Tom Bilyeu is the co-founder of billion-dollar brand Quest Nutrition and host of Impact Theory. The mission of Impact Theory is to impact culture at scale by giving people an empowering mindset through education and entertainment. Acquired through his own life experiences and the hundreds of elite performers he’s interviewed, the high-impact, actionable gems of wisdom Tom shared in this podcast that can serve as shortcuts for any of you looking to step up your game in business and life. 

AUBREY: Tom.

TOM: What’s up dude?

AUBREY: It's good to see you brother.

TOM: It is very good to see you my friend. 

AUBREY: Yeah man, I'm excited to talk to you today because there's two things that I think people probably care about as much or more than anything else. Love and money. And there's a lot of ideas that we have about love and money that I think are a little bit skewed by our cultural conditioning, maybe our own genesis of these thoughts themselves, what we've seen in the world. But really, when you start to go deeper in, you start to see for yourself, start to learn lessons, and these are two things that you know a lot about. You've been on this journey in earnest. Today is the day of your 19th year wedding anniversary. Which is beautiful.

TOM: Yes, that gave me chills. It's crazy. 

AUBREY: Yeah, man. So we'll start by talking about, because it started even earlier for you, which was this drive to earn. The drive to make money. I mean, as you were growing up, this part of your mythos was “I'm gonna make some money.” 

TOM: Yeah. It's interesting that you use the word mythos because that is right. So I didn't understand what money was, but it very much had this sort of grandeur in my mind of a great myth of the rags to riches story. And growing up, I wasn't poor. I used to think I was, if I'm honest, until I saw real poverty and then I realized, okay, I was not poor. But I wasn't able to get the things that I wanted all the things and I wasn't like a spoiled brat about it or anything, it just really gave me this excitement quite frankly that I could become rich. And that was thrilling and is still a gift like I wish I could give to other people that belief that you can become something different. And so, as a kid, a child of the 80s, growing up in Tacoma, Washington, basically bordering on rural, my dad sort of teetered between white collar and blue collar. And I had to work every summer since I was 12 years old. My parents refused to buy me a Nintendo. I had to buy it myself. I took a job in a door factory at 12 in order to buy my own Nintendo. And when I think about it, like, I'm actually really glad because it made me angry when I was a kid. And then you start thinking. “Well, I'm gonna get rich and I'm gonna be able to get whatever I want.” And because it didn't become a dark energy for me It was just exciting this thought that oh my god, like I can go be rich. So I used to tell people all the time. I'm gonna be rich and it's so funny because my cousin who was actually relatively close, she's quite a bit older than me, but relatively close when I was growing up only just found out that I ended up actually becoming rich. And so she was like, “wait a second.” And she just kept asking my mom, "Is this the same kid?” Like, that was lazy. That was unfocused. That was hyper. And she was like, that kid now is wealthy? And she was just happy, but almost couldn't believe it. And it was such a powerful reminder that everyone used to make fun of me. Because I was like, the only person in my family that was like, “no, no, no, I'm gonna be rich, what do you mean?” And just nobody else allowed themselves to dream like that. 

AUBREY: That's interesting to trace it back to this early belief. And you can almost not take entirely the credit for that part, but you can also instill the wisdom of that because that kind of came to you in some ways–

TOM: I am really unnerved by the things I don't feel that I earned right and there are insights in my life that I don't know why I had that insight and it's ended up serving me so well. So yeah, part of why I get in front of the camera is, what if I had never had that insight or met that person that said that thing at that moment? And so it's like I'm just trying to pump as many like, hey, I learned all this the hard way. 

AUBREY: To be that person for somebody else. For someone else to say, no, no, I can be rich too. This gave me permission. I saw it. I felt his energy, I believe him and I can do the same thing. That's sometimes all it takes.

TOM: For sure. 

AUBREY: You know what's interesting is my story for what drove me to be successful was actually tied in, and we're not finished with money by any stretch, but it actually ties into love, because as much as my family was actually quite wealthy, and so I was used to wealth in that category, and I always believed that that was probably my own destiny. I certainly wanted to carve my own path to do it. For me, I recognized it was very much like the Scarface mythos. Like it was, first you get the money. Then you get the power, and then you get the women. And because I was really a frustrated lover. I would love a girl so much. Of course this is childish love, juvenile love but I would think that I was in love. I love you. I would write them love poetry. I'd fashion them little gifts or whatever I would do. And they'd be like, oh, whoa, too much. I'd be like, why? But why? And then it built this almost sacred rage of like, Well, you just wait. One day, I'm gonna have everything. I'm gonna be the most physically fit. I'm gonna be the most mentally fit, emotionally fit, financially fit. I'm gonna be the type of person that you're not gonna say no to. Because I'm gonna be the best of us. And for me, that same thing that kinda, that you, I hear in you from it for a different reason of there's just this kind of fire to be the best. But for me, it was kind of universal finances were just one of it, but it really drove me to be, “all right. Why is total human optimization?” Well part of it was this chase of like I have to be the very best so when I really love that girl, she won't say no to me. Now of course love is a lot more nuanced than this very simplistic childish view 

TOM: There's something interesting in that to me that gave you that initial push. How do you think about that now? Is that a dark energy to you that you're glad that you got rid of or do you see it as something that really helped you?

AUBREY: I see it as an ally. It's kind of like a dirty fuel source, but if the only engine you have on the boat is a coal engine, use coal. Like, shovel coal. It's fine. Eventually you can switch to solar power or wind power. 

