#115 Tony Robbins – Save the Life of Someone You Care About, New Book: Life Force

Feb 21, 2022 | OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE, The Gabby Reece Show

Episode #115: Tony Robbins – Save the Life of Someone You Care About, New Book: Life Force

My guest today is author, coach, speaker, entrepreneur, and human tornado, Tony Robbins. A lot of you are familiar with the business side of Tony’s profession. Today, Tony is here to serve your health.

I am excited to share his latest book LIFE FORCE: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life and Those You Love. This book is a real leaping off point for all areas of health and medicine. We cover treatments that are available right now that most don’t know about and what is coming in the near future. We touch on Tony’s lifestyle and dealing with cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, heart disease and so much more.

I could have asked Tony hours more of questions because there is so much information in this book. Tony shares a few of his own personal medical fears, challenges and injuries that really catapulted him into wanting to pursue a deeper understanding of how to heal or ways to avoid problems later by doing early detection tests. He is no stranger to hardship and is a master at adapting, perfecting, healing, and growing.

He is acting as an aggregate and, along with the help of Peter Diamandis, M.D. and Robert Hariri, M.D., PH.D, they hit Life Force out of the park. Don’t let the cover fool you. This is a workbook for you and your loved ones.

Listen to the episode here:


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Key Topics:

Tony Robbins – Save the Life of Someone You Care About, New Book: Life Force

My guest is Mr. Tony Robbins. You know him as an author, a speaker, a coach, and an entrepreneur, basically a human tornado. He has a book out called Life Force. What I want to say about this book is that this book is for you. The reason is that he talks about everything. The tagline is How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love.

He had some medical fears and he’s recovered some big injuries, and this led him onto this path. This is a person who’s like, “How do I learn more and who do I talk to?” He becomes your ultimate aggregate in this book, giving you things that are available right now for you, so whether it is for performance or longevity. But what if it’s for cancer or diabetes or Alzheimer’s or leukemia or Parkinson’s or heart disease or obesity? He goes all the way into it.

He did the book with Peter Diamandis and Dr. Robert Hariri. Hariri has been in the field of stem cells for over twenty years. There is so much information in this book, so that’s why I am excited to share it with you. It’s called Life Force. 100% of profits from Life Force are being donated to Feeding America, which is the largest food bank network in the United States, and to scientific research to combat cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.

This is a genuine book from people who go, “We want to share this with you. We want to have discussions about all that’s in the pipeline, all that’s on the horizon, and what’s available at this moment.” As you know, Tony is busy and he goes big so I try to interject here and there. I wanted to bring focus to this topic and to this book so you can either listen to it or get it because there’s something in there for everyone. Enjoy.

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Gabby, are you in Hawaii or in Malibu? Where are you?

I’m in Malibu. Our youngest daughter is going to conventional school so we’re basing out of here and Laird is chasing waves from here. Where are you?

I’m in Palm Beach.

Civilized. Congratulations on your baby.

Thank you. He’s the greatest gift in our life here. I have 5 kids and 5 grandkids. I have a 48-year-old daughter and I got a ten-month-old as of today. It’s a beautiful life. I see you have three kids, too. Is that right?

I have three daughters. I went all the way into girl parenting. It was a great education. I spent three days with Byron Katie.

She’s a dear friend of ours and we love her.

I was reading your book. You know how she is. She can send you her love directly.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

The idea of investments, learning, making more money, and all this high-powered stuff was never my real thing. It was interesting for me to watch somebody who can accrue all of this complicated information. The thing about your book, Life Force, is that you guys did an incredible job of taking some complicated ideas.

I appreciate a couple of things about this book. One is the way you section things off. Maybe if it felt more about performance, you have that crew, but then you get into, “Let’s early test. Let’s look at what’s going on with our overall health. Is it cancer?” It’s all these things and reminding people what the advantage is to early tests. On top of it, what’s available now, what’s maybe coming, and a lot of your own personal stories.

People see you as superhuman. You’re a guy who has answers. I am always in awe of people who are courageous enough to go, “Let’s go this way.” You’ve had that since your mid-20s. You’ve had your physical challenges. There are three incidences, in particular, your skiing accident, detoxifying all the metal by eating healthy, and then dealing with some things with a tumor. Maybe you could share some of those stories so people realize that it’s not that you’ve never navigated any challenges.

If you’re up for it, we can start where it began. I had an injury that made me write this book but what started it was my fear of cancer because many people have that, even in their 30s now. One of the reasons I put the diagnostic chapter early is people in their 30s are deathly afraid of it. They’re worried about Alzheimer’s already probably because they have parents or grandparents that are going through it. Maybe we start with that if that’s okay with you, but I’m happy to flow wherever you want to go Gabby. I’m easy.

I love this human part of it. For me, I want you to lead that journey, whatever feels the most compelling to you. People don’t realize that you didn’t have the easiest childhood, and then you fell into Jim Rohn. You had some mentors that led you on this path. You discussed how you had it in the back of your mind that you were concerned about either dying young or getting cancer.

It was brutal. Because I worked twenty-hour days and because at an early stage, I was working with the president of the United States and people from all over the world, sports athletes, there’s that part of our brain that most of us aren’t good at managing. I sure wasn’t back then. It’s that fight or flight system in your brain, the ancient brain, the survival brain.

