The Big Pharma Lie Exposed: SSRIs, Diet & The Truth They Don’t Want You to Know | Mikhaila Peterson (Fan Fav)

Fan Favorite: This episode originally aired on July 8, 2021. It’s easy to quietly go through life never really facing yourself, your struggles and your fears. There is a solution to numb the pain of reality and move towards comfort where it’s easier to accept things as they are no matter where you are. Mikhaila Peterson gracefully embodies the struggle of what it means to face yourself and all of your inadequacies and continue to push and explore through discomfort in pursuit of finding meaning while protecting what it means to be human, be a mother, be sexy and a successful business woman. SHOW NOTES: Accidental | Mikhaila talks about unplanned pregnancy at 23, career, & marriage [2:03] Anxiety & Chaos| Navigating stress from relationships and reducing chaos [7:17] Marriage | Mikhaila on the challenges of marriage before building foundation [10:12] Having Children | Is there a “right” time to have kids or only trade-offs to consider [14:54] Parenting Balance | How to balance an ambitious career and guilt free mothering [18:15] Criticism | Mikhaila on identifying where she could be wrong & being even keeled [25:28] Volatility | Mikhaila on how she’s navigating her triggers and stress response [28:32] Self-Awareness | How Mikhaila began to notice her symptoms and reactions [33:18] Sex Appeal | Mikhaila on embracing her sex appeal and growing her business [38:12] Confidence | Having confidence & the borderline of being overly self conscious [51:12] Being Hardcore | What it takes to push self-limits and see what you can achieve [56:18] Having Impact | Mikhaila on getting “greedy” wanting to help many people [1:01:39] Pushing Limits | Finding balance to push too hard or being more reasonable [1:04:34] Burnout | Mikhaila on pushing through work you don’t enjoy doing, outsourcing [1:10:18] Order & Chaos | Mikhaila on the navigating the balance of order and chaos [1:16:55] Discomfort | How to explore discomfort while building a brand vs. individual [1:19:46] Healthy Diets | Mikhaila on how she regulates diet chooses for her daughter [1:23:33] Carnivore Diet | Mikhaila on the benefits of an all beef diet on her body [1:29:00] FMT Experience | Mikhaila shares her experience with 10 FMT transplants [1:32:43] CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Monarch Money: Use code THEORY at ⁠https://monarchmoney.com⁠ https://monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year! Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠ https://shopify.com/impact Netsuite: Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at ⁠https://NetSuite.com/THEORY⁠ https://netsuite.com/THEORY iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at ⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Mint Mobile: If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at ⁠https://mintmobile.com/impact.⁠ https://mintmobile.com/impact DISCLAIMER: Upfront payment of $45 for 3-month 5 gigabyte plan required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customer offer for first 3 months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details. ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:⁠ apple.co/impacttheory⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with somebody I think you guys are going to find utterly fascinating, the one and only Michaela Peterson. Michaela, welcome to the show.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me on. This is exciting.

• 1:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, of course. So you obviously have come to prominence for two very interesting things. Number one is the lion diet, which I'm sure we will get into, but is definitely not where we're going to start. And then the other is your dad, Jordan Peterson. But you are far more interesting than either of those two things. And so I'm really interested to talk. We've spent time, I've been on your podcast. We've had some business-related conversations going on, which I have found you incredibly professional and easy to deal with. So I know sort of both of your hats of sort of public intellectual and CEO of your dad's company. So I've gotten maybe a little bit of a glimpse into something more than people would see if they've just encountered you in the media.

• 2:12Tom Bilyeu?

  And what I want to talk about is life architecture.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Which is, I'm sure I have to explain. So the way that you've built your life to me is atypical. You have said of yourself that you're not afraid to be a contrarian. You're not afraid to, you know, go counter to what people tell you. And so you've created a pretty interesting life for yourself. I think the best place to start to explain that is in a day and age where people are having kids later and later and later in life, you chose, as an ambitious person, as far as I can tell, to have kids in your twenties. So why don't we start there? How thoughtful was that? Was that accidental? Was it something you put a lot of thought into?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's an interesting place to start. That is a very complicated story, actually.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Scarlett was an accident. So I was in university. I'd done two years in psychology and then I'd switched over to biomedical science and I was in my second year. And I got pregnant and I kept her because I couldn't emotionally handle any other option.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  And it was extremely stressful because I was, so I was 23 when I got pregnant. And my life plan was to have kids ideally before the age of 30. But I'm also, like you said, very career oriented. And I was in my second year of university, so that was not ideal for, you know, when to have a kid. But, but I decided to keep her and I ended up dropping out of university and then doing part-time work for my dad and which turned into full-time work very rapidly when Scarlett was about six months old. But the choice to...

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Have, I didn't really feel like I had a choice. I got, I ended up, um, when I, when I got healthy, I stopped taking all my medication, including birth control.

• 4:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you were worried about what it was doing to you from a gut perspective?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, not even from a, from a gut perspective, but also from a psychological perspective. Like, my mom told me that when she'd gone on birth control, it had made her severely depressed and she hadn't recognized that until she stopped taking it. Uh, and I kind of laughed that off, but um, I started taking birth control when I was fourteen. And I was severely depressed, so I thought, who cares if you add another pill on top of it, I'm already depressed. Uh, which was like an immature way of thinking about it, uh, as a fourteen year old might. But when I was twenty-three and I stopped taking my medications and I got healthier, I was like, I don't want anything impacting my mental function.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  And so I stopped taking birth control, just in case it was, and I do believe that I was having, um, I do believe it was causing depression. Uh, but it, it wasn't the only thing in my life that was causing depression at that point. But yeah, I did stop taking it and that ended up resulting in Scarlett, whom I'm thrilled to have. But it definitely put a bit of a kibosh on the direction I thought my life was going to take. However, it ended up not being a negative thing, it ended up being a positive thing, but it was scary.

• 5:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff in that. So one, is your, were you married at the time or not?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  I was not.

• 5:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And is Andre the father?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  At the time, yes. So, so On- Andre and I were, um, Andre and I were dating for eight months at that point. And at that point, I hadn't, I was twenty-three, I was really looking into my health and trying to optimize that, and I wasn't really focused on. A long-term relationship because I was 23 and I was focused on other things and I was like, you know what, I have time to figure that out later. Like, I'll figure that out by the time I'm maybe 26 or 27 or 28 even. And I can start thinking about that, but I ended up having to think about that a lot faster because Scarlett came around.

• 6:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, that's interesting. That puts a lot of pressure on a relationship, though. And when I think about, so I look at you, and I could be totally delusional, I don't know you well, but when I look at you, it seems like a lot of thought goes into the decisions that you make. And so, as you approached marrying Andre, given the sort of complexities of having a child, did that weigh in the decision? Like, did you, were you more prone to marry him because he was the father of your child? Or were you like, no, that doesn't matter?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Oh, no, 100%. I was really, I was really stressed out about being an unmarried mom. Like, really, really stressed out and felt, you know, societally pressured into it.

• 6:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  We moved, oh, yeah. And you know what? This was a bit skewed because if it was me now and I went back in time, I probably wouldn't, I certainly wouldn't have felt that way. But I'm much more confident now. At the time, I was dealing, I was actually dealing with serious, this gets complicated, serious SSRI withdrawal. So my anxiety was ridiculous. So I was thinking about a whole bunch of things that I shouldn't have been concerned about. And that most certainly influenced my decision-making at the time.

• 7:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you had an impending sense of doom?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I had an impending sense of doom for about, yeah, a year and a half, two years after I stopped taking SSRI's.

• 7:42Tom Bilyeu?

  That is super interesting. So now you guys have obviously navigated those waters, you've been together for years, you're having a second child? Is that accurate?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  That is not accurate. We are not. That may be happening in the future.

• 7:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you're, you're open to having a second child? I'd heard you in an interview say, "We will definitely be having more," or "I'm definitely going to have more," I think maybe the more accurate quote.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  That was probably a more accurate quote, yes. We've been navigating, it's difficult because we've been, man, like, he's been with me through me coming off of psychiatric medication, which was a trip and a half that I would not recommend anybody go through the way I did. Uh, so he's been with me through that. He was with me through taking care of my dad in the last year and a half and the trauma and stress that has to do with those experiences has been hard to navigate with a relationship, to say the least. It's been tricky.

• 8:41Tom Bilyeu?

  So, one thing I'd love to hear more about is um, the growing confidence and I am really surprised, and again, this comes back to just, we're really just now getting to know each other, but um, I'm really surprised, given your public persona, that you felt societal pressure to get married or to not have a child out of wedlock. Um, what was it? Just the judgment of it all or something else?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Like, honestly, I think the, I wouldn't underestimate the SSRI withdrawal I had. I think that the anxiety and the, this, this horrifying impending sense of doom I had, like I said, for about two years after I stopped taking the SSRIs, I think I was looking into aspects of my life to try and identify what was causing uh, my reaction, because when you get anxious, you try and identify what in your life is making you anxious. And so I had, you know, my, my dad was randomly getting controversially famous, which was incredibly stressful for my family, so that was a real source of stress. And then I had a surprise pregnancy,

• 9:48Speaker 01

  which is, was a serious, real source of stress. Uh, and I think I was partly trying to

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Reduce the amount of chaos in my life. Uh, in any way possible. And then, yeah, I was definitely. I definitely partially felt pressured. Um, there was some family pressure. And there was some kind of neighborhood pressure. We moved to this. It wasn't a suburb of Toronto because it was still in Toronto, but it was kind of on the outskirts. And everyone there was thirty five and they had kids. And. I was pregnant and they were like, there was judgment there about not being married. And there was also like, what do you do as a job? Which is a weird thing to ask a pregnant person. Which is like, what do you do as a job? Well, like currently I'm having a child. Like that's my job at the moment.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Um, so I think I was just trying to reduce the amount of chaos in my life by making things as ordered and structured as possible. And one of the things I thought. Might help and my family thought might help was getting married.