TOM: My thing is, I don't understand why people rule out things that are painful or what I'll call a dark energy. And I mean that sort of in the Star Wars way. Evolution gave us a lot of tools. And I feel like in a modern context, people are trying to get rid of a lot of the tools. And I'm like, but they work. And if you spend too much time in the darkness, it becomes corrosive, so don't. But if that's what got you moving in the beginning, then there's something really powerful in that. So many people start on a path and they just keep going down that and they don't have the kind of realizations that you've had, so that it can switch over to solar, to use your analogy. But it's so powerful to want to be sexually attractive. It's so powerful to want to be powerful. The number of people that get bullied and then rebound so hard because it's like, never again, right? I'm never gonna be looked down on or abused. Like, I'm gonna take control. Now look, it breaks most of the people that it touches and is therefore a tragedy. But leveraging that, to say I won't have that again in my life is super powerful. I like the sacred rage. I like that 

AUBREY: Yeah, it's interesting because now obviously I'm with the woman of my dreams. And I don't think it required me accumulating all of these different levels of mastery, but certainly it didn't hurt that I accomplished as much as I did in my life from such a well rounded perspective. But nonetheless, however it happened, I think there was a lot more to it than just putting up statistics and saying, did you meet the criteria? I think we're a perfect match for each other. But ultimately–

TOM: Well, so sticking on that point for a second, I think that my gut instinct is none of the metrics of success are what attracted her. But my obsession is getting people to understand this. Winning a championship is irrelevant. Becoming capable of a championship performance matters a lot. And so becoming the kind of person that was able to achieve these things matters, getting emotional mastery, the confidence to run a business, showing that you learn in sort of an iterative process and what that does to the mind in terms of humbling you and yet giving you a lot of skills. That's the kind of thing that people are attracted to. So, yes, I agree that you didn't need to earn the money or whatever, but you probably had to go through that kind of crucible to gain those skills, the insights, the mentality, which of course is ultimately what drew her to you. 

AUBREY: Yeah, that was the forge that made the blade of who I am, that honed the sword of my spirit, in an important way, to be able to actually withstand the heat of a birthing, blinding star like Vylana, right? Like, I had to forge myself to be able to hold that and say, “shine, baby, shine.” However hot you want to go. Burn up a million galaxies, and I'm going to be there and hold you. And I think that's what made us such a match. So it wasn't the actual things, but it was the process. And that was perfectly said on your part, that you kind of identified that. But now that I have, I'm with her, that fuel source, that idea that I have to keep driving myself to get the woman of my dreams? Okay, got the woman of my dreams. It is now denied me. The coal engine is like, it's out. There's no more coal that I can feed in the engine of, now I gotta be better because somewhere out there is that woman. And when I meet her, I wanna be ready. Well, I met her and we're together and of course we were growing together. The coal engine is out of service. It doesn't work anymore. And if I'm being honest, I miss it because that was a fuel source. Now, it wasn't a fuel source that was meant to carry me my whole life. However, finding motivation in the world, in the place beyond that fuel source, I miss sometimes, some of that dirty coal energy that was driving me forward. And so I guess I would push this back to you. Now that you've achieved, you've quenched your own sacred rage, your own desire, and your own belief in what required you to get to where you're at. What is it now that you've replaced? What is your solar energy that's actually driving you forward? 

