A really fun interview we did before the Mastermind.com launch. On today’s special episode Russell interview Tony about a new course coming out with Tony, Russell, and Dean Graziosi. Here are some of the incredible things you will get to hear on this episode:

-- Hear a little bit about Tony’s humble beginnings and his road to becoming who he is today.

-- Find out how Tony got started with mastermind groups.

-- And find out what kind of things will be included in this new course.

So listen here to see why Russell, Tony, and Dean Graziosi have created a course, and what it will be.

And I honestly thought I was a dumb kid until I was in college. I always assumed I was dumb. I didn’t know any better. And I think a lot of people that do follow me have been in that same situation. And this whole concept of self education was the first, when I started learning for the first time about something I was passionate about, I remember the first time I read a book there was something that grabbed me and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I see how this is something that’s helpful to me.”

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-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

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Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I want to share with you guys something that I’m really excited for. And this is an interview that I did with Tony Robbins. A lot of you guys know, depending on when you’re listening to this, we are in the middle of the Mastermind.com product launch. And it’s kind of an interesting back story.

I was at a big mastermind group with Dean Graziosi, and on the flight home we happened to be sitting next to each other, and during that flight he told me about this project he was working on. He said, “It’s kind of like masterclass.com except for masterminds.”

I was like, “Dude, do you own mastermind.com?” He’s like, “No.” I’m like, “Oh you should buy it.” He’s like, “It’s not for sale.” So I remember when I got off the plane I looked at it, and mastermind.com the person on the home page was holding a Two Comma Club award and I’m like, “This is one of my funnel hackers who owns this.” So we messaged him and negotiated and ended up buying the domain and then giving it to Dean and Tony as a gift for their launch.

We spent a lot of, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say how much money, but it was over half a million dollars on the domain name, gave it to those guys as a gift. And then they said, “hey thanks for the gift, in exchange we’d love to have you as a partner in this business.” And I’m definitely the minority partner in this business. Tony and Dean own the majority of it, but it’s been so fun to be able to work with them behind the scenes on this project and the product and the product launch and all these things that have been so cool.

And I know that Dean’s been killing himself, really been putting everything together, Tony as well. And what’s cool is I had the chance to actually interview Tony about the concept. So what you’re going to be learning in the course and things like that. And about self education and about masterminds and a whole bunch of other things.

So you know, I think I’ve had a chance now, twice in my life, to interview Tony and he’s interviewed me once. It’s just every time it’s the coolest thing ever. So I wanted to share the interview with you guys. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to queue up the theme song here, and when we come back, we’ll have a chance to hear the whole interview here behind the scenes of it. And after you listen to it, what I recommend doing is if you want to get my bonuses, I have no idea if the launch is still open at the time you’re listening to this, but if the launch is still open, I’ve got a whole bunch of bonuses if you buy it through my affiliate link. And if you go to secretsmastermind.com. So secrets (plural) secretsmastermind.com, you’ll have my affiliate link there and you can go and see all the bonuses and stuff through buying from me.

So with that said, we’ll intro the theme song and when we come back you’ll have a chance to listen in behind the scenes with the interview with me and Tony Robbins.

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I’m so excited to be here with you guys today. I am here with probably one of the coolest human beings on planet earth, Tony Robbins. How are you doing today Tony?

Tony: I don’t know about that introduction, but thanks brother, good to see you.

Russell: Great to see you too. I think my audience is obviously super familiar with you because I talk about you so much, you’ve spoken at our events twice, which has been one of the coolest things in the world. And you’ve been someone who’s had such a huge, profound impact on me, so many ways that I don’t even think you know. Both in my personal life, in my marriage, in my business, I could go on and on telling stories.

Maybe I’ll do that after the interview because I don’t want to waste those stories now when I have you in front of me. But you’ve had such an impact on me and my life and I’m just grateful to have a chance to first off, be interviewing you, second off, be kind of part of this project you and Dean put together. And I’m just so excited to be here with you.

Tony: I just want to say to your audience, the feeling is mutual. I’m sure anybody that’s already dealt with you, they already know who you are. But when I looked at people in this industry who are really, I look at it as the knowledge business really, and you’ve shared so much but you’ve done it with such integrity, brother. You always have such a sincerity to you and a generosity to your spirit, how you deal with people. No bull, not blowing smoke your way. Anybody who doesn’t know who this man is, Russell is the real thing. He really cares and you over deliver, and that’s my signal as well. So I gotta add more value than anybody else does in the business and you always do that. So it’s always a pleasure to be with you, my friend.

