The a16z Show - The Future of Longevity with Tony Robbins

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Welcome to “The Ben & Marc Show”, featuring a16z’s co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen.  In this week’s episode, Marc and Ben are joined by special guest Tony Robbins to discuss the future of longevity.  Tony Robbins is an entrepreneur, #1 NY Times bestselling author, philanthropist, and the nation’s #1 life & business strategist.  For over four and a half decades, Tony has empowered more than 50 million people from 100 countries around the world through his audio programs, educational videos, and live seminars. He’s also the author of six international bestsellers, including “Money: Master the Game” (2014), “Unshakable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook” (2017) and “Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life and Those You Love” (2022).Joined by a16z’s own Dr. Vijay Pande, PhD – General Partner since 2014, and founder and leader of a16z Bio + Health – the group discusses new breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, AI, biohacking, gene editing, mindset and confirms why this might be the best time to be alive. Enjoy!Watch the full video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/V8h11baC_ok Resources:Marc on X: https://twitter.com/pmarcaMarc’s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitzDr. Vijay Pande on X: https://twitter.com/vijaypandeLearn more about Tony Robbins: https://tonyrobbins.comTony’s Time to Rise Summit (Jan 25-27, 2024): https://timetorisesummit.com/join-now  Pre-order Tony’s upcoming book “The Holy Grail of Investing” (Feb 2024): http://theholygrailofinvesting.com Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your mind is a great tool. It should be used. Don't let it use you. If the placebo effect is so strong, it'd be great to understand it. It'd be great to harness it. Athletes are usually the first people to do this because they're like biohackers. The future is what we make it, right? It's not inevitable. It has to be willed into being. No pain in my spine for the first time in 14 years. Shoulder feeling perfect. Three months later, DMRI, there's absolutely nothing wrong. Data plus AI plus iterations means we can finally make advances. Aging is the real disease.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the A16Z podcast. This is your host, Steph Smith, and I hope you're having an excellent holiday break. I hope this episode is actually the cherry on top of that break, because we really do have a pretty special guest. In addition to hearing from Mark Andresen and Ben Horowitz today, who of course are co-founders here at A16Z, you're also going to hear from Tony Robbins. Now, if somehow you have not heard of Tony Robbins, he's an entrepreneur, number one, New York Times. by selling author, philanthropist, and more. For over four and a half decades, Tony has empowered more than 50 million people from 100 countries through his programs and is the author of six international bestsellers. Not bad. Now today, Tony, Ben, and Mark are also joined by A16Z's very own Bio-Health founding partner, VJ Ponday. Together, the four of them discuss the new breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, AI, biohacking, gene editing, mindset, and why this is truly the best time to be alive.

What a great conversation to preface for the new year. Enjoy. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16C fund. Please note that A16C and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

For more details, including a link to the website, to our investments, please see A16C.com slash disclosures. We're all living, I know, in challenging times, but you're actually living in the best time to be alive. The opportunities that are going to happen in the next 12 to 13 years for people who take care of themselves are beyond their wildest imagination, because we're at the base of that explosive geometric curve right now, and it's pretty darn exciting. Welcome to the Mark and Ben podcast, and today we have a super special guest, the world famous Tony Robbins, who is, in my view, probably one of the great psychologists of the last 50 years,

and has done just incredible work and helped so many people. And he is kind of the number one person that you call if you need to improve your performance or get your head together, whether you're a president or a great athlete or anything. So it's a tremendous privilege to have him here. And with us also is the head of our biofund, Dr. Vijay Pondi, who will be able to be a great athlete or who will be very helpful as Tony's last book is a book called Life Force, which is a book all about regenerative medicine and how to basically live your best, healthiest life with the best health span possible.

So with that, welcome, Tony. Well, thank you. And thank you for such a nice introduction. As I said, before we got on, you guys are the legends here. I'm so grateful to have an opportunity to visit with you. What you've created around the world, the kinds of companies you guys have helped make happen and support

is super inspiring. So thanks for having me on. Yeah, no, absolutely. So I want to start just a little with, you have this great story that kind of led to your book and led to your kind of work in the field of health where you had a snowboarding accident, which is a lot following you over the years. A lot of where some of your best work comes from is your worst moment. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how that happened here. Well, sure. I've always been involved in health. I'm kind of I'm a biohacker myself. I have to be. I was followed for three and a half years by a group that worked with Tom Brady and a lot of the greatest sports teams and they were tracking my body. And I do these events that are four to seven days and I've got 15,000 people in a stadium and

I got to hold the person at the top for 12 hours, not a two-hour movie that somebody spent $300 million to make. So it's just me. So the amount of energy running around the building, going up, engaging people is amazing. I burn 11,300 calories on average, believe it or not, every single time on a single day. I jump a thousand times. I weigh 290 pounds. Every time you come down, your body hits four times the body weight. So imagine a million jumps, or a million pounds of pressure, I should say, a thousand times a thousand happens in a day. So as a result of all that, I'm always looking for breakthroughs. But I'm also a little crazy. And I was falling one day, a 20-year-old snowboarder down the hill. And I did not have their moves. And I discovered that the hard way.

And I woke up, having taken a jump, and I thought I broke my neck. I tore my rotator cuff. And the nerve pain from that, if you've ever experienced, that's pretty brutal. So, you know, I own pieces of several sports teams, fortunately. And we have some of the best doctors in the world, both the Dodgers and the Warriors. And so it's like, okay, what should I do, doc? And every single one in surgery, surgery, and they're like, okay, what's the prognosis? Well, between three and six months of rehab and it can happen again. And I said, what about stem cells?

Because, you know, I've been reading about stem cells and hearing about them like everyone else. And they said, oh, no, no, worthless. It's not going to do anything for you. But for me, it was just like investing. I want to see with the least amount of risk of the greatest possible reward. It was the asymmetrical risk reward here. And I started asking around,

ask a dear friend of mine, Pierre deemondis, who I think you guys may know. Yeah. Peter's dear friend and partner. And I said, who's the best in the world in this area? You've got to know him. And he said, I do. His name's Bob Harari.

I'll introduce you. And it's kind of like saying, I want to wonder about basketball. So I'll introduce you my friend, LeBron James. Bob's like one of the founders of what stem cells have done for people. Long story short,

he said, they're right. If you use your own stem cells, you're over the age of 40, I'm not going to see much. But if you go down to Panama or various other places, he told me I could go, and you get four-day-old stem cells that come from the core that's normally thrown away, he said, I think you'll see a transformation. And he said, look, you look at risk-reward. It doesn't work, and you always go to the surgery. So long story shortened. I went down four days, several injections. First day, I was just really tired.

Second day. I woke up and I had spinal stenosis as well, for example, for 14 years. No pain in my spine for the first time in 14 years. Shoulder feeling perfect. Three months later, DMRI, there's absolutely nothing wrong. I've never done anything since. So I got invited by the Pope, believe it or not. The Pope does the biggest conference every two years on understanding these new cellular medicines

because it's no longer fetal tissue, obviously. No one's doing that. And so I was invited to be a cleanup speaker for four days, the best expert, from the world and I said, I'm coming. I've come for all four days. And I met people that was sent home to die and who are totally healthy today and got to hear all of these breakthroughs. And I said, how come the world doesn't know about it? And then I spent out the studies that show the amount of time it takes for a breakthrough to happen to get your clinician on average is 27 years. It's just crazy. And I said, Dr. Vijay, not in his head. He knows, obviously.

I why he works with you instead of a traditional approach. So I said, I don't want to get that out. but I want it not to be my opinions, like my financial books. I interview the best in the world and find out what they're saying, not the average person, because the average doctor, even great ones were saying, this is a waste of my time, and they were dead wrong. So this book is filled. It's 700 pages of the very best to increase your energy, your strength, and your longevity from the best experts in the world.

Wow. And you kind of slipped in. You went to Panama to get that treatment. And so what are the factors in our system that make that? only available in Panama and you have to do this medical tourism in order to get, I mean, it's kind of weird. Well, I got to leave America and go to Panama to get healthy. That seems Maybe you should ask Dr. Vijay more. He and I would probably agree they have a tough job, right? Really tough job. And these are, you know, new breakthroughs for them. And it takes a long time

for them to approve something. But there are several IDNs. I have a company here in the U.S. that people go to called Fountain Life where they do all their diagnostics and saves a lot of lives because you discover within a few minutes something someone didn't know was going on in their body. They had no sense of. But while they're there, we also have gotten some IDNs to do some of those studies with stem cells here in the country. So you can get those exceptions, but you've got to know where they are and you've got to be part of a study to do it. Yeah. And Vijay, like what led to that particularly with stem cell research? Yeah, I mean, stem cell research is a part of the larger regenerative medicine where people are first just trying to understand biology because it's kind of amazing. I think about

even like how a human being gets created, it sums from these original cells that become all different types of cells. And you combine that with the fact that when we think about disease, we think of disease as something bad happening to us, but a lot of that stuff is exacerbated with age. And that age itself is like so much of the challenge that we get cancer and Alzheimer's and type two diabetes with such greater incidence as you get older. So aging itself is so much of the problem. And I think you combine these two things together. You get cells that are young that don't have the garbage that sort of adds up as time goes on. Really amazing things are possible.

