Tom Bilyeu On Exiting The Matrix, How To Develop ‘Techne’ & Why Mindset Is Everything

Like most of us, Tom Bilyeu chased money for nearly a decade only to end up emotionally bankrupt. What this filmmaker and serial entrepreneur came to realize is that the struggle is guaranteed. The money is not. So you damn-well better love the struggle. Acting on this epiphany, Tom and his partners sold their technology company and founded Quest Nutrition — a play premised not on profits, but rather on creating value for people. Ironically, Quest exploded, becoming a billion-dollar business in roughly 5 years, making it the 2nd fastest growing company in North America according to Inc. Magazine. This is all very interesting of course, but it’s Tom’s next chapter that captured my curiosity. After exiting Quest, Tom embarked on a mission to truly empower people — an act of service aimed at eradicating, at scale, what he sees as an epidemic of impoverished mindset. Hence was born Impact Theory — a media company with a juggernaut talk show cornerstone in which he goes deep with all manner of inspiring people dedicated to positive transformation. The aim? To influence the cultural subconscious by building a single-minded content creation machine that makes exactly one type of content — content that empowers people. A long-time fan of Impact Theory, I had the good fortune of being a guest on Tom's show a few months back. I walked away from that experience even more impressed with Tom. Sure, he's über successful. And the legacy he is now building is as masterful as it is laudable. But it's his generosity of spirit, matched with a keen and heartfelt curiosity, that left a lasting impression on me. The more I looked into this man and his mission, the more convinced I became that he would make a great guest for the show. And so here we are. This is an exchange designed to upend your sense of personal possibility. Shock you out of The Matrix. Change the story you tell yourself about yourself. Facilitate greater expression of the true self within. Access reservoirs of hidden potential. And ultimately become the best version of who you really are. And it all begins with changing your mindset. As someone who operates in a similar landscape, I have the upmost respect for Tom's mission and him as a person. Chocked with practical advice and implementable takeaways from the frontlines of business, relationships, personal growth, self-improvement and everything in between, this conversation does not disappoint. To view our conversation on YouTube, visit bit.ly/tombilyeu425 And don't forget we're also now on Spotify! Let the master class begin! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  So, when it came to, do I buy an island and retire? Or do I double down? It came down to what will make me love my life the most? And the reality is that the thing that will make me love my life the most is to do the things that are fulfilling. And I think fulfillment has a very specific, universal formula. And that formula is, work your ass off to get very good at something that you care deeply about, that allows you to serve not only yourself, but other people. That's it. You gotta have all of it. That feeling, which will survive through moments of suffering, hardship, loss, that is all that matters. That's when you feel good about yourself, when you buy yourself.

• 1:44Rich Roll?

  That's Tom, Bill, you, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:59Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody. How are you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. Welcome or welcome back to the show where I go deep, I go long with the most inspiring paradigm-breaking changemakers across a wide cross-section, a wide spectrum of culture, science, entertainment, sports, medicine, spirituality, basically a whole variety of topics with the idea being to help you, help myself, continue to grow, to evolve, to progress towards our most expressed selves as we trudge this road of happy destiny. Did you guys watch the Oscars?

• 2:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. There's something weird about competition when it comes to art and creativity, but on some level, I don't care. I still really love watching the Oscars. I always have. I get into all the pomp and circumstance and, oh my God, Free Solo, that's documentary, right? How unbelievably cool was it to see Chai and Jimmy and Alex and Sony onstage getting their statues from none other than Aquaman, who's quite a climber and athlete in his own right? It was just a beautiful moment and so, so well-deserved. Is it weird that I feel this odd pride about the whole thing, even though I have absolutely nothing to do with the movie?

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  I don't know, but just being honest about that. And I gotta say, it is the second year in a row that I've had the best documentary-winning filmmakers on the podcast. So if you're new to me or to the show, check them out. Last year it was Brian Fogle, who is the guy behind the amazing documentary Icarus, which won the Oscar last year. It's a must-see and that was a must-listen conversation, RRP 328. And then I had Alex Honnold on, that was RRP 351, and then Chai Vazarelli and Jimmy Chin, that was RRP 407. So please check those out if you haven't already. Did I mention Tom "Bill" Yu is on the show today? Well, he is, and I for one am pretty excited about this.

• 4:05Rich Roll?

  And that's coming up in your ear hole in a couple few, but first...

• 4:17Rich Roll?

  Can I read an email? This is something I like to do from time to time. I haven't read one in a while, but I got one the other day that really just stopped me in my tracks and I wanted to share it. It's from a guy called Scott Cutshell and it goes like this. "Rich, I stumbled across you while deep diving some Lance Armstrong on YouTube, specifically you interviewing him, which led to now binge watching your channel on YouTube. First of all, thank you for your passion, your channel, your taste in guests, your questions and insights, your presence. Second, my personal story is extraordinarily bizarre and fucked up, but I did want to share it with you as my allotted Warholian 15 minutes of fame has for the most part

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  expired on it. But it does apply on occasion and definitely in light of what I'm seeing on your channel. Born in 1963, upper-middle class, blond hair, blue eyes, born to a United States Marine who fought and survived the Korean War, who married his childhood sweetheart and together with the aid of the GI Bill, then went to Syracuse, she working at Westinghouse as a stenographer typist while he, Beryl, asked his way through to a degree in accounting and business in a touch under three years before settling into the now-dead American dream. Career: step ladder up from lowly accountant to junior to CPA to senior partner, house on the hill with two sons and a new Cadillac every two years.

• 5:43Rich Roll?

  It was all mine for the taking, but it was not meant to be. My brother, five years my senior, was tougher, cut different than his baby brother, me, and somehow knew and understood how to blow off the fights and the squabbles, the slights that wound and stick and fester between two parents that forgot their love for one another. But me, no, I was the sensitive one. I absorbed it all, I tried in vain to break up the adult fights, always to zero avail, and in the process went from golden child to fat fucking disappointing slob." By 11, I had little boy tits and was sporting a slightly pregnant belly. Gym class was brutal, dating was asinine.

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  The former jarhead dad was unforgiving, while the loving mom, making up for it all, hugged me while feeding me, always out of dad's eye shot. Pizzas, subs, chips, ice cream. It was her way of saying, "I'm so goddamn sorry you were born sensitive to a fucked up, love-wounded marriage between two parents that lost their way." Besides food, my only solace became music and my bicycle, i.e. freedom and independence. By 15, I had 185 pounds on my 5'9" frame. By high school graduation, I weighed 220 pounds. Lots more horrid shit I can mention, but I know you're busy and probably get tons of these types of emails, so I'll fast forward.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  I got pretty good at music while getting a lot worse at figuring out my inner demons, but, Rich, I did luck out. Maybe I am not so evil and worthless after all, with an amazing woman who was blind enough to look at me from the inside out, instead of the opposite, and marry me. Together, we made an amazing daughter before I peaked at 501 pounds in 2005, and was given a death sentence by the medical community. Varyiatric surgery or death, bro. Then I got angry at all of it. The slights, the demons, the teasing, the shit-talking, the PE teachers way back when that I begged to not put on the Skins team, but they always somehow did anyway.

• 7:49Rich Roll?

  And on death's door, had the blissful good fortune of watching a bicyclist commuting to work through our living room window one day. And it all flooded back to me. Possibilities, cycling, being my own captain, running from my parents' anger and arguments, and much more. Fast forward again. Three years later, early 2008, I had lost 332 pounds. No surgery, no pills, just me and a custom-made bicycle, lots of veggies, and a metric fuck-ton of support from my wife and daughter. The press showed up, Oprah showed up, the Today Show. Final fast forward- And then I'll shut up 11 years later, I'm still small. I did it. I fucking did it.

• 8:33Rich Roll?

  I burned out riding though, too many miles, too many close calls with texting, Starbucks sipping soccer moms and BMWs, SUVs, too much alone time too. So I walk a bunch now and row my ass off to forget all the shit talk from years ago. Your channel makes me feel like there are folks out there, blood brothers, if you will, that are bound by deep hurt and a slow burning flame that softly says, "I might be damaged beyond repair, but I am not entirely fucking broken." For that, I thank you. Namaste, Scott Kutchall. Yeah, man, that's right, Scott. You are not entirely fucking broken, my brother. And

• 9:17Rich Roll?

  that is the deal. That is the why, that is the way, because on some level, we're all at least a little bit fucking broken and recognizing it, acknowledging that is the first step in moving past it, in growing and evolving. And it's the reason I feel so strongly about sharing these stories, the stories of others who have confronted their own brokenness, their wounds and their trauma, and found a way forward. Because change is possible, and it's really these stories that light the path. And as I was watching the Oscars last night, I keep reflecting back on my favorite part, which was Rami Malek's acceptance speech. He won Best Actor for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  Rhapsody. And, and he basically said that they made a film about a man who was just so unapologetically himself. And the fact that that film and Rami's performance is so celebrated is proof that we're all longing for authenticity. And I think that's right. I think that's true. And in my own small way, it's really what I'm trying to do here, to tell stories that allow us to seek and find belief in our own wounds, our own innate potential within ourselves. Change is our mandate, and it's also infectious, and it's contagious. So anyway, thank you, Scott, for reaching out and sharing your story with us today.

• 10:47Rich Roll?

  Okay, Tom, Bill, you. So many of you likely know Tom as the host of Impact Theory, which is this super popular, very inspiring YouTube talk show slash podcast, which I had the good fortune of being a guest on some months back. If you missed that, I'll put a link up to it in the show notes. In any event, I walked away from that experience really impressed with Tom, not just his incredible entrepreneurial success, or the incredible show that he's built, or his professionalism, but mostly by his warmth and his curiosity, like true, true curiosity. If you watch his show, I think you know what I mean. And all this just made me more curious about him. And the more I looked into him,

• 11:31Rich Roll?

  the more interested, impressed, and convinced I became that he would make a great guest for this show. And so, yes, here we are. For those unfamiliar, Tom is a filmmaker and serial entrepreneur, perhaps best known for Quest Nutrition, which is a company that exploded, becoming a billion dollar business in less than five years, making it the second fastest growing company in North America at that time, according to Inc. Magazine, which is all very interesting, of course, but it's Tom's next chapter that really interests me more and compelled me to get him on the show. Because after exiting Quest, Tom has been on this mission to really and truly empower people, to eradicate what

• 12:11Rich Roll?

  he sees as this mass poverty of mindset, and to do this at scale through this media studio that he's built called Impact Theory. And as somebody who operates in a similar landscape, I got to give it up for Tom. He's really raised the bar, and I have the utmost respect for his work and for him as a person. And this conversation, which I think you will very much enjoy, it's chocked with great practical advice and takeaways from the front lines of business, relationships, mindset, personal growth, self-improvement, and everything in between. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to exit the matrix. So give it up for my man, Tom, Bill, you, and let the masterclass begin.

• 12:59Rich Roll?

  Good to see you, my friend.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Dude, good to see you.

• 13:02Rich Roll?

  I've been looking forward to this for a while.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you and me both.

• 13:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, man. Thanks for making the trip all the way out here. I appreciate it.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  That is a pleasure, for sure.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  I have to say that I had an extraordinary experience doing your show. Everything from top to bottom was amazing. And of course, there's the production value side of it. I mean, you've got like this staff of people and you've got like 2,000 cameras going and a sweeping crane. And it's all very impressive. You're running it like a legitimate network daytime television show, like at the highest, highest level. So that's impressive, but I think what, what really stuck with me and has really pushed me and, and, um, made me think more deeply about what I do is the intentionality

• 13:54Rich Roll?

  that you put into the conversations that you have. Like there is a lot of time and deep thought that goes into what you want to accomplish when you sit down with people.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 14:07Rich Roll?

  So elaborate on that a little bit.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one started with if I was going to enter the space and start doing something, there were two things that had to be true. One, I really had to deliver value. And this started for me as an exercise of creating something that would be valuable for my employees. And at the time that I started the show, I had 3,000 employees, about 1,400 full-time and the rest part-time, but I had a lot of people. And I had written this thing called the Impact Theory Belief System. And it was the 25 things that anybody needs to do to their mindset in order to empower themselves to do whatever they want. And I had one overarching fear when I wrote it, that people would memorize it, but they wouldn't live by it. And so people would come up to me and they would say, oh, like bullet point 14 is my favorite

• 14:51Speaker 01

  or whatever. And I'd be like, I don't even know what bullet point 14 is. I don't have it memorized. And I'm living by it, but it isn't something that I memorized. And That was beginning to become apparent that people could, they could remember the concepts, but they weren't necessarily putting them into practice in their lives. And so part of it was they're only hearing it from one person. They're only hearing it in one way. And I think that people oftentimes have to be hit from multiple angles until the analogy or whatever that really clicks with them, or they hear it at just the right moment, or they hear it from somebody who just talks in a different way. And so it really resonates and changes their lives. And that was always my goal to change people. And so I thought, I'm going to start bringing people on. This, this whole podcasting thing is really taking off. It's becoming something pretty extraordinary.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  So let me enter that in a way that's going to bring value to my employees. And that was sort of the thought at the beginning. And then I thought, well, if we're going to go to all this trouble, let's really do something that will reach a broad audience. And then I thought, okay, well, if I'm going to do that, there are a lot of people doing this. But I just have a fundamental belief that there's always room for the best. And so I wanted to come in and bring something new. And what was that new thing that I could bring to the table? And I thought, people go on and they give the same interview over and over and over. And it's, it's really dictated, one, because they've got talking points that they want to get across, so that's, you know, can be difficult to get around. But two, people ask the same question. And so I thought, what if I could go watch essentially everything that they've put out, listen to every podcast, read their book, do all of that,

• 16:19Speaker 01

  which would admittedly take an extraordinary amount of time. But could I learn something new in that? Which hopefully will improve my life. Could that allow me to package this interview up better for my employees and the people listening to this? And then could I honor the guest with that so that they really saw that I took their knowledge very seriously? I really wanted to learn from them. And then that I could get them out of what I call their loop. So they're used to saying all these things. They've already given those interviews probably, certainly in the beginning. By the time they got to me, they'd probably already done 10 other interviews. So I had to know their loop so that I could build, and this is where the intros came from. I could build an intro that with all the love, respect in the world, took that story away from them.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  So it had already been told at the top of the interview.

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and that's not easy to do. I mean, you have to, there's certain people come in and they're, they... Have their talking points and that's their goal, right? They, they want to communicate those talking points. And my strategy has always been that's fine. I will give them that bandwidth, but we need to exhaust that and move beyond it. Right? And so that's why mine tend to go longer and you don't get into it until the later stages of it. Because, because people have to go through that exercise, right? To get to the other side. But, I mean, you've done a masterful job of that. And I think there's a lot packed into what you just said. But at a very high level, top level, um, what you're doing is an exemplary example of this incredible moment

• 17:51Rich Roll?

  that we're experiencing right now, this democratization of, of not just education, but you know, powerful information that holds the, you know, the potential to be transformative.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 18:05Rich Roll?

  Um, and it's cool to be a part of that movement. I often think about, you know, what I, what would I have done when I was 18 years old or 16 years old and I was struggling with who I wanted to be and what I wanted to express and what I wanted to invest my time in. And there just weren't the resources that there are now. So I don't think that we can overestimate the impact of this movement on what future generations, you know, are going to look like, which is cool.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Dude, I, I agree aggressively. And I think that we're still in the beginning stages of what this is going to become. But this is really pretty extraordinary. One, that people are embracing long form. And I remember when I started, I don't know if you got the same feedback, but everyone was like, Tom, you cannot do an hour long interview. That's crazy. Like no one is going to listen to that. And I was like, that's not true for me, certainly. And I actually seek things out that are longer. And so we did like the original episode that I did with Tim Ferriss. We broke it up into four parts, even though it was only an hour long, which now seems just ridiculous, but my team was just convinced that it would never work. And my thing is like you were saying, part of this is you have to build rapport. Now thankfully you and I have already done an interview. So dude, when I say that I'm ready, you can take me as deep as you want, as fast as you want. And I will go there.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  But oftentimes you have to like first build that. Trust, build the rapport live in the interview as you're going. And so then the ends of the interviews tend to be better because it's longer and you've you've gotten to build a little rapport. So that just felt all true to me. So we stayed with the long format, even though at the time, everything seemed to run contrary to that.

• 19:40Rich Roll?

  Well, the format lends itself to being long form and it's an antidote to our short attention span, soundbite culture. And I think there is a deep, you know, you speak a lot about mythology and I think it taps into this thing that we all have within us to hear a great story or, you know, or, or tell a great story. And if it is being well told, then there shouldn't be some kind of finite time limit on it. And I know for myself, when I'm listening to an amazing podcast, I'm frustrated if it ends, if it's short, like I'm, I'm ready for it to go as long as it needs to go to play itself out.

• 20:21Rich Roll?

