Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - This Will Change How You Do Everything w/ Tony Robbins | EP #69
Episode Date: October 19, 2023In this episode, recorded during this year Peter’s Executive Summit, Abundance360, Peter and Tony discuss moonshots and the audacious goals Tony has set for himself and the world. 22:18 | Action i...n the Face of Uncertainty 39:11 | Feeding the World with Technology 1:01:15 | Building a Future for Our Children Tony Robbins is the nation’s top business and life strategist as a motivational speaker, coach, and philanthropist with over 20 years of experience. He has coached Fortune 500 top leaders and U.S. presidents. Support Tony’s moonshots:  https://give.feedingamerica.org/a/tony-robbins https://100billionmeals.org/ _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J Learn more about my executive summit, Abundance360 _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time.
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Tennessee sounds perfect.
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Montreal-style bagels eaten in brandon manitoba here we take the best from
one side of the world and mix it with the other and you can shop that whole world right here in
our aisles find it all here with more ways to save at real canadian superstore you got to have
something that is large enough that it makes you crazy and you don't know that you can do it, but you got to know you can do it.
I know it sounds ridiculous.
There's got to be some part of you that turns it into a must, not a should.
If it's a should, it gets done when it's easy.
When it's a must, it happens no matter what.
It's not about the goal.
It's about who you become.
The first question people go to is how, and that's the wrong question.
Watch out for the tyranny of how.
Tyranny.
Don't start with how.
It'll shut down your capacity.
Start with what and why and get that so strong.
Then start brainstorming.
There's a million hows.
Give yourself an experience that's so vivid over and over again.
And all of a sudden, the certainty will be there.
When the certainty is there, you come up with the answer.
You get really certain.
I'm going to do this.
We're going to make this happen.
I don't mean false, fake, just optimism.
I mean in your core.
And then what happens?
You tap massive potential.
You take massive action because you know it's going to work.
And what kind of results with massive action, mass potential?
Usually some pretty damn good results.
And when you get good results, what does it do to your belief?
Your brain goes, see, I told you you were a stud or studette.
I told you you're the man.
I told you you're the woman. I knew you could do this.
One of the friendships I cherish in life is with a dear friend, Tony Robbins. We've been friends
now for the better part of 20 years. He's funded a couple of X prizes. We've written a New York
Times bestselling book together. We've co-founded a couple of companies. What most people don't know about him is the audacity and size of the moonshots that Tony
is taking in the world.
Now, I had a chance to bring him as a closing speaker in conversation with me at A360 2023
to talk about his moonshots to inspire people to go bigger and to go bolder in the world.
to inspire people to go bigger and to go bolder in the world. And in this podcast episode, we're going to dive into his various moonshots. These are moonshots including providing clean
drinking water to the world, planting hundreds of millions of trees, delivering a hundred billion
meals to those who are hungry, reinventing how we provide energy to the planet, providing an
extended health span. This man does not stop. Who he is on stage is who he is in private life.
He's one of my heroes, someone I care deeply about. So join me for this conversation. Learn
from the master about what it takes to have a moonshot mindset
and how you scale your moonshots to impact the planet in a meaningful fashion. Here's a man
who's passionate and dedicated about creating a world that is hopeful, compelling, and abundant
for humanity. All right, let's dive in. This is a conversation from my private A360 Summit in March of 2023,
and it's going to be a timeless conversation.
Enjoy.
First of all, Tony, listen, you're coming off of an insane trip to the Middle East.
How many days at UPW?
Four days.
We had 40,000 people from 185 countries.
It's crazy.
And here, this man does not stop.
I'll leave you voice notes every once in a while
and saying, who is the insane person who schedules you?
And then you call and ask me two days later
if I come join you.
And you said yes, and I am forever grateful.
You know, our mission here is to inspire
this amazing group of entrepreneurs to go bigger
and to take moonshots.
And I thought thought no better way
than to share the extraordinary moon shots you're taking. And every time I think I know them all,
there is another one. But Tony doesn't do anything on a small scale. It's all on Tony's scale.
And I want to dive into those. I want to start with one that I'm going to feed through our conversation,
which is perhaps the one that you're taking to the highest limits,
and that is around food.
Yes.
What's the number of people on the planet today that have food insecurity?
It's normally 80 million people a year.
Every five seconds, a child dies of hunger.
This year, it's 350 million people.
And the reason is because of the COVID policies we had.
In Africa, there was no travel.
And 80% of the food, or I should say the income in those countries very often, is coming from tourism.
So they have no money.
Then you have the Ukraine war that, of course, is the breadbasket.
And then the WF would prefer people not use fertilizer. And yet 50% of all the world's food is generated by fertilizer, and it comes mostly
from Russia, which is shut down. So we have 18 countries on a verge of famine right now,
according to the UN. And it's more severe than most people ever could imagine. It affects
everybody, whether you care about children or feeding people or not. The instability in the
world will certainly affect the world as a whole if we don't do something about it. Yeah. And the challenge is that most people
are blind to it because it happens over there. Yeah. But the fact is we can do something.
We can do something in the near term to help save those lives and do something in the longer term
to reinvent our food system and our fertilization
system, which you're working on both. Yes. Well, one is, you know, it started for me and it's not
just something that I intellectually was involved in. I grew up in a pretty tough environment and
we had time when there was no food and my life was changed. The reason I get to do what I do
really is not because I'm such a good guy. It's because somebody who's really good to my family
on Thanksgiving when I was 11, we had no money, no food. We wouldn't have starved. We had saltine crackers and butter,
and that's what we would have had. But Thanksgiving makes it magnified that you're not having a feast
when everybody else is. And my parents were fighting and saying things you can't take back,
unfortunately. And my life was changed by a knock on the door. And I went and answered the door,
and there's this tall guy standing there with two giant bags of groceries. And he had an uncooked
frozen turkey in a pan on the ground because he couldn't carry it all. And he said,
is your father here? And I was like, just one moment. And I was euphoric. And I went to my
father. He was yelling through the door at my mom. And I said, there's a man at the door for
me. And he said, will you answer? I said, I did. He goes, who is it? I said, I don't know. It's
for you. And I was just so excited to see him be transformed by this gift. But when he came to
the door and saw the man, he had a reaction I was not anticipating. And I never forgot it because it
kind of filters how I try to help people with food insecurity. And that is he got very angry.
He just said, listen, we don't accept charity. And he went to slam the door. The guy holding
the food is pretty big. And he leaned forward. So the door hit his shoulder and bounced back open,
which made my dad even more mad. And he sir sir before you get upset i'm just the
delivery guy somebody knows you're having a tough family time thanksgiving everyone has tough times
and they want you to have a great thanksgiving with your family my father went to shut the door
again this time the guy's foot was there and it bounced off his foot and things were getting
animated and then this man saw me and said something.
I thought my father was going to just punch him out.
He looked at me and he looked at my father
and he said, sir, don't let your ego get in the way
of taking care of your family.
The veins on the side of my father's throat,
I can still see them today.
He turned flush red and he didn't hit him.
He took the groceries and he slammed on the table.
He didn't say thank you.
He closed the door.
Completely changed my life. How old were you. He closed the door. Completely changed
my life. How old were you? I was 11. And it changed my life because I realized, I didn't realize at
that moment, but I realized years later, our whole lives are changed, controlled by three decisions.
See if it's true for you. The first decision that you're making every moment of your life is what
are you going to focus on? We don't experience our life. We experience the life we focus on.
Our brains are distortion, deletion, generalization creatures.
You can hear about AI and get scared.
You can hear AI and get excited.
You'd be wrong about both.
Who knows?
But our experience of life is not life.
Our brains distort, delete, and generalize.
And we only experience what we focus on.
Whatever you focus on, you'll feel, even if it's not true.
So that day, my father chose to focus on the fact he'd not taken care
of his family. I know that because he said it over and over again. But the minute you focus
on something, your brain has to make the second decision. See if it's true for you as well.
As soon as you focus on something, you have to decide what does it mean? That's what your brain
does. Is this the end or the beginning? If it's the end of a relationship, you're going to behave
very differently than if you think it's the beginning of a relationship. Is this person
dissing me, disrespecting me? Are they challenging me? Are they coaching me? Are they loving me?
Your meaning will change your emotion. Your emotion controls your life because it controls
the third decision. What are you going to do? My dad's meaning was he was worthless because he's
not taking care of his family. And what he decided to do was leave our family, which at the time was
the worst experience of my life. But I chose that day three different decisions. I wasn't so conscious about it, but I could see it looking back. I chose to focus on there was food. What a
concept. It's pretty cool. And then my second thing was that changed my life was the meaning.
