What It Takes To Go From $0 to $1,000,000 In 3 Years with Tom Bilyeu
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Being an entrepreneur is gruelingly difficult and it will test your character. I have said to people many times, entrepreneurship is like begging somebody to punch you in the face over and over and over. What do you feel is broken in the American economy today? This is where I think you and I are going to disconnect. What's a skill you're working on right now? I'm going to be the best old man video game streamer, period, ever. Let's talk about My Bone, I Gotta Pick. Pick, let's go.

Let's go. I and countless other people have gone down the road of just pursuing wealth only to find out it's actually a terrible strategy for generating wealth. Have you made any money mistakes along the way? Oh, yeah. So buckle in.

What's up, guys? Today, I've got a powerhouse guest joining me, Tom Bilyeu, an entrepreneur and founder of Impact Theory, which is a personal growth company with a wildly popular YouTube channel and podcast. And today, we're talking about what it takes to go from zero to millions, what's really keeping Americans broke, and a foolproof solution to fix the economy. And hey, before we jump to it, I've got a theory that could impact this YouTube channel, and it involves you smashing that like and subscribe button. So get to it. Tom, welcome.

Thank you. It's good to be here. This is awesome. It is, man. I'm excited. I feel like I'm inside of the metaverse because I always see you on the internet and now you're in real life. This is exactly what it feels like. It's how I picture you, though. You're not far from what YouTube would portray. Okay. We'll take that. We'll take that as a win. I met somebody this morning, though, that was like, man, has anybody ever told you your voice sounds exactly like that guy, Tom Bilyeu?

And I was like, funny you should mention it. Coincidence? I think not. So if you Google Tom Bilyeu, a lot of things come up. Most of them good, luckily. But you do a lot of different things. Entrepreneur, screenwriter, co-founder of Quest Nutrition, YouTuber, podcaster, you know, video game creator. What is your elevator pitch when you meet someone and they go, who is Tom? What does Tom do?

Ooh, I am living proof that there's only one belief that matters. If you put time and energy into getting better at something, you will actually get better. So that, like the thing I'm trying to put out into the world, the thing that actually unites all of those seemingly disparate things is that you're having a biological experience. You can master your biology, point yourself in any direction, get better at something and execute at a high level.

And that is the loop I live in all the time. So I'm just asking myself what's going to be the most fulfilling thing that I could point myself at right now with this next increment of call it 15 minutes. As a brand, though, I am a little terrified at how schizophrenic I come across on the Internet. It's terrible for the brand. Then you can just call yourself a serial entrepreneur and then you can and it does sound cool and all of that.

Um, but that's very misleading. You will get trapped in the sort of Instagram of it all. I want to talk about wealth. I've heard you say that at one point you were worth 2 million on paper and you were more unhappy than ever. That is correct. What was the sort of correlation between the two?

Well, so here is where I think people misunderstand what money is. So money is the great facilitator. If you want to do a thing, money is going to be necessary and you can do incredible things. Like when people are like, bro, he's got $320 billion. Like how could you ever spend that in a lifetime? I'm like, I can do that on a long weekend. Do you people not know about companies, buying companies, like the things you're trying to create?

So that's crazy to me. You can do a lot with money. You can build, but really big things take an obscene amount of money.

uh so the thing to really just think about is all right i'm worth 2 million on paper but inside my body when i'm alone i don't have the neurochemistry that feels good and i'm like why don't i and then i realize because i'm pursuing a product i don't care about i'm just a slick marketer which does not make me feel better about myself it's a skill set but i don't i am wired for connection

And so I felt this tremendous distance. It's funny because now we talk about authenticity and community. These words didn't exist back then in that format. So I was just like, I feel so isolated. I'm not really being who I am. Like this just doesn't feel good. And I don't even use my own product in my own company. The phrase I had was, I want to feel alive. And so I went to my partners and I said, here's your equity back. I'm not going to cross the finish line. So I don't want anything for this, but I need to go do something that makes me feel alive.

And long story short, they end up saying, "We feel the same. What would we have to build together to keep working together?" And so I end up not leaving, but it just changed our approach. And the next company becomes Quest and it blows up huge. And so the tremendous irony was once I stopped leading with I'm here to get rich, which when I was worth 2 million was my stated goal every day. I'll do whatever it takes within my code of ethics, but within my code of ethics, I'll do whatever it takes to get rich.

