mike koenigs interviews tony robbins -...

“Success Leaves Clues” - Mike Koenigs Interviews Tony Robbins

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Mike Koenigs: Hi everyone, this is Mike Koenigs. I’m here tonight with Tony Robbins who

has just come off stage to be on this call.

The title of the call is “Success Leaves Clues: Why Successful People Become and Stay Successful in Any Business or Economy.” And you already know this, Tony is the master of answering the big question, which is the why. He calls himself the “Why Guy”, and that’s really our goal tonight, is to provide mental clarity and what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur. And what I believe is the most important thing is all about giving back and it’s what I know Tony is all about, and that is contribution, so being a conscious capitalist. And what happened is when I sent out the invite to join us, the response has been amazing and the questions have been amazing. So instead of me talking, I just want to say Tony, thank you a million for taking time out of your really, really busy life. You just are finishing up with the NBC show or at least closed it out. I know you just got off state teaching a bunch of Australians and Chinese fold and your voice is raspy, so I just want to make this nice and short and sweet and at the same time, deliver massive value because I know that’s what you’re about.



Tony Robbins: Well, thank you buddy. I appreciate it. And you know Mike, you’ve made a huge different for me. You helped me enter this online marketing world, you along with kind of our little family of internet marketing people. You’re the best of the best but you’ve really kind of helped me, “Yeah, that’s it. Here’s how we do it,” and helped us with the technology, and you’ve just been fantastic. So anything I can do back, obviously I want to give back to you personally, as well as with people that follow you.

Mike Koenigs: Yeah. Thank you very much. Well, the great news is I think we’ve got again

just massive support out there for the campaign that’s going on. And also, I want to bring it back home and kind of talk about the core, the root of where you came from first, which is who are the most successful people that you’ve modeled because most of the questions that are coming in are like, “I need a jumpstart. How does Tony get into state, maintain state? Who are the people that he models? Who does he respect most?” So who are the top three most successful people that you’ve modeled throughout your life? Can we start there and tell us what do the three have in common?

Tony Robbins: That’s a great question. You know, I have a hard time limiting it to three

because I’ve modeled so many people. I think one of the mistakes people make is—and your ego gets involved—is to try to find “the perfect person” when in reality, we all have different parts of ourselves. I think early on, I was looking for the perfect role model for everything and then I’d be disappointed, and that’s because people are human. But over the years, I’ve had all kinds of role models. You know, Jim Rhone was one of my very first teachers. He’s a personal development speaker. I went to work for him when I was 17 years old, and he was just an incredible philosopher. He taught me something I didn’t believe, which was, philosophy matters most. You know, he would always tell me how to do it, show me the strategy.

But how many people do you know that know what to do and they don’t do it? Or even people worst that I’ve seen over the last 32 years of my career who actually have succeeded and they’re miserable because their philosophy of life, their beliefs, their values, their rules, even if they allow them to succeed or follow-through or take action, they don’t allow them to enjoy their life or be fulfilled or make a difference or have any sense of meaning in their life.

So Jim Rhone was a huge role model for me from a standpoint of realizing

that in life, you only get paid for the value that you add and that life is not about what you get. Life is really about what you give and that’s what’s going to light you up. That isn't just an economic model, that’s a model that makes you feel phenomenal about your life and out of that, there’s more energy and out of that energy, there’s more passion. Out of that passion, you’re able to give more and you can even give the same material but there’s



an energy behind it that moves people because people don’t respond to information.

I told people information marketing is bullshit. You need to be marketing

emotion. You need to be marketing to meet people’s need, and you can’t do that if you’re not living it and sustain it. You can do it for a while. And so, you know, with Mike, with yourself and with Frank Kern and with Eben Pagan, John Reese, Dean Jackson, Jeff Walker, people that are in this kind of little group of family members who have this unique approach to life, which is how do we add more value instead of being competitive in the traditional sense of competitive, which is, “I’m going to hang on to what I have. Screw you. I’m better than you are.” They’re all guys and everybody is competitive and playfully competitive. But the regional word of the word ‘competition’, it comes from Latin and it means to conspire together.

00:05:05 So if I’m going to play basketball with you and you’re a good player and I’m

a great player, I’m not going to let you off easy. My goal is to push you as hard as I can because I’m conspiring to make you better and vice versa but not in a place where I’m trying to attack or destroy you. I don’t need to tear you down. If we both push each other, we both get better and the world is better for us. So philosophy is something that most people think of as, “Oh, that’s bull. It doesn’t matter.” And what I found is almost all of the successful people who have the philosophy of life, that allows them to make one plus one equals three instead of, “How do I deceive somebody else so I could become stronger?” And now, if you’re a guy or if you’re a woman who’s more masculine in your nature, either one because there are many women that are extremely masculine and there are many men that are very feminine, the feminine is about connection; the masculine very often has put domination about breaking through, about, “How do I make something happen?” And so, both energies are available in everybody. But most people that I know have learned to channel that energy in a way that contributes to not only themselves but the people around them. So Jim Rhone was one of those people for me for sure in his philosophy.

On the other side, I have John Grinder, and John Grinder was the founder of

Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP many people have heard about. That was one of the first real sciences that blew my mind. It was a behavioral science, a psychological science. I got involved in the days when it was only psychologist and psychiatrist, and they were all not using this at the fullest extent. I said, “Man, this could change somebody’s life.” You know, I don’t care. I don’t have to sit with somebody and meet him once a week for the next two years to make income off of them. I don’t need to make the income. I wanted to just change their life. And ironically, by doing that, I developed systems that eventually made me more money than if I’d met



these people everyday for—or every for 52 weeks out of a year and made them a traditional therapy client. So he was a strategist. He had an approach to life. He had a philosophy also and his philosophy was model the outcomes. Both people have that in common.

