The WILD Story of How Tom Bilyeu & Partners Built Quest Nutrition Will Leave You INSPIRED

So, this next individual How How many of you here have watched Impact Theory? Yeah. [ __ ] awesome. This is the Napoleon Hill of our generation. I'm telling you, even better, okay? He was the founder of a company years and years ago. He wanted to make nutrition bars that were healthy, sugar-free, alcohol-free, and it was one of the fastest accelerated startups. 57,000 I don't know. It's like It was the second fastest growing startup in in in the history of startup worlds. A huge huge thing. He's helping to make an impact out there. Like he's the host of Impact Theory, founder of Quest Nutrition. I want to get Get up on your feet. All right. Thank you guys. Thank you. Okay, we're we're super limited on time, so I want to dive into this. We have 60 minutes to change your industry and hopefully change your guys' life. I have no financial incentive. I don't have anything to pitch. So, literally, I'm going to be ruthlessly cold about the state of your industry and what I think you need to do if you want to make change. So, I've been invited because I'm being called, by Tristan anyway, I'm being called a disruptor. And the way that we built Quest Nutrition, the way that we turned it into the second fastest growing company in America, we grew by 57,000% in 3 years alone in manufacturing, so hundreds of thousands of square feet, millions of dollars of equipment, all starting from a capital start of $10,000. So, we ended up turning it into a billion-dollar company, and the way that we did it as three guys with no outside funding was by looking at the problem in a completely different way. Humans lead with belief. That may be the single most important thing to understand. Humans lead with belief, meaning you don't do something and then believe you can do it. You won't even take the first step if you don't believe that your actions will be rewarded with results. That's why so many people are paralyzed because they think that they're not worthy, they think they're or they know they're uneducated. They know that they're not the person that they need to be in order to accomplish. And the reality is you're probably not. The fact is your skill set has already taken you as far as it's going to take you. So, if you are unsatisfied with where you are today, I have some horrifying news for you. I'll chase it with some good news, but first let's start with the bad. The bad news is your life is an exact reflection of the choices you've made. That's it. It's not circumstance. It comes down to skill set and choices. You've chosen to build a certain skill set. You've chosen to do certain things, take certain risks, play certain things safely. Whatever the case may be, those were all choices. Now your life is a reflection of that. What I want you to understand though, the belief, the only belief that you need to have that thing that is going to allow you to take that first step is not to believe that you're capable of what you're trying to build because we all know you're not. I knew that I wasn't when we started Quest. I knew I wasn't the person that I needed to be. I understood that. It just didn't paralyze me because I believed one thing. And if you take nothing else from what I say today, burn the following statement into your soul. Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. That's it. Charles Darwin is often misquoted as saying that it's the strongest of species that survive. He never said that. What he actually said was it's not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptive to change. We're the apex predator for a reason because unlike any other animal, we have the ability to go in any direction, any direction we want. We're the only species that you can find anywhere. At one point, James Cameron was actually at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We can thrive anywhere. From Inuits living in the tundra to peoples that have survived in the desert. Because humans adapt. That is the fundamental nature of what we are. When they first decoded the human genome, what they thought they were going to find was all this complexity, all these genes. They decoded the onion. They saw that it had 40,000 genes. And then they decoded the human genome, and they found that we had 20,000 genes. And they said, "How's that possible? How is it possible that an onion is more genetically complicated than a human?" But what they didn't realize was all that stuff that they were discarding as junk DNA is epigenetic signaling. We have this massive amount of code that all it does is it tells those 20,000 genes how much and when to turn on or off. We are designed to adapt. So wherever your business is now, whatever your skill set is now, whatever your vision of yourself is now, you can change it. You can become anything you want to be. But life is going to ask you one simple question. What price are you willing to pay to get there? And that's it. That's the hard truth. If you're willing to pay the price and you can become whatever you want. You can become truly capable of the extraordinary. But you've got to go through the process of building that skill set. You've got to be willing to stare nakedly at your inadequacies to understand that you aren't yet the person that you want to be or need to be to execute against your goals, but that you can become that person and then start walking down that path and day by day, brick by brick, build the skill set that you