Andrew Huberman: OnlyFans Is Hijacking Your Brain - Fake Intimacy, Real Consequences PT 2

In Part 2 of this explosive conversation, Tom Bilyeu continues his deep dive with Dr. Andrew Huberman, unraveling not just the biological and social traps ensnaring men, but the actionable steps required to break free. If Part 1 exposed the crisis, Part 2 provides a roadmap back to purpose, agency, and authentic accomplishment. The conversation shifts from diagnosis to actionable strategies: Andrew shares the science of goal setting, behavioral replacement, and how to tap back into the powerful circuits of dopamine and testosterone for real-world achievement. Together, Tom and Andrew explore the surprising link between order, environment, and motivation—from cleaning your room to building oceanic fish tanks—and why meaningful, generative achievement (not endless digital consumption) is the antidote. Expect challenging perspectives on what men should actually aim for in life, how gaming and virtual worlds could either empower or further entrap, and the philosophical rabbit-hole of free will, evolution, and the unsettling possibility we’re simply vessels for our gut bacteria. If you want the playbook for reclaiming your biological drive and creating a legendary life, this is the conversation you need to hear. SHOWNOTES 43:19 How to Reclaim Control Over Your Biology 50:24 The Feedback Loop of Accomplishment 01:04:33 Why Fish Tanks Are Better Than OnlyFans: Investing Dopamine 01:15:34 Final Thoughts: Celebrating Male Drives & Social Contribution FOLLOW ANDREW HUBERMAN: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/hubermanlab YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab Podcast: https://hubermanlab.com CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. SleepMe: Visit ⁠⁠https://sleep.me/impact⁠⁠ https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. Tailor Brands: 35% off ⁠⁠https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35⁠⁠ https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠⁠ https://shopify.com/impactHims: Start your free online visit today at ⁠⁠https://hims.com/IMPACT⁠⁠ https://hims.com/IMPACT. Linkedin: Post your job free at ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/impacttheory⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/impacttheory What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show⁠join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call⁠see if you qualify here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/⁠sign up here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,⁠ Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook⁠ https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:⁠ ⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory⁠apple.co/impacttheory⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:⁠ ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:⁠ ⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:⁠ ⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:⁠ ⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:10Speaker 01

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time. And you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 1:38Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with the one and only Andrew Huberman. If you haven't listened to part one yet, hit pause, go back, check it out. You're going to want to hear everything that we've talked about so far. Let's get right into it.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  I'm curious how you see AI playing into it. I'm not an expert in AI, but like for somebody, for instance, who I don't know, is interested in creating things. I mean, we're aside from just searching in AI.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  You know, what do you see coming next that people like, you know, people like me and everybody out there don't quite see yet in terms of the next iteration of where we're going to be like, everybody's using this.

• 2:18Tom Bilyeu?

  It's easy to think like a sci fi writer. And so that's always the best way, I think, to come at it. I like to remind people right before I make crazy predictions that the only thing I know is that nobody sees the future clearly. It will unfold in a way that is surprising guaranteed. So everything I'm about to say, I say, knowing that I'm going to be wrong. So the only question is, will I be directionally correct? AI is the ultimate pattern recognition machine and it it may never become human like, but it is going to extend life radically. It is going to be better than us at everything. It'll be a better therapist. It'll be a better husband. It will be a better wife. Like it, it, it will be so good because remember, go back.

• 3:01Tom Bilyeu?

  My core thesis is that all of life full stop is about manipulating my own brain chemistry in alignment with what evolution wants, which is for me to have kids and to have kids. But as you said, it's easy to hijack that. So AI will be so extraordinarily good at recognizing the patterns that we operate under. It will know exactly how to make us feel anger. That's what we want to feel clarity, certainty, laughter, sadness, whatever. The the patterns will be so easy for it to replicate. Now, this is going to be over time, obviously. So I think the thing that maybe surprises everybody, the world will bifurcate. And so on the one hand, you're going to have people like me. You go full transhuman. You are thrilled to be able to live out a thousand year life inside of virtual worlds where you are fighting dragons

• 3:46Tom Bilyeu?

  and exploring planets and it will legitimately be unbelievably cool. Then on the other hand, you have people that will be deeply religious and will see people that basically become a different kind of entity as an affront to God. There will be violence and how bad that violence gets will largely be determined by how economically disruptive the switch over to what will inevitably be a post capitalist, post scarcity world. Because one of the big things that I think AI is going to do, and just as a reminder to everybody, this won't play out like this. This is merely directional. Uh, that it will almost certainly drive energy costs to zero.

• 4:28Tom Bilyeu?

  And as soon as you drive energy costs to zero and have a first like run of robotics, which are already coming off the line. So this will happen. You have free labor infinitely. And so that means that the only thing you're up against is resources. You could theoretically eventually run out, but given our birth rates are so terrible, I don't think that's going to be the problem. So you can have anything you want, anytime you want, and it will so profoundly break our meaning and purpose circuitry, which I think are essentially all that matter in a human life, that that's where I come back around to, oh, game development is going to become a whole thing because people will need meaning and purpose, but they'll have everything they need.

• 5:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So how do you create something that is sufficiently difficult, very engaging and enjoyable, but also hard and it makes you scale and push and all of that? And video games quite literally have optimized themselves perfectly to that endeavor. And the technology is now getting so good that you can, you can create worlds that get bigger and bigger and bigger and more nuanced and complex over the years. There are games now that are being developed for five or six years before they launch. And then there, there's one game called No Man's Sky that's in its 10th year post-launch, just getting better. Like there, it's crazy. So now we have to be careful that so much of that, again, it's never going to play

• 5:59Tom Bilyeu?

  out like the way that I just described it. I'm going to be as surprised as anybody else. But in terms of like what we can understand today, what do the trajectories look like? What are the things we have to worry about? You have to worry about meaning and purpose. You really do have to figure out what does the world look like on the other side of capitalism? Capitalism is the only economic system that works. I'll fight anybody on that one and have started. So it's going to be a fascinating future, but rocky, wild.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I want to just offer up a potential model mostly for your thoughts, but it's one that I believe very strongly in. And there is some evidence to support this is true, which is

• 6:44Speaker 02

  the time scales over which we are used to getting reward and linking effort with reward. I've said before on this podcast and others, you know, like beware of any kind of thing that allows you to engage with it seamlessly without effort. Anything that brings you reward or dopamine without effort that precedes it even a little bit is very dangerous. It's very likely you're being hijacked. Okay.

• 7:07Tom Bilyeu?

  I think there might be more to that because every time I hear you say that I think of, I don't know if you know what a souls like game is. They're absurdly difficult. And there was a guy that did a whole video series about how his dad's first video game ever was, I think it was Dark Souls. But anyway, it was a souls like game. And the caption is, my dad's first game that he ever beat was Dark Souls and it changed him. And the video is pretty cool of this guy like talking about how many lessons about life that it taught him and how to get better at something that you literally have, he didn't even know how to move in three dimensional space in a video game when he started. So he's in his like 60s, if I remember right. So anyway, just so I look at that and I go, I have a feeling though, people don't mean that. I don't think you mean games.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  No, well, it could be games. I think that, you know,

• 7:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Could it? Like, or is there something, this whole fish tank thing?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Where it's like your real thing isn't, was it easy? Your real thing was, did it give you energy that you carry somewhere else?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Right. And it was, and it's reasonably hard, not extremely hard, but it's reasonably hard to put together something that's sustainable, that looks really awesome, that like aesthetically is balanced and the chemistry is right. It's not easy. You can't just like throw a bunch of fish and plants and stuff in and I've helped with it now, but I've done these for years. And so you have to have an understanding of how this stuff ratchets together. I think that from the time we're very little, until the time we die, whenever that is, you know, we're developing this, this sense of, of reward contingencies. Like, you know, when you're little, you know, your parents play peekaboo and you get a reward every time that the hands open up, right? Then it's sort of object permanence. They know these, you know, these are developmental milestones. Like, is the ball, can you think the ball is behind there? Oh, the ball is here. Over time, you know, what we call

