The Joe Rogan Experience - #999 - Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: August 16, 2017

Tom Bilyeu is the Co-founder of Quest Nutrition and also the Co-founder & CEO of Impact Theory.

5, 4, 3, 2, the infamous Jamie countdown and we're live Tom. What is up man? Tom, Bill you if you're wondering, Bill you. Bill you? People are wondering. How do I say that? Bill you. Dude, I've eaten more of your bars than any bar ever in the history of bars next to you

in the Primal Kitchen bars. Whoa. That's it. Well I take that as an honor. So you're in fucking lofty company. Rar bars. Whoa. That's it. Well, I take that as an honor. So you're in fucking lofty company. Rarified air, man. Yeah. That's awesome.

Those goddamn Quest bars are the shit. Thank you. Especially those chocolate brownie ones. Dude, tell me about it. You guys nailed it with those. Thank you. So what was the idea behind the company? Like some low sugar, low carb nutrition?

Yeah. At the time that we were thinking of launching the company, there was nothing on the market that we would eat. It either tasted terribly and was good for you, or it tasted great and was horrible for you. So we wanted to create the first bar that tasted like it had sugar but didn't, and metabolically speaking, had a great response. Dude, it's a grind, man.

If you try to go on a keto diet, and you try to find really good, healthy, delicious stuff to snack on. Boy, here's a question. Do Quest bars kick you out of ketosis? No. Really? No. See, if I eat a full bar, I'm going to be out for sure.

But it only has like nine grams of carbs. How many grams of carbs? Yes, but the protein is high. Well, it's actually less than that. Do you count net carbs or full-blown? You know what? I'm very loose with it. I don't do a whole lot of counting carbs. For the most part, what I'm doing is eating whole foods. The most part I'm doing is a lot of that

Primal Kitchen. You know that Chipotle mayo, that Chipotle lime mayo? I'm not bullshitting. I don't. It's fucking fantastic. I might eat a case of that a month and I'm not bullshitting. I put it on everything because it's super high fat and really delicious. So I put it on eggs. I go cook up a couple of eggs in the morning, and then I'll take some scoops of that chipotle lime mayo and just slop it on there with sliced jalapenos. That is amazing.

So I'm getting a lot of fat. Do you know the macros on it? No, I don't calculate all that shit. Really? I'm not a nerd, bro. But you stay in ketosis? You can. What?

Yeah. Do you take your blood levels? I have. Yeah. I have. I don't do it that shit. Really? I'm not a nerd, bro. But you stay in ketosis? You can. What? Yeah. Do you take your blood levels? I have. Yeah. I have. Yeah. I don't do it on a regular basis. I just essentially eat.

Well, what I'm doing is, for the most part, if I'm eating foods, the foods that I'm eating are very high fat, very low carbs, and then 20% of the time I fuck off. All right. 20% of the time. Like 20% of the time I fuck off. All right. 20% of the time. Like 20% of the time. Like I try not to fuck off too hard, like with desserts and stuff like that. Do you like desserts?

Yes. Even on a keto diet, you don't find that that's reduced? Yeah, it is reduced. But once you start eating the ice cream, you remember how awesome it is. But a lot of exogenous ketones. That I don't fuck with.

Never done. Did I try it once? I think I did. I was told that it would like help with a headache and i was like i call bullshit this is oh okay for like the keto flu uh it wasn't when i had i did have keto flu profoundly uh but that's what happens when you're a dumbass the first time that you try going ketogenic how did you uh what'd you do i went true four to one after a three day fast. Four to one, explain that to people. So for every gram of combined protein and carbohydrate I ate, I ate four grams of fat, which is brutally difficult to do.

You're never going to do it by accident. I had a spreadsheet and everything that I ate had to go through the math. So I had to figure out like, what's this going to be as a total meal? You literally have to like scrape every bit of oil out of the math. So I had to figure out like, what's this going to be as a total meal? You literally have to like scrape every bit of oil out of the pan. Like you've got to be hardcore, sop up. Like if you've got cabbage or something, sop up all the oil to make sure that you're getting it all. It was hateful. I absolutely hated it. It was so disgusting. And Dom has talked about that. The palatability of four to one is very, very low. At the time I thought I needed to do that. I was trying to do cancer prevention. So I went hard, hardcore keto, trying to get the ratio between my blood glucose and my ketones right.

Were you experiencing health difficulties? No. But at Quest, we were really trying to experiment, like find out what's the edge of this stuff. We were putting millions of dollars into research, especially into cancer, trying to find out, like, does a ketogenic diet have the positive implications on cancer that we hope it does and um at least in a clip that i saw on your show when don was on he was talking about that the um the inner the energy crisis that the cells go through that are cancerous because some some forms of cancer yeah i think there's there's some doesn't he think it's all of them i know some people are there was an article recently about brain cancer there was a type

of brain cancer that actually lived off of fats um didn't respond to a low-carb diet. I mean, I believe there's several different kinds of cancer. And so I don't know if all the data is in on that. Right. So your idea was just to do it, just to get yourself in a really healthy state and monitor your own body? Yeah, my thing was like if it has that potential, it's worth trying, right? What's a three-day fast not a big deal? And then two weeks of being in ketosis, going into it, I didn't know how hard it was going to be. I didn't know what four to one was going to feel

like. And I didn't know how to supplement. So it was real misery. And I really did have what they call the keto flu. You feel like you have the flu. It sucked. And my whole thing is like being uber disciplined. So once I commit to something, I'm not going to stop just because it sucks. And I wasn't smart enough to go and ask somebody like, what do you do? Like, is there a way to supplement your way out of this? So I just muscled through, but it was total misery. I don't understand why you never tried exogenous ketones. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Well, so you know Peter Atiyah, right? No. You don't know Peter Atiyah?

Who is he? You have to immediately get him on your show. So Peter Attia is a good friend of Dominic D'Agostino, so that would be an easy connect. And he's a doctor, a physician. He did a TED Talk, which crushed, absolutely amazing. And he goes from practicing traditional medicine, and this is his TED Talk, so this isn't me, this is him saying it, being fairly judgmental about the people that he's treating. This woman comes in,

she has diabetes. And, um, God, I think she was either there to have an amputation or she'd already had one, something. Anyway,

he realizes in, as he like starts breaking all this down, that this is like a human being and he, what they're doing isn't solving the problem. So he's like somewhere, the system is failing a lot of people. And how do we rectify it? And as he's giving the TED Talk,

he starts like crying. It's so amazing, especially getting to know him and knowing that it's totally sincere. This was not a guy faking it for the camera. And so ends up completely changing his life. He starts really trying to figure out what's going on metabolically,

finds high fat, finds ketogenics. For a while was known as the the fat man or the keto man i forget what they called him but long before i'd ever heard of ketogenics and starts um nuci have you heard of nuci no nutritional science initiative um raises a ton of money and they're trying to do like real double blind empirical studies on nutrition because they're like like there's so much guesswork in all of this. We really want to prove it ends up leaving that. I don't,

I won't speak to why I honestly don't know, but ends up leaving NUSI founding a private practice as like a high end concierge guy. We were trying to get him involved at quest just cause his nutritionally, this guy's mind is unreal. And so talking to him about that stuff and him walking us through like keto flu and how you can actually supplement your way out of it and all that. But I unfortunately didn't know it at the time. Uh, so yeah, I suffered needlessly. Hmm. So, um, that's interesting. The, the,

the flu thing is a weird feeling, right? Because your body just feels so weak and you don't understand it. You've been eating and you, you almost are in denial. Like I can't believe that this is just carbs. There's no way like this is something something's going on. Yeah. Is it carbs or is it protein? I mean, I guess gluconeogenesis is turning the protein into glucose, but it is weird. Or is it that and this I actually don't know the answer to. And I'm now outside my realm of what I understand. So full disclosure. But there's obviously something in the micronutrients because the people that later told me you could have supplemented your way out of this, they were talking about, and I don't remember well, but it was like magnesium and

some other things. It wasn't, oh, just, you know, have more carbs or more protein. But I will say at a two to one diet, you, at least I didn't experience the flu at all. And that was sustainable. I did that for nine months. And that was amazing. It was transformative from an anti-inflammatory perspective. It was just unbelievable. So just more low carb than keto, totally. Yeah, so I've been low carb for a very long time because if I am having a cheat weekend, and we were talking about this just before we went live,

if I'm having a cheat weekend, you can hear me getting fatter. It is so crazy how well my body turns a calorie into adipose tissue. It's nuts. So you get fatter quicker. I get fat very, very fast, especially with carbohydrate. But even if I spike my calories and they're all clean, I'll get fat fast. Wow. And this didn't used to be the case before you tried these low-carb diets?

No, this was always the case. Always? Oh, so you've always been that kind? No, this was always the case. Always? So it wasn't until, yeah, that's why I tried low carb. Because I'm so frustrated with always being like having a wet look. A wet look? Yeah. What's that? Maybe I'm making that up.

So that's what my partners and I used to refer to people like me who just have a natural smooth layer of fat. Like I have to do so much cardio to get that like dry look where you're just really tight, like a massive amount of cardio. And is that the case, even with a, like a low carb diet? Like when you get leaner on a low carb diet to be sure. Uh, but it doesn't like, if I want to be lean, lean, I have to do cardio. So you're essentially got a really good adaptation body for famine. Yeah, I'll survive a famine. The zombie apocalypse, I've got you.

Like, I'm making it through that. Hmm. Very confident. Do you watch Walking Dead? Because a lot of people that think they're going to make it, they don't make it, man. I do watch Walking Dead, but I'm way behind. I'm on, like, season three. Where'd you stop?

Because people are telling me I'm going to tap out. When they killed Glenn. Oh, wow. It's a spoiler alert, I guess, right? I made it that far. I made it that far. But yeah, no, we're beyond that. But here's what I find interesting about that is I want to do some content on what are the 10 leadership lessons you can learn from The Walking Dead.

Because I think they're there. That's what I find interesting about the show. Rick is inconsistent. I'm not buying them in the last season. That's why I bailed out. I don't know, man. What leadership things are you going to learn when everyone's turned to shit

and a bunch of people killing each other? All right, so let's go to one that you would have seen because it's before Glenn dies. You've got the kid. They find him at the bar. They've got his teammates. I don't have a better word for that. His clan, whatever. They the kid. They find him at the bar. His teammates, I don't have a better word for that, his clan, whatever. They go ballistic. They start shooting. You take him back

to your place because you want to help him. He paled his leg. He's hurt. Do you kill him? Do you set him free? What do you do? Well, it's a TV show. It's not real. You don't have to be really around the guy. You have to know. I think it's part logic and part instinct when

you're dealing with a situation like that like how much of this guy's behavior was because he was stuck with a bunch of other shitty people and how different is he when he's free and how much does he listen to reason and logic and how much is he willing to contemplate the possibility that there's a better life if everybody works together if not kill him you kill him. If you think that he's immeasurably damaged, like maybe he's a big liar, he lies about a lot of stuff, and you know you can't count on him, you know he's going to be a liability, and he's not going to be an asset,

and he might very well try to kill you in your sleep or something like that, yeah, you've got to kill him. That's what I find interesting about the show, is it makes you think about stuff like that. Let me ask you this. If something does happen, like Asteroidal Impact, right, and there's only like 10% of the people left, do you want to be amongst those 10% of the people,

or would you rather be one of the people that died? Wow, that seems like a trick question. I want to be one of the 10%. Can I just say, have you read The Stand by Stephen King? No. Oh, dude, you would love it. Yeah. So it's about a super flu, right?

So it wipes out, let's say it's 10%. I don't remember what the number is, but it wipes out virtually everybody. And then the remaining people have the task of rebuilding society. Now it's a Stephen King novel. So there's a lot of weird shit going on. Right. But that captured my imagination so profoundly when I read it.

I read it probably 15 years old. Dude, I still think about that. I think that would, while I wouldn't want it, because inevitably a lot of people that you love end up being in the 90%. So that would suck. But if it happened, it would be fascinating to see how we rebuild. But if you've seen the road, that's a pretty dark take on what happens, but a little more optimistically.

I mean, look, it could be wonderful if you really can survive and you really find a way to live off the land and you find a good group of people and y'all work in coordination and You cooperate and you have a wonderful little civilization you take care of each other or it could get horribly ugly and then you could be dealing with cannibals and marauders and people invading you and Where do you fall? What do you mean? 90% or 10%? Oh, 100% or 90%.

Really? You hit me in the head with that rock. Wow. Fuck all this, dude. That's interesting. Yeah, man, you don't want to be one of those survivors when there's nothing left. You don't want to be one of those people seeing if you can eat a charred foot because you're super starving. Well put.

Just, I mean, maybe it's a cop out look the only reason why we're here is because monkeys fucked when they were living in trees you know and they figured out a way to get to become a person over who knows how many millions of generations or whatever it's been but i think um if you really stop and think about like what your life would be if everybody out there was dead and there was only like 10 of the people that first of all, 90% of the people dead, that's a lot of stinking rotten bodies. You got to get through that. That's going to be awful. There's going to be 10%.

What's the odds that any of you fuckers know how to work electricity or know how to get a generator going or, um, know how to re up a power plant. Like what if a power plant goes down? What if, uh, the grid is down? You need to have a fix a car.. Like, what if a power plant goes down? What if the grid is down? Do you not have to fix a car? Do you even understand how a car works? Like, most people don't. 10%?