want. Now, I'm going to be talking for 20 minutes and then I'm going to take Q&A. And what I want to do in that time, remember, I'm not in your industry and yet each and every one of you, there are no restrictions. You can ask me anything you want about how to grow your industry. And at the end of that, if I've done my job, you guys will have a vision for your industry that is radically different. And as foundation for our conversation, I want to tell you my journey. I started out as a filmmaker. I went to USC film school. I was one of four people. Only four people get chosen to do a senior thesis film at USC. USC film school is statistically harder to get into than Harvard Law. I was one of only four chosen for a senior thesis film. I thought my life was set. I thought I had natural talent. I could just roll up and do whatever I wanted and it would be golden. And up until that final film in my senior year, I was proven right. I just kept getting selected, selected, selected. Everything I was doing was working. And then my final film was so bad and I fell on my face so embarrassingly that people were actually cutting my film into small reels to make fun of it. And it was so embarrassing to me that I stole the master so that no one could ever see it again. And I went into crisis. And I graduated film school. I didn't have any money. No more support from my parents. And the three picture deal that I thought I would walk away from film school with evaporated when I ruined my final film. And I realized in that moment a very hard truth. I wasn't a talented filmmaker. That was just a truth. The world wasn't conspiring against me. I wasn't good. And because I wouldn't wasn't good, I didn't make a good film. Because I didn't make a good film, I couldn't advance my career the way that I wanted to. And because of that and having a fixed mindset, meaning I believed that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits. They were given to me at birth. I didn't understand that I was the ultimate adaptation machine. I could become anything. I didn't know that. So, I laid on the floor of my unfurnished apartment. Not knowing what the hell I was going to do with my life. I felt so lost and hopeless and terrified. I wasn't able to pay all my bills. I didn't know how I was going to survive. Ultimately, I meet these two guys. Very successful entrepreneurs. And as a kid growing up in a morbidly obese family, that was a little chubby myself, I had promised myself two things. My family also bordered between blue collar and white collar. Two things. One, one day I would be rich. And one day I would have six-pack abs. I had no idea how I was going to get there. But I was committed to those two things. So, when these two guys came into my life, they were very successful entrepreneurs. And they were bodybuilders. I literally couldn't believe it. I was like, this is crazy. This is the two things I told myself I would figure out. And they said, "Look, Tom, you're coming to the world with your hand out. You want to make art, you have to control the resources. So, come with us. We're about to start this technology company. Get rich, and then you can go back and build a studio. And I thought, that's brilliant. It's exactly what I'm going to do. I thought it would take about 18 months. So I joined them and they said, look, you're starting as a copywriter because that's the only thing that we can justify paying you for. But don't think of yourself as a copywriter. Understand, you can become any role in this company that you want. You just have to get the right skill set. You've got to become the right person for that job. And so I took them seriously and I busted my ass and I got better. And over a period of about six and a half years, I became the chief marketing officer in the company and they gave me 10% ownership in the company because I was working that hard. So at that point, six and a half years in, I'm worth I'm a multi-millionaire on paper and I'm completely miserable. And I realize, I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness. This can't be real. Like all the things that people warn you against, I'm actually living them. Like this is it's such a joke. I could not believe it. And so I went to my wife who by the way, her father did not want me to marry his daughter and he said that very plainly. And I remember telling him, sir, I know what you see right now is a broke kid, but I'm the most ambitious person you've ever met and one day I will make your wife rich. Now imagine those words hanging in the air. And I'm a multi-millionaire on paper, but in real life, not so much. And I walk into my partners and I tell my wife, I say, look, I want to be happy again. This is so miserable. Marketing a product that I don't believe in, pushing something that I don't think is adding value to people's lives. I can't do this anymore. And she said, I totally get it. I bet on you. So I go into my partners and I say, here's the equity back. I literally handed back $2 million. I said, "I need to go do something that gives me more energy than it takes. I need to be passionate about what I'm doing." And they were completely caught off guard. And I left. I'm driving home. I'm on the phone with my wife. I did it. I quit. That's the hard part. These guys are like my brothers. I've been working side by side in the trenches with them for 6 and 1/2 years. And as I'm telling her that, my phone rings. And it's them. They said, "Come out to dinner with us." And for love of the