Tony Robbins is a legend. He’s known around over the world as #1 New York Times bestselling author, life & business strategist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and peak performance expert. He has consulted with and/or coached some of the world’s greatest athletes, entertainers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and four US presidents. He has dedicated his life to helping people change their lives for the better.
Tony is a good friend and have had the opportunity to be front row in his life-changing multi-day seminars. From mental training to visualization to priming and even walking on fire (hot coals), I’ve used Tony’s techniques to help me bring CreativeLive to life and successfully sell that business. I think he’s one of the most compelling thought leaders of our time.
This mission has lead him to find new solutions and breakthroughs to improve peak performance, prevent disease, and improve long term health. It’s the basis of his latest book, Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love.
After being told his own health problems were irreversible, Tony experienced firsthand how new regenerative technology not only helped him heal but also made him stronger than ever. The good news is that these medical breakthroughs aren’t just for the wealthy. Every 18 months, technology doubles in power and halves in cost, making treatments dramatically cheaper over time.
Of course, medicine isn’t the only way we can increase our health and happiness. Tony helps us deconstruct the patterns of top performers to understand how our mindset and daily habits can transform our quality of life.
“Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.” Tony Robbins
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Patterns of Success
Identifying and using patterns that have worked for peak performers can help “save the 10 or 20 years of learning by trial and error to get to that point.” Deconstructing the lives and practices of many of the world’s most successful leaders and performers, Tony has found a number of patterns emerge time and time again. In our conversation, we discuss three common patterns: mission, priming & gratitude, and doing the hardest thing first.
Have a Mission
Have something that you care about more than yourself. “It could be your family, photography, your business, or something you want to do in your community”, says Tony.
When people have something that’s more important to them than themselves, they don’t run out of energy and excitement.
For many, progress itself can be fulfilling. It’s easy to get comfortable and not grow when it’s just about you, he said, adding that progress is the secret to happiness. “If you’re not making progress, you’re not growing.”
Priming & Gratitude
Tony describes priming as the act of taking time to adjust our thoughts and emotions so that we can live at a peak state.
“Priming is most powerful when completed in the morning to set a productive and powerful tone for your day. It’s also useful for mastering your emotions as it gives you a moment to take a breath and control your reaction,” he says.
Tony starts his morning routine by plunging into freezing cold water. He attributes the cold water’s power as a key to physical and mental health.
Next, a brief gratitude practice- written or not.
“The two emotions that mess us up are anger and fear. I practice gratitude because you can’t be grateful and angry simultaneously, and you can’t be grateful and fearful simultaneously.”
He also devotes a few minutes to a “prayer-type experience” and then focuses on three things he wants to accomplish. “But I feel them as done, and I feel the gratitude of it.”
Another daily habit is to leave an audio message for someone that contains a “sincere compliment.” To Tony, appreciating the people around us sincerely “deepens” our relationships and helps us have a better life experience.
Do the hardest thing first
Difficult tasks require intense energy and focus. Utilizing your most productive energy early allows you to pair the most difficult and complex tasks with your peak mental state.
“How you start and end your day are two really important things. But of the two, I think how you start your day is the most important.
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Chase Jarvis: Hey everybody what's up, it's Chase. Welcome to another episode of The Chase Jarvis Live Show here on CreativeLive. This is the show where I sit down with the world's top performers and I do everything I can to unpack their brain to help you live your goals in career, hobby and life.
Today's guest is a legend, maybe even the legend, Tony Robbins. Tony is an entrepreneur, a bestselling author, and the nation's number one high performance business and life strategist, helping the world's very best achieve their goals from athletes like Serena Williams and Ronaldo to business icons, like Oprah and heads of state around the world.
In his coaching programs and personal development programs and events he's helped more than 50 million people, yours truly included. I shared that I studied with Tony before in person, as a guest at his retreats and from mental training to visualization, to priming and setting goals.
Some of the goals that brought CreativeLive to life and helped me sell that business. Tony has been right there by my side, helping me through the individual coaching programs and his various videos and events around the world. Absolute legend.
Now this episode is dense and powerful. Some highlights, we talk about mindset as the most powerful tool in the world. We also talk about the most important habit, which is having something that you care about more than yourself as a fundamental driver.
We talk about how progress equals happiness, his new book, which is absolutely incredible called Life Force: How Breakthroughs and Precision Medicine Can Help Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those That You Love.
This is the result of interviews and work with more than 150 of the world's top medical pioneers, new breakthroughs changing everything about how we navigate medicine, completely new paradigms for treating and beating diseases like cancer, like genetic errors, autoimmune diseases, and more.
It is an absolutely incredible episode. I'm going to let you enjoy this, step out of the way, again, yours truly, and the one and only Tony Robbins.
Chase Jarvis: The one and only, the legend himself Tony Robbins. Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here, bud.
Tony Robbins: Thanks Chase. Nice to see you.
Chase Jarvis: It's really good to see you. The last time I saw you I was walking on fire with you somewhere in Florida. I don't know how you did it, but you talked me into walking across some hot coals. So thank you very much for teaching me how to use my mind.
We're going to go a lot bigger today, but I first for the eight out of the 150,000 people that are listening, for those eight people, I would love for you to orient us in space around your area of focus, of work. I mean, we know that you're the number one life and business strategist, the peak performance expert, the New York Times best seller, but what gets you up in the morning? Start there.
Tony Robbins: Well, I've always been obsessed with kind of answer the question of what changes the quality of people's lives. I want to have an impact. It isn't because I was just so intellectual about it. Just, I grew up with a lot of pain and suffering, so I don't want anybody else to have it.
And I love to see people reclaim themselves. And so I became obsessed at a very early age. I didn't have a lot of role models. So I took a speed reading course and my whole goal was read a book a day, which of course I didn't do, but I read about 700 books over seven years, all near human development, psychology physiology.
I developed certain skills where I could take somebody with a lifetime phobia and wipe it out, not in seven years, which was a typical, five, six, seven years, but in 30 minutes and I kind of built my career by challenging psychiatrists and psychologists initially.