Jim Rhone taught me success leaves clues, so it’s where it comes from. He

said, “Listen, what is it that you want in your life?” I said, “I want to be happier. I want to make a difference, and I want to be stronger. I want to be financially free.” And he said, “Whatever you want, make it a study. Don’t leave it to chance. If you leave it to chance, if you just hope,” he said, “none of this is going to come about in your life. You have to become obsessed, you have to know everything about it, you got to master it.” So he said, “The only way to do that is don’t talk to somebody you can teach this stuff; talk to somebody who lives this stuff.” And he said, “Even if they’re not a good teacher, you become a good student. You get on your knees and figure out what it is that makes them tick. You know, somebody that is incredibly successful, is making ten times more money than you are, and you say you want to make more money. You can’t work ten times harder. Unless you’re lazy, then maybe there’s room for that, but you’re already working that hard. There’s no way.”

“So the only way you’re going to get to that person is either trial and error

learning, learning by your own experience, which could take you ten years, 20 years. You might spend your whole life and never come across what works. Or you can say, “You know what, my job is to invest in the most viable resource I have—my brain, my intellect, my philosophy, my strategies, my tools, my understandings.” Because if you make that investment, whatever you think is costing you Tony for thousands of dollars or even $10,000.00—there was a time when I couldn’t even pay my rent and I lived in a 400-square foot bachelor apartment and even before that, I was sleeping in my car because my dad got kicked out of his house, so he went back east. My mom thought I was in his side, so she kicked me out, too.”

“So the first night after she exposed him, I was literally sleeping in my 1968

Volkswagen Baja Bug. I had a large trench coat I got at the thrift store, but there’s this thing inside of me that began to realize, man, I would listen to these people in saying, “I got to put myself in the environment. I got to get in proximity with people that are the best, and it’s going to rub off on me. What they know, I’m going to start to know. What they feel, I’m to going to start to feel. I can’t do it once; I got to do repetition.”

And so both—John Grinder, the strategist who could show me how to wipe

out a phobia in an hour where traditionally, it would take seven years, I was able to apply that because I had a philosophy of constant never-ending improvement in myself. I had this philosophy that I have to know the answers; I have this hunger. I would do whatever it takes. But in addition to



that, he showed me how. So now, I have both the philosophy and the strategy.

I didn’t have just confidence; I had competence as well. I knew the fastest

way to get there. But both of them live for modeling, modeling being figure out what someone’s doing that’s succeeding and do that. Don’t be stupid to learn by your own experience because you can’t get more time. You can always get more money but you can’t get more time. And so, that’s what I began to do. And Rhone would say, “Model people who are the best. Don’t settle for somebody good.” He said, “Extend yourself.” His little philosophy was, “Take a rich man to dinner,” and I said, “I’m broke.” He goes, “That’s the point.” I said, “Well, if he’s rich, he can take me to dinner.” He goes, “But he won’t. And if he does, he’s got no obligation to tell you anything.” He said, “You go scrape all the money you’ve got and don’t have a meal. Go take this guy to dinner and find out what makes him work.”

00:10:02 He said, “I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I knew someone who’s

making ten times more money or they were ten times happier or there have ten times better relationship, than I’m going to sleep at night and their life is better and they know the answer and I don’t even bother to find out what it is.” And he said, “Most people, they’re not going to give it to you easily. You got to go and you got to pursue them. You got to passionate. You got to pay them. You got to go to work for them. You got to do a trade that from your perspective is a huge investment on your part. From their perspective, it’s tiny because they already passed where you are.”

And so, both of them have that philosophy, and so I got really good at this

idea of modeling. And I also model what didn’t work. I look at what people did that screwed up and I began to say, you know, there’s a model of what to do. It’s also a model of what to be aware of. In life, you learn to put your reasons. You really learn so that you can have a better life and you learn also so you don’t have a painful life. Life offers enough pain to us without us adding to it by our own ignorance. So, both of them have that common denominator.

But along the way—you know, Peter Guber is a dear friend of mine. He’s

the chairman of Mandalay Pictures; he’s the founder of Mandalay Pictures. He was head of Sony. He’s got 52 Academy Award nominations; he’s made everything from Rain Man to Batman. He’s one of the most brilliant business people I know and worth hundreds of millions of dollars obviously, equals to a billionaire, and he’s done it all doing what he loves most, but he’s just a strategist. He is the one who taught me this idea that proximity is power. He said to me, “Tony, one time, I was doing really well with my life at this stage,” and he was saying, “Tony, you’re doing so well. What are



your goals now? You know and I know you got to keep growing or you’re not going to be alive. It’s not about the money, it’s about the business, it’s not about whether you’re respected or not. You got all that crap.” He said, “What do you want?” And I was telling him some of what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to touch people. I have a foundation and now feed three million people. At the time, I was feeding like 500,000 people and I said, “I want to do this.” I said, “I want to do that.”

