Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #110 Why Mindset is The Key to Success with Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

CAUTION ADVISED: this podcast contains swearing. Do you believe that people’s values can change, or are they set in stone? Can you gain talent and intelligence through practice, or are they innate? Do you have a growth mindset or a fixed one? My guest on this week’s show is convinced that change is available to all of us, at any time. Tom Bilyeu is a US entrepreneur who co-founded a billion-dollar nutrition company. His weekly YouTube show, Impact Theory, explores the mindset of the world’s highest achievers, to share the secrets of their success. And during this conversation, you’ll learn how to implement some of those yourself. We talk about the importance of being a learner and how openness to criticism is, in fact, a superpower. We also discuss how to shift self-limiting beliefs. One of Tom’s mantras is: ‘only do and believe that which moves you towards your goal’ and he describes how you can use that to change your thinking around things like weight loss or fitness. Tom and I delve into topics like nutrition and diet, although we do not necessarily share the same views – but that’s the beauty of a conversation like this, being open to debate. He has what he calls ‘strong convictions, loosely held’ and I love that as a description of a mind that’s always curious and open. As a doctor, I know different methods work for different people – and at different times. So health is a great example of why a fixed mindset isn’t helpful. Tom’s motivation and passion for life is infectious. His mission is to help people live to their full potential and execute their dreams – I hope after listening to this chat you’ll want to start working towards yours. N.B. this conversation was recorded in October 2019. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/110 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you're going to recognize that your identity in and of itself is a construction and then ask yourself, okay, well, what would be the ideal identity to construct? The answer is to be that of the learner. My identity is that of the learner. That's it. The only thing that I value myself for is my willingness to admit when I'm wrong and to learn. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. So here we are again for episode 110 of my podcast. For regular listeners, welcome back and for new listeners, a very warm welcome. Today we're going to be talking about the importance of mindset. No matter what we want to achieve in life, work success, health success, relationship success,

or increased productivity, whatever it is, mindset plays a very important role. And my guest today is none other than Tom Bilyeu. Tom is a US entrepreneur who co-founded a billion dollar nutrition company and he actually sold his company a few years back and now spent his time trying to inspire others. He has a weekly YouTube show called Impact Theory which explores the mindset of the world's highest achievers and the secrets of their success. And at the core of Tom's work is his belief that mindset is key and that ultimately we are all responsible for our own.

Now, Tom believes that adopting a growth mindset is essential when aiming for any goal and passionately believes that being a lifelong learner and always being open to criticism is in fact a superpower. We cover a variety of different topics in the chat today, including how to shift self-limiting beliefs. Nutrition also makes its way into the conversation today. And I think it's fair to say that Tom and I don't necessarily share the same views on nutrition, which is largely reflective of our different experiences and different professions. I'm always

more than happy to have people on my show who have got different viewpoints to me. In fact, I think it is super important for all of us to regularly have our own views challenged. I certainly do not want this podcast to be an echo chamber. And I think the way we disagree with other people is really important. Can we share our differing views with kindness, compassion, and understanding? In fact, Tom has what he calls strong convictions loosely held. And I love that as a description of a mind that's always curious and open. As a doctor, I've always been open to learning from my patients and listening carefully

to what they tell me is working in their life. I know that different methods work for different people and at different times. So health is a great example of why a fixed mindset is really helpful. Tom is very forthright in the way he communicates his ideas. For sure, that will not be everybody's cup of tea. But having been on Tom's show twice before and having spent a fair amount of time with him, I know that Tom's desire to help people is genuine. His motivation and passion for life is infectious and his mission is to help people live to their full potential and execute their dreams. I hope after listening to our conversation that you will want to start working towards yours. Now before we get started I do need to give a quick shout out to some of the sponsors who are essential in order

for me to put out episodes like this one. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast. Now, Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes. I know many of you are using Athletic Greens as part of your daily routine. You're getting up, you're having your glass of water with athletic greens in that's helping you feel as though you are doing something proactive for your health right from the get-go. Now, I do prefer that people get all of their nutrition from food, but I do recognise that for some of us, this is not always possible. So, if you're looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy

to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation.

So Tom, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you for having me, man. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, well, I'm actually in your house recording this. And I've got to say, I feel pretty energized. We've just had, we've just gone super deep on your show. We did. It was a lot of fun. A lot of fun, yeah.

And you've definitely caused me to challenge some of my existing ways of thinking and hopefully evolve them and refine them a little bit. So I want to thank you for that. Dude, my pleasure. Same, man. I've got to say, Tom, your show on YouTube is brilliant. There is authenticity there. There is intensity there.

And it intrigues me that you are moving. You're still going to do that, but you are moving to this newer format that I've just been on with you for these longer conversations. So I'm interested, having watched your show for a period of time now, where does that intensity come from? Wow, that's a hard ride I wasn't expecting. Where does the intensity come from? So part of it is what I call an

affectation layer. So it is me knowing that if you want to communicate in a way that hits people in their bones, you have to be prepared to leverage all that human communication has to offer. Right. Like and it has a lot to offer. And a lot of times people are afraid to really embody what they're feeling. And so I try to really embody what I'm feeling. Now, that's the second part. When you embody what you're feeling, your brain goes, whoa, this shit must be like really intense. This must really matter. And so then you actually start feeling that intensity. And then that makes embodying the intensity that much more easy. And you create this self-reinforcing loop. So, and then part of it is just like, I've always, this self-reinforcing loop. So, and then part of it is just like, I've always, when I get into something, I, two things, one, I am prone to getting excited or really having a reaction to it. And two, I understand the mechanisms and the feedback loops in the brain. So I can amp that all up to a much higher level. And so I used to teach and one of my former students then hired me

and I was obviously when I'm teaching, it's very easy to get passionate. You've got a room full of people and there's just a performance layer to it. And then he and I were alone and I was breaking something down and I was getting really passionate and he goes, wow, you can do it even when there's nobody else around. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, your, your passion. Like, and I was like, I'd never really thought of it. That was probably the beginning of me thinking of it. There is an affectation layer here.

Like part of this is at first, I'm just doing it to communicate, like to really get a point across. But then the more I try to get the point across, the more my brain goes, oh my gosh, this is something real. This is big. This is exciting.

And then you actually start getting excited and then it gets bigger. And what do you mean by affectation layer so you have i don't like saying performance layer but there is a performance layer to communication and i a very long time ago i wanted to be a stand up comic and i learned very early probably about the age of 12, that the way you say something will determine whether it's funny. Not what you say, not just what you say. How about that? There's also the way you say it. And once you get good at the way you say something, you begin to realize, huh, it's not just that it makes it funny. It can actually give you the chills just with the way I say something. And so the brand of comedy that I pursued when I was pursuing it was I didn't tell jokes.

I told stories and I made them funny in the manner in which I told them. Then when I went away from comedy and I wanted to take myself seriously as a creator, which first manifested in film and then later business, it was, it became passion. So, but it was the same thing of understanding, interesting, the way that I modulate my voice, the way that I either tighten my diaphragm or speak from my chest or from my throat, like all of it has these different reactions and it makes people respond differently. And so I got very good at understanding how pacing and rhythm and all of that stuff helped my message get across better. So what I'm hearing as you say that is a listener of the show, let's say, who is looking for

inspiration, who is looking to pick up some tips and tools that they can apply in their own life to feel better and live more. I'm hearing that you have figured out that the way you communicate, that the way you talk to someone or to a group of people impacts the feeling that they get and how powerful your message is. So to flip that, and how powerful your message is. So to flip that, have you seen that people talk to themselves in ways that are either helping them perform at the level they want to perform at or speak as themselves in a way where it's actually harming them? Definitively, but I would say that's more words than the affectation layer that we've been talking about. There is an element of performance, that self-performance that would really be useful for people, which I just

did on the word really, which is what I was talking about where you need to embody it. So if there's something new, and we touched on this ever so slightly when you and I were talking and I was trying to explain like how malleable everything in our lives is. And one of the ways, like when you really research the brain, everything you learn about the brain tells you how to manipulate yourself. So far more than it becomes like this useful tool for relationships or being a better parent. It's like, you're going to understand what your brain is doing so that you can leverage it for your own success. So one of the most important things I've ever learned about the brain is it's absolute necessity to justify your amplitude of reaction.

So if your amplitude is small, your brain goes, oh, it's not a big deal. Oh, my, um, God, I'm using a whore. I was the first thing that came to my mind. Mother, forgive me. My mom just said, it's not a big deal. You know what I mean? Like your brain is going to try to make sense of that. If you freak out, your brain is going to say, whoa, this really is a big deal. I just lost at a video game. This is crazy. My whole life is crumbling. Or Liverpool. If Liverpool were Liverpool were to lose right I'm sure before you began your separation from your obsession with the game like you if I were to take your testosterone levels they would drop when you lost right so your whole body is responding based on

you building up this thing in your mind as important so if people can understand the process of desire creation part of it is just amplitude. Part of it is saying, this is important to me. I want this. And like really embodying it, really getting into it. Much like I'm doing right now. And in doing that, your brain starts to go, whoa, this is a big deal. So we can use that.