As a young kid, trying to prove myself, today now I've trained, I have a partner, Cloe Madanes, and we've trained almost a hundred thousand therapists around the world in the techniques we do, they actually get credits to learn the techniques.
But then we started working with athletes early days. It was Olympic athletes and Andre Agassi. And then, over the years, I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of world series, NBA championship brings for all the teams that I've had the chance to work with, NHL hockey teams and so forth.
So I applied it to sports. And then I started applying the fundamentals of really understanding pattern recognition. In other words, if you're a great photographer, you're a great musician, by the way, I loved your book and I love the opening in your book. I just, I hadn't read it a long time. I pulled it back open again.
I love life isn't about finding fulfillment and success. It's about creating it, right? I know your whole thing's creativity, but to me, that's my exact same mission.
I just attack it slightly differently. But to me, it's about pattern recognition, because that's what makes things no longer be chaos, then it's pattern utilization. So use stress or stress uses you as an example, right?
And then it's pattern creation, which is what we're both about. And so what I've tried to do is learn from the patterns of people of the most successful in the world and save people the 10 or 20 years of learning by trial and error to get to that point.
And then getting people, it's like playing somebody else's music on a piano, right? You play other people's music and eventually you know enough, you can stand on those shoulders. Now you can create your own because you have so many reference points, and that's what's evolved for me. So now I have 105 companies. It's ridiculous.
I actively manage about 16 of them, but we do about $7 billion in business and variety of industries from AI to education, to my resort in Fiji and sports teams that I own. And I love the game of life, which is again, figuring out those three tools and helping people do that.
Because if you have kids, and I have five kids and five grandkids and you say, how do I set them up to win in the next 20 years when 40% of the jobs we now know will be gone, replaced by algorithms and robots and obviously various tech approaches to life.
Then the one thing that gives you power is the ability to see those patterns so you're not in chaos, use them and again, eventually create them and that's what you teach as well. So I just do it in a little different way.
And this is my 45th year doing this. I started when I was two, of course. And so now, I take subjects like I spent after the 2008 debacle, I've coached Paul Tudor Jones, one of the top 10 financial traders for 24 years. So I know a bit in that area and I thought as much as I know, I want to help people.
So I came up with this idea that I'm going to go interview 50 of the smartest financial people in the world. People that all self made billionaires, all started with nothing, nobody from the lucky sperm club and see what they did. They all did it differently and then put it in books.
And so I put in books and made it simple enough that they're number one New York Times bestsellers, but more importantly, people change their lives.
And now my latest focus, this new book called Life Force is really the power of these breakthroughs that are happening in regenerative medicine, you know what? The technology revolution that we've all experienced, that, I'm old enough. I had one of the original cell phones that was a foot long, weighed two pounds, cost 10 grand or the Motorola. You'd probably know what I'm talking about.
You had to charge it for six hours so you can get 30 minutes of talk time. Now your apple phone, you get for free with a contract for the services. And it's got a hundred times the power that they had in the computers that ran the Apollo mission. Right?
So the same thing is happening now with human technology. Because we're all coat. And so I'm sure you've heard about CRISPR and some of the breakthroughs there with gene editing.
Well I've discovered there are the dozens and dozens of tools like that right now that most people never see because they're in this area of standard of care and I needed some of those changes for myself. So I took me on a journey and so I really wanted to help anybody else I could.
And so I wrote this book, and then we're donating a hundred percent of profits I've done with my last three books, the same thing I was fed when I was 11 years old and we had no food. So I've fed 42 million people over my lifetime.
And about seven years ago, when I'm interviewing all these billionaires, I saw the Congress cut food stamps. They call it the snap program now, by $6 billion, which means every family that actually needs help would have to go without food one week out of every month, unless people like you and I stepped in.
So I set a goal, what if I fed 50 million people in a year instead of a lifetime? What if I did a hundred million? What if I fed a billion people? So that was seven years ago and we're up to 850 million meals. So we're going to hit the billion a little bit early and 20 million meals are going to come from this book to give you an idea and the balance of the profits are going to take care of people by research on Alzheimer's, cancer and heart disease.
Chase Jarvis: And that's just the beginning. So we're going to get to the book in a sec. I don't know if you can see, I've just been towing this thing around for the last 10 days, dog earing pages. I do want to get to that, but before we go, I want to stay at this 30,000 foot level for a second.
Tony Robbins: Sure.
Chase Jarvis: I think it's indisputable that you truly are the number one life and business strategist, peak performance coach. You've coached more number ones in the world, more heads of state. And the words that again, having been a guest at many of your programs, I want to say thank you very much.
Tony Robbins: My pleasure.
Chase Jarvis: Part of what you have been able to discern as, your phrase I believe is success leaves clues. And whether it's the financial world, whether it's the world that we're going to talk about, precision medicine, I'm interested in starting out at habits because the folks that are listening right now are watching the show.
There are things that they can do today. And it's my hope that you can start us off as we go a little bit deeper into your material. What are the key habits that you see the most successful and not just successful, but fulfilled people that you've worked with, what are some of the key habits that they have in their lives?
So that we can orient, again, before we get into money and specifically precised medicine, what are some key habits that people at home should start at?
Tony Robbins: First, I love your question. I want to point out what you just said. You didn't just ask for success. You said, and fulfillment. Because success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, you see people that have succeeded in business or finance, but then they take their own lives. And there have been many really wonderful people that have done this to themselves over the last few years. And so it's really critical to have both.
I think the most important habit to start with is having something that you care about more than yourself, a mission. It could be your family, it could be photography. It could be your business. It could be something you want to do in your community. It could be humanity, but I don't mean virtual signaling. I mean, you know what you're really driven by. And when people have something that they care about more than themselves, they don't run out of energy.
They don't run out of excitement because if it's just about you, it's easy to get comfortable, and comfort makes you not grow. People ask me all the time, Tony, you meet millions of people. What's the secret to happiness?
