If you give yourself one piece of advice to your 21 year old self, what would it be if you keep giving your
all your gifts will make room for you. The only solution to long term happiness is to get outside yourself. The human mind will always find something to be concerned about, pissed off about, worried about, but when you're serving you're not there, find something you care about more than yourself, because that's what's going to be the secret to your growth and your aliveness. Whether it's your family, it's your friends, it's your company, it's a non profit thing to you. It's a
mission for you. And if you've got that kind of drive, you're going to keep growing. And if you keep growing, and have plenty to give, and if you keep giving, you're gonna have a meaningful life. You
Randy, Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers and trailblazers of excellence, with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and a host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives. My guest today is somebody most people already know, the incredible
Tony Robbins. Tony is the number one life and business strategist in the world who has coached and advised some of the most successful and powerful people in the world, including three former US presidents, Nelson, Mandela, Princess Diana, as well as countless athletes and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Oprah. He is also an incredibly successful serial entrepreneur and investor. He's invested in 114 companies and runs 12 of them, which together have $8 billion in revenues.
He's a New York Times best selling author, and his instructional course personal power has sold more than 40 million copies. Tony is also one of the world's leading philanthropists, a mission he started when he was 17 years old, and has since secured more than a billion meals for people around the world. Tony, thanks for being here. Welcome to a search of XLR. Good to meet you.
What an honor. Thanks. Cindy, so let's start with our parents, born in North Hollywood, raised in Azusa and your dad, Boris, underground parkade tenant mom, Nikki, drug addict, used to beat the shit out of you, poured dishwasher detergent down your throat until you threw up and chased you out of the house with a knife. Tell us what that was like as a kid growing up, and the dichotomy of that of you saying that she was a great mom, well,
the dichotomy is she really is a good human being, but when people get altered chemically, they become somebody else. And I wouldn't have called her a drug addict, but she drank alcohol pretty excessively, and when she mixed it with like value and other things, she got very violent. And I have a younger brother, five years younger, younger sister, seven years younger, and so I had to kind of be the mom and dad a little bit. It made me
grew up very early. But a lot of the best qualities of my life came from my mom, to give a fair picture, otherwise people just generalize. She was very loving person. She cared for friends very deeply. What? So when she was sober, it was a very different experience, and that's why, personally, you know, I never drank I don't have any judgment people would do, but I just never want an altar, because I was in a family where multiple people did that. My natural father also drank as
well. But, you know, he had a interesting life. You know, he was a parking attendant. You said he's underground all day long. Was before he had machines and he'd sit there all day long and make change with people and never move for 40 something years. And so my mom kind of despised that, so I think she instilled that in me. I don't want to be that way. I need to
become more successful. But I think the truth is, as I look back on it, if my mom had been the mother I wanted to be, I truly wouldn't be the man I'm proud to be, because she made me a practical psychologist. I had to learn her moods and her emotions, how to manage and how to shift it. So, you know, we could manage those times without it became violent or difficult
at the same time. Just to put it in balance, she pushed me to do things I never would have done on my own, and built a lot of my muscles, so to speak, psychological muscle, because she was very demanding. And those things happen. And then there was a third part, which I walked in with, which is, I just have a love for people. I was like, when I was a little kid, I was trying to do things for strangers all the time. My mom tells people stories. I was Mother stories she used to tell
people. Is like, what's telling me to like, Has he always been this way? And she said, I can remember when I sent him next door to the liquor stores, living at this liquor store, she's pregnant with my brother. So I was probably, you know, five years old, and I sent him over to get some milk and bread, and it took forever to come back, and I came back with no milk and bread. And no money, and we had no money. And she said, You know what happened? I said, Well, there's a poor boy
there. So I gave him the money, and she said, We're poor. It's a story process. So I think a combination of reaction to the environment, but not wanting to be a victim, not being willing to settle that shifted me. And then I have four different fathers of radically different role models, and Jim Robbins,
who adopted me. Name I carry was the one that I was most close to, even as my natural father, he was a semi pro baseball player, and, you know, I developed a lot of Moxie, because to develop Google to have love with him. It was real through sports. So initially it was. Really through sports and all that developed for me, so many
of us have life changing moments. We're gonna talk about many of yours on the show today. But one of them happened when you were 11 years old. There's a knock on the door. Can you tell us about the delivery guy? Yes. And then the three decisions that you thought about that came out of that huge event.
I was 11, and now we at, you know, my fathers were good men, but they variously got unemployed at various times, and when they're unemployed, my mom didn't work, so we had no income. We had some food stamps, so we had Thanksgiving when I was 11. We had no food. We
weren't gonna starve. We had saltine crackers and peanut butter, but when everybody else was having a turkey dinner, it really feels a bit depressing, and my mom and dad were screaming each other and saying things that you know I didn't want my brother or sister to hear. And once you say them, you
can't take them back. And and then my life has changed because knock on the door, I go there, there's this big guy standing there with two bags of groceries, one in each hand, and he had already sat down a pot with a frozen turkey on the ground, and he said, Is your father here. And I'm like, Just one moment, I was like, so excited, like, little boy at Christmas, like, this is going to change everything. My dad's gonna be happy. Mom's me so happy. So I went to my dad, just
glad the door for you. He says, You answer and I said, I did answer it. He's for you. What does he want? I said, I don't know. He said he could only talk to you. And then I'm sitting there waiting with a, you know, internal joy, and he opens the door, sees the man. Does not let the man even speak, and just says, we don't accept charity, and slams the door on the guy. But the man holding the grocery said, lean forward a little bit so it hit his shoulder. It bounced off his shoulder, which
made my dad even more mad. He said, Sir, sir. He said, listen, somebody knows you're having I'm just the delivery guy. Someone knows you're having a tough time. And everybody has tough times. You know, at times they want you have a great Thanksgiving. My father said, We don't accept charity. And he pushed again because the guy leaned in his leg and foot had gone in, so it hit his toe and popped open again. And so now my dad's even more aggravated. And
then the guy said something. I thought the guy was gonna get my dad's gonna punch him in the face. He wasn't mean about it. He actually a soft, gentle voice about and he saw me, and he said, Sir, don't let your family, you know, suffer because of your ego. Gray Line and my father's face. I mean, I remember like yesterday, the veins in the side of his neck popping his face deep red, and I'm waiting for him to punch him, and then his shoulders just
dropped. I'll never forget he grabbed the groceries, threw him the table, didn't say thank you, slam the door. And I was shocked, and then I was sad, and I didn't know how to process, you know, why isn't he happy, or why, you know, we're gonna have, we're gonna have a great Thanksgiving. Now, you know, and but my father had always said, you know, strangers, nobody cares about us. And I thought we lived in a very wealthy
community. It's actually very lower middle class, but we were in the poorest of the poor, literally across the railroad tracks, and that's where the people went in that particular community that really had nothing. And so it looked like nobody cared. But I had different evidence that day, and I remember, I didn't figure it out that day, but I don't know, about three years later, I was probably 1415, years old, and I was, I became obsessed with understanding human behavior at
that stage. Already, I was already starting to read books and absorb things at that stage. Took a speed reading class and said, I read, you know, book every day. I didn't do that, but in seven years, read seminar books in human development, psychology, physiology, but I got, I started thinking about, like, what made that happen? And I've realized there's three decisions, as you noted, that you're making right now your audience is making right now.
When I say we're making them, we may not be making them consciously. Most of the time, they're unconscious. So you get the same result over and over again. If it's a good result, a good result, most people not so. Great result. That's what it is. And those three decisions are, number one, you have to decide what the focus on. Now, again, if you don't think about it, you'll be triggered by the environment, or you'll be triggered by your habits. But whatever you focus on, that's
your experience of life. I always tell people you don't experience life. You experience the life you focus on. Right now, you could focus on something and get yourself pissed off, if it's not in your own life, it could be about other people, right? You could find total joy in this moment or gratitude if you focus on something else. So we don't experience life, it's what we focus on and what we focus on we
feel, even if it's not true. So if you think somebody is taking advantage of you, you get all angry, and later on, you find out they didn't. You felt like an idiot, right? But when you were focused on it, it was real to you. So focus equals reality to the individual, even though it's not reality and actuality, or a simpler way, his focus equals feeling. So I thought about, what did I focus on that day? And what did my dad focus
on that day? And it was so easy, because my dad said it under his breath over and over again, his focus was he'd not fed his family, right? My focus is there was food. What a concept. I thought that was awesome. But the biggest difference is the minute you focus on something, the second decision you have to make, your brain makes is, what does this mean? Is this a threat, or is this an opportunity? Right? Your brain is doing that constantly, and so is this person disrespecting me?
Is this person challenging me? Is this person coaching me? Is this person loving on me? If you think they're disrespecting you, you're gonna have a very. Different emotional response than if you think they're warming on you, right? And whatever emotion you feel controls the third decision, which is, what should I do? You're pissed off, you're gonna have very different decision if you're feeling grateful,
obviously, right? So the meaning is what really changed my life that day, because my father's meaning, I know what it was also because he said it over again, he unvetted his family, and he was worthless, and what he decided to do is leave our family shortly after that, which was at the time, I thought the worst event of my life, because I loved him so much. But my meaning is what changed my life. It's why I'm here today. The meaning my brain came up with is
that strangers care. Strangers do care somebody we don't even know doesn't even want credit, and they saw we're in need, and they helped us. That changed my entire world perspective. And what I decided to do is, someday I'm going to do that for other people. And so I promised myself someday I'd feed two families. I'd double the impact. So when I was 17, I had very little money. I was just getting started a
little tiny business. I went to this grocery store and outside of Venice, California, and I went up to the manager, and I said, Listen, I told the story. I got fed when I was a kid. I want to go feed two families. I got a limited budget. How about you give me a discount? You know, I'm not doing this for me. And the guy gave me 10% off. And I thought, cheap bastard. But I took the 10% and I took two grocery bags rollers, and I filled them with enough for two or three days of food for two
families. And then I called a local church and said, and near the barrio area in the area that I knew people were suffering, and I said, Do you have a family that really needs food but probably be too proud to get it? That was kind of model of my family. I'm sure we could have found food if we got it, asked for it somewhere, but we were going to do that. And so they
gave me two names. And so I loaded up all the food, I brought a friend's van, and then I I turned around, and I put an old t shirt and jeans, because I saw my dad responded. So I was like, I'm not going to be thanked. I'm just going as the delivery guy. And then I wrote a note. Said, This is a gift from a friend. Please have the beautiful Thanksgiving. We all have tough times at times. Hope this makes your Thanksgiving
better. And someday, please, if you can do well enough, do this for one of their family, you know, and but love a friend. And then I realized where I was going. They may not speak Spanish, so I had a friend write it in Spanish on the phone. So I show up at the house, this shouldn't say houses, little apartment, and I knock on the door the first place, and this woman, about this tall, comes up to about my chest, looks up at me, sees the groceries and
screams. And I'm like, Oh no. She grabs my head and pulls me down to her and starts kissing my cheek. I said, No, no, I'm delivery boy. Delivery boy, delivery and I said, Oh. And I remembered I have notes. I reached the head of the note and I flip it over. She saw it in Spanish, and she read it, and she started to cry. And then she grabbed and started kissing again. I said, No, no, delivery boy. She goes, No. Gift of God. Gift of God. I'm trying not to
cry. And then I said, Well, you know, where do I put these groceries? And there's a tiny little room right the tables right there. And she points. And so I go to put there, and then I hear these screams, and all sudden, when one boy hits me, one way, one boy hits the house, four kids. And it turned out that her, I found out afterwards that her husband had left them three days before Thanksgiving with no money and no food. It's like, not the exact same situation as mine, but so close.
