Tom Bilyeu

00:00five four three two the infamous Jamie countdown and we're live Tom what is up man so I'm bill you if you're wondering bill you people are wondering like how do I say that bill you dude I've eaten more of your bars than any bar ever in the history of bars next to you in the primal kitchen bars whoa that's it you're in those goddamn quest bars the especially those chocolate brownie ones dude tell me about it you guys nailed it with those thank you so what was the the idea behind the companies like some low sugar low carb nutrition yeah at the time that we were thinking of launching the company there was nothing on the market that we would eat it either tasted terribly and was good for you or it tasted great it was horrible for you so we wanted to create the first bar that tasted like a dead sugar but didn't and metabolically speaking had a great response did it's a grind man to find if

00:56we could he try to go on a keto diet and you know you try to find like really good healthy delicious stuff to snack on like well here's a question dude quest bars kick you out of ketosis no really no see if I eat a full bar I'm gonna be out real sure but it only has like nine grams of carbs protein is high so it well it's actually less than that depending do you count net carbs or full-blown you know what I'm very loose with it I don't do a whole lot of counting carbs for the most part what I'm doing is eating whole foods the most part I'm doing is a lot of a lot of that primal kitchen you know that chipotle mayo that chipotle lime mayo I'm a fantastic I might eat a case of that a month and I'm not bullshitting I put it on everything because it's super high fat and really delicious so I put it on eggs I go cook up a couple eggs in the morning and then

01:51I'll take some scoops of that chipotle lime mayo and just slap it on there with sliced jalapenos using so I'm getting a lot of fat you know the macros on it no I don't talk to it all that you really a nerd but you stay in ketosis you can what yeah take your blood levels I have yeah I have yeah I don't do it on a regular basis I just essentially eat well what I'm doing is for the most part if I'm eating foods the foods that I'm eating are very high fat very low carbs and then 20% of the time I off 20% of the time like 20% like I tried to off too hard like with desserts and stuff like that do you like desserts yes even on a keto diet you don't find that that's reduced yeah it is reduced but once you start eating the ice cream you remember how awesome it is but a lot of exhaustion is ketones yes yeah never done ever ah did I try it once I think I did I was told

02:45that it would like help with a headache and I was like I call didn't okay for like the keto flu it wasn't when I had I did have keto flu profoundly but that's what happens when you're a dumbass the first time that you try going ketogenic how did you would you do I went true four to one after a three day fast four to one explain people so for every gram of combined protein and carbohydrate I ate I ate four grams of fat which is brutally difficult to do you're never gonna do it by accident I had a spreadsheet and everything that I ate had to go through the math so I didn't go out like what's this gonna be as a total meal you you literally have to like scrape every bit of oil out of the pan like you've got to be hardcore stop up like if you've been habit or something stop up all the oil to make sure that you're getting at all it was hateful I absolutely hated it was so

03:35disgusting and Dom has talked about that the power mobility of four-to-one is very very low at the time I thought I needed to do that I was trying to do cancer prevention so I went hard hardcore keto trying to get the ratio between my blood glucose and my ketones right were you experiencing health difficulties no so but at Quest we were really trying to like experiment like find out what's the edge if we were putting millions of dollars into research especially into cancer hmm trying to find out like does the ketogenic diet have the positive implications on cancer that we hope it does and at least in a clip that I saw on your show when Tom was on he was talking about that the the enter the energy crisis that the cells go through that are cancerous cuz solving some forms of cancer yeah I think there's there's some you think it's all of them I know some people are there was an

04:20article recently about brain cancer there was a type of brain cancer that actually lived off fats that didn't respond to a low-carb diet mmm I mean I believe there's several different kinds of cancer and so I don't know if all the data's in on that right that's so your idea was just to do it just to get yourself in a really healthy state and monitor your own yeah my thing like if if it has that potential it's worth trying right what's a three day fast not a big deal and then two weeks of being in ketosis going into it I didn't know how hard it was gonna be I didn't know what four-to-one was gonna feel like and I didn't know how to supplement so it was it was real misery and I really did have what they call the keto flu you feel like you have the flu it sucked and my whole thing is like being Boober disciplined so once I commit to something I'm not gonna stop

05:06just because it sucks and I wasn't smart enough to go and ask somebody like what do you do like is there a way to supplement your way out of this so I just muscled through but it was total misery finally I rushed my you never tried exogenous ketones that doesn't make a lot of sense so you know Peter with TIA right no you don't know Peter idea who is it you have to immediately get him on your show so Peter attea is a good friend of Dominick D'Agostino so that would be an easy connect and he's a doctor a physician he did a TED talk which crushed absolutely amazing and he goes from practicing traditional medicine and and this is his TED Talks listen to me this is him saying it being fairly judgmental about the people that he's treating this woman comes in she has diabetes and god I think she was either there to have an amputation or she'd already had one something anyway

05:53he realizes in as he like starts breaking all this down that this is like a human being and he what they're doing isn't solving the problem so he's like somewhere the system is failing a lot of people and how do we rectify it and as he's giving the TED talk he starts like crying is so amazing especially getting to know him and knowing that is totally sincere this was not a guy faking it for the camera and so ends up completely changing his life he starts really trying to figure out what's going on metabolically finds high fat finds ketogenic s' for a while was known as the the fat man or the keto man I forget what they called him but long before I'd ever heard of ketogenic s-- and starts new si you heard the new si and the nutritional science initiative raises a ton of money and they're try to do like real double-blind empirical studies on nutrition because they're

06:43like like there's so much guesswork in all of this we really want to prove it ends up leaving that I don't I won't speak to why I honestly don't know but ends up leaving new C founding a private practice as like a high-end concierge guy we were trying to get him involved at Quest just because his nutritional e this guy's mind is unreal and so talking to him about that stuff and him walking us through like keto flu and how you can actually supplement your way out of it know that but I unfortunately didn't know it at the time so yeah I suffered needlessly hang so that's interesting is a weird feeling right because your body just feels so weak and you don't understand it you've been eating and you you almost learn denial like I can't believe that this is just carbs there's no way like this is something something's going on yeah is it carbs or is it protein I mean I guess

07:31gluconeogenesis is turning the protein into glucose but it is weird or is it that and this I actually don't know the answer to and I'm now outside my realm of what I understand so full disclosure mm-hmm there's obviously something in the micronutrients because the people that later told me you could have supplemented your way out of this they were talking about and I don't remember well but it's like magnesium and some other things it wasn't oh just you know have more carbs or more protein but I will say at a two to one diet you at least I didn't experience the flu at all and then that was sustainable I did that for nine months and that was amazing it was transformative from an anti-inflammatory perspective is just unbelievable so just more low-carb than keto total yeah so I've been low carb for a very long time because I if I am having a cheat weekend you were talking

08:18about this just live if I'm having a cheat wake and be right you can hear me getting fatter like it is so crazy how well my body turns a calorie into adipose tissue it's nuts so much fatter quicker I get fat very very fast especially with carbohydrate but even if I spike my calories and they're all clean I'll get fat fast Wow and this didn't used to be the case before you tried these low carb diets now this is always a case always it wasn't until yeah yeah that's why I tried low carbs I'm so frustrated with always being like having a wet look mm-hmm wet look yeah what's that yeah maybe I'm making that up so that's what my partners and I used to refer to people like me who just have a natural smooth layer of fat like I have to know I have to do so much cardio to get that like dry look we're really tight like a massive amount of cardio and is that the case even with a like a low-carb diet

09:13like when yeah I'll get leaner on a low-carb diet to be sure but it doesn't like if I want to be lean lean I have to do cardio so you're essentially got a really good adaptation body for famine yeah I'll survive the famine the the zombie apocalypse I've got you like I'm making it through that hmm very confident do you watch Walking Dead because a lot of people to think they're gonna make it they don't make it man way behind I'm unlike seasoned where'd you stop cuz people are telling me I'm gonna jump on when they killed Glenn oh wow it's a spoiler alert I guess right I made it that far but yeah now we're beyond that so but here's what I find interesting about that is I want to do like some content on what are like the ten leadership lessons you can learn from The Walking Dead because I think they're they're like that's what I find interesting about the show Rick is

10:05inconsistent yes I'm not buying them in this the last season that's why I bailed out I don't know man I mean what led leadership things you're gonna learn when everyone's turned to and bunch of people killing each other all right so let's go to one that you would have seen since before Glenn dies you've got the kid they find him at the bar right and got his teammates I don't have a better word for that his clan whatever they go ballistic they start shooting you take him back to your place you want to help him he bailed his leg he's hurt do you kill him do you set him free what do you do well it's a TV show it's not real you're really around the guy you'd have to know right you know I think it's part logic and part instinct when you deal in situations like that like how much of this guy's behavior was because he was stuck with a bunch of other shitty people and how different is he

10:53when he's free and how much does he listened to reason and logic and how much is he willing to contemplate the possibility that there's a better life everybody works together if not kill him and you don't want if you think that he's immeasurably damaged like maybe he's a big liar he lies about a lot of stuff and you know you can't count on him you know he's gonna be a liability and he's not gonna be an asset and he might very well try to kill you in your sleep or something like that yeah you gotta kill him right yeah that's what I find interesting about the show is it it makes you think about stuff like that let me ask you this if something does happen like asteroid impact right and there's only like 10% of people left do you want to be amongst those 10% of people or would you rather be one of the people that died wow that seems like a trick question I want to be one of the

11:3510% like of that can I just say have you read The Stand no no dude you would love it yeah so it's about sure superflous right so it wipes out let's say it's 10% remember what the number is but it wipes out virtually everybody and then the remaining people have the task of rebuilding Society now it's the Stephen King novel so there's a lot of weird going on right but that captured my imagination so profoundly when I read it I read it probably fifteen years old dude I still think about that I think that would while I wouldn't want it cuz inevitably a lot of people that you love end up being in the 90% mmm so that would suck but if it happened it would be fascinating to see how we rebuild if you've seen the road that's a pretty dark take on what happens but yeah I'm a little more optimistic Lee I mean look it could be wonderful if you really can survive and you really find a way to

12:27live off the land and you find a good group of people and y'all work in coordination and you cooperate and you have a wonderful little civilization take care of each other or if you get horribly ugly and then you could be dealing with cannibals and Marauders and people invading you and where do you fall hmm what I mean ninety percent ten percent Oh hundred percent ninety percent really hit me in the head with that rock Wow I'll call this dude that's interesting yeah I mean you don't want to be one of those survivors when there's nothing left you know you don't want to be little people seen if you can eat a charred foot you know cuz you're super starving well put just I mean maybe it's a cop-out look the only reason why we're here is because monkeys when they were living in trees you know and they figured out a way to get to become a person over who knows how many millions

13:16of generations or whatever it's been but I think you really stop and think about like what your life would be if everybody out there was dead and there was only like 10% of people that first of all 90% of people dead that's a lot of stinking rotten bodies so you got to get through that that's gonna be awful there's gonna be 10% what's the odds that any know how to work electricity or know how to get a generator going or know how to read up a power plant like what if a power plant goes down what if the grid is down you need you have to fix a car do you even understand how a car works like most people don't 10% if you could get really unlucky and get 10% of people who don't know and they're just looking for a job yep those are the people that survive no question that's case you might not make it do you know the you know the not in the United States but the human

