Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 472: Tom Bilyeu- Quest Nutrition Co-Founder on Overcoming Obesity, Building a $1 Billion Company, Lessons from The Matrix & MORE

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

In this episode Sal, Adam and Justin interview Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of the $1 billion company, Quest Nutrition and host of Impact Theory. Tom struck a serious chord with the entire Mind Pump Crew as he discussed growing up in a morbidly obese family, his rocky journey to the goal of 6-pack abs, his business hits and misses, building Quest Nutrition, his philosophical influences and much, much more. Check out Tom at www.impacttheory.com or on all social media @tombilyeu. Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee, Mind Pump's first official sponsor, at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Intro of discussion with Tom Bilyeu (1:28) Tom's early years/beginnings health/mental journey (3:36) Struggles growing up in morbidly obese family / battle with his nutrition (18:35) How did he deal with self doubt/keep pushing forward? (23:33) How did Question Nutrition come about? (42:54) The first bar that doesn't rot / Quest Bar beginning  Impact Theory / how it's involved/ Tom's vision with it (58:47) Tom's thoughts on supplements / keto (1:24:32) Tom current connection/thoughts to exercise and nutrition (1:37:26) Advice from Tom regarding mindset (1:49:00) Related Links/Products mentioned: Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell Impact Theory (Tom's website/Podcast) Inside Quest - Podcast/show on YouTube Pre-Suasion - Robert Cialdini Phantoms of the Brain - V.S. Ramachandran Spark - John Ratey Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Fankl @TomBilyeu (Instagram) Kickstarter People Mentioned: Joseph Campbell Ron Penna (Quest Co-Founder) Mike Osborn (Quest Co-Founder) Kevin Kelly - 1000 True Fans Robert Cialdini V.S. Ramachandran Dominic D'agustino - Twitter - @DominicDAgosti2 Peter Attia John Ratey Victor Frankl Jaime Wheal Firas Zahabi - Twitter - @Firas_Zahabi

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Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Probably one of my, if not my- No, I get to say this one was my favorite. Dude, you guys always get the favorites. I did, I'm gonna have to, this one's my favorite. I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon here, bro, for sure mine. I mean, we've had a lot of guests that I think

like hit really home with like one of us or whatever, but he couldn't be more in each one of our wheelhouses. From his entrepreneurship, the business side of him, his neuroscience mind, his star wars mind, even that he's literally connected. He had every one of us. Yeah, I think. Me, Adam and Justin had a child. We all have like, googly eyes.

Yeah, we were. No, it's, um, uh, cannot wait to do more. I mean, so we interviewed, uh, Tom Billu, who's the founder of Quest. Yeah, co-founder of Quest. A Quest and I mean, if founder of, uh, impact theory. Impact theory. And if you don't know Quest, uh, nutrition, obviously maker of Quest bars, one of America's great,'s great success stories in business. A lot of

people don't realize this, but that company was one of the fastest growing companies when it first came out, valued at one point at over a billion dollars, just dominated their segment of the fitness supplement food industry. And Tom and his partners are why that happened. And he talks about that. But he also talks about his own personal journey through obesity and some of the struggles he went through and his own self-awareness of moving through that process, which I found very fascinating.

I found a lot of what he was saying was a lot of what we encounter with clients that we've worked with except Tom is just so super aware of the whole process and You know he articulated the whole process very well. It's just overall just a fantastic conversation Honest to God one of our absolute favorite interviews you can find more about Tom Bill you by just basically looking them up Tom Bill you on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, his last name is spelled B-I-L-Y-E-U. So here we are, here's Mind Pump talking to Tom Billu.

I wanna ask you about how you got into Quest. I know you have an interesting story, a personal story about your own fitness, and what got you into this? Well, it was quite the journey. So I grew up in a morbidly obese family and had watched the really destructive power that food can have over people. And it's an amazing drug man, and the food industry who, I don't think they were sinister,

but they've done a really good job of understanding brain chemistry and how to manipulate it through food. And so you get the sort of downward spiral that we're in now. But you have to back up in terms of how I got into the business side of things. So I met the guys who ended up becoming my co-founders and quest nutrition long before we founded Quest. And I was trying to be a filmmaker, they met me and said, look, you're coming to the world with your hand out and you're never going to be able to control your art like that.

So if you really want to be an effective director who escapes the pain that so many artists go through where other people, they commission your art and therefore they get a control the direction that it goes, you really need to understand business and you need to get access to resources. And so they said, why don't you come work for us? We're starting this technology company, it was called Awareness Tech, and we need a copywriter. And but don't think of yourself like a copywriter.

Like understand that you can have any position that you want in the company, you just have to become the right person for the job. And so I was just young enough and just dumb enough to take them seriously. I dove in and I started learning anything and everything that I could. And you guys see the movie The Matrix?

Of course. All right, so let me have that movie. Hold it about a million times. That's my favorite movie, and it's my favorite movie because it changed my life. And it gave me the allegory that I needed to understand that I was in control of my own life, and that the limitations that I perceived

as being external were actually internal. And you know, there is no spoon. There is no spoon, right? That's like one of the best ways to move the episode. I love that, sure. So external, where I actually internal. And there is no spoon. There is no spoon, right? That's like, that's what's moving up. That's what's moving up. So yeah, I knew you were gonna hit it off. So, you know, I see that. I hear this, there is no spoon.

And the other things, like when Morpheus says, you know, do you really think that that's air you're breathing? And when he has a sort of epiphany moment of realizing that he's in a system that isn't controlled by muscular strength and it's controlled by belief. And look, it doesn't directly translate to the outside world, but I began to ask myself questions like, what's my version of jacking into the matrix?

Well, for me, it was reading. So in reading, especially when I found Audible, because I can assimilate auditory information way faster than I can reading, like, I've tried to speed read, I just can't get the, I can go fast or I can understand, but I can't yet do both. So for me, it was once I learned about Audible and then I could listen to a book at 3x, then it really was like being jacked in the matrix

because I could get the information so much faster. And so that was huge for me and then what was my kung fu, right? So if jacking into the matrix was reading, what did I need to be reading about? And for me, that really was business in the mind and it was beginning to understand my own mind. And so I went super deep on neuro anatomy,

like really beginning to understand the brain, how it works, what it's doing. And this was the breakthrough piece of knowledge for me that was your brain is a three pound lump of jelly encased in your skull and it never sees light. I thought, wait a second. If it never sees light, then everything, like looking at each other right now, right?

This is all our brain's best guess based on electrical chemical inputs that it gets, and then we construct a reality. Now that reality is good enough that we don't bump into a ton of shit, and we can navigate our way around the world, but at the end of the day it's made up, it's a total construct. 100%.

So now I know, okay, my brain is lying to me. It may have good intentions, but it's lying. And it's making things up to try to help me get through the world. But what are the things that it's doing that are actually counterproductive for me? And if I understand them, can I get around them? Can I usurp their processes and begin to use them to my advantage?

And so the gym is, I mean, just to really, you know, connect with you guys, became like this core thing at the center of my being. I absolutely hated it. I still do not enjoy going to the gym, but it is so powerful mentally, all right? And you guys look, you see what it takes to transform your physique. You know the amount of energy, discipline, dedication, over time that it takes to do that. And yet the rest of their life is in shambles. And they're not able to take those same things and make them so powerful as a physical athlete,

as a bodybuilder, whatever the case may be, but they don't translate it to business. They don't translate it to their profession. Somehow, some way, they're not crossing the chasm between all these profoundly universal tools that they happen to be applying to the gym and then actually applying them to other areas of their life. I always found it fascinating because it's all connected,

but I always found it fascinating how you had people who understood the fitness and health side, and they got that, they got that part, they understood food, they understood how food affects them, they understood how to eat to feed their bodies, they understand how to be active and take care of themselves. And then the challenges they had with business and personal relationships.

And then on the flip side, you found people who were excellent in business, excellent with personal relationships. I had many clients like this, could not figure out the fitness side, and you realize it's all kind of the same process. It's all the same understanding how to utilize these things to get what you want,

and why were some of them come easy to us, and others are so extremely challenging and why other people have the reverse. I always found that absolutely fascinating. You've made that connection right now. You said why we have that? Why you've got the fit people who don't understand that? How old are you at this point, Tom?

When is this happening for you? Well, so I really got on my journey of, we'll call it building my mind in my early 20s. I read a book called The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. And, you know, I mean, look, film school is all about psychology. So at the end of the day, you're there, you're trying to learn, like, one of the coolest things they teach you about in film school is the way that anatomy is either working for you or against you. Because if you think of, when you're

a director, you're really trying to orchestrate people's emotions. So if you're going to do that, you really do have to understand neurochemistry, you really do have to understand the way things like attenuation happen, and that there's a muscle in your ear that actually turns down the volume. So if you're in the presence of loud noises, it begins to tighten, you can hear less. So if you want to make a loud noise again, you'd first have to drop the sound to zero and then hit them with something so that the muscle in the ear relaxes. So it really got me thinking about, okay, as somebody trying to orchestrate these motions through narrative, through storytelling, one, you have to just understand humans on a psychological level so that your narrative

is importing something that's really going to resonate with them, but then you have to do it in a way that their physical body is going to allow them to perceive. And so that was the beginning, but then when I read the Power of Myth, not long after that, so call it 2223, that book really changed my life. And it's probably the sort of seminal demarcation point in my, my own education, because what, and it is the reason that I founded Impact Theory, because the book basically says this, you can look all throughout time and history and the way that we transmit ideology is through mythology. So we tell these stories, people actually believe the stories are true, right?

So think about the craziest mythology you've ever heard. At one point, people believed them to be accurate historical tales. So they believed that these stories are true. They transmit this really powerful ideology, which tells us how to live. And in understanding how to live, we're able to make sense of ourselves

and our position in society and all that. And Joseph Campbell's pitch is, people now know that the myths aren't real. And because they know they're not real, they're not taking in the lessons, because they're not taking in the lessons, the mythology's not real, there's no transitional moments profoundly marked through ritual. So back in the day, you can imagine, there was no 40-year-old living with his parents. That just didn't happen, right?

Why? Because at 13, they literally drug you away from your mother. They took you out into the woods and they circumsized you without any sort of anesthetic. They just take a sharp rock and they cut that shit off, right? And it was like, okay, well, you know now. You know you're an adult. You went through something so-

There was a ritual always. Right? Like 100%. They would take you out, they'd kick your teeth in, or like there were societies where they would make you jump off a platform, not with a bungee cord, just like a vine. Vine, they'd still do them. They'd still do those cultures that do that.

Exactly, or they'd put the hooks in your flash and they'd lift you up, like some crazy shit. But you knew I'm a man, right? There's no mistake about it. And so his pitch in the book is because we don't go through these transformational demarcation moments where you know now you're fundamentally different human being, you just get like this arrested adolescence. And people aren't continuing to evolve. And I found that utterly fascinating. So when I got married, I actually went through a ritualistic

scarification because I wanted to remind myself I'm a different human being the day before I get married and the day after I get married. And that began my obsession with mythology. What's a ritualistic? What do you mean by scarification? You actually had something cut into your skin or something? I got a tattoo. I just think it's ritualistic.

Oh, I was just saying, it sounded way tougher when you said it like that. Well, in that, no, I mean, that's what, a lot of people get tattoos because of that. There's a lot Well, I mean, that's what a lot of people get tattoos because of that. There's a lot of, you know, that's a, you, I mean, the way you presented it, that's exactly what it is.

I know many people, you say, what's that tattoo for? Oh, that's when my child was born, or this is represents when my friend passed away. You hear quite a bit of that, you know, from people who do that. Is this now all before you get into, was this process before you started really? Yeah, are you still heavy at this point?

Yeah. So at that point, I had actually learned how to lose weight, but not intelligently. So I was at this point, the Mike and Ron, the guys who became my partners, referred to it as my pencil neck phase. So I had lost the fat, but I like, didn't, I had no concept of muscle. So, and then, end up going back into a cycle of learning how to put a muscle,

but I'm using a seafood diet, so I end up getting really fat, like, fatter than I'd ever been in my whole life. That's a whole nother, like, side of the journey. But so, yeah, this was sort of, okay, I know I don't want to die of obesity. And I'm, I'm very good at reducing my calories. So that I just used that strategy, right? So if you reduce your calories enough, like you're going to lose fat, it's just the reality.

