We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH001: The Life Force Revolution w/ Tony Robbins

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. My guest today is Tony Robbins, who's the author of a new book called Lifeforce, which instantly jumped to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Tony has also written two bestselling investment books, money, master the game, and unshakable. As I'm sure you know, he's a legendary life and business strategist and an expert on peak performance. He's coached world-beating athletes like Serena Williams, business leaders like the Salesforce founder, Mark Benioff, not to mention billionaire investors like Paul Tudor Jones. He's also a philanthropist who's provided 850 million meals through his partnership with

Starting point is 00:00:34 Feeding America. Of the last few years, I've spent a lot of time with Tony personally, and so I've seen up close what an incredible force of nature he is. He's a brilliant life hacker who's great at figuring out winning strategies in different fields, whether it's the art of investing or the science of longevity. But what really stands out most for me is the sheer passion and intensity that he brings to pretty much everything he does. In this interview, we talk about how to optimize your health and energy, about the secret to

Starting point is 00:01:02 creating a happy and meaningful life, about what money does and doesn't do for you, and about what you can learn from wildly successful friends of his, like the business mogul, Sir Richard Branson, the football star Tom Brady, and Ray Dalio, who runs the world's biggest hedge fund. Hope you enjoy our conversation. You're listening to The Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi, everyone. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with Tony Robbins. Tony, welcome and congratulations on your new book, Life Force. Thank you, brother. Nice to see you, William. Hi, it's a real pleasure.

Starting point is 00:01:54 This book grew out of a challenge when your own health was suddenly in serious jeopardy. Can you tell us about the accident you had on a ski slope in Sun Valley, Idaho, I think about eight years ago and how that set you on a path to write this book. Yeah, I think about six or seven years ago, but it was crazy. I've always been interested in anything that makes health stronger. And you know, I'm a biohacker. So my work requires me to go 12, 14 hours a day on stage with 15, 20,000 people. So I thought I had all the tools all together. But when you start chasing a 22-year-old professional snowboarder down the mountain and you don't snowboard very much, I got quite an education. And I had a wreck. I literally thought I broke my

Starting point is 00:02:31 neck. But as it turned out, I just tore my rotator cuff severely. I was in 9-9 pain on a 0 to 10 scale. And so, you know, I do what you normally do. You're right. You know, I couldn't sleep, only had an hour's sleep. I reached out to as many people as I could. I found a pulse, electronic magnetic frequency, PEMF. It's a mouthful. But it took the pain from 9-9 to 5 so I could sleep and it can help you heal bones and nerves, but it wasn't enough. So I went to the doctors and, you know, I went to four different doctors, every single one, surgery, surgery, surgery and I said, okay, well, what's the prognosis? Will I be able to do everything like usual? And they said, well, it could re-tare even after the surgery. You may not be able to lift your shoulder above your arm. And

Starting point is 00:03:10 what's the recovery time? Well, four to six months of rehab. And I was like, wow, you know what I do for a living. It's like, I can't be walking a one-arm man going around with those people, 10, 12 hours a day. So I said, there's got to be a better solution. And of course, I'd heard about stem cells like everybody else. And I heard a mixture about it. People, a lot of the doctors, I asked them about it. Oh, they don't work at all. And other people raved about him. So I called Peter Diamandis, who's one of my dear friends, and he's a rocket scientist, but also an MD from Harvard. And I said, listen, you know everybody in the tech business. You know people in the medical business. Like, who should I talk to? And he said, you should talk to Dr. Bob Harari, who's now a partner and co-author in the book as well. And, you know, it's kind of,

Starting point is 00:03:44 I didn't know at the time. It's kind of like saying, you want to learn about basketball. Let me tell you about, you know, like introduce to my friend LeBron James. I mean, 38 years ago, he helped discover what are now stem cells by giving old rats young blood and vice versa. And the old rats got younger and the young rats got older and that led to really understanding stem cells. And so he said, Tony, listen, your stem cells, you don't want to do local stem cells out of your own body because after 40, 45, they drop off the cliff. So you don't want autologists, which means your own, you want to get oligenic, which is just a fancy word for other people's, but he said, you want young, powerful stem cells to heal this. This is a severe injury. And he said, you always go back to the surgery,

Starting point is 00:04:20 but I would go do this. And he said, what you want? I said, well, I don't want fetal cells. He goes, no, you want four or five-day-old cells which come in the cord or the placenta. He said, because that's what makes the baby. That's the force of life, life force. So he told me where to go. I went down. I had three days of treatment, just an IV in a shot each day. The first day, I just felt tired.

Starting point is 00:04:38 The second day, I had a cytokone response. Unfortunately, I knew what it was, so I didn't panic. I was kind of shaking and freezing for about 20 minutes. And then they said, listen, you know, you're fine. You know, sometimes when you have that extreme response, you get even greater healing. We'll see. I went to sleep. And I left out a really important part of the story.

Starting point is 00:04:53 The fourth doctor I went to not only told me about my shoulder, but he sat me down and said, life as you know it is over. Literally his exact words to me. And I was like, what? He said, let me show you your spine. You have extreme spinal stenosis. I'd had extreme pain for 14 years before that. And he said, you know, Tony, this is not something just going to get repaired.

Starting point is 00:05:12 You know, one good jump, one snowboard accident, one thing on the stage. And literally, you would not be able to walk again. And, you know, somebody hits in the stomach and you're ready for it. No problem. I got to be honest with him, I was not ready for it. it and it took me down for a few hours and then my brain kicked in and it's like, I'm not willing to settle for no life. There's got to be the solution. So stem cells were it. So on day two, when I woke up, not only was my shoulder perfect and I've had the MRI,

Starting point is 00:05:36 obviously three weeks later, totally perfect, no surgery, no layoff for four to six months, but I stood up with no pain in my spine for the first time in 14 years. So that made me obsessed. I went to everything about stem cells. And then I learned, William, that it isn't just stem cells. There is an incredible set of breakthroughs and precision medicine that I had no idea about. Most people have no idea about. And as a result of all the work I was doing, I was invited by the Vatican to come and speak and believe it not, the Pope, every two years holds the largest conference in the world for regenerative medicine because it's not fetal tissue.

Starting point is 00:06:09 So he sees this as a gift from God. He wants all the greatest doctors. And I didn't just do the cleanup speech. I went for all three and a half days. And I saw things I never thought would ever be possible 20 years in the future. I met 11-year-old boy. He was, you know, had 60% chance to live at 4, and he got stem cells from his brand-new sister, and he's alive today.

Starting point is 00:06:28 I met people sent home to go to either hospice or to die who went and got carty cells and are totally healthy today. And I don't know if you saw it, but in nature, just this last week, it's 10 years since Dr. June came up with carty cells, these special cells that when people have tried, everything else have been turned people around. And they never use the word cure. No cancer specials, but they're talking about as a cure now because 10 years later, they still have these carty cells in.

Starting point is 00:06:52 I met Jack Nicholas there, the greatest golfer of all time. He was told he was supposed to have spinal fusion. He couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes without unbelievable pain. And you know, spinal fusion doesn't even work half the time. And so thank God he can do it. He did stem cells. And today he's 82 years old, plays golf again, plays tennis. And so I was like, the world needs to know this.

