How Tom Bilyeu Sold Quest For $1 BILLION

Tom bilius sold his company Quest Nutrition for a billion dollars in cash and today we had the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles and learn the secrets from someone who successfully started and sold one of the most recognizable nutrition brands in the world to be honest we both went into this having no idea what to expect but within one hour we were blown away with what we heard so you'll be able to get an inside look into what it's like to sell a billion dollar company how you could start your own business from the ground up and how you could find the love of your life as soon as you subscribe and hit the like button if you haven't done that already you done that Jack I have but before we get into it we gotta thank our sponsor streamyard upfront costs can be a huge deterrent for people trying to get into content creation and if you want to start a podcast like us surprisingly you don't need to build this super fancy studio and that's because of our sponsor stream yard stream yard's a 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this house is uh very special to me because it was sold by Jason oppenheim yes uh when did you buy it was it two years ago three three years ago that would have been in 2019 very end of 2019. yeah so I covered this house actually on my channel when it was being built did you really went through with the developer a really nice guy and with Jason too and uh going through this house the amount of work that he put in US is insane is telling Jack it's like removing some of the telephone poles in front of the house and like even fixing the roofs of the people below you to make sure that they're not ugly roofs those are things that you don't think about when you're buying like you know a few million dollar house but when you get up to this caliber of home and Jack said it's like dude this is the nicest house this is the nicest house I've ever been yeah it's insane congratulations and you were the buyer of this which I think is so cool to come full circle and be back here because I remember this garage and the owner had an extensive car collection and he had a lineup of cars here and uh and he had a centenario Lamborghini over here in the front that was all carbon fiber and it's cool to see that it's now a podcast yeah YouTube Studio yeah how did you get your start to be able to buy a house like this I'm gonna I'm gonna go fast and then when you find something you think your audience will care about we can drill down let's stop right there all right so I did not grow up with money I used to think I grew up poor I did not I have since seen poverty but we were lower middle class so I didn't know anybody with money I didn't just didn't know how to think like a person with money nothing I went to film School graduated thought I would get the three picture deal I did not and I found myself completely hopeless because I had no idea how to break into the industry which that is like if I had to guess what the thing is that really makes me resonate with people I can explain that moment you have big dreams but you don't know what to do like that's my sweet spot and that was so it induced such paralysis in my life that I know what that's like to be stuck there and for me it all happened pre-internet so I just was like what do I do and so very long story condensed way down I end up writing a screenplay it gets made into a feature film I was horrified by the results but I had met these two very successful entrepreneurs they said you're coming to the world with your handout if you want to control the art you have to control the resources so come with us and get rich what was the film uh oh God it's called Brazen Bowl uh to give it give us those yeah thanks Graham I did say there was nothing off limits and here we go so yeah no it's fine but uh it was about so do you guys ever hear the kill Dozer no all right this is a real thing so the everything I'm about to say is a hundred percent true okay there was a guy who had like a machine shop and he uh had the the people in the zoning committee come and change the zoning of his business and so he went out of business and he was very angry that they changed the zoning and so it takes him a year but he builds what ended up being known as the killdozer and he basically takes a bulldozer soups it up puts armor plating on it and then this guy remember this is all real this guy then takes that bulldozer and destroys the homes and businesses of everyone on the committee and but he does it surgically so if your house is in between two other houses he didn't touch either house on either side just demolishes him now this is terrible no one should ever do this and you're in a very dark place if you do but if you kind of like a Revenge tale it was pretty gnarly okay but the bad news is very negative punch line he gets killed so he it's it's like his last stand but ends up destroying all the stuff and so I was like let's make the villain of our story that guy but you can't use the real story obviously but that was the inspiration and so Brazen Bulls about this guy that gets done wrong by people he blames them for everything and so he lures them into a building that's empty and we actually filmed it in LA in this empty building and played by Michael Madsen if you guys know who that is a regular on the Quentin Tarantino circuit and uh thought thought it was a really cool idea just didn't execute well which then gave me got me obsessed with you know how do you do how do you get control of that process how much did you make from that and how was it nothing so speaking of doing things for free I wrote it for free yeah because I wanted the experience I wanted to get to know the producers and all that stuff so I was like yeah sure uh no problems whatsoever but walking away from that realizing yo like it's one thing to work really hard for free didn't care about any of that but when it gets taken out of your hands and why my estimation made worse it just really made me want to control that process that led me to needing to get rich I thought it would take 18 months it took 15 years but it worked and so that's how again in a very very brief not sure explain how it worked what was the business that you started 15 okay are you able to disclose the numbers on the film like how much I actually don't know the how much it costs it was super low budget so like a million dollars something like that um and how much I made I have no idea literally none so by that point I was crying let me ask what didn't you like the most about the film uh so storytelling is meant to elicit an emotion if you fail to elicit the right emotion from the audience at the right time you have failed the movie did not elicit the right emotion at the right time for um and no I don't want to paint like my screenplay was Shakespeare was not the screenplay was probably meh at best uh but the movie didn't make it to Matt so uh that discrepancy was frustrating so when you're writing the screenplay you know what you want the audience to feel at this moment and because I'm actually more of a director than just a writer so I knew how this was meant to be shot like what where you need to put the camera what you need to get from the actors all that and so I was on set every day and it just wasn't so got it tell us about that business that you started what inspired it why that I was a tag along so it was created by these two very successful entrepreneurs and it was a technology company called awareness Tech and they knew me from uh as a filmmaker and so they'd seen me speak on film and they were like hey we need a copywriter why don't you come and help us but don't think of yourself as an employee think of yourself as a potential partner and if you work hard enough and perform at a high enough level will actually make you a partner and they said that to everybody and so I watched them make that pitch to 30 40 50 people I don't know it was just constantly and that's how they would try to attract talent but I took them seriously and I worked like a fiend I didn't ask for a raise for five years because all I wanted was equity and so in the end I got equity in the business but by the end I was so burnt out and so unhappy because I was chasing money that I went in and quit and I was like here's your Equity back knocking across the Finish Line can't keep doing this at that point the equity is worth about two million dollars and I'm like uh this is just how many miserable longer would you have had to go to actually realize that Equity it never would have gotten there I know now looking back on it so at that time I was just like good choice it would have been a good choice if I'd done that at 18 months but I kept telling my wife no no just another 18 months another 18 months another 18 months and it's six and a half years she said you're now damaging our marriage because I would come home and say don't even ask me about my day and I don't want to talk about it and when I would drive in because this was in the Marina Marina Del Rey for anybody familiar with SoCal and it's one of the most beautiful places on Earth when I would drive in it was like dark clouds would roll in thunder and lightning I was just so profoundly unhappy what do you hate about it um I hated that I didn't care about the product I hated that um I was in a very aggressive environment events where people were outright cruel now I will say it worked perfectly for me and it turned me into the person that I am now so I'm actually grateful for it but when you're doing all of that and you're suffering every day for something you don't believe in just trying to chase money and the act of it is absolutely hateful it becomes very hard to get motivated to keep going in and so I needed to wall myself off so I'd wall myself off but that meant that my wife couldn't ask me about it and so then that started to make her feel like she was sort of orbiting my life but not actually a part of it and so when she said look it's damaging the marriage and for me my marriage is my highest priority so I was like cool then something has to change and so we had a whole plan it's gonna we were gonna move to Greece cut our expenses down to nothing I was gonna go in and quit give the equity back and I'm just going to go write the Next Great American screenplay come back get it made and I go in and quit