Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Tom Bilyeu: Impact Experimentalist! ​(#197)

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Tom Bilyeu is shaking up multiple industries on his way to impact a billion brains in the Universe! Boy, was this a fun interview to do! Tom runs a legit film studio out of his house and I was delighted to be connected to him via my friend Danny Miranda. Tom did not disappoint. We discussed his epic careers -- he's now on at least his third incarnation after founding Quest Nutrition (and selling it for a billion dollars!), then starting a multimillion subscriber YouTube Channel / media empire called "Impact Theory", and now as a creator and evangelist for NFT's. We discuss his journey. We discussed the scientific method and I enjoyed his take on being an experimenter -- though he did not agree to change the name of his channel to "Impact Experiment" despite my pleas! Lastly, I found our discussion of finding meaning without children particularly touching. Tom's as honest and earnest as they come. I found that all the more refreshing given the status, wealth, and power he's made alongside his wife and partner for life, in business and life, Lisa. We discussed: Regrets in life? What’s wealth for? Can’t just be for Lambos and Yachts! What’s the most precious resource? How to stay hungry? How to know when money success leads to drinking your Kool Aid? Why pivot to NFT instead of sticking to becoming the next Walt Disney? Entropy and the physics of happiness: Audible is hands-down my favorite platform for consuming podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books! With an Audible membership, you can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. The Audible app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. Audible members don’t have to worry about using their credits right away. You can keep your credits for up to a year—and use them to binge on a whole series if you’d like! And if you’re not loving your selection, you can simply swap it for another.Start your free 30-day trial today:  Audible.com/impossible or text “impossible” to 500-500 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:51The Origin of Quest Nutrition 00:01:47 What is your rubric and how is it similar to the scientific method? 00:02:00 How do you know when to pivot? 00:05:05 Can too much knowledge be an inhibitor to financial success? The paradox of teaching Vs doing. 00:08:54 What is the purpose of wealth? 00:13:46 To parent or not? Passing on legacy, optimizing for joy and impact. 00:25:52 Tom's interview styles and techniques. 00:28:40 Finding synergies with creative disruption. 00:32:51 On NFTs and moments of disruption. 00:40:54 What blockchain/NFT strategy is there for creators/scientists to capture value? 00:43:13 Tom's theory of the "ownership" neuron. 00:47:44 Proof of work, tangibles versus blockchain and NFTs. 00:53:11 Hunger to know why and where you're wrong! 00:53:32 What would you put on your billion-year time capsule? 00:55:43 What advice would you give to your younger self to go into the impossible? 00:56:58 You can't make a racehorse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig! 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volkow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another fascinating episode with another fantastic guest. Today's guest is Tom Bill you. Tom's been impacting my life and my waistline for over eight years since I first used his Quest nutrition bars to slim down to drop five pounds from my double chin to my stomach.

Way back when I was giving a TEDx talk called going to the ends of the earth to image the beginning of time. You could find that on YouTube. And I was really kind of influenced by him and his epic mission to influence millions of people around the world from everything from crypto to nutrition and beyond. And he's really kind of a semi-scientist himself, although he denies that he has any scientific training. Of course, that's not the type of scientist that everyone should or can aspire to. Nevertheless, he is a hilarious and insightful, thoughtful person. We actually got into a lot of fascinating things off the topic, in addition to things like crypto and NFTs and how we can maybe reimagine the way that science is rewarded.

But we also talked about children and life and marriage and things that I don't think he's ever talked about before. And if you listen to the very end, you'll see he paid me an incredible compliment that I don't feel I am worthy of. But stay tuned to the end for that. Now, I just got back from a rural wind trip to New York City and Washington, D.C. You can see some of those exploits and upcoming videos on my channel. Dr. Brian Keating, please do subscribe. And while it was great to be away, my first trip in two years to the East Coast, exactly two years, I definitely had a lot of misgivings about traveling and missing my family,

et cetera, et cetera. But in the end, I was really thrilled to have gone when you come back. You're thrilled to have left and thrilled. even more to come back and you get to be with your family. And that's wonderful in this wonderful season, this season of giving thanks. And I want to give thanks to you for all the wonderful reviews you've been giving me. I'm almost up to 310 reviews. You can leave the 310th review after listening to this. Here's some inspiration from someone named Brian Smith, 818, who said, excellent podcast. Brian is amazing. No, no, no. He didn't say that. He said, Brian is among the

most insightful people I know. When you start listening to the podcast, you'll immediately admire his obsessive curiosity. But as you get to know him, you'll see a deeper sign of what makes him special. He respects his guests, but probes them for deeper answers. And because he's so well read, he brings a tapestry of polymathic knowledge to every episode. Do yourself a favor, subscribe, listen, and learn from Brian. Well, I really like that from a fellow Brian, but it's also, in most part, due to my guests. And I'm honored to have them on. We have more Nobel Prize winners coming on. We have Nobel Prize losers like Dame Jocelyn Bell Bernal. We have amazing guests from all across the scientific and thought leadership community.

Stay tuned for some big announcements there. Today we are going to really have a wonderful kind of off the normal topic conversation with Tom Billiam. And I do hope that you will leave a review as Brian Smith then, as 309 other people have, to talk about how. you are impacted by this podcast, who you'd like to see on the podcast. And you can leave reviews, I think, in only two places, Apple Podcasts, or on Amazon Audible, which you'll hear more about later in the show. So anyway, for now, I invite you to sit back, relax, and come along on a journey into the impossible with a man who's made an impact on millions, maybe billions around the world. And that's Tom Billia. Enjoy.

Any sufficiently advanced technology? is in distinction from magic. I'm here today with Tom Villiers, who's been an influence on me. Tom, you didn't know this, but I gave a TEDx talk back in 2014, along with her mutual friend James Altutcher, and he was the closing act.

I was the opening act, and I had to drop five pounds. And I didn't know how to do it because I'm addicted to eating sweets and good taste and stuff. And my trainer friends told me, you've got to get this quest nutrition. It's like the real deal.

It tastes just like a candy bar. It's just like a cookie. I want to thank you. You, because of you, you allowed me to drop those five pounds. I dropped them from my double chin to my rear end. And I just, I want to thank you. No, seriously. You did.

You really helped my life. And I made the TED Talk. I cut weight. Those five pounds that made a big difference. I want to thank you for that. That's cool, man. My pleasure. Yeah, when we started.

