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Welcome everybody to the podcast.
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Tony Robbins here.
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Today I have the privilege to introduce to you, or maybe reintroduce if you watched the podcast from last year that we did, a dear friend of mine, a man who s a great spiritual leader.
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He s a man of inspiration.
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He s a master communicator.
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He s a man of God.
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He s a speaker of the gospel.
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He s a voice of hope and love and warmth, and I think a voice of reason for
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tens of millions of people, including myself.
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And he s really unique.
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Bishop Jakes is a bishop.
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He s also a TV and film producer.
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He s a Grammy-winning award-winning music producer.
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He s a New York Times number one bestseller.
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He s written 40 books.
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He has 44 zero.
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And he started out, you know, being raised in West Virginia.
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And he starts his first church at 23 years old in West Virginia.
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And now he has his own church, of course, the Potter House in Dallas, Texas.
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It has 30,000 people that participate.
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It s non-denominational.
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And you re also, you have this incredible gift that this ability to move people so much that Time Magazine back in 2001 said you re the best preacher in the United States.
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And you re the preacher I think most preachers kind of model around the world today.
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So I want to welcome my dear friend, TD Jakes.
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Thanks for being here, TD.
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Thank you for having me.
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I m so delighted.
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Anytime I get to breathe the same air, share the same space, or be on the same Zoom with you, I always come out a little better and learn something that helps to broaden my perspective.
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So I m looking forward to the conversation.
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Well, thank you.
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Well, you re here to broaden ours.
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I m here to listen and learn, as I always do when I m with you, brother.
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We re going to talk about his new book.
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It s called Don t Drop the Mic, How the Power of Words Can Change the World.
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There s 440 pages of pure magic in this, and I m not blowing smoke.
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Gorgeous.
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You give stories, strategies, tools.
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You even have a partner in crime, so to speak, who goes through and he s a brilliant scholar and shows where some of the organization comes from in your history, like the shoulders you stand on, just like I do, and different shoulders.
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But also he goes through it and takes one of your sermons and kind of helps us break it down.
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It s really, it s an extraordinary book and
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I ve read many of your books, but this one is truly unique.
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My first question is simple.
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Why this book?
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Why now?
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Why a book on communication to me is obvious?
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Why now seems somewhat obvious, but tell me why for you now?
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And maybe tell us a little bit, Dr. Frank Thomas, his role, and perhaps just clarify.
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Most people think drop the mic.
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You re saying don t drop the mic.
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A lot of people think that s the goal.
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Maybe you can clarify the metaphor.
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Well, you know, drop the bike is something that became very popular amongst the hip hop at the end of a performance, they would drop the bike.
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And it became a cliche to represent that you had this powerful moment.
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It was a thrash the bike moment.
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So I just reversed it and said, don t drop the bike.
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And initially, to be honest with you, Tony, I started out writing a kind of a legacy book to pass on to the next generation what I had experienced during my tenure of ministry over these past almost 45 years.
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The diversity of platforms that I spoke on, both faith platforms as well as secular platforms, as well as business platforms and entertainment platforms,
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I had such a panoramic view of articulation from so many perspectives that I started writing about that.
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And then it evolved that the pandemic came and the racial tensions arose.
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And I thought, wow, while I m talking about talking, our nation is trying to have a conversation that we re talking over each other and at each other, not to each other.
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And I had to include some elements about that into it, as well as your intimate, most personal relationships.
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drop the mic on talking to your children, don t drop the mic on talking to your wife, don t drop the mic on dealing with hard subjects and tough times.
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To believe in the power of communication, to be the conciliatory agent that is necessary to bind up the wounds of brokenhearted people is the substratum of what made me write the book.
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That s beautiful.
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Tell me, you know, maybe you can share with our audience, you write about it in the book, about the influence of one night watching your father watch the news when a very special man came on, who became obviously a partial, at least one of the role models in your life, a very important one.
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Tell us a little about where this began and how that developed a belief in you that a person with a microphone can change the world.
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Well, first of all, I m about six or seven years old.
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My father is like a Goliath giant to me, a huge mammoth man, both physically and my opinion of him was huge.
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And this was one of the rare times that he wasn t working, because he worked a lot.
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And I was watching the news came on, and there was a man of color speaking.
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At that time, that alone was a rarity.
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to turn on your TV set and see somebody who looked like you speaking was very, very rare.
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And my father s expression, I don t know, I went back and forth between looking at the way my father looked at him and looking at amazement at how he handled the mic and how he tackled the problems that were pervasive during that time period.
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I grew up in the era of the 60s when
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colored bathroom, the colored water fountains, and the Vietnam War, and all of the chaos that was going on in our country back then, kind of mirrors all the chaos that s going on right now.
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And instead of grabbing up a gun like some people did during those times, and are doing today, Dr. King grabbed a mic.
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And it taught me at a very early age, it left an indelible impression upon me that a mic can often be more powerful than a gun.
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And we live in a society today that anything we don t like, we want to shoot it.
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But what we need to learn is the power of words, the power of communication.
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Dr. King exemplifies it, Muhammad
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Gandhi identifies it in many ways.
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Nelson Mandela exhibited it through the apartheid.
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And I think if we re going to ever have a more perfect union, then we have to become more involved in speaking and speaking to people outside of our sphere.
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That means
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You can t just be CEOs talking to CEOs, you really need to get down to grassroots and talk to people outside of your bubble.
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We have created all of these bubbles but they re asphyxiating because we don t get doctors talk to doctors, preachers talk to preachers, unbelievers talk to unbelievers, believers talk to believers, and yet we re thrown into this
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homogenized society that asked us to live together and we can t live together if we don t learn each other s language and how to talk to each other.
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One of the things I was touched by in the book was the understanding that Western history is usually taught in a written form.
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But West African history and African history is usually taught in an oral form.
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And then, of course, there are times, obviously, for Africans that were slaves that they weren t able, they weren t allowed to even read or do something that nature, but it even goes earlier than that.
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It was the tradition of learning.
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And you are, you ve carried that tradition on and Dr. Thomas, I guess, played a role in looking at some of that.
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I mean, obviously,
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Well, Dr. Thomas s expertise is in African-American preaching.
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I mean, that s what his doctorate is.
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That s what he teaches at the university.
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And it s a substratum of what his passion is.
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He not only is a preacher, he s a professor and a theologian and a scholar.
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And he challenges me to explain to people how I do what I do, which is very, very challenging.
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because you do what you do.
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You don t really often think in terms of passing it on to somebody in an explainable way that causes them to be able to benefit from the dynamics of what you do.
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Because what I do is such a mixture of the science of linguistics and the art of connectivity.
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Yes, collaborate together in such a way that you can t distinguish the science of from the art of it to know it is one thing science to feel it is the artistic part of it.
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And there I am trying to explain something that is not always tangible.
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It is not always great communication.
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It isn t just tangibles it s not just the definitions of words, it s all the inferences and implications that come from the word, and whether you re having a discussion like we are, or whether you re trying to talk to your wife.
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don t always mean the same thing.
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And understanding the distinctives can determine whether you end up in divorce court or having the second honeymoon.
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Yeah, big difference.
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I ve always said the things that affect us most are invisible forces, right?
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You can look at physical things, gravity, too much, you re dead, too little, we re gone, right?
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Radiation, without enough, we re dead, too much, we re gone.
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But I think the most powerful force is human emotion.
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and understanding that words are triggers for those emotions, and that we re responsible for how we respond to them.
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We certainly have that choice.
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But different words have different potency.
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And you ve really been extraordinary.
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That s why I ve been such a fan of yours, is both the quality of your intellect, most importantly, the quality of your heart, but also your capacity to express that in a way that reaches the human heart, that pushes through those limitations.
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And your church is not all African-American.
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Your church is a mixture.
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So you ve been able to reach people all over the earth.
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So I m curious, what part of Martin Luther King, come back to him for a second, what part of him have you embodied or has become a part of you?
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I m curious from your perspective.
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Well, I would never be as presumptuous as to compare myself with him.
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I think he was one of the most amazing orators of my generation.
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I agree.
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Maybe many generations.
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you know, to paint such picturesque language and words, the way his voice inflection, his presentation, his mannerisms all led to an unstoppable force that actually changed the world as we know it.
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And so, but I think it affected all of us in some way to be inspired that there is hope in talking
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And then you have to understand the underlying inference of faith in the black community means something different than it does in most white communities where a church is totally about faith.
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For us, it was where the civil rights movement was born.
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It was where our first schools started.
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It was the first platforms.
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People like Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, many others sang on.
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They started out in a faith platform.
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because that was the only platform we have.
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Consequently, today, when you get ready to reach our community, to bypass the faith element of it is to bypass the gateway that opens up all of the community to you.
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And so understanding that, when you say a preacher, what you picture depends on what your experiences are.
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And in our community,
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That includes activism, that includes social justice, that includes business advice, that includes looking over contracts before people buy houses.
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We come to our pastors expecting a lot more from them than just elements of faith.
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Well, his faith, much like Gandhi, was a model for him as well, that peace could be the solution, that unifying us was the answer, not separating us.
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One of the beautiful things your book did is it brought some of that history of the African American experience in the midst of you teaching people how to communicate and bring their voice forward.
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It s a beautiful synergy that you created here.
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I m grateful that you ve created it.
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One of the things that I would like to say, particularly to your audience, living in a bubble is expensive now.
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You make statements that you have to spend millions of dollars to correct and damage control and public relations.
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Most CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs are focused on diversity and inclusion and equity.