brotherhood, for the connection that we had, for them helping to transform my life, for showing me how to control my destiny, for showing me that I could adapt, for showing me that I could add any skill to my life that I wanted, that I could completely change my body, my mindset, everything. I went out to dinner. And they said the words that ended up changing my life. They said, "We could do this without you, but we don't want to." And all of the sudden that let me connect to something other than the money. Wasn't about getting rich anymore. It was about a brotherhood. It was about camaraderie. It was about building something. But I'd already done the hard part. I'd quit. So I said, "I'm never coming back to that environment. So if we're going to keep working together, here's what it would have to look like. It would have to be a company based on value creation. It would have to be something where I'm passionate about it. Because let me tell you something that is true beyond measure. The struggle is guaranteed. The success is not. The struggle is a guarantee. So you better love what you do on a day-to-day basis. Read Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. The only moment that's real is right now. Now follows you. So, every time you're doing something, if you're standing and staring and waiting for someone to finish going to the restroom or whatever, you're standing in line at Disneyland, that is your life. That is the sum total of what you are about in that moment. And life is simply a string of those moments. And so, you've got to start asking yourself, am I using those moments wisely? And I knew I was never going to go back and chase money. I needed to in the moment feel good about what I was building, feel good about how I was contributing, be lit up with passion. And let me tell you, passion is not something you were born with. It drives me nuts. Everybody thinks they're going to turn inside like an archaeologist and find that thing, their deepest passion, the thing they always loved, hiding inside. As As soon as you say it, I hope it sounds ridiculous. That you would love something that much and yet somehow be blind to it. It doesn't work like that. It's like real love. You've got to go on a date first. You see somebody you're interested in. You talk to them. It sparks something. You spend time. You engage. And through that process of engaging with it, maybe, if you're lucky, it turns into a fascination. But if you really want a passion, you've got to go through the process of gaining mastery. And mastery is the part of the relationship and business or in romance where everybody falls apart. Cuz it's where the work starts. It's where you have to do things long after it stopped being fun. Like let me tell you, my wife had, still has quite frankly, dysbiosis. You guys know what dysbiosis is? For those that don't, it's when your microbiome in your intestinal tract gets messed up. So, you have a hard time keeping food down. It is miserable. It is pain and cramping and being doubled over and having to go to the emergency room, getting emaciated, losing your hair, your fingernails breaking. But I'm more proud of those moments of being there for her and helping her through that than the times of fiery romance. Fiery romance is easy. But the love, that connection, that I would die for this woman, that comes in those moments. And the same is true in your business. The process of becoming extraordinary. Which by the way is what you're going to have to do. If you want to change this industry, don't worry about other people. Don't even worry about the industry. Worry about yourself. Paint a vision of yourself as somebody who is capable of the extraordinary, who is capable of more than the next person, who is willing to push harder and go farther than the next person. Do that and everything in your life will change. So I lay all of that out for my partners. It's got to be that. It's got to be something that I can fight for like that. I've got to be able to be myself. I'm tired of hiding as a marketer. I want this to be about community and connection. And this was in about 2009. Social media didn't have a name. Everybody thought it was just a distraction. And I said, "I actually think that this is an opportunity to build a community. That social media is really just a megaphone. And you can give people a reason to build you up or tear you down, but the choice is yours. If you're adding value, if that's what this is all about, if you're demonstrating passion, if you're showing people how hard you will go just to help, then you can build a group of people around you that want you to win. And when people want you to win, you've got something. And that's the thing about your industry. I have gone to a chiropractor regularly for 15 years. Because when you lift weights, you get knocked out of place all the time. Now the first time I went, it sounded like voodoo. I didn't understand it. And by the way, that's one of the biggest problems in this industry. You are fighting a world at large that equates you to voodoo. And when I started researching cuz I wanted to be able to come here armed, when you look on the first page of YouTube for results, at least half of them are news programs asking whether or not this is real medicine or witchcraft voodoo, a scam, whatever. So, that's what you're up against. But what we realized at Quest was only results matter. People could say whatever they wanted about us. They could say whatever they wanted about the