TOM: It's interesting. So I got very lucky in that my dreams did not come true when I thought they would. So I graduate film school, feel totally lost, and going through a really gnarly dark period in my life, I meet these two very successful entrepreneurs. They say, “look, dude, you're coming to the world with your hand out.” If you want to control the art, you have to control the resources. Because I wanted to build the studio that I'm building now. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so, I thought it would take 18 months. And we were going to build a company together and get rich. And it was going to be amazing. And then I was going to start my studio. And 18 months turned into 6 and a half years, turned into 8 years. My wife finally pulled me aside and said, “Look, your obsession with getting rich is now damaging the marriage.” And I was so obsessed. And I was building a company I didn't care about and I was working my ass off constantly around the clock and it was all that dark energy. And it was just like, I'm gonna get rich. There was no sort of meaning or purpose behind it. Even now, the studio has a why. Back then it didn't. I just love movies. And so, I love movies. I want to make movies. I want to get rich so I can be rich. And so it was just like money, money, money. Every day going into work, I just felt like my life force was being sucked away. And I remember once Lisa finally said, “hey this isn't fun anymore. You hate what you're doing on a day to day basis. There's a dark cloud over you when you come home you come home and just work more, we're not connected anymore. You've said that your number one priority is marriage. It's time to prove it.” And so I was like, “whoa, that's a wake up call.” It happened so slowly, I didn't realize how profoundly unhappy I had been chasing money. And so, I go in and I quit. I said, look, I need to feel alive. Lisa and I were gonna move to Greece. I was gonna get back to writing screenplays, and that was gonna be that. And then I'll build my wealth that way. And keep in mind, I have promised my father in law, who did not want me to marry his daughter, I'm gonna make your daughter a wealthy woman. He's been waiting for eight and a half years. I've got her clipping coupons. Like, I mean, there's a lot in this moment of, like, on paper, I was worth about two million dollars at the time. Now, as you well know, paper money does not spent. You can't, it's not cash paper money. It's like a theoretical entry point in a database somewhere paper money. And so, on paper I'm “wealthy”, but experientially I'm not. And so, I go in and I give this equity back, and I'm like, I just need to feel alive. So like, whatever, like if money is the metaphorical devil that's tempting me, I spend my eight years instead of forty days in the desert, but I have that moment, like if you've seen Lord of the Rings, when the Cate Blanchett character gets the ring and she sees how powerful she can become. And then she gives the ring back and she's like I've been tested and now I know who I am. And I was like at this moment I have been tested. I'm giving this money back to go feel alive. And now what I know about myself. I will never again do something that doesn't make me feel alive. If I'm willing to give back 2,000,000 and say I'm just going to go live in a shack on a beach somewhere in Greece in some tiny ass town so I can write because that makes me feel alive, then you can't tempt me with money anymore. And so, it ends up being this hugely cathartic moment. Now, I'm driving home. Baby, I did it. We're fucking moving to Greece. I'm going to write. I'm going to be that husband again. We're going to connect emotionally. I'm going to be alive. This is going to be amazing. I am pulling in the driveway, and they call me, and they're like, “you took us by surprise. Come out to dinner with us. Let's just talk about this.” And so, they were like, we actually feel the same. And so, what would it look like for us to keep working together? We all lay it out, it's gotta be about passion, it's gotta be connecting. And I said, look, we have to change the question from what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail, which is the question we used to ask each other. Two, what would I do and love every day, even if I'm failing? Because now I know the struggle is guaranteed. But the success isn't. And so that's when I began to get obsessed with this idea of, I may not actually win a championship, even if I become capable of a championship performance. Like, think of all the Hall of Famers. That it just didn't click, it didn't happen, the right team at the right time, whatever. But they still had this incredible career. But for whatever reason, they just don't have the ring to show for it. But that's still an incredible life, an incredible career. And so I thought, I'm going to focus on that. I'm going to become great at what I do. And I'm going to be passionate about what I do. And I'm going to try to add value to people's lives. Now, saying that today, in 2021, is like motherfucker, everybody says that. This is back in like 2007, 2008. Nobody is talking like that. And so I give my partners this whole pitch about this thing that we now call social media that didn't have a name back then. And I was just like, dude, this is about that Kevin Kelly notion of a thousand true fans. Let's just add a lot of value to these people. Let me be who I really am. We now say authentic and I want to connect, build, we would now call it community. So I'm saying all these things that are now sort of de rigueur. Everybody does it, but it was a super novel. And so now I just show up every day and I'm like, I'm going to love what I do. I'm going to add value to people's lives. I'm going to think about my mom and my sister. It becomes a mission based thing for me. It's about ending metabolic disease. Now it's like, okay, this isn't about money anymore. And now I felt alive. And so, at 2 am on a Friday, as you know, when you're building a business, it's ridiculous hours. Doing a lot of dumb shit that you wish you weren't doing. One time, actually, 2 am on a Friday, I was beneath a piece of equipment, fixing it, bloody knuckles, trying to get this thing repaired. I hated working with my hands as a kid. I hated it. I would never do it with my dad all this. But now, to serve my mom and my sister, who are morbidly obese, and to help them by making a food that they could choose based on taste, and it happened to be good for them, that's what I was focused on when I was there with my bloody knuckles under the piece of equipment at 2 am on a Friday trying to fix it. It wasn't about money anymore. And I was like, I can't believe this works! I cannot believe that simply by saying money actually can't buy happiness like meaning and purpose that matters. So now imagine, I don't know that it's gonna become quest nutrition like it echoes the unicorn billion dollar company I'm just thinking about my mom and my sister. I'm all alone in a warehouse in fucking Compton. None of what becomes the dream is that moment. This is just about meaning and purpose. And so now, I’m like, “this worked.” Chasing money made me feel dead inside. Meaning and purpose, showing up for my mom and my sister. This is rad. And I refuse to lose. And I feel like a warrior now. Now as the money happens and I end up getting tremendously wealthy and it all works and we exit the company and we get the Championship ring and all that. I'm like, thank God. I understood that money wasn't gonna change anything. It was all about the meaning and purpose. So now and I remember the day that literally I go from a normal bank account because in a business, you're just getting your salary like anybody else. You don't have that wealth moment until you sell a piece or all of the company. So I go from, I'm worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper, but I'm still driving a beat up Ford Focus with a leaky exhaust. So, but now it's like refresh, refresh, refresh on my banking app, and boom, all of a sudden there's a lot of commas and zeros. And so I'm like, oh my god, I don't feel any differently about myself, at all. All the insecurities that I had when I was poor, I still have and all the pride in who I am becoming was before the money hit. So the money didn't change anything. It was a great confirmation that essentially it doesn't matter. Money's powerful. It's actually more powerful as you well know than people think. It just isn't what they've been told. So money can't affect your sense of self. Can't affect your insecurities. It won't make you proud of yourself. It won't make you feel good, but it lets you build. It lets you create. So I'm like, okay, well now I'm fantastically wealthy. I know that meaning and purpose is all that matters. So retiring now wouldn't make any sense. So now I need to answer the question, which by this point I was very confident in. Your meaning and purpose is something new. So, if my meaning and purpose was my mom and my sister and metabolic disease, now that I've exited that, can I point that at something else and be as hungry, as on fire for that thing? And the answer is yes. But it's a process. So I don't know how much you want to go into the process–

AUBREY: Where I'd like to pause for a moment is, so for people who don't know, quest nutrition focused on nutritional products, foods that actually helped with metabolic conditions because it was low carb and you're one of the first real big significant players. There was putting out things that didn't have a bunch of sugar and didn't have a bunch of carbohydrates and still tasted good. And it was really supporting people who are actually like your mom and your sister, but you had this Crystalline vision of two human beings that you loved. Your mom and your sister. So when you went from that media company into this quest nutrition, we're like, all right. We're going all in with this and you had that image. It's almost like that motivation. It's like what you see a soldier out there in the field and they can pull out their little thing and it's their sweetheart. And it's like, this is why I'm coming home and they put it back in and then they charge back forward and go through. It's a very clear understanding of what the motivation is. So you've built a quest and I'm sure you've supported your mom and your sister in many different ways. And I'm sure, potentially, that's still a big part of your mission in whatever it is. Impact Theory, and what you've built subsequently, it's for the world. And the world is kind of, it's sometimes names and faces pop up, they flare up for a moment, but it's a lot more nondescript, it's a lot more ephemeral. It's like, I'm helping the world. Other moms, and other sisters, and other brothers, and other fathers. 

TOM: I think you have to anchor it. 

