E194: From Broke & Sleeping on the Floor to a $1 Billion Exit w/Tom Bilyeu

Tom Bilyeu went from sleeping on the floor to co-founding and selling a billion-dollar company, Quest Nutrition. Today, he's the force behind Impact Theory, a media studio with a bold mission: pull people out of the Matrix at scale. In this episode, Tom reveals the frameworks that helped him transform from a self-proclaimed “emotionally fragile” dreamer to a high-agency entrepreneur and truth-seeking machine. We cover everything from skill stacking and the physics of progress to first-principles thinking, radical candor in leadership, and how he’s building a real-world version of Ready Player One. If you're obsessed with performance, truth, and high agency thinking, this one’s for you.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Some point in your life, you were sleeping onthe floor, and then again, you sold your

(00:05):
company for a billion dollars.
How could somebody go from in a place of suchdestitute to such success?
How's that physically possible?
It really isn't like some grand miracle.
It comes down to drive, a willingness tooutwork people, good ideas, and then the
ability to aggregate talent.
That's huge.

(00:25):
And then are you actually going to take therisks, learn from your mistakes, stack the
skills, and keep pushing forward?
Most people just break under the weight ofembarrassment.
And they will fail at something.
People will laugh at them, rightly so.
They really did embarrass themselves and thatperson just goes I never wanna feel like this
again and they object out and it's the peoplethat go, okay, well I just know from the

(00:50):
physics of the situation standpoint that I canlearn from this and if I can acquire skills
that other people don't acquire, I can dothings other people can't do.
Which path do you wanna go down?
And you've mentioned laws of physics, firstprinciples thinking.
You've had neurosciences, doctor NolanWilliams, you have doc doctor Andrew Heberman,
and and many other neuroscientists.

(01:10):
Where do you stand today, 2025, in regards tofree will and whether human beings have free
will?
It does not exist.
Tom, welcome to the How I Invest podcast.
Thanks for having me.
So you're not only part of this extreme classof entrepreneurs that sold a company for a

(01:31):
billion
dollars, but perhaps most impressively, you didso with a background that didn't include an Ivy
League background from a blue collarupbringing.
How did you accomplish so much coming fromhumble beginnings?
The honest answer is that I went on an insanejourney of trying to map cause and effect.
And so it's what I call the only belief thatmatters.

(01:53):
The only belief that matters is that if you puttime and attention into getting better at
something, you will actually get better.
And unfortunately, intellect also matters.
So just raw ability, though I consider myselfto be middle of the pack, I at least meet
minimum requirements.
And so between meeting minimum intellectualrequirements and then just an unrelenting work

(02:13):
ethic, I've been able to get enough shots ongoals we were talking about before we started.
In this area, it mattered a lot to try a lot ofdifferent things, to figure out where I was
weak, to be able to go in and shore up myabilities.
And then just over a long enough time period,then you can, if you get the timing right and
all of that, you can actually have somesuccess.

(02:35):
So I think that ultimately business is really agame of resilience.
If you quit, then you're never going to have achance to stack the learnings of all your
failures.
And so most people are just too afraid to beembarrassed, so they get embarrassed once and
they stop.
Stacking your failures.
Is there a difference between stacking yourfailures in a specific domain versus stacking
new failures in different domains or differentaspects of your life?

(02:58):
Yes.
Knowledge stacks.
And so if you're going broad, you're gonna havea much harder time.
But the human mind is extraordinary at patternrecognition.
And so losses over here can, you know, apply tosomething else.
And so certainly over time, I've been inmultiple different industries as sort of part
of my calling card as an entrepreneur is thatI've shown that this stuff is repeatable across

(03:19):
different industries.
But there's no doubt that I feel very goodabout the fact that for the last call it five
years, I've just been doing one thing.
And so in doing that and focusing entirely onmedia, it has allowed me to accelerate the rate
at which I learn because all of my lessonsapply not just broadly, but specifically to the

(03:41):
thing that I'm doing.
Like I mentioned, you came from a blue collarbackground.
You went to USC, which is a great school, butnot necessarily Harvard or Stanford or where
you have this elite advantage coming out of thegate.
What was the biggest, I guess, obstacle thatyou had to overcome?
The number one biggest, whether it's peer groupor mindset or resources, what was the one thing

(04:03):
that was hardest to overcome on your path toselling your company for a billion dollars?
I did not understand how the world worked.
And so if you're not mapping the physics of asituation, you are gonna be routinely surprised
because you think, well, when I do this thing,it's gonna yield this outcome.
And then you do that thing and it yields atotally different outcome.
And that's very surprising.
And if you don't understand that this is adeterministic universe that you can map cause

(04:27):
and effect and you can then act in accordancewith cause and effect, you're gonna be very
confused until you finally figure that out.
And so that dissipates whatever learning you'regonna do.
So, you try something, it fails, but youmisattribute that failure.
And so now as you try figure out, okay, what isthe thing that I actually need to learn from
this lesson?
If you take away the wrong lesson, you're gonnakeep going down the wrong path.

(04:49):
I see this in economics all the time.
And once you look at, say, rents areskyrocketing and you think we need the
government to step in and they need to regulatethe rents, but you don't understand that that
actually causes there to be a dearth of supply.
And then that lack of supply causes eitherbuildings to go down in quality because nobody

(05:10):
can afford to renovate them or rents to go upor both.
And so that's just a failure to understand theroot cause of something.
This is why thinking from first principles isso important.
And so because I didn't do that in thebeginning, I was just constantly unable to do
what I now call velocity made good.
So there's a nautical term of like the wind isgonna blow whatever direction it's blowing.

(05:33):
You're trying to get wherever you're trying togo.
The wind is not always blowing in the directionof where you're trying to go.
And so you've got to learn how to angle thesails, tack back and forth in order to leverage
what is there to get where you wanna go.
Man, I just could not do that.
And so I would go where the wind was blowing,and that was not always where I wanted to end
up.
So I had to develop a worldview that was goaloriented thinking from first principles.

(05:55):
So I know where I want to go.
And then it's what I call the physics ofprogress.
You just start running a loop of basically thescientific method to say, I know where I'm
trying to get to.
I have a guess on what I would need to do toget there.
And now I'm removing emotion from the equationand I'm just saying, what works?
What action actually moves me at an efficientrate towards my goal?