Russell: Thanks, I appreciate that. Well very cool. Today we’re going to be talking about something which I think is something very true to my heart and your heart as well, is a concept of masterminding but also I think even a step deeper is just self education. And I know for me, growing up, and I think a lot of people who follow me, we’re entrepreneurs who our brains go a million miles an hour and we get into this school system where we’re supposed to be sitting and listening to a teacher talk and we’re twitching. And I’m looking out the window at the playground and there’s things happening and I’m getting in trouble and they’re yelling at me.

And I honestly thought I was a dumb kid until I was in college. I always assumed I was dumb. I didn’t know any better. And I think a lot of people that do follow me have been in that same situation. And this whole concept of self education was the first, when I started learning for the first time about something I was passionate about, I remember the first time I read a book there was something that grabbed me and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I see how this is something that’s helpful to me.”

Then I became obsessed and I read way too many books, which is interesting. But I want to kind of start, before we go into that, when I came to the very first UPW, which was over probably 11 or 12 years ago now, which was one of the coolest things in the world. I don’t know if I ever told you this, I didn’t know what UPW was. I knew it was a Tony Robbins event, so I showed up with my backpack and my laptop thinking I would be sitting there taking notes. I walk in and people are jumping and dancing and I was like, where am I? I have no idea what’s even happening. That night we were walking on fire, and it was just, you know, it was not what I was expecting. And just something that shifted my life forever.

But one of the concepts you talked about that had a profound impact on me. This was before I really got deep into my whole journey of all this stuff. You talked about the concept that you called Decade in a Day. I’d love for you to kind of tell our audience about that, what that is, and how that works. Because I think when they realize that it’s so empowering of like, “Oh my gosh, I can figure out all these different things because of it.”

Tony: Well I would just say that it’s all about self education as you said. You know a standard education you get standard results. And if you look at the average American, I mean today, 60% of Americans haven’t saved a thousand dollars for retirement. 40% of Americans living in the best economy in the history of the world say that if an emergency came up, they couldn’t raise $400.

So it’s insane, that’s why there’s this conversation about socialism coming up, because so many people own an iPhone, but they’re not an entrepreneur, they don’t even own Apple. They use Google every day, but they own a piece of Google, they don’t think that way.

So I grew up in a really poor family, with four different fathers, it was a pretty rough environment. But I had the privilege of going and hearing Jim Rome when I was 17 years old. And I went, I was working as a janitor, I was going to high school, I was working part time also at a TV repair shop. And I just remember sitting in this room and I remember the guy I was working for on the weekend, I was doing moving for him. And the guy had become pretty successfully financially buying and flipping homes in Orange County, California, it was like 1977 to give you an idea.

And I remember my parents said, “This guy used to be such a loser.” My dad said. And now he’s really successful. So as a kid, you get by with this stuff, but at the end of the day I worked my ass off and he really liked me. And I said, “Listen, before I go, my dad said you used to be such a loser and now you’re so successful, how did you do that?

He goes, “Your dad said that?” I was like, “Yeah.” He goes, “Well…” he told me this story. He went to this seminar and he didn’t know what a seminar was and I said, “What is a seminar?” and he said, “well it’s a man who’s got 20, 30, 40 years of experience, he figures out the best of what he’s learned and he teaches it to you in 3 or 4 hours.” And I said, “I’d like to go to that, could you get me in?” and he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, will you?” and he said, “No.” I said, “Why?” and he goes, “Well because if you don’t pay for it, you won’t value it.” And I said, “How much is?” he said, “$35.” And I’m making $40 a week as a janitor. I was like, “That’s a week’s pay.” And he’s like, “Okay, learn on your own and take decades.”

So I scraped it together, and that was when I started to realize that in one night I learned more about how to improve my life in 3 or 4 hours from this man who had 30 years of experience that I didn’t have, he compressed those decades into days. And that’s what locked in my mind.

So I took a speed reading course and I said, “I’m going to read a book a day.” And I didn’t do that. I read 700 books in 7 years all in the area of human development, psychology, physiology. So everything in my life, I have such a passion for the power of self education. It is a power that is available to any human being today, especially because of the internet all over the earth. It never existed before. You could learn from people you’d never be able to learn from. You can find the best experts on earth from wherever you are. Versus you know, the university system we’re in right now where the greatest debt we have in this country, 1.5 trillion, more than consumer debt, is college debt now.