Things that sound like miraculous or like science fiction. But just even going from like sperm and egg to a baby is kind of miraculous if you think about it. Miracles happen all the time. And now the question is how can we harness the miraculous biology that's already happening? And you know, athletes are usually the first people to do this because they're like biohackers, right? So my clients like Christiana Rinaldo, he turned things around in six weeks that would have taken six months and he did it with stem cells or Jack Nicholas. I don't know a few years ago, Jack was telling me he could literally, I think it was four or five years ago, couldn't play golf, couldn't play tennis, almost the rest. There's just, that's how he has to adjust his life. And, you know, he did stem cells and he's perfect, both of them, plays tennis, plays golf, has a great time. So people just need to know that this is really possible. And the FDHA, to their credit, they're working hard and evaluating things and moving. I mean, stem cells have been involved. in so many studies now, as Dr. Vijay knows, there's zero question in terms of their value. But it's been the Wild West in the U.S.

People get out and promote things and say things that are totally insane. And they're like one or two cases. And that's all it takes. And the media goes crazy, as they probably should to try to warn people. But then it all gets thrown out with the baby with the bathwater. I mean, there was somebody who was doing injections of stem cells and other things in people's eyes and somebody went blind. I mean, it's insane.

That's not something you do in a trillion years. So you have to find the right sources. And that's one of the reasons that we co-founded Fountain Life with Dr. Bob Herrera, because one of the greatest experts in the field who really found some of the initial breakthroughs that made us understand what stem cells are and how they work. But it's still really unique. And I still, you know, some of the best places to go if someone's listening, really, is like a group like RMI.

It's called Down in Costa Rica, some of the most sophisticated and the best. But I went to Panama originally, and that's literally all it took. I have a dear, dear friend. We own a piece of sports team together. I won't mention his name because I want to tease them about it too much. much, but he'll probably hear this. And I was saying, you've got to go do stem cells, man. He's like, same doctors, going to him, rotator cuff issue. He's a little bit older than I am. And he said, no, no, no, it's not going to work. I said, they told me the same thing. Look what's happened to me.

But he's surrounded by them, right? So he went into the surgery, and he's had two surgeries since then. He started over again, then another rehab that lasted four and a half months, four days for me. I mean, that's why saying, Dr. Vijay, it sounds absurd, doesn't it sounds impossible, but it happens all the time. I mean, Dr. David Sinclair, as you're familiar with, probably Dr. Vijay, is probably one of the greatest experts in this area. And as he said, aging is the real disease. As you age, everything else accelerates. Everything starts to break down. And part of that is stem cell exhaustion and the communication that those stem cells provide. That's why exosomes are now a really valuable tool as well when used properly. Well, and you actually point to like one of the

key things that we think about innovation being innovation science or maybe the drug, but innovation, the regulatory side could be perhaps the most impactful way that we could help patients. And what do you think the innovations on the regulatory side are, Vijay, like in terms of the current process and where it could go? Yeah, I think the challenge is like to put your feet in their shoes, it's actually a really hard thing to do because you're the last line of things, but part of it might be sort of reframing how you think about things. And we saw this sort of in the arc of how regulation came to be that we had this Lidomide crisis, which was a horrific thing. that kids were being born, malformed. And so the FDA gets created. Ironically, nothing that the

FDA has done would have helped the phlymite crisis because you don't test on pregnant women and so on. But there's a lot of other things that perhaps did really help patients. But then perhaps the pendulum swung too far. And then you get to the HIV crisis where people are dying of AIDS and they're just trying to get drugs. And their options are die now or die later or try the drug and maybe survive. And actually the pendulum went the other way to realize that there was an opportunity for really helping patients by getting them the drugs. And I think that's part of it, is the realization that some of these are questions of science, but some of these are questions of policy. Like, how do we want to think about things? And that's a different type of problem.

That's a policy problem, not a science problem. Yeah. And actually, one of the things Tony talks about in the book is the process is safety first and then efficacy and then efficacy at scale. And how do you think about that, Vijay, like, is that necessary for the FDA to show efficacy or is there a more efficient way? Yeah, so you bring up a great point here because, yeah, so testing for toxicity, that's clearly important and that's established. But actually, the thing that a lot of people forget is that after the FDA, insurance companies will also determine whether the drug is really worth it. That's their business. And there's a real marketplace for that. And if it's improved, then they'll pay for it.

And so since that's happening anyways, it's interesting to think about really harnessing that, especially since there's things that some people might think are crazy. Like, if you had a drug that was as good as the best drug, but cheaper, that still can't get, that won't go buy the FDA because it actually has to be better than the last drug, even if it's not better scientifically, but it's better in other ways. And so if you leave that to the payers, the payers are like, hell yeah, I would love to have a drug that's 10 times cheaper. That would be something where we could get it to more patients. We could do so much more with it.

Those are things that really the only thing about when you're thinking about from a market perspective, and from the fact that they're really the customers using this. And I think that change of framing could actually have a huge impact on how patients get drugs. There's also companies like in Silico that are using AI and trying to reinvent basically how drugs come to the market and the tempo, where what took 5,000 people they can do with 50. And, you know, kind of like Invita, what it's done and its ability to forecast. how they build a chip, doing that and actually being able to predict what would happen in a study and so forth. And they're very excited about what they think they can do in this area. And they're not the

only one. They're just one of the leaders in the field right now. So the ability to get the right drugs to the right people. Precision medicine also, right? It's rejuvenation, yes, but it's precision. What does your body need? What's the right amounts? And with some of the information that we have from the human genome now, some of that is actually starting to become usable for us. It's been such a mass amount of information. Now the specificity is starting to come about. And then you got things like CRISPR that can enter in to actually start editing it all. So we're all living, I know, in challenging times, but you're actually living in the best time to be alive. We actually have the least amount of violence in the world if you measure it that's ever been. No one of know that if you watch

your television because, listen, the media is good people. Their job, though, is to make money for their shareholders. And we all are wired with a negative bias. So they know that leads, it leads. And so now anything in the world looks horrible, we get to hear about it. And we're also just also in a season that happens to every 20 years, so the season changes and people are much more fearful. But in spite of all that, the opportunities that are going to happen in the next 12 to 13 years for people who take care of themselves are beyond their wildest imagination, because we're at the base of that explosive geometric curve right now. And it's pretty darn exciting. Yeah, Mark, actually, you just wrote the techno-optimist manifesto where you talk about the

possibility for a brighter future, kind of against the like super pessimistic attitude. How do you think about the future and what the next 10, 15 years will be like? Well, look, I agree with Tony. I mean, if you look at the substance of what's happening, there's a lot to be optimistic about. I mean, look, I will say, though, there are a lot of forces that play in the world that want to keep these things from happening, and there's a lot of repression that's taking place. There's a lot of people trying to prevent change. And so there is a pretty active campaign in the other direction. And, you know, that campaign has taken hold of a lot of universities, a lot of government agencies, a lot of the power structure of the people who get to

decide whether things are legal. The press, Tony mentioned. And so, yeah, I mean, like the future is what we make it, right? It's not inevitable. It has to be willed into being. And people have to decide what they want. Actually, that gets to an interesting change that's happened in science over the last, you know, kind of the way science works over the last 50 years has really changed in the universities. And we have the replication crisis in various things. And one of the things, kind of as a student of Tony that I've noticed is he's sort of a scientist from the previous era, from the kind of Einstein, Heisenberg, that era where it's a lot of, I'm going to do this experiment on myself. And then I'm going to try it in reality and kind of a very pragmatic way of going about things

as opposed to the goal being publishing a paper or winning a prize or getting tenure and so for us. So Mark, maybe you could talk about like how science has changed in the current crisis we have in science. Yeah, look, I mean, it's a very, very deep topic we could spend a lot of time on. I mean, look, science emerged 500 years ago, originally out of religion, studying the universe of glory God. And then over time, it became sort of intertwined with the enlightenment and rationalism and the scientific methods started to get developed. But really, if you trace scientific innovation discoveries from around 500 years ago to basically around World War II, it was a very elite activity. It was a lot of people experimenting on the

themselves. You know, it's like the archetypal scientist in the 1700s was Ben Franklin, where it was like Ben Franklin himself out in the rainstorm with a kite, right, trying to figure out lightning. And you know, Thomas Jefferson considered himself a scientist, had him in his spare time and so forth. And Einstein was famously a patent clerk, right? He wasn't a professor anywhere at the time he figured out relativity. And then basically after World War II, science became institutionalized. And good news, bad news, we built up these massive research universities, this federal funding for science. And certainly we got some big waves of science technology out of that. We got nuclear power. We got the computer chip. We got the internet and so

forth. So we got certain aspects of biotech out of that. But, you know, over the last 30 years, I mean, I think you just kind of see in plain sight with a replication crisis that institutional science seems broken at some fundamental level, like a very large percentage of the studies in the last 50 years don't replicate. They're basically fake results. And so now we have this sort of institutional process. We saw it play out during COVID in a not very successful way. We're seeing the universities kind of torturing themselves in plain sight these days. And so there is this sense in a lot of fields, a much higher level of stagnation, a much lower level of breakthrough than I think that we would expect, given all the money that's being poured into the

system. And I think more people are starting to ask the question, is this actually the system that's going to generate scientific results in the future? I can tell you, in my own world, it is true. I start with me and then a small number of people around me and then I start to scale it. Once I see it works, you're absolutely right about that. I recently, about three years ago in the middle of COVID, some doctors from Stanford approached me because they had two of their doctors go to one of my six-day programs I do called Date with Destiny, and they were both clinically depressed and came back with no depression symptoms. And friends and doctors around them were like, this is impossible. This couldn't possibly be. And they got off all their drugs. So anyway,

they called me and said, what data do you have, typical situation? And I said, well, I've got millions of testimonials. I've got 100,000 people have been through these various forms of programs. I can give you. No, no, no. Like the data. I said, well, I'm not a scientist, and most people I'm interested in working whether they're interested in results. If they see results, they're happy. I have money back guarantee for what I do, right? It's pretty simple.

