Tony Robbins Interview On Marketing And Innovation - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #83

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Everybody.

It's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

Yes, we're here, Dean.

It is happening now.

It's happening now.

18 months, Dean, tell.

Tell everybody what we got going. I'm in New York, you're in Toronto.

And we've got Mr. Special Guest, Mr. Tony Robbins.

Yes, Tony, how are you? Where are you? I'm in Fiji at my resort here.

That's nice. You know, we always thought we joke about this. We've had guests from Australia on. We've had, you know, from all over the place. So it's just we're living in amazing times. All the technology that we can. We can do this. So, Tony, we really appreciate you coming. And we always like to kind of start out and ask, why do you love marketing?

Well, I wasn't a lover of marketing. I'm a lover of people. And I love having impact and changing lives. But very early on, I realized that my ideas were going to die on my lips unless I learned how to market them, unless I got people to seek me out. And you can only speak to so many people directly. You have to be able to speak indirectly and have them feel like you're speaking directly. You have to communicate in a way that causes them to have the hunger and desire to come to you. And marketing, as you And I, all three of us know, has changed radically in the last 10, 15 years. Fifteen years ago, it used to take and you just do some advertising. And on average, if a person was interested after four exposures to an advertisement, they would engage in some kind of beginning the process of buying behavior. Today, it takes 16 exposures on average. So at that point, most marketing can't really do anything. You can't afford that kind of marketing unless you're doing institutional marketing. And the secret is, really cut through all that and figure out how do you really reach the core audience? And you know, Dean, I think you and I, years ago, we had an interview. We went over and did an interview and did some mini golfing. In the midst of it all, I never forgot something you, I believe, shared with me, which is really when you think about marketing, you got to really think about. And I've always thought about this, but you made it even more clear who is the specific target you want. I think a lot of people market today to this mass audience. And instead of marketing the forest, you got to decide which specific tree or blades of grass or flowers that you really are going to have a message that really connects with. And so I believe marketing is the essence of everything. Peter Drucker said, there's only two aspects of business that really matter, innovation and marketing. And I don't separate them because I think marketing without innovation is just trying to sell something. If you really have something that you constantly innovate, you're constantly finding a way to make it better. If your mindset is I'm one reason in business and one reason only, that's a way to find a way to add more value to other people's lives than anybody else is adding, well, in order to keep that truth with yourself, you got to keep deepening, enriching, strengthening, finding some way to make what you do better, whether it be the product itself or the service itself, or the way you deliver it or the offering itself. And I think that you can't separate the two together. If you are constantly innovating, you're going to also be innovating your marketing, and you're going to have something to market. But if you keep trying to sell the same old idea over and over again without any way of finding a way to add more value to your customers, I think marketing becomes extremely difficult.

It's the innovation that keeps you kind of excited and passionate about it.

Right.

It's like Joe has spent some time with Richard Branson on Necker island, and we had a video interview with him, and he said one of the most important things in marketing is that you've.

Got to have something that you believe.

In so strongly that you're proud to shout about it from the mountains. And I think that's really kind of what innovation would be. It's just continuing to make it better and always keeping, like you said, your love for people in mind and doing everything that you can to serve them the best way that you can.

I think so. I think if you're not focused on figuring out how to absolutely not just delight, but blow away your client or customer, if you're not looking to create raving fans, your marketing will have a limited amount of impact. Because even if you market well, in the old days, I had my infomercials, and we put those things on there. What made my products go crazy were not those infomercials we advertised like crazy. But there were people that came out back in those days, and literally, I won't mention who, but somebody in my industry who saw how successful my first show was, came out and copied it. I mean, almost word for word. I had back in those days, a guy named Fran Tarkenton who was A great football great at that time they went and found football great to be the interview person. I worked with some athletes and they went and got some athletes. They did it in the same sequence. They copied my same everything and the show was a total failure. The reason is because the product sucks. But if your product is not incredibly valuable to people's lives, your marketing is going to fall flat. Because the ultimate marketing is word of mouth marketing. If you got word of mouth, a great message where there's constant improvement and innovation in people's lives, then you start to hit home runs.

How long has it been since you were on TV? As strongly as you were like.

9? I started doing infomercials. It was the early stage of those. And Guthy Ranker came to me, started out because they came to me and said, we're doing this. We understand you promote this book can grow rich when I'm like 27 years old. And they said, we are Pete duplicators and we're thinking of doing these little infomercials and would you appear in it? So I did. I got an endorsed it. And they had about, I don't know, 20 people endorsing, including Ronald Reagan. And then they, and I thanked them at the time. I said, you know, I've been seeing these infomercials and they're so horrible. Everybody's saying, you know, you can get rich doing nothing. And I said, you know, I think if you guys did a really quality program, you can make a difference and I'd like to maybe partner with you on something. And they were kind of like, don't call us, we'll call you. And you know, just didn't think much of it. But when they did the focus groups, you know, over 80% of the people, I don't know if they're real Number of 83 something percent of the people said they bought because of me, out of all the people they heard speak. So they called me back and wanted to do a deal. So by the time I was 29 to my first portion with the early days of infomercials, in those days, you know, there were 50 channels. So you literally couldn't. I mean, you saw me on television no matter where you were, because I was on television for gosh, from 89 to roughly 2002, probably I was on every 21st, every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day somewhere in the US or Canada. That was where that was where I was going with that was that you.

Really haven't been on television for 10 years. And then yet still your UPW, your unlimited power weekends. You know, I was with you in Florida last spring and there were 3,500 people there. And that's a testament to really the. The audience that you have kept and expanded because of maybe what that initial exposure started out for you.

Well, that's what I tell people. Exposure will not get you above. Do it by advertising what you know, if you want to see what it really does. My advertising worked because when I got the product out there, people crazy told other people, people don't trust infomercial. They're a horrible venue. And you know, it's pretty much a de now because there's thousand channels and nobody watches TV anyway. But even during time was a horrible venue. I only chose it because I needed a distribution channel. But what made it work was people told other people, no, this is extraordinary. So that when they saw it on television, it started a conversation with someone else who already had it. You can't believe the focus groups have done people that watch these shows and were interested but still held back. And then they heard from somebody or they read about somebody who had really changed their life in some way and that pushed them over the edge. But no Arvind and juvenile, they continue to grow. This year we did 5,000 people in New York and we had 6,000 people last month in San Jose.

Right on.

You know what, Tony? With everything you've been doing over all these years, I mean, if you weren't who you were, most people, we didn't even do an introduction of you because it's just obvious our listeners know who the heck Tony Robbins is.

But you know, when someone doesn't know who you are really what you do.

What do you say to them? I mean, how do you describe you?

