Tony Robbins | All-In Live from Miami

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
Our next guest needs no introduction, Tony Robbins.

**Tony Robbins** (0:05)
You have to figure that out. Like I always say, if you want to take the island to burn the boats, I got a chance to work with the President of the United States, Quentin, and he calls me one day, true story, and says, Tony, they're going to impeach me in the morning. How many of you have ever achieved a goal, you worked your guts out for, and then achieved it and went, is this all there is?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:19)
Horrific, horrible.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:23)
It's great to meet you.

**Tony Robbins** (0:25)
Thank you.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:25)
You're bigger in person. You're a big man.

**Tony Robbins** (0:29)
Compared to what?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:30)
A normal human.

**David Friedberg** (0:31)
Okay.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:33)
You're large.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:34)
You're like too deep.

**Tony Robbins** (0:34)
Let me see your hands.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:35)
Yeah.

**Tony Robbins** (0:36)
There you go.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:36)
There you go.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:38)
You're a big guy.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:39)
You're glad he just had his hand.

**David Friedberg** (0:43)
It could have got really interesting. You're true.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:45)
True. Maybe not if he was in the cold plunge. You never know. OK.

**David Friedberg** (0:51)
Enough.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:53)
When I told people you were coming, I got like a range of responses. And your poor assistant chief of staff is in a total panic about all the questions I'm going to ask you.

**Tony Robbins** (1:03)
I don't care.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:04)
Yes. I know you don't care. But I got the range of the infomercial guy. He has had a profound impact on my life from very significant friends of mine who we know in common, who have been to your seminars to he's kind of a guru, self-help. It's all kind of like snake oil. I want to know where this all started because my perception of you was the late night, when I was growing up in the 80s, the infomercials. And then I looked into it and I started looking into the self-help space. You actually were inspired by a self-help guru who you went to work for in the, I think, the late 70s.

**Tony Robbins** (1:44)
Jim Rohn.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:45)
Yeah, Jim Rohn. And you have been on this for a while. And a lot of the techniques that you studied are very real. These are real techniques in psychology. And when I looked at them and I was looking at the history of it, you know, you look at Ralph Waldo, Emerson, Self-Reliance, Freud, Young, NLP, natural neuro-linguistic programming, and even L. Ron Hubbard, who took it in a different direction. A lot of these self-help things.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:15)
Are you getting to a question?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:16)
I am. I am.

**David Friedberg** (2:17)
He wants to show you that he spent two hours on Wikipedia before we started.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:20)
I went down the rabbit hole. The Wikipedia. Who is Tony Robbins and why did you get addicted to all this self-help stuff? And then it's kind of been packaged in a couple of different ways in your life. So I'm curious, this sort of arc of how you got into this and then what you do for people now, because my friend Mark Pincus and then we have Benioff, a friend of the show, my friend Kevin Rose, these guys, and then civilians. One of my wife's friends goes and runs over coals with you in Hawaii, and she's a makeup artist and she loves it and she can't shut up about it. So tell me how you got into self-help, how you packaged it and why you decided to be a coach and do these seminars instead of starting a cult or religion.

**Tony Robbins** (3:08)
I got to unpack that. Yes, please. Well, people know me at different stages. I was on television every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day for about 12 years during infomercial days. I hated infomercials, but there was no real vehicle. You could get out to a mass number of people other than writing a book, and most people don't read. But it started for me. I grew up in a pretty tough environment. I was born in downtown LA, I had four different fathers, I had a very powerful mom who I loved dearly since past. Beautiful soul, I created a lot of my success to her. But also when she drank alcohol and took prescription drugs, she was a different person, very violent. I have a younger brother, younger sister. I really became a practical psychologist in my youth, learning how to manage her emotions in her states and how to really get things done.