And they said, well, what would you be willing to do with study on depression? Because during COVID, as you know, depression went through the roof. It still is. Suicides went through the roof. Overdoses went through the roof. And I said, I love that. That's an area that we're extremely effective in. And I asked them, what will you measure against?

Because I had no idea. What do the meta studies show around depression? And I couldn't believe it. 60% of the people that go in, according to the meta studies, for treatment of depression with drugs and or therapy or both, 60% make zero improvement. 40% improved, and the meta studies show on average, they improve 50%, which means they're half as depressed as they were. Now, some people do get well, but it's a very small percentage of the people. And I'm sure you saw the SSRIs on the cover of Newsweek last year. They don't work.

And yet we still sell them for some reason. And so the bottom line is, I said, you can almost get that result with a placebo. They said, yeah, I said, I think we all crushed that, but you do the study. I said, but what's the best study? What's the most effective thing you've ever seen? And they said it was a study done at Johns Hopkins about four and a half years ago where they take people for a month who were clinically depressed. And they, for a month, gave them psilocybin, right?

So magic mushrooms and cognitive therapy for a month. I said, well, out of that, you should have got some kind of change in their psyche, you know? Yes, they said it was amazing. It was the greatest result they've ever measured in the history of psychiatry, 54% of the people, six weeks after the treatment, had no symptoms of depression whatsoever. I said, okay, well, our target is that I'd do better than that, but you're in charge. Why don't you model that same study? Use the same contrasting group, which is what they did.

The results were so amazing that they sent out blind the stats to do different organizations because they're afraid they're going to get canceled. 100% of the people that they put through this program after six weeks had zero expressions of depression. Better than that. 17% of them had suicidal ideation, not a single one had suicidal ideation afterwards. They followed up 11 months later, they're under 12, but they did 11 months because people were getting back from COVID and they had all the stats on, you know, how people loneliness and all the things that are happening at home. Anyway, 71% decrease in negative emotions, 11 months later, 52% increase in positive emotions, loneliness through the floor.

The transformation is amazing. It was written up in scientific journals, just as you described, right, in the journal of psychiatry. I thought, boy, people will really be looking for us now. Not a single phone call. No one's interested and they're still selling the drugs that don't work. So part of it is the institutionalization of the system. We're actually doing a study right now. Stanford wanted to do another one.

They're doing the largest behavioral study. They've ever done 750 people, not one month, three months, full year. It's just finishing this month as last December it began. And it's on quiet quitting and loud quitting and engagement. As you guys know, when it comes to business, engagement equals EBITDA, the highest levels of engagement, highest levels of EBTA. And for your audience, you know, they measure things as engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged.

Activists engage are the people that still work for you but are trying to harm your company and anger. And what's crazy is that in those four years of COVID, the largest drop in engagement in the history of their records, the largest increase and actively disengaged, the loud quitting people. And the study they did with us, I can only tell you what it was at six months.

They're going to announce it and publish it shortly. at the 12-month mark, but we quadrupled the engagement. Took what four years got rid of in six days. They sustained it. I never saw them again. And at the six-month mark, which is the last measurement I got to see, had it increased another 50% beyond what it had because they had a shift in their psychology and their mindset.

I know you, I think it's you, Ben. It was you, Mark. I can't remember. I get you guys mixed up in your quotes sometimes because I read so many. But I think one time I read you said the hardest part of being a CEO is really my own mindset. You know, it's your ability to get yourself to go through. That's what I found.

I got 111 companies to push through the difficult times. Anybody can do well when things are going your way or fighting the right players. That's not hard. I think you also talked about dealing with those players and they feel entitled as well. But the psychology changes everything and it's true for everyone. So that's my obsession. And we really want to make a difference because we're living in a world where most CEOs don't know what the hell to do. I was at a Fortune 400 conference and with Mark Banias, a good friend of mine and they invited me in.

and they were doing these interviews, and they were asking people there, how many of you have people working five days a week? And at the time, less than, this is six months ago, less than 20% of the people raised their hand. And these are Fortune 400 companies, and it's just 500 companies, I just, I can't even believe it. How many wish everybody is here five days a week?

95% of them raised their hand, right? So I know there are jobs where you can be hybrid or be gone all the time, certainly software, things of that nature, but we're dealing with issues that we've never dealt before in the history of business, And obviously it's affecting office buildings and local restaurants and everything else. But helping people become more engaged to me is the only way they're going to be fulfilled. Because I'm sure you've read, people are the most unhappy in their work that they've measured in 20 years,

even pre-COVID. And they thought, well, I don't want to go back to work because I shouldn't have to do that. I'm like being home now. And now when they're home, they feel isolated. Right, right. People think is if I have it easier, I'm going to be happier. And you both know, all three of you wouldn't be who you are. You know that the effort is the reward, that being able to push.

those things is what shapes you. It's what makes you proud of who you are as a human. This idea of self-esteem that's so overused with children, it makes me crazy. You don't get self-esteem because someone tells you you're good and you don't lose it because people tell you're worthless. Someone tell you're worthless your whole life. You can go read between the lines, I'm going to show you who I am. Or someone to tell you're beautiful your whole life and you don't believe it, right? What makes you have esteem for yourself is doing difficult things. And our society, unfortunately, is not reminding people that we're here to give something. We're not just here to get when most of our society is measuring what to get. And that's making people so unhappy. They don't

understand that you'll never be happy when you don't have a meaning in your life more than yourself. And when a focus is just on your own sense of comfort, I mean, anybody can meet comfort needs pretty easily. It's funny. You said you're not a scientist, but I think by Mark's definition of original scientists, you're absolutely a scientist. And it seems like really unfortunate in the current system that here you are with these amazing results, which should be what we're teaching undergraduate psychology, students, and so forth. It should be what the average person when they go to see a psychiatrist gets, and instead we're getting SRIs that don't work. And do you ever think about, and you have your own lane, and you get it to the people through

your seminars and so forth, but do you ever think about, like, is there a way? to emerge those channels or to kind of overcome this just like weirdness where we have one method that you've invented that gets amazing results. We have this whole other school of thought based on psychologists that were wrong about a lot. Like in the history of psychology, some of the heroes were just wrong. Like Freud was wrong about a tremendous amount of things. I guess how do you think about that because you have such a big mission to kind of improve people's lives? I want to reach as many people as I can. So truthfully, these journals and people of that nature don't reach a lot of people.

I mean, my seminars, thanks to COVID, when everything got shut down, I was used to doing stadium. So if you can imagine, I get a call from the Gulf of California, who I don't share necessarily values with 100%, but I'm friendly with. And he says, sorry to let you know, the stadium that you had there for 15,000 people, you can only put 100 people in there. And I was like, what? So I was like, screw this. We'll go to Vegas. They'll never shut down Vegas. We moved all the people to Vegas five days before they shut down Vegas.

We're going to Texas. I know the governor there. He's never going to bend. Same thing. About a week out. He bends. I'll do movie theaters. We'll do movie theaters only 10 people each.

That's what that'll allow you to do. They'll list be 1,200 movie theaters. They'll go locally. They'll have a big screen. So I finally just cut that out. So I finally built a studio. And now we do our live events with 15,000 people. But you do a hybrid events also.

And I started doing events then where all of a sudden my 50s. 15,000 person event was done in people's homes. I built 20 foot high LED screens, about a 25,000 square foot place, built it all around me, brought in, made some new software technology so people could shake their phone instead of clapping. You know, it's got an electric signal of one claps you don't hear up when 20,000 people clap. It's like thunder. You know, I went to our friends over there at Zoom and got them to expand the volume from a thousand people to 25,000. And all of a sudden, we started growing. So now I've last large seminar did last, last year, year was 1.8 million people for six days. So it's like just go around it. The other way is I think by

hitting businesses and I've always said I want to talk to whoever the general public, I'll build it, they'll come. But I'm going to start directing businesses now because now that I have this way to do things asynchronous and synchronal, but anywhere in the world, I think it's a new way to do this. And that's why I supported this study because I think we can start to affect people's psychology, emotion, and health by hitting the bottom line, and that'll bring those resources to people and companies. So I think that's another avenue that we're going for to have an impact. If you think about what Tony does, actually, maybe you're not a scientist. You might be way more impactful than that. Maybe you're like a psychological engineer because like you're

really wanting to solve a problem, not just like something, write it up and then, you know, and like an engineer will iterate, we'll study, will be empirical, we'll learn from theory and learn from all the other stuff, but we really actually care about working. And whether it works or not, I think the only thing you really care about, right? You don't care about awards or... And what I care about is finding people,

I'm not the only one. I mean, that's like they're... I'm not saying, I got all the answers. The way I wrote my financial books, the right, I wrote this book, this book, you know, 150 of the best regenerative scientists in the world, Nobel laureates, the best doctors in the world.