Starting point is 00:07:13 So I went back and said, I went to Simon Schuster and said, you know what I did with money where I interviewed the 50 best, you know, financial minds on Earth, the Ray Dowell. is the Carl icons, the Warren Buffets. I said, I want to do this with regenerative medicine. I want to show things that people have no idea are available right now that mostly only billionaires or wealthy people know, but it's not about expense. It's just knowing what's available and knowing what to ask for instead of being caught up in the normal standard of care. And they said, great. And then I went to Peter and said, why don't you join me and help me with this? And then

Starting point is 00:07:41 I went to Bob and said, why don't you as well? You know, you're both MDs. And so for the last almost three years, I've been working on this project, as you know. And it's been a labor of love. Now I'm donating 100% of the profits as I did in my last three books. We're going to feed 20 million more meals. I've been feeding 100 million people a year for the last seven years. We're up to 850 million meals. Instead, I feed a billion people. So this will help.

Starting point is 00:08:02 And then we're also, the balance of the profits are all going to Alzheimer's, cancer, and heart disease research with some of the top doctors in the world. So I'm excited. But what we learned, William, was there are these breakthroughs. Like, I know you know about CRISPR. Most people have heard of it. But these gene therapies and this gene editing is curing to do. diseases that have never been cured before. Sickle cell anemia wiped out in a little girl who can't

Starting point is 00:08:24 breathe. You know, sickle cell anemia is brutal. Kids that can't see getting gene therapy that can see again. You know, stem cells that are healing people that didn't have the use of their arms or legs, not to mention healing simple things like arms and shoulders and things that you go through for injuries in a sports athlete or an elderly person in a matter of days instead of weeks or months or longer. You know, there's a new program that's out. You know, the FDA goes through three phases, but so your audience understands, you know, phase one is safety, phase two is efficacy, phase three is efficacy and scale, and then if you make it through that, you can approve. Well, this is a company that has a single injection, and if you have arthritis, osteoarthritis, one injection, it stimulates this thing

Starting point is 00:09:04 called the Wint Pathway. It causes your body to make stem cells that are like new, and it regrows your tendons in 11 months. No more arthritis, but more importantly, it's from your epigenome, from the initial instructions. And what it does is you end up a place. like 16-year-old tenants, even if you're 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. There's a new test called a C-C-T-A test that I got a phone call for my partners in life. I have a group of doctors I partnered with. They have a group of centers. And one of them owns 12 hospitals. He's selling them because he wanted to get into precision medicine instead of reactive medicine. And he called me up, and he's a really understated guy. He doesn't overstate anything. He says, Tony, you've got to come

Starting point is 00:09:42 to the center. The greatest breakthrough in cardiology in the last 10 years, we've got first access to and I'm like, well, what is it? He said, well, you know, if you look, your heart disease is the number one killer of men and women. He said, if you look at a CT scan, a high resolution the best, it's very hard to read. Lots of times mistakes are made. They're looking to see, you have those plaques and what's the level of calcium. You see, but they can't really verify clearly what is calcified, which means it's healed versus what is still loose and could break off and become a widow maker, give you a stroke or give you a heart attack. He said, but there's this A.I. And we're the first ones that have access. He said, it literally goes on open,

Starting point is 00:10:20 and opens all your arteries digitally, seeks out and says, what is calcified, what is not, gives you a score and it can predict a heart attack five years in advance and tell you what to do to prevent it. So my father-in-law was with me, who was just turning 80. I love him to death. And he's a guy that's kind of a self-made man. He had his own business, had a lumber business. But when you're getting 80, almost everybody around you start saying, you know, better arrange your affairs. And I've watched the last two or three years. more fear, more uncertainty in him. So I said to him, I told him what it was. I said, I'm going to go to this test. And I said, why don't you come with me? I said, we're both at a stage of life

Starting point is 00:10:54 where we're going to certainly have some of these liquid versions, the ones that can break down. And I said, but they'll show us where they are in our bodies and it'll show us what to do. So he agrees with me. We go to the test, William, it's unbelievable. You know, I'm better than I was five years ago. I'm in a really great shape. But my father-in-law was perfect. He had nothing. I mean, he was like, clean as a whistle. And you talk about changing your mindset. And then, you know, we have this treatment that we've done for some of the greatest athletes in the world. I've had it done where they now can just scan your body for wear a connected tissue, where you've had an injury.

Starting point is 00:11:26 I have this ankle I torched years ago when I was on stage. And it was so bad no matter what treatment I got, I finally gave up. You know, if somebody came to give me a massage event, I'd say, don't touch it because the nerve would fire off and I'd feel like electrical charges in my body like electrocuting me. And they go and they scan it. they see where the problem is. They see where the nerve is. They put this fluid in, like ammiofluid, like you were born with. It opens it and heals it, pops in a place, takes like 10 minutes, and you can smack my ankle, no problem. Well, my father-in-law has had a real hip problem. That makes you feel old too, and he can't walk for squat, and it's painful. So after you guys, his heart,

Starting point is 00:12:00 we're there. So they do his hip. It took about 25 minutes, 30 minutes. He walks out perfectly, no pain, smooth. So we get on the plane, you'll appreciate this one. He's sitting across me like this, And he goes, you know, Tony, these people talk about living 110, 120. I don't know if I buy that, but my heart's perfect. I'm walking perfect. He said, you know, I could live another 20 years. I could live there'll be 100 years old. He goes, you've only been married to my daughter 22 years.

Starting point is 00:12:24 That's like a whole other life. And like you've seen the whole complete change in him. You know, you've got people like the Harvard professor who's Dr. Sinclair, one of the most famous longevity experts in the world. He's 53, but chronologically, but he's 33 biologically. I've been doing what he taught me for about the last eight months. I'm 62 in a few days, a few weeks from now. I'm 51 in my body.

Starting point is 00:12:48 And my goal is to get it down into the 40s. So we're living at a time where you can do simple things that crush you nothing. You can use technology and the price is dropping because the same technology that we used to use to make the price of anything. You know, the power goes up as you know, every 18 months by 100 percent and the price drops by 50. Well, we're all code. So now billionaires are spending more money than any time in history. They want to live forever. And scientists and technology are coming together.

Starting point is 00:13:15 And these things that sound like magic or science fiction are happening right now over the next 24 to 36 months. So I wrote this book to give people answers because at least once a week I get a phone call from somebody. Or once every 10 days, somebody's got cancer, somebody out of Alzheimer's and their family. Somebody's out of stroke. And I wanted to be able to bring them real answers, not just the standard of care. The way I did it was interview 100, just like I did Money Masked Game. I interviewed 150 Nobel laureates, scientists, some of the best doctors on the earth in regenerative medicine.

Starting point is 00:13:44 So we brought that forth. And then again, making it available to anybody so they can not only change their own life, or perhaps change or even save the life to someone they love. For me, one of the most valuable lessons in the book is that we should also really take advantage of these stunning advances in diagnostic technologies. I agree. So you can detect problems early. And actually, thanks to you, I went to San Diego, I think, and had my Cs.