And anybody who is one of your listeners that’s a millennial or a z generation coming up, this is what they’re all worrying about. This is what they’re all dealing with. And they think, “How am I ever going to get through this piece?” But what’s really amazing is we’re guaranteeing all that through this lousy education.

Very often professors even at the best universities have never done what they’re talking about, they’re just telling you. And the information is gone. Even a medical doctor. The half life of medical education is two years. That means two years after you leave, 50% of what you learned is worthless. Now the pharmaceutical salesman’s gotta do it.

So for me, I wanted to know those answers and Rohn used to say, “Success leaves clues.” If someone is truly successful at anything, they’re not lucky. If they do it once, maybe they’re lucky. Get rich, anybody can get rich. Can you stay rich? Can you become wealthy? Can you add enough value to stay there? That requires a different way of thinking and being.

If somebody lost weight and kept it off for 30 years and kept it off, they’re not lucky. He said, “find out what rich people do and do that.” He said, “Find out what poor people read and don’t read it.” He said, “I don’t just mean financially poor, emotionally, spiritually poor because whatever they’re feeding their mind, that’s where it goes.” So he embedded this drive in me. I don’t know, the drive was probably there, but the system in me of saying, “I’m going to learn about other people’s experiences.” Every great investor knows, other people’s money, an OPM is a leverage tool that can grow you geometrically financially. Every great wealth has used some of that.

But I’ll tell you what’s more valuable than other people’s money, other people’s experience when the other people’s experience is the best in the world. So they may have taken 20 years to figure something out, and with the tools I’ve learned to model to extract it out of them, we can pull out the best that they’ve learned in maybe a few hours, a few days, a few weeks at most. Maybe a few months if it was super complex.

So now, what Dean and I have done, we decided to partner together along with you and say, “how do we help a mass audience of people to do that?” Because I have had the privilege of doing something I love. I was a kid from a zoo set, who didn’t have enough money for food. Now I feed a hundred million meals a year in the US, this year we’re going to get half a billion. We’ll be a million meals within five more years.  I mean, I have the privilege of traveling and helping millions of people. I don’t have to work another day in my life. I’ve got all the toys people say they want, but I have something more. I have meaning. I have this sense that my life matters because I have the information and tools that can add more value than anybody else because I’ve never stopped learning and I keep adding it.

So Dean and I now, our focus is how do we take the 60 years between us and then your history and then say, how do we take that to as many people as possible and say, “Look, if you want to be a person and you’ve got some knowledge base…” Let’s say you’re, you cut great hair, I know a woman who makes $250,000 cutting hair, and most people make $60. I remember talking to her going, “You’ve got to share this. I mean so many other people are struggling.” And she got excited about it and now she does these workshops and she makes all this money on the side while she still does what she does. She makes almost as much teaching as she did cutting hair, but she has all these people that love her because their business has grown because she shared her knowledge.

So my skill is extracting that, showing people how to do it. And then Dean’s great skill, like yours, is also turning that into a technology or into software so that we got the combination. Or if somebody wants to be like, I started out as what I would call a knowledge broker. I didn’t have the skill. I had people I knew were brilliant. I wanted to bring them to other people. But then gradually I also developed another skill, which is extracting that knowledge not only on myself but on other people.

So when I did Money Master The Game, I interviewed 50 of the smartest people in the world financially. Warren Buffet Ray Dalio, Carl Icon, Paul Tudor Jones, and I was able to extract things that no one thought I could extract and put it in a book where now, it’s crazy. I don’t say this to blow my horn, I say this because it blows my mind. I’ve now, I was at JP Morgan’s billionaires conference, you have a billion dollar net worth to be there, and I’m the head speaker for this piece. You know, worth magazine just named me for the fourth year in a row as one of the 100 most influential people in global finance. I’m up there with the same guys I interviewed.

And it’s not because of me, it’s because I extracted the best of what they’d done, but I’ve also been able to share, and then I built several multi billion dollar businesses in the last 5 years in that industry. Took one business from 16 billion as a partner, not just me, but to 38 billion AUM, another one from zero to 4 billion, another one from zero to a billion in 2 years. It’s because I applied what I learned from the best.

So I am so effing passionate learning from the best. That’s why I’m passionate about you, because you do that same thing. You’ve modeled those marketing skills and you systematized them and shown people how they can take advantage of those in Clickfunnels, better than anybody I know of in the business. And you’ve done the same thing, so I honor you.