I started thinking, “I have all this because I’m going to die young.” It became an unconscious obsession. It wasn’t that I’m going to die by an easy thing like a car accident and be gone, it was slowly of cancer. When you focus on something, Gabby, I’m sure you and your husband know because you’re creators, you tend to experience it.

[bctt tweet=”Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is pain. Ignorance is a disease. Ignorance is a lifestyle you don’t want to have.”]

Cancer came into my life, or the tumor did, but it started with someone else. It started with my girlfriend coming home one day crying uncontrollably and I was like, “What is it?” She’s like, “My mom got cancer. They gave her nine weeks to live and sent her home.” If it was me, you’re a mom, I’m a dad, we’ll do more for those we love than we’ll do for ourselves.

Thank God it was someone else first because then everything in me kicked in, my whole mindset of, “There’s always a solution.” “There are people that have Stage III, Stage IV cancer that recovered.” I was a speed reader. I took a speed-reading course when I was still in junior high school and I’m like, “I’m going to read a book a day.” I didn’t do that but I read about 700 books. That became my way of learning, growing, and synthesizing.

I went out and started reading every book I could on cancer. I looked for people that had Stage IV cancer and turned it around. There was a book called One Answer to Cancer by a dentist who had pancreatic cancer, which you probably know is the most devastating one of all, most deadly for most people. He cured it himself and he did it by detoxing the body and pancreatic enzymes.

It wouldn’t be the book I’d recommend today because there are so many other better things, but I gave her that book to manage her brain. I said, “You have nothing to lose.” She went for it and within a few weeks, she felt better. Within a few months, she had a tumor on the back of her shoulder and she had one in her feminine organs. The one on the back of her shoulder, you couldn’t even see now.

After two months when she should have died, the doctor finally said, “Let’s do exploratory surgery.” All he found in her body was something at the end of the pinky size of my fingernail. The doc said, “This is a miracle.” She goes, “It is a miracle but let me tell you what I did.” He’s like, “No, this is spontaneous remission. This is a miracle.” She was in her 40s. She’s now in her 80s and still alive.

That was the initial impetus for me to say, “I got to take care of my body.” Like you, like your husband, like the people that we work with a lot, I’m a biohacker because I make huge demands on my body. I do four seven-day seminars with stadiums of 15,000 to 20,000 people and I’m going 12 or 13 hours a day. I’ve had people measure me that worked with Tom Brady and a lot of other Olympic athletes. I burned 11,300 calories in one day. I didn’t think it was possible. It’s consistent. They’ve measured me for over three years.

I jumped 1,000 times and they were explaining to me I weighed 282 pounds. Every time you hit, it’s four times your body weight. Imagine 1,000 pounds times 1,000 jumps in one day, it’s 1 million pounds of pressure. My bone density looks like a gorilla. It’s insane what’s happening to our bodies. I’m doing these in my body that most people wouldn’t do at any age. I’m stronger than I was then. I used all these tools.

Sure enough, the tumor shows up again at the peak of my experience. I’m a helicopter pilot. To renew your license, you have to do a new medical every two years. The doctor leaves me a message a few days later and my assistant said, “He wants to talk to you.” I said, “Tell him to send the report. I didn’t go in there for a problem.” I get home at midnight, I get a note on my door and it says, “Call the doctor. It’s an emergency.” Now my brain is going crazy.

I called him in the morning and he said, “You have a tumor in your brain, in your pituitary.” I’m like, “How could you know that?” He said, “Because you have so much growth hormone.” That’s hard to figure out. I was 5’1” in my sophomore year in high school. I’m 6’7” now. I tell people that the difference is personal growth.

I got these huge hands, sixteen feet. I’m like, “So what?” He goes, “You have gigantism. I did these tests. You have a tumor on your pituitary and we need to rush you into surgery.” I’m like, “Slow down. What are the contraindications even if this is true?” He goes, “You could die. You’ll probably live but it will affect your endocrine system and you probably won’t have much energy.” I was like, “That’s my life. I want to get a second opinion,” because what I did with Jenny reminded me to get a second opinion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the studies that Mayo Clinic has. They now tell everybody including their doctors that people need a second opinion because they did a study with 26 patients and found that only 12% of the time, the second opinion was the same as the first. Meaning 88% of the time it was different.

Because of that, I was like, “I want a second opinion.” He was not enamored with that idea. He didn’t have a good bedside manner, but then I said, “I’m going to try the other side. I’m going to try someone who works on the biochemical side instead of surgery.” I went to this guy in Boston, completely different bedside manner, a super nice human being. He said, “Tony, it’s in there and it’s infarct, but it’s still producing a huge amount of growth hormone in your body. You should never do surgery. It is too risky. There’s a place in Switzerland where you go twice a year for an injection, and then your arteries won’t get too big.”

I said, “My arteries are fine. It started when I was 17.” I was 31 at the time. I said, “What if I did nothing? What if I just measure it to make sure it didn’t get worse because there’s nothing wrong right now?” He goes, “I want you to be certain you’re going to be okay. There are going to be side effects from the drug.” I went to six other doctors, end of the story.