Starting point is 00:14:07 T scan done and a full body MRI and my genome sequence. Can you explain why it's so important to diagnose problems earlier? I remember, for example, reading in the book that one study showed, I think, an 89% chance of survival if you detect cancer early versus something like a 21% chance of survival if you detect it at a late stage. Yeah, you're hitting the nail on the head. You know, the Cancer Society did another recent study with 100,000 people and it came out with a fundamental precept, which is, if you find something at stage three or four, you have an 80% chance of dying. Now, I prefer the 20% chance of living and figuring that out, but that's how they describe it. And it's true, it's just

Starting point is 00:14:45 much harder. If you're at stage one or two, you have an 80 to 99.9.9% chance of living, in some cases, 100% chance of living. And so the idea is little. Now, the problem is most people think, I have to admit, I was one of these people. I don't want to get medical system. And what am I going to go to a physical for? They're going to pat my knee, listen to my heart, look at my ears, make me cough. You know, they did it 80 years ago. It's like, you know, if health is the new wealth, I want to focus on health, but without knowing what's going on, you can't because we're overly optimistic. And if you find something when it's little, you can handle it so easily.

Starting point is 00:15:17 So, for example, the book is filled. It's really an emotional book while you're getting these tools because we tell you the stories of these heroes that have created these gigantic breakthroughs. And almost all of them have one thing in common. They lost a wife or a husband or a child or someone close to them and something inside them snap and said, I'm not going to settle for standard of care. And they spent the last 10 or 20 or 30 years coming up with answers that now you and I can use today because of them. And one of them around cancer, since that's one that so many people have fear about, with cancer, there's a new

Starting point is 00:15:49 test besides MRI, which can do across the brain brain barrier. Like I said, the biggest problem with cancers is, you know, we have mammograms, we have colonoscopies and people do them. But most of the cancers that kill you are the ones we have no tests for. Now there's a single blood This man lost his wife to cancer and you can do this test and it gives you 50 different cancers in your body before there's any symptoms. Yeah, this is so amazing. This is Grail is the company. What's that?

Starting point is 00:16:16 This is Grail. It's an amazing, amazing test and it's what it's probably going to be a thousand bucks or something to catch early. I think it's going to be $650 soon. I think the price is already coming down. It's brand new. But I'll tell you what, to be able to know for sure where you stand is priceless. I'll give an example.

Starting point is 00:16:30 We had a guy that came to our life centers. It's the name of the centers we have across the US and we're opening one now in Aberdeen Abu Dhabi. You got a guy come in. His wife pushed him. He'd already done his physical. And most physicals don't go deep. But his doctor was good.

Starting point is 00:16:41 He did blood tests on him, urinalysis. So I'm totally fine. Well, my wife's requiring it. So he pushed him. So we do his test. And guess what we find out with a grail test? He's got bladder cancer. Just the beginnings of it, thank God.

Starting point is 00:16:53 So guess what? It's an outpatient treatment. Took 20 minutes. He's got zero cancer and he's totally fine. Versus trying to catch it later about time he finds the symptoms. And now you got a real challenge. The same thing with a CCT. TAS. I'll tell you another one. You know, you're my friend. You know my life. You know, many years ago, 53 or so, I'd be on stage and all of a sudden, you know, I don't have any notes. I go 12 hours a day, five days in a row, right? I'm here in the audience. I'm responding what's happening. And suddenly, I don't feel exhausted, but I was like, why was I telling that story? Where was I going? I've never had that in my life. I was like, I'm 53. This can't be dementia. I mean, what's going on here? And I didn't know, I came back from London one day, flew in, got home early in.

Starting point is 00:17:34 the morning, went out to the jacuzzi, the sun was rising, got out of the Juzzi, and collapsed. And what happened is I got up, it took me into the hospital, I lost a third of my blood supply like that because I had mercury poisoning. And where did it come from? I was a, you know, vegan for 12 years. Then I went for the next 10 and just did, I wanted to eat something, it gave me a little more protein. So I just went with only fish, but I was very disciplined, you know me. So it would be salvin fish, salvin fish, but it was sword fish and tuna. And there's 75-year-old fish. They eat the younger fish, and they absorb all of their mercury.

Starting point is 00:18:07 We polluted our oceans so badly. And I don't methylate well. It's a technical term of what your body does to break things down. They found out on a zero to five scale, I was 123. Five is like, could be really lethal. It was the most they'd ever imagine. They actually sent the health department here in Florida out to my house to interview my staff because they thought maybe my wife, you know, well, William.

Starting point is 00:18:27 You know, who's the most beautiful person you've ever imagined. They thought maybe she's trying to kill me because I have a large life insurance. policy. But obviously not. And they found out it was the fish. So I would say one out of three of my friends minimum or people I recommend go get a metals test, it's super inexpensive. You find you might have candium. You might have lead. You might have mercury. And you want to catch it when it's small and it's easy to get out because it's taken me five years to get it out. I took it from about 123 down to like eight on a zero to five scale. But I'm still detoxing it. It doesn't stop my memories now. I don't have the energy problem. But it's that important. Another one that's

Starting point is 00:19:01 Simple is hormones. Like most women know about hormone replacement therapy because of menopause. And there's a lot of controversy. And in this book, I have an entire chapter just on woman's health, and I did not write it. I had three female doctor sciences, geniuses writing because I want it written for a woman's perspective for a woman. But one of the things that happens is we think about replacement therapy for menopause, but before you get to menopause or even a man, we have biochemical changes.

Starting point is 00:19:27 And usually the time you go to your doctor, and they're going to recommend something, you have problems. But now they have hormone optimization therapy, which is small changes that make a radical change in your energy or health or strength. So we had like a man who came in who was 53, I think, 54 years old, and listless brain fog, 36 pounds overweight, can't lose weight, really try to work out, wife complaining, no intimacy. And he's mad and frustrated with everything. And he's like, no, I've already had my blood test. I've done everything else. And you know, here's what happens. He's at 225 on his testosterone. So you're not in danger. tell you about 150. But most men need seven, eight, nine hundred to feel human. And so, like, all we

Starting point is 00:20:07 are to do is make this small change in his hormones. And all of a sudden, an explosive change. You lost 36 pounds in about four months, found back his no more brain fog, feels 10 years younger. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is pain. Ignorance is lack of energy. Ignorance can be deaf if we don't know what we're doing. And so some of these diagnostic tests are just priceless today. And like I said, you can easily see how fast you're aging today, right? Because you're age and the rate of aging could be different. They could be aging faster than your age or slower than your age. And now we're learning things that can actually slow the process down and scientists believe they're going to be able to actually reverse what we're experiencing in aging.

