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In this interview I sat down with Tom Bilyeu, successful entrepreneur, host of Impact Theory, and co-founder of Quest Nutrition and Impact Theory Comics, to discuss Neon Future and the origin of the his interest in producing comics. Some of you may recognize Neon Future as the project co-created with Grammy nominated DJ Steve Aoki. I hoped to get a sense of how the project came together and what content and ideas Impact Theory Comics want to bring to the sci-fi audience, and the broader comics audience in general. Leading into the interview, Tom and I discussed some of my personal challenges as a writer and creator, which he comments on briefly.

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ComicAttack: I watched your interview with Seth Godin – it was a great interview. For those of our audience who aren’t familiar with Impact Theory, what would you like to share about the brand and about the intention behind it?

Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, so our goal is to pull people out of the Matrix. And by that, I mean that I want to give them an empowering belief system. My wife and I have been very successful in business and we founded a couple of companies that have really been impacted at the employee level by people that grew up really, really hard. And I’m talking like in the middle of the ghetto, extreme violence, and we put the word out on the street when we were hiring at Quest Nutrition, at our last company – that even if you had a criminal record, we would still consider you as an employee. So, we had people lined up around the block and we just began to realize that there were really, really extraordinary people out there in the world that won’t do much with their lives because of their mindset.

All of us have a lens through which we view the world and depending on what your lens is will determine what you even try, right? So even looking at your own story, you’ve been willing to try. So, you left the job as a security guard and you left a lot of security behind. Most people won’t take that risk. They don’t believe in themselves, they don’t know how to learn, and so even though they’re very capable they just don’t ever try. And I just don’t think that’s okay. I want to make sure that everybody at least encounters an empowering belief system, and I think there’s two ways to do that: one is you can do straight-to-camera non-fiction stuff – so me talking to a camera, interviewing people like Seth Godin, but the flip side of that coin is to do something that’s much more emotional – to tell a story, to give them characters that they can connect to on a deeper emotional level. But to do that, you’ve got to write stories. And so we want to do both.

We want to do the non-fiction stuff where I explain my background, how I transformed my life, how I went from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car – true story – to building a billion-dollar business. And then talking about how different movies and things really changed my life and taught me how to think. So that’s the idea behind doing the fiction stories, and to blend the two together to hopefully really impact people and make a significant change in their lives.

CA: How did you make the transition specifically into publishing, and find this story in particular?

TB: Well this story in particular came from Steve Aoki, who came on the show Impact Theory. I interviewed him, we really connected and I know that he wants to be cryogenically frozen when he dies, and so that gave me the idea that what if we really could defeat death? And what if someone that had Steve’s heart was the one in control of that? What would that look like? And so, that was the genesis of this story and then we got together, brainstormed it, brought on Eisner Award winning writing Jim Krueger and created this amazing, huge world and teamed up with some insanely talented artists. I’m actually touching one of them and I can see the other – these guys have just been extraordinary.

CA: Yeah, the work in the book is phenomenal.

TB: …Neil Edwards and Jheremy Raapack are just unbelievable. So that was how we came up with that story and the reason we wanted to get into publishing was I never wanted someone to be able to tell me, “No.” I wanted to be able to tell the stories we wanted to tell and so that was an idea that started about 15 years ago. I was in the film industry, I’d made a movie and I was not happy with the way it came out because I couldn’t control it. I had these two very successful entrepreneurs and they said, “You’re coming to the world with your hand out, and if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources. So come with us and get rich.” And I thought, “Amazing! It should take about 18 months!” It took 15 years, but it worked. So now we’re building a studio and we’re publishing ourselves so that we can tell the kinds of stories that we want to tell.

CA: I have to ask, because you mentioned it, what influences – both fiction or non-fiction – did you draw on in crafting this particular narrative with Neon Future?

TB: So, non-fiction: a lot. There have been so many people – Carol Dweck who wrote the book Mindset, David Eagleman who talks about the brain and how the brain works, which I know that seems weird but when you read the story, you begin to understand, because really this is about a character who has to go from being lost, alone, insecure, afraid, depressed to becoming a true bad-ass. And the only way to go on that journey is to learn something about yourself, to learn something about how the mind works…

CA: And to choose out of that mentality.

TB: Exactly, exactly. And so, that’s on the non-fiction side. Then on the fiction side, it was, I mean The Matrix is a pretty clear reference – that movie shaped my life. Star Wars is a pretty clear reference. The work of Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey, which you also see reflected in Star Wars. All of that stuff you’ll see in this book. But then we also tried to push it and go beyond that and have been influenced by people like Yuval Noah Harari, who’s talked a lot about development of civilizations, a lot of future predictive stuff. We’ve tried to make the science-fiction as close to science-fact as we can. So everything that we use in the book, even though it’s clearly exaggerated, is based on real stuff, and hopefully that comes through in the book.

CA: The technology on display in Neon Future is astounding, but not necessarily relegated to the realm of science-fiction. With the existence of movements like transhumanist-focused Humanity+ and advancements like Elon Musk’s Neuralink on the horizon, what real-world developments do you feel are way closer to realization than the average person is aware of?

