#08 - Tom Bilyeu: nutrition, fasting, meditation, mindset, immortality, and the secret formula of fulfillment

Foreign. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful, top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics@peterattiamd.com. In this episode I interview my friend Tom Bilyeu. Tom is the co founder of Quest Nutrition. Many of you have undoubtedly heard of this. They make obviously Quest Bars and a number of other products, but I think Quest Bars are sort of what put them on the map and keeps them on the map. Tom is one of three co founders and I know two of the three quite well, including Tom. He's also the host of something called Impact Theory, which actually we spend quite a bit of time talking about. I knew a lot less about Impact Theory and his work there than I knew about Quest. Now his mission in creating this was to create this sort of idea of what he calls an empowering media based platform for accelerating mission based businesses. Tom is incredibly driven and I think that comes across in this discussion. I've sometimes been accused of being a little too hyper, but when I'm around Tom, I actually sort of feel like I'm on Quaaludes or something given how much he's just sort of salivating and just, you know, so passionately jumping out of his seat to basically tell you about something that is generally really interesting and really, really helpful. He's just a completely driven Mission guy. And I learned a lot about Tom on this episode that I didn't know. I've known Tom for probably five years, maybe six years. But one thing I didn't know was that in the history of Quest, he basically interviewed virtually every person that was hired. And this is a behemoth company. And I'm not just saying that he was interviewing people who were applying for jobs in the C suite. I mean, if you were applying for a job on the production line, Tom wanted to interview you. And he would always ask people the same sorts of questions. And there was one question in particular that he asked everybody. I was actually kind of surprised by the answer. But in this sense, his time at Quest became a little bit of a laboratory for what he ended up doing later on and we what what he's doing today and where I think he's going. So in this episode we're going to talk a lot about Tom's history with dieting and how he changed his views on fat and fasting. And he had quite a radical transformation there. His quest for immortality, which if you've ever heard me talk on this subject, I. I'm not convinced that that's desirable or plausible, but I certainly love hearing about others talk about it. His background and what led to the co founding of Quest. Probably one of my favorite stories because it really speaks to following your bliss versus following the dollars, which I think the many great entrepreneurs will tell you is their secret. What he describes as a growth versus fixed mindset. I think this is a really important concept and I think it is worth paying attention to that. Why he would interview everyone he talked to or hired at Quest. And again, I was surprised by that. That was a completely new fact. We talk about why he started Impact theory and we talk about what fulfillment means to Tom. Now you'll be able to find a lot more information about Tom and some of the things that we talk about on this show inside the show notes, which will be@peterattiamd.com podcast so without further delay, here is my discussion with my friend, Tom Bilyeu.

Tom, yes.

Thank you so much for inviting me to your lovely place.

My pleasure, man. I have wanted to get you on my show forever.

So I am, I know, I feel like a real kind of jerk because you've been asking me for so long and I've been saying, yep, yep, yep. And then I pulled the bait and switch and got you on good. But I promise you, if you still.

Want me, I'm yours in a heartbeat. It would be amazing.

Well, just before we started, I met your wife for the very first time.

Which I'm shocked by. I still can't believe we've known each other this long and you've never met my wife.

And that's what prompted me to remember that it was about five years ago that Dom d' Agostino and I came up to meet with, I think at the time, just you and Ron.

Well, the first meeting I think was even with just Ron. I remember coming back and he was like, oh, we're into fat now. And I was like, that just seems crazy because at the point I was truly, truly rabbit starvation and had had massive success with it. And I did that because I was legitimately fat phobic. I was one of those dumbasses that was like what's fat, dude? Obviously it makes you fat. But that was me. Like, I already had a nutrition company at that point. That's the crazy part. So when I came back and I remember where I was and he was like, oh, yeah, we met with this guy, Peter Attia, Don d'. Agostino, and they really made me believe in fat. And I just thought, whoa, like, what a strange new world I've walked into. And then it ended up changing my life.

It's interesting because I've heard Ron say that many times. I've never heard you say what you just said, but I've seen video clips of Ron talking about this and I. I can't believe that the meeting that Dom and I had with you guys could have had such an impact on a company that was already on quite a trajectory.

Yeah, when you seek out disconfirming evidence, like when you actually want to know how you're wrong and you meet somebody that is really A, smart and B, just so well educated on a particular topic, it's like a fireworks moment. You long for those things because it's like, look, my suboptimal life has gotten me this far. Like, I've already achieved all of this living like a fool in some way that I'm as of yet unaware of. If I can become aware of that thing and then make different choices, then can my life be different? So the reason that it had such a big effect is because that's how we look at the world. It's like, I want to know how I'm wrong. I want to know in what ways I'm suboptimal. And so you guys coming in and making such a compelling case for fat. I ended up trying it really soon after you guys came because the thing for me, and I'm actually super curious to get your beat on where this is still. But at the time you guys are saying, look, there might be some anti cancer properties. And so I am obsessed. Dude, I don't know if we've ever talked about this. I'm obsessed legitimately with living forever. And what's the Woody Allen quote? I want to live forever by not dying, not by having my works go on. So I really, truly want to live forever. That's something that's captured my imagination since I was a little kid. So when you guys were talking about anti cancer properties, I said, all right, I got to give this a shot. And I did it. And I hated it in ways you can't imagine. I was doing a 4 to 1. I was in therapeutic range. So my, what, ketone bodies were north of 3, and my glucose levels were, like, low 60s, if I remember right. And I felt so sick, like, it was crazy. And I was warned, hey, there's this thing called the keto flu. So when it was happening, I was like, well, hey, found it. And I just thought, I just need to get through. You know, I forget how long I was staying therapeutic, but, like, let's call it five days. I'm gonna stay in the therapeutic range for five days. It's total misery, but, like, I can gut it out. And I made it through. And I was like, I'm never doing that again. It was so miserable. But in that time, I went from chronic wrist pain. I'd been icing my wrists up to two times a day, every day for 15 years. And I had, like, these little burn patches on my wrist from where the ice touched because I was just icing so frequently. It was crazy. And that was like, to just get through the day. But I had lost all this weight, dude. So I was £230. I go on a rabbit starvation diet, which I'll define as ultra high protein. Probably north of 80% of my calories were protein, and then just as little fat and as little carbohydrate as I could possibly intake. So I was doing basically a lot of steamed chicken breast with nothing but salt on it, and that was it. And I would eat, basically. I don't know, I was probably. I would oscillate between 1200 and 1500 calories a day. And I did this for roughly two years. And I went from 230 to about 170 and lost 60 pounds. And it was pure insanity. And I looked so good, dude, I was shredded. Best optical shape of my life. And I just wanted to stare at my abs all day. It was amazing. So I'm walking into this whole fat thing with that, right? Like 50 Cent said, I came into the game humble. Can't nobody tell me shit. Now it's like when I got lean, I was like, I've got this figured out. There's nothing left. And I just. I thought I had it dialed in, knew what to do, and never once did it occur to me that that was making my wrist 10 times worse. And so when you guys came and said, hey, there's anti cancer properties, I do it. I hate it. But in the middle of all that, I realized my wrists don't feel better. They feel perfect. And I remember coming into work going, this is the worst experience of my life. It is so Unpleasurable to be in therapeutic range ketosis, not knowing how to supplement. But guys, it is like a drug like effect on my wrists. I've never. This is crazy. And it' just eating. So I said, I'm never taking fat out of my diet again. I was like, there clearly was something to cell membranes anti inflammatory. There were all kinds of things about the importance of fat that I just wasn't appreciating. And now I'm experiencing it. So from that moment, whatever that was back in 2013, I've been now some variation of high fat, low carb or true ketogenic.

And when you were at 230, that was a relatively fit 230.

I was working out hard, I was strong as an ox. I would have had no stamina. I wasn't doing any cardio. It was purely about strength. So like, it wouldn't be something that would impress me today. And when I see pictures of myself back then, I'm like a little grossed out because it's like I got so myopically focused on getting bigger that I didn't realize how much of it was fat and really went through a bit of bigorexia during that phase where it was literally, if I saw food, I ate it. I just, I never wanted to miss out on like anything conceivably anabolic. I was all about it. And then I put a similar amount of obsession to losing the fat. And so then I lost a ton of muscle and so wasn't nearly as strong anymore. But I looked awesome. So I went from thinking only about strength to thinking only about aesthetics. And now I think about performance, and it's just changed everything.

So you said something a second ago, which is pretty interesting, and I'll pose to you a thought experiment. So you said you want to live forever. Now, what if I said to you, tom, it is your lucky day, because once in my life I get to bestow on one individual immortality. And I offered it to you here right now. Would you take it?

Yes, without question.

All right. Now, do you have kids?

No.

But you're married. I am a lovely wife.

Yep.

You have, you have wonderful friends.

Definitely. And they're all going to die.

That's right. Would you still want to live forever knowing that everyone you know is going to die definitively?

And that to me is such a psychological trap that you of all people, you have kids. So if I granted you your children, not your spouse, just your kids, would you want to do it?

It's a very interesting question because. So the short answer is I don't know the answer. I'm not convinced it's achievable. So I don't put a lot of time in thinking about something that I don't think is achievable, Though maybe you'll talk me into thinking it is achievable. I take a little bit of a Jobsian approach on this, which is there is something reasonable about death in that it's just closing the loop on the carbon cycle, and it forces a little bit of urgency. There's a sense of, you have to get something done now. That said, I hate the thought of saying goodbye to life. I mean, I hate the thought of. So I'm 45. Let's assume I've got 50 more years left on this planet. I know how fast the last 30 went by. I remember being 15 like it was yesterday. And I know that the next 30 and the next 40 will feel quicker because they will occupy a smaller percentage of my relative timeline. So I realize that very soon I will die. So when I think of it that way, I think, God, I just want one more year. One more year, one more year. But do I really want it to be immortality? Would I ever want to bury my children when they were old?

