 How long have you been doing it? 10 and a half years. That is insane. Yeah, yeah. Man, you really got on to podcast before anyone else. You know what though? It's kind of like, you know, the cryptocurrency craze right now and everyone's doing it. People who got it in 10 years ago, there's a few of them that made like millions of dollars. But most of them, they bought like one Bitcoin and they're like, eh, whatever. And then they sold it when it went up to $100. Right. So that's kind of where I feel like almost I did it with podcasting, it was like in super early. But then for six years I was like, eh, I'll just record one of these every three weeks and not care. Right, yeah. Had I been running it like a business back then and been more serious about it, it would have looked a lot different. Like if you look at the Rogan show or Nerdist were, they're handing out stickers and stuff. And I remember getting a sticker for Nerdist podcast and I was like, they're making stickers? What are they doing that for? Now of course it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. You slowly build up to this enormous brand. Yeah. And speaking of enormous brands, you tell me about Quest Nutrition Man because I looked online when I was Google stocking you as required before. I mean, I did that before we were friends too, but I'm like, oh, I gotta refresh my memory about this stuff. The brand that you, I had to do math in my head, which I always despise. Yeah, I'm with you there. Because the growth was it was like 57,000% over the first two, was it two or three years? Three years, yeah. And then I was like, oh, that's like 57 times. Wait, no. It's like 570, wait, hold on. It's 570, and then my brain melted because I thought, how do you grow that much at all? I mean, that's like going from, hey, I've got a box of stuff I cooked up into my kitchen to like, hey, we need another warehouse to store all my stuff. That is literally what it was like. And we went from, because this isn't manufacturing. Like it's one thing to scale by 57,000% in software. Yeah, I've got users. I gotta pay Amazon an extra $50 a month, right? I've got a few extra servers, right? Yeah. The last boss it was going from renting a commercial kitchen by the hour to at the end of it, we had just in one of our facilities, 300,000 square feet. I mean, it was absolute madness. Which is another number that kind of, you can't wrap your head around when you think about it. Cause you think about, oh, my house is 1,500 square feet. You're like, how many of my house fit into 300,000? Right. You could fit multiple football fields in one of our facilities. It was sanity. That's a lot of bars slash food products. Yes, agreed. It really is crazy. And at that scale, little mistakes, and I'll get into this in a little bit, I think too, but little mistakes are millions of dollars slash, hey, we're gonna throw out 400,000 bars that have too much chocolate in them or whatever. But how do you even go from the seed idea? Cause when I was looking up on Facebook a long time ago, you and I have a mutual friend that I grew up with. And I thought, oh, how could you know this guy? Doesn't make sense. I asked him and he goes, oh yeah, I think we did like a movie thing together a few years ago. And I was like, nutrition brand, YouTube channel, online community, movie business. Were you just focused on a lot of different things or were you just kind of like, I guess I wanna do entrepreneur stuff, dot, dot, dot movies, dot, dot, dot nutrition bars. What's it do? No, man, I so wish that I had been like clever about this and that is not at all been my trajectory. So I fell in love with filmmaking when I was about 12 years old and just knew I'm gonna be a filmmaker. You're in a good business for that now. Now, right? Right. You wanna talk about seeming the most circuitous route anywhere ever that has been my life. So go to film school, think this is gonna be it. And I'm doing really well in my first couple of years in film school and think I'm just gonna smash this three picture deal when I graduate. But literally believe that. Like I wanna be able to understand, right? So. Get James Cameron on the phone real quick. Exactly. I'm almost graduated. Exactly, that's how it felt. And I thought, oh man, like I'm gonna have it made. I'm doing well here. And then my senior, so four people at USC get selected for a senior thesis film. It is a big deal to get picked. And I ended up getting picked. And so now I'm like, I'm one of the four. Like it's just all happening. It's all coming to fruition. All coming together just like I planned. Right, exactly. And then I crash and burn my senior thesis film. It is so horrific and so embarrassing and literally all but go into depression and just think I now have no idea what I'm supposed to do with my future. And I felt completely lost. And cause now I've graduated. There's no more infrastructure to help me cause I wasn't at all self-directed. So I needed that school. I needed the teachers. I needed the introductions. Like I needed those things to have a certain automatic nature to them. And so once I was all gone and I had sort of burned all those relationships by being untalented, I thought, what do I do now? Like I don't know how to get an agent. I don't even know how to get better. So I don't even know if I can get better. That's scary, right? Yeah, not having an agent fine all in good time but if you have no idea how to improve, that's kind of a scary. There's no, I was gonna say prospect. There's no, bleak. Big time. And that's how it felt. And I remember one time I was in an apartment. I couldn't afford furniture and I'm laying just on the floor. I'm laying on the floor with my face like pressed into the carpet. And I'm like, what am I gonna do with my life? Yeah, I was like, I don't, I never categorized myself as having been depressed at that time, but I was flirting with depression. And so I just felt lost. So I, thankfully, the thing that I ended up getting into is teaching filmmaking. And in teaching filmmaking, I realized to be able to teach, I need to start learning more about this. And they say the fastest way to learn something is to teach it that is so true. So in the process of teaching it, I really start to like feel like, whoa, I'm actually understanding where I went wrong in film school, what I had done wrong. I can now explain it to other people. And so then it became, well, if I can explain it to other people, can I begin to fix it in my own life? And that began the, I didn't have the words at the time because Carol Dweck had not yet written her seminal book mindset, but I began to develop a growth mindset sort of accidentally as a way to escape the depression of feeling like I'm a talentless hack. So I needed a new mindset that was gonna let me feel like I could get good and teaching gave me that little in that thread that then did become me developing my mindset, seeing that, whoa, I was actually able to make these students better that I really did. I wasn't blagging it, as the Brits would say. I really understood why their films, their scripts weren't working. I could