AUBREY: Yeah, so that's my question, how do you go from something that's very anchored to something that's very like okay, I'm helping the world, but it's hard to connect with something like the world rather than a person 

TOM: Now I had to anchor on people. So, the process was recognizing, okay, it’s that intimate connection. The quote is often attributed to Mother Teresa, whether it's apocryphal that she said it or not, I don't know. But the quote goes, no one will act for the many, but people will act for the one. It's the same sort of idea, a million deaths is a statistic, one death is a tragedy. So helping a million people or a billion people or whatever, that doesn't anchor me emotionally. I used to be a big brother to this kid and this started when I was 18. I was just doing it for extra credit in college, long story why. But I felt a desperate need to get good grades and they offered extra credit to go basically mentor in the inner cities because I went to USC, which is in the ghetto. And once you go ten feet off of campus, you're in one of the worst neighborhoods in America, and certainly in Southern California. They put me in one of the worst schools, in one of the worst school districts, to help one of the worst problematic kids. This kid, he's just freaking out, and I don't know what to do, I'm 18. And he's fucking going haywire, going crazy, they tell you at week six, you're supposed to tell them, “Hey, I'm only coming for two more weeks, this is an eight week program.” So I say, “Hey, I'm only coming for two more weeks.” And when I say an already problematic child went nuclear, it was crazy. I've never seen a human meltdown like that. He walks up, so tiny, he was on Ritalin or something, so stunting his growth, very small. And he walks up to this kid that's like twice his size, socks him in the stomach. So imagine, we're sitting at a table, he just gets up, runs off, punches this big kid in the gut. Kid goes down, I'm like, what is happening? And so I finally, I'm calming him down, I get him to sit back down, and I'm like, is this because I said I was only coming for two more weeks? And he finally calms down enough and he says, yes. I say, “alright, listen.” The way he was doing things is he would throw a fit for the first hour, and then when I said I would have to leave, he would beg me to stay. So I'd end up staying for two hours. So, finally I said, “look, if you'll do your homework the second I get here, so I only stay for an hour, as long as I live in Los Angeles, I will mentor you. Fair?” And he was like, “yes.” And so what was supposed to be 8 weeks turns into 8 years. Comes out, he was being abused at home, I didn't realize. I became the guardian, the ward of the court that helped him into foster care. Like, that's how embedded into this kid's life I become. Over 8 years. And I didn't save him from his zip code and the reason I don't say his name anymore, I don't want people looking him up or whatever. He has not yet thrived though I remain optimistic and would love to get back into contact with him. So hopefully he will see one of these videos and reach out. I've tried to track him down. And so I become obsessed with this idea of right now in America. This is true. It's actually true in most of the developed world. Your zip code is the number one predictor of your future success. So back at Quest, I saw a thousand of my 3,000 employees reminded me of this kid. And I was like, I don't want to fail again. Because what ended up happening is, once he got into foster care, they just moved him farther and farther and farther away. And I was broke at the time, and he was like two hours away. So we end up losing contact. And I'm like, I’m not okay with that. So I opened what I called Quest University, which of course now becomes Impact Theory University, which we give away to anybody that can't afford it. And it's me just, saying, think like this, act like this, and it'll make your life better, but realizing that unfortunately, the realities of the human brain are such that by the time you're a fully baked adult, you can still change. All of us can change, but you can change a lot more when you're 11. And so we have now aimed, 85 percent of what Impact Theory does is aimed at 11 to 15 year olds, because I think of this kid every day. And if anybody wants to see what that looks like, I did a video on YouTube called my master plan. So if you type in my name plus master plan, you'll see me talking about this kid and all the kids at quest that I got to know very very well. That the inner city is just demolished. And why I fight as hard as I fight to create the things that I'm creating. But the short of it is, there's about five people that I know and love and can think of that have been, some of them have now escaped, and that's some of the most gratifying things in my life, but some of them haven't, and so many of the other people at Quest didn't. So it's just like, holding those names and those people in my mind, staying in contact with them and thinking like, what would I actually need to create to make sure that nobody else has to go through that. So it's the big vision of making sure nobody gets to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset anchored by these five people that I think about on a daily basis.

AUBREY: That's really important advice for people to keep in mind is to anchor it and not just be working for some idea, but work for a person that anchors and represents that idea. I remember I was recently in this little business mastermind group of people in Austin, part of the community that wanted to get together and post transaction and I'm talking about my Fit For Service fellowship, which is bringing a group of people together going through initiatory rituals building a community where people can be vulnerable and support each other. And one of the guys was like, well, why are you doing this anymore? Like the money's inconsequential compared to relative, to everything else. Why do you care? So because all of my questions were about that. How do I make this better? That's really what I was focused on there. Like what are you? What are you even worried about? And I really thought about it and it's because when I'm there with somebody, and I see them, and I see the breakthrough happen, and I see something transform, and I stay in touch with them. We have an app, so I stay in touch with them. I've run into them in different places, a lot of them moved to Austin. I'll see them, and I'll know that I actually did something for that person. For Sarah. Not for the world, even the person with the little thumbnail picture and says, “wow, your podcast changed my life.” Oh, thank you. It comes automatically. I do feel whatever gratitude I can feel for that moment, but it's hard for me to take it in. But when I know that person, and I've been in a sweat lodge with them, and I've been in, breath work with them, and I've shared my own tears and my own experience with them, then it becomes meaningful, and then I can really care in the way that provides that solar energy that I really crave, that fuel to drive me. And I think more intentionality, even when I'm writing another book. And I'm thinking about, this is going to be really helpful for everybody who reads it. Well, everybody who reads it is meaningless. I need to come up with like, no, it's going to be helpful for this person. And all the people like them, but really anchor it. So that's very good advice for me to hear, and I'm sure good advice for other people to hear. 