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And as you do that, you don t hire people for decoration.
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You also have to include them into your life.
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You can t just include them into your office, but to include them into your life so that you can circumvent bad choices.
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Maybe this means something
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And in the book, I talk about how I offended many Kenyan people while I was trying to ingratiate them.
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And I didn t understand that what a particular word meant in their society.
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I quickly found out as lit up by social media for about two and a half days with fire, hell and brimstone, I quickly retreated and said, whoa, I didn t know that.
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So what you don t know can be expensive.
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It can be detrimental.
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And it can cause you to alienate an audience as we become more global.
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And as the country waxes more brown, if you re going to ingratiate and have a following of any kind, you have to be diverse in your ability to communicate with them.
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and understand sensitive tones, whether it is for somebody with a learning distinction or whether it is for somebody who is smaller of stature, getting the right language to communicate with that sensitivity.
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I know it s laborious, I know it s frustrating, but it is the catalyst through which growth is attained.
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You have to grow beyond that which is familiar to you.
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there s no expansion.
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Otherwise, we just live in a box, right?
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And, you know, there s one thing that makes people happy is progress and growth, right?
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We grow, so we have something to give.
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And if we don t grow, we don t have much more to give.
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And then life becomes really empty.
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It s just about the self.
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And anybody who s focused on themself, see so many people today that are extremely well off, and they re angry all the time.
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What are they angry about?
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They re angry because they really aren t growing.
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You know, you re giving somebody everything you think that s enough, doesn t matter what color their skin
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that there has to be some form of growth.
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You remind me of a funny example of one of my early days when I was in my 20s, I went overseas for the first time.
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I was talking in this country and I didn t understand what s going on.
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I said, this is so, so, so important.
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I was doing this and that, and all of a sudden people get really riled up.
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And then I started to make the linkage because it means the middle finger in the country.
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I was like,
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You know what s funny about that.
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Most of us when we go overseas will really study and get a briefing about the culture.
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Yes, but we don t study people in our own country who are distinctive from us.
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with the dignity of the importance that says you are worth studying, you are worth the focus of my intellect so that I don t inadvertently offend you.
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And you have to learn in the language of the people that you want to reach what is the most effective way to do that.
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I think that gives us some room for expansion.
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for development, for inclusiveness, for a more harmonious, a more perfect union, whether that union is in a marriage or in a workplace.
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There s a different type of poor.
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All poor people are not the same.
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There s a difference between being poor in the inner city and being poor in the middle of America on a farm.
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where you re barely able to make ends meet.
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They re both poor, but they have different dynamics and different enemies and different things to contend with.
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You re not stepping over needles.
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You re not dealing with gang violence.
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You re dealing with a different kind of poverty.
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And so when we start respecting each other s story and listening and learning that story, rather than allowing the media to tell us who other people are, we do a lot better.
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And so what we re doing is saying,
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don t drop the mic is let s keep talking.
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Even when you get it wrong, even when you get trolled, even when you get corrected, even when you get your feelings hurt, don t draw back and stop talking.
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We ve got to keep talking because we ve got to keep breathing the same air, drinking the same water, sharing the same space, often sharing blood transfusions.
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If we can share blood, we can share conversation.
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That s right.
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We have so much more in common than we have apart.
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It s just ridiculous, but it gets magnified.
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I know you and I have talked offline.
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You ve seen the social dilemma and those haven t.
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I hope they watch it.
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You see how there s a certain class of people that now are treating you like you re a lab rat.
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They know how to stimulate you by giving you what you already believe and then piss you off by making another extreme, keep certain information from you and keep you online.
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And it just makes them
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Bill Adair, Ph.D.
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: trillion trillion dollars living some of these companies are worth a trillion dollars now with a D. Bill Adair, Ph.D.
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: But, but one of the beautiful things that I think that you do, and I think it s required if we re talking about quality communication, you just said the first step in my mind.
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Bill Adair, Ph.D.
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: which has got to know your audience got to know what they need you got to know what their hearts are you know there s.
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I think the language either you or maybe it was in the back of your book that Dr. Thomas gave was this idea, I used to talk about fear into power, but you re talking about pain into power, right?
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You know, moving pain into power, how to shift that, but you can t do that.
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If you don t know someone s story, what they re going through, what they re experiencing, including your wife or your children or someone else.
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So I wanna know for you, to me, communication is about connection and it s really about serving in some way.
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I mean, that s the whole purpose of it, is we connect and serve.
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Without it, we have nothing.
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But what do you see as the purpose of communication and from your perspective, and how do you know when you re effective and what makes you so effective?
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And I know I m not blowing smoke your way.
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You know who you are.
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So what do you think it is?
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Well, you know.
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At its core.
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I mean, there are many things, but at its core.
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First of all, we are one of the few species that are able to communicate both verbally and in writing.
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to change the meaning of something with a voice inflection, with a suffix or prefix changes in definition of a word, and we re able to write that, and we re able to read that, we re able to speak that, so you don t see ants writing books, you don t see that sort of thing, and I think that we don t want to lose that
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with 163 characters, we would have never gotten the Gettysburg Address, we would have never gotten Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, we would have never gotten Edgar Allan Poe, we wouldn t have gotten James Weldon Johnson, all of those great writers and thinkers and orators of all different cultures and kinds culminate when we respect language.
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And I think
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Respect is a substratum of communication, you cannot communicate with something, something or someone that you don t respect enough to study, and I suggest in the book, it s not enough to study your material, you also have to study your audience.
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You have to study who s coming in the room.
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What is the demographic?
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What is their story?
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What are sensitive touch points for them?
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In order to be a great orator, you have to be able to use an illustration that connects with that crowd, that audience, that situation.
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And putting that kind of time into it is respect.
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Because whatever we respect, we give time to.
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And whatever we don t respect, we don t give time to.
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And so subliminally,
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when we don t really do the research, we re saying you re not important.
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And so we have to be retooled to think beyond the parameters of our sociological construct to embrace diverse types of people.
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And I think for me, I was amazed that people thought that I was a great orator.
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I never thought that I was.
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But what is really striking to me is to be able to
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to add language to heart, to be able to express what a feeling feels like.
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What does pain feel like?
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What does love feel like?
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What does hurt feel like?
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What does depression feel like?
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The more adept we are at being able to take those words and use them as paintbrushes to paint a picture that you can see of an abstract feeling that I am having,
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the more congenial our relationship is going to be, the more empathy we re going to have, the more connectivity becomes possible because we are hearing.
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And in the book I talk about, while the book is about speaking, it is just as much about listening as it is about speaking.
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Because if I lose my hearing right now, then eventually my speech is going to
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deteriorate though there s nothing wrong with my tongue the deterioration of my speech is coming from my inability to hear and we re living in a time right now that we ve lost our hearing and it s showing up in the way that we speak to each other and about each other we have stopped listening so we have stopped speaking to each other correctly that kills a marriage
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that kills a business, that kills a company, that kills a company that doesn t have a way of listening to its consumer, that kills a business anytime you don t have a way of listening to it.
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Not just the person in the C-suites, but the person who is pushing the broom knows something you need to hear.
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And really smart people make everybody a teacher.
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That s true.
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And they become a student.
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And that s what makes you smart, is that you never stop learning.
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You never stop learning.
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And you can learn a little something from just about anybody, including your children.
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The greatest business people I know, men or women, they practice that.
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They don t talk about it.
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They ve actually institutionalized it.
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I have a dear friend that built half of Las Vegas, and he s always told me the greatest breakthroughs he s gotten have been from the bellman, from the people behind the counter, because they know.
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There s a quote in your book that I ve used often as well, and it s that the best form of communication is when you hear what s not being said.
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In order to do that, you have to invest at a different level.
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not only in the history but also in this moment to see and feel and experience rather than predict in your mind what you think you re going to say.
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I can t tell you how many times I ve organized the talk and my number one thing is who s there, what do they believe, what do they want, what are their wounds, what are their hurts, what are their desires, what are they proud of.
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Like I will before every talk I have this battery of about 40 questions that I ask, I have my team ask it, then I ask the people when I get there, then I have to see some people there, and then I m able to customize it in a way that really makes sense.
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But I also think you brought up something else which
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Trust and respect.
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I think those two qualities are the most important foundation for any quality relationship, business, personal, intimate.
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But you ask people a lot of times, you know, what does it take for you to trust somebody?
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And the response most people will give me is, well, you know, it s just a feeling, or I trust them because they ve done what, you know, they said they do.
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But I said, have you ever had somebody who s done what they said to do, and then they didn t?
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They said, yeah.
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I said, well, could you trust an enemy?
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And I don t really believe in enemies, but use the metaphor.
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And they say, well, I don t know.
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Well, yeah, you can if your interests are aligned.
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If we can find our interests aligned, we can trust each other.
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If I win and you win, if I lose and you lose, if we re tied to the hip, you can trust somebody, but then respect.
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What does it take to respect somebody?
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And I think it s knowing the other person brings something to table you don t have, and that requires honesty with yourself, some humility, but also just opening your eyes.
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There s no human that I ve ever met that I m not see, I couldn t learn from that isn t superior to me in some way.
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look at myself as inferior, because I also know I have a unique life experience and there s certain things no one s like me and so it allows me to see that person in an equal level, but I think trust and respect.
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Without that human communication does not last it breaks off very, very quickly, but I d like to know what about presence.
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You know, great communicators have presence.
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Martin Luther King has presence.
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I m not saying you re Martin Luther King.
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I know you re very humble.
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But you have your own unique presence.