and give the equity back and I'm driving home and my partners call me on the phone like whoa you caught us off guard come out to dinner with us go out to dinner with them they're like we actually feel the same what would it take for us all to keep working together so we laid out what that would look like and that thing ended up being Quest Nutrition whoa Jack how did we end up back at the studio this is so weird I have no idea Graham I have a feeling it's because we got to talk about Aura I don't really wear a lot of rings here but you know what you convinced me to try it out and I gotta say I like it a lot I check it every single morning I check my sleep and it's one of the things I didn't realize just how bad of a sleeper I was you're a bad sleeper careful it's really it's really bad and it started tracking every single night of sleep with the aura ring and it's been incredible I never thought that I would be uh opening an app this much but every single morning it's not the first thing I check it's cool because all that data that you get from the app you can actually use it to improve your sleep so for example for me I noticed my sleeping was way more efficient when I wear earplugs and I saw data in the app that shows that yeah so now I wear earplugs like every night I also like how it stays charged for up to a few days so I don't have to think about like charging it every single day it becomes annoying but I could charge it once it's good for a few days I don't have to think about it I really like it a lot I didn't think I would like it as much as I did it's like that Health app on your phone but like way way better it's like you take that times a hundred and you get one of these things so if you guys want to check them out too it would help out the channel tremendous we got an affiliate link Down Below in the description uh try it out let us know what you think what's not to like and I'm not a ring for it I don't like wearing rings but I put this on with that said all right guys let's get back to the podcast now the irony of ironies is one of the the promises that the three of us made to each other was that we will never again chase money and so once we stop chasing money we made just all the money in the world it's crazy and so it's one of those like just ridiculous cliches how do you go from Tech to Quest Nutrition how did everybody thought we were crazy because we were going at the time where it was like that's how you make your money this is like the height of this would have been 2009 so 2009 everybody in Tech it's like popping off we've recovered from the.com bubble like this is where you know Facebook is blowing up there's just so much money everyone's like you're gonna get out of that into manufacturing what are you doing but we had said it's got to be something that we're passionate about it has to be something that I know I'll fight for at 2 A.M on a Friday night that I have a reason to be there other than money and so I'd grown up in a morbidly obese family so for me and it was different for all three of us but for me it was about fighting for my mom and my sister and I was like I want to make food that they can choose based on taste and it happens to be good for them and so at 2 am on a Friday which I always use that because I was real I remember one time literally being under a wrapping machine with bloody knuckles trying to repair it because if we don't finish this batch if the the protein matrix gets cold you lose it and so every batch was worth five thousand dollars and we just couldn't afford it and so I was like we're staying here till this gets done I could spend 20 minutes just describing that moment it's crazy but anyway that at that moment when I asked myself why am I doing this that I would have a very profound and compelling answer and so when I could think about my mom and my sister I'm like yo you're going to do this my sister ends up losing like 120 pounds it was incredible so it was awesome and I had the emotional reason to keep fighting but because it was really coming from that place and we look we were very business savvy they had been in business even longer than me by that time I had been in business for almost a decade it was like we had a lot of learnings under our belt three Ultra Hardcore people that have been working together for a long time very disciplined but you put all that together and I understood social media before virtually anybody else my partner understood the nutrition just freakishly well and then my third partner or sorry my second partner the third of us was a literal Iowa farm boy and so he knew how to build things and so he was like when everybody told us that you were never going to be able to manufacture this kind of bar he actually re-engineered equipment so that we could it was just nuts man it seems like all the right things at the exact level but how do you go and start like I see the see the why like here's why I'm gonna do this but how do you even start doing something like that and like coming up with that concept of this is what we're going to have this is what we're gonna offer like is it a super concrete answer for you so of everything you need to start with a really Crystal Clear goal okay so we want to end metabolic disease okay big mission but what your goal is not clear enough until you know what to do with the next 15 minutes of your life that's how I look at everything all right so my goal is to end metabolic disease what's stage one don't try to change Behavior try to leverage it okay word so I know people will eat junk food okay so what if we could make junk food that leveraged all of the junk food science but did it with ingredients that are actually good for you instead of bad for you cool so we're going to need to understand the biomedical markers that we're going to look for like right now I'm wearing a glucose patch we used to check our blood and we would eat the our own product to see is it working is it not working because we had a belief and I still believe it to this day the number one thing you should pay attention to is what is your glucose levels if your glucose levels are constantly high you're a diabetic so it's like and we know chronic inflammation all that stems from that so we just started working backwards on the problem but you have to have these principles that's why when you and I were talking in your interview I'm always trying to distill what's the principle so I can abstract it from that moment and apply it to anything so all right this is going to be a nutrition company cool what are we trying to do and metabolic disease why because my mom and my sister are struggling from this I don't want to die any sooner than they have to so it's deeply personal for me what are the things that have gotten them there they're choosing food based on taste could we get people to choose food based on taste and move them forward metabolically yes we can what are form factors people are already used to a protein bar why hasn't anybody made this protein bar before as we found out it's because all of the the scaled up equipment had been engineered over seven years with the use of high fructose corn syrup once you take the high fructose corn syrup out because it will elevate your blood sugar which defeats our whole purpose once you take that out it won't run through the equipment anymore so now you have to be willing to become your own engineers and you have to develop your own equipment it's crazy and so at that moment where I'm sure a thousand other people had the same mission one did the same things with the same beautiful reason all that but they got to the point where they had to engineer their own equipment they're like yeah I know we had an Iowa farm boy or they knew what to do they were willing to do it but they couldn't get the word out to anybody else because they didn't understand what I understood which was that social media wasn't even called that back then but it was going to change everything and that I just wanted to build community and I wanted I didn't know the word authentic back then in the way that we use it now but that was my whole thing I was like guys I don't want to be a slick marketer I want to be who I am kept saying that I want to be who I really am and so it was just like all the things that are cliche now at the time nobody was doing and my background was filmmaking so I knew how to make content so now you've got a guy who wants to be authentic who's trying to end metabolic disease so our product is real leveraging this thing we now call social media and knows how to create content so it was just like all the dominoes fell just two years before they fell for anybody else and so we were what was the startup cost how did you fund that so that we did very little so we got profitable off of ten thousand dollars so from the software company so we didn't burn the ships to the shore we kept running the software company by day and making the protein bars at night so we were doing that until the company was profitable and then I was the first one to move over full time and then my partners stayed there kept their salaries I dropped mine to next to nothing and then started running Quest and then his quest started making more money I could start drawing more salary and just did it that way and then finally to scale up we had to take a big risk we sold the um we sold awareness stack and then reinvested basically most of that money into buying the equipment because it didn't sell for that much into buying the equipment to fund Quest and so that's how we were able to do it people like working the two jobs and then also balancing a relationship a she or wife back then yeah she was yeah so what was that 20 years uh it was awesome so my wife just to be a good wife when I was like hey we need somebody to help us ship the product can you just out of the living room just you know ship one or two orders a day yeah of course whatever you need it's all good and then one or two orders a day became one or two an hour or became one or two a second and she just grew with us until we were doing 80 million dollars in revenue and then she was finally like I hate this so much this is not what I want to do with my life she's also a filmmaker so we moved her over into running the media Division and then she was the one that kicked off what has now become impact Theory which at the time was called inside