• 8:46Speaker 02

  education involves longer and longer paths of effort and waiting before you get the reward, the either the surprise, it can be positive, neutral or negative. You know, any number of things in video games, you know, the sense of varying the duration of effort before you get a reward is very important. This is intermittent reinforcement, right? It's how it keeps you engaged. I, you know, I I'll be 50 next month. So I I did a PhD, which took a while, took me four years, did a masters before that. And it was hard, like it involved a lot of hard work and I enjoyed the work. And I published some papers and I'm very proud of those papers, but those papers took a lot of time. So by the time I finished graduate school, because my papers took on average a couple of years from the time I started the first experiment until the time the paper was published,

• 9:30Speaker 02

  I'd sort of like a a clock in my mind that like the the meaningful rewards come about once every two or three years, not more frequently than that. Now, of course, there are other things I enjoy. I had to go snowboarding, do a good run or, you know, date with my girlfriend and I enjoy that. So there are other things too, but in terms of what where I was really putting a ton of like, you know, a mission and purpose effort. And then when was the outcome? You sold a company, made a lot of money. You put a you put your heart and soul and a ton of effort into that company. Yeah, you see it on, yeah, absolutely. And and so that set you up to be able to do hard things over long periods of time. I think that we develop a kind of core understanding based on our experience and what we engage in of how much effort we're willing to put in before we get a reward.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Only fans, I think, is a very predictable, get reward quickly type scenario where people in what we call in train, they start their circuits start to match to that expectation. So that reading one page of a of a real book feels like a real haul. Reading a whole chapter of a book feels like a real haul. Reading a whole book feels like a massive expenditure. And in the and in the age of TikTok, where you're used to getting these dopamine rewards very quickly, it's it's not just the number, but it's the speed at which we sort of expect novelty. And so one thing that I think is very clear that like people of our generation, since we're similar in age, we're accustomed to putting in effort over long periods of time without the expectation that the reward should have happened yesterday or the day before.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  The longer period of time over which you can extend your, your, your notion of where effort and reward are linked, kind of the time bin, I think the more powerful you are as a human being. I mean, Elon, there's a reason why Elon is the richest person in the world. Yes, he's brilliant. You may disagree with his politics, many people do. But let's, let's be honest, the guy's willing to play the long game. I remember, because I was going, I was a postdoc at that time, when the Tesla shop opened up in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and then it disappeared. I remember the early failures of like come and go. I remember seeing those cars, then they kind of disappeared. And then, and then now you see them everywhere. And now they themselves are a controversial thing. But, you know, and then it's the rockets. So he's used to doing, quote unquote, hard things. But the

• 11:41Speaker 02

  part about hard things that we don't often think about that we can teach ourselves is long bouts of effort over long periods of time, leading to some sort of reward that then maybe we export to something else like the fish tanks. Maybe it's, it's a degree. Like, what's the value of a four-year degree? In my opinion, yes, you learn some things. But the more important thing is that you expended effort, and it took you four years. So you learn, I can work for four years for something that may or may not actually be of value in today's day and age. I still think it's of value. I am a university professor after all. But say you're doing okay. I'm doing okay. I mean, not everyone needs a degree. I think that there, you know, there are people who are brilliant mechanics and engineers and programmers that did not need to do that. So I don't think it's the universal path for everybody. But

• 12:23Speaker 02

  this, I do think anyone could do this exercise. They could say, how, like, how long can I wait while expending effort? How many days? How many weeks? Like, how, how durable am I in terms of investing effort for an outcome that may or may not be certain? It may, it may not be zero. I know it won't be zero, but it's probably not going to be a billion dollars, but it could be. So the value that you got from that intense effort, was that in your twenties? Uh, we sold in my thirties. Yeah. So I think there's something uniquely valuable about one's twenties and thirties.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Because you're so filled with energy, you're sort of at the optimal end of health. Not when you're a kid.

• 13:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Especially for guys, you can just feel there's something different about guys in their twenties and thirties. Like, it is a very special window, gentlemen, if you can hear my voice right now, do not waste that time.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  It's raw energy.

• 13:13Tom Bilyeu?

  It is just, it is a different game, like even now, because I've had employees stay with me for long periods of time, young men, that you're watching them change. And there really is something about that whole, um, the twenty seven club of musicians that die at twenty seven. There's something that happens right around there, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, where you start looking at yourself going, did I do it or not? And there's a disillusionment of like the childishness with which you looked at the world begins to fade away and you really start to question yourself. And if you don't have defenses against the fact that nothing really matters, truly, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Uh, you are just trying to yank the levers in your own brain.

• 13:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, but I, the language I use to describe what you're talking about is nature does have a backdoor way of making certain things. Um, unpleasant, even though like masturbation, uh, I've done my fair share. And it's rad in the moment, and then immediately after it doesn't feel like sex feels different, it feels more profound, I don't know what other word.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Generative.

• 14:14Tom Bilyeu?

  It, that's really interesting.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Good sex is generative, you get energy from it, even if you're relaxed, well, you've also done something for the relationship.

• 14:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it feels, it feels ebullient, it's, it's expansive, it's uplifting. In a way that masturbation isn't, even though they both end in orgasm. And so I'm like, nature clearly recognizes the difference, like it, it. I'm hijacking my reward system with masturbation. I'm hijacking it with sex, but in a way where it's like, ah, yes, this is what I wanted you to do. So I'm going to give you that like extra long-term, slow release sense of everything is okay. Not even okay, everything is good, you're moving in the right direction.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  And it reinforces pair bonding, right? I mean, it brings you closer to the relationship.

• 14:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That feels good, that's what I'm saying.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  That's what, that's what I mean, yeah.

• 15:01Tom Bilyeu?

  There's like that slow really, because pair bonding, nature could have said, I don't give a fuck. And so like you, you get nothing from that. But it doesn't. It's like, this is rad. I want you to do this.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've done something useful.

• 15:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  You've done something useful. As opposed to, there's useful, there's not useful, and then there's net negative. And I think what's missed in these activities where people are, where their dopamine systems are hijacked, is they don't see that they're, that they're slowly slipping underwater. Now, I'm not, I'm not a, you know, I'm not for, here for total moral judgment, right? Like, you know.

• 15:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not moral judgment. I, I don't think you're putting that across.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  I hope not. I hope not.

• 15:39Tom Bilyeu?

  If I can get you to buy into this, all I'm trying to map for people is there are evolutionarily placed algorithms in your brain. If you do things that it wants, you will get this slow release feel-good. It's what I call fulfillment. If you do things that are fulfilling, and ironically or not, hard work is a part of what I consider to be nature's recipe for fulfillment. If you don't work hard, it won't work. You'll never get fulfillment. Nature needed to make sure you were willing to work hard because life was hard for millennia.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, even the children, not even, the children are very wealthy people who don't have to work hard for their wealth. These are not happy people.

• 16:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Thousand percent.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  The ones that learn the family trade and do that, they, they can be happy people. But, you know, I've known a fair number of them. They, I mean, you can dissolve a human by giving them too many resources without requiring effort.

• 16:23Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:05Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:47Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  And there's something in that, I agree, I think we're totally aligned in this, you know, mid to late twenties and thirties, that if there were a biological clock in men, it would be those years, not because of lack of reproductive potential, but lack of generative drive potential, because there's a feedback loop on it. Like, I'm approaching 50, and I'm not saying this, you know, as a boast. I put a lot of work into the working out and the sunlight and the thing and the researching, and I work a ton, probably not as much as you, Tom, but a ton and always have. And I feel better now than I did in my thirties, probably because I take better care. Now... Am I more prone to injury? Probably in these kinds of things, but I'm stronger now. My endurance is better. My, my, like, my foot, my thinking process is sharper.

• 19:32Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And so I don't subscribe to this idea that it's a down, you know, downhill slope.

• 19:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Certainly.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Provided you put the work in early. Now, if somebody's in their mid to late 40s and they're hearing this, I still think you can cap, you can catch some of the wave, but I think it's harder. I really do. And I think that you can do it, but it's very important that you understand that you better have something where you are investing over long periods of time. Now, people with families will immediately say, that thing is called kids. Well, and then I say, well, yes, applause to you because you are fulfilling your evolutionary.

• 20:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Nature is so happy with you.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Or, or a request, evolutionary request to do this. So they're very happy with you. So I'm not saying that this has to come just from profession. This is, but you know, the things are related because families require resources and so on and so forth. So.

• 20:15Tom Bilyeu?