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Starting point is 00:25:08 I think at one point you write that exercise can actually reduce the risk of cancer by something like 45% type 2 diabetes by 50% of, 50% of. maybe. If we want to be fitter and healthier and more energized, what are a couple of the most effective things we can do now to upgrade these lifestyle choices? That's great, because beyond technology, there's these basic things that are huge. Let's start with sleep because the one I didn't do. You know me pretty well, right? So I've been a four or five hour sleeper all, sleep when I die, my wife loves eight hours, you know, like come to bed. And I was writing the sleep chapter on the research I did at 6.30 in the morning having to be up in three hours. And I was like,

Starting point is 00:25:45 something's wrong with this picture, right? But the man who changed my view of it was Dr. Walker. He's the head of neurology there at UC Berkeley. He's kind of like the sleep guru of the world. For Google, he's the sleep guru. He's just a genius. And he got my attention. And he said, Tony, I know everybody has varying needs. And he said, I know you think you don't need much. But let me give you a study done on 1.6 billion people. I said, there's no such study. You couldn't coordinate that. He goes, I didn't need to. He said, 70 countries have daylight savings time. And here's what we've learned around the world. When we spring forward and lose an hour, just one hour of sleep for the next three days,

Starting point is 00:26:19 no matter what country you go in, the average increase of heart attacks is 24% for those three days. So the body catches up. When we fall back and get an extra hour, it drops an average heart attacks drop 21%. He even correlates it to accidents because of people's focus and so forth. So then he showed me that sleep four to five hours a night usually have testosterone levels that are for someone 10 years older than they are. It's like, okay, you got my full attention. And then he showed me that for women, intimacy-wise,

Starting point is 00:26:49 you know, he said, not everyone needs exactly eight hours, but for every hour less than what the body needs, they have about a 14% less desire to be intimate. So a woman who's missing two-hour sleep or three-hour sleep is not going to feel any desire, and then their relationship doesn't feel as connected and so forth. And the solutions are so simple.

Starting point is 00:27:07 Like the body works on rhythms. One of the most powerful things is having a specific time to go to sleep and wake up consistently. It changes what the body can do it. Now, a certainty. Another one is making sure that you reduce the temperature in the room between 65 and 67 degrees. At that temperature, you sleep at a deeper level. Some people do those little chill pads in the bed.

Starting point is 00:27:28 Other people just do it with the temperature of the room. Yeah. Peter Diamandis convinced me to get one of those ulla pads for my wife. I've never seen her sleep more in my life. It's the most astonishing thing. It's weird. These little interventions actually can be transformative. And they change your life for the rest of your life.

Starting point is 00:27:44 A third one, most people know you shouldn't be looking at blue light, but of course, almost everybody does. That's why people are up on their iPads and their iPhones. You can put on these simple glasses that make things have a red tone. And so it doesn't over-stimulate the brain. So you can still watch or do whatever you want, but when you're ready to sleep, the brain is ready to sleep also. So those are just a couple of the things that are there.

Starting point is 00:28:02 When you talk about exercise, why don't people exercise? Because most of them do it so extremely when they finally go to do it that they're in such pain that they stop. It feels like a pain. Or they say, I have no time. So what the science shows is smaller amounts of exercise more consistently causes people to produce greater results. So a little 10-minute exercise or 12 minutes, five days a week, even though it would be nice to do more, will create so much momentum you won't get injured. Or I'll give you an example. There's a company I invested in because I was exposed to it years ago. It's called osteosteostrong. And what they found is, you know, for women, most women are really aware that bone density changes radically as you

Starting point is 00:28:41 get into your 50s and beyond. It can be extremely dangerous. It's as bad as breast cancer in terms of the impact on women. And so most men don't know that your muscles are limited by your bone density. If you have stronger bone density, you can build stronger muscles. And so a lot of Olympic athletes do this now, but they have this technique that causes you. I did this before they had these machines. I took a woman who was, I think it was 62, 63, gray-haired lady. I took her to Gold's gym when I first learned about this technique. And the technique then was you find a weight that you can't lock out, but you don't bring it down here. If a car was coming, you wouldn't try and stop it here. You'd stop it out here, right? And then it uses all your muscles. So their whole thing is how to use

Starting point is 00:29:18 most muscles at once, but also stimulate them with the right form of stimulus. And you need a much stronger stimulus than most people get, but then you need rest. And they found this by doing a study on 35,000 bodybuilders, six, seven day a week guys going to the gym, almost all of them plateau. And out of the study, many things came, muscle confusion techniques, lots of them. But one of the things they learned was when these people got sick or injured and they were off for 10 days or more and came back, they almost always did a personal best. So most of us over-trained. I take this one minute to go to the gym.

Starting point is 00:29:50 I got a camera crew because I want to see this because I've been hearing about this. There's a 25-year-old roughly guy ponytail doing the leg press with a bunch of weight. He's sweating like crazy. He finishes his set. And he's going to do another set. And this lady says to him, excuse me, sir. While you're resting, could I just jump in do a quick set? You know, we got a camera crew there, and this guy looks up like somebody's punking him.

Starting point is 00:30:10 She gets down and says, would you add 150 pounds? Literally, I added 150 pounds above this 25-year-old kid, right? Because she's not starting her legs back here. It's out here, not locked. And it stimulates all of this at one time. So I went and did this, and my first time, I used to bench press like 225, and my first time I could hold 450. But the problem was I got up to like $5.95, and then one arm was stronger than the other,

Starting point is 00:30:32 and I torqued myself and got injured. after I'd added about 22 pounds of muscle. So I stopped doing it. I said someday I thought somebody did with air pressure. Someone will come up with some Q'd Price computerized systems. So now there's centers about 150. I'm around the world called Osteoste. The workout is 10 minutes.

Starting point is 00:30:47 Literally 10 minutes. You can wear your clothes. You might not even break a slight sweat. But you go in and you do these 15 second exercises on four devices. You're done in less than 10 minutes. And it's unbelievable. You don't work out again for another week, sometimes 10 days. If you come back and don't get stronger, you wait 10 days.

Starting point is 00:31:04 and you'll get stronger the next time. Then there's also the things that'll get you work out with VR now. A lot of people work out because it's boring. And there's these incredible workout facilities that have been created now. Like, I'm not a gamer, but I went and did one of these. I bought one because it's just like, it's so much fun. You don't even realize you're working out. But at the same time, you're playing this game and you're working yourself out.

Starting point is 00:31:23 So physical exercise, but I'll give you the simplest one. JAMA did a study. If a person walks on a treadmill or live, one hour for a day, five days a week, reduce your chance of a heart attack by 52%. So it's like there's little things that you can do that can make these big differences. Most of the book is about optimizing your physical health, but the last two chapters obviously are about the power of the mind and how our mindset determines the quality of our lives.

Starting point is 00:31:50 We've all obviously been through a lot during this pandemic period, whether it's getting sick or financial challenges or fear and stress or losing people we love. And when I ask people on Twitter for questions they'd like me to ask you, someone called Misha Sharikov, who I'm going to send a signed copy of my book to thank them, said, how do you deal with deep emotional adversity? And I'm wondering if you could give us your perspective on how to take control of our minds so that when these extreme challenges come up, whether it's COVID or business challenges

Starting point is 00:32:17 or health challenges, how do we actually deal with it so that they don't wreck our lives? Well, one thing that we all have to remember, and I write about this in this book, is that we all are going to experience extreme stress in our life. It's the one common denominator. I don't care if you're a multi-billionaire. I don't care if you have the greatest family. I don't care if you've tried to do everything right. Something's going to happen.

Starting point is 00:32:37 Your house is going to burn down. Somebody's going to burglarize you. You're going to lose a dear friend. Someone's going to tell you you have a tumor. I mean, that doesn't sound very positive. Aren't you shut up to your Tony talk about this? But it's the truth. If it hasn't happened, it's going to.