(06:15):
And if you can get out of storytelling and intothat, now you've got a chance to move forward.
But I did not understand that at the beginningof my career, and so it was very frustrating.
One of the challenges with understanding causeand effect is that you're essentially a fish in
water within your own brain.
So the reason you got that outcome previouslywas because you had that thinking previously.

(06:38):
How do you get outside of your brain and learntrue cause and effect in the world, not in the
model in your brain?
Starts with distrusting your emotions.
So I've said a gazillion times on my tombstone,I would like it to read.
You are having a biological experience.
And the reason that I want my tombstone to readthat I'm having a biological experience is

(06:58):
because I am trapped inside what you're callingthe water, what I'll call the frame of
reference.
My frame of reference is made up of my biology,my beliefs and my values.
All three of them are effectively invisible tome.
So I'm trapped inside of a Mr.
Potato Head device that has eyes, ears, senseof smell, taste.

(07:18):
It's giving me a very limited version of theworld.
For people that haven't heard this stat, Iremind myself of this all the time, we only see
0.0035% of the available electromagneticspectrum.
So we look out at the world and we think thisis all there is.
And in reality, it is the world's mostinfinitesimal slice of what is actually there.

(07:39):
And from that, we tell ourselves a story.
And if you don't understand that you weretrapped inside that story, you're really gonna
be, in a dire position.
So the way that most people get trapped is theydon't navigate by logic.
They navigate by emotion.
They believe that because they have an emotion,it is accurate, and therefore, they will move
forward because something feels right versusthat it's actually yielding progress towards

(08:03):
the defined outcome.
And so, yeah, distrust your emotions.
That is lesson number one because they are notdesigned to take you where you wanna go.
Give me a simple example of where your emotionscould lead you astray.
Your emotions are designed to get you to makerapid decisions in a very complicated world

(08:23):
towards one end and one end only.
To stay alive long enough to have kids thathave kids.
And if you understand that all of your impulsesare pushing you to survive long enough to have
kids that have kids, but your goal is to builda company, then all of a sudden it's like,
well, hold on a second.
These are competing drives.

(08:44):
And so needing to be able to extract yourselffrom that and think simply from first
principles becomes extremely important.
So to give you an idea, when I first startedgoing down the path of building a video game, I
made a catastrophic error in that I was tryingto build a game that felt good to play it
immediately.

(09:04):
And you just cannot do that in game developmentbecause of the nature of the computer resources
and how hard it is to get high fidelity.
So I ended up wasting millions of dollarstrying to get something that felt right while I
was playing it versus saying, okay, I knowwhere I want to end up.
I need to break that into technical chunks andthen execute against those technical chunks,
knowing that two or three years from now, itwill start to feel right.

(09:28):
But in the beginning, it's going to feelterrible.
But I have to understand how from a dopaminecircuitry set up that all of this stuff is
eventually going to work.
I understand dopamine loops, if I understandreward, if I understand risk, all of those
things, I can know on paper, apply them in thislow fidelity environment, and ultimately stack

(09:49):
towards that.
So had I not steered by the emotional desire tocreate something that felt awesome in the
moment, I could have saved myself so muchmoney.
That one still brings a lot of trauma.
But, learning that was very valuable.
I think we shared 99% or so DNA withchimpanzees.
I imagine across humans, it's probably 99.99%.

(10:12):
One So of the ways that you could go aboutlearning your own biases is just to learn human
biases or homo sapien biases and thengeneralize that you probably have the same
evolutionary preprogramming.
And that's kind of how you could look atemotions versus rational versus irrational.
Or said another way, if something that was veryrational a million years ago in the Sahara

(10:33):
Desert may not be rational today, 2025.
So true.
Very well said.
So you have this, what you call the algorithm,the truth seeking algorithm that you apply in
order to get to ground truth.
What is that algorithm?
It it is so multivariate that I'll give you ahigh level breakdown, but by all means, on

(10:57):
something because this goes incredibly deep inany direction.
So at the highest level, this is about thinkingfrom first principles, meaning you're not
reasoning from analogy.
You are literally building up from the laws ofphysics.
There are physics to every situation.
There is a never ending string of cause andeffect.
And where am I inserting myself in whether it'soperations, marketing, whatever, there's

(11:22):
physics to money.
So as you think about the decisions of capitalinvestment within your own company,
understanding like, okay, I'm gonna outlay thiscapital.
I need to understand how I'm gonna get thatmoney back.
And again, when people do things based onintuition, I think this is gonna work.
There are far more people that end up in thegraveyard than end up being Steve Jobs.
So people have to be very realistic about,okay, I'm deploying the capital.

(11:44):
What what lever am I deploying this capitalagainst?
How does pulling that lever actually yieldmoney back to my company?
I find that most entrepreneurs don't even turntheir company into a series of levers, the
number of emails that you send out.
Okay?
That may matter tremendously in your company.
For me, the videos that I post on YouTubematter a lot.

(12:04):
How many views the videos get matter a lot.
So the levers that I can pull, they'reultimately gonna start upstream there, and then
everything else for me is downstream of that.
So just what are the physics of my situation?
What are the physics of the humans that I'mtrying to interact with on whatever level?
And then running what I was talking aboutearlier, the physics of progress.
So I come up with I know where I'm trying toend up.

(12:25):
I come up with a hypothesis that I believe willget me to overcome whatever obstacle stands
between where I am now and where I'm trying toget to.
I then actually document what I'm gonna do withthat test.
And part of that documentation is to write downmy expected outcome.
That's the part that people never do.
So whatever result they get, they say tothemselves, yeah, that's what I expected.
And so you don't learn anything.