  And it's the one medium that you can enjoy while you're doing something else. And it's not on television once and then you miss it. You can, you can, if you feel like it's too long, you can break it up and enjoy it over time. And yeah, I got that same feedback early on, but I just knew for my, I, I just tried to, I try to have conversations that I would want to hear and that I would enjoy. And I knew as a fan of the medium early on, as an early adopter, that those were the conversations that impacted me the most and stayed with me over time.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  You know, so in the, another thing you said is you were talking about these fundamental principles that, that, that you divined and how people would point out one or the other. And yet there was this gap between, call it inspiration or motivation and actual implementation. And that's where I really like to dig deep into because I think there's a ton of motivational content out there. We can look at an Instagram post and feel inspired and it lures us into this false sense that we've actually accomplished something, right?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:31Rich Roll?

  It's very different to put that idea into action. And I think people,

• 21:38Rich Roll?

  you know, sort of fall into this place where they think they've implemented it when they actually haven't, right? And I know you're somebody who said, you know, motivation is, I don't know what you said exactly, overrated or it's bullshit. So how do you think about? Uh, traversing that divide.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I think that everything in life comes down to what your own value system is. So what's your identity? What are your beliefs? What are your values? What are your habits? What are your routines? When you figure those out, that like, if you just gave me a sheet that told me what those were about somebody, I would tell you what the outcome of their life is going to be. And for me, implementation, being willing to face the fears, the anxieties, the unknown, the need to stare at my inadequacies, so I can figure out what skills I actually need in order to go and do something, because implementation is really a question of skill set. So that's why motivation ultimately is going to let you down. It's like, you may be motivated to go do something, but let me walk you through exactly what will happen. You're motivated to try this thing, which you don't know how to do, and you suck at it. And so you go do that thing, you suck.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  It hurts your ego, because your ego is tied up in being right, being good, being talented, worthy, all those like permanent um, set states that people don't realize are malleable. And so they get stuck in that. It damages their self-esteem, so they want to run in the opposite direction. Psychological immune system kicks in, reminds them that that was stupid anyway, why were they worried about even trying that? And so they back off. And any one time doing that, it's not a big deal. It's just that people do that over and over and over and over and over. And my thing is that's such a predictable pattern in humanity. It's like, what do you have to do to counteract that? And the thing you have to do is emotionally reward yourself for being willing to take the steps. So, okay, I know I'm going to do this, I'm going to suck at it, it's going to hurt, it's going to hurt my self-esteem. And so what do I need to do to make sure that I don't trip up over that in a way that makes me turn and run in the opposite direction?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Number one, stop valuing myself for being good at something. And start valuing myself for being willing to learn. So that's just a core part of my value system, is I am a learner. That's my identity, being willing to put in the energy to learn and get better is a part of my, um, not only my belief system that people can do it, but part of my values, that that is important to do as a human, you should do that. So when I see something that I want to accomplish, then I know that I'm going to have the fortitude and the stamina to see that through, because it taps into my identity of the learner and my value system of this is important and should be done. So then I just keep going down. So I hit the, the wall of my inadequacy, and I don't meet that with stopping. I meet that with, cool, now I know what I have to get better at.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  I'm now aware of what the skill set is. And so now that I know what skill set I need to develop, and I believe that it can be developed, then I just put the work into developing the skill. Now, the one thing that I think gets lost in all of that is people lose desire. And they think that that means that, oh, it wasn't as important as I thought it was, or I didn't want it as much as I thought I did. The reality is that even desire is something that you have to learn to cultivate, to turn into a raging inferno. Like, your wants have to become needs. And I think there's some weird pushback. People think that, like, if it's real, if it's love, then there's no energy that's put into building that up. And I think that's BS.

• 24:51Rich Roll?

  So, you think that that desire is a teachable concept?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Desire is definitely a teachable concept. The real question is, building that desire, will that actually work? And so, I think people have something in their mind of something they were forced to do that they didn't enjoy, and there was no natural inclination towards that. And I'll say, yeah, you're probably never gonna be able to build something there. So, that's like trying to start a fire with wet moss. It probably is not going to happen. But if you have something where it really is a spark of real interest, it's not a love, it's not a passion, but it's a spark of real interest. Now, that's something that you can work with and really turn into something by building it, because there is a process that goes along with building that desire. There is a process that takes something from interest to full-blown passion. And if people are willing to go along that process,

• 25:42Speaker 01

  then you really can evolve that initial just sort of, oh, it's a spark of interest, to the very thing that I'm willing to give my life over to completely.

• 25:50Rich Roll?

  And your mindset for entering into that is this idea that you're a learner, right? That you've cultivated some level of self-awareness around this concept. So, how did you arrive at that? And how can other people do the internal work to figure out what it is that is their kind of internal barometer for approaching?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Personal growth. So I'll give people the answer to the second question first because it'll be more usable. And then because it's entertaining, I'll tell you how I came to it, which is unfortunately grotesquely clumsy. But what they should do is read the book mindset by Carol Dweck. I think it's the most important book in the English language, bar none. It is. A bold statement. It is, and I keep waiting for flack on this, but certainly nobody that's read it pushes back. They may not agree, but they don't think I'm crazy. Right. And the reason that I say that that it is that important is I can't think of anything more foundational. So in terms of how to structure your belief system in order to then leapfrog and learn stuff and get out of your own way.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  So at a very simple level, the book says this, there are some people who think that their talent and intelligence are fixed traits. That's a fixed mindset. Then there are other people who believe that their talent and intelligence are malleable traits that can be developed. And they are developed through challenge. And those are people with a growth mindset. So people that believe they can grow into basically whatever they want to become. Do humans have limits? Yeah, almost certainly. But there is such a gap between where you are and the upper bounds of human limitation that to even worry about limitation just doesn't make sense. We put people on the moon. So like, once you accept that we could figure that out, it's like, you're not aiming at anything crazier than that. So it's going to fall within the limits of what humans can do.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So going after that and developing that mindset and being aware of what Carol Dweck calls the false growth mindset, which you alluded to earlier, where people think they're thinking in the right way. They think they're implementing something, but they're really not. So once you have that, so I wish I had read that book because it would have made that all clear. Unfortunately for me, I had the like king of all fixed mindsets and I was convinced that my talent and intelligence were fixed. That it was just about, you know, not what hand life dealt me, but playing that hand well. And so to play my hand well, and even then I wouldn't have understood what well meant, but I know how I was acting and well. In those days for me meant feeling good about myself. Okay, so.

• 28:14Rich Roll?

  What age are we talking about?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Um, early twenties and below.

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  So I'm wondering whether that's entirely intellectually honest, because I do know that when you were a young person, you had this goal of going to film school and everybody told you that was not going to happen and you were intent on making it happen and you made it happen. So on some level, if you were, if you were, if the messaging that you were on the receiving end of was you don't have the talent, you don't have the resume, whatever it is, you had enough of a growth mindset to decide to overcome that signaling? Or was that just pure competitive, I'm gonna show them, they're wrong?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  It wasn't a growth mindset at all, but it was that I believed that I was talented. So I believed in myself enough to think, oh, I have the talent to do this. Now I had deep fears that I was wrong about that and that plays itself out and you see it in people's lives where they're really going for something. But you can see when they're not making it, they're like in panic mode. Because they think that means something about themselves other than they're just still more skills to gain. Um, so at the time I had the belief that I was a, um, that I had God given talent. And so I believed that I-

• 29:25Rich Roll?

  Where did that belief come from?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  My dad made an offhanded comment when I was 12 that I ran with for the next like 10 years. Which was, um, he and knowing my dad may have actually just been trying to save me from embarrassing myself. So what he said was, his actual words, now that I play them back, uh, were, I think you're actually better behind the camera than you are in front of the camera. Now, he may have meant, hey, you should stop trying to act and you should get behind the camera. But the way I interpreted it in my 12-year-old mind was, you're really talented behind the camera. Now admittedly, in the little movies that I was making with my friends with the VHS camcorder, which, I mean, when I think about what it is compared to today, it was crazy, but I knew where to put the camera to make it funny.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  And funny was my only goal back then. And I was legitimately funny. So you take the, um, the-

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Initial wins that I got, because I don't think we're blank slates. So, and I think that some people think that's my mentality. Oh, we're all blank slates, you can be whatever you want. I think that the degree to which you can change is so profound. It's probably better just to think of yourself like that, even though it's not actually true. So I have predilections and I've always gotten disproportionate gains. Anytime I put energy into verbal skills or written skills, I would get disproportionate response. So me and the next person could spend the same amount of time with the same amount of intention and ferocity, and I would just get a little bit better than they did at anything related to verbal or words or writing. And so because of that, I was really focused in the early years on things that were verbal. So I wanted to be a stand-up comic. I did stand-up comedy for a long time.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  I've been in like young author programs and speech and debate since I was, you know, 11 or something. So for sure, I got

• 31:06Rich Roll?

  That's very extroverted for somebody who characterizes themselves as an introvert.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Well, now help me process through this. So then I for sure would have told you, I am the extrovert of extroverts. Now either I misidentified that or I have changed over time. And I honestly don't know what the truthful answer is. But now for sure, I, I am not in any way, shape or form drawn to social situations. I want to retreat. I am a terrible networker. So people mistake a persona that I use, the ability to speak on stage, because it's a skill that allows me to do what my truest, deepest desire is, which is to help people. So I want to impact people. I want to see them go on the same kind of transformational journey that I went on. But when I think about what gives me massive anxiety, it's getting up and speaking in front of people, even doing a podcast like this.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Like, these are things I've had to learn to manage in myself, because I'm just not drawn to them. I like to be alone. When you said you like to be hermetically sealed in your space, dude, that resonates with me emotionally in a way that you can't imagine.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, let's take it back. Paint me the picture of young Tom.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  So young Tom found my space in the family was to be the peacemaker and to be the comedian. So that was the way that I could have a unique voice. I was the youngest in my family. I remember asking my mom one time, I was, I was funny when I was a kid, right? And she said, You were busy.

• 32:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  And I was like, that's not funny. That's not the same thing. And so as a kid, I definitely, my identity was being funny, making people laugh. Um, that very much carried through my high school years. And in high school, I basically did like an impromptu comedy routine, five days a week around my lunch table with the nine or 10 other guys. Um, that, and I did that every day.

• 32:53Rich Roll?

  And what, was there a driver behind that? Was that?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Self esteem.

• 32:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a lot of, a lot of comics say, you know, it was a, it was their way of distinguishing themselves or, or overcoming some sense of awkwardness or trying to find a way to fit into the social circle.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  1,000%. So I was emotionally weak. So, and I found that being funny stopped me from getting picked on by bullies. So that was rad. I could make them laugh and I would diffuse it. And I remember there's this really gigantic guy at my school, like pituitary tumor big, I mean, just crazy big. And he said one time, don't pick on Bill U. He's funny. So it, that became my defense mechanism. So if somebody wanted to fight or the typical teenage things, I would just diffuse it by being funny.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Um, because I was terrified, absolutely terrified that I was just going to get beaten up. And because I didn't know how to fight and, um, was too emotionally weak to deal with pain, that I didn't learn to fight or anything like that. So that sort of insecurity about how to navigate my way through that, I, I did with humor. It matched up with my value system. I didn't think less of myself. I thought, wow, this is a great strategy. I can talk my way out of things. And so by being funny, I got left alone, which was great. And so none of that was like an issue for me. I didn't grow up as the kid that was picked on or anything like that. That wasn't a part of my identity. Um, so, and I loved being able to make people laugh, made me feel good about myself. So, and part of that was driven by the people that I was really close to growing up.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  I believed they were much smarter than me. So I always felt dumb. Because I felt dumb. I needed something to be better than them at so I could feel good about myself. And I was just funnier than they were.

• 34:32Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And this, uh, this, you mentioned that, that you were the peacekeeper or the peacemaker. Was there strife or conflict in the house or?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  It didn't seem like that at the time. I mean, looking back, three weeks after I left, my dad moved out. So clearly there was something going on. And when he left, he said that he'd been unhappy for 10 years. So that puts me at eight years old. So from the time that I'm eight, there's something going on. Um, I certainly didn't understand it when he left. It took me by surprise, but, um, is it possible there was that? My dad was very distant from me emotionally. So was that, and I considered him to be funny. So was that me trying to emulate him to get his attention? I honestly don't know. It's never been like a real pain point for me. So I've never done the hard sort of emotional work to figure out why I ended up doing that stuff. Um, to me, the, the more interesting question is why did I stop? So when I left for college, I said, I'm not going to be funny anymore.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  I'm going to take myself seriously as an artist. And that became really important to me. And so I didn't, um, do comedy or anything until after I graduated college, had failed at film school, uh, which is a whole nother framing, uh, cause there's two ways you could look at my film, school career as being this tale of you can do anything you set your mind to, or you can look at, at it as it failed and it really changed me. And that is the perspective that I use because I think it's more powerful. Um, but when I got out and I was sliding towards depression, then I returned to comedy. Because that was like, okay, well, I failed as a serious artist, but I'm going to go back to being funny. Um, which is a whole story because I got back into it. I performed at the Laugh Factory and, uh, do you know who Mitch Hedberg is?

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Okay. So imagine this, I've never heard of Mitch Hedberg, have no idea who he is. I'm in this really dark place in my life. I think I failed as a filmmaker. I have no idea how to get back into film, none. And it's paralyzing. And I'm like, okay, what do I do? What am I good at? Comedy? Great. I'm gonna get back into comedy. I start practicing again. I can feel my mind almost speeding up. I see the opportunities for jokes everywhere. This is great. I feel good. I feel like my old self, like I did back in high school. It's amazing. And I go to the Laugh Factory and it's open mic night. Now, in an open mic night, major comedians will come, but they're trying out new material. So they're, they're terrible, even though they're famous. And after all the open mic night, or my people, most of the audience is already gone because they all came to see their friend try their hand at comedy.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And then more famous people come up. Their material's terrible. So by the time we get to the last person, there's only, I'm not joking, like 15 out of 300 people left. And so I'm like, I don't think I can do another one of these, but I wanted to learn, right? Like I'd been listening to how they try material, all that. And I get up to leave, my friend and I, and Mitch Hedberg's manager comes on stage and is like, guys, guys, before you go, the next man coming is the funniest man in America. You are not gonna want to miss this. And I thought, you gotta, with that kind of buildup, you gotta give it a shot, right? What could it hurt? So we sit back down and this guy had never heard it before, ever in my life, walks out. And he is so funny, Rich, that actually during his bit, I'm laughing so hard.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  I thought to myself, can you die from laughing? Because I could not catch my breath. It was that funny. And I thought, if he keeps going, I'm actually going to die here in the theater. And so at the end of that, I thought, okay, that's funny. That's how good you can get. And I thought, to get that good, I would have to dedicate my entire life to it. And I'm not prepared to do that. So that became this moment where I was like, okay, I closed the door on that. And it's not as clean as it's gonna sound in the story. But I closed the door on being a comic and that only left filmmaking. And so I was like, how am I gonna get good at this? And so I started researching the brain. I came across brain plasticity. And it was hotly debated in the late 90s. Is the brain plastic? Can you learn as you get older? Or is it sort of done at 11, 12, 13?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  And I thought, well, some people are taking it seriously, that you can change your brain, that you can learn new things, you can push yourself. And people now can't remember that this was actually credible scientists saying, you can't. It's locked. What you have is what you have. There's no way to change it. You're losing brain cells every day. And there's a reason that you can't learn a new language without an accent. It's just, it's done. But I chose to believe that the people who are saying, no, no, no, the brain is plastic until the day you die. I chose to believe that they were right, even though I wasn't sure. And that led me down this path of thinking about, because I started teaching filmmaking. And I was like, I'm able to make their films better. If the brain is plastic and I can learn something new and I'm able to make their films better, why can't I make my own better?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And so that became the thing that ended up putting me down the path of actually developing what we now call the growth mindset, but back then didn't have a name.

• 39:10Rich Roll?

  Right. And so why then did you not pursue filmmaking to the hilt with this newfound, you know, understanding of brain plasticity, or at least this belief that you could develop your skill? Why did that not be the path?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  I did. It was. So, yeah, yeah. So what happened was I was teaching film and looking for any way to have the time to write, to put together a screenplay that I could go out and basically pull an M. Night Shyamalan, where the script is so good that I know that somebody's going to let me direct it. So that was the path I was on. I was teaching. Meet these two guys, very successful entrepreneurs. There were two things I promised myself when I was a kid. One, one day I'm going to be rich. Two, I'm going to have six pack abs. Now, I legitimately went through this thing in high school where I was like, I like poetry and I like filmmaking. Which am I going to pursue? And the reason I ended up pursuing film was you couldn't get rich being a poet. So I was like, cool. I love film. And it was in the eighties. It was just cranking out millionaires. So I was like, this is rad.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I'm going to go do that, something I love, and it's something that can make me rich. So they come across my life. They're yoked. These guys were like bodybuilder types. They had six pack abs. They were successful entrepreneurs. And they were like, look, man, you're coming to the world with your hand out. If you want to control your art, you're going to have to control the resources. So stop being a teacher. Stop trying to work your way up. Come with us. Be a part of this startup. Work your ass off. Become a true entrepreneur. Get a piece of the company. When we sell, you'll be rich and you'll be able to finance your own films. I thought, oh, my God, this is perfect. We thought it would take about 18 months to build this technology company up and sell it. And of course, it ended up taking 15 years, took multiple companies, a not a nervous breakdown, but a spiritual crisis and all.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Of that to realize I was never going to chase money again because chasing money, the struggle is guaranteed, the success is not. So I needed to love what I was doing. That's a whole nother story. But in there, I also actually had a screenplay produced and a movie starring Michael Madsen, who's famous from Tarantino films. And I thought, this is it. This is my break. This is the beginning. And it was atrocious. And I was so heartbroken with how the movie came out that I was like, I have to stay on this path. I have to control the money. And so I buckled down. I did it for 15 years, built a billion dollar company, and exited that with a whole lot of cash and am now building my own studio.

