The best investments in the world are limited to the wealthiest people. How insane is that? Imagine you're making 50% more money per year compounded.

The Holy Grail of investing.

It's mind boggling. Show people how to actually do it, how an average person could do this now. That will change the game.

The greatest keynote/inspirational/motivational speaker of all time. What do you do when we're not watching?

I've had the opportunity to work with everybody from Mother Teresa.

Serena Williams.

Nelson Mandela, Every Living President. Who coaches you? It started me on a journey. I decided to feed 100 million people.

What's the dialog amongst the Titans of the world?

The biggest problem in our society today is where's the world right now? What's coming? It's going to be a disaster. If you want to help your kids have a great future, regardless of AI, something's going to change. Got it. People talk about 10,000 hours. I've got 90,000 hours. Wow. That's a big difference. Uncertainty kills performance. If you're considered the best on Earth, you're going to prosper no matter what happens. What's something about Tony that nobody knows.

Welcome to The Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive the first two chapters of my new book, The Score That Matters, for free if you text Hawk to 66866. Now on to the night's featured leader. For the past 40 years, Tony Robbins has been known worldwide as one of the most impactful business and life coaches. He's hosted millions of people at his events, written six international bestselling books. He's involved in more than 100 businesses that have done more than $7 billion in revenue. And as part of his work with Feeding America, Tony has provided more than 850 million meals to those in need. Tony has personally coached President Bill Clinton, Serena Williams, Conor McGregor, Mark Benioff, Usher, the Golden State Warriors, and many others. During our conversation, we discussed Tony's origin story and what he learned from early mentors in his life, like Jim Rome.

Then he shares how to develop, maintain, and grow confidence in yourself. Then Tony shares his intense, maniacal preparation process for his live events and how all of us can prepare for the big moments in our lives. Talk about that and so much more. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Tony Robbins. Tony, first, thanks for coming on a Learning Leader Show. It's great to have you, man.

Thanks, Ryan. It's great to meet you.

I'm curious, over the course of your life, you've gotten to work alongside some of the best of the best leaders who have sustained excellence. That's really what I study here and have for the past nine years. I'm curious, what have you found to be some of the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time?

I've been very privileged, to say the least. I've had the opportunity to work with everybody from Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Every Living President, except the current one, some of the greatest leaders in entertainment business, obviously in finance. Common denominators. I'd say that the number one thing is finding something that you care about more than yourself. They have some mission or vision that gives them that energy. You and I both know when it comes to drive, there's push and there's pull motivation, right? Push, you're going to get exhausted eventually. Pull is something so compelling to you. It's more than you that you to give more, to do more, to create more. I think, second, I love people that are wickedly intelligent. I love wicked intelligence. However, I've met some wickedly intelligent people that can't fight their way out of a paper bag in a pragmatic way. I would say that right up there with that sense of mission is that hunger. The hunger to be more, to do more, to give more, to create more. A hunger that doesn't go away, not a hunger like, I got a goal to achieve X, lose weight and get to the party type of thing.

That hunger that's sensationable. Whether you're talking about somebody like Mark Benioff at Salesforce, he isn't doing these things anymore. Or somebody like Ray Dalia who's still delivering after 50 years, almost in the investment business, or you look at somebody like Richard Branson, who's got as much passion and hunger, almost 70 years old as he did when he was 16, starting his first company, Invergent, that crypt. So I think hunger is the most beautiful thing. And then one more is they're willing to do the hard work. I mean, some people have a nice vision and they're hungry, but not hungry enough to do what's hard and do it over and over again with repetition. I always say But when you see someone who's the best in the world at something, people get rewarded in public for what they practice insanely in private. I'm fortunate enough to own a piece of several sports teams, and I've coached some of them in the teams, and one of them that I got a chance to work with and own a piece of is the Warriors. I've gotten to know the players over the years, and Steph Curry is the greatest three-point shooter in history.

But people look at him and you see him make a shot. He releases the ball for almost half court. He's chewing on his thing. He turns around. He doesn't even look. He knows it's going in. People are like, Oh, my God, that's magical. Well, it is, but they don't realize for his entire life, he shoots 500 shots a day, every single day, seven days a week, 3,500 shots, no exceptions whatsoever. Give me an idea. That means he's doing 14,000 shots a month, 168,000 shots a year. In his career in the NBA, which is a little more than 15 years, he shot literally 2.5, 2 million practice shots. So he can make 3,000 shots shots, basically, that are three pointers in the real games. I mean, it's just the number of shots he takes in a real game, the number he makes in a real game, are not even one-tenth of 1% of the practice shots. It's like that's what it takes. If you have that hunger and drive, if you're willing to do the hard work, if you got someone to serve greater than yourself, you're going to be a great leader.

There's a lot of things you're world-class at, but I think most people would agree you're maybe the greatest keynote/inspirational/motivational speaker of all time. I'm curious, when you hear that, what do you do when we're not watching? Because we see you on stage. We see you moving thousands of people, stadiums, arenas of people. What are your Steph Curry jump shots? When nobody's watching to get ready to change so many lives when you're on stage at live events?

That's a great question. People ask my wife sometimes, What's something about Tony that nobody knows? And she said, What his work ethic is like in terms of preparation? I'm so overprepared. I was doing this event a couple of weeks ago. We had 1.1 million people for four days from 195 countries all participating in the seminar I put on. And so you had people from every walk of life, every country, 193 countries, all the countries in the world. But I was up till three or four in the morning every night, watching the videos of people before they joined this challenge. And then each night, I gave them homework. And I watched and watched and watched. And what happens is I start to see patterns, and I see what people need, and I change what I'm doing the next day based on that. But also, I've fortunately been doing this. People talk about 10,000 hours. I think a lot of people, that's a barrier. You only really need about 20 hours to get good at something, decently good, not masterful, but good. I think a lot of people don't begin because they hear this 10,000 hours. It's been so overused.

