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Jan. 23, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:53:10
Beyond Mere Survival | Tony Robbins @TonyRobbinsLive | EP 517
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Time Text
The first thing to understand is that people see the world through their aim.
Anyone can deal with the difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow.
If you leave your zone of comfort, if you move away from your father's tent, if you move away from what's familiar to you, and you do that voluntarily, and you make the sacrifices necessary as a consequence, this is what will happen.
I look at it this way.
We don't experience life.
We experience the life we focus on.
Much of what we think we're doing ourselves is being shifted by the outside world.
So I say, prime yourself.
That's what religious practice is supposed to do.
Yes, and I think that's what it does do.
The aim for me is always a quest.
It's like, I have a question, and it's a real question, and I want to get farther in answering it.
Hello, everybody.
I had the opportunity today to sit down with Tony Robbins and in the remarkable basement of his house as well.
And so that's the setting.
And Tony and I have got to know each other over the last couple of years and have had a number of discussions.
And partly what we've been trying to puzzle out is our, what would you say, The similarities between our parallel endeavors, I mean, Tony's, I suspect he's probably the most popular and impactful speaker, personal development speaker the world's ever seen.
Oh no, I'm very fascinated by what he does and I've seen his events and I've reviewed some of the scientific literature pertaining to his achievements.
That's actually what we started our conversation with because Tony's program has been subject to scientific scrutiny and it seems to have remarkable antidepressant properties.
And so I'm very interested, like Tony is, in how people chart their life course and how they establish their aim and how they determine their strategies and how they describe their conditions for fulfillment and what fulfillment is and how it can be sustained and how it can be self-improving and how it can be brought to other people.
That's really what we spent our time discussing.
I wanted to hear his thoughts on the matter and how he construed and conceptualized his approach and also what makes him such a compelling public speaker, how he prepares for that, how he relates to the audience, how he can sustain his energy for really remarkable periods of time because I found myself quite exhausted generally after about three hours of full-out public speaking,
let's say, That's a performance, and you've got to be all in if you're going to do it right, but Tony does that for like 12 hours a day for four days in a row, many, many times a month, and so I was curious about, well, his technique and how that was similar to mine and how it differed, and so, well, we talked about all that, and I suppose what's the core of it all?
Well, I think the core of it, at least in part, is something akin to the old Nietzschean That if you have a why, you can bear any how.
And so, Tony helps people discover the why, well, and the how, for that matter.
And that is definitely akin to what I'm attempting to do when I'm lecturing and writing.
And so, well, our discussion helped clarify that and flesh it out and make it more concrete and make it more accessible to people.
And so, you're welcome to partake in that.
And that's what's on the menu for today.
So, Mr. Robbins, I'm going to start by reading something, because you did something that is very rare.
You submitted your process, your life improvement process, your public life improvement process, to a clinical trial.
So I'm going to read some pieces from the abstract of the paper that was published in consequence of that inquiry.
So the paper is called Effects of an Immersive...
Psychosocial training program on depression and well-being, a randomized clinical trial.
The first thing I would say is clinical trials are extremely difficult to do.
I've always been highly impressed by any scientist, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist who will do a clinical trial because there are innumerable impediments.
It's hard to get subjects.
It's hard to specify the control group.
It's hard to get ethical clearance.
It takes forever.
People drop out.
It's very difficult to publish.
It's generally a very thankless endeavor.
And you did it along with the authors of this paper.
And the results are quite stunning.
I'll read a bit from the abstract.
So for everybody watching and listening, every scientific paper has an abstract that essentially summarizes the findings so that if you're doing, say, a detailed overview of a given field...
You can get the gist of things rapidly, and so the abstract summarizes the most important elements of the study.
Psychiatry stands to benefit from brief, why?
Well, you want things to be efficient, non-pharmacological treatments that effectively reduce depressive symptoms, which are very common.
To address this need, we conducted a single-blind, randomized clinical trial.
So people were assigned randomly to group, which is...
A marker for a well-designed study assessing how a six-day immersive psychosocial training program, and that's Tony Robbins' program, followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days.
What's a psychosocial exercise?
Well, Tony will walk us through that, but it's an exercise that's designed to optimize psychological functioning, but also social functioning simultaneously because it's very difficult to be healthy by yourself.
And so, you could think of mental health in particular, although also physical health, as a communitarian or collective endeavor.
So, and Tony definitely understands that.
Followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days improves depressive symptoms.
45 adults were block-randomized by depression scored two arms.
The Immersive Psychosocial Training Program and 10-minute daily exercise group.
A gratitude...
Journaling group or a gratitude journaling group.
So now the idea there was to not only assess whether Mr. Robbins' program was an effective treatment for depression, but whether or not it was equally or more effective than another treatment that wasn't pharmacological that had already been shown to be of...
Demonstrated utility.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And a gratitude journal helps people focus on what's positive in their life instead of what's negative.
And people who are depressed tend to be preoccupied with what's negative.
Depression severity improved over time with a significantly greater reduction in the psychosocial training program group.
So that meant that Mr. Robbins' intervention worked.
About an 83% reduction in...
Depression severity.
And by six weeks, virtually everybody in the intervention group showed remission in their symptoms.
And six weeks is a pretty decent length of trial because one of the complications with clinical trials is how long do you follow people?
A week?
Two weeks?
A month?
Six months?
Two years?
You know, the best studies would attempt to do all of those, but that's virtually impossible.
So, this was...
Well, so I think we should start by talking about this.
Because I'd like to know, and everybody listening would like to know, I suppose, first of all, what was the program?
And then why did you submit it to a clinical trial?
And how did you get scientists to participate in that?
Well, you took that complexity and made it equally complex.
Yeah, thank you, sir.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
It was actually really simple.
You know, I've been working with people.
This has got to be my...
48th year beginning now across the world.
I have the privilege of recognizing there's only so many patterns.
While the brain has infinite complexity, it's not completely complex in terms of the mind.
And so, over the years, I've developed a series of processes to help people kind of develop what is their true north for them, not for me, and shift their values so that they're naturally pulled in the direction of what they really want at this stage as opposed to what their conditioning has to do with.
And so, as you well know, We don't experience life.
We experience the life we focus on.
In every moment, what's wrong is always available, so is what's right.
And it's not positive thinking, it's about intelligence.
If you're in a lousy state, you don't treat people better, you don't perform better, you're obviously not happier.
So what we teach people is how to shift their focus, how to determine what values at this stage of your life are the ones that are most important to you that will pull you towards what you want.
I always look at motivation, and I don't like the word motivation, but people overuse it, so I might as well use it, because I'm not a motivator, I'm a strategist.
But I also believe in the power of inspiring people, obviously, and having high energy.
But, you know, there's two types of motivation.
There's push motivation, as I'm sure you know.
That's where you're using willpower and making yourself do it.
And, you know, Jordan, you have an enormous amount of willpower.
My respect for you is through the roof, all that you've dealt with and all that you've done.
And it's shaped who you are because you haven't given up and moved forward.
But there is a limit to willpower.
I got a lot of willpower, too.
But there's no limit to...
Pull motivation.
Pull motivation is something that you care about more than yourself.
Something that's a magnificent obsession.
Something where you're contributing.
It could be your kids.
It could be your family.
All that ties to the aim of your values that move you forward.
And so we have a six-day process I do called Date With Destiny.
And by the way, if your viewers ever want to get a feel for it, there's a documentary on Netflix called Tony Robbins' I'm Not Your Guru, because I'm not here to be your guru.
But it'll give you like an hour and 45-minute walkthrough, and it's pretty dramatic.
And the name of it again?
Tony Robbins' I'm Not Your Guru.
It's on Netflix.
And you see me deal with people that are suicidal and turning them around, and then you see us follow up four years later, so you see it last, because most people wouldn't think it.
Last, if you can make a change that quickly.
So how does that relate to the study?
Well, two professors, as I understand it, we were approached by Stanford, and they said two of our professors had come here, they were clinically depressed, and they're off medication, and all they did was go to this six-day program.
We don't understand it.
Do you have data on this?
And I said, sure, I've got millions of testimonials, and somebody said, no, no, no, scientific data.
I said, no, that's not been my focus.
My focus is just to get results from people, but if you want to do one, I'm open to it.
What would you like to study?
And they said, well, right now is the middle of COVID. And they said, you know, depression is through the roof.
Suicides through the roof.
Overdoses are through the roof.
I said, I know.
And they said, we'd love to test this non-pharmacological approach to it that you have and see what it really produces because this seems miraculous.
And I said, well, it's not miraculous.
It's just rewiring the way in which people perceive their world.
If I'm going to go...
Do the Dakar race where I'm going to go 9,000 miles to the Sahara Desert.
You can't take the car you're currently running and expect it.
You're going to die in the desert.
You need to have that car re-engineered.
So, for example, the exhaust can get above the sand.
Well, we help people re-engineer.
And we don't tell them what to do.
We show them how to re-engineer themselves.
So they have their own autonomy and ownership.
And I said, but tell me something.
If we're going to study this, what do the medical studies show?
And the meta-studies show that they said that 60% of the people who come for treatment, whether it's drugs or therapy or both, 60% make no improvement.
That's the average.
40% improve overall.
The average improvement is 50%.
So I said, so they're half as depressed as they were.
They said, yeah, some people get well, but most people are on drugs for the rest of their lives.
And I said, you can almost do that with a placebo.
And the guy had a nervous laugh, and he said, well, yeah, maybe.
I said, well...
I said, I'm sure it sounds like hubris, but just based on history, I'm sure we'll do better than that.
I said, what's the best study of all psychiatry you've ever seen in terms of wiping out these symptoms?
At the time, they said there was a study done at Johns Hopkins, you're probably familiar with it, five years ago, where for a month, they gave people psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and cognitive therapy.
And they said the results were the greatest in the history of psychiatry.
At the end of six weeks, it was their evaluation, that group had 54% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever of depression.
I said, well, that's a great standard.
I said, I'd like to see us beat that.
I said...
Again, it doesn't sound like hubris.
It sounds like maybe arrogance.
I'm not coming from that place.
I just think our numbers will be significantly higher, but we'll see.
You designed the program.
So they designed it, and as you said, they had a separate group that was just like they did for Johns Hopkins, you know, test group.
They didn't have my work.
They had gratitude journaling.
They did various other things.
And the results were beyond their imagination.
At the end of...
Six weeks after just going through a seminar, no drugs, no 101 therapy, just the rewiring for themselves.
93% of them had no symptoms whatsoever.
It's nothing like it has ever been done.
And they published it in the Journal of Psychiatry.
Do you have any idea?
Has there been any longer-term follow-up?
Yes, there has been.
Oh, there has?
Yes, yeah.
And 7% of the people still improved, but they didn't completely eliminate their symptoms.
But here's the best part.
19% came in with suicidal ideation.
Zero suicidal ideation afterwards, which is what I've seen over and over over the decades.
So they followed up a year later, and they found 52% increase in positive emotions, 71% decrease in negative emotions a year later.
And now they've done additional studies.
They just did a one-year study with 1,500 people.
So you can appreciate this.
It's like the biggest study you can imagine.
750 in each group.
And this one is on engagement in business and in life.
Because right now, since COVID, the engagement levels have gone through the floor.
You're probably familiar with it.
They have three measurements.
One is, you know, are you engaged?
And engagement equals EBITDA or equals profit in companies.
You can see a direct relationship, right?
Then there's those that are disengaged.
That would be what people started calling quiet quitting, where they're doing the minimum they need to.
And then there's actively disengaged, which is actually people who are angry and they're just trying to hurt the company.
Right, right, right.
That's not good.
That's definitely not good.
Hello, everybody.
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Since COVID, the drop in engagement is the biggest drop in the history of any form of measurement around the world.
In addition, the largest increase is in active disengagement.
Yeah, well, people's trust was violated.
That's right.
They were angry.
And so they did a group, and they haven't published it.
It'll come out shortly, but I can give you the broad strokes that I'm so excited about.
They eliminated all of the disengagement that had been driven by four years of isolation in six days.
