Tony Robbins helps us master the MONEY game with value bombs galore!

What's Shake and Fire Nation? Johnny Doom is here and I am fired up to bring you our featured guest today, Tony Robbins. Tony, are you prepared to ignite?

Mr. Robbins has empowered more than fifty million people from a hundred countries through his audio, video and live training programs and has created the number one personal and professional development program of all time and more than four million people have attended his live seminars. Tony, I mentioned this in the pre interview chat, but your son Jarek, he rocked Fire Nation just a few weeks ago and the Robins Bar set high. So are you ready to match his fire?

but to support people in need as all profits of the book are donated to Feeding America to provide meals to those facing hunger. And with the launch of the hard copy, Tony was able to provide a hundred and one million meals, Fire Nation, think about that. And his goal is to do more this year with your help, Fire Nation. So grab your free copy by going to MoneymastertheGame dot com. Now, Tony, I want to chat with Fire Nation about this book because I read it.

Huge book, but I have a beautiful balcony here and and the sun was shining and I just ripped through it. So can you talk to Fire Nation who are entrepreneurs, who are looking to take their business and life to the next level? Why is this book for them?

And that is really creating a money machine outside of your core business. It's just intelligent. All of us know that the most basic financial advice is don't put all your eggs in one basket. Diversification is everything. It's the only thing that's It's only free lunch and there is in the financial world. But most of us, by our nature, put all of our money, our time, our resources into our business, which is great because it's an area you have the most influence or control.

But there are things that happen that are outside your control. None of us want to talk about government can change the rules. Things can shift radically in terms of the way consumers evaluate things. You know, the economy can take a gigantic shift. And so everybody should have an income for life that's separate from their business.

You know, uh Ken Blanchard's a dear friend of mine and I met him almost thirty plus years ago. I helped him with his golf game, take six strokes off his golf game, and I didn't play golf, so it made us buddies, and then he said, I want to give you the best financial advice of my life. I said, I'm all ears. He said when I was first coming out with my book

A friend of mine, who's a very wealthy man, said, you need to make sure that you understand that a business will always eat whatever capital is available. And he said, so you have to set some money aside that is separate from your business.

that's only for you and that you don't even touch it. It just grows and creates financial freedom. And he said, I would Ken, if I were you, I'd take your book and your company will benefit from the book, from the people that become interested in your services. But the profits of that book should go into a separate account. And Ken told me that that's what saved him during the tough times in his business. I took his advice. I did that with my infomercial business and I did that with my book.

And quite frankly, those two things made me wealthy by themselves, so that, you know, that didn't matter what happened to my business. And there were several times early in my company where it looked like we were looking at very steep situations where it was like people thought we might go bankrupt. We didn't. but what kept me from being stressed was I built this tremendous amount of compounded wealth over the years in this separate category. So I think every entrepreneur

and must create for themselves a separate way of having an income for life because when you're investing, you're not investing for assets. Assets can drop forty, fifty percent overnight, whether it be, you know, look at oil is down seventy percent over the last two years.

You know, stocks in two thousand, two thousand eight were down fifty percent and that happens in a common way. We've seen real estate drop thirty to sixty percent depending upon where the market was in two thousand eight, two thousand nine.

So assets change. What you want is income for life. Income is what gives you freedom. Income is what allows you to do what you want, when you want, where you want, with whomever you want, to give as much as you want, to experience what you want, that's what's available. You can't have that if All your eggs are in one basket. So that's why this is an area worth mastering. And then once you master it, it doesn't take a lot of time to be able to stay on target.

things change, the economic climate changes, et cetera. And that phrase, a growing business will always eat all available capital, I think is actually a great segue for more than one reasons to Your hundred and one million meals that you donated last year and you're looking to even go more than that, I mean

You're doing great things with this book and I wanna get more into the details on that in a second, but why did you choose this philanthropy outlet to go down when you had really anything that you could have chosen?

But he took the food because the man kind of confronted him and said, Don't let your family suffer. Somebody just knows you need some help. But my dad left our family shortly thereafter. I thought it was the worst experience of my life, turned out to be the best. 'Cause it gave me such incredible drive. I said I was gonna do this for others. So when I was seventeen, I've had two families and next year four and then eight.

And I just kept doubling it, got my small company involved in those days. And then eventually I got to a hundred thousand, then a million of people a year, then two million a year through my foundation. Then I started matching those two million with my own two million. So we fed four million people a year for about twelve years.

