure this is entirely what you meant, but if that glowing orb is. You now have something that's useful, that lights the way, that allows you to move forward in the way that you want. That feels really close to what I think people ought to be doing, it
- [44:45]
Bedros Keuilian
seems to me, and I've been on this path, like, intentionally and in a very focused way, like in a ruthlessly focused way the last decade. That for me, again, that is the meaning of my life, to just keep removing the layers. What is Bedros 2.0, 10.0 going to look like? And again. But I'm also so convicted by my belief system that I also know I could will things into being. So, like, I can will the universe to work, collude with me, right? Conspire with me. Which also goes back to, like, your rules. Like, I also believe the universe has rules. And it's like, hey, man, you thought of something? Yeah. Every second that passes says the universe to me in my mind, every second that passes, I'm going to make it less achievable. So you thought of something. You just learned a new skill. Do it, do it. Yeah, but it's not going to be right, Mr. Universe. I know it's not. But you could either wait to get it down correctly, but you're going to be so in the deficit because all the number of minutes and hours and months that go by that I've struck, you know, all these strikes against you, or if you do it now, take imperfect action, you just learned it, deploy it, you can course correct. Like, the universe is testing you. Like, do I want to keep rewarding this guy for this idea? I'm like, oh, my God, I did it. It's scary. Is it going to work? Oh, it kind of worked. Okay, well, great. But can you fix it? Yes, I can. I'm going to keep fixing it. It's this cool thing where whether call it the rules, call it the universe. I really believe that the self work and the rules, and taking that orb that's glowing and trying to raise its radiance, the more we do, we do develop these skill sets. Like, these skill sets exist, but we uncover them, unearth them, and then we could use it to make money, have meaning, leave an impact, have significance, create a legacy. I suppose we could also use it for evil, but that goes back to character, core values and all that other shit, right?
- [46:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that's a whole nother conversation. Because I think most people that from the outside we go, that person's evil. They never think they're evil. No, but there's something you said that I want to go deeper on. So I am reading this book called the Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley. And he talks about. Because you were saying you need to take imperfect action, the universe conspires with you. If you're the first person, that it's going to get harder the longer you wait. And in the book, he's talking about a potential explanation for why that really is. And his theory is that because everything evolves, literally everything, that electricity gets invented. And the light bulb is going to be invented necessarily after electricity, but that it will be a certain period of time after electricity that you get the light bulb based on. What kind of filaments are there? Can you blow glass? Like, there's all these things that have to come together, right? So. And he points out that, like, we think of these moments of. That inventions are these moments of genius, and that it's this one person that sort of propelled us forward in this great leap. And he said he doesn't think that the world actually works that way. That what's happening is things are evolving and things will happen at a given point based on that evolution. And that there are like eight different people that have been credited with the invention of the light bulb. And it's only because we're in the west that we think of Thomas Edison. But in reality, in different countries almost at exactly the same time, other people came up with a light bulb. And that there was the same thing. I forget another really famous invention. I'm forgetting it was the telephone or the phonograph, whatever. But it was like they. The patent was filed in the patent office on the same day. And it's a really interesting idea. And Michael Jackson said the same thing. He called. I think it was Quincy Jones in the middle of the night. And he's like, quincy, I just had an idea for a song and we have to record it. And he's like, why do we have to record it right now, Mike? It's like three. Three in the morning. He said, because if we don't record it right now, Prince is going to. And he was like, but it's just a random fucking idea that you've had. What are you talking about? How would Prince know? He's like, no, like, once it's out there, it's out there.
- [48:58]
Bedros Keuilian
The ethers of the universe.
- [48:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. And I think what he was really getting at gives me the chills. What he's getting at is there's all this shit going on in the world and it all comes together and we're all the product of Our time. This really freaks me out as somebody trying to have a second, like, arc in his entrepreneurial career. It's like, I got it so right with Quest, and now I'm trying to do something totally different in a totally different field. And I'm like, ooh, there's really something to. Am I of the moment? Because a kid growing up, now, they're just of the moment. They're not thinking, like, I didn't think about Quest. Quest was me. And look, it was me and my partners. Don't get me wrong, it was this confluence of three people. But just to keep it about the part of me that was me, I was reacting against being an entrepreneur chasing money. I was like, this is so gross. I just want to be myself. This idea, wanting authenticity, wanting to build community, all of this. But I had it as a. I was moving away from all the bullshit that I saw that I didn't like about building businesses. And it happened to coincide, right, with social media. Now I was on the bleeding edge of social media, not because I was clever, because I was having a big emotional reaction, and I decided to pursue it. And so I was of that moment. And so all of those things that happened to coincide right as social media was coming, boom. Quest hockey sticks. It goes crazy. And, like, if you think about what you built, if that had been in 2019, it would be a very different story, right? And so all this idea of, like, it's out there sort of in the ether, and are we able to have the balls to move when it strikes us? Because it's out there for everybody.
- [50:39]
Bedros Keuilian
Well said. You know what? There is something to, you know, being in that moment, Right? And so are you saying then that you feel like in the second arc, you feel differently than you did the first time around? Like, you know too much? Are you too strong?
- [51:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Not that I know too much. It's that I really had to. So I spent about a million dollars launching a comic book. And it was a financial waste because I was making comics for when I was reading comics, and I was reading comics in the late 80s, early 90s. And so then my instinct was to make films, like the films that I had when I was a kid. But that's done, man. It's dead and gone. Like, kids don't even think about that. And so I, in my 40s, had to go on this journey of, like, okay, wait, comic books are still getting turned into movies, so who's doing it? Right? That leads you to Japan, which then ultimately leads you to ask the question, why Does a single title. A single title. Bedros in Japan outsells the entire western comic market. Okay. Outsells Wonder Woman, Batman, Spider Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X Men. All of it combined is outsold by Demon Slayer. And so I was like, how the fuck is that possible? And looking at it then leads me to this idea that they call shonen, which translates as the few years. So they had narrowed in on this idea, which is now, I know, known as the age of imprinting. 11 to 15, where the brain's in a really weird state, which is why power of myth taking kids on these journeys that you guys are now doing, which is incredible, where you have to have this rite of passage. But the reason that a rite of passage happens at that fucking age is because your brain is in this hyper malleable state where it's no longer drinking from the parents, it's drinking from culture. And so now in my 40s, I had to discover manga and anime and like really be in it. And so it's now very calculated. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to figure out what this moment is now. Maybe I've learned so much that's perfect and maybe I'm now at. Because I feel like I'm at the cutting edge of something. I feel again the way I felt at Quest, where I see something other people don't see. But I had to brute force it. Whereas at Quest, I was of the moment. So I'm like, I don't know, like my whole life I get to answer this question. It's fucking fascinating to me. I'm totally unafraid of failure. That just is. Is not a concern for me.
- [53:20]
Bedros Keuilian
Are you as into anime as you were in the comic books of our era?
- [53:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Now this scares me. I was saying this to my mom this weekend. I don't know if everyone is as malleable as I am and they just don't do the thing. I have a process. I can walk people through it. This is what you have to do if you want to fall in love with something new. Or is it not a process? It is a process, but that it won't work for most people. And it works for me because by nature I just happen to be hyper malleable. I don't know the answer. So I act as if anybody can do it. But I don't know if that's true. And I'm terrified by the 50% of us that's hardwired because some people don't meet minimum requirements.