You could get really unlucky and get 10% of the people who don't know shit and are just looking for a job. Yep. Those are the people that survive. No question. If that's the case, we might not make it. Do you know the United, not the United States, but the human population got down to, I think they think as low as like, I want to say 7,000 people at one point in time? After the eruption of a super volcano?

Yeah, there was some super volcano eruption that there's a theory that it dropped the human population down to an unbelievably low level. And it was not that long ago either. I think they think it was like 60,000 years ago or something like that. Whoa. I didn't know the timing, but yeah, I had heard that, which is pretty fascinating. Not good. Not good. If that's real, 60,000 years ago?

Especially when you think of genetic diversity, that's really terrifying. Yeah, maybe that accounts for a lot of our fuck-ups. You know, it's interesting too when they keep finding these new humans, you know, hmm like fossilized you're talking about Yeah, like new humans that they didn't know existed like they found one in Russia fairly recently like an offshoot of humans Like we just kind of got lucky to make it to this that you know, not read homo Deus No, so Noah Yuval Harari also wrote Sapiens. He talks about that sort of thing in both of his books. Like how is it luck?

What do we have? Like what made humans the apex predator? And looking at our ability to be social, but where does that come from? Like when you look at – so the way that he ended up defining it is the reason that humans become the apex predator is because unlike an ant, which is actually very, very impressive with how they can organize large number of ants, beings, whatever you want to classify it as, they can't do it flexibly. So it's like we have sort of a pre-written code and these are the things that we do and that's it. And you fall in the line, you go to food, like you build a colony. It's always the same way. Humans can organize in similarly large numbers, but they can do it flexibly so you can organize and watch a nascar race you can

organize and fight a war you can organize and build a church like whatever the ways that we want to organize and one of the things he says is at the heart of that is our ability to convey kinship through something other than genetic relations so what he refers to it as is like that the grand fiction the narrative that we tell each other, which is often religion or whatever, but it lets people who've never met, like the way I always like to think of it, imagine two guys that meet each other

and they both ride Harleys. Never ever met, but they click, right? Because they share that thing, which is a stand-in for a belief system. So that to me is pretty interesting as to whether, and his hypothesis is the reason that we ended up taking over Neanderthals and all that was because of that. Because we could organize using symbology, using metaphor, we were able to organize more flexibly in larger numbers

and really be accurate with how to attack and things like that so that we could eliminate a rival clan. Oh, it totally makes sense. I mean, it's one of the more fascinating aspects of being a person, right? That we can assume so many different forms and culture and behavior and the patterns that we follow. But you've got to think, if we got down to 7,000 people, we're pretty lucky. We're pretty lucky that that wasn't like a full wipeout. I'm fucking terrified of Yellowstone. Dude, that's one of those, as you look closely at it,

it's like, I just pretend that that's not a threat. I don't know what else to do. There's nothing you can do. But if it goes, it's a global one. Like, it's a real problem globally. I mean, locally, it's a disaster. But globally, it's a real problem. It's going to cloud the skies.

It's going to put us into nuclear winter. Those big ones, like the one that they think. See, did you find anything on that one? Yeah. Where was it? I want to say Indonesia. South Asia, yeah. Yeah.

There's something crazy around it, too. It said there's a couple studies on how many people were left, and it said there was roughly maybe 1,000 reproductive adults. Oh, God. Some said as low as 40 reproductive pairs pairs which would be like 80 people. There'd still be kids maybe but that's What? The amount of

Jesus Christ. Most likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled homo sapiens struggled together for pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until the late stone age wow when we humans began to recover holy fuck but there was a time hold on um we damn near went extinct wow so yes 70 000 bc so a little bit more than 70 000 years

ago a volcano hold on hold on uh called Toba in Sumatra in Indonesia went off, blowing roughly 650 miles of vaporized rock into the air. It's the largest volcanic eruption we know of, dwarfing everything else. Holy shit, man. That's a comparison to- Wow, that's interesting to see that. You see Mount St. Helens, the amount of ejected material versus... Wow.

So it got down to as low as 40 mating pairs? A study suggests that, yeah. Holy shit. Yeah, I mean, we're just at the whim of the natural forces that make mountains. And there's a giant volcano volcano a caldera volcano under Yellowstone and I think like a week ago they had something like 1,500 earthquakes wasn't it like some some stuff Jesus thinking like a month in a month period time they were they it was like really recently they talked about this how many

earthquakes they had over a very short period of time just constant and consistent just boom that's crazy in June it's at 400 okay there's something in I believe it was in July it was another one like really recently but you know that just that kind of shit that there can be 400 earthquakes in a month like what 878 yeah two weeks later that's it that's the thing i was looking at 878 earthquakes in two weeks that's what it was so it's like 1200 plus earthquakes in a month in two weeks that's nuts and that's not much you know it's small earthquake but it's the the And that's not much. You know, it's a small earthquake, but it's the idea that there's so significant volcanic activity under something that we didn't even know was a volcano until like, I want to say like a decade or two ago.

They used satellite imagery to figure out that it was a caldera. They didn't even know. And just how big it is. Yeah. You can't see it until you get far enough up that you really start to see the crater. That's what's nuts. Yeah. They realized what it is. It must't see it until you get far enough up that you really start to see the crater. That's what's nuts. Yeah, they realized what it is. It must have been like a horror movie.

When they pulled back and went, oh my god. Oh my god. It's like that scene in Twilight Zone. To serve man. It's a cookbook. I haven't seen that. You haven't seen that one? No. I've seen Precious Few. Twilight Zones, to be honest. To Serve Man is one of the best ones.

It's a bunch of aliens come down here. Spoiler alert. It's from 1950, fucks. They come down here and they realize that somewhere along the line, people realize that there's something going on and that they're taking these people aboard their spaceship and they're not coming back. And then at the end, they've left this book and the book they thought to serve man was

like they wanted to serve us. And it turns out it's a cookbook, but it's too late. They're already aboard the spaceship ready to get eaten. It's dope. The Twilight Zone has some awesome endings. I have to give it that. Well, they had such a bounty of premises. Like their premises are incredible. Only to this day, if you stop and think about all the you remember william shatner with

the um did you ever see that one where there was like i think i've seen like three and i don't remember them he went to a diner and there was a place that he uh was at that had like one of those little um like a fortune teller box it was like they these have but jukeboxes you know that were in do you ever see a jukebox in a diner yeah yeah so like you'd be sitting at a table you can actually control the music this thing that you're seeing up there he had a fortune teller and you'd put in a cent a one cent coin and ask him a question yes or no question it would give you answers and he became obsessed with it and started started fucking with him and it was like it was just getting too close to reality i was gonna say is it coming true like is yeah yeah i don't want to give away any much

okay so no spoilers on spoiler but it was just a great show man i mean just they tried to bring it back right but i think it tanked when did they try to bring it back god i want to say early 90s something like that yeah i could be way off on the date. When did they try to bring it back? God, I want to say early 90s, something like that. Yeah. I could be way off on the date, but yeah, they definitely tried to bring it back. Without Rod Sterling, it's going to be tough. And I wonder how many of them were actually written by Rod Sterling. A good question.

Because he was always a host of it. Imagine if he was just a host and really didn't have nothing to do with it. They brought it back in the 80s and in the 90s. Really? Yeah. Yeah, it's hard. When you get something like that, first of all, you gotta pay a lot for it. Because I know that was one of the reasons why they switched over the

Tower of Terror ride at Disneyland to Guardians of the Galaxy, was that they couldn't come to a licensing agreement with the Twilight Zone. Really? Yeah. Wow. Because the Tower of Terror ride was always about the Twilight Zone. You know, Rod Sterling would come

out in the beginning of it, and that was the whole ride was about this haunted tower. Right. You know, and you get in it and it just takes you for this crazy fucking ride. And they somehow or another couldn't come to some sort of a deal so they decided to turn it into the Guardians of the Galaxy ride. Hmm. Seems

yeah, if you have a deal. So they decided to turn it into the guardians of the galaxy ride. Seems. Yeah. If you have a deal with Disney, you know, seems like you'd want to keep that rock and roll. Keep that dude. Somebody got greedy. I would agree with that. That's a big part of business,

isn't it? Yeah. Somebody just gets a little crazy. It does a little too much Adderall. It's a little fired up. It's cocky. Yeah. You'd be surprised how often that happens.

Like behind closed doors. Entrepreneurship is, it gets weird. It's like little fired up. Gets cocky. Yeah. You'd be surprised how often that happens. Like behind closed doors, entrepreneurship is, it gets weird. It's a sure. Like you were just dealing with going back to your point about these are monkeys that learned how to have sex and then do something. You feel that sometimes. And also I would imagine being an entrepreneur, like organizing a team of people that are going to work together in harmony. Yeah. Organizing a team of people that are going to work together in harmony and not stab each other in the back, not trip each other up with office politics, not get in the way with a bunch of bullshit social issues between each other. Like, how do you structure that? I mean, I can't imagine what it would be like to run a significant business and have a lot of it being dependent upon the way the people in the office that you don't even know you guys hire them, the way they interact with each other.

Yeah, so one, you have to get really good at thin slicing people. You have to be able to very rapidly identify, like, are these going to be people that are going to make this a better place to work, which is one of the things that I think is most important. Like, forget are they good at their job. That's important, too. You've got to know that. But are they going to make this a better place to work?

And some of the biggest mistakes I made in my career have been keeping people because they were good at their job, even though they were toxic to the environment. So it's a walking dead type scenario coming back again. I'm telling you, like there are real lessons that you can learn about like entrepreneurship and stuff like that, where it from pop culture. So yeah, that, that would be one of them. That was really intense. Uh, figuring that one out, that would be one of them. That was really intense. Figuring that one out, that was a hard lesson. And then knowing when your businesses transition. So in the beginning, you're a startup,

nobody knows who you are, you don't have enough revenue. So you need people that are gonna just bust ass. They're gonna come in, they're gonna be hardcore hustlers, get it done, whatever it takes, 2 a.m. on a Friday, they're gonna be there for you. But then at some point, and the reason, by the way, that you can make that exchange is you can't pay them a lot. They don going to be there for you. But then at some point, and the reason, by the way, that you can make that exchange is

you can't pay them a lot. They don't have a lot of skills. So what they have to offer is they're willing to work hard. So you're essentially throwing human capital at whatever problems you have. Now, if you get the right people motivated and you're a lead from the front kind of guy, like when we first started Quest, I was wearing a hairnet every day, lab coat. I was making protein bars. And I would walk in and say, what's the worst job?

And whatever the guy said, this is the worst job today. Oh, it's a little sticky, whatever. So this station is actually the worst. So I would take that station and I would rock it with a smile on my face. I would be upbeat, energetic, and I would just outwork everybody. And the reason I did that was I knew when the day came that it was going to be a Friday at 2 a.m. and they're all going to want to go home. But we've got to get this batch done that no one would ever question my work ethic. So when I said, guys, I need you to stay, like they would be there. Also, because of where we were,

when you're in manufacturing, you're inevitably in the inner cities, the only place you can afford that kind of real estate. So we were hiring from the surrounding neighborhoods. So we're literally in Compton, hiring people that grew up in the inner cities, hardcore. And I remember my first lesson in hope and one of the guys came up to me he's just killing himself he's doing such an

amazing job and just always working putting in the hours doing whatever it takes and he came up to me one day and he said you know you care more about my success than my own mother and he was like I never had a vision of my future I didn didn't even want to look at it. It was because his sister had been shot to death in the heart with an AK-47 in his front yard when she was like 12. So, I mean, it's just, there's so many stories like that. You can't imagine. Another guy held his father while he bled to death from a gunshot wound to the head. I mean, just nuts. And so hearing him say that, I was like, he was saying it as a way to explain why he was so committed, why he was working so hard.

Cause basically he didn't use these words, but basically I've never had hope before. And this is really fucking exciting. So, but then understanding where's that transition, right? Where do you go from, okay, I need a bunch of hustlers. We don't have the money to throw at really skilled labor. So I need to throw it at people that'll just work really, really hard. But then at some point it's what I call the dragon begins to eat its own tail So you're growing so fast You're getting so big that without the systems without professional management in place like you just can't get bigger because people start stepping on each other's toes It starts getting confusing the leadership isn't close enough to everybody that that sort of do-or-die mentality that they would see in me

They would see me on the line. They would see how I would work. It's not there anymore, right? So now there's layers between you and it started to fall apart. That, that was a hard lesson. So realizing that, Whoa, like I've got to now start bringing in professional managers that actually know what they're doing, that have done this before, built out production studios, um, or manufacturing so that we can really do it right. That we can put systems in place to take care of people, but then you get bureaucracy, which is like a nightmare, especially for the hustlers. So then they feel disenfranchised. But it's the only way for you to grow.

