Ep 207 | Tony Robbins: How to Survive America’s Winter of Fear | The Glenn Beck Podcast
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Transcript
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Today, I have an interview with a remarkable man, a man whose work has reached over 50 million people in over 195 different countries over four and a half decades.
He has personally influenced four presidents, Serena Williams, Usher, the Golden State Warriors.
He is involved in over 100 private businesses and was named by Harvard Business Press as one of the top 200 business gurus.
American Express said he was one of the top six business leaders in the world.
From investing to biohacking to overcoming depression, he has made a name for himself in so many different fields it's hard to identify or categorize him.
He's here to tell us how he became the man he is today and the lessons he's learned along the way.
And also to give you a feel about what you're about to watch,
I went to his home.
And here's a video of me taking a slide into the interview room, which is his basement
on the waterfront in Florida.
They told him he couldn't have a basement in Florida.
But because he's all about doing the impossible, there I am sliding into it.
Please welcome entrepreneur, philanthropist, author, and coach.
Tony Robbins.
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If we want to get our country right, there's a couple things we have to do.
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So how do you describe yourself?
What would you, what would you,
what do you describe?
Because you do everything.
You better experience me.
How would you describe me?
Non-stop
energy
and
extraordinarily well read,
well-researched.
A little spooky because can read people that fast.
Yeah.
That fast.
But how would you describe yourself?
I'm just a guy that loves people.
I grew up in a pretty tough environment and I had to become kind of a practical psychologist because my mom, who I'm so grateful to, I'd never be who I am without her, but she was a unique creature and had a lot of challenges with herself.
And she used alcohol and she used prescription drugs.
And when you combine those two, it changes your personality.
And so it was kind of a rough physical environment.
And I had a younger brother five years younger, younger sister, seven years younger.
So I had to protect them.
So early in my life, I had to figure out how to manage her emotions, how to manage her mind so that she didn't do things that were really destructive to me or others.
And
just, and at the same time, I always just loved people.
I love, I hate suffering.
I've done enough suffering myself that I want everybody else to suffer.
And it made me, when I was just in my teens, want to be a, you know, I was a reader anyway, but I wanted to read everything and learn everything I could about how to improve or change a life and how to end suffering and how to create positive influence in people.
And I just got so immersed.
I mean, I read 700 books initially in seven years.
I took a speed reading class.
I was going to read a book a day, but, you know, I didn't do that.
But I, you know, I got a little jaded.
Everything sounds the same after a while.
And then I woke up to the fact that
there's lots of ways to communicate truth, but you got to live it or it doesn't mean anything.
It's just, it's just in your head.
And so I really became obsessed with how can I use something out of this book?
How can I apply it?
And early on, when I was just in high school, I was like, Mr.
Solution, you had a problem, I had a solution, especially if you're a girl.
I was highly motivated.
But like my friends, you know, I was, believe it or not, I was 5'1 in high school.
I'm now 6'7.
I tell people the difference is personal growth.
But I had a tumor that made me grow 10 inches in a year.
I didn't know it.
So I grew up really fast physically.
But at the same time, I was struggling.
I was overweight.
And so I learned these tools and I lost weight.
And I was like, oh,
better life, more attraction with girls.
And my buddies asked me how I did it.
So I helped them.
So I got hooked early on on having answers that can change the quality of life for somebody and became almost like an addiction because it made me so happy to make people so happy and have a way that hopefully it was lasting because they made something change not for the moment.
I mean, anybody can change something.
Change is not the issue.
If you do nothing, your body is going to change.
The economy is going to change.
The world is going to change.
Progress, that's different.
Progress requires consciousness.
It requires a plan.
It requires some action.
And so early early on I started accumulating those skills.
And then gradually I started learning things like NLP, neuro-linguistic programming when it first came out.
And I wasn't a therapist, but I had this passion for wanting to help people.
And I went in and did things people have not been doing before in that area.
And I started challenging psychiatrists and psychologists.
Didn't start out that way, but on the radio, because they would challenge me and I would say, give me your worst patient and I'll handle them in one hour.
You've been working with them for seven years.
And I literally did that multiple times.
And that built my brand and my name.
And over the years, it just evolved.
And then I got involved in businesses because I realized my ideas were going to die on my lips unless I had the ability.
I couldn't just be an artist.
I had to create art shows.
There wasn't a way to distribute this other than if you did speeches for companies or wrote some books.
And I wanted to go deeper.
So I built things and I had lots of trial and error learning.
And so now I'm in a place where, you know, I'm a businessman.
I'm a philanthropist.
I'm a speaker.
I'm a writer.
I'm a father of five now.
I've got, you know, 48-year-old daughter and I've got a two and a half-year-old daughter.
How do you have grandkids?
I live a diverse life.
So I'm just a guy that cares and I love helping any way I can with people.
How do you, I mean, your home is riddled with people working all over.
It's true.
I mean, it is, it's a buzz.
How do you
handle all of that and stay A, plugged into the family?
Yeah.
You know, how do you, how do you,
a balanced life doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
No, and I, I mean, I was, I was interviewing Mary Callhan Erdos when I was writing one of my financial books years ago, and she manages, you know, two and a half trillion for J.P.
Morgan, one of the smartest ladies I've ever met.
And I said, asked her the same question.
And she goes, you know, I think it's a fallacy.
There's no such thing as balance.
She said it's life fork integration.
And the way I explain it to people is like, if you and I get on a seesaw or teeter totter or whatever you call it and where your viewers are in the world,
and we say, okay, the goal is balance.
Well, it's not going to take very long between you and I to balance it.
Now we're just sitting here.
It's not going to take long for one of us to jerk that around just to feel alive, right?
So I don't look at it as just balance.
I think balance is valuable, but I think it's more finding what matters most to you.
It's different for everybody and trying to organize your life in that way.
And as far as your answer to around here, yeah, I have large staff, but we are fortunate enough to have a home where we can separate the personal side from the professional side.
And we do have that.
And we have our special dinner times and all those things.
But a lot of that, honestly, is new for me.
It's post-COVID because I figured out how I could do what I do for, you know, do a seminar for a million and a half people for 40 days and come home, you know, as opposed to before I lived 275 days on the road and took my wife and took my kids.
One of the reasons we had a child was because of COVID.
Because once I was home and I said, I don't have to give up the impact, I can still go on the road, but not constantly.
We said, let's give it one more try, and God blessed us.
Wow, that's great.
Yeah.
I have found fame and fortune battery, basset to the soul, battery acid.
And a lot of people can't handle that.
And they, you know, you're in trouble when you want it.
When you find yourself going, oh, I don't want to lose this, then you're, I mean, you're done.
Yeah.
How do you, how do you balance
that?
You have people following you around the world like you're the grateful dead.
You know, the band without the long hair and the dope.
And,
I mean, they, they built,
I mean, I've experienced it.
It's a community.
It's really not about you.
It's about the people you meet and the like-minded people.
And it becomes a community.
How do you handle that and the influence that you have to make sure that, you know, you're
you.
Does that make sense?
I've always been me, so I can't think of any else.
And I'm not a very political creature, fortunately.
I certainly have strong feelings about things.
But no,
it's like public speaking.
People say to me, like, how do you get there with no notes and go four days or five days, you know, 10, 12 hours a day?
You know, I've made lots of deposits in my emotional spiritual bank account so that when something shows up, there's a challenge, I can cash that emotional check.
I can deliver for somebody.
And in public speaking, for example, when people are so stressed about it, I always tell them, it's, why are you stressed?
Because you're thinking about you and how you're coming across.
I'm not thinking about me.
I'm in what I call uptime.
I have to, I'm inside my head thinking, I'm going to lose an audience of 12 or 14 or 20,000 people for 12 hours a day when they once sit for a three-hour movie somebody spent $300 million on.
I have to keep your full attention.
So if I'm in me, you and I are disconnected.
But if I'm up in what I call uptime and I'm seeing and feeling everyone and I have a plan for the event and it always changes, it doesn't matter what it is.
I go work all night.
Often I do two, three, four times, four in the morning.
And people ask my wife, like, what do people not know about Tony that's unique?
And she's the level he prepares.
And then I get up and it all disappears
because I feel something.
I see this person needs something.
But I'm overprepared.
So like my whole nervous system's turned on and I'm out here, not in here.
And that's also why people have such a great time.
It would never go do that.
Like, I'm going to go to a seminar for 10, 12 hours a day.
Oh, yeah.
Or I'm going to do one virtually.
You know, when I first started doing them virtually and we have people here, we start at 10.30 in the morning and it's already midnight or 12.30 in Sydney, Australia, and thousands of people there they'll go from midnight till one in the afternoon four days and nights full tilt same thing's happening in europe different set of hours you know so we've been able to find a way to immerse people and it's kind of like when you're out there and you're really serving people and you meet their needs all their needs time disappears because like how long is a long time Some people say a long time is a thousand years.
Some people, it's 10 years.
Some people it's two minutes, right?
More two minutes these days, you know, the way we're conditioned by technology.
So, but when you're, when you're not enjoying yourself, it feels like an eternity in a minute.
When you're completely fulfilled, time disappears and it disappears for me too.
I'm, I'm with these people.
I'm feeling the experience of it.
So I don't have this fame thing.
I never was doing it for fame.
I did it to serve.
And I think you can feel the difference between somebody who's trying to be somebody versus someone who truly wants to serve.
And I'm not perfect in any way, but I love people.
I love seeing that transformation.
It still makes me go, I don't have to work just like you the rest of my life, but I work harder now than I ever did because I've just, I see the needs.
And right now we're in kind of a winter time where people have so much fear.
It's so much uncertainty.
And it's a predictable cycle, but most of us don't study history.
So most people live in fear like this is the worst time to ever be alive.
It's just not true.
So let's go there for a bit.
And I've been on a personal note,
no surprise to you.
I called you six months ago, maybe and said, Tony, my son is
in trouble.
He's got depression.
He
has low self-esteem.
He can't seem to find, and he is full of great stuff.
And you said, yeah.
And you said, send to me.
You actually, I think you asked, is he willing to change?
Is he ready to change?
Because you said, you won't change him, but you can motivate him to change.
Yeah.
Environment where he can choose for himself.
And it's not so much motivation.
I want to clarify that because I hate that word.
I've been called it so many times over the years because people see a giant crowd, 15,000 people jumping.
But what it really is, is about producing the energy.
So you're in a higher state of mind.
And in that state, you behave very differently than you're low energy and trying to make something happen.
But my whole life is about strategy.
And so you've got to get someone in the state where they can change.
And then you've got to provide the tools that can help them to change.
Well, I have to, I publicly want to
thank you.
I sent a
young man who had all the potential in the world, but couldn't find it.
And
you sent back an amazing young man.
I know he was, but he didn't know that.
And it's, it's, uh,
as a parent.
What have you noticed?
On the negative side, I just want to say he's turned into Yoda and he's pissing me off all the time now.
He said to me today, he said, he said, Dad, money isn't real and I have unlimited potential in front of me.
And I'm like, okay, sit down.
There has to be some balance.
Yeah, a little balance would be nice.
But
he's not depressed.
He is,
he's not in himself all the time.
I woke him up day after Christmas,
probably seven o'clock in the morning.
I said, hey, buddy,
I need some help.
Can you help me?
He didn't say what?
He sat up, sat on the edge of the bed, and he's like, yeah, what do you need?
And he is the,
boy I always knew he would be.
Well, he's becoming the man that you want, yeah, that he wants to be.
Yeah, I'm sure you'll be very proud of.
But he did all that work.
It wasn't me.
I know.
I just created an environment where he could find the truth.
Right.
You know, it's corny to say the truth sets you free, but it's so true.
And most of us live some version of a limited lie about who we are, especially in the culture we're in today where being a victim and, you know, it's rewarded so much and where people, the mindset is, you know, what's the world going to give me versus what am I responsible world to bring to it?
I mean, I remember, you know, John F.
Kennedy, I was just a little baby, but, you know, we've all seen the speeches, what are your country going to do for you?
What are you going to do for your country, right?
Different question.
Unfortunately, today, it's, what are you going to do for me?
And I think that's why people are so unhappy.
You look at what's happened with COVID and regardless of rights, wrongs, it was a disaster the way we dealt with it.
People got used to being home and paid to be home and do nothing.
And now they don't want to go to work.
Why should I have to go to work?
Why should I do this?
Why should I show up?
Well, the problem is now they're at home, a large number of them.
And if you read the studies, they're really unhappy.
They feel isolated.
They feel separate.
Because life's not about me.
It's about we.
And your son started to get that, right?
That's why he wants to give you the help.
It's like we aren't happy by ourselves.
We can make ourselves feel pleasure by ourselves.
You can drink something, eat something, watch something, have sex with yourself, whatever you think will work.
But it's never the same as when you have a great experience in life.
What's the first thing most of us want to do?
We want to share it, right?
Somebody we love.
Why?
Because when we share it, it becomes more.
There's only so much you can feel by yourself.
And until people find something that they want to do something for beyond themselves, they fall in love with a mission or with their family or with a business or with something, you're going to have a very limited life.
So now this whole focus, obsessive focus people have about self-care and taking care of myself and everything.
Like I should be afraid if someone has a different belief system than I do.
