¶ Forbes Riley on Confidence and Charisma | Turning Pain into InfluenceIn this week's episode, Dr. Pompa welcomes Forbes Riley. Media mogul, pitch expert, andTL;DR (No Spoilers)Watch it here: Dr. Daniel Pompa Social MediaForbes RileyDr. Daniel Pompa Social Media
I was overweight because my mother loved us with food, so I was really kind of chunky, and I walked into a baseball bat and I had a nose that came off the side of my head. My entire high school, senior years, the last three years of high school, we spent seeing my dad in the hospital almost every night. So my mother turned to me one day in the hospital room and said, kiddo, we have no money for college. I'm really sorry. That was my only dream.
We're gonna be a lawyer, I'm gonna do something, you know, with this smartness. The phone rings. Out of the blue, and it's ESPN, I'm like, okay, uh, what do you want? We'd like to offer you a $75,000 two-week job to host the X-Game. And then these two binders show up. And then 300 athletes, I didn't know any of them. And now it dawns on me they've made a mistake. They've seen me play a reporter on some TV show. They saw the comedy thing and they're thinking I can do this.
The Queen of Pitch and one of the most dynamic women in media.
Forbes Riley has generated over $2.5 billion in product sales.
She has rewritten the rules at every turn. She's a walking masterclass in reinvention.
And today we're going behind the pitch to explore the mindset, grit, and soul behind her legendary career. 200 plus pitches infomercials, and she is the queen of the pitch.
That was an awesome intro. You win.
But you know what? It's so much more than that because how you got there, oh man, most people would be like, there is no way that this girl turned into this girl. And I said to you yesterday, wow, you offer women so much hope. And you know, that is your pain-to-purpose story. We're gonna unpeel it back. I want to hear every story. I want to get to the raw.
You just inspire me to want to be better. Do you know that?
Okay, I want to take back I want people to know who Forbes Riley really is. I mean, because you know, who when people meet you, they know in a quick short period of time that they're not meeting just an average person, they're meeting someone who's a game changer, a world changer. So, but I say all that to say that these people that are world changers like yourself come from something extraordinary, from pain to purpose typically. Take us back to a childhood. I want to know what formed you.
I do.
So I grew up in Long Island, oceanside Long Island, a very sleepy town near the water, but about 30 minutes from New York City. But I don't think we knew that because it was a very quiet town. My dad was um he was an inventor, he was an engineer, he built printing presses, uh, didn't have a college education, which was interesting. He was just really smart and very introverted. He was also a magician, and he vowed that his little girl was gonna learn magic.
So I've been doing magic since I was a little girl.
And what magic you do, she does magic, folks.
I do magic at dinner tables. I used to make doves appear. I did all the talent shows as mag as a magician. And there's something unique about being able to do a trick for someone. You can look and just do, oh, here's a card or here's a dove. You have to set it up. You have to the same way I do pitching is to establish a reality that may not exist before I start talking about it. So that skill, who knew it was gonna turn into this?
And my mom is a daughter of an immigrant who's a butcher, and she was a bit of a hoarder, she held on to things. She was a dreamer, but a quiet dreamer. So I've got these two parents who are very quiet, just one we had no other family. I had a younger sister, and I was four years old when I found my grandma dead in my bedroom.
Oh my gosh.
And I remember my grandfather just passed away, my newborn sister was there, and my mother was sad and she was crying. She just lost both her parents, her only in her only family except for us. And I remember thinking, I want to make this woman happy. And for most of my life, my entire focus, whether it was getting A's in school, I got a lot of them. I have lots of achievements. I wanted to prove to my parents that that happiness existed for them. And that was really my mission.
So you did you think you I mean what was driving you was m making them happy.
Yeah. I have I, you know, I was a top A student. I skipped your high school, skipped your college. I have a list of accolades a mile long because the goal was, and I didn't know it, was to just make them happy. I love them and they love me so much. Now, along the way, there were some bumps. So I'm eight years old, and I go off to elementary school, and they noticed that my teeth went in all different directions.
And I Summer teeth. Some are here, some are there.
Well, I suck my thumb, I think that was about kind of an insecure little habit. And the crazy thing is, my they took a mold of my mouth from 1968. My mother still has we have I still have the mold, which is we take out at Halloween and to scare kids because it's nasty. And I've come to understand that everyone does the very best they can at that moment.
I believe my parents were doing this to help me, I believe the orthodontist was doing it, but he put this little girl who I thought was kind of cute in braces for eight years. That's her entire childhood. I had silver, I had rubber bands, I had headgear, and then when I was eight and a half, they screwed a thing to the roof of my mouth called a tongue thruster, and I tucked a guess. And showed him a weird guy, and nobody can understand a single
¶ The early loss that shaped her drive and voice
word that I say.
That was a pretty good imitation.
Well, not only that, but I had big frizzy black hair, I was overweight because my mother loved us with food, so I was really kind of chunky, and I walked into a baseball bat and I had a nose that came off the side of my face.
So no offense, but you were then you would say your identity or false identity was you were pretty fugly then.
Fugly? I never heard that.
Yeah.
I mean but now I just put those two words yes. Oh, yeah.
Meaning, like, you know, you just described something pretty bad, right? Yeah. So that didn't do well for your self-esteem?
Self-esteem. Not at all, but I was smart, and that was the thing that I had. I was really smart. Um, I used to hang out with the principal doing linguistics when I was in second grade. I was doing all kinds of things, it was amazing that that intellect, but I couldn't communicate with people. I couldn't talk to friends. I had no friends and except for my parents. And it was a very unusual childhood. I watched a lot of television, a lot of movies, and I formulated some ideas.
I wanted to be James Bond. I would watch that and you know, I imagine that I could snow ski and wear great gowns and go to I I remember that one.
This remember the scene where it's skiing down and went through the restaurant thing.
This is a really sexy, fun life. Nothing like what my life looked like. But I had this dream because I watched the Academy Awards and I imagined if somebody was living that dream, could that ever be me? And that was definitely a driving force for everything, certainly as I got older. I have James Bond moments.
Okay, but how did you imagine it would be the fuggly little girl with the bad identity, right? Because you knew you weren't attractive at that point. You made you insecure, I'm sure. So how did you possibly think you were going to be able to be the next James Bond or this life anyway?
You know, I don't know if I thought I could be. I just wanted it. And so it was set in motion. Remember, I started this conversation about what do you want?
Yes.
I wanted that. There was no way that's good. If you ask me logically how, no idea how. I just wanted to.
Was there something in your brain that thought, I probably can't, but I still want it?
No, never thought about that. I can't. Okay, well. In fact, that's one of my superpowers. I don't know what I can and can't do anyway. And neither do you. So stop saying that you can't.
No, it's true. Lesson number one, write that down, right? You don't know anyway, so why are we saying it? Why would I say no?
Somebody's doing it, why not me, is what I always thought. And so uh when I was about 15 years old, my dad, as if things couldn't get weirder, my dad as an engineer slipped one day on a printing press and ripped off the whole front of his left hand. Oh, gosh. From his fingers, all I mean That's called de-gloved. Is that what it is? Yeah, okay, it's not nice. Um he spent three years in the hospital, had 15 different operations. I learned about skin graphs on your legs.
At one point, they sliced open his arm, stuck his hand inside his arm, and let this part grow onto a new palm. It was 1975, fascinating kind of technology. And I had a great respect for hospitals. My entire high school, senior years, the last three years of high school, was spent seeing my dad in the hospital almost every night. And then we were broke because they will deplete your money until you have none before they can do, you know, give you aid.
So my mother turned to me one day in the hospital room and said, kiddo, we have no money for college. I'm really sorry. That was my only dream. We're gonna be a lawyer, I was gonna do something, you know, with this smartness and this ugly face. And my dad's doctor, and this is where I have this philosophy, lesson number two, believe it, achieve it. Well, dream it first. Dream it, believe it, and achieve it. And the believe part is say your dream out loud.
You get some dream in your head, you talk about it, and watch how things manifest because you believe it's possible.
And why out loud?
Because then other people hear it. So if I tell you my dream, it becomes a reality. I will fast forward a minute and I'll tell you some of the dreams, some of the crazy dreams that I spoke out loud that have become my reality. And so my dad's doctor overheard my mother and I talking. She said, We have no money for college, but there is this thing called the Miss Teenage America pageant that's coming to town and they're offering a scholarship.
And then she looked at my face and said, But that's not going to be for us. I will tell you, that's a 50-year-old memory that I have never forgotten.
How did they feel right there? Can you remember how you felt?
I know exactly how I felt. I just felt sad that I couldn't do anything for my family. I felt sad that I, in fact, was ugly. And I believe, and I knew my mom was trying to protect me. She was not mean, not a mean bone in her body. I was just sad that this was the lot that I had. I would go to bed every night. I would push my my nose in. I would, I want, I would pull out the kinky hair. It was really, it was bad. Luckily, there was no suicide conversations when I was a kid.
There was no social media.
Yeah. Today it's different. It would have been very different. Yeah.