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And that s, by the way, really important.
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I see so many people try to copy you, or in my world, copy me.
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And it s usually entertaining, right?
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Because they re missing their power would be to be themselves.
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So what is presence for you?
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And how would you describe what it means to speak from the soul?
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Because I know that s the language that s in me and in you.
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How would you describe those two things?
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I think that I am the most powerful where I am the most passionate.
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Yeah, me too.
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That is to say, I m not a good liar.
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I have to really care about it.
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No one is.
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Yeah, I have to really care about it.
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My heart has to be in agreement with my brain for my mouth to be potent.
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And so understanding that about yourself may limit the subject matter that you embrace, but it will impact the audience more powerfully, because there is some synergism between what is impassioned in your heart and what comes out of your mouth.
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That s very important.
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I wanted to say a comment about the word trust you know in business to set up a trust, you re going to invest in it.
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And I think it s very difficult to trust people who want power without investment.
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So regardless to what the nature of our relationship is, the greater the investment, the more likely I am to be able to trust you.
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And that investment can be the curiosity.
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It can be my favorite sentence is, what did you mean by that?
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Or we ll get through with the meeting and I ll say, what did you think about that?
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Because it is through that that I make sure that what you said is what I heard, that what we experienced, we walked away
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with the same thing, that maybe your perspective can broaden mine.
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That s respect.
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To ask questions is respect.
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We never ask questions of people that we don t think have answers.
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And anybody we don t ask questions, we don t respect.
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So to invest with your curiosity, to invest whether it s financially or a study or research or to invest your gift to be able to reach a person, it creates a trust because there is an investment there.
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And I think that that is very, very important.
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important, and I will never care how much you know, until I know how much you care, and the more I know how much you care, then what you know can become more beneficial, and it can be banked in the warehouse, and a trust evolves out of that, and a building of a relationship evolves out of that.
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And I think that s very important today because we are allowing that which is artificial to replace that which is spiritual, emotional.
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You mentioned the word soul, the engagement of my passions, my purpose, my pain, my strengths, my weaknesses, my fears, my certainties and my insecurities make up the elixir that makes me who I am.
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And it s not just the parts of me that are glad
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of me that are broken and shattered and sensitive and tattered and torn, add to the whole elixir and the recipe of who I ultimately become when I walk out on stage.
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And that presence, that presence is a composite of all of those experiences.
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And might I dare add,
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that sitting in this chair is also my grandmother and my grandfather and my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather and all my ancestors are all sitting in this chair, so much so the chair ought to break because I didn t get here by myself.
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I am the sum total of everybody who came before me.
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So true.
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I have a simple rule I tell everybody.
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I said, I m not a great speaker.
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I don t really look at myself as a speaker.
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I m a communicator, but I m a source of influence.
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I m here to help
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someone make a shift.
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That s really my goal.
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My communication is to persuade someone what s possible for themselves and to move them forward as opposed to what s impossible.
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I don t know about that.
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I have had the terrible task of having to speak behind you.
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So I don t know whether I can let you get away with that.
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When we were in Canada and you mesmerized 8,000 people in a stadium and then they put me up to speak and you sat back and watched, I thought, oh, this is
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Or I snap back and got mesmerized and I m not blowing smoke, brother, because we re different.
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That s what s so beautiful.
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We re different in our approach.
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You re so eloquent.
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Your language is so amazing.
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But I think what s true is we both, I have a rule, I won t speak about anything I m not passionate about.
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If I m not passionate about it, I want to learn it from somebody else who is, because obviously I don t have enough value there.
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I m not here to just speak to speak, right?
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But I also, I was touched in your book, it s in a different part of the book.
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About two thirds way through the book, you interview Dr. Thomas, or you bring in Dr. Thomas and you write several chapters.
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And that s where I got some really beautiful pieces about the oral history we talked about.
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I want to go there a little bit later, but one thing that triggers me right now is this idea that in the African American community.
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Soul has been so well-developed because of so much pain.
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Meaning, if you can go through so much injustice, so much pain, so much just insanity, and you can find hope still, that s the soul s depth.
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That s the power of it.
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And anyone I know, no matter what color their skin, who has something to deliver, it s usually because they ve been through hell and kept going, and then they had an intention.
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I m making the movie of Man s Search for Meaning.
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I don t know if you ever, did you ever read the book by chance?
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No.
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That s Viktor Frankl.
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It s a gentleman who was a Jewish man who, it s an extraordinary book.
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When somebody is like in a really bad place, I give it to him.
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He witnessed his family being killed in front of him, two of them thrown in the gas chambers.
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And he survived that experience because he created a reason to communicate in the future, a reason to live in the future, make sure this never happened again.
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It s a pretty amazing story.
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But again, the people that can reach people have soul.
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And so many of us are trying to avoid suffering.
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And yet suffering can have a deep meaning.
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I don t want suffering on any human being.
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My whole goal is to end suffering for people as fast as I can.
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But I also know the value of suffering.
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Can you address that?
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Where is suffering in our lives?
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Is it required?
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Is it necessary?
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Where do you see it is?
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What makes life amazing is death.
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If life would not be valuable, if the clock were not ticking.
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It is the fact that we lose people that makes us learn to value people.
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You can t have North without South.
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It is the polarization of both experiences that causes you to find the middle.
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So if you re gonna be a balanced person, no matter how much your net worth is, you cannot escape suffering.
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There is going to be,
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hurt feelings, hurt bodies, hurt circumstances, loss of loved ones, and each one educates you in some way that none of us enjoy it.
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all of us experience it, and it is what is common amongst all of us, and none of us escape it.
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If we come here naked, we die naked.
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You can take nothing with you that you attain.
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So all of these little toys that we re playing with in the dash between the two dates, we don t get to put none of them in the casket with us.
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And if we do, we still can t take them with us.
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And what we do have
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is a collection of experiences and moments and memories that enrich us, that engage us, that cause us to gradually, gradually, very gradually become better people.
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I don t think that you become a better person overnight.
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I think you gradually become a better person through the mixture of good and bad and sunshine and rain and pleasure
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conclusions.
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And when you start thinking about that, I wanted to tell you this, because when you were talking, it made me think about something John Lewis said.
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They asked John Lewis before he died, what he thought about Black Lives Matter as opposed to civil rights movement.
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And he said, in many ways, it has the same purpose and synergy and passion, and he wanted the young people to go forward.
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And then he said the strangest thing.
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He said, the only thing I wish they would do that they don t do, he said, is when they march, they ought to sing.
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That changes the whole experience, doesn t it?
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Yeah, it s a whole, because... That brings the spirit into it, doesn t it?
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Exactly.
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A higher consciousness to it.
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Exactly.
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And the unification of singing and so forth, not just anger is unifier, but like the higher spirit is unifier.
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Anytime you can sing, Wild Dogs bite you.
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And while water hoses are turned on you and while you re beating over the head with clubs, there s a different sound to the song that comes from a soul who has had to climb their way up and has dirt in their fingernails than somebody who took voice lessons.
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It s a beautiful tone.
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But when you sing from your soul, you sing from the wounds of life, whether they be wounds
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brokenness or stillborns or parents with Alzheimer s, it changes.
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When he says to sing, I just got chills all over me because... I got chills when you just said it too, it s just so beautiful.
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It is the missing ingredient for not just one particular movement, it s the missing ingredient, I think,
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There s so much of humanity that s living in this place of right and wrong, good and bad, and there s not the unification.
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There s something about the human spirit.
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But as you said, the tone, the pitch, the feeling that comes from having experienced that is what penetrates.
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It s the only universal experience.
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I tell people all the time, the one thing you can count on is suffering.
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But you don t have to stay there.
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That s our choice, whether you stay there or not.
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But everyone s going to have extreme stress.
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Are you going to let it destroy you or drive you, right?
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It s like, who is not going to have an experience regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their economics, regardless of their history, their background, regardless of how many people love them?
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Everyone s going to have extreme stress.
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They re going to lose a loved one.
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They re going to have somebody says you ve got cancer.
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They re going to say you re going to be in a position where you get robbed.
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There s going to be a fire at your home.
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There s going to be an economy that drops down.
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You re going to lose your job.
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How exciting is all
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But there s no one who escapes it.
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I ve seen some of the wealthiest people in the world and their child was born with gigantic physical difficulties.
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And I watched the suffering they go through.
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No one escapes it.
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So the question is, what are you going to do with it?
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And I think the other thing that those extreme stress things do is I ve noticed they remind you how strong you really are if you push through.
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If you keep pushing through the whole thing, if you re going through hell, keep going.
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And the other thing it does is it shows you who your real friends are.
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Like, who really cares about you, right?
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Not your Facebook friends, and no disrespect, but the people that actually care about you.
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When the going is tough and everybody else goes off to their stuff, those are the people that matter.
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You don t need a million of those people.
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You need a few humans that you really love and are there for and love and are there for you.
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And the other thing to do is I think it strengthens your psychological immunity.
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I have a friend that was locked up, you know, in North Vietnam for like 10 years, beat,
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On a slab or they make you pee in the acid from his pee would go now is back and burn him I remember you spoke to me years ago, his name is Captain coffee and got coffee, you know he went through this piece with the IRS came after him.
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And they re really being abusive, in my opinion, as his friend looking at him.
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He s like, you know what?
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He goes, they can do nothing North Vietnamese do to me.
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There s nothing that can make me stress now.
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That s the immunity that comes if you can push through that suffering.
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So I don t want it for anybody.