It was ridiculous. It's like, talk about grace. And so, you know, the kids got all excited, so I hadn't come out to the van and helped me bring more stuff in, and when I saw the pumpkin pie, it was like, over there, over the top. And then it was time to leave, and this one little boy would not like go on my leg. He was so cute, and he was so just wonderful. When I had to the next house, I didn't speak Spanish, so I turned the lady, I said, Felice Navidad,
Merry Christmas. You know, it's Thanksgiving that she started laugh. She's been crying now she's laughing. And I gave him all hugs. I went to leave, and I got in the van, and I'll never forget, you know, put the thing in reverses my buddy Zen. I didn't really to the gears properly. And I looked in the rear view mirror on the porch for the four boys and the mom, they're grin into mirror to ear mom's crying and smiling simultaneously. And I started crying uncontrollably. And I was
like, Why am I crying? It's such a beautiful moment, and trying to get the thing in gear. And literally, I couldn't see us crying so hard. And then I realized today my worst day became my best day, that if I had not suffered like that as a child, but I'd be there to help this family, and the answer is, why I believe I'm a good person, probably not. And so the next year, I fed four families. I was hooked, and then it was eight. And then I have a little
company. I got my employees involved, and I got a bigger company. Then I eventually got to 4 million people, 2 million from my foundation, 2 million from me every year. And then I was doing this book money Master the Game, where I interviewed Ray, Dalio, Carl, Icahn, Warren Buffett, 50 of the smartest financial people in the world. And I'm reading these multi billionaires that I see that the government has cut food stamps. They call it SNAP program now by $6 billion I think was the
number. It basically means every family that needs food has to go out with one week a month without food, unless people like you and I in the private sector step up. So I called my foundation and I said, how many people I fed in my lifetime? I didn't know the total number, and they said 42 million. I was like, Wow, I'm as really excited and proud about that. But I thought, what if I blew that
number through the. What if I did in one year as much as I did in my whole life, and I did 50 million meals, and I was like, what if I did 100 million meals? I was 1100 million meals for 10 straight years, provided a billion meals. That is an exciting outcome. And so I did. I teamed up with Feeding America. They distributed the food, and I did it in eight
years. And then it didn't stop there, because I do another billion but because it hasn't got problems, not got away, but I'm looking for sustainability. And then I was working, I was in UAE, and MBS was got to meet him and develop some relationship with Him, a friendship. And one day he called me up, and he said, come to lunch with me. I have someone I want to introduce you to who's the only other person I know feeding as many
people as you are. And it was governor Beasley who was the head of the World Food Program. He won the Nobel Prize for feeding people there for the UN and so we decided to join forces about a year and a half ago, and said, Look, normally, 80 million people are at risk every year. Starvation in this world, it's terrific. A child dies every 15 seconds of hunger. It's insane. This year, it's three 50 million and no one's talking about it because news cycle is so short.
Everybody focuses on everything else. There are 11 nations in Africa that the bread basket for Africa is the Ukraine. So there's nothing coming out because of the war. The WF doesn't want people using fertilizer, but 50% of the world's food supply comes from fertilizer, and most of the comes from Russia, which was shut down, so the price of fertilizer went through the roof. So there are 11 nations where people on the verge of starvation knows anything about it. So I said, how many meals
would we need? We need a sustainable solution. How many years to get to sustainability? How many meals would we need? He said, I don't know, 20, maybe 50, 60 billion. I said, Let's do 100 billion meal challenge. I said I did 100 billion meal I mean, I did a billion meals, all I need is 99 more people like me or organizations. And I said I wasn't a billionaire when I started, you know, I grew as I contributed more, you know, and and so we did that, and it didn't turn out very fast. I
went. I remember going to this one man who's a good friend of mine, who's very generous, and when I did my first billion meals, he contributed to it. And he said, what you doing now? I said, I'm doing this 100 billion meal challenge right in over 10 years, and I'm looking for people to do 100 million here for 10 years. And he goes, Tony goes, how much would that be? I said, about $100 million and it's like 10 cents a meal. And he said, 100 million dollars. He said, I sent you, but it's over
10 years, you know? He says me, that's beyond my pay grade. He's worth $20 billion plus, I was like, oh my god, this is not gonna work. So without boring you the details, I altered my approach, and we announced just two weeks ago, we hit the first 30 billion meals in two years. And quite frankly, we already have commitment now. I haven't announced it yet. For 60 billion meals. We'll be at 60 by the end of this year. So we're gonna blow through the 100 billion
meals. But the point is, would I've ever done that if I was a well fed child, if I had been totally nurtured again? I'd like to believe I would. I'm a good person, but I don't know if I'd had that much drive. So I really believe everything happens for a reason, including what went wrong with my mom and I, I honor what happened to my wife, as opposed to be a victim, and I try to encourage other people to
do the same thing. I never even told anybody about the story of my mom until after she passed. And I was with a I was in New York with a group of young Hispanic and African American children who only had single mothers. And I was talking about biography is not destiny, and you can make different choices. And I'm looking at him, I can mine read. They're looking to this tall white guy's wealthy. So I told them the whole story, not the ones I gave you, the details I had. They were crying
their eyes out. I was crying my eyes out and and I realized sometimes it's valuable to share that with people, but my overall theme is, don't settle and don't be a Don't be a victim in this process. What if everything in your life happened for a reason? What if there was a higher purpose, but it's your job to find it. I believe life is always happening for me, not to me, but it doesn't always look that way. So I gotta dig. I gotta find and sometimes it
takes it. I don't know, in your life, have you got any experiences where you went through that were brutal, that were painful, that you'd never want to go through again, but maybe 510, years later, you look back on and go, Man, I'm so glad that happened. I don't want to go through it, but made me so much stronger. Made me care more. Can you relate
to that in some Yeah, bullies thought her as a kid. Yeah, brutal. Yeah. But
it made you stronger. It made you care more, made you be a different person. And I'll go emotion in you even now, when you think about it, you're near tears just even thinking about it. So I think it's important for people to realize that if they go back and really look at their life, if they're if they don't go on drugs and alter their state. It's an alter state. You'll never come up with a better
meaning. But if you stay off drugs, and you stay straight and you push for it, sooner or later, you're going to find there is a benefit that far exceeds the pain you went through. And I don't want to see anybody suffer. The reason I do what I do is I suffered so much on everybody else to suffer. So I've spent a lifetime looking at tools to help people break those patterns, master their body, their emotion, their relationship, their finances, the areas of life that matter. When your
mom kicked you out with a knife, you were depressed. You she kept your 86 Volkswagen,
1960 Volkswagen, 60 Volkswagen,
40 hours a week you were making she kept it. Yeah, and there were. Main you slept on a hill. Then you slept in a friend's laundry room, yeah. And then you read a book called The Power of believing by Claude Bristol. Now you went magic of believing by Claude and Bristol, yeah, the magic of believing. And you went on to read 700 books. What was so inflammation, what was so inspiring about that book? If you tell us about what you were writing on the mirror as you
were reading that book. Sure you doing
your homework. It's beautiful. I saw that radical preparation is big part of your life, mine too. No, when she kicked me out, she wasn't gonna stab me and kill me. I wasn't worried about dying, but I wasn't going back in that house. And so I did sleep on the hill, and then it rained. So it's like that plans out, and they just slept there in the rain. Just no I got into the tree and froze, and I finally
just went in. I knocked on the door of a friend who was a girl, a girlfriend, and but her family really cared about me, and I said, you know, can I sleep in your laundry room? So that's where I was. I had, I don't know, $4 to my name, and $13 whatever. And I just took a little bit of money, got on a bus, and I went to this bookstore that I had remembered, because I'd run 13 miles on my 13th birthday. I had this obsession I was going to push myself. And so I remembered this
bookstore. So I went there, and I just guided this book the magic of believing. And all it really taught was the power of belief. Belief controls everything. Everything you do is based on your belief, but it showed how to program your beliefs by conditioning them by repetition, by what I'd call incantations, as opposed to affirmations. Affirmations, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy. Everybody goes bullshit. I'm not
happy. But if you use your body and your voice and every ounce of you is congruently speaking, that over and over again, it basically hypnotizes you into owning that experience. And so I used to write on the mirror in the laundry room. You know, only a loser is depressed, which is not true. But I knew I wasn't a loser, so I used that as the leverage I'm not going to be depressed, because I was so
depressed, really. And I had all these affirmations I would do, and I go on a runs, and I do, you know, every day, and every way I'm getting stronger and stronger, and I would just program this nervous system mind until I could really be in a position where I felt like I could succeed, and it worked. It produced tremendous change in me. But it didn't stop there. As you said, I'd started reading before that, but I just got reignited to read. And reading was my escape, but it was also
my transformation. I escaped the world, and as I entered Emerson's essays, and I'd read a lot of autobiographies, especially because when you read an autobiography, you're reading the words of that incredible human being. So you're thinking their thoughts. And if you do that for days or weeks, or whatever the case may be, you start to take that on. It's like if you want to play the piano, and you can mess around on your
own. But if you're smart, you learn other people's music, and all of a sudden you do some amazing things, but after a while, you played enough you learn enough patterns that now you become the creator. Now you start to create your own patterns. And that's pretty much what happened for me with these books. And then also events. I went to seminar after seminar. I had no money when I did money for my rent, but I go invest in a seminar, because I'll never go pay for this until I change
what's going on in me. And then I was also i because it was all the money I had. It was such a big investment. I wrote down the guy said, but I wrote down them, and I didn't miss a word. I didn't get up to p I mean, and I was obsessed with using what I learned, because I had to, because I'd given up all the money. I had to do it. And so that, I think some people it's easy to do things, and so they don't retain it. But for me, I was, I was obsessed with getting the result. We
all have a lot of big moments in your life again, I want to go through yours to thank so much about your story. When you were 17 years old, you working at Grand Dora High School as a janitor, helping move people on the weekends, and there was a friend of your family's who was a landlord and very awkward conversation and Sue, where he said, My parents said, Hey, you're such a loser. How are you
so successful? So tell us about Jim Rohn and the influence you had on your life and the question that you asked the landlord. And he said, No fucking way. I'm not doing that. You do it yourself. Well,
my you know, I had to help support my family's minimum money for food, so I'm going to school, and I kept two different jobs as a janitor because I could work in the middle of the night, and they didn't charge you pay by the didn't charge you, pay you by the hour. They bid you by the result. So I could do two banks in the middle of night, do a great job, take the busses home
and contribute. And then on the weekends, I would try to find something to do also, because you didn't have to do the banks then. And my mom and dad knew this man, who might as my dad's words were, used to be such a loser. Now he's so successful, and I wonder what happened to him. And all he was was he was buying properties, fixing them up and flipping them in Orange County, California in the 1970s like 7019 77 and the market was exploding. So he was doing very
well. So he needed, he was very efficient in his workforce, to move things. And so he always hired a like a high school student. And I've been five one in my sophomore year, and I got a tumor in my brain. No one knew, that's why. And I do 10 inches in a year. So I was like, get that big strapping guy. We'll do this. So I come and I I'm a hard worker. And after two days of work on my guts out, he's like, you're the hardest working guy I've ever met. He goes, I'm really impressed. Let
me take you to lunch. So he takes me to lunch and and he starts asking questions. I said, I want to ask you some questions. I said, you know. Dad. And I wasn't saying trying to be harsh or funny. It's just, when you're a kid, you just don't realize. I said, my dad said you should be such a loser now you're so successful. Like how to do that? He was taken back, obviously. She just said, what? And he goes, Well, he goes, it's probably pretty accurate about me. I said, Well,
what changed you? And he said, I went to a seminar. I never even heard the word seminar before. I said, What's a seminar? He sits where a man who has become incredibly successful over decades takes all these learning the decades and tries to compress it into a few hours or a few days and save you all that trial and error learning. I said, Well, that's fascinating. I said, so how long the seminary goes? It's three and a half hours. I said, Well, how much is
it? He said $35 would be like, $250 in today's dollars inflation, and I was making $40 a week. So I said, Wow, that's expensive. I said, Can you get me in? And he's like, Yeah, but use it anymore. I said, Well, will you and he said, No. And I said, Well, why not? And he said, well, because you won't value it if you don't pay for it. I said, No, no, no, I'm on my own. I've been sleeping in my car. I'm working as a janitor. I'm to give him the whole story, right? He goes, I don't hear the
story. He said, If you're really committed, you'll go there or, he said, learn on your own experience, and take 10 or 20 or 30 years, or maybe never figure it out. So I remember, I like sweating bullets. Some of this decision, do I do a week's pay for this one three hour thing, right? And I was like, Oh my God. And then I went down there. I had graduated to a 1968 Volkswagen since my mom had gotten the other one, Baja bug.