And Marcia Brady, by the way, was the example of beauty. She sure was, yeah. She was hair down the middle, straight blonde hair. And by the way, here's how I knew it was. She was hot. Do you remember when she when they threw a football, I hit her in the nose? Yes, I remember that episode. Okay. Yeah. Because she had a broken nose, she wasn't pretty enough to go to the prom. Yeah. So now it reinforced that I was, in fact, ugly. Oh gosh.
I know. And so And you're probably thinking, Marsha, if I had that nose, I'd be sad. It's like, you don't have this nose.
By the way, she got to go to the prom with Bobby Sherman. And I remember just, oh, how or Davy Jones, I think it was David Jones.
I don't remember that part.
But see, I loved all of those guys. I had crushes on everybody. I was just this dreamer. And the funny thing is, my dad's doctor turned to us and said, I'm going to fix your daughter's nose. Now, you're a doctor, you studied this. I had no idea really what he was talking about. But it was it was very hard to breathe, and he watched us suffer as a family. And I have these photos, and I'm going to give them to you to put up here because I think you want to see this. Oh, yeah.
It's very hard to conceptualize what I'm talking about. When you see the two images, because I woke up a few days later, Daniel, and I looked in the mirror, and this cute girl looked back at me. She had big eyes. The braces were off. She had a smile. She had this cute little nose. And I looked at her and I said, you know, we're going to save our family. We're going to enter this goofy pageant and we're going to win. I have no reason to say any of this.
I had to go scrounge up a hand-me-down bridesmaid's dress because I had no money. My talent was tap dancing. I still had kind of chunky thighs. But I
¶ Tragedy, guilt, and learning to see herself again
wanted it so bad. I didn't tell anybody in school. I had to go, there was a series of auditions, and there were 500 girls when I walked into the first meeting. And I looked at them, I'm grabbing my dad's good hand, and I said, one of these girls is going to be on TV with Bob Hope on NBC. Okay, I okay.
We're gonna pick up, but it's like stop stop there. Okay, because uh you all you got is the nose fixed, right? You still did you still have the teeth, though.
No, that the braces had just come off.
Okay, the braces finally came off.
So now I I'm looking at it and you'll see the picture. You will literally see it before and after. You won't even recognize the two girls. They don't look like sisters.
Okay, so the new nose, new teeth, and you're looking at yourself with hope again. Absolutely.
I literally looked at it.
So now what you wanted, you felt maybe a little closer to manifest.
I saw her.
She was beautiful.
And and she and it was bizarre. You know what's funny? What's interesting is I can't go back and have a conversation with her because I really, as I tell the story, cannot imagine what I put together to make this happen. But when I looked at her, I said, we're gonna do this. And there's a moment, there's a picture when we're all on stage. Thank God my dad loved taking pictures. And there's a lot of very cute girls there. Any girl could have won this.
But I remember very distinctly when we talked to the judges who were sitting below us, this this drive that I had, it was not about me. I want I didn't want to be a beauty queen. In fact, I wanted anything but it was a means to an end. And I kept looking at my mom and dad behind them and thought, I'm doing this for you guys. And I remember there's a picture of me the moment I won. And it's miraculous. It's like, oh my gosh, you you got it.
And what's funny is the the story is only good about walking in saying, I want this, is that I did get it.
Yeah.
And then I went on to the nationals.
What did your mom do? What was her reaction? Because remember, she was the one that said, Well, that's not for us.
You know, my mom, God bless her soul, she had a mentality, and I feel bad for people who are surrounded by family members who don't believe in them. You trust the family member and they give you their insecurity. My mom said success is for other people. She believed that good enough was good enough.
False identity, false identity. We were talking about this yesterday.
Yeah, we were. And she loved me more than anything, but she knew she just didn't have anything, you know. She was she grew up living on the couch in the one-bedroom apartment that her immigrant parents had. And she was like, We're doing really well. We have a house, we have a roof over our head, and you don't need to want for that much. You know, you're happy, be happy. And then eat. That was the other thing, have something to eat.
And we go off to the nationals, and this is interesting because it's in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's 1977. And they made you fill out the sheet about not only where you were from, what you did, your religion. That was I you can't do that today, but on there, you they're all like, you know, y'all have the funniest accent I ever heard. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Accents how we talk in New York. What's wrong with these people? And I had no idea how bad my accent was.
And they're like, Y'all have trees where you live? I'm like, I don't live in New York. What's the bagel? I'm like, okay, you guys, it's like a donut without a sugar. Well, mom, can you help me? I was so out of place. These little girls had trained to be in pageants their whole life. I was so out of place. I was so prejudiced against for a variety of reasons. And I didn't win. I did get on TV with Bob Hope. I got great photos, and it's a great thing because I went on to the Jerry Lewis Telethon.
It really was a and I got a scholarship to college. But I learned a lot about prejudice and how we don't understand each other. And I went off to college to be a lawyer because I thought, okay, that's just what I'm gonna go do. But in my heart, I always wanted to be that actress. I wanted to be that James Bond. I wanted to experience life. And and I also told you an interesting story, too, about an experiment that happened when I was 10 years old.
That I went to school one day and all the kids with brown eyes had to stay after school and get extra homework and were told they weren't good enough. And all the kids with blue eyes got to get extra credit, got to go home early. And I'm like, I got Hazel. They're kind of bluish-green, and I was like, no, no, you're in the brown eyed category.
Dang. You know, when you told me this story originally, I was like, well, who would allow this to happen? But they pitched it to the parents in a good way. Like they're gonna be able to experience what it feels like to be have prejudice against them, and that'll make them better. That's kind of how it was pitched, right?
So you set the stage. We lived in a very all-white community, and it was Jewish and Italian, pizza, pasta, and matza. And they wanted they wanted these kids to understand and feel what it felt like to be judged on something you can't change.
Right.
And I will say that I'm grateful because my third philosophy here is that life happens for you, not to you.
Yep.
I'm so glad that they put me in the brown eye category because I developed a great sense of awareness about how not to judge people on surface. And I'm grateful for this. But I went off to college and I thought, you know, I'll be a lawyer because I'm smart, and that's you, in fact, if you were smart in my high school, you were either a doctor or a lawyer. If you don't like blood, you had no choice. Oh my gosh, we need better guidance counseling. And but I wanted to be an actress.
Now, here's a story that you don't know. Uh, when I in my high school, we had a lot of plays, and I would always audition for the plays, and I always got very bottom, townsperson number three, or chorus.
¶ Pitching with passion - the truth behind billion-dollar influence
I never had a character with a name, I never had any lines, but I auditioned all the time, and I was in all the plays, and I just watched other people get all the accolades, and I kept thinking, oh, I do think I'm meant for more. I'm they don't know. Where do you where did this drive come from? I just had these big dreams and I always have.
I almost want to say how blessed that I'm sitting here talking to you and sharing this with the world because that little girl, even though she wanted it, had a lot of barriers to overcome.
Yeah. And so But that's what made you great. Go ahead.
Honestly, I have survived so much, and I appreciate that. That I get to see her and go, yeah, you know what? I did that for you guys. I'm on a show about pain to purpose because I've lived so much pain. Yeah. And so I auditioned for this is my senior year. I auditioned for Shakespeare's As You Like It. I'm in the drama club, but it's I I got I go to the call board and I remember looking at the very bottom to figure out what chorus person am I, what towns person. My name's not there.
Now I did have a fair amount of insecurity that built up over time. And I said to myself as I'm looking at this, okay, just not for you. You're just not that good enough. Now, here's a really weird moment. The universe has a very funny sense of humor. So I look to see who got the lead role. The lead role in this play is on stage for two and a half hours. She dresses up as a boy and a girl, and she manipulates everybody. It's an amazing character. And I'm like, okay, who got it?
And there's my name. And I remember looking at it going, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I can't and I went to the professor and I said, I wanted this since I was a little girl to be the lead in a play, and now my senior year when I'm gonna go up to be a lawyer, you give this to me, why? And he sat me down in a chair just like this, and he told me all these things about me. And I did the play, and it was wildly successful.
And I believed in him that he was that the belief in me was right. And on that note, I called my parents when that play hit, and I said, guys, I love you so much. I know we worked so hard to get me to college, to be a lawyer, to have a career. I'm going to New York City to be an actress. And they're both crying on the phone, and they're like, We love you, you know, we can't help you. And I said, It's gonna be okay. I'm gonna be fine. And it was.
I auditioned for my very first feature film, and I got the lead role. It's a movie called Splatter University.
I didn't see it.
I know. Well, I'll tell you what's funny about it. It's an 80s slasher movie. And when I read the script, she has a beautiful story of a young teacher who goes to a school after another girl, another teacher's been killed at a slasher movie. But she has a great heart and there was no nudity. That was my big thing because I didn't want to embarrass my parents. And I said yes, and I star in this film, which today has a whole groupie following.