• 10:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. And did that help?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:57Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting, just because of the, the difficulties inherent in a relationship?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the fact that it was new and we didn't know each other that.

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• 13:15Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:21Speaker 01

  Well, and the fact that there was, instead of going through, you should like, it really is worth going through the steps of a relationship, right? Where you get to know each other. And then you have some sort of trust foundation and you make sure that your, you know, your future goals align. Maybe those are the steps before you get married. And we skipped a whole bunch of them and had to do the second parts after. Which was, and we were young, like most people. I mean, it was different before, but most people I know now, like lots of people are getting married in their mid-30s and having kids. So we could have been easily 10 years ahead of other people.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  And 10 years less mature and just with less, you know, experience. So it was tricky. It's been tricky for sure.

• 14:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I broke all my own rules, which of course I didn't have rules in my early twenties. But I met my wife when I was 24, she was 21. And we ended up getting married. She was 22 still. And I was what, 26? So. Now I tell people, hey, you should not get married until you're at least thirty years old. Um, and you know, I ended up not having kids, but I was like, definitely don't have kids before you're thirty. Um, just because there's so much maturation that has to happen. There's so many like coming up with your own rule set and just having experienced more of life and sort of getting yourself oriented in a more useful way.

• 14:54Tom Bilyeu?

  So I can only imagine, you know, what all of the sort of exacerbations that come with the, you know, juvenile arthritis and all of the crazy immune struggles that you've had, plus SSRIs. Um, plus the so weird rise of, I can't imagine if all of a sudden when I was, you know, whatever twenty-three, that my dad became world famous, uh, that would be surreal, to say the least.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yes. It's been tricky. The one thing, though, about having a kid early is if you, I'm not sure if this happens, but if you wait until you're thirty, I feel like a lot of people go through, um, a lot of self-discovery and self-improvement around that age. And then if you get too involved in that, maybe you miss the opportunity to have kids. But if you're under the age of twenty-five and you're still immature and stupid, that might be the chance you have. Um, we'll see what happens with me, but I think, I don't know. It's tricky. It's tricky because you either do it when you're young and immature and you don't know any better, or you risk missing it, I think.

• 16:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. And you're talking from a biological perspective? People just have such a hard time.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Well, oh, yeah. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. I mean, women in particular. Um, but I mean, you, you wait until you're smart enough and you're thirty and then you have a, depending on the person, because some people have, can have kids later and there's, you know, in vitro now, but you can easily miss it. And I've had like parents of friends or family members miss it by waiting until they were thirty-eight and then just being like, oh, man, shit. Now that I've got my head on straight, it's too late. So it's hard to figure out if you should do it when you're young and stupid. Or wait, there's gotta be a good point somewhere.

• 16:38Tom Bilyeu?

  You know, it's interesting, the, the advice I always got from my own parents and my in-laws, who are just crestfallen, that my wife and I have decided not to have kids. They've, they've dealt with it now, but you know, when that was sort of breaking news, it was very hard for them to deal with, but they just kept saying, there's never gonna be a right time. Cause that was my thing, like, look, I'm in full build my business mode. I have no interest in having a child right now. And they were actually right in the sense that they said, look, you're, you're always going to feel like there's some thing that you need to do first. And I just got, I finally had the realization, well, if I'm always gonna feel like there's something else I would rather do, uh, then why have kids?

• 17:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I was very open to it for my wife's sake, because you know, my sort of read on the situation was it'll be way more meaningful to her than it will be to me. But then she ended up going on her own journey and deciding that she didn't want kids. So you know, that was when we officially decided not to have them. But what advice, knowing that I could not be more open and trust me, you will not distress me in any way, shape or form, if you're like, every human should have children. But what do you think about that journey? Like now that you've done it, is it one of those where you're like, oh my God, I never would have anticipated that this would be this important, but now that I've done it, here's what I've learned?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Uh, I think I could have easily been one of the people that waits too long because I'm so career oriented. Because even at the moment, I'm like, oh, the podcast is really getting going. I have so much opportunity. I'm working like 12 hour days and I enjoy it.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Uh, I didn't enjoy pregnancy. Like I, some women enjoy pregnancy. I didn't enjoy it, um, possibly because of the SSRI withdrawal, or the new relationship, or any of the other uncertainties in my life, but I didn't enjoy it. So, uh, so however, uh, I don't love anything in the entire world as much as I love Scarlett.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  So.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Having that is, makes like any of the difficulties worth it. And I don't think I would have, and I wouldn't have gotten that unless that accident had happened. So, I think, I don't know, I think that people who don't have kids probably don't know what they're missing because I think the relationship between a parent and a child is so strong, it's unbelievable. But then if you don't know what you're missing, then does it matter? I'm not sure. I'm not entirely sure. Um, I want more kids, for sure, just because of the bond I have with Scarlett. But the things I'm gonna have to give up is going to hurt, for sure.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Uh, because I really like work and I'm gonna be able to see opportunity that I'm not going to be able to pursue because I'm spending time being pregnant and breastfeeding and staying at home. Uh, even though I wouldn't stay at home for like the whole childhood. Um, but, so it's a trade-off, but I mean, everything in life is a trade-off, so what can you do, really?

• 19:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that, that is an interesting concept to me, um. You know, this idea that there is no sort of right or wrong way, there are only trade-offs. There's a guy named Thomas Sowell, I don't know if you've ever heard of him or not, but, um.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I do, indeed.

• 19:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh my god, he's so interesting to me, and his obsession is getting people to understand, life is a trade-off. Like, you can't have, he's usually talking about policies. You can't have these policies and expect a utopia on either side. Like, it's all just a trade-off, and so now asking yourself which of the sort of bags of good and bad do I want? Um, and, you know, making your decision in a more sort of realistic way, um, is how you have to think. So, as a voice for, um, modern women, which are in a very interesting time, and I, I may mean that in the way of the sort of Chinese curse of may you live in interesting times. But it is, uh, it is a very interesting moment where you have

• 20:43Tom Bilyeu?

  two really competing visions. You can take the more traditional path and prioritize motherhood and.

• 20:50Tom Bilyeu?

  You know, give that your time and attention. You can be a total career person, or you can do both. And how do you think about that? Like, as you talk about working 12-hour days, right? There's only so many hours that Scarlett's awake. So some of those hours now are given to work and aren't given to her. And so how do you find that balance between? I don't love anything as much as I love her, including business. But at the same time, for some reason, I'm pulled to have some of that in my life.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  That is a very good question. And that was so hard on me. But I've more come to terms with it now. And so what I've decided is whatever life I can make for myself that makes me the happiest means that when I'm around her, all she sees is a joy-filled mother. And so that's what I want. And if that means fewer hours spent with Scarlett, but a happier me, that's better for her.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  The alternative would be me giving up some of my passions, spending more time with her, and possibly ending up resentful towards a child, which is the worst thing you can do for a kid. So I was like, whatever decisions I make, has to avoid any type of resentment. Because being around resentful people is just terrible. So I talked to some of the more career-oriented women in my family. So my mom stayed home with me, which made me feel terribly guilty about doing any work. Not that my mom didn't work, but she was really was a stay-at-home mom. So it made me feel really guilty about wanting to pursue work.

• 22:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you loved it that she stayed home?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  I didn't know any different, and I was told that that was the right thing to do. So, yeah, I loved my mom being at home, but I didn't have any other experience. So I don't know what the other experiences would be like. My two aunts were like pharmacist and nurse practitioner. And both of them got nannies and went back to work when their kids were fairly little, like two, something like that. And so I had calls with them when I was really, you know what I was doing, actually, is I was working for my dad full-time with a baby on me. And I was just like, this is really, this is a lot to do. Um, and so. I got a nanny after talking to one of my aunts who said.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  You know what, I've talked to my kids, you know, I've felt I had waves of guilt about it. I've. Talked to them about it and said, you know, should I have been there more? Did I miss things? And she said, all of her kids who are my cousins, who are. Super successful, like. Funny people, not traumatized or anything. Um, they're like, no, you were like, we saw you, the, the hours you spent with us were when you were happy. And we saw. You know, a woman who could go out and work, which was. You know, good for them to see. And so I think. I think it depends on the woman. I think if you want to stay home with your kids, stay home with your kids. That's gonna be great for them.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  But if you want to do something else and then you end up staying home with your kids and then you're resentful at home, that's toxic. So do whatever that helps you avoid that. And I'm fortunate enough and I work hard enough that I'm able to. Um. Work and have a nanny. And then the other point I'd like to make is. The nanny we have right now, her name's Uli, uh, and she's not like. She's not a normal nanny. She's one of my best friends. She's somebody I trust with my child. She's absolutely incredible. She's really smart. So we seriously lucked out. And before we found Uli, I was not that com- I was. Um, more guilty and not as comfortable with leaving Scarlett with other people. It was like, you know what?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  She'd probably be learning more from me. I don't know if these people, no offense to them, but I don't know if these people are very smart. Maybe you, you want your kid to be around smart people, right? Um, so finding Uli was just. Unbelievable. So now I'm like, Scarlett doesn't care. She has fun, like every day. She just has fun all day. She learns a ton of things. She goes out to museums. And then she comes home, she has fun with me. Like, she goes to bed, we get up in the morning, like. She's thrilled about everything. She's the happiest kid I've ever seen, which I credit partly to her diet. But. Things, I've managed to work it out. So I think that you can do both, but it's way harder than choosing one. And there's gonna be pitfalls either way.