Starting point is 00:32:48 I've had all the above, right? But what I've learned over time is when you push through extreme stress. Some people just give up and collapse and go to this emotional, wasted place. If you can first take care of your body and mind, if you can feed your mind 20, 30 minutes a day, something you go after because your mind's focused on that as opposed to what comes at you in your pocket with clickbait, something that makes you stronger psychologically, emotionally, physically. That's what you manufacture your life from. But then also, it's what you do with your body where you push. Like the human system responds to challenge.

Starting point is 00:33:18 The more we challenge, the more we grow. And so, you know, I do things every day. I have a set of daily regimens that push me to get stronger and stronger. I'm like I said, I'm going to be 62 years old. I'm doing things I couldn't do when I was 27 years old to give you an idea. Faster, stronger, better. I can lift more weight. But it's because we're pushing.

Starting point is 00:33:34 And when you do that, when you push through extreme stress, however you do it, three things happen. One, you discover how strong you really are because we all underestimate ourselves. Two, you find out how you're real friends and family are because they're the only ones to stick around when all hell's breaking loose. And three, you build almost an immunity to all the stuff that used to stress you out. I have a friend that was in Vietnam and locked up by the North Koreans. It's just like a crazy experience, seven years locked up in a cell by himself on an angle, chained to the floor, and we go to the bathroom so the acids would run down his back and burn his back. You know, I remember seeing him one time decade or two later, three years later,

Starting point is 00:34:12 I became friends with him. His name's Captain Coffee. And I said, Captain Coffee, I said, I can't believe you're not stressed about what the IRS is doing. You have this IRS agent who was out to get him for whatever reason. And he won the thing. But it took him four years of his life to get his money back and go through the. this, he goes, Tony, after going through what I've been through, what the heck of the IRS can do to us? You know, so it's a different frame. But also, you need to realize the power of your mind's more

Starting point is 00:34:33 than you realize. So, like, just a simple example, we all know about placebos. We discovered, I should say, in World War II, a doctor was treating people and they ran out of morphine. The nurse saved him. She created a saline solution, gave her to him and initially said to him, here you got more morphine. Now, you need morphine to these men going to shock and their pain is extreme, right? He believed it was morphine. So his physiology focused, he said, listen, you'll be out of pain in literally a matter of seconds. He injected them. Nobody died. Nobody wanted to shock. Most of the people, their pain disappeared. And they had nothing but what we now call a placebo. So when he came back from the war at Harvard, he is the one that started his studies that now

Starting point is 00:35:11 are the basis of most, you know, chemistry, which is we compare it to a placebo, to an inert piece. What most people don't talk about is a lot of times, placebos are more powerful than the drugs. But no one's going to tell you that is they don't make billions of dollars selling a placebo. But here's what we've also learned. The size of the intervention affects how strong your brain believes and how you send healing to your own body. So if I give you a small pill versus a big pill, statistically changes are radical. If I give you an injection, much more powerful than a pill in terms of the amount of change.

Starting point is 00:35:41 They even do fake surgeries, placebo surgeries. The VA did a study. I put it in the book. They did arthroscopic surgery. And they took a third of people and didn't do surgery. They just cut a little thing across their knee and sewed it up, didn't change the knee at all. And a year later, the people had not had surgery but thought they had the surgery, where the least amount of pain, the most amount of mobility, and they don't even fund it anymore.

Starting point is 00:36:03 It's more than that. You can give somebody a drug that makes their body do something and your mind can overcome it. So Harvard did a study. They gave people barbiturates, which of course, slow your body down. Give them a big red pill and said, this is an amphetamine that's going to send you through the roof. Every single person they tested, they went through the roof. And we can make ourselves sick by our brains. So I interviewed Norman Cousins when I was 24 years old.

Starting point is 00:36:26 If people don't know, he was kind of the father of psycho-neuromunology, how our brains can change our immune systems. A deadly disease, massively painful, did not want to do traditional approach. And so he decided he was going to laugh himself into health, which sounds absurd. They made fun of him at the time. He's a genius of the man. And now there's buildings with his name on it. He's one of the fathers of psychoneomology. But he watched these and the pain disappeared, but also his immune system kicked in and was cured to the disease.

Starting point is 00:36:51 He wrote a book called Anatomy of the illness. I interviewed him when I was 24. He said, Tony, it's more than you think. We don't like to make ourselves sick. We can make other people sick because it's viral. I said, what do you mean? It's viral. He goes, you know, if somebody, you know, yawns and you find yourself yawning, don't yawn, right?

Starting point is 00:37:06 Or somebody laughs. It's not that funny, but they're having at such a good time. You find yourself laughing. He goes, it happens with symptoms of disease. He gave me an example. He said, I was at this college football game. and somebody got really sick, projectile vomiting. And of course, the doctor on staff came to look at this man.

Starting point is 00:37:21 He's asking what happened, what was different, trying to figure out what the cause was. And the only thing that seemed different in his regimen was he'd gone to the vending machine and shortly after this happened. So he thought the vending machine must have pollution in the coax or in the soda. So he announced it because he wanted to be else to get sick over the loudspeaker during the football game. He said, Tony, it was like a movie. He said people started projectile vomiting over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes all over. He said it was like viral catching, and then literally 12 different ambulances came to take people

Starting point is 00:37:50 to hospitals. This is how serious it was. And then an hour later, they did some tests and found it wasn't the vending machine. They announced it and suddenly everybody got well. I'll give you the modern example of that. CDC, most people are worried about COVID, obviously. COVID deaths are mostly those who have comorbidities or someone who's highly aged. But we now know the number one risk factor other than age is obesity. 79.8, call it 8. 80% of the people have died of COVID were obese and has comorbidias that come with it, something we could do something about. But I couldn't believe this.

Starting point is 00:38:22 This is a CDC study I put in the book because everything is documented, otherwise you wouldn't believe it. CDC says the number two risk factor of dying of COVID, anxiety and fear. Because literally your fear can shut down your immune system. Your fear can change your heart rate. Your fear can change your oxygenization level. It changes it all. And yet most of what we've done, unfortunately, in our media, has create more and more fear about this. These people aren't bad people.

Starting point is 00:38:45 They're doing their job. They're trying to enrich their shareholders by getting more eyeballs. And unfortunately, the news knows we're not here to inform me. We're here to startle you. You know, your child may die of drinking water, film at 11. Everybody watches, right? So you've got to take control of your own mind. And the three ways I talk about how to do that just real fast is your decisions control everything.