People love Miss Julie Parker, and it was the beginning of this trajectory of something going, you might have been made for more, but keep going. And I have not stopped. I mean, I went on to do a whole bunch of films, I did soap operas in New York, I ended up on Broadway with Christopher Reeve. But okay, now here's the thing. So I'm in my 20s, now I am kind of cute, and I'm living in a four-story walk-up in a Chinese over a Chinese kitchen, smell terrible in Hell's Kitchen. But I'm doing it.
I've got crazy roommates and we're living this life. And I was like, about one day. Um, oh, so you need an agent. And I met a couple of agents, but I didn't go to Juilliard, I didn't go to any of the respected schools, and I was a little scrappy in my behavior, I guess. And one day I do meet this big time agent and he invites me to lunch at a hotel, and I'm expecting we're gonna have lunch. Only apparently it's not downstairs, it's upstairs.
So I thought, okay, I'll go upstairs, and I knock on the room, it's his hotel room, and there's lunch for us. And I'm like, I'm very naive. I really was. And I said, okay, great, then we have lunch up here. Only I was supposed to be on the menu. And luckily he was shorter than I was, and he started to chase me around the bed. And I remember thinking, You've got to be kidding. And I laughed at him, going, Really? Really?
And then I experienced a little bit more of this in offices and casting couches and things that were like well, that's never gonna happen. I grew up with some very supreme morals. My mother, I think, was a virgin at 27 when she married my dad, and there was something about that to me that was very, very important. And at some point I thought, well, how do you get work without an agent? And then something hit me. I said, You know what you do?
I got a piece of stationery, I wrote CMA on it, creative management for artists. I figured out how to get the breakdowns, which is what the casting people send to agents to get actors. I got them. And I hired a woman named Lindsay Maxwell, and Lindsay was British. Lindsay thought Forbes Roddy was a spectacular talent. And she would call very often, and I was her only talent because I was also Lindsay Maxwell.
And so here I am, and I've never really told these stories publicly because I thought at some point they're gonna put me away or arrest me, but I was my own manager for three years. I booked movies and television and commercials because I could pitch me better than anyone else.
The natural the queen of pitch.
And I got a Broadway show opposite Christopher Reeve as my own manager. But this is a true story,
¶ Overcoming lies, building belief, becoming unstoppable
yeah. And I didn't talk to anyone, remember, I didn't have a whole lot of friends ever. So a lot of what I did was just on my own. I had conversations with myself, um, and it's what I did for years. Uh and then at some point in the 80s, New York City got so bad, and I really had big dreams, but I can only get so far being my own manager, and uh I decided to say, you know what, I'm going to LA. And I did. And um now I'm deciding if I should tell you guys something I've never really talked about.
I was working as an actress, and when I wasn't working, and I landed a Broadway show, this is you know, you're doing all these amazing things, and I had I have killer stories way more than we have time for. Um, but something happened. Uh because you need to make money, and I'm a terrible waitress. I have I literally had a waitress job for one day. I got my real estate later.
I see, I would think you would be an amazing waitress. It must be uh it must be your scatter. I don't know.
Yeah, no, no, no, it didn't really did not work because I would chitch. With people, I want to talk to you everyone. Of course, yeah. So you had food orders, that's not happening. I got a real estate license for one day. I literally got my license, showed one couple an apartment, and thought, I can't do this. And then the question on the table was, What are you gonna do? And um, well, dear friend of mine, it was the actor strike in the early 80s, and he called me and he said, I got a goofy idea.
He brings me to his back then 42nd Street was X-rayed to theaters, and he was a comic, he reminded me of Paul Rudd, kind of funny little goofy, and his best friend was an agent for strippers, and he looked a lot like George Clooney. So you got goofy and kind of handsome, and they said, We've got an idea, we're gonna create a company called Strippogram. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. He said, Yeah, we don't really know either, but here's what we want to do. We we tried it.
We we want someone to go into a company, into a business, and pretend this was long before punking, and literally punk an executive, and then you're gonna dance off your clothes down to kind of like a little bikini. And I'm like, he said, Yeah, he said, so well, because I'm like, he's I he gave me $50. He said, Go downstairs and get a garter belt. I'm like, a what? He's gonna go downstairs. And remember the woman in Beetlejuice that kind of loud. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I get downstairs to this and he's like, she's like, What do you want? I I need a belt. Like, what kind of belt do you need? I'm like, I need a garter belt. She's like, ah, give me a minute. She comes out with this thing, and I'm like, there's nothing. Well, I'm like, what do you do with this belt? And she put stockings on me, and I got the whole thing all set up. It's like, pretty sexy, pretty nice.
I go back upstairs and I talk to them, and they said, Well, we'll put on the music gonna dance off your clothes. And I'm like, what part of this doesn't sound like a conservative and I can tell my mother what I'm doing?
But there was something about- you see this was so not who you were before.
Not at all.
Yeah.
But there's something about it that seemed kind of fun. And again, I don't ask me why I took it challenge.
There was some intrigue in the fun of it, and there was something because you were definitely going outside of who you were.
Well, now here's what I just unpacked recently. I was recently, now this is like 40 years later, I was recently in a very bad van accident. And I ended up going through some things, and what came out of that was me remembering something that happened to me when I was 15. I was wearing a bikini. My dad, God bless him, who loved me so much, told my mother that he was going to teach his first kid to fly before she would drive a car. He loved flying seaplanes, it's what he it's one of his passions.
We didn't have a whole lot of money. And so he got some friends who could fly planes, and one day, I'm 15, he's and I had gone up for the first time, and and it was kind of fun. And he said, kind of like to a guy like you, but it was on his 30s, you know, give my daughter go out to the beach and you know, go flying. Was very innocent. We go out to Montauk Beach, we land, and the the runway dead ends into a beach which dead ends into the Atlantic Ocean. There's nobody there.
There's no cell phones in 1975. I'm 15, he's about 30, and he had very different intentions. And so he ended up molesting me, and there was nothing that I could do about it.
And we get back- Wait a minute, you didn't have any recollec recollection.
Oh, no, hang on, just oh, I knew that part of the story. I knew this happened. And I was fine with what had happened. I'm like, okay, what happened? But we this is the part that I didn't remember. We were flying back, and there's a bridge, a steel bridge, that goes uh gets Spire Island to Long Island, and I'm in the passenger side, he's in the pilot side, and he leans over again to touch me in the plane.
And the plane, as he does, veers over this way, and we are literally going like this right into the bridge, and he pulls, gets it's like pulls up just I could literally lick the bridge. That's how tight talk about traumatic. I land and my father says, So how was your afternoon? I said, It was fine. What are you gonna tell your dad? He's gonna kill this guy or kill me, or I didn't know what I didn't know what to do. I didn't say anything. I come home, my mother says, How was your afternoon?
I said, It was fine. I walked upstairs, I closed my door, and I forgot about it. And I never talked about it, never told anybody. Literally last year uh I was in the middle of a weight loss challenge, and I guess I'd lost enough weight, I'd stored something in my body, and all of a sudden this bridge comes flashing into my face, and I had no idea what I was looking at, and then it all came flooding back what had happened, the trauma of that moment.
And then I thought about all the things that had happened that I just never never even dealt with. But it now explains to me that maybe all those telegrams, because I ended up doing stripogram for almost 10 years. Oh, wow. It's a whole nother story. I know we don't have time for everything that went through to me, but here's I had a rule: no sex, no touching, no nudity, and I embarrassed you to no end, being the man in charge. It was like I was given a key to the psychological kingdom.
I would walk in, I did one, I stopped Wall Street for seven minutes. Now let me tell you something. This was really interesting, and I got to make my own scenarios. Your wife would hire me to embarrass you on the podcast. She might say, Forbes, you're gonna go in and pretend to be this high-level CEO, and you're gonna sit there and talk to Daniel for like 10 minutes, and then at some point you're gonna go, Daniel, I want you to hear this song. And it's it would have been your birthday.
Happy birthday, Daniel! And you're like, Okay, that's weird. She's doing singing to, and then the music would go, da-da-da-da-da. And I would move this away, da-da-da-da-da. And I'd have all these clothes on. And right here on a podcast live, I would strip down to like a bikini, your wife, girlfriend, and everyone in here would be looking at you, and I would have embarrassed you. And they would have given me a hundred dollar tip, and I would have walked out.
Could that have been the the the control that you now have over when you were out of control?
Let me tell you something. I didn't understand why I loved this, but I would But you loved it. Let me tell you something. Two things happened. One, I got paid in cash, and I got tipped, which means you would make $50 to $75 a telegram plus a tip Yeah, but there was something more psychological. Oh no, no, but at some point I had $10,000 stuck in my drawers at home. I mean, I come from no money.
Yeah, all of a sudden I had cash everywhere, but I did not realize why I loved it so much until last year.
Yeah. The van accident.
Yeah, yeah. It was my control, the only control I had over men. Yeah.
That's where I was going with it. Yeah. No. Exactly.