And he said, “Well, a lot of things you want to do require you to spend a lot

of money for other people beside yourself. You’ve got what you want.” I said, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Well, you should leverage that.” And he said, “You know, you should leverage that by building businesses.” And I said, “I am doing that.” He gave me a little coaching and finally gave me this little goal in piece. He said, “Here’s what I’ll tell you. I can tell you how to do this but I’ll tell you one thing, proximity is power. If you get around people that are the best in the world at what they do again and again and again, and you’re in their environment, whether it's going to a seminar or whether it’s going to work for them, whether it’s going to take them to lunch, whether it’s immersing in their books or their tapes or what the case may be. But if you can get in proximity of these players,” he said, “you’re going to become like them. And secondly, if you get enough to be like them and you start to grow, you’re going to get to know them. At some level, you’ll eventually be strong enough that you have something you can add value to them. And when that happens and you’re around them, deal will happen. Things will happen.”

And so he said to me, “You should get around stockbrokers,” or not

stockbrokers, excuse me. He said, “You should get around some people that are investment bankers. How many investment bankers do you know?” And I said, “Well, probably hundreds.” “How many do you spend time with?” I said, “None.” He said, “That’s a mistake.” So I put out—I started a plan to start put myself in proximity with people that are best of the best. Deals came together and that’s how I had the biggest pay day of my life. I mean, I had one pay day where I’d worked—God only knows I’ve done 18-hour days over and over again and I made a lot of money. But I had one deal where I worked on it for three or four hours a day and it was a company that was involved with taking public. I made $30 million that day. And a couple of years later, I made $400 million in a day off one deal. I could have worked 24/7, 365, and never have that happen. How did I get to that?

I started by modeling somebody who have more money than I had. I started

by modeling somebody that was happier than I was, finding out what they did differently. I found they were constantly reading. I wasn’t a reader. I was complaining, I was worrying, I was freaking out. I’d read the newspaper in those days. I made sure enough to remember we read newspapers instead of being online, do you know what I mean? And so the bottom line is there was no Twitter. I was reading the paper and I was throwing my mind with



the same crap everybody else did and I thought like everybody else. But I started to get around these leaders and it looks like leaders are readers, and I just started immersing everyday and so, I’m going to read a book a day.

I didn’t do that but I took a speed reading class and I’ve read about 700

books over seven years, not everyday. They were all books on how to improve, how to expand. And I began to realize that when you start reading somebody else’s work, you start thinking like the author. When you start listening to them—and that’s voices in your head, which is easy to do because you can do that while you’re driving. You can do that while you’re working out. You can do it with what I call net time, no extra time—you start to get it in you and what you need that both Grinder and Jim Rhone and Peter Guber talked about, all the people I know, is mastery comes from repetition.

So often, people say, “I know this,” and I’ll say, “Really? Are you doing it?”

If you don’t do it, you don’t know squat. You understand it. Understanding is not mastering. I always tell people there are three levels of mastering, Mike. First level of mastering anything, I don’t care if it’s internet marketing. I don’t care if it’s your body. I don’t care if it has something to do with a relationship. I don’t care what it is you like. If you want to master something, you don’t want to dabble anymore because dabblers are always frustrated. They always try something.

00:15:06

You know they’re a dabbler when the say, “I tried this,” “I tried that.” You got to be the master. They don’t try it; they just do it and do it and do it and do it with so much repetition, with so much intensity and with so much passion. But pretty soon, man, it’s in your body. You don’t just think it, you feel it, you breathe it, you experience it. You know, mastery is tying your shoes, how confident are people tying their shoes. Well, they’re good at tying their shoes because in the beginning, it was a pain in the butt. You were trying to concentrate. You were a little kid and it was this giant task and it seemed impossible. It had so many steps but you kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And at one point, you succeeded and boy, all it took was a little success and you were proud of yourself, you know, this emotion. So you went from cognitive understanding, which is kind of the first level of mastery, to emotional mastery where it’s like, I know how to do this and I realize what it means. It gives me a freedom. It gives me power. It gives me joy. It gives pride. It brings me up. It gives me control over something in my life.

When you start to link emotion to it, or not doing this is costing you all these

things, now you’re more likely to follow through. You don’t just know it intellectually; you know what it means emotionally. And then if you do that



enough, with enough emotion and intensity, it gets in your body and it’s like, “Okay, I’m tying my shoes. I can chew gum and I can drive the car and do everything else simultaneously.” It becomes a part of who you are. And each of these guys did that, so they all were modelers. They all had a philosophy of adding massive value to other human beings. They’re all people that believed proximity was power. They’re all people that said you have to put yourself in the environment, that good ideas are not going to interrupt you. And they were all people that refused to listen to anybody who said, “I tried this,” or, “I tried that.”

They would just—frankly, one of them I’ll say would call and bitch slap

them. They couldn’t stand somebody of that nature. They would avoid them like the plague. They surround themselves with people whose mindset was, “I’m into mastering this and I will do it until…” You read that book “Out Wires” that’s been written recently and it was a great study. There’s a lot of interesting elements in there, but he talks about the fact that to master anything takes about 10,000 hours.

I look at my life and I say most people are completely unrealistic in what

they’re going to do in the next month or maybe even in the next year. They set goals—I was completely unrealistic. Everybody was telling me, “Get a job! What’s wrong with you?” And I’d go, “But I have a mission.” They go, “Yeah, yeah, isn’t that cute?” Do you know what I mean? But I was like, I did. I have this dream or this goal, and I did not achieve. I overestimated massively what I could do in a year. I completely underestimated massively what I could in a decade or two, or in this case of myself, three decades of my life.