And my father had always said, I had four fathers, they all thought nobody gives a damn about you.
We lived in a community where it kind of looked like that. And the meaning I got is that strangers
care. And if strangers care about me and my family
I got to care about strangers
and so I thought someday I'm going to do this for someone
so when I was 17 I fed two families
and it was the most beautiful experience
because one of the families was about boring with all the details
I went as the delivery boy
because I saw what happened before
I didn't go to be appreciated
I wrote a note so this is a gift from a friend
have a beautiful Thanksgiving
and someday if you can pay it forward and take care of one family. I would love a friend. And I had
somebody write in Spanish on the back. I got to the first place. I'm wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
I got my little note. I called this local church. And I said, who needs food but is too proud to
come get it? And they gave me two families. And then I rented. I didn't rent. I borrowed a buddy's
old van. I didn't know how to do a stick shift very well, so that wasn't a very good session for his van.
And I remember I knocked on the first door,
and I'm holding these groceries, and the door opens.
There's a woman about half my size standing there,
and she looked up, and she screamed.
Oh, my God.
And I said, no, no, no.
And then she screamed again, and then she goes, oh,
and she grabs my head and starts pulling me down and kissing my cheek.
And I was like, no, no, delivery boy, delivery boy delivery boy she didn't understand so I reached and got the
note I turned it over it was in Spanish and she read it and then she started to cry and then she
grabbed me in and started kissing me I said no no delivery she goes no gift of God gift of God
and I'm trying not to cry and so I said like where do I put this and there's a little room you could
see where to put it so I put the groceries on it, and then I heard this noise, and I heard this sound, another sound, and before I could react,
boom, boom, one leg was hit by two little boys, and then the other one, she had four kids.
Wow.
Turned out she had four kids, and her husband had left her the week before with no money,
no food before Thanksgiving. And when the boys, I said to the boys, come help me get the rest of
these goods out, it was so cool, and when they saw the pumpkin pie, it was over. I was so excited. And there was time to leave. And I'll never forget, I was like,
I had to go feed the next family. And these boys were hanging on to me. And I didn't want to go,
but I had to go finally. And I didn't speak any Spanish. So I looked at her and I said,
you know, it's Thanksgiving. I said, Feliz Navidad.
And she laughed like you did. She was crying and she started laughing and she gave me the hug and
i'll never again i got in the in the car and i was trying to put the thing in reverse and i looked
into her mirror and on this little tiny deck are these four kids with these giant smiles and the
mom with the giant crying with a giant smile on her face and i just lost it i just started crying
like where i literally couldn't see how to stop and And I was like, why am I crying? This is such a beautiful moment.
And I realized my worst day had just become the best day of my life.
The worst day of my life I thought was my father leaving.
I had four fathers, but he's the one who adopted me.
My name comes from Robins.
I wouldn't have been there if my family was well fed.
Would I really begin fielding a billion people? No.
So I went out, I started with two
families in the next year, four, and then eight, and then I had a little company, got them involved,
and I had multiple companies. And now I have 112 companies. We do $7 billion in business,
and all my employees get involved. So we went from two families, four families, a million families
to four million families. And then about 2008, I was so upset by what happened to financial markets,
and I've been coaching Coach Jones for 20 years.
I remember.
Food stamps.
Yeah.
And so I decided to write this book, Money Master the Game, and interviewed Ray Dalio
and Warren Buffett and all the best of the best in the area, and tried to find the common
strategies.
And while I'm interviewing these multi-billionaires, I'm seeing that they cut food stamps, which
now they call the SNAP program in the US.
They cut it by $6 billion. Congress did,
which means every family that actually needs food would have to give up a week's worth of food every
month unless people like us step in. So I called my team and I said, how many people I fed in my
lifetime? I had no idea. It was 42 million people. And I was like, wow, that made me really happy.
And I said, well, what if you talk about moonshots? So I was like, what if I'm writing this book?
What if I fed as many people I did in my lifetime in one year?
What if I fed 50 million people more than in my lifetime?
And I was like, what if I fed 100 million?
What if I did 100 million for the next 10 years
and provided a billion meals?
And I just finished that two weeks ago,
and I finished it two years ago.
Don't run over that.
Yeah.
Thank you. that. So the decision to start with the first two meals at age 17 led to that connection to
a billion meals. And just the importance we talked about earlier of starting, of beginning,
that first step, that first inclination to take action.
How did that feel to reach a billion? I felt incredible, but one of the things I've learned
in my lifetime, I'm sure you've all learned it too, is when you're getting clear to achieving
a goal, it's not about the goal, it's about who you become. What you get is not going to make
you happy. Who you become will make you happy or make you sad. And I've noticed in my lifetime,
I don't know if you've seen it, that when you start to go for a goal and you're about to achieve it, if you wait
to achieve it to set the next goal, there's a little bit of a lull that'll start, you know,
a little plateau. And I'm not into plateaus. So I immediately was like, okay, what am I going to do
next? And it's not the only project I'm doing, obviously, is food. But we sponsored the XPRIZE
here. And I went and brought my friends from the UAE involved, Shaikh Tanoon is a good friend of
mine, and said, let's do an XPRIZE,
let's feed the next billion, let's find the sources of protein that can be cheap
enough to feed everybody but also delicious enough so the test is not just
we're gonna produce this food and cheaper, we're gonna produce in a way
that's better for the environment,
doesn't require all the water, doesn't pollute the air and so forth, but also
does it at a cheaper price and is delicious.
They can't tell the difference.
So that's the goal there.
And then along the way, while I was doing this project with you, I was, I'm in the process
with some friends of attempting to buy Forbes right now.
And Steve's a good friend of ours.
And I was, we have, we have Shiv here.
We have Shiv here.
He's the one that's doing this at Magomed.
But Magomed is here too.
I got, I got a chance to get a phone call when I was in 2019 when I was in Abu Dhabi.
MBZ called me up and said, I want to have another lunch with you.
We'd had lunch two days before.
And he goes, you're doing so much to feed people.
There's only one person I know that's in your category.
And of course, he brought Governor Beasley, who's like way beyond my category.
He's running the UN program.
He won the Nobel Prize for feeding people two years ago.
So we became good friends and we went back and forth.
But then with this last year, he reached out to me, actually.
One of my dear friends who's here tonight reached out to me and said,
you know, you've got to see the Twitter war that's happening between Elon Musk and Governor Beasley.
What's happening?
He wants him to write a big check to try and solve this problem because the problem
is bigger than ever before.
Nobody realized how big it is.
And so I entered in a little Twitter argument and said, listen, I don't think it's just
Elon's responsibility.
I think it's all of us.
We can do this together.
We can make this happen.
So we ended up having further conversations.
And I said, how big is the hole?
And he said, Tony, you know, the long-term solution we're working on is great, but you
got to fill the hole right now.
Yes.
And it's between 50 and 75 billion meals that we need around the world.
I was like, wow.
I said, then why don't we do 100 billion meal challenge?
All we got to do is find 99 people like me.
I'm not a multi-billionaire, and I've been able to do it.
There's plenty of multi-billionaires.
There's plenty of average people that could participate.
And I said, we'll fill the gap then while we're coming up with a long-term solution
through the XPRIZE. And he said, well, will you help me go one-on-one around the room,
around the world to talk to different wealthy people to invest? And I said, well, when I talked
to Warren Buffett, when I interviewed him for my book, he told me that the Giving Pledge didn't
take off right away. People didn't respond to Warren Buffett. But then he started sponsoring
the Forbes philanthropy dinner and people got
competitive in a good way. And it just took off like crazy. I said, so why don't we see where
everybody's together, 400 richest families. Let's see if Warren will let us take 45 minutes of that
dinner and tell people what's really going on because they have no clue. I said, I'll speak
for 15 or 20. You speak for 30 and we'll at least see what we can do and see if we can raise these
meals. And so Warren actually agreed and Warren got sick, so we took it over.
And Governor Beasley did an unbelievable job.
He's an amazing human being.
And we raised 5 billion meals in an hour, which was pretty extraordinary.
It took a lifetime to do a billion, right?
It was fantastic.
And Magomed, I don't know if you're out there someplace,
but my dear friend Magomed
and Shiv are partners of mine and various things we're doing together.
But he, I met him there and we started talking and I said, you know, I don't give a damn
about the money.
Cause I remember I called one friend of mine who's a, you know, he's worth about $20 billion,
beautiful man.
He sends me a check every year for like half a million dollars.
I won't take his money.
So he sends it to me to give away.
So I add to my philanthropy with it.