company. Our product was metabolically real. And that was our stance. We're either going to do this right or we're not going to do it all. We used to repeat that over and over and over. We're either going to do this right or we're not going to do it all. And when we first tried to launch the company, we had this formula. We thought this formula is amazing. It doesn't use sugar but it tastes like it has sugar. This is incredible. We're going to crush. So, we went to the contract manufacturers. By the way, every protein bar you've ever eaten, with the exception of Quest, is basically made by four or five different companies. And they make the bars for everybody. They just switch out the labels and boom boom boom, they pump it out. We went to those same guys cuz we just thought of ourselves as marketers. We went to them and said, "Hey, here's our formulation." They said, "This is great but it can't be made." And what we realized was the equipment that was commercially available had grown in lockstep with the use of high fructose corn syrup. So, once you remove high fructose corn syrup, suddenly it doesn't run through the machines. So, we had to become our own equipment manufacturer. So, we were designing equipment so that we could manufacture the bar that we wanted because we knew the only thing we cared about was adding value, and value is measurable. You're either helping people or you're not. And that became our gold standard. And that was how we grew. Our marketing wasn't about saying how cool we were. It was all about building a community, celebrating people, encouraging them, doing what we called mirror marketing. We wanted to show them. We didn't want to show us. We didn't even want to talk about us. We didn't start talking about us until they started posting photos of them making recipes with our bars and stuff like that. And we realized, "Whoa, that's actually what they really enjoy is showing all the different ways that they can interact with our bars." We had people at the Eiffel Tower like holding up our bars. We had people making recipes. It was crazy. Our job was to create the space for that. Our job was to bring so much value that somebody felt connected to the brand. And our job was to be real people. I used to tell the staff all the time, "We are not a nameless, faceless organization. It's us. We're the people behind the company. We need to be willing to stand up and be counted. Know what we stand for. Know what we want this company to mean to people. And that was going to be the way forward. At the end of the day, if you guys are really going to revolutionize this industry, that's the standard you're going to have to hold yourself to. Because you've been trying for decades to play the PR game, and you're losing. So, I think you have to take a fundamentally different approach to your industry. About how you reach people, about what you offer people. Because chiropractics has been around for a very long time. And we haven't solved the problems. I see you guys as being in the wellness industry. I don't see it as just being about the spine. That happens to be one area of expertise. But at the end of the day, sometimes my problems weren't solved by the chiropractor. So having somebody that I could go to that actually understood things from a holistic standpoint, like my chiropractor was a former bodybuilder. If any of you know bodybuilding, he won the Mr. Olympia competition. Guy named Franco Columbu. Wow. We know Franco. Franco's incredible. But his message to me every time I came in was, "You don't need multiple sessions. I'm going to put you back in place. Your problem is the way you lift, you lift like an idiot. Let me show you how to lift so you don't need to see me anymore." And he would spend the time trying to show me how to lift properly because he knew if I add enough value, maybe I'd lose this guy as a client, but for sure he's going to tell the next person that needs my services. And so we had half of our company going to Franco because we believed in it so much because it added value, because it worked. So I can go on national television and say, "Yes, chiropractics works for some stuff." And it's worked incredibly well. But having that testimonial where somebody's not incentivized to say something nice and they say it anyway, that's how you get big in the age of social media. All right, with that, I want to open it up for questions. Hit me up. As far as um having a new idea that people within the profession, within your own field that should be on your team, um may not like. There's a conversation in chiropractic going on right now. We have negative brand equity. It's no secret. Most people that don't know what we do think that it's not good. Um there's a conversation going around of should chiropractic shift to calling ourselves doctors of vitalism? Should we identify with a different name first so that you don't instantly say, "Oh, I'm a chiropractor." and they just automatically go towards, "Oh, so you crack backs." or "I heard so-and-so got a stroke." or whatever. Um From the outside looking in and from someone that's super successful and speaks to so many successful people, what do you think about that idea? And when would be the time to make a shift like that? If that time were to come, what are some of the signs? Is that even a an idea of a good strategy? Should we rebuild the ship of chiropractic or or should we continue to do what we're doing, but throw a different label on it so that we're not starting already in