109 7 Simple Steps to Master the Game of Money with Tony Robbins

"It's time to become the chess player, not the chess piece." - Tony Robbins If you enjoyed this episode, check out the video of the full interview and the show notes at www.lewishowes.com/109. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 109 with international bestselling author, Tony Robbins.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. I am so excited and grateful for today's episode. And the man that I'm interviewing is Mr. Tony Robbins, and it is so fitting that it is the week of thanks and Thanksgiving here in the United States. And this is an interview I've wanted to do since the beginning of the School of Greatness Podcast. So I am very grateful and thankful that we're able to release this on this very specific week. And Tony Robbins, if you don't know who he is, for the past three decades, he has served as an advisor to leaders around the world. A recognized authority on the psychology of leadership, negotiations, organizational turnaround, and peak performance.

• 1:15Lewis Howes?

  He has been honored consistently for his strategic intellect and humanitarian endeavors. His nonprofit, Anthony Robbins Foundation, provides assistance to inner city youth, senior citizens, and feeds homeless. And feeds more than 3 million people in 56 countries every year through its International Holiday Basket Brigade on Thanksgiving week. Robbins has directly impacted the lives of more than 50 million people from over 100 countries with his bestselling books, multimedia and health products, public speaking engagements, and live events. Yes, he is a very large man and he's up to a huge game in the world and in his life.

• 1:58Lewis Howes?

  And this week, we've got him on. Very excited about this. He is actually talking about money and how to master the money game. The seven simple steps to financial Freedom, which is this new book that just came out. I read the entire thing. It's like 600 pages. It's something ridiculously long, but it's so captivating. And I want you guys to go pick up a copy, grab a couple of copies for your friends, give them away as a Christmas presents, because it may be one of the most powerful things you do for someone as a gift, to show them how to master money in their own life. Now, I dive into a lot of different things in this interview. And I want you to go check out the show notes over at LewisHowes.com/109, because we've got a video from the entire interview that you can go watch.

• 2:43Lewis Howes?

  And Tony's a very captivating guy, so you're gonna wanna make sure you go check this out and watch the video as well, over at LewisHowes.com/109. Some of the questions I asked Tony is, if you were to change the education system from the very beginning, what would you do to implement and teach to the next generation about money? Because I felt like we never really learned about money growing up. I asked him who mentors him personally, who coaches and mentors him today? I asked him how he handles a breakdown, if he has any of them. I talk about and ask him why gratitude is the secret to wealth. Again, this is a week to be grateful and thankful. And he talks about how gratitude is one of the secrets to wealth. I ask him why. I asked him, how do you start shifting your mindset towards giving when you have nothing to give?

• 3:28Lewis Howes?

  Then I asked him, what is something small he's done that he's very proud of? And if he was 31 years old again, my age, what three things would he do financially, knowing what he knows now? Again, he's interviewed over 50 of the wealthiest people in the world, and condensed it into seven simple steps in this book on how to master money. We cover a lot of different things in about an hour conversation. Very blessed and grateful to introduce you to the one and only Tony Robbins.

• 4:01Lewis Howes?

  So I'm here with Tony Robbins. Thanks so much for coming. Thanks, Harry. Very excited about this interview. You are actually one of the three people I've been wanting to get on the show since I started the School of Greatness. I've complimented you. You are one of them, Will Smith. That was awesome. And The Rock. I know both.

• 4:17Lewis Howes?

  All three of you are extremely inspiring and you're just up to such big things in the world. And that's what the School of Greatness is all about. So I'm very excited, very excited to talk about your new book. Thank you. Money Master the Game. I am a very slow reader. And I've only probably read four books, cover to cover. One's The Alchemist.

• 4:34Tony Robbins?

  Yeah, great book.

• 4:35Lewis Howes?

  One's The Four Hour Work Week, and I'm almost finished with yours.

• 4:38Tony Robbins?

  Okay, well, this is quite an accomplishment then.

• 4:40Lewis Howes?

  It's a huge accomplishment for me.

• 4:41Tony Robbins?

  It's a big book for anybody.

• 4:42Lewis Howes?

  It's a huge accomplishment, but so interesting, and I feel like I've done a pretty good job of earning a lot of money over the last few years.

• 4:50Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 4:50Lewis Howes?

  And before, I never knew how to make money.

• 4:52Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Lewis Howes?

  I was an athlete. I was trying to make it to the NFL. That was my only focus was playing sports. I didn't never learned about how to make money.

• 5:00Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:01Lewis Howes?

  So when I was able to dive into this and really to learn the ins and outs of making money, but actually allowing money to make money for you.

• 5:08Tony Robbins?

  Exactly. Make money while you sleep.

• 5:09Lewis Howes?

  Make money while you sleep. It was so interesting, and I feel like I've done a good job of making money over the years, but there's so much more in here that I'm like fascinated by.

• 5:17Tony Robbins?

  Well, it's interesting because I did the same thing. You know, I come from a very poor background, and we had no money for food at times, quite literally. And it was, it was rough. So I, I wanted to make sure money wasn't a, you know, an issue for my future family, so I figured out how to make money. And I figured when I was, I don't know, 23, I figured out how to make a million dollars in a year. I went from 38,000 to a million. And you don't do that by some new strategy. It was a psychological shift as well as a strategy shift.

• 5:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:40Tony Robbins?

  But then I made the same amount of money for seven straight years, even though I built a dozen more companies, I have more people than ever. But it was like unconsciously, well, you want more than a million dollars? What are you, you know, are you greedy? And, and I was, I was actually staying, where was I? I was in, I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I arrived at two o'clock in the morning on my birthday. I didn't have a private plane, so I had to go like four different connections from where I was. And I get in this place, and it's a horrible place, and I call my kids, and I'm talking to this woman on the phone named Maria, who used to run my house and take care of my kids. And I said, you know, Maria, I'm sorry it's so late, but I want to talk to my kids. Oh, happy birthday. She gives me this whole thing. And then she walks me to Mr. Robbins, you know, she says, I never dreamed I'd live in a castle, because I had a place called the Delaware Castle.

• 6:19Tony Robbins?

  And I, and I just want to thank you. I feel like a princess. She goes, last night I was sitting in a jacuzzi, looking out at the water and thinking how lucky I am, and I'm in the Ramada Inn in those days. Looking at this moose head going, this woman is really rich. So I finally decided to listen. If I can make, you know, 38,000 or a million, that, it's not about money. It's like growth. So I went, you know, I want to make three million, but I want to make more of it while I sleep. But then I really began to realize it doesn't matter how much money you make. It's really your capacity to take your creativity and stop trading time for money. It's the worst trade in the world. Everybody's a financial trader. They don't realize they're a trader. They're trading time and you can't get more time. So this book is how to take anybody, an average person, a millennial just getting out of college with a bunch of debt and saying, how do I really make this work? Or a baby boomer saying, how do I still retire?

• 7:02Tony Robbins?

  And the way I did it was I said, I want to interview fifty of the most brilliant financial people in the world. Because most people don't know that I've been working with Paul Tudor Jones, one of the top ten financial traders in history for twenty-one straight years. And he hasn't lost money in one year in twenty-one years.

• 7:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:16Tony Robbins?

  We made money in the tech blow up that happened in two thousand and nine eleven. In two thousand and eight, when the market was down fifty-one percent from top to bottom, he made twenty-eight percent positive, right?

