Tony Robbins (02:38):
And so I do what you normally do, I couldn’t sleep, only an hour sleep. I reached out just as many people as I could. I found a Pulsed Electronic-Magnetic Frequency, PEMF, it’s a mouthful, but it took the pain from 9.9 to five so I could sleep, and it can help you heal bones and nerves, but it wasn’t enough. So I went to the doctors, I went to four different doctors, every single one, surgery, surgery, surgery. And I said, “Okay. Well, what’s the prognosis? Will I be able to do everything like usual?” And they said, “Well, it could re-tear even after the surgery, you may not be able to lift your shoulder above your arm.”

Tony Robbins (03:09):
“And what’s the recovery time?” “Well, four to six months of rehab.” And I was like, “Wow. You know what I do for a living. I can’t be walking a one-armed man going around with those people 10, 12 hours a day.” So I said, “There’s got to be a better solution.” And of course, I’d heard about stem cells like everybody else and I heard a mixture about it. A lot of the doctors, I asked them about it, “Oh, they don’t work at all.” And other people raved about them. So I called Peter Diamandis who’s one of my dear friends, and he is a rocket scientist, but also an MD from Harvard.

Tony Robbins (03:34):
And I said, “Listen, you know everybody in the tech business, you know people in the medical business. Who should I talk to?” And he said, “You should talk to Dr. Bob Hariri, who is now a partner and co-author in the book as well. I didn’t know at the time, it’s like saying, “You want to learn about basketball? Let me introduce my friend, LeBron James.” 38 years ago, he helped discover what are now stem cells by giving old rats young blood and vice versa and the old rats got younger and the young rats got older, and that led to really understand getting stem cells.

Tony Robbins (04:00):
And so he said, “Tony, listen, your stem cells, you don’t want to do local stem cells out of your own body because after 40, 45, they drop off the cliff. So you don’t want autologous, which means your own, you want to get allogeneic, which is just a fancy word for other people’s. But he said, “You want young, powerful stem cells to heal this. This is a severe injury.” And he said, “You can always go back to the surgery, but I would go do this.” And he said, “What you want is… ” I said, “Well, I don’t want fetal cells.” He goes, “No, you want four or five day old cells, which come in the cord or the placenta.” He said, “Because that’s what makes the baby, that’s the force of life, life force.”

Tony Robbins (04:32):
So he told me where to go. I went down, I had three days of treatment, just an IV and a shot each day. The first day, I just felt tired. The second day, I had a cytokine response. And fortunately, I knew what it was, so I didn’t panic. I was shaking and freezing for about 20 minutes. And then they said, “Listen, you’re fine. Sometimes when you have that extreme response, you get even greater healing. We’ll see.” I went to sleep. I left out a really important part of the story. The fourth doctor I went to not only told me about my shoulder, but he sat me down and said, “Life as you know it is over,” literally his exact words to me.

Tony Robbins (05:02):
And I was like, “What?” He said, “Let me show you your spine. You have extreme spinal stenosis.: I had extreme pain for 14 years before that. And he said, “Tony, this is not something you’re just going to get repaired. One good jump, one snowboard accident, one thing on the stage and literally you will not be able to walk again.” Somebody hits you in the stomach and you’re ready for it, no problem. I got to be honest with you, I was not ready for it and it took me down for a few hours.

Tony Robbins (05:25):
And then my brain kicked in and is like, “I’m not willing to settle for no life. There’s got to be the solution,” so stem cells were it. So on day two when I woke up, not only was my shoulder perfect, and I’ve had the MRI, obviously three weeks later, totally perfect, no surgery, no layoff for four to six months. But I stood up with no pain in my spine for the first time in 14 years. So that made me obsessed. And I said, “I want to know everything about stem cells.” And then I learned, William, that it isn’t just stem cells, there is an incredible set of breakthroughs in precision medicine that I have no idea about, most people have no idea about.

Tony Robbins (05:58):
And as a result of all the work I was doing, I was invited by the Vatican to come and speak, and believe it or not, the Pope every two years holds the largest conference in the world for regenerative medicine. Because it’s not fetal tissue, so he sees this as a gift from God. He wants all the greatest doctors, and I didn’t just do the clean up speech, I went for all three and a half days and I saw things I never thought would ever be possible 20 years in the future. I met an 11-year-old boy who had 6% chance to live at four and he got stem cells from his brand new sister and he’s alive today.

Tony Robbins (06:28):
I met people sent home to go to either a hospice or to die, who went and got CAR T-cell and are totally healthy today. And I don’t know if you saw, but in nature just this last week, it’s 10 years since Dr. June came up with CAR T-cell, these special cells that when people have tried everything else, have been turning people around. He never used the word cure, no cancer special stats. What they’re talking about is a cure now, because 10 years later, they still have these CAR T-cells in. I’ve met Jack Nicklaus there, the greatest golfer of all time.

Tony Robbins (06:56):
He was totally supposed to have spinal fusion, he couldn’t stand for more than 10 minutes without unbelievable pain. And spinal fusion doesn’t even work half the time, and so thank God he didn’t do it, he did stem cells. And today, he’s 82 years old, plays golf again, plays tennis. And so I was like, “The world needs to know this.” So I went Simon & Schuster and said, “You know I did with money where I interview the 50 best financial minds on earth, the Ray Dalios, the Carl Icahns, the Warren Buffetts.” I said, “I want to do this with regenerative medicine. I want to show things that people have no idea are available right now that mostly only billionaires or wealthy people know, but it’s not about expense, it’s just knowing what’s available and knowing what to ask for instead of being caught up in the normal standard of care.”

Tony Robbins (07:37):
And they said, “Great.” And then I to Peter and said, “Why don’t you join me and help me with this?” And then I went to Bob and said, “Why don’t you as well? You’re both MDs.” And so for the last, almost three years, I’ve been working on this project as you know, and it’s been a labor of love. And then now I’m donating 100% of the profits, as I did in my last three books, we’re going to feed 20 million more meals. I’ve been feeding 100 million people a year for the last seven years. We’re up to 850 million meals. I said I’d feed a billion people, so this will help. And then the balance of the profits are all going to Alzheimer’s cancer and heart disease research with some of the top doctors in the world. So I’m excited.

Tony Robbins (08:10):
But what we learned, William, was there are these breakthroughs, like I know you know about CRISPR, most people have heard of it, but these gene therapies and this gene editing is curing diseases that have never been cured before, sickle cell anemia, wiped out in a little girl who can’t breathe. Sickle cell anemia is brutal. Kids that can’t see getting gene therapy that can see again. Stem cells that are healing people that didn’t have the use of their arms or legs, not to mention healing simple things like arms and shoulders and things that you go through for injuries in a sports athlete or an elderly person in a matter of days instead of weeks or months or longer.

Tony Robbins (08:43):
There’s a new program that’s out. You know the FDA goes through three phases, but so your audience understands, phase one is safety, phase two is efficacy, phase three is efficacy at scale. And then if you make it through that, you get approved. What is a company that has a single injection? And if you have arthritis, osteoarthritis, one injection, it stimulates this thing called the Wnt pathway. It causes your body to make stem cells that are like new and it regrows your tendons in 11 months, no more arthritis, but more importantly, it’s from your epigenome, from the initial instructions.