You know, somebody said the other day, Chris Rock said, if you think words are violence, no one has slap the shit out of you on national television.
It's like, that's not violence.
Words are not violence.
But we're in a culture that is predictable.
I mean, this is not something new.
This happens about every 20, 25 years, like clockwork.
We go through these seasons.
And I'm a student of history.
You can look at a thousand years of Roman history and see these patterns.
And the value of seeing the pattern is.
Then you realize it isn't the worst time.
It's like people saying it's the worst political time in the history of America.
I can read you the posters that were put up between John Adams and Jefferson.
And Jefferson,
it makes Trump and Biden and Republicans.
It makes them look like the nicest people in the world.
I think Jefferson said Adams was a hermaphrodite.
You got it.
It's crazy.
Your children will be raped and their heads will be on bloody pipes.
Yeah, no, it's.
I showed it to people in my seminars.
Like, here's a reality check.
Because we think when things are going bad, we're thinking to go bad forever.
When things are going great, it's going to go great forever.
But really, life is a series of good times where you're allowed to do things.
Springtime where it's easy to grow.
If you're in business, you think you're a genius.
If it's springtime economy, everybody does well to some extent, right?
If you're a child, you grow like crazy.
You don't have to work at my two and a half-year-old speaking Chinese, English, Spanish.
She's over here, you know, playing the piano.
I'm like, it blows my mind how much she can absorb, how quickly.
That's springtime.
But then there's a testing period.
So if the, you know, if you're 0 to 20 is, you know, your springtime, 0 to 19, then 21 to,
41, 42 is you're the soldier society.
Literally, if there's a war, they send you, but you also are testing.
You were taken care of to some extent.
You didn't have to provide your own food, probably.
At least you've gone to work at 14 or 15, so
but you're pretty well looked out for.
Now you say, I'm going to test all that.
I'm going to see what I believe, what I think is right.
And when you're that age, you think you're invincible.
You think you're going to be president of the United States and multi-billionaire and have 100 relationships simultaneously, and then you find you can't even manage one.
So it humbles you a little bit.
That's 22 to 42 range is a really rough time for a lot of people because they're still trying to figure out who they are.
Then you got that 43 to 63 range, and that's more like, okay, we had an easy spring, we have a tough summer that tests us, and now it's fall.
You're in your power.
You can do more today with your finger, your pinky, than working 12 hours a day before because you know patterns, you know people, you know what to do.
You're in a different stage of life and you and you want to share that.
And then 64 to 84, or 94, 94, 104, 120, the oldest living humans, that's your winter time where like you don't have to try to prove to anybody who you are anymore.
You know who you are.
I mean, you might still care, but if they don't, you're okay with it.
You know, you know, it's like landing your stage of life, my stage of life.
You know who you are.
And it's like, all I want to do is serve, right?
You're, you're the elder statesman of society.
And it's not, you know, if you've done your homework and worked your tail off of those other three seasons and taken care of your health, then it's the best season of your life of all.
And most people don't know that.
So I'm going to be 64 in a month and it's like my favorite time of my entire life.
But just like there's stages of that, there are stages for people in history.
And it's equally important because if you look at what caused human beings to go from living in fear all the time, hunter-gatherers, am I going to survive, to building communities?
It was one pattern recognition.
Because I'm a big believer.
There's three skills your children need, I need, you need with AI, with nanotechnology, everything coming.
Instead of being fearful, you got to be good at recognizing patterns.
Because if you recognize the patterns, you don't think this is random and feel fearful.
You go, okay, I understand this.
If you know how to use patterns, you can do very well in business or life or finance or relationship.
It's all patterns.
And if you know how to create patterns, that's the ultimate level.
Now you really have a mastery over your life.
And when we figured out seasons, one distinction, humanity changed.
Because we went from planting and not working and saying we have to hunt around to, no, no, if you plant in the spring, only in the spring, take care of it through the summer, reap in the fall and keep some of that for the winter.
You can stay in one place.
You don't have to live in fear.
It changed, it created communities, countries.
It created the world as we know it today.
One distinction.
Well, those same seasons happen in your life.
They also happen in history.
So think about it.
If you think about times when it's been, people have been extremely optimistic and the country feels optimistic.
That's not now.
As we clearly know, right?
And people kind of work together.
I'll give you an example I love to give people.
I think I shared this when you were at my seminar.
If you think of somebody and you don't have to know a lot about history, just try this.
If you're born in 1910, and if you don't know your history, someone born in 1910, those first 19, 20 years, pretty well protected.
So World War I happened.
They didn't go to war.
They were protected by their parents.
There was some tough times, but someone's taking care of you.
Some people better than others, but still better.
But guess what?
They grew through a time of the roaring 20s.
They're 10 years old in the roaring 20s, 12, 14.
And they were looked down on by older generations, just like baby boomers and some Xers look down on millennials and Zs right now.
They got it so easy.
They don't know what hard is.
And there's some truth to it.
Yeah.
Because they haven't been through the war.
They haven't been through those things, right?
They didn't have to go out and pump their own water.
They didn't have to get blocks of ice to keep things cool.
Yeah.
They do all that.
They don't go out and farm their own food and so forth, right?
Working all day and all night.
So what happened was those kids think about it.
All this technology happened just like now in a short period of time.
Radio, television, cars, airplanes, boom, boom, boom, boom, within a few decades.
And what are they thinking?
I'm going to party.
It's a roaring 20.
I'm going to have a time of my life.
And right when they turn 19 and think that's about the time that's going to happen is 1929.
And these weak kids had to get strong to survive.
And what happened?
Well, people jumped out of buildings.
People are standing in breadlines.
The Midwest is a dust bowl.
It was rough.
Now, it wasn't rough every moment.
When we say it's wintertime, We're in Florida.
It's kind of stormy outside today, but most days here, it's 74, 76 degrees, nice and sunny and beautiful.
So winter is different.
And even then during the Depression, it wasn't constant problems.
Stock market crashed two years later, jumped up, dropped again.
But the overall theme in winter is fear.
Everybody's fearful and they overreact to those things, right?
So what was their reward for making it through 10 years of depression?
By the time they're 29, it's 1939.
Congratulations, World War II.
And you and I weren't alive then, but the people then, it didn't look like we're going to win.
I mean, Hitler was strafing countries.
If you didn't think that was the possibility of even Jesus returning, you know what I mean?
Without a doubt.
It was evil and dark.
If you're in Lenin, you're being bombed upon.
Churchill's using his voice to keep you up in the game.
And it's a time that nobody who's alive today really fully understands unless they really, they're really old and managed to make it through that time.
But those people fought through that and they became what America calls the greatest generation because they got strong.
by being tested for 20 years of their life.
It was not easy.
They come home and they're the heroes.
And we have a new season.
What follows winter?
Thank God.
Springtime.
Always.
Some winters are long, some are short, some are easy, some are hard.
But you never go from fall rewards, easy, straight to springtime.
You got to go through winter.
What they go through winter and they come back and we've got 17, 18 years of optimism overall.
Meaning, my gosh, America's a great place.
You fought in the war.
You're a hero.
We'll give you VAO and you've got a house.
We're going to have this new technology.
You're going to have a different quality of life.
Think about 1945 to the time that John F.
Kennedy was killed, 1963, those 17 years.
Camelot, optimism, those challenges, but overall.
It's an amazing time.
Unbelievable time.
But then he gets killed, John F.
Kennedy, then Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King.
And you go through the hot summer that you can see in every season, every 80 years, you see a lie clockwork, these 20-year cycles where the theme becomes frustration and anger and fighting, usually between generations at that point.
And we go through this new set of values.
And so think about, say, the 60s and 70s.
If you can remember them, they say you weren't there.
I don't know.
Compared to the 80s, 90s, 2000s.
Very different value systems.
Why?
Because the kids that were protected, the baby boomers, they came back, these heroes, they had lots of sex and lots of kids, this huge boom, and they wanted their kids to have it better than they did.
So they overprotected them, told them how smart they were.
You're going to go to college.
And when they got there, since they didn't have to work at anything, a lot of them used drugs, overdid it.
A lot of them protested things, but they hadn't done anything yet.
And so there's a lot of fighting.
If you ask people, they've asked for the last 50 years in universities, one question, this test goes on and on.
And the question is, which is more important to you, you think, for your life, developing a philosophy of life that makes you happy or the pragmatic skills so you'll have financial security or freedom?
What do you think 82% of the people said in the 60s and 70s?
Money.
Or no, the opposite.
That's right.
What do you think the answer was in the 80s and 90s and 2000s?
Money.
That's right.
Because those X-generation kids, their parents, boomers, were into their world and their life and changing the world.
They didn't pay attention to their kids as much.
If you saw the movies in those days, it was kids were like Rosemary's baby.
It was exorcist.
But in the 80s and 90s, it's three men and a baby.
It's baby on board.
Right.
Because that ex-generation had to fend for themselves, come home, turn on the TV, figure things out.
Last kid.
They grew up differently.
Not every person, but they were like
kids, right?
So they were more pragmatic, right?
Now, they didn't want their kids to be that way.
So guess what they did?
Those millennial kids, including including some of the books, they spoil them rotten.
They go and fight for their thing.
I couldn't imagine my parents coming to my professor and arguing about my grades or micromanaging where I'm going to be or helicopter parenting.
I'd go berserk.
I also couldn't imagine staying home.
We have more people from the ages of 20 to 35 living at home right now than any time in history, including the Depression.
And it's like, why should I go?
Mom makes my food.
I got a great place to stay.
Don't have any overhead.
So the generations are raised differently.
You and I might be individually different than our generation, but the overall themes are there.
So we've gone through the reaping times of, guess what?
Credit's cheap.
You go through the spring and summer, and now we're in winter.
And winter where people see things like it's going to end.
We're going to have a third world war.
You know, the whole thing is going to be done.
We've always had those risks, but they're interpreted differently through the psychology of the season.
And so winter...
Is there not a difference, however, in this particular winter because of technology, all these different things that that have been introduced.
We're doing experiments on our kids with technology.
I mean, not,
well, I think knowingly.
We're experimenting with things that are fundamentally changing them
in ways that are some good, some very, very bad.
So
there's new forces.
at play.
That's absolutely true.
There's forces that can accelerate the problems and damage and destruction, and there's forces that can accelerate the goodness.
Correct.
They're both there.
So AI can be used to destroy things and AI can be used to accelerate mankind.
You can argue it's going to do one or the other.
You can live in fear, but are you really going to be able to stop it?
So I'm more pragmatic.
I look at there's two worlds you got to be able to manage.
There's the external world, which you can't control, but you can influence.
And there's internal world that you have absolute control of if you learn how.
Meaning controlling your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your actions, and therefore the quality of your life.
Can you go through
the six things that we
learned this in your seminar, and it is, it was fascinating because it's absolutely true and how you had 15,000 people there.
Yeah.
And you asked, raise your hand if it's this.
Explain this because you predicted what we would say and it was absolutely right.
Well, it's not hard to predict right now.
So as I, you know, this is going to be my, I guess, my 47th year doing this.
I'm coming up on 47th.
I've been 46 years I've been doing this.
So I'd have to be an idiot at this point, having traveled to 195 countries and worked with people from the most successful to the most challenged, not to see patterns.
So like not only patterns in history, but there's patterns in you.
You don't overeat every moment.
You overeat in certain times when you're bored or when you're frustrated or when same thing with smoking or drinking, there's patterns and there's nothing wrong with you.
We just need to change the pattern and you can change your life.
So when I look around and I see, okay, look at the world, I want to look at what I can control within myself.
Because when people are really freaked out,
maybe the best way to describe it is this.
There's three decisions people are making every moment.
As your viewers or listeners are with us right now, they can test it in their own mind.
Three decisions everybody's making.
Now, I'm not saying you're making them consciously.
A lot of what we do, more than half of what we do, is on automatic pilots, a habit.
Good thing about habit is you get in the car in the early days trying to do our stick shift.
I'm going to do this, this, watch the rearview mirror and drive.
It's too much.
But after a while, it gets in your body and you can drive that car while you're doing three other things, hopefully not reading a text, but you did about other things, right?
Because it's in your nervous system.
You get more done.
But also when you get into habit, you end up being stuck in the same mentality, the same emotion, the same patterns, the same kind of relationships.
So if you want to change your life, you can take care of these three decisions that you're making unconsciously or consciously.
Make them conscious, you can change your life.
First one is, what are you going to focus on?
Like I tell people,
Whether you think your life is great or horrible has nothing to do with your life.
It's the life you focus on.
Right.
Because right now, in your life, are there some magical things no matter what's happening in the world?
Are there some beautiful things?
Your son is an example of that.
Your wife is an example of that, right?
The people you get to have some positive influence with and hopefully inspire.
There's so much in your life that's beautiful, your health.
But what's wrong is always available, and so is what's right.
And so it's just a habit of focus.
So you can think of something and think of the worst case scenario, and it doesn't have to be true.
The minute you think of it, it's true in your body.
You're seeing it, you're feeling it, it feels real to to you, and then you react accordingly.
And I've discovered there's three patterns of focus minimum that you could look at.
You could change your whole life with anyone.
So one is, do you tend to focus more on what you have or what's missing?
What would you say for you?