However, there's no question that if you keep improving, it's not the number of hours, but if you keep improving, and I've got 90,000 hours, I'm talking about on stage. That's not preparation times. When you do that enough, at some point, I I'm going to be an idiot. I have to see patterns, right? And I think being able to recognize patterns, most people today have such a short attention span. So to take people that won't sit for three-hour movie, much less a 20-minute presentation on video, and take them all over the world in different locations in different time zones and go 12 hours a day, 13 hours a day, where they're fully engaged requires a different level of preparation. It's also preparation in my body. So I do so many things now become popular, like goal plunges and stuff. I've been doing this for about 18 years, to give you an idea. I have a hyperbaric oxygen machine. I reduce my oxygen for my intense workouts. So the amount I do physically to be able to get up there and maintain that energy for 12, 13 straight hours for four days or six days or seven days in a row is another element of mine.

And then it's constantly asking new questions, constantly learning. I think very much like you, Ryan, that's why I wanted to meet you. It's like you and I share this passion for understanding what's the difference that makes the difference in the quality of leadership or the quality of life. I'm constantly getting that from books and conversations, and quite frankly, most importantly, from real people that I have the chance to interact with that are leaders around the world.

The best athletes in the world have coaches. You've coached some of them. I think of Serena Williams. She's like the best of all time. You're one of her coaches. She also has a tennis coach. Michael Jordan had Phil Jackson, and Tiger Woods has hired swing coaches and other types of coaches. Presidents, Bill Clinton I would call you the nightmare. Well, I'm going to get to that story in a second. But my point of saying is that the best of the best, they want to be coached. Payton Manning talks about this all the time. He loved being coached in practice and games. He loved it. If your coach didn't coach you, he was upset. Who coaches you? You're the guy coaches everybody else. Who helps you? I'm curious. He watches your film or gives you feedback. How do you get coached?

Well, I have a group of people that often call me their coach, but I'm not stupid enough to be around such brilliant people and not learn myself. I have a Or a group like Mark Benioff from Salesforce. Mark came to my seminar years ago, and he was working for Oracle, and he went to four seminars in a row. And then he finally came up, introduced himself, and he said, Why don't you come on this journey with me? You convince me I'm leaving Oracle. I'm going to start this company called salesforce. Com. And he said, I'll never get it. He said, We're going to do $100 million in business and change the world. So now he's doing like 30 billion. So it's been a fun journey. But Mark is one. Ray Dahlia was another one who's a dear, dear friend, who's a great coach. When I go to... Like last week, I wanted to get some coaching on where I think the world's going financially. And I have the good fortune that I could pull together Ray Dahlia, Paul Tudor Jones, Howard Marks, Jeffrey Gunluck, all in a matter of three or four days and pick their brains.

Peter Guber is a dear friend of mine who owns the Warriors and the Dodgers, and we own multiple pieces of teams together, but he's got 52 Academy Award nominations, one of the most brilliant people I know in the world. So I'm lucky enough to have so many brilliant people that when I come and they say I'm their coach, I know how to coach them on what I'm doing. But when I get someone with great expertise, Trust me, I pick their brains, and we usually become good friends, and we then become pitching and catching instead of me just pitching to them. I love it when somebody can throw the ball back. I'm fortunate to do that with the people I have the privilege of surrounding myself with.

I'd be curious if you could take me inside a retreat or an off-site, whether some of those guys are other people where you're together in rooms, you're having dinners, you're probably doing some physical things together. What does it sound like in those rooms? What's the dialog amongst the Titans of the world? What's the type of stuff you talk about and how do you help one Well, it depends on the context.

Last week, when I was talking about, we had a group of leaders together, and we went up to Whistler Canada in the mornings. We all skied and snowboarded and so forth. Then we came together for the second half of the day from noon to midnight or one in the morning. It's the I do deep immersions. And we were digging every aspect of what's happening. We had Secretary of State, Pompeo there. And we're finding from all these brilliant minds, we had, I think, eight self-made billionaires there all talking about where's the world right now? What's coming? How do we adapt? Because we have $212 trillion of unfunded liabilities when you count Medicare and Social Security, and there's no human way that can ever be paid back. And so now the interest rates are higher. The interest on that alone, if interest rates don't drop significantly, it's going to be a disaster. It's not that far in the future where 50% of all tax receipts would just be covering, to give you a perspective, the interest rate. If the interest rates stay where they are in that same short period of time, we get to where 100% of tax receipts would just be covering the debt, just covering the interest on the debt.

So that's not feasible. So something's going to change. And so that brings up a lot of emotion as you might matter, because people love certainty, and they have their lives the way they are, and they want to continue those ways if they're successful. But you have to be able to adapt. And we're in the middle of a global change. Ray Dahlia talks about this when he talks about the changing world order. There are these patterns that you can see. And by the way, everything I do is about patterns. If you develop three skills, or if you want to help your kids be sure your grandkids have a great future, regardless of AI or robotics or nanotechnology, the answer is they've got to come learning machines. The way you do that is, number one, you master the skill of pattern recognition. Because when you start to recognize patterns, things are no longer chaos. They're no longer overwhelming to you. But what's more powerful is when you not only recognize them, but you get the second skill, you start to use those patterns. You look at any great musician, any great business person, any great financial trader or investor, anyone's great at anything.

They know exactly the way to move their body or their voice or the camera angle or their eyes to produce that result, maximum result, every single time if they're the best in the world. But the very best make it to the third level, which is you start creating your own patterns. If you're learning to play music, if you're playing the piano, initially, you're probably going to be playing somebody else's music. You're learning a pattern, and you learn how to use it. Then gradually, you start to bring yourself through it. I think that's really what I do in those environments is I really help people see what those patterns are. So there are some patterns in the economy. There's patterns in people's emotions. There's patterns in business. I'm fortunate enough now to have 114 companies. We're doing over seven and a half billion dollars in business across all these different industries. And it's all because I never went to Harvard Business School or any business school. I got to work with the best entrepreneurs in the world and study their patterns, figure out what made them successful, and study the ones that made people make mistakes or have failures.