You better be using it. We can be using that ourselves to amp ourselves up. Correct. You talk a lot about mindset. You talk a lot about value systems. We touched on passion, right? And we didn't fully explore this, but there was something that I felt from you that actually, you were saying that people can't say, you know, obviously I don't have a passion, right? And passion is something I've written about. I think it's super super important i think that regularly doing things that you're passionate about has been shown to make you more resilient to stress so when people are saying to you tom i don't have a passion do you believe them like do they simply not have a passion or what are your what is your technique to help them find that

passion yeah they i do believe them they are almost certainly correct because people don't understand that passion is a process so they want it to be like love but i will say it is like love even love is a process you have to go on dates it starts maybe with sexual attraction then you actually want to get to know them and then through that engagement with that person it starts to blossom into something passion is exactly the same. Passion starts as a flicker of interest. And it seems pedestrian and kind of boring.

And if it's like you with football, there's some other element, right? So I have the good fortune of you and I just went very deep down the Liverpool rabbit hole. And if I'm not mistaken, this is going to be playing in Europe like gangbusters. So I will use this example. I'm married to a Brit, by the way. So I'm just going to go deep on calling it football and the Premier League and all that good stuff. All right. So your story with Liverpool is, I think, super indicative of how a passion develops. So first of all, there's probably something innate in us that would draw us to sports anyway,

even as a spectator. So there's already that going for you. Then you happen to have the immigrant journey of wanting to fit in and your friends were into it. And you've got your home life where it's, you know, a very different cultural upbringing. And then you have the westernized school life and one anchor point would be soccer. And then it's this team spirit environment and all of that. And so you begin to feed into that. And what starts is like, oh, this is kind of fun. Oh, this is interesting becomes, oh, my friends really like it. And it's great way to bond. And oh, I feel connected to them. And there's oxytocin going like crazy. There's dopamine rushes and you're getting all this neurochemistry and

you're like, whoa, this is so cool. And so you start to embody it. And the first time you cheer, oh my God, like this is literally what happened to me. So I'm a diehard Spurs supporter now. Wow. Now, how did that happen? So my wife's family is all about Tottenham and they took me to a game. Now I really wanted to bond with my father-in-law. He did not. He was always very kind to me. I need to impress that upon people, but he was not particularly impressed by me in the beginning. So I was very eager to make an impression when I was a young, dumb kid. And he took me to a Spurs match. And I remember at first being like, okay, like I'm here to support the family, but I don't really care. And then you cheer and then you sing and then you win and everybody's hugging and

you're going crazy and all the neurochemistry for bonding is happening. And then they take you again the next year and then you watch it on TV and you go again and it just starts becoming this thing. That is how you develop a passion. It starts with, oh, this is interesting. I have an agenda. I engage with it. It turns into a fascination. There's other neurochemical rewards. Now for a typical passion, I will say there's part of what makes passion interesting to me is the acquisition of a usable skillset. So when I'm talking about a passion, I don't mean a more passive passion, like a sports obsession, but even that, like when I think about that, it's the more you understand

the game, the deeper your passion is going to be for it. So even there, there's an element of that. But like, let's say music, the better you get at music, the more passionate you're going to become. You've worked really hard for this set of skills. And that set of skills allows you to manipulate people's neurochemistry by playing these songs. And that makes you feel good about yourself. And so the better you get at it, the more passionate you are about it. And I think it becomes hard to develop a robust passion if you suck at something. Now you're gonna suck in the beginning, but that's like the sort of fascination phase.

It really becomes a passion when you start getting great. So if someone doesn't feel a passion towards something, they're like, yeah, I get all that, but I don't have passion. I don't have something that I'm that interested about. What do you do then? So some of this comes down to, we're all very different. So some people are going to take to passion easier than others. Some people are going to struggle with it and they're going to have to stay longer with this sort of habit formation. Is it a skill you can train?

It is. Yeah, definitively. so humans are the ultimate adaptation machine everything including whether you store white fat or brown fat is a skill that you can acquire you're about the woman that swam the Bering Strait in a wetsuit so crazy she's like I want to swim the Bering Strait which is a space between Russia and Alaska how far is that far enough it could be a bathtub that shit is so cold. Like the fact that, I don't know, it isn't admittedly. It's a long way and it's cold. Yeah, it's not like a thousand miles, but I'm gonna guess it's 20 miles.

I mean, it's something. It's a significant swim in the freezing cold. It's a significant swim in a swimming pool, let alone in the freezing cold. So this woman for a year, she sleeps in Alaska with the window open. You can imagine Alaskan winters, that's cold. So this woman for a year, she sleeps in Alaska with the window open. You can imagine Alaskan winters, that's cold. So she ends up transforming some percentage of her fat from normal adipose tissue to the far more thermogenic brown fat and is able to swim and not die of

hypothermia. So that's but one extraordinary example of the ways that humans can change. So when you understand that, okay, this is a game of adaptation, of directed adaptation. I'm going to pick this thing that I'm aiming at and I want to get good at that. What is that thing? Maybe that thing is learning to desire. Maybe that thing is courage. Maybe that thing is playing the piano. All of these things are things that you can get better at.

Grit is probably my favorite thing that people think of as, well, you're just sort of born with it. You either have it or you don't. No, even that can be developed. Meditation being one of the most extraordinarily simple ways to get better at being able to stay focused on something over and over and over, which is a key component to grit. So it's all learnable. That's the punchline there. This is one thing I really

wanted to explore with you today, Tom, is this idea that a lot of these skills, well, a lot of these behavioral patterns that we think are, no, they're innate. We've either got them or we don't. You passionately believe that you can train these skills. And I really want to explore that because why are you so convinced that we can train these things as skills? Where does that come from? And what are the ways you mentioned with passion, but with other things? I mean, you have spoken before about your value systems, which I find incredibly fascinating and almost to the point that, you know, I don't know what you would say. Is it possible to live your best life?

You know, it's a very, very broad, generic term. Is it possible to actually, you know, do what you want out of your life, get what you want out of your life without clearly defined values? No. So I think that one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they mistake their value system, their belief system for objective truth. When in reality, it is things that you have assumed through osmosis from your family, your friends, the greater culture around you. And once you recognize it as the construction that we were talking about before, you can't unsee that. And you begin like the easy example is to think about people that grew up in other cultures from you. They just see the world differently. And you look at them and think they're crazy. Religion being the easiest one. But you grow up

somewhere else in the world and you just have a different default religion. And that different default religion gives you a whole lot of different base assumptions about life and what it means to serve a higher power or just the way that it gives you a very different basic framework for right and wrong. And I mean, it is really pretty extraordinary to me that humans, simply because they grew up in a different place, would go to war over a different fictional story and kill each other and die in the name of that story. But we do take those beliefs on. We do take those values of that culture on, like to the core of our being, to the life and death point. to the life and death point. So, or let's take a silly example. In America, like 20 years ago, soccer just seemed stupid. It was something that kids did. And you didn't get many adults that pursued soccer. Whereas if you grew up in England, man, holy hell. So it's in those different cultures, your dad is cheering you on. He's got you a, you know, a kit when you're a little kid and like, you just wear it as a default and you want to connect with

dad. So you have the kid and then you go to school and they have kids and it's like the neighborhood you grew up in, ah, like all who you support. Right. So it becomes like a whole thing. Humans are so like, we are designed to soak, soak in whatever environment we happen to be born into. Because not just like locationally, but like what's going on? Is food scarce? Is this a time of hardship, a time of plenty? And so making sure that we adapt to that, we don't come pre-programmed with as much as say a horse, right? A horse is walking day one. Like it is crazy how long humans have to develop. We have a part of our brain, which I'm telling a doctor here, but the prefrontal cortex doesn't finish developing until you're 25. That's crazy. It's not made of different materials. Not like that material is harder to make.

It forms last so that it puts sort of that capstone after you've taken in all of the information about your surroundings, figured out the culture that you're in, and then it sort of solidifies and cements and the part of your brain that gives you the control and all of that comes after you've got your beliefs and your values and all those things settled into place. So when I think about the, like, almost certainly, you ready for the bombshell?

Yeah. Almost certainly to answer the the the dark side of your question we're probably complete automatons with absolutely no free will that's almost certainly true but if you act like that your life is going to be miserable and so i just i can't fathom a universe in which it makes sense to use volition, if you have any, to frame the world like that. It just doesn't make sense. So even if I am just simply pre-programmed to tell people that they can change their mindset and they can change their beliefs and values and all that, it has been so transformative in my own life to do that, to step back and go, oh, I was on a path that I was so unhappy and I had the world's most fixed mindset. So for anybody that hasn't read Carol Dweck's seminal book, Mindset, fixed mindset is where you believe your talent and intelligence are fixed. You're just born with it, is the way it is. Growth mindset is your talent and your

intelligence can be changed through deliberate practice. So I was headed down one path where I thought, I was just born with this, whatever this is. And my life was about putting myself in situations where I felt cool and smart and didn't believe I could get any cooler or smarter. And then when I finally realized, oh, wait, that's actually a dumb way to frame the world. Click binary switch over to I choose to believe that I'm malleable, that I can get better, that I can get smarter, that I can learn something today that I didn't know how to do yesterday. And I went from, I mean, just to make this really gross for a second, I learned all of that in a dingy one bedroom apartment in a bad neighborhood with no furniture because I

couldn't afford any. And we're now recording the podcast in my gigantic Beverly Hills mansion. Right. And I'm saying that as a result of the mindset, that is not a result of me being better than somebody at something that is a result of me figuring something out that I think not everybody can do, but anybody listening to this podcast, if they've made it this far, they meet what I call minimum requirements. I mean, that is an empowering story. What I'm getting from you, Tom, is this idea that change is available to us at any time. Correct.

