Tony Robbins | All-In Live from Miami

You have to figure it out. Like I always say, if you want to take the island, you burn the boats. I got a chance to work with the president of the United States, Clinton, and he called me one day—true story—and said, “Tony, they’re going to impeach me in the morning.”

How many of you have ever achieved a goal you worked your guts out for, and then achieved it and went, “Is this all there is?” Horrific. Horrible.

It’s great to meet you. Thank you. You’re bigger in person. You’re a big man.

Compared to what?

A normal human.

Okay. They’re large.

See your hands? Yeah, there you go. There you go. It’s like you’re a big guy. You’re glad he just had his hand. It could have gotten really interesting.

You’re right. True.

I mean, maybe not if he was in the cold plunge. You never know. Okay, enough.

When I told people you were coming, I got a range of responses, and your poor assistant chief of staff was in a total panic about all the questions I was going to ask you.

I don’t care.

Yes, I know you don’t care. But I got the range from, “The infomercial guy has had a profound impact on my life,” from very significant friends of mine whom we know in common and who have been to your seminars, to, “He’s kind of a self-help guru. It’s all kind of like snake oil.”

I want to know where this all started, because my perception of you was the late-night infomercials when I was growing up in the ’80s. Then I looked into it, and I started looking into the self-help space. You were actually inspired by a self-help guru whom you went to work for in the late ’70s.

Yeah. Jim Rohn.

Jim Rohn. You’ve been at this for a while, and a lot of the techniques that you studied are very real. These are real techniques in psychology. When I looked at them and at the history of it, you look at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Freud, Jung, NLP—neuro-linguistic programming—and even L. Ron Hubbard, who took it in a different direction.

Are you getting to a question?

I am. I am. He wants to show you that he spent 2 hours on Wikipedia before we started.

I went down the rabbit hole. Wikipedia.

Who is Tony Robbins, and why did you get addicted to all this self-help stuff? It’s been packaged in a couple of different ways in your life. So I’m curious about this arc of how you got into this and what you do for people now.

My friend Mark Pincus, Marc Benioff, a friend of the show, and my friend Kevin Rose—these guys, and then civilians. One of my wife’s friends goes and runs over coals with you in Hawaii. She’s a makeup artist, and she loves it, and she can’t shut up about it.

So tell me how you got into self-help, how you packaged it, and why you decided to be a coach and do these seminars instead of starting a cult or religion.

I’ve got to unpack that.

Yes, please.

Well, people know me at different stages. I was on television every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, for about 12 years during the infomercial days. I hated infomercials, but there was no real vehicle that could get you out to a mass number of people other than writing a book, and most people don’t read.

But it started for me because I grew up in a pretty tough environment. I was born in downtown Los Angeles. I had 4 different fathers. I had a very powerful mom, whom I love dearly. She has since passed—a beautiful soul. I attribute a lot of my success to her.

But when she drank alcohol and took prescription drugs, she was a different person—very violent. I have a younger brother and a younger sister. So I really became a practical psychologist in my youth, learning how to manage her emotions and her states and how to really get things done.

I think the thing that changed my life the most, though, was when I was 11 years old. My fourth father got fired from his job, and it was Thanksgiving. We had no money and no food. When I say no food, we had crackers and peanut butter—but not a Thanksgiving dinner, which was kind of depressing.

My parents were fighting and saying things you can never take back. I was trying to keep my brother and sister from hearing it. Then my life was changed because someone came to the door. I opened it, and there was a big guy with 2 bags of groceries in his hand and a frozen, uncooked turkey in a pan on the ground. He had obviously carried it and set it down.

He said, “Is your father here?” I said, “Just one moment.” I thought it was going to be the most joyous moment, but my father was angry because he felt humiliated. He looked at it as charity and said, “We don’t accept that.”

Long story short, the man said, “I’m the delivery guy,” and my dad had to take the food. That day changed my life because my father left shortly thereafter. I really loved him. He’s the one who adopted me, and I carry his name.

But it also taught me that our life is determined, I think, by the meanings we give to things. Is this the end or the beginning? Is this person dissing me? Are they coaching me? Are they loving on me? Whatever you decide controls your life.

I was fortunate enough at that point to come up with a different meaning. We grew up in what I thought was a wealthy community. It was very low-middle-class, to say the least. We were on the other side of the railroad tracks, and it looked like nobody cared. My father kept saying, “No one cares about anybody else.”

But this was new evidence for me. It was like, if a stranger who doesn’t even want credit is delivering my family’s Thanksgiving dinner, then strangers do care, and I need to care about strangers. So I promised myself, at 11 years old, that someday I would give this back and feed at least 2 families.

Then I grew up and started studying patterns. I started seeing that everything is a pattern. All of you know this: whether you’re an investor, a great CEO, a great dancer, or a musician, it’s really because you recognize patterns. Things are no longer chaos for you. You see what’s going on, so you have the power of anticipation.

The second skill—I try to teach this to my kids and grandkids—is to utilize those patterns. I have 5 kids and 5 grandkids. I have a 50-year-old daughter and, thanks to COVID, a 4-year-old daughter. I’m asking myself, “What do I need them to know?” The world is changing so fast. They have to be able to recognize patterns, and step 2 is to utilize them. That’s where the power is.