No, you won't want to bury your children, right? So that. And this is the legacy fallacy trap for me. So people talk a lot about legacy. So I've decided not to have kids, right? So people are like, oh, my God. But what about when you're older and on your day deathbed, you're gonna work so much, won't you think? I wish I had spent my time differently. And the answer is, of course, of course, every time you change your phase in life, your point of reference is now that phase. And so on your deathbed, you will instinctively see your life completely differently. But my thing is, why'd you live your life the way that you did? Because in that phase of your life, that was the only way to live that made sense. So even if you're acting out of fear, you're in the middle of the fear, so the fear makes sense. So everything that you're doing has a logical move. And so to live your life out of sync with where you're at in that moment, to try to hit a target, which is to feel good on your deathbed, to me, is crazy, because what that presupposes is that all along your experience of life was awesome because you were living for that moment on your deathbed. My thing is optimize for the moment. You're in. Now I'll optimize for my deathbed when I'm on my deathbed. And I will try to do all the things that make being on a deathbed as. As acceptable as possible, or maybe even as beautiful as possible. To suddenly recognize the imminent death that is upon me. And the transience becomes the beautiful thing that I railed against for so long. But I know that I will have the frame of mind to find the beauty in it. I won't spend a lot of time lashing myself for all. Oh, God, I wish I'd done that differently. Or now with this frame of mind, I can see things so clearly. I should have had kids. But right now, in this moment, I fucking love my life. And so this morning, after two hours of sleep, I couldn't fall back asleep because I was so fucking excited to get up and keep working on a project. Now I forced myself to go to bed because I knew that after two hours, midday, I'm just gonna crash. But that's the level of excitement I have for the things that I'm doing that I call work. So if you can build that into your life, then you're gonna be okay. And here's how I think of kids. I want kids, dude. I really want kids.

Would you take one of mine?

If they're amazing, absolutely. And if somebody tells me you've raised them well, so you've gotten past a lot of the hard stuff, I would. The only thing I want more than I want kids is to not have kids. So it isn't one is undesirable and the other desirable. It is that they are two very desirable things. And by a slim margin, one wins out. So what I think people need to focus on is construct your life around things that give you energy and fill you with joy, like a deep sense of fulfillment. That's why I think a lot of people actually made the right decision to have kids. Kids to me, from the outside, seem like pretty instant biological fulfillment. You have a kid and there's a feeling that you get about having that child. You just can't manufacture any other way. And that's beautiful. And for people that either just want that kind of fulfillment or don't find fulfillment in anything else, kids seem like a really good plan. But for me, I just found that I could build fulfillment into doing other things. And it was incredibly gratifying. And I had big brothered for a long time and that informed a lot of my decisions about the realities of the day to day of having a kid. It's Amazing. But it's such a time consuming endeavor.

Yeah. Sometimes I realize I don't remember what it was like not to have kids. I think it's great when people like you can articulate that, hey, not everybody has to do this thing. It's interesting that it's almost something people have to opt out of instead of opt into. It's sort of like become a default thing. Like you're. If you don't have kids, people are looking at you like, why don't you have kids? But I think I understand what you're saying for sure now, going back to the other question about immortality. So you obviously have a great sense of urgency and purpose about what you do. And again, I don't want to spend too much time on theoretical fun questions, but do you worry that if you knew you could live forever, some of that urgency would go away?

Not even a little bit. So there's a book I read, dude, read this book. It's called Einstein's Dreams. And, and in that book it's a bunch of short stories that explore the nature of time. And one of the explorations is a planet where everyone lives forever and the world just breaks into two camps. Naturally you've got people that do nothing because there is always time to do it tomorrow. There is no sense of urgency whatsoever. And then you have this other camp of people that do everything because they know I can actually stack all of these passions on each other and that sequentially, one by one, I can get extraordinary at everything I've ever wanted to be extraordinary about. And when I read this as like a 12 year old, I was like, oh my God, that is so me. Like, I knew to the like, visceral core of my being that that's how I would be given that opportunity. And then I was given that opportunity, at least in the financial sphere of, you know, hey, what would I do if I never had to work again? And what would my life look like? Would I be one of those people that just, you know, buys an island, retire, sip my ties? Or would I really go hard? And to me, the answer was so evident, like when I finally had the money, the resources to do whatever I wanted, knowing I never have to work again, ever. Even if I lived for 200 years. I started moving faster because now I could do more of the things that I wanted to. I could delegate more, I could solve some problems just by throwing money at it. And so did I earn that state of being which I like to think I earn all of the things about myself that I Value. But maybe I didn't earn it. And maybe that's why, at 12, it resonated so hard with me, was just, I'm not one of those guys that's like, oh, man, I don't know what I want from life. And there's nothing I'm passionate about. Like, there's so many things I'm passionate about, let alone just really interested in, let alone fascinated by. So for me, the battle is eternally. I don't have enough time and encountering things that you really love doing that really, really, truly, you're just excited and it doesn't matter. Like, I'll give you an example. So Impact Theory, my new company, we're a narrative company. We tell stories. And one of the stories that we're about to put out, it's a comic book. I'm so into writing this book, into telling this story. And the World cup is on, and the team that I support because America didn't qualify is England. They were playing today and the game's going. Everybody here is having a great time. And I stepped out to go work on the comic. And so I'm choosing between these two things, both which fill me with joy and passion and was so much fun. And I thought this is a good sign when the thing that's technically work, that is moving me towards a business objective is so much fun that I actually find myself, like, pulling away from this. Truly just a celebration in a game to go work on that thing. So structuring my life around things like that make it very easy for me to say definitively, if I could live.

Forever, I would live forever now. It wasn't always rosy, right? I mean, I think I've heard a little bit about how Quest got started and what you guys were doing before and how you guys all knew each other. But what were you doing before Quest and what brought you, Ron and Mike together?

Yeah, it depends on how far back you go. So I went to USC films school, was studying film. That was going to be my shtick. And I had cheated all the way through high school. I believed I was smart, but didn't really have anything to back that up. My own mother, when I left for college, she finally admitted this years later. When I left for college, she just quietly assumed I was going to fail because I didn't show any signs of, like, being the guy. I promised myself when I went to college I would never cheat again because I thought this. I'm studying now what I actually care about. I'm taking on tens of thousands of Dollars of debt. It just doesn't make sense to cheat. So literally as an incoming freshman, I said, arf, sink or swim. I'm going to do all my own work. And it's just going to be what it's going to be because I need to actually learn this. And so go there. My SATs are a 990, I took it twice. So like you can imagine, I'm like barely getting into school. The film school wanted a 1300. I didn't have it. I go to the admissions committee, I'm like, what do I need to do to get in? They say, look, SAT just tells us how you're supposed to do in school. So if you apply as an incoming junior, we're just going to look at your transcripts and we don't care about your sat. So I thought, okay, cool. For the next two years, I have to get good grades. So I didn't date, I didn't drink, I didn't party, nothing, man. Dude, all I did was work. And I got extraordinary grades. And I think probably about the time that I applied for film school again, I had a 4.0. I mean, it was just absolutely murdering it. Remember, no cheating, nothing. Just all me fucking hard ass work. And I get into film school and I start crushing it and I'm doing great and I'm like, oh my God, I'm the man. Like, I am so talented. This is crazy. And you know, my dad's telling me I'm talented. Like, and I get to film school and I'm just proving it. Everyone's like, you're never going to get into film school. I got in. And only four people in your entire class get to direct a senior thesis film. And I was chosen. And I was like, dude, this is my life. I'm going to graduate with a three picture deal. I'm going to be the next Spielberg. This is insane. Like, it's all working exactly as I planned. And then my senior thesis film, I fucked up so badly that I stole the master because it was that embarrassing. And people were cutting clips of my film together into like these joke reels to make fun of it, to make fun of me. And it was emotionally devastating because I realized the truth. And I'm not saying this to be humble, the truth was I didn't have talent. And that film made it abundantly clear I didn't know what I was doing. I was in way over my head. And finally this film was just elaborate enough to expose that I actually didn't know how to tell a story. And that was crushing because I had a fixed mindset. So I believe that you're either naturally talented or you're not. To me, filmmaking was like singing. Either you can sing or you can't. And all the training in the world is only going to refine whatever talent you already have. So I was like, wow, well, I guess this is it. I'm not talented. I crashed and burned. I am now flirting with depression. I've graduated. My parents aren't helping me financially. I'm taking remedial jobs. I mean, it's just like. And it was the period of my life I call the king of remedial jobs period, where I would only interview for jobs that I thought I would be smarter than the person interviewing me because I needed to feel smart. And I just believe my talent, intelligence were fixed traits, and life was about making the most of them. So I never wanted to be in a situation that made me feel badly about myself. And so that puts you in stupid places. So I'm a college graduate selling video games retail. That was my life. And then I got a phone call, and somebody was like, hey, you should come teach filmmaking. We need some people to help. And I went and taught. And through teaching and I'm truncating the story a bit. There was a lot of suffering in this part that I'm skipping over. But I end up teaching filmmaking and realize, well, I'm actually able to help make their films better. And if I can help them make their films better, why can't I learn and make my own films better? And so that became the seeds that would ultimately grow into a growth mindset. But at the time, I didn't have those words. I had some Tony Robbins. I was clinging to that for dear life. And the thing that really changed my life was, I don't know if you remember this. This would have been back in, like, 99. People were really debating brain plasticity. And one side was like, it's total bullshit. Your brain done capped out 12, 13. Somewhere around there, it starts a pruning process. After that, you're not going to learn anything major new. I was like, oh, God, that would be dire. And then the other side was like, no, no, no. New science. It's coming out, guys. I'm telling you, the brain's plastic. You can learn anything at any age. And I said, all right, I'm going to make a decision. I choose to believe that the camp that's saying that you can change is right. And so I started reading and reading and reading about the brain Voraciously to try to understand how it could change what I needed to do, what the process of getting better at something, what the neurological process of that was like, what are synaptic connections? How does the myelination process work? And all of that stuff filled me with so much excitement that I could change. So, okay, I suck today, I don't have to suck tomorrow. I can just pour myself into this and get better and push and work. And so that's what I started doing. Right about that time I encountered these two bodybuilder meathead guys. And of course immediately write them off as like, bodybuilders are dumb. And then they open their mouths and I was like, jesus, these guys are smart man. And they were like, look, we're starting a new technology company and we need a copywriter. And I was like, well, you know, hey, that sounds amazing. Because their pitch to me was, dude, look, you're coming to the film industry with your hand out. You need to get rich, control the resources and then you can make films the way you want to make. And I'm, you know, whatever, 23, 24. And so I'm like, that sounds amazing, let's do that. And so they thought it would take about 18 months. I was going to go help them build this technology company, they were going to sell it and then I would have the money I needed to make films. And of course it doesn't play out that way. And I go into first an amazing period where I'm learning to be an entrepreneur in a startup environment in an ultra grueling like, hey, don't be a fucking idiot, get it done, kind of move faster, like that kind of doggy dog environment. But I ended up up thriving in that and really getting strong, which is I needed to toughen up. I'm just going to be really honest. And it was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. I believed I could change and grow. And I met guys that helped me to a high ass standard and pushed themselves and wanted to grow and get better. And they knew a lot about business and so they just brought me into this pressure cooker environment and made a very similar offer to dozens of people. And they said, look, this is a startup, you can have any job in the company you want. You just have to become the right person for the job. Now for me it was all about fighting to become a filmmaker. I just needed that money. So I went hard, hard and just fought and clawed my way up and, and ultimately was the only one left standing.