And then while I was writing this book over these four years, I'm interviewing all these self made billionaires and I'm watching Congress has wiped out food stamps by eight billion dollars. You know, they call it the SNAP program now. But basically it's food stamps and what it is is every family that's supported would have to give up a meal for their entire family every day for a week out of every month, twelve months out of the year.

to match what they cut, and they're expecting the private sector to pick it up. And I you know I've been feeding peep millions of people for years, and I know the private sector is already stretched.

So I thought, you know what, I went to Feeding America'cause they've been a great partner for me. They're the most efficient, you know, food relief organization. You have to understand there's forty nine million people in the richest country in the world that don't know where their next meal's gonna come from, and seventeen million of those are children.

So I went to them and I said, look, I got a five million dollar advance for this book. If I gave you all five million, how many people could you feed? And they told me and then I got more excited and I wrote a much bigger check above the book. And so we fed 102 million people last year, we're gonna feed a hundred million this year, and I've laid out a plan to feed a billion people over the next ten years.

But you know, it's not my only philanthropy. I I provide fresh water in India for a hundred thousand people a day. I'm gonna reach that out to a quarter of a million this year and eventually in the next five years get to a million people a day because the number one killer of children there.

is waterborne disease and it's so easy to solve. So I'm interested, you know, in things that make a difference. Um the X Prize for Education where we're creating a competition for all these software developers

to develop a form of software that can work on an iPad that a child can teach himself to read, to write, and even to code. And the very best of that that comes out of that over the next three years, that X prize competition, myself, Elon Musk, a couple other people put up a thirty million dollar prize. And you know, the code will be available to everybody. So this is the type of thing that I think can change the quality of people's lives. And those at this stage of my life I'm fortunate enough.

that you know, I've got all these companies, you know, eighteen companies, I'm fairly busy guy. But with five billion in sales, economics are not a question for me. And so I'm able to focus on goals that inspire me that have to do with contribution primarily at this stage of my life.

There's just really not that much left over. So what do I do when my business doesn't have that much left over? Where do I start? Like what would you say to the vast majority of people that are my listeners that are in that situation?

and understanding accounting, which is the least sexy, least exciting thing you can tell somebody. And I hey, I'm with you, I can't stand accounting. But you have to understand the language of business is accounting. And unless you can turn numbers into financial intelligence,

you will make the wrong decisions, which is why half the businesses are gone in a year, 80% are gone in five years, and in a 10-year period of time, 96% of businesses fail. And the 4% that succeed doesn't mean they're profitable. It just means they're still standing.

So what I you know, I do a program called Business Mastery, which is one of my most passionate programs for me personally. It's five day basically total immersion. It's it's boot camp for entrepreneurs. And I got people in there, probably half the room or a third of the room that

just beginning the journey and doing less than a million dollars and I've got, you know, about twenty percent of the room that's doing, you know, two hundred and fifty million plus. So how do you do something that's gonna match all their needs? There are certain fundamentals

that everybody needs to do. And if you're a entrepreneur, you've got to master the marketing and the sales. You've got to know what business you're in, but what business you're really in. You've got to be able to manage the business you're in while you're also managing the business you're going to become.

And that sounds overwhelming. How do I optimize my business without spending more money? How do I grow my business thirty to a hundred and thirty percent in the next twelve months, or if it's a small business, you know, even a thousand percent over the next twelve to eighteen months? And so those are my obsessions, but what I teach people to do sounds like a lot. I immerse them, I teach them, I give them the very best tools that I learned from Mark Binioff at Salesforce.

from Steve Wynne who, you know, built Las Vegas, you know, and most of it. From Peter Goober who owns the Warriors took him from last place to first place in less than five years. Uh you know, fifty two Academy Award nominations on the Dodgers. You know, I got a who's who group of people, Richard Branson that I pull from, but then what I show people is we all have heard the phrase you gotta work on the business, not in the business.

But if if I was going to give advice to your members, I would say to them, you have to decide to stop being a business operator and become a business owner. Operators are always stressed. There's always more than you can do. And what I teach people is after I teach'em these fundamentals in five days and nights of total immersion, they come out on fire. But then I say all you have to do is set up a simple system of ninety minutes to two hours max once a week.

where you work on the business with your team. I don't care if your team is an army of two or twenty thousand. You have to step out of the day to day and look at each of these fundamentals. And I teach people each week to focus on one of those, marketing, sales, optimization.

raving fan culture, whatever it is, so that they're constantly improving. And we do a seven week cycle seven times in a year. And when you're constantly making those improvements in all areas, you don't end up with a flat wheel. You know, most people are good at marketing or they're good at innovation, they're good at sales, they're good at something, they're good at writing code.

