Zibby is joined by entrepreneur, best-selling author, philanthropist, and the nation’s #1 life and business strategist Tony Robbins to talk about his latest book, Life Force, which covers incredible recent medical breakthroughs that can help add years to your life. The two discuss how Tony’s childhood inspired him to read over seven hundred books in just seven years on psychology, physiology, and philosophy which have shaped how he approaches the medical world today. Tony also shares some of the treatments that have significantly helped him and his family over the years, what he plans to do with his Fountain Life and Life Force Centers, and why he is attempting to donate at least a billion meals through his partnership with Feeding America. To learn more about Tony, see here!

Transcript:

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Tony. Thanks so much for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books” to discuss Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love.

Tony Robbins: Zibby, it’s a privilege to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you from some of my friends who have been on your show. Thanks for having me on.

Zibby: It’s a pleasure. This book changed my life. I was reading page after page. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, listen to this.” I kept reading out loud to my husband. I’m like, “There’s something you can do to inject your knees. You’re not going to have pain,” and this and that. Every chapter had something new and revolutionary and exciting. I am so energized about the book.

Tony: I’m so thrilled. First of all, thank you for taking the time to read it because not everybody does before they interview you. It’s a big book, as you can tell. I really wanted to write a guidebook that could give people the best that exists because there are breakthroughs happening in health right now — you know now — that most people don’t even know about that you would think would be twenty years in the future, and they’re happening today. If somebody’s got arthritis, there’s a single injection. It’s in FDA third-level trial. I’m sure you know, first is safety, second is efficacy, then third is efficacy at scale, and then it gets approved. They hope by the end of this year, beginning of next year, if you got arthritis, single injection. Causes your own stem cells to regrow your tendons in eleven months. It uses the initial genome, so it’s clean. It’s like sixteen-year-old tendons even if you’re forty or fifty or sixty years old. We’re living in the greatest time to be alive, and most of us don’t know it, especially in the COVID world where there’s been so much fear that we’ve not looked at all the cool things that are breaking through to help people.

That’s why I really wrote this. I wanted to write it because — I’m sure you get the same thing. You know so many people. About every ten days, two weeks max, someone’s calling me. They got cancer. Their mom or dad’s got Alzheimer’s. Someone’s got a stroke. I want to give them answers that are real, not the same old hashed things that are there. I wrote this book not only for me and my family, but for anyone so they’d have it for themselves, but for someone they love, like you talking about your husband. Here’s an answer. You wouldn’t even know it happens. Then you go, try these things. Many of them are relatively inexpensive, and a lot of them that are free, the natural things you can do. They completely change the quality of your life, radically. That’s why I wrote it. That’s why I was into it, other than my own injuries and things I had to be able to deal with.

Zibby: It’s literally like a preview. It’s like watching a movie trailer for all the things that are going to be better in the future. You’re like, this one’s not FDA-approved. Wait until 2028. I’m like, okay, I’m hanging in for that. It’s very exciting. Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet. That’s a pretty big goal for a book. If any of things actually pan out, and many of them obviously have, it’s mind-blowing to think about what that’s going to do for the community at large. What does it mean if we all start living longer and living better and aging becomes something that doesn’t necessarily have to happen in the same way that we predict?

Tony: To me, that’s the most exciting thing. What’s really cool is, you can have quality of life today. I’ve tried to make sure that about two-thirds of those things are things you can do now. Then the third are, okay, if you do this now, in the next twenty-four months — two years will go by like that. You’ll have these tools available, but you’ll be healthy enough to take advantage of those tools. That’s a big part of this process. As you said, there are people today — I’m old enough to remember having one of the first cell phones. This is a good idea of how technology works. We all know every eighteen months it basically doubles in its power and halves in its cost. You and I are code. Everything about health now is going in that area. A cell phone used to be, literally, a foot long. It weighed two pounds. You charged it for six hours so you could get thirty minutes of talk time. It cost ten thousand dollars in current dollars. It was four grand then. Now you got a phone that has a hundred times the power of what took us to the moon and back, and it’s free with a service over here. We’re at that beginning of this massive transformation. You have all the wealthiest people in the world who have technology, and they’re saying, I’m going to spend that money so that I can slow the aging or reverse the aging process. As you read, it’s actually happened. There are some tools that are really there. I’m excited to share with you. We’ll go wherever you want to go in this interview, but I’m excited to meet you.