  I always tell people, you, if you're not going to have kids, you better have a damn good reason. And I don't have kids, but I'm hyper aware that I have to account for that because it's what nature wants me to do. And so if I'm not going to do it, then I better find what the thing is, it's going to give me meaning and purpose and all of that.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I think we're totally aligned on this. I mean, I think, I think we're in contrast to the conversation we had a few years ago when we sat down here. I think we are now in a place where everyone is realizing that social media, wonderful, but has these real traps in it. First, we heard about the traps for mostly adolescent girls, Jonathan Haidt's work and so forth. Um, now we're hearing about the, the plight of, of boys and men, you know, and the New York Times just ran this thing about what boys and men need as opposed to what's wrong with them. It talked a little bit about what's wrong with them, but now they're, they're entering the discussion about what they need. Right? And, you know, how are we going to get functioning members of society that are men to catch up?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Well, I think that it's some, you know, the process of learning, like long-term investment. And it's funny because earlier I was asking like, what are your thoughts on crypto and investing? This is an area I'm really, you know, wise to. It's kind of the same thing, right? You, you hear this from Warren Buffett, right? You know, that you've got to play the long game. Like especially, perhaps especially with crypto, right? You know, that thing you can just get in and make, make a few bucks. You could probably do that. You could flip, but it's very hard to predict. It's very volatile.

• 21:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Five percent of the wallets make 95% of the money. Good luck.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Is that right?

• 21:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah. Like. If you don't know how to invest, if you are not doing it around the clock, if you do not have a proven track record, then just be in the market for a very long time. Like be broad, assume you know nothing, like and just play a very long, and I'm talking like a 25 year game. Don't, don't try to make your money off of some crazy shit coin like that. This one breaks my heart. Economically, we have done the world a lot of dirt and we are forcing them to gamble with assets. Long story that my audience will be very familiar with. But yeah, it's play, play the long game or you're toast.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Do you think that the crypto market and world is starting to resemble some of the OnlyFans like contour of kind of like the allure? Like come, come hither, you know?

• 22:26Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I think what it is, is it, it is hijacking the similar like, okay, I know how especially the male brain works. You're trying to get access to females. Females respond to resources. So, hey, you don't understand why the financial system is broken, but you can feel something's wrong. And so now you just want to get rich as fast as you can because everything's out of reach. Come to this thing and it's hijacking the gambling circuits. So I'm sure like so much of them, you've talked about this, I literally learned this from you, but you, nature doesn't reinvent the circuitry, it's just recycling it. So I suppose in that way it is similar to OnlyFans, but it's, what it attracts is gamblers. I learned this the hard way.

• 23:07Tom Bilyeu?

  So crypto is all about gambling and it's an asset class. So if you know how to do it well, I think Bitcoin is real in terms of it will function more like a normal asset, like either an equity or gold, we'll see how it plays out in the long run. But it works as you can think of it like gold, you can think of it like an equity. Either way, it's going up in value, but don't try to day trade is basically my punchline there. But the, the get rich quick side of crypto is also very real. And whatever gambling speaks to, it speaks to that.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I have a friend, his name is Ryan Suave, and he's an expert in the addiction treatment world. There's trauma treatment as well, and he's worked with a lot of different types of addicts. And he told me once that the Hardest addiction to break is gambling addiction because in his words, the next one really could change it all. But then he told me something, I just want your reflections on it because I can't wrap my mind around this. He said, the crazy thing is after gambling addicts have been at it for a long while and they've gone through their cycles of destruction and often replenishment again and then restruction, they start getting, they say they start getting addicted to losing, which I cannot understand, except from the perspective of perhaps it's an opportunity to win again. But

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Is it cutting? I mean, that's about the only thing. Yeah, I mean, maybe they're self loathing and to start out with, or maybe there's some sort of weird inversion of the of the pain pleasure relationship with dopamine. We know that that pain taps into the dopamine pathway. Maybe they're so hard pressed. The secession of pain or actual pain? Uh, pain. Whoa. Actual pain. I mean, so maybe it's that their dopamine is so depleted from kind of winning, losing, winning, losing that they they now like pain is the only thing that will do it. I don't know, but I think That's dark. And I believe him. There's no reason for him to lie to me. And I'm not a gambling addict. I would tell you if I was. But there's, and if I was a gambling addict, I'd probably tell you that if I was a gambling addict, I'd tell you if I was. But, uh, but I'm not. But, but I

• 25:10Speaker 02

  think that, you know, I do think there's something in that statement that if it's even a tiny bit true, might ratchet back to what we were talking about earlier related to the relationship between porn, OnlyFans, masturbation, this feeling of shame, this feeling of, oh, like, what a waste of my time and my money and energy. I'm in the shame spiral is a is a real thing in addicts. It's it's something that repeats itself over and over again. And this is why they always say, you know, addicts are most susceptible to relapse when they're at their peak of feeling great and whether at their at their bottom of feeling like absolute garbage. That makes sense. Yeah. So, um, you know, again, these these circuitries are, they're, they're, as you pointed out, they're wired for us to progress as a species. And knowing that in order for

• 25:55Speaker 02

  our species to progress, not everyone has to win and a lot of people can lose. Sometimes that's all I need to hear to remind myself that I want to be like in the in the in the winning lane.

• 26:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, please.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  You know, and what that requires these days more than anything is not participating in a ton of behaviors. It's so much more nowadays about what you choose to opt out of.

• 26:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Facts.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  You know, and so when David Goggins says, you know, nowadays it's it's so much easier or even ea- easy, although I think easier is a perhaps more accurate way to put it, to be extraordinary. I think it's really mostly about what you don't do, what you're not doing with your time and energy.

• 26:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that's part of it. I'll, as an entrepreneur, I'll say, uh, to anybody out there that wants to shine in this era, all you have to do is work like you're from the eighties. Like, period. Like, I was just, there was another

• 26:41Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 26:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Gen Xer, we were like laughing our asses off at like, I mean, forgive me for anybody that's had to do it, but it's like when people are like, I, I need a mental health day. It's like, the fuck is that? So I'm not saying mental health is not a real thing. It is. I'm saying you need to have a relationship with your own mind where you are in control. And I find people like in the modern era, people just do not know how to get in control of their own minds. That is wild to me. So I don't know if it's just coming up. We had, you're staring at a wall for like eighty percent of your life. And so you've got to find a way internally to get control of that process and not be bored out of your mind or whatever. Or the way that our parents raised us, I don't know, man, but like the it work ethic really is rare. Like, and it it's just looked at differently.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, there was a time, people will be shocked to to hear, but, uh, where if you missed your ex, if you pined for your ex, guess what? You you couldn't know what they were doing. You couldn't text them. And thank goodness, because guess what you did? You went out and you did other things. You didn't obsess about the relationship that you had like two years ago. You weren't like in commit, you weren't like, you know, sussing out what they're doing or wondering if you this or that, like you just moved forward. You had no choice but to either move, stay still or move forward. And I think, uh, I love it. Work like, work like it's, uh, in the, in the eighties. I have a question. You sold your company.

• 27:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Billion dollars.

• 28:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  It's a lot of money. Um, there've been a few, um, instances on X and on Reddit where I've been, um, kind of pulled into a conversation around, uh, the, somebody will sell their company for a ton of money and they'll come out publicly and say, Uh, you know, I feel suicidal. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm super unhappy. I mean, everything we've set up until this point perfectly explains why that is. They were on a cycle of striving. That's where the dopamine was coming from. Now they've got the reward and like video game is over. And they don't know what to do and they aren't quite at the point where, and of course, as dopamine goes up, which inevitably happens on the day they see all that money in their bank account. It goes down in a proportional decrease, you know, below baseline, takes some time to come back up.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  So there's just a matter of time, but then of course it's a daunting thing if it took you, how long did it take you to build Quest?

• 28:50Tom Bilyeu?

  If you count the company before it, which allowed us to fund it 12 years.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's go for another 12 years and yet you did that. So I'm interested, did you have a kind of postpartum, as they call it, kind of depression?

• 29:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally not even a little bit.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  So did you celebrate your win?

• 29:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm, sort of. The team never would have known what day we sold on because it was, um, I went to work like normal. My, my wife and I got in a fight over it.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 29:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Because she's like, okay, what do you want to do now? Cause it was like happened early in the morning. We had the call where it's like 18 bankers and confirm, confirm, confirm. Cause they're literally going to push a button. It's going to send you a lot of commas and zeros. And so they do it, boom, money hits. You're sitting there, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. On your banking app, it hits. You're like, holy hell. And we actually took a photo of the moment where it like hit. I've got my fist up in the air and I'm like, oh my God, like we're actually rich. This is wild. And she was like, okay, what are we doing now? I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm going to work. And so she was very surprised. And then when I left Quest, like left, left, last day, last day was a Monday. Impact Theory, I started the next day on Tuesday. So I didn't take a day off. And the reason is because I learned the lesson about money back at the company before that.