• 7:27Lewis Howes?

  Incredible.

• 7:27Tony Robbins?

  So every day, literally, he emails me, I monitor him, I come see him, I work with him. And he pays me seven figures a year to be able to do this. And I've been able to continually help him go to the next level. But quite frankly, I've learned more from him, I think, than I could ever teach him.

• 7:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:40Tony Robbins?

  And he helped me open these doors. So this book is the best from every self-made billionaire that I could find. Carl Icahn, I mean, I'm sitting down with this guy. He just made two billion dollars in the last eighteen months off a thirty million dollar investment off Netflix. He sent an email or a tweet out.

• 7:55Lewis Howes?

  Tweet out.

• 7:56Tony Robbins?

  About Apple saying it was undervalued and became, and two hours later it was worth seventeen billion more by a tweet. So the people I've got to hang with over the last three, four years have been, I've got a PhD in finance and the people controlling the world's finance. And what I've tried to do is the reason I do that is make it simple, bring it so I could train anybody else. Because in this business, what you don't know will hurt you financially. So I want to know how to protect people and how to help people maximize. And that's why I did the book.

• 8:20Lewis Howes?

  It's incredible. And what I want to know is why we weren't taught these things growing up.

• 8:25Tony Robbins?

  Me too. Tell me.

• 8:26Lewis Howes?

  Right? So if you were, if they were like, okay, Tony, we're giving you the key to the education system.

• 8:32Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Lewis Howes?

  And how would you apply, what teachings would you apply into about finances? Learning about this, how to generate wealth as opposed to trading time for money, but really leveraging it and investing it the right way? What would you start implementing?

• 8:44Tony Robbins?

  Well, the first thing you want to teach anybody, a child, a kid, anybody is that you'll never earn your way to freedom. You just don't. You look around and you see Kurt Schilling, if you remember from Boston Red Sox.

• 8:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Tony Robbins?

  At a hundred million dollars a year, he's broke. Bankrupt. I asked Warren Buffett, I said, "What made you the wealthiest man in the world?" And he smiled and he said, "Three things." He said, "Living in America is great opportunities, having good genes, I lived a long time." And he said, "The last thing is compounded interest." And we all know about compounded interest, but I give the example of a book of this guy, Theodore Johnson, worked for UPS, never made more than fourteen thousand in income in his entire life in a year. And in old age is worth seventy million dollars. And how did he do it? All he did was he took a percentage of his income, his percentage was twenty percent. Now, his family said, "You can't, we can't save any money." But he met a friend who said, "If you pretend there's a tax, and the tax just took the money away from you, and you never see it, the money just comes out of your account and goes in investment account, you'll be financially free."

• 9:39Tony Robbins?

  And so he was disciplined, he didn't look at it, it happened, seventy million dollars by compounding. So, people's mistake is, and kids don't know this, adults don't know this, that you won't earn your way there, but you can compound your way there. What I wanted to do is say, "Where do you put that money?"

• 9:52Lewis Howes?

  That's a trick, right?

• 9:54Tony Robbins?

  That's a secret. Well, the first trick is actually doing it, almost nobody does.

• 9:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 9:57Tony Robbins?

  The second trick is, you really have to understand where you're gonna get hurt, because

• 10:01Lewis Howes?

  The fees.

• 10:01Tony Robbins?

  The fees are just destroy people.

• 10:03Lewis Howes?

  You have a whole chapter about the fees, I was like, "This is incredible."

• 10:05Tony Robbins?

  Isn't it wild?

• 10:06Lewis Howes?

  It's nuts. Like, you lose so much money just on the fees.

• 10:09Tony Robbins?

  Well, just so people have an understanding, ninety-six percent of all mutual funds never match the market, I mean, they never beat the market. So I was just on a morning show this morning, and Michael Bloomberg's, one of his guys in the house, some of his money. So I'm, you know, this is the only industry I know of where people think they can be a doctor, they think they can be a financial planner. And I said to him, I said, "Well, look, the statistics, Warren Buffett taught me this, he said Ray Dalio told me this, David Swensen who took Yale from one billion to twenty-four billion in two decades, these are people telling me this."

• 10:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 10:38Tony Robbins?

  Nobody beats the market except a couple unicorns that nobody has access to. And I said, I didn't say, "You're not one of them," but I said, "Here's the truth, ninety-six percent of mutual funds don't match the market. That means four percent succeed." Now, what are your chances of picking the right mutual fund? People don't know what they're doing. They put their money in a 401k, they pick a mutual fund not knowing what it is. If you play blackjack, and you and I play, and you get two face cards, and your inner idiot says, hit me. I wanna, I wanna give up one chance in a million, well, you're ace. You have an eight percent chance of winning. If you try to get a mutual fund, you got the four percent chance of winning. So what I show people is not only do you not get the result, thinking logically, if I hire someone else to do it, they'll do better than me. But in addition, you pay around two thousand percent more than it's worth.

• 11:21Tony Robbins?

  Meaning you get the same exact product, the same stocks, if you own the index, right? You own a piece of all of America's best companies, say the Vanguard 500 Index, 500 top companies. That costs point one seven percent, like less than two tenths of a percent versus the average mutual fund is three point one seven. Because so, you get the idea, compound over time. But, but first, just hear that, so you're just like, if you, the average car sold in America is a Honda Civic, it's twenty thousand dollars. You can get the Honda Civic for twenty thousand, or you can pay three hundred and fifty thousand, that's the difference between point one seven and three one seven. But if you look at it over a period of like, how old are you? Thirty-one. Thirty-one, okay. So let's assume you and a couple buddies at thirty-five managed to put aside a hundred grand.

• 12:02Tony Robbins?

  And you manage, not to add any more money, but to grow it at seven percent despite of ups and downs in the market. And you're sixty-five, how much money do you have? Well, if you paid one percent in fees, over those thirty years, a hundred grand became five hundred and seventy-four thousand bucks. Not bad for never adding another dime. Right. If you had three percent in fees, had the same growth, but three percent in fees, you now have three hundred and twenty-four thousand bucks. Almost half as much. Quarter million dollars, seventy-seven percent less money. And, and you had the same return, it was just the fees. So, the world, most people you ask them, what are your fees? They have no clue. Right. So I've created a site where people can go, they can type it in, you find exactly what your fees are, and what you should be paying. And it just, it's highway robbery. Where in the world would you pay two thousand dollars, two thousand percent more for the same exact product?

• 12:45Tony Robbins?

  You can only do it because the financial industry makes things so opaque, so convoluted, and people feel overwhelmed. And hard to understand. Very hard to understand. That's why I tried to come in here and go, look, time to become the chess player, not the chess piece. Let me teach you, so you understand what's going on. It's not that complex. They use all these big words.

• 13:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Tony Robbins?

  But when you know what's going on, you don't get screwed. And more importantly, you take advantage of the system instead of letting the system take advantage of you.

• 13:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I like that. Now, you've coached some of the world's greatest athletes, former presidents, biggest CEOs. Who coaches you? I've had a lot of people asking me to ask you this question.

• 13:18Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Lewis Howes?

  Who mentors you, who coaches you today?

• 13:20Tony Robbins?