Zibby: Yes, I’m like, I need to get that cream. I need to do the whole-body test. Literally, I’m like, okay, it looks like there’s one of these centers in Florida. We’ve got to get down to Florida. Then I kept reading. Thirty pages later, I was like, no, wait, there’s one in New York. We’ve got to find it. Let’s go back to you growing up because I found that very fascinating too, how it is that you loved books so much, your friend’s mom, Ginny, how you basically solved her cancer because of your determination and research skills and how you have continued to apply that nonstop. Here’s the proof. Tell me a little bit about growing up and why it was so important to you, what your childhood was like, and how all this came to be.

Tony: I grew up in a pretty tough environment. My mom was such a huge influence on who I became, but she also got addicted, unfortunately, to alcohol and prescription drugs. I had to really become a practical psychologist to learn how to manage that. Then I didn’t really have any role models. We were a very poor family in terms of financial terms. Not a lot of education in my family. I decided I was going to read a book a day. I took a speed-reading class when I was still in junior high school. I didn’t read a book a day, but in seven years I read about seven hundred-plus books, psychology, physiology, philosophy. It was my way to escape. I could enter into someone who’s in a concentration camp and made it through that. That made my life look a lot easier. Then I would share that. By the time I was in high school, I was Mr. Solution. You had a problem, I had a solution. Especially if you were a girl, I was highly motivated make that happen. I just loved people. I wanted those answers. As I grew up, those books became a basis for me.

I became a coach. There were no coaches in those days. There were sports coaches. I kind of developed a new industry. I learned to be able to turn people around with a lifetime phobia in less than twenty to thirty minutes when normally, they’d be in therapy three, five, seven years. I challenged psychiatrists in those days. I was a young, punky kid. I was on TV. I was like, I’ll do this in thirty minutes. You took them seven years. I’ll do it now. I built my name. Then I started working with athletes. At a very young age, I was very successful. Then there’s a part of our brain we all are probably familiar with. It’s that survival brain. It kicked in all of a sudden where I started thinking, wow, I have all this success at such a young age. I’m working twenty-hour days. It must be because I’m going to die young. Somehow, that thought got in my head. Then, it wasn’t going to be easy, like a truck was going to hit me. I was going to die slowly of cancer. I got obsessed. I don’t know what was wrong with my brain, but I didn’t know how to run it in those days.

Zibby: As someone who thinks about their death all the time, any opportunity, I’m like, what if it’s going to happen here? What if I get in this plane? What if I do this? What if it’s right here but no one’s going to know that I went to this store here? They’re not going to find me for a really long time if there’s some — when I read that about you, I was like, I don’t usually think about slow, drawn-out, terrible deaths. I usually think about all these horrible, immediate deaths.

Tony: I don’t want to influence you to think of slow death.

Zibby: I know. Now I’m like, great. Now I have something new to add to the list. Anyway, I relate. Keep going.

Tony: What happened was, it got so crazy bad, I was having nightmares about it and so forth. Then sure enough, you focus on something long enough, it shows up in your life. It showed up later in my life, but the first time was not me. It was my girlfriend. She comes home crying uncontrollably. “What is it? What is it?” “My mom. My mom.” “Your mom what?” “My mom has cancer.” It was like, oh, my god. They’ve sent her home. She’s got nine weeks to live. Something in me kicked in. I don’t think I would’ve done it for me. You’re a mom. I’m a dad and a grandpa. We’ll do more for others we love. Somehow, I’ve always believed there’s an answer. You may get it too late, but there’s an answer to anything. You got to find the answers. There are lots of people at stage-three and four cancer that made it. I was like, I’m going to read every book. I’m going to find every answer. In those days, the first book that grabbed me was called One Answer to Cancer. It was by a dentist who had pancreatic cancer, which is the most deadly. He was told he had six weeks to live, and twenty or fifteen years later, wrote this book. He was still alive. He did it through detoxing the body and pancreatic enzymes. It wouldn’t be the book I’d say today, but it was the best thing I found. I gave her As a Man Thinketh because I knew we had to get her to control her mind. She was willing to go for it. She was like, “They told me I’m going to die anyway. Why not?”