And once I started saying, I may never get rich. So I just want to struggle against something that really matters to me. Now you're focused on value. And so I was focused on adding value to somebody else's life. And then that made me feel better inside. When I was alone, I was like, yo, you're fighting for these people. Like you're a warrior for these people. And that gave me a frame of reference to push through all the hard stuff and to keep going in hard days. And that earned my own respect.

Once you have your own respect, now when you're alone in the shower, you're like, yeah, I'm still dirt poor, but I feel good about who I am, what I'm becoming, how hard I work, all of those things. And so in that moment, I said, I will never again do something I don't care about for money. And that's, I've seen a lot of young people, you know, they call into the Ramsey show. A guy called in yesterday and he said, I want to switch careers. And we said, why do you want to go into medical sales? He said, well, you can make a lot of money.

And I was like, dude, you're going to get burnt out and go back to the job you had before. Like I can see that future. So how do you talk to young people who are watching who are going easy for Tom to say he's got the money? I want to go make that money. And I'm not passionate about X, Y, Z thing. And so I'm just going to go make as much money as I can. I say two things.

One, as the saying goes, a fool never learns. A smart man learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. I have been down that road. You can listen or not listen, but I and countless other people have gone down the road of just pursuing wealth only to find out it's actually a terrible strategy for generating wealth. So if you actually wanna get rich, it's a dumb path, but fine, ignore me.

The other thing I would say is the Cassandra complex. I love this is a Greek myth. I love it so much. I am convinced this was a myth that grew up from people trying to explain to their kids what it was like to be a parent. The Cassandra complex is she has an affair with a god or whatever, all the classic things in Greek mythology that get you punished. And her punishment was that she would know the future, but nobody would believe her.

And so this is the same thing. That would drive me crazy. Bro, this is what it feels like to have had repeatable success, hyper success, but to have started where I was once so broke, I was scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to go to a job interview, okay? So I go from that to one of the most ridiculous mansions in Beverly Hills. I didn't get any smarter, but I acquired a lot of skills.

A set of ideas has completely changed my life. Once you realize that, you want to tell people, "Hey, if you think like this and act like this, you get this. I see you do it all the time in your content." Only 2 percent of people will listen to you, and for the other 98 percent, I am Cassandra. I know the future. I know their future because I went through it all. Yet, despite me speaking as fast as I can,

98% of the world will not believe you. They're still going to touch the hot stove. Even though Tom told them, here's what happens when you touch the hot stove. Correct. Now, the bad news is most people will live with their hand on the hot stove and they don't understand why their flesh is boiling. That's even worse. And that gets into, if you stare into that void very long, you get very sad. Yeah, it gets dark real quick. Hello, darkness, my old friend.

Well, here at Ramsey, we're all about transformation. So we're after the same thing. We want to help people, obviously with their personal finances, but now with their relationships, with their careers and help them grow. And it really comes down to you have more control and agency than you think. For sure. Over yourself and your future. Here's the question for you. You obviously have a lot of wealth today. You've been very successful launching businesses. But if you had to start over with zero dollars in your bank account today, what would you do to get back to, let's say, a million dollars?

All right, so the first thing is I understand this question is about money, but one thing I really want people to understand is success can never be guaranteed. Once I learned that the dumbest question in the world that you can ask yourself is what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? Because you will lose your whole life to that. You will pursue something you don't care about because you want the end result so badly.

I think the way smarter question is what would I do and love every day even if I were failing? And so the mistake I think I made, even though it ended up generating hundreds of millions of dollars, the mistake that I- It's a good mistake to make. It is, man. And look, money is so powerful. It's more powerful than people think. It just isn't what they expect.

But if I were really in that situation, I'd be like, okay, I cannot guarantee that I'm going to get to the million dollars other than a nice, slow, invest broadly, be patient. All of the things that you teach are just bang on. But this is somebody who's getting at the entrepreneurial thing. They want to know, did Tom learn something where if I had his knowledge, I could start at zero and I could guarantee that I'm going to get to a million?

And the answer is no, because if you pursue something that people do not value enough to pay you that kind of money for, either in product sales so that the value of the company goes up or in salary, because believe it or not, you can get so good at something that people will pay millions of dollars in salary.