Starting point is 00:39:05 But the most important decisions are often made unconsciously. So one of those is what are you going to focus on? Most people let their focus go wherever their phone, people around them make it go and whatever you focus on you feel even if it's not true. If you're worried about your kid and you think, oh my God, they could have done this and died. While you're thinking about it, you feel sick to your stomach. Later on, you find out they're okay and you're okay. Focus equals feeling, but there are patterns of focus. So what that means I teach people in seminars is I'll ask people. We all have patterns. Where do you tend to focus more on what

Starting point is 00:39:36 you have or what's missing? I know you do both, but which more? Well, during COVID, there's no question. And even with achievers, they tend to obsess about what's missing. And what does that do? It doesn't matter how smart you are. You cannot sustain happiness when you're constantly focusing what's missing. Second one, do you tend to focus out what you can or cannot control? Well, there's tons in life you can't control. The things you can or the things you can influence. With COVID, it's gone crazy. Most people focus on what they can't control. Do you focus more on the past, the present, or the future? Well, a lot of people focus on the past, some of the present, some of the future. But if you're focused on the past, you can't change,

Starting point is 00:40:11 or a future that you imagine that's worse, imagine. I ask people all the time, I say in an audience, 15,000 people, I'll say, how many of you know someone who takes antidepressants, and yet they're still depressed? 80% of the people raise their hand. What's it possible? Well, you look at the side of the box and it says, create suicidal thoughts, that's a clue.

Starting point is 00:40:28 But all they're doing is numbing the emotion. They haven't dealt with a source of it. If you're constantly focused on what's missing, what you don't have, what you can't control, and the past, you're going to be pissed off, angry, sad, or depressed, or some combination thereof. So changing those three patterns literally can change your whole life. You also have this very helpful technique that I've found myself using.

Starting point is 00:40:48 Actually, I used it earlier today. You'll be happy to hear, which is the 90-second rule. Can you explain how you use that? You did that, William. Yeah, I did it because I got a message that you could only talk to me for 45 minutes. I was like, I can't believe that. They just told me they pushed it back 10 minutes. So that's great news.

Starting point is 00:41:04 So literally I found my, I thought there was a kind of symmetry to the fact that you were annoying me. And I was like, I'm going to use his technique to calm myself. down and the bloody thing works. So can you explain how it works, please? The idea is this. Most people are focused on, like we said, well, they don't have what's missing, right? Most of us, what's wrong, is always available. So is what's right. But unfortunately, for human beings, most of us think we're going to be happy when someday someone, something works out a certain way, or if you'll just behave the way I want, or if I'll behave the way I want myself to behave. But humans have variability, right? You know, I've got 105 companies. What are the chances

Starting point is 00:41:40 right now somebody is screwing up out of the thousands of employees on three continents? About 100% if my definition of screwing up is doing something different than I think they should. So all I had to do is pick up my phone to be stressed out. I've been to realize my happiness is pretty cheap, right? Good news, bad news, you're in between it all. And one day I met this friend of mine in India, and he taught me this simple principle. He said, my spiritual vision is to live a life where what you talk about, Tony, living in a beautiful or peak state is what I called. He goes, I call it a beautiful state. What you call a peak state is an energy, high energy state, love, joy, determination, loyalty, commitment, appreciation, right? Drive. These are all high energy states. And when you're in them,

Starting point is 00:42:18 you do the right thing. And then there are states, he called suffering. I didn't like this because I didn't think I suffered. I'm not a sufferer. But he said, you know, you talk about lousy states. And when people get those low energy states, frustration, anger, sadness, worry, envy, you know, overwhelmed, we do the wrong things. And he said, I just started thinking, what if I, it didn't matter what happened in my life externally, I prefer it to be a certain way. But my view was, I'm going to live in a beautiful state, some of these high energy states, doesn't mean you're happy every moment. It might be driven. I might be hungry. It might be appreciative. It might be grateful. It might be fun. It might be loved. So it's not just, I'm happy all the time,

Starting point is 00:42:54 because that's BS. You're not all the time. It's meaningful. It could be. He said, but I'm going to live in that most of the time in my life. I'm committed to live in that state. And I was like, I love that. I'm going to steal that. He goes, I stole all your stuff you can steal it, too. I said, but I would change the language for me, at least. I would say, life is too short to suffer. And there's always things you can't control. There's always things you wouldn't prefer, but we make them life and death instead of it's my preference. And that's why relationships get messed up and everything else. So in the book, I described this process of how to identify what triggers you and how to extract it from yourself, but eventually you start to create what

Starting point is 00:43:27 you described, which is the 90-second rule. And it's like a gain. It's like you can get out of suffering, anger, frustration, sadness, whatever, in a second with a perceptual shift. And the number one perceptual shift is appreciation. Or it could be gratitude or it could be love. But the minute you appreciate something, the suffering is gone. Suffering doesn't come from the facts. Suffering comes your perception of the facts. So if you said to me, I'm so upset my mother died, well, if that happened in the last two, three, four weeks, it's understandable. It was a year ago, you're not suffering because your mother. You're suffering because your mother shouldn't have died in your perception, right? And now you can tell me all day long where your perception is and you keep

Starting point is 00:44:05 suffering or you can shift it. And so you learn to value your happiness more than anything else because happiness is a power. All the studies show, and I know you've seen him, William, because we've worked together like on the financial side as well, I don't care how much money you have. If you're not fulfilled, if you're not happy, happy people live longer, happy you have longer relationships, happy people are healthier. It is a power, but in our culture we kind of poo, poo happiness to show how sophisticated we are that we don't get sucked into feeling good about things and so forth. idiotic. That's stupid. That's ignorant. And I try to tell people, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is pain. Ignorance is, can be death because you're ignorant to the things that could be changing

Starting point is 00:44:43 your health or your vitality. That's really what we're really talking about the 90-second rule. And I give people different techniques to break the pattern. I'm glad you used it today. That's awesome. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. And customers now expect proof of security. just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform.

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Starting point is 00:47:59 before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. Yeah, it was weirdly helpful, I have to admit. I encourage people to read that part of the book. It actually works. To talk a bit more about this issue of money and happiness, in the final chapter of Lifeforce, you write, when I interviewed more than 50 of the most successful billionaire Titans of Finance for my book, Money Master the Game, there were only a handful that appeared to be truly consistently happy. And I don't mean fake happy. I mean living in a state of gratitude, appreciation, and able to find meaning and problems and

Starting point is 00:48:40 challenges. And I wondered if you could talk a bit more about this issue of money, because you grew up a poor family, right? I mean, there were times where your mom and your fathers couldn't afford food or clothes or, you know, you really had difficulties. And now I think it's fair to say you have hundreds of millions of dollars and you own beautiful houses and you fly in a private plane. And so you've experienced both ends of the spectrum. And a lot of people listening to this podcast kind of, I think, share my fairy tale illusion that if I become super rich, it's going to solve a lot of my problems. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about what the money does give you and what it doesn't give you, having experienced both ends of the spectrum.

Starting point is 00:49:14 That's interesting because I can tell you not only from my own experience, but I've had the privilege of working with some of the most successful financial people on the face of the earth. And that's why I alluded to that. When people hear that, well, these people, not many of them are really happy, when people say to me, you'll see that money doesn't make you happy. Money doesn't make you anything. It magnifies who you are. If you're mean, you have more to be mean with. If you're more giving, you have more to give. And so it's an illusion.