So I come from a morbidly obese family. So, you know, that was, at least for me, that was the whole idea was giving food that people could choose based on taste. And it happened to be good for them. Yeah. But you didn't have to ask them to go. go out of their way. It was like, we really wanted it to taste like cookies, candy pie, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And the ultimate validation of it is my kids will eat that rather

than, you know, some partner or something like that. Yeah, yeah. We used to have a lot of people report that, which is tough. Yeah. So I want to start with actually going further in that vein, you know, I heard interviews with you from years back just about that process or what your intent was, not in the chemical, you know, laboratories and the particle accelerators, et cetera, et cetera, but to make something healthy, to make something that had mimicked certain properties that were delicious, because that is the best way to incentivize good behavior. I viewed that as a very scientific quest, no pun intended. I want to talk about the scientific method, how you approach things analytically, and on what your rubric is.

How do you make decisions like this? Like, we're going to get into this, then we're going to pivot and we're going to become entertainment. Then we're going to pivot and we're going to get into NFTs, founders keys, stuff like that we'll get into. How do you know when you can make a pivot? Is there a rubric? Is there a checklist? How do you go through these? Yeah, so it's interesting.

So I created this thing I called the physics of progress. You're the right person to have this conversation with. And so because I, one, I'm trying to navigate my own life. So I never would have stepped in front of the camera if I wasn't running businesses. Because for me, that's like I need to be checking that this stuff really works. I need to be using it on a daily basis. And then, oh, I'll look into a camera and say, here's what I'm doing and these are the results. and finding the like to try to explain to somebody how you get good at business because I'd often say things like

hey fill your heart with love think of the community and all that but oh by the way you also have to be business savvy because there's a bunch of people out there that have good intentions but they can't grow a company so I was like what is business savvy like you know how do you explain that and so I start breaking this down okay what do I do and I'm like all right well I start with my goal I know what I'm trying to do. And then once I have my goal, I just identify, I'm here and my goal is there. And what stands between me and that is essentially entropy. Everything is moving towards chaos. So I have to inject all this energy into this closed system in order to create order. But you have to do it in like a really specific way. And that specific way is understanding the obstacle that stands between you and where

you want to go. And then you basically create a test, like you have a hypothesis and then a test that you're going to run to see if it works. You run it. You learn and then you repeat. And so I, I break this whole thing down and I'm like, it's the physics of progress. And one of the guys on my team was like, that's the scientific method. And I was like, what? He's like, look it up. And so I look it up. I'm like, oh, my God, this is literally the scientific method, recontextualized for business.

And what I love and, you know, people talk about this in science a lot, when people rediscover the same thing from different angles, you know you're onto something fundamental. And truly, everything has a physics of, right? There's a point at which you're no longer at analogy, you're at first principles, and you're just thinking from there. And so business is no different. You need to get down to what is the actual nature of the problem that you face. And when you get to the nature of the problem, then you can build up. So I do this thing called business decision making, where people that have, you know, thriving businesses come.

And it's like, give me your hardest problem. And you'll see, without me knowing your industry, I can help you find the answer very quickly. because you're just, you're getting to first principles. What's your goal? Where are you? What is the thing creating the problem? And then how do we come up with our best guess, hypothesis, on the most efficient way to solve that problem?

And then if we've thought through that well, we run that. We will fail to some degree. And then we try again. And so what's really interesting about that process is people think that it's going to be complicated. They think what they need is my 20 years of business. What they actually need is first principles. And the second you get to first principles, you can now solve these.

It's iterative, of course, but you can now solve the problem. Do you think it can work in reverse almost because of the curse of knowledge, like I mentioned before we started filming, you know, that most of my friends that teach economics or teach at business schools or whatever, they're not super successful financially. Not that that's the only metric for a prize in success. Obviously they're incredibly intellectual, but you know, most people that win the Nobel Prize in economics, for example, they're not, you know, billionaires, right? or not in practical terms.

And you would think they know the base layer, as you call it, the zero first principles. They know that better than anybody. Is there such a thing that's holding them back? Perhaps this curse of knowledge, like they know it, but they can't teach it because they're too far away from being at the beginner's mind perspective? That's really interesting. So we could rabbit hole on keeping a beginner's mind, which is more important than people realize.

And I think is the reason that generations end up thinking they're at war with each other. they're not actually at war. It's just that people tend to calcifying the dogma. And so it's open-minded versus calcified. And then that's why this generation then will calcify and the next generation will be open-minded. But it's really, if you can keep an open mind, I don't think you find the conflict between the generations.

But getting into why those people aren't successful specifically, one is they're following their passion. And so they're super into something. They're in this feedback loop that to me is very much like love. Love is only what I'll call real love when it's reciprocated. So you get into a feedback loop where I feel this thing, you feel that thing. It's a flywheel. Yeah.

And it's like, oh my God, you're making me feel better. I'm making you feel better. And ah, like you get in this really cool loop. If you're developing a skill and you're getting good at it, and let's say that they're in intellectual circles or they're teaching or whatever, and so they get into that flywheel around the education portion. So what they're actually getting good at is teaching that thing versus doing that thing. Now they could flip it and decide I'm going to go get good at that thing instead of

getting good at teaching it. But what you'll find is there are certain personality types or make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop Applant Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more.

See Store online for details. Personality elements that are necessary to be successful in business and the one that takes everybody by surprise, you must be able to self-soothe. And if you can't self-soothe, you'll never win as an entrepreneur because you're thrown into an environment, not only is the market full of chaos, but the amount that you can do as one person is so tiny

that now you've got to get a whole large group of people to galvanize around an idea and a direction, get all of them pointed in the same way and moving at speed. Then it's all going to break down because one day somebody's dog is going to have been hit by a car that day. Their kid is having a fit. COVID's going to happen. COVID happens.

And so now, so you're like, wait, all I want to do is economics. Like when I read the books, I'm on fire. I feel the way that I want to feel. But when I'm dealing with HR, I don't feel the way that I want to feel. And so a thousand little moments like that led them to just, they kept hitting a barrier and finding, ooh, when I'm teaching it, when I'm reading about it, when I'm studying it, when I'm alone with the idea, I'm in the loop that I want to be in.

And then when I try to organize other people and like even dealing with the administration or maybe they don't even understand business where they have like some people have conflicted. ideas around business. And so it's just enough of those little nudges away from one side and towards another that they get really good at one thing and it doesn't monetize well. Right. Yeah. And if you look at it, you know, I know you've talked a lot about this in the past, but, you know, kind of the inspiration as Seneca, Simon Seneca, so you know, finding your why or whatever, you know, it's easy to optimize for that in economic terms with money or in influence in science. We have citation counts. That's our metric. That's our lucre.

What is to you the purpose of wealth? Because obviously you're optimizing for financial success, but for impact as well. What is the purpose of this? I've had billionaires on. I've been fortunate to have billioners on the podcast. Everyone gives a different answer, which is not the same as like a scientist. You get five scientists. I want to understand how quarks work.