TB: In truth, I actually tried to make the book as predictive as possible. So, from what you’re talking about with Neuralink, our main character has brain implants that give him, essentially, superpowers. But, what in the book is very important to me is that it can’t be given. It has to be learned. And so while he has the implants, the implants are really just potential, and I think that’s true of technology. I think we are going to see brain implants for sure. I think we’re going to see prosthetic limbs that mirror or even surpass what we have as normal human function now. There’s a guy you want to look up called Hugh Herr and he’s a double leg amputee, lost his legs in a climbing accident and created these prosthetics which, if he’s wearing long pants, even though he is a double leg amputee, you cannot tell that he has prosthetic legs. He can sprint. I mean, it is insane. So, all of the prosthetic stuff in the book is real. And then there’s some more advanced stuff that we get into that I think is predictive, such a resurrecting somebody. I think some of the technology for organ and tissue preservation is already real and will become more and more advanced. That’s something we touch on in the book that I’m really excited about. And then, really, what will a transhuman look like? All of that is real. And we carry that pretty deeply as the story goes along.

CA: A question that I had, that kind of steps outside…in terms of the technology like Neuralink, do you feel something like the Technology Singularity is something that we’re actually, that we can see in our lifetime?

TB: Definitively. Yeah, there’s no question. So, the technology singularity which Ray Kurzweil defines as the moment technology has begun advancing so rapidly, we can no longer predict it – he says that’s coming in 2045. So it’s like, if you’re eating healthy, you’re going to be here. That shit is near term, man. And that’s why…so we sat the story 30 years in the future, technically just beyond the technological singularity. Our world is a little more recognizable than I think Ray Kurzweil would have you believe and I just find that things always end up taking a little longer than we expect them to, so we wanted the book to feel very near term, but be different enough to be exciting.

CA: As a society, do you think that we are ready for that level of advancement?

TB: Definitively not. And I don’t think anybody would be surprised by that, and that’s a big part of what the book explores is that it’s set in an America where advanced technology becomes illegal because of the joblessness that it creates. And that IS going to happen. Not necessarily the illegal part, but the joblessness. So how, as a society, do we deal with the joblessness is gonna say a lot. And how do we respond to people that choose to get augmented? Which, when people hear that they think, “Aw, man, that’s so far in the future.” It’s already happening right now – today. People already have cochlear implants that were deaf and had never heard and can hear. People that were blind and can see. I mean, things that we thought of as the realm of miracle is already happening right now, today. And so, where will that be in 30 years? I think it’s going to be extraordinary. But very disruptive.

CA: Now I’m also sure that there’s a fair amount of research put into crafting this world. And delving into the technological and sociological impact of this dystopian iteration of America, what have you learned about the institutions and social mores that will have to adapt to keep pace with that advancement? And is it something we’ll see in the story?

TB: A: Amazing question. B: Yes, you will very much see it in the story and C: the things that we’ve learned are just what kind of groups spring up in all of this. And so, like, for instance, Neon Future, we kind of liken Star Wars, you forget that society views them as terrorists. Because we as the reader are gonna view them as the heroes. But in reality, they’re the insurgency. And so, what kind of insurgency is going to rise up in this? And what happens when a government has too much power? So those are things that we really deal with. But the thing that I’m most excited about is, basically, the augmented people in our book are modeled after Jewish people in the 30s in Germany and how scary a time it is when you’re not ghettoized yet, but you’re being spit on in public, and where does that go? And there’s so many phobias at play, even just here in America right now, today in 2018. And to really chase that out into the future in a moment of economic crisis when people are at their most xenophobic – you know, what will that look like? And what kind of organizations will rise up to protect a persecuted class? That’s been really fun to explore.

CA: Without giving away too much, was it important to balance the more cerebral exploration with the very visceral action we see in the first issue? Personally, I found the pacing to be spot-on, but I imagine that sweet spot is something that can be difficult to maintain as the narrative becomes more layered. What was the intention around action vs. exposition and exploration?

TB: We want a book that really moves, but we wanted a world big enough that, as you move, you feel the depth. And so we do go back and forth between some of the more cerebral elements, but never in a way that’s going to bog down the narrative. We really want people to be breathless, on the edge of their seats. We’ve imagined this as an 18-issue story, broken into three 6-issue arcs and each issue is really gonna keep the pulse pounding but at the end of the day, this is a thinking man’s book. There’s just no two-ways about it. And so we really want to explore the themes of really, where is society going, the things that we’re all going to have to deal with in this lifetime, but it’s character driven. So no one’s ever going to get lost in any of that. The only thing you have to appreciate to appreciate this book is a love for humans. And if you have a love for people, you’re really going to have a hook in this book. Definitely, this is an action-oriented story that’s going to pop from beginning to end, but hopefully in the tradition of the greats – The Matrix, Star Wars, and things where you gravitate to the characters but at the end of it, you’re like, “Holy hell, I just went on a ride.”

CA: One last one from me. If there was any single idea or concept you want readers to take away from reading Neon Future, what is that one thing that you really want to stay with people?

TB: You are capable of anything. But whether or not you execute against that is entirely up to how hard you’re willing to work.

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I would really like to thank Co- Founder Tom Bilyeu and the team at Impact Theory Comics for this opportunity to discuss their inaugural IP. Check out my thoughts on Neon Future in our coming review.

Neon Future is available now @ https://comics.impacttheory.com/

Christian Davenport
cable201@comicattack.net
Images by Eric Snell, Julian Cassady Photography, and Impact Theory Comics
esnell@comicattack.net