None of that's guaranteed, but the struggle is going to be guaranteed. So what would I enjoy struggling at? Is the honest, like big lesson that Tom has learned through all of this is struggle well. Now, okay, skillset.

you want to make sure that you're going to make somebody money. So I would focus on the parts of my skill set in the beginning when I don't have any leverage where I'm going to say what I know is the leverage. So I'm going to walk in with huge swagger into somebody's office and I'm going to say, look, put me in here for 30 days. Don't pay me anything. I'm going to add value in these very specific ways. I will have

audited their company. I will know exactly where they're trying to get to. And I will just lay out a plan where I'm giving away all my secrets to where I want them to walk out of that meeting going, he just gave us the blueprint for how to do this. Now, if they're real, they're going to know the difficulties in the execution.

And so they're going to be like, yo, lock that guy up. Anybody that will do this for free, anybody that's not worried about their ideas being stolen, whatever, they're willing to work for 30 days for free. Let's find out if this guy's real or not. Now, the big trade, the big hammer that's waiting for them, like if I know this is like a game show and I have to get to a million dollars, is I need equity.

So I'm going to add value and I'm going to get my equity. And the equity is going to be the thing that lets me get to a million dollars very quickly. Now for the right company, I can add value so fast. I will say I could almost certainly get a million dollars worth of equity in six months. If you get to where I've gotten and you've done the things that I've done. So I built three multi-million dollar companies in three wildly divergent industries. So I've done security software,

nutrition and manufacturing, and now media. So it's not exactly a fluke where they go, well, yeah, that's only because, well, you've done it in all these industries. Correct. It's not a fluke anymore. It's a set of ideas that are repeatable and teachable. You've got a hot take on the difference between being rich versus being wealthy. And a lot of people conflate the two. Can you unpack that? It's not a linguistic thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about, but rich is money. Wealth is going to be you are a person whose internal life is full of fulfillment. Now,

If you don't have money, you're always going to be in a hard place. Unless you go full monk mode where you wake up every day and you work on diminishing the part of your brain that wants

which is the only way to do it. I'm not drawn to that. But as I tell people, I keep it in my back pocket. Total detachment of just, if one day I'm like, yo, this wanting thing just is no good. I don't want to pursue another thing ever again. I'm just going to completely detach. Fair enough. I have never found myself even close to that, even in my darkest of days. If you pay attention to my content holistically, you will understand fulfillment is the punchline.

All the money in the world, no fulfillment is a horrible life. Fulfillment and no money, great. I would much rather be in that position. But the real answer is money and fulfillment.

That's the ultimate game because now you're in control and control your time. You have the great facilitator at your disposal and it makes a difference. Look at stats on health, right? So the more money you make to a certain point, your health actually goes up. So the reality is you are having a biological experience.

And if you don't tame your mind, you, no matter what you do from a wealth perspective, your life will be miserable and your life can be amazing. The greatest thing life has to offer you is reciprocated love.

That's it. There's no higher aim. You need meaning and purpose in your life, and there's a formula for that, and it is to work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you for your own reasons that allow you to serve yourself and others. And if you do that, life will be great. Struggle well. Goes back to that.

I also have a new TV show idea where you become a monk. I really want to see that. Hoo-wee. These are so many great ideas. I got to figure out how to make money on this thing. It's simply too good. I want to talk about investing. As we talk about building wealth, we talked about you can't save your way to serious wealth. You have to invest.

You've built a lot of wealth from your entrepreneurial endeavors. You talked about equity and exiting companies. But for those of us that are working nine to five jobs, what is your philosophy around investing for that, the average Joe? Get in a fund. Get in a fund. Do not actively manage Vanguard. Put a certain amount of money in there every month and leave it alone. Have a minimum.

minimum 10-year horizon, just whatever amount that you can put in there and not think about, put that in. Do not try to get clever. Do not try to pick stocks. Don't get fancy. Bore yourself to death.

and let that accumulate slowly over time. I believe investing is gambling. The government is forcing you to do that, fine. What is the most risk appropriate way that you can gamble? A fund like the S&P 500, the more you spread things out, the better. If you can bet essentially on the global market, you're probably in an even better position. And then if you can find a way, and this is why I am a very hopeful person for Bitcoin,

Because I think anybody raised as a digital native should be watching Bitcoin to see if it ever stabilizes.

Right now, part of its appeal is the volatility. But you actually want Bitcoin to be boring. You want Bitcoin to be treated like gold. You don't want it to be a crazy roller coaster. What you want is a way around the government using fiat currency to force you to gamble. You want a thing that can't be inflated so that if you put $10 of savings into Bitcoin that 100 years from now, you still have $10 worth of buying power. That's what you want. And...