And I'll always laugh and say, it's pretty simple, it's one word, progress. Progress equals happiness. Because if you're not making progress, you're not growing. And there's only a few rules in the universe. They're not mine. They're the universe.
Everything grows or dies, and everything contributes beyond itself or it's eventually eliminated by evolution. And so for me, growing and giving is the game. And so you got to find something that makes you want to keep growing and giving so you don't get comfortable.
I mean, I don't have to work another day of my life. I'm fortunate enough at this stage of my life and success in what I've done. But now I work harder than I ever have because it's so fulfilling.
So then what are the habits? You need that first discipline of something you care about more, not virtue signaling, you really do. It'll get you up early, it'll keep you up late, it'll excite you. For me that's seeing people transform. That's seeing people reclaim themselves, but everybody has their own thing.
And in finding it, creativity for you is not just photography obviously, it's like, you've got this base of showing people how to create. And to me that's progress, right? So it's like, you can't sit at the table of success too long or you get fat and bored, right?
So we need to feel alive. A lot of people achieve a goal and then their brain goes, is this all there is? Or even if you achieve the goal you loved, it's like you loved it, how long did you stay excited about it? Whatever you succeeded at?
You may have worked on it for years. Did you stay excited for a year? Almost never. Nine months, six months, three months, three weeks, three days, three hours, because you're not supposed to stay just satisfied because our nature is to grow and when we grow we have something to give.
So to me, that's the core. Everyone has different disciplines, but I think how you start your day is one of the most important ones, because it frames everything, right? And there's a concept known as priming, priming is, a lot of people think their thoughts are their thoughts and they're not, their thoughts have been primed by the environment. And there are many studies done on this.
So I like to prime consciously, but I'll give you an example. Harvard did a study and they had people in our country here in America, at least, there's a belief in a lot of people culturally, that people that are from Asia are superior in math.
There are a lot of people that believe if you're female, you're not as good at math or sciences, both of which by the way are not true. They're gross generalizations. But these are cultural belief structures. And people tend to buy into cultural belief structures, and then it controls what you experience.
So they did a study with people, women specifically, and Asian women. And they gave them the SAT test on math. But they did one thing only, one thing before they started, they asked them one question. In one case they said, what's your gender? And the others they asked, what's your ethnicity?
It's insane. The people that were asked their gender scored 20% lower on the test on average. The one asked who are Asian about what their ethnicity were scored almost 20%, almost a 40% difference in those numbers.
There's examples that have been done over and over again with people being influenced without them knowing what's going on. So I like to prime myself and most people I know do something to prime themselves for their day. Now some people do it by athletic demands, working out in the morning, some people do it by taking you on the biggest challenge first, because if you take on that big challenge, you get it concurred you get momentum and you want to do other things.
So everyone I've ever interviewed who's the best has some ritual that sets them up. But it's different. My own rituals are I start my morning, very first thing I do, I go on this freezing cold water.
It's not because I like freezing cold water. I'm fortunate enough in my homes around the world. And I have multiple homes because I travel so much. I have these cold plunges I've created that are 56 degrees.
And in my home in Sun Valley, I literally walk through the snow in the winter and I go in the river, which is usually about 42, 43 degrees, sometimes a little colder. And I don't do it because it's fun under this life. In fact, I can't think of a day where I woke up thinking I can't wait to get in that cold water, but I do it for two reasons. There's a health benefit. Every cell in your body, all the blood flows change, your lymph flow is changed in a millisecond when you get in water that cold.
But also it's the mental discipline of teaching your brain, when I say go, we go, I don't walk up and go, oh, let me wait until I'm a little warmer, maybe five more minutes or, so I've done it for years and years and years I say go, we go.
And so my brain has learned when I say I'm doing this, there's no internal negotiation. It just happens. And so that's a habit that I've developed in myself. Next habit that I do is I do this priming process. And if anyone else learned it, rather than me try and explain it here, it's only 10 minutes.
I was never a meditator, but it really involves you doing about three minutes of those 10 minutes of gratitude, thinking of three moments in your life you're grateful for that are real, not remembering them over there, remembering like you're in the front seat of the rollercoaster right now like you're there.
So your biochemistry changes and it's real. It's not fake. And the reason I use gratitude, it sounds namby pamby, but it's because the two emotions that mess us up are anger and fear. And so you can't be grateful and angry simultaneously, and you can't be grateful and fearful simultaneously.
So most people have a highway to stress and a dirt road to happiness. I start my day by wiring myself and I do it every day. So it just starts to happen, right? Naturally to find that.
And then I have three minutes of kind of a prayer type experience, and then three minutes where I focus on three to thrive. Three things I want to accomplish, but I see them as done. I feel them as done. I feel the gratitude of it.
And so it literally primes your brain to perceive things differently. Then the third thing I do usually is leave a message for somebody. And I leave a message, usually audio messages and I just leave a sincere compliment, but I don't go, you're a great guy or something.
I think it, "John, I saw you yesterday or last week when we were with those kids, everybody else walked off and you spent an extra 10 minutes with them, I just thought that was so reflective of your spirit and your soul and how much you care."
And I do that because it's sincere. But it also makes me think about what do I appreciate about all the people around me and it deepens your relationships. And then the last thing is I try to do the most difficult thing of the day first, so that boom, you crush that and then you got momentum. Everything else is easy.
So how you start your day and how you end your day are two really important things. But of the two, I think how you start your day maybe the most important.
Chase Jarvis: Although I will owe you debt of gratitude, I've still primed to this very day something you personally trained me at in Florida. I still train. I do that every day. And I also am a cold water person except 57 sounds kind of soft Tony, I don't know, I'm in the 45 range, I don't know.
Tony Robbins: I can't get my thing any colder, but I get the river colder. But I will say if people want to [inaudible] explain it, they go to Tonyrobbins.com/priming, there's no cost, there's a video there. Show you how to do it. So just go to my website/priming and you can learn how to do it if you want to.