  I have always looked for people that were playing the game at a different level than I am and or knew the road ahead. I always tell people anticipation is power. If you ever play a video game against a child, it's pretty disastrous, right? Maybe not for you. You're maybe a different generation. But for me, it's like, you know, it's not the kid is faster and smarter if they played this game before. Like eight million times. So they know the first shot's here, the second shot's there, the third shot there. And you're like reacting. So when you're reacting to things, you fail. So my mentors have been people over the years, different people. My earliest mentor was a man named Jim Rohn. He was a personal development speaker, just touched my life. Then I was involved in neuro linguistic programming, NLP, when I was, gosh, 21, 22, 23 years old and became partners with a man named John Griner.

• 14:00Tony Robbins?

  Brilliant man, co-founder of that. But in my last couple of decades, it's been people like Peter Guber, who's owns the LA Dodgers and owns, you know, the Golden State Warriors NBA team. And he's just, he's got 52 Academy Award nominations. So he's a mentor for me. Paul Tudor Jones, I coach, but also I'm coached by him because they would get to pitch and catch. And then, you know, I've got some people in my life that, you know, like Steve Wynn is a dear friend of mine, most of Las Vegas.

• 14:26Lewis Howes?

  He's brilliant.

• 14:27Tony Robbins?

  And these guys are all 18 years my senior. So they know the road ahead. And I'm able to learn from them and advance and then kind of anticipate things. And that, to me, is incredibly valuable.

• 14:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, very cool. Now, I want to ask you how you personally handle a breakdown. Because you, I've been to your workshop and incredible experience.

• 14:44Tony Robbins?

  Thank you.

• 14:44Lewis Howes?

  And you teach people how to overcome their fears and how to handle breakdowns. But how do you personally deal with it? And do you even have any breakdowns?

• 14:50Tony Robbins?

  Yeah, they sent me a list of questions you had just to kind of give me. That was one of the questions I was like. You know, it's interesting. It's breakdowns, it's certainly not something I experienced. It's not because I'm so talented or so brilliant or so fearless. It's just, you're like an athlete. You're an athlete. Yeah. You're in shape. Yeah. You're not gonna have a reaction in your body like somebody who doesn't take care of themselves. Right. So, you know, I believe, and I don't believe in emotional intelligence. I think it's useful, but I'm more interested in emotional fitness. Because intelligence is a capability. Fitness is a state of readiness. Interesting. If you are fit, you can take that demand right now. You can deal with it. You can deal with that physical stress, that emotional stress. Same thing's true with psychological fitness, emotional fitness, right? So, I'm, I'm pretty fit. And part of that is not because I'm so smart. Part of it is I, I've taught this for decades.

• 15:35Tony Robbins?

  I remember I had a woman who came to one of my seminars in, um, in her, I don't know, early eighties probably. And she would run in this room, five, 10,000 people, I think it was, you know, she went to a couple of 10,000 person events. And she would get in this front row, fight her way through there. And she'd jump and go for it. At one break, she came up to me, I was signing a book for her, and she says, she goes, "Mr. Robbins, I've seen you at like eight of these." "I've seen you like when you're really, I know, I can hear your voice, you're hurting, or you haven't slept." She goes, "You always seem to be so up all the time. How come you're so up?" And I said, "Well, part of it is I attend all these seminars." Yeah, yeah. So, I'm teaching it. So, there's a fitness in that. But there's also, you know, I've, I've buried three fathers and, and one mother. And, you know, that affects your life. I've, uh, you know, I've had a physician look me in the eye and say, "You have a tumor in your brain." Wow.

• 16:17Tony Robbins?

  And so, I've had those moments that, when you've had extreme stress and you push your way through it, you build psychological muscle. It's like, it takes a lot to knock me off. You know, in the early days, we didn't have $50,000 to keep the doors open. How do we do it? Then I had, you know, graduated to five million. I graduated to, uh, a partner that, mine who kind of didn't do things well. And I ended up owning a hundred million dollars because I had to take on his debts. A hundred million dollars. And, but when you do all that stuff, you know, now my company's doing five billion, you know, a year. So, you, you, you keep expanding what I would call really the circle of your, the threshold of your influence. Sure. You know, everybody has a threshold of control. And if you get beyond it, you kind of freak out, so. It takes a little bit more.

• 16:58Lewis Howes?

  You don't have breakdowns.

• 17:00Tony Robbins?

  I don't have a breakdown. Do I get pissed off or get frustrated or tired? Yeah, but breakdown, honestly, no.

• 17:05Lewis Howes?

  So, so how do you handle it if you get tired or something?

• 17:08Tony Robbins?

  I sleep when I can. I mean, it's honest, it's pretty simple. But, you know, when I've, when I've had challenging times, I mean, I have so many tools.

• 17:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Tony Robbins?

  You know, I, I pull them out. It's almost like you as an athlete, you know, you don't just physically break down.

• 17:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 17:22Tony Robbins?

  You take care of yourself, so.

• 17:24Lewis Howes?

  You're constantly training that.

• 17:25Tony Robbins?

  I think most people don't train their mind in emotions. It's like, I think the most powerful muscles to me are not physical, as strong as important as they are. It's like faith is a muscle, courage is a muscle, determination is a muscle, playfulness is a muscle. You know, passion unexpressed weakens. You know, faith untested gets smaller. So, I'm always, I, I call it deep practice. I'm always pushing myself to the edge and pushing yourself to the edge makes you stronger.

• 17:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. In the book, I was really excited to hear you talk about, you say the secret to wealth is gratitude. Somewhere in the book it says that. And I think maybe it was someone else you were referencing.

• 17:58Tony Robbins?

  Yes, it came from Sir John Templeton.

• 18:00Lewis Howes?

  And every day I practice gratitude. When I wake up and every night, I always try to say to my girlfriend or someone I'm talking to before I go to sleep. Three things I'm most grateful for.

• 18:08Tony Robbins?

  That's great.

• 18:09Lewis Howes?

  Now, why, so I was, I was pleased to see that. I was like, I'm on the right track if I'm living gratitude, but why is that the secret to wealth?

• 18:15Tony Robbins?

  Well, Sir John Templeton is probably one of the greatest investors in history. He, people don't know his name, he started out with nothing. He wasn't sir, he wasn't from another country, he came from the US. And he decided that he wanted to understand wealth. And so he saved $10,000, a huge amount of money in those days. And when Hitler invaded Poland, he developed a belief. His belief was you make your money in times of maximum pessimism. Like if you were around in 2008, 9, you remember what it was like, right? You could have bought, you know, the Sands in Las Vegas, you could have bought their stock for $2.28. Today it's $67. It's a 3,000% return.

• 18:49Lewis Howes?

  Not bad.

• 18:50Tony Robbins?

  You could have bought Citibank for less than a buck, right? So, people in those times, he understood that. And so what he did was, and everybody thought the world was gonna end. He took $10,000, he bought every stock on New York Stock Exchange that was a dollar or less, including companies everybody thought were going bankrupt. But when things are bad, people think it's gonna be bad forever. When things are good, they think it's gonna be good forever. And they're always wrong, life's cyclical. So, there's a season for everything. So, once we got through World War II and went a few years later, guess what? Those same stocks made him a billionaire. So, when I asked him, I said, what's the secret to wealth? His response was, he touched me, he goes, you know it, you teach it. I said, what's that? He said, gratitude. And I said, why do you say that? He said, because if you got a billion dollars and every day you live pissed off and frustrated, the quality of your life is called pissed off and frustrated.

• 19:34Tony Robbins?