TOM: Yeah, and then the other part of that is, so desire is a process. So, people will sort of get that love is a process. You have to actually spend time with that person, you go on dates. Like, there's a reason that those rituals exist, because it is a process of doing certain things that make you end up falling in love, and you develop a neurochemical reaction. The first time I saw Lisa, my now wife of 19 years, the neurochemical reaction was one of sexual attraction. And now I have that that's like a note in this now symphony of responses that I get. And understanding that that took a high degree of intentionality even just like the sort of blind way that we spend time with those that we love, sharing experiences and life and all of that, that's the process. But when it comes to desire, there's like a really specific process that people can do that will anchor it. So when I was deciding, okay, we're going to do this thing called Impact Theory. And now I know these people that I want to build this for, but that's not enough yet. I have to attach this. Like I'm building a studio for these people for this reason. And so, whenever I hear somebody say you're born with a mission in life, I always get my backup at that because a thousand years ago, had Steve Jobs been born, I think he still would have lived an extraordinary life, but it would have looked nothing like it looked now. He wouldn't have been like, I want to create the iPhone, right? It just didn't exist. So we're all a product of our time. And once you realize that, then it's like, well, then if that's true, that Steve Jobs a thousand years ago would have fallen in love with something the way that he fell in love with current technology, then what is that process that anchors it to something, and can I take conscious control of that? And it goes like this. You tell yourself. I'm going to build a studio to help people 11 to 15 to make sure that nobody gets to the age of 15 without encountering a growth mindset. Why? Because of this kid that I failed. Now, I had never said to myself, I failed the kid that I mentored before. In fact, my whole story around him was, I showed him that somebody loved him. At a time where he was unfortunately being abused at home, he didn't know that anybody loved him. And so I became that figure in his life. Now, I was too young to really understand it at the time, but like now looking back, I completely understand what that would have been like for him. And so I switched it to saying as much as I loved him, I did end up failing him in that I did not save him from his zip code. And that became like this really important thing. And the more that I said that to myself, the more that I told other people I wasn't willing to fail more people and that I was going to build the studio to make sure that I could help people at scale, the more that I then embodied the passion. So I didn't just say it blankly. I was really expressing the way that I wanted to feel when I thought about that. And so you have this mechanism in your brain that justifies the amplitude of your reaction. So if you react big to something, your brain goes, Whoa, I guess this is a big deal. And so you can actually just layer that on.

AUBREY: It's like the universe is listening. 

TOM: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Absolutely. And you get this neurological feedback. So the more that I do that and put it out in a big way to actually embody it, it starts to become real. And so the master plan video that I was talking about I'd been reinforcing it myself by the time I recorded that probably for about 18 months, maybe two years. So it completely caught me off guard when I explained it out loud for the first time to other than just my friends that I had failed this kid, and that I wasn't gonna. And I just completely broke down and cried with no layer of performance. Like, I know what it's like to get on stage and perform and make sure that people feel your passion. I was fucking caught off guard. It was really almost awkward how caught off guard I was and I thought oh my god this really works. Like the more I told myself, this is what this is about, this is why I'm doing it, it actually became that. And so you have to anchor on something real like that was all there for me. And it was all too easy to really buy into yeah, I really did fail him. But it was a process. And it's so powerful when you realize that you can aim that process at something.

AUBREY: Yeah, people think that it's just something that's, it's innate. It's there or it's not, and you have it or you don't, but you've taken something, a kernel of something that was real, and then almost like how an oyster will make a pearl. It'll take, there's a grain of sand of your initial desire, but you're wrapping it in whatever pearlescent layer over and over and over again. So that when you open that oyster anytime you got a shining glistening fucking pearl of desire. It's super powerful to think about because then we all have these little grains of sand. But what are we gonna make a pearl out? 

TOM: You need the grain of sand. But by the time you're done, it's become this useful thing. It's not always beautiful, but it's become useful.

AUBREY: Sure. Let's talk a little bit about love, because you were explaining something we were just catching up and you noticed I had some new tattoos on my arm. And you went into a conversation about one of the challenges with love is there's not enough connective tissue through the rituals and through the shared experiences. And that actually led you to getting your tattoo. So explain the theory and then explain one of your solutions to that theory in getting the tattoo. 

TOM: So I grew up soft. So my adult life has been about learning to toughen up. I was not a tough kid. I quit playing football because every time they said hike, I knew that I was gonna experience some level of pain. And so I was like, well, this is dumb. So not realizing that resilience would become the most necessary ingredient in my success. So as this is sort of beginning to dawn on me, I read this book called The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. And in the book, he's talking about how basically, he's looking at marriage and how many marriages fail and that he thinks part of what's breaking down in society is there's no coming of age ritual and then marriage rituals have lost their punch. They became really watered down. And I thought okay, well, I'm at the time I read it I'm probably, I don't know, maybe 24 or something like that. So the coming of age ritual is kind of past but I could do a ritual. Like really making my marriage something meaningful from a ritualistic standpoint. And the cool thing was I married a Greek woman. So we had a traditional Greek wedding. I had to get christened the whole nine. But they're waving smoke and chanting in ancient Greece and like Greek. And so it there was this really sort of foreign, it felt like a ritual in a way that all the weddings that I had attended before where it's like a pastor who's kind of funny and he's cracking jokes and you're in a normal church, which in the west coast of America, the churches wasn't even Catholic church. So I was so used to an old rec center and it's also where they hold the church ceremony, so it's also where the weddings are, you know what I mean? I remember one of my cousins had their reception at what was known as the Tacoma Sportsman's Club, where literally, the floor is sawdust, there are animal heads on the walls, and peanut shells on the ground, you know what I mean? Like, it's one of those. And so, I didn't have a high sense of like, weddings were pomp and circumstance and ceremonial. There was none of that in my world. So for me, it was so like, whoa, like what's going on? It feels important. I'm in this old church because we got married in London in an ancient city and I've got people chanting in an ancient language and I've had to go to all these lessons to get christened. And I mean, it's just so surreal and having something that was more ritualistic was already like, I knew that we were moving towards that. And so I wanted to go through a ritualistic scarification as a part of this otherworldly experience. And so I thought, okay, what would that look like in a modern context? It needs to be something that scares me. It needs to be something that's going to hurt. And it needs to be something that's permanent. And it's like, doing it to yourself is somehow harder than like, the tribe is forcing you to do it. I was like, I'm living in a world where nobody's gonna care if I do this or not. But I still, it needs to scare me, it needs to hurt, and it needs to be permanent. So I was like, okay, I could get branded. Maybe I'd do that I could get some sort of like really painful piercing, I used to go to this thing, it's so weird, it doesn't even seem like my personality, but there was this thing called the fetish ball, and I used to go to that, and it just so weirded me out. And they would do these things where they would put rings on their back, and then connect each other. Like, rings in their fucking flesh, dude. And then they would, like, do this tug of war, and you could see their back pulling. Oh, it was crazy. So I was like, I could do something like that. That fucking scares the life out of me. And so I was like, 

AUBREY: That brings new meaning to exchange rings. 

