Tom Bilyeu - Impact Theory

Full transcript: Tom Bilyeu on London Real

4:12 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Tom Bilyeu, the American broadcaster, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Quest Nutrition, the billion dollar company known for its revolutionary corporate culture and mission. Most people know you as the host of Inside Quest and now Impact Theory, the business and mindset focused interview show featuring conversations from some of the world’s most amazing people, including Wyclef John, Simon Sinek, and Tim Ferriss. Tom, welcome to London Real.

5:34 Thank you for having me on, man. I am a huge fan of the show, and I use it in my research routinely. So first of all, I have a debt of gratitude to you. So thank you. Thanks. I mean, it’s great hearing that we’re over here broadcasting.

5:48 We never know who’s wanting to wear. So true. You know, you came in and you’re like, I know this set. So, you know, it’s great for us to hear. Yeah, it’s very cool.

5:56 Love what you’re doing. And you have a crazy story as well. So I don’t know where to jump in. But first, let’s talk about London. What are you doing here? Well, my wife is British.

6:05 So we were actually coming to Europe for the Cannes Lion. We had a festival that’s going on over there, and we could not come all the way to France and not stop in and see her family. So came here, staying with the in-laws. We’re just beautiful human beings. And yeah, so it was coming over.

6:24 And this worked out perfectly. You lived here 15 years ago. I did. I mean, like, I don’t want to go too deep, too quick. But what was Tom 15 years ago? Because like you land in Heathrow and you’re like, you take the Piccadilly line up to wherever, you must be thinking, I did this in 2001, 2002. Do you get weird flashbacks or not?

6:43 I don’t. So we come here a lot. So I’ve now spent, I mean, cumulatively quite a bit of time in London. Like I was saying before, we lived here for a year. I was a very different human being to actually answer your question.

6:57 And the first time I flew in, I felt like I was landing on the set of Mary Poppins. And I was freaking out. So I didn’t even have a passport until the first time I came. So met this girl. She’s British and invites me to come see her.

7:10 And I had to scramble and get my passport and I come and land. And I was just flipping out and just so excited. And was that kid that always wanted to see the world but never really got a chance. But that’s sort of the bright side. When I lived here, I had a fixed mindset.

7:23 And so it was a very dark time in my life where I had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. And I had trouble getting out of bed, not because I was depressed or anything, because I was lazy, like profoundly lazy. And as you know in the winter here, it’s cold. And it’s not like in America where you can sort of make the house a nice even temperature. It’s like you go to sleep with the heat on, you sleep with the heat off.

7:47 And we slept with it off. So I’d wake up in a cold room. And I was so mentally weak that I couldn’t get out of bed just because I was cold. It’s pretty ridiculous. Looking back now, it hurts to think about.

7:57 Well, look, this can be a big culture shock. And I got here in 97. Then I went back to 99 to New York City. But I came back again in 02, right around when you did. Right after I was in New York City for 9-11. And then my whole life pretty much just almost blew apart in 2001.

8:13 And so me coming here was like my rebirth, my cleansing. And I kind of built myself back up from January 2002. But London at first to an American, it’s just sometimes it’s weird. It’s hard. It didn’t have a lot of the conveniences of home that sometimes you expected.

8:28 I used to remember hearing all of my banker American friends and their wives complained they couldn’t get a pizza past mid-May. The cable wouldn’t get installed on Sunday. High quality problems. But it took me years to get used to London. And now I love it.

8:43 And London’s matured so much now to where I think it’s like one of the most avant-garde cities in the world. So now it’s got great restaurants and entertainment. But back then, it still was rough around the edges. Which probably didn’t make it any easier for you. It didn’t. I mean that wasn’t like a big struggle point for me. Honestly, it really was.

9:00 So I’m not a born entrepreneur. So a lot of people talk about entrepreneurs are born not made. That is not my case. I am a hand constructed entrepreneur. And so that time in my life was really before I had developed a growth mindset.

9:14 So I just, yeah, I didn’t have control of my own mind. And so that makes you do a lot of really dumb and sad things. And at the time, like I didn’t have a job. And my then girlfriend, now wife, was like bringing home the money. It was just a very weird time for me. But actually didn’t color negatively for me.

9:31 London. My in-laws are incredible. The city is amazing and breathtaking. As somebody who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, like coming here was legitimately like it was my first real experience with a big city. So L.A. is a sprawling metropolis, but it doesn’t feel like a big city.

9:48 New York feels like a big city. London feels like a big city. At the time, I hadn’t been to New York since I was 13. So I didn’t really have a sense of it. So coming here was really, really magical.

9:58 And so art is like my first love. And there’s something about the architecture here that really draws you in. And it was the beginning of my transformation, quite frankly. Wow. Well, I want to talk about that as we get on, because, you know, for you to just say that shocks people, you know, because they see how successful you are and whether it’s in monetary terms with Quest Nutrition or whether the latest stuff in the broadcasting in your mindset.

10:22 But it’s nice for people to plug in right now and know that 15 years ago, you know, you could have a hard time getting out of bed and that it’s just your mindset that’s changed. So if people are listening, maybe they should just stay tuned a little bit more because I want to get into that. But I guess we should start maybe at the end and we’ll go back to the beginning because you’re a broadcaster now. And most people probably know you for that first now. But why did you decide to start broadcasting?

10:50 Well, the honest answer is a game that I play called No Bullshit, What Would It Take? And so I’ve worked in the inner cities a lot and I’ve seen the just absolutely dramatic negative impact that growing up in a certain environment has. So I refer to it as generational poverty. It has nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with mindset.

11:09 And going in there, so at Quest, we were literally manufacturing in Compton, California. So nice and famous for being very underprivileged. And so going into that area, hiring the local people, and I was really, it was really important to me to let people know whether you have criminal record, you know, you were in gangs. Like, I don’t care about any of that. So what I would tell people is I don’t care who you are today.

11:35 All I want to know is who do you want to become and what’s the price you’re willing to pay to get there. And so we’ll give you that chance. And once we put out into the neighborhood that you could apply for a job even if you had a criminal record, we literally had people like out and around the door down the parking lot waiting just to be interviewed because no one will give you a shot. Once you have a criminal record, like getting back into the system is next to impossible.

11:57 So we brought these people in, really gave them a chance to do something special with their life. And in that process, I begin to realize the mindset that these people are walking in the door with is so detrimental to a path of success. And it just planted a seed in my mind that at my most, like, honest with who I am and what do I want to accomplish, I want to pull people out of the matrix. Now, what I mean by that is to get them out of that generational poverty, that mindset of it’s just a whole bunch of limiting beliefs.

12:27 It’s, well, my parents told me that nobody wants to see me succeed. My parents told me that nobody and my entire community, quite frankly, tell me that nobody ever escapes where I grew up while, you know, success may be possible for other people. It’s just not possible for someone like me. And so you would hear that all the time, all the time, all the time. And I used to ask the magic genie question. And I would say, hey, because I’m trying to find out who these people are, right?

12:50 A magic genie shows up. It’s going to grant you one wish and one wish only. You can’t wish for anything, for anybody else. It’s got to be totally selfish. It’s got to be something for you.

12:56 Can’t cure cancer, bring somebody back from the dead, none of that. What do you do? Universally, the answer was I want a job. Now, OK, fair enough. They’re just saying that because I’m interviewing them for a job.

13:07 Not money. So I’m like, not money. So that’s total BS, which is what they secretly want, by the way. But they’re not going to say that in a job interview. So I would push, you know, is it you really want a job?

13:16 I really want a job. Isn’t what you really want money? Like, that’s the whole thing that you’re going to get out of this exchange. Yeah, actually, you’re right. OK, fine. I do want money. All right, fantastic. Brian, drumroll.

13:25 How much money do you want? There’s only one answer I ever got. You have a guess? One million dollars. One million dollars, baby. Now, one million dollars doesn’t even buy you a nice house.

13:36 So that to me was like, this is a magic genie. I’ve had to talk you into being honest about the fact that you want money. And then once we actually get to money, the number you come up with is a million dollars, which, by the way, asking for money from a magic genie is a travesty to end all travesties. Don’t ask for that. But not even getting into that. Like the fact that they couldn’t think beyond a million dollars was crazy.

13:59 And it just shows like people don’t really dare to dream big because they don’t think it’s possible. So for them, I’m sure the whole exercise was just absurd anyway, but like not allowing yourself to dream about what’s really possible and then backing into the execution steps. So that became my obsession. Like, how do you get mindset? Because that’s all it is, right?

14:16 Because I went from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car. That’s a real story to building a billion dollar business, making myself fantastically wealthy in the process. So I know what that looks like. I know you don’t, at least for me. I didn’t start anywhere amazing.

14:32 It was about having to shape myself into becoming capable of that. So seeing this mindset, this holding them back and asking the question, no bullshit, what would it take to give everyone a mindset that at least gives them the chance to succeed? They won’t all succeed, but it’ll at least give them the chance. And the answer was to build a media company. The reason for that, do you know Joseph Campbell? Yeah, of course.

14:53 So I read The Power of Myth when I was like, I don’t know, 21 or something. It totally changed my life in ways maybe we’ll get into later, but in very deep and profound ways. And in that he said, if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And what it made me realize, at the end of the day there’s only one way that humans assimilate truly disruptive information. And I needed them to totally disrupt the way that they were thinking. And the way that people assimilate that information is through narrative.

15:21 So you got books, comic books, TV shows, movies, and video games. Those are the five dominant forms of narrative that we have now that we could give somebody an empowering mindset. So pair that with the timing and you’ve got the opportunity to build a social following as a broadcaster. And then on the other side for us, we’re building traditional narrative content. And this all feeds into my obsession with a total merchandising strategy from a financial standpoint and why Disney is different than everybody else and what they did right.

15:49 That every studio in their wake has done wrong and why we think we’ll be the ones to do it the right way. Okay, and this is the guy with the hero’s journey concept as well. Correct. Which is again, I guess, kind of a metaphor and a narrative, kind of a whole idea of that rolled into one. Which is very powerful as well. It’s everywhere. I’ve even used it in my TED Talk without thinking I used it.

16:11 And we actually encourage a lot of our academy members to tell their own hero’s journey as an exercise in reframing their failures. And so you can use them as these huge assets that you kind of bring back to the world, you know, of all your learned lessons. So I love this idea. Weren’t you too busy building a billion dollar company? Or were you now, was it time for you to mentally transition as well? Was it a timing thing too?

16:35 No, not at all. So for me, it really was looking at what is the best thing that I could do to build Quest. So Quest was meant to be my forever company. So I never intended to leave it. And started, the reason that the show originally was called Inside Quest was I had written these 25 bullet points called the Quest Belief System.

16:55 And they were the things that I had to do to my mind in order to go from, you know, staying in bed because I’m cold to being able to actually execute at the highest level of business and doing the hard things and suffering and all of that. I’m going to read some of those later. You created those in 2010, like back in the day? Or was it more recent? Yeah, that was probably 2011. But yeah, it was right around there. And so the reason that I had written those was I was really terrified that I was going to be taking something from people.

17:24 And when you look at the hierarchy of a business, the way that people get rubbed the wrong way is they come in and they like work their asses off. And making protein bars is physically very demanding. So it was a very hard job, especially in the beginning. And I wanted to bring these people on, right? I don’t care who you are now, I want to know who you want to become and all that.

17:45 But I needed to make good on that promise. So I needed to help them become the person that they wanted to become. You talked about our unique culture. The unique culture was all about you can do anything you set your mind to. So that may take you away from me. So making protein bars is just your tuition.

18:00 I want to help you become the person that you want to become. Don’t lie. Like really tell me where you want to go. And if that’s to create a competing company, final teacher, everything I know, if that’s to go on and do something totally different, but you’re going to give me two years of your life and really commit, I’m all for it. But there had to be reciprocation on my side other than a paycheck. I just couldn’t feel good about it otherwise.

18:17 So the 25 bullet points were me saying, here, this is really what you’re trying to learn here. But it’s not about memorizing. So the show became my reaction to people could memorize them and they will come up and say, hey, bullet 12 is this. And I’d be like, I literally don’t know if that’s true or not because I don’t have the bullet points memorized. I’m living them, but I’m not going to waste time memorizing them. People were doing the reverse.

18:39 They were memorizing them, but they weren’t living them. So I wanted to create the show, bring on the most successful people I could get my hands on, because I knew you’re going to see over and over and over without them knowing what the 25 bullet points are. They’re going to talk about the 25 bullet points because you selected the guests or because you asked the questions or how would every day are the most fundamental three. The most fundamental truths of the human condition. Really? That’s it. That’s it. They are the most foundational things that I could think of given the anatomical structures of our brain.

19:09 Like we are a certain way. Human animals, like for all of our differences, our similarities are infinitely more striking. But pulling out those points is something that I would say you uniquely do by having guests on, like, say, Simon Sinek, because otherwise, CNN and Fox would be pulling these 25 points out on a regular basis. I mean, it takes a talent to show people those, right? You have to be going down a certain path.