Chase Jarvis: It's excellent we've also done a show here on it. I don't know about a hundred episodes ago, but very, very powerful. And I like the idea of success leaving clues. Now, as someone who has dedicated their life to something bigger than themselves.
I think the word that you used is helping people transform their lives. You've gone very deep on a number of topics. Early on it was personal achievement, success, fulfillment. Some of the things we've already talked about, you mentioned mastering money after the financial crisis, bringing together some of the best minds, Ray Dalio, others, to really dissect how to manage your money as it's often obviously a key to taking care of ourselves, the people that we love.
This most recent endeavor, that again, the book, and one of the reasons that you're on the show today, Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Help Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love.
So I would like to do a short, deep dive here and understand, I believe from reading the book, but also conversations that we've had, that you became interested in precision medicine because of your own experiences, which I think are the fundamental drivers.
You can get interested in things that affect other people, but if something affects you deeply, you're more interested in it. So can you share with us why you started caring about this, the future of precision medicine from your own experience as the starting point?
Tony Robbins: Well, I'll take you back just a second to the initial drives, because I've been focused on being kind of a bio-hacker for a long time. But it really started based on fear. When I was early in my career, I worked 20 hour days. I tried to give people everything I possibly could.
And I was fortunate enough to work with some great athletes and President Clinton and a whole series of very high level players. So very quickly by comparison to what most people would imagine, I became successful in what I was doing, no one sees what's behind the curtain, but in my head it was like, wow, this is amazing.
And then there's the survival part of our brain that I had not really learned to manage. And that part of my brain's like, why do I have all the success so early? Well, it must be because I'm going to die young. It's the crazy thing that our human mind can do. The mind can do crazy things.
And then I started obsessing about it. This is like when I'm 18, 19 years old, to give you an idea, 20 years old initially and they just got bigger. But as I obsessed about it, sure enough, it shows up in your life. And the first time it showed up in my life was not me.
It did show up with me, but first it showed up with my girlfriend. She showed up one day and was crying uncontrollably. My mom, my mom, your mom, what? "She has cancer. They sent her home to die. She got nine weeks to live."
If it had been me, I don't know if I would've showed up the same level, but most of us will do more for someone we love than we for ourselves. And so my whole thing is, she's not dying, look, successfully is closed there are people who have been stage 4 cancer, tons of them, thousands of them that have turned around and said that we are not going to let this happen. I'm going to read every book. I'm going to find every answer.
And so I found this book way back then called One Answer to Cancer. It was written by this dentist who was given, I think it was six weeks to live. He had pancreatic cancer, which is one of the most deadly. And 15 years later, he writes this book and he described how he detoxed his body, took pancreatic enzymes.
And so I gave her this book and said, "They say you're going to die, you don't want to die, this is best book I've read so far. I don't know. It's the perfect one, but maybe you want to read this, see if it appeals, you want to try this."
And then I gave her As a Man Thinketh to kind of manage her mind. And within few weeks of doing this regimen, she felt sizeably better. Her energy restored. And then I think it was about six weeks later, eight weeks later, it was eight weeks, she had this protruding tumor on her back shoulder and then she had something in her feminine organs and you couldn't physically see it anymore.
And she's supposed to die at nine weeks. And so at 10 weeks the doctor said, maybe we should do exploratory surgery. And they went in, the only thing left of the tumor they found was something a size of the end of my Pinky's fingernail. And the doctor said, "This is a miracle." And she goes, "It is a miracle, but let me tell you what I did."
He goes, "No, no, no. Don't tell me what he did. It doesn't matter. This is a miracle, this is spontaneous remission." She was in her forties. She's now in her eighties, still alive.
And so that shifted me from victim-hood to I'm going to know everything I can about health and I'm going to be a bio-hacker. And then you've been to my seminars, you've got 10, 15,000 people going 12 hours a day when they wouldn't sit for a three hour movie. So I got to hold that level of energy.
So I learned all these tools to make my body do things that are kind of inhuman. I burn 11,300 calories in an average day on stage. I have this group that's worked with Tom Brady and a lot of Olympic athletes. And so they've monitored me over three years. I jump a thousand times in a day, because I'm going up the building, around keeping everybody engaged.
Chase Jarvis: I've seen it in person, it's impressive.
Tony Robbins: I'm 280 pounds. So they explain to me every time you come down, it's four times your body weight. So it's a thousand jumps times a thousand pounds, it's a million pounds of pressure in one day. So eventually that I was still able to do that. But then when I was 32, I'm a helicopter pilot, so you have to renew your license by getting a physical every two years.
So I went to just get a normal physical. And then my assistant kept saying, the doc wants to talk to you. And I said, "Just tell him to send me the report," it's like, I didn't have time for this. And then one night I come home and there's a note stapled to my door saying, "Hey, you got to call the doctor, he says it's an emergency."
Well, I didn't get home until 12:30 in the morning. And so, I called, no answer. And then your mind goes crazy, right? I've lived all these good ways, but yes, I'm flying airplanes all the time. Maybe it's radiation. Do I have cancer?
And then it's like, I developed this part of myself. It's like, okay, a courageous person dies once, a coward dies a thousand deaths, let me wait and see what it is. But the next morning I called the doc and he says, "You got a tumor in your brain."
I said, "What? There's nothing wrong with me, I came from my physical." He goes, "No, you have a tumor at the base of your skull, it's in your pituitary." And he said, "It's definitely there." I said, "How could you possibly know that?" And he said, "Well, I estimated you have a lot of growth hormone." I'm like, "Well, I'm 6'7, I was 5'1 in high school. I got hands bigger than your head. And I got size 16 shoe, how'd you figure that out." Right?
But he said, "No, so I did these tests and you absolutely have it." And I said, and he want to rush me into surgery immediately. And I was leaving the next day to go to the south of France for seminars.
I was like, "Whoa, whoa, slow down." And even then, because of Jenny, the woman I told you about, I had developed, you got to have a second opinion. And now the Mayo Clinic just did a study about four years ago and they recommend even their doctors, you get a second opinion.