Tony Robbins (09:17):
And what it does is you end up like 16-year-old tendons, even if you’re 40, 50, 60, or 70 years old. There’s a new test called a CCTA test that I got a phone call from my partners of life. I have a group of doctors I partnered with and I have a group of centers and one of them owns 12 hospitals. He’s selling them because he wanted to get into precision medicine instead of reactive medicine. And he called me up, and he’s a really understated guy, he doesn’t overstate anything. He says, “Tony, you got to come to the center, the greatest breakthrough in cardiology in the last 10 years, we’ve got first access to.” And I’m like, “What is it?”

Tony Robbins (09:49):
He said, “Well, heart disease is the number one killer of men and women.” He said, “If you look at a CT scan, the high resolution, the best, it’s very hard to read, lots of times, mistakes are made. They’re looking to see, you have those plaques and what’s the level of calcium?” You see, but they can’t really verify clearly what is calcified, which means it’s healed, versus what is still loose and could break off and become a widow maker, give you a stroke or give you a heart attack.” He said, “But there’s this new AI, and we’re the first ones to have access. It literally goes and opens all your arteries digitally, seeks out and says, what is calcified? What is not? Gives you a score. And it can predict a heart attack five years in advance and tell you what to do to prevent it.”

Tony Robbins (10:32):
So my father-in-law was with me, who was just turning 80, I love him to death. And he’s a guy that’s a self-made man, he had his own business, had a lumber business. But when you get 80, almost everybody around you starts saying, “Better arrange your affairs.” And I’ve watched the last two or three years, more fear, more uncertainty in him. So I said to him, I told him what it was. I said, “I’m going to go do this test.” And I said, “Why don’t you come with me? We’re both at a stage of life where we’re going to certainly have some of these liquid versions, the one that can break down. But they’ll show us where they are in our bodies and they’ll show us what to do.”

Tony Robbins (11:04):
So he agrees with me. We go do the test. William, it’s unbelievable. I’m better than I was five years ago, I’m in really great shape, but my father-in-law was perfect, he had nothing. He was clean as a whistle. And you talk about changing your mindset. And then we have this treatment that we’ve done for some of the greatest athletes in the world, I’ve had it done, where they now can just scan your body for wear connected tissue where you’ve had an injury. I have this ankle I toed years ago when I was on stage, and it was so bad, no matter what treatment I got, I finally gave up.

Tony Robbins (11:33):
If somebody came to give me a massage, I’d say, “Don’t touch it,” because the nerve would fire off and I’d feel like electro charges in my body like electrocuting me. And they go in and they scan it. They see where the problem is, they see where the nerve is. They put this fluid in like amnio fluid, like you were born with, it opens it and heals it, pops it in place, takes like 10 minutes. And you can smack my ankle, no problem. Well, my father-in-law’s had a real hip problem, that makes you feel old too when you can’t walk for squat and it’s painful. So after he gives his heart, we’re there.

Tony Robbins (12:01):
So they do his hip, took about 25 minutes, 30 minutes. He walks out perfectly, no pain, smooth. So we get on the plane, you’ll appreciate this, William, he’s sitting across me like this. And he goes, “Tony, these people talk about living 110, 120. I don’t know if I buy that. My heart’s perfect, I’m walking perfect. I could live another 20 years, I could live to 100 years old. You’ve only been married in my daughter 22 years, that’s like a whole another life.” You’ve seen the whole complete change in him. You’ve got people like the Harvard professor, Dr. Sinclair, one of the most famous longevity experts in the world. He’s 53 chronologically, but he’s 33 biologically.

Tony Robbins (12:40):
I’ve been doing what he taught me for about the last eight months. I’m 62 in a few days, a few weeks from now, I’m 51 in my body, and my goal is to get it down into the 40s. So we’re living at a time where you can do so simple things that costs you nothing, you can use technology and the price is dropping. Because the same technology that we used to use to make the price of anything, the power goes up as every 18 months by 100% and the price drops by 50, but we’re all code. So now billionaires are spending more money than time in history, they want to live forever. And scientists and technology are coming together and these things that sound like magic or science fiction are happening right now over the next 24 to 36 months.

Tony Robbins (13:21):
So I wrote this book to give people answers, because at least once a week, I get a phone call from somebody, or once every 10 days, somebody’s got cancer, somebody’s had Alzheimer’s in their family, somebody’s had a stroke. And I wanted to be able to bring them real answers, not just the standard of care. And the way I did it was I interviewed, just like I did Money: Master the Game, I interview 150 Nobel Laureates, scientists, some of the best doctors on earth in regenerative medicine, so we brought that forth. And then again, making it available to anybody so they can not only change their own life, but perhaps change or even save the life of someone they love.

William Green (13:53):
For me, one of the most valuable lessons in the book is that we should also really take advantage of these stunning advances in diagnostic technologies so you can detect problems early. And actually, thanks to you, I went to San Diego, I think, and had my CT scan done and a full body MRI and my genome sequence. Can you explain why it’s so important to diagnose problems earlier? I remember, for example, reading in the book that one study showed, I think an 89% chance of survival if you detect cancer early versus something like the 21% chance of survival if you detect it at a late stage.

Tony Robbins (14:28):
Yeah. You’re hitting the nail on the head. The Cancer Society did another recent study with 100,000 people and it came out with a fundamental precept, which is, if you find something at stage three or four, you have an 80% chance of dying. Now, I prefer the 20% chance of living and figuring that out, but that’s how they describe it. And it’s true, it’s just much harder. If you’re at stage one or two, you have an 80 to 99.9% chance of living in some cases, 100% chance of living. And so the idea is little… Now, the problem is, most people think, and I have to admit I was one of these people, “I don’t want to get in a medical system. What am I going to a physical for? They’re going to pat my knee, listen to my heart, look at my ears, make me cough like they did 80 years ago.”

Tony Robbins (15:07):
If health is the, I focus on health, but without knowing what’s going on, you can’t because we’re overly optimistic. And if you find something when it’s little, you can handle it so easily. So for example, the book is filled… It’s really an emotional book while you’re getting these tools, because we tell you the stories of these heroes that have created these gigantic breakthroughs, and almost all of them have one thing in common, they lost a wife or a husband or a child or someone close to them and something inside them snapped and said, “I’m not going to settle for standard of care.”

Tony Robbins (15:38):
And they spent the last 10 or 20 or 30 years coming up with answers that now you and I can use today because of them. And one of them around cancer, since that’s one that so many people have fear about. With cancer, there’s a new test besides MRI can do across the brain barrier. Like I said, the biggest problem with cancers is, we have mammograms, we have colonoscopies and people do them, but most of the cancers that kill you are the ones we have no tests for. Now, there’s a single blood test. This man lost his wife to cancer and you can do this test, and it gives you 50 different cancers in your body before there’s any. So amazing.

