Tony Robbins addresses the crisis of young men living with parents into their thirties, arguing that societal blame is shifting back to personal responsibility. He details his rigorous morning routine involving cold immersion and gratitude, alongside regenerative medicine like stem cells and Grail testing for early cancer detection. Robbins outlines a five-step transformation chemistry where dissatisfaction drives individuals past rationalizations into a "dark opening," requiring them to own their victory. Citing data showing 93% of Stanford depression participants achieved remission through his program's physiological changes, he promotes his free Time to Rise Summit, which has attracted over 1.1 million global participants seeking to master their body, mind, and business. [Automatically generated summary]
I've forgotten the number, but millions of men in this country that play video games all day long and live in their parents' home when they're 35 years old.
I mean, it's the largest number since even higher than during the Depression.
So there's no question somebody will be seduced for that.
But I think...
Ultimately, it's just like what we've just experienced.
The pendulum threw so far to blaming everybody else.
Everything is the outside world.
Nothing, you know, merit doesn't matter.
We just threw a pendulum that you knew it had to swim back eventually.
We hoped it would swing back sooner, but it's beginning to swing back.
it so Tony Robbins I was going to introduce you by saying a man who needs no introduction And then I'm looking at one of the books here, The Holy Grail of Investing.
And of course, Carl Iken said that a man who needs no introduction.
You do need no introduction, but it must be an annoying way to start an interview for someone to say something like that.
Well, you've been an influence on me, but you've been an influence on many, many, I've told you privately, many of my family members and helping my brother-in-law get through back pain and a whole bunch of stuff.
I think most people have had dreams and goals in their life, and they've had, obviously, as all of us have, plenty of disappointments because, you know, you want to make God laugh.
So I think the thing that stops people, whether it's in their relationship or whether it's their business or their career or their body, is the disappointments of the past.
And so what really shows up is fear.
You know, the fear of failure, the fear of success, the fear of rejection, the fear of the unknown.
There's so many fears, but they all come down to two fears that everybody has.
We're all afraid we're not enough in some context.
Not rich enough, smart enough, young enough, old enough, wise enough, funny enough, whatever it is, attractive enough.
Especially if we have that fear that we're not enough for someone we really want that love from.
And the deepest fear is that if I'm not enough, I won't be loved.
And love is the oxygen of life.
I know it sounds corny, but You know, if a baby is born and you don't give them physical love, they get what's called failure to thrive syndrome.
They actually physically die.
Love is our evolutionary advantage.
It's what makes us survive.
And so I look at most people, and most people have so much fear still because of so many disappointments that they're afraid to get their hopes up.
Of course, if you don't get your hopes up, if you don't commit to something, if you don't give your all every time because you're afraid of failing, you're not going to follow through.
So I think it's fear that stops people in any area, but also what happens is you start to form a limiting identity.
And this is the thing I hope that your listeners or viewers will really consider.
I believe the strongest force in anybody's personality, in the human personality, is the need to stay consistent with how you've defined yourself.
We all have an identity for ourselves.
So you'll hear people say something like, is there a difference between somebody who feels depressed and somebody who is clinically depressed?
Well, yes.
Once you have the title clinically depressed, you can go to one of those people and do you think clinically depressed people have happy moments?
I was fortunate enough to have a similar pattern as you.
But I'll talk to some people that smoke cigarettes and they'll say, no, I've smoked for 10 years and I've stopped and I'll never smoke again.
If I come to them and say, would you like a cigarette?
They don't go, what brand is it?
What do they say?
They go, I'm not a smoker.
I'm not one of those.
The way we define ourselves, what we are and what we're not.
It controls every thought, feeling, emotion, and behavior of our life.
So it works at all levels.
If I set a thermostat in this room at 68 degrees, and that represents your comfort zone, your identity, your comfort zone is not what you want.
It's what you're used to, right?
So it could be 68 degrees is what you're used to in terms of intimacy, or 68 degrees is how much financial well-being or freedom you're used to or security you're used to.
It might not be a lot.
It might be a little.
It's not your goal.
It's what you're used to.
Once that's your comfort zone, once that's your identity, if the temperature in this room drops from 68 to 65 to 62 to 60 at some point, the heaters kick on because the computer says, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're a 68-degree-er.
You're not a 60-degree-er.
This is no good.
And you feel pressure.
The heaters kick on and drive you back up to where you're supposed to be.
And most people listening probably have had times where it got so bad you finally said, not another day, another moment.
I'm changing this now, this relationship, this thing under my body, whatever.
But what most people don't realize is it happens on the other side as well.
If you're a 68-degree-er and you start doing better than you expect, you get momentum, you start to crush it, you start to go 80 degrees, 90, 98 degrees, suddenly the computer inside goes, what the hell are you doing?
When people say they're stuck, it's because they're only using a part of their capacity or part of their brain.
So what I like to look at is how do you expand your identity?
You do things that violate your old identity.
That's why I do a fire walker.
We took people skydiving.
It's like, if I get myself to do that thing I once thought was difficult or impossible, my brain goes, then what else can I really do that seemed to be difficult or impossible?
For me, I remember when I was...
I was 16 years old, just about turned 17, and I had four different fathers, and my mom was a volatile person.