Because they did 286 patients and they found only 12% of the time was the first diagnosis and the second the same. 88% of the time, it was different. So you got to get another opinion.
So I said to him, this is way back then. I hadn't done the Mayo Clinic, but I knew my own experience, I was like, "I need another opinion. If you don't mind, who do you recommend?"
And he did not have a good bedside manner. He was pissed. So I went off to do my seminar over in the south of France. And then the brain started going again. Right? So I went to go do the test, found out the MRI that I did have a tumor. It's why I grew 10 inches in a year, but it inferred a little bit, meaning it shrunk a little bit, was still there putting growth hormone through me.
And he wanted to cut me. So I was like, "Let me ask somebody who has the biochemical approach as opposed to the surgery approach." I went to this top guy in Boston and he had a totally different bedside manner.
And he is like, said to me, "Tony," he goes, "I wouldn't do the surgery in a million years. It's too risky. A, you could die. B, it'll mess up your endocrine system. You'll have no energy." He goes, "I think what you should go is go to Switzerland. And there's a new drug you can do just once every six months, simple injection. It'll keep your arteries from growing. And that's what kills [inaudible] gigantism."
And I said, doc, I said, "I really appreciate your approach, but he wants to cut me. You want to drug me?" He laughed, he goes, "The baker wants the bake. The surgeon wants to cut, you're right, I want to drug you."
But I said, "What if I did nothing since there's no challenge right now, this happened at 17, I'm now 32." He goes, "Well, you could do that. But I think you'd be more certain if you did the drug."
And I said, "Well, what if the drug has side effects?" And sure enough, by the way, six months later after he told me to do this, really good man, by the way, the FDA did not allow it to come to the US. Because they found it created cancer.
I went to six other doctors, end of the story, this last doctor comes to me and says, "Tony, you have huge growth hormone, but I've never seen any human recover from two marathons per day for three days in a row within two days," he said, "That growth hormone is like supercharging your ability to recover."
And he goes, "I know bodybuilders that spend $1,200 a month to get what you're getting for free." So I was 32. I'll be 62 in a few days. Bottom line is, I've monitored it, I've never had a problem.
So it taught me to question, not to not pay attention, but to question and say, I want to look at other opinions. And then why I finally wrote this book, I had all that history but then about four years ago, I'm being an idiot chasing like a 14 year old chasing a 22 year old professional snowboarder down a mountain.
And he had moves I clearly did not have. And I thought I literally broke my neck. The injury was so bad, but it turned out I tore my rotator cuffs severely and I went, of course, I couldn't sleep. The pain was 99 on a zero to 10 scale. So I slept one hour, an hour and a half. So I go to all these docs over the next week, everyone, surgery, surgery, surgery.
But I ask them, "Okay, tell me the process. Am I guaranteed?" And they, "Well, you're not guaranteed to have your shoulder lift beyond this level, it may not work. It could tear again." Four to six months of rehab, I got to go do summers. I can't do it with one arm. Right?
And then the last guy sits me down. He's a really nice guy, but he goes, "Now I have to be straight with you." And he pulls out my spine and I had spinal stenosis, which I knew, I've been in pain for 14 years. And he said, "Tony, one decent hit, and life as you know it is over right now."
He said, "No more jumping, no more running, no more snowboarding." And you know, if somebody punches you and you're ready for it, it's one thing, but I was not ready. It was devastating. So I got over the devastation and said, "I need to look for some other options because none of these solutions work and there's no guarantee there's surgery that would help."
So I went to Peter Diamondis who's a good friend of mine, he is a rocket scientist, but he is also an MD from Harvard. And then I went to Dr. Bob Hariri, who's one of the early fathers of stem cells. He's a neurosurgeon.
And Bob said, "Tony, your stem cells at your age," this is back then. He said, "They drop off the cliff at 40. So you don't want to do this stuff where you're doing otologist, which means your own cells. Be fine for an elbow or knee, but not on your whole shoulder."
He said, "You need four day old stem cells." He told me where to go. I said, "I don't want fetal tissue." He goes, "No, no, these are cord stem cells or placenta. When babies are born, they usually throw it away." I went down and got an IV and an injection three days in a row. First day, I just felt tired.
Second day I woke up not only no pain in my shoulder, I woke up with no pain in my spine for the first time in 14 years. And I did the MRI three weeks later, nothing wrong with my shoulder, no surgery. So I became an evangelist.
I want to know everything about stem cells, but then I realized it wasn't just stem cells. Again, it's this whole regenerative medicine breakthrough. And I was invited by the Pope to come, believe it not the Pope. Every two year puts on the number one regenerative health conference, brings doctors from all over the world because he sees it as a gift to humanity.
And I think he made me the cleanup speaker. And I'm not an idiot. I'm not going to just go speak. I stayed there for the whole three, four days. I met everybody. I met a kid 11 years old who was supposed to die at four, and his sister's stem cells turned him around.
I met people sent home to die by their doctors and they didn't give up. And went and did CAR T-cells and all here they are eight years later, totally healthy. And so that started me on a journey and that's why I ended up writing the book.
And so then I just found all of these tools. So think about this, for example, I know you know about gene therapy. So there are people that are blind they now can see. There's a kid that was on America's Got Talent who can see now from it.
They are curing diseases with CRISPR, literally editing the genes. You got stem cells where people are healing in days instead of months. Jack Nicklaus wrote an endorsement on my book, a greatest golfer of all time. I met him at the conference, Vatican conference.
We ended up developing friendship and he was supposed to get spinal fusion, which by the way only works about 50% of the time and you're pretty immobile. So he did stem cells instead, he's 82 and he couldn't stand for 10 minutes without pain, he couldn't golf, couldn't play tennis. Now he plays golf and tennis at 82 years old.
Christian Ronaldo, the greatest soccer player probably of all time. Instead of going through months of rehab, when he pulled his [inaudible] he was able to do it in less than three weeks with this.
