How I Invest with David Weisburd - E194: From Broke & Sleeping on the Floor to a $1 Billion Exit w/Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Tom Bilyeu went from sleeping on the floor to co-founding and selling a billion-dollar company, Quest Nutrition. Today, he's the force behind Impact Theory, a media studio with a bold mission: pull people out of the Matrix at scale. In this episode, Tom reveals the frameworks that helped him transform from a self-proclaimed “emotionally fragile” dreamer to a high-agency entrepreneur and truth-seeking machine. We cover everything from skill stacking and the physics of progress to first-principles thinking, radical candor in leadership, and how he’s building a real-world version of Ready Player One. If you're obsessed with performance, truth, and high agency thinking, this one’s for you.

some point in your life you were sleeping on the floor and then again you sold your company for a billion dollars how could somebody go from in a place of such destitute to such success how is that physically possible it really isn't like some grand miracle uh it comes down to drive a willingness to outwork people good ideas and then the ability to aggregate talent that's huge and then um are you actually going to take the risks, learn from your mistakes, stack the skills, and keep pushing forward. Most people just break under the weight of embarrassment. And they will fail at something. People will laugh at them. rightly so. They really did embarrass themselves. And that person just goes, I never want to feel like this again. And they eject out. And it's the people that

go, okay, well, I just know from the physics of the situation standpoint that I can learn from this. And if I can acquire skills that other people don't acquire, I can do things other people can't do which path you want to go down and you've mentioned laws of physics first principles thinking you've had neurosciences dr nolan williams you had dr andrew heberman and many other neuroscientists where do you stand today 2025 in regards to free will and whether human beings have free will it does not exist tom welcome to the how i invest podcast thanks for having me so you're not only part of this extreme class of entrepreneurs that sold a company for a billion dollars but perhaps most impressively you did so with a background that didn't include an ivy league background from a

blue collar upbringing how did you accomplish so much coming from humble beginnings the honest answer is that i went on an insane journey of trying to map cause and effect and so it's what i call the only belief that matters the only belief that matters is that if you put time and attention into getting better at something, you will actually get better. And unfortunately, intellect also matters. So just raw ability, though I consider myself to be middle of the pack, I at least meet minimum requirements. And so between meeting minimum intellectual requirements and then just an unrelenting

work ethic, I've been able to get enough shots on goals we were talking about before we started. In this area, it mattered a lot, to try a lot of different things, to figure out where I was week to be able to go and shore up my abilities, and then just over a long enough time period, then you can, if you get the timing right and all of that, you can actually have some success. So I think that ultimately, business is really a game of resilience. If you quit, then you're never going to have a chance to stack the learnings of all your failures. And so most people are just too afraid to be embarrassed, so they get embarrassed once and they

stop. Stacking your failures. Is there a difference between stacking and failures in a specific domain versus stacking new failures in different domains or different aspects of your life. Yes, knowledge stacks. And so if you're going broad, you're going to have a much harder time. But the human mind is extraordinary at pattern recognition. And so losses over here can, you know, apply to something else. And so certainly over time, I've been in multiple different industries that sort of part of my calling card as an entrepreneur, as that I've shown that this stuff is repeatable across different industries. But there's no doubt that I feel very good about the fact that for the last call it five years, I've just been doing one thing. And so in doing that and focusing

entirely on media, it has allowed me to accelerate the rate at which I learned because all of my lessons apply not just broadly, but specifically to the thing that I'm doing. Like I mentioned, you came from a blue collar background. You went to USC, which is a great school, but not necessarily Harvard or Stanford or where you have this elite advantage coming out of the gate, what was the biggest, I guess, obstacle they had to overcome, the number one biggest, whether it's peer group or mindset or resources. What was the one thing that was hardest to overcome on your path to selling your company for a billion dollars? I did not understand how the world worked. And so if you're not mapping the physics of a situation, you were going to be routinely surprised

because you think, well, when I do this thing, it's going to yield this. outcome and then you do that thing and it yields a totally different outcome and that's very surprising. And if you don't understand that this is a deterministic universe that you can map cause and effect and you can then act in accordance with cause and effect, you're going to be very confused until you finally figure that out. And so that dissipates whatever learning you're going to do. So you try something, it fails, but you misattribute that failure. And so now as you try to figure out, okay, what is the thing that I actually need to learn from this lesson? if you take away the wrong lesson, you're going to keep going down the wrong path.

I see this in economics all the time. And once you look at, say, rents are skyrocketing and you think we need the government to step in and they need to regulate the rents, but you don't understand that that actually causes there to be a dearth of supply. And then that lack of supply causes either buildings to go down in quality because nobody can afford to renovate them or rents to go up or both. And so that's just a failure to understand the root cause of something. This is why thinking from first principles is so important.

And so because I didn't do that in the beginning, I was just constantly unable to do what I now call velocity made good. So there's a nautical term of like the wind is going to blow whatever direction it's blowing. You're trying to get wherever you're trying to go. The wind is not always blowing in the direction of where you're trying to go. And so you've got to learn how to angle the sails, tack back and forth in order to leverage what is there to get where you want to go. man, I just could not do that.

And so I would go where the wind was blowing. And that was not always where I wanted to end up. So I had to develop a worldview that was goal-oriented, thinking from first principles, so I know where I want to go. And then it's what I call the physics of progress. You just start running a loop of basically the scientific method to say, I know where I'm trying to get to. I have a guess on what I would need to do to get there.