And we explore this a little bit on my conversation on your show about what does it take for us to change? Do we need adversity of a certain intensity to, you know, to ask ourselves, to challenge our own belief system and, you know, make us change basically. And I guess this is something I know you wrestle with. I wrestle with this all the time. I lie in bed thinking about this stuff. Do you need fundamentally pain on one level to actually start the process of change? I don't think necessarily you do, but I think a lot of us, unfortunately, that is what ends up happening. That certainly is for me. What was it for you? How did you go from changing from a fixed to a growth mindset? Because I've heard people say, you know, you've either got one or the other. You've either got your fixed mindset or you've got a growth mindset. And this fascinates me on

an individual level. This fascinates me for patients that I see. Frankly, this fascinates me for my children, right? Two young kids under 10. I want to learn from you about these different mindsets. If we are malleable, if we can adapt, if change is always available to us, then what are those things that we should be doing? So here's the bad news about my story. It, of course, involves pain. So I didn't have to hit some crazy rock bottom,

so I'm very grateful for that. So mine was a mixture of deep personal shame shame of feeling like I was talking a big game about being successful, but I was not doing anything to actually become successful. And my father-in-law certainly was lovingly calling me out on that and made it clear that he didn't want me to marry his daughter because he didn't see me doing anything with my life. And his very pointed question was, how do you plan to take care of my daughter? And my response to him was, I know what you see is a broke, out of work, undereducated kid, but I'm the most ambitious person you've ever met. And then the next day I laid in bed probably for four hours in the morning and had done that the day before and the day before and the day before and the

day after and the day after and the day after. And it wasn't until finally I was like, man, I'm telling my wife, I'm going to, or my then fiance, I'm going to make her rich one day. And I'm not doing anything to actually make good on that. And I've been saying this stuff for a very long time. I'd been telling people I was going to be rich probably since I was 11 or 12. And so I just thought, wow, I say this all the time, but I'm not doing anything. And the fact that my wife, then fiance, is having to guilt me just to get out of bed, like that's a bad sign. So that begins a process. There was nothing binary, unfortunately. It wasn't like some lightning rod moment where one day I have a fixed mindset,

then I have a growth mindset. Like I'd started researching the brain by this point. And so I'm thinking like, yeah, man, like it is a little weird that I'm not doing anything. Like, what do I know about the brain that would sort of explain this? And then as I begin learning about the brain and start coming across some of these ideas

about brain plasticity and how much we can change, and I start really buying into that, then I meet people that have, they wouldn't have called it a growth mindset. We didn't have that language back then, but they had a growth mindset and they believed that they could change. And so I was like, whoa, yeah, this thing that I believe, I'm actually seeing it here in reality. And so right then I got involved in being an entrepreneur and being an entrepreneur is like, if you want a growth mindset, put your house on the line and start a business. You'll get a growth mindset real fast because it's either that or you're

going to lose the business because you just have to own. I'm not good enough yet. I do not understand this. I'm too dumb to pull this off. So I really better get smart fast. So are many of us too comfortable then to develop a growth mindset? So if our lives are okay, if we have a roof over our head, if we can pay the bills and, you know, we're not, let's say deeply fulfilled, but we're just going around living our life. We're waiting for the weekends. We get smashed on a Friday night, a Saturday night to sort of, you know, for a whole multitude of reasons, you know, you are making the case, I think, that you can just choose. Yeah, I don't want to make it sound too easy because it is not. and the brutally difficult, it's deadly simple, but it is very difficult for most people.

So the problem is far more insidious than, oh, it's just people are too comfortable, because you have billionaires killing themselves. So we're dealing with now a mental health crisis. And so to really unpack the answer of change, you can talk about it without talking about the microbiome, but it would be a mistake. And so getting to really understand your physiology, I hope is one of the things that I beat the drum so hard that people really begin to research the brain. They begin to research mood disorders. They understand exercise. They understand diet because what ends up

happening is your mood is so dysregulated. Your belief system is so dysfunctional and the psychological immune system is so strong that you get that biofilm around your belief system that becomes impenetrable. And no matter what you say to people, no matter what example you show to them, they just cannot shake themselves out of dysfunction. So what's happening is people have, they have created an identity without realizing that they've created an identity. So when you, if you're going to recognize that your identity in and of itself is a construction and then ask yourself, okay, well, what would be the ideal identity to construct? The answer is to be that of the learner. If you have a fixed mindset and your identity is something

that is anything other than being a learner, it is very fragile. So to use Nassim Taleb's language, you need to build an identity that is anti-fragile because if you don't, when someone attacks you, what happens? You feel badly about yourself, right right it's very easy to get under somebody's skin because you've triggered their insecurities when you trigger their insecurities the psychological immune system kicks in and it says no no ronigan you're not bad they're bad they're dumb they don't know what they're talking about they're an idiot only a fool would not be keto or not be a vegan or whatever their identity is wrapped around. And so they go on the offensive and they never stop to think, hey, when like, I'll give everyone listening, lean in. I want you to hear this part.

When somebody tries to hurt you, they will almost always start with something real. So they're going to come at you with the thing that they know you're most insecure about. And so why do people, when somebody, people always like, oh, if they come after you for your looks, it's because they've lost. No, they're coming after you for something they know will hurt you. So people are coming after you at a place where they are most likely to trigger you. The triggering is the psychological immune system, which is beneficial because people with the highest levels of self-delusion also report the highest levels of happiness. So that's incredible, right?

That's super powerful. I'm so grateful for the psychological immune system. I can only imagine the number of times it saved me from spiraling into despair because I see myself a little too accurately. So I get its use. But if you flip your mentality and say, my identity is not as a entrepreneur, it's not as a vegan, it's not as a doctor or a podcaster. My identity is that of the learner. That's it. The only thing that I value myself for is my willingness to admit when I'm wrong and to learn. Now, the secret power there is one, it's anti-fragile. So the more you attack

somebody for being stupid, if they're a learner, I am literally asking one question when somebody says I'm doing something wrong or I'm dumb. What am I doing wrong? In what way am I dumb? Because if you give me that piece of information, I grow more powerful. So I'm always looking at the hilarious secret about wanting people to criticize you is like the more you try to hurt me with something real, I have the chills. The more you try to hurt me with something real, the more powerful I'm gonna grow

because I'm actually going to open myself up. Even though you're saying it to hurt me, you are actively trying to tear me down. You're probably going to hit me with something that I can learn from. And so what I always tell people is when people are chucking rocks in your head, think of them as actually being gold nuggets or bricks or whatever. And you can take that gold to the bank. You can take that brick and build a house, like however you want to think of it, but

you have to let it hit you. You can't deflect it and send it flying off in another direction. You've got to take it. It's going to sting a little, but then you're going to have that material with which you can do something. And so if you build your identity around being the learner and you're constantly growing, over time you grow more powerful, but you have to lower the psychological immune system, or you can tweak it. Much like you can go in and edit a virus to deploy something in the human body you can edit the psychological immune system to say the only thing you can protect me with is that i'm the learner love it i mean i love that i love this idea of being anti-fragile what that's the

seem to live for you yeah what a beautiful concept what What a powerful idea, particularly these days, right? Where we're all getting offended at every little thing. We can't put anything out without getting offended by someone. But what does that tell you? You know, as we discussed, Tom, I mean, I love, these days I'm in a really good place where I feel I can, any friction in my life, anything that starts to bother me, for me, that's an opportunity to learn. That's something to, why is that bothering me? Why is that triggering me? Is there an element of truth behind this? Or do I disagree? I don't think I'm as anti-fragile as I would like to be. In fact, I know I'm not because I'm, you know, I'm constantly trying to grow this stuff. But it is

even just that flipping mindset whereby instead of looking at who's posted the comments and looking them up and thinking what do they know right that sort of thing it's like hold on a minute is there an element of truth to this why is this triggering me and i think that then comes back to this idea that you said when we realize that these ideas that we have constructed are simply, they're just constructs we put in our mind, right? But if you have not realized that, that is what you said you'd not realized. So how do you help people? Is it possible to help people who have not yet realized or who don't accept that what is in their mind is a construct, that accept this is the way I am, this is my personality, I cannot change that. So here's the very distressing and painful

realization I've come to. It's probably possible it does not violate the laws of physics. So there is some like magical answer that you get to. And as a doctor, you well know it's going to be different for every person. So now it doesn't scale. And since I'm obsessed with scale, I just had to let go. If somebody's not already there, if they're not willing to go, okay, I buy that premise and now I just need like the different paths and the ways that I go about this, but like the central premise I buy, I just don't put energy there. I actually find that very distressing. And my initial inclination, because a lot of this, of course, is born from there are people that I love that don't have a growth mindset. And so it started with, I just want to help that person. And then you realize, wow, man, I've been at this for decades and I've made no progress. So this is certainly a function of me.