• 29:58Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'd started a company called Awareness Tech and I thought that's what was going to make me rich. Ended up being totally miserable. Long story. I end up like, I, I go in and quit. I'm like, I can't do this anymore. This is like a nightmare and. They pull me back and are like, listen, we're unhappy too, but what are we gonna need to do to stay together? And so outline what ends up becoming quest. And so that becomes the thing that keeps us all together was the thing that we would do and it wasn't about money. So that was me going, well, I'm never gonna do anything again for money because I'm worth $2 million at the time. And I'm so profoundly unhappy. If I was worth $20 million, I wouldn't care. If I was worth a billion dollars, I wouldn't care. I don't, I don't want to feel like this. And so I was like, okay, this is why people tell you that money can't buy happiness.

• 30:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And so it was thankfully, I learned that in my late twenties and then didn't get wealthy until my late thirties. So I had figured out, oh, this is a game of meaning and purpose. The only thing that matters is meaning and purpose. Heard, got it. So I'll never make that mistake. So when we sold the company, I was like, uh, the only thing that matters is pursuit. That is my drug of choice. So when I say I'm ambitious, what I mean is I always want to pursue something gigantic. And the getting it, because now I've got it, the getting it is cool, but it's, that's gonna wear off and I'm gonna get used to it. We're recording this in a nice fancy house and we have guests that are staying with us. So I'm seeing it now through their eyes again. And I'm like, oh, that's right. I live in some crazy mansion. But you really, that doesn't matter. Like you're gonna get numb to anything.

• 31:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And so meaning and purpose is the only thing that's gonna see you through it, like working your ass off in service of making progress, which actually is the only thing that matters, attaining it doesn't. But making progress towards a goal that is what I call honorable. So it serves you and other people. And if you're doing that, life's gonna be okay. The second you stop doing that, you, nature is going to reach inside your brain and say, this is not good. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in.

• 32:06Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  And I love it. You managed to avoid one of the biggest traps. I mean, I grew up in Silicon Valley and some friends who've done incredibly well financially with companies. And they all report the same low on sale or a health issue comes along and they realize that they've been just destroying themselves health wise.

• 33:24Tom Bilyeu?

  They haven't watched enough of your content.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:26Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm not kidding because for real, for real, the gift you are giving to the world is that people can actually come to understand their biology. And so if I can get people to understand, look, I know this feels dark when you first think about it, but you're an automata. So these are all just processes that are running, but you feel very much like you're in control. Awesome. It's a great feeling. I'm glad I have it. So I'm not going to abuse that. So then I'm like, I am going to be present in this body, feeling the way that this body interfaces with the world. So I need to take that seriously. And so if I know that sex is awesome, but momentary relationships are hard, but the greatest thing that life has to offer you required love. It's probably the right way to think about it.

• 34:10Tom Bilyeu?

  That a family, kids, like huge emotional incentive. So not, don't do that at your peril. Like you have to be very careful with that. I'm always going to want to pursue, no matter how much I achieve. And the way I explain that to people is you'll never have a meal so satisfying that you'll never need to eat again. You'll never have sex so good that you'll never want to have sex again. Right. So you're never going to have an accomplishment so big that you don't want to pursue again. So just meaning and purpose is nature's way of continuing to push you forward and make life worth living. If you don't have that, suddenly life stops being worth living. And the question I used to ask myself all the time was how many billionaires have to commit suicide before I accept that money won't be the answer? And so then it's just like, okay, cool. These are all knowable things.

• 34:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm just going to act in accordance.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  I mean, it's remarkable that you're able to see information and make sense of it and apply it. I think a lot of people can see information, make sense of it, and they're less effective at applying it.

• 35:07Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, I have just suffered more perhaps like I've been so dumb and suffered so much because of my stupidity that I'm literally just trying to be like, okay, look, I do dumb shit all the time. I would just like to not repeat the dumb stuff.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Doing dumb shit is part of that S R Y gene too.

• 35:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Much to my dismay.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  It's part of like hitting yourself with the rock and then hitting a person and then throwing the rock. I mean, I, I definitely, um, I think that in building a life, as they say, right? I think what you talk about in terms of meaning and purpose, it's something that, um, if somebody doesn't know exactly what it is, it can feel a little bit overwhelming, like, how do I find my meaning? How do I find my purpose? And I, I really do believe that it starts with the immediately actionable things that you at least know are not net negative. They can be neutral or they can be positive, but at least they're not net negative. I have this diagram and I'm almost embarrassed to share it, but I, you know, turning 50, I've been working my ass off for a long time and really enjoying it and loving it. And, um, and I share this only because I think it might be useful to people.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  I, I realize that I get up in the morning, I do the sunlight, do the hydration, I get some exercise, I take care of myself in the ways I describe on the podcast. But I have this little drawing that keeps me in line and keeps me in healthy pursuit. And it's basically a picture I like to draw. Um, I sometimes put my drawings on Instagram, but I, maybe I'll put this one someday. It's just basically like a giant ball of like, of razor wire in the middle. And then on the other side of that razor wire is like a, a road. And I'll have like, you know, like writing, book, podcast, like learning, reading papers, meditation, exercise, although I like to exercise. So like all the things that lie on the other side of this really, it, it takes effort to get over there. I think some people think I just like wake up and I'm like, I used to be like that.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  And I used to wake up in the middle of the night and just start working and then fall back asleep in my twenties and thirties. Now it's, it's a bit more of a battle, you know? And I used to get upset with myself, what, what changed? Well, on either side of that razor wire, I have these like two slopes. And on one side is, it literally says like numbing out. And on the other side, it just says like rage bait engagement. And so I actually think that represents my merge of kind of creative, real world and and virtual world nowadays, where I wake up into the world and I know that there just can be a bunch of things that are pulling on me that are like a slippery slope I could fall down. And so it's not enough for me to just say, okay, I'm gonna just go on social media for 10 minutes. Uh, and that's it. It's not that I'll be on there for three hours. I have self-control.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  But I have to remind myself what my neural circuits are confronted with each day. And I'll tell you, there is nothing like the feeling of getting over that razor wire. Sometimes I feel like I'm literally crawling through it and getting to the other side and completing some work. So that even just like 45 minutes of really solid work, that landscape transforms into a completely different picture, where it's just a flat landscape and I can go anywhere I want the rest of the day. And I'm not, you know, exaggerating that the transformation, what I sort of feel capable of is completely different. I only offer that as, you know, just, um, if people are struggling to be like, yeah, I'm hearing all this, but I'm watching it and I'm not doing anything with it. Like you, you have to kind of scruff yourself and throw yourself through the razor wire these days.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  It's getting harder to work like you did in the eighties. Cause as you said, one of the benefits of the eighties and nineties was that there wasn't a lot of distraction. You know, you could take a bus ride and read a book or learn or journal or, you know, do math problems or do your homework or whatever the hell it was, right?

• 38:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you complain, people were just like, stop complaining pussy, get to fucking work.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, first.

• 38:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And listen, I get it. Like there is a certain amount of toxicity that I understand.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:44Tom Bilyeu?

  But it also made people tougher.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:46Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  The thing, the thing that I grew up skateboarding and I wasn't great at it. I mean, I got put on a team.

• 38:50Tom Bilyeu?