Probably what I have.
Yes, I think that's true of you.
And that's one reason that you're able to sustain yourself when things are crazy in the outside world.
Because if you keep focusing on what's missing, I don't care how happy your life looks like, you can't sustain happiness.
Correct.
And so what most people do, especially in a consumer culture, in a culture where there's social media and people fake what their life is like.
Yeah.
Like you see so many girls that are depressed because they're comparing these ridiculous images that are not even real.
They're filters and everything.
And they feel like they're not enough.
And they get depressed the more time they spend in some of this social media.
So if you're focusing on what you have, you're going to feel happy and joy.
And that'll give you an energy to face the challenges.
But if you're constantly focusing on what's missing, you feel empty.
Second pattern, do you tend to focus more on what you can or can't control?
I know the answer with you would be obvious to me, but what is it for you?
The things I can control.
That's right.
And when people focus on what they can't control, they feel really stressed.
And is there, how much is out there we can't control?
Almost all of it.
Almost all of it.
Except what we think and feel.
You can't even control your own bowels.
Go to Mexico or someplace and you can try and think your way through things like
revenge is a real thing.
You can't even control your bowels.
So it's control is an illusion.
what we have is influence you can't control your son you've learned that but you can influence him in a positive way if you enter his world not yours right so when we look at things we say okay you know what am i what can i control what i am in charge of that gives you power that gives you energy that allows you to face the challenges otherwise you're so depleted here's the third one do you tend to more focus and by the way i'm asking this not just of you i'm hoping your listeners or viewers are also asking this question themselves and just to be as honest as you can there's no good or bad just want to see what the pattern is.
It's not you.
It's like software.
And certain software will make you really messed up.
You're not messed up.
The software is making you messed up.
We can change the software.
We can change the pattern, the habit.
So the third one is, do you tend to focus more on the past, the present, or the future?
We all do all three, but where do you spend more of your time?
Because I'm a historian, a little in the past, but not my past.
Yes, I get that.
And all the future.
Yes.
So most people, if they're unhappy, focus on the past, not historically.
That's recognizing patterns
too.
But if you're focused on things in the past you can't change
and you're focused on what you can't control and you're focused on what's missing, you tell me what emotional patterns are you going to have.
You're miserable.
You're going to be miserable, frustrated, angry, sad, or depressed.
Now, I asked people, I did it in your audience, I think, you know, 14,000 people.
I said, how many of you know somebody that takes antidepressants and is still depressed?
You look around the room, it's always 80, 90% of the room.
Why?
Because you give somebody antidepressant, and you know, I'm sure there are places where it might be necessary, but for most people, all that does is numbs you.
And the side effects can things like suicidal thoughts.
It's pretty brutal, you know?
And so what happens is it hasn't dealt with the issue.
The core issue is the habits of how you think and how it makes you feel and how you behave.
So the first question that you want to be able to answer is, what am I going to focus on?
And unfortunately, the human brain has a survival mechanism that tends to make us look for things that can harm us in our minds.
And we're no longer looking for a saber-toothed tiger because they don't exist.
So now we wonder, what are people thinking of us?
Or do I have enough money?
And so we go into survival mechanisms over stuff that isn't really survival.
And so people find themselves so stressed out.
And then they feel more about what they can't control.
And now the news follows you in your pocket.
You don't have, you and I are old enough to remember buying a newspaper.
Oh, I know.
And if you walk by and it said, great weather this weekend, you smile and kept walking.
But it's a big storm coming.
Those days you put in your 50 cents, now it rings in your pocket, right?
And you started to read it because survival sells.
And so if you want to be happy, happiness is your job.
That's not your brain's job.
Your job is take control.
So how do you, this is kind of going into kind of a personal thing, but I think there's a lot of people that are struggling with the world today, struggling with their kids, struggling with the schools, everything.
And they got to pay attention to it.
Yes.
You got to figure out how you're going to navigate.
Yes.
But I know so many people say, I've just turned it all off.
That's not a good thing.
But it's, again, I think it's survival.
It is survival.
You can't.
You're overwhelmed.
You're overwhelmed.
So they check out.
Right.
So how do you balance that here?
Well, you balance it by a couple new patterns.
If you're constantly focusing on what you can control and you're constantly focused on what you do have in your life, those two alone will change your life completely as a pattern because you'll see different things.
You'll experience life completely differently.
And when that habit happens, it doesn't matter what's happened in the external world.
Look, you and I could have all hell breaking loose around us.
And can we find a centered place within ourselves that all hell will be breaking loose and could still feel centered, strong, and happy?
The answer is yes.
But we live in a Western culture.
Well, if you sit and sit and just be happy, people come and take your furniture.
So you have to also master the external, right?
So I teach people both skills.
Think of it as like, if you want a great, if you want an extraordinary quality of life, oh, what is that?
Life on your terms, not mine.
You might want three beautiful kids.
You might want a beautiful garden.
You might want to build a sports team.
You might want to build a business.
You might want to write poetry.
I don't know what it is, but you got to know what it is that's an extraordinary life for you.
And if you want an extraordinary life, you have to master two skills.
And that's what people need to do.
Skill number one is the science of achievement.
How do I take what I dream about and make it real in spite of all the challenges out there?
Because people are doing it every single day in winter.
Some people freeze to death in winter.
I'm talking metaphorically.
And some people build a fire, spend time with their family, build a business, educate themselves.
Some people snowboard or ski.
But if you're like, winter will kill me and that's your mindset, you're going to find a way to die in winter or feel like you're dying in winter, right?
So it's like making that psychological shift to saying, I'm going to get the skills to actually manifest what I talk about.
And I've taught those for decades and I've lived them and fortunately been able to demonstrate results.
That's why people pay attention.
But the more powerful skill is missing in our culture, really missing, is the art of fulfillment.
To have an extraordinary life, you can't just achieve.
How many achievers do you and I both know that have everything they can imagine and they took their life or they're miserable, even though they have abundance in their relationships and their family and their kids and their finances?
You and I both know tons of people.
I wrote this book, Money Master the Game, and I interviewed 50 of the most successful investors in the world, people that started with nothing and became billionaires.
Nobody from the Lucky Sperm Club, right?
They all did it.
And what struck me is some of them became good friends, about a a dozen of them or so.
What really struck me is there were probably five of them that I can't say for sure, but I've been around enough that are actually happy people.
So you go, oh, money makes you really miserable.
No, you know, I know people with no money, they're very happy.
I know people with lots of money, very happy.
Money magnifies who you are.
If you're mean, you have more to be mean with.
If you're kind, you have more to give, right?
That type of thing.
And so it's learning to find what is going to fulfill you.
And that's unique for everybody.
It's not a science.
You know, as I said, art of fulfillment.
Because, you know, I talked to my friend who loves art and he has got this painting he wants me to see.
Very wealthy guy and dear friend of mine.
And he's, you know, I go to see this painting.
He's telling me
he's wanted us for like 14 years.
He's coveted this painting.
He just outbid everybody at Sotheby's.
Come to my house to see the painting.
And I come to the painting.
I look at this painting.
And it was like 80 or 90 million dollars.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
$82 million.
Anyway, and it's a red square.
It's a Rothko.
But I looked at him and said,
I said,
you know, they missed some spots.
He did not like that.
I was teasing him.
I was like, you know, give me $100 for the red paint.
Give me 20 minutes.
I think I could do this.
He goes, no, you understand.
It's Rothko and committed suicide.
Well, that ought to be his blood for $70 million worth of miss for the paint.
But for him, I'm not making fun of him.
He can look at that painting and have an orgasm, basically, because it just, he knows so much meaning about it.
I look at it and see splatches of paint.
I'm the one who's not able to feel the full value because I haven't educated myself how each stroke and what it means and where it comes from.
Or you don't find value in that.
And I don't value that.
But if I did, I can see it's so valuable for him.
So everybody's different and you've got to find what it is.
Cause if you don't, I always tell people success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.
You make everybody else happy and you're miserable.
And we've seen how many people like that.
you know, designers, comedians, people, brilliant, brilliant people that made everybody around them happy, but not themselves.
So I think those are the two skills that have to develop.
And you have to stop
the amount of information coming into your head because we're drowning in information.
We're starving for wisdom.
It's not an information society anymore.
It's an attention society.
So, why is there clickbait?
It doesn't need to be true.
The minute you click on it, if I get you angry, pissed off, or excited about something, you click on it, I get paid.
That's how it works.
And people in the media are not bad people.
You know that.
No, I know.
I might disagree with you on that.
Here's what I believe.
It might be a different thing on this.
I don't know if you're bad people.
They're doing what they're rewarded for.
Yes.
They're rewarded for taking care of their shareholders.
Yes.
How do I do that?
I get your attention at all costs.
And it's a war for your attention.
And everybody's trying to get it.
So you are being conditioned by everybody else and you're constantly doing.
There's stuff like something came in my pocket the other day.
I looked it up and it was, you know, was one of those Apple notifications.
It was about somebody's, some famous person's father went to hospital.
And no disrespect, but I don't know this person.
It's like, why is that coming to me right now?
It's like constantly coming.
And what comes to you is usually what's going to either upset you or reinforce what you believe.
And that's the social media is done.
That's what the media is done.
So you have to just stand guard at the door of your own mind.
It's like my original teacher, Jim Rohn, used to have a great thing.
He said to me, He said, Tony, I was talking about, you know, I was struggling.
I hadn't done this, that.
He goes, well, listen to the input you're taking in.
He said, garbage in, garbage out.
He goes, try this on precise.
What if your worst enemy drops some sugar in your coffee?
What's going to happen?
You know, sweet coffee.
What if your best friend, your mother, your father, somebody you really care about by accident drops one drop of strychnine in your coffee?
Said, you're dad.
He goes, well, life is both sugar and strychnine, so watch your coffee.
Every day, you have to stand guard at the door of your mind.
You can't just stand guard it.
You got to feed it.
He taught me every single day, miss a meal, don't miss reading 30 minutes.
And I don't mean something that comes in your pocket.
I mean a book.
I mean something on philosophy or a skill or a talent or something that makes you more.
Because if you keep inputting that on a daily basis, it changed my life.
And by the way, I rationalized I didn't have time for doing it.
So then I got into audio tapes in those days, tapes.
That's how old I am.
And you didn't have YouTube and everything else with you everywhere.
And I would go spend $300 to get six cassette tapes from this guy in L.A.
who had all these best psychologists and speakers.
And I'd listen to the stuff over and over and over again because repetition is what makes it real.
And I programmed myself.
I conditioned myself.
I can remember when when my life changed probably the most.
You know, I'd been to Jim Rohn's seminar, the speaker I told you about when I was 17, and I was really into that.
Can you tell just quickly the story of, because you were a janitor.
Yes.
And you had no money.
That's correct.
So tell that story.
Well, I was still in high school.
I was a junior in high school and I had to help my family.
So I'm working as a janitor.
I'm going to school.
And then my parents, my father, my mom, my dad had a friend of theirs.
And my father talked about this guy who's so successful now.
And he goes, he used to be such a loser, my father said, right?
And one day this guy called up and he said, listen, you know, I need somebody strong.
And I just started to grow.
I went from 5'1 to like 6'1.
He goes, you know, does your son need to make some money?
And they said, yes, he does.
Well, I need to move furniture.
So I went and worked for this guy and I worked really hard.
And he was impressed by my work ethic.
And he sat me down for lunch one day.
And he goes, you really, you can have a great future.
Very few people have this kind of work ethic.
You don't dodge it.
You're giving your all.
And I said, well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
I said, I'd love to ask you a couple of questions.
He goes, sure.
I said, my dad said, you used to be such a loser.
Now you're successful.
I really, truly said this.
Only a kid thinks this way, right?
And he goes, what?
I said, well, you know,
he goes, well, it's true.
I said, what changed you?
He said, I went to a seminar.
I said, what is a seminar?
He goes, it's like where a man who's super successful and wasn't to start with teaches you what he learned over 20 or 30 years in like three or four hours and saves you a huge amount of time of trial and error.
And I was like, wow, I didn't even know such a thing exists.
I said, does he do them?
He goes, he does them once a month.
I said, could you get me in?
He said, yeah.
But there was no follow-up.
I said, well, will you?
And he goes, no.
I said, why not?
He goes, because if you don't pay for it, you won't value it.
I said, look, I'm a janitor.
I'm going to school.
He goes, you got to do it.
How much is it?
$35.
It'd be like $250 in today's money, right?
For three hours.
I was like,
that's a week's pay, $40 a week's pay.
And he goes, well, then just go learn on your own and see how many decades it takes.
You decide.
So it was one of the big, I thought it was such a giant decision to spend 250 bucks, right?
The equivalent of, because it was a week's pay to go listen to some guy talk for three and a half hours.
But I bet you squeeze every day.
I did, because I was already reading.
I was always finding answers.
I was already like on the path, so to speak.
And I remember I pulled up my 1968 Volkswagen bug, Baja bug that, you know, I pulled up at this nice hotel in Orange County and turned the engine off and exploded right.
And I had my two-piece leisure suit I got at the thrift store, you know, with a fake gold chain.
I was like, take care of this baby.
And I went in and sat down and I took notes like crazy.