- [54:05]
Bedros Keuilian
Bro, can I tell you something? About yourself that I've figured out about you.
- [54:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Please,
- [54:11]
Bedros Keuilian
you my opinion. I'm just gonna share my opinion.
- [54:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Please.
- [54:14]
Bedros Keuilian
I think you give too much credit to the hard wiring and not enough credit to the fucking savage that you are.
- [54:20]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. I only think about the savage. And the only reason I acknowledge the hard wiring is I'm watching culture walk a stupid line where they're acting like there is no hard wiring. And that's gonna end in fucking disaster because you can no longer predict the outcome of your actions. So, speaking of which, baed ros, let's talk about this new movement in your life. I know you're sun setting the Empire podcast.
- [54:47]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah.
- [54:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Starting something new.
- [54:48]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah.
- [54:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Why?
- [54:51]
Bedros Keuilian
So you know the Empire Podcast? Well, part of it is phases of life, right? Like, we all go through seasons of life. And so when I was broke and, you know, living in Section 8 housing when we first came to the United States, it. All I wanted was money. Because I remember the conversation in our house, and when you're the small one in the house. I was six years old when we came to America. So my older brother was 19, my sister was 21. My mom and dad and my older brother and sister were always talking about how we're running out of money before we run out of month. Like, every end of the month, it was always having to make a choice between do we leave the water on or the electricity on. And it was always water because you could live in the dark. You can't live without water. And these Section 8 housing apartments that we lived in in Santa Ana. And so I kind of grew up thinking, like, money's gonna solve a lot of problems. And so I want money. I want money. And so as you. As you become an entrepreneur, you have money, and then soon you cover your costs and have a good life and give your family experiences, and you start realizing, all right, there's more to life than money. And so seasons, phases of life. And so. But. And as it turns out, I was good at making money. You do anything long enough, maybe part of it is that 50% hardwiring. The other part might have been just me being so desperate for it. I just looked at any mentor I could find from old school copywriters like Gary Halbert all the way to, you know, people that really focused on how the mind operates from, like, the Tony Robbins and beyond. And so the Empire podcast was really about me sharing my gift of being an entrepreneur and how to turn any ideal into a business, and that business business into an empire. And then if you want to sell it, sell it. If you want to scale it, scale it and go on. But I realized especially right around 2019, 2020, with the pandemic and all that, Holy hell, man. Like, we are in a place where society is not doing well now. We see how depression and anxiety has gone through the roof. We see the prescription drugs for mood altering, prescription drugs that are up by 400%, especially during the core of the pandemic, suicide, suicide rates, all those things, right? And so I was like, man, I'm in a place where I'm able to mentor my kids. And they're staying at home. Thankfully, they're in a good head space. We're working out with them, we're going on hikes, we're talking to them about what's happening in the world.
- [57:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you homeschool your kids?
- [57:18]
Bedros Keuilian
No, we don't homeschool them, but they go to private school. And, you know, the way I explained to them is, hey, guys, this is your Great Depression. This is your Great Depression. This is your version of my 9, 11 that we experience where there's uncertainty and chaos and economic crash, et cetera. And so rather than having them be afraid of it, like you guys are of age, they were so 12 and 14 at the time of the pandemic. And so talking to them, walking them through it, because I just figured my dad never did that with me. Like, I love my dad. He brought us here, he risked his life to bring us the United States. But everything else was on a need to know basis, and I didn't need to know. And so the Empire podcast was all about that. Making money, building empires. The Bedros Kuyen show that's launching here is me talking about culture, me talking about community, me talking about how we're. It just seems like there's a perfect scientific, artistic design to. They're trying to separate us by left and right, by black and white, by mask and no mask vax and no vax, by if they can. If they can separate us by shoe sizes, bro, I feel like they would. And I feel. Who's they?
- [58:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, do you believe in a grand conspiracy? The New World Order, that kind of stuff?
- [58:39]
Bedros Keuilian
I don't know if it's a New World Order, but I do believe that the they is a very smart group of powerful people that run the world. And there is a smart group of powerful people. They're called the heads of state. And the people that voted them into or not voted them, that financially enabled them to get into there, have control. A great example of that and I always use it as a micro economy, like a micro scale. I'm the president, no longer the CEO, but I'm the president of Fit Body Boot Camp, a franchise. Right? You could look at as every franchise location. We've got hundreds of franchise locations as a state, the clients in there as the citizens of that state. Now I could say that we're going to start using Tom Bilyeu's water and I can mandate all franchisees to start using it. And Tom Bilyeu is going to give me hq, the president, a kickback from using that water instead of the other water. But now I can force my franchisees to use that. Now my franchisees have to then force their clients, their citizens to use that. I could raise the prices, I could raise the franchise royalty fees and I could justify it by saying whatever I want. And if you don't comply, you've. Well, you've signed a franchise agreement. And that franchise agreement says that I could pull your franchise and make you de brand. And if you d brand, you lose your money. I could stop sending your. Your money. Right? And so it's. I'm. I'm my own little country. When you look at a franchise, it's a little country with a leader and states and citizens. And so when I just look at it that way, well it just makes sense that they exist, the franchisors. And so when you look at all different fr. Like what if. I'm not saying this, this doesn't happen, but if me and the other franchisors across many industries, hell, let's just say fitness industry, come together and we're like, hey, from now on we're all going to raise the franchise buying fee to 80 grand and not lower. Mine's 49. 6 right now. Right, 80 grand. So we conspire on that and the franchise royalty fees are not going to be 7% anymore. It's going to be 10% across the board. Right? If we all conspire to do that now, whatever franchise brand you want to open up, it seems like 6 1/2 dozen in the other. Really what we did is we conspired together. Just like the universe might conspire, people conspire to do things. And again, you know, everyone's got best of intentions, but they say the path to hell was paved with good intentions. And so do I believe in the they. I do believe that there's a they. At some point maybe they did go into power to. There's power. Absolute power is absolutely corrupt, bro. We're not Supposed to be this powerful. We're not. I plan on giving away as much of my money as I can so that I save my son and daughter from corruption. Money is corrupt. Money is corrupt when you don't make it yourself. I believe that. It's another personal belief that I have. I earned mine. I built mine from the ground up with my wife. Certainly stood on the shoulders of giants and watched what they did and modeled that and paid for coaching and got the results from it. But if I just hand them all the assets and I hand them all the passive streams of income, I do believe that they will shit on their lives. That is probably the biggest, thickest blanket I could put on their radiance. That's interesting, in my opinion. And so anyhow, I do believe that there is some level of conspiring happening at the top. And so when you look at it
- [62:07]
Tom Bilyeu
that way, why divide us? What's the. What do you think is the purpose?
