The Wolf Of All Streets - The Danger Of Betting Against Bitcoin | Tom Bilyeu of Quest Nutrition and Impact Theory

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Stemming from a deep passion for 360 degree health and wellness, Tom Bilyeu achieved world-wide success as the founder of billion-dollar company Quest Nutrition. Tom didn’t stop there, wanting to teach others what he learned along the way, so he began his second act called Impact Theory — designed to help and inspire people to develop skills needed to improve themselves and the world around them. Now, Tom believes Bitcoin, blockchain, NFTs, and the entire crypto market will play a pivotal role in his pursuit to make the world a better place — plus Tom has shiny, diamond hands.   In this episode Tom Bilyeu explores: Covid’s existential crisis Making money vs. investing money The secret to the universe Winning the game of money The neurochemistry of collecting The danger of betting against Bitcoin HODLing and entrepreneurship Building the next Disney Launching an NFT and blockchain platform Finding meaning and purpose Continuing to stack sats Teaching others how to succeed --- Cosmos:  Visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos to learn about the Cosmos Hub and how the $ATOM can connect every blockchain. Cosmos is the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere.  Find new staking opportunities, applications, or build your own parachain at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos  --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Cosmos. Stay tuned for more information on them later in this episode. What is up everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Today's guest is the founder of Quest Nutrition, one of the most popular brands of all time.

After achieving monumental success with Quest, instead of hanging up the towel, Tom continued to push boundaries and started Impact Theory, a media platform designed to help others reach their full potential. And on top of all of that, probably most exciting to us is that he also has diamond hands, which I can't wait to ask him about. Tom, bill you, man.

It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Dude, I'm stoked to be here. Should be a lot of fun. Awesome. Guys, before we get into the questions, once again, you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast for twice a week. I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, art, music, sports, politics. This podcast is powered by Blockworks. You can check out everything they've got going on at blockworks.co

and you can check out everything else I've got going on at thewolfofallstreets.io. And now to get into today's episode. So Tom, obviously you're very passionate about wellness, about a 360 degree approach to life. And I want to dive right into it for our audience. Where does Bitcoin and cryptocurrency fall into that? Yeah. So when everything kicked off in 2020 with what was going on in COVID, I really went through sort of an existential crisis on behalf of, you know, the people that I see myself serving. So my background is I've worked in the inner cities a lot. And so I see up close with people that I love what happens when you're not sort of set up for success in a systematic way and realizing like that the, the veil between the two worlds of

those that are sort of destined to, you know, just have things keep going worse for them, generation after generation. And those that have this opportunity to really grow their wealth is it is literally just a question of behavior. And, but getting people in a situation where those behaviors become easier, become default, it's hard. And even in an era now where they can listen to the wolf of all streets for free. No, no, no. I know you laugh because obviously I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's true. You're putting out content for free that they could also be taking advantage of.

And Seth Godin has this really awesome thing. Oh, because of course, people are going to push back and say, I don't have any money to invest. And when people tell Seth Godin that they're not a good writer, he says, show me your bad writing. And it's like, if, if somebody is only able to invest $10, so be it, but that's better than doing nothing. So anyway, I have this existential crisis. These are the people that I want to serve. And I'm looking at this going, whoa, like we're pumping so much money into the system. This is going to get really crazy, really fast. And there are going to be winners and losers. And so all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, it felt like, okay, I need to in some way address this. So I get, you know, I've reached, so I get the biggest names in finance, like in the world

on my show. And my one question is what does the average person do? And they're so big and they're so used to dealing at the macro and handing, handling billions of dollars. They had no idea, like they couldn't even almost conceive of that person who's, you know, in, in the fist fight. And so I was just like, okay, how do I meaningfully help in a world where I don't know a lot about it? I'm very good at making money. I am not good at investing money. So for myself, I was like, I really need to learn this game as well. And so embarking on researching what was going on in crypto happened for me because I had a business use case for NFTs. And so in learning about NFTs and getting excited by the technology, that of course leads me to

blockchain, which leads me to crypto, which then leads me to going, whoa, like I need to shift some of my own net worth, but also made it clear that this is the great equalizer, but you have to get people to take action. And like you said, at the beginning, I am like captain diamond hands. So I'm just trying to get people to understand this is, I'm not good at the day trading stuff. So I'm nothing I say should in any way be construed as advice on that plane, but getting people to understand, like, as Michael Saylor says, you have to own something. So if you're not in a position where you can own your. So if you're not in a position where you can own your own home, you're not in a position where you can own your own business,

like get a couple of sats, you know what I mean? And so for the first time, it's like this idea of cryptocurrency or just crypto in general, opening these incredible financial opportunities to people the world over, whether you're banked or unbanked, it becomes irrelevant. And so that was what got me obsessed is if you can get people to understand what this moment is, to get them to do their own research, to get them to make whatever investment they can afford to lose, but to think as an investor, like that's what I hope I can bring. It's interesting because there's like a bipolarity there that I touch on quite a lot is that you're wealthy, so you need to store value, right? You saw immediately that obviously hyperinflation would be bad and that dollars are losing value and you needed somewhere

to store your value so you would buy Bitcoin and have diamond hands. But a lot of people stop there and don't realize that it also works at the other end for people who can only afford five or $10. So I think it's just really interesting that you've identified both of those and actively, you know, pursued fixing that for yourself and for other people. That's my obsession, man. So because I'm not a born entrepreneur, and I had to figure all of this out, what it made me realize is, oh, the world works in a certain way. Like whether that's finance, whether that's business, whether that's your emotional life, there are physics to all of those situations. There are things that just are true. And once you understand

what those are, now you can actually play the game well because everything becomes predictable. And getting people to understand, no, no, no, the problem here is not that you're being left out. The problem here is that other people know how the game works. You don't know how the game works. And so you feel like other people can manipulate you because you don't understand how the game works. So in crypto, I don't know where the break is for whale,

