THE PROBLEM WITH TONY ROBBINS AND HIS NEW BOOK ON MONEY

I’ve just read – or rather, tried to read – Tony Robbins’ latest New York Times bestseller, Money: Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom .  

Robbins has always exhibited a troubling grandiosity, having flattered himself that he has unlocked the hidden key to all human understanding and motivation. But now, in a preposterous attempt to tackle a subject that has baffled greater minds for centuries, Robbins has written a massively unreadable tome with endless lists and lessons and reminders, repeating truisms like, “Don’t lose money.” It takes him six hundred pages of small print to offer 7 Simple Steps .

The first pages of the book are a tedious compendium of sanctimonious plaudits from politicians, celebrities, and athletes. Bill Clinton, Ray Dalio, Carl Ichan, Marc Faber, Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Usher, Quincy Jones, Steve Forbes, and a cast of hundreds. He claims to have consulted with two royal families and three Presidents, as well as countless heads of state. Institutions like Accenture and Harvard Business School have called him a ‘business intellectual’ and a ‘guru.’ The accolades are relentless, like proliferating vegetation in a science fiction movie.  

But methinks Robbins doth protest too much. Rather than raise Robbins’ stature, this list of endorsements simply lowers my estimation of the endorsers, whom I now see as easily tricked by Robbins’ cult-like platitudes.

As you can tell, I am not a fan of Tony Robbins. I sympathize with the fact that he was raised in poverty and a broken home, that he could not afford college, and was stricken with a glandular tumor that made him awkwardly huge. His description of life prior to becoming a motivational speaker is one of the best descriptions of poverty and depression that I have ever heard (it is available on YouTube). And I sympathize that he found himself on the brink of adulthood – like too many young people today - broke and alone, working as a janitor, living in a dingy apartment, until one day he decided to turn his life around.   For all that, I give him credit.

What bothers me is that he decided to turn his life around by teaching other people to turn their lives around.

This creates a malignant circularity that haunts everything Robbins touches. He is the nation’s leading expert on success, and he knows about success because he achieved success by lecturing others about how to achieve success.  Got that?

Robbins professes a hard-nosed realism, and every other word in his lexicon is “success,” “results,” or “achieve” -- yet curiously there is no evidence that his methods produce, well, success. All of his success stories are anecdotal, and it seems likely that for each person that found him inspiring, there were probably others who found him ingratiating and formulaic.  

When it comes to the topic of money, Robbins admits that when he started the book he knew very little about the subject. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t dwell on his video from 2010 that warned of an imminent stock market crash, right before the market doubled. A few years ago he was touting gold, which has declined. Nor does the reader learn the full story of Robbins’ involvement with a dot.com company that seemed to crash and burn, eventually delisting and going private. No matter. Robbins is undeterred.

You see, he is on a mission because so many people have approached him for advice in the wake of the financial collapse.   As a public service to you, the reader, Robbins became an autodidact on economics to write this book, taking time out from his other endeavors such as late night infomercials, revival-tent seminars, fire-walking events, his line of nutritional supplements, and his promotion of the QLink pendant that repels ambient radiation in a way that scientists have yet to grasp.

But in this case, the mountain of a man has given birth to a mouse. Most of the supposed revelations in this massively disorganized mess of a book are time-worn techniques that have already been better described by others: balancing a portfolio, dollar cost averaging, tax avoidance, avoiding mutual fund and brokerage fees, the power of compounding, and so forth.

The second half of the tome is a series of fawning interviews with investment ‘gurus,’ many of whom use strategies that directly contradict each other, and also contradict Robbins’ advice to have a balanced portfolio.   Robbins thinks that if he talks to a few of the most successful money managers, he will figure out the magic formula for making money, oblivious to the reality that they all took different routes -- some of them were riding the market, others were contrarian, some were weighted toward currencies, some toward equities, and others took eccentric approaches; even worse, many of them used leverage and had locked-up capital that allowed them to multiply their earnings and hold positions far longer than any individual will be able to replicate.  Far from proving that there is a simple way to make money, the endless meandering of the book belies the actual truth that there is no simple path to financial freedom.

A curious amount of space is given to Ray Dalio’s All Weather Portfolio, as if it is the Holy Grail of investing, yet in other parts of the book Robbins pushes real estate, structured notes, inflation adjusted treasuries, gold and commodities, and endless other strategies.  Robbins is very taken with Dalio’s description of life as a jungle that we have to cross to get what we want, and therefore we need to associate ourselves with savvy jungle guides. For Robbins, this penny-ante and threadbare analogy resounds with gravitas, unaware that it is reducible to the simple truism that there are obstacles in life.