You reduce them too much. You're also going to lose muscle mass, especially if you're not working out. So I live that reality as well. But yeah, at that point when I'm reading the power of myth, that's where I'm at. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I had a question. So, have you heard of Hero with a thousand faces? Yes, just of Campbell for me.

Right, so it's just reminiscent of Lucas' whole story along with that, how he became a filmmaker and all that. Do you feel like a kind of kinship with that? Deeply and more profoundly than I think I'd be able to explain with this crude language. So truly, man. Give it. And I'm connecting right now. Right?

Like, did you guys just become best friends? Yeah. I saw his rebel lion. I used to know that Justin is like a huge star wars nerd. Just get that. I am literally as he said, I am wearing a star wars necklace right now. I have a lightsaber right behind me.

Full full respect. So, Joseph Campbell actually worked with Lucas on creating the mythology around the film, and that's one of the reasons that I think it's held up so well, is it was really Campbell asking himself a fundamental question, how do we make the power of the mythology accessible to a modern audience? Because he was like, I know they're gonna watch it and they're gonna know it's not a real story.

So if it's not a real story, is there a way to transcend that and still, you know, get people to understand the ideas because it's the ideas that are important and the barrier just happens to be sort of modern cynicism quite frankly of like, you know, it's just entertainment. Right, we dismiss it by saying it's a popcorn munching movie. And I'm just like hell bent to let you know, it's just entertainment, right? We dismiss it by saying it's a popcorn munching movie. And I'm just like hell bent to let people know.

Like hiding in today's biggest popcorn munching movies is some of the most important and powerful ideology you will ever encounter just like, hey, if you really want to be successful at business, your ass needs to wake up and get in the gym. Why? Because you will learn a fundamental truth about the way that the human body works.

If you lift a weight today, you'll be able to lift more weight tomorrow and more and more. You have to do it right. Obviously, there's a whole bunch to it. But you're going to go through the mental gyrations of, I don't want to pick up the weight. All right, I get it, dumbass. But if you do it, you're going to get this result. Now, focus on the result and show up, prove something to yourself, earn credibility with yourself. These are all the things that go into becoming a great leader and somebody who's effective at business. If you go in and lift every day,

and you're not getting stronger and you're gaining fat, the world is telling you something very clear. You are doing the wrong thing, right? Because your goal is to get lean and add muscle. We'll look at the results. You're getting that yes or no. No, okay, well, you're doing the wrong thing. And people in the gym, like they get it,

and they'll be so results oriented, like, I'm getting the result that I want, cool, I'm doing this, it's the right thing, I'm gonna do more of it. But in the gym, like they get it, and they'll be so results oriented, like I'm getting the result that I want, cool I'm doing this, it's the right thing, I'm gonna do more of it. But in the business world, they don't hold themselves that same standard. It's so weird, but there's this thing, the gym, that will give you literally exactly what you need to understand,

like how all of this stuff works to be data driven, to look at this stuff, to be a learner, to not be arrogant. But when it's the body and it's so easy to see and understand whether you're getting the results, like people can check their ego, but they just, in business, they get trapped. You know, I think the problem is, is that people think it's so separate.

You know, I have, I've been personal, I've first became a personal trainer about 20 years ago, and I had a lot of success working with, early on with kids, teenagers, 13, 14, 15 years old, and parents would start bringing their kids who needed to get in shape or whatever, but then they kept keeping their kids with me because they did better in school, they would do better at home, they weren't

acting out or rebelling as much. And one of the reasons for that was as I made those connections for the kids, so for example, I'd have a kid who would come in and the mom would tell me, Hey, you know, here's this stuff about his way. He needs to lose weight, whatever. And then I'd ask him, Well, how is this school? How is he at home? And they would kind of relationship with friends. Yeah. And it would look at me kind of funny about that. And I'd say, Well, that's real important. Then when I would train them and we'd do pushups, for example, and let's say today we did five,

and the next time we did them we did six, and I would make those connections with them, and I'd tell the kid, look, you see how you put in some work and how you got better, and it's so clear, right? With fitness, it's so clear, it's so easy. It's very tangible. You did six, today you're better. You are not the same person today as you were last week.

You are literally a stronger person. You are a different better version of yourself. Of yourself. And then these kids would, and I would make those connections with other things and lo and behold, they would start succeeding in other aspects of life. I think people sometimes were so good at separating things like, oh, I'm really good at this, but it's not, it's actually the same process, as you're saying. It's the same learning process.

The good thing about fitness is it's very tangible, it's very clear, it's not as, you know, esoteric as, let's say, relationships and stuff like that. So at this point, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're learning these things about neurobiology, you're learning these things about your own psychology, you're doing, it sounds like a lot of self-examining, and you're making connections now to your own obesity, your own relationships of food. This must have been a very difficult transformative time because the first thing you said when we started talking was you came from a morbidly obese family. So this was how you grew up, this was your life, this is what you knew, how difficult was

it for you? Yeah, talk about some of the struggles with the beginning. Yeah, how hard was it to look at that in an examin' it? Yeah, well, the hard part is feeling like it shouldn't be that way, right? So like, I should be able to eat a bag of cookies and be lean.

I look at these people that can do it and it just pisses me off. It's like, so I remember being really frustrated because just to give you an idea of how ignorant I was to nutrition in the beginning. So I buy those big tubs of redvine licorice because they're faffery, bro. So, and I'm eating it, and I'm not losing weight.

What is going on? I'm not eating hamburgers and stuff, and I remember my roommate's girlfriend at the time was like, I think sugar turns to fat if you don't burn it. And I was like, what? Like that doesn't make sense. Like how crazy? Right? Like how on earth would sugar turn to fat? Like that just didn't make sense to me. So I'm end up getting married. And I feel like I'm being really good at my diet. I'm not eating the things that they tell you to stay away from. I'm end up getting married and I feel like I'm being really good on my diet. I'm not eating the things that they tell you to stay away from. I'm not eating steak largely because I couldn't afford it.

But I'm having those snack well cookies, which again are fat free. So people are telling me, don't eat fat, not eating fat, totally don't fuck with it, not realizing that what they're replacing it with is carbohydrate. But I don't even understand that there's macro nutrients. I don't even know that's a concept at the time. So, you know, I'm eating less than I've ever eaten and I'm getting heavy again. And so I'm like, what is going on? So I'm simultaneously starving and getting fat, which is like the frustration

point. Now, are you internalizing this at this point? Because by the way, you represent a large, what you're talking about, represents a large percentage of American population. At this point, are you internalizing it and saying to yourself, like, it's just the way it is. It's my genes, I'm not lucky. Some people can do this and they, obviously, I'm doing what I'm supposed to and it's not working.

So something's wrong with me. Is that the process that's going through? Are you battling that at all at this point? I'm battling that it seems unfair, right? So because so many people in my family suffer exactly the same, I didn't feel like, well, I'm the only one. It just seemed like this is dumb. Like, why can some people eat what they want?

And so there's like this voice and you had to just get pissed. So, and it's totally irrational, right? So you can waste time focused on that, which at the time I did. And so I was just angry. And I remember when I first went low carb, right? So meet these guys who good at business

and like incredible shape. And they're like, dude, you gotta stop with the carbohydrates. And so I was like, okay, cool. Like I'm gonna try it. And I take carbohydrates out of my diet and I feel terrible. And I remember saying to my wife, I was so angry. I said to her, if I eat a cookie right now,

I'll feel like a million bucks. And the thing was, it was true, right? Because I hadn't broken my addiction to burning sugar glucose. So because I was still a sugar burner, if I had eaten the cookie, the headache would have gone away. Now, I would have taken myself back again and I would never get through and finally move over

into a ketogenic state and actually start burning fat. But I didn't know that at the time. I didn't know there was something on the other side of that. So it was just like this frustration of the solution to my problem, and this is where people get hung up. The solution to my problem, which is that my neurochemistry is in a bad place right now, so I don't feel good, and the solution is a cookie.

And because it's true, people stop there. They eat the cookie, they feel better. They never realize that with enough grit and discipline on the other side of this, is a physical transformation, where I'm not gonna live in this state. I need to get through this purgatory that I'm going through.

I need to get on the other side. And luckily, I was at that point, I was beginning to surround myself between my wife, who's just always been an incredible influence. And my business partner is Mike and Ron. I was surround myself with my wife, who's just always been an incredible influence, and my business partner is Mike and Ron. I was surrounding myself with people who were like, hey, there is something on the other side of this.

Well, it's amazing that you made that connection powerful. Because, I mean, one of the best cures for a hangover is another drink. One of the best cures for drug withdrawal is to use that drug again, and you made that connection between the two, and most people don't. Most people would say, well, this is not for me. I got to eat that cookie or whatever, and it's just the way I am. This sounds like a very intense period of just self-examination of kind of awareness. And now at this point,

you're going low carbohydrate, you're starting to kind of get things. Where are you going now from here? Well, so this is, you know, my physical transformation is really like 15 years in the making. So there's sort of a lot of phases. The first is learning to lose fat sort of clumsily, but also losing a lot of muscle mass. And then it was going low carb and understanding like macronutrients and how to do all of that. Then it was actually being able to add on muscle but getting into a bigger rexia phase

where I was so terrified of missing a potential percentage of anabolic effect that I just eat, eat, eat, eat. And I hated eating at that phase and you could never have convinced me of that when I was a kid. But like, you're just, you're pounding so much like chicken breast, eggs, just anything that you can get that's like a protein source down your stomach and that you've got like calorie goals and shit, right?

So like, I have to eat this amount. And so by the end of it, I was doing shots, shots of olive oil. Just to get like enough calories. You ever done a shot of olive oil? Well, I'm doing shots, shots of olive oil just to get like enough calories. You ever done a shot of olive oil? Well, I'm Italian, so yeah. Okay, so we'll remove you from the equation. It's nasty.

Oh, it is so horrifying. So I got to the point where I had to mix. I couldn't do the olive oil straight. I just couldn't do it. And so I started putting it in diet mountain dew and shooting it that way. Oh, it got so nasty that by the end of it, I couldn't drink Mountain Dew for like three years. Oh wow.

Because it just reminded me of that like olive oil taste. Oh, so horrifying. I'm loving the story right now. You are literally going step by step through the process of awareness. The process of awareness with nutrition, but you're such an intelligent guy that you're able to talk about

the mental notes. Do you? Yes, this is amazing. You know how many people listening right now are just the mind-feeling? Yeah, I get it below. Well, not a lot of people have this ability to reflect on yourself. Is this from a mentor? Are you reading something right now that's helping you with this? Because I feel like I didn't get this until like my mid-twenties where I started to really self-reflect and I no longer were looking at everything else around me. It was always about what can I do, what can I do, or what can I do better, how can I push myself, where are you getting this information that's driving you to continue to dive deeper into yourself? So it really comes from a promise that I had made to myself

when I was a kid and there were two things that I told myself, I will make these things happen. And one was growing up in a morbidly obese family, I said, I will have six pack abs. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off, but like I was obsessed with Bruce Lee and he used to say the abdomen is the window to the soul. And so I had, I'm going to have six pack abs,

so come hell or high water. And then the other was growing up in a family that sort of teetered between white collar and blue collar, I was gonna get rich. And so the two driving factors in my life, really there were three. There were three things that really pushed me. One, I wanna get six pack abs, two, I wanna get rich, and three, I really, really come alive when I'm creating. So like that artistic expression.

So the reason that I was so obsessed with film, I mean, I grew up in the 80s, right? So in the 80s, if you really wanted to get rich, you got in film, man. Like film was like, that was the thing. That's how people thought of the way they think of entrepreneurs today. Like they were thinking I want to be an actor, I want to be a director. Like those are the people that really made the money. And that's why Hollywood became Beverly Hills, became like that center of projected wealth.

If you wanted to show that somebody was wealthy, they were in Beverly Hills, they were in the film industry. So that just spoke to me because it was like artistic expression, I absolutely loved it. And this is right when camcorders are coming on the scene. So it was like my dad could borrow one from work sometimes and so we got to play around with it.