but I'm almost certainly not a whale. So technically whatever manipulation whales are doing, I'm just as like a victim of as anybody else, but it doesn't matter. It's like, understand the thesis, which will tell you when are good moments to get in, which will explain things like buy the dip because you don't want to buy high. Right. So understanding like just the basic stuff about how the game works, that's a life changer. And for me, the first thing that I learned was how the human body works. And so going to the gym changed my life. It showed me,

whoa, I didn't have to get fatter. I could actually take control of that process. And then I applied that same thing to business. And I realized business is a game. It has rules and you can learn the rules of that, learn what the levers are that you can pull to change things for yourself, for other people. And now my newest sort of version of, oh, there's a game. It has rules. It has physics. That's a better way to say it, is finance. And anybody that meets what I call minimum requirements intellectually, that unfortunately

is a real thing. But like if you meet minimum requirements, which are much slower than people think, you can learn the rules of the game. So it's like put the energy into learning the rules of the game, and suddenly you'll know how to move. And why do you care so much about teaching other people to learn the rules of the game? Most people obviously learn it themselves, then maybe they pass it on to the people immediate around them. I mean, I touched on in the intro, obviously, you started Quest, massively, you know, multi-billion dollar business. You didn't stop there. You didn't stop and go sit by the pool, which I think a lot of people would. You went on to found impact theory

and try to teach other people to replicate that process. I mean, what is it in you that you care so much to do that for others? Okay. So now I'm going to give everybody listening the secret to the universe. And I promise this is the secret to the universe. So success isn't about money. It's not about fame. It's not about adoration. It is entirely about how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. Okay. So if that's true, then this is a game of neurochemistry. And I don't know how many billionaires have to commit suicide before people realize, okay, this really isn't a game of money. There's no amount of money I can give somebody that if mentally they're suffering, that they will stop suffering. Now money solves money problems. Money is actually more powerful than

people think, not less, but it isn't what they've been told. And so I had the good fortune of, I built my wealth through a business. Now that sounds maybe obvious, but when you actually do it, it's a really bizarre way of accumulating wealth. Because what happens is there was a point where I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper, but I was driving a beat up Ford Focus with a leaky exhaust. And I had to bum rides off of my employees because I wasn't pulling money out of the company. So the company's growing in value, but I'm not like taking money out. And so then one day you sell a piece of the company in our case, and you're sitting there with your banking app and you're just hitting refresh. Cause you know that they're wiring, you know, a lot of commas and zeros.

And from one refresh to the next, you go from sort of normal income to truly wealthy. And it's like, so you have this lightning rod moment. I know where I was standing. I know roughly what time of day it was like, I mean, it's, it was so binary before, after, and I didn't feel any differently about myself. And so every insecurity that I had when I was, you know, sort of normal income to having wealth, I felt exactly the same. And so I was like, okay, now I get it. Now I get the thing. When I look at, you know, when I was broke and I would look at somebody with money, I used to drive around Bel Air, looking at the big houses, dreaming. And you think those people are cool. They're amazing.

They've got something I don't have and I want to have it. And because I can see the house, I understand the money. I think it's, this is a game of money. And so I, some part of me and my journey with money is, is I'm very much narrowing down the scope of the real experience. But in that moment, I realized, okay, money doesn't change how I feel. I'm still carrying all of my insecurities with me. So now I have further confirmation that this is just about, have I become the kind of person that I am proud to be? And so putting all of my energy there led me to meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose is everything. So I know, hey, we just sold the company. My wife and I could buy an Island, retire, never work again, but without

meaning and purpose, I will slide down a slope of bad neurochemistry, right? I will start to feel badly about myself. So now you put me in my own historical context at 18, I start big brothering for this kid in the inner cities. And, um, anybody that wants the full story on that can search my name plus master plan. I explain completely how what I'm doing today is a reaction to big brothering that kid who I was not able to save from his zip code. And then having 3,000 employees and 1,000 of them grew up hard, just like that kid. And so now I'm like, I'm not going to fail these guys the way that I failed to save this other kid.

And so what do I have to do? And so I created a theory on how to impact people at scale. That becomes impact theory, the company, which of course is why it's called that. And the theory is you have to hit people on an emotional level. And I just, I'm also wired to enjoy seeing people win. So I want to see people win. I know I can help because I had to do all this mental work myself and it can be taught. It can be repeated. Anybody that meets minimum requirements can do it. Um, and so, yeah, I'm just from a neurochemical standpoint,

thrilled to be able to contribute in some way. Um, maybe it's a pessimistic view on life, but I would say that the general experience, I think, if you look at humanity is that few people cheer for winners and a lot of people like to cheer for people's downfall and like to see people lose. So what do you think of that? It's interesting. I think that we have both. So I think people love to cheer for somebody on the come up and then they love to see them be torn back down. And then they love to see a comeback story. So it's like, we have this bizarre fascination, but this is the physics of the human mind, right? So we have this bizarre fascination. We love an underdog. And then we love to tear people down who we feel are sort of out of reach or that we in some way smell that they think they're above us. And then

because for ourselves, we like to think that we can be redeemed for our own mistakes. We like to see somebody rise back up. So as I've always said to my wife, if behavior is predictable, it shouldn't be upsetting. And that cycle is predictable. So even though I know like people cheered for me as I was rising, some people will want to tear me down. Um, and then others will enjoy, or even the same people will enjoy if I then rebound. Um, I people will want to tear me down. And then others will enjoy or even the same people will enjoy if I then rebound. I'm not going to be upset by it. So it just is. It's the cycle. That's interesting to hear the cycle sort of described that way. That makes so much sense. So something that really, you know, that really resonated for me is when you talked about that

moment when the money hits your account, and you didn't feel any different. And I think there's a lot of people in crypto who, well, got very wealthy very fast. Maybe they've lost some of that in the last month. And I noticed sort of a trend among my friends and myself who qualify, I think, in that is that it actually created, it's a cliche, the mo' money, mo' problems, but that actually, I think it brought a lot of unhappiness to people because the single thing that they thought was going to do the trick or pull the trigger had no effect. And it left them then wondering, now what? Because if the money didn't do it, what is going to do it? Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's the right question. And so I had that realization

in my sort of late twenties when I was showing up every day with the stated, the stated mission to get rich. And I said it every day. And when things were really hard, I would just say, I'm doing this to get rich. I'm going to get rich. I'm going to get rich. And because I didn't grow up with much money, that was a very enticing proposition. And that took me about eight years. For eight years, I just showed up every day working in business, trying to learn it, grinding it out, working obscene hours with the stated mission of getting rich. And this goes back to your, well, if you have a strong enough why, you can survive anyhow.