Finally, one of them said to me, “Tony, you do have this tremendous growth hormone. I know bodybuilders are paying $1,200 a month for the amount of growth hormone you’re getting. It’s insane how your body recovers. This is a gift from God.” I’ve measured. That was when I was 32. I’m now 62. I’ve had no problems. They haven’t grown. It reminded me that you got to find that.

Why I wrote this book ultimately, all this history, was about years ago, I’m being an idiot chasing a 22-year-old professional snowboarder down the mountain on my snowboard. He did things I could never do and I discovered I couldn’t do them. I came down and I thought I broke my neck. I ripped my rotator cuffs apart. It’s an unbelievable pain. It wouldn’t go away. Nerve pain, you know what I’m talking about. 9-9 pain, I couldn’t sleep.

I got a PMF machine. If you’re not familiar, it’s extraordinary. There are about 3,000 studies on it. It took me from 9-9 to 5 and that allowed me to sleep, but then I kept looking for solutions. Every doctor is like, “Surgery…” “Four to six months of rehab, you may not lift your shoulder all the way again. It can tear again.” I was like, “There’s got to be a better way.”

I went to Dr. Peter Diamandis, who’s my dear friend and my partner, and I said, “Tell me. There’s got to be a better approach. I’ve heard about stem cells.” He said, “Go talk to Bob Hariri,” who was now my partner as well. I said, “He’s one of the best neurosurgeons in the world. What does he know about stem cells?” He went, “He was one of the guys to discover stem cells.”

I sat down with Bob and talked to Bob about stem cells. He’s like, “I want you to talk to my friend LeBron James about basketball. He’s the best in the world.” He told me exactly what to do. He said, “You can always go back to the surgery but why don’t you try this first?” There’s a lot of variety of what’s done in this country and around. I went outside the country. I did three days of treatment with IVs and shots. On the first day, I felt nothing other than tired.

I was also diagnosed with spinal stenosis. A doctor told me, “Life is over. No more jumping, no more snowboarding, no more any of these things. One good hit and you won’t be able to walk.” He told this to my face. Spinal stenosis, I woke up in the morning with no pain in my spine for the first time in fourteen years. We did the MRI two weeks later, zero wrong on my shoulder. I’ve never had a problem since. I became obsessed. I want to know everything about stem cells, and then I realized it wasn’t just stem cells. We’ve had a revolution in the last few years in medicine that’s nothing else, a precision in medicine that can make changes you never dreamed of.

GRS Robbins | Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins – Energy is life. The quality of your life is the quality of your energy.

I got invited by the Pope to come to be a cleanup speaker. Believe it or not, the Pope believes so much in stem cells. Every two years, he has all the best doctors in the world come because he wants humanity to benefit from it. All the best in these types of precision medicine. I said, “I’m not going to be the cleanup speaker. I’m going to attend all these classes.”

I met an 11-year-old who was told he’s going to die. He got his sister’s stem cell and he’s alive. People were sent home or put on hospice who didn’t give up and went and did some of the new things like CAR T-cells. Now, they’re in complete remission 4 or 5 years later. I said, “I want the world to know this.” In the last few years, I’ve interviewed 150 of the best Nobel laureates, scientists, and doctors from all over the Earth. I’m not a doctor, but I have access.

I put this in a book to synthesize this, to give people the best tools for strength in energy and performance that you and I need, but also for anybody you love. About once a week, every ten days, every two weeks max, someone calls me and somebody in their family has got cancer or Alzheimer’s or had a stroke. I wanted to be able to not only help them prevent that but if they got there, to know what’s beyond the standard of care. The standard of care in those categories is not doing much unfortunately right now. I put the book together and we’re donating 100% of the profits like I’ve done in my last three books. We’re providing 20 million meals for Feeding America and the balance goes to Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease. I want to get the book out to as many humans as I can.

I did want to say to people that this book is a book you could have at home and reread almost like a textbook. I love audiobooks but this book is also worth physically owning so you can flip through chapters. I want to tell you that I called my stepfather who got Parkinson’s. I asked him if they had anyone who had talked to him about the ultrasound technique that you talked in-depth about, 630,000 patients that were receiving benefits.

Maybe what we could do is we can slide around because you talk about lifestyle components, sleep, and all of these things. Maybe we could give a few tips because there is a lot of information in this book. To a lot of people, what you do is going to look superhuman. When you’re going to go and you’re going to spend four days and you’re going to be connecting with people for 12 or 15 hours, do you get nervous?

I don’t anymore, but it’s like would you be nervous tying your shoes? Even when I was younger, I didn’t get nervous because when I talk to people about public speaking, supposedly it’s the second biggest fear that people have besides falling, you’re only scared if you’re thinking about yourself. My whole thing is I love people so much. I know it sounds absurd. It’s what has driven my whole life. When I was a little kid, I’d stop strangers and try to help them. I’m wired that way.

For me, it’s not about me. If you’re focused on the people out here and you’re figuring out what they need and not thinking about yourself, then you don’t have the nervousness. I’ve only done this for over 45 years at this stage of my life. I started when I was 17. I have a little bit of a history of working with every group you can imagine, the most upset group you can imagine, the most positive group you can imagine in 195 countries.