the loser's bracket? So, I personally wouldn't worry about doing a rebrand because you have fundamental problems that you're not addressing. And if you rebrand and don't address those problems, you'll just taint the new name. So, here's here's the truth. You guys offer a service. The service is awesome. Some problems are solved by it. And if you stay in that lane of we only address problems with this that it actually fixes and we don't start veering into other stuff that maybe it fixes or maybe it helps with. Like if I were an outside consultant, man, I would just get real raw and be like, "Drop that woo-woo shit." Like get stick to alignment, right? Like stick to the things where it's really easy to show people this is what happens. You get like this is how Franco explained it to me. Dude, your body is like it's so [ __ ] connected and the second you lift funny or one side of you gets stronger than the other and it pulls like a vertebrae a little bit out, then it's like the other side's trying to compensate or your muscle goes into spasm and it's like, yeah, that's actually exactly what it feels like. Feels like it's firing randomly. He was like, that's because it is. And so, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pop pop you back. It's going to slide back in. The muscles will be imbalanced and neither of them are going to be pulled in the other direction. And literally, as soon as he did it, it felt better. And so, it was like, oh, he told me exactly what was going to happen, what I could expect, and it happened. And by the way, here's this is another one, man. You got to know your [ __ ] Like this this is one where with the compassion in my heart, I actually wish this weren't true. But the reality is the reason that there will always be a hierarchy in things, cuz there's so much compassion and beauty in this industry. Like that that is one thing I resonate with really well. Like you guys really get purpose and all of that. At least the the heart of it. I think there I think there's people doing some iffy stuff that's really causing you guys a lot of reputational damage. But I know how many of you really have heart and really want to see people do awesome stuff. But even with that, if you don't know your [ __ ] like I can't tell you how many times my wife and I have told stories about Franco. I have not said a word to this man. I walk in the door and he was like, oh, you messed up your, you know, your scapula doing deadlifts or whatever, right? And I'm like, how the hell do you know that? I literally just walked in the door. He's like, oh, the way that you're holding your shoulder, blah. And then he would pop and I was like, whoa. So, he could see stuff. My wife, the same thing. Oh, you've come in for like your back, but it's actually your soas or whatever, right? And he would just nail it because he knew it that well. Now, Franco was a guy who used to pose as an anatomy chart in his chiropractic college. And he said it and if you've ever seen Franco in his prime, you would know why. He literally looked like an anatomy chart. It's crazy. And he said, because of that, for hours, class after class after class of just standing there and being a model and showing the muscle separation and where everything is, he was like, I got to hear the classes over and over and over and over and over. So, his level of education was just insane. Also, he spent decades lifting heavy weights. You have to understand the muscles. You've got to be able to imagine them, think about them as you fire them so that they'll actually grow under the stressor. So, his knowledge is crazy. And when you've got people going around telling stories like that, all of a sudden if you're a little skeptical about going to see a chiropractor, you're not anymore. So, you have to know your [ __ ] Don't do anything even slightly like, oh, but this will make me more money. Right? That's where it gets dicey. But, I get it. I meet you with compassion. I promise that you're like, I got to keep the lights on. So, if I'm going to help people, I've got to generate enough revenue to actually help them. So, how do I do that? That's where I think you have to expand your vision because it it needs to be in line with what you do. Once it's not in line with what you do, then people smell a rat when you go for the pitch. They're like, oh, man, this isn't real. Like, this is a true story. Really think about this for a second. Remember, I was chasing money. I wanted to be rich, rich, rich, rich. I finally get rich and I realize, oh my god, this is leaving me so unhappy. I want to do something that helps people. I want to add value. I want to be passionate. So, we said when we started Quest Nutrition, we made protein bars. We got everybody together on the support staff and we said, if anybody ever calls in and says, how do I lose weight? The answer is, and I quote, boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli. Not because we sell boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli. We didn't. Because it's the real answer. And so, I want you, above all, to focus on truth. So, that somebody they may walk out of your clinic, they may never come back cuz you either solved their problem or you weren't going to be able to solve their problem. You knew that. And so, you sent them elsewhere. But, that person becomes a referral. If you're taking notes, write this down. Never never go for the sale. Always go for the referral. Never go for the sale. Always go for the referral. When that