TOM: Yeah, right? 

AUBREY: At a wedding, yeah.

TOM: But I thought, okay, there's one element. I swore I would never get a tattoo, needles scare the life out of me, and that would allow me to create more meaning. So I could design a tattoo, which would be my promise to my wife. I would have it permanently emblazoned on my body, and it would be this constant reminder to never ever look for the exit. That this is about, I'm all in, I am literally a different man before and after the wedding. And so I ended up designing my tattoo and coming up with basically the four words that really meant something to me and getting them tattooed forever on my body and in Greek so that it has that element of mystique and it hurt and I was scared and didn't want to do it as the time was coming. I'm like, Oh my God, like, am I really going to do this? At the time, I was legitimately not quite phobic of needles, but really close to where they weren't drawing blood, but they were injecting, it was called prolotherapy, doesn't matter, it involved needles, and I almost fainted. Like, that's where I was around needles. And it was everything I wanted it to be. And it really did, like, galvanize. It gave me this, and we treated it as a ritual. We went there, made a big deal of it. Like, I'm gonna get this tattoo, my wife came with me, and it was like a whole thing. And I remember the whole time that it hurt, I was saying to myself, I'm doing this because my marriage is forever, and I will never look for the escape hatch. I will never back out of this. I will do whatever it takes to thrive in this marriage. Now, that doesn't mean that if my wife was abusive or something like that, that I wouldn't divorce, but it's like, it would really have to be like some crazy over the line shit, and dude, that's really come to my rescue. Like, there have been times where it gets hard, and just knowing that that door was forever shut to me, and so the only thing I had was, well, how do I make this work? 

AUBREY: Yeah, the only way through is forward. Have you done anything since that's a similar type of ritual that you guys have done, it's almost like the renewal of vows, so to speak, but the renewal of ritual that you've continued through your relationship.

TOM: That's interesting and I would be very open to that. We haven't largely, because originally we were trying to come up with a design where I could add to the tattoo like every year or five years or something. And honestly, I would actually still like to do that, but we haven't. I would also like to do a renewal of vows. But my wife doesn't want to. For her, we did it. It was perfect. It meant everything to me. It's never sort of lost its importance, and I don't want that to be one of the times that we do this. But it still speaks to me. If she was into it, I would do it like every five years or something. I think it would be cool and beautiful, but it doesn't resonate with her, and I don't feel super strongly about it.

AUBREY: So I got married. We got married in the peak of COVID and we wanted to get married and we wanted to just elope and do it. And we felt passionately that we wanted to do it, always knowing that we were going to do the proper one when we had more time and the world was more open and everybody could travel. And so we have that scheduled now coming up and we're now designing, all right, what do we want this to look like? And I've always believed that we should take every different thing that exists. and make sure that it has the meaning we want. All right, if you think it's a funeral and you're supposed to wear black and sit around the thing and throw a little dirt on it, well, is that meaningful to you? Is that honoring, what you would want to honor this person with and what they would want to be honored by you by? Like, I think we should all take a fresh look at everything. And I think this is very important. Every holiday, Valentine's Day, Halloween, don't just go with what's been done. Think about it. What do you want it to be? What do you want Christmas to be? What do you want Thanksgiving to be? What do you want, and certainly, your wedding, or your birthday, or whatever it is. So this is the first opportunity to really, in a meaningful way. Put my money where my mouth is, really back up what we're saying, and my wife's fully on board, so we're now in the process of, alright, how do we envision something that is the most meaningful to us? And we had a quick little discussion, it was actually last night. And we were talking about it, because eventually it will go into a kind of dance party situation after it's all done. And she was like, well maybe this DJ because of some of the crowd. And I was like, no, no, stop. This is a dangerous place we're going to. We throw the party because it's the music we want to listen to. This is our ritual. This is not for everybody else. We're inviting them, we want them to be there, but this is a dangerous, slippery slope, the moment we start making decisions based on what other people want. We have the DJ that we want there. And if it's hardcore trap music the whole time and everybody's like, what the hell? Like, so be it. They're at our wedding, it's that's their experience that they're signing up for. They're here to experience us in our fullness. And so I guess that's as far as we've gotten so far as principle number one, this is for us, this is for us in all choices that we make and it will unfold as it unfolds. I'll be, of course, sure to share the story, but I love this idea of reclaiming our myths and our rituals and our holidays and our celebrations. Like you, rite of passage was something that I missed, but I found it in my own way, in my own vision quest, which I think I talked about on your show when I was on. I was very fortunate. I stumbled into that. It was a little past the age of a normal rite of passage, but I was still 18. That was powerful. And so all of these things come back in, along with the mindset, along with so much other information and access to the right foods and there's so much that the world needs right now.

And I think this is one of the important pieces, like we need to bring meaningful ritual back in where it's not just the husk, but the kernel is there, not just the empty paper wrapping around what used to be the candy of some intense initiatory experience or a divine revelatory experience. We don't just want the wrapper, we need the meat, we need the candy. 

TOM: No doubt. Do you know Michael Easter? 

AUBREY: No, I don't. 

TOM: Oh man, I think you'd love him. Super interesting dude. Wrote a book called The Comfort Crisis. And it is all about basically, lives have gotten so easy, there's no coming of age rituals, there's none of this hard stuff. And I forget which warrior tribe he was talking about, but at whatever age, 15, 16, something like that, they give him a spear. And tell them you have to go kill a lion. 

AUBREY: Maasai. 