And then the best part was without any more interaction with me every month, even for a year, they increased in their engagement.
Oh, really?
Because what's happened is now the hunger is awakened in them.
They now have a sense of control over their own life and identity.
Same authors?
A different group.
Some of the same authors.
Some of the same.
UCLA. And that big a difference in group size.
Yes.
Because one of the criticisms of the study, obviously, was that there was a small number of people.
Yes, yes.
But not small by most averages, as you know, right?
Well, clinical studies are very, very difficult to do.
Yes, exactly.
So it's very easy to criticize a study for having a small number, but it's very difficult.
To run a better study.
Yes.
Right, right.
They've also done a study where, a separate one that they published in a different journal that I can get to you, which was about the teaching style because what they wanted to figure out is how.
Yes.
How does this work?
So I'll tell you what they uncovered.
There's a separate group that had been working with them and had worked on measuring my body on stage because I do immersion events.
I think you know four days, 15,000, 20,000 people in a stadium, 12,000, 13,000 hours a day.
And when COVID happened and they shut everything down, I wanted to still help people.
So I built a studio because every stadium in the world was shut down.
And I started doing it with people in their homes.
So the first thing I did was during those first three and a half years before COVID, they had been measuring me.
So they had me wear this $75,000 device that measures everything.
They'd take my saliva and my blood at every break.
And they found a whole crazy set of statistics.
Like, you know, I burn 11,300 calories on stage in a day.
I didn't think that was possible.
But consistently, that's my average.
Chess masters, Jordan, I guess, burn about 3,500 to 4,000 not moving.
And so before I even get on stage, I burn about 3,500.
I jump a thousand times.
I'm standing here.
I'm going out in the crowd.
I'm running up.
I keep the stadium engaged.
Most people won't sit for a three-hour movie.
It's like watching a toddler play.
No, I mean, I'm serious about that.
Only the dollars got you engaged.
Well, I'm serious about that.
Because as you think about it, people spend $300 million on a movie and go past three hours and you lost everybody, right?
For taste and attention spans.
We got people there.
We do the digital program now.
And we'll start at 10 a.m.
here in Palm Beach.
And we have people from 193 countries, every country in the world.
So let's say Australia, we start here at 10 a.m.
It's already midnight there.
They go from midnight to one in the afternoon for four straight days and nights, and we lose 6% of the people on average.
It's mind-boggling.
We have figured out how to keep people engaged.
So it's compelling and it's long-lasting.
But here they say, why does it work?
So they measured all these things in my body, and then they discovered something else.
If you know Tom Brady or the Tampa Bay Lightning that's won multiple championships in the NHL, they studied these people.
They found something called what they call the championship biochemistry.
And you'd appreciate this.
Every time I get on stage...
And the same thing, Tom Brady's down by 10 points, as I'm sure you've seen in the Super Bowl, and he's got two minutes to finish, and somehow he comes back to win.
He, all these people, including myself, have this explosion of testosterone.
I mean, it looks literally like jumping up a hill.
And normally with testosterone, as I'm sure you know, cortisol comes, the stress hormone as well.
Cortisol drops off the cliff.
So all you get is this incredible focus and drive, plus you remember things, which is why they think it has such cognition that lasts a year later.
Because if I asked you where were you at 9-11, every person, you're not even American, could tell you where they were sitting, what was around them, what was going on.
Asking where they're on 8-11, they have no clue, because information without the emotion doesn't have any lasting impact.
So that's sort of like the biochemistry of a very enhanced flow state.
Very much so.
It's lasting a long time.
Very much longer period.
And you're modeling that.
In an embodied form.
And people are mirroring that.
You got it.
Then they're doing mirror neurons, right?
Mirror neurons.
So first they did this with me and they said, this is incredible.
And the level I could sustain it was what blew them away for the amount of time.
Because normally it's something somebody does for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour.
But the best part is then they started measuring my live audiences.
And when COVID happened, they put people in 10 different countries and measured people there in real time.
And then they showed it up and it looks like music.
Because, as you know, with mirror neurons, if you saw some people rowing and you're empathetic or connected, you actually feel that to some extent in your body.
Well, I do that with people, obviously.
Well, these people, their energy, their explosion of testosterone, the drop-off of cortisol, and that is why they believe it has that lasting impact.
But they did a study with one of the top...
That was the comparison group.
Yeah.
And saw what the measurements were afterwards versus mine.
And the difference was for the first, I think it was three weeks on that one, almost a month.
Yeah.
It was a nice increase, like 30% increase, more than you would expect.
He's one of the top professors there.
But mine was 350% and it lasted six months and then 12 months.
And the difference was, it wasn't the content.
It's what we did with our biochemistry.
So it's about rewiring yourself.
You can think all day, but you might both know.
I modeled it with my body, my voice, and everything else, and they do it.
And when you do a...
The other thing of it is we're using immersion.
So...
I could have a lot easier job by going there for four or five hours and doing it, right?
But the immersion is when you go 13 hours, there is a different change in your body and your biochemistry.
Well, the beautiful thing is you get to see that lasting impact because people know how to ignite it themselves.
They also see that you can do it.
So I got a funny story.
They experience doing it.
This is the point I really think is important.
A belief is a poor substitute for an experience.
Yes, definitely.
So I give them the experience of it over and over again, and they get wired.
And now it's like, I'm hungry.
I want to do more of this in my life, and that's why it has such lasting impact.
And I knew we would, but I didn't go out for the study.
They came to me.
Now they're doing another one.
They're doing a third or fourth study.
So they're just fascinated by the results.
However, that was published in the Journal of Psychiatry two years ago.
Not one phone call from anyone about how to implement that with themselves.
Yeah, yeah, that's not surprising.
If you cover the cover of Newsweek, right, two years ago, I'm sure you saw it, it says Hooked on Hype.
Yeah.
And it talks about the meta-studies now show that no SSRIs, they don't work.
And they're no better than sugar pills, but we still give them to 43 million Americans over and over again with all the side effects they have.
So it's part of the culture that we're in, unfortunately.
But we're just working to the people that are hungry and want to shift.
We provide them opportunity.
I don't pretend to be the end-all and be-all for everybody, but it works.
And people who've been through it know it works.
It's been them telling their friends for decades, but now we have the science to back it up.
Okay, so I've got a story to tell you and then a bunch of questions.
Great.
So I know this biologist, Derek Cooper, and we did a podcast together.
He's a very interesting thinker, and he's spent a fair bit of time looking at dopaminergic functioning and relating that.
In part, to insect behavior, bees in particular.
So I want to tell you something funny about bees.
And the reason I'm outlining this is because...
The biochemical principles that you describe are extremely fundamental.
They're echoed throughout the living kingdom, all the way down to the insect level.
This is ancient circuitry.
Only you would have this kind of information.
I did a lot of studies of animal behavior when I was trying to figure out human motivation.
And if you can find extremely distal...
It means you've found something very profound because it's been conserved over evolutionary history for maybe hundreds of millions of years.
So you know you're onto something that's extremely fundamental.
And you can tell that in the story that you described because it's reflected in hormonal changes.
So bees communicate about sources of value.
So bees go out and they forage kind of randomly.
And then if they find a good storehouse of value, which is like a flower bed that's...
Not too far away.
Yeah.
And that's rich.
Yes.
Then they go back and they dance.
And they indicate by the quality of their dance where the flowers are, but also how much energy needs to be expended to get there, but how much energy they will be acquired in consequence of the voyage.
Okay?
And they do that in part by intensity and duration of dance.
Wow.
Right.
So now imagine what they're doing.
You see what they're doing.
It costs a bee to expend energy, right?
So, if another bee watches the bee that's communicating and expending energy, the lesson is something like, this bee is so convinced that that energy source is worthy of investigation that it's willing to risk expending energy to communicate about it.
Okay, so...
It's starting to feel like a bee right now, just so you...
Well, exactly.
That gets the other bees excited.
But it's not...
As you said, it's an experience and it's not an argument.
It's like the bee is demonstrating by its willing to sacrifice its energy that the end goal is worth the attainment.
Okay, so that's very much analogous to what you're doing on stage because you're expending.
You said right at the beginning you're expending 11,000 calories in an 11-hour period and you're able to maintain it.
So people watch that and they think they see and this is at this...
At a level that's so primordial that even insects can do it, they see that you're willing to risk a tremendous expenditure of energy over a very long time to communicate a particular pattern of perception.
And so that's convincing because it's an existence proof.
Now you said some other things that are extremely interesting that I think are worth delving into.
So you talked about pull motivation.
Versus push.
Yeah, versus push.
Pole motivation is positive emotion.
It's the manifestation of the same dopaminergically mediated positive emotion that indicates the existence of a valuable store of treasure.
And so that's kind of a quest issue.
So we're wired so that we feel enthusiasm when we see ourselves moving towards a valuable goal.
Okay, now you're...
And then you said some other things very carefully.
You said you're not a guru, and what that means in part is that you're encouraging people to believe that there is a goal and that goals are worthwhile, but they have to come up with the goals themselves.
That's right.
It has to be life on their terms, not mine.
Well, it's partly because they need to establish their own conditions for satisfaction, and they have to do that in consequence of their own contemplation.
You know, and by the way, You have a copy of my book here, We Who Rest With God.
One of the ways that God is characterized, and I describe this in the book, is as the spirit of calling.
Right, right.
So there's two primary characterizations of God in the biblical writings.
There's more than two, but there's two primary characterizations.
One is the spirit of calling and adventure.
So that's exemplified in the story of Abraham, for example.
And the other is as the voice of conscience.
Spear of adventure that's associated with this pull motivation.
Yes.
It's the hero's journey.
It's the hero's journey.
Yeah.
Although the hero's journey also incorporates elements of conscience.
Yes.
Right?
And there's a push element to that that's probably worth discussing as well.
It's like calling says, here's the path and conscience.
warns you when you're deviating from it.
That's a reasonable way.
Thank you, Lennon.
By the way, I just have to thank you.
No one on Earth can do what you do and do the depth of analysis you do to take a Pinocchio story and turn that into an archetypical story of personal evolution and archetype.
I mean, I'm thinking about when you said consciousness, the bug bugging you and your conscience.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like, you blow me away.
I think you're a treasure, Jordan.
I just want to say it.
Thank you, sir.
I think you're one of the gifts to this world.
But please continue.
But I just love the way your brain goes into these areas.
Well, it's really worth, given the framework that you're using, it's really worthwhile understanding this technically.
So here's a way of thinking structurally about the process that you outlined.
Okay, so the first thing to understand is that people see the world through their aim.
Yes.
And I mean that literally.
I understand.
And then when you hear the story of someone's life, you actually hear a description of their aim.
That's right.
Okay, so now...
You specify the aim.
Now, the first thing that happens perceptually, and you talked about perception, the first thing that happens is that once you specify the aim, the pathway appears.
That's how your perceptual systems work.
And the reason for that is, well, if you can't see your way to get where you're going, then what good is it to see?
Right, okay.
You specify the aim, the pathway occurs.
Well, that's the precondition for a quest.
Okay, now the next thing that happens, so the pathway occurs, the next thing that happens is that sets the frame for emotional experience.
So now, everything that you encounter as an obstacle on that pathway elicits negative emotion.
And everything that you encounter that facilitates movement forward evokes positive emotion.
So one of the corollaries of that is no aim, no positive emotion.
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Yes.
Right.
No hope.
No enthusiasm.
I call it when you look at people that are pressed.
Or even people just not where they want to be.
They have no compelling future.
Yes, right.
Anyone can deal with a difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow.
Yes.
And so when people think about our country, our country has just gone through a period.
Regardless, I'm an independent.
I voted on both sides of the aisle, so this is not a political statement.
But if I asked you, what has been the vision for this country in the last four years, last eight years even?
To somehow pay off our debt, to make it through these times.
No one has got a clear vision.
As opposed to, look at a Democrat and a Republican.
Kennedy got up and talked about, in this decade, we're going to put a man on the earth and return him safely.
The city on the hill with Reagan.