But I told him about this.
He's helped me with the other meal thing.
I said, now I'm done with the billion meal challenge.
I'm closing in.
We're going to do a hundred billion meals.
Here's why.
Here's the, he goes, well, how much is that?
I said, well, they're 10 cents to 30 cents a meal.
I said, honestly, mine were 10 cents a meal in the US,
but it can be as much as 30 cents overseas
because the things involved there.
And he goes, well, that's beyond my pay grade.
And I thought, that's beyond his pay grade and i thought that's beyond his pay grade i'm in deep right now um so we changed the focus to saying yes
people will give money but let's get the raw resources we need let's see if we can't get it
the lowest car i want to get the meals and so magomed he's out there somewhere he's hiding out
but he's a beautiful man yes and um and we're speaking you know he speaks russian where'd you
go megamed where are you there he speaks russian where'd you go
megamed where are you there he is in the back there i want to tell you what this man has done
back here so megamed came up to me we met this connection like we've known each other for decades
it was crazy and he goes we're gonna get this done we're gonna get this done he started calling some
of his friends he used to run the innovation segments segments of russia and he owns russia
the russian version of forbes And he did a black cover during
the war and left. So he's no longer there. But he said, listen, I know some friends. And I said,
we need the fertilizer. We desperately need fertilizer and we need grains. And we know
where they're needed because the country's in Africa from the UN. And so he literally convinced
a couple of his friends to make donations that are in the 500 million dollar range and they have already shipped to about 70 of the places we raised enough now delivered enough
for 60 billion meals we've done that in the first six months so what's amazing though i think we
the illustration for all of you here that i know you're working your tails off and many of you
already have you know giant moonshots you're making or you're going to make new ones the next
day or so is you know i think the distinctions you gave, I came upon independently of you,
and you've came independently from me, or hearing DARPA's description. You know,
you got to have something that is large enough that it makes you crazy, and you don't know that
you can do it, but you got to know you can do it. I know it sounds ridiculous. There's got to be
some part of you that turns it into a must, not a should. If it's a should, it gets done when it's easy. When it's a must, it happens no matter what.
And the difference between should and must is reasons. Reasons come first, answers come second.
If you've got strong enough reasons, if you've got a big enough why, you can figure out how to
do anything. But what keeps people, I think, from making moonshots real, because you've got to look
at the side of why people don't do it or why they don't follow through.
I think, number one,
that the first question people go to is how.
And that's the wrong question.
How is absolutely the wrong question to start with,
because if you've never done it before,
what that produces is uncertainty.
If you have uncertainty,
then you don't execute at the same level.
It's like people saying knowledge is power.
We all know that's bullshit, right?
Execution is power.
Knowledge is potential power.
Execution beats knowledge every day of the week.
So my bias is towards action.
Even if it's the wrong action,
you're going to learn quicker than if you do nothing.
But the challenge is people are asking how,
and that produces uncertainty.
What you got to ask is what and why.
If you know what needs to be done and why it needs to be done,
if it's strong enough,
then there's a level of certainty that will show up in your nervous system and you'll be able to inspire
other people as well because you can't fake it everybody can feel it and so if you can come up
with that and find out how to turn that certainty on that's what i do with people athletes business
people everybody is how do you turn that on and keep it on turn that on and then knowing what and
why you can figure out how it's like you know john f
kennedy didn't know how to get to the moon when he said we're going to put somebody on the moon
return to turn the earth safely in this decade and people at nasa are like he's insane we don't
have the resources but they did it that's leadership that's a moonshot right and it can't
just be you so that's the other part is it something that doesn't just inspire you is it
something that'll keep you going when it doesn't look like it's going to work, keep you from giving up? But is
it something that'll get other people to join you? Otherwise, it's just you and you're not going to
do it by yourself. There's no moonshots that are done by individuals. That's bullshit. Individuals
may stimulate it, but it takes a team. It takes an army of people to make something happen. So I
think watch out for the tyranny of how. Tyranny.
Don't start with how.
It'll shut down your capacity.
Start with what and why and get that so strong.
Then start brainstorming.
There's a million hows.
And if there isn't a way, you can find a way or make a way.
And I think that happens.
And the other thing that happens is when you succeed,
you get momentum.
That's the other thing I mentioned to you.
There's a cycle I work with athletes
and also business people called the
success cycle. And it's based on the idea that you ever notice the rich get richer and the poor
get poorer? And I don't mean money rich. I mean rich. Do you ever notice happy people tend to get
more happy? Unhappy people get more depressed, more pissed off, right? Same thing is true in
every aspect, including finance. So there's, maybe we can throw on the screen. I'll just show you
real fast. I find this really simplistic and useful
when I'm working with an athlete or somebody.
So this is a cycle.
It has a sequence.
So if I said to you, what's the potential of your moonshot?
What's the potential of any human being?
What would you say the potential of any human being is?
Shout it out, I'm curious.
What is it?
What's the potential?
Oh, that was powerful, unlimited.
What is it? Come on, guys.
What is it?
If you can't come up unlimited in this room, you shot it in the wrong place, right?
Here we are.
So it's unlimited.
Now, is it literally unlimited?
Of course not.
But it's not as limited as our thinking, that's for sure.
So our potential is amazing.
Now, if I point over here in the bottom right-hand corner and go results, do most people's results
reflect their true potential?
Yes or no? No. No way. Why not?
Yeah, I mean, you're saying they don't take enough action. That's very true. Massive action can be a
cure-all, right? If you don't just take a massive action. Take a massive action, see if it's working.
If it doesn't change, it doesn't change. You keep changing. It's like how long you give your average
child to learn how to walk before you shut them off and go, you're not a walker.
You go, no, my kid's going to keep trying until.
So yes, action makes a huge difference.
However, if you don't have certainty the action's going to work,
this is what people do.
They call it trying.
Trying is bullshit.
Trying is I'm just doing enough to justify that I didn't give up too easily.
Trying is you don't believe it's going to work.
You're not absolutely certain, so you don't tap your full potential.
Who's going to tap their potential when they're uncertain?
And no one wants to fail, so you're going to take massive action when you don't think
it's going to work?
So when you take little potential, little action, with little belief, what kind of results
you get?
Little, terrible results.
And when you get terrible results, what does that do to your belief now? Believe it or not, it gets
worse. Now you're even more uncertain. You tap even less potential. You get even worse results,
right? Less action, worse results. And now you're on the downward spiral. Who's ever done this in
your life in any area? Yeah. Yeah. If you don't raise your hand, you lie about other shit too,
don't you? Come on. Okay. But it also works on the other side side i know you've all experienced it because you're all peak performers right so what
happens something happens and you get something about something you get really certain i'm gonna
do this we're gonna make this happen i don't mean false fake just optimism i mean in your core
and then what happens you tap massive potential you take massive action because you know it's
going to work and what kind of results with massive action mass potential usually some pretty damn good
Results and when you get good results, what does it do to your belief your brain goes? See I told you we're stutter
So that man I told you the woman I knew you could do this now you tap more and now you're on the upward
Spot now who here is experienced both sides at the same time in different parts of your life
Like one area is going one direction
The other is your your finances going area your kids going another, right? Or your body's going direction, your
business in another. So the way you change this, most people go, I got to work on more action.
Well, if you took a salesperson and he's uncertain, he makes a hundred calls and says,
you wouldn't want to buy this from me, would you? Right? Some people are going to buy just
because they don't want your kids to starve, right? But you're not going to do well. You have to change the certainty.
But how do you change the certainty when you've never done it before? That's what a moonshot is.
And it's so simple. You all know it. You've all practiced it. But sometimes we forget.
It's the same with everything a great athlete does.
You produce the result in your mind first with such vivid, deep emotional train
that your brain can't tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and something you actually have experienced. In fact, when you want to do
something just for two seconds, since you've been sitting that so long, stand up just for a minute,
if you would, just for a second. Stretch your body out just for a second. And put your feet together
like so, so they're touching. All right? Touching together. I'm not apart, touching. And then just
slowly bring up your right index finger straight in front of you.
And when I say now, don't do it until I say now.
I want you to turn clockwise comfortably and just notice where you normally naturally relax.
Go ahead.
Turn clockwise and notice where you stop.
Okay.
Come back around.
Take your finger out of your neighbor's ear.
Close your eyes.
Now, every one of you knows the power of visualization.
And some of you would say, I don't visualize.
But if I said, what color is my shirt?
You would say, black.
How do you know?
You go, I saw it.
Well, some of you slow down the image and actually see the shirt.
Most of you don't.
Your just brain asks.