And then people say, “Well, I don’t know if I may be able to get there.”

You’ll get wherever you go when you start heading in that direction, and the only impossible trip is the one you don’t start. And so, that whole mindset, that entire psychology—I’m a big believer that 80% of success in anything is psychology and 20% is mechanics. I mean how to do something is easy. How do you lose weight? How do you get fit? Come on, any idiot can do that, right?

Mike Koenigs: Right! What was that? One more time, repeat that again because I think

what you just said is critically important. Tony Robbins: I think 80% of success in anything in my life experience, and I’ve been in

every kind, you know, on 12 different companies. I’ve been in five different industries. I created a billion-dollar brand in the industry that really didn’t exist in its size. My second biggest competitor is on maybe a hundred million in its entire lifetime. To have that kind of dominance in something, it comes by understanding what makes the biggest difference in performance, in success, and in fulfillment. And in all of those things, 80% of success is



psychology. It’s your beliefs, it’s your rules, it’s your mindset. It’s the perceptions you have of what’s possible and what’s impossible. It’s your rules for how much effort you demand from yourself. It’s how consistent are you, which is developed by your psychology. Do you try it or you go until? Are you about dabbling or about mastering? And 20% of success is the mechanics. Aren’t you investing? Investing is a complex task but it’s not instantly complex.

I coach one of the ten top financial investors in the history of the world. There’s a guy who made $500 million back when the stock market crashed in the 80’s, the largest percentage crash in a day. Even after all we’ve seen, it’s the largest percentage crash in a single day. And when that day happened and everybody was freaking out, he made a half a billion dollars. No one had made that much money in a day in human history. You can’t live on that but it’s a good start, right? And his all mindset was, “Tony, it’s not mechanics. Everybody knows the mechanics. They just forget the mechanics because their psychology, their fear, their uncertainty, they’re feeling they’re not enough. It comes over them and then they want to blame everybody else. They want to come up with a reason. We run to excuses. We try to ignore the problem. We try to blame somebody else.” He said, “The power is always in this moment when you make yourself responsible and you figure out what you’ve got to do in spite of the environment to succeed.”

So, how to invest? That’s my complex. Why to invest? Why get yourself to

follow through? What’s going to move you to this stuff? What’s going to keep you going?

00:20:05 That’s where the power is in life and that’s been my specialty for 32 years,

working with three and a half million people from other countries; that’s my focus. So some of the common denominators I cover a lot faster, but I’m passionate about it, are these elements, a model that works, notice what doesn’t work, avoid it. Remember, 80% psychology, 20% mechanics. Make sure that you put yourself in a position where when you don’t have the answers, you get yourself in proximity with those ideas or those people. Great ideas don’t interrupt you. They must be pursued, consumed. And to master something, you don’t read it once. You don’t listen to it once. You don’t buy the damn thing and not open the box. Or read a pictograph(ph) and you say, “This is something I’m going to do a little bit on every single day of my life. I’m going to do this.” Or I’m going to do one hour a week and just focus on this aspect of mastering it.

But you know what? An hour a week, an hour a month, an hour every two

months, you can master anything. My thing, I would ask people this, “How long do you want to take to get your goal?” “How long do you want to take



to master this?” And people go, “I want it right away.” Oh really? Then how you know that is, what are you willing to do? If I want to master something and I do it once a month—I mean I became a good speaker and, you know, I wasn’t a good speaker. I didn’t have the desire. I didn’t have the confidence. But in order to reach people—which was my goal—in order to touch people, I had all these great ideas and began to realize if I talked to people one-on-one and I want to touch the world, holy crap, I’m going to be a million years old before I can touch the world.

So I said, “I got to talk to groups.” I was just a kid and I didn’t have a great

background. I’m driving a Volkswagen and I got a leisure suit from the thrift store that I started out with, and then I’m going to go try and convince business people how to become more successful, and I did that by going to work for somebody who is very successful so I would have to learn what he did and live it every single day. And I would go out and try to figure out how to make this thing happen. But every single day, I was trying to do a little bit more, and most of the people in Jim Rhone’s organization would go out. They’d go out and do one speech a month; that was the average person. And I decided I was going to go out and speak three times a day; that was my goal. And there was no booking. I had to go book my own speeches and I didn’t have a reputation or identity, so I was speaking to anybody. I’d go to some Qantas(ph) club. I’d go to some real state office where they’re supposed to have 15 people and three showed up and one was drunk, and I had to figure out how to get the drunk guy to fully participate. And you need all the skill when you do that. And when I was doing it three times a day, I mean, think about it. The best guy in this entire organization would speak once a week and I’m speaking three times a day.

In the beginning, this guy had a skill like you couldn’t believe. I mean he

could walk in a room and he could literally get eight out of ten people. So I go out there and I get one out of ten. But look at what I’m doing. I’m speaking three times a day to at least ten people. I’m getting three people involved everyday and I’m doing it six days a week. I’m getting 18. And he’s going out once a week and out of ten people, he’d get eight, and I kick his ass. And then, he’s going like, “How is he doing it? He’s such a great speaker.” I wasn’t a great speaker at all. I was just in total immersion.