TOM: Maasai, yes, thank you. So you know the ritual well. And I just thought, that's some real shit. And they have the whole phrase that many promising warriors have been lost to the lions or something like that. Like motherfuckers actually get eaten. Like, that's when you know, like this is for real. And when you realize that this was stuff that started when I need to know that the people to my right and left can help protect me in this crazy dangerous environment. And so while I admittedly would not do a ritual myself to put me in that kind of peril, nor would I send my kids, if I had them, into that kind of peril, it's powerful. Like doing things that are actually that level of hard where it's like a 50/50 shot that you make it. He talks about that in the book. There's a Misogi, I think. There's a guy that he went traveling with and this guy has this whole notion of the Misogi, something like that. I'm close. And that it should be something that's hard enough that you're not, it really is a 50/50 shot that you do it. But that whole thing is, rule number two is don't die. 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. I think when you look at that I have a men's group that I'm part of and a lot of high achievers and really exceptional individuals in this group and one of them keeps pushing, cause we all try to bring some ritual into our thing. He keeps pushing this Navy seal practice where you put on a weight belt and hold a weight. And you have like a resuscitation team above the pool, but you walk on the bottom of the pool until you pass out. And I'm like, that's called drowning, man. Like, I don't know why you want this. He's like, keeps looking at me because he knows that I'm into this stuff. I'm like, it's drowning. And he's like, no, no, actually like the autonomic nervous system knows. And you don't actually suck in air for a good minute after. I'm like, man, like I just started sweating. I'm like, that might be too far for me. But the idea of it, I see why it's so compelling. And I see why in some elite special forces training, they've offered this because the person that you know yourself to be on the other side of that, is not only what other people know you to be, but you know about you. Like, if you went out and faced the jaws of the lion, or you walked on that pool without scrambling up to the surface to breathe, like, you know something about yourself. You're like, I looked death in the eye. And I didn't flinch. And that gnosis of your own power, that's strong. And I've done a lot of intense things. And that's really served me well. But there's always this thing that's looming out, like my buddy suggested. I'm like, God, it scares the shit out of me.

TOM: Yeah, that one is, I think, a little hardcore for me. Where it's like–

AUBREY: It's too hardcore for me. 

TOM: Maybe most people's autonomic nervous system, it will suck in water per minute, but like, what if I'm the one guy? Oh, it's rare, but it does happen.

AUBREY: Yeah. You've had the unique opportunity to converse with some of the most amazing people in the whole world. Do you feel like it's accretive? I was talking to Matthew Hussey about this, and he was saying, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of information that's available and accessible to us. And he was wondering if perhaps, keeping things a little more narrow serves you better, because you can get lost in all of these different rabbit holes of information and practices, and I tend to think that cumulatively it is all helpful and that we're such a multidimensional complex being that finding, exploring all these pathways is what I'm deeply driven to. Have you thought about that at all? Or do you really feel like, look, the more information we can get from the more disparate sources, the better. 

TOM: So I think you have to be really thoughtful about this. So, one, if people go back and watch my show from the beginning to now, they'll see that the guest selection has changed pretty dramatically. And it's a little heartbreaking because there are some people that I had on the show and I love them so much and I would love to have them back. If it were not for the fact that I realized, I can only have guests on where I would have done that research anyway. So, the way that I think about it is 80% of my time I spend going deep on a very limited set of topics. 20% of my time I spend going very broad, but still on a relatively limited number of topics. But for most people, it's pretty buckshot. The reason that I think it's important to do both, one, the success of my life has come from going deep. Far more than it has from going broad. But I am shocked at how often going broad ends up triggering something that ends up then serving me in this area that I'm going deep. Especially because I'm in storytelling. So, you'll come across, like for instance, when I read Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. Never in a million years did I think I would end up writing a story set in like a dystopian future that was essentially about Nelson Mandela. And I just read it because it's like homeboy went to prison for 27 years and didn't come out bitter, like how the fuck do you pull that off right. And so, that sucked me in but then the idea of what I called the third way. I don't think he ever called that, trust me I'm not trying to take credit for anything that amazing human being ever thought or did but I walked away from it with this idea of, okay, you've been oppressed, you can come out and be the oppressor. You can come out and remain oppressed, or you can find a third way of unity. And that idea just was so profound to me, and then it's like, somebody, a long story about how the comic comes into being and how I end up writing the story, but in real time in that moment, I had to pitch an idea. Boom, that idea comes to my mind. When I read it, I certainly didn't think this was gonna become a story. So I find that going broad will serve you. But you don't want to just always go broad. 

AUBREY: Yeah, I think that's really good pragmatic wisdom because I can find myself oftentimes going just 10 feet deep on a million different things. I think there's an old metaphor that says, you don't strike oil making a hundred wells that go ten feet deep, you strike oil digging one well that goes a hundred feet deep. And that's definitely the case for the most part. But nonetheless exploring all of these little different test wells to see. But then when you find something that's interesting, having the discretion to push everything else to the side and say alright, I'm going to go in here until I find the gold, until I find that thing that I've really been looking for. It seems like the most practical way to go about it because it is an absolute flood of information that's out there and getting a cursory view of everything. And then taking the time to really dive deep is pretty essential. 

TOM: And then where things really get interesting, so you look at the people that have won Nobel Prizes, it's almost always an area of overlap. Where biology and chemistry overlap. So, I have accidentally, I wish I could say that this was something smart that I did, but I've accidentally reinvented myself every ten years. So, first I went to film school, thought that was going to be my entire life. Then, I got into technology. Then I got into nutrition and manufacturing, and then I got into an actual media company. And so, each time I've had to completely build a new knowledge base. And by doing that, like, one of the ways that I immediately understood that the print comic book industry is dead is because I came from the world of nutrition. We had 8,000 points of distribution. I mean, something stupid like that in 145 countries. I knew what flavor of bar was selling in what store, where we were, in what aisle, where are we on the shelf? Like, I had so much data. Go over to comic books and all of a sudden you realize you don't even know what sells. All you know is what the distributor, because there's only one, pulls into their system. That's it. You're blind. As soon as I'm in there, I'm like, well, this is never going to work. Because nobody knows how to get their sales up because they don't know what's selling. So I was like, this is dumb. Left that, immediately went to digital. Now, when we first made that switch, we looked crazy because it was like, only 15% of comics are sold digitally. Why would you ever go 100%? And it's like, because you guys all have a Western comic mentality. Nobody even realizes this thing called Webtoon exists. Webtoon is doing the same number of views on Webtoon as on YouTube all across Asia. The US shows the same pattern of adoption, but we're 10 years behind. So, because they're all focused on that and don't realize it's broken, because it's the only industry they've ever known, they didn't have the same reaction I had, which is you can't build a business on this. Which I never would have known had I not spent a decade in nutrition. 