actually help them. That gave me the insights into my own stuff. And so I felt like, okay, I can do this. And then these two entrepreneurs saw me give a lecture on the power of media and storytelling to influence behavior. And so they're looking at it from the perspective of influence buying behavior. And so long story short, they're like, hey, we need a copywriter. Why don't you come join us? And they said, you're coming to the world right now with your handout. You wanna be a filmmaker, but you're begging for money. You don't control your art. That's always gonna be a frustrating experience. So come get rich. And my house simple, that sounded at the time. Yeah, I was gonna say, didn't you believe them? Yeah, to be honest, I did. I have the magic sauce, just get in my van. They were, that is what I should have heard. But instead I was like, these guys have done it. They're self-made, right? So they're self-made multi-millionaires. They're telling me that they're willing to teach me how to do it. And so sure. And I remember everybody saying, oh, you're crazy, what are you doing? You've got this good job, it's safe. Like you're taking this big risk. These guys could be total shysters. Like you have no idea. It sounds like every internet ad ever. Like I've got a secret formula. Trust me, watch this five-part video series and then enter your email address. Exactly, and yeah, it was absolutely hilarious. But I took them at their word and went to work for them in the beginning. And they said, look, this is a startup. So don't think of yourself as a copywriter. You can have any role that you want in the company. You just have to become the right person for the job. And that means getting so good at that position that we want to put you there. We want to give you the responsibility. And I took them seriously and I just busted my ass. How old were you at that time? I would have been 26. Okay, so what time period did we go from like, I'm depressed, my face is pressed into the dirty carpet in this rental to now you've got a new sense of purpose with the startup? It was probably over about three or four years. Okay, because I just want to clarify this stuff. Because a lot of people go, one day it's gonna, and it's like now this one day overnight thing and this shift could take like half a decade. It took a very, very long time. And I mean, I would say that I am very aspirational. So I always feel like the person I'm trying to become is off in the distance. So it's still ongoing, but it was truly, truly, I had my first real epiphany about 10 years in where it was like, okay, that epiphany just changed my life. So, but that took almost a decade. What type of epiphany are we talking about? Where I realized it mattered what I built my self-esteem around and that I had been building my self-esteem around being right and being smart. And that meant I was putting myself in smaller and smaller rooms with smaller and smaller people and the most dangerous thing, that actually made me feel better about myself. And this is where people get lost, like from the outside, oh, like you never want to do that. But it's like, yes you do, because it feels awesome. And so that's how people get in trouble. So even though I was limiting my prospects in life, I truly was feeling better about myself. So you're essentially, yeah, you're kind of going down this narrow path where the better you feel about yourself, it requires you to cut away people who are better at something than you, cut away a learning opportunity, narrow your focus to something that's not gonna go anywhere so that you're the smartest guy in the room or something along those lines. 100%. Oh, that's so dangerous. And I called myself the king of remedial jobs. And I loved that because I was the king of something. Yeah, you're like, I'm the smartest Apple picker here. Yeah, I was selling video games. That was when that phrase occurred to me. I was selling video games in a retail store. Like GameStop type situation? Yeah, it's a company that's still around. It's called GameDude. And I was driving like 45 minutes to the job and then working like anybody in retail, punch in, punch out. Oh man. And calling myself the king of remedial jobs. And I was just, it was a really, it's sad looking back, right? Cause I could be so many years ahead of where I am now, but I learned some really powerful lessons about wasted time and about like life is essentially the skill set that you have and like, that you need to have a learner's mindset and building your self-esteem around being right or being smart is incredibly fragile because you'll inevitably meet people brighter than you. Yeah, it's a, I want to be clear though, if you work at GameDude right now or GameStop, we're not making fun of your job. It's just that that was clearly not a fit for you. Correct. Given the other things that you've done. By the way, if you're working at GameDude, be the best GameDude employee of all time, which was not what I was trying to do. Right, no, it was like not what you were doing. You were just there because you're like, I need a job and you need to be. And I like video games. Yeah. All right, this makes sense. Yeah, and also, I think that it's really common for people who are in jobs like that to think, well, you know, this is only temporary, but then not necessarily be doing anything to get out of that situation. So if you're doing something like that and you realize it's temporary and you actually have a plan to get into a different situation, build yourself up more, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that type of position. I just want people to know that we're not like, oh, retail, what a loser, right? Because that's not how I feel about that at all. Okay, so you're in, you're in GameDude, or you decided to bounce from GameDude and join these entrepreneurs. Well, so that was before I was teaching, but yes. Right, of course. Okay, so you leave teaching, you're working for the entrepreneurs and at what point do you end up with bright blue shoes that match your house? That, well, that's a whole another story. The honest answer to that is when we were at Quest, we decided to launch an apparel company. Let me back it up, let's back up. Hold the shoes then, the shoe story. I wanna make sure we stay linear at least a little bit here. So you're working with these entrepreneurs, but why nutrition? Because you decided to start this nutrition brand with a bunch of business partners, I assume at the time we're also friends. There's a lot of protein bar companies, man. Why are you jumping into that crowded space with everybody and their brother trying to be the next Quest nutrition now to set the bar? So this was back about six years into my relationship with them and I went through an emotional crisis where I realized I was making more money than I'd ever made. By that point, I'd earned 10% equity in the company, I was making more money than I'd ever made. On paper, I was a multi-millionaire. It was like, but I was so unhappy. What was the company, what did they do? It was a technology company called Awareness Tech and we made security software. So it was like, your employees are emailing things out of the company that's sensitive and they shouldn't be, and so this stops them. They're useful but not sexy. Correct. And certainly not something you identified with as your life's purpose. 