"Mormons Figured This Out" - Tony Robbins on Why Young Americans Need to Serve

Patrick Bet-David (0:00)

So you know, when you look at Mormons, the church, I'm not, you're gonna see what direction I'm going, I'm gonna come back to a good place.

I worked with a lot of Mormons for a long time. I know you have as well, you know, you go to a lot of the sales organization, Utah, it's filled with a lot of Mormons. They get their kids, when they turn 18, 19, they go on two years. They go on a mission, and then they come back. And they're able to learn a language within six weeks, so the FBI is trying to learn how Mormon uses, how do you teach these people this language so quick? Like Nick Shirley, who is doing great work, he's Mormon, so he doesn't have a problem going to these countries. You see, sometimes, Israel, when somebody wants to go back and see the country, they will bring people back to show them how special it is, and you see how much Jews have a lot of pride in what they have. What can we do as Americans to take our youth, to send them somewhere, fund it, to realize how great America is, so we minimize the amount of socialism that's starting to spread amongst the youth?

If you were the Secretary of Treasury, Tony Robbins, what would you do to get some of these young kids to realize how amazing America is?

Tony Robbins (1:01)

Well, I think most people, a belief is a poor substitute for an experience. You can believe what America is like when you haven't compared. You saw the people coming here during the World Cup time, and they're raving about America, and their view of America has been done by the media, the same media that's convinced Americans that this is a terrible place. So it's nice to see how the rest of the world actually sees this when they're actually here. They were excited about the size of our burgers and whether you could have ranch dressing. But everything that people take for granted in this country, they take for granted not because they're not good people, they just don't have an experience. So anything gives them the experience would do it. If I was president of the United States, though the thing I would do if I had the right and you can't, is I would definitely have a national service. In Israel, as you know, once you turn 18, everybody joins the service. And by the way, if you're 120 or 130 above in IQ, they put you in Massad, they put you in AI. And that's why I have partners there, because there's a concentration of intelligence there, that like no other place on earth for the size of the population. But when you serve, it helps you see other worlds. That's what these Mormons do too. They get to see how good it is here. They get to serve also and feel their life is about something more than themselves.

When we think it's only about us, we get angry because we're not made to just get or made to give. Anybody who has really experienced something where they care about something more than themselves, whether it's your children or whether it's something in your community or at your company or at your county or whatever it is, there's an energy that human beings have. That's what makes us human when there's something we're here to serve. Life is calling to us. It's like we don't really have a vision in this country anymore that's strong enough for people to be called. John F. Kennedy used to have the famous phrase, don't ask what your turn to do for you, what can you do for your country? Our whole thing is, what are you doing for me and you're not giving me enough now and I'm a victim.

So I think we have to give that example by showing people that have succeeded from nothing. It's same thing with rich people. I had someone the other day saying, well, we should take all the money that Elon has and we can pay for all these things. Elon doesn't have all this money.

You can call him a trillionaire. It's all in businesses. It's all buildings. It's creating things. Have you ever seen communists? Did they create a cell phone? Did they create AI?

No, that's not done by governments. That's done by individuals who take risks with their capital. And so if we divide all that up, I did a video years ago where I showed if you took all the richest people in the United States, you took all the sports teams, you took and you killed them all and took all their money. You can't cover the US government for a year, right? And you lose who's going to produce the value going forward. So our mindset has to shift if we're going to succeed. And I'll tell you when it starts to shift. When you start to become an owner instead of just an operator or consumer.