After a few weeks, she felt better. After six, seven weeks, she was still alive. She had a protrusion on her of tumors. One was in her female organs. Finally, after about nine or ten weeks, she’s passed up the time she’s supposed to live. The doctor convinced her, “Let’s do some exploratory surgery.” All he found in her body left was something the size of the end of my pinkie fingernail, literally. The doctor said, “This is a miracle.” She said, “Yes, but let me tell you what I did.” He goes, “No, no, no, this is a spontaneous remission. This is a miracle.” She goes, “It is a miracle, but let me tell you what I did.” He wouldn’t listen. She went and started speaking at churches. She was forty-two or three at that time. She’s in her mid-eighties alive today. That changed me completely. It made me go, okay, there are answers. It made me a health nut. I just started studying everything I could. I needed it because I’m on stage twelve, thirteen hours with a stadium of ten or fifteen thousand people four, five, six days in a row. People that wouldn’t sit for a three-hour movie that someone had spent three hundred million dollars on, I got to hold their attention. I run up the stairs. I’m active. We’ve done studies on me. The guys that do Tom Brady and a lot of Olympics athletes have monitored me and found that I burn 11,300 calories in one day on stage.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Tony: It’s insane. It’s like two and a half marathons. I jump a thousand times in a day on stage. I weigh 282 pounds. They explained, every time you come down, it’s four times your body weight.

Zibby: Wait, you should start offering classes where people just do your motions. A new aerobics trend can be the Tony Robbins Hop or something. Then people could boost their calories. It could be an add-on to the Life Force.

Tony: They’ve done studies — later on, we can talk about this — on my audience and what happens to them. They mirror me along the way. Not as many calories, but they mirror me along the way. Anyway, all these huge demands on the body, I had to figure out what to do. Then one day, I get this phone call. I’m a helicopter pilot as well. You have to renew your pilot’s license every two years and get another physical. I go get a physical. I’m going about my business thinking nothing about it. I keep getting this call from my assistant saying, “The doc says he has to talk to you.” I said, “Send me the report.” Then I get this note when I got home at midnight one night. It’s on my door. It says, “You must call the doctor. It’s an emergency.” Then all of a sudden, that old brain kicks in. It’s like, oh, my god, I’m so healthy, but all the flights I’m taking, the radiation, do I have — the whole brain goes nuts. One thing I’ve learned is the old phrase, a courageous person dies once; the coward dies a thousand times. I’ll wait to find out. I call in the morning. I’m still concerned, obviously. He says, “You have a brain tumor.” I said, “A brain tumor?” He goes, “Well, it’s a pituitary tumor at the base of your brain.” I said, “How could you know that? I came in just for a physical test.” He goes, “I did these blood tests because I noticed you have a lot of growth hormone.” I said, “How’d you notice that?” I’m 6’7″. I was 5’1″ in high school. I got hands bigger than your head and size sixteen shoes. A breakthrough thought. “What’s that got to do with anything?” He goes, “I suspected that you have gigantism and that you have a tumor, and you do.” He said, “I want to put you in surgery immediately.”

I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Because of Ginny, and I’d done lots of research — I’m sure you’ve seen, the Mayo Clinic tells everybody you need a second opinion no matter how good your doctor is because they’ve done studies. Two hundred and eighty-six patients, and they find literally twelve percent of the second opinions are the same as the first. Eighty-eight percent of the time, it’s different. Then getting a second opinion, it refines at least two-thirds of the time. I was like, “Okay, I got to get a second opinion. Can you refer somebody?” He did not have a bedside manner, this man. I went to this gentleman who works with body chemistry rather than surgery in Boston who’s one of the best in the world. Completely different guy. Did all my tests. Nicest human being on earth. Said, “Tony, you’d be crazy to do surgery.” He said, “One, you can die. Two, it’ll mess up your endocrine system. Your whole life is energy. Can’t do that.” I said, “I’m in. What’s the solution?” He said, “I want you to go to Switzerland and do this injection twice a year. That’s all you got to do.” I said, “But right now, my arteries are fine. Everything’s fine, you said.” I still have the tumor in my brain, but it infarcted, which means it’s shrunk a good deal. I have a lot of growth hormone. It’s still there, but nothing is being harmed. He said, “The baker wants to bake. The surgeon wants to cut. I want to drug you.” He was so nice. I said, “What if I did nothing and just measured?” He said, “You could do that, but I want you to be certain.” I said, “Well, there’s a price to certainty. What if the drug doesn’t work?” I went to six other doctors after him. One doc finally said to me, “Tony, you do have a lot of growth hormone,” but he goes, “Look at your ability to heal from the insanity of what you do with your body. I’ve never seen anybody do anything like this. I know bodybuilders spend $1,200 a month to get what you get for free, so I’d monitor.”