- [62:14]
Bedros Keuilian
The Internet did something, especially as we're entering Web 3.0, bro. It created freedom in a way that we hadn't seen our. Like, you remember pre Internet. I remember pre Internet vividly. Right? And like, I would have to get on a bus and go to service merchandise or wherever to buy something or jamco or zodies or whatever the department store was. Now I could Amazon prime it and it's here the next day. It's exactly what I wanted. And now anyone can create a channel, a YouTube, a network, a platform. The Internet has given us so much freedom and that freedom. And humans are like, we take an inch, we'll take a mile. That's just how we are. We have gotten too free. And I, I'm pretty sure it gotten too scary going back to the franchise model. If my franchisee started to add a juice bar and I said nothing about it. And now they're adding squat racks because Fit Body Boot Camps don't have squat racks. Now it looks like a CrossFit. Now they're adding child care, right? Like, hey, now they're going to monetize more with child care. Well, wait a minute. Child care is not part of the Fit Body model. It's a whole different liability insurance. Plus you have to have certified people. Like, watching those kids. Like, you can't just do that. Now you guys have too much freedom. I've got to bring the compliance officer of Fit Body Boot Camp down on your ass. Isn't it the same thing, the web? The economy has been good for so long, so long. And this web has given people so much Freedom that I believe that they needed to create something to create this division and control and compliance of humanity. And so let's tighten the noose down again, because it's compliance. The compliance officer coming down on us is how I see it, on regular, I hate to say it this way, on the civilians, on regular people, wage earners, because first they were going to tax you and us. We're going to tax the rich. They're going to tax you and us. And I'm like, no, don't do that. Because me and Tom know how to pass that cost along to you. I will raise my prices. I will find a way to still make my product profitable. You, the customer and the employees will end up paying for it because I, I'm too clever. And then to tax you, they will create inflation. And they did. Right. And so anyway, I don't know if we're getting political, but that's how I do believe that control and compliance is being exercised right now by them.
- [64:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting. I sometimes worry that I'm too naive, so I don't have a sense of the they. I am willing to accept that that probably is naivete because I hear your example and, and that makes a lot of sense to me. And somebody has to be getting funding people to run campaigns and all that. At the end of the day, we elect. But here in the west anyway. But going back to this idea of the evolution of everything, that cycles happen and you've got Ray Dalio mapping out these cycles and empires rise and they fall. And the reason he says that that cycle just repeats endlessly is because. Because there are only so many human personality types. Again, why I think about the 50% that's hardwired, even though in my own life I'm only thinking about the malleable part, is that if there's only so many personality types, then of course things are going to repeat because you just find people bumping into each other. And there is a finite number of ways that those personality types will interact. And they get in these sort of cause and effect loops and they just are what they are. And it doesn't repeat exactly, but it rhymes. And it rhymes because enough changes. And just like the Earth isn't just rotating around the sun, we're also actually flying through space, right? So there's directionality to everything, so there's directionality to culture, but there's also this sort of loop, right. Even though we're going that way. And things do change, but there's a lot of rhyming that goes on. So I don't think a lot about the they, but I'm willing to just say, okay, naivete. But what I do think a lot about is as social media has come along, it's an evolutionary moment, right? So we couldn't have predicted how social media was going to impact us. And the bad news is it's not all bad. In fact, I would say it's primarily good. But it's created this weird moment where because humans are so influenceable that, I mean, that's why they're called influencers, that you end up getting this when you marry it to an algorithm with our desire to connect with another human and to be swayed by their influence if they have some sort of magnetism or whatever. And then the algorithm just fucking really goes, oh, this is what you respond to. And so it takes you down these like hyper niche holes. And if you don't have a rule in your life that says you must seek disconfirming evidence, you end up really seeing the world that way. And it just seems true. So whatever the algorithm is showing you, it just feels that's the true narrative. It doesn't feel like a narrative, it's just that is true. So to your point about, okay, we have division. So I ask myself, okay, if I'm having a biological experience. And when I say there are rules to this game, I mean that the world works a certain way based on the way that the human animal is based on gravity and physics and all of that stuff. There just is a way that things work. Why are we able to split into camps of two? Why could they divide us by our shoe size? And hopefully people know about that study where you can give people a red shirt or a blue shirt and people will click up and automatically start treating people in the red shirt differently. Like, what the fuck, you know, it's make believe. But we were just tribal like that. So it's evolutionary. So what is it that allows us to be so evenly parsed into these groups? Well, left and right is the basic thing that a tribe needs, is you need some people that are all about compassion so that we don't leave people behind, that we have cohesion, we're looking out for each other, there's reciprocity. But then you have, if you look at that on, on a large enough sample, what you find is then you get the freeloader problem. So if we were all compassionate, you get freeloaders who go, oh, word. There's an evolutionary niche for just taking advantage of people. It's like the cuckoo bird, which is where you get the idea of a cuckold from. Right? Cuckoo bird's like, oh, word, I can drop off my egg in your nest and you'll raise it and feed it and all that stuff. Amazing.
- [68:40]
Bedros Keuilian
That's where the idea of a cuckold came from.
- [68:42]
Tom Bilyeu
100%.
- [68:43]
Bedros Keuilian
No kidding.
- [68:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep. So you always run into the freeloader problem. So the other side of the equation has to be people that go, no, personal responsibility is everything. Now what you get is a group that works because you get people who are like, yo, you cannot just leave people behind. You can't be tyrannical and not think about people. You've got to love them and like, you know, worry about them and lift them up. You've got other people that are like, hey, you can't fucking take advantage. You've got to pick yourself up and you've got to like, really? A group only becomes strong as the weakest link. And so we've all got to rise up. Now, when you bring them together, they're high functioning because it's in the friction between the two where it's like, this half knows, okay, I need to find concessions where it's going to work. And then this half is like, okay, we've got to find, we really should look out for people. And when they are working well, then we thrive. But now the algorithm is pulling us down into these, what's called peak shift. And I'm thinking of this stuff out loud. So everyone's going to have to bear with me if a week from now I think very differently, but this feels right to me. So there's this idea of peak shift where if you take, there's this bird that the mother has a big fucking red nose beak and when the bird sees that big red beak, it goes crazy. And there was a research scientist that was like, is it responding to the size of the beak, to the fact that it's red? What actually makes it go, mom, like, I'm going to go into my feeding frenzy. What they found was the brighter you could make an artificial one, and the brighter you made the red, the bigger you made the beak, the crazier the chicks went. And they just like went berserk. They called that peak shift. So the algorithm's all about peak shift.
- [70:20]
Bedros Keuilian
Oh, you like that?
- [70:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Then you really like this.
- [70:23]
Bedros Keuilian
You like that?
- [70:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Then you really like this. And you begin to dopamine habituate. And so it just like, ah, it goes crazy. People are in there scrolling all day. You get one narrative, it takes you down this one path, you're not seeking disconfirming evidence. You. You get tied into these influencers. And if I can really put something that's hit me recently, if you're feeling overwhelmed, I guarantee there's a study on this. Even though I don't know it, but I have felt this, so I know it must be true. If you're feeling overwhelmed and someone tells you hate that person, it feels awesome. Because it's certainty. I know exactly what to do. Hate that motherfucker. They're wrong. I'm right. That feels awesome. I agree. People are intoxicated by certainty. So you just gave me certainty combined with all those other things. And so now it's like, even if there isn't a they, and this is just spontaneously evolved, we're living in this fucking moment. And so this is happening, this is real, and shit is getting weird. And for the first time in my life, I. I'm paranoid. I'm like, not literally paranoid, but I'm like, oh, like, I'm worried. I'm worried that things go to bloodshed. That's my actual concern.