Look, as they say, Bitcoin is hope. But right now, Bitcoin is extremely volatile, so you need to be extraordinarily careful. So, yeah, I really do hope that it stabilizes over time, becomes a really boring asset class. If people watch this channel, they know my feelings about crypto. I agree that— You hate? I wouldn't call it a hate. People assume that because I say, hey, this is not a great— if you're going to invest 15% of your income, put that into a retirement account, tax advantage accounts versus crypto. Okay.

So what I've said is that cryptocurrency is Mary Kay for young men. And I want you to prove that wrong.

Let me first figure out what you mean by that. So it's a pyramid scheme? Like you get your boys hyped on it. It's not that crypto itself is the problem. It's the people that do it that sort of ruin it. Like their obsession. There's this, bro, you got to get in on this. And I understand there's cool technology. It's finite, all this stuff. But there's just an element to it that I can't wrap my brain around that's just icky. Yeah, no, I hear all of that. So here's what I would say.

The vast, vast, vast majority of crypto is trash. The vast majority of crypto is the modern day get rich quick scheme. And because it works just enough, it perpetuates.

And it is not where I would advise people put any money other than imagine yourself at you're in Vegas. I don't walk by people at gambling tables and be like, I can't believe you're doing that. I'm like, yeah, if you enjoy gambling, go do it. Just please eyes wide open about what you're doing. And you are gambling on culture. And when you're inside the culture of I'll call it Web3 culture,

It is, it's really fun. They're very irreverent. They're very art focused. They're very, there's a young energy. Then they lose a bunch on the roulette wheel. And then they're like attacking each other. And it's like, yeah, because you guys were tricking yourselves that you weren't just gambling. This is gambling. But that would be the goal. Just dumb, boring, simplistic, save. Don't spend a ton of money. If you want to spend more money, make more money. And that's where I would push people. What have you done for your skillset? Literally.

Skill set for Tom today. I've already worked on skill sets from the moment I woke up. This is where people start to think I'm a psycho. I am so obsessed with optimizing skill acquisition because I love it. What's the skill you're working on right now? Like are there particular ones you focus on? Of course. Okay, this one's silly, but it's true. You said you woke up today. What is the skill I'm going to try to get better at? I am going to be one of the best video. I'm going to be the best old man video game streamer period ever.

Wow. Because I'm building a video game, so this becomes an important marketing vehicle for me. It is a very different skill set than being in World Affairs or an interviewer. Like, this is a totally different thing. What does it take to be a good video game streamer? Okay, so... Because you can be good at video games. That's one aspect. Well, when you're old, you're almost certainly not. So, as an old man gamer, you almost have to remove off the table that I'm going to be good at this.

because reaction time, you're old in esports at 24. Like old, like, oh my God, he's 24 and he's still in it. And you're in your 40s right now. Late 40s.

So you're saying your brain just can't react as fast as much as you want to keep it sharp, which you are one of the sharpest, you know, late 40s guys I've met. Very kind. And you're still saying I can't get that good. A 26 year old can't keep up with a 17 year old. Let's just be real clear about how fast video games are measured in milliseconds. So that's going to wear off very, very fast. So now it becomes a question of how do you add value to somebody's life when they're watching you stream? My whole shtick is.

I have encountered a set of ideas that will make your life better on so many dimensions it's freakish. I'm trying to find a way to put those into video games.

And so I will play video games and chat will come in. They'll ask questions. So I'm there playing, answering questions about mindset, answering questions about business, just giving away my ideas, not as fast as I can talk when I'm streaming, but giving them away, trying to connect with people that are young, feel lost, disconnected. And so meeting people where they are. But you have to be entertaining. You have to have good ideas. They have to walk away going, whoa, that was a good use of my time. A lot of times when you watch a streamer, you walk away feeling like,

I enjoyed that, but that was empty. The guy was kind of fun and funny and I like the way they say this phrase.

And my hope is that they'll encounter my stream and be like, yo, I still got to engage with a game that I love. But all the while, like, I actually felt good about that. I've got ideas now that I can walk away with. Now, again, I live in the physics of progress. This may be a terrible idea. And that may not be the path to becoming the greatest old man streamer. And this is one of my superpowers is, A, I'm not afraid to be embarrassed. So if this ends up really being a stupid idea and everybody's like, haha,

fine, I'll just look for the next idea and I'll push it forward. But you really do have to look at, is there a market? Can I build this up? Is this actually going to be viable? And if it's not, either move on to something else or just say, okay, failed experiment, but...

