Tony Robbins | All-In Live from Miami

0:00Our next guest needs no introduction. Tony Robbins. You have to figure that out. Like I always say, if you want to take the island to burn the boats, I got a chance to work with the President of the United States. I quit and he calls me one day. True story and says, Tony, they're going to impeach me in the morning. How many of you ever achieved the goal you worked your guts out for and then achieved it when it's this all there is? Horrific. Horrible. It's great to meet you. Thank you. You're a bigger and person. You're a big man. Compared to what? I'd normal human. You're large. You like to use your hands.

0:35There you go. You're a big guy. You're glad he just said his hand. You could have got really interesting. You're true. Maybe not if he was in the cold blood. You never know. Enough. When I told people you were coming, Yes. I got like a range of responses and your poor assistant chief of staff is in a total panic about all the questions I'm going to ask you. I don't care. Yes, I know you don't care. But I got the range of the infomercial guy he has had a profound impact on my life from very significant friends of mine who we know in common, who have been to your seminars. to he's kind of a guru's self -help.

1:22It's all kind of like snake oil. I want to know where this all started because my perception of you was the late night when I was growing up in the 80s, the infomercials. And then I looked into it and I started looking into the self -help space. You actually were inspired by a self -help guru who you went to work for in the, I think the late 70s. Yeah, Jim Ron. Yeah, Jim Ron. And you have been on this for a while and a lot of the techniques that you studied are very real They're these are real techniques in some shops in psychology and when I looked at them And I was looking at the history of it, you know you look at Ralph Waldo Emerson self -reliance Freud young NLP natural Neural linguistic programming and even Elron Hubbard who took it in a different direction a lot of these self -help things Are you getting to a question?

2:16I am. I am. I saw you that he spent two hours in Wikipedia and I'm a fool. I went down the rabbit hole. You are Tony Robbins. And why did you get addicted to all this self -help stuff? And then it's kind of been packaged in a couple of different ways in your life. So I'm curious, this sort of arc of how you got into this and then what you do for people now. Because my friend Mark Pinkis and then we have Benny off, a friend of the show, my friend Kevin Rose, these guys and then civilians. One of my wife's friends goes and runs over Coles with you in Hawaii and she's a makeup artist and she loves it and she can't share about it.

2:54So tell me how you got into self -help, how you package it and why you decided to be a coach and do these seminars instead of starting a cult or religion.

3:07I got unpacked that. Well people know me at different stages. I was on television in every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day for about 12 years, doing it for commercial days. And I hated it for commercials, but there was no real vehicle. You could get out to mass number of people other than writing a book. And most people don't read. So, but it started for me. I grew up in a pretty tough environment. I was born in downtown LA at four different fathers. I had a very powerful mom who I loved dearly since past. Beautiful soul. I created a lot of my success to her. But also when she drank alcohol and took prescription drugs, she was a different person.

3:39Very violent. I have a younger brother, younger sister. So I really became a practical psychologist in my youth learning how to manage her emotions in her states and how to really get things done and I think the probably the thing to change my life the most though is when I was 11 years old My fourth father and he got fired from his job and it was Thanksgiving We had no money and no food when I say no food. We had crackers and peanut butter But you know not a Thanksgiving dinner which kind of depressing and my parents were fighting and you know saying things You can never take back and it was trying to make my brother and sister not hear it and my life was changed because someone came to the door I opened a big guy two bags of groceries in his hand and an unfrozen turkey uncooked in a pan on the ground He obviously carried in a set down.

4:18He said is your father here, and I was like just one moment Yeah, and I thought it was gonna be the most joyous moment, but my father was angry because he felt humiliated He looked at it as charity and said we don't accept that long story short the man said I'm the delivery guy and my dad I've picked food and that they changed my life because my father left shortly thereafter and I really loved him He's the one adopted me and I carry his name. But it also, our life is determined, I think, by the meanings we give to things. You know, it's just the end of the beginning. Is this person dissing me?

