In this episode of Impact Theory, I sit down with Tom Bilyeu to talk about how he went from being an aspiring filmmaker to becoming a wildly successful entrepreneur, and how he did it by using the evolutionary lens through which he views things.
00:01:01.740I actually talk about this in the happiness book when I discuss being anti-fragile to rejection and failure.
00:01:08.040Then you set up, you became a wildly successful entrepreneur.
00:01:12.800You co-founded a company called Quest Nutrition, which you're no longer associated with, which is a very successful billion-dollar company.
00:01:19.540And now for many years, you've been hosting the show Impact Theory.
00:01:47.860And at any point, if you want to talk about YouTube and what you need to do to get your numbers, obviously, you're way ahead of the vast majority of humanity.
00:01:56.900But if you ever want to really smash it, I've got some ideas for you.
00:02:00.920Because you have the thing that it takes.
00:02:04.920And I think it's just the algorithm game that you're not playing to its full potential.
00:02:09.740I look forward to learning from the master.
00:02:11.580Okay, so I thought we'd start since I started with your quick professional trajectory.
00:02:18.840Tell us a bit about how you went from being, I'm assuming, someone who was an aspiring filmmaker to then becoming a wildly successful West Nutrition guy.
00:02:32.040Maybe you can also share some lessons about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and so on.
00:02:35.380Yeah, so I'll give you the whole thing in a nutshell with an eye towards an audience that hopefully comes to you for one of the reasons you're so phenomenal, which is the evolutionary lens through which you view things.
00:02:46.780So I am just obsessed with the idea that you're having a biological experience.
00:02:52.920And when you interpret your life through that lens, then all of a sudden you can start making some momentum.
00:02:57.800So my life is the story of at first not understanding that and running into a lot of brick walls.
00:03:04.060And so I went to USC film school, as you said, but didn't know how to break into the industry.
00:03:10.260So when I graduated, I thought I was going to get the three-picture deal, be the next Steven Spielberg.
00:03:52.960It took 15 years, but it actually worked.
00:03:56.720And so in that journey, I began realizing the things that were holding me back, which again, I was having a biological experience.
00:04:04.280I was living a very small life because I did not understand that I had basically wired my dopamine system to be maximally rewarding when people told me that they thought I was smart.
00:04:18.200And so I would argue for dumb ideas just because they were mine.
00:04:21.740And so even though I knew this idea is going to move me backwards from my goal of getting rich so that I can go build a studio, but I want to win this argument so badly because I feel like if I lose, you're not going to think I'm smart.
00:04:33.780And so there was literally a day that changed my life where I ended up convincing my then business partners of an idea that was terrible, that actively in the argument, there's a voice in my head screaming, you know, this is bad for the business.
00:04:49.540And so I convinced them, we're going to do it my way.
00:04:53.160They walk out of the room and I have an existential crisis and I'm like, okay, hold on, no judgment, self.
00:05:01.240Because you're telling people that you want to be successful, but here you are arguing for an idea that you know is dumb just because you want them to think you're smart.
00:05:10.780Do you want to be successful or do you want people to think you're smart?
00:05:13.440And so I realized, whoa, I actually want to be successful.
00:05:17.180And that brought me face to face with, okay, you actually want that even upon reflection.
00:05:21.500And yet you're operating in a totally different way.
00:05:24.400And so what is, and this wouldn't have been the language I used then, but now what's the neurochemistry that you're in the grips of that's causing you to make dumb decisions?
00:05:37.620Again, I wouldn't have had these words back then, but that dopamine process pointed at something useful so that the more dopamine I secrete in my brain, the more I'm moving towards my goals.
00:05:49.000And so in that one sort of just being nakedly honest with myself about, hey, there's actually this really gross behavior that you're doing.
00:05:57.920You're driven by this insecure thing over here.
00:07:02.540There's a book called The Enigma of Reason by Sperber and Mercier.
00:07:09.460They're two French cognitive psychologists.
00:07:12.580In the book, they argue that people haven't evolved the capacity to reason to seek some objective truth.
00:07:23.240But to your point, they've evolved the capacity to reason to win arguments.
00:07:30.160So it doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong.
00:07:33.260What's important is that I win the argument.