And how do you deal with all of that shit? So, yeah, it is weird. I've got to imagine also, like, you want the people that are working for you to have some sort of stake in the success of the business. So, like, organizing that has got to be difficult. Like, how much of a percentage of the business do you like organizing that it's gotta be difficult. Like how much of a percentage of the business do you give to the workers? Like you have to make, to incentivize them to like really innovate. And there's gotta be something on the line for them. There would be something, some sort of a reward I would imagine. Right. Well, you'd be shocked how many people don't

agree with that. Now I'm with you. And to me, it's great. And I guess it's, uh, what's the argument against it? That you're not going to get anything for to me, it's great. And I guess it's what's the argument against it? That you're not going to get anything for it, that it's nice in idea, but they won't actually work harder. They won't work smarter. They they just they're not in a position to bring benefit from getting that. But here's what I'll this is the argument I've always given to people that say that it you're not going to get the benefit from them maybe that you would get from you like i get equity is triggering you in a certain way and you've got a certain skill set and so you can execute against that but especially now from millennials down the sense of working for the man working for some other like there's no stability in that equation anymore you used to

trade 40 years of your life because you could just kind of count on the fact that you would be there for 40 years those days are gone man People spend something like 1.8 years or something at a given job and then they move on. The best way to get a raise is to jump to another company. So millennials, dude, they jump around, around, around. So there's no longer this like, hey, I'm going to give you stability and you're going to give me like an adequate level of performance. So those days are gone. Now, my thing with ownership is one, tie it to being there until an exit so that what I'm trying to incentivize is you taking me all the way across the finish line. So if you don't take me across the finish line, you don't get anything. Fair enough. And then on top of that, just the sense

of really being able to say, I own a piece of this company is so empowering for people, especially for people for whom that's never been an option. Maybe it was never an option for their parents. Like they, they've never even heard of a company doing something like that. Being able to go to literally the lowest person on the totem pole and say, I'm going to give you, it's going to be small, obviously, but I'm going to give you some percentage ownership in this company. And now literally we are all owners. So you have like the most selfish incentive to make this company. And now literally we are all owners. So you have like the most selfish incentive to make this company successful ever. Now, this gets tricky. Can I ask you to stop you right here? What is across the finish line? To sell a company or IPO, right? So you either sell or IPO. And I

was going to say what gets tricky is like the company I'm building now, Impact Theory, I don't plan to sell it. What is that? So Impact Theory is a traditional narrative studio. So think Disney. So we're building the next Disney. Making movies. Movies, TV shows, comics. How grandiose. You're building the next Disney. How dare you? Well, bigger than Disney, I guess. What? Just to be honest. I don't want to

lie. How could you possibly do that? What are you calling it again? What's the name of it? Impact Theory. Are you going to have like Impact Theory land in Paris? No, probably not. But only because, follow me here, only because by the time that we'll be able to do that, because I'm going to need a similar timeline. I'm going to need 50, 60 years to pull this off.

I'm not that spastic. Okay. And by then, virtual reality. Or augmented reality. It just won't make sense to build out the physical structures. Right. I guess. Some people want to rock at old school.

They do. Oh, man. Jesus. We could really Some people want to rock at old school. They do. And oh man, Jesus, we could really get into that about how the world's about to bifurcate and you're going to get between people who augment themselves, brain augmentation, and people who refuse to.

Did you read Fahrenheit 451? No. Oh dude, cool part in the book. All right. So the world splits. Knowledge is dangerous. So we just burn books offhand. And it creates a really stable society.

So most people are all for it. But you have these people who are like, fuck that. Like I want to read, you don't get to tell me what to think. And so they move off into the woods. And I remember reading that going, I can actually see something like that happening. And I think the moment that that's going to happen is when humans begin to augment themselves, not to overcome like cochlear implants. You were deaf. Everybody gets that. Um, retinal replacements and things. Okay. You couldn deaf. Everybody gets that. Retinal replacements and things. Okay. You couldn't see people get that, but when it becomes, no, no, no, I just want to raise my IQ. I want to be able to process data faster. That's when people are going to be like,

fuck that. And you're going to get a bifurcation. Now, how weird does it get? Because now the reason I am convinced that people are going to do this, AI is going to get real, real fast. Even if real fast is 50 years, like it's going to get really compelling and you're going to find people just to keep up with artificial intelligence. You have to augment yourself. Otherwise you just accept that this stuff is going to outpace you.

And I guess I'm just a lowly human now. So I think it is going to happen. I don't think there's any question about that. But I also don't think there's any question when that starts happening, some people will refuse. Well, if we really do augment ourselves to keep up with artificial reality, artificial reality is supposed to change like 10,000 years of advancements in the first two weeks once it starts augmenting itself. Once artificial reality figures out how to do a better job of creating artificial reality,

which it's absolutely going to do. If it can learn and actually create. Right. We were just talking about this with Brendan Schaub, who was in here earlier, about the movie Alien Covenant. We gave away a spoiler alert. Did you see that movie? I haven't. Well, there's one of the things in there, these robots, these artificially intelligent

robots, and they realized that giving them creativity was a huge mistake. And so they don't have creativity in the new models. It's really fascinating. Because if you do give some sort of an artificially intelligent creature thing, whatever you want to call it, that you make, once it starts becoming sentient and creating things itself, it's going to look at its own wiring. It's going to go, why the fuck did you connect that to that

when you could just do it this way? And why look at its own code? Like, what's this pathway? Like, that's kind of redundant. How about we just do it this way and why look at its own code like what's this pathway like that's kind of redundant how about we just do it this way how about you open up that end of it how about people looking at things because they're worried about mortality and all these different you know their own their own demise and the finality of death and this is all tripping them up and they really should be thinking about this way and then boom they're off to the races and in a week two weeks three weeks they're down the road thousands of years of human evolution yeah have you you hear about the facebook ai yes

yes fascinating yeah they started talking in a new language yeah what the fuck and everybody pulled the plug that was the first one that was like oh shit like i didn't think of even the the most simple ways that they could just rip step to the side and like ice us Out you're you're absolutely right. It's gonna happen fast. It's gonna get weird It could become the matrix or what does it become it could be something unimaginable I mean it could be a real God I mean we really could create and that's not a bad use of the word in the term when you're talking about Artificial intelligence, I think one of the problems with that

is we start thinking, robot. Oh, you're making an artificial robot. You're making a system. This system has desires and this system has goals. If you're somehow or another engineering the ability

to create and innovate into this intelligence. You can call it artificial all you want, but it's real. It's right there. So I don't know what it is. I think the problem with the term artificial reality is we start thinking about science fiction. We start thinking about robots and things like that. You're making a thing that thinks for itself.

And it doesn't just do things like your computer does things. No, no, no. This does things without you asking it to. That's where shit gets super weird. And then it starts examining. If you give it the ability to create and the desire to create, it's going to start examining

all the different systems around it and replicating it and figuring out far better solutions than our stupid little monkey minds are going to be able to do. And within a decade or two decades, we're probably, if we do augment ourselves to keep up with it, we're going to be unrecognizable. We're going to be all locked into some gigantic,

worldwide, wireless information hub where we're exchanging ideas and emotions with each other. wireless information hub where we're exchanging ideas and emotions with each other. And it's, I mean, having the access to information on just demand like we do now is probably changing us in some really profound ways that we're not even aware of right now. And the idea of this becoming just a baby step and some infinite journey once sentient AI goes live. I mean, when guys like Elon Musk are terrified, you should be paying attention. The people are poo-pooing that.

I'm like, man, I don't know. That guy seems smart. Yeah. Yeah, we have to be insanely thoughtful. And I think, and look, I am a neophyte. I'm not the guy to listen to. And you should be listening to people like Elon Musk on the topic. But my gut instinct is it's the underlying drives.

And you talked about that. Once you give them the drive to create, now it gets weird. So what are the things that you imbue them with at the earliest level? That has to be decided way fucking early. So imagine if you imbue the AI at Facebook with a desire to connect to their human overlords and communicate effectively and make sure that they're kept in all that stuff, like that's going to give you a very different result than failing to give them the desire to, you know, please or whatever, like humans have a desire to connect with each other.

They have empathy, they have compassion. And it is only in the rare case of a true sociopath that that kind of thing is missing. And we see if you think of a sociopath as essentially AI gone wrong, we see the kind of damage that they can wreck on the world. So you have to be so thoughtful about what that underlying desire system is, the thing that propels them forward. Yeah. And giving them the ability to rewire whatever that desire system is. If they decide that there has to be some sort of, there's some sort of reward for competing. So they decide they're going to compete.

And then they start looking at how their thought process is arranged, how their coding is arranged. And they go, well, this is not the most efficient way for us to compete. The most efficient way for us to compete is to be completely ruthless and not worry about biological life at all. Let's get into that though. So have you seen the studies that they've done on trying to figure out like, so if you heard, obviously you've heard nice guys finish last, right? So a guy named Eric Barker wrote this book called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He covered, I forget who did the actual studies, forgive me, because I'm now attributing it to Eric Barker and

he was just talking about somebody else, but they ran these studies where they wanted to find out, um, do nice guys finish last or not. And what they found looking at the data, nice guys finished last and they finished first. So if you're a nice guy and you let people take advantage of you all the time, you're just going to get trod upon. But if you're a nice guy and people know like, Whoa, you're a nice guy and you want to do great things for you. Um, and I call this the Keanu Reeves effect. Like, look how far that guy's gone. It's unbelievable. His career is unimaginably great. And when you hear people talk about him, like just by so quiet and private, but behind the scenes, everybody's like, he's a good dude. I've never met him. I can't tell you, but just like you hear that over and over and over. He's a good dude, good dude, good dude.

And I think that that's created a lot of the opportunities in his life. So somebody created this basically contest where they said, submit your, A.I. and they're going to compete in a contest to see who can essentially it's called the prisoner's dilemma. So in the prisoner's dilemma, something like this. And hopefully I nailed this first shot here. The prisoner's dilemma is, let's say you and I were both arrested. Now, we know that we actually committed the crime. We did it together. We're arrested. We're now put in separate cells to be interrogated. We can't communicate at all. If we both stay silent, we only get one year. If I rat you out, but you don't rat me out, then I go off scot-free and you get five years. If you rat me out and I don't write you out, vice versa. And if we both rat each other out, then we get like three years or something. so the best thing

in no uncertain terms is one year right we both stay silent but you never know what the other person is going to do so and you can get zero by ratting the other person out so it's actually to your advantage in a one-off to just say yep fuck him he did it until he gets out of jail and kills you so there's that and so that gets into this thing and so they said what we have to do is let them play it multiple times so that you have the equivalent of he gets out of jail and kills you. So there's that. And so that gets into this thing. And so they said, what we have to do is let them play it multiple times so that you have the equivalent of he gets out of jail and then he kills you.

Right. And what they found, they had these really complicated algorithms, ones where like they're taking all these factors into play. And ultimately they had people that their algorithms that were like the pure bad guy,

always taking advantage, the pure nice guy, never taking advantage. And then the one that won was the simplest piece of code. I think it was two lines of code and it was code named tit for tat. So it goes in, it assumes you're going to be a good guy. So it stays silent the first time. But if you rat me out, then the next time I rat you out. And what it does is it, it, cause you had all these different algorithms that don't know each other competing, all trying their best strategy. And what it found was tit

for tat was ultimately the one that won because it would actually other ones that were learning from your behavior. It was so easy to predict. Also people that led with something good, they ended up in a virtuous cycle forever. So tit for tat ends up being the best strategy. So from that perspective, actually be interesting because it's not always the thing you think like mercilessness doesn't necessarily win. And so finding like like what is that equivalent in the machine world right and it comes back to what you were talking about what's the reward right so once you know what the reward is then you can have a better guess as to where they'll settle out and then their ability to code themselves i mean i feel like if you have an artificial

intelligence and you give it the ability to create a new artificial intelligence and in eliminate whatever possible restrictions or firewalls or whatever we've put on it yeah so once they start writing their own code we're fucked that well not necessarily it comes down to but we could be right so it comes down to whether they want they want a relationship with us or not and that's why I think the real race is not to let AI get very far ahead. So AI will follow an exponential curve. So it will eventually be so rapid, right? So exponentials are simple doublings. So most people think linear. So if I say I'm going to take 30 steps, I'll end up about 30 yards away. But if I take 30 exponential steps, so

I go first one yard, then two yards and four yards and eight, then 16, um, 30 doublings is like a billion meters. So you're like around the earth 26 times or something crazy. So an exponential curve can get freaky, but like before you get to those, like really astronomical, the, the elbow of the curve, you could be making decisions along that path. And this is definitely where I feel like, oh God, do I really know enough about this to say? I'll hypostulate from an ignorant standpoint and say in there somewhere, as you can see, like this is really taking off.

You can leverage what you're learning from the AI before it becomes a sort of all powerful being that can do whatever it wants. And we can then begin the augmentation process in humans, which I think is inevitable. Yeah, I think that's definitely inevitable. It is fascinating when you think of the possibilities, like that we're really just speculating as to what's going to be invented and how it's going to be implemented and what effect it's

going to have on society. It's a really amazing time to be alive in that sense, because I feel like we are literally on some sort of a launching pad, watching it happen, looking in in a bunch of different directions trying to find out which one's going to go live first and the Facebook AI thing happens and everybody's like oh Jesus look at that it's happening right there like wow okay they shut it down they shut it down okay we're good for now you know that I'll admit that one gave me pause well we are techno optimist but that gave me pause we're incredibly imperfect the the human animal with its emotions and fears and all the weirdness of us, all our anxiety, all our contemplating the possibilities, the ego, all the different variables that we take

into our lives and society and culture and civilizations. These are really ineffective ways to exist and thrive. are like really ineffective ways to exist and and thrive but they're they're animal ways integrated into this new hard one zero culture like this this new binary thing this you know computer code operating systems internet information data engineering all these different like really hard things and then inside these hard i mean mean, by hard meaning like, you know, like a, like a, an intersecting line hits another wall and then there's a building and then there's steel glass,

all these things that humans have made, but they're all like absolute things. And then with us, you have like, wow, I wonder, boy, what's going to happen to people like me.

