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Dembling’s experience in writing The Making of Dr. Phil: The Straight-Talking True Story of Everyone’s Favorite Therapist