19:31 So the path in my interviews that I’m going down is all about mindset. And whenever possible, how did you shape your mindset to get where you are? Right. That my favorite narrative, because I think it’s the most empowering, is an authentic true story about how somebody goes from not believing in themselves, having a fixed mindset to believing anything is possible and actually executing against that and being able to articulate the steps along the way.

19:55 So my fundamental belief, and I don’t think anybody could convince me otherwise, is that, like Darwin said, it’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. So humans become the apex predator, not because they’re stronger, smarter, faster, because they’re more adaptive. So if we are the ultimate adaptation machine, then we need to get rid of all these old notions about what we’re capable of by the time that we hit.

20:23 I mean, people think that by the time you’re like 19, your life is over, right? And you’ve learned what you’re going to learn and that’s it. And I mean, there’s just so much neuroscience around the fact that that’s just not true. So getting people to show that, like how they did it, to tell stories. I mean, you know, you talked about it in the beginning.

20:38 I make no attempts to be cool because I don’t think that pulls people out of the matrix. Me saying I’m a born entrepreneur when I’m clearly not, like that doesn’t help the millions, hundreds of millions of people that are struggling in the way that I struggled that really can become an entrepreneur, whatever else they want, if they put their mind to it. So your employees are coming up. By the way, this is rule number eight, and I love it. And I just wanted to pick out a few because it’s very poignant here.

20:58 This is Quest University. Making food products is just how you pay your tuition. See beyond your job description to the opportunity of becoming the best version of yourself. So I love that concept, you know, and again, that’s like the ultimate mission. So, you know, the work here is just so you can become better, educate yourself, build the best you and all that other stuff, which is really interesting.

21:17 But my point is, is that people would come to you and say, Tom, what’s number seven? What’s number 13? And you’re like, tell you what, I’m going to create media and narratives that’s going to constantly instill these values into your head. Correct. So it was internal first, or you thought I want to tell the world this as well. Now, literally, it’s called inside Quest because it was meant for the people inside Quest. And then as we were doing it, it was like, man, this social thing.

21:39 So we were early adopters of social media. So we were planning out our Facebook strategy back in 2009 when other people thought like, that’s just a distraction. We could really see how it had potential. But as things were migrating towards the personal side, like finally me stepping out front, which I never wanted to do, which I get people are never going to believe that that’s true because now I’m so out front, like aggressively. But really didn’t. And my chief marketing officer literally for years kept saying, dude, we need to do a show around you. We need to do a show around you. And that felt so icky to me. And I had lied on Facebook about my birthday, which is still fake on my Facebook page because I was convinced someone’s going to steal my identity. Right.

22:18 So that’s where I start. And I’ve really had to like evolve social media. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So that’s where I start. And finally realizing I think this is starting to get away from me. And that personal branding is going to be a thing that stepping out front would be very important.

22:31 Stepping out front would be very advantageous. People have a natural inclination to gravitate towards an individual, not a company. So let me start doing this. I think I have a viewpoint that would be useful to people. So then we did inside quest as an opportunity outbound as an opportunity for the world to learn what this quest stand for. And this goes back to my obsession with Disney. At one point in the 30s and 40s, Disney was probably the most famous person alive. And he really lived the ethos of his brand.

23:00 And look, post sort of post his death, like there’s some controversy around that. But that’s what he stood for and represented and really went out of his way to craft that when he was alive. And obviously that fed into the brand narrative, which is just incredibly important. Now we live in a world where you can’t fake it anymore. Social media is too ubiquitous. You’re going to get caught out at some point. So I think the only way forward is to really be authentic. But in being authentic and stepping out front and in putting out a message that is actually useful and advantageous to the people that listen to it, you can tell people this is why my brand stands for.

23:29 This is what we’re doing. Come look behind the scenes. Get to know me as a human being. Like look me in the eye on a weekly basis, certainly possibly on a daily basis. Follow me around. See what I do. And then then you’ll know what the why. So we’ve talked about Simon Sinek. You’ll know the why of my company, right? You’ll get that. You’ll understand what I’m driven by, what I’m trying to accomplish. And then also, I’m sure in fact, I will prognosticate here every day. Tell me if this is true. Every day someone writes to you and says, you Brian Rose have changed my life. So that’s what I do.

23:58 I’ve changed my life. Is that true? Oh, yeah, it must be made, right? You’re putting out all this of the chills. You put out all this amazing content with good intentions, which you set off camera. So cool. I wish we’d been recording. You said, God, with a bad setup and good intentions, you can still do amazing things. I love that. So when you have good intentions, you’re really trying to do amazing stuff for people. They can feel that. And so I feel like we’re living through sort of a the second wave of the social revolution now where it’s it’s about who are you?

24:27 Who are you as a person? How does that feed into your brand? What is all of this? And what do I get out of it as a consumer? Right? So in your case, you’re changing people’s lives. The same thing I’m trying to do. I actually want to change people’s lives. So this is me at Quest going. Quest is a company about transformation. It’s not about protein bars, right? We wanted to impact people’s lives positively. So how do we push that to the next level? And inside Quest to me was the obvious answer. Now, the reason I spun it out. It’s really hard to get people to see a brand.

24:56 We sold protein bars. There’s no way around that. That sells protein bars to become this media company that’s all about mindset and all that. So we were building two separate audiences. And so that was becoming weird. And I just had to be honest. There are two things that I have to do in my life. And that’s to address the two pandemics that we face. The pandemic of the body and the pandemic of the mind. And I felt the pandemic of the body, it’s now moving. I’ve got two partners. They’re going to keep running with it. They’ll make that magic happen. But no one’s going to do it.

25:25 And so we transitioned out, took the studio that we had built there, and turned it into a literal standalone media company with aspirations of being bigger than Disney one day. So that’s our plan. And do you think a company can only do one thing? Do you think if you get big enough and the public knows you as that, is that the conclusion that you kind of made? Is that Quest is going to be the protein bar company and the media company has to be a separate entity?

25:53 I think you have two paths before you. You’ve got the Virgin Path, where he had, I mean, what he started some like 300 companies under the Virgin brand. Nuts! Eight of them or whatever become billion dollar brands. That’s equally crazy.

26:05 But the rest also fail. Yeah, sure. Like there was a whole story today about all these Virgin brands you’ve never heard of. They were just like crazy. The Virgin Brides. I don’t know if anyone remembers that.

26:14 Virgin Condoms. Yeah, all these failures too, which is a weird, beautiful thing. But you were saying, sorry, there’s two. Yeah, so that’s path one is yeah, you find a way to detach the brand identity from the product, which we were not able to do at Quest. Okay, so and maybe we could have like if my partners and I really shared that vision and they were willing to go with me, but that’s a lot of risk. So when you look back at Virgin, he had to buy his Virgin music co founder out because he didn’t see the transatlantic airline that Richard wanted to do. So why would he? Right. So hey, let me make this easy bottom out company. Exactly. So it takes you’ve got a very strong vision. Oftentimes it’s counterintuitive. Oftentimes it’s deeply personal and you’re the only one who’s going to see that through. So we didn’t share the vision for that.

26:59 And so rather than try to like force that make them uncomfortable, like we had such an amazing run for 14 years. We were partners, utterly transformative in my life and still technically am I’m just not there in a day to day role, but still in the partner in the company. Really believe in it. I think it’s going to crush. I evangelize for the brand, but this gave me an opportunity to, you know, we had been so successful financially. It gave me an opportunity to start something new. I co founded it with my wife who’s just amazing. And I think that’s a great opportunity to be able to do that.

27:28 And it’s just amazing. And we’ve not only worked together, but we’ve been married now for 15 years. So we know how to work together. We know how to build something. So that was why we spun it out into a standalone. But hopefully we’ll be a little more strategic and how we place the brand. It can be more flexible. And then option two to go back to the brand thing. So if option one is Virgin option two is essentially what Quest is doing. Quest makes protein bars and it’s known for that. And it wants you to know it for that. And it’s going to double down on that.

27:57 And I think they’re both very sound strategies. One may require a little more tolerance for risk than the other, but you’ve seen company on Apple, right? Another one that’s it may seem obvious what they’re doing now, but Apple TV from Apple computers, the iPod, all of it, the iPhone was very counterintuitive. Very much so. Yeah. And so you were inside Quest was around for a year or two, about 18 months. Okay. And it was internal first. And then you opened it up or it was always something that other people consume. By the time we actually.

28:26 Went live, we went out to everybody, but like at first it was just a YouTube channel and we weren’t really doing other socials. And then we started really getting more strategic because I didn’t worry about whether it caught on with the world at large. It was really just focused. As long as the employees are watching and digging it, we’re good. But then it was just like, well, if we’re going to do it, let’s really do it. And so we did about, I think just shy of a hundred episodes of inside Quest. With guests on each episode? Yeah, that was always the way it was. Always.

28:55 We did a couple clip shows, but yeah. So how many episodes have you filmed with like different guests? Oh, now we’ve done, it’s got to be 135 somewhere around there. Okay. All right. And before we get into the next iteration, Disney, what do you see in Disney? Why do most people sleep on Disney or they don’t see the beautiful things they did in the past? I literally can’t actually, I know exactly why people aren’t disciplined. So I’ll walk through that.

29:25 If I say to you, Hey, I’m going to go see a Warner Brothers movie. You know nothing about it. Could be uplifting, could be tragic, could be heartbreaking, a horror film. Who knows? Right? Could be anything. But if I say I’m going to go see a Disney movie, you know something about it. I don’t have to tell you anything else. I’m going to go see a Disney movie. You already know something. So he, he being Walt Disney understood that they had to stand for something that the brand Disney in and of itself had to stand for something and it can’t just be quality. Right? So everybody’s going to say that. Well, it stands for quality. Quality what?

29:53 So he really understood that it needed to be, and this isn’t the language he would use, I don’t think, but the magic of childhood, right? Just capturing that thing that we all feel as kids, whether you’re a child or an adult, you can all relate to that magic of those like simple, beautiful moments in life. And they captured that in the brand ethos, maintained that for a very long time. Then buying Pixar was a no brainer. There was so much, you know, connection between the two in terms of their ethos and the way that they work and the type of product that they put out.

30:23 That was a no brainer. Then the other thing that they do is they’re looking at all the culturally relevant intellectual property out there that can be merchandise and they buy it. So buying Marvel was one of the smartest things they’ve ever done. Buying Star Wars was amazingly smart. And they’ve been using since the 1930s, they’ve been using a total merchandising strategy, which means Disney sees their primary sources of revenue, not the piece of art that you create, but the merchandising that you sell around it. So it’s what I’ll call the shout and echo model. So the movie is the shout.

30:53 The merchandising is the echo and it’s the echo that makes the money. So looking at that and knowing that from a technological standpoint, we’re now moving into an era where things can be made on demand. You don’t have to have the inventory risk. So here I am thinking, how do you build a studio in the modern era? You’ve got social media can be done essentially for free. Certainly the distribution of it can be done for free. You’ve got the opportunity to merchandise, which you can do for basically you don’t pay until you make it. So it’s perfect.

31:20 You’re paying out of cash flows, which is just an incredible place to be. And I think that that’s going to happen to more and more pieces of the industry as 3D printing comes down and cost becomes more ubiquitous, can print in more materials. Like that’s just going to get more and more interesting. So now, because what I wanted was when I look at, okay, if I’m going to compete with Disney or I’m going to compete with Sony Warner Brothers, all that, they’re willing to throw $200 million at a tentpole film. Like, that’s crazy. Like, how do you compete with that? So and I think in the next seven years, one of the major studios is going to go under because you miss.

31:50 Two or three times in a row and you’re done. Like that’s it. You just go out of business. So I think they’re making way too big of risks in a time where do you know who E.L. James is familiar. Fifty Shades of Grey. Okay. Yeah, the author. Yeah, she had five million readers before she published the book. Think about that for a second. Five million readers before she ever published the book. That’s insane. Like, this never happened before you. There’s no way to do it. So she went on a website, wrote it all in this fan fiction website, got a huge following. And then she went to a publisher and said, would you like that?

32:20 Would you like to publish my book that has five million followers? The only answer is yes, of course we would. Right. And that book is sold some just ungodly number of copies. So that puts us in a position where as content creators, if you’re trying to be a studio, if you’re trying to be something bigger than a multi-level or a multi-channel network, I think you’re just looking for virality. You need to give your community an ethos. So going back to Disney understanding that the brand ethos has to stand for something. So my new company, Impact Theory, it stands for something, right? It’s going from pulling someone out of the matrix, going from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. And it’s hero’s journey from a thousand different directions, right? I can tell a thousand different stories, but it’s all that same uplifting transition of going from that fixed mindset to the growth mindset. So that’s how we want to feed into that. But we want to do it by going out to the community with that ethos, asking them to submit ideas. We then filter the ideas, make sure that they make sense of the brand ethos, give them back to the community for them to actually create real properties, which then come back to us and we look for the virality in that. So there’s a technology layer that we’re working on now that hopefully in the next year we’ll have ready that’ll allow us to gamify that sort of interaction back and forth with the different ideas and properties and things like that. And right now we’re working on securing the life rights to people whose stories I think are just unbelievable. Some of whom we’ll call have a very low level of celebrity for their specific life. A couple of them have been guests on our show, so I know how good their stories are and how much our audience resonates.