14:07population got down to I think they think as low as like I want to say 7,000 people at one point in time after the eruption of something like the supervolcano yeah there was some supervolcano eruption that there's a theory that it dropped the human population down to an unbelievably low level and it was not that long ago either I think they think it was like 60,000 years ago or something like that oh I didn't know the timing but yeah I had heard that which is pretty fascinating not good not good if that's real 60,000 years ago especially when you think of genetic diversity that's really terrifying yeah maybe that accounts for a lot of our fuck-ups you know it's interesting too and they also they keep finding these new humans you know hmm like fossilized you're talking about yeah like new humans that they didn't know existed like they found one in Russia fairly recently like an offshoot

14:55of humans like we just kind of got lucky to make it to this that you know non-red homo Deus No so Noah you've all her re also wrote sapiens he talks about that sort of thing in both of his books like how is it luck what do we have like what made humans the apex predator and looking at you know our ability to be social but where does that come from like when you look at so the way that he ended up defining it is the reasons that humans become the apex predator is because unlike an ant which is actually very very impressive with how they can organize large number of hands beings whatever you very much fight as they can't do it flexibly so it's like we have sort of a pre-written code and these are the things that we do and that's it and you following the line you go to food like you build the colonies it's always the same way humans can organize and similarly large numbers but

15:45they can do it flexibly so you could organize and watch a NASCAR race you can organize and fight a war you can organize and build a church like whatever the ways that we want to organize and one of the things he says sits at the heart of that is our ability to convey kinship through something other than genetic relation so what he refers to it as is like that the grand fiction the narrative that we tell each other which is often religion or whatever but it lets people who've never met like the way I always like to think of it imagine two guys that meet each other and they both ride Harley's never ever met but they click right because they share that thing which is a stand-in for a belief system so that to me is is pretty interesting as to whether it like and and his hypothesis is the reason that we ended up taking over Neanderthals and all that was

16:28because because of that because we could organize using symbology using metaphor we were able to organize more flexibly in larger numbers and really be accurate with how to attack and things like that so that we could eliminate a rival clan totally makes sense I mean that's a it's one of the more fascinating aspects of being a person right that we can assume so many different forms and culture and behavior and the patterns that we follow but you got to think if we got down to 7,000 people were pretty lucky I'm pretty lucky like that was it wasn't like a full wipeout I'm terrified of Yellowstone well that's one of those as you look closely had it was like I just pretend that that's not a threat I don't know what else to do there's nothing can do but if it's if it goes it's a global one like it's a real problem globally I mean it's locally it's a disaster but globally it's it's a

17:20real problem it's gonna cloud the skies it's gonna put us into nuclear winter those those big ones like the one that they think did you find anything on that one where was it that's a Indonesia South Asia yeah yeah something crazier on it too it said there's a couple studies that how many people were left and that said there's roughly maybe a thousand reproductive adults some as low as 40 reproductive pairs which would be like 80 people this will be kids maybe but this that's rough what Jesus Christ most likely there is a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 but draggled homo sapien struggled together for a pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until the late Stone Age Wow when we humans began to recover holy but there was a time with hold on sorry we Dan damn near went extinct Wow so yeah 70,000 BC so a little bit more than 70,000 years ago a volcano hold on

18:23hold on called Toba in Sumatra in Indonesia went off blowing roughly 650 miles of vaporized Rock into the air it's the largest volcanic eruption we know of dwarfing everything else holy man that's comparison wow that's interesting to see that you see Mount st. Helens the amount of ejected material versus Wow so what so it got down to as low as 40 mating pairs a study suggests that yeah holy yeah I mean we're just at the whim of the natural forces that make mountains and there's a giant volcano a caldera volcano under Yellowstone and I think like a week ago they had something like 1,500 earthquakes wasn't it like some studies taking like a month in a month period time they they they it was like really recently they talked about this how many earthquakes they had over a very short period of time just constant and consistent just boom in June it's at 400 okay there was something in believe

19:36it was in July was another one like really recently but you know that just that kind of but there can be 400 earthquakes in a month that's the thing I was looking at 878 earthquakes in two weeks that's what it was so it's like 1,200 plus or quakes in a month alone in two weeks and that's not much you know it's small earthquake but it's the the idea that there's so significant volcanic activity under something that we didn't even know was a volcano until like I want to say like a decade or two ago they use satellite imagery to figure out that it was a caldera they didn't know it is yeah I think you can you can't see it until you get far enough up that you really start a crater that's what's nuts yeah they realized what it is must have been like a horror movie when they pulled back and went oh my god oh my god it's like that scene in Twilight Zone and like to serve man it's a cookbook I

20:39haven't seen that you haven't seen that no I've seen precious few Twilight zones to be honest to serve man is one of the best ones yeah it's a bunch a Lian's come down here spoiler alert it's from nineteen fifty bucks but they come down here and they realize that they somewhere along the line people realize that there's something going on and that they're taking these people bored their spaceship and they're not coming back and then at the end they've left this book and the book they thought to serve man was like they wanted to serve us and turns out it's a cookbook that's too late they're already bored spaceship ready to get eaten it's dope dude the twilight zone has some awesome endings I have to give it that well they had such a bounty of premises like their premises are incredible like to this day if you stop and think about all the remember William Shatner with the sea that one

21:32but there was like I think I've seen like three and I don't remember them he went to a diner and there was a place that he was at that had like one of those little like a fortune teller box it was like these two have but jukeboxes you know that we're in do you ever see a jukebox in a diner yeah yeah so like you'd be sitting at a table you can actually control the music this thing that you're seeing up there he had a fortune teller and you would put in a cent a one cent coin and ask him a question yes or no question it would give you answers and he became obsessed with it I started started with them and it was like it was just getting too close to reality doesn't say is it coming true like it's yeah I don't give away any much okay no spoilers but it was just great show man I mean just they tried to bring it back right but I think it tanked wouldn't they try to bring it

22:21back god I want to say early nineties yeah yeah mmm I could be way off on the date but they definitely tried to bring him up without rod sterling it's gonna be tough and I wonder how many of them were actually written by rod sterling a good question cuz he was always the host of it imagine if he was just a host and really didn't have nothing to do with it really yeah yeah it's hard when you get something like that first of all you got to pay a lot for it because I know that was one of the reasons why they switched over the Tower of Terror ride at Disneyland to guardians of the galaxy was that they couldn't come to a licensing agreement with the Twilight Zone really yeah does the Tower of Terror ride was always about the Twilight Zone you know with rod sterling would come out in the beginning of it and that was the whole the whole ride was about this

23:11haunted Tower right you know and you get in and it just takes you for this crazy ride and they somehow or another couldn't come to some sort of a deal so decided to turn into the guardians of the galaxy ride seems the if you have a deal with Disney you know seems like you'd want to keep that rocking keep that dude yeah somebody got greedy I would agree with them that's a big part of business isn't it yes somebody just gets a little crazy does a little too much adderall it's a little fired up gets cocky yeah you'd be surprised how often that happens behind closed doors entrepreneurship is it gets weird it's sure like you were too lit you're just dealing with going back to your point about these are monkeys that learned how to have sex and then do something you feel that sometimes and also I would imagine being an entrepreneur like organizing a team of people that are

24:02gonna work together in harmony yeah and not stab each other in the back not trip each other up with office politics not getting away with a bunch of social issues between each other like how do you structure that like I would have I mean I can't imagine would it be like to run a significant business and have a lot of it being dependent the way the people in the office say you don't even know yes hire them the way they interact with each other yes a one you have to get really good at thin slicing people you have to be able to very rapidly identify like are these gonna be people that are gonna make this a better place to work which is one of the things that I think is most importantly forget are they good at their job that's important to you got to know that but are they gonna make this a better place to work and some of the biggest mistakes I made in my career

24:47have been keeping people cuz they were good at their job even though they were toxic to the environment and walking dead types in there telling you like there are lessons that you can learn about like entrepreneurship and stuff like that where it from pop culture so yeah that that would be one of them that was really intense figuring that one out that was a hard lesson and then knowing when your businesses transition so in the beginning you're a startup nobody knows who you are you don't have enough revenue so you need people that are gonna just bust ass they're gonna come in they're gonna be hardcore hustlers get it done whatever it takes to am on a Friday they're gonna be there for you but then at some point and the reason by the way that you're that you can make that exchange is you can't pay them a lot they don't have a lot of skills so what they have to offers they're willing

25:30to work hard so you're essentially throwing human capital at whatever problems you have now if you get the right people motivated and you're a lead from the front kind of guy like when we first started quest I was wearing a hairnet every day lab coat I was making protein bars when I would walk in and say what's the worst job and whatever the guy said this is the worst job today oh it's a little sticky whatever so this stations actually the worst so I would take that station and I would rock it with a smile on my face I would be upbeat energetic and I would just outwork everybody and the reason I did that was I knew when the day came that it was gonna be a Friday at 2:00 a.m. and they're all gonna want to go home and but we've got to get this batch done that no one would ever question my work ethic so when I said guys I need you to stay like they would be there also

26:11because of where we were when you're in manufacturing you're inevitably in the inner city is the only place you can afford that kind of real estate so we were hiring from the surrounding neighborhood so we're literally in Compton hiring people that grew up in the inner cities hardcore and I remember my first lesson in hope and one of the guys came up when he was just killing himself he's doing such an amazing job and just always working putting in the hours doing whatever it takes and he came up to me one day said you know you care more about my success in my own mother and he was like I never had a vision of my future I didn't want to look at it it was because his sister had been shot to death in the heart with an ak-47 in his front yard when she was like 12 somebody's just there's so many stories like that you can't imagine another guy held his father while he bled to death from a

26:55gunshot wound to the head I mean just nuts and so hearing him say that I was like he was saying it as a way to explain why he was so committed why he was working so hard because basic he didn't use these words but basically I've never had hope before and this is really exciting so but then understanding where is that transition right where do you go from okay I need a bunch of hustlers we don't have the money to throw at really skilled labor so I need to throw it at people that will just work really really hard but then at some point it's what I call the dragon begins to eat its own tail so you're growing so fast you're getting so big that without the systems without professional management in place like you you just can't get bigger because people start stepping on each other's toes it starts getting confusing the leadership isn't close enough to everybody that that sort of do-or-die

27:39mentality that they would see in me they would see me on the line they would see how I would work it's not there anymore right so now there's layers between you and it started to fall apart that that was a hard lesson so realizing that whoa like I've got to now start bringing in professional managers actually know what they're doing that have done this before built out production studios or manufacturing so that we can really do it right that we can put systems in place to take care of people but then you get bureaucracy which is like a nightmare especially for the hustlers so then they feel disenfranchised but it's the only way for you to grow and how do you deal with all that so yeah it is weird I've gotta imagine also it's like you want the people that are working for you to have some sort of stake in the success of the business so like organizing that it's got to be

28:23difficult like how much of a percentage of the business do you give to the workers like you have to make to incentivize them to like really innovate and there's got to be something on the line for them they would there's something to some sort of a reward I would imagine right will you be shocked how many people don't agree with that now I'm with you and to me it's great and I guess it's what's the argument against it that you're not going to get anything for it that it's nice in idea but they won't actually work harder they won't work smarter they they just they're not in a position to bring benefit from getting that but here's what I'll this is the argument I've always given to people that say that it you're not gonna get the benefit from them maybe that you would get from you like I get equity is triggering you in a certain way and you've got a certain skillset and so you can execute

29:09against that but especially now from Millennials down the sense of working for the man working for some other like there's no stability in that equation anymore you used to trade 40 years of your life because you could just kind of count on the fact you would be there for 40 years those days are gone man people spend it's something like 1.8 years or something at a given job and then they move on the best way to get a raise is to jump to another company so Millennials dude they jump around around around so there's no longer this like hey I'm gonna give you stability and you're gonna give me like an adequate level of performance so those days are gone now my thing with ownership is one tie it to being there and tell an exit so that what I'm trying to incentivize is you taking me all the way across the finish line so if you don't take me across the finish line you don't get