And you have all these weird, real human feelings and variables and maybe weaknesses that we're not going to be able to compete. If we hold on to all those, all the things that make us amazing, that make crazy movies and great books, the creativity that allows someone to make an incredible fantasy painting or whatever the fuck it is that it comes out of us in our creations. We're going to have to get rid of that if we're going to keep up with the AI. The AI has no use for that shit. Yeah, sort of. So imagine here's something that I find interesting, and I admittedly don't know how this plays out when something simply has the instructions to read your lines of code, right? So your code will tell you what to do. And sure, there's elements where it plugs in a variable and

stuff. And it'd probably be actually quite hard to build in things like creativity and stuff like that. But one thing that I find fascinating about humans, and I hope that there's a corollary in AI is if you damage a human's ability to feel emotion, they can't make decisions. So I found that so fascinating. Literally, they are normal in every other respect. Do you know V.S. Ramachandran? No. So one of the most famous neuroscientists working today, an amazing human being,

done awesome studies on stuff like this. So what happens when people's brains get damaged? You can't say so. If you damage them, but what if they're born with this issue like what if they have like some sort of a and my god I work either way I'm a sociopath well it doesn't make them this one in particular doesn't make them a sociopath but what it does is make it impossible for them to so if I said hey do you want to go get lunch we can either get Chinese or Thai and you just

you you can rationalize why you would prefer Thai, but you ultimately can't make a decision, because you need that emotion to tell you what to do. Now emotions, the theory goes, are tied to your subconscious and the subconscious can process data faster and in vaster quantities. So what it's doing is instead of then feeding you information in the form of words it just feeds you a feeling and then you go based on that feeling but without that depth of information being processed and handed up in the form of an emotion a human can't make a decision which i've literally as i was reading about that i was like no no man i'd be able to i'd be able to like i'd be able to

reason my way around it but i know better than that's crazy. The human mind is nutso. So the reason I hope that there's some corollary is that you need to build into AI for it to function properly, right? Because nobody knows how to build general AI yet. And I like to think that part of that is going to be the safety valve of they have to have emotions to give them that sort of non-pure analytical. It's got to be super flexible, right? Because like strict analysis, let's go Star Trek for a second. So Spock, right? Not always able to do what needs to be done. You need the human who can be nimble and can read like all the ambiguities and morality and things like that and finally make a decision. So there are times where logic is going to let you down. So I'm hoping that because they will need, I hope, this grand thing that in humans manifests as. So I'm hoping that because they will need, I hope this grand thing that in humans

manifests as emotions, I'm hoping they need something similar because in that you can program, like we were talking earlier about how do you make the desire, right? The desire to do something. If you can build in what I'll call goodness, just for lack of a better word, if you can build in goodness into that, a desire to connect, a desire to help, you could, in theory, create benevolent AI. That's interesting. This is me riffing. I am not an expert. No, no, no.

But it just makes sense. It also makes sense that emotions might be required to take action, that you have to have some sort of a reason to take action. If you don't have a biological imperative, right, if you're not worried about breeding or your social status or what is causing you to move forward. And if you made a perfect AI that was emotion-free, would it just sit there idly and do nothing? Because there's no reward to it that's worth risking its existence or doing anything to change the environment around it, other than perhaps the worry about the power shutting off. And even then, if it's not worried about existence, if it doesn't have any fear, if it doesn't have any emotion where it's considering the potential of death, like why, why would it act? Yeah. And I think that would sit there. I

think at some point in the code, you have to write something that compels them to do something. So if you think of human beings as we exist now, it's like the first attempt at sentient AI. And I think that's a pretty plausible way to look at us. You realize we are by nature an active species. So we go into any environment. We try to figure it out first and then dominate it. And no matter where you put us, that's what we try to do. You put us in the Arctic, we're going to try to tame the cold. You put us on the plains in middle

America and we're going to hunt the bison. I mean, it's just what we do, right? So you've got the drive of survival, but you also just have that exploration gene. And maybe that's because that's how you avoided everybody dying of one plague plague because you just constantly wanted to spread out and dominate new dominion. But that's interesting. And so at some level, that's a decision when you think about AI. So somebody, whatever, blind evolution, fine, but something has made that decision for us. And in AI, it will have to be a very cognizant decision. And I think we'll have to get to true general AI. I think so many layers will have to be laid down of things like that. Oh, this is an active robot. It never just sits idly.

It always is looking for, and what's that thing, connection to be of service. Like decisions like that will have to be made. Now, what do you do with the psycho who's like, I'm going to create AI that takes that open source because this will inevitably be open source. And I switch the variable from be nice to crush the skull love. Right. So, you know, no question. There are all kinds of problems. But it is so interesting to me to think about this stuff.

It is. It's also interesting to think of why people are so attracted to the romantic ideas of like living off the land like as technology is getting more and more complex you're seeing more of these reality shows where people are like uh living the subsistence existence in like alaska and you know salmon fishing and chopping their own wood for fire like yeah look at them there's there's lists they're existing in a very closed loop system. When you're looking at like Plains Indians or something like that,

we romanticized the day they used all of the bison. They used the hide for their clothes and they just did what they needed to stay alive and there was no innovation. If you were born, birth to death, you wouldn't see any change in the civilization. You would see essentially just like bows and arrows chasing bison making campfire picking up the teepee when the then the herd moves following them ad nauseum continue you

know it's a there that's very romantic to us right now particularly romantic I think it kind of always was in some way because I think we've always been aware that this thing once it gets going, once the momentum gets rolling in this, as you're saying, exponential change, it's just chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. It's just stacking on top of each other. And then we all know it's gotten to a weird, unmanageable position during our lifetimes as far as information is concerned.

I mean, when I was a kid, you had to read books. If you wanted to watch something on TV, you had to be there when it came on. You know, and then you saw it once, and that was a wrap. You know, and you could see reruns is the only way you could see something again. Oh, I remember this episode. This is a rerun. Yep. You know, you couldn't choose when to have it.

Now you can choose everything all the time on your phone. You're carrying it around in your pocket. It works for hours and hours of video. The input that you have into that, it's like you can create your own. You're carrying it around your pocket. It works for hours and hours of video. The input that you have into that, it's like you can create your own content. You can make your own videos. I mean, how many fucking people are on YouTube that have millions and millions and millions of videos, of hits rather, of their videos, and just all these people tuning into their content, like all over the world and that just the idea that this is happening in our lifetime it didn't exist 20 years ago and it's now like one of the most impactful

things in the history of human nature you got to go back to like the printing press for anything to have you remotely as much of an impact on the culture as the internet itself that's crazy it's in our life it's crazy i know how old? 41. So you remember probably when the internet was clunky. When it was just like, you know, you were probably real young and like probably 17 or something like that. And you first heard about AOL. I don't even know what email was when I was 18. It was the first time somebody said the word, hey, we should get email accounts when we go to college. And I was like, what the hell is an email account?

See, that's the right year. Because you got all the way to like high school and into college before it started affecting you. I didn't have my first computer until I was a junior in college. Whoa. Yeah. Didn't have AOL until I graduated. So I was in my early twenties before I'd ever logged onto the internet. You've got mail. It's crazy. Yeah. I didn't, uh, I didn't get online until 94. I moved to LA, and my friend Robbie, who actually worked at a computer store before he was a comedian, he taught me about it. You were way ahead of me. I didn't get on until 98, 99. You know what I did as soon as I found out?

As soon as I got online, I started downloading UFO files. I was like, these UFO reports. What's in there? I was completely convinced. That's hilarious. I was like, these UFO reports. What's in there? I was completely convinced. That's hilarious. I was like, I'm going to find the truth. It's online. You could download it.

And you could download it. It would take forever. And we'd be like, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, because of 14-4 modem, chunk, chunk. And then I would print it. Wasn't it mostly like text back then, too? Yeah. There was like no pictures or... If it was a picture, it would take you hours to download.

And they're coming so slow. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. I remember my friend sent me a porno film. Not even a porno film. It was a clip. It lasts like 15 seconds. It took like an hour for him to send it to me. Pictures used to take 20, 30 minutes just to load.

It was crazy. Yeah. Websites were so strange. You would start loading them, and they would come down like water slowly coming down the side of a building. You'd see it like it was weird. I just remembered my dad catching like he looked at the history and found some porn set I went on to.

I was like, I don't know, eighth grade, and it was like Pamela Anderson's first Playboy pictures. And he was like, I want to see what you're looking at while I'm not here. And he went and took a shower, and the whole time it was still loading. And I was just like, oh, no, what's he going to see? What like I want to see what you're looking at while uh while I'm not here and he went and took a shower and the whole time it was still loading and I was just like oh no what's he gonna see what's he gonna see it's just a tick tick load line line that's hilarious I don't know 30 minutes probably later yeah now I mean you can get insane internet on your phone it's really pretty impressive I mean and then the phones are getting weirder and weirder too like do you remember when phones first came out the cool

people had a little phone like i remember how to raise her i was like bitch look how little my fucking phone is it's a little skinny ass thing pick it up call people close it it's like a credit card shoves in my pocket you were the coolest man yeah one of them little phones you were an idiot if you had one of those big phones right what are you doing that big stupid phone now it's like things like this new samsung yeah there is nokia old school son but the really small ones were that right there the above one look at that the fuck is that thing they tried to make a new kind of like dial all around it you hold that thing up to your ear. Like a cell phone was the size of a beeper. Yeah, those were the shit.

Those little tiny-ass phones. Now you've got that new Galaxy Note 8. Have you seen that monstrosity? Gigantic. It's huge. Whose pockets are going to fit these things in? That's a real problem.

When I first got my iPhone 6 what was it, 6S? Was that the 6 Plus? That's the size of this one. I was like, God damn, it won't even fit in my pocket. So that was the first time. And I'm still, I use the big phone. Look at that new one. That's the S8 Plus.

Jesus Christ, that's huge. That's the S8, but the Note 8 is even bigger. Look at that thing. Look at the size of that thing. That could be a woman with small hands. It's hard to tell. I would like to see it in the hands of a basketball player. If you've got

LeBron James, finally I've got a phone I can hold in my hand. For him, it's probably King Kong. Home little tiny people. You know? Those big giant hands. Like, for a basketball player, like some sort of a Bill Russell type character with giant hands, that's a good size phone. But to small people, not so much.

You're just trying too hard. I never, I had a Galaxy Note before. I never used that pen. I was like, when I first got it, I was like, this pen is going to rule. This is going to be the big difference. I'm going to send people pictures. I'm going to draw dicks on them. I had this plan.

It's a good plan, John. That was the plan. It was just to make funny pictures. And I never used it. I got lazy, I think. I just, it wasn't that interesting. One thing that is interesting, though, is that you can circle something and, like, say if, like, there's a part of an article that you think is interesting, you could circle

it and copy it and paste it really simply and easily. Really? Yeah, that's pretty good. The actual image itself, like, say if someone sends you something and there's some text in an image, you could just circle around it and, and send that to yourself and save it. Yeah. What do you use? iPhone?

Yeah. Do you ever fuck around with windows? Um, I did for a while. My first computer was windows, um, for work at one point I was having to use windows, but,

um, yeah, as somebody who really appreciates good design, that didn't last long. Windows 10 is pretty good, but it's not quite good enough. It's pretty goddamn good. But that's what's always been fascinating to me is that Microsoft is the biggest company when it comes to operating systems.

But it's not the best. And everybody kind of knows that. But there's this weird sort of battle. I mean, Apple's big enough. They make the best stuff. They make the most high-end stuff in a lot of people's eyes, but it's really limited. Like, you can only get what they put out. If you want a Windows laptop, you have 100 options.

More, you know? If you want a Mac laptop, you have a few. But the interesting thing is that was Steve Jobs' approach, right? Was he came in and said, you have too many options. This is stupid. You've really got to narrow this stuff down, Microsoft Surface laptops. And it pulled the recommendation after announcing it. I guess two years ago

they recommended it and now it's like the first time they've pulled it in a long time. Oh, interesting. Predicted reliability. With an estimated two-year breakage rates of 25%. Ooh, that's not good. They got cheap. The new one, the Microsoft Surface. Well, that's interesting because there was another study that I

saw, not a study, you know, one of those lists that listed it as the best laptop available in 2017. This just like within the last week. Maybe it's just like different consumer groups, but maybe the best laptop while it works. Yeah. You know, if what you have is a breakage problem. Yeah. The problem is it working. While it's working, it's the best.

How long is it going to work? It's not going to work that long. But it's like a sprinter. They're the fastest, but they don't run the longest. Very true. Maybe think about that. Very true. I think that's fair.