33:50 So you would go and say for a dollar option, Brian, I’m going to pay you a dollar and now I control the rights to your life for the next, let’s say two years. And I have two years to get it turned into something, either a comic book, a TV show, a movie, whatever we agree on. And then from there, like every time we hit a hurdle, you make money. So if the dollar is obviously nothing, but let’s say when the first comic goes into production, then you get a bump. When it gets picked up as a TV show, then you would get a bigger bump. But if you’re really smart, Brian, and I know you are, then what you really want is a piece of the merchandise.

34:20 And that’s our thing. Total transparency, total authenticity, letting people know. And I’m telling people exactly how we’re building Modern Studio because I know no one else has the discipline to follow me. Merchandising. When I hear that, and based on this narrative, I’m thinking Star Wars action figures. And I’m in the media business and honestly most media people, unless you’re Disney, they don’t even think about physical products. I mean, sure they do, I guess if they’re selling them later. But what does that look like?

34:48 Well, it looks exactly like that. The shirt that I’m wearing right now is one of our shirts that buy it and it gets printed at that moment. And I hold no inventory risk or anything like that. And we can routinely put them up. What does this stand for?

35:01 Tough in the fuck up, Buttercup. It’s going to be the title of this episode. And literally, it was one of those sayings where in the middle of a Q&A, a live Q&A on Facebook, somebody said like, hey, this situation, what should we do? And I was just like, look, sometimes you just got to tough in the fuck up, Buttercup. And then people started writing, oh my God, please make that a t-shirt. Right? That’s the world that we live in. So then we made it as a t-shirt goes live, people can buy it. So but that’s like totally minor. The real play is to make a property that resonates with people like a Disney film and now it becomes a part of your identity.

35:32 So think about Star Wars, right? This is this story changed the world. Didn’t change it as much as you’d think. But George Lucas makes this film that nobody thinks is going to be a success. Okay, so he had just directed THX 1138 totally avant-garde sort of weird. It is weird. Didn’t make a lot of money. But then he makes American Graffiti. American Graffiti hasn’t released yet. And he gets Star Wars. He makes Star Wars. American Graffiti still hasn’t come out. Okay.

35:59 When he makes Star Wars, the crew’s walking offset. They all think it’s this ridiculously stupid children’s film that’s never going to amount to anything. And nobody believes in it but him. And finally, when he’s ready to go make it, he realizes they’re not going to promote this movie like the studio now doesn’t believe in it. There’s been so much like kerfuffle on the set with the cinematographer and everybody saying like this movie’s a joke. They’re not going to promote it. They’re just going to let it die. So then American Graffiti comes out. So Star Wars in the can. He knows no one’s going to do anything with it. American Graffiti comes out and I think becomes the first movie to cross 100 million dollars. It wasn’t the first. It was one of like the rarest few becomes absolutely massive.

36:38 And the studio realizes, oh, we’ve got to keep this kid happy. So they go back to him and they want to like triple quintuple whatever what they had paid him to do Star Wars. And he says, don’t pay me any more money. Let me maintain the merchandising rights so that I can make sure that I can market this film. He’s not thinking like, oh, the merchandising rights are going to be worth something. He wants to make t shirts and posters just to get the word out. And he knows that the studio can stop him if he doesn’t have the merchandising rights. So he retains the merchandising rights for that reason and that reason alone.

37:06 And then when the movie comes out and it becomes the astronomical hit that it is now all of a sudden he realizes, oh, dear God, I’ve what I made on actually making the movie is a pittance compared to what I’m making over here. And I mean, he’s made billions of dollars on the merch. So it’s going to be rare that you have a hit like that. Right. Most of them aren’t going to be that most of them are going to be base hits. But the problem is this where everybody else falls down. If you think about a Warner Brothers or you think about a Sony, they have to reinvent themselves every time.

37:36 Because there’s no like continuation from the last movie. It’s why they like sequels because at least then there’s some merchandising carry over all the relationships that you’ve established with the merch and the manufacturers and knowing like what hair color Jack Sparrow’s beard should be. Like all of that stuff has already been decided. So it’s way easier. So now they try to stay in that ecosystem as long as they can. But that’s not their studio model, right? Their studio model is a breath. Everything make any good story. We make good stories, right? It doesn’t feed into a brand ethos. So without that, that’s the reason why they’re always pulling back on the merchandise because from a technical standpoint, do you know how many decisions you have to make? Think about every decision you made. We were talking about it before, right? The chairs face each other. You had to actually argue that with your team. So now multiply that across a thousand pieces of merchandise for a single film property. Everybody’s exhausted and taxed. So it’s just never being maximized except by Disney because they’re still selling Mickey Mouse, dude. Mickey Mouse came out in the 1930s and they still sell Mickey Mouse. So it’s like they stumbled upon something. Walt was a genius. I don’t care how or why, but they stumbled on it, but nobody’s copying it. So, but when I find myself slipping out of the rhythm every time it’s because of lack of discipline. It’s I see another story that I moved by and I want to tell it. But it’s like, if it doesn’t fit the brand ethos, you can’t because you devalue the top level brand, which means you devalue your ability to do merch. So, and at the end of the day, the merch and it comes, I mean, we can get really complicated here. It comes down to what’s

39:06 Called self signaling, right? So I wear this shirt to an interview. You’re wearing the suit, right? I love your stories about the suit because you used to be wearing like, Oh God, like the, it wasn’t Ed Hardy, but it was like G star. Yeah, it’s such a different vibe. And then you switch it over to the suit makes you feel differently makes me feel differently about you. And your goal was largely to tell me who you are. But I know you use affirmations a lot. So it’s like you’re sort of dressing in a way that’s sort of physical affirmation. If you will. So me wearing a shirt reminding me to toughen the fuck up.

39:36 Is important to me. So it’s, it’s meant to say something to you. But when we signal, we signal loudest to ourselves. Interesting. So self signaling. Okay. You can be huge for it. And so most studios don’t have the discipline to stay on brand to make that Disney merchandise model work. And they’ll, they’ll just go to the fair weather. Okay, we got to do this because they’re desperate for those quarterly on. Okay. And just to finish up the merch question in 10 years from now, what other merch might you sell me? Man, that’s a great question. I’d love to see a lot of physical merch. That would be like the most exciting thing for me would be to be in a world where we’re a 3d printing on demand. Or I mean, quite frankly, getting to the point where we just know like this unit sells and so like when a t shirt hits and has true virality, then we do the screen printing and we hold inventory and all that because we can get better margins and do special things for the customer because we’re the one shipping it. So I mean, there’s reasons to do that stuff. But it will be so dependent on the property that it’s really hard to prognosticate but will win when we’ve got bedsheets, socks, watches, lampshades, sleeping bags, you know, apps like it on apps as well. So digital products as well. Okay, but kind of less than $100 type things. Man, if you if you want to buy a custom Tesla, that’s in one of our properties, like the impact theory Tesla. And they want to partner. I’m all for it. That’s fascinating. I’m really glad we had this discussion because I’ve never heard

41:06 This idea talked about when it comes to like digital media. And, and it’s fascinating. Maybe that’s because you come from a physical product side that you don’t try to ignore it like so many quote unquote media people do. Well, so you’re about to live in a world where people are going to ask the question, why should I pay for this thing that feels like it should be free, right? So and and I am telling you, we are all at the tip of a very large iceberg where people are going to be compelled to give away and you’ve got an awesome model because you give as much away as anybody might need.

41:36 To really make a transformation, but invite them into a deeper world if that’s what they want. And that to me is sort of the only sustainable model. But like so much more is going to be given away for free, right? Think about a singer who just is they need the attention, right? So if you think about don’t worry about selling your music, that would be my biggest tip. Don’t don’t sell your music. Go on tour, build a following, make people feel touched by your music and they will take care of you forever. If they don’t feel touched by your music, now you’re in trouble. So that’s where I think the music industry got a little bit lazy there for a while because there was so much money to be made in record sales. You didn’t have to worry so much about touring. Now as it’s touring, it becomes touring and being an influencer. So working with a brand to tell people, hey, go buy this, you know, because I rep it. That becomes the way that people really monetize. But I think for people like us that are putting out this content to ignore physical product will 10 years from now be a death knell if you don’t start thinking about it today. But because you’ll have a good, I mean, it’ll be a sliding scale of decreasing returns by the end of the year. You’ll have a good run for the next five to 10 years, but it will dry up. Okay, interesting. Let’s talk about our good friend Simon Sinek. Start with why it’s interesting to look at your show and maybe even our show and a bunch of shows out there and say what was there? Why? You know, and you started it to kind of reflect those internal corporate values that you felt so passionate about that were really human values. But you didn’t start it to necessarily make money. You didn’t start it to be a YouTube Internet famous. Like you can see the why in every brand out there. And whether it’s Joe Rogan or

43:06 Mark Marin or you or Fox News, like the why is down in there. You don’t have to look that hard to find it, whether it’s me in the chair placements or all that stuff. I mean, for London Real, like this wasn’t even a company for three years, you know, and like it was just me broadcasting to get my demons out and try to connect with the world. And because it was so much goddamn fun and connecting. But you know, when you think about your why and what you know, what your media brand is, you know, do you think about how yours is different than everything else? And does it change? And do you look back to those first 10 episodes? And are those similar to your last 10 episodes? Yeah, they are actually somewhat similar. I think what you’d find is I talked a lot more in the early episodes. And I don’t talk as much now. Why isn’t that maturity as an interviewer, understanding how to get better answers, needing to put less of myself out there to create the energy on set, like doing some of that as sort of pre producing on the way in. And then quite honestly, like I was beginning to realize I needed to establish myself because I was so asking the question, why should anybody care about me? And so I felt I had to establish myself. So yeah, just as I’ve gained more confidence, I’ve, you know, the guy that shows up the lowest dressed is usually the most successful person in the room. Like that’s, you know, so I’ve just gotten to the point now where I know I’m doing a good job. So I don’t have

44:36 To be so loud. Right. I think I was a line in American gangster or something like that. Quietest guy in the room is the, yeah, the kind of the biggest guy in the room. Yeah. And when you went to design your show, so it was like the hour long piece and they’re kind of the four parts. And I know I’m geeking a little bad out on broadcasting on you, but it’s okay. It’s my show. How did you make those choices studio audience, you know, your first 10 guests, I’m going to do it this way because, you know, you could have done anything. You could have kept it open. You could have kept it shorter format. Just wondering why you made those decisions.

45:06 Because those are, those are really important decisions in my opinion. They say so much about you and the brand and they sub communicate to the audience. And most likely you won’t change it for the next 10 years or for the rest of your life. So I just wonder if you thought about why you made those decisions. Yeah. Oh yeah. Very much so. So long format was because I wanted to go deep. So I’m looking at all the other people doing shows out there and with precious few exceptions, it’s like pretty surface. It’s mostly celebrity driven. And I just thought that’s not interesting to me. So I had like a hard and fast no celebrity rule when we started and my team freaked out because they were like, how are we ever going to build an audience? Like if you don’t bring on celebrities, but I was like, I want people with amazing stories that have really transformed. They’ve done something incredible. Like I want those people. And so we brought on. It was a little more cerebral. Um, as you know, at my request and long form gave us a chance to really sink in and get to some things that other people might not be able to get to. And then in front of the audience was because I wanted my employees to be able to watch it. Um, and then that, so that was why the audience, but then that took on a life of its own. And I find that people are certain people. So certain people react poorly to the audience and they get a little nervous and maybe the clam up a bit and other people come alive. So like Gary Vee, right? Gary Vee loves having an audience. Amazing. And so it was a lot of fun. You just talk to you anymore. I just talk to the audience. Yeah, which hey man, for me, the show at the end of the day is for the crowd. So like if the crowd is able to engage with him in real time and

46:36 That brings something beautiful out of him, then I love it. And I like it because I think very few people in doing what I do can perform in front of a crowd. So this was me saying, okay, how do I also position myself to shine? Like I want to put myself in a light where I can get better at something where I can do something that other people can’t do. Like it’s, it’s gotta be like you playing, um, a unique game. Otherwise, why? Why?

47:06 I thought that that brought an interesting dynamics. I know most people are trying to sort of keep it on the DL way more intimate. And I thought, God, if we could open this up to an audience which creates a different vibe, a different energy. And I know not many people will be able to follow me into that space. Um, then we’ve got some. Okay, so you’re doing audience now for every show. You had a few without you like Ferris you did without. Yeah, so Ferris was right. Well, so I’ve done Ferris twice once with a big audience and then once with like three people. Uh, and so we, we don’t go out there.

47:36 We go out of our way to have an audience now we so it fluctuates with the guests. So when we have a big guest, a lot of people show up when we don’t have a big guest and we don’t. And before it was like, we would fill the audience no matter what. Yeah. Um, but now it’s just like, that’s not sustainable. I’m not worried about that. So, uh, like when Gary was there, I mean, we probably had 20 people in the audience. Um, and then, you know, the average guest, we may have six or seven. So it’s, and it’s in LA you shoot. Yeah, we literally shoot at my house. Okay. Your house. Okay. Wow. Okay. That’s cool.