And now I'm removing a motion from the equation, and I'm just saying what works, what action actually moves me, at an efficient rate towards my goal. And if you can get out of storytelling and into that, now you've got a chance to move forward. But I did not understand that at the beginning of my career. And so it was very frustrating. One of the challenges with understanding cause and effect is that you're essentially a fish

and water within your own brain. So the reason you got that outcome previously was because you had that thinking previously. How do you get outside of your brain and learn true cause and effect in the world, not in the model in your brain. It starts with distrusting your emotions. So I've said a gazillion times, on my tombstone, I would like it to read. You are having a biological experience.

And the reason that I want my tombstone to read that I'm having a biological experience is because I am trapped inside what you're calling the water, what I'll call the frame of reference. My frame of reference is made up of my biology, my beliefs, and my values. All three of them are effectively invisible to me. So I'm trapped inside of a Mr. Potato Head device that has eyes, ears, sense of smell, taste.

It's giving me a very limited version of the world. For people that haven't heard this stat, I remind myself of this all the time. We only see 0.0035% of the available electromagnetic spectrum. So we look out of the world and we think this is all there is. And in reality, it is the world's most infinitesimal slice of what is actually there. And from that, we tell ourselves a story. And if you don't understand that you were trapped inside that story, you're really going to be in a dire position.

So the way that most people get trapped is they don't navigate by logic. They navigate by emotion. They believe that because they have an emotion, it is accurate. And therefore, they will move forward because something feels right versus that it's actually yielding progress towards the defined outcome. And so, yeah, distrust your emotions. That is lesson number one, because they are not designed to take you where you want to go. Give me a simple example of where your emotions could lead you astray.

Your emotions are designed to get you to make rapid decisions in a very complicated world towards one end and one end only, to stay alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And if you understand that all of your impulses are pushing you to survive long enough to have kids that have kids, but your goal is to build a company, then all of a sudden it's like, well, hold on a second. These are competing drives. And so needing to be able to extract yourself from that and think simply from first principles

becomes extremely important. So to give you an idea, when I first started going down the path of building a video game, I made a catastrophic error in that I was trying to build a game that felt good to play it immediately. And you just cannot do that and get it. game development because of the nature of the computer resources and how hard it is to get high fidelity. So I ended up wasting millions of dollars trying to get something that felt right

while I was playing it versus saying, okay, I know where I want to end up. I need to break that into technical chunks and then execute against those technical chunks knowing that two or three years from now it will start to feel right. But in the beginning, it's going to feel terrible. But I have to understand how from a dopamine circuitry setup that all of this stuff is eventually going to work, if I understand dopamine loops, if I understand reward, if I understand risk, all of those things, I can know on paper, apply them in this low fidelity environment and ultimately stack towards that. So had I not steered by the emotional desire to create something that felt awesome in the moment, I could have saved myself so much money. That one still brings a lot of trauma.

But, yeah, learning that was very valuable. I think we shared 99% or so DNA with chimpanzees. I imagine across humans is probably 99.99%. So one of the ways that you could go about learning your own biases is just to learn human biases or homo sapient biases and then generalized that you probably have the same evolutionary pre-programming. And that's kind of how you could look at emotions versus rational versus irrational or said another way, something that was very rational a million years ago in the Sahara desert may not be irrational today, 2025.

So true. Very well said. So you have this, what you call the algorithm, the truth-seeking algorithm that you apply in order to get to ground truth. What is that algorithm? Ah, it is so multivariate that I'll give you a high-level breakdown, but by all means push on something because this. goes incredibly deep in any direction. So at the highest level, this is about thinking from first

principles, meaning you're not reasoning from analogy. You are literally building up from the laws of physics. There are physics to every situation. There is a never-ending string of cause and effect. And where am I inserting myself in whether it's operations, marketing, whatever? There's physics to money. So as you think about the decisions of capital investment within your own company understanding like okay i'm going to outlay this capital i need to understand how i'm going to get that money back and again when people do things based on intuition i think this is going to work there are far more people that end up in the graveyard than end up being steve jobs so people have to be very realistic about okay i'm deploying the capital what what lever am i deploying

this capital against how does pulling that lever actually yield money back to my company i find that most entrepreneurs don't even turn their company into a series of levers the number of emails that you send out. Okay, that may matter tremendously in your company. For me, the videos that I post on YouTube matter a lot. How many views the videos get matter a lot. So the levers that I can pull, they're ultimately going to start upstream there, and then everything else for me is downstream of that. So just what are the physics of my situation? What are the physics of the humans that I'm trying to interact with on whatever level? And then running what I was talking about earlier the physics of progress. So I come up with, I know where I'm trying to end up. I come up

with a hypothesis that I believe will get me to overcome whatever obstacle stands between where I'm now and where I'm trying to get to. I then actually document what I'm going to do with that test. And part of that documentation is to write down my expected outcome. That's the part that people never do. So whatever result they get, they say to themselves, yeah, that's what I expected. And so you don't learn anything. So you want to say ahead of time, this is what I think this is going to yield. Then you run that test. Did it yield that or not? If it did, you have mapped the world accurately.

If it did not, you have not mapped the world accurately, and you have a fundamental problem of understanding the cause and effect. You need to address that with another guess. Like I said, this is a scientific method. You're going to try to improve your guess based on what you just learned through that failure, and you're going to try again. And then you just live in that loop in every dimension of your life. And I think at some point in your life, you were sleeping on the floor.