It sees the picture at micro speed.
And all of a sudden, bam, you know the answer.
So some of you don't slow it down, but you still visualize.
So just for a moment, I want you to imagine, stay standing with your feet together, imagine
your fingers coming up again.
Don't actually do it, but imagine it vividly, like you're seeing and feeling that finger
come up, and see and feel yourself turning twice as far this time, and it's effortless.
And then in your mind, do it again.
See and feel the finger coming up, and see and feel, just imagine it going three times as far this time.
And it's fun.
And you enjoy it.
And you expect to go further.
When you're a little kid you'd say, measure me.
I measured you last week, son.
Measure me again.
Right?
Now bring the finger up in your mind one more time.
And this time feet stay straight.
And this time imagine going all the way around like an owl.
You go all the way around to the front.
Okay? And it's fun. And it's easy. And every time you imagine going all the way around like an owl. You go all the way around to the front.
Okay?
And it's fun.
And it's easy.
And every time, you expect to go further.
Now, open your eyes.
And bring your finger up.
And now, turn as far as you can comfortably.
And let's see where you go this time.
Ooh.
What was that moaning doing there?
How many of you went significantly further this time?
Say, aye.
Aye. Nobody went at least 25% further.
Say aye.
Then grab a seat and just answer this question if you would for me.
And that is, could you have turned that far the first time?
Of course.
Why didn't you?
Because even though you're unaware of it, you even have beliefs about how far you can turn.
A belief is a poor substitute for an experience.
You can tell me what you think about China, but if you haven't gone there and have no experience, you're just telling me your belief. A belief is a poor substitute for an experience.
You can tell me what you think about China, but if you haven't gone there and have no
experience, you're just telling me your belief.
And beliefs can be changed very quickly.
Give yourself an experience that's so vivid over and over again, and all of a sudden the
certainty will be there.
When the certainty is there, you come up with the answer.
Without the certainty, it won't happen.
So if a moonshot's going to happen, in my opinion, like when I, the first version of something I did was, I was at the school when I was like 29, and these kids
were doing all my stuff. It was a grade school. It was in Houston. It was a real tough area. And
they said, we want you to come. So I thought it was going to inspire these kids. And instead,
I sat while they did, like every grade got up and did some version of what they learned.
Every day they were doing some aspect of my work. And the end i was really touched and i was like i don't want this to end in the sixth graders who just only had one year of it
i said you know what i said if you guys are willing to commit i said i'm going to sponsor
all of your college educations i said every single one of you college education get to pick what you
want to do i'll put the criteria down i'm going to sign a contract for it but what i want from
you is a b average and i said and i'll also get you mentors and i want going to sign a contract for it. But what I want from you is a B average. And I said, and I'll also get you mentors. And I want you to give 30 hours of community service.
Now, why did I do that? Well, because I don't have a college education. I think it could be
great for many people. It's not great for everybody. But I wanted them to be people
that changed their identity from someone who needed help to someone giving help.
And if they were doing that, that would change their life even more than the school, in my opinion. And so the school system didn't work
real well. They came and thought I was proselytizing these children for some cult I was creating or
something of that nature. And then they finally became my friends. And then gradually, as I
followed these kids all the way through school and college, and now some are doctors and lawyers and
so forth, went all through that time. But when I sat this down and I signed the contract, I didn't
have any clue I was going to pay for that.
I didn't have any clue.
When I did the billion meals, that seemed, you know,
I was thinking I'll donate this and that.
It was like $100 million.
I'm like, holy shit.
But then it happened.
But then notice the momentum.
Now in six months, we're at $60 billion
when it took forever to get to a billion.
That's what happens, I think, with moonshots.
You get momentum.
You've all seen this in sports, right?
Who's ever seen somebody in sports, an athlete, let's say an NBA, come on up to shoot a free
throw or a football player, a kicker coming out, and you think before they release the ball,
before they kick it, you go, they're going to miss it. Who's done this before? And how many
of you were right? Make some noise if you're right, right? How did you know? You could see
the lack of certainty. Without certainty, there's not execution.
So my advice to you on your, you know,
and it's my own two cents, that's all it's worth.
You got to find your own version.
Find something you're so passionate about
that you'll go to the ends of the earth for.
Find something you care about more than yourself.
Find something that other people care about
more than yourself.
And then find something that the size of the challenge
will excite the hell out of you.
Of all the things that I've done in my life, truthfully, about, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, I was like, I'm going to continue all the things.
I love what I'm doing, but what's going to really get me going?
There's no toys are going to do that.
Islands, planes, all that shit.
That's really wonderful.
It's nice.
But what really moves me is impact.
So now I do all these things.
The food is only one of many of the projects.
And let's talk about the food and then come back to it a little bit later.
But your decision to go from a billion to 100 billion meals, it happened in an instant?
Yes.
And your level of confidence in making that?
Certainly, because I said there's 8 billion people in the world, and I only need to find 90 more important people than me.
So there's got to be more than me it you created a model that gave you enough
confidence in that and then my next thing is let me go let me go to the people that can say yes
let's get one let's go fishing not on a trout farm that's a lot of fishing in the sewer let's go
someplace where people have the capacity doesn't mean they will say yes but increases your chances
and then i also i'm a big believer in proximity as power.
One of the first billionaires I ever got to know gave me some advice one day,
and he was saying,
Tony, my whole life was changed by this idea of proximity.
He said, if you wanted to make a movie right now,
you can make any movie you want,
because I was in like 28 films where people threw me in.
I didn't even ask for it.
It was even before Shallow Howl and things like that.
But he said, because everybody,
you have so many clients that are
heads of studios, that are great actors, that are great agents. So you're in proximity.
So thinking about it, if you want to do a deal with IBM right now, he goes, I'm not saying you
couldn't do it, but you certainly wouldn't have had the same advantage that Bill Gates had with
his parents right there on the board of IBM. Proximity is power. So for your moonshot,
I think you've got to get in proximity with the right people.
It's one of the reasons that we write the books that we've done, the books I've done,
the one we did together.
Go to 150 of the smartest scientists on earth, Nobel laureates, regenerative doctors.
What do they know now?
Because the time between when you have a breakthrough and it actually gets to your clinician is
on average 18 years.
So we want to just blow that out and give people direct access.
You know, I'm super passionate about longevity and healthspan.
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transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now back to the episode. One of the things that
I've learned, Tony, and I know you know this too,
is you're giving also,
as you're going out for those 100 billion meals,
you're giving people the gift
of allowing them to participate in this.
Well, there's no question.
Can you speak to that?
And so often, even when I was doing this in the early days
in San Diego, just starting out,
I wrote this little book called Notes from a Friend.
And we started not just giving food,
but giving this little cartoon-like book for people.
And there was this man, I'll never forget,
who came and he took half the stuff he gave
and he gave it to somebody else,
and he kept handing out food for everybody else
because he got into the whole spirit of it.
You saw his whole, again,
he became someone not looking for help.
He was someone who could be giving help.
It was an identity change.
All lasting change, by the way, in your life,
my life, or anybody's, is a change in identity.
Anything else is a fight.
It's like if you once smoked and you don't anymore, and I came to you and said,
would you like a cigarette?
You're not going to go, what brand is it?
You're going to say, I'm not a smoker.
I'm not one of those.
Identity is the most powerful force that controls the human psyche.
Change your identity, change your life.
Expand your identity, expand your life.
Shrink your identity, change your life. Expand your identity, expand your life. Shrink your identity, shrink your life. So I try to get people to do things
that change their identity.
Even the silly, fun things we do,
like the fire walk or wood burn,
things that we do gives someone an experience
that after they do it, their brain says,
if I can do this, what else can I get myself to do?
That's the way that I think you create
a real lasting change in people.
But in all the cases, like for example, I noticed I was in India and I see all these
kids dying of waterborne disease and I said, this is insane.
So I found a group of people there and now we're providing a quarter of a million people
with fresh water every single day.
My goal is to get to a million people.
We're expanding the size of it.
But when it came to the air, I'm fortunate enough to have a private plane, a BBJ.
I'm conscious of what it burns in terms of fuel and trees.
So I was like, okay.
I found out what my burn was.
It's about 3,000 trees a year.
I'm planting 100 million trees.
I've already planted 71 million.
But I didn't just plant the trees, to your description.
I worked with this group called Trees for the Future.
And throughout parts of Africa, east and west, we go in and we create these forests that provide the water and the trees and they go through four years of training
and usually they have one crop a year and if it doesn't work out, they're dead and they
make $125 a day, $1.25 a day which is just, not $120 but $1.25 a day which is insane.