That was when I was thirty-two. I’m sixty-two. Thirty years later, and there’s been no problems in my body. Again, it taught me to think for myself in this area. Doctors are the greatest human beings. I’m not maligning them. I have lots of friends that are doctors. They’re the most dedicated, devoted — they don’t take care of themselves very often because they’re taking care of everybody else. The half-life of a medical education, according to Harvard, is eighteen to twenty-four months. Half of what they learn is out of date in eighteen to twenty-four months. Then who has to teach them is the pharmaceutical salesman. As we all know, opioids and things like that, they don’t always tell the full truth. Most of them do, of course, but not all of them. You got new problems. I try to explain to people, your doctor’s a person that’s so devoted. They’re walking by a river, and they hear somebody drowning. They don’t think about themself. They dive in to save them, give them mouth to mouth. As soon as they save him, they hear two more screams. They save the first, save the — then they hear four more screams. They don’t have time to go upstream to see who’s throwing them in. This book is showing you what throws them in and what you can do now to shift that. Then the final thing that happened to me and the reason I finally wrote this book — a long answer to you, but it’s an important one.

Zibby: That’s okay. That same thing happened to me with a brain tumor, by the way. I went to six doctors. The first doctor told me I had to have surgery right away. The second one, same thing. I went to six doctors.

Tony: You’re kidding me.

Zibby: The last doctor looked at the slides in a whole new way. He’s like, “No, no, no, that tumor, that was there all along. You don’t need surgery.” Now I’m fine. I’m fine.

Tony: Wow, Zibby, I am so grateful for that for you. You’re my sister from another mother here.

Zibby: I know, right? It’s crazy. When I read your story, I was like, this is nuts. You should always get many opinions. I just talked to a friend this morning. She’s like, “They think I should do this.” I’m like, “Let me give you this doctor. Just a second opinion. You have to do it.”

Tony: And sometimes a third and a fourth.

Zibby: Anyway, go to the rotator cuff.

Tony: It’s not disrespectful, by the way. Mayo Clinic says everybody should do it. They say even their doctors, you should. It’s just being smart. Anyway, the final step was, about four years ago — you know I’m a crazy person. I’m chasing down a twenty-two-year-old professional snowboarder down the mountainside. I tried to do some things I hadn’t done before. I thought I broke my neck. I ripped my rotator cuffs out, which are pretty critical. I’ve lived with pain because I grew so fast. It was 9.9 pain on a zero-to-ten scale. Then I went to all these docs. Everyone one of them, surgery, surgery, surgery. What’s the rehab? It’s four to six months. You may not be able to lift your shoulder. It could break again. Then I got diagnosed with spinal stenosis by one of them. He said, “Your shoulder’s one thing. Now that you’re here, let me show you your spine.” He goes, “One good hit, and you won’t be able to walk again. No more jumping. No more running.” No more life. It was like a gut check that you weren’t prepared for. I was like, I won’t accept this, not until I exhaust every possibility. I’d heard about stem cells. It’s like the Wild West in the US. There’s so many terrible people doing shabby work here, unfortunately. The FDA’s cleaning that up right now.

The bottom line is, I went to one of my coauthors who’s a dear friend of mine, Dr. Peter Diamandis. He is a rocket scientist and a Harvard MD. I said, “What’s the most cutting-edge in this area?” He goes, “Tony, you got to talk to Dr. Bob Hariri,” who’s now my good friend and partner. I said, “He’s the best neurosurgeon. What does he know about stem cells?” He goes, “No, he was one of the fathers of stem cells.” It was kind of like saying, I want to learn about basketball. Go and talk, over here, to my friend, best basketball player in the world. Pick whoever you want. I sit down with Bob. He said, “Tony, you can always go back to the surgery. Why don’t you do stem cells? Here’s where you get the best stem cells.” I said, “I’m not into fetal stem cells.” He goes, “No, I wouldn’t recommend that in a million years. Here’s what you do. Cord stem cells or placenta. We throw those away most of the time. They’re four days old. They are the life force of the human body. They make everything happen.” I went and did these three days of just IVs and shots. The first day, I felt tired. The second day, I woke up — I never expected this. Not only was my shoulder perfect — we had done the MRI; it’s fully fine — but my spinal stenosis is gone. I have no pain in my spine after living with it for fourteen years. I became an evangelist. I want to learn everything about stem cells.