Quest and so it was great so our lives were coming together she was no longer orbiting around me found her own entrepreneurial chops really I mean she was one of the founding team members who was there from day one helped build that and then by the time that we exited Quest she was like a full-blown entrepreneur at that point so it was her and I that started this with a small team of Believers and here we are got it and how much time did it take and how much did it cost to go from an idea to an actual tangible product at Quest yes uh so it took us 18 months to come up with a formulation that would have cost if we got profitable off of 10 grand you probably dropped on a two or three grand into the formulation that would have been our biggest single car last and then it's just ingredients and stuff beyond that but it took a long time I did not think it would take that long what's crazy is you know what your enemy is in food it's water I never would have guessed that now to anybody that knows about food the mold is gonna at least uh something you need to be shelf stable yeah and so we didn't to give you an idea of how green we were we didn't even know that it was water that would cause it to mold and we actually considered a marketing campaign of the first bar that rots to let people know because this is before like organic was like a big thing we wanted people to know this is like natural like it's not full of preservatives and then we realize that's a terrible marketing message let's not do that let's find a way one week yeah which is sadly true uh so we had to learn things like how you bind water and all that stuff and so we finally got to a formulation that was shelf stable and then we were Off to the Races so it was 18 months all the while you were still doing the copywriting stuff at the tech company as well by then I was doing way more than that at that point by the end of my tenure there I was the chief marketing officer got it okay and then you said it was a few thousand dollars all the way until having the actual tangible product yeah so it took us 10 grand to get profitable so with that was all the early development getting a food scientist to help us get the actual formulation to buy the first really small batches of ingredients all that so there's not much this is why I freak out and people are like oh you can't like start because you have to have a ton of money it's not true I mean look ten thousand dollars nothing just needs that it is a lot I get that I'm not saying that it is easy right but I'm just saying it's not the insurmountable thing that people think it is and then what about marketing to get your first ever customers were you selling just like family and friends or did you go to not give them away so you want to find out who's your ideal customer and we were really focused on I want my customer to be a walking billboard for the efficacy of the product so we went to bodybuilders now that was never going to be the only person that buys your product not if you want to scale you're going to go out to the my mom and my sister somebody that aspires to be in great shape and so we went I'll tell those people and said this is the first protein bar that isn't a candy bar in Disguise this is real so eat it test your blood look at your results like don't take our word for it actually try it and they were like no way no way I'm not eating it and so we would stand at events like the Arnold or the Olympia Carnival barking free protein bars the first bar is not jumping Skies no one would touch it so it's like just getting that one or two people and so they would try it the first day finally begrudgingly walking around the show they're starving it's in their bag they're like all right I'll try this they eat it they come back the next day like that's so good there's no way that this doesn't have sugar in it like we're used to people scamming in line we're like dude test your blood sugar look at it look at the ingredients try it and so it just spread like wildfire people are like oh my God this is actually real we had dietitians using it in people's contest prep it's crazy so now at every pool party around America somebody would you know walk up to the guy with six-pack and say what do you eat you'd be like Quest and so it's just like the most organic stuff so we started doing what we call mirror marketing which was hey everybody we want to see what are you cooking because people would use Quest product to cook to make crazy desserts how are you cooking with it uh show us your physical transformation and then we would just repost all their stuff and so then they wanted to point people to be like yo look at my recipe or look at my transformation this is just it was insane and did you guys have a big marketing budget or was it mostly just Word of Mouth like the product was so good like testing right like they don't have to have a marketing but their stuff just sells itself and people market for them yes and you need like Twitter or sorry uh Tesla has Elon on Twitter right where he's got a gazillion followers and he knows how to get that message out and to Rally the community we had Facebook Instagram before companies were using it so we were showing that a brand could be effective on there by building communities celebrating your community getting them to talk about it making them the cool person that knows that Indie band before anybody else and like that was all of our credibility in the beginning and then we made a really smart decision that at first everybody thought was crazy uh I I literally had to stand in a room and everyone in the company took turns point this is literal took turns pointing at me and saying Tom you're just being an [ __ ] and the whole thing was I said we should go online first rather than go in stores and so in the end anyway despite all of that I win the argument and everybody we try it and that becomes the reason that we able to keep High margins because we kept saying no to retailers for a year or more we're not going to go into retail yet and so many people were walking into a GNC or a vitamin shop saying why don't you carry Quest that we were finally able to negotiate terms that gave us enough margin to really scale the business how does that work to go into retail like how do you get shelf space like that and what are the terms like for the very beginning because it sounds like you were able to show the demand and then leverage that to a better deal how does that deal work 100 that's just like how much they pay you to well so you you have to build in all the different channels that you're going to be selling through so if you have a distributor they're going to want 50 right off the bat just plain and simple but they may be selling to a retailer like Walmart that's going to want 50 60 percent right off the bat so it's like how do you deal with both of those well you probably don't because your margins are going to go to virtually nothing if you have to sell to a distributor that wants 50 points and they're going to sell to and this is off retail and they're going to sell to um Walmart that's going to want their 50 point it's like what do you do so you try like we did and not use a distributor to get into key retailers like that but that means you have to build out your own sales for us so anyway you break your channels down it took me a long time to even understand what a channel is I don't know if you want me to go into that but it's basically groupings of points of distribution so gyms is a channel big box retailers like Walmart is a channel okay so you pick your channels you pick your go to market strategy with those channels and then you have to negotiate all of your deals by channels in some cases by retailer so typically you're only going to have one distributor in a channel you can get multiple but it can get weird they're all jockeying for a position and they can battle against each other and you have to deal with all that anyway this I don't know how much of a Treatise you want on that you can keep pushing hard on that but anyway so you figure out what's standard and then how much can you deviate from standard based on your points of Leverage we were holding back we had huge demand in the different channels of wanted to use us and so we were able to negotiate better deals so that we weren't giving out 50 points that we were able to keep a richer cut in the beginning and that helped uh I'm just curious like as a small like Grassroots Grassroots company how are you able to compete with these other massive billion dollar companies that are offering protein bars as well and were you nervous they would just do exactly what you were doing what did you do with that machine that you guys created did you patent it or something you can't patent a recipe so no we did file for some patents on some of our equipment some of the other things we were doing though we thought we were better off not filing for a patents you have to reveal how you're doing everything so better we thought to leave it as a trade secret so some things we just didn't do we actually Incorporated corporate Espionage where our competitors would send people to get a job at Quest so they could see how it was done and take it back so you only have say an 18 to 24 month lead when you get that big because we we were a rocket ship in five years we went from not existing to being valued at over a billion dollars crazy town so people are going to wake up and be like all right you just ate all my market share I have to figure out what the hell you're doing uh so what was the other part of that question how do you do it yeah like especially in the beginning right like how are you able to compete with these massive okay so the I live by a mantra there's always room for the best so we were in a declining category so when we first launched in 2010 the category had been declining for years and more entrants were coming in by the day and so when we originally pitched the quest bar we had a distributor say I need another protein bar like I need another hole in the head and so he passed now you can imagine as we became like the thing he was not happy with his decision to have passed um and if you have something that is actually better than the competition and you Market it better and you make the brand stand for something more there's always a way to come from whatever deficit you have to be Savvy