Tony Robbins How To Hack Your Bank Account & Your Biology #531 Full Episode

Foreign a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is about the timeless value of cacao. It turns out that classic era Maya money in the late 600s and 700s actually did grow on trees, at least where conditions allowed. Cacao trees grew in Tabasco, Mexico, and a few other places with humid river valleys, heavy rainfall and protection from sun and wind. And the Mayan rulers at Calakmul in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala collected annual tributes in cacao beans, not coffee beans, even though those also grow in the same regions. Today's guest is someone I literally look up to because he's taller than me and for many other reasons. None other than Tony Robbins. Number one New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, philanthropist. For more than four decades, millions of people have enjoyed his warmth, humor, and just transformational power in Tony's business events, his personal development retreats, which I've had the honor of attending multiple times. He's the nation's number one life and business strategist who consults and coaches some of the world's top athletes, entertainers, Fortune 500 CEOs, even presidents of nations. And interestingly, and you might not know this about Tony, he's the founder or partner in more than 30 companies, 12 of which he actively manages in a bunch of different industries, including virtual reality, Major League Soccer, top resorts and spas, companies with combined annual sales of $5 billion. And today, Tony's coming on the show so we can talk about his most recent book called Financial Freedom Playbook, which is where he talks about how he went from these incredibly scrappy stories as a young man building his business to this very unusual position of being able to manage a dozen companies at that level of performance. It's just about unheard of even in the world of successful business. So we get to pick his brain. Tony, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. Dave, it's a privilege to be back with you.

What made you at this point in your life where you've changed the lives of millions of people? Some of my favorite entrepreneurs cite your work as being what, their fire. So you've already had this personal transformation level to become an expert on the financial side of things. What was your motivation for doing that?

Well, there's only a few subjects that really impact the quality of your life in a significant way. Right. It's your emotions, it's your relationships, certainly your finances and your career. And so I've always actually taught these principles Fundamental principles. And I've coached Paul Tudor Jones now for, gosh, 24 years, I believe it is now. And he's one of the top 10 financial traders literally, in the history of the world. And so I've learned a lot in that area and I've not thought about in this area, but when 2008 happened, I did extremely well because, you know, you make more money when things are burning down than when they're growing, if you understand what you're doing. But I was just devastated to see the number of people around me that were hurting. I saw people that have been incredibly successful financially just take gigantic hits during that time in their businesses and their investments. And it made me nuts. And I remember I kept thinking, somebody's going to do something. And two years later, around 2010, I saw this documentary and it was really a systematic breakdown. It won the Academy Award, but a systemic breakdown of how a small number of people almost took down the world economy. And then the punishment we gave them was to give them more money. So by the end of this film, you're either totally depressed or you're totally pissed off, depending upon your personality. I was the pissed off type because depression doesn't change much. And so I thought, what can I do? I'm just one guy. Well, I could interview 50 of the smartest people in the world because I've got access. I mean, literally the smartest people in the history of finance. Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, Carl Eichlein. Right. Paul Tudor Jones. And so I thought if I do that, I can then figure out what's really working in the system. I can get an unassailable view of what it takes to succeed. And so I end up doing this 575 page monster called money. Master the game. I'm really proud of it. Steve Forbes said there was a Pulitzer Prize for an investment book. This win, you know, hands down, we got huge endorsements, great impact, number one bestseller. And I fed a lot of people because I donated all the money to Feeding America. So we fed 400 million people in the last four years. To give you an idea, I'm going to feed a billion over the next six. But I wrote Unshakable because in the midst of all this, I realized, my God, we have the longest bull market in history. Now we are approaching it. At the time. There's going to be a correction, there's going to be a bear. And if we're not smart, people are going to go right back to what they did in 2008, and they're going to get hurt again. And I don't want to see that happen. I wanted to write a book that somebody could read in a weekend, literally, a millennial who thinks they have too much debt and they just, they don't think there's a future. And I want to show them exactly how they can succeed, you know, and somebody on the other end, you take a baby boomer that thinks it's too late and show them that you can still become financially free. And so that's why I wrote the book. And I'm really proud of it because it's not me. It is the works of the greatest investors in the history of the world. And the only part that's me is the psychology side, which very few people would argue that isn't my expertise the last 41 years. So it's a beautiful combination. And I found just tremendous stories of people changing their lives as a result of this. And this book Also, I donated 100% of the profits. So we're going to feed another 100 million people over the course of this. So anybody who picks up the book for themselves will also feed 50 families, which I'm really excited about.

Now you have the book broken down into three sections and you talk about wealth. There's a playbook. But the area that's most interesting to me is the psychology of wealth. Tony. The reason that's interesting is that when I was 26, I made $6 million, which was awesome. The company that held Google's first servers. When I was 28, I lost it because I did not understand the psychology of wealth. What do people do wrong when they think about wealth or when they have emotions around wealth? What's getting in our.

Well, you know, we all have a 2 million year old brain, right? And that brain is not designed to make you happy. It's designed to make you survive. And it deals with money issues like survival. You know, there's no saber tooth tiger that you gotta go run from now. So now the brain worries about life and death. Oh my God, do I have enough money? What are people thinking of me? And it has these insane reactions. And so, you know, part, there's a whole chapter in the book that's all about the biases that we have that show you that your own brain is probably the biggest challenge of becoming wealthy because you have all these conditions in your own psychology. There's, you know, confirmation bias. When we want believe in something, we don't look to disprove it. We live to prove it to ourselves. Well, in investing that's disastrous. You talk to Ray Dalio, he'll tell you his number one thing is to find educated people who disagree with him violently. And he wants to interact with them because he wants to see what they're seeing that he's not seeing, because he knows he can't see it all. You know, it's our nature as human beings to think in terms of recency. You know, oh, this is going well now. So it's always going to go well, or it's going terribly now. It's always going to go terrible. There are seasons or economic seasons, and they come around every 20 years. There's cycles that are shorter than that as well. But if you understand that winter always comes. Some winters are long, some are short, but they come. In other words, one of the facts that most people don't understand around investing, it keeps them from investing, is, oh, my God, you know, I don't know when's the right time to do it. You know, the market has been up for a long time or the market's due for a correction. Well, 5% of the time, the market in every year, on average, 5% of the time, the market hits a new record. So when you hear a new record, new record, new record, it's about once a month. So you get an idea that's true over history on an average. Now, sometimes you have long periods without it and longer periods with it. And what people don't realize is there's also a correction. A correction is a technical correction from a high of 10% drop or more up to 20. Once you hit 20, it becomes a bear market. And so these corrections happen Every year since 1900, on average, every single year. And here's what's crazy. The average correction is you lose 14% in the short term. So if you react, you're going to lose your money. But if you stay in, like, I'll give an example, two years ago, you probably remember in January of 2016, we had the worst stock market opening in January in the history of the stock market. $2 trillion melted down. They went to Davos, where all the wealthiest people in the world said, what do we do? The market's down 9% in January alone. And they asked Ray Dalio, the greatest hedge fund investor in the history of the world, what should we do? And he said, don't panic. There's one of these every year. And we're not. 80% of those, by the way, don't become bear markets. 80% don't. So he said, don't need to panic. And he actually said on cnbc, in the middle of this panic read Tony Robbins book, he said, I did an interview with him and I showed you exactly.