That's who I go to to get the answers. And then now I know them. Oh, you're so smart. I'm not smart. They're smart. I'm just smart enough to go to the world. them. Same thing in the financial area. Ray Dalio, Carl, Icon, you know, Paul Tudor Jones, these all guys that became my friends over the years because I went and took what they did

and made it simple enough that the general population could use it. My billionaire clients found it valuable, but so did, you know, the average person getting started. So to me, it's a modeling process and an iteration process. Modeling what already works and then figure how to go to a different level. But I don't have to reinvent the wheel. But I have been doing what I've been doing now, this will be my 47th year coming up. You can clearly see I started at three, of course. But, you know, at this point, I could be an idiot. I'd have to see there are patterns, right? That's what makes all of us good at what we do. It's pattern recognition, pattern utilization, and then if you're good enough, pattern creation. Maybe you play someone else's

music initially. You learn the patterns. You learn how to use them, but eventually you can build on top of the shoulders of the people that you've learned from. And I think that's what we all want to be, but also that's what we want our children to be from us, right? To have a choice, to have choices we never had before. And I think that's threatened a little bit by some of the psychology that's currently in the culture. But I'm not worried because, you know, I always think of history in cycles, right? It's like good times, creates weak people. You always see it. You see it Roman history, Greek history. Good times, weak people, weak people, bad times, bad times create strong people, strong people create great times. Think of a great generation born in 1910 and they come of age

at 19 years old and 1929. It's like they thought they're going to party like everybody else. They were generation that would look down on like millennials were by older generations or z generationists now they were looked down on they got everything so easily they didn't go through war war one they didn't have to fight they had radio and television and all of a sudden boom depression it toughen them up they had to change to survive and then oh by the way what time they're 29 it's 1939 it's war war two and they go to war that looks like we're going to lose they was going to win those people came back strong and Every single generation is tested. The question, are you tested in the early years, the middle years, the later years,

or the late, late years of your life? Because if you study history, the patterns are consistent. So I study history. I study patterns. And humans have so many patterns. You're not angry all the time. You don't know very good all the time. You don't do anything all the time.

There's certain patterns that make you that way. And you are not your pattern. And that's why I'm able to help people to change. They don't have to change themselves. This change the habit they've been calling themselves that's really getting in the way. Definitely. You hit on a thing that I want to ask Mark about. So Tony kind of mentioned things in the culture that are degenerative. And in particular, we've got this big wave of everything from the, what's good for the people is for them to not work so many hours. Or it's better to be a victim than an aggressor and this and that and the other. And they're all kind of extremely destructive things. for personal psychology. How do you look at the waves of these political movements

and what's happening now, when has it happened historically? How do we get out of it? Yeah, it's actually something that you go back to Nietzsche, talked about this like 140 years ago now. Basically, it claims to speak on behalf of the oppressed are how our sort of modern ruling class like stays in power. And so if you want to run for office, what's the message that you tell people?

Do you tell people you can take responsibility for your own lives and you can achieve great things or do you tell people you're a victim? And anything bad that's happening to do is not your fault. And it doesn't matter what you do. You'll never be able to succeed. And the system is rigged against you. And the system is oppressive.

And people of other collars and ethnicities hate you, right? And they're trying to keep you down. I often use the term demoralization campaign, right? To like basically win office, you basically sell a demoralization story. Then, of course, you promise that, of course, as the leader, you're going to help these poor oppressed people kind of overcome that. And then that's the part that never quite happens because. The magic trick, yeah.

Well, because if that happens, then you can't run for reelection on the same story. Right. This is also the problem with like every nonprofit, right? This is like the problem, homeless. You know, we spend like a billion plus dollars to these quote unquote homelessness nonprofits in San Francisco every year and homelessness keeps getting worse. Right. And it's like, well, of course it does. It's because if you're a homelessness nonprofit, do you make money by actually solving homelessness or having there be more of it, right? You feed the problem. It's really intensified in the last decade. Like we're in this culture in which this sort of prevailing message from the sort of most important elites is you're a victim. And they're going

to keep selling that story for as long as people keep buying it. And then I think, Over time, I think more more people are going to figure out that they're being sold a bad story and that that leads nowhere good and that there's no way to live life as by thinking that you're oppressed the whole time. And the right thing to do is to say, oh, actually, I live in a like free and prosperous society and I can improve myself and I can take control my destiny and I can do great things. Until then, you're trapped. When people come to my seminars, because of what you described, I say, I just want to warn you in advance. This is not a safe space and there'll be no warnings. If you're looking for a safe space and your definition is everyone's going to tell you what you already believe and you've wasted your time to come here because. this is all about questioning all of our beliefs and testing it and seeing how does it really work in the real world.

And in that way, it's really the safest space at all because the truth will set you free. But most people don't care about the truth anymore. They just care about reinforcing what they already believe. And as you said, whatever's reinforced continues. But the pattern is so extreme now. It's like silence is violence. Words are violence. I think I heard Chris Rock say, if you think words are violence,

no one slap the shit out of you on national television. Violence is violence, right? And those same people now are chanting death to people in Israel. I mean, it's just crazy. I hate what's happening on both sides of the Middle East. When innocent people are injured, I don't care what their background is, it's horrific. But to say words of violence and you're going to eliminate somebody from the staff for doing it, but you're not going to stand up and say, no, beheading of children and raping of women is totally okay.

It's not okay on any side, whether it being guys. or be Israel or anywhere else, and none of it is okay. But it's crazy where our world has entered. But again, the pendulum, I agree with you, Mark. I think the pendulum is thrown so far. And there's a point now where the quiet middle is finally starting to speak up because it's affecting the quality of their life on a massive scale. But when you vote people in office and they know they can give you whatever you want and they're willing to do it to and just print money, that's why we end up in the position we are right now with inflation. Yeah, Tony, on the Israel-Palestine issue, you had a crazy story in the book about

the seminar you were doing right when 9-11 happened, where you had one of the members of the audience was from Pakistan and then the other was a Jewish member. And it sounded like they were ready to kill each other right there. Like at the seminar, I would love to kind of hear that story and how you think about it in today's context. Yeah, it was 9-11. I was in Hawaii.

We were doing at the time a 10-day seminar where I basically killed people. I take them 12, 14 hours a day for 12 straight days and nights. and I bring in some really brilliant, brilliant teachers. I had Storm and Norman, Norman, the general Norman, come in and teach leadership a variety of people. But what happened during 9-11 was I just finished an evening at midnight one in the morning, and we were in Hawaii, so around 3 o'clock in the morning, banging on my door, letting me know, hey, turn on the television.

And so I did and saw what everybody saw on CNN. And the first building hit, and I thought, this was horrible. And everybody didn't know it was terrorism. When the second one happened, all hell was breaking loose in the building, the entire hotel was made up of thousands of people from all over the world. We were translating, I think, eight languages simultaneously. We had every religion there. So there were people that were fighting in the halls. There were people crying uncontrollably knew this was the end times. Everybody responded to it based on what I call their emotional home. We have an emotional home,

a place we go back to, whether it's good or bad. If you're used to negative feeling, sadness, and feeling sorry for yourself, you'll go there. If you're an angry person, you'll go there. If you're a person that looks out to support others, you're going to be in a supportive role. And that's all that happened. Everybody played the roles they play. They went to their emotional homes. But it's brutal. No one's wanted to come to class. It said, get everybody in class. We brought them all together. And I said, listen, by now I'm sure most of you know, this has occurred. We can't get off the island here. All the flights were canceled. So we got to do what we can do. So let's do a blood drive and then let's process this together. And I ask people three questions,

because these are the three decisions people make every moment they're alive. First, you decide what to focus on. We don't experience life. We experience life. We experience the life we focus on. And what's wrongs always available. So it's what's right. So 3,000 people died. It was horrific. I wouldn't play that any smaller than what it was. But 4,000 people die every day of heart disease and cancer. And no one says a word. Their mothers, fathers, brothers, if they're in airplanes falling out of the sky, everybody, right? Dr. Vij would be going crazy. But we're just immune to it. So whatever we focus on, we feel. And so the decisions of what to focus on, whether you can control it or not, whether it's the past present or the future, whether it's what's missing

from your life or what you have controls the quality of your life. So I put you in groups. I want to tell me, what did you focus on when you heard it? What did it mean to you? It's at the end, the beginning. And what are you going to do? And then I walked around the room and got the education of a lifetime because I watched this woman who had this really thick accent and she was talking so angrily. Spit was coming out of her mouth to the people in her group. And I made sure the groups had men and women and they were from different countries. And so I peered in. I said, ma'am, can I ask you a question? I said, are you from the United state. She said no. Have you visited New York ever? She said, no. I said, you have family here? She said, no.