And then again, you sold your company. company for a billion dollars. Those two things are very far apart for anybody keeping track of my timeline. So this was not me like sleeping on the floor, the facility, and then we suddenly be successful. Those are years apart. And yet, those are two data points, which I think very few humans have been on both. How could somebody go from, you know, in a place of such destitute to such success? How is that physically possible?

It's skill set acquisition. Life really is very simple. You are trying to imagine a world that's better than this one And then gain the skills that allow you to build the things that allow you to cross that chasm And it's maybe not easy, but it is very doable. So take Quest for instance. So we start Quest. We realize that one of the major challenges that we're facing actually has to do with the government subsidizing corn of all things which has led to 70 years of people creating manufacturing equipment that assume you're going to be using high fructose corn syrup.

The second you take that out, it changes the texture of the product that you're trying to make, almost irrespective of what product you're trying to make. And so now all the equipment doesn't work. And so we realized, oh, man, to use a liquid fiber instead of a liquid sugar as our binding agent to get the macro nutrient profile that we wanted, we'd have to become our own engineers.

We literally had to engineer our own equipment. And so that was a wild departure from where we thought we were going to end up. But once you're just thinking, okay, this is a game of skill acquisition, there's something I don't understand. This is a problem that does not violate the laws of physics. So it is possible. And then you just go about either saying, I'm not willing to acquire those skills or that's the skill I'm going to have to acquire.

And so when we started, we certainly didn't think we were going to become manufacturers. We saw ourselves as product people and marketing people. We didn't see ourselves as operations at that level. And so that was what the goal demanded. And so that's what we had to do. Now, also, I want to be very clear that timing plays a part in all of this. And some people will call that luck. Sure, perfectly willing to accept that.

If you don't have the right timing or you don't acquire the right skills, you'll be dead in the water. But beyond that, it really isn't like some grand miracle. it comes down to drive a willingness to outwork people, good ideas, and then the ability to aggregate talent. That's huge. And then are you actually going to take the risks, learn from your mistakes, stack the skills, and keep pushing forward? But I really mean it when I say, most people just break under the weight of embarrassment. And they will fail at something. People will laugh at them, rightly so. They really did embarrass themselves. And that person, person just goes, I never want to feel like this again, and they eject out. And it's the people

that go, okay, well, I just know from the physics of the situation standpoint that I can learn from this. And if I can acquire skills that other people don't acquire, I can do things other people can't do. And if I can do something that the world wants, that nobody else can do, I will be successful. And so there have been many a tortured night for me where it's like, well, is that sequence of thoughts still true. And if that sequence of thoughts is still true, I just need to ask, do I want to keep doing this? Because it is hard. It is emotionally taxing. And if I do, then just get on with it. This is just how the physics of the human situation works. And if I don't, then eject out and don't make excuses. Just say, I got to the point where emotionally

this wasn't rewarding enough for me to keep doing this. And so I'm, you know, I'm tapping out. It's interesting because this embarrassment is also evolutionary wiring when we were in these small groups. Embarrassment could mean literally dying and being ejected from tribe. And yet, it still feels bad today. So how do you manage around that? Do you just say, I'm going to be embarrassed for the next five years and just suck it up? Do you find a counterbalancing way to have more pride in your life? Like, what are some behaviors that you can incorporate in order to make, to blunt the blow of

embarrassment and other negative emotions. The most important thing is maybe tangential to behavior. It was realizing in my mid-ish 20s that I would argue for ideas that were terrible in terms of taking me towards my goal, but that were mine. And so they made me feel smart. And I thought, oh, this is a trap. And so I realized, okay, there are two paths before you. No judgment.

Which path do you want to go down? Do you want to be right all the time? In which case you need to go into smaller and smaller rooms. you're the smartest person. Or do you want to actually achieve your goals, which means you're going to have to routinely face that you're surrounded by people smarter than you, certainly in any one thing at any one time? There's always going to be somebody that knows more about it than you. Or they may just legitimately have higher IQ, be able to process data faster, whatever, but if I can aggregate that talent, I can still get ahead, but I've got to find something new

to build my self-esteem around and realizing that I had a choice about what I built my self-esteem around changed my entire life. And so I stopped trying to build my self-esteem around being better, faster, smarter, stronger than the next person, and instead built my self-esteem around identifying the right answer faster than anybody else. Did not care if it was mine. I just cared if it was efficient in moving me towards my goals. Would celebrate the life out of the person whose idea it was. I did not try to steal their idea because that didn't matter. me that didn't help with my ego at all because I was building my ego around my willingness to say, oh, I was wrong, you were right. And by the way, through a hilarious twist of the human

psyche, by me celebrating the person for that idea, people wanted to bring me their ideas nonstop because they met somebody that had the courage to be wrong, to publicly fail. And when something was right, I was going to celebrate that person. So now people are bringing you ideas nonstop. You just have to be the person that has enough foresight to go, this idea good, this idea bad. And now you're going to have no shortage of ideas. But that, like, there's really one thing in my life that I say, that was a line in the sand. There's my life before and my life after.

