Jordan Peterson sits down with author, success coach, and public speaker Tony Robbins. They discuss the art of communication, the immense power behind mindset, the clinical study which proved the impact of Robbins’ approach, and the reality that knowing your “why” allows you to bear any “how.” Tony Robbins is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and renowned life and business strategist. In over 45 years, he has reached 100 million people across 195 countries through his transformational events. He has authored 8 bestselling books, including three #1 New York Times bestsellers: “Money: Master the Game,” “Unshakeable,” and “Life Force.” Robbins created the top personal and professional development program, with over 10 million seminar attendees. As chairman of a holding company with $8 billion in annual sales, he’s been named a top global business leader by Worth Magazine, Harvard Business Press, and Fortune, which dubbed him the “CEO Whisperer.” This episode was filmed on January 12th, 2025. | Links | For Tony Robbins: Join Tony Robbins for the Time To Rise Summit 2025 https://timetorisesummit.com/join-now?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=&hsa_cam=19428663036&gc_id=19428663036&h_ad_id=687085712534&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA7se8BhCAARIsAKnF3rxlMuI7GVZaZbcPYj8YYmfETimZIlMpN2dEM59yQtxKFN0AooIqR3AaAvx7EALw_wcB “Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru” documentary is now on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/80102204 On X https://x.com/TonyRobbins?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TonyRobbins/ On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tonyrobbins/?hl=en On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJLMboBYME_CLEfwsduI0wQ Website https://www.tonyrobbins.com/?srsltid=AfmBOopb6lAZKWCHSNdMBHylzXR6t6dHnlBZW81ovKrKYajli67wMPNp
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
The first thing to understand is that people see the world through their aim. Anyone can deal with the difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow. If you leave your zone of comfort, if you move away from your father's tent, if you move away from what's familiar to you, and you do that voluntarily, and you make the sacrifices necessary as a consequence, this is what will happen.
Chapter 2: How can a compelling future help in overcoming challenges?
I look at it this way. We don't experience life. We experience the life we focus on. Much of what we think we're doing ourselves is being shifted by the outside world. So I say prime yourself.
... ...
Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down with Tony Robbins and in the remarkable basement of his house as well. And so that's the setting. And Tony and I have got to know each other over the last couple of years and have had a number of discussions. And partly what we've been trying to puzzle out is are, what would you say, the similarities between our parallel endeavors?
I mean, Tony's, I suspect he's probably the most popular and impactful speaker, personal development speaker the world's ever seen. Oh no, I'm very fascinated by what he does and I've seen his events and I've reviewed some of the scientific literature pertaining to his achievements.
That's actually what we started our conversation with, because Tony's program has been subject to scientific scrutiny, and it seems to have remarkable antidepressant properties. And so I'm very interested, like Tony is, in
how people chart their life course and how they establish their aim and how they determine their strategies and how they describe their conditions for fulfillment and what fulfillment is and how it can be sustained and how it can be self-improving and how it can be brought to other people. And so that's really what we spent our time discussing.
I wanted to hear his thoughts on the matter and how he construed and conceptualized his approach, and also what makes him such a compelling public speaker, how he prepares for that, how he relates to the audience, how he can sustain this energy for really remarkable periods of time, because I found myself quite exhausted generally after about three hours of full-out
Public speaking, let's say, because that's a performance and you've got to be all in if you're going to do it right. But Tony does that for like 12 hours a day for four days in a row, many, many times a month. And so I was curious about, well, his technique and how that was similar to mine and how it differed. And so... Well, we talked about all that, and I suppose what's the core of it all?
Well, I think the core of it, at least in part, is something akin to the old Nietzschean dictum that if you have a why, you can bear any how. And so Tony helps people discover the why, well, and the how for that matter. And that is definitely akin to what I'm attempting to do when I'm lecturing and writing.
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Chapter 3: What clinical evidence supports Tony Robbins' methods?