Then I realized it wasn’t just stem cells. These breakthroughs in precision, regenerative medicine are amazing. Now I got invited by the pope to speak as the cleanup speaker. The pope actually throws on, every two years, the biggest regenerative conference in the world. That shows you how far it’s come. It’s not fetal tissues. He sees this as a miracle for humanity. He brings in all the greatest doctors and asked me if I’d be the final speaker. I was like, I’m not dumb enough to just come speak. I’m going to attend all four days. I met this eleven-year-old boy that, at four years old, was told he had a five percent chance to live. His sister gave him stem cells, and he’s perfectly healthy. People that were sent home to die to hospice who went and got different types of treatment that are listed in the book there for cancer that are breakthroughs, I said, I got to share this with the world. That’s what drove me to say, I got to find the answers. The last three years, I’ve been interviewing a hundred and fifty — I’m not a doctor, but I have access. I went to a hundred and fifty of Nobel prize winners, the best scientists I could find on earth, and the best MDs to say, here’s what’s real right now. Then here’s what’s also coming in the next twenty-four to thirty-six months. That’s really the origin of this book.

Zibby: Wow.

Tony: By the way, I’m donating a hundred percent of the book like I’ve done my last three books. We’re feeding twenty million people. Because I was fed when I was a kid, I committed to feed a billion meals. I started out doing forty-two million meals over my lifetime. Then about six years ago, seven years ago, I partnered — I was doing this financial book. All of your friends, I’m interviewing. I’m interviewing these multibillionaires who started with nothing. I have so much respect. Then I’m watching congress cut what used to be called food stamps — it’s now the SNAP program — by six billion dollars. Every family needs, one week a month, to give up their food unless and I, public sector, steps in, private sector steps in, I should say. I said, how many people have I fed? Forty-two million. What if I fed fifty million a year? Then it was like, a hundred million. What if I fed a billion people over ten years? That was seven years ago. We’re at 825 million meals in my partnership with Feeding America. We’re feeding twenty million meals out of this. Then the balance of the money is going to help with Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease research.

Zibby: That’s amazing. I’m so glad you put that in the book, too, because that’s unbelievable. How much is a meal? Can people help with your —

Tony: — They can double up with me. If they put in a dollar, they can get ten meals for that dollar because I’m matching whatever people do. I put in a lot more than just the fifty million. It goes beyond the book. I’ve taken all three of my last books and put a hundred percent of the money towards that because it’s just so important. Right now, because of COVID, I’m sure you know, there’s so many families that are desperately in need, lost their jobs and been through challenges. This is a book that becomes a guidebook that you can use for yourself or the people you love. Also, you know it’s making a difference for other people simultaneously, so it’s a virtuous cycle.

Zibby: Seriously. Why wouldn’t you buy this book? What are the downsides? You can feel good. You can live healthier and better. One of the assessments that you talked about through the — it’s the Life Force Center, right, where you get a whole —

Tony: — Yes.

Zibby: Tell me about that. Can anybody just go and do that? When can I sign up? is the question. Shouldn’t everybody figure out what they need to work on and all of that? Why wouldn’t you try to do that for yourself?

Tony: We have seven centers across the US and some overseas. We’re opening more. Also, we’ve made it with an app so that you can go to your own doctor get some of the tests.

Zibby: We downloaded the app.

Tony: Oh, you did? Look at you. You’re all over it. You can go to any of the centers. You can do these treatments. Some of these treatments can be done by other people. I don’t want to be limited to our business, per se. Obviously, we have our own place. I want to tell people about some of those tests. I was one of those guys that’s like, I don’t want to get in the system. I don’t want to know. I’ve completely changed my view. I’ll tell you why. You take cancer, for example. The Cancer Society did a study with over a hundred thousand people. This is the general number. You can get specific numbers on each cancer, but the real thing that kills people is that we catch it at stage three and stage four. We have mammograms. We have colonoscopies. We have some tests for certain types of cancers, but the ones that get us are the ones we don’t test for. A gentleman who had worked with Google that’s now a friend of mine put together — he lost his wife to cancer. Really sad experience, to say the least. He was working on these solutions. Now there’s a blood test. It’s called GRAIL. It can test for fifty different cancers and catch them before there’s any symptoms whatsoever. What the Cancer Society found is, if you find it at stage three or four, on average — I wouldn’t accept anybody’s averages — on average, you got an eighty percent chance of dying. If you catch it at stage one or two, you have an eighty percent chance of living, in some cases, a ninety-nine percent chance of living. You want to catch it when it’s little.