Russell: Thank you. It’s interesting, you know, I look at my path and it’s been fun because what you just did in the financial space, it’s interesting because four years ago you were not in that world at all, right. But you went and did that, extracted all this stuff, built this engine, this book, this everything that’s now blown up. And I didn’t realize how many billions, which is insane, that’s a lot of B’s. But it’s all about that.

I think when I got in this business too, the marketing stuff, I didn’t know a whole bunch of it, but I had the initial spark of “oh my gosh, this is cool.” But I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t go to school for that. So I was like I gotta find out people who are doing this. And then just like you I went and found the best people. In fact, my first business was me interviewing all these people that I wanted to hire for coaching but I couldn’t afford them. So I was like, what if I just call and see if I can interview them for this thing that I was doing. They didn’t know nobody was listening, but most of them said yes.

And I had a chance to interview these minds in marketing that you know, I remember the late Gary Halbert, one of the greatest marketing minds that’s ever been on this planet, before he passed away I had a chance to interview him for an hour, getting him to tell me all these amazing things. And it’s just like, man I got this man’s wisdom who spent how much of his life learning and mastering and doing these things and spending tens of hundreds of millions of dollars marketing and testing and coming back and be like, this is what I found. And it’s just super powerful.

Tony: By the way, just one thing about this. If you go for a standard education, you’ve got a great one. You know, we’ve got 110 universities now that have over a billion dollars set aside. You know, Harvard just raised 9.5 billion the other day. My buddy at Yale University is one of the top financial investors in the world. David Swenson, he took them from 1 billion, they have 24 billion at Yale. But what’s the education? 27% of the people that come out of college actually say they’re applying what they learned in their job. In other words, 73% it’s been worthless. And they spent 50, 100, 200 thousand dollars, 100 thousand dollars a year, maybe 3, 4, 5 hundred thousand dollars, over 4, 5, 6, 7 years and they got nothing to show for it.

What we really have out there is a bunch of hedge funds that have universities attached to them. We call them universities now. And we pay for all that. We guarantee all that. So you don’t want to be, I don’t want to say you don’t want to be part of that, that’s education too. But if you want to have domain knowledge, you gotta go to the people that are doing it, that are alive, that are perusing the result today.

You want to go to the best. Because someone says, “Well I got ten years of experience.” I often say, “Bullshit. You’ve got one year of experience you’ve done 10 times. You grew the first year, and do the same shit for 10 more years.” You’re looking for people that are absolutely the best in the business, and if you have even a part of that in yourself, you gotta figure out extracting. Because often we’re unconsciously confident, meaning we don’t know how we do it.

But if you can figure out you can do it. Then you can teach others and now it doesn’t just become your benefit, it becomes something you can spread to the world. And you can structure that as a part time or full time business and have an extraordinary income, but doing something that feels meaningful, not just selling a widget. Nothing wrong with selling a widget, but it’s a hell of a lot more when you feel like your life is actually making a difference.

Russell: So cool. This morning I was preparing for this, and this concept of mastermind and I was like, where did this initially come from? And I know it came initially from the book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I went and found my copy and I’m reading it and trying to find the section on masterminds to refresh my mind. And I remember I found the section and Andrew Carnegie is the one who had Napoleon Dyn..Napoleon Dynamite! Napoleon Hill go write this book. And what’s interesting, Andrew Carnegie, I wrote this down so I could have it. He said that, “Any time there are two minds that come together, it creates a third mind, which is an invisible mind, or a mastermind.” And later in this quote, another thing I was reading, your initial mentor was Jim Rohn, he said, Jim Rohn said, “You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

I think it’s interesting, you look at that. The mastermind is all about bringing groups of people together, when you do that the synergy between them, everything grows bigger. I know that I’ve been running mastermind groups for the last 6 or 7 years now inside the marketing industry, which has been really fun. But the first time I really heard about any kind of groups like this was at the original UPW that I was at and you started telling this story about the scorpions group, I think was the unofficial title. But I would love if you told that story because I think there’s so many cool things that came from that, that I would love people to understand some of the background of how it happened for you in your business.



Tony: Well thanks. It actually changed my life radically. It started as getting a letter and a beautiful leather jacket that was for batman from Peter Guber who was at the time the chairman for Sony and Columbia pictures. He created the first big movies like that, that ever created. He had 52 academy award nominations. I mean, just a genius.