• 25:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. Now. Do you get shade thrown at you? For having a nanny?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't care about those people. Like, those people don't know. I do, for sure, but, or, or you get told, well, there are some things that are true, though, right? You get, you get, I've read statistics about, you know, you leave your kid in daycare and it can cause cer- certain problems growing up. Or, or getting a nanny is bad for kids because of X, or having a separated family is bad for kids because of X. But, at this point, I really believe that what I've set up here is more like having extended family. So I think if you can set it up so that it's more like extended family, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, people used to live in groups, pe- like, this isolated two-person couple with no grandparents and no aunts and uncles,

• 26:17Speaker 01

  and no cousins is abnormal for humans. Like, people used to grow up with a whole bunch of other kids and with cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. Lots of kids were raised by their grandparents. And so, expecting one couple and particularly one mother to do that entire job is absurd. So I think if you can, if you can, especially if you're lucky enough to be able to hire people that you trust, and that your kids like, and then it turns into more of a extended family, I don't see what's wrong with that. So, I get some hate, but I mean, I get a lot of hate from morons that don't really care about.

• 26:52Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting to me, I've heard you talk a lot about people that throw shade at you, and you'll do exactly what you just did, which is, you know, I don't really listen to the people that are, you know, just attacking me. But actually, there are some people come at you with things that are real, and you're so, um, sort of even-handed about that, which I find. That, that's why, um,

• 27:13Tom Bilyeu?

  in dealing with you in business and the other encounters that I've had with you, it's, it's always very even keel. So, it was the same thing, so, I don't know if you know, but I originally, I didn't, your dad, um, somebody had presented your dad to come onto my show in the early days of my show, and I said no. Because my marketing director at the time was like, "No, no, no, he's really misogynistic." And I was like, "Well, shit, I don't want somebody misogynistic on my show." And then, I went and actually watched his videos, because his name just kept coming up. And I was, I realized I had formed an opinion about somebody without knowing anything about them. So I was like, let me just go check this guy out. There's no way he's coming up this often if he's just like a total psychopath. And I start watching his content and I was like, huh? Like this guy is so even keel. Like I don't understand

• 27:58Tom Bilyeu?

  how people have created this sort of weird caricature of who he is. Um, I found that very, very surprising. And so in the face of sort of all that criticism, to be able to be even keel, to be able to say, well, 80% of that argument doesn't make sense, seems, you know, ad hominem, they're just attacking me for whatever reason. But hey, that, there's actually 20% in there that's interesting and I need to pay attention to that. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM.

• 28:40Tom Bilyeu?

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• 29:23Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you keep that open mind? Is it just something that you've, you're, I mean, given obviously who your parents are, do they train you to do that? Like, where do you come to that open-mindedness?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, part of that's gotta be personality. Um, I know with my, I know I'm extremely open uh to new ideas. However, I think what happened was when I started to delve into diet and I ended up putting my autoimmune disorder into remission. With diet, which is something that I was repeatedly told by the medical system was impossible, wasn't even worth looking into. When I managed to put myself into remission, I didn't believe anything I used to believe. So I thought if I'm wrong about the most important aspect of my entire life, what else am I wrong about? Like what, what else am I looking at that isn't real? So then I was like, it, it got really bad for a couple of years where I didn't trust anything I thought, like I was like.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  I, I don't trust the government, I don't trust any figures of authority. Like I don't trust what they're teaching in universities, I don't trust medical school, like it was everything. Uh, and I'd gotten a little bit better since I've.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  It's gotten a little bit better, I'm still fairly distrusting of institutions and authority figures. But it's better, um, so when I get criticism, I'm always thinking, okay, well, I could be wrong. And it was always what I was most sure about that I was wrong about. I was like, no, this is definitely this way. If I ever had that like. I don't know, I can kind of identify the feeling now, it's like an emotional, it has to be this way. Then that's where I'm, that's usually where I'm making an error. So I'm, I'm pretty careful, um, that being said, I think that my online. Presence is far more even keeled than I am in reality. Like you guys aren't seeing the tweets I'm deleting.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  So, so that's probably just because, I don't know. That's just because you guys aren't seeing the inside picture.

• 31:32Tom Bilyeu?

  But even that, like, the ability to talk about that, I find incredibly interesting. I just interviewed, do you know who Danny Trejo is, the actor?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 31:42Tom Bilyeu?

  For people that don't know the name, they would certainly recognize him. He's the most killed actor in cinema history. So, he's died some just ungodly number of times on screen. And he wrote a biography, which is really good. And he does not make any attempt to make himself look good. He's just like, I mean, he was a violent criminal when he was young. And he just like lays that shit out, lays out his drug use. I mean, just like crazy, crazy stuff. And there's something so disarming about that, where you're like, okay, I actually believe the things that he says about himself that I admire, because he was so honest about the things that don't make him look great.

• 32:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And you've talked a lot about being a volatile personality. I'm assuming that's what you're talking about. Do you actively try to manage your volatility? Or do you just go, hey, that's a part of me and it is what it is?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Both. So, I think that I wouldn't be as volatile, except that I took SSRIs for like the developmental years of my life. So, age like 11 to 22.

• 32:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that made you more volatile, or the immune reaction?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  100%. No, I think it was the SSRIs. It's hard to say, because I went on SSRIs because I was exhibiting psychiatric symptoms that needed to be treated, right? So, it wasn't like I was just randomly medicated. I was suicidal when I was in grade five. And I think that was probably from the inflammation and the autoimmune disorder and my body just freaking out.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  But then I was medicated, and over the years, I got more and more and more and more and more volatile. And I've spoken with hundreds and hundreds of people who've taken psychiatric medications. And volatility specifically seems to be something that happens with SSRIs or SSRIs. So, I think that I got medicated pretty heavily through my developmental years. And that exacerbated my volatility, because it doesn't feel quite right. Like, when I kind of spike, and I know people get angry and they spike, but my spikes seem to come sooner than they should. So, I'm pretty, I'm getting more and more aware of when it happens. But it's still difficult to navigate. And I have a lot of, a lot of trauma from being sick and watching my family be sick.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And so... At the moment, yeah, I'm actively trying to navigate, oh, that's a response to. Like, I I I know people, people hate on trigger warnings and things, um, which I understand, but I am identifying what kind of behaviors trigger me and then send me into kind of a stress mode. And if I go into stress mode, it's interesting. This is something I've just recently figured out is something stressful will happen and I'll be like, ah, that's weird, I'm fine. And then twenty five minutes later about, I'll get this brain fog and I'll be like, okay, I can't think anymore. Like, I can't think. It's like my brain has, like, left my body.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  And now I'm just like walking around in this haze of fog. And so that's a specific stress response I have now. So I'm trying to figure out how to hop out of that fog haze or how to identify a stressful situation before that twenty five minute period has passed. And then the brain fog kicks in. So I have ways like exercise and Wim Hof breathing and cold dips and saunas. Um, and I write and I do things I like, like podcasts. But it's tricky to navigate, like, brains are so complicated and I was medicated for so long that I didn't have a chance to learn my response to things.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And now I think it's been colored by SSRIs, but that's me now. So I'm okay with that.

• 35:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That's really interesting. Trauma is utterly fascinating. Uh, in terms of, especially if it occurs early, the way that it actually rewires your brain. Um,

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 35:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I've never heard of the delayed sort of brain fog. That's really interesting. Um, is it a similar type of brain fog that you would get when you have eaten something that's thrown your immune system out of whack? Or is it? More like fight or flight.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  It's not fight or flight anymore. I'm not sure if it used to be fight or flight, but. It took me a while to figure out because what I would do is I'd get into a stressful situation and then. It'd be like this delayed brain fog thing would happen and I thought I had eaten something. Cause it felt exactly the same. It was like, oh, I'm having a response to something again, but then.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I only eat like, I eat like two things. So then I started being like, well, maybe there was something on, you know, the meat I was eating. But then that stopped clicking. I was like, okay, there's nothing on this. So why am I having this brain fog? And that's when I started realizing, oh, it's because I had this fricking stressful. Stressful day or stressful conversation half an hour ago, um, but that's, so that's annoying. It's really annoying to deal with, like, those aren't things I want to deal with. I'm like, could that, could that just not happen? I don't have. A couple of hours to figure out why I'm stressed out and why I have this brain fog to like go back and figure out what stressed me out. And I don't have a lot of patience with myself probably and emotional reactions to things.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  So I'm like, that's, I am too busy for that. I don't have time for that. Uh, unfortunately, my, my body disagrees.

• 37:10Tom Bilyeu?

  You haven't obscene amount of self-awareness though, which I have to imagine is extraordinarily helpful as you work through these things. Have you always been self-aware? Is that something that you've cultivated later in life?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  That came after the putting my autoimmune disorder in remission. Because when I was monitoring, like I was monitoring my body like a science experiment. So I was taking science in school. I was tracking like fourteen different body symptoms. Twice a day on a spreadsheet, rating, rating them out of ten twice a day. And so I had to like detach and monitor myself from the outside. And I did that every day for like.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Maybe four years. So I started to identify like every tiny little thing that was happening. So that's that was not natural. Like I think growing up sick, I actually actively avoided what was going on inside me. Otherwise I would have just been like, you know, help, I'm in pain all the time, which isn't ideal. So I think I kind of avoided that. And then I, when I was trying to figure out the autoimmune problems, I went, you know, all in and did that for about four years. So that was definitely cultivated and now I'm probably. No, I don't think I'm too aware. I don't know if you can become too aware. You can overreact to responses. I might overreact to some of my, like the brain fog being like, oh no, it's a food reaction.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  When it's like, oh no, that's stress. That's just stress.

• 38:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's, that is really an interesting question. And my gut instinct is somebody who I, I went from very unself aware in my sort of teens and early twenties to hyper self aware in my late twenties, early thirties. And you really can. And maybe the way you're framing it is better, but you really can get functionally too self aware. Now, maybe it's just you're investing in it too much. Um, but there's no question, like I used to do stand up comedy and I found it very easy before I developed hyper self awareness and I found it very difficult after I became self aware. You just become so aware of like every nuance of yourself, how you're coming across, what that person might think.