I want to understand how the cosmos came to be. I want to understand the DNA replication. But what is the purpose of wealth, at least as you see it, Tom? to me it's all about what are you trying to build so I very fortunately learned truly in a visceral sense that money can't buy happiness very early and I'll make that more specific money doesn't influence your neurochemistry the way that you want it to so what happens is at least if you grew up like I grew up sort of middle to lower middle class you looked at wealthy people especially in the 80s when it was like that was celebrated and amazing and every john

his film was set in a neighborhood in Chicago that I wanted to live in. And, you know, I looked at that and thought they were cool and amazing and it was everything that I ever wanted. And, you know, so I had this sense of like, they're cool. I'm sort of lame. I want to be that. And so if I get rich, I will feel about myself the way that I feel about them now. And money can't do that. So money won't help you. So whatever insecurity you have, whatever thing about yourself that you don't like all of that's going to follow you. And so I can make you as rich as humanly possible, and it can't touch that part. And unfortunately, I mean, maybe fortunately, in fact, fortunately, the only thing that really

matters in life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. And you don't need to be wealthy to feel good about who you are. And there's a whole formula that I have for that. But when I think about then, why then do people keep chasing money? because even I'm still chasing money. And if I know that that's not true and I've spent a whole lot of energy in my life making sure that I do feel good about myself

when I'm by myself, then why do things with revenue in mind? And the answer is because it lets you build. And if it is true that money at its very nature, and this is an idea I'm obsessed with, don't think about things. Think about the nature of things. Once you start thinking about what the nature of money is,

now you understand why people chase it. So it's not going to help you feel better about yourself, but it is a way to basically capture your time and energy and carry it across time without devaluing it. And so now it's like, whoa, you're saying that right now I can spend my time in a way that can result in something that I can take with me across time and space. That's the only thing that you can do that carries forward like that. Every other use of your time, it terminates then and there.

maybe you have a memory, like if it's an experience or something like that, and that's useful to be sure, but even those tend to degrade over time. Whereas if you can get good at investing in a way that the economics are captured and preserved, what's really being captured is the time and the energy. And so now you can essentially aggregate all that fruitful time and energy, and now you can point it at something. And the reason that matters is when you take diffuse energy, right, I have however much time I have left in my life.

But it's sort of evenly spread out the energy that I can. use. But if I can capture it in the form of money, now I've got a magnifying glass. And now I can build something. I can aim that magnifying glass and actually change the world. And so you think of a magnifying glass turns this diffuse, you know, radiation from the sun and just something. Entropy. Exactly. And it will light shit on fire. And so that's exactly what people can do with their time and energy by turning it into money first. Then you can concentrate it and you can create something absolutely spectacular. And so once people understand that's the nature of money, that's the nature of work, now you don't expect it to be something that it's not,

which is it's not going to make me feel better about myself, but it is going to allow me to build something. So if I can build something, that makes me feel better about myself. Now you get into this loop. So like my mission is to make sure that nobody gets to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset, makes me feel like I matter, gives me meaning and purpose, but I need money to do it. And so I've been very thoughtful in my life about doing things that allow me to capture that energy. I want to ask you and feel free

we can always cut this out. But you made a conscious decision, if I remember correctly, not to have children. And I always say, you know, people are greedy because they want to teleport, they want to live forever, and they want to take their money with them, and they want to take their houses with them. And I said, you can teleport, Tom, you can actually, there's a physicist telling you,

you can teleport, you just can't go. In other words, you can teleport your values, your mindset, your philosophy. even your, you know, even your DNA, if that matters to you, and I'm less of a fan of like how important DNA and blood matters. But with a child, and, you know, I'm blessed to have children. I feel like I'm, by the way. Yeah, yeah, right.

But I'm blessed to at least make this teleportation of me and my wife and our values into the future. And I'm curious. And again, it's not saying you want to talk about. We can cut it out. No, I love it. Let's fucking go. Ask you the hard questions.

I'm about it. I feel like you have so much impact on so many. people around the world, but, you know, there is a difference. And I don't just mean biological kids. Some people can't have kids, you know, ideological kids you're making a lot of. What was that choice like? Why was it consciously done in a way that, you know, I feel like if you have a stake in the future, as you do clearly, oftentimes you want to incentivize that by your own children or by ideological children. So why was that a kind of, I don't mean to ask, you know, prior or anything, but why was it a conscious decision not to have children, as I understand, unless I'm...

Oh, no, no, no, you're right on the money. And I'm so not sensitive about this, so you can ask it as hard as you want. Okay, fine. So the way that I see it is this. I really want kids. Like, I really want kids. I could write you a poem about the transformational nature of that. That would convince you that I had kids because I really understand what that's about,

partly because I big brothered for a kid for eight and a half years and I see how they become like this thing that you care about and you love and you want to protect and so like I get it. The only thing I want more than I want to have kids is to not have kids. And so it was this like, oh man, do I, because I will regret not having children when I'm old. Like I'm so aware of that. And so my thing is going to every decision with your eyes wide open. understand everything is a trade-off. So Thomas Soul, I think, is a brilliant economist. And he says, there's no utopia, people.

There is just trade-offs. That's right. And so to have children would be this beautiful trade-off. And I would get something absolutely extraordinary in terms of the upside. But the life that I've worked so hard to construct for myself is so joyful and full of fulfillment that I was like, I'm trading unknown for an unknown. And it may be better. and I may do it and go, oh my God, of course.

Like, how could I have ever thought that I didn't want to do this? And I got a piece of advice and it really, and I remember when he said it to me, I said, this is the best advice I'm ever going to get on having kids. Entrepreneur, a successful guy, and I was really debating it. And I was like, look, I love building so much. I don't want anything to pull me away from that. And I'm like really concerned. Yeah.

So what do I do? Have kids, not have kids. He goes, Tom, have kids, don't have kids. It doesn't matter. But whatever you do, do it all the way. And I was like, whoa, that is really good advice. And so I just decided that I wanted to, I never wanted to have something that made me feel guilty that I was at work. And I thought, I already know, like I have two little dogs. And if I work too much, I start feeling bad because of

the dogs. And I just know myself well enough. I feel a tremendous sense of obligation to help and to do better. And if I have kids, I wouldn't be able to build the business the way that I want to. And that's a tradeoff. And I will miss out on a huge part of the human experience by making that choice. But I also capture something that people with kids won't be able to do, which is to be unconflicted about that thing that you're doing and that there is nothing because I'm building the company with my wife. So it's like, the more I invest in my marriage, the more I can invest in the company. And I don't have anything that's, you know, sort of calling me or wanting. wanting me home. And to make matters worse, I'm very close with my extended family. So all of that