100% and the fact that we didn't use it in our own company was a pretty good signal that this wasn't something that was really native to who we were. Right. So I had just like, I had gotten so deeply dissatisfied with chasing money and I had been chasing it really hard for a very long time and realized that I was living the cliche of money camp by happiness. So I went to my wife and I said, look, I can't keep doing this. This is legitimately soul-wrenching. So don't wanna keep doing this. And I said, look, I wanna go quit and let's move to Greece and I'm gonna go back to writing. And we were gonna move to Greece for two reasons. One, we could find somewhere to live more cheaply, not in Athens, obviously. You're gonna live in like some outskirts town and then I'd be able to really get good at Greek. So my wife is Greek. I learned Greek to basically impress her and I really wanted to get like properly fluent. Learning Greek is impressive. Yeah, that's legitimately impressive. It wasn't easy. I'm gonna tell you that. It's a lot of like, Flemish sounds. It, well, yeah. And I'm not even good at making the sound. So let's start with that. I have a horrific accent, but that was, it was gonna be the double whammy. So I go into my business partners and I say, look guys, I can't do this anymore. I am so profoundly unhappy. Here's your equity back. I don't feel like it. Oh, you gave the equity back. Oh, 100%. Oh, man. If I'm not gonna cross the finish line, I don't think I should get anything for this. So here it is, you know, peace out. And they were, they were totally dumbfounded. They didn't see it coming. Yeah, like you're giving us the equity back. And not only that, just we'd been working together for six years by that point. So it was like, what is happening? It came out of left field. I had not mentioned anything. I was a good soldier for the notion of we're gonna do whatever it takes to make this company profitable, build it up and sell it. And originally when they said, hey, come join us, get rich, it was get rich in 18 months. Now, I should have known better. They should have known better. Do you think they knew at the time? No, no, I don't. I think they really believed it. And they had had success before that on that kind of timeline. I mean, this is right around like the dot, it was post.com crash, but it was like, there was still that fever and it was building back up that like to get rich so fast in technology. We're gonna flip this. We're gonna flip it. Exactly. Microsoft is right on the doorstep. Well, they were thinking they had this whole thing like with security agencies. So like governmental agencies. Oh wow. And there were people that were like, oh my God, this is exactly what we need. And it's like- Cause if anything moves fast, it's the government. And that should have been my first step off. So yeah, that, I think they believed it. I certainly believed it. And then that turned into six years of not taking a day off and just like legitimately selling my life for a very long time to get rich. Now, looking back, it was so empowering in terms of what it taught me about entrepreneurship and all of that. And like really put me to the test in terms of how hard am I willing to work to make something come to fruition. But it had begun to not only detract from me emotionally, but from my marriage. I mean, it was just a nightmare. So when I say, like I quit, thank you guys so much. They say, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. Really? That phrase let me connect back to something other than the money, which was the brotherhood. And remembering that these were two guys that I loved and trusted and wanted to be around. I just didn't want to be around the business anymore. And so that was really big. And I think that there's many, many ways they could have responded that I still would have been like, no, thank you. I just can't do this anymore. But that one in particular was like, for them it was also about something other than the money. So I said, look, if I'm gonna come back, then the following things have to be true. We've got to build a business that's based entirely around passion. It's got to be all about value creation. I want to build community. And I didn't have the words for transparency. So I kept saying, I want the business to have my real personality. Like I want to be who I really am. I don't want to be a clever marketer. I want to be me. And I want that to be valuable to the community, to the company. And so they were like, man, we feel exactly the same. So we set a goal that in the next six months we'd hit X revenue and sell the company or we would not hit X revenue and we'd sell it anyway. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah, but just obviously for a lot less. Sure. So six months later we still hadn't hit the revenue and so we decided we're gonna start our next company. So we didn't just like sell the company and then figure it out. Like at that point we began in earnest and we'd been talking about it up to that point but we began in earnest building that next company. So to answer the question you actually asked which is why get into protein bars. So going back to it has to be something that we're passionate about. It's got to be based on value creation. So we founded the company in fairness for three very different reasons. But for me, I'd grown up in a morbidly obese family and wanting to help them, wanting to save my mom and my sister. Were you also overweight or not? I was overweight but not like that. And I had been losing. So to give you a story that'll sort of frame where I was, when I went to college, I took it so seriously and I was working so hard and I was so focused that instead of gaining 15 pounds I lost 35. Wow. And you're thin, I mean, if you're watching this on YouTube you know this but there's not a whole lot you can lose. Well back then there was a little bit more. There's a little bit more. And I saw a girl my sophomore year in college that I hadn't seen since high school and she was like, whoa, what happened to you? She was like, I used to think of you as the chubby kid. And I thought, what? Like that was so like your whole childhood suddenly gets like re-imagined. I was like, well, you thought of me as a chubby kid because I used to suck in my gut all the time. I didn't think people could tell. Like I'm getting away with this, nobody even notices. Yeah, so not realizing that I absolutely was not getting away with it. But compared to my family who really struggled profoundly, I didn't struggle like that. And by today's standards, no one would say that I was chubby. But back then, I mean this is 25 years ago, back then sure, so you'll round me to the chubby guy growing up. And then I really put on weight later, so as I started getting older and metabolism changes. Tell me about it. So I ended up putting on about 60 pounds. Now