And what did that Company do specifically.

Awareness Technologies made data loss prevention software. So if you had a company and this is all timing, right? So this is the early 2000s. So it was like you have a company and you're worried your employees are taking HIPAA data out because your healthcare. Or you're worried that they're taking customer data out because the credit cards are still sort of the wild, wild west at this point. And people could just pop in a USB and take it out, or they could email it out. So we made software that would allow you to say, okay, if it has, you know, this type of information, credit card data, whatever, flag it and don't let the attachment leave. Not via USB port, not via email or whatever.

And I assume you're talking about Ron and Mike. This is.

Yeah, yeah.

So you guys exit this company when.

So that we started wrapping up around 2009. So in 2010 we launched Quest 2009. We bring on a new CEO who bought the company. And it was sort of a staggered exit. So he and I, the new CEO and I didn't see eye to eye. He didn't think I was very good at marketing, and I thought he just didn't understand marketing. So I said, look, I'm gonna go start our next company, which we actually offered him a percentage in because we didn't want him to sweat us working on it in the background. And he turned it down. Whoops. And so he goes on this firing binge, fires a bunch of people. And I said, you know, I think there's one more person we need to fire. And he's like, who's that? And I said, me. And he was like, okay, why? And I said, we don't see eye to eye. You think marketing is spreadsheets? I think it's storytelling. So we've got this new company that we told you about and I want to go be the first full time employee. And so I was respectful and phased myself out and made sure that they were standing. But he agreed to let me go and let me out of my contract. Mike and Ron stayed behind on contract for. Again, it was staggered, but for a year I was operationally on my own, building the company up. And that's how I exited that. And then they finally exited. It was like a year later for. I think Ron came first and then another six months and Mike was there.

What was the impetus for starting Quest? What itch were you guys scratching?

So I can only speak for myself on this one, and I'll say that when we were building awareness technologies in the Beginning it was learning so much about being an entrepreneur. It was insanely empowering. And it was just giving to me, giving to me, giving to me. And then I sort of was hating what I was doing so much that whatever knowledge I was gaining, I was still being eroded. And I used to tell my wife, it's chipping away at me, like, I'm just not having fun. Like, this is so miserable. And so it was taking more energy than it was giving. So I was getting drained every day. I never wanted to talk to my wife about what I did. So I'd come home, she'd be like, what were you up to today? And I'm like, I don't want to talk about it. Like, I just didn't want to think about it anymore. It was just soul sucking because I didn't care about the product. There was no us in the product. Like, we were just trying to make something. We used to joke it was a company that was born to be sold into slavery. Like, we just wanted to get rid of it, like from the jump. It was never something that we believed in. We actually did VC pitches where we said, don't worry, you guys can get rid of us. We don't care. We don't have an ego about this. Like this, and I quote, this company was meant to be sold into slavery. We actually said those words multiple times, not realizing. To a VC that makes you sound like an asshole who just wants to get out of the company. I'm not going to trust you with my money wisely. So. So just couldn't get it for a long time. Couldn't get any money raised. So anyway, it's robbing for me. And I'm by this point they've given me 10% ownership in the company. The company's worth like 22 million at its height. So I'm like, I'm a multimillionaire on paper. And I'm just like, I am so unhappy. I'm living the cliche of money can't buy happiness. So I go to my wife and I said, look, I know I promised that I would make you rich and I'm going to, to, but I'm going to need to go backwards for a minute so we can go forward. And I said, I need to do something that makes me feel alive. Like, I just can't keep doing this. It's so miserable. And so she was like, yeah, I haven't seen you this unhappy in a long time. Like, do whatever you need to do. So I went in and quit. And now in the story, it sounds kind of cool because of how it ends up working out. But at the time, I was ashamed because I was like, I just can't do this anymore. I'm so unhappy. And I had told them anything within my code of ethics I will do to build this company. Company, period. And I realized it's just not true. Like, when it's stealing my life from me, it wasn't worth it anymore. So I went in, I said, guys, here's your equity back. I'm not going to cross the finish line. I don't want to get anything for this. You could sell the company tomorrow for a billion dollars. You will never hear from me. Of sound mind and body. I am walking away from this, and I'm leaving you in the lurch. And that's exactly how it feels to me. And so they were stunned and taken aback. And I drove home, and I'm literally pulling into the driveway. I'm on the phone with my wife. I did it. The hard part. The two guys who I love, they are my brothers, and I just said, I'm leaving. And the phone rings, and it's them. And I'm like, hold on one sec. Let me take this. And I click over, and they're like, come out to dinner with us. I go out to dinner, and they're like, look, you caught us by surprise. The reality is, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. And that let me connect to something other than the money. Up until that point, it had just been like, we're doing this for the money, for the money, for the money. I'm going to make money. I'm going to get rich. I'm going to go make movies. And then it was the thing I really care about in this. I care about the brotherhood. I care about the camaraderie. I want to build something of value. I want to build something I'm passionate about. And so I'd already done the hard part. I'd already quit. So I was like, if you guys want to work with me, then it would have to be fundamentally different. It'd have to be a different company. We'd have to be building something we care about, something we're passionate about, something that the Mother Teresa quote, or at least that's attributed to her. No one will act for the many, but people will act for the one. So I was like, I can show up every day thinking about my mom and my sister, who are morbidly obese, and they're gonna die far too soon. If we can't solve this problem. Cause Ron was like a nutritional freak at this point, and he was just into it. And he'd helped me transform my physique. This is like in the middle of me losing all the weight. And I think I got it figured out. And I thought, whoa. With what he knows about human metabolism and nutrition and my passion for marketing. And I've got this whole new vision that's gonna leverage this thing that is now called social media, but wasn't called that back then. And I just saw this vision fucking your boy Tim Ferriss, who I read his book and he introduced me to Kevin Kelly's notion of a thousand true fans. So I became obsessed with this notion of a thousand true fans. I'm gonna find a thousand true fans. And I stopped reading email. Thank you again, Timothy Farris, for that one. I haven't read email in any meaningful way since that book. And so I was like, I'm gonna go off. I'm gonna mark it this way. I pulled Mike and Ron into a conference room. I gave him this whole pitch. And it's easier just to explain it the way I'd say it now. These weren't the words I was using back then because we didn't have these words. But, guys, look, social media is going to change everything. It's going to allow people to build community. All it is is a megaphone. If you give people a reason to say something good, they'll say something good. And if you give them a reason to say something bad, they will say something bad. But if we can build a company around value creation, about building community, not trying to hawk product, actually bring these people together, help them. Because most of them want to lose weight. Help them lose weight. Make the mission of our company to end metabolic disease. Like, all of a sudden, we can really do something. People know who we are as people. I was obsessed with that. I was like, I want to be me today. I would say I wanted to be authentic back then. I was just like, I want our personalities to shine through. I want people to know who we are. Companies shouldn't be nameless, faceless organizations. They should be real people. And you should really feel them in the copy, on the website, in the content that they put out. I know how to tell stories. Let us tell stories to these guys. So we started building just a totally different infrastructure than any company out there. We made our own content studio. We were creating all of our own content. We were essentially telling stories. What does the brand mean? What should it mean to you? And that ended up because we were so early in the game of social media, we just exploded.

Yeah, it's kind of amazing. And I remember the first time we met, which I guess would have been 2013, so you guys were certainly. You would see a quest bar here and there in a store, but nothing like you do today, of course. But I really remember you explaining this at the time and me sort of not getting it, which was. And I don't even remember back then, like, what were your main social media channels? Was it mostly Facebook? Was Instagram around? I don't even remember.

It didn't even exist. I remember when that came out. Out.

Wow. So this was all through Facebook.

All through Facebook, a little bit of Twitter, and then probably year two, Instagram started to be a thing, and then we started putting more and more resources and then Instagram exploded. And Instagram really carried a lot of weight in the fitness community because it's so visual. So that was a huge win for us.

When did you realize that this thing could work? This thing being Quest?

Well, I knew it could work from the jump for what I wanted, which was I wanted to love what I was doing every day. And I wanted to feel like I was sort of going to battle a righteous battle with my two brothers who I cared deeply about and thought they had just amazing skills that would just be incredibly valuable in what we were doing. And I felt ready as a marketer. I felt like I understood something that nobody else understood. I felt that we could move fast and I felt that we could serve our customer well, and that was it. And I believe because we always talked, we were a food company. We didn't look at it as a supplement company or a bar company. We were a food company and we were going to end metabolic disease. We wanted to make meaningful contributions to the world of how food is made, sourced, processed, understood, eaten, like all of it. And even just looking at the kinds of imagery we were putting out there, we went so against veins and chains, right? So the bodybuilding industry up until that point was literally guys with massive muscles, huge veins, wearing chains. And that was everywhere. Everywhere had that image. And we thought, oh, man, we're going to focus on food. I became obsessed with this certain color, blue, which I thought was appealed to men, appealed to women. It was like this beautiful, optimistic, creative color. I did all this research on what blue means to people and how it hits the retina and literally it became like an actual stress point because it was hard to get the right color, but then it becomes this iconic color. The whole industry starts copying it. It was bananas, but, like going contrary, like I heard. I don't remember where I heard this, but they said if you really want to be successful, you have to be a contrarian and you have to be right. And we were a contrarian and we were right. And so because of that, it just everything went nuts. And so looking at everything differently and building a company that we were excited about in a new way, taking care of customers, it was just. Yeah, it was crazy.

And you've been now doing impact theory.

For two years, just under. Yeah.

So talk to me about that transition and tell me a little bit about what impact theory is. I mean, I think I have some idea, but my guess is I'm probably missing a few of the details and also the understanding of when you decided, hey, it's time to go do this other thing full time. Because this was obviously a passion for you always.