But they're not good at other elements and so it's like a flat tire, which is not a problem if you're driving ten miles an hour, but most entrepreneurs going a hundred miles an hour, it's pretty jarring. It'll it'll knock you off. It's the other reason why also every one of these people needs to have a financial, you know, money machine on the side that's growing so that they can have that sense of confidence that gives you the room to breathe while you're building your business. But I think

You can't enter a business like the accounting is a perfect example. I always tell people the chokehold on the growth of your business. is always the owner. It is always the leader. And 80% of that chokehold is your psychology, meaning your limiting beliefs about what your business is capable of doing or how fast you can turn around. Twenty percent though is the mechanics or the strategy.

So if I got, if I taught you the best marketing tools, the best sales tools, the best optimization tools, how do you grow your business 100%? the best tools in being raving fan culture. Whatever it is, the best tools in innovation, if you don't have the right psychology, you're not going to implement it. You're going to understand it, but you're not going to follow through. And I always tell people, you know, knowledge is not power. It's potential power.

The real power is execution. Execution trumps knowledge every day of the week. So that's why you need a system to make sure you're implementing and you're not just implementing in what you're good at. You're implementing in all these areas. And one of the things I do in that program, by the way, is we give people a four-hour MBA, if you would, from the most brilliant man I know in the accounting space.

Who's got all his degrees in that area, but he compresses down to what he learned at Harvard in literally four hours so that now you have a foundation so you can manage your people. I also have a business that provides virtual CFO services, because the difference between an accountant

And a CFO is a difference between f failing or succeeding in business. An accountant gives you numbers and they'll tell you you got this profitability, it's all after the fact. You have nothing you can do with it. A great CFO is someone who's turning those financial numbers into actionable intelligence so you can make decisions in real time that can make you successful and not fail. Problem is you're gonna go get a CFO, it costs you a good one's three, four, five hundred thousand dollars.

So I've created a virtual CFO service where someone can literally for, you know, I think uh like it's five grand a year or four grand a year, they can have somebody that once a month is making sure this doesn't happen to them, figures out where you are and where you go. So I'm obsessed.

with helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. And, you know, I started with absolutely nothing. I have no business background. To grow to the number of businesses, and you know, I'm in seven different industries and I dominate most of them. I just made an announcement two days ago that I just

Merged with a company that's got you know 18 billion in assets. It's called Creative Planning. And I'm on their board of directors. I'm now their chief of of investor psychology, but I'm a partner in the firm and I mean it's just overnight and now we'll be at twenty billion in about four months, five months.

I mean it's another leverage piece. All this comes from my ability to know how to grow businesses rapidly, and I'm here to tell every one of the entrepreneurs listening, you can learn this, but you can't do it half-assed. Like uh any uh you know if you're a pilot. There's two levels of being a pilot. There's called VFR, which is visual flying rules. So I'm looking out my window here on Palm Beach. It's seventy eight degrees. The skies are clear. It's a gentle wind.

Any idiot can fly on a day like today. That's visual flying rules. But if you're going to be able to succeed and fly in all the environments, you have to become instrument rated, which means you have to be able to read all those instruments and know what they mean because when you get in the middle of a cloud

and it's foggy, you you know, you get vertical. Your body thinks you're in a different direction than you are. The only way you live is to be able to read those dials. Most business owners do not know how to read their financial dials. They don't read their marketing dials. They don't know truly how to read their optimization dials. And what that's why you've got to master the skills and the psychology, and then you can grow any business.

And Tony, something that's fired me up recently is that you launched the Tony Robbins podcast, which is for both small and medium-sized business owners who are looking to gain that competitive advantage and dominate their existing market or create an entirely new one. So first off, congrats on joining the podcasting family. It's no surprise you are number one in all of iTunes as we're speaking. What made you decide to get into the podcasting game?

And so what we did, we took some of the people that I I personally respect and love much most and interviewed them. And then I was able to put a frame in the front about how to attack it and a frame in the back about how to utilize it. So for example, Tom at Quest, you know, they built a billion dollar business.