So, you know, that collision, it's like Bill Gates growing up in the air where computers were first coming available where he lived and his, I think it's high school happened to have one of the first computers. So it's like this confluence of what's going on in technology with where you happen to be. So my dad happened to have access to this camcorder, which made me fall in love with directing

and being behind the camera, which tied with my desire to be wealthy. So it's like all these things had to do with being results oriented, right? Like you can look, I remember getting one of those. This is another thing. So the very first step that I took towards getting Sixpack abs was a late night infomercial about the same called the ABB flex, I think.

And it was like this weird looking device that you'd press down in your abs. I remember that, yeah. And they were just like showing the guy whose abs are just crazy shredded, right? And I'm like, oh my God, like, I'm gonna get it. It works. Yes, like I'm about this.

So, and this, at this point, I'm like dirt poor, I'm living with like three people in a one bedroom. I mean, it's crazy, right? But I get the, you know, scrounging money together for my 60 bucks, whatever I get the same. So great. And I start doing it, and I'm like, I really feel the burn, my abs are super sore the next day,

but I'm like, I don't see my abs. And so like, I'm literally confused. And I'm like, I don't see my abs, I don't know what's going on. And somebody said, you know, I think part of the problem is like, you have a layer of fat over your abs. I was like, what? Like, some bullshit.

Yeah, I was like, but then, working, if that's true, then I need to lose fat. I don't need to gain muscle. Like, I don't understand. So it was like, this whole, like, all these things, like, sugar turns into fat and I have this layer of fat over the muscle. And if I don't get rid of the fat,

I won't actually see the muscle. So it's like, it's all starting to formulate in my mind and I'm thinking, okay, I'm results oriented. I wanna get the six pack abs. I need to go where, and I don't have the clarity of thought to say I need to go where the data is leading me. I mean, that's like today's wording applied back then. But it was like, I need to change something

because I'm not getting the results that I want. And so being relentlessly focused on knowing what I wanted, like goals, understanding what my goals are, maybe one of my superpowers, right? So on knowing what I wanted, like goals, understanding what my goals are, maybe one of my superpowers, right? So I knew what I wanted. And because I knew what I wanted, I could work backwards. Okay, so if this machine isn't giving it to me because my abs are heading under fat

and eating licorice isn't working for me because sugar somehow magically is turning into fat, then I'm starting to understand the changes that I need to make. And then the real transformation happened when there's so much information, and this is really pre-internet. There's so much information in books. It's all conflicting. You listen to two experts.

They both disagree with each other. They're fighting over it. It's like, who the hell do you listen to? So I decided my strategy was going to be to find somebody who had already done it, because I knew whatever they were going to tell me had at least worked once. And at least I had just strategy. Right? So the Ron who ended up becoming my business partner

at Quest was that guy, right? So super intelligent, great shape. And I just said, you tell me what to do and I'll do it. And there were, he was the guy that convinced me to do shots of olive oil. So not everywhere out of his mouth back then was exactly great. But it, at least having one person consistently sort of assessing, where are we, what changes do we need to make?

And, and being willing to listen to feedback that got me in that loop. We're okay. I at least knew how to put on muscle. He was very, he helped me put on muscle, learning how to then maintain the muscle and lose fat. Excuse me. That became like a whole another journey. And the one more story, if I may be so indulgent. Do it. Indulge away. Was, and this was awesome.

So, I had been working out, I was working out two plus hours a day, six days a week. I mean, I was just like in a demon phase. And I had added so much muscle mass. I was so excited and so proud of myself. It was so transformative. Like you know that, that year, right? That first year, we just changed your physique. And my physique was radically different.

I was so much stronger than like I had ever been. It was absolutely awesome. I was so excited. And I was about to see somebody I hadn't seen in like two years. And so I put my tightest t-shirt on. I was like, this is gonna be amazing. I look so good in this shirt. She is gonna clip out. And so my put my tightest t-shirt on. I was like, this is gonna be amazing. I look so good in this shirt.

She is gonna clip out. And so my wife and I go and we meet her and she doesn't say a word. Oh, now my son of a baby, my physique is so different. You can't imagine. So I'm like, how could she not say a word? So I say to my wife, like, what the fuck? Like she doesn't say anything.

And my wife with all the love in her heart looks at me and says, maybe she just thought you'd gotten fat. Oh. And I was like, oh, what? Like, is that where I'm at? Like, as my physique so messed up and so distorted that you could really mistake me for just being fat.

And she was like, yeah. Like, you've put on the muscle, it's rad, it's so exciting. And for people that understand physique, they get that under the fat, you've got a lot of muscle. And if they see you deadlift at the time, for me, this was a lot, I was deadlifting almost 400 pounds, like I was super stoked on that. And she was like, but for people that don't understand physique,

it may just look like you're fat. And so in that instant, I could see myself the way I really was, right? Because before that, I'd become so my opically focused on like certain things, like how bigger my biceps do they stretch my shirt, you know, like the, how, where are my quads? Am I starting to get separation? You know, like all the shit that like you really get obsessive about.

And then all of a sudden, I could just see I was smooth, I was round, I had a gut, I had massive love handles, which is like my Achilles heel. And in that moment, I took the before pictures and then just went on what ended up being like a two-year grind to drop like about 60 pounds. And then like truly for the first time having like six pack abs. You're such an incredible process. It's like- Oh God, so many people have to be able to connect to this. Oh my God, because you take one addiction and it moves to another and it moves to another and you're moving along a path and throughout that entire process, you're getting clear

but you're still not clear. So you're still seeing yourself through an interesting filter, whether it be some people see themselves and say, my God, I'm too skinny. Other people see them and say, what the hell are you talking about? Or vice versa. My God, I'm so fat. You know, it times I've had clients, female clients come into me, um, you know, in middle age and say, oh, God, you know, here's a, here's a picture of me 10 years ago.

I want to look like this again. And I'll always ask them, how did you think you looked back then? And they'll be like, oh, I thought I was so fat, but I was crazy. And I'm trying to help them realize like like, you do realize that we're dealing. Yeah, we're dealing with, yes, there are some fitness goals, but there's also the distorted, you know, view of yourself and you're seeing things through a filter. And we started this conversation by saying, your brain is literally creating your reality. Nothing you see, you know, we're not seeing what's outside our heads.

We're seeing what's inside our, inside our heads. And that's part of it. Now, along this process, how do you deal, because here's the thing, you're going through a lot, you went through what a lot of people go through. The difference is you continue going through it. You kept pushing, you kept growing, you kept self, more self-realization, more growth.

How did you deal with self-doubt? Because you had to have it, some of these points, and we'll get into business also, but there's gotta be points where you're just like, this is this fuck I just want to quit. This is not working for me. Like how did you, what made you keep going? What gave you that tenacity?

It really comes down to an understanding of the mind, so what you were talking about. So parallel and all of this stuff, I'm like relentlessly researching the brain at truly an anatomical level, like trying to understand, not just the cascade of chemicals, but that there are regions of your brain that they're designed to process x, y, and z.

Let's talk about what are called split brain patients. So there's this area of tissue between the left and right hemisphere called the corpus chalosum, and it allows the two hemispheres to talk. Now what most people don't realize is what it's doing is one hemisphere is telling the other to shut up. So once you cut that and they do it for people with intractable seizures to try and isolate the seizures.

Amazing studies, by the way. If you're really into like behavior and psychology, they've done some amazing studies on people with this particular procedure and fascinating, fascinating stuff. Yeah, it's crazy. My favorite one along that line is you create a split brain patient, and all of a sudden, one half of the brain is deeply religious, and the other half of the brain is an utter aggressive atheist. Oh my God. In the same brain. Okay, now think about that for a second. That's fucking nuts. So, I'm not shumlin'. Move, I just washed it just wash really I'm actually intrigued

What's it what's a call split? I haven't seen it. Oh, yeah, that's who did that. I didn't know that's who did that Yeah, wow That's right. He's got like 34 personality which is that's like a whole another intrusion So yeah, and it just what really freaks me out about that is that's when you begin to realize like the voice is in your head are real. And there is a negative voice in your head and that negative voice from an evolutionary perspective. And that's the other thing.

I look at everything from the perspective of how did this weird trait help us survive at some point. At some point, it almost certainly converted an advantage. Now, some things admittedly just sort of hitchhike and they come along as sort of a byproduct of something else, but I find it really instructive to say, how did this serve me at one point in history? And the voice in your head that's trying to keep you safe,

the one that's telling you not to like overstep your position and make sure that you fit in in the group, like when getting ostracized from the group meant certain death, like it was pretty important not to step on too many toes, not to piss people off to really understand sort of where you are in the hierarchy, to make sure that you were trying to mate with the appropriate level of female,

you know, like all these things, it sort of tell you know your place and stick in it. This is why public speaking is always one of the number one fears people have, that public, that social, you know, being ostracized in front of people, my God, people would rather swim with alligators than, you know, do something embarrassing in front of a million people. It's, what you're talking about, it's very, very fascinating.

Yeah, and that, that one is incredible. And that study came out. I was like, I can't believe this is real. That people, people are less afraid of being in the casket than they are to be the one giving the eulogy. That's crazy. That's like, what? People are less afraid of dying

than they are of speaking antifineral. Yeah, what people don't realize. Doesn't make any rational sense. What people don't realize is the way evolution works, right, is that you have to survive to pass on your genes. So it's the better safe than sorry, you know, rule. It like, it trumps everything when it comes to evolution. So the light, so if I look around, if I think that there's something around the corner,

because I might be afraid that there's something around the corner, it's much better, especially from evolutionary standpoint, it's going to be beneficial for me to assume that something dangerous is around the corner, versus not assume, because just in case there is, I'm going to survive. And so we are these massive, anxiety, fear ridden, not logical. We think we're logical, but we're not thinking creatures. And when you examine it from an objective point of view,

it really is mind blowing. Like, I'll give you an example. If we took, you know, 500 random people and asked them, hey, you know, is it safer for kids to play outside today than it was when you were a kid growing up? Almost all of them will say, yeah, absolutely. It's actually not true. It's far safer today than it was, you know, 30 years ago. That's what you meant to say, you messed that up. Oh, then I messed it up. Yeah, you said It's actually not true. Far safer today than it was 30 years ago. That's what you meant to say, you messed that up.

Oh, then I messed it up. Yeah, you said that people would say that it was safer back then than it is today. They would think it's safer back then than it is today. But it's false, it's far safer today than it was back then. And the reason why they think that is because of TV, because of social media, some kid gets kidnapped somewhere in the country.

Oh my God, it feels like it's happening all over the place and so we're better safe than sorry. I'm gonna think the bad, that's where I'm gonna go naturally. And that goes with taking chances with anything, business or relationships or my God. It's just one of those things that molds our behavior so much.

So learning that stuff is fascinating. So you're learning this stuff and it's literally driving you to be more tenacious with your own goals and growth. Just understanding that. Are you influencing your family at this point? Like are they really paying attention to your process? And are they supportive or in the beginning, they were curious at best. And so my mother, who by the way has always been my biggest cheerleader, just always

always supported me. But and she admitted this not too long ago, once I'd been very successful and everything and she could sort of come out of the closet. She just quietly assumed I was gonna fail. And I remember like when I was approaching college, I almost chickened out and I was, there was me and one other guy for my entire graduating class that left the state.

Everybody else either didn't go to college or went to the same two colleges. And so at the last minute, I was like, God, I don't know that I wanna do this. And you know, I could just go to that same school that all my friends are going to go to. And my mom put the hammer down. And she was like, absolutely not.

You were going to, I ended up going to USC. You're going to USC. You're going to follow your dreams. And then literally every day after that, she's been trying to get me back. And so I'm like, finally one day, this was probably about five years ago. I was like, mom, what the hell?

Like, you were the one that kicked me out. And so I'm like, finally one day, this was probably about five years ago, I was like, mom, what the hell? Like, you were the one that kicked me out. You, I would have, I was trying to stay at home and you literally kicked me out. And she said, yeah, because I just always assumed you were gonna fail. And it was the way she said it. Like, she said it with love in her heart.

Like, there was no malice. She just thought, you have to at least try to chase your dreams, but I've seen you. You haven't shown any signs of promise. You're super fucking lazy, which by the way was entirely true. And so I just thought, well at least you'll never say what if you'll have tried it. It wouldn't have worked out. You'll come home.

Like you'll have a nice life. You know, I mean, for my mom, she's still to this day. Lives like in a car, five minutes from where she grew up. So it's like that's, and by the way, the stat on how many people do that is so crazy. I can't remember the exact number, but it's gotta be well over 50% of people end up within five miles of where they grew up.