And at the break, I went up to meet Jim Rome and I said, Listen, you know, I've been studying all you're doing.
And while I was in the class, you know, people are looking at me because we're with these round tables.
And I'm, some of the things he said, I knew from books.
So I'd like finished some of his sentences, you know, that time.
And I wasn't very quiet.
I didn't realize I was.
So I said, look, I want to come to work for you.
And he goes, young man, you know, he goes, you have to go through all my seminars.
And it was like $1,200 to be like $12,000 today based on inflation.
I'm like, you know, think $12,000.
It's like, I'm sleeping in my car.
My dad got kicked out.
I had four different fathers.
My mom was very powerful.
She thought I was on his side.
She chased me out with a knife.
I knew she wasn't going to kill me, but I wasn't going back in that building.
And so it's like, I'm sleeping in my car.
I'm working as a janitor and going to school.
And he wants me to spend
$12,000 to come to his programs.
I said, look, look, I'll go to all the programs.
Loan me the money.
I promise you I'll pay it back.
I'll come to work for you.
I'll pay it back.
You keep all the money.
And then I'll be such a great example for you to tell people about how things were turned around.
Right.
And he looked at me and he goes, son, I'm not your banker.
He goes, you know what?
It's really simple.
Some people have to survive.
Some people have to succeed.
You decide which one you are.
And by the way, the class starts on Saturday.
This is like on a Tuesday.
And I'm like, and I was, I was angry.
I was like, this guy's a jerk.
He just wants my money.
I'm 17 years old and everything else.
But it was truly the best lesson because I went out and I figured I'd borrow the money.
And I didn't realize banks don't lend money to people that need it.
They all want to loan it to your damn plan.
Yeah, right.
Plus, you know, I remember I went, I got rejected like, I don't know, six banks in a row.
I'm running out of time.
And I'm in this place called Wes Gavina, California on this big avenue called Citrus Avenue.
And it's multiple banks.
I'm at the last bank and I'm running out of time.
And so I didn't know I was doing best.
It's like getting myself in state.
You know, I'd never done it before.
It's like, I can't walk out of here without this.
I got to get this done.
It's a must for me.
It's not a should, you know.
And I went in and I looked for for somebody who looked persuadable.
And there's this very kind woman there.
Her name was Mrs.
Williams.
I'll never forget.
And I walked straight up to her and shook her hand, looked her right in the eye, and I said, ma'am, I'm here.
My name's Tony Robbins.
I'm here to borrow $1,200.
Now, I'm not here to borrow it, to fix a car or go on vacation.
I'm here so I can attend a seminar.
And she started to laugh, which was not a good sign, right?
So she goes, a what?
I said, I'm going to go to the seminar.
This man's going to teach me, manage my time and my finances and help people and do these things.
And she's like, I don't understand.
I said, trust me, it's really the best, but I need the money right away.
So she starts to look at my application and she says to me,
she goes, Citrus Avenue, which is this huge avenue, goes through like five cities, right?
It's commercial avenue.
And she goes, I didn't know there were any apartments on Citrus Avenue.
And I said, well, I kind of have a mobile home.
And I told her the truth, which I was asleep in my car at back of 7-Eleven and Denny's because it was 24 hours and wouldn't make me move.
And I said, but I get the mail because I talk to the mailman and he explained my situation and I'm there at noon.
I pick up my mail right there.
So you can send it there.
And she's like, you want us to loan you $1,200?
We can find you at 7-Eleven.
And she just couldn't even believe I told her the truth about it.
And she goes, I don't understand.
Then she looks and sees my age and I'm 17.
And she goes, Are you 17?
I said, yeah.
She goes, you're not even legal to sign up a document in California for a loan.
I said, I'll be 18 soon.
She said, how soon?
I said, how soon do they have to be 18?
But it was two weeks.
So I said, okay, we worked that out.
And at the end, she goes, the bank's not going to loan you this money.
I just don't see how they could do it.
They're not going to send it to 7-Eleven.
I said, we don't understand.
And I was like so passionate.
I said, I'm not just doing this for me.
I'm going to change.
I didn't think in terms of millions of people in those days.
I said, I'm going to change hundreds, thousands of lives in my life.
This is my mission, right?
And so she looked at me and she goes, with that kind of absolute passion, she goes, I think you're going to do something.
I hope it's good.
And she goes,
How do I know I can really count on you?
So we had this long conversation.
At the end, she said, I'm going to go to the bank.
I'm going to to go to the bank manager and I'm going to recommend this, but I don't think he's going to say yes.
I said, he's got to say yes.
And she goes, but if he won't loan you the money, she said, I will.
If you can stare me in the eye and tell me beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'll never have to come look for you.
And I got tears in my eyes.
And I just reached across this poor woman and grabbed her and hugged her.
She was not prepared for that.
She got the bank to loan me the money.
I took 1,200 bucks, 12,000 bucks, basically.
I went to this, you know, three-day seminar.
It's all it was, day and night.
And I met a man there named Mike Keys, who's still my friend today, 45 years later.
And he was not as broke as I was.
I didn't have any place to stay.
He let me stay in his hotel and we became dear friends.
And, you know, some people just put it on their credit card.
For me, that was, that was more than my, my, my home.
My home was my car.
It cost more than that.
And I was writing every word he said down.
He said, the, I wrote down the.
And I figured out at one point, every, every word was worth like three cents, you know, so I didn't get up to B.
I was just so in it.
And it was so funny because decades later, you know, I spoke at Jim Round's funeral, but I went to work for him.
I became the top guy in his company.
And then at one point, he was changing his company.
I started my own company as a brokerage, and I brokered him and other speakers.
And then I eventually became the speaker.
But it all came because one of the most important things I learned from Jim Rome that I would, I hope I didn't bump that for you guys, but that I hope I can get across to your audience.
And I think your audience probably has some semblance of this.
I had forefathers who were always broke.
There was no money for food.
You know, I'm sure you know I've fed over a billion people now.
I did that last year.
I want to do it 10 years.
I did it in eight years, 100 million meals a year.
It set this goal.
It started with me feeding two families because I was fed when I was 11.
It's Thanksgiving, no food, crackers and peanut butter, but no meal.
And somebody delivered all this food to us and it changed my life.
Not the food, but the fact that a stranger cared.
That's why I'm here today.
And so if strangers care to me, I got to care about strangers.
So that shift in my psychology happened and it changed everything.
But the bottom line is.
Everything in my life shifted when I started focus on what Jim Rohn taught me.
And here's what he taught me.
He said, Tony, I said, why are all my fathers, why don't we have food?
They're good people.
They get fired.
They can't find the job.
And it's like, I've been through it with all my dads and they're good people.
And I said, I also don't understand how this teacher over here barely makes any money.
And this hedge fund guy makes a billion dollars in a year.
And he said something I'll never forget.
It changed my life.
He said, Tony, he said, we're all equal as souls.
We're not equal in the marketplace.
I said, what does that mean?
He goes, people think they're supposed to go do something and just be rewarded when your job job in life is to do more for others than anybody else does.
And if you can do that, if you can become more valuable to others, you will prosper as well.
But your focus first to be about how to give, not how to get.
And he goes, somebody works at McDonald's.
I'm not saying anything negative about them.
He said, Tony, that's not supposed to be a career job.
That's an opening job.
And it doesn't pay for squat because anyone can learn it.
And these days, you don't even know the English language.
They got pictures, right?
Push the buttons.
He goes, so it's not going to pay much.
It's going to be replaced by machines.
It's already happening in some of these restaurants right now.
But back in the end, he was saying, like, so you don't get paid much.
He said, that teacher, he said, how many of those teachers credit?
I said, I had some good, really good teachers, a couple of really good ones.
He goes, but out of all of them, how many were great?
I said, well, I can't make that evaluation.
He goes, but they're helping a small number of kids and they have no standard they're measured by.
So there's some
exceptional teachers and there's some that are below average.
Right.
This guy, people in those days were getting like a 6% return.
He goes, you know, this guy is in a position where instead of taking 12 or 13 years to double your money, he's producing results of 38% a year.
He made a billion dollars because he made 50 billion for his clients.
And he said, so I'm not saying you have to be money oriented, but if you are going to have an extraordinary quality of life where you have economic freedom, you have to learn to work harder on yourself than your job.
You have to become more valuable.
And it's so interesting because when I read Warren Buffett, when I was writing one of my first book,
I thought I knew the answer to the question.
I said, what's the most important or best investment you've you've ever made?
I'm waiting for it to say Coca-Cola or Geico.
You know, I know all those investments.
And he goes, it's what you do.
And I said, I do a lot of things.
And he said, I went and I had all these ideas and dreams.
They would have died on my lips, but I learned to be, I'm a great communicator.
And he goes, and I did it by going to Dale Carnegie.
Best investment I ever made in my life.
And the other day I saw him being interviewed again.
And he just the other day, people were talking about inflation.
And he said, here's how you deal with inflation.
It's simple.
Invest in you.
It doesn't get taxed.
Your skills grow.
And if the dollar goes to nothing and we're using shekels, but you're the best lawyer, doctor, you're the best, you know, web designer, you're going to get the most shekels.
You're going to have a great life.
So that philosophy of, it already appealed to me because my life was, you know, I really believe the secret living's giving.
I know it sounds corny, but I believe that in my soul.
And so my whole focus is how do I do more for others than anybody else?
And in the beginning, I could do a few things and my skills grew like you.
And then it got to the point now I've got 114 companies.
We do $7 billion in business.
I learned the patterns of business.
I learned how to succeed in investing.
And then I take in all those subjects, health, finance, et cetera, and try to take that to people by first showing them it really works and you can live it.
And then helping people find their tools of that.
So that's kind of been the evolution of how I've got about it.
It is.
You are, you're involved in so many different things.
And we're sitting in the basement of your house, but you live on the ocean.
And we're in a basement.
People don't have basements.
You know, we have water on this side, our boat is, and we have the ocean on this side.
I know.
We're actually underwater.
Right.
We're underwater.
And when I found out you had a basement, I thought only Tony Robbins would have the balls and really the drive to go, so get some scuba gear on and dig it out.
They told me it was impossible.
You know what it triggered it is actually I started to play squash.
And, you know, it's like you at this stage, I care about people.
So I had to drive 20 minutes there.
And then, you know, if you're even slightly nice taking pictures, it's another 15 minutes in and out and driving home i can't take that much time so i was like i want to build one well you got 25 000 square feet and you you got the acres where are you going to put it there's no other place to put it and i go down here and they said what so i built a slide as you know that goes under the ground and they said that's impossible you're below the water table i said well have you ever been to atlantis ever ever been you know to an aquarium i said I said, there's only 38 homes in this little town.
I know the mayor, the police officers, they're all here.
I love them.
They love me.
Some are fans fans of my work.
I said, I'll get it approved.
And all you got to do is find how we do this, build a submarine around it.
This is what we're going to do.
I want to build a place like this.
So we have, you know, most people never see this, but we have basketball courts, bowling alleys.
We got spas, we got
golf courses, work.
All that is underground here, and no one even knows it's here, but it came real handy when COVID happened.
Yeah.
We had all these choices in our home.
But it is, do you think that comes?
I mean, that, that defines you.
Well, I have to give credit to great great mentors.
I mean, I can't take credit.
I I got to coach some of the I've gotten to coach some of the most brilliant people in the world Mark Benioff who created Salesforce.
You know, he came to my seminars, came to like one of them four times in a row, and he's as big as I am, you know, he stands out.
And finally, one time he came and shook my hand and he goes, you've convinced me to leave Oracle.
I'm going to start my own business called salesforce.com.
We're going to change business around the world.
And he said to me this, he goes, we'll do $100 million in business.
You can count on it.
And now he's doing like whatever to 38 billion or something.
and Mark's a great friend.
So while I coached Mark and he says, I'm his coach, I'm no idiot.
I study what Mark's doing and I learn those patterns.
Peter Guber is a dear friend of mine who, you know, we're both partners in the LAFC football club and the Warrior, Golden State Warriors and L.A.
Dodgers.
And he's made 52 Academy Award-ming movies and he's a professor at UCLA.
I mean, he's one of the most incredible people I know.
And I love pitching and catching with him.
And, you know, originally I was, quote, coaching him, but I'm no idiot, man.
I'm learning.
And one of the things I learned from Peter was that, you know, you can make your vision as large as you wanted.
I watched him do it.
I watched him take things from nothing and create them.
So it's not that I'm so smart.
It's just I'm smart enough to figure out what it is I really want.
I'm smart enough to figure out role models that made it real for me.
Because for most people, I'm no idiot.
Most people are not happy.
They're not fulfilled.
They're not physically healthy.
They don't have passionate relationships.
And they don't love their work.
That's most people.
I'm no idiot.
I know that.
But why would you study disease if you want to be healthy?
It's like, I want to find the few that do and figure out what they're doing different and do that and then help other people do that as well and try to make it fun for them to do that so that people have the time of their life while their life is transforming.
Right.
So that's what's guided me.
I can't take credit.
There's just so many brilliant people I've been surrounded by that I had a privilege to serve and I was smart enough not to just serve them but learn from them.
So my
grandfather said, you know, the people who had money in the Depression made money.
Yes.
And, you know, they were ahead of the game, et cetera, et cetera.