Most people think of the physical as going and — why even go? He’s going to tap my knee, look at my throat, look at my ear, make me cough. None of those things are really a breakthrough. They’ve been done for eighty years. You wouldn’t use a phone from ten years ago. Some of the new technology with MRI and things like this, you can catch something when it’s small. Then it’s an outpatient thing, and your life is perfect. I can’t tell you how many people come — we have people that come who don’t think they have anything. A gentleman, his wife kept pushing him to come to our Fountain Life center. He’s like, “Just do the test. Do the test.” He’d done a urine test. He’s like, “No problem.” Sure enough, we found that he had cancer in that portion of his body. It was so new, the beginning of it, it was an outpatient thing, and he was done. No cancer in his body. I used to be like, don’t let me know. Now I’m one of those people, let me know. I want to know. There’s an amazing test. Heart disease is the biggest killer, as I’m sure you know. I got a phone call from my partners at Fountain Life. I have a partner named Dr. Kapp who’s been in the business about thirty-nine years. He’s built twelve different hospitals. He finally decided he’s going to sell all those hospitals. He wants to do preventive care. He wants to do the things that are precision medicine. That’s why we partnered up. He called me up. He said, “Tony, there’s this new test. It is the biggest breakthrough in at least a decade in cardiology. Have you ever had a CT scan?” I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “They’re so hard to read. Even a doctor .” They’re looking to see calcium inside your body and seeing what the ratio is and how likely you are to have a heart attack. He said, “There’s this new test called CCTA. It uses AI. It literally digitally opens all your arteries and looks through and finds, yes, you might have calcium in there, but if it’s hardened, it’s healthy. You don’t have a problem. If it’s soft plaque, that can break off. They call it the widow-maker. It can give you a stroke or a heart attack.” He goes, “Tony, they can predict a heart attack five years in advance but show you what to do to prevent it.”

My father-in-law was with me. He was just about to turn eighty at the time. He’s a vigorous guy. He owned his own business, self-made man, was in the lumber business, so pretty strong guy. When you’re turning eighty, everybody starts saying, organize your affairs, and all this. I could just see the drop in his energy. My gut is, he’s got more in there, but the mind plays such a role, and the environment we’re in with people, such a role. I said, “Dad, I’m going to go right here in Florida, just around the corner. Why don’t you come with me?” I told him about the test. I said, “I’m going to go do it. At our stage of life, of course, we’re going to have some soft plaques, but they’ll be able to tell us what to do to turn it around. I think it would be better to know.” He goes, “Okay.” I take him with me. My father-in-law is clean as a whistle. He has nothing in there. The guy is so solid. He is celebrating and stuff. I was eighty percent better than five ago. I’m in great shape also. He’s literally clean as a whistle. Then he had a problem with his hip. Some of the technology available today is mind-boggling. I used to have this thing on my ankle where I tore it when I was on stage twenty years ago. If someone gave me a massage, don’t touch the ankle. It would shoot nerves up my leg like someone’s electrocuting it. They go in there on ultrasound. They see exactly where the tissue is mangled.

Zibby: I loved that one. They open it up.

Tony: They put this fluid in, the same fluid that you have when you’re having your baby. It heals it and opens it in about ten minutes. I’ve never had pain in it since. Some of the greatest athletes in the world work within this area. They’re listed in the book. My dad had a hip problem. He’s walking kind of weird. It took fifteen minutes to get his hip perfect. Now we get on the plane to fly home. We’re in Western Florida. We live on the East Coast. My dad sits down. I’ll never forget the look on his face. He looks twenty years younger. He’s got this big grin. He goes, “Tony, you know these people that talk about living to 110, 120? I don’t know if I buy that BS, but my heart’s perfect. My hip’s perfect. I’m walking perfect. I could live another twenty years. You’ve only known my daughter — you’ve only been married to her twenty-two years. That’s like another lifetime.” Total transformation in his psychology because it takes away the fear. Same thing with Alzheimer’s. One of the most important tests you can do is for metals. You got a lot of mamas out there. They’re taking care of everything. No matter what you do, the lifestyles we have today, there are so many metals in the environment. I actually had massive mercury. It burned a whole in my esophagus, lost a third of my blood supply. I could’ve died. You know what it was from? Salad and fish. I was so disciplined. Salad and fish, but I had swordfish and tuna. They are old fish, seventy-five years. They eat the younger fish with all their mercury. I also don’t methylate well. I didn’t know these things. I didn’t have a test for it. Literally, it almost killed me. I was losing my memories at fifty-three. I’m like, how is this possible? It interrupts your mitochondria, so it interrupts your energy. A little hundred-dollar test, and you can know if you have it and know what to do while it’s still small and easy.