00:07:35.900What's important is that my team wins the argument.
00:07:38.900And so that which you were experiencing, they would argue is the default architecture of the human mind.
00:07:45.620Now, the reason why I became very intimately aware of their work is because in chapter seven of this book, The Parasitic Mind, where I talk about what are some epistemological strategies that we can use in seeking truth, I say, look, there are some objective ways to seek some objective truth.
00:08:06.600People aren't necessarily interested in seeking truth.
00:08:09.880They're interested in winning arguments.
00:08:11.700So I think it takes actually quite an incredible self-awareness that you eventually had to be able to say, I'm succumbing to this trap and I'm going to overcome it.
00:08:22.940And so to the old maxim of the ancient Greeks, know thyself.
00:08:26.900In your case, in knowing yourself, you eventually were able to correct it and that led you to great success afterwards.
00:08:34.340Yeah, it is a thing that really drives home for me, the idea that we have created a problem in society where we now think philosophy is like this, ah, that's just philosophy.
00:08:47.900I think that people really have to have a personal philosophy that they can articulate so that they could explain to you what's my North Star, so what am I trying to accomplish with my life and my actions, that they can articulate their belief system, that they can articulate their value system,
00:09:03.600that they understand that they are caught in what I call a frame of reference, which is like whole life beer goggles that distort everything you see.
00:09:27.720And once you understand that, now it's like, oh, I can articulate all of this stuff.
00:09:32.700And so now that I can tell you what my philosophy is, I can tell you what my North Star is, I know what my beliefs are, I know what my values are, and I know all of that together creates this distortion that causes me to see the world in a certain way.
00:09:45.140Then you start asking, can I intentionally distort my frame of reference so that I'm what I'll call is getting closer to ground truth.
00:09:55.240Now, I think there's a pretty good reason why Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson ended up having this debate that completely derailed about truth, because truth is excruciatingly hard to identify, because we believe that what we see and understand in our interpretation is the truth, not realizing it's just false, that the only thing that's true are the physical laws.
00:10:22.700And now if you're building up from physics, you'll very quickly realize you get into the human mind, and then everything else becomes interpretation.
00:10:29.580And so it's very rare that even if we agree on what the facts are, that we will agree on what the facts mean.
00:10:38.120And then virtually impossible for people to agree on now that we know what the facts mean, what ought we, I use that word in a moral sense, what ought we do about the fact that these are facts.
00:10:48.020So the way that I think about truth is, I'm trying to predict the outcome of my behaviors.
00:10:52.940If I do this in a business, it will go well.
00:10:55.080If I do this in my marriage, it will yield the result that I'm looking for.
00:10:58.320If I'm able to do a thing and have accurately predicted what that's going to lead to, I must be getting close to ground truth.
00:11:04.380If I make a prediction and do a thing and I get a wildly different result, my map of reality is broken in some way.
00:11:12.480And so once I started going, oh, cool, I care about effectiveness.
00:12:18.940So it exactly speaks to your point where people use their affective state to shape their informational landscape.
00:12:26.860So I'm just putting what you just said in academic talk.
00:12:30.780So then after you sell your stake in Quest Nutrition, eventually you start this new endeavor, Impact Theory.
00:12:42.380And we mentioned earlier how big it's become and how much it resonates with so many people.
00:12:46.960So are you able, I know it's often difficult to speak about one's own qualities and you are a modest guy, but what are the unique attributes or assets that you have?
00:13:01.020Yes, maybe you know how to play the algorithm so you get more views, but ultimately if you weren't a good conversationalist, if you didn't have interesting and poignant questions to ask, people would not turn to the show no matter how you played with the algorithm.
00:13:15.580So you can answer that and then tell us whether, because now everybody wants to start a podcast.
00:13:22.100I mean, everybody and their mother and their dog has a podcast, right?
00:13:24.980When you and I entered this ecosystem, there were many fewer players in the game.
00:13:31.280So what would be, so first, what were some of the, what are some of the unique assets that you have that make it successful?
00:13:38.600And can some of these things talk to aspiring future Tom Bilyeu's?
00:13:43.620Okay, so just to answer the first thing about me first, and then I'll go on because I actually teach people how to do this.