If you do it long enough—if you play someone else’s music long enough—some of your own starts to come through, and you start to be a creator of patterns. That’s when you become masterful. Those are the people we know in investing—you know their names—or in business or anything else.

Once I learned that, I realized there’s nothing wrong with people. We just get caught up in patterns, and we do them for so long that we think they’re us. It’s hard to change you; it’s easy to change a pattern. I got really good at it. I changed my body. I changed my finances. People started coming to me, and gradually it became my full-time focus.

I began having people call me as I started producing results. I’d get these athletes calling, like Serena Williams. She was melting down and couldn’t get on the court because her sister had just died. She had lost recently, and she was gun-shy. I had to turn her around right then, and there was no net.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to do that over and over again. It built my career and brought me to a lot of sports teams. Now I own pieces of some of those sports teams.

I also started looking at people who were depressed and suicidal. Knock on wood, I don’t know—did any of you see “Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru” on Netflix? Anybody here? If you haven’t seen it, you can see the work. We follow up 10 years later, and you see that the people are still in great shape because we’re rewiring the way the brain works.

It’s not a bunch of pump-up. I do use energy, because without energy, nothing changes. But you can’t just have energy; you need strategy.

As I did that, I started working with businesses. I’ll give you a perfect example. I’m 31 years old, and my career is starting to soar. Then I got a chance to work with the president of the United States, Clinton. He called me one day—true story—and said, “Tony, they’re going to impeach me in the morning. What should I do?”

I was 31 years old, and the president was asking me. I said, “Could you call me sooner?” This was like, “Tomorrow morning.” But because there was no net, my brain figured it out. You have to figure it out. Like I always say, if you want to take the island, you burn the boats.

Sorry, Tony. What did you tell him?

I can’t tell you that.

Okay.

That’s a private thing. I’ll tell you if you want to know. I don’t share unless somebody shares.

What I will tell you is that I got good at studying businesses and became an entrepreneur. Now I have 114 companies in massively different industries, but we do a little bit more than $9 billion in revenue. I love the diversity.

I get to work with athletes. I get to work with the team you formerly had ownership in. I have a little piece of it. Peter Guber is one of my dearest friends, as you probably know. I’ve gotten to work with some of the greatest athletes in the world, some of the greatest musicians, some of the greatest entertainers, and the greatest entrepreneurs.

I don’t go there just to teach them. I go to learn.

Can I ask you a societal question for a second?

Okay.

You’ve been, in some ways, diagnosing what ails people for, let’s say, 40 years now. Every society has its own pothole, and maybe teenagers and young people today suffer from a very different thing than Jason, myself, and Friedberg did at our ages.

Can you diagnose the level of happiness and sadness, and satisfaction and dissatisfaction, that this current young generation has relative to other younger generations? Where is it different, and where is it the same?

I don’t think I’m the only one who can see it.

I think expectations, you know—I always tell people expectations are what make you really unhappy. We can’t not have any, obviously, but trade your expectations for appreciation, and your life changes. Our expectations now are controlled more by social media, especially for that generation. They’re seeing people who are incredibly wealthy and thinking, “That’s who I should be,” and feeling like they don’t have anything.

What turned people in the Soviet Union against the Soviet Union when they got access to seeing how Westerners lived? Then things changed. When they didn’t see it, it was okay. Today we compare ourselves to others in ways that aren’t real. Young girls who go on social media—you’ve seen all the studies, I’m sure—get depressed because they’re comparing themselves to images that aren’t even real. It’s fake.

Expectations minus reality equals happiness. What I really say is, progress equals happiness. If you’re growing, if you’re going at something, even if you’re not there yet—if you’ve got to lose 50 pounds and you lose the first 5 or 10, or you’re in a relationship and you finally face what has to be dealt with, or you face your finances—there’s a momentum that happens and an aliveness.

Ask all of you here, and those of you in the room: How many of you have ever achieved a goal you worked your guts out for and then achieved it and went, “Is this all there is?” Who’s had this experience? Right? That’s a horrific moment. It’s horrible. It’s worse than failure, because most of us simply fail. We get back up and figure it out. Completely.

But try this one for size: How many of you achieved a goal that you worked your guts out for, were really proud of it, and were euphoric? Who’s had one of those? By a show of hands, make some noise out there if you’ve had one of those.

So the question is, how long did that good feeling last? Did it last 6 years? No. A year? Euphoria? 6 months? 6 minutes? 10 minutes? 6 weeks? Yeah, 6 minutes. For most people, I’ve found, it’s been 6 minutes and about 6 weeks.

Why is that? Because we’re meant to grow in life. You grow or you die. The whole universe has these laws: You grow or you die. When you grow, you have something to give. Unless you’re giving something beyond yourself, if it’s always a trade, you don’t have any esteem for yourself. You don’t have any inner pride. But when you have something to give, that’s when life feels more meaningful.

Yeah. Jonathan Haidt’s book from years ago, *The Happiness Hypothesis*.