there's no doubt you have to be able to make noise and get people to pay attention but if the product actually does what you say and you know how to articulate what you do well there's always a shot I'm sure a lot of people always think like some of the challenges in growing a company like that would be finding Distributors getting the supplies necessary and all the legal stuff for you what did you and the other partners obviously find to be the most uniquely challenging barriers that you guys had to manufacture make through all day that that was the only time where I was like oh are we actually going to be able to pull this off because we got told by people that have been in the industry 30 40 years this bar cannot be made and so we went around the world China all across the U.S Canada looking for equipment that would make our very peculiar what we call Matrix and we would stop their equipment we'd just seize it up and we started to think maybe this really won't work and my partner was like no I think I know what to do but you're gonna have to let me cut apart this equipment that we spent all of our money on and if it doesn't work now we're screwed because we can't even sell back the equipment because at least if we don't cut it up we still sell it right right we'll have failed but we can sell it back and so it's like Do or Die mowing we're like yeah let's do it and did and it worked and and that gave us that first and look we ended up making far fancier equipment down the road once we understood why we had gotten into work then we could go to the other manufacturers and say we basically need you to make us you know a piece of equipment like this with these tolerances and all that stuff and it was funny because you'd walk around our facility and it's like oh yeah that one piece of equipment I could have bought a Ferrari like a really nice Ferrari and here I have this thing that slabs protein bars but it worked out in the end now what was your decision to sell what was that like yeah so we ended up being so successful that we now had options we stopped agreeing on how to run the company and what the future was but we didn't need to agree anymore and for me I was always doing this to to control the art so that I could by that point I thought of it as building a studio and they knew that and so I was like you know I think this is that time what we've done is incredible we could sell the company for a billion dollars and let's do it and so I at that point I do not speak for them I can't tell you what was inside their heart and soul but it was a an amazing 14-year Journey as partners that had run its course and gave me and Lisa a chance to spin out the the media side of quest which was pretty weird to have a media company inside of a protein bar company to spin that out into a standalone company and part of the um what I saw as the future that we couldn't all agree on because I was like brands have to step forward and say what their values are you need to be able to see the person uh create content around who you are as a company what you stand for all of that and so I had originally started impact Theory back there called inside Quest but basically the same show and um I was like this is really the future that content is going to be such an important part of what brands do and so when we were like you know I don't think it didn't match their vision for what they wanted to do I just said cool let me spin it out do a standalone company and uh We're Off to the Races what did they want at the time was it to try new products and just go heavier into the marketing side or it would be it would be very unfair for me to try to characterize what they wanted to do but I will say that it didn't involve media in the way that I saw it and so I really thought we need to and look it sounds counterintuitive I totally get it we we need to invest more money in the media we need to be doing more strange things in our marketing to get a broader audience I wanted broader appeal I wanted people using it as a transformation tool I wanted to create documentaries around the Transformations and sponsor athletes that were you know doing crazy things and so how much of that they liked didn't like don't know I will say on balance it was definitely not a fit I felt very strongly in One Direction they felt very strongly in the opposite direction and it was like okay do we battle this out does one of us compromise in in a pretty big way or do we just say this has been amazing and part ways now when it's amicable and go each do our own thing how does a buyout even work at that point is it is does a larger company just absorb everything is it just your share that gets purchased like how what's the process like so what what ended up happening was we said okay this is the value that I brought to the company you freeze that in time and say cool if this whatever anything that you get over where I'm at that's yours I'm not there to build it that seems very fair to me as it turned out we sold basically at that same value so it didn't end up mattering they didn't stay too much longer after I left um and but that was the deal if they had taken it for the next 15 20 years and built it you know into a three trillion dollar business or something that would have been all theirs um but yeah can you share what your take-home was after selling in terms of how much I walked away with raw dollars I will say that it's it was nine figures get into math okay it was in the nine figures somewhere it was in the nine figures yeah and and I'm just so curious because it is so such a stupid question but you sell a company for a billion dollars do you just get like a check or like a deposit they literally just deposit it in your bank account you're kidding it's surreal what what bank account did you have uh this would have been at Chase this is just a Chase account with nine figures in it yeah and then and what about taxes uh you pay them you pay them I've paid a very painful amount of tax for living in La we were talking about why I'm trying to sell my house because I just don't think the way California is going with tax makes any sense uh so yeah but I I'm I'm a big hey I love America I'm here to pay my taxes so I have paid tax and I'm not I'm not Savvy like you man I don't try to be clever like but no [ __ ] pay taxes what was it like though looking at your bank account seeing nine figures that's crazy what was the most amount of money you had in your bank prior to that point uh by that point I was I was making a pretty good salary and have been for a few years so low six figures low six so like a couple hundred thousand yeah yeah to 100 plus yeah oh people don't understand I was worth over a hundred million dollars probably over 200 million dollars and I was driving a beat up Ford Focus with a leaky exhaust and was borrowing rides off of my employees when my wife needed the car it was hilarious what was your rent or mortgage at the time were you just Frugal in every facet of Life yeah so we we had really we had a uh it was a nice enough house don't get me wrong for that period of my life I was very excited so nobody while there were times in my life where I was in a very small apartment by the time Quest is thriving we're in a nice you know middle class house and um we had to put it up as collateral so it was at risk but we had a decent house but we stopped going out we sold because it obviously we had two cars but when we started Quest we had to sell it so that we could cut our expenses back to nothing so I went from making like 150k down to making 50k and with the house on the line and all that stuff and yeah we just scrimped and scraped and our mortgage was manageable and quite frankly I rolled the dice a bit and it paid off looking back now I wouldn't because I had an adjustable rate mortgage and had Quest not been successful I would have gotten oh Blitzer rated uh so got a little bit lucky with that um and yeah and being worth so much why were you Frugal is it just rooted in your DNA you don't have expenses I was uh I we're in this house so like to say they don't have expensive tastes me a bit stupid but I only have expensive taste for a house I don't the house is a piece of art that you can live in so I've always had a thing like I got hardwired for houses being a representation of wealth and my whole life as a kid I want to be rich because I was again I wasn't poor now that I understand what real poverty is but I thought of myself as poor so the whole time growing up couldn't have all the things that I wanted I've been working full-time summer jobs since I was 12 to get a Nintendo I had to work in a door Factory nobody should cry for me but like as a 12 year old you feel a bit hard done by so I'm like yo when I get older I am going to get rich and so my every time I visualize that it was the big house and all that and then once I got the big houses like I don't need fancy things so I the average thing that I buy is manga so it's like nine dollars so that's it I don't wear fancy most some of my clothes I guess that I bought a few years ago I went through a fancy phase but almost all my clothes are bought on Amazon your pants look expensive they're not did I bought these on Amazon for like forty dollars did you buy that yourself yeah yeah yeah so I I have a particular style that I like in fact I am wearing the culmination of what I was going to say so my pants I bought on Amazon for forty dollars and my shirt though I bought on in Tokyo so I'm a psychopath for Tokyo techware so as often as I can I will go to Tokyo and Shop in their districts and so I'm an anime junkie and so this was like a collaboration of like this little Boutique shop in uh Tokyo that did this mashup with my favorite anime which is Neon Genesis Evangelion so anyway so yeah I don't have super expensive taste beyond the house but the house is so ridiculous that it feels absurd to say that I don't understand would it have deterred you from buying that shirt if it if it was five times they cost or no no no no because I mean look I have a limit got it just so for instance I almost never fly private and everyone thinks I'm out of my mind but every time I think about flying private like to to go International is like 100 to 150 000 one way so I'm just like that's an employee for a year and a good employee for a year I don't care enough to fly private I'll fly first class so