And at the time, I knew of his name obviously because he was famous, but I get this letter saying, “You’ve changed my life and I want to have lunch or dinner with you, please come to the studio.” And long story short, we became, we hit it off from the very beginning. You know there’s some people you can pitch to, but again, one of the things I love about you brother, is we can pitch and catch to each other. I don’t just pitch, you can throw the ball back. And Peter is that way.

And we had this, just ignited relationship. So he calls me a couple months later and says, “Tony, I’ve been thinking so much about how you changed my life, and I told all my friends about you.” And he says, “Listen, I have this group of people, it’s the most valuable thing in my life. That’s saying a lot, out of all of the beautiful things in my life. I’m not saying it’s more valuable than my family, but for my growth the most valuable thing.”

He said, “I got this group of about 11 guys, 9 to 11 guys and we meet three times a year. We go on these incredible trips. It’s not the trips, the trips are gorgeous. We do these amazing things. But what happens in the conversations on that trip between us, it sparks something. All it takes is one idea and the whole trip is worth it.”

And he goes, “We haven’t, all these guys are probably you know, 18 or 20 years your senior just like I am. But l told them about you and how special you are, and we never let anybody else in the group, but they want to have you come on one trip and if they like you Tony, you can do this ongoing. It will change your life more than anything you can imagine.”

And I said, “Well, who’s on the group?” and he said, “Well, the greatest NBA coach.” Which was Pat Riley at the time, and he’s a dear friend obviously, to this day.  And he says, “There’s another gentleman but I’ll keep his name private, but he’s the richest man in Canada.” And he goes through this list, like wow. And he goes, I said, “What do you thinking of?” and he goes, “Well, we’re going to do this trip. We’re going to fly to China. We’re going to do this thing on the great wall and then we’re going to go to Cambodia, then we’re going to Vietnam.”

And he does this whole thing, and in my mind he knows that I was a business operator. I wasn’t an owner. So if I wasn’t there, nothing is going on. If I wasn’t there I’m stressing out. And I’m thinking, how long is this thing. And I said, “I’m curious, how long is this.” He said, “I don’t know, it’ll be 14, 15, 16 days. You know, 12 days. Something like that.” And I’m like, “Oh.” And in the back of my head I like, “Holy shit, I can’t take that many days off.”

And the next thing, I said, he goes, “Yeah, we fly on private jets the whole way. It’s exquisite.” And he goes, “Yeah, we just all divide it up.” And I’m in my head going, you know, we’re going to fly a couple of Goldstreams to china and Vietnam and Cambodia, like 40 hours of flying and 3, 4 thousand dollars an hour, whatever it was back then. I’m like, holy shit, that be like 3 quarters of a million dollars. I said, “Well how many of, what do you think my part…” He goes, “Oh don’t worry about. It’ll only be 30, 40, 50 thousand something like that. Probably 30-40 thousand.” I’m thinking, 30 thousand in 12 days. 30 thousand in 12 days, holy shit.

And he goes, “So the dates on, everything else.” And I said, “Well, let me check my calendar.” And there’s this long pause and he goes, “Check your calendar?” Excuse my French, but that’s what he said. He said, “Did I hear you correctly? I’m inviting you to be with 11 of the most brilliant people on the face of the earth for 12 days that you can learn from and you….” And I said, “No, no, I’m putting it on my calendar.” I said, “I’m putting it on my calendar.”

So I hang up the phone and I’m like, holy shit. I gotta commit to this. So I blocked out the days, and the economics. And I get on the plane with these guys and those days, I wouldn’t even take an aspirin, and these guys all take an Ambian and they’re going to be sleeping for 14 hours. And there weren’t enough beds so the owner of the plane is a good friend to this day, he says, “We’ll alternate beds.” I go, “No, no. I’m going to stay up. I have to work.” He goes, “Tony you’re not going to stay up for 14 hours.” I said, “No, I’m busy.”

So they all go to bed. I’m sitting there rocking in my head for 14 hours going, oh my God, 30-40 thousand dollars, 12 days, what the hell am I doing here? I was miserable. So we finally get there and we go through Cambodia and Shangri La and all these places, and I don’t know, we’re probably three days in and we just did a bike ride through Vietnam and we get on a plane, we’re about 3 or 4 days into it. I’m still miserable. And the guy who is the richest man in Canada sits next me, it’s his plane, and he’s reading the paper. I’m reading the paper, and he’s reading the paper and all the sudden I get this smack on my paper and I pull it down and he smacks it again.

