Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Tom Bilyeu: The Billion-Dollar Entrepreneur Mindset That Turns Failures into Success | AI, Entrepreneurship | E327
Mon, 06 Jan
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After his senior thesis film at USC flopped, Tom Bilyeu abandoned his dream of becoming a filmmaker. As he worked low-paying jobs and relied on his fiancée for financial support, he found himself spiraling into depression and struggling with a lack of purpose. But then, he immersed himself in personal development and brain plasticity research, discovering that effort and learning were the keys to unlocking his potential. As a result, he adopted a growth mindset, leaned into deliberate practice, and overcame self-doubt to become a highly successful entrepreneur. In this episode, Tom shares his journey from building a billion-dollar business to pivoting into the world of media and personal empowerment. He also shares insights into how AI could transform the creator economy. In this episode, Hala and Tom will discuss: 00:00 Introduction to Tom Bilyeu 02:18 Tom's Philosophy on Impact and Purpose 05:08 Balancing Work and Personal Life 07:36 Handling Overwhelm and Prioritization 11:49 Approaching Failure and Learning from AI 16:50 First Principles Thinking 21:37 Tom's Personal Journey and Overcoming Laziness 32:04 Film School and Realizing Limitations 33:28 A Terrible Senior Thesis Film 34:58 Discovering Brain Plasticity and Growth Mindset 36:11 The Loop of Desire Explained 39:08 The Power of Storytelling 43:41 Journey to Entrepreneurship 50:17 The Future of Content Creation with AI 56:10 Project Kaizen and the Creator Economy 01:00:19 Final Thoughts and Advice Tom Bilyeu co-founded Quest Nutrition, a billion-dollar company that revolutionized the health and wellness industry. After exiting Quest, he founded Impact Theory, a media company focused on empowering people through mindset education and storytelling. He hosts Impact Theory Podcast, one of the leading business and personal development podcasts. With experience building multi-million-dollar businesses across nutrition, software, and media, Tom is a recognized leader in entrepreneurship and innovation. He is also the creator of Project Kyzen, an immersive virtual platform blending personal development and technology. Resources Mentioned: Impact Theory: impacttheory.com/ Tom’s Podcast, Impact Theory: https://apple.co/404gbk7 The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee: https://amzn.to/3VJCsSA Sponsored By: OpenPhone - Get 20% off 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/PROFITING Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://www.youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at https://www.airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to https://www.rocketmoney.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new All Show Keywords: Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset. Career & Entrepreneurship Career, Success, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Careers, Startup, Entrepreneurs, Business Ideas, Growth Hacks, Career Development, Money Management, Opportunities, Professionals, Workplace, Career podcast, Entrepreneurship podcast Artificial Intelligence & The Future of Work AI, ChatGPT, AI Marketing, Prompt, AI in Action, Artificial Intelligence, AI in Business, Generative AI, AI for Entrepreneurs, Future of Work, AI Podcast
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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Meaning and purpose is ultimately all that matters. If you have all the money in the world, but you don't believe in what you're doing, then it will be a very empty pursuit. Progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. The average human is designed to get better. So if you put time and attention into getting good at something, you will actually get good at that thing.
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How do we push through our emotions to achieve our goals?
I think people should don't let anybody tell you something is impossible unless it legitimately violates the laws of physics.
You've built billion dollar companies across different industries. And right now, money is really not a concern for you.
Money only monetizes once. You can only spend it one time. But knowledge and connections monetize forever. As long as you're then you can have everything you want.
Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com profiting. Terms and conditions apply. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com slash deals. Yap gang, 2025 is a year of change for me. I'm single and there's nothing tying me down to Jersey anymore. And so I'm looking to set up residence in Texas or Florida.
Yap gang, hold on to your screens and get ready for an inspiring and insightful episode as we welcome Tom Bilyeu, the co-founder of Quest Nutrition and the visionary behind Impact Theory. Tom's not just a successful entrepreneur, he's a master at transforming challenges into opportunities.
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Chapter 2: How can we find meaning and purpose in our work?
Obviously, I'm very thoughtful to make sure that I enjoy what I'm doing, even when I'm failing, that it's a thing that I not only care about the potential outcomes, but that I enjoy the process. So you got to fill your time somehow. And I'm not a retired to the beach kind of guy. So impact is to say it in a word.
How do we push through our emotions to achieve our goals?
I think people should don't let anybody tell you something is impossible unless it legitimately violates the laws of physics.