That why wasn't very strong. And so I was on paper, I was probably worth about $2 million. I should have been ecstatic. I felt dead inside. I was like, this is a joke. I cannot believe I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness. So I'm not going to do this anymore. I went in and quit, gave all my equity back. I was like, look, I'm not going to cross the finish line. I don't want to get anything for this. I need to go feel alive. And my partners were very surprised. And they, I don't know, 30 minutes later, as I'm driving home, telling my wife, I did it. I quit. We're out. We're moving to Greece. We're going to cut our life needs back to basically zero going to live in some small town.

And I'm just going to write the thing that, that fills me with joy. Cause I, the whole reason I wanted to get rich was to build my own studio. And so I'm like, we're going to do that. And yes, we're taking a step back. And yes, we're going to be broke again. And that's not a thrilling proposition, but I need to feel alive. And so in feeling that weight lifted off my shoulders, my partners called me and said, hey, we feel the same. What would our business life need to look like for us to stay together? And so we came up with this, you know, breakdown of like, it would have to be based on passion. We'd have to be adding value to people's lives. It would have to be community-based, like all the things I needed to feel alive again. And so we decided, okay, well, it might not make

a good business, but that's what we're going to do. And the company that we built around that ethos was Quest. And so we end up going from not existing to being valued over a billion dollars in five years. I mean, it's crazy. So you get this, you know, quote unquote, overnight success, 12 years in the making. I needed all of the years of thinking that getting rich was going to be the thing that solved that emotional hole in my life, realizing it's not realizing value creation, having a why, serving other people and myself. Don't get me wrong.

I am the most diehard capitalist you're ever going to find. And by doing that, by focusing on something that served not only me, but other people, now all of a sudden, even when I was losing, I felt good. And so I always encourage people. The question everybody tells entrepreneurs to ask is what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? And that was a question I've been asking myself for years. And it led me into a miserable situation because I was only thinking about if I achieved this

thing, then it would allow me to do something else. And I said, okay, hold on. That's the wrong question. Instead, I'm going to start asking what would I do and love every day, even if I were failing? Do that. And so that was Quest. That's impact theory. It's something that, because I'm trying to build the next Disney, right?

Disney has a 90-year head start and God knows how many billions of dollars plus, you know, an obscene amount of IP. So the odds of me actually beating them border on zero. But that's the thing that even if I fail, I believe in the mission of why we're doing it. And then just the joy of being around storytelling every day is in and of itself thrilling. So I'm like, well, even if I fail doing this, I will have had an amazing time and believed in my mission. And so that becomes make that the core of your thing. And then everything else will take care of itself. So what does it look like when you compete with or beat Disney? Because obviously there's a vision there. And then after that, I'd like to get into how NFTs and blockchain fit into that vision. Yeah. To be honest, I can't even answer that question without getting into NFTs and blockchain, but it goes like this. So, all right, Tom, you just said this was all about that kid that you failed, like the whole zip code test. And you've got a thousand employees that you

want to help make sure don't succumb to that. So what does that have to do with storytelling? And the reality is, so I go to film school, I get out, I have no idea how to break into the industry. This is back in the late nineties. There's no YouTube video cameras don't really exist in any meaningful way. So I'm like, okay, I need to get rich so that I can build a studio myself. I'd written a screenplay, got turned into a film. The film was god-awful. And I got really good advice, which was if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources. And so that was what put me on that I need to get rich thing. And so in all of that, in building the businesses and becoming a person that I could respect,

my whole desire to have a why changes. I become obsessed with meaning and purpose. And so I start wanting to help my employees and just a huge believer in that the whole meaning of life is to take your potential and to turn it into actual usable skill set. And so the reason that works is because that's how you build fulfillment. So you work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you that are very hard to acquire. There's a subroutine in the brain that wants to make sure you earn the things you have.

So work really hard to acquire the set of skills that serves not only myself, but other people in pursuit of a goal that is both exciting to me and honorable, meaning that it does also serve other people. So I'm totally jacked up on this. And so at Quest, I'm like, well, I'm just going to teach people how to do what I did. So I've got all these guys in the inner cities. Many of them are incredibly bright. Their backgrounds are insane. I'm like, if you can survive that, trust me, you can survive business. Like it'll be a cakewalk compared

to being a drug dealer. When people like I used to joke, cause we, my thing is it doesn't matter who you are today. It only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there. Okay. Well, if that's true, why wouldn't I hire a former gang member or a former drug dealer, right? If they're willing to be a bad-ass employee, then I should be willing to take them on. So I did. So we had former drug dealers, gang members, it was crazy. And I just wanted to teach them directly all this stuff because no one ever showed up with a shotgun to take my protein powder. But people would actually show up at their house

with a shotgun to take their drugs and their drug money. So I'm like, entrepreneurship is easy compared to that stuff. So I'm gonna tell you how to think, I'll tell you how to act like an entrepreneur and you can do this. And about 2% of them did the other 98% didn't. So I was like, okay, I get now that you can't hit people in their logical brain. You've got to hit them emotionally. And so that's where the studio idea comes. It brings me full circle to my first love. Anyway, it just all seems too perfect. And my thing is Disney over the last 90 years, by telling one kind of story over and

over and over from a thousand different angles has created the most magical place on earth. And so I was like, well, can I create the most empowering place on earth? And so that's our thing. We tell one kind of story over and over and over that's the vision, but Disney was founded in 1924, right? That looks very different than if you're founding a studio in 2021. So now it's like, what does a studio founded today look like? And that brings us to the blockchain. So I don't know if you have specific questions there,