00:13:50.300So what makes me interesting, so I'm actually not a good conversationalist, though I think that's very kind of you, but just in terms of me trying to always be very good at recognizing where my skill set lies and where it doesn't, I have a real awkwardness to me in initial interactions, which surprises me as much as it surprises anybody else, but nonetheless is true.
00:14:12.240So what I had to get good at was really learning about that person, so that I could give an interview that nobody else was going to be able to give, because I would read all of their information, I would read their books, so like when you came on to talk about the parasitic mind, I'm going to read the parasitic mind, I'm going to read your other works, I'm going to read your tweets, I'm going to listen to you in interviews.
00:14:33.240I'll put in 12-ish hours of work for one interview, and so that's me going, okay, you don't have like a Rogan's effortlessness where you can just talk about anything, so I need to know where am I going with this, and then I am an iterative anything.
00:14:52.460I'm an iterative interviewer where I'll do a thing, I'll get feedback, I'll adjust, I'll do a thing, get feedback, adjust.
00:15:00.300It's what I call the physics of progress, so because I don't lie to myself, and I'm like, nah, I'm not good at that thing, whatever, now I can actually figure out what skill I have to get good at.
00:15:10.240So anyway, just being relentless on that, I won't lie, I'm intellectual, so I've always been highly verbal, so that was why I started the podcast back in the day.
00:15:23.920I was like, okay, if you put me in front of a camera in this situation, I can do my what I call magic trick, and so that is part of it, know thy strengths, and so leaning into that, and then I am just unbelievably curious.
00:15:39.680So I spend, if you average it out, I spend two hours a day in just pure knowledge acquisition, 365 days a year, including Christmas.
00:16:06.680I'm actually reading, he's coming on my show next week.
00:16:10.400This is a book, I mean, I'm not paid to promote this, it's just because we're talking about books.
00:16:15.040This is a book by an evolutionist who, the book is about urban ecology and urban evolution.
00:16:23.740The idea being that in the same way that Darwin studied, you know, the Darwinian finches, how a finch, a bird, will evolve different beak structures depending on which Galapagos island that particular bird is at.
00:16:39.320Well, urban ecosystems end up creating these artificial islands where what started off as a singular species within the same city, you could then have these islands of, let's say, pigeons that within a very short timeframe can completely evolve different morphological features and behaviors.
00:19:31.280Is so important to what we're going through right now that I, one, I've tweeted you, I think, several times saying,
00:19:39.900hey, congratulations for hitting the Amazon bestseller list over and over.
00:19:44.960Well-deserved, such an important idea at this point.
00:19:48.620And even if you strip it of the sort of political valence, the story of my life is the story of being trapped by my own parasitical ideas that I was unaware I had.
00:20:19.320I mean, look, it's, it's been unbelievable.
00:20:23.760And I guess we'll talk about this when we talk about purpose and meaning and happiness, you know, why do we do the things that we do?
00:20:30.320And, and for me, I mean, there are, I've got many valuable answers to, to explain, you know, what gets me up in the morning, but one of which is seeing how helpful some of your ideas that people consume.
00:20:45.120And they, they come up to you in the street.
00:20:46.660So it could be a complete anonymous person who comes up and says, oh my God, I'm just reading the parasitic mind now.
00:22:36.200And so that's really gone through multiple phases in my life.
00:22:39.140Phase one was just pure mindset, just getting people to understand how to build a belief and value system that will allow you to achieve your goals.
00:22:46.080And then now I've moved into another phase where I'm saying, okay, if you've primed your mind for that, what are you now doing with that primed mind?
00:22:55.680And so ultimately you get a mindset because you want an outcome, a useful mindset.
00:23:00.760And so focusing on the biggest ideas that we struggle with in our time.
00:23:07.920And so my world's really bifurcated into two things.
00:23:11.320I do a lot aimed at kids in the form of video games and comic books, which is the thing I am least known for.
00:23:18.140There's literally like 27 people currently that know that I spend time on that.
00:23:21.860And then what I'm known for is the stuff aimed at adults.
00:23:26.120And so I feel like it's pretty undeniable that we live in, if not the most pivotal, and I mean that truly in a, we're going to end up going in a different direction, the most pivotal time in human history or one of the pivotal moments in human history.