It doesn't happen very well at this stage of my life. But you know what I would tell people? I'm in the business of breakthroughs. I live to have those moments, those moments in time with somebody where there is this instant change. When people talk about change takes 10 or 20 years. I always say it's bullshit. It really takes a moment. It's the moment you say, I love you, it's over. Let's begin. I'm walking right now. I'm running. I'm starting now. I'm going to go start some program. I do. Those are the mom to change your life. You change your life in the moment of decision. But what happens for a lot of people is they have a story that keeps them from doing that. The story might be, I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. The story might be, I'm too young, I'm too old, I have any money. I don't have the resources. Everybody's got different stories, and those stories put you in such a lousy state that you never find the strategies that can make a difference. So to me, a breakthrough is that moment in time when the impossible becomes possible. And you don't just know it, you act on it. And it can be triggered by so many things. It can be triggered by learning a new strategy. It can be triggered by having an experience that just pisses you off and you finally say, no more. It can be by meeting somebody that inspires you, or they're doing something that you said couldn't be done. You're staring it in the face and can't deny it. And you know, you know what? I'm as good as they are. There's no excuse here. It could come because you had a birthday with a zero on it. It could come because of a divorce. It could come because you're sick and tired of being sick and tired. Or it could come because you read something, heard something intended, something that lifted you into a different state of mind when you start to remember who you really are. But the secret is, when that trigger happens, there's a shift in your belief, there's a shift in your sense of certainty about who you are. And out of that belief, change that story, change about what life's about or what you're capable of or what you're going to do. Now you take. You have a different state of mind, that state of certainty that every athlete has. I'm sure you've all seen somebody going on the basketball floor and they're going to shoot two free throws and you know, before they let go of the ball, they're going to miss it. Or a kicker on a football field out there, and you go, the guy's going to miss it, you know, beforehand because you could see he was missing that edge of absolute certainty. Without that edge, it's damn hard for you to maximize your true capability in life. Because if you're going to question yourself, you're going to be in an altered state, a state of doubt, and that state's not going to cause you to execute. So my view is, what are we going to do to get someone to create a breakthrough? How do we shift? What's the strategy that could change their whole business? What's the strategy that could change their whole life? Because sometimes you got the right person to just do the wrong thing. Or sometimes you have the right person doing the right thing at the wrong time. Buying a house, right thing to do, 2007, wrong time, you're screwed. If you were in the U.S. right, you're down 30, 40, 50. If you're in Vegas, you're down 70%. So it's really understanding how to create the breakthroughs, how to take advantage of the resources inside yourself and other people. And so 35 years ago, just trying to figure out what the hell I was. I hated being called a motivator. I was just a kid. I wasn't a therapist. And the only way you could coach people. I use the word coach now. That wasn't using. The only way you could work with somebody is if you're a therapist. And I see, no, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a guru. I'm not a motivator in my life. The people who touched me the most as an athlete were my coaches. I was actually better than some of my coaches, but they still drove me. So it's not about being better. It's just I was in the forest, they were outside the forest. They could see things and give me that feedback. And I thought, that's what I really am. I'm not better than anybody. I'm coaching. I'm beside them. But I got my expertise because I spent these decades doing it. And so I started this coaching metaphor within the area now of helping people, which was never used before outside of sports. And I'll never forget, there was a stage, talk about marketing. There was a stage of the Larry King and I just coached President Clinton at the time. And I'd gotten out. I'm on Larry King, and first thing he says, what is this coaching thing? You know, I've never heard anybody call themselves a coach who's not in sports. I was literally at the point, after all these years thinking, maybe I just dumped that damn thing. And it felt like within six months, the whole damn world became a coach. It's like psychiatrist became coach Ansel. Before coaches, everybody used the term. But when I used coach, it wasn't like it is now where you go and get certified. My whole thing with the coach is you judge me on results just like you do a sports coach. And if I don't get results, you kick me out, you don't pay me. You know, today, unfortunately, I created a bastard child where everybody, the brother is a coach, and there's no way to differentiate performance. Most people are looking at these things based on just you know, they got a little thing to hang on the wall. They. So my whole approach really is if you're going to find a way to have your work, your vision, your company, your product, your service, really truly have the most maximum possible impact, then you have got to come back to these two themes of innovation and marketing. You've got to come back to this place that says, doesn't matter how good my marketing is or my product, doesn't kill it. The combination cannot be separated.

Yeah, I love it.

You know.

No, go ahead. Good.

I was going to ask like when you were. You're talking about 35 years, you just figuring out what you are. And there was a period between when you started and when you did the infomercial, which really kind of was the catalyst probably. What kind of things were you doing to market yourself before the infomercial? What was your, what was your approach then?

Well, they picked me to come interview me because I was already the dominant brand in the industry at that point. Before the infomercials, I was doing seminars in 20 cities. I was doing a couple thousand people at one day business seminars at that stage. And I was also doing my Unleash the Power within program. In those days there were about 500 people at them. So I had the largest events even before the infomercial business. And so the way I marketed back then was the same thing as my whole thing would give people an experience. And everybody talked about the concept of free. Today my whole experience is always give someone an experience of such enormous value and then make a request by offering them something of even more value where they can go deeper. And so that was my whole strategy. Early days I did all the free guest events where I would get up and I'd say, I don't care what your problem is, I don't care if you've had it for years. I'm the one stop therapist. Come up here and I'll turn you around right here and right now. And I would literally look for the toughest client. I'd turn them around. My whole career actually got launched. My marketing began and really was launched in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I had a partner in business, a person that worked with me and I went and learned neuro linguistic programming and I met John Grinder and I was really fired up about it. And after it was a six month training program and after four days I declared I was the best NLP practitioner in the world, which built a lot of rapport with the people been in it for 10 years. And I said, listen it was my way of challenging myself. I figured if I put myself in the line, they challenged me and I'd have to grow and I'd say, great, let's have a melt off. You bring the worst client you can, I'll bring the worst client. Let's see, you can produce the result with swap clients if you want to bring the results fast. This radio show, and it was my first radio show and I had done a firewalk and somebody heard about it. They brought me in this radio show and these are the days before there were real shock jocks. But up in Canada, in Vancouver, they had this guy that was kind of early version of that. And I didn't know, I was clueless. It was my first radio show. And I get on the show thinking I'm going to be interviewed about what I teach people and how people change people's lives. And this guy starts in on me with all these challenges. You don't have a degree. What's your background? What is this coaching thing? You're not a coach, you're not an athlete. On and on and on. Just really ridiculous stuff. And if it wasn't bad enough, this guy called in and it seemed like my worst day, but it was the best day of my life because my marketing really started with this guy. This guy calls up, he's a psychiatrist. And I just got done saying, some people call up on the radio and they say, can you do this? Can you help me with that? Whatever they said, I said, yes, yes, yes, of course, yes. I'm the one stop therapist. I'll have one hour or your money back. You say nothing if I don't produce the results. And so, you know, people are getting very excited about this. Everything you can imagine calling up. And this psychiatrist called that and he says, you're a charlatan, you're a liar. People like you should not be allowed on the radio. This is my ultimate marketing breakthrough. And I'm looking at him in my head thinking, who is this guy? What's he doing? And he says, you know, you can't cure a phobia in less than an hour. That's impossible. It can take years. And sometimes even after years, it doesn't work. Now when somebody attacks you, there's a good marketing case you got to think about, what do you do when somebody attacks you? You guys, what would you do?

You start to defend yourself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it depends on you. Yeah, I treat it differently these days because some criticism I think is useful and others is toxic.

And so it Depends on the source.

But yeah, I mean, kind of.

I would typically psychologically go into the mode of trying to defend.