  But if you have nothing, but you're euphorically grateful for whatever you have, you're the richest person that you're gonna know. He said, so it doesn't matter how much money you got if you don't have gratitude. So I do the same thing, by the way. I have a process I call priming, where I get up every morning. I do mine in the morning. I do this radical change to my body, kinda alter my state. And then I do ten minutes, I never miss, and my first three and a half minutes is what I'm really grateful for. And I make myself think of at least one of those three that's something really simplistic. Instead of something giant, you know, the wind on my face, the look in one of my kid's eyes, you know, something of that nature. And then I do three minutes of strength and healing, and three minutes of when I'm gonna create my world. And I do that for a minimum of ten minutes every day, because I believe you have to condition it, you don't just hope that stuff shows up.

• 20:13Lewis Howes?

  You set your intention each morning.

• 20:14Tony Robbins?

  Well, no, no, every day.

• 20:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, very cool. So what are you most grateful for recently in your life?

• 20:19Tony Robbins?

  So many things. Well, it's Thanksgiving, so one piece, well, one is my daughter is forty years old and she's, she's been my child forever, and she's gonna bring me a grandson.

• 20:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow, congratulations.

• 20:30Tony Robbins?

  Thank you very much.

• 20:30Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 20:31Tony Robbins?

  Um, but also it's Thanksgiving, so for me, it's a very emotional time because my family was dead when I was eleven, and we had no food at Thanksgiving, and uh, it touched me so deeply, and I decided I was gonna get back, so when I was seventeen, I fed two families, and then four, and then eight, and then I didn't tell me I was doing it, and then I got my friends to do it, and my companies grew, and you know, I've fed forty-two million people now over thirty-seven years, and uh,

• 20:53Lewis Howes?

  But you have a challenge for this, right?

• 20:54Tony Robbins?

  Yeah, well, this one, what I did is I decided, you know, writing this book, and in the middle of writing it, last summer, most people didn't even notice, Congress cut food stamps. They don't call it food stamps anymore, but I lived on them, so I know what they are, food stamps, but my family, family lived on them. But they cut it by eight point seven billion, which means you eliminate two million people from the rolls overnight, and they still need to eat. So I support all these nonprofit organizations, and Feeding America is the largest in the country. And so I thought, I'm gonna call attention to this, so if I donated all the profits of this book in advance, how many people could I feed? Because I normally feed two million through my foundation, and I match it, so I feed four million a year. And uh, they said you could feed ten million people. I was like, wow, I mean, And then as the years gone by, I've gotten more and more inspired. And so now I'm gonna feed fifty million people personally.

• 21:38Tony Robbins?

  And not just from the book, I'm writing a larger check on top of it. But also, I'm working with Feeding America to get matching funds to feed a hundred million people.

• 21:44Lewis Howes?

  Incredible.

• 21:44Tony Robbins?

  So to go from my family not being able to eat to feeding a hundred million people is a pretty amazing sense of gratitude and a sense of grace.

• 21:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:52Tony Robbins?

  And I've done my part, but there's been grace in that as well.

• 21:54Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing. It's incredible what you're doing and very inspiring. So thank you for doing that.

• 21:58Tony Robbins?

  So anybody who gets the book.

• 22:00Lewis Howes?

  You're feeding family.

• 22:00Tony Robbins?

  I get any prominence for you.

• 22:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:01Tony Robbins?

  But it'll also feed an average fifty families every book.

• 22:04Lewis Howes?

  A hundred percent is being done.

• 22:05Tony Robbins?

  Hundred percent. Only a hundred percent.

• 22:07Lewis Howes?

  More than that.

• 22:08Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 22:08Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing.

• 22:09Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Lewis Howes?

  Now, I think I also read in the book, I don't know if you said this or someone else said this, but the key to living is giving.

• 22:14Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 22:15Lewis Howes?

  Now, I think I might have heard you say this actually back when I first saw you when I was sixteen at an event. And I remember thinking, I don't have anything to give. I don't have any money, you know, how am I supposed to invest my money?

• 22:27Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Lewis Howes?

  Ten, twenty percent every month? And then how can I give on top of that? But I really understood that, you know, it's so valuable and important to give. And I work with a lot of nonprofits myself, building schools for kids around the world.

• 22:38Tony Robbins?

  That's wonderful.

• 22:39Lewis Howes?

  And I've seen a big impact in my life, in the way I'm able to serve people.

• 22:42Tony Robbins?

  Sir John Templeton told me that he's never seen anyone tithe, which, you know, tithing is usually ten percent of what you earn, for at least a decade, he didn't become incredibly financially free.

• 22:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 22:52Tony Robbins?

  And I think the reason is, I had a moment like when my whole life changed. It was kind of twofold. I had, I was, I was really young, like yourself, back then, right? Working my tail off, trying to build a business. And you get big goals, you know, you don't always succeed to start with.

• 23:05Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 23:06Tony Robbins?

  They just come together, right? You know, it was hard. And I remember I was so frustrated because I was working eighteen hour days and nothing was working. And I was broke and I felt embarrassed, you know, I should be doing better than this.

• 23:16Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 23:16Tony Robbins?

  And so I was driving home from Orange County on the fifty-seventh freeway in San Gabriel Valley, out near a place in Pomona, California. It probably doesn't matter, but I remember it so vividly because it was almost midnight. And I was at this breaking point. And then I was like, why am I not, you know, doing better? And then I just pulled over the road and I used to keep these journals, I still have them, written journals. And I wrote in big lines, you know, the secret to living is giving. And I started to cry. And I realized, I am so focused on what am I not getting?

• 23:42Lewis Howes?

  Receiving.

• 23:42Tony Robbins?

  I'm not focusing on what I'm giving.

• 23:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Tony Robbins?

  So for six months, man, it turned me around. But then, you know, something else that get in your body. It was in my head, it was in my heart, but it had to get in there to stay. And I started going through some really tough times. And I lost everything financially. And I was mad at everybody because like I loaned a friend a thousand bucks and, you know, I'd been doing well and. He didn't even return my phone call. Oh. And what changed me was I I was down to, I don't know, twenty two, twenty three bucks, something like that. I don't know, it was twenty four dollars. Enough that I knew that I didn't have money for food for the next week. And I didn't have any prospects. And I was living in Venice in this four hundred square foot bachelor apartment, feeling sorry for myself.

• 24:17Tony Robbins?

  And I thought, you know what? I gotta eat. So I'm not gonna drive my car, because I'm not gonna spend the gas. I'm not gonna pay for parking. Sure. I'm gonna go to all you can eat place and load up for the winter, right? So I could get more, like, one meal a day. Right. And so, uh, there's a place called Marina Del Rey, not far from Venice. And it's beautiful community, and it's right on the water. And there's a place called El Torito. It's still there. It's a little, uh, uh, restaurant. It had taco bar and all that kind of stuff. So I walked there for the three miles, and I go, I'm gonna go and load up. And I was all about myself and getting through this. And this little, well, this woman walked the door. I had a very attractive lady. That's probably why I caught my attention. And I'm waiting to see who her boyfriend is, and there's nobody up there. There's a little guy down here. It was obviously her son.

• 24:57Tony Robbins?