person believes in you, they trust you, you had a moment to monetize them, to get the quick dollar, and you didn't, that person now wants to give you money. It's literally incredible. And I can't tell like I'll I'll give you guys an example. So, I create content now. I create a lot of content. I put about 5 to 7 hours, depending on the week, of content out every week. And I don't monetize it. I don't charge anything for it. And I know people are waiting for the other shoe to drop. And at the end of this, you're waiting for me to hit you up with something, anything, to buy from me. There's nothing. I want to add value. Now, my full disclosure is one day I may have an ask, cuz I create My new thing is creating movies. And so maybe one day I just want you to tell people that the movie exists. I don't even need you to go see it. But if I've ever added value to your life, just tell somebody it exists, so that I can find my audience. I'm not joking. I have had people show up at the gate to my house saying, "I just want to work for you for free, because I dig what you're doing." Three or four people have come up to me in the back already just since I was here and saying, "Thank you for what you do." That's it. Thank you for what you do. Imagine that. But that's the world we live in. That's the opportunity that you have is to just play the long game. And I don't believe in patience. In fact, I have a shirt that says, "F patience." I am not a patient man. I am the least patient person you were ever going to meet. I am actively anti-patience, because you will accomplish nothing in your life if you're patient. Nothing. And anybody that tells you to be patient, I want you to be immediately skeptical. But what I always do is I play the long game. I play the game of reputation. That's what you guys have to do. You're in a battle for your reputation. And I would say the thing that you guys need to do is turn inward and not tolerate it. You just can't tolerate it. If you've got people in the industry, like you guys are going to have to decide what you really believe is core to being a chiropractor, what your actual value proposition is, and anything outside that, we got to nip in the bud. Because that's what's damaging your reputation. Oh. Uh look to Dr. Lux ready. Hey Tom, this has been great. I got a question for you. Um Thank you for Let's have this Whereas we're having this conversation of the profession as a whole, something that I've observed over the last 15 years is that I'm going to piss off a lot of chiros when I say this, too, is that chiropractors are let's just say emotional about their business. And they use emotion to in essence run their business. I'd like you to talk to us about the scope of building a multi-billion dollar organization and a company and the use of emotion inside of it versus logic and how we can use logic as a profession to drive us to the next tier. Because all the Emotion is great, but if we don't have logical systems to take us collectively to the next level, we're going to fall apart in emotion. Yeah. So here's now where I'm going to piss you off a bit. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. E- Everything else is just you're trying to find a way to fill your day that's meaningful to you. So meaning and purpose, which I would say are are just core core in the emotional center of your existence, that's all that matters. Now, the question becomes, how do we use logic? How do we use systems to scale our meaning and purpose? It's rare that you meet somebody that doesn't want to touch more lives, that doesn't want to help more people. And one thing I really hope what I incite here is a riot of compassion. Compassion for the people that are selling like dodgy [ __ ] because you know why they're doing it. They're not sinister, they're not evil. They want to keep the lights on. They want to buy dope Christmas gifts for their kids. They want to take a rad vacation, right? Like, I get it. We all get it. So, meeting people with anger and rage and all of that just is not going to play out, and it's going to just further divide your industry. You guys are going to have to come together and be understanding of how we ended up here. But then, to his point, we have to be deploying things that actually allow us to scale. So, when we were scaling Quest, scaling that fast is is it's almost comical. Like, you're I was in a never-ending state of hiring. We went from one employee to 1,400 employees in about 4 years. Do the math just in how many people you have to hire a day. It's crazy. So, you have to have systems. You get to the point where you're only as good as what you write down. You guys can't have a gentleman's agreement in the industry. You need a declaration. You need a manifesto that people sign like it's the Declaration of Independence. That says, this is what we're about. This is what the chiropractic industry is, not what it should be. This is what it is, and now anything that falls outside of that is outside the bounds of what we see as the industry. And if that's patient-centric, if that's all about value creation for you guys and for the patient, right? Don't get lost in this. It's important for you guys to create value in your own lives. Emotionally, spiritually, financially. But it's got to be in service of the customer. It's got to be in service of the people coming to you looking for help. And if it's always in service of them, then you guys will get somewhere. But without those systems, you won't you won't