some of it was me trying to get more muscular, but some of it was, I just didn't know what I was doing. So I was just packing on the pounds. And so I got 60 pounds heavier than I am now. And this is still while we're at the technology company, not thinking about nutrition, but we're all talking about nutrition just in terms of what we can do with it in our own lives. And so I finally just like get fed up of being fat. And I'm like, I really want to get lean. But people that set the bigger, more aggressive goals, they're the ones that end up actually attaining them. So I didn't say like, oh, I want to lose 10 pounds. I said I want to get six pack abs. Why do you think it is that people who set more audacious goals are more likely to achieve those goals? Is that what you're saying? Well, totally. And it's because it's exciting. And you need a compelling future to use Tony Robbins' words. You need a compelling future to pull you through. To be that thing that you wake up excited because working out sucks, dieting sucks. So you've got to have something that like you're amped up about. And so for me, this was right after the original X-Men came out and I wanted to look like Wolverine. Dang. That was like- Aggressive goal. Well, now admittedly, if you look at him in the first movie compared to the last movie, he's like 25 pounds heavier of like pure muscle by, you know, movies three and four. Right, yeah. And it wasn't quite as audacious. Now you have to take all kinds of hormones probably or something. Yeah, possibly. Not saying Hugh Jackman takes anything, just saying some people might need to. Yes. And I certainly did not want to do that. And I've never used exogenous hormones just not because I'm not even opposed to it. And I'm sure at some point in the future I will as a hormone replacement therapy or whatever. But certainly back in my 20s, I didn't want to play with that. And so I go hell bent, gonna make that happen. That was I put it up on the fridge. I'm gonna look like this guy and just start dieting, dieting, dieting. And over that period just become obsessed with nutrition and realize how much through what you eat and don't eat, you really can have massive impact on your body. So it was a very exciting time for me. So in that period, I'm thinking about, I want to save my mom and my sister. I've already had this, by the time we found a quest I'd probably done about 45 of the ultimate 60 pounds of loss. Wow. I'm like really, really into nutrition. It seems like such an awesome way to impact people. And so that's why we decided to do it. And there were no protein bars in the market that we would eat. So despite the fact that it was a crowded marketplace, we just knew that there was really an opportunity. And it's fascinating for anybody out there that is thinking about being an entrepreneur and people are telling you it can't happen. So first of all, everyone told us that we'd never be able to make it in the protein bar market. We actually had a distributor tell us, I need another protein bar. Like I need another hole in the head. And then unlike you, I came in late to the podcast game. And when I first started, a very well-known and well-respected guy that's helped a lot of people like get started on stuff like this. I won't rat him out, because I actually really like him. But he was like, did you too late to the game? Like it's just- Oh, that's so not true. It's not gonna happen. Even now it's not too late. I totally agree. We're in new media. There's, this is infant days of even of the internet, maybe toddler days of the internet. Yeah, of course. I mean, there's, otherwise we wouldn't be inventing new means of distributing media every year. I mean, Snapchat brand new. Somebody's dominating that. DJ Khaled or whatever, dominating that, right? Not too late. That's funny that somebody told you that. That's almost like a fear thing. Like, I hope you don't enter the space because I'm doing pretty well and you're kind of adjacent to my niche or something like that. That's interesting. The funny thing is he's actually paid to consult on that stuff. He doesn't even have his own. Huh, okay. Yeah, so I mean, it was one of those like, your name goes on a list. Good sir. Yeah. As I get bigger, I will think of you every single day. It's like the Game of Thrones list that Aria has of people she wants to kill. Exactly. I don't plan to stab him in the neck. Maybe not quite like that. But I do love that there are people that give you doubt and I think one of the greatest things, cause I really respect this guy to this day and look, he actually is a great person. He just didn't see it and didn't see how I was going to pull it off, right? And so he kept asking like, but what's your like, what's your thing? Like what differentiates you? And so, you know, when people doubt you, especially people that respect you, it gives you that little extra. Little extra, yeah, a little extra. It's like Al Chapo's dad told him he's never going to be a big name drug dealer. Is that really true? That's what I saw on his little. I want that to be true so badly. That would be amazing. Son, you'll never make it in the drug trade. You're never going to be a godfather. And he's like, you just watch. I'm going to be the most horrible person in Mexico. That's hilarious. Yeah. So, okay, so you are trying to help out your family. You've got that sort of why you've got this other person doubting you with the new media stuff, but quest nutrition, why is this special? There's no protein bars you would eat. I do remember buying protein back in the day and one of the ingredients was cookies. That was literally one of the ingredients in the cookie flavored protein. That's amazing. A lot of the Mickey cookie flavored includes real cookies. Do I want to be eating this every day? I'm not sure. No, you want to. It just won't do good things for you. Right, right, sure. So, you're creating these bars and then suddenly obviously whatever marketing magic you guys had and whatever sort of product distribution business magic you had resulted in your company becoming one of the fastest growing companies in the country. Yeah, so what was really going on there is you had us fed up of doing business the old way saying this is all going to be about value creation. We're now going to deprioritize making huge profits. So that's never going to be how we make a decision. We're going to make, look, we were business savvy. We weren't stupid, but at the same time, if an ingredient was more expensive but better for you, even though that meant that it would be less profitable because you can only charge so much for a protein bar, then we would accept that it was going to be less profitable. And when we started, we really didn't know. Like is this business going to thrive? Is it going to survive? We had no idea. We thought through just being shrewd at business, we could at least survive, but we didn't expect it to grow that rapidly, so. You didn't. So even you were surprised by the amount of growth. The speed 100%. We always thought we would get that big. We just thought it would take a very long time. So what