• 41:34Rich Roll?

  So you finally arrived at this place where you can get back to storytelling.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 41:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you still have, you have aspirations of doing narrative content? Long for like feature films?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Aggressively so.

• 41:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Rich Roll?

  Well, you just went through the whole timeline of everything to like back it up a little bit. It's interesting that you jumped into this startup situation because I'm not getting from you that business was a driving force for you as a kid. It was about art and expression.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yes, 1,000%. I am not a born entrepreneur. Yeah, not in the slightest. And I, part of the reason that my philosophies are what they are is because I have lived them. So when I talk about the, you know, having a negative voice, it's because I have one and it is aggressive. When I talk about anxiety, it's because I had anxiety. When I talk about being able to become an entrepreneur, it's because I had to. So I didn't have the instincts. In fact, from an instinct perspective, I didn't have any. And I had to learn all of that. Now I would say I do have good business instincts because I've trained them over time, but I certainly didn't have them in the beginning. And in the beginning of my business career, the, and this is real and I really want people to feel what I feel when I say this. The only contributions that I would make for probably the first two years of being in

• 42:57Speaker 01

  business, the only contributions I would make to a conference call were to say goodbye. And I remember looking forward to that because I was finally going to get to say something. But because at least I knew enough to keep my mouth shut when I didn't know and I didn't understand, I didn't want to look stupid. So I would just be quiet. I would listen and learn. And I'm very grateful to the guys that gave me that opportunity. They would let me on the call. So I was often in rooms that I probably would never have been allowed to be in if I'd been in a traditional company, but because it was a startup, they just kept letting me listen in on phone calls and stuff. So that ended up being really, really extraordinary for me. But yeah, I had to learn to be an entrepreneur.

• 43:33Rich Roll?

  So why did these two yoked dudes want to invite you in to this startup play? Like, what was it about you that attracted them to you?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  So they, God, what words would they use? So they thought that I was bright. They thought that I could write. And they thought, we need a copywriter. So let's bring this guy in. We're basically going to get underpriced talent. And because as a teacher, you're not making much money. So they didn't have to fight very hard to pay me what I was making as a teacher. So they could, they moved me over. They said, look, this is our whole vision. And they were very, very compelling. And this is our vision, 18 months, sell the company, come over, be a part of this, you're going to have what you need to finance your own film. So I thought, this is amazing. And I remember asking them, guys, this all seems too good to be true. Everyone I've talked to about the job offer you guys have made me is telling me that don't do it. Like,

• 44:31Speaker 01

  there's no stability. These guys are crazy. If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. And so, of course, because no one in my family knows startups or anything like that. And I said, this isn't a trick to get me into business, is it? Because you know I want to be a filmmaker. And they were like laughing and they're like, Tom, don't be so ridiculous. Like there are easier ways to just get a traditional employee. And I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then, and in all sincerity, I think what they saw was a kid. They understood his dream. They really thought they could make it happen. And they really didn't think it would take 15 years.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Uh, so while I ended up getting sucked into business, I really don't think that was. I just think they, they saw somebody that they could get more out of than they were gonna pay for.

• 45:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  That's the.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  And so you had an exit from this technology play. And it's the same dudes that you started Quest with.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I ended up working with them for 14 years.

• 45:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Um, so what started the technology company was rapidly turning into an, I don't know what this is gonna be. So at about six and a half years, I went in and quit. I said, I can't do this anymore. I'm moving to Greece. Uh, my wife happens to be Greek. I'm gonna move to Greece because I speak Greek, but I won't say that I'm truly fluent. So I'm gonna go there, get truly fluent, cut my expenses to nothing, live some meager existence and write. And I'm gonna come back being fluent in Greek and having, you know, a couple of screenplays that'll just be bulletproof. And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I said, here's your equity, because by then I'd earned 10% of the company through sweat equity. And I said, here's your equity back. If you sell the company tomorrow for a billion dollars, I'm, you're never gonna hear from me. I get it. I'm not crossing the finish line. I shouldn't get anything for this.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  And that was huge for me because I really believed at that moment that I was walking away forever. And I knew I, no matter what, I would never, because they had been sued by other people who felt, um, in previous companies. And they were always like, God, it's so gross. You create opportunity for people. And I was like, they created opportunity for me. I'm walking away. So I was like, yeah, there it is. And I'm going to, um, go do my thing. And they said, look, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. And that's what I needed to hear to reconnect and to the brotherhood and be about something other than the money. And so I said, look, I've already done the hard thing, which is quit. So now let me tell you who I really am, what I'm really about, what drives me. And I, I thought that my primary driver was getting wealthy and I realize now that it's not.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  And my primary driver is fulfillment. And chasing money does not fulfill me. And so, hey, I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness.

• 46:55Rich Roll?

  So you had that realization before the money came in?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Well, yes. So on paper, I was technically a multimillionaire, but let me tell you, there's a huge difference between paper money and real life money. So what, when I gave back the equity, I was giving back about $2 million. But it was just paper money. It's not real.

• 47:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  So I don't expect some like, oh, my God, that's so amazing.

• 47:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  It was, you know, maybe one day it'll be worth something, maybe it won't.

• 47:20Rich Roll?

  But you didn't go to Greece.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  I did not.

• 47:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I didn't even make it home.

• 47:23Rich Roll?

  And you didn't?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  I was pulling into my driveway when they called me and said, come out to dinner with us. And then that changed the course of my life because then I could finally say like, look, I want to create value in people's lives. I don't just want to sell them something. I didn't use the words authentic at the time. It's a buzzword now, but back then nobody was saying it. But what I said was, I want the company to reflect our real personalities, who we are, what we want to do in life, the things that we're passionate about. I want it to just pour through in everything that we do. And so we moved away from really boring security software to something that we were going to be passionate about. And the phrase that I used was, we need to ask ourselves, what would we do and love every day, even if we're failing? Because the struggle is guaranteed, the success is not. So for three very different reasons, we end up launching Quest Nutrition.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  But it was born out of that misery. It was born out of, I'm never going to be this unhappy again. I want to feel alive. I know about myself. I like community. I like connection. I like seeing people, being able to help them. I want to add value. I don't want to steer by money. Look, money's important and don't get me wrong. I want to make even more money in my life. But there's a certain way that I want to make it. I want to make it by creating things that people value tremendously and they would rather have than the money. I don't do hard sales tactics. It just doesn't make me feel good. So there are ways to generate tremendous wealth in your life that are all value add, humanity plus. And so that was the driver. Now, part of the reason that we ended up being so successful is while that's now in vogue,

• 48:50Speaker 01

  at the time, everyone thought we were crazy. We come out talking about authenticity, about passion, about community, that there wasn't, social media as a phrase didn't exist, but Using today's language, we're going to do all of this socially, all of our marketing is going to be social media. We, I'm going to use storytelling. I'm going to go back to stories. I'm going to tell people what it means to support this company, to buy this product. What does it say about them? Who are they? Who are we? And then we're going to step forward as people, as individuals. We want people to know who we are. And we're going to put employees first. So it's employees first, then customer. And when you do that and you're building this like tight ecosystem of people that you believe in that believe in you, it's just, man, it's really extraordinary. And now it's a movement, but we were early, just early enough,

• 49:32Speaker 01

  using social media just early enough that we just broke and it just went crazy.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What's interesting is that I guess I thought, oh, you exited the technology play and then we're sitting on some cash and then had the idea like, okay, well, what's next? But it wasn't like that, right? It was more of a pivot midstream.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  So walk me through the pain moment of, of making that decision and how you come to this realization that you want to be involved in a more purposeful, fulfilling, service-oriented kind of endeavor.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  I was, for the first three years, I, I felt so amazing. I was on fire. So I leave teaching and I go into this place where I know nothing. But now I'm thinking about brain plasticity. I'm thinking about learning and now I'm around guys, they believe in that to their core. And they were all like, what do you want to be? You can be anything, but you've got to like bust yourself in half to figure this stuff out.

• 50:31Rich Roll?

  Who are these dudes? Like you just stumbled into quite a partnership.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  A thousand percent. Life-changing in a million ways. And the fact that they were so growth-minded now put me, when they say you're the average of the people you spend the most time with, the five people. So now I have my wife totally growth-minded and I have my two business partners who at the time were just my employers, but they were totally growth-minded and they held me to a crazy high standard. And so they kept telling me, stop thinking like an employee. Start thinking like an owner. If you act like an owner and deliver results, we'll make you an owner. But you have to actually live up to that. And they're like, you can have any job in this company you want, but you have to become the right person for the job. I thought, whoa, like, what if that's real? What if that's not a gimmick? And so I put it to the test. And I remember one day deciding, okay, cool.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  If this is real, I'm going to show up every day acting like I'm the only person here. And that if I don't do it, it's not going to get done, which means I don't have a job description anymore. There's just shit that needs to get done and I'm going to do said things. And that changed everything. It changed our relationship, changed the dynamic. So for the first three years, it was empowering me. I was learning lessons. And even though I was in a pretty intense, sort of almost like martial artsy environment, where it was like, you just get kicked in the face and knocked down and nobody is helping you back up. Part of it is they want to see if you'll get back up. And so it was, it was intense to say the least, but for me, what I needed, I needed to toughen up. It's not what everybody needs, but that was precisely what I needed.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  And I was a kid that I remember one time getting hit in the leg with a soccer ball in the middle of a game. And it's cold in Washington, but got hit in the leg and it left an imprint of the soccer ball. And I just walked off the field because it hurt. And so to me, it's like, it hurt. Why would I keep doing this? And so that was like a pattern in my life. Like if it hurt emotionally or physically, I would just quit. And so this was the first time where I was around these like tough mofo's. They did not play around. They expected you to rise to their level. They led by example. They were all in busting ass. And I just thought, this is rad, man. This is what I need. I need to go hard. And the harder I went, the better I got and I saw like, and I started working out, which this is huge. You'll get this more than anybody. So never really worked out my entire life.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  I'd started probably a year before I met them, working out. And I was like, whoa, you can actually change your body. It goes into this whole brain plasticity thing. And then I met them and they were yoked. So I was like, just tell me what to do. And for the first year, they wouldn't. They were like, you're never going to stick with it. You're never going to see it through.

• 52:58Rich Roll?

  It wouldn't even tell you.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  No. So I started working out basically to prove them wrong, to be like, no, no, no, I'll stick with this. And then the more I worked out, the more they started giving me advice. I chose to listen to just them. And so all of a sudden, all the noise of the world of like, do this, don't do that. Ah, like people giving you conflicting information. I just had one ideology to listen to. Maybe it's not the best ideology, but once you're focused and you have at least one thing, you'll optimize for that. And so it just changed my life. And I ended up putting on like 60 pounds, largely fat, but also muscle. And that showed me that whoa, you can transform your body. And that really made me believe in just how far I could transform my mind.

• 53:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you grew up like as an overweight kid, right?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Here's the problem. So I was a chubby kid, but I did not think of myself as chubby. And I was only chubby by the standards of the 1980s and early 1990s, which if you saw a picture of me now, you'd be like, you weren't chubby. Compared to today, I was shredded. But back then, to give you an idea, so I grew up, my family is morbidly obese by any standard. Even back then, and I thought, okay, I'm the skinny one in a heavyset family. And then I go to college and because I'm working so hard now, which is a whole nother story. Working my ass off. I lose like thirty, thirty-five pounds my freshman year.

• 54:12Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  So it was just crazy.

• 54:14Rich Roll?

  Unusual.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Without thinking, without trying, I was just working too much and I didn't have any money, so I couldn't afford junk food. So I go home and, or no, sorry, the next year, so the beginning of my freshman year, I met a girl I knew in high school. And she takes one look at me, she's like, oh, my God, I didn't even recognize you. I always used to think of you as the chubby kid. And so at nineteen, all of a sudden, in like a sixth sense moment, my whole life played back as me as the fat kid. And I was like, how is this possible? And so I realized that like, even though I would suck in my gut, so it wouldn't push out my shirt too much. People could tell I wasn't exactly svelte.

• 54:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  So it is very unfair of me to say that like, oh, I was obese or anything like that. I didn't get heavy until I was in my mid twenties. Then I got heavy.

• 54:54Rich Roll?

  Hmm. And so why the, it's, it seems like a strange pivot to go from security software to nutrition and bars. A, you know, it's completely unrelated business. And B, it's also a crowded marketplace.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Everyone told us we were crazy. They're like, what are you doing? You make money in technology, you lose money in food. What are you doing? And in two thousand nine, when we first started planning on launching the company. There were sixteen hundred flavors of bars and combinations of companies on the market, just in bars, sixteen hundred.

• 55:29Rich Roll?

  I can't imagine what it's now.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Oh, even worse. And we went to a distributor and he said, I need another protein bar, like I need another hole in the head. And we thought, whoa, okay, but there isn't a single bar in the market that myself and my partners would eat. So we like, we know there's at least a market at three. And our whole thing is steer by what's metabolically true. So we were just like, man, you can take your blood sugar and figure out if you should be eating those bars or not. And they, I mean, they had like thirty and forty grams of sugar in our competitors' bars. So we're like, this is crazy. They either have no sugar and taste terrible, or they have all kinds of sugar and taste good, but your blood sugar is going to spike. You might as well eat a Snickers bar, no joke. So we were like, we're gonna make the first bar that tastes like it has sugar, but doesn't.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Now, needless to say, that was infinitely harder than we thought it was going to be. But because we had such aggressive growth mindsets, and by this point, even I, and I was the new kid on the block, had eight and a half years by the time we founded that company of just diehard entrepreneurial experience. So you've got three seasoned entrepreneurs coming into this company, not knowing anything about it, but having the will to win. And so what ended up happening was, I'm sure a thousand people before us had formulated a bar that tasted just like ours and had no sugar. And the reason they never went to market is the second we went in, because equipment has developed in lockstep with the use of high fructose corn syrup. As soon as you take the high fructose corn syrup out, your bar may taste amazing, but it won't mass produce,

• 56:56Speaker 01

  because all of the equipment is counting on the existence of that because of the texture that it gives it. So all of the pressure tolerances and all that are designed to have high fructose corn syrup. So everybody else hits that roadblock and they just start adding high fructose corn syrup. And they try to add as little as possible, but they do it to make it run. We said, oh, I guess we're gonna have to develop our own equipment and become our own manufacturers. So when every manufacturer told us, you can't make this bar, not profitably anyway, no way. We said, okay, well, then we'll have to do it ourselves. We bought equipment, learned very quickly that people were right, you can't produce it on standard equipment. But it just so happened that one of my partners is a literal Iowa farm boy and could fix anything. So he's looking at the equipment, he's like, I know how to cut this apart and put it back together and it'll work.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  We thought, oof, if we do that and you're wrong, we're now in real trouble, because all of our money will be tied up in this. Whereas before, we could have at least resold the equipment. And he does it and it works. And it was just like, holy hell.

• 57:49Rich Roll?

  What was it that had to be changed about the equipment? To allow you to produce at scale without that ingredient.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  We had to be able to put more pressure on the product because it ours wasn't like liquidy, like high fructose corn syrup is. Ours is more like Kevlar, really soft until you put it under pressure and then it would get hard. So we had to put enough pressure that it would form the bar and that it would stick through as it was cut, but not so much pressure that the bar itself to the end consumer would be hard. So that was a big thing. And then also in traditional manufacturing, you cool it before you cut it. But if we did that, our product became too brittle. So there were just all kinds of changing equipment and reordering things and all that.

• 58:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So did you have your own facility, manufacturing facility?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Literally, I was manufacturing. So for the first year, I was the only one that was there full time. My other two partners were still running the tech company. And so I'm in a hairnet every day, lab coats, gloves, and making protein bars.

• 58:45Rich Roll?

  Wow. And what is the, uh, the secret to go? I mean, it's, I'm trying to think about how to articulate this. So you have this bar, but that's still very different from the ubiquity that bar, uh, you know, has today. I mean, you can't go anywhere without seeing it. The thing is everywhere. How did you penetrate the market so completely?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's a very long road, but it starts with social. So we're like, all we care about is community, man. We just, maybe this is a big business, maybe it's not, but I'm going to go speak to people that I know and understand, that know and understand me. So we're going to go after other people that are lifting weights every day like we were. And so we went after bodybuilders and figure competitors and just said, look, this is the first protein bar that isn't a candy bar in disguise. We hit them up on social. We, you know, it wasn't called DMing back then, but like you build this relationship on social and so you can connect with these people from all over the place.