And that's almost what we all do. Unfortunately, that moment, something in me clicked and I didn't, because I realized if I pushed back on him, all he's going to do is push back harder. So I thought I got to break his pattern. So I said, sir, I said, let me ask you a question. I said, are you a scientist? He said, of course, I'm a physician. And I said, well, great. I know a scientist would never assume anything, young man. I said, what I'm saying, sir, is you've never met me. Is that true? He goes, that's true. And I said, you've never met my clients. Is that true? He said, that's true. I said, you've never met me, you've never met my clients, and yet you're calling me a liar on national radio. I said, so what you must be stating, since you're a scientist, is your hypothesis. And your hypothesis is, I'm a liar and a charlatan. I can't do what I do. So I said, if you're truly a scientist, you have to be willing to test your hypothesis, don't you, and change. And he goes, well, yeah. He said, well, great. I said, tomorrow night, I'm at the Holiday Inn. I'm doing a free guest event. And I said, I'm going to do a series of demonstrations, show people what I'm talking about is real. I think that's the best way for you to prove that I'm a charlatan is come to the RVN and bring me one of your patients. I said, bring me somebody you've never been able to cure. I said, I'm sure you have plenty of those. And he says, well, we all have patients that aren't ready to change yet. I said, that's funny. I haven't found any. Of course, at that point, I've probably done four therapies in my entire life.

Right?

Right. But I was so confident, I just believed I could do it. Right. This guy, he dabbled around the bush. And the radio guy stepped in and goes, see you tomorrow night. It's a Holiday Inn. It cuts him off. So the next day of the Holiday Inn, I show up. I don't know the guy's name. The room packs up. In those days, if I would have got 75 or 100 people to show up for a guest event, it would be a huge event. And I have this room with walls next to it. Being optimistic that I might open it up and maybe get 200 or 300, 500 people showed up to see the shootout between me and this guy. So I open it all up, and literally, I'm hoping the fire marshal doesn't come in, because they'll shut me down. I got people standing along the back and along the walls, people sitting on the floor. There's just no room. It's packed like I never dreamed. Pa. Meanwhile, I'm picturing. I don't know what this guy looks like. I don't know his name. So I'm picturing this, you know, big, tall guy, because everybody says, okay, I'll be there. You know, I don't know about you, but I hear somebody's voice. I can't help but make a picture in my mind what they look like. I picture this giant guy with this scared woman on his arm. Nobody fit that criteria. And then, like a movie, it's like, I tell you, like it was yesterday. I'm on stage. I introduced myself in those days. I know one introduced me. So. Hi, my name is Tony Robbins. I'm here today to share with you a few tools that can show you how to compress things you would think might take years or decades in a day. I know it sounds like hyperbole and exaggeration, but I'm going to do some demonstrations today. And then the side door bursts open and, like, this big entrance. This guy comes in. He's about five, two, with this woman wrapped around his arm. He walks straight to the front and stands right in front of me while I'm talking to the audience. I turned to the audience and I said, it looks like I have a visitor. I go down to shake the guy's hand. He won't even shake my hand. He just goes, here is the woman. And so I take this poor woman on stage, and I said, how many of you heard me on the radio the other night? 90% of the room raised their hand. I said, well, this is the woman in question. I said, she's been treated by this psychiatrist for seven years, and her problem is that she has these snake phobia. She goes to sleep at night and she dreams of snakes biting her in the face. And it wakes her up sometimes two or three times a night. He's worked on it for seven years. This should take me, oh, 15 or 20 going crazy. And I pulled it off, fortunately, in 15 minutes. You know, all I did in the beginning is I said, how do you feel about snakes? And have you ever seen a phobic response. It's an uncontrollable response. And this woman starts screaming and shaking out of control. I calm her down, and by the end, I wrapped the snake around her, and that became my signature. So for the first. Gosh, probably I started when I was 20, when I was 17, when I was 23, I kind of launched onto the market, you know, in the marketplace, nationally, on a major scale with NBC and all those different people. And I did it by doing these challenges. I take people that NBC would say, couldn't get in an elevator, and they're completely phobic, and I'd take them on Peachtree Plaza down Atlanta and take them up in the elevator. But it became my way of doing it. My way of doing is show people I'm not just promoting here. I got something that really delivers. And then they'd interview the people coming out of it. But here's what happens also with marketing. Guy launched my career, made my career go. And for the next few years, I was this young man that was helping people all over the world, and my events exploded, and my marketing was all Tony Robbins results. Then what I learned is, if you don't do something in the media, you know, Madonna figured this out decades ago. It becomes an old story. A nice story becomes an old story. So Madonna's changed her Persona got me so many times. I didn't want to change my Persona, and I didn't know what was going on. All of a sudden, overnight, after three or four years, it was an old story. And the new story was Tony Robbins. This powerful man is taking over the minds of senators and congressmen and these types of things. So I wrote my book Unlimited Power as a way to say okay. Instead of defending myself and saying, that's not what I teach, I'd say, well, obviously, you haven't done your homework. And I wrote the book and became a New York Times bestseller when I was 24, and that started launching it. So I used the book, I used television, I used results, and then I used challenge marketing, really, to get my message out. And that's what grew me into a giant group, giant brand. Before we had the infomercials, and the infomercials that's obviously added to that was steroids. You know what's interesting?

Go ahead, Joe, while I say this. We were talking about. What you were saying is you were giving people a compelling demonstration of exactly what happens. I mean, they saw it with their own eyes. If you're standing on stage with a woman who's been terrified of snakes, Forever.

And you work with her and all.

Of a sudden they see it happen before their eyes and she's wrapping this snake around her. That's pretty compelling evidence that you know what you're doing. We just had our last episode of I Love Marketing. One of the things we talked about was that a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument.

And I would say that what you.

Just said, a compelling demonstration is more powerful than a convincing argument.

You demonstrated it.

They see that you can get the result and that's going to compel them to, to want to get that result for themselves.

You're absolutely right. I think it's the most important thing. And that's why I say can't separate your product from your marketing. So many people say, tell me the secret to marketing. And I tell them, tell me what your product or service is, tell me what it is, tell me what makes it better than anything else. If it's not, go to work on that. Now, if you've got the best product or service, but you aren't marketing now, you got a new challenge, right? But that's an easy solution. Being able to market is easy if you have an extraordinary product. But if you have an extraordinary product, that's where you need to go back or service or company or whatever is you're offering it. But I do know, I teach people all the time. You know, I've been turning around businesses for three decades, right? That's one thing I love. I love turn around people. I love turnaround businesses. And we do our business mastery programs and we'll take companies and grow them 30 to 130% literally in three months. And there are a multitude of things we do, but one of the first things to do is change the offer. I would say change your offer, change your life. You look around and Groupon is an offer. Think about it. It's a multi billion dollar piece. And all they do is get all these companies to give their best offers. And they built a multi billion dollar enterprise off of that. If some people are old enough days when they used to have Columbia House and they used to offer, when I was a kid, you could get these 12 cassettes of music or albums or whatever they were in those days, you could get 13.

If you found the magic toolbox or the magic treasure chest and put that.

On your order form. Think about it, what was that? It was just the most compelling offer and then you were on the monthly piece. You had to buy so many a month. So the offer is critical, absolutely critical. But if the product doesn't deliver, it's going to backlash on you like you can't imagine.

Let me ask you, what's the greatest thing and the toughest thing about being a personality brand?