scale ever. I think we have time for one more question. Um David Bradley from Cardone. Hey Tom. Hey. Um we've heard a lot this weekend about um success being duplicational, right? So, success is no different than any other skill, right? Duplicate successful actions of others, you can have it. Can you tell us about your morning routine? Like what what does a day in the life of you look like? Yeah, absolutely. Um so, that's a really powerful point. And habits and routines are I I am basically a bunch of habits and routines duct-taped together. That that is my life. I am profoundly lazy by nature. Um and that's true. My own mother, when I left for college, my mom basically kicked me out of the nest. She forced me to do it. I didn't want to leave. And I was just having a panic moment. Um confidence um was nothing. And she said you got to got to go do it. Got to chase your dreams. And then so I did and I left. And then she has spent every day since then trying to get me back. And I said, "Mom, this doesn't add up. You were the reason that I left. I never would have left if you hadn't forced me to." And she said with no malice in her heart, "I was just assumed you were going to fail." And I was so grateful in that moment for that raw truth because that really is who I was then. And what I want people to understand cuz it's easy for me cuz I used to be about 60 lb heavier. It's easy for me to show you me 60 lb heavier and then the abs like people get that. They don't get the mental and emotional transformation. It's hard to visualize. But the reality is I was lazy. I was under-educated. I didn't have confidence. I felt like the dumbest person in most every room I was in. I was not voted most likely to succeed. I got a 990 on my SATs and I took it twice. I wasn't the person you would circle and say watch that guy. I used to wear clown hats. I'm not kidding like as a regular fashion statement. And that's where I started. And then I realized humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. I can change in any direction that I want. And the way that I did the change was habits and routines. So this is how I rock every day. I am in bed by 9:00 p.m. like it's a religion. I do not set an alarm. So anybody that says that's impossible, I built a billion-dollar business without setting an alarm. You can do it. But you're going to have to go to bed early. And you're going to have to go to bed and leave yourself enough time to get the sleep that you need. Now why am I so obsessive about sleep? Normally entrepreneurs, it's all about man, do whatever it takes, stay up, burn the midnight oil. I'm telling you right now that is a fool's errand. Because your brain is how you experience and function and build and do all the incredible things you want to do. And if your brain is functioning sub-optimally, you are never going to get where you want to go. So I prioritize sleep. The next thing is I immediately go to the gym. I hate the gym. More than you know. And people that say that they get an endorphin rush, like my wife, my wife seems insane to me. She's like singing in the gym and having a great time. I'm like, this is crazy. You seem like a nut job to me. But she's like, "Oh man, it feels so good." And I'm like, "Literally every set hurts. I don't know what you're talking about." So, I am trying to get in and out of the gym as fast as I can, but I go to the gym every time because of cognitive optimization and longevity. For anybody that has ever watched my content, you know I actually am trying to live forever. Right now, I know I'm going to die, but I'm really hoping that I can buy myself time for medical science to catch up. So, I live in a way that is optimized for longevity. So, I work out. The next thing I do is I meditate. Meditation is one of those things, oh my god. So, for years, like we all have our thing that we need to get better at, and mine was I was really weak and emotionally soft. Like if I was on the soccer field and I got hit with a soccer ball as a kid, I would cry and ask to be taken off the field. That's just where I started. I'm mean sad, but that's the truth of it. So, I had to learn to toughen up. So, to get into business, that was like number one for me. I had to get tougher. So, I didn't want to meditate because it sounded so soft. I was like, "Oh, that sounds gross. I don't want to do that." And then I met a Navy SEAL named Mark Divine. And Mark Divine looked me in my eye and said, "You're an idiot. Start meditating." And I thought, "Okay. Well, this guy's pretty tough. So, if said tough man says that I need to be meditating, I'll at least try it." So, I meditate. I do a very simple box breathing method. I don't do equal sides on all parts, which is what a traditional box breathing method does, but it's in through the nose, inhale hold, out through the nose, exhale hold. Repeat the cycle. And so, I do that for about 20 minutes. The reason that I do that is because it puts your brain in an alpha wave state, which is known as calm and creative. So, you're not getting sleepy cuz you're if you're following my protocol, you're very well rested, you're getting the sleep that you need. It's amazing. You're always full of energy. And I do that for like I said about 20 minutes, and then I go into what I call think-itating. Think-itating came because I was really annoyed that during meditation I wasn't supposed to think about anything. I was supposed to keep coming back to the breath, but the problem was I was getting in this calm, creative