Yeah. So to understand impact theory, you have to understand Rashawn Jackson. And when I was in college and desperately trying to get good grades, I had a teacher offer extra credit to go tutor inner city kids. And so I said yes. And they of course give you the most problematic kids you can imagine. So they gave me this young, probably drug and alcohol impacted, hyperactive kid who was hyperactive on a level I'd never seen. The kid was bouncing off the walls all over the place was crazy. And my job was to get him to do his homework. And so for the first hour, he would cry and scream and freak out and like run around and get in fights and just go nuts. And then when I would say, all right, hours up, I gotta go, then he would become so sweet and soppy and he would cry and just beg me to stay and help him. And so like a sucker, I would stay. So he'd get me for two hours. And so around like week four, week five, I realized this kid's trolling me. Like he knows he gets an extra hour if he ignores me for the first hour, and then his sweet and sweetness and light the second hour. So that starts getting really annoying for me because I've got so much work to do. And on week six, you're supposed to tell him, hey, I'm only coming for two more weeks because it's an eight week program. So week six, I tell this kid, only coming for two more weeks, just so you know, and he flipped out. He nuclear is 8 at this point and just, just goes bananas. And he was, he was really small because he was on Ritalin or something. And so Stunted, his gross was just tiny, tiny for his age. And he went up and just slugged this kid who was like, no joke, three times the size. I just never seen like pent up rage like that. And I was like, wow, I finally get him under control, I get him back. And I'm like, is this because I said I was only coming for two more weeks? And he says through sobbing, hysterical tears, yes. So I said, look, because now I'm fed up with the whole just like drama routine. And I said, if and only if you do your homework, the moment I get here, as long as I live in Los Angeles, I will keep coming and helping you with your homework. And so he agreed. And that turned into an eight and a half year relationship. And I end up becoming far more than just a tutor. And he becomes an integral part of my life and I his. And, and I didn't know it at the time, but he was being abused at home and he ends up getting taken away by the police. And he makes me the guardian of the court. And I have to help him through the court system and into foster care. I mean, like, that's how intertwined our lives became. And then I'm young and poor at this point and they move him farther and farther away. And I never really felt like I was able to help him because I was so young and stupid. And the only thing I really knew how to do was to show him that there's a life he never sees. So I would take him to see movies in Beverly Hills because I was like, movies cost the same, but I can at least take him to a beautiful neighborhood. That left a really lasting mark on me and my personality and it planted a seed. And then flash forward 10, 15 years later, I'm at Quest. I now have 1400 employees and about a thousand of them grew up hard, just like this kid Rashaun. And I realize I have an opportunity to help make their lives better. But how? And so we start thinking of the saying called Quest University. And it was meant to be making protein bars is your tuition, but really learn the things you need to learn to go and have a better life. And so I write the 25 bullet points, which are the 25 things I had to do to my mind to go. From laying on my unfurnished apartment floor, flirting with depression, not knowing how I was going to do anything with my life, feeling totally out of control, hopeless and lost to building a billion dollar brand, I knew exactly what I had to do. The changes in beliefs, the thought patterns, everything that I had to do. And so I started giving that to people and trying to help them. And people would come to me and, like, these are thugs, dude. Like, tattoos up the neck, teardrop tattoos, grown men coming to me in tears. You care more about my success than my own mother. I have hope in my future. For the first time ever, like, people moving up. One guy comes off the line and ends up working in our tech department because I showed him how to, like, learn tech on the side. I mean, it's just crazy. Like, so many stories like that. Absolutely extraordinary. And I was like, when I'm at my most honest, I love helping with the body. But when I'm at my most honest, helping with the mind is what I'm meant to do. And so I thought, we're doing all of this for the employees. Let's create a show. We'll call it InsideQuest. And I'll interview. Because what I feared, and I remember when I did it, I said my big fear in writing these 25 things down, they hung on the wall. It was like a whole thing. My fear in writing them down is that you'll memorize them, but you won't live by them. And so I wanted to bring other successful people in that I knew just because they're universal laws of success. I knew would say roughly the same thing over and over and over. And these guys would see, okay, it's not just dad. It's all these people that are saying the same thing. And so that became really important. And so I'm pouring myself into making that great in an effort to really do something amazing for the employees. And then at this time, we end up having just the incredible financial windfall at a personal level that, you know, we'd all fantasized about since the day we got into business. And I realized all of a sudden, you know, we're in a very fortunate position where the three of us have the financial wherewithal. We don't always have to agree on everything. We don't always have to move in the same direction. The company would be very stable now without me. They didn't necessarily. They being running Mike didn't necessarily have my level of excitement for doing the mind. And our consumer base was asking, why the hell is the protein bar guy talking about mindset? So it was a total brand disconnect. And I looked at it and thought, given enough years, I can get people to change the way that they think about this brand. But are my partners going to want to share in that horrific cost as I shift the brand to fit what I want to do. And it didn't seem like a fair thing to drag them through. So, you know, I said, look, this is something that is important enough to me that I have to do it in my life. So we agreed to part ways at that point and build things the way that we see fit. And so I took the studio that we had built inside of Quest and spun it out into a standalone company that's now Impact Theory. We create both what I call nonfiction content, stuff like this, interview shows, and then fiction content. So we've got our first comic book coming out that we hope to turn into film or tv.

So how much of what you learned in film school figures into what you do today?

A lot. A lot. So film school is psychology with. And put the camera here for best results, once you understand that, that your job is really to take the audience on an emotional and ideological ride. That at the end, they're entertained, but, at least from my perspective, also enriched. And look, most films don't worry about the second part. That's an obsession of mine. But when I think about the things that really shape my life, it's the stories I tell myself about myself, and it's the stories that I identify with and make the dominant metaphors in my life. Joseph Campbell said, if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. So I have lofty visions of what can be impacted through art. I heard a quote the other day, though, that is very sobering and definitely keeps me thinking about ways to really impact people. And he said, if, what, 300 years of Shakespeare hasn't stopped genocide, then what hope does art really have? And I think that's a fair point. But I think that we're living through a time today where you can marry the nonfiction, the direct, the explanatory with the metaphorical, because I think the big problem is that the belief in the metaphor is dropped out. And Joseph Campbell again talks about this and says, part of the reason that you get these stunted adolescents is because there's no ritual driven by belief that the ritual has deep meaning. So people aren't different from, you know, childhood to adulthood without those transitional rituals. And same with divorce. And he said, you know, I think a big part of the divorce rate is that people don't have these transitional rituals. And so I took that really seriously. And when I got married, I went through a ritualistic scarification because I wanted to be a different man the day before my wedding than the day after. And I can't tell you how many times that's really, like, reminded me going through something painful that was difficult, made me think of myself as different and begin telling myself a different story, that.

I'm married now, so say more about that. What did you do exactly?

When I put it into normal terms, it won't sound as cool, but I got a tattoo. Now, for me, tattoos were not something I wanted. I don't like tattoos. Don't have a thing for tattoos. I have exactly one, and that was the one that I got as a ritualistic scarification. I was deathly afraid of needles at the time. Deathly afraid. So for me, it was facing my biggest fear, doing something that was painful with this thing that held some sort of mythical, like, element of terror in my life. To give you an idea, I was one of those guys that when I had injections in my wrist, at one point I almost fainted. And I wasn't even looking because the thought of a needle penetrating my skin freaked me out that much. So that's where I was when I got the tattoo. It was just. It was the scariest thing I could think of within the realm of reality.

Right.

I didn't go swimming with great white sharks. Okay, that obviously would be far more terrifying. But within the, like, the plausible realm of this isn't potentially actually dangerous. It was the worst thing I could think of. And so doing that, having to face that fear, having to do that ended up being really important for me, transitioning out of being single to being married.

I've heard you talk before about money, and it's something that I've certainly asked a number of my patients. One of the privileges of medicine, I think there are several, but one of them, I think, is that you form relationships with people where you can ask very intimate questions. And sometimes they're not just about their health, wealth, it's about their happiness. And even though my patient population is quite small, given the affluence of some of my patients, I've had interesting discussions with people about how wealth does and doesn't impact their lives. So I guess even though you're not my patient, I'll ask you basically the same sort of question, which is, did you feel different the day after your liquidity event?

No. And that's the weirdest part. Here's exactly what it was for me, and I think this is near universal. When I looked. When I was poor and all through my childhood, I looked at people that had money and I had adoration for them. It just seemed so cool. And I thought that in some way they were better than me, or certainly in a better place than me. And that that made them in some ways better, certainly more desirable to be like that. And so looking at them, you meet them with a bit of reverence. And so in the back of your mind somewhere is the notion that when I get money, I will have that adoration for myself, and I will have that sense of reverence for myself. And you think that somehow, like, all the insecurities that you have will be washed out by that reverence and adoration, and it's not. And you realize that you feel exactly the same the next day. And the easiest way I can explain it is to say that it's like losing your virginity. Before I lost mine, I legitimately thought, like, colors would be brighter. I would just be somehow a fundamentally different person. And then I had sex and was like, oh, that was rad. I loved it, but I'm not a different person. And that was exactly how I felt with the money. It was rad, dude. Money is better than people think. It's more powerful than people think, to be certain. But it's not at all what people have been told. It's not going to impact how you feel about yourself. It is merely going to extend your capabilities. You'll suddenly be able to. To facilitate things you wouldn't be able to facilitate. Money is essentially inert, right? There's a bit of heat energy to a dollar bill that you could release by burning it. But short of that, the money in and of itself is inert, but it can facilitate things. Now, if you have a clear vision of what you want to facilitate, and it's a problem that can be addressed with money, suddenly money becomes insanely powerful. And if you really want to think about how powerful money is, think about how much of your own life is determined by what you get paid to do. Now imagine controlling that money, and you realize that you're able to aim incredibly intelligent, capable people at problems you want solved. It's not even necessarily the problem they want solved. So that gets really, really interesting. And then if you can help them fall in love with what they're doing, if you can give them a supportive environment, if you can make sure they know that we're all equals here. We have different roles, but we're all equally important. That their voice is desired, that they're there because you want to hear from them, then it's like, holy hell. I know I only get their attention because I'm willing to pay them, but now that I have their attention and can create this ecosystem, this environment for them to thrive in. We can do some pretty extraordinary things.

It seems like one's motivation around money can change because certainly, I'm guessing when you were young or when you were, let's say, right out of college. Right. You're sort of at a low point. It sounds like we didn't go too much into it. Although that's the kind of stuff I enjoy talking about. It's the pain and the humiliation of that experience. And at that moment, my guess is you would have thought, give me a bunch of money and my problems go away. And maybe I'm wrong, but I don't get the sense that at that moment you would have realized that that wasn't true. And at best, that money would have given you the opportunity to go back and do what you loved. And those are different things, right?