And that was deciding that the only thing I was going to allow myself to feel good about was my willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies and my willingness to improve on those rather than trying to hide them and just seem smarter than the next person. it said another way you built your ego positive ego on wanting to have the best company to aggregate the best talent to be the most successful as an entity versus being this individual lone wolf where you're the smartest person in the room but nobody wants to work with you nobody wants to invest in you so it's not that you even took embarrassment you framed in what it means to have pride in yourself in your accomplishments in a different way and then you were able to align with that and as a side effect people also wanted to align with that because you're no longer egotistical, although I would argue you built an ego around a new belief. Yeah, I tell people, look, I'm an egomaniac. I just built my ego around something that you're not going to find offensive, which is that I'm perfectly willing to admit when I'm wrong. But when I think I'm right, I'm going to fight like hell. So this is not like,

oh, you said something and therefore we're going to do it. It's like I, I care about effectiveness, but I care about effectiveness ferociously. So if I think, somebody is putting forth an idea that isn't going to efficiently move us towards our goal, I'm going to be a psychopath. I'm not going to do something that I don't think is going to work. And I went through a phase where I really did just, I want everybody to make sure that their ideas are heard and we'll try anything. And I gave people all the space in the universe. And the reality is most people have not built their self-esteem around that or they don't have the intellectual horsepower or both. And so you end up spiraling into madness. So you do have to come in and say,

I'm going to be the arbiter. I'm going to say what we are and aren't going to pursue. I want the best ideas. I do not need them to be mine. But if I'm not convinced, we are not going down a stupid path. And we are going to run the physics of progress. And we are going to call our shots before we take them. And if we were wrong, we are going to map who's more likely to be right.

I get into this all the time with my producer on YouTube. And I'm like, listen, there is always a finger to point at if click through rate is terrible. I want to know the person that came up with the idea. and if that person came up with an idea that yields a terrible click-through rate, that is a mark against their reputation for creating good headlines and thumbnails. And conversely, if somebody kills it, I want to know who it is. And I don't care if I'm the best. I want to know who the best is so that we know when we're at loggerheads and it's like, man, that seems really counterintuitive. I'd be very surprised if that works. But hey, 70% of the time, you're right more than I am. And if we were in

Vegas, we're going to take 70% odds every time. So then we just go, cool. That person right now, they have the best ETRs. If there is a collision and we can't all agree, we're going to go with their idea. I do not understand how people don't get obsessed with effectiveness. But most people don't, man. Most people care about one thing. They want to be right. And even if that person may have a 70% batting average on cause and effect, and you have a 50%, even though that person's not 100% you have to go with what by default you go with what that person's saying because he or she has empirically proven higher confidence in that domain so it's like if they start going down over time then we're going to know hey you were hitting for a while but right now like

you're really off your let's say trailing three months you went from a 10.1 average CTR down to a 6.2 my trailing three months is 8.7 well I just passed you and so on this one we can't come to an agreement, so we're going to do whoever's in poll position at that time. So, yeah, it is literally just everybody needs to get their ego out of the way. We're looking for efficiency. Data will speak for itself. I'd like to remind everybody, everyone is naked in a spreadsheet. And so if you're just looking at the spreadsheet and you're like, well, there are the numbers.

It's nice and easy to see who's good at what. And I believe people should hunger for that knowledge. There's this meme in Silicon Valley where a billion-dollar companies are built by people that, quote-un-unquote, are going after mission, quote-unquote, don't care about money. And I resisted that for many years until I started interviewing these people. And I did find that they were highly mission-driven. Do you find that billionaires or people building one, 10, 100-billion-dollar companies are fundamentally looking at the business differently than, you know, your average millionaire? Today's episode is brought to you by Square. smart, streamlined tools to make running your business simple because the right tools make all the

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at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash how I invest. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. The real answer is having a mission will get you to focus on the right thing, which is a long-term vision. It will give you the energy that you need to fight when things are getting very difficult. And when you put those two things together, you've got a shot at something. And this is why founder-led companies will often, even though, like, when I look at Apple, you've got Steve Jobs, obviously on a mission, founder-led, just had like a real.

real strong sense of aesthetically what the world should look like, where technology should go, how it could integrate with people, was very forceful. And if he thought that somebody was bringing him garbage, he was going to let them know. And so he was very able to position himself as a compelling leader. He was right enough. He was forceful enough. He had a clear enough vision that he was able to do it. Now, Tim Cook has made more money than Steve Jobs. But I think Tim Cook is in the revenue extraction part of that company's life cycle, and they will inevitably decline over the next, whatever, 10, 15 years as a result of that, because it's just how he's wired. Now, God bless him. Like, when you pair somebody like Steve Jobs with an operator

like Tim Cook, it's magical, and long may it have continued. But alas, cancer had different plans, and we are where we are. But if you understand that both of those mentalities are incredibly valuable, then you know how to hopefully architect something really incredible. But it isn't confusing to me that Tim Cook is not able to make the counterintuitive moves that Steve Jobs is able to make or the whole idea of flying the pirate flag of the way the bureaucracy will end up just grinding things to a halt. But if you have somebody like Steve Jobs, it is just constitutionally obsessed with an idea. And he'll do everything including grabbing the best engineers, taking them down the street,

telling everybody else to get the hell out of the way and let them come up with something interesting, well, then you're going to stay vital. But there are two different things. You can have a, take DeLorean, you can have a maniacal founder that is completely unmoored from reality, but has like this really compelling vision,