29:54anything fair enough and then on top of that just the sense of really being able to say I own a piece of this company is so empowering for people especially for people for whom that's never been an option maybe it was never an option for their parents like they they've never even heard of a company doing something like that being able to go to literally the lowest person on the totem pole and say I'm gonna give you it's gonna be small obviously but I'm gonna give you some percentage ownership in this company and now literally we are all owners so you have like the most selfish incentive to make this company and successful ever no this gets tricky can I ask you to stop you're there what what is across the finish line to sell a company so I peel all right so you either sell or IPO and I was gonna say what gets tricky is like the company I'm building now impact Theory I don't plan

30:43to sell it what is that so impact Theory is a traditional narrative studio so I think Disney so we're building making movies build these TV shows calm grandiose building the next Disney how dare you well bigger than Disney what just just to be honest I don't want to possibly do that you're gonna have and would he call on it again what's the name of it impact Theory you're gonna have like impact Theory land in Paris no probably not but only because follow me here only because by the time that we'll be able to do that someone in need a similar timeline around we need 50 60 years to pull this off I'm not okay and by then or augmented reality it just won't make sense to build out the physical structures right I guess some people want to rock it old-school they do and we could really get into that about how the world's about to bifurcate and you're gonna get between people who

31:30augment themselves brain augmentation and refuse to do you read Fahrenheit 451 know how dude cool part in the book all right so the world splits knowledge is dangerous so we just burn books off hand and it creates a really stable society so most people are all for it but you have these people who are like that like I want to read you don't get to tell me what to think and so they move off into the woods and I remember reading that going I can actually see something like that happening and I think the moment that that's gonna happen is when humans begin to augment themselves not to overcome like cochlear implants who were deaf everybody gets that retinal replacements and things okay you couldn't see people get that but when it becomes no no I just want to raise my IQ I want to be able to process data faster that's when people are gonna be like that and

32:14you're gonna get a bifurcation now how weird does it get because now the reason I am convinced that people are gonna do this AI is gonna get real real fast even if real fast is 50 years like it's gonna get really compelling and you're gonna find people just to keep up with artificial intelligence you have to augment yourself otherwise you just accept that this stuff is gonna outpace you and I guess I'm just did lowly human now so I think it is going to have don't think there's any question about that but I also don't think there's any question when that starts happening some people will refuse well if we really do augment ourselves to keep up with artificial reality artificial reality is supposed to change like ten thousand years of advancements in the first two weeks once it starts augmenting itself once artificial reality figures out how to do a better

33:01job of creating artificial reality which is absolutely going to do if they can learn and actually create right we're just talking about this with Brendan Schaub was in here earlier about the movie alien covenant we gave away spoiler alert see that movie I haven't well there's one of the things in there's these robots these artificial intelligent robots and they realized that giving them creativity was a huge mistake and so they don't have creativity in their new models it's really fascinating because if you do give some sort of an artificially intelligent creature thing whatever you want to call it that you make once it starts becoming sentient and creating things itself it's going to look at its own wiring it's gonna go why the did you connect that to that when you just do it this way and why look at its own code like with this pathway that's kind of redundant how

33:47about we just do it this way how about you open up that end of it how about people looking at things because they're worried about mortality and all these different you know their own their own demise and the finality of death and that this is all tripping them up and they really should be thinking about this way and then boom they're off to the races and in a week two weeks three weeks they're down the road thousands of years of human evolution yeah have you you heard about the face book AI yes yes fascinating yeah they sort of talked on you know in any language yeah wasn't and everybody pulled the plug first one that was like oh like I didn't think of even the the most simple ways that they could just rip step to the side and like Isis out you're you're absolutely right it's gonna happen fast it's gonna get weird questions is it become the matrix or what does it become

34:32it could be something unimaginable I mean it could be a real god I mean we really could create and that's not a bad use of the word in the term when you're talking about artificial intelligence I think one of the problems with that is we start thinking robot oh you make it an artificial robot you're making a system okay and this system has desires and this system has goals and it has if you're if you're somehow another engineering the ability to create and innovate into this intelligence that you create called artificial all you want but it's real it's right there so I don't know what it is alright I think the problem with the term artificial reality is we start thinking about science fiction start thinking about robots and things long you're making a thing that thinks for itself and it doesn't just do things like your computer does things no no this does things without you asking it

35:28to that's where gets super weird and then it starts examining if you give it the ability to create and the desire to create it's gonna start examining all the different systems around it and replicating it and figuring out far better solutions than our stupid little monkey mine's gonna be able to do and within a decade or two decades we're probably if we do augment ourselves to keep up with it we're gonna be unrecognizable we're gonna be all locked into some gigantic worldwide wireless information hub but we're exchanging ideas and emotions with each other it's it's I mean having the access to information on just demand like we do now is probably changing us in some really profound ways that we're not even aware of right now and the idea of this becoming just a baby step and some infinite journey once sentient AI goes live we could I mean guys like Elon Musk

36:29are terrified you should be paying attention the people are pooh-poohing that I'm like man I don't know that guy seems smart yeah yeah we have to be insanely thoughtful and I think and look I I am a neophyte I'm not the guy to listen to and you should be listening to people like Elon Musk on the topic but my gut instinct is it's the underlying drives and you talked about that once you give them the drive to get now it gets weird so what are the things that you imbue them with at the earliest level that has to be decided way early so imagine if you imbue the AI at Facebook with a desire to connect to their human overlords and communicate effectively and make sure that they're kept in all that stuff like that's gonna give you a very different result than failing to give them the desire to you know please or whatever like humans have a desire to connect with each other they

37:17have empathy they have compassion and it is only in the rare case of a true sociopath that that kind of thing is missing and we see if you think of a sociopath is essentially AI gone wrong we see the kind of damage that they can wreak on the world so you have to be so thoughtful about what that underlying desire system is the thing that propels them forward yeah and giving them the ability to rewire whatever desire system is if they decide that there has to be some sort of and there's some sort of reward for competing so they decide they're going to compete and then they start looking at how they can how their thought processes is arranged how their coding is arranged and they go well this is not the most efficient way for us to compete the most efficient way for us to compete is to be completely ruthless and not worry about biological life at all but let's get into that

38:05though so have you seen the studies that they've done on trying to figure out like so if you heard obviously you've heard nice guys finish last right so a guy named Eric Barker wrote this book called barking up the wrong tree he covered I forget who did the actual studies forgive me because I'm now tributing it to Eric Barker and he was just talking about somebody else but they ran these studies where they wanted to find out do nice guys finish last or not and what they found looking at the data nice guys finish last and they finished first so if you're a nice guy and you let people take advantage of you all the time you're just gonna get trod upon but if you're a nice guy and people know like whoa you're a nice guy and you want to do great things for you and I call this the Keanu Reaves effect like look how far that guy's gone it's unbelievable his career is unimaginably

38:44great and when you hear people talk about him like just buy so quiet in private but behind the scenes everybody's like he's a good dude I've never met him I can't tell you but just like you hear that over and over and over he's a good dude good dude good dude and I think that that's created a lot of the opportunities in his life so somebody created this basically contest where they said submit your you're AI and they're gonna compete in a contest to see who get an essentially it's called the prisoner's dilemma so in the prisoner's dilemma goes something like this and hopefully I nailed this first shot here the prisoner's dilemma is let's say you and I were both arrested now we know that we actually committed the crime we did it together we're arrested we're now put in separate cells to be interrogated we can't communicate at all if we both stay silent we only get one year if I rat you

39:32out but you don't rat me out then I go off scot-free and you get five years if you rat me out and I don't write you out vice versa and if we both rat each other out then we get like three years or something so the best thing in no uncertain terms is one year right we both stay silent but you never know what the other person is going to do so and you can get zero by ratting the other person out so actually to your advantage in a one-off to just say yep him he did it until he gets out of jail and kills you so there's that and so that gets into this thing and so they said what we have to do is let them play it multiple times so that you have the equivalent of he gets out of jail and then he kills you right and what they found they have these really complicated algorithms ones where like they're taking all these factors into play and ultimately they had people

40:16that they're algorithms that were like the pure bad guy always taking advantage the pure nice guy never taking advantage and then the one that one was the simplest piece of code I think it was two lines of code and it was code named tit for tat so it goes in it assumes you're gonna be a good guy so it stays silent the first time but if you rat me out then the next time I rat you out and what it does is it it because you had all these different algorithms that don't know each other competing all trying their best strategy and what it found was tit for tat was ultimately the one that won because it would actually other ones that were learning from your behavior it was so easy to predict also people that led was something good they ended up in a virtuous cycle forever so tit for tat ends up being the best strategy so from that perspective actually interesting cuz it's not always

40:59a thing you think like mercilessness doesn't necessarily win and so finding like what is that equivalent in the machine world right and it comes back to you what you're talking about what's the reward right so once you know what the reward is then you can have a better guess as to where they'll settle out and then their ability to code themselves I mean I feel like if you have an artificial intelligence and you give it the ability to create a new artificial intelligence and you eliminate whatever possible restrictions or firewalls or whatever we put on it yeah so once they start writing their own code or that well not necessarily it comes down to but we could be right so it comes down to whether they want they want a relationship with us or not and that's why I think the real race is not to let AI get very far ahead so AI will follow an exponential curve so it will

41:49eventually be so rapid right so Exponential's are simple doublings so most people think linear so if I say I'm gonna take 30 steps I'll end up about 30 yards away but if I take 30 exponential steps so I go first one yard than two yards and four yards and eight then sixteen thirty doublings is like a billion meters so you're like around the earth 26 times or something crazy so an exponential curve can get freaky but like before you get to those like really astronomical the the elbow of the curve you could be making decisions along that path and this is definitely where I feel like oh god do I really know enough about this to say I'll high postulate from an ignorant standpoint and say in there somewhere as you can see like this is really taking off you can leverage what you're learning from the AI before it becomes a sort of all-powerful being they can be

42:38whatever it wants and we can then begin the augmentation process in humans which i think is inevitable yeah I think that's definitely inevitable it is fascinating when you think of the possibilities like that there's we're really just speculating as to what's going to be invented and how it's going to be implemented and what effect it's gonna have on society it's it's a really amazing time to be alive in that sense because I feel like we are literally on some sort of a launching pad watching it happen looking in a bunch of different directions trying to find out which one's gonna go alive first and the Facebook and I think happens everybody like oh Jesus look at that it's happening right there like wow okay they shut it down they shut it down okay we're good for now you know that I'll admit that one gave me pause well we are techno optimists but that gave me pause

43:22we're incredibly imperfect the the human animal with its emotions and fears and all the weirdness of us our anxiety all our contemplating the possibilities the ego all the different variables that we take into our lives in society and culture and civilizations these are like really ineffective ways to exist and and thrive but they're there animal ways integrated into this new hard one-zero culture like this this new binary thing this you know computer code operating systems internet information data engineering all these differently really hard things and then inside these heart I mean by hard meaning like you know like like a an intersecting line hits another wall and then there's a building and then there's steel glass all these things that humans have made but they're all like app absolute things and then with us you have like wow I wonder boy what's gonna happen to people like me

44:21have all these weird real human feelings and variables and you know maybe weaknesses that are we're not going to be able to compete if we hold on to all those all the things that make us amazing that make crazy movies and great books the creativity that allows someone to make them incredible fantasy painting or whatever the it is that it comes out of us in our creations we're gonna have to get rid of that if we're gonna keep up with the AI yeah I have no no use for that yes sort of so imagine here's something that I find interesting and I admittedly don't know how this plays out when something simply has the instructions to read your lines of code right so your code will tell you what to do and sure there's elements where it plugs in a variable and stuff and it probably be actually quite hard to build in things like creativity and stuff like that but one thing that I