So if you’re not getting the result you want, there is only one reason, you’re

not modeling. You’re trying to learn by your own experience or you're not mastering. You aren’t in total immersion or you got the wrong psychology. You’re looking for what you can get, not what you can give. You’re trying to say, “How come I’ve worked so hard and I don’t have the result?” It’s kind of like a farmer going out and planting a seed and come back the next day and go, “Where is the crop?” What are you, new? There’s a whole set of seasons you got to go through. You got to take care of this damn seed everyday and till the soil and take care of it. Once it starts to grow, you got



to go through the hot summer. And once you got through the hot summer, then you get the fall when you get to reap. And then you got to start over again because it’s wintertime. You go through rough times, difficult things, and you got to plant again.

That’s the cycle of life. We’re in a society now where we’ve been involved

for so long with instantaneous gratification where we’ve been in a 20-year cycle of such unbelievable abundance that people forgot that life has several seasons. And so, now we’re in winter and people are like, “Oh my God, what will I do in winter?” It’s because they haven’t ever been in a real strong time except fall. We’ve had 20 years of economic fall, the greatest 20 years of economic history. And now, the 80-year cycle that happens every 80 years is happening where all of a sudden, credit is tightened a bit, people’s choices have shifted, but you got a whole generation of people that are used to having whatever they want instantly at their fingertips on their phone, on the internet. They don’t have to pay anything for it and these people are not emotionally fit. They’re psychologically weak and those people will be trounced by people who developed just a little bit of psychology of inner strength and developed a little bit where they go, “You know, this day I’m going to put 30 minutes of this,” or, “Each week, I’m putting an hour into this.” Those people who have some simple rituals will dominate and succeed while the other people are sitting around wondering why, pointing the finger or ignoring or blaming or buying something and never following through. I mean, that’s the majority of people in our society today.

00:25:02 It’s going to change because as we go through tougher times, you get

stronger. The strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker. And so, I’m looking for the people that say, “I’m strong and want to be stronger,” or, “I know I’ve been weak and I’m not willing to be anymore. I know I’ve settled. I know I’ve given up. I know I’ve been in a situation where I’ve told myself I have no control and I know that’s bullshit, that all of us as human beings have choices and powers and I just need to figure out which skill sets I got to master to be in control of my life.” And those are the people that I work with. I work with people that are leaders. And I don’t mean leaders like everybody follows you. I mean leaders like they have a standard for their life now.

They may not have had it before or they may have always had it. They’re

may be the best in the world. Those are people who call me first because they’re looking for the edge. That’s my clientele. I got the biggest clientele in the entertainment business and a base clientele in the financial business. People that are the best in the world reach for this. That’s why they’re the best because they always stay hungry. And then, I get people that finally got hungry. You know, they lost the job or they’re looking at the economy and



going, “I may lose. Their company may be in trouble.” Or they go, “You know, I’ve been totally successful but I’m sick of this. I want to do something new.” Or they go, “I lost my money in the investment field and I need to create a new source of income so I can retire later on.”

I mean the people that really change their life have one common denominator

that I have from such an early age, and it’s called hunger. That’s it, Mike, and I know you have it, Frank has it, John Reese has it. Dean Jackson has it. Jeff Walker has it. You don’t see anybody that are successful and still successful and still growing not like they were successful awhile ago and their living off that who hasn’t stayed hungry. Hunger means there’s something inside you that won’t settle. There’s something inside you that knows who you are as more than how you are living even if how you’re living is better than everybody else. And you don’t give a shit about anybody else. What you give a shit about is being your best because from that, you can help everyone else.

But without that, if you’re not being your best, if all you are is coming up

with reasons or excuses or being a critic, I mean any idiot can be a critic. It takes no guts. It takes no talent. It takes no skill. You can slap some words together and you don’t even have to have any guts today to take authorship of it. You’re on the web and criticize something. How many people try to run their business by finding somebody successful and running some piece with a link in it that says, “so and so sucks.” And then they go to that link and—they’re just trying to get a little bit of traffic because they can’t add any value, so they try to be a parasite of somebody else. I mean how often have you seen that crap? Those people come and go because they haven’t mastered anything.

But if there’s a hunger in you that says, “There is more out there in life. I

won't settle,” then, you got to go start modeling to figure out how. And you got to put yourself in emersion, you got to create a couple of simple rituals, and then you need a coach or you need somebody to hold you accountable so that you when inevitably get off track, which we all do, the people around go, “Bullshit.” Or your coach goes, “You’re not doing that at all! You do that. You brought me in for this reason.” Or you get yourself in such a habit of filling your mind by reading or listening or filling your brain with a stuff that would make a difference that your habit takes over. You know, you listen on another one and you go, “Oh my God,” and you kick your own butt. But everybody needs to have their butt kicked, everybody.

And so, I still have that group of people around me. And one of the reasons I

moved into this direction of like looking into this area was I built unbelievably stressful business. And then I watched—for example, my informational business, it’s an aging industry obviously. When I started, there were only 50 channels. So I could be on television and that ubiquitous.



Everybody knew who I was. Then people started saying, “What happened to Tony Robbins? He’s gone!” I wasn’t gone. There are just 500 channels. Now, it’s 1000 channels. Your chances of coming across to me dropped through the floor by a thousand fold.