• 39:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And so my life has been this sort of weird uh roller coaster of not self aware and actually had a lot of really good things come from it. And then realizing, oh, actually this lack of self awareness has damaged these areas of my life. I'm now aware of them. Let me repair that. But in, and I would not change it for the world. I am much better off sort of on the hyper self aware side. It's it, all of my business success is due to that. My ability to sort of constantly self improve. But whoa, it is, you know, going back to the idea of trade offs. There's a trade off.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, there definitely is. I think I was lucky to not lose certain aspects like when I so that two year period after I stopped taking SSRIs, I couldn't, I really couldn't do anything like I the things that I loved, I couldn't do anymore like I'm I'm pretty good at public speaking, just kind of off the cuff and that went away, but that was now like I know what that was and that was stopping SSRIs suddenly. Um, after that, I kind of kept the self-awareness in regards to my body, but I don't have that as much, I don't think, for better or for worse. Uh, I I didn't seem to lose that for social speaking or

• 40:40Speaker 01

  for talking to other people, so I didn't have that hyper-awareness about how I was looked at. And I think that's probably helped because of all the criticism I've had online. I'm like, you know, I don't care. I still think I'm cool like. So that part didn't switch. It was really physical, um, which is why I've had a hard time, I think, figuring out my emotional state because I've been identifying it too much with physical problems when it's like when some of it is just the experience of emotions, which is physical too, but you know.

• 41:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Speaking of physicality, we're living through an utterly fascinating moment and my wife has some of the similar um topics to deal with that you do. So here I'm having these business exchanges with you, but if I go to your Instagram page, I'm going to see this combination of business and bikini photos. Same with my wife. She runs a multimillion dollar company is is an unbelievably gifted entrepreneur, but she's also sexy and it is so interesting to watch women navigate that. And how do you think about that? Like what? I know you get a lot of um

• 41:54Tom Bilyeu?

  hate for the fact that those photos exist, but I've also heard you talk about and I went and audited your account and it is absolutely true. The they get a massively disproportionate level of interaction. How do you think about that? And and and here's my real question. When somebody as intelligent as you understands the power of being sexy, how do you deal with that?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so it used to make me angrier. Um, and especially. Being in charge of my dad's business. And having. Business conversations with. Particularly with men, but it's not just men, it's also with women. Uh. Because of the way I look. I'm immediately put into this category of like stupid, young, blonde. Woman who has. Only.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Only had any type of influence because of her dad. Right, so I I immediately know what kind of little box I'm put into. And it used to make me really frustrated and angry. And now I just find it funny, mostly. So I've played up the, like, we had a Times. Just a terrible article written about my dad and I, and I was in that article way too much in the Times earlier this year, and she called called me. Some sort of, what did she say, pouting Barbie? And I, and. And so. I've decided to embrace it, really, like, you know what? Yeah, okay, fine, I can do both. Sorry if that makes some people angry. But is it bad, like, is it worse than just doing one?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Like, if I'm smart, do I have to be? Like, frumpy? Like, is it, is it just one? And. Instagram is tricky, so.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  It's tricky because you're navigating, like, how to spread. Awareness about your brand. And so I can put out these podcast clips, which is ninety-five percent of my content is podcast clips. Uh, and they get interaction and people enjoy them, people share them. But then. If I, you know, every frickin', I don't know, two months or three months, put out a bikini photo. Then, you know, a quarter of the comments are people like, how could you do this? How could you do this? And then

• 44:18Speaker 01

  the other, but then it like I I said, it gets like ten times as much engagement and then my followers grow and then more people become aware of my podcast. So I think it'd be stupid not to. Plus, I'm actually really, really proud of the fact that I look okay because I didn't look okay for a while, like I had my hip and ankle replaced. My skin was like dying. I was really not okay. And I've managed to pull myself out of that. Exercise, eat on this really strict diet to keep myself healthy and I look good. And so I also want to show people that, hey, I went from, you know, that to this and you can too. It's not just me. And showing how my body looks is a really effective way of doing that.

• 45:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, here is the dirty secret nobody wants to talk about, and I don't understand why nobody wants to talk about this. Humans care about bodies a lot. They care about their body. They care about other people's bodies. We we are we are hardwired to give a shit. We are hardwired to care about the bodies that we see on other people. And we are we are wired even more deeply to care about our own bodies. And I grew up in a morbidly obese family. The the people that I love the most in this world are morbidly obese. So I don't have any judgment. I love those people, whether they're in shape, out of shape, whatever. I literally couldn't give a shit. I don't love them more or less. So to me, it's not about worth or value. It is about, guys, we're all playing a game of psychology.

• 45:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And one of the most potent elements of that is is the the physical body that we walk around in and the way that people respond to it. And I will just speak to guys for a second, since I don't know what it's like to be an attractive woman, though I feel like I would rule the world if I was an attractive woman. But

• 46:08Tom Bilyeu?

  When you add muscle, not only do women react differently to you, guys react differently to you. And any guy that is unwilling to admit the following truth, when you get into an elevator, you go, "Which of these motherfuckers could I beat up? And which of these guys would be a problem for me?" And I don't, like, in the boardroom, everywhere, everyone is like, there's that just subconscious routine that like, it is, it is an echo of evolution, but the reality is it's there. And so, I feel very differently about myself when I, and I hate the gym, but I feel very differently about myself when I'm strong and can lift heavier weights and when I look better.

• 46:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And, and I haven't told this story in a long time, but there was one point, I was so hardcore about my diet that I was ripped, six pack abs, the whole nine. I was at a pool party, a woman swam across the pool, crawled up out of the pool, turned to my wife and said, "Can I pet his abs?" And I was just like, this is the most, like, I, I've done incredible things in business, nothing compares to the woman crawling out of the pool, asking my wife if she can pet my abs. It was crazy. And it's like, it's so petty, and maybe I shouldn't, but it was amazing. And so, yeah, like, looking at my wife and being like, "Look, you're super hot, do your thing." Like, be both, right? Be both intelligent and show people that you know what you're doing, running a business.

• 47:33Tom Bilyeu?

  But don't be afraid to be beautiful or sexy, like, I don't understand people that try to shut that off.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting because it seems to be the same, it's funny, it's funny. So, the people I usually get criticism from are more conservative men and women. It's not just men, it's conservative men and women that, like, give me shit about bikini photos.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And it's also conservative men and women that are like, you know, why are, why are women nowadays? Why do they have short hair that's dyed blue? Like, what happened to femininity? It's like, you can't have both. You're gonna like make fun of someone for trying to, I don't know, portray femininity. Or, or be, you know, Marilyn Monroe-esque. Or type of Barbie, or like whatever. You're gonna give them criticism for that, but then also complain about the fact that women are shaving their heads? Like, choose one. But anyway, it's probably different people complaining about the same thing, but. Yeah, I don't know. I'd say do both if you can do both.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  And people are hardwired to look at attractive people. People are hardwired to think that attractive men are smarter than they are. Right? Like, there's a correlation between. Yeah, there's a correlation between how attractive you are and how intelligent you are, partly because.

• 48:56Tom Bilyeu?

  How, how good-looking you are and how intelligently you're perceived? Or there's actually a connection between good looks and intelligence?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  I don't know. I won't, I won't, wouldn't be able to comment on that. From what I remember, I'm gonna go out on a limb here. No, I'm not. I'm not gonna say that. From what I've read, men go after attractive women and women go after smart men. So logically speaking, you'd end up with hotter, smarter people. If that's how it works. But I don't think, at least not recently, I don't think I've read a study that actually confirms that.

• 49:28Tom Bilyeu?

  The difference between hearing like one study that comes out with this really fascinating finding, and then can it be repeated? That's a whole different thing. But, uh, going back to people will find other people attractive. On my first date with my wife, I was like, look, I'm always gonna find other people attractive. And if that freaks you out, like, you're not dealing in the real world. And if you are asking your partner to pretend that they quote-unquote only have eyes for you, I'm like, you're gonna be so insecure because you know that you find other people attractive. And so if you know you find other people attractive, then you're going to assume that they find other people attractive. But they always say, no, no, no, I only have eyes for you. It's like, that's how people get into these deeply insecure states.

• 50:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So I told my wife, look, I'm always gonna find other people attractive, but I'm not gonna do shit about it. Because I'm into you, like, I wanna be in a relationship. Obviously, I didn't say I'm committed to you on date one. But like, as we got serious, I was like, look, there's a difference between sexual attraction and commitment. I said, one day, you're gonna be a bag of wrinkles, homie, and I'm still gonna be committed to you. Right? Because I wanna share a life with you. And that's like, the commitment that I'm making is, will there be a hotter person coming along at some point? Yes, of course. Am I going to chase that person? No, I am not, because I wanna know what life is like sharing this life with you. But the other day, we were taking a shower together, and I was just like, you know, I wanna say thank you.

• 50:56Tom Bilyeu?

  You're in your 40s, you're still hot, you work your ass off to be in shape, and I wouldn't love you less if you didn't. But I'm like sincerely grateful that she takes such good care of herself. And it's like, I don't know, that's taboo or whatever, but to me, it's just, that's just reality.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that makes total sense. I think you have to fall in love with somebody's brain, right? Because the brain's gonna, well, gonna stick around hopefully for as long as possible. And looks aren't, but yeah, you can definitely, like, you can be a, if you get your diet right and you exercise, you can be hot for a really, really long time. Like, I, I think a lot of the, and this is definitely taboo to say, but a lot of the, oh, you know, as soon as you hit 40, you're not hot anymore. I think a lot of that is from people not eating properly and not exercising. And so, yeah, you're not gonna be hot, but there are a lot of 25-year-olds that also don't eat properly and don't exercise and are also not hot. So I think if you stay healthy, I mean, who's that man? There's one woman, Grace and Frankie. Grace, what's her name?