Man, I and I I would I want to make this into a series because I think Stripogram is a great story. Uh, it evolved into a very big company. It was really um a very lovely adventure, how it became the two of the guys and myself. And all the crazy stories. I did one on a set of a soap opera, I did one on a commuter train. I was weirdly, you know, you talk about who is this girl? Who takes their clothes off on a computer, a commuter train at 6 a.m.
in the morning? Yeah, right. You know, it's like, and we're getting there, but it's like now you are empowered, driven to help women. And I think, you know, we've had this conversation. I think women right now are set to change healthcare. I mean, you know, and the health of America and in so many things and business. And, you know, I see where it's all come from now. It's like it's just so clear to me of what you've been called for such a time as this.
That's exactly what I feel like. I have gone who you would never have a guest who'll sit here and tell these stories. Ever. Yes. And I'm still in my 20s in this story. Oh my gosh. I know. Yeah. But I, and oh my god, and there's so many. I I I I wish, I wish that she then had someone to talk to, but I didn't. I just kept moving forward and maybe to be here for a time like this. Yeah. Because it gives me a crazy sense of confidence. And I'm not all that confident. That makes sense.
I'm a bit of an introvert. I would probably hold on, wait here.
All right. Get on off. A bit of an introvert. Yep. Is Joshua in this room? Yeah, Joshua. She's a bit of an introvert.
I watched a TED, I watched a TED talk called The Extro they're looking at my husband, going, Really?
Yeah.
I watched a TED talk called The Extroverted Introvert. You know what introverts don't like? They don't like small talk. If you notice last night at V- That's me.
I said, yeah, I know.
I'll talk marketing with you all day long. I'll have conversations like this. Same way. I will stand on stage and hate small talk. I'll go to a room.
But I come to a party. I'm ho I suck at small talk. I hide behind my wife. Right. Yeah. Because she just it's natural to her. Small talk is actually really interesting when she does it. When I do it, you can tell something's wrong.
Isn't that fair?
You're gonna like it.
And so the qualities of an introvert, and it's kept me from a lot of different things, by the way. But if I'm the center of attention, I know how to hold the court. If I'm not, I will, and I don't drink at parties, so I don't go to parties because I always feel like I don't know what to do. I don't know who to talk to. If I'm not comfortable with people, I just stay in the corner, I leave. I'm the same way. Right. Are you an introvert?
I am. I am. But people don't think I am because I'm on stage, I'm doing this. I'm yeah, I'm, you know, but I'm an introvert by every definition.
Here's how you know you're an introvert. First Friday night of COVID, I remember this very well. I'm like, yes, nobody gets to go out. I don't have to worry about it. I'm so happy to be home. Everybody was at home. I can't express to you how much I love that. That's an introvert.
Oh, yeah, okay.
But you know, here's the interesting thing, right? Yeah, my wife would be out of her mind, right? She was like, we're going anyway, right? So she made it happen, right? She's an absolute extrovert, so that's why it's easy for me to just go in her wake and I go into a party. I'm always behind her, always. You know, because she just makes it easy for me. But once the conversation opens up into something like meaningful, I'm all in. I'm all in. But it's getting there, oh no. Yeah.
It is, I don't like labels. I because you can fast forward through my story. I currently have over 47,000 students, and I hear how people label themselves and diminish who they are. And I realize that that isn't just not healthy for you. How do you know you are an introvert?
Yeah.
Well, I have certain signs for me when I I kind of figured that out, it wasn't to diminish it, it was just to kind of understand some of my quirks. It's like, well, why don't you do that? I'm like, I just didn't. I don't like picking up the phone and making cold calls to people. Um, a lot of things. I I love the internet. I love, you know, it's great that you can meet people, LinkedIn. I can find out all about you and then connect to you and feel comfortable.
So being able to compensate, people say, uh, I also, you have ADHD. Great. I get more done in an hour than most people do in a week. It's a superpower.
No, my son is ADHD. He runs company. I mean, he's amazing, right? It's a it's a superpower. So it I perceive ADHD as like this positive thing because I watch my wife, I watch my son, and I'm like, dang, I wish I had a little bit of that. It's like so I don't think of it as a negative thing. We talked yesterday, we talked um a little bit about false identities, right? And I mean, you had so many false identities put on you, right?
And just, you know, and I describe false identities as labels that are given mostly by people who love us dearly our parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, you know, who really care, but they they just randomly say things, right? That are maybe, you know, look true on the surface. But anyways, we take on these labels, and then those labels become us, and then that holds us back.
And coaching adults, doctors for so many years, I realized it's the false identities that are holding people back, right? Yours didn't. I mean, it you know, yours didn't. I mean, you were given a lot of false identities. So what the heck? How did you break through? Because I find when I'm coaching people, it's hard to get them to not believe these false identities. And, you know, listen, I believe we are all striving for, you know, the true identity is who God created us to be.
I see you so much of that, maybe even more so than you. I just see you who you were meant to be, who God created you to be, despite all this. You know, but my gosh, how do, you know, how'd you get there?
Wow. How much pain do we have time to talk about? But also so much success. It's very confusing. You know, and I got to Los Angeles. One of the first things that I did is.
You're confusing, actually. Yeah, this is exciting.
This is okay. Let me go down a couple of crazy things that just happened because I have this unabashed desire to do, whatever that is. I walk into a comedy club. I've never been in a comedy club before. And I they they have a whole list of you know names. I guess it was the end of the four second day. I walked on stage. In fact, I walked in wearing a dress, carrying some pants, and the woman said, Well, just get on stage. I said, I can't, I'm not funny in a dress. She said, just get up there.
And we had a conversation, and she said, Come here, you need to meet the owner. The owner is Jamie Masada of The Laugh Factory, where Ellen DeGeneres and Robin Williams and Jerry Seinfeld all got their start. And he looks at me and he says, I like you. You're gonna be my host every Friday and Saturday night. I'm like, what does that mean? He said, Yeah. And I and I left. And I'm like, I'd never been in a comedy club. I didn't even know what that meant.
So I went and I opened up Cosmopolitan magazine and I read Ruder Rudner had made a very funny thing about health clubs. So I got on stage on Friday night, eight o'clock, welcomed everybody, and said, Hey, and I did her routine because nobody, and he's sitting in the back, he's like, Come here. He said, What you doing? I said, I'm being funny. He said, I did not hire you to be funny. I got funny people.
You go on stage without a thought in your head, ask somebody where they're from, give me 10 minutes, and introduce the funny people. Okay, I did that for three years. You know what it was like to be around the greats of the great in comedy? And I was never that funny, but I got to work around that. I'm not qualified for that. I went and auditioned for a DJ job to interview classic rock stars in a place called Westwood One. It was off the record with Mary Turner. I'm not a DJ at all.
I don't have any musical background whatsoever, but my agent at the time, who represented me because I had the comedy thing, said, no, no, no, go in. I met the producers, I get the job. The next thing you know, I'm sitting in a room like this with Foreign Sting, Jeremy Clapton, George Thurgood. I'm like, and then I don't know anything about them, and I refuse to do any research whatsoever. So the conversation is very fresh. For example, you know uh Walter Becker from Steely Dan, right?
I'm sitting with him and I would say very unusual things like, so Steely Dan, how'd you get the name of the band? He's like, Oh, you know it's the name of a skill dildo. Yeah, no, I didn't know that. Oh my, let me tell you, I said a lot of those things. Yeah, they loved me. I was the most naive interviewer ever. Yeah then I auditioned for okay, a sell me the pen moment. This changed my entire life. What? A sell me the pen moment. Oh, a sell me the pen moment.
Well, you know, that Wolf of Wall Street. I walk into an audition because when you're an actress, you walk into a lot of auditions. I would audition for commercials and movies and TV, and I got all kinds of small things. And one day, there's a pen sitting on a desk. Daniel, if I gave you 20 seconds, sell me a pen. Go.
Yeah. What did Jordan Belfry say? He said, I think someone picks up the pen and starts going, okay, well, you need this pen because look, it's so nice, it's so shiny. No.
Right. No. So my moment, long before Wolf of Wall Street came out, I looked at the camera and I said, The funny thing about pens. When I went out to college, I was 15 and a half years old. I'd skipped year high school. I was very young, naive, and insecure. My mother used to write me long hand notes. I'd race the mailbox to get them, and I realized a pen like this can reach out and touch somebody's heart.
See.
Jake of Body by Jake walks out from behind the camera, grabs my face, you're gonna make me a lot of money.
Yeah.
And what he had in mind, we talked about Body by Jake.
Y'all remember that? Come on. Yeah. Oh, I'll send you a clip of this. Wait a minute. That was eight, that was nineties.
Was it ninety? Yep, 1991.
Okay.
And he had his vision for a 24-hour network because cable had just happened. Yeah. It went from three to five channels to 500 channels.
So now you're entering the pitch.
Well, this was crazy. No one ever taught me how to pitch.
I had no idea what we were doing. But he saw because you brought the emotion to the pen, right? Not describing it. Look how nice the blue color is. Okay, yeah, uh-uh. No, you're not gonna sell a pen, but let me tell you why this pen is gonna change your life.