It doesn't matter which person, but they both had a vision that unified America for a period of time, created an optimism.
Now you're starting to feel, not everybody obviously, because it's left and right.
But a lot of people are now, I don't care if it's Republican or Democrat.
Give me somebody competent.
Give me somebody to get results.
And there's an excitement about change because things have not happened.
There seems to be more of a compelling future, especially in the health area.
You and I are both passionate about, right?
With Bobby Kennedy and the army of people that were attacked during COVID who were telling the truth, and now they're going to be in charge.
So the world is shifting.
But I really think it's important for your listeners or viewers to understand, because I think you and I couldn't be more aligned.
A compelling future is everything.
Because without that, you can have an aim, by the way, but if it's not compelling, it's not going to do much.
Well, and you demonstrate in the physiology of your lectures the fact that that...
That compelling aspect is possible and real.
Yes.
But I also get them to experience it once again.
If they just watch me, I'm not here to be their role model examples.
I'm not here to be your guru.
I'm here to be your friend.
I have some insights.
You have insights.
We can learn from each other, right?
But the idea of getting in a state of mind where you're in a heightened state of consciousness because your energy increases.
Think about it.
When your energy drops...
Usually negative thoughts grow with that pretty massively, right?
Self-negative thoughts, thoughts about society.
As you raise the energy level, it's like plugging into a computer.
You have the greatest computer, but enough electricity.
But if there's full electricity, there's power there.
And most of us have gotten adjusted to a level of energy, especially post-COVID, that we don't even realize because we're like fish in water.
It has dropped massively.
When I walk around into companies, that's why engagement became so important to me.
There's just not the same level of engagement, and no one's trying to deliberately do it.
They were conditioned for four years to sit still in front of a computer and do anything, and many people before that weren't doing anything.
It just magnified it.
But when the energy increases, that's my first job, your consciousness increases with that frequency of intensity.
When you said memory, well, there's a physiological explanation for that.
Okay, so dopamine does two things.
It produces that feeling of enthusiasm.
That's why people take cocaine, for example, or most of the drugs of abuse that are stimulants.
Right.
Okay, so it produces that feeling of reward, but that's not all it does.
So imagine that there's a positive outcome and that produces some enthusiasm.
Okay, now imagine that there's a chain of neurological events that led up to that positive.
Yes.
Okay, what dopamine does is encourage the neural systems that were active just before that positive event occurred to grow.
Yes.
So now that means...
You're creating more wiring.
And you're strengthening whatever connections we're used to have.
You're going from dial-up to a higher level.
if you're increasing the energy and you're simultaneously getting people to configure their goals and those two things are happening at the same time, that should increase the probability that the goals that they adopt will be instantiated permanently into memory.
And then it's also not exactly the kind of memory that you would call to mind to talk about.
It's the kind of memory that you see the world through.
So that's a different, that's procedural memory.
It's a completely different kind of memory.
I got it.
It's the kind of memory that, so let's say you practice applying a certain framework of interpretations Okay, that...
That practice reconfigures procedural memory, and that's literally the rewiring of the system through which you view the world.
That's correct.
Right, right.
And when you have a new view of the world, you come up with new meanings.
And meanings, as you know, we both know, you do maps of meaning.
My entire life has been, you know, I remember reading Man's Search for Meaning.
I'm actually making the film.
And it was one of the books that influenced me the most because the ability to find meaning, even in the most difficult time, and Viktor Frankl to me is just a godsend to this planet.
Yeah, it's a great book.
It's crazy.
If you haven't read it, please, whoever you're listening, read it.
That's Man's Search for Meaning.
Yes, read that book.
It's incredible.
But the point of your meanings change, Your focus and your meanings change when your energy shifts.
And so it's so fundamental to bring that energy up.
And most people have no reference for it in their body.
You know, if you go to a concert, I remember Pat Riley came to one of our...
You know, owns a piece of the Miami Heat.
He was an amazing coach, if you're not familiar with the NBA basketball.
One of the winningest coaches in history.
Good friend of mine, known him for 30 years.
And he came to one of our programs and he said, Tony, this is like the seventh game of the NBA championship, but it goes on for four days and it's 13 hours a day.
Right, right, right.
So that vibrancy, and most people at the game are cheering at times and not.
This is an experience in your body.
That's why I do the number of hours.
That's why it's immersion.
That's why it's multiple days, four days or six days.
And that's why it has...
That's the lasting impact.
But you're right.
The dopamine circuits are actually creating, what's the weight matter in your brain?
The myelin, right?
Creating the myelin.
Yeah, that's right.
If you look at a great athlete, people look at somebody, I'm fortunate enough to own a piece of several sporting teams, and one of them is the Golden State Warriors.
And you look at Steph Curry, the greatest 33-point shooter in the world.
And people look at him, and he goes and he shoots the ball from almost half court.
And he's chomping on the side of his mouthpiece and he doesn't even wait to go.
He turns and smiles and he knows.
And then all of a sudden the crowd goes wild and it goes through.
It's like, it looks like impossible.
But where did that impossible come from?
He built the Milan over and over and over again so it's hardwired.
He knows exactly what to do and how to do that.
This is the part that we all forget.
I always tell people, when you see people who are amazing in public, they're being rewarded in public for what they've practiced massively in private.
Yes, yes.
So here's his plan.
Just take 15 years in the NBA, that's the only he's been there.
Greatest three-point shooter in history, nobody even close if you're not familiar with the NBA. He practices 500 shots a day, every day, seven days a week, bar none.
That's 3,500 shots a week.
That's 168,000 shots a month.
2.52 million shots, not forget his college career, just in his professional career, so that he can make 3,300 three-point shots and be the greatest in history.
That's less than one-tenth of one percent of the time compared to his practice.
So the wiring in him is so...
Powerful, but it doesn't just show up.
Hope and excitement are wonderful things, but you need competency as well.
And in order to have that, the hope can get you started, give you the drive, the vision, the aim.
But you've got to have the execution.
You have both the strategy and you've got to have the execution.
Okay, so let's talk about that because you talked about eliciting motivation.
Over a long period of time.
So I'd like to know more about...
Or I would even say the word, if I may, drive.
Because motivation is, the reason I use it, it's like a warm bath.
You should probably take a bath, but it doesn't last, right?
You should still do it.
But drive is like, everyone is motivated.
If you're overweight, you're motivated to eat, right?
Come on.
I want to find out what drives you, because if we unleash your drives, not my drives.
What drives you towards the right aim?
That's right.
What is it that will unleash you?
That's what this experience is about.
That's different than just being motivated.
Okay, so let's walk.
Okay, so I have an exercise that people can do online called future authoring, and one of its steps, and I'd like you to tell me how this compares to what you're doing in your seminars, in your events.
It's a conditions of satisfaction exercise, or it's a meditation and contemplation exercise, or it's a prayer, or a request for revelation.
But here's the idea.
Imagine for a moment that you could have what you wanted and needed in five years.
But there's a condition.
You have to know what it is, and you have to specify it.
Then the question would be, well, how are you going to discover that?
And the answer is, you ask yourself.
It's like, okay, what would...
It's like the Viktor Frankl scenario.
Even hypothetically, what would get me out of bed in the morning on a very, very difficult day?
Yes.
What could I imagine could come to me in my life?
We'll get you up late, get you up early, make you fully alive.
Yeah, well, what would make you persevere in times of trouble?
Exactly.
Even a more direct question.
Okay, so...
And by the way, I find, tell me it's the same for you, it's not just the aim or objective, it's strong enough reasons.
In other words, somebody say, I want to make a billion dollars, but they don't do it.
And they envision to get excited about it, a million dollars, whatever it is.
I want to have three perfect children.
I want to write a book, whatever.
The secret is, reasons come first, answers come second.
Once I know what I want, I've got to figure out why.
Yes.
Because purpose is stronger than object.
So the object may inspire you, but what's going to keep you going is strong enough reasons when it's tough.
What are the reasons?
Okay, I want this money.
For what?
Well, I want to provide a home for my mom.
Well, that's very different than I just want to have these pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on it, right?
People say, I want money.
They don't want money.
They want an emotion.
They want an impact.
They want security, or they want freedom, or they want to be able to contribute, or they want to do something they think money will give them more choices on, right?
They don't want the money.
So I'm always trying to dig underneath to figure out what is the...
Yeah, that's the substructure.
Exactly.
That's the surface desire.
And many people focus on the surface desire, not knowing enough reasons to follow through.
That's why New Year's resolutions don't work.
91% of them, I don't know what the latest statistic is, people don't follow through after three weeks.
By the time they're hearing us speak, if they had New Year's resolutions, they're gone.
Because they don't have the reasons to push through, and they don't have the strategy.
It's wonderful if you say, I want to see a sunset, but if your strategy is to start running east as fast as you can, I don't give a damn how positive you are.
It's not going to work.
So it's a combination of that aim, those values, that drive you and I are talking about, that ignite enough reasons for it, and then the strategies to execute.
You'll eventually find your way there, but the speed at which you do it is if I believe in modeling.
I believe success leaves clues.
My original teacher, Jim Rohn, taught me that.
He said, if someone is successful at anything, they've got a great relationship and it's 20 years down the line and they still do it.
Or they lost weight and kept off for 10 years.
Or they went from nothing to not just making money, but sustaining financial security and freedom for their family.
They're not lucky.
They're doing something different than you are.
So instead of you trial and error, which is the standard way in which we learn, You find the pathway to power by finding someone who's done it consistently and produced results.
That obsession within me has launched most of the books I've written, most things I've done.
It's like, I want to know what this book was.
How do I help people with...
The best breakthroughs in health, for example, life force and energy, they take 17 years to go from the breakthrough time to your clinician.
Like, how do I shorten that up?
I'm going to interview 150 of the most brilliant regenerative doctors in the world, Nobel Prize winners, and find out what they're doing and give it to you right now.
Or I'm going to finance.
I can talk to your finance about what I think, or I can go interview 50 of the smartest financial people in the history of the world that are alive today and find out what do they do?
And while they're different, I look for what are the common strategies, elements, what is guiding this?
And then I can teach that my billionaire client goes, this is incredible, and the average person goes, this is incredible.
It's very much what you do.
It's finding the pathway.
It's finding the DNA. It's finding the codex of how to go from where you are to where you want to be.
But it is more than just the aim.
That'll start you.
You've got to have the purpose or the reasons or your purpose.
If it's somebody else's purpose or reasons, it won't last.
And then you need the strategies too because that'll give you the driving.
You will figure it out if you can discipline your disappointment.
If you can push yourself beyond what most people give up on, you're going to get there eventually.
You're going to keep flexing.
But you'll get there 10 times faster if you can say, wow, there's already a pathway that's been proven.
Why would I reinvent the wheel?
I'll still bring myself to it, my own uniqueness to it.
But there's certain fundamentals that if you do them, you're going to have economic abundance.
If you don't, you're going to have pain.
That's actually the purpose of stories.
Pardon me?
That's the purpose of story.
That's exactly right.
Okay, so you said something that I think we could delve into technically too.
Okay, so you said an aim isn't sufficient.
It'll get you started.
Okay, and then you said you have to have reasons.
Okay, so let's think that through for a minute.
So one of the things we do in this program that helps people rewire their aim is do a multidimensional analysis.
And we step people through that.
It's like, okay, now you've sort of figured out what...
You would want and need if you could have it.
But let's flesh that out so you could say, well, how would that positively affect your intimate relationship, your marriage, right?
How would that positively affect your family?
How would it affect your community?
So you're making them come up with reasons.
Well, then you can imagine this, too.
You can imagine that, like, in some ways we're loose constellations of...
Multiple motivations.
And you want to meld those all together so you're serving the same name.
And then you're not...
As opposed to being pulled apart.
I want to be totally successful and never be rejected.
If you're going to be successful on a social scale, that's not possible.
And so if you have those two conflicts, you're going to take two steps forward and three back.
And that's what we do with people.
We have them re-engineer the values so they pull you forward as opposed to pull you apart.
Because most of us have so many conflicts.
It's a lack of clarity usually.