Yes. A great study in there showed that economic progress was the best predictor of happiness. It wasn’t the absolute dollars you were earning each year, which flatlined after a certain baseline standard of living. Beyond that standard of living, once you were able to get food and housing and all the things you need to survive and thrive, what predicted happiness was how much things changed from year to year—the rate of change. He’s absolutely right. Other studies show the same thing.

But there are new studies that add another dynamic. It’s also affected by who is in your environment. Today, who is in your environment because of social media isn’t real. We’re in a place where people evaluate themselves not only by the circle of friends they hang out with, which certainly plays a role, but even more so by what they see online.

I’ve always told people, if you want to grow, get on the field with people 2-fold beyond where you are. If you want to play tennis, and you’re good at tennis, and you’re fortunate enough to get on the court with somebody who’s world-class, like a friend of mine, Serena Williams, if you go out and do that, you know you’re terrible. But just to get on the court with her, you’ve got to get great. If you play against somebody you’re better than, it’s only a matter of time before your skills go down as well.

So I think our society has an expectation today. My original teacher, Jim Rohn, a personal-development speaker and more of a business philosopher, said something to me when I was really young and just beginning with him. I said, “All my fathers were good humans. Why were we always broke?” I looked at this billionaire hedge-fund person who made a billion dollars last year, and this schoolteacher who, in those days, made about $40,000.

He said, “Tony, that’s fair. But here’s what I can suggest to you: We’re all equal as souls, but we’re not equal in the marketplace.” He said, “If you go to McDonald’s and get a job, you don’t get a living wage. You’re not supposed to. It’s a first job. Anyone can do that job and learn it in an hour. But if you find a way to add more value to people”—because he said to me, “Can someone make twice as much money in the same time?” I said, “Yeah. 5 times, 10, 100 times.” He said, “Yeah. The guy who made a billion dollars produced a 42% return. Did you know that? Those are people’s futures. Those were people’s college educations. Those were their retirements. He is worth it.”

You must be assessed based on doing more for others than anybody else does. That’s been my moniker for all my companies, and it’s been the core. I think that’s what’s missing, to answer your question. It’s, “What is life going to give me?” versus the Kennedy days of, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

How do you help a larger swath of society unwind the addiction to SSRIs, the kind of doom loop, doomscrolling, and the general malaise that then manifests in all these weird ways—the inability to talk to each other, cutting people off because they voted one way versus another? All this stuff just seems so difficult, because all of the social media, mobile technology, and social platforms aren’t going away. They’re here, they’ve permeated everything, and they’re not just going to disappear overnight.

But if you study the youngest generation as they’ve come forward, they’re getting off even Instagram now. They obviously got off Facebook a long time ago. Their parents do that stuff. They’re going to these individual places that are more intimate. They don’t want everybody to know what they’re doing there. The pendulum throws itself so extreme, and then we correct. It’s what we just experienced politically. It’s the same thing.

It’s easy to rationalize that. But I’ll tell you, Stanford came to me during the COVID period because 2 of their professors had gone through my Date with Destiny program. It’s a 5-day total immersion where you rewire yourself and decide what you want. I don’t tell you what your values are or how you’re going to live your life. Both of them had been on medication. Both were clinically depressed. They came back and said, “They have no symptoms. They’re off all their medication. How does this happen?”

We had this long conversation, and he said, “Well, do you have some data?” I said, “Well, I have millions of graduates and stories.” He said, “No, no, like scientific data.” I said, “No, but I’d be open to doing a study.” During COVID, they wanted to longitudinally follow the people who had gone through it.

Oh, wow.

Yes. They put people in and did their own study. I said, “If we’re going to do this, tell me what the standards are. What do the meta-studies show? How many people get well through traditional approaches of drugs and therapy?” I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but it’s crazy. 60% of the people who use drugs or therapy to try to get out of depression make zero improvement. 60%. Forty percent improve, he shared with me, but the average improvement is 50%.

Most are on drugs for the rest of their lives, and he goes, “You should be able to do that with a placebo.” He laughed and said, “By and large, it’s true, in fact.” He said, “Yeah, sort of.” I said, “Well, I know it sounds like hubris or arrogance, but it’s not. I’ve just done this so long.” I said, “We will destroy that.”

I said, “What’s the best study you’ve ever done?” They said it was Johns Hopkins, about 8 years ago. They gave people psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and cognitive therapy for a month. I said, “Well, something had to change—that kind of biochemical shift, right?” It was the greatest result they’d ever seen in psychiatry up until that point. At the end of 6 weeks, 53% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever of depression. There was nothing like it in history.

I said, “That’s my target to beat.” Again, it might sound arrogant, but I said, “With enough experience, I will bet we do it.” You set up the study with all the comparison groups, and he did. They ran the study, and I’m proud to tell you that at the end of 6 weeks, 93% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever. Seven percent had symptoms, but they had lessened massively. Seventeen percent had suicidal ideation coming in; coming out, none did.

They followed up a year later: 72% reduction in negative emotions a year after I’d not seen them, and a 51% increase in positive emotions. Now we’re doing it in business. They did a 1-year study with 1,500 people, and they just finished it.