Great human being, but when she mixed prescription drugs with alcohol, it was pretty painful and disastrous.
So I remember she kicked out another one of my fathers, and then she decided one night that Christmas Eve that I was on my father's side, and so she kicked me out.
My dad went back to Chicago on his own.
He didn't know I got kicked out.
And I got my 1960 Volkswagen at $40 a week.
But I was working as a janitor, so I took buses to a place in Pasadena, California, San Marino.
And I would work on these two banks in the middle of the night, still in high school, because I wasn't paid by the hours, paid by results.
I could do two banks.
I get paid well.
Come back home, get up on three or four hours sleep and go to school.
Well, I would take buses.
Well, one night I finished at two in the morning.
And I go out and I'm waiting for the bus on this main avenue.
And, you know, it's 2 in the morning.
There's no cars.
And I'm waiting and waiting.
And 2.15 and 2.30.
And right around 2.30, somewhere in that range, a car drives where I rolls down this window and goes, hey, buddy, didn't you know there's a bus strike?
And we know some, we have some mutual people that we really care about together.
So to me, life is about relationships.
If the quality of relationships is extraordinary, your relationship with whatever you believe, the universe, your creator, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with your loved ones, your relationship with those that you want to serve, if those are strong, it's pretty hard not to have a great quality of life.
How much of all of this do you think is connected to societal trends?
So, for example, right now, I've sensed over the last couple months, sort of post-election, that there really feels to be like a renewed spirit in America.
Like, people are less fearful, at least in my little circles.
There's a feeling like, oh, America could come back.
We could feel good about all of this stuff.
And I think that actually really starts scaling at some point.
And I think that this is going to be my first interview of 2025, which is sort of why I wanted to do it right now.
It's like, if we can use that, Man, that's rocket fuel to change everything.
And certainly, to some extent, where people are politically.
But I'm an independent.
I voted on both sides.
And I see, as you said, a lot more optimism.
I see people who are on the left actually supporting Donald Trump, who were talking about him being evil before, because they want the country to change.
And I think, you know, there's an old phrase from a good book called The Good Book.
It says, without a vision, people perish.
And if you ask, what was the vision of America for the last...
Four years, even eight years.
It's not been clear.
The greatest presidents we have brought a vision, right?
Whether it's Kennedy talking about, we're going to put a man on the moon and return him back to the earth, or Reagan and the city on the hill.
You can pick any great...
President, and they had a vision for the country.
And I think what's happened is there's a vision of change.
And we're so dissatisfied with where it is that there's a surge of enthusiasm to say, let's go shift this thing.
We can do it.
We can make it happen.
I think people are also getting tired of an identity of America being a terrible place when America's made up of so many great human beings.
We've made plenty of mistakes, like every country in the world, but I think we've done extremely well over the overall history, and we want to be better.
But I think that optimism is...
It's real for a large number of people because it's new.
It's always easier when it's new.
The question is, will it hold up two years from now?
And I think you have to get enough momentum here that people then start to say, yeah, that vision is being realized.
If people see real results...
I think that optimism will grow and people will take more action.
But if they don't execute, that's a different game.
Do you think that maybe there's some sort of inverse relationship between when things are going well and maybe when your message resonates more?
Because if something isn't going well, then people, you know, sort of at a meta level, then people need more of this versus if it's going well, then they can kind of...
You know, when people analyze who comes to my events, you know, it's like, you know, we're doing an event here in January of over a million people come, right?
And they come and try to analyze, you know, who are the demographics of it.
And they're everywhere.
I mean, we do 193 countries, every country in the world simultaneously, over a million people, and they all have one thing in common, one thing.
It's not age, it's not economics, it's not political, it's hunger.
When people are hungry, they change their life.
So sometimes people get hungry because things are really rough.
Sometimes people get hungry because they have a birthday with a zero on it past 40. You know, sometimes people are hungry because they're going through a divorce.
So sometimes pain makes you hungry.
Some people are hungry and that's why they're successful.
They never lose that hunger.
If you look at somebody, you know, like Richard Branson, you know, Sir Richard Branson.
Richard is a friend.
I mean, he's as hungry today in his late 60s as he was when he was 16 and starting, you know, Virgin in a Crypt.
You know, he's got that same hunger.
Hunger to do more, to be more, to create more.
So, yeah, sometimes painful things make people pay attention more.
No matter what the season is, people are looking to make improvements in their life.
And I'm looking for the person that's hungry.
That's who I can serve.
If you're in that lukewarm middle where it's not that bad, not that good, I'm probably not the right guy for you.
But if you're ready to say, it's time to take it to another level, I've spent a lifetime getting skills on financial skills to turn it around, emotional skills, relationship, your physical body.
The areas of life that really matter most have been my obsession for, at this point, this is my 48th year doing this, believe it or not.
If you spend that many years traveling obsessed with what's the difference in people, I hope I found some differences by this point that are meaningful and that can work.
And of course, I have.
So I can do more now.
I can create more now because I grew.
And there's nothing I'm teaching that I didn't...
I wasn't like a genius.
I figured out because I had problems I had to solve.
Or I met somebody that was brilliant and I said, I don't want 10 years to figure that out.