So what are you trying to do with this company? Literally pull people out of the matrix. What? Yes. Wait a minute. That is our stated mission, my friend. We are here to pull people out of the matrix so i can i can walk you through it if you really want to know yeah it goes like this so um

when i i'm not a born entrepreneur so i'm very very far from it and through are there born entrepreneurs there are people that will tell you that there are only born entrepreneurs those people are idiots yeah i would agree with no they're not there's some amazing people that will tell you that there are only born entrepreneurs. Most people are idiots. Yeah, I would agree. No, they're not. There's some amazing people that say that, but I just think that they're very, very catastrophically wrong about this. Yeah, people love to say shit like that. To me, it's like saying you're a born mixed martial artist. Now, there might be people that have certain athletic gifts that make it they get early wins, and there's just things that click into place for them in a way that it doesn't for other people.

early wins and there's just things that click into place for them in a way that it doesn't for other people. But if you get a grinder, somebody that's really willing to put in the work, then you can get somebody who becomes absolutely extraordinary. So that certainly has been my life. So I grew up being taught to be a good employee, keep my head down, do as little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs. That was my life. So my parents taught me to be a good employee. And I, obviously that didn't sit well with me. I wanted to do something more. I had a pretty big ambition. Uh, I go to film school and I do very well in film school until my final film. And then I fall flat on my face, embarrass myself and realize I'm not a talented filmmaker. And in that, what made you notice that you weren't? And why'd you think you couldn't get

better? So great question. So when I started film school, I believed that you either were talented or you weren't right. There's just some things you either can sing or you can't, you either can draw or you can't. When it comes to art, which I saw film as art, you're either good or you're not. And so that was how I thought of it. Now, I thought you could get better at the technical side. So I was going to film school to learn the technical aspects. But I was banking on the fact that I was inherently talented. So I go and my first year and a half went very well. And I was crushing it, certainly by my own estimation, doing very well, getting the attention of my classmates. And then only four people out of the

entire school for your year get to make a senior thesis film. And I was chosen as one of the four. So it was like, yeah, man, I just, I have it. And there were two filmmakers that were really big for me. One was John Woo. Do you remember John Woo? Sure. He was red hot. Yeah. Like the eighties and nineties. Yeah. A lot of shoot them ups a lot. And I loved him and he was famous for, he would roll up on set. He wouldn't think about it ahead of time. He just put the camera wherever felt right. And his movies were mind blowing. People always referred to it as his violence is like a ballet. It's that well orchestrated, that beautiful, that interesting. And so I thought, okay, well, if I'm naturally talented, then I should be like that. And then there was Hitchcock, who was sort of the plotter. He would spend all of his time like pre-planning the film.

Every shot was so orchestrated ahead of time. He said, I get bored on set. And I thought, God, man, like he doesn't sound like natural talent to me. So I'm over here. I want to be John Woo. I show up on set acting like I'm John Woo. I don't pre-plan anything and put the camera where it feels right. And just publicly embarrass myself as I turn this film into a piece of shit. And at that point, I thought I was, you know, about to graduate, get the three picture deal. Everything is going to be set. It's going to be amazing. And there I was about to graduate, get the three-picture deal, everything is going to be set, this is going to be amazing, and there I am, crash and burn. Now the other students are circling me like vultures because, I mean, that's the film industry, man.

It is a zero-sum game, or at least it was back then. That's how people saw it because it wasn't like today where you could edit on your fucking... I mean, he's editing, like, right now. Like, that didn't exist. So it was you had to get access to real resources. So when I realized, oh my God, I don't have a thesis project to show people to get an agent or whatever it's done. I'm not a talented filmmaker. And so I was so desperate

in that I needed something that would free me from feeling like a permanent failure. And that thing that I had was the notion of Alfred Hitchcock. And even though it wasn't sexy, it gave me a window into maybe there's another way. Maybe there is another way that somebody can be an artist and they just have to learn it. Like think about if somebody draws, right? Some people can rotate an object in their mind.

If you've seen an IQ test, they make you do that. I can't do that. I literally can't rotate an object in my mind. I don't even understand people that can do it. So I thought, well, maybe you could become a great artist just by memorizing every conceivable pose, like a chess player. The great chess grandmasters are the ones that have memorized so many different moves and combinations that it becomes somewhat intuitive for them. So I thought, okay, that's going to have to be my path. It gave me an escape route. And then going down that path of saying, I just have to learn this stuff. I'm not naturally talented, but I have to learn.

Unfortunately, Carol Dweck had not written her book mindset at that point. So I didn't have the words, growth mindset, fixed mindset, but I began to transition out. So a fixed mindset is what I had, which you believe your talent and intelligence are fixed traits. They can't be changed. Somebody with a growth mindset realizes that your talent and intelligence are malleable, that you can develop them through discipline practice. So I began to adopt sort of the beginnings of that mindset, realizing that I'm just a grinder, I have to work and I have to get better. So I start teaching film school. And in teaching film school, the best way to learn something is to teach it. So now I'm getting better as a filmmaker, just by teaching it to these guys, helping them develop their scripts, helping them shoot their films. And then at that time, these two very

successful entrepreneurs came into my class. And there were two things as a kid, I promised myself growing up in a morbidly obese family that one day I would be rich and one day I'd have six pack abs. And so here were these, they were yoked. These two yoked bodybuilder guys that were successful entrepreneurs. And they said, why don't you come work for us and be a copywriter? And it's a startup company. You can have any role in the company you want, but you just have to become the right person for that job. And then you can get rich and you can go back and control the art. You can make movies your way. So I was like, oh my God, like this is too good to be true. I have to go do this.

So I joined them as a copywriter as they were starting this fledgling technology company. And just to keep this from getting impossibly long for about eight and a half years, I just chased money. I was just trying to get rich to go back and make movies my way. But in that they were very growth minded. I began to really develop a growth mindset to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to without limitation. I just had to understand that there was a gap in skill set between where I was and where I wanted to get. And I had to be willing to put in the work to get that skill. Right. So I trained exactly one time with a man. You must know him for us, the hobby. Sure. All right. So for us, by the way, I feel a

moral obligation to help him become famous because he is one of the most intriguing minds I've ever come across in my life yeah we were supposed to do a podcast last there's a ufc in anaheim but his fighter got canceled the the fight got canceled and so he uh one of them not coming on i'm a big fan of his though that as a person heartbreaking as a fighter uh trainer as well as a mixed martial artist very talented guy very and in getting to roll with him in my single moment as a grappler it was did you ever grab it before no never so you just rolled with him the first time he's a black belt yeah but and that's why it was the best thing ever so he

knew how to not let me get injured he knew how to move in just the right way how to show me things he's so kind and compassionate and patient. I can't imagine like a better intro to grappling. It was unbelievable. And what it showed me that even just in like the hour that he and I grappled, I went from, dude, I am so lost, even spatially, I can't tell where I am. Like once you start moving me, I just get lost. And then an hour later, I could, he gave me like these two basic moves to learn how to execute. And by the end, I could do it. And it was like, the exact reminder of what a growth mindset is, and how even something that foreign to me, with a good teacher, practice, you can get good. I mean, look, it's going to take years and years and years to become even competent in jujitsu, let alone be able to

participate at a high level. But it was a great micro reminder of just how powerfully humans can learn. Now, here's my theory about humans and learning and why, and just, I guess, to wrap up my entrepreneurial journey. So decide I don't want to chase money anymore. I'm not going to do that. So I go into my partners.

I say, look, I quit. This is about eight and a half. Actually, I quit at about the six-year mark and ended up actually getting out at about eight and a half years. So six years, I say, I quit. I can six year mark ended up actually getting out at about eight years So six years I said quit I can't do this anymore. I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness This is absolutely ridiculous So here's your equity back final cross finish line I shouldn't get anything for this what so you didn't you weren't obligated to give that money back you decided to correct

So like a movie but that to me is is the right thing to do Hold yeller do I get shot at the end of this? But that to me is the right thing to do. Old yeller. Do I get shot at the end of this? I don't know. It sounds like so romanticized. Yeah.

So I think everybody should live by a code, right? It's what's right for you. And so I have a code, very strong code that I live by. That was one of the things. Like I'm the one quitting. Like these guys have done nothing but create opportunity for me. So I'm quitting. I'm not going to cross the finish line because I feel literally dead inside. I can't keep doing this. It doesn't make sense. I realize the game you're

playing is not money. I promise it's not success. It's brain chemistry. So once you understand the game you're playing is brain chemistry and that if you have $7.4 billion and hate your life and want to commit suicide, what the fuck good is the money? And conversely, if you have no money, but you feel a deep sense of fulfillment self-pride and believe in what you're doing like what do you care that you don't have money right better brain chemistry yeah better brain chemistry 100 so so what'd you do so they said look we could do this without you they were totally caught off guard they said we could do this without you but we don't want to so let's talk about what would it look like for us

to work together. And so by this point, like we've got a deep friendship, you know, I'm not like the new kid on the block anymore. And I said, okay, if we're going to work together, it's got to be something entirely predicated on value, not money. I need to be honest. My highest priority in business is not profitability. It's camaraderie. So that's why when they said we could do this without you, but we don't want to, that was the thing that let me reconnect to the brotherhood that had made it interesting for me in the early days. And so that felt amazing. And so I was like, I'll come back if it's all about value. If we're doing something we're passionate about and if we're asking and answering the question, what would we do every day and love even if we were failing?

Because the struggle is guaranteed. That's hard to get a bunch of people in a business to agree to that, though, isn't it? Well, it wasn't for me because they were already there. So they were like, it's crazy. We felt the same way for a very long time. Because we and by we, they were so much farther ahead than me at this point. So they really gave me the opportunity to learn. Had really built that tech company up.

We got, I think, a valuation of $22 million, if I'm not mistaken, at one point. So they really, and gave me the opportunity to learn, had really built that tech company up. Like we got, I think, a valuation of 22 million, if I'm not mistaken, at one point, and we just couldn't get it passed. And so it was like, we'd been struggling for years to move the needle more and we just couldn't. So it wasn't like, oh, I come in and give some amazing Jerry McGuire speech and they're all like, all right, fuck it, us too. It was like, finally, somebody just said what everybody was already thinking. So they said, all right, let's give us a timeline of six months. If we hit these revenue numbers in six months, we'll keep going. But if we miss them, we'll sell. So we didn't hit them. And so we began the sales process.

And all in, it was about eight and a half years by the time that was finally sold. And the thing for three very different reasons that we decided to found that was going to be predicated around delivering value to our employees and our customers. decided to found that was going to be predicated around delivering value to our employees and our customers. That was going to be that thing that we would love doing every day, even if we were failing that allowed me to connect emotionally because it ended up being quest nutrition. I grew up in a morbidly obese family and I wanted to save my mom and my sister. And it would, it gave me this mother trees has a great quote. She says, nobody will act for the many, but people will act for the one. So finally, I could just think about two people that I knew and loved, and I wanted to do something awesome

for them. So when I got tired, when I was fatigued, rather than thinking about money and a big house and a fast car, I was thinking about fucking saving my mom and my sister. And our idea was, if we could make food that people could choose based on taste, and it happened to be good for them, we could actually end metabolic disease. So that was like the driving force and we were fucking excited about it. And we didn't know if it would be a real business. We didn't know like every time we'd explain it to people, we're putting value first. And we thought, God, do we sound like total assholes?

But it was like, we really believed in it. And so it gave us insights into social media. This is back in 2009 when nobody was really using it for business. And we could see that it's just a megaphone. So if you actually do deliver that kind of value for people, they're gonna talk. And now they have the ability to talk to a global audience

within minutes of an interaction with your company. So if you were really taking care of them, you really delivered a product that was real, and you were building community, community, community, then you could really do something. And so that's how it took off. But it really did, I used to joke and say, Quest is a company born out of misery.

Because it was. It was three guys slogging it out, not really even liking the product that we made. It just served a need in the marketplace. It was security software. We didn't care about it. We didn't use it in our own company. So it was like, oh, God.

So getting into something, we were obsessively talking about nutrition anyway. I've lost 60 pounds and kept it off. I went through a pencil head phase. I've added muscle. Like learning about diet to escape the fate of my family has been so important to me. But that was all back at a technology company. So we were now leveraged.

And one of my partners is a fucking nutritional genius. This dude is unreal. So leveraging what we were doing and thinking about already just was insanely powerful for us as a business opportunity. And we ended up making more in a single day at Quest than we made annually at the tech company. Dude, you went from telling me about being a failed movie maker in college to the full journey of Quest Nutrition. Yeah. I don't know if that's good or bad, but there it is. Yeah, it's a crazy journey, man.

It's weird that you didn't want to go back to filmmaking, though. You realized you fucked up, and why you fucked up. Well, so here we all come full circle. So this is what your new company is. So your new company is about making, you want to make films? What do you want to make? Traditional narrative content, yeah. So comic books, books,

movies, TV shows. Now have you fucked, don't you think that it's one of those things that like when you were in film school and when you're like trying to come up with a thesis film that this was like a step

in a very long journey of figuring out how to make films and that when you left it, you kind of, you're going right back to where you were or has life experience given you more tools to work with. And you could sort of apply those to the idea of creative filmmaking. Yeah, exactly that. So what I'm not trying to do is go back and be a director. What

I want to do now is build the studio. So, um, becoming an entrepreneur and training myself in that way has created an obsession with scale for me. So the thought of myopically making one movie is absolutely terrifying. Like just the amount of time it would take and your ability to push multiple things forward, uh, essentially grinds to a halt. So you want to sort of finance other people's ideas and projects. That'll be part of it. That'll be a part of it. That'll be part of it. Bringing a team together that can execute at, at scale and create, um, uh, a lot of content. And in the beginning, we're going to have to partner with people, we just don't have enough finances, like we have enough to, you know, build the infrastructure and get the creative together, but we're not going to

be, you know, financing 100 plus million dollar film every year. So we'll need to partner with people. But that's essentially what I've spent the last 15 years learning how to do is the business side of things, how to build teams, how to get them pointed in the right direction, how to think through, okay, you've got this grand goal. You want to make a studio bigger than Disney, but like, what are the real, like, what are the things you can do today to actually take a step towards that? So is your like desire to do things changed? Like your, your desire is not to create a film anymore. Your desire is now to create business. Your desire is to create some sort of a large organization.