He goes, “I want to talk to you.” I’m like, “Okay.” He says, “I’m pissed.” I said, “You’re pissed?” I think, shit. I pissed off the richest man on the trip, it’s his plane. He goes, “Everywhere we go, everywhere we go, people we don’t know, people don’t speak English, ‘Tony ah! Love Tony! Love Tony!’ We’re in China, we’re in Cambodia,” he goes, “you know how much I’m worth? I’m the richest man in Canada. You know how many businesses I have? I’ve never had somebody look me in the face and say, ‘I love you’ I’ve provided income for their kids, everything else.”

He went on and on and he seemed so intense and then he smiled. And I realized he’s messing with me. He said, “I have the impression you don’t think you deserve to be here. That you’re not one of us.” And then he said, “Tony, you know what I’d give (I was 30 years old) to be 30 years old? When I was 30 I had made my first million and lost it. I was broke. You got this you got that.” I said, “Yeah, it’s not the things for me.”

And he asked me my goals and at the time I thought someday I’d serve in the political environment, I’d run for president on my own, my own money, my own standards. Not my goal now. I’ve served more presidents and I have a very different view of the political system today. And I want to be independent in what I’m doing. And he said, “Well if you want to do that, Tony, you need to understand one of the most important principles of wealth.”

And this is what I got out of the whole trip, it was worth the whole trip, it was just one phrase. “proximity is power. Right now, if you wanted to make a movie…” and I hadn’t done Shallow Hal, but I was in 25 movies. He goes, “You know so many people in the movie business, producers, directors, writers, they’re all your fans. You don’t do anything and they put you in all these movies. If you want a script you like and they said it was decent, you’d have everybody in it. You’re in proximity to them. They want to put you in the movies. They’re doing it all the time. You could make your own film.”

He said, “But if you want to do a deal with IBM, do a deal with them, no disrespect, you’d have a hard time because you don’t know anybody at IBM. If you want that kind of wealth, how many investment bankers do you know?” and I said, “I don’t know, a couple dozen.” And he goes, “how many do you spend time with?” I said, “Not many.” And he said, “you need to go spend time with them.” I said, “Yeah, but I want to give them something and I don’t have a plan.” And he goes, “Just get in proximity. If you’re around them they’re going to want to know you, want to do a deal with you.”

So I did because of this, and I became part of this group and I’m still part of it, to this day. We do two or three trips a year. But what was great was, you know, the first 3 or 4 months I did this, I went probably to New York, and probably met with, I don’t remember, 5 or 6 different of these top financial guys, investment bankers and I came back the next trip and he’s like, ‘Hey dude, how’d you do.’ I said, “Well, I’m around these 7.” “7? You call that massive action?”

He just gave me shit, so I kept doing it for 3 years, 2 ½ years. And the woman in my life at the time was like, “Why are you going to New York again, it’s such a waste of time.” I said, “No, I’m just going to keep doing this.” And one day I got a deal that made me $30 million in a month. And I’d not made $30 million in my life at that point. And then I got a deal that made me 400 million dollars, I took the company public in 3 months.

And then I also lost most of that when the stock market crashed in 1999, but it taught me the power of proximity and that became my fundamental mastermind. Now today, my mastermind is larger than that. I’m constantly working with people, sometimes it’s one or two but it’s the best in the world at what they do. I coach them, and I’m not dumb enough to think I should only be learning, I should be teaching them. I gotta learn from them too.

So putting masterminds together, that’s what I do now. I took my original group, you know, we call ourselves the scorpions, our little song, our Aerosmith song, dude looks like a lady, we tease each other mercilessly. We got our little scorpion symbol and stuff, and its’ a really unique group of people. But I created my platinum partners and my lions and I bring them together and I compress decades in a day. I share the best of what I learned, but I get them to teach each other.

This last weekend I got a group of 44 of them, that are my highest donors to my foundation, so I honored them by doing a place at my home in Palm Beach here, and I had here, like last year I brought in Tom Brady. I brought in Michael Phelps, you know I brought in the greatest of all time. Michael Phelps has got more gold medals than anybody in history. Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in history.

This year I brought them Kevin Hart, I think the greatest entertainer, hardest working man in the business, he’s made 45 movies in 15 years. How the eff do you do that? We found out how he did it. How has he built his brand from nothing? How has he done this? And saved all that time, the guys’ a genius. He’s smarter than almost anybody you know in the business.