and they will ride it into the ground. The guy that did Ocean Gate obviously believed, he put his own life at risk, but he also imploded and turned into a, puff of blood and cartilage. So it's like, there are realities to be faced. So I don't think that either one in isolation is like, hey, we should all want to be like that. I think you need to figure out who you are. You need to figure out what's going to allow you to show up at 2 a.m. on a Friday night when everybody else is out partying or spending time with their kids. And if you're an operator

who's obsessed like Tim Cook, great. You fly to China. You build those deals and you do something absolutely incredible. But you're not going to be the guy that starts the company from nothing. You're not going to be the guy that gets Wozniak to join you when, you know, you guys are like two stinky, barefoot weirdos in the computer scene. So it's just two different personality types at two different moments. And honestly, I think you need both. What about long-termism versus short-termism? Obviously, most people say you need to think long term, but there's also some short term and thinking short term that I have seen work or in certain situations unpacked, you know, when businesses could benefit from long term

thinking versus short term thinking. If you don't do both, you will go out of business. So until your employees are perfectly fine to be paid only on the long term, you're going to have to both have short term positive outcomes. But if you really want to win, you've got to have a long term vision of where you're going to go. So I think about this in game development. In no uncertain terms, I'm trying to build Ready Player 1, a gigantic world that people effectively live inside of, create inside of. But if I try to build all of that now, I mean, you're talking about billions and billions of dollars of investment. And it looks like what Facebook is doing, right? So you have to have these short term wins that allow you to finance the next phase of your development.

And so there's a certain level of this that you see with the way that Elon Musk builds, which I think is brilliant. He's trying to get to terraform Mars, but he's got to earn the right. He's got to launch satellites into space and make that profitable before he can go all the way and land on Mars. And there's going to be all kinds of different things, including building robotics that he's going to have to do. So he's not sending humans up there to build the kind of colony that will need to sustain life. And so he's chunked this up into all these different pieces, including solar, which is going to be effectively how you'll generate power, that or nuclear, how you would generate power. when you're up, you're certainly not going to do hydropower. You're not going to do wind as far as I know.

So this is going to be something that you have to figure out, okay, what are the technologies that I can build a thriving business right now here today? And they work that secondary part in the long-term vision. But if you don't do both, then you don't have the mission-driven side that's going to keep everybody pushing that's going to galvanize a large group of talent that are going to believe in that mission and feel like they have meaning and purpose. And you're not going to have the capital. perhaps we could label instead of short-termism call it pragmatism so you need long-termism and pragmatism

you don't necessarily need to be doing short-term deals where other people feels you know taken advantage of you definitely don't want to do things where people are feeling taking advantage of that's for sure whether you call it short-termism pragmatism whateverism you want to call it if you have built a reputation of being extractive you can have a very hard time building the kind of alliances and aggregating the kind of intelligence and capital that you need to pull off these grand endeavors. If you're burning bridges with every VC that you meet, then you're going to run out of access to capital very, very fast. Now, I think you can get away with a lot when you've got the kind of string, the kind of track record that Elon has. So you see him burning political bridges as fast as he can build them.

I think he'll be fine. So it's going to make things more difficult. but we all have a personality and you've got to deal with the realities of your personality. The very thing that has taken him as far as it's taken him is also the thing that causes him to collide in these really sort of weird childish emotional ways. But do you want to knock those out of him or is that part of what makes him him? So the bigger the results that you prove you can yield, the more extractive and unhinged that you can be and still get somewhere because people realize,

if I can attach myself to this guy, we can really go somewhere. I say all of that to say people want to put everything in these really neat like boxes, but the reality is it's so messy and living in the information age where we can see all of this stuff. I think more and more things resist being placed in these neat boxes. This is why my brand has evolved so radically over time. I started to feel like a liar just telling people like all the mindset stuff because I was like, the reality is this is way more complex than I'm making it sound.

And if I want people to actually be able to win, I've got to map for them the things that I actually do on a day-to-day basis, and it's messy. How do you even map such a sophisticated system versus using kind of these parables of think long-term and only act long-term? How do you actually map the micro? Okay, well, we need three hours just to do this. It would go something like this. You have to figure out what, you know where you want to get.

What is the reason you won't get there automatically? It's what I call the chaos machine, but the chaos machine is basically life, entropy, everything moves towards chaos, your competitors are trying to break you and get there first. Your employees have all kinds of complexities going on in their life, same with you, everybody's competing for talent. So there's just going to be a thousand things that are going to try to slow you down and stop you. So you've got to develop an obsession for what is the obstacle that. that's before me right now, what is the sequence that I could put things in, that would be what I call my important things list, that if I did them in this order, I would most efficiently make steps towards my goal. And then you're just constantly in that loop of the physics of progress

we talked about before so that you're understanding, okay, I tried this, but it didn't work. So what's going to be the thing that I have to adjust? And in all of that, what I tell people is you don't have sufficient clarity until you know what the most efficient use of the next 15 minutes of your time would be towards your goal. Because once you're there, now you're down into the concrete. Now you're down to the specifics. And I think people lose sight of one simple fact. Success is merely a sequence of effective things you do in a row day after day, month after month, year after year. That's it. But it is a never-ending sequence of things you do. Emails you send, meetings that you have, products that you build. But it is things you do.