4:48Are they coaching me? Are they loving on me? Whatever you decide controls your life. And I was fortunate enough at that point that I came up with a different meaning. We grew up in an environment. I thought was a wealthy community. It was very low in the middle class, at least. And we were on the other side of the railroad tracks and it looked like nobody cared. And nobody, my father kept saying, no one cares about anybody else. But this was new evidence for me. It was like, if a stranger doesn't even want credit, is delivering my family Thanksgiving dinner, then strangers do care. And I need to care about strangers.

5:16And so I promised myself that at 11 years old, at some day I'd do this back and feed at least two families. And then I grew up and I started studying patterns. I started seeing that everything is a pattern. All of you know, as you're an investor, if you're a great CEO, if you're a great dancer and musician, it's really because you recognize patterns. things are no longer chaos for you. You see what's going on. So you have the power of anticipation. And then the second skill I think I try to teach us all my kids and grandkids. I have five kids and five grandkids. I have a 50 -year -old daughter and thanks to COVID, a four -year -old daughter.

5:47And I'm thinking, what do I need them to know? The world is changing so fast. They have to be able to recognize patterns, step two, utilize them. That's where the power is. And if you do it long enough, you play someone else's music long enough. You know, some of you starts to come through and start to be a crater of patterns. That's when you come masterful. Those are the people we know and investing, you know, other names or in business or anything else. And so once I learned that, I realized there's nothing wrong with people. We just get caught up in patterns and we do so long we think they're us and it's hard to change you.

6:13Easy to change a pattern and I got really good at it. And so I changed my body, I changed my finances, people started coming to me and then gradually it became my full -time focus. And I began to have people calling me as I started producing results and I'd get these athletes that would call Xerina Williams and she's melting down and she can't go on the court because her sister just died and she's lost recently and she's, you know, she's got gun shy and I got her right now turn her around and there's no net. So fortunately I'll do that over and over again and built my career and brought me to a lot of sports teams and I own some of those sports teams pieces of them.

6:46And but then I also started looking okay, I started working with people that are depressed and suicidal and knock on wood. I don't know. Did any of you see 20 runs? I'm not your guru on Netflix anybody here. So if you haven't seen it, you can see, thank you. You see the work, but we follow up 10 years later. You see the people are still in great shape because we're rewiring the way the rain works. It's not a bunch of pump up. I do use energy because of that energy, nothing changes. But you can't just have energy, you need strategy. And so as I did that, I give you a perfect example on 31 years old in a career starting to soar and I got a chance to work with the president of the United States, Clinton, and he calls me one day, true story, and says, Tony, they're going to impeach me in the morning.

7:23What should I do? I'm 31 years old. The president asked me because I said, could you call me sooner? Tomorrow morning, but because there's no net, my brain figured it out. You have to figure it out. It's like, always say if you want to take the oven, you burn the boats. And then I got good at what do you tell me? What did you tell me? I can't tell you that. I have to. That's a private thing. I'll tell you what I know. I don't share unless somebody shares, but what I will tell you is I got good in studying businesses and that became an entrepreneur. and I have 114 companies and massively different industries, but we do about $9 billion, a little bit more in revenue.

8:00And I love the diversity. So I get to work with athletes, I get the team you were formerly on the ship and I have a little piece of Peter Goober's on my dearest friends, as you probably know. And so I've gotten to work with some of the greatest athletes in the world, some of the greatest musicians, some of the greatest entertainers, the greatest entrepreneurs. And I don't go there just to teach somebody who's kind of a little worm. Can I ask you a societal question for someone? Okay, so you've been in some ways diagnosing what ails people for let's say 40 years now. Yes. Every society has its own pothole and maybe teenagers and young people today suffer from a very different thing that maybe Jason, myself and Freiberg, get at our ages.

8:42Can you diagnose the level of happiness and sadness and satisfaction, dissatisfaction, that this current young generation has relative to other younger generations, and where it's different and where it's the same. I don't think I'm the only one who can see it. I think expectations, I always tell people, expectations are what make you really unhappy, and we can't not have any obviously, but trade your expectations for appreciation or life changes, but our expectations now are controlled more by social media, especially that generation, right? So they're seeing people that are incredibly wealthy and thinking that's who I should be and feeling like they don't have anything.