He had this idea for a 24-hour network called Fit TV. It was divided into four parts. The first part was Tammy Lee Webb doing aerobics, then Jake Healthy Living, a little workout, and then 15 minutes of me selling products. I didn't even know what that meant. And everybody brought their products on, and it was a very funny time because two things happened. One, I never had a body and I never had abs. So I had somebody make jackets for me.
And if you watch all 1500 episodes, I'm wearing these jackets that cover my butt. But luckily, God is very funny. Hopefully, if you're tall and skinny and gorgeous, you also can't pitch. And these fitness models would come in, and that's how I used to look at it. They'd come in, they were ripped, they were shredded, and we would go, okay, so sell me this. They're like, okay, so like, what does it do? Oh, yeah, okay, so it works your abs. And it how does it do that?
And I was like, okay, stand right there.
Yeah, yeah. Let me talk about it.
Here's what we talk. That's exactly what happened. I did that for five years. 1,500 products. It was my amazing job while I was off auditioning for movies and TV. He sold that network to Fox in 1993 for $500 million. Oh my God. And then infomercial started. And now all of a sudden, this girl who wanted to be all of those things was positioned to be the only female who was pitching on television. You had a lot of the guys who came in who it was a man's game. It was totally a man's game.
Oh, Billy Mays, yeah. What did he pitch?
OxyClean. But he pitched more than that. And I've worked with everybody. Um, there's not a single person from George Foreman to Tony Little to Tony Horton from P90X. Who is Chamois? What was his name? Vince. Vince Hoffer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ron Popeel, said it and forget it. That whole industry
¶ Strip Program Series Proposal
was emerging as the only female pitch person was doing her thing. So what happened then was the guys would want a girl sidekick to pretty much go, hmm, that tastes good. Yeah. Oh, look at I did a lot of that.
Oh, yeah, yeah. She's no sidekick. Yeah, I know. You're gonna be like coming out, they're the sidekick all of a sudden.
That sometimes happened. I gotta tell you, as a woman, I was definitely creating new territory and pissing a lot of people off because I had a lot of opinions. Because the script would read this, and I'll go, what if we did that? Like Forbes, we don't really want your opinion. Just save the line as you wrote it.
Um, like let us do the pitch.
Yeah. And so that was interesting. But I ended up selling two and a half billion dollars worth of product. The numbers were insane. I had a hundred million dollar hits, and then QVC and HSN happened. They just evolved. Like I was literally like a surfer. And you're gonna, you know where that wave, you can feel it, and you get on top of the wave and you're riding it.
Yeah.
This wave was just like made for me.
So when you're the pitching, you're really watching ahead of like how many are being sold, how many are being sold.
Like Oh, you've not been on home shopping? No. Oh my gosh. I don't do this.
It was but literally you're seeing.
Oh, well, not in an infomercial. An infomercial is is pre-recorded. Okay. And so you have no idea. That's another thing. You don't know who you're talking to. And this is where all my pitch theories came out. You would have to look at the camera and imagine who you were talking to. It's why I don't ascribe to something that everyone else does. Everyone believes in an avatar. My and you probably know what your avatar is. You know what your avatar is? Absolutely. Really? What's your avatar?
Yeah, I people looking to get well. However, women between the ages of 35 and 65, because women are driving and owning healthcare, right? No, no, no.
But see, in a real avatar, they'll make you say, What's the woman's name? Well, her name is Sarah. She likes poodles, not shepherds. She drinks keynote, coffee, and I'm like, oh my god, oh wait, no, wait, wait. And I hold a philosophy that I can create anyone into my avatar. Doesn't matter what, I've got a solution to a problem, I've got to identify that you've got the problem, I've got the solution, we're gonna trade. And I will tell you, it's grossed a lot of money that way.
So infomercials happened, and I was just in the right place at the right time. But I will tell you, it was very debilitating at some point. Oh, you're talking about the numbers. So in infomercials, you have no idea. You're recording it in pieces and then it happens.
But QVC is different.
Live home shopping? Yeah, live home shopping. Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
So I get asked to do my first live home shopping. People don't even really know what this is. And I'm living in LA. Live home QVC is in Pennsylvania. So my first product they asked me to do was a product called Biodepolis.
What?
It was a hair retardant.
Okay, I don't know about this.
I can't say the word retard without laughing. I don't want to slow the hair, I want a hair remover, and biodepolis is kind of stupid. Yeah, that's a horrible name. It's horrible. I get to- You've sold zero of that, right? Well, Hank, don't I Okay, so I walk into this cavernous studio, there's 18 cameras, and there's nobody operating them. So I'm not sure like what camera to look at. You're like that, like me, me sometimes.
In a professional environment, these little red lights, I don't know the host, and we start talking about this, and it goes so bad. So bad that on the way out, I simply said, I'm never doing this again. I'm fine. About six months later, they call me and said, Hey, we want you to QVC. I'm like, No, I'm good. They said, No, let me explain something to you. It's a fitness product. A thing called the Orbitract. You're very good at fitness. Orbitract.
And the girl who did it before you made $70,000 in a year.
And I thought were they saying that that's a lot?
Yeah, she had she had six visits, she made $70,000. I did six into seventy, thought maybe I don't ever have to be a waitress. Uh and so I went and I pitched this product the very first time we sold out. That first year I made $210,000.
Yeah. And I never looked back.
Now, what was interesting is I'd have to fly whatever jobs I was doing in LA. And remember, what's cool about being an actress is you could have 15 jobs in a year. You can work a movie a year, you know, a day on a commercial, a week on a movie, go do QVC. I used to have stacks of 1099s. But my friends, when I was in acting class, would go, Oh, you're selling crap on television. You're you're selling out. I'm like, You're a waitress. I have a lot of cash in my pocket. I own my car.
How is that selling out? And what's interesting is that pure actors, they waited for that big break for the agent to call. Meanwhile, I'm rolling in dough. I'm on television. I'm having a great time. It's not typical. I have no role models because there's nobody doing what I do. Yeah. And I just kept moving forward, thinking, okay, at some point this will change. What did change to I don't know how to fast forward this whole life, but I met my my first husband uh and he was in politics.
He was very much extroverted. And one of the things that we did that changed again, how many times can you change the trajectory of your life? Because I had no plan. People say, What's your five-year plan? I'm like, I I I didn't know I was gonna be doing this podcast until last night at dinner. That's true. So I love being that open to it. I have a general idea of where I'm going, and maybe I would have gotten different places.
You know, the thing that hurt me was focus, one of my least favorite F words. I wanted to be an actress, I also wanted to be a TV host. I ended up hosting the X Games for ESPN. We don't have time for me to tell that story, but that I launched a franchise as the on air talent opposite Stuart Scott. I don't know anything about sports. But somehow they gave it to me. And so it's interesting about the X Games.
I so I don't know how you go back and backtrack this, but I'm doing the stand-up comedies in, you know, help doing that. And there's this thing, this opportunity that comes along. I didn't know how to ski. And I remember thinking to myself, James Bond. That's exactly what I said. I knew it. I literally said, I want to ski. And I opened up the newspaper one day, and there was an ad for somebody who could do a Club Med kind of bar party for ski resorts must know how to ski.
So I go to this and I'd been to Club Med a lot, and I did some work for them in the entertainment area. And the first question they ask you, and this is a really important thing to know, I went into the meeting knowing the first question they were going to ask is, Do you ski? And so I don't want to lie. I said yes. And then I mumbled, just not right now. Not quite a lie. But I also didn't think that the job had anything to do with skiing.
They wanted this entertainment bar party at four, you know, four o'clock in the afternoon after skiing, opera ski.
Oh, yeah.
They didn't want people to leave the resort, and it was sponsored by Jose Cuervo Tequila. Okay, they said yes to me. They said, we want you to create this little thing, and we're gonna let get you to go to differ 10 different ski resorts this season and do a kind of a comedy game show. And I said, Okay, I'm in.
Yeah.
And then I went off to a uh Copper Mountain, had a club med for two weeks. I learned how to ski. And by the time I got the job, I was a good kind of blue diamond skier.
Yeah, yeah.
And so we did this kind of comedy thing, and then they layered in a three-on-three co-ed snow volleyball game.
Yeah.
I don't remember if I don't know if you remember this. It was called the Jose Cuervo Games of Winter. Yeah. We did in 10 years every mountain, so 10 years I got to go skiing. I ski 60 days a year, okay? And got to do all this. Well, one day ESPN2 comes to make a little half-hour special out of what we're doing. And it was a very odd thing, and it was very wonderful. Uh so many details I could share with you. But a year later, the phone rings out of the blue, and it's ESPN.
I'm like, okay, uh, what do you want? We'd like to offer you a $75,000 two-week job to host the X Games. And my response was, Who is this? Why are you calling me? Or it's one of my friends. And they said, I'm sorry, let's let's put a producer on the phone for you. And they said, Look, we have a piece of videotape of you last year, and we've been looking for the right project for you. And I said, Yeah, okay, I'm in.
Thank you.