- [71:38]
Bedros Keuilian
How does a paranoid Tom Bilyeu prepare? Because I think I'm a bit extremist, so I can't trust myself.
- [71:45]
Tom Bilyeu
And I. I'm selling.
- [71:46]
Bedros Keuilian
This is good for your audience and
- [71:47]
Tom Bilyeu
for me, I'm selling everything. I don't want to be tied to anything. Massive mobility. Read Ray Dalio. He wrote a book called Principles for
- [71:56]
Bedros Keuilian
Dealing with the Changing World Order.
- [71:58]
Tom Bilyeu
And he said, you need to be mobile, you need to be able to go basically wherever stability is. I've heard you talk about this, so I know you know the concept. Get off the X. I don't know where the X is going to be, but I know that I own a lot of real estate and I probably shouldn't. So that's move number one. Now. I don't think I'm the guy people should listen to. I'm fucking fumbling my way through this. I. I just want to make movies.
- [72:22]
Bedros Keuilian
I was just curious what your move was, but that, that's where I think mobility is key. Like my, My personal feeling and opinion is that liquidity and mobility is key.
- [72:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [72:33]
Bedros Keuilian
Today more than ever, like, all everyone who's stockpiling, like, guns and weapons and, like, making that underground bunker, like, I
- [72:42]
Tom Bilyeu
haven't gone that far.
- [72:42]
Bedros Keuilian
I think it's quite the opposite. Like, that's all great.
- [72:46]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you mean it's the opposite?
- [72:49]
Bedros Keuilian
I think the vision that most people have is when they come to take my property or to take my shit to rape and pillage like I will. Me and my wife will defend, you know, our canned food and our gold and our, with our guns and ammo. Not really. First of all, I think statistically less than like 99% of people have any training with their weapons, number one. Number two, most people are ill prepared if that were the, the apocalypse hit the fan thing was going to happen. And because I actually studied with these, the guys like John Lovell, Warrior Poet Society and others like them who have been actual true warriors, like, they don't think about hunkering down. They're all about liquidity and mobility. Like very intelligent warriors who understand that I've got to be liquid and mobile because I, I don't know where the X is going to be, but I know I won't be on it. And the resource that helps is obviously money, right? Yeah.
- [73:49]
Tom Bilyeu
And I hope, man, I hope I'm just being paranoid and that.
- [73:52]
Bedros Keuilian
Nothing wrong with healthy paranoia. Yeah. I mean it's when it keeps you up at night, it's when you begin. I believe there's a tipping point to anything. Like my dad was taking whatever, like two baby aspirin a day. His heart's doing just fine. I bet if he took a handful a day, it'd probably burn a hole in his stomach. It's when we hit the tipping point, which goes back to your social media example, that the algorithm sucks us down this hole, this rabbit hole so accurately and gets us to believe that this is truly the reality. And if we are not looking for the contrary, actively looking for it, we will begin to believe that this is a shit that hits the fan moment. And I must, I must prepare. And what preparation looks like for one guy may be very different than the other.
- [74:36]
Tom Bilyeu
No doubt you were born in Soviet controlled Armenia.
- [74:42]
Bedros Keuilian
Yes, sir.
- [74:43]
Tom Bilyeu
How has that informed what you're telling your kids about this moment? Might be the most interesting way to ask that.
- [74:50]
Bedros Keuilian
As you were talking about, see, this is why I like hanging out with you. This is the most selfish thing I do. Whether it's food with you or just this. I do realize that when you've grown up under communist control and then when your dad was a member of the communist party and so he kind of tells you you grew up hearing the stories. So seeing it and then hearing the stories, it does influence you in the way you think. Like, well, shoot, that government did that. Like they literally went to oppress the citizens. Like there was just different classes. My dad was part of the 18% of the society in the Soviet Union who had this different color, dark red passport. And I remember he'd be able to get bread and cheese from any store that he wanted when they were out. And there were lines. Me and my mom would have to wait in lines until my dad became a member of the Communist Party. And we never once waited in line again. In fact, I grew up eating caviar. We talked about this in your previous show. The last time you interviewed me, I was eating caviar in Armenia for breakfast and then come here and I'm meeting, like, out of dumpsters and section 8 housing. So talk about it. But that government did oppress its people. And so I do realize that I look through life through those lens at times. And so hearing you talk about, like, hey, what if this is just, like, really good algorithm doing what it's supposed to do. Oh, shit. What if? All right, so, okay. A little less paranoia. Cool. More preparation. Yeah. And then just live your life. And just live your life. But it just breaks my heart when I see. Dude. When I see people this far apart. Like our country. Humanity has never been this far apart. And maybe we need it. We need to go so far apart where we feel the pain and then get back together again. And maybe it's that I'm 48 years old and I've got more gray than I've ever had, and I'm. And realizing that I've had a really good life experience and worried from what my kids are going to have as a life experience, like, what's going to happen for them and their kids. Like, I want to. I can't wait to hold Andrew and Chloe's babies. But I also know I'm going to be like, fuck, what's life going to look like for them? So I'm so hell bent on trying to influence society, humanity, and what I feel is a better way. And I know it's. You know, hindsight's always 20 20, and things always are more glamorous when you look back. But how simple was it for us, dude? Growing up in the 80s and 90s, you know, like, all right, so you got your Walkman, you got your CD player. You're like, there was no fentanyl to overdose on. There was. I just.
- [77:30]
Tom Bilyeu
I will say, though, I was legitimately afraid of nuclear war.
- [77:34]
Bedros Keuilian
I do recall. I do.
- [77:36]
Tom Bilyeu
I was.
- [77:37]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah.
- [77:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Really? I mean, that was like a thing. And I was right at that age where my amygdala was just 80% of my brain during the Cold War. Yeah. And it was like, hey, this Mutually Assured Destruction. I remember having to explain that to my neighbors. Oh, no, no. The reason they won't launch nuclear missiles is because of Mutually Assured Destruction. That's. That's rough. So I do remind myself of that. Like, okay, have we been this divided before? Probably. I mean, we're at civil war. Like, literal guns being fired, civil war, people being killed. So it's like we have gone through things like this and people rebound and we're super resilient, but I don't think it happens by accident. And so it's like, how do we nudge each other back in a loving direction is how I think about it. But how do we.
- [78:29]
Bedros Keuilian
I think it comes with the individual, and I think that's where it comes. When we try and change a whole party's ideology and belief system, it's not going to work. It's going to be the individual. Like, the individual watching this, listening to this right now and going, shoot. We had two different ideas on maybe the rules of life and how things work, but then they kind of agreed that there is this radiance within us, whether it's we're born with it or we have to turn it on and then stoke that fire. Yeah, I could buy into the idea of that. There's something within us that needs to thrive.