but- No, you gave yourself the perfect segue. You can tell that you've done this before. Yeah, so have at it. Guys, this is so cool. For the first time in history, rather than a company or project sponsoring the podcast and newsletter, a grassroots community is doing it. The Cosmos community is extremely passionate and active. And because of that, cool things like this sponsorship can happen. Their Atom token has been absolutely on fire

and solidified itself as a top 50 coin by market cap. And the Cosmos platform has so much in store. Now, if you don't know about them, Cosmos is effectively the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere. One of the things I'm most excited about is their new DEX, which is coming out, which will connect to any blockchain. So you can swap ETH, ERC20, BSC, or any other token with Atom plus this DEX. We'll have order books just like any centralized exchange so it'll feel familiar trading just like you do anywhere that you've traded before. This is a first. It's never existed until now. You need to absolutely check them out at the wolfofallstreets.link

slash cosmos, C-O-S-M-O-S, and see everything they have going on. You have to be numbers focused, right? So you're a chart fiend. That's one of the reasons I found you. You know, you're very good at sort of looking at that stuff, being dispassionate, breaking it down. And you have to do the same thing as an entrepreneur. You've got to look at the data and say, what is the data telling me? So we're all a product of the age in which we grow up. So I am a child of the 80s. So I came out thinking I'm going to write comic books that will get turned into the next blockbuster franchise.

And so that's what we did. And we went from never having made a comic book to having comic books on the shelves in like 10 months. And everybody was so impressed and we doubled expectations and everybody's freaking out. Oh my God, Tom's a genius. Like, I can't believe he pulled this off. And I'm looking at the data going, Tom's a moron.

Like even doubling expectations, there's no money here. And now I'm in the thick of it. I understand how the comic book industry does distribution. And I'm like, this is antiquated. I was just doing distribution in like 150 countries. Basically every viable country in the world carried Quest Bars. So I know how you

should be getting real-time updates down to the specific store, all this. Comic books are ridiculously antiquated. So I went in and I'm like, either I'm going to have to buy the distribution and do that all myself, or I need to find an alternate thing. And I was like, there's no way that this isn't being done better digitally. So let me look at who's the player in the digital space. That led me to this company called Webtoon, which depending on your age, you're going to be immediately like, yeah, of course, Webtoon Comics. Like that's the only way to read a comic. And if you're not, you're never going to have heard of them.

But there's something like a hundred times bigger than the Western comic market. It's not a little, it is so dramatic that it's hilarious to me that Western creators don't even think about going digital because they're like, well, when we go digital, it doesn't work. It's because you're not on Webtoon. You're not speaking to that consumer base. So literally overnight, we make everything pure digital. We lean into Webtoon and that becomes our modus operandi. But once you go purely digital, you start asking yourself of the top 25 highest grossing media properties of all time, I think

it's all but one make 85% of their revenue off of merchandise. So what's the merchandise equivalent of an all digital shop? And you're very quickly led to, well, there'd have to be digital scarcity and well, digital scarcity doesn't exist until NFTs. And so the second I had been introduced to NFTs, of course, wasn't called that back then, but six years ago, a guy who's building an extraordinary technology that I cannot wait for him to announce publicly introduced me to it. And so when I saw NFTs, I was like, okay, we're going all in. And we just on a dime reallocated a massive amount of our capital to building in blockchain, blockchain gaming. We're building an NFT platform specifically focused on anime, manga, and video games. That launches really soon. So I'm super excited about that. But that's sort

of how that loop closes. Right. So why do you think that that scarcity is so coveted and so valued? What is it in people or in you that, you know, wants to distribute in that manner that really, you know, touched, that really, you know, inspired you to go that route? Because I think that a lot of people we still see, well, it's just a JPEG or, you know, that's just a video, big deal. And they don't get it. So I'm just curious why you had that light bulb moment.

Yeah, so this goes back to that idea of your, I call it, you're having a biological experience, right? There are physics to everything. There's physics to the human mind. And once you understand human psychology, which for any entrepreneurs out there or traders, because good Lord, the movement in prices, I assure you is largely a function of human psychology. Once you understand human psychology, a lot of this stuff becomes less surprising. And when something is predictable, it shouldn't be upsetting. And so one predictable move, number one, there is a subroutine inherent to the human mind around ownership. So if you're like me and you start collecting garbage, bail, kids,

kid cards as a kid, and you realize like, yo, this is mine, man. I can trade this. I can sell it. I can go to like a little shop back in the day where they sell like the more rare cards. And I'm willing to spend $5 to get like this really cool card. And so I've lived that I have a collector's mentality, which is what led me to comic books. I have thousands of comic books in my personal collection. And so I experienced the neurochemistry of collecting. So just like back at Quest, I knew there was at least there were three founders. I knew there were at least three people that would buy the bar that we were making that believe there was nothing else in the market that we would eat. So, hey, if I can find more people like me, I've got a business. So I know

I respond to collecting. I respond to collecting, whether it's digital or physical. They hit me slightly differently, but I've been collecting. I've been collecting pins now on Pinterest for years. I have thousands of pins, but I don't share them with anybody because I don't feel like I own them. So as soon as NFTs came out, NFTs in and of themselves, just the mere existence of that like collision of pixels in that particular arrangement gives me an emotional reaction. Then I get another emotional reaction when you tell me that I can buy it. Now, I don't mind that other people can see it,

but I want to be either the person that owns it or one of the people that owns it. And through the same called self signaling, I know that by saying, I, Hey world, I have spent money on this. Now I tell you about who I am and I tell myself about who I am. So that has a neurological component. That's exciting and fun. And so all of that was super predictable to me. And then now the second part of the predictable equation is what Max Planck says about science. This is crazy. This really bothers me, but it's true. Science does not advance one insight at a time. Science advances one funeral at a time. Now, why is that true? Motherfuckers can't change. People cannot change. You are a product of your time. Most people will not be able to do the mental shift of like, oh, this was cool, but now something else is cool. It becomes, I have put my identity

into this thing, right? This is so easy with cryptocurrency, right? Take somebody like Warren Buffett. Good dude, man. Offered the world a lot of value, but he like can't do that thing of saying, I'm going to fall in love with something new because there is an element of that. Like when you ask him about money and like, but Warren, you don't spend it. So what's the point? He's like, it's a game. How high can I get the score? So he's in love with that game. He knows that game. If you're in your eighties and you've played fantasy football your entire life. And now I tell you to go do fantasy e-sports. You can be like, why the hell would I want to do that? So just like, don't need those people to make that shift, have compassion. It's very hard for any of us to make that shift.