48:06 And then they come and yeah, and that’s how you roll, but you’d like having the audience there. I love it. Because it pushes you and it most times brings out something good in the guest. Yeah. Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. And if I could, I would do everyone in front of 150 people. I mean, that would, that, that would be the fantasy. But what you find is crowd management is one of the most difficult things you’re ever going to do because getting people there, like you have to have somebody out there on the street, like handing out tickets. Hey, come see the show. And I saw, wow, that’s a lot of work. Yeah.

48:36 Just doing the lab event thing. Um, it’s interesting you say that because I’ve done a couple of shows with crowds and I’m also used to here and I’m used to going deep and you know, I get these professional boxers that are, you know, cry after two hours. And I just love these moments that I knew wouldn’t happen in an audience situation. And sometimes people play the audience and they want to get the laughs. And sometimes, like you said, some people get a charge by the audience, but sometimes they turn into someone that maybe they’re not because they’re always worried if people are approving with the claps and the laughs. So sometimes yeah, I go the other way, but I understand why you’re doing it with the audience. And I totally get why you do what you do because you’re absolutely right. It is you’re going to get a different, a dramatically different interview. If you have real intimacy, like right now, you and I have real intimacy than if we had a big crowd here. So yeah, it, it is purely a question of what show are you trying to make? Yeah. Talk to me about your vision for the media you’re creating and the change you want.

49:36 You want it to have on these people, whether it’s these, these kids in Compton that you used to employ and you saw this mindset, or I’m sure when you look at the world or maybe just watch mainstream media for a little while, you’re like, okay, guys, there’s something wrong here. Okay. I worked at Quest and we worked on this body problem, but we got this serious. What did you say? This other pandemic, right? What is it that you see at its base level that is just completely out of whack in your mind? And what do we need to change?

50:06 So now I’m going to talk to your friend, you know, Nick, who is the CEO of Quest. Nick, you know, you’ve been working on this job for a long time, but I’d like to ask you a question. Right. Nick, what is it? What do you see as the biggest problem you’re trying to solve right now in the brains of our fellow humans? So, and I’m just, I’m just, I guess I’m kind of asserting that the media is not helping us solve that problem now in its current form. I would probably argue it makes it maybe worse, but you obviously are trying to solve it.

50:36 To do something different. Yeah, so the biggest problem that we face as a species is you have a brain that is essentially outdated. The algorithms that you’re running are meant to keep you safe from a lion jumping out of a bush and the scarcity mindset when it comes to food and you are neurochemically rewarded when you find something with a lot of salt and fat and so you go crazy and eat as much as you can. And gorging made a lot of sense, you know, whatever, 50,000 years ago when you never knew where your next meal was going to come.

51:05 So you should take on as much caloric density as humanly possible. Now when there’s a store around every corner, that really becomes a problem and we’re seeing that problem play out now. So it’s understanding that your brain is this magical organ that lives in total darkness, in total silence, and yet by transforming the inputs that it gets into electrochemical impulses, it creates a very realistic representation of the world. But once I realized that it’s a representation, it is not the real world.

51:39 And so the great example, where your optic fiber connects to your eye, you actually have a dime size blank spot in your field of vision and yet you don’t perceive it at all. That’s crazy. And that’s your brain going, this is what I think would be there and it just slots it in. And anyone ever wants to test that you can put like two X’s on a piece of white paper and like maybe 10 centimeters apart and move it and it just disappears and it fills it in with whatever the background is.

52:06 It’s like it’s playing this game on you. That is, you have said it so well, your brain is playing a game on you, which I call The Matrix. And you’re in The Matrix. Have you ever heard the David Foster Wallace speech, This is Water? No.

52:19 Oh dude, you got a great one coming for you. Listen to it, it’s amazing. And the whole speech is about how a fish is the last one to realize that he’s in water. It’s so ubiquitous, it’s so a part of his life that he totally takes for granted like us with air, right? We’re moving through it all the time but yet it had to be actually discovered at one point.

52:38 So there are things in your belief system that are that ubiquitous, that ever present, that much of a foundational building block of who you are that you don’t even question it. Like I’ll give you an example, suffering is meant to be avoided. That doesn’t seem controversial, right? Saying it to you because of your mixed martial arts like background, you’re like, yeah, that’s a sure thing. But the average person is going to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously suffering, move away from suffering, move towards pleasure, right?

53:04 I’m here to tell you, if you do that your whole life, your life will be a misery. So you’ve got to find a way to better understand from a neurological perspective how you respond to suffering. So suffering will break many people. So for many people it is because they don’t know how to cognitively deal with it, it will just break them. But for some people it will supercharge them, right?

53:24 And so if you, man, search for meaning, have you read that? Yeah, I love that one. Victor Frankl, incredibly powerful book. You have a neuroscientist, I can’t remember if he’s actually a neurosurgeon, but certainly a neuroscientist who goes into Auschwitz and starts taking a clinical look around. And he realizes he can predict within 72 hours who’s going to die.

53:46 And he said you’d see them give up. And he said the moment they gave up, they’d be dead in 72 hours. And I thought that is insane. And he said the whole thing is when somebody knew why they were fighting, and I think it’s Nietzsche that says once you know your why, you can suffer anyhow. Like when you know what you’re trying to get to, the why, why you’re existing, why you’re going through the suffering, all of that, you’ll push through even Auschwitz.

54:08 And so he said when he could hold on to that thing, like it was worth fighting for, and he would keep going. And that would drive him. And in that you grow and you become stronger. So when you put yourself in a position of suffering, that is when your body responds to stressors. And somehow people understand this in bodybuilding.

54:23 Nobody thinks I’m going to pick up a bag of groceries and look like Dorian Yates, right? Like nobody thinks that. So you’ve got to go in, you’ve got to put your muscles under massive stress, routinely tear the tissue, build it back up like it’s a process. But people get it. It starts with a stressor.

54:38 But when it comes to the mind, for whatever reason, people try to optimize for ease. And they don’t try to put themselves, so like I did a three day fast, not too long ago. A three day fast sucks. And the whole point of doing it is to suffer. Because in the suffering, you will be forced to either give up and quit and recognize, I am a quitter, which is at least honest if people are willing to accept it.

55:01 They probably won’t come up with all kinds of excuses, but you quit or you made it through. And to make it through, you’ve got to come up with a tactic. And this is fascinating. And they’ve done this with the marshmallow test. Yeah.

55:13 So the Stanford experiment, putting people in the marshmallow, say you can eat it any time you want. I’m going to step out for a minute. I’m going to come back. If you wait to eat it till I come back, I’ll give you a second marshmallow. They’re never coming back.

55:22 When they walk out of the room, they’re just going to wait and see how long it takes you to eat it. Right? Fascinating. And kids, they come up, they sing to themselves, they cover their eyes, they do all kinds of stuff to not be distracted by it. Some of them bite the underside and try to hide that they’ve bitten some of it.

55:36 I mean, they try to come up with all these incredible little tactics and tricks to make it seem like, or to actually have waited and delayed their gratification. And then the scores later, because they followed these kids for like 25 years, and the scores later were so correlated to their ability to put it off longer. So the kids that waited the longest to eat the marshmallow do the best in school, get the best highest paying jobs. I mean, it’s nuts. And so what I’m saying is you can get better at not eating the marshmallow.

56:05 And so that’s really the goal, is teaching people, learning the tactics through suffering, how to not eat the marshmallow for longer and longer and longer, whatever your marshmallow is for me to get out of bed, even if it’s cold and to understand like the suffering isn’t something to be avoided, the suffering is something to conquer. So forcing myself through a three day fast to go through the suffering, showing up at the gym every day, I hate the gym, just call a spade a spade, whatever like endorphin rush my wife gets, and she does clearly, I don’t like there’s no joy in it for me whatsoever. But I love proving something to myself every day and showing up and pushing through the pain and lifting something even when it hurts, going through that process, all of it, the self discipline, all of that is pushing through the suffering.

56:48 So that’s just one example of a whole host of examples of these beliefs that are holding people back that stop them from becoming who they could become. And if they could just fight through those beliefs so that from a neurological perspective, I just understand the battle that we’re really fighting, that the brain is working to keep you small and safe, trying to keep you from being ostracized from the group. But you can overcome all of that. The brain is insanely malleable, right?

57:11 That old brain, it just wants to keep you alive long enough to be safe and reproduce and die. Which it leads for a very, probably unfulfilling life. Yeah, fulfillment is not necessary for raising children. And since its job is to pass on progeny, it doesn’t really matter. Have you had Ryan Holiday on, obstacles the way?

57:30 Very much so. Okay, it’s booked to him. So this is a lot of those same things. So go to where that hardship is. Again, Jocko Willink comes up, discipline equals freedom, this whole idea of going into this hard stuff.

57:42 And so look, that’s one of the fundamental messages you want to get into people’s heads, right? Which is hard, because it’s the opposite of kind of everything that technology is about and everything we sell to humans, which is take a break, relax, don’t go there. And I was somebody that succumbed to it the most. Which gives you the blueprint maybe to help other people out of it. Exactly.

58:06 My thing is, instruction manuals should only ever be created by people that didn’t know how to put something together at the beginning, had to figure it out, and then can go back and write all the stuff that’s counterintuitive. Because when you know how to do it, you forget how weird and misleading some things are. Okay. And are you constantly trying to put yourself in these various different uncomfortable situations? I do it a lot.

58:27 I could do it more. I won’t say that I’m some perfect bastion of like, hey, I’m going to leave and just go suffer today. I do simple things like restrict my calories massively, do cardio when I don’t want to do cardio. I use a Bright Lines technique. So let’s say I’m starving, but my Bright Lines says I don’t eat before 1130.

58:49 And you bring my … This actually happened one time. I was prepping for an episode. I was so hungry. My wife brought me my food accidentally 30 minutes early.

58:58 And she brought it in. I was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. It’s so sweet. And then I thought, okay, wait, this sucks. It smells so nice.

59:05 And now I have 30 minutes until I can eat it. And then I thought, wait a second, this is perfect. It’s a great opportunity to practice Bright Lines, discipline, suffering, all of it’s right here. So I was literally sitting over and I’m breathing it in and feeling cocky because I knew I wouldn’t, right? Discipline equals freedom.

59:20 I knew I was never going to eat that before 1130 because I have a Bright Line. So wait a minute. A Bright Line is like a fixed thing. Yeah. There’s no way, shape, or form.

59:27 Okay. It’s like a rule that is never broken, a Bright Line. Correct. 100%. And I have a phrase, it’s your fault.

59:33 It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. Correct. What does that mean? Well, I heard a very wise man, his name is Brian Rose.

59:39 He has a show called London Real. And he was talking about, even if it rains, you should say, this is my fault. And at that moment I knew you and I are kindred spirits, my friend. The story that I always tell people is, it’s funny because normally I’m telling this from America. I say, my wife is British.

59:56 And let’s say that she wrote Home in London with her mom in the bedroom that she grew up in. The door is locked. The alarm is on. She’s safe and sound. And right at that moment, a meteorite comes screaming through the atmosphere, smashes through the bedroom and kills her.

1:00:10 Whose fault is that? Unless you’re trying to guess what you think I’m going to say, people say it’s dumb luck, divine providence. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way that it is. And my answer, in no uncertain terms, is that’s all my fault.

1:00:24 And I’ll tell you why. There actually is an organization. Right now, this is all real. That tracks what are called near-Earth objects. They’re looking for the ones that are on a collision course with Earth.

1:00:35 They’re trying to figure out how they could knock it off course if they need to, a planted nuclear explosion, laser beams, whatever the case is going to be. But something to make sure that nothing ever collides with the Earth. I know they exist. I’ve never called them to give them encouraging words. I’ve never sent them an email with ideas.

1:00:51 I’ve never sent them a dime of my money. Nothing. Now, I think that’s smart because I think the odds of my wife being killed by a meteorite are virtually zero. So spending my time thinking along those lines doesn’t make a lot of sense. But if she were killed by a meteorite, I wouldn’t waste time saying there was nothing I could have done.

1:01:06 I chose not to do something, plain and simple. So if you’re always making choices, then everything in your life is a result of the choices that you’ve made. If you’re hit by a drunk driver, at a minimum, this is really going to piss people off so brace yourself. You’re going to get ugly comments for this moment. That’s right.

1:01:20 We’re like that. If you’re hit by a drunk driver, you have been victimized. There’s no question. But you choose whether to play the role of the victim. And you can remember that you didn’t have to get in the car that day, that you made that choice.

1:01:33 Maybe you put yourself into an odd situation, whatever. And the moment that you’re willing to accept this is my fault, you’re back in control. And my only thing, and I use the word fault to get people’s attention because otherwise you just can’t wake them up. I don’t want you to blame yourself. That would be just as useless as playing the role of the victim.

1:01:50 So don’t victimize yourself. Just own, this is my fault. I could have done something different. I will do something different next time. I will take better precautions, whatever the case may be.

1:02:00 But now you’re back in control. And once you accept that level of control in your life, now anything becomes possible because you’re going to look for the path. You’re going to look, what could I have done? And that was really where the game, No Bullshit, What Would It Take, was born out of. So no bullshit, what would it take to stop my wife from being hit by a meteorite?