that matters but the gap between first class and private is astronomical so I could afford it but I never do it so there's just I think of everything in terms of what I can do with the money because I'm trying to build a studio I'm trying to build the next Disney so my ambition is still so much bigger than my net worth no matter how big your net worth is Hollywood wipes out like Saudi princes right so as much money as I have I don't have Saudi Prince money so it's like I know better I know what this game is like I know how it's played I know how quick you can lose hundreds of millions of dollars so that's not my game so I'm making sure that we can play the long game here so when you got that nine figures in your account what was going through your mind at the time and how do you divvy that up in terms of what you're going to do with it to make it last I I am not thoughtful like that I have way too high risk tolerance so that would be a great question for my wife so I would legitimately bet everything on building the next Disney and grind myself down to no dollars left in my bank account if that's how it came down and would have no heartburn whatever I wouldn't feel weird about it at all because as I'm trying to get people to understand the once you have the knowledge you can remake the money so there is no point in my life where I will ever struggle to make two three million dollars a year I could go to any Fortune 500 company if I wasn't going to start my own and say look this is what I know this is what I've done I'll work for free for three months by the end of it they will pay and give Equity it just so I have no fear I will forever live a whatever lifestyle I want to live so my thought is just I need to protect my wife who does not share my same like I just want to build this next thing I care deeply about that next thing my wife very much feels she's willing to take risk up to a point but she feels like look we sacrificed for so many years we finally made it and if we're not Reckless we never have to worry about money again even at a very high lifestyle so I'm yeah I think about her far more than I think about myself but I we obviously run things here based on a budget and so I know if everything goes wrong how much would I lose for the year how many years could I afford to do that before because I feel a tremendous responsibility to the team yeah how did you meet your wife right you guys are asking like the greatest hits I love these questions okay so uh my wife and I are a metoo story so get ready for your channel to be canceled uh I was teaching my wife was my student and uh school for adults I want to be very clear about that uh I was teaching filmmaking and she was 21 at the time and she saw me at my best and it was amazing and we hit it off right away and when I met her I had recently learned how to be good with women because I was terrible up until that point and truly how do you learn oh it's really simple you must be willing to walk away and you must be worthy I don't know your audience well enough I'm going to give you the truth you can edit it out if you say the truth here here is the the reality think about just hold it in your mind for a second what sex really is okay the the messy reality of what sex is you have to go from high my name is to that to do that you must be worthy of that now you might be able to trick him into doing it once but I've gotten my wife to do that for 22 years you have to be worthy so one you have to be worthy two you have to have confidence meaning you recognize your worth and because you recognize your worth you're going to act completely as you are who you are because it does not make sense to get somebody into a relationship that's not going to work so broadcast who you are and be willing to walk away so if you are worthy of someone inviting you into their body and that that is an amazing incredible moment that you guys can share and it's your real Partners in that act because I'm very much not a like don't get with somebody that you you can Dominate and push around get with somebody who is your equal we can go into that as much as you want I have very strong feelings but you want to do that and you need to understand that you have that worth that you've done the work that you're good at something that matters and then that you don't need that person and that even if you feel like you need that person and they're the only one for you and all that the second you act like that they will become elusive you'll never get them and you can't tolerate the friend zone or anything like that like I'll give you an example I never had to say this to my wife but if I had thought I was sliding into the friend zone I would just say like hey if I'm not what you're looking for totally respect that you are lovely and I wish you the best in everything I'm not interested in the friend zone all the best to you and you know if I can be a reference or whatever let me know uh but this is where we part ways and at that point and I'm very good at this I would flip a switch in my mind and I would never think about that person again you just you how long did it take to develop that sort of mindset though 23 years really and what was there an event or an inflection point where you're like oh got it if you want to get good at something find somebody who's already good at that go to them and ask them what do you do beg for the absolute truth and then when they tell you believe them I went to George leonardopolis yeah George got laid left right and Center and I said George is he Greek he is great okay is he like a famous guy or something not at all now he's just Greek man and uh they're natural charismatic that is as George was very charismatic and very good looking and did he have an accent though he did not I grew up in America so he didn't have that going for him but very Charming and I said George what's the secret because I am terrible with women and he said oh you just have to be a dick to them and I wanted to bang my head on the table and I was like one I know him and he isn't a dick so he's saying something and it's so cliche so finally I was like I'm not going to reject this because the guy I know that is the way that I want to be with women is telling me that that's a secret he's telling me in sincerity he's wrong but he's telling me sincerely so what does he actually mean and then I realized oh he's always himself and he's willing to walk away and I was like that's so interesting and so he isn't like oh what do you want what do you like which then just puts you in this like you're there to to placate them yeah like it just makes you okay I'm just gonna say the real words you you in my estimation if you want to be good with the typical female you need to be self-assured confident strong um very good at something that they care about and you need to embody all of that and then you need to be wildly interested in who they are make them feel better about themselves when they're around you than when they're not and them feel like whoa this person really lifts me up but they're honest and they tell me the truth and they don't ever pull punches and if they say something that I don't like I'm going to let them know that I don't like that very calmly but just hey I like this I don't like that and I was shocked at how intoxicating the woman who is now my wife and she will be the first to tell you that it didn't work only on her I had had a chance to test this out before meeting her and realized and it was night and day could not get laid flip a switch very successful with women and was I was laughing I was like I can't believe this is true and then flashing back on my life there was this girl that I really liked in high school and she used to always say when we're not dating you're super cool and the second we're dating you're not yourself and I couldn't understand what she meant and so then I played it back and I was like oh my God it's because I had fear of loss and so when we weren't dating it in fear of loss because we weren't together so just who I am that would get her attracted we would date and then because I liked her so much I had fear of loss so I started trying to act the way I thought she wanted me to act then I'm not interesting there's no sort of power in that there's just someone supplicating themselves to you it's just not interesting it's interesting so by flipping that switch everything in my life changed now I've only told one woman that I love her I've been in a committed relationship for 22 years like so if anybody thinks they hear me saying I'm a lothario or a Playboy that's not my life at all but I am telling you that it is a game of psychology and if you don't play it well you will lose and so all the guys out there right now that are losing it is 100 their fault it is not Society it is nothing other than you do not understand the psychology of the person that you're sitting across from that you're trying to effectively sell yourself to and because I took the time to actually figure out what that is the complexities because right now you hear red pill [ __ ] be dominant they're your property the really terrible advice find a partner find somebody who can challenge you but be yourself challenge them be worthy be good push yourself every day be aggressive be um hardcore try to take up as much space as you can try to mansplain anything that you're passionate about like don't be hesitant at all and then shut up and make sure that you're giving them that space and you're drawing that out of them and you show how much you respect them and how interested you are in them and find somebody you actually care about so that this isn't a game and then then just be open and honest and it's incredible my wife is my equal in every conceivable way on balance but there are things that I am way better than her at and in those moments I lead and there are things that she's way better than me at and in those moments I follow and because I can do both of those but I am not at all afraid to take the lead then you get an interesting Dynamic how has your Dynamic changed over 20 years oh brother so when she became an entrepreneur that was the rockiest period in our life because she had been a stay-at-home wife for eight years so I had somebody that cooked for me clean for me took care of our puppies laid my clothes out literally my clothes would be laying at the end