In business, you know, IBIDA is engagement, right? The most engaged employees in companies are there, and we’ve all seen that drop. If you’re not familiar with it, we usually go through 3 levels: engaged, disengaged—which we now call quiet quitting—and then actively disengaged. That’s hard quitting, where they’re in the company but trying to harm it.

The largest drop in history since COVID has happened in engagement, and the largest increase has been in active disengagement. They took 750 in each group, a test group versus a normal group. In 5 days, they found that a month later, the engagement levels had returned far above what they were pre-COVID. More importantly, without any more interaction with me, because they changed their wiring, over the next year they continued to increase their engagement. They followed them for the full year.

A lot of what you’re doing has its roots in what we call CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and attribution theory—how you interpret what people are saying to you. But you also need a pause when you do have a reaction coming to you, just pausing for a second, then making sure you understand and checking the reality of that.

These are techniques that you actually have in your programs.

Yes, they do. But if you also don't change the physiology of the person, you have a limited range. I'll give you an example.

I think maybe explaining attribution theory would be really good for the audience and why that's so powerful.

Well, I think, if I may, given the limited time, it's more important to understand physical change. Your biochemical changes will last. If I ask you all where you were on 9/11, no matter what country you're in—even if you're not in America—everyone knows where they were, what they saw, and who was there. There's a biochemical change.

If I asked you where you were on 8/11, you wouldn't have a clue. What they did was follow me and see what happened to my body onstage for 12 hours a day, 4 days in a row. They had me wear this huge device, and they took my blood and saliva for hormones every hour on the hour.

They had also done this with Tom Brady. The group had also done this with the Tampa Bay Lightning, who've won multiple times. What they found is what they call championship biochemistry. When Tom Brady is down by 10 points in the 4th quarter and comes back to win, how does that happen? His biochemistry has an explosion of testosterone, which makes you remember everything. That's why it's retained, and it puts you in a place of total focus.

With testosterone, you usually also have the stress hormone cortisol. In Tom's body, when he goes there, the cortisol drops off a cliff. It's unheard of. They call it championship biochemistry. The same thing happens in Tampa. The same thing happens every time I get onstage—not sitting like this, but doing what we do.

What's more important is that they then decided to measure my audience. They did it first before COVID, and then I started doing seminars digitally all around the world. We had 1.3 million people for a 4-day seminar. I usually did 15,000- to 20,000-person stadiums for 4 days, and now that's the size we're able to grow to and scale. We figured out how to make it work.

When they measured people in 15 different countries, it looked like music. They came in, and we suddenly started to go up together and make the same response—the same kind of focus and the same cortisol drop. That's why they believe it's lasting. The same thing happens with engagement, right? It's biochemical.

So I do believe in all the elements of cognitive therapy and neuro-linguistic programming. There are so many, but the unique thing that they saw me do, and that they tried to explain how it lasted, is the biochemical shift.

So pairing CBT with this physical activity and this intensity—that is the secret.

That makes total sense.

Otherwise, it won't last, right? You can make it last by repetition, by affirming. This is why, when we go on a retreat and they organize these corny corporate retreats, it's not corny that they want to do a thrilling experience and go white-water rafting to help people bond, because people's lives are so sedentary. They don't experience this. That's why all you lunatics are jumping in ice-cold baths every year.

Yes. That's why you feel alive.

You must have a very high excitement level. You have to be in a helicopter and jump in cold water to feel alive at this point.

I've been doing this for 18 years. In the last 10 or 12 years, everybody does it now. But yes, I'm also a biohacker. I have to be able to get up and do what I do.

Imagine: I burn 11,300 calories on average in a day. I jump 1,000 times. I'm in a stadium; I'm not just standing there. If you're standing there, you'll be bored out of your mind. I engage, or I'm running up the walls. I'm there with everybody. I could strike at any moment. That's what keeps people fully alive.

But when you do that, I'm jumping 1,000 times and I weigh 290 pounds. Every time you come down, they explain it's 4 times your body weight. So it's 1 million pounds of pressure, you know. I've been doing that since I was basically 19 years old. This is my 48th year doing it.

If you had been diagnosed by the industrial psychological psychiatry complex these days, would they just have said you were a kid with ADHD or something? What do you think?

I don't know what they'd come up with. I'm a freak as far as they're concerned. But you know what's nice now? Virtually every psychological leader—maybe a dozen of them—has endorsed what we do.

In fact, now therapists in various states in the United States can actually study my work and see the results, because there are very few places where you can see an intervention and then follow up to see what the result was a year later. They get credits for that.

If you circle back to when Tom Cruise said, “Hey, listen: exercise, diet, meditation,” and he laid out that there are other ways to deal with depression, everybody was like, “What does he know? These doctors know better.” Now the doctors have all come back to his position, which is: let's focus on your diet, let's focus on your exercise, let's focus on your sleep, and let's focus on your meditation. Those 4 things will do more for you than any pill—correct? In your estimation, 100%?

100%. Yet we have 60% of people in the country on a pill, and most of them have more than 1. Anytime you combine 3 pills, you cannot predict the outcome in your body.