And then, we started a program, our digital recorders. And then pretty soon,

people were like, “Who needs that shit? I’ll just download it of off iTunes.” And now, people just get what they want directly off the web. So, it’s a different world. I started saying, “You know what, I have a mission. I have a direction.” My business isn’t fine. Fine is not good for me. I want to go out and reach more people. I want to enter into this. So I started saying, “Okay, who’s great out there?” Then I started stumbling across—asking who is the best and finding these people. The great privilege I had was Frank, John Reese, Eben, yourself, Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime and Dean Jackson. Every one of them had been to my seminars or listened to my tapes because I’m ancient enough. I’ve been around there long enough that when they were starting their careers and they were hungry and they’re looking for great tools, most of them reached out and grabbed it, so we had immediate affinity. And they’ll have this great privilege of having my students where I turned around and became their student. And that’s part of why I created this whole product. They said there is too much goody that I’d have these conversations—you know Mike, you’ve been in some of those. And we’d be sitting down there, it’s like ideas are flying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It was like, “You know what, this is worth millions of dollars of value to our businesses and to our lives. But guess whose getting to hear this? Only each other. You guy, I think I got a unique skill to bring this a different way. You know I do. You’ve used my stuff.”

00:30:05 “Let me come in an interview guys and let’s take—you are all the New

Money Masters. You are all like people that started with nothing and because of your guts and because of your commitment and because of your courage, because of your faith, because of your philosophy of adding value, because you’re relentless, because you wouldn’t give up, because you’ve got vision, a lot of because, you got enough drive that you figure this stuff out that nobody else figured out. You created a new set of pathways.” You’re the guy that—you look at somebody like Jeff Walker. I mean he’s a stay-at-home dad. I mean, he’s like—everybody doesn’t know Jeff. He’s one of the coolest people you’ll know. He’s the last thing of a salesperson.

You know, I talk 100 miles an hour and I’m passionate. I’m over the top.

And so you know, people go, “Oh, he’s a salesman. A salesman is freaking passionate and intense.” That’s what I’m made for. I’m over the top; that’s me. I’m this way all the time.



But you know, what’s interesting is, you look at somebody like Jeff and he’s like, “How are you doing?” He’s like the complete opposite of me. That’s what I love about the guy, and I’m looking at this guy and go, “This is the guy who was the first guy to goes from $300.00 to $3500.00 to doing $100,000.00 in an hour in a day.” And then create this whole launch strategy that everybody else learned from. Frank learned from it. John learned from it. You’ve learned from it. Everybody learned from it. Then all of a sudden, you come along and you get somebody like John Reese. And here’s a guy that, you know, he was completely broke. He told me this story. We’re hanging out and he’s like, “I was at the Subway sandwich place. I had no money. I owed $100,000.00. My buddy is going to feed me and I was so sick with worry. I couldn’t get out of the car to go in and have the sandwich they’re going to buy for me.”

And three years later, he makes a million dollars in less than 24 hours on the

web. I mean to me, those stories, how somebody did that—and I have a unique way to kind of pull that out because that’s part of my skill. I’ve done it for 32 years, right? Those stories are amazing and then those strategies are absolutely invaluable because if you own a business, a traditional business of any sort, you can’t run it in this marketing in the traditional way anymore. I mean it just doesn’t work. You’re competing with everybody else for a limited resource.

But if you innovate, if you take some of these tools and apply them to the

business, you got this incredible competitive edge. If you’re in business and you work for somebody else and you’re concerned, well then here’s the place where you can go have a secondary income. If you lost your big investment that you’ve been saving for years with because the market’s changed, you can get that thing back in a new way, and we all have different reasons. Or you’re bored and say, “I want to have some fun. I want to master a new area of life.” I want to understand that.

Whatever reason you got, the best way to go to the next level is learn from

the best that exists. So that’s what I started doing. And they said, “You know, that’s a great theory.” So we called the New Money Masters and people get—each month, they get these DVD interviews and an audio so you can do it when you’re running or working out, but you could also see in the eyes and see the pieces and the see strategies. And then I got each of these guys to then break down with me step-by-step what you do to apply this if you wanted to create an income opportunity or if you had a mission you wanted to get out there, something that really matters to you, whether it’s making money or not. Or you got a core business that’s there or you want to find a new income stream.

And then I said, “Listen guys, this is great. Why don’t we make it once a

month that people want to go follow-up through it once a month where you



do a webinar and we actually have people interact with you and ask you questions?” Why? They got to do their homework first. They got to be part of the normal gold membership. But if these people want to go to a different level and they want to really get to know you and be in proximity with you, because of technology, there could be none. And so, I convinced these guys to do it and we had a blast making it happen. And now, we’re about to launch it. So that’s what this is all about.

Mike Koenigs: Really, really great. I can’t tell you, Tony—you’ve basically answered

virtually every question that came in and every question I had for you, too. And maybe just to pre-frame everyone or frame them separately from what you went through, what we have here is this entire series of product, the monthly program. Everyone here who’s listening can go to http://0s4.com/r/MONEY to learn more and meet as you say the Band of Brothers, which is I really, really like that because I think out of all the things you’ve talked about, every one of these guys who I’ve known for a couple years really embodies every one of the qualities that you’ve covered from your own mentors. And also, they all are students of yours. That’s one thing that all of us have in common with each other. But they’ve taken things—

Tony Robbins: But now, I’m their students, too. That’s something that’s makes me really

proud. You know, that’s very cool. It’s like what’s goes around, comes around. I’ve learned so much from these groups of guys. I mean some things also I knew, but they did it in a different way. Sometimes you know something, “Oh, I know that, but I wasn’t doing it.” If you’re not doing it on a squat—and so seeing Frank, hanging out surfing and looking at his lifestyle and saying, “This guy’s having a time of his life,” because he’s doing things easier.