And so, well, our discussion helped clarify that and flesh it out and make it more concrete and make it more accessible to people. And so you're welcome to partake in that. And that's what's on the menu for today. So, Mr. Robbins, I'm going to start by reading something. Okay. Because you did something that is very rare.
You submitted your process, your life improvement process, your public life improvement process to a clinical trial. So I'm going to read some pieces from the abstract of the paper that was published in consequence of that inquiry. Okay. So the paper is called Effects of an Immersive Psychosocial Training Program on Depression and Well-Being, a Randomized Clinical Trial.
The first thing I would say is clinical trials are extremely difficult to do. I've always been highly impressed by any scientist, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist who will do a clinical trial because there are... innumerable impediments. It's hard to get subjects. It's hard to specify the control group. It's hard to get ethical clearance. It takes forever. People drop out.
It's very difficult to publish. It's generally a very thankless endeavor. And you did it along with the authors of this paper. And the results are quite stunning. I'll read a bit from the abstract.
So for everybody watching and listening, every scientific paper has an abstract that essentially summarizes the findings so that if you're doing, say, a detailed overview of a given field, you can get the gist of things rapidly. And so the abstract summarizes the most important elements of the study. Psychiatry stands to benefit from brief... Why? Well, you want things to be efficient.
Non-pharmacological treatments that effectively reduce depressive symptoms, which are very common. To address this need, we conducted a single-blind randomized clinical trial. So people were assigned randomly to group, which is...
a marker for a well-designed study, assessing how a six-day immersive psychosocial training program, and that's Tony Robbins' program, followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days. What's a psychosocial exercise? Well, Tony will walk us through that, but
It's an exercise that's designed to optimize psychological functioning, but also social functioning simultaneously because it's very difficult to be healthy by yourself. And so you could think of mental health in particular, although also physical health as a communitarian or collective endeavor. So, and Tony definitely understands that.
Followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days improves depressive symptoms. 45 adults were block randomized by depression scored two arms. The immersive psychosocial training program and 10-minute daily exercise group, a gratitude journaling group, or a gratitude journaling group. So now the idea there was to
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of knowing your 'why'?
And a gratitude journal helps people focus on what's positive in their life instead of what's negative, and people who are depressed tend to be preoccupied with what's negative. Depression severity improved over time with a significantly greater reduction in the psychosocial training program group. So that meant that Mr. Robin's intervention worked. About an 83% reduction in depression severity.
And by six weeks, virtually everybody in the intervention group showed remission in their symptoms. And six weeks is a pretty decent length of trial because one of the complications with clinical trials is How long do you follow people? A week? Two weeks? A month? Six months? Two years? You know, the best studies would attempt to do all of those, but that's virtually impossible.
So this was, well, so I think we should talk about, we should start by talking about this. Because I'd like to know, and everybody listening would like to know, I suppose, first of all, what was the program? And then why did you submit it to a clinical trial? And How did you get scientists to participate in that?
Well, you took that complexity and made it equally complex. Yeah, thank you, sir. Thank you. I appreciate it. It was actually really simple. You know, I've been working with people. This has got to be my 48th year beginning now across the world. I have the privilege of recognizing there's only so many patterns.
While the brain has infinite complexity, it's not completely complex in terms of the mind. And so over the years, I've developed a series of processes to help people kind of develop what is their true north for them, not for me, and shift their values so that they're naturally pulled in the direction of what they really want at this stage as opposed to what their conditioning has to do with.
And so as you well know, we don't experience life. We experience the life we focus on. In every moment, what's wrong is always available, so is what's right. And it's not positive thinking, it's about intelligence. If you're in a lousy state, you don't treat people better, you don't perform better, you're obviously not happier.
So what we teach people is how to shift their focus, how to determine what values at this stage of your life are the ones that are most important to you that will pull you towards what you want. I always look at motivation and I don't like the word motivation, but people overuse it. So I might as well use it because I'm not a motivator. I'm a strategist.