But by the time we provide the water and we've shown them what to do, they have a crop every
single month so if one doesn't come through, they're still fine.
They don't try to make it across the desert and die
they believe farming could still work they stay in their community and they make about 12 and a
half dollars a day which doesn't sound like much but it makes them wealthy in that community so
again they're learning and participating so when you're on plan i'm going to plan 100 million
trees we're at 71 million um i'll just give you just a quick point there we have about i think
three trillion trees on the planet right now
uh one of the projects a dear friend of both of ours mark benioff is focused on is a trillion
trees project if we can plant an additional trillion trees it would absorb enough co2 to
take us back to pre-industrial era cot levels in the atmosphere yes right if you could only build
a device that would pull CO2 out of the atmosphere
and store it for a long time,
that would be incredible.
If it grew itself,
it's amazing.
And it's beautiful
and it makes a difference
in the world.
But the same thing is true of,
you've got to look at
what your passions are.
I was doing an event one time
and it was a business event.
I do all these trainings
and during one of the days,
I have people see
how to really invest
because even though
they've worked their heart
on their company,
things like COVID happened and you could have your whole company just shut down overnight by the government so you need another opportunity and so we do a brief investment series
on them and then we have them figure out what do they want all this money for again what's it for
what's the reason right we have to brainstorm all these things they want to create or do or share
and then I always bring in philanthropy into it even somebody who's never ever done it before
and this woman about nine years ago stood up
and she had tears in her eyes and she said,
I want to make enough money.
I want to sponsor children that are being trafficked.
She goes, I have a friend of a friend who lost their child.
It's the most horrific thing on earth.
And she goes, this organization called
Operation Underground Railroad.
And they go in and they set these guys up
and they don't just save the children.
They teach the local police in these countries what to do and how to do it. They're former guys from
the CIA and really sharp people. So I said, well, what does it cost to sponsor a child,
to save a child's life? She said $3,500. So I said, okay, I'll put up a quarter of a million
dollars in matching funds. Let's see what we can do. And by the way, that's my strategy.
Everything I do, I go to those organizations and I say, I want matching funds.
Now, if they don't deliver it, I still give them the money.
But I try to just double the impact of everything I do.
Why not?
Why not ask?
Why not empower them?
I say, you can use my name, you can use my money.
Say, I can double the number of results you get.
And so that really does take off.
But in this case, I got really inspired and I actually went to Haiti.
I went undercover with these guys.
I've seen the photos.
Yeah, they had this makeup, I had a big scar on my face the whole thing and uh i've played this role it
was the most disgusting experience of my life and one of the most beautiful when you see these
children that are literally tied by a chain doing tricks 10 or 12 times a day and they're 12 years
old they're eight years old it's just horrific but to see them when they were freed one of the
greatest days of my life you've set a a goal. You set an initial goal there.
It was how big?
Yeah, originally it was I was going to sell 10,000.
We've already saved 29,000, so I want to save 50,000.
I grew up in a town of 50,000,
so that's what we're moving towards in that area too.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
You know, the role of philanthropy is critically important.
We talk a lot about exponential technologies.
We talk about moonshots.
We talk about changing business models and so forth.
And I think just like in our X price for feeding the next billion,
it's a long-term solution.
And these moonshots take a decade at least to mature.
And in the meantime, we need to feed those people that's
right you mentioned water we're getting ready I mentioned earlier we're ready to
launch about will be 130 150 million dollar desalination prize yes and that's
great but in the interim we still need to give people water yes let's talk
about education next now you along with Elon we were one of the funders of our Global Learning XPRIZE.
Yes.
And we had on stage here Imad Moustak on Monday.
Let's hear it for Imad.
Amazing.
Absolutely, absolutely a brilliant man, right?
And he has committed $100 million.
I've joined him in that journey to go and educate all of Malawi using that same kind of software, but generative AI.
And there's a vision in the future where all of this gets demonetized and democratized, where education for the poorest child and education for the richest
child is the same yes and so ultimately we're heading that way in the education world is there
anything else you're focused on yeah i'm just to me it's innovation i just back from saudi arabia
and saudi arabia is really a transformed place if you've not been there in the last five years
um you know four years ago even you couldn't hear. You couldn't go to a concert. You couldn't go to any movies. Women couldn't drive. If you went to a restaurant,
there was a woman's restaurant and a man's restaurant. 1979 was a huge year if you study
history in the Middle East because not only did you have Iran's revolution, which was
really an economic revolution. It wasn't a religious one. The Shah
was corrupt. People didn't have any money. But the people who made the thing happen were religious.
Now they're running into the same thing again. There's another need and desire for revolution.
But at that same time, a group of terrorists in that group attacked the Saudis and tried to kill
their royal families. And so they tightened their society at a level that seemed insane to anybody
on the outside. But today, 70% of the people
who live in Saudi Arabia weren't alive in 1979. So they have no memory of it, no experience,
no upset, including the Crown Prince, who will soon be king as his father's passing,
and BS. And so it's interesting because they don't have those limitations and they want
to be exposed, they want to be across the rest of the world. And you get to see the
power of moonshots when a country's aligned I was just a child when John F
Kennedy was here but I remember even Reagan getting people aligned where
there's there's a natural vision where are we gonna go what are we gonna do why
are we gonna do it that unify people today the vision the United States seems
to be division is the vision it's like how do we differentiate how do we attack
how do we destroy well you go we attack? How do we destroy?
Well, you go over there and there's nobody complaining
about coming to work three days a week.
And there are 20, 30 goals.
Everyone knows them.
I mean, everyone in the streets,
people, they're just,
they're aligned with them.
It's amazing.
And there's just live there.
This is the 2030 vision, right?
The 2030 vision they have.
And so one of those was to have
33% of the population be working women.
And it's already 37% seven
years early.
Many of you I know probably have seen NEOM and think maybe it's not going to happen.
I went there.
You can see the infrastructure in the dirt already.
They're spending a billion, excuse me, a trillion eight probably by the time they're done.
There's a $64 billion gigaproject where their home base is there.
And the level of talent that's been attracted around the world, when there's a clear vision,
when there's something that's going to change society in the world when people are
aligned it's just amazing we saw the same thing happen in the uae you saw it in singapore when
it was just nothing but dirt there's you know there's there are lessons to be learned from
leaders that understand how to take a moonshot but align a country and this is we've talked about
this unless you've got that massive transformative purpose
that is fueling your moonshot,
that you communicate to your teams,
you communicate to the world, right?
Why is everyone going to work
for Elon at SpaceX,
even though he's somewhat
of a tyrannical leader,
but they love the passion.
They love the mission,
the clarity of it.
At the end of the day,
people want that meaning in their life.
And you can deal with any, you know, you know, depression is out of control in this country. It is around the world, but especially in this country.
And obviously we've seen this massive suicide overdose and depression explosion that's
happened since COVID with everybody trapped in their homes and so forth.
And now people don't want to even work. so they don't have a sense of meaning.
It's wonderful to talk about UBI, but I always bring up what's going to be the meaning for
people if they don't work?
Because you can pay for everything and that doesn't make people satisfied, right?
We have to do something that's meaningful.
What's meaningful is different for every person, right?
So maybe I think it's easy to come up with solutions in your head but then
there's a reality of how humans work but the reality also tony i would say is that a lot of
people are working not for what they were passionate about to do as a child they're
working to get food on the table insurance for their families just to basically survive
and the question is and listen i've gone back and forth and we've had a lot of conversations about technological unemployment.
We were talking about doing some programming there together.
At the end of the day, if UBI does exist, the question becomes,
can that be used to enable someone to educate
and to give them the running room to go and find that thing
which they're passionate about?
My two cents, which is all it's worth, is two cents.
There needs to be some tie to some form of performance or work as well.
If there isn't anything there, then it's a hand-off.
I'll buy that.
I agree with that.
I mean, otherwise you're inviting it.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, you know me.
I have a few more people than most people ever dream of.
I care deeply.
But I also know that you can disempower someone by making them so weak.
And so I think we have to do both.
That's going to be the delicate thing. The delicate thing that we're all facing right now
is everybody sees the kind of discovery of fire where AI is becoming real as we speak
and exploding. It's going to change every aspect of society. Well, if you forget AI,
if all you had was self-driving cars and'd think taxi drivers, truck drivers, and Uber
drivers.
It's five million in the US alone.
Right?
Their jobs are going to go away.
Is it going to be three years, or five years, or seven years?
I don't know.
Maybe you know better than I do.
Maybe Elon can tell us better.
He's usually ahead of schedule in his descriptions.
Yes.