There's not a clear aim.
There's not enough reasons.
Poor strategy.
But ultimately what really stops people and what I do with people and events is I find the inner conflict.
Yes, definitely.
The inner conflict is what's keeping them from executing.
It means they're actually living out multiple stories simultaneously and they don't have the same aim.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
And that's okay too.
It doesn't have to all be the same story, but there has to be some unifying element to what matters most to you for you to live an extraordinary quality of life.
Again, life on your terms.
What you think is extraordinary.
Is that three children?
Is that writing a book?
Is that building a business?
Is that all of the above?
I don't know.
It's got to be on your terms.
So one of the things I discovered when I was walking through the biblical stories is the book itself is structured in a manner that's analogous to the pattern that you just described.
So, what happens in the biblical stories is that a sequence of stories are put forward that each circulate around a form of high order goal.
So, I'll give you an example.
So, in the story of Noah, for example, the voice of the divine in the story of Noah is characterized as the intuition that calls the wise to prepare when trouble is brewing.
Right?
So that's God for Noah.
Because Noah is described as a man who's wise in his generation.
So he's the sort of person you'd go to for advice.
And his ability to intuit is well developed in consequence of his practice of wisdom.
And everyone recognizes that.
And now he has a powerful revelation or intuition that all hell's about to break loose and he should take appropriate steps.
And that's his faith in God.
But God in that...
The highest goal, you might say, in that story is this intuition of the wise to prepare in the face of disaster.
Okay, that's very different than the God that makes himself manifest to Abraham.
So Abraham is someone who's resting on his laurels and who's privileged at the beginning of the story.
His parents are wealthy, and there's no reason for him to lift a finger.
And he comes...
God comes to him as the voice of adventure, and God says to him, it's very cool.
This is the covenant, by the way, and I'm sure you'll see the relationship between this and what you're doing in your seminars.
God comes to Moses as a spirit of adventure, and he offers him a bargain, which is the covenant.
He says, if you leave your zone of comfort, if you move away from your father's tent, if you move away from what's familiar to you, and you do that voluntarily, And you make the sacrifices necessary as a consequence.
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If you persist long enough, because it took you like 98 to have this for skin, right?
Yeah, exactly.
But he didn't give up, he just kept moving forward.
It didn't matter if he made mistakes, he kept moving in the right direction.
Yes, and that's partly the element of his faith, okay?
So the deal is, your life will become a blessing to you.
So that's that antidepressant phenomenon that we're describing.
So instead of living in misery, you'll live in something approximating.
Hope and security.
That's the first part of the deal.
The second part is, your name will become renowned among other people and you'll deserve it.
So that's a good deal because people want social status and they want the security and the capacity to cooperate and compete peacefully that goes along with that.
It's a fundamental, it might even be the fundamental human aim, but it's at least a fundamental human aim.
That's number two.
Number three is, it'll give you your best shot.
Establishing something of multi-generational permanence.
So that's a good deal because one of the things that people want when they search for what's meaningful is that they say, well, I'd like to do something that lasts or matters.
So that's the third thing.
And the fourth thing is you'll do it in a way that'll be of a benefit to everyone else.
So it's not a zero-sum game.
And so it's so cool, this story, because what it does is align.
The calling of adventure, so that would be that calling or pull, with those four outcomes.
But then there's a meta move in the...
Which gives you more reasons, because we'll always do more for those we love than we will for ourselves.
That's the beauty of being human.
That's humanity at its best, right?
Yes, that's why you want to think through, if you do have an aim, what the benefit would be to the people that you love and to your community.
Because it anchors it.
Okay, the meta claim...
In the juxtaposition of these narratives, this is so cool, is that the voice that tells the wise to prepare in the time of crisis...
manifestations of the same distal goal.
So you could imagine that the ultimate uniting goal brings all the underlying potential stories together.
And then that's developed through the biblical corpus.
And in the New Testament, that's fleshed out completely because the claim in the New Testament is something like the embodiment of the spirit that's characterized in multiple ways in the Old Testament is made manifest as the willingness for voluntary self-sacrifice in service that's fleshed out completely because the claim in the New Testament is something like Willingness for voluntary self-sacrifice in service of the highest goal.
And that's what's acted out in the passion story.
And that seems to me to be precisely accurate.
Because you said yourself earlier that a goal that is only serving your...
Our own, so to speak, narrow and proximal motives isn't one that's going to last.
It has to be anchored in multiple ways and it has to be worthwhile.
But there is this insistence that's...
I think this is the monotheistic hypothesis, actually, is that there is a distal aim that unites all subordinate aims and if you can ally yourself with that, you become something approximating an unstoppable force.
100%.
That's where all the energy comes from.
There's so much...
I look at it this way.
You can call it God, you can call it life, whatever.
I prefer God, but still, life supports whatever supports more life.
So as an individual with my own goals, take your bees, the bumblebee could be selfishly going after just the nectar for itself, if you want to call that selfish, but then what attaches to its legs is pollen, and that's why I have more flowers, right?
So there's a certain amount of benefit by anyone's individual desires, desire of the father, right?
You know, it's like with that desire is the ability to fulfill it if you can persist and discover.
But I found that I believe that when your desire is to serve something more than yourself, first of all, you get out of yourself, so there's no more of the internal anxieties.
That's for sure.
You're not there.
You know, that concern, thoughts of yourself and neurotic suffering are so...
Closely allied statistically that you can't separate them.
So if you were thinking about your narrow self, that's the definition of misery.
100%.
The mind is distorting, deleting, and generalize.
It's a reduction system so that all this input doesn't overwhelm us.
So what happens?
That reduction system makes us not see, not experience some aspects of life.
That's why I said we don't experience life.
We experience the life we focus on.
So it's our job to direct the focus, but then have enough reasons to follow through on that focus, and then have enough emotional fuel.
I mean, think of it this way.
It's the difference between knowing something intellectually and having it in your nervous system.
Mastery starts with cognitive understanding.
Cognitive understanding is like $3 will almost get you a Starbucks.
You know, no one cares.
It won't do anything, right?
But if you go from that to emotional understanding, which is consequence you're describing, where I start to learn that if I do this, it gives me this pain, or if I do this, it gives me this pleasure, now I'm going to apply more of what I've learned.
Well, my goal is to get down to physical mastery.
That's the procedural memory level.
And that's what you're able to do with immersion after day.
Yeah, that's right.
Because you don't have to think about it anymore.
It just happens.
When I went to drive a stick shift car the first time, I don't know your experience, but mine was overwhelming.
That guy teased me because I'm like, I'm supposed to do this and this and this and watch the road too.
It's never going to happen.
But sure enough, you get in your nervous system with enough repetition, enough emotional reward, and then all of a sudden it's in your body and now you can do 12 other things.
Hopefully you're not texting, but you can do it all.
That's what people meant by character.
Yes.
A character development is the development of those procedural habits that shape perception itself.
A hundred percent.
Right, and it's not the same as propositional knowledge, which is the knowledge that you can discuss.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, and it does require, and so you're, now, so let me ask you about...
But I want to finish something you said, because I want to, I haven't done your process, I want to do this.
What do you call the process you described?
Future authoring.
And you are getting to think of reasons.
So the only thing I would add to that, if I was able to add my two cents, which is all it's probably worth, I would alter their state while they're doing it to a higher level of energy.
Just doing it alters your state.
So the advantage to the system that we have is it's distributable online, it's highly inexpensive, it doesn't take very much time, and it's scalable.
But it doesn't have that participatory element.
So that's a problem.
Choices of music, or you could generate some element of exercise for them to do physically, a breathing process.
For example, in the study you saw, they mentioned 10 minutes of practice.
Well, not everybody did it, but the 10-minute practice comes from something I do.
You're familiar with priming, right?
Yeah.
So for your audience, just remind people, priming is when you think it's your thoughts, very often those thoughts have been primed by the environment.
So one quick example, so they know what we're following, you and I are following, is they took a group of actors, four of them, two men, two women, had them go out and approach people in the park and the mall and all these things.
And they walk up to them and they have a cup of coffee.
I mentioned this the other night when we were together.
And they hand you the coffee and they look down.
So could you hold this for a second?
And they look down.
They don't wait for you to say yes.
Well, 98% of people take the coffee because it looks like it's going to fall otherwise.
They reach in their pocket, they take out their phone, they put it back, they say, thank you very much.
They practice doing the exact same way, the same facial expression, men and women into 100 people each, 400. The only difference is half of them they gave iced coffee to, half of them they gave hot coffee to.
Now, 15 to 20 minutes later, somebody comes by with a clipboard.
And they come up and say, excuse me, here's $20.
This is not a scam.
We're just under a tight timeline for our research.
If you read these four paragraphs of this story and answer these two questions, we'll give you $20.
And a lot of people didn't even take $20.
They're just, okay, I'll do it.
They read the story.
They ask them a question.
The primary question is, describe the main character of this story.
What were they like?
What are their qualities?
81% of the people were given.
Iced coffee said the person was cold and uncaring.
79%, basic meant variability, of the people that got the hot coffee said the person was warm and genuine.
The same thing happens with creativity tests, showing you IBM and Apple, seeing those.
That's all you got to do before the test.
The ones that see the Apple commercial or even the logo, because Apple commercialists think differently.
Scored 22% higher on the creativity test.
So much of what we think we're doing ourselves is being shifted by the outside world.
So I say prime yourself.
That's what religious practice is supposed to do.
Yes, and I think that's what it does do.
Well, so for example, in the story of Abraham...
Yes.
Okay, so the story is a sequence of...
Micro-adventures that Abraham has, and they expand in scope as he progresses, which is the story of life, right?
But at the beginning of each adventure, he aims upward, and that's the rekindling of that covenant, and indicates his willingness to sacrifice.
Right, right, right.
So that's an indication of that, what would you say, humble willingness to change, and it's a prime.
And it's a very useful prime, and it's one that you can actually apply.
So, for example, and I'd like to know how you do this, technically, when you go on stage.
So before I take the stage, my wife and I do this.
We have a musician, which is really helpful.
He helps us focus, and everybody in the audience focus.
And there is something about music that does that entrainment, that physiological entrainment that you described.
You wouldn't last those 12 hours if you're just sitting still.
It's all movement.
It's all music.
It's constant.
And different types of music.
There are different emotional states that I want to produce.
Right, right.
I use that as well.
Yeah, yeah.
I could see that in your events.
There's a party atmosphere to them.
And there's a reason that people use music while in religious ceremonies, for example.
Sure.
Okay, so the next thing that I try to get the aim in mind, and my wife does too, because she introduces me And the aim for me is always a quest.
It's like, I have a question, and it's a real question, and I want to get farther in answering it.
And so I don't know what I'm going to say, but I know the tools I'm going to use.
But the aim is, I know the aim.
The aim is a clear question.
If I don't have that, the talk wanders, and it's opaque.
There's an outcome.
There's a clear outcome that unifies you moving towards it.
And you're unconscious.
It takes over.
Well, that's the prime.
Because I can even have the plan, but because I know the outcome, when I go out, I feel the room and it always changes.
Of course.
Okay, okay, okay.
So that's one of the things I was curious about.
Okay, so the other thing we do is take a moment, and this is a very serious moment, to remember that 3,000 people took a lot of their time and energy and money.
To come and do this, and they're very happy to be here, and we should be very happy that they're here.
Also, because it's highly unlikely, and that we should be, we should do everything we can to eradicate anything that isn't entirely grateful for the opportunity, right?
So now we've got aim and the appropriate mindset, and that's a prime.
And then it is so interesting, eh, because I learned over time that...
I had to do a lot of preparation for the talks.
Now, I can do it with less now, but I do a lot.
But once on stage, I had to pursue that aim and I had to let the preparation go.
That didn't mean I didn't have to do it.
You don't have the same belief.
Okay, so I'm very curious about the way that you manage this because you're a very high-intensity speaker and you're very charismatic and compelling and you maintain it for much longer than I do.
I go for like 90 minutes.
I had lectures at the university that were three hours long.
I was pretty much done at the end of that.