Very. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, back then I was chasing money all out because I thought it would solve all of my problems and I thought it would make me cool as hell. I just thought it would be so cool, dude, I thought, I'm gonna be the man. I want a fast car. I want a Lamborghini. Like, I want the every blingy, like, thing that you can imagine. I wanted it all and I fantasized about it. And whenever I thought about money, the only thing I thought about was what it could buy me. That was it. And how cool people were gonna think I was, how cool I would think myself. Yeah, that was the nature of money to me.

Who do you consider a role model in people who have taken great wealth and put it to maximum impact?

Elon Musk. No question. He's probably. I really want to think about this. He's probably one of the few people that legitimately makes me feel badly about myself and, like, makes me sweat when I think about, like, oh, could I really do that? Like, I like to think I can do anything, Peter, but woof. Spinning that many plates at one time, Yikes. I don't know that I process raw data fast enough. That's the God's honest truth.

And so let's consider one of those Things, which is SpaceX. I used to be an engineer, so I'm pretty impressed by the kilo to dollar ratio of payload. Sometimes I still can't believe it's happened. I mean, what they've done. Have you ever been to see a launch?

No, have you?

I have not. I have a couple of friends who have.

I'd love to.

Yeah. I mean, there's some really cool videos out there.

Yeah, I've seen the videos. Videos are amazing. Taking off and landing.

And you've seen the videos where like you have to wear the correct headphones to be able to.

Actually, no.

Oh yeah. There's a guy on YouTube, maybe we can find it for the show notes. But there's a really cool video where you can actually hear. You just get an amazing auditory experience basically. Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's actually not that recent. I feel like it was in the last three or four months. Yeah. Pretty impressive. Yeah. I've heard people talk about how SpaceX could be a trillion dollar company, which is pretty interesting. I don't know, it's funny, when I went to college I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. So I'm obviously pretty interested in that stuff. And this is going to sound like a complete sort of poo poo on the whole thing, but I'm so much more interested in what's happening on Earth than what's happening in space. And I don't know when that transition took place. But as interesting as I think that stuff is, intellectually, I just think emotionally I feel much more curious about what's happening right in front of me. And I'm also equally amazed at things that we don't know that are so close. Like, you know, because I used to spend so much time swimming, I'm kind of amazed by the ocean, which is like, you know, if you think about it at its deepest point, it might be what, 12, 14 kilometers deep. Like that's a trivial distance. You could walk that in an afternoon. But when going straight down, that's at depths of unknowns. Like we can't even fathom new types of organisms that don't even require sunlight. That kind of stuff. So by selecting Elon as your example, it's sort of like saying, look, there are lots of incredibly wealthy people, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, many of these folks who have, you know, and people who are less well known, like John Arnold, who through philanthropy have done remarkable things. But Elon has done it through building companies that are kind of paradigm shifting. I mean, that's an overused term, but I think it's safe to say that for his stuff. So what is the paradigm you want to change?

I want to make sure that no human being on the planet fails to encounter an empowering mindset. That's what I'm all about. And so meeting kids in the inner cities. And I'll tell you a story. So I used to interview everybody. If you got a job at Quest, I interviewed you whether you were the EVP of Global sales, or you were the janitor, you interviewed with me. And so that meant that I went through a phase where all I was interviewing was people working for the production line, which naturally draws people from lower income brackets. And I started asking just because I wanted to really understand, like, what motivates you. Because my thing was I never wanted to hire somebody into a parasitic relationship where I was going to get their time and essentially give them very little money, when you really think about it, in exchange for that time. And so I thought, wow, they're going to spend 50% of their waking hours with me and I'm going to give them not enough money. And I didn't feel good about that relationship. Now, you can't build a business just by throwing money at everybody. So what else could I do to add value to people's lives? So it's like one thing. I can hire people who there's a secondary thing that they can learn from us, and then they can go on and do that thing so they can build their skill, set up. The example I gave earlier of the kid who wanted to learn technology, awesome. Came in, busted ass, made a lot of protein bars. But also we helped him get a job in tech within our own company. He then goes on to start his own tech company. It was crazy. So I was looking for people like that. I wanted to know, what's that next thing I know that you don't want to spend the rest of your life working a protein bar line, so what's the next thing that you want? And if I really believe that I can help you get there, then our selfish desires are aligned. We can work together to make something amazing happen. And I would rather have you for three or four years and you believe that I'm making your life better every day than to have you for 20 years. And you hate every bit of it. The way that those two people will work is so dramatically different.

Just to be clear, part of your motivation is also selfish. Right. It's like I'm going to get way more out of you in four years on a per unit basis, a productivity basis, than 20 years where you're, you know, you're going to stay here forever, but you're not happy. And then part of it is sort of altruistic.

Yeah, I'll even say it's all selfish. So I don't think selfish is necessarily a bad thing. I just think that we all live life from our perspective. We're motivated by certain things. I like to see other people win. I'm wired for It. So I remember when I was like 6 or 7 in an Easter egg hunt, I pretended not to see some Easter eggs because I knew winning meant a lot more to my sister than it did to me.

Me.

So I pretended not to see them. She found them and she won, and she was very happy. So that's just me. I just like to see people that I care about happy and having a good time. So that's part of it. I'm wired for that. So I know that I'm going to be stoked if I see that they're having a good time. And then I want to build a big company, make a whole lot of money. And the only way I can do that is by convincing extraordinary people to come work for me and then make it a great environment where they don't want to leave. So, yeah, I don't mind people saying that it's entirely selfish, fine. If it's good for people, I'm okay with that.

This became your lab. I mean, I didn't realize this. You interviewed every person you hired.

So I've interviewed north of 1500 people, which doesn't sound like a lot when you think of all the things you do 1500 times, until you go to interview 1500 people and you realize, jesus, this is a lot of people. So, yeah, years of my life were spent interviewing. We were growing by 500 years.

What did you learn from that process that surprised you the most?

Yeah. This is a punchline to the question that you actually asked. In wanting to find out what is your real desire, I started doing this magic genie question. So you can ask for anything that you want. Want anything at all. Gotta be something selfish, though. It can't be to cure cancer or bring somebody back from the dead. And you can't ask for more wishes. So what do you wish for? And I wanted to just get, like, that truest thing that they really want. And. Peter, to a person, remember, I interviewed hundreds of people to a person. They all said the exact same thing. What are the odds that, like, let's just say that that particular question I asked 300 people. What are the odds that. That every single one of them, without exception, would give you the same answer?

Well, if you're not leading them or asking the question to each of them at a point in the discussion that was equivalent. So you're priming them. I would say the answer is. The probability is incredibly low.

Okay. So I'm leading them just enough that we narrow the world down for sure. Otherwise this really would be like a magic trick. Because almost to a person, this was less universal. But almost to a person, the first answer was, I want a job. Which I know is bullshit. They're saying that because they are there for an interview. So I would say, okay, I get that. A lot of people give that to me as their first answer. So this is now me leading them, and I say, why do you want the job? And they would say, for money. Okay, rad. So is it fair to say you would ask the magic genie for money? Yes. So none of this is weird to me. The weird part is when I say, give me a number. And every single one of them, every single one, I never once got a variation, gave me the same number. And the number was a million dollars. A million dollars. Peter, what the fuck are you going to do with a million dollars? You can't buy a house in LA for a million dollars, let alone be set up for a life. It's a magic genie. Now, I've thought about the magic genie question a lot, and if you're asking for money, you've already wasted your ask. But fair enough. Like, I spend a lot of time thinking about the magic genie. But the fact that they all asked for a million dollars was crazy to me. And the first time I heard it, I thought, whoa, that's weird. The fifth time I thought, man, how is it possible five people have said the same thing around number 10? I actually thought my team was fucking with me and that they had started telling them ahead of time to do it just to, like, mess with me. By the time we got to 25, I realized something about humanity, that you only dream as big as you think, and you only think as big as what you see. So if what you see around you is that everyone's wishing and thinking about a million dollars, because that seems like an impossibly large amount of money, you never go. My dream in life is to terraform Mars. Okay? You never think that big. You're stuck at a million dollars. It would never occur to you that you can terraform Mars because your thinking is so limited by what you've seen. And I thought, whoa, if I could just give them my mindset overnight, because I'm interviewing people that are smarter than me. And I'll define smart as the ability to process raw data quickly. Okay, does that seem like a reasonable definition?

It seems like one component, but I don't know the definition of smart. I would certainly include that in it. But let's grant that that's the definition we'll use for the moment.

So I would Come across people that blew me away. They could just think faster than me. They could see all the different permutations of a given problem and come up with a solution that was well thought out, more intricate than I could could. And so I thought, okay, well, my success isn't predicated on intelligence. It's definitely partly hard work. But I work hard because I have a certain belief and a mindset that I can. That my efforts will be rewarded. So I started thinking, okay, humans lead with belief. It's because I believe that I can get better at something, that I'll pour myself into it. But they don't believe that they're going to get that result. So they don't. They don't believe that they could ever get $100 million. A billion dollars, 100 billion a trillion. That's just not real to them. So even though we're talking to a magic genie, they don't think that big. So it was crazy. And if you push them and really write them, they'll work their way up to 10 million. But nobody ever goes a billion, a trillion. They just don't. So I was like, wow. I became obsessed with how do I codify my mindset, what I've done over the last. At that point, like 12 years of just training myself to think a certain way. How do I impart that to people? And that is still my obsession. So that's what I'm hoping can be done through story. And when you read Homo deus and sapiens, just really understanding how narrative is so massively influential and that the dominant narratives that we use are all religious. And then you look at how I think the bottom is falling out in terms of belief in a lot of the religions for a lot of people, and you just go, okay, well, what's the ultimate punchline? When people no longer have a metaphor that they put any weight in, they have. Have no belief in, then it really becomes a documentary. And my life is what my life is. I know it because I see it. And that scared me. Because now if you can only envision what you're living, you can't even turn to the Bible to see extraordinary acts. You can't the Quran, the whatever, to a movie, something to have some vision of something that's bigger than what you've done. And I thought, could we use storytelling to give people a way to think in the way that the Matrix gave me a way to think? And so that became the obsession.