sense of connection and camaraderie and love and joy that comes from the familial environment, I get from them. But as they die off, I really am going to say, fuck, I gave up a lot to do all of those things. And in that, and I've tried to run the thought experiment of whether it will be cold comfort to me that I have built these things and all of that. And I come to one inescapable truth about the human condition. The only thing that matters is your frame of reference. And so if in that moment I say, you sacrificed like an idiot. You gave up, you could have children at your bedside right now, taking care of you, loving you, and you sold that out for what? For a company to help strangers halfway around the world for money, I'm disgusted. What were you thinking? And if that's

my frame of reference, it will be devastating emotionally. And I will be ruined. But what I know is that I don't need to choose that frame of reference. And the other frame of reference is to say, you built something that mattered and it impacted people's lives and you optimized for joy while you were doing it, that the pursuit of that thing gave you so much, that there were days where you were giddy looking around. Like, this fight that I'm doing to build this company, win or lose, has been the most fun I've ever had in my life. And you really tried to maximize your potential and to be fulfilled, to matter,

to do things that help. And that was awesome. And so if now you wish that you had had kids, more than that, do whatever you need. But don't lose sight of what you were really doing and what the frame of reference. was that got you here. And I find any decision in your life, you can just flip your frame of reference. It's the same truth, but you look at it from one angle and it feels terrible. You look at it from another angle and suddenly you're like, wow, that actually feels amazing. So I am very thoughtful about how I frame the things in my life, especially the things I can't

change. It wasn't just, you know, oh, we're frivolous and we won't be able to take as many trips to Europe. That's certainly true, although not too many people are, you know, taking world trips right now, right? So what do you think is the most misunderstood thing about either you or business? And in other words, there are concepts that are misunderstood by the general public entropy. We talked about that. Maybe we'll talk a little bit more. I mean, one of my favorite things to think about is, if I ask you, Tom, like, how can I make your life twice as good right now? Like, if I give you, you know, twice as much money, does it make your life twice as good? Not really. I mean, can only water ski behind one yacht at a time, right? Not how I spend my money, but yes,

Because I go immediately to how much faster could I build and would that really help? But then if I ask you, how could I make your life half as good? There are an infinite number of ways, right? That would be very easy. Your dog, whatever. With kids, it's even more so. So people kind of neglect that optionality that there is this network effect. There is this entropic dependency and there's more availability of states that your life could be worse than it could be better.

That's really interesting. And for that reason, which is the definition of entropy, it's disorder to order. and then it's much harder to get ordered and focusing the light, like you said before, it's organizing energy, the sun puts out a lot of energy, but it's not as well organized until we use it on. So I'm asking, what is the most misunderstood part about you, your life, the businesses that you make, what seems easy to people is really hard, what's really hard that seems easy? How do you like parcel out?

Because you only have, you know, this limited resource of time, although I want to get into other aspects that are limited in my opinion. But how do you allocate resource? to direct them entropically to focus into the sunlight beam of laser intensity that you do so exquisitely well. Well, so in terms of what do people misunderstand, I don't know. I don't spend a lot of time. I just don't get that feedback.

It's not like I'm doing some heroic thing to avoid it or anything. I haven't got a lot of feedback. But in terms of what people misunderstand about business, it's really emotional regulation. And so I've seen a lot of people that were far smarter than I. they either don't have the stamina or they can't they can't deal with the emotional pain of failure and because to learn you must fail if you can't reorient yourself to not worrying about that you're never going to make it so that's that's the part in business i'm always trying to get people are about me that i'm trying to get people to understand i am not smarter than the average person

I'm not a fast thinker. I am a obsessive thinker, so I end up thinking deeply about things, but I'm not a fast thinker. But despite that, I've been able to put together a useful set of ideas and skills that allow me to move forward because I can emotionally regulate myself, deal with failures, and then let the knowledge from the failure stack. That's like my real superpower. Now, how do I allocate the resources that everything is gold-driven? like what is your goal? This is the thing that the number of people that come up to me, usually as an entrepreneur,

and they're like, all right, Tom, I'm really struggling. Like, what's the key? And I'm like, don't say a word. I'm going to make a prediction. I'm going to ask you what your goal is. And you're going to tell me you know exactly what it is. Then you're going to say it out loud, and it's going to be really vague. And they're like, no, I got it.

And so then I ask, cool, what's your goal? I want to win a gold medal. and I'm like, amazing. In what? The Olympics? Yes, the Olympics. Fantastic. Summer or winter?

Summer. Great. Swimming or tennis? Swimming? Fantastic. Backstroke? Freestyle medley? Like, what are we doing?

People think they're clear because they have that like initial sort of ballpark thing that they want to do. Passion, right? Yeah. And the answer people actually give when I say, okay, what's your goal? I want to help people. It's not a business. I want to be famous. Right.

It's so vague. So, like, you have to get laser targeted. What by when and how much? Like, when you get that focused on what it is that you're trying to do, then we can back into the next 15 minutes because they're, you know where you want to be, you know where you are. And so if you can get good at identifying that gap, the entropic principle, the thing, that's the problem, then we can start figuring out what our proposed solution is.

Once we think we know our proposed solution to the problem that stands between the, us and our goal, now I know what to do in the next 15 minutes. I know whether I need a racket or a swimming pool. And until you get that kind of clarity on what it is you need to become the best in the world at in order to achieve your goal, you can't move forward. And so allocating my energies is always around first principles thinking around that scientific loop that we talked about, knowing where I'm trying to get to. And I want to pivot a little bit because I see you pivoting so much in life and it's so commendable. Because I think, you know, one of the the lessons I've gotten from interviewing 10 Nobel Prize winners to date is that when they

get bored of something, when they're not having fun, that's the key moment. That's the question, you know, they say about marriages. If a psychologist is interviewing somebody, you know, a couple and they're having a problem. If one of them, like, rolls their eyes or something, that person, they're going to get divorced. Like, it's just a 99% correlation. When you're not having fun as a scientist, which you normally don't think of it, you think about, you know, very bookish and studios and, but it's actually really fun. And it's very creative, which people don't often appreciate as well. What is your rubric, again, your metrics-focused guy? So what do you app business has a metric? It's built in. But I see your, you know, kind of killer, you know,

app or your secret power, superpower is actually your podcast, your interviews, the conversations that you have, the deep dives that you take, both you and you should do a live and now you're doing it here. How do you know when you're doing well as an interviewer? Like what, like what is going on in your mind? What app? Because I know you've got an app running in your back. Like, I'm doing good, I'm doing bad. Like, I'm sitting here, you tell me about the, you know, optionality that you decided with not having kids. And I'm like, that's kind to give me chills. Like, that's really cool. At least he's thought about it. He's not some selfish, you know, a self-absorbed guy. But how do you know when you're interviewing somebody?