9:17I mean, what turned people in the Soviet Union against Soviet Union when they got access to seeing how the Westerners lived? Then things changed. When they didn't see it, it was okay. So today we compare ourselves to others in ways that are not real because like young girls that go on social media have seen all the studies I'm sure, they get depressed because they're comparing the images that aren't even real. Let's say. The expectations minus reality equals happiness. And what I really say is progress equals happiness. And like if you are growing, if you are going at something, even if you're not there yet and you are going to lose 50 pounds and you lose the first five or 10, or you're in a relationship and you find a face what has to be dealt with, or you face your finances.

9:53There's a momentum that happens in our liveliness. I mean, ask all of you here, and those of you in the room, how many of you ever achieved the goal you worked your guts out for and then achieved it when, is this all there is? Who's had this experience? I'm curious, right? That's our horrific moment, right? Or it's horrible. It's worse than failure because most of us simply fail, we get back up and figure it out, right? But try this on for size. How many of you achieved the goal that you worked your guts out for and you're really You're proud of it and you're your for it. Who's had one of those?

10:17I'll buy you, show me some noise out there if you give it to me. All right. So the question is how long did that good feeling last? Did it last six years? No. Or be it for you? Six months. Six minutes. 10 minutes, yeah. Six weeks? Yeah. Six minutes? Yeah. For most people, it's been six minutes and about six weeks, that's now. Yeah. And so why is that? Because we're meant to grow. In life, you grow or you die. All university on my loggers, you grow or you die. And when you grow, you have something to give. And unless you're giving something beyond yourself, if it's always a trade, you don't have any steam for yourself You don't have any inner pride, but when you have something to give, that's when life feels more meaningful Yeah, Jonathan Heights a book from years ago The happiness hypothesis.

10:58Yes, a great study in there on Economic progress being the best predictor of happiness. It wasn't the absolute dollars you were earning each year that's in a flat line after a certain baseline standard of living. Beyond that standard of living, once you're able to get food and housing and all the things you need to survive and thrive, what predicted happiness with how much things changed from your year to change? The rate of change. Well, he's absolutely right in our list today, but there are new studies that have had another dynamic. It's also affected by who is in your environment. And today, who's in your environment because the social media is not real.

11:31And so now we're in a place where people evaluate not by their circle of friends they hang out with that certainly plays a role. But even more so, and I've always told people, if you want to grow, get on the field of people 10 fold of where you are. And if you want to play tennis and get a tennis and you're fortunate enough to get sit down with somebody who's world class like a Sreena Williams, friend of mine, if you go out and do that, you know, you're terrible. But just get on the court with her, you've got to get great. If you play against somebody, you're better than, it's only a matter of time before your skills go down as well.

12:00So I think our society, people have an expectation today. I also, my original teacher, Jim Ron, a personal development speaker, more of a business philosopher. He, I went to one time when I was really young just beginning with him and I said, all my fathers are good humans. Why were we always broke? And I said, and I look at this, you know, billionaire hedge fund person, you know, and he made a billion dollars last year. And this school teacher only made, and go those days, like, $40 ,000. Ace of Tony, that's fair, but here's what I can suggest to you. We're all equalist souls, But we're not equal in the marketplace.

12:34And he said, if you go to McDonald's and you get a, you don't get a living wage, you're not supposed to. It's a first job. Anyone could do that job and learn it in an hour. But he said, if you find a way to add more value to people, because he said to me, can someone make twice as much money in the same time? I said, yeah, five times, 10, 100 times, he said, yeah. He said, the guy that made a billion dollars produced a 42 % return. Did you know that? Those are people's futures. That was people's college education. That was their retirements. He is worth it. You must become obsessed on doing more for others than anybody else does.

13:03And so that's been my moniker for all my companies and it's been the core. And I think that's what's missing to answer your question. A toning for the way it's like, what is it like going to give me versus a Kennedy days if don't ask what you're going to do? But how do you help a larger swath of society than unwind the addiction to SSRI's, the kind of doom loop, doom scrolling, like just the general malaise that then manifests in all these weird ways, the inability to talk to each other, the, you know, cut people off because they voted one way versus another. All this stuff just seems so. Because all of the social media, the mobile, the social, everything's not going away.