• 59:40Rich Roll?

  Well, this is a model that's repeated time and time again.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Now, now it's standard. Then it was like, what are you doing? Like, people actually did not understand it. So, but because we knew, like, our marketing messages that were good people, we're not trying to sell something. And we're living through a time now where the most powerful marketing message you can have is to actually be a good person, to lead with value creation, to try to give more value than you get. Like, it's just powerful marketing stuff, but no one was doing it back then. So you want to talk about cutting through the noise? We cut through the noise like this. Hey, Rich calls Quest. And he says, hey, guys, look, I'm really trying to get in shape. What should I do? You should eat chicken breast and broccoli. Do you guys sell chicken breast and broccoli? No, we don't. Then why is that your answer? Because it's true. And you should only eat our product in those times where you're on the run or you need something that just tastes like a cookie.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  And you can't have any more boiled vegetables or whatever. And so people are like, whoa, like these guys aren't trying to sell hard. We would send out a newsletter and it would just be recipes that you could make with our product. So never said, go buy our product, nothing. Just like, hey, here's cool stuff that people are doing. And we developed what we called mirror marketing. So we wanted to reflect the consumer back. So we told people, hey, if you put the bar in the microwave, it makes it really soft. So people went nuts for that. But then they started telling us, oh, by the way, if you do this and this and mix it with this and chop it up, you can make ice cream, you can make cookies, you can do, ah. We're like, whoa. So we started saying, hey, so and so told us you could do this. Look at this, isn't this amazing? So people are like, wow, that's rad. Like if I submit stuff, they might like call me out and hype my stuff. And so it just became them seeing themselves.

• 1:01:09Rich Roll?

  Community.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:01:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's amazing. So you go over like a four or five year period. You, well, from 2010 to 2013, you become one of the fastest growing companies in North America.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:01:29Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:01:31Rich Roll?

  I think you must have had to staff up like crazy.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Oh dude, this is, I wish people could see this now because people think of growth like that as being like a digital product or something where it's like, what did Instagram got to a billion dollar valuation with like eight employees or something? That is not how things went for us. So we were a manufacturing business. So we had to buy equipment, which has like six, eight, 12 month lead times. We had, so imagine you're growing, you're doubling month over month and you've got to project out 12 months. Think about how terrifying that is from a capital perspective. Cause you're only making the money you're making today, but you've got to spend the money that you're going to need to be spending for 12 months from now. It's absolutely bananas.

• 1:02:11Rich Roll?

  Did you do a crazy capital raise?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  No, we did literally, we had one mezzanine debt round. Very small, but it gave us enough that we were able to get to the point where we could borrow against accounts receivable. So we could get the line of credit. And again, mad love to my partner who managed all of that stuff, which is absolutely a genius with building those relationships. We had a belief, make friends before you need them. So it was like, we were very proactive in that stuff. But even just getting the, um, the square footage that we needed to be manufacturing out of was pure insanity. And you would move into a space and think that we're good here for the next three years. And I'm not joking, you'd be out in six months. It was so crazy. It was just happening so fast. And we had to staff up. The way that we had to staff up was crazy. It led to one of the most beautiful periods

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  of my life, though, which was, we put, we needed people. So we put out on the street that we would hire people even if they had felony convictions. So we had people lined up around the building just to get an interview. And that was extraordinary and introduced me to just some beautiful, beautiful humans that completely shaped my belief system is why I launched Impact Theory. Because when you see enough lives where it's like, these are extraordinary people who will do nothing with their life, because they don't believe they can. Like that, yeah, that really shaped me.

• 1:03:25Rich Roll?

  Wow. So by 2015, was it around 2015 that you're at the billion dollar point?

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  But yeah, by 2015, we had already like cashed out a little bit and had, um, just tremendous financial success.

• 1:03:38Rich Roll?

  Is that, is that when you exited?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  I left at, at the end of 2016.

• 1:03:43Rich Roll?

  Okay. And when did you start Impact Theory?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  The next day.

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did. Okay. So there was a clean break in between the two for you.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it was transitioning from one to the next.

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  Right. So most people who would come into obscene wealth like this, you know, would think about buying an island or, you know, go, going off and living some crazy life of luxury or traveling the world for the next five or 10 years, essentially doing nothing. Um, and you decide to invest in this new endeavor seemingly immediately. Like, why did you make that decision?

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Well, that was thankfully a reaction to I went through the pain of living the cliche of money can't buy happiness early. So that was the very thing that gave birth to my true financial success.

• 1:04:33Rich Roll?

  So walk me through that, though. Because most people will never experience what it's like to come into crazy wealth.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It is a really funny moment, and funny is the right word. It's it's fun, but it's also funny in that when I was growing up, part of the reason I wanted to get rich was I looked at those people with admiration and I did not look at myself with admiration. So I thought, oh, well, if I can get wealthy, then I will look at myself with admiration. This would be amazing. And then when I got the money, by then I had changed myself fundamentally as a person and I had earned so much self-respect and so much self-worth that by the time I got the money, I didn't, I wasn't looking for anything from the money, other than it is the great facilitator. It will let you do extraordinary things. But it won't make you an extraordinary person. It won't make you feel any differently about yourself. And because the money came literally like that,

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  because we had paper wealth, so I was a worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper. But I just cannot stress enough, that's meaningless in your real life. I was driving, you know, at one point, a beat up Ford Focus. My wife and I had to share. It had a leaky exhaust. And yet I'm worth, at that point, I was worth tens of millions of dollars. But there were employees that were living far better lives than I was from a financial standpoint. So that's paper money. Now, bank account money came in an instant. And so it was about, I don't know, six years into our journey, and we decided to take a small investment to diversify. So it was a pure founder liquidity moment. And because the valuation of the company was over a billion dollars, you can imagine, even at a small

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  percentage, just the raw number of dollars is insanity. So all of a sudden, I was fantastically wealthy. But I was like, it is so, in fact, this, this was how that day went. So everyone I said earlier, you beliefs, values, identity, habits, routines, right? These are the things that make people up. And I just have a value system that says, it's not about the money. It's about building something you believe in. It's about serving other people. It's about work ethic. It's about showing up and working. And I value myself for that. So on the day that the money hit, it hit at like, I don't know, 8am in the morning or something. And my wife, we're both in the gym and she's like, what are we gonna do today? And I was like, what do you mean? I'm going to work. And she like couldn't wrap her head around that. She's like, whoa, whoa.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  You're gonna go to the Lamborghini dealer? Yeah, she's like, come on, we've got to like, go do something, we've got to celebrate. And I'm like, there's no universe in which I don't show up for work today. None, under no circumstances. So if you were to ask my employees, when did the money hit? They'll be like, I have no idea. They knew that it did hit, but they didn't know what day because I acted completely the same. And the thing that I want people to understand is I feel the same. So all of the like things that I believe about myself to be good, I still believe to be good. I earned them, I earned them by doing the hard thing, time and time and time and time again. I know how much I'm willing to serve people and my family and myself and all I just know. I've done it for years and years and years. So when it came to, do I buy an island and retire? Or do I double down?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  It came down to what will make me love my life the most? And the reality is the thing that would make me love my life the most, because it would still be fun to just go home, be with my wife. But the thing that will make me love my life the most is to do the things that are fulfilling. And I think fulfillment has a very specific, universal formula. And that formula is work your ass off to get very good at something that you care deeply about. That allows you to serve not only yourself, but other people. That's it, you gotta have all of it. Techni.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Literally. Yes. It is literally techni. Yeah. And people, they don't think about that. Explain what that is for people that don't know. So it's this ancient Greek notion of fulfillment, basically. And the fact that it's coming from that word techni, like to get good at something and something that's hard. So the way that I explain it to people is people think of like doing something like going and ladling soup at a soup kitchen, which may be the right place to start. But ultimately, you're going to realize anyone can do this. And so I haven't earned something special that allows me to serve myself and humanity. So it's, part of it is working your ass off to get a set of skills of real value. And my, my whole thing, here's, this may be the biggest problem we face as a society.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  People don't remember that skills have utility. They let you do something. You don't learn to build a house to impress your parents. You learn to build a house so people can live in the house you build. And once people understand that, like, holy shit, you're building this house so somebody can live in it, build a home in it, have a family, be sheltered from storms, like, fuck, it's a real thing, man. And so all of that effort and energy went into, I have the chills right now, is so you can create that moment for yourself, for other people. It is, it is something so much more than going to architecture school, which maybe you went to because your parents wanted that and they, they were architects. And so you do that thing for that and you forget that the whole reason you became an architect was to build houses.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  And so, once people realize, oh, I'm putting all of this time and energy to build these things because they let me do something. What do I want to do? What do I want to give? What do I want to create? When you look at skills from that perspective, it, it is like, it is being a superhero. It is being a superhero. You're going to collect these abilities. These abilities actually let you do something. The fact that Superman can fly allows him to save people, allows him to do things other people can't do. We all have this opportunity to become capable of the extraordinary, to be able to do things other people can't do. And that feels so good.

• 1:10:08Rich Roll?

  The thing is though, most, the thing that's unique about you is that you were able to come to this realization and develop a, a level of maturity and self-awareness without having to go to the, you know, play it out at the Lamborghini dealership, right? Cause most people who would come into that kind of wealth would go and have that experience for a period of time only to discover, you know, what you just expressed, but on the other side of it. So why were you able to do that? Why were you able to avoid that experience and circumvent it?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  They say, a fool never learns. A smart man learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Far too often, I've been a fool and have repeated mistakes over and over and over. But I really do try to be smart. I'm not usually as wise as I would like to be and just find that I, um, I learn things a hard way. But I really do learn them. So pain for me is a tremendous instructor. Maybe because I hate it so much and just want to move away from it. But thankfully, I don't run from it. I figure out what I did that made me feel that pain, whether it's what I value myself for, or whether it's just, hey, bad skill set and you need to address it and then actually addressing it. So in the time where I was chasing money and, uh, like I said, the first three years gave to me.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  And then the next three years chipped away at my, my ability to enjoy my life.

• 1:11:32Rich Roll?

  So it's actually in the founding of Quest that you learned that lesson?

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  It was in the, it was in building awareness technologies. So building awareness technologies, I did not enjoy the process. And so at the end of that, I had spent about three and a half years being profoundly unhappy, profoundly where it's like, it was hurting my marriage. My wife would want to talk about work and I wouldn't want to talk about it. I would get this like sense of dread as I approached the office. It was just gnarly, man. And it was in that period that I developed really crushing anxiety because A, I was always in over my head because I didn't know anything about business and it was just really hard to learn. Uh, I was in a very intense, um, environment where it's just like, you'd hear things like only an idiot would do that, like all day, every day. I'd be like, oh my God, this is exhausting. And so you put that all together and I'm doing all of that for, for a product I don't believe in. I'm not building community.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  I'm not connected to people, like community, all that stuff. None of it existed. So I was just like, I'm so unhappy. And so talking to my wife, I was like, anything would be better than this. And somebody wrote an article, unfortunately, I only read the headline, but I, I so know the feeling that it resonated. And it was the joy of quitting. And there's that moment when you first quit and it's like the lift, the burden lifted off you is so profound. Because that, that particular frame of reference is just in an instant, it's gone. And that's amazing. And that's what I was thinking about when I went in and quit. I was like, I just need the change of circumstance badly. And so my solution was going to be to go do the only thing that ever made me feel awesome. And that is creating films.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  So, and I didn't have the finances to make like actual films, but I could write them, which is essentially just your time. And I remember there was a time before I quit where I had directed a feature film. And I direct this feature film over a few weekends and then I edit it myself nights and weekends. And there was a time I was, if I could finish it before Christmas, I'd be able to play it for my family because it was never going to go theatrical. And I was so excited to do that, that I was sleeping between forty-five minutes and two hours a night without setting an alarm for like ten days. And I thought, this is inhuman. How's it possible? I'm waking up with this little sleep. And it was because I was so excited. I wanted to like get this film done and show it to everybody.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  And the actual act of cutting it together, which for anybody who messes with film here off camera, they know it is so fun when you see it like come together and you're creating this moment. You feel something and you give yourself the chills. It's like that for me makes me feel alive. I was like, I want to feel like that all the time. So that was all I knew. I was no smarter than that. I just knew feeling dead inside, hating my life, hating my job, was so miserable. I'd rather be poor doing something that I loved than rich doing something that I hated. And so now I knew that about myself. Then building Quest really taught me about technique, fulfillment, all the things that mattered. Meeting these former drug dealers and gang bangers and like really connecting with them as a human

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  and watching them blossom gave me something that I never could have predicted. And then I haven't talked about, I don't remember if I've ever mentioned this to you. I big brothered for eight and a half years. Oh, wow. And that ended up planting a seed. It didn't, unfortunately, I was too young. This is one of those moments where I was definitely not being wise and I was probably being a fool. I was being changed by this relationship, but I didn't really understand it. I was too young. So I started big brothering when I was eighteen and I, he was eight and I stayed with him until he was sixteen. It was a crazy experience. He was very, had massive developmental problems and was just a great kid, man. He was just a great kid.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  And it started as an extra credit assignment and it was only supposed to be eight weeks. And at the six week mark, they tell you to warn them. I warned him that I was only coming for two more weeks and he went nuclear. And I was just like, what is going on? And I'm like, is this because I said I'm only coming for two more weeks? And he says, yes. And I'm like, all right, look. As long as I live in Los Angeles, I will help you with your homework. But you have to stop freaking out all the time because he was really problematic. I was like, you have to do your homework. When we're together, you have to do your homework. Is it a deal? Says, yes. And that turns into the eight and a half year relationship. And he, I end up finding out he was being beaten by his adoptive mother and he gets taken out of the home. I get made the guardian. I help him into foster care.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  It was really, really crazy, but I was too young and stupid to really know what to do with that or what to make of it. And unfortunately, I will say, I probably didn't. I gave him somebody he knew loved him, but I didn't change his life. And that makes me sad.

• 1:16:16Rich Roll?

  Do you know what he's doing now?

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  I touched base with him like through somebody else once briefly about four years ago. And I've tried to get in touch with him again, but he didn't have a phone and so, no.

• 1:16:28Rich Roll?

  But is the point of that story that that experience informed how you would then create bonds with these ex felons that came to work?

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  That was part of it. What that, the reason that I was so open to hiring ex convicts was, one, I just have a belief that it doesn't matter what you've done. It only matters who you want to be and the price you're willing to pay to become that person. So it's like, eh, yeah, we all have pasts. We've all either done stupid things or had stupid things happen to us. And so being stuck there doesn't make any sense. You get to choose what you do tomorrow. So that just being in my ethos. And then Rashawn, who was the little kid, he was a beautiful human and everybody thought he was a piece of shit. And I just thought, that sucks. Yes, he has misbehaved, that is for sure, but he's a beautiful human. And they're just too overwhelmed to have the time to stop and see the person. And so that sort of made me fall in love with them.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  And I just thought, this kid is so like amazing. And I thought of him like my own little brother. And I was just like, dude, I love this kid and I want good things for him. And so it just showed me that like. There are, there's a whole swath of humanity that people just sort of brush aside. And through him, they spoke to me. And so that made me want to create this opportunity for other people that I knew were in similar situations, that had had rough upbringings of the most extraordinary kind. And I knew some percentage of them, not all, but some percentage of them are going to be the most beautiful, kind, loving, compassionate human beings ever, who are capable of these amazing things. But somebody has to introduce the mindset to them. And so that became my mission.

• 1:18:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting because the more predictable route for you, uh, once you exited Quest would be to get an office in Hollywood, hang a shingle out, hire a development exec and start reading scripts and getting involved as a producer. Right? I mean, nobody would have batted an eye. Lots of people do that. That's kind of the tried and true route for the newly minted rich guy who wants to get into film.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is for sure. And I think-

• 1:18:32Rich Roll?

  Did you think about that or?