Like, give us, like, that app that's running in your mind. Because you're obviously very... I have two different interview styles. So it partly depends on which interview I'm running. If I'm doing the, you just wrote a book and I'm trying to help you give the best interview you're ever going to give to distill the book, then it's like, I map it out beforehand. And I'm like, how close are we getting to stringing together the best answers they've ever given to these questions into one, like, nice, concise package. Not like the first time they ever told the secret, but the best time. Yeah, so I find their loop, and then I help distill their loop down, and then hopefully

have tangents that I want to go into that really clarify and are fresh. And so that's interview style number one. Interview style number two is that they're on a topic that I'm so fascinated by. I know the interview is going well when I completely forget that I'm interviewing them. And I'm just locked in. And this was, so about two years ago now, I pulled my team aside and I said, look, I'm not having fun anymore. And I'm doing the same interview over and over and over. And it's not interesting to me.

And so we're going to need to broaden the type of interview that I can do. And what was happening was I was interviewing mindset people. And it was getting to the point where I could give a better mindset interview than answer than they could. And so I was like, this isn't fun anymore. And to expand it, it was, there needed to be some niche, like what's going to be that thing? And so the idea was, okay, well, I'm building a mindset so I can deploy it against something. And so now I'm going to start bringing people on that I'm just fascinated by that are, you know, whether it's neuroscientist or an astrophysicist, you know, people that, And I'm like, look, the audience, we didn't build that audience.

Right. So it's going to be a rough. We're going to go through the desert for a while. And we will come out the other side because eventually we will gather a different crowd. But it was two years of like, ooh, our growth is really slowed down. But now as it clicks over and, you know, we built this other community, it's like we're demolishing our all-time records and just going crazy. But you really, I mean, to bring. it back to your initial question, like, you have to know what you're trying to deliver to

the audience to know the metric by which to judge it. And do you find that like things that are seen to an an unrelated, you know, I call it for you, your forklift moment, things that you would have never thought would come into play in a business and then, okay, I know how to drive a forklift and that's going to save my ass one day, but are there things serendipitously that you kind of, quote unquote, count on and that contributes to your success? Or is it more methodical? Because I see this paradox in you. It's a method. methodical and also very, very kind of not carefree, but just open to serendipity. Yes.

And now I'm going to say, it's not a quote, but an idea that you'll actually be able to tell me if this is real, because I've quoted this so many times and every time I'm like, I'm pretty sure I remember this right, that most Nobel prizes are awarded where two areas overlap. So it's like chemistry and physics or whatever. And so. It's like Rosalind Franklin discovered DNA. She was a physicist.

they wanted for medicine. Correct. Correct. All right. I'm very happy to hear that that's real. Now, that I think is the reason I've been successful, the way that I have. So... The synergy.

Yeah, because what ends up happening, my perfect example is... So almost every 10 years, I've ended up disrupting myself and moving into something completely different. So I start in filmmaking. Then I go to technology software, security software, of all things. Then I go into nutrition. No software, nothing to do with filmmaking, nothing. and now into media. So at Quest, what helped was while I was a filmmaker before.

And so I built out a whole studio inside of a protein bar company, and social media ends up becoming our thing. It wasn't even called social media back then. So it was like nobody was doing it, but because I was a filmmaker by trade, it made sense to me. And so we were creating content as a company before other companies were doing it.

End up being one of the things that helps us blow up. Now you move into media, start a comic book division at Impact, theory, go into it. And as soon as I see the distribution model, I'm like, wait, I just came from nutrition where we're distributing to 90,000 points of distribution. I've got down to the shelf, like what's moving, how many units I have. Yeah, I mean, it's like you're getting real-time data. And because of that, I can do marketing in specific regions and not others, and I know what flavors work where. And so it's like with that data, I can steer the company. But in comics, it's like,

from the 90s, I'm not kidding, one distributor was a joke. And so I'm like, guys, you can't do this. And so we got on a call with them. And I'm like, hey, we need this data, this data, this data. And they're like, we're not going to supply that. So I'm like, well, then we're not going to print comics anymore. Like it was so self-evident. I'm like, looking around to all the other comic distributors.

I'm like, guys, you can't put up with this. Like, this is insane. And so we immediately pivoted hard to going pure digital. And so then literally we hard pivot, pure digital. COVID hits. Now the comic world is like imploding because none of them are digital. We're popping off because we've. gone digital. And it's like, I never would have moved that quickly if I didn't have the experience

from being in the nutrition industry. So it's like you end up going, whoa, like this thing that I never would have realized the driving the forklift or people that don't know that story. You know, my dad forcing me to work in a paint factory as a kid learning how to, I had to get certified to drive forklift and angry at my dad, like thinking this is the dumbest thing ever. I'm like, why are you making me do this? But in the bill you household, every summer you had to have a job. And so, yeah, I ended up paint factories, paint warehouses, because my dad worked for a paint company.

And then, flash forward, 15, 17, maybe even 20 years later, I remember how long. And the equipment shows up at Quest. And we look around and we're like, how are we getting it off the semi? Like, what have we done? We've just taken delivery of like hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and a big semi-truck backs up and there's no way to get it off the truck and into the warehouse. And my partner's like looking around and, oh my God, if only we knew how to drive forklift. And I'm like, guys, I actually do know how to drive a forklift.

And so went, got the forklift from a neighbor in the, you know, the complex, unloaded everything. And I literally looked into a camera and was like, dad, wax on, wax off. That's crazy. And so, yeah, skill acquisition is the name of the game. You never know when you're going to need something. Look, be intentional about the skills that you acquire, but don't be afraid to reinvent because it does end up coming back in some way. Going back to your Olympics analogy, you know,

I feel like the most successful people are like the biathletes. Like they're not the best skiers, not the best shooters, but they're best guys who can ski and shoot at the same time and maximize that vector, that projection into that space. I want to pivot in the last few minutes to my standard three questions I ask all my guess. But before we do, I want to talk about NFTs because you've obviously gotten really interested in it. First of all, I remember you're saying, like, your goal has become Disney 2.0, 3.0, whatever. Now you're obviously incredibly invested into the, invested, you know, in terms

of your intellectual capital, into NFTs and so forth. Those on the surface, I mean, there's comics and so forth, but those on the surface don't appear to be completely co-aligned. If I'm your career coach, like, can you explain to me, how do those dovetailed together, or do they not have to? No, they do. Okay, so I'm obsessed. I hope we got a little bit of time here. So, as much as you have. I have a whole strategy. So when we started impact theory, I said to the team, our job is the stay in business long enough to find our moment of disruption. And I didn't know what it was going to be. I could not have predicted that it would end up being NFTs.