I said, well, why are you so angry? And she goes, because I just do it. I just get so angry about these things. I said, well, I'm just curious. How often do you get angry? She goes, what do you mean? How often I get angry? I get any real lot. Why? I said, well, once a week, once a month, daily. And long story short, it came down to she sees anger as fuel. She does it all the time. I went to another group, just to give a quick example, and a woman's crying uncontrollably. And she's talking about how guilty she feels because she's a nurse. She's from New Jersey. And she should be there.

And she can't get off the island and people are dying and she's not able to help. And I felt her emotion. And then same thing. I stopped her. And I said, ask you a question, how often do you feel guilty? So what do you mean? I said, once a month. It feels guilty all the time.

So people went to their place. But when I went to do the shares, one woman got up and shared the fact that after we finished at midnight, she went back to her room and she was planning on separating from her boyfriend and left in bad situation. But when I sat that night, she decided to call him, say, I love him, and that she wanted to marry him. And it turns out he was at the top of the World Trade Center. And sure enough, she'd let her left a message from him. She was asleep and she played it for us, talking about how much he loves her and how much it means such a world to him that what she said, and he doesn't matter to tell her this, but he's not going to get out of the building. It's on fire.

and she's wondering probably why this happened because her previous boyfriend was murdered. And he said, all I can tell you is maybe this is the lesson to tell you don't ever wait to love again. And so everybody's crying. The next guy stands up at the end of the story. He says, my name is so-and-so.

I'm from Pakistan. I'm a Muslim. I'd love to say I could hold your hand and feel sorry for you, but this is retribution. It was like the entire building turned into a war zone. Because another man stood up

who had lost, I guess, 12 of his friends that day at the top of the center there and one of the financial institutions and his family lived in the occupied territories, Jewish man, and they started going at it. And I'd run them on stage and we did this integration process that it's all on film. And anybody can see it. We've posted it because you took these two guys that wanted to kill each other. At the end, they formed a group that actually went around with Jews and Gentiles, Christians, and Muslims altogether and started preaching in different churches and mosque and so forth.

piece. And the young man wrote a book called My Jihad where he talked about he was trained in a camp. His dad sent him to Berkeley so he wouldn't do it. He told people that morning his only wish was he was on one of those planes. And then he realized the jihad was with himself and now he's transformed himself. So there's ways to shift people no matter what. How does that relate to today? I mean, there's so much pain that you have to do it families at a time, organizations at a time. First got to feed people and find electricity and save some lives. And then we're going to have to deal with a psychology what's happening there on both sides. There are no simple answers in this case. But people can completely change their beliefs no matter how embedded they are if you find the right

leverage. And if you can get them to see that it's really everything I blame you for, even if you've done something to me, my experience is mine alone. Everybody has their own 100% responsibility for what they feel. Now, somebody tries to kill you, obviously. You're going to feel a certain way. But being able to shift your psychology so you can have a healthy life, everyone's capable of doing. It's not easy, but it's doable. And it's certainly hard with a group of people, but I mean, I've been doing that with tens of thousands of people, millions of people for decades, and I'm not the only one. One of the things that you get into in the book, which kind of merges your work and kind of the work of all the scientists that you've assembled and so forth is this

kind of idea of the mind's connection to your health and things like psychoneuroimmunology and how that works. And I'd love for you to talk about that a little on Vijay, for you to kind of chime in on how powerful is this? If I get sick and I just fix myself and how does that work would be, I think, really interesting for everyone. Well, I look at it, you got to do both. I look, you have to do the physical side and the mind side. The mind has much more power than we give it credit for, and I know Dr. Vijay, I'm sure, done homework on it, but you can take any result you get with virtually any drug, and at least 25% of the time, the placebo will do the same result in almost every study I've read. In some cases, it's much of 40 or 50%, but there's no money

made in placebos. And placebos can even work when you know it's a placebo. That's what's crazy about it. The interesting thing about placebos is people think, well, it's just a sugar pill, and then you convince the mind, and then somehow the body takes over. But Harvard's done studies where they actually give people a barbiturate, which is slowing the body down, and tell them it's an amphetamine, give them a big red pill. The size of the pill makes a difference, by the way.

The bigger the pill, the more profound the impact. If you give an injection even more so, if you do fake surgery, even more so, more convincing to the brain and it produces a result. But imagine we giving it a barbiturate, your whole body has to slow down. Your brain believes it's an amphetamine, and their biochemistry speeds up,

and they do vice versa. I mean, the most invasive would be, there was a study done by the VA, and it was on arthroscopic surgeries. And what they did was they took a group, and as a result as they changed all the policies, the VA around this, and they gave them fake surgeries. What they did is put them under just like the other group,

nobody who they were, cut open the knee, just cut the flaps, sewed it back, did nothing to the knee. The other group, they did arthroscopic surgery. And what they found is after six months, the group that had nothing done to them improved more than the group of the surgery. And after doing the several follow-up studies,

that they no longer fund it. So it's literally that powerful. And it was not just self-reporting, was also the mending of it as well. So what our brains can do is amazing. Ellen Langer from Harvard is a friend of mine. She's the one who did those reverse studies where she took people in their late 70s to this place in the Andorondacks for three weeks. And they put nothing but newspapers, pictures, everything from 35 years earlier. And they literally lived it. They were all talking the first person, they had a television set that had things from that time in black and white. And in two weeks, the transformation of these people, the pictures alone would blow your mind. But their blood pressure went down.

Their immune systems became stronger. I mean, their resting heart rate changed. I mean, these are changes that just physically shouldn't be any way. But the mind has that kind of power. It also has the opposite power. I remember Norman Cousins when he was alive. I had privileged to spending time with him. He came to one of my fireworks because he was so fascinated by what the mind could do in that area.

And he was telling me the study about, he said he was at this game. It was in L.A. and he wrote up about it later. And there was this person who started projectile vomiting. And it was right there in the midst of a large number of people. And they ran off. And when they came back, they were trying to figure out what it was, what caused this. And so sure enough, they thought maybe it was the soda pop he drank. So the announcer said, if you drink any of that soda pop, please stop.

I'm talking about Coca-Cola, whatever it was out of that machine. and people started projective vomiting all over the stadium. Literally, they had 12 ambulances come there and take people away. And then about an hour later, they figured out it wasn't the soda pop and everything cleaned up and beside it. So we not only can heal ourselves. We can make ourselves sick. And our concept of aging and what age means is so rooted. I used to have this gentleman who's now passed away when I was in my early 30s.

I'd bring into my events. and I would have people close their eyes during one of these health events. And before I began, just to talk about the power of the mind, I said, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a 75-year-old man. Okay, what you think a 75-year-old man would look like in a good picture, good sense.

And I have my friend walk out on stage when they open their eyes, I said, is this the man you pictured? And he's bench-pressing 450 pounds, and he was just chiseled and incredible at 75 years old, right? And one of my dear friends, this is years ago, one of my dear friends I've known for almost 35, years the other day, just turned 70. And he said, he was walking by the mirror and he goes,

he looked in the mirror and he's fit as, the fiddle is unbelievable, right? And he goes, I owe that to you. He goes, that stuck in my head because the image I had was a broken down old person, but from that day on, I had an image of what I'm actually like right now today. So, yes, I would never just say only the mind. I go for the biochemistry, you go for the shift that you're going to make in the body. But if you leave out the mind, you're an idiot. They're so combined. you can do all the right things biochemically and your mind can overcome them. Yeah. This is one of the areas I think is super fascinating.

I think a lot of times people reframe things the wrong way that we think of the null hypothesis as the placebo instead of no drug. And I think finally we're starting to understand actually how it works. Because if the placebo effect is so strong, be great to understand it. It would be great to harness it and it would be great to take advantage of it because of hopefully a lack of negative side effects. And I think that's what we're starting to see in that field of psychoneuroimmunology. And it is just fascinating even from the molecular point of view, like the same proteins, GPCRs that are in our brains are in our gut. And the mind gut interface is very complicated and very interesting.

And we're just starting to sort of poke away at it. And I think part of what the problem here that for everything we've been talking about for trying to improve healthcare is that we've got the innovations on the science side, we've got to deliver it to people. And I think what we're starting to see is more value-based care, more ways that people care about the outcome rather than just providing a service. And if you care about the outcome, you'll incorporate whatever works. And we're just at the beginning of that. But I think people will really start looking to these areas when they're really incented for solutions.

Yeah. And Vijay, maybe you could expand on that from like a health care system. What does that mean? Like, how does the health care system work today and drive the incentives? And then where do we want to get to in order to? to become become. Yeah, the healthcare system right now is a fee for service, kind of like a plumber. So a plumber will come over your house and they'll fix something. Do they care about your house? Will they be thinking ahead for what your house needs? That's not their job. Like, that's your job, right?