1:02:17 And then realizing, oh my God, there’s actually an organization and all this stuff that you could do. So that is probably one of the most important things anybody could realize. Your life is 100% exactly a reflection of the choices you make. So abused by your parents as a kid, nothing you could do about that. But you can certainly do something about how you think about it now.

1:02:39 It’s the way to escape any possibility of jumping into victim mode by taking again, as Jocko would say, extreme ownership. Whereas like you said, everything is your fault. So yeah, it rains, it’s your fault. Jocko got elected, it’s your fault. Just own it.

1:02:52 And once you just have that as a default mechanism, you’re kind of ready and armed. For now, you can live your life as you choose it. And isn’t that awesome? Yeah, it is awesome. Like, that’s awesome.

1:03:03 It is awesome. To know that anything, if I had made different choices, I could have gotten a different outcome. Yeah. It’s very powerful looking forward. Yeah.

1:03:10 You know, when Jocko came on, we really started talking a lot about that in this office. And for a while, a few people were owning things like, oh yeah, that is my fault. That’s my fault. And I was like, well, actually, you can’t just own it as your fault. You now have to be responsible and take proactive action.

1:03:24 So either if something happens, you want to own it. Okay, now what are you going to do? You know, to make sure it doesn’t happen again and then just take all these proactive issues. But it’s an amazing way to kind of grab life that way. And that’s really important.

1:03:37 The steps to execution, what are they? Like how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again? You have a tough job getting these messages across. And there’s limitations between two guys in leather chairs talking. And I’m sure you feel them sometimes, you know, as you’ve been broadcasting the last year and a half.

1:03:55 And I feel them sometimes too. And you know, we’re having an amazing discussion and we will continue to. And I’ve had amazing discussions with, you know, Simon and other people where I’m like, that is just the ultimate amount of science and everyone’s going to get it. And yet they don’t. They pick up on Simon talking about millennials or in my case, Simon talking about Trump and it goes viral.

1:04:14 And it’s a great clip, but there were so many of the things that were so important. How do you continue to get the message through to people that don’t want to watch two guys talking? My thing is I’m a filter. So I’m not out there trying to get a hold of everybody. Only certain people want to make change at the level that will allow them to achieve whatever they want in their life.

1:04:35 And my thing is empathy and compassion. Meet people with empathy and compassion wherever they are. And I get asked that question a lot. Hey, Tom, it’s like, my mom, I love her so much, but she’s got a fixed mindset and she keeps telling me I can’t do things and that I’m never going to be able to accomplish my dreams. And what do I do?

1:04:49 And the answer is meet your mom with empathy and compassion. Understand that she has a fixed mindset. That’s how she views the world for you because that’s how she views the world for herself. So she’s forever going to hold herself back because the first step is belief, right? People think that belief comes once you’ve done it.

1:05:02 You won’t even take the first step if you don’t believe that you can accomplish it. So we lead with belief as a species. So you have to find a way to believe in it to move. So your mom is giving you an awesome challenge. And you believe in the face of her doubt, right?

1:05:16 And to me, when people doubt me, Brian, it’s a gift. I love that because I believe in beauty and rage. And you need both. I need people to love me. I need to want beautiful things for myself and for others.

1:05:28 I want to create something amazing. I want to help a lot of people. I also want to prove a lot of people wrong who don’t think that I can do this. I want to crush the enemies that want to see me fail, that want to do anything they can to ensure that I fail. I spend 80% of my time here and I spend 20% of my time here.

1:05:49 And the irony is, as Darth Vader will tell you, there’s power in the dark side. And once you learn to balance those, then you really get something interesting. And here’s another way to say it. You have to know when to love yourself and know when to hate yourself. I think it’s 80-20 again.

1:06:05 You want to spend 80% of the time loving you and being proud of who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what part of your journey you’re in, really loving that you’re showing up, that you’re playing, maybe you’re not yet satisfied with the level you’re playing, but no worries. Like you’re there, you’re doing it, you’re showing up. And then 20% of the time being wildly disappointed by yourself, being horrified by the fact that you were so lazy and so afraid of being cold that you wouldn’t get out of bed.

1:06:32 Like that’s terrifying and that that’s not acceptable. That’s not a person that you’re prepared to continue to be and that you find that so disgusting in yourself that you’re going to make an immediate change. And if you don’t do that, you’ll never grow. You’ll spend all your time over here, you’ll be pacified. So let’s really go deep on Ryan Holiday, ego’s the enemy.

1:06:52 Talk about being pacified by the dream. Merely having the dream, I want to do good things for people. Have you heard a lot of people say that? Yeah. Yeah, people say that all day.

1:07:00 I want to do great things for people. I want to help the world. In what way? Like they don’t get specific. So they’re pacified by the dream.

1:07:06 So you’ve got this person who’s really not living up to their potential, being pacified by the vision of what they could do and who they could become, but they never, to your earlier point, they never find the path to execution. So I find without kicking myself in the ass, without being deeply dissatisfied with myself, 20% of the time, because if it’s more than 20% of the time, you begin to erode yourself and it gets very corrosive. You’ll chip away at your own self-esteem and that’s a total waste.

1:07:29 But you do have to be willing to kick your ass. What does Tom hate about himself these days? I always struggle with profound laziness. So that is people look at my work ethic and they think it’s because I’m not lazy. And what they don’t understand is my work ethic is my routines and my habits to make sure that I don’t fall back into laziness.

1:07:51 But lazy is my default mode. So lazy just comes into conflict with my ambition. So my ambition is stronger than my laziness, but it does require me to do that. I think that I’m a great leader. I think I’m a terrible manager.

1:08:05 Right now, I feel like it’s not a skill set that I want to develop, but when I say that, I feel a little icky. So I have to search within myself to find out, like, am I just being lazy about that? And then if I put in the work, I could be a great leader and a great manager. Or is it really better left to other people with a different personality? I don’t know yet.

1:08:25 But those are two areas that I’m deeply unsatisfied and I could go on, I assure you. I like this 80-20 concept. Are you going to write a book soon? I am writing a book now that we hope to release in 2018. Yes.

1:08:41 Okay. And I haven’t heard some of these ideas before, but it’s nice to kind of see. Who wants to see you fail? I can picture them so clearly, but I will never say their names. I won’t do them that much.

1:08:54 So there are specific people or archetypes. There are specific people. Oh, yes. Okay. And you use that to channel that dark side.

1:09:01 Oh, yes. Yes. It’s a profound effect. Okay. You mentioned execution when you were talking there.

1:09:10 Tell me about execution. What does it mean? How do you feel about it? You’ve built a company. And there are a lot of people that talk about building companies.

1:09:20 I’m sure someone said, Tom, I had that idea to do that over the years. But you took it a step further. So tell me your read on it. Execution is the only thing that matters. And so one of the reasons I talk so much about the total merchandising strategy and all that and really explain to people what we’re doing, I do it for two reasons.

1:09:38 One, I want people to understand I do social influence, and you could call me a social influencer, but I’m building a media company. This is how I view myself. This is how other people view me. So I want people to understand. The game is over here.

1:09:53 I need you to understand that because I’m going to be asking you to come participate in this over here. So we’re very open and honest, and I laid people out on the website. You can go see our three phases of execution and how we plan to do, where we are in phase one and all that, why we’re doing all that stuff. So one, just so that they understand it, so that the brand doesn’t catch people off guard. I’m very sensitive to that.

1:10:13 You need to be who you are from day one. And then two, I want a gun to my head to know now that all the secrets are out. Anyone can ask me any question about anything we do, and I will tell them, because I want to win against people who are not handicapped. And I think that, and look, there might be something where I’d hold the timing or whatever if we’re trying to do something cool that requires a bit of timing and stuff like that. But man, for the most part, I will just go in and tell people, this is how you would do it.

1:10:39 If you want to execute me, do this. Because I am so confident that they’ll never do it, that even if they’ve got the discipline, they don’t love it like I love it. So they’re not going to have the passion to be counterintuitive. And that I find is interesting. When you’re so passionate, you gain so many skills that you get to the point where like Bruce Lee said, don’t think kick, kick until you just kick.

1:10:59 And that to me is incredibly important. You need to get so good at something that you can be counterintuitive because you know five or six moves down the road where this ends up. And that’s where I’m at with that, with media. What’s an example of that where you could be counterintuitive in the short term knowing that it’s going to come full circle? So the social content, right?

1:11:18 So if you’re trying to be Disney, why are you doing social content? It doesn’t make sense. The social content though is building the brand ethos. So Impact Theory as a brand will stand for, it already does. So people write to me every day and tell me you’ve changed my life.

1:11:30 Like imagine, just imagine for a second, we live in a world where you can build an audience of millions of people and some percentage, even if I say it’s 10%, that 10% of the people believe their life is fundamentally different and better because of you. 10% of millions of people, that’s huge. Hundreds of thousands of people believe because of you, their life is fundamentally different and better, that they talk to their spouse about you. Maybe they tattoo your brand on their body somewhere, that their friends have to tell them to shut up because they talk about London Real so much, right?

1:12:02 That’s a thing, okay? So we’re living in that era and I’m living in that era where my whole idea is to build a brand ethos. So what is the fastest, the no BS way to build that ethos? To stand out front and talk about it, to actually impact people’s lives, to put content out that does that. All the while, marrying that to traditional content, which is, and I’m not sure where people disconnect more, that traditional content actually is the only scalable way on a global level to give people the mindset that they need.

1:12:32 Have you read Sapiens or Homo Deus? Yeah, I’ve been listening to Sapiens Audible. I haven’t gone into Homo Deus yet. Sapiens is awesome. Homo Deus will change you fundamentally as a human being.

1:12:44 That book, when I was reading, I was like, oh my god, it’s so crazy and powerful and he talks about how the most important force, the most important force humanity is going to encounter in our future is fiction and narrative. And he backs it up so powerfully and the example that he gives that I think is just beyond incredible is, think about the Crusades for a second. The Crusades happened and were such a collision of cultures because you had two people that believed exactly the same thing but mirrors of each other.

1:13:19 So you had the Christians saying, one true God telling us to reclaim the Holy Land, we’re willing to fight to the death for it. You had the Muslims saying, one true God telling us to reclaim the Holy Land, willingness to die for it. But they believed in different, one true Gods. And so when they collided, the match up was so perfect that they annihilated each other. If one had said, one true God were meant to reclaim the Holy Land but all of life is sacred and nothing else matters, then as they collided they would just back off and they would realize that the Holy Land was not as important as the sacred of human life and they would migrate somewhere else where they could build a peaceful colony.

1:13:57 You wouldn’t have had the collision, you just wouldn’t. So you need that fiction because back in the village, if you were growing up in England and you’re about to go off in the Crusades and the young woman whose attention you were trying to get when she hears you’re about to rush off to the Crusades, she’s batting her eyelashes and swooning and your parents are like, oh my gosh, you’re being a good Christian and a good son, we’re so proud of you. So everybody’s reinforcing this fiction in your head.

1:14:19 The easier way for people to think of it is, so it’s called intersubjective truth. It’s only true as long as everybody believes it, right? Because we all now look back at the Crusades and go, what were you doing? Like they didn’t make any sense, it was so much unnecessary bloodshed. So from our perspective it seems patently ridiculous but from their perspective it was like the greatest thing you could do but great in a way where everyone is like responding to you like you’ve done something great.

1:14:45 So it wasn’t like just in your own head, everything in your society and culture was telling you that it was amazing. The church felt grateful, your parents were over the moon, I mean everything, just reinforced it. So the perfect struggle at the time. So his whole thing is A, what things are happening like that now where it seems so obvious and real to us now but we realize it’s actually an intersubjective fiction and another example of an intersubjective fiction is money.

1:15:09 Money only has value as long as we agree that it does, otherwise it’s just paper that you could I guess light for heat energy but when it’s zeros and ones in a computer it really has no value. So only has value because we agree it has value. So what are the intersubjective fictions that we’re all believing in now? What problems are they causing us and what ways are they helping us? But as we move into the next generation human which is essentially a cyborg, we’re going to have to program those intersubjective fictions.

1:15:36 We’re going to have to decide what’s real and make that a part of the AI to give it the same frame of reference. So we’re going to be making these decisions as we evolve because we literally at this point we’ve evolved, we’re rapidly evolving past human as a purely biological entity. Because we’re so connected with the computers. That and like really think about things that are already interfaced. So cochlear implants where you give people who are deaf hearing, vision where you can give people artificial, I don’t know if it’s retina’s lens or something but they’re giving them literally essentially bionic parts in the eye to give them the ability to see some of whom were blind either from birth or from very, very young.

1:16:14 So it’s, we’re already there. Elon Musk is now investing in a brain computer interface company. So it’s like this stuff is going to happen. It’s going to play out over the next 10 to 20 years. So his whole thing is that fiction is going to have to be solidified.