And if you get enough of that, you develop principles that can you. That's what happens in these situations. But we have private one-on-one conversations. We have group conversations when it's intimate like that, only 500 people. But then there's the 10,000, 15,000. I just did 1.1 million people, and we're still having pretty intimate conversations because I'm using technology adapted because of what happened during COVID. I built a 25,000-square-foot studio with 20-foot-high LED screens, 0.67 resolution, so I can see everything that's going on. I went to the founder of Zoom as a fan of and said, Listen, I need more than 1,000 or 1,200. I need 50,000. I need 100,000. Now we can bring up on screen, full screen, interact with you. You're larger than life, 20 feet tall, and the interactivity is amazing. We have people, we'll start, for example, here in Palm Beach, Florida, at 10:00 in the morning, and it's midnight in Australia. We got thousands of people going from midnight in Australia till 1:00 in the afternoon the next day, about 12:30, 13 hours for four days and nights. I'm looking them, I'm seeing them in their homes, and I can see the sun coming up and then going down by the end of the program.

Those patterns really help us. But everything I do still requires a change in physiology. What I mean by that is, information doesn't change your life. If I asked where you were on 9/11, I bet you remember vividly, am I right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wait room at Miami University.

You can remember the moment, what you saw, who was there. People all over the world, even non-Americans, can tell you that. Why? If I asked you where you were on, say, 8/11, you don't have a clue. And the reason is Information without emotion is barely retained. But when there's strong emotional information, it's retained. We've done these studies during COVID. I was approached by the people at Stanford because two of their professors came to one of my programs, a five-day program, and they were both clinically depressed and came out with no depression, no more use of the drugs, anything like that. They were blown away. They said, Do you have any data on this? I said, Well, yeah, I got millions of clients. They said, No, but like scientific data. I said, No, but if you want to run a study, I'd love to support it. I said, We'd love to do one on depression because as you can imagine, during COVID, depression went wild, so did overdoses. I said, Okay, but what are the meta studies show? What are we banking against? What does traditional intervention look like? He said, Well, it's usually drugs in some therapy, verbal therapy.

He said that across the meta studies, 60% of the people make no improvement, which I had no clue. It's pretty horrific in my mind. 40% improve, but on average, they improve 50%, which means they're half as depressed as they were. Some people get well. Most don't. Most stay on these SSRIs for a very long time. We now have proven a year ago, the meta studies show SSRIs don't even work, but we still sell millions of them every single day. It's crazy. I said, Well, I think we could beat that. I think you could beat that with a placebo. He laughed and said, Maybe. I said, What's the best study you've ever done? Well, if we were banking against that, and they said, Five years ago at Johns Hopkins, they did a study where they took people for 30 days and gave them psilocybin, magic mushrooms, hallucinogenic, and cognitive therapy for a month. I said, Well, after a month of that, you must have got some change in their brain. And he laughed. He goes, It was the most incredible change we've ever seen in psychiatry. Six weeks after this 30 days of the drugs and the therapy, these individuals showed no symptoms whatsoever.

54% of them had no symptoms whatsoever. And he said, It's amazing. I said, Well, why don't you use that as the benchmark? So they did. And we used no drugs, obviously. It wasn't a month, it was five days. But it was reorganizing, which is what we do, the pattern of perception, the pattern of decision making, the pattern of emotion, which affects everything in your life. We don't tell people how to do that. We show them how to do it and how to rewire it in their nervous system so it's automatic. The interesting thing is the results were so dramatic. They were afraid it'd be canceled. They took the information, sent it blind to three other organizations, got the same results. The results were these. After six weeks of attending the five-day, it's called Date with Destiny seminar, 100% of the people had no symptoms of depression whatsoever. Even better, 17% of the who had suicidal ideation, which means they're constantly thinking of suicide, none had it. They did a follow-up 11 months later with no more intervention from me, no interaction from me with any of those clients. They found that they not only were not depressed, but they had a 72% reduction in negative emotions and a 51% improvement in positive emotions.

They're now doing one on quiet quitting and corporate engagement. They just did a year-long program, the largest study of its type. I haven't seen the final results, but I saw them at six months, and it was amazing. It took away four years Years of shutdowns created a massive disturbance from engagement, which, as you probably know, engagement is directly tied to EBITDA or profit. The higher the engagement, the higher the profit of a company. There's engage, there's disengaged, and there's active disengaged. Disengaged would be like quiet quitting, and actively disengaged is like loud quitting, where people are still at the company but trying to destroy it. In the history of those studies, in those four years of COVID, we had the biggest drop in engagement in history. We had the largest increase in active disengagement in history. We, in five days, outstripped everything that happened from four years and then some, and it continued to grow for six months. I'll get to see the 12-month mark, but from when I've heard third party, at least, it's gone extremely well. There are ways to rewire people, and a lot of it has to do with the way in which you engage the nervous system.

It isn't just sitting and listening to somebody, that wouldn't do squat. But when you engage the nervous system, you change biochemistry while you're learning, that's that retention like you had for 9/11.

Wow, okay. Massive transformation that you make with people. That's obvious, proven, right? Studies are there. I want to go back to maybe a little bit more relatable time. You're 17 years old, rough upbringing. Most people, it's well known, but you meet Jim Rohn. I love mentors, and I love the story because I'm so lucky to have some really amazing mentors and football coaches in my life that have changed my life. I'm curious, Tony, when you think about that time in your life and the work ethic you developed and all the things that came about from that relationship, what did you learn from Jim and how did he help you?

I think one of the most valuable things I learned from him was I had four different fathers. We were always broke. We had no money on Thanksgiving when I was 11. As a result of that, I got fed. But it was more than getting fed. It made me believe stranger's care. It started me on a journey from 17 on where I started feeding people, two families, four families. Then I decided to feed 100 million people a year, 100 million meals a year. Anyway, in the United States, I said, I'm going to provide a billion meals in 10 years. I did that in eight years. I finished that last year. Now I'm doing a hundred billion meal piece. But what I really learned from that was I had so much pain and suffering. I wanted to understand why my father were always broke or losing their jobs because they were good people. I mean, from my perspective, I've sonned all four of them. They're good human beings. Jim Rohn said to me, he said, Tony, the way I can explain this to you is we're all equal as souls, but we're not equal in the marketplace.