You've built billion-dollar companies across different industries. Right now, money is really not a concern for you. Yeah, and something that I love for you is that you've got so many different like philosophies and ways that you live your life. And one of the things that you've said is that the most crucial aspect of life is what you think about yourself when you're not alone.
Money only monetizes once. You can only spend it one time, but knowledge and connections monetize forever. As long as you're , then you can have everything you want.
Now, what you think about yourself when you're by yourself. So there's no one there to hype you up, no one there to tear you down. What do you think about you? And it's normally in that quiet space that people start beating themselves up and they don't feel they're living up to their own ideals. That matters. I think ultimately we just were hardwired for it.
Yap gang, hold onto your screens and get ready for an inspiring and insightful episode as we welcome Tom Bilyeu, the co-founder of Quest Nutrition and the visionary behind Impact Theory. Tom's not just a successful entrepreneur, he's a master at transforming challenges into opportunities.
And so how do you feel self-respect and having self-respect for yourself is impacted by the work that we do and the jobs that we have?
And in this episode, he'll share his journey from building a billion dollar business to pivoting into the world of media and personal empowerment. He'll also share his thoughts on how AI could transform the creator economy. Tom is somebody that I've looked up to for such a long time. I'm so excited to have this conversation. He's been such an inspiration to me.
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Chapter 3: What strategies can help manage work-life balance?
There was never the additional layer of I'm mentally breaking because I just, it's all about priorities. I have them in priority order. I draw a dotted line and say the things below the dotted line just are not going to be addressed right now. And I'm able to just shut that door.
And that's always my barometer of, okay, if my marriage is really the most important thing in my life, simply because it has yielded the most return on my investment, then I needed to make a change. And so at the height of all that, I pulled my wife aside and said, look, I will find my way back to you.
And what I find is people are not able to shut the door on the things that exceed the number of hours that they're willing to work. And so they're trying to track everything, even the things that are what I call dormant priorities. And that's the thing that drives them crazy.
And it just became about putting business processes in place that I could hand things off, that I wasn't trying to do everything myself. And so it's like, look, at the same time, it's the period of my life that I'm probably the most proud because if the world was ever going to break me, that was going to be the moment And so it didn't.
And you literally just have to do what's known in behavioral cognitive therapy as cognitive behavioral therapy, excuse me, as a pattern interrupt. And so like anybody, I get that initial impulse of like, oh my God, like I can feel my brain speeding up. And that's when I say to myself, I don't do overwhelm. And then I do diaphragm breathing and I slow down ironically.
And I kept pushing forward and I got the business to where it needed to be. And I got back into the rhythm of prioritizing my marriage. And so, look, it was not a period without its consequences. But if you're very cognizant of that, if you engage in my case with both the business and the marriage, to communicate, okay, business, this is what we're going to have to do.
And in slowing down, rather than trying to speed up, to do everything, it just dissipates. And I thought this would be something I could just tell people about. They would adopt it and it would be great. Man, I see people get overwhelmed all the time.
We're going to have to get people in that replace these different elements. We're going to have to create new processes so that this isn't so manual. And then dear wife, we're going to need to start setting aside some time. I need a couple more months to really put these processes in place. But if you can just bear with me until this time, I won't be working these stupid hours anymore.
I feel like so many entrepreneurs get overwhelmed and it's so true what you're saying. Overwhelm is a feeling that is maybe not necessarily real. We can only do so many things. And so if we just prioritize what we're doing and set some boundaries, then we shouldn't necessarily get overwhelmed. It also helps that you have a wife where you guys are very communicative about your goals.
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Chapter 4: How can we overcome feelings of overwhelm?
Evolution has one goal, to make sure that you survive long enough to have kids and have kids. Okay, so I'm doing something right now that hurts. That means I'm doing a thing that evolution does not want me to keep doing, or I'm doing something pleasurable. This is something that evolution wants me to keep doing.
Well, so failure, the only right way to approach it is to approach it like AI. So when AI is trying to learn a pattern, which is essentially what all of us are trying to do, it tries a thing and it gets a result. And it's not like you can't imagine the AI having like an emotional breakdown. Oh, my God, like I tried to play this video game and it didn't work.
Okay, now, if my goal is not focused on having kids that live long enough to have kids, I have some different goal, then those emotions might not be what I need to reach my goal. And this is what I see all the time. People confuse feelings. Feeling with thinking. Don't make that mistake, boys and girls. Feeling is not thinking.