So if you're a person that can shift and get excited about the new thing, be stoked on that, feel good about that, but don't like get some derangement at those people that they can't do it. Right. Because it's like, it's just the way the human mind works. So I'm not tripped out that some people are like, hey, this is just a JPEG, this is garbage. It's like, cool, I get what camp you're in. I have compassion that you can't change and evolve. I'm not like that.

I wanna be in love with the new thing. So this came across, I could see the value. I have the neurological reaction to it. I know other people are gonna be like me. I know the next generation will grow up and it will be self-evident. Yeah, it will not only be self-evident, it'll just be par for the course.

And they'll think that everything else is nonsense in the opposite way, right? 100%. And now here's the worst part. Something new will come along when they're old and they won't adjust. Of course. Right.

It's the cycle. It is, it's biology. So, but I want to get more specifically then into what you are actually doing with NFTs because I think it's clear, obviously, it's in the comic book space and that you've gone in heavily, but what is it going to look like? Yeah. So this is where, man, what I'm trying to get people to understand. So I have, in essence, forced my entire family to open wallets, to start dabbling, at least researching crypto. I gave them

their seed capital and just said, look, go play with this money so that you're not worried about losing it in the hope that they could fall in love with this whole journey. Because my thesis is this is going to change the world as fundamentally as the internet. So I can tell you from experience in 1994, I heard about email. I had no idea what it was. It was like, what the hell is an email account? And now when we go imagine one person in their lifetime goes from what's an email account to I'm super wealthy, but my car is a piece of crap because I don't drive. I'm Uber all day, right? But in 94, when you told me about email, no one would have predicted Uber, but that's where it went. So all I'm saying is, Hey, that tremendous of a tectonic shift is happening now because of decentralization, because of cryptography, because of what it will do to creative minds who now see that they have a new tool because where I started was smart contracts. That was my in. I was like, wait a second. I can get a piece of art to update in real time based on

an outside event. So let's say that you buy a NASCAR, you know, NFT and in a race that car crashes, I could have it spin out and show the actual damage from the race in your NFT that you have hanging on your wall. Like that was immediately, my mind was like, okay, this is where we're going. And then I was like, if I can imagine that, that's the early bad idea. That's the dumb idea.

What's this going to look like in 10 years? So honestly, I cannot predict all of the ways that this will be cool. I'm essentially betting on that over time, I will just understand the cool factor a little bit faster than my competitors and I'll be ahead of them. So here's what we're doing today. I don't want people to think this is my thesis forever. What we're doing today is it starts with IP.

So we currently create stories and characters. We create them as comics. Now, I don't have a lot of ways for you to interact with that unless I take it back into the real world, which I'd rather not do because there are huge costs associated with that. And it's just sort of a disconnect. If you tell me you like to read it digitally, chances are you want to interact with it digitally. So now that means if you look at what a 21st century studio looks like, it's going to over index on video games. It's not going to be

as focused on film and TV. That's still big, but it's becoming commoditized as we get the streaming wars and all that. The streamers make a lot of money, but the content creators don't, not like in the heyday of Hollywood. So I had to break myself of that thinking of somebody who grew up in the 80s where a film producer was making hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of their life just from producing, not even necessarily creating the IP. So that whole model breaks down. Now you've got, okay, you can get awareness and you can think of a film or TV show as like advertising, but ultimately there needs to be a way for the consumer to really interact with something that has a reasonable sort of ticket price. So we're investing into crypto gaming. I love the idea of NFT gaming where you own some piece of that. And I'm a fanatical Destiny 2 player for anybody out there that plays Destiny 2. And this whole

time I'm like, why on God's green earth does Bungie not allow the community to upload things like ships? Okay. Because your spaceships, they have no value in the game whatsoever. It is purely aesthetic. So there can be no conceivable argument to not let the community do it, which they would have done for free. But now in a world where NFTs exist

and they can actually monetize that, I just, I couldn't understand. Now what ends up happening, going back to predictable behavior, you create this IP, to predictable behavior, you create this IP, you get big, you have shareholders. Shareholders don't like to see other people take their IP and use it in a way that is in their eyes, demeaning to the character or whatever, shows them in an unfavorable light. Who knows? Maybe just, they don't like the level of art quality. That's absurd. Now living in this

era. And so this is my pitch to, and I, and I will continue to walk you guys through the exact things that we're doing, but I want people to understand the logic. This is my whole thing. So we have this NFT marketplace. Now I focus on core competencies. Any entrepreneur needs to identify their core competencies. One of my core competencies is art entrepreneur needs to identify their core competencies. One of my core competencies is art, right? Makes sense. We make comic books. So core competency, number one,

I need to have a deep Rolodex of artists. Core competency, number two, I need to be able to market to people that are into anime, manga, and video games because that's where I start on Webtoon, right? There's a direct line there. So put those together. A marketplace selling NFTs makes a lot of sense, not just for my own NFTs, but for other people's NFTs. So I create the IP. I monetize it partially through NFTs in a myriad number of ways.

So having that platform where I can put my own and host other people allows me not only access to the money, but access to the artists. And now I'm building out developers who I can also help me build out the NFT gaming. So it becomes this sort of funnel of all these. When I look at a Venn diagram of where my core competencies overlap, you get this blockchain space, you get NFTs. And so that's where we're really beginning to heavily invest for that reason. But for that reason is the important thing I want people to understand. So we've got comic books, comics, which will be turned into NFTs. We've got art from the comics turned into NFTs.

