Sham Read online

  Despite the quasi-intellectual pretension of much of Robbins’s patter, his seminars incorporate routines with a high kitsch factor. Robbins will invite an audience member onstage and easily lift him up off the ground. Then he’ll order his subject to “feel centered and grounded. Imagine you are connected firmly to the earth!” Robbins will try to lift the man a second time and won’t be able to. No, I am not kidding.

  For such reasons, the happy little community of Robbins World occasionally displays signs of unrest. You see it mostly on the discussion boards he provides for dedicated disciples, if you check often enough. Recently people have complained about management censorship: the sudden disappearance of posts and threads that voice displeasure with any of Robbins’s materials or the long-term efficacy of his programs. In 2001 some fans were dismayed to learn that Robbins and his wife, Becky, had divorced; after all, many followers had bought his books and tapes on the surefire steps to a lasting marriage.

  Worse publicity has stemmed from events that hint at a certain disingenuousness on Robbins’s part. In 1995 he agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations that his company overstated the profit potential in video franchises for his seminars. According to the FTC, prospective franchisees paid fees between $5,000 and $90,000 for the rights to charge admission to seminars featuring the master on tape. Robbins agreed to reimburse franchisees for a total of $221,260 in basic expenses, and up to $49,875 for any unused “video kits” beyond what was supplied with the original agreement.

  But if anything symbolizes the emperor’s-new-clothes aura surrounding Robbins, and the dangers attending today’s blind faith in SHAM, it’s an Internet venture-cum-boondoggle known as Dreamlife.com.2 The New Age Web site with the mind-blowing multimedia effects was supposed to deliver SHAM content in six categories: mind and spirit, money and finance, relationships and family, health and fitness, career and business, and creativity and fun. Subscribers could avail themselves of “live” chats with such New Age celebrities as Shirley MacLaine, advice for the lovelorn, job-hunting pointers, even tips on selling a screenplay in Hollywood—in short, everything you could want in SHAM evangelism under one colossal digital tent. Robbins had lofty goals for Dreamlife’s size and profitability, saying he wanted to build the site into “the eBay of personal and professional empowerment.”

  Unfortunately—for its average-Joe investors above all—the project never quite made it past beta stage after its launch in the fall of 1999 and is now defunct. More to the point, at no time in its development cycle did Dreamlife have any meaningful revenue stream, proprietary products, or realistic strategies for generating either. This should not have been surprising, given the origins of the deal. Dreamlife was put together by Allen & Co., a Wall Street investment-banking firm long identified with mergers and start-ups marked by imaginative financing. To avoid the usual paperwork and reporting rigors of an initial public offering, Allen & Co. spun off Dreamlife from an obscure medical-services firm, Global Health Systems Inc. Global Health Systems had nothing to do with self-help and no income from online operations. What it did have was a stock already up and running. That stock, however, was listed not on the white-glove New York Stock Exchange or on the sexy NASDAQ, but on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, which Bloomberg’s Christopher Byron later described as “the cheesiest, rankest, most volatile sub-basement on Wall Street.” Further, though Robbins was to be the marquee player, he already had long-term agreements in place with two publishers, Fawcett and Fireside, and was reluctant to assign any of his seminar revenues to Dreamlife. This effectively left the new venture bereft of anything to sell except “T-shirts and trinkets,” wrote Byron, who followed the project closely from its inception.

  Under those sketchy circumstances, most savvy investors would have run and hid. What made the difference here was Robbins. In exchange for the use of his name, he got a 57 percent stake in the deal without investing one dime of his own money. Allen & Co. then went out and effected so-called private placements of Dreamlife stock to a who’s who of the rich and famous: newsmen Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel, NBC president Bob Wright, sports impresario Wayne Huizenga, tennis great Andre Agassi, and Hollywood producer Jon Peters. All of them queued up for a slice of the Tony Robbins mystique.