was happening was we were making all the decisions based on what's better for the customer right at a time where social media is taking off. So right at the moment where we say, you know what, the social media thing, it's going to be a game changer. Other people don't see it, but we're going to bet huge on it. Realizing the reason we were going to win at social media was because we were going to give people a reason to talk about us. And that reason was always going to be uplifting, empowering, exciting. We were going to evangelize them at every turn. It was going to be the world's greatest customer service. It was going to be the best product. It was going to be marketing that was all about value add. Instead of trying to sell, we wanted you to get a recipe that like, even though it wasn't like a hard sell, you were stoked that you got a good recipe for healthy food. If you called up and said, hey, I want to lose fat, what should I eat? We'd say chicken breast and broccoli. And when you sell chicken breast or broccoli, but that's a true answer. So we were always encouraging people to eat whole food whenever you can. We understood where we fit in. When you're on the go, when you want something to taste like a cookie, but actually isn't made with real cookies, like we were the thing that you were going to eat. And people were just like, Jesus, this is a different kind of company. So now imagine that we're investing in social media when it's small, the other person's really thinking about it. But the universe is just coming to social media hand over fist. So every new person that came onto social media was just a new person that was aware of us. So all the old brands had a worse product and didn't understand social. And we were social from the jump. And not only just social, but about building community. Right, so the other brands are like, click like on our Facebook page to get notified about stuff. Like new things that we want to sell you. And you guys had more of it, like you said, a value add. But that, I mean, does that explain 57,000% growth? Is that just how, was everyone just talking about quest bars at some point? Literally. Yeah, I feel like I heard about it and everybody I know knew about it, but also I was kind of a nerd in this space. So I just, but 57,000%, even if one person was your customer the first year, you had 50, you know, that's... It gets massive. It's massive. I mean, when you look at the scale, we did hundreds of thousands of dollars our first year. So it wasn't off of a tiny number. It wasn't off of a, you know, we weren't doing 10 million our first year, but it was, I mean, look, in five years alone, we were valued at over a billion dollars just to give you an idea. Like, and that's just math, right? That's math on EBITDA. So it was real and we were making real revenue. We don't report our numbers, but they were big. Yeah, they would have to be. So big numbers. Yeah, I won't report it. Privately helped the company. It was a lot of dash. Yeah. Amazing and just absolutely incredible. And really, like, we just were willing to do things other people weren't willing to do. And one of the huge breakthroughs for us, because the product was real, by the way, that is like a really important thing to know. What do you mean a product was real? Metabolically advantageous. So if you're somebody on Instagram and you're, you know, a fitness person, you pose in bikinis all day, you're actually eating our product because it tastes good and it actually helps you stay in shape. So they were just going crazy talking about it. And being the cool new band, it was like you wanted to tell somebody about it because you were the cool person that knew about the saying that nobody else knew. It was real. We were uplifting, community based, value add marketing. So there was just like, there were no dark corners. It was just this comp, not only is the product good, but like when we encounter these people at a trade show, they're nice to us and they treat us well and their customer service a second to none. And it was just all happening right as people were getting more crazy about fitness and social media was kicking off. It was just like the perfect storm of timing with us being fed up of business as usual. And so we were just doing everything in a different way, always putting the customer first. So why the hell did you leave? What's going on? Dude, it was, A, it was an amazing 14 year run. The truth of- 14 years. I wanna highlight that. Well, not a quest. So it was 14 years from the time I met my partners to the time I left. But that's a, I mean, that's a really long time. Yeah, and seven years at Quest. So it was, it was unbelievable, amazing, transformative, everything for me. We had gotten to the point where we had so much success and I felt like Quest was crushing it and it was gonna continue to crush it without me. And I began to have a vision that was divergent from my partners. So one thing was we wanted, we always wanted Quest to be a platform company. It was part of the reason it was called Quest. It was like whatever your Quest is. And so we started to do, going back to my shoes, we tried to do an apparel brand and the apparel brand failed. And the reason the apparel brand failed is you don't think of like upscale apparel when you think of a protein bar company, right? So, and we, because we were so in our heads and we knew like the mindset that allowed us to build it, like the protein bar was never the thing. It was a food company about empowerment. So for us, it was so natural to do clothing about empowerment, food about empowerment. And for me, I'd always wanted to do a show specifically, that's sort of a lie. I always wanted to do something about mental empowerment. And then over time realizing that a show was the right answer. And ultimately end up doing the show and the show was so amazing. And I had so many cool guests come on the show and we end up, you know, getting in the original iteration hundreds of millions of views. I mean, it's just bonkers. Yeah, I mean, that's how I found out about who you were. And I was like, geez, I hope this person succeeds, but there's a part of me that's like, but not too much because I don't want to feel bad about myself or anything. So, so get good, but not that good. So it's really good whiskey, by the way. I'm glad you like it. It was, it was gonna be an expensive endeavor because even with all the views people were going, what's the guy behind a protein bar company doing a show about the mind? We weren't even talking about the body because I wanted to get away from that. I wanted to expand the brand. I wanted people to understand like, we are more than protein bars, we're even more than food. Like there's a mentality behind all of this that's let us make these very counterintuitive decisions that has led to this kind of success. And because I had the story of, look, I got into this to get rich, you know, 14 years ago and have gone through this total transformation of realizing that really is an empty dream. It's like Jim Carrey said, I hope everybody gets rich and famous so you can see that's