It's like the AI just goes, OK, I'm trying to learn the rules of the game and I move the paddle this way and I don't make contact with the ball. I don't get any points. So what if I move over here and then eventually makes contact with the ball and the ball bounces and scores a point? It's like, OK, I see now I have to make contact with the paddle and the ball and the ball will then hit this.
So feelings are literally a very high bandwidth communication from the part of your body and your subconscious mind that can read a lot of points of data very, very quickly. But it's hard to translate that into conscious thought, into communication. words, even more narrow of a data pipe. And so you just get a feeling, right? Tiger and bush run. You don't have to think through it.
And so you're just getting what are known in AI as samples. So you try a thing, it gives you a piece of data. This is a sample. Now you know a little bit more about the world. And if people understood that you're running trial and error as a way of building up a prediction engine so that you know, oh, when I do this, I get this outcome. And that really is all life is.
In fact, you may not even get to tiger. You just have a sense. I need to get out of here right now. You don't know why. You don't know what it is. Maybe you picked up on a rustling in the bush. certain way, you know, a stick cracked. And the same is true in relationships, in business, you just get this overwhelming feeling. Now, if in that moment, you realize my life isn't actually in danger.
It's what I call the physics of progress. You're trying to build a prediction engine so that you know, when I do this, I get this result and I want to go to XYZ goal. And I see what I have to do in order to get there. And I've got such an accurate prediction engine. I can now do all the things that are going to take me there.
Now, you can never be guaranteed to arrive at your goal because the world is just changing so rapidly. But at least if you're running this exercise of the physics of progress, you always know what to try next. Whether it will work or not depends on a whole host of factors. But that is really, really useful. And failure is a necessary part of that sequence.
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Chapter 5: What is first principles thinking and why is it important?
What do you mean start with human psychology for info products? Because I think I have a lot of like online entrepreneurs listening.
So I don't want people to feel like this is an exercise where it's like, oh my God, do I really have to go back to quarks and bosons and all that stuff, which we don't even fully understand anyway. So most of the time when I'm running this experiment, it's for something for sales and marketing. And so forget all the early stuff, just get to how does the human mind operate?
And he was like, well, does it violate the laws of physics to lower the cost of batteries? It might, if you go and look at what it costs to get it out of the ground and all that stuff and to mine it. And you may be like, yeah, this is just it. And there's no way to get any cheaper. But when he looked at it, he realized, whoa, there's like all these markups along the way.
What do people look for in products? Like what is the truth, the inescapable truth of the human mind? So like, for instance, people don't make decisions rationally. They make them emotionally. I mean, I can just tell you that from the architecture of the human mind standpoint, that is true.
We could actually get closer to the source. We can do them for a lot cheaper. Cool. Same thing happened to me at Quest. We took our formulation for a protein bar to the manufacturers and they said, this bar can't be made. And we're like, hold on, does manufacturing this bar actually violate the laws of physics? Like that doesn't seem true.
And so once you get to that, it's like, oh, well, you may want to sell this product on features and benefits, but it won't work because that's not the architecture of the human mind. So now, instead of like, if you're looking at somebody else in your field, And you think, well, they're doing it as good as it can be done. Well, not necessarily.
And so we went and looked at it and long story short, we realized what was happening is because the government subsidized corn, everybody used high fructose corn syrup in their products as a sweetener. It's cheap. It's delicious.
So all the equipment that had been manufactured over like the last 70 years could be made with the assumption that all the products that would run on it would have high fructose corn syrup. So this government intervention had all these downstream effects that nobody thought of. So when we said, well, wait, it's not that the bar can't be made, it's that we would have to engineer our own equipment.
What are they missing in terms of their approach that would allow you to get more bang for your buck? If you go back to instead of the frame of reference that they're handing you and go, what do I know to be true about the way the human mind works? Now you can do something better. You can do something different and win because you're building up from universal truths about how people think.
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Chapter 6: How can we learn from failure and move forward?
But people give you positive feedback. This is why so often adults are pursuing something that they first got that positive feedback on as a kid.
Then there is your brain will justify what whatever amplitude of emotion you display. So if you freak out, your brain goes, whoa, I guess this really matters. So I was like, okay, well, then if I repeat a really high emotional state every time I talk about my goal, would it begin to myelinate such that now I'm Whenever I talk about it, I get that big emotional response.
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So at first it felt like I was faking it. And then six months later, whenever I would talk about it, I would feel that sense of like passion and excitement. I was like, I can't believe this works. So be careful because you can align yourself to dumb things.