  A thousand times worse than you, but also gross.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Well, I got put on a team out of sympathy. So that's how bad I was. But I have a lot of friends in that world. And I'll tell you, you know, there's this story, real world story that a few years back, you know, a dad, a push, his daughter didn't want to drop in on the ramp. I think it was his daughter, maybe his son. And he pushed her and I think he actually got charged with it, with it like a, like a charge. When I was a kid, and this is kind of like when I was a kid, but this is true. When I was a kid, there's a guy, he's my good friend Gary, I've known him since I was 14. The way you dropped in on a rant was you put your tail down. And it's scary. It looks over. You look like you're gonna die. You look like you're gonna die. And you potentially could slam really hard. I've seen some broken arms on first attempts and second. And basically Gary would say to me, I'm gonna push down to the end of the deck, the thing up on top, and I'm gonna push back. And by the time I make it back, you've either dropped in or I'm gonna push you in. Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Guess what? I dropped in on my own. Did I slam? Yes. So there was a different mindset. And I think when we were kids, it sucked to hear I trudged for seven miles in the snow. So we're kind of in that a little bit. We're a little bit in that right now. For sure. And I want to acknowledge that we know we're in that. But the thing that you can't get in your teens and twenties and thirties, you have that drive, but the thing you can't get is how valuable it is to capture the best of what's available to you and to discard the worst of what's available to you. And like, there's this whole notion, like, no one's coming to save you. Like, no one's coming to save you. It took me, you know, I had to be in real states of fear. You know, real states of fear to yank myself out of mediocrity. And there was a stage in my

• 40:20Speaker 02

  life where I was really just like, not, I wasn't doing shit at all, basically, dumb stuff. And so no one's coming to save you. But the best part is when you start saving yourself even a little bit, the sense of agency that comes from that is awesome. And for anyone younger hearing this, I'm just gonna tell you that someday you'll be on a microphone, telling someone, you're like, when you're in your twenties and thirties. So I'm here saying that on the threshold of my 50th birthday, you're gonna be there too. It have, I remember when we'd sit around and be like, why are these guys talking to us about how hard it was and this and that? Yeah. But I think that's the only real thing that you can't access when you're young. Youth isn't wasted on the young, you know, like, it's kind of what you do with it, you know, it's like, it's an opportunity. Someone kicks a soccer ball your way, you can use it or not use it. But you, I

• 41:03Speaker 02

  love the phrase, it's from Sam Sheridan's book, A Fighter's Heart, a book I really love about all the different fighting sports. And he says, you know, you can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19. There's certain things you just have to wait for. And there's certain things that just require experience. But the other stuff, it's like, you just have to like, scruff yourself and get your ass in gear. And that razor wire picture I offer up because it. It doesn't get easier but to do it, but it gets more and more predictable how to do it. And so it's the same effort every day. There are very few days that are just easy breezy. This notion of flow is kind of an illusion in my mind. Flow comes on the other side of the razor wire.

• 41:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that. All right, you've given a ton of advice to people at the individual level. Now, given your closeness certainly to Jay Bhattacharya, how would you advise the current administration? Like, how should we be approaching this so that good ideas get to the broader public? And there's really two people I want to talk to you about. Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH and then RFK at the HHS. Like, what should these guys be doing?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yes, you want to just get into some like non-controversial territory?

• 42:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course, let's go all the way to vaccines.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Sure. So before I do this, I just want to say very clearly, and I'm not saying this to impress, I'm saying this because I want to make sure that what I'm about to say, people understand my framework. I, you know, I am only here because US tax dollars funded the grants that I worked on for my PhD, my postdoc, and in my laboratory. I was an NIH reviewer for many years, so I reviewed grants, decided what get funded, what didn't get funded. I was a standing member and I had grants from the NIH for many years, which means millions of taxpayer dollars helped fund my laboratory to do research. So I understand the process of what gets funded and what doesn't get funded and this kind of thing. Okay, Jay and I know each other well. I know Robert less well.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  I think it's absolutely crucial that there be an audit of the NIH, and I think that's what Jay-

• 43:05Tom Bilyeu?

  What will we be looking for?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  We're looking at what work is meaningful and what work is derivative. You know, I'm going to get some hate from my scientist friends for this, but if you're not doing derivative work, you're not worried about it. Derivative work is work that the NIH traditionally has favored funding very-

• 43:24Speaker 02

  What we would call incremental work. And this is a shame. This has to do with the fact that the grant process became so competitive that they really wanted to see work already completed before they'd say they'd fund it. So there was this game that scientists have been playing for the last 10, 15 years that no one wants to talk about, but I insist on talking about, which is you would complete the work, then you would submit your grant, show that you could do the work. They'd fund that work and then you would use the money to do the next thing, repeat. The problem with this model is that it forces fields to move very, very slowly. There's also a process in which it feeds this kind of communities working on similar problems so that everyone can understand everyone else's grants very well. And if you come up with something that's really outside the box of very high potential

• 44:08Speaker 02

  payoff, there was a lot of discussion around supporting innovation and significance and big outcomes, but those weren't the grants typically getting funded. It was very hard to change fields or do something new. It was so scientific progress, especially in the neurosciences, has been very slow. There's been a lot of technology development, but if you look at the developments in cell biology and cancer biology in the last, you know, 50 years, you can compare that to neuroscience. Neuroscience got a surge, but it progress has been slow in terms of treating disease. Certainly, we don't have treatments for most of the major neurologic and psychiatric diseases. So first and foremost, I want J and company to encourage high risk, high potential payoff, not risk in terms of public health risk, but high potential payoff work.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  What that means is some grants are only going to get funded, go five years and it'll be nothing and someone will have to come up with a completely new proposal. So that's

• 45:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Are there areas you want to see them focus? Cancer, Alzheimer's?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Psychiatric and neurologic illness. After all, it's the national institutes of health. Now, people will say, well, mouse work isn't the same as human work. Mouse work is, I'll go on record saying, very important for establishing basic mechanisms that then are translated to humans. However, there are a lot of studies that are being done in mouse now and in, you know, models like C. elegans worms and Drosophila flies that are kind of repeating themes that we've known about for a long time.

• 45:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And you think that's pointless?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  I think it's a waste of taxpayer dollars, given there are finite number of dollars. I think there needs to be a very serious audit of what work is really meaningful. And I'm not saying take people's money away completely. I'm saying you tell people, listen, you got one more year or else you gotta propose something radically different.

• 45:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Because the taxpayers are no longer interested in government-funded arts and crafts.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Some work, I'll say this, I don't like saying this, but the truth is some work is phenomenal. And is really making great strides to improving human health and treating disease. Some of it is government-funded arts and crafts. And I think that the scientists out there, they know who they are now.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  There is value in basic research. It doesn't all have to be applied research. I mean CRISPR, right, came from discoveries that were essentially from microbiology. So you never really know what's gonna, you know, where things can lead. But we're now living in the age where you can make much better hypotheses about what could lead to better fields. I think the other thing that's really important is I do believe, and I'm gonna catch a lot of flack for this on X. Covid and vaccine controversies aside, we need to maintain or increase the federal budget for research. It's not a huge, huge portion of the federal budget. And believe it or not, both sides of Congress agree on that. It's very unlikely that the federal budget for research will be cut.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  And then people say, well, I don't wanna pay for this stuff that's meaningless and it's all with Big Pharma. Listen, it's not all linked into Big Pharma. Most scientists are doing really good work. They're trying to get it right. And most who are doing kind of derivative work, that's not very, you know, high potential payoff, are doing that because it's been the way traditionally that you get your grant funded. So we need an overhaul where really exciting, high potential payoff work is being supported. That's the number one thing. The number two thing is we need to incentivize young scientists to go into the field. We are losing a generation of scientists. This was true before the new administration. Because doing science is hard, you don't get rich doing it. And there's a lot of uncertainty in it. So we need to make sure that there's enough grant dollars

• 47:40Speaker 02

  directed towards younger investigators. So I'm talking about 55 and younger.

• 47:44Tom Bilyeu?

  That's young?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, or even, you know, because you're finishing your PhD typically when you're in your early 30s. And then you're postdoc in your 30s and people are starting their labs in their 40s.

• 47:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Oh, man, you're getting your first R1, your first big grant. I got my first R1, let's see, I want to make sure I get this right. I got my first R1 at 35.

• 48:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, genius is a young man's game. How are they dealing with that? Like, when you look at physicists, all of their breakthroughs were in their 20s and early 30s.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, physics and math tend to be fields where most of the great discoveries happen early in someone's career. Biology tends to build on itself within laboratories and as people go on and their laboratories get bigger and better funded, they are able to acquire better people.

• 48:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Did we see that even before the current, like, grants?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's always, you know, my former postdoc advisor, Ben Barris, he's dead now, but he used to say, like, no one, these are his words, but he used to say, uh, no one does anything interesting after, uh, you know, five years after 10 years, they're kind of like, their big discoveries are done. And then they tend to do, really great labs tend to do really great work. But if you really look and you go, is this like awesome work? I mean, there are examples, like Dowdner Lab and CRISPR and things like that. But a lot of labs are just kind of like stamp collecting at that point. They get really good at the grants and papers game.