William Green (16:15):
This is Grail, is the company-

Tony Robbins (16:16):
What’s that?

William Green (16:16):
This is Grail-

Tony Robbins (16:16):
It’s called Grail.

William Green (16:17):
It’s an amazing test. And it’s probably going to be 1,000 bucks or something to catch early-

Tony Robbins (16:21):
Yeah. I think it’s going to be $650 soon. I think the price is already coming down. It’s brand new. But I’ll tell you what, to be able to know for sure where you stand is priceless. Well, I’ll give you an example. We had a guy that came to our Life Centers, that’s the name of the centers we have across the US and we’re opening one now in Abu Dhabi. We had a guy come in, his wife pushed him. He’d already done his physical and most physicals don’t go deep, but his doctor was good. He did blood tests on him, urinalysis, said, “I’m totally fine, but my wife’s requiring it.” So we pushed him.

Tony Robbins (16:47):
So we do his tests. And guess what we find out with the Grail test? He’s got bladder cancer, just the beginnings of it, thank God. So guess what? It’s an outpatient treatment, took 20 minutes. He’s got zero cancer and he is totally fine. Versus trying to catch it later by the time he finds the symptoms, and now you got a real challenge. The same thing with a CCTA test. I’ll tell you another one. You’re my friend, you know my life. Many years ago, at 53 or so, I’d be on stage and all of a sudden… I don’t have any notes. I go 12 hours a day, five days in a row. I’m here in the audience, I’m responding what’s happening.

Tony Robbins (17:20):
And suddenly, I know I felt exhausted, but I was like, “Why was I telling that story? Where was I going? I’ve never had that in my life?” I was like, “I’m 53, this can’t be dementia. What’s going on here?” And I didn’t know till I came back from London one day, flew in, got home early in the morning, went out to the jacuzzi. The sun was rising, got out of the jacuzzi and collapsed. And what happened is, I got up, they took to the hospital. I lost a third of my blood supply like that because I had mercury poisoning. Where did it come from? I was a vegan for 12 years.

Tony Robbins (17:51):
Then I went for the next 10 and just did… I wanted to eat something that gave me a little more protein, so I just went with only fish, but I was very disciplined. You know Me. So it’d be salad and fish, salad and fish, but it was swordfish and tuna. And there’s 75-year-old fish, they eat the younger fish and they absorb all of their mercury. We’ve polluted our ocean so badly. And I don’t methylate well, it’s a technical term of what your body does to break things down. They found out on a zero to five scale, I was 123. 5 could be really lethal. It was the most they’d ever met.

Tony Robbins (18:21):
They actually sent the health department here in Florida out to my house to investigate my staff, because they thought maybe my wife who you know well, William, who’s the most beautiful person you’ve ever imagined, they thought maybe she’s trying to kill me because I have a large life insurance policy, but obviously not. And they found out it was the fish. So I would say one out of three of my friends’ minimum or people I recommend go get a metals test, it’s super inexpensive, you find you might have cadmium, and you might have lead, you might have mercury. And you want to catch it when it’s small and it’s easy to get out because it’s taken me five year to get it out.

Tony Robbins (18:50):
I took it from about 123 down to like eight on a zero to five scale, but I’m still detoxing it. It doesn’t stop my memories now, I don’t have the energy problem, but it’s that important. Another one that’s simple is hormones. Most women know about hormone replacement therapy because of menopause. And there’s a lot of controversy. And in this book, I have an entire chap just on woman’s health, and I did not write it. I had three female doctors geniuses writing because I want it written from a woman’s perspective for a woman.

Tony Robbins (19:18):
But one of the things that happens is, we think about replacement therapy for menopause, but before you get to menopause, or even a man, we have biochemical changes. And usually, the time you go to your doctor and they’re going to recommend something, you have problems. But now they have hormone optimization therapy, which is small changes that make a radical change in your energy or health or strength. So we had like a man who came in, who was 53, I think 54 years old, and restless, brain fog, 36 pounds overweight, can’t lose weight, really tried, tried to work out. Wife complaining, no intimacy.

Tony Robbins (19:51):
And he’s mad and frustrated with everything. And he’s like, “I’ve already had my blood test. I’ve done everything else.” And here’s what happens, he’s at 225 on his testosterone. So you’re not in danger till you’re about 150, but most men need seven, eight, 900 to feel human. All we got to do is make this small change in his hormones and all of a sudden, an explosive change, he lost 36 pounds in about four months, found back his… No more brain fog, feels 10 years younger. Ignorance is not bliss, ignorance is pain, ignorance is lack of energy. Ignorance can mean death if we don’t know what we’re doing.

Tony Robbins (20:24):
And so some of these diagnostic tests are just priceless today. And like I said, you can even see how fast you’re aging today. Because your age and the rate of aging could be different, they could be aging faster than your age or slower than your age. And now, we’re learning things that can actually slow the process down and scientists believe they’re going to be actually reverse what we’re experiencing in aging.

William Green (20:45):
Another major theme of the book is that these simple lifestyle changes like exercise, good nutrition, intermittent fasting, and sleep are surprisingly transformative for your health, your energy, your quality of life. I think at one, point you write that exercise can actually reduce the risk of cancer by something like 45%-

Tony Robbins (21:02):
Yeah, 42%.

William Green (21:04):
… Type 2 diabetes by 50%, maybe. If we want to be fitter and healthier and more energized, what are a couple of the most effective things we can do now to upgrade these lifestyle choices?

Tony Robbins (21:16):
That’s great, because beyond technology, there’s these basic things that are huge. Let’s start with sleep because it’s the one I didn’t do. You know me pretty well. So I’ve been a four or five-hour sleeper, I’ll sleep when I die. My wife loves eight hour, like, “Come to bed.” And I was writing the sleep chapter on the research I did at 6:30 in the morning, having to be up in three hours, and I was like, “Something’s wrong with this picture?” But the man who changed my view of it was Dr. Walker. He’s the head of neurology there at UC Berkeley. He’s like the sleep guru of the world, or Google is the sleep guru, he’s just a genius.

Tony Robbins (21:45):
And he got my attention and he said, “Tony, I know everybody has varying needs.” He said, “I know you think you don’t need much, but let me give you a study done on 1.6 billion people.” I said, “There’s no such study. You couldn’t coordinate that.” He goes, “I didn’t need to.” He said, “70 countries have daylight savings time. And here’s what we’ve learned around the world. When we spring forward and lose an hour, just one hour of sleep for the next three days, no matter what country you go in, the average increase of heart attacks is 24% for those three days before the body catches up. When we fall back and get an extra hour, it drops an average heart attacks drop 21%.”

Tony Robbins (22:23):
He even correlates it to accidents because of people’s focus and so forth. So then he showed me that sleep four to five hours a night, usually have testosterone levels that are for someone 10 years older than they are. It’s like, “Okay, you got my full attention.” And then he showed me that for women, intimacy wise, he said, “Not everyone needs exactly eight hours, but for every hour less than what the body needs, they have about a 14% less desire to be intimate.” So women who’s missing two-hour sleep or three hour sleep is not going to feel any desire, and then their relationship doesn’t feel as connected and so forth.