At this point, it’d be like the things that you do with volleyball, your husband does with surfing. In his case, I’m sure he’s nervous because his life is on the line at times. My life is not in line but I feel like other people are. I wrote this book to not just change lives, but without being corny, it will save lives. I know you know it because you read it. If they do a few of these things, it’ll save the life of someone you care about if you understand it. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is pain. Ignorance is a disease. Ignorance is a lifestyle you don’t want to have.

It is hard to look at. I was having some AFib stuff. You want to know and you don’t want to know. That’s human, but your point of getting there and getting equipped with information and being your health advocate, one of the doctors in your book encourages people to not turn that over. What I always say to people is, “If you’re uncomfortable, bring a bossy friend or a family member with you to forge the way of being your health advocate. Maybe ask those hard questions that are difficult to do, especially when you’re feeling vulnerable.”

There’s a lot of output. You go there and you say, “I’m going to focus on the people and the mission.” It’s probably tied to your big brother thing when you were taking care of everybody else when you’re younger. How do you restore? Because that’s a lot of out and a lot of give. When you see people that are either lighting up or they are suffering, and part of why they’re coming there is they’re looking for this change. You have a real-life, you have a partner, you have a new baby, and all these things. Forget the physical. I don’t even care about your 1,000 jumps. What the output of the emotion, people don’t realize how hard that is. How do you recover from that?

It takes a few days physiologically to do it. I’m doing the equivalent of two marathons and calorie burns each day. There are a couple of days of physical recovery. It has to do with your belief systems. I met a gentleman decades ago and he was the first Caucasian martial arts champion in China. In those days, they still had those fights that go to the death. They do fight after fight so I asked him what set him apart and he said, “Most guys know how many fights they’re going to do so they try to conserve their energy because they think they only have so much and they’re going to run out. Mine is the more energy I expand, the more energy I have.”

I remember him saying that to me on that day and I never forgot it. I was like, “I am extending energy but the more I extend, it’s turbocharged, the more I have. Since it’s about something larger than myself, it’s a mission. It’s not a job. I feel called to do it.” The bottom line is it’s a virtuous cycle because I get to see and hear that impact. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing this for over 45 years, I can’t go anywhere in 295 countries where I’m not stopped daily and someone’s saying, “Tony Robbins, you changed my life.” I was like, “No. You did, but I’m glad I helped. Tell me what you did.”

Outside my children, my wife, and my family, it’s one of the most fulfilling things in my life. I focus on the impact, not the expense of the energy. I look at it as turbocharging and then I go recharge. I do cryotherapy. I’ve got my oxygen chamber, the PMF, and all the things that I do to constantly prepare myself for what I’m going to do again because it’s like an ultra-marathon each event I do.

You do a lot of intense training. This is all in the book. Maybe you could share a little bit about that one type of training where you say every 7 to 10 days, you’re doing a little bit more static but heavyweight. I found this interesting and I would love to know how you personally incorporate that and even what some of the exercises look like.

You may have heard about static contraction. I was in my 30s when I heard about it. I was always working out but usually getting injured overtraining all the time. I was fascinated and started reading about these studies that were done with about 35,000 athletes and they do it over two years. A lot of things like muscle confusion came out of those original studies back then.

One of the things that came out and they didn’t know what to do with it first was they noticed that athletes inevitably would get sick or injured. If that happened and they were off and not training, they’re normally training 6, 7 days a week, they weren’t training at all because they couldn’t. They come back ten days later or two weeks later and they almost always have a personal best. They began to realize it was so obvious that almost all of us who are real athletes overtrain.

[bctt tweet=”You got to do these simple tasks. They’ll free you from fear and they’ll put you in a position where you get to win the victories of life that you’re after.”]

We don’t build muscle, for example, when we’re pushing the weights. It’s when you’re sleeping. We got to create the stimulus. The secret was what’s the ideal stimulus to get the maximum result? What they began to discover is that your muscles are limited by your bone tensile strength. They began to say, “How could we strengthen that?” They began to find there was a ratio of 3.5 times your body weight, which of course the average person could never handle.

I started doing this initial training with static contraction. I have long arms. You probably know the difference between short arms and long arms doing a bench press. That makes it much harder. I would do 210 pounds, which I max out on. The first one I did with static contraction was 445 pounds. What happens is you go below where you’re locked out and you have to hold for fifteen seconds. If you can hold it at fifteen, it’s too lightweight.

If you’re going to stop a car, you wouldn’t be doing it down here. If you’re a mom, you’re going to be out here to catch the car and try and stop the thing from running over your kid. That goes to every muscle through the chest and all the way through. They developed four exercises. When I was 32, I went to Gold’s Gym and I took this woman who was doing this because I was fascinated. She was in her early 60s but she looked a bit older. There was a 25 or 27-year-old guy doing the leg machine. He’s got weights all loaded up.

This woman is pausing between and sweating. This woman’s fully clothed because it doesn’t take long. It takes ten minutes to do the exercises. Lifting all the weights and putting them together takes more. She goes, “Excuse me, could I get a set in between you?” The guy looks at me and looks at her, sees the camera, and thinks he’s being punked. She goes, “Would you add another 150 pounds?” She did it. She didn’t start here and push out. She started below the lockout firing it all off. I got in and I did it my first time. I had all the weight in the gym and three guys on top of it. It was 2,700 pounds or something.