But as an entrepreneur, you have to look for cultural energy. And there's been something really weird happening in the culture that I round to. And I don't know how you feel about swearing on the show. I've done it a couple times already. But you can beep it out. That's what I call. There's fuck you. Fuck the man energy building up.

And, you know, authoritarian. Yeah, like, so I'm watching this. And I'm like, oh, there's something going on. Like, there's all this friction between the generations. Like, what is this? And I'm beginning to realize that when you look at tectonic plates, there's all this pressure building up. Oh, my God, you actually know the person.

So Eric Weinstein says somewhere. I don't remember where I heard. I don't think he said it to me. But he said, the generations, the part of all this friction is that the old generation isn't passing the baton to the new generation. That's right. And remember when he said it, he is one of the smartest people on the planet. I sit at his feet constantly.

But it's the one thing he's ever said where I thought, no one ever hands off the baton. It's just that, historically, physicality was such a part of our day-to-day life that the old generation couldn't hold on to power. They were just outperformed by young people. But now everything is becoming information, and therefore experience is more useful than youth, vigor, and physical strength.

I say wisdom is more important than knowledge. Exactly. Well said. So they're able to cling to power in a way that previous generations couldn't. And so you're getting all this friction building up between the generations.

And the housing bubble happens, burst. Satoshi writes a white paper, creates fuck you man money. And so no one's ever going to lord this over us again. We understand this decentralized movement and we're going to do this whole thing.

And so here, I am going, okay, I've got this huge incumbent in Disney that has done an extraordinary job. I am in nothing but awe of my competition. Like what they've done is absolutely breathtaking. And I'm looking at it going, okay, they've got a 90-year head start. They've got billions of dollars in IP and billions of dollars in revenue. How am I ever going to... Brand and awareness.

Exactly. How am I ever going to like really have my moment? Then I start looking at the blockchain. I see what's happening there. somebody introduces me to the idea of digital scarcity like six years ago, and I remember seeing it going, that's going to change my business forever. But then probably forgot about it because the tech wasn't there yet. And as it goes, people start creating all this incredible infrastructure. And then about eight months as of when we're recording this ago, somebody says the letters, NFT, in a string to me

for the first time. And I, within 72 hours, have allocated millions of dollars in capital. Because I realize one thing that NFTs does that gives me what I need in order to actually take on Disney. And that is going back to that, in fact, the magnifying analogy I got from thinking about why NFTs are changing the world. Because it isn't that they're collectibles. That's cool. And that's like a part of what makes it work. It's not even the technology, which the technology is so important.

And to think from first principles, you have to understand it. But that technology allows for companies now to really harness. in an efficient way, the energy of a community, which has not yet been possible. So what it's opened is this ability, all that fuck you to the man, energy that's pent up, you're able to take a distributed mentality and say, hey, what I'm going to do, I'm going to create products, but I'm going to let you as the community capture the long-tail value of that. Now, the second that became technologically possible for the audience to capture 90% of the long-tail value of the products that they help promote, you just change.

everything. Why? Because the current incumbent companies will not be able to make the mental switch. This is exactly how incumbents get disrupted every time they calcify into dogma and they end up getting disrupted by somebody who just has come up in a new world. It's so fun having a scientist so I can use all these quotes. Max Planck, right? Science does not advance one inside at a time. It advances one funeral at a time. Why? Because people cannot let go of these ideas that worked. They worked. You built a career on them. Kodak did great, right? But you can't do it when you see the digital camera, even though you invent it. So it becomes this whole quagmire.

So now you get a company like me, all I'm looking for is a moment of disruption. And you're telling me all I have to do is give up a ton of revenue, no problem. Because what I actually need is the magnifying glass. I don't actually need that much revenue. It's very easy to give that away in the short term because it comes back in the long term. So imagine. I'm not trying to build the next Netflix right now. That's a distribution platform.

oh God, the thought of trying to build that, no way. Like that's unimaginable amounts of capital to try and build. Not going to do that. But I can build something on the back of NFTs that allows me to just get my community absolutely fever pitched because they know. So we have a product coming up called Mary Mods. It's a story. We want to turn it into a franchise, but we're making an NFT of it first, which they can then buy. And then if I actually pull off turning that into a franchise,

that collectible ends up having real value. And so you create an incentive in the audience because they're going to, on the secondary market, we'll take a very small amount. They'll capture the absolute lion's share of that. And now, if I go to Netflix and say, hey, guys, all you holders of the Merrimods project, we're going to be pitching Netflix. I want you to stand in the parking lot with a sign that says, I'll watch MaryMod's. right and if I can get and that's a bit tongue and cheek but if I can get 5,000 people to activate to show up

to call in to whatever then it's a very different negotiation and so I learned an immutable truth at Quest which is whoever's closest to the audience controls the negotiation and if you've added value to the audience's life and then ask them to do something that's sort of low effort for them but huge in fact for you yes they'll do it it's absolutely incredible and the blockchain is what unlocks my ability to capture that energy by giving them products that they capture the value of. And it's just like, I say this to as many entrepreneurs as I can, as fast as I can, about how they've got to switch the way they think. You need an NFT strategy.

This is about activating your community and letting them participate in the growth of the companies and products that they help support. It's never existed before. So I want to start to wrap up with that concept, but now apply to science, my domain. So it used to be that professors would get decent salary. I'm a public employee of the state of California, but I have freedom. I had academic freedom. I had all the upside in the past, but none of the administrative, bureaucratic, all the different hurdles and sort of legal compliance that I have to go through every single day

that I have almost no time to teach. By the way, they never taught me how to teach. I had to learn that myself. But also there I'm expected to do research, and I'm not making as much. money as I could and I see my students that go to Google and Apple and come here or something like that, they're making twice the salary of a public employee. So I'm asking, you know, on behalf of other scientists, is there a strategy or, you know, where you could see it from the creator side, you talked about from the broader platform side of how they could be participant beneficiary owners of this intellectual

property, but somebody has to create. Now, in science, you know, you'd like to think, oh, science belongs to the public. And it does if the public pays your salary, pays for my research grants, pays for my graduate students. But what if they don't? I guess I worry about a slightly dystopian phenomenon, and I'm hoping that you'll disabuse me over that notion, which is that if we NFTIs, you know, Andrew Huberman, who was on your podcast recently saying, this is great, you know, we're going to look for, you know, first microscope picture of this, you know, this gene, it was I actually found it very scary because privatizing science is antithetical to what I think of as science. I actually find that very frightening. And so I'm worried that could we become a victim

of the success and the scalability that you evangelize so successfully if NFT's going to science. In other words, I get the case for business, for profit, or whatever. Science, I would like to think is for the public. But along those lines, we also, you know, don't do a great job selling it to the public. I mean, a scientist, they say, is outgoing if he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. So we're not, we have a great, we have a great script. and we're terrible actors. That's amazing. Are you worried about, you know, kind of like ice nine phenomena where it's just going to go across the world.