Tony Robbins (22:55):
And the solutions are so simple. The body works on rhythms. One of the most powerful things is having a specific time to go to sleep and wake up consistently, it changes what the body can do, now a certainty. Another one is making sure that you reduce the temperature in the room between 65 and 67 degrees. At that temperature, you sleep at a deeper level. Some people do those little chill pads in the bed. Other people just do it with the temperature of the room.

William Green (23:19):
Yeah. Repeatedly, Amanda has convinced me to get one of those OOLER pads for my wife. I’ve never seen her sleep more in my life. It’s the most astonishing thing. It’s weird these little interventions actually can be transformative,

Tony Robbins (23:32):
And they change your life for the rest of your life. A third one, most people know you shouldn’t be looking at blue light, but of course, almost everybody does, it’s why people are up on their iPads and their iPhones. You can put on these simple glasses that make things have a red tone and so it doesn’t overstimulate the brain, so you can still watch or do whatever you want, but when you’re ready to sleep, the brain is ready to sleep also. So those are just a couple of the things that are there. When you talk about exercise, why don’t people exercise? Because most of them do it so extremely when they finally go to do it, that they’re in such pain that they stopped, it feels like a pain. Or they say, “I have no time.”

Tony Robbins (24:03):
What the science shows is, smaller amounts of exercise more consistently causes people to produce greater results. 10 minute exercise or 12 minutes, five days a week, even though it’ll be nice to do more, will create so much momentum you won’t get injured. Or I’ll give you an example, there’s a company I invested in because I was exposed to it years ago, it’s called OsteoStrong. And what they found is, for women, most women are really aware that bone density changes radically as you get into your 50s and beyond, and it can be extremely dangerous, it’s as bad as breast cancer in terms of the impact on women.

Tony Robbins (24:37):
Most men don’t know that your muscles are limited by your bone density. If you have stronger bone density, you can build stronger muscles. And so a lot of the Olympic athletes do this now, but they have this technique that causes you… I did this before they had these machines. I took a woman who was, I think she was 62, 63, gray-haired lady. I took her to Gold’s Gym when I first learned about this technique. And the technique then was, you find a way that you can’t lock out, but you don’t bring it down here. If a car was coming, you wouldn’t try and stop it here, you’d stop it out here, and then it uses all your muscles.

Tony Robbins (25:06):
So their whole thing is, how to use most muscles at once, but also stimulate them with the right form of stimulus. And you need a much stronger stimulus than most people get, but then you need rest. And they found this by doing a study on 35,000 bodybuilders, six, seven day a week guys going to the gym, almost all of them plateau. And out of the study, many things came, muscle confusion techniques, lots of them. But one of the things they learned was, when these people got sick or injured and they were off for 10 days or more and came back, they almost always did a personal best. So most of us overtrain.

Tony Robbins (25:38):
I take this woman to Gold’s Gym, I got a camera crew because I want to see this because I’ve been hearing about this. There’s a 25-year-old, roughly, guy, ponytail doing the leg press with bunch of weight. He’s sweating like crazy. He finishes his set and he’s going to do another set. And this lady says to him, “Excuse me, sir, while you’re resting, could I just jump in, do a quick set?” We’ve got a camera crew there, and this guy looks up like somebody’s punking him. She gets down and says, “Would you add 150 pounds?” Literally, I added 150 pounds above this 25-year-old kid.

Tony Robbins (26:05):
Because she’s not starting her legs back here, it’s out here, not locked. And it stimulates all of this at one time. So I went and did this. And my first time I used to bench press like 225, and my first time I could hold 450. But the problem was, I got up to like 595 and then one arm was strong in the other, and I torqued myself and got injured after I’d added about 22 pounds of muscle. So I stopped doing it, I said, “Some day.” I thought something do with air pressure. Someone will come up with some cute priced computerized systems. So now there’s centers, about 150 them around the world called OsteoStrong.

Tony Robbins (26:35):
The workout is 10 minutes, literally 10. You can wear your clothes, you might not even break a slight sweat, but you go in and you do these 15-second exercises on four devices. You’re done in less than 10 minutes. And it’s unbelievable. You don’t work out again for another week, sometimes 10 days. If you come back and don’t get stronger, you wait 10 days and you’ll get stronger the next time. Then there’s also the things that’ll get you worked out that like with VR now. A lot of people are like, “Workout’s boring.” And there’s these incredible workout that have been created now.

Tony Robbins (27:03):
I’m not a gamer, but I went and did one of these, I bought one because it’s so much fun, you don’t even realize you’re working out. But at the same time, you’re playing this game and you’re working yourself out. So physical exercise. But I’ll give you the simplest one. JAMA did a study, if a person walks on a treadmill or live one hour for a day, five days a week, reduce your chance of a heart attack by 52%. So there’s little things that you can do that can make these big differences.

William Green (27:31):
Most of the book is about optimizing your physical health, but the last two chapters, obviously, are about the power of the mind and how our mindset determines the quality of our lives. We’ve all obviously been through a lot during this pandemic period, whether it’s getting sick or financial challenges or fear and stress or losing people we love. And when I ask people on Twitter for questions they’d like me to ask you, someone called Misha Sharikov, who I’m going to send a signed copy of my book to thank them, said, “How do you deal with deep emotional adversity?” And I’m wondering if you could give us your perspective on how to take control of our minds so that when these extreme challenge challenges come up, whether it’s COVID or business challenges or health challenges, how do we actually deal with it so that they don’t wreck our lives?

Tony Robbins (28:12):
Well, one thing that we all have to remember, and I write about this in this book is that we all are going to experience extreme stress in our life. It’s the one common denominator. I don’t care if you’re a multi-billionaire, I don’t care if you are the greatest family, I don’t care. If you’ve tried to do everything right, something’s going to happen. Your house is going to burn down, somebody’s going to burglarize you, you’re going to lose a dear friend, someone’s going to tell you have a tumor. That doesn’t sound very positive. Why don’t you shut up Tony, don’t even talk about this, but it’s the truth.

Tony Robbins (28:36):
If it hasn’t happened, it’s going to, I’ve had all the above. But what I’ve learned over time is, when you push through extreme stress, some people just give up and collapse and go through emotional wasted place. If you can first take care of your body and mind, if you can feed your mind 20, 30 minutes a day, something you go after, because your mind’s focused on that, as opposed to what comes at you in your pocket with click bait, something that makes you stronger psychologically, emotionally, physically, that’s what you manufacture your life from. But then also, it’s what you do with your body, where you push, like the human system respond to challenge.

Tony Robbins (29:07):
The more we challenge, the more we grow. And so I do things every day, I have a set of daily regimens that push me to get stronger and stronger. Like I said, I’m going to be 62 years old, I’m doing things I couldn’t do when I was 27 years old, to give you an idea, faster, stronger, better, I can lift more weight, but it’s because we’re pushing. And when you do that, when you push through extreme stress, however you do it, three things happen. One, you discover how strong you really are, because we all underestimate ourselves. Two, you find out how your real friends and family are, because they’re the only ones that stick around when all hell’s breaking loose. And three, you build almost an immunity to all the stuff that used to stress you out.