I did this but there was a problem. I remember I got to 595 on a bench press and one arm was out of balance with the other and I tweaked. I stopped doing it. I built all this muscle mass and I kept saying, “Someday, someone is going to build a computer system.” I thought it might be with air so you don’t have the danger of what’s going on.

There’s this company called OsteoStrong and they built a computer system to be used by top athletes but also can be used by someone in their 70s or 80s because it’s the only thing proven to build your capacity for your bone density. He did it for his grandmother initially and then athletes got hooked on it. It’s four exercises. Once they’re set up, it says “If you’re not loading the weight and everything else, it can take you 10 or 12 minutes.” It centers all over the US you can go to for these.

I use it. I do it once a week once because you keep getting stronger. If you’re not, you take more time off. Usually, it’s 7 to 10 days off and I still do other forms of training but for bone density and pure strength. It’s amazing. My wife never lifted weights and was never into lifting weights. The first time she did it, she could press 80 pounds or something like that. She did 360 pounds. It’s a unique scientifically based process.

The limit to your muscle strength is your bone strength. As women get older, especially late 40s or 50s, osteoporosis is one of the biggest challenges out there. If you take those drugs, they fossilize your bones and then your bones tend to shatter. This is a scientifically proven version of this that’s extraordinary. It’s called OsteoStrong.

This is one example of so many things that you share in the book that people can do right now and that is available. You have 99% bone strength.

Bone density. They showed this to me, “These are Olympic athletes. This creature called you is stronger than 99% of the bone strength of anybody they’d ever measured in history.” I’m also jumping 1,000 times a day. I’ve been doing that since I was 17. There’s some power. It’s not just that. You mentioned something. A lot of athletes follow you so I relate. We’re both athletes. What I do requires an endurance athlete that most people would never dream of.

You got to take care of yourself. I used to have the same thought you mentioned earlier. It’s like, “I don’t know if I want to know.” If you go to your doctor for your physical, let me look at my ear, make me cough, and check my heart. You wouldn’t use a phone from ten years ago. Why would you use something that’s 80 years old when there’s new technology? There’s tech now.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Most people who do this research have fear of cancer even in their 30s and there’s a good reason. 40% of people will have a cancer diagnosis at some point in their life. That’s crazy. It’s different if you catch it when it’s at the beginning versus the end. The Cancer Society did a 100,000-person study and found that if you discover it at Stage III or IV, you got a real problem. 80% chance you won’t live. I don’t buy in stats because we’re all individuals but that’s the general experience. If you get in Stage I or II, 80%, in some cases, 99.9% chance you’re going to succeed. Meaning you’re going to heal or it might even mean outpatient.

We had a man who came to one of our centers around the country and his wife kept pushing him. “I don’t need to do this.” He has gone to his doctor and he did a urine test and everything else. Everything was clean. There’s a new test called a GRAIL test. It was developed by a gentleman from Google. His wife died of cancer.

Most of the people in my book, the heroes who have created these breakthroughs, almost every man or woman in it lost somebody they loved and it made them go, “I’m not going for a standard of care. There has to be something better that I can do.” He created this test and they can now test 50 cancers. Most of the time when you get Stage III or IV, it’s not a mammogram, it’s not a colonoscopy. It’s for these other cancers. Now, it can find them before it’s even Stage I.

This guy came in and sure enough, cancer in his bladder, but it was quick. It was an outpatient procedure. He’s totally fine, nothing to do. We caught it now, not when it grew into something bigger by the time he found out. That’s when it gets more difficult to treat. That’s why I want people to know that a combination of this GRAIL test and this MRI test that can go over the GRAIL can’t, like brain and so forth, one of those is so easy to do. If it’s something to be dealt with, you deal with it. I’d rather know and deal with it than wait till it’s too late.

GRS Robbins | Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins – As far as my wife is concerned, the secret to a great relationship is it’s a place you go to give, it’s not a place you go to get.

I’ll give you another one. The number one killer is heart disease. My partner calls me and says, “Tony, we got first access to the greatest breakthrough in cardiology in the last ten years.” I said, “That’s a big claim.” He’s an understated guy. He built twelve hospitals and he sold them because he wanted to help people with preventative care and transformative precision medicine instead of the old version. I said, “I trust you but give me more.” He goes, “If you’ve ever had a CT scan, even doctors have a hard time. They’re looking to see, have you built up calcium and do you have any clues it’s going to give you a heart attack?” He said, “If you try to read one, it’s extremely hard even for a well-trained physician.”

There’s a brand-new AI called CCTA and it opens every one of your arteries digitally and searches and sees, “Is that calcium hardened? It means it’s not a problem or is it loose, which is what becomes the widow maker?” They can predict the heart attack up to five years in advance and more importantly, tell you what to do. My father-in-law was with me. He’s a beautiful man. People around you start telling you, “At 80, arrange your affairs.”

There’s nothing wrong with him but everybody worries. I can feel the drop in him when he was with me. I said, “I got this call with my partner. I’m going to go to the center tomorrow. Why don’t you come with me? We’re both at a stage of life where we’d have to have some of those soft pieces in there. They’ll show us what to do. Why don’t we go find it out? It’s better to know.” He goes, “Okay. I’ll come with you, Tony,” so we go.