And what about, Tony, the move away from SSRIs now to psychedelics and psilocybin? There are all these cures.

Yes. I'm sure you saw the cover of Newsweek a couple of years ago. It talked about SSRIs and said, “SSRIs don't work.” They don't. They've been proven not to work by the meta-studies, but we're still giving them to millions of people. The side effects are depression and sometimes suicide. It's insane.

Looking for something else to rewire your brain is why people are starting to either mildly dose or heavily dose or go on these substances. The problem there is—there's nothing wrong with it. Anybody wants to do whatever they want to do. I'm not prescriptive about how to do it, but I like the idea of being able to take charge and make conscious decisions.

I've had that experience. I went and investigated it myself directly. I went down into South America and had an experience. It was quite profound, but what are you going to do with it? For some people, it just becomes another way to party, and then you're not going to get any results that really matter.

If you're doing it with a therapist, with intentionality, and with a guide, like I was, it can be different. I was completely against it, and I met Tony Bossis from New York University. I said, “I'm just not into drugs. I'm not a freak, but people around me overuse them and abuse them, so I've always just not done that.”

He said, “Tony, it's not a drug, because a drug you take every day. You've got to take it every day.” He said, “I'll show you.” He showed me videos. He was working with people who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He said, “Watch this.”

He said, “I'm going to show you in advance. This woman is an atheist. She's not like a California atheist, where there might be some God in the trees or something. She's a New York atheist. There is no God.”

He showed me the video. They do 2 different sessions, and they don't know which one is going to be the real one. She comes out at the end of the session where she had the experience, and she said, “I experienced God.” About 96% of the people say it's 1 of the 3 most profound experiences of their life. It was for me.

I used to think I could handle anything, but the one thing I was weak at, I'll be honest with you, was somebody dying, because I had handled that within myself. That's why I went to do it. I don't have a fear of dying. I don't want to die, but I don't have the fear of it anymore.

If you went through deep trauma in your childhood, psychedelics can, I'm told, take you right to that place, and you will have to confront it. That's why doing it in a safe environment is especially important if you're a child of trauma with an alcoholic father, which I had as well. It's very challenging.

I don't recommend going to just a guru or somebody like that. When I went down to South America, there were a lot of people who took advantage of women down there, because once you're in that state, you're really in a different world.

There are people now—there's a big push at UCLA, and they're doing it at Stanford. They're all studying it now, and I think using it in that area could make a difference. But my point is, you get the same results without it, and I'm not suggesting people have to do it one way.

Tony, can I build on Friedberg's question? Happiness is sort of a rate-of-change problem.

Yes.

You're incredibly successful. You're incredibly famous. You have a great family. You're fabulously wealthy. How do you frame your mind in terms of this rate of change so you're seeing progress? Do you do that for yourself?

Yes, of course. I think men and women—it's a generalization—but I think they evaluate life differently. I think most men have grown up in a hierarchical world. Some women do as well, and they have an idea of where they think they should be at a certain time.

Most people aren't there at times, whereas if you're fortunate enough, you're ahead of the game. I got to the point probably 10 years ago where I had done all these things. I didn't have any less enthusiasm, but I didn't have anything that was like, “What am I going to do now?”

I'd done philanthropy my whole life because I got fed, so I started feeding people.

I did it at 17. I fed 2 families, then 4, and I got hooked on it. Then I got my little company involved, and we got to 4 million people—2 million from me and 2 million from the general public.

When I was writing Money: Master the Game, I interviewed Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, and Warren Buffett—all the best in the business. At the same time, I saw that the government cut food stamps—now it’s called the SNAP program—by, I think, $6 billion. It meant every family that needed food would have to go without 1 week of food unless people like us stepped up.

So I called my foundation and said, “How many people have I fed in my lifetime?” I didn’t know the number. They said, “42 million.” I was really gratified by that, but I was also thinking, “What if I did what I did in a whole lifetime in 1 year? What if I fed 50 million people in 1 year? What if I fed 100 million? What about 100 million for 10 straight years and fed 1 billion people in the United States—the richest country in the world—but we have about 20 million people who don’t know where their next meal is going to come from?”

I hooked up with Feeding America to deliver the food, and I’m proud to say we did it in 8 years. But the problem hasn’t gone away. So now I’ve hooked up with Governor Beasley. When I was in the UAE, MBZ introduced me to Governor Beasley. He explained to me that he ran the World Food Programme.

Yes, he won the Nobel Prize for that. MBZ said, “I want you to meet the only guy I know who’s fed more people than you.” I said, “He’s fed a lot more than I have at the UN.” But we sat down, and we became friends.

Now I said to him, “Normally, 80 million people a year are at risk of dying. This year, it’s 385 million because of the war in Ukraine. It’s the breadbasket for most of Africa, and there are 11 countries near famine right now. You don’t read about it in the news because you’re reading about something on somebody’s knuckles, right?”

Then there’s not enough fertilizer because Russia has been cut off, and it made the price triple. Farmers can’t afford it. So I said, “We need a period of time to get to sustainability—10 years, let’s say. How many meals would we need in the meantime just to close the gap?”