I'm not good enough to make that breakthrough. So I can keep going and try to optimize my everything for that one person. Or I can say, you know what? When they're, when, when they have sort of terraformed their own mind to the point where they're receptive to this, I will be here. But until then, I'm going to go over here and just say, all right, look, here's a base assumption that I have. If you agree with that and you want to understand like where I'm coming from and how to use these tools and tactics, like then I'm here. But otherwise, there's a guy named Jeffrey Canada who introduced me to this concept.

And I really want to get him on my show because I think I'm quoting him accurately, but I responded so strongly. And I probably encountered this idea almost 15 years ago now. And he grew up in Harlem and said, I'm going to go get a degree and I'm going to change the education system. And he ends up getting a full ride, I think to Harvard and goes back into the school system and realizes, well, you can't change it and gets very influential and starting up his own education system and realizes that you can't save the adults. And so he said, you have to give up on the adults and focus on women who are pregnant or may become pregnant. And all you need to do

is get them to read to their children because it's the number of positive words people hear by the age of five that like he considered the single most predictive thing of their future success, which is exactly why he said your zip code is so predictive of your future success. Cause it basically says how many words, positive words you're going to hear by the age of five. And I was like, fuck, that's crazy. But when you think about the language centers of your brain and like what that impacts in terms of future ability to communicate and get a good job and oh man, it's just crazy. So anyway, that whole concept of give up on adults, focus on kids, gave me the language to understand, give up on people for whom

it would, it's not that it's an impossible task. It's that it is so hard. It doesn't scale go where it's easy. And if you're talking about education, easy as young. And so when I think about mindset, I, the easy is people who already embrace the notion of a growth mindset. They may not have built one yet, but they believe in it. So how do you build one? So that's easy. Like once we get to the part where, okay, now you're prepared, you just have to understand the confluence of things that make up your frame of reference. You can think of it sort of as a mini personality. So your frame of reference is going to be dictated by your beliefs, your values, your identity, your habits, your routines, basically all the things that fall into the default network of the brain, anything that you do automatically. So when you get a grasp on those things and

realize that all of them are malleable, like beliefs, people often mistake for objective truth and it simply isn't true. Like when you think about the fact that your brain is doing its best to create a virtual environment for you, is in no way, shape, or form meant to objectively represent reality. Like just think of the narrow band of the light spectrum that we see, the narrow band of frequencies that we hear. Like it's really small.

And our brain has just gone, eh, these are the ones that matter to us. But if you did the same to a bat, it would crash and die. So it's like, it's different for every species. Every species took a different umwelt, if you did the same to a bat, it would crash and die. So it's like, it's different for every species. Every species took a different umwelt, if you will, strategy and said, okay, here are the things that I care about. Here are the things that I care about to optimize my environment. I think that the by-product of the nature of the human self-loathing, which you don't accidentally escape that.

I think that it takes a lot of work for people to become something that they're proud of, to contribute meaningfully to the group. I think that we have so many mechanisms designed to keep us alive. Don't resent the negative voice in your head that is saying bad things about you. That was so important at a time where if you were ostracized, let's say you were a sailor and they left you on an island

because you couldn't tell that you were pissing people off or that they didn't like you. Like that was some real life or death stuff. So all of these mechanisms served a purpose. We just have to now also be grateful for our ability to be self-aware, to learn about the brain, to be recursive in our thinking and go, hey, does that belief serve me? Let's talk about a really tangible example. So we're talking about beliefs that we

have constructed. So a very common thing for people to have is negative self-talk, right? So, you know, I see it in friends. I see it in patients. You know, I can't stick to any diet. Okay. This always happens to me, right? So there are universal truths for sure. But are those statements universal truths? No, clearly not. So somebody who thinks, who is listening to this, who is, he says, yeah, man, that's how I talk about myself. You know, I'm pretty hard on myself. I put myself down all the time. You know, I'm not the kind of person who exercises, you know, workouts, they're just not for me. I'm the one who always gets passed up for that job promotion. Are these examples, in your view,

of self-limiting beliefs that can be shifted? Definitively. Definitively. Yeah, yeah. In every case. A thousand percent. Those particular examples, one thousand percent. So in every, in every case, a thousand percent, those particular examples, 1000%. So my thing, a rule that I live by and a rule that I aggressively try to give anybody that will take it is only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. So if you want to feel badly about yourself, then telling yourself, yeah, I always get passed up for a promotion. The world is against me. Like that, that is a dark place to live. Um, if you want to have the confidence that's needed, the lightness, the charm, like, then you've got to internalize that.

Oh man. Like if you add value, you're going to move forward in life. Like this is all going to work out. It's going to be amazing. Like the amount of almost delusional optimism you need to be a successful entrepreneur is hilarious because if you can't believe, you certainly can't get anybody else to believe. And so you've got to have this willingness to say things like that in your head. Like right now, my stated goal is to build the next Disney. Now you can imagine the odds of me pulling that off border on zero, but I don't think like that. I can't allow myself to think like that. So it's like, I have to say, okay, this is interesting enough to me. And what I'm, what I value myself for is the sincere pursuit. So I've completely divorced myself from the

outcome. I don't care whether I do it or not is irrelevant. What I value myself for is did I show up every day and actually go for it? Not rhetoric. Did I actually go for it? Was I constantly checking myself? Am I actually making progress? Am I doing the right things? Could this possibly lead me where I wanna go?

And if it can, then I get to celebrate myself at the end of the day. And if it can't, I'm just BSing and I'm just saying things to like say something cool and get people's attention, then I don't get to feel good about myself. So when you are able to go, oh, it wouldn't behoove me to sit here and focus on this is impossible. There's only one Disney for a reason.

I'm never going to be able to pull this off. Like if you can recognize that if you tell yourself you can't win, you will act in accordance with that belief. Like you will only push so hard. Whereas if you believe, no, no, no, it's not going to be easy, but through deliberate practice, I can get so good. I can learn all the things that I need to learn. I can get the right people excited. I can get people motivated. I can make mistakes. I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, but I'm going to learn from those mistakes. And I'm the kind of guy that learns from mistakes. I'm not afraid to make mistakes. I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, but I'm going to learn from those mistakes. And I'm the kind of guy that learns from mistakes. I'm not afraid to make mistakes. I just keep trying and trying and trying. And people like being around me because I'm uplifting. I'm high energy. I'm a lot of fun. So I'm going to be able to attract the right people. So when

I meet somebody, I'm not thinking he's never going to like me. Like you just, there's enough going against you to not be fighting yourself with self-defeating. I'll even, I won't even say beliefs, just repeating self-defeating things, repeating even negative things. You have to understand the power of repetition. People do not understand the power of repetition. You repeat negative things, you're going to believe negative things. You repeat positive things, at first it will sound like BS to you, but over time you'll actually be very comfortable with the idea this is different though isn't it from just saying the right things because you shared that you know back in the day i don't

know maybe in your 20s you would say oh wait it started a lot younger i am going to be rich okay i'm gonna i don't know if you said i'm gonna be a success but you were saying the right things right so you had that positive language, yet you were not doing anything to actually make that come true, right? This is not the secret. I'm not saying say positive things and everything changes. I'm just saying you remove one roadblock.

Did you ever see the secret? I have not yet. So I'll give it to you super fast. So the secret is half amazing and half absolute bs the half that's amazing says you if you think you can you can if you think you can't you can't and that is true dude the the way the mind works man if you believe it is possible then you're the roger bannister effect yeah it stood for decades then you're the Roger Bannister effect. Yeah. It stood for decades. People thought that the four minute mile was humanly impossible, that the human body just

couldn't do it. One guy was like, nope, it's not true. Ends up running the four minute mile. Okay. A barrier that stood for decades. He breaks the four minute mile. And then within 45 days, I think somebody else breaks the four minute mile. It stood for decades. And then within the year, three people break it in one race. So once you believe something is possible, all of a sudden it gets a lot easier. It's like the hundred meters. I remember as a kid, there was this magical 10 second mark, right? I don't know when it got broken, but now in most races, everyone's under 10 seconds. Do you know what I mean? Everyone's's like various things it's the same kind of thing so beliefs are powerful um but i think it's it is important to clarify that point because it's not just about saying the right thing so again trying to bring it back to a listener who may be struggling with their weight and who has a bit of negative self-talk around that that i i

just i can't lose weight i have tried i've I've tried every diet. You know, it's too hard. So they could hear this conversation and go, okay, I get what Tom's saying. I think I get what he's saying. I need to be positive. But you're not just saying you have to be positive, are you? You're saying something more difficult than that, or certainly something that requires a bit more work than that.