(12:46):
So you wanna say ahead of time, this is what Ithink this is gonna yield.
Then you run that test.
Did it yield that or not?
If it did, you have mapped the worldaccurately.
If it did not, you have not mapped the worldaccurately, and you have a fundamental problem
of understanding the cause and effect.
You need to address that with another guess.
Like I said, this is a scientific method.
You're gonna try to improve your guess based onwhat you just learned through that failure, and

(13:10):
you're gonna try again.
And then you just live in that loop in everydimension of your life.
And I think at some point in your life, youwere sleeping on the floor, and then again, you
you sold your company for a billion dollars.
Those two things are very far apart for anybodykeeping track of my timeline.
So this was not me, like, sleeping on the floorof the facility, and then we suddenly be

(13:31):
successful.
Those are years apart.
And, yep, those are two data points, which Ithink very few humans have been on both.
How could somebody go from, you know, in in aplace of such destitute to such success?
How's that physically possible?
It's skill set acquisition.
Life really is very simple.
You are trying to imagine a world that's betterthan this one, and then gain the skills that

(13:57):
allow you to build the things that allow you tocross that chasm.
And it's maybe not easy, but it is very doable.
So take Quest, for instance.
So we start Quest.
We realize that one of the major challengesthat we're facing actually has to do with the
government subsidizing corn of all things,which has led to seventy years of people

(14:18):
creating manufacturing equipment that assumeyou're gonna be using high fructose corn syrup.
The second you take that out, it changes thetexture of the product that you're trying to
make, almost irrespective of what productyou're trying to make.
And so now all the equipment doesn't work.
And so we realized, oh, man, to use a liquidfiber instead of a liquid sugar as our binding

(14:38):
agent to get the macronutrient profile that wewanted, we had to become our own engineers, we
literally had to engineer our own equipment.
And so that was a wild departure from where wethought we were going to end up.
But once you're just thinking, okay, this is agame of skill acquisition, there's something I
don't understand.
This is a problem that does not violate thelaws of physics.

(15:01):
So it is possible.
And then you just go about either saying, I'mnot willing to acquire those skills, or that's
a skill I'm going to have to acquire.
And so when we started, we certainly didn'tthink we were going to become manufacturers, we
saw ourselves as product people and marketingpeople, we didn't see ourselves as operations
at that level.
And so that was what the goal demanded.

(15:21):
And so that's what we had to do.
Now, also, I want to be very clear that timingplays a part in all of this.
And some people will call that luck.
Sure.
Perfectly willing to accept that.
If you don't have the right timing, or youdon't acquire the right skills, you'll be dead
in the water.
But beyond that, it really isn't like somegrand miracle.

(15:46):
It comes down to drive, a willingness tooutwork people, good ideas, and then the
ability to aggregate talent.
That's huge.
And then are you actually going to take therisks, learn from your mistakes, stack the
skills, and keep pushing forward?
But I really mean it when I say most peoplejust break under the weight of embarrassment.

(16:08):
And they will fail at something.
People will laugh at them, rightly so.
They really did embarrass themselves.
And that person just goes, I never wanna feellike this again, and they eject out.
And it's the people that go, okay, well, I justknow from the physics of the situation
standpoint that I can learn from this, and if Ican acquire skills that other people don't
acquire, I can do things other people can't do.

(16:30):
And if I can do something that the world wantsthat nobody else can do, I will be successful.
And so there have been many a tortured nightfor me where it's like, well, is that sequence
of thoughts still true?
And if that sequence of thoughts is still true,I just need to ask, do I wanna keep doing this
because it is hard, it is emotionally taxing.

(16:52):
And if I do, then just get on with it.
This is this is just how the physics of thehuman situation works.
And if I don't, then eject out and don't makeexcuses.
Just say, got to the point where emotionallythis wasn't rewarding enough for me to keep
doing this, and so I'm, you know, I'm tappingout.
It's interesting because this embarrassment isalso evolutionary wiring when we are in these

(17:16):
small groups.
Embarrassment could mean literally dying andbeing ejected from from tribe.
And yet, it still feels bad today.
So how do you manage around that?
Do you just say, I'm gonna be embarrassed forthe next five years and just suck it up?
Do you find a counterbalancing way to havepride more pride in your life?
Like, what are some behaviors that you canincorporate in order to make, to blunt the the

(17:40):
blow of embarrassment and other negativeemotions?
The most important thing is maybe tangential tobehavior.
It was realizing in my mid ish twenties that Iwould argue for ideas that were terrible in
terms of taking me towards my goal, but thatwere mine.
And so they made me feel smart.
And I thought, oh, this is a trap.

(18:02):
And so I realized, okay, there are two pathsbefore you.
No judgment.
Which path do you wanna go down?
Do you wanna be right all the time?
Which case you need to go into smaller andsmaller rooms where you're the smartest person?
Or do you want to actually achieve your goals,which means you're gonna have to routinely face
that you're surrounded by people smarter thanyou certainly in any one thing at any one time.

(18:23):
There's always gonna be somebody that knowsmore about it than you.
Or they may just legitimately have higher IQ,be able to process data faster, whatever.
But if I can aggregate that talent, I can stillget ahead.
But I've got to find something new to build myself esteem around and realizing that I had a
choice about what I built my self esteem aroundchanged my entire life.

(18:44):
And so I stopped trying to build my self esteemaround being better, faster, smarter, stronger
than the next person, and instead built my selfesteem around identifying the right answer
faster than anybody else.
Did not care if it was mine.
I just cared if it was efficient in moving metowards my goals.
Would celebrate the life out of the personwhose idea it was.
I did not try to steal their idea because thatdidn't matter to me.

(19:07):
That didn't help with my ego at all because Iwas building my ego around my willingness to
say, oh, I was wrong.
You were right.
And by the way, through a hilarious twist ofthe human psyche, by me celebrating the person
for that idea, people wanted to bring me theirideas nonstop because they met somebody that
had the courage to be wrong, to publicly fail.

(19:27):
And when something was right, I was gonnacelebrate that person.
So now people are bringing you ideas nonstop.
You just have to be the person that has enoughforesight to go this idea good, this idea bad.
And now you're gonna have no shortage of ideas.
But that, like, there's really one thing in mylife that I say that was a line in the sand.

(19:48):
There's my life before and my life after.
And that was deciding that the only thing I wasgoing to allow myself to feel good about was my
willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequaciesand my willingness to improve on those rather
than trying to hide them and just seem smarterthan the next person.
Said another way, you built your ego, positiveego on wanting to have the best company to

(20:09):
aggregate the best talent to be the mostsuccessful as an entity versus being this
individual lone wolf where you're the smartestperson in the room, but nobody wants to work
with you, nobody wants to invest in you.
So it's not that you even took embarrassment,you framed in what it means to have pride in
yourself and your accomplishments in adifferent way, and then you were able to align

(20:31):
with that.
And as a side effect, people also wanted toalign with that because you are no longer
egotistical, although I would argue you builtan ego around a new belief.
Yeah.
I tell people, look.
I'm an egomaniac.
I just built my ego around something thatyou're not gonna find offensive, which is that
I'm perfectly willing to admit when I'm wrong.
But when I think I'm right, I'm gonna fightlike hell.