1:16:26 We’re going to have to decide like what are the intersubjective fictions that we allow the AI access to because a non-biological entity doesn’t have the millions of years of evolution to just pre-program them for that. Right. Or do a reality check or a gut check or see if it really feels right or makes sense in my physical body too. And you’re excited because you’re on the forefront of this narrative fiction creation that’s going to have such an impact on the future of the world.

1:16:54 Is that correct? Yeah. Yes. I mean it interests me because it’s going to be so important. If I’m really frank, I’m not thinking transhuman in the content that we’re creating.

1:17:04 Like I want to impact people today when we’re still biological. But I do find that fascinating. I think it’s very interesting. I think it’s important for us to think through where this stuff is headed. But that’s more just fascination than actually creating content around that.

1:17:20 Yeah, I think in the beginning of Sapiens, in the first few chapters, he kind of structures out that basically everything that we think is real is around some fictional narrative. Whether it’s money or a corporation or even our society. And he has a great way of breaking it down. I hope you’re going to have him on your show soon. Oh man, it would be amazing.

1:17:37 Yeah. And so that’s interesting. You mentioned money. I had a great guest in here one time that we were actually in the studio and we had about 25 London realers in the room. And he said, what is your relationship with money?

1:17:49 And he asked everybody to shout out a word. And it was fascinating what people shouted out. I think I said something like a pain or something. It was like four years ago. And I was still coming off the ex-banker.

1:17:59 I running away from money and capitalism into this other world. And now I’ve made a little more peace with that and I’m coming back. But it is a bunch of zeros and ones. I was wondering if you could tell us about your relationship with money and how that may be changed over the years. And yeah, the way you see it now and the way you think other people should see it.

1:18:19 Money is amazing. It is incredibly powerful and it’s not at all what you’ve been told. So I think we all have an intuitive understanding that money is going to make us feel about ourselves the way we feel when we look at somebody that succeeded at the highest level. So whether that’s your favorite footballer, whether that’s Bill Gates, whether that’s Jay Z, it doesn’t matter. Like you look at somebody that’s achieved and they have the wealth, the big house, the fancy cars, the jewels, the clothes, all of that.

1:18:53 And you admire them and you think way better things about that person than you think about yourself. So I think people think when I get money, I will feel that way about myself and it just isn’t true. So money is never going to touch how you feel about yourself. If you’re insecure, you will remain insecure. You’ll even remain insecure if you got the money for yourself, right?

1:19:14 Unless in that process of becoming great at something good enough at it to actually extract the money. If that process reduces your insecurity, great, but getting the money will not. So I remember when I finally had like real money and I was like, wow, I feel like exactly the same person, like exactly the same person. And that was weird. And you kind of feel like things should be different.

1:19:41 Like shouldn’t colors be different? I thought this is maybe a little embarrassing. I felt the same way about sex. I remember thinking once I have sex, like somehow the world is just going to be different, right? And then you have sex, you’re like, that was awesome.

1:19:51 But everything is the same and I still have to go to work and I still have to do all this mundane shit. Like none of that changed. That’s exactly what money is like. But what people don’t understand about money and the reason it will be chased forever, as long as we’re in a physical world and we’re not like in the matrix somewhere, the reason people will ever chase it is money is real because money facilitates. You can go up to somebody and with enough money, there’s virtually nothing you can buy from them.

1:20:17 You can go to their house, you can buy their car, you can start a business, you can, Bill Gates is going to use it to end disease, you can build infrastructure in a company, you can save lives. I mean, it’s just the amount of power to create that money gives you and what you create could be a hospital. It could be you fund researchers that are creating some new medical breakthrough. I mean, it’s just money’s ability to create is so beautiful. And if you have this narrative about the accumulation of wealth being really dangerous and nasty, it’s absolutely not true.

1:20:51 There are dangerous and nasty people and if they have a lot of money, they will squander it in my opinion. They will use it in ways that just is not necessarily uplifting to themselves or to society and so I don’t quite understand it. But man, let me tell you, like I have been poor and I have been rich and rich is way better. It is better in like every conceivable way if you understand what it is. So it’s when people don’t understand it that its real power is merely to facilitate your most beautiful dreams.

1:21:19 When you do that and when your beautiful dreams serve other people, there’s nothing better. Like people don’t feel weird about you having money because you’re creating something of value. Like that to me if you’re creating something of value and I believe that we’re moving into a new entrepreneurial era where because of social media, people are going to demand authenticity and transparency. If you want to run a company, if you want the right to be my internet service provider, if you want the right to own my favorite football team, if you want the right to own my grocery store or whatever, I need to know what you’re doing with the money.

1:21:58 That’s it. I don’t need to control it. I need to know what you’re doing with money because I want to know if I support that and if I dig who you are as a person and I like your product, awesome. Got a great relationship. All will be well.

1:22:09 And that’s so obviously coming. If millennials are starting to turn up the heat, Gen Z is going to crank it. Once Gen Z is the primary buyer, that will be the de facto mode. When I think about where have I gotten the timing right in my life, where am I ahead of the curve, it’s on that. I create so much content and my whole thing was, and you’ll get this reference because you’re into MMA.

1:22:34 When you see a guy in MMA get dazed, what does he do? He grabs legs. He may not know where he is, he’s just been trained. If you’re confused, grab legs. Sometimes they grab the referee’s legs because they’re really confused.

1:22:46 That’s your home base. You can protect yourself there while you get your bearings. I wanted to make sure that the content that I was putting out was so fundamental to who I am as a human being that if you woke me up in the middle of the night, punched me in the head and I was dazed and confused, I’m still going to give you the same answers because it’s actually who I am. There would be no way for you to secretly record me and catch me out saying something crazy.

1:23:12 That to me and then that’s going to be, I think, for a certain type of person, it will be the most profoundly effective marketing tool that you could have is to actually be yourself, to go out like I’m wired to want good things for people. I love seeing other people win. Now, make no mistake, I want to win even more, but I actually enjoy seeing other people win that makes me happy, especially if I care about them. When you’re wired like that and you can enjoy other people shining and you want to help them and do good things but you’re not afraid to compete and really go out there to win, people can get behind that.

1:23:42 You had, I think, a policy in Quest where you would really openly talk about how you felt about stuff and kind of get vulnerable and bounce ideas and if something felt funny, you would look around the room and it was a place where you could really be honest about ideas. I remember hearing you say one time, do you think that’s why you’re so in touch with who you really are and because a lot of the things you’re saying is like it’s really fundamental IP that is Tom. A lot of people would take them five years to actually figure this out about themselves and yet you feel like, I feel like you’re just kind of saying the way it is.

1:24:15 You know, it’s interesting and thank you for that, that’s very kind. I see myself as I’m a mess and every day I’m just trying to be a little less of a mess. So what I mean by that is I think that the human mind is so malleable that it can be pushed in any direction and it can very easily get pushed in negative directions that don’t serve you and so people can struggle with depression and anxiety and not catch it early and so it really spirals out of control and becomes a problem and I learned early on that when I tried to be cool that it made me anxious and so I just stopped trying to be cool because I didn’t want to be anxious.

1:24:56 But then, so you’ve got me now sort of being defenseless, not trying to be cool, never afraid to use self-deprecating humor and then I realize the very powerful lesson that at some point, no matter what you want to do, being so good that you can’t be denied is like in and of itself the ultimate defense. They say in the law, the truth is an absolute defense and I’ll say in life from a perspective of success, talent is an absolute defense. Like when you get so good that you can’t be denied, like you’ll be fine.

1:25:33 So I have no interest in trying to look cool because it makes me anxious because I’m not like fundamentally cool and then the other is I am hell bent to actually be great. I want to actually be great. Like I want to be capable of things other people are not capable of and then I’ve cultivated a hyper sense of self-awareness so when my motives are ugly, when they’re petty, I’m aware of it. And so when you know like, oh god, I’m doing that because I’m insecure or like when I said that one of the reasons I talked a lot in my earlier interviews when I was the interviewer was because I needed, I felt like this sucking need to establish myself.

1:26:12 So there was insecurity there. I was so worried people would be like, why am I listening to this guy? That I had to show like, hey, I’m well-read too. So I had to like put that out into the universe. So it was only as I got more and more confident and actually got better that I needed to do that less and less.

1:26:25 Yeah, I always say when I do my job the best is when I just shut the hell up and let the other guy talk. I get that but I’ve actually enjoyed the times where you and I are back and forth more. So it’s a balance. Yeah, it’s a balance. Well, that’s and that’s for other people.

1:26:40 You know, you might be a little bit different. One of the reasons Quest was so successful, you went into a market that looked like it was saturated, right? What you guys are making protein bars in 2010. So one thing I find interesting is that first of all, no market is ever purely saturated. But you went in with these 25 different values or at least they became your values but you went in there and the whole idea was I’m going to out execute other people or my team’s going to out execute other people.

1:27:07 And I would be doing a horrible thing if I didn’t get you to talk on that a little bit because it’s fascinating to look at these values and think, okay, if you can get a team that feels this way about something like the Crusades perhaps, then it’s like this SEAL team that can go in and beat anything no matter how much money you throw at a problem or an established industry or you know, Bill Gates is the CEO and it looks like you guys won because of this culture. And I was wondering if you could speak on that and if you knew you were doing it at the time and some of these belief systems and we’ll post them in the show notes as well but you know, you can do anything you set your mind to without limitation and then the previous rule is a lie but it’s an empowering lie.

1:27:49 We do and believe that which empowers us. Personal growth is the highest priority of all team quest members. I love that. You’re happy to train people if they want to go compete with you because it gives you someone to compete against. Quest University, we talked about it earlier, great place, safe place to make mistakes.

1:28:05 Members of team quest do not make excuses ever. I love the one every member of team quest is expected to work hard, smart and long hours which is controversial these days especially for Gen Z. They’re not going to work long hours but you were happy to say it. These kinds of things. I was wondering if you could just talk about the idea of a company culture and how the right set of ethos can get people the long way and if some of those make you smile a little bit if you kind of remember them.

1:28:31 Yeah, so I think company culture is absolutely critical and it needs to be a filtering mechanism. So not everybody is going to like it but the people that like it and get on board, that’s when you can really do something spectacular. I think that company culture and certainly the belief system was me saying what could these people learn while here that will empower them for the rest of their lives and this is the answer. So none of these answers are self-serving.

1:28:58 They happen to also help me by the way. These are the ideal kind of people that I want to work with or people that really embody all 25 of the bullet points but at the end of the day these are things if you do like you’re going to be employable anywhere like anybody wants to hire people like this. So that was really important to me to feel like these were that I could push you on it knowing I’m making your life better that if I came in and I rode you hard and I pushed you and I made huge demands of you demands that no other job would ever make because I wasn’t thinking about just making you good here.

1:29:32 I’m trying to set you up for the rest of your life wherever you want to go and that was something that people that work directly for me got it. It was transformative and they would do anything for me and I mean quite literally some of the guys keeping in mind these are former drug dealers, ex-gang members, some of them literally would have killed for me. So it was just an awesome time. We were all there. They got to see me working.

1:30:00 So for almost two years I was making protein bars every day and it’s a physically demanding job. This is before we really had all the fancy equipment so a lot of it was manual and so I’d come in and I say which job is the worst job and people would say like oh this job is the worst job today because whatever it’s like extra sticky cool I would take that job and I would do it with a smile and I would get people amped up and I would make sure everyone was excited and that way they could see me doing the worst jobs. I remember there was one time the toilet overflowed and there was literal human feces on the floor and I told the janitor don’t clean it up, I’ll clean it up because I wanted everyone in the company to know I’ll never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.

1:30:36 And when they see that now people are like they’re galvanized around that because my energy was always up. I was always excited and they could tell I’m pushing you not for me. I’m pushing you for you like because it was very open. If you only want to be here for two years whatever like I’m totally fine with that but while you’re here you’re going to be striving to be the best version of yourself. And now let’s get really controversial.

1:30:58 If Gen Z is not going to work long hours they’re going to get their lunch eaten because I promise some percentage of Gen Z 100% I guarantee this I will put my life on it. Some percentage will work long hours and the reason they’ll do it is because it’s the only way to win. And so I don’t say it because like there’s some glory in working long hours. Actually I say it because there’s glory working in long hours like only the people that do all three win because if you’re going to work hard and smart and I’m going to work hard and smart how do I beat you?

1:31:28 Harder and smarter but then what happens when the hardest working guy the smartest working guy is also the longest working guy he’s going to win. So there are only three things that you have in your control in that might as well do all three. So here’s why people push back on that because they don’t yet realize that you can make the demand that you make a living doing what you love. Once they realize that once they realize what is most true to them in the universe whatever that is for me it’s pulling people out of the matrix that sits at the core of my being I’m going to do that whether I make money or not.

1:31:59 So at the core of my being is a desire to help other people free themselves from their own limitations and to see them execute on their potential at the absolute highest level. So I’ve made the demand that that’s how I generate wealth. Okay fantastic. So now even if I’m losing I’m going to be having a great time and I know that for me to win and execute and beat all the other people trying to play the same game that I’m playing I’ve got to work harder work smarter and work longer period.