So what is that that you are saying? Let's take that as an example. Somebody's tried to lose weight. They can't. They feel they've tried every diet. They feel they can't get a consistent pattern going and working out, etc, etc. So break it down for them. Is it several steps? How do they start changing their mindset in that particular situation? I'm just taking a quick break in the conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show. Vivo Barefoot are a minimalist footwear company that I am a huge fan of. I myself have been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for years, as have my entire family. They make really comfortable, minimalist shoes for adults and for children that are perfect to live your entire life in. Many of us at the moment are trying our best

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they continue to offer a fantastic discount. If you go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more, they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA and Australia. And importantly, they offer a 100-day trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20% off code by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Yeah, So when somebody is talking about weight loss, my first thing is always, you've got to love yourself where you are at. Now that's not going to be enough. And I'm not

one of those people that's like, Oh, just stare at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you love yourself 10 times a day. It's not going to work, but it really does have to come from a place of compassion. You're not going to be able to whip yourself into great shape. Like you one have to get very comfortable that you're worth making the change. Otherwise you're not going to stick with it. And then two, you have to get to the laws of physics. So does anyone think that if I put them in a prison cell for three years and I gave them no food that they would walk out morbidly obese? prison cell for three years and I gave them no food that they would walk out morbidly obese. No, right? Nobody thinks that. Now they will think that's unreasonable. The person would die of malnutrition, which depending on your level of obesity is actually not true. And I

think the longest water only fast was something like 384 days. It was absurd. It was more than a year. So you can water only want to be very clear about that. So no one, like if you really get down to brass tacks, everybody gets that no one is in a position where it would be impossible to lose weight. So then it becomes, okay, if we know that it's not impossible, then it becomes a question of what are you willing to do? Then you have to ask, am I willing to do what it's going to take? And you're not that's fine like it is an absolutely reasonable life to me to say i know what it would take to get in better shape and i don't want to do it okay cool and but if you're going to live that life i have one recommendation live it fully really enjoy it say my life is going to be a lot shorter than it would

otherwise be the one area where it gets tough is your level of inflammation is going to be so high that it's just going to be hard to enjoy your body. But let's say that you're able to get past that. Lean into it. Enjoy it. Relish it. I always tell people the only thing that is heartbreaking, eating a bowl of ice cream is not heartbreaking. Eating a bowl of ice cream every day is not heartbreaking. Eating a bowl of ice cream and being sad about it and being ashamed of it, that's sad. That's heartbreaking. So whatever path you choose, know that you're a worthy human being regardless of what path you choose. So now if it's like, well, I've tried the being out of shape path and I don't like that anymore and I want to go to the other path. Okay, rad. Let's get excited about that. Like, let's go all in. Part of it is you can't just do it for health reasons.

You've got to understand there is a part in the human mind, I am absolutely convinced. I don't know that there's been any studies done on this, but dude, I have never once met a human being who didn't, when they lost the weight, didn't say, yeah, secretly, I did not like being overweight and I feel so much better about myself now. I think there's an innate part of the human brain that tracks how you look, how you feel, and how much effort you put into it. And when you put a lot of effort into creating a positive feedback loop, dude, something so

magical and beautiful happens. And I'm just telling you, there's nothing more rad than getting strong and feeling good about your physique. There's nothing. And it is so petty. And that's why no one wants to talk about it. But that is the God's honest truth. Like six pounds, I- You were overweight, right?

I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now. I was a little chubby. That is the right way to frame where I was at. Growing up, I thought of myself as completely normal because my family was morbidly obese. So even though I was slightly chubby, I didn't think I was chubby relative to them. Correct. Relative to them, I was shredded. And then I met, so when I went to college, long story as to why, but I ended up losing like 25 or 30 pounds. So most people intentionally,

you were trying to totally accidentally. Okay. And like like i said long story about work and work ethic and the whole thing but anyway i end up losing a lot of weight and not having enough money but when i bumped into a girl who i hadn't seen since high school she was like oh my god i always thought of you as the chubby kid and i was like wait what i replayed my whole life like in the sixth sense and i was like i was the chubby kid. I had no idea. So anyway, I was slightly chubby growing up, nothing crazy by today's standards, not in the slightest. And then in my twenties, late twenties, early thirties, I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now. So when I got lean and had like just razor sharp six pack abs, dude, it's rad.

And don't let anybody tell you that it's not rad. It is super rad. It is as cool as you think it's gonna be, but it's a lot of energy and effort. So I don't need people to do that, but whatever path you're gonna go down, go down with enthusiasm. So if they choose they're gonna go down that path,

you have to start telling yourself a different story. Anybody can lose weight. They have to do the right things. There's a lot of individual variability, so I'm gonna to have to experiment. I'm going to have to stick with something. There are basic nutritional things. You're just going to have to get right. And I don't know that we'll agree on this, but if you gave me, in fact, I, can I tell you a show that I actually want to do? Please do. I want to get a, an apartment complex with, let's call it four units, but you can't leave the unit. It's the only catch once you're in. It's like Big Brother, but Big Brother for diet. And now I'm going to do different experiments in different quadrants. And we're going to see how frustrated do people get?

What's the diet like? Are people irritable? We're going to take blood levels. They cannot eat anything I don't give them. There's no sneaking chocolates, nothing. I know exactly what you're eating. It's like prison. It's like prison, but cheerful. It's Big Brother. So in my Big Brother experiment, if you and I get to dictate different diets,

I'm going to put my money in terms of rapid weight loss for the greatest number of people. I'll put it on keto with restricted calories they will be the least frustrated and irritated and they will lose the most fat and muscle maintenance is the only thing that i have seen is a bit dicey is this what you think i'm going to disagree with i wasn't sure where you fell on like what the optimal diet is people are are normally like, ah, you can't give everybody one diet. And admittedly, I'll say I'll ballpark it at 85% of people will respond perfectly to a keto diet, blood levels, everything, cash money, 15%, maybe not so much. Hey, I don't necessarily disagree with you. I have seen, I've never

measured ketones in my patients. It's just not something i do but when i have used particular strategies low on refined uh and processed carbs with certain patients particularly those with metabolic issues like type 2 diabetes or high insulin high fasting insulin levels and high blood pressure yeah i've seen you you absolutely get rapid weight loss you get a rapid reduction in inflammation so things like even joint pain that people think they've had for years which actually they think was down to their weight often not always but often the joint pain gets better because actually suddenly it's not the weight that was causing the joint pain or not the whole story it was the inflammation in the body that was driving it i have seen this i have also seen other diets work so i guess yeah and that

that's why i'm saying it's not a one-size-fits-all i'm just saying other people will get amazing results from other diets but if you said you have to blanket like what's the what's the one horse you would back that would be the one yeah i'm not sure i necessarily say that's the one horse i would back but i've seen incredible results has an md okay and one of us doesn't i think everyone you've worked with 10 000 patients i've worked with zero so i my money is still on you in this one but look i'm i'm i've become relatively diagnostic for the simple reason that i've got to help the people who come in and see me right so if people have got a certain belief system around food i still have to be able to help them. I still have to be open-minded. And I think passionately that I should not put

myself in a camp as a doctor. If I'm going to be open-minded, if I'm going to help everyone who comes in, if someone who comes in and they want to be vegan, I want to be able to help them. If someone comes in and they passionately have had good results on low carb and want to stay low carb, I also want to help them. So I want to help people around their belief systems. Sure, I want to do things that may ultimately challenge them and force them to actually change their belief systems. But you mentioned, how do you get short-term weight loss? I think there are a million ways to get short-term weight loss. But if you do this experiment, right, where you have them not locked up, but you have them in their voluntary

confinement of eating what Tom Billy is going to give them to eat, then what is the goal of doing that? Would the goal of that be doing what gives someone short-term weight loss? Is the goal there to show someone what is possible? Or is the goal, should that be be a goal short-term weight loss is is that a valid goal and again i have never really been overweight i have not been obese i can only speculate what that feels like i do not know but do you think that that is a worthy goal when long-term can be a very very different case from short-term i would only optimize for long term in the fantasy land if we're actually because keep in mind i'm building a studio so if you're talking what would i do if it were an actual tv show you have to manufacture some drama so let's keep it 100 real over here

uh but in like just my real life yeah you want to optimize for long term for sure but i think that there are some incredibly powerful things like a keto diet like just cutting out carbs and sugar where you will get a rapid reduction weight loss you're not going to get like biggest loser numbers but you're going to get like over the course of a year you could easily drop 60 pounds 70 pounds depending on how heavy you are we've also you know we we both know and consider rich to be a good friend of ours rich role and obviously rich would take a different approach here right rich is obviously um he's gone vegan and you can vegan keto you can vegan keto sure but he's not done that and of course he is a endurance athlete as well but he also speaks a lot of people who resonate

with his message and find that their health is improving their weight is dropping about this let's talk yeah so i guess the point i'm trying to make is different things work for different people yes you agree with that anyway aggressively and let's get real specific i know i'm totally derailing and this is your interview and now i'm just hey man coming in here like i don't know where these things go that's the fun thing for me this really bothers me we have a kid here he's from vietnam born and raised as vietnamese as you're ever going to see a person this kid can eat rice like it's going out of style and his blood sugar normal his ha1c levels normal dude if i i once watched him cane an entire like box of blackberries and his HA1C levels are normal.