It's interesting because one of the, just as you were saying this, I mean, I think one of the things I'm most proud of in my life is that I've gotten to sit down with so many incredible people like you and integrate some of that into my life all the time.
And then it helped me grow businesses and work with people who I love and do all these things.
So it's real and it's true.
And I guess it's just hard making people understand that you have that power.
Well, I think if you wait for life to do it, that's one approach.
Another way is to say, am I on the path or not?
The path.
What's the path?
The path of progress.
The path of progress is what's going to make you fulfilled and happy.
Nothing else will.
What you get won't do it.
It'll get boring.
But if you are growing, if you're feeling like you're becoming more, experiencing more, and because of that you can give more, you're going to feel totally alive.
But I look at it this way.
I go, the first step to getting on the path, know if you're there, is do you know what your driving desire is?
Have you awoken your hunger?
For something.
If you want to change your body, your mind, your emotions, your relationship, your business, your economics, whatever it is, you got to get hungry.
You got to get crystal clear on a vision more than where you are now that would excite you and put you on fire.
Then the second step is you got to tell the truth.
You got to find and tell the truth.
I mean, find the truth of what's kept you from doing this in the past.
And there's only a few things.
There's fear.
Everybody has fear.
There's limiting beliefs or a limiting story, like I've tried everything and nothing ever works.
The minute you develop a belief, a sense of certainty about how life is, it limits you if it's a limiting belief.
Is it some other emotion?
Is it overwhelm?
Is it stress?
Is it a lack of skill?
Something you need?
Or is it a habit that just gets in the way?
Those five are usually the fundamentals that kept you from making progress.
So once you know what you really want, first step on the path, you find and face the truth.
You create a little map, a massive action plan, a couple things you're going to do to make progress immediately, not waiting until it's perfect.
And then you've got to do what's hard.
You've got to slay the dragon.
You've got to go get the skill, or you've got to overcome the fear, or you've got to push through the thing that stops you.
And then the other three steps are easy.
Then all it is is having a daily practice, measuring, because if you don't measure, you won't keep getting better, and then celebrating enough.
And then it'll happen again.
What's your next desire?
But that's the path.
If people want to make progress, it starts with just getting clear on what you want.
Because most people, Dave, when you ask what they want, they tell you what they don't want.
I don't want to feel this anymore.
I don't want to go through this crap anymore.
I don't want to have to experience this anymore.
Well...
Where focus goes, energy flows.
If you need focus on what you don't want, you get more of it.
Or they just say, I want a big house or something like that, but that's not really a thing.
You know I was privileged to go on tour with Jordan Peterson for a year and a half, and one of the things, because he would talk about slaying the dragons often, and one of the questions that would come up in Q&As, I'm curious your take on this, a lot of people would say, okay, I found the dragon and I'm in the process of slaying it or I'm doing it now, whatever the thing is.
But they were having trouble letting go of the way they were when they were fearful of the dragon.
You've got to learn how to manage your emotions, right?
Most people will say to me, I just don't feel like I can do it.
I don't feel it.
If I waited until I felt like I could do something or it felt good, I wouldn't have done 90% of what I've done in my life, right?
But somehow we have this illusion, and young people today, especially in college, have been taught these...
B.S. beliefs like everybody's supposed to make you feel good.
That if they say something you don't like and you're offended, that's their problem and they need to be corrected.
As opposed to, like, I need to make life on my terms.
I need to grow.
I need to expand.
I don't need a trigger warning so that I don't react.
I need to get rid of my triggers.
That's my responsibility.
I mean, I think Jordan and I both agree on one thing, which, lots of things, but one of them is it's 100% responsibility gives you freedom.
Most people want freedom.
But you can't have it as long as someone else is making you feel this way.
Someone else is making you act this way.
And so the answer to your question, like, how do I get past those limiting thoughts, beliefs, or identities, is you've got to condition yourself.
You know, there's a silly metaphor, but it's a true one.
You know, you go to a circus, and they take a baby elephant, and they got a little chain around them, and they put it, and they drive a little stake down in the ground.
And for a baby elephant, they tug around, they try for a long time, and eventually they learn.
I can't get loose.
Well, they do that for them for years, and now they're a giant elephant with one movement they could pull down the entire big top, but they don't even try because they're so conditioned.
It's like, that's who I am.
That's my identity.
I'm not personally able to do that.
So to do something, again, that's outside your identity, something that says, I could never do this, but I'm going to do it anyway, that's what breaks up the whole system.
And one way I did it back in those days were these incantations, because three things determine how you feel in this moment.
If you're listening right now at home and you're bored or you're excited or you're curious or whatever feeling you're having, number one is how you're using your body right now.
If your body's like this or like this and you're watching and you're listening, you're going to have a different experience than if your body's like this, if you're leaning forward like this.
Anything you do with your body changes your biochemistry.
So I show people what are the movements that actually change you into a state you feel good.
If someone's depressed, what's their body like?
If you see somebody depressed, where's their head?
Because I think you're emanating something that's very true and right, and it's having some sort of reaction in my body.
I've had this a few times in interviews that I've done, or sometimes someone will say something deeply, deeply true, and it seems like the room shifts for me a little bit, and I'm fully having that right now.