  And he's wearing this three-piece suit, you know, a little fast. He opens the door for her, he pulls out the chair for her, and it was just... He stared into his mother's eyes. I mean, he was just pierced into her eyes. I don't know what it was, but something about him was just so moving. He was such a sweet, caring, loving young man to his mother that moved me. So I I paid for my meal. I always left seventy and eighteen bucks, put it back in my pocket, what was left. Walked up to this young man, introduced myself, and I said, hi, I don't remember his name. I think his name was Ronnie. And I said, Ronnie, I said, uh, I said, you're really, I said, you're a class act. I saw how you opened the door for your lady. I saw you held out the chair for your lady. He goes, She's my mom. I said, that's even more classy. Right. And he's, and I said, so cool that you're taking her out to lunch like this. And he goes, well, I'm not really taking her to lunch, because I'm just eleven, and I don't, I don't have a job, you know? Right.

• 25:42Tony Robbins?

  I said, yes, you are. And I had no plan. I literally just reached in my pocket, took all the money I had, changed dollar bills, and threw it right there in front of him. He looked at me like this. He goes, I can't take that. I said, sure you can. He said, well, why? I said, because I'm bigger than you are. And he got this big grin on his face. His eyes got this big. And I didn't, I just shook his hand. I didn't even look at this wa- his mom, and I just walked out the door. But the reason I tell you the story is... I had no car, I had no money.

• 26:05Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 26:06Tony Robbins?

  I did not, I was euphoric. I was like flying home. I was like, you know, I probably looked like an idiot, probably skipping or something.

• 26:14Tony Robbins?

  I, and what I felt was, I should have been like, what the hell did you just do? I have no meal, what are we gonna eat? I went on that night, I laid out a plan, and the plan was gonna take me, you know, ten days, two weeks. So I thought, well, people fast for a week, I could fast for a week, you know, that type of thing. And I was in this great mindset about it. And I woke up the next morning, and I get the old regular snail mail shows up, and it's this guy called a zillion times, he wouldn't return my call. I opened it up, there's a check, thousand bucks, plus interest and an apology.

• 26:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 26:40Tony Robbins?

  So I'm sitting there, and I, and I started to cry, honestly. And I was just like, why did this happen, you know? And I don't know if it's true, but I decided that day this happened because I did the right thing. Cause I didn't have a plan, it wasn't a strategy. I just thought this little soul beside me, I knew it was right, and I did it. And I didn't do it because I thought I could or I couldn't. I didn't even think about it. And that's the day I became a wealthy man. Cause I didn't have any money, but scarcity left my body. And I had plenty of ups and downs since that time, and various times in my life. But I never went back to that, oh my god, you know, how's it gonna happen? It's like breathing. Do you stop and say, God, is there gonna be any air before you take a breath? You know it's gonna be there. You don't, you don't run your life by that aspect. And so, that to me is what it's about, is showing people, if you won't give a dime out of a dollar,

• 27:23Tony Robbins?

  don't bullshit yourself. You'll never give a million out of ten million, or ten million out of a hundred million. It's just not gonna happen. But if you can do that now, you, you don't ever get beyond scarcity, you start behind it. You, you, you make a decision to get beyond it.

• 27:35Lewis Howes?

  So how does someone, you know, when they're living in scarcity, there's any fear?

• 27:38Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Lewis Howes?

  And it's like this emotional feeling, it's in your body, like you say, when you're like, I can't even pay for my meal, how am I gonna like start giving? What are some things that people can do to start overcoming that mindset, or start strengthening it, or shifting it?

• 27:52Tony Robbins?

  I'll tell you a couple things. I'll tell you what I did when I was first on my own. You know, I got, my dad, my mom kicked my dad out when I was seventeen. She's a very powerful one, like, poor father, so they all learned how to get the boot. She thought it was his side, so she kicked me out next. I was seventeen. She chased me out with a knife. She wouldn't have hurt me, but I wasn't going back in the room.

• 28:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 28:08Tony Robbins?

  And, um, that's how I figured out what to do. And I didn't play stay and I'm staying in somebody's laundry room for a while and I started reading and feeding my mind and then I developed this little system and the system was really simple and I tell people now is I say number one, every single day, you gotta feed and strengthen your mind. Until you do that, you're always gonna be in fear. Because fear is automatic. The human brain is designed for survival. It's not designed for success. Your brain is not designed to make you happy. That's your job. And the only way you're gonna do it is if you feed your mind, because otherwise weeds grow automatically. My coach, mentor Jim Rohn used to tell me, he said, Tony, every day you gotta stand guard at the door of your mind. You gotta watch what's going in, because if you're not careful, stuff will go in. He said, not all the times it's somebody who cares about you. He said, you know, if you're Your family.

• 28:49Tony Robbins?

  Yeah, if your worst enemy puts sugar in your coffee, he said, what happens? I said, you got sweet coffee. He goes, what if your best friend by accident, or your family, don't mean to, they drop one drop of strychnine in your coffee, you're dead. He said, so life's sugar and strychnine and watch a coffee. Right, right. So every day I decided, I'm old enough, honestly, there was no internet those days, I'm pretty ancient, I used to go to the library, because there's no place to go. And I would read biographies, I'd read people's lives, and it'd make me go, wait a second, as bad as I think it is, the greatest people in the world had it worse. Sure. So there's something here. So you feed your mind. Jim Rohn used to say to me, skip a meal, but don't skip reading. He said, read thirty minutes a day, I don't give a damn what it is. And today, I don't mean internet crap, I mean, read something, a biography, read something that's a strategy, read something that's gonna change your life.

• 29:32Tony Robbins?

  And the second thing I tell people is feeding your mind's great, but you gotta also strengthen your body. And you do that as an athlete naturally. I learned to do that, because fear is physical, right? You know where you feel it. And if you go work out, if you go lift, if you go run, even if you're out of shape, you just go for an intense walk, that experience alone changes your life. Every day in my life, the first thing I do before I do my priming, if I'm at one of my homes, I jump in some hot water for fun and I jump in freezing water. And I have, you know, a river, you know, in one of my homes in Sun Valley, and I've got cold plunges everywhere else. So I go in fifty-seven degree water, boom. And what it does is like, it's teaching my brain, I do, I tell my brain what to do, and it does it. It doesn't feel like it, it doesn't wanna do it, and every cell in your body's alive, right?

• 30:13Tony Robbins?

  So it doesn't have to be like two hours with something, it can be something you do for thirty seconds, but it's training your body to be strong, because a strong body gets a strong mind and vice versa. Yeah. The third thing I tell people is find a role model. You know, it seems impossible till you see somebody's done it. So, you know, Ray Dalio is one of the greatest investors in history, the guy was a caddy, right? You know, his dad was a jazz musician, his mom was a homemaker. You know, he's worth fourteen billion dollars.

• 30:38Lewis Howes?

  He found someone to mentor him.

• 30:39Tony Robbins?

  He found, well, he found multiple people to model.

• 30:42Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 30:43Tony Robbins?

  You don't always find a mentor, but you find somebody you can model. And when you start seeing that somebody else can do it, and you see they really did, you start to believe, you start to get certainty. And then the fourth thing I tell people is it's massive action, you can constantly change your approach, and then it's find somebody worse off than you are and help them. Because when you do that, it gets you out of yourself. And that's what I really have people do. That's what we do at Thanksgiving, we have our basket brigade where two million people get fed.

• 31:05Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 31:05Tony Robbins?

  Not the one I do, the one that I get people to do. And it's amazing, people go in there and they see, my God, I thought my life was tough, but look at this person's life. It makes you appreciative, it puts life in perspective.