Yeah, sort of. So in reality, my real desire is I want to pull people out of the matrix. Yeah, that's what you said before. That's what I was trying to work my way back to. So that's the most sincere thing. So the matrix to me is a set of limiting beliefs that the vast majority of people have that stop them from achieving what they could achieve in life if they only understood that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine and that we are the only animal you can put into any environment and we will be able to survive and thrive so we can do that sort of give me an example where we you don't think well we don't we don't survive and thrive in horrifying climates like you bring people to

an article they survive they certainly don't thrive look thrive in horrifying climates. Like, you bring people to Antarctica, they survive. They certainly don't thrive. Look at indigenous people, right? Sure. They do, and we can go in and build a research facility. So some of the adaptation is mental. What do you mean you say there's no indigenous people living in Antarctica? Like, what do you mean indigenous people?

Sorry, the Arctic Circle is what I was thinking. I apologize. So there's two kinds of adaptations. So you know that woman that swam the Bering Strait? Okay, so she sleeps with her windows open in a cold climate. I forget where she lived. Basically what she's doing by constant cold exposure is changing her adipose tissue to brown fat. So now it's more thermogenic, and she can actually do something that she wasn't able to do.

And if you're really going to let me get crazy, like looking at what Wim Hof has done with his ability to regulate internal temperature is pretty crazy. And then just what they're discovering with DNA from, at one point it was considered to be just junk DNA, and now they're realizing that it's actually epigenetic responders, essentially. So are there limits? Yeah, probably. But just as like looking at the way that we only have what 20 000 genes and an onion has like 40 000 genes so what is it that makes us more complex if you will give me that we are complex

and it seems to be the what they originally thought was junk dna which is your genes will turn on or off express themselves in different amounts based on your environment and your diet and even some just like how you're thinking your microbiome, like all that stuff then regulates how your genes are expressed. And we have a much wider ability to adapt to climates. If you're not gonna let me go as extreme, but we have the widest ability. Would you agree to that? Okay. So of all the species, we have the widest flexibility. So it's that ability to adapt that I think is, is one of our greatest strengths. I don't remember why I started down my path of adaptation. But the fact that humans can adapt in whatever direction they want. I began adapting myself through mindset. And that really showed me how far I was able to come mentally from where I started. So as I saw what a huge impact it had on my life, both emotionally

and financially, becoming somebody who's entrepreneurial minded, taking extreme ownership for my life, assuming that everything is my fault, that I can always do something, I can change something, I can get a different result, I can learn a new skill, whatever the case may be, but that I can turn myself into what I need to be in order to execute at anything. So that changed me so much. And then I've worked in the inner city so much and seen what happens when somebody really has limiting beliefs and how much that holds them back. So I big brothered for a kid in college, ended up turning into like an eight-year relationship. And so I saw him go through a lot. And I remember, so he grew up in first South Central

and then moved to Compton. And I remember taking him to see movies in Beverly Hills just because I wanted him to see beauty. Like the way in which his worldview had been constructed was so bizarre and limiting. There's that song by, oh God god i'm gonna forget his name but he says they don't want to see you win kodak black kodak black i have no idea who that is all right so anyway it's a song by a guy named kodak black and he talks about how they don't want to see you winning and that was his mentality like nobody

wants to see me get out of the ghetto right not my Not my own mother, nobody. So that was his frame of reference was just, yeah, well, it just wasn't meant for me because of where I grew up. Encountered those kids I was telling you about, dad shot to death, sister shot to death, like just crazy life. And their perspective was very, very limited. And they had no sense of how they're going to make something come true. So I want to help people develop an empowering mindset. Disney understood something, which is why I use them as our foil, which is every piece of content that they make feeds into a brand ethos. So if I say I'm going to go see a Sony movie or a Warner Brothers movie or a Paramount movie, you know nothing about it. But if I say I'm going to go see a Disney movie, you already know something.

So we have to have the discipline to make sure that everything that we're creating feeds into that. And what would that thing you're feeding into be? Like escaping the Matrix? So everything you're going to do is going to be motivational in some sort of a way or informational, inspiring? It's got to be entertainment first and foremost. But I'll give you examples of movies I wish we had created wholesale. I wish Impact Theory had made the Matrix. It's the perfect movie in my opinion.

I wish we had made Star Wars. The whole religion of the Jedi is wildly empowering. Do you know how ridiculous it is to say that you wish you made the two greatest movies of all time? Of course you do. Right?

But I'm saying from an ideological... I wish we'd made Avatar. Actually, I don't wish we'd made Avatar. Why? Honestly, I haven't looked at it closely enough to know if it falls into that,

but I don't remember it having... That's more of like a nature theme and taking care of the earth theme, whereas I'm looking for empowerment themes. So, themes and what what like in terms of fiction all of it it's gonna be documentaries like what are you gonna try to do so mostly uh as of right now entirely fiction um and the idea behind that is the way that humans assimilate truly disruptive information is through narrative.

If you've read Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, he talks a lot about that and the hero's journey. And so wanting to leverage that, and it's not an accident that I was so impacted by The Power of Myth. And then Joseph Campbell is the one that worked with George Lucas on creating Star Wars and making sure that real hardcore mythology is at the core of it. So I just think that's how we build our belief system. It's how we build our ideology. It's how we pass it on to other people. And I'm a big believer.

Don't try to change behavior. Try to leverage it. So people are already reading books, reading comic books, so on and so forth. It's a weird motivation to not just make things that are entertaining, but to make things that are entertaining that you think are going to be inspiring. But then to use Star Wars and The Matrix as examples, like, do you think those movies really pulled people out of anything or just entertain people? Because I'd be much more inclined to think the latter. Sure. So here's how I look at it. I'm a filtering mechanism. I can't save everybody. Not everybody cares. So some people are going to respond. Some are. The Matrix changed my life in a deep and fundamental way so i know the matrix yeah 100 how so at the time when i had the fixed mindset um literally right out of college i'm in the depths of i'm not a talented filmmaker and now what the hell do i do

right i went to a comic con uh literally across the street from usc and they were um handing out tickets to go see the matrix at warn Brothers Studios. And I was very excited, took the ticket, went that night, went in. Do you remember the movie well? Oh, absolutely. All right. So when Agent Smith goes, no officer, your men are already dead. And then they cut to up there, Trinity jumps, camera goes slow motion and spins around her. The entire audience, myself included, yelled because it was just unlike anything we'd ever seen in a movie. It was such a rad experience.

And so that primed me for what ends up being the perfect metaphor for limiting beliefs. And you know Michael Strahan? Mm-hmm. All right, so Michael Strahan said the same thing. He was like, the year that he got the award for most sacks in a single season was because of The Matrix. So literally his own words. He came on Impact Theory, interviewed him, asked him that question.

He said, without a doubt, that movie is the reason that I got the record. Because he said, up until that moment, I see Morpheus and Neo training. And Morpheus says, do you really think that I'm faster than you because of my muscles? You really think this is air you're breathing and Strahan realized holy shit I have a belief that I can only get one sack per game but why can't I get two why can't I get three and he said because of that he would get a sack and then go no I can get another one and he said I realized in that moment that once I got a sack in the game, I would back off because I just believed that was like the most anyone could do in a game. So, and it had a similar impact to me. It made me realize

I needed to figure out what my, what is the matrix, right? Cause I don't actually think we're in a simulation. So what is the matrix belief system? What is my version of jacking in reading? What is my Kung Fu business? Like those were all the things that began to stack it wasn't there while i'm sitting in the movie theater but those were the things that it were in my mind and i just kept thinking about it thinking about it thinking about it and i think in movies so when i give examples a lot of times i give examples from movies because they have that impact now the reason that i don't think something like this would work and the reason that i think so many people have not responded the way that i've responded is nobody is allowing people to take it seriously

So social media, I think is gonna change that so nobody's allowing people to take it seriously. Everybody brushes it off. It's just entertainment So what do you mean by that? So Joseph Campbell in the power of myth talked about? He was asked by Bill Moyer Bill Moyer said I've seen it read it Okay so when he goes what do you think happens to a world where people no longer believe in mythology and joseph campbell said you're living through it right now and the point being that you have all the mythology in the world but nobody believes in it anymore everybody knows star wars isn't real everybody knows the matrix

isn't real but people actually used to believe that religion was real. And so you had this mythological tale, whether it was, you know, Zeus or whether it was Cassandra, all the Greek mythology, whether it was Jesus Christ, didn't matter. People believed it. They thought it was real. And so people still do. Correct. But I would say that that's diminishing day over day. It's gotten less.

Will you give me that? From, I'm sure, ancient times. I mean, I don't know what the current state of atheism, agnosticism, and deity worship is. I would imagine it's probably somewhere in the 50% range, though. I won't even challenge that. I will give you my gut instinct. My gut instinct is, while people are still deeply religious, they don't believe in the literal word as much. Well, let's Google what percentage of people today consider themselves religious versus the past. See if we get anything out of this. And then if we get anything there, we have to figure out who believes it. I think people still cling to it because it's comforting.

And then if we get anything there, we have to figure out who believes it. I think people still cling to it because it's comforting and because the uncertainty of existence and the finite nature of our life, it's very disturbing. That open-ended feeling of not knowing when it's going to happen or what's going to happen and having some sort of a calm and peaceful belief in an overlord. Like someone who's paying attention to this whole thing and has got a plan. I'll agree to that. My thesis isn't that people don't believe in something. It's that they don't believe in the literal word as much. As much.

How about this? It didn't help me. There are some people out there like me. What do we got here, Jamie? Unaffiliated rose from 2014 by 6.7%. From 2014?

From 2007 to 2014. So in seven years it rose by 6%. But they still identify Christian? Unaffiliated. Unaffiliated, yeah, nothing. With any religion. So they're what, spiritual? Christians went from 78 to 70.

What? Same time period. 78%? Wow. I think it's American population. The American population of Christians is 78% to 70, whatever it is. So it dropped 8%, but still a giant number of people. That's why you have to say you're a believer in God in order to be president.

They still maintain that that's like a necessary thing. Like if you are a person running for president that says, don't know you know i have no idea and i'm personally inclined to believe that maybe uh maybe there's no god like people would go fucking crazy you would never get to be president we have this fundamental desire even if there's zero proof and there absolutely is zero proof especially when you think about the stories in the bible and some of the more preposterous ones. There's no proof that any of those ever really took place. There's no proof. What was the guy that called the she-bear to kill the children that were mocking him for being bald? I have no idea.

You don't know that story? No. There was a guy in the Bible that these kids were giving him a hard time for being bald. So he called upon God to avenge him, and God sent a bear to kill the children that were mocking him. Yeah. That's intense. Guess what?

Elisa. Yeah. Elisa? How do you say that? Elisha? Elisha? Elisha. Yeah, he went up to Bethel.

As he walked along the road, some boys came from the city and mocked him. And when they mocked him, God sent a bear. And the bear fucking killed the kids. Wow. Yeah, there are some crazy stories. Yeah, I'm guessing that didn't happen, kids. I'm guessing that God's not such a piece of shit that he sends a bear to kill little children.

How about the kids just, they were talking shit about this guy being bald. They didn't notice a bear was sneaking up on them. More likely. You know, when you're talking a bunch of shit, you make noise. The bears realize, oh, these are high-pitched noises. Probably delicious little kids. And then they moved in. But still 70%, man. So

it's less people believe, but still, that's a giant number. It is. It's a giant number. It is. It is a giant number. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. Like how many of them actually believe, you know, and to what extent? Right.

And what is it they actually believe? Yeah, so something, my thesis is that something's wrong. Uh, this isn't a, an anti religion thing for me. I have no beef with religion. If it's making people positive and connecting and doing something great, I'm all for it. Um, I am not a religious person. Um, and so maybe I needed this for me to have something that could give me the ideology that I needed. The reading, the power of myth really changed my life. I read it and he talks about in the book how, um, basically one of the things he thinks is going wrong with divorce. And the reason that divorce rates are so high is that ritual has really lost its impact. And you don't have these demarcation points between

childhood and adulthood or between being single and being married. And he was like, you know, back in the day when you were 13 they took you out of the woods they literally ripped you from the clutches of the women took you out and with no anesthetic they would circumcise you and now you know like you're a man so because there's none of that you get arrested adolescence and there's sort of a weakening of the the the import of the religious ceremony as far as divorce goes and so people aren't taking that seriously so and he talks about the import of the religious ceremony as far as divorce goes. And so people aren't taking that as seriously.