That's not BS. You're a very energetic person, so you would feel that, for sure.
That's really wonderful.
The second part, think of it as a triangle.
There's the physical body, putting yourself in the right physiology.
What controls your whole life is what you focus on.
People don't experience life.
They experience the life they focus on.
What's wrong is always available.
So is what's right.
So whatever you focus on, you feel.
Like most people all say, have you ever thought of something you were freaked out about, you're worried about constantly, thought about constantly, felt sick to your stomach, and it never happened?
Everybody raised their hand.
I've done this dozens of times.
When are you going to learn?
So it's like learning to change your focus.
And then the third thing you do is to change the language you use.
The words you use create meaning.
Meaning creates emotion.
Our entire life is based on where we live emotionally.
You could say, you could have a billion dollars, and if every day the emotions you consistently come back to is feeling frustrated and pissed off, your life's frustrated and pissed off.
If you have a beautiful family, and they love you, and you love them, and you've got great health, but every day you sit and worry, your life is not about family, it's not about love, it's about worry.
So our emotions are controlled by meaning, and meaning is controlled by this triangle, what you're doing with your body, your focus, and your language.
One word can change your biochemistry in a heartbeat.
The difference between, is this person challenging me?
Are they dissing me?
Are they coaching me?
Are they loving me?
If you think they're loving you, you're going to respond very differently than you think they're dissing you, right?
There's a different biochemistry.
There's a different response.
The words we choose also create that.
So incantations, when you're using your body with full intensity.
And you're focused on something and using language that starts to condition your mind and body, that's one way to change identity as well.
Do you think that we're sitting here, obviously, where there's some incredible sports memorabilia here and you've been around a lot of athletes and you have some other incredible sign things and all this stuff.
It's like, do you think athletes that are at the prime of their ability, that they're sort of intuitively...
Getting this properly.
Like when you see someone, whether it's play baseball at the highest level or basketball or box or whatever it is, do you think that that's just something that they're in some ways sometimes doing without even knowing?
Some of them probably know it.
I think someone like Michael Jordan probably really knew.
They know that there's only so much you can do physically, that it's really a mental game, a psychological game.
The greatest sports athletes, they're there.
The difference is going to be 80% psychology and 20% mechanics.
And, you know, all these rings are from national championships, Major League Baseball, soccer, the LA Dodgers, the Golden State Warriors.
These are all teams, a couple of my own, a piece of, but I've coached all those teams.
I work with all of them.
And when you work with like a Steph Curry, you start to realize like he's got the most incredible psychology, but he drives it every day with experience.
You know, people look at him and you see him make a shot from almost half court and he turns, he doesn't even look.
He turns around and just smiles like he already knows it's in.
You know, swish, right?
You choose on his mouthpiece and people go, how does he do that?
Well, you go work with Steph.
He makes 500 shots every day, seven days a week, bar none.
That's...
3,500 shots a week.
That's 168,000 shots a year.
That's 2.5 million shots plus in practice in 15 years just of his professional career.
So he could take 16,000 shots and make 3,400 and be the greatest three-point shooter in history.
See, people are rewarded in public for what they practice in private.
And people don't realize that.
So that practice also makes him have certainty inside.
And if you're talking about mindset, certainty is what gives people to follow through.
When you see somebody coming down that lane with full force, like LeBron.
There's zero uncertainty whether he's going to put that ball in the basket, right?
And so that level of certainty is what sets anybody apart.
Because, you know, there's a big thing with people losing weight through Ozempic and some of these other things.
And I think there's probably some arguments you can make for people in certain health conditions for it.
But in essence, what you're saying is the work is the key thing here.
So changing your diet, working out more, doing all those things.
You balance something like that, sort of science, which you're obviously a man of science, versus the actual work part and the shortcuts around all those things.
So I read Life Force, and I told you that, and you helped me with my brother-in-law's back stuff, who had debilitating, I mean, barely could walk for a long time, and he's significantly better now.
How hopeful are you, and I should thank you for him, because it's like, and for my whole family.
But how hopeful are you that now we do seem like we're caring about health more, and that it feels like regulations are going to change, and some of the things you wrote about in that book that you really can't do in the United States now, but we know they're doing overseas, that that is now going to start changing.
I'm very hopeful about that because, you know, right now the pharmaceutical industry is a very useful industry, but it also has terrific side effects.
And, you know, Bobby Kennedy is a good friend of mine.
I was his first choice to run a VP. I chose not to do that, but I've stayed obviously in touch with him.
And his core message, he's been bastardized by so many people and bad mouth.
But his core message is, let's get the poisons out of the food, and let's just make sure everything is tested to be safe.
And so much of what we take for granted being tested is not, including the vaccines for many of our kids.
So I think it's really important we look at that.
But I think I was with Bobby and Dr. Marty McCary, who's head of FDA, and who else was there?
And we had...
I'm trying to think of the third person's there.
Oh, Dr. Oz.
All three of us were together a few weeks ago and talking about what they're going to do among stem cells and some of these other opportunities.
I experienced, for example, I'm a biohacker, so I've always looked for cutting edge.
I have to.
I've got to go on stage.