But tell me how you prepare for one of these events.
And then you also said when you go on stage, you read the room.
And I want to know what that means.
Because you obviously, it was one of the things I taught my wife when she was learning to speak publicly.
I said, well, first of all, don't look at the crowd.
It's not a crowd.
Pick people because you can talk to people.
You're talking to a person and you can do that, right?
And then, so you get your attitude right and you, oh yes, and then if you look, I told her, look everywhere in the audience because everywhere you don't look, you're afraid of, right?
And so you want to go on stage and you want to position yourself.
You look at these people and you look at these people and these people and these people and you see where you are and then you're not self-conscious.
And then, If you're pursuing your aim, so the aim is I'm going to answer this question and I'm going to be pleased that these people are here.
You're not self-conscious because it's not about you.
You hit 100%.
Okay, okay.
So tell me what you do.
So first, I'll mention just about public speaking as a whole.
It's one of the largest fears that people have in a public place.
Yeah, right.
And people ask me, don't you have that fear?
Well, of course not.
I've done it, you know, 8 billion times.
Right, right.
But the real reason is I wasn't scared in the beginning.
And the reason I wasn't scared is because I was obsessed on the audience and what do they need and what I believe passionately I can serve them with.
I'm not there.
I call it uptime.
When you're in uptime, I'm out here feeling you.
You see a speaker that loses the audience for a moment, or completely, they go in their head and they're trying to think of what to do.
They're self-conscious, and they're done.
Then it's about them.
Exactly.
How am I doing?
What do people think of me?
That's different than, am I getting through to them?
Or am I pursuing the question?
How far along are we in getting them to where we're committed to here?
What are they really experiencing?
My preparation starts with physics.
For the same reasons.
You wrote in your first book, and I've been teaching it since I was 19 years old, I guess.
I call it physiology first.
You call it shoulders back, right?
It's like the physiology has to be created first in me, or I can't take you there.
If I want to touch you, I've got to be touched.
Yeah, yeah.
If I want to move you, I've got to be moved.
So first there's the endurance aspect, which is, you know, I do oxygen deprivation.
I do everything you can imagine.
You dream of exercise so that I can get up there and sustain for 12 or 13 hours for four days or six days.
So that's one part.
Then people ask my wife, what's something about Tony that no one realizes?
She said how hard he prepares.
Because...
I could do the same.
I could use my pinky.
I could do nothing and get up to do with this stage of my life.
But I believe that loading my commitment to be the best I can be to deliver for these souls is I've got to be clear on the outcomes.
And I have multiple outcomes in multiple days and pieces.
I have primary outcomes for each day and even segments of the day.
It's like, okay, these are my primary outcomes.
And then I close my eyes and I focus on who's there and why they're there.
Why do you close your eyes?
Because I want to see it.
I want to feel it.
I'm a see-feel person.
I see it and I can feel it immediately.
So I see what the result needs.
I see where the audience is.
And then I think about what makes everybody unique.
Let's say a stock brokerage company or I'm going to a general population.
I'm going to China.
And there, obviously, it's not about, or let's say Japan's an even better example, it's not individualism and the need that people have to save face.
And then how do I meet those needs?
So I think in depth about who these people are.
Even though there's a huge audience, there are patterns.
Some are general, but they're wide enough and important enough.
And then I also have interviewed people in advance.
My staff does.
And I read why they're there, what they're interested in, what the hooks are, just as triggers.
In my Date with Destiny seminar, everybody has like a 12 to 22-page questionnaire they do.
That's a very intensive program.
I read them all, 5,000 of them.
I will not remember everybody's name, but I will remember those patterns.
When somebody stands up, a brain takes off and knows where to go with it, right?
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What do you watch and listen for when you're on stage?
Before I get there, though, one more piece before I get there.
Physically, I'm there.
Mentally, I'm connected.
I tell people in business, fall in love with your customer.
Don't do a transaction.
If you fall in love with your customer or your client, they'll become your client.
They become your client, you're going to serve them long-term.
You're going to have yourself a friendship, a relationship.
I do that.
Before.
I create that relationship with them before they've ever had a relationship with me inside of me.
And then the third thing I do...
That's gratitude for their presence.
I'm so grateful for the presence and grateful that I have the privilege to serve them and learn from them.
Because I don't have the delusion when I get up there that I'm just here to deliver every single time.
I'm going to learn from these interactions as well.
And I tell people that.
You know, it's interesting.
You see people who are intimidated or arrogant.
I don't experience either one of those in my life.
And I think it's because early on I made a decision.
I don't have to worry about trying to be enough because I know every person I meet is superior to me in some way.
Not because I'm inferior, because they have a different life experience.
Like with you, your capacity with language, your capacity, I know how to deal with stories, active, pragmatic stories, reshaping.
But your ability to take any mythological, religious...
Ellen, you just blow me away.
I mean, that's very sincerely, it's like you have a gift in that area.
It's incredible.
I don't have that same gift.
I have portions of that maybe, but not that.
I have other gifts, right?
So I look at you and I hold you with such respect.
And so I developed strong relationships because people feel the love and respect.
You can love somebody and not respect them.
Yes.
Right?
You can respect somebody and not love them.
Well, I'm a lover, so that's easy.
Right?
I find the good in everybody.
But I respect because I know it's going to be there.
Now, I'm not worried about losing something because I also know.
That's a great way to establish a relationship with someone, right?
Well, yeah, because people feel the difference.
But I also know, and this is not ego-driven, I'm superior to every person I meet in some contexts because I have a different life experience.
And in my life, it's been an obsession.
This will be my 48th year doing it.
what makes people do what they do.
Why can you give some people everything, love, support, education, economics, and they end up in rehab their whole life and someone else's life just smashes the hell out of psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, go through abuse and then become Oprah Winfrey.
And they touch the world, right?
And when I began to realize it, it's biography is not destiny.
And so then I started to see what are the core principles that shape all of that?
And now I want to put it into a process.
So then what I do is right before I go on stage, I have a last set of physical things I do every time.
I do a set of movements I do in my body, like wake up my whole nervousness.
Imagine I want to take my energy to level 0 to 10, level 20. There's no 20 level 10. That's limited thinking.
I'm going to take it as intense as I can.
So now when I relax, relaxing is a 9 or a 10 as opposed to a 4 or 5. My energy has to capture a stadium and sustain it.
So I do that.
Then the last piece that I do personally is, it's a prayer.
And it's just, I wear these baseball caps a lot of times and on the side of it, it says to be a blessing and underneath it says, and you'll be blessed.
That's my mission.
So I ask God to just, you know, please use me.
Use me, Lord, today.
Use me to bless them in whatever way they need to be blessed.
And I make that move my body and music hits and I go outside there and then it takes over.
It takes over.
When I was bleeding out, it takes over when I had mercury poisoning and I was throwing up as renouncing my name.
And I'm going to get up for 13 hours.
The other day I went to Mexico, and I won't give you the gory details, but I discovered that willpower does not control your bowels.
It's not enough when you've been to Mexico.
And I'm getting on stage with 19,000 people and 30...
I've gone for five days with E. coli, and my body is in convulsions, and I'm trying to think, how am I going to hang on?
I walk out there, and I'm walking out nimbly instead of running.
I had to tell the audience, if I disappear, please don't leave.
I'll be right back.
I've had this little experience, right?
And in 15 minutes, I go from my body's hanging on for dear life to something takes over.
I don't know if it's the sympathetic that takes over, but then 13 hours without a break, and I'm in it.
But I really believe that's that part when I said life supports what supports more life.
If I now, when I suddenly had, I was 25, I married a woman that was 11 years my senior.
She'd been married twice before and she was unhappy without her kids.
So I adopted her kids.
So I'm 25 and have a 17-year-old son, an 11-year-old, a 5-year-old.
My level of growth.
By that responsibility that I took very seriously, while I still want to change the world was explosive.
Well, if your goal is to support your family, that's a different level of insight than just you.
You're going to get more insights if you're looking to serve a community, if you're looking to see humanity.
I'm not talking about virtue signaling.
I'm talking about in your soul, you know what is real.
Deepest purpose and desire is what you're called for.
Well, when that happens, there's an aliveness and a strength that seems to overcome.
It overcomes exhaustion.
It overcomes everything.
That's what Frankel said.
Because it comes through you.
It's a calling.
It's a different experience, right?
But I also just want to mention, I mentioned the 10-minute pieces.
That priming I was telling about, I start every morning by priming myself, including the days I'm on stage.
What is priming?
I wasn't much of a meditator.
My meditation is serving people.
God kind of comes through or somebody stands up and they're going to commit suicide.
It all just happens.
Or I'm running on the beach.
I'm in nature.
That's my version of meditation.
More active movement.
But I realized there was value in the stillness at that stage and the peace.
And so I developed this little 10-minute process.
And why 10 minutes?
Because if I told you 20, you'd tell me you don't have the time, right?
If you don't have 10 minutes for your life, you don't have a life, right?
You agree with me?
So I said, I want to do three things in that 10 minutes.
What is the emotion that keeps most people, what messes up their relationships, messes up their career?
Two of them, in my belief.
Fear and anger.
Those two.
What's the antidote to those?
Gratitude.
As simple as that is.
But not mamby-pamby gratitude, I'm grateful.
Like, if I ask you what it was like driving on a roller coaster.
And you remember the roller coaster over there and tell me about it.
There's no change in your biochemistry.
But if I get you to be in the front seat going over the edge, that's fully associated.
I'm going to get the biochemical changes.
So what I do is I do these changes in my body.
It takes less than a minute of this kind of breath of fire, if you know yogic breath of fire, explosive breath, which changes the biochemistry.
And now I take 10 minutes and I do three things.
One, I take three minutes, a minute each, and I think of something in my life that I'm incredibly grateful for, but I'm in the front seat feeling it, being there, experiencing it.
So it has a biochemical change, not an intellectual change.
And I usually pick one of those three.
It's got to be something really simple.
It could be the wind on my face from the ocean here.
It could be the smile of my daughter, you know, the morning.
And so I don't make it just like everything's going to the moon, right?
And so I train myself to feel that.
When do you do that in the day?
First thing in the morning, right?
What do you mean first thing?
Do you mean as soon as you wake up?
I go outside.
I do the water first.
I do the hot and cold.
So I do, you know, people, now it's very popular, but I've been doing it for...
What, 17 years I've been jumping in the cold and doing it.
So I have cold plunges ever in my home in Sun Valley.
So that wakes you up.
It not only wakes you up, it's also a mental discipline.
Your entire lymph system, blood flows.
But there's never a day I can remember where I was like, I can't wait to jump in this freezing water at 52 degrees.
Yeah, right.
Or if I'm going to the river in Sun Valley, walking through the snow, and it's like 42 degrees there, right?
But...
When I get to it, there is never hesitancy because I am training my brain, besides my body, that people say, I don't feel like it.
I don't give a shit if you don't feel like it.
Of course you don't feel like it.
It's cold water.
No, but I don't negotiate with myself.
It's like the minute I get there, I don't go, okay, let me get ready or let me get one more comfortable moment.
It's like, when I say go, we go.
And I've done that for years.
So now when I say go, we go with anything else.
There's no discussion.
This is what we're going to do right now.
This is a unified force.
So I get that, and then I sit and I do this breathing, and I do three minutes, fully connected, what I'm grateful for, a huge biochemical change.
Three minutes on what would be a prayer or a blessing, where I ask for guidance to cleanse my system of anything that's no longer needed, to strengthen my greatest strengths, my love, my passion, my commitment.
And then I see sending that energy out like in a circle to those closest to my family, my closest friends, my associates, my clients, my customers, anybody they want to meet.
Right, so that sets your attitude to them.
And also, I'm sure you've seen, you know, the Dalai Lama, they did those studies where people focus on compassion for people they don't even know.
And there's a change in the brain and how it functions and it affects you.
So I do that for myself.
So there's a science-based everything I do as well.
And then third...
Well, if you practiced universal love, you'd probably get better at it.
Yeah, I would think so.
Well, why not, right?