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  No, no, not even momentarily. To me, it was, it was very clear that, um, I want to stay in control of the project and that if you, so whenever you're doing something, ask who's living my idealized life? And looking at that, it was very clear the person living my idealized life in terms of their ability to impact was Walt Disney. And so, okay, I'm like, I'm looking at this guy and I'm like, what made him so different? Why is the Walt Disney Company still the most powerful, um, studio? And it became very clear to me that they had done something that had never been replicated and that I was the right person to replicate it again. And that was, they told one story from a thousand different angles. And because of that, the brand began, became to mean something.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  And keep in mind, the world's changed so much, social media, all that. So that's in the back of my mind as well. I've already had luck at this social thing. People are resonating with my message. I'm able to touch people. It's real. What I'm putting out there, if you follow the advice, it will change your life for the better. You know, firstly, I believe that. So I thought, okay, well, I can have the discipline to only tell one kind of story so that the brand itself begins to mean something, so that the ultimate marketing vehicle becomes- Just leverage the brand to say this is an impact theory thing. And once you know, oh, wow, this is an impact theory thing, then it's like, you don't have to do all the legwork. And the way I explain it to people is, if I say I'm gonna go see a Paramount movie or Warner Brothers movie, you don't know anything about it. But if I say I'm gonna go see a Disney movie, you already know something.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  So I have one belief, and that is a, the 25-point belief system. That's it. Like, that encompasses my whole ethos. So I want to tell stories that empower people, period, simple as. So my thing is, if Disney can create the most magical place on earth, could we create the most empowering place on earth? And I don't mean physically like a Disneyland, but by telling stories, both nonfiction through social media, and fiction through comic books, movies, TV shows, could I create an ethos that was as clear and easy to recognize as Walt Disney's magic? That was about empowerment. And so that's what we're about. So there will be some element of, we're reading scripts and being producers and attaching things and just getting things produced.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  But the, the real thing is, if Disney were founded today, I think there'd be a huge social component. And there, there's, it's not a mistake that Walt Disney at one point was considered the most famous man in the world. And the US government literally would send him on goodwill missions to other countries. So there's just something about when you have an ethos that people can believe in, when there's a face to the company and it's not just a corporation, there's someone to believe in, there's someone to get value from, even if you're not consuming their product. Like, there's just, people gravitate towards that now in the era of social media. And I have the same feeling I have now that I had at Quest, which was, it's the right message at the right time. And so, given where everything is going, so we started two years ago.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  The word impact now is like everywhere. And it's because that was, we could see like emotionally, because that's where I was. I wanted to make impact and I could see that that's where the world's going. Like, people just want to make impact. And millennials feel it, but Gen Z is obsessed by it. And so I think that there's just, I'm on a collision course right now to make content that Gen Z is gonna be changed by. And so, that, that is really what I'm about, is, is creating the content that is going to define culture. And what is the long-term vision? Is Disney. I mean, that's the easiest way to sum it up. The reality is, it will take Roughly 75 years to mimic a Disney. I get that in terms of where they are today.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  Theme parks.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  I don't think so. And this is where it gets into any 75 year time horizon is absolutely laughable. So I use Disney as a shorthand. Things will change so much technologically in the next 75 years. We may be uploading our consciousness. Like, I get it. It's going to be so different. It is quite literally impossible to predict where we're going. So I don't even bother trying. I just, so people understand the sort of gravitas of what we're trying to build is to say, we're building the next Disney. So then you understand that I'm going to be in comic books. I'm going to be in movies. I'm going to be in TV show. I'm going to be in distribution. We're going to be in video games. We're going to be in VR. We're just not going to do it all at once. We're going to start with an area of core competency. Right now, our area of core competency is the social stuff. We make

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  an awesome show. I'll vouch for that. Beyond that, we're completely untested. We've put out a comic book.

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we got this Steve Aoki thing.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  And I think that it's amazing. And that's why that we give it away. Because I just want people to read it. I want people to see that the quality will speak for itself. But we did get picked up. We are going to be in stores. So starting in March of 2019, we'll be in your local comic book shop. You can also order it online. But that, I think, is going to show people that we can really tell a story at the absolute highest level. We're already working to get that translated into film and television. So a goal in 2019 is to get that placed at a studio and being actively developed for production. So I'm super excited about that. We have two other projects that are being developed. But that just helps people understand, like, the grand vision of where we want to go.

• 1:23:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a big vision. I mean, it's an audacious vision. Like, where does this audacity come from?

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Man, so everybody lean in if you're listening to this. This is one of those things that audacity is, is nothing. Don't, don't worry about being audacious. The reason people fear being audacious is they don't want to be me 10 years from now when this all fails. Right? They're thinking, oh, man, what if this doesn't work? This guy's going to look like an asshole. And it's like, yeah, maybe other people will think that I'm a total dumbass. It doesn't matter. And why doesn't it matter? Because of techni. Because if I know how to build a house, I can build a house. So my thing is, I'm not trying to posture or be cool. I'm telling you, I have a set of fucking skills. That set of- Skills lets me do things. I'm just interested in doing those things. So whether or not I hit my timelines does not matter. I'm in the skill acquisition game. Skills let you do things. I'm in the game of doing the things that my skills allow me to do.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  So I wanna impact people's lives. Maybe I'm not able to pull it off at a film level. I'll find another way. Or maybe it takes me a lot longer to pull it off. Okay, fine. As long as I love what I'm doing, even when I'm failing, there's nothing to lose.

• 1:24:41Rich Roll?

  No, because you know, on this idea of technique, along the way, you are fulfilled with every step on the journey.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:24:49Rich Roll?

  Right? Every time you upload a new, you know, conversation, a new episode of your show, it's a, it's a, it's a cool feeling to be able to put that out there and know that it is quote unquote, you know, impacting people. And it is, it is.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  And that's the thing, you know this, like you, you say something into a microphone, like right now, the, the feeling that I have, while I know people are listening, the feeling I have is it's just us in this room. But one day, somebody's gonna come up to you or me and say, I heard that podcast you guys did and it really touched me and it changed me in this way. That's all I need. So I'm not, I'm not afraid to be audacious because I know that you're never going to exceed what you're aiming at. So your only, your hope is to hit some percentage of what you're aiming at. So I might as well dream massive. And one, it excites me. And then two, I'm not afraid of the failure. So once you have that, like, oh, it's exciting for me to dream big and I'm hyper conscious of, you break it down in small pieces. Like I'm, I'm not worried about building theme parks and all that stuff right now.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  What I'm doing right now today is make a good comic, put out a good interview show. That's it. That's what my life consists of. Stay in business, be profitable. Like those are the things that I think about. So I keep my, you know, my goals, my immediate term goals very manageable, but I make sure that they're feeding naturally into the grand vision. But I don't get scared or lost and thinking, oh, my God, I have to do all that. Nope. Right now, today, I need to read a script. I need to make sure it's okay. I need to authorize it to be drawn. That's it. That's today. And as long as you're able to focus on that and get good at that, and then just always push yourself to make your skill set better and better and better. As long as it's leading towards that thing and you have clarity on where you're trying to go, so that you make sure the skills you're acquiring will actually lead you there, you'll be fine.

• 1:26:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. As Yuval Noah Harari famously says, clarity is power. Indeed, it is. You, you have, uh, you know, a very. Um, distinct and profound degree of clarity about what you're doing. And that drives this engine in large part. Um, and you also have very set kind of rules about how you regulate your time and live your life. And these principles that you've, you know, divined about uh, what drives success, et cetera. So I'm curious, uh, how or if the guests that you have had on your show have challenged that worldview. How have you grown or changed um, as a result of, of doing the show that you do?

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that, that is one of the greatest gifts that doing a show like this can do. I think you may be the one that said this, like, it gives you a chance to meet people that would otherwise not give you the time of day. And I'm just like, I'm gonna have this so true. Like, people, they just need that little excuse for like, okay, I have very limited time. Why am I coming? I don't know you. So you know what I mean? Like, why am I making it? So, once you have like, oh, I can help you reach an audience, get your message out there, give a thoughtful interview. Then it's like, okay, that brought us together. Now we may have real chemistry, like, I'll speak from my side, I have real chemistry with you. So you asked me to come out here, I was like, fuck, yes, like, I was so excited to do it. Um, and hopefully this will be one of many times that we get to spend time together, whether it's, you know, on, on record or not. So it's like, that is super fun.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Now, because I'm a learner, because that's my identity, and because I really believe whatever skill set you have today, it's already taken you as far as it's going to take you. So unless this is where you want to be for the rest of your life, you've got to be open to change. You've got a hunger for it. So, A, I don't fear change. I actually enjoy change because change has been the thing that's allowed me to improve my life consistently. And so I'm always looking for ways in which I'm wrong, because I don't value myself for being right. And once people understand that, that, for me, it wasn't, in the beginning, I was just telling myself to do that. It wasn't at a limbic level. Now I've been telling myself to value myself only for my willingness to admit when I'm wrong and to learn that at a limbic level, it's true. So when somebody tells me I'm wrong, I have this rush of like, oh my God, this is amazing.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Cause if they're right and I really am wrong and they're making me aware of this, I'm going to get more powerful. So, and that goes back to my real belief in skills having utility. So it's like, the- Ego doesn't have utility. Maybe some, but it's not when misplaced and built around the wrong things can be super dangerous. But because my ego is actually built around my willingness to stare at my inadequacies, when somebody tells me that, oh, you're doing this bad, wrong, or whatever, I don't spend time. It does still sting. I think that's just natural. So it'll be like, oh, that sucks. But oh, a reminder that this is going to give me something powerful. And so I use it sort of as mental jujitsu. And then I open myself up and I learn. So

• 1:29:17Rich Roll?

  What would be an example of that?

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  So David Goggins. So like I said, the thing I've struggled with in my life is emotional weakness. So being around people that are very, very tough inspires me to rise to that challenge. So really understanding his notion of like what it took him to break the world record for pull ups and how many times he had to fail to go through it, what he had to do to his mind to callous his mind, that whole notion of like getting so tough, things get easier over time, because just like you'll callous your hands, you callous your mind, that's been tremendously impactful. Give you as an example, like, everything that people know you for comes after this extraordinary battle with alcoholism, which is like, so rad. Like, you're so much more interesting to me because you went through that. So you

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  the like sage-like quality, which by the way, you feel when you're near you. And I know a lot of your guests are probably never going to actually be in your vibe. And like, it's rad. And there's, it's so cool, because it was born of somebody that had to go through, like, they went through the hero's journey and they've come back to teach, right? And so that makes that really profound. So when I think about, okay, really having to go through something and wanting to be wise, because I haven't had to go through that particular thing, I can draw on your wisdom of having the tenacity to rebuild, to not be afraid to rebuild, to not be afraid to make amends, to look at what you did, and maybe most importantly, to reach back to help others. And that becomes the thing that really solidifies people on their journey. So it's like, all of that stuff, and just like what you've done physically, man, it is crazy to me how old you are. Like, it seems impossible.

• 1:30:45Rich Roll?

  Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. But what I, what I, what I think is interesting about that is, and we talked about this when I was on your show, that For me, pain has always been a great teacher. It's what reminds me of the mistakes that I've made. It's the thing that gets me to wake up and actually modify my behavior. And I always couch that by saying that, you know, you don't have to be in pain to change. The opportunity to change is always within your grasp, but it is the rare individual who can grab onto that without having to suffer some kind of consequence that drives that decision change, right? And I look at you and I see somebody who, whose trajectory skyward is not as linear

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  as perhaps an internet narrative might couch you. You've had your ups and your downs and you've battled with, you know, everything from self-confidence to depression and all kinds of things in there, but you haven't had like some big bottom reckoning moment. And I think it's that commitment to being a learner that's allowed you to short circuit that and grab onto these lifelines as you see yourself moving in perhaps a negative trajectory to course correct before having to pay that cost.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:02Rich Roll?

  And that has, you know, created this kind of accelerated trajectory to bring you to where you are.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny, I was thinking about this today. People don't have enough rules in their life for themselves. So for instance, I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less, doesn't matter. And I don't want to, that's why I have the rule. Because I went through-

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  You've calloused your mind.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Literally, I went through a period where I would lay in bed for three to four hours, awash in shame and my inability to get out of bed. And it just embarrassed me. And so I felt badly about myself, so I wanted to make a change. So I knew that I needed a bright line. So, bright line, 10 minutes or less, you get out of bed, as soon as you realize you're awake, that's it. So, and the rule is more specific, it's like I have to have had at least five hours of sleep. But, once you put the rule in place, then you just live by it. And that's how you earn credibility. Like, right now, I don't feel the way telling you that, that I want to feel. This is a good moment, he's on my team, I'm pointing to him, this is a good moment. So I'm saying this, and I don't feel good about saying it. Why? Because today, I don't know what happened, I got out of bed in 11 minutes.

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  And I was so pissed- You literally time it.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 1:33:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, from waking up to actually physically getting out of the bed.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Correct. My feet must be on the floor and I must be standing up- Before it ticks over into the 11th minute. And today, I don't know what happened. I was, I was aware of the time. I knew I needed to get up. And for whatever reason, one of the minutes just went faster than I thought. When I looked back, I was like, damn it. And so

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  I'm surprised you even made it here today then.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Right? So now this comes into like knowing how to handle something like that. Like if you totally fall apart because you don't live up to any of your rules, you're violating another one of my rules, which is don't do anything that doesn't move you towards your goals. So it's like, yes, I, it is a part of my identity to confess this. So because I'm talking about it, I want to say it now to an audience. It's the only thing that will allow me to reset and be able to feel good about it again. Cause I don't lie when I miss it, I own it.

• 1:33:49Rich Roll?

  Well, look, if your biggest problem is it took you 11 minutes to get out of bed instead of 10, this is a high quality problem.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Right, yes, very true. But my thing is people don't have the rules. And so I have other rules. For instance, I wear a size 32 pant. And it's just, that's it. And so

• 1:34:05Rich Roll?

  No matter what your waist is.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I won't let my waist get out of line with that. So I use the pants as a way to guide. Now I would go down if I got so lean that I was, you know, 31. That's not a problem, but I'm not going to allow myself to go up. And it's super tempting, like especially around Christmas. I don't try to hold abs through the winter. So during Christmas, like right now, I do not have abs. So, and I'm totally fine with that. I switch a different part of my mentality. I, during the holidays, my wife and I definitely celebrate with food and it's amazing. And I love it the most. So, but if that celebration took me up to like 32s don't fit anymore, I gotta cut back because I have a rule. So it's like, that's how I keep myself in a lane. I keep myself from getting into trouble. I know the things that I accept for myself and what I don't accept for myself.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  And it's all like stated, it's very clear.

• 1:34:54Rich Roll?

  So as somebody who is in this world of self empowerment and, and, you know, trying to address this poverty of mindset, to use your phraseology, what are the challenges that you have? Like where, where's, where are your blind spots? If we're in this zone of vulnerability and confession, like what do you still need to work on?

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Um, I think that chat, like really doing things that scare me is something I believe in and don't want to do. So for instance, um, I got hired to speak at a freediving conference. Now I told my team that I would do anything within my code of ethics to help build the company. So when I got the offer to do the freediving and he wanted me to freedive. Rich, when I say my greatest fear in this world is open water, I don't fear anything.

• 1:35:44Rich Roll?

  I can help you with that.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  That's interesting and maybe you're the exact person to to help me with it, but I that is a gripping fear for me. And so when the offer came in, I said, yes, I have to do it. And I didn't want to do it and I was fucking dreading it. And the guy ended up not getting enough people to sign up for it and I was happy about that.

• 1:36:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, it didn't.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  And so he canceled it and I was so ecstatic and I was like, yeah, this is my problem. I was glad it got canceled. I should be traumatized because it was a real moment.

• 1:36:13Rich Roll?

  What you should do, here's what David Goggins would tell you, what you should do is still go to whatever that location is and get a free driving instructor and follow through on that.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Correct, and I'm not going to do that. And that, but this is, this is the question you asked, right? So I don't value that in myself. That, that, I think what you just said would be the best thing for me in terms of continuing to earn credibility with myself. And I have no intention of doing it.

• 1:36:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  And I excuse it away because it doesn't lead me towards my bigger goal of building the company. It would be time away that I'm not getting revenue that I can give back to the company. So it's like, I can, they are excuses, though. The reality is I'm not doing that because I'm scared and I don't want to have to face that fear. So I have fears that I allow to stay in my life, that I don't respect that about myself.

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  I want to talk about your marriage a little bit.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:06Rich Roll?

  You have an amazing relationship with your wife.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:37:09Rich Roll?

  And I'm curious as to how you make it work as life partners and as business partners. Because this is something that's personally, you know, interesting to me as somebody who does the same.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  So part of it is that we're building the same company. Because it did not work like that when I hated my job. She wasn't working at all. She was a stay at home wife at the time and I'm working, I hate my job. I don't want to come home and talk about it. I'm working around the clock, around the clock. And so I just wasn't spending time with her. So it was a nightmare. And so finally, at six and a half years, she pulls me aside and says, this is now damaging our marriage. Now, going back to like your rules and all of that, it, my highest value is my marriage. That's the thing I value over the wealth, over ambition, everything. So if ever I was doing something that's damaging my marriage, I'm gonna correct course. And so that was part of why I went in and quit and I started taking time off. So And you got married young, right?