00:23:43.180And being awake, paying attention to what's happening and making sure that even though I don't believe in free will, I believe that we do respond to ideas.
00:23:58.460And so I try to put out ideas that are going to be more useful.
00:24:03.200And so going back to the idea of, okay, what just mapping out, you're having a biological experience.
00:24:09.740What are the biological states you're in the grip of?
00:24:12.920How do you begin to change that through your belief systems and your value systems?
00:24:17.880And so I spend a lot of time doing that and then helping myself and others think from first principles, approaching the biggest issues of our time.
00:24:27.120So, you know, bringing people on and talking about Israel, Palestine, bringing people on and talking about Trump and Biden, bringing people on and talking about this one really has my heart, the economy.
00:24:38.660And just like, okay, like, what do we do with this?
00:24:48.820So if I were going to sum it up in a single word, it would be empowerment.
00:24:53.280But that's why to me, the interviews that I do are still based on empowerment, as is the video game.
00:24:58.760You know, it's very interesting because, for example, in hearing your response to what are the five books that have influenced you the most, or when I hear a lot of your responses to my questions, you're very much someone who's in prescriptive mode.
00:25:14.380And let me give a broader academic explanation of what that word means in the broader sense.
00:25:22.240So when you study decision-making, as I have, you could study decision-making in one of three ways.
00:25:28.540You could study decision-making under the normative framework.
00:25:33.420Normative means, so classical economists have these axioms of rational choice.
00:25:38.940If I prefer car A to car B, and if I prefer car B to car C, then it must be that I prefer car A to car C.
00:25:47.760If I don't adhere to that, I'm being irrational in that strict sense.
00:25:53.800I'm not adhering to that axioms of rational choice.
00:25:56.960And so I am violating a normative principle.
00:26:00.000Normative meaning it abides to a norm of rationality.
00:26:03.940So that's one way of studying decision-making.
00:26:06.580Many psychologists and behavioral scientists, such as myself, will study descriptive decision-making.
00:26:14.340I'm not trying to study decision-making in the context of a norm.
00:26:17.880I just want to describe how do people shop for a car?
00:26:21.100How do people choose between political candidates?
00:26:24.280How do you decide when you've got three attractive prospective mates whom you're going to marry, right?
00:26:29.800You just want to describe the process and the behavior.
00:26:32.880And then the third type, so I said normative, I said descriptive.
00:26:38.000The third type that's going to fit you is prescriptive decision-making.
00:26:43.320Prescriptive decision-making is when you try to develop a mathematical model that prescribes some optimal behavior.
00:26:51.940So, for example, there is something called the traveling salesman problem, whereby a traveling salesman has to visit 10 cities, A, B, C, D, E, F, right?
00:27:02.940In which order should he or she visit those cities to return back to the starting point so that you minimize the cost of travel or the gas cost?
00:27:15.300So there is an actual mathematical algorithm that I would solve that allows me to minimize cost.
00:27:36.200Is that something that you've uniquely found?
00:27:39.060Because until I wrote the happiness book, Tom, which involves prescription, how to live a life so that you're happy,
00:27:47.960I had never been someone who was in prescriptive world.
00:27:50.540I was in academic world, I was in descriptive world, and it's only recently that I've entered prescriptive world.
00:27:56.800But whereas it seems like much of your interventions in life are prescriptive.
00:28:01.560What are your thoughts about all that?
00:28:03.400That, I mean, you've just put words to something that I can see now strikes me as so self-evidently the way to live that I've never thought about it.
00:28:16.680And I'm playing my life back like in the sixth sense for everybody that I meet.
00:28:21.900I'm like, wait, were they in one of the other two modes?
00:30:12.040So, for example, if I were to say to you, you know, I'm I'm going to go back to school and get a degree because I love the purity of learning.
00:30:29.220On the other hand, if I said, you know, I really think that I need to change careers.
00:30:33.380And I think based on my unique skill sets and based on the market conditions, I probably should go back and get an accounting degree because that's going to secure.
00:30:43.580There I am being extrinsically motivated.
00:30:47.180So I think it might be it's an empirical question that one could test.
00:30:50.860I think that people who might be very strong on prescriptive approaches to life might oftentimes score high on the extrinsic thing.