  The outreach to Brokaw et al. raised $15.1 million in seed money. But more important, as word of this “opportunity” spread, assisted by credulous if not downright fawning media coverage, the stock soared. Once trading at 75 cents per share, it hit $16 by Christmas 1999. With some 40.4 million shares outstanding, Robbins’s stake was suddenly worth $368 million. On February 12, 2000, Robbins introduced Larry King and his one million viewers to Dreamlife. With characteristic élan, Robbins described his new portal as a place “where you can take any dream you want and turn it into reality.” Too bad Robbins could not do that with the site itself. By the fall of 2000, the Internet bubble was bursting, and Dreamlife—still, really, with nothing to sell—saw its stock price plummet to a year-end low of just 94 cents, according to its SEC filing. There is no hard proof of how many of the big early stake-holders, including Robbins, had dumped their shares by this time. But there’s no question that most of the average Joes took their lumps.

  After further financial gyrations, notably a deft merger with Discovery Toys, Dreamlife reemerged as EOS International on December 31, 2001. EOS has nothing to do with anyone’s dreams, and it still doesn’t have any true products of its own to sell, but it does acquire firms that sell them, mostly through product parties, catalogs, and the Internet. The company declared a loss of $16.7 million in 2003. Robbins remains as vice chairman of the board. On a late October day in 2004, EOS stock was selling, on that same OTC Bulletin Board, for 16 cents a share.

  The astonishing thing about Robbins is that even skeptical followers don’t usually abandon him. They’ll post dubious messages on his discussion boards, questioning the usefulness of going to that next seminar . . . but they’ll end up going anyway. Michael Roes, who admits to being hooked on Robbins for “some time now,” told me, “Tony’s got great material, and he’s so personally compelling. It’s clear that he lives this stuff through and through. We’ve got some of his nutritional formula, we’re working through his CD sets, we’re off the meat and dairy.” All this, says Roes, even though more than a few elements of the Tony Robbins experience “really bug me and I’d really like some answers.”

  After attending a seminar in Anaheim in 2003, Roes was particularly bothered by the QLink connection. “It was all very suspicious,” he says. “I don’t understand Tony’s emphasis on it. Nowhere [in the literature] does it say, ‘We have this thing, and it works, and we can prove it.’ ” He concludes, “I guess crowds don’t think very well. They just follow.” And yet Roes is one of the followers. He and his wife still plan to follow Robbins right to the next Life Mastery Program in Fiji, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

  In Michael Roes, we once again see the fundamental paradox of self-help: If it works, people should emerge from their larval state and become the fully evolved individuals SHAM vowed to help them be. But many of them never seem to emerge. And with the self-help gurus dependent on selling a steady stream of products and services to a loyal following, you question the sincerity of the effort to transform all those caterpillars into butterflies.

  “Robbins and the others may talk a good game about self-reliance,” says James Randi, “but this is an industry that survives on repeat business. If you could go to every seminar or every bookstore, you’d see the same faces over and over and over again.”

  AND TONY MARCHES (OR FIRE WALKS) ON

  Having embedded himself deeply in his disciples’ heads, Robbins now has designs on their “kitchen cupboards, medicine chests, and gym bags,” as the New York Times put it in an August 2003 article. That is to say, he has begun plotting and executing an ambitious assault on the “wellness” marketplace. According to at least one knowledgeable insider, Paul Zane Pilzer, a former Reagan admini
stration economist, the wellness industry pulls in some $200 billion annually, and that figure could hit $1 trillion before 2010, as more and more baby boomers try to fight off the ravages of age. Robbins, in the New York Times interview, made no secret of his ambitions when it came to the wellness market. “I want to own it,” he declared.

  Robbins isn’t alone in that goal. Phil McGraw, you will remember, has pursued the same market with his controversial line of energy bars and “nutraceuticals.” McGraw also has his diet book and his cookbook. Meanwhile, several high-end resorts nationwide now feature “Chopra Centers,” offering the wellness regimens endorsed by the guru whose name they bear. For a fee, cell-phone users can avail themselves of the preachments found in Chopra’s book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, delivered daily.