do. So what are the things you're doing? What are the outcomes that they're yielding and just track efficiency to goal obsessively? I've been thinking a lot about this concept of high agency, which you really helped popularize. George Mack just wrote a whole thing. I think it's highagency.com. How do you define high agency and how do you apply that principle to your life? So in life, you really can bend the world to your will, but you have to develop the skills to pull it off, but also the tenacity, the resiliency. You have to become anti-fragile to use Nassim Taleb's phrase. I think it's absolutely brilliant. The more you are attacked, the stronger you need to become. And for me, that's simply recognition of the way

that the human psyche works and putting myself in positions where I'm being challenged, understanding that building my self-esteem around being right as a trap, understanding that skill stack, understanding that you can get so good at something that people literally can't stop you from doing that thing, barring force. And so just constantly, relentlessly saying, okay, if George Bernard Shaw is correct, this is a paraphrase, but the reasonable man conforms to the world,

the unreasonable man insists on trying to conform the world to him, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. If that really is true, you have to learn to be unreasonable. You have to do the things that people tell you can't be done. You almost have to take a perverse pride in going, okay, people say this can't be done. Does it violate the laws of physics? No, it does not. Therefore, it is possible. And now it's like, okay, am I going to put in the time and energy to actually get that good at this thing or not? And then giving everything you have, man, to a degree where people actually worry about you

to make that thing happen. And most people just don't want to live like that. Fair enough, man. I tell people, be very careful who you model yourself after. If you just want to be a good dad, I'm not the guy to model yourself after. I don't have kids, specifically so that I can be an obsessive psychopath and build, build. And, hey, when I'm on my deathbed, I will not have children surrounding me. That is what it is. Everything's a tradeoff. So if you want to be high agency, you need to know where you were trying to get to and just let absolutely nothing other than the laws of physics stop you.

and you've mentioned laws of physics first principles thinking what's the opposite of that how would you define that everybody goes from feeling so uh this seems impossible and they don't actually map out okay well it seems impossible but no BS what would it take what would it look like if it were possible people don't do that they just go uh this uh feels overwhelming seems like too much i can't imagine doing it therefore it isn't real it's all emotion based reasoning which by the way is where the absolute vast majority of humanity lives their entire life. They are 100% trapped inside the heuristic of their emotions. They believe because they feel it, that it must be right.

And they will act on it, man. It is wild. So I teach entrepreneurs and I see this all the time, all the time. People do not even take the time to build clarity. They just go, I have a feeling. This is going to work. And so they run headlong into something stupid. I have a feeling this isn't going to work.

And so they don't even sit down to have the, conversation. Let's say that they're deeply anxious about confronting their business partner who's not thinking about the right long-term outcome. Okay, well, they will avoid that conversation to the point of letting the business rot. It's absolutely wild. But their emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect. So it seems right and smart and worthy to not go be confrontational with your business partner. You don't want to hurt his feelings, whatever, whatever, instead of being like, okay, we either are or are not trying to reach that goal together. And if we're not, let's know that now so we can actually say what our real goal is

instead of the goal that we're putting in PR and all of that. Yeah, feelings, man. Feelings are the opposite of starting from logic. Previous guest, Zaid, Rahman, Fasio, Flex said anytime you hear the words, best practices run, because that is not a first principle's thinking. That's really interesting. Yeah, he's right, for sure. However, you also don't want to have to relearn lessons every day. And so what I tell the team here is, listen, we look up at the night sky, we see a bunch of stars. We're going to draw constellations. We have to, because we need clarity on how to move forward. But those constellations aren't real. And so my job is to get you guys all excited about where we're going to go navigating at night with these constellations. and then I'm going to figure out which part of that constellation isn't real.

I will adjust it and I will come back with a new constellation. But you do need people to move forward with best practices, et cetera, et cetera. But you have to be paranoid that those will calcify into dogma and you'll stop being nimble. But if you don't have some sense of like this is how it should be done, then you just get mass chaos. We talked about high agency. The opposite of high agency, I don't call it low agency. I call it passive. passive behavior why is so much of the population passive uh life is terrifying you're often wrong

being wrong sucks it has huge consequences you will get laughed at you will be an outsider people will tell you you're stupid you won't be confident in yourself and so it's much easier to go along with the herd the herd can be vicious uh we are also living in a populist moment where everybody wants you to be on a team and there's high emotion if you're not on that team or a team uh it can be very very lonely and humans are not wired for that life is just too uncertain and so when we find that uncertainty we have an emotional desire to find certainty in the crowd again and very few people can step outside of that being passed is just a lot easier it's somewhat of a learned behavior whether a lot of times somebody was very aggressive in your life and you basically learned to

passive, learned helplessness, didn't respond. A lot of those passive people don't want to turn into monsters, don't want to be aggressive. But the opposite of passive is not actually aggressive. It's assertive. How would you delineate between being assertive and being aggressive? I don't distinguish between the two. To me, those are synonyms. At the end of the day, you have to risk being a dick. Like, you have to, this is what we're doing. If you're a good leader, you will have listened to people. You will have a track record of not trying to do your idea, but only ever trying to do what is efficiently moving you towards your goals. You celebrate other people's accomplishments. If you do all of that and then people are creating a

problem, you need to point out that problem. And if that problem persists, you need to be very clear that that's not going to be tolerating. You've got to nip it in the bud. People are going to push back. This is the chaos machine. Everybody has their own ideas. Everybody thinks that they know what's best. And if you get to the point where we're at disagree but commit and you're not willing to force that through the machine, then your machine will pull in a whole bunch of different directions. I'm not saying that it can't be done. I'm sure there are plenty of, I'm sure there are some number of very gentle leaders, but the reality is there are too many things that are trying to take you down. If you don't have the fortitude to fight for what you believe in, you'll get

pecked to death. How would you divanche an egotistical, aggressive leader from an aggressive and pro-social leader. If you're egotistical, you want it because it's yours. You're still stuck in your emotions. Your ego is built around being right. Your ego is built around people showing you deference. What I tell people here at Impact Theory is I want you to give my feedback to me publicly and aggressively.