Well, good question. Fame is an interesting and crazy thing. People want to know everything about you want a size shoe you have, they want to know what you have for breakfast. You don't have any privacy ever. You're in a restaurant and conversations are listened to. So that's the not so thrilling thing. But the value of a brand at all is extraordinary. I mean, people get down on their knees at 7:11 and reach behind something else to get a Coca Cola, right? So once you have a brand, you have the most valuable commodity on earth. If you have a brand that is. Has fame attached to it, it adds another level of energy to it, so to speak. But also the side of that is, you know that they're going to be people when there's a personality attached to it that are threatened. It's hard to be threatened by a Coke. But if somebody comes back and says, oh my God, I changed my life, I heard this guy, Tony Robbins, it was the most amazing thing I've ever done. And you're my best friend and you've been coaching me forever and telling me what to do and I haven't done it, you might say, oh, he's a piece of crap. You don't even know who I am. There's a need in human beings to feel significant. And even if I think I'm not any more significant than they do, if they think I am, then they want to tear you down. It's what happens with all the celebrity culture. We build people up and we tear them down. In Australia, they have a term for it. They're actually honest about it. They call it the Tall Poppy syndrome. If you become really successful, they're going to cut your tail down to size. But what's interesting is people have impressions of who they think you are because of what they've made up based on celebrity. Like, people have extremes. For me, he's unbelievable. Changed my life. The greatest thing in the world. And other people, he's the devil and he's horrible. And they've never met me, never talked to me, never been to an event of mine, nothing of that nature. But it just comes with the territory. And the other part is when you're a celebrity brand, people often want that physical celebrity. So scalability becomes challenging, except through technology. But I've managed over the years here to put my core into What I do and then still teach other people to facilitate it and give myself some leverage. But I think that's the other challenge of the celebrity brand. I don't think if I had my choice and I was just a business person, I would just build a brand. I wouldn't build a celebrity brand because it would give me, frankly, more freedom. Even though the celebrity produces energy and juice and I can do any media, I want hardcore Coca Cola to do any media. They gotta buy the media. There's some advantages to it. But for me in this, because I was a business person, I never got in this for business. I got in this to change lives. I did it when I had no money, I did it when I was near bankrupt. I do it now when they don't have to do it anymore. I'm financially free, so it's fulfilled me. So in my case, I look at my quote, celebrity brand, which I don't look at a celebrity, but that's how people perceive it. Certainly not Tom Cruise or something of that nature. But it opens doors. When people see me, they at least have an interest, even if they have a negative opinion. They got an opinion, they got an energy to it. Now if they have a negative opinion, they meet me, I can interact with them and I can potentially give them an experience and say, holy shit, he isn't who I thought he was. If there are already positives, the door opens for me. So I see it as the entree that allows me to touch more lives. Without it, I wouldn't touch as many lives. And that's why I love quote marketing and branding, is the branding allows me to touch lives around the world. I wake up every morning and this morning a half a million people have for the first time opened up one of my books, opened up an audio program, opened up some video component, opened up some element of what I do on average in a day. It's a pretty amazing thing. I've had 50 million people get my books and audios and videos and I've had 4 million people attend my live seminar. So all that didn't happen because I just thought about it. Hope people show up. It happened because I innovated and marketed continuously and I still do.

I think you're underselling yourself thinking you're not as famous as Tom Cruise. Do you ever have people ask you, aren't you the guy from Shallow House?

You know what I was going to ask you, Tony? You've got like your own Secret Service type security team at your events and Dean Jackson was considering getting A couple bodyguards for our next event.

And I wanted to ask you if.

You think that's a good idea.

I mean, I don't know if you really should be protected.

I travel in the general population, I don't go with anybody. But at the event it's a requirement because unfortunately we can't, you know, people come up and they, they want to shake hands, do something right now. And also when you get groups of, you know, my UPWS are now 5 and 6,000 people. My mega events are, you know, 10 to 12,000 people people and big ones are 30,000. When you have that many people, there's a certain number of people that are a little crazy. You know, somebody you think, yeah, well.

I can, I can assure you that shit does not happen to Dee Jackson. So we do not, we do not have to worry about it. We have a good friend named Dan Sullivan who founded a company called Strategic Coach, which he actually started coaching in the 70s when like you were saying earlier, no one even heard of the word. And he has this term called industry Transformers. And like a lot of the people that I think we work with are literally industry Transformers. They're at the top of their game. And certainly in the industry of personal development, self help, I mean, you are the guy. And how do you think you've changed the self help slash personal development industry? I mean, you've been, you've done so much. I mean, how do you think you've really put your stamp on it?

I don't know that I put a stamp on the industry. I think I put a stamp on people. The stamp on the industry is humorous to me when I see all these ads and they're taking word for word from things I did 20 years ago in infomercial ads. The language that's duplicated and the pieces that are used and the way things are framed and people using music and events and changing people's physiology and all the duplication that you see of processes that no one had done before me in events, I certainly see those pieces. But I look at it honestly, I'm not proud of my industry. I'm just being honest. I don't attack anybody. Really amazing people. And fortunately some of them have just recently passed. Stephen Covey being one of them. They're people of just total integrity, people that what Stephen got up to say. Stephen lived, he walked his talk and he wasn't just promoting. Unfortunately, my industry is filled with a ton of people that are promoters. They're white suit salesmen who don't really deliver the goods and it just like industry, it makes me, you know, cringe that I helped create an industry that now goes out there and isn't really tied to results, which was my intention, like a bastardized child. So there are some great people but like every industry there's a few people that deliver a great, There's a lot of people that deliver something mediocre and then there's some flim clam people. And unfortunately our industry does not have a great reputation. And so my view is to try to wherever I can to show people that not all things are equal. Some people truly are adding the value. So I don't know that I've stamped the industry other than maybe marketing and formats of seminars to make them more entertaining because you know, I pick people. If you can imagine, an average weekend for me is 50 hours, five zero. And most people won't sit for a three hour movie where you know, someone spent $300 million and I'm going to take them for 50 hours with just my voice and my thoughts and my emotions and take a group of three or five or 10,000 people on a journey that they're going to come out of the greatest experience of my life. And they can vote with their feet at any moment and get a money back guarantee and they don't. So the whole people, I do these like in London. We have six languages translated simultaneously. We got people from all these countries, somebody from Germany, a soccer mom in a headset and then Anthony Hopkins sitting right beside them who says I won't sit for two hours for anything or Oprah Winfrey, I will not stay for more than two hours. Twelve hours later, she's out of her mind going, this is the greatest thing in my life. So those experience giving people value what I live for more than I try to change an issue. Because you can't control other people's behaviors. All you can do is control your own.

You're a master of controlling, you know, creating an environment where people are in peak state for that whole thing. I was, you know, amazed when we were at the UPW event. The power, the visceral power of loud music on changing your physiology. Like you really integrate that into the whole thing. It's not that you're, everybody's sitting there listening to you lecture for 50 hours. That's not what it's about. I think we were there and I don't think we barely sat down at all. I mean it was just continual, you know, continual high, engaging interaction. It was really, it was, it was something.