And so right now we have to be sort of the general contractor of our body. And we have to bring in the plumber and the electrician or whatever to take care of that. What would be better is somebody who is financially incented for our outcome, incented to keep us healthy. And we're starting to see that right now. one of the innovative areas of companies that are both payers and providers. So right now an insurance company can largely just say no or pay. But if the insurance company is also one providing, they want to keep you healthy because healthier people cost less. And of course, now we're finally have the incentives aligned.

And I think that was what was mistaken. Like our incentives are misaligned. We'll have all this crazy stuff. But when we all want the same thing, which is for us to be healthy, then actually people will do creative things to be able to align that. And I think what Tony was talking about just recently, but also earlier, for like different ways of thinking about mental health and all these things. If you're just providing services, you may even want to be a therapist as an annuity. You know, the therapist is there for a long time.

Curing someone quickly may not be what you're financially incentive for. And so we need to really flip all of that. And I know Tony, you've spoken to that. So if we can flip the incentives, I think, then we can finally get the health care we want. And then Tony mentioned something earlier that I wanted to come back to. which is drug development is very different now with AI and then our understanding of the human body through kind of a different data set

than we've had historically. Vijay, maybe you could talk about that and how does it kind of change the way that we want to think about everything from development to regulation to like when things are safe and so forth? This is something that I think many of us have been waiting for for a decade or two

because we see that biology is really, complicated. I mean, of that, there's no doubt. We don't even know all the actors. You don't know all that's going on. And so a very top-down approach is probably going to fail. But what AI, I think, has in common with what we're talking about with Tony's approach is that AI is very empirical. It's like, give me the data. Let me come up with the best thing I can come up with. Let's try it. And then we'll iterate that and do better and better. And in a sense, it's basically just the best way to mathematical way to handle the data and iterate and improve. And that's what active learning is and so on. So that's actually perfectly coinciding with this revolution in biology

in medicine where we can now measure things. We can do tons of biological experiments. We have tons of wearables, tons of measurements. And so data plus AI plus iterations means we can finally make advances. And I think that has to then be coupled with a regulatory system that would understand that there are these advances and try to help accelerate them. Because if we don't get those iterations will be stuck. And sometimes it may take like five, ten tries or something, but we want to do it safely, but we want to encourage innovation. And that tension is, I think, still being worked out right now. I think the good news is when you talk to people in the regulatory agencies, I think they want to help people. They want innovation. They don't want to stifle innovation. So now the question is, how can we

work together to really promote that? Well, on the incentive thing there, though, if you work at the FTA, for example, it would seem that if you let a drug through that's dangerous, that's very bad. That is very bad. But if you approve a drug, that's good. That's like maybe nobody cares. Yeah, that's the problem. That asymmetry there is for sure there. And like I think we have to reframe it almost like the classic trolley problem where if you don't let the drug through, we're actually killing people right now by not getting these advances through.

And I think people and beings aren't very good at sort of holding that in their head. Very bad at it. Yeah. It's why we take off our shoes after 9-11. Or like the self-driving cars, right? Like self-driving cars now, in many cases, could be safer than human drivers, but they won't be perfect. But people, I think, can't reason that actually you're killing people by having humans drive

once self-driving cars are more safe. And Tony, in the work that you're doing on health, how do you think about how to move these incentives so that all this great work can actually take effect? Because it does feel like the amount of innovation that's about to happen is going to completely overwhelm the current way of doing things, particularly with incentives to stop progress. I think AI is providing the ability to do things faster, quicker and more accurately. So take two of the biggest diseases that kill people, heart disease and cancer. AI has made a giant change in that just in the last year, year and a half.

I was one of the first people to get one of the cooler CCTA scans. My partners in the Mountain Life called me up and said, Tony, this is the greatest breakthrough in cardiology we've seen in 20 years. And what it does is you try to read one of these scans of what's happening in your body. It's pretty hard to be able to read, even if you're a great doctor. And these scans literally go in and create a three-dimensional description of what's going on in your body and contract, okay, these are calcified versus soft. I mean, the soft ones can break off, right?

And literally, they'll give you the widow effect. They're going to give you a heart attack or a stroke. Calsified, your body has actually healed itself. And there's been no real way to clearly see that before these AIs. And the level of details mind-boggling with precision. I remember I went and I had my 80-year-old father-in-law come with me. Man, I really love dearly. I mean, he's a self-made guy.

He was the lumber business. He's strong as an ox still. You start turning 80 and everybody starts saying, well, you should start prepare for the inevitable end and so forth. I could see the psychology dropping him. So I said, hey, pops, I said, I'm going to go do this test. We're just going to the center here. It's a little 30 minutes away.

I said, once you come with me and we'll do it together. I said, I'm sure we both have some plaques, but it'll show us what it is and then it'll show us what to do and it's exactly precise to our body. It's like nothing you've ever seen. And he said, okay, we'll go. So we go. We do the test.

And to give you a contrast, one of our friends had a calcium test of a thousand. Yeah, that's high. He couldn't get life insurance. It was over. I've never seen an insurance company to do this before. But with our work, we went to them and they reversed themselves because when we showed his thousand was all calcified. His body was completely healthy. There was no risk whatsoever.

And they actually gave him the life insurance, which blew me away. I never think insurance company would do that. But that's how accurate is now. It's indisputable. Anyway, the one of the story is my father-in-law, he's clean as a whistle, right? I got a few things, but he's clean as a whistle. He walks out that place, and we have this hydrodissection, which is, you know, if you have certain problems in your body with your tissue or nerves are trapped, they put this fluid in

and it helps to open it up and heal it in seconds, literally. I had a problem in my ankle for 14 years, 15 minutes, and it's never been a problem again. It's mind-boggling. And so, he had a hip problem, so they went and did hydrodissection. He did his test. I'll never forget, we get on the plane, and Mark and Benny sits down from me, Dr. VJ, and he's got this big smile on his face. He goes, Tony, people talk about living to be over 100 and stuff.

I don't know about that, but I'm only 80. My heart is solid, like a 20-year-old. My hips, I'm walking perfect. He goes, I can live another 20 years. I'm as long as you've known my daughter. He said, I think I could do that. So the psychological shift's amazing, but then there's cancer, right? So the AI was part of how Grail came up with their blood tests,

which you're probably familiar with, not all your audience may be. But the biggest problem with cancer is we catch it too late. We have a variety of tests, a mammogram, let's say, colonoscopy and so forth. But the ones that get us are the ones we don't measure. And the problem is when you read the Cancer Society studies, you say, well, if you get stage three or stage four, you got about an 80 to 90 percent chance of dying. I prefer a 20 to 10 percent chance of living. That's how they frame it, to be fair.

On the other side, if you catch it at stage one or two, it's about a, 98 to 100% chance that you're going to be healthy. So I had a friend that went in and did all the scans and did the grail and did the MRI for his body. And his wife was getting to do it. He didn't want to do it. Sure enough, you had stage one bladder cancer, but guess what? Caught it immediately.

Stage one, yeah. 40-minute procedure, outpatient. He's totally fine and healthy. I have another partner only two weeks ago. He's looking to help create this solution in the highest-end locations. The person who built a multi-billion dollar set of hotel chains, sold them. December of 2019 right before COVID brilliantly. But now he's at a different stage of life. And he wants to build these centers where they're not like these little spas, but a place you have a home

or go visit and live, but where it's truly the cutting edge and medical care and medical screening and rejuvenation. And so I put him through our center and he was blown away. And guess what? Two aneurysms, one about to hit him. He went and just had the surgery the other day and saved his life. So AI is already entering the world because it's so much more effective and it's so much cheaper and it's going to only get faster and cheaper. To me, that's the solution. Besides just educating the general public, general public no longer just accepts a medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, they go on the web and read eight million horrible things, but a lot of people today are saying, no, I'm going to educate myself. I need to be the CEO of my own health today. I need to take

these doctors in who are the best and get them to coach me. But in the end, I've got to make the decision what's right for my own health. I have a tumor. I was 5-1 in high school. I'm now six, seven. I tell people the difference is personal growth. That's a lot of personal growth. The truth is I had a tumor and in my pituitary gland and it made me grow 10 inches in a year, which is when people talk about growing pains, it's physically stretching and muscles cramping. It's incredibly painful. But I went through that. And then didn't know what it was. And then around 30 years old, I'm a helicopter pilot as well.

So I'd go in and get my ruin in my license. And this doctor had a suspicion. He did a blood test and called me and told me, I needed to immediately have surgery. Brain surgery. I said, what even brain surgery? Well, you've got a tumor and your pituitary gland. How do you know, this blood test?

I said, well, I didn't come to you with any side effects. And long story short, he did not have a good bedside manner. He wanted to do surgery no matter what. I wanted a second opinion. He was irritated. So I did several second opinions. So the Mayo Clinic has found that 74% of the time, the second opinion is not the same as the first.

It's insane. They recommend the second opinion, right? So I went and got five opinions, and one wanted to drug me, one wanted to do surgery, one wanted me go overseas to do these shots in Switzerland only twice a year to be safe. And I said, but doc, I don't have, my arteries aren't enlarged, all the things, I don't have any symptoms.