And he built it from scratch and Tom built it all based on the principles that I teach and you know gives credit to it. He and his team and his partners have done a phenomenal job and they've used social media and they've built an extraordinary brand. So, you know, Tom's a dear friend, you know, digging in and seeing how he did that is so instructive for, you know, any entrepreneur. So what I really want to do is just bring them some great quality people besides myself.

who can give them insights that are unique and important to becoming successful as an entrepreneur.

even dorm rooms. Plus we're working with remote employees, freelancers, and multiple team players. Heck, when you consider all the time we spend on our mobile phones, you might even say we love them. But keeping personal and business calls separate can be tough. You might even use two mobile phones. But that's expensive. Not to mention annoying. What if you miss that one big call you've been waiting for?

That's why I use evoice. You don't have to buy a second phone to get a second line. There you go. Now you've got yet another reason to love your phone. So go ahead and grab it. Yep, the mobile phone that's right in your hands. And visit evoice.com and add a second line today. Evoice is offering Fire Nation an extended 60-day free trial. Visit evoice.com and use promo code FIRE. That's evoice.com, promo code FIRE.

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Tony, we have six minutes left, which I really want to use very effectively. Now you go through the six human needs in a very powerful way. I'm gonna list them real quick. We have certainty, uncertainty, and variety, significance. connection and love, growth and contribution. Can you maybe choose one of those that you're just feeling right now for any number of reasons and do a little bit of a deep dive for us for Fire Nation?

And those needs are hardwired within us. And there's inherent conflicts. Like we all want certainty, but if you're totally certain, you're bored. So, you know, we also need uncertainty to feel alive, variety. If we have too much uncertainty, people freak out.

And if you live in the middle, you're you're kind of dead. So the secret is learning how to meet both needs simultaneously. We all have a need to feel significant, unique, special, important. Everybody has that need. Even people say, I don't want to be unique. You know, that's protest too much. Of course they do.

But we also, the more unique you are, the more separate you feel. And we all need to feel love and connection, and that's unification. And so there's a kind of a war that goes on between these three people. And then the spiritual needs are we have to grow. You know, if you ask me, what does it take to be happy? It's one word, progress.

Progress equals happiness. If you're not even where you wanna be, but you're making progress in your business, you're making progress in your body, you're making progress in your relationship, you're gonna feel alive. And when you achieve a goal, Th y goals only feel good for how long? I don't give a sh what the goal is. The biggest goal in your life, you achieve it and after a while is this all there is. Because we're not designed just to get a goal.

who we become that makes us really happy or really sad. And so we've gotta grow. That's what makes us feel alive. And when we grow, we have something to give. And giving is what makes people feel like they have a meaningful life. You know, nobody wants to be a taker. You might think so on the surface, but you know, anybody who takes, it's a pretty empty feeling. When we feel like our life has meaning beyond ourselves, when we feel like we're here giving more than we're taking.

That's when someone starts to prosper, not only financially, but emotionally and spiritually. And I think the game of life comes down to understanding it's not about me, it's about we. The secret to living is giving, as corny as that sounds, but it's real. I can remember early in my career as an entrepreneur, my first year and a half in business, I was just turning seventeen, or just turning eighteen rather, uh my entire seventeenth year, I'd worked my guts out.

And I was very frustrated because nothing seemed to be working at the level I thought it should, because everybody overestimates what they can do in a year and they underestimate what they can do in a decade or two. Right. And so I'm s I remember I was on the fifty seven freeway outside Pomona, California at midnight in my nineteen sixty eight Volkswagen bug. You know, no one on the freeway, pissed off, angry, frustrated.

I'm like asking myself, what's missing? What's wrong? What am I missing here? And then all of a sudden I got it. I pulled over on the freeway. I still have this journal today. I keep physical journals.

And I wrote on a full page one phrase, the secret to living is giving. And I sat there and cried and I realized, holy shit, that's where I started. But I got so caught up in the frustrations of my business that I was focused on why am I not receiving instead of focusing on how can I give more?

And when I shifted that, everything shifted. My business took off to another level. So I really believe that growth and contribution are the most important needs of all. That everyone finds a way to be certain, even if they lie to themselves. Or variety they can do it with drugs or alcohol or food or cigarettes.

or significance you can tear other people down and have the illusion that you're significant. If they're going going down, you have the illusion you're going up. But the only thing that's lasting is growth and contribution. And so

I try to show people how to be fulfilled. Ultimately, my mission is to help people to experience an extraordinary quality of life. Life on their terms, not mine. Everyone has a different idea of what they really want. I don't care if it's three perfect children or build a billion dollar business. or write poetry. Everyone has a different view. But if you know what your view is, really there's two master lessons to master in life. The first one is the science of achievement. That is

It's a science around money. It's a science around your body. If you do there's laws. If you violate these laws, you're gonna have excess month at the end of your money. You're gonna have financial stress. If you align with them, You don't have to be in the you know lucky sperm club to be able to grow from wherever you are to where you want to be. We live in a world where that option is there, but you have to understand the rules of the game. And if you don't, that's why I wrote this book.