We've got the monetization of the NFT platform itself. Then we've got the IP that started as a comic, became an NFT, now also becomes an NFT game. So imagine we do a comic with robots. Then we create an NFT breeding game around robots. And of course, going back to what I was saying about IP, I wanted to do that with the Gundam franchise. And quite frankly, and I'm still working on trying to pull that off. But when you go to them, they're super paranoid about people using their IP in a way that they don't like. But when you've come up in this era and you realize people are making fan art, whether you want them to or not, it's just the artists can't capture any economics. The brand can't capture any economics, but the art

still exists. So there's, you know, going back to people just can't train their thinking. So those guys, all those big brands will either adapt or lose to someone like me. Who's like, yeah, go ahead. Just don't make it pornographic. Like do whatever you want. I have final say, if I think something is, you know, shitty, it's, you know, um, making fun of the brand, you know, outwardly you're trying to hurt the brand or you're doing something pornographic. Yes. I'm going to stop that. But beyond that, like you want to incentivize that community to go crazy. And then if I can capture some of the economics along with the artist, even if it's like 10%, there's like really something super powerful there. Um, but most of the people cannot,

most of the legacy brands cannot wrap their head around that. So much of it, when you're talking about it, having a 20 year background in music reminds me of all the problems with sampling. Because obviously, you know, you would sample something, it would be great exposure for the artists, then the artists would embrace it, but then the label would be pissed off

and they would have it taken down and the artist who actually made it would be pissed at the label that they took it down. And it's this endless circle of, you know, of basically pain because nobody knows who owns what or what they can do with it. Dude, when I launched my YouTube channel, I had exactly zero subscribers. And so our mantra in-house was hashtag steal this content. We wanted people like so we use this blue in all of my shows, the background is blue. And the reason I do that is I knew

people might even like trim the video to cut out my watermark, but they'll never be able to get rid of that background. And so by having this iconic set and by telling my team, not only do I not want you to go flag this stuff, not only do I not want you to go flag this stuff, not only do I not want you to steal their monetization, I want you to partner with these people and start supplying them as much content as you can. And so now on YouTube, which is probably the hardest of the platforms to build on, we've got over 2 million subscribers, hundreds of millions of views,

because we just like, take it, go do something. As long as what you're doing is value add to the world, I'm all about it. Do you think that in context of what you're seeing in that vision that you have 10 years, 20 years down the road, that we really start to live in this sort of ready player one future and we detach ourselves from the physical world

and we go into VR, AR, and we start to own things in the metaverse. And that's really what the future is going to look like for these next generations. Well, so now we're getting into a really interesting conversation. Here's what I really think is going to happen. The world is going to bifurcate and you will get, so I wrote a comic about this called neon future, where you'll get some people that will embed technology in their bodies, right? Neuralink with what Elon Musk is doing, which may be a bad name with this crowd these days. And then you've got people that will be, you know, more what I

called in the comic authentic. So they don't upgrade themselves in any ways. And now I'll set that bifurcation aside and just focus on what happens with the people that do decide that they're going to upgrade themselves. Because I think in a single sentence, I'll get everyone to agree with me. If I ask you to imagine what it looks like in a hundred years, you might say, no, we're never going to get there. But if I say, what's it going to look like in a thousand years? Everybody goes, yeah, it'll be there.

So this is only a question of timeline. It is not if, it is when. Yeah, and so what does that look like? What does this neural link look like? You're living your life in a game. You're sitting in a chair, like in a, in a movie and your whole life basically exists in this. Once you can tap into, once you can tap into the nervous system and you can make me think I'm feeling something now there's, I mean, the reality is it would make no sense to live in the real world, unless you were part of that early bifurcation where you said just for sort of spiritual, moralistic reasons, I believe that's the path to go down because I can create a far more interesting experience for you over here. And when I talk about, Hey, you're having a biological experience and you should

chase fulfillment. I say that because I know what you have to do to actually feel the neurochemistry that you want to feel, to feel grounded and strong and confident and all the things that feel good and lead us to living a life, you know, that where we're surrounded by people that we love and we're contributing to society, all the things that we associate with good and avoid all the things that we associate with bad, right? Drug addiction is somebody saying, I don't know how to live my life in a way where I can manipulate my neurochemistry to be so that I feel the way I want to feel. So I take a drug that makes me feel the way I want to feel. Now, unfortunately, due to biology, that's a downward spiral. But once we usurp biology, now it's just like, why would you not

live in a world where you're not watching a video game? You're playing a video game. And so you get the full highs of saving somebody's life. And maybe you want the full lows of, of somebody dying. Maybe you don't, but you, you can decide. And so it is when you think of technology, the way that I do, which is technology is the hope of a better future, it becomes a one-way street. There is no going back. Nobody will ever look at the future and say, I wish it was less cool than the present. I wish it were less joyful, less hopeful, less whatever. Now, whether we can pull it off is a question I'm setting aside, right? So that's outside the scope of my argument. My argument is, do I think that we will ever as a species, all of us anyway, avoid going down the

path? No, I do not. And so then it just becomes what neurochemical experiences do people want? And that, I mean, can we really predict that? No, but it's like, that's an endless. Yeah. But what's so interesting is that, um, I was an evolutionary, uh, biologist in college. I was an archeology and evolutionary biology major. Um, and what you're describing is really a world where after millions, argue billions of years of, um, survival of the fittest of evolution, where a species takes a step to evolve themselves and steps outside of that biological pattern. Oh yeah. Which we already have. I mean, if people aren't looking into CRISPR gene editing, oh my God. And this is like the early clumsy days and we can already do crazy stuff. So, you know, where again, don't look in a hundred year time

horizon, look in a thousand year time horizon, unless you think somebody is going to stop the pursuit of that technique or techniques like it, then it will just keep advancing. Now, I think it's going to happen a lot faster than that, but it like, you just sort of get rid of the easy arguments when you say, fine, forget a hundred years, look at a thousand. All of these things are one way streets. So incredible to think about. I want to go back to something you were talking about really earlier when you said that you invited all these huge financial celebrities and billionaires onto your show and you asked

them and none of them had any idea. Did any of them have any practical advice for a person who lives paycheck to paycheck or were they all so completely out of touch that they didn't even get it at all? We had one guy who his bread and butter is being really tactical. So he had amazing advice. His name is Ramit Sethi. And he is very tactical. Now, I have no idea what his stance is on crypto. I had not discovered it at that point. But everybody else, like, and there was one person, and I will let them remain nameless. We actually got into an argument in the, we cut out the really gnarly bits. But it was, I thought he was being such an asshole.