But that.
But that's an important point.
Sir John Templeton, I got chest interview multiple times before he died.
I interviewed him a week before he passed.
And he was a role model for me because I grew up with nothing.
He grew up with nothing.
He wasn't sir.
You know, he was the first billionaire investor starting with nothing.
Beautiful man.
He made a donation each year larger than the Nobel Prize for people he thought made the biggest difference in spirituality, not religion, but spirituality.
And loved the man.
And his whole thing was that what made him incredibly successful is you make all your money during times of maximum, maximum people's upset, maximum fear, maximum everything.
Because what happens is when things are going well and you want to sell your piece of real estate to me, do you want what it's worth, less or more?
You want more.
Your business.
If things are going great, less or more.
When things are going down, people are like, take it from me, anything you want.
Here's what you can do.
And so a lot of those wealthy people made money because during maximum pessimism, they understood there's a cycle and it's not going to be winter forever.
Winter is always followed by springtime.
If you look at every bear market we've had in the history of the United States, it's followed by a bull market.
But most people
are actually in
the winter.
I mean, we're in the winter of fear and everything else,
but things haven't collapsed.
No, they haven't.
Yeah.
But, you know, we have $32 trillion left.
Yeah, I know, they're going to.
And if you talk about Social Security and Medicare, it's $110 trillion.
There's no way on the face of the earth we can pay that off.
So we have to figure out what's going on.
And our government, they're spending money like water.
Trillion, they treat like billion now.
And, you know, to give your viewers a sense of this, how things get exaggerated when things are so large, people lose a sense of it.
A million seconds ago,
how long ago would be a million seconds ago, would you guess?
This first gut response.
You don't need to be right.
A million seconds ago.
I mean,
I know I think I've heard this, so it's a lot longer than that, but I would say, you know, if I didn't have some clue,
five years.
Good guess.
12 years.
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Right?
So a million seconds is 12 years.
Okay.
A billion seconds?
32 years.
When people talk millionaires and billionaires, they're not in the same universe.
Right.
But try trillion.
That's the new government number.
Right.
32,000 years ago before man was known as man.
And we have $115 trillion
of debt really because you got to think about medicare social security unfulfilled promises so we're going to face some big challenges and the biggest way you know where we are winter wise is more the emotion everything is taken to the worst everything is seen as the worst people see people's motives as well it's like guns let's take an issue right
whether you're for or against guns We all want our children protected.
But instead, the other side's evil.
No, they just have a different view about how to do the same thing you want for your kids.
So
some benefit.
Let's find some balance for each other.
Any issue that people are so divided on.
Now, I remember when I actually worked with Bill Clinton and the same day, I went across the other side of the aisle and spoke to the Speaker of the House Gingrich.
Today, you couldn't do that in a million years.
You'd be evil, right?
You can't talk to them.
People used to fight like hell and then go have a beer together.
Today, we have these divisions, but that's what happens every you know, 80-year cycle like this.
You can see it.
There's a great book that I'd recommend your viewers read.
You probably have read, called The fourth turning excellent and another book called generations that was the one before that and when i saw bill clinton he had this book he's a student of history and you know gingrich is a star and he had the same book so i read that book first big book it shows the cycles of history and how they're created by the way we're raised but then the one the fourth turning you'll be reading about something and you know it's right now and it's a new york times article and it's from 80 years ago you know and then they do it over and over and over again it's a book i highly recommend people because it helps you to see this is not the end times Look, if there's a principle that can guide your life, there's a few givens we should start with and we'd be less stressed.
One given is everything changes and everything ends.
Everything.
Now, I look at that as a positive because when something ends, there's a new beginning.
But other people go, it's over.
No,
it's a hero's journey.
It's a call.
Because your life is the same and you're not growing.
And God, the universe, whatever you want to call it, is calling you to say, there's more of you.
And you got to go deal with it.
You got to go on the adventure.
And the adventure is not easy in the beginning, right?
You meet new people, you face different challenges.
Maybe you find some new mentors.
You got to learn to slay the dragons.
And when you do, you become more and you get to come home the hero and help other people.
But most people today are expecting, how do I just have the straight line to what I want?
And the crazy thing is, if you get everything you want easily enough and without effort, your parents always said, you won't value this if I just give it to you.
I'm like, no, you can get me the car.
I never had that choice.
I had to earn it.
But what's interesting is people are so unhappy.
It's like what we're talking about earlier.
You look at people today, there's quiet quitting and loud quitting.
So there's a
Stanford did a really cool study, one on depression, which one I can share with you.
It's really interesting.
But the one they just did, they just finished one year study on working with people that they put into my program for a six-day program.
And what concerned them is in our world today, since COVID, there's been a giant change.
They measure in companies your level of engagement.
The companies have the largest engagement have the largest level of net profitability or EBITDA.
Second level is disengaged, and the third level is actively disengaged.
Disengaged is like now what they call quiet quitting.
How do I do the least amount of work and keep my job?
Loud quitting is people that work there and they're trying to destroy the company because they're angry and pissed off.
The biggest change during COVID in the last four years, the four years of COVID, was biggest drop in history of people engaged.
and the biggest growth in actively disengaged trying to create harm and anger.
And so they don't know what to do.
Most companies don't know what to do.
People don't want to come to work.
Then they don't go to work.
They feel isolated, you know, back and forth.
I know some jobs you can do easily at home, engineer, use software, things like that, but not all.
If you're in something that's collaborative, it probably takes some connection.
But what's interesting is they're the most unhappy they've ever been because, again, you're not being called to do anything.
The more you try to self-soothe and just take care of yourself, your world gets smaller and smaller.
It's like, how do you build a muscle?
You don't build a muscle by hanging out.
If you don't use it, you lose it.
But if you make a demand on this muscle, it's going to grow and you're going to have strength.
And so one of the reasons that we want to have a life where you have something that you want, you want to care for or serve more than yourself is it calls you.
It doesn't take much to fill your basic needs as a human being, right?
You asked me earlier about those six needs.
So I didn't forget, I just wanted to show you.
It's a little complex to say in two minutes, but here's how it came about.
I'm traveling, you know, in an average year, let's say, you know, 30 countries, let's say, 25 countries.
I mean, it was an intense schedule.
And I'm entering Japan and then I'm going to China.
Completely different cultures.
Japan, everybody's appropriate and quiet, at least in those days.
China, literally, I'm surrounded by, you know, a four-story building with, you know, 15,000 people.
And they're putting corridors up because they've just come up and spashed through it.
I mean, people would suffocate.
Women would take off their heels and stab my security guards with their heels trying to get to me.
No sense of space, right?
Different culture.
Italy's a different culture, you know?
And so I had to learn how to work in every culture.
And one of the things I noticed was, regardless of the cultural rules, you saw the same problems in every culture, the same upsets, the same relationship challenges, same business challenges.
I'm like, how could this be?
Because we've all been raised differently of a different culture.
Obviously, in Asia, saving face, very different individualism of U.S.
versus some collectivism.
I know those things.
But I began to discover there were certain things that were universal.
And there were six needs that every human being has, regardless of your cultural upbringing.
You're born with it.
So the number one thing is you have a need for certainty, a need to know you can avoid pain and that you can have some comfort.
Well,
that's a survival instinct.
It's in everybody, right?
But you don't really have to do much to survive today.
So unless you live in third world country, probably going to do pretty well.
And so what happens today is you can get that certainty by doing the same thing every day.
You can get certainty by smoking a cigarette.
You're all stressed out, smoke a cigarette.
What do you do?
You exhale and you breathe out and your body calms down and you feel comfortable, right?
So you can get certainty by working out and feeling strong.
You get certainty by lowering your expectations.
It's never going to work.
Nothing ever works.
You don't get your dreams or goals, but you meet your needs.
And the thing I want people to understand is people violate their own values to meet their needs.
If
you want love more than anything, and you believe if you tell someone the truth, they won't love you, you will lie, even though you will beat yourself up if you consider yourself to be an honest person, right?
So when I began to understand this, I started seeing that dynamic.
Okay, so what happens if you can totally meet all your needs for certainty?
You get bored.
So God, the universe, seemed to create also a need for uncertainty, for variety, for surprise.
And I always ask people, how many love surprises?
I asked him in a seminar of 10, 20,000 people.
They all cheer.
Yeah, I love surprises.
I say, bullshit, you love the surprises you want.
The surprises you don't want are what make you grow and they make your life have some kind of variety to it.
And so if you have too much variety, people freak out.
Too much certainty, we freak out.
And so that's why you see people like you get in a relationship.
And, you know, I'll give you an example, a third need, the need for significance.
Everyone has a need for significance to feel unique, special, important, needed.
We all have different ways of describing it, but that's the core need.
But you also have a need for love and connection.
So if I'm trying to be so significant all the time, the more I have to be unique and different than you, it feels okay for a while, but then I'm like, where's my connection to people?
If I go connect to everybody, and I was like, where's myself?
Where's my individuality?
So these needs can sometimes clash.
And the goal is not balance where you got certainty and uncertainty.
The goal is to get it all.
So have you ever rented a movie you've already watched?
Get a life.
I've done the same, right?
Why would you rent a movie off watch?
Because you're so excited.
I don't like it.
Because you've watched it years ago and you're hoping it's been long enough.
You forgot enough crap that you'll feel like variety again.
So you met both needs.
And that's a neutral way.
People find a way to meet their needs.
And the difference in people's lives, we all have the same needs.
The differences in people are twofold.
Which of these six needs do you value at the top, one and two?
Is it certainty?
Is it love?
So they are certainty, uncertainty, variety, significance, love.
And then the spiritual needs are to grow and to give, to contribute.
Those six needs.
I can show you any behavior somebody does and in seconds show you what their real motivation underneath it is.
Everybody's got a million reasons why they do things, stories.
There's only six real reasons that we do them.
So if I'm driven by certainty, I'm going to be moving in a certain direction that makes me comfortable.
If I'm driven by variety, I might be all in.
If I'm in a building and I'm a variety guy,
I'm a security guy.
I know where all the exits are.
If my top value is variety, I probably don't even know which room section I came into.
I mean, for the fun of it, right?
If you're significance-driven, having to be special and unique, which we all want, but it's your number one, then you're always comparing yourself to everything and everyone.
How can you still feel significant?
Well, you have to either lie to yourself and say you're more special than everyone else on earth, or you have to surround yourself with people you feel superior to, both of which will keep you from growing.
And when people say, what does it take to be happy?
Lots of things, relationships, but the core of it is progress.
If you grow, you feel alive.
And if you feel alive and grow, you have something to give.
And that's what makes life meaningful on a spiritual level, not just survival.
So everybody finds a way to be certain, even if they lie to themselves or work 20-hour days.
Everyone finds variety, drugs, alcohol, movies, working hard, building something, positive ways, negative ways.
You find a way.
Everyone wants to find a way to feel significant.
Some do it by having more earrings, more tattoos.
Some do it by knowing baseball scores.
Some do it by having a certain amount of money.
Some do it by knowing art.
Some do it.
There's a million ways to do it.
So the ways you do it, the question is, do you meet your needs in a way that is sustainable or just obtainable?
Like the example, I think in your seminar, I went to a guy and said, I want you to lose 30 pounds by tomorrow morning at 8.30 and I have $30 million.
I'm putting an escrow account.
Can you do it?
And he's like, no, of course you can't.
Cut off the legs, cut off an arm.
We can get you there.
Right.
That's right.
It's an obtainable goal, but it's not sustainable.
That's like when you drink or you smoke or you do whatever, it'll make you feel comfortable, but it doesn't last.
You got to do it again.
But there are ways to meet your needs that are so fulfilling that it's a positive addiction.
You can get addicted to running, for example, as a simplistic example, or reading or learning and have it meet your needs for certainty and variety.
And you can feel significant because of the wisdom you get and you can have something to share with people.
So what I'm a student of and what you mentioned in the seminar is our culture, primarily because of social media in the last 15 or so years and the way social media being the primary driver has made us significance and certainty driven almost exclusively.
So you see people, and as you know, in the seminar, I have people do this analysis.
I don't tell them anything.
And then I have them look at what their needs have been, the way they've lived.
Like we all want love, but most people want to be certain that love's not going to go away or it's going to be there.
Or they want love, but they need to be significant enough to think they're worthy of it.
Right.
So they have these pathways that don't go directly to what they want.
And so they get overwhelmed.
And so most people are certainly insignificance driven, but when I ask in the seminar, okay, what's the downside of making that the top of your list?
Write out what you think the downside is.
And what do you think should be the top of your list?
Almost everybody you see moves to, I want love or growth or contribution versus certainty, which
everything changes and everything ends.
So the only thing you can be certain about is change, right?
And so I think what happens is I can diagnose what's going on, but more importantly, I teach people to diagnose themselves.
So for example, if a person smokes a cigarette, what needs does it meet?
Certainty, you're comfortable.
Variety, it'll change your state.
Significance used to be it, like smoking because I'm cool.
Some people still think it is, but now we kind of put you in a little building in a little corner here.
It's a little harder than that.
Connection.
So, you know what?
Some people stop smoking and they start eating.
Because they need a new way to do it.
They can eat.
It's convenient.
It makes them comfortable.