AUBREY: Right. It's what Robert Green in the book Mastery calls the Da Vinci Effect.

TOM: Interesting. I read that book. 

AUBREY: Leonardo da Vinci was a master sculptor. He was an engineer. He was a biologist who did autopsies. He did all of these different things and then when he paints the Mona Lisa it's with the information of a lot of the things that he has or when he designs all of his inventions and the sketches, he was bringing a lot of things together. And I absolutely agree with you and that's the advice I give. Find the two things or three things that you're passionate about, go deep in both of those and see where they meet each other for the overlap. And that's a big area of success, for me, I can say the same thing, these disparate fields of interest come together. And I think some are still coming together as I reach depth where I'm actually getting to a place of significance. Cause you have to reach that place of significance. You can't be really shallow and then have a very shallow overlap. You have to be deep enough in enough things that the overlap is in the depth of significance. And then from there you can birth something even really special. Because it's unique. 

TOM: No doubt. Yeah, and when you realize just how young you are, and that it's like, you've got this many areas of overlapping expertise, imagine what it's going to be like when you're twice as old as you are now. And that to me is a key thing that I want everybody to understand, but certainly young people, is that, dude, 80 years is a long ass time, and then if you can push it, and if you're young now, odds are that if you live a healthy lifestyle, you're going to live even longer than that. Like, you've got a lot of time to become a master of some pretty insane stuff. And part of what's kept me going is that I'm so excited by learning new things. And the number of people that look at a new technology or whatever and are like, Oh my God, like, I'm exhausted, I don't want to learn a new thing. It's like, dude, you're gonna get passed by. And it's the classic way that humans go around, you hit somewhere around sort of late 30s early 40s where you're just like, I just want to leverage what I already know man I don't want to go learn a new thing. And that makes me sad, more than most things. Like, learning in and of itself is joyful.

AUBREY: So throw yourself into an adventure. Throw yourself into a challenge. Throw yourself into uncomfortable, unknown, uncharted waters. And rely on yourself to swim your way out, figure it out. Yeah, that's great advice. Well, to wrap this up, if you were going to give the listeners just some advice from you, just channeling, like, alright, obviously we've given a lot, but any final words of advice or wisdom that you would like to leave people?

TOM: You are having a biological experience. So, if I have one mission, my whole thing around making sure that you encounter a growth mindset is really about getting people to understand you're having a biological experience. So what do I mean by that? Your brain has been formed by millions of years of evolution. You probably feel like you're above that. But in reality, you are in the grips of that biology. And once you understand that you don't have to be a slave to your emotions, that you can actually, there are what I call physiological hooks in changing your emotional state and once you take control of that realize you can orchestrate it, do things like build desire because it's a process. And if you're worried that there's nothing I'm passionate about in life, and everything just feels milquetoast for me like, it's okay for you Tom because you have a passion. Recognizing that, Oh, okay. This is biology. I can learn something new because of something called brain plasticity. I love this thing because that mechanism of desire has been built up. And recognizing that this is all nature, I want to make sure that you live long enough. To have kids that have kids. So it's like, every impulse, desire, want, everything that you have is fucking nature slamming you in the back to get you to do that stuff. Now, you don't live in that same environment anymore, so some of these impulses don't make sense. Take over eating, made sense when food was hard to find, not so much when your pantry is stocked full. Understanding that love, going back to that, in the beginning nature wants to make sure you're having some sex and you're having babies. So that initial desire is one. It's all consuming. It's all about that sexual energy. But then nature changes its mind after that and for the guy, wants to make sure that you move on and go have more kids and spread your seed as far as you can. And if you don't see that coming, that's gonna catch you off guard. So, I could go literally a whole nother show, just all the ways that your biology is fucking with you. But once people realize, okay, I'm having a biological experience, that I can take control of, I don't have to be a servant to my emotions, I can have an agenda, leverage my biology to get the pleasure that I want. Pointing me in the right direction, using the pain to move away from things that don't make sense, and I don't have to live by the law of accident. Getting people to understand that and take control of that process is my everything. That's my magnum opus. 

AUBREY: That's beautiful, and I would just add that when you figure this out, let's say you heard this and something clicks, don't go back and judge yourself for not living that way in the past. You didn't have the information before. And that's something that I think people resist. These messages of radical self sovereignty and responsibility because it's their own judge judging what they've done in the past as if they were supposed to have known that already and supposed to have done something different. Past is gone. Don't worry about it. It's all good. You did your best. I promise. Because you did it. But now, right now, you can make a different choice. And follow everything that you said, and practice these things, build your own desire, be aware of your biology, and change it. This is possible. 

TOM: Preach. 

AUBREY: Thank you brother, this was amazing, so good to see you 

TOM: Thank you man, this is so much fun, same.

AUBREY: Yeah. A lot of fun. Obviously Impact Theory, people can find you. Unbelievable show. And where else, anything else that you want to point people to? 

TOM: @TomBilyeu. If you want to know what I'm doing on the technological front with NFTs and all of that, Twitter. Instagram is the sort of broadest where I cover a lot of mindset and stuff like that. And then YouTube is the show. 

AUBREY: Beautiful. 

TOM: That's it. 

AUBREY: Alright. Thank you so much everybody. Much love. We'll see you next week.