Tony Robbins (29:44):
I have a friend that was in Vietnam and locked up by the North Koreans and is just like a crazy experience. Seven years locked up in a cell by himself on an angle, chained to the floor and he’d go to the bathroom so the acids would run down his back and burn his back. I remember seeing him one time, decade or two later, three year later when I became friends with him, his name’s Captain Coffee and I said, “Captain Coffee, I can’t believe you’re not stressed about what the IRS is doing.” He have this IRS agent who was out to get him for whatever reason, and he won the thing, but it took him four years of his life to get his money back and go through this. He goes, “Tony, after going through what I’ve been through, what heck do the IRS can do to us? It’s a different frame, but also you need to realize the power of your mind’s more than you realize.” So just a simple example, we all know about placebos.

Tony Robbins (30:27):
We discovered, I should say, in World War II, a doctor was treating people and they ran out of morphine. The nurse saved him. She created saline solution, gave it to him and initially said to him, “Here, you got more morphine. Now, you need morphine or these men going to see shock and their pain is extreme.” He believed it was morphine. So his physiology focused, he said, “Listen, you’ll be out of pain in literally a matter of seconds.” He injected them, nobody died, nobody went into shock, most of the people, their pain disappeared and they had nothing, but what we now call a placebo. So when he came back from the war at Harvard, he is the one that started his studies that now are the basis of most chemistry, which is we compare it to a placebo to an inner peace.

Tony Robbins (31:06):
What most people don’t talk about is a lot of times placebos are more powerful than the drugs, but no one’s going to tell you that because they don’t make billions of dollars selling a placebo. But here’s what we’ve also learned, the size of the intervention affects how strong your brain believes and how you send healing to your own body. So if I give you a small pill versus a big pill, statistically changes are radical. If I give you an injection, much more powerful than a pill in terms of the of change. They even do fake surgeries, placebo surgeries. The VA did a study, I put it in the book, they did arthroscopic surgery and they took a third of the people and didn’t do surgery. They just cut a little finger across their knees, sew it up, didn’t change the knee at all.

Tony Robbins (31:43):
And a year later, the people had not had surgery, but thought they had the surgery were the least amount of pain, the most amount of mobility, and they don’t even fund it anymore. It’s more than that. You can give somebody a drug that makes their body do something and your mind can overcome it. So Harvard did a study that gave people a barbiturates, which of course slow your body down, give them a big red pill and said, “This is an amphetamine that’s going to send you through the roof.” Every single person they tested went through the roof, and we can make ourselves sick by our brains. I interviewed Norman Cousins when I was 24 years old.

Tony Robbins (32:16):
If people don’t know, he’s kind of the father of psychoneuroimmunology, how our brains can change our immune systems. A deli disease, massively painful, did not want to do traditional approach, and so he decided he was going to laugh himself into health, which sounds absurd. They made fun of him at the time, he’s a genius of the man. And now there’s buildings with his name on it, he’s one of the fathers of psycho neurology, but he watched these and the pain disappeared, but also his immune system kicked in and was cured to the disease. He wrote a book called Anatomy of an Illness. I interviewed him when I was 24.

Tony Robbins (32:45):
He said, “Tony, it’s more than you think. Not only can make ourselves sick, we can make other people sick because it’s viral.” I said, “What do you mean it’s viral? He goes, “You know how if somebody yawns and you find yourself yawning, or somebody laughs, it’s not that funny, but they’re having a such a good time, you find yourself laughing?” He goes, “It happens with symptoms of disease.” He gave me an example, he said, “I was at this college football game and somebody got really sick, projectile vomit. And of course, the doctor and staff came to look at this man. He’s asking what happened, what was different, trying to figure out what the cause was, and the only thing that seemed different in his regimen was he’d gone to the venting machine and surely after this happened. So he thought the vending machine must have pollution in the cokes or in the soda.

Tony Robbins (33:22):
So he announced it because he wanted to be able to get sick over the loud speaker during the football game, he said, “Tony, it was like a movie.” He said, “People started projectile vomiting over the next five, 10, 15, 20 minutes all over.” He said it was like viral catching, and then literally 12 different ambulances came to take people to hospitals. This is how serious it was. And then an hour later, they did some tests and found it wasn’t the vending machine, they announced it, and suddenly everybody got well. I’ll give you the modern example of that, CDC, most people are worried about COVID obviously. COVID deaths are mostly had those who have comorbidities or someone who’s highly aged, but we now know the number one on risk factor other than age is obesity.

Tony Robbins (34:03):
79.8, call it 80% of the people have died of COVID were obese and has comorbidities that come with it. Something we could do something about, but I couldn’t believe, this is a CDC study, I put in the book because everything is documented, otherwise, you wouldn’t believe it. CDC says the number two risk factor of dying of COVID, anxiety and fear, because literally your fear can shut down your immune system. Your fear can change your heart rate. Your fear can change your oxygenation level. It changes it all. And yet, most of what we’ve done unfortunately, in our media is create more and more fear about this. These people aren’t bad people, they’re doing their job. They’re trying to enrich their shareholders by getting more eyeballs.

Tony Robbins (34:38):
And unfortunately, the news knows, we’re not here to inform you, we are here to startle you. Your child may die of drinking water, film at 11:00, everybody watches. So you got to take control of your own mind. And the three ways I talk about how to do that just real fast is your decisions control everything. But the most important decision is often made unconsciously. So one of those is, what are you going to focus on? Most people let their focus go wherever their phone, the people around them make it go. And whatever you focus on, you feel, even if it’s not true. If you’re worried about your kid and you think, “Oh my God, they could have done this and died.”

Tony Robbins (35:10):
While you’re thinking about it, you feel sick to your stomach. Later on, you find out they’re okay and you’re okay. Focus equals feeling, but there are patterns of focus. So one of the things I teach people in seminars is I’ll ask people, we all have patterns, where do you tend to focus more on what you have or what’s missing? I know you do both, but which more? Well, during COVID, there’s no question. And even with achievers, they tend to obsess about what’s missing. And what does that do? It doesn’t matter how smart you are, you cannot sustain happiness when you’re constantly focusing what’s missing.

Tony Robbins (35:41):
Second one, you tend to focus on what you can or cannot control. Well, there’s tons in life you can’t control, the things you can are the things you can influence. With COVID, it’s gone crazy, most people focus on what we can’t control. Do you focus more on the past, the present or the future? Well, a lot of people focus on the past, some the presence, some the future. But if you’re focused on the past, you can’t change or a future that you imagine that’s worse. I ask people all the time, I say in an audience of 15,000 people, I say, “How many of you know someone who takes antidepressant and yet they’re still depressed?” 80% of the people raise their hand. It’s possible.