(20:51):
So this is not like, oh, you said something,and therefore, we're gonna do it.
It's like, I I care about effectiveness, but Icare about effectiveness ferociously.
So if I think somebody is putting forth an ideathat isn't going to efficiently move us towards
our goal, I'm gonna be a psychopath.
I'm not gonna do something, that I don't thinkis gonna work.

(21:12):
And I went through a phase where I really didjust, yeah, I want everybody to make sure that
their ideas are heard and we'll try anything.
And I gave people all the space in theuniverse.
And the reality is most people have not builttheir self esteem around that or they don't
have the intellectual horsepower or both.
And so you end up spiraling into madness.
So you do have to come in and say, I'm gonna bethe arbiter.

(21:33):
I'm gonna say what we are and aren't gonnapursue.
I want the best ideas.
I do not need them to be mine.
But if I'm not convinced, we are not going downa stupid path.
And we are gonna run the physics of progress,and we are going to call our shots before we
take them.
And if we were wrong, we are going to map who'smore likely to be right.
I get into this all the time with my produceron YouTube, and I'm like, listen, there is

(21:54):
always a finger to point at.
If a click through rate is terrible, I wannaknow the person that came up with the idea.
And if that person came up with an idea thatyields a terrible click through rate, that is a
mark against their reputation for creating goodheadlines and thumbnails.
And conversely, if somebody kills it, I wannaknow who it is.
And I don't care if I'm the best.

(22:15):
I wanna know who the best is so that we knowwhen we're at loggerheads and it's like, man,
that seems really counterintuitive.
I'd be very surprised if that works.
But, hey, 70% of the time, you're right morethan I am.
And if we were in Vegas, we're gonna take 70%odds every time.
So then we just go cool.
That person right now, they have the best CTRs.
If there is a collision and we can't all agree,we're gonna go with their idea.

(22:39):
I do not understand how people don't getobsessed with effectiveness, but most people
don't, man.
Most people care about one thing.
They want to be right.
And even if that person may have a 70% battingaverage on cause and effect and you have a 50%,
even though that person's not a 100%, you haveto go with what by default, you go with what

(23:00):
that person's saying because he or she has,empirically proven higher
cost in that domain.
So it's like if they start going down overtime, then we're gonna note, hey.
You were hitting for a while, but right now,like, you're really off your, let's say,
trailing three months, you went from a 10.1average CTR down to a 6.2.

(23:21):
My trailing three months is 8.7.
Well, I just passed you.
And so on this one, we can't come to anagreement.
So we're gonna do whoever's in pole position atthat time.
So, yeah, it it is literally just everybodyneeds to get their ego out of the way.
We're looking for efficiency.
Data will speak for itself.
I like to remind everybody, everyone is nakedin a spreadsheet.

(23:43):
And so if you're just looking at thespreadsheet and you're like, well, there are
the numbers.
It's nice and easy to see who's good at what.
And I believe people should hunger for thatknowledge.
There's this meme in Silicon Valley wherebillion dollar companies are built by people
that, quote, unquote, are going after amission, quote, unquote, don't care about

(24:04):
money.
And I I resisted that for many years until Istarted interviewing these people, and I did
find that they were highly mission driven.
Do you find that billionaires or peoplebuilding $11,000,000,000,000 companies are
fundamentally looking at the businessdifferently than, you know, your average
millionaire?
The real answer is having a mission will getyou to focus on the right thing, which is a

(24:28):
long term vision.
It will give you the energy that you need tofight when things are getting very difficult.
And when you put those two things together,you've got a shot at something.
And this is why founder led companies willoften even though, like, when I look at Apple,
you've got Steve Jobs, obviously, on a mission,founder led, just had, like, a real strong

(24:49):
sense of aesthetically what the world shouldlook like, where technology should go, how it
could integrate with people, was very forceful.
And if he thought that somebody was bringinghim garbage, he was gonna let them know.
And so he was very able to, position himself asa compelling leader.
He was right enough.
He was forceful enough.

(25:10):
He had a clear enough vision that he was ableto do it.
Now Tim Cook has made more money than SteveJobs, But I think Tim Cook is in the revenue
extraction part of that company's life cycle,and they will inevitably decline over the next
whatever ten, fifteen years as a result ofthat, because it's just how he's wired.
Now, God bless him.
Like when you pair somebody like Steve Jobswith an operator like Tim Cook, it's magical

(25:33):
and long may it have continued.
Alas cancer had different plans and we arewhere we are.
But if you understand that both of thosementalities are incredibly valuable, then you
know how to hopefully architect somethingreally incredible.
But it isn't confusing to me that Tim Cook isnot able to make the counterintuitive moves

(25:55):
that Steve Jobs is able to make or the wholeidea of flying the pirate flag of the way the
bureaucracy will end up just grinding things toa halt.
But if you have somebody like Steve Jobs thatis just constitutionally obsessed with an idea,
and he'll do everything including grabbing thebest engineers, taking them down the street,
telling everybody else to get the hell out ofthe way, and let them come up with something

(26:17):
interesting.
Well, then you're gonna stay vital.
But there are two different things.
You can have a take DeLorean.
You can have a maniacal founder that iscompletely unmoored from reality, but has like
this really compelling vision and they willride it into the ground.
The guy that, did Ocean Gate obviously believedhe put his own life at risk, but he also

(26:38):
imploded and turned into a puff of blood andcartilage.
So it's like, there are realities to be faced.
So I don't think that, either one in isolationis like, Hey, we should all want to be like
that.
I think you need to figure out who you are.
You need to figure out what's gonna allow youto show up at 2AM on a Friday night when
everybody else is out partying or spending timewith their kids.