But I also believe in the power of inspiring people, obviously, and having high energy. But, you know, there's two types of motivation. There's push motivation, as I'm sure you know. That's where you're using willpower and making yourself do it. And, you know, Jordan, you have enormous willpower. My respect for you is through the roof, all that you've dealt with and all that you've done.
And it's shaped who you are because you haven't given up and moved forward. But there is a limit to willpower. I got a lot of willpower too. So, but there's no limit to pull motivation. Pull motivation is where something that you care about more than yourself, something that's a magnificent obsession, something where you're contributing. It could be your kids. It could be your family.
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Chapter 5: How does personal energy influence public speaking?
And the name of it again? Tony Robbins, I'm Not Your Guru. It's on Netflix. And you see me deal with people that are suicidal and turning them around. And then you see us follow up four years later. So you see it last because most people wouldn't think it lasts if you can make a change that quickly. So how does that relate to the study?
Well, two professors, as I understand it, we were approached by Stanford. And they said, two of our professors had come here. They were clinically depressed and they're off medication. And all they did was go to this six-day program. We don't understand it. Do you have data on this? And I said, sure, I've got millions of testimonials. And somebody said, no, no, no, scientific data.
I said, no, that's not been my focus. My focus is just get results for people. But if you want to do one, I'm open to it. What would you like to study? And they said, well, right now is the middle of COVID. And they said, you know, depression is through the roof, suicide's through the roof, overdoses are through the roof. I said, I know.
And they said, we'd love to test this non-pharmacological approach to it that you have and see what it really produces, because this seems miraculous. And I said, well, it's not miraculous. It's just rewiring the way in which people perceive their world. If I'm going to go do the Dakar race where I'm gonna go, you know, 9,000 miles to the Sahara desert.
You can't take the car you're currently running and expect it, and you're gonna die in the desert. You need to have that car re-engineered. So for example, the exhaust can get above the sand. Well, we help people re-engineer and we don't tell them what to do. We show them how to re-engineer themselves so they have their own autonomy and ownership.
And I said, but tell me something, if we're gonna study this, what do the medical studies show? And the meta studies show that they said that 60% of the people who come for treatment, whether it's drugs or therapy or both, 60% make no improvement. That's the average. 40% improve overall. The average improvement is 50%. So I said, so they're half as depressed as they were?
They said, yes, some people get well, but most people are on drugs for the rest of their lives. And I said, you can almost do that with a placebo. And the guy had a nervous laugh and he said, well, yeah, maybe. I said, well, I said, I'm sure it sounds like hubris, but I said, just based on history, I'm sure we'll do better than that.
I said, what's the best study of all psychiatry you've ever seen in terms of wiping out these symptoms? And at the time they said there was a study done at Johns Hopkins, you're probably familiar with it, five years ago, where for a month they gave people psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and cognitive therapy. And they said the results were the greatest in the history of psychiatry.
At the end of six weeks, it was their evaluation, that group had 54% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever of depression. I said, well, that's a great standard. I said, I'd like to see us beat that. I said, again, it doesn't sound, sounds like hubris. It sounds like maybe arrogance. I'm not coming from that place. I just think our numbers will be significantly higher, but we'll see.
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Chapter 6: What is the role of motivation versus drive in achieving goals?
At the end of six weeks, after just going through seminar, no drugs, no one-on-one therapy, just the rewiring for themselves, 93% of them had no symptoms whatsoever. It's nothing like it has ever been done. And they published it in the journal. It's like,
Do you have any idea? Has there been any longer-term follow-up? Yes, there has been. Oh, there has?
Yes, yeah. And 7% of the people still improved, but they didn't completely eliminate their symptoms. But here's the best part. 19% came in with suicidal ideation, zero suicidal ideation afterwards, which is what I've seen over and over, over the decades. So they followed up a year later and they found 52% increase in positive emotions, 71% decrease in negative emotions. A year later. A year later.