He said, “Tony, 50, 60, maybe 70 billion meals.” So I said, “Why don’t we do a 100 billion meals challenge?” I said, “I did 1 billion meals. I did it in 10 years—100 million meals a year. I wasn’t a billionaire when I started. I’ve been blessed, obviously, but there have got to be 99 other people like me who care, or businesses, or countries.”

We began that process 2½ years ago. In the beginning, it did not go well, but I’m proud to tell you that in the first 1½ years, we got 30 billion meals. I’ll be announcing at the UN this fall—I can’t tell you the numbers; I’m supposed to wait until then—but it’s more than double that. So we’re well beyond that.

But right now, in Darfur—thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate your applause. I think we also want sustainability, and any of you who want to donate, I’ll match it. I do it at Feeding America. You donate $1 million, I’ll match it. You can put in $10, and I’ll match it.

But now, in Darfur, we have these war zones. There are people right now surrounded by those rebels—a million people right now—and no one’s funding anything because no one can get in. They’ll shoot the plane out of the sky.

Governor Beasley and I have teamed up, and we found this retired military group that wants to do good works. They’ve done it for a while, and we’re buying the C-130s. I’m donating the first million meals for the week. I got 2 people to match me, so we have 3 weeks’ worth of food.

We’re going to fly in and airdrop all that food. I’m going to the UAE because I know the leaders there. We’re going to Saudi Arabia, and I’m going to say, “You can’t shoot this down. This is not political. There are no weapons. It’s just food.” We’re going to prove it works.

Then we have a tour from June 7 through the 15th with all those leaders to hopefully get them to step up. Qatar has already stepped up and said they’re going to give 30 million, and we’re going to save those lives. People will die otherwise, and everybody just gives up. I’m not a person who gives up.

I just want to say, to answer your question, that for anybody, I think we all need moonshots. We all need something to go for. Have you ever achieved a goal and then there’s a drop because we’re made to keep growing?

When I did that, I was like, “Okay, my wife and I found some kids who were trafficked. We couldn’t believe it.” I said, “I want to save as many people in the city I grew up in.” It was 30,000 people. Now we’re at 76,000 kids we’ve saved.

I worked with some of the best organizations and helped make a movie some of you may have seen last year or 2 years ago that was all about this process. It blew up on July 4—the movie Sound of Freedom.

Is it hard for you to frame your mind around a goal that’s measured differently from the thing that you were successful at? Your goal is to make money, and then you make a ton of money, and then you’re like, “Now my goal is to do something philanthropic.” It’s a totally different measurement.

What happens, as you said, even if you’re motivated by it, is that a lot of the people around you may be very unmotivated by it and almost pull you back from it. How do you think about that?

I’ll tell you, I’ve done this my whole life. Peter Guber is our mutual friend—you know Peter. One time, I was sharing with him my frustration that people weren’t helping these children or helping with trafficking because it sounds so bad. You don’t want to hear about it.

Peter really was a student. He said, “Tony, you taught me this. People do things for different reasons. Some people donate because they want their name on the wall. Some people donate because they’re guilty because they inherited their money. But some people donate because they really care. You don’t care. Just meet their needs.”

I found that I had a friend who was on a plane the other day. I’ve known him 44 years, and a person was reading my book. This is my book where I interviewed 150 people who are the top regenerative medicine scientists in the world. It’s a big book—700 pages—and this guy was marking it and going crazy.

My friend loves to see how people respond. He said, “So what do you think of that book?” The guy goes, “Oh, my God, stem cells and this and that. You can’t believe what you can do with your body and how you can change it.”

Then he said, “What do you think of the author?” The guy goes, “Oh, he seems like such a nice guy. He took nothing from all his books. He donated it all. He feeds all these people.”

“Well, but he’s rich,” he said. “So it must be easy for him.”

My buddy turned to him and said, “What if I told you I’d known Tony for 44 years? I knew him when he had $10 in his pocket and didn’t know if he was going to get his next meal. He gave $5 to a guy in the street. He taught me that if I won’t give a dime out of a dollar, I’m never going to give $100 million out of $1 billion.”

You start now, and your life is different. I invite people to find a moonshot. Mine started with feeding 2 families, then it became 4, and then it became larger.

My economics are obviously extraordinary, but what drives me now are all the things I’m doing. I need tens of millions of dollars for what I donate.

Let me ask you a question on that. How do you think about the relationship between focus and effectiveness? My experience has been that the more we try to do—the broader the range of things we try to do—the harder it is to do any 1 thing exceptionally well and have these outsized returns.

There’s a nonlinear relationship between focus and outcome. The more you concentrate your time, energy, and capital on 1 thing, the more nonlinear it becomes—how well that thing does when you’re an effective person.

You have movie projects, book projects, speaking engagements, businesses, ownership in sports teams, and people calling you. How do you think about focusing your time and the effectiveness that you can then have in the things that you choose to do?