You eat a lot of food.
Your stomach fills up and now you breathe differently.
You actually take a breath variety of different flavors some people like you know they're they're snobs about what they're going to eat they get significance they know special things about it and for a lot of people eating is a way to connect with other people now you don't grow well you grow but
and you aren't necessarily contributing anybody else but it meets your basic needs and what i found is anytime a belief an emotion or a behavior meets at least three of these needs, you'll become addicted to it.
It could be a positive addiction or a negative addiction.
Once it hits three, you're pushed over the edge to want it.
And so I show people change is not about giving something up.
It's about trading what you did here to meet your needs for something that meets your needs even better.
And then it's easy.
And so that helps me understand when you say I read people, I can see very quickly in a few minutes, if someone says, you know, I want to win an Academy Award.
That's the most important thing in life.
Well, what need is driving them?
Certainty.
Significance.
Significance.
And everybody can learn it.
So what I try to do is teach them.
And it's not so you judge other people.
It's so you can appreciate what their needs are.
So your son had certain needs that anyone have at his stage of life.
He wants to feel certain.
He wants to feel significant, right?
And he didn't feel like he was enough.
And so he'd have some uncertainty.
And that uncertainty can lead to fear and they can lead to nothing is going to work and then feeling sad and depressed and all kinds of things.
All we had to do is one, you can't do these things intellectually.
We had to change his biochemistry.
We put him in an environment.
You were there.
Your wife was there.
He was there with 14,000 people and then came to date with Destiny, had a similar experience.
but what happened during that time his biochemistry was changed this is maybe i can explain it this way so i mentioned the stanford study well the first stanford study was done during covid they came to me and they said gosh we've had two of our professors or one was professor and one somebody on their team who were clinically depressed they came to this program for six days with you and they have no symptoms of depression they're not taking their drugs this is amazing do you have any data i said well yeah i've got millions of people
they go no no scientific data i go no but if you want to do a study i'd be open to it And they said, we'd love to study depression because right now during COVID, when people lock down, remember, suicides went crazy, drug overdoses went crazy, and depression went crazy.
I said, let's do it.
I said, but tell me what the standard is.
Like, what do the meta-studies tell you about depression?
Like, how many people get well and so forth?
They said, the meta-studies, when you look at multiple studies, 60% of people treated with drugs and or therapy make no improvement.
It's horrible.
40% improve.
The average improvement is 50%.
They're half as depressed.
No, don't get me wrong.
Some people get better, but it's a very small number.
So I said, well, you could almost get that with, you know, a placebo.
And the guy said, yeah, you almost could.
And I said, well, I think we can beat that.
What's the best study you've ever done?
And they said, it was done at Johns Hopkins.
I think it was five years ago now.
And he said, they gave people psilocybin, magic mushrooms, for a month with cognotherapy for a month.
And I said, well, you should have got some kind of change.
They said it's the most powerful change that they ever measured in science.
54% of people six weeks later, no symptoms of depression whatsoever.
Pretty unbelievable compared to anything else we've done because SSRIs don't work.
It was on the cover of Newsweek a year ago, but we still sell them, right?
And so I said, wow, that's impressive.
I said, I don't know.
I think we can do better than that based on what I've seen, but well, you go test it.
So they set up the same study, same contrast group, everything else, and no drugs, no month, just this one seminar called Date with Destiny I do.
And it was done for six days.
And people can watch it.
By the way, if they go on Netflix, they can see Tony Robbins, I'm Not Your Guru.
That's the title of it.
There's a documentary that shows you like in an hour and 45 minutes what I do in six days.
It's really inspiring.
But at the end of it, the results were so dramatic, they were afraid they get canceled.
So they sent out blind, you know, study numbers to three other organizations.
It was all confirmed.
At the end of six weeks, 100% of the people, this is the Journal of Psychiatry last year, 100% of the people, no symptoms whatsoever.
Even better, 17% of the people had suicidal ideation, meaning they're constantly thinking about suicide.
None of it.
They followed up 11 months later.
They're going going to do 12, but people are coming back home from COVID.
And so it was great.
They had great statistics on the general population as well.
11 months later, 80, excuse me, 72% increase in positive emotions.
Excuse me, 72 decrease in negative emotions, 52% increase in positive emotions, no depression 11 months later.
How do you get that kind of lasting change out of a few days?
So they...
Previously, a group that they worked with had followed me and done all these markings in my body, meaning they work with like Tom Brady, like some of the greatest athletes in the the world and so forth.
And so they measured everything.
I wore this $58,000 device that measures your heart rate variability.
They came and take my blood and they take my saliva in between breaks.
And they found some interesting things I do with this body of mine.
You know, I jump a thousand times a day in a seminar and I, you know, I weigh almost 290 pounds.
So every time I come down, it's four times your body weight.
So it's a thousand pounds of pressure, basically.
Thousand jumps, right?
Times that.
And they're like, look, look at your bone density.
These are humans.
These are ultraman athletes.
This is this gorilla called you from the demands of doing that for 46 years.
My calorie burn is 11,300 calories on average in a day on stage.
And 4,3800 that is before I get on stage.
Because chess players I found, I didn't know this, they tried to explain it to me, they, without moving, they use their mind so intensely, they burn about 3,500, 3,800.
But I go a lot longer than that.
I do 12, 14 hour days.
I have the lean body mass of defensive lineman to give you an idea.
It's like, so they measured everything, but they also found something really interesting and then they started measuring my audience.
And that was the greatest athletes and teams in the world, the Tampa Bay Lightning, they measured as well.
When they get in a really rough spot, they have this thing they call championship biochemistry.
Tom Brady's down by 10 points.
It's the fourth quarter.
And he comes back to win in less than two minutes.
How the hell does he do that?
His testosterone surges.
So he has this huge drive.
And at that level, your memory goes through the roof.
But normally what gets in the way is cortisol.
Cortisol is a stress hormone.
His testosterone surges and his cortisol drops through the floor.
So he's just so focused.
He's so present.
It doesn't guarantee he's going to win, but he's going to maximize his capabilities.
I do that every time I go on stage.
They followed me for three years, but here's what's really cool.
I started doing digital seminars too.
They first did it with the live ones.
COVID, I had people all over the world.
They sent people into 13 different countries, measured people in real time, and it looks like music.
I go into these states biochemically, and the audience follows me and they get to this state.
That's how we like have people do the firewalk or the wood breaking.
They get to the state where they can push the fear aside and they can push through because they have strong testosterone and low cortisol.
So that biochemistry is why it's retained.
If I asked you where you were on 9-11, almost every person even from other countries tells you where they were, what they saw the moment they saw it.
If I asked you where you were on 8-11,
because information without emotion is barely retained.
Information with a lot of emotion is massively retained.
So I create states, your son is an example of that, where people are in these peak states of mind biochemically, and that's why they retain it and produce the results.
I will tell you that I think that
I was so impressed by
the way, I mean, you use every sense, every sense
to put people in state.
And it's
movement, sound, music,
everything.
Engagement.
And you,
you know,
oh, he's a guru.
No, no, he's not.
You're not, you're not doing any of that.
That's right.
And you say it on the stage, first of all, I'm not your guru, but you also say, look,
if this is what we're doing to your body, and you're showing
how it all works.
And it's.
And by the way, your son, like, he could have just watched that, but he participated fully.
He got himself some states.
He starts to realize who he really is.
No.
And he's still going to, he's still got a lot of learning and stuff to go in his life, but he has a totally different foundation to look at life through because his biochemistry has changed.
It wasn't with drugs.
Right.
And Tanya and I were, I mean, she said, we're not going to walk on fire.
I'm not going to walk on fire.
I'm not going to walk on fire.
And I told her before we went, I said, you know, those people that wear the cheese block hats, you know, the Green Bay Packers.
I said, if you're going to Tony Robbins, you have to just put yourself in that mindset.
I'm just going to wear a big cheese block and I'm going for it.
I don't care.
Because, you know, we don't push anybody to do it, and people all say, I'm not going to do it.
And then you get in the environment, you're in a different state.
Yeah.
And of course, it's not about the firewalk.
It's about whatever stops you in life.
That's the fire state.
Yeah, right.
It's like this thing that normally stops you as fear, and you learn how to snap out of it and do it anyway.
You know, I used to use skydiving in the beginning, but it got hard to get 10,000 people in the middle of the sky over New York City in the middle of the night.
So I had to find other metaphors.
And when people are at home, I can't, I'm all starting fires around the world in 500 countries.
So we do wood breaking.
We show them something.
Normally in karate, you take a year to learn, and they do it in a few minutes, but we use it as a metaphor of breaking through what's stopping you.
Correct.
And then it becomes more physical instead of just intellectual.
Yeah, it wasn't
what was so great is she did it for a different reason.
I did it for a different reason.
And it was
what's your worst fear that's going to stop you?
Yeah.
And
hot coals.
You know, it's not my worst fear, but that stops you.
Once you walk across them,
it just changes.
Yeah, because your brain goes, if I can get myself through this thing that I once thought was impossible or at least difficult, what else do I think is impossible or difficult that I can also crush with just a few changes in strategy?
Yeah.
That's the value of it.
That's why I use it as a metaphor.
But as you know, that happens the first night of the four-day program.
If people think that's going to be the peak, you know,
three day four, it's a whole different level than they ever dreamed of.
You know, it's fun to do.
All right.
We didn't have a chance to talk about a new book out on investing.
Geez.
you've got a uh seminar you're doing for free yes i'd love to mention that if you can
so i'm every year since covid when you know i was doing my seminars in their stadiums and then governor you know from california
who is an interesting guy with different values different belief structures but i i know gavin well his team calls up and says oh oh by the way your stadium of you know 12 500 people you know 15 000 maybe you only put 100 people in it like what
you know so it's like and then he shut down all California.
So my thing was, script, we're going to Vegas.
They'll never shut down Vegas, right?
So I get all 12,500 people by the time it's 13,000 people to go.
They're going to fly to Vegas.
And one week out, they shut down Vegas.
So I was like, we're going to Texas, right?
You know, you live in Texas.
Yeah.
The governor there, he's tough.
Yeah.
He says he's not going to do this.
And I know a friend there has a church, 14,000 people.
We'll use his church.
This will be great.
We move everybody to Texas.
Two weeks out.
They shut down Texas.
So then I go, movie theaters.
At least we can do like 1,300 movie theaters.
We'll put, because they only put 10 people in, 10 people each, but they'll have a big screen.
They have this great sound of music.
It'll still be there.
We'll deliver for them.
They don't even have to travel.
This will be really easy, right?
They shut down the movie theaters.
So after all of that crap, I basically said, I've got to build a studio and I've got to find a way to engage people at home, no matter what the hour is, engage them.
And I honestly didn't even know if I could do it, but I felt like I had to.
And the first thing I did was I said, first, people need us right now.
They're trapped at home.
I said, I'm I'm going to do a seminar.
It requires no money, no travel, no anything, and we got to make a difference for people.
And it was unbelievable.
We decided to do this, you know, three and a half day program.
And it was just three hours a day, but we gave people so many great tools.
And the first one, we had half a million people.
The next year, we had 750,000.
Last year, we had 1.5 million people from 195 countries, every country in the world.
And the stories, like
there was a man there
that
would never come to a seminar.
He weighed 700 pounds.
He's in bed.
He hasn't been out of bed in six years.
He has to wear an oxygen mask.
He can't go to the bathroom.
It has to be done where he is, right?
And so it was free and somebody put it on the screen for him.
And so he watched and then he raised his hand and called.
So I bring people up on the screen and interact with him.
He's in bed and I'm having this conversation with him about what happened.
He'd been injured and he took these drugs and then it broke him down in his body.
And I was just showing him that you don't have to settle.
It doesn't matter.
He's such a perfect example.
And so I gave him some simple things to do.
So he took like this iron rod and started doing the super light rod back and forth here.
Anyway, I told him, you get, you're going to do these things and you lose enough weight that you can't get to the bathroom.
And then you lose enough weight, you can walk down the stairs.
You lose enough weight, you can drive a car.
And I'll fly you to my seminar and you'll walk on fire with us and we'll have a good time, right?
He's lost 310 pounds.
He, within three months, made it to the bathroom for the first time.
He no longer wears an oxygen mask.
They told him he'd have to do the rest of his life.
There was a woman that was on the side of the road here in Florida.
She got kicked out of her house, of her rent or apartment because they were going to sell it or whatever, and she didn't have the resources.
So she's under an underpath watch underpath watching this.
And we have a million and a half people and they're all over the world.
And we build a community now with all these people helping each other.
So people start showing up, finding out where she is, helping her find a place.
We had this guy named Rico.
I just saw him last week, two years ago.
He went to this program we did, you know, for free.
And he was just out of prison.
tattoos everywhere, very intense character, and had been very abusive to women in his life life and had a baby girl who he could not see.
And he went through this huge transformation for the program.
And it's been two years.
And guess what?
He was watching, he was driving a truck.
So he pulled over and he was watching in the truck for this program for three days, you know, for a couple of hours a day, two and a half hours a day.
And anyway, now he's got full custody of his daughter.
He actually coaches other people who get out of prison.
I mean, he's this incredible transformation.