Another one that most women are familiar with is hormones, but most women think about that in terms of menopause, hormone replacement therapy. One of the greatest breakthroughs that’s happening in science is hormone optimization therapy, which means before there’s a problem, with a minor intervention, you completely change your life, energy, cognition, everything. We had a man come in just recently at Fountain Life. He thought he had long-term COVID, foggy brain, all these things. We go in. He says, “I’ve already done all my testing. My doctor’s done my testing.” We said, “What are your numbers?” We did it again to see where it is. His testosterone was 240. For most men to feel healthy and strong, it needs to be in the seven, eight hundred, nine hundred — it depends on the person — up to a thousand. Someone will say to you, “You’re fine.” They won’t tell you you’re in trouble until you’re really in trouble, like 150. He wasn’t that far from it. You can change that. He lost twenty-four pounds, got a zest for living. His energy’s back. There are simple things you can do with some basic tests. You can also do your own age. David Sinclair is a Harvard professor who’s one of the greatest longevity experts in the world. He’s fifty-three years old. He’s thirty-three in his biochemistry. He’s done it by using a few simple tools that we teach in the book. I just applied it. I’ve only been doing it for a year. I’m sixty-two in a couple weeks. I’m fifty-one in my biochemistry.

Zibby: I just took this test too. I went to a longevity center, but I’m embarrassed to say —

Tony: — Oh, did you? What’d you find out?

Zibby: I am forty-five years old, and I was forty-five on the test.

Tony: That’s not a bad thing.

Zibby: It’s not good.

Tony: There are things you can do now to bring that down, though, Zibby.

Zibby: I am. I’m trying. Yes, I’m trying.

Tony: Got to be the right things. It’s not just exercise and diet. There’s some things that can start to reverse the aging process. I’ll give you one really quick. This will sound complex. People listening, you don’t have to remember these words. It’s not a test. It’s in the book. There are three words that will be useful to know over time if you want maximum energy and strength. One of those is understanding that there are seven master hormones. They’re called sirtuins. It’s in the book, so you don’t have to remember. These sirtuins do two of the most important things in your life. Number one, they affect your mitochondria, which is where all your energy comes from, your ATP. It’s the source of energy in every cell in your body. They blast those furnaces. They help covert food so that actually occurs and you feel the energy in your body. By the way, one thing COVID does is it gets in as the virus and it eats up the mitochondria, the energy in your body. That’s why people have this long-term fatigue type of experience if they don’t do an intervention.

It also reduces your inflammation, which is where most disease starts. Also, these master genes turn on and turn off different genes. Most people know by now, your genes are not your destiny. Your genes are a code. Which ones get turned on or turned off is affected by what’s called the epigenome. Think of your genome as the piano. The piano player is your epigenome. That’s affected by your diet, by your weight, by radiation, by all these things. That epigenome is triggered by sirtuins, these genes. It turns all this on and off, gives you energy. Then it has a second job, which is, it cleans up all of your DNA. As you age, you’re exposed to more radiation, more chemicals, more things. There’s an accumulation of breakdown in your DNA. It literally cleans up the DNA. Here’s the problem. When you turn fifty — you’re not there yet — you lose about fifty percent of the ingredients that makes those sirtuins run. There’s a fuel for it. Think sirtuins and NAD+, NMN. Three words. Sirtuins — you don’t have to remember it. Just think genes.

Zibby: It’s in the book.