So if you pick a goal that's honorable, that is legitimately exciting to you, and then talk to yourself about it, what you're going to achieve, what you're going to do, and like with that feeling of passion and excitement that you hope one day you will feel naturally. And then when you talk to other people, which is even easier than talking to yourself, same thing.
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You embody, embody the emotion you wanna feel and do that over and over and over. And then at least in my experience, call it four to six months later, now you can just be talking about it normally and you get that sense of like, oh man, this is really important to me. This is really exciting. You're like, wow, it's so crazy because six months ago, I was interested, like it was legitimate.
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Chapter 7: What role does mindset play in entrepreneurship?
When I started, there were 400 podcasts. There's now 6 million podcasts. So it is just insane how many more podcasts, I may have said 400,000 podcasts. So the world has just changed absolutely dramatically. And that's going to keep happening where the format of a podcast itself is going to get disrupted by somebody alone with an AI doing things that nobody's ever thought of before.
reality where if AI does all of the wildly disruptive stuff that people think it's going to do over the next, say, 10 years, it's also going to be dropping the cost of virtually everything. So everything is just getting cheaper. Now, this takes you into a post capitalistic society. And there are big questions around what that looks like.
And the difficulty of production, the friction of going from idea to execution is the current moat. That's going to go away, which means this will be more like TikTok.
But people will have access to the things that they want for far, far, far cheaper. Now, that doesn't mean people won't find a way to peacock through other means because we will. But especially when you throw in the mix brain computer interfaces, this is all going to get real weird. There are already people that can play video games like proper video games using just their brain computer interface.
So instead of there being a person that has a podcast, take a Rogan or something like that, instead of that person dominating the landscape, you're going to have like, oh, one of his episodes might pop off, but somebody else is going to release something else that's a totally unique format that nobody saw coming. And it'll just be like that.
And people will just be scrolling onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And that's going to happen across everything. It's going to happen across video game production, which I trust me, I have just as much anxiety as you. But the key is to adopt AI faster than the competition. And then just remember that one, we're moving towards an abundance reality where it's It's nuts.
And you were just saying when you first started 400,000 podcasts and everyone was telling you there's no chance it's already saturated. AI is going to make things even more saturated. So what is your perspective about the increased competition and if there's even a point to participate if there's going to be that much competition?
If AI does all of the wildly disruptive stuff that people think it's going to do over the next, say, 10 years, it's also going to be dropping the cost of virtually everything. So everything is just getting cheaper. Now, this takes you into a post-capitalistic society, and there are big questions around what that looks like.
So I think people make a mistake when they do preemptive quitting or preemptive strikes. The reality is you want to pay attention. You want to be at the cutting edge. You want to be integrating AI. Right now, AI is a phenomenal tool and it is a terrible master. So it's not going to be able to do things without humans yet. So people should be excited right now for this phase.
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Chapter 8: How can storytelling enhance our entrepreneurial journey?
Amazing. Well, it sounds super fascinating and very exciting. And I can hear the passion in your voice about it. Tom, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. I was very nervous. I never get nervous. And I was so nervous in the beginning for some reason. So I just have looked up to you for a long time. So I just appreciate your time.
And then if I can really ground this for people, guys, you have to learn how business works. Like business has physics. And if you really want to get good, you need to learn those physics. And they are available for anybody to learn, anyone to master. The game is really relatively simple. Learn it. Learn the game. Do not let yourself get overwhelmed. Just one piece at a time.
I end the show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. And this can just come from your heart. Doesn't have to be anything that we talked about today. What is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?
Always be learning. Always be learning. So it should cue off of your goal. So again, your goals make demands, but I spend on average two hours a day, 365 days a year, every day for the last 15 years, maybe more learning. Be a relentless learning machine. Pick apart the skill set. Learn it.
And when you say physics, do you mean like sales, marketing, finance, those kinds of things?
Yes. And where it interfaces with leadership and human psychology? Yes.
And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Amazing. And what is your secret to profiting in life?
At Tom Bilyeu across the socials. Best place is probably YouTube. So for me, I know that nothing matters more than reciprocated love. So I make sure that I put a ton of time and attention into that. And then also I manage my biology. So I get sleep. I eat healthy. I exercise. I work out. I maintain loving relationships beyond just my wife. Those things are incredibly important.
Amazing. Thank you so much for all of your time. Really appreciate it.
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