• 31:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, very cool. Now, talking about feeding the mind.

• 31:17Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 31:18Lewis Howes?

  If you could only leave three books behind. The end of your life. Three books behind to your kids.

• 31:22Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 31:23Lewis Howes?

  And, or the, you know, the message to the world of like, here's the three most important books that you should read.

• 31:29Tony Robbins?

  That's tough.

• 31:30Lewis Howes?

  What are those three books that?

• 31:31Tony Robbins?

  All the books I've read.

• 31:33Lewis Howes?

  You only pick three?

• 31:34Tony Robbins?

  That's a tough one. I don't know if I can do that, but I'll tell three off the top of my head. I'd say Man's Search for Meaning.

• 31:39Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 31:39Tony Robbins?

  Viktor Frankl, because all of us in our lives are in the experience of extreme stress. I don't care how much money you have, I don't care how much people love or respect you, you'll have your time. It might be a health issue in your family, it might be something happens to the economy, it is something happens to all of us. And so, to see how people that were put in the most insane unjust environment, people that were in Auschwitz, how they dealt with that unbelievable situation, and how the ones that thrived in spite of it. And to go through Viktor Frankl's way of understanding how to create meaning in your life, I don't think there's a more important book. I think maybe another one might be As a Man Thinketh, because it's a book that you can read dozens of times in your life, it's small, and it's the core of everything. As you think, so you are. I mean, obviously, the Bible is an extraordinary book, or whatever religious document a person believes.

• 32:24Tony Robbins?

  I'm personally a Christian, but I tell people, whatever you believe, you need to practice it, whatever it is. Because there are many different ways of connecting, you know, to what has created us. And then, that's three already, but I'll give you one more. I think another one that's important would be understanding the life cycles of humanity. There's a book called Generations, it's a big book. It's, I think, a thousand pages, eight hundred pages.

• 32:46Lewis Howes?

  Bigger than this book.

• 32:46Tony Robbins?

  Much bigger than this book. But it's a book worth reading, because it shows you how, as every hundred years, eighteen hundred years, we run through the same cycles. Like what we've just gone through economically in two thousand eight, happened eighty years before. And you can go through a thousand years of Roman history and you see it. And then when you begin to be able to anticipate what's coming. You know how to take advantage of the season. Some people freeze to death in the winter. People that are prepared might snowboard or ski and have a good time. So it's a brilliant book and it's by Strauss and Howe. It's worth reading.

• 33:14Lewis Howes?

  Cool. Alright, so those are four. I'm curious, why didn't you recommend one of your books?

• 33:17Tony Robbins?

  I don't think I've read fucking history.

• 33:20Lewis Howes?

  I'm just teasing.

• 33:21Tony Robbins?

  I'd rather, I'd frankly have to put someone in a vet.

• 33:24Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, yeah. Events are incredible. This is a question from your son.

• 33:28Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 33:28Lewis Howes?

  And I said, is there any question you haven't asked your dad? That you're still curious about? And he said, yeah. You know, he's pretty calm, actually. You know, he's a calm guy. He's not outrageous like you.

• 33:39Tony Robbins?

  He's pretty outrageous.

• 33:39Lewis Howes?

  And he said, he said, um, you know, my dad does everything on such a big scale. Everything is big. Everything is huge and impactful. It's like the biggest it can be, the best it can be.

• 33:50Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Lewis Howes?

  He said, but I wonder what's something small he's done that he's so proud of? So is there something small you've done? You know, an example was giving money to, you know, that child was a great example of that. But is there something recently you've done that's so small that you're like, really proud of?

• 34:06Tony Robbins?

  I know, a lot of people don't think proud is a good term. I think it actually is. Ego is edging God out. That's when you make shit up to make yourself feel good. But I think if you've really done something, you know you have and no one could take that from it. And so I'm proud of who I am as a man. I'm proud of the things that, you know, what goes on when the camera's not on. And there are people around me all the time that will tell other people stories about what I really like. So I don't have to communicate that to people. It gets shared. So I don't know. I don't know if there's, there's so many things in life. I don't measure them as big versus small.

• 34:37Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 34:38Tony Robbins?

  My, my, my wife was somebody who would see one person and be thrilled. And I had to see, you know, 10,000. I think so. She's balanced it out for me. I still, I feel like life is short and while you're here, I want to have the most impact that I can. So I go deep and I go wide. But every interaction to me is an important interaction. And, and sometimes that interaction is just being kind. I know it sounds stupid, but kindness can, to the right place, the right time, you know, somebody can be suicidal. You don't know it. You're being kind and it changes their state. There's a, it's an interesting story of, um, there's a gentleman who, who wanted to kill Nixon. And he couldn't get access to Nixon. It's a true story. And so he became, he wrote a journal. That's how we know the details of it. And he decided he's going to go after Wallace.

• 35:21Tony Robbins?

  And he goes to shoot Wallace. And he actually did do that shooting. And when they read his journal, it was fascinating. He didn't want to kill Nixon because he didn't like him or Wallace. He just wanted to be famous. He wanted to be worth something. And one of the reasons he didn't kill Nixon is, he was going after Nixon and he was this far from the president. And an old woman bumped into him just as he's reaching his pocket to get this gun. And in the middle of this, everything's frenzied. He wants to shoot, become the most famous man, you know, another one of those assassins. And this woman grabbed his hand and said, "I'm so sorry. I'm just so sorry." And he said in his journal afterwards, his hand was on the gun.

• 35:56Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:57Tony Robbins?

  And her looking in his eyes with this love in her eyes and this kindness in her eyes. He said, "I couldn't make her witness that," and he put the gun away.

• 36:03Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 36:04Tony Robbins?

  That saved Nixon's life.

• 36:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 36:06Tony Robbins?

  So he left her Wallace, you know. But that's the power of a moment of kindness. So I think we underestimate. Uh, you know, somebody came and fed my family when I was 11 years old, you know? Um, obviously the person must not be alive still because I've told the story.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  And they haven't reached out to you.

• 36:19Tony Robbins?

  They haven't reached out to me.

• 36:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Tony Robbins?

  But, I mean, imagine what the impact of that was by that one little act of kindness.

• 36:24Lewis Howes?

  Crazy. Yeah, amazing. Um, so you're, go back to 31. You're 31, you're my, you're my age.

• 36:30Tony Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Lewis Howes?

  What are the three things you'd do with your money, based on the information in this book? You know, talk a lot about asset look allocation.

• 36:36Tony Robbins?

  Yes.

• 36:37Lewis Howes?

  The fees, understanding where you're putting your money and understanding, uh, finding a fiduciary, right?

• 36:42Tony Robbins?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:42Lewis Howes?

  Talk a lot about that, but what would you do if, uh, you're making?

• 36:45Tony Robbins?

  Knowing what I know today.

• 36:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, go back. You're 31 years old. What would you be doing? Well, three, three things you'd do first.

• 36:51Tony Robbins?

  Uh, well, you have a good income, so we're talking about you.

• 36:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, sure. So you're making six to seven figures.

• 36:56Tony Robbins?

  Great, that's wonderful.

• 36:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Tony Robbins?