It's not just loud music, it's understanding music. Different pieces of music can evoke different emotions. And so I combine the music with my own state. The reason I don't sit down, you know, when Oprah's people are there, they're filming and they're like, oh my God, you've been standing here for four hours and you've not gone to the bathroom and you've not stopped and I'm stretching everybody at the point and aren't you exhausted? Are you kidding me? I'm just warming up, right? And they came back six hours later and then eight hours later and they go 10 hours. I mean, how the hell are you doing this? Because I'm not in my own body, I'm in them. You know, I think to deliver for people, you got to get out of yourself and somebody else. I don't feel, I'll feel my body later on. Trust me, like somebody ran you over with a, you know, attract a four day event like that. But I don't feel it when I'm there because I'm not inside of me. I'm inside them, feeling it, experiencing it, sharing it, delivering it. And it's a combination of your ability to constantly engage value for people, the use of music, the use of movement that make us feel alive. And so, you know, Pat Riley came, I'll never forget, and he came up to me, this is like the seventh game of NBA championship. He said, but it ain't two or three hours, we're going for 12. It was the biggest compliment I felt I could get. So that is part of what I deliver. I deliver the results. But I also, here's what I believe. I believe marketing, if you want to know. I look at it three ways. I look at you get people on board by telling the truth about what you stand for, what you believe. People don't give a shit what you say you're going to do or how you're going to do it. They don't know what you believe. If you look at Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King got 2 million people to show up in Washington. He didn't have a solution. He just talked about what he believed. Very famous speech. And people can relate to what they believe. You think about Apple computers, you're buying what they believe more than you are product. You don't even know what the product is half the time before you buy it. You don't really know. You don't have experience. You just know. They believe we create great shit that's cool as hell and it always works at the very best. And you're going to love it. And people know that they believe in the best. They believe in simplicity. They believe in it always working. They believe those things are what hook people and bring them towards you. Because people with similar beliefs connect together. Then you start to deliver what it is that you really do. Not how you do it, but what do you do? What's the result you deliver. You know, we take people, this is what we do with them. We take them from where they are, where they want to be. We get people to lose 150, 20 pounds, 30 pounds. We get people turn their business around from, you know, falling off the thigh to growing at 5% to going at 30 to 130%. Some of them literally 1000% growth. You know, what do we do? We take families and we put them back together. What do we do? We take people to the press and show them how to really, truly get off the drugs and turn their life around. That's what they want. How you do it? Okay, well, we do these seminars, and they're 50 hours long. 50 hours long. Who wants to hear that crap? What they want to hear is what do you believe and what do you really do? And then you need to confirm that what you believe and do you actually deliver. Then the how is like, that's the brief stuff. Just enough logic for them to understand that, you know, there's a basis for this. How I model the best people. And I didn't just come up with all this stuff. I found people within relationships for 50 years, and they're still passionately making love, not just hanging out as friends. And I think about what they did. I get coupled together at the very beginning and see what's different and what broke it up later on. That's how I can turn relationships around. How do I turn businesses around? Well, how about Steve wins? One of my best friends, Mark beanie, off of salesforce.com starting, started his company right out of the UPW, left Oracle, and built a $3 billion company. How about the list of people that I model so that how part's still valuable, but it's a lot less important than the first two elements if you're going to be effective in marketing.

You know what, guys? I don't know if you missed me at all. Probably not, but I literally dropped off the line for a couple minutes while I was in New York here calling in from a Miss you at all, but you? I didn't think so. I mean, you're here with Tony Robbins. I don't think there's ever going to be of a lot moment here.

But Tony, that was really like. I appreciate you sharing that and that shows a real. I see the framework in that. But when you were talking earlier that one of the things that you love to do is do company turnarounds, and you've been doing that for years. And maybe a lot of people don't realize that you.

That you do a lot of that.

Is there a framework that you have if you're going in to turn around a company, what is it that you're looking at? Or is there certain things like how.

Could we model what you do here?

Could you tell a little bit about how you would look at turning around the company? Maybe tell it as a story of a company that you have turned around?