If you practice gratitude, you're going to get better at it.
And what am I doing all this?
I'm wiring myself every day to do this, right?
So it becomes like when I wake up, it starts to happen.
And then the third one I call Three to Thrive, where I think of three things, a minute each, that I want to accomplish or achieve.
And I see them as already done.
I feel them as done.
I celebrate them as done.
So my reticular activating system, which I can talk in shorthand for you, you understand.
If I go and I buy a car and outfit, suddenly you see the car and outfit everywhere.
Well, weren't they always there?
Yes.
But now it's important to RAS, right?
So I wire my RAS for the final victory with the emotion and the impact on my family, my friends, and everything else.
So are you doing that with the images?
Yes, I close my eyes, I see, feel, and I feel.
I walk through it, I celebrate it.
Okay, so tell me exactly that.
So at the end of those 10 minutes...
When you're running these simulations, you're not...
You're making the case that you're not only thinking about it in words.
No.
Like, so what are you doing?
Are you in a state that's like a dream?
Like, is it image-based?
Now, you said there's emotions.
It's image and feel.
Everyone has different synesthesia patterns, as I'm sure you know.
Mine are C-feel.
Some people are audio-feel, right?
Some people, everybody has different, well, not everybody has synesthesia patterns.
Some people stay on one modality, as you know, and that limits you.
But I wired myself to see, feel.
So I know that's it.
So I see it.
I feel it is done.
And then I'll say something.
So it's quite a multidimensional simulation.
That's right.
That's what makes it real.
Yeah, yeah.
And now what happens is now you're vibrating.
Now the world hits you.
Because look, there's two worlds you've got to master.
The outside world and the inside.
Well, you can't control that outside world.
You can influence it.
But I can certainly control what I focus on, what it means to me, what I'm going to do.
And so now, when things come in, they bounce off.
Now, I might do 60 seconds of grace later in the day, like take a minute.
And kind of reignite it if I feel like I need a little boost for it.
But when you do that enough, it's the myelin.
It's like Venus Williams and her sister, right?
Right, right.
They wire themselves by playing since they're so small and doing it.
So I'm wired to find the solution.
I'm wired to find the gratitude and I'm wired to find the good in it.
And so it doesn't just show up, right?
It doesn't show up for Steph Curry.
You do, again, what you're rewarded for in public is what you practice in private.
So I do all that before I get on stage, then I get on stage, and then it flows, and then I feel.
And I will work sometimes till 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, and I have a team around me that are amazing, and they work crazy hours with me, and I'm creating something new, and I lay out.
I'm a sequence guy.
The dog bit Johnny, Johnny bit the dog.
Change the syntax of the same ingredients.
It's a very different experience, right?
So I'm always figuring what's a good syntax.
And we all laugh about it because we work hard.
And then I get up that morning and get up on stage.
And within five minutes, all that crap's out the window.
I may still use pieces.
But like you said, this is the part you understand that most people don't.
Why do I do that if it always changes?
Because I'm loading my brain.
There's a difference between what people call emotional intelligence and what I would call emotional fitness.
Emotional intelligence is a capability.
You can be capable of being smart and not use your intelligence.
I ask people, are you an honest person?
Yes, but can you lie?
And anybody's honest, let's say yes, I've lied, right?
So let's say, you know, whether you show up or not, I look at emotional fitness, it's not a capability, it's a state of readiness.
I've activated all the circuits.
So now when I walk out there...
My nervous system is wired to serve you in any way that could possibly show up.
So you're ready to contend when you go on stage, and it's partly because you've prepared, and you manifested faith in yourself by showing the commitment to the preparation, plus you've primed all those stories, because one of the things preparation does for me, you know, so I'll have the question in mind, and then I think of it.
I think through the stories, and they're stories I know, and I think through way more stories than I'll use, but now they're at hand.
That's right.
They're activated.
It's like a belief.
Think of this.
A lot of people have conflicting beliefs.
So which one do they act on?
You may have been raised, look before you leap.
Someone else taught you, he who hesitates is lost.
Okay, they're both in you.
Which one are you going to act on?
Whichever one has been activated the most.
It's the activation of your nervous system.
That's the part I think people miss.
So many people have great philosophical understanding, but they don't execute.
And I'm a big believer that knowledge is not power.
Knowledge is potential power.
Execution...
It dwarfs and trumps knowledge every day of the week.
So I am an accelerant for the activation of moving forward, not just the understanding.
Right, so that's partly why you put so much stress on the physiological element of truth.
100%, but also then it resides in you, not as a thought.
Right, sure, sure.
Okay, so let's talk.
That's why the results are lasting.
After we walk through people through these stages of the process, we do then...
Focus and specify strategy.
It's like, okay, and the strategy is pretty, it's very concretized.
And I try to do this in my lectures.
So I have a question.
I want to lay out the structure of the question and the answer conceptually, but then I want to nail it down to transformations in perception and action.
So that's strategy.
That's right.
Okay, so tell me how you link the motivational element, the drive element, let's say, to the...
So motivation and drive are personalities, by the way.
That's a very good way of conceptualizing it because they have a viewpoint.
They have emotions.
They have a philosophy.
They're not just cause and effect physical sequences.
So you're revoking personalities in people.
By the way, this is a really important distinction.
I believe, and I think you probably do.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
We have multiple personalities.
We don't have one personality.
This idea that we're a single personality.
That's right.
And I believe when someone stands up and they've got a problem, what that really is, is an unanswered question.
So we say, I got a problem.
And I'll say, what's your question?
Right?
Yeah, right.
Because if we solve the question, your problem disappears, right?
But what I also notice is I believe that answer is already inside them.
You know, you can know that.
This is a very good thing to know if you're having a discussion with your wife.
Men get frustrated with women sometimes because women, on average, have higher levels of negative emotion.
And so that means that they're more...
Well, they're dealing with children and survival.
Well, they have their reasons.
Yeah, very big reasons.
And they're prey.
The thing that they've done most of life.
Men have been the thing that could screw things up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They have their reasons.
And they're bigger and they're stronger.
But what it means is that they're more sensitive to environmental disruptions, on average.
And then they try to communicate that to men.
But...
It isn't necessarily the case that their alarm system, which indicates a problem, is differentiated enough to specify it precisely.
So partly what you're trying to do when you're talking to your wife and she brings you a concern is to find out the question, which is what you just said.
There's a problem, but there's a question in that, right?
And one of the errors that men make when they're listening to women is that they jump from...
They presume the question too rapidly and jump to the solution without allowing the...
Or another consideration is, they don't want you to solve the problem right now and men are focused on solving problems.
That's how we grew up in the hierarchy.
They want connection, they want caring, they want empathy first.
And foremost.
And so if you're busy giving the solution, I've made this mistake so many times, Jordan, in the beginning because I'm wired to give people solutions as my whole life has been.
But for my wife or for any woman, even my daughter, my mother came in earlier and it wasn't about solving.
It was about bringing presence to her.
It was about her being comforted.
It's about me feeling her and her feeling that I feel her.
And that solves it by itself because women get together and oftentimes they don't solve the problem.
They just say, I can't believe you're going through this.
I don't know how you do it.
And that nurtures them so they can return to their natural self where they're able to deal with all these things.
Women are unbelievable.
Men tend to be single-focused, as you well know.
They have diffused awareness.
They can be here and hearing what's going on with a kid and what's happening to you and what's going on here together.
That blows my mind when we're capable of.
But with it comes an enormous burden.
And what we need to understand is...
As men, we don't carry that same burden.
We can end things more easily.
Women tell us how to be alive.
Because men can go for the target and get there, celebrate, and it's over.
Women bring the life to everything.
So we miss out on that when we make the illusion that we're just going to solve this.
It's why not just men and women, all of us have different models of the world, as you well know.
And so the more I can understand your model of the world, the more I can support you, love you, influence you in a positive way towards what you want.
So to me, to influence another person, you have to know what already influences them.
Like most people are good.
I look at what creates an extraordinary life.
I think it is leadership.
And to me, leadership is influence.
And influence is the ability to shape the thoughts, feelings, and emotions in a positive way.
You can influence in a negative way the quality of someone's life.
Whether it be your kid, whether it be your friend, it has to start with you.
You can't do it yourself, you can't do it with anybody else.
So, if it influences that, you've got to know what influences people.
Most people, do you have three children?
How many children do you have now, I'm sorry?
Two.
Two children, right?
So, I met Michaela, so I know her.
If you're, you know, most people have not a favorite child, but they have an easier child.
Was that true in your experience?
Well, Michaela was more difficult, but she was ill.
Okay.
Right, but apart from that, I wouldn't say so.
Okay.
Most people tell me, well, I had an easier child.
And they laugh.
And I said, now, was that child more like you or more like someone else?
And they all laugh because the one that has great influence is the one that's more like them, right?
But the real secret to influence is being able to influence anyone by understanding what's already influencing them.
Of course, when you tell the child that's like you to clean the room the way that works for you, it works.
The other one goes, read between the lines.
They have a different personality, different way of being.
So my whole focus is, Enter people's worlds where they are by understanding their model of the world as opposed to trying to impose yours and wondering why it doesn't go anywhere.
If I can align your needs, your desires, your outcomes with what we're doing together in a company, in a family, in anything, then we're going to have enormous harmony and there's less friction.
So you're going to go from where you are to where you want to be 10 times faster.
Of course, of course.
Yeah, you want...
You want everybody to be rowing in the same direction, even if they're in their own boat.
Okay, so I want to talk about, if you would, I want to talk about how you help people translate this aim and energy now that you've established into strategy.
So how do you guide people through that process?
Because that's where the rubber hits the road.
100%, because you've got to get the experience in them.
So I may start.
I'm going to raise the energy.
I'm going to start to introduce questions, and they're rhetorical questions, but you watch people start to process.
If I say to you, don't think of the color blue, don't think of the color blue, don't think of the blue, we know what color you're thinking about, right?
If I want you to think about your mother, I start talking about mine.
If I want you to think about your high school years, talk about mine.
You'll go in a trance, and you'll go to your place.
Most change, I find, lasting change always happens in an altered state.
An altered state of consciousness.
Well, you can call it hypnosis.
Have you ever seen people go to an elevator and push the button that's already lit up?
If you got a dollar for everyone, you'd be rich.
Or you're even driving your car, and then all of a sudden something gets you fixated, and then you wake up and go, who the hell's been driving the car, right?
People go into trans state.
Trans just means you're more internal than external.
So I utilize that.
I let them go to their internal world and enrich their maps, and then once they have an understanding, the cognitive, and they start seeing the emotional consequences, now we have them do something while they're there.
I call it e-cubing.
I'm able to hold people at length because I believe people want to be entertained first in the world we're in today.
We're not in the information age.
It's over.
It died.
There's too much information.
We're drowning in information, starving for wisdom.
So what people want is entertainment.
So I earned the right.
By entertaining, by making them laugh, cry, move them so much.
The people who didn't think they're going to be, the people who came there like this, right?
In a matter of 15 minutes, that's all changed so radically.
So now I have the right to educate them.
And now I want to bring them the best insights.
Why do you think that convinces them?
It doesn't convince them, it opens them.
Yeah, but why?
Because you just described it as entertainment.
Because it produces an emotional change, not just an intellectual one.
Why does that make them open to the difficulty of change?
Because they get comfortable when you're laughing or trying or moved emotionally.
You're wide open.
Things are not, you're not hanging, you can't hang on.
Is that a matter of establishing something approximating trust?
Without a doubt, there's trust.
I remember one time, a good friend of mine is now, I've known him for 25 years, but when I first met him.
You make a connection.
Yeah, I was on stage, and I go out, there's what you said, and I'm working, in those days, it was the 80s, you wore a suit and tie and three-piece suit, like you on stage.
For 13 hours a day.
And my friend, who wasn't my friend then, he came in and he was somebody dragged in there.
He's like this.
And he goes, I remember looking at you and watching you.
And the sweat on your tie was gradually going through.
The entire thing was soaked.
My chest was soaked.
I was dripping.
And I was giving every ounce of my soul.