Crazy nuts. Yeah. So she just assumed you know that I was gonna be coming back home, but I don't because the one thing that nobody accounted for was this sense of being goal oriented. Like I know what I want, and so I'm just driven enough to get there. So yes, while I'm lazy, if I look at laziness,

like this is real in my life, I am profoundly lazy, but I look at laziness and I say, is it gonna move me towards my goals yes or no? No, well then I can't indulge in it. So, and this goes back to why I had to study the brain and understand that you've got these voices in your head for a reason. They don't serve you necessarily in a modern context. So, while you have emotions, while you have negative voices, choosing

to listen to them is where you have your power. You can either listen or ignore them. Now my thing is, sometimes I actually listen. So, like, I'll wake up in the morning and be thinking, oh, you really fucked up that business decision or you know what yesterday, you just did not train hard enough and secretly in your heart, you know that's true. And most people are like, Tom, what do you do to like silence the voice? And I'm like, I don't silence the voice. I don't even try to silence the voice

because that motherfucker's the only one telling me the hard truth. And I want to know, like I may ignore them because it may be counterproductive to see myself as less. And in fact, I should probably work really hard to see myself as more because it's gonna give me more confidence, gonna let me move forward.

But the moment I become blind and I can to see myself as more because it's gonna give me more confidence, it's gonna let me move forward. But the moment I become blind, and I can't see where I'm messing up, or I'm not kicking myself in my own ass, like that's why you plateau, and then the young, hungry, upstart comes and kicks your ass. Like how did Quest come in and just take the world by storm? Because we were just hungrier than everybody else. We wanted it. We were willing to do crazy shit

to make it happen. And it's like the day you think you've arrived, the day you think you figured it out, that you're doing it all right, I promise you you're dead. I wanna know what that crazy shit is. Yeah, let's talk about that. So how did it start?

How did you start with Quest? Cause you met these two guys, these friends of yours, you're fascinating with film, you're losing weight, you're figuring that process out. How did we get Quest? Yeah, so Quest was born out of misery. And for eight and a half years, I chased money in a way that you just can't imagine. And it got to the point where my wife was like, this just isn't sustainable.

And probably for about six and a half years, other than Christmas time, we just didn't take vacations. We didn't go anywhere, we didn't do anything. I was working seven days a week. That doesn't mean there weren't times here and there and stuff, but I mean, it was overwhelming for six and a half years, where I felt compelled. If I was awake, I either needed to be working out or working, which is fine because that's actually my strategy now. But now I've slipped in one caveat that I have to love what I do every day, whether or not I'm failing. So at the time, I was just chasing money.

So I'm using this all-in strategy no days off, like full-till grinded out to make it happen. And in all of that, we're building this technology company. It is a fine company. It's okay. We make a decent product. But no one's thinking like, hey, there's a customer out there that really needs this. How are we helping them with this? We weren't thinking about that.

We were thinking, how do we be clever marketers to get our conversion rate up higher? So it was all about conversion rates and landing pages and CPC SEO. That was my day. That's all that I thought about. I never thought about the customer. I never thought about, is this good for them? Are they going to love me for this? Are they going to want to tell me?

Don't you feel like so many companies do that though? I feel like that's so so popular. The vast majority, right? Because they're focused on money. Now, here's why people are focused on money. It's the same reason people will always, always, be focused on money. Just as they will always be way more motivated

by how they look than by how they perform. Okay? That's some truth bombs for you. Why? Because that is the human condition. If you tell someone, hey, if you eat like this and you exercise, you're going to look the way you look now, which you're deeply unsatisfied with, by the way, and you've deepened securities around, but you're going to live for a hundred years. People won't do it. But if you say, maybe girl, you're asking and it looks so good.

If you do this, that fucking jump on it. Because that's the real, they wanna walk down the street and have somebody go, God damn, you look good. That's immediate visceral transformation of their neurochemistry, right? The distant thought of living longer just doesn't impact in a drug-like way, the way it does when somebody looks at you,

like I remember this true story, my wife is standing next to me, so I promise you this is true. A woman, this is my shredded, this woman jumped in the pool from the other side in Vegas. Swam across, crawled up out of the pool, walked over, looked at my wife and said, can I pet your husband's abs?

Now, think about in that moment, how most awesome feeling everyone that happens is. Everybody deserves that at least one time in their life. Dude, like honestly, the day that we had an obscene amount of money click over into our bank account wasn't quite as good. Like, that's just honesty, right? Like, that was so fucking cool to have,

like, to be like, I made this, I did this. This is hard work, this is discipline, and I have gotten this woman who was attractive, by the way, to swim over, to ask my wife permission to pet my abs. Like, that's just, that's motivating. I wanna live forever, like that's a real thing for me. But even I am well aware that I am more motivated by looking good than that.

So true. So that's just the truth of the human condition. Once you understand sort of the truths of the way condition. Once you understand sort of the truths of the way that things are, and sort of bringing it around to money, one of the things that is just always, always, always going to be powerful for people is money, because money is real, money does things.

Now, here's the catch. The things you think money does are not the things that it actually does. So people think, hey, I look at this rich guy, and I think, oh my God, he's so amazing. Like, I idolize him, I want to be him. Like, that is so cool. And they think when they have money,

they'll feel about themselves, the way they feel about that guy, but they won't. And the way that you feel about yourself will not be changed by anything other than the, your willingness to suffer and build a better life and to be disciplined and prove things to yourself. Like, that will change your vision of yourself, but having money will not. But having money solves money problems and having money facilitates amazing things.

Bill Gates is going to cure malaria and he's going to do it because he has access to billions of dollars, right? So you can do profound, fundamental, earth shattering changes with money. Money is worth the quest. But... Great word play there But if you're not careful it really will erode your soul and you'll be living the nightmare of money camp by happiness And so that's where we were and we were building awareness technologies. I was making I mean Pitons compared to what we ended up doing at quest

But I was making more money than I'd ever made in my life And I was completely miserable because I was just chasing money all day. And so I went into my partners and I said, I had gone from copyrighter, right? So that's where they started me. I'd worked my way to 10% owner in the company, chief marketing officer. And so I said, guys, I'm quitting. I'm giving back your equity.

I don't, if I leave and don't cross the finish line, I don't think I should get anything for that. So, you know, best of luck. And they, I left and thought that was it, and I'm, you know, leaving this all behind me, and I'm gonna go pursue something that makes me feel alive. Did you know what you were gonna pursue?

Or did you just say, I don't wanna do this? I got a search. No, I knew what I was gonna pursue, yeah. So it was a rudimentary form of impact theory. So it was gonna be creative base, it was gonna be sort of leveraging comic books to build movies that really pass ideology and we've gotten a lot smarter about it since then. So good thing I didn't do it, you know, 10 years ago when this was all happening because now is the time and we can get to that later. But so do that, I'm literally pulling

into my driveway at my house and they call me and they say the now famous words, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. And that allowed me to reconnect to something other than the money. And it let me reconnect to the brotherhood and why we had been friends and why those had been on the one hand, just the most beautiful eight and a half years of my life, of having these guys

that I felt like I was going to battle with every day and just loved it and had grown and learned so much and was so grateful to them to being such amazing mentors. And so we said, all right, they said, you know, we feel the same. We don't feel alive. We think we could be doing something better. So let's set a revenue goal.

And if we don't hit it in the next, it was like six months, then we'll sell the company. So six months, we didn't hit it. Began the sales process. By the time it all wraps up, it's like two years after that day that I quit. And in that process, we begin thinking, okay, well, what's going to be the next thing? And for three, very different reasons. It ends up being quest nutrition. For me, it was a group in a morbidly obese family.

I was watching people that I love very much eat themselves to death. And I just knew that the answer to helping them be happy was to get them out of the negative self-body image because it was so eroding their self-esteem and their confidence, they're just never going to be happy when they feel that negatively about their own body. The only way to do that was to make food that they chose based on taste and it happened to be good for them. That was my goal, and then my partner Ron really, really is the nutritional genius.

The guy is just like on another planet. And I mean this sincerely, he is, in my opinion, the Steve Jobs of nutrition. Like what he's able to see, like how far out into the future, he can see the way that he understands human metabolism is unreal. And he has dedicated himself, the way that I've dedicated myself to learning the brain.

He has dedicated himself to learning about metabolism, like at the deepest level and seeing connections between what we eat and cancer and he's to watch him get taken so seriously by the highest level cancer researchers in the world and he's not saying he's correct, but just that, like, you may be having insights here that nobody else is having, like, and I'm aware of what's going on around the globe.

So it's just really, really fascinating. And then our third partner is just a logistical genius. And so when Ron, and this was the crazy thing that we were willing to do that other people weren't willing to do, was when we formulated our bar and then tried to go to market and get somebody else to manufacture for us, because we had no intention of making it. Every contract manufacturer out there said,

this bar is awesome, like from a taste profile, from a nutritional profile, it's great, but it can't be made. And we didn't believe them, which was a mistake, because they were right, by the way, but there was one caveat to that. And this, like, if anybody out there remembers anything, I say today, remember this part of the story.

They were right that the Quest Proating Bar could not be made on the equipment that existed. So you've got two choices. You can either change your product to fit the equipment. Or create the equipment. There you go. Or you create the equipment. And so we were the first company,

you just gave me the chills. We were the first company that said, we're gonna change the equipment, right? So we got into the game of being our own manufacturer, which everyone thought we were crazy. And actually engineering our own equipment and working with people to change things. So we knew we couldn't buy anything off the shelf. We had to make modifications. But we were willing to do it. And like that subtle shift in mindset of realizing that there is still a door open

when people say it can't be made. Like going back to the matrix, that's their limitation. That's not mine. Now, did you know you were crazy or did you go into it saying, no we could do this and now looking back a holy shit, what were we thinking man? Yeah, we thought, oh, we got this, con, like this stuff. It's so rich, you know what I mean?

Like, we just need the grit to get through it. And then we went from, it took like eight people, like six hours to make 1200 bars by hand with rolling pins and handheld knives, sealing them three at a time with like this little sealer that you had to step on. It was crazy. Wow. To it taking more people, more time to make fewer bars on the industrial equipment.

And we were like, oh dear God. And now we've, you know, just spent virtually all the money that we got from the sale of the last company on this equipment, like, what do we do now? And so that was when Mike was like, I think I can re-engineer this. And that was the real inflection point. And he was right. He's an Iowa farm boy. I mean, just like, absolutely amazing story of Waxon Wax off, like his whole life.

He's learning to make shit, to fix things, and the farm thinking, I'm in business now. Like I wasted my youth only to find himself looking at it, grabs a sawzall and a blowtorch, and cuts the stuff apart, puts it back together, and it works. And then was able to work with engineers to design new equipment that would allow us to scale. I was just incredible.

And while it was happening, we're like, this is special. Like what's happening right now, special? Well, so how long is this process now? You start making these bars, are you starting to sell them? Like how long have appeared a time before you're like, holy shit, it's actually, this is kickin' ass. It took about 18 months to formulate, because you can make something that you can eat and

is delicious, but making that shelf stable is like a whole nother ball game. So we actually considered doing a marketing campaign called the first bar that rots. Because what we want to people understand is like, it is very smart. This is actually real, right? We're not putting preservatives in it. There's no sugar, there's nothing

because binding the water is your problem, which I never would have known going into this. So your enemy when you're making something shelf stable is water. And you've got to find ways to bind that water to trap it inside another molecule so that it can't interact with anything, especially mold, right?

Because that's what ends up happening. Whatever bacteria is in the, that's present there, it has the environment to grow and it does and now you've got problems. So you've got to find a way to bind the water and we worked with some amazing people to help us figure that out. But that all took about 18 months. As soon as we launched our strategy was to give it away. So we had we had an early internet model. Yeah. I mean I don't

that's totally the internet model. Very very successful. And this was back in so we originally started conceiving of the company in 2009. So in 2009, I had been really impacted. It wasn't called social media at the time, but I was being impacted by what was happening with this idea. I think it was Kevin Kelly told to me via Tim Ferris about this notion of a thousand true fans, right? Like, find your thousand true fans.