Tony Robbins (36:14):
Well, you look at the side of the box and it says, create suicidal thoughts, that’s a clue, but all they’re doing is numbing the emotion, they haven’t dealt with a source of it. If you’re constantly focused on what’s missing, what you don’t have, what you can’t control and the past, you’re going to be pissed off, angry, sad, or depressed or some combination thereof. So changing those three patterns literally can change your whole life.

William Green (36:35):
You also have this very helpful technique that I’ve found myself using. Actually, I used it earlier today, you’ll be happy to hear, which is the 90 second rule. Can you explain how you use that?

Tony Robbins (36:44):
Yes. I’m glad to hear you did that William.

William Green (36:45):
Yeah, I did it because I got a message that you could only talk to me for 45 minutes. I was like, “I can’t believe that.”

Tony Robbins (36:49):
They just told me they pushed it back 10 minutes because I looked at the [crosstalk 00:36:52].

William Green (36:51):
That’s great news. Literally I thought there was a symmetry to the fact that you were annoying me and I was like, “I’m going to use his technique to calm myself down.” And the bloody thing works. So can you explain how it works please?

Tony Robbins (37:05):
The idea is this, most people are focused on, like we said, what they don’t have, what’s missing. Most of us, what’s wrong is always available, so it’s what’s right. But unfortunately for human beings, most of us think we’re going to be happy when someday, someone, something works out a certain way or if you’ll just behave the way I want, or if I’ll behave the way I want myself to behave. But humans have variability. I’ve got 105 companies. What are the chances right now somebody is screwing up out of the thousands employees on three continents? About 100% if my definition of screwing up is doing something different than I think they should.

Tony Robbins (37:39):
All I had to do is pick up my phone to be stressed out and I got to realize my happiness is pretty cheap. Good news, bad news, you’re in-between it all. And one day I met this friend of mine in India and he taught me this simple principle, he said, “My spiritual vision is to live a life where what you talk about Tony, living in a beautiful or peak state,” is what I called. He goes, “I call it a beautiful state. What you call a peak state is a high energy state, love, joy, determination, loyalty, commitment, appreciation, drive. These are all high energy states and when you’re in them, you do the right thing.

Tony Robbins (38:08):
And then there are states, he called suffering, I didn’t like this because I didn’t think I suffered, I’m not a sufferer. But he said, “You talk about lousy states. And when people get in those low energy states, frustration, anger, sadness, worry, envy, overwhelm, we do the wrong things.” And he said, “I just started thinking, what if, it didn’t matter what happened in my life, externally, I prefer it to be a certain way, but my view was, I’m going to live in a beautiful state, some of these high energy states, it doesn’t mean you’re happy every moment, it might be driven, I might be hungry, it might be you’re appreciative, it might be grateful, it might be fun, it might be love. So it’s not just, I’m happy all the time because that’s BS, you’re not all the time, the meaningful it could be.”

Tony Robbins (38:47):
He said, “I’m going to live in that most of the time in my life. I’m committed to live that state.” And I was like, “I love that, I’m going to steal that.” He goes, “I stole all your stuff, you can steal it too.” I said, “But I would change the language for me at least, I would say, life is too short to suffer. And there’s always things you can’t control, there’s always things you wouldn’t prefer, but we make them life and death instead of it’s my preference.” And that’s why relationships get messed up and everything else. So in the book, I describe this process of how to identify what triggers you and how to extract it from yourself. But eventually, you start to create what you describe, which is the 90 second rule.

Tony Robbins (39:18):
And it’s like a gain, it’s like, you can get out of suffering, anger, frustration, sadness, whatever in a second with a perceptual shift. And the number one perceptual shift is appreciation or it could be gratitude or it could be love, but the minute you appreciate something, the suffering is gone. Suffering doesn’t come from the facts, suffering comes from your perception of the facts. So if you said to me, “I’m so upset my mother died.” Well, if that happened in the last two, three, four weeks, it’s understandable. If it was a year ago, you’re not suffering because of your mother, you’re suffering because your mother shouldn’t have died in your perception.

Tony Robbins (39:52):
And you can tell me all day long what your perception is and you keep suffering or you can shift it. And so you learn to value your happiness more than anything else because happiness is a power. All the studies show, and I know you’ve seen, William, because we’ve worked together on the financial side as well, I don’t care how much money you have. If you’re not fulfilled, if you’re not happy, happy people live longer, happy have longer relationships, happy people are healthier. It is a power. But in our culture, we poo poo happiness to show how sophisticated we are, but we don’t get sucked into feeling good about things and so forth. That’s idiotic, that’s stupid, that’s ignorant.

Tony Robbins (40:23):
And I try to tell people, ignorance is not bliss, ignorance is pain, ignorance is poverty, ignorance can be death because you’re ignorant to the things that could be changing your healthier vitality. That’s really what we’re really talking about the 90 second rule. And I give people different techniques to break the pattern and I’m glad you used it today. That’s awesome.

William Green (40:41):
Yeah, it was weirdly helpful, I have to admit. I encourage people to read that part of the book, it actually works. To talk a bit more about this issue of money and happiness, in the final chapter of Life Force you write, “When I interviewed more than 50 of the most successful billionaire Titans, a finance for my book, Money: Master The Game, there were only a handful that appeared to be truly consistently happy. And I don’t mean fake happy, I mean living in a state of gratitude, appreciation and able to find meaning and problems and challenges.” And I wondered if you could talk a bit more about this issue of money because you grew up in a poor family.

William Green (41:12):
There were times where your mom and your fathers couldn’t afford food or clothes, you really had difficulties. Now, I think it’s fair to say you have hundreds of millions of dollars and your own beautiful houses and you fly on a private plane. And so you’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum. And a lot of people listening to this podcast I think share my fairytale, illusion that if I become super rich, it’s going to solve a lot of my problems. And I wondered if you could talk a bit about what the money does give you and what it doesn’t give you having experienced both ends of the spectrum.

Tony Robbins (41:42):
That’s interesting because I can tell you not only from my own experience, but now I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most successful financial people on the face of the earth, and that’s why I alluded to that. When people hear that, well, these people, not many of them are really happy when people say to me, “See, that money doesn’t make you happy,” money doesn’t make you anything, it magnifies who you are. If you’re mean, you have more to be mean with, if you’re more giving, you have more to give. And so it’s an illusion. When I was growing up, I had four different fathers, we had no money for food and it’s why I provide 100 million meals a year, these billion meals that I’m doing right now with Feeding America.

Tony Robbins (42:12):
And what I learned I thought was, oh, every father couldn’t provide, my mother talked about it, they always argued about money, and it was all true. All those arguments happened, but if they didn’t have the money argument, I learned very clearly over the years, they would’ve argued about something else. Money can certainly create that feeling of scarcity, and anger, and fear, and resentment of those who think have more and they were lucky or something, but the person who changed my life was my original mentor, Jim Rome and he really taught me something interesting.