Well, I gave a bunch. But here's a simple. Just because I know we're running out of time towards the end here, think of it this way. I looked in any, any set of changes you want to make in your own personal life and your business life, there are millions of items you can focus on, but there's only certain areas or categories that matter. If you look at your life, you say, it's my body, my emotions, my relationships, my finances, my mastery of time, my mastery of my career business, my mastery of money, and the mastery of the spiritual side of life. Right? So you're talking about seven or eight areas of life that if you focus on those seven or eight areas and you don't major things, you focus on the majors, you put focus in it, you're going to do extremely well. Well, in businesses similarly, I chunk businesses into seven kind of pillars of power. Seven pillars that you've got to make progress on all of them. If you just focus on one of them, you're going to be in trouble. I look at businesses and I start with the end in mind. I go, the seventh force I'm looking at is do they create raving fans, Raving fan clients, and are they a raving fan culture? Is it something where they just create satisfied clients? Because everything else we're going to do is a waste of time if we can't deliver something that blows people away. That's why the marketing is worthless. You better even get a good start, right? You could go there, you could go pump up some great piece. Like in our industry, there was. What was it called? The secret. Right. And they wanted me. I didn't participate with it deliberately. I said, this is a fad thought based on one thought. It'll get really popular and it'll buy out because it's bullshit. It isn't true that everything is just what you think. You know, like, if you think positively, it all goes your way. Okay, so the people in Auschwitz were negative thinkers. Give me a break. You know, it's like, this is delusional. It is a law of attraction, is a real law, but it's one of dozens of laws. And you're promoting this thing. So we watch the thing fly up to this giant thing and then crash and burn. You know, here I am, 35 years later. You know, we just get stronger and stronger and stronger because we focus on all the areas, not just one little component. So in a business, I start with that raving fan component and say, is that really there? Because if that product or service is not delivering that, we really don't have the basis of growing this business. So we're going to have to focus on that first. Then I go and I go through a methodology. I start out with, okay, we really need to understand where this business really is, and we need a business map on how we're going to get to where they're going to go. And I do that usually by going in and digging under the business to figure out. Ask the people of business the questions Peter Drucker always asks. There's only two questions in business. What business are you in? How's business? And so no matter what, verbally, in a few seconds, you see how their business really is. Oh, it's pretty good. Yeah, okay. Sure it is, buddy. Let's dig in and get to the truth here. And then what I do is I get people to define what business they're in and what business they need to be in. I think that's critical. If you have a great product, you may just not understand what business you're in. I'll give you an example. It's one woman, terrible market. She actually had a great product. I asked her what business she had, and she said, I was in Australia. And she goes, I'm in the ecological letterbox marketing business. And, you know, we're in a room of a thousand people. And how many people are interested in the products you just shared? Not a single hand goes up, what the hell is ecological letterbox, you know, marketing business? She goes, well, you know, we use ecological materials to market to your letterbox, which means it's direct mail. Right direction. So I said, well, I think your first problem is you don't even know what business you're in. If I was in your business, here's the business I'd say I was in, I'm in the business of helping any business grow more customers immediately. And by the way, I also can do it in an ecological way. I said, how many business can make you more money? And 90% of the room raised their hand. I said, so you're starting out with a definition of your business that eliminates most of the people you can do business with. Then part of that business map is then I dig underneath and go, okay, who's your customer? And find out who their customer is and do they know? And then I ask them who their customer needs to be. Because many of you got your customers just merely because you marketed and never came. Versus who's my ideal customer? And then I'll dig under and say, who are you in this business as a business owner? Is this person really an artist, talent? Are they truly an entrepreneur? Are they more of a manager? So we see what they need. Then I ask, where are you in the business cycle? I think one of the most important things for any business to know is just like a human has a life cycle. You start as a baby and an infant, you become a toddler, you get teenager, young adults, you grow. At every stage there are different problems and they're predictable. If you know the problem's coming, you can solve it before you get there. Most businesses, and most of you guys know 95% of businesses, 96% of businesses are gone in 10 years. 4% make it, 4 out of 100 make it. That doesn't mean they're profitable. So the reason they don't make it is they don't understand the life cycle and they don't understand where they are in the life cycle. So they do the right thing at the wrong time and they're dead. So I go in there, that's all part of that business map. And how are we going to get there? You know, and I put together a plan. Then the second section I look at, I've looked at the end in mind number seven, which is raving fan clients and culture. I come back here to the business map. It's a map, not a plan. Because you got a five year business plan is either stupid or a liar. But the world's changing way too much in that time period. There's no way you can truly predict the technology. You guys know. You just did your conference with my friend Ray Kurzweil. So the second piece I look at strategic innovation. I'm putting them in order. I start with the NMI number seven. Then I go to number one business map. I Go to two strategic innovation. As I said earlier, if you don't innovate, all innovate means is you found a better way to meet people's needs. And if you're not innovating, if that's not a part of what you're doing, you're eventually going to die. Then I go thirdly, I go into world class marketing and there we dig underneath and I help people figure out what's their current marketing, what's their, you know, what is their, how can they have a value added marketing, you know, right now interrupted marketing doesn't work anymore. Just trying to grab people's attention. You can do it, but it's not going to give you a competitive advantage. If you do more of it than other people, you might do slightly better than other people. And then I lead the marketing to their sales processes and to the sales processes. I then work with them on what are we going to do to take care of the financial side of your business. Most business owners are like VFR pilots. If you fly planes, you've got VFR and ifr. Like DFR means you can fly whenever it's beautiful and sunny out. IFR is there's a big storm and nothing's working. You can read the instruments and you can fly. Most people fly well when it's going well. So they don't know how to manage their finances. So we show them how to literally be able to manage and lead their CFO or their account. And then my favorite part is optimization and maximization where I'll go through a business. This will answer your question real specifically. And I go, okay, we're going to grow your business right now. But instead of saying we're going to grow at 100%, which sounds impossible to you, I'll give you an example. Pat Riley is a friend of mine. And Pat used to be the head of the Lakers and obviously the Knicks, and now one of the owners of Miami Heat. And when I knew him back in the Laker days, in the very early days when he reached out to me, he was having a real struggling time. He was trying to get this team that had just lost the NBA championship, Magic Johnson and those guys, to increase their productivity by 25% and they felt they couldn't be any better. So we started talking about this constant, never ending improvement and rechunking it. He eventually came to the guys and goes, I don't want you to get better. You know, the reason he said that is because as soon as you tell a champion he can't get Better. You tell him to get 25% better. When he worked his guts out and he's exhausted out of his mind, he's going to just roll his eyes and blow you off, which is what they're doing. They come back and say, you know what? I was wrong. You guys can't get 25% better. You're not going to get better. Let's just see how things drop. Let's just give it our best. These guys start pushing back, and they push back. Here was the strategy. Make it be small increments. So he said, look, how about you guys just increase 1% better on five areas your game, 1% better on free throws, 1% better on block shots, 1% better on, you know, stop and turnovers. And of course, all the guys go 1%. That's absurd. I can be 10%. But what happens is you got, you know, 11 players on your team. If they all got 1% better in five areas, it's 55% better on the floor. Five guys doing 5% better is 25%. So I do that with businesses. I come into business and I go, okay, it all starts down with your leads. It's all about driving traffic or getting leads. Tell me how many you got. Let's take a look. Whatever size business, you know, HomeX is one of our clients. We've grown their business. $750 million is they credit us for in their own language, not our measurement. And then I take a chiropractor who's got an army of three, and we double the business in six months. Start the same place. Let's look at where your lead flow comes from. And here's the magic form. I want to get you 20% more leads to start with. If you have the fulfillment of capability, they'll give you 20% more business. And it sounds difficult, but when we work with them, it's not. Then we go and say, now here's what we're going to do. I'm going to make all these other changes in your business at 3%, 7%, 10%. I'll give you a specific example. So I took one of my own divisions, my own company. I did this at TwinLabs. I did this at one of my coaching divisions, one of the companies. I'll use the coaching division example. I went to the division, I said, look, guys, tell me, how many leads do you guys have? He goes, well, we reach out to 30,000 outbound calls a month. And I said, I'm not asking how many you reach out to. I'm Asking, how many leads do you have? He said, well, 2 million. I said, you got 2 million leads and you're reaching out to 30,000 people. Why? He goes, well, because we've got 13 people and make 100 calls a day. And that's what they can get to, is 30,000 calls. And I just like, holy shit. I sat down with the team, I said, here's what we're going to do. I want you all to make 100% more money in the next year. 100% more money. I think you're paid pathetically, but unfortunately you're paid what you're worth currently. I said, that sounds harsh. True. I'm worth more. So here's how we're going to do this. I said, I'm going to show you how to grow this, and I'm not going to do seagull management. I'm not coming here squawking a lot, crapping all everybody and flying out. I'm going to be side by side with you, and we're going to build this. I know the numbers. Let's go through it. So I said, let's start with the first thing. So there's 30,000 leads. So let's just grow that 20%. We can get 6,000 more leases by taking up the damn list and calling them. Oh, we'd have to get some more people. Yes. How many would you have to get? Well, four more people. Okay, that's what. Well, we don't have the space. My whole thing with life is you don't need resources. You need resourcefulness. If you're resourceful, you can get whatever they are. You're creative enough, you can get the money. You're determined enough, you'll break through the obstacle. Right? Emotion is the ultimate resource. It's not things or people. You can get those things if you got the right state. So I get these guys, straighten out and, okay, we're going to do this. So I go, okay, now tell me, out of those 30,000 calls, how many meaningful conversations are you having? Meaningful conversations? You get them on the phone or you get them, you engage them. And I said, you can do the same thing if it was on the web, right. You know, how many people are coming to your website? How many are opting in? That's what we're really talking about. And they go, well, you know, 6,000. 6,000 out of 30,000. I go, gee, that's 20%. So rather than saying, that's horrific, I want to shake you people, I calm myself down and said, is that good? Bad or indifferent. And you get all the silence. And of course, the great thing is your top person in any company will go, I think that's bullshit. I reach out, I get 68% of the people. So now everybody else is panicking. I'm going to raise it to 68%. I look at them and say, you know what? I want to just raise this 3% from 20 to 23%. That's undoable. But we'll come back and figure out how afterwards. Let's set our numbers first. One of the biggest problems in trying to business is you try to figure out the how before you decide the what. You got to figure out the what and the why. If I know what I want and why I want it, and I'm fired up enough, I'll figure out how. But if you try to figure out how first, you'll never get fired up because you'll be trapped in the mindset of, I don't know how to do this. So they go, okay, well, we can do 3% more. I said, I'm going to give you the 20% lead. You don't have to worry about it. All you got to do is get 3% more people in conversation. Okay, well, how many of those do you actually set an appointment with? And they said, 2,700. Okay, 2,700 or 6,000, that's 45% appointment booking. I said, okay, is that good, bad, or indifferent? Same story. Quiet, quiet. One guy, that's a piece of crap. I'm doing this. I know my exact numbers. And he shows me. So he's twice as much. I go, you know what? Let's just improve that 7%. I'm going to make any improvements here, more than 10%. And the overall, I'm going to average less than eight out of all these, like, say seven areas. Then I go to the next step. I go, okay, out of those appointments, how many people show up? They go, 18, 90, 70%. Good, bad, or indifferent. You decide to increase that 10%. And you get the idea. Then we talk about, how many of those people do you close? Okay, how many of those do you follow up with? How many of those? And we go through these different stages. At the end, here's what I do. I make changes of 20% of the leads, which I do for them. Their changes are 3% more meaningful conversations, 7% more appointments set, 10% more appointment shows, which is so easy to solve. 3 more percent more clients closed, 5% more upsells, and we reduced the discounts. We didn't want to raise the price, we reduced the discounts by 8%. The average improvement was only 8% on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 items. We grew the business 134% so that the same thing with TwinLabs. We've done the same thing with Homex. We can do it on scale or anything else. It's taking what you're doing instead of trying to eat the whole whale with one bite, saying how do I grow my business 150%? Let me chunk this down into the most important components and let me figure out improve those just a little bit. You start up front with a larger number of leads, like loading the freshman class. If you want a lot of seniors, you got to load the freshman class. And then what you do from that now is making incremental improvements but they're compounded in the larger number of leads and you see a business explode. So that's just one approach that I do when I just look at let's say the marketing and sales value chain and I'll just go through seven or eight elements. Improve this 3%, that 5%, that 7% and we sit down and brainstorm how are we going to do this? Now give me 10 ways to do this. Let's pick the three that are the cheapest, easiest, fastest low hanging fruit that will get this thing done and we're able to consistently turn around billion dollar companies or armies of two or three.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that. One thing I have to ask you before we wrap up, given what happened with the recent firewalk incident, how do and how should leaders deal with crisis?