• 48:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Um, and I'm not cynical about science. I love research science. Yeah, I love it. I mean, it's the raw materials for the podcast after all, you know.

• 49:02Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not fish tanks, but.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not fish tanks, and it's, you know, but it's not crypto, you know, but no, I'm not into crypto a little bit. But here's the thing. If we can fund higher potential payoff work and we can support the younger researchers, and several of my graduate students and postdocs now run their own labs. So yes, I'm heavily biased here. I'm not saying that the older investigators need to, like, be turned out to pasture. They have a lot of value to bring to teaching. They have a lot of value to bring to grant review, to paper review. They should be the one doing all the, like, boring administrative stuff for which there's no, um, they'll keep their jobs and get salaries. And some of them are spectacular, but they can get private funding. They're gonna hate me for saying this.

• 49:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Jay handed you, like, a big stack of these are the grant applications. Are there, like, keywords you'd be searching for?

• 49:47Speaker 02

  I would read abstracts and I would look at publications.

• 49:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And like, narrow, narrow it down for me. You're like, uh... So obviously, we're going to be in neuroscience, but like, what are the big things you like? If we solve that?

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it Alzheimer's?

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if I saw a grant that said, you know, in the last round of funding, or what I'm proposing is to test a completely new molecule in the context of Alzheimer's. This molecule is found in neurons. This molecule accumulates in Alzheimer's brains.

• 50:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And so Alzheimer's number one?

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Alzheimer's is one of the major ones. I would say Parkinson's is another.

• 50:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm, is that on the rise?

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Uh, Parkinson's is, you know, common enough that, you know, loss of dopaminergic neurons is common enough that you'd want, you want to be able to treat this. Yeah, it's age associated also, so there's severe and less severe forms. I would say restoring vision to the blind, a field that was my former field, huge. I mean, more than 80 million people per year get glaucoma, which is the second leading cause of blindness. Cataract, we can now treat, you can slide out the, you know, the occluded lens, you can put in a new one, that's been done. I mean, and it's, the eye is, you know, it's more than an engineering problem, but it's an engineering slash biology problem. Neuralink's working on this, paralysis as well, there are other people working on this stuff, but I would say Alzheimer's is a huge one. I do think that the emphasis on metabolic health in the brain is a very interesting idea.

• 51:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I've heard you ask questions, I have no idea what your thesis is on this, but ask questions about the relatedness of parental metabolic health to autism? Is that, like autism from where I'm sitting is like, the rates are skyrocketing so hard?

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Three percent, three out of 100 births.

• 51:28Tom Bilyeu?

  God damn!

• 51:30Speaker 02

  The world expert in this, Sergio Pasca, he's an MD at Stanford, he studies this, he's working on treatments and cures for autism.

• 51:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Three out of 100?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Now, they vary in severity, right? You have what's called profound autism, people that will always require support. You have people that are kind of on different aspects of the spectrum. You have things like Timothy syndrome, which is associated with heart defects as well. You know, when people say, you know, why are we trying to cure autism? I understand what they're saying.

• 51:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't, that's crazy.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  You know, but ask parents, would you rather have your unborn baby be, you know, somebody be autistic child or non-autistic child? You're going to get the answer you expect. Also, we rarely discuss the, the physical health issues that are associated with autism that are like epilepsy, like heart, heart challenges, like gut microbiome challenges that are very severe in many cases. So, but it's 3%, it's four to one male to female now. Which is that S R Y gene confer confers a susceptibility also, or it could be that females are protected somehow against whatever it is. You know, Chris Palmer, who perhaps, you know, he's a psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  He's really been pushing this idea that early inflammation of the brain is always inflammation, excessive inflammation brought about by any number of different things, maybe multiple things, might establish a greater susceptibility to autism and explain some of this. So that's why he talks about metabolic health in the parents.

• 52:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, speaking of R F K, have we completely debunked the idea of vaccines and autism?

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Okay, so Robert Kennedy wants to reinvestigate. Here's the deal. Here's what we know in the published literature. Just stick to that because the rest is really just speculation, right? Andrew Wakefield was this medical doctor in the UK who published papers on the, what he said was a link between vaccines and autism, M M R, measles, Mumps, rabies, vaccine and autism. There are people who still believe there's a link based on those data. Here's what we know for sure. Those papers were retracted and he lost his medical license for fraudulent, for allegations of fraud. Okay, I didn't go into those papers. I don't, you know, but that, so that's where that stands. There's another group.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  This is a husband, excuse me, this is a father-son group who have also been on this kind of vaccine autism train, who I think the last name is pronounced Meyer, I think it's M E I J E R, something like that. And they've also been big proponents of this idea that vaccines are associated with autism. Here's the problem with their data. The problem is many of their papers have been shown by others to have flaws in methodology and/or that the review process wasn't carried out the way that standard review was carried out. Now, I'm not saying, I didn't go and, you know, I'm not the one making those claims. Other people are making those claims. So there's very little.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Belief in those papers from the traditional academic and medical community. And yet, those are used often to cite, you know, support for the vaccine autism link. My understanding is that RFK placed one or both of those guys on this sort of vaccine review board. So, you know, that's controversial in its own right.

• 54:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  There are many-

• 54:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you tense about that personally? Like, I don't know how much you want to comment about that.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Sure, I mean, I think that there have to be balancers for any, anytime someone has an extreme position. You know, you don't want a panel made up of, you know, diametrically opposed positions, you know, with a big valley in the middle. You also don't want a bunch of people lumped up on one side that all believe the party line or go against the party line. I think panels of reasonable experts that can really debate things and vote is the way to go. But we have to have thresholds for what we consider good data versus bad data. Now, in, in the current situation, we say published is published. Some people say, well, that journal's the great journal, Nature, Science, right? Other people say, well, Nature and Science isn't that, you know, people start arguing about this. And, and then you're down in the weeds around, you know, science sociology.

• 55:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  My feeling is, look, there are many papers that point to no lack of direct relationship between vaccines and autism. However, and I, I just canted good conscience, just say that, full stop. So I say, however, if those are really strong data, they'll hold up for another investigation. Now, is that what we want to be spending our federal tax dollars on? Apparently so, right? He's head of HHS, he gets to decide. Good data should stand the test of time. So I do think if they're, if they're going to go in and test them again, and apparently they are, it should stand up, it should stand up. How those studies are done, who's reviewing the papers? And, you know, how they're interpreted is going to be absolutely critical.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  So I think it should be an independent review board. So people that are really know how to look at the data and for which they have no bias one way or the other, that they have no skin in the game. We're not talking about, you know, bringing in Peter Hotez, who's like a real vaccine proponent versus, you know, Malone, right? Because it's just like, that's like, it's like professional wrestling at this point. That is so well said. Like, you know, like we got, they're just, that's not, both those guys could argue me into the ground that they're more qualified and I know I have my opinion, but it's just they're the wrong people for this situation. For sure. We need a bunch of really great cancer biologists. We need some people outside the US and we need people that are open to the possibility, because this is what Palmer has raised, that there may be an inflammation susceptibility that certain vaccines exacerbate