1:32:24 So it’s only when you hate your job you feel like you’re doing it in service to somebody else and all of that that is like well why would I do all three because their mentality is already so skewed they already believe that they’re in a job where they’re being taken advantage of nobody that works for me feels like that at least that’s my goal inevitably someone will but my goal is to make sure that people don’t feel that way and if they do I have failed. It’s almost like they’re in a martial arts academy and again like you said it’s like that you know making protein bars is just how you pay the tuition and we’re building you’re forging human beings and if you get people to buy into that and again it’s self fulfilling if they buy into it then they actually are becoming those people.

1:33:05 I haven’t really heard of that kind of ethos before I mean that’s pretty unique right? I certainly hadn’t seen it. This you slowly kind of identify based on your values and how you wanted to work in your own personality and kind of act out these these 25 steps. It really was me going what are the things that I did to my own mindset to you know go from being broke to being actually able to execute on a business and then the other was I don’t want to feel parasitic like I could feel so you know whatever almost 10 years ago now Gen or sorry Millennials are really starting to be felt in the workforce and there was like this disconnect at a stereotype level of what a millennial was you know the lazy entitled all that and myself and what I believed were necessary for success.

1:33:56 So and if you take it from that you might really understand it. This isn’t me placing a value judgment this is me going success is one human convincing another human to buy something in the traditional business sense right it’s not the only form of success but in a traditional business form of success it’s one human being convincing another human being and even broader than that let’s throw sports in there like there’s going to be so many things that fall into this category that if you’re going to have success at the highest level you’ve got to convince another human being to be dazzled. The only way to dazzle people is to set the bar ridiculously high and then surpass all expectations.

1:34:31 It is not to manage expectations to set the bar low under promise and over deliver as a people normally want to do but that doesn’t dazzle anybody that may make you a consistent player like OK cool you’re great off the bench you come in you play your seven minutes awesome well done. That’s very different than being winning the Ballon d’Or right so two different universes. So if you want to win the Ballon d’Or you’re going to be out there rain sleet hail shine snow doesn’t matter you’re going to be out there doing your thousand shots on goal a day a thousand shots a thousand shots a thousand shots like it’s just that’s it you have to become capable of the extraordinary strong I was I was thinking about something else these values of team quest came from eight and a half years that you wasted in your mind at a previous company although you might argue that these values came from doing all the wrong things for the wrong time.

1:35:26 Can you just speak on that briefly because at one point well we might not be talking you might be right copy it an island in Greece right now if you chose to walk away from that job right. Yeah so my journey goes something like this I go to film school think that I’m going to graduate film taught my class get a three picture deal and be off to the races and it does not quite work like that and my senior year I crashed and burned artistically and got out I’m teaching film I’m desperately trying to figure out how I’m going to break into the industry and I meet these two guys would later become my partners in quest. But first I meet them as these two successful entrepreneurs and they say hey we’re starting a company you’re coming to the world with your handout right now you want to be an artist and you build a control the art you’re never going to be able to control the art until you control the resources so why don’t you come learn about business become a copywriter that was the job they had available in this technology company called awareness tech and come be the copyright force but don’t think of yourself as a copywriter think of yourself as a potential partner in the company and you really could become a partner in the company if you are performing at that level so you can have any job in the company you want but you have to become the right person for the job so I knew that I was going to have to blood sweat and tears and get new skills and all of that and I’m definitely

1:36:42 Shortening the story but that was my mentality coming in long story short I do that I take them very seriously I claw my way up by the time we exited the company I was an equity owner in the company and I was the chief marketing officer so I’d gone from copywriter to partner but about the six year mark even though I had done that and even though I was making more money than I ever made in my life I was profoundly unhappy and I had decided that I just couldn’t do this anymore and my wife and I were going to move to Greece and my wife is Greek we’re going to move to Greece and I was going to learn really learn the language like I speak it a bit but like I was really going to learn the language we’re going to be in a beautiful location somewhere where we could live inexpensively and that was it I was going to do it made me feel alive so it was that notion of if you do what you love if you make the demand that you earn your living doing something you love even if you’re failing you’re having a great time and so that was my thing going to do that go into my partners and I say look guys here’s your equity back if I don’t cross the finish line I don’t think I should get anything for it thank you it’s been amazing but I’m so unhappy I just can’t keep doing this they were shocked I’m driving home I’m literally pulling into my driveway and my phone rings and they’re like come out to dinner with us so I’m I was actually on the phone with my wife saying I did it like we’re going

1:37:57 It’s all over it’s amazing I’m gonna be happy again and I said they just invited me out to dinner you know out of respect for these guys I’m gonna go so go to dinner and they say the now famous words we could do this without you but we don’t want to and that let me reconnect to the brotherhood and think about something other than the money it had so been about the money and gaining access to resources and all that that just I didn’t have any passion any interest I had sort of lost that sense of real deep I mean it really was more than friendship it really was brotherhood and it had lost that sense of it and wanted to reconnect to that and put that back at the center so I said look I’ll come back but under one stipulation we never do anything again to chase money and if we put at the center of our brand ethos that we’re gonna build something that creates value that it’s gonna be us like authentically us that I’m not hiding behind a corporate veil but it’s really gonna be us as people building this and make it a unique fingerprint of the three of us you know hence the belief system and all that to filter the world and find the people who think like we think then I’m in but that’s the only way that I’ll ever do it again and they were like we actually agree we felt the same way for a long time and it’s just nobody had really like planted a flag and said enough is enough so over the next two and a half years we sold that company we began thinking about what the next thing

1:39:17 Would be and for three very different reasons that answer ended up being quest which we really did found on principles of value community building and when I say value meaning adding value to the customer so you can ask two questions what adds more value and what brings more profit and sometimes they’re not the same and so whenever those two were in conflict we would go with whatever added more value and it the irony of all ironies is once we stopped prioritizing money and we started prioritizing value and community we ended up making at quest more in a day than we made it our previous technology company annually so it’s crazy how can you can you speak on that a little bit further because it sounds like some fairy tale where if you try to pump value out and I had Alex icon on here and his wife Mimi there a great couple here in London and he said he said one point said Brian he’s like if you want to be rich no one cares that you want to be rich what they care about is if you can give them value and if you can provide enough value then maybe that other thing will happen but you know it’s one thing to say it but you know you kind of lived it yeah and the important thing to remember is I lived it not because I’m smart I lived it because I was so dumb that I got so angry and upset with myself that I just rebelled in the opposite direction so I chased money so hard and I wasn’t like agreed is good guy but like I was literally just thinking like how do we get more profit

1:40:45 Out of every customer right and that’s how you think of them it’s like all right I’ve got you know 250,000 customers and what could we do to get an extra $2 out of each one of them like that’s so gross like when you think like that it makes you it puts you in a weird headspace because I don’t think animals are wired like that certainly I’m not so it didn’t make me feel good about myself and then it’s hard so I wasn’t even like not like we’re having big wins so it was like yes we were making money but it’s like like it just wasn’t that impressive right so you’re working your ass off because we’re working hard smart and very long hours making good money but not like that windfall you know that we were hoping for and you’re not feeling great about yourself and you’re not passionate about the product and like you don’t get the connection of like wow I did something amazing for these people and they’re riding in to thank me like I feel really good about that we had none of it so it was like after doing that for six years I was just like this I can’t do it anymore I am I’m literally at a neurochemical state of like not being willing to stay here like I yeah I understand neurochemistry enough to know what was going on it was just like dude I’m just in a bad zone like this sucks every day sucks Monday sucks Tuesday like it all sucked so I was like this is dumb I need to shake out of this I need to change

1:42:01 Something radically so you know and really going beyond that because it is in the Pollyanna tale of like all you have to do is add value because you have to add value in a way that’s financially sound you have to be empowered financially to keep this all going to push things forward like if you’re not if you don’t know how to build a business like none of the wanting to be nice works and this and we I talked about it a little bit earlier but now let’s really go deep I want to bite people’s eyes out when they tell when I say what would you like to know I’ll teach you anything about business that I know what do you want to know no like I just want to help people man what am I supposed to do with that awesome go ladle at a soup kitchen right but that’s not what they want rightfully so if you want fulfillment and if that’s what you mean by you want to help people you want to feel fulfilled you want to feel good you want to add value to other people the key ingredient to that is what’s called technique getting good at something and then applying that skill right think about all this stuff Bill Gates has learned and now he’s going to use it to cure malaria his ability to organize large disparate groups of people to get them focused on one task to you know amass the resources that he’s a master point that at it to work with governments and non-governmental agencies alike and get them all focused on this one problem he’s going to feel really good about that

1:43:17 When he can run the numbers on how many children he saved because he took a skill that he’d gotten good at and what really drives me nuts is today people just want to skip to feeling good about having helped but they don’t even know in what way like what are you fucking good at what are you best in class it what is that thing that you’re willing to dedicate the next 15 or 20 years of your life just to getting good once you know that once you are ungodly talented at something once people around the world point go that guy knows the shit like that guy knows what he’s talking about and let me tell you long before I stepped out front and people started talking about me in the media people were talking about me behind closed doors like wanting to come and like sit with me to get counseling on marketing and community building and how to understand social media and all that and it was like all invisible and and there are hundreds of thousands of people like this right now there’s just no visibility but because social media is changing the way that people think about their career path and what they want is the visibility they want the attention they want the accolades but they don’t understand all of that stuff is a byproduct of having spent decades heads down getting really fucking good and here’s the best part nothing none of the accolades none of it not the money nothing is nearly as intoxicating is how good you will feel about yourself knowing I’m better than everyone

1:44:38 On this planet at this thing no one can touch me I’ll outperform you like six ways to Sunday you can’t intimidate me you can’t make me nervous nothing because this is what I know this is what I do but like that scares me the way that as a culture we’re trying to move past that but it only scares me a little bit because I the people that allow themselves to fall prey to that my heart breaks for them some percentage won’t whether you’re a millennial a Gen Z a baby boomer doesn’t matter the some percentage gets to win in the game with humans you have to dazzle and to dazzle you have to be the best and as long as people understand that those people the people that get that however small or large that percentage is they will win they will be the ones that take things over they will be the ones that find a way they don’t make excuses they don’t blame they don’t say it’s the government’s fault they don’t say it’s bad regulations bad birth as abused by my parents they don’t waste time with that bullshit they just go okay the only way to win is to be better than everyone else awesome I’m gonna go get better than everyone else those people will always rule the world which is why you have Robert Greene on your show talking about mastery hundred percent right because he says it all right there go master something take your ten years or your ten thousand hours right it’s the only way yeah like yeah you mentioned millennials there tell me about the famous Simon Sinek millennial clip what

1:46:03 Do you make of it in retrospect and why the hell was it on someone else’s YouTube channel yeah so you want to talk about wanting to punch myself in the face it so the millennial clip was amazing because he really touched on a nerve and Simon’s ability to articulate an idea is phenomenal and so he really and it was one of those where not too bad yourself well thank you sir it was one of those moments where a truly great artist I don’t know that’s right word for him but we’ll use that a truly great artist having the performance of his lifetime and I’ve seen him give that talk other times and somehow like it’s still a plus by anybody else’s standards but on when he gave it with me it was flawless he didn’t stumble on a word he didn’t I mean it just it was perfect and so it allowed it with none of the like awkwardness that can happen whenever somebody’s talking that was all gone which is delivered perfectly at a moment where it’s divisive so some people just agree with him and can’t believe it and heads nodding and oh my god this guy’s amazing and then other people like hate following it and watching it thinking like what does he know and he’s stereotyping us all and not everybody’s like that and so there was just enough friction to get it passed around somewhere passing it because they loved it somewhere passing it because they hated it but to me no matter how you shake it or bake it it it is the insight on millennials the stereotype of

1:47:24 Millennials for sure so I think it gave a lot of people the framework with which to understand it got over a hundred and sixty million views the reason it got picked up by somebody else is the reason that I now work with Vayner Talent because sometimes looking at your own content it becomes hard to understand like all the pieces to pull and put out there and I think that those guys are uniquely gifted at that they’re like the way that they handle the back end is just unbelievable so that kind of thing is really really important if there are any content creators watching the show you create a piece of content you’re about 10% of the way done the other 90% is going in and understanding like what movements within this piece are worth pulling out putting out organically paid like how do we then push that all out what platform does it go out on some bites are going to perform on Facebook some are going to perform on Instagram so somebody else watching our content saw that because I was still in the mode of I’m doing this for my employees and sure if it happens they’d out great but I wasn’t thinking about maximizing my following now seeing how obvious that clip was with my new perspective yeah I want to punch myself but again you use that pain point to take an action step for sure which is to hire Vayner Talent and now you’ve got someone else perspective that can look at your content and say well wait

1:48:37 A second this right here will work over here and if I talk to this person here they’re gonna something will happen right okay and that’s what they specialize in yeah okay wow and again still regardless even though if it was 7 million views on this YouTube channel you know it was your show yeah it didn’t hurt so that’s another way of looking at it but it was shared on Facebook that’s where it got the hundred million yeah so it got a hundred and sixty on Facebook but we were also on places like Australian MTV played the clip and all kinds of news outlets and it was insanity it was one of those I got a phone or a text from one of my employees back at quest and he goes hey congrats on the video hitting 10 million text him back you mean one million he’s like no it’s a 10 million go to our webpage like it’s not a 10 million man he was like no no no let me show you a screenshot and then it was the other page and by the time I checked so in the span like of an hour of when he first text me to when I realized where it was it was at fourteen million and then twenty million and then forty million and then it was insanity never seen anything until you experience real virality it’s like it’s dizzying yeah it’s a weird thing and did you ever try to claim that content back or do we have some to tag us and stuff which they did but by then it was like most of the virality was sort of over so that wasn’t like a huge windfall for us yeah yeah in retrospect did people