- [78:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So to your point, the right place to start is with yourself. Right. So trying to figure out, okay, what do I have wrong? How do I be the open mind that comes to the table to try to find a path forward, but I just don't feel like I have wisdom in this. Like, Ray Dalio talks a lot about things that have happened in history, but that have not happened in your life. And the things that are going on right now have happened in history, but they haven't happened in my life. And because I'm so experiential, like, for whatever reason, I've always had to learn things the hard way. And so, yeah, I don't know that I have any wisdom to impart here, but in my. I find it very fascinating and I really want to understand what's happening. Like, what is this revealing about human nature? I don't think we can ever count on the algorithm to do anything other than maximize what humans respond to. And unfortunately, we respond to certainty extraordinarily strongly, which is the opposite of an open mind. We respond to fear a lot more than the flip side. It's going to be a lot harder to have a good news show than it is to have a bad news show. Right. If it bleeds it leads. And so all of these things are real. So it's like, okay, I know all of these things are real. What can I do? Do you have advice? I know you do. I know the punchline to this, but what's your advice to people on social media? How do you deal with it? Do you make it a part of your life? Do you not make it a part of your life?
- [80:27]
Bedros Keuilian
I do. It's a very big part of my life. But I divide social media people into two camps, consumers and creators. And I believe that you're better off being a 90% creator, 10% consumer. And that's what I am. And I create content that the 1.0 version of me would want because I've been able to take myself from 1.0 to 2.0. And if 10.0 is my goal, then when I get to 3.0, I'll create content for the 1.0 and 2.0 version of myself. And if I feel like that's what you've done to see your evolution over the last four or five years, I feel like you are coaching the younger Tom Toms who were. Who are like Tom 1.0 out there in society. It ain't rocket science that social media is a business, and it is there to stoke fear, create a level of certainty, and also it stokes uncertainty so that we can be attracted to those that. That speak in certainty. That's what's beautiful about social media. When you just look back at the hell that social media is, it creates uncertainty, and it's like, well, people, what do you mean? Well, let's face it. Social media has probably caused a lot of kids to kill themselves. Like, some kids have, like, been bullied, been felt like they don't belong. Fear of missing out. Right? It's created this uncertainty within them. And they felt that certainly the solution to this is death. And so we do have to see how powerful this thing is. Like, anyone would be stupid to not look at Hitler or bin Laden and not realize there's something to take away from there. Those evil powers did have a great way of communicating that perhaps if we can learn that, put it to good use, that maybe we can create good outcomes with it. So my belief system on social media is to be a creator of content that. That the older version of you would benefit from and would help those people level up to the higher version of you. And if we all did more of that and consumed less of it, that we'd be less influenced by it. But I also realized, like, there's Literally, like, variable response. The whole idea of this, like, it's a casino thing, right? Like, you pull the slot machine, do. Am I going to get the three cherries? If I do, I'm a winner. Shit, I only got two cherries. That was close. Let me try again with another $20 bill. Variable response. So variable response works on pumping out dopamine. Like, no one's business, bro. They figured out how to get this thing. Our brain to pump out the right addictive chemicals. So well, that you do. Goes back to routine, goes back to morning ritual. Rules and rituals I believe will save someone from going down the social media. Depression, anxiety, time, suck vacuum. That it really is. Yeah. Because I've got rules and rituals about it. Like, I won't like more than three things. Right. So if, like, you and Lisa and my friend Craig pop up and my first, I'll like you three. That's it. If I just keep going. I've now starting to suck to the variable response funnel. And now I'm gonna keep liking and liking. I will literally just go through all my friends, and it'll show me stuff from yours, like, six weeks ago. Like, there's no end to it. So I've. I create rules and rituals, and when I have rules and rituals and also I know I'm an addictive person, and I think most of us are, man. That's why we're so easily. To get addicted to social media. I'm an addictive person, and so I know that I'm more susceptible to getting addicted to that pattern, and that pattern could. And then I'm also ocd, so everything I do is obsessive. That's a bad combination, right?
- [84:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Apparently not for entrepreneurial success.
- [84:11]
Bedros Keuilian
Not for entrepreneurial success. Touche. But in that path. Oh, my God, man. To get addicted to it and then to go OCD on it, forget about it. Like, this is why, man, I could eat a bag of bagels. My wife was like, that's like a baker's dozen. Thirteen bagels and two things of phillydalphia cream cheese. Like, where did it go? Like, I must finish it all, Tom. I can't leave anything half finished, even bagels.
- [84:33]
Tom Bilyeu
How long would it take you to eat 13 bagels?
- [84:35]
Bedros Keuilian
I would stand at the kitchen buffet, 45 minutes.
- [84:41]
Tom Bilyeu
No way. I thought you were gonna say four days.
- [84:45]
Bedros Keuilian
No, dude.
- [84:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa. Yeah, that's interesting. I have an obsessive mind, but not a. I don't have an addictive personality, so I don't find myself doing that. If I. I don't like, eat one chip and then I'm fine. But I'm like, food used to be more of a problem for me. Food is not a problem. But I thrive on rules. To your point, what are some rules and rituals that you have in place? So we know the social media one.
- [85:10]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah. So there's a social media one, you know, going back full circle to a morning routine. The best morning routines, I believe, start in the evening. So some of the rules that I have read. Right, right. No iPhone. No, no, no, no.
- [85:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Starting at what time for me at
- [85:26]
Bedros Keuilian
9pm because I go to bed at 10. No iPhone, no iPad, no laptop.
- [85:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Hour before bed.
- [85:30]
Bedros Keuilian
Hour before bed.
- [85:31]
Tom Bilyeu
What are you doing? Talking to Diana.
- [85:33]
Bedros Keuilian
We're either watching. We'll typically watch. Right now, we're watching the Bluths. Oh, my God. Where they built. It's a comedy show.
- [85:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God.
- [85:44]
Bedros Keuilian
Arrested Development.
- [85:45]
Tom Bilyeu
There we go.
- [85:45]
Bedros Keuilian
We're watching that with the kids. So we'll watch one episode of the Blues or Arrested Development. Then we'll go in the hot tub. Kids will fuck around in the pool while we go in the hot tub.
- [85:53]
Tom Bilyeu
And the hot tub is just relaxation talking.