It makes sense on paper, but I have to test it to see if there's really a market there. I'm here for it. I've actually had the idea that I want to play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater while giving financial advice. Go for it. Is this viable? It sounds like I could join you in this old man streaming world. Yes, because here's the thing. Kids, younger people, all of us, but really younger people, they want to see something happening as they're listening.

And there is something about video games that for somebody like me, simply seeing the world of video games, the art, the effects, the sounds, all of it,

It does something to me subconsciously that I really enjoy. And the way that my dad enjoys looking at old cars, I enjoy being around video game art and video games and all that. You're transported to a tiny other universe. But even just like if I just accept it as a physiological thing, I feel the way I want to feel when I'm encountering video games. Not even necessarily playing them, just encountering them. Okay, cool. So that's going to take up the visual space.

Now, I'm going to leverage that. I've got you here. You came for the video game, but you stay for the, in your case, financial advice. So you might actually be surprised that people that would otherwise not give you the time of day

they encounter you on stream. They're like, oh, cool. Like, this is dope. Instead of just talking about nothingness or having a bunch of catchphrases, you're actually giving me financial advice, walking me through your story, but you're where I'm at. And I'll tell you right now, maybe the number is tiny, and this is the experiment that I'm running now, but there are some people that will never encounter your ideas unless...

You do it live on a video game stream. Meet them where they are. Maybe it's four people and then it's not worth doing, but maybe it's 400,000 and all of a sudden it's like, whoa, there's really something here. That's legit. All right, we'll jump right back into our chat with Tom in just a sec. But first, let me tell you about one of today's sponsors, Laurel Road.

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I've heard you say this, pain is amazing and powerful. So what is the relationship between pain and progress? The reality is that life is a chaos box, a chaos machine maybe, because it is optimized to generate chaos. And

to bring order to that chaos, you must pour energy into that system. Whenever you're pouring an inordinate amount of energy, it is going to be difficult. And just like working out, there's literal physical pain. Lifting a heavy weight. Yeah. Your muscles begin to burn. You get tired. You're fatigued. It requires a lot of discipline. You have to not do a thing that you would rather do. And so...

You're going to get signals from your body that denying yourself the things would be immediate gratification. That has its own level of that sucks. And then you're probably doing something that is psychologically taxing, meaning it forces you to confront your own limitations. Nobody likes that. That's my specialty, not liking stuff. And so now people are optimizing for the short term, but they get this larger context of pain. They don't understand why they don't like their life.

And it's very hard for them to understand if I were willing to take the short term sort of physical pain of confronting the difficulties, delaying gratification, working really hard, not knowing if I'm going to get anything out of this. But, oh, this larger context of I'm working really hard in service of something that matters to me and those that I love. And I feel good about that.

And so there's always this weird disconnect that forces you to come up with a psychological frame of reference that says suffer now and you will get self-respect. The problem is most people say to themselves, suffer now and you get a lot of money. And it's the wrong frame, but I get why it gets more clicks and why people perpetuate it. Wow. I feel like I just entered the matrix. That was amazing.

I want to talk about the economy. It's something people keep bringing up. When I ask people, what's the number one thing holding you back? Largely, the answer was the economy and inflation. So what are you personally actually worried about? Because a lot of it's headlines and Tom's smart enough to go, meh. Are there anything that actually worries you about the American economy specifically right now? Yes, aggressively. But that's

It's very confusing for my audience that I'm a mindset guy who can very much help you build self-respect and a love of life. And I'm always talking about you need to be optimistic. And then you look at my YouTube headlines. It's like the world's burning. And people are like, wait a second, how do I reconcile these two things?