Tony: Right behind it is the fuel. It’s called NAD+. In order for that to give you fuel, it has a precursor called NMN. When they give NMN to mice, they live thirty percent longer lives. If they give to NMN to an old mouse — a twenty-four-month-old mouse is like a seventy-year-old person — they can run one kilometer on a little track. A young mouse who’s strong and fit can run a full kilometer four hundred percent more in terms of power. They give NMN to these old mice. Within fourteen days, they’re running two to three kilometers 203 times more than a younger one. My whole thing is, well, that’s nice, but will that transfer to humans? It doesn’t always. Two weeks ago, it was in the Daily Mail, and about a month and a half ago it was in Boston, it was leaked that there’s a new form of NMN that’s been developed by this company called MicroBiotech. They’ve been giving it to the soldiers there, special forces soldiers. These are the strongest already. Their endurance levels have exploded; their ability to develop muscle, which, as you age, is one of the problems that make people break down, sarcopenia. Their cognitive capacity went through — I met a seventy-two-year-old guy who’s a chess player that hasn’t played for a decade. He’s playing competitive chess again from this. This is not a nutraceutical. This is going through the FDA. Within eighteen to twenty-four months, they think they’ll have approval and be available for anybody. These types of breakthroughs, they’re miraculous and are happening right now.

Zibby: The other mind-blowing thing was 3D printing organs.

Tony: Yes. Isn’t that unbelievable?

Zibby: That was wild. I could not believe it. I couldn’t believe it.

Tony: It’s been done. Dr. Tony Atala, Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University, has been doing this for twelve years. He has been taking people — first of all, soldiers lose an ear — there’s a picture in the book. He literally uses your own stem cells and regrows a new ear for you. He’s done it with bladders for twelve years. Normally, your body would reject something. How does he do it? Spray-on stem cells. He literally sprays them on this shape and builds a new organ. If you have an older car, you can make it new by changing the tires. Change the engine. Change the paint. That’s what we’re doing with our bodies. When I wrote the chapter, which was about a year ago — I’ve met with several people that do this. One of them was Martine Rothblatt. She is just a total genius. She created Sirius Radio. Then she was told her daughter had this uncurable lung disease. She couldn’t breathe. It was worse and worse. There’s no drugs. There’s no approach. There’s no nothing. Getting on a list for new lungs, it’s a long shot these days. She’s a problem-solver. She eats problems for breakfast. She’s one of the smartest human beings I know. By the way, she was a man before. She’s a woman today. Her whole family supported it. Just a total genius human being.

She says, I’m saving my daughter. She sold most of her interest in Sirius, took the money, and went to find solutions. Nobody is getting it. Finally, she found a drug that didn’t work for what they wanted it for, but it would work for what she was doing. She couldn’t get anybody to sell it to her. She wasn’t a doctor. She went and hired all these other doctors. She was relentless. Got the drug. Saved her daughter’s life and saved thousands of other people’s lives who are in this situation. Now she’s building organs. She’s found a way to take lungs that don’t work and repair them so they can be utilized for people , but doing the same thing. There’s four organizations doing this right now. In the short term — Dr. Church from Harvard is the top geneticist and one of the top on earth. He said pig organs are the first step while we’re getting this up to speed because they’re so like human beings, but they’d be rejected. They scoured the DNA that would make them rejected. He told me by the time the book comes out, he said, “In early 2022, we’ll have the first pig transplant for a heart. I promise you.” It happened two weeks ago. You probably saw on the news.

Zibby: I did.

Tony: It is amazing. The future — I’m talking, in three years, they believe they’ll be able to print from yourself, your own stem cells and build these replacement organs. You need a new organ, we just swap it out. You’re brand-new again. It sounds, again, insane. It sounds like thirty years from now. It’s happening right now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Wow. So much information. So much information in the book. I am totally energized. Your energy, of course, is completely infectious. You can put your infectious disease specialist on that too. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Congratulations on having an almost-seven-hundred-page book. I loved how you bolded things. Thank you. That was really helpful. It’s just been literally life-changing to read this book and chat with you today. I can’t wait for all the new announcements. I’m totally coming to this center. I’m going to be first in line.

Tony: Let me know when you’re coming. Reach out to me, if you would. I’ll make sure my team knows you’re coming. If you ever want to come to a live seminar, now as mom, you don’t have to leave home to do it. I’d love to have you as my guest. We’ll send you the schedule. You let us know if you want to attend.

Zibby: I would love it, especially if I can jump up and down and burn 11,000 calories. Have a great day, Tony. Thanks so much.

Tony: Thank you, Zibby. Take good care of yourself. Blessings.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

LIFE FORCE by Tony Robbins

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