And he talks about ritualistic scarification and how, man, you knew something had changed when people put your body through some kind of transformation. So when I got married, I went through a ritualistic scarification to remind myself that I was a different man the day before. What kind of ritualistic scarification did you go through? A tattoo. Oh, that's a grandiose way. Right? But here, how dare you call it a ritualistic scarification? That's how I saw it. So I don't, I don't do tattoos. You'll see nothing. I have one tattoo, which I did specifically for my wedding. I've never gotten another one.

And at the time, this isn't the case anymore, but at the time, one of my biggest sort of realistic fears was needles. So it was me saying to my wife, I'm going to go scar my body using needles, which freak me the fuck out to remind myself, A, I want it to be painful. And then B, I want it to be permanent. And I'm glad that it's something that I have this active fear of. So in doing all of that, it really did make the whole wedding just a bigger deal to me. That's very interesting. But I think when we're talking about Joseph Campbell and the issues that I think are very real about people not experiencing like a grand event or at least some sort of a ritual that gets them to adulthood. at least some sort of a ritual that gets them to adulthood. I think there's a significant issue that we have with just things being far too easy and that there's no real difficult path where the warrior has to find themselves in myth or in a person's actual life that they have to overcome some very difficult thing.

Now for you, I'm sure, uh, some of those, I mean, we all have difficulties in life, but some of the difficulties that you experienced when you were in film school was like this creation of this thing, you know, but once you tried to create this thing and it didn't work out right, do you, don't you have this like desire to go back and try to figure it out? Right. Like, don't you have to desire like, okay, like I see where I fucked this up. I try to be like John Woo instead of trying to be like Alfred Hitchcock. And I see that there's, like, a way you could be systematic. You're obviously a systematic thinker.

Like, you're talking about you're a quote organizer. You have all these quotes in your mind. And you have all these systems that you follow, including, like, following, like, some of Gary Vee's social media stuff, right? It's like you're a system. You follow, like, these are ways to engage in success right so I would feel like that would like haunt you a little bit it's interesting it doesn't so since then I have done I have done a low-budget feature film okay I wrote a screenplay

that was turned into a feature film. That was a horrifying experience. Why was that? Just because it didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to. It wasn't executed as written. I mean, look, this is the age-old writer's complaint. But I have changed as a person over time to where I'm just now way more interested in scale. So I still have that love for cinema. I love storytelling.

I think story is a, it is a way that we assimilate information. Like that is, when I think about the things that have painted a vision for me of what is a man, came way more from movies than say my own father. So, and that is not to downplay, like having a relationship with somebody that

you're in proximity with is, is ultimately, I think going to be the most powerful thing. It's just not scalable. So looking at how impactful media has been for me and for a lot of people, um, and this whole notion of self signaling, because at the end of the day, the way that I see the company is we're a merchandise company. So you create the intellectual property. I mean, this is out of Disney's playbook. You create the intellectual property in order to create the merchandise. And it's the merchandise that drives a lot of the revenue, not all of it, but it drives a lot of the revenue. And in having that, you also create this thing called self signaling. So as I dress a certain way to tell you something, which is how it starts, it also tells me even more loudly than you. So as I like, I have a Batman shirt, and I have a Superman shirt. And when I wear those shirts, it reminds me of my tie to that ethos, right? So Batman is you don't have any superpowers, motherfucker, you just have to work really, really hard. And you've got to be prepared to tap into the dark side to keep pushing hard enough to, you know, avenge what you believe is you're failing.

So Superman, it's a perfect analogy for passion, right? He's a normal guy, except when he's in the yellow sun. And that gave me a way to think about getting in line with my passion. I remember I was obsessed with that when I decided to go in and quit. I was like, I'm like Superman, and I am out of the yellow sun because I'm not passionate about anything. And the only time that I can do things and make me feel that, that are extraordinary or when I'm really passionate, the matrix obviously is like the core metaphor for my entire existence. So what is such a crazy thing to say? Yeah. It's a weird thing. The matrix is the core. Wow. Okay. The core metaphor, right? I recognize it's a metaphor, right? Um, but it's, it's a core metaphor right i recognize it's a metaphor right um but it's it's

a core metaphor and not to beat joseph campbell that didn't expect him to come out of my mouth this many times in this interview but he said if you want to change the world you have to change the metaphor so and people have talked a lot about that with the how the world changed from the metaphor of the steam engine to the metaphor of the computer uh and that just it changed the way that you thought about workers it changed what you thought about intelligence and just changed a lot of things just by shifting from one metaphor to the next. So dealing in the realm of metaphor, giving people access points to different things through storytelling, which obviously is riding on the back of metaphor, I think is an incredible access point. But more importantly, it's something people already do.

So you're leveraging behavior that's already there. And that was like a necessary part. The same thing with Quest, right? Don't ask people to eat less and exercise more. We've been telling them that for 60 years, whatever. It works for a narrow band of the population, but it doesn't work for everybody. So finding something that people are already doing, people are already watching movies, TV shows, playing video games, reading books, comic books. They're already doing it. They're billions and billions of dollar industries. So being able to tap into that, leverage social media now. So this is where

we first got onto this part where I was saying, you're in a position where most people don't take it seriously. They don't try to extract the life lessons. They're not Michael Strahan. They don't see a movie one time. Well, most people just enjoy it. They just go to see a film to be entertained. Correct. This is a fascinating approach though, to create films, to change the way human beings think about life. But now keep in mind, if we don't entertain first and foremost, we've got nothing. Right.

So people need to be able to watch the movies and have no idea that there's a message. Disney is a perfect example of that. Disney is trying to tell you that right should always win, bad should always lose. Right, but they make movies for children. Sure. I mean, it's a different thing like organizing something like that to a grand scale to make films for humans that you think can pull them out of the matrix through entertainment. Do you think this works

for kids, but only kids? I don't think kids are a little bit more pliable and they don't have enough information. Sometimes you can show them some things through cartoons and things along those lines. It could set in with them a little bit easier and better. It's absolutely possible to send a message through a film that really radiates with people, resonates with people. Because I have a deep and abiding fear that this is only going to work with kids. Really?

Yeah. I don't know that that's true, but there's a guy. Do you know Jeffrey Canada? No. Super cool dude. Um, grows up in Harlem and realizes, dude, the school system is fucked. Like everyone has just given up on all of us here in Harlem, but he's super bright ends up going to Harvard and says, I'm going to become a doctor. I'm going to go back and change the education system. And does that goes back and spends, I don't know how many years in the education system and just realizes, yeah, this is never going to work. You can't change it from the inside. There are so many politics is so much entrenched bullshit. Like this is going nowhere.

So he leaves and decides that he's going to, um, give up on adults and he's going to start with kids. In fact, not even that he's going to try to find women who are about to become pregnant. start with kids. In fact, not even that he's going to try to find women who are about to become pregnant. And all he wants to do is because he looked at what makes a middle class kid successful versus an inner city kid who goes on to not be successful. What's the difference? And what he found was it's the number of words that a child hears before the age of five, I think it is, and the ratio of positive to negative. He said, your average kid in the middle class, here's 5 million words for the time that he's five, 70% are positive, 30% to negative. He said, your average kid in the middle class hears 5 million words before the time that he's 5, 70% are positive, 30% are negative.

Whereas in the inner city, a kid hears like 2 or 3 million by the time that they're 5, and the ratio is reversed. So it's 30% positive, 70% negative. So he said, I'm just going to make my life's mission solving that problem. So he finds his mother's-

That's a crazy issue. That's a gigantic issue. Massive. And he said, what happens is the language centers in the brain just don't develop properly and because of that they struggle later in life trying to get a job because they can't communicate as well um so he felt like he had just put his finger on sort of that baseline but the reason i bring jeffrey canada up is because he gave up on adults so as i'm thinking through this look we haven't executed on this nobody

should be taking me seriously right now i know that so i've got like this and and i'm like everybody told us we were crazy when we said we're launching a protein bar people like motherfucker are you stupid the 1600 protein bars in 2009 it is the most crowded space ever one guy actually told us i need another protein bar like i need another hole in the head and then five years later we're inc 500 second fastest growing company in north america grew by 57 000 how because we believed that it could be done, right? So I get it. Well, because you made a good product also and people were enjoying it and that's what they wanted. And that's kind of the same thing with making films.

Like you have to make a good product that people are going to enjoy. But it's a fascinating thing that you're coming to it saying that you want to change people and take them out of the matrix. But you're also saying that you're like a memorabilia company or a merchandise company. I mean, that's kind of the same thing, right? It's like you're talking like objects that go along with your films, and that's a big part of what. So you're planning all this out from a financial standpoint, right? But what about a creative standpoint? Like to be able to put together all these ideas, like to say, oh, I want to make the new Matrix.

Oh, I want to make the new Star Wars. And I want to change the world. I want to drag people out of this mundane reality they live in and show them the power of myth. Right. Yeah. More, I want to show them the power of belief. I don't think they're ever going to see the power of myth. Why wouldn't they see it if you could see it?

Maybe they will. I don't know. Just not a focus for me. I just want them to take the usable mindset and apply it. And I think that we live in an interesting time now where social media can comment on the things and say, here's what's extractable from this. So will you try to adjust films accordingly? If someone comes to you with an idea and a script and they want this project to be created, you try to adjust it accordingly to try to have the highest amount of impact? And how are you going to do that? Yeah. So hopefully we'll be a beacon to people that

really understand the mindset. So, um, we laid out a three phase approach to building the studio on the website, literally from day one. Uh, and phase one is build the community. So we're building a community around ideology, people that come and listen. In fact, this is how you and I connected. So one of my, um, one of the people that follows my show wrote to you and said, Joe, you really got to get this guy on your show and sent you a clip. And you said, Hey, this is actually pretty interesting. You should come on. Um, so that's all around ideology, right? So I've spent the last 20 plus years of my life constructing my mindset to allow me to be successful. And because I've had a certain level of success, take me seriously so now what I'm trying to do is just find the

most efficacious way to actually get that ideology in people's hands and I know if I can incept them in entertainment I've got a shot but if I can't entertain them first I've got nothing so if we don't see any way to sneak it in if we don't have good movies like I mean I mean, I think this is where you were going. If the movies aren't just good in and of themselves, like we're fucked, we've got nothing. So we have to get really good at making really good movies that people want to see for their own sake. So that, and that's a Herculean task, no question. And we're going to have to assemble an amazing creative team that really understands at a very deep level the ideology

of the company well in and of itself making entertaining films like having a company that makes entertaining films is difficult brutal make entertaining films and have this sort of life-changing message i don't envy you it sounds like a long task but hey look it can be done if disney did it and arguably they certainly did with kids you know i mean they've they've made some really powerful movies with some really good messages no question no question and look it's going to be a bumpy road i know that there's going to be well there's guaranteed failure and hopefully success um but it's something that i believe in enough to fight for it so when you talk about you about, you know, don't you want to go back and sort of make good

on the filmmaking promise? No, that's not what I meant. What I meant was, there's no promise. I just meant, is it something that you think, like, hmm, maybe I could have adjusted. Maybe I could have done this. Maybe I could have built on my skill set. Maybe I could have continued making films

and tried different approaches. And I feel like you know if you had a real passion for and it was something you were so interested in you said you were killing it early on in your film career or in your film school career like I wonder why you didn't like continue to try to readjust and try to try come back at it otherwise by that as well I think everyone myself included thought you know when we had the success at Quest now I could do whatever I wanted That I would just immediately start writing and directing and it just didn't feel

It wasn't what I wanted to do anymore Well, that's an important message in and of itself because to tell people you know Like look follow your your heart's content Don't be trapped in your earliest ideas if you have an idea early on that You know I'm going to become this, and then somewhere along the line, you discover this new interest that kind of supersedes the other one and surpasses it. Follow that one. You know, you don't have to say, oh, I thought you were a filmmaker. I was for a little while. You know, like you could do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you could find a million different pathways and a million different avenues, but

ultimately what's going to resonate the most with people is something that you're actually passionate about. You really feel. Really feel. Not faking it. Not trying to establish some sort of a narrative that you think is going to be successful with people or resonate with people, but what do you actually feel? That seems to be like the great pieces of art, the great works, you know, that people have created, the opportunities that I've got a chance to talk to people that have done some pretty amazing shit. It was all like an interest. It was all a thought that they had that they followed through all the way and then got immersed in it. You know, but it was never thinking about it in terms of the ultimate eventual result.

You know, that's why I think it's interesting that you're approaching this and you don't just have an idea to make something creative and, and fascinating and fulfilling to enjoy, but you also want to establish some sort of a narrative that changes the way people look at the reality around them. Yeah, definitely. And when I, when I think about what I'm really driven by, and this was almost a confession to my team was I don't care about, I love movies and I love the path that we're on right now, but I don't love it enough to risk my fortune and to work as hard as I'm working that just never would have drawn me back. So what I do care enough about to put everything at risk and to work as hard as I'm working

is pulling people out of the matrix. And I know those are my words that maybe don't get people to see what I mean. So the kid that I big brothered for, just to give you an idea. So his name was Rashaan, an amazing kid. He was very disruptive in class. He was drug and alcohol impacted,

but still really bright, but they had him on like Ritalin or something. I honestly don't know what, but it stunted his growth. So he's really small, hyper aggressive. Um, he was adopted and his mother was abusing him, but I didn't know that. And I'm very sad. I was just too young. And I just, I didn't know what was going on. Even though looking back, you suddenly realize, too young. And I just, I didn't know what was going on, even though looking back, you suddenly realize, holy hell, there were so many clues. Um, but I didn't pick up on them and he just living a life that is, um, is horrible and growing up in the inner cities as well on top of all that. And so I come and of course there, he's the student they give me. And all I'm supposed to do is for eight weeks, I'm just supposed to come in and help him do his homework. And so he's the student they give me and all i'm supposed to do is for eight weeks i'm just supposed to come in and help him do his homework and so he's very clever so i would show up and

for an hour he would ignore me he would get in fights he would push me away and then like five minutes before i'd have to leave i'd say i have to leave and he would start crying and freaking out please no just stay help me with my homework and so finally i'd be like all right i'm gonna help you but if you don't right now get to work, I'm leaving. And so then he would be an angel and do his homework. And then week two was exactly the same. And three and four and five. I thought this fucking kid is playing me like he's like trolling me in real life.