And the way that you reconcile them is that ideas matter. Things can go so wrong that millions of people are starving, killed, or just maybe it never goes to that. But America is no longer the generator of ambitious people that are driven to bring innovation and awesome stuff. And it is amazing.

terrifyingly easy for that to happen. Where culturally, we're just not pushing the way that we used to. The most important thing I would want people to take away from me is you need to be able to stare nakedly at how the world actually is. And if you're actually being manipulated, that's not a pass to lay in your house and cry about it, but it's important to know, "Oh, okay, I'm being manipulated. People want me to see one thing." But you can also run what I call the physics of progress.

where it's a very simple six-step cycle where you come up, you know where you want to go, come up with your best guess on how to get there, and you run an experiment on whether you've actually figured out the way to get there or not. So almost no matter how bad things are,

The right answer is simply, okay, that's real. That's where we're at. Now, how do I thrive in this system? But if you fool yourself, and this is what I think people do a lot today, if you fool yourself into thinking that the world is just, everything's great, everything's working perfectly, I'm not being manipulated at all, like just do my thing, you will wonder why you can't keep making progress. Don't try to be skeptical, try to be accurate. And so if it's like,

When I act in an optimistic way, I move closer to my goals than just be optimistic. If when I am pessimistic, I move closer to my goals than be pessimistic. But I...

I value an idea by its utility of moving someone towards an honorable goal. Well, let's dig into the economy stuff. What do you feel is broken in the American economy today? Okay, so this is where you have to understand what is the nature of money. Like, what is it actually, and how does it move and flow? Most people don't understand what money is. They know we print it. But the vast...

swath of humanity, they may understand, yeah, well, obviously you print it. I have it in my pocket, but they don't know. Or it's in my bank account in a digital number. Right. But they don't understand that printing money, and this is where I think you and I are going to disconnect. I think governments have a moral obligation to their people to give them a way to save money that cannot be inflated. Every economy that I'm aware of in the world right now, they're

they have an inflatable economy. So they're using a fiat currency and you can at a moment's notice, create more of it. And if people understood that when that happens, even though they didn't take any money, let's just say you have $1,000 in your bank account. If I put more money into the system,

let's say, enough such that that $1,000 can now only buy $900 worth of goods. You look at your bank account, you go, I saw my $1,000. What's the problem? It's your buying power. That's inflation, as we know it. Which is exactly the same as stealing. These are my words. I know you're not going to like these. That's exactly the same as stealing $100 from you.

So you're saying the government is literally stealing your money when they print more of it. The government is literally stealing your money, and they steal your money in a whole bunch of other ways as well. Manipulation of CPI is a way to steal from entitlements. Which is Consumer Price Index. Correct. Okay. And...

the entitlements that people get paid are based off of the CPI because if the inflation is going up, the government has an obligation to match that. So they want to report that inflation is really low because they know that they have a huge burden coming their way, a debt burden coming their way, and they have to find a way to get out from under that. And instead of being honest about

and saying, uh-oh, we're going to have to cut back on spending because we have so much debt, right? Our debt grows by roughly a trillion dollars every 100 days, which if I were going to sum everything up, debt, money printing. Those are your problems. You cannot keep deficit spending. You just can't do it.

it's going to come back to haunt you. And people have a sense that you can spend forever as a government and that there's no breaking point. When they say that they're trying to control inflation, what they're saying is, I'm trying to control how much we have to steal from you before we default.

That's really what they're saying. And that's a nasty game. And that game makes true the statement that I've heard you say, which is you're never going to save your way to wealth. You're going to have to invest. Now, if I could use a slightly different word, which will get at what I think is the truth. Now, remember, once we know the truth, great, then play the game. But the truth is, because the government is more than happy to inflate your buying power away, you have to invest.

And if you understand that investing is actually gambling, then you can say the following statement. Because the government steals your buying power, you have to gamble in order to make more money than they steal.

Once you understand that's actually what's happening, then you go, hold on a sec. That doesn't sound cool. You should just be able to save. If you save $10 as paycheck, 100 years from now, if that buys $10 worth of stuff, just like it would today, we love life. And in fact, if the government weren't inflating away all the benefits of improvements and efficiencies, so technically $10 100 years from now should buy you more, not less,

But it actually buys you a lot less in 100 years. Because we found ways to bring costs down and we can pass the cost savings on. But instead, with inflation, it's going to cost more. Now, how much of this is, you know, people say, well, it's the greedy corporations. They're making record profits, Tom. Yeah. So really, it's their fault for raising the prices. So here's the thing.

We, capitalism right now has flaws that are being exploited and people have to figure that out. The question becomes, where are the flaws? And I would say the flaws are a corporation has every incentive to go to the government and be like,

"Look, you guys need to take care of us. You need to take care of the citizens. If you just pass some regulations, we'll really be able to help people out. This is going to be amazing." And the government's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that. More regulations." And so regulations allow these companies to get in a position where they can gobble up more of the profits.