You know I brought in Mike Tyson because I wanted to show them, you can be the best in the world, and success is not a vaccination against suffering. He was in such pain before. And then how he changed. Then I brought in Conor McGregor, who says he’s retired, but I’ll be coaching him on his next fight. You know, he’s just a genius. He’s ready, he’s ready to do this thing, but he’s got to get his right price. He’ll retire until they pay him the right amount. He’s a guy that willed himself from nothing. You know, he’s got no money, he’s got his car, working as an apprentice plumber, 12 hours a day, and he learned how to take control of his mind. He taught us all the things he did, where he literally created himself being the best, and you’ve seen of course, did it in two different belt levels. Two weight classes simultaneously. No one’s done that in history.

So learning about other people’s experience is the ticket. There is nothing that you can do that comes even close. I don’t give a damn how great your education has been, you need an education that’s current from the people that have done it, and you gotta learn how to extract it, that’s what we do. That’s what Dean’s done for 20 years, what I’ve done for 42 years, so between us 60 years. How many years for you now?

Russell: Well I’ve been doing the business for 15, so I’ll give you guys a little bit in there.

Tony: 75 years between the three of us, I think we got a few things we can share with you, if you really want to go to the next level.

Russell: So cool. Well, one last thing and then we’ll kind of wrap this. Because I think people understand the power of self education about masterminds and groups. But I think probably the biggest thing I think people are going to be thinking is, “Of course you can do it, Tony. You are Tony.” Or “Russell, you’re Russell.” Or “Dean…” or whatever. But I know we’ve been working on this project, you guys have found a lot of people that are doing this that aren’t, it’s not just like you want to be a Tony Robbins or Russell Brunson or whatever to go and create something like this. This is happening at all sorts of levels, to all sorts of people, in all sorts of industries.

And I know, I can share a couple of, but I’d love to see if you’ve got some as well that are just people that are…

Tony: I want to tell you how simple it is. It’s like I was talking to a woman a few years ago, she makes, the average person who cuts hair makes 60 grand a year, this woman makes 350 thousand dollars a year. I remember saying to her, first of all, I was blown away, and you know, you feel her presence. She’s just an extraordinary human being anyway. But I just said, “What is it that has really given you this gift?” and I started interviewing her and pulling things out of her and I said “You’ve gotta teach this. There’s so many people who love what they do but they make so little income.”

So we started talking with her and Dean started talking with her, and sure enough she started to create these little classes for herself. Little workshop mastermind, she shares and they do the mastermind together and she not only still makes all the money she does there, but she makes as much money in her little classes as she did in anything else. But she feels this meaning, another level of meaning that’s like, “Out of all these people that love me,” she said, “Because I’ve helped them grow their income by 10 fold, 5 fold, 6 fold from where they were.”

She goes, “It’s made my life feel even more joyous.” So she has the meaning and she has the money. I think that’s the difference. But literally you can do this in any industry. You can be in sales, and you have some expertise. You’re a good negotiator, you’ve got some expertise. You know how to write software, you’ve got some expertise. Anything where there’s expertise can be modeled, but again, a lot of times you don’t realize all you do. I’m really good and Dean’s really good at extracting it to. Like what is it that really works, and systematizing it. And then putting in software that does it for you.

And then also, it’s like what we’ve done for these people, I realized, they can even extract it, but they need to know how to structure a course. Whether it’s a workshop or just going to be a mastermind, or whether it’s going to be a membership group that’s ongoing. There’s many different ways of doing it. And they could be big, I do 10, 15, or even my biggest ones this year are 50,000 person events, football stadiums. But you know, you could do it with 5 people, 25 people. It could be the mastermind, it could be the workshop.

You might want to be somebody that extracts it from other people. That’s how I started. I was kind of a knowledge broker promoting other people and then like Money, Master of the Game, I went and pulled all that knowledge out. Once I learned it I became an expert in that field.

So really what we’re talking about is it doesn’t matter what you do for a living, whether you have an expertise or you want to go get it from other people, we could try to do it and then systematize it, and then most importantly, like you, market it. Because between Dean, myself, and you we’ve got 75 years of marketing and we know one headline can change your income or your return by 2 thousand, 5 thousand, 10 thousand percent without spending one more penny. And we’ve systematized that.

So this is both the software that we’re putting together and the course and then that’s when people get the opportunity to learn about it. It can be done with anything.

Russell: yeah, I’m so excited for this.