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  I did. I did. Yeah, I got married at 26. And so realizing that, okay, I'm now damaging the marriage and that the marriage is my highest priority, then it's very clear I need to change something. So one, that I have that in the right order in my life so that when my wife says, hey, you need to make a change, I actually make it and I'm not conflicted about it. It's very easy. Then my wife is very good at giving me all the rope in the world to be ambitious, to pursue those things that matter to me so much, but that she speaks up when it gets to the point where she is actually having a hard time now. And she is very good at that on two levels.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  One, not saying it too soon. And two, actually protecting the marriage because I'm bad at that. So I get so focused on what I'm doing and I'm so in love with trying to solve that puzzle and push it forward and all that, that I would push things too far, for sure. And so it's an area where I always tell people, the one group that I think there is a tool that is underutilized by this community, and that is anorexics. And I totally get it. It is truly a battle. You're fighting for your life. I'm not making light of this at all. I just know about myself that that the intoxication of the willpower to not eat is something I feel very strongly. It's how I ended up losing, where I ended up losing 60 pounds and getting really lean.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  And the way that I did it was essentially by starving myself over extraordinarily long periods of time. And I felt so good about myself being able to do it. I thought, ah, this is how people get themselves in trouble. There's actually a positive side to this and the sense of control and power and all that is very self-affirming. And I thought, okay, well, if I know that about myself and I know that I have anorexic tendencies, then I'm just gonna tell my wife, you're in complete control of this. The second you tell me that I'm acting in any way, shape or form in a way that's edging up towards illness, I will stop, not because I want to, but because I trust you and I'm empowering you with something I don't think I can trust myself on. And so she did. And so when it got to that point, she said, okay, it's now you're starting to worry me. I think that we're edging up on it. And I changed instantly, not because I had reached my goals

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  or because I thought she was right, because in a moment of emotional sobriety, I empowered her to know that I can't trust myself. So getting into that space where you go I know this is an area that I have a blind spot. I'm not the right person to make this decision, even though it's actually about myself. I'm going to empower somebody that I love and trust, and then I'm actually going to follow through with that. And so that's a tool that's served our marriage very well. I know I can trust her to be the guardian of the relationship in terms of that, are we spending enough time on it? And then it's, you know, just constantly looking for ways to better communicate, defining terms. There's a whole host of very specific tools that we use. And then we both have growth mindset, so we want to get better.

• 1:40:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you're on the same mission, I think, is, you know, a fundamental aspect of that. And, you know, people ask me all the time, like, how do you work with your wife? How do you make it work? And it's a gift, you know, it's amazing to have a collaborative partner that's also your life partner. It's also fraught with minefields. You know, you have to be more consciously aware of how you're navigating your relationship and also bifurcating the professional aspect of what you're doing from the personal. Because, as you know, what you do now doesn't feel like work, even though it is work, and it's very easy without erecting healthy boundaries and being consciously mindful of the relationship,

• 1:41:39Rich Roll?

  that all the conversations can suddenly become about what you're doing, the projects that you're working on, and the, you know, the professional aspect of what you're doing. And you have to really carve out that time to put that aside and focus on the relationship itself. So, true.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. But she gives you that hard feedback.

• 1:42:00Rich Roll?

  She does. She's very good about that. She's equally excited about her own growth as an entrepreneur. So it is very exciting for us. But like you said, we are very careful to carve out the time to just be husband and wife, to play, to do things that are fun, to make sure that we're having sex. That, that's huge. And I think that oftentimes people let bed death creep into their life. And keeping that passion and that physical connection has been a huge win for us. And it's something that, look, it doesn't take a lot of effort to want to do that. But to make sure that we're cognizant of that, that we have, it's not something that we state, but we're terrified of becoming roommates.

• 1:42:40Rich Roll?

  And so we're very conscious to keep that physical spark, the passion, very much alive, exciting, not routine. So that, that served us well.

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  I like to think of kind of what imperils humanity right now can be boiled down to, well, many things, but essentially a crisis of consciousness. So many people are living their lives reactively. And I don't mean to be flippant about that. You know, life is hard and people are just trying to, you know, earn a living and put food on the table and get through the day.

• 1:43:17Rich Roll?

  In your experience with all the, you know, business experience that you've had, the books you've read, the people that you've spent time with, what do you think is the biggest impediment to people waking up out of this matrix-like existence that's so easy for us to fall prey to?

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  So I've had a realization recently that I'm not an all-lanes driver. There are certain things I've spent so much time thinking about that I'm very good at answering questions and there are certain things that I'm not. So I'll give you an answer to that question from my very specific lens, which is all about the person. So I think that if the things in the world that scare me, the divisiveness scares me. And when I think about what is the individual's creation of that divisiveness, it is, one, a desire to belong to a group intensely, a fear of being ridiculed or emotionally ostracized.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  And once we know that we have this like sucking need to belong, to be respected, to be liked, you can really begin to decide what are the things that you want to be liked for, respected for. And when those are things that you respect yourself for, then all of a sudden it becomes very easy to do two things, to build something that is born of connection, community, kindness. Not that you're not selfish, I'm very selfish. It just so happens that the more selfish I am, the more I like to connect and help other people. I am very much doing it for me. But it manifests in a way that is humanity-neutral, worst case, and I think humanity-plus ultimately.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  So that starts with me, having a growth mindset so that you want to see how you're wrong, that you can have these really ferocious ideas, but hold them loosely. Because the moment that your identity is wrapped up in your ideas, you are in real trouble, man. Your identity should be wrapped up in your outcome. What outcome do you want? And are you actually getting that outcome? And then as long as you're not a sociopath with an ugly outcome, like people that get into identity, politics and things like that, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say, no, for real, the world they imagine is a beautiful world for the people that they love and care about. Okay, fair enough. So I'll just give them that they're trying to do something positive. But when you look at the outcome in terms of how it affects everyone,

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  it starts to break down pretty fast. Like, that's where it really starts to worry me. So that to me says that your identity is based on something that isn't necessarily anti-fragile. It's probably based on something pretty fragile. So to use Nassim Taleb's term, something that is fragile, that's easy to understand. Something that is anti-fragile isn't something that's strong or resilient. Those are still defined by their breaking point. It's just that their breaking point is far away. But ultimately, even something that's strong, it's strong because you think, wow, it can take a lot before it breaks. Something that's anti-fragile, on the other hand, actually grows stronger the more that it's attacked. So, and that doesn't mean you entrench in a position that clearly everybody is saying like, this is crazy. The only anti-fragile position that I can think of is to be that of the learner. That is truly anti-fragile.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  So for instance, if you come at me and say that I'm stupid, I'd be like, amazing, in what way? And the reason that I say amazing is because I know that skills make me more powerful. So you've just said that I have a blind spot, which means that I'm less powerful than I could be. And I'll define power because I think it weirds some people out. To me, powerful just means you can close your eyes, imagine a world, a better world than the one that we have today. You can then open your eyes and actually create that world. So that's the kind of power that I'm trying to amass in my life. The ability to impact people at scale in a positive way. If you're telling me that I'm less powerful than I could be, amazing. I want to know in what way, because once I'm aware of it, then I can address it. Cause I know about myself, that I'm willing to accept that I'm inadequate. Because I know that it's a temporary state. I'm not good at it yet.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  If I decide that it really does match with my goals and what I want to do, I can get good at it. So it's not ego damaging for you to tell me that I've, you know, I'm not doing something in a way that I could be, could be better. Cool, tell me how. When people don't want to hear that, it's like, ugh, it's, they're in a very brittle place. They're being backed into a corner and people lash out and they're backed into a corner. So at an individual level, I would say to everybody, if you feel that your blood boiling when somebody challenges you. If you feel like a caged animal or like you're being backed into a corner, I promise you 100%. It is not the truth of the world. It is that you have a fragile something, a fragile ego, a fragile belief system, something in there can break. And because it can break, you're trying to protect it.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  And the more you try to protect it, the more hardened and potentially violent, vicious, cruel, whatever that you may become. So when it isn't that, and you're not afraid of that thing breaking because you want to take information in, you want to assess it. It doesn't mean you're going to agree. You may take that criticism and go, I actually don't think that's accurate, but I'm really grateful that you gave me that piece of information. And look, intention matters. You can tell when someone's just trying to be a dick. So it's like, you've got to be cognizant enough of that. But when you get to that point where you're, you're leading with, everything is my fault, including the way this person's coming at me. I've done something to make them want to come at me too hard or whatever.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  So at the individual level, I think that that, the fragility versus anti-fragility is, is where everyone should start.

• 1:48:46Rich Roll?

  Well, to be anti-fragile, you have to feel safe, right? So if somebody's coming at you and they have a criticism or a critique and you feel yourself recoiling or having some kind of fear response, chances are that there's some truth to it. Because if somebody lodges some completely outlandish accusation at you, you can laugh it off, right? So there's a kernel of reality there that you're being forced to confront. And on some level, that challenges. Uh, you know, your membership in your tribe, somehow you're, you feel unsafe in being open to looking at that. Right? So you have to feel secure in your self-esteem or in your position in life on some level in order to receive that in an objective way.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  And your self-esteem has to be built on something that they can't attack. That's the problem. So if your self-esteem is, I'm a good um tribe A, then this, as soon as I say, well, tribe A sucks, like you're in real trouble because your whole esteem is built around your identity to that group. All the things that make you good are based on that. So for instance, in gang culture, there's this notion of putting work in on the street and could be selling drugs, could be murder, could be whatever. So if I now come and say, well, your gang sucks, there's no way you're going to take that because you may have killed for that gang or done, you know, things that put you at tremendous risk or, you know, you've been defending your brothers this whole time. So you cannot take on board that that group isn't worthy, right, just amazing.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  So it becomes this real emotional conflict. So my thing is the, the, going back to what is anti-fragile? And you want to talk about something I'm open-minded to being wrong about. I just keep coming back to being the learner, right? So your identity isn't group A, politic this, politic that, tribe this, tribe that. It is, I'm a learner, first and foremost. I'm somebody that wants to bring value to myself and to the world, first and foremost. So it's like, once you get to that, then as people are assaulting you, chances of them triggering a self-esteem, like in, like if somebody wanted to hurt my self-esteem, they would need to call me out on, on, are you really spending time learning? Or have you really improved? I think you're the same that you were two years ago, like, whoa.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Like if I really, like you said, felt that that might be true, then I would really, that would call some shit into question for me because that's my identity.

• 1:51:08Rich Roll?

  Right. If somebody came to you and said, actually, you're not a learner.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so that's one of those for me where my belief is now that's so absurdist that I would brush it off, but if they were able to like compel me to see it, the funny thing is being a learner then kicks in again. And I'm like, shit, if they're really right, then here's my chance to finally actually be a learner. But so that's why I think that one's anti fragile. But that's where it's like you can get yourself into trouble if they're hitting on the very thing that your identity and self esteem are tied to.

• 1:51:37Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, these things can be at odds with each other if that ethos of being a learner starts to conflict with your identity within a certain tribe, right? So which is going to supersede the other?

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  And people have to make those decisions. That's like, I am ultra ambitious. And I told my wife, the only thing you can never ask me to give up is ambition. And at the same time, my marriage is my highest priority. It's my highest value. So I'm constantly balancing the, is she asking me to give up my ambition? Or is she just reminding me that we've hit a moment where I need to put it first and I need to stop working for a day or two days, whatever, and really just give her my undivided attention. And as long as it doesn't feel like she's actually asking me to get rid of my ambition, then it's like, yeah, of course, because that that is what I want for myself. It is the thing that's brought me the most value in my life is my marriage, for sure.

• 1:52:31Rich Roll?

  Where does that ambition come from then?

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's the one thing I wonder about in terms of like, okay, we're not blank slates. Was I just given ambition? Like at a neurological level? Maybe certainly possible. I've made it bigger and more all consuming throughout my life. That is for sure. I have just enough stubbornness in me that growing up when people told me I couldn't do something, part of my like, every time someone told me I couldn't do it, I would say, well, I'm gonna do it bigger. You can't even do this, let alone that. Then I'm gonna do this. And you know, we ultimately get to I'm building the next Disney. So it's like

• 1:53:03Rich Roll?

  So it's externally driven then?

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Some of it for sure. But some of it is, everything in my life is driven by how something makes me feel. And I really believe all you have in this world is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. So in that dark, quiet night, when you're all alone, do you feel good or not? And so I steer by that. And when I start losing sleep because something is stressing me out, or I think I handled something poorly, I have to correct that.

• 1:53:30Rich Roll?

  And what are the tactics?

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  So, part of this is you have a belief system through which everything is filtered. So, my thing is, okay, belief system. I can get good at anything I set my mind to. Uh, belief system number two, having a growth mindset is the absolute ideal. So, that means that just because I'm not good at something now doesn't mean I can't become good at it. That I should only value myself for being a learner. I shouldn't worry about being smart, right, good, talented, nothing. Just the willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies. So, if I've done something and it's making me feel badly about myself, I start running through those filters. Also, does this beating myself up, is it moving me towards my goal or away from it? Now, a little bit of beating yourself up actually probably does move you towards your goal because it kicks you in the ass, gets you moving, taking it seriously, you're really thinking about it. But then too much of it begins to erode yourself.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  And so, I have to balance, like, am I just beating myself up? And now I've taken it too far and I'm losing sleep over something I just need to let go and focus on getting better instead of punishing myself, like, just get better at it. Um, so, those, those are the tactics that I use. The word "yet" is a huge tactic for me. "Tom, you suck." "Oh, I'm not good at that yet." "Okay, cool, thank you, got it." Um, I can get good at that. Um, and, and just keep coming back to those very simple, basic building blocks of my belief system. What I value, where my priorities lie, what my goal is, having total clarity, am I actually moving towards it? And then just really holding yourself accountable to that without damaging your self-esteem.

• 1:54:52Rich Roll?

  And how do you apply those tactics day to day? Like, what is the actual process? Is it journaling? Is it meditation?

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  Well, I'll give you the one with, uh, well, so I do meditate, not every day, but I try. Uh, that makes it sound like I can't do it if I want to. Uh, meditation falls in a certain order in my priority list. And there are days where, because, um, sleep in terms of time allocation is my number one priority. So, I get as much sleep as I need. I haven't used an alarm with any regularity in 15 years, maybe a little more. Um, so, that for me is number one. So, now, if I sleep longer than I expect, unless I have an early morning meeting, like today. So, I slept longer than I expected and I had an early morning meeting. So, now it's like, uh, I've got to truncate. Working out to me is more important than meditating, so working out happens first. Then, if I have time, if I've worked out and I have time, I'll meditate.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  So, my order goes, working out. Learning, meditating. So depending on what the order is, and the order might flip if I'm like really in a stressful period in my life or something like that, then I may make meditating a priority because I'm not feeling good. So you've got to have some flexibility, but because I know the order that they go in, like today I worked out and I wasn't able to learn or meditate. I did a little bit of learning because I do in transitional moments, but I didn't get to like sit down and really like clock some time.

• 1:56:12Rich Roll?

  And what does the learning look like?

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  Almost exclusively, reading and podcasts. But by reading, shout out to audible, I mean listening. But yeah, I do almost exclusively all of my reading is audible. You can speed it up to 3.5x now. That's so sexy. I can't even tell you. Like I had

• 1:56:29Rich Roll?

  If I did that, I'd have to listen to it again.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  Really? No, you could

• 1:56:32Rich Roll?

  I don't know that I could retain it.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  You can work your way. You will, for sure. 100%.

• 1:56:35Rich Roll?

  And what does the meditation process specifically look like?

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Dead simple. So I use what I call just breathe. So it was born of Mark Divine's box breathing. At least he was the one that introduced it to me. So he preaches, do it for equal parts. So you've got the inhale is the exact same length as the inhale, hold, exact same length as the exhale, exact same length as the exhale, hold. And I'm doing that made me feel out of breath. I just felt weird. So what I started doing was I'm going to maximize the pleasure in each part of the breath cycle. So for me, it happens to be a sort of medium inhale, a very short inhale, hold, a rapid exhale, I just let the air out, and then a very prolonged exhale hold. And that rhythm feels

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  awesome. And I do that for 10 or 15 minutes and I can get into an alpha wave state. I feel calm, creative. It just feels awesome. That's one of those things that people that haven't tried meditation or tried it but never got to the part where it feels awesome. My heart breaks for them. It is a tool I rejected for so many years because it felt wussy to me. And remember, I'm the guy that had to learn to toughen up. So I feared that that was like backwards momentum. And so finally, when Mark Divine looked at me and was basically like, stop being an idiot and try this. And he's like this tough ass Navy SEAL. I thought, all right, I'm gonna try. And then it changed my life.

• 1:57:54Rich Roll?

  It's interesting that it took you that long, given your interest in neuroplasticity and brain development.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  And being open minded and all of that. Yeah, I was.

• 1:58:02Rich Roll?

  As a learner.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  I was a moron. There's only two ways about it.

• 1:58:04Rich Roll?

  Right. Do you have a council of mentors? Like, who do you look to for advice and guidance other than your wife?

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  It's really books, man. Books and podcasts. So, you know, like, I have the very good fortune of bringing on essentially a mentor every week to come in. And people think of it as the hour that I spend with them recording. It's really the 12 hours I spend researching them. That's where it's like 12 hours in Rich Roll's world, and then capping that with, you know, an hour, hour and a half where we just get to talk and get to know each other. Like, that's on a whole nother planet. So that, that's really my mentorship these days.