  But no one seems as ideally positioned, with as captive an audience, as Robbins. He is vice chairman of IdeaSphere, which manufactures organic food and other health products sold under the Robbins banner. His Web site and seminar literature promote a wide array of health products, from his Life Balance Pack, which promises to “cleanse and revitalize your system” (and includes a helping of those “collodials”), to his Alkaline Weight Loss Program (which not only promotes “the permanent weight loss you deserve” but also “neutralizes the excess acids in your blood,” with the help of still more collodials), to his Ultra Greens method of deriving “pure energy” through a “unique formulation of sprouted grains, organically grown grasses, and fibrous herbs,” among other things.

  Equally important to Robbins’s long-range vision, IdeaSphere’s executive offices are stocked with former Amway brass who know the ropes of direct-to-consumer marketing. To help things along, Robbins looks to gobble up companies that can give him an instant presence in health and nutrition markets. In 2004, for example, IdeaSphere announced that it had purchased Twinlab, a once-strong nutraceutical brand weakened in recent years by the ephedra scare. Twinlab gave IdeaSphere a ready-made line of sports drinks, herbal teas, food bars, and other popular products. And Robbins isn’t done. He says he’s poised to forge a revolutionary alliance with one of America’s largest manufacturers of athletic shoes and sports apparel, and has his eye on a major chain of health-food stores—edging him ever closer to his dream of becoming a full-service wellness powerhouse with some degree of influence over almost all of the faithful’s choices. As George Carlin opined, thus does self-help become, simply, help. And—just maybe—control.

  As for the real long term? Robbins has said he wouldn’t mind taking over for Oprah Winfrey when she’s ready to pass the torch. It’s a fitting aspiration; those are, after all, shoes that only the inimitable Tony Robbins may be big enough to fill.

  5

  “YA GOTTA WANT IT!”

  He’s supremely confident. He knows he’s going to do what he wants.

  —Baseball player David Bell, age thirty, explaining what makes former teammate Barry Bonds such a great hitter, in the Morning Call

  (Allentown, Pennsylvania), April 27, 2003

  He has the best batting eye I’ve ever seen, and probably the quickest hands to the ball as well. And his upper-body strength is almost superhuman.

  —Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, age fifty-three, explaining what makes Bonds so great, quoted much later in the same Morning Call article,

  almost as an afterthought

  Some years back I sat in attendance as Tommy Lasorda, baseball’s reigning ambassador-at-large, delivered an hour-long after-dinner speech to about fifty employees of Staedtler Inc., a manufacturer of precision writing and drafting instruments. The Staedtler personnel were carefully selected for their worthiness to be present on such an august occasion. Before the speech, the firm’s marketing vice president, Ted Wheelock, shared his hopes for the evening’s festivities. The company had been stingy with its expenditures for training and motivation, but the sales team was mired in a dismal slump. Wheelock felt that Lasorda, motivator extraordinaire, could help the staff “take things to the next level.”

  I came away spellbound by Lasorda’s presentation, albeit not for the reasons one might think. At no time during his $500-a-minute spiel did he impart a single shred of tactical wisdom. Lasorda discussed nothing specifically relevant to Staedtler’s business; he might have been talking about pens, he might have been talking about chicken parmigiana. His advice ranged from the merely banal (“There are people who make things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened”) to the childishly simpleminded (“Ya gotta want it”); he even spouted nonsense of Yogi Berra proportions (“The thing you notice about losers is, they don’t win”). Along the way, he told inspirational stories about athletes who succeeded against all odds; like all self-help gurus, but more than most, sports speakers love inspirational stories. For his pièce de résistance, he trotted out the well-worn tale of how a hobbled Kirk Gibson lifted his battered frame off the bench and, through sheer grit, blasted a pinch-hit, game-winning home run in game one of the 1988 World Series. “Kirk just wasn’t going to be beaten that day!” Tommy thundered, as if to imply that the losing pitcher, Dennis Eckersley, a notorious competitor in his own right, came to the ballpark that afternoon not especially caring whether he cost his team the series.