You can see what's going on in Facebook. Everyone thought Facebook was just a distraction for businesses, and I'm looking at it and going, it's just a megaphone, right? So it gives people a chance with a minute of an interaction with your company to say something nice, like what a powerful way to find those 1000 TrueFans, and to give them a reason to say something nice.

So we went, we said, our goal now is no longer about selling, it's about evangelizing customers, it's about delivering value at every conceivable touchpoint, the product, customer support, everything. Like we're just gonna bend over backwards. We're gonna create community. This is gonna be all about building community on this Facebook thing.

And so we just, now it is so self-evident. Everybody's building community and social marketing and all that. Back then, we didn't even have words for it. Right, we were just like, we wanna deliver value. We wanna celebrate transformation. We wanna build a community we want to deliver value, we want to celebrate transformation, we want to build a community, it's what we were calling mirror marketing. We want them to see themselves, not the products.

So it was like, it was just really a transformation and that's why between actually making this product that was totally a paradigm shift and tasted like it had sugar but didn't and we had all our own equipment so we were able to make something nobody else was able to make. And then marketing in just a totally new way, being really early on the social movement, that's how we blow up and we end up growing in manufacturing. Think about that for a second.

In manufacturing, we grew by 57,000% in three years. So you did this through Facebook and giving away lots of product and having people try it. Yeah, writing to people literally, I think Lane Norton was actually one of the early people that we wrote to, but it was him and a bunch of people liked that that we knew would understand the product. And that they would flip it over, look at it and go, I call bullshit, this is going to be disgusting.

And they eat it and go, whoa, this is amazing. It tastes great. And it's macro nutrient profile is just unparalleled. Wow, so because you guys were named, why don't you name one of the fastest growing companies at one point in the magazine, 2014, we were the second fastest growing company in America. Now, how long has, from inception till now, how long has Quest been around now? I think we're edging up on six and a half years.

Six and a half years. How big is the company? Can I ask? Yeah, it's, we don't disclose numbers, but it's, it's big. It was validated over a billion dollars. Holy shit, and a very short pair of time. Wow. I mean, that is a meteoric rise. Now, it, and here's a thing that how many employees know? I can't give you an accurate count as of today, because I'm not, I'm in a founder role now with the company I'm not there on a daily basis. But at last count when I was there it was 1400. Now, and a lot of people are going to hear, wow, you know, six years so fast, like, but this is really the beginning of this whole process was way before that.

Obviously, all the stories you told us from, you know, from what you did before, it sounds like it all contributed to, you know, the know the formulating you know getting this product on the on the market putting together having the courage to Create your own machinery to make it all that stuff. I mean, it's a long it's a very long process And I want people to know that like it doesn't just start when quest was invented It started way before that no question and this goes back to you know It really got me thinking about this when we started talking about it is you've got got to put something that you love doing. Like the question I asked myself is, what would I love doing every day, even if I were failing, right?

Cause you can love just about anything when you're winning, cause then everything's easy. It's effortless, there's huge reward. But what do you love enough to do it? Even when it's really hard and you're losing, right? That you just believe in it. And so that was the big paradigm shift for us was that. And so it was stuff that we were already doing

and thinking about. And so for everybody listening, if you wanna start a business, like start from there, so what are those things you're interested in that you really, like you just believe in, it's an obsession, you do it when it's free, like it's just, it captures your imagination

and makes you feel alive. Find a way to build a business around that. What do you see now? Well, before you go, Transistar, I want to get into impact theory a little bit because before we got on the mics, you started to share a little bit about that and your vision and how that came to be. I see a lot of our audience that are big mind-pump fans are going to see a lot of parallels with that. And what we're doing, I didn't really realize that a lot of people or that anybody else really saw this.

I mean, I believe just like what you said earlier that it's going to change social media and having your own platform and the podcast and the YouTube channels and things like this will become necessary for all businesses in the future and you'll get gobbled up if you don't explain impact theory and how that evolved and how that's connected all this and in your vision with that. Yeah, for sure. So just like back in 2009, it was very clear that the social media was going to change everything and that some people just were never going to embrace it. And they'll finally sort of do it when their arm is being twisted at the end, but the problem is when you get a big company and you get a big change like that, they just culturally,

they can't make the adjustment. There's too many people to try to get on board and get excited about it, which is why. And this is sad to me because it does not need to be this way. And people just need to understand you're fighting against a natural human inclination towards becoming an expert. And when people are an expert, they fight to defend that status. I totally, I don't ever wanna be called an expert. Why?

Because then my ideas will calcify into dogma, and I'm not learning anymore, I'm not staying fresh. So like student first. So refreshing to hear. You have to, and here's, it is a survival mechanism. It's not me trying to be cool. Like that should just, you wanna stay relevant, you wanna stay capable,

because you're always from a commerce perspective and commerce rules a day for a reason we can go into all that, but we'll not for now. From a commerce perspective, you're always going backwards, you're always going downstream. It is always to the young, always, okay? They will always be the most dominant economic force.

Once you understand it, and the reason just really simply is because people have the propensity to calcify into dogma, if I buy Crest, I buy Crest forever, there's nothing you need to do to me other than make it available where I shop, you don't have to advertise, you don't have to market nothing. But young people, they don't have that established yet,

the world is so dynamic, they're discovering things for the first time, they're totally malleable. So advertisers, marketers, business people always need to be looking backwards. But the problem is they're not escaping their own mind. They've calcified into dogma, the way that they market is the way that they market and Snapchat. Like what the fuck is that? That could never be like usable for business. Look dumbass. Like the 12 year old grew up with it. So now it's a part of how they interact with their friends, right? Just goes public.

This is like the world that you live in, whether you want to or not. So you better figure it out and find a way to internalize it because to what we were talking about before we started rolling, the world has changed. It's already happened. Now most of you've been shot and you don't realize that you're dying.

That's the reality. And what I'm trying to do, impact theory is to acknowledge that the gun went off and I don't wanna be hit by the bullet. And the bullet looks like this. Everyone is beginning to understand now millennials. It's, but it's just like stock tips. By the time it reaches the general public, by the time the general public is aware

of something in the stock market, the opportunity's gone. You've already missed the boat of millennials, okay? Start thinking about Gen Z. What Gen Z, Gen Z right now, I think there are 19 to 20 at the upper edge and then going down to five years old, okay? Gen Z is who you need to start thinking about and they have grown up 100% with social media. They don't know a world without social media.

So, grandpa, you can tell stories about the world that didn't have social media and how it was like some better, more pure time, or you can accept that it is the reality and that's given them a mental framework where transparency is as it should be. And the days of companies trying to keep things from you trying to position and spin,

like that shit's dead is disco. And so, like when you look at the days of companies trying to keep things from you, trying to position and spin, like that shit's dead as disco. And so, like when you look at the number of people that voted for Trump that were millennial or younger, it's like zero, right? So because of the sense of spin and all, like they're just, it's so anathema to them, like they can't even begin to bear it. So understanding that as a business person,

you must become transparent. The reason I had no desire to step out front. When I was, I had had, I had had, by the time I stepped out front, I had had 13 years as a business person, never once made any attempt to be visible. When we started quest, everyone was like, dude, the company needs a face,

like you should step out and do it. And I'm like, no, I'm not interested in that whatsoever. And then I began to realize the shot's been fired. Like, whether I want to or not, there needs to be a level of transparency. So we started building the studio inside of Quest, which ended up being called Inside Quest. We had the show Inside Quest, which is all originally just

about trying to pay forward what I had done to my own mind to the employees, but then realized, okay, this is actually an awesome opportunity to be transparent, to show the world who we really are behind the scenes, so they can feel good about it, because wealth creation in like a cloistered hidden way, like freakspeed,

there's actually a line in a rap song. Oh, God, I wish I could remember it. It's something like money out front, no problem, money in your pocket, you got drama. It's something like that, where it's like, if you're trying to do a mass resources and hide it and not show the world what you're doing with it, people are gonna get weird.

Like, that's a truth of today, right? You can argue whether it should be or shouldn't be, doesn't matter, that's a truth. But you can amass all the wealth you want if you show people, look how I use it, right? Nobody's hating on Bill Gates. Do's worth billions of dollars, but he's out trying to cure malaria.

Who's gonna hate on that, right? The real, in fact, realism is so important. Like if you ask people, you know, does the faceless CEO of Walmart, do you think he deserves his salary? Everybody like, no, that guy's paid way too much. And you ask him, hey, do you think Beyonce earns all of her money? Oh, absolutely. I think they know her because she's so much more transparent.

You know, I had an interesting, you're talking about, you know, Generation Z, which for some reason, you know, generation Z, which for some reason I was unfamiliar with the terminology to describe them, but I have two kids, and I had an interesting situation or paradigm shattering moment because I've just moved into a new place,

I just ordered, you know, or set up, you know, TV, so I have like, dish network or whatever, and my kids watch approximately zero percent of it. They watch YouTube. I literally am wasting, I don't know, 150 bucks a month on, you know, cable TV or whatever. And my kids could give a shit, they watch YouTube. And I'm looking at these YouTube channels

that are, you know, dedicated to kids. There's a fucking channel, no joke. I'm not making this up and people with kids know exactly what I'm talking about. There's a channel where there's a kid that opens up toys. This is, they're videotaping them, opening up toys and putting them together and they have like 30 million views.

They're getting more views on these stupid kid opening up a little, you know, toy and putting it together and playing with it, then mainstream TV is getting and I'm like, it's blowing my mind. I watch another kid's play video games, but it makes a lot of sense because when you're growing up, you used to watch like your friends older brother, like master all these levels that you're trying to accomplish and stuff. So it's like this whole like channel is derived around. But all these buffers, like all these gatekeepers to information are gone.

Like there's no middleman anymore. It's like they just want to know you and you were talking about, you know, knowing about what you're doing with your money. Like the more transparent you are, first of all, you can try to not be transparent today. Well, this is why I remind pump raw truth, too. This was a part of our motivator was providing the raw truth in the fitness industry, because you being in the industry also have to know it's probably one of the most polluted industries when it comes to bullshit that's out there so much propaganda. I mean it's crazy.

Oh so much of the information is just it's just false so so impact theory your what is the goal with it what are you looking to do with it. with it. So to make it really succinct, so I was explaining at the top of the show, jacking into the matrix, my version of that is reading. So I'm reading to assimilate all this information, and then my kung fu is business. So understanding that through line, I'm literally thinking in movie terms. So hiding in movies, hiding in pop culture are like all this amazing ideology. If you understand how to put it to use in your life, the matrix and its ideology and the power of myth and a lot of these things that I read took me from scrounging my couch cushions to find

enough change to put gas in my car. That was a real story to being a self-made multi-millionaire, okay, building a billion dollar brand. So what I want people to understand is the information is there, you're just not taking it seriously. And so, we're living in this fascinating time where you can create traditional narrative, right? So, look at what Disney's doing. They're buying all the culturally relevant intellectual property from Marvel Studios, Pixar, Star Wars, all of it, all the things that resonate, they're just buying up. And the reason that they're buying that up is they understand one fundamental truth, to make that ideology echo people by merchandise. So what we're trying to do is create the next generation of entrepreneurs, right?

So how the matrix influenced me, but give me the ideology that I put to use. We're trying to create the next generation of entrepreneurs and help those companies come into existence and make the world a better place. By creating traditional narrative, because I'm a huge believer that you shouldn't try to change behavior, you should try to leverage it. So I know that people watch these movies. I know that people are gonna eat this content up whether I want them to or not,

and then they're gonna buy merchandising, and I want them to surround themselves with stories and ideas through merchandising. Like I'm wearing a Star Wars necklace right now, because it reminds me of the ethos of Jedi's. I have Batman T-shirts, Superman T-shirts, Iron Man T-shirts, all things that I use because when I look in the mirror,

I want Bruce Wayne staring back at me. I wanna be reminded of the mindset. And so that's really powerful and because I have a social platform where I can go and explain this stuff in super plain English. Then it's like people actually now have access to that information in the way that they used to before mythology began to lose all of its steam.

So that's our goal. We want to incubate companies and incubate content creators to put a super fun. Give an example how you do this though right now. Like when I, is it happening already on your YouTube channel in the podcast? Like how is it? how do you do that? So we have a three phase approach which you can read about at impactherry.com. Phase one is build the community,

that's just absolutely crucial. And it's gotta be measured in the millions. And if you guys saw my big fat Greek wedding, in that the mother says, the father may be the head of the family, but I'm the neck. And the community will always be the head. You do not get to tell the internet what to do, right? That's like super famous. So you don't get to tell the crowd of the family, but I'm the neck. And the community will always be the head. You do not get to tell the internet what to do, right?