45:15find fascinating about humans and I hope that there's a corollary in AI is if you damage a human's ability to feel emotion they can't make decisions so I found that so fascinating you literally they can they are normal in every other respect you know vs Ramachandran No so one of the most famous neuroscientist working to date an amazing human being done awesome Studies on stuff like this so what happens when people's brains get damaged you can say them if you damage them but what if they're born with this issue like what if they have like some sort of a and Michael it'll work either may seem a sociopath well it doesn't make them and this one in particular doesn't make them a sociopath but what it does is make it impossible for them to so if I said hey do you want to go get lunch we can either get Chinese or Thai and you just you you can rationalize why you would prefer Thai

46:07but you ultimately can't make a decision because you need that emotion to tell you what to do now emotions the theory goes are tied to your subconscious and the subconscious can process data faster and in vaster quantities so what is doing is instead of than feeding you information in the form of words it just feeds you a feeling and then you go based on that feeling but without that depth of information being processed and handed up in the form of an emotion a human can't make a decision I literally as I was reading about that I was like no no no man I'd be able to I'd be able to like I'd be able to reason my way around it but I know better than that it's crazy the human mind is nutso so the reason I hope that there's some corollary is that you need to build into AI fort to function properly rikes nobody knows how to build general AI yet right and I like to think that part of

46:54that is going to be the safety valve if they have to have emotions to give them that sort of non pure analytical it's got to be super flexible right because like strict analysis let's go Star Trek for a second so Spock right not always able to do what needs to be done you need the human who can be nimble and can read like all the ambiguities and morality and things like that and finally make a decision so there are times where logic is gonna let you down so I'm hoping that because they will need I hope this grand thing that in humans manifest as emotions moving they need something similar because in that you can program like we were talking earlier about how do you make the desire right the desire to do something if you can build in what I'll call goodness just for lack of a better word if you can build in goodness into that a desire to connect a desire to help you could in

47:45theory create benevolent AI mmm that's interesting bombs me riffing I am not no no no it just makes sense it also makes sense that emotions might be required to take action so you have to have some sort of a reason to take action well if you don't have a biological imperative right if you're not worried about breeding or your social status or what what is causing you to move forward and if you made a perfect AI that was a motion free would it just sit there idly and do nothing because there's no reward to it that's worth risking its existence or doing anything to change the environment around it other than perhaps the worry about the power shutting off and even then if it's not worried about existence if it doesn't have any fear if it doesn't have any emotion where it's considering the potential of death like why why would it act yeah okay and I think that would sit there I think at

48:41some point in the code you have to write something that compels them to do something so if you think of human beings as we exist now is like the first attempt sentient AI and I think that's a pretty plausible way to look at us you realize we are by nature an active species so we go into any environment we try to figure it out first and then dominate it and no matter where you put us that's we try to do you put us in the Arctic we're gonna try to tame the cold you put us on the plains in middle America and we're gonna hunt the Bison I mean it's just what we do right so you've got the drive of survival but you also just have that that exploration gene and maybe that's because that's how you avoided everybody dying of one plague because you just constantly wanted to spread out and dominate new Dominion but that's interesting and so at some level that's a decision when you think about AI so

49:32somebody whatever blind evolution fine but something has made that decision for us and in AI it will have to be a very cognizant decision and I think we'll have to to get to true general AI I think so many layers will have to be laid down of things like that oh this is an active robot it never just sits idly it always is looking for and what's that thing connection to be of service like decisions like that will have to be made now what do you do with the psychos like I'm going to create AI that takes that open source because this will inevitably be open source and I switch the variable from be nice to crush the skull of right so you know no question there are all kinds of problems but it is it is so interesting to me to think about this stuff it is it's also interesting to think of why people are so attracted to the romantic ideas of like living off the land like as technology is getting

50:29more and more complex you seeing more these reality shows where people like living the subsistence existence in like Alaska and you know salmon fishing and chopping their own wood for fire like yeah look at them this list they're existing at a very closed loop system you know like when you're when you're looking at like Plains Indians or something like that we romanticized the day they used all of the Bison they used the hide for their clothes and they they just did what they needed to stay alive and there was no innovation if you were born birth to death you wouldn't see any change and the civilization you would see essentially just like bows and arrows chasing bison making campfire picking up the teepee when the herd moves following them ad nauseam continue you know it's there that's very romantic to us right now particularly romantic I think it kind of always was in some way because I

51:21think we've always been aware that this thing once it gets going once the momentum gets rolling and that's you know as you're saying exponential change it's just junk it's a stacking on top of each other and then we all know like it's gotten to a weird unmanageable position during our lifetimes as far as information is concerned I mean when I was a kid you know read books you know if you wanted to watch something on TV you got to be there when it came on you know the and then you saw it once and that was a wrap you know and yet it gets he reruns is the only way you could see something again oh I remember this up so this is a rerun yeah you could choose one to happen now you can choose everything all the time on your phone you're carrying around your pocket it works for hours and hours of video the input that you have into that it's like you could create your own content you can make

52:09your own videos your sup I mean how many people are on YouTube that have millions and millions and millions of videos of hits rather of their videos and just all these people tuning into their content like all over the world and that just the idea that this is happening in our lifetime it didn't exist 20 years ago and it's not like one of the most impactful things in the history of human nature you gotta go back to like the printing press for anything to have you remotely as much of an impact on the culture as the internet itself that's crazy it's in our life crazy I know how old you 41 so you remember probably when the internet was clunky when it was just like like you know you were probably real young and like 17 or something like that and you first heard about AOL was when I was 18 was the first time somebody said the word hey we should get email accounts when we go to college

53:00sounds like the hell's an email see that's the right year cuz you got all the way to like high school and into college before it started affecting you I gotta live like a regular person I was a junior in college well yeah didn't have a oh well until I graduated so I was in my early 20s before I'd ever logged on to the Internet it you got mail that's crazy yeah I didn't I didn't get online until 94 I moved to LA and my friend Robbie who actually worked at a computer store before was a comedian he he taught me about it you're way ahead of me I didn't get on until 98 99 you know what I did as soon as I found out soon as I got online I started downloaded UFO files I was like with these UFO reports what's in there I was completely convinced that's I was like I'm gonna find that in the truth it's online you could download it and you can download it would take

53:51forever and like chunk chunk chunk as a 14-4 modem chunk trunk then I would print it wasn't it mostly like texts back then - yeah yeah there's like no pictures or if it wasn't it would take you hours to download anyway they're coming so slow clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk I remember my friend sent me a porno film not even a porno film it was a clip last like 15 seconds it took like an hour from sent it to me pictures used to take 20-30 minutes it still it was crazy yeah websites were so strange you know you would start loading them and they would come down like like water slowly coming down the side of a building you know you'd see it like it was weird just remembered my dad catching like he looked at the history and found some porn so I went out of eighth grade and it was like Pamela Anderson's first Playboy pictures and like I want to see what you were looking at Walla well I'm

54:43not here he went took a shower and the whole time it was still loading and I was just like oh no what's he gonna see what's you're gonna see that take a little line line that's on it 30 minutes prior later yeah now I mean you can get insane internet on your phone it's really pretty impressed me and then the phones are getting weirder and weirder to like remember when phones first came out the cool people at a little phone I can remember how to razor it was a look how little my phone is it's a skinny ass thing pick it up call people close it it's like a credit card shouts in my pocket you were the coolest man yeah one of them little phones you were an idiot if you have one of those big phones are you doing that big stupid phone now it's like things like this new Samsung there is no key old-school sorry but the really small ones were that right there the above one look at that

55:36dot as is that thing they tried to make a new kind of like dial all around it you hold that thing up to your ear like a cell phone I was like the size of a beeper yeah those were the those little tiny ass phones now you got that new Galaxy Note 8 have you seen that monstrosity gigantic it's huge so I guess whose pockets they're gonna fit these things in that's a real problem I first got my iPhone was at 6s was that the 6 plus that's big I was like goddamn like it won't even fit in my pocket so that was the first time and I'm still like I used the big phone but I knew one that's the SI plus she likes Christ that's that's the s8 the note 8 is even bigger look at that thing wow it's got a pet look at the size of that thing like that could be a woman with small hands it's hard to tell I would like to see it in the hands of a basketball player you know if iqv got

56:38like LeBron James like finally I got a phone I can hold in my hand you know because for him it's probably King Kong home little tiny people you know those big giant hands like for a basketball player like some sort of a Bill Russell type character with giant hands that's a good size phone but too small people not so much you just trying too hard I never I had a galaxy note before I never used that pen I was like when I first got it I was like this pen is gonna rule this is gonna be the big difference I'm gonna send people pictures I'm gonna draw dicks on them I had this plan it's a good plan Joe that was the plan it was just like to just make funny pictures you know were there and I never used it just I got lazy I think I just it wasn't that injury one thing it is interesting though is you can circle something and like say if like there's a part of an article that you think is

57:32interesting you could circle it and copy and paste it really simply and easily really yeah it's pretty good with the actual image itself like say if someone sends you something and there's some text in an image you could just circle around it and and send that to yourself it's a little yeah what do you use iPhone yeah do you ever around with Windows um I did for a while my first computer was Windows for work at one point I was having to use Windows but yeah as somebody who really appreciates good design that didn't last long Windows 10 is pretty good yeah it's not quite good enough it's pretty goddamn good but that's what's always been fascinating to me is that Microsoft is the biggest company when it comes to operating systems but it's not the best you know when everybody kind of knows that but it's there's this weird sort of battle I mean apples big enough they have

58:20plenty they make the best stuff to make the most high-end stuff and a lot of people's eyes but it's really limited like you can only get what they put out if you want a Windows laptop you have 100 options I made more you know if you want a Mac laptop you have a few but the interesting thing is that was Steve Jobs approach right was he came in and said you have too many options this is stupid you've really got to narrow this stuff down Microsoft Surface laptops I pulled the recommendation after announcing it I guess two years ago they recommended it and now it's like the first time they've pulled it in a long time Oh interesting a predicted reliability with an estimated two-year breakage rates of 25% ooh that's not good they got cheap yes the specific the new one the Microsoft Surface well that's interesting because there was another study that I saw reading out

59:04study you know one of those lists that listed is the best laptop available in 2017 I just get like within the last week maybe it's just like different consumer groups but maybe the best laptop while it works yeah you know if what you have is a breakage fryer yeah my problem is that it working while it's working it's the best how long is gonna work it's not gonna work that way but it's like a sprinter you know they're the fastest they don't run the longest very true maybe think about the internet man I think that's fair so what are you trying to do with this company like literally pull people out of the matrix so yes wait a minute that is our stated mission my friend we are here to pull people out of the matrix so I can like walk you through it if you really want to know yeah it goes like this so when I I'm not a born entrepreneur so I'm very very far from it and through it

59:58are they're born entrepreneurs there are people that will tell you that there are only born entrepreneurs those people are idiots yeah I would agree with people that say that but I just think that they're very very catastrophic ly wrong about this to me as I saying you're a born mixed martial artist now there might be people that have certain athletic gifts that make it they get early wins and there's just things that click into place for them right in a way that it doesn't further people but if you get a grinder or somebody that's really willing to put in the work then you can get somebody who becomes absolutely extraordinary so that certainly has been my life so I grew up being taught to be a good employee keep my head down to as little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs that was my life so my parents taught me to be a good employee and I