of the bed so my gym clothes will be set out my work clothes will be set out I did not have to think of anything she sorted it all all of our personal things flights trips family my mom was going to get a birthday gift all it's just all sorted out I have to think about anything and then she started thinking hey maybe I actually like this entrepreneur thing and then it was like you know she was stepping into a far more aggressive personality type like really starting to feel her own and getting involved in areas of business that had been sort of my domain and the space that made me feel cool and that was a hard thing to navigate and so what I told her was you have to give me the opportunity to mourn and so because the relationship I thought we were going to have where you were going to be my wife we're gonna have kids you were going to stay at home take care of the kids that's gone I don't get that anymore and that was the the thing that we got married based around so let me mourn that but I want you to be whoever you want to be and it would violate my value system if I respond to in any way other than I want to help you become the best version of yourself the way that you define it and so we've got all kinds of standard operating procedures Rules of Engagement that it would take me a long time but I'm happy to answer anything on that about how we ended up making that work how we did a transition period where she slowly over like a week or two weeks weaned me off of okay I'm setting out some of your clothes not all of them I'm making some of your meals but not all of them down to okay now you're self-sufficient we divide you know the different work that has to be done all that stuff um and it's absolutely incredible but you then if you're doing things that are overlapping you have to be very thoughtful about who has more expertise in one area over the other should always listen to each other you should want disconfirming evidence but if you can't agree on something you have to have a rule of Engagement around what are you going to do when you can't agree so for instance I am the right person between the two of us to be the CEO she will be the first to admit it so when we founded the company I and my Act of making sure that she feels what she needs to feel which is that I believe she is my equal and she is my partner and she is my priority the lawyer said look you need to split the company 51 49 we don't care who has 50 51 percent who has 49 but to avoid illegal nightmare you must do that and Lisa was like Tom will take 51 and I was like Over My Dead Body we are 50 50 equal Partners make the ultimate divorce nightmare I have failed if I don't have enough influence over her that I can navigate this process and I'm so confident that I want what's good for her and will sacrifice half of my [ __ ] to make sure that her life is good why would I ever do that I also know who she is barring head trauma she's never going to ask for more than half of the business I'm just utterly convinced of that and so make that the nightmare but wife of mine let's be very clear if we ever Collide on an idea and you can't convince me and I can't convince you which we will both try very very hard and we will respect each other and really listen and really talk but if after all of that we can't agree we will go with my idea every single time are you okay with that yes cool then we can March forward now if in that moment I had been like oh well I think how do you feel like that's never gonna work because the reality is I'm not willing to do this if that isn't true because I am the right person to make those decisions so you have to have the clarity of knowing when you're the right person you have to have the historical track record of oh I follow you whenever you're the right person I back off you know that in your bones you know that I listen you know that I'm not saying this from ego I'm saying this from we recognize what each other's skill sets are and that happens to be mine so anyway getting to that high level communication that's what people have to be able to do and every day pushing yourself to be a better version of yourself like that [ __ ] is hard but if you do that for 30 40 years you can be in real beast mode but growing together is the hard part because things are going to change and if you can't navigate those moments well you're in trouble and you didn't ask this but I have one more this is on my mind no I'm so into this all right so there's one more thing that people really have to be thoughtful about there is a reason that so many marriages break up around the 25-year Mark I always thought it was because they had kids and that's when kids leave the house now I'm sure that can be a big thing that breaks up marriages for sure but my wife and I don't have kids and we have found our marriage isn't in danger but we found this new thing that we're colliding over that I'm like oh my God I see how this plays out in a couple that doesn't have the tools that we have what ends up happening is over time so you should marry somebody that has a different world views than you you don't want somebody that thinks the same as you you want someone with the same values you do not want somebody that thinks the same so my wife and I come at things very differently I see how things could work she sees how things will break that has made us an incredible pair so we each have these World Views and over time life kicks you in the face you learn a lesson and your world view refines and it gets more robust and more robust but remember you each have different World Views but they're becoming more solidified over time so now 25 years into your relationship you've got dramatically Different World Views and you know that your worldview is right and so now you've got these two World Views that start clashing all the time and you can't break them out of it I just tweeted out about this today you have to be very careful you can't want people to think the way you think because otherwise your world view will solidify and it will become a prison and so what happens is life teaches you the way you approach the world is right the way you invest is right the way you run your YouTube channel is right look at all your success now imagine that going for 25 years now you're just like I'm right like I don't know what do you want me to say like this works man all My Success everything that we've done it's right it's right it's right but you have different World Views and you both believe they're right so unless you are hungry to find that area where oh okay I can't argue from the place of I'm right and you're wrong but we both have to argue from the fact that I believe I'm right I feel right and getting my solution my way will yield what I want and the same is true for you so now we're colliding over something where it's not that you're wrong it gets very complicated you can't even see what I'm thinking and feeling you hear all the words but you don't see the world through my distorted mirror you see the world do your distorted mirror so I can't see what you're saying because I don't see the world through your distorted mirror so now you you have to go okay we're both smart people who love each other we're colliding we each think the other person is crazy which is why you're getting upset because you think how can you live life like that it's so ridiculous so you're like okay at this moment I have to say even though I really really believe that you would be better off doing things my way like I can steal man your argument I can tell you what your argument is this is not confusion even though I can do that I think you're crazy and I don't want to do it that way you have to have a rule of Engagement for how do we approach this problem and this is where most people break because in that moment you're going to have to do something sub-optimally and your marriage has to be the thing you want to protect the most because oftentimes my wife and I will collide or something around the business so now she could be [ __ ] with millions of dollars and I have to be willing to lose that money to protect my marriage because I'm gonna have to compromise to some point on certain things it gets complicated because I know that first thing I said if we disagree it's always going to be my idea but hey you've got to contextualize if you're beating someone to death all the time all the time all the time like you're just gonna demotivate them so even though by agreement I could it's not wise and I want this to get too complicated so you have to be willing to compromise there may be real consequences to that compromise and you have to want that marriage their ability to have high self-esteem and to feel loved and appreciated and to feel like you're equal you've got to want that for them so badly that you will compromise on some of the things you want and they have to be willing to do the same if you can do all of that it's everything man because there are going to be moments where I would just tell you a person loving you and going to bat for you and being there for you in the ups and the downs and helping you think through the hardest problems and not judging you when they see you at your worst that is so much better than money there's nothing nothing I've tried it all there's nothing better than that at least if you're hardwired like I am so my understanding is that for conflict resolution between a married couple that's been going on for a while the best thing is to acknowledge and to be mindful that there is a distorted window for yourself there is no objective right and wrong which we can get into I'm going to give you a quick hypothesis I'm not sure I'm right about the reason yet I know I'm right about the the symptom I don't know if I'm right about the cause there's a guy named Donald Hoffman yeah who believes that all of the world is basically a computer interface and if you think about reality as being the electrical switches that are either on or off that's the reality of a computer that's the reality of sending an email that's the reality of playing Grand Theft Auto but you don't interface with it like that you send an email by click clacking on a keyboard to make little words appear on the screen but what's really happening is electrical circuits going on and off really fast to process zeros and ones okay that's too complicated so his belief is that we