  So what I would do in that range is I would take and I would model one of the best masters. If it was me, one of the people. Asset allocation, some people are clear, is the one thing that I met with, uh, David Swensen. He took one billion, turned it into 24 billion in two decades, in 20 years. Which is mind-boggling. A billion a year, right? Just think about that bubble of doubling. It's just mind-boggling. And I asked him, I said, "What, what are the dials? What are the only dials we can touch?" And he said, "Tony, to increase your return..." There's only two things you can do. He said, you can make better selections of stocks. He said, you can have better timing. He said, and you can have better asset allocation. He said, the first two will never happen because the first two cost you money. Gotta hire somebody, everybody's wrong on the timing. He said, asset allocation, which simply means dividing your money into different buckets.

• 37:41Tony Robbins?

  Some of those buckets are secure so that even though you think you're going to be a genius, you're going to make money no matter what, that money grows slower, but it'll always be there and it'll give you freedom for the rest of your life. There's a growth bucket, which is also a risk bucket. We forget that.

• 37:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Tony Robbins?

  Because one of these Ray Dalio taught me, he said, Tony, everybody invests in what they think they know. If you grew up with real estate, you're not a genius, but you made money in real estate because anybody can when real estate's going up.

• 38:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:05Tony Robbins?

  You think you're a genius. You think you know stocks. Oh, you're a genius, you know, in nineteen ninety-nine, right? You're a genius in two thousand, you know, ten, when things started to go bad. He said, whatever you invest in, in your lifetime, that area is going to drop fifty to seventy percent. There is zero exception. He'll show you mathematically and he could show you historically. So he said, you have to diversify even though you don't want to. And you have to divide these monies up. So every one of them taught me different asset allocations. But one, the one that I think is the most valuable for anybody to really take advantage of is Ray Dalio's. Because Ray Dalio's figured out, why is it in two thousand eight, if your stockbroker, your financial planner said, we're going to protect you, we're going to put you half in stocks and half in bonds, why did they both go down? You weren't protected at all. Same thing happened in two thousand.

• 38:50Tony Robbins?

  And he figured something out. When you think you're in a balanced portfolio, you're not balanced. And the reason is, stocks are three times more volatile than you'll find in bonds. What does that mean? Means when you think you're fifty fifty, you're fifty fifty with your money, but you're not fifty fifty with your risk. You're ninety-five percent at risk and five percent on the good side. That's where everybody loses. So he figured a formula because he said, look, someday I'm going to be gone.

• 39:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Tony Robbins?

  I want my kids to have the money long term. I want, you know, all the philanthropic things I'm doing to be taken care of. So he spent fifteen years studying the markets and figured out. How do I design a portfolio that'll make money every time? Like if it loses money, it lost in seventy-five years, it's lost one point six percent when it's lost, but it's been right eighty-five percent of the time. Wow. If you went to Vegas and you go to play and it worked for seventy-five years, it made money eighty-five percent of the time, and when you lost, you lost one point six percent, and when you gained, you gained more than ten percent. Ah. The biggest loss in seventy-five years, it's three point nine five percent, less than four. Wow. So why did people not make it in the stock market? Because when you take a fifty percent hit, they all say, stay in. Nobody, the average person never stays in. Sure.

• 39:55Tony Robbins?

  If you look at the last twenty years, the average person, the stock market over twenty years, from nineteen ninety-three to twenty thirteen, has averaged nine point two percent. Pretty cold, compoundy. Double your money, pretty damn quick doing that. Right. But the average mutual fund investors made two point five percent. Oh. Why? Because they freak out, they sell when it goes down, they buy when it's looking good, it's the wrong time to buy it. They don't know what to do. So what Ray Dalio's strategy does, and by the way, he's never shared this strategy ever. And he gives it in here. He gives it in here, just mind-blowing. Now, I pushed him, I teased him, I controlled him. In the end, I said, look, you're not taking any more money, help the average guy out. He lays it out, you can do it yourself, or you can have someone else do it for you, but it takes fifteen minutes a year, and eighty-five percent success over seventy-five years. And it not could take any time for you, it lasts thirty years.

• 40:40Tony Robbins?

  You lost money four times, one of those is point zero zero three percent, so it's really break-even. And again, the most you ever lost, less than four percent, average one point nine percent. So if you're looking for a plan, I put some money there. Maybe other money that I would do is I'd take some of that money and I'd look at, what are the biggest trends? Hmm. I have a lot of my money also in senior housing. And the reason is twofold. Um, it's a demographic inevitability. There's this giant wave of baby boomers, and there isn't enough senior housing to take care of them. And I also, I like it, I like to create a quality place for someone to be able to be lived and taken care of and so forth. But there's huge income from it, and there's the growth in the asset itself. Sure. So I'd be looking at, what are the big trends? But I would make sure I walked down a segment of my money that just, I took a percentage of my income no matter what, and I made it really big, and I made it so I never have

• 41:25Tony Robbins?

  to work again. And that's where I am now, I don't have to work. And what's ironic is, when you interview people that make at least seven hundred fifty thousand a year, right, just under a million. Eighty percent of them say they'll never retire. When you interview people that make a very little amount of money, they all talk about wanting to retire.

• 41:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:40Tony Robbins?

  And the people that do retire say they'll retire after seventy-five. Like, you know, Steve Williams, my buddy, is seventy-two. Warren Buffett's eighty, what, four now?

• 41:46Lewis Howes?

  Still working.

• 41:46Tony Robbins?

  You know, uh, you know, I met with Jack Bogle, who created Vanguard. He's been in the business sixty-three years.

• 41:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:53Tony Robbins?

  He's eighty-five years old and such a genius. Sitting down there, he spent four hours with me, by the way. Just, he came by for forty-five minutes, he wrote in the book here, he goes, Tony Robbins came by for forty-five minutes, four hours later, had the most provocative and probing interview of my life, he said. But, but, you know, the guy's still in the game. Because the real goal is not to have to work. If you don't work, you will start craving mad, because we all need to be productive to feel alive.

• 42:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, interesting. Couple of questions left for you.

• 42:18Tony Robbins?

  Sure.

• 42:19Lewis Howes?

  One of them is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 42:23Tony Robbins?

  I don't know. I think everyone has greatness. I, I don't like that separation. I, I, I respect it because in sports, I think it's really easy to measure. But sports is one aspect of life. You know, I think everyone has the opportunity to be great. To me, being great is being outstanding. To stand out from all the rest and, and as you know, in sports, it can be by, you know, a few microseconds, right? You know, in the Olympics, you know, it can be a nose hair and you stand out. If you stand out, you show other people what's possible. Not everybody likes that. Some people get angry and think you're showing them up. Other people get inspired. I've always been inspired by somebody who's the best in the world at what they do. And so I think greatness is somebody who just will not settle and finds a way to do, be, share, and create in life what they want.

• 43:05Tony Robbins?

  As opposed to fitting in. I think most people are trying to not be rejected. I, you know, I wrote in this book, I, you know, I took a quote from Aristotle saying, you know, how do you really live your life? Well, if you don't want to upset anybody, it's really simple. Don't do anything, don't say anything, don't be anything, and everybody will like you.

• 43:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Tony Robbins?

  But if you want to have a quality life, I think you just have to put yourself on the line. And so to me, greatness is people that put themselves on the line, they keep growing, they won't settle.

• 43:29Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. So what's next for you? Why are you still? What are you still up to? I mean, why are you going after inspiring a hundred million people, feeding a hundred million people? What's next?

• 43:38Tony Robbins?

  Why not? It's like, what else are you gonna do in your life? I, I, I look at, there are lots of challenges. I mean, this is a problem I wanted to go after. It's a problem because people are being abused by a system and nobody means to abuse it. It's just,

• 43:49Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 43:49Tony Robbins?