60:43obviously that didn't sit well with me I wanted to do something more I had pretty big ambition I go to film school and I do very well in film school until my final film and then I fall flat on my face embarrass myself and realize I'm not a talented filmmaker and in that what made you notice that you weren't and why did you think you couldn't get better so great question so when I started film school I believed that you either were talented or you weren't right there's just some things you either can sing or you can't you either can draw or you can't when it comes to art which I saw film is art you're either good or you're not and so that was how I thought of it and I thought you could get better at the technical side so I was going to film school to learn the technical aspects but I was banking on the fact that I was inherently talented so I go and my first

61:26year and a half went very well and I was crushing it certainly my own estimation doing very well getting the attention of my classmates and then only four people out of the entire school for your year get to make a senior thesis film and I was chosen as one of the four so it was like yeah I just I have it and there were two filmmakers that were really big for me one was John Woo do you remember John sure actually redhot great yeah like the 80s and 90s yeah shoot-'em-ups a lot and I loved him and he was famous for he would roll up on said he wouldn't think about it ahead of time he just put the camera wherever felt right and his movies were mind-blowing people always referred to it is his violence is like a ballet it's not well orchestrated that beautiful that interesting and so I thought okay well if I'm naturally talented then I should be like that and then there was

62:15Hitchcock who was sort of the plotter he would spend all of his time like pre-planning the film every shot was so orchestrated ahead of time he said I get bored on set and I thought God man like he doesn't sound like natural talent to me so I'm over here I want to be John Woo I show up on set acting like I'm John Woo I don't pre-plan anything and put the camera where it feels right and just publicly embarrass myself as I turn this film into a piece of and at that point I thought I was you know about to graduate get the three picture deal everything is gonna be says it's gonna be amazing and there I am crash and burn now the other students are circling me like vultures because I mean that's the film industry man like it is a zero-sum game or at least it was back then that's how people saw it cuz it wasn't like today where you could run edit on your he's editing like right now like

63:01that didn't exist so it was you had to get access to real resources so when I realized oh my god I don't have a thesis project to show people to get an agent or whatever it's done I'm not a talented filmmaker and so I was so desperate in that I needed something that would free me from feeling like a permanent failure and that thing that I had was the notion of Alfred Hitchcock and even though it wasn't sexy it gave me a window into maybe there's another way maybe there is another way that somebody can be an artist and and they just have to learn it like think about if somebody draws right some people can rotate an object in their mind have you seen on IQ test they make it yeah I can't do that I literally can't rotate an object in my mind I don't even understand people that can do it so I thought well maybe you could become a great artist just by memorizing every conceivable pose like a

63:52chess player the great chess grandmasters are the ones that have memorized so many different moves and combinations that have become somewhat intuitive for them so I thought okay that's gonna have to be my path give me an escape route and then going down that path of saying I just have to learn this stuff I'm not naturally talented but I have to and firstly Carol Dweck had not written her book mindset at that point so I didn't have the words growth mindset fixed mindset but I began to transition out so a fixed mindset is what I had which you believe your talent and intelligence or fixed traits they can't be changed somebody with a growth mindset realizes that your talent and intelligence were malleable that you can develop them through disciplined practice so I began to adopt sort of the beginnings of that mindset realizing that I'm just a grinder I have to work

64:34and I have to get better so I start teaching film school and in teaching film school the best way to learn something is to teach it so now I'm getting better as a filmmaker just by teaching it to these guys helping them develop their scripts helping them shoot their films and then at that time these two very successful entrepreneurs came into my class there were two things as a kid I promised myself growing up in a morbidly obese family that one day I would be rich and one day I would have six-pack abs and so here were these they were yoked these two yoked bodybuilder guys that were successful entrepreneurs and they said why don't you come work for us and be a copywriter and it's a startup company you can have any role in the company you want but you just have to become the right person for that job and then you can get rich and you can go back and control the art you can make

65:17movies your way so I was like oh my god like this is too good to be true I have to go do this so I joined them as a copywriter as they were starting this fledgling technology company and just to keep this from getting impossibly long for about eight and a half years I just chased money I'm just trying to get rich to go back and make movies my way but in that they were very growth minded I began to really develop a growth mindset to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to without limitation I just had to understand that there was a gap in skill set between where I was and where I wanted to get and I had to be willing to put in the work to get that skill right so I trained exactly one time with a man I you must know him for us the hobby sure all right so for us by the way I feel a moral obligation to help him become famous because he is one of the

66:02most intriguing minds I've ever come across in my life yeah we were supposed to do a podcast class there's a UFC in Anaheim but his fighter got canceled the fight got canceled and so he wanted not coming on I'm a big fan his though that as a person heartbreaking as a fighter trainer as well as a mixed martial artist very talented guy very and in getting to roll with him in my single moment as a grappler it was did you ever grab a before no never so you just rolled with him the first time he's a black belt yeah but and that's why it was the best thing ever so he knew how to not let me get injured he knew how to move in just the right way how to show me things he's so kind and compassionate and patient I can't imagine like a better intro to grappling was unbelievable and what it showed me that even just in like the hour that he and I grappled I went from dude I'm so lost

66:55even spatially I can't tell where I am I mean once you start moving me I just get lost and then an hour later I could he gave me like these two basic moves to learn how to execute and by the end I could do it and it was like the exact reminder of what a growth mindset is and how even something that foreign to me with a good teacher practice you can get good I mean look it's gonna take years and years and years to become even competent in jiu-jitsu let alone be able to participate at a high level but it was a great micro reminder of just how powerfully humans can learn now here's my theory about humans and learning and why and just I guess to wrap up my entrepreneurial journey so decide I don't want to chase money anymore not gonna do that so I go into my partner's I said look I quit this is about eight now actually I quitted about the six-year mark ended up actually getting

67:43out at about eight half years so six years I said quit I can't do this anymore I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness this is absolutely ridiculous so here's your equity back final cross the finish line and get anything for this what so you didn't you weren't obligated to give that money back you decided to correct so but that to me is is the right thing yellow the yellow do I get shot at the end of this yeah so I think everybody should live by a code right it's what's right for you and so I have a code very strong code that I live by that was one of the things like I'm the one quitting like these guys have done nothing but create opportunity for me so I'm quitting I'm not gonna cross the finish line because I feel literally dead inside I can't keep doing this doesn't make sense I realize the game you're playing is not money I promise it's not success it's brain chemistry so

68:32once you understand the game you're playing his brain chemistry and that if you have seven point four billion dollars and hate your life and want to commit suicide what the good is the money and conversely if you have no money but you feel a deep sense of fulfillment self pride and believe in what you're doing like what do you care the Dominic Wright better brain chemistry yeah better brain chemistry was that so so what you do so they said look we could do this without you they were totally caught off guard they said we could do this without you but we don't want to so let's talk about what would it look like for us to work together and so by this point like we've got a deep friendship you know I'm not like the new kid on the block anymore and I said okay if we're gonna work together it's got to be something entirely predicated on value not money I

69:15need to be honest my highest priority in business is not profitability it's camaraderie so that's why when they said we could do this without you but we don't want to that was the thing let me reconnect to the Brotherhood that had made it interesting for me in the early days and so that felt amazing and so I was like I'll come back if it's all about value if we're doing something we're passionate about and if we're asking and answering the question what would we do every day and love even if we were failing cuz the struggle is guaranteed that's a bunch of people in a business to agree to that though isn't it uh what wasn't for me because they were already there so they were like it's crazy we felt the same way for a very long time because we like we we and by we they were so much farther ahead than me at this point so they really and gave me the opportunity to learn had

70:03really built that tech company up like we got it I think a valuation of twenty two million if I'm not mistaken at one point and we just couldn't get it passed and so it was like we'd been struggling for years to move the needle more and we just couldn't so it wasn't like oh I come in and give some amazing Jerry Maguire speech and they're all like are I us too it was like finally somebody just said what everybody was already thinking so they said all right let's give us a timeline of six months if we hit these revenue numbers in six months we'll keep going but if we miss them we'll sell so we didn't hit them and so we began the sales process and all in it was about eight and a half years by the time that was finally sold and the thing for three very different reasons that we decided to found that was going to be predicated around delivering value to our employees and

70:44our customers that was going to be that thing that we would love doing every day even if we were failing that allowed me to connect emotionally because it ended up being quest nutrition I grew up in a morbidly obese family and I wanted to save my mom and my sister and it would it gave me this mother Teresa has a great quote she says nobody will act for the many but people will act for the one so finally I could just think about two people that I knew and loved and I wanted to do something awesome for them so when I got tired when I was fatigued rather than thinking about money and a big house and a fast car I was thinking about saving my mom and my sister and our idea was if we could make food that people could choose based on taste and it happened to be good for them we could actually end metabolic disease so that was like the driving force and we were

71:25excited about it and we didn't know if it would be a real business we didn't know like every time we'd explain it to people we're putting value first and we thought God do we sound like total but it was like we really believed in it and so it gave us insights into social media this back in 2009 when nobody was really using it for business and we could see that it's just a megaphone so if you actually do deliver that kind of value for people they're gonna talk and now they have the ability to talk to a global audience within minutes of an interaction with your company so if you were really taking care of them you really delivered a product that was real and you were building community community community then you could really do something and so that's how it took off but it really did I used to joke and say Quest is a company born out of misery because it

72:06was was three guys slogging it out not really even liking the product that we made it just serve the need in the marketplace the security software we didn't care about it we didn't use it in our own company so it was like God so getting into something we were obsessively talking about nutrition anyway I've lost 60 pounds and kept it off I went through a pencil-head phase I've added muscle like learning about diet to escape the fate of my family has been so important to me but that was all back at a technology company so we were now levered and one of my partners the nutritional genius this dude is unreal so leveraging what we were doing and thinking about already just was insanely powerful for us as a business opportunity and we ended up making more in a single day at Quest than we made annually at the tech company dude you went from telling me about being a

72:56failed movie maker in college to the full journey of quest nutrition yeah I know if that's good or bad but there it is yeah it's um it's a crazy journey man that's weird that you didn't want to go back to filmmaking though I could you've realized you up and why you up well so here we all come full circle so this is what your new country company is a new company is about making you want to make films like when you want a traditional narrative content yes sir comic books books movies TV shows now I've used dude don't you think that it's one of those things that like when you were in film school and when you're like trying to come up with a thesis film that this was like a step and a very long journey of figuring out how to make films and that when you left it you gotta kind of you're going right back to where you were or has life experience giving you more tools to work

73:46with and you could sort of apply those to the idea of creative filmmaking yeah exactly that so what I'm not trying to do is go back and be a director what I want to do now is build the studio so becoming an entrepreneur and training myself in that way has created an obsession with scale for me so the thought of myopically making one movie is absolutely terrifying like just the amount of time it would take and your ability to push multiple things forward essentially grinds tool so you want to sort of finance other people's ideas and projects it'll be part of it you get part of it that'll be part of it bringing a team together that can execute at at scale and create a lot of content and in the beginning we're gonna have to partner with people we just don't have enough finances like we have enough to you know build the infrastructure and get the creative

74:32together but we're not going to be you know financing 100 plus million dollar film every year so we'll need to partner with people but that's essentially what I've spent the last 15 years learning how to do is the business side of things how to build teams how to get them pointed in the right direction how to think through okay you've got this grand goal you want to make a studio bigger than Disney but like what are the real like what are the things you can do today to actually take a step towards that so as you're like desire to do things change like your desires not to create a film anymore your desire is now to create business to create in some sort of a large organization yes sort of so in in reality my real desires I want to pull people of the matrix so that said before the souls trying to work my way back to like so that's the most sincere thing so the