He goes, anyone can take that for an hour or two.
But 12?
Daisy said, that son of a bitch can jump.
I can jump and make this thing happen too.
And so there is a trust factor that happens there.
You just said that's a consequence of the commitment that you're indicating by your, what would you say?
Well, your commitment to the project.
Pure energy to serve them.
So it's like they have to do whatever it takes.
And they get it.
They get that I'm there in service of them.
That I could do all this a lot less and be fine.
And they'd probably be fine.
I'm not looking for fine.
I'm looking for transformation.
That requires more.
And then the answer to your question is, I have them do exercises where they take that insight and they do with somebody else.
Let's say it's matching a mirror and learning how to create rapport unconsciously.
Have them sit next to a stranger they've never met.
And mirror their body perfectly.
Have a third person adjust them until they're there and then say, tell me what you're experiencing.
And the other person writes down what they're experiencing.
Somewhere between 80 and 90% of the time, they will say the same feeling, but about 30% of the time, they'll see what this person is seeing.
I'm on a boat.
There's two children.
They're blonde.
I mean, how could they know that?
Because they're tapping into the exact same thing that's happening in the nervous system next to them.
Now, once you've had that experience, you don't forget it.
When I do a Q&A with people, because I've met, I don't know, how many thousands of people doing that, and then I also learned this in my clinical practice.
If you watch...
First of all, I kind of think of those Q&A lines like a wedding reception, you know, because that's a privilege, right, to have that happen every night.
That's for sure.
Well, then they want to stick around and meet you.
You should be pretty damn happy about that, if you have any sense.
But, you know, if you watch people carefully, and this is also a way of not being self-conscious or nervous, you see that everybody has a tempo.
You know, and I found that if I reach my hand out to shake their hand, At their tempo, I immediately establish rapport.
And I think it's because I've indicated by something that subtle that I've watched them and I know them as well as I could know them given that I've only met them five seconds ago, right?
So it really gets things off on a good foot.
And that's that mirroring.
And for your viewers or listeners...
You know, there are different modes of the brain.
So when you're in a visual state, imagery state, you tend to talk more rapidly.
Use words like, I see that, I picture that, I imagine that, right?
Visual words.
And this rapid, because the picture's worth a thousand words.
When someone's more in an auditory state, they have a different tempo, a different approach, much more Jordan-like.
And it also soothes.
And for somebody who's in that state, it's great.
And then there are people that get into the kinesthetics of their body.
And they're more like, you know, I just don't feel it.
I just don't get a sense of it.
The audience is going, I don't hear it.
I'm listening, but I'm not hearing it.
Visual person.
So, by the way, visual people.
Driven crazy sometimes by kinesthetic people.
We're all three, right?
But in certain contexts.
And so I tend to go more visual.
I've got so much I want to share.
My passion brings it.
So it brings in energy.
But if I don't slow it down for 12 hours, I'll lose a part of the audience.
So the same thing, shaking hands.
You shake and reach out to shake hands.
And it shakes hands like that.
That's the person's individual.
Person goes like this.
It's more rhythm.
And they shake hand like that.
It's auditory.
Somebody's more hesitant.
And they kind of reach out.
It's more kinesthetic.
I can even know by the way they're approaching me what language to use that will pull them in closer.
Am I going to use visual language, auditory, kinesthetic language?
How do you know that?
Because I can tell by their movements.
You can see if someone's more kinesthetic what their movements are like versus visual what their movements are like.
And you mirror it.
And when you mirror it, they feel an unconscious connection.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They feel like you're already doing that.
It's like a dance.
It's exactly like a dance.
And you see people do it naturally.
You asked about the audience.
When I look at the audience.
I'm looking at people and I'm seeing individuals and I'm talking, people say, it sounds like you're talking directly to me and there are 20,000 people.
Well, I'm sure you experienced that as well.
Well, it's because there's only so many patterns, but I care so deeply.
I'm looking, I'm feeling, I'm talking directly to people, but I'm also watching.
Because if you watch your audience, there's waves.
There's a person there that when they change the leg and flip over, four other people do.
Yeah.
Right?
And I start seeing the movements in the audience and I go, okay, boom, I'm going after this guy because when I get him, I got ten people.
Oh, yeah.
So you can identify the people who trigger that, can you?
Yes, yes.
And it's not always who you think it would be.
Like, there might be some strapping, you know, guy, like, you know, an athlete, a guy that comes in that's an NFL player and people might be looking at everything else but they're not influenced by him.
And then there's this young lady right here, and she moves, or this mom, and she moves, and there's 20 people that seem to adjust.
I've never noticed that.
Yeah, it's a fun thing to notice.
It also makes me stay so awake, because I have to be in here, not in here.
And that's why you can sustain.
Engagement and sustained joy and excitement and everything else.
We're moving their bodies.
We're completely connected.
They're altering their own physiology and biochemistry.
And they're focusing on what matters most to them, not to you.
And they're learning tools there's consequence to.
And they get to feel the consequence in real time.
So the chances of falling up.
So I call it EQing.
First, entertain them.
Then educate them with the best tools.
So I don't just say, here's how you're going to do financially.
I go out and I interview 50 of the smartest financial people on earth.
And I teach them their strategy.
And they're like, oh my God.
Or like, you know, everybody wants to do well financially and they have more freedom.
Well, anyone get their compounding, right?
You can take a child, 19-year-old, and say, put $300 aside.
Sounds like a lot, but you're living at home.
Put that $300 aside.
Put it in the market and the S&P. It's averaged 10% over the last 100 years.
And guess what?
They do that from 19 to 27, and they can stop.
They put in $28,000.
Their friend starts at 27 when they stop and has to go to 65. They put in $140,000.
The first guy's got $1.8 million in retirement.
The second guy who's putting more money in, he's only got $1.2 million in that experience, right?
So today, one of my last books was The Holy Grail of Investing.
It's like, I don't just teach you the philosophy.
Yes, there's the philosophy.
How you're going to invest is very important.
I interviewed Ray Dalio, the greatest, you know, hedge fund investor in history.
And Ray, I asked him at one point a question.
I'm always digging for the strategy too, right?
Besides the philosophy, I said, what's the single most important investment principle of your life?
And he paused and he smiled.
And we had this great conversation.
My interviews were supposed to be 30 minutes and they went three hours because I got so engaged.
That was fun.
So Ray and I became good friends.
But he said, Tony, I'll tell you, there's a holy grail.
That's the name of the book, because there's a holy grail of investing.
Anytime you can find 8 to 12 uncorrelated investments, in other words, stocks and bonds usually are uncorrelated.
If stocks are going up, bonds are less, vice versa, right?
If you can find 8 to 12 of those, you reduce your risk by 80% and you increase your upside with nothing else.
Now, he told me this in about...
A month later, I was at J.P. Morgan.
They do this alternative investment conference.
You've got to be a billionaire to go.
And I'm one of the speakers.
And right before me, he's Ray.
And somebody asked him a very similar question.
At least he ended up going back to it and giving the same answer.
And I watched all these billionaires who were not taking an ounce of notes, dropping their head and writing like crazy.
So it's like, people don't get this.
And they realized it was hard to do.
So then here's the strategy part.
I'm not just going to tell you that.
I got to show you how.
And so I had to find out for me.
Now, you and I are lucky enough and blessed enough that we've done well financially and we have access to a lot of people.
And I'm sure you're offered the opportunity.
But it's like, where do the wealthiest people put their money?
Where they're going to get the most return with the least risk, right?
The average person doesn't have access to what they have.
Private equity.
If you look at the last 37 years, 37 years of stock markets all over the world.
Basic private equity has outstripped every stock market in the world for 37 straight years.
Private equity means they buy private companies, they build them up, they add value, and then they sell the company for a multiple or they take it public for people who don't understand.
That's what I mean by private as opposed to the stock market.
Those individuals have more flexibility.
If you want to see what wealthy people do, 46% of their assets are in private assets.
Private credit.
Private equity.
Because if you look at the Fortune 400, the wealthiest people in the world, here's the pattern.
Which industry has the most billionaires?
It's not tech, which is what a lot of people think.
It's not real estate.
It's financial services.
And it's not hedge funds, because they go up and down.
It's private equity.
So I found this out.
You put invest your money in the S&P 500, and over the last 37 years, your average compounding has been 10.7%, which is really nice.
Basic private equity.
Not the guys I interviewed for this book.
When I interviewed this book on the Holy Grail, I interviewed the 10, 12 top people in the world.
The best guys that have produced returns plus 20% for 25 years compounded.
It's unheard of, right?
So, guess what?
S&P is 10.7.
Basic private equity, now these guys, have averaged 15.7.
So imagine compounding 50% faster per year.
If you put a million dollars in 30 years ago on the S&P, it's worth $42 million today.
If you put a million dollars at the same time, same amount of money in private equity, it's worth $223 million if you did basic private equity.
So then I go a step further and go, how do I get people in there?
And then I fortunately saw that...
Right, you probably know there's something called an accredited investor.
These levels that the government has where you don't get access to the best investments unless you have a certain amount of money, a million dollars, a certain level of income.
Well, it doesn't make sense because how many business people you know are good business people but not great investors?
Or someone inherited their money.
So they don't have these skills, but they get to do this.
They get to have this kind of return.
I was pushing for it.
It didn't come from me.
It just happened.
It's like, why?
This is so unfair.
Congress last year decided, why don't we give people a test they can study for?
And if they pass the test, they got the education.
It's not that complex.
Now they can have investments that can grow 50% faster.
And so it's available.
Then I went a step further.
I was like, okay, it's good to know this.
It's good to have access to this.
But the very best of the best, I'm sure you know, they're very hard to get in because it's all sold out in advance, the very top people, the people that produce the greatest returns.
So I was ruminating about this with a friend of mine who I'd helped, who was a friend of Paul Tudor Jones.
I've coached, he's one of the top 10 traders in history, and I've coached him for 24 years now, a little more than that.
But one of his partners broke off, and I'd helped him out.
He says, Tony, I'm saying, you know, I get pieces of these things, but not big enough to make enough of a difference.
And I said, I want to help people because there's new rules changing.
And I was like, but I don't even want to talk about it because what little slice are they going to get?
It's not going to matter.
And he says, Tony, he goes, you've done so much of my life.
I got to tell you where I put most of my money.
Now I'm perking up.
This is a very bright man, right?
He goes, there's this place in Houston, Texas, this company.
I'm like, Houston, Texas, not Singapore, not New York, not Connecticut, not London.
He goes, yeah, they're off the beaten path.
He said, they've discovered a way.
Where you don't invest in these private equity and try to get a little piece of it.
Where you literally buy a piece of the company and you own all of those and you get the 2% they charge and 20. So you not only get the compounding I told you about, but you're doing what the wealthiest people in the world do.
I said, how the heck do you do that?
He goes, I'll introduce you.
I'll show you how it works.
Imagine the difference between betting on a horse or owning the racetrack.
That's the difference.
Well, now you take that strategy that you instituted and the compounding of what it does, you end up at your goals 10 times faster.
So it's not just understanding.
Everything I do has got to be philosophy and strategy.
It's one of the things I respect about you.
A lot of people teach philosophy and then you understand it.
And philosophy helps you to understand the why and have meaning.
It's critical.
But if you don't have the strategy, you're not going to execute.
And some people deep strategy without philosophy.
That's right.
And so they know how to do it.
They don't know why to do it, right?
So it's the combination.
A lot of the corporate world's like that.
So my world is constantly modeling the best.
I'm no idiot.
I know most people in the world are not really physically fit.
They're not really happy.
They're not in a passionate relationship.
They're not earning what they think they should earn.
That is most people.
But there's a few who do.
And I mentioned the few who do versus the many who talk.
So I can take their models and bring it to the person who can now be one of the few who do also if they choose to.
Got it.
But then it requires all the things you and I teach.
The aim, the peace, the persistence to make that happen.
I want to close this with a discussion.
You have an event coming up.
Yes, I do.
So will you walk us through that?
Sure.
You know, it's interesting.