state and I was having amazing ideas, and I wasn't supposed to stop to write them down. That really bothered me. So, I said, "All right, I'm going to carve out time right after I meditate to start using that vibe, that alpha wave state that I'm in to take these notes and have these ideas." And so, by allowing myself that to know that my meditation cycle is two parts, one where I really am just coming back to the breath, back to the breath. Every time my mind wanders, I'm just back to the breath. Because after that, I'm going to get my computer, I'm going to put it on my lap, I'm going to keep doing the breathing. I'll even close my eyes between ideas, but when I have an idea, but I write them down. After I think-itate, then I get time to read. Reading for me, ABL, boys and girls, always be learning. Always be learning. I read obsessively. I read in every transitional moment. If I'm walking from the gym to the kitchen, I've got my headphones on, I'm reading. If I'm in an Uber, I'm reading. If I'm on a plane, I'm reading. I'm always trying to learn something at all times, whenever I can, to keep my mind fresh because of the only math equation that matters. II = IO. Ideas in = ideas out. If you want fresh ideas for your industry, start researching. In fact, can I be just a touchy bit judgy for a second? When I was researching to give this talk, I thought, "I'm going to bet in the last 48 hours, I've done more research on this industry than 90% of the people I'm going to meet." And that's the problem. It's all there for you. Like when you start going video after video after video and you don't My [ __ ] What is up, dude? It's good to see you. Are you speaking? Oh, you guys are in for a treat now. So, when I was doing that research, I thought, all right, this is incredibly powerful. Going result after result after result. And because I don't I'm not trying to like do confirmation bias, where I only see what I want to see, I wanted to see the truth of the industry. I thought, wow, it's all laid out right there. So, I spend a lot of time reading and then notice I haven't said I eat yet. Then I go get ready for work. Then after all of that, by this point I've usually been up for about 4-5 hours. Then I eat. So, I do an intermittent fasting protocol. I dip in and out of ketosis. So, I usually do 1 week of ketosis where I'm actually I have ketones present in my bloodstream. Which we don't need to go into what that is. If you know what it is, you know. If not, you can look it up. And then I do a higher protein cycle after that. But I always postpone my first meal as long as I can. Uh I'm usually up around 4:00 a.m. Um so, by the time I eat it's usually 8:00 or 9:00. I don't take meetings ever before 10:00 a.m. Which means from 4:00 to 10:00, I have 6 hours where I do what I think is right for the business. I keep a list, by the way, of important things. Should always have a list of important things so you never have to think, hey, what should I be doing? You go immediately to your important things list. It should be a list of execution, not of thought. So, it is things to do to move your business forward. And you should live obsessively in that list. Then by the time 10:00 rolls around, all my employees are there and then I start taking meetings. You'll also notice I did not say I check email. I respond to about five emails a week. Email will be the death of Western civilization. I promise. Get out of your email. In fact, I want to give you guys the gift of shame. And what I'm going to say is every time you check your email, I want you to feel an overwhelming sense of shame. Because in those moments, what you're saying is someone else knows better how I should spend my time than me. That's what checking your email is. It's totally reactive. Now, I get it. You're not going to get it down to zero, but man, it should be close. You need to spend the time being the governor of your own life. Of planning out what you should be doing, of understanding things well enough to map your life out, and then execute against that map. I think we have time for one more. Um so, if you didn't hear, are there any principles I have that haven't changed? Um yes, from the time that I I wrote them down, I'll say that they're still there. So, I actually took the time to write down because I realized as we were growing and we had, you know, over 1,000 employees, I was like, you're only as good as what you write down. So, I wrote down my 25-point bullet belief system, which if anybody wants it, you can go to impacttheory.com. It's the impact theory belief system. It's entirely free. And that is as of right now how I think, but I'm desperate for Tucker Max to tell me how I'm wrong so that I can change those. Because when you have people in your life that push you, or you read a book, and it opens your eyes, like a book in a box, then you can really be transformed, truly. So, I'm always hungry to see my thinking evolve, to see it be pushed. So, I don't hold on to anything as dogma. In fact, I am terrified of dogma. And one of the first uh video posts I ever did was say, "Look, I'm going to come at you strong. I'm going to tell you what I believe, but the second I believe something new, I will change." So, if you've latched on to something I said 6 months ago, and I contradict myself 6 months later, brace yourselves because I'm trying to change. And to quote Jay-Z, you think I worked this hard to stay the same? All right, thank you guys so much. [ __ ] you. Thank you guys. Thank you.