And now they've done additional studies. They just did a one-year study with 1,500 people. So you can appreciate this.
Oh, is that right?
It's like the biggest study you can imagine. 750 in each group. And this one is on engagement in business and in life because... Right now, since COVID, the engagement levels have gone through the floor. You're probably familiar with it. They have three measurements. One is, you know, are you engaged? And engagement equals EBITDA or equals profit in companies.
You can see a direct relationship, right? Then there's those that are disengaged. That would be what people started calling quiet quitting, where they're doing the minimum they need to. And then there's actively disengaged, which is actually people who are angry and they're just trying to hurt the company when they stay there as well.
Right, right, right. That's not good. That's definitely not good. Hello, everybody. I want to tell you about Peterson Academy. So as I watched the universities deteriorate and become inexcusably ideologically rigid over the years, I started thinking about what might be done to address that.
We have the technology at hand now to film the best lectures on any given topic at every university around the world and to bring the results of that filming and distribution to a wide audience at a very low cost. And we also have the ability to do that with the best possible production quality. And so I started working with my daughter and her team
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Chapter 7: How can storytelling influence personal and social dynamics?
There's a very inviting and welcoming social media element to Peterson Academy and it's all available at an eminently reasonable price. We set out to produce the best education platform in the world and I think we managed that.
Go to Peterson Academy and gain access to the kind of education that was once reserved at the best institutions for the most elite and privileged of students and change your life in consequence.
Since COVID, the drop in engagement is the biggest drop in the history of any form of measurement around the world. In addition, the largest increase is in active disengagement.
Yeah, well, people's trust was violated.
That's right. They were angry. And so they did a group, and they haven't published it. It'll come out shortly, but I can give you the broad strokes of it that I'm so excited about is they eliminated all of the disengagement that had been driven by four years of isolation in six days.
And then the best part was without any more interaction with me every month, imagine for a year, they increased in their engagement. Oh, really? Because what's happened is now the hunger is awakened in them. They now have a sense of control over their own life. Same authors or different group?
Some of the same authors. Some of the same. UCLA. And that big a difference in group size. Yes. Because one of the criticisms of the study, obviously, was that there was a small number of people. Yes, yes.
Yes, but not small by most averages, as you know, right?
Well, clinical studies are very, very difficult to do. So it's very easy to criticize a study for having a small number, but it's very difficult to run a better study.
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Chapter 8: What are the benefits of focusing on a communal goal?
Right, right.
They've also done a study where, a separate one that they published in a different journal that I can get to you, which was about the teaching style, because what they wanted to figure out is- Right. How? How does this work? So I'll tell you what they uncovered.
There's a separate group that had been working with them and had worked on measuring my body on stage, because I do immersion events, I think you know, four days, 15, 20,000 people in a stadium, 12, 13 hours a day. And when COVID happened and they shut everything down, I wanted to still help people, so I built a studio, because every stadium in the world was shut down.
And I started doing it with people in their homes. So the first thing I did was during those first three and a half years before COVID, they had been measuring me. So they had me wear this $75,000 device that measures everything. They take my saliva and my blood at every break. And they found a whole crazy set of statistics. Like, you know, I burn 11,300 calories on stage in a day.
I didn't think that was possible. But consistently, that's my average. Chess masters, Jordan, I guess, burn about 3,500 to 4,000 not moving. and about 3,500. I jump a thousand times. I'm standing here. I'm going out in the crowd. I'm running up. I keep the stadium engaged. Most people won't sit for a three-hour movie.
It's like watching a toddler play.
No, I mean, I'm serious about... Only the toddler's got you engaged.
Well, I'm serious about that.
Because if you think about it, people spend $300 million on a movie and go past three hours and you lost everybody, right? For attention spans. We got people there. We do the digital program now. And we'll start at 10 a.m. here in Palm Beach. And we have people from 193 countries, every country in the world. So let's say Australia, we start here at 10 a.m. It's already midnight there.
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