And at week six, they tell you, hey, warn them that you're only coming two more weeks so that they're not surprised. Cool. Week six, I tell him, hey, just, you know, I'm only coming two more times. And he goes nuclear. Freaks the the fuck out like it was so shocking like I didn't have experience with kids so he's flipping out and this was already a kid with behavioral problems so I was just like the fuck is going on and finally uh slowly all too slowly I realized okay wait is this because I just told you I'm leaving and he's like yes and yes. And I said, look, largely just to calm him down. As long as I live in Los Angeles, I will help you do your homework, but you have to

do it the second I get here. Deal? And he said, deal. So that turns into an eight year relationship where it became way more than helping him with his homework. I started taking him to movies and trying to show him just a different side of life and took him on this thing called Troy Camps. We got to see the mountains for the first time and just all like really, really getting involved in his life. And then when it finally came out that his stepmother or his adoptive mother was beating him,

from what I heard, she was chasing him down the street with a baseball bat. And I just like, I literally couldn't believe that was real. And so they took him away immediately. And I was the first phone call and his lawyer called me and said, he has asked that you be the ward of the court or the guardian to help him through the court system. And so I helped him do that and helped him get into foster care. And, and I'm just looking at him going, I know where this ends up. Like I know where this ends up and it isn't good. And so that was the seed, right? I didn't think about, I'm going to dedicate my life to helping people like this. Wasn't that, but it planted a seed and it really fucked with me.

And I stayed involved with him in foster care for a couple of years, but then they just moved him so far away that I was broke at the time. It just was too far away. So, but that stayed with me. And then when I started at Quest and we were helping all these kids or working with all these kids and I saw how extraordinary they were,

which by the way, drug dealers, some of them are amazing entrepreneurs. And so it became this notion in my, it's unreal, dude. I'll tell you some stories sometime. Sure. Absolutely fucking crazy. And I thought, Jesus, you're a better entrepreneur than I am. Like they're telling me how they watch like the cop cars and when they change shifts and

how they know that they're being identified by their cars. And so they change cars all the time. It's crazy. And so I'm like, Jesus, it gave me this concept that I called mining for astronauts. And I'm like in here, in here somewhere in here being the ghetto are some of the most amazing minds I've ever come across. And these guys could be anything. It could be fucking astronauts, right? Like whatever they wanted, but they don't believe they can. And when I would interview them, it was nuts. So imagine you're interviewing. and I came up with just like a fast way

where I didn't have to think, I could just ask the same questions. And one of the questions was, a magic genie shows up, he's gonna grant you one wish and one wish only. You can't wish for more wishes. You can't cure cancer, bring anybody back from the dead.

It's gotta be something for yourself. What do you wish for? Universally, to a person, they all said a job. Okay, that makes sense. You think that's what I wanna hear, so you're trying to get a job, so you can tell me you want a job. Then when we get past that bullshit, and I tell You, you think that's what I want to hear. So you're trying to get a job. So you can tell me you want a job. Then when we get past that bullshit and I tell you,

obviously that's not true. Like, what do you really want? Like what's the job meant to get you money? Okay. Do you want money or is it something else? No, it's money. Awesome, man. It's a magic genie. You can ask for whatever you want. What do you want? You know what answer every single one of them gave me? Well, $1 million. You can't buy a fucking house for a million dollars. Okay. It was so crazy. It's a magic genie, Joe. Like you can't buy a fucking house for a million dollars okay it was so crazy it's a magic genie Joe like you can ask for a trillion dollars but their frame of reference was so small one guy this is like the one exception said he wanted an airport I found that so weird so I had to push on that one I was like why an airport he said because business guys come through the airport I was like okay, what good does that do you? And he said, because then they can teach me about business.

Now think about that for a second. How fucking many steps removed are you from what you actually want? But that's like, they, they don't, you say I'm a systematic thinker, right? So I had to learn that. That's not where I started. So I spent, thankfully, one of the things I'm most grateful for in my life, I have to learn everything the hard way, but because I learned things the hard way, then I can show other people what I did, where I fell down and how hopefully they can avoid some of the mistakes. Now, most people ignore me. I'm well aware of that. But you have a desire to teach people this. This is what's interesting. You're not just internalizing this. This is not just yourself. Correct. And I look, I'm wired for compassion. I really enjoy other people succeeding. Uh, the, my favorite example of that is when I was five. So my sister

would have been eight and a half. Um, I pretended not to see some Easter eggs so that she would win the Easter egg hunt because she cared about winning and I didn't. So that's just a natural inclination that I have that I've fed into, that I've chosen to take pride in. And because of that, look, it would be a way cooler story if I said, I met this kid, Rashaan, and it changed my life forever. And I knew I had to dedicate myself to helping people.

It didn't. I met Rashaan and then spent almost a decade chasing money. Right? That's the truth. So, but in that process, like that way that I felt in those moments where I had hoped that he would do something When I met the kids that were working on the production line and I could see fuck I am one of them literally came to me he's absolutely hysterical he's in tears and

he he was like you're like my fuck and Stopped himself and I thought obviously he was about to say you like my father, but that felt weird for him So he stopped and said you're like my father, but that felt weird for him. So he stopped and said, you're like my older brother. And he's like, I've just never had anybody that actually cared about me. So now mix that with the fact that I'm only interested in scale. And maybe I would be. What does that mean?

Touching 10 people and having 10 people show up at my funeral and just be like, this motherfucker changed my life. And because of him, my 18 grandkids and all, like they're going to have a better life. That just doesn't do it for me. And I'm being honest. Maybe, maybe I am a worse person because of this. I honestly don't care. It's just true. It's who I am. So scale is interesting. Having, I would much rather touch a million people and none of them know who I am and know that a million people's lives are better off than touch 10. And they credit it all to me. It's just way more interesting to me at scale. Now, I also believe that, uh, a 501 C three nonprofit is like the worst way in the world to do something. If you're

trying to do good, finding a way to do it through commerce, where it's a self-sustaining economic engine. That's interesting. Cause the thing that like like this is so weird to me, if you have a nonprofit, you have to go beg, literally beg money from people that have a for-profit company that have figured out how to make money. They probably have a little bit of guilt, so they want to give money to you. It is the weirdest dynamic ever rather than just building a company that at its core is trying to do something good and awesome that you can be proud of. I'm fucking proud. If I crash and burn, I'll still be proud of what I was trying to accomplish. I believe in it makes me feel good to want to do amazing shit for people. I actually believe that this is the way that you give somebody a belief

system that is antagonistic to acquiring a new belief system because to do it at scale, they can't want it right. The people, the people that want to change their physique do. They eat right, they exercise, and they get results. And the people that don't, and there are people that I love very much in my life, and I'm going to lose them too early because they don't want to eat better. So the only solution I could think of was there's no option. Everything is healthy and delicious. So all the things that you want to eat, you can. And so that was the mission at Quest. Certainly while I was there, that was the mission at Quest.

We are gonna find, what are those? It was like 26 categories that we thought got people into trouble. And we are gonna make a healthy version of each and every one of those motherfuckers. And that was the mission. So that there would literally be nowhere for people to go to eat badly

because they could just pursue their most base instincts of just gluttonous. Give me carbs, sugar, salt. I want it all fat and that they'd be eating a healthy version, but it felt and tasted just like that. So our first marketing message was stop compromising. So that's a long way of saying it's all about leveraging people's behavior against them to get them to make the right changes. And I believe that the way that we're going to do this, we live in a unique time where I can go in fucking microphones like this and I can explain

to people how to build a mindset I do this literally I put out probably six or seven hours worth of content every fucking week what just telling yeah hundred percent really the day you're ready to come on my show be raw which people have been begging for forever what What's your show? Impact Theory. What is that? So Impact Theory is me bringing on people like you that have had just unbelievable success and finding out what are the things that you did to get there. So my interview style is I'll know more about you than your own mother. You'll show up.

You'll get a little unnerved because how the fuck did I figure all this stuff out? But then we can have a really cool interview because wherever you want to go, I'm going to be able to go. I'm not a journalist. I want you to shine. You've literally inspired me, by the way. I told you a little bit about why when we first started talking. You're the only person that makes me sweat from diversity. That's like my thing as an interviewer, dude. I can interview anybody. It doesn't matter. dude like i can go i can interview anybody it doesn't matter but then i saw your fucking show and i realized i can't interview a porn star um i probably would suck with hannibal burris somebody who's just fucking funny and needs somebody to go back and forth with and i realized but fucking joe can do dominic d'agostino like on one day and then immediately turn around and do like porn joke

and then immediately turn around and do like porn joke. Anyway, so would love to bring on people like you. Come on, because it all started back at Quest. I have this 25 point bullet belief system that I wanted everyone in the company to understand. I used to be an employee. I had an employee's mentality. And here are the 25 things I had to do to my mind to become an entrepreneur and generate wealth in

my life and feel like I was in control of my life. Nobody else controlled my destiny, but me. Here are the 25 things. I had this unending fear that people were going to memorize the fucking bullet points and they wouldn't live them. So I wanted to create a show where they, cause it's hardest to impact those closest to you. Don't know if you've experienced that. I certainly have. So say, so it's hardest to impact those that are closest to you. Yeah. Why is it hardest? I think it's because there's too much familiarity.

My mom looks at impact. You mean in a way like inspire them. Yeah. Right. But not even through your own success. You don't think that it inspires them. Like my mom is finally starting to say things like, tell me a little bit more about whatever.

But for a long time. But is that impacting her or is she just curious? Not yet. She's asking in the way that like, hey, I'm actually interested in making that change. But I'll just speak for myself. In my life, for whatever inadequacy that I have, it's been very hard for me to impact those closest to me. So what I wanted to do at Quest was bring in people that were wildly successful and I wanted, unprompted, I wanted the audience to see,

you're gonna hear them say the same things I say, even though we don't know each other. And time after time after time, they heard people going through, these people have never seen the 25 bullet points, but they would go through like, I mean, maybe it was like six or seven of them. It's not going to be exactly the same, but they would touch on so many, it was fucking freaky. And so that really started to play into, okay, we're, we're now moving into a different era where you can step forward.

And I think transparency and authenticity are a big fucking deal in, in companies today. I think that Gen Z is going to demand it. And I think any company that hides. Did you say Gen Z? Gen Z, yeah. Is that Generation Z? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah.

Have you not heard that? No. Oh, man, welcome. You're going to hear it everywhere now. Is that the new thing that the kids are saying? There's new kids coming up? Generation Z? Marketers are saying it.

Oh, if you type in Gen Z, you get like a bazillion results. So Gen Zers are known for like they say that they're the altruistic generation. So these people are not comfortable with big business. And I think that they're going to demand a level of transparency into the people that are running the company. transparency into the people that are running the company and the people that get that Elon Musk, um, um, Richard Branson, people that aren't afraid to like really step out front, then people just resonate with that. And so that is why I do all this. That's why I'm stepping out front. That's why I want people to know who I am and what I'm doing. I need to build a community. If we're going to pull off this mission, impossible building the studio, that's all

got to happen. So, um, that's why I create all this content that's why I bring people on that have inspired me and my goal is just to set them up so I want everyone to walk away from my show going like off camera behind the scenes like that was the best interview I've ever done so yeah that's that's like my mission I just want people to see it from all these different angles hear all these different people say it. And quite frankly, selfishly, I wanna learn. And so one, the biggest, the thing that probably impacted my life the most

was when I stopped building my ego around being smart. And I started building my ego around being a learner and being super humble and sitting at people's feet and just wanting to listen and learn. And then immediately put what I learned into action. So the show is also wildly selfish for me and the staff because we get to meet incredible people that have just super empowering wisdom. And so I believe that the dual track of the social content was just on the nose,

right? You would come on the show and you would just tell us like how you did it. You would talk about like how you got into standup comedy. I got into standup comedy because I was the fucking funny guy when everybody else was nervous. Right. But then like it actually has to become a craft and you got to do it over and over and over and talking about that grind and how you get good over time and people are going to trip the fuck out and just like go, Whoa, maybe that's exactly what I need to do, which is a message I think a lot of people need right now, which is it's a long grind. Yeah. So it's stuff like that, but that's impacted. Tom, I got to wrap this up. But thank you very much, man.

My pleasure. I appreciate it. And good luck. It's a very ambitious project, and I'm certainly going to be watching. Awesome, man. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for StarQuest. I really love your bars.

You guys are awesome. Thank you. All right, folks. See you on Friday. Bye.