And the reason I want that is because I don't want you afraid to say, Tom, this is stupid. This is a terrible idea because you're worried about how it's going to come across, or I'm going to fire you. like just give it to me as raw as you can in public. And if you happen to spill into aggressive, I literally don't care. I just want the right answer. And so I'll take that on. I will thank you for the feedback. Now, I'm not telling people I want you to be a jerk. I don't. But I don't want people to be afraid that, oh, man, if I say that, this is going to be taken the wrong way. Now, I want to know what you believe to be true. What do you believe to be true? I'm blind to something.

I know that. And if I'm blind to something, I'm counting on other people to say, hey, this is the thing I think you're blind to. Now, they're not always going to be right, just as I will not always be right about what they're blind to. I won't always be right about what's going to work in the market. But we should all be well-intentioned people that say what we believe to be true, even at the risk of being a jerk, like just say your thing. And then once we have clarity, we can decide how to move forward.

And if I'm wrong too many times, then I'm not going to survive very long. I will lose talent and I won't be able to keep the company float. Rightfully so. I've got to be right enough to build momentum in the company. It's just that simple. giving leaders feedback is one of those things that sounds very easy but extremely difficult to institutionalize how do you create the incentive framework that people are willing and proactive about giving you feedback keep people on reward people that are effective and willing to speak

to power and fire people that are too emotionally weak to do it people are super weird about that second one but that is very important if i they're at impact theory and anyway, there is not a single person who has ever been fired for telling me that I had a terrible idea, even if they were aggressive. I just literally don't care. But there have been plenty of people that have been let go because they just, they can't speak to power. And then when they leave, it's like, whoa, this was very different, a very different assessment of what we were doing than you had when we were working together. So like, what gives? And it's always like, I was just afraid of this, that, or the other. And so, yeah, listen, I hate that it sounds

so cut and dry. But if somebody is working for me because they need the paycheck, it is not my fault that they don't know how to save money. So you should always have six months so that you can tell a boss that he is a moron if you need to. And here at Impact Theory, somebody's going to find out real fast. I don't care. If you think I'm a moron, just tell me how so I can get better because I know I'm not going to be able to do this by myself. And over time, a certain subset of people go, he's actually serious about this. And they will spread that word to other people because they'll be like, man, I've, I've said things to him that I thought for sure we're going to like really piss him off. And they don't. He just wants, excuse me, he just wants the right

answer. And yeah, over time it permeates the culture. But I have found, and maybe just because I'm not good enough, but I have found I cannot get 100% compliance with that. Some people just live in fear. I want to go on a bit of a sensitive subject for many people, free will. You've had neurosciences, Dr. Nolan Williams, you have Dr. Andrew Heberman and many other neuroscientists. Where do you stand today, 2025, in regards to free will and whether human beings have free will? It does not exist. Like, I'm shocked that people even fight for this. It just seems so self-evident.

It isn't possible that it exists. I don't understand how people come to that conclusion. There's a book by Robert Sapolsky called Determined. Read it, report back. Like, I have seen him do countless debates with people. I just don't see how there is any wiggle. room whatsoever for free will. But don't live your life like that. You've got to live your life like you do have free will. So to me, this is just a switch. I flip my mind. I just, I don't care.

It is what it is. I'm going to live my life as if I had free will, even though it seems patently self-evident that we do not. And how do you reconcile high agency with a lack of free will? It's people that have had the good fortune to have the right genetics. the right upbringing and encounter the right ideas are going to be high agency. It just is. But here's the thing. We respond to ideas. So it is a good thing that as humans, we propagate these set of ideas because they will impact the other people who are also deterministic creatures to move in a new direction had they never encountered those ideas. So even though I know I can't help myself but say these things because of my biology, my upbringing, the ideas that I've

encountered, the things that I've tried, mistakes that I've made, all the things I've learned, the frame of reference that I've cultivated over time, deterministically, of course, like, I get it. It makes it so that the words that are coming out of my mouth are not my choice, but nonetheless, it feels like they are, and I lean very deeply into how much it feels like they are. And so here we are. It's interesting. I don't understand why that question is so interesting to people. It's like consciousness. I couldn't care less. Like, unless you're trying to do something like if you're okay if it's necessary for AI cool I get it you got to figure it out but if you're not programming AI why do you care you are conscious before we argue I want to

strengthen your your view one was there's Benjamin Libitz experiment in 1980 which found that basically the brain had made a decision 300 milliseconds before actually the person believed that made the decision so it was basically literally hardwired in the brain another other one is using fMRI machines there's a study in 2008 by dr soon that basically is seven to ten seconds before they reported conscious awareness of the decision an fmri fmri machine came into the head basically could predict that they had already made the decision the way that i look at this is i'm a compatibilist i believe that we don't have free will in the macro sense but we do have free will in the micro sense what does that mean that means that means

that I can't get out of my brain, like these questions I'm asking you, my preparation, all those are deterministic, but it's determined based on the actions that I made in order to get that information. So I do have free will in terms of the inputs and the behaviors I put in my head and kind of my own LLM that I've developed. But once it's in there, it's very predictable what I'm going to ask, how I'm going to counter. But I do feel like that that's my view. That's also roughly two-thirds of philosophers have this compatibleistic view versus kind of crazy. There's also an opposite crazy, libertarian free will, which I think is nonsensical, which is I could come up with a completely first principled ideas that I've never heard

or seen anywhere. I don't believe that either. And not many scholars do as well. Fair enough, man. It just seems so easy to disprove that. But, and I'm happy to start going down that path. but, yeah, I, this is, this is something that's so, like, open and shut for me. Do you want to argue?