I pulled up in front of the nice hotel in Orange County, California, and gave it through the keys to the valet. You turn my engine off, and it usually had a little explosion. I was wearing a blue leisure suit, which is what people were in those days that I got in the thrift store, fake gold chain, but I was ready to rock and roll, baby. And I went in, talked my way, and a guy had set this thing up so I could get in.
And I sat in that seminar. And I'd read so many books that when Jerome was speaking, I would finish some of his phrases, and you're at a round table. I was somewhat disruptive, without meaning to be, but I was so enthusiastic. And then during a break, I went up to Jim Rohn and told him the story about, you know, how I've been doing all this stuff, and I wanted to come to work for him. And he's like, young man, if you want to come work for me, you have to go
through all my programs. And, you know, it was in those days, $1,200 it'd be like, you know, $12,000 today, 10, 10,500 things, the translation. So I know that kind of money. I'm sleeping my car in an old trench coat I got the thrift store. I'm working this janitor of, you know, trying to keep everything going. And I said, I tried to tell him my story, and he said, No, no, no, I don't want to hear all that. He said, I'm not your
banker. So I said, you could loan me the money, and then I'll go get these great results, and I'll tell everybody that you helped me do this, right, this whole plan. And he goes, No, no, I'm not your banker. He goes, you know, what do you want to come to work? You have the money by Saturday. And he said, everybody gets what they have to have. Some people have to survive. Some people have to succeed. Decide which one you are. And he walked away. And I was pissed off. I was like, he's
an asshole. I mean, I'm struggling. He's rich. I'm willing to pay for it. I just want him to finance it, you know. And then after bitching in my head about him for a while, another part of my brain started going, he's right, he's right, he's right. He's like, he's right, what he's right? You've always got what you had to have, but you haven't had much. It hasn't been any money must for
me, you know. And so I was like, okay, so I went to banks, thinking, banks will loan you money when you need it, which, of course, is, I'm sure, you know, if they only loan you one of you don't need it, you know. So So I went to four banks in row, turn down, turn down, turn down, and I'm running out of time. So I finally I'm outside the Bank of America, West COVID In California, a place called citrus Avenue, and I'm I didn't know what I was doing, but I was getting myself pumped up
physiologically. I know I know what I was doing now, but I was getting in this really strong state. So I go in there and convince somebody I walked in, I looked for somebody who looked persuadable, and there's this kind looking woman, kind eyes. I thought she'll understand. So I walked up to her with all the energy I had, shook her hand, probably shook it off, and said, I'm Tony Robbins. I'm here today to borrow $1,200 I don't want that money for, like, did repair
or something. I don't want for a vacation. I want it so I can attend a seminar. And she had this weird look on her face, like I'm not getting through to her. And she said, Well, I appreciate your passion. I said, I want to go, and I just want to go for me, I'm going to learn how to manage my time and this and that have lead and blah blah. And I said, and I'm going to go help hundreds of 1000s of people. That was the goal I had
at that time. And she said, Okay, young man, well, let me see your application settle down. And she goes, I appreciate your intensity and passion. And so she's reading it, and she sees my address is on citrus Avenue. It's a commercial street that goes through four cities. There's no apartments on it. So she says, citrus Avenue. She said, Where is she apartment in Citrus Avenue? I said, Well, I don't really have an apartment. I have kind of a mobile home, a
mobile home. So I told her the truth, I'm sleeping in my car at 24 hours between Denny's and 711 they don't make me move. I talk to the mailman. He gives me my mail because he understands what I'm going through. So if you send it there, I'll get it. And her eyes are getting like this. And then she says, so you want the bank to loan you money and we'll send the bill to the 711 And you'll be in your mobile car, sleeping, she goes, and then she goes, and you're, you're 17 years old. I said,
What does that matter? She goes, You can't sign a contract till you're 18. I said, I'll be 18 soon. She said, Now, soon? I said, I assume that to be 18. I said, I'll be 18 in two weeks. She goes, Well, probably that. I just don't think the bank's gonna loan at you. It's like, oh no, you understand I gotta do this. I'm I got even more passionate. And she said, Listen. And she looked at me and she said, you're serious about
this, aren't you? I said, as serious as a heart attack, I'm going to use everything I learned. I'm going to do all these things. And she said, I've never met anybody quite like you. She said, if you look me in the eye and swear to me, I will never have to come looking for you, because I'm not going to 711 or Denny's. I will do everything I can to get the bank to help you, but if they won't, I'll loan you the money. But you better take this seriously. And I like, jumped across the desk
from yesterday. She was ready for that stuff, and I said, I always tell people he gave my start, and that's why I've always told the story. And her name was Mrs. Williams, and she got the bank, you loaned me the money. Oh, she didn't have to do it. I don't know how she does. Don't know how she does. Maybe she co signed, I don't know, but I took $1,200 which is makes me emotionally but now remembering it, and all the money in the world is more expensive than the car I was sleeping in, right?
You know? And I went to Jim Rohn seminar, and I met a man there named Mike Keyes, who's still my friend today, 45 plus years later, and and he had just a little bit more money than me, and he said, Look, stay in my hotel. In my hotel. You don't stay in your car. And we were both pretty broken, but a lot of very wealthy people were there learning from him. But because of that, like I said, it's like
we were writing every word. I didn't go the bathroom and everything, but at one point, I figured every word was worth, like, three cents or some ridiculous thing, but I was so committed. And then Jim Rohn, years later, I spoke at his funeral. He's a beautiful man. He would start his seminars and say, you know, every time I get up here, I want to do a good job, because you never who knows in your audience. And he tells the story about this guy who was in a kid who's room and shouting
out answers. And he going, you know, it was Tony Robbins. Today, there's people all around the world. And then he also would tell the story about Mike, the two guys that were the most broke because we probably applied it as much or more than most people would. So that's where my whole start began. We
all have a aha moment where we say, Okay, someone tells us that we're special. And you had an interesting teacher named Mr. Cobb your sophomore year in high school. Again, I think a lot of guys all have their ultimate crush. You had one a senior cheerleader in high school. What did he tell you? And took you aside where he thought you were getting in trouble, and instead, it just opened up your whole world. He
he was a very kind of right wing, straight laced guy that taught speech and and I get in a speech class, and I screwed around. I was pretty humorous, and so I would take over the class to some extent. And the reason I took over the classes, there's a senior song leader, cheerleader Nancy Coleman, who I was totally in love with, but I was not in her league, but I would get her attention over everything, you know, the main football players there. I'd humiliate the guy and
tease him. I was crazy in those days. And so after class, Mr. Cops, Mr. Robbins, you stay. I need to speak to you. And I was like, oh shit, I'm busted. And I sat down, and it wasn't I expect. He goes, You know, why I've asked you to sit down here with me today after class. And I was like, Yeah, I think I do. He goes, why? I said, Well, you know? And I started to say, what
I did? He goes, No. He goes, I've been a teacher for 30 years, 30 plus up here was and he said, I've never seen anybody stand up and capture every kid in this room's attention when he speaks. He said, it's unbelievable what you do. And I was like, flabbergasted. I didn't have any reference for that whatsoever. And he said, I think you have a gift. And he said, I know more about your story than you probably think I do. Knew about my mom and things
like that. And he goes, I think I found a speech that embodies who you are, and it was called the will to win. And it was all about the only way I made it to that point in my life was pure will. And he goes, I want you to read this, memorize this, and compete and persuasive oratory. And I was like, I'm not, you know, you have to be a junior to do it. He goes, I don't care. I'm gonna get you in. And so I
read this speech. I was very emotional reading, and it was so tapped into my own story of who I am and and I got up and I took first place, and another first place, another first place. And I mean that didn't win every single one, but I won about 80% of the time as I win these competitions of the year. And so that developed that skill set in me. And then I decided to run for student my president, even though I wasn't the most popular kid in school, but I did it
differently. I went to everybody and found out what they wanted and came back and told the truth. I don't think this could be done. I think that could be done. And, you know, I won. And so it taught me that you didn't have to be popular, that you could, if you told the truth and serve, you get through to anybody. Because I beat the most popular kids in school by far. So it was kind of another
launching pad. Well, each of those things stack on each other to make you start to believe in something more is possible.