So, who knows?
We've had that conversation.
But he's the most brilliant guy in the world, so I'd still listen to him.
I might edge his dad a few years to what he tells me, right?
With no disrespect, just total enthusiasm sometimes goes a long way, but you've got to go beyond that.
Whatever the year is, just think about it.
Five million jobs.
That's how many that we saw during 2008 disappear.
They destroyed the entire economy.
That's one profession.
as one profession.
Who's going to hire someone to be a truck driver to drive only eight hours a day
and complain about health care and want more money
when they can have a self-driving truck
that they can depreciate
and it can work 24 hours a day and be more effective
and probably have less insurance?
So we are, you know, all of us were farmers.
80, 90% of America was farmers 150 years ago.
But, you know, we're not.
Today it's 3% farmers.
We feed the whole world.
The difference is the amount of time we had to change.
No one thought back then about, you know,
being a web expert of some sort.
But the amount of speed of change now
is going to create a real dislocation.
There is seismic change coming.
The short term, I'm not worried about the long term with jobs.
There will be more jobs.
But I think short term in our adaptation
is the thing that we're going to have to be ready for because it's going to disrupt people.
Now in places like UAE, they actually evaluate every job and how many there are and they
let people know going to college there aren't that many jobs in this area but there's more
here. That doesn't mean they have to change what they're going for, but they're aware
that you're wasting your time going to college studying something that's already antiquated.
So it's really important I think that we look at things and we educate people in society
because if we wait until the changes happen,
which is pretty much what's happened.
I remember I was with President Obama and I was saying,
what have you guys discussed about this?
He goes, well, we don't really know
if the change is going to happen, not happen.
I said, but what if it does?
And it will.
We all know when finally the change happens,
it's like that.
I know in this room what exponential change is.
The general population, and unfortunately a lot of leaders don't think that way,
we have social unrest if we don't get our act together and prepare people for what's coming.
All this technology is magnificent.
Lightning, electricity can light up a city or kill people.
Certainly it'll be abused. Certainly it'll, I think, be used for greater good over the long term.
We just have to look at the transition time and what that's going to do with human emotion,
because our technology is faster than our emotional and psychological development right now.
That's the scary thing. Lightyear is faster than our government regulatory capacity.
That does scare me. We've had some conversation here about, is this technology regulatable?
Can it be steered? Can it be influenced?
We can at least educate people of what's coming,
but the majority of people actually don't.
I'm not the expert.
When you talk to the experts.
Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode
to talk about a company that's very important to me
and could actually save your life
or the life of someone that you love.
The company is called Fountain Life.
It's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins
and a group of very talented physicians.
You know, most of us don't actually know
what's going on inside our body.
We're all optimists.
Until that day when you have a pain in your side,
you go to the physician in the emergency room
and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this,
but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on
for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was
the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the U.S. today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers
give you a full-body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking
for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup.
It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians
to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually.
Might as well find out when you can take action. Found Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.
We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you,
please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New
York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to
fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that
is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies,
my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans.
Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter.
It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.
All right, let's go back to our episode. Let's talk about, you know, we've mentioned, discussed, worked on that health is the new wealth.
Yes.
Let's talk about the work that you're doing in health that we've done together and that you're doing elsewhere.
I'm a first-class…
You want to talk about Fountain First or Life Force?
Sure.
Yeah.
So we wrote a book together.
It was initiated because I'm pretty crazy and I have a pretty nuts schedule and I'm
usually on stage not sitting like this but we're 12 hours a day, 13 hours a day with
people that wouldn't sit for a three-hour movie that somebody spent $300 million on.
You've got to keep people engaged.
And I've got a stadium full of people.
And I've got to do that for four or five, six days in a row.
So I've learned those skills.
Now we're doing those when COVID came.
I had to adapt.
You can imagine I'm used to stadiums.
And all of a sudden, Governor of California calls up and says, you can put 100 people in that stadium.
He's like, that's not going to work real well, right?
And so I was like, let's go to Vegas.
We'll go to Vegas.
That's what we'll do.
And they never shut down Vegas.
10 days outside of the event in Vegas, they shut down Vegas.
Then I was like, OK, we'll go to Texas.
Anybody here from Texas?
Yeah.
Texas is its own country, right?
You guys like it.
We can do whatever the hell we want.
I talked to the governor.
We're never shutting down, he tells me.
I'm going to rent my buddy's church, 15,000 people.
Nine days before we go down, they shut down Texas, right?
So I was like, we'll do this in movie theaters, right? We're going to find this in movie theaters.
And so sure enough, I'm going to do 1,500 movie theaters, 10 people each, at least have big sound,
and the movie theater shut down. So I looked around and said, I can't do one of these little webinars on a little 52-inch screen I'm used to a stadium and so I built the stadium I built a building with 50 foot
high ceilings and put 20 foot high LED screens 50 feet around I went to Eric
Yon his friend from zoom and said you got to give me 25,000 people instead of
a thousand we built software so you could shake it and now I did a program
in January for 1.5 million people from 195 countries in six days.
That's how much has grown to give you an idea.
It's just wild.
But I had a group that followed me for three years prior to this change in my life, which
has given me some more balance, sort of, and getting more overseas.
But they measured my body in all these different ways.
That's what triggered this book on health.
I've always been oriented towards health.
I've got to be a peak performer.
You have to. And so if you're going to go 12 hours a day, well,
they followed me for three years. They made me wear this device all day long. It's like a $58,000
device. It measures heart rate variability, everything you can imagine. They come and do
my blood. They came and did my saliva to find out my hormonal shifts. And they found that I was
burning 11,300 calories per day on stage, to give you an idea.
I said, that's impossible.
But they explained to me that chess players burn 4,000 not moving.
I was burning 3,500 before I got on the stage, just by my focus.
And then I found I jumped 1,000 times during the day,
because I don't stand on the stage.
If this was a real event, I'd be out in the crowd up in the group.
And it's kind of like a living room.
I can pretty much hug you guys here. But in order to do that, I'm jumping a thousand times. Well,
I weigh 282 pounds. Every time you jump and come down, it's four times your body weight.
So imagine a thousand pounds times a thousand jumps, a million pounds of pressure each day for 46 years. This is my 46th year. I started when I was two. And then, hey.
So, but anyway, the bottom line is that if you've ever been running with a friend and you can't
speak anymore, it's because the lactic acid is built up to a four. I was at 18 still speaking.
So I tell you this because along the way, I'm used to like deliver all this. And then suddenly
I had two challenges. One was I didn't find out until afterwards, I'm used to like deliver all this. And then suddenly I had two challenges. One was,
I didn't find out until afterwards, I was starting to lose my memories. I was like,
I'm on stage. I don't have any notes. I go 12 hours a day. And suddenly I'm saying a story.
I'm like, why was I telling this story? And I was good enough in what I'm doing that most people didn't know, but I knew it was freaking me out. And so I found out that I had massive mercury
poisoning. On a zero to five scale, when you measure it at five, I was 123, the highest they'd ever measured.
You don't do anything small, do you, Tony?
No, I didn't do the small.
They actually sent, I did this in New York,
and they sent the health department
out to my house in Florida
because they thought maybe my wife
was trying to kill me
since I have a large life insurance policy,
which she was not, fortunately.
But I was a vegan for so many years,
like 14 years,
and then I wanted more protein.
I went to just fish, but my fish was swordfish and tuna.
And swordfish and tuna are 75-year-old fish.
They eat all the smaller fish that absorb all of their mercury,
and my body doesn't methylate well.
So the result was I was losing my memories of my energy,
discourage your ATP, everything else.
So I had to detox that.
And then in the middle of that, I decided to be an idiot
and follow a professional 20-year-old snowboarder down a mountain. And let's just say I did not make
the same moves he did. And I ended up, I thought I broke my neck and I ripped my rotator cuffs
severely. So I go to four different doctors, all really brilliant surgeons, and they're all like
surgery, surgery, surgery. And I said, what about stem cells? And they said, no, no, they'll never work.
And then I called Peter and I said,
who's the best in stem cells in the world?
I said, I don't know, you know.
So we interviewed, I'd known Bob before,
but I didn't make the connection between Bob and Uri.
Bob and Uri, right.
And so Bob and I talked and, you know, it's like,
it's kind of like, let me introduce you to my friend,
Bob Uri about stem cells.
It's like, let me introduce you to LeBron James.
He'll teach you about basketball.
It's kind of the approach there.