(27:00):
And if you're an operator who's obsessed likeTim Cook, great.
You fly to China, you build those deals, andyou do something absolutely incredible.
But you're not gonna be the guy that starts thecompany from nothing.
You're not gonna be the guy that gets Wozniakto join you when, you know, you guys are like
two stinky, barefoot weirdos in the thecomputer scene.

(27:22):
So it's just two different personality types attwo different moments, and honestly, I think
you need both.
What what about long termism versus shorttermism?
Obviously, most people say you need to thinklong term, but there's also some short term and
thinking short term that I have seen work or incertain situations unpacked, you know, when

(27:43):
businesses could benefit from long termthinking versus short term thinking.
If you don't do both, you will go out ofbusiness.
So until your employees are perfectly fine tobe paid only on the long term, you're gonna
have to both have short term positive outcomes.
But if you really wanna win, you've gotta havea long term vision where you're gonna go.
So I think about this in game development.

(28:04):
In no uncertain terms, I'm trying to buildReady Player One, a gigantic world that people
effectively live inside of, create inside of.
But if I try to build all of that now, I mean,you're you're talking about billions and
billions of dollars of investment, and it lookslike what Facebook is doing.
Right?
So you have to have these short term wins thatallow you to finance the next phase of your

(28:27):
development.
And so there's a certain level of this that yousee with the way that Elon Musk builds, which I
think is brilliant.
He's trying to get to terraform Mars, but he'sgot to earn the right.
He's got to launch satellites into space beforeand make that profitable before he can go all
the way and land on Mars.
There's going be all kinds of different things,including building robotics that he's going to

(28:48):
have to do.
So he's not sending humans up there to buildthe kind of colony that will need to sustain
life.
And so he's chunked this up into all thesedifferent pieces, including solar, which is
going to be effectively how you'll generatepower that are nuclear.
How you would generate power when you're up,you're certainly not gonna do hydropower.
You're not gonna do wind as far as I know.
So this is gonna be something that you have tofigure out, okay, what are the technologies

(29:12):
that I can build a thriving business right nowhere today?
And they work that secondary part in the longterm vision.
But if you don't do both, then you don't havethe mission driven side that's gonna keep
everybody pushing, that's gonna galvanize alarge of talent that are going to believe in
that mission and feel like they have meaningand purpose, and you're not going to have the
capital.

(29:33):
Perhaps we could label instead of shorttermism, call it pragmatism.
So you need long termism and pragmatism.
You don't necessarily need to be doing shortterm deals where the other people feels, you
know, taken advantage of.
You definitely don't wanna do things wherepeople are feeling taken advantage of.
That's for sure.
Whether you call it short termism, pragmatism,whatever ism you wanna call it.

(29:55):
If you have built a reputation of beingextractive, you're gonna have a very hard time
building the kind of alliances and aggregatingthe kind of intelligence and capital that you
need to pull off these grand endeavors.
If you're burning bridges with every VC thatyou meet, then you're gonna run out of access
to capital very, very fast.

(30:15):
Now I think you can get away with a lot whenyou've got the kind of string, the kind of
track record that Elon has.
So you see him burning political bridges asfast as he can build them, I think he'll be
fine.
So it's gonna make things more difficult, butwe all have a personality, and you've gotta
deal with the realities of your personality.

(30:36):
The very thing that has taken him as far asit's taken him is also the thing that causes
him to collide in these really sort of weirdchildish emotional ways.
But do you want to knock those out of him or isthat part of what makes him him?
So the bigger the results that you prove youcan yield, the more, extractive and unhinged
that you can be and still get somewhere becausepeople realize, whoo, I can attach myself to

(31:01):
this guy, we can really go somewhere.
I say all of that to say people wanna puteverything in these really neat, like, boxes,
but the reality is it's so messy.
And living in the information age where we cansee all of this stuff, I think more and more
things resist being placed in these neat boxes.
This is why my brand has evolved so radicallyover time.
I started to feel like a liar just tellingpeople like all the mindset stuff because I was

(31:24):
like, the reality is this is way more complexthan I'm making it sound.
And if I want people to actually be able towin, I've got a map for them the things that I
actually do on a day to day basis, and it'smessy.
How do
you even map such a sophisticated system versususing kind of these parables of think long term
and only act long term?

(31:44):
How do you actually map the map the micro?
Okay.
Well, yeah, we need three hours just to dothis.
It would go something like this.
You have to figure out what you know what youwanna get.
What is the reason you won't get thereautomatically?
It's what I call the chaos machine, but thechaos machine is basically life, entropy.

(32:07):
Everything moves towards chaos.
Your competitors are trying to break you andget there first.
Your employees have all kinds of complexitiesgoing on in their life.
Same with you.
Everybody's competing for talent.
So there's just gonna be a thousand things thatare gonna try to slow you down and stop you.
So you've got to develop an obsession for whatwhat is the obstacle that's before me right

(32:29):
now?
What is the sequence that I could put things inthat would be what I call my important things
list that if I did them in this order, I wouldmost efficiently make steps towards my goal.
And then you're just constantly in that loop ofthe physics of progress we talked about before
so that you're understanding, okay, I triedthis, but it didn't work.
So what's gonna be the thing that I have toadjust?

(32:51):
And in all of that, what I tell people is youdon't have sufficient clarity until you know
what the most efficient use of the next fifteenminutes of your time would be towards your
goal.
Because once you're there, now you're down intothe concrete.
Now you're down to the specifics.
And I think people lose sight of one simplefact.
Success is merely a sequence of effectivethings you do in a row day after day, month

(33:18):
after month, year after year.
That's it.
But it is a never ending sequence of things youdo.
Emails you send, meetings that you have,products that you build, but it is things you
do.
So what are the things you're doing?
What are the outcomes that they're yielding?
And just track efficiency to goal obsessively.

