Transcript
A (0:00)
The first thing to understand is that people see the world through their aid.
B (0:04)
Anyone can deal with a difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow.
A (0:08)
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.
B (0:21)
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. So I'm.
A (0:32)
That's what religious practice is supposed to do.
B (0:35)
Yes, And I think that's what it does do.
A (0:36)
And the aim for me is always a quest. It's like I have a question.
B (0:39)
Yes.
A (0:40)
And it's a real question and I want to get farther in answering it. 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, 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 his 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, that's a performance and you gotta be all in if you're gonna 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 while we talked about all that and, and, and I, I suppose what's the core of it all? Well, I, 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. 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 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. 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 so, 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 a, 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 not only assess whether Mr. Robbins program was an effective treatment for depression, but whether or not it was equally or more effective than another treatment that wasn't pharmacological, that had already been shown to be of demonstrated utility. Yeah, exactly, exactly. 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. Robbins 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?