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But the suffering I ve gone through, you ve gone through, the people you love have gone through, there s a purpose in it if we use it and don t let it use us.
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It s like stress uses us or we use stress.
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You know, COVID uses us or we use COVID to make better movements, better decisions.
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You know, the situation that happened here a year ago, we got to figure out how to use it, not be used by it.
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So I couldn t agree with you more.
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Tell me this, you and I have both made mistakes as speakers, right?
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You ve talked about that in your book.
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I remember early on in my career, I used to always do these free guest events so I could show people, I could really deliver not a talk, but a transformation.
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And so I d always have somebody, who here s got something you can t change?
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Who s got an uncontrollable bogey?
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Who s got a problem you can t do?
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Who s totally depressed?
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And that was my signature.
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And it always seemed to work.
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I found a way.
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And this one time, this person, three people are pointing and the person didn t volunteer.
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And I used to do that anyway.
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And I put that person up there.
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And TD, I was there, it was a free guest, but it s supposed to be an hour and a half, and three hours later, when about 30% of the people were left in the room, because I wasn t giving up, and I finally cracked the case with almost nobody left in the building.
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But I learned something.
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I learned I got to get someone vested a little bit in wanting to change, perhaps, if I m going to try and do something in front of an audience in 20 or 30 minutes.
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But what s the situation where you fell flat, and what did you learn from it?
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Oh my gosh, there have been many.
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I did a high school event with a bunch of high school kids, of which I had nothing in common with.
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And I walked in the room and I just, I felt like I flunked.
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I don t know whether I did or didn t, but I felt like I flunked.
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Number one, you know, high school kids, they don t want to be there anyway.
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And they re sitting there and they re kind of looking at me like, yeah, what are you going to be talking about?
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And the combination, in order to be effective, I have to find, there s a chapter in the book where I talk about finding the joint.
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I have to find the joint.
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What connects us?
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What is a bridge that connects us?
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I could not find that bridge in that room in enough time.
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And I did a terrible job.
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from it that finding the joint that connects us and building out from there is how we are able to embrace new and different kinds of audiences.
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If you find the joint, what is common to us, and right now what is being pumped into our veins is what s different about us.
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Constantly.
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Constantly, for ratings, for dollars, for
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advertisement for hits on a site.
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We are being pitted against each other continually until our houses are split.
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It s not just our country.
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We re splitting with our own relatives.
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We re falling out at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
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Think about it.
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Conflict is throughout humanity.
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Conflict sells.
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We ll talk about this in a minute because you re really good at using drama in your speeches.
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But what is drama?
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It s conflict.
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And so you think about if there was a movie or a book and the movie starts out with, we got a main character and they re happy and they re healthy and they have great relationships and they re doing great economically and they have connected to God and they have a beautiful mission.
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And then halfway through, they re happy and they re healthy and great relationships, beautiful, a beautiful mission and healthy.
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In the end, they re like, who s going to go to that film?
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Nobody.
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So unfortunately, human beings are pulled in by drama, but drama is now used where it bleeds and leads in the media.
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And now you don t have to go for the news.
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It follows you in your pocket.
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It travels through social media.
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You know, it s a different world.
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You and I both have had the experience of recently finding ourselves speaking to empty rooms, talking to cameras.
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I watch, obviously, many of the pieces that you do, the sermons you do, and you ve got about nine people in this giant auditorium that you ve built.
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And me too, I m talking to people in 195 countries.
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I m seeing them, fortunately, on the screens.
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I m seeing them in the rooms, but it s not the same.
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So tell me something.
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How have you had to adapt to be more effective without an audience there?
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Or have you had to?
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Or are you doing the same thing?
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Well, it took me back to how I started.
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You and me both, brother.
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My first event, I thought it was gonna be 500 people.
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Seven showed up and they re all different parts of the room.
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I m like, come down here to the front row.
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Yeah, that is the advantage from starting from ground level zero.
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All life could ever do is push you back to where you started.
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So it pushed me back to where I started.
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And where I started was preaching to the people that I imagined were listening.
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Oh, that s very cool, yes.
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Yeah, that s where I started.
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I started with an imaginary audience.
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Yeah, me too.
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And an imaginary crowd, and an imaginary need, and an imaginary circumstance.
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And from that, I began to speak to those empty chairs as if there were people there.
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And there s something about faith calls those things that are not as though they were.
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There s something about if you can envision
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yet, then you have the power to make that thing become whatever you envision it to be.
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And so when the room went empty.
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I didn t, I just envisioned it as if it were not.
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And I kept on talking, though I was an empty room I look like a fool, but people all over.
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my audience all over the world has quadrupled in this year.
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Our numbers have gone up 300% in this year.
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52 different countries zooming into our service in this year.
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And in spite of the atrocity of the virus and the social justice issues and all of that,
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it created a vortex where people all over the world are looking for something to hold on to while life is filled with boisterous winds and gailing air all around us, leaving us in a tempestuous situation for which there seems to be nothing solid to hold on to.
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That s when faith becomes almost tangible in the absence of anything to hold on to other than the inner strength of your convictions.
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It s like working out in the gym and they put you on a ball and tell you to lift weights.
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And because of the process of everything being unstable, you find your core.
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So the core of who we are is strengthened when everything else is shaking around us.
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That s when our core becomes more solidified and more profound.
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I wanted to say this too.
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I think when you talk about everybody suffers, that s true, but people who are trying to think analytically and in a linear fashion find it the most difficult when they are suffering because they have not
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allowed space.
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Yeah, they re not emotionally fit, they haven t been worked out before.
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It s like if you ve had a kid that s protected his whole life, never breaks a bone, he s scared to break his bones as an adult, but if you broke all your bones, it s like, give it to me baby, I m gonna live this life, right?
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Exactly.
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And for them, what I talk about, don t drop the mic,
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Struggle with finding words to express abstract ideas and struggle with it and if it s better to write it, write it.
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If it s better to speak it, speak it.
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And don t start out talking on social media.
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about sensitive issues.
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The reason we often alienate audiences is that we re talking to the world about something that we should be talking to a friend about.
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Because if there is a trust relationship, and I call you and I say, hey, I m thinking about this idea.
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Does this sound crazy to you?
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And you say, hey, man, if I were you, I wouldn t say that because somebody could take that this way or that way.
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We try it out on millions of billions
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Billions of people, you know, and they were shocked when we get all of this blowback coming back at us, because you cannot.
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If your world does not reflect the world that you speak to on social media, then you haven t developed the skills to speak to that audience yet.
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Until your audience, your life becomes a microcosm of your following, then you have no litmus group to test your ideas to see how they respond in different settings.
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And that s absolutely true, I echo everything you said.
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And Aristotle also said, to avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing and be nothing.
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Which is not an option for anybody who really cares.
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And we also live in a culture now where it used to be, if you didn t like something, I don t like that film, you just didn t watch it.
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Now somebody wants to cancel it and get rid of it and everything else.
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It s a funny little phase we re going through.
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Funny is the nicest word that I can find for it.
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Let s talk about it.
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fear for a second, because, you know, if someone s going to pick up a book and says, I want to be a greater communicator, and I m going to do it beyond one person, even with one person, it can happen to depend upon the person.
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You know, one of the biggest fears people have besides dying, it s rated up there in the top two or three, is public speaking.
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And I don t have that fear.
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I remember in the beginning, but in the beginning, I was thinking about me.
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And very quickly, I learned there s zero fear if I m not thinking about how I m doing, but I m focused on serving you and I m noticing what s working.
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And if it doesn t, not being attached to it, just changing, changing, changing until I find it because I m here to serve.
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You always tell people if you re afraid, it s because you re thinking about yourself.
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That s my approach.
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What is your approach to coaching someone who might be saying, gosh, I really have a voice.
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I want to share, but I m just afraid, especially in the world we re talking about.
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You already gave some good advice about their audience.
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What about just dealing with the fear of getting up and speaking in front of a group of people?
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I think that you grow as a speaker and you re not gonna go from being silent all the time to being an orator that speaks in front of millions of people on the first trip.
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Let s start with three.
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Let s start with 10.
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I think we have, you know, the times we live in now, everything is instant, instant gratification.
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immediately.
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Greatness is not something, it s not an app you download.
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It s something that has to grow like a rose bush.
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It has to grow, it has to evolve, it has to bud and blossom and bring forth fruit.
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That whole process is necessary because it informs itself as it develops.
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As it develops, it increases itself.
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It becomes more profound as it develops.
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So I would say to them to start out in a room you know before you go into a room you don t.
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And to begin to build confidence and some dexterity, a wit, and nimbleness of mind starts in small spaces.
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And I m going to say something that s really strange.
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And this may kill the whole interview.
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Talk to yourself.
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That s great.
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Talk to yourself.
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I agree.
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We don t engage ourselves.
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We don t entertain ourselves.
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We have so many things to entertain us that we don t use our brain anymore to entertain us.
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One of the great privileges of growing up poor, I was poor but I didn t know it, but one of the great things about being a poor kid who didn t get toys, you had to create toys out of sticks and rocks and go down and play in creek beds and it made you creative.
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And so sometimes you have
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to get there before you get there, and you have to talk before you get in the room, and get the rehearsal of being able to verbalize what you are trying to happen.
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To verbalize it is quite different.
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When you take a couple in my business, and you take a couple and you bring them in for counseling, and they have to verbalize what they re angry about, a lot of times it s very difficult for them to put it into words.
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So they start insulting each other.
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No, no, no, no, no, no.
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You don t get to insult her.