It's funny, I was thinking about it while you were explaining. What would I ask for in the genie question. And it's so interesting that I wouldn't think to ask for money, which is not to say that I wouldn't love to have more money because of the reasons we described. It would be amazing to be able to amplify the things I want to do. The first thing that jumps to my mind is like the type of laboratory I'd want to have. And how I hate the fact that all of the, the best scientists that I interview for my book and for the podcast and just folks who are my friends, I mean, they spend 50% of their time fundraising. And I imagine a world where you could create a true institute where you're going after high risk translational problems with infinite resources. So let me tell you, if the genie would give me the dollars, I'd be happy to take them. But I actually think the first thing that comes to my mind would be some form of fulfillment, because at least money, you sort of know it can be got. But fulfillment strikes me as one of the hardest things to find. Again, maybe I'm biased by what I see clinically, which is people who have more money than they could ever spend. I've actually had one patient say to me, it's almost impossible to spend more than $600 million in your lifetime. That was the number I remember that was like, you know, anything over 600 million is just a wait, like you can't possibly spend it.

That is a failure of imagination, I assure you. I mean, look at Elon Musk.

Come on.

Like even just to pour 600 extra million into each one of his three companies, he could do well.

I think this person was saying through like expenditure on, you know, like willy nilly stuff. But interestingly, fulfillment seems to be something that's missing. I certainly don't think I know fully what it means. I think I've had moments where I've experienced it, but. But it's interesting. If it's a real magic genie, can you imagine what that would feel like? Yes.

Can I give you my secret formula to fulfillment?

I would love to hear it.

So one fulfillment is a neurochemical state. So there's no possibility of a flatline. There's no way you're just going to have it forever. I think that it ebbs and flows with the movements of a day. But having said that, I think that fulfillment comes from becoming someone that you're proud of, building a skill set that was incredibly hard to build, that serves not only yourself, but other people. So you're doing the hard things. You're not doing things that would be deeply pleasurable, and in building your identity around not doing things that are pleasurable in order to become extraordinary in order to serve other people, I think that's the name of fulfillment. When I think about the times where I feel just awesome, it is because I did something really hard while other people were playing. It made me more powerful in the way that I define it, which I can't believe. Power has become a dirty word. Power to me is, close your eyes, imagine a world, a better world, the world you want to create. Open your eyes and have the ability to manifest that. That's power. So Mother Teresa had power. She was able to do things. That is what leads to fulfillment. It's what the Greeks called techniques. It's not enough to go ladle soup at a kitchen, right? That should. That's pleasurable, feels good, but it isn't fulfillment because you didn't earn any special ability to do that. Now, fulfillment is the guy that worked at Toyota that came into the soup kitchen and said, I'm going to improve their efficiency so more people get fed. And he increased their output by like 40 or 400%. I don't remember how to 4 in it, but it was like, massive. And I thought, that's fulfillment. He worked his ass off. I'm sure there were a ton of days at Toyota where he was like, what am I doing?

Doing?

Why am I doing this? But he gained this set of skills that was insanely powerful, and he put them to use in a soup kitchen. Now that feels good. That's fulfillment. So getting people to a place where they can learn that the cool stories are the stories that, while you're in it, suck. Like, when I heard your story, a swimming around Catalina island, that sounded like actual madness to me. When I heard that you swam from Catalina back to the mainland, that sounded crazy. And the same thing with doing the one in Hawaii. I was like, this is crazy. These are my greatest fears. Open water is my greatest fear. And I thought, but that's why he gets to feel good about himself, because he did those things. It's in the hard stuff. It's not the easy stuff.

That is interesting. I certainly agree that it's very hard to be fulfilled if you are not in the service of someone else at some point, you know, in other words, I think obviously you have to be in service of many things and others being only one of them. And so, you know, for many people, I think that might be part of the relational joy that they experience in having kids is For a great period of time, you are in service of those kids. In fact, sometimes it seems like you're in service of them too much and you don't get a break from that. But you don't have to have kids to obviously be in service of another person. Yeah, I don't know. I really find this question of fulfillment and true relational joy to be interesting. And we're in sort of a weird time, right? Because I was talking to a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist. I actually hope to have him on the podcast at some point because this is a discussion that. It's probably going to be a controversial discussion, but I think it's an important one, which is, is there any evolutionary basis for suicide? So that's question one. And the question two is, do we believe that we are seeing, on an age adjusted mortality, adjusted basis, are we seeing suicide at a greater extent today than we were before? Or is it just that we are paying more attention to it now? Or it's less? But I do wonder, is there any part of civilization that contributes to society? And my intuition says yes, that's about the extent to which my knowledge would go on this topic. But I want to talk about this with somebody who really thinks broadly about this because something that is so against our DNA, like our DNA, is pretty geared towards survival, if you think about it, maybe at the risk of oversimplifying, what pain could be so great that it could override arguably the single most primitive drive that our species would have. And so I think the prevalence of suicide is such that virtually no person I know's life hasn't been touched by it, which tells you how ubiquitous it is. And it's sort of, you know, you alluded to depression. I mean, I just think when people really are honest with themselves, like if they haven't thought of killing themselves, they've certainly thought life isn't that much fun. And that's kind of a sobering thought.

I've become obsessed with this topic. I'm unfortunately not the person you're looking for that has the real deep knowledge. But I will say this, I'm not the right person to take any advice from on this topic. But follow my logic. I think that there's something terrifying happening with the microbiome. And I think that the potential effects of the microbiome being one of the massive contributory factors in what feels like. And again, I don't know, is it just we're paying attention to it more? Maybe, but man, it feels epidemic right now. It's Crazy. You had Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade kill themselves in the same week. I mean, it's like, we can just accept money doesn't solve the problem, fame doesn't solve the problem. And so I just started thinking, okay, well, what are we going through right now? Now, I am particularly obsessed with the microbiome because of what happened to my wife, which I can't remember how much you and I have talked about this.

No, no, I don't think I know anything.

All right, so three years ago, we are on our way to Vegas. Packed the bags, baby. I'm on my way. And my wife goes, I'm not feeling well. I feel funny. And I was like, what does that mean? She's like, I don't know. I just don't feel right. And then an hour later, she's like, gosh, I'm feeling kind of nauseous. I think I need to go home. And I was like, whoa. So she leaves, and then she calls me from the parking lot crying, and she's like, I just projectile vomited everywhere. And I was like, oh, baby. Like, wow, this crazy. Like, I can't remember the last time that she threw up. So I was like, all right, well, go home. I'll come down. I'll deal with that. Don't worry. Just go. She goes home, and I think, okay, stomach bug, bad timing, bummer. But it didn't go away. And it became. She wasn't vomiting anymore, but she couldn't hold on to food. And I was like, ooh, this is getting a little scary. And it's one of those where, like, how many people does diarrhea kill? You know? So I was, like, really getting paranoid and just non, stop, non stop, non stop. Everything she ate, nothing, like, would stay. And I was like, whoa, this is getting really scary. And so we have her microbiome tested, and they're like, you basically don't have a microbiome. They're like, it's been so decimated by overuse of antibiotics because my wife used to get chronic chestnut infections. And so she took antibiotics just in the time that I knew her, probably, I don't know, 12 times. So. And who knows how many before that? So, I mean, she just absolutely murdered it. And then, of course, this sends her into. If she wasn't clinically depressed, she was getting real close and just really, really struggling emotionally. Struggling physically. Unable to, like, maintain a physique. Like, just. It was crazy. And so in building it back up and seeing how complicated it is, seeing how much it affects the neurochemistry, knowing that, what, 95% of serotonin is stored in the gut, I mean, it's crazy. So it just started being this whole thing of like, whoa. I think this is wildly underappreciated. We started doing a lot of microbiome testing at Quest and it was just like, man, people's microbiomes. The diversity is just absolutely atrocious. It's pretty crazy. So whenever I hear something that has to do with neurochemistry, I immediately go to, this is a microbiome problem.

So what's changing it then? So in her case, antibiotics might have played a role.

Massively restricted eating. So we both had really restrictive diets. So remember the whole rabbit starvation? She was doing the same thing. So just over restriction, over sanitizing hands, over washing hands, like never getting anything that's dirty. Yeah, I mean, just making literally every mistake that you can make with your microbiome.

That would suggest. Because again, the microbiome in that situation would be a facilitator of an environmental issue. Right. The environmental changes being nutrition, overuse of antibiotics, sanitation, things like that. I also wonder if there are sort of psychological emotional cues in the environment that exacerbate this problem.

What do you mean? Like stress?

I mean, I hate that word because it's such a sort of loaded term, but. But I wonder if people feel more alone today than they felt a couple hundred years ago. One of the things you talked about earlier that you were very passionate about was, even though you didn't use the word, was kind of your tribe. It's funny, people ask me if I'm ever talking about my training in medicine. They're like, residency sounded really horrible because you worked about 110 to 115 hours a week, probably slept about. I remember I slept about 28 hours a week. So it was pretty miserable. And it's really funny, I look back at it as one of the fondest five year periods of my life. And it's. Despite all of those things. Of course, not because of all those things, but part of it was just the camaraderie. I mean, just brotherhood and some sisterhood. Right. I mean, there was just amazing male and female residents that you were in the trenches with. And it was a shared sense of purpose, a shared sense of mastery, a shared sense of suffering. But I wonder if outside of places like the military and residency and startup companies, which are places where you see a lot of that camaraderie, are we losing that more broadly? And was that something we were wired.

To Experience that's really interesting. And another thing that really interests me is the way that culture, culture stacks. So if you had X amount of expectation on your shoulder to succeed, then you give that to your kids plus some. And then they give that to their kids plus some. And when I think like how much my parents drug me around and that seemed crazy, but then I see how much parents drag their kids around now, that's one of the reasons I don't have kids. I was like, if that's the expectation, I'm not prepared to be a chauffeur. So it just gets crazy. The amount, like the level of sort of. And look, I'm a freak for efficiency, but the level of like clinical efficiency that people work into their lives where there is no more play. Like, one thing I will tell you that my wife and I are really good about with each other is reminding ourselves not to lose playfulness. Because look, when I came into business, I needed to toughen up, I needed to get harder. That's just true my personality. And so as I did that and became more powerful, more self assured, like it was amazing, but I started to harden. Like everything about me was just harder. Like my wife would be telling a story and I'd be like, get to the punchline. Which is a terrible thing to do in your marriage, by the way. And she was like, you just gotten harder. Like you need to be playful, like loosen up. You used to be goofy. And so, yeah, it's interesting, like how much of that stuff is as we shape each other and we shape the society and we talk about things like terraforming Mars. But then all of a sudden, like, fuck, you've got to give your life over to terraform Mars. Like if you want to be the next Elon Musk, he set the bar so high that it's like, where is that breaking point where there's no more natural off switch, You've got your phone all the time. There's no natural break where it's like, well, there's no electricity. So when I'm in the cave, like there's nothing left to do or it's the weekend, there are no phones, there is no email, so everybody's gone home, so there's no work to be done. So there were all these natural sort of kill points that exist anymore. And look, I'm the biggest violator of all. I love, love to work. My problem is people apply this stuff when they don't even love it that much. And so now they're just working around the clock. At something that drains them, that gets scary fast.