• 1:58:45Rich Roll?

  You have a very interesting interest in longevity. Yes. Can you talk about that a little bit?

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to live forever. I'm doing my best to plan to live forever. But here's, I find this very interesting. And I'm way interested in the potential blind spot that I'm creating around how I should be acting today, given that as of right now, I am going to die. So I'm very aware of that. It does not cause me emotional distress to think that I'm dying. So it's not, I don't spend a lot of time struggling with it. There are two types of people. There's move away, and there's move towards. I'm not moving away from death. I'm moving towards living forever. So I don't have a fear of dying. I think that when I'm dead, I'm dead, and that's it. I don't think there's anything after that. I think it is a light that has been turned off. So.

• 1:59:30Rich Roll?

  It's no spiritual perspective on that at all.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  If that's how you define spiritual, zero. And I personally think that's amazing. So I think that the fact that life, one of my favorite quotes came from Phil Jackson, sounds very Buddhist to me. Things come together, things fall apart. And that's just how I see it. For right now, my atoms are together. One day, they will fall apart. And cool, I dig that about life. There's, there's a sense of renewal that comes with that. And that's one thing I struggle with. If we all start living forever, what happens to ideas? So because I think they will stagnate. I don't think most people push themselves. So I think there, there are problems with that. But because I love life, because I believe in a near infinite ability to change and grow and adapt, and because I'm so excited about hard work and struggle and building and creating and connecting,

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  it's just, it's, it's just rad. Like, I can't imagine ever, unless my life became just pain. Then, yeah, I'd be like, no, this doesn't make sense. Like, tap out.

• 2:00:24Rich Roll?

  Well, the idea of living forever as a pure thought experiment is fascinating because you would have to believe or imagine that a huge percentage of the population, should this become an event, an eventuality for people, would suddenly be struck incredibly risk averse because of the cost of taking a risk is so high. If you could perchance live forever, why would you skydive? Why would you do any of these things that would put that prospect in peril? And I think it would create mass paralysis for a lot of people.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  So this, this is really fascinating, and I think that would be true for the next 50 years. And then after that, we'll get to the point where either you can upload your consciousness or you can, and let's say you don't buy into 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, it will happen. So yes, we may go through a period of paralysis, and, and I think that is utterly fascinating. I would be one of the paralyzed people. I'd be like, no, no, no, I just have to live forever. I don't want to go outside. So.

• 2:01:25Rich Roll?

  Until life became so mundane and it's, it's intolerable, right? The idea that the prospect that you would live forever, I mean, we can't even, I don't think our brains are plastic enough yet to really fully.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Well, so now you're getting some really fascinating shit about like how much. So when I think about living forever, immediately assume I mean as a cyborg. Because I really believe that we're going to begin augmenting our brains, either just by uploading our consciousness or by augmenting our wet works to the point where we have brain-computer interfaces. Elon Musk says in the next, god, like, six months, he plans to make an announcement that he thinks is going to shock people about the state of computer-brain interfaces. So it's not here today by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not far away. So it's certainly coming. It's measured in decades, not, you know, hundreds of years. So that's super trippy and super interesting to me. And how much of these things can we mess with?

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  So like, for instance, you live forever, but you're not afraid to take some amount of calculated risk. And then we have to ask the question, how much of the emotion that causes people to do such dumb and hurtful stuff, do we want to get rid of? Any of it? Maybe none of it. Maybe we accept that you're going to get mass shootings because some people go to such a dark place and that it's better off to have the mass shootings as tragic and horrifying as they are. Or no, maybe we should get rid of those entirely and not tolerate that. I don't know, man. I am not the person to answer those questions. I just want to be there for the debate. And this is what I find so interesting. It never occurred to me until I was on Joe Rogan. It never occurred to me that some people don't want to live through the apocalypse. I always thought everybody wants to be the person on the other end.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  And that was the first person that was like, no, no, no, I don't want to be, I don't want to make it through. I was like, wow, that mindset just never occurred to me.

• 2:03:15Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. Well, I think the thing that is most appealing about that, if I entertain that concept, which I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about, the thing that appeals to me is the, I mean, I'm somebody who, time is my most precious resource. I'm always trying to get more time. It's the one thing that I can't renew, right?

• 2:03:44Rich Roll?

  And there just isn't enough time to do all the things I want to do. What would life look like if suddenly time was the most available resource that one has?

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  There's a book that covers this. It is amazing. Have you read Einstein's Dreams?

• 2:03:58Rich Roll?

  No.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Oh, you'll love it. You will love it, dude. I'm telling you. So this whole book deals with like time, just like it's um, it's a totally fiction book that just does a whole bunch of thought experiments in narrative form about different aspects of time. And one of them is a world where everyone lives forever. And the world bifurcates into two kinds of people. I read this when I was like somewhere between twelve and fourteen. It left such a lasting impression on me. It is why I'm obsessed with living forever. So I read this story and I, and he's, he says, the world bifurcates into these two kinds of people. Type A, they do nothing because there's always time to do it tomorrow. Time is so infinite that they, they never do anything.

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  And then type B does everything because they know there's time to get truly great at everything they've ever loved. And I was like, that's me. That's my camp. There are so many things in this world that I am absolutely in love with, passionate about, let alone just interested in, but I don't have the time. And so my life is a constant triage of having to say, because they say eighty percent of business is knowing what not to do. It's like, I don't just want to build the next Disney, dude. There's so many more things that I find so interesting. I want to travel to Mars, but I'm never going to do it. Because it's, it takes me away from the one thing I've had to say, this is my mission in life. My mission in life is to influence culture, to give everyone an empowering mindset. What they do with the empowering mindset.

• 2:05:17Rich Roll?

  But it's driven by a sense of urgency. If you remove that sense of urgency, I don't know that you can really anticipate the downstream impact on your internal drive.

• 2:05:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely true. And I'm willing to accept I'm completely ignorant to that. But from my perspective today, let me tell you how it feels. I use that word super intentionally. So just doing the thought experiment for me and I, I've. This is a little cheeky to put it in this way, but I've lived through the moment where I know what I would do when I have money and I have to give it up to do something. And I choose to go do something that makes me feel alive. I've had the moment where I've had all the money in the world and I know what I do. Do I retire? And the answer is no, I don't. I keep going as if I had urgency for what though? You could say, oh, to have the impact to leave the legacy, but I don't think legacy at all in the slightest. If you told me, Tom, you could spend the next 40 years building the saying, but no one will ever know who you are. I'd be like, fine.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Does it, does the impact actually happen and carry on? Yes, perfect. It is that experiment of thinking like, whoa, we can actually make the world better. And that people will go on to do amazing things. The only thing that matters to me is what I think about it. It doesn't matter what other people think about me. That's irrelevant. I can't control it. It's going to change throughout my life. It just too many people have said, if you stay in the game long enough, you will see yourself become the villain. So I know like right now, people will come up to me crying and thanking me for their help. I'm one sentence away from saying something that really upsets people. And then people come in and like, fuck you, I hope you burn. So it's like, I get it. I know how that plays out. So I don't care about that. It's beautiful when it's positive and I've helped somebody, but I'm only worried about what I think about myself. So I know about myself. The thing that I'm moving towards is really thinking that I'm making impact.

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  And while it's possible that on a long enough timeline, I will stop being neurochemically rewarded for that and not care anymore. And thusly I might slow down and not want to do anything. But nothing in my 42 years of experience lead me to believe that that is true about me. So I am, there's nothing, there's no shortage of things I'm so excited about that the thing that scares me, I have two fears. My wife dying because we have this beautiful shared experience and I don't want, I don't want to try to recreate that. And it can only be recreated in real time. So it would take me 18 years to get back what I have with her. And then the other thing is brain damage. Because if I can't process data, the way that I process data now, I worry it won't be as fun. So.

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  Like the struggle of everything, the trying, that's I value myself for that. And that's what I really love. And then just innately, and I don't know that I did anything to earn this. I love change. So where other people are freaked out by change, dude, I welcome change aggressively. The bigger the shake up, the better. So.

• 2:08:00Rich Roll?

  Well, that fear of brain damage might have something to do with your aversion to freediving.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Oh, that is, well, the freediving is thalassemia phobia, thalasphobia.

• 2:08:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, there's a word for it?

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  I think the fear of the, the deep. Yeah. So it is a completely irrational fear of being consumed by sharks or other gigantic creatures of the deep. There is something that really freaks me out about how deep and dark it is below you. And this may be as simple as I watched Jaws and it just scared me that much.

• 2:08:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  But dude.

• 2:08:33Rich Roll?

  You don't go swimming in the ocean there?

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 2:08:37Rich Roll?

  How about where it's clear, like in the Caribbean or like a lake?

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  I'll swim out to where I could get back within six seconds of where I can put my feet on the ground.

• 2:08:47Rich Roll?

  That's it.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:08:48Rich Roll?

  Wow. Um, what does success mean to you? How do you define that?

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Techni, 1,000%. That's it. That is all that matters. So building a set of skills that was insanely hard to do, but it meant something to you to build it. That gave you the ability to do something you care deeply about. That allows you to serve not only yourself, but other people. That feeling, which will survive through moments of suffering, hardship, loss. That is all that matters. That, that's when you feel good about yourself, when you're by yourself.

• 2:09:18Rich Roll?

  Conversely, how do you think about failure then?

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  Um, not trying. For me, like to not have the audacious goal, to not really give it a, a real shot. And I know I'm constantly gut checking myself for, am I playing at building the next Disney? Or am I actually building the next Disney? That means something to me. So if I get to the end of this and the world is clapping for me and they're like, oh my God, you're so amazing. And look how far you went. But I know that I was only playing at trying to get there. And then I kept dialing it back because I was getting too scared. That, that will be failure for me.

• 2:09:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And what about the difference between? Inspiration or motivation and real impact?

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  I love inspiration and motivation, but it is the neurological equivalent of candy. It's rad, it has its place, but everyone, because those just happen to be fleeting neurological states. Yeah, you, you just have to find something that's way more grounded. You need a mission, you need a grand why, you need to know what it is. And, and this is not a discovery, it's a thing you decide. I decided now, because I tell it as a story, people think, oh, it was unavoidable. He meets this kid, Rashawn, and that coupled with all the people that he worked with at Quest. It's sort of inevitable that he decides that he's going to build impact theory and try to change culture to give everyone an empowering mindset. Yeah, well, literally a year before I decided to found impact theory, my mission in life was

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  to end metabolic disease. So it's like you decide and then you point yourself at something. Nothing is ever going to feel right, like this is what I was put on earth to do. It won't feel that way until about a year or two years after you've been saying that's what you're going to do, that that's what you're committed to and actually acting in accordance with it. And then you'll be like, yeah, this actually is my mission. So people just have to decide and start going down.

• 2:11:01Rich Roll?

  Right, so when someone comes to you and says, oh my God, look what you've built. It's so inspiring, but I don't know what my purpose is. I don't know what makes me passionate. I'm not sure which direction to take, like what is the counsel? I'm sure you field this question all the time, like what is your counsel to that individual?

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  So first and foremost, go play, go discover, like wander around, go to a different country, like encounter enough stuff that you see what actually gives you that spark of interest. Don't expect a spark of passion, doesn't happen like that. You're going to be interested by something and that something will be maybe a little more interesting than the next thing. That thing now go down the process of really engaging with it, like go full in. So if you were traveling around India and you went and taught a, you know, a week long math class and you were like, I've never been this fulfilled in my life, move to India and teach in the slums for a year. And if in that.

• 2:11:54Rich Roll?

  Or how about just when you go back home, maybe, you know, start tutoring kid, like you don't have to revolutionize your life overnight, but if you start bringing greater expression to that impulse, it will lead you in a trajectory that you can't foresee in that moment.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  Super powerful answer. So I'm a thousand percent with that, engaging with it, whatever phase that takes, but really spending time with it, really doing it. Then if it turns into a full-blown fascination where you're like, I really dig this, then we're going to go down the process of gaining mastery. Only in the process of gaining mastery will you find passion. So to me, passion comes out of, it's kind of like love. I don't believe that love, it needs a different word. Unrequited love is a very different neurological state than reciprocal love. So if you have unrequited love, to me, that's something you really, like, I love singing, but I'm shit at it. So I have unrequited love. I love singing, but singing does not love me back. Now, I could go down the process of gaining mastery,

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  and then I may find that I have a real passion for it. Because part of it's going to become, oh, I'm gaining this skill, and this skill of singing allows me to have an emotional impact, not only on myself, but on other people. I can make them feel good, I can change their mood, I can tell a story, whatever it is that you want to do with the music. But when you're able to do that, and you're truly good at it, and it has the outcome that you desire, then it can become a passion. But to get a passion, you've got to fight through just ridiculous amounts of boredom, fatigue, everything, to truly become good enough at it, that it's a skill that has utility.

• 2:13:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, people don't like that. I mean, two observations. The first is, people want the fast-track, uh, superhighway to being where somebody like you is. They don't see all the toil and the obstacles, et cetera, that got you to this place. And I think secondary to that, or perhaps the primary thing really, is commitment to, um, self-understanding and self-knowledge, such that your, your level of awareness is adequately tuned, so that when that impulse arises, you can recognize it. But if you're disconnected from your, yourself, from your, this meat suit that we're walking around in,

• 2:14:08Rich Roll?

  because you're eating shit food, and you're watching too much television, and you're just reacting to your, your environment 24/7, then when that moment arises, you're unlikely to recognize it. So there is a, there's an actualization process of commitment to self, I think, that is requi, and it's, it's a, it's an ephemeral concept, but that, I think, is the key to being able to, um...

• 2:14:38Rich Roll?

  To act on that impulse when the moment occurs.

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:14:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because otherwise, I think we're all we are. We're all visited by these moments. So the difference is who's paying attention.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Do you have like the silver bullet for self-awareness? I have a mechanism, but I'm not sure that it's very good.

• 2:14:58Rich Roll?

  I don't have a silver bullet. I think it's a long slog, you know? I think it's a daily, it's a daily process and commitment to self-connection. And, and that's going to look different for, for all different kinds of people. It can be yoga, it can be meditation, it can be exercise, it can be reading, it can be journaling. Can be any number of things, but I think carving out that time in that space to focus inward, in whatever way that resonates with you, I think is crucial to,

• 2:15:30Rich Roll?

  on that journey of, of, of self-discovery and self-actualization.

• 2:15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:38Rich Roll?

  Would you agree?

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  I would. And, and as you were talking, I was like, God, this is a book worth writing. And it's a book worth writing, one, because I get asked about it all the time. Two, because you're right, and it is so fundamental. And three, because I don't have the easy answer. I'm not even sure how I did it. So it's like,

• 2:15:54Rich Roll?

  If somebody gave you an easy answer, I wouldn't trust that answer.

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:57Rich Roll?

  Either.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  But I want that easy answer.

• 2:15:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course, we all do, right?

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  But you're absolutely right.

• 2:16:02Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  But it would be fun to do that work of figuring out, what did I do? Because I was, me in particular, I was very unself-aware through most of college. And it had its advantages for sure, because there were, like I had, I was saying earlier, I didn't feel bullied growing up, but there was one kid who came up to me after high school and apologized for bullying me. And I was like, bro, I was so like unself-aware. I had no idea.

• 2:16:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  So if you were making fun of me, it just didn't make my radar.

• 2:16:31Rich Roll?

  I had a couple of people, I had those conversations as well. Which is nice.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  Which side were you on?

• 2:16:38Rich Roll?

  I was on the, I was the bullied.

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:41Rich Roll?

  But I've had people atone for that with me, which is interesting.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I wish that I had been like more aware of it. I was like, wow, how oblivious was I? So that was pretty crazy.

• 2:16:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And are you going to get back up and do more stand up?

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I, it's not a driver for me. So the thing is, it never came from a place of like, oh, I have some sucking wound that can only be savved by, you know, getting that adulation from people. I loved it. It was fun. It was, it was a something I got very good at and I enjoyed making people laugh and, but I, the, the truth of the matter is I'm living room funny. I'm not stage funny. And to get stage funny, I'd really have to put work into it. So when eh, like, it, to me, it's far more interesting. And the funny thing is now, so many years of like letting that muscle atrophy, I, it's not like a go-to thing for me. I don't have the jokes like there. Plus, I only ever knew how to be self-deprecating.

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  So my funny came from, one, I was just a storyteller. So I wasn't like, like Mitch Hedberg told jokes. Um, I didn't have jokes. So it was just like, let me tell you about my first prostate exam. That was one of my best bits. Fucking hilarious. But that was, it's just a story.

• 2:17:55Rich Roll?

  Well, that's incompatible with how you live your life now as somebody who's very, uh, intent about the language that you use about yourself, right?

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  Very, very, very, very.

• 2:18:05Rich Roll?

  I've, I've noticed you catching yourself a couple of times even today throughout this conversation where there's a bit of negative self-talk creeping up and then you course correct it.

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:18:15Rich Roll?

  So what is that relationship between, um, language and manifestation?