Tony Robbins (42:37):
First, I’ve learned later in life, you just got to put happiness first. If you don’t put happiness first, how many people have you seen who are incredibly wealthy who’ve taken their life just in the last few years alone? You can think of fashion designers who just did this, you can think of a great guy from CNN, the food expert that we all knew, Anthony Bourdain, you can look at some great comedians that have taken their life who had more money than they could possibly spend. You don’t need a lot of homework to see money doesn’t make you happy. But what does make you happy I found is having a meaningful life.

Tony Robbins (43:07):
And a meaningful life doesn’t mean you’re happy every moment, it just means you have a sense that you’re growing and you’re giving. There’s only two rules in the universe that seem immutable to me, they’re not my rules, they just look around everything. Universe grows or it dies, and everything universe contributes to, it’s eventually eliminated by evolution. And so if you look at people that are happy and say, what makes people happy? The answer is progress. Progress equals happiness. A lot of people achieve a goal they work so hard for and then they go, “Is this all there is?” That’s horrible. That’s worse than failing because most of us when we fail, we pick ourselves up and go for it again, but if you’ve succeeded and you’re unhappy, you’re screwed basically.

Tony Robbins (43:44):
But there’s the other side. There’s the times when you worked your tail off and you’re enthralled, it isn’t like, is this all there is, you’re enthrall for how long? How long do you stay happy when this a magnificent thing happens for a year? Nine months? Six months? Three months? Three weeks? Three hours? Three days?” Three minutes. Most people are somewhere between three hours and three months max. And the reason I believe is you can’t sit at the table of success too long or you get fat and tired, and exhausted, and bored. We’re meant to grow. When we no longer grow, we pretty much disappear.

Tony Robbins (44:18):
Man, there’s a statistic in life insurance that’s well known, stupid for women, men after they retire, die on average within five years. Women don’t retire because kids, they think about everybody, taking care of everybody, doing all those things, they have multiple errands. Now, if you retired and took on a new project, that really matters, that’s a different thing. We are meant to have a meaningful life, which means we got to make progress. If you’re not to your goal yet, but you just started losing weight or you’re helping people take control of their finances here, you start to put a plan together, you start to make progress, you’re going to get excited.

Tony Robbins (44:49):
Getting there is not what you think it is. I remember I was on stage at the Continental Center in New York, I was 39 years old and I’d worked for my entire life 20 hour days. And I’d done very well by most people’s standards, but now I had a public company when public while I was on stage, and I was doing what I love most 15,000 people. And when you really give your all, people are incredibly generous and it’s this virtuous circle, I’m pouring into them, they’re pouring me. It’s just pure love and joy and happiness. One of the best time, enjoying a stretch. Someone came and whispered my year, one of the company got public and my stock was worth $400 million, and I was 39 years old.

Tony Robbins (45:23):
And that’s beyond my other assets. And I was like, “That’s incredible. That’s extraordinary.” And then I went right back to what I was doing and I had the time of my life. And then I went home that night, it’s a true story, and I felt depressed and I never felt depressed. And the reason was the guy on stage, if you meet me on stage, I’m the same guy on the street, but I was in a relationship with a woman where in the beginning, she loved that I made things happen, I took charge, made it happen. But sometimes you had a relationship with somebody who loved that initially because it’s a part of yourself you’ve not developed. That’s why you’re attracted.

Tony Robbins (45:56):
And if you stick with them long enough and you don’t grow, you’ll be pissed at them. And so I tried to adapt. I was such a pleaser at that stage in my life, and I’d get quiet, do these things and I wouldn’t be myself. And I remember, I’m old enough, you might be William to remember, VH1 used to have this story show called Behind the Music, and it was always a band. They tell their story, they get to the peak of success and then somebody drug overdose, so they get a car accident. It was the same story every time. And I remember saying to myself that day, “I’m not going to be a VH1 story.”

Tony Robbins (46:24):
And so I made this change in my life and my relationship side, and the money went up, and by the way, it was 1999. So you can imagine what happened in 2000 with a crash. Most of it went away, but I became somebody better. If I’d had all that money at that stage, I don’t know if I would’ve developed the same levels I did. Now, I’m actually much further than I was back then, but I had another 20 years of development that I’ve done and I did it for different reasons. I didn’t do it for the economics, I did it because it’s meaningful. And I think that’s what people need if they want to have an extraordinary life.

William Green (46:57):
It seems like for you the key is always a matter of sharing and service. I remember, I hope I’m not speaking out of school here, but I once asked you what you said to yourself as you got on a stage with 12, 15, 20,000 people? And you said to me, “Lord use me.” And I know you’re a spiritual guy. I think that’s something people don’t really know about you is the degree to which you are trying to be a force for something good, whether you’re regarded as grace or God, or the universe, or mother nature, or whatever. Can you talk about that because I think it’s so central actually to having a happy and meaningful life? So I’m not saying this in a proselytizing way, but actually, I think it’s a really essential part of happiness and fulfillment.

Tony Robbins (47:34):
I think you need daily rituals that bring you back to the fact that there’s something greater than yourself and also connect you to serving. The word hero comes in Latin from servus which means servant. Some people think hero means, I beat on my chest, look who I am. And to me, that’s insane because you know the people that do that, no one can stand them. We can pick some political figures, but we won’t mention names or anything else. And people just are turned off by it. More importantly, the quality of your life’s, the quality of your relationships. And relationships come from only one thing really, truly caring about another person. And I care about strangers. I know it sounds absurd, but I think you know me well enough to know it’s true.

Tony Robbins (48:10):
And so I got to a point in my life where I’m serving, serving, I’m loving, I wouldn’t stop, but I didn’t need any other economics. It’s like, I’m not obsessed, like you said, I’m privileged to have planes, an island and all these things, but you can take all that stuff away. It doesn’t change who I become as a man, that’s what I own. All the other stuff can go away. And a big part of who I become as man is like… I remember when I was getting ready to do Money: Master the Game. And I was interviewing all these billionaires, like I said and I’m looking around and seeing all these people suffering and I was just like, “This is wrong. I can’t do everything, but I can do something.”

Tony Robbins (48:42):
And that started me with big goals in terms of contribution philanthropy. Now, if you won’t give a dime out of a dollar, I’m going to tell you right now, in my earliest stages, I know you know the story, I wrote about in the book, financial book, I had $26 to my name and I gave all of it away after having a $6 meal one time. Well, I won’t bore you with a story, but it changed my life because I had no money for food, no money for anything, but I was free because I got out of scarcity. But if you don’t give a dime out of a dollar, I can promise you, you’re not going to give 10 million out of 100 or 100 million out of a billion, never in a trillion years. I hear people all the time say, “Well, it’s great people like you do that. When I’m rich, I’ll do it too.”

Tony Robbins (49:15):
But I started getting not just economics about philanthropy, it was like, I went to India and I saw these children dying of waterborne disease and I was like, “I got to do something. This is not that hard to solve. So now I provide a quarter million people a day with fresh water. I’m trying to move it up to a million people a day to the resources of the people that I have there. I own a plane, so I’m not an idiot, I know this has a carbon footprint. So I found out my carbon footprint is 3,000 trees. So I was like, “I didn’t just buy 10 years with of carbon credits by putting the money down to grow more trees down in the South America, but I also said, “I’m going to plant 100 million trees. I’m at 71 million right now.