What routines or rituals do you have around protecting yourself to maintain a creative environment? I mean, do you have forced downtime or forced time away from work? I'm guessing exercise is still very important to you. I mean, what sort of routines do you enact to make sure you can function at your best longitudinally?

Well, to make sure that I function at my best, I optimize cognitively. So my diet is like, thing number one. I don't fuck around with my diet. My diet is on point and I work out five days a week, and that is hugely important. I hate it, absolutely hate the gym. But it's critically important to strength, longevity, and cognitive optimization.

Why do you hate the gym?

It hurts is the honest answer. That's part one. Part two is, dude, remember the whole thing. I want to live forever because there's so many things I want to do that I love, that every minute I'm in the gym is a minute I'm not doing something that I would really intrinsically love. Like, in and of itself, the moment is fun in the gym. I love the result. I love being able to say I do hard things, but in the moment, it's just pain. It's lactic acid building up. It's heavy weights. It's the disappointment of not being able to lift a weight that you've been trying to get. It's like everything about it is meeting my limitations, even if it's just the limitation of I can only do so many reps in a given set for a given weight, and it's like, I literally failed to do this thing. So the act of being in the gym for me is anathema to the things that I love. It's ugly. It's not even beautiful. So it's like iron and weights. Oh, God. Like, I'm always surprised that I have to explain that to people. Do you enjoy the gym?

Gym?

Me?

Yeah. I do. Yeah.

My wife loves the gym. You're both crazy to me. Like, whatever endorphin rush you're getting, I'm not getting. Like it is. Everything about it in the moment is unpleasurable.

It's interesting. I wonder why I enjoy it. I guess we all get the things that are easy for us and for me. Fortunately, exercise comes easily in terms of it really requires no discipline. Now, sometimes it's a bit of a challenge as far as time management, and sometimes I don't feel like exercising, but it's always for the reason you just described, which is I've really Got this other thing to do, and it's really pressing, but let's be fair. If you said to me, peter, I'd like you to go swim the Catalina Channel next year, that I have no desire to do again. I have no desire to spend what probably amounted to 20, 24 hours a week in the ocean swimming.

Whoa.

As part of the training. I mean, that I don't have a desire to do, but. But I really do enjoy deadlifting, which is not to say it's not unpleasant, and it's not to say that it also makes me upset when I can't do it. So I certainly understand all of those things. I mean, so I have this thing where part of my shtick in longevity is rule number one is don't get hurt. Right? So it's like, exercise matters, but, like, don't be an idiot. And so, you know, one of the things I've been fortunate to develop over the years with the help of a lot of great physical therapists, trainers and such, is a really good sense of the cues that tell you something's not right that day. So I'm getting pretty good at knowing when my glutes are not firing and when I'm dumping the weight into my sacroiliac joint or into my lumbar spine. And so even to this day, about one out of every five times I go to deadlift, I abort.

Really?

Yep.

That's smart.

So I'll go. You know, I warm up bar 1351-852252-75315 is always the warmup. And if on the way up that ladder, I don't feel perfect, like, perfect, all glute, basically doing the work, nothing loading into my lower back if I don't feel that we're done. And honestly, I think at least out of. Yeah, probably one every five sessions, we just abort. And that pisses me off. I mean, truthfully, I get really pissed for, like, another couple hours. I'm like, I can't believe I didn't get the deadlift. I gotta wait a whole week to try this again. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I have the same rule with squatting. You gotta can it if you can't do it. But now go back to nutrition. Tell me about what does dialed in for you mean.

So I'm on just whole foods whenever humanly possible. So I try to vary my sources. So I'll have a wide variety of vegetables constituting a very diverse color array. I eat a lot of eggs. I Have a lot of fat in my diet, primarily from olives and olive oil. Those are the big fat. And then I do eat a fair amount of red meat. That would be, I guess philosophically, some people believe it to be a higher carcinogenic meat. I'll say this, I'm not the right person to take advice on it, but I have no fears about that. I get a lot of my fat from that as well. And then yeah, that's it. Whole food cycle between beef, chicken, some lamb, a little bit of pork and just try to keep it quote unquote clean. High fat, low carb. And I never cheat. Not never, but wow, it's rare. Twice a year maybe. And then it's not like some debaucherous day, it's like, ah, meal.

What do you do as far as meal timing, fasting, things like that?

Yeah, I also do a lot of fasting, so I do a lot of intermittent fasting. But then also. So at least once a year I'll do a five day fast. And that's water only. It's not like a Ramadan style water only fast, fast, fast for five days. That's been big.

What do you feel when you do the five day water only fast?

Anger, A lot of hatred? No, the big thing, to be fair, what I love about fasting is that it's hard as hell and I know that I'm going to stick with it. So there's so much just like juice that comes from, from that. But the reality is the first two days are easy. By day three, the problem is mostly boredom. And what I've realized is I get a lot of dopamine hits from knowing, oh, I'm gonna eat, like, here comes this meal. I love this meal, it's gonna be awesome. And there's none of that. So your day doesn't have those like excitement markers in it. So for me the big problem is. And then also by day four, I do start slowing down. Even though I'm fully keto adapted, I'm posting awesome numbers. I'll get in into the threes when I'm doing a five day fast. So it's like my machinery is there. I usually do a cycle of keto leading up to a fast. So I'm already primed to burn fat. So it's not that, it's just I do feel less energetic.

So.

And I don't know if I just am not a great fat burner or if I'm able to. I don't use the ketones as efficient. I don't know, but by day four, I'm like, yeah, I'm 20% off my normal. Like I go, go, go. Now it's not like anybody around me notices. I just know that it takes, I have to push my energy out more. It's not just naturally there for me.

How does your body composition change in that five days?

I'll lose fat for sure.

How much weight do you lose on the scale?

I probably, I've never weighed myself. I know better because I can get super myopically focused on the scale. I'm gonna guess call it like three to four pounds probably.

That's it. Yeah. That's interesting. I lose more than that just doing a five day FMD, really. So that's like the, you know, 750 calories a day. It's a thousand the first day and then 750 for four days. Yeah, I can lose now that said, it depends on the nutritional state I enter. So if I come in relatively carb fed, yeah, I'll lose ten pounds in five days. But of course, much of that is water. So each gram of glycogen is carrying around 4 grams of water. So as you, if you take your glycogen stores down to 50% of baseline, you think about how much glycogen that is, is plus how much water it is, plus the plasma reduction. It's interesting. I mean, I think it probably speaks to the fact that you're entering at a pretty lean state if you're only losing three or four pounds in a five day fast.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't do. I never carb load ever. Unless it's like Christmas and you know, I have a snack or dessert or something there.

But you know, it's so interesting. People assume because of all of the time I've spent in ketosis and all of the stuff I've written about it, that I don't like carbs. But it's like it'd be hard to find a person who likes carbs more than me. Like, I've never really met a carb I didn't like. I just freaking love them. Like I can eat plain white rice. Like I could eat a bathtub full of plain white rice.

Wow. I just freaking love it. I was gonna challenge you because I love me some carbs, but yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna eat plain white rice. You got me beat. I hand the crown willingly over.

And then when you do, if. How often are you doing that?

If I'm in a ketogenic cycle, I Do if the entire time. So let's say I do one week protein, one week keto. That's pretty typical for me. So. And I just bounce back and forth. Cause I find if I do too many consecutive weeks where I'm actually posting ketones in my blood, that I do start to notice a softening of my muscles and so I just don't feel as hard. So I tend not to stay ketogenic for long, but I'll bounce back and forth.

So you're saying you'll go a week of ketosis, which is obviously restrictive in carbohydrate and protein.

Correct.

And then on your protein week, do you mean you're adding both carb and protein back in or mostly just protein?

Just protein, protein.

And so on your on protein week, how many grams a day of protein are you getting?

Ooh, it's been a while since I counted. Now I just steer by my blood and how I feel. I probably throw in, I'll add, from what I'm normally doing, I'll add 40 grams of protein. It's about right.

That's really interesting because that's not that much. So let's say in ketosis you're walking around at 100 grams, you'd go up to 140.

Correct.

Which would be enough to knock you out. And do you reduce your fat intake during the off week?

Sort of. Unless you unintentionally. Yeah. When I'm high protein, it'll come down just because the calories are being replaced with protein and.

Okay, so yeah, what I'd asked you was where does your if fit into that? Are you ifing during the ketone week but not the non ketone?

Correct, Correct.

Correct.

Because I find it so easy to intermittent fast when I'm ketogenic and I find it a little more distracting. I always do. Like I never eat in less than a 12 hour window, so. But I don't consider that intermittent fasting. I only consider it intermittent fasting if I go all the way to 16 hours without food my average day, even when I don't consider it. If I eat my last meal at six and then I eat my first meal at eight, that's typical for me. So what's that, 14 hours?

Yep.

So my typical day is a 14 hour gap.

And then how deliberate are you about your sleep? Very.

I'm a psycho about sleep. So I'm in bed by 9pm every night like it's a religion. Monday through Friday. On Saturday I'm a little looser. But yeah, I get to bed, I don't use an alarm. I sleep as much as I need, I wake up. When I wake up, it is what it is. And I have been doing that now for like 16 years. So that's critical. Dude. Being tired is a unique form of misery. You are worse at everything you do. And so for somebody who's trying to optimize cognitively, like, I'm trying to get as much done as humanly possible. If I don't get sleep, then I'm just slower. So I'm like, I was better off spending the time sleeping and then just being more efficient with the time that I was awake.