evolve to have this user interface and now we're just dealing with the world through the user interface if he's right and it feels like even though it may not be literally true the outcome makes that feel like it's true then you know my distorted mirror is really just my version of that interface it's not it doesn't represent what is real objectively we're not at the laws of physics level so since I know that I'm not dealing with the the on and off I'm just dealing with an interpretation of it it becomes much easier to have this conversation of I just recognize that my worldview is an abstraction so everything I believe is not it's not literal truth I'm just dealing in the the realm of psychology what we call symptoms of whatever the underlying thing is that has helped me a lot to get out of my own way to not be like well I know I'm right that this really is a black coffee mug where my wife's like it's gray what are you talking about it's blue it's like you start to realize yeah that might actually be how it's represented for you with your computer interface or your distorted mirror to stick with one metaphor and so that becomes easier to to stop thinking I'm right and therefore we need to do what I say when did you start thinking that way this is going to surprise you in terms of the answer when I was 14 15 I really wanted to be good with girls and I wasn't and so that began a very long journey of what is it that I have to learn to get good that led me to reading Cosmo magazine which led me to thinking about women through a psychological lens and then my mother gave me the best piece of advice your audience is going to be very surprised by the term this interview is taken my mom gave me the best piece of advice around women that I've ever gone to this day and she said women need to trust you in order to have an orgasm and I was like what I'm sorry like how old are you uh probably 15 16 and so I was just like ah trust doesn't even enter into the equation for me I don't even need another name so that was so strange and it just made me go whoa I'm I'm having one Experience One frame of reference over here but for somebody else it it is such foreign territory that I have to begin to understand what is true and so that put me on this Quest that led me to neuroplasticity the human ability to improve all of this stuff ends up paying dividends because for a long time I didn't think I'd ever be successful I didn't think I was smart enough I didn't realize that you could get better I had a fixed mindset all this stuff but so all these little pieces start coming together with the Dao de Jing long story uh so I start cobbling this idea together that you can step outside of your frame of reference which I wouldn't have known to call it that then and more thought of it as different brains see the world in different ways and if you can understand how they see it then you can find a way to translate well this is how I feel but I need to translate it into your language to make you feel what I want you to feel so something my wife and I talk a lot about it doesn't matter what you say matters what the other person understands so to get to that then you have to go oh well the female brain is very different from the male brain I understand it's highly controversial but I'll just tell you real life's gonna slap you in the mouth if you want to argue that point and so by embracing that and so how do you define truth it'll be an easy way truth is if I believe it and act as if it were true does my prediction engine work or break when I look at the world with the assumption that the female brain is different and very specific and predictable ways I can predict the outcome of my actions bouncing off my wife just as an example better than if I assume she views the world in the same way that I do if I group women into a rough group and I make predictions about my behaviors and the response I will get from them based on putting them in a group and of course huge distribution we have way more in common than we have separate where compared to other things we're basically the same but if you have if you operate with that you'll find that your prediction engine is way better at predicting outcomes and so the more you get into steering your life by I believe they're saying to be true any it's a hypothesis scientific method tells me any hypothesis makes a prediction if that prediction holds true then the hypothesis becomes a thesis so I'm just constantly trying to get my best guess which is my hypothesis tested to see if the predictions it makes actually are true and when they are then I upgrade that thing to a thesis I never say it's fact or it's true largely because of the Donald Hoffman problem so I'm constantly looking for that disconfirming evidence that will give me a better way to perceive what's happening so my prediction engine will be even better and so you refine refine refine let's say you're in a relationship with the girl for a couple of years how do you know that this is the one that you should spend the rest of your life with like what are the pillars to a successful marriage I asked Alex and Layla hormozy this question they gave me a very similar answer to what I thought the answer was and I want to know your opinion yeah so what you're looking for is shared values but complementary World Views so again to give the example between Lisa and I I'm uh move towards something Lisa's largely move away I look and see opportunity no matter what I'm very um I don't mind risk at all and Lisa is more risk-averse she sees how things could break she's about systems and process and so when you put us together once we realized that we needed to Value the tension between the two of us and that it's what makes a kite work you need a kite and a string if you have just the kite the wind will blow it into nothingness it will crash land in a tree end up on the ground whatever if you have just a string that lays on the ground but you have a kite and a string the dynamic tension between the two if they both respect each other now it can keep that kite Aloft so she's a string I'm the kite neither of us are useful without the other but we have core values that are the same so for both of us our marriage is our number one priority we have certain views around family communication uh what to pursue not pursue so just a lot a lot of shared values so look for that and then because I am such a huge love junkie I think you want to look for somebody that makes you feel like there's no way that two people have ever felt like this before at the beginning you have to understand that the neurochemistry that's going to change over time but that moment of like yo I'm so into this person because if you're not into that person because it will get hard and when you ask yourself why am I with this person if you don't know you're in trouble and then the last thing I will say is I highly recommend especially the men to do some sort of ritualistic scarification so it could be as simple as a tattoo that's what I did but you wanna it only worked for me because I it's the only tattoo I have I'm not like a tattoo guy if you're a tattoo guy it's not going to work but you want to do something permanent that will remind you you are a different person before you get married than after so immediately after getting married I took a tattoo that I designed and give to my wife as a wedding present and got it tattooed and the whole time I did it I wanted to focus on the pain wanted to focus on the permanence and that I was doing this specifically to be a different person at the end of this came from a book called The Power of myth where he talks about one of the reasons he thought that so many marriages fell apart is there's no meaningful ritual that demarcates single life from married life and so then I did a lot of things around really thinking about my willingness to die for my wife and all of that and so just spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about that my wife and I never even joke about divorce we don't even say that word in our house we call it the d word so there is no exit it's there look there are things neither of us would stay in an abusive or Loveless marriage um but it's our job to make sure that it never gets there and may have a lot of tools and tactics to make sure that we don't get there but it should be the most amazing thing in your life Barnum oh I would love to continue talking about that but I definitely think we should probably get back to the the sale of quest because that's also I mean that's why we're here to talk about your fantastic Journey as an entrepreneur I do want to say this I am a huge fan of quest I got put on shout out to Eric from try carrots do we have uh chips here there are chips over there I noticed I didn't want to open them because you were shooting with him before and I was like this is gonna be the loudest thing if I open up this bag of chips yeah I know but I gotta say right now I'm on I'm on two packs a day nice yeah I'm on two packs of quest chips a day you know I can stop whatever I want I swear I can but I love them they taste so good they're really healthy I put my housemates onto them and uh lovely so let's let's talk about after the sale so I'm just so curious It's kind of it's kind of like winning the lottery then again with a ton of effort what did you do the day after the sale were you just completely absolved of all of your work that you had been doing for Quest and you were just like free to do whatever you'd like with your time so we took money in two stages so the first day age was we took a small investment but at the price it was absolutely massive so that was the like clicking Refresh on my banking app button like oh my God and now you know we're worth so much money that was that moment I ended up making even more money the second time but by then it was like I was already very wealthy and so it didn't have the same I possessed but the first time it was really important to me that I was at work on time went in did my thing no one at Quest knew when the money hit because it was like I'm here to build something I'm on a mission I'm not worried about that then the second time I had already been out of the company for two years I think before like the final sale sale sale finished and then the second tranche of money hit um so yeah by then I had I literally we uh wrapped Quest