• 56:55Speaker 02

  and that there's a genetic predisposition, predisposition, excuse me, to autism that sends things down a certain trajectory. I have a feeling, whatever the answer is, it's going to be far more complex than yes, they cause autism or no, they don't. Yeah. Okay. Now, in terms of Robert's general theme of let's get dies out of the food, cool, like let's get dies out of the food. Is that the biggest issue that we're facing? No, I think the highly processed foods are not food. I think they have calories. I think they increase dopamine. I think they provide very few nutrients and they provide little satiety. They are basically the equivalent, the nutritional equivalent of OnlyFans minus the masturbation part. Okay? So they're about as good for our species as that. Should I be jerking off when I eat Twinkies? Please, no, I know, and now this. I gotta get something out of this.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  No, no. So I think that, you know, and we also, you know, I've been looking at this historically, right? I'm not a nutrition scientist, but you know, if you step back and you look at, you know, what's the history of cuisine in the United States? We're not a country famous for our love of nutritious food. What are the American foods? As American as apple pie, cheeseburgers, corn dogs, hot dogs, fried chicken, milkshakes, pizza. Yeah. Like, you know, and then everything else that we like is like the, the really high calorie fat and carb combinations with sugar, like croissants, lasagna, like that's our version of French and Italian food, right? And so this is not a country that historically has thought much about high nutrient density relative to calories. And I think that's really the key.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Nutrient density relative to calories. So you want your proteins. For me, that's, you know, meat, fish, eggs, chicken, et cetera. You want your quality fats, you want your olive oils, your some saturated fat from butter. Some is probably fine, as long as it's limited. You want your clean starches, right? You know, pasta, rice, these things. But if you go to France, you know, they take great pride in the nutritional value and taste of their food and how satiating it is at a given portion. That's not the United States. We were always about volume and value. And what happened is we stopped moving. We started eating more and we stopped moving. If Ozempic has solved any puzzle, it's the following. Why is everybody so fat? Or you weren't even allowed to say that word a few years ago. Why is everybody so fat? Because they're eating more calories than they burn.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  We like sat around scratching our heads for years going, I wonder why everyone's getting. They were, we were eating more and moving less. And I'm not being disparaging, right? I mean, obesity is a serious health concern. You can now finally talk about this as a health concern. And the ones that are really like have been injured the most are these poor kids that were just eating what they were given. You know, they're not, they're not trying to damage themselves. So, and then the problem is that, that adipose fat tissue generates its own hormone signals. And then it starts diminishing the, the other hormone systems of the body and depleting, you know, intramuscular fat gets stored and then now you've got a really sick animal, human, that you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't do this to your dog and we're doing this to ourselves. So I think RFK's emphasis on dies is, is kind of like tip of the iceberg.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  I think the key is you can't outlaw things in this country very easily, right? Especially not foods, especially on limited budgets. But I think the real emphasis should be on getting people knowledge about and access to really nutritious food, which includes things like steaks and burgers. It's just like, you know, peel away the sugar filled buns and the, and the cheese and get them eating that and vegetables and fruit. And I think we're gonna get there, but not after a lot of pain and suffering. So, as you can probably tell, I'm very passionate about these issues because people will say, you know, the federal budget for research is ridiculous. This all just funds big pharma. No, it doesn't. Like, no, it doesn't. Like, that's just, that's a lie. Like, the number of grants that are funded, NIH-funded labs, these people aren't making a lot of money on pharma.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  And if they do make a discovery, like the discovery of growth hormone a few years ago, yeah, the investigator might get some money, the university gets some money, and yeah, the the the company makes some money. But like, I think we all are grateful that growth hormone exists as a as a thing, that, you know, synthetic growth hormone. So it's not this like diabolical structure that that we imagine. Big Pharma has its issues.

• 1:00:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I was gonna say, this this is where

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  But it's not academia that's the problem. That's why I want to be very clear. And now, of course, I'm biased, right? I'm still a tenured professor at Stanford.

• 1:01:04Tom Bilyeu?

  I think it's worth like putting your foot down on that, especially because you're from the inside. You're somebody that's earned certainly a lot of credibility by years, you know, year five of putting out good information. But I see, so entering the economic realm, I realized very quickly that like in physics, when you offer a new theory, it better describe the world that I see. So in economics, when you describe like, hey, capitalism works, you better explain than why shit is so broken right now. And if you cannot explain why somebody can't afford a house, why so many people are like, the American dream is dead. If you can't explain why that's happening, don't come to me with like, this thing that I'm supposed to believe works wonders isn't working.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Great, great argument. Yeah, great argument. So going back to the earlier part about what I would tell Jay, why is the NIH kind of broken or been broken? Well, we're not funding young investigators. They're not incentivized. It's meaning it's hard to get money to do really new things. It's derivative. What's the problem? And I'm gonna earn a lot of enemies this way, right? You know, I have tenure, I'm good, is

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Too many older investigators. They're not retiring. They're not retiring. In Japan, they understand this. They do a forced retirement.

• 1:02:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm, what age?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Um, I think it's sixty-five.

• 1:02:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  I could be wrong, but, but there's real value placed on the young investigators there. So in our system, you have people who are, have like five, six, seven, eight grants. That's a huge number of grants. That's five, six, seven, eight grants that could fund five, six, seven, eight other laboratories that are starting out. They're taking too much of the funding. And these are the same people who are saying, we need more money because the young investigators aren't going to have any money. They're taking too much. So I don't earn any friends in the older group, but look, I also have this independent life now. So like, like, come at me. Like, I've seen how this process works. They can run off foundation money. They're tenured, they'll still get a salary. You get more time with your kids and grandkids. Spend some time mentoring the younger generation of scientists. We need to peel off that top layer.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  And yes, some of them are doing spectacular work. And guess what? It's time to go. Because there's only a finite amount of money. And those people are eventually going to retire and die. I've watched many of them retire and die. They're going to retire and die. And this next generation, there's a huge trough in terms of their funding. We've got people leaving science in the United States. And if you want to look at it from a monetary perspective, the return on investment to great science done in basic laboratories is enormous. It's like a twenty to one, twenty to one. It's, you know, it's, it's variable because not every lab is going to make a, you know, a, like a drugable discovery or a deviceable discovery. But when you look at it historically, that's, that's an underestimate.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  So, and I'm probably even lower than I should be. I'm going to stay conservative with that. So the problem is too many old scientists not doing much, but taking too much of the funding and publishing derivative papers. This is the issue. And you know, you might get the sense that maybe I've been asked about this and maybe I'm like playing a bit of a role. You bet, you bet I am.

• 1:04:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  You bet. And I'm not competing for funding anymore. I don't need their money. So.

• 1:04:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm very excited for the Huberman, I don't give a fuck arc, like that.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Well, I'm.

• 1:04:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I feel like we're at the very beginning of that.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Today, today was the official start.

• 1:04:20Tom Bilyeu?

  We're unveiling.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  I told Rob, my producer, before coming over here, yesterday we were talking, I said, you know, I feel like I'm at the, I might feel I'm at like kind of a maturational threshold. And he goes, uh-oh.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I've done enough. I don't, I'm not all wise, but these are, these are systems and areas that I'm very familiar with. And I think that young scientists are also very afraid of older scientists because they're like, oh, all the promotions, all the elected to the National Academy. Look, in a couple of years, the National Academy of Sciences might not even exist.

• 1:04:50Tom Bilyeu?

  That's wild.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Trump might eliminate the AAAS, the American Academy of Sciences, America for the Advancement of Science. Science Magazine may not exist. So this whole kind of old network is, these things have gone on cycles. Ray Dalio talks about financial and cultural and, you know, these macro cycles over 500 years. These happen in science, too. And I've studied those with, with a, with a fine tooth comb. I've studied those. And what you see is every few years, a field kind of wakes up because guess what? The veil's pulled back and they're like, okay, where are all the discoveries? What are we doing wrong? They go, well, it's slow, it's hard. And they go, actually, let's look at the structure of what you've been doing. Uh-uh, revision. And that's going to happen in the next few years. And I think that

• 1:05:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And you're here for it? You're clapping?

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm here for it, provided. And I do think Jay has been very, very good about lending his ear to people. This isn't, Jay Barchar is not a radical disruptor. He's somebody that is definitely under, you know, competing pressures and he's doing his best. But he's listening. And my hope is that he'll do what, you know, at least these two things. He, he says he will. And I'm gonna, I mean, you can bet I'm gonna stay in his ear. And there's a cohort of younger investigators that run labs that are like, yeah, like, we really want to go after big problems. We need the money to do it. And so it's like, old guys and gals, time to step aside. And if they say the same thing about me and podcasting someday, I'll step aside. There's a time to hang up your cleats.

• 1:06:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, here, here's where I will take a different stance. So Eric Weinstein was the first person to introduce me to this idea that the old guard needs to step aside. I'll, I'll take a hard pass on that. The new kids need to get so hardcore that they cannot be fucking denied, like plain and simple. Podcasting became podcasting because it was young guys that were like, fuck these kids. Like, I'm not gonna try to be, yeah, with TV. Like, I'm just gonna go do my own thing.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  It's like indie music in the 90s.

• 1:06:38Tom Bilyeu?

  A thousand percent. Like, look, it, if you Can take over the current system, do it. That's awesome. The infrastructure is already there. But if you can't, you don't just hang your cleats up, cry about it like the like. Look back in history. It's always the young bucks that are like, cool, I'll find a way around this. We need people to your point, like we've got to get culture to say, dear, young, brilliant mind, I want to celebrate the life out of you. When you go do a thing and be successful. That's why I love what you've done in terms of becoming a podcaster, getting literal global notoriety. Obviously it comes with slings and arrows, but it's incredible. The fact that we get to watch you learn this stuff.