I said, What does that mean? He said, Well, think about this, because I was complaining about the fact that a school teacher only made, I think back then it was $40,000 a year when I was asking the question, and some hedge fund guy made a billion dollars that year. It was pretty famous. He said, Well, let's start with McDonald's. He said, People complain about McDonald's and minimum wage. He goes, It's not designed to be a long-term job. It's an entry job. The reason it's so cheap, it's minimum wage, is because anyone can learn to do it, so there's not a lot of added value. In fact, now, as I'm sure, fast food is now starting to use robots already, they're going to replace it all because anybody can do it, and the robot certainly can do it. He said, Now, you look at your teachers. I'm respectful of teachers. I had some great teachers. He goes, But of all your teachers, I'm sure you had some really good ones, but what percentage were great? I said, I don't know, but I had two or three that were amazing. He goes, Two or three? And he goes, And how many people did they influence?

I said, Well, we had a class of 35 people. He said, So they picked a job also where they were not rewarded for performance. They wanted instead security. So they have a limited return because lots of people want security, and most people are not willing to put themselves on the line. He said, The guy you're talking about, the hedge fund that you're so judgmental of. He said, even in those days, we're getting a 6% return, right? It wasn't like the recent years of two and three on bonds and things like that. He said he got 47% return for three years in a row. He said, Tony, those are people's pensions. That's their future. That's their children. That's their college funds. That's everything. He goes, he's worth it. He said, What I want you to get from this is your job is to become more valuable. Your job is to find a way to do more for others than anybody else is doing. I said, That's actually aligned with my own emotions view of life or spiritual view of life, which is that's what makes for me business spiritual. I always tell all the people in my company, this is a spiritual game.

Our job is to do more for others than anybody else in the marketplace. If we do that over and over, year after year, eventually you'll build a brand, and When you build a brand, you will not have to worry about prosperous because people will get on their knees and reach behind to get a Coca-Cola from some other Cola because that's the brand they want. If you're considered the best on Earth, you're going to prosper no matter what happens. That idea of constantly adding value he really brought to me. But he was a mentor. I had a mentor named John Grinder, who was the co founder of neurolinguistic programming, NLP. I learned from him how to really make changes in minutes people think would take months or years. He was a genius. How to use language to change the nervous system. He was also a former Green Beret and Special Forces guy and worked undercover. He had a unique way of using his body to change the way he was thinking and feeling. I learned a lot from him. I developed my own style of it, but the principles of that were priceless for me. Throughout my life, I've had that.

Then I have all the people I told you about that I start out being the coach to, but I quickly start trying to learn from them as well. It's like when I'm doing my financial books as an example, or I did my Lifeforce Health book, I I've been 150 of the greatest doctors literally in the world, regenerative doctors, scientists, Nobel Laureates, the best of the best. I don't go to the average guy to get answers. The average guy is a nice person, but they're not going to give you a breakthrough. They're going to tell you what everybody else tells you. Same thing in finance. I went and interviewed 50 of the smartest financial people alive, all self-made billionaires, nobody from the Lucky Sperm Club, right? They all earned it from scratch, and they all did in different ways. My job is find those patterns and then present it in a way where people can really get it. I think that's a huge part of what we do, is we're able to take complex issues and deliver them the way that people can really use them.

You brought up GRINER and NLP. Can you go a little bit deeper here? Because I think some have heard that. They know the acronym, but they don't maybe fully understand what that means. What's NLP?

A program, it's a study of how the nervous system can be affected by language, neurolinguistics, and then programming, how you can condition the nervous system, basically. It was a study of some of the great therapists in the world, some of the best in family therapy. Erichsonian hypnosis was something that they studied. They looked for the patterns that were able to create changes in minutes instead of months or years or decades. Grinder and Bandler are the two cofounders of it. In fact, Richard Bandler is coming to visit here. He's going to come speak for me at my home to a group of the biggest donors for us. I'm excited for people to see one of the cofounders. I didn't spend a lot of time developing with him. I was really good working with Grinder. But it was just beautiful patterns, learning how to eliminate a phobia that somebody could be in therapy for seven years. I learned how to get rid of it in 15 or 20 minutes. I built my career in the beginning by challenging traditional psychiatrists and psychologists, getting on radio shows and saying, I don't care what your problem is. I don't care if you've had phobia for years.

See me all had it one hour because I'm the one-stop therapist. Then I'd get all these calls, and then, Can you do this? Can you do this? Yes, yes, yes. Then my career really started. It was in Vancouver, British Company Canada. I was saying this, and this psychiatrist made my whole career because he got on the phone and on the radio and challenged me. He said, You're You're a liar. You're a charlatan. People like, You shouldn't be allowed on the radio. He's really harsh. I paused and I was trying to be nice and I said, Sir, have you ever met me before? He goes, No. Have you ever met my clients? No. Because you never met me, you never met my clients, and you're calling me a liar and a charlatan on national radio. I said, You're a scientist, aren't you? He said, Of course, I'm a physician. I said, Well, a scientist would never make an assumption, so you must be stating your hypothesis. He paused and he goes, Yeah. I said, Your hypothesis is I'm a liar and charlatan, but you have no evidence, and I suggest you come and prove it. I said, The best way is I'm doing a free event at the holiday inn two nights from now.

It's free for everyone to come. I'm going to do a series of demonstrations. I said, Why don't you bring me one of your own patients? I said, Bring me somebody you've never been able to cure. I said, I'm sure you got plenty of those. You want to play hardball? I can play hardball, right? And he goes, Well, we all have patients aren't ready to change yet. And I said, Well, I haven't found any. Of course, I've only done four therapies at that point, but I was a real believer in it, right? And so sure enough, the guy cuts him off. He says, See you on our night, the holiday in. Those days, I'd have a free guest event, might have 50 people in it, and 500 plus people showed up. We had people standing along the walls. I mean, if the fire department came in, they'd shut us down in a heartbeat. In those days, I introduced myself. I don't know, Ryan, if you do what I do, but have you ever meet somebody on the phone for the first time? You haven't seen them yet, and you hear their voice, and you make a picture of what they look like?