Well, that's a good question. Tell me, what do you think happened?

You know, there's the new. First off, you have 6,000 people there. You know, all I saw from the perception of, I don't know, know, other than I think people probably got hurt because of, I don't know, maybe they weren't in the right state or something with the way that, you know, the firewalk was set up is what I think and perceive. But I, you know, knowing you and you know, look, we're not great buddies but we spent the day at Singularity University. I've followed your stuff for years. You know, we've had an opportunity to, you know, meet each other on occasion and things like that. And knowing you, I know you really care about people and you're not going to, you know, do anything stupid or set people up in a dangerous sort of thing. So my, what really happened? I don't know. I'D like to hear it from you, but again, I'm more interested in how to, you know, how does, how do you deal with crisis or criticism and stuff? Because, you know, a bunch of people just come out of the woodworks attacking you, you know, not looking at the fact that you've, you know, changed millions of lives. And when you're playing a game at the level that you are, certain things are going to happen all the time. But I don't know really what happened.

I mean, because you obviously didn't see what's come out. Fox News reversed themselves completely on air, which is unheard of. You know, they so rarely will do an on air retraction. Correction. What's happened is a guy, some young college kid, at midnight we're out with 6,000 people, stormed across 40 lanes of fire. He got off a bus and saw this and freaked out and called the paper and said, there are people out here screaming in agony and pain and they're being tortured. That's the language that was actually quoted in the article. Right. And they came to our medical team at every event and said, did anybody get burned? They said, yes, we have 21 people. Obviously we keep a record, take care of everybody. And burn, by the way, means that they had a hot spot or they had blisters and the newspaper advertised the market, said there were people with second and third degree burns. And next thing I know that paper was covered up and it was a telephone game all over the world articles and sent to me when I was in London at the COVID Tony Robbins seminar ends in streams of agonizing pain. That was the title of the article. Fox said two dozen people were hospitalized with second and third degree burns after a breakdown of the Tony Robbins firewalk. Their corrections said no one was burned, no one had third degree burns. People that were burned had the equivalent of a hot spot or blisters like you can get from a sunburn. And no one was hospitalized. We regret to say this. We're sorry. What do you call Huffington Posted as well? How did I handle this? I woke up the next morning to this story that had no thesis in truth. And then the next day was literally covered. Literally around the world. They just picked it up. And the way the 24 hour news cycle works today. So the first thing you have to do is center yourself because part of you just wants to shake somebody and scream because there isn't an ounce of truth in it. We had 21 people get some kind of hot spot. It's less than usual. We have about 1% of people get a hotspot. We have one target. The next morning they were in the seminar, there was nothing there. And hot spots where the blisters are gone within two or three days. And they have a life changing experience. The media comes out and interview them expecting to find people in the hospital, which are none. They come to the seminar expecting people on crutches and all messed up. There were none. Two TV crews came out, one of them covered the story and everybody there, every single client there. The New York Times interviewed 68 people. And they came to my people and said, you know, we need another angle on this story. And the guy goes, well, what did you talk about? He goes, interview the people. Goes, I am. But they're all saying the same thing. I'm fine. It's great. Why don't you report that? No one else is reporting this. The person in the New York Times said, my editor's not going to like that. So they still used a crazy headline, but then in it they quoted all the people talking how they were great, everything was fine. So if you don't stay centered in the middle of a storm, you're in trouble. So I stayed centered and I just said, listen, the truth is what I got to get out. And so I reached out and said, listen, we need to reach out to some medium, say, please come interview the doctors, please come do your homework, please call the hospital there. But the story's already gone and no one gave a damn. Was very frustrating. And then the Huffington Post actually grabbed a hold of this and Arianna Huffington been to our event and so she sent one out to do a research on it. And the woman did the research. She met all the doctors and they said, this is totally a lie. They need to blow this up. She went to the hospital. Now no one was hospitalized. Completely false. So she wrote the first article, which and then she also interviewed. We had, you know, 20, what do you call it, soldiers that just gotten back from the war that are part of the Wounded warriors program. And she started interviewing them and they talked about how this is the most life changing piece. They got their edge back that they haven't had since they lost a limb or since they're burned and so forth. You know, we had actors there. We had a woman who's, you know, one of the bronze, won the bronze a week later in London. So they did all those pieces and then that shame, along with my lawyers, you know, now the true story came out, went on Fox, and then Fox retracted it. So now the only challenge is that you have all these people out there that heard some story, which is a sensationalized story. Bad news travels fast. Good news doesn't travel so fast. They don't know about it. So what we have now is we just point to the truth. We just point to the article and go to completely false. But if you let yourself get off your center, oh, my God, you want to kill yourself because there's no justice in it. But that's what also happens with the world we're in today. If it's a celebrity brand, if you open up the newspaper, the magazine going through the counter, there's half those people are my clients. And the things that are said there, 99% of it doesn't have an ounce of truth. They literally make up stories that used to be just the yellow journalism, something you see on News of the World or the National Enquirer today. There's no division between the National Enquirer and Fox News or somebody of that nature. Now, to be fair. And my appreciation of Fox News is they didn't correct it, but they corrected it only under it was so much of a manufactured story and lie that they had tremendous exposure. And then they did correct it. So the center of the storm, you got to find your center. You got to stick to the truth. If you've done something wrong, you got to own the wrong what you've done and got to correct it. If you've done something wrong, then you got to stay with it and not be upset. And everybody said, why don't you just go on the air and do this? If I went on the air and said this is all not true, then it would just mean me saying it's not true. And you'd say, well, of course he's going to say that. But that's why I was patient. It's amazing that nobody thought to ask about.

You said something very interesting, that that was actually less than normal. Like, they made it sound like all hell broke loose in San Jose, that.

This just went way wrong.

And you're saying like, well, that was actually less than normally get burned firewalk event.

Yeah.