75:19matrix to me is a set of limiting beliefs that the vast majority of people have to stop them from achieving what they could achieve in life if they only understood that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine and that we are the only animal you can put into any environment and we will be able to survive and thrive so we can do that sort of give me an example where we you don't think well we don't we don't survive and thrive in horrifying climates like you bring people to an article they survive they certainly don't thrive but they gotta get people right so sure they do and you can we can go in and build a research facility so some of the adaptation is amazing there's no indigenous people living in Antarctica like what do you mean an Arctic Circle is working I apologize so there's two kinds of adaptations so you know that women that swam the Bering Strait mm okay so she

76:08sleeps with her windows open in a cold climate I forget where she lived basically what she's doing by constant cold exposure is changing her adipose tissue to brown fat so now it's more thermogenic and she can actually do something that she wasn't able to do and if you're really gonna let me get crazy like looking at what vim Hoff has done with his ability to regulate internal temperature is pretty crazy and then just what they're discovering with DNA from at one point it was considered to be just junk DNA and now they're realizing this actually epigenetic responders essentially so are there limits yeah probably but just as like looking at the way that we only have what 20,000 genes and an onion has like 40,000 genes so what is it that makes us more complex if you will give me that we are complex and it seems to be the what they originally thought was junk DNA

76:57which is your genes will turn on or off express themselves in different amounts based on your environment and your diet and even some just like how you're thinking your microbiome like all that stuff then regulates how your genes are expressed and we have a much wider ability to adapt to climates if you're not gonna let me go is extreme but we have the widest ability would you agree to that or okay so of all the species we have the widest flexibility so it's that ability to that I think is is one of our greatest strengths I don't remember why I started down my path of adaptation but the fact that humans can adapt in whatever direction they want I began adapting myself through mindset and that really showed me how far I was able to come mentally from where I started so as I saw what a huge impact it had on my life both emotionally and financially becoming somebody who's

77:57entrepreneurial minded taking extreme ownership for my life assuming that everything is my fault that I can always do something I can change something I can get a different result I can learn a new skill whatever the case may be but that I can turn myself into what I need to be in order to execute at anything so that changed me so much and then I've worked in the inner cities so much and seen what happens when somebody really has limiting beliefs and how much that holds them back so I Big Brother for a kid in college ended up turning into like a eight year relationship and so I saw him go through a lot and I remember so he grew up in in first South Central and then moved to Compton and I remember taking him to see movies in Beverly Hills just cuz I wanted him to see Beauty like the way in which his worldview had been constructed was so bizarre and limiting there's that song

78:46by I'm I forget his name but he says they don't want to see you wind Kodak black Kodak black I have no idea anyway it's a song by a guy named Kodak black and he talks about how they don't want to see you winning and that was his mentality like nobody wants to see me get out of the ghetto right not my own mother nobody so that was his frame of reference was just yeah well it just wasn't meant for me because of where I grew up encountered those kids I was telling about dad shot to death sister shot to death like just crazy life and their perspective was very very limited they had no sense of how they're gonna make something come true so I want to help people develop an empowering mindset Disney understood something which is why I use them as our foil which is every piece of content that they make feeds into a brand ethos so if I say I'm gonna go see a Sony movie or a Warner Brothers

79:33movie or a Paramount movie you know nothing about it but if I say I'm gonna go see a Disney movie you already know something so we have to have the discipline to make sure that everything that we're creating into that and what would that thing you're feeding into be like escaping the matrix so everything's gonna do is be motivational in some sort of a way or informational it's got firing it's got to be entertainment first and foremost but I'll give you examples of movies I wish we had created wholesale I wish impact Theory had made the matrix it's the perfect movie in my opinion I wish we'd made star wars the whole religion of the Jedi is wildly empowering anything do you not ridiculous it is to say that you wish you made the two greatest movies of all time of course you do right but I'm saying from Avatar well actually I don't wish we'd made avatar so honestly I haven't

80:16looked at it closely enough to know if it falls into that but I don't remember it having it that's more of like a nature theme and taking care of the theme whereas I'm looking for empowerment themes so yeah empowerment themes in what what like in terms of fiction all of it it's gonna be documentaries like what are you gonna try to do so mostly as of right now entirely fiction and the idea behind that is the way the humans assimilate truly disruptive information is through narrative if you've read Joseph Campbell's the power of myth he talks a lot about that and hero's journey and so wanting to leverage that and and it's not an accident that I was so impacted by the power of myth and then Joseph Campbell's the one that worked with George Lucas on creating Star Wars making sure that real hardcore mythology is at the core of it so I just think that's how we build our belief system

81:07it's how we build our ideology it's how we pass it on to other people and I'm a big believer don't try to change behavior try to leverage it so people are already reading books reading comic books so on and so forth it's a weird motivation to not just make things that are entertaining but to make things that are entertaining that you think are gonna be inspiring but then to use Star Wars and The Matrix is examples like do you think those movies really pulled people out of anything or just entertained people because I'd be much more inclined to think the latter sure so here's how I look at it I'm a filtering mechanism I can't save everybody not everybody cares so some people are going to respond somewhere the matrix changed my life in a deep and fundamental way so I know mhm how so at the time when I had the fixed mindset literally right out of college I'm in the depths

81:52of I'm not a talented filmmaker now what the hell do I do well I went to a Comic Con literally across the street from USC and they were handing out tickets to go see the matrix at Warner Brothers Studios and was very excited took the ticket went that night went in do you remember the movie well oh absolutely all right so when Agent Smith goes no officer your men are already dead and then they cut two up there Trinity jumps camera goes slow-motion and spins around her the entire audience myself included yelled because it was just unlike anything we'd ever seen in a movie it was such a rad experience and so that primed me for what ends up being the perfect metaphor for limiting beliefs and you know Michael Strahan mm-hmm all right so Michael Strahan said the same thing he was like the year that he got the award for most sacks in a single season was was because of the matrix so

82:49literally his own words he came on impact they interviewed him asking that question he said without a doubt that movie is the reason that I got the record because he said up until that moment I see Morpheus and neo training in Morpheus says do you really think that I'm faster than you because of my muscles you really think this is air you're breathing and Strahan realized holy I have a belief that I can only get one sack per game but why can't I get two why can't I get three and he said because of that he would get a sack and then go no I can get another one and he said I realized in that moment that once I got a sack in a game I would back off because I just believed that was like the most anyone could do in a game so and it had a similar impact to me it made me realize I needed to figure out what my what is the matrix rights I don't actually think we're in a

83:34simulation so what is the matrix belief system what is my version of jacking in reading what is my kung-fu business like those were all the things that began to sack it wasn't there while I'm sitting in the movie theater but those were the things that it were in my mind and I just kept thinking about it thinking about it thinking about it and I think in movies so when I give examples a lot of times I give examples from movies because they have that impact now the reason that I don't think something like this would work and the reason that I think so many people have not responded the way that I responded is nobody is allowing people to take it seriously so social media I think is gonna change that so nobody's allowing people to take it seriously everybody brushes it off it's just entertainment so what do you mean by that so Joseph Campbell in the power of myth

84:18talked about he was asked by Bill Moyer bill Moyer said I've seen it read it okay so when he goes what do you think happens to a world where people no longer believe in mythology and Joseph Campbell said you're living through it right now and the point being that you have all the mythology in the world but nobody believes in it anymore everybody knows Star Wars and real everybody knows the matrix isn't real but people actually used to believe that religion was real and so you had this mythological tale whether it was you know Zeus or whether it was Cassandra all the Greek mythology whether it was Jesus Christ didn't matter people believed it they thought it was real and so they'll still do correct but I would say that that's diminishing day over day it's gotten less will you give me that from I'm sure ancient times I mean I don't know what the current state of

85:09atheism agnosticism and deity worship is it's I would imagine it's probably somewhere in the 50% range though I I won't even challenge that I will give you my gut instinct my gut instinct is while people are still deeply religious they don't believe in the literal word as much well let's let's Google like what percentage of people today consider themselves religious versus the past so if we get anything never get anything there with I think people still cling to it because it's it's comforting and because the uncertainty of existence and the finite nature of our life it's a it's very disturbing that open-ended feeling of not knowing when it's going to happen or what's going to happen and having some sort of a calm and peaceful belief in an overlord like someone who's paying attention this whole thing it's got a plan I'll agree to that my thesis isn't that people don't believe in

86:06something it's that they don't believe in the literal word well yeah how about this it didn't help me so there are some people out there where some numbers here what do we got here Jamie I'm affiliated rose from 2007 to 2014 by 6.7 percent from 2014 from 2007 and so in seven years it rose by six percent by Christian unaffiliated any religion so there what's miracle Christians went from seventy eight to seventy by the time period 78 percent Wow I think it's American population the American population of Christians is 78 percent to seventy whatever it is so it dropped eight percent it's still a giant number of people that's why you have to say you're a believer in God in order to be President they still maintained that's like a necessary thing like if you are a person running for president that says I don't know you know I have no idea and I'm personally inclined to believe that

87:07maybe maybe there's no God like people would go crazy you would never get to be president we have this fundamental desire even if there's zero proof and there absolutely is zero proof especially when you think about the stories in the Bible and some of the more preposterous ones there's no proof that any of those ever really took place there's no I mean it's there's no proof that what was the guy that called called the she-bear to kill the children that were mocking him for being bald you know there was a no idea you know it's alright now there's a guy in the Bible that uh these kids were giving him a hard time for being bald so he he called upon God to avenge him and God sent a bear to kill the children that were mocking him yeah isn't done yes what Elijah yeah ELISA okay said Elijah Elijah Elijah yeah he went up to Bethel as he walked along the road some boys came from the

88:02city and mocked him and when they mocked him God sent a bear in the bear killed the kids y-yeah yes and that didn't happen kids I'm guessing that God's on such a piece of that he has sends a bear to kill little children how about the kids just they were talking about this guy being ball didn't knows a bear was sneaking up on them more likely you know when you're talking about your you may noise the Bears realized he's a high-pitched noises probably delicious little kids and then they moved in but still 70% man so it's less people believe but still that's a giant number it is it is a giant number yeah got me night that's a good question like how many of them actually believe you know and what to what to what extent right and what is it they actually believe yeah so something my thesis is this something's wrong this isn't an anti religion thing for me I have no beef

89:08with religion if it's making people positive and connecting and doing something great I'm all for it I am NOT a religious person and so maybe I needed this for me to have something that could give me the ideology that I needed reading the power of myth really changed my life I read it and he talks about in the book how basically one of the things he thinks is going wrong with divorce and the reason that divorce rates are so high is that ritual has really lost its impact and you don't have these demarcation points between childhood and adulthood or between being single and being married and he was like you know back in the day when you were 13 they took you out of the woods they literally ripped you from the clutches of the women took you out and with no anesthetic they would circumcise you and now you know like you're a man so because there's none of that you get

89:56arrested adolescence and there's sort of a weakening of the the import of the religious ceremony as far as divorce goes and so people are taking that seriously so and he talks about ritualistic scarification and how men you knew something had changed when people put your body through some kind of transformation so when I got married I went through a ritualistic scarification why had to remind myself that I was a different man the day before what kind of ritualistic scarification did you go through a tattoo oh that's a grandiose way right but how dare you call holistic scarification that's how I saw it so I don't I don't do tattoos you'll see nothing I have one tattoo which I did specifically for my wedding I've never done another one and at the time this isn't the case anymore but at the time one of my biggest sort of realistic fears was needles so it was me