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I want you to verbalize what you are angry about.
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And the more they begin to verbalize, they have to calm down to do that.
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They have to think to do that.
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They have to get engaged to do that.
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And in the process, a little fairness creeps in and a little perspective creeps in and little by little.
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But if I just allow you to sling insults and rage and what we do now, we call you names.
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you re a race baiter, you re this, you re that, you re homophobic, whatever we want to call you, we call you a name to avoid listening.
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Because once I can put you in a category, I isolate you there and I don t give you credit for being a human being.
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You re a white man.
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You re a black man.
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Anytime people can put a label on you, they can put you in a file and discredit you.
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And that s why I don t like labels.
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Even when people say that I m a minister, I say, yes, I m a minister, but don t put a period where God put a comma.
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I m a person.
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I m a thinker.
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I m a leader.
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I m a CEO.
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I m a creator.
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I m a writer.
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I m a man.
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I m a father.
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I m a guy.
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I m a fool.
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I m crazy.
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funny, I m stupid, I m smart.
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All of that is sitting in this chair right now.
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And to have the whole spectrum of yourself engaged in the process when you speak to people.
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Because I ve heard you speak.
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You ll make them laugh.
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You ll make them cry.
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You ll have everybody jumping and leaping through fire and doing cartwheels and stuff like that.
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You can get them in, but you bring all of Tony Robbins comes to the stage.
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It s not just a piece of him.
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It s all of him that comes to the stage.
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And I think that in order for you to be a great orator, you have to know who you are and bring all of yourself with you when you stand behind the mic.
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And when I said, don t drop the mic, that means that the mic is attached to something.
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It s influence, it s power.
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It s not just speaking.
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It s a platform, it s a stage.
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it s drama, it s film, it s music, it s song.
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Whatever God gave you to work with, that is your microphone and you cannot drop it.
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I love you personally.
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I think you know that.
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I d love a strong word for a lot of people, but it s just the truth.
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I also think that when you look at what makes you effective in my mind, looking across the table at you, it s all those parts of you that you described that people don t want to take in because it s too hard.
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Most people are cognitive misers.
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They just want to figure it out real quick.
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Also, they don t want anything they have to be questioned.
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So the fastest way to not be questioned or have to think or communicate or
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persuade or share or anything, it s just label somebody.
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But the one thing that I think, and you tell me if I m wrong, that is behind it all, the one thing that ll go through every shield is not judgment but love.
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I mean, you can t influence somebody while you re judging them.
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You pour so much love.
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I loved my audiences.
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I really think and feel who they are.
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I know they re different everywhere.
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Like you, I ve had to adapt as well.
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I mean, I went from
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2019, a typical year, going to 116, 117 cities in 17 or 18 countries, some two or three times.
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Four, five, six, seven day programs, quarter million people to two and a half million people this year.
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And I ve got to be home.
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That s why I now have a whole baby girl, because I don t have to be a nomad.
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I m still doing some live events.
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But when I go to China, I think, what s different than when I m in Japan?
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And then even amongst them, who s there in that audience from that country and what s going on?
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What is the culture?
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What is the experience?
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So most people don t want to do that, but where is love in the magic of your power?
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It s everything.
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I think so too, brother.
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It s absolutely everything.
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It s absolutely everything.
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I told my people, I said, if you love these people, you got through to them.
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But if you re sitting here trying to do a presentation, just go home.
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Yeah.
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It s everything.
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And you know what s funny about it?
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When somebody loves you, you can feel it.
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Yes.
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You can sense it.
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You know, it s great to say it, but you can also sense
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the legitimacy of it comes through in the way you engage with the person.
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And not only can we feel our love toward each other, the people who are listening at us can also feel that.
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It s infectious, it s contagious, it spreads, it spreads through the audience, it spreads through the family, it spreads through the corporation, it spreads through
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I took a tour several years ago, I talked about it in the book, about going to Nike.
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And everybody from the gate to the CEO, everybody was saying the same thing about the company, how it started, what was important to it.
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The message had permeated the entire staff of thousands and thousands of people.
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They were all infectiously excited about Nike.
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about Nike.
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And I left there, I was so inspired, not only about Nike, but I thought, I want that in my life.
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I want that in my office.
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I want that in my family.
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The synergism where we have the same story and the same enthusiasm, regardless of our status, it means that the brand has gone in before it goes out.
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Sometimes we re trying to get the brand to go out, but it hasn t gone in.
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And you have to build the brand inwardly before you build it outwardly.
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And that s true of our culture here.
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You know, Nike, they don t talk about the mistakes they ve made, which they ve made plenty, right?
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Child, the usage of piece overs.
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I mean, you can go on and on if you want to tear Nike down, but you can also look at what they ve created.
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The number of people whose lives have been touched, the jobs, the people, people going to school, all those things.
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And they re focused.
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I always tell people what s wrong is always available.
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We need to look at it so we can fix it.
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But if it s constant,
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You ve missed life.
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What s right is always available.
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And if we can t spend more time on what s right, we can t unify.
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We got to both hear what s wrong and address it, and also feel what s right, because otherwise there s no balance.
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Then it just becomes judgment and there s no love.
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And I think the penetration, the unifying factor that makes somebody a great leader is they create a culture.
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Average people follow the culture.
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Leaders create a culture.
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And if it s a culture of love, everyone will feel it.
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And like you said, it s infectious.
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It starts to touch everyone.
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I think what happens, I want to say this because I think it s important.
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Yes.
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Anytime you start dealing with sensitive issues between a couple, between races, between cultures, between countries.
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Yes.
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What we often look for because we are solution oriented is who do I blame?
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Whose fault is this?
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Okay.
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And if you enter into the stream from whose fault is this, you can t resolve the problem.
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I had this experience that I shared.
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I think people were really enjoying the book, but I was driving down the road and I was a young man and I came over a hill in West Virginia.
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And when I came over the hill, there was a car wreck.
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And I pulled over to the side of the road.
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I ran over to the man.
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There was blood all over the windshield.
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The windshield was cracked and he was bleeding.
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And I said to him, do you want me to call the police?
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And he said, no, call an ambulance.
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I never forgot it because calling the police means who was at fault.
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Calling an ambulance means I just want to get better.
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We can figure out who gets the ticket later.
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Right now, I need an ambulance.
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I think we re calling the police on a society that needs an ambulance.
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And until we understand that telling the truth about our history isn t blaming you,
6
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It s owning the reality without painting this facade of who we really are so that we can demystify why we are the way we are now.
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We have to go all the way back to what happened then.
6
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You can t come in at the last scene of a movie and figure out the movie from the last scene.
6
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You ve got to go all the way back to the beginning and find out why this character is enraged.
6
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So when we might shoot it out of sequence,
6
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But when you air it, you have to air it in sequence.
6
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And what s wrong with us today is we can t have a conversation about then, because all we hear when we talk about yesterday is that s not my fault.
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That s the police talking.
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I want the ambulance.
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I m just telling you why I m bleeding, OK?
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And so if we would stop being defensive,
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which kills marriages, which kills employees, which kills harmony as a country.
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The moment we stop being defensive, we get greater.
6
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On 9-11, for a period of time, we stopped being defensive and we got greater.
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We weren t arguing.
6
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We unified.
6
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We unified up under attack.
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We immediately unified and all of a sudden the country stood in solidarity and nobody cared who was rich, who was poor, who was black, who was white, who was Democratic, who was Republican.
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We had been attacked and I m saying it shouldn t take 3,000 people falling on fire out of a building to bring us together and remind us that we are better together than we are apart.
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So well said.
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So beautiful.
6
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So beautiful.
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Listen, I think that we re living in a time in which unification is the power and we have to be able to go back and bring it forward.
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We have to understand where things stand.
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But we also, just like in a relationship, in those relationships you re talking about, the question I want to know is not just, what do you want?
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What do you need more importantly than even what you want?
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To me, I used to have these big mission statements when I was a kid growing up.
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I m going to be an expression of God s greatest love, and I m going to inspire millions of people.
6
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And it went on for like 45 minutes.
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Now my mission s really simple.
6
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How can I help?
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And it feels so sincere and real, and it shows up every way.
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How can I serve?
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How can I help?
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And I think when we come to that place, it gets rid of a lot of those pieces because it shows this is what I m here for.
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I want this to be better for you.
6
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And I think we have to show that to each other.
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Like you said, whether it s in a relationship that is intimate or whether it s a business one or whether it s a racial situation or it s another country, it s there.
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Absolutely.
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And we have to be patient.
6
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Yes, the patient, because sometimes if a doctor walks into the hospital room and ask the patient, what do you need, he may not have the
6
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to be able to articulate what he needs.
6
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But if you ask him how he feels, he can tell you how he feels.
6
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It hurts right here.
6
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I don t know what I need to fix it, but it hurts right here.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that while we develop the language, it takes a while, even in a marriage.
6
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If my wife walks in there right now and says, what do you need?
6
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you know, it depends, you know, are we talking about dinner?
6
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What do you want?
6
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What do you need?
6
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How can I help?
6
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But if you will let me find my way into the conversation
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because I may not have the ability, and when I don t have the ability, Dr. King said that rioting is the language of the oppressed.
6
SPEAKER_01
When I don t have the ability to articulate what I need, all I can do is be angry, and I m just angry, and I want you to fix it, but I don t know how to write the prescription.
6
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So what has to happen is, when we know someone is injured,
6
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We have to understand their limitations to articulate what is wrong and figure out what they need.