Hold a crowd of 15,000 or 20,000 people for four days and nights for 12 hours a day when they wouldn't sit for a three-hour movie these days that someone spent $300 million on.
And some got dragged there.
But I got to turn them around.
So that takes an enormous amount of energy.
So I have all these biohacks that I've learned to do to make myself stronger, fitter, and more able to do things.
But I tore my rotator cuff years ago.
I was going down following a...
24-year-old snowboarder.
I wasn't 24 and I didn't have his skill.
And I thought I broke my neck.
I mean, I did a jump that he did, only I didn't do it the way he did it.
And I tore all my road shooter cuffs severely.
Well, so I own some sports teams.
We have some of the best doctors in the world.
They all surgery, surgery, surgery.
And I was like, before we do the surgery, you know, how long is the recovery time?
You know, three to six months.
Can it happen again?
Well, often does.
What about stem cells?
And the universal response from people I respect, people I know, was, oh, they can't do anything.
So I was like, before I go do this, let me go investigate stem cells.
That's how it started for me.
And I talked to a friend of mine, who's really well-connected, who's the smartest stem cell person in the world?
And he told me this guy named Dr. Bob Hariri, who's a partner of mine in writing the book.
And I didn't know it was like saying, you know, you want to learn basketball, let me introduce you to LeBron James.
He's the guy.
Anyway, the bottom line is he said, they're right.
Your stem cells after the age of 40 aren't going to do squat for something that torn.
But he said, if we get you 40-old stem cells, he said, we're talking about they come from things that are thrown away, right?
When mothers are born, they throw away the placenta.
That's what it comes from.
It's not fetal tissue.
He said, if we get you those, he said, I really believe it'll heal you.
But he said, you have no downside.
He said, you can always go back to the surgery.
I went and I did stem cells.
I went to play some Panama because you couldn't do it here, unfortunately.
And I did four days, just an IV and a couple injections.
First day, I felt really tired.
Second day, I woke up with no pain in my spine.
I've had spinal stenosis for 15 years.
No pain in my spine and no pain in my shoulder.
After three days till I find I have an MRI, my shoulder is perfect.
Now, how do you explain that?
Well, the stem cells.
So I got invited by the Pope to come speak.
The Pope, believe it or not, every two years has this conference where he invites all the people involved in regenerative medicine and stem cells and so forth.
I said, I'll do the closing ceremony, but I want to come for all four days.
So for four days, I met the number one doctors in the world in regenerative medicine.
I met people that were sent home to dive, every kind of this cancer disease you could imagine, who were completely turned around.
I was like, how come people don't know about this?
And I found out that on average, from the time there's a breakthrough, the time your clinician knows about it and actually starts to use it is on average 18 years.
18 years.
So I said, I'm going to write a book about this.
So that's why I got excited about it.
So stem cells, exosomes, but also there's things right now that you can protect yourself with.
So many people develop cancers and so many people develop aneurysms today.
Even young people, it's happening greater than ever post-COVID, as I'm sure you know.
We have these turbo cancers.
Well, I built a company that does monitors.
We have five different locations in the U.S. and other people do it too.
But you can go in today and if we...
We monitor your body.
We, you know, do an MRI of your body.
And we do, like, there's a thing called a grail test.
A grail test will show us 50 different cancers that we test for.
The reason people die of cancer is if you catch it at stage four, which is where a lot of these are found because we don't have tests for them, right?
If you get at stage four, your chance of dying, you know, the Cancer Society talks about is 80%.
I prefer 20% chance of living, but their point is well made.
If you get at stage one, it's like 99.9% chance of living, right?
14% of the people that come for scans just to see their fitness and their health discover they have a major issue.
I have a partner, we're building a group called The Estates, where people can go and have these luxury experiences and have this kind of medical treatment and support for stem cells and so forth all over the world.
Sam Nazarian, he built SLS hotels and Mondrian and people like that.
And when I first met him and he had this vision, I said, why don't you come through and do our testing?
And he did, and he had two aneurysms.
One was so bad that his doctor saw it and took him to the hospital immediately and said, you wouldn't make it to the hospital if this happened.
So you've got to know what's going on.
And so we have some tests now, like another one's called the CCTA test.
It's a CT test that goes through your whole body and uses AI. And it can literally see and tell you, digitally show you every single vein, every artery of your body, how much plaque there is, whether it's actually going to be blocked or not, at a level of precision that's never been done by humans in history.
And so what's really cool about it is it'll tell whether it's loose material, which can break off and create a heart attack or aneurysm, or whether it's calcified.
If it's calcified, it's healthy.
We had a guy with a thousand calcium score.
If you don't know what that means, it means most people think this guy's going to die.
Couldn't get life insurance.
The life insurance company changed their view because of the CTA test because they found it was all calcified.
The guy's totally healthy.
I took my 80, he was 81 years old father-in-law.
He was a guy that, you know, I had a lumber business, really physical guy.
But as you get in your 70s and 80s, people saying, well, you're getting older.
And I could just see him, his mindset starting to change.
And they told me about the CCTA test.
And I said, Dad, I said, I'm going to go to this test.
I'm sure we've got some stuff in us.
But I said, then they'll show you what they do to clear it out.