And so Bob said, Tony, you know, they're right if you do your own stem cells. After
40, you just don't have them. But if you could get cord stem cells, and he told me where to go,
and I did it. And Peter knows, four days later, my arm was perfect. Four days. From such nerve pain,
I couldn't barely breathe to perfect. No surgery. The prognosis before was it would be six to,
you know, eight weeks minimum, maybe 90 days,
maybe more. You can re-tear. I've had friends I've told about, one has gone and done this,
the other one did the traditional prognosis, re-tore it twice. So I decided I want to write
a book on the very best, just like I did in finance. Go interview the best in the world,
and the best person to do it was with Peter, so we did it together. And then, just like when I did
the financial book, I wrote this financial book, and at the end of it, it was 670 pages. And it's, you know,
still the number one financial book of the last 20 years. But I was like, people won't all do this.
They need someone to hold their hands. So they need a fiduciary, somebody who's a real fiduciary,
not somebody who claims they're a fiduciary. So I found 10 top fiduciaries, and I recommend the
book. I took no money for the book. I donated all the money for the book.
And then sure enough, I find out about six months later that there's this gray area on
the wall where someone can say they're your fiduciary, and a minute later, they're a broker.
They just changed their hat angle, and you don't know the difference.
That made me so angry.
I wrote a new book.
I kicked all those people off of it and put together a new partnership.
And in that partnership, we took a company called Creative Planning from $18 billion to $50 billion in AUM.
They did an unbelievable job, and now they're at $200 billion.
And so I've sold my interest in it, but I decided we should do the same thing in health.
We need to give people the answers they can do on their own, but we should find a location.
And so together, we really formed, with two of our partners, Fountain Life.
Yeah, it was amazing.
We launched that now some four years ago
and ultimately wanted a place that we could send people
that would have the highest level diagnostics and therapeutics.
It's still expensive, and that's a problem, right?
Demonetizing and democratizing this.
We have out of the book, I think, a wait list of like 30 locations that want to do it.
But I think the real innovation for us was the health insurance side.
That's right.
So if you think about this, 14% of the people that come to Fountain Life, we do full-body MRIs.
We do everything.
Many of you know now there's like the Grail test that can find up to 50 different cancers.
You know, the challenge with cancer is most of the cancers that kill us because we find
them at stage three and stage four.
And usually that's because we don't have a test for it.
Most of the cancers we don't have.
70% of all cancers that kill you are not being tested for.
That's correct.
And so the study shows that if you get it at stage three or stage four diagnosis, you
have an 80% chance of dying.
I prefer the 20% chance of living.
But their point is, if you get it at level first stage or second, you have an 80% chance of dying. I prefer the 20% chance of living, but their point is if you get it at level first stage or second, you have between
90 and 99.9% chance of survival. So we have people come in, 14% of the people
that come through our centers have a life-threatening issue they don't know
about that we can handle immediately. And I had one friend that went, his wife
kept pushing him and pushing him and I said, you know, you might want to listen
to your wife, he's got good ideas here. He said, you know, you might want to listen to your wife.
She's got good ideas here.
He said, oh, I've been to the doctor.
Think about what a physical is today.
It's the same crap that you went through 50 years ago.
It's absurd.
You don't really learn anything.
And yet we have all this incredible data that we can pull out.
So people come in and they discover he came in
and found out that he had kidney cancer of stage one.
An outpacing procedure took him minutes, and he's totally fine. I can't tell you how many people
come to me and said, it saved my life. So 40% of the people that come see there's multiple things
they can do to massively increase their energy. It's either a hormonal issue or some other balance
as well. So people come in, they discover things. But we were talking about how do we make this
financially able for people and so
we formed you know a life insurance company or should say health insurance rather where it costs
the same amount of money as any other health insurance but what we do is we do all this
testing up front we invest in the money up front most of the expenses on the back end where people
are dying so we not only save lives the most important thing but we make it economically
feasible for people to be able to have all their employees know where they stand right now. Catch it when it's little. Now, I was
one of the people who's like, I don't want to know this stuff. I don't want to hear all this.
You might find something that's really not there, but I was totally wrong. When you dig in with the
data we have today, the false positives are so small, you're crazy. You're going to find out
eventually. When do you want to know? That's true yeah and you know it's a it's a transformation
and it drives me nuts uh the health care system we have in the united states at least is so
expensive and its performance is so poor and we need a a revolution and it's disease care it's
not health it's disease care um and so there is nothing more valuable than your health yeah so
i'm very proud of the of the team and what we've done there.
And if it works successfully, we're in a situation at the end of the day that will transform and flip the insurance company.
Fire insurance pays you after your house burns down.
Health insurance pays you after you're sick.
Life insurance pays your Mexican after you're dead.
Let's flip that business model.
Great opportunities if you have an insurance business out there.
Tony, one of the big challenges and questions we've talked a lot about these last few days is mental health.
And what can we do?
We're going to eventually, we have some incredible technology from Mary Lou Jepsen, who's here, who's learning how to, you know, has been reading and writing onto neurons and can eventually transform your mental status, how emotionally can use that
to measure blood flow in the brain for stroke analysis, ultimately disrupt glioblastomas,
incredible work. But it turns out that you have been doing that in an amazing way.
Can you talk about the work and the studies recently done on mental health?
And depression in particular.
Yeah, depression is out of control.
One of the reasons it's out of control is people today have no compelling future.
Kids today.
You know, you hear many millennial kids now, when I say kids,
and the oldest ones are 41, 42 years old now,
and next generation talking about not having any children
because they believe the story that the whole world is going to hell,
that we're going to have an ecological disaster
and how can I raise my child in this environment?
Or they think we're so divided.
I mean, if I showed you images of John Adams and Jefferson
and what they said about each other,
you'd see that nothing has changed in all this time period.
We just have some, yep, somebody has it.
I'll throw it up on the screen.
Yeah, put it up, it's funny.
It says, you know, if you like Thomas Jefferson,
he's a murderer, he's a robber, he's a rape, incest, adulterer,
whose practice will be practiced throughout the land.
You're prepared to see your dwellings in flames.
Female chastity violated.
Our children ribbing in pike.
This is John Adams talking about Thomas Jefferson.
And you see Jefferson talking about him.
He's importing mistresses from Europe and trying
to marry one of his sons to the daughter of
King George. He's a hideous, hermaphrodite
character with neither the force of
firmness of a man nor the gentleness
and sensibility of a woman.
Wow, he makes Trump look extra. Those are our founding fathers
talking about each other.
So I guess the whole Trump
thing's been around longer than we think, right?
But my point is that we need a compelling future.
Anyone can deal with a tough today if they have a compelling tomorrow.
But we aren't providing that.
There's no vision anymore communicated.
Everything is about how to rationalize, make it smaller.
It's the opposite of what this conference is about.
It's not about abundance.
It's about scarcity.
And it's just not true.
I remember when I was in junior high school,
I had this teacher that came in one day,
and he was always doing weird things.
And I was wondering if I was ever going to drive a car,
because some of you are old enough to remember
when we had gas rationing in the 70s under Carter.
And I didn't have a car yet,
but people had to stand in line for about a mile long.
And depending upon whether your license plate
ended in an odd or even number determined whether whether you could even buy gas that day regardless
of the line and I remember he came in he read this document and it was from the
New York Times and it talked about lights out we're out of oil everything's
gonna stop and you know we've seen this the Club of Rome did this in the 70s
we've heard over and over we're all gonna die right it's just not true but what's really
interesting you read this article at the end it was whale oil it was from the new york times in
the 1800s 1850s it was great but to answer your question specifically during covid i was approached
by stanford university and they said they had two of their professors that attended one of my
programs called date with destiny some of you if you've if you go on netflix there's a documentary on it if you're interested in seeing it. It's called Tony Robbins,
I'm not. How many folks here have been to Date with Destiny? Holy shit. Yeah. And it's one of
the most transformative, amazing programs on the planet. If there are a couple of things I wish I
had done when I was younger in my life, that was most definitely one of them. That one, Burning
Man, Ayahuasca, move it up 30 yards. I'm glad I'm thrown in right next to of them. That one, Burning Man, Ayahuasca, you know, loop it up through here.
I'm glad I'm thrown in right next to Burning Man.
That's awesome.
But they said,
we had two of our professors go through this six-day program of yours,
and we can't believe it.
They have no symptoms of depression.
And we're curious,
do you have any data on this?
And I said, well, data,
I've got hundreds of thousands of clients,
millions of clients,
but with testimonials and stories, and I know what happens. You're changing the focus. You're changing the meaning, which
changes the biochemistry. And they said, well, how about we do a study then? I said, great.
And I said, what do you want to study? He said, just depression, how effective this is with them.