I believe in concentration of power, but I don’t have the limitation of thinking it has to be every moment on just 1 thing. I actually built a system for myself when I was really young and had my second business. I wasn’t doing well at my first one, so I started a second one. Very brilliant. It’s like saying, “I’m now a terrible parent. Let me have another kid.” That’s what most people do as entrepreneurs.

I knew I needed to take control of my time, so I took these time-management courses. You had a little book in those days and your A, B, and C priorities. I did it for about 2 weeks, and after a while I was like, “There’s no way I can do everything on my list.” I was frustrated. Who can relate to this in your own life?

Every time-management system does the same thing. I don’t know if it’s digital or not. You start with the same question. Thinking is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

As I said that, you’re going to think and ask yourself, “Is that true or not?” You’re going to evaluate it through your references. That’s a question, isn’t it? We could take you all the way down the line, but for simplicity’s sake, the question “What do I need to do?” is the wrong question.

So I will tell you this: When President Clinton said, “What should I do?” I taught myself something different.

I said, “I need to control my focus and concentrate it.” But I also need to have purpose behind it because purpose is stronger than an objective. I’m going to make a billion dollars—for what, though? The purpose—that’s where the energy and the fuel are. And then I need a map. I called it RPM, like increasing your RPMs to get from here to there.

Then I ask, “What do I want? What’s the measurable result? Why am I doing it? And then what’s the map—the massive action plan?” And then I go find the 20% of things that will give me 80% of the progress. And then I put things in categories. I have companies in categories. I have my family life in a category. My body’s in a category. Every week, I predetermine what the most important outcomes for the week are. When you do that, you’re able to have that concentration of power.

And where I am, I’m there 1 million%. I found that the skill of concentration doesn’t have to be just one thing. In your businesses, you get great leaders. Obviously, I couldn’t do all these things myself. But when I’ve got great partners—when you’ve got partners who are extraordinary in the health area—I created this company called Fountain Life, and I got Peter Diamandis as my partner. He’s a genius. I partnered with Sam Nazarian, some of you know from SBE, right? He created Mondrian and SLS hotels, and we’re building 15 extraordinary luxury hotels around the world where you can go and be scanned and have everything there. Now, I love it. Even though it’s too much, you love it. And I have time for my daughter, which I adore, right? She’s 4 years old.

I’m saying it in slight jest because you are hyper-efficient. You’ve got this crazy energy level. There is a theory that sometimes people become a little too addicted to success and to improving themselves. Do you ever stop and just enjoy the day and not try to improve everything? Do you ever stop and just laugh and maybe enjoy some sushi and play golf with your friends and play some cards, or does everything have to be the 78,000,000th meal and person you saved?

No. Well, there’s a part of me that’s that way, for sure.

Really? What do you do?

No, there’s a part of me—the first part that’s as crazy as you describe—but there’s another part of me that values love and relationship above all else.

Got it.

Peter’s one of my dearest friends of 35 years. He was down here in Miami, called me up, and we had everything booked. I moved everything, and we spent 2 hours just staying out together because I love him dearly. He’s 82 or 83 years old right now. I don’t know a better human being. He’s my priority. My daughter’s my priority. My outcomes change when there’s something more important, right? That’s there.

But I’ve also learned that I have to be able to turn the switch off, and I do that. Ray Dalio is a good friend, and learning to meditate was something I thought I’d never do in my life. But I’ve developed a simpler pattern for myself, and meditation is how I start my days. I have to take care of my body, and when everybody else goes to bed, that’s when I get my thinking time. So from midnight till 3 or 4, for me, is usually my time.

Are you like a 3-hour sleeper or a 4-hour sleeper?

No, more like 4 and a half to 5. Not ideal—5 is ideal for me—but I can certainly do that. That’s always been that way. Not when I was a kid, but once I discovered my passion. You’ve all heard the phrase, right? The 2 most important days of your life are the day you’re born and the day you discover what you’re born for. When I discovered that, the energy in my body changed radically.

Do you think about mortality a lot? I’m curious. I know you’re into stem cells. We’re all getting to a certain age, and we’re all going to the same destination. Looking back on your life and finding meaning in that—I know some people our age start thinking about legacy. Does that matter to you? Are you thinking, “Hey, how many years do I have left?”

I never thought of that until about 64. I’m 65 now. I never did. So, just in the last year, you started thinking about it?

Was there something that caused that to happen?

My daughter, I think—having my daughter come along. I had her at 61.

You had a daughter at 61?

Yeah. She’s 4 years old.

4 years old. Wow.

Yeah, so I’ve got a 50-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old.

Got it. I was confused by the math when you said all that, and I was asking the question because, you know, in your brain, it’s all questions and answers. I told my wife originally, I said, “I’m going to have a kid by 50.” I said, “I don’t want to be there at my kid’s high school reunion—or, excuse me, graduation—and be 70 years old.”

But I look at people like Peter or Steve Wynn. I have a whole group of friends who are in their 80s. Peter’s doing more today than he did when he was 45.

Yeah, and so I look at that and say, you’ve got to take care of your body.

There are things you don’t predict. My eye may look a little weird to some of you—you may not notice—but about 5 weeks ago, I started to feel irritation in my bladder and had a hard time breathing. It was very weird for me because I’m very intense about the way I do hyperbaric oxygen and cryotherapy. So it’s really weird for me not to have that.

I went and got tested at Fountain Life, where we have our stuff, and they found I had a massive amount of arsenic in my body. They measure it on a scale of 0 to 5; 50 would be off the charts. I was at 3:45. It was so bad that the first thing he said was, “You’ve got to watch your eyes.” Five days later, my retina detached, which can make you blind.

So I went in for emergency surgery here in Miami with one of the best doctors out here. Normally, you have the surgery, and then you have to lie on your stomach for a week and not get up, looking down, because they put this gas behind the retina. But fortunately, I put Bobby Kennedy together with Trump. He’s a good friend. I called him, and he got me connected with top guys at 2 different hospitals. They said, “This is the guy. We’ve got it all together.”

He said, “I think this is not as effective. It’s not like 90% effective; it’s like 70%.” He said, “I can’t imagine you lying on your stomach for 7 straight days and nights, not moving.” I said, “I can’t either.” And he said, “If I do this, it’s like a belt around your eye, and you’ll be able to sit up at least.” That was only 3 and a half weeks ago, so this eye is still having some issues.

Yesterday, I found out from Fountain Life that there’s a new approach to your immune system. All this is coming out because my immune system was affected by these metals. When you think you’re aging, often what it is is poisons in your body—metals in your body. It’s so crazy.

There’s a man named Dr. Xiao, and I’ve seen everything. I wrote Life Force. I know of 150 of the best regenerative doctors in the world. I know of them all. I’ve interviewed them all. Dr. Zho has created this approach. I’ve done stem cells. I healed my shoulder with stem cells; I didn’t have to go through surgery. But he does what he calls re-education of your immune system.

My beta cells were through the floor from all these metals, so now all the other things your body would fight off are coming through, right? My whole body was going into reaction. He discovered the stem cells that are in the blood—not MSC cells, but these blood cells—and he’s worked 25 years to do it. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

He does plasmapheresis. You probably have heard of it, where they take blood out and put it through a filter, and it can be very useful. I’ve had that before. But what he does is take your blood through and take your white blood cells—your immune system—out overnight. He puts it through a filter with cord blood stem cells. You don’t actually put someone else’s cord blood stem cells in you; it’s the intelligence that gets transferred. Then he puts it back in your body, and they spread and change your immune system back 20 years.

That sounds like a ridiculous promotion.

This guy’s not a promoter at all, and it’s all science. What got me to go there is that Dr. Helen from our place at Fountain Life showed me this ALS patient. ALS is usually a death sentence, and this guy was shaking and couldn’t lift his hands above here. He did the process, and 3 weeks later he was doing this. No exaggeration.

They do type 1 diabetes and turn it around—any autoimmune disease. Most of aging is really the breakdown of the immune system. That’s why we’re seeing so many cancers after COVID and the injections. A lot of young people are experiencing these turbo cancers because their immune systems have been harmed. When people think about aging, it’s really the immune system. So, the people who are going with alopecia, where they have no hair.

I met one woman, and she got a full head of hair. She's 70 years old and got all her hair back. It's in New Jersey, and he's on an IND. So he's in Phase 3, though—he's gone through his Phase 3. He's doing his submission, and we're going to bring it to Fountain Life here because there's nothing like it I've seen.

But there are things like that. If you stay well and take care of yourself now over the next 5 to 10 years, the kinds of transformations are going to allow us to be in a position where every year you could be a year younger, or at least maintain where you are. I mean, it's not science fiction.

David Friedberg talks about this all the time on the show. We're 10 years behind you, or maybe 15 in some cases—or even 20, actually, I think. We're this very interesting generation that might get to benefit from some of these incredible technological advancements.

You absolutely will. Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Robbins. Thank you so much. Bring it in. Thanks for tuning in to this amazing episode we had with Tony Robbins. And thank you Tony Robbins for joining us. Our new bestie here at Allin. If you want to come to our next event, it's the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. fourth year for All-In Summit. Go to allin.com/events to apply. A very special thanks to our new partner, OKX, the new money app. OKX was the sponsor of the McLaren F1 team, which won the race in Miami. Thanks to Haidider and his team, an amazing partner and an amazing team. We really enjoyed spending time with you. And OKX launched their new crypto exchange here in the US. If you love All-In, go check them out. And a special thanks to our friends at Circle. They are the team behind USDC. Yes, your favorite stable coin in the world. USDC is a fully backed digital dollar redeemable one for one for USD. It's built for speed, safety, and scale. They just announced the Circle Payments Network. This is enterprisegrade infrastructure that bridges the gap between the digital economy and outdated financial reality. Go check out USDC for all your stable coin needs. And special thanks to my friends including Shane over at Poly Market, Google Cloud, Salana, and BVNK. We couldn't have done it without y'all. Thank you so much. We'll let your winners ride. Rainman David. We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you. Queen of [Music] your winners. Besties are gone. That is my dog taking notice in your driveways. Oh man, my habitasher will meet me up. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. [Music] We need to get back. [Music] I'm going all in.