- [85:56]
Bedros Keuilian
That's a rule, too. To relax, talk 20 minutes, 30 minutes while the kids goof off. And then they go in the hot tub with us and we all get out. They go to bed. We go to bed, 10 o', clock, lights out. That's just how it worked out. But screens off by 9 o' clock in terms of computer, laptop and iPad. We do watch a show and then go into the hot tub, number one. Number two, bring the 30 ounces of water upstairs with me. Because if I'm gonna drink 30 ounces of water in the morning, it needs to be on my nightstand. Otherwise it might take me 20 minutes to get there. If I'm showering and just doing all this shit. Create my GSD list the night before. I believe taking that stuff out of my brain and putting it on a notepad just allows me to do a brain dump. And I always put the hardest, scariest thing that I'm going to do tomorrow morning. The thing I want to avoid at the top of my GSD list. Right. It's common sense, and it's not swirling around in my head. And my subconscious mind is keeping me awake thinking about it. It's on a list of three to four things to do. The worst one at the top of that list. And so again, that's another one of my evening rituals. And I'll set my alarm and lights out off. I Go. But some other rules are that if there's people who always. And to date, I've got 119 people blocked on my phone. Some friends, some clients, former clients, I guess I should say some just people who were friends. But it's the people that go, hey, Tom, did you see this article about your brand, your company, your thing? And it's always negative. The ones that always do you like, motherfucker. Did you hear that I was on the Inc. Magazine? Did you hear that I was an Entrepreneur magazine's top 500 fast growing franchises? I didn't see you text me the link to that. Right, but you hear that somebody died at a fit body boot camp? It's a gym. People do die at a fit body boot camp. You know, all of a sudden you're sending me, did you hear that somewhere in Tallahassee, Florida, somebody died at a fit Body boot camp? Thank you. I'm aware of that. Right. And so people who are just so quick to show up with negative news, especially via text, I just block them. Like I'll see a pattern. I don't tell them or whatever, like, hey, I'm gonna block you. You gotta not do that. But if I see someone's got that pattern in my life, they are addicted to causing drama. I don't need that. So that's one of my main rules as well of blocking them on my phone. At which point they could just call the house line and talk to Marlon, my house manager, and not me. At which point she'll leave a little notepad note and that's that. Those are my big major rules. And then, but mostly on social media, create 90%, consume 10, 10%.
- [88:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Rules, man. I think that this is one of the most underutilized things for people that want to be successful. You really, you have to one, identify what are the things that I struggle with. What are rules that I can put in place for me, the biggest one, I know we've talked about this before, is I have to be out of bed in 10 minutes or less because otherwise I will lose hours, man. It's crazy. Like, I am still shocked when it comes to laying in bed. I'm like an alcoholic. It's like no matter how many years go by that I don't do it, I still every day want to do it. It's super weird. And I just find myself wanting to lay in bed. How do you like. And maybe you feel like you've always had this, but how do you teach other people to be a savage? You talk about being A servant savage and the need to be capable of that savagery. 1. Do you mean savage literally, or do you just mean being tough? Like, how do you think about that?
- [89:11]
Bedros Keuilian
Both. Both. I'm sure you would jump to my throat and, like, attempt to kill me, and probably kill me if I even made any attempt to attack Lisa. Like, you need to be a savage, right? But you're also a savage in creating your businesses. And the impact theory show a savage in, like. It doesn't matter how you feel. You're up doing your show, you're up doing your ritual, you're up stacking your wins. It might be walking like molasses during days that you're not. Maybe you didn't sleep well or having an off day, but you're still savagely going through your day. So savage in both ways. I do believe that those who are skilled in the art of violence are least likely to become violent. And I've known this.
- [89:52]
Tom Bilyeu
That's really interesting. Why do you say that?
- [89:54]
Bedros Keuilian
Because of my experience as a kid. See, growing up in Section 8 housing, so in Russia, judo and sambo are some martial arts that were really big in the Soviet Union. So my dad taught me that very quickly. Judo, sambo. And then as soon as I became 11 years old, he put me into Kenpo, karate, kicking and punching. This is pre Jiu jitsu era. And growing up in Section 8 housing. So I'm the foreigner. Imagine me, the foreigner kid with the funny bull haircut and the clothes that my mom made and the Section 8 housing. And in Santa Ana, there was a gang called F Troop. They're still out there causing violence. But my dad had bought me a little bike from a garage sale for like eight bucks or something, dude. It was, like, rusty. But it worked, right? And then these gang bangers stole it. And they lived in the same complex in the neighboring complex. They stole it. I went home kind of crying, like, hey, this is what happened. My dad gave me a beating because that's what a communist dad does. And when I told that to Kevin, by the way, my therapist, he's like, hey, anything ever happened to you as a kid? Like, do you want to talk about. Because he helped me with my stress and anxiety and all that stuff, right? That was the reason I went to a therapist. I was like, no, man. Like, no, there's nothing as a kid that I want to talk about. Like, okay. He goes, well, what about your parents? He goes, well, what about your parents? Well, my parents, you know, my mom spanked me. My dad gave me a Beating. But I would have rather had those beatings and spankings than like, all my other friends that were put on restriction for 10, two weeks. They can come out and play with their GI Joes with me. Like, they really have to, like, pay the price. I just got a good beating and I can go out and play again. Kevin. And he's laughing. He goes, that didn't leave a scar on you? I'm like, nah. I go, plus, what happened to me as a kid even before that was even worse. That's where I had enough. I apparently built enough rapport and trust with him where I hinted to what had happened to me, hence being molested. And that's how we. What was supposed to be one month of therapy ended up being 15, 16 months. Because then we started working on what happened to me as a kid. But anyway, going back to the savage and a servant, what I found was that when my dad was. He beat me and he goes, if you don't come back with your bike, the beatings will continue.
- [91:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
- [92:00]
Bedros Keuilian
That was a lot of money. He spent eight bucks for having three, four jobs living in Section 8 housing. That eight bucks can go towards food and water and all this other stuff that he put towards a bike. Give me a flathead screwdriver, and he's like, go get the bike. I didn't have to ask him what I do with the flathead screwdriver. And so it was simple enough that the more violence I could cause, the more compliant they became. Were you a big kid? I was a bigger kid, yeah. I was a stocky kid. And my two friends in America were. My first friends in America were black. Section 8 housing. It's either Mexican black kids or foreigners. Dwayne and Torrance. Torrance, I found. And when we stay in touch, Torrance Jackson in Anaheim. Duane, I have no idea, but he lived in apartment number 22 at the Shade Tree Apartments. God, I still remember that we played Snake in the Grass together and all this. So them two had my back and we went and got my bike. And it didn't even have to take any use of the flathead screwdriver to get my bike back, because they understood why we were there. And so. But I realized in that moment that, like, all right, sometimes violence is. Is the way, but I also understood that violence could work against me when a whole bunch of them showed up and whooped my ass many years later, put me in the hospital. All this to. To tell you that you begin to. And now, man, doesn't matter how big someone is how wiry someone is, how muscular someone is, someone knows jiu jitsu, or they've taken the, you know, you know, a few months of Muay Thai kickboxing, like they will just like meatloaf your face right in or just take, take the air out of your brain and you're passed out. And so today people are more dangerous than ever. And when you realize that, I don't know, what do they say in Texas? Like an armed society is a polite society. Well, technically, most people these days with the knowledge of violence that they have, I just want to treat everyone as though, you know jiu jitsu, you know, kickboxing, you might have a flathead screen driver in your back pocket. And therefore I'm going to be cool to you, so I'm going to be a servant. But I love knowing that I could show up as a savage, knowing that I don't really pull that card out unless I have to. And the savage is also the guy or gal who's willing to, they see a car accident. Everyone else is rubbernecking and you know, taking video like that. Savages is someone who's run into that car breaking the glass window and pulling out the people out of it. Right. They're willing to stand in the gap between good and evil. I don't know if I shared this with you on your show last time I was here. My family and I, we do our annual trip to Maui right around Christmas. It's just something that we enjoyed Hawaii when we got married for our honeymoon. So we decided to do an annual trip with the kids several years back. Andrew was probably six, Chloe was four. We're flying back. It's one of the. From Maui. We took an 11pm flight back from Maui to LAX and it's those big jumbo jets where there's like the lay down seats up front, like in the, in the middle and on the sides. And so we're in the very back of first class. We all have our fun seats and then. But way up front in first class, there's a dude going off like smashing the seat. I didn't tell you the story.