You're starting your seminars. You're doing some with Jim. He's letting you speak at 20 year olds old, I think you're at your first seminar. And there was someone there who was basically criticizing you. Tony doesn't know shit. He's really not doing anything. And then there was some and he's basically saying, Hey, I've got a. Client that has a snake
phobia. You said, I can cure it, but the better one that I think a lot of people would be more interested in, and I think you could create a whole new business. I know you're you've done well. I think people have said, Tony is now a billionaire, as you were able to give a woman an orgasm who had never had one in her life before without touching her, well, without touching her. So, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of guys listening out there saying, holy shit, Tony, you got to write a
book about this. And then there's a bunch of women out there who are not sexually fulfilled, where I think there'd be a 5050, audience there on that one.
Oh no. I made my career by taking challenging psychiatrists originally, and saying, Give me your worst patient. I'll have them in an hour who'd been working with five or six or six or seven years. I started that in Vancouver, and it became kind of my calling card. Now today, you know, I train psychologists and psychiatrists. They study my work and they get continued
education credits. Kind of crazy, but in those days, I was angry to see somebody spend five, six years at something that I had learned techniques that truly could wipe it out in less than an hour, sometimes 15 minutes. And so I use that. I take somebody like snake phobia and bring it out. They freak out, and at the end, wrap the snake around them, and people be like, holy shit. This is amazing. But, yeah, one of the more dramatic ones was woman who is an orgasm, but women are straight
that in the seminar, no, right? I
did not touching her. And the people were just, guys are like, can you teach me how to do that when I'm talking that when I'm tired? But women are very different than men, physiologically in that area, the man you can be, I always say, women need a reason to make love. Men just need a place. So a woman, if she is not emotionally safe, secure, there's a whole series of elements that allow her to be able to let go and experience an orgasm. And so I was just able
to guide her to that. But it became people talked about it a lot. It became a big piece. But then I did things to like the army. I took a training program that they've been doing since World War One on training people in pistol shooting. And I told the general I could take any training program and have cut the training time in half and increase the competency. And he said, You're crazy. I said, No,
I'm expensive. We negotiated. I went through a years with the top secret clearance, and then did a whole series thanks to the army, and I cut the training program by three days out of four, one day, one and a half days versus four days, and qualified 100% of the people instead of 70% of the people. And so that opened up doors. I got to do coding. I got to do other things of that nature. And then I started with sports teams, and then I got Nelson Mandela and mother, Teresa and
Bill Clinton. And then, you know, a way to think about this is Randy. It's just patterns. Everything is patterns. So if you want to think about like I have five kids and five grandkids, I have a 50 year old daughter, and I have a almost four year old daughter now, so I have quite a spread. I adopted my first three kids when I was very young, and I look at them today and I think, okay, the world is changing so rapidly. We're at the base of the change. We're not even at the
acceleration of the change. And in the next, say, 10 years minimum, but even five years, there'll be more change that's happened in the history of mankind, between nanotechnology, obviously from Ai, obviously from robotics, right? So many things that are coming here. So how do you lot of jobs are gonna be disrupted, depending on whose studies you read, 40, 50% of the jobs. How do I make sure my kids and grandkids can do well, or you and I can do well no matter
what happens in the world? I think you need three skills. Skill one, you have to get good at the science of or just the recognition of patterns. Everything's patterns. History is patterns, financial patterns, company patterns. What you don't get angry all the time. You don't smoke all the time, or you don't drink all the time. You do those things when you're bored or when you're triggered by sadness or when you feel alone.
So once you understand patterns, you have less fear, because it's not the world is in chaos anymore. And so I really started to get good at studying patterns of all sorts. And then the second skill, though, is if you can use the patterns now, you have power. You don't just know it's happening. You know how to use it. So that's what a great financial trader does. I worked with Paul Tudor Jones for 24 years, one of the greatest traders in history. It's like
it's all patterns. If you look at somebody's great with music or singing, they know how to use the sound or the movement of the body produce the result. A great director knows when to come in, when to come out, what to do with the music. But there's not unlimited patterns, and when you learn how to use them, it's like learn to play the other people's piano. But then the ultimate level is when you become a creator of patterns. That's when you're able to do things that no
one else does. You become a master of your particular domain of focus. So I look at those three skill sets, and I say, I want to make sure that I had that as many areas as possible. And when I learned how to do that, that's when I started getting the calls, because I did it to me first, and then all sudden, I get the phone call when the kid is suicidal. And knock on wood, I've never lost one, you know, done 1000s of
them. And we've got, you know, there's a documentary on Netflix called Tony Robbins, I'm not your guru. Great. If you go there, watch it. You see it to two people. I mean, yeah, it's mind boggling. What happens is, you get to see people, but you see them five years. Eight or two, and what's happened to them, which is pretty amazing, because it, you know, they're no longer suicidal. Obviously, one
of them is actually now a life coach in Berlin. That's right, which is incredible. That's
right, you've done your homework. So anyway, long story shortened, the bottom line is, when I understood that, then I got that's how I started getting people like President states or, you know, somebody coming to me saying, What am I? Remember, I got a phone call the afternoon. One day, it's President. I'd say it's Bill Clinton saying they're gonna impeach me in the morning. What should I do? My first response was, could you call me sooner?
It's tomorrow morning? But because I had these, I had no net, and I'd go like Serena Williams, she can't get back on the court. Her sister got killed, and it's us open and and I gotta deliberate now that having no net but also having developed enough patterns gave me a capacity to create patterns that produce results that people had never seen before, and then I started doing it in business.
So now I have 114 companies. We do $9 billion in business now and across all these different industries, I had no traditional college education and business, it was just all modeling. Jim Rohn taught me, success leaves clues. If someone is successful, not for a day or week or a month or a year, but a decade or more, they're not lucky. They're doing something different than you. So figure out what that is. And so most of my books are that. Like, I wanted to help people
financially. After 2008 I was pissed off. I knew a lot in that area are like, Okay, let me interview 50 of the smartest financial people in the world, and they're all different, but let's extract what do they have in common? And my billionaire clients loved it, but the average person loved it. You know, that's a New York Times number one best seller, and millions of copies sold because people could take it and actually change their life. Did the same thing with life force.
Interviewed 150 of the greatest regenerative medicine doctors in the world, Nobel Prize winners.
Because right now, the breakthroughs that happen today, on average, takes 17 years from the time of the breakthrough to your clinician will start to talk to you about I was like, I want to blow up that 17 years somebody write the book and empower people and show them what's happening with stem cells and exosomes and all these different technologies, and so because of that, I'm able to expand so rapidly, because I'm good at pulling up those patterns, and then I know how to
put them in a format that makes people really change, and has fun doing it, because I believe that, look, we're not in an information culture anymore. The information society died a long time ago. It's too much information. You're drowning in information and starving for wisdom. But we are entertainment culture today, so you got to capture people's attention. And most people have a long
attention span. I got to hold them for 12 hours or 13, for four or six days when they wouldn't sit for a three hour movie someone spent $300 million on and they're a stadium of 20,000 people. I got to get the guy at the top to be engaged. I've learned how to do that. That's a skill set to be able to do that, but it came from
learning all these patterns. So I entertain them, first get them so have the greatest experience, laughter, joy, fun, playfulness, tears, sometimes, but then that gives me right for the second, an E cube. I educate them. I give them tools that I have modeled from the very best on Earth at work, they're proven, and that are cutting edge, and
then they get results. And then, while they're there, I empower them to practice with real human beings and see what works and does it so they don't just leave there uncertain. So that's why, one of the reasons why so many people get such lasting results is because we have a process, and we do it for everything. We're teaching finance or relationship or, you know, how to shift yourself psychologically, emotionally, or how to shift your body. We still use that kind of secret sauce to make it
happen. I first heard your name from my speech therapist, I think, was 1415, years old, and he had done something called the Fire walk, which was invented by a woman named Molly Turkin. She had taught you at the year before, before,
toy burger.
But yeah, so she, she showed it to, I think, and 1.5 million people have been through the firewalking. Gosh, no, that's that's pretty cool. And then unlimited power came out and changed my life
on touch the dead was only when they were reading.
I was a freshman in Michigan. University of Michigan, I thought, no, just thinking about my speech and just
sorry. Nobody's sorry. I've touched. I'm really touching. It moved you so much. Oh, stop, and I find the only place that you should never have sadness or any embarrassment of tears, because water out of the eyes is one of the few places liquids can leave your body publicly. Okay,
yeah, I mean, well I could, and it was, I worked so hard.
Next Ram was up in this touch,
you know, I, you know, suffered for so long speech. And I. You know, we go to McDonald's, so I learned how to say, I have a hamburger. I mean, it was, it was just a lot of work every night. And I thought, you know, I worked so hard to do that as a good student, that was something I can control. Yeah, you know, the hardest worker. I mean, I graduated top 1% of my class at Michigan, and does work my ass
off, yeah. And in that book, there were two things in that book that from the same story, which you've already told, that really made an impact on me. First of all, your your boldness, two years before you wrote that book, when you went and said, I can improve your shooting by 50% you had no training and pistol shooting. You never held a gun or shot a gun before, which is just mom power. I'm like, God, how fucked
is that possible? Yes. And then the fact that you did it, and it really said, you know, it's a power of the mind. And yes, you know, so much of my success today is really just thinking about things, I think, in a different way than most people. I mean, we'll talk about preparation in a minute here. And I think, you know, there's good preparation, there's great preparation. And then if you think of the world's tallest building with the spire, is very thin air, it's like a pin at the
top of that Yeah? And it really like that pin reminds me of the focus. Yeah? You talked about, and also talked to me about how to get to that focus that anybody can do it. Yeah. It really changed my life. Wow, I'm
really touched here. That's beautiful. Well, you've had an amazing life. I'm sure you've shared on air, but I've done my homework on you, too. I mean, company founded, what is it? 25% of the internet. 30% the internet goes through it. You know, $19 billion company and all the other companies you built your passion through beaches and so I'm so
touched. But you know what I really respect about you, Randy, and I find true is some of the most successful people in the world had pain initially that drove them because it wasn't easy for them, so they'd
overcome it. It's like you look and say, How is it somebody you can give them all the love, support from a family, all the education, economic well being, and they spend their life going in at a rehab and somebody else, I mean, life steps all over them, and somehow they develop a hunger to do more, to be more, to give more, to share more. And you obviously have that, and you
lived your life that way. So when I redid this interview, because I saw the results that you created, because I have great respect for that, but I guessed or hallucinated, I didn't know. I guess that you probably had a pretty rough being, that you don't have to have enough being to have that hunger. But like I said earlier, would I really feed a billion people if I was well fed? Maybe I've fed 100,000 people. I don't
know. Maybe I've been 10,000 maybe I've had two but I think it's important for people to know what you just experienced, that the worst of times really is designed to be the best of times, but it's our job to use it, not let it use us. Most people today, our culture today reinforces people for being a victim more than being a victor. If you're a victor, you must have abused someone. You must
take an advantage. If you're a victim, well, look all this love and attention comes your way and it's it's an upside down world right now. It was generated a good portion by social media, where nothing is really true, where people alter the way they look, so they look better than they are, and then picks people insecure all the time because they're worried about, what if people find out I'm not who I project myself to be. The easiest thing in the life is to be yourself and your your
vulnerability. Right now, I just honor and respect. I can go up into tears at the edge of the lap about something that matters. I don't think that's unmasculine. I think it's just sincere So, and your sincerity comes from the level of intensity what you face. But look at the muscles you built, yeah, because of that. So you had speech difficulties. So just even say order a burger to where you are today. Is this incredible entrepreneur building these businesses, doing your podcasting
others now, teaching others to get over their pain. That's great. Yeah, me too.