My father-in-law was clean as a whistle. He has nothing in his system. He completely changed his perspective on his life. There are some cool things we’ve done with professional athletes where your soft tissue gets tight, and then it starts to contract a nerve. I have this thing on my ankle from an injury many years ago. I wouldn’t let anybody touch even a masseuse because it’d shock up my leg.

You go in and use ultrasound. In five minutes, they can see what’s going on. They inject it with amniotic fluid, the same thing you were born in. It opens the area up and five minutes later, there’s no pain. I’ve never had pain since. My father-in-law has a hip problem. He couldn’t walk right. Twenty minutes later, he’s walking perfectly.

This is the best experience. We sit down on the plane and he’s got his arms crossed and goes, “Tony, do you notice people talk about 110, 120?” “I don’t know about that stuff.” He goes, “My heart is perfect and I can walk perfectly. I could last another twenty years. I can last 100 years old.” He goes, “You’ve only been married to my daughter for 22 years. That’s like another lifetime.” His whole life has changed. I want to get across to people. You got to do these simple tasks. They’ll free you from fear and they’ll put you in a position where you get to win the victories of life that you’re after.

I have athletes but I also have a lot of what we call householders, people who navigate and get information. You break things up beautifully in this book. You talk about the top killers. You go into cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and things like that. You give ideas about tests that are available to people, even talking about your genome tests.

I called a friend of mine whose husband has been dealing with leukemia. I said, “You have to order Tony’s book and see what’s out there.” What they went through a few years ago, new treatments are available already. This isn’t only about if you have serious issues, but you even get into your vitality pharmacy, so to speak.

I love Dr. Sinclair, but it’s things that are readily available to us right now and the differentiation between some pills. You said this in the book. I had a stem cell treatment and a lot of athletes go, “It doesn’t work,” or what have you. You also break down which stem cells for what, how, and things like that. For people interested in gene therapy, CRISPR. This is a thorough book.

My goal was to help somebody whether they’re an athlete or they just want to have better energy, more vitality, more strength, want to live longer, or they’re dealing with a real issue. There’s this new technique, it’s one of the chapters in the book. It’s using super-powered ultrasound and they do incisionless brain surgery. No incisions and it takes about 1.5 hours to set up, but then they find the spot that’s creating the tremors.

I watched a woman who was on fifteen medications and couldn’t walk across the room but once they found the spot, the treatment was fifteen seconds. She came out and walked across the room, picked up a glass of water and drank, and burst into tears. Have you ever seen somebody get the audio implants and they can hear for the first time? It’s that experience. A swimmer that is 60 years old and hasn’t been able to swim and can’t walk again, he’s back in the pool.

The woman I described was on a 50-mile bike hike two years later to raise money to help people understand that there are these new solutions that are available. On leukemia, by the way, there’s a chapter about CAR T-cells. This is one of the breakthroughs I learned about when I went to the Vatican. It has been around for more than a decade. They came out with several articles and it’s now being described as a cure. In the cancer field, nobody used the word cure.

These are people that tried chemotherapy and radiation, nothing worked. They use this gene therapy called CAR T-cells, these supercharged cells that go in. Normally, your T-cells don’t recognize cancer. It has a hard time recognizing. It makes them recognize them and kill them like measles. They didn’t think in a million years that years later, they’re in their body still killing any cancer cells. People have no remission whatsoever. This is for liquid cancers.

The book shows you specifically everything. I want people to know there are answers that are available right now and there are answers that are coming over. Energy, strength, and vitality for the people that work at home, especially after COVID and so forth, is one of the big concerns. Mitochondria in every cell is the blast furnace. That’s where energy comes from. It creates ATP, the batteries of the body. COVID comes in and eats up some of that energy out of the body. That’s why you have such fatigue. It’s why the body breaks down. You’re familiar already with these things called sirtuins. I’m not going to have you memorize these things. They’re in the book.

Think of three things. There are seven master hormones called sirtuins. They do two things that are critical. First of all, turn on and turn off different genes in your body. Most people know your DNA is not your destiny. It’s your epigenome. What genes get turned on or off can be changed by your diet, your exercise, your sleep patterns, etc. What feeds that is the sirtuins and they turn them on or off. They reduce inflammation, which is the basis of injury and most diseases, and they fire up your furnaces for more energy in your body.

They have a second stage, they clean up your DNA because as you age, you get accumulated radiation exposure, chemicals, and your DNA gets knocked down. When you need it most around 50, NAD+, which is what makes the sirtuins go, they’re the fuel, it drops by 50%. Imagine you’re at a mansion and you had a young staff and they kept it up to speed. If something broke, they fix it. Your mansion has a beautiful view. The staff gets older and then the resources aren’t available and then the whole thing starts breaking down, that’s aging.

Dr. Sinclair from Harvard chronologically is 53 but biologically, he’s 33. He discovered things like NAD which needs NMN. There are these master hormones. They need fuel from NAD but NAD’s precursor to get in the cell is NMN. We did this with our company. We tested six companies’ NMN products and not one had an NMN in it. I don’t believe they’re all liars. Most of it is made in China and NMN breaks down over 30 to 45 days.