• 51:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, the show?

• 52:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Jane Fonda, she is, she's hot.

• 52:08Tom Bilyeu?

  It's crazy.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Really old.

• 52:09Tom Bilyeu?

  She's in her seventies.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  She's got this crazy diet, yeah, she's got this crazy diet. She's realistically, she's probably had a facelift, but who hasn't? So she's got this crazy diet and she exercises all the time. She's still hot. So it's also how you act too.

• 52:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Church, in fact, let's go back to your notion of confidence. I remember in college, there was a heavyset girl in our class. When I say that woman was sexy, like she was so confident. I was just like, damn, like the confidence was sexy. So you had said, okay, I wasn't confident. I became confident. What was that process like?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Well, I've got this weird type of confidence where I'm insanely self-conscious. Like insanely absurdly self, I was not this self-conscious before. I don't know what happened, but one of the things I lost, I guess maybe with this introspection or whatever you want to call it, was that type of self-confidence. So I can do public speaking, but I'm very self-conscious about how I look. Maybe that's from being on social media.

• 53:12Tom Bilyeu?

  That doesn't happen.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  I'm not entirely sure, but uh, I don't know. I, I, I don't have like the pure, like I think if you saw me in person, I wouldn't. I guess depending on who I was talking to, I'm not sure if I would come off as that like self-confident person as much as social media makes it seem. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I don't really know what I look like from the outside. To answer your question badly.

• 53:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm not even worried about what it looks like from the outside. What I find interesting is so to me, confidence comes from competence, right? Like you're good at something and being good at that thing gives you a sense of. So it's the exact way that I respond to people and they say, hey, what do you do when you don't have self-worth? And I'm like, the honest answer is you have to go do something you think is worthy. Because once you're doing something where you're like, hey, I don't give a shit what other people think. I'm out here helping people. I'm working hard to be valuable, not only to myself, but to other people. And like, for instance, if you poured yourself into Scarlett and she's doing well and she's thriving and she feels loved and you know she feels loved and

• 54:19Tom Bilyeu?

  you know, sure, she has her challenges, but she's working hard to overcome them and you could just see she's got emotional stability. And then somebody comes along and says, you're a terrible fucking mother. You're just like, look, it stings. I don't like that somebody's telling me that I'm a bad mother. But to be honest, like, you're not getting into my heart on this one. Because I know what's going on in her life. I know how much I pour myself into her. So there's always gonna be the sting of somebody saying that you're a loser, you're dumb, you're whatever. But when you know you and you are confident in you, meaning I believe doing these things are valuable and I do these things, right? And when you do that, now you have a sense of self. Now you value yourself because you do things you think are valuable.

• 55:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And that to me is the only way. It's always gonna hurt a little bit when people say something, but it doesn't devastate a whole day or a week. I mean, it used to really fuck me up for a long time when somebody I respected said something negative about me because I didn't. I wasn't doing the things I needed to do to value myself.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  That's fair. I think I would still have a hard time if somebody I respected said something negative about me. But yeah, I think it's important. I've done so much hard work.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  But I'm also, I'm 29, so this is, this is very recent, right? Like when I was, I started working for my dad when I was 20.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Six, I just turned twenty six and that's when I started full time work for my dad. And so I had no idea what I was doing. Like I honestly had no idea what I was doing for a long time and I learned really quickly and I talked to a lot of people and I was pretty obvious and blatant and honest about the fact that I didn't know what I was doing. So I was really, I was like a sponge about learning things. Um, and then it took about, I think two years and I was like, okay, now I'm talking to people and I might know more than these people I'm talking to. So, once, once I had that awareness, then I think I got more confident and I've, and I'm around people that I trust now, who I think have a better more honest perception of me than I do from, from being me.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  And so I can listen to those people and they, you know, the positive ones anyway are like, oh no, you're, you're competent, you're a competent person, you're good at this. And so I'm starting to listen to more of that, uh, but it's been tricky. I usually identify and compare myself to people who are like, it's really stupid. Like even for this, even for podcasting, I'm like, damn it, I've been doing this podcast for like a year. It hasn't been for very long, right? And, and I'll, I'll go to, I'll go compare myself to somebody who's been doing it for fifteen years and is like ten years older than me. And I'll be like, why am I not there? And which is completely unreasonable. So

• 57:18Speaker 01

  I don't even know if that answered your question. I don't know how good I am at ha- having a view of myself from the outside. I think I'm probably too hard on myself, but I also don't really know how to do kind of self-improvement and work on things without being a little bit too hard on myself. I think it's better to be a little bit too hard. Or even maybe a lot too hard than to end up going too easy on yourself and then not accomplishing anything. Although you might not even be the type of person that wants to accomplish a whole bunch. I don't think there's anything wrong with that either. If that's not what floats your boat.

• 57:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Homie, you are right in the middle of like the conundrum. Cause it's so interesting. So as somebody that's, you know, whatever, a quote unquote influencer. The thing that I think a lot about is, hey, be careful taking advice from me because there are certain things I want from my life. And if you want the same things that I want, then my life will make a lot of sense. But if you want a stress free life, or you want to be the greatest dad of all time, I am a terrible person to take advice from. I work 93 hours a week.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:19Tom Bilyeu?

  I've decided not to have children, you know what I mean? So it's like, you really need to be thoughtful, but at the same time. The truth of the world is that it will be run by the most hardcore motherfuckers on the planet. Just is what it is. And I think in fact, your dad gave me the most interesting idea ever. This reinterpretation of the meek shall inherit the earth. And when you think of the meek as being weak, it's always, that just sounded so dumb to me. But when you go, actually, the ancient translation, and whether this is true or not, I cannot say, but the concept is so powerful. That the ancient definition of meek was actually the person who was insanely skilled, had the potential to be violent, but kept their sword sheathed.

• 59:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Now that person actually will inherit the earth because that is the person you cannot push around. But yet they understand the need to bring people together or that, you know, like, I think it was Bruce Lee that said, you have to win the fight without even fighting. Like you just have to be that much better, that much more confident that people understand, yeah, I'm just gonna back away from this one. And that to me is, is super interesting, but the, the sort of mess thing that you're dealing with is, all right. You don't need to be hardcore. That is not the only quote unquote path to heaven. There are amazing lives to live.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  And it's not necessarily the happiest way to, to live.

• 59:37Tom Bilyeu?

  100% depending on your personality. For sure. So many paths to live a truly happy life. But if you really want to run this bitch, then it's like, you're gonna have to be ultra hardcore. And that's where I, you know, somebody that doesn't have kids, it's like, well, the sort of softening of everybody doesn't really matter to me. I know who ends up running things is the people that are hardcore. That are determined, that are aggressive, like, just is what it is. So if you don't want that and you want to throw shade at that, it won't matter. Like, the people that figured that out are going to run the companies, they're, you know, just, they're gonna take over. And, but I weep for other people because the process, what I think the meaning of life is, is to take your potential

• 1:00:22Tom Bilyeu?

  and turn it into meaningful skill set. And when you do that, to do that, I should say, you have to force yourself into an adaptation response. And the adaptation response takes a ton of pressure.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really stressful. I mean, I have like, I have waves going in between, I literally can't handle this. I literally can't work this much. Like, I'm, this is half killing me. Like, I can't handle this. And I'll have a day of that, and then I'll have like seven days of, this is awesome, I'm on top of the world. I figured out a whole bunch of problems. This is a breeze. I got this. I could do this forever. And then something will come up and be like, this isn't, this is an insane way to live. I can't do this anymore. It's gonna kill me. I'm gonna die early. And then I'll go like right back into that, oh no, I've got this. I'm on top of the world. It's exhausting. Um, I'm, I think what I'm influenced by isn't just, isn't just like stature or power,

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  but I'm really intrigued to see what can happen if I take advantage of all the opportunity I'm given and try my hardest at something. Like, how far can I go, just as me? And I'm really curious to see how far I can go. So that's what's, that's what makes me curious. And I think that started with, I think lots of people have that, but that started with, oh, I got rid of an autoimmune condition, like a serious one, that I was supposed to have for life. If I can do that, what else can I do? Like, how fit can I get? How rich can I be? Like, how well-known? Um, ideally, how many children? But we'll see. That's, that's on the back burner. That's a complicated mess up there with, with the other goals. But I'm just really curious about how, where I can get to.

• 1:02:06Tom Bilyeu?

  That that is the question that sits at the center of my life legitimately. The reason that I didn't retire when I exited my last company was because I wanted to see how far can I go like how much knowing what I know now, right? Rather than lamenting that I didn't know this stuff in my teens or twenties. Now that I know it like, how far can I take this? How big of a thing can I build? How many lives can I impact? And scale to me matters. And I know a lot of people, people can think it's gross all they want. Like, that's so cool to me, like to build things at scale to aim to like legitimately. Michaela, I promise you on my deathbed, nobody is going to hear me say, well, as long as I impacted one person. Now, that doesn't mean I don't think that's rad for other people.