There's some real breakthroughs.
Why don't we go do this together?
So we go do this.
My father-in-law.
Is perfect.
His veins are absolutely perfect.
He has nothing to worry about.
He's been worried all this time.
Zero worries whatsoever because what he does have is calcified.
So he comes out and they have this hip problem and there's this...
Technique that they can do that opens up whatever muscles have been tight in a matter of seconds.
It uses water and hydration and so forth to open up the factors.
So they did that.
So now he's walking perfectly.
His cells are perfect.
We get on the plane to come home, and I'll never forget, he sits across and he goes, you know, Tony, he goes, you know, I don't know about those people talking about living to be 120, but, you know?
My hip's perfect.
My heart's perfect.
My veins are perfect.
I think I could live in the late 90s, you know?
And his entire perspective changes.
So we need to test where you are, and then you need to see some of the tools that are becoming available that can help you regenerate that most of the greatest athletes in the world are taking advantage of.
I'm not thinking about what it was right before this or what I'm going to do right after this.
And then I also have everything organized by categories.
Like my family is a category of my life.
My body is a category of my life.
My various businesses I have in categories.
And so I have outcomes or goals for all those.
But I also, I teach business because I've, you know, I had no business background.
We've done pretty well.
We're doing 8 billion.
I'm going to grow it, I'm sure, to 15 to 20 is the target.
I've got some great industries where we're number one in those industries.
We have some that are brand new.
So there's great diversity in what I get to do.
I used to be a business operator.
Business operators are always stressed because you're doing everything yourself, making all your choices.
I learned to become a business owner.
I learned how to bring vision and strategy and hire the very best people and give them clear outcomes and get us aligned on a purpose and then turn them loose and then step in strategically.
So I run, you know, out of all those companies, I run about a dozen more actively.
The others I'm just strategic in and I come in when they're necessary.
And then some of them I don't need much of them.
We own...
One of my businesses, we own 80 different private equity firms, and they're some of the best in the world.
So these are $100 billion, $50 billion, $20 billion private equity firms, and we own the firm, a piece of the firm.
So we get the two in 20. We run that.
Now I do that for other people.
I show them how they can do that.
So whatever I learn, I get excited about how I can take it somewhere else.
But overwhelmed?
I can get overwhelmed just by the demands at times.
But it's a brief, like I said, I give myself my 180 seconds and time to kick back in gear.
There's no good in just being overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed comes, if people listen to get overwhelmed, and a lot of people do, the number one way you get overwhelmed is what I call stacking.
So have you ever overreacted to someone, your kid or somebody like that?
We think of one after another after another, and then we're in overwhelm.
You can also do the opposite.
You can consciously, which I do every morning, this is how I do it, I do something that I call priming.
I prime my brain.
It's not a meditation because I found sitting and not thinking is not something I'm really good at, and I don't know how many people that frankly are, right?
But instead, what I do is I do these three three-minute pieces, a little more than three minutes, and what I do is I focus on for the first three minutes...
Everything I'm grateful for.
Because gratitude is the antidote to the two emotions that mess most people up.
Mess up your relationship, mess up your business, and that's fear and anger.
You can't be angry and grateful simultaneously.
You can't be fearful and grateful simultaneously.
So I don't do it in some phony, I'm grateful, I'm grateful.
I think of three specific things in my life that I feel really grateful for.
I usually find a little one like today was the wind in my hair was outside.
Another one was a smile on my daughter's face when she was doing her ballet yesterday and she was so proud of herself, you know?
I could think of two or three things.
For a minute, I experienced them in my body like I'm there.
Not like watching someone go down.
You know, a roller coaster there, thinking like you're in the front seat.
And that changes your biochemistry.
And now I do that every morning to start for three minutes.
Then three minutes of kind of a blessing or a prayer for the people I love.
And then three minutes I focus on what I call three to thrive.
What are three things I want to achieve?
And instead of like hoping they're going to achieve, I see them, feel them, celebrate them as done.
Whole thing's done in 10 minutes because if I say do something for 20 minutes, you tell me you don't have time.
But if you don't have 10 minutes for your life, you don't have a life.
But the reason is, for me, it's not only the physical benefit, like it flushes your body, obviously, your immune system, everything gets pushed, but blood flow.
But I also, I don't hesitate.
It's like a mental discipline.
It's, you know, windy outside today.
It's a little chilly out there.
It's like, it doesn't matter.
I don't go up there and go, well, let me see when I'm ready.
It's like, I kill my brain, we go, we go right then.
I've been doing it for so many years that when I tell my brain something else, we do it.
There's no negotiation within myself.
So I do that first.
Then I do my priming.
And by the way, if people want to do priming, then go to TonyRobbins.com forward slash priming.
I made a video.
It's free.
And you can do it.
But it's 10 minutes.
And in 10 minutes, you're stacking the good.
And then your biochemistry changes.
Now when stuff happens, it's hitting on you being resourceful instead of hitting on you being frustrated or pissed off or stacked by all the things that have been overwhelming or stressing you.
Because we get so caught up in our conditioning, like the elephant, right?
We don't use our brain fully.
So part of what I do is create environments where people, when your energy is high, when the energy is super high, your brain and everything functions in a peak state.