I'm used to doing, for most of my lifetime, these big stadium events.
And I love doing it.
It's fun.
And I'm doing it all over the world.
And then COVID hits.
So, you know, my wife was beautiful.
I had a 60th birthday party.
And I said, I don't want to party.
And she said, we're doing a party.
We'll do a party with a purpose.
So we raised money to help.
One of our passions is helping kids that have been trafficked.
And so we raised $19 million.
We put in $5 million, but $14 million for the audience.
It was like unbelievable celebration.
All my friends there was just great.
3,000, 4,000 people.
Three days later, I'm on this high, and I get a call from Newsom's office saying, by the way, this thing has come about, you can put 100 people in the stadium up here where 14,000 people are planning to come, right?
And we still have a few more weeks to market.
We can't put 100 people in there.
So, like you, I'm not a person who gives up, so I was like, we're going to Vegas.
They'll never shut down Vegas, right?
So sure enough, we moved 14,000 people, Jordan, to go to Vegas, and about...
10 days out, I think it was 11 days out.
They shut down Vegas.
So I'm like, we're going to Texas.
It's its own country.
And the governor says, I'm not bending.
And a friend of mine has a big church there in Houston.
Rent the church.
We're going to come there.
They shut it down nine days before we got there.
So then they said, movie theaters, you can put 10 people in the movie theater.
I said, here's what we'll do.
We'll broadcast the movie theaters.
They can put 10 people each, they'll have a giant screen, they'll have great music, and they'll still have personal interaction, and they can do it local.
We'll make this work, right?
Shut down the movie theaters.
So I built the studio, and this relates to the event I'm doing, is I would never have done this, Jordan, except necessity.
That's why I say crisis is one of the greatest gifts in our life, because it produces a necessity for change, if you're going to succeed, if you're going to find a way.
And so if you said to me, I'm going to take the energy I have in a stadium and have people do this in their home and their living room, their garage, whoever it is, there's no way.
But I had no choice.
I want to serve people.
So I built a studio, 50-foot high ceilings, 20-foot high LED screens, 50 feet around me.
I went to the founder of Zoom and I said, I can't have 1,000 people.
He's a fan of mine.
We've got to get it to 25,000 people.
I made it so that we built some software so that people, instead of clapping, could shake their phone.
And it sends an electrical signal.
Well, if one person doesn't, you don't hear anything.
But when 25,000 people do it, it's just like the stadium.
It's like thunder, right?
You can feel it.
So it's all authentic, interacting.
And then I can bring people up on the screen bigger than life.
I can see everything.
I can see more than if I'm there.
And I know their name.
People are sitting, and I can see them throughout the day as the sun rises and sets because it's 13 hours, right?
And I can see somebody there in Australia, and I can see what's going on.
I see their kid.
I can say, John Smith, what the hell are you doing there sitting on that bed?
And they jump up.
I got their name.
I know where it is.
So it actually works incredibly well.
And women, some women, the idea of being in a giant audience doesn't feel safe.
So for some women, some men, it's actually a better experience for them.
So then I was like, okay, I want to help people with this, but they're not going to do this.
People are stuck in their homes.
You know, I can't just sit here.
We got to do something.
I'm fine business-wise, financially.
That's not it.
It's my mission.
So I said, let's do a seminar where there's no cost.
Let's do a seminar where there's no travel because usually people fly to another country to meet me and go to an event.
There's no expense for a hotel.
None of that stuff.
Still immersion, but not enough that freaks them out.
We'll do like three hours a day for three days or four days in a row.
And let's do it in their homes and see what we can pull off.
First year, we had 343,000 people.
I would have had it done 16 stadiums, right?
The next year, it went to 700. This last year, it was 1.2 million people attended from every country in the world.
Now, here's what happens.
It's free.
It's not partially free.
It's totally free.
My only request is, since you got it for nothing, I need you vested.
I want you to do an assignment each night that shows you're acting on this.
And put a little video or description here on YouTube or on social media, on Facebook.
And then I'm up all night in Jordan because I get so inspired by all these different people and their stories.
But then I get to see someone and call them the next day.
So I'll give you an example.
There's a guy there named Matt.
I just saw him recently.
He's 700 pounds.
He would never make it to a seminar because he's in bed for six years with oxygen mask on.
He's told he'll never live without the oxygen mask.
He can't get up to go to the bathroom.
It's all through a tube.
But it's free and it's on a screen.
So he decides to attend the seminar, right?
He gets so inspired and he did some of the exercise I asked.
So I saw it the night before.
So I call on him, bring him up to interact with him.
And we start to put together a plan.
Because think about it.
It's the hero's journey.
You know the hero's journey better than anybody, right?
You have this ordinary life, and you get that call to adventure.
It could sound like cancer.
It could sound like your business is shut down by COVID. It could be a relationship ending.
It doesn't sound like a call to adventure, but that's what it is.
Well, the call adventure happens, and as you know, most people don't take the calls.
They have to take more hits.
They have to take the call.
And then you go on the journey, and you meet new people, new friends, and you meet new mentors.
And you get past the point of no return where you have to go forward, and then you do battle.
And eventually you slay your dragons.
You come home the hero of your own life and you have something real to give people because you've lived it.
It's not just book knowledge.
And then as soon as you're done, it happens again.
You're challenged again.
So I look at it this way.
Instead of waiting for life to show up, I say, have a way to measure are you on the path?
Here's how you know if you're on the path.
First question.
You and I would be so aligned on this.
What is your deepest desire now?
Let's awaken that.
Let's find the reasons for it.
What do you want now?
Because desire sets the tone of the story.
It's my desire to serve God.
It's my desire to build a family.
Whatever it is, you know that sets the tone.
So we activate that.
Then the second step that we take you through is face the truth, which is what has stopped you in the past?
And Jordan, I found...
Relatively, there's only a few things, maybe five.
It's like fear.
That's why he didn't do it.
Or it's a limiting belief or story.
All the good ones are gone.
I've tried everything.
You know, it's not true, but you believe it, so you don't act on it.
Or it could be a different emotion.
It could be an emotion like, you know, overwhelm, stress, something of that nature that keeps you moving forward.
Or it could be a habit.
You want to lose 30 pounds, but you go to Starbucks and get a smokey mocha whatever every morning.
It's not going to work.
Or you're missing a skill.
Right?
You just don't know how to manage it.
No one taught you what to do in those areas, right?
So there's only a few things.
Once you have enough driving desire and reasons and you take on the path, you're on the path now.
You know what you want.
Second step to keep on the path is knowing what's prevented you.
Next step is build a map, a massive action plan.
Not a perfect plan.
Just what are the two or three things that'll get you momentum?
What can you do right now?
What's it going to do that's difficult when you do that's easy?
Start with the easy one and go with the difficult one.
I personally like to go with the difficult one first.
You do whatever your style is.
You go with the most difficult one you're likely to manage.
Yes, I agree with you.
It's your most certainty that you can still find the way.
And then, step four is you've got to do the hard work.
You've got to slave the dragons.
You've got to actually get the skill.
You've got to push through whatever that limiting belief or fear is.
Once you've done that, the rest is easy.
Now all you need is a daily practice, like priming.
And by the way, the priming thing I mentioned, if your audience wants to go there, there's no charge for it.
You can go to TonyRobbins.com forward slash priming, and there's a video that shows you how to do it, if you want to do that little 10-minute practice.
Okay, we'll put that in the links.
That'd be great.
But regardless, You now have some daily practices that keep you on the target.
Then you measure ruthlessly because you can't manage something you don't measure.
That's the biggest problem in most businesses, right?
You know, it's like, I'm fortunate enough now I have literally 114 companies who do $9 billion in business and I have no business background, only self-educated by studying the best.
And the patterns are the same.
I see what the patterns are, right?
So now you measure and then you celebrate.
And then just like another one, you start over again.
Now, what's my next desire?
So while they're with us, we show them how to increase their energy, what to do to shape their relationship, what to do to shape their career.
Three hours a day, it's like going to a movie, but the movie's your life.
Where do people find out about this?
They can go to, it's called the Time to Rise Summit.
So it's timetorisesummit.com.
And when is it?
And it's coming up January 30th, 31st, and February 1st.
We do this once a year.
Okay, and this is all online.
They can access it online.
They access it through Zoom.
Zoom, exactly right.
It's TimeToRise.
Timetorisesummit.com.
Timetorisesummit.com.
Okay, and that's open to everyone.
Yes, everybody.
Right, and so that they can see in real time all the things that we discussed today.
And they only see it, but they can experience it, they can do it, and they can put a plan together for this year.
Instead of some enthusiasm.
Yes, exactly.
A vision.
With a strategy.
That's right.
Combination.
You got it.
Right, right.
All right, sir.
Well, that's excellent.
And so we'll put those links in the description as well.
I think what we'll do, for those of you who are listening, on the Daily Wire side, there's been a sea change in the political scene.
Well, it's not just the political scene, right?
It's deeper than that.
It's the cultural scene.
Yeah, I'd like to talk to you about that.
I'd like to see what you think about it and what you've observed.
Great.
Yeah, so for everybody who's watching and listening who's inclined to join us on the Daily Wire side...
For those of you who are already Daily Wire subscribers, join Tony and I there, and we'll continue this for, well, the typical half an hour.
And in the meantime, thank you very much for your time and attention.
Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you.
We're in your basement tonight, today, which is really quite fun.
We're actually in a place that's underwater.
We have ocean on this side, intercoastal on this side.
And I started playing squash, and my friends, you know, I had to go drive 20 minutes, and if you're nice, it's 20 minutes of pictures.
So it's a couple hours to work out.
It was like, I need a place.
And they said, well, you got 25,000 square feet, several acres, but there's no place to put it.
I said, we're doing it down here.
And he said, what do you mean down here?
He goes, it's below the water table.
I said, have you ever been to Atlantis?
Have you ever been to Scripps Oceanography?
And they said, yeah.
I said, build a submarine around it.
Whatever we got to do to make it airtight.
So we literally are underwater with a submarine surface around us.
And we got 7,000 square feet and we got bowling alleys and all the things for kids and grandkids.
How did I get into this place?
Tell the story.
Well, you tell the story.
Well, it's a very comical story.
There's a garage above us, and in the garage there's a trap door, which is stainless steel.
And if you open up the stainless steel trap door, there's a stainless steel slide, and that slides you down.
It's kind of lit up with purple lights, which is, you know, very disco-y and comical.
And it slows you down nicely so you don't land on your...
Tea kettle at the bottom.
And then you're in this weird, evil supervillain lair, which is extremely comical.
I got Tom Brady, Ray Dalio.
Everybody becomes a kid when they come down.
And I want to make sure fun is part of life.
I'm a serious mofa.
I want to change the world, but I created a structure that creates fun as well.
This ARC conference that we run, this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, that's February 17th to 19th, by the way, for those of you who are watching and listening.
And there are now tickets available to this.
This is the first time we've done this at ARCforum.com.
One of our rules is that we want to do it with a sense of play.
Yes.
You know, one of the things I figured out, I think this is right, is that the antithesis of power...
Like compulsion and force is play.
Yes, I agree.
That's the opposite.
Play is power.
It's a different form of power.
Yeah, well, it's the kind of power that sustains and improves and requires no compulsion.
That's right.
Right.
And that you enjoy while you're doing it.
That's right.
For reasons that aren't sadistic, let's say.
So, all right.
So, everybody can join us on the Daily Wire side for the 30-minute conclusion of this discussion.
We'll turn our attention to cultural issues and, well, into the current political scene.
Join us there.
Thanks, Tony.
Thank you so much.
It's such a pleasure to talk to you.
Thanks to all your viewers and listeners for watching and taking the time.
Yeah, and to the crew here, thank you very much for setting this up.
It's very helpful to me and to all the viewers and listeners to have these podcasts made accessible wherever I'm traveling.
We've got an army of beautiful people here that made this happen.
Looks like it's just you and me.
It's not just you and me.
It's an army here.
They're very enthusiastic and hardworking and that's a precondition for making this successful.
Okay, everybody.
Ciao.
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