• 1:02:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, if that's the thing that you care about and you want to be like really intimately involved with a small number of people, like, that's rad. I'm so glad some people do that. But that just isn't my thing. Like, I want to impact millions of people. And whether they know who I am or not is, doesn't really matter to me. I just want to know, hey, I did these things and it echoed that largely.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's cool. I started off, that's cool. I started off, I started off with the goal, one single person, which is interesting. When I started, I started with a blog called Don't Eat That. And I was just chronicling my food journey because I was like, if, if anyone else is suffering from the same weird autoimmune response and SSRIs and whatever, if anyone else out there is suffering as much as I'm suffering right now, and I can help them not feel alone, for one person, I would feel better. So I started with one, I started with one person. But then my blog started picking up and kind of like the paleo community and then I got greedy really quickly.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  It was like, oh, my God, if I helped one person, like, I really helped one person, then I really helped another person. I was like, oh, my God, I could be doing this for way more people. And that, that would be so much better. But so I definitely got, got greedier about that. But I don't think it's greedy to want to help people or improve people's lives or reduce suffering from the lessons you've learned. I think that's admirable.

• 1:04:20Tom Bilyeu?

  I also think it's agreed that it's admirable. And I think it's very. Interesting that we all get to live in a world where even if you categorize like it is. One, it's very easy to make me sound crazy. I've I've become well aware of that when I get quoted in. You know, articles and things, I sound like a madman. So but we all get to live in a world where some subset of people are crazy driven. Like there's just, I even refer to it as my sickness. Like I have a sickness to matter. Like I need to. Live a life of meaning and purpose. And when I don't matter, that's when I start to feel like there's something off in my life. And as hard as I have worked to build companies that other people, I mean, I get people write to me all the time about.

• 1:05:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Whether it was the physical transformations back at Quest or now the mental transformations with Impact Theory. Like, you know, I mean, your family must have heard this so many times. You guys are intimately familiar with the idea of, hey, you saved my life. I was contemplating suicide. I encountered you, your ideas, whatever. I made this radical transformation. And that person has been able to leverage me and I'm sure countless other people that for whatever reason. Like we just constantly pour ourselves into that thing that we care about. It could be sport, it could be business, it could be being a parent, whatever. But we all get to live in a world where there's in some percentage of people, there's subconscious wiring to just go all out.

• 1:05:48Tom Bilyeu?

  And to make every day count. And I just can't look at that through like a dirty lens.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, neither can I. I I think it's, I think it's unbelievable what's the amount of effort. Some people will put out there. And I think it's unbelievable how different people can be. Like, uh, well, I've got friends, like good friends and they're, and even my brother, like he's the, you know, lesser known Peterson. And he is, he has put his life together so well.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable and it's like he's gonna live longer than me for sure. Stable although his his diet isn't my diet, so we'll see. But he he's like he's stable, he's happy, he's got the cutest little family. And a dog and he lives by a park near my parents and he's just like put together and happy. And reasonable, like he doesn't seem to have this obsessive need for more. That's sort of like a bit obsessive. He's just reasonable, he's happy where he's at, he wants to accomplish a little bit more, but like he wants to go to bed. At a reasonable hour and not do anything that's verging on like. One of the interesting things about people who push themselves is you can end up hurting yourself and you push yourself too hard.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Right? And it's really hard to learn, at least for me, it's hard to find the balance of pushing myself too hard. Put pushing myself just enough and then pushing myself too hard and burning out and just having these ups and downs and ups and downs. Um, and so I think you you either have the type of person that's like apt to push themselves too hard. And hurt themselves, or you have the type of person who maybe has more of a reasonable approach and. Doesn't err into the side of hurting themselves. Like, do you end up working so much that you hurt yourself or do you have a pretty good handle on how much you should push yourself?

• 1:07:45Tom Bilyeu?

  This is exactly why I despite that there are downsides to being self-aware, I would not trade a gram of it. Um, I never hurt myself, I never push myself too hard, I will never burn out because.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:07:58Tom Bilyeu?

  When it's when it stops being fun, I stop. And so this is what I'm so I'm like Captain Hustle Porn, like go, go, go. But what I I want everyone to understand that. I can do that because if on a random Tuesday, I'm like, this isn't fun. I'm feeling stressed, then I I actually will take time off, so.

• 1:08:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Doing less is always an option. It's always an option for me. It's always an option for everybody else. And anybody that tricks themselves into thinking that sometimes the right answer is stop, do less, pause, go fucking zone out, like go play a video game, have sex, masturbate, whatever. So it's like because I trust myself to actually do that. Because I don't like, I don't think accomplishments, like accomplishing in and of itself is not valuable. Going hard to turn as much of your potential into skill set, that's interesting to me. Sincere pursuit to me is the name of the game. So I don't care whether I achieve the goals that I set out for myself. I care very much whether I sincerely attempt to get them.

• 1:09:04Tom Bilyeu?

  But over everything is, is my life joyful? Because if my life isn't joyful, what am I doing? So the only reason that I work as hard as I work is A, I've constructed the company to be the exact thing that I would do even if nobody was paying me. Like, think about this for a second, Michael. I'm actually making money by talking to you. I'm getting paid for this conversation. So this is deeply interesting to me, right? So I've constructed a life where the harder I go, I'm doing things I want to do. So at Impact Theory, we write comic books, which I would do for free. So we write screenplays, TV dramas, you know what I mean? Like, we do all this stuff that I just love. It's like my deepest passions.

• 1:09:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And then I trust myself to stop, you know, a pause when I'm not having fun.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  What about when you were working at Quest? Was it the same setup or?

• 1:09:58Tom Bilyeu?

  A hundred percent. So what, so here's why. When I was in my twenties, I showed up every day and said, I'm here to get rich. Everything I was doing was just the stated goal was to get rich. And I was working at a company that I didn't.

• 1:10:15Tom Bilyeu?

  It wasn't a bad company. I just didn't care about the products that we made. And so there I burned out. There I was working an insane number of hours and it stopped being fun. And I went in and quit and gave back $2 million worth of equity and like all this stuff. And in the end, my partners and I ended up staying together and we said, okay, the next company we're going to build is going to be completely predicated on what we could do and love every day, even if we were failing. Now, once you set your life up like that, then it becomes easy. So Quest was when I had learned that. So we had essentially, we didn't do it literally, but we'd essentially made a pinky promise to each other that hey, if this stops being fun, we'll change something. And because of that, I was having a great time, even though it was an obscene amount of work.

• 1:11:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And then when it stopped being fun, I exited the company. So it was an amazing ride and I didn't stay past when it was a thrill ride. And so, yeah, it's been, you know, like I tell my employees now, I have zero intention of selling Impact Theory. But if my life stops being joyful, I will sell Impact Theory. So you just have to, I don't know, have real clarity on one idea, that you're having a biological experience. And ultimately, for all I know, I'm a brain in a vat somewhere. And so if that's true, and this is all fake, which I mean essentially you are a brain in a vat, right? Your brain is housed in your skull and it runs this sort of virtual reality and it makes you feel things.

• 1:11:46Tom Bilyeu?

  But ultimately, it's just about what, what do you feel? And so I optimized for feeling.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, everything you said makes complete sense and I know that, but I'm not very good at putting that into practice. So about, about a month ago, or two months ago, maybe it was three months ago, I think, I had a conversation with my dad and we both were like, you know, oh man, the last couple of years have been so awful. We have to make sure that everything we're doing is fun, because we shouldn't be doing work, right? It's still work, but it should be fun. But there's been a bit of, because I took care of my dad and didn't focus on the business for about a year and a half, there's been a lot of catch up to do with implementing like tech and things I don't want to do and just have to do.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  And so I'm, right now I'm in this stage where I'm kind of like pushing through a bunch of.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  It's almost like administrative

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  tasks that I think if once I do, I will never have to do again. So I'm in, I'm in that period of time. But I also realized that I'm so conscientious that I'll just do work I don't want to do. And I'm so disagreeable that when people will point out that I'm just doing work I don't want to do. I'll ignore them and continue. And so I realized that recently and was like, oh, I should be really careful about pushing myself to do work I don't want to do because I'll just do it. Right? I don't mind the discomfort, but I do mind it. It drives me crazy, but like I'll still do it. So I need to err more on the side of remember this is a biological experience. Remember that this, the entire point of this is joy.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Um, I think I've had such a like rough time with and with being sick that I'm just like, no, like also having my dad as a dad. And he's like, don't go after happiness. Go after meaning, but then you can err into the side of

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  do hard work forever and then die, which is not what I'm going for. Um, but I think I'm also balancing that with just start kind of just starting off. Kind of just starting off a business and needing to put all the tiny little annoying bits in place to make it work. But ideally that'll be over in the next three months. We'll see.

• 1:14:05Tom Bilyeu?

  I, I will give you some really bad news. It's never going to be over. And it's what Jeff Bezos refers to as overhead. Every job, e- every job, no matter how much you love what you're building, there's some percentage of stuff that just you have to do that isn't going to be fun. But you can get way better at the balance. So some of it is probably going to be, you just spend too much time there and you don't realize what can be outsourced. And so once you get to the point where it's not, okay, I'm never going to get this to zero. But I want to do things that I'm uniquely qualified for. And I want to get rid of the things that like basically anybody could do or doing this at a B level would be fine. Yes, I would do it better, but I don't enjoy doing it and I can outsource it to somebody.

• 1:14:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And so like, for instance, I hate contracts. I cannot tell you how much I despise reading legalese. It's heinous. Everything about it is terrible. But you realize, or at least I have realized, that it's really hard to not pay attention to the contracts that matter. And so, you know, despite having a billion dollar company, it's like I was still reading contracts. So I know that there's like, there's no point at which something doesn't matter enough that I have to deal with it. So, but you try to, you know, minimize, minimize, minimize.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I'm doing a pretty good job. I've just, yeah, it's hard. It's tricky. It's tricky balancing these things. It's tricky not overworking, uh, but I'm still having it like, I'm still having a ball with the podcast. It's, I think.