00:35:09

I tend to do things harder. Do you know what I mean? So I can still do it to some extent, but he got me to look at it differently. Or you know, looking at somebody like Dean Jackson who said, “Look, I’m creating my life so I have total freedom. I’m making it my entire thing as I work so I have lifestyle. I don’t work so I have life.” It’s only for lifestyle and I figured how to do that in the shortest period of time. Those are just cool ways of looking at your life if you can back up that philosophy with the strategies, and that’s what these guys do. I think the website, what you called as the Money Masters Movies, what is it?

Mike Koenigs: Yeah, http://0s4.com/r/MONEY. Tony Robbins: Yeah, that’s the right address but I’d say these are the new Money Masters.

The old way to do stuff, it’s old. It’s not working, the old institutional approach. We live in a world today where somebody in their house, in their



garage, in a hurricane—John Reese, he’s in the middle of a hurricane in his parent’s house because his house was being flashed—you could make a billion bucks while the hurricane is going on, but with a laptop. I mean that’s the world we’re in.

So I think of these guys—to give them the right title. They’re the new

Money Masters but you’re given the right address. That’s my sense on that. Mike Koenigs: Yeah, I know. I appreciate it. I think looking at them, the one thing that they

all do that’s a little bit unique is every single one of them, unlike oldest Money Masters, the new Money Masters share their information. Every one of them talks about what strategies, what techniques they’re using, and they model each other.

So there’s this huge acceleration in the effectiveness of their marketing and

that’s something that I know you saw right away and you talked about. But I wanted to remind you of it because I remember when you said that the first time and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. You know, there’s that bond that exists and I think when more businesses learn to model each other in real life that there isn’t competition. There’s co-opetition that can exist all the time. And that to me has been one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned because they are my mentors and my friends as well, and it’s just been incredible to participate in this project of course.

Well, let’s see. I think the only other question that I had—I mean I wanted to

ask you what is the one thing that all these guys have in common? And you said hunger.

Tony Robbins: Yes. Mike Koenigs: Is there anything else that you observed after meeting all of them? Tony Robbins: I think your definition of being a conscious capitalist is the term I also use. I

believed that’s a great language pattern for several qualities. They’re hungry, but a conscious capitalist is the number one factor as they know that there’s only one way that you fulfill meanings in your life and that you succeed long-term, not short-term but long-term. That is, you’ve got to add more value that anybody else is adding. That’s what every one of these guys does, and so that’s also why I think they cooperatively compete. They cooperate. They learn. They share because they go, “I want to add value to Frank because the next thing I know, Frank is going to add value to me,” and the game just gets better and better and better and better.

But you know, what’s interesting about these guys, they are willing to share

with everybody, but not everybody is inside this family to say the least. This is the best of the best that’s in there and they trust each other and respect each



other, and they all are so different. I mean Eben couldn’t be more different than Frank or David Long(ph). Jeff Walker couldn’t be more different than you than to David Long. Dean Jackson couldn’t be more different than I am and to David Long. But this Band of Brothers have in common this hunger, this desire to give and to grow and to expand and be the very best, and to constantly find a way to take the game to the next level, and they’re all strategic. They’re all saying, “It’s not about working harder, it’s about working in a strategic way.” Not just even smarter because you’d be smart and still not get the greatest impact. They all have that in common and I think that part is there.

And the other part is they all have fun. They’re conscious capitalists. They want to make a difference in the world and they want to have a good time. Every one of them has figured out how to have a great lifestyle. Eben was—when he first started out, I know he was in this 500-square foot trailer trying to figure out how he was going to get through his dating disasters. And he turned now in his $25 million business with 80 employees. What blew me away and changed my thought process is he figured how to do that with a virtual company. He didn’t have to have all these infrastructures and everybody live in one place and do the old strategy, which eliminated huge costs, made it much more profitable, let him have a different lifestyle, let these people have a different lifestyle. I mean, I started to model some of these things. Frank’s the same way.

So if you want to change your life, the only way you do it is get around new

voices because if you are on the same voices around, you’re going to have the same conversations and the same conversations, they will lead you to the same place mentally and emotionally. My whole life has been about getting around new voices. That’s how this little project started. And I decided this is too rich. We want to share it. This is a killer. This is fun. I want to do this consciously exultantly. I want the other people to get it, too. That’s what I do for a living.

00:40:05 And then you get around enough new voices or enough new conversations

and innovation happens. Your philosophy changes, you get strategies, tools. You also got to get yourself some new questions. You know, keep people asking the same question. “How come this doesn’t work?” Wrong question. “How could I make this work ten times better,” not, “How do I get by,” not, “How do I survive?” “How do I thrive?” “How do I take the worst economic time and turn it the best economic time?”

You know, Sir John Templeton was a friend of mine. He passed last year and he was the first investor to be a billionaire starting from nothing on his own. In his entire way of making money was asked this question, “Where



are people at the maximum level of pessimism in the world?” “Where did people believe the world is over, because that’s where the most money can be made?” And he made himself a billionaire by doing it.