That's like super famous. So you don't get to tell the crowd what to do, what to think, they're gonna tell you, but you can point them at anything you want. And there's a great quote actually about the media. The media is terrible at telling you what to think, but they're amazing at telling you what to think about. And once you tell someone what to think about,

you've already won half the battle because you've got their focus on something. And focus changes everything. If you follow me socially, at Tom Billio, you're gonna see, like, I have an obsession with focus. Like, what you put your focus on is gonna determine your life, 100%. Because merely focusing on something makes it more important.

Once it's more important, you assign causality to it. Read the book Pre-Swashing by Robert Cheldini, this notion of causality from just importance implied by focus. Very interesting and that's one of the ways that the media manipulates people. So anyway, that's what we're trying to do. I'll give you an example of what we're doing right now that's sort of the perfect example. So we have this talk show. Like you guys, I'm able to attract thought leaders in a certain niche. One of those niches happens to be the brain because I'm so focused on that and I think it's so, so relevant no matter what you're trying to do in your life.

The most famous neuroscientist on the planet right now is a guy named V.S. Ramachandran. He wrote the book called Phantoms in the Brain, absolutely astonishing book that just details some of the stuff like severing the corpus close and what happens. He came on the show, did the interview with him, and after the interview, he realizes like, whoa, you've done your homework, you actually understand this stuff.

I have a research assistant who's building a company called Neurovalens, and you guys are gonna love this. I can't believe I didn't bring a sub-signer. So they have a device, could be total bullshit, full disclaimer, and you guys will gonna love this. I can't believe I didn't bring this up sooner. So they have a device, could be total bullshit, full disclaimer, and you guys will smell the rat, and this one just as I do, but they have a device that is FDA approved, believe it or not, for claims regarding weight loss,

because it stimulates the vestibular nerve. Now, there are whole theories. The vagus nerve, people stimulated it to death. They've done like every study that you can do on stimulating the vagus nerve. But nobody's really looked at the vestibular nerve. Now the vestibular nerve, as you can sort of guess from the name, is meant to track balance motion movement, right? There are hypothesis goes like this.

There's nothing in the body that counts calories. So what's deciding whether to operate or down-regulate your metabolism? And the vestibular nerve communicates directly with the hypothalamus, which is in charge of your regulating metabolism. So there are guesses, like an iPhone tracks movement, that the vestibular nerve is tracking movement and sending a signal to the hypothalamus saying,

we're moving a lot, therefore, it would probably be a bad idea to store fat. And in doing that, what they found is by stimulating it, that they notice a reduction in the amount of stored body fat. And they're beginning to do studies now watching with, forget the name of the thing you put on your face that tracks what indirect, calimetric reading out of God and brutalizing it. Lane Norn right now is rolling over because I'm killing this a bad. But it's detecting, I think, the hydrogen levels in your breath,

which tells you how rapidly you're oxidizing fat. That's the rough ballpark idea for all the scientists in the house. They know how badly I got that wrong, but that's the directional thing. And what they're seeing is that you're, as you're wearing the device, the it does seem to up-regulate and even continues to up-regulate after you take it off.

Now, I go into this with a level of skepticism you can't imagine. So, but anyway, that's how the cycle works, right? If this is real, let's just pretend for a second that it is and it has like a 20 to 30% ability to increase up-regulate your breakthrough, right? It would be absolutely amazing. First shattering. And if you're really thinking about it

and you go, wait a second, the only other thing that I know is that tide to movement motion exercise is depression and anxiety. If that's true and that's where they're taking their studies now, it would literally be the trifecta. It would be... Make you happier, make you lose weight, make you feel more energy, give you better,

you know, better cocktail of hormones and chemicals and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it would just be nuts. So the social aspect of the show introduced us to a company that we believe if it's real, and we're very much in the process of finding out if they're real, if it's real, is just an important company that's gonna be making

the world a better place that we wanna be involved in. So now, as we build this community, we can point the community over to that and say, we need your help, is this real? The way that we're positioning it, does it make sense? We want you to be ambassadors for it if you've used it and it's added value to your life, like tell people about it. So that's one way. And then that one we would build social content around, but the mindset to be successful, like for those entrepreneurs to actually have the grit, determination and stuff to see it through, you see it through, you're going to be pulling that inspiration from somewhere.

We believe that you pull that inspiration from images and pop culture as well as social content. If you look at the research that's being done on whether Instagram accounts are total bullshit, motivational ones, or if they actually do something, they actually do something. It's pretty interesting. Again, they talk about it in that book, Pre-Swashing, that you can get people to be better at sales just by surrounding them with motivational posters because it primes them. If you guys know the priming effects of like, get people to say a number from their Social Security number. If it happens to be a high number, they're like five times more likely to pay more for something than they would if the number was low.

So random, but that's how priming works. Great sales tactic, by the way. If you guys have, if you have something that's expensive and your product offering saves, there's no way we could charge you $10,000 for this. And then all of a sudden, they're super open to 150 bucks. There's actually a very riddle that you can do that demonstrates priming,

where you tell someone to say the word most three times in a row quickly, and then you ask them, would you put in a toaster, and they'll say toast. And no, you put bread in a toaster. And there's a few riddles like that where you're primed somebody, and it just demonstrates right away. Very, very important understanding for sales.

We did sales training for a long time, and we talked on-and about how to prime people to get them to kind of look where you want. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. So when you look at, so you're looking at content creators, are you looking for people who are just under the radar, YouTube, podcast, you know, all the kind of the new, you know, media type of people and people who are making an impact and you're going in and saying, Hey, we think you've got something awesome. We want to

take you to the next level. And then you know, because that's not scalable. So what we want to do is it is very clear to me and I'm one of those guys man I'll tell anybody my secrets my strategy all that because I think the only thing that matters is execution and I just don't think people can out execute so anybody that wants to prove me wrong and out execute me here's what you're going to do you're going to build a community that's number one step two you've got to have a technological component of this because what you need to be looking for is vi-rity. Okay, out there in the world right now, like you guys are saying, you have people from Nigeria, I think it was one of the countries you're talking about. Right, so right now in Nigeria,

there's a kid who's got the next amazing idea for either a business or a piece of content. You know, he's the next George Lucas thinking of Star Wars, got this whole amazing universe, it's going to impact, it's going to be awesome, but I'm never going to meet the guy. And there's also a thousand other people in Nigeria with terrible ideas, and I don't want to have to wait through those. So what you do is you build the community, you put the layer of technology where you're gameifying the community's experience,

so they are rewarded in a way that's meaningful to them, which can be as simple as a leaderboard, that they've read the most number of scripts, that they've earned the most number of badges. This is how, like, you guys play video games? I'm a total video game freak. And video games, like, that industry more than any other industry,

and you talked about Twitch earlier, right? Getting people to watch other people play video games. What? Like, that is so crazy. But, they've done such a good job of gamifying that experience. So, by sitting in the stream, I earn, like, some reward from your stream,

which can actually be spent on stuff. So, doing that, gamifying that experience. So, they're incentivized to do the things I want them to do, right, they're the head, they get to tell me, but I get to point them. So I point them in a direction. They're rewarded for doing that by moving up the leaderboard, getting points,

getting swag, getting, you know, whatever, trips. Jesus, who knows, like if they've done enough, I'll send them to the, you know, Tony Robbins Summit in his private Fiji Island, which is real, by the way, actually has his own resort, just if we could all take a second to the US. That's all of us are huge Tony Robbins. So you do that, that's the technology piece,

and then what you look for is virality. So something's gonna pop, right? Oh my God, this story from this kid in Nigeria pop. Now, how do I know this is gonna work? Because 10 years ago, Zooticomics tried this, was the digital offshoot of DC Comics, but they were too early and they were predatory. So they came, I really feel bad for them.

So from a company perspective, they said, oh, it doesn't work. But as the outsider, I'm watching it going, no, no, no, you did it too early and did it wrong. If you change these two subtle things, like this will crush. Why? Because that's, look at Kickstarter.

That's how the world works now. Like you put up your idea and you see what idea do people respond to? Oh, they responded to that one? Awesome. Let's get behind this one. And now by the time you get behind it, it's already got all this momentum behind it

because people are already aware of it. And then you tell the community guys because of you, right? Giving them that sense of causality. They're able to actually impact this company because of of you guys, we're now getting behind this and we're working as a business behind the scenes to build partnerships so that when we get something that pops and goes viral, we take it immediately to the studio that's gonna execute on it.

And I am a huge believer in comics. When I think it's just an amazing medium and then two, it gives you the ability to do grand scale stuff for dirt cheap. You could draw someone in a living room for the same price you can draw an apocalyptic battle. So comics are just a great way to rapidly get ideas out of the world. There's two comics right now.

God, do I want to name them? Probably not. There are two comics right now that we're in high-level talks with the studios that own them to get the rights. So, and our pitch goes like this, give me non-exclusive merchandising rights and the ability to make even if you won't let me do canon stories. Give me the ability, so think of Star Wars, right? There's canon stories that, like, if someone dies in a canon story, then they're really

dead. But if in their fanfiction over here, and even if it sells like 50 million copies, and somebody dies, eh, you can still say that that wasn't canon, right? So there's this notion of the universe of. So there's the universe of Star Wars, and not everything is canon. So give me the non-exclusive merchandising, right, and the ability to make either canon or non-canon, I don't care which, stories in that universe in comics only. Now what I'm gonna do, and watch me, I'm gonna revitalize your brand so we go after ones that we think

are intellectually incredibly important to the world that we live in today. And, but they're undervalued for whatever reason by the people that own the rights. So let us do that. We'll revitalize the brand and our goal is we're gonna be so fucking good and we're gonna crush it

and we're gonna tell these stories and some of them are gonna go viral and our community is gonna be so ferocious about it and we're gonna be reinforcing the ideology. of them are gonna go viral and our community is gonna be so ferocious about it. And we're gonna be reinforcing the ideology. Remember, that's all I care about. The ideology to make people more empowered, right? Cause at the end of the day, I'm trying to create companies.

Okay, I'm trying to create companies that actually change the world because I think that's the ultimate expression of mindset. You get to a mindset place and you're now able to build something that affects the world. So secretly, even though people can understand the, like they get it, when I say we're gonna be bigger than Disney in the same timeframe,

they can repeat that, they can latch onto it. But the secret is actually, I'm only doing this to create the next generation of empowered people. I happen to believe empowered people express themselves as entrepreneurs. So even if they're not the owner of the company, they're entrepreneurial minded, they're working in a company that's mission-based, blah, blah, blah.

So we're trying to get that ideology across through that entity to reinforce that ideology, to make it echo as I think of it. You need to reinforce it with merchandising. Now, understanding that from a beautiful place is to see why Disney does what they do. Maybe from, I'll just give them, they do it from a beautiful place too fine. I have no problem with that. But they know their business is merchandising

and that the reason you make the movies is to sell merchandise. 100%. So once you get that, then boy, because here's the thing that is gonna make me be successful or other people are not. For 15 years, I went on the sabbatical of learning business. And I've only now come back to my love for narrative, right?

So, and in that sabbatical, I learned how narrative actually works to build a business and to become a marketing vehicle. But forget the marketing vehicle, how do you rally people in your own company? How do you get them focused and pointed in the same direction? It's always going to be ideology. It's something to believe in. It's the mission of your company. It's the value system of your company.

It's the ability to spread that value system within your company, which is brutally hard, by the way. But those are like understanding that potency and how to do it, and then ultimately how to monetize it. That's the game. And we're just in a new world of being media companies. How big is your boner over there, dude? I know.