Like if I ate like that, I would be in a diabetic coma. It is so crazy. I'm you're going to think I'm joking. I'm not. If I eat white rice, I can see it. I can see it. I'm talking like a quarter cup. I can see it.

My love handles, dude. It is insanity. I can see it. My love handles, dude. It is insanity. When I eat carbohydrates that I could eat from his bowl, the same white rice and dude, you hear me getting fatter. It's bananas. So, and then my wife, we can, my wife is not quite half my size. So I'm like, what? Buck 75-ish. She's like 95 pounds. We can go calorie for calorie. Okay. Calorie for calorie. She will get hot at night. I will not. She will sweat through the bedsheets. I will not. She won't put on fat. I will. So there was no question, dude, food is a signaling molecule. It tells your body to do things. It is not the second law of thermodynamics, whichever. It doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics,

obviously, but it tells your body to do certain things. And your body can decide to burn off the calories. It can decide to lower your metabolic rate and store the calories. So your body gets to decide what it wants to do with the energy, whether it gets rid of it or keeps it. I've never understood that whole fucking argument. So it is so different for different people. And like the vegan thing, I've never done the experiment. That is a very fair statement to make. But when I increase my vegetable intake, I certainly don't feel better. And if anything, anecdotally, I start to feel a little less. Whereas if I start going towards a carnivore diet, I feel better and better, baby. So it is so variable. It makes me angry, but I think that there are some bordering on universals. Nobody,

nobody gets better blood levels on a Twinkie diet zero people exactly zero people so they're twinkies for people listening in the uk are oh my god that's right uh what do you guys have what i hear this term i have i have mark hyman's head of talks about twinkies before i mean what is a twinkie so a twinkie is a yellow sponge cake made of almost entirely sugar loosely held together by flour and injected with a cream that is even more sugar so it is just like sugar on sugar so it's a highly processed yes and there was there was a guy who like substance correct a highly processed sugar like infested food like substance there was a guy that did the twinkie diet and he wanted to prove dude this is all the second law of thermodynamics if you keep your calories low enough you can eat

twinkies and you're going to get lean and that is absolutely correct if you take your calories low enough you can eat anything you want and you're going to get leaner and leaner and leaner but you are quite literally your cells are made of the things that you eat. So if you believe that, if you recognize that your cells turn over what every single cell turns over in seven years. So if all you eat for Twinkies, all you eat for seven years is Twinkies, one, you're dead long before that.

But even if you could make it. And that's why I'm not a huge fan of weight loss as a goal necessarily in and of itself. And again, I fully appreciate I've never carried excess weight before. So I don't know what that feels like. But for me, it's about health. It's so much more than just simply weight loss.

You and I are aggressively on the same page. Tom, I'm going to ask you this. You mentioned that this friend of yours who can eat 85%. Oh, Will, my teammate. You're Will, teammate you will you will who are you listening will you rice indulging eat whatever you want yes that's will so the fact that you mentioned that you can have a little bit from will's bowl yeah and you will put on weights i've actually gotten fatter just talking about this right now okay i can feel it and the fact that you said that for 85% of people

a keto diet is the way to lose short term weight is that a belief system or is that an absolute truth I won't know until I test it and dude when I say I'm open to being wrong I do not need to be right about this I just want the truth

I want to know what is the thing that I think would impact the largest swath of humanity based on my nowhere near N of one, this N of in real life that I've met N of 35, the thing that I've seen impact people the most dramatically is keto. Every theory is autobiographical. So of course the keto diet was wildly useful for me nothing impact i used to ice my wrist every night for 15 years i had what i thought were permanent burn marks on the back of my wrist from having ice on them all the time and because i just had such high levels of inflammation so is your belief system now biased towards keto because of your personal experience?

Yes, of course. And that's not a criticism. I have the same thing going on with me. It can be criticism. I don't mind. But my thing is I have a strong conviction loosely held. So my identity- This excites me.

Oh, dude, I wish I had thought of that. A strong conviction loosely held. Correct. Now that sounds to me like an absolute truth or something that I would like to live my life by. So please expand. So I don't remember where I heard this. It's a very famous, at least here in the States phrase. So to believe something, I mean, you've experienced it. Like you, you know, it's real, but at the same time, you've been wrong before. So it's like always keeping your mind open. I'm trying to optimize, right?

I'm trying, if you ask me what the point of life is, it is every human has an just insane amount of potential. And the point of life is to turn that potential into skills. The only way to do that is to go, oh, I'm not optimized yet. I'm not good enough yet without damaging your self-esteem. Me saying that, I'm proud of myself for being willing to say that. So, hey, the things that I believe have gotten me this far, they're not going to get me any farther. So I always want to know where am I

wrong? I'm wrong about a lot of things and I'm blind to most of what I'm wrong about. So I believe things. I'm not going to be paralyzed. I'm not going to pretend that I don't have things that have worked very, very well for me. But just like Newtonian physics is useful, but not entirely true. And quantum physics is useful, but not entirely true. So it's like, you just have to keep being open to where you're wrong, keep finessing it. So yes, I believe that keto is insanely powerful. If somebody came tomorrow and said, actually, let me show you how it's killing everybody who tries it. I'd be like, oh, okay, cool. And I would just move on to the next. My handle does not have keto in the title like so it's not become your identity definitively not yeah i don't care how people get there will i love him to death i'm watching the

way he eats i'm looking at his blood levels and going okay well it's obviously working i'm not gonna go his blood levels are wrong they're doing it wrong nope you can't will you can't eat rice that would be stupid so looking at it it seems like well he's come from a rice bearing culture so it would make sense that the people would be optimized over how many millennia to be able to process exactly rice well i have not in a particular environment as well and i think this is the piece that often gets missed in in this whole picture on diet as well so we look at different cultures and we look at their diets. I do this as well.

And I look at the Okinawans, for example, who are eating 80% carbs and they're not putting on weight and they don't have insulin resistance and by and large, they don't have high rates of type C diabetes, right? Yet they're eating 80% carbs. Therefore, if we say carbs are the problem and they are the cause of obesity

it simply cannot be true on one level when we look at this population for something to be an absolute true that has to be consistent in every single situation agreed yes i'll give you one absolute truth on diet let me see if you agree with this your microbiome whatever it is designed designed is the wrong word whatever it is optimized to metabolize will determine how what you eat impacts you you're gonna give me that absolutely and i actually think well i'm going to circle back to this because just to finish the point about the Okinawans, their diet works for them, A, from how they have evolved, B, from the environment in which they are currently in. So they live in a low stress environment. They have adequate amounts of sleep every night. They don't eat meals in a rush. They sit together and have communal

mean times. They have a strong sense of community. Their diet is minimally processed and is seasonal. When we look at them, we cannot take the diet of 80% carbs in isolation. We have to look at the whole picture around it. So I have speculated in my first book, could it be that the low-carb diet, which I agree works super, super well with many, many people,

certainly at least definitively in the short term, in the long term, it's arguable with certain people for short from what I have seen. I have used this with my patients. People have seen me, 5 million people in the UK have seen me on television, put type 2 diabetes into remission with what would be considered a low-carb diet. But the fact that I refuse to put my identity about being a low-carb doctor is something, you know, a strong conviction loosely held, right? I want to be open to everything. I don't want to get so caught up in my own identity, my own belief system, that I can't see something else that is going on. It is true that many people

experience amazing improvement on a carnivore diet, an all-meat diet. That is true. You see this being posted everywhere. People say their joint pain is gone, their bloating is gone, their indigestion is gone. Now, do we know what it does in the long term? I have not seen research yet that makes me feel that we are confident what happens in the long term, but I have seen this work. I have also seen a low-fat vegan diet that's done from minimally processed food work, and I have speculated in my first book, could it be that in the West, when we are a sleep deprived culture, which drives up your blood sugar and makes you insulin resistant, we are a stressed out culture, which drives up your blood glucose and makes you insulin resistant, we are physically inactive. So we're not just moving our bodies enough. We're not getting all the anti-inflammatory benefits of exercise. Could it be that in this culture, a low carb diet seems

to work so beautifully well for so many people? Could it be? I mean, are you open to that as a possibility? I am, but can I hate you for it? Because you're almost certainly right that there's all these other variables that confound everything. It is so frustrating. But yeah, for sure. I can totally see. One, I will say no matter what,

that's all wildly influential. Whether it negates things like culturally where you were raised or whether it trumps microbiome, who knows? But yes, you're touching on powerful variables. But I think it's all part of the picture. And I think you actually accept this, Tom, because you said, if you accept that you can lose weight, you know, you said a number of things, but you also said you're going to have to accept that there are multiple ways that you're