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  I, I think it's, I think it's massive. I don't think that thinking something or saying something makes it true, but I think that thinking something and saying something makes you believe it. And the things that you believe you will unintentionally guide yourself towards. Um, I think your belief about yourself and what you're capable of influences your accomplishments more than you can imagine. Just because you don't put in the extra mile of effort or whatever that it was going to take because you don't believe that you can. Or you don't even allow yourself to dream it. And if you don't dream it, you're never going to come up with a plan. So it, it is wildly influential in terms of what happens, just not in a mystical way, in a very like tactical. You just end up either doing or not doing the things that you should.

• 2:18:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, if anybody doubts that, uh, I challenge you to take a week and. Write down all of your internal self-talk, every thought that you have as it occurs. And most people would be shocked at the internal dialogue that we all have with ourselves. I had to do so much work and it's still such a challenge to overcome a lot of that

• 2:19:21Rich Roll?

  negative speak that goes on in my head.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Can we dig into something fascinating here?

• 2:19:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  Because I have the luxury of seeing you from the outside and not the inside, that's so weird to me. Now, I get it. I believe you because I'm exactly the same. So I have all this negative self-talk and it's like, God, what do I have to do and accomplish for that voice to fall silent? And the answer is it will never fall silent. I'm not even sure I want it to.

• 2:19:43Rich Roll?

  But you can counter-program.

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  A thousand percent. It's so interesting to me, looking at you from the outside, being around you makes me feel some kind of way. And that some kind of way is more at ease.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  Spiritual is the wrong word, but that's like the vibe, like there's just like depth that like sort of hums off of you, like somebody who's knows something that you want to know.

• 2:20:08Rich Roll?

  It's, it's, people say that to me and I know there was some feedback from me doing your show on that level, like, oh, he's so chill. But that's not how I feel.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  That's the fascinating part. And that's what, the reason that I really stopped to put a finger on this is I want people to understand that you feel like rich, but you may look like rich to other people. Where people are like, whoa, like you've really got stuff together. And once you can come to terms with, oh, this is the nature of being a human. The nature of being a human is the brain developed a mechanism over millions of years of evolution to pitch up this negative stuff and you don't have to believe it. It is merely meant to keep you safe. So you may hear it as one of the voices, but when it's the only voice, you're inherently in trouble. And so people think they've done something wrong, that they are a bad person because they have this negative voice that's beating the shit out of them. But the reality is that voice is, is a mechanism.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  It's like being mad that you have a second arm. It's like learn how to use it.

• 2:21:05Rich Roll?

  Well, it requires you to.

• 2:21:09Rich Roll?

  Distinguish, and I don't know how you feel about this with your perspective on spirituality, but I look at it like the brain is bifurcated between the thinking brain and your higher consciousness, or higher state of thinking, your unconscious mind. And this, you know, thinking mind can run rampant and run all of these narratives, and we think we don't have control over that, or we identify that with our higher consciousness. And understanding that these are separate and distinct from each other, and also, understanding that you actually can control that thinking mind, and you can decide whether you're going to

• 2:21:51Rich Roll?

  pay attention to it or not, is, I think, the first step in recalculating that story, and taking greater control over how you think and behave. Hmm, yeah, most definitely. You know, and it's, it's, it's almost like you have to play a trick on yourself. And for people that, that have, have trouble understanding that, just imagine you're having an amazing dream, and in that dream, you're having a conversation with somebody. And that person says something to you that you did not anticipate. Well, your brain came up with that. In the deep recesses of your unconscious mind, that was conjured up without your awareness of it. And I think that should give you a glimpse of the complexity of this

• 2:22:34Rich Roll?

  thing. And we're all walking around with stories, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and who we are. And I think we vastly underestimate the power of those stories to shape the lives that we ultimately end up leading. And if you can take control of that story, and change that story as a storyteller.

• 2:23:00Rich Roll?

  Your life will change.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  More dramatically than people can imagine.

• 2:23:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Well, let's wrap this up with, with one little final inquiry here. For the person who's stuck, for the guy or gal who's in the cubicle, who's hates their job, is in a dysfunctional relationship, is in debt, whatever the case may be, desperately wants a way out, a way forward, a lifeline. Where does that process begin for you? Like, what is the advice that you give that person?

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  So it begins with believing or acknowledging that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. So the, the thing that has made us the apex predator is not that we're stronger. It's not even that we're smarter. In fact, the, the quote often attributed to Darwin is that, oh, it's the survival of the fittest. He actually didn't say that. What he did say was, it's not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. Now, the reason that humans are the apex of all apexes is because we are the most adaptive species to change. So if you know that, then it becomes infinitely less important who you are today. And what matters is, who do you want to become?

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  And what price, and the price being the time and energy that you're going to put into acquiring the skills to become that person. So imagine the person that you want to be. How would they act? And then start acting like that. If the person that you want to be would leave their job and, you know, regardless of whether they had a safety net, burn the ships and go after something new, then that's what you should do. If the person that you want to be would start working nights and weekends because they very much value having a stable income that they can provide for their family or themselves, whatever, but are going to be disciplined and spend nights and weekends to get the skill set to go be more valuable somewhere else, or to start their own company, whatever, then do that. So there are a thousand ways to make your life what you want it to be, without even changing your circumstance. You could just, like you were just talking about,

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  change the framing, the perspective from which you tell your story. In fact, now I will tell you my film school story from both angles. There are two, this is the facts of what happened. I applied to USC but didn't realize you had to apply to USC Film School separately. So I get into USC, but I have terrible SAT scores. I took a 990, or I took it twice and I got a 990 combined score. It's terrible. They do it differently now, so people don't realize just how bad that score was.

• 2:25:24Rich Roll?

  That sucks, actually.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  That was atrocious. And so when I looked at the Film School, it required a 1300. And so I was like, whoa, how am I supposed to get in? I go see the school counselor at USC and they say, listen, Tom, stop. Cause I was taking film classes, the general education classes. They said, immediately, stop taking those classes. You are not going to get into Film School. Not words like that, those words. They said, statistically speaking, you're more likely to get into Harvard Law than you are to get into USC Film School. The number of people that apply is ungodly. The number of slots are tiny. You're not going to get in. You're going to end up spending a fifth year here because you will have wasted your time.

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  And I said, okay, I'm going to get in. Thank you very much, the stubbornness in me. So if you say I can't, I'm going to. And I said, there's gotta be a way to figure this out. And I found out that one of the teachers that was on the admissions committee would let you join him for lunch. So I joined him for lunch and as much as I can't believe this, no one else did. It was just me. And so I'm sitting down with him and I'm like, all right, look dude, here's the situation. I want to get into Film School, but I got a 990 in my SATs. He was like, Tom, what does SAT stand for? And I said, um, Scholastic Aptitude Test? He's like, that's correct. It's meant to tell me how well you're going to do in college. So there are two admissions periods.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  One, as you're coming into college, in which case I care deeply about your SATs. And then the other is as an incoming junior. He said, you've already missed the freshman window. So your SATs don't matter anymore. What I want to see is how good of grades can you get? Because that tells me how well you're actually doing in college. He said, I don't care if you're already a good filmmaker. We want to make you a good filmmaker. I just need to know you know how to learn. So he said, get good grades. So I locked myself in my dorm for the next two years. I didn't drink, I didn't party, I didn't date, I didn't do anything but study. And I studied like a beast. And at the end of those two years, I either had a four point or like a 395, something crazy. And so I got into Film School. So now I'm like, all right, motherfuckers, I told you I was going to get in.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  I got in and I did it in a clever way. I went and asked the guy what I had to do. He told me. I did it for two years. I was crazy disciplined and it worked, man, and I'm here. There are three production classes that you have. You've got a 290, a 310, and you crew a 480, which is a senior thesis film. So I do my 290s, they're pretty good, and I start getting attention for my filmmaking. So in 290, people are like, "Wow, this kid, he's kind of one to watch." Because my 290s were so good, for 310, you have to partner with somebody. Now, you have to either be a director or a cinematographer. Now, needless to say, everybody wants to be a director. But then, if you're not going to be a director, or sorry, if you're going to be a director, you want to get the best cinematographer.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  And so what ends up happening is, the people that can't get a cinematographer end up being cinematographers. So a lot of times, like, people sort of make do. I wanted to be a director, and one of the other best directors wanted to be a cinematographer. So now, everybody wanted him as their cinematographer, and he chose me. So now, I've been one to watch in 290, I get the ideal partner for 310, and we kill. How'd you get that guy? Um, he thought I was talented, fun to be around, and that I was one to watch. And so, in terms of, I would be a good person to partner with in order to get a good 480. So, partners with me and we kill it. And we don't make the classic mistake that most student filmmakers make, which is to tell a feature-length film as a, you know, silent film.

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  So we told a very short moment in time as a silent black and white film, where you wouldn't expect people to talk anyway, so it didn't feel like a silent film. So, people love it, does very well. We both get top-level crewing positions on a 480, we both crush that. And both of us actually end up getting selected. Only four people get chosen for a 480. And we both got selected to direct a 480. So now, I go from, "You're never getting into film school, kid, you're more likely to get into Harvard Law than USC Film", to being one of only four people to not only get in, but direct a senior thesis film. So right, I'm killing it. Tom, what are you talking about? You failed the film school, baby. You did everything. You were one to watch. And I was like, man, I'm making it. I'm gonna graduate.

• 2:29:40Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get my three picture deal. This is gonna be amazing. I'm naturally talented. I knew it. Everything has proven to me that I have natural talent as a filmmaker. Fixed mindset all day, but who cares, baby? Cause I got the talent. Then I go into the 480 as a director and I fuck it up. And I crash and burn so spectacularly that people are taking snippets of my film and cutting them into what we would now call memes. But at the time was just like mean to be funny and they would like screen it in front of the class. People would be pissing their pants with laughter because it was so bad. And I was having like basically an emotional breakdown. And I call my mom from the middle of the school. I'm laying on the ground on a payphone. And I'm like, my life is over.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna graduate now from film school with no senior thesis that I can show anybody. And this is a point in filmmaking. There's no like digital filmmaking. No one's ever made a film on digital before. That doesn't exist. If you wanna shoot a film, minimum for a no budget film is a hundred thousand dollars. That might as well have been a hundred million dollars. So I graduate, I steal my master, by the way, which I still have because it is that bad. I know when people hear this story, they just think I'm being humble. I'm telling you just like my SATs. Over my fucking dead body.

• 2:30:53Rich Roll?

  Come on.

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  Everybody, everybody has that one thing. I've told the story many times. I don't, I think my wife has seen it, but only once. So yeah, over my dead body, the thing will never be seen. Although I have to admit, like at some point, maybe it'd be cool to show when, once I have something that I'm, that I've done that I'm proud of, I might show it.

• 2:31:11Rich Roll?

  You could make that part when you give, when you give presentations to show a clip of it.

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely right.

• 2:31:19Rich Roll?

  Anyway, sorry I interrupted you.

• 2:31:21Speaker 01

  No, not at all. So I steal the master because it's that bad and I never want people to see it. And I graduate and now I feel lost and I'm like, I'm never gonna break in. My life is like, I had one shot. I actually made it and. I totally messed it up and so it's over. I'm never going to be a filmmaker and that was my identity. I was a filmmaker and so now that was gone. And I was like, wow, I don't know what to do. And so I was sliding towards depression. I would lay on my, the floor of my unfurnished apartment because I couldn't afford to furnish it. And I remember the feeling of the vinyl carpet smashing into my face because I would just lay there for an hour, two hours at a time. And I was like, yep, my life is over. I don't know what to do. I'm sliding towards depression and thankfully I started reading about the brain to avoid sliding towards depression.

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  So now there are two ways to look at my film career. One is dude, against all odds, you became through hard work and discipline. Not because anything was given to you. People told you would never do it and you worked and worked and worked and you got it and you did it. And you were one of the four people selected to do a 480 and the amount, even though your 480 wasn't good, the amount that you learned from that 480 transformed you, not just as a filmmaker, as a human being, and became one of the most transformative revolutionary things that set you up. That's real. That story is there in what you just heard. The other story is you got arrogant, you got cocky, you believed you were the next John Woo, that you could roll up on set, that you were naturally gifted, you didn't have to work. So you hardly broke your script at all.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  You like, I wrote the script in like an hour before having to turn it in to be considered. I never touched it again until the first day of shooting, didn't storyboard, nothing. Just rolled up and thought, I'll know where to put the camera. It'll all just feel instinctive and intuitive. And so I went and nothing was working. It was all garbage. My crew didn't believe in me. The film was falling apart. Teachers tried to save me, but couldn't get through to me because I was so convinced I know what I'm doing. And it just turned into a pile of garbage because I have no talent. Now, both of those scenarios are true. It is true that at that time I did not have talent. Now, it doesn't mean I couldn't develop skill, but I didn't have talent. So which do you, which story do you repeat to yourself?

• 2:33:31Speaker 01

  For the first probably two years after I graduated, I repeated the I'm not talented story. Then I began reading about the brain and realized, oh, I just haven't developed skills yet. And so then I began to change the story and to focus on the discipline and all the things that I'd learned and all that. But both are true. And so what I tell people is because you're more likely to believe something negative, don't even worry about what's true. Worry about what empowers you. When it comes to just yourself, I'm not talking about, you know, Fake news, or you know, a post-truth world. I'm just saying for yourself, there's both of those narratives are based on facts. So the truth of one or the other doesn't matter. One is empowering and one is disempowering. Act in accordance with the one that's empowering.

• 2:34:11Rich Roll?

  It's a great place to end it, dude. Powerful.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 2:34:14Rich Roll?

  Boom.

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 2:34:15Rich Roll?

  How do you feel?

• 2:34:16Speaker 01

  Feel great, dude. Anytime I'm hanging out with you, I'm a happy man.

• 2:34:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thanks for bringing the heat today, man.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 2:34:21Rich Roll?

  I loved it. If you're digging on Tom and Impact Theory, he's an easy guy to find on the internet. If you just, if probably if you type in Tom on Google, it'll, it'll pull up your stuff.

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'm that cool yet, but if you type in Tom BI.

• 2:34:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there, yeah. So Impact Theory on YouTube, on iTunes, wherever you enjoy your narrative storytelling, empowering content, you can find him at Tom Bilyeu on Twitter and Instagram as well. Yeah.

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:34:50Rich Roll?

  You have any good interviews you're excited about that are coming up?

• 2:34:54Speaker 01

  Well, I will say if they haven't heard yours, it's always cool to see the roles reversed. So I highly recommend that episode, which I think came out amazingly well.

• 2:35:02Rich Roll?

  That's good.

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  We've got our David Goggins, episode two coming out. That one's gonna be huge.

• 2:35:08Rich Roll?

  You've already recorded that?

• 2:35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's coming over here pretty soon, too.

• 2:35:11Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 2:35:12Rich Roll?

  Good.

• 2:35:12Speaker 01

  Amazing. So yeah, he's, he's evolved as a person. He'll bring that. It's just phenomenal.

• 2:35:17Rich Roll?

  Exciting.

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  So yeah, I'm super amped on them.

• 2:35:19Rich Roll?

  Cool. All right, man. Come back and talk to me again.

• 2:35:22Speaker 01

  Anytime.

• 2:35:23Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 2:35:27Rich Roll?

  That's great, right? What an amazing guy. What an amazing energy Tom has. Super smart and successful, but also down to earth. And I think it's his earnestness, if I really think about it, that makes me feel most connected to him. In any event, let him know what you thought of today's conversation. At Tom Bilyeu on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all the places. Of course, if you haven't checked out his show, Impact Theory, please do that. It's so good. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes, as well as a number of other resources to expand your education about the world of Tom and Impact Theory there at richroll.com. If you're struggling with your nutrition and you're looking to dial up your nutritional program and need a little guidance, check out our meal planner.

• 2:36:13Rich Roll?

  At meals.richroll.com. There you will find thousands of healthy, delicious, easy to prepare, plant-based recipes, all customized based on your personal preferences. We have unlimited grocery lists. We integrate with grocery delivery in most cities. We have an amazing team of customer support, coaches, people who really know what they're talking about on the ready, seven days a week. And it's all available to you for just a dollar 90 a week when you sign up for a year. So learn more. And to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support the work we do here on the podcast, there's a couple of ways to do that. Just tell your friends about the show or your favorite episode. Take a screen grab, share it on social media,

• 2:36:54Rich Roll?

  tag me at Rich Roll on Instagram or Twitter. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you can support us financially on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing and editing today's podcast that you can find on YouTube. Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK, David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music as always by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here next week with another amazing episode. Who is coming up next week? You know who it is?

• 2:37:36Rich Roll?

  It's Chris Schumacher. This is an amazingly impactful episode of a guy who basically went to prison for taking another human's life and has been on a redemptive journey since his release. It's a very emotional and I think touching and intimate conversation with an incredible human being. So you have that to look forward to, too. Until then, take it easy, everybody. Have a great week and let's get out there and be our best seller, shall we? Peace.