You know the thing too, with what you said, Tony, because the main thing I was getting at is really how do you handle criticism and how do you handle that level of pressure? And there's a lot of people that listen to us that put themselves in high levels of responsibility and risk and a lot of successful people, and they get attacked, and they get attacked a lot from shit that's just totally unfair. And people that are jealous or whatever. And I just wanted to hear your perspective on how you handle situations when.

Stay centered and add more value. That's the bottom line. When it's a specific story, if there's something you've done, own it immediately. Own it, tell the truth and fix it. If it's not something you've done, get someone else to tell the truth for you and make sure they're a person who's truly validated in the press or the media or something of that nature. Because they're not. If it's your customers, that's helpful. That's the great news about social media. People who went to the seminar all wrote on their social media. This is total lie, exaggerated. There was a radio lady there. It was a very popular radio show. She went on the radio show and talked about it. It was totally a lie. There were people screaming in pain with people chanting and getting in state for the seminar. But that process you just got to weigh yourself through. But when it comes to the criticism, you cannot be Nike or a brand of any sort. The bigger you are as a brand, the more you're going to get criticized because everybody's got a competitive streak about it. And what you got to do is just go, look, you know, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. As long as I keep adding value, as long as I do more for other people than anybody else is doing over the long term, the truth will come out and the cycle of success will continue.

Yeah, that's awesome. So we're getting close to the time where we need to wrap up and certainly you've created so much stuff and wanted to ask you what's next and any new programs in development are on the horizon that all of our listeners should be aware of. Partake in things like that.

Yeah, well, I'm very excited and frankly angry about them. I haven't written a book. I got a three book deal with Simon and Schuster since like 19, I don't know, 89 or 90 or something in 92 or 93. So I haven't written a new book in so many years because I just, I'm not. I'm always creating something new so fast. By the time I write it, I feel like it's out of date. And I just don't like the writing process. And very few people read a whole book anymore. You know, it's like they read pieces of it in the event I can deliver it. But I am excited about doing a new book and it's really on the 10 biggest Wall street lies and the 10 truths that will set you financially free. We live in a country right now where things are so out of balance, where people have no clue how to truly get financially free. And it's one thing to go build your business and grow and do that, but everybody has that vehicle. And even people who have businesses, as you well know, can do well for a while, but it's not, you know, get wealthy and stay wealthy. Right? That's the secret, to stay financially free and financially independent. And so I, you know, I coach one of the top 10 financial traders in the history of the world. This is a guy that made $400 million in 1989, or 87 when the stock market crashed, and more money than anybody's ever made in a single day before him. Now, George Soros has made more. He made a trillion, excuse me, a billion in one day. I've been coaching him for 20 years. The guy pays me seven figures a year to coach him. He hasn't lost money from the day I started with him. He lost money for a couple years, and then I stepped in. And for literally 20 years, he's made money. And I know that business incredibly well. I'm right now just starting. I'm going to do a documentary and I'm going to do a book that's going to really show people how they're being ripped off. But instead of just look how horrible it is, here's what you can do. This is what the wealthy people do. I'm interviewing 25 billionaires. They're all people I've done business with that I know who are going to give the insights as to what are the myths of Wall street, what are the things people tell you? Like, Buy and Hold is the strategy and solution. I mean, anybody who knows the marketplaces that we're in knows that the world has changed. There are seasons when Buy and Hold works really well for 20 years, 30 years. And there are other times we'll buy and hold. Try Buy and Hold in Japan for the last 20 years. And tell me how you're doing. You're still down 70%, 80%. Still, say 70% of the stock market. Right. Keep buying and holding. It's just. It's a lie. These guys know it's different. So what do mutual funds really do? You know, the average mutual fund costs you 4.4%. They don't advertise all that. That's according to Forbes. It's 4.1%, the average mutual fund cost. And 96% of them can't match the Dow can't match the S and P. So really, there's some things out there that people need to know. So I'm very passionate about that. I'm going to be working on that early next year and bringing it out. And then the other thing I'm doing right now is I've partnered with Mark dining off@salesforce.com and I'm part of a company called Cloud Coaching International. We're launching a dreamforce of 70,000 people there. And we do work with multinational companies. Dell VMware, $4 billion company. And we come in and we help them turn those companies around by changing the process of them using their CRM software instead of just training people, actually creating a cultural and behavioral shift that increases sales. So we took Dell next to the last division and got it to number two in less than 12 weeks. A 30% increase in their business by doing this what we call coaching in the cloud process. So we're launching that. We've been doing it, but we're launching it officially at this new mutual partnership. And Mark Benioff was a partner in it at Salesforce coming up here in September.

That's awesome.

Well, you know what, Dean? I can give you the final word since who's a better golfer between the two of you? You, Dean, or Tony?

Tony Robbins is quite a golfer.

Hit the ballpark, right, Dean? I can put it on holding. Tony, I'm doing you a favor.

I tell him, I told you that when people ask, I always tell them that you're quite a golfer.

And we just leave it at that. That's enough. Right?

Because that covers you.

Either way, you're quite a golfer. Wait, wait, wait.

One more thing. I told Peter Diamandis that I would mention him on this interview because he's one of my dearest friends and also one of yours. And he wrote an awesome book called Abundance. What do you think of that, goofball?

Oh, my God. He is the real thing. I mean, the man's level of vision, what he did in building X Prize is the classic entrepreneur story. You talk about marketing. I mean, he had this dream of what he wanted to accomplish. He got all the astronauts together, all the NASA people together and launches this X Prize for $10 million. And he didn't have a million. He didn't have $1,000 in the prize by the time he launched it.

Yeah, and then that bastard Richard Branson swoops in and licenses technology. I mean, it's unbelievable. But, you know, he's an industry transformer also, so. No, Peter is Fantastic. And Dean, anything else you can, I mean, look, we can go on for two weeks, but in the timeline, we.

Really, we appreciate you coming on and sharing with us. Every time I talk to you, I like you more and more. It's fantastic. You shared really valuable stuff.

I can't wait to read the transcripts.

And listen again and again because there's so many gems in there. You talk so fast. It's like this fire hydrant of just incredible, incredible wisdom. And I think this is going to become one of our most popular episodes.

Let me mention too, for our listeners, you can go to tonyrobbins.com obviously if you've not seen some of the latest things that Tony's doing, you can get information about his events. You can download a free trial of some of his audio programs. You can listen to it. Tony's obviously done a lot. He's, he's just completely an industry transformer and doing great stuff. And your longevity in this industry is unlike any other. And you're the man. So we really, really appreciate you taking the time to do this and totally look forward to any other stuff you got going on. We'll continue to keep everyone posted. So please everyone give us your comments. And you got any other smartass questions or anything, Dean, like if you got into a fight with Dr. Phil, could he take him or anything? Where do you want to?

I think Tony Robbins could take Dr. Phil for sure.

That's good. We gotta play golf. We'll get out there. Okay, buddy. Thank you guys. I really appreciate your time. I hope your audience gets the core message. The core messages at the end, that is the non negotiable piece is live in the spirit of marketing where your focus is how to add more value than anybody else does. Don't market just a market market because you've got something that was life changing. If you start with that, your marketing will start to transform. And if you want specific strategies and details beyond this, obviously come to a business master UPW or download our stuff. But thanks for having me on, guys. I look forward to seeing you guys soon.

Awesome. Thanks Tony.

Bye. Bye.