That's why I'm still doing this. So you know, I don't have this shit at this stage of my life, right? I mean, I'm gonna be 65 in a few weeks, and my wife's like, what the hell you know it's like? We ever gonna slow down? I said, probably not, honey. She goes, I love you so much. A crazy person, but I am. I'm crazily driven because now it's no longer the pain that drives me. That's how it started. The anger at some points, was driving me, but those sources of fuel don't
last. What will keep you driven is not so much push as pull. Push as you're trying to make yourself doing something. Pull is that you've got an obsession for something you want to serve something more than yourself, and you disappear. I mean, when we think only about ourselves, we're always messed up, anxiety and fear and all this. You hear all these kids today talking about, you know, mental what's the word they use for it? Mental wellness? What do they call it?
Mental challenges, or whatever, you know, and wanting to soothe themselves. They know they need to become stronger, and they don't know, and it's not their fault. They've grown up in an environment where you can push a button and get whatever you want in two seconds on your phone. You know you only have to walk cross street get the food. God forbid, they'll deliver it to your house. You know that's the world we're in. But the world goes through seasons, and the
season you experience are. Early in life, of being really challenged. Every 18 to 20 years, the season changes, and so we have seasons of our life. Zero to 21 is springtime. It's easy to grow even if you had a work like I did to help your family, still, if it was a war, I wasn't going to war yet, right? You're being fed information, being supported. 22 to 42 is kind of like the summer when you get tested. You walk in thinking you're invincible,
you're 21 years old. You're gonna be president united states, you're gonna be a multi billionaire, and you're gonna have 100 relationships simultaneously, and everyone's gonna be happy. Then you're turning 3233 3435 and you're like, shit. I can't even manage one relationship effectively, and I'm not a billionaire. What the hell is going on? You get humbled, but you're the soldier of society. If during that time, 22 to 42 there's a war, you're going to war, not the people
younger and older, right? And so that's the area of life that's the most challenging for most people. That's the area of life where there was the most struggle, probably for you and your youth, in that stages. You get to 43 to 63 that's fall. That's the Reaping diet. If you worked hard in the spring and summer, you're going to reap. That's like when it's a fall economy, everybody makes it. Somebody wants to give you a loan, and because you got a pulse, you don't even have a
job. You know, they want you to buy a piece of real estate. They're willing to do it. We all know those days that happens every 20 years, like cycles, like like clockwork, 18 to 20 years, 17 to 20 years. Then what happens then, after reaping and having your most power, we're now at this stage of your life, holding out 5056, so at this stage your life, my bed is you can do more with your pinky than when you work 20 hour days. You still work 20 hour days, but now you're producing that much more,
right? Same for me, but when you get to that stage, you reap if, or you weep in the fall if you didn't do the work in the early seasons. And you obviously worked. But I'm here to tell you, my dear friend, what's coming, because I wouldn't have believed this. You know, you go 64 to 8464 to 104 64 to 120 the oldest living humans, wherever you live, to that's the winter season, but that's the season where there's the most joy in my
entire life. Because one, you have relationships that are people you've loved for 30 years, 40 years. I mean, there's nothing that comes close to that you know who you are. When you're 20s to 40s, maybe even 50s, you're still trying to prove to yourself, or maybe others, who you are. You get this point just like, it's not that you don't care, but you don't give a shit. It's like, I know who the fuck I am, and I'm
not here for everybody. I'm not the right style for I don't pretend to be, but I know my shit, and you know your stuff. I respect you. Respect me. That's cool. It's a different world. There's no There's none of that push anymore. It's just I want to serve, instead of, like, giant mission statements I used to have. Now, my mission is really simple. How can I help? Right? So it's like someone calls me and they're, you know, they got somebody that's suicidal, a kid is having a
learning problem. A business needs to be turned around. Or because I've spent a lifetime accumulating those answers, besides what I do at all my companies, individually, I do that, and it makes my life feel fully alive. So as long as you keep your health, that stage is the happiest, it is the most fulfilling, and most people think it's not going to be. So that's why I want to plant a seed with everybody who's
listening. So thinking about health, we all have had health challenges, not everybody, but I've had big ones. I know you've had a big one, and I want to talk about two separate events. You had a girlfriend while you talk about her mom, Jenny, and how that influenced how you thought about health in the future. I know you read a book that no longer is kind of the book you would recommend today, and then when you're 31 years old, you're on your way to coaching Saudi Arabian chic, who's paying you a
million bucks. You're getting your helicopters license. Yeah, you get, you get some phone calls. Some of our best ideas come in the shower. I mean, I like this thing in the shower. I'm horrible. Well, you had an epiphany in the shower. So tell us about what happened and what came out of your
health scare. Well, two things that I think you're alluding to. One is, when I was just a young kid, I was very, very driven, and, you know, I achieved a good deal of success at a very young age. But then in my unconscious, my brain would say, like, how does this happen so fast? I mean, I work on my guts out, but still, this is amazing. And my brain would go, well, you're gonna die young. And then I got obsessed with cancer. Some people, our family, died of it. I watched
them wilt away. And so I had it was very vivid to me. And so, like, unconsciously, it's like, I don't want to die cancer. Maybe I'm just all happening now because I'm not going to be here very long. And then one day, my girlfriend's mom came home, and she's diagnosed with cancer. She had it in her feminine organs and also a lump in her breast and and they told her she had nine weeks to live. And I've always been the person that's like, there's always a solution.
Well, for me, I probably wouldn't done as much, you know, we usually do more for people we love than we do for ourselves. And so I just geared up. There was no fear in me. I was like, we're gonna solve this. And so I went, grabbed all these books, and I read like seven books, and I got this one book called one answer to cancer, which wouldn't be the number one book I picked now, but it was written by a dentist who had pancreatic cancer, which is the most aggressive. Positive and got rid
of it in less than 90 days. And they thought he's going to die within six weeks. And so it was all about a detox the body and getting certain essentials into the system and so forth. And so I said to her, Look, the doctor says you're going to die. Why don't you read this and see why don't you apply this? You got nothing to lose. And then they said they want to do exploratory surgery on her. And she came to me at, I think it was 19 at the time to say, Should I do the
surgery? I was like, I can't tell you she did the surgery, and I'm a wrong you know, you'd die. But it was me. They shrunk sizably, like you could see it protruding for her here, and she could feel it protruding, and now she couldn't feel the protrusions. And the doctor did agree that it gotten smaller. And I said, was me. I think I'd wait if it keeps getting smaller. But the doctor convinced her just to be safe.
And he dug around, and he literally, I found something the size of the top of her little baby fingernail. And the doctor said it was a miracle. She said, is a miracle, but let me tell you what I did. And he's like, No, it's a miracle. It's a spontaneous remission. She said, Yeah, but let me tell you. And so he wouldn't listen. So she went around to churches, but what it did to me was, is she's still alive today. She's in her 80s, right? What it did for me is it made me no longer have
fear. It's like, okay, there's a way to handle this. And I wouldn't have probably come across it. I would have been in my own pity pot, probably because I was so afraid, or I've been so fearful, I wouldn't have found it. And so I became very much health oriented. And then your example was, Oh, when I got diagnosed, at one point, I went to see a sky won't bore you long story, but I want to see this doctor, and I'm a pilot, and so you have to get certified, right? I'm a helicopter pilot
and a fixed wing pilot. And he decided that that perhaps I had a disease without telling me, and he did these tests. So he calls me and calls me and calls me and calls me, and I'm like, tell him to send the report. I'm flying to South of France, you know, and I got home one night, there's a note on my door, and it says the doctor says it's an emergency. You have to call him. So then your brain goes crazy, right? So the first time, I'm
like, can I have cancer? I've done all the right things, but I fly a lot, water, radiation, you know, your head goes crazy. It's like, stop, because I try to call him. There's no answer because it's, you know, one in the morning, but I tell morning by time I got home. So I was like, Okay, I'm not going to worry. It's like coward dies 1000 deaths. A courageous person wants, if there's a problem, I'm going to handle it. I went to sleep. I got the next day, and the guy tells me you have a
tumor in your brain. Said, what? Because you have a tumor in your brain, you have a pituitary tumor. I said, How could you How could you How could you possibly know these I did some extra blood tests because I had a hallucination, and that tumor is creating a huge amount of growth hormone in your body. I said, you know, How'd you figure that out? You know, my hands are bigger than your head. You know, my feet are size 16. He goes, No, you have gigantism. He said, There is an active tumor in
there, I guarantee. I said, How do you know that? He goes, Why did this blood test? I said, explain it to me. He goes, Well, it's really complex. I said, I'm just I said, I'm a smart person. Explain it to me. He couldn't explain to me because he didn't know how it works. He just knew the answer. So he wanted me come in immediately. Do you know an MRI? And then he wanted to go do surgery, and I'm like, I'd like to get a second opinion. And I said, Well, you recommend
anybody? And he was not, you didn't have a good bedside manner. And I wasn't a nice person in that state. I was angry because I was shocked. And so he said, find it yourself. So, long story short, and I went to Sloan Kettering, I found this doctor, and sure enough, I had a tumor in there, and it it actually caused this massive growth spurt, 10 inches in a year. But then it infarct, which means it swallowed up a good portion of itself. I still have
it to this day. But what the guy want to do is surgery anyway, that's, well, side effects are what? Well, death. You know, really low energy. Well, energy is my life. So then I went to another doctor, another doctor. When doctors gonna send me to Switzerland for shots that they had, and you'd only have to shot every six months? And he said, I think that's what we can do. And I said to him, I said, Doc, it was his last day of practice. He was 72 he's the best in the country. And he goes, I said,
This guy wants to cut me. You want to drug me. He goes, the baker wants to bake, and Bucha wants to butcher. He said. I said, but what if I did nothing? I mean, my heart valves the right size. There's nothing off, except I grew fast. And he said. I said, what if it's a gift from God, like it makes me? He goes, Well, it does make you repair quicker because you got a lot of growth hormone. And he goes, Well, I just wouldn't take a chance, just to be certain I do
it. Well, the drug I didn't take, the FDA outlawed because it caused cancer. I found out a year later. So I missed a bullet, and then I finally, after, I think it was eight doctors, I got a doctor. It says, you do have a huge amount of growth hormone. You get about $1,200 a month, which is what a bodybuilder would be paying at that time for this. He goes, it's gonna make you restore really well. As long as you monitor it, you don't do anything. So I'm still, you know, I still monitor it, but
not every three or four years. I haven't seen any change. And you know, I'm, you know, I've got a body that I also buy a hack the hell out of it. But you know, if you believe the true age measurements, I'm going to be 65 in in chronological age, but I'm 52 in biochemical age, which is nice.