(33:39):
I've been thinking a lot about this concept ofhigh agency, which you have really helped
popularize.
George Mac just wrote a whole thing.
I think it's highagency.com.
How do you define high agency and how do youapply that principle to your life?
So in life, you really can bend the world toyour will, but you have to develop the skills

(33:59):
to pull it off, but also the tenacity, theresiliency.
You have to become antifragile, to use NassimTaleb's phrase.
I think it's absolutely brilliant.
The more you are attacked, the stronger youneed to become.
And for me, that's simply recognition of theway that the human psyche works and putting

(34:22):
myself in positions where I'm being challenged,understanding that building my self esteem
around being right is a trap, understanding theskill stack, understanding that you can get so
good at something that people literally can'tstop you from doing that thing, barring force.
And so just constantly relentlessly saying,okay.
If George Bernard Shaw is correct, this is aparaphrase, but, the reasonable man conforms to

(34:46):
the world.
The unreasonable man insists on trying toconform the world to him.
Therefore, all progress depends on theunreasonable man.
If that really is true, well, you have to learnto be unreasonable.
You have to do the things that people tell youcan't be done.
You almost have to take a perverse pride ingoing, okay, people say this can't be done.
Does it violate the laws of physics?
No, it does not.

(35:06):
Therefore, it is possible.
And now it's like, okay.
Am I going to put in the time and energy toactually get that good at this thing or not?
And then giving everything you have, man, to adegree where people actually worry about you to
make that thing happen.
And most people just don't wanna live likethat.
Fair enough, man.
I I tell people, be very careful who you modelyourself after.

(35:28):
If you just wanna be a good dad, I'm not theguy to model yourself after.
I don't have kids specifically so that I can bean obsessive psychopath and build, build,
build.
And hey, when I'm on my deathbed, I will nothave children surrounding me.
That is what it is.
Everything's a trade off.
So if you want to be high agency, you need toknow where you were trying to get to and just

(35:49):
let absolutely nothing other than the laws ofphysics stop you.
And you've mentioned laws of physics, firstprinciples thinking.
What's the opposite of that?
How would you define that?
Everybody goes from feeling.
So, this seems impossible, and they don'tactually map out.
Okay.
Well, it seems impossible, but no BS.
What would it take?
What would it look like if it were possible?

(36:10):
People don't do that.
They just go, this, feels overwhelming, seemslike too much.
I can't imagine doing it, therefore it isn'treal.
It's all emotion based reasoning, which by theway is where the absolute vast majority of
humanity lives their entire life.
They are 100% trapped inside the heuristic oftheir emotions.
They believe because they feel it that it mustbe right and they will act on it, man.

(36:33):
It is wild.
So I teach entrepreneurs and I see this all thetime.
All the time.
People do not even take the time to buildclarity.
They just go, I have a feeling this is gonnawork.
And so they run headlong into something stupid.
I have a feeling this isn't gonna work.
And so they don't even sit down to have theconversation.
Let's say that they're deeply anxious aboutconfronting their business partner who's not

(36:58):
thinking about the right long term outcome.
Okay.
Well, they will avoid that conversation to thepoint of letting the business rot.
It's absolutely wild.
But their emotions make dots feel like theyconnect that don't actually connect.
So it seems right and smart and worthy to notgo be confrontational with your business
partner.

(37:18):
You don't wanna hurt his feelings, whatever,whatever, instead of being like, okay, we
either are or not trying to reach that goaltogether.
And if we're not, let's know that now so we canactually say what our real goal is instead of
the goal that we're putting in PR and all ofthat.
Yeah.
Feelings, man.
Feelings are the opposite of starting fromlogic.
Previous guest, Zaid Rahman Faci of Flex said,anytime you hear the words best practices, run,

(37:43):
cause that is not a first principles thinking.
Thinker.
Really interesting.
Yeah.
He's he's right for sure.
However, you also don't wanna have to relearnlessons every day.
And so what I tell the team here is, listen.
We look up at the night sky.
We see a bunch of stars.
We're going to draw constellations.
We have to because we need clarity on how tomove forward.

(38:06):
But those constellations aren't real.
And so my job is to get you guys all excitedabout where we're gonna go navigating at night
with these constellations, and then I'm gonnafigure out which part of that constellation
isn't real.
I will adjust it, and I will come back with anew constellation.
But you do need people to move forward withbest practices, etcetera, etcetera.
But you have to be paranoid that those willcalcify into dogma, and you'll stop being

(38:29):
nimble.
But if you don't have some sense of, like, thisis how it should be done, then you just get
mass chaos.
We talked about high agency.
The opposite of high agency, I don't call itlow agency, I call it passive, passive
behavior.
Why is so much of the population passive?

(38:50):
Life is terrifying.
You're often wrong.
Being wrong sucks.
It has huge consequences.
You will get laughed at.
You will be an outsider.
People will tell you you're stupid.
You won't be confident in yourself.
And so it's much easier to go along with theherd.
The herd can be vicious.
We are also living in a populous moment whereeverybody wants you to be on a team and there's

(39:13):
high emotion.
If you're not on that team or a team, it can bevery, very lonely and humans are not wired for
that.
Life is just too uncertain.
And so when we find that uncertainty, we havean emotional desire to find certainty in the
crowd again, and very few people can stepoutside of that.
Being passive is just a lot easier.

(39:33):
It's somewhat of a learned behavior, whetherlot of times, somebody was very aggressive in
your life, and you basically learned to bepassive, learned helplessness, didn't didn't
respond.
A lot of those passive people don't wanna turninto monsters, don't wanna be aggressive, But
the opposite of passive is not actuallyaggressive.
It's assertive.
How would you delineate between being assertiveand being aggressive?

(39:56):
I don't distinguish between the two.
To me, those are synonyms.
At the end of the day, you have to risk being adick.
Like, you have to this is what we're doing.
If you're a good leader, you will have listenedto people.
You will have a track record of not trying todo your idea, but only ever trying to do what
is efficiently moving you towards your goals.

(40:16):
You celebrate other people's accomplishments.
If you do all of that and then people arecreating a problem, you need to point out that
problem.
And if that problem persists, you need to bevery clear that that's not gonna be tolerated.
You've gotta nip it in the bud.
People are gonna push back.
This is the chaos machine.
Everybody has their own ideas.
Everybody thinks that they know what's best.
And if you get to the point where we're atdisagree but commit and you're not willing to

(40:39):
force that through the machine, then yourmachine will pull in a whole bunch of different
directions.
I'm not saying that it can't be done.
I'm sure there are plenty of I'm sure there aresome number of very gentle leaders.
But the reality is there are too many thingsthat are trying to take you down.
If you don't have the fortitude to fight forwhat you believe in, you'll get pecked to

(41:00):
death.
How
would you differentiate an egotisticalaggressive leader from an aggressive and pro
social leader?
If you're egotistical, you want it because it'syours.
You're still stuck in your emotions.
Your ego is built around being right.
Your ego is built around people showing youdeference.
What I tell people here at Impact Theory is Iwant you to give my feedback to me publicly and

(41:25):
aggressively.
And the reason I want that is because I don'twant you afraid to say, Tom, this is stupid.
This is a terrible idea because you're worriedabout how it's gonna come across, and I'm gonna
fire you.
Mike, just give it to me as raw as you can inpublic.
And if you happen to spill into aggressive, Iliterally don't care.
I just want the right answer.
And so I'll take that on.