I said, well, I think you're going to find it to be very effective, but what's the best? What's
the meta-studies show?
And I don't know if you guys are aware of it, but 60% of the people that go in for treatment
of depression with drugs and or therapy do not get an ounce better.
60%.
Only 40% improve.
And according to meta-studies, half the improvement is about 50% improvement.
So they're half as depressed as they were, and they're taking medications that on the
side says create suicidal thoughts in some cases.
And I don't know if you saw the cover of Newsweek recently.
It was about three or four months ago.
But the meta-studies now show the SSRIs don't work, but we're still feeding new people.
It's just insane.
So I said, OK, 40%.
I said, hell, you could do that well with a placebo.
And they said, almost.
And I said, so what's been,
that's the meta study. What's been the single best study you've ever produced? And they said,
three and a half years ago at Johns Hopkins, they did a study where they gave people psilocybin,
magic mushrooms, and cognitive therapy for a month. So you're stoned for a month and talking for a month. Something's got to change, right? And so sure enough, the greatest result they've ever seen in the history of psychiatry,
30 days later, 54% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever after 30 days of this drug. But
unfortunately, it's illegal. And no one has really followed through on it. There's people
trying to pass a law to get it involved and therapists. So I said, great, why don't you use
the same contrasting group as that model that that study, and let's do it.
So they did.
And the results were so insane that they didn't publish them right away.
They blind sent the data to different organizations.
And finally they published it in the Journal of Psychiatry last year.
One hundred percent of the people 30 days later having no drugs, one hundred percent
not a single set of depression, not one.
And 17% of the participants had, when they went in, had suicidal ideation,
attempting suicide or thoughts of suicide.
Zero at the end of those.
But the thing I was most proud of is a year later, 11 months later,
they tested people again with no further interaction from me whatsoever,
and they had a 72% reduction in negative emotions of 51% improvement and positive emotions so it's just it's extraordinary and why does it work that's what they want to
know and it's biochemical so remember I told you they followed me for three
years one of the things that one of the groups does this work with Stanford is
they do this performance modeling like on Tom Brady and people of that nature
some sports teams that have continually dominated like the Warriors.
And sure enough, they find that there's a biochemical change
in people that can perform at the highest level under stress.
They call it the championship biochemistry.
And what it is very simply is a guy like Tom Brady,
he's, you know, there's two minutes left, he's down by 10 points.
And, you know, we've seen him do this over and over,
come back and win Super Bowls. How does he do it? Well, he gets a surge of testosterone, which my body does explosively
at levels that you rarely see. And then the cortisol, which is the stress hormone, drops
to the floor. So as a result, you have all this drive and total clarity without fear.
And what's interesting is every time they measure me, I do this. But when we started doing this,
they did it with my live audience. then they started measuring when we did this
digitally.
So we got people all over the world doing an event, and they're all in their homes,
and I didn't even think I could pull that off and have it be effective, but we figured
ways to do it.
And they went and sent people around the world and measured them as well, and if you know
mirror neurons, these people's biochemistry literally mirrors my biochemistry.
It looks like music.
We all go into that championship state.
And in that state also, with that testosterone increase,
your cognitive capacity explodes massively.
They did another study at Stanford
where they just did increase in cognitive capacity, for example,
and they saw a 300% increase out of my event,
contrasting it against the number one most popular professor at Stanford
teaching my exact content.
He got great improvements, but 30 days later it was gone. Contrasting it against the number one most popular professor at Stanford teaching my exact content.
He got great improvements, but 30 days later it was gone.
And the reason is I believe in what I call e-cubing.
E-cubing is I've got to create a biochemical change in you for you to change.
It's not just intellectual.
Otherwise it doesn't last.
And it's got to be somewhat conditioned.
So I believe you've got to entertain people first, especially in today's society.
We're not an information society.
There's too much information.
We're drowning information, starving for wisdom.
So especially young people, you've got to entertain them.
So I entertain them so that, you know,
a long time is you're not enjoying yourself, right?
Could be two minutes.
A great time, hours go by.
So we produce that entertainment.
Then we empower people.
We shift them biochemically by movement,
by music and so forth to make a real shift, then while
they're in that state, we get them to do things to develop new habits. And a combination of those
three things creates a long-term impact of retention and cognitive impact, but more importantly,
behavioral change. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer
that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out
there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every
devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the
world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the
world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies
are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future
of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI,
3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as
an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your
neural nets with, go to dmandus.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode.
and learn more. Now back to the episode. Tony, you're also playing in the extraordinary world of energy. It's a big, complex area, but can you tell us about the moonshot you're taking in that
area? Well, there are several technologies that I've been exposed to over time that can make a
difference, and I'm working with some of my friends in the Middle East as leverage to take those things to scale I can't actually I just signed a deal potential
deal and I can't give you the details but I'll give you just what's available
you know here you know California you see the governor here's a beautiful man
and he comes out and says you can't have you know combustion cars by what it was
a 2030 and two weeks later you can't plug in your
electric car because there's not enough electricity to support it so we we're ahead of our skis
anybody who's intelligent knows this i just interviewed jamie from jp morgan and jamie
diamond and he was acknowledging all these this isg we've we've screwed ourselves over we're saying
we're going to do this and we don't have the technology and i'm everybody wants green energy but we don't have the conversion we
have the storage or the capacity and so the price has gone crazy here in la the price was eight
cents a kilowatt hour it's 49 cents they just approved so people like us that doesn't affect
the average person it affects massively and we all want green energy green energy so just we got to
make sure that it works
and so i love that you're going to do the sequestering project here i think that's fantastic
carbon but there's one organization and again i'm sorry i can't talk about the details now but
we'll be publicizing it as soon as it's confirmed the next 45 days can you talk about the basic
technology i'll tell you how it works they're able to take any hydrocarbon, so oil, gas, or coal, and subtract the carbon out of it before they burn it,
and they sequester that in graphite.
And graphite is a core ingredient that's needed for everything you can imagine from batteries on down.
But what's amazing is they can create pure green hydrogen then,
and this is not like in a lab, I've actually seen it in a particular location where it's, the first location where it's working. Hydrogen, pure power, nothing
but moisture, carbon, totally sequestered, you don't need to have a prize to do it, I
was thinking they should probably come apply for your prize and get the 100 million added
to their list, because they're doing it right now. But the side effect of it, there's two
side effects that are amazing. One is, okay, get graphite.
Well, they make graphite at $50 a ton, and it costs $500 a ton.
Now, graphene, many of you are probably familiar with,
was discovered, I think, 14 years ago.
It's 200 times stronger than steel.
It's 100 times lighter than paper.
It has greater conductivity than copper.
There are more applications pending for applications of this,
you know, the federal government, but almost nothing's being used because it costs between $67,000 and $200,000 a metric ton. So it's so expensive, no one can really use it yet.
They can make it as a side product between $3,500 and $5,000 a ton. So everything I've seen thus
far is there. I'm going through validation process with some very potent people.
If it goes forward, they'll start converting plants.
What's great is there's 3,800 power plants that produce a third of the CO2 in the world.
You don't have to care about the environment you're being pressured to anyway.
But even if you didn't care, you'll do it because they can convert a plant in less than 12 months.
It costs about $125 million.
They get all their money back within seven months
from just side benefits.
You can take a plant that was earning $50 or $60 million
and earn $300 to $500 million from the same power plant.
So instead of shutting down the power plants
and not having them and losing those jobs,
we convert them to clean energy immediately.
This is technology that currently exists.
And again, until I've seen the final, final, final verifications
of everything I hold
back but there'll be something you'll be announced quickly this is states that are looking at it
right now this is an example of the kinds of breakthroughs that are materializing that are
enabling us to slay these grand challenges that are so scary when you first hear about them yeah
but the human mind comes in to fill the void to solve
it over and over again the biggest challenge I think we have is the media
they're good people there's no one in the media it's a bad person but they're
doing what they're paid for they got to get make money for their shareholders
there's only one way get your attention yeah again it's an attention economy now
what gets your attention even the old days when we bought newspapers and you
walk by if it said good weather this weekend you kept walking. It's a big
storm coming you put in your 50 cents and got the paper. Today it follows you
in your pocket and now you and I both know the story doesn't even have to be
truthful. All they need is the headline to grab you. Once you click on it they're
paid. So we have a tough situation in that we're constantly feeding the
worst possible scenario to people
and then wondering why people don't, why they're depressed, why they don't want to move forward
with children, why people don't want to go to work. And I think it's our job to shut that off
and take back control of our own minds and do the best we can for our kids and friends of that nature
as well. luck