In 1939 when the World War II started, he went out and he invested in stocks in the middle of the depression when everybody thought the world was coming to an end. He bought every stock that was down to a dollar including companies that were going bankrupt. And after the war just a few years later, it jumped up and within ten years, it was worth a billion dollars. He went to Japan, I mean the one place after World War II, you wouldn’t invest in Japan. It was rubble. It was a mud. There was no culture, there was no income, there was no business. There was radiation everywhere. And he bought these for pennies because when people are pessimistic, the opportunities for your life are expanded geometrically if you’re not living in that place. It’s not being optimistic, it’s being smart; there’s a difference. Optimistic people go, “Oh, it’s so wonderful out there,” and they don’t do their homework. That’s not what this is. You need new voices. You need to ask new questions. You need new perspectives. It’s the only way your business and your life is going to change. How do you get there? You get around other people that have a totally different way of looking at life. How should you do it? You go out and you get around some people with new passion so some of that passion rubs up on you. And then you try some new experiments. You keep doing what you’re doing because you need stability, but you got to try something. And then if you’re smart, you don’t just try it. You do it until you master it. So that’s part of the philosophy that has allowed me to generate what I got in my life and frankly anybody I know who keeps growing, expanding, and can find a way to do well no matter what the environment is. That’s the essence of what Money Masters, the New Money Masters is all about. It’s about getting those new voices, getting those new questions, getting those new perspectives, getting those new strategies, getting that new passion in your life, and doing it in simple works like, “Wow! Once a month, I can listen to one of these,” and then there’s going to be a game play put right in front of me. And if you’re one of those people that says, “I really want more,” for a time you want more, you can go toward that elite group and you can be literally interacting with these masters themselves once a month. “So once a month, I’m getting this film. I’m watching it, I’m listening to it, I’m incorporating it.” I might think, “Each week, I’m going to play each of these, one of these little strategies, so I start to make progress one step at a time.” And then once a month, I can jump on if I want to be a part where I actually interact and say, “I tried this. This thing worked. What would you do differently?” I mean, I just think it’s something that technology makes possible where you’re in a different part of the world and you’re synchronous to somebody else. You don’t have to be in their world and you get all these



benefit using simple medium of DVD in the internet. But on the other side, you can still have instantaneous communication once a month with a mentor not at $10,000.00 a month or $20,000.00 a month or the types of numbers that these guys charge to be able to do that, but as part of a group where the price goes through the floor and it’s just ridiculous.

Mike Koenigs: It really is amazing, yup. This is such a great time to be alive. [Laughs] Tony Robbins: Yes, it really is. Mike Koenigs: Well, here’s the deal. Tony, you’ve answered every question. I know

you’ve got to get some rest and— Tony Robbins: Actually, I had to get back on stage, but this was [Voice Overlap]— Mike Koenigs: Oh, that’s right. We’re only—you know, there’s a part, I forgot about that.

Alright, well, I know I got to let you go then so you can get back on stage. Well, I’m looking forward to our next conversation. We’ve got a lot to chat about, but I really appreciate you taking the time out and letting everyone know about this.

To learn more, just visit http://0s4.com/r/MONEY and if you’re listening to this, it means you’ve obviously received the link, so I’ll send the link to you, too, and I’ll also have this transcribed so you’ll be able to read it. And I always think it’s incredibly valuable, as I know you do, to be able to consume it anytime, anywhere, any device on your time. And this is the kind of material that you’re going to want to listen to over and over again because there are so many nuggets and gems in it.

Tony Robbins: I hope it’s been valuable for people and wherever you are out there, listen,

wherever you are, nobody is better or worst than you are. We all start some place and we can take ourselves to whatever level we want, but the only way you get a lasting impact is committing to this philosophy of constant never-ending improvement where your mindset is it’s never enough. I’m hungry, son of a gun, and I never know what idea, what person, what experience is going to be a breakthrough for me, so I’m going to keep putting myself in proximity with those ideas, with those strategies, with those tools. And if you do that over and over and over again, there’s a day, there’s like a tipping point—you got the vanilla ice cream and you start pouring chocolate in their and it’s white, white, white, and all of a sudden, a certain amount hits and the whole thing is brown. That tipping point happens in my experience when you immerse yourself enough.

00:45:08



I started doing that when I was 17. It was my good fortune and I would take my money and go down to this place called Knight Education LA with this guy that collected all the greatest cassette tape programs in the world at that time, way before Nightingale-Conant, and I would take—and it was expensive as hell—and I would take a week’s pay and pay for all these tapes and go consume them. I’d listen to this stuff when I was going to sleep at night to condition your self. So with the web, you got access to a lot of these things, and I hope that this brief little session we had has value. And the only other thing I want to say Mike is anybody listening here, if they’re following you, they must already know, but you’re the real thing. And I’m grateful to have a friend like you that is genuine, that is raw, that’s real, that’s about adding value, that really cares, and it’s damn brilliant. I mean your great skill I think is this capacity to look at how to create little money machines for people. How do you create these systems that really work for people, and you’ve been incredibly generous with me and you’ve been incredibly generous to almost anybody I’ve ever introduced you to or I’ve seen you’ve come across. And you’re a great man, you’re a great husband and your Vivian worships and loves you, and I know you do her, too. In the middle of all the crazy work you do, to have that going well as well is a lot to acknowledge within you. So I just want to acknowledge you as a friend and as somebody who is a mentor to so many people, and you’ve also been a good mentor to me, so thank you.

Mike Koenigs: I really appreciate that, Tony. That means a ton to me, it really does. Well, I

why don’t we let everyone go and if you’d hold on for 30 seconds, I just want to give you a quick update when we sign off here. So I’ll let everyone go. Thank you so much. And one last time, make sure you visit http://0s4.com/r/MONEY and thank you so much for listening.

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