And then these two binders show up. One of sports I'd never heard of, like street losing, skysurfing, BMX bike. They've not been invented yet. And then 300 athletes, I didn't know any of them. And now it dawns on me they've made a mistake. They've seen me play a reporter on some TV show. They saw the comedy thing and they're thinking I can do this. I'm not qualified. And I said to myself, I'm going to show up.
It was 1995 in Providence, Rhode Island, and they're going to fire me because I'm not qualified.
Yeah, but knowing you, you don't care. You didn't care if you weren't qualified or not. You're showing up. Well, that's the truth.
Yeah.
And I will tell you, I had an excellent producer, and there's a moment I've got it on videotape. The very first night when I went live, I looked at, and I here's the thing: it was a live show. So you did not get to see the recording. They did record it on three-quarter inch tape, but I didn't have a three-quarter inch deck. I got all the tapes. I remember thinking that was so very important. Stuart Scott, my co-host, was generous and amazing.
And I just had the best time ever, whether I was, I could do it or not, I was doing it. And I never saw what I did. They called me again the next year and hired me back. And I'm like, they're gonna fire me. And I and I did that for six years.
Wow. I kept thinking I didn't even know that. I didn't know you did that.
20 years later. And I feel free to go to YouTube and search out ESPN, Forbes Riley, and Stuart Scott.
Yeah.
I had a kid help me download all these three-quarter inches when YouTube came out, because I thought YouTube was a good storage container because the tapes were disintegrating. And I watched that first night when Stuart throws it to me, and my co-host here is Forbes Riley. And I watch her and she's brilliant. She's not good, she's brilliant. And I'm like, how did I not know that? How did I not see that? How did I not know that?
That's an interesting take looking back at your life.
Oh my God.
Yeah. I know why they didn't. So what made you so? I mean, what in your life, we just told some amazing stories, what prepared you for that moment? What made you great?
Every little step I'd ever taken. David Richmond having a belief in me. My parents loving me, even though they couldn't help me, had a belief in me. No one ever said I couldn't do it. And so I just did. And I kept doing different aspects of this. And I'll tell you what.
And what did that feel like when you saw that person, you?
I hadn't really watched a lot of my own work. And I remember looking at it and just absolutely in shock. One, I was so mad at myself for not looking at that sooner because I would have had much more of a belief in me. You know, one of the things that people did along the way, though, was I got put down for my weight all the time. I was about 15 to 25 pounds overweight. Now, let's see. Here's a glass, right? Is the glass fat?
Looks skinny to me.
No, but it's a glass. It doesn't matter if it's fat or skinny, it's a glass. It looks fat if you hold it next to my finger. Oh. Yeah. So I'm kind of normal weight in real life, but on TV, if you put me next to somebody who's 15 pounds underweight, I was overweight. Right. I did a Broadway show with Christopher Reeb. The first thing he did was send me to Overeaters Anonymous. I was told to go on every diet. I had an Academy Award-winning director, John Avelson, on the phone with me.
There was a movie with Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi called Neighbors. I remember that. And I'd auditioned for the role that Kathy Mori already played. And he calls me on the phone and he said, We really love you. And he said, I'm doing I'm doing this. I'm not supposed to even call you or talk to you. But if you could just lose the weight they're telling me that you need to, it's yours. I couldn't. I think I ate a donut. I think I was I was such an emotional eater.
All the issues that I had, let's go back, and this is an interesting thing. So let's let's just fast forward to something that's on your topic about pain. So all the things that had happened to me, losing my grandma, uh, having my dad in an accident, my mother got held up at the house at gunpoint when I was a kid, and that traumatized her, and all of those things, the molestation, all found a place in my body. And I remember thinking, how do I shift this?
And I went to my very first self-help kind of conversation. And in that meeting, there were hundreds of people. And he said to us, You all have to come in when the music stops after your break. You have to be in your seat. We all agreed. You all promise to be in your seat when the music stops. So, of course, the music stops. I'm rushing my seat. I'm such a good girl. And there's one woman who's standing up and she rushes in and it's like, oh, so sorry.
Uh and the big Tony Robbins-ish kind of guy says, Please leave. She says, No, no, no, no, no. I had to go to the bathroom, I had to get on the phone. Please leave. How do all your excuses show up in your life? You're not welcome in this room. You promised that you wouldn't do that. I'm hysterical crying. I'm like, oh, please let her in. And all of this emotion came up, and I'm like, oh my gosh. He finally did let her in, but it was a traumatic moment in my life. I will never forget that.
And he made us all make a promise. And my promise was, because I didn't even realize I was doing this, that I was going to go home that night and not open the refrigerator like I always did and find comfort in whatever food I saw. And so I made that promise to myself. And I go home that night and I open the refrigerator and something happened. You can feel the cold on your face, and there was a chocolate cream pie there. And I could eat a cream pie with no utensils. I had an overeating issue.
And I didn't know that I stuffed down my emotions with food. Right. And all of a sudden I'm going to eat it and I hear this little thing go, You just promised not to do that. The other one says, Assure you, we're hungry. We're going to do this. And I'm literally standing between these two images, having a conversation about what I just promised to do and the little angel and the little devil. And at some point I got so upset I closed the door. I said, just go to bed.
And I sat there all night long, couldn't even go to sleep. And I'm like, what's going on with me? What's happening here? And it was the first kind of come to Jesus where I realized some part of me had been lying to myself that I really was eating out of this frustration. And it didn't happen until many years later. I wrote a little book about this called Eat, a journal for what you eat and for what's eating you.
And I went through some self-help trainings and I realized all the issues that had been plaguing me in my life were insecurity, were lonely. And I'm grateful that I got that. Something spurned inside of me, and I've been asking this question ever since. When I see people in that kind of pain, because pain recognizes pain.
Yes.
And I can look at you and simply ask you a question. What's your very first memory in life? What is it?
Give me wait. Being over at the house. I got it.
Give me one memory.
Yeah, it was uh poker, poker night. How old are you? Um, yeah, just that moment, how old? Probably this high. I don't even know how long I am.
Okay.
Yeah.
And what exactly is happening in this memory?
My Uncle John's laughing.
Okay.
You know.
What decision did you make about life at that moment?
That I love family over, I think. You know, I mean, it's like I I I love people.
So wait, so listen to this. I love family over. I've been to your house. You invited me to stay at your home. Yeah. You have a beautiful family. That is, I believe, the programming in your hard drive. I love family and people.
It's true.
Now, did anything traumatic happen to you when you were little?
Well, my um oh, I remember one that I remember crying in my crib and um my it was a spider that I I had my parents, my mom looking for a spider. And I I thought the spider was this big.
Okay.
And I made them like, you know, hang on. Going over. So but by the way, I I I'm saying this, but I was in a crib. So how old could I be? About 24. Yeah. Okay, yeah.
So here's the crazy thing about that. What decision did you make about life about that one?
I hate spiders.
No, but something more. Your mom came, somebody came to help you.
Yeah, my mom. I remember my mom coming up. But then she ended up having to get my father because we had to lift things.
Okay. I don't believe that memories are real. I believe it's a story that you've told yourself.
Yeah, because how could I even remember that? I don't even know if it was real.
But you but the decisions you make about life are real. So, for example, you've got a kid who falls out of a tree, breaks his leg, Good Samaritan comes to help him, takes him to the hospital. His decision at that moment is people are wonderful and he becomes a pastor. Same, same story. Another kid falls out of a tree, breaks his leg, people come to help him. His decision is mom and dad are never there when you need them. I can't stand them. I need other strangers to help me.
He becomes a criminal. Same incident, different decisions about life. And what I've concluded through all the work that I've done, and I'm very inspired to do this work, is that you want to remember the very first one. See, and I and I look at your life, and you are very family-oriented. I don't know about spiders, but I do know that you reach out to women and there's a woman in your life who truly helps you and that you love very deeply.
Yeah.
Now, if your mom and dad have been fighting, and that's one of your first memories, maybe you become a lawyer. If they're fighting over money, maybe you become somebody who's a divorce attorney or having to why do people do what they do? Yeah, so these things form us, right? They definitely form us.
I very rarely meet Where are our perceptions of them?
Well, I very rarely meet people who have positive beginnings. Because what happens is it's a traumatic moment that most people stick. That's why it sticks. It lights up a neuron in your brain. But this breakthrough thing, because of my own personal trauma that I went through, has been something I've done under the radar to thousands of people. Yeah. I don't really publicize it, but I love watching the transformation.
Woman comes to me recently and she's in her 50s, she's the CEO of a company, and she says they're gonna fire me. I said, Why aren't you doing a good job? She's like, I'm doing a great job, but I cannot seem to get on stage and talk about what I do. My hands get sweaty, I throw up, and I I give it to somebody else to do. As a CEO, I have to do that. And so we went back. You know what her first memory is?
Now it's funny, her first memory was very positive, but if something happens to you about seven to ten that's traumatic, you spend the whole rest of your life trying to fix and get back to that first memory. And you can see this in people. At seven years old, second grade, she gave a school book report. She got so nervous, she peed all over herself. Her the kids in school laughed at her, and the teacher didn't help her.