Sure. I'm picturing this guy going, Okay, I'll be there. I'm picturing this huge guy with a scared woman on his arm. Nobody matches that criteria. I get up to introduce I go, Hi, I'm Tony Robbins. I'm here today to show you how I can make changes in minutes. You thought we were months or years. Just as I'm going in the next sentence, like out of a movie, the side door bursts open, and this guy's like 5'2. This woman wrapped around his arm, goes walking straight down the middle, stands right in front of me while I'm speaking. I turned the audience and go, It looks like I have a visitor. I go to shake his hand. He went in and shake my hand. He goes, Here's the woman. I proceeded to take this woman on stage. She had a snake phobia. He had been treating her for seven years. A snake phobia is an a controlled response to it. She'd have a dream of a snake biting her on the face, and the adrenaline would wake her up. It would happen sometimes three or four times a night, seven years. I said, Well, bring her down.

That should take me 10 or 15 minutes. They got her more riled up. But I brought her on stage. I showed it how quickly you could easily get her fearful. When I was done about 20 minutes later, I wrapped a snake around her, and I had my hook. I found the way to get across. Then I got people that were addicted to drugs and alcohol. I got a woman who hadn't had an orgasm in 10 years, and I had an orgasm without touching her. Guys were coming up to me going, You teach me how to do that when I'm tired? It became very popular. But those experiences allowed me to accelerate the number of people I could reach because results became my brand.

Wow. You have this amazing amount of confidence. This is a question I get from newly promoted people from time to time. Is this sense of imposter syndrome and maybe a lack of confidence? Sometimes those go hand in hand. What are the ways you would advise other people who are lacking some of the confidence that you have to then acquire that and then maintain it and grow it?

Confidence is conditioned, and confidence without confidence is not great. But if you can least get the confidence that you can find the answer, it's this... I don't even like the word confidence. It's to utilize. The word for me is certainty. Have you ever seen a great basketball player or a kicker in football, and they're going to shoot the three throw or they're going to go kick it, and right before they do it, you go, They're going to miss it, and sure enough, they do. Have you ever had that experience? Sure, yeah. You're an athlete yourself, so You were a quarterback, weren't you? Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. What is it that people see that are amateurs? They see the uncertainty. Uncertainty kills performance. Now, certainty doesn't guarantee great performance, but it maximizes your possibilities. For me, I wasn't confident, but I did it the same way. You see, I just gave you the example earlier, why is Steph so confident? Because he's done it 8 million times. Confidence is tying your shoes. When you get up to speak, a lot of people get fearful, and I can give them a little tip. It's fearful because they're thinking about themselves instead of being in the audience.

If you've done your job and you have enough things to talk about, I have an idea of what I'm going to talk about, but then I feel the audience and the whole thing changes. But it's because I made so many deposits in my emotional, psychological, spiritual bank account that when I go to cash a verbal check, it doesn't bounce. There's plenty there. There's nothing that I know of that's better than preparation because when you're overprepared, you have certainty. I can handle anything. Then decades of that certainly builds more certainty. But I'll tell you where it really started for me. I remember when I was 17, my fourth father and mom had a big fight on Christmas Eve. She gig my dad out. She was a pretty powerful lady. He went back east and left us there. I was devastated. I started to defend my father. My mother chased me out with a knife. Now, she wouldn't have stabbed me or killed me, but I wasn't going back in that house. I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I was still in high school, and I was working as a janitor because we were really poor.

I needed help support the family. I took these busses to go there, and I'd come home at 2:00 in the morning because you could clean a bank, and it wasn't per hour. It's like, if I cleaned two banks and did it within the time period that I wanted to do it, I got the job done, it didn't matter how many hours. I'd finish that at 2:00 in the morning, go home on the busses, get up and do this whole game over and over again. One night, I came out of the bank at 2:00 in the morning, and I'm standing at the bus stop, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, no busses. I'm freaking out. I know what I could call. Can come pick me up. I'm way too far away. And so all of a sudden, a car comes by, a lone car in the middle of the night, and guy pulls over, rolls his window, goes, Hey, bud, didn't you see the paper? I said, What? He goes, There's a bus strike. So it's like, Holy shit. How the hell am I going to get home? And at that point, I had a lot of anger in me.

So it started with anger. But I had picked up this book called The Magic of Believing by Claude M. Bristol, an old classic book. And I'd read it, and it talked about how to condition your mind. And you don't do it by affirmation. Affirmation is when you go, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, and your brain goes, BS, you're not happy. It's when you speak something with such authority and use your entire body with such certainty over and over again that literally you hypnotize yourself into finding this new reality, this new part of yourself. So I decided I was going to run home. This is 14, 14 and a half miles. And I never run three miles. I was a little overweight. But it was pure... First, it was anger towards my mom. And then I got rid of that because you run out of that feel real quick. And then I just like doing these simple incantations every day in every way, I'm getting stronger and stronger. Every day in every way, I'm getting stronger. Every day in every way. And I emphasize a different word. Then I go, Every day, I'm happier and happier.

I did that the entire way, ran the longest I ever run in my entire life. But what really came out of it was this conditioning in me of absolutely nothing will stop me. And to this day, I'll be 64 in a few weeks. That part of me is so vibrantly alive. Whenever I need it, it's there. So it's a conditioning process. I do the same thing around economics. I grew up I'm dead poor. I don't want my children to have to go where we are. We got no food. It's the reason I provide 100 million meals a year. I've done that now for 10 years. So how did I change myself? I created these incantations. God's wealth is circulating in my life. His wealth flows to me with avalanches of Abundance. All my needs, desires, and goals are met instantaneously by infinite intelligence, for I'm one with God, and God is everything. And with every word, I see it. So I'd say avalanches of abundance, say avalanches of Love, and respect, and connection, and growth, and economic well-being. I would do that for hours in my car, driving my little Volkswagen. What happens is your brain literally becomes certain.