(41:47):
I will thank you for the feedback.
Now I'm not telling people I want you to be ajerk.
I don't.
But I don't want people to be afraid that, oh,man, if I say that, this is gonna be taken the
wrong way.
Now I wanna know what you believe to be true.
What do you believe to be true?
I'm blind to something.
I know that.
And if I'm blind to something, I'm counting onother people to say, hey, this is the thing I
think you're blind to.

(42:07):
They're not always gonna be right, just as Iwill not always be right about what they're
blind to.
I won't always be right about what's gonna workin the market.
But we should all be well intentioned peoplethat say what we believe to be true, even at
the risk of being a jerk, like just say yourthing.
And then once we have clarity, we can decidehow to move forward.
And if I'm wrong too many times, then I'm notgonna survive very long.

(42:27):
I will lose talent, and I won't be able to keepthe company afloat.
Rightfully so.
I've gotta be right enough to build momentum inthe company.
It's just that simple.
Giving leaders feedback is one of those thingsthat sounds very easy, but extremely difficult
to institutionalize.
How do you create the incentive framework thatpeople are willing and proactive about giving

(42:47):
feedback?
Keep people on, reward people that areeffective and willing to speak to power, and
fire people that are too emotionally weak to doit.
People are super weird about that second one,but that is very important.
If I they're at Impact Theory anyway.
There is not a single person who has ever beenfired for telling me that I had a terrible idea

(43:11):
even if they were aggressive.
I just literally don't care.
But there have been plenty of people that havebeen let go because they just they can't speak
to power.
And then when they leave, it's like, woah.
This was very different, a very differentassessment of what we were doing than you had
when we were working together.
So, like, what gives?
And it's always like, I was just afraid ofthis, that, or the other.

(43:32):
And so yeah.
Listen.
I hate that it sounds so cut and dry, but ifsomebody is working for me because they need
the paycheck, it is not my fault that theydon't know how to save money.
So you should always have six months so thatyou can tell a boss that he is a moron if you
need to.
And here at Impact Theory, somebody's gonnafind out real fast.
I don't care.
If you think I'm a moron, just tell me how so Ican get better because I know I'm not gonna be

(43:55):
able to do this by myself.
And over time, a certain subset of people go,he's actually serious about this.
And they will spread that word to other peoplebecause they'll be like, man, I've I've said
things to him that I thought for sure weregoing to, like, really piss him off, and they
don't.
He just wants excuse me.
He just wants the right answer.
And, yeah, over time, it permeates the culture.
But I have found, and maybe just because I'mnot good enough, but I have found I cannot get

(44:19):
a 100% compliance with that.
Some people just live in fear.
I wanna go on a bit of a sensitive subject formany people, free will.
You've had neurosciences, doctor NolanWilliams, you had doctor Andrew Haberman, and
and many other neuroscientists.
Where do you stand today, 2025, in regards tofree will and whether human beings have free
will?

(44:39):
It does not exist.
Like, I'm shocked that people even fight forthis.
It just seems so self evident.
It is impossible that it exists.
I don't understand how people come to thatconclusion.
There's a book by Robert Sapolsky calleddetermined.
Read it.
Report back.
Like, I have I've seen him do countless debateswith people.

(44:59):
I just don't see how there is any wiggle roomwhatsoever for, free will.
But don't live your life like that.
You've gotta live your life like you do havefree will.
So to me, this is just a switch.
I flip my mind.
I just I don't care.
It is what it is.
I'm going to live my life as if I had free willeven though it seems patently self evident that

(45:19):
we do not.
And how do you reconcile high agency with alack of free will?
Yeah.
It it's people that have had the good fortuneto have the right genetics, the right
upbringing, and encounter the right ideas aregonna be high agency.
It just is.
But here's the thing.
We respond to ideas.

(45:40):
So it is a good thing that as humans, wepropagate these set of ideas because they will
impact the other people who are alsodeterministic creatures to move in a new
direction had they never encountered thoseideas.
So even though I know I can't help myself butsay these things because of my biology, my
upbringing, the ideas that I've encountered,the things that I've tried, mistakes that I've

(46:03):
made, all the things I've learned, the frame ofreference that I've cultivated over time,
deterministically, of course.
Like, I get it.
It makes it so that the words that are comingout of my mouth are not my choice, but
nonetheless, it feels like they are.
And I lean very deeply into how much it feelslike they are.
And so here we are.
It It's interesting.
I don't understand why that question is sointeresting to people.

(46:26):
It's like consciousness.
I couldn't care less.
Like, unless you're trying to do something,like if you're okay, if it's necessary for AI,
cool, I get it.
You gotta figure it out.
But if you're not programming AI, why do youcare?
You are conscious.
Be before we argue, I wanna strengthen youryour view.
Yes.
One was there's Benjamin Libet's experiment in1980, which found that basically the brain had

(46:50):
made a decision three hundred millisecondsbefore actually the person believed they had
made the decision.
So it was basically literally hardwired in thebrain.
Another one is using fMRI machines.
There was a study in 2008 by Doctor.
Soon that basically, seven to ten secondsbefore they reported conscious awareness of the

(47:12):
decision, an machine came into the head,basically, could predict that they had already
made the decision.
Mhmm.
The way that I look at it this is I'm acompatibilist.
I believe that we don't have free will in themacro sense, but we do have free will in the
micro sense.
What does that mean?
That means that I can't get out of my brain.