That's a hard thing to explain to some people because, you know, certainly theoretically what you describe makes sense. But I think a lot of people say, look, at the end of the day, if you're gonna give me four more hours to work and I'll sleep four hours instead of eight, how can that be worse? There's a study that was done at the University of Chicago a couple of years ago. It's a pretty good study, very small study, but it was very well controlled study. They took a group of healthy volunteers and did euglycemic insulin clamps on them, which is of course the gold standard for measuring glucose disposal. So they did the study, or they did the euglycemic clamp, and then they restricted their sleep to four hours a night for 14 consecutive days. So basically they did for two weeks what we did in residency for five years, and then they controlled what they were eating during that experiment. So the result I'm about to describe was not simply the result of that. They, they ate more during that time. But when they repeated the euglycemic clamps, their glucose disposal had fallen by 50%. So they became about twice as insulin resistant with getting four hours of sleep a night for just two weeks. Whoa. This is but one study. There are other studies that have looked at other elements of this, and I sort of assumed that the extra fatness I got in residency was just due to my dietary deterioration. But I now believe that it was also in large part due to the lack of sleep. The other thing is it's very difficult to consolidate memory with sleep deprivation. The hippocampus is very sensitive to this. And of course that's where we consolidate memory. So I'm kind of amazed at the gaps I have in my memory from that period of my life.

Yeah, when you said that, that you look back on it as one of the best periods of your life, I thought, how do you, you Remember it like when I get that fatigued. And the funny thing is, I'm the same with film school, it's the same thing. Just no sleep, dude. It's ridiculous. And at the end of that, like, the bonding is intense because you're all going through this hard thing. You're having to help each other. You're all exhausted, but you find a way through. It's amazing. And then in the end, I was like, jesus. There are just patches where I'm like, I don't remember, man, because you're so tired. It's crazy.

So do you meditate? Do you have a practice around spirituality?

Ooh, it's interesting you think of meditation as spiritual. So I meditate like a fiend. It totally changed my life, and I don't know where I would have been in my more stressful years without it. I'm so grateful. And for a long time, because I'm a fool. I didn't meditate and didn't want to. Didn't want to hear about. It sounded so feminine. Like I was a guy really needed to toughen up, which is weird. This come up like three times times in this. And so, yeah, I just resisted it. And then I met a Navy SEAL named Mark Devine. I don't know if you've heard of him. Amazing dude. And he was like, stop being a jackass. Meditate. And so I went and watched his videos and I thought, all right, if it's, you know, a Navy SEAL tough guy, let me give this a shot. And I was like, whoa. Once I understood, it's taking me out of the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic. And that diaphragm breathing actually causes that trigger to happen, that it's mechanistic. I was like, okay. All of a sudden I. I get this. This isn't. Woo woo. This is like some hard biology. And allowed me to really begin to train down because I am incredibly anxious by nature. And when I was in business and constantly out of my element and learning and I was always behind, I developed just massive anxiety. And so I had to find a way to, like, figure that shit out. And so meditation has been just inhumanly helpful. So now if I'm, like, about to go on stage or something, guaranteed, if they're, like, doing the announcement, I am meditating, diaphragm breathing, getting into a nice calm state. Like, it is crazy to me how well it works. And now I'm an evangelical for this. Like, I want to bite the microphone so people will listen if they have not Tried meditation. Like, it is such a game changer, Such a game changer because it gets rid of what I call the background radiation. Like all that just sort of residual stress. You're not even sure what you're stressed about. You just feel uneasy. Something. Something's looming and so meditating. Even on my worst day, I can get to absolute zero where I am totally stress and anxiety free just from breathing. It's crazy.

Do you have a mindfulness component to that? In other words, are you doing a breath meditation where while you are breathing, you are focusing on a component of the breath? Or is it more a concentration thing where you have like, you know, sort of a mantra in the background?

All breath.

All breath.

100%.

I don't remember who said this. It might have been Sam Harris, but it might have been somebody else. And I reflected on it and realized it's very interesting. And it's quite true that if you ever consider a negatively valenced emotion. So the reason I throw in the word valenced is because some people get all bent out of shape when you say an emotion is positive versus negative. So just so no one gets bent out of shape. I'll just say negative versus positively valenced. None of them are really rooted in the present. So depression, sadness, anxiety, fear. When you think of all of the negatively valenced emotions, they are virtually all rooted in the past or in anticipation of the future. And I think it was the realization of that and the desire to sort of drown out some of those things that got me very interested in mindfulness meditation, which was this notion of being as present as possible. And I even took it to really interesting depths of. I don't think Sam made this point, but somebody made this point, which was even pain, physical pain that we endure is actually more about the anticipation of worsening pain or progression of that pain or non cessation of that pain than it is the actual moment. And I was like, that can't be right. So Josh is my body worker. So one day Josh is working on me and there's this one move he does on me that is. Is quite literally upsetting. It's when he gets into my serratus and my subscapularis and it's unbearable on many levels. Definitely there's some nerve impingement going on when he's getting in there. He's probably like yanking on some of the hairs on my armpit or something. Just the whole thing is unbearable. And one day when he was doing it, I was like, all right, try the Exercise, focus on your breath and focus on the pain at exactly that moment. But don't think about how much it's going to hurt in two more minutes. Just think about it in that moment. And I was totally amazed by that experience. And it was like a very interesting tool that I have since continued to experiment with anytime I find myself in extreme pain, especially pain that sort of lasts for a long period of time. And it definitely makes me understand that there are probably people out there who can have total mind control over pain. Speaking of mind control, I remember the first time you came over for dinner. You guys came all the way down from la, down to San Diego, we all had dinner, and I remember you talking about mind control. You were like, I want you to come and work for Quest because I just have mind control over you, some shit like that. Do you remember that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how do you think about that? Have you refined your thinking around mind control?

Yeah, I think that really comes down to energy output. I think that you really can. It's almost distressing how much you can move people in a direction you want them moved if you're willing to put in the time and the energy. But you really have to play a super long game and oftentimes not worry about what's their best interest. And that just does not suit my personality. So I found that far better to think about, like, who are the people that are resonant with what I'm doing? Here's what I'm doing. Put it out there, Tell people, get them excited, show them my excitement, let them understand my vision where I'm trying to go. And then go, okay, of these 20 people that I would love to do something with, who's the one that steps forward and says, I want to do that with you? That to me is far more interesting. So I used to say, and this is what you're thinking about. On a long enough timeline, I can get anyone to do anything. And I just don't even think about it like that anymore, even if that's true. And maybe it is. Like, if you give me 100 years, like. Like, maybe nobody can resist, you know, my wily charms, but it just stops being interesting. It's like, I want to do stuff with people that want to do it. I want to do it with people that are excited about it. And so, yeah, I take a really different approach now. And my thing now is about sharing the vision. Here's what I'm trying to do. Embody the excitement, because I know how infectious it is neurologically. I know that it. We really do share energies. And if you're around somebody else and you're amped up, like, they're gonna pick up on that, they're gonna get more energetic. And I just know that people like to be around people that make them feel more alive, that make them feel better about themselves, that feel energized. So finding people like that and then I am just really not a fan of having to be a Rah Rah leader. Like, I want to play my part in the creation of whatever we're creating as well. So I would much rather do that. Like, create the environment, create the enthusiasm, show people we're trying to do this and it matters and you're going to be able to get that fulfillment that we talked about. It's going to be hard as hell, but we're going to be able to do it. Like, I want to create that environment and then go and fight too. So that's far more interesting than having to, like, you know, Jedi mind tricks and shit and, like, trying to really understand what you want and make sure I'm setting things up so that you're getting that. And I'm always just thinking about you, man. Far better to say, this is the environment, this is what we're doing. Who wants in? But I'm sad that you never came to work for Quest. I did really want that badly, dude.

Yeah.

Like, I know people are listening to this podcast right now because they believe in you, but I'm just saying that belief is well placed. You are one of the most intriguing human beings I have ever met. The way your mind works. I almost stopped you earlier because you were saying something that's so fucking interesting that I was like, just the way you think through a problem captures my imagination. So there are just some people. Dude, I have a total man crush on your brain. It's amazing.

Well, I appreciate that very much, Tom. And I can't thank you enough for making the time today. And I really want to apologize for the fact that you're doing this before I'm doing your show. And I promise you, if you still want me to be on, I'd be honored to be on. And I can't wait to. I don't know how I'm going to top this. I don't know what you'll ask me about. That's interesting.

Oh, that will be fun. Trust me, we. We will crush that. I would have you on in a second. So whenever we can make that happen.

We'Ll make it happen.

And anybody listening to this that likes themselves. And Peter Attia, you will want to hear that interview because I promise I will take this guy to some very interesting places.

So where can people learn more about you if they're listening to this and they're new to you?

Ombilyeu. So my last name is spelled B as in Bravo. I, L, Y, E, U. It's across all socials. My primary two are going to be Instagram and YouTube. YouTube.

So yeah, you have a pretty prominent YouTube channel, don't you?

Dude, I'm proud of that damn thing. So YouTube is hard to win at. It is hard to build a meaningful audience and we've done a really great job and it's just growing crazy. By the time people hear this, I'm sure we'll have crossed 400,000.

Wow. Yeah, I didn't realize it was that big.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really, really been special. And we just pour our heart and souls into making an awesome show and getting people like you on the show. No bs. Like, I'm just really, really proud of what we've done there. And one of my favorite stories. So I'm walking in a Vegas casino and a 51 year old black man jumps out in front of me crying. And he was like, dude, you changed my life. And I thought, this is the world we live in now. Like you can make content. Like, here's the thing. And I think it goes without saying, I'm not paid to be on the show. I'm on this show because I believe in you and I believe in what you're going to bring to people. And I think this is going to be special. And I'm so glad that you did it because meeting you once randomly changed my life. The fact that you're going to make yourself available through the show to the millions of people that I hope find this, it's incredible. Like, what an insane time that we live where extraordinary people can be rewarded for sharing that kind of stuff. Jesus, dude, I know how much you charge to be a concierge client. So, like, it is crazy. Like it's so amazing. So, yeah, I love it. I love what we've done with YouTube. I love them. Proud of the show, which is called Impact Theory. Just the people that have come on and share their wisdom is bananas. So, yeah, very cool.

Thank you, Tom.

Thanks for having me.

You can find all of this information and more@peterattiamd.com podcast. There you'll find the show notes, readings and links related to this episode. You can also find my blog and the Nerd safari@peterattiamd.com what's a nerd Safari, you ask? Just click on the link at the top of the site to learn more. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively non lame once a week email where I'll update you on what I've been up to, the most interesting papers I've read, and all things related to longevity, science, performance, sleep, etc. On social you can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, all with the id PeterAttiyamd. But usually Twitter is the best way to reach me to share your questions and comments. Now for the obligatory this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice and note no doctor patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to the podcast is at the user's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnoses or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they have, and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures, the company, companies I invest in and or advise, please visit Peteratti md.com forward/about.