He goes, well, just to be certain. Turned out that drug. a good man, by the way. Six months later, the FDA did not allow it in the U.S. because they found that it caused cancer. So I still have the tumor. It infarct, which means swallow a good portion of itself up. It's still in my brain. It gave me a huge amount of growth hormone, which I don't I get what basically body billers pay $1,200 a month for, I guess. And it's naturally flowing through my veins. And I look at it as a little gift from God, the gift from the universe type of thing. But I've still measured. I haven't had any changes. But if I've done what anybody else told me,

and I'm not educated myself to all my options. I do leuvens in a piece of my brain. And by the way, number one side effect is loss of energy, which to me would be like cutting Samson's hair. I get up and we do 12 hours at a shot. With the level of intensity, most people can't even imagine.

And I'm 64 years old. I'm doing more than I did when I was 24. So that was not something I was willing to settle for. So I think that's why I wrote the book, Life Force. I wanted to give them the best experts on the face of the earth in every area that matters. and then they can dive in as much or as little as they want. Do the natural things they can naturally do

or take on some of the newest breakthroughs in medicine as well. Yeah, one of the things that you hit on is people are nervous to get these new diagnostics. And so we have a company in Vijay's portfolio called QBio, which has built an MRI scanner that can basically scan you in 10 minutes instead of an hour and it's much cheaper and so forth. And then they do a digital twin type service where they do comprehensive blood tests and all these kinds of things.

And I was so excited about it. Mark and I were just like, we're going to buy this for every employee so that they can just do it. The hard part is getting them all to go. So the ones who have gone, we've had amazing results. A couple of people caught things very early and a life-saving kind of diagnostic, but people are nervous. They don't want to know. How do you overcome that?

I kind of help people in the book with that because I was the same thing. is like, I don't want to do that. It's going to find something. It doesn't matter. We're going to over respond to it, overreact. But the technology is so solid today that to not know you're an idiot. Because if you get to the stage three, four, it's too late. So why not catch it when it's small?

And if you got nothing going on, it's just like a cool update like it was for my father-in-law, where it actually will bring optimism. If there's a challenge, I want to know it now. But, you know, same thing in business. When I was a young man in business, I was overwhelmed with two companies. I got 11 companies now. It was like, if someone said, there's good news and bad news, just tell me the good news, right? Now I always say, tell me the bad news.

The good news will take care of itself. Tell me the bad news. Let's solve it. Let's move. I think you have the same mindset with your own health. But what you're doing, I would like talk to you offline about the company because we have a whole series of centers. We find 14% of the people have a life-threatening disease they don't know they have.

And we are able to intervene immediately in ways that make a difference. But we also find about 68% of people have something that could massively improve their energy level in their body, which is the basis of health, everything in your body. So whether that be hormone, support, I'm not talking about replacement. I'm talking about optimization. You go to your doctor today, and if you're a male and your testosterone's 150, they'll say, you're fine. But most men don't feel like a human if they don't have somewhere between 600 and 800 or more. It depends on the person. So you don't have to replace anything, but there are certain things that can give you vitality. We don't remember a couple centuries ago, 1800s people lived on average of 30. Now the worldwide average

is 72. And so it's like the world has changed and you deserve to know the breakthroughs. You don't have to use them all if you don't want to, but you should know what your options are. Well, you know, we have mental models for this too. Like you could imagine this could get as standard and unexciting like going to the dentist. You know, they go to a dentist, you get your scan like, oh man, I have a cavity. Okay, I'm going to have some procedure or you take it out. It's not a big deal. It's not fun maybe, but it's like not life threatening. And you can imagine that might be the future of something like cancer, where you get your scan, like, oh man, it's like stage one.

I have to do some surgery or maybe take this drug by a cop super early. It's going to be very straightforward. It's not going to kill me. It might not be pleasant, but actually kind of like not going to the dentist for like a lifetime could be very unpleasant. Like not going to know this could be anymore. Yeah.

Yeah, interesting. And I guess we used to die of all kinds of things that we don't. That's right. Yeah. We actually have an insurance company now we're doing for businesses that self-insure where our insurance costs the same amount, but we do all these tests in advance. And the reason we can do it and it's profitable

is because we catch it when it's small. All the money goes for those later stages when people are breaking down when it's too late. And so you change their life, you save their life, and you save economics as well. I think that's the entry point. I think businesses are probably the entry point,

as well as individuals who are going to seek out a better quality of care. For employees, like one of the things that I find, which is why it's so compelling for businesses, is as a business, you've got a business incentive to not have your employees get sick, but it also is kind of a great, to your earlier point, Tony, about, okay, are you actively engaged? Are you actively disengaged? Are you kind of semi-engaged?

And nothing kind of engages people more than, wow, like you're going to live a long time, we're going to take care of you, this is the thing, life is great, that's the thing that gives people kind of gets them fired up about work. And we kind of have this old system where businesses have to provide health insurance, but it's done in like the dumbest way imaginable, like massively expensive. We don't want to pay for diagnostics. We only want to pay when you get sick and all these kinds of bananas things. So maybe that is. We have a disease care system, not a health care system right now. Yeah. Yeah. But that's going to change. Because also so much is being miniaturized. That's what I want to find about what you guys are doing. I know open water is working on one NMRI you could do in your home

for like $1,500. I know they're not there yet, but that's their vision and direction. So much is going to be things that are tied to your wrist or we're going to have that data live. We don't have it right now, but at a whole different level in the next six to 10 years. And I think it's going to make a giant difference. And you look around with AI and you look around all the jobs that will be disrupted, new jobs will be created. But my bigger concern is that people, you know, people say, well, no one has to work. Well, that's part of the challenge you have right now. People need meaning. And without some form of work and some people's work is play. I don't know. I assume for you guys it's more play than work. It certainly is for me. It doesn't mean it's

not hard at times. But the bottom line is you enjoy it or you wouldn't be doing it at this stage your life. You don't have to, nor do I. But if you can get people to experience that meaning and whatever they do, but it's got to be the thing that we're somehow missing that's part of the mental health side is understanding that I'm here, something more than myself. Until you find something you value more than yourself that you want to serve, you're going to have limited energy, limited focus, limited everything. Because the more you focus on yourself, the more you're miserable. It's just the way the mind works. Your mind is a great tool. It should be used. Don't let it use you. It's like tech. Tech sometimes

starts to use us if we're not smart, right? Social media is a perfect example of that. But if you're smart, you use your mind. But your mind's never going to allow you to enjoy an apple. It's going to go, is it organic? It's good. Use and question everything. But, you know, your heart and your spirit are part of that health. And getting people to experience more of that aspect of their life changes everything. It changes the meaning of their life. It makes them more fulfilled. And I'm really interested not in just solving a problem.

I'm interested in extraordinary quality of life. Most people don't have it. Most people are overweight. Most people don't have great relationships. Most people are not financially sound. I mean, I'm not dumb. But there are a few that are. And I prefer to study the few who do and expand the few who they do to the largest number

I possibly can. and then the rest I try to take care of by providing food for a billion meals as I've done, or I'm now working on a hundred billion meal challenge to give you an idea because I got fed when I was a little kid and 11 years old with no food, changed my entire life,

but the biggest change was not the food. It was like strangers care. That belief came out of that meal. And because of that belief, I promised myself I'd do it for somebody else someday. So when I was 17, I fed two families, and then four, then eight, then 12, and they just kept multiplying until I got to,

four million a year, two million from me, two million from my foundation. And then I was writing Money Master the Game, interviewing 50 of the smartest financial people in the world, Ray Dalio, Carl Eichon, Walter Jones, Warren Buffett. And while I'm doing it, I saw they cut the food stamp program, it's not called SNAP. And they cut it by $6 billion, which means every family on Earth, we're not on Earth, the United States, that needs support would have to go without one week's worth of food unless people like us jumped in. So I was like, how many people I fed at my lifetime from the bridge when I started and I found out it was 42 million. I was really excited about that.

But I thought, what if I did that in a year? What I'd done my whole life in a year? I did 50 million. There was like, what if I did a hundred million years? What I've been 100 million meals for a decade, did a billion meals? And I'm proud to tell you, I did it in eight years, not 10 years. We finished at this last year. But now the issue's bigger around the world.

Governor Beasley, who's just retired from the World Food Program with the UN, is now a partner of mine in this area. And he called me up one day and he goes, it's unbelievable what you've done here. but because the 80 million people normally looking for a meal that are food insecurity is 350 million this year. No one's talking about it. The Ukraine War has basically shut down the breadbasket. The WF doesn't want people to use the pieces for fertilization that we normally use, right?

They don't want us to use that. And most of it comes out of Russia. So what are we going to do? Well, people are dying all over the place. So we got together and I opened up the Forbes Philanthropy event and I brought him in and myself and we both spoke. And they said, look, and we're looking for 99 more people like me. I'm not a multi-billionaire. And I did this.

I did 100 million meals a year for 10 years. And there's got to be 99 more people that can do that. We need about 70 billion meals while they get the infrastructure in to deal with things over the next 10 years. I'm proud to tell you, we're up to 60 billion meals in a year. So it's like, what's possible can change when you educate people? What's possible can change when you do something people don't think is possible? And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not pretending to have all the answers.