(47:33):
Like, these questions I'm asking you, mypreparation, all those are deterministic, but
it's determined based on the actions that Imade in order to to get that that information.
So I do have free will in terms of the inputs,like, and the behaviors I put in my head and
kind of my own LLM that I've developed.
But once it's in there, it's very predictablewhat I'm gonna ask, how I'm gonna counter.

(47:55):
But I do feel like that that's my view.
That's also roughly two thirds of philosophershave this compatibilistic view versus kind
of crazy.
First there's also an opposite crazy,libertarian free will, which I think is
nonsensical, which is I could come up with acompletely first principled ideas that I've
never heard or seen anywhere.
I don't believe that either, and not manyscholars do as well.

(48:17):
Fair enough, man.
It it just seems so easy to disprove that, butand I'm happy to start going down that path.
But, yeah, I, this is this is something that'sso, like, open and shut for me.
Do you wanna argue?
Because we can certainly get into it.
I'd love to hear

(48:37):
You tell
me.
For sure.
Yeah.
I'd love to hear
Okay.
So, how many Nobel Prize winners have Downsyndrome?
Zero.
Okay.
Why?
Because they don't have enough intellectualhorsepower in order to be one of the people
selected for Nobel Prize.
Correct.
So we are all limited by our biology.
If you are limited by your biology, how in anyway, shape, or form do you have free will?

(49:01):
You are merely a, like, conscious agent insideof a deterministic sequence of events.
So if if we both know that that one weird twistof biology makes it impossible for them to
achieve certain outcomes, I hope it is selfevident that you are equally impossible of
achieving certain outcomes, that we are allbeholden entirely to our biology.

(49:25):
You are just a chemical processing plant.
And given that this is about physics.
And once it's about physics, there's no roomfor free will.
You can't transcend physics.
You are trapped.
You are trapped by the laws of physics in thesame way that a video game character is trapped
by their coding.
A Fortnite character cannot become Minecraftcharacter instantaneously.

(49:48):
It's all deterministic.
It's all code.
So given that I I yeah, I I'm guessing peopleare bothered by it in some weird way, but I'm
like, turn that piece of your brain off.
One of the arguments against determinism isquantum physics.
The only thing they can argue for is there'srandomness, but randomness is not the same as

(50:10):
free will.
It just means I can't predict the outcomes ofthis because of quantum.
And therefore, even though it is deterministic,it's determined on a probability spectrum and
not on like a one to one.
But the best explanation I've ever heard ofquantum physics is quantum still adheres to
this is the most likely outcome.
So even if all of these insane number ofvariables all have some dice roll as a part of

(50:34):
them, it still has a dice roll that's a part ofthem.
They are a finite number of possible outcomes.
And even if it's an infinite number of possibleoutcomes, you're still beholden to the laws of
physics, even if the permutations are literallyinfinite.
But in that, none of that says you took controlof that process, not like you get to reach into

(50:59):
the quantum realm and go this one instead ofthat one.
So let's talk about knowledge accumulation.
There's a completely new industry or new topic.
How do you get up to speed at the fastestpossible pace on something completely new?
For me, it's engagement with the topic at themost tactile level that I can.
So you wanna learn about building video games,build a video game.

(51:22):
There's no faster way to learn it.
AI is also just an obscene advantage.
I cannot fathom how useful this has alreadybeen in my own life.
When I think I'm like, as a Gen Xer, I'm likethat complete cusp where in high school, we had
to go to the university library and literallyrandomly search books for information, to find

(51:42):
even just a quote to then the Internet comesalong, but it's slow and terrible to then the
Internet, like, oh my gosh.
Like, you can get answers so fast to now thebirth of AI.
It is wild.
So, yeah, AI and, like, actually getting yourhands dirty between those two things, man, can
get up to speed on a topic very quickly.

(52:03):
I call it the cost the cost of curiosity.
So it's gone down from spending months in in alibrary, and now the cost of curiosity has gone
gone down that even just things I'm completelycurious, like, I had my bachelor party this
weekend.
I'm like, when was it created?
Within within two seconds, I found out thefirst bachelor party was in fifth century BC,

(52:23):
which really blew my mind.
But I would never spend twenty five hoursresearching when a bachelor party was started,
but now that cost of curiosity has gone down.
And and it helps on big big topics as well, butit's it's kind of it makes the world so much
more interesting.
Agreed.
Where
where do you go five, ten years from now,deterministic or not?

(52:46):
Where do you see yourself, and how much willmedia be a part of who you are in the long
term, or is this more of a short term stretch?
Now for me, I've known that I wanted to be inmedia since I was 12.
This has been me making good on a promise tomyself that I would generate the finances that
I need to control my artistic destiny.
And so here we are.

(53:07):
We've been building a game called ProjectKaizen now for about three and a half years.
I could not be more proud of what we'veaccomplished.
Probably still a year away from being on Steam,two years away from, like, it being, like, the
final version of this phase anyway since thelarger vision is gonna take probably a decade
and a half.
But that is where I expect to be in five yearsis still building that out.

(53:34):
You being on YouTube or some equivalent to beable to pursue my intellectual pursuits, I
would imagine I'm also still doing.
I believe that America is in the midst of anabsolute crisis right now, both economically
and culturally.
And never did I think that I would be talkingabout that kind of thing, but it has become one
of the most important obsessions of my life.

(53:57):
I think maybe because I don't have kids,ironically, it makes me wanna make sure that
I'm leaving the world to people in a betterstate than I found it.
And I don't feel like that's currently thecase.
So if I don't think in terms of legacy, but Ido think in terms of like be good to the next
generation.
And yeah, we're in The US very specifically isin a super dark place.

(54:21):
We are going to go bankrupt on our currentcourse.
I would say within ten years, we'll start todefault.
That's a mathematical inevitability.
We would have to change course dramaticallyfrom what we're doing right now.
I think about that a lot.
So I imagine five years from now, I'll still betalking about that.
I I did listen to your to your interview withRay Dalia.
I listened to Marc Andreessen, Tony Robbins.

(54:43):
You've had some of the most amazing people onthe planet.
Where could people keep up to you, and wherecould they go to see more of your podcast and
to learn more about where you're working on?
Go to YouTube at Tom Billieux for sure.
Oh, thank you, Tom, for for reaching out, and,thank you for for jumping on podcast.
Thanks for having me on, man.
I appreciate it.

(55:04):
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