- [95:15]
Tom Bilyeu
No.
- [95:15]
Bedros Keuilian
Okay, so he's smashing, dude, we're up like 35,000ft up in the air. We're over the Pacific Ocean, bro. Like he should have done this on the tarmac where they could have removed him. He's smashing the seat back in front of him. And now the dude's like, dude, bro, relax, what's going on? And he's just like foaming at the mouth. Going bananas. People have gotten up and kind of gotten into that galley where they make your coffee and all that stuff. And I look at my wife. Next to her is Chloe. Across the aisle, my wife and Chloe. And next to me is Andrew. Andrew looks at me, I'm like, buddy, everything's going to be okay. I look at my wife, she looks at me, I just like, hey, we're going to be fine. Chloe's knocked out, sleeping. I look at the guy behind my wife. He's. He's now sitting this thing up, right? And we made this eye contact like no words were spoken. No words were spoken, Tom. But I just knew he had my back, and I know he knew that I had his back. Now I'm thinking, this is post 9 11. Something happens. Like, we're all gonna dogpile on this bad guy, right? Cause no one's gonna die because you're not landing this thing in the water. So you gotta make sure this guy just goes down. So anyway, long story short, we see the flight attendants go all the way to the back. They're coming down our end of the aisle. Their plan is to cut through the galley to create a wall between angry, ballistic mad guy making the gun gesture and hitting everyone's seat. They're trying to make a human wall between him and the cockpit. Got it. So as they're coming down, I see two interlaced black handcuffs, those zip ties. And I, like, stopped the flight attendant, like, ma', am, is everything okay? How can we help? Like, she goes, he's a flight risk. We need to ask him to put these on. And I, I'm like, well, can we help? And she goes, we have to ask him to put these on. I guess the law is they have to ask you, Tom. So next time if you decide to lose your on the plane, he has to agree. He has to agree.
- [97:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [97:00]
Bedros Keuilian
They come in front of him, three flight attendants, and you can see this older lady flight attendant gesturing, like, you got to put this on. He stands up, he's like, I'm not putting those fucking things on. She looks up towards me and like, help. I look at this guy just through the corner of my eye, and I see him standing up. And we both. I had just finished. Remember I told you I did the six week marathon challenge? I just. Since then, I've been doing, like, about two challenges a year. I just finished an MMA challenge.
- [97:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Nice.
- [97:29]
Bedros Keuilian
I was like, all right, man. I want to learn to really fight, right?
- [97:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's see how this works. Yeah.
- [97:33]
Bedros Keuilian
With, at the time, king of the Cage Welterweight champion Aaron Weatherspoon. Awesome, tiny little guy, tatted up, peaceful. Until he brought me on the mats and he would just have his way with me. But in six weeks, he taught me some really cool stuff. And then he went in the ring and beat the shit out of me. Because every six week challenge has to end with either a marathon or whatever, right? So anyway, that's a different story. So I, we go and that's just me and this guy. And I look at this guy, he's like, what are you gonna do about it? I was like, bro, just put those things on. Like, just like, be cool, right? I'm wearing flip flops and I got my Hilo Hattie shirt on. It's like fucking, we're coming from Maui, dude. Sweating profusely because I'm nervous. He goes to shove me. And I did exactly what Aaron Weatherspoon taught. I parried out of the way, got behind him and got him in the rear naked chokehold. Tom, I'm not gonna lie to you, bro. I hope Aaron Weatherspoon never sees this video. In the back of your mind, you're like, okay, I'm paying this guy to coach me. So like the times that I got him in an arm bar or Rear Naked Choke hold or guillotine, maybe he was just like kind of going with it, you know? He really wasn't choking. He just tapped. Because I'm paying him, right? Dude, it worked. So I'm choking this guy out. I'm choking this guy out. I'm on his back. I'm talking in his ear like, dude, just calm down. Now he's bucking like a bronco. I'm sliding out of my flip flops because I'm sweating and I'm wearing flip flops. And he's taller than me, so I'm like, my toes, right? I'm like, that's right. Aaron said, like, when that happens, take a deep breath. It'll tighten up more. And then he started to like, crumple over.
- [98:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Tough Jesus. It's working.
- [98:59]
Bedros Keuilian
He's on his knees. I'm on his back now. I'm like, now the one dude who's here to help me, he's trying to wedge. He's trying to wedge the zip ties between my gut and his back and bring his arms back. And it's not working. I'm like, okay, what would Aaron do? I quickly got him in a guillotine chokehold. You know the old elementary school, get a kid in a chokehold and walk him around the campus thing. That Would happen to me all the time because I'd get bullied, right? So, dude, I flipped around and got him into guillotine and it worked. And this guy zip ties him. He zip tied really too tight, and so the zip tie cut into him, so we had to re zip tie him. That's a different story. Anyway, flight attendants made us sit in the back with him. We take turns.
- [99:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
- [99:39]
Bedros Keuilian
Yeah, we got all the hummus and wine you could drink and eat on the flight. And we landed in lax. LAPD took him away. And that was that. But all this to say that thank God that my dad had instilled this savage mindset in me. Like, you have to be the one that does something, son. You can't just be the one goes, hey, someone should do something about that. And so that's always been my mindset, is if I have to cross my arms and go, someone should do something about that. Maybe I should. Should be the one. Maybe I should be the one funding that movement. Maybe I should be the one saving that person out of the fire or saving that flight, whatever the thing is. And so I've always. But I also want to show up as a servant and love you up and how much value can I add to your life and what can I do to connect? Because I also realize I'm a big commanding guy and so I could come off as a threat. So look, I see a ping pong table. Everybody, let's play ping pong, you know, Plus, I enjoy it. So anyway, that's. I believe the more savage servants we can build, the more confident, capable protectors and providers we will have. Men will finally feel that they have this role in their life. Every guy feels like they want to have conflict. Like we have this thing called the project. It's a 75 hour men's personal development program, but it's 75 hours straight. So my lead instructor for it, Ray, is a former Navy seal. Then we have the psycho sociopathic form Marine. I've learned not to say former Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine, apparently. Then there's me teaching life, productivity, time management, building businesses. Because they're all entrepreneurs that come to this thing. MMA fighter, former SWAT operator, teaches pistols and rifle stuff. And so we really. 90% of these guys, when the Marine asks, how many of you have never hit another man before? 90% of the hands go up. How many of you have ever choked out another man? 90% have never choked out hands go up. And so realize, yet they still have the desire. You're a man, you have this desire to be aggressive, to have some level of conflict, to be able to like, ugh. But you can't because society has neutered us so much. And so there we teach these guys to be violent, but to also learn how to control their violence so that they're not. Because otherwise, when you never show your violence and you're savage within, you become a passive aggressive man. And that is where toxic masculinity begins. The passive aggressive man, the nice guy syndrome. There's a great book out there called no more Mr. Nice Guy. That's the passive aggressive man. That's, you know, toxic masculinity is the passive aggressive man who will yell at his wife and put his fist through a wall at home where it's safe. But when he's supposed to stand in the gap or raise his voice in a situation where the opportunity of right and wrong are presented, or jump out of a seat and choke a motherfucker out, he won't do that. He won't do that because he's not really sure if I can. I know I could probably yell at my wife and my kids and scare them. Well, here's your chance to fight with a pugil stick. Here's your chance to wrestle a guy. Here's your chance. And when they do, they realize, oh, you know what? First of all, I could take a punch. Secondly, I know what it feels like to get choked out and choke another man out. You know, I think I am going to go learn this thing on my own. Jiu Jitsu or Muay Thai. And every single one of them report back that they're more peaceful, that they have less stress because you're on the mat two to three times a week or in the ring getting after it. I literally have zero stress, bro, like, because of it. In terms of, like, where I want to, like, rage out and kill someone because I'm like, somebody else might try and kill me. Like, I'm just going to be cool.