And he was being so flippant about, well, I'm going to get rich in this time. And these motherfuckers ought to just get rich too. And it was like, yo, so that was really gross to me. Like if you've really got something figured out to me, it's like the honor of my life is that I struggled really hard to learn these really important concepts. And now other people can do it too. And I don't know, man, I'm just wired for that. So no, most of them are so macro. And by the way, that was a failing of Tom Bilyeu. That was not a

failing of them. You don't bring these guys on and saying like, how do you balance your checkbook? You bring them on. They've got a certain insight. I should have brought them on for that insight. So I am the one that screwed up in, I wanted that really tactical stuff. That's not what they do. That's not where they spend their time. You can't expect everybody to be good at everything. I should have brought them on and said, Hey, let's talk macro trends. Let's talk about where this is going, taking them into their strong zone. Honestly, I was, it really felt like an existential crisis by proxy. And I was so worried about other people that I was just making poor decisions

in who I brought on the show. So I've tried to be much, much, much more thoughtful about that. And again, with the exception of one person, walked away just thinking, okay, these guys are extraordinary. I just brought them on for the wrong thing. And my bad, I'll learn. I'm so grateful that they exist and that they have the macro advice that

they have and just have to be smarter next time. We've only seen a couple of these billionaires really grapple onto the idea of Bitcoin, right? I mean, there's the Druckenmiller and Tudor Jones, and obviously the Michael Saylors and even Elon Musk's of the world. Do you think that most of them will get it? Or do you think that most of them will get it? Or do you think that most of them will Warren Buffett it right away? They will. If they are a public influencer, they will have to or they'll have to stop being an influencer because so like Michael Schiff is playing a really dangerous game.

It's a fascinating game because as an influencer, you have to take a really hard stance on something. Now, you want to take the hard stance and be right because then you look like a genius. If you take the hard stance and you're wrong, there are a couple off ramps that you can take and say, okay, now I've immersed myself in this, right? I've figured it out. And now sort of I'm going to, you know, learn and get behind this. So if Peter Schiff ends up being right in crypto over the next five years, craters and it goes away, which I'm just telling you is never going to happen. But if it did, he looks like the genius of geniuses, right? And so long time to get there, though.

And like I said, he's playing a super dangerous game because one, it's in the short term, like we're recording this at a moment where it looks like maybe a bull market's turning into a bear market. So it's like some of this will, people will have a way to grab it and say, these guys are fools. But if you zoom out, all of a sudden it's like, it doesn't even make sense to talk about. Like we're still, I think right before we started, we're like 35, 36K on Bitcoin, you know, and it was like 10 years ago, it was like a buck 50. So it's like the, the ROI on that is so obscene and so crazy. Um, that if you just apply the same metrics that you

would look at the stock market, nobody says, Hey, get into the stock market. Unless you're like a genius and you spend all your time at that. Nobody gets in the stock market and says, you're going to make money in six weeks. They say, look, hold this for five to 10 years. There'll be an off ramp at some point. So yeah, going back to the influencer thing, it's a super risky bet to bet against something that's done as well over the last 10 years as it has, that's gotten to a trillion dollars as rapidly as it has. If I'm not mistaken, it's no technology has ever gotten to a trillion dollars in market cap faster. So it's like, oh, do you really want to bet against that? I am certainly way too ignorant to bet against that.

It just seems self-evident to me, given technology, given decentralization, given what I know about human psychology, it's like, it's a one-way street, you know, coming back to that idea. So some of them will just, you know, fade away into nothingness, but be rich as all get out and it won't matter and you know, whatever. And so there's a sense of renewal and turnover. And I, what I really believe they should do. And I say this with like love and compassion is they should really stand convicted with what they believe. And they shouldn't worry about being on the right side of

history. They should just pour yourself into, if you're really looking after other people, really say what you think is true. And then if you change your mind over time, come with humility and say, Hey, I no longer think this is true. This is what I think is true now. And my advice to, you know, sort of the Twitter mob, if you will, is also have compassion for let people change their mind. Like, why wouldn't you want some Peter Schiff? Schiff is smart. And so it's like, whether he gets this one right or wrong is irrelevant.

Like he, he has shown an ability to think through hard problems. And it's like, if he doubles down and just can't change his mind, then, you know, you stop listening. But if somebody goes, ah, I now see what I did wrong, I'm very open to hearing them out. I just take everything on a case-by-case basis. So strong opinions loosely held. I mean, even Michael Saylor at one point in the early 2010s was like, Bitcoin's a joke. I mean, almost all of them did, in fact. Almost every billionaire who ever came around at some point thought that it was nonsense. Yep. I didn't give it any time of day. And again, I'll go back to I don't value myself at all for being an investor.

But also a mantra that I have in my life is I don't value myself for being right. I value myself for identifying the right answer and then putting all my energy behind it. So inevitably, I'm going to say things that are wrong that don't make any sense. And, you know, at some point you hope that you figure it out. And for me, it took a technological use case in my business for me to look at it long enough. And I hear Michael Saylor talk about this a lot. It's like, hey, before you formed that opinion, how much time did you really spend looking at that underlying technology? Because to me, anyway, what happened was once I understood the technology, then I was like,

whoa, this is going to be transformational. I've heard people compare being an entrepreneur to being a hodler of Bitcoin because there's incredible ups and downs and it requires tremendous conviction. Do you think that's an apt comparison in your experience if you're both? That is super apt. For me, the stress of the market goes to basically zero in investing. If you do a couple of things, only invest money you're willing to lose, recognize that paper gains are something that play out over the long term, and then make sure that you

have a thesis. So for instance, if your thesis is okay, I'm only investing as much as I'm willing to lose and I'm willing to lose all of that before I would sell if I haven't gotten a 5X return, but once I get a 5X return, then I'm selling. Okay. Well then just stay true to it. Don't do what most people do, which is you get to 5X and you're like, oh man, but I bet I could get 10 X. Right. So it's like either sell off the amount that makes you whole on your initial investment so that it's like, well, I was always comfortable going back to zero. So cool. I do that. Or have some set amount of money that you want to pull off and take out and then actually take it out. So it's like, if people write their thesis down and then hold themselves accountable to that thesis. So like my thesis is

that cryptocurrency, and I'll keep it that vague, cryptocurrency is a one-way street, meaning it will never go down in value on a long enough timeline. Any one coin might, but over the long run, it won't. So I just invest in the top coins. And then if something else starts to, you know, let's say I will invest in anything that hits a trillion dollar market cap, right? Once it hits that, that's part of my thesis.