Robbins’ motivation is also unclear. The book is layered with self-promotional links to Robbins’ affiliates. For example, one such affiliate mentioned in the book is Stronghold Wealth Management, and the copyright page of the book contains a disclaimer, “At the time of this publication, the author is in discussions with Stronghold Wealth Management to enter into some type of business relationship,” and Stronghold is listed as a Anthony Robbins Company in the Appendix.  Is he promoting Stronghold? Or himself? Or is Stronghold actually Robbins in disguise? He claims to be giving the profits from the book to charity, but does that include ancillary income from affiliates, or merely the publishing royalties from the book itself? Who knows.  None of this belongs in an objective book on the subject of money, and no reader should be tasked with untangling these conflicts of interest.  

Missing in this treatise is any grasp of the political and economic forces that create immiseration and poverty for so many people – you know, the great majority of Americans who don’t find themselves with the luxury of having investments to worry about. A recent study found that nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. On behalf of the low and middle classes, Robbins strikes a populist tone that he was outraged by the financial mischief that caused the 2008 meltdown; but then instead of siding with the victims against the perpetrators, he decides to interview the wealthiest of the wealthy, including many who benefitted from the meltdown. He has nothing to say about the criminal disparity of wealth in this country, nor does he have the sensitivity to realize that for most Americans money is not a “game” but a matter of survival. His message to the disenfranchised, foreclosed, struggling majority is that they should ‘sit at the feet’ of the great masters of finance.

In short, this book is just another display of Robbins’ grandiosity. He flatters himself that there is no subject on which he is unqualified to become an expert. And since he can understand anything and everything – why not finance?

All of this would border on humorous self-parody if there was not a dark underbelly to Robbins’ entire methodology and persona.

Although he seems harmless, Robbins is a brainwasher.   To grasp this, watch a video of him at a seminar and notice how he uses rapid-speaking technique and tautologies to short-circuit any critical function in his audience. He essentially hypnotizes them with truisms, creating the feeling – the impression – that they have gained some insight, when in fact nothing has been said. This is why Robbins constantly implores the audience to say “I” if they agree – never letting them pause to reflect. In this whipped-up state of ecstasy, he tosses out truisms like ‘decisions shape your destiny,’ ‘emotion creates action,’ ‘action is affected by your state of being,’ ‘we have a need for certainty and a need for uncertainty,’ ‘we need to feel significant and connected,’ and other banalities. The audience is spellbound and paralyzed – it feels that it has grasped something of immense clarity and import, while its critical thinking is neutralized by the hyperactive pace and movement of Robbins on stage. He then assigns busywork, telling the crowd to make lists, repeat mantras, and focus only on their goals. These are brainwashing staples in every cult.  And through a kind of malevolent ingenuity, his writing (such as this book) does the same thing in written form.

Everything about Robbins is a triumph of image over substance. He has no background in chemistry yet he sells nutrition supplements; he has no background in physics yet he promotes an anti-radiation device; he is not an athlete but is called on to help athletes win tournaments; he is not a psychologist but has trained 15,000 therapists in his life-coaching institute; he has a ‘research institute’ that is in 100 countries and touched 3 million people. He claims in a TED talk that he is called on to prevent suicide attempts, and to help heads of state solve political puzzles.   He helps salesmen make sales, athletes win sporting events, politicians run countries, couples sort out their marriages, overweight people lose weight – there is no ostensible limit to his expertise. He is a human ‘all weather portfolio’ who can help anyone at any time.

Stop and think for a minute. No human being can do all these diverse things with anything remotely resembling competence.

In reality, despite the endorsements on this book, I would venture that Tony doesn’t really help people, other than providing a mental placebo effect. What he does is create the impression that he is helping people, or more accurately, he convinces people that he has helped them.  He is successful at being successful, and he is famous for being famous.

There is a palpable sadness beneath the Tony Robbins phenomenon. It has all the makings of a classic American tragedy. An unsuccessful young man starts a career – improbably – touting techniques for success. He graduates to fire-walking seminars, convincing participants that they are exercising mind over matter by thinking cool thoughts, when in fact their feet are protected by the poor conductivity of the coals. He then grows to mythological status by convincing others that they too can beat the odds, and his gargantuan body becomes a metaphor for ‘awakening the giant within.’ He promises the ability to make people spring out of bed with enough energy to take on the world.

The message is eaten up by people who feel helpless and beleaguered by the complexities of modern life.  In Robbins-land, you can achieve everything with Tony’s help: a happy marriage (even though Tony got divorced), physical fitness (even though Tony looks a little overweight), great achievements in business (though Tony has no product), and all the other blessings of upper-middle class heaven.  

Tony is selling a world where you don’t have to think about the sad reality of violence, poverty, abuse, conflict, bad luck, and the vagaries of relationships.   He gives you a false universe where your destiny is completely in your hands.

All you have to do is follow his tautologies, keep yourself busy with his tasks, repeat his mantras, eat his supplements, buy his books, attend his seminars, follow his advice on marriage and relationships, and now, untangle his 600-page opus on the simple steps to financial freedom.