People, a woman who'd, you know, lost her two-year-old daughter to cancer and just couldn't get over it, turned around.
People growing their business, you know, 130%.
So it's been fun.
And so I'm doing one more this year.
It's coming up January 25th through the 27th.
And it's called the Time to Rise Summit.
And all it is is each day for about two and a half, three hours, instead of going to a movie or sitting on your tail, we're going to give you to get a plan, not some news resolutions, and show you the strategies to how to first change your energy.
Because low energy, you don't do anything.
You're not going to be a great partner in life.
You're not going to have great relationships.
You're not going to have a great business.
So we show you the tools to maximally change that.
What do we do to change your emotions?
Because if you're frustrated over and fearful about the world, you're not going to make progress.
So we give you real tools, you practice them, and I give you a challenge each day.
This is what you're going to do today.
Tomorrow, we'll come back.
You use it.
Let's see what you did.
We'll go to the next step.
We do it around their finances.
We do it around their career.
So we try to hit the areas that matter most.
And I love it.
And to have a million F people in 195 countries, which is every country in the world, and then see the community and how they support each other is amazing.
So anyone, you go to time to rise summit.com, time to riseummit.com.
There's no charge for it whatsoever.
And people comment, it's just my way of trying to give back.
And I love doing it.
And a lot of people love that and doing other seminars and things with us.
But whether they do or not, we take care of everybody, which I'm excited about.
And then you mentioned this book, which is The Holy Grail of Investing.
And I've written three number one bestsellers to the New York Times in a row, but the two of them were financial.
This is the third in the trilogy, the final one.
The first one I wrote because it was 2008.
I was so angry because I worked with Paul Tudor Jones, for example, one of the top 10 traders in history.
In 1987, when the stock market dropped 20% in a day, still the largest percentage in a day, he made over 100% for his clients over that year, just unbelievably brilliant man.
So I worked with him for about 24 years and he gives me the details every day we meet.
So I've learned a lot, to say at least from a genius like that.
But I thought to myself, when I saw people losing, you know, their 401ks and they're, you know, losing their homes and barber, my barber was messed up.
My billionaire clients are messed up in 2008, 2009.
I thought somebody's going to do something.
No, they gave more money to the people that almost destroyed the system, as you know.
So I was like, I don't have all the answers, but I have one good thing.
I have access.
So I said, I'm going to interview 50 of the smartest people in the world financially, all started from nothing.
Warren Buffett, Ray Dahlia, Carl Icon, Paul Tudor, all these guys.
And I'm going to see what's the common denominator.
That's what I'm good at, taking complex and making it simple.
My billionaire clients will like this, but I want something the average person could do.
So I wrote this 670-page monster book that can take you from nothing to where you want to be.
And it's been the best-selling book of its type in the finance category over these years.
Then I wrote one called Unshakable to prepare people for when I knew
what was going to happen.
No one knew when.
I knew it was going to be COVID, but you know, there's going to be, we've had too long a bull market.
There's going to be a bear market.
People are going to be afraid I wanted to lose.
I wrote this book
because
so many people don't think it's possible to win anymore.
My other books will show you how to win, but there's an area that can speed up the time in which you achieve.
And most people are completely unaware of it.
And it started with a conversation with Ray Dalio, who's one of the greatest hedge fund managers in the world.
He manages almost $190 billion in business.
He manages pension funds.
He's a genius.
He's most successful.
Like 2008, when the market's down, whatever it was, 34, 35%, he was up like 7%, 8%, given idea.
Just smart man.
He became a good friend.
And I asked him a question one day, and I said, I prepared for like 14 hours to do this hour interview, which went three and a half hours
because he knew I understood.
So we went back and forth, pitching and catching.
And one of my final questions was, what is the single most important principle of investing that you believe could make the biggest difference in anybody's life?
And he said, Tony, I struggled with that for 20 years.
I'm going to tell you the holy grail of investing.
That's where it comes from.
And he said, it's pretty simple.
He said, if you want bigger returns so you can have financial freedom, you usually have to take bigger risks.
Correct.
And he said, you know, because I just interviewed all these people, that the number one focus, the most of the best financial people in the world is not losing money.
Right.
It's not making money.
It's not losing money because they know if you lose 50%, you got to make 100% to get even on that stock or that business.
He goes, you also know that we all know asset allocation is everything.
And asset allocation is a big word for your audience, but I know many of them are sure of it.
I know what it is.
It simply means whatever money you have, $1,000 to invest, $10 million to invest.
What percentage are you going to put in a bucket of things that are low risk and probably not as high a return?
So it takes longer to get there, but it's safer.
What goes in a bucket of where it's more risk, maybe more upside, but you could also lose, right?
And so different assets fit that.
And do you do 50-50, 70-30, 80-20?
And that's related to when you need the money, your age, you know, what's your risk tolerance, a variety of elements, right?
And he goes, and the fourth thing I know you know, and it's called asymmetrical risk reward.
The illusion people have is that the billionaire people took gigantic risks.
Because if you look at somebody like, do you know Richard Branson?
You know Richard, right?
Give it a go, Mr.
Give it a go.
Let's give it a go.
Let's try anything, right?
Risk his life on a balloon, risk his life on a boat, risk his life going to space.
But when it comes to investing, uh-uh-uh, his whole focus is asymmetrical risk reward.
How do we have the least amount of risk humanly possible with the most upside?
Paul Tudor-Jones would make investments, and when I helped to do some turnarounds, was having a challenge 22 years ago, he would only invest in those days.
I'm going to invest the dollar only if I think I can make five.
That's not easy to find.
But if I'm wrong, I can risk another dollar and still make four.
It could be wrong four times out of five and be okay versus someone trying to get a 10 or 20% return.
So that's asymmetrical reward.
Richard Branson, the reason I bring him up is when he took on
British Airways and decided he's going to start an airline, His biggest risk was buying these giant Boeing airplanes.
Correct.
He took a year and a half to to negotiate with Boeing and said, I'm going to buy all these airplanes, but your part of the deal is if a year from now I don't make it, you're going to take all the planes back and there's no loss to me.
Wow.
And he pulled that off.
Wow.
So that's how these people think.
No risk, all upside.
And then the last one is diversification.
So he said, I know, because we talked about these four things, whether you talk to macro traders or people that, you know, buy for value, these are the things they all agree on.
He goes, Tony, I've looked at that asset allocation.
That's how you don't lose money and how to do it and the diversification.
And I found this formula.
If you can find, here's the holy grail.
If you can find eight to 12 non-correlated or uncorrelated investments, you reduce your risk by 80% and you keep your upside or increase it.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, most people know that when things are going well, people tend to put their money in stocks because they have more growth potential.
And when they're a little more concerned, they put a little more money in stocks.
If you go to a traditional financial planner, they'll say, we're going to do 60-40 or 50, 50 and so forth.
But what happens is they're not usually correlated, but they are in tough times.
2020, they both went through the floor.
2008, and if you go to your broker, they'll say, well, you know, this just never happened.
No, it happens every time.
And he explained to me why that happened.
I won't go to the details of it.
But he said, if you can find these uncorrelated investments,
it is the only free lunch.
Imagine being able to double or triple the tempo in which you get to your goals because you can get higher returns, but not having higher risk.
It's unheard of.
So he told me that.
And then it's hard to find those eight to 12, which is where I wrote this book.
But also I went to J.P.
Morgan.
I was a speaker there at their alternative investment conference.
You have to be a billionaire to go.
And Ray was right in front of me, speaking right before me.
And someone asked him a similar question.
What's the most important kind of principle?
And he goes, he went through the whole thing, the holy grail of investing.
And I watched all these billionaires who aren't taking notes the whole time drop their heads and write like crimson because it's such a simple principle.
But here's the problem that most people don't realize.
Your asset allocation where you put money makes all the difference high net worth people have 46 percent of their money not in public markets but they have 46 percent of their money on average latest report in private equity private credit right and private real estate there used to be 8 000 companies you could invest in the stock market now there's 3 700.
the s p 500
25% of the total value of those 500 companies comes from five companies.
Wow.
That's how imbalanced it is right now.
And so we're in a world, and if you go to the Russell 2000, I think it's 40% of them don't make money.
They're betting on the future for them, right?
So you got a limited number of options and everybody pouring their money, especially when bonds were giving you nothing.
Everybody's taking more and more risk, right?
So how do you find these non-correlated investments?
And then I started to see in the last 35 years, this is what I want your viewers and listeners to hear.
If you want to speed up the tempo of getting where you want to go, you can't put everything in private equity or private credit, but just give you a balance.
In the last 35 years in global markets, private equity, average average private equity has outsurpassed public markets for 35 straight years all over the world.
So I'll give you the example that most people know in the U.S., the S ⁇ P 500.
It's averaged for 35 years, 9.2%.
Now, if you're getting 5%, it takes 14 years to double your money.
But when you're getting 9%,
wow, you know, you can start doubling your money pretty damn quick.
You're in eight years, right?
But the average private equity during that same time of 35 years average was 14.2.
So what that means is you're getting 50% greater returns compounded year after year.
So here's how you can understand it if you didn't hear anything else I said.
A million dollars, if you put it in the S ⁇ P 500 35 years ago and forgot about it, it's worth $26 million today without you doing anything.
If you put it in private equity, not the top people, which I interviewed for the book, the average, 14.2, you have 139 million in the same time with the same amount of money.
Unbelievable.
So that's why their asset allocation is different.
The average person has less than 5% of their assets in private credit, private real estate.
They have it in REITs.
They have it in those areas, and they tend to get correlated.
So once I learned that, then I was sitting down one day.
It's like, I knew this.
You know it.
We travel in similar circles.
It's like, boy, there's some managers that are the best in the world.
But trying to get in there, it doesn't matter that you have money because all the pension funds get it first and the ultra-wealthy people get it first.
It's kind of like being outside the velvet rope at a good club in New York and you got the money, but you don't got the looks.
You don't know the people.
I don't care how much money I am.
You're not getting in this place, right?
So I would get little pieces of these companies, but it's like if you want to buy one of those newest Ferraris that, you know, that they're doing the specialty Ferrari, it's pre-sold to other Ferrari owners before you even get there.
So I was so frustrated.
I was talking to one of Paul Tudor-Jones' partners who went on to start his own company.
I said, you know, like, what's your experience?
He goes, Tony, even I was around Paul.
There's, you know, it's limited, but I'll let you own a secret where I put most of my money.
This guy's really brilliant.
So I'm like leaning forward, right?
Really sophisticated man.
He goes, there's this company in Houston called CAS.
He's the ACM's like Houston?
I was waiting to say Singapore, London, New York, Connecticut, right?
He goes, yes, they're off the beaten path, but they're the best at this.
He said, they're not the only ones, but they're one of the best.
He said, there is a way for you where you don't have to try to get in those funds, where you can own a piece of the company that owns all those funds.
See, these companies make so much money.
If you look at the Fortune 400, the wealthiest people in the world, and I said, which industry has the most billionaires?
Most people tell me tech or real estate.
They're both wrong.
It's financial services, but it's not hedge funds that go up and down.
It's private equity because what do they do different?
Different than 20 years ago where they're just trying to take advantage.
Today, I love the philosophy.
They find a company, instead of trying to buy a stock as cheap as they can, the right timing, they buy a company as well as they can, and then they add massive value.
They bring in a new CEO, new technology, new marketing, new whatever, and they grow the business and then they sell it for a nice multiple, either publicly or to a bigger company.
And the returns they get are ridiculous.
So I interviewed 13 of the kings of private equity, private credit, and private real estate.
And these are guys like Robert Smith.
He created this little company called Vista.
That's a $100 billion fund.
He started with nothing.
He is the most brilliant guy you ever meet and the nicest human being you'll ever meet.
And I got in their heads, just like I did in those previous books, but how do you do the alternative investments?
And it's so exciting.
So for example, if you put your money, if you can get your money in one of these, they call you a limited partner if you're an investor.
If you own the company or you're the CEO or C-suite, you're a general partner, right?
So hard to get as a limited partner, but you can buy a slice, if you know the right ways, of the general partnership.
And so here's what they get.
They get 2% of your money and it's locked up for five years.
That's why you wouldn't put all your money here because it's not liquid.
But for lack of liquidity, you get better returns overall, right?
So they're going to make 2% a year on, let's say, a billion dollar fund.
That's a small, small fund, right?
A billion dollar fund.
They're they're going to have 20 million dollars a year for five years how'd you like to have a hundred million dollars of income that was guaranteed for five years whether they do well or not that's what they get but then they get 20 of the upside and most of these firms can grow from a billion to two billion in five years they get 20 so they make 20 they make 200 million dollars on the growth they make 100 million they make 300 million dollars on a billion dollars by just growing it now these are firms now that there's one firm we started i think they had i think they were at four billion and now they're like at $22 billion.
And you can only imagine love profitability.
So I get the 2% ongoing income and I don't run the business and I get the 20% upside and I get a piece of all their funds, the ones they did in the past when there's low inflations, the ones now with higher inflations, the one they'll do in the future as well.
If the business ever gets sold, I get a multiple on the business that they sell.
It's one of my favorite things in life.
Now, I got excited about this, but how can you tell the general public?
There's about a dozen of these.