But there are people that have the answers, whether it's health, whether it's finance. I want to go to them and I want to take what they have and bring it to people now, not 20 years from now, when their clinician finally gets up to speed. That's amazing, by the way. And thank you and thank you and congratulations. And I didn't even have to thank you because I can see it's done more for you, probably than anybody who's gotten a meal. It's amazing. I love it. Are you kidding me?

I get to meet some of these people, but very few of the amount of billion meals. But Feeding America has been my partner, by the way. And they're the best organization I've ever worked with, and I've worked with tons. They're really efficient here in the U.S. But now it's a bigger issue overseas, as you know, that's what's working on now. So you've hit on something that has been driving both Mark and I crazy, and maybe you can help us with it in Silicon Valley. So in Silicon Valley, with the advance of AI,

there's all these people who are worried about what AI might automate. And then their answer is this idea of universal basic income, where it's like, oh, like we'll make it so only us smarties have to work, and then you regular people will just make it so you don't have to work. And you're both, he and I are like, wow, that's a bad idea. You're going to take away everybody's purpose. And by the way, you know, AI hasn't so far taken away any jobs it doesn't look like, so we'll see how that goes or the net on a net basis.

But kind of countering that argument is tricky in the sense that I'll point out things. I'm like, you know, we have UBI for Native Americans. It's called the reservation system, and it's horrible. And, you know, it's $65,000 a piece, and it does not do anything. It's the worst thing we probably ever did. But people go, well, like, what are you going to do? And how do you think about, like, what are we going to do in these job transitions as they happen? Because even if we're net plus jobs, we'll probably transition out of some old jobs,

as we always have with automation and get to the new ones. And how do you think about that and making sure people have purpose when they lose their job and have to get retrained? I think it's one of the biggest issues that no one's paying attention to. I asked President Obama about this years ago. And he's like, oh, it's not going to change that fast. And I said, hey, look at what just happened in the world financial crisis. The number of jobs of people just driving Uber, taxis, and trucks. Let's just assume at some point in the near future, you're going to have the opportunity to not have a truck driver who needs health care.

who will complain and can only drive eight hours a day max and takes lots of insurance. And now you've got a truck that you can depreciate and can drive 24 hours a day without having an accident. The insurance is lower. I said, that's eight million jobs. That's the entire number of jobs that were just lost during that time that make the economy look like it's going through the floor. That's one category.

And I said, you're telling me there's no, he goes, well, we've all discussed it with a bunch of experts and no one thinks the change is going to have that fast. Maybe he's right. Maybe there won't be. But there's going to be disruption. There's no question for certain jobs. And we're not preparing these people at all. And what happens is just giving somebody money is never enough because they need that meaning.

And once they get the money, they'll want more of that money. I'm not suggesting taxing, let's say, some of these technologies separately and providing some core resources for those in need makes sense or somebody's displaced. That money goes for education for something new. I think that's interesting. But paying people to do nothing, I know there's some studies where they'll say, look how well this worked, but they're pretty rare and they're not. long term. And so I'm very skeptical personally. Well, there's six needs all human beings have in my

experience. And that's how I manage and work with people. It's like I see which of those needs are kind of their top two driving force. So we all need certainty, comfort. We can avoid pain, have pleasure. But if you're totally certain every moment, you'd be bored out of your mind. So we need uncertainty. We need variety to feel alive. Too much variety of people freak out, too much certainty they're bored out of their mind. And there isn't like a lukewarm middle. it's more your ability to meet both needs simultaneously. There's the need for significance, to feel unique, to feel special, to feel important. You can do that by taking risks and trying to build something, but then if you fail, you look

like you're worthless and unloved. And so most people found tearing somebody else down is a much faster way to feel like I'm moving up. It's an illusion. It doesn't last, but it's become a driving force in social media, for example. You can have significance by how you dress. You can have significance by having certain pronouns. You can have significance by knowing sports scores, many of them.

You know, significance by making more money. There's so many ways to get significance. The only question is, do the ways you do it empower you or disempower you and the people around you? Fourth, we need connection and love. Everyone needs it. Some people settle for connection because love's too scary. And then the spiritual needs are number five, we got to grow.

We grow or we die. Number six, we got to contribute. So if I don't work, I need something else that's going to call me past my certainty, get me to step into the world of uncertainty, which is where all aliveness comes from. Aliveness comes from uncertainty. You're not knowing. That's where growth gets stimulated

by trying something you haven't done before. We need to find better ways to feel significant by doing something useful for others as opposed to demanding significance by you calling me King Tony, because that's my new pronoun or whatever it is that you want to be made for it, right? Tire, holy sire, that's my pronoun for now and right.

So it's like lots of ways. the question got to ask yourself is do they serve or not? And I think our society has become very driven by certainty and by significance, but it's significance at any cost. And so I can change the colors, the pictures, and the way I look, I can tear somebody else down to look good. I can put up a flag of another country and I don't know anything about it, but suddenly I can virtue signal and I'm a good person. And so all that I think is starting to wear out, I hope, because we're all dying for something deeper. Reality TV is bullshit. It's like, is there anything real left in our society?

And I think when there's something real, people tend to move towards it. That's been one of the great things that's helped me in terms of reaching mass number of people because you can't fake it when you're doing something 12 hours a day, four straight days and nights, giving every ounce of your soul. People start to go, hey, this is the real thing. And then they step up because you go first. And Mark, like, how do you think about this whole, oh, people don't need to work? perhaps we should hand them money or this purpose in life.

And if not work, then what? Yeah, so the Romans had a fundamental conception of politics, and it had to do with a relationship between patron and client. And so the definition of success in Roman politics was, as a politician, you wanted to be a patron to as many clients as possible. And of course, it's a dependency relationship, right? The clients are dependent on the patron. And so basically, I think that's the pattern that keeps reestablishing itself,

which is, again, if you're a politician, what do you really want? You want a dependent voter base, and you want a voter basis dependent on largesse and things that you can do for them. And then ultimately, that resolves to handouts. So there's a very natural inclination in the political system to basically, let's say, farm the citizenry. And I mean farm in the sense of farm animals. It's a very natural motivation on the part of politicians.

And so, look, it's one of these things where people have the negative psychology we've been talking about, the idea of basically getting free handout sounds pretty good. When people have real self-respect and real pride, they find that to be very offensive, which is very dangerous from a political standpoint, because then they're not going to just always vote for the person who's giving giving them the handout. And so as with all these things, it comes back to one's own view of oneself and whether one is proud of what one is doing with your life. Tony, what do you have coming up next? I got a lot of things. But one thing I've done since the very beginning of COVID is when people

are stuck at home, I was like, how do I reach people and have an impact? And so I decided, I don't want money or time or travel, get in the way. So I built the studio. And we started doing these events for three days, and we called a summit. And it's called Time to Rise. to rise above all the BS to own yourself again, regardless of what's happening with the economy or the environment. What do you do with your body, your mind, your emotions, your relationships? And it's just three hours a day for three days. There's zero charge. And we really have a blast. Last year, we had 1.8 million people join us to give you an idea for those three days. So it's coming up on January 25th through the 27th, 25th to the 27th, and then if they go to Time to Rise Summit.com,

Time to Rise Summit.com. And I have a new book coming out. It's my third in the financial area, one that I think you guys would appreciate. This one is called the Holy Grail of Investing. And it's really based on the fact that for the last 35 years, as I'm sure you know, the S&P has been up, what, 9.2, and the average private equity is but up 14.2. So literally 50% better compounded per year for all those years. I interviewed 13 of the best in the world people like Robert Smith from Vista Partners and Manors $100 billion.

Vinod Kosla, who's in your category, obviously. Ramsey from Veritas. Michael Kim was considered the king, basically, of Korea. I've got the largest fund over there in Korea doing Chinese and Asia. And I brought their principles to play. But I also wanted people to see not only of these people producing 20% plus compounded returns, some of them more than that for decades, but I wanted to see that they could get in the game. I only got into this little bit ago, but I own a piece of 65, not funds, but the actual

firms themselves. You can be a general partner or limited partner, limited partners, investors. A lot of times it's like you guys, pretty hard to get in there. And I was frustrated by that initially. And then I found out there were ways to actually own a piece of the businesses. So we own 65 of some of the biggest Silver Lake, Starwoods, this Veritas you name. It's pretty exciting because you get the two and 20 as a partner in this. right alongside it. So I explain that, explain how you can now own a part, small portion of a sports team where they've averaged 18% versus the 9.2 over the last 10 years. They're not just putting butts in seats now. Now it's a different game or private credit where as a compliment the bonds

where people can see two to three times returns. So the book is all about those principles and tools and it comes out on, I believe, February 13th actually. So hopefully people will join us. then go to Time to Rise.com, and there's no charge for it, and I'd love to serve them. All right, and that sounds exciting. I think I'll be joining that. So thank you again.

With that, since we've taken so much of Tony's time, and by the way, I've enjoyed it tremendously. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate your time and your energy, and more importantly, I appreciate what you do in the world. Blessings to you all. All right.

Thank you so much, and right back at you. Thank you, Tony. Okay.