When it's really low, and most people don't even realize it's low, because post-COVID... People's energy as a whole has dropped because they live at home.
They work at home.
They're in an environment at home.
They're in their pajamas doing their business half the time, that type of thing.
And so what happens is there isn't that pickup of energy.
And so if you measured your energy zero to ten, and if you don't measure something, you can't manage it.
So ten is unstoppable energy.
Zero is dead.
You know, where most people want to ask an audience, where were you yesterday during the day before you got to this event?
And they're somewhere between four and seven.
And I'll always say to them, would you ever date a five?
Like, particularly frustrating for you as the public person you are in that, I was just, before you walked in, I was watching a five-minute video of the prep that you do to do these shows and the amount of, you may know the numbers, you jump 11,000 times and it creates this much pressure.
That you were doing these live with these people, feeding off the energy.
They're giving you the energy to the amount of time that you clap.
I don't know what the exact number was, but it was just you've broken down all of these numbers, but then you have to do it virtually, and you've done incredible things.
I've been to the studio here with the Zoom wall and the entire thing, but to remove the personal...
Like, face-to-face version of that versus someone's now sitting in their chair at home, maybe in their pajamas listening to you.
Yeah, I never would have believed it was possible because I'm used to doing stadiums.
And, you know, people have been doing an event.
No, it's like a rock and roll concert.
I mean, Pat Riley, you know, owns a piece of the Miami Heat.
One time he went to one, he's like, this is like the NBA championship.
But he goes, it's like...
For four days!
It's like every minute.
He goes, I've never experienced, the only time I've experienced this kind of energy.
And that's really what it's like.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to go four days and make it happen, right?
So, yes, I didn't think it was possible.
But, you know, the governor of California's team calls me and says, we're about to do an event in March of 2020 and says, oh, by the way, we're really sorry.
We've changed the rules.
You can put 100 people in the stadium where I had 14,000 people.
And it's like two weeks before.
I'm like, screw you, right?
Fine.
We're going to Vegas.
They'll never shut down Vegas, right?
So a week before we go to Vegas, they shut down Vegas.
We're going to Texas.
Texas is its own country.
The governor says he'll never bend, right?
Ten days before they shut down Texas.
So then I'll do it in movie theaters.
We'll do, you know, 1,400 movie theaters with 10 people each.
Are you worried that because of all the technological advances, we'll all end up just sitting, you know, or a certain percentage of people that maybe you can't get through to or that are not so aware of what's going on here, we'll end up just sitting sort of eating the bugs.
You know, that's like the meme now, that they won't really do anything.
And it's sort of a version of the Olympic question I asked.
But so many of our needs or what we think of our needs are going to be taken care of in AI and everything else.
And you won't have to work as much, let's say, that it will just be too enticing.
Well, there are, I don't know, I've forgotten the number, but millions of men in this country that play video games all day long and live in their parents' home when they're 35 years old.
I mean, it's the largest number since, even higher than during the Depression.
So there's no question somebody will be seduced for that.
But I think...
Ultimately, it's just like what we've just experienced.
The pendulum threw so far to blaming everybody else.
Everything is the outside world.
Nothing, you know, merit doesn't matter.
We just threw a pendulum that you knew it had to swim back eventually.
We hoped it would swing back sooner, but it's beginning to swing back.
You can see it.
You can feel it.
And I think what happens is there's a chemistry to transformation, Dave.
Think of it as the first piece is satiation.
Anything, even if it's really good that you do long enough, you'll get satiated.
And now it doesn't feel so good anymore.
It doesn't feel bad.
That doesn't feel good.
And that makes you start to think maybe there's another way of living and you start looking around for other options.
That won't change you by itself, but enough satiation will lead to dissatisfaction.
That's the second element.
And when you start to get dissatisfied, that means the stuff you used to do now, not only does it not feel good, but it actually pisses you off or annoys you or makes you feel lousy.
And so now you're driven.
Now you have some drive.
To find something more.
It started with just being satiated.
If you had, your favorite meal was, you know, prime rib and lobster, and you have it three times a day for four years, I don't care how great it is, you're going to get satiated.
But dissatisfaction leads to the third piece of that chemistry, which is you get to a threshold.
The threshold, like, I don't know if any of your viewers have had the experience where they're like, I had a relationship where they stayed way too long.
Until one day you finally wake up and go, you used to rationalize.
It'll be better in the future.
That's why you stayed.
Or it was better in the past.
But one day you go, it was painful.
The past is painful.
The present is painful.
I'm out of here.
I'm changing this now.
That threshold where there's enough pain, enough leverage that you're going to make a change.
And that brings the fourth element, which is an insight.
And the insight almost always is, it's you.
It's not them.
That you have some control that you've not realized.
Some responsibility that you could exercise.
And that moment is the opening moment.
There's a big opening.
That's the fifth element.
And the opening is dark.
You don't know what's the other side.
And so you have to jump into that opening.
And what some people do is they go through all these steps and then they see opening and they don't know what it is and they pull back and then you get to start over and wait to get satiated enough until I'm dissatisfied enough.
Do it again.
What I used to do is kick people through the opening, right?
And they change.