Because we can certainly get into it. I'd love to hear you. You tell me. Yeah, I'd love to hear of you. Okay. So how many Nobel Prize winners have Down syndrome? Zero. Okay.

Why? Because they don't have enough intellectual horsepower in order to be one of the people selected for a Nobel Prize. Correct. So we are all limited by our biology. If you are limited by your biology, how in any way, shape, or form do you have free will? You are merely a conscious agent inside of a deterministic sequence of events. So if we both know that that one weird twist of biology makes it impossible for them to achieve certain outcomes,

I hope it is self-evident that you are equally impossible of achieving certain outcomes, that we are all beholden entirely to our biology. You are just a chemical processing plant. And given that, this is about physics. And once it's about physics, there's no room for free will. You can't transcend physics. You are trapped. You are trapped by the laws of physics in the same way that a video game character

is trapped by their coding. A Fortnite character cannot become a Minecraft character instantaneously. It's all deterministic. It's all code. So given that, I, I, yeah, I, I'm guessing people are bothered by it in some weird way, but I'm like, just turn that piece of your brain off. One of the arguments against determinism is quantum physics. The only thing they can argue for is there's randomness, but randomness is not the same as free will. It just means I can't predict the outcomes of this because of quantum.

And therefore, even though it is deterministic, it's determined on a probability spectrum and not on like a one, one. But the best explanation I've ever heard of quantum physics is quantum still adheres to this is the most likely outcome. So even if all of these insane number of variables all have some dice roll as a part of them, it still has a dice roll that's a part of them. They are a finite number of possible outcomes. And even if it's an infinite number of possible outcomes, you're still beholden to the laws of physics, even if the permutations are literally infinite. But in that, none of that says you took control of that process,

not like you get to reach into the quantum realm and go this one instead of that one. So let's talk about knowledge and accumulation. There's a completely new industry or a new topic. How do you get up to speed at the fastest possible pace on something completely new? for me it's engagement with the topic at the most tactile level that I can so you want to learn about building video games build a video game there's no faster way to learn it AI is also just an obscene advantage I cannot fathom how useful this has already been in my own life when I think I'm like as a gen Xer I'm like that complete cusp where in high school we had to go to the university library and literally randomly search books for information to find even just a quote to then the internet comes long but it's slow and terrible to then the internet like oh my gosh

like you can get answers so fast to now the birth of AI it is wild so yeah AI and like actually getting your hands dirty between those two things man I can get up to speed on a topic very quickly I call it the cost the cost of curiosity so it's gone down from spending months in in a library and now the cost of curiosity has gone down that even just things I'm completely curious like I had my bachelor party this weekend I'm like when was it created within within two seconds I found out the first bachelor party was in fifth century BC which really blew my mind but I would never spend 25 hours researching when a bachelor party was started but now that cost of curiosity has gone down and it also helps on big big topics as well

but it's it's kind of it makes the world so much more interesting agreed where where do you go five 10 years from how deterministic or not where do you see yourself and how much will media be a part of who you are in the long term or is this more of a short-term shed no for me i've known that i wanted to be in media since i was 12 uh this has been me making good on a promise to myself that i would generate the finances that i need to control my artistic destiny And so here we are. We've been building a game called Project Kaysen now for about three and a half years. I cannot be more proud of what we've accomplished.

Probably still a year away from being on Steam, two years away from it being like the final version of this phase anyway, since the larger vision is going to take probably a decade and a half. But that is where I expect to be in five years, is still building that out. being on YouTube or some equivalent to be able to pursue my intellectual pursuits, I would imagine I'm also still doing. I believe that America is in the midst of an absolute crisis right now, both economically and culturally, and never did I think that I would be talking about that kind of thing, but it has become one of the most important obsessions of my life.

I think maybe because I don't have kids, ironically, it makes me want to make sure that I'm leaving the world to people in a better state than I found it. And I don't feel like that's currently the case. So if I don't think in terms of legacy, but I do think in terms of like be good to the next generation. And yeah, we're in, uh, the US very specifically is in a super dark place. We are going to go bankrupt on our current course. I would say within 10 years, we'll start to default. Um, that's a mathematical inevitability. We would have to change course. dramatically from what we're doing right now. I think about that a lot. So I imagine five years from now, still be talking about that. I did listen to your interview with Ray Dalia. I listened to

Mark Andres and Tony Robbins. You've had some of the most amazing people on the planet. Where could people keep up to you and where could they go to see more of your podcast and to learn more about what you're working out? Go to YouTube at Tom Billu. For sure. Thank you, Tom, for reaching out. And thank you for for jumping on podcasts. Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow. Also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.