You can easily meet the formula that he teaches for Holy Grail, as long as it's not just public markets.
By the way, those high net worth people, 46, 47% in private equity, private credit, private real estate, 29% in the public markets.
You still need liquidity.
I do that as well.
But what was really interesting was you look around and you see what's happened within that marketplace and you start to say, well, how could I get this to the average person?
Couldn't get in before.
Congress did something really wonderful.
The House did.
Whoa.
I know.
Amazing.
Stop the press.
And And it was bipartisan and it just happened just in the last six months.
And now the Senate's taking it up.
And it looks like it's going to pass.
The House has already passed it.
And here's what it is.
It is so unfair, in my opinion, to have only wealthy people have investments that have the greatest return.
And that's what the government does.
You have to be an accredited investor, have a million dollars of net worth, not counting your house, $200,000 in income.
That's the basis, right?
One of the two.
And it's like,
So the richest people get richer.
It's like so unfair.
Somebody in Congress got that idea and they bipartisan passed it.
And here's what they came up with.
You can take a test now.
And if you can pass the test, you get access to those investments and become a credit investor, which I think is so great.
Because I know a lot of people, you probably do too.
They were good in business.
They're not a good investor.
They're not a sophisticated investor, but they have the money so they get access.
So now these things are accessible, becoming accessible.
Now the push is to get it available for people's 401k.
So there's going to be a huge change in the marketplace in the area.
I'll give you two others real fast.
Back in 2021, not long ago, you couldn't get any money on bonds.
Now you get 4% or 5%.
It's a decent return, right?
People are getting 1%, 2%, ridiculous.
So what went crazy?
High-yield bonds, junk bonds.
2021, they were paying 3.9%,
which sounded huge compared to everywhere else.
So people, the market went up and exploded and dropped through the floor.
These are risky bonds.
And so interestingly, I was making 9% on private credit the whole time.
with less risk.
How could it be less risk?
These private equity firms, since banks stopped loaning money, money, except for the biggest firms, and think about it, public companies, 3,700, there's 100,000 firms in the United States alone that have 100 million to 3 billion in profitability or in business.
It's giant.
They need financing.
The banks don't really loan to them anymore.
So over the last 10 or 15 years, it's created a new market, and that's private credit.
These smart people that know how to evaluate, evaluate companies, and they loan to them, and they get to know them really well.
They have a 1% failure rate overall.
Any bank would die for that.
And they keep loaning to them as they need more capital in the future.
But here's the best part.
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I'm 3.5%.
I don't have to pay 7% or 8%.
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But if you had an adjustable mortgage, it's a little bit more terrible.
Well, on the business side, those same movements with the interest rates happen.
It's the equivalent of adjustable, right?
And so it's a floating rate.
So when we were loaning money to people in these private credit companies at, let's say, 5% and 6%, at 1.7%,
those same people that borrowed that money are now paying us 11, 12, and 13%
because it went up.
We have no more risk.
We haven't done anything more, but we're making even more money while interest rates go up.
And I own the 2 and 20 on those businesses as well, to give you an idea.
So I have 65 companies, some of the biggest in the world.
tens and 30 and 50 billion, 100 billion dollar firms that I have a piece of.
Now, why would a company want to sell that?
Because years ago, they didn't.
But now, starting with Bain after 2008, Bain came out and said, We're going to put our own money in right beside you.
They were the first ones to do that.
And now it's the standard.
We do that in all of our businesses.
And so if they put, if they open a fund and they have to put their percentage in of $50 million and it's tied up for five years, they open another fund, pretty soon they can have a liquidity issue.
So they don't sell because they want to.
They take your money so they can build more of those elements.
But you have to know the right people, the right ones.
So I explain in the book how that can happen.
Last one I'll tell you is sports.
I wanted to be a professional athlete.
I did not have the skills.
I used to go to Dodger Stadium.
We had no money.
I was in the furthest bleacher seats out there and I was bleeding Dodger blue, you know, that up there.
I wanted to be a baseball player.
Now, as you see over here, I've got like six championship rings.
These are teams that I own, but also the ones I've coached, the Golden State Warriors, the L.A.
Dodgers, et cetera, et cetera.
But what was amazing was the first team I finally had enough money I could participate with was when we started the LAFC Football Club in L.A.
And it was fun.
I got to help be part of the team, design the colors, the elements, the stadium.
It's a blast.
Then I moved to Florida and I owned a team that I never got to see and we won the championship.
It's pretty amazing.
But the amount of microscope I had to go through to get qualified, it's mind-boggling on the amount of money.
There's new rules that were passed just three years ago that allow you to buy a small slice of your favorite sports team or multiple sports teams, which is even better because you have more diversification.
There is no correlation between what happens in major league sports and what's happening in the stock market.
In fact, these companies used to be putting butts in seats, but they do well during inflationary times as well.
They just jack up the price of the hot dog and people pay it.
You know why?
They have a monopoly, a legal monopoly.
No one can compete with you if you're the person in LA or Chicago or wherever it is, right?
Second, they have fanatics as their customers.
That's what the word fan means.
And it's multi-generational.
Thirdly, now they've got all kinds of the businesses, real estate, media.
So Peter Guber, one of my dear friends, partner at LAFC and partner in the LA Dodgers, he bought the Dodgers for $2 billion with a group of people several years ago.
No one had paid more than $800 million for the team.
They thought the Dodgers were worth a billion.
He paid two.
Now, Peter is a very sophisticated guy.
So I go to him and say, I know you're not dumb.
Everybody's saying you're being an idiot.
What do you know that no one else knows?
And he said, Tony, I'll give you a hint.
He said, these are media businesses.
That's more money than anything else.
No one watches.
They've cut cords now.
So of the top 100 shows that were out last year, 92 were sports in terms of viewership.
And they'll watch the commercial still.
Super cool.
So he said, that's all I'll tell you, but I'm going to make an announcement a week and then come over and we'll have a little party and laugh.
And he sold the local television rights for $7 billion and made $5 billion straight away.
Oh, my gosh.
Now, those are local.
When you own an NBA team, you get your percentage.
I don't know how many teams there are.
I've forgotten whatever number.
You get an exact percentage of all the national rights equally, no matter how big or small your team is, but you keep your local rights.
And the value of that just goes up and up and up.
So how'd you like?
Like, I own a piece of the Red Sox, the Dodgers, the Golden State Warriors, you know, the Pittsburgh Penguins.
I mean, and here's the cool thing.
Michael Jordan, I forgot the exact number.
I think he bought a piece of the hornets, the NBA team, for I think it was 238 million, if I remember right, pretty close.
I might be off by a little bit.
He just sold the rights, 12 years, sold it, kept some of it, sold the rest for 3 billion 12 years later.
Oh my gosh.
The average across Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, NBA, and Major League Baseball, the four you can get, the NFL's not into it yet, but hopefully they will be soon.
The average across them in the last 10 years is 18% compounded.
And there's no correlation.
So now you've given yourself another total protection, lowered your risk, did something fun, and part of a business that really does well, even in massively inflationary times.
So the book is showing all these categories most people have no dream is possible, showing how you can qualify if you're not qualified, and then 13 interviews with the smartest people on the planet who are doing this over and over again.
Most of them have compounded 20% a year or more for decades.
Now you're doubling your money every three and a half years instead of every 10 or 12 or 8 or whatever.
So it's a way for people to get to their goals.
It's not the only way and it's not the perfect way, but it's one that people need to know.
And that's why I wrote the book.
And by the way, 100% of the book, like all of my previous books, all the money is donated to Feeding America.
Because while we're helping other people do well, I want to make sure that the people that are making a difference for those most in need are being taken care of.
And so we've set that goal.
I set the goal to feed a billion meals in 10 years.
We did it in eight.
Now I'm doing a 100 billion meal challenge because I'm working with Governor Beasley, who was the head of the World Food Program.
He won the Nobel Prize a few years ago because he called me up one day and he goes, Tony, I love what you're doing.
MBS, the head of UAE, introduced us and he said, you guys are both feeding the most people.
I said, I'm not doing like the UN.
And he said, but Tony, today, you know, normally there's about 80 million people that don't know where the next meal is going to come from in the world.
It's horrific.
He goes, but because of the experiences that have happened stacked between the Ukraine war, which is the breadbasket, and then the WF and not having access, they don't want you to use fertilizer.
Half the world's food comes from fertilizer.
And Russia is one of the biggest exporters of fertilizer.
The price of fertilizer is going through the roof.
People are starving in like 21 countries.
He goes, this year, there's 350 million people that can die if we don't do something and no one's talking about it.
So I thought about it for a while and I said,
how many meals would we need?
I said, we need to get the long-term solution, but short-term.
He goes, Tony, it'd probably be 60, 70 billion meals.
I said, why don't we do a 100 billion meal challenge?
I said, I was no billionaire when I started this.
So I was like, I did 100 million meals a year for eight years and pulled it off, a little more than 100 million.
There's got to be 99 other people, the 99 other people in the world would be willing to do it.
So we launched it at the Forbes Philanthropy event.
And on the spot, we got 6 billion meals committed, which is more than I've done in my lifetime, times six.
And now I'm proud to tell you we've got 60 billion.
And I'm working towards the 100 billion, which looked completely impossible when we started.
So it's like learning to think better and deliver it.
And at this stage of my life, I'm sure like you, it's like, you know, things are nice.
I'm privileged to have some nice things.
But that's never what's driven me is seeing a transformation happen.
And now, you know, it's like, okay, what really are your goals?
Like, okay, feed a billion people.
That's pretty exciting.
I started with two and then four and then eight.
I didn't start with a billion, right?
Now 100 billion.
It's like the game gets exciting.
I turn around and said, you know, I was in India and I saw all these kids dying of waterborne disease.
And it's like so simple.
So now we provide fresh water for a quarter of a million people a day.
I'm fortunate enough to have a
large private plane to take me around the world.
And I'm not unconscious about that.
So I looked up how much am I actually using in terms of carbon?
And it was the equivalent of 3,000 trees a year.
And it's like, I'm going to plant 100 million trees.
So I'm up to 71 million now.
But I'm not just planting them.
We're doing it in East Africa where people make $1.25 a day and have one crop.
And if it breaks, they got nothing.
And we built these forests around them.
We provide the water and the trees.
And now they have a different crop every month.
And they're making $12 a day, which sounds like nothing, but it makes them wealthy in that community.
And they don't try to cross the desert and die because they have no food and no, you know, no opportunity.
So it's like, you know, we both have, I know, a passion for helping kids that are trafficked.
I set a goal.
I grew up in a city of 30,000 people.
I I said, I want to free 30,000 girls and young people, and we're up to 35,000.
So now I'm going to make that quarter of a million as my goal over the next 15 years.
So it's like, that's it.
And now I decide I'm going to do a billion trees.
I'm going to get to 100 million quick.
So it's the game of life gets bigger and bigger.
And it gets so much more exciting than when it's about you.
Because there's only like so much that really makes you happy.
Experiences make you happy.
Relationships make you happy.
Things, yeah, you feel happier for a while and they're gone.
It's still appreciative of them.
But giving is is the thing that lights people the most.
And when you can give to people that don't even know who you are and then they can't thank you and I'm not looking for a thank you, there's no feeling on earth that's greater than that.
I mean, I meet a few of these people now and then from, whether it be because there were traffic or someone who had no food, and it's like, God really has blessed me to allow me to find a way to add enough value to other people's lives that I could do well for my family, but also have enough abundance to do that.
But I'll tell people the secret.
I hope your audience hears.
A friend of mine, Mike Keith, the guy I told you about, I've known for 45 years, he's on a plane, like, I don't know, six months ago, and he called me afterwards and he said, there was a guy there reading my, my, my book on health, my, my life force book, and he's sitting beside him.
And he goes, hey, what do you think of that book?
You know, because he's known me all these years.
He goes, oh my God, this is so incredible.
Stem cells and the breakthroughs and rejuvenation.
He goes on and on about he read, he read.
He goes, this is inspiring and exciting.
He goes, what do you think of the author?
He goes, that's Roy Robinson guy.
He's so brilliant.
And he goes, and you know, he donated all the profits in this book, you know, 100% of the profits.
And then he says, but, you know, he's rich.
So, you know, I guess it's easy.
And Mike, this big smile on his face, he said, what if I told you I've known him since he was 17, 16 and a half years old?
And I remember him at 17 with not enough money for his own food.
And he went out and giving money to people there that he had gone before he took care of himself.
Because that's the truth.
So I always tell people.
If you won't give a dime out of a dollar, you're not going to give 10 million out of 100 million.
It's not going to happen.
But if you do it when you're struggling, which is what I did, it teaches your brain there's more than enough and it gets you excited about something more than yourself.
And so for me, at this stage of life, that's what juices me the most.
My friendships, my family, and the sense of contribution.
And then I love my day job.
You know, I got all these companies, but my mission is still to empower people.
And I'm grateful I'll be able to help your son a little bit, help your family.
Because you help so many people.
So it's like, that makes me even happier.
Thank you.
Banana hands.
Thank you.
You got some strong hands yourself.
I keep thinking you'd lean into me, and I thought, you are the definition of the mark on the mirror.
Objects appear closer than they are.
It was awesome.
Thanks for the time.
I appreciate it.
Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.