Tony Robbins (49:50):
If you look around and hunger is the biggest challenge. I’m going to buy a billion meals. And now I’ve got a Billion Meal Challenge for Sustainability I’m doing with the XPRIZE, and I’ve got heads of the UAE to be my partners on. So it’s like we have a 20 million prize to figure out how to solve this on a world level. So when you start having those goals, then the reason I do my business, and I’ve done them well, I love the challenge, I love making things that are extraordinary, but what I love most is seeing the impact from people’s lives and then seeing how I can utilize those resources to do things that can shift the quality of life for people I don’t even know.

Tony Robbins (50:20):
And there’s been studies and I wrote about it in Money: Master the Game, where now they can study, they can see the hormones triggering you just from your saliva. But you’re at Starbucks and you’re not rich and you just decide, “I’m going to buy the next five people or 10 people their coffee,” you don’t know who they’re, the high that you will get from that, you can find five, six, seven hours later in most people. And you going and getting some toy for yourself is great, it’s nice, but things don’t give sustainable fulfillment. What give sustainable fulfillment for people is growth and giving. If you’re growing and giving you’re going to have that fulfillment. So it’s not that I’m such a good guy, it’s just I discovered what life’s about.

Tony Robbins (50:58):
And early in my life, fortunately, I was wired with a high level of empathy and it made me care about strangers. And now that gift just gives me a gift because if I died tomorrow, I’ve had the greatest family, I’m not playing I die tomorrow, I’ve had the greatest life. I’ve been blessed beyond compare. I’ve worked my ass off to do it beyond what most people would dream of. I’ve had the rewards that go beyond money or beyond fame or fortune. I have the reward that every man and woman deserves. It’s the one you earn with yourself because you know, regardless of what other people know, who you’ve become, you know where you started, you know where you are. And self-esteem, I hate the term, it’s overused, but esteem for yourself does not come because everybody tells you you’re great.

Tony Robbins (51:36):
You can hear that a million times and think you’re not great. You can be told by everybody you’re an idiot and you go, “I’ll show you. I’m going to show you who the hell I am.” It has nothing to do with people say, it’s do you face challenges regularly and find a way to overcome? That’s what’s going to raise your own sense of identity. That’s what’s going to give you inner pride, not ego pride. I’m talking about a pride that you deserve because you’ve earned it. I think every man and woman deserves that.

William Green (52:01):
I want to ask you one final question since we have an investment audience here, you spent so much time with friends of yours, like Paul Tudor Jones is multi-billionaire, Ray Dalio, multi-billionaire, incredibly successful people. You write here about people like Martine Rothblatt, some of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs you’ve come across. If we are trying to replicate these people, model these people and think, “Okay, what can I learn that these people have in common?” What have you learned from hanging out with these absolutely extraordinary people that can help us on our own journey?

Tony Robbins (52:27):
I can tell you because early on, people asked I was the burning question as I met these people earlier in my career and then I just saw the pattern over and over again. What sets them apart? Hunger. I love crazily, intelligent people, wickedly, intelligent people, but I know a lot of them can’t fight their way out of a paper bag. It’s hunger that separates people, the hunger to grow, the hunger to give, the hunger to master, the hunger to go to another level. If you look at somebody like Marc Benioff at Salesforce or Ray Dalio who’s unbelievable human being or you look over at Sir Richard Branson.

Tony Robbins (53:00):
Richard Branson is as driven today as when he was 16 in that Crip starting virgin in the cemetery and he is in his late 60s. That hunger to be more, do more, give more, share more and not settle is the factor, because it’ll get you to maximize everything else. But from a practical perspective also, it’s the capacity to do three things. Pattern recognition, anyone who’s extraordinary in investing in business, in music, in entertainment, in parenting, in health, I am obsessed with finding patterns. Humanity changed from survival, hunter gatherers, to communities when we figured out one pattern, the pattern of seasons.

Tony Robbins (53:39):
So we knew if we plant in the winter, it doesn’t matter how you’re working, you’re going to get nothing. But if we plant in the spring, protect in the summer, reap in the fall, hang on to some for the winter, we got to build community, cities, states, and the world. That changed humanity. So pattern recognition, the best or good at pattern recognition in their area raise unbelievable with this, $168 billion, I think is what he has right now. I was doing my first interview with him years ago and the prime minister of China calls for some coaching, he goes, “Do you mind if I take this?” “It’s quite fine, go ahead.” It’s just amazing. But the second skill is pattern utilization. Some people recognize a pattern, so it’s not chaos anymore, but they don’t know what to do. You got to know how to use a pattern.

Tony Robbins (54:19):
And the real masters, William, and you know them as well as I do and you’ve done this in your life in some areas as well as I have, you learn other people’s patterns to play the piano, and then after enough time, something magical happens. You don’t just know them and use them, you’re able to start creating your own patterns because you have so many reference points. And pattern creation is what Ray Dalio is, not just recognition and utilization, that’s what Marc Benioff is, that’s what Serena Williams is, that’s what Tom Brady is. The greatest of all time and I have the privilege of working with some of the greatest GOATs, the greatest of all-time athletes, for example, they all are unbelievable pattern recognition creation and utilization, and I should say in creation, but what sets them apart and why they do it fully, hunger.

William Green (55:03):
That’s great. Thank you so much, Tony. You’ve been a great force for good in my own life. And I really want to thank you from that bottom of my heart. Thank you.

Tony Robbins (55:10):
As you’ve been for me, William. You understate your value to me too. I send you all my love and appreciation.

William Green (55:16):
Thank you so much. All right. Lots of love. And I hope our audience has enjoyed the conversation as much as I have. Take care.

Tony Robbins (55:21):
And you got your hour, and I got to go.

William Green (55:23):
It’s magnificent. I won in the end.

Tony Robbins (55:25):
Talk to you soon.

William Green (55:26):
All right. Take care.

Tony Robbins (55:26):
Take care, brother.

William Green (55:27):
Take care. Cheers.

William Green (55:29):
All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me and Tony Robbins today. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If you’d like to learn more from Tony about how to optimize your health and happiness, check out his new book, Life Force. It’s one of those rare books that will not only improve your life, but might actually save your life. And if you’re curious about the 90 second rule that Tony and I discussed, you can learn more about that in the final chapter of Life Force, which is all about how to live in what Tony calls a beautiful state. If you want to learn more about Ray Dalio who manages the world’s largest hedge fund, check out episode 410 of We Study Billionaires in which Dalio spoke with me in-depth about how to invest in today’s changing economic environment.

William Green (56:04):
You can also connect with me on Twitter @williamgreen72. Thanks to everyone who wrote to me on Twitter to suggest questions for me to ask Tony Robbins. I ended up asking him a question that came from Misha Sharikov. As a way of saying thanks, I’m sending Misha a signed copy of my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, which is based on hundreds of hours of interviews that I’ve done with many of the world’s greatest investors. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to being back with you again soon. Take care.

Outro (56:29):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.