Why does that all matter? Two reasons. It’s what I want you to know, too. For an old mouse, twenty months is like a 65, 70-year-old person. An old mouse can run 0.25 kilometers. A young, strong mouse can run a kilometer full tilt. When they give NMN to the old mouse, they run 2 to 3 kilometers within fourteen days, full tilt, 2% to 300% more than a young mouse. You go, “Does that translate to humans?”

This is what’s cool. A company called Metro Tech out of Boston has been working with Special Forces. It’s been all under wraps, so to speak, top-secret, but one of the commanders got excited by the results that he talked to somebody in the media and it was in the Daily Mail. They don’t have the full story because it’s still top secret. The part I can tell you is these are the greatest bodies in the world, Special Forces, men and women. They are able to maximize levels of endurance they’ve never seen, increase muscle strength. As you get older, sarcopenia is one of the big challenges. Their cognitive capacity has gone through the roof.

[bctt tweet=”If it’s something to be dealt with, you deal with it. I’d rather know and deal with it than wait till it’s too late.”]

This is not going to be a supplement. This is its own molecule. It’s called MIB-626 and it’s going through the FDA process. This will clean up your DNA, increase your energy, and increase your cognitive capacity. There are studies being done in four different hospitals, COVID studies, kidney studies on top of endurance studies. There are things you can do right now and there are some things coming that will be life-changing if you understand the basics of energy in the body. To me, energy is life. The quality of your life is the quality of your energy.

In one of the last chapters you get into, you personally will use the hyperbaric chamber. You talked about heat and ice, breathing, and sleep. We’re not talking about, “You’re going to only hack your way to health.” You support it with your lifestyle choices. You do a full and robust chapter also on women’s health, which I appreciate the extensive chapter on women’s health.

That was written by three of the best female doctors in the world because I didn’t want to touch that one. I’m still a guy. I want to make sure it was done properly for women. There are some pieces in there that are amazing. For example, there’s a woman who loves her husband so much and hasn’t been able to have an orgasm in almost ten years. There’s this simple laser treatment and she now has orgasms but also her whole hormonal capacity changed. There are some beautiful things in there for women that women got to know.

A lot of women after childbirth, because of the uterus and stuff, it can impact their ability to orgasm and people are afraid to talk about it. It’s important to bring it all out in the open. This book is for everyone. It doesn’t matter your age, whether you’re looking to be as healthy as long as you can or redirect or you’re already going and you want to perform greater. I have to ask you as a person because you are an example of somebody who does a lot of the right things. Are you a pescatarian? Are you a vegetarian? What is your personal food diet?

I was vegan for twelve years and then I felt emaciated. Sometimes when you’re vegan, what you want to eat is limited. I went to fish for the next 12 or 15 years and loved it. The fishes I had were swordfish and tuna so they’re filled with mercury and I had mercury poisoning. It’s why one of the tests is so important. It burned a hole in my esophagus and I lost 1/3 of my blood supply.

Now, I’ve gone to clean fishes and certainly not the older fishes. I’ll have some chicken at times but I’m high in light foods, light vegetables. I look at my plate and go 70% light foods, and then 25% or 30% is going to be a protein of a sort that is natural, clean, and so forth. I’m sensitive about the fish now as you might guess. Mine was also exasperated by the fact that I was just eating it for fuel thing. I’m doing the best thing, fish and salad. Unfortunately, what we’ve done to our oceans affects that immensely. You got to know the impact and the cleanliness of the fish.

From the outside, you have this long marriage, children and grandchildren, and a successful business. If you’re able to encapsulate it, what’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned or that seems to work for you? Maybe you did it one way and now you’ve gone, “I’m doing it a different way,” as a husband and as a father. A lot of people are navigating that. These are not the objective areas of our life. These are the tricky emotional heart. Is there something that showed up for you and you go, “This seems to work being a husband and being a father.”

I’m unbelievably blessed. People say this stuff all the time. I’m not saying it to blow smoke. I have the most incredible life on the face of the planet. I was married previously. I had four fathers so I’m never getting divorced. I stayed in that relationship for fourteen years and I’ve been married for 22 years since then. The person was a great human being, but we are radically different. The beauty that came out of that is she’d been married twice before me and she had kids from two different husbands.

At 24 years old, she was eleven years my senior, I had a 17-year-old son instantly, an 11-year-old, a 5-year-old, and then 1 on the way. I learned on the job quickly because I love people, I love my family even more. They’re all in different stages of life. I learned, on the job, parenting in every stage simultaneously. My daughter’s ten months old now and I know so much more. You have so much more life experience.

As far as my wife is concerned, the secret to a great relationship is it’s a place you go to give, it’s not a place you go to get. That’s the way I look at it and her, too. Our fights are I’m trying to do some for her and she wants to do it for me. I’m blessed in that area. It’s also because we have a mission. I know you and your husband have that as well. There’s something beyond yourself. If you’re only doing something of yourself, it’s easy to get comfortable. I don’t need any more money. I don’t need more business. I don’t need anything more. I love the diversity and the challenge. I love my family most of all. My wife and I are involved in all these businesses and things together. Our kids are involved. They’re adults now, other than my daughter.