What a great reference. Yeah. So I am not. So I will disabuse you that. You're going to see a wonderful future. Look, let's always remember Thomas Sol is correct. Everything is a tradeoff. Right.

But here's how it will actually play out. So the big concern, sort of irony of ironies, the big criticism of NFTs is why would I ever pay money for something that's available to everybody? Yeah. So they're going to remain available. to everybody for a couple reasons. One, it's the same reason when somebody buys art, the vast majority of people want to put it somewhere people can see it.

And the adoption of art in NFTs is a hundred times, a thousand times, more than art that's going to hang in your house. Why? Because you can flex it. Now, there's this idea of the God neuron, right? That some people just have a neuron in their brain that makes them much more responsive to religious experience. and so they have this sense of awe and wonder,

and so they can't fathom how somebody could not believe in God. I think there's also what I'll call an ownership neuron where there are just some people, they just want to own it. Even if it's a star in the sky and everyone gets to look at it, to them it just matters. It means something to own. Now I happen to have that neuron. So I'm like, yo, that's mine.

I own it. That's in my wallet. Now, there's a whole side to NFTs where there's the way up to think of NFTs, It's NFTs with matrix code hiding inside of it. Right. It's not like putting it in a free port in the Bahama. You can't see the code, but it's there. And so I can imbue it with utility.

Yeah. So it isn't just that, oh, you are the, like I saw this meme that was like, oh, I get NFTs now. If I own it, I'm the only one that's allowed to pretend that I actually own it. And when you don't understand metadata, that's what it seems like. But for instance, we did a project called the Impact Theory Founders Key. Yes. If you have one of the keys, anybody could go screen grab it, and now they have your exact pixel perfect copy of your key.

But if you show up to one of my live events and try to get in, I'm going to scan it and I'm going to see that you don't have metadata and that it's not actually yours. So it's imbued with an intelligent feature that is not repeatable, not replaceable, not breakable, yeah. Exactly. So what I think is going to happen in science, it will be something like this is the first photo of, you know, whatever gene, whatever. Breakthrough Star of a nebula or whatever and the people that want to own it are now going to be able to own it And then when it's a real moment like that becomes culturally significant think about NBA top shot So NBA Topshots done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue Selling moments that just the night before we're free right Anybody can watch.

Tape it anybody can watch now go on YouTube and see it yeah but people still want to own it right and so now when science is finally has this moment where somebody like you or Huberman or whoever can say, hey, public, here is this new discovery for everybody to see, look at it, take it. And by the way, we've got the NFT. Now, they're more incentivized than ever to make sure that the whole world knows about that. Why? Because it makes the NFT more valuable. So now the more famous they can make the information, the more famous they can say, this moment really matters, it leads to this.

and look, people go take the information and people like, oh my God, this leads to this break to, that break through, ah, it's all this stuff is happening because this person shared it with the world. That NFT skyrockets in value in a community that cares about science and cares about NFTs. When I say that over the next,

whatever, 20 years, billions of dollars will be generated, I mean billions of dollars, $3.8 billion were generated in NFTs in August of 2021 alone. So I'll say over the next 20, 25 years, there will be billions of dollars in educational, scientific things that people are going to create in NFTs, that the market will say this was a... It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

Relevant enough moment and a scarce enough supply that this matters. And then most of that value will be transacted on the secondary market. So the community gets to capture that value. We talked about how important that is. But you can get... It redounds to the benefit of the create. Right. For several reasons.

One, they'll get a royalty if they're smart. They don't have to, but that will certainly help fund more science and all of that. But also, they become known as the person that did that. The NFT matters. They become sort of celebrities within that culture, which get some more attention. And trust me, attention opens doors. And it just becomes this incredible loop. Yeah.

Yeah. And the last thing I'll say about that, I also think there's a parallel kind of metaverse with blockchain in general that you could have things which are scarce in science like proof of discovery. Proof, you know, I discovered that the universe is expanding and accelerating rate. Well, that's pretty darn cool, but I'm not ready. I have to validate it, verify it. But if somebody else, if I submit it to peer review, you know, which is like the ultimate centralized, you know, a finance of science, then someone could steal that, block my paper. I never get a published. They discover, they claim discovery of it, right? But if you have proof of actual accomplishment, proof of discovery, whatever you want to call it, that could revolutionize the science. That's huge. That's huge. Once you timestamp it on the blockchain, that's it. That's open and then verifiable. The next kind of stage in this, in this conversation, I want to just maybe pivot to one last thing or revolving, you know, crypto and so forth. And that is, you know, revolves around the three things that are here. One is a, that's a piece of gold. This is a bookmark from my first book. I'm going to leave with you. So this is gold.

This is a meteorite. This is 4.2 billion years old. This is your gift for having, for coming on the Into the Impossible podcast. So that's four billion years old. Now, talk about proof of work, okay? Yeah. So for that to occur, you had to have a supernova explode in the local arm of our galaxy imbuing the local arm that we would later inhabit with dense metals to make a core of the earth, to crystallize light metals and so forth, to the gravitational field, not be too heavy like Jupiter and just have gas and suck up ice and we can live there. So for us to be here, that thing had to be there and is a result of an explosion. Gold comes from the collision of two neutron stars.

Talk about proof of work that occurred billions of years ago as well, and then eventually migrated its way to where Earth would form in the solar system and is in the crust at some level. How do you, and then I have this book, and I have a quest cookie over here, and these are sort of, you know, fungible in some sense or another, but, you know, to the extent of convincing the ordinary average person, you know, of the value of something that, as you say, is replicatable, is on the content side, when they see this, there's only one of those, and it took a neutron star explode, you know, for that to create it. How do you cause that phase change, you know, to use a physics term, in just ordinary people to say, like, this mess. ed object, you know, which weighs nothing, can be transported. We and I both had a Michael Saylor on, you know, he loves to wax emphotatically about, you know, Bitcoin's travels up the speed or, you know, try doing that with gold or whatever. But, you know, how do you convince people

of that? You know, when it's not in our nature as human beings, we like scarcity. Our mind thrives on finite games of collecting things like Nobel Prizes and cookies and gold. How do you convince the average person to go against maybe that, is that genetic, I guess is what I'm getting to. Is there something visceral in the human being that maybe distrust the ephemeral, the digital, the meta? Or do you think that's just a matter of time and maybe I'm a little awesome? Yeah, I think it is literally only change. So people have a hard time changing. So if you have come to value the physical, if you have the amazing frame of reference that you have for explaining this is two neutron stars colliding and that's the only way that we get gold, for you, that's so cool

that it's like, okay, it's neat that you can do like mathematically sound money with computers, but that doesn't have the romance of the colliding stars. Right. But not everybody has the understanding. When you say neutron stars, like, yo, you know what that means, right? Most people are like, I don't know what that is. That's like, it's esoteric, right? Whereas what they really respond to is just what they grew up with.