1:50:00 Know Simon more than you guys well rightly so and infinitely more they knew him I mean I think I say or something like that in the entire like 10 minute clip that you do and me yeah Simon was shining like let him do a saying it was it really was beautiful and I was as a leader I was grateful to have that answer so you know for me the win there was I thought it was the de facto answer on millennials period and the one time that it came like background I was at a burger restaurant in America called Shake Shack and one of the guys working in the back comes running up and goes aren’t you the guy from YouTube so I was like yes that was it that was that was my big Simon Sinek moment yeah that’s cool I think it’s a game changer for Simon though I think it was yeah a lot of people change about that yeah we came back to London and he was interviewed on stage and they kind of led with that video yeah but again it’s fascinating when you see something go viral or kind of viral I mean that’s a super viral but like you know we’ve had clips that kind of just go off and again it’s that perfect combination of something most likely they’ve said before but they get it just right with you with the just right camera it’s clipped out just the right timing and then of course it hits the nerve divisive great word half against half for and then all of a sudden it just starts going and it’s amazing I always feel good about those things because like when the guest comes in including you today

1:51:24 I always say like I want to put it’s not the best version of Tom Ford but I want everyone to understand this man as much as humanly possible and so if part of you gets out there and someone’s like this is amazing and it starts blowing up I just I don’t always feel great about it totally I get that very much just like money who do you want to have in your show I’m sure you get asked that all the time but what do you say when people say that do you have like the wish list the bucket list that kind of thing I do Jay Z would be amazing I think he’s the current quintessential American dream story and I say American dream with like the way that it used to inspire people around the world I really truly believe even in today’s world that you can do anything you set your mind to I’m not saying it’s going to be easy but that’s what makes Jay Z story so interesting is he grew up in a really rough neighborhood nothing was handed to him felt like he had to deal drugs he shot his own brother which is a whole fascinating story and then just rises up above that not only to get famous as a very talented musician but to become a legitimate and effective businessman so that story inspires the living daylights out of me so I think that a lot of people be moved by that and I think I could get an interview out of him that nobody else would Barack Obama right now every day that passes I think people’s vision of who he is changes and I think they’re very open to hearing him

1:52:47 Now in a way that they weren’t and I’m not political in the slightest but I’ve really been interested to interview him again so I think I can take him somewhere that he’s never gone in an interview before and then there’s a lot of people that like just do really inspiring stuff that we have in our bucket list people like we’ve already interviewed him but he was a real bucket lister David Goggins yeah which oh my god that guy changed me in real time like being on set with him he’s a Navy SEAL but he’s the Navy SEAL that other Navy SEALs go no no this guy’s hardcore and he there was a book called Living with a SEAL written by Jesse Itzler okay so I believe Jesse Itzler is a billionaire his wife certainly is I think together they’re worth multi-billions just very talented entrepreneurial family and he felt he could get tougher and so he hired a Navy SEAL to live with him for a month and wrote a book about it called Living with a SEAL he did not reveal who the SEAL was book comes out my team pitches me on Jesse Itzler and I was like I’m sure Jesse’s amazing but give me the SEAL like this guy sounds incredible and they’re like well they haven’t announced who he is and I’m like come on guys like we can find him so they start trying to find him and then three weeks into our mission to find him they announced who he was for whatever reason and so they then got a hold of him got him on the show he’s he changed me probably more than any other guest I mean just in real time on the

1:54:14 Show yeah because you felt the energy behind the message and you’re like wow 100% yeah that just changed me is what you’re thinking yeah oh yeah definitely yeah then that’s the greatest part of our jobs you could argue that’s why we’re doing oh for sure because the same thing happens with me and that’s the beauty of doing a live show because let’s be honest most like you know conversations on YouTube between two people are not in the same room right so the beauty of doing this and again another barrier to entry as you talked about and like I’ve waited two years for a guest to come here and we just wait because it’s got to be here but yeah I get physically and mentally changed by the guests because they put these imprints on my brain like you know what would you go say that kind of thing I would argue though if you’re gonna go and speak with Obama or Jay-Z and this thought just came to me that you do it in a format like this because it’s that one moment where you can go deep with Barack or deep with Jay and if there’s a hundred people watching I’m just saying you might not get the version you want and you’re a deep dude and I’m just saying maybe two hours in a room with two of you you might get something that I mean literally could be epic like they’ll play that footage when they die right and that’s what I mean I don’t know that’s what I always think I’m always thinking I’m I’m getting a snapshot of this human that 400 years from now they can look back and be

1:55:29 Like that’s that’s what Tom was that who that’s who Tom is at the time so interesting I’m always open um couple questions about you your personal kind of habits is there anything you changed about your game on a daily basis that when you did you were like okay I’m just able to 10x whatever my happiness my production my value created to the world there’s any kind of habit you have or set of habits Tom I always ask everybody a few questions at the end you might know they’re coming but that’s alright if you could make a phone call the 20 year old Tom give that young man a bit of advice I guess he’s still in film school at the time probably thinking about the three picture deal and the merchandising deal and all that stuff that’s going to come afterwards give that young man a bit of advice would you tell him very easy you have a fixed mindset right now you believe your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and they are not my friend they can be developed so right now be honest you’re not a very good filmmaker but you can become one if you’re willing to put in the work so get on a path of growing and developing and understand any skill or talent can be developed because my whole thing was I

1:57:01 Wanted to be naturally talented and I wasn’t and it was very heartbreaking and very hard and so until I discovered the whole notion of a growth mindset that I could work my way to that I was lost cause so if I could have come to that years and years earlier that’d be powerful hmm best advice you ever received I’ll give you this one my father-in-law once pulled me aside he was at this time I was I don’t even think I had a job when he told me this and he has been very successful his life story is incredible starts in this tiny town a tiny village in the mountains of Cyprus and works his way up to running one of the largest shipping companies here in London it’s just an unbelievable story so you would think I would listen to anything he said and he pulled me aside and he said Tom I’m gonna tell you the secret to being successful yes please Andreas tell me and he goes no more about any meeting deal whatever it is no more about it than anyone else in the room always and I was like I get that Andreas but my boss isn’t really like incentivized people to be like that like if I put ideas out there he’s really just gonna shut me down and so knowing now how I sounded to him he just went quiet and I didn’t really think anything of it three years later I’m now in business trying to learn this entrepreneurial thing and I realized you know what I need to do I need every room I go into I need to know more about it than that my father

1:58:32 And I tried to tell me and at that moment literally the next time I saw him I said Andreas I have to apologize to you you gave me what may be the single greatest piece of advice in my life three years ago and I’ve ignored you for the last three years but now like a blinding flash of insight I now understand how genius that is and if you look at impact here in what I’m doing my only game is to be the most well-researched interviewer that’s ever walked into an interview ever like that’s my shtick so and all of that stems from that realization that you can get good at anything the only way humans are dazzled is by being capable of the extraordinary when you know more about a topic than anyone else in the room you can put more deal pieces together you know what to push on what to give on all of that you know the personalities in the room you can orchestrate it’s great advice lastly to that 20 year old that’s watching us it used to be you anywhere in the world except maybe China because I don’t know if YouTube goes there yet what advice do you give to them okay they’re the Gen Z they’re coming up everyone’s discounting them saying they’re you know addicted to their phones what advice do you give to them do and believe that which moves you towards your goals that’s it so that to me is so core and fundamental and if someone had given me that advice then that would be my best piece of advice but sadly I’d learn this one the hard way so I find that self-esteem fucks

1:59:57 Everyone up and the reason it does is not because they have it because I think you need self-esteem and when you don’t have self-esteem all hell breaks loose that’s when people truly become at risk for suicide you need self-esteem but what you build your self-esteem around is a choice but going back to that notion of this is water when and where you made your choice may have been handed to you by your parents they may have rewarded you emotionally for doing a certain thing and so that became your identity became the thing that you built your self-esteem around just always that way for you so you’ve never known anything else so for me it was being smart and being right that was how I had come to define myself and think positively about myself and so because of that I found myself arguing for stupid ideas because they were mine and I so wanted to be right I so wanted people to perceive me as smart that I would just keep pushing and I remember one day in a business meeting I convinced my business partners of an idea that I knew was a bad idea there was a voice in my head screaming want to talk about being aware even when you can’t stop yourself I had this voice my screaming this is the wrong idea you know it’s the wrong idea because it’s gonna move us away from our goals so why on earth are you arguing for this and I ended up winning the argument and they actually acquiesced and they said fine we’ll do it your way and I had this existential

2:01:12 Moment of panic where I was like I just got what I wanted but it’s moving me away from my goals so if this is my goal and supposedly I’m acting in accordance with my goals what do I really want because I just did something that got it made me feel good about myself I felt right but it moved me away from my goals so at that moment I realized wait a second I’m building my self-esteem around something that’s so fragile because I’m so routinely thankfully around people smarter than me it makes me feel bad about myself it makes me want to crawl away spend less time around them and then also I’m wrong a lot but so be it if you can look past that and then identify the right answer faster than anyone else put the energy behind that right answer tell people like man this was you know so-and-so’s idea it was incredible never trying to steal their idea but just trying to be the energy get people excited make sure that that crosses the finish line like once I switched my self-esteem around that then I felt good I could say I’m Ryan you’re absolutely right I’m totally wrong about that thank you for that insight like that’s incredible in fact I just said something to you a few minutes ago and you were like no please tell me and there was like legitimate like you actually wanted to know because you knew I’m gonna be empowered by this piece of knowledge like when you think like that that’s when you really get empowered because everyone is better

2:02:29 Than you at something and my thing was get really good at sitting at their feet and learning once you can do that once you can humble yourself once you’re like it’s not even so much humbling yourself because I don’t even like it doesn’t impact my ego my egos driven by getting that piece of knowledge so I want to be empowered I want to be stronger I want to learn something I want to grow so I built myself a seam around being the learner and identifying the right answer and being willing to admit when I was wrong that changed everything in my life powerful stuff tell my story remember when someone sent me the first clip of Inside Quest and they were like look at these guys look what they’re doing they’re doing what you’re doing they’re the competition and I just right away I said to him what are you talking about let’s look at what they’re doing look at this cool thing look at this pre-roll they’re taking pictures behind look they’re laughing look at the way he structures the questions look at the timeline along the bottom of the screen like this is amazing stuff what they’re doing and I I never look at media as competition and I don’t know because I was grew up on Joe Rogan and he inspired me to do this show and he invited me on the show and for him it’s like we don’t play this old media game of scarcity it’s like we all create and when we all create everyone wins and so like even when I ever go back to my banker competition

2:03:45 Scarcity mindset I always overcompensate and say no no no no let’s go out of our way and bring these people on to our show and talk about their content and promote their stuff and be like well let’s look what they’re doing different and how can we make this better and why did he make that choice and what can we do and so and when your clip goes viral well how can we not miss that or maybe we want that to happen too you know that kind of thing and so it was great seeing your stuff I love watching you from a distance I love the fact that you have you know it’s somewhat similar tastes as we do as in looking for people that necessarily aren’t famous but have this message and that means and here’s the real truth people that no one’s gonna want to hear is that nine out of ten of your guests they’re a blip and no one’s like and you’re like are you kidding me and I know you’ve had this experience are you kidding me this gold in this episode and if you guys just watch this it would be a game changer and yet you choose to watch this here but again that’s why very few people are in the long-form content business because it’s not about quick rewards it’s not about your ego it’s not even about people listening what you think is important you just got to put it out honestly for the sake of just putting it out there in my opinion and if you put it out with that energy of I’m not trying to make a short-term profit I’m not going to turn it into this I think

2:04:58 People feel feel the purity and they feel the authenticity and that’s what a success is and if you look at the independent media that’s become a success it’s usually from men and women that are creating it in that way and you’re doing that and it’s amazing to see I love seeing it you’re much better in person as in it’s great to get inside your head you don’t get a chance to answer questions much I know you’ve done some episodes where you put yourself in the chair and I do that once a year too and it’s great but it’s nice to see you just talk about this stuff and you know you have real IP like real intellectual property that’s your own so I can’t wait for the book I like the fact that you’re very controversial about what you say you have to be that these days it’s the only way people get lessons and get information so big honor having you here I’m gonna probably pick your brain after the episodes over for your thoughts I always want like constructive criticism on what we’re doing too but just super excited where you’re going those 25 sets of beliefs really got me excited as I need to go further and articulate the London Real vision because it starts off with a feeling in your gut about what’s important but sometimes you get so busy doing the thing and then you realize that people are like what do you do and you can’t just say go watch 25 episodes because that’s what you kind of have to do for a show to really