And if you start stripping away some of those regulations, and I am not libertarian, I love government. I just like a nice, small, tight government that says what they are trying to do, that is open and transparent with the people, that understand that they work for the people, and that their job is to measurably improve their, what I will call, fulfillment.

And if the government cannot measure their impact on fulfillment, then you can't let them keep spending because they can't exist in that loop I call the physics of progress. So now they're just...

doing things and campaigning and manipulating you into believing they're doing great things. They're going to help you if you choose them. Yeah, so it gets bad. So look, I don't want corporations to be completely unfettered. I think there do need to be some regulations, but I think the government itself has to be wildly paranoid about the tendency for governments to seek size and control.

governments should not seek size and control. They should seek the betterment of their population, period, end of story. And if they just said, here are the five metrics that we're going to look at, and we're going to have independent third parties that are judging whether those metrics are being hit, and then total transparency of budget, that would go a very long way. Let's talk about my bone I got to pick. Pick, let's go. We have a lot of common ground when it comes to financial beliefs, but you've said that owning a home is not a good investment. What do you mean by that?

Here's my take on a home. You put your money into a home if you would like to pay an insurance policy against the government stealing all of your money.

because a home requires upkeep. And so you're gonna be paying a ton of money into that thing that if you were renting, you would not have to pay. You probably won't get everything back out when you sell it at the end. However, you kept up with inflation.

So unless something really, you buy it like the top, top, top, and you spend the next 25 years just clawing back to break even and you were paying the whole time to do it. So I think people are just a little unrealistic about the math, but I know your guys' math.

If they follow your conservative math, like 25%, like that whole thing. - Yeah, 15 year, pay it off early. - Hey, word. But that is not where most people end up. I just really want people to understand the essence of the thing. So to me, home ownership is, hey, you get a home and owning it feels very different

than renting it. If you continue to pay into that system and you can actually afford it, you now have an insurance policy against government stealing your money through inflation, which is not to be sneezed at. And as long as you don't need that money out quickly ever, then you're great.

But if you have a massive amount of debt and you ever find yourself where you can't make those payments anymore, now all of a sudden everything you paid into that system can be taken from you because you don't actually own it. They underestimate how expensive homeownership it is, but it's because they're feeling the pain of, quote, throwing away money on rent, and they

And they go, well, home's going to solve all my problems. And you're saying, no, it can be a money hole. And it might not pan out for you. Yeah. If you understand the essence and you treat it right, it really can solve problems. But if you don't, it can create problems. So I found that most people who have built wealth, they've made some mistakes along the way. And a lot of people who may not know your story or they just see super successful, Tom, they don't know that you've made mistakes.

Have you made any money mistakes along the way? Oh, yeah. So buckle in. The most powerful money lesson I ever learned, which unfortunately I've learned multiple times, but is that...

When you're building a brand, people want consistency. So they want you in a box. And as a brand, you should be trying to cram yourself into a box because you want people to know what they can expect from you. And please understand, this is the advice that I know I should be taking and am not. So I don't want people to audit my brand and be like, wait, I need an outlet for each of the aspects of my personality. So, but that's terrible for the brand.

As long as people understand that. Okay, so Quest, we launched an apparel company and it was all mindset focused and like being super hardcore. And we were just shocked when it failed. And then I suddenly had a different perspective. And I was like, would people want Quaker Oats to launch a high fashion line? Probably not. In today's world, I think Gen Z would actually be like, yes. You might be able to get like a hipster, ironic moment out of it, but you're gonna have a hard time. No longevity. No longevity.

And so I was like, oh, wow, that's interesting. They think of my brand very differently than I think of my brand. And the clothing was me trying to show you how I think of my brand. But our brand was actually very inviting to people that were struggling with their weight and trying to improve their lives. And the clothing brand was for people that had already like they had the ideal physique and it was clothes for people with a

Okay, flash forward. I launch a video game company. So two and a half years ago, I launch Impact Theory Studios. We're making a video game. And I'm a big believer that if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you will actually get better. And so I'm like, I can learn this. Now, the problem becomes, if you don't bring people on that have expertise, you're just learning everything the hard way and it becomes ridiculously expensive.

So what I should have done was go out to somebody as a consultant because the problem was I couldn't hire people to come inside the company because they were like, you're a YouTube guy or a protein bar guy, depending on how they knew me, trying to do a video game. Like, this isn't going to go anywhere. And so if I was just like, look, I'm going to pay you an obscene amount of money to come in and reduce the amount of mistakes that I make, that would have saved me millions of dollars. Millions.