So she made a decision at that moment that she was never going to speak in front of people, that it was dangerous, don't do it.
Right.
At 52, it's still permeating her head. We do a breakthrough session. I'm very proud to say not only does this woman have a TED talk, but she's a raging CEO who does our quarterly meetings. So how did you break her through? I do a thing called breakthrough. And I What's it like? A little too intense to do right now.
Okay. Fair enough. But give us the basic of it. You know, like in other words, what are you trying to bring people to the realism?
One woman comes to me and she says, Forbes, I've never been kissed. She's in her six, she's in her sixties. What would you do with someone like that?
What would I do? I've never been kissed. My first answer would be like, Well, why do you think that is? That would be my instinct, if I write or wrong.
And her answer is because when she was 10 years old, her parents went out of town, her next door neighbor took her in for the night, groomed her a little bit, and had her raped by 12 guys downstairs in a sit in a satanic ritual. And the last one, when he was finished, said, Whenever you have sex, you're gonna think about me. She was 10. She didn't even realize that it happened for many years when she uncovered it through therapy. She was traumatized by this.
She comes to me and says, Can you help me? I do what I do in my living room. And about 20 minutes later, this woman whose name is Sandy looks at me and says, said, I've been in therapy for most of my life. I never need to go back.
You did it. Wow.
I want to fall in love. I want something like you and Joshua have.
Wow.
And it's that beautiful. And I do that a lot. And I will tell you of all the things that I do in my life full circle is I get to heal the little girl who is so hurt and couldn't figure it out. And I figured out a system that nobody does.
Wow.
I've watched Tony Robbins, I've watched other people do this. And and I'd love to, well, you wait, Daniel, I did it from Marilee.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I came, yeah. It's the thing where it's just a pr it's just a it's a thing I take you through.
Yeah, no, exactly. And I I asked her earlier, what did she do? Uh well, it's kind of hard to explain. Just like you said. Hard to explain. Yeah, exactly. So that's why I said I appreciate that, because I I kind of knew that.
Because here's what I have against therapy, and I'll say this publicly, and I've never really said it, but you have a pretty big platform. Therapy was created many, many moons ago by men. Uh, and I often say, uh, I have a key to things that therapists don't want you to know. Freud and Young have their head up their ass, get off the couch and into your life. If you could get over something in 20 minutes, I don't need two years. I don't care how you feel about it.
I believe that too.
I believe that your brain is a mechanism, and if it stores all these neurons, and if you could rewire something that is so traumatic to not bounce off that anymore, but to bounce off a sense of love and understanding that whatever's happened to you in your life, and let's bring this full circle to pain to purpose, yes, that it is fuel for what you get to do. And so you how do I explain this?
Anything that happened to you, if you can figure out how to blame it so much and fire up those neurons, and we should blame, you know, as kids we're blaming. Does every kid blame? Oh, he did that. He did it. Blame somebody. I don't believe in forgiveness, which is radical. I believe that you blame them until you are exhausted. When you have no more, you then turn it around and say thank you. Thank you to what? Well, thank you.
I'm a great mother because my mom was absent, because she beat me, because I saw the way she treated men. I am so loving and benevolent because of that trauma. And then you get to a great thing, you're like, and it's light bulbs. I watch physical light bulbs go off around people's heads, going, oh my God, I'm who I am because of that.
Yeah. Not in spite of it. I am being who I am because of the pain in my life.
Yes, absolutely that's where you're so driven. You went through so much, and now you want to and then finally you say, I love you. And for some times, I had a I had a woman that I did this with who went through this with her, the boy for a guy who killed her brother. She was carrying such rage and such hate that it was eating her alive. You don't say a phrase like that without it being true. She was being eaten alive. Dis-ease comes from the mental anguish.
And when she said thank you, I thought the room was going to explode. And then I said, Say, I love you. And she's like, for 25 minutes, Daniel, I at some point I'm watching. She's like, And then she finally, I said, I'm not going anywhere. We're gonna be here for three days if you don't say it. And she's like, I love you. And then something dawned on her that her brother is gone, he's not coming back, he is in a bed, he's in his wherever he has to be, everyone dies, and it's over for him.
And when she said it and she finally embraced it, what it did for her was to not let the hatred eat her up. And that was probably the most traumatic one that I've ever personally witnessed and gone through.
Yeah. I I people are out there going, okay, I want this woman to coach me. Uh, you know, I mean, you said you're coaching almost 50,000 people. I mean, I know you're coaching people on everything you've learned in the pitch, meaning, and again, it she doesn't expect you to be selling a product. It's different than that, right? I mean, you know, it's every principle to sell what you believe in. And, you know, but again, man, you need to coach that.
Well, I first have to say thank you. I don't know that I've ever done a podcast where I have revealed so much of my personal story.
And thank you, because that's what people need. I mean, I just Because you are breakthrough. You are exactly paying to purpose, changing lives, making a difference. And, you know, not many people had those stories in their life, but you inspired many.
Well, I just turned 65, and I will tell you a lot of the insecurities that come out of the stories are why I'm not as well known as, say, Oprah. I had my babies, you know, there's a little one more thing. Um in when when 9-11 hit, my brother-in-law was in 9-11. We he had a firehouse a quarter mile north of the World Trade Center. When the second building came down, all of the people who worked there were gone in a moment.
Yeah.
Except my brother-in-law, who we then put on a tour across the country. But there's a real heavy heart. I went to high school with all those guys. Right after that, my mom and dad died within a year. My best friends. It was very hard to deal with all that. And I remember saying I was married at the time, we'd been trying to get pregnant, it wasn't happening. So while I'm doing all of these working jobs, I'm still going with my own personal serious pain. And I uh I said I want a baby.
And I almost forgot I was 41 years old. We've been trying for five years. And uh went through in vitro, and I remember the doctor saying, You're not pregnant, you're very pregnant. And I was pregnant with twins. Yeah, and that miracle happened. And now for the prior eight years, I've been raising a little boy up in South Central from the Big Brother-Little Brother program. I give birth to these two beautiful twins. Life is finally good, except my parents aren't here.
And six months later, Dexter is walking from a haircut to church right outside his neighborhood of South Central, less than a mile from Beverly Hills, and a kid who wanted to get into a gang walked up behind my little boy and shot him dead ten times in the back. Just unloaded a whole clip into him, and my little boy died on the sidewalk. And I've got two babies. And I've got, let me tell you, you want to talk about crazy pain? What do you do with all that?
So, what I did was I buried my head in work and I did home shopping. I did everything I could. It's why it's so scattered. I just worked. I didn't want to feel much, and I've got two beautiful babies. And my husband at the time sat on the couch for two years in such pain. I had a nanny help me raise the babies, and we all kind of did what we could to get through that grief and that trauma. My wedding photo, he was best mad at my wedding, my wedding photos all over the LA Times.
Talk about massive kids. Like, how big does your pain have to be to find the biggest purpose? I will tell you, I've been pushed to the max. And then there's a crazy video online because at some point, about a year after all of this happened to me, uh, I realized that my house in Los Angeles was too small to raise two kids. It was only a two-bedroom house, but it was on a half an acre.
And so I had bought in an architect and he said, Well, if you knock your house down, I can build instead of cinder blocks the same square feet. I'll give you a thousand square feet more out of sticks, same price, but it's $25,000 to knock your house down. I didn't have $25,000 to do that. And you can't take a mortgage on a house they want to knock down. It was a very confusing. And I simply said out of my craziness, can't we just blow up our house? He said, Excuse me?
I said, Mel Gibson blew up a house for lethal weapon. So I went online, it's 2008, and I said, willing to have my house blown up. Three days later, knock, knock, knock at the door, and it's the die hard movies. No way. And they said, We'd like to blow up your house and give you 25,000. Yeah.
And I made it, that's manifesting things right now. But that's what I'm talking about.
That's the part you can't even explain.
Yeah, exactly.
So they come in and I said, you know, feel free to blow it up. I made a movie about this. Now I'm going to share with you that everyone has cell phones now. This was 2008. I had a camcorder that looked like this. Yeah. And if you go to YouTube and you type in Die Hard Explodes My Home, you will see my house blowing up, and my two little kids, they're three and a half years old, watching their house go to smithereens. And then something happened.
Daniel, it's 2008. You know what happened in December 2008, a week after I blew up my house? The housing market crashed.
Yeah.
Oh no, I just blew up the equity in my house. And now myself, my ex, and my two kids have to live in a 1,200 square feet like garage. We have no place else to go. And for two years it took us to rebuild that house. So I'm gonna tell you if you can get through all this roller coaster, there's something beautiful at The end of it, right? Are you exhausted yet? So now what I do, fast forward, all of those stories are stories. And you watching this have stories.
I I only told them because you're so generous and so gracious, and I just love your energy. What I'm gonna share with everything changed, and I'm gonna bring it to now because this is where I get to help other people. It's the middle of COVID. My beautiful man Joshua has had a motorcycle accident. He's gonna spend six months in a wheelchair, depressed, and no idea what's gonna happen. With no idea for anybody in March 2020.