13:40It's here. It's permeated and it's not just going to disappear overnight. But if you study like the youngest generation as they've come forward, they're getting off of even, they've obviously got a Facebook long time, but their parents do that stuff, right? But they're not even Instagram. Now they're going to these individual places that are more intimate. They're wanting not everybody to know what they're doing. The pendulum throws itself so extreme and then we correct it. It's what we just experience politically. It's the same thing. So it's easy to rationalize that. But I'll tell you, Stanford came during the COVID time the period and they came because two of their professors had gone through my date with Destiny Seven.

14:15It's a five day total immersion where you rewire yourself to decide what you want. I don't tell you what your values are, how you live your life. And both of them had been on medication, both were clinically depressed and they came back and he said they have no symptoms. They're off all their medication. How does this happen? So we had this long conversation and he said, well, do you have some data? I said, well, I have millions of graduates, you know, stories, because no, I'm like scientific data. I said, no, but I'd be open to doing a study. So during COVID -19 - A walk to longitudinally follow the people that have - Yes, right.

14:43Yes. And so he took, but they put people in, they did their own study. Because I said, if we're going to do this, tell me what the standards, what are the meta studies show? Like, how many people get well through traditional approaches of drugs in therapy? You know, I don't know if you're aware of it. It's crazy. 60 % of the people who use drugs or therapies try and get out of the pressure and make zero improvements. 60%, 40 % improve, you shared with me, but the average improvement is 50%. Most trying drugs the rest of their life. And he goes, I said, you should be able to do that with a placebo.

15:09And he laughed and said, probably me. It's true in fact. And he said, yeah, sort of. And I said, well, I know it sounds like hubris or arrogance, but it's not. It's just done this so long. I said, we will destroy that. He said, what's the best study you've ever done? They said it was John Hopkins now, it's been about eight years ago. And they gave people psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and cognitive therapy for a month. And so if something had a change, that kind of biochemical shift, right? And it was the greatest, up until that point, the greatest result they've ever seen in psychiatry, that at the end of six weeks, 53 % of the people had no symptoms whatsoever depression, nothing like it in history.

15:44So I said, that's my target to be. And I said, again, right, it's on the arrogant, but I said, enough experience. Everyone bet we do it. You set up a study with all the comparison groups and you did and they ran the study. And I'm proud to tell you that the end of six weeks, 97 % of people had no symptoms whatsoever. 7 % had symptoms but they had less than massively. But 17 % had suicidal ideation coming in and coming out and none did. They followed up a year later. 72 % reduction in negative emotions, a year after I've not seen them, 51 % increase in positive emotions. So now we're doing on business.

16:15They had a one year study with 1500 people, they just finished it. And you know, in business, you know, EBITDA is engagement, right? The most engaged employees in companies are there and we've all seen that drop. If you're not familiar with it, we usually go three levels. You measure engagement, disengagement, which would be now we call it quiet quitting, and an active disengagement. That's hard quitting, whether in the company we're trying to harm it. The largest drop in history since COVID has happened on engagement and the largest increase in active disengagement. They put the group in, 750 of each group, test group, personal group, In four, excuse me, in five days, they found a month later the engagement levels were turned far above what they were pre -COVID, but more importantly, without any more interaction with me, because they changed their wiring over the next year and they followed them for the full year.

17:00They continue to increase their engagement. A lot of what you're doing is, and has its roots in what we call today CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, attribution theory, how you interpret, what people are saying to you. That's part of it, but you also need a pause. When you do have a reaction coming to you and just pausing for a second and then making sure you understand and checking the reality of that. These are techniques that you actually have in your programs. Yes they do, but if you also don't change the physiology of the person you're limited range, I'll give you an example. They sent a group and followed me for, I think three.

17:32I think maybe explaining the attribution there would be really good for the audience. Why that's so powerful? Well, I think if I may, just just a little bit of time, I think it's more important to understand physical change because your biochemical change is what lasts. If I asked you all where you were in 9 -11, no matter what country you're in, if you're not American, it was where they were. What they saw who was there, right? There's a biochemical change. I've asked you where in 8 -11, you don't have a clue. So what they did is they followed me and they saw what happened on my body on stage 12 hours a day for days in a row.