At some point people realize that they're better than different people. I remember I was playing golf. I'm a horrible golfer, causer, by the way, best place on earth. Um. As you Yes, and I'm playing with this guy, and I'm a horrible golfer, and we have a fro I have a pro golfer who came in, who's a friend, and we're all playing golf, and I'm just, you know, I lost 40 balls that round. And it was interesting to hear the conversation between
those two guys. And the golfer said to this player, who had been in eight all star games, 10 All Star game, who said, you know, at what point did you know you were better than everyone else, and 99% of people weren't gonna make it? So when did you know that you had this incredibly special gift that you could motivate, inspire hundreds of millions of people around the world, which you have? I mean, I put up on my social media. I'm doing Tony Robbins, you know, this is, this is my dream
podcast. And thank you. I got hundreds of DMS. You know, I posted to La story. I'm so pumped like going to Tony Robbins, how's it doing the show? And it's just fucking exploded. That's awesome. I mean, you've influenced so many people. When did you know you had this gift?
Well, first of all, I'm complimented. Thank you. I think, I think my gift is different than people think. My gift is the depth of my caring. I know that might sound core corny to some people, but when people ask my wife, what's something about Tony that nobody knows, and she says, how much he prepares because, you know, I could get up and do a four day seminar for 12 hours a day, you know, without thinking at this stage. But I every audience I organize, I do interviews for
people in advance. I find out what they're after, what they're doing. When I do my date with destiny, I got 5000 people, and they do a 10 to 20 page document. I read them all. I mean, the ones they turn in. Of course, some people turn them in the night before, and I'm doing it. But I'm obsessed with giving my all, every time I can serve. And when I'm up there, I think that's my secret, is I remember a friend of mine, good buddy now, came to a seminar years and years ago, and he was like, you
know, what is this bullshit? You know, positive thing to crap this guy up there in those days, it was the 80s, you know, you wear a suit and tie while you're in a seminar, and it's, you know, I'm by the fire. It's 110 degrees, you know, sweating. And I was on stage, and I was, you know, I get people to change their bodies, because that's how you change your mind. Just trying to change your mind. It doesn't do shit. You got to change the physiology first. So
I changed their bodies. And part of what we do is we have people extend up and rise up and jump and all these different things. And I remember just like, you know, you know, he was with a guy that was an NFL Pro Bowler, and the other guy he came with, it was a billionaire. I was like, I'm a billion. I'm gonna do this jump and shit. And he goes, Oh. And he goes, 15 minutes later, we're all jumping because he said we watched you.
We watched the sweat go from here all the way down to the end of your tie, and you, it was obvious, like you were giving every ounce of your soul. So if you could do that crap, I could jump right. And so I think people, I'm able to reach people, because you can't fake that for four days, 1213, hours a day, and they know don't have to do it. You can. They can feel it. So people open when you're there to truly serve them, not serve yourself. And I say that's
my biggest one. The second thing is, I'm obsessed with strategies about how to get results faster. And they work because they're the best. They're not the best because I created them. I modeled the best combination. So when did I know that? You know, I don't know, probably, probably, shortly after, I was working with the President, and I'm 31 years old, 32 and I seen
the President United States. We were in Camp David and as Bill Clinton at that time, and and he's wanting my advice, and I'm listening to him, and I got like, This guy's a president United States. And man, he is really messed up, and he's the most powerful man on earth. And so we begin to realize we're all
just people and and that. But my skill set kept growing, and when I started being able to do anything from turn around the army to, you know, speak in any country, and take people 1213, hours a day and have the impact, obviously I couldn't miss that I had that skill or the interventions that I'd done. And then, you know, you know, we all have some sense of inner pride.
And you know, it's funny for me today, because I have young bucks come up to me and say, you know, remember my name, because you know, someday, you know I'm gonna, I'm gonna be where you are. And I always tease them go, gosh, that's fantastic, because when you get where I am, you'll be where I was, because I'm not gonna stop growing. So let's do it, you know. So I love that sense of growth and competition as well. So, but I don't look at it as like I have this great
gift. I look at it like people have gifts. My job is to help them uncover them, but I have a great gift. The gift is just loving on them and having a skill to figure out how to get there.
I came from the California fires. I was
there on Tuesday Wednesday. I was there for business and some friends. And so two friends lost their homes, one of them third home, because let me know it's it's terrible. It's just
like again, talking about getting emotional. Just most our friends lost their home. I got a call from principal of school. You know, she calls all the time, right? And so I see the school pop up, and I never had. To a phone. It's a recording, and I only have my phone on I'm writing a book on preparation called extreme preparation. So I don't answer my phone in the morning, and my son was in town. I was trying to coordinate. You know, he's home from college, so I
have my phone on there. I see it didn't answer calls again and said, Oh, we're evacuating. Meeting in school. There's a fire. Come look out. I look out my window. I live in Brentwood, my officers in brown. I look in the palace. I'm like, Holy fucking shit. Most fires, you just see the smoke, right? This fire was black, a black tornado that was just didn't stop. I was there. I saw I was, oh my god. So I rushed down to my car, got in a parking rush, and then we're about three miles away
from school. And so I, you know, sun, so I'm driving down Sunset maniac. So as everyone else double honking, crossing the double yellow lines, parked, I don't know, five block away, sprinted into the school, right? I mean, you just look at the fire, you can see it expanding, and it's just sheer pandemonium, right? You got the kids crying, you know, you got the parents all your kids, and you know, you run out of there and then tell
them everyone, she is eight. I have five kids, so she's in second grade at Pali, and then we have a four and a half year old in preschool, preschools in Santa Monica, so they closed the school later, but we had to get to Pali. And six hours later, the school burned down. And two hours later, our first friend, their school, their their home burned out. So so many, so many people are suffering so bad, all of our friends, 90% of our friends, lost everything, their home, their belongings, thank
God, they're all safe. Which is most important? You said that crisis is a gift. What would you tell all of those families today who are in that situation, who are suffering immensely. What should they be telling their mind to help them feel better?
Well, I know a lot of them are very angry, as they have every right to be, because the government has not done its part and without playing politics, one side or the other, you know, to empty the world was empty. In Pacific Bible states, they lied and said they just ran out of Frank. Governor was saying they ran out because of the use. It's not true. They emptied it in the summer. So there's just some stupid things
that brought that about. So I understand the anger, but in the end, you still got to take care of you. You can vote differently in the future, but right now, what do you do? Well, I had a home in California that also burned down years ago. It was my dream home. I built it, and everything I wanted had all the memorability of my life it had, you know, I grew up in an age where there weren't digital
pictures. So all the pictures are gone, all my favorite rare books, all the inscription, everything that had sentimental value was gone. But in the midst of me feeling this grief and frustration, I realize this is not going to serve to stay in this place. I need to be a role model for my kids. I have kids, and that was four at the time, and I need to be I need to show people how to deal with this, because this is something that's unfortunately common. We're all going to experience extreme
stress. I don't care how rich you are, how good a person you are, how religious you are, everyone in their lifetime is going to experience extreme stress as you have and that I have, and probably more than once. Aren't you guys glad you came to this positive
conversation? But it's true. I mean, hearing Yeah, but we're all gonna have a house burned down, or we're gonna lose a job, or a COVID type thing is gonna shut our business down unfairly, or you're gonna have some of your family who gets a terminal disease, or you're going to get a terminal disease. I mean, every one of us is going to experience extreme stress. The question is, what do you do when
you have extreme stress? And the stupid answer, but it's an accurate answer, is, when you're going through hell, you got to keep going. And the better answer is, when you push yourself through it and you go to the other side, you get three amazing benefits that will affect your life forever in a good way. One, you discover how strong you really are. Because if it's extreme stress, and you don't give up, and you don't succumb, and you keep moving forward, you go on what's called
the hero's journey. We've all heard about it. All the stories of mankind can be put into one fundamental story. What is the hero's journey? You're living your life. All these people living life, their ordinary, normal, day to day life, and boom, something comes and smashes it. The Smash is a call to adventure, a call to a different world than you would have entered into if it hadn't happened. You don't know what it is. You don't even know why it is. It looks like it's for
terrible reasons. But as I said earlier, what if everything's happening for you, not to you doesn't look like it? I'm not saying it's fair, who said life was fair? But it's gonna lead to something new. It'll lead to an expansion. And so when that happens, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, Luke Skywalker and Star Wars, you can take anyone, they're living a normal life, and then something happens, a tornado, there's a landing, or his parents get killed,
something disruptive. And then, usually, most of us don't want to go on the journey because it's uncertain. We just stay upset with where things are. But eventually you're usually pushed into going on that journey. And when you do, what will happen is you will meet when our home burned down, my first thing was, okay, we lost things. I valued a lot of those things, but. Things are not the same as my family. Things for losing things is not
losing family this. This is a gift, and so I had to turn it into gratitude, because when you're angry and fearful, you can't change squat, but gratefulness, you can't be angry when you're grateful, and you can't be fearful when you're grateful. So then what did that lead to? It led to us building a new home in a different place. It led to meeting new friends and made me new mentors, and led to new decisions to now here I am in my favorite home, here in Florida. I never would have left
the Del Mar castle. It was a castle built out of pieces of castles in Europe. On top the hill was my ultimate place, my family. It's not even close to what I privileged have the privilege and blessing of having my life today. I love where I am or what I'm doing, but I would have never known that, because I would have stayed there bar having to change. And I think
that happens to a lot of us. So by the way, when you go on that journey and meet these new mentors and meet new friends, you'll develop new skills, and then you'll have new battles.