It's just like any muscle. The more you use a muscle, the stronger it gets. You don't use it, you lose it. Most people, if they've never done something before, they get stopped by what I call the tyranny of how. But I've never done it. Yeah, I'm going to do this. Oh, but I've never done it. Oh, they don't have certainty. What I've learned is I don't even know how, I don't even know what and why. If I know what I want and why I want it and why it's important enough and it's something more It's not even just me, then I just step into it and I'll find it. I've done it enough times now that I have that internal certainty. But it's a habit, just like the habit of shooting the ball. You got to do it before it's needed, not suddenly try to get that confidence when everything is on the line.

One of the things that I love that's been a through point of this entire conversation, Tony, is that when you want to learn about something, you don't screw around, you go to the best of the best in the world. The third book in this trilogy, when it comes to money and finance, I'm I'm curious to learn more about the Holy Grail of investing.

Well, actually, I hadn't written a book in 20 years back when 2008 happened. I just don't like writing books because when I'm speaking, it's live. It's now, you can change it. It's like sitting by yourself and writing books. Most people don't read, unfortunately. But when 2008 happened and we went through the world financial crisis and my billionaire friends were stressed out and my barber was, it didn't matter who you were. Everybody was affected by them because the government didn't give you money like they did during this last round we had with COVID. So at that time, I finally, after two years where nothing happened, we punished the people that almost destroyed the financial system by giving them more of our money. My answer was, Let me go interview 50 of the smartest financial people on Earth and say, Is the game still winnable? Because it looks rigged. And it is in some ways, but it's still totally winnable if you know what you're doing. I figured I can go from the best to the best. Well, that grew. And then a few years later, I realized I've given people all these answers. It was a 700-page, 650-page book.

My billionaire friends loved it. It was number one New York Times best seller. It's still the best selling financial book of this century, the last 2024 years. But what's interesting is I knew when all that changes, people get all that when the market starts melting. And bear market happens usually about every five years. We've had an extended time without one for a while. And so I decided I'd write Unshakeable to protect people for that so they wouldn't make the stupid mistakes that most people make that ruin their financial future. And I thought that was done. But then it kept bumping into people that the majority of which are not where they be financially. Their goals are not on target. And now inflation is really eroding that even more for people. And so when I was talking to Ray Dow, he became a good friend over the years, the last decade or so. I was asking one time, instead of all the principles we've talked about, it If there was a single principle that would be the most important investment principle of someone to know if they're going to succeed, what is it? He said, Tony, I struggled with this for over a decade because I want to tell you what I think is the Holy Grail of Investings.

That's the title of the book. It comes right from I said, What is it? He goes, Well, everybody wants bigger returns, but bigger returns usually require more risk, and more risk can keep you from getting the returns. It's just this bad cycle. He said, But everyone knows the power of diversification. Diversification is the only free lunch. Mark which won the Nobel Prize for it. He goes, But very few people understand how to apply it. He said, I'll tell you what I found out. If you can find 8, this is the principle, if you can find 8-12 uncorrelated investments that you believe in, you reduce your risk by 80% and get the same upside or better. There's nothing like it. I remember when he told it to me, I got excited, wrote it down, and then I started to go work on it. You find it's not easy to get things that are not correlated. The obvious ones you'd say aren't correlated are stocks and bonds. Stocks are designed, they're going to go up. Bonds are going to be in safety when they go down. But of course, in 2022, they both went down. 2008, they both went down.

If we had more time, I can show you it's happened over and over again. That's not a good solid strategy because that's not going to protect you during down times. How do you find 8-12 uncorrelated investments? We have to turn to private investments, private alternative investments. I'm talking about private equity, private credit, private real estate. I thought, The one gift I have in my life at this stage is access. What if I interviewed 13 of a baker's dozen of the greatest institutional or greatest, I should say, private equity investors in the world and found out what they do? I was blown away. I was blown as I was by the first 50 people I interviewed, the Ray Dives, the Carl Icons, Warren Buffets, et cetera. I have to say I respect all those people immensely. I have a greater affinity for these men and women because they have firms that are $20 to $100 billion funds. They're consistently producing 20% compounded for decades. Some of them 30% compounded for decades. The average investor can't even think of those, wouldn't even believe it. But of course, for decades, if you're a big pension fund, if you're a big financial institution, if you're the ultra wealthy, you got access to these things.

First, I just wanted to figure out how to get my own 8-12. I remember one day I was at... J. P. Morgan holds an alternative investments conference once a year, and you have to have a billion dollar net worth as a minimum to get in. I was speaking. I wasn't a billionaire yet, so I'm speaking. But right before me was Ray Dahlia, and somebody asked them the same question, and he gave the same answer, 8 to 12. These billionaires, everyone had not written a note all morning, and every head went down and wrote it like crazy. It was so simple. But then how do you find it? Well, when you go interview these guys, you discover that they have built machines. They're not trying to find alpha by finding the right timing and just the right price. They create alpha, and they do it by adding more value. They buy a company, and let's take an example like Robert Smith of Vista. Robert Smith is named one of the top 50 most brilliant financial minds of this century. He's a genius. How $3 billion fund. I can't tell you what his compounding is because you have to have a prospectus.

But all I can tell you is it's way above 20% per year for 26 straight years, way above it. How does he do it? Well, he's specialized. Software as a service is his specialty. He can take any company like that, and he knows so much about it over these 26 years, 30 years. He knows what to do with the CEO, what to do with the marketing, what to do with some of the costs. He takes that thing, builds it up like a machine, and then sells it to a larger company or takes it for a giant multiple in either case. That's how they're able to do this. There's a gentleman named Ramsey Ms. Solomon at Veritas. Oh, my God, this guy's a genius. In 2000, I think it was 10 or 11, his partner committed suicide. The agreement is when the key player leaves, the people could take their money out. Usually in private equity, your money is tied up for five years. They do that because then when the market goes down, they don't have to sell. They can buy then. When the market goes up, they can sell. They have a great advantage over the public markets.