18:00They had me wear this huge device and they took my blood and they took my saliva for hormones every hour on the hour. And they'd also done this with Tom Brady. The group has also done this with the Tampa Bay Lightning who won multiple times. and what they found is what they call championship biochemistry. When Tom Brady's down by, you know, 10 points since the fourth quarter and he comes back to the way and how does that happen? His biochemistry has an explosion of testosterone, which makes you remember everything. That's why it retained. And it puts you in a place of total focus. But with testosterone, usually also have the stress hormone of cortisol.

18:35In Tom's body, he goes there, the cortisol drops off the cliff. It's unheard of. They call it a championship. And the same thing happens. Tampa, sending out was every time I get on stage, not sitting like this, but doing what we do. What's more important is they've been in the side to measure my audience and they did it first before COVID and then I started doing seminars digitally all around the world. We have 1 .3 million people for a four -day seminar. I usually did 15, 20 ,000 person stadiums for four days and now that's the size we able to go to and scale and we figure out how to make it work.

19:04Well, when they measured them in 15 different countries, it looks like it looks like music. They come in and we suddenly start to go up together and the same response, same fine of focus and the same cortisol drop. And that's why they believe it's lost. Same thing happens with engagement, right? It's a biochemical. So I do believe in all the elements of cognitive therapy in our linguistic program. There's so many. But without the unique thing that they saw I did and that's trying to explain how it lasted is the biochemical shift. So pairing CBT with this physical activity, this intensity, that is the secret.

19:36That makes total sense. Otherwise it will last. Right. You know, you can make it last by repetition, right? Like, you know, firming something. This is why when we go on a retreat and they organize these corny corporate retreats, it's not corny that they want to do a thrilling experience and go whitewater rafting to help people bond. Yes. Because people's lives are so sedentary that don't experience this. And that's why all you lunatics are jumping in ice cold bats every day. That's why you feel alive. Right. You have a very high, like, excitement level. Like you got to be an athlete. You have to jump in cold water to feel alive.

20:08I haven't done that 18 years and the last 10 or 12 years everybody does it now But yes, no, but it's also my biohacker have to be able to get up and do imagine I burn 11 ,500 calories on 11 ,300 calories on average in a day. I jump a thousand times. I'm gonna stay to him I'm not just standing there if you're standing there be bored out of your mind I engage or I'm running up the walls and they're with everybody. I could strike it any moment That's what keeps people fully alive. But when you do that I'm jumping a thousand times. I weigh 295 pounds every time you come down they explain it's four times your body weight so it's a million pounds You know of the pressure and I'm doing that I've been doing that since I was now basically 19 years old This is my 48th year doing it if you had been diagnosed by like the industrial Psychological psychiatry complex these days would they just have said you were like a kid with ADHD or something?

20:59What do you think I don't know what they come up with? I'm afraid as far as they're concerned where to put the scale. But you know what's nice now is I have virtually every psychological leader out of maybe a dozen of them have endorsed what we do. In fact now, therapists in various states in the United States can actually study my work, see the results, because there's very few places you can see an intervention and then follow up and see what the result was a year later, and they get credits for that. If you circle back to when Tom Cruise said, hey listen, you know, exercise, diet, meditation, and he kind of laid out there's other ways to deal with depression.

21:30and everybody would like, what does he know? These doctors know better. And now the doctors have all come back to his position, which is let's focus on your diet, let's focus on your exercise, let's focus on your sleep, and let's focus on your meditation. 100 % four things will do more to you than any pill, correct, than your estimation? 100%. Yeah, we have 60 % of people in the country on a pill. In some of these... And most of them have more than one. And each time you combine three pills, you cannot predict the outcome in your body. And what about Tony, then, the move away from SSRIs now to psychedelics and suicide.

22:00Like there's all of these, it's all these curals. Yes. Well, I'm sure you saw the cover of Newsweek a couple of years ago, it talked about, and the cover and it said, SSRIs don't work. They don't. They've been proven not to work by the meta studies, but we're still giving them millions of people. And the side effects are depression. Sometimes suicidal. It's insane. So looking for something else to rewire your brain is why people are starting to either mildly dose or heavily dose or go on these pieces. But the problem there, there's nothing wrong with anybody, I'm not approved about it, but I like the idea of being able to take charge and make conscious decisions.