on a Monday and started impact theory on Tuesday so I didn't take time off didn't take a vacation like for me it it I stopped chasing money eight and a half years into my Journey so it was not about the money work ethic means a lot I think that people should steer in life by how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself and so when I was going to be alone I knew I'd want to say the day the money hit my account I worked just like any other day and so yeah that you didn't buy anything lavish so I did end up buying something for my wife but I didn't buy anything for myself what'd you get her uh we got a cool piece of jewelry which now I don't remember if it was a bracelet or a necklace whatever that wasn't super meaningful to me um but and because she had worked so hard it wasn't even like I was buying her something it was like she had earned that money too so like there was no sort of cool romantic moment in that for me um I think there was for her because that was like her like I'm a bad [ __ ] moment like I did this I can buy this myself like I earned this and so that was really cool for her and really meant something for her um but for me it was about I show up to work in this same way despite having the money and why do you do this podcast I'm just curious because you I mean you have a ton of money you made a ton of money you don't necessarily need to be making more money from this podcast I'm assuming right I'm sure it's expensive to keep this house going on and everything but what is the purpose behind this okay so that is a very detailed answer so I'll give it to you in a nutshell if you want to push in on anything we can so first and foremost you need to make a self-sustaining economic engine so I'm trying to build the next Disney I'm never just going to be able to fund that forever right so Disney's a behemoth billions of dollars so I need to build a company that makes money and the great news is I can sell fund it for years and get it going and getting off the ground to huge risk all that because of the very fortunate position that I'm in but ultimately impact theory has to make money the second reason was even before I left Quest I knew that I have a magic trick and that magic trick is I can explain very complicated ideas and make them accessible to people and I was like I'm gonna go from being the protein bar guy to to building a Hollywood studio no one's going to take me seriously no one even knows who I am so I'm just going to be another Rich muck trying to make movies I'm like that's not going to work so my thesis was if you put me in front of the camera I can go impact millions of people's lives and so when I want to sell something to Netflix I can say to my community hey I'm going to be at Netflix pitching this idea and 5 000 people show up in the parking lot and be like yo I'll watch anything that impact Theory makes and that would be huge and then my second thing was some of the people in that Community are also going to be Executives at these Studios and they'll let me come in and Pitch just because my contact my content has impacted their lives which has already happened and we've had some really amazing opportunities come from that and then the third thing is that what we really need is to find all the talented writers directors and things that I just need to broadcast be able to tell people what we're up to so that they'll see that they'll understand what we're all about and they'll want to come be a part of this and so getting eyeballs and what you're doing is really really really important the only part of this that didn't work out was I also thought that people would go oh uh tell them I watch all your videos are amazing the comic books you're doing those are about empowerment too yeah I'm gonna read Comics it doesn't work like that you're either a comic reader or you're not and you need to approach people with Comics or TV shows whatever in a totally separate way so we're actually now bifurcating the company so it'll be impact Theory and impact Theory Studios they will have their own identities they'll be philosophically aligned but if you go to impact Theory Studios it'd be like landing on Disney you'd see characters animation cartoons video games that stuff and you wouldn't see the shows the university all of that and then also the only reason that I'm doing all of this everybody needs meaning and purpose that's critically important and I knew that going and retiring and being a rich guy on a beach somewhere was never going to make me happy so I wanted to make sure that I could show up and fight for something every day and so what was going to be that thing that I could fight for and the app answer for me was I took myself from scrounging my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car it's a real story to selling a company for a billion dollars and I was like I'm not smarter than the next person but I have built a frame of reference that's more useful and so I was like yo I can teach these ideas so it actually started as Quest University where I was just telling the employees like hey I want you here because you know that I believe more about your future than your own mother and so I'm going to teach you how to do whatever you want teach you everything I know about being an entrepreneur all that so you can control your life they're just ideas and you can adopt them as readily as I did and so started there and then we started this I was like okay our meaning and purpose is to make sure that nobody gets to the age of 15 without at least encountering a growth mindset at scale through story now that we're bifurcating the two companies it'll basically be ideas what people think of impact Theory now and entertainment which is the comics and video games and web3 nft stuff do you think in order to build a 10-figure company you have to be some sort of way such as obsessive high IQ or as Jordan Peterson would say not agreeable is there some sort of like stereotype that fits the type that can build a 10-figure company yeah so I think you're going to have to be all of those and get the timing right so there is a level of intellect that is going to be absolutely critical to build a company of that scale I think you can build a nice life with a solid IQ so I don't want people to overly focus on intelligence it's far more about skills but I used to teach a business class called business decision making it's the only thing that matters if somebody's teaching you copywriting you're going to be made it best like it's just what's it'll build you a decent business and if you're okay with a 10 million dollar business which I would not be it's perfectly fine but if you really want to build something you have to find a problem that people have you have to solve it with an incredible product you have to be amazing at managing people you have to be able to paint a vision you have to be able to make a product that's better than the next you have to understand marketing and storytelling psychology Finance like it's it's really unbelievable and on top of that you have to be so driven that you can run what I call the physics of progress so every business I don't care what it is is just a string of trial and error so physics of progress is just a scientific method recontextualized for business so you're going to come up with a hypothesis that's you and that's just your best guess of all right I'm here I want to get here and there's an obstacle between me and my goal my hypothesis is my best guess about what I would need to do to overcome that obstacle then you turn that into a thing that you can do you do that thing it will fail to some degree you have to stare nakedly at your own inadequacies figure out why it didn't work be very honest about that which will then re-inform your new hypothesis which is better educated now you will come up with a better thing to do you will try that hopefully it will be more successful but it'll still fail a bit you will have to stare nakedly at your own inadequacies figure out why it went wrong and just keep doing that over and over and over and I know that we're out of time there are a million different places that it breaks down but mostly it's ego and skill set quick answer can we get does being rich make you happy uh being rich doesn't make you happy but it is a profound facilitator I would rather be um happy and Rich than happy and not rich right it probably gives you the freedom that you know you a lot and if you're like me and you're a builder it really allows you to Short Circuit a lot of the early pain and suffering and just a random question because I always get curious when I see places like this how much does it cost to have this house just like like exist property taxes the Landscaping I mean you have a a literal wall on the outside of this house that is just like covered with a bunch of plants and everything I'm sure all that can be the water bill including tax and all that stuff it's high six figures High six figures just to have have this house exist yeah can I take a guess at it 600 can I take a guess yeah I was about to say 650. right you're almost bang on yeah daddy's crazy property tax alone is about 475 000 a year maybe 500 Grand depending on the assessment but it is the city of Los Angeles and well it becomes difficult now to deduct that because of the uh the salt cap 10 grand oh wow yeah how's the Uber looking uh three minutes oh yeah you're right you're just right on Sunset random questions Graham um anything you want to pitch or anything you want to go for where could we I do want to say we would love to have you back on the bus oh my God at some point because I feel like we just scratched the service we're at an hour 20 we have to go shoot something else we're literally ubering right to the next shoot I'd say if you guys want to see a longer episode I could do this easily for like yes three hours yeah same same me on yours yeah yeah man I'm all for it you should just make it a whole day yeah anything we could ever do for you less serious has been incredible very kind guys thank you it was a lot of fun thanks I love this thank you so much my pleasure anything you want to pitch or anything you want to at tomb bill you come and find me there we go nice and simple cool thank you so much thank you guys for watching really appreciate it until next time cool thank you man I really want to go longer on this