People are willing to tie up their money a little bit and have liquidity somewhere else and have those kinds of returns. You look at what he did. He went around and met every investor, so no one left their money out. He grew from less than $2 billion to $45 billion in the last 10 years. Again, returns way above 20%. How did he do it? He specialized the government buys more technology than anybody else. Most people don't want to deal with the government. It's such a pain in the rear. He figured out how to master that. Now he's able to produce these returns again and again and again. But here's what's really exciting, to give you a sense, Ryan. The reason I wrote the book is two things happen. One is more people can participate now. I'm sure you know the government actually classifies whether you can access these or not. The best investments in the world are limited to the wealthiest people. How insane is that? I've argued about this forever. Just a few months ago, the House and Congress agreed, and they came up with a new law. It was bipartisan. It's pretty amazing.

In fact, I think only 50 votes against it, like 380 plus votes. It was to say this, you could have inherited your money. That doesn't mean you're a sophisticated investor or you might be a good business person, but that doesn't make you a great investor. Why should someone have to have that amount of money, a million dollars minimum if you're going to be a credit investor or 200, not counting your house, or 200,000 income or 300,000 for a couple is the standard right now. They said, We think you should be able to take a test so you understand what you're getting into. If you pass the test, you should be an accredited investor. They passed that law. Senate has now picked it up. In the next 90 days, they think that'll pass bipartisan as well. That'll change the game. But it used to be only 1% of the people were credited. Now, it's one out of five families that are credited investors. I was like, Okay, I want to do this. But then there's one other problem, Ryan, and I'm sure you maybe experience this as well. You know a lot of people. I know a lot of people.

The very best investors in the world, their funds are closed out in a heartbeat. It's like if you want to buy one of the new special purpose Ferraris, the SP2, It's $4 million, and you can't even buy one because they're all pre-sold to all the other Ferrari dealers. Well, it's the same way when you look at these people. These are the best of the best. Now, before I explain something to you, let me show you one of the things. If you want to know how valuable private equity investments are and where they should be in your asset allocation, the wealthiest people on average have 46% of their money in alternative investments, private equity, private credit, etc. And they only have 29% in the public markets. Still need the public markets for liquidity, but that's a big difference. That's why as profitable as they are. Why? Because they know something you probably don't know, not you, but people don't know. And that is this. If you look at the S&P 500, you bought the index, which is common for people to do today. Great way to simplify your investing and does pretty well. In fact, for 35 years, it's averaged 9.2% compounded.

For readers that aren't used to this, think of that as doubling your money every eight years. That's pretty cool. However, if you weren't dealing with the guys I'm dealing with in this book, if instead you're dealing with average private equity The average private equity has been 14.2%, imagine you're making 50% more money per year compounded. Compounding is where you get wealthy. Let me give you a number for that. If you had a million dollars to put it in the stock market and you forgot about it, 35 years later, it's worth 26 million. A million in the same time period in private equity is worth 139 million. Or you could say $100,000. You're now worth 2.6 or $100,000, you're 13.9 million. It's mind boggling. In the last 35 years, every stock market in the world has underperformed average private equity. Now, let's talk about access for a second. I got some access. You probably got some access, but it's a little sliver because it all gets eaten up. You only get access if you know the right people and you got enough money. One day, I was lamenting about this to a friend of mine who used to be a partner with Paul Tudor Jones and formed his own firm.

Very successful I was like, I got access. I shouldn't complain, but the numbers are so small. It's like, it's not where I want to be. He said, Tony, you've done so much for me. I'm going to clue you in on where I put most of my money. This guy is incredibly successful, so I'm leaning forward on this one. Tell me. He said, There's this firm in Houston, Texas called KAS. When he said Houston, Texas, my brain got scrabble. I'm like, not New York, not Connecticut, not London, not Singapore. Houston? He goes, Tony, they're outside the bubble. Here's what they've done. Instead of fighting to try and get some sliver of one of these funds, he said they've taken billions of dollars, they've locked arms as investors, and bought in giant pieces, small pieces, but giant numbers, across the biggest private equity firms in the world. Here's what that means. When you invest in private equity as an investor, you're called a limited partner. The general partner is the owners of the fund. That's the CEO, the C-suite, those individuals. Well, they charge you 2% a year while your money is tied up for 5 or 10 years, what situation you're in.

They're guaranteed a huge sum of money, whether they perform or not. If they had a billion-dollar fund, to give you a perspective, Ryan, for five years, that means they have $100 million tied up. Most of these funds are $20 billion to 100 billion. How'd you like to have a guaranteed $100 million as your base of income, guaranteed. But then they get 20% of the upside. So it's not uncommon to grow their business from a billion to 2 billion. I have one company that we invested in. I think we started out at something like 6.2, and I think the numbers now are 35. So you get a sense of the massive expansion that you get with that. So they make their 2 and 20. Well, when you're a partner, you get the 2 and 20. You're literally side by side with them. You're not being charged that, you're getting it. And you get mini vintages, meaning not one fund, you get every fund they own. The funds they did in the past under low inflation. The funds they're doing now under high inflation. The future funds they're going to do. So you get diversification across time.

If the fund ever gets sold, by the way, when they go from one to two, their cost doesn't go through the roof. It's a small cost change. When they ever get sold, they get sold for a multiple, you make them multiple on the business. It is my single favorite investment. I have 65 private equity firms that I have a piece of. The Vistas, the Veritas, the Starwoods, the NCAP, the biggest ones in the world. So this is the thing that's available now, and that's why I wrote this book to show people how to actually do it, how an average person could do this now.

Wow. So a regular person, anybody can do this now?

That's correct.

Got it. Love it. Man, I know we got to run, Tony, but I got one more before we take off. In addition to encouraging everybody to dive into the new book, The Holy Grail of Investing, you're meeting with somebody who's a little bit later than you were when you met Jim Rome. Maybe they went to college, they graduate, they want to do some good in the world, but they're not really fully clear on what that's going to be. What are some general pieces of life/ career advice you give to that person?