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In a relationship, sometimes I want my wife to fix something that I never even articulated was wrong and got angry with her because she didn t respond to something that I never even said.
6
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Or maybe if I walk in there and say, what s wrong with you?
6
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And she just starts crying.
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I don t know.
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I don t know.
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I have to take the time.
6
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to allow, to be patient with the patient because they don t always have the ability to write the prescription because their thoughts are blocked by their pain.
6
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And I think America is hurting right now.
6
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The people who are the most angry in this country are the people who are the most hurting.
6
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whether it s middle america where the steel mills have shut down and the farmers are not making money and the crops are not growing and there s an oppression there or whether it s urban areas where there s issues where you re trapped by an
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invisible walls of systemic racial complexities that are difficult to articulate.
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It s education.
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It s housing.
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It s so many things.
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It s family.
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It s generational problems.
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So understanding that we all have these needs.
7
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We have to be patient with the patient.
7
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And those of us who don t have those needs black, white and brown and they are black, white and brown, who don t have those needs on the basis of the fact that we don t have those needs but we have other needs.
7
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That s the brotherhood of humanity.
7
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I might not need what Tony needs, but I need something.
7
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And I can relate to your need because I know what it is to be successful and still have a need.
7
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Because people often think that if they see you on TV, you don t need anything.
7
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That if you got a nice car, you don t need anything.
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And sometimes you don t even notice the car you re driving.
7
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because of the pain you re feeling.
7
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And sometimes we don t treat the successful because we buy into the myth that success cures personal pain, and it doesn t always do that.
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No, it does not.
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It rarely does that, actually.
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Dr. Thomas was a big influence on this book and big influence on you in so many beautiful ways.
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I know he wanted, it appears, to make sure that your place in history was there as well by articulating this unique way in which you ve been able to communicate to hundreds of millions of people around the world through all these different tools that you have and the scalability that technology brings us, but you brought a message to it that went beyond scalability, went to the heart.
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And one of the great ways he described, or you together described, what you do was use the metaphor of cooking.
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And I learned by reading the book, I didn t know that you really enjoyed cooking.
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But having this idea of a recipe, this idea that you need the ingredients, but you also need the directions.
7
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And the combination is the essence of how you get something done, even as a communicator.
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But I also found, and I want to see if we could talk about three pieces he described that are part of your background.
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You talked about how you always do things from scratch, meaning these
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fundamental ingredients that you use, and that many of those come from the Christian tradition.
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Some of those obviously come from the African American tradition and a combination of the two.
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He listed many examples, but there s three that he pointed out that I really found interesting.
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One was drama.
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You know, this idea that you can use drama effectively to capture the human spirit, to awaken somebody to something.
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And then the second we talked about was the will to adorn this idea that we have this desire, all of us, it comes from within, this desire to have beauty, experience beauty, surround yourself with beauty, but
7
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He gave some really unique understandings to me, the white American, as to why, let s say, African-Americans are pulled in a certain direction.
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Some people think exaggerated beauty or overdone beauty.
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And he said, there s never enough beauty and it s never overdone.
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I just thought it was fascinating and it made total sense.
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And then the third one was storytelling and folklore, which you re magical at all three.
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So can we start maybe with drama?
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And when he described drama, he gave these six elements.
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I wrote them down here.
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Let s see where they are.
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The freedom of bodily expression.
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He s talking about drama and the African American communication, African American churches.
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that what was unique about it was you would use the freedom of full body expression, the freedom of emotion to be expressed, the tone that could vary, the volume and the call and response, and then those pregnant silences.
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And it s like, I read about it, it s like, you know, Quincy Jones always said to me one time, he goes, you know, it s your DNA tone.
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And somebody goes, you re damn near African.
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And if those are the criteria, I certainly match a part of it.
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But tell me a little bit about how important drama is for someone to be effective in the communicator, whoever they re talking to.
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And then let s take a second to look at this idea of adorned beauty and a little bit of storytelling.
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We ll do them one at a time if we can.
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You know, first of all, let s take the drama.
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Christ spoke in parables, no stories.
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And they were dramatic stories.
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And he did them to describe the abstract kingdom that we couldn t see.
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And it said the kingdom of heaven is lacking.
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And so drama takes something that you can t touch and brings it down to something that you can relate to.
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And drama connects us, it connects us with abstract ideas and brings it center stage, often through the dynamics of a story, because it is easier to scrutinize a character than it is to admit that s me.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So sometimes I can teach you something through a character.
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A certain man had two sons.
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I can teach you something through a character that I couldn t say to you directly.
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How are you treating your kids?
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You don t spend enough time with your kids.
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You re going to get defensive.
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Oh, yes, I do.
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I do so-so.
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But if I tell you a certain man had two sons, I don t have to fight through your defense
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Plus, stories entrance you, right?
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They take you internal.
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If I want you to think about your high school years, I talk about mine.
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If I want to talk about your mom, I ll talk about my mom.
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And you go there.
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You can t help it, right?
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Exactly.
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And all of a sudden, you are in that moment.
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A perfect example of that was when George Floyd cried out from Benicio Chavez s knee for his mother.
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Yes.
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white women, black women, brown women, every mother on the planet said, saw her child under that knee.
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Hold up.
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You know, he s calling for mama.
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I m coming, baby.
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You know, there are certain things that are common to us.
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And drama creates that.
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That s why the arts are so important, because drama creates a platform to do that.
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The second thing that I want to say about drama is important.
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In a remote control world where we click a button and we can cut you off, we re not going to sit there long if you re standing there like a stick and the only thing moving is your lips and you don t have any drama.
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When we re used to being sensory overload through all of the devices that we have and we re watching multiple screens simultaneously,
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and now you want to bring me in for an hour and lecture me and hold and captivate my attention.
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I think the drama, the full engagement, the whole cacophony of the orchestration of you, what makes an orchestra beautiful is how we take all of these different instruments and orchestrate them to produce a song or tune.
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That s the same thing that a speaker does when you
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take all of you and it s not just bringing it and throwing it all on the table.
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It is being able to orchestrate it in such a way that there is harmony to produce an expected end.
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So we do that through the instrument of dramatization.
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When we start talking about adorning,
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Yes.
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We had to adorn.
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Poverty demands adornment.
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You know, poverty demands- Explain to me what you mean by adornment, if you would.
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To decorate, to enhance, to take an abstract idea and make it visual, to make it colorful, to make it more palatable.
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Adornment is what we do with food when we season it.
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You know, what are we having for dinner tonight?
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When the kids come in the house and say, what are we having for dinner tonight?
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And you don t say, well, we re having cumin, and we re having cinnamon, and we re having a little paprika, and seasoned salt, and a little bit of garlic powder sprinkled over chicken.
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You don t give them the adornment.
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You tell them we re having chicken.
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But when they taste it,
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The adornment is how you season it that made the chicken exceptional.
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Because if you actually just gave them the chicken without the adornment, it would not be nearly as sensational.
7
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So the ability for a speaker to be able to bring seasoning to the statement causes it to be an experience and not something to be endured, but something to be experienced.
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And people walk out saying, you should have been there.
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I can t even tell it like he told it, but you should have been there.
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What they re saying is, I didn t have the cumin, and I didn t have the garlic powder, and I didn t have the crushed cloves, but there was something about that chicken that was exceptional.
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And it s always not the chicken, it s the adornment.
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And so to adorn a message, to adorn an address, sometimes it is the fact that you fell down on your knee to propose.
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It is the fact that you had music in the background for the first kiss.
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It is the fact that the tinkling of Chablis glasses connecting together.
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It makes the moment memorable.
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All of that enhances.
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It adorns the moment.
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It isn t the moment, but it adorns the moment.
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And so we come from a history that required adornment because we didn t have money and we didn t have things.
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So we had to adorn the moment through little things like jumping the broom when we got married, which was the African tradition.
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You had to adorn the moment.
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We couldn t go shopping for wedding gowns and do all of that sort of thing.
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But that does not mean that there is not a poetry even in poverty, that there is not class and beauty even in pain.
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There are certain things that adorn even the most unpalatable situations that cause them that you have to back up and look at it and say, wow.
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I never will forget being in Soweto in Alexandria in South Africa.
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they re going into this very oppressed area and they had dirt floors.
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And I noticed the floors were dirt, no wood, no tile, no carpet, nothing like that.
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They were dirt floors, but they were swept.
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They swept them with brooms.
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They kept it neat and it was beautiful.
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And you could see the broom marks in the dirt.
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They adorned what they had.
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So if you don t adorn a hut, you won t adorn a mansion.
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And so the art of great speaking is to adorn it until justice flows down like mighty streams of living water, cascading down into the deepest parts and the dungeons of lower Alabama until, you know, that s adornment.
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That s adornment, all right.
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You know.
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the mastery of linguistics to adorn something that otherwise would be hard for the audience to hear.
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But Dr. King was masterful at adorning a text.
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I sure was.
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And what makes somebody a great storyteller?
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There s drama as a part of that.
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What other component is there that makes a great storyteller?
8
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Because
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You know, Jesus, as you said, was a great storyteller.
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I think part of it is he related to people with his stories.
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You know, he didn t go, say, go recruit Christians.
8
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He went to the fishermen and said, become fishers of men, right?
8
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Oh, I understand the whole process.
8
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Put a little out, they bite, bring them in.
8
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So, but what do you think makes somebody a great storyteller or how can someone become a better storyteller?
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When we don t
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leave spaces where words in to communicate ideas and that is to say, I ll use a Bible story because they re easy for me.