90:49saying to my wife I'm gonna go scar my body using needles which freak me the out to remind myself a I want it to be painful and then be I want it to be permanent and I'm glad that it's something that I have this act of fear of so in doing all of that it really did make the whole wedding just a bigger deal to me and so that's really interesting but I think when we're talking about Joseph Campbell and the issues that I think are very real about people not experiencing like a grand event or at least some sort of a ritual that gets them to adulthood I think there's this is a significant issue that we have with just things being far too easy and that there's no real difficult path where the warrior has to find themselves in you know in myth or in in a person's actual life that they they have to overcome some very difficult thing now for you I'm sure some of those I mean we all have

91:47difficulties in life but some of the difficulties that you experienced when you were in film school was like this creation of this thing you know but once you tried to create this thing and it didn't work out right do you don't you have this like desire to go back and try to figure it out right I don't you have to desire like okay like I see where I this up I try to be like John Woo instead of trying to be like Alfred Hitchcock and I see that there's like a way you could be systematic you're obviously a systematic thinker like you're talking about your your quote organizer you have all these quotes in your mind and you have all these systems that you follow including like following like some of Gary Vee social media stuff right it's like you're a system you've followed like these are ways to engage in success right so I would feel like that would like haunt you a little bit

92:31it's interesting it doesn't so since then I have done I have done a low-budget feature film okay I wrote a screenplay that was turned into a feature film that was a horrifying experience why was that just because it didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to it wasn't executed as written I mean look this is the a writer's complaint right so but I've I have changed as a person over time to where I'm just now way more interested in scale so I still have that love for cinema I love storytelling I think story is a it is a way that we assimilate information like that is when I think about the things that have painted a vision for me of what is a man being way more from movies and say my own father so and that that is not to downplay like having a relationship with somebody that you're in proximity with is is ultimately I think going to be the most powerful thing it's just not scalable so

93:31looking at how impactful media has been for me and for a lot of people and this whole notion of self signaling because at the end of the day the way that I see the company is we're a merchandise company so you create the intellectual property I mean this is a Disney's playbook you create the intellectual property in order to create the merchandise in this the merchandise that drives a lot of the revenue not all of it but it drives a lot of the revenue and in having that you also create this thing called self signaling so as I dress a certain way to tell you something which is how it starts it also tells me even more loudly than you so as I like I have a Batman shirt and I have a Superman shirt and when I wear those shirts it reminds me of my tie to that ethos right so Batman is you don't have any superpowers you just have to work really really hard and

94:22you've got to be prepared to tap into the dark side to keep pushing hard enough to you know avenge what you believe is your failing so Superman it's a perfect analogy for passion right he's a normal guy except when he's in the Yellow Sun and that gave me a way to think about getting in line with my passion I remember I was obsessed with that when I decided to go in and quit I was like I'm like Superman and I am out of the Yellow Sun because I'm not passionate about anything and the only time that I can do things made me feel that that are extraordinary or when I'm really passionate the matrix obviously is like the core metaphor for my entire existence so what is such a crazy thing to say yeah there sure so weird thing the matrix is the cool okay the core metaphor yeah right okay guys it's a metaphor right but it's it's a core metaphor and not to be Joseph

95:07Campbell death didn't expect him to come out of my mouth as many times and interview but he said if you want to change the world you have to change the metaphor so and people have talked a lot about that with how the world changed from the metaphor of the steam engine to the metaphor of the computer and that just it changed the way that you thought about workers it changed what you thought about intelligence and just changed a lot of things just by shifting from one metaphor to the next so dealing in the realm of metaphor giving people access points to different things through storytelling which obviously is riding on the back of metaphor I think is an incredible access point but more importantly it's something people already do so you're leveraging behavior that's already there and that was like a necessary part the same thing with quest right don't ask people to eat less and

95:52exercise more we've been telling them that for 60 years whatever it works for a narrow band of the population but it doesn't work for everybody so finding something that people are already doing people are already watching movies TV shows playing video games reading books comic books are already doing it the billions and billions of dollar industries so being able to tap into that leverage social media now so this is where we first got on to this part where I was saying you're in a position where most people don't take it seriously they don't try to extract the life lessons they're not Michael Strahan they don't see a movie what most people just did enjoy it they just go to see a film to be entertained correct there's a fascinating approach though to create films to change the way human beings think about life but now keep in mind if we don't entertain first and foremost

96:36we've got nothing so people need to be able to watch the movies and have no idea that there's a message Disney is a perfect example of that Disney is trying to tell you that right should always win they make movies for children sure yeah I mean it's it's a different thing like organizing something like that to a grand scale to make films for humans that you think can pull them out of the matrix through do you think it's tame this works for kids but only kids I don't think kids are a little bit more pliable and they don't have enough information sometimes you can chose and show them some things through you know cartoons and things along those lines the kids set in with them a little bit easier and better it's absolutely possible to send a message through a film that really radiates with people resonates with people because I have a deep and abiding fear that this is only

97:20gonna work with kids really yeah I don't know that that's true but there's a guy do you know Jeffrey no super cool dude grows up in Harlem and realizes dude the school system is like everyone is just given up on all of us here in Harlem but he's super bright ends up going to Harvard and says I'm gonna become a doctor I'm gonna go back and change the education system and does that goes back and spends I don't know how many years in the education system and just realizes yeah this is never gonna work you can't change it from the inside there are so many politics is so much entrenched like this is going nowhere so he leaves and decides that he's going to give up on adults and he's going to start with kids in fact not even that he's gonna try to find women who are about to become pregnant and all he wants to do is because he looked at what makes a middle-class kid successful

98:10versus an inner-city kid who goes on to not be successful what's the difference and what he found was it's the number of words that a child hears before the age of five I think it is and the ratio of positive to negative he said your average kid in the middle class hears five million words before the time that he's five seventy percent of positive 30 percent of negative whereas in the inner-city a kid hears like two or three million by the time that they're five and the ratio is reversed so it's thirty percent positive seventy percent negative so he said that's I'm just gonna make my life's mission solving that problem so that finds my shoe that's a gigantic issue massive and he said what happens is the language centers in the brain just don't develop properly and because of that they struggle later in life trying to get a job because they can't communicate as

98:51well so he felt like he had just put his finger on sort of that baseline but the reason I bring Geoffrey Canada up is because he gave up on adults so as I'm thinking through this look we haven't executed on this nobody should be taking me seriously right now I know that so I've got like this man and I'm vet like everybody told us we were crazy when we said we're launching a protein bar people like are you stupid the 1600 protein bars in 2009 it is the most crowded space ever one guy actually told us I need another protein bar like I need another hole in the head and then five years later were Inc 500 second fastest growing company in North America grew by 57,000 percent how because we believe that it could be done right so I get it people have made a good product all right we're enjoying it and that's what they wanted and that's kind of the same thing with making films like you

99:34have to make a good product that people are going to enjoy but it's a fascinating thing that you're coming to it saying that you want to change people and take them out the matrix but you're also saying that you're you're like a memorabilia company or a merchandise merchandise company I mean that's kind of the same thing right it's like you're you're you're talking like objects that go along with your films and that's a big part of what see you're planning all this out from a financial standpoint right but what about a creative standpoint like it's a to be able to put together all these ideas like to say oh I want to make the new matrix oh I want to make the new Star Wars and I want to change the world on a drag people out of this mundane reality they live in and show them the power of myth right yeah more I want to show them the power belief I don't think

100:18they're ever gonna see the power of myth why would I see it if you could see it maybe they will I don't know just not a focus for me I just want them to take the useable mindset and apply it and I think that we live in an interesting time now where social media can comment on the things and say here's what's extractable from so when you try to adjust films accordingly if someone comes to you with an idea and a script and they want this project to be created you try to adjust it accordingly to try to have the highest amount of impact and like how are you gonna do that yeah so hopefully will be a beacon to people that really understand the mindset so we laid out a three phase approach to building the studio on the website literally from day one and phase one is build the community so we're building a community around ideology people calm and listen in fact this is how you and I

101:03connect it so one of my one of the people that follows my show wrote to you and said Joe you really got to get this guy in your show and sent you a clip and you said hey this is actually pretty interesting you should come on so that's all around ideology right so I've spent the last 20 plus years of my life constructing my mindset to allow me to be successful and because I've had a certain level of success people take me seriously so now what I'm trying to do is just find the most efficacious way to actually get that ideology in people's hands and I know if I can incept them in entertainment I've got a shot but if I can't entertain them first I've got nothing so if we asked anyway to sneaking it in if we don't have good movies like I mean I think this is where you were going if the movies aren't just good in and of themselves like we're we've got nothing here so we have to get

101:51really good at make really good movies that people want to see for their own sake so that and that's a Herculean task no question and we're gonna have to assemble an amazing creative team that really understands at a very deep level the ideology of the company well in and of itself making entertaining films like having a company that makes entertaining films is difficult brutal make entertaining films that have this sort of life-changing message onvo sounds like a long task passionately hey look it can be done if Disney did it and arguably they certainly did with kids you know I mean they've they've made some really powerful movies with them some really good messages no question no question and look it's gonna be a bumpy road I know that there's gonna be sick well there's guaranteed failure and hopefully success but it's something that I believe in enough to fight for it so

102:42when you talk about you know I don't don't you want to go back and sort of make good on the the filmmaking promise no not that's not what I meant what I meant was not there's no promise I just meant is it something that you think like hmm maybe I could have adjusted maybe I could have done this if I could have built on my skill set maybe I could have continued making films and tried different approaches and I feel like you know if you had a real passion for and it was something you were so interested in you said you were killing it early on in your film career or in your film school career like a wonder why you didn't like continue to try to readjust and try to try come back as otherwise by that as well I think everyone myself included thought you know when we had the success at Quest and now I could do whatever I wanted that I would just immediately start

103:27writing and directing and it just didn't feel it wasn't what I wanted to do any well that's an important message in and of itself because tell people you know like look follow your your heart's content don't be trapped in your earliest ideas if you have an idea early on that I you know I'm going to become this and then somewhere along the line you discover this new interest that kind of supersedes the other one and surpasses it follow that one you know you don't you don't how like you don't have to say oh I thought you were a filmmaker right it was for a little while you know like you could do whatever the you want I mean you could find a a million different pathways and a million different avenues but ultimately what's going to resonate the most of people something that you're out passionate about really feel really feel not faking it not trying to so you know

104:10establish some sort of a narrative that you think is going to be successful with people or resonate with people but what do you actually feel and if you could figure that out man you know that's that seems to be like the the great pieces of art the great works you know that the people have created that have the opportunities that I've got a chance to talk to people that have done some pretty amazing it's all the it was all like an interest it was all a thought that they had that they followed through all the way and then got immersed in it you know but it was never thinking about it in terms of the ultimate eventual result you know that's why I think it's interesting that you're approaching this and you don't just have an idea to make something creative and and fascinating and fulfilling to enjoy but you also want to establish some sort of a narrative that

104:58changes the way people look at the reality around them yeah definitely and when I when I think about what I'm really driven by and this was almost a confession to my team was I don't care about I love movies and I love the path that were on right now but I don't love it enough to risk my fortune and to work as hard as I'm working that just never would have drawn me back so what I do care enough about to put everything at risk and to work as hard as I'm working is pulling people out of the matrix and I know those are my words that maybe don't get people to see what I mean so the kid that I Big Brother four just give you an idea so his name was rashon an amazing kid he was very disruptive in class he was drug and alcohol impacted but still really bright but they had him on like Ritalin or something I honestly don't know what but his stunted his gross was