not the answer. So it was like, I had gone through that. I realized like viscerally in my soul, I knew that chasing money wasn't the answer. And that once I stopped chasing money, I became fantastically wealthy. So it was like, guys, I'm telling you like, I've gone through this crazy journey and the way that I think of it is I got out of the matrix. Okay, I had this, the matrix to me, the movie is the perfect metaphor for a limiting- You love the matrix. Wait, if you don't know Tom, he loves the matrix. Love the matrix. And the whole, the matrix changed my life. And because of that is the reason that we're building the studio, but not to get ahead of myself. So I'm starting the show because I really want to show my employees. That's how it started, which is why it was called Inside Quest. I wanted to show the employees Inside Quest that you're gonna hear, I'll bring on all these people that have inspired me, that are successful, that have achieved at the highest level. And you're gonna see, they say the same things I say because they're just universal principles of success. It's not like, oh, this successful guy is saying one radically different thing from this guy, from this guy, from this guy. Like you just don't hear it. Like it's the same things over and over and over. And so that's how it started. And then I thought, well, if we're gonna be doing this, why aren't we broadcasting this? Why aren't we leveraging social? We're a social first company. Like let's really start to broadcast. And so we started doing that and we started gaining a following. And I think fairly it was, I'm now dragging my partners along because it's still a business. It still has to be built, right? Sure. It has an expense structure. Like we're, you know, we've got all this equipment and we're allocating space to the studio and we're really trying to make something of it which does not come for free. Yeah, didn't your partners at some point think I'm over here selling protein bars and Tom's over here farting around on YouTube, what the hell's going on here? For sure. And so it became a question of is this actually moving protein bar units yes or no? And I believe to the core of my being that over a long enough timeline, it'll move units of anything because it's real. But that's a very expensive test to drag two other people through. So it just got to the point where we didn't share the vision. It was going to be very expensive for me to prove it out. It didn't seem fair to drag them along on that. And so we had just had the kind of success where we didn't need to agree to disagree, right? We could just say, hey, this has been an amazing run. I know you guys will continue to kill it. And one of my partners is the nutrition guy anyway. So it was just like a no brainer. So for my life to be complete, I need to address what I consider the dual pandemics of the body and the mind. So I'll always be involved in health and the impact theory we're now developing a new show all around health, which I'm really, really excited about. And then also the mind and what does that look like? And we play a game, or I play a game, I should say as an entrepreneur, no bullshit, what would it take? So no bullshit, what would it take to end metabolic disease, which was the mission at Quest? The answer is you have to make food that people choose based on taste and it happens to be good for them. And the no bullshit answer of mindset, how do you pull people out of the matrix to use my words? You need to hit them at the narrative level. So the only way that humans assimilate truly disruptive information is through narrative. I mean, they've done literal studies on this and... What does that actually mean? So think about mythology. You know Joseph Campbell? I know of Joseph Campbell. So he wrote a book called The Power of Myth and he talks about how humans for all time have been telling the same story over and over and he called it the hero's journey. And he wrote a book about it called The Hero with a Thousand Faces and then he followed up with The Power of Myth and he talked about how sitting at the core of all societies, all of civilization are these narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about our country, about our tribe, whatever. And these narratives are entirely fictional but when you don't recognize them as fiction they carry a ton of weight. And he talked about what happens when you live in a world where nobody believes in the mythology anymore and he said we're actually living through that time right now. And he said there's no shortage of mythology but people don't believe in it so they don't know how to extract the value. So I'm sitting here going first of all The Power of Myth, the book changed my life fundamentally probably more than just about any other book I've ever read. What about The Matrix though? Well, so that as a movie I'll give it that that changed my life from a movie standpoint more than anything but if I'm really honest, if I didn't have the framework of The Power of Myth I wouldn't have known how to read The Matrix. And so looking at why don't people extract the immense amount of value out of all of this amazing mythology that we create but nobody's telling people how to like look at Superman and understand it as an allegory rather than as just a piece of popcorn munchings left. So I thought, okay, I think I have the timing right again on something. I had the timing right at Quest in terms of how to market it. I think I have the timing right now to marry social content with traditional content to show people how to extract real value that will actually change their lives. Just like at Quest, eating the product was changing people's lives and so they were absolutely insane about telling people about it and they felt such a connection to the company we're getting that same thing now at Impact Theory. So I was just at an event, success live and literally I got mobbed and I walk in and it's people, I'm an entrepreneur dude, I walk in and people wanna take photos and literally the organizer of the event had to come and say, guys, we have to break this up because other speakers now literally it's the house doesn't have enough people in it. And that's because people watch the content whether it's you, whether it's me, whether it's any one of the guys that are doing what we do, the people listening to the content are actually being changed by it. And when somebody is changed by your content as you well know, they're so grateful and they just wanna be drawn deeper into that. And so I wanted to leverage the power that we now have by creating this kind of content to give people actionable steps that are already changing their lives to marry it to the way that they're gonna change their belief system. And I don't think their belief system is gonna change as radically in a less emotional environment like a podcast as it will in movies, TV shows, comic books, books, video games. Like if you could make this sort of just default setting that every character that you create, every storyline that you tell is about empowerment so that they literally can escape it. It's