You're speaking right to me. Yeah, I know. I know, yeah, it's over there. It sounds like a lot of that is very similar to the way that I think and approach everything, too. And I would love to, I'm actually going through a process right now with Kickstarter and everything else. So everything you're talking about is very much on the forefront

of how I think and how I want to really include this Community aspect and have that feedback and that's going to drive my business and my core values You know out into the world. So along with mine pump obviously being the the megaphone and like our message and really like impacting the world From how we see it and how you know the root of really why we do this, why we do, why we want to educate people how to find their own path for fitness, how to, how to sort of navigate through all the bullshit. Like, this is like, this is really like, you know, something that we think about constantly and we're always reiterating. So. It sounds like you're using the internet model of really finding that talent,

whereas in the past it was like, you had your scouts, they would look out and they'd look for things. But you're using that community model, which of course has the dual benefit of, now you've got your driven people who want to promote it. Almost like that garage band type feel like, oh, we really want to support this band

because we were the first ones to listen to them. Kind of an older model business, which is really, I guess it is older model, gosh, it's been around now for a while. American Idol was really good about that. They put on a TV show, they showed the process of this person came from nowhere, they're doing this competition, now they win,

and it was like instant sales because everybody watching felt so connected to that new singer, versus just introducing this new performer who you've never heard and you know is the music good or not. I mean at that point it kind of doesn't matter. You're behind them, you feel connected to them and it sounds like you've got kind of some of those those components kind of tied into what you're doing. So your role now with Quest is you're now more of a consultant. You're no longer You know the working or directly running the company like as you were before

Yeah, the easiest way for me to sum up what I do is I'm the chief evangelist So I so believe in the company and really think that they're just gonna keep crushing it And I think they will become one of the biggest and most important food companies on the planet But I'm any day-to-day involvement with the company and my time is totally taken up with impact three. I agree. I think what Quest has done has been incredible. And I've seen some shifts and changes in the fitness industry over the last, I don't know, 10 years, but even more recent, maybe even the last five years that I've seen bigger changes, faster changes than I saw in the previous 20 and 30.

One of the biggest things I've heard from people who are going to these fitness conventions is, they're coming back and they're telling me, man, there's a lot of supplement companies that are now going the natural route, the no artificial sweetener route, whereas five years ago, you would go to the Arnold Classic, the Olympia.

You saw none of that. It was all the best chemical formulation and the most advanced looking stuff. Now it's kind of like it's merging with that natural wellness kind of side. Do you see that for yourself? Do you see that being the kind of the future of supplements and food in the fitness industry? If you'll let me add near-term to future, yes, it is the near-term future. I think the only thing that will work in a sustainable way is what's real. So, some things that are purely natural are not necessarily metabolically advantageous.

So, I think those things will go by the wayside, but I think that yeah, like if you look at what's gonna be the most effective from metabolic standpoint, it's gonna be the things that are closest to real whole food. I mean, that's our message back at Quest when I was there anyway was, if you called in and said, hey, I wanna get healthy, what should I be eating? The answer was chicken breast and broccoli. And we're not incentivized to say that,

because we don't sell chicken breast or broccoli. It's just that that's the truth, right? And eat whole food whenever you can. So we knew when our products fit in, it was when you want some of the taste I could desert, when you need something that has a high level of convenience. So that's really the game, but you're going to see a lot of stuff happen

in the natural world that just doesn't serve people metabolically. And certainly the hardcore athletes at the core of the scene, they're going to migrate to what's really working. And as our ability to assess what's happening at a cellular level increases, then I think we're really going to start to tune in to like what really is the home run here. Yeah, because a lot of the troubles I see with companies when they get very big is they become this big ship

that's very hard to steer. That's like Tom said earlier, it'd become very dogmatic, you know, which is the opposite of you guys believe. So I mean, I think Quest is gonna continue to thrive. It's pretty exciting to watch the real thing. You were just eating keto cups? Yeah.

I mean, that's, I mean, that was a pretty quick, and you're working with, you guys working with Dr. Diagostino, correct? Yeah, Dominic Diagostino and Peter Atia really came in and, do you guys know Peter Atia? Mm-hmm. He's so amazing. Have you guys had him on?

No, we all. Oh, God, you gotta get him on. Like, that dude is unbelievably, he's really, really cool. If you like Dom, you're gonna like him a lot. Cool. And they came in, this was, God, this is like three or four years ago now. And they said, basically, you guys have a fundamental misunderstanding of fat.

And fat is critical. And if you're not eating fat, because like at that time, I intentionally tried to exist in a state of rabbit starvation. So if you guys know the stories about trappers in the West, back in the day, during the winter, they would eat rabbits and starve to death. And the reason that I would happen is the rabbits themselves were so lean that they weren't getting enough fat to just maintain cellular integrity.

And so they would die. And that had to be the most surreal experience ever because you're eating, but not understanding the important role of fat. It's essential. Right, so they were biting the dust. So that I was trying to like sort of always be on that edge because I find for me that I was able to maintain nice, hard muscle mass and get lean, lean, lean.

But what I wasn't noticing was all the inflammation in my body was actually due to not having enough fat and possibly, if you're really going to let me get crazy, having too much protein in my body. That now I'll say, that's not crazy. We talk about that. We talk about that all the time. It's great to hear you say that. And here's the thing, like, if I, if I could speak for myself and make sure everybody understands, I do not represent question and nutrition right now. I am talking purely from my own experience. I struggled with inflammation for 15 years. And I used to have to ice my wrists every night

for 15 years to the point where my right thumb was numb down the back of it, and I had like these weird little burn marks on my wrists where the ice touched, you know, because of the bony parts of your wrist, just get an unusual amount of the pressure. And I just thought, well, it is what it is, what I have to do.

I couldn't press heavy, like I had to avoid all of that. Dom and Peter Atia come in. Tell us we're totally misunderstanding fat that it has Possibly got a couch all this language. Possibly has implications in anti-cancer properties and so I was like, well if it really does have anti-cancer properties and and the theory goes Like this that basically cancer cells share a trait. They are damaged in such a way that they can no longer burn ketones as a fuel source, they can only burn glucose. And if that's true, then you could, you're in a position where if you rob the body dieterally of glucose, that you should be able to kill the cancer cells by essentially

starving them to death, That's the theory. I heard that and thought, okay, I'm gonna start doing something every year where I do a three day fast and then I lead into about three weeks of four to one ratio ketogenic diet, meaning for every combined gram of protein carbohydrate that I eat, I'm gonna eat four grams of fat. And I tried it, it was total fucking misery.

I cannot tell you how much I hated it. And I had keto flu. It was a nightmare. Keto flu is like a low grade flu. You feel like 10 pounds of ass. It's so badly. And so I was just like, oh man, these guys are crazy. I can't do this. But midway through I realized, huh, my wrists feel perfect.

And they haven't felt this good in 15 years. Like this is crazy. And I was so blown away by it, I said, well, I'm never going back to rabbit starvation because the way that I felt, it was, I've never had food feel like a drug before. It felt like a drug. It was that impactful.

It was that binary night and day, one moment my wrist hurt and have this pain where I have to ice. And the next minute they feel, not better, they feel perfect. And so I was like, wow, this is weird. So I stay high fat for another year. I think this is amazing, wrist pain is gone,

just incredible. And then in that period, I'm actually learning how to do ketogenic's right. And realizing that there's, if you're gonna go four to one, like you've gotta be supplementing, and you know, there's just things you have to do to avoid the keto flu. And so then I go through a phase where I'm two to one

for nine months and I've never cognitively, I've never felt better. And it totally changes your relationship to hunger because your body switches from dietary fat to body fat instantly. So you don't go through the performance degradation that you would if you're eating protein because protein can be turned into glucose.

So glucose and theogenesis, I'm assuming your audience knows all about this, so I will belabor the point. But once I dropped my protein and took my fat up, that was just a whole another world. And so, like I said, for nine months, I was living at a state always north of 0.5, not always, ever in now and then, I would go crazy on a weekend or something. But for the most part, not. I mean, it's really rare. I was at 0.5 millim molars or above on ketones present

in the bloodstream is using a precision extra and ketone strips to check it. So I mean, this wasn't like piss strips or anything. This was like legit, testing my blood multiple times a day. Never felt better, it was awesome, but I found it hard to maintain my muscle mass. So I've now switched and I do roughly four days a week of high protein and three days a week ketogenic and it's been amazing.

Very similar to how I eat. And I had inflammatory issues as well. And you know, protein, I'm so glad you said that about protein, protein and fitness because we know it builds muscle directly, right? Oh, amino acids build muscle. Therefore, more protein means more muscle because that's the rationale that we use.

And it's become like this macro, this magic macro nutrient where you just can't eat too much of it. And I've encountered more than enough clients that I've worked with where protein takes too high and they just get inflamed and feel shitty and we bring it down. And wow, they feel amazing.

And they're building more muscle. Oh, they predict a future backlash on that for sure. Oh, you're starting to see a little bit. You're starting to see a little bit. You're starting to see a little bit of that future backlash when it comes to, you know, too much of protein intake. Because there's still people in our industry who advocate ridiculous levels of protein,

like two grams per pound of body weight. And, you know, I've got 150 pound female clients who are like, oh, I'm eating 300 grams of protein a day and they're wondering why they take a shit once a week, you know, and it's like, well, maybe you should get your protein intake down a little bit. So, you guys are now, or Quest is now having some of these keto type bars and supplements. And you're starting to see other companies start to kind of copy that a little bit. Was that a hard thing to convince everybody to do?

Was like, hey, we're going to go this direction or was everybody still open-minded like, hey, you can do this. thing to convince everybody to do was like, hey, we're going to go this direction or was everybody still open-minded like, hey, so first of all, Ron, who's really the just nutritional guide of the company is, is never dogmatic and really like, he'll, he'll switch on a dime. And because we've all worked with him long enough to really, really have faith in what he's doing and know that he's, he's going to look at the science, right? He's going to look at the data. And if the data's there, he's going to keep doing it.

If the data's not there, he's not. Beautiful. And, and he's there, he's gonna keep doing it. If the data's not there, he's not. Beautiful. And he'll go all in on something. So, you know, he was like, Hey, I'm gonna be doing a keto experiment. Anybody that wants to join me join. And then we talk openly, and I was telling everybody, like, this sucked. I hated it.

But my risk, you know, and so you just, everyone's talking through, like, what do we experience? You were fined over time. We've abandoned things that just don't seem true. And then we've doubled down on unpopular things because we're looking at the data, and it's just don't seem true. And then we've doubled down on unpopular things because we're looking at the data and it's just true. So, and that's been, you know,

that's something that you can count on. Like that's just, that is the way this guy's mind works. And everyone there has so much faith in him because he's just, you know, you earn credibility and you earn it over time. And he's earned that credibility internally over time where God, he would, people would have to suspect brain damage or drug use, and not be like,

all right, it sounds crazy now, but I'm sure in the end it'll prove out, or he'll abandon it if it stops seeming real. Now to bring things full circle a little bit with you and your own personal fitness, you had commented how you hate working out in the gym, still how you don't like it. Are you finding now your own personal relationship

with exercise and nutrition? Are you finding now your own personal relationship with exercise and nutrition? Are you finding that still has ways to progress and you're still finding that you're getting, I hate to use the word better, but advancing or progressing in terms of your own understanding of your connection to things like exercise and nutrition. Yeah, definitely. And when people ask me about my morning routine, it's like, it is one of the most important parts of my morning routine. It is the first thing I do. It is the thing I prioritize.

The only thing I prioritize over the gym is sleep. And that's it. So, to me, you gotta start the day that way. Not only the stuff we talked about earlier, or any credibility with yourself and learning things about yourself and what's possible, but if you guys have read Spark by John Rady, just understanding the mind, body connection, and it's possible. But if you guys have read Spark by John Rady, just understanding the mind-body connection and it's real and you know, science is

acknowledging now you have a second brain that lives in your digestive track. I mean it's just it's real and I think that every day more science is gonna come out and we're gonna start learning about the microbiome more and we're gonna realize like all this stuff is so tied to well-being that if you're not paying attention to what you eat and exercising, you're missing out on optimizing the human performance. Even though I'm not an athlete, that's just not the game that I play. As a mental athlete, which I very much consider myself, I know that I have to get my body

right. If you look at some of the, you guys know about e-gaming, the sports, sorry, they punch me in the mouth. The sports that those guys guys have strength and conditioning coaches that come in and teach these guys about diet and exercise. And it's like, that's going to be the next big thing, because they're looking, I mean, their world is judged in milliseconds.