- [103:11]
Tom Bilyeu
This is very interesting to me because it's the very thing that I know I have not focused on in my life and ought to, but the first time that somebody put it on my radar was Faras Zahabi, who was the. I don't know if he was the all around MMA coach of Georges St. Pierre, but certainly the jiu jitsu coach for Georges St. Pierre and had him on the show in the early, early, early days. And he said, tom, I want to choose kindness. I don't want kindness to be my only option. I was like, damn, very Good point. And then Jordan Peterson has started talking about this recently where he looked at the phrase from the Bible, the meek shall inherit the earth. I have to admit this always bothered me because I always interpreted meek as weak. So I was like, why would the weak inherit the earth? It doesn't make sense. Like, I know that it isn't true. And so how does that, like the Bible, believe it as a literal thing or not? It's got wisdom that's obviously lasted for a reason. So I was like, why does that resonate? So Jordan Peterson, whether he's right or not is another question. But this feels right. Looks up, I think the ancient Greek translation of meek. And it means to basically to be good with a sword, but keep it sheathed. And so there's a reason they didn't say the weak shall inherit the earth. But when you are a competent fighter, then you can choose combat or you can choose not to. But there's no internal conflict. There's no nervous, aggressive like a Chihuahua that's like barking and freaking out because it feels like it has to act big and tough because if it can't get you to back down and it actually goes to blows now it's going to be in trouble because it doesn't actually know how to fight or just paralyzed, like you said. And they just stay because they're afraid that they won't be able to do anything. And I do feel that that is one that as guys, you do have that impulse that you get in an elevator and you think, could I take this guy? Even in business, it still does run across your mind. And so to not address it, I think does. To not have that tool in your arsenal just robs you of one more thing. But also it sets up what you're talking about, where you've got people who are guys are going to try to get laid full stop, period, end of story. It just is what it is. And so if you don't have that confidence, you don't feel like you can be manly and win over a woman's heart by being the sort of prototypical tough guy. Not even tough guy, but like to have that, yeah, a dangerous man, but. But meek in the. That you're weaponized, but you keep your weapon hidden. Then you go for the nice guy tactic. Oh, the, the subtlety, the more feminine way of being sly, where it's reputational. Oh, he's not the right guy for you anyway. Like they, you know, they slide in that way. There's a whole strategy that in the animal kingdom, there are actually like frogs that do this. I think there are other ones as well where there is a legitimate male strategy where they try to look like a female, and so they can bypass the dominant male and they can mate. It's crazy. So I fear a strategy that guys are tempted to deploy, but it isn't a confident, grounded, expansive strategy. It's sort of shifty, like secretive, desperate.
- [106:49]
Bedros Keuilian
It's a desperate attempt.
- [106:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Not a good energy.
- [106:51]
Bedros Keuilian
When that's your only tool, you have to make that tool as useful as possible. And so. And a lot of dudes end up in the nice guy friend category. It's like, hey, how'd you become a friend? You're trying to get laid, and now you're a friend. There was a comedian. I forget the comedian. He goes, all those people that you just described, those guys, they're the dick in the jar now. Because then when that girl gets a boyfriend, as in soon as there's a conflict with the boyfriend and she goes, I hate him. I'm thinking of breaking up. That's the guy who goes, it's like, in case emergency, break glass. You know what? Yeah. He is a bad guy. He is a dick. Maybe. Maybe you hoping that if he just also pisses on the boyfriend, that he can get laid for the night. Like, that's not a cool way to do it. But if that guy also had the tools of confidence and he was capable and he knows how to protect, but he also knows how to stay cool, like Fonzie, because there's no good. Even in the best fight where you win, you still get hit. I've been stabbed.
- [107:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
- [107:49]
Bedros Keuilian
I've got a giant scar on my calf. Like, the guy went down, I hit him.
- [107:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Stabbed in your calf.
- [107:54]
Bedros Keuilian
Because when you hit him and you're like, I'm done. And then he pulls out a knife and just slices your calf, that's how you get stabbed in your calf. So even in your best fights, you still get hit in the process of trying to win. And so. But see, again, if someone's been on the mats before, they've been in a ring before, they've been in a fight before, you realize, like, okay, it's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt me even when I win. Can I now try and talk my way out of this? Can I be cool? If I have to, I can always resort to that. But can I be cool? But if. But if that shifty, desperate. I'm the. I'm the beta, you're the alpha thing is the only tool I got. I don't I don't want that, dude. I don't want that desperate thing because what if I'm with my family and you decide not to have mercy on me and I can't plead my way out of this? I want to be able to, like, get both thumbs in your eye holes as quickly as possible. Right? That's just a reality. We all, like. You said it, man. We go in the elevator, we'd start, like, sizing people up. That's just how it is. I don't know about you, but I've got such a predator's mind that I'll be in an. I'll be in a grocery store, and I'll see, like, a woman with a purse, and she's, like, looking at something. I'm like, I could steal that purse right now. I see a guy who's, like, in his car and he's got his door open, but he's got his head in, his ass is sticking out. I'm like, that 5 Series BMW could be mine right now. I know exactly what I would do to pull him out of his car and take that car so quick. Like, I do believe that every man has a predator's mind. It's in our. It's just the way we're wired. But I also have experienced a lot of violence where I've had my ass whooped, where I'm like, that dude could also have a concealed carry permit as I'm pulling him. Whack. That also. That dude could also grab a knife and slice. Because I've been sliced before, right? And so. And I would never do that these days, right? Like the old me, I've carjacked and home invasion robberies. But the. The new me, like, realizes that there's people. The great might equalizers, the gun, the knife, or multiple people. And if you get past all those, then there's a universal karmic justice that always has to take place to balance out. You know, you being an asshole means your kid gets cancer.
- [110:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [110:03]
Bedros Keuilian
I believe in that too. That my sins will be paid for by my kids. And so I have to add so much value, bro, to make up for all those fucking years of being an asshole.
- [110:14]
Tom Bilyeu
It's a useful way to look at it, even if it's not literally true. Where can people follow you?
- [110:19]
Bedros Keuilian
Best place to follow me is on Instagram. Edrowschooling. I love it.
- [110:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Guys, follow him. He's absolutely incredible. He's right about an incredible amount of things. And speaking of incredible things, if you haven't already Be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [110:37]
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