And you get in the game with someone more experienced than you are and you don't have the education, you know the old phrase when a person with experience ends up meets a person with money, the person with experience ends up with your money, right?

'Cause they don't understand. I mean look at the we lost the national treasure just recently in Robin Williams a couple years ago, right? Here's a guy everybody loved. He was a master of achievement.

He wanted to make his own TV show. No one said he could do it, he did it. It became the number one show, which was his goal. He made people laugh all over the world. He wanted to make movies. And he did it, then he wanna make movies where he wasn't funny, then he wanna make movies where he wasn't funny and he got an Oscar for not being funny and he pulled it off. He wanted a beautiful family, he wanted tons of money, he got more money to get spend, and he hung himself. Hung himself.

That's an example of success without fulfillment as the ultimate failure. You know what you you want to make sure you figure out how to enjoy your life and the way you enjoy your life. is not someday when your business is doing billions of dollars. If you can't enjoy it right now while you're struggling, you won't enjoy it later on, I'm here to tell you. You gotta find ecstasy in this moment. And the way to do that

at a p principal levels to realize everybody's fulfilled by different things. If you go to an art show in New York or LA and you look at this painting and go, you gotta be kidding. How much is it? They go, ten million dollars and you think you gotta be kidding. I my friend Steve Wynne called me up on his birthday and said, I got this

New painting, you gotta come see it. He said, I've coveted it for 16 years. It cost me$80 million,$82. So I go to his house thinking it's gonna be a Rembrandt. And and it's not. It's this picture of an orange and red square. It's called a Rothcoat. Orange and red square. I said, Peter, give me I mean Steve, had to give me, you know, some paint and ten minutes and a hundred bucks and I can do this.

Build a financial business on the side, but find a way to enjoy every moment. Every great friend I have, you know, uh Peter Goober, you know, owns the Warriors. I was just with him at the game the other night. And we're talking, and what are we talking about? We're talking about the early days when we both struggled our asses off.

And we have so much joy because in order to have a foreground, you need a background. So if you're struggling right now, not a problem. Just break through. And the way you break through is immerse in education. and make sure whatever you're educating you push yourself to act on it and make sure you're setting aside those ninety minutes to two hours a week where you're not in the business, you're working on the business systemically.

Getting outside input so you can grow this thing, so you can be better than anybody else, because in the end it's all about how do I do more for others than anybody else is doing. If you add more value, if you do more for others than anybody else does in the marketplace.

and you do it year after year, decade after decade, you will dominate the marketplace, you will become a gigantic brand and economics will never be a question in your life. You'll have plenty to give, do, share, create, and enjoy.

I suggest that people measure when you're feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, and you create a ninety second rule that says, I kill this monster while it's little. Life is too short to suffer. Find a way to enjoy every damn moment and build your business simultaneously. That'll make you truly successful, not just somebody who's got a business or made some money.

His show notes page will pop up with everything that we've talked about today. You name it, it'll be there. Boom. And of course, Fire Nation, the final call to action is head over. to money masterthe game dot com. Grab your free copy of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Money Master the Game. This is a limited time offer, so get on over there. I've read this book. I own the hard copy. It's amazing.

Tony, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you. And we'll catch you on the flip side. One of the challenges we face as entrepreneurs is keeping our personal and business lives separate. If you're like me, you're constantly doing business from different locations and making calls to different people.

Guess what? There's no longer a need for two phones. Just get a second line added to your mobile phone from evoice. Evoice is offering Fire Nation an extended sixty day free trial. Visit evoice.com, use promo code FIRE. That's Evoice dot com

Tony Robins, somebody that I've admired from afar for decades, literally. It was pretty nerve wracking for me, but you know, I definitely try to break the ice in a couple ways and I wanted to share with you my strategy for going through this. Again, I wanted to make it short, sweet. I had a very limited time with Tony, so I wanted to make the most of the recording time that we had possible, but I still wanted

Maybe make that one little connection that I did have with him. So check out what I did, let me know what you think, and prepare to ignite.