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Blind Bartimaeus the Bible says, the son of Timaeus sat by the highway side begging.
8
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and he heard that Jesus was passing by.
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It doesn t describe the Palestinian wind, the sand that had cut into his bones, the aches and pains and the disappointment of being sat there every day.
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It just says he sat by the highway side begging.
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And then it doesn t dramatize the fact that though he was blind, he could hear.
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And how in spite of losing one thing, he had not lost everything.
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And he had learned how to use what he did have against what he did not have.
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That s not written there, but that s part of the story.
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And he cries out to Jesus at this high decibel pitch scream, have mercy on me.
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But if that s all you read, but you didn t read the intensity behind it, that it was the desperation that provoked the scream and that his heartbeat was racing and his blood was pulsing through his veins.
8
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restrained when he screamed above the crowd to catch the notice of a fleeting moment that if he lost this moment, he may have lost his miracle.
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And so desperation drives him beyond protocol and makes him become more rambunctious and demonstrative to get the attention of the only help available because it was in fact passing by.
8
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So when I stopped, you see that?
8
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So what I said, it was in fact in a pause, that s the pregnant pause.
8
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It allows the hearer a moment to catch up to the dramatization of the moment.
8
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Or you just read the words.
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And how empty is that?
8
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And why do you need a preacher if you re just going to read the words, right?
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Yeah, when I read words, I see pictures.
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That s why I do movies.
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That s why I do films.
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I see pictures.
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And then I describe the picture, not just the word, but I describe the picture that is created so that you have a sensory perception that goes beyond that which is intellectual and goes down to the soul.
8
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And you can feel Blind Bartimaeus and his desperation and his groping, pressing feet, standing.
8
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up and crawling to get to Jesus in the hopes that he might leave just a wee better than how he came.
8
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You step into the experience as if you re there and you- Absolutely.
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As I always say, you can t move people if you re not moved.
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You can t touch people if you re not touched.
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And unless you re in the experience, you can t bring someone to that experience.
8
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And you are magnificent both in linguistics, but your capacity to step into that moment and live it as if you are there yourself and share it with your audience allows them to experience it as well.
8
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It s gorgeous.
8
SPEAKER_00
You talked about having the ingredients and then having the instructions.
8
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But you and I both go off the instructions.
8
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In fact, you talk about that in your book.
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You said, I forget the languages, but something like, you know, what great communication is, I m forgetting the exact language, but it s the capacity to follow those directions until you don t, like knowing when not.
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When do you know not to, I have my own version, but when do you know not to get rid of what you thought you re going to do?
8
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So often I ll work with my team, my creative team.
8
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I m crazy.
8
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I over-prepare.
8
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I ll work for hours and hours, days and days, lay it out, lay out a
8
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I m a syntactician, I believe sequence matters.
8
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The dog bit Johnny, Johnny bit the dog.
8
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Very different if you re Johnny, right?
8
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So I know sequence matters and I feel it and I lay it all out.
8
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And then I go to the audience and 80 or 90% of the time, I ll use some of those things, but not in the sequence, because I just feel something else is needed right now.
8
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I can see it, I can feel it.
8
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I don t do it based on a presupposed element in most cases.
8
SPEAKER_00
So how do you know when to go off script?
8
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And give us an example of you going off script and why it was more effective, if you don t mind.
8
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Let me answer you in a long roundabout way, and I ll try to be quick.
8
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I m in Johannesburg, and I was invited to go on a safari as a part of being a guest speaker there for these billionaires that they had over there.
8
SPEAKER_01
They invited me to go on a safari, and it was my first time going on a safari.
8
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I took my son with me.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I m sitting beside on a Jeep early that morning.
8
SPEAKER_01
My wife wasn t here going.
8
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She stayed in the house with the doors closed peeking through the window and all the animals.
8
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My son and I got up early and we got out there and we went.
8
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And I m sitting beside a zoologist who was driving the Jeep.
8
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And out on the end of the engine of the Jeep is a metal chair place where a Zulu is sitting there with a rifle and we re going through the jungle.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the zoologist is explaining all of the various components of the zoo, how the animals  teeth are cut in such a way that when they bite the branch, they prune it without destroying it, and how nature is so designed, or God, if he pleases, so designed the planet to be self-sustaining, right down to the hoof prints of the animals and what it does to the soil.
8
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It s very interesting.
8
SPEAKER_01
But the problem was, we had been driving all day and we had not seen the elephants.
8
SPEAKER_01
And he explained the elephants, but he couldn t find them.
8
SPEAKER_01
Toward the end of the day, the Zulu stood up on the edge of the Jeep and licked his fingers and put it up in the air.
9
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and said, the elephant is over there.
9
SPEAKER_00
And all of a sudden my head exploded.
9
SPEAKER_00
My head exploded because, not because of the majesty of the elephant, so that was incredible.
9
SPEAKER_00
Not because we found the elephant, so I wanted to do that.
9
SPEAKER_00
My head exploded because suddenly I realized I was sitting in between intellect, he could explain it, and instinct, he could find it.
9
SPEAKER_00
You have to engage both intellect and instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
Intellect makes you able to remember a particular piece of content, information, data, stats, whatever it is that you re getting ready to deliver.
9
SPEAKER_00
Instinct tells you
9
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it, how to convey it in a way that is most effective.
9
SPEAKER_00
An instinct happens in moment.
9
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It doesn t happen on the paper.
9
SPEAKER_00
It happens in the moment.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s an instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
I have gotten up to speak with things written down on a piece of paper, and right before I got up to speak, thought, throw your notes away.
9
SPEAKER_00
Same with me.
9
SPEAKER_01
Have you ever done that?
9
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Tons.
9
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Most of the time, actually.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I m not exaggerating, it is most of the time.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I still value feeding my brain in advance.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of like making deposits in a bank account so when you go to cash and check, it doesn t bounce.
9
SPEAKER_01
And if you ve made so many deposits of experience and life and emotion and commitment to understanding who you re here to communicate with and what you re passionate about, what you think can help them,
9
SPEAKER_01
then there s plenty to pull from.
9
SPEAKER_01
But as part of like, you know, result, I always tell people success in life is a result of good judgment, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
You make good decisions, you re gonna have a great life.
9
SPEAKER_01
Good judgment comes from experience, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
That s where part of our instinct comes from.
9
SPEAKER_01
And experience often comes from bad judgment, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
It s like learning.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I think trusting that instinct, whether you have history or not, you re still a human being.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I think we all have it, but people don t always trust it.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that s one of the great gifts that you have.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s why the spontaneity of what you do.
9
SPEAKER_01
You ve done your homework.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know your core message, the messenger that you re describing, or what is your message.
9
SPEAKER_01
But you also can vary in the moment and embody it all.
9
SPEAKER_01
All those pieces.
9
SPEAKER_00
If you think about it, intellect, on the level that we re talking, is unique to the human species.
9
SPEAKER_00
But instinct is common to all forms of life.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s why turtles lay eggs on the beach,
9
SPEAKER_00
the moment that the turtle eggs are hatched, they instinctively turn toward the water and sea turtles will immediately flap their way down to the water without instruction.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s why birds fly south in the winter.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s why whales mate in Mexico in January and December to March because it s instinct to go where the waters are warm.
9
SPEAKER_00
for the birthing and the raising of their babies.
9
SPEAKER_00
Instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we have both.
9
SPEAKER_00
Good God, we have both.
9
SPEAKER_00
We have intellect.
9
SPEAKER_00
We ve got the zoologist.
9
SPEAKER_00
We have the intellect.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we ve got the Zulu.
9
SPEAKER_00
We ve got the instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
And if we put them together, because sometimes what
9
SPEAKER_00
What wins your son, if you re losing ground with him, isn t your intellect, your degrees, your accomplishments, or writing him a check.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s the instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
to understand this is a be there moment.
9
SPEAKER_00
Be there moments do not come with warning labels.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s instinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so the instinct is just as important as the intellect.
9
SPEAKER_00
Whether you re building a sermon, whether you re pulling a cake out of the oven, the instinct says, the recipe said, leave it in there for an hour and 20 minutes.
9
SPEAKER_00
My instinct says, it s done at an hour and 10.
9
SPEAKER_00
My instinct overrides my intellect.
9
SPEAKER_00
I pull it out then and I left it in the full time for a mile and it would have been dry.
9
SPEAKER_00
But my instinct saves my intellect.
9
SPEAKER_00
What we want to do and the reason I wrote the book is to adorn you with both, both the intellect and the instinct to be able to be better at verbalizing, the sensitivity to know when,
9
SPEAKER_00
and where and how to bring your best self to the stage, whether the stage is a typewriter, a laptop, whether the stage is the company you own, or whether the stage is the family you love.
9
SPEAKER_00
We don t want to lose any stages.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the thing that will cause you to lose the stage is if you don t recognize the value of the mic.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s beautiful.
9
SPEAKER_01
You just did the best summary of your book that anybody could give.
9
SPEAKER_01
Of course you would.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s your book.
9
SPEAKER_01
I hope people pick it up.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think instincts and intellect are harnessed when you have a purpose that s bigger than yourself.
9
SPEAKER_01
When there s a purpose for what you re doing more than yourself, there s something about life that supports something that s supporting more of life.
9
SPEAKER_01
If you re doing it for yourself, certainly life s going to show up for you.
9
SPEAKER_01
But if you re trying to do it for your family,
9
SPEAKER_01
You re supporting more of life.
9
SPEAKER_01
You re different inside a community, humanity.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m not talking about virtual signaling bullshit.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m talking about you know what s in your heart.