Starting point is 00:49:37 When I was growing up, I had four different fathers, we have no money for food. It's why I provide 100 million meals a year, these billion meals that I'm doing right now, feeding America. What I learned I thought was, oh, every father couldn't provide. My mother talked about it. They always argued about money. It was all true. All those arguments happened. But if they didn't have the money argument, I learned very clearly over the years, they

Starting point is 00:49:56 would have argued about something else. Money can certainly create that feeling of scarcity and anger and fear and resentment of those who think have more and they were lucky or something. But the person who changed my life was my original mentor, Jim Rohn. And he really taught me something interesting. First, I've learned later in life, you just got to put happiness first. You don't put happiness first. I mean, how many people have you seen who are incredibly wealthy who've taken their

Starting point is 00:50:18 life just in the last few years alone? You can think of fashion designers who just did this. You can think of a great guy from CNN, the food expert that we all knew, Anthony to Bourdain. You can look at some great comedians that have taken their life, who had more money than they could possibly spend. You don't need a lot of homework to see money doesn't make you happy. But what does make you happy, I found, is having a meaningful life. And a meaningful life doesn't mean you're happy every moment.

Starting point is 00:50:44 It just means you have a sense that you're growing and you're giving. There's only two rules in the universe that seem immutable to me. They're not my rules. They just look around. Everything universe grows or it dies and everything universe contributes to where it's eventually eliminated by evolution. And so you look at people that are happy and say, what makes people happy? The answer is progress.

Starting point is 00:51:03 Progress equals happiness. You know, a lot of people achieve a goal. They work so hard for it. And then they go, is this all there is? That's horrible. That's worse than failing because most of us, we fail. We pick ourselves up and go for it again. If you've succeeded and you're unhappy, you're screwed, basically.

Starting point is 00:51:17 But there's the other side. There's the times when you worked your tail off and you're enthralled. It isn't like, is this all there is? You're inthrulled for how long. How long do you stay happy when this a magnificent thing happens? For a year? Nine months, six months, three months, three weeks, three hours, three days, three minutes. Most people are somewhere between three hours and three months max.

Starting point is 00:51:39 And the reason I believe is you can't sit at the table of success too long or you fat and tired and exhausted and bored. We're meant to grow. When we no longer grow, we pretty much disappear. Men, there's a statistic in life insurance that's well known. It's different for women. Men, after they retire, die on average within five years. Women don't retire because kids, they think about everybody taking everybody, doing all those things. They have multiple areas. Now, if you retired and took on a new project, it really matters. That's a different thing. We are meant to have a meaningful life, which means we got to make progress. If you're not to your goal yet, but you just started losing weight. Or you start, like, you're helping people take

Starting point is 00:52:16 control their finances here, right? You start to put a plan together. You start to make progress. You're going to get excited. Getting there is not what you think it is. I remember I was on stage at the Continental Center in New York. I was 39 years old and I'd worked for my entire life, 20-hour days. And I done very well by most people's standards. But now I had a public company when public while I was on stage. And I was doing what I love most, 15,000 people. And when you really give your all. People are incredibly generous and I'm, you know, it's this virtuous cycle. I'm pouring into them. They're pouring in me. It's just pure love and joy and happiness. I'm at the best time. And during a stretch break, someone came and whispered my ear, the company gone public,

Starting point is 00:52:52 and my stock was worth $400 million and I was 39 years old. And I didn't matter. That's beyond my other assets. And I was like, that's incredible. That's extraordinary. And then I went right back to what I was doing and at the time my life. And then I went home that night. It's a true story. And I felt depressed and I never felt depressed. And the reason was, you know, the guy on stage, if you meet me on stage, I'm the same guy on the street. But I was in a relationship with a woman where in the beginning she loved that I made things happen.

Starting point is 00:53:21 I took charge, made it happen. But, you know, sometimes you had a relationship with somebody who love that initially because it's a part of yourself you've not developed. That's why you're attracted. And if you stick with them long enough and you don't grow, you'll be pissed at them. And so I tried to adapt. I was such a pleaser at that stage in my life. And I get quiet, do these things that I wouldn't be myself.

Starting point is 00:53:38 And I remember I'm old enough, you might be William, to remember VH1 used to have this story show called Behind the Music. It was always a band. They tell their story. They get to the peak of success. And then somebody drug overdose, so they got a car accident. It was the same story every time. I remember saying to myself that day, I'm not going to be a VH1 story. And so I made this change in my life and my relationship side.

Starting point is 00:54:00 But the money went up. And by the way, it was 1999. So you can imagine what happened in 2000 with a crash. Most of it went away. but I became somebody better. If I'd had all that money at that stage, I don't know if I would have developed the same levels I did. Now I'm actually much further than I was back then,

Starting point is 00:54:18 but I had another 20 years of development that I've done, and I did it for different reasons. I didn't do it for the economics. I did it because it's meaningful. And I think that's what people need if they have an extraordinary life. It seems like for you the key is always a matter of sharing and service. I remember, I hope I'm not speaking.

Starting point is 00:54:37 out of school here, but I once asked you what you said to yourself as you got on a stage with 12, 15, 20,000 people. And you said to me, you know, Lord use me. And I know you're a spiritual guy. And I think that's something people don't really know about you is the degree to which you're trying to be a force for something good, whether you're regarded as grace or God or the universe or mother nature or whatever. Can you talk about that? Because I think it's so central actually to having a happy and meaningful life. So I'm not saying this in a proselytizing way, but actually I think it's a really essential part of happiness and fulfillment. I think you need daily rituals that bring you back to the fact that there's something greater

Starting point is 00:55:12 than yourself and also connect you to serving. You know, the word hero comes in Latin from serbo, which means servant. Some people think hero means, you know, beat on my chest, look who I am. And to me, that's insane because you know the people that do that. No one can stand them. You know, we can pick some political figures, but we won't mention names or anything else, right? And people just are turned off by it. More importantly, the quality of your life is the quality of your relationship.

Starting point is 00:55:34 relationships. And relationships come from only one thing, really truly caring about another person. And, you know, I care about strangers. I know it sounds absurd, but I think you know me well enough to know it's true. And so, you know, I got to a point in my life where I'm serving, serving, I'm loving. I wouldn't stop. But I didn't need any other economics. It's like I'm not obsessed. And I, you know, like you said, I'm privileged to have a plains and an island and all these things. But you can take all that stuff away. It doesn't change who I become as a man. That's what I own. All the other stuff can go away. And a big part of who I become as a man is like, I remember. when I was getting ready to do Money Master the Game, and I was interviewing all these billionaires, like I said, and I'm like, looking around and seeing all these people suffering, and it's just like, this is, this is wrong. I can't do everything, but I can do something. And that kind of started me with big goals in terms of contribution philanthropy. Now, if you won't give a dime out of a dollar, I'm going to tell you right now. When my earliest stages, I know you know the story I wrote about in the book, financial book, I had $26 to my name, and I gave all of it away after having a $6 meal one time. Well, I won't bore you with a story,

Starting point is 00:56:32 but it changed my life because I had no money for food, no money for anything, but I was free because when I got out of scarcity, but if you don't give a dime out of a dollar, I can promise you, you're not going to give $10 million out of $100 or $1 million out of a billion, never in a trillion years. I had people all the time say, well, it's great people like you do that. You know, when I'm rich, I'll do it too. But I started getting not just economics about philanthropy. It was like, you know, I went to India and I saw these children dying of waterborne

Starting point is 00:56:54 disease. And I was like, I'm going to do something. This is not that hard to solve. So now I provide a quarter million people a day with fresh water. I'm trying to move it up to a million people a day. for the resources of the people that I have there. You know, I own a plane, so I'm not an idiot. I know this has a carbon footprint, so I found out my carbon footprint is, you know,

Starting point is 00:57:11 3,000 trees. So I was like, I didn't just buy 10 years with the carbon credits by putting the money down to grow more trees down in the South America. But I also said, I'm going to plant 100 million trees. I'm at 71 million right now. You look around, and hunger is the biggest challenge. I'm going to buy it a billion meals. And now I've got a billion meal challenge for sustainability.