But then I realized three or four years later, I meet them and some of them would go back to what they're doing.
It's like, I now bring people to that edge and get them to make the jump.
Because if you initiate that jump, you own the victory.
It's not something I did for you.
You did it for yourself.
That chemistry is what I look to help people create.
So they came to me and they said, you know, we had two of our professors go through one of your programs.
Both were clinically depressed.
Both are no longer on medication.
Neither one is depressed.
This is pretty miraculous.
Do you have any data?
And I said, well, yeah, I got millions of testimonials.
I mean, literally millions.
They said, no, no, no, but scientific data.
I said, no, but if you want to do a study, I'd be happy to do it.
And they said, well, I said, what do you want to study?
They said, depression.
So they took my Date with Destiny seminar.
It's a six-day program where people rewire themselves.
I don't rewire them.
They rewire them.
And I had them go through the program.
They tested them.
They had a test group, obviously a comparison group.
But before they did it, I asked them, I said, tell me, what are the current numbers on depression for treatment?
And I was blown away.
They said 60% of people that take treatment, both drugs and therapy, 60% make zero improvement.
40% improve, but the average improvement is 50%, which means they're half as depressed as they were.
Some people get really well, but very few.
Most people are on medication forever.
I said...
That would not be a hard number to beat.
I said, you can almost do that with a placebo.
He goes, I agree with you, but that's the numbers.
I said, what's the best result you've ever seen in the history of psychiatry?
It was done at Johns Hopkins, I think it's five years ago now, and they used psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and cognotherapy for a month.
I said, a month of that kind of alteration?
Should have got some kind of change.
They said it's the most successful thing we've ever done in history.
After six weeks, 54% of the people had no symptoms of depression.
I said, well, then our target is to beat that.
I think we can.
Well, let's see.
And by the way, psilocybin is illegal in most places, so it's not an option, right?
Plus a month of it, right?
So they did the test, and they did one group that they did the same way they did against the psilocybin test, meaning the same test group.
And they did our group at the end of six weeks.
Guess what?
93% of the people, 93% had no symptoms, and 7% that was left made significant improvements, but they still had some feelings of depression, so they needed additional work.
17% came in with suicidal ideation.
Think of the commit suicide.
Came out, zero had suicidal ideation.
One year later, overall, 72% decrease in negative emotions, 51% increase in positive emotions a year later.
Now, how did that work?
Physiology is what is the secret.
They followed me around.
You alluded to some of the tests they did.
They found out that I burned 11,300 calories in one day on stage.
But then what I found was something really interesting.
One of the groups had worked with Tom Brady and they've worked with the Lightning, the hockey team that's won multiple times.
And they found that there is what they call championship biochemistry.
When Tom Brady, for example, is in the fourth quarter, is down by 10 points, and it's two minutes to go, and he comes back to win, how does he do that?
His biochemistry does something really interesting that mine does as well on stage, and that is there's this massive surge of testosterone, which gives you total focus and drive.
It also makes you remember things, right?
9-11, you remember.
8-11, you don't know where you were.
Right?
It's the emotion plus the information that links in, right?
But then what they also found is cortisol usually goes up with testosterone.
Cortisol is the stress hormone.
But for the people that do this, championship, their cortisol drops through the roof.
So all you get is the benefits of driving testosterone, none of the stress.
I go into it every time I go on stage.
But then they started measuring my audience.
And then they measured my digital audience in their homes around the world.
It looks like music.
We start out different and then all of a sudden...
We become entrained.
And literally, the audience's biochemistry chases mine.
They come and do your blood samples.
They do your saliva.
They do all those pieces to see where you are.
And so what happens is people, as a result, that's why a year later, they're still experiencing it because it's a rewiring in their nervous system.
It's not just a thought or a cognitive idea that they learned.
And so that's why we've been able to get the kind of results we have for 48 years.
But one of the things I wanted to do is, like, people were at home, people were scared, and I was like, we need to do an event for people in their homes where you don't have to travel, doesn't cost any money, and we can really deliver them.
And not some, like, one-hour pitch.
Let's give them a three-day seminar.
Let's do, like, three and a half hours a day, so it's not overwhelming.
It's like going to a great movie, but it changes your life.
And we did it.
And the first one, we had 300,000 people.
The next one, 800,000.
Last year, it was 1.1 million people from all over the world.
There's no charge for it.
It's called the Time to Rise Summit.
If you go to timetorisesummit.com, you can register for it.
And what we're going to do is like, you know, the new year gives you an artificial feeling, like new year, new life.
It's totally in our heads, but it's a cool thing.
It's like a fresh start.
But if all you do is come up with some New Year's resolutions, you know those don't work.
So this is about creating what you want, the plan, and the pathway of how you're going to do it.
And we train you for those three days.
It goes, you know, about three hours a day, roughly, to give you an idea.
And you can sit in your home and do it.
You can do it at the office.
You can do it with your friends.
You can do it with your family.
Courage you do it with people you love.
But I promise you an experience you won't forget.
And then you'll be part of a community.
Of more than a million people around the world who are all looking to improve their body, their mind, their business, their relationships, all those different things.
So if you'd like to join us, it's not partially free, it's totally free.
Love to have you, and it's our way of serving every year.