And my 17-year-old daughter walks downstairs, she's doing high school in my house with her brother and says, Mom, let's take your business online. I'm like, no, no, no. I I tried to get online. I don't understand online, it doesn't make any sense to me. I spent a lot of money, digital marketers, I they all took my money and said, Mom, I've been making money online since I was 12. Remember that little lens business that I did? I made my first $10,000 doing that.
Then I started to work for your famous friends. I built Les Brown and Joe Thizman's website and their YouTube channel, and she shows me her statement. You know, she's got $100,000 in her bank account. She's 17 with like a D in English, and I'm like, what are you what is this? Where did you get this money? She said, Mom, they all paid me. You're the only one who doesn't believe it.
This is like a conversation I had with my son. Yeah, same thing. I'm like, what are you doing? You're making business online? What?
Right.
Yeah.
And I sat with her for three weeks. She said, Why don't you teach people how to pitch? I said, Well, I don't even know if I can teach it. I'm just good at it. She says, No, you're not. I mean, you're good, Mom, yes, but I watched and you have a system and you can teach systems. I promise you, I'll make you a million dollars in a year if you listen to me. What kid says that to her mom?
Right.
We had nothing to lose, and I said, sure, let's go for it.
Yeah.
We spent three weeks putting together what it is that I do for people, how to articulate what you do. I did this crazy thing called a webinar for people on remember the thing called remember when there was no Zoom? Remember your very first time going on Zoom? You're like, oh yeah, do a what? What? Right. I had 25 people on Zoom and I created, I'd already been teaching live a little bit, but I had a thousand dollar product. I had 25 people in the room.
I taught them with all this zest that I have, and yeah, and I sold one of my product and woke up the next morning. I had zero dollars in the account the night before. I woke up and they would say 25K. I called McKenna and I said, What does the K stand for? I didn't know.
That's cute.
We made $25,000 in a night. We did that four times in a row. We were a six-figure business. A mom who'd never been online and a 17-year-old who promised her mom she was going to make it come true. Nine months later, we believed it then. Nine months later, we walked on Russell stage and got a two Comic Club Award, which means we made a million dollars in one funnel.
And for the last five years, all the pain and all the tragedy and all the confusion that was my life up until that moment became my purpose. And my daughter's gone through none of this. So she kept looking at me, going, Mom, why do you why do you talk such a big game, but you keep playing small? And I'm like, you know what? Oh, that just really hurts. Oh, yeah. I knew I was made for more. I've done all these crazy things, but I carried all this baggage with me.
And I did a breakthrough on myself, and I made a decision at that moment that I was going to be the mom and the rock star that she wanted me to be. It's been five years. We run a company together. Uh she's awesome. We have, like you said, 50,000 students. I teach pitching. I enroll people into their greatness because I see visions for them. If you can articulate what you do, and then I take if I if you're stuck.
Because people don't know how to sell what they do. You said to Hayes last night and myself, well, what do you do? And well, I help. No, that's not what you do. And then you taught him how to really encapsulate what he does.
And I love doing this. And there's a light bulb when I teach him the couple of things that I know and pitch like a pro, boom.
Yeah.
¶ Childhood Trauma and Abuse Revelation
And then I will teach again quietly. I've never talked about breakthrough publicly, like this public. But I will do a training underneath that because if I look at you and you're so stuck and I see that you are writing your future from your past, my coaching's not going to do anything. Right. So we do an emotional detox.
Yes.
And because you're like, you can't get healthy if you don't detox yourselves, right?
Absolutely.
So that's what I'm massively committed to is that people finally embracing. And here's the thing my daughter's mission statement is that she takes people 40 to 80, takes their mission and monetizes it. We have 80-year-old who are now online running businesses. They don't have to be large businesses. They're making more money. If it's $500, $1,000 a month, they weren't doing that. That's true. The sense of self-esteem, passion, and purpose. We are gifting that to people.
And I'm on a ride that has changed my life. And just so that everybody here knows, when I met you, you're that version of me who's doing it with their family. Your son said to the same thing to you. You didn't see it. I'm watching your success. And there's a little level of parallel. Your son is brilliant. You're doing it with your family. You're in love with your wife. And I'm like, oh my gosh, it's hard to find a mentor, somebody who's been there and done that.
And you, my friend, are the rock star.
My son said, thank you. My son said that to me. Dad, you need to be taking this directly to people looking for answers. People are looking for answers. You get, how? Online. What? Oh yeah. Boom, right? It's like we're helping the world and prophesied in my life, God through my wife. Not only is God going to get me well, but I'm going to take a message to the world. I'm taking a message to the world. You're taking a message to the world from pain to purpose. How do you people find your coaching?
You know, um, I'm still doing this every Sunday. If you just go to ForbesRiley.com, all my social media is there, all my trainings are there. Uh every Sunday, and Daniel's trying to coach me out of this, I go live. I've been doing live, I don't have an automated. I go live every Sunday. I've been doing it for five years. Um, it fills my soul to watch people transform.
Me too, man.
And Sunday happens to be what, my church? We call it church of the fit. How does your life fit together? How does your physical, emotional, financial all fit together? Yeah. And I get to preach and teach. And then if you want to go on a journey to learn how to be more articulate to finally get what you want, you know, I made a deal with myself when I was a little girl. I said, when and if I can ever communicate again. But remember, I couldn't talk right now. That's right.
The braces.
I'm gonna continue to communicate and get people to get their message out because the truth is you deserve to be heard. You deserve to stop listening to voices and old voices on people around you who love you, who tell you you can't, and listen to the one voice that proves to you that you're unstoppable.
She's the queen of purpose.
Thank you.
Pain to purpose. Wow. You're gonna have to share the episode. You know how many people you just gave hope to? Including myself. You inspired me. And um, how many people need to hear those stories to become who God created them to be?
Thanks to McKenna. I'm finally releasing, I've done lots of little books, but I'm releasing a book called Pitch Secrets A to Z. And for the last eight years, I've applied to TED Talks to talk about pitching. And when I first did, they called me and kind of yelled at me. Said, we don't take pitches here. You're not allowed to pitch from the stage. I'm like, okay, that's not my definition of pitch. I'm not pitching a business.
And I tried and tried, uh, and I hate that word trying, because I failed. And one of the things I learned from failure is embrace the failure and learn the lesson. And this last year, uh can I finish with one more story?
Why not?
I don't even know what time it is. Like six weeks later, you're still listening to me. Yeah, we were like, okay. So last year I was in a van accident. I was having a James Bond moment. I was snowmobiling on a glacier in Iceland with my family.
This is what you dreamed of.
And I said it was, it's gorgeous. You go to my Instagram, could Forbes Riley, and look at the beautiful photos. And then we get on the bus to go home. There's 16 of us. And thank God that photo is not the last photo of my family you will ever see. Because the bus skidded off the road, went flying through the air, and crashed down on my side of the bus.
You should have been dead.
No, I not should have been anything. Thank you. I might have been.
I mean, when people have an accident like that, oh my god. I remember you sent me the pictures. I'm like, how is she not dead?
I have my cheek, I have my eye, I have my brain. And there was a moment I remember when McKenna looked, she was with her brother behind me, and she said, because I wasn't moving initially, I was absolutely in shock. And I think mom's gone. And I heard her say that. And I think that changed everything in my trajectory. Because at some point I will be gone. And I look at that little girl's face and I just ooh. And the funny thing out of that happened was I found some purpose.
I um I actually went on a weight loss journey. I got fitter than I've ever been. I watched you transform after that. I said something crazy to myself that I was going to make this part of my life matter more than it ever has before. It can't go wasted because it just was not solidifying. And so out of all of that, I reapplied to Ted X because I think I have an idea worth sharing about pitching. And I am more spiritual, I am more connected, I am more loving.
I think that I'm a little on borrowed time. And now I don't care what happened before. I am unstoppable. And when I look at you, look at me, I feel it. And so I applied and I got 85 rejections. And part of me wanted to creep in that little voice going, see, I told you shut up. And three weeks ago, I opened my email, and there was my first TEDx acceptance. And I'm like, Oh my god, oh my god, I did it.
The next week there was another acceptance, and then there was a third acceptance, and a fourth, and a fifth. I got accepted to five different TED Talks the last two weeks. I'm not gonna do all of them. I'm gonna choose two. You're allowed to do more than one. But at some point, I kind of look at it and go, you know, Forbes Riley, as expected.
You had one thing to tell them. Hearing the stories going, I just I want my life to transition like that. What would you be telling me?
Here's the thing. I don't know if you get to live more than once, but if you do it right the first time, once is enough.
There you have it. From the queen of pitch to the queen of purpose, we haven't even seen the whole Forbes Riley and what she's going to do. She's changing humanity, so can you. Listen, please like, share, comments about the show. Please share it. People need this type of hope. From the queen of purpose herself, Forbes Riley. Uh, thank you for tuning in. Another Dr. Pompa podcast from Pain to Purpose. Wow. That was one heck of an episode. Thank you. Thank you.