It's not like it's all just easy, the battles with the external, the battles with what's going on inside of you, and when you conquer and slay your dragons, you come home the hero, and you're able to give to other people, not on book knowledge, because you've lived it, and everyone can feel when you've lived it versus you're just talking bullshit or talking something you've thought of, right or read about. And by the way, when you're done with that you've helped those people,
it'll happen again. That is life. So what I tell people is, right now, you've got to cultivate gratitude. It's not positive thinking bullshit. It's because to live in pain will not make it better in any way. You have to make that shift of gratefulness that you didn't
lose it. I mean, it is a miracle that there are, what, 13 people that died out of that, when there's 10,000 homes that are gone, and all the schools and all the, you know, shopping centers and all those things that are out there, that's an incredible gift. It looks like, you know, a war zone. I mean, I was there. I know what you're talking about so badly number one, but here's what happens. You find out how strong you are.
Here's the second thing you learn when you go through hell, you discover who your real friends are versus your Facebook friends, because there's the ones that show up and are there for you. And thirdly, you develop an immunity to future challenges, because you develop muscle in dealing with this issue that you wouldn't have. It's like, how do you build a muscle? You don't pick a light weight and do 100 reps that will do nothing, you get a way you can barely lift and you could
push through. And you're trying to do eight reps, and you're you can't do one more, and the trainer says four more, you know? And you do three more, and you get more growth there than any of the time. This is building us emotionally and spiritually. It is not fair. It is not just. It shouldn't have happened and it has you. Better use it so it doesn't use you. And then the second thing I do is give them tools, and so we can announce it here. I haven't
made a public announcement. Yet, there is a tool called New calm that I've used for multiple years, and a lot of people, PTSD use it, but also just average achievers or average people, either one will use it so they can calm their nervous system, because most of us have a lot of stress. And it also has, what has great sleep mode and a great Wake Up mode. I've used it for years. It's one of the best tools available, because I know what it's like. It's 100 bucks a
year, whatever. I'm buying a year's worth of it, and I'm buying six months. I'm getting them to donate six months, and we give a year to anyone in Southern California that wants it for a year. No strings attached. Then there's a skill you may have heard of called tapping. It's based on understanding meridians in the body when, when things happen down, for example, in Sandy Hook, it's brutal situation. We went down there and turned families around using this 3000 scientific studies. It's a very
simple tool. So we built an app so millions of people can do this. I'm doing that for people for a year, and then I'm already doing something I do once a year, which is when COVID happened, another huge, unbelievable event affected the whole world, and people are locked in their homes. I was used to doing all these stadiums, right? You know, 15, 20,000 people, and they shut down every stadium around the world, London, Australia,
everywhere in the US. So it's like I built a studio, and I said, Okay, people are stuck at home. They're depressed. Depressing is going through the roof. People are suicidal. It's like, I gotta help people where they live. So even though I wouldn't have done it ever, I remember, I'm gonna do this in people's homes when I'm used to a rock and roll concert of a
building. To give you an idea what it's like on those seminars, like Pat Riley, he owns the Miami Heat was one of the greatest coaches in history. I remember the first time he came with these seminars with me. He's like, this is like the seventh game at the NBA championship, only, instead of two hours, it's 12 hours for four days. You know, it's like,
the energy is unbelievable. So that's used to I want to do that in somebody at home, in their bedroom or their living room or their garage, watching me on a little screen, right? But because there was no other choice, I came up the way it did. I built this studio. 55 ceilings, 20 foot size, LED screens all around me, 50 feet point six, seven resolution, so I can see more than I can see in you right now. This car apart
for me because it's magnified. I went to the guys that run zoom, and I said, I can't have 1000 people. I hate 25,000 people. And then I said, I got to be able bring them up to see them. I built software so instead of clapping your hands in a seminar, you might pop you're you shake. Your phone, it sends an electrical signal. When one person does it, you don't hear it, but when 25,000 people do, it's like thunder, so it produces the same experience. So then I said, Okay, people are
stuck at home. They're fearful. Let me eliminate every obstacle to them getting goodness in their life. Let's eliminate no travel. They can't so we're gonna do it in their home or their office, wherever they are. Let's eliminate money. Am I gonna charge you anything for it? Let's make an immersion, because that's what works. Learning a language a little bit at a time you don't speak it. Drop you in Rome for 90 days, you're gonna be speaking the
language. So I use immersion, but let's do immersion that doesn't freak them out, like three hours a day for three days. And let's really give them the skills to change their energy, their body, their emotion, their business, instead of a bunch of news resolutions, they don't get followed through on. And so we announced it, we put it out to people, and I developed these tools to keep people engaged. And we have people for 193 countries that
attend. The last one, I did a 1.2 million people in it from every country in the world. And we're doing it again this year, and I only do it once a year. And so whether you're in Southern California having challenges, you could join that also, but people from everywhere in the world go and again, it's not partially free. It's totally free. It's called the time to rise Summit. So if you go to time to rise summit.com time to rise summit.com you can sign up.
There's no fee for it, and you can do it at home or at the office. You do with your family or your friends. But the kinds of results that people get are unbelievable. And I don't charge for it, but I say if the one value I want back from you, for you is, if you're going to do this, we're going to give it to you. I want you to do an assignment tonight, give an assignment each day, and the transformations, and they posted on Facebook, the transformations
are unbelievable. And then you have a community of a million people who are all hungry and driven to make their life better and helping each other. So it becomes, that's how I start every year now. So anyone could do that. If you're watching, I hope you'll do that's why I'm doing a bunch of podcasts right now. I want people know about it. It's coming up, january 30, 31st and February 1. January 30 through February 1 content from anywhere in the world. Again, no
charge. So go to that experience, but the people in Southern California even more. So I'm gonna give them those tools for them that but for everybody else, I gotta do for everybody. And they could also go to that event, and I can promise you they'll be turned around. It doesn't mean it'll all be easy. You just mean they'll be on the path to having what they really want. Let's talk
about a couple things that make people successful. We've talked about preparation. I'm writing a book called extreme preparation. It's been one of the hallmarks of my career. You do a shit ton of preparation as well. Talk to us about Ray Dalio, and you said something in the book. I've been teaching this and coaching this for a long time. It really helps, takes the impossible and makes it possible. It helps improve your win, right?
Dramatically. Yes, and you can do if you're so many things I've heard, oh, I can't get that job, even if someone's firing 40,000 people, there's a job for the person who does a preparation. You talk about a concept called Pitch and cash. I've never thought about it that way. But tell us what you did for Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio do for everybody. But if you have
right, yeah. And by your by the way, I've done a lot of podcasts, I think around 150 podcast, your team was the most thorough in terms of questions, scheduling minutes. It was, it was great. I'm like, like, Hey, your team speaks my language. I love this. That's
good. Well, no, what? I wrote this book, money master the game. And I wrote it because in 2000 80s, remember the world melting down. But I was coaching Paul Tudor Jones at the time, one of the top 10 traders in the history of the world. You know, this is a guy who, in 1987 stock market dropped 20% in one day, the largest still percentage drop in the day. He made 100% for his
clients. Genius. So when this was all happening, I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't believe afterwards nothing was done, and that the punishment for the people that almost destroyed the financial system was give them more money. So I said, I don't have a lot of skills, but one skill I have is the ability to get to the best people, and I'm good at modeling, so let me interview
the very best. So in preparation for those like Ray Dalio, is one of the greatest, you know, hedge fund traders in the hits history of the world, there's already in his class. And so I prepared for him, I think three and a half four hours the night before. I prepared weeks before. But I went even deeper. I knew every part of what's going in. So I went in as typical, supposed to have a 45 minute interview, and I went three hours and same they
have with Jack Bogle. Jack Bogle actually wrote a quote that says, Tony Robbins came by for a 20 minute interview, and three and a half hours later, it was the most piercing interview of my entire career, right? I get three hours today.
I'll come drive with you in the car. We'll say we'll save the equipment wherever you're
going here anyway, what it allowed me to do when I sat down with them is what I call pitch and catch, which means he'd say something. I knew what it was, and I could add some value back and forth. It built a great rapport, and we're good friends today because of it. But one of the questions I asked him at the time, was what is the single most important investment principle, all things you've learned that people should know. And he said, Tony, that's a great question. I
struggled this for years. I finally came up with what I call the holy grail of investing, which is the title of the book that I just came up with, and it was based on what he taught me. And he said, Tony, if you can find. Eight to 12 uncorrelated investments. You reduce your risk by 80% and you increase your upside. That's wild. Now that sounds wonderful on paper, but when you go to do it, it's something else. And then I was at the JP Morgan conference.
They have a alternative investment conference where you got to be a billionaire to go, and I'm one of the speakers, and raised right before me, and somebody asked him some questions, and kind of led to a similar question, like, what's the most important member? And he said, The Holy Grail, same thing. And every head in the world was not written a single note the entire day. Drop down and ruin it down. So it's like, I need to realize even sophisticated people miss this
one. They may know it intellectually, but they got it. So then how do you do that? Like it's hard, because you say, okay, stocks and bonds aren't correlated. Usually, stocks are going up. Bonds are a different price point. That's usually the balance, but during tough times, they get aligned. And so you have to have sophisticated tools
to do it. And then I started studying history and saying, Okay, your asset allocation, where you put your money at risk, small risk, larger risk, upsides, etc. Your philosophy investing is the single most important thing. Every every one of the people I interviewed agreed on that. So I said, Well, what is the asset allocation for the most successful people in the world? Well, ultra wealthy people have 46% of their assets and private equity and private credit, like, Yeah, but that's
hard to get into. And I started doing the homework, and I found, in the last 37 years, there isn't a single stock market in the world that has built be average private equity now I wrote this book, and I interviewed 12 of the Masters of the Universe, people that then 20% plus compounded for more than a decade, or two decades, unheard of in the normal market, because when things go down, they don't have to sell, so they're not stuck. And when things go down, they can buy.
When things go up, they can sell. They have more flexibility, only the timeline challenge that somebody owns a stock make the right they have. And so I started studying them, and I was like, here's the real numbers, the S, p5, 100, most people would invest in, right? The index has gone up 10.7 over the last 37 years. It's pretty amazing. Compounding. The average private equity of these guys has been 15.7 so if you could compound 50% faster, people don't understand what
that means. If you put a million dollars in the s, p, 37 years ago and you never touched it, it's worth $42 million today. If you put a million dollars in the same day, same amount of money in private equity, average private equity, it's worth 220, $3 million today. So now here's the next problem. How does the average person get that? Well, you're I know you're a fit. Familiar, there are things like a credit investor. The government doesn't give you access to all these investments.