105:50really small hyper aggressive he was adopted and his mother was abusing him but I didn't know that I'm very sad I was just too young and I just I didn't know what was going on even though looking back you suddenly realized holy hell there were so many clues but I didn't pick up on them and he just living a life that is is horrible and growing up in the inner cities as well on top of all that and so I come and of course he's the student they give me an all I'm supposed to do is for eight weeks I'm just supposed to come in and help him do his homework and so he's very clever so I would show up and for an hour he would ignore me he would get in fights he would push me away and then like five minutes for I I'd have to leave I'd say I have to leave and he would start crying and freaking out please no just stay help me with my homework and so finally I'd be like all right I'm gonna

106:41help you but if you don't right now get to work I'm leaving and so then he would be an angel and do his homework and then week two was exactly the same and three and four and five and I thought this kid is playing me like he's like trolling me in real life and at week six they tell you hey warn him that you're only coming two more weeks so that they're not surprised cool week six I tell him hey just you know I'm only coming two more times and he goes nuclear freaks the out like it was so shocking like I didn't have experience with kids so he's flipping out and this was already a kid with behavioral problems so I just like the is going on and finally slowly all too slowly I realize okay wait is this because I just told you I'm leaving and he's like yes and I said look largely just to calm him down as long as I live in Los Angeles I will help you do your homework but you have to do it the

107:33second I get here deal and he said deal so that turns into an eight-year relationship where I became way more than helping him with his homework I started taking him to movies and trying to show him just a different side of life and took him on this thing called Troy camps we got to see the mountains for the first time and just like really really getting involved in his life and then when his it finally came out that his stepmother or his adopted mother was beating him from what I heard she was chasing him down the street with a baseball bat and I just like I literally couldn't believe that was real and so they took him away immediately and I was the first phone call and his lawyer called me and said he has asked that you be the ward of the court or the Guardian to help him through the court system and so I helped him do that and help them get into foster care and and I'm just

108:26looking at him going I know where this ends up like I know where this ends up and it isn't good and so that was the seed right I didn't think it out I'm gonna dedicate my life to helping people like this wasn't that but it planted a seed and it really with me and I I stayed involved with him in foster care for a couple years but then they just moved him so far away that it was I was broke at the time it just was too far away so but that stayed with me and then when I started at Quest and we were helping all these kids are working with all these kids and I saw how extraordinary they were which by the way drug dealers some of them are amazing entrepreneurs and so it became this notion in my it's unreal dude I'll tell you some stories sometime sure absolutely crazy and I thought Jesus you're a better entrepreneur than I am like they're telling me how they

109:13watch like the the cop cars and when they change shifts and how they know that they're being identified by their cars and so they change cars Alyssa crazy and so I'm like Jesus it gave me this concept that I called mining for astronauts and I'm like in here in here somewhere in here being the ghetto are some of the most amazing minds I've ever come across and these guys could be anything it could be astronauts right like whatever they wanted but they don't believe they can and when I would interview them it was nuts so imagine you're interviewing and I came up with just like a fast way ated where I didn't have to think I could just ask the same questions and one of the questions was a magic Genie shows up he's gonna grant you one wish and one wish only you can't wish for more wishes you can't cure cancer or bring anybody back from the dead gotta be something for yourself

109:56what do you wish for universally to a person they all said a job okay that makes sense you think that's what I want to hear so you're trying to get a job singing tell me one job then when we get past that and I tell you obviously that's not true like what do you really want like what's the job meant to get you money okay do you want money or is it something else no it's money awesome man it's a magic Genie cast for whatever you want what do you want you know what answer every single one of them gave me well 1 million dollars you can't buy a house for a million dollars ok it was so crazy it's a magic Genie Joe like you can ask for a trillion dollars but their frame of reference was so small one guy this is like the one exception said he wanted an airport I found that's so weird so I had to push him out and I was like why an airport he said because business guys

110:41come through the airport I was like ok what what good does that do you and he said because then they can teach me about business now think about that first of all how many steps removed are you from what you actually want yeah but that's like they don't you say I'm a systemic thinker right so I had to learn that that's not where I started so I spent thankfully one of the things I'm most grateful for in my life I have to learn everything the hard way but because I learned things the hard way then I can show other people what I did where I fell down and how hopefully they can avoid some of the mistakes now most people ignore me I'm well aware of that but you there's desire to teach people this this is what's interesting you're not just internalizing this this is not just yourself correct and I look I'm wired for compassion I really enjoy other people succeeding uh the my

111:29favorite example of that is when I was five so my sister would have been eight and a half I pretended not to see some Easter eggs so that she would win the Easter egg hunt because she cared about winning and I didn't so that's just a natural inclination that I have that I've fed into that I've chosen to take pride in and because of that and look it would be a way cooler story if I said I met this kid rashon and it changed my life forever and I knew I had to dedicate myself to helping people it didn't I met rashon and then spent almost a decade chasing money right that's the truth so but in that process like that way that I felt in those moments where I had hoped that he would do something when I met the kids that were working on the production line and I could see I am one of them literally came to me is absolutely hysterical he's in tears and he he was like you're like my and

112:19stopped himself and I thought obviously he was about to say you like my father but I felt weird for him so he stopped and said you like my older brother and he was like I've just never had anybody that actually cared about me so now mix that with the fact that I'm only interested in scale and maybe I would be doesn't mean doing touching ten people and like having ten people show up my funeral and just be like this changed my life and because of him like my eighteen grandkids and all that like they're gonna have a better life that just doesn't do it for me and I'm being honest maybe maybe I am a worse person because of this I honestly don't care it's just true it's Who I am so scale is interesting having I would much rather touch a million people and none of them know who I am and know that a million people's lives are better off than touch 10 and they credit it all to me

113:07it's just way more interesting to me at scale now I also believe that a 501 C 3 non-profit is like the worst way in the world to do something if you're trying to do good finding a way to do it through Commerce where it's a self-sustaining economic engine that's interesting because the thing that like this is so weird to me if you have a non-profit you have to go beg literally beg money from people that have a for-profit company that have figured out how to make money they probably have a little bit of guilt so they want to give money to you it is the weirdest dynamic ever rather than just building a company that at its core is trying to do something good and awesome that you can be proud of I'm if I crash and burn I'll still be proud of what I was trying to accomplish I believe in it makes me feel good to want to do amazing ship for people I actually believe that

113:52this is the way that you give somebody a belief system that is antagonistic to acquiring a new belief system because to do it at scale they can't want it right the people the people that want to change their physique do they eat right they exercise and they get results and the people that don't and there are people that I love very much in my life and I'm going to lose them too early because they don't want to eat better so the only solution I could think of was there's no option everything is healthy and delicious so all the things that you want to eat you can and so that was the mission at Quest certainly while I was there that was the mission at Quest we were gonna find what are those it was like 26 categories that we thought got people into trouble and we were gonna make a healthy version of each and every one of those and that was the mission so that there would

114:37literally be nowhere for people to go to eat badly because they could just pursue their most base instincts of just gluttonous give me carbs sugar salt I want it all fat ah and that they be eating a healthy version but it felt and tasted just like that so our first marketing message was stop compromising so that's a long way of saying it's all about leveraging people's behavior against them to get them to make the right changes and I believe that the way that we're gonna do this we live in a unique time where I can go in microphones like this and I can explain to people how to build a mindset I do this literally I put out probably six or seven hour worth of content every week why just telling but yeah really the day you're ready to come on my show be robbed which people have been begging for forever what's your show impact Theory what is that so impact Theory is me bringing on

115:29people like you that have had just unbelievable success and finding out what are the the things you did to get there so my interview style is I'll know more about you than your own mother you'll show up you'll get a little unnerved because how the did I figure all this stuff out but then we can have a really cool interview because wherever you want to go I'm gonna be able to go I'm not a journalist I want you to shine even you have literally inspired me by the way I told you a little bit about why when we first started talking I you're the only person that makes me sweat from diversity okay that's like my thing is an interviewer dude like I can go I can interview anybody doesn't matter but then I saw your show and I realize I can't interview a porn star I probably would suck with Hannibal Buress somebody who's just funny and needs somebody to go back and forth with

116:14and I realized but Joe can do Dominick D'Agostino like on one day and then immediately turn around and do like porn joke anyway so with love to bring on people like you come on because what it all started back at Qwest I have this 25 point bullet belief system that I wanted everyone in the company to understand I used to be an employee I had an employees mentality and here are the 25 things I had to do to my mind to become an entrepreneur and generate wealth in my life and feel like I was in control of my life nobody else controlled my destiny but me here are the 25 things I had this unending fear that people gonna memorize the bullet points and they wouldn't live them so I wanted to create a show were they because it's hardest to impact those closest to you don't know if you've experienced that I certainly have so I would say that so yes to impact those that are closest to you yeah why

117:07is it hardest I think it's because there's too much familiarity my mom looks impact you mean in a way like inspire them yeah right but not even through your own success you don't think that it inspires like my mom is finally starting to say things like tell me little bit more about whatever mm-hmm but for Abel but is that impacting her she just curious not yet she's asking in the way that like yeah I'm actually interested in making that change but I'll just speak for myself in my life for whatever inadequacy that I have it's been very hard for me to impact those closest to me so what I wanted to do my quest was bring in people that were wildly successful and I won unprompted I wanted the audience to see you're gonna hear them say the same things I say even though we don't know each other and time after time after time they heard people going through these people have never seen the 25

118:03bullet points but they would go through like I mean maybe it was like six or seven of them it's not gonna be exactly the same but they would touch on so many it was freaky and so that really started to play into okay we're now moving into a different era where you can step forward and I think transparency and authenticity are a big deal in in companies today I think that gen Z is gonna demand it and I think any company that hides Jenna do you say Gen Z Gen Z is that generation Z's oh yeah yeah have you not heard that oh man welcome you're gonna hear it everywhere now so yeah kids oh if you type in Gen Z you get like a bazillion sure results so gens ears are known for like they they say that they're the altruistic generation so these people are not comfortable with big business and I think that they're going to demand a level of transparency into the people

119:01that are running the company and the people that get that Elon Musk Richard Branson people that aren't afraid to like really step out front mm-hmm then people just resonate with that and so that is why I do all this that's why I'm stepping out front that's why I want people to know who I am and what I'm doing I need to build the community if we're gonna pull off this mission impossible' of building the studio that's all got to happen so that's why I create all this content that's why I bring people on that have inspired me and my goal is just to set them up so I want everyone to walk away from my show going like off camera behind the scenes like that was the best interview I've ever done so yeah that's that's like my mission I just want people to see it from all these different angles here all these different people say it and quite frankly selfishly I want to learn and so

119:48one the biggest the thing that probably impacted my life the most was when I stopped building my ego around being smart and I started building my ego around being a learner and being super humble and sitting at people's feet and just wanting to listen and learn and then immediately put what I learned into action so the show is also wildly selfish for me and the staff because we get to meet incredible people that have just super empowering wisdom and so I believe that the dual track of the social content was just on the nose right you would come on the show and you would just tell us like how you did it you would talk about like how you got into stand-up comedy I got into stand-up comedy because I was the funny guy when everybody else was nervous right but then like it actually has to become a craft and you got to do it over and over and over and talking about that

120:30grind and how you get good over time and people gonna trip the out and just like go whoa maybe that's exactly what I need to do which is a message I think a lot of people need right now which is it's a long grind you know so it's stuff like that but that's impact Tom I got to wrap this up but thank you very much man I appreciate it in good luck it's a very ambitious project and I'm certainly gonna be watching awesome man thanks for Stars quest love you bars you guys are awesome thank you all right folks see you see you on Friday bye