going to have to go through a period of self-experimentation. That is exactly what you said. Maybe not verbatim word for word, but you said something like that. And I think that's the point. I think when we, you know, we look at, you know, these gurus, these diet gurus, and we think that that is everything. I must follow this. The reason when we had our conversation on your show, when you try and push me on, okay, so how many times a week or what is the exact thing you should do? And I wasn't trying to be deliberately sort of, I didn't want to not answer your question, but I really truly believe in personalization. I truly believe that actually the route to long-term success, short-term and long-term success, is when you figure it out for yourself, is when you do something, not because I told you to do it, not because you heard Tom Bilyeu tell

you to do it, but because you use something that you heard as inspiration, you tried it, you experimented and you feel, hey, actually this is working for me. Brilliant. Great. Then you've got that empowerment. Then you understand that then makes you feel good. Then you get the identity change. And that is what I have seen work. That makes sense to me. That feels clear to me that that is what is possible. So on the carnivore diet, I do accept that people get great results. I happen to think my view on this is that these changes are being um are basically happening through the microbiome i think that many of us have got disrupted microbiomes these days if not most of it in fact we know that all of us do to a certain degree compared to modern hunter-gatherer tribes we know that right so we've all got uh what we are currently considering with our current belief systems which again could change

suboptimal microbiomes and i think the thing that often drives suboptimal microbiomes when you have a suboptimal microbiome too many carbs for some people especially too many of the wrong kinds of carbs the highly processed refined carbs can cause problems so therefore i think when you go to a carnivore diet, I think initially at least what is happening is that you're not anymore driving those imbalances in your microbiome. I do not have proof of this, right? So I'm giving an opinion at the moment. I want to make that super, super clear. But I think about this a lot because I am not oblivious to what is happening on social media. I'm not oblivious to these reports. I'm not oblivious to patients telling me I've gone to an all meat diet

and I feel fantastic, right? We're not getting into the environmental issues and all of that. So that is another rabbit hole that, you know, I'm not sure I want to go down necessarily today. But I think just to be super clear on that, that is certainly my view, which I actually happen to think is consistent with your view. Because I think that whole thing about strong convictions loosely held, if that is how you live your life, which I think it is from what I've seen of you on your YouTube channel, but even from spending time with you today, I think that is a great way to be. And it stops this whole identity culture where we become so defined by the way we eat. You know, that is everything about us. I actually think social media on one level has made it challenging, you know, because you go on Instagram, people's handles,

it's almost defined by one of the choices they've made. And on the face of it, I don't think people think that this is a problem. And I don't think I did until we're having this conversation. As I think about it, I think, could that be a sign? Do you see where I'm going here? Could that be a sign of something deeper? Could just the simple thing of, hey, I'm setting up my Instagram accounts. Oh, you know, I love eating this way at the moment.'m going to call myself you know whatever right if language is important and i think we both agree that language is important if belief systems are important then what does that do when your identity that you are putting out to the world now becomes defined by a particular way in which you eat. Do you think, Tom, that that can be problematic?

Wildly. I always tell people, man, be so careful what username you pick. Because people will do like FatmanLazy101. It's like, yo, that is not what you want to put your finger on and say, that defines me, that's who I am. Or Born to Lose. These are legitimate things that people reach out to me with stuff like that and i'm like man you just cannot reinforce

that like every time every time every time you're on instagram or twitter or whatever it's like reinforcing this negative view that you have of yourself and you you've been speaking about reposition right what you repeat you become what do you repeat each day and by doing that what have you become you know i i don't want to give you a bs answer so i have a list of beliefs that i used to repeat they've become so automatic now that i don't but if anybody's interested i actually put them up for free download on impact theory.com. It's called the 25 point belief system. Um, so those are all the things, human potential is nearly limitless. You can do anything you set your mind to. Um, it doesn't matter who you are today. It matters who you want to become,

what price you willing to pay to get there. There's a whole bunch of things like that, that were exactly what I had to start believing in order to change my life. Things that I repeat now, I can figure this out. That's change my life. Things that I repeat now, I can figure this out. That's probably the thing that I think the most often, because I'm often so daunted by what I'm trying to build, that to stay playful and to enjoy it, I have to keep reminding myself, I don't know how to do it yet. That's okay. The process is what this is all about. I'm committed to sincerely pursuing. I'm not worried about the outcome. I can figure this stuff out. And then getting excited about learning. Like I really, really love learning. And I don't love learning for an abstract reason. I love learning because skills let you do things. And the best example of that, I think is architecture. Like when you

learn architecture, you can build things like bridges that don't fall down when cars drive over them. I mean, that's pretty extraordinary or building a house that can keep somebody safe during an earthquake. It's like, there's some pretty amazing things that humans can learn how to do and being an MD actually saving lives. So that is born of learning something that you at some point didn't know you learn it and then you're able to do things so the glee that comes with learning for me is because i know i'm actually going to be able to do something i couldn't do 10 days ago or whatever and what is this thing you're trying to build disney man i'm trying so my whole thing is i don't yeah yeah for real oh wow now the question becomes why why am i building that so have chosen, cause I don't believe that anything is given to

you or it's your divine right or mission from birth or anything. But my mission is to pull people out of the matrix at scale by giving them an empowering mindset through narrative. So I want to tell people stories for all ages, kids, adults, everywhere in between that give them stories that are entertainment on the surface. Think of The Matrix. But if you take Morpheus's advice, your life will actually be better. Or Star Wars. If you take Yoda's advice, your life will actually be better.

Yoda led me to Taoism. Taoism really dictated a lot of my early life, which led me to understanding the brain and things that helped me calm myself down and get out of my own way and learn how to deal with the shame and the negative voice and all of that stuff. So I want to give people stories that are on one level, pure entertainment, they can just enjoy them and it doesn't feel like they're being preached to. But on another level is actually giving them beliefs and values that can propel them forward.

I'm way distressed by the fact that people, the number one predictor of your future success is your zip code, not your, not your IQ, which that would suck, but at least I could get behind that, but your zip code. So that's way too distressing for me. So I want to create all forms of media that change the course of people's lives. I'm blown away by that mission. I think it's incredible. I hope you get there for sure. But I guess even if you don't, it doesn't matter because you'll be doing something incredible along the way. And is this idea to be almost counter to Disney? Is that the drive? It is definitely trying to be a force for

good i don't think of it as being pitted against disney so the way that i see it is disney created the most magical place on earth by telling one kind of story from a thousand different angles they're the only studio that's had that kind of discipline so my question is if they can create the most magical place on earth can i create the most empowering place on earth? Can I create the most empowering place on earth? I mean, literally, I don't plan to build an actual Disney land, but, um, I think that having consistency of storytelling, make sure the brand means something only telling one kind of story, always around empowerment heroes journey. Um, that that's the goal. And I think that there are archetypal stories. They are archetypes for a reason. They speak to something very primal and very deep within us. And I'm trying to tell those kinds of stories in a way that has

context enough that somebody can extract the values just as we would from stories around a fire camp and ages of old that really begin to tell you the values and mores of the society that you're growing up in. And for me, it's all about personal responsibility it's about the ability to change to be courageous to you know stand up and contribute all that good stuff is that what impact theory is doing is that part of it 100 that is it so it's funny because people think of us as uh like just a social company. That's not how we see ourselves. So we see ourselves primarily on the friction fiction side.

And then what we do to drive awareness and market is the social side. So I, my belief is that if Disney were founded today, it would look like this. It would have social content and it would have fiction content. You would start with the fiction. That's sort of the top of the funnel. And then you graduate to the nonfiction. So we get you with the ideas of, you know, an empowering mindset, growth mindset, personal

responsibility, all of that. And then we graduate you to the speaking direct into a camera and saying, think like this, act like this, and it will give you the most fulfilling life and allow you to do extraordinary things for yourself and to help others and all of that. And so that's sort of the way that we see people walking the path, but being honest about what my skillset was, you know, when I started all of this, it was like, I'd had so much success in business that I knew I could go from nobody knowing who I was to building an audience off of largely that credibility that I had earned by building such a big company. And then once I had people's attention, I could begin to show them that

there's something more here, um, around mindset about how I built the company, about what I had to do to my mind from going from a relatively bad employee to a hyper successful entrepreneur. Um, and so that's, that that's that's sort of the wrapping but the the message is just to give people that empowering mindset i'm almost lost for words i mean that is such a fantastically inspiring mission i wish you all the success possible in in getting there um as we start to wrap this thing up now, one of your values that I once heard that I found super fascinating was this rule. Sorry, not value. One of your rules. I don't know how many rules you do live your life by,

but one rule I heard was this idea that basically when your alarm clock goes off, you have to physically get out of bed. Is it within 10 minutes? Correct. 10 minutes or less. Do you still apply this rule in your life? Every day. It's the only thing I do every day,

not Saturday and Sunday, but even then I'm pretty religious. So this is one of those things that you repeat day in, day out. Oh, yes. When you said repeat, I thought you meant out loud in my own head. No, no, no, no. I meant what are the practices? What do I do do daily oh so i that one is is the most religious so i because i am so i'd be really interested to be studied because i really do think that i have

a harder time clearing whatever neurochemistry from sleep there is i have a harder time clearing whatever neurochemistry from sleep there is. I have a harder time clearing that out than most people. Um, so waking up for me is, is very painful. So I've had to create that rule. Otherwise I lay in bed for three and four hours. I'm not joking or exaggerating. Um, so that's been really important. I meditate almost every day. I work out almost every day. I eat clean almost every day, including the weekends. So that is, those are like the things that I do daily. But where did that come from? I read, I learn every day. You learn, of course.