So to optimize for that, like the first one that started working the body, I'm sure, just started handing people their ass. And then it spread like wildfire through the industry and now it's just standard. The top teams all have strength and conditioning coaches. Well, that is crazy. So what do you like about, or what form of exercise

do you find you like the most, or how are you making it? Yeah, do you typically lean to a certain modality, or for sure, so I like weights, so let's just start with that. Now, do you like weights, or do you hate it the least? I hated the least is fair. That's much closer to the truth. But there are things about it that I do like. Like there's something manly about being able to say

I can lift that, right? And so on the times I really need that boost, you put on some death metal and you think about like, you feel the fucking calluses in your hands, you go, yeah, I've earned these, right? And you just get after it. And there is something about that. There's just no substitute for what thatuses in your hands. You go, yeah, I've earned these, right? And you just get after it. And there is something about that. There's just no substitute for what that does to your mind.

Yeah, I think the next, what you'll find in your evolution with exercise is, because you're moving, I mean, I swear to God, you're moving like textbook along the path that I always try and get clients to move through, and that always successfully, because not everybody has that same, I guess that mental discipline. Yeah, mental discipline or drive or ability to self to be aware, a self-aware. And the next, because it can be and it can last for a long time to be motivated with exercise

by the results. That can last a long time, but it doesn't always last forever. Most times it doesn't. In fact, you'll find people kind of stopping and starting or falling off the wagon, getting on the wagon. The next evolution seems to be what I've seen the most and what I tend to try to motivate people to get into is where you find that you start to enjoy the process. Once you start to enjoy the process of exercise and stop worrying so much about the results, the results become a side effect of what you're doing, and then it becomes so much so effortless.

And you start to exercise according to how your body wants to work out and it starts to change. The ultimate goal is intuitive eating and intuitive training. I mean, that's the ultimate goal for us. It's the ultimate awareness is not having to track, not having to stress, and it is. It's intuitive. Yeah, I mean, personally, my workouts have changed so much because I was so my own body

image issues revolved around being too skinny, not being strong enough. And so my workouts reflected that. And I was very goal driven and result driven in terms of my strength and muscle mass and how much I can lift and how big I can get. And if you look at my workouts now, they're so different. I still live with weights, I love lifting weights, but it's different because now I'm enjoying the process and I'm not so focused on the results. And the side effect of it is I'm more mobile, I'm still strong, I look better and it's almost shocking to me that that could happen, not focusing on just those things. And the process is so much, I hate to use word healthier, but it really is on a mental spiritual. Yeah, definitely

on rewarding, much more rewarding. What one piece of advice could, because we have a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to the show, a lot of people in fitness who are trying to build their business in particular, what are some pieces of advice you can give them that can kind of help them, you know, get through some of the trials and tribulations. Yeah, I have one and this is man, take this advice to heart and really listen to this. Do and believe that which moves you towards your goals, period. Do and believe, right? Most people think that there is some objective truth that they need to be a slave to and it's just not true.

So if you have a negative image of yourself and you have that rule in mind, then you need to self-assess and go, does thinking that I'm dumb, ugly, fat, lazy, whatever, does it serve me? If it does, I'm going to double down on the belief. But if it doesn't, and things that make you a lesser version of yourself almost never serve you, then you've, by definition, you have to abandon that. And so many people spend time obsessing over the things that are bad about them,

that are negative about them, that they never stop to think, like what does that do? Like if you know that there's a truth to neurons that fire together, wire together, then when you look at your image and you think, oh, you're dumb, you're fat, you're lazy, then literally you begin to associate yourself with those things and those will hardwire in your brain

and now that becomes true. Now, why did it become true? It became true because you thought it over and over and over. So what happens if you took something else? And you said, I am powerful, I am capable of executing at the highest level, I can take a meeting with any human being on the planet and persuade them to see something my way that I can assess value that I can grow and learn and develop.

Now you start repeating those things, they will become true. Not because either is empirically true. They become true because you obsessively focus on them. So once you give up focusing on this negative voice and you start even though you're going to feel like an asshole in the beginning, you start telling yourself this empowering stuff, all of the sudden you'll be able to do it. And the reason we were as successful at Quest as we were is because Henry Ford is right.

Whether you think you can or you think you can't. You're probably right. Exactly. Yeah. Once you understand that, like that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was neither one is true. You believe in one, it becomes true. And that's why to me the matrix is the ultimate metaphor.

So right now there's people that are out there that you could do something with your life, but you won't because you listen to the negative voice. And you're just convinced that because something like let's take abuse, you were abused. And so you think that makes you a lesser person, because you think it makes you a lesser person, it does. But there are other people out there that overcome the most horrific shit that you can imagine. Read Man Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.

Like if you're ever doing cardio and you're feeling weak, read Man Search for Meaning, okay? This is a neuroscientist that went who was in like four different concentration camps, ends up finally in Auschwitz, and he said, I'm looking around at everyone here and you can tell when they're gonna die because they give up.

And he said the moment they give up, you know, three days later they're dead. So we said the reason that people make it or don't make it had nothing to do with like genetics and being strong, it had everything to do with whether they found meaning to live for. And once they had meaning to live for it, then they had something that they were gonna fight through.

That to me tells you right there, it is about the power of the mind. And people like, they just, they don't, they don't lock into it. I'm so glad you said that because what I realized a long time ago was it's not just about saying those things to yourself like I am powerful long time ago was, it's not just about saying those things to yourself, like I am powerful. I will succeed, I will not give up.

It's about practicing it constantly because it's like training your fucking body. Like if I wanna learn how to run better, I can't just practice it once. I got a hard wire, that new recruitment pattern into my muscles and the same thing goes for your brain. You have to create that pattern, reinforce that pattern. It takes practice, so just doing it once,

10 times, 100 times is not enough. You have to do it over and over and over and over again, and it becomes a pattern in the brain. And they're actually finding that this is probably one of the reasons why. I don't know if you're familiar with some of the new research on psychedelics and how they're using it in therapy and they're finding that they'll give someone...

That's not good about it. Oh, that's great. They'll give someone, you know, MDMA and, you know, one or two sessions is equivalent to, like, a year's worth of therapy and they're thinking, well, how is this even possible? Well, the substance did something to the brain that allowed it to make these connections much quicker and stronger because of the altered state of consciousness than if the person was in their normal state of consciousness. Very, very fascinating stuff. And you saw, you obviously into this kind of stuff. Oh, I'm utterly fascinated. So I'm a total chicken and I have not done any psychedelics, but so you guys had Stephen Kotler on his co-author,

Jamie Wheel. I had to get him to talk about it, but he stayed away from it. All right, dude, get Jamie Wheel on your show. He pulled me aside before we started recording. He said, Tom, I have zero fucks left to give. So he said, you can ask me anything you want, like we'll go in on it.

And so he is so eloquent. So you're hearing this guy at like just the height of being able to articulate a sentiment in like a really elevated way, talking about like getting totally fucked up at Burning Man, right? And so he's really able like I've never done anything like that. And afterwards I was like, God, do I need to try and micro-dosing like that? Like he really makes it sound. You do need to try and do that. Especially a cerebral guy like you.

For sure. You have to say, I'm having a hard time shaking the idea. You guys are reading Stealing Fire right now, right? So that book is amazing. And reading that, you can't not at least think, like, God, I kind of have to try this. I was like at least once. I was so mad that I couldn't get Kotler to talk about it, man.

I wanted to dive into it with him. I wanted to get it. to talk about it man I wanted to dive into it with him. I wanted to get get Jamie because it so there's certain people that That you can talk about a subject like that and you think God you're you're really making this sound worse like think of MMA Right, there's certain people you talk to them about MMA like do you guys know for us the hobby? No, I don't know you must get them on your show my God, okay, so he's GSP's trainer He is the modern day Bruce Lee's unbelievable. Now you hear him talk, he's amazing. You hear him talk about MMA and you think,

how could I have gone my whole life without being like a practitioner at the most like sort of monkish philosophical level? Like this is the center of the intellectual universe. That's literally what it's like talking to him about. And then there's other people where you're like, yeah, you sound like you're gonna stab somebody in the bar. You know what I mean?

So it's like so totally different of the spectrum. Jamie is like that with drugs. There are some people that can talk about psychedelics and you wanna distance yourself because they sound like a scary hippie who took away too much acid. And then there's Jamie who's like, he's very intellectually, he's gonna talk to you

about breakthroughs, he's gonna talk to you about what the studies are showing of helping people get past trauma. He's gonna talk about the neurological wiring breakthroughs. He's going to talk to you about what the studies are showing of helping people get past trauma. He's going to talk about the neurological wiring pattern and why it's important and how there's this thing he calls the cosmological perspective. And he says, for us to understand who we are, we first must understand who the other is.

For us to understand compassion for the other, we have to step beyond us and them to getting to a nation-wide level where now everybody in your in-group, you can have empathy for empathy for but then that's still defined by the other nation or whatever and to really understand that you need that pale blue dot moment of getting into the cosmos and looking back in the earth and understanding how the things that were sort of saying our differences between us are really minor like when you think that we're on this floating rock in the middle of nowhere, and the perspective that it gives you is what he thinks is gonna unify everybody. So he can talk about that, or he can talk about, as this is his quote, tripping your balls off in Burning Man. And so, you know, he can talk about it all and really is sort of shamanistic in his way to come back

with what you should take away from it, and how it can be empowering knowledge and information. And I mean, you're reading the books you understand how it can be empowering knowledge and information and and I mean You reading the books you understand that it's not just about drugs, right? It's about there are three ways to get into ecstasis as they call it The first way is meditative or mystical states the next one is flow which you could get into through an extreme sport or something like that And then the third one is psychedelics and he says it all comes down to your access to time and your willingness to risk. He said if you have 30 years and you're really risk averse then you should meditate because you

can get to the same place. But it takes that long to get that good at meditating. And so if you need something, if you've just gotten out of the Iraqi war and you don't want to live another day, then you need MDMA and you need it today. And they've seen that a single dose of MDMA and you need it today, right? And they've seen that a single dose of MDMA with a professional that can do the talk therapy through it that you can have permanent lasting effects. And that's what's crazy. They'll follow up with them six months later, a year later, and the breakthrough persists.

And so, hearing that, man, let me tell you, if I was really struggling with something, I would do it in a heartbeat. And the only reason I don't is, and look, don't become dogmatic, right? So I hear my own voice, but I'm the guy who doesn't do drugs. And because I have that story, like, I'm like, God, do I really want to give that story up?

But if it's powerful as people are making it sound, it may be. Well, the brain, the brain images actually, oh, changes in the brain. But without, you know, and I don't want to sound like a commercial psychedelics and these stuff. Yeah, what a psychedelic specialist. No, no, no, but our fitness and health podcast. No, I'm not a psychedelic. Psychedelics are what, here's what they are.

Very powerful tools. And very powerful tools can be used. Like anything. For good, for bad, you know, this is why I think the future of psychedelic use is going to be, I think it's going to be legalized, but with licensed therapists and professionals, I don't think if you've ever done, never done a drug like that, you should go drop acid and you're going to come at them and be like, that was fucking great. I had a great time. A lot of you are going to come at them and be like, that was the most terrifying

period of my life. And now I have PTSD as a result of it. That's also a reality. So they're just very, very powerful, powerful tools and I think we should study them and look into them and I think being dogmatic one way or the other because there's also the dogma of these drugs will change the world and make everybody peaceful if we could just spray MDMA on the whole world. Everybody would go to war and we'd be all, and that's also a bullshit.

Have you hung out with Aubrey Marcus at all on it? I haven't but people bring him up to me a lot. So something tells me I need to. Yeah, it'd be worth having him on the show. You're interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just from the business side talking about this. I mean, he's done Ayahuasca I think like 17 times or something like that. Like he calls himself the spiritual warrior or the spiritual. What is either warrior poet? Warrior poet. Warrior poet. Yeah, yeah. Well, I know you got gotta go, man. It's been a freaking blast. 100% we're gonna do this again for sure.

We have to do this, yeah. Absolutely love having you on your list. And if you like Mind Pump, leave us a five star rating review on iTunes. If we like your review and we pick it, you'll get a free Mind Pump t-shirt. Also, check us out on YouTube. We put up a new video every single day, Mind Pump TV.

And you can also find us on Instagram at Mind Pump Radio. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal, at my Mind Pump Adam Adam and Justin at Mind Pump Justin. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps on a ballad, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is

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