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Home » Tony Robbins on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Transcript)

Tony Robbins on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of author, success coach, and public speaker Tony Robbins’ interview on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast episode #517. (Jan 24, 2025)

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down with Tony Robbins and in the remarkable basement of his house as well, and so that’s the setting. Tony and I have got to know each other over the last couple of years, and have had a number of discussions. Partly what we’ve been trying to puzzle out is our—what would you say?—the similarities between our parallel endeavors.

I mean, Tony’s, I suspect, he’s probably the most popular and impactful speaker, personal development speaker the world’s ever seen. I’m very fascinated by what he does, and I’ve seen his events. And I’ve reviewed some of the scientific literature pertaining to his achievements. That’s actually what we started our conversation with because Tony’s program has been subject to scientific scrutiny, and it seems to have remarkable antidepressant properties.

Discussing Life Strategies and Public Speaking

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so I’m very interested, like Tony is, in how people chart their life course and how they establish their aim and how they determine their strategies and how they describe their conditions for fulfillment and what fulfillment is and how it can be sustained and how it can be self-improving and how it can be brought to other people. And so that’s really what we spent our time discussing.

I wanted to hear his thoughts on the matter and how he construed and conceptualized his approach and also what makes him such a compelling public speaker, how he prepares for that, how he relates to the audience, how he can sustain this energy for really remarkable periods of time because I found myself quite exhausted generally after about 3 hours of full-out public speaking, let’s say, because that’s a performance, and you got to be all in if you’re going to do it right. But Tony does that for, like, 12 hours a day for 4 days in a row, many, many times a month. And so I was curious about, well, his technique and how that was similar to mine and how it differed.

And so, well, we talked about all that. And I suppose what’s the core of it all? Well, I think the core of it, at least in part, is something akin to the old Nietzschean dictum that if you have a why, you can bear any how. And so Tony helps people discover the why, well, and the how for that matter, and that is definitely akin to what I’m attempting to do when I’m lecturing and writing.

And so, well, our discussion helped clarify that and flesh it out and make it more concrete and make it more accessible to people. And so you’re welcome to partake in that, and that’s what’s on the menu for today. So, Mr. Robbins, I’m going to start by reading something. Okay. Because you did something that is very rare.

Clinical Trial of Tony Robbins’ Program

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You submitted your process, your life improvement process, your public life improvement process to a clinical trial. So I’m going to read some pieces from the abstract of the paper that was published in consequence of that inquiry. So the paper is called “Effects of an Immersive Psychosocial Training Program on Depression and Well-being: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” So first thing I would say is clinical trials are extremely difficult to do.

I’ve always been highly impressed by any scientist, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist who will do a clinical trial because there are innumerable impediments. It’s hard to get subjects. It’s hard to specify the control group. It’s hard to get ethical clearance. It takes forever. People drop out. It’s very difficult to publish. Like, it’s generally a very thankless endeavor. And you did it along with the authors of this paper.

And so and the results are quite stunning. I’ll read a bit from the abstract. So for everybody watching and listening, every scientific paper has an abstract that essentially summarizes the findings so that if you’re doing a, say, a detailed overview of a given field, you can get the gist of things rapidly. And so the abstract summarizes the most important elements of the study.

Psychiatry stands to benefit from brief, nonpharmacological treatments that effectively reduce depressive symptoms, which are very common. To address this need, we conducted a single-blind randomized clinical trial. So people were assigned randomly to groups, which is a marker for a well-designed study, assessing how a 6-day immersive psychosocial training program, and that’s Tony Robbins’ program, followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days.

What’s a psychosocial exercise? Well, Tony will walk us through that. But it’s an exercise that’s designed to optimize psychological functioning, but also social functioning simultaneously because it’s very difficult to be healthy by yourself. And so you could think of mental health in particular, although also physical health, as a communitarian or collective endeavor. So and Tony definitely understands that.

Followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days improves depressive symptoms. 45 adults were block randomized by depression score to 2 arms, the immersive psychosocial training program and 10-minute daily exercise group, or a gratitude journaling group. So now the idea there was to not only assess whether Mr. Robbins’ program was an effective treatment for depression, but whether or not it was equally or more effective than another treatment that wasn’t pharmacological that had already been shown to be demonstrated through positive utility.

TONY ROBBINS: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And a gratitude journal helps people focus on what’s positive in their life instead of what’s negative, and people who are depressed tend to be preoccupied with what’s negative. Depression severity improved over time with a significantly greater reduction in the psychosocial training program group. So that meant that Mr. Robbins’ intervention worked, about an 83% reduction in depression severity.

And by 6 weeks, virtually everybody in the intervention group showed remission in their symptoms. And, 6 weeks is a pretty decent length of trial because one of the complications with clinical trials is how long do you follow people?