GRS Robbins | Tony Robbins

Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love

When I was doing MONEY Master the Game, I interviewed all these billionaires. I interviewed Mary Callahan Erdoes who is at JP Morgan, probably the most powerful woman in finance in the world and the nicest and best human being you’ll ever meet. I was asking her about work-life balance and she said what I’ve experienced. She just articulated much better than I had. She said, “Tony, I’m here because my dad was in this business and he used to bring me to the work where I got to play and be there. I sat behind his desk and created these visions. For me, there’s no such thing as work-life balance if you’re an achiever, but there’s work-life integration.”

That’s what we have. Our mission is not some outside thing. It’s a part of our lives. Our friends and family are all involved in it. We have this incredible juice that comes from seeing people’s lives change radically and being able to play a small role in that and it fulfills us. That provides the fuel. You learn by trial and error, some of it, and hopefully, by reading good books and learning from your friends, how to parent better, and so forth.

I had a trial by fire of a 17-year-old, 11-year-old, and 5-year-old when I’m 24. I learned a lot at that stage, but you never stopped learning. If you stop learning, you’re an idiot. I don’t believe I have all the answers and that’s like this book. I knew a lot about health before this. I’ve taught health principles for years and I’ve lived them, but it’s like, “Let’s go learn from the best on Earth what’s the best right now and not twenty years in the future so we can take advantage of what’s happening.” It’s amazing what’s happening in the area of health right now and it’s only going to get better.

In the next few years, there’ll be more transformation in this area than in the last 200 years combined, and that’s not an exaggeration. You have multi-billionaires spending all their money saying, “I want to live forever,” and you have science catching up. You’ve got gene editing and you’ve got diseases that have never been cured and they’re being cured. You have people that are never able to see getting gene therapy and they’re no longer blind. This stuff sounds like science fiction but it’s the reality. If you don’t know, you’re going to be in the standard of care and all you’re going to see is this and you’re going to miss out. That’s why I wrote this book to give people access to all that.

I want to mention one more, sleep. Sleep is such a basic. I can tell you ten basic things but they’re important. I was a guy, I’ll sleep when I die. Give me 4 to 5 hours, that’s all I need. My wife is an eight-hour sleeper, “Please come to bed.” I met Dr. Walker from UC Berkeley’s neuroscience department. He’s probably the best sleep doctor in the world and he said, “There’s been a study, Tony, you should know about.” I was writing that chapter at 6:45 AM when I had to be up three hours later for the seminar I was doing. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Where he hooked me was he said, “1.6 billion people participated in this study.” I said, “That’s impossible. How could you possibly organize that?” He goes, “I didn’t. It’s called daylight savings time. Seventy countries have it and here’s what we’ve learned. When we spring forward and you lose an hour, in the next three days, heart attacks go up 24% like clockwork, around the world, in every country, that happens. When we drop back and get an extra hour, heart attacks decrease by 21%.” I started going, “Wow.” A man who has 4 to 5 hours asleep, usually his testosterone levels are that of a person ten years his senior. I was like, “I’m 60. I don’t want to be 70 here.”  That got my attention.

If you’re a feminine force and you care about this or you’re a masculine force that wants your woman to feel loved, a woman’s sleep is even more important because 1-hour loss of 8 hours, she’s 14% less likely to have the desire for intimacy. In two hours, it doubles up. Three hours, it doubles up. In the world we’re living in today, there are some simple things you can do like having a consistent time to get up and go to sleep because the body has a rhythm. Also, keeping the temperature in the room between 65 and 67 degrees, that cooling allows you to go deeper into sleep. Also, not looking at blue lights as most people know like your phone right beforehand or your iPad and having a sleep mask. Those four simple things completely change your sleep.

I wear a WHOOP. I want to see what my strain is every day versus my rest. I have all the stats for the last couple of years and it’s priceless. I work now to make sure I get eight hours in bed. I don’t always sleep all eight hours, but I’m in bed for eight hours. I’ve never done that in my life but I’ve seen a radical change and the amount of endurance that I’ve got from that alone.

I always love the badge of like, “I don’t sleep.” That’s not a great thing. Tony, thank you for writing Life Force with Peter Diamandis. I could ask you a million other questions. This book is a useful tool for people. Congratulations and thank you for doing it. I learned some interesting things and what I loved is that it’s directive. I can go there, I can get this resource, I can look, and I can ask this question. It’s great. Even obesity and diabetes, everything is in here. Way to get it done. It’s unbelievable. Thank you.

Thank you for your example in sport and life. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it, Gabby. Take great care of yourself.

Thanks. Aloha.

Aloha.

—

Thanks so much for being here. If you’d like, rate, subscribe, and leave us a review. All of my music was graciously done by Frank Zummo and Tom Thacker. If you want to see some of the behind-the-scenes action, follow me, @GabbyReece. Remember, don’t miss new episodes every Monday.

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About Tony Robbins

GRS Robbins | Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins is an entrepreneur, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and philanthropist honored by Accenture as one of the top 50 business intellectuals in the world. Robbins is a leader called upon by leaders: He has consulted with and/or coached some of the world’s greatest athletes, entertainers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and four US presidents. Robbins is a founder, partner, or early investor in 100+ privately held businesses with combined sales exceeding $7 billion annually. Through his philanthropy and partnership with Feeding America, he has provided more than 800 million meals and is on track to provide 1 billion meals by 2025.