I'm in, the odds of that zeroing out are virtually zero at that point. But I'm not the guy that's like, oh, I'm going to make a billion dollars on the next, you know, whatever small coin. So that's just me. I don't want to have to pay attention like that. So I'm happy to just say, yo, this is in for the next 10 years. So business, I'll say you have to have that same level of conviction, but business, man, you can't, you can't just huddle. You got to be in there every day, like a fighter, throwing punches, trying new things over and over and over.

And dude, the crazy thing about being an entrepreneur, the world changes so fast. You can have a genius idea three years ago. And if you executed fast enough, it returned revenue. But three years later, even though it was brilliant three years ago, now it's dumb. Now it's antiquated.

And most entrepreneurs cannot wrap their heads around that. You can also be way too early though, right? Because ride sharing wasn't a new idea when Uber had it. You just didn't have a phone. Yep. Yeah. Timing is everything. Yeah.

So it's just really interesting. So you touched earlier on the idea of decentralization. You kind of just briefly went past it. Is that a part of crypto that you see as being, you know, very important for the future as one of the key elements that is going to change the world? I know it's obviously a one way street. We've talked about NFTs. We've talked about Bitcoin.

But then there's this entire world of DeFi and everything built on Ethereum and these other chains. Yeah, my honest answer around decentralization is, so I'll say this is my current thesis and I'm super open to people proving me wrong. What I learned back at Quest is that convenience trumps everything. And so you get a Binance smart chain rise up because it's easy. It's convenient. In the age of horrendous gas prices, people are like, fuck that. I'm going over here. It's way cheaper. It may be centralized, but like, eh, do it, you know, like all things being equal, I'll go with something that's centralized or decentralized over centralized.

Yeah. But when things aren't equal, like then I'll give on one or the other. So I, I don't over index on decentralization as a literal term. Now, the way, when I say decentralization, I think this is sort of gaining more emotional internalization of how people mean it, that the user participates in the economics. That's becoming like what blockchain is doing, what this idea of decentralized is doing is saying, I, as the maker of said video game, do not need to control every element of this. So I'm going to essentially decentralize ownership of different things. It may still all reside on my server, but I'm going to

act in a way where I cannot take that back. Even if technologically I could, I'll so destroy my image in the public, I would never do it. And I think that probably gets you close enough where you're going to see a lot of companies do that. Certainly now where gas fees are a real issue. But ownership becomes the big thing that changes. And then some level of immutability so that at least within the confines of maybe I have to put a little trust in the company that they won't, you know, change their own rules, but within the rules that they have set up, they can't like take something back from me. And I think that will, people will hold companies to that standard. There's this guy named Kagan, who is a NFT video game commentator. And he just goes so hard on Twitter about like,

if you don't have an ownership component in your game, I'm not going to play it. You know, and it's, it's kind of fun and funny right now because, you know, he's got, let's say, you know, 5,000 followers or whatever, but like two years from now, he's going to have a million followers. And then it's going to be like, he's, he's the vanguard of an ethos that I think is, you know, talk about one way streets. It will take over. Like when you're raised that you own the sword in the game, you own the skins in your game and you can resell them and you can capture those economics. How do you undo that? You're never going to undo that. Like any company that offers that will win. I mean, that's just human psychology one-on-one.

So I know we're up against it with time here. So what do you say to someone who's looking at cryptocurrency for the first time, looking at Bitcoin, looking at NFTs, what do you tell them to do to get their feet wet? Research, man, like this all comes down to understand, like, don't listen to the pundits on buy here, buy there, listen to people that are explaining how the technology works so that you're getting to the physics of the situation. One, like the reason Michael Saylor is so powerful is he reasons from first principles. And so I recently interviewed him for my podcast and trying to get people to understand like what he's doing is the reason he's been successful in business. The reason he's been successful in Bitcoin is he's reasoning from first principles.

And whenever you can take something down to, it's just like, there is no layer below this. There's nothing more fundamental than this. It's why he refers to Bitcoin as basically trapping the economic value of sunshine into a cryptographically secured store of value. It's like, when you understand that really is like the actual physics of the situation, then it's like, okay, whoa,

I can get my head around that. And so once you understand sort of the core rules of the game, now you can begin making your own decisions. Now you can recognize when an influencer has sort of gone off the rails, but when you're just sort of blindly trusting somebody, you can get into a difficult situation, even if that person has all the good intention in the world. And they just happen to be wrong. Like it's a part of why I think Twitter can get so angry is they didn't do the work themselves. And so they just wanted to trust somebody, which is the nature of a human. I totally get it. But it's like, ultimately you've got to own yourself. You've got to decide I'm choosing to listen to this person. Like, I think

even on the podcast, I said to Michael Saylor, if I've gone way, like seven figures into Bitcoin because of you, Michael Saylor. And by the way, if it ends up being wrong, I will never blame you because I have gotten an understanding of how things work because of you. But if it works, I'll celebrate you because you were the one that led me to the physics. But that's what I would say. Research, research, research so that you can make your own decisions. There you have it. Be responsible for your own financial decisions

and otherwise. So where can everybody follow you after this and keep up with what you're doing? I'm at Tom Bilyeu everywhere. So yeah, I'm super active on YouTube, Twitter. You'll find me there. Awesome, man. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Really enlightening. And you touched on a lot of things that I think I needed to hear myself. So I think that other people will grapple with that and will grasp onto that as well. So thank you very much. Dude, thanks for having me on. This is a lot of fun.