Especially on the weekends. Yeah. I mean, I think that is very much undervalued and maybe, maybe next time you're on the show, we'll sort of go down that rabbit hole and explore that. But where does this come from? This in particular, the one about getting up within 10 minutes of your alarm clock going off. I just would love to dive into that. I should have corrected you. I don't set an alarm clock. So it's, I get up 10 minutes after realizing I'm awake. So once I realize I'm awake, I immediately look at the clock. I see what time it is. I have 10 minutes to get out of bed. I try never to wake up to an alarm. So I prioritize sleep. I get as much sleep as I need. And I go to bed early. So I go to bed at nine. My wife's out of town. So I might go to bed early

tonight. But I go to bed at nine and then I wake up when I wake up. Sometimes that's 3 a.m. Sometimes it's 7 a.m. Depends on what's been going on. And but I find being tired a unique form of misery. So anyway, once I realize I'm awake, the 10 minute clock starts. I get out of bed immediately. And then against your wishes, I well, that's not true. So usually I'll meditate. Very first thing I do. I'll meditate for 15 to 25 minutes and then I go straight to work or yeah now i used to work out after i used to do

this in a whole different order i used to work out immediately then meditate then work now i meditate then i typically will start working and then go work out and that in that elapsed time is usually about three hours before i go to the gym. But this is all happening so early in the morning. But just to clarify, it's not that that's against my belief system at all. Actually, you have created an intentional life for yourself, right? You have gone through various processes. You have put in habits. You have done the self-experimentation. You would not like the level of stress in my life. I'm going to be really honest. Hey, I've got a high level of stress in my life. i'm going to be really honest hey i've got a high level of stress in my life but i would argue that the things that you are doing on a daily basis

are making you more resilient to that stress so therefore stress is not necessarily about the whole conversation about stress doesn't always have to be about i need to reduce the stressors in my life because for some people they simply can't you know if you if you can't afford to eat properly if you're working two jobs if know if you if you can't afford to eat properly if you're working two jobs if you're on benefits you don't feel and i've worked in practices where this is the case with people you know i'm realistic that is stressful right that is real stress right it doesn't mean i can't help them be a little bit more resilient so they can tackle that stress a bit better and they can manage their life a bit better. That's what I'm passionate about. You know, whether you're living in a mansion in Beverly Hills or whether you're

in inner city town in the UK and you're on benefits and you can't afford to properly eat, you know what? We've all got different stressors and doesn't mean we can't become more resilient. So I would argue that you do daily things that make you more resilient. I also would argue that you have created an intentional life where you, as you say, you work out every day, right? So you are literally relieving stress from your body every day. If you're working every day, that is more than what most people do, right? Exercise is one of the best stress relievers. It doesn't matter to me that you are working maybe 15, 20 minutes after you wake up because you're meditating first and you are making sure that you have time later to put in the things that are going to help you. So look, as I said on your show, it's all about personalization. You have gone through the process and now you can personalize the life for you. And

I find that inspiring. And that's what I wish for every listener of this podcast. On that, that inspiring and that's what i wish for every listener of this podcast on that to finish off tom i'm gonna make it two questions rather than one question and i know we're both tied because we've been talking for a long period of time we're still here man we are ready to rock penultimate question yes right good use you don't hear that word enough. You have interviewed over the past three, four years? Four years, yeah. Four years, you have interviewed some of the most influential and high-performing people in the world. So, in all those conversations, from the learnings from all those conversations, is there a consistent theme? Are there some common themes that you have learned and would you be open to sharing them?

Yeah, of course. So the only one that I'll say is just absolutely universal. You have to take responsibility for yourself. That's the simple as, and that's why, man, it is so hard when you're talking like weight loss. It's like, I want to love people at the same time and then tell them it's on you, man. It is on you there. Like it might be harder for you. I get that. It's gotta be the hardest for somebody. And that's somebody might be you. I understand. I feel like I, it is brutally hard for me to lose weight, brutally hard for me to gain muscle. Um, but man, you just cannot make excuses. i say that with like love yeah shooting out of every pore that i have but it's like it is the only path it is a law of physics you have to take responsibility you have to take action no one is coming to save you no one is going to do it for

you everyone that has ever achieved something extraordinary comes to grips with that realization and then gets to work. Period. I mean, that was powerful. That is the one thing that has come through from pretty much everyone, I guess. Pretty much everyone. Everyone. I'm talking people that have been horribly victimized, people that have had it great. They all come to the same conclusion. I have to take responsibility for myself. That's it. Like I can control what I do. I can't control the outside world, but I can control what I do. And if I really go hard, I can win, but I have to be open that I'm wrong, that I have to learn and just responsibility. And it's powerful that from all these people you spoke to, that is the theme that keeps rising to the top for you.

Literally every interview I've ever done is a variation on that theme. Yeah. Wow. Well, that in many ways might negate the final question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When you feel better in yourself, you get more out of life. I've seen this over and over again. You have no doubt heard this over and over again. What I love to leave my listeners with at the end of conversations is simple, but actually they don't have to be simple. Some actionable tips, things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately to start improving the way that they feel. You have a lot of wisdom, Tom. You've got a lot of thoughts, but I wonder if you'd be open to condensing them right at the end and leave the listeners

with some take-home tips. No question. There's only one thing that they need to do, and that is develop a growth mindset. Everything stems off of that. Like when I interviewed Carol Dweck, the author of the book, Mindset, I asked her if she meant it to be as foundational as it is. I don't know that there's anything

below it. I don't know that there's anywhere to go below it. It's like, that's where it starts. You either believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits, or you believe that you can change them and get better. Once you believe you can get better, then it opens up a whole world to you like personal responsibility. There's no personal responsibility if you can't change anything. So once you accept that you can change, then taking responsibility and getting to work, everything becomes possible. So it really does, as much as that's like airy, it's, that's where you must start. So Einstein said it another way. He said the most important question, any, or the most important decision people must make is whether you live in a friendly or a hostile universe. Are things working for you or against you? Can you change or not? When you get those things down, and I don't

mean I hate it when people say the universe is working for me. I don't think that's what Einstein meant because I don't think anything is working for you. That's why I think you have to get to work. But I think that if you decide, because he called it a decision, when you decide to see things framed in a positive way, then the world opens up to you. Get your mind right. Everything else will follow. Tom, love those final two thoughts from you. Super helpful. Super helpful for me. Super helpful for the listeners. If people want to catch up with you, where can they find you? At Tom Bilyeu. I am super active socially.

The last name is spelled a little weird. It's B as in Bravo, I-L-Y-E-U. Guys, check Tom out on social media. Let Tom know what you thought of the episode today, of his ideas. I'd highly recommend you check out his YouTube channel. Check out Impact Theory. It is is brilliant you will learn a lot tom thank you for inviting me to your home thank you for agreeing to come on my podcast and i hope at some point in the future we get to repeat this most definitely thanks for having me on thanks man that concludes today's episode

of the podcast what did you think honestly? Honestly, I find Tom's passion for living a better life infectious and so, so motivating. And I really do think Tom's final thoughts there are ideas that we should all spend a bit of time reflecting on, especially the idea that we can proactively decide to look at life positively. And when we do, everything starts to open up for us. As always, do think about one thing you heard in the conversation today that you can start applying into your own life immediately. In fact, why not let Tom and I know on social media? I would also encourage you to check out Tom's YouTube show. If you're interested, I have been on his show twice in the

past few years. You can see links to my appearances as well as more about Tom on the show notes page for this episode of the podcast on my website. Now, many of you would contact me at the moment say you're struggling with energy and there are so many different factors at play. But if that's you, I do have a free six-part video series on how you can get more energy that you can access simply by going to drchatterjee.com forward slash energy. So if that's of interest to you or someone close to you, just head over to drchatterjee.com forward slash energy. If you did enjoy today's show, please do take 30 seconds to go onto your podcast app and give the show a review. I know I ask every week, but it really is so important to raise the

visibility of the show and really help get this content out to more people. If you have someone who you think will be interested in this conversation but does not listen to audio podcasts, someone who you think will be interested in this conversation but does not listen to audio podcasts please send them over to my youtube page where all of the podcasts are available to watch in full a big thank you to vidanta chastity for producing this week's podcast and to richard hughes for audio engineering that is it for today i hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back very shortly with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it

because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time.