Millions of dollars. A lot of zeros on the end. A lot of zeros. So that one was rough. Try to remind myself that every day. So the first year, we spent probably five times more than we now spend in the last, say, 10 months. And we've gotten...

five times more out of the last 10 months. So it's a literal 10X difference in efficiency of capital. So it's awesome that you can learn anything, but you really do need to get people in that have expertise

don't overvalue your ability to learn because it can be really expensive. So I've seen the nine to five job, the traditional, I have a 401k and subsidized health insurance. I work 40 hours a week for a company. I've seen that be villainized by much of the younger generations who go, listen, I want freedom. I want flexibility. I'm going to be an entrepreneur. It's going to solve all my problems. I'm going to have a four hour work week because Tim Ferriss said. And what do you say to that as a guy who's,

had the success, who's been the entrepreneur, you've been the employee. Is it as simple? Is it going to solve their problems? Oh man, okay, I love this question. I will try to keep this as simple as I can. Being an entrepreneur is gruelingly difficult and it will test your character. You're going to find out how badly you want it.

And I have said to people many times, entrepreneurship is like begging somebody to punch you in the face over and over and over. And if you think I'm kidding, start a company. You will very quickly realize that really is true. And your every day, every day, even on days where things are going great,

you're going to walk out of a meeting and get blindsided by something that's going terribly. And if you value autonomy enough, it's worth it. And so for people that really have a high tolerance for risk,

obscenely grand ambition, a terrifying amount of drive. They can physically handle the tax because, to give you an idea, in that first year of game development, I was working 120 hours a week. Wow. Okay, run the math on that. First of all, people will call BS. I did it for eight months. People are going to say there's no way.

There's a way. I have no incentive to lie about it. It was stupid. I was working 120 hours a week because I was making so many mistakes. Not because I'm cool. So you're going to get gut checked against reality real fast when it's on you if you make payroll.

And you've got to have good ideas that people are willing to pay money for. So the mistake people make is they think being a good person is the same as being a successful entrepreneur. And it's not. And so you can be a good person and drive your company into the ground. And you will find that it's very hard to be a leader. You will find that it's very hard to make something at a profit that people are willing to buy.

on and on and on. I want it for anybody for whom that's who they really are. And it will be the ride of their lives. And man, meeting people like that is thrilling. It's just really, really cool for the right person. But this is where people have to know themselves, know what you want. And if you want things to be a little more chill, then you're going to need to work for somebody else. If you can do your job in four hours, do it. But try it. See what happens.

Most people are going to find getting something off the ground is like launching a rock into outer space. You have to overcome the gravity well of just not knowing what you're doing, that the marketplace is full of people that are a little better than you. This is why I say, if you want to be successful, you're going to have to work hard, smart, and long hours.

And whenever I make that comment, people jump into the comments and they say, if I'm working hard and smart, why do I have to work long hours? And the very simple answer is you will go against someone like me and I'm doing all three. And so you can't control the marketplace. That's like an NBA star going, why do I have to work hard, smart and long hours? Be

because that's what Kobe Bryant did. And so if you want to go against him and have him score 81 points in a single game, which he actually did, then by all means, chill, relax, lay in your bedroom. But if you want your name to echo through history, you're going to do all three. And so all of the people making those comments, they just don't know what it takes. And hey, fair enough. I just want to see them fulfilled.

But fulfillment's a totally different path. If you really want to win as an entrepreneur, if you want all that freedom, it comes at a terrifying price. Well, that settles it. Enter entrepreneurship at your unrest, kids. I also like to live dangerously.

Tom, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I want to make sure that you can tell people where to find you and some exciting stuff you got going on, including the game. Let's do it. So you can find me at Tom Bilyeu across all the socials. YouTube is probably the place for this audience, but we do have a university that teaches business tactics. So check that out. It's called Zero to Founder. So if you want to stare into the abyss and chew glass, you can do that.

I will show you how to do it with maximum efficiency, impact your university, zero to founder. I will see you there. And then the game is called Project Kaizen. Love it. Tom, thanks so much. Great conversation. It was wonderful. Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. Big thanks to Tom Bilyeu for dropping some serious knowledge on us today. And if you're hungry for more insights on wealth and a meaningful life, stick around for my sit down with happiness expert, Arthur Brooks. It is coming up next or click the link in the description to watch. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.