• 1:07:19Tom Bilyeu?

  You make it available to all of us and now you're getting to that wisdom part of your career where you also have the director of the NIH in your phone. It's like, that's the, that's a really interesting thing. But it came of you coming up through the like way youngins did it. You know what I mean? Like you're inventing a new path and you're doing something new and different. So may you never step aside, but may you get outperformed. It's like that. I want someone to, I want to be able to fight as hard as I can and I want a young buck to take it from me, but I'm not going to give it up.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:07:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna hand it over.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:07:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Try to do my shit till the day I die.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we're taking good care of ourselves. So they're gonna have to come at us.

• 1:07:57Tom Bilyeu?

  They're gonna have to fight hard. But it's like, I'm not going to pull the ladder up. That's where I'm like, all right, you're a dick.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Like if you're pulling the ladder up and you're trying to handicap the next generation in some way. Uh, I couldn't respect myself if I was doing that. But I also wouldn't respect myself if I was like, all right, you just take it up.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Get out of here.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  No, I have no plans to hang up my cleats. I think that, you know, there'll be a natural endpoint at some point by death or something else, or I'll pivot to something.

• 1:08:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll speak for myself. I will fade into irrelevance. I have no doubt that there are just, I'll be so disconnected from culture, it'll just be too different. And so the people that understand me, that grew up like me, they're just gonna die. I mean, this, this is the way of things. I don't have any beef with that, but I'm gonna go down swinging.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  Well, I love documentaries and I love watching documentaries across fields. And, uh, you know, we talked about the 27 effect, you know, people dying at 27, like you want a really, um, beautiful, uh, window into. Kind of like the spirit of art and how fame can destroy somebody and like, you know, you watch Basquiat about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Or the documentary about him, or I just recently watched The Future Is Unwritten, which is a free documentary about Joe Strummer and The Clash. The Clash only lasted for five years. It's wild. It's wild. It was a short, and then he went into this long kind of creative desert that lasted almost 12 to 15 years. Whoa. Came back at the end and did three albums that were produced by my friend Tim Armstrong. With a band that was not punk, it was Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, amazing music.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  And as Tim said, there's three masterpieces at the end of his career. He seemed to like pull together all the aspects of himself, like having grown up in Cairo and all these places at the end. And I watched that and I was like, oh, this is so interesting because if you watch other music band documentaries, Grateful Dead or whatever, you'll see that there are these, there are these arcs. Where people have, it's the initial thing, like you watch the Defiant ones about Beats. You know, and that whole thing with, um, with Dre and like, you see there's this sort of essence. Energy at the beginning when you're just being you and then that like creates this big wave. And then there's inevitably like people fall out because of the excesses or because of the public attention. And then people grapple with kind of like trying to find their way.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  And then the ones that break through that with the knowledge of how the system works and they still have the energy. And they're not succumbing to the excesses. It's like, whoo. They're the ones that really rise to, to like major power and you can never really predict where they're going to be benevolent power, creative power. So that's why like Dre is where he's at. You look at his story versus like some of the other guys in N W A. And it's like, whoa, like these are very divergent paths, right? Dead, jail, destroyed into ignominy versus like, you know, where Dre is at, right? So, but they all started from the same place. And so you start looking at these two very different genres of music. Or you look at like a, a scientific career, like Oliver Sacks turned public health educator.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  And you start realizing there's always this kind of like raw energy, not really thinking about where it's going to go, breakthrough. Downshift and then most people dissipate at that point. So the ability to just keep pushing through like you did, you sold Quest. What did you do the next day? He went back to work. I'm so grateful to my PhD advisor because I didn't have that good sense and that, you know, I'll never forget. I think it was my second paper in graduate school. We published it in Science. It's like, you know, less than 1% acceptance rate. My second paper, I'm like, publish in Science Magazine and I was so stoked. And my dad, who's a scientist, was like, just enjoy this feeling, but you can expect a dip afterwards. He somehow understood the dopamine trough. And I went to her, I was like, are we gonna throw a party? And she's like,

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  I mean, we could get a pizza or something, but like you already had the party. And I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, the work was the party. And I was like, okay, no party. Went back in and we ended up publishing like eight or 10 papers together. Yeah, over the next, you know, it took us some years, but and that was so valuable because I thought you win, you celebrate. And she was like, I mean, we can have a pizza, but like, why not just go back to the process? So it like really speaks, it's a much, you know, it's a micro level. It wasn't the sale of a billion dollar company, but the lesson was the same for me. So, but yeah, I'm not, I'm, I'm not gonna pull up the ladder either. I want to see more great podcasters. When Chris Williamson hopped on the scene, I was like, this kid's gonna do awesome. It's weird I call him a kid. He's not that much younger than me.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  But he was on Love Island, so we get to tease him a little bit, but I was like, this guy's gonna be a major player. I could just see it. You, it was like, it's just apparent. And now I've, I've been watching Founder's Podcast with David Senra. He kind of does around founders and that kind of thing. He's a, he nerds out and does these solos and I'm like, the, the passion that he's putting in it, I'm like, this guy's killing it.

• 1:12:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. When you see somebody that's really.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Just the energy like that. And it feeds us because it reminds us of like how it all, you're like, yes, there's more of us. You know?

• 1:12:35Tom Bilyeu?

  It's cool.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Brother, I have so many more things that I could ask you, but uh. I will just thank you for coming on. This was absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for your time. This is really, really fun.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  It was great fun for me too. And it's always a pleasure to sit down and to see you. And I'm, I'm in such gratitude for you and, and Lisa and, and just what you've been doing and like your spirit about it. Like, I don't know if things get you down. If they do, it's not apparent. And you've been a real inspiration for me. You were in this game before I was. And so you're like my, kind of like the varsity guy when I was coming up as JV.

• 1:13:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Obsessingly kind. Thank you.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  It's true. And, and I learn from you all the time, on camera, off camera. So I'm in, in real gratitude to you.

• 1:13:16Tom Bilyeu?

  I appreciate it. Well, the next thing I want to do, I want to get you to be a full blown capitalist. So if you want to tell people where they can get some of this incredible yerba mate, everybody.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm half Argentine. My dad's Argentine. I grew up drinking loose leaf mate, which is stuff out of the gourd. And I always wanted a zero sugar cold brew mate. So I developed and I'm a partial owner, full disclosure, in Matina, yerba mate. They're now on Amazon. Soon they'll be in that big store where everybody shops for healthy stuff and other places. And you can order directly from Matina. It's awesome. It has zero sugar, 120 grams of, excuse me, 120 milligrams of caffeine. It's all organic. It's got organic ginger juice. It tastes awesome. There are a bunch of flavors like peach and mint and raspberry and mango. And, and I love this stuff. I, full disclosure, I'm a serious caffeine drinker. I drink like up to 800

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  milligrams of caffeine a day. Most people don't require that, but it's a super clean energy. I love it. And if you, if you give it a try and, and you like it, or if you don't, you know, send me some feedback as a DM on Instagram, but.

• 1:14:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Listen, man, I love it. Obviously, I'm a big believer in entrepreneurship and people making incredible products that they really believe in. And to everybody out there watching, he showed up with this today just to let me try some. I didn't even know it was his. So I was like, bro, you, you gotta start like putting this stuff on camera.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  This wasn't an intended promotional.

• 1:14:41Tom Bilyeu?

  No, but I want to get him wearing t-shirts, like for real. Like when you make something that you believe in, like stand 10 toes down, let the world know, like, don't be bashful. I know that people are gonna bitch and complain or whatever, but literally. The modern world brought to you by entrepreneurs. And so being bashful about the things that you create, bringing something to market is incredibly difficult. And now the market's going to decide whether it's good or not, but getting it to this point is extremely difficult. Very rare. And I'm excited to try it, man. So I hope that it smashes for you.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Thank you. Well, I hope you like it. And yeah, 90% of the adult population in the world consumes caffeine every day. And I will argue that it's the best, most even, clear energy. So I, I love it and I'm excited for people to try it. So thank you.

• 1:15:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, for sure. All right, everybody. If you have not already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics.

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