So if you grew up and your friends are like, oh, you know, did your parents? parents give you any ETH today, are you using your wallet to, you know, pick up a new skin on Fortnite? It just is. It's, you know, David Foster Wallace, this is water. For them, it will be self-evident that that's just a superior, it is the way that money is handled, right? So the transitional generation is the only generation that, like, we really have to think

about. And so where it starts is, can they generate enough of a use case? so that you want it. And so Bitcoin and Ethereum as of the time of this recording specifically have done a very good job because you've got people like me and trust me this is not financial advice do your own research. But like when I look at my portfolio and I'm like, guys, I'm making so much money, this is insane. And all I did was listen to somebody who said, Tom, take an amount of money that you're willing to lose and put it in this and just see what happens. I finally did it once I actually understood the technology.

And you just see that number going up. Now it's volatile. So I've also seen it go down. But my thesis is to hold. And not to look every day. You talk about Paul about that. Exactly. And so I've seen a lot more up than I've seen down.

And I mean, now it gets into a very complicated question. It's why it has so much value with inflation and all of that. But the transitional generation, there will be a fight. And some people will say, this isn't really valuable. And this is dumb. and look at all these people, and you already see that going on right now. But the use case of it gets pretty profound, pretty fast. And so people that give it a try, I think the overwhelming number of them,

nothing will ever be 100%. The overwhelming number of people that get in will be rewarded either in just it's frictionless money. It's so easy. Like literally today, I had a vendor that I owed 50 ETH to. It's a lot of money. Now, normally I'd have to like, if I can call and deal. deal with all the stuff to get the money and like get it out and get all their numbers and I'm

panicking is this right and I was literally like cool just send me your um your address and I'll send it to you right now and so gives me the address this the address yes that's the address click and you know whatever 90 seconds later he's got the payment wow so it either is better or it isn't in ways that people value and to the extent that it is better in ways of people value it will be adopted. Otherwise, it won't be. I'd love to someday talk to you about, you know, how do you steal man versus straw man different approaches,

but in the limits, in the interest of time, I want to ask you my patented three rapid fire questions all related. Really fast, I want to give you an answer to that because it's actually really important. Yeah, yeah. So you have to hunger to know why and where you're wrong. And the only way that people will hunger to know why and where they're wrong

is if they care more about their goal than being right. And if they build their self-esteem around finding the right answer, rather than being right. If you do that, oh my God, then the world suddenly opens to you. So I am desperate, even though it still hurts, it's embarrassing when I'm wrong and I've said something and somebody's like, that's actually not true. I'm like, oh, God. But now I'm like, cool, give it to me.

It hurts, it stinks, but now it can actually do something. Like you said before, it's like all growth is, you know, revolve some pain or whatever, right, in one way or another. And here's the phrase I want to like, on my tomb cell. Well, let me fold this in. So Arthur C. Clark, 2001 in Space Odyssey. these monoliths that are floating around. They're like time capsules that are going to last a billion years.

What do you put on your billion year lasting time capsule? You ready? Yeah. Lay it on me. Skills have utility. I just want people to understand. You learn something because it lets you do something. And so if you protect your ego and you never learn, then you can't do anything.

And so your entire life becomes about managing your neurochemistry. And you never get to do anything or experiencing anything. But once you're like, I don't value myself for being right. I value myself for identifying the right answer. So I'm more than happy to be wrong. In fact, mistakes and failure are the most information-rich data stream on planet Earth. So I'm more than happy to do that. And in doing that and learning those lessons, I can now do things other people can't do.

And the most fun way to explain that is the most talented athletes on planet Earth were paid millions of dollars to stop Kobe Bryant from putting a ball. in a little hoop. And despite that, he got so good that he scored 81 points in a single game. Against other pros, yeah. Correct. And so it's like, if that doesn't get you excited to go get so good at something that people can't stop you, like they actually can't stop you. Not like I mean that is a theoretical thing.

I mean, literally, they can't stop you. Like, that's superpower, yeah. Yeah. No, I call that humble swagger. You know, if you can balance dichotomies of having appropriate humility, but not being cowardly. The Talmud says the easily embarrassed cannot learn. You can't learn if you're easily embarrassed.

On the other hand, you can't create greatness unless you have a little bit of swagger. Second thing, so that came from Arthur C. Clark, the namesake of my Center for Human Imagination at UCSD that I'm a co-director of. The first, the other comment that usually comes into play is he said, Arthur C. Clark said, the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. That's the title of my podcast. I want to ask you kind of advice to your former self. What aspect of life perplexed you as a 20-year-old, 30-year-old, whatever, that, you know, could you give advice to that person to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible?

What would that advice to your former self be? So the lesson I needed to learn is I was really worried that I wasn't smart enough to be successful. Like that haunted me in a way that no matter how I try to explain it to people they won't understand. I'm talking almost being paralyzed with just like, Did you ever see the movie Amadeus? Yeah. All right. So Solieri was a real life contemporary Mozart.

And he laments to God in the movie. And he says, God, why make me just good enough to recognize that I'll never be as good as Mozart? And I was like, somebody sees me. That's what it's like to be me. I feel like I've been made just smart enough to realize I'll never be really smart. Like I'll never be one of the greats. And that really bothered me. and what I ended up learning, which is encapsulated in a quote,

and I need to look back up who said this because it's so good, you can't make a racehorse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig. And so my life is the answer to the question, what does a really fast pig look like? And so I would have told myself, stop worrying about whether or not you're a racehorse. Just become a fast pig. It's so much better than where you're at now.

You will die. You'll run out of time long before you run out of potential to realize. So stop worrying about whether you're one of the greatest and just get a thousand times better. Right. Yeah, there's a famous story in the Talmud that the famous rabbi goes to heaven. And so I never became like Moses. And God's like, well, Moses didn't get into the promised land. And so you're not getting into your own promised land either.

But I didn't want you to be the next Moses. I wanted you to be the best Rabbi Zusha. That was his name. Well, Tom Bill, it's been an honor getting to interview you. You've influenced my life personally, physically, mentally. And I know millions around the world. And I just want to thank you for your awesome mission that you've been on. May it continue, as we say, to 120.

Thank you, Tom. Thank you for having me, man. This was so fun. Dude, that was one of the most fun interviews I've ever done in my life. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating.

That's DR. Brian Keating. and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.