Starting point is 00:57:30 I'm doing with the X Prize. and I've got heads of the UAE to be my partners on. So it's like we have a $20 million prize to figure out how to solve this on a world level. So when you start having those goals, then the reason I do my business is, and I've done them well, I love the challenge. I love making things that are extraordinary. But what I love most is seeing the impact on people's lives and then seeing how I can utilize those resources to do things that can shift the quality of life for people I don't even know.

Starting point is 00:57:54 And, you know, there's been studies done. I wrote about it and Money Masked the game. Or they now they can study, you know, they can see the hormones triggered on you just from your saliva. But you know, like you're at Starbucks and you're not rich and you just decide, I'm going to buy the next five people or 10 people their coffee. You don't know who they are. The high that you will get from that, you can find five, six, seven hours later in most people. And you going and getting some toy for yourself is great. I mean, it's nice.

Starting point is 00:58:19 But things don't give sustainable fulfillment. What gets sustainable fulfillment for people is growth and giving. If you're going and giving, you're going to have that fulfillment. So it's not that I'm such a good guy. It's just I've just covered what life's about. And early in my life, fortunately, I was wired with a high level of empathy and it made me care about strangers. And now that gift just gives me a gift because if I died tomorrow, I've had the greatest family. I'm not playing on time tomorrow. I've had the greatest life. I've been

Starting point is 00:58:44 blessed beyond compare. I've worked my ass off to do it beyond what most people would dream of. I've had the rewards that go beyond money or beyond fame or fortune. I have the reward that every man and woman deserves. It's the one you earn with yourself. Because you know, regardless of what other people know, who you've become. You know where you started. You know where you are. And self-esteem, I hate the term, it's overused, but esteem for yourself does not come because everybody tells you you're great. You know, you can hear that a million times and think you're not great. You can be told everybody, you're an idiot and you go, I'll show you, I'm going to show you who the hell I am. There's nothing to what people say. It's do you face challenges regularly

Starting point is 00:59:20 and find a way to overcome. That's what's going to raise your own sense of identity. That's It's going to give you inner pride, not ego pride. I'm talking about a pride that you deserve because you've earned it. I think every man and woman deserves that. I want to ask you one final question since we have an investment audience here. You spent so much time with friends of yours like Paul Tudor Jones, who's multibillionaire, Ray Dalio, multibillionaire, incredibly successful people. You write here about people like Martine Rothblatt, some of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs you've come across. If we're trying to replicate these people, model these people and think, okay, what can I learn that these people have in Kong? What have you learned from hanging?

Starting point is 00:59:56 out with these absolutely extraordinary people that can help us on our own journey. I can tell you, because early on, you know, people asked me, you know, I was the burning question as I met these people earlier in my career and then I just saw the pattern over and over again. Like, what sets them apart? Hunger. I love crazily intelligent people, wickedly intelligent people, but I know a lot of them can't fight their way out of a paper bag. It's hunger that separates people. The hunger to grow, the hunger to give, the hunger to master, the hunger to go to another level. You know, you look at somebody like, Mark Benioff at Salesforce or, you know, Ray Dalio, who's, you know, unbelievable human being,

Starting point is 01:00:31 or you look over it, you know, Sir Richard Branson. I mean, Richard Branson is as driven today as when he was, you know, 16 in that Crip starting Virgin, you know, in the cemetery. And he's in his late 60s. That hunger to be more, do more, give more, give more, share more, and not settle is the factor because it'll get you to maximize everything else. But from a practical perspective also, So it's the capacity to do three things. Pattern recognition, anyone who's extraordinary in investing, in business, in music, in entertainment, in parenting, in health. I am obsessed with finding patterns.

Starting point is 01:01:06 Humanity changed from survival, Hunter Gaviners, to communities when we figured out one pattern, the pattern of season. So we knew if we plant in the winter, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're going to get nothing. But if we plant in the spring, protecting the summer, reaping the fall, hang on to some for the winter, we got to build community, city, states, and the world. That changed humanity. So pattern recognition, the best are good at pattern recognition in their area. Rays unbelievable at this, right? $168 billion, I think is what do you ask right now. I was doing my first interview with him years ago,

Starting point is 01:01:35 and the prime minister of China calls for some coaching. Well, he goes, do you mind if I take this? It's quite fine. Go ahead. It's just amazing. But the second skill is pattern utilization. Some people recognize a pattern, so it's not chaos anymore, but they don't know what to do. You got to know how to use the pattern. And the real masters, William, and you know them as well as I do, and you've done this in your life in some areas as well as I have, it's like you learn other people's patterns to play the piano. And then after enough time, something magical happens. You don't just know them and use them. You're able to start creating your own patterns because you have so many reference points. And pattern creation is what Ray Dalio is, not just recognition and utilization.

Starting point is 01:02:14 That's what Mark Benioff is. That's what Serena Williams is. That's what Tom Brady is. You'd be greatest of all time, and I have the privilege of working with some of the greatest goats, the greatest of all time athletes, for example, they all are unbelievable pattern recognition, creation and utilization, I should say, in creation. But what sets them apart and why they do it fully, hunger. That's great. Thank you so much. Tony, you've been a great force for good in my own life, and I really want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. So as you've been for me, William, you understate your value to me too. I send you all my love and appreciation. Thank you so much. All right, lots of love, and I hope our audience has enjoyed the conversation as much as I have. Take care.

Starting point is 01:02:55 And you got your hour in. I got to go. It's magnificent. I won't in the end. All right, take care. Take care of you, brother. Take care. Cheers. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me and Tony Robbins today. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If you'd like to learn more from Tony about how to optimize your health and happiness, check out his new book, Life Force. It's one of those rare books that will not only improve your life, but might actually save your life. And if you're curious about the 90-second rule that Tony and I discussed, you can learn more about that in the final chapter of life force, which is all about how to live in what Tony calls a beautiful state. If you want to learn more about Ray Dalio, who manages the world's largest hedge fund, check out episode 410 of We Study Billionaires, in which Dalio spoke with me in depth about how to invest in today's changing economic environment. You can also connect with me on Twitter at William Green 72.

Starting point is 01:03:41 Thanks to everyone who wrote to me on Twitter to suggest questions for me to ask Tony Robbins, I ended up asking him a question that came to you. from Misha Sharikov. As a way of saying thanks, I'm sending Misha a signed copy of my book, richer, wiser, happier, which is based on hundreds of hours of interviews that I've done with many of the world's greatest investors. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to being back with you again soon. Take care. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH001: The Life Force Revolution w/ Tony Robbins

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