00:31:25.760Well, but so let me tell you my reason and then you tell me what yours is.
00:31:29.220Maybe it's the same because I'm so pure of spirit that if I go to a networking conference, I am violating my internal sense of I just want to connect with people for the love of connecting with them.
00:31:44.080But if there is an ulterior motive that I'm going there for networking purposes, it feels false and inauthentic to me.
00:31:53.580So because I have that purity strain in me, I can very much navigate an intrinsic world and I'm happy with it.
00:32:03.040And I say to a fault because oftentimes I need to be hit by the reality that says, hey, you know, you also have to maximize efficiency, as you said, or you have to solve real pragmatic goals.
00:32:17.740So maybe I'm too much on the intrinsic end and maybe you're more on the pragmatic end and maybe the optimal point is somewhere in the middle.
00:32:49.120And the closest thing I can get to, to a state that people would want to have as their default would be fulfilled.
00:32:56.920Fulfillment is the only emotional state that I know that can endure even grief.
00:33:03.980So I have a whole formula for what equals fulfillment.
00:33:06.860But I think that that is irrelevant for this conversation.
00:33:10.280I think the reality is that you want to feel a certain way in your life.
00:33:14.560I want to feel a certain way in my life.
00:33:16.560And it just so happens that the thing that gets me to where I want to be with just like where I'm feeling the way I want to feel the most often is being prescriptive.
00:33:28.340So that if we're roughly 50% hardwired and there's nothing you're going to be able to do to change it and 50% malleable, for whatever reason, at this point in my life, you put those two things together.
00:33:39.680And being prescriptive just is like the clouds part and the beam of sunshine falls on me.
00:33:44.520And whenever I can be in that mode, the world just feels right.
00:33:47.420Whereas for you, you're using a more, because I consider myself very intrinsically motivated, but just to use your language for a second, even if I am mistaken and I'm being extrinsically motivated, I'm still not pursuing anything other than a psychological state.
00:35:13.200But now that I see it, I can discard it.
00:35:16.860So anyway, obviously, not everybody views the world the way that I view the world.
00:35:22.440But I think we are all chasing the same thing, which is there's a certain way I want to feel.
00:35:26.540And I'm going to do the things that make me feel that thing.
00:35:30.180Do you think that given that now you clearly see how much, as you said, the clouds part when you enter prescriptive world, could you have foreseen, you know, in a parallel universe, you becoming a clinical psychologist, right?
00:35:46.760Because a clinical psychologist, by definition, I mean, they come to see you, they lay out the fact that they've had six very unsuccessful relationships.
00:35:58.680They don't see the recurring pattern that they're always picking the exactly imperfect person to be with.
00:36:07.600They want stability, but they're attracted to the bad boy.
00:36:10.400And it takes you, the clinical psychologist, to say, well, do you see that each of these patterns are repeating themselves?
00:36:16.360So could you have seen, by the way, not that it's too late.
00:36:19.360If tomorrow you decide to be a clinical psychologist, I'm sure that you could go and get the training to be it.
00:36:23.820But would that have been something that you would have naturally gravitated toward when you were deciding to go to the USC film school?
00:36:31.960Oh, I could have gone into clinical psychology?
00:37:56.420So, I mean, you're exactly the non-psychoanalyst because the psychoanalyst says, let's dig deep into your soul for the next 19 years before we may have a light of hope.
00:38:12.520Whereas you're saying, I'm going to talk to you once or twice on the couch.
00:38:16.120If by the third time you're not implementing some of this stuff, you're out of here.
00:38:20.260Yeah, so I've thought long and hard about, because I do love teaching.
00:38:26.700Now, do I teach one-on-one or do I focus on scale?
00:38:31.160And so people that have heard me talk long enough will hear me say, I'm a scale guy.
00:38:35.720What I mean by that is now I don't have to worry about the sort of one-off, are you doing this or not?
00:38:41.120I'm putting out ideas that I use every day that have led me to tremendous levels of success.
00:38:45.820I accept that 2% of people will take those ideas and it will change their life forever and 98% won't.
00:38:52.320And then when I want to focus on the 98%, I go tell stories.
00:38:55.780And I just try to plant very simple ideas that nudge people in the right direction.