  What, then, was so spellbinding? The reaction to all this. At the end of his talk, Lasorda was applauded and backslapped as enthusiastically as if he’d just delivered the Sermon on the Mount. A joyous Wheelock opined that he’d gotten his money’s worth and then some. “Already?” I asked. “How do you know?” He answered by way of a broad gesture at the smiling faces and general vigor that still simmered in the room as Lasorda made his gracious (but efficient) exit. “The guys are stoked,” he said.

  A few months later I called Wheelock to find out how things were going. The sales slump continued.

  Today, there’s just no sating corporate America’s appetite for the lessons and putative logic of that very special offspring of SHAM we’ll call Sportsthink. Simply stated, if there’s a twist on self-actualization that’s distinctively, emblematically American in this nation of people whose spirits soar and sag with the latest ESPN ticker, Sportsthink is it.

  “Look on any manager’s bookshelf today and there’s Walsh’s books,” Karlene Sugarman, a sports-psychology consultant, told me. The Walsh is Bill, coach of the once-dynastic San Francisco 49ers, and the books are Finding the Winning Edge and Building a Champion, both early winners in sports-motivation publishing. Sugarman continues, “Sports becomes the model for how things are done.” John K. Mackenzie, a corporate-communications theorist and writer, puts it this way: “Nothing can suppress our compulsion for moving the locker room into the meeting room.”

  Mackenzie understates the impact—Sportsthink now extends well beyond the meeting room. But corporate America’s unbridled enthusiasm for it certainly gives some indication of the magnitude of the phenomenon. Between 1991 and 2002, U.S. corporate-training budgets grew from $43.2 billion to $66 billion per annum. Though the portion of that sum given over to sports-influenced protocols is hard to pin down, the answer clearly runs to ten figures. Insiders peg the domestic banquet circuit alone as a $500 million annual enterprise, with Lasorda and his imitators and successors putting in appearances at not a few of the eight hundred thousand off-site meetings corporate America holds each year, pocketing fees from $5,000 to upward of $100,000. Companies spend additional billions on “after-action”—the books, videos, CDs, workshop tutorials, and other ancillary materials designed, says Mackenzie, to create “a bright shining world where never is heard a discouraging word and everybody is a winner all the time.”

  LIFE IS A GAME—WIN IT

  America’s desire to bask in the greatness of its sports heroes is nothing new. The banquet circuit already existed in Babe Ruth’s day, and was in fact a concern of some Yankees officials, who worried about the weight the not-exactly-svelte Babe would add during his off-season banquet binges. But in those days, even top-tier athletes often appeared gratis, deeming it
an honor just to be invited to speak. Legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, of the fabled “Gipper” pregame speech, did a fair amount of speaking in public, though surprisingly it did not come naturally to him, and he never considered himself good at it. Vince “Winning Is the Only Thing” Lombardi emerged as a huge draw during the 1960s, becoming one of the first sports luminaries to be paid decent sums for his motivational appearances. His son now trades on the famous name and an uncanny physical resemblance, delivering after-dinner inspiration at the relatively modest $5,000 to $10,000 level.

  One could say that the modern era of sports motivation began on September 1, 1993. That was the publication date of basketball coach Pat Riley’s book The Winner Within, which formulated what Riley knew of sports motivation into a complete philosophical system—or as his subtitle put it, A Life Plan for Team Players. The book became an instant classic and required reading among corporate strategists. It also spawned an entire publishing category of credibly “nichified” alternatives to such blue-suited success books as Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s One Minute Manager and Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

  In the wake of Riley’s smash hit, if you coached basketball at almost any level, corporate America wanted to hear what you had to say about life, work, empowerment, fulfillment, actualization, or [fill in the desired SHAM buzzword]. In 1995 Phil Jackson, then coaching the Michael Jordan–era Chicago Bulls, churned out Sacred Hoops, the movement’s most unapologetically Zen synthesis of sports, truth, and life. After leading the University of Kentucky to a national championship, Rick Pitino chipped in with Success Is a Choice (1997), whose title became one of Sportsthink’s core maxims. Duke University’s Mike Krzyzewski, known affectionately as “Coach K,” contributed Leading with the Heart (2000), which brimmed with such memorable Lasordian insights as “a leader’s ability to think on his feet . . . is of paramount importance.”