just there, it's ever present and the characters that they look up to and the TV shows that they watch, the lead characters are struggling with and then ultimately making decisions that if the person watching the show emulates it will make their life better. And so my whole thesis is built around Disney. And Disney, I mean he founded his studio in the 30s. His model's been staring everyone in the face and nobody's replicated it since the 1930s and it went like this. Disney understood one thing that every studio has ignored for whatever reason. And that was every piece of content that he put out had to be feeding into a brand ethos. So everything is about the magic of childhood about good triumphing over evil. So if I say to you, I'm gonna go see a Sony movie or a Warner Brothers movie, you don't know anything about it. Right, no, I don't have any sort of, oh well if it's a Sony movie it's gonna go this way. But if I say I'm gonna go see a Disney movie. Right, yeah, you're right. You already know something. I've got a preconceived notion of what it's gonna be about and that I can probably bring my kids that I don't have. Yeah. Exactly. Possibly gonna be animated. So our thing is if Disney's the most magical place on earth can we make the most empowering place on earth? And so that's the model and that's why it's gotta be. And that places your living room. As of right now that place is literally my living room. And the funny thing is we actually call this impact house. This is, and we could really derail into what we're trying to turn this into in terms of being a cultural magnet and getting influencers here like yourself. Yeah, so far so good. Right, so I mean it isn't a mistake that you and I have gravitated towards each other. It isn't a mistake that so often the guests that I'm researching for my own show I end up at what you're doing, right? Because you're helping people live a better life. You're helping people get the skills that they need to be more empowered to do something. And I want to get to know people like that. I want to be useful to people like that. And when it happens and it's a real connection, and I would say that you and I have more than just a like, hey, we can be useful. It's like, hey, there's really something here. And the first time that we hung out was literally just that. You came to the house and we just chilled. Yeah, it was awesome. We clicked right away, which is like, I like to think I can click with a lot of people, but I was actually, it wasn't just like, okay, how much longer do I, I was like, wow, I really like this dude. And frankly, the first time I started looking up at your stuff, I was like, okay, another person in a similar space, he'll be gone in three months. Ignore, close the window. Then later on it was like, oh, this. And then I saw a video clip and I thought, oh yeah, I've seen this guy. And then I was like, all right, I'm gonna look up more about this Tom Bill you got. And then I saw you popping up everywhere and I looked you up and I was like, okay, he's done other things. He's not just like, I wanna write a book so I can be a thought leader so I can quit my day job, which is where I think a lot of people come from. And then I started following what you're doing. And then that's when I was like, I gotta meet up with this dude. So I really do like what you're doing and what you're creating. And you do have a huge vision at some point where I just kind of felt like, wow, you built this. I mean, we're in your part of your living room, filming this right now. And I thought you have dedicated yourself to this if this is something you're building into the place where you live, which I have also done, right? It's not something where it's like, oh, I do this until I get bored of it. I mean, you clearly have a lot of focus and a lot of drive and you've worked through a lot of different projects, including Quest. And then you took your piece of that, which you just as easily could have never worked again and we could be having this conversation on your boat about how you retired at age, whatever, instead of doing something else. Well, that's a, here we go. How about this? Why are you still working? You don't need to do that. Yeah, it's interesting. So when we were able to take some money out of Quest, Lisa and I had a real decision to make. Do we buy an island and retire and never work again? Or do we re-engage? And the honest answer is, man, we didn't even have to think about it if I'm really blunt, because I know the game that you're playing, it isn't success, it's certainly not money. It's brain chemistry. And I want, there's an old Greek philosophical notion of technique that you spend your time gaining a set of skills that become of use to other people and the deepest sense of fulfillment you will ever have is by leveraging the skill set that is so unique to you that you've worked so hard for to help other people. And that is for sure how I'm wired. So the thing that really gets me excited that compelling future that we were talking about earlier for me is about how many people can I help get out of the matrix? And meaning, shuck off the limiting beliefs, see how their potential is nearly unlimited. I don't wanna get into stupid talk, throw it in the air, but it's like people are capable of so much more than they think because they think there's gonna come a day where they won't feel fear or they won't feel anxiety that day is never coming for you, but you can still push through that. And on the other side of that, I really started to get good, really execute at an absurdly high level, but it's all based on belief system and the belief system that you build for yourself that you build, it's a decision, you decide the things that you're gonna believe. You decide that you're capable of virtually anything. You decide you can learn and get good at something. I don't need people to believe it to be a universal fact, you just decide. And once you decide those things, then you start acting in accordance with that. And when you act in accordance with the belief that you can do anything and you can do it because you can learn it, not because you have some innate talent for it, that you can learn to get good at anything. Then suddenly you start working your ass off. You start practicing and studying and getting better and brick after brick, you turn it into something. So the more people that I can get to do that, one, I'll feel fulfilled in the process of doing it. And then two, I wanna live in that world where people are lit on fire and they're doing like, they've created a passion for themselves. They're living in accordance with that and they're building something to make the world a better place. So if we decide, okay, look, I'm gonna learn to do better with this or I can learn to do better with that or build these certain skill sets, what do we do then when confronted with, let's say, evidence to the contrary, right? Like, oh, I'm gonna learn how to build this business and I'm really gonna focus on this and I'm gonna teach my kids different values than I grew up with or move my family to a better neighborhood