• 1:15:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Podcast is really good, by the way.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. I'm really, really, really enjoying it. Like every time I do a podcast, I'm like, completely pumped up afterwards. Like, wow, just talked to this amazing guy. I'm full of ideas. Like, and I would like everything I do to, not everything I do is going to be like that. But I'd like to have that energy I get post podcast um, in as many aspects of my life as possible. And I know some of the things that just crush it. And as soon as I'd get, I get an administrative task, which is something I did almost, that I did full time for six months until I outsourced it for my dad. But that just crushes me and it's like contract reading or anything finance related

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  or anything that has to do with numbers, um, or correcting, like correcting small things on social media that I'm like, you know, this tweet should have gone out with a link in, in the same tweet or this thumbnail is a bit off. I hate that stuff so much. I think I've been overdoing it with that and I need to outsource.

• 1:16:51Tom Bilyeu?

  That will definitely be, I'm sure, a big part of it. And then some of it is, you mentioned earlier that you like solving problems. That's the big thing. Like, if you're not an entrepreneur, you don't like quite understand, like, why do people get excited about business? It's not necessarily that they're excited about business. It's problem solving. It's like figuring out a puzzle. And so you're doing that all day and it does, it actually gets very, very addictive. So, yeah, you'll, you'll start solving more and more of those problems and spending less time on the things you hate and, and more time sort of reframing the, all right, this is painful, but I've gotten good. Like, the thought that I now can read contracts and I trust myself more than I trust my attorneys. It's like, that's a, it's a pretty powerful feeling to be like, okay, I can't be bamboozled.

• 1:17:35Tom Bilyeu?

  So that is strong magic, as they say. Now, I want to talk about an, an idea that we sort of touched on earlier, which is order and chaos. So, obviously, your dad has made that duality a sort of household term. What do you think about that? You know, when we were talking about how you structure your life and how you think about that stuff, and certainly in business, it's a tug of war. How do you think about finding, you know, when we talked about personality types, the joy is in the friction between the two, right? If everybody were the same, I don't think we'd have as interesting of a society as we have, given that there actually are personality differences and, you know, as long as we're not at war with each other. So how do you, how do you think about order and chaos?

• 1:18:20Tom Bilyeu?

  And do you see them as masculine, feminine? Or do you conceptualize them totally differently?

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I probably react to that a bit intuitively. So.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  Hmm, let me think.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  I like my life when it's a bit, I would say, chaotic. Like, I like traveling to new places and, and going to experience new things and kind of living in the unknown and jumping on business opportunity. Like, you know, what's gonna happen if I do this? What's gonna happen if I do that? And I think if you live your life too much in order, then you're not gonna have any new opportunity because that's all foreign territory. And so foreign territory, I put that into chaos.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  I probably have a difficult time navigating between the two. Like I said, I think I'm.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  I think I do well with a bit more order in my life. Um.

• 1:19:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Because of your personal volatility?

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  I think just because of the situations I've been thrown into, like, I mean, the autoimmune disorder, SSRI withdrawal, my dad being sick, my mom being sick. So I'm probably just like, if the universe could give me a little bit more order, that would be great because they're throwing, throwing a lot of chaos at me. That being said, when I get into something stable, I'm like, okay, I can't handle this. I'm bored. I need out. This is strangling me. So it's not just the universe. It's also me. Um, I don't, I haven't identified how to navigate between the two very well. I think I'm doing as best as I can at the moment, like I'm, I have, you know, I'm running my dad's company. I have my own brand.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  I have a lot of opportunity. I seem to be healthy. People around me seem to be healthy. My kid is amazing. She's doing amazingly well. So I guess that's, that would be a good judge too. Whenever I'm freaking out about something, I'm like, oh, I can't handle this anymore. I'm doing too many things. I'm like, you know what? Scarlett's really happy. As long as that stays stable, I'm probably doing okay. So I don't know if that answered your question at all.

• 1:20:38Tom Bilyeu?

  The interesting thing about this format, so I do different types of shows, but in conversations, it's, you know, e- exploration. And it always feels dangerous. I don't know if you get this sense because your sort of personal brand, I think is very different than the way that I built mine, but it always feels dangerous to me to play with ideas that I don't have any certainty around. Um, but I have found that when I avoid those topics, one, I don't grow and then two, I feel like a coward. And so I didn't like that feeling. So, um, in the sense that you're exploring something, it was perfect. Um.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:21:15Tom Bilyeu?

  When you think about.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Feeling.

• 1:21:17Tom Bilyeu?

  The feeling of exploring a new idea?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, most of the people I have on my podcast are because I'm trying to, well, you do the same thing on yours. But it's, it's usually because I'm trying to explore something that I'm uncomfortable with. Um, I don't usually like to get into debates. Debates make me uncomfortable emotionally. Like, I don't wanna argue with you. I've had enough arguments in my life. Um, but I, I like the, I think I like the discomfort. Yeah, otherwise I wouldn't be so like pokey online and controversial and I must like it, right?

• 1:21:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's interesting. The reason I don't like it is, or the reason I should say that it feels dangerous is I don't mind exploring a topic in terms of how somebody else feels about that topic. But in terms of like, oh, I've never really thought about, you know, male feel ma- male and female dynamics. Let me start pontificating about it. Like, you can get yourself into hot water because that the out of context clip of you working through that idea will stay with you forever.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that is, you know, as I think, and, and I really, I, I am so conflicted. I try not to be conflicted about things in my life. I try to just make a decision and, and go with it. But I am legitimately conflicted with a lot of the business opportunities I've had as a budding media company have come because I have a public persona.

• 1:22:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And at the same time, as the brand grows, I want, cause we're just out there telling stories, right? So as the brand grows and you think about building the next Disney, I don't wanna be encumbered. I don't want that brand encumbered by what people think about me. And so it's like, well, by having the world think something about me, I've leapfrogged ahead of other people. But at some point, I think it will become a liability. So I'm trying to like walk this really fine line of like, you know, exploring these ideas, feeling the way I wanna feel as a person, you know, that I'm brave enough to um, think through very tricky, thorny ideas that matter, right? I'm not a, I'm not contentious by nature. I don't like to fight for the sake of fighting. I'm not a contrarian.

• 1:23:28Tom Bilyeu?

  But that is, um, you know, I want to feel like I'm brave enough to talk about these sayings in a way that will actually help somebody in their life, which ultimately is my goal.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's, that's really tricky to navigate because it's, that's also not just, you know, you being cowardly or anything. That's actually you thinking because people can take soundbites and spread it around and you end up teaching or making people believe something that isn't true because of how you sounded then when you were trying to explore something and people can't make mistakes online without being destroyed for whatever mistake they made. And if you can't make mistakes, then you can't learn very well. So, so then there's that. It's, it's really tricky. I don't have a, I think I'm disagreeable enough that I don't care. Like, what are you, like, what are you gonna do? Bring in internet?

• 1:24:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that is, uh, yeah, that's, that's interesting. If I didn't have the, the quote unquote baggage of the brand and what I know I'm trying to do with it, I think I'd be a lot more cavalier. It's like I've already been so successful financially. I'm never gonna starve to death. I don't have to worry about any of that. But, um, yeah, I do think about it in terms of whether or not it's good for the brand. Speaking of brands, one thing that you're really known for that we haven't touched on is diet. You mentioned something earlier that I thought, I wanna ask about that, but now that it's much later into the episode and we will have weeded through a lot of, uh, sort of casuals, I wanna ask, you said that your daughter's diet is really good. What is your daughter's diet? Is she eating beef and salt?

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  Oh, God, no. That would be insane. Like, eating beef and salt sucks. It fixed all my health problems. And I can, I can full on say that it fixed all my health problems, but it wasn't fun. It sucks. I miss foods. So, no, I, I am so careful with her diet, though. Like, I'm the most neurotic.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Mother on the planet, probably with her diet, because I had no idea how much of my issues were genetic. Like, they're not obviously genetic. I don't have some weird genetic glitch that I'm aware of. Um, but I was like, well, this depression came down on my dad's side. My mom has arthritis. Um, celiac disease is in there somewhere, or at least a wheat sensitivity. So I was like, how much of this is genetic? Um, and I'm so, I was so sick, um, I was like, how much of that could I pass on to Scarlett? Uh, whether that's through like microbiome or genes or whatever. I was like, I don't want to trigger anything. Um, when she's young. So then, do you feed little kids a whole bunch of foods so that you dampen down their immune system? Or do you feed them the foods you think are healthy?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  And I went the route of feeding her the foods I thought were healthy. And so I breastfed for a long time. We started out with introducing like meat and meat fat, because that was pretty similar to breast milk. I was like, that's a pretty easy transition. Breast milk, meat fat, meat, and then really slowly started to introduce more foods. And she's healthy, so she's three and a half, super healthy, like I've said. But she can kind of identify when she's eating too much of something. So right now she eats like, she mainly eats meat and she has some vegetables and some fruit. She doesn't have dairy, she doesn't have grains, she doesn't have any processed foods. Um, she doesn't do legumes. It's basically

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  vegetables, fruit and meat. And she's thrilled with that. She doesn't drink juice, she drinks water, right? So it's pretty, it's pretty strict. But if she eats too much fruit, she'll get a bit bloated and she knows that she ate too much fruit. Right, so I figured that if I had been little and I had been more restricted in my diet, maybe until I was like six or seven. I think I probably would have been able to intuitively eat. Right, so when I started cutting things out when I was twenty three and I started to intuitively eat and say, okay, I ate this and it makes me feel this way. I think you have to get to a certain age to be able to do that. I don't think two year olds could do that. I think if you give two year olds candy, they're gonna feast on candy.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Right, so I don't think you can say, oh, just, you know, just eat a little bit of candy to a two year old. So I think if you feed them and you teach them to eat intuitively, I figure by the time she's in school. And she goes over to people's houses and she eats their food. My hope is that if she ends up not feeling good because of something she ate. She'll be kind of like clear enough and clean enough that she'll be able to identify that herself and then she can make her own decisions. But until she's, you know, five or so, I'm prioritizing like healthy fats, a lot of meat, vegetables and limiting. She she she still eats fruit, but she can't like gorge on fruit.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  And like I said, she drinks water, so I guess we'll see how that turns out, but at the moment, it's great. She had sugar once. In sausages that my mom bought. When she was two, when she was just eating meat. And she turned into one of those, you know, those tantrum children that you see in airports and you're like, what is wrong with their parents? They're just screaming. She screamed like that in that like angry for like a day after the sausages. And it was not very much sugar in those sausages. Yeah, and I was like, whoa, I do not want that. Like, that's terrifying. The tantrum-y toddler screams. She doesn't have tantrums. She'll get overtired and cry, but she doesn't have tantrums. I've never met a toddler that doesn't have tantrums.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  I'm like, how much of tantrums are sugar? I don't know, but Scarlett seems to be doing great, so I'm just gonna keep doing this.