  It's not an evil system. It's just, you have large corporations that are set up to make a profit, and that's their job. They're not set up to make you as an investor more profitable.

• 43:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:57Tony Robbins?

  So they take care of their shareholder first. So they get all the fees they can and manipulate the system. So I wanna give people freedom, you know? To me, that's valuable. But, you know, what I do with my life is I look at what I see that moves me. I mean, I, I always tell people, people ask me about speaking, they say, you know, how do you be an effective speaker? I said, "Don't speak about shit you're not passionate about." You know, and that you don't have a true, true edge where you can help somebody.

• 44:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Tony Robbins?

  If you can add massive value and you're passionate about it and talk about it, otherwise shut the you-know-what up. You know, that's my view. So when I find things that I'm very passionate about, I like to go deep. I think we live in a, you know, a Facebook world, a Twitter world, a tweeting world, texting world, where people are, by technology, not realizing they're becoming more and more shallow. I mean, there are people ending relationships by texting now.

• 44:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:40Tony Robbins?

  It's like, you know, it's just, "Are you kidding me?" They go, "Why is that person upset? I can understand. Did you see this? I texted him." And I, I look at them going, "Are you kidding?" But technology is making us think that our Facebook friends are our friends. I mean, give me a break. There's only a few friends you can go deep with. You can't have 10,000 friends.

• 44:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Tony Robbins?

  And go deep. And I think a lot of people are dissatisfied because technology's making us go faster and faster. So I look for things to go deep in, and I think in, in our lives, there's a few areas that matter. Your body, your emotions, your spirit, your relationships, your economics, your business. Those half dozen or so areas, I like going deep in, and I'm gonna keep doing it.

• 45:14Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Chad Moretta asked me to, he said, "All the interviews you've done lately for Provenance Book, they've been very intellectual." And he said, "I'd love to see you get in his physical state and show your move." So in a second, I wanna see if, if you'd be open to doing a thumb wrestling. And getting into state so we can show people how you do this. If you're open to it. If you're open to it in a second. You're going to getting in state, getting in state is, that's not what it's about. I would love to see, see how you get into it, right before you go on stage or whatever. I don't go to state to thumb wrestle. Trust me. Arm wrestle?

• 45:48Lewis Howes?

  But before we do that, if you're open to it, I just want to, I want to acknowledge you, Tony. I think it's, you know, you've had a huge impact on my life and so many people, I posted last night. You know, I'm gonna be interviewing Tony, is there any questions you guys might have? And hundreds of comments and questions and people saying how you've impacted their lives. So I just want to say, thank you for creating the spark for so many people, including myself when I was 16 and watched you for the first time. Where did you come to the seminar? It was in St. Louis, Missouri, at the Javits Center back in the day. It was, I don't think it was UPW, it was like. It was a one day event, wasn't it? It was one, it might have been one or two day day, I remember it was like, Donald Trump was there, Dick Vermeil, like a lot of people were there. And I remember my dad bought us floor seats, like probably halfway back on the floor.

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  And there was a moment where you walked out and you came out and you walked right next to me. And I remember thinking, first off, wow, you're really big. You're pretty big yourself. Was smaller then, but I remember thinking, how, you know, this is so inspiring that someone can take an idea of what they want, their vision, and create it and manifest it into speaking in front of thousands of people and really adding so much value to the world and so many people's lives. And I remember then thinking, that's something I would love to do one day, is be able to turn a vision into reality. And, you know, so I want to acknowledge you for creating the spark in so many people. Every workshop you provide, so many people are moved and changed. And so I think it's so powerful what you've created and I want to acknowledge you for that.

• 47:15Lewis Howes?

  I really appreciate it. I'm glad to know that was one of your triggers. Yeah, yeah. That's very cool. Thank you. I'd love to do this move if you could do it, if you're open to it. So what do you want to do? You want to thumb wrestle? I would just do your move, if you could show. You're open to it? Okay, okay. I know, it's just totally artificial. It's like we talking about passion, right? I said, don't do it if you're not passionate, I'm not passionate about thumb wrestle, but how do we do this? So we're gonna go, one, two, three, four, I declare thumb war. Okay, have you ever done this before? No, go for it. Okay. You gotta get my thumb down. You gotta hold it for three seconds. Okay. You got big hands.

• 47:51Lewis Howes?

  Okay, this is gonna go on for 20 minutes?

• 47:54Lewis Howes?

  Oh, you got it. I think you gave it to me too easily. Tony Robbins, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Continue that work. Thank you. Awesome. I gotta give you a hug.

• 48:13Lewis Howes?

  And there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do me a big favor and send this interview to a friend of yours. I want you to email one person and I want you to CC me on the email. My email address is [email protected]. Send this to a friend who you think could use the support of understanding how to master money in their own life or take money to the next level. Maybe someone's struggling or maybe someone who's stuck and trying to take it to the next level. CC me in this email to that person, [email protected] with the episode number, LewisHowes.com/109. Send them that link and I would love to see how many people send this out to their friends and get this message out there. If you guys

• 48:57Lewis Howes?

  have yet to check out the previous interview with his son in episode number 108, go ahead to check out Jerick Robbins interview. We got back-to-back interviews with them, very cool. And please share this with your friends online, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google Plus, anyone who you think could use help understanding how to master money in their own life. Go ahead and send this out, LewisHowes.com/109. Would love to get the message out about this interview. And let me know your thoughts over at the blog. Again, LewisHowes.com/109. You're gonna get the full video interview with Tony there, me and Tony in New York City. And leave a comment about what you thought the most interesting part of this interview was and what opened up for you. Would love to hear from you guys. Also, big shout out

• 49:40Lewis Howes?

  to some friends of mine down in Austin, Texas. I was just there this last weekend. And again, met some interesting people who listen to the School of Greatness podcast. A few people came up to me in different places in Austin and said hello. One guy that I remember specifically, his name's C.T. Big shout out to C.T. We had about a 30-minute conversation where he was talking. About the episodes that really impacted him and he was telling me on some ways that he could support me and my business and it was just a great interaction. So again, if you guys ever see me anywhere in the world, I'm constantly traveling, please come up and say hi to me. Let me know which episode you like the most, which one impacted you the most. Tell me what you're up to. Tell me how you're living a great life. I want to hear from

• 50:23Lewis Howes?

  you. I want to know what you guys are up to. So please come say hi, give me a high five, give me a hug, whatever it is, I'm down to say hi and I would love to connect with you guys. So, thank you guys so much for doing what you do. This was an absolute pleasure for me to do this interview with Tony Robbins and I'm super grateful for his team for hooking it up for me so we can make it happen so that I could get the message out to all of you. Make sure to pick up a copy of his book, Money Master the Game. I don't read that much. I skim a lot of books and I go through a lot of skimming, but I read everything in this book and it's extremely powerful and I learned so much more about wealth generation and wealth creation through reading it all. So I'm definitely implementing this right now from what I learned

• 51:06Lewis Howes?

  from Tony. Thank you guys again for all that you do. We've got some incredible interviews coming up. Got to finish out the year strong and get ready for a huge 2015. So you guys are incredible. I love you guys so much. Thank you for being so active and engaged in these episodes and on the School of Greatness podcast. You mean the world to me and I love you guys so deeply and so very much. So you guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.