and things like that, whatever your goal might be. What happens when you start failing here and there? How do you preserve your belief system in the face of that? Because you could just as easily go, we're gonna make protein bars that people are gonna love, it's gonna change lives and then your distributors go, look man, I need another protein bar like I need another hole in my head. How do you preserve your belief system instead of just going, hey guys, nobody wants these bars, let's just throw them in the garbage? Yeah, I mean, that comes down to how did you build your belief system? Like, did you build it well? So I actually have, I've enumerated my belief system, it's 25 bullet points, which you can download at impact theory.com. You can have the same pages I was like. No, no, 25 bullet points, nice and simple and it is, they are the changes, I can speak. They are the changes. Going to that in the show notes, by the way, because I've talked over the URL, just go to the website, we'll find it. They're the changes that I made in my mind in order to become capable of running a business or building a studio, whatever. And in there is how to address failure. In there is the notion, the success is not guaranteed, the struggle is guaranteed, like I promise it can be hard or I promise that it will be hard, I can't promise that you're gonna win. So make sure you're doing something that you love so that the mere act of striving and trying for it is making you feel more and more alive. So look, at the end of the day, let's say that I spend the next 60 years of my life trying to build the next Disney and beat them at the game and I never pull it off, okay? Well, so be it. As of right now, I'm so minuscule and people so don't take me seriously and it is literally hilarious how often people are just like, yeah, that sounds stupid. Some people will actually say it to my face and other people won't, they just like- Who says it to your face? I won't say it, but if you listen to enough podcasts, there are some fairly large figures that have made mention of not having a lot of faith in what I'm doing, but like I said earlier, the doubt, that is something that can drive you and allow you to push past it as long as you have the belief that you can learn anything, that you can get good. Cause my whole thing is even if I never achieve it, I'm gonna love the process because I believe in what I'm doing, the why of my mission to pull people out of the matrix to help them live a better life. I really believe in that. This is not a non-profit, this is a for-profit company so I've got the everyday puzzle piece of trying to figure out what I can monetize without turning people off, like how we make this really profitable and I enjoy that puzzle, like I enjoy the elements of being an entrepreneur, like they're really interesting to me and when you align things that you find interesting in your passions, then the struggle which is guaranteed is actually enjoyable. So I'm a deeply ambitious human being and I've just learned over time that you can make the demand that you make money doing something that you really, truly believe in. So yeah, to the person that is met with failure after failure after failure, the whole point of having a belief system is to inoculate you from losing enthusiasm during that process. Yeah, it seems very difficult to do because at some point you have to know whether or not your product or service is a good idea but that can be separated from your belief system that what you're doing is gonna benefit you in some way. So maybe your light-up, pant, decoration idea is not the way forward but the belief system doesn't have to take a hit, doesn't have to take a torpedo. Well, because the belief system in that one in particular is gonna tell you if it's not selling, it's not good enough. People don't want it. And you have to face that cold hard truth. And so now it becomes the difference between a path and a goal. My goal is to get people out of the matrix. I think the right path is to build a studio to do it. But if I'm wrong, then I'll pivot but I'm not gonna give up on the goal. The goal is like the most meaningful thing in my life. So I would just find another way to do it. Do your business partners think you're crazy for bouncing from a top name brand company that you spent forever, fricking forever building? You finally get to the top of the mountain. You can finally maybe take a breather and you're like, all right, I'm gonna go start from the bottom just cause I like pain. It's interesting. I don't know if they would say that I'm crazy but it clearly isn't what they want for themselves. How about that? Yeah, like they could be fishing on a yacht right now. They're like, I wonder what Tom's doing right now. Those guys are hardworking as well. So I doubt you're ever gonna find them just fishing off the back of a boat. Like they're engaged people. They wanna build the things. That's my gut. And obviously I'm the wrong person to speak on their behalf. But yeah, I would be very surprised by that. I always find that whenever I meet people who are highly successful, unless they're older and they've just burned out at some point or they're leaving it to the younger generation, there is no such thing as too much or the peak is always a false peak because you just constantly wanna drive. People often even say that about businesses that are nowhere near the size of Quest, like Art of Charm, they're like, man, your show's one of the biggest out there. What's next for you? And I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm only in the first 10 years of a 40 year career. Now it's just starting to get really fun because now I don't have to worry about how I'm gonna pay my mortgage. Now I can actually do things that are riskier because I'm not gonna be homeless if I fail. And people are like, man, you should just chill. You should just get good at golf or something. And I'm just thinking like, maybe in 40 years, not right now. So I understand, I understand the hunger for sure. And I definitely understand building a studio in the middle of your house and having a bunch of hardworking people hammering away on computers in your kitchen for example, I mean, it's a fun environment. I think your real blessing here is that your wife, Lisa, puts up with it. Yeah, well, she's my partner. I mean, we co-founded this thing. So she is a co-conspirator in every way, which makes it easy. So it's not having to convince her, it's just showing her a compelling vision that she's excited enough about to give up her kitchen. So far, so good, right? So far, so good. Tom, is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you wanna make sure you deliver? Oh man, my thing is whatever you think is gonna give that value to the people that listen to you. I really trust you to bring people on that are gonna help them do what they wanna do in their lives. And I certainly don't take that for granted. So I wanna be a tool of service for you. You are, if nothing else, a tool of service. That was quite the pause. Yes. Man, thank you so much. Awesome dude, thanks for having me on.