9
SPEAKER_01
In my experience, the instinct and the intellect come together for a higher purpose.
9
SPEAKER_01
And you don t have to think about it.
9
SPEAKER_01
It just comes through you.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then it s your job, as you said, to recognize and use it.
9
SPEAKER_01
But when you re already focused on serving, it tends to happen, in my experience.
9
SPEAKER_00
So let me ask you.
9
SPEAKER_00
I think the older you get, the closer you get to valuing
9
SPEAKER_00
selfless giving of toward purpose and destiny and legacy.
9
SPEAKER_00
I think when you re younger you re trying to prove to yourself, do I have anything.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And once you answer that initial question, do I have something.
9
SPEAKER_00
The question becomes, how can I use it to better serve something bigger than myself?
9
SPEAKER_00
Because suddenly, in the middle of my life, I realized that I am not living with you.
9
SPEAKER_00
I am dying with you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Your own mortality, without a doubt.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
The moment I know that I am not living with you, that I am dying with you, then our conversation becomes so rich.
9
SPEAKER_00
True.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, talking to you right now, I lose sight of the fact that anybody will hear our conversation.
9
SPEAKER_00
Our conversation becomes so rich.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because we were chosen not only to live together, but to die together.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we re having this conversation while the clock is ticking.
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Yes.
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While the clock is ticking.
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And we will never, if we do this again tomorrow, at the same time, in the same place, in the same clothes, we could not recreate this moment to save our lives.
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This moment stands in a category all by itself to be savored.
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to be enjoyed, and then it dissipates.
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It goes to live in our memory bank until our memories are gone.
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Yes.
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You make it so rich because you said, my wife, I always call her Dr. Death because she always compares everything to death in this area.
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But death being a counselor, not a jailer, that s the difference.
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Some people think of it as a jailer and it becomes fear.
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And I think you quoted somebody in the book here,
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or you re talking about when we fear something, we either worship it or we don t understand something, we worship it.
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It was Alice Walker.
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We either worship it or we fear it, right?
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Learning how to utilize that as a counselor so that you find a more deep meaning in your life is so powerful.
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So I wanna ask you, in a world that s so divided, if we re not gonna drop the mic and we re gonna use our intellect, not just spew things and our instinct
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What are the most important things that those of us who have a voice, and we all have one, when the world we re in today, everybody has a voice, the question is, will you be heard?
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Right?
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And it doesn t even matter what the scale of reach is.
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It s the scale of depth of reach, right?
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It s not reach, like, I can get to this many people.
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It s how deep can I go?
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What would you say are some things, maybe some principles that you would say would guide someone to not drop the mic in that moment and to not push people away or bring in ways to make sure we find ways to appreciate and unify rather than separate?
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Because you talked about in the book, if I remember correctly, the language I think you used was something like those that
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communicate in a way that separates or builds a bridge.
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How do we, in those moments, not screw it up by just our own emotion or own desires, but use it to build a bridge instead of distancing or
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Let s let COVID-19 become our teacher.
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There are 8 billion people on the planet, but it infected us one at a time.
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The real change happens one at a time.
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It didn t affect every country at the same rate or the same pace, but little by little, one at a time, it spread.
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At first, we called it an epidemic.
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And then it kept spreading and spreading.
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And then they said, no, it s a pandemic.
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And then it became a matter.
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It was almost unstoppable when it happens one at a time.
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And that s something everybody listening at us can do.
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One at a time, we can change the world.
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If we delegate that responsibility to Congress or presidents or senators or governors,
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then we will misappropriate our own human responsibilities because the changing of the world begins with every inhabitant in the world.
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And so to the degree that you have influence.
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you start to change where you are.
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Whether you re an entrepreneur, you ve got three people on staff, and all of them look like you, act like you, dress like you, think like you, then you have the challenge to integrate your team and have an experience that not only creates diversity, but inclusion.
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Diversity invites me to the party, including
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Inclusion asks me to dance.
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So you start one by one by one.
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That s a great distinction.
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Will you say that again?
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I want everybody to hear that.
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That s beautiful.
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Diversity invites me to the party.
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Inclusion asks me to dance.
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That s gorgeous.
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That s gorgeous.
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I think we have been doing a lot of diversity.
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We ve invited people to the party.
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But they re never asked to dance.
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They don t go to the after hours, happy hour.
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They don t go to the event at the golf course.
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They re not really in our life.
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They re decoration for our books.
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And so when you include people and make them a part of the family, then our distinctions begin to change.
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And so it starts with who you invite to dinner.
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It starts with you coming to my house, not just me coming to yours.
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It s an amazing experience when you come out of areas that you control.
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How much more you learn about people when you don t control what time dinner starts and what we re going to have for dinner and what s going to be on the menu and what kind of music is going to be played.
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As long as you are in control, you may invite me into your control, but I m still subordinate.
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Give up the power of always being in control and sit down on the floor with the Japanese and have a meal, even though you re not good with chopsticks.
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Have the experience where you don t control all the variables.
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It starts on that level.
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Go through a neighborhood you drive past.
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The highways allow you to bypass it, and so does your heart.
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Because anything you can drive past, you can live past.
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Talking about having the experience.
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I ve always said that a belief is a poor substitute for an experience.
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Absolutely.
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You can have a belief about white, black, brown, and purple.
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You can have a belief about China, but until you go to China,
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and not a sanitized version of it, right?
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As you described, because we call it American experience is more of a sanitized one.
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But if you go be there with real people and real experience, then you start seeing the universals and you also see the differences.
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And then they don t just, you don t just learn them.
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Many of them become a part of you.
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My final question for you, dear brother, and thank you for going for so long and going forever with you.
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I just look at the time.
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Got way over, but thank you.
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And before I ask you that, I want to just remind everybody, you got to go pick up this book.
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If you re not convinced by now, you never will be, but go pick it up.
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You know, just don t drop the mic, right?
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This is your opportunity.
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My last question is simple.
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What s the purpose of your life at this stage at 63 years old?
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You know, like when I say purpose, like I said, everyone expresses it differently.
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There are many purposes.
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And what are you most passionate about today?
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I have always been somebody, one of those crazy nutcase individuals who thought he could change the world.
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And I remain optimistic that I can change the world.
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And with the degree of strength and days and wind and breath that I have left,
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I want to do things that leave the world better than when I found it.
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So when I look at real estate, I m looking at housing.
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I m looking at creating workforce housing and creating better community options for people who are first responders.
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Because now we re living in cities where the people who serve the city can t afford to live in the city they serve.
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So I had this lofty notion that I can change the world, that I can get inner city kids pointed towards science, technology, engineering, and math, that I can make inroads there by exposing them to
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summer classes on STEM and after school classes that help to subsidize what they re not getting in school.
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I still think I can change the world.
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Out of the 30,000 formerly incarcerated inmates that have gone through our Texas Offenders Reentry Initiative, on one hand, we re training the inmate for a job.
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And on the other hand, I m meeting with CEOs saying, will you give them a chance?
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And so I m trying to supply need and supply because sometimes there are CEOs who really want to make a difference.
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But you putting an ad in the Wall Street Journal won t reach the guy you re trying to touch.
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And so I want to be a bridge that connects supply and demand so that the best of us can go forward with the country rather than to sit around the pool waiting on those that we have elected to change the world because they are encumbered by politics when it comes to changing the policies
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they create a better, more holistic country and a better and safer world.
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Sometimes they have to obey the rules and it will take 10 years to do something that you and I can get together and do in 10 minutes if we don t relegate all the change to their plate.
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Certainly a degree of change belongs to them and only they can do it.
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But Dr. King wasn t a senator.
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He wasn t a mayor or a governor
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or president, he was dead at 39.
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And yet there s not hardly a country you can go into that doesn t know who he was.
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And he did all of it before he was 40.
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We are the people we have been waiting on.
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And it starts when we speak up, not when they speak up.
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It is when we speak up.
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And I still think I write toward that end, I live toward that end, that I could leave a legacy behind me that I change
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If I didn t change the world, I changed somebody s world.
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If I could change somebody s world, then to them, I changed the world.
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That s true.
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That s beautiful.
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Well, thank you for not only sharing with people how to be more effective communicators professionally, personally, but for the spiritual and soulful nourishment that you always bring because of who you are as a man and as a soul.
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Take in what you ve heard today from this man, soul to yours, and decide what can you do?
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What can you do today?
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Because so many times people say, I don t know how.
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Dr. King didn t know how.
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You know what and why.
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You know what needed to happen.
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You knew why it needed to happen.
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And then you know how will show up.
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The tyranny of how is what keeps people from stopping and starting, I should say.
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It s what stops people.
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So you re not one of those individuals.
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And I hope today people have been inspired on multiple levels to live a deeper, richer, and a more integrated life.
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So blessings to you, my brother.
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And thank you for your time once again.
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Thank you for your time and for the interview, and most of all, sincerely, on a personal note, I thank you for your friendship.
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It has often been a blanket that kept my heart warm.
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Thank you.
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You re better and more articulate than I am, but I think you can feel from my soul to yours how much I love and appreciate you.
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And I know people will be touched because people are touched by what s real and what s raw.
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And there s so much fake in the world.
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Even reality television is fake, as you well know.
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It s nice.
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A couple of brothers can get together and talk truthfully.
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So thank you for that great privilege, and I ll look forward to seeing you soon.
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Thank you.
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Take care.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is directed by Tony Robbins and produced by the Tony Robbins team.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.