• 1:29:16Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting. Yeah, when people come to me and you know, they have a problem. Hey, I'm anxious. Hey, I'm depressed. Uh, my cat died, whatever. I'm like, it's your diet. I guarantee. But Tom, it's static on my TV. I don't care. It's your diet. I just promise you. And I came to that, you know, not, I did not go through what you have gone through, not by any stretch of the imagination, but watching what my wife went through, which was brutal, and I actually worried at one point she was going to die. I was like, uh, yeah, what you eat matters. It matters a lot. What you eat ate matters. And I never thought that I would say that. So it's, yeah. Could tantrums be tied to diet? Absolutely. It is startling how much is tied to diet.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It's scary. And well, I figure you want to feed your kid the healthiest thing you can, right? And kids don't need candy. They don't even remember anything below the age of four. Why do you need to feed them candy? Like, if that's not good for them, why bother do doing that? So I don't do that. And Scarlett's doing very well.

• 1:30:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And how do you handle having things in the house that you can't eat?

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  I don't really have cravings anymore. So I've been doing just meat since 2017. And I have, I now have wild salmon and sardines and I had like caviar today, which was wonderful. And I'll eat chicken rarely. So I'm not stuck on all beef.

• 1:30:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, and I haven't been- For, for people that don't know your diet, it's probably worth a super quick thumbnail sketch.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  So I had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, two joints replaced. I was on ASAS RISE for bipolar type two. I went on a paleo diet when I was 23 and it massively improved my symptoms. Enough that I stopped taking all my medication. I had extremely severe SSRI withdrawal, which is something I didn't know existed and it was horrible. And I started reacting to like light and sound and temperature sensitivity, like I was sensitive to everything. And my sensitivity to carbs skyrocketed. I figured out eventually that an all meat diet alleviated the SSRI withdrawal. And eliminated the arthritis that had been reduced by the paleo diet initially.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  So I went on an all beef diet because I was desperate to find one food that I didn't react to. And it was beef. So I went on an all beef diet December twenty seventeen. And in about a month, my arthritis was better. My skin cleared up. In six weeks, the SSRI withdrawal lessened dramatically. So the depression and that doomy feeling went away. In five months, the lingering anxiety went away. And I've been on that um since December twenty seventeen, but I've managed to reintroduce lamb. Lamb would have been totally fine at the same time as beef. I now know that. Um but I have lamb, wild fish, like I said.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  I've tried to reintroduce plants because I'm hoping that at some point in the future, my immune system will calm down and it'll allow me to eat some. Pretty innocuous plants, like people shouldn't really react to a carrot. However, my immune system is not quite at that point. So if I do try and reintroduce plants, um I tried like pressure cooked peeled apples. Like I tried really like baby food and I ended up getting arthritis after a few weeks of of eating that kind of food. Um, my assumption is I have some sort of um. Something triggered my immune system or is continuing to trigger it like a bacterial, something that I can't test for. And that's giving me this reaction, but. An all meat diet completely transformed my life.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  I'm not vitamin deficient. I don't supplement with anything other than like salt and some potassium electrolytes. Uh, and that's the backstory. So that's why I was very careful with what Scarlett eats and having other food in the house doesn't seem to bother me because I don't have cravings anymore. So if I get really hungry, and by that I mean like if I don't eat for a day and a half.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Then I'll start to like, look at fruit and things and be like, oh yeah, I wish I could eat fruit. But if I'm like in a good place, I don't really care. I like how easy it is. Like I just air fry steak. I eat a steak like twice a day. I don't have to think about food. I don't have to grocery shop. Like it reduces the complexity in my life. I don't have an autoimmune disorder. I'm not on any medication. I'm healthy. So I think I'm thankful enough to have the diet that I don't care that there's other food around. And I'm happy that the people who are around me don't have to have the same diet as me and don't have to eat that way. Like I wouldn't wish it on somebody. So if they're enjoying their food. Great. Ideally, I will be there at some point, which I think I will. I'll figure it out eventually, but I'm not in that much of a rush.

• 1:34:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Have you ever considered a fecal microbial transplant?

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, have I done it actually?

• 1:34:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, did it help?

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  C. C. difficile. Um. This is gonna be controversial, but I'll share it with you guys anyway. So I went to, I went to the Tameout clinic. Um. I actually got in trouble for this, but I went to the Tameout clinic and they do uh FMT transplants for people who have autoimmune disorders or autism or like a ton of different things. And I had a C. difficile infection really badly. Um, and antibiotics, I didn't want to try antibiotics because that was the reason I had the C. difficile infection. And I did ten FMT transplants and nothing happened. Um. And then I, so I had this infection and it was like four months later. I was like, this is getting bad. I'm on the verge of hospitalization.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  And so I started doing research into it and I found this protocol for C. difficile, if you have, if, if the FMT transplants aren't working, then it might be a problem. I figured maybe it was a problem in my small intestine. How would you get FMT transplants to a small intestine? So I found a protocol online where you double encapsulate, I actually put this on YouTube. You double encapsulate uh the microbiota from FMT samples and swallow it. And if you double encapsulate it, then it makes it to your small intestine and I fixed it in one day.

• 1:35:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  So. So yeah, I've tried it and it completely fixed the C. diff problem. So I think if people have like gut damage and imbalances there and they can't tolerate probiotics, which I can't. Like if I take probiotics, I get arthritis. But that worked. So I've done that a number of times to try and rebalance my microbiome, which I figure is out of whack and that's causing some problems, but it hasn't allowed me to expand my diet.

• 1:36:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That is so interesting. So I'm, I am beyond fascinated by FMT because of what my wife went through. Uh, why is what you just said controversial, though?

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  I don't know, because people aren't thinking.

• 1:36:25Tom Bilyeu?

  But what do they actually get mad at?

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Um, I, the people got mad at me for giving out medical advice, even though I was like, like, Jesus, C. diff. I had people contacting me because I talked about having C. diff and I had people contact me from the hospital being like, I'm dying. People die from that. And I was like, well, tell your doctor to read this research paper and do that. Sorry if they're not figuring it out. Anyway, that's a sore spot. I'm still annoyed about that. It's like, I just, I just read a paper online and then did it and it worked.

• 1:37:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I, uh, I, it is admittedly, people need to be careful giving medical advice, but holy hell. The number of things that people go through and they have no idea what to do to get out of it. If the N of ones aren't at least speaking up saying, hey, N of one, do your own research, but here is my experience. Uh, yeah, that's crazy that they would be upset by that. So I've been obsessed with FMTs. Um, I knew that you could do encapsulated and I knew that you could do, um, basically like reverse enemas, but I, I, I had actually asked somebody and apparently I didn't understand their answer or something. I had said like, how do you know like where you're placing it? Because different microbes should be in the

• 1:37:44Tom Bilyeu?

  small intestine versus the large intestine. And yeah, they made it sound like, oh, it's so easy. But yeah, the fact that you would take a tablet for one, that makes more sense.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a lot of people, especially if they've already tried to fix their diet and they're still suffering from food sensitivities or uh small intestinal bacterial overgrowths like C. diff or anything else. If they do FMT enemas, it's not going to do anything because it stays in your colon. And if your problem is in the small intestine, the only way you can get through it, get to it is orally or there's studies I've read that do intranasally, but I don't know why you'd want to do that. Um, so. Yeah, but that would be in a hospital. But anyway, so these protocols do exist, but um I think FMT is so new that most people just think, oh, you know, enema, but that doesn't work for a lot of people who have this because it's in their small intestine.

• 1:38:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow, that is so, so, so interesting. Man, Michaela, this has been an absolute wild ride. I did not expect to end on shit, but hey. Uh, there we go. It is so fascinating. I'm so grateful that you're putting out as much information as you are. Um, in terms of your diet, I know that you're writing a book on the whole crazy journey. And uh hopefully when that comes out, we'll get a chance to speak again. Um, but I really think that as time goes on, you are going to be known for a lot more than just diet. Um, it's your, like I said earlier, your podcast is fascinating. The opposing views thing, the show that you do

• 1:39:25Tom Bilyeu?

  uh is really, really exceptional. Where can people connect with you to follow along in your journey?

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Um, I would say YouTube. So it's youtube.com/MichaelaPetersonVideos or just Michaela Peterson on YouTube. Instagram's Michaela Peterson. Twitter is Michaela Alexis. Uh, but I'm probably most interesting on YouTube unless you want to see bikini photos every three months and then that would be Instagram.

• 1:39:55Tom Bilyeu?

  That is perfect. Yeah, guys, trust me when I say the content that she's putting out is really phenomenal. And when, I mean, if you're, you made it this far in the show, you understand how she thinks through things, very thoughtful. She's carved out a very interesting niche for herself in the podcasting world that I think is going to continue to grow and grow and grow and be massive. So if you're not already following her, be sure to do so. And speaking of things you should be following, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

• 1:40:43Tom Bilyeu?

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