Tony: Give some examples of what you’ve seen, because I know you’ve worked with so many

Russell: We’ve got so many fun ones. We have one lady who’s a boudoir photographer and was doing that as a thing for a while and then eventually people got, her other photographer friends were like, “How are you charging…” because I don’t know exactly the fees, like $100 a session for a regular photographer, versus like a thousand for a boudoir photographer. So she started doing these little groups and bringing people together. “This is how I do what I do.”

And later that became courses and books and stuff like that for her. But a lot of times people think if they’re going to get into the education business, it’s like I have to write a book, which I’m writing my third book right now and it’s the most painful process I’ve ever….I think it’s, my wife gets mad when I say this, but I think it’s worse than giving birth. There’s more pain I think than that.

Tony: Don’t say that.

Russell: I shouldn’t say it out loud. But it’s so painful and I think a lot of people think that’s what they have to do if they want to share their information. And it’s like, maybe eventually, maybe eventually you’ll do a course, but the fastest way is to get people in the room, put them together and share it like that. And it’s like the fastest way to do it.

Tony: Every time you do it too. Because I want to address something you just said a minute ago, if I may, because I don’t want to let this go by. The “I’m not a Russell. I’m not a Tony. I’m not a Dean.” Bullshit. I created this guy Tony Robbins. He’s me, don’t get me wrong, but the tempo which I speak, the way I live, it’s a result of all that I’ve learned. The reason I speak like this, with this intensity, is because I have so much passion because I have so much knowledge. I didn’t have any of this to start with. I wasn’t this guy. I trained myself to be this guy.

Part of what I do in the course is I give all the knowledge and we could give you all the skill and you still won’t follow through, it’s still dealing with the fear that stops people. It’s the fear of rejection, it’s the fear of failure. So part of our course is doing what I did to myself to literally condition myself, and I know you’ve done the same Russell, to get yourself to follow through. I mean you use some of your athletic ability because you used to train yourself as a wrestler, I remember.

I trained, I was an athlete too, but the training I did with my mind in this area, and my emotion in this area was more important than anything else I learned. And if you don’t get that training, then you’ll just be another person taking another damn course.

So I told Dean from the very beginning. I said, “We’re going to give them the best tools, we’re going to give them the best technology, we’re going to give them the best follow-up coaching, give them the best blue print. We’re going to give them the best tools, literally online tools and computer tools, software, but we gotta make sure we give them the best emotional tools.” Because 80% of success is psychology and learning how to change that.  You’ve done that to yourself, you’ve sculpted yourself. You weren’t always this guy, I wasn’t always this guy, and Dean wasn’t. So I don’t want people to negate that.

Plus you don’t need to go out and do something that can hold 10 or 15 thousand people at a time. All you need to do is be somewhere that can hold 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 or not even hold anybody. Develop a mastermind where the mastermind itself brings that energy into the group.

So don’t undersell yourself, please, because so many people do that. All you gotta do is do what’s next. Do what’s next, do what’s next. And before you know it, I always tell people, most people they overestimate what they’re going to do in a year, and they underestimate what they’re going to do in a decade. And a decade goes that fast. 10 years from now, Jim Rohn used to say, “10 years from now you’ll surely arrive. The question is where.” And if you get started now, you won’t believe where you are. For me, this is my fourth decade, 42 years doing this. I started when I was 3 of course, but you get the idea.

Russell: So cool. Well, I appreciate you Tony, jumping on and doing the interview with me today. I just think this will be super huge for people. And when we jump offline I’ll tell everybody a little bit more about exactly what’s included in the program and the software and the training and all that kind of stuff, so they can get deeper and jump into it. But I just wanted to thank you so much for your time and spending time doing this. And also, this project. I know this is the first big course you’ve put out like this for how long? It’s been quite a few years, hasn’t it?

Tony: This course is completely different, and I’m excited about it because, also I’m excited about working with you and working with Dean, it’s fun to do something synergistically. Usually I carry the whole thing on my own back. It’s nice to all do it together and bringing the different flavors and insights for people. I think people will be deeply touched. It’s just, it’s meaningful. It’s meaningful for me to have the privilege today to do, to know where I’ve come from, to know where I get to be today and it’s all this path. And we’re showing people the exact path of how they can do it, self starting from wherever they are. Blessings to all of you, thanks for having me on. Russell, I’ll hope to see you soon, brother.

Russell: Awesome, thanks Tony. Appreciate you man.

Tony: God Bless.