I tell people that there's no comparison for a belief versus This is an experience. A belief supports substitute for an experience. You might believe this is going to be something I'm going to love or I'm going to be great at something, but you need the experience. And so what I tell people is get around things that you think you're interested in, that you think you'd have a passion around, and find a way to shadow box, volunteer your time, do some menial job just to be in the environment, so you see what that's like day in and day out. Then something's going to hit you. When something hits you and it unleashes your desire, that's the first step. But you need not only passion and desire, you also need skill. I'm very passionate about singing, but you wouldn't want to listen to me. I love singing. I love music. You have to make sure that along with your passion, there's a skill you can gain to make yourself effective in that area. But the only way you're going to know is by putting yourself in different environments and experiencing it. You can't just do it in your head because we're terrible at predicting what's really going to fulfill us.

But I'd also say, you don't even have to know what your final version is to already have a business on the side that has no employees and you only have to work on a few hours a year, and that's becoming an owner. The biggest problem in our society today, as young people, they like socialism. A lot of them talk about it because they've never been in a socialist country. I was in the Soviet Union when it was the Soviet Union. It made me a capitalist. It wasn't equal. It is not fair. They have no idea what that really is. It's not just free money. The reason is we haven't taught them to tap in a free enterprise. I'll give you a simple example. Do you have an iPhone?

Yes.

Have you bought several over the years?

Yes.

Me, too. I've had every iPhone since the beginning. I was trying to help this young person understand I understand this. I went online, I figured out the exact prices of every iPhone. We total it up, it's $20,326, I think it is. It's over $20,000, $20,653. Then I went and said, Let's see if we bought that same iPhone, the first one in 2007 was $604. Well, let's buy $604 a stock at the same time of Apple. And every year, whatever they spent on the phone, we bought those shares of Apple at whatever the price was. You know what it's worth today? $204,000. Well, Instead of being out 20 grand, you have 204. That's being an owner instead of being the stupid consumer. And so it's like, by the way, today, you can have fun with this. If you're worried about the stock market, part of why I wrote this book is because there's all these other options that aren't tied to the market. Market can crash. And sports teams go crazy. Sports teams have produced, check this out, an 18% compounded return for the last 11 years. But you can go back all the way to the '60s and '70s when people weren't making any money in the market and you were getting 16% compounded returns.

It's mind boggling. One of my dear friends, Peter Guber, we own some sports teams together, and he owns the Dodgers, the Warriors. We own together the LAFC. I have a little piece of the Dodgers, a little piece of the Warriors. What's amazing is, I remember when he bought the Dodgers, it was $2 billion he paid for them. If you look at the newspapers at that time or watch the media, they all went crazy. No one's paid more than $800 million for a baseball team. The Dodgers are a great team. Maybe they're worth a billion, but not $2 billion. This guy's crazy. He'll never make the money. I went to Peter and I go, Peter, I know you're no dummy. I want to join you in this, but how are you going to make money spending two billion on this? He said, Tony. He goes, I've made 52 Academy Award nominated films. He goes, I like Cliffhangers. I'll announce on Tuesday. When you hear it, call me up and we'll go party together. Sure enough, I hear on Tuesday, I call him. He sold the local TV rights for the Dodgers in one day for $7 billion and made $5 billion net in the day.

Because of cord cutting, sports now have become a different thing. They're not just buts in seats. They have a monopoly. If your fans are fanatics, and they're multi-generational. They own the real estate, and now media is everything. Of the top 100 shows this last year, 92 of the top viewed shows in the United States were sports because you can't binge on them, and you got to watch it real-time, and you got to watch the commercials, and that's what makes them so valuable today. People can own a piece of a sports team. You had to go decades to make enough money, get enough reputation to be part of buying a sports team. Today, there's a couple of companies, smaller ones, that know how to do this and have their in every sport: NBA, Major League Base, National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer. The only one that's not done it yet is the NFL. They announced two days ago in the New York Times that in six weeks, they're going to make a decision. It looks likely they're going to probably join this as well so that Now people can have the fun of being an owner, but also the returns that are much greater than the stock market, and it's not tied to the market.

If you're worried about that, you need diversification. Just another great opportunity. While you're looking for your ultimate purpose, why not set a financial security along the way? Even if you're starting with tiny amounts of money, you can create financial freedom along the way while you're having what you find to be your ultimate dream.

Love it, man. Tony, thank you so much. The book, again, is called The Holy Grail of Investing. Really appreciate your time, Tony. I'd love to continue our dialog as we both progress, man.

I look forward to them. By the way, I wanted everybody to know, if you get the book for yourself, I'm donating, as I've done for my last three books, 100% of the money to Feeding America. We've provided over a billion meals in the last eight years in this book and my additional donations. But while you're helping yourself, you'll be helping somebody else in need, too.

Love it, man. Thanks so much, Tony. Appreciate it.

Take care.

It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, rian@learningleader. Com. Let me know what you learned from this conversation with the great Tony Robbins. A few takeaways from my notes. The advice Tony received when he was 17 from Jim Rohn. He said, You Our job is to become more valuable. We are all equal as souls, but not equal in the marketplace. Our job as leaders is to continually add more value to those we are serving, to those we are leading. We should always be thinking about, How can I add more value? Next, commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence. They find something they care about more than themselves. They have a deep hunger for and they work amazingly hard at it. You are rewarded in public for what you practice in private. Steph Curry has taken far, far more practice shots than the ones in games, and he's rewarded in public for what he does in private. Then a belief is a poor substitute for an experience. You might believe it's something you're going to love, but you don't fully know it until you do it.

You got to get in the arena and do it, see what it's like. That's when you'll really learn. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Tony Robbins. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. Because you continue to do that, and you continue to go to Spotify or Apple podcast, and you subscribe, and you write a review and rate the show, hopefully five stars. By doing that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. For that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.