The best investments the best investments are reserved for people that already have money. It seems so unjust and unfair. I was squawking about it. I didn't do it, but somebody woke up in Congress, and last year, that's why I wrote the book. Last year, they came out with a new rule. Said it's got to confirm it this year. But the new rule is, well, you could get a lot of money by inheriting. It doesn't mean you're a sophisticated investor. You could be a good businessman,
but not a great investor. So why would we penalize people? Say, if they have a certain amount of money, let's give them a test to take. They can study for it. They understand it that anyone can have access to this. So imagine the compounding value to get your financial future when you can do this. And then there's one more thing I'll say, just because I know we're out of time. So I'm talking to this guy who was one of Paul Tudor Jones's associate partners before, and he broke off and
started his own company. I'd helped him really grow his business quite a bit. And I was saying to him, private equity is great, and because of guys like you and I, we have certain relationships and brand and so we get access to some of the best. But the amount you get, they're all sold out right away. It's so small that it wasn't going to alter my life in any way. So I was, I was, you know, saying, man, it's like, how did
he get in there? It's just the very best is already sold out, and he goes Tony, you helped me so much. I got to tell you where I put most of my money. I said, most of your money is a very sophisticated financial guy. I said, Yeah. I said, where he goes? There's this Company in Houston, Texas. And I went, Houston, not Singapore, you know, London, New York, Connecticut, same Houston. He goes, Yeah. He said they're off the beaten path, but they are brilliant. And here's what
they've done. When you try invest in private equity, you've become what's called a limited partner. And as you know, you give them your money, and then they charge you 2% of your money, whether they make your money or not, and then they get 20% of the upside. And people are willing to do it because they're so successful, but it makes them very wealthy. If you look at the Forbes 400 you'll see which industry has the most billionaires. People think it's tech, it's not. They think it's
real estate, it's not. It's entertainment, it's not, it's financial services, and it's specifically not hedge funds that go up and down. It's private equity. So I look at this and I'm like, okay, these guys are the masters universe, and they're getting two and 20. He goes, Tony, they have a way for you not to try to get into a fund, but to own the fur. So think about, instead of embedding on a horse, owning the racetrack. I'm like, you can do that. He goes, You. Yes, and
we've done it. They've done it with some of the like Vista, if you're familiar with, some of the best companies in the world. 100 billion dollar funds like that are producing results that are incredible. So I went and I became a client. And then it turned out the founder of that company, 20 years before it was a student of mine, like you, changed his whole life, and he's like, Tony, how do I get you involved? As I want to get him also I invest in the company. And then I wrote the book to it.
People know all these opportunities are available, like sports teams, if you want an asset that's not correlated, sports teams have done well in every market and every environment we've ever done, and they do better than the s, p, right? So I worked for a lifetime those five rings back there, those all championship rings from different sports where I worked with a team, and some of them I owns, on a piece of the Dodgers, on a piece of the Golden State Warriors, but I
coach the Warriors. Well, it's the most fun experience you can imagine. It's something you really enjoy. But also the returns, on average across all those sports are 14% compounded, not 10.7 and you own a monopoly. You own a business that's a legal monopoly, and who are your customers? Fans that comes from, fanatics that are multi generational, and now they're not just sports teams, the entertainment value. I'll just give you one example, the
Dodgers. My friend Peter Gerber about the Dodgers, I get chance to later on, they invested them. He paid $2 billion for the Dodgers, 2.1 I think it was. And everybody in the news is saying, no one's paid over a billion dollars. This is insane. They this. They'll never make
money $800 million more than the second bidder in that deal. That's crap. And
everybody's like, This is crazy. So I said, Peter, I know everything. You're nuts. I know you're not nuts. You'll slide the ski guys. I know. What do you know? What are you gonna do here. And he leans toward he goes, I love a cliffhanger. He's Movie Maker, right? He goes, wait three days. I want to make the announcement. Then you call me, we'll come over and
celebrate. He announces three days later, if you own a sports team, NBA, like there's 232, teams, if I remember correctly, you get 1/32 of all the media coverage. It's done nationally, internationally. It's huge. And the NFL, which is the first team, to just they were holding out, we just made a deal with them without doing what the NFL. They get a check for four, $50 million they ended every year just for their percentage of the league. Just that, but you get
to keep your local rights. Peter sold the local rights for $7 billion they made 5 billion and profited in a day doing this so you can get a small piece of a sports team, have the joy of that, have the benefit of that, and have something else that's not correlated the stock market. So I'm passionate about giving people choices, and I'm so grateful that the government is finally waking up to not limit people who can participate.
Unfortunately, we're out of time. Okay, I have two hours more of questions, and I believe in life, you don't ask if you don't get so I'm hoping to have the opportunity to come back and finish what we started. There's so much about there's so much about money that I want to talk to and advice. I'm gonna ask you one more question before we hang up, before we hang up, before we end the podcast, sure if you could give yourself one piece of advice to your 21 year old self,
yes, what would it be?
Yeah, that's a very common question today. It's so interesting. People ask that all the time. And I thought about it multiple ways. I think Jim Rohn gave me a piece of advice when I was very young. One of those was me trying to understand, you know why my fathers, like I said, were struggling so much. You know the good man, and he was the one who taught me that we're equal to souls, but we're not equal in the marketplace. You got to add more value. But he also taught
me something else. When I was really frustrated, he said, Tony, if you keep giving your all your gifts will make room for you. And I think the same piece of advice. I mean, I know more today and everything else.
But I think if you just keep moving forward, if you will not let anything stop you and you really focus on serving, because I really believe the only solution to long term happiness is to get outside yourself, the human mind, who always finds something to be concerned about, pissed off about, worried about, but when you're serving, you're not there. There's something magical about finding something you care about more than yourself, then you get that pull motivation we talked about
instead of push. You know, push doesn't last, pull does. And if you've got that kind of drive, you're going to keep growing. And if you keep growing, and have plenty to give, and if you keep giving, you're gonna have a meaningful life. In the end, that's what we all really want, is a life that's really full of
meaning. And so mine is full of meaning because of my family, because of my kids and grandkids, but it's also for all my chosen family and friends and all the people I have the privilege to serve all over the earth. And I've been able to do it for multi generations. I got friends that I knew when they're 40, but now 82 and 83 and they're still crushing it. And so that generation I have, my generation that grew up with me.
I'm 60, I have a generation of people that are, you know, 45 or 50 or 55 like you that started listening to me when they're 20, you know. And then I've got 17 year olds that are joining it. So the privilege and the blessing to be able to serve all these different people in different stages of life and have more to give now, because I've lived so much life, and it's certain things you don't know without. Living them, no matter what you try and how to
learn from other people. And so I'm excited about what the next 30 plus years, hopefully, if I live that long, will provide in terms of my ability to serve even more people. And I think that's what you got to do. If I were to finish, I'd say, Find something you care about more than yourself, because that's what's going to be the secret to your growth and your aliveness. Whether it's your family, it's your friends, it's your company, it's a it's a nonprofit thing to
you, it's a mission for you. If you can find that and find something that gives you that pull, your life is going to be one hell of an adventure. When
I started my show three and a half years ago, I made a list of my top gas you were number one.
Touched by that. Thank you.
Some great grateful we're here. Grateful to you for making an influence in my life and and so many more. And I want to shout out to Doug Evans, for making this happen and never would happen without Doug. You can pour it. It's important to give credit to where credit is due. This has been a true joy. Yes, I'm grateful to you. Thank you very much, and I hope we do have a chance to get to know each other and sit down again. So you should come to have you ever been to an event? No, I haven't
been to a well. I'll tell you a quick story, and I always have to go. When I was an unhappy lawyer, I met a guy named Brian, met a boy, yes, of course. And Brian and so at some point, our company is going to go public, and Brian had heard about so he invites me to sing Peter Gruber's house. Yes, I get there, and I'm the only one there, not in the business, the entertainment business, and everyone's the agent. It was a movie mobile meeting for Armani series, these young agents. I'm
a tech guy. So I got, I don't know if I had jeans on, in a shirt like this. I'm looking around it. You got people doing jumping jacks. Wasn't jumping jacks, but sort of you, they were doing jumping jacks in their suit. I was worried they were gonna rip their shirts. And I remember walking out of Peters house again like I read your books. I have a book Awaken the Giant film, which in first edition that I brought, brought with me. It's a paperback. You can say it's got yellow pages
that I read a few times. And I honestly walk out again, like you had motivated me already. I'd read your first book and and here it was. And so that was the only one I had been to. But I remember walking out of Peters mansion, you know? And I remember thinking this house up off its foundation, 29 girlfriend out on my pinky finger when I got out of the car, was so pumped. So
imagine doing that. We did that for like two hours at this house. That was years ago. But imagine being with 1015, 20,000 people and doing four days and nights that you get rewired. I want people to know that what we do here is not about thinking. Sanford did a study. We don't have time to talk about it. But you know, people go through and they get treated for depression, that's what they were interested in. And 60% of people make no improvement. 40% of those people
improve. 50% on average, some people get well, most people on drugs the rest of their life. And when they did the study with my group over six days with no drugs, no anything, 93% were no longer having depressive symptoms. 7% improved, 17% had suicidal ideation, considering suicide, going in, none of them afterwards, a year later, 71% reduction in negative emotions. 52% increase in positive emotions. So this is a
conditioning process. We're discussing something which is can be stimulating, but to get your results, you got to get in your body, and that's why I still do events. So you've got to come to events my guest and everyone please join me for you know, go to time to rise, time to rise summit.com and you could do one from your home for a few hours a day. But if you get a chance come to unleash the power, then you'll be my guest. So we'll blow you away. You have the time of your life. I promise
to come. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time, Randy. I wish you would have prepared, damn it. Now, Randy, I really am impressed in you've done your homework part about this meeting, long as you have so many details to talk about. But I really appreciate that, because I I'm an extreme preparation person as well. My wife will tell you I'm nuts because and then I don't use all that, but your brain is awakened
by all of it. And you, you know, you have more choices to be able to serve somebody when you're there. It's like, think of it this way. It's like, if you may, have grown up with two different beliefs. You were taught, so which one are you gonna live by? You were taught, look before you leap. You're taught, who he who hesitates is lost. Which one is gonna guide you, whichever one is more recently awakened in
you. So when you prep even in something you know, it's bringing it into the forefront of your nervous system, so that you're more likely to be able to make that difference. So I really honor you for doing that. You.