So you have these tools that are amazing. There's an injection right now, it's in phase three trials so your audience understands phase one is safety. Phase two is efficacy, phase three is efficacy at scale. And then if you make it through that, you get approved.
So they're in the final phase three trials. They believe they'll get approved the end of this year or beginning next, check this out. Single injection, if you have arthritis, osteoarthritis, it causes your own stem cells to regrow your tendons but it does it based on your epigenome, meaning the original code.
So you get like 16 year old tendons, even if you're 40, 50, 60, or 70 years old. Heart disease, most people know it's the number one killer. The best thing is prevention. What's the best way to know? A CT scan.
I have a group of partners now and we have different centers to do this type of work. And one of them called me less than six months ago and says, "Tony, there's this new breakthrough. It's the greatest breakthrough in cardiology." The guy who's talking to me doesn't overstate. So it's like, I said, "That sounds like a big statement."
He goes, "No Tony, I'm not exaggerating. It's a new AI that can take a CT scan where they're looking to see whether or not you've got build up in your arteries. And what they're looking for is calcium buildup," but he said, "Heart calcium means it's healed. You're not going to have heart attack. It's the loose calcium that can break off and be the Widow-maker and give you a stroke or give you a heart attack."
He goes, "This AI opens the arteries digitally, seeks through them, shows you what's happening and measures what's calcified versus uncalcified due to your score. And then they can predict a heart attack, five years in advance and they tell you what to do to avoid it."
So my father meanwhile was with me. He just turned 80. People around him, he'd been a really vibrant guy. He owned his own business. He's in lumber business, very strong man. And people tell you get your affairs in order when you're 80. And I get to see the energy dropping.
So I said, "Hey pops." I said, "I'm going to go to the center here and I'm going to do this thing." I explained it to him. And I said, "You and I are both at a stage of life we're going to have some of this soft plaque, but we can know how much is there and they'll show us what to do."
He goes, "I'm in." So I take him over there and the best thing happens. He goes there, he's clean as a whistle, everything's he got is calcified. He has nothing loose in his body. His entire mindset changes. And then there's a new form of therapy that's we've done for some of the greatest world class athletes. I've had it done.
I toked my ankle a decade and a half ago. And the nerves are so sensitive that even though I got a massage, don't touch it. Because it'd be like getting shot electricity up your leg. And they go in, they scan you with ultrasound. They see exactly where the tissues have locked in against the nerves, they put an amnio fluid, which opens it all up, the nerve releases, and I got no pain whatsoever.
So my father-in-law has this problem with his hip and he's walking bad, feeling old, 20 minutes later he is walking perfect. So we get on the plane. This is my favorite experience. Is he sits across me and he goes, "You know Tony, those people talk about living 110, 120. I don't know if I believe that, but my heart's perfect. My hip's perfect. I could live another 20 years. I could live to a hundred."
He goes "20 years, that's like a lifetime. You've only been married to my daughter 22 years." And his entire mindset has changed. There's a doctor at Stanford. You may have heard of doc, he's the top longevity expert in the world, right?
And David Sinclair's his name. David is 53 years old. He has figured out how to reverse aging for a period of time, your chronological age is not the same as how your organs age or how you're aging as a whole. So he is 53. But chronologically, he's 33 in his biochemistry.
I've done what he taught for nine months, 10 months now, I'm 62, but I'm 51 in that area. And I've only done it for nine or 10 months. So these breakthroughs are real. And there's some things that you can do that are really simple.
You're worried about cancer. Broccoli sprouts, as simplistic as it sounds, they've been showed thousands of studies of what they do for cancer. And they kill 80% of cancer cells in the breast for women, because it has this thing called sulforaphane in it that is proven. But most people know nothing about it.
Sleep. I interviewed, I was doing the sleep chapter when I was, my whole thing is I'll sleep when I die has been my whole life. That's why I look at things, right? And I interviewed this doctor, Dr. Walker's his name. He's professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
And I'm doing the chapter, after doing the interview with him at 6:15 or 6:30 in the morning. I got to be up in three hours. This is my life. And I'm like, something's wrong with this? But he convinced me to change my pattern. I'll tell you why.
He said, "Tony, I know one fact that'll get your attention above all others." "What is it?" He goes, "We did a study with 1.6 billion people on just losing an hour of sleep and what it means."
I said, "How could you coordinate a study like that?" He goes, "We didn't have to. 70 countries have daylight savings time." He said, "Check this out. When we spring forward and we lose just one hour for the next three days, no matter what country you go in, heart attacks go up approximately 24% on average across the world. When we fall back and get an extra hour, they drop 21%."
He even has correlations to car accidents. So then he showed me, somebody like me sleeping four or five hours a night. Their testosterone is usually the same as a man 10 years older than they were, that got my attention.
And then for females for every hour less than eight hours and some women seven hours is enough. He explains the difference. But for every hour beyond what they need less, they have 14% less desire to move forward.
So he teaches real simple things like having a consistent time to fall asleep and wake up because the body's based on rhythms, dropping the temperature to 65 to 67 degrees. So you drop into a deeper sleep. Having an eye mask or you don't have the light.
There's some simple things that don't cost you anything but completely change the quality of your life. And so I try to get all of them, including the alternatives that we have for Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, like the best that exists out there. So people know what choices they have.
Because every day of my life, every day, once every 10 days, two weeks or a week, somebody calls me. I have so many people I know or that know of me. And they say, person's got cancer in their family or they do, or family members got Alzheimer's.
And so now I can send them the best that exists right now. And they know who to contact. They know what to do. They understand the science behind it. So I wrote this for the people I love and I wrote it for the people that you love. So hopefully you can help them, not just yourself as well.
Chase Jarvis: So this book is very, very dense and I should congratulate you. It is a masterpiece of taking something very, very complex and simplifying it. So folks like myself and the readers and listeners of the show can actually make progress.
My question is, at 600 pages covering everything from stem cells to T helper cells, to athletes, entrepreneurs, taking care of the older adults in our lives. There's a lot of information here. How do you recommend?
I read it cover to cover because I'm fascinated by every aspect of the book. At times, it's overwhelming. As someone who's aggregated all this, do you think this ought to be more of a reference?
For example, if a person listening is Type 2 diabetes and they can read the chapter, the synopsis on diabetes and there's everything from what you can do at the dinner table at mealtime, for example, to the most audacious and lofty goals and surgeries and things like that. So how do you recommend we wrap our heads around basically an encyclopedia of the future of what medicine is available to everybody?
Tony Robbins: Well, I divided into five sections. The first section sets the tone, so to speak and gives you some of the pieces that help you understand why we age, what's changing, what's going on, stem cells, et cetera.
The second section is all these hero stories of people like the Parkinson's guy that now you don't have to do brain surgery. I watched a woman literally turned around in front of me who was taking 15 medications. She took, can't walk across the room, and she just did a 50 mile bike ride, right?
It's all non-invasive ultrasound. So I tell the stories in the second section of some of the greatest breakthroughs, then the third section is all the stuff that you can do that costs you nothing right now, things for your energy, your body, your diet, et cetera.
And then the fourth section's the one that'll overwhelm some people because it's every major disease and every tool that's available. And I recommend read the ones about the ones that you're concerned about or the people you care about or come back to it when there's a problem.
And then the last section is really the mind and the power of the mind and your emotions and how to create the quality of life you want. Because you have a great body, but you don't have the emotional wellbeing and the mental wellbeing. You're not going to heal.
So I recommend you do it all at one piece. I recommend reading those first three sections and then the fourth section dive in only to the level that you really want to right now and then read the last section so you get the benefit of that. I think that's the best way to take it on.
Chase Jarvis: It's an incredible gathering of information and I know it wasn't easy and I know you had some folks, Peter Diamondis who's also been a guest on the show and good friend of yours I know and Dr. Hariri.
So thank you for that guidance. And as again, someone who is fanatical about this stuff and consumed it all, the ability to use this book as a reference, I don't know again, if that's how you intended it, but.
Tony Robbins: Yeah, it's like a guide book. So when you need it, now that you know it, you'll pick it up when you need some pieces or you'll dive in some things like, NMN that gives you the body, the energy and the mitochondria you go, man, I really want more energy. Then you could dive in and do that activity.
So I try to get people at the end to say, you don't need to do all this. You now know what's available. What are three to five things you want to do right now for your own life? And then if somebody in your family or friends is having a challenge, boom, pick up that section, you can deliver it to them or you can reread it and go, wow, this is the stuff that can save you right now.
I wrote the book without sounding ridiculous, not just to help improve or change your life, but it truly can save lives, especially the diagnostic stuff.
So I'd really recommend also for anybody, especially if you're in the range of 40 or older to really take a look at the diagnostic things, because the things in that section can literally save your life. And they're really easy to do and going to a doctor and having a physical, most of us don't even do it anymore because having somebody tap on your knee, look in your ear, check your heart by listening. I mean that was done 80 years ago.
And now you can do some things that really tell you exactly what's going on. So you can handle things when it's little, not wait until there's a real challenge, or you can have the peace of mind of knowing, hey, I'm crushing it. This is a great place to be.
Chase Jarvis: That biological age is something I'm working on, getting down. To that end, there's a bunch of people who are listening right now are saying, yeah, but I am not wealthy. I am not connected. I don't have access to doctors or medical insurance or so many of the things that have historically separated have and have not.
And I'm wondering if you can comment on how this book can transcend that historical mindset about what is available to the people who are watching and listening. I'm admittedly, we have many of the same friends and if I need something, I'm going to call Tim Ferriss for this or Brene Brown for that.
And yet, so many people in the world don't see themselves in that light. And so what can you guarantee that your book will do for the folks who don't feel connected to people that actually are able to offer that help? How can you help us understand this book is for them as well?
Tony Robbins: Well, I wrote it so I could give you access. I do have access. I'm fortunate enough to access, but I also went after the access. So I literally save you all the time and energy and here's who to reach out to.
And you'd be surprised, stem cell therapy used to be extremely expensive. Four years ago when I did my intervention on my shoulder, you could do your elbow or your wrist or a knee usually for 2,500 bucks today, less than a laptop. And surgery is more expensive than that.
And you got a life back and you didn't have surgery, right? But mine was much more complex. It's spinal stenosis, mine cost I think at the time I think it was $25,000, but the surgery was more so I was like, okay, but now I just did an uptake just for vitality and energy.
And I did these and it cost, I think it was 7500 bucks for the same treatment. I mean, and so it's starting, it's going to be, my goal, the companies I'm working with is to get the price down by 90%, and it's getting closer and closer.
But for example, you've seen some people get those audio implants and they cry. They can hear for the first time. Well, that's kind of the impact with somebody with Parkinson's and that now is covered by insurance. It's in a hundred different hospitals around the world.
And broccoli sprouts, come on. It doesn't cost you anything, right? Sleep. So there is so much and it cost nothing, but then if you need something, you can graduate based where you're going to go. But it's kind of like, again, it's the cell phone situation, right?
That costs 4,000 bucks when I had that cell phone, it must be 10 grand in today's money. And now you can get one for the price of a contract. So it's all coming down so fast, that I show you what's available right now and what's available in the next 12 to 36 months.
It will blow your mind and price points are going, because here's what happens. It's all technology now. So technology, as you know, every 18 months doubles in power and housing costs. And that's what's happening with these treatments.
So this is not for the wealthy, this is for anybody that just really wants to maximize their health. But if you get in a real health issue, it's a lot cheaper. I mean the average treatment for cancer depending on the type of cancer is between a quarter million dollars and half million dollars, right?
But insurance is covering it. Well, the interventions that some of these doctors are doing are also covered by insurance. CAR T-cells as an example, last week or four days ago, in nature this big article and it talks about for liquid cancers like leukemia, people with cancer never talk about cancer cures.
They're calling it a cure because 10 years later, people are not only free of cancer, but they have these CAR T-cells still killing off cancer in their body with no additional intervention. So this is the type of stuff that's available.
So don't let your mindset of limitation limit you from getting resources that can cause you to have an experience of unlimited energy or strength or vitality. And do the homework because if you don't, ignorance is not bliss.
Ignorance is pain, ignorance in its worst case is death. You owe it to yourself to get this for yourself and other people. And again, I'm not making a dime on this. We're giving a hundred percent of it away. You can help other people while you're helping yourself and the people you love.
Chase Jarvis: Mindset's the last thing I want to cover. But before we do just by analog, the human genome cost $3 billion to get the first one and now it's like $600 or something like that. That's just-
Tony Robbins: That's right. It took 13 years for one person's, and seven years into it they only get 1%. They thought it would never work, they thought it's going to cost hundreds of billions. So it was 2.7 billion, three accurate, say $3 billion. And it took 13 years.
Now it's 600 bucks and you have it done overnight. That shows you what I'm talking about that's happening right now. And it's accelerating, right? MRIs cost a lot of money right now. There's a company I actually invested in myself that's built technology for a portable MRI, not tens of millions of dollars, not $2 million, something that literally would cost $25,000 and would be portable.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that's happening right now. So again, let go of the old paradigm in your mind that says, "Oh, I can't have those things. Only rich people have that." That's total bullshit. That's just you playing a game in your head, which is why you got to make sure you master this part as well as what's going on physically.
Chase Jarvis: That to me is something that you can't underscore enough. And one of the reasons I wanted to end with mindset. I'm looking here at chapter 24, page 569, create an extraordinary life, the power of mindset.
Now we're having a full circle moment here because so much of the early work that you did, again, seminars that I've been a guest of yours at, working with the names you've named, Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Jack Nicklaus, the best in the world.
So much of that was mindset. And I saw that in your early coaching. Now, here we are with this most recent book called Life Force and we're back at mindset. What role does mindset play in one's life?
Tony Robbins: Well, think about, let's just talk about placebos for two minutes. Placebos as most people know, they're inert substance that people get, but they think it's a drug and their body responds as if it was the drug. It was started in world war II. It was discovered by a doctor who ran out of morphine trying to treat people.
And if you don't treat morphine anomalies, their pain go there, but they go into shock and they die. And it was actually a nurse, not the doctor that came with solution. She filled a syringe with saline, handed the doctor, he thought it was still she found some more morphine. So he injected it with the expectation, his face, his voice. This will take you out of pain. This is going to make you well.
And he didn't find out until afterwards that he treated 10 people with saline solution, with nothing in it, not one went into shock and they all lived.
So when he came back after world war II to Harvard, this doc said he was the one who created what we now consider to be the most valuable studies where you compare a drug to a placebo, which is inert.
What people don't talk about is a lot of times placebos are more effective than the drugs, but no one talks about that because there's no money in that, right? You don't make billions of dollars by teaching people about their mind.
So bottom line is the larger the intervention, the more your brain believes, the more the reaction we get. So a pill has a certain reaction, a bigger pill more, an injection higher.
In my book I described the veteran's administration did a study with knee surgeries. They took a third of the people and did a fake knee surgery. Meaning they cut them open up and just sewed them back up and did nothing to the knee, just so they had a scar there.
And a year later I have the statistics in there, but the bottom line is that people that didn't have surgery reported no pain, more mobility than the people have the surgery. And it's just because that's the power of this.
So, and you can even give somebody not a placebo, you can give them a drug. Harvard did a study where they gave people barbiturates, slow your body down, told people is an amphetamine in a big red pill and their body sped up, did the opposite of the drug. It's not just our body can do what drugs do it can do, it can counter a drug.
We can make ourselves sick by the way we think. So one of the reports I have in there is from the CDC. Most people by now know that dying of COVID outside of age, the number one factor is obesity. 79.8% call it 80% of the people that died were obese.
They have all kinds of comorbidities, a result of that. Something we could easily take care of, but no one talks about it. But the number two, no one talks about in the CDC study was anxiety and fear. Because psychoneurology, our minds can shut down our immune systems. Our minds can change our breath. And so that's the number two.
And unfortunately, if you look at the news, most of it induces fear, right? And people aren't trying to do a bad job, they're just trying to report, but so much fear that people are overwhelmed. So our mind is everything.
And so I teach some techniques as I've always done saying, okay, it's great, you took care of your body. Let's make sure you have an extraordinary quality of life. Because your emotions are everything. You got a billion dollars and if every day the emotions you feel most often habitually are anger and frustration. Then your life's anger and frustration.
You have three beautiful children, a husband or wife that loves you, but you're worried all the time. Your life is worried. You don't feel the love. So we all have an emotional home, a place we're used to going back to, and it might be time to upgrade your home. And so in the book, I walk you through some of the ways to do that. Some of the questions you could ask yourself, some of the decisions that can change that very quickly,
Chase Jarvis: All that plus the potential of living to 120 years old. The fact that we're going to have Nano robots in our blood in the 2030s, an incredibly inspiring book. Tony, thank you so much for creating another masterpiece, another, I guess a mountaintop for us to look up to, to aspire to.
And what you've done is made it available again, we're talking about, folks, listeners out there, Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love. You've done it again man.
Tony Robbins: Thank you Chase, I really appreciate it. Thanks for all you do. Keep all that creativity flowing brother.
Chase Jarvis: Happy to do it and I'll look forward to a golf match sometime you, me and Mary B, it's happening. We're going to get together sometime and maybe in Sun Valley.
Tony Robbins: I love that. I heard you've gone there a lot. So we go there a lot too. We love it. Mary's coming back. Say goodbye too.
Mary B: I'm just too telling Tony you're going to get smoked doing golf. So get ready.
Chase Jarvis: The gauntlet has been thrown. I do not doubt that tone. Thanks again, bud. Have a good one. And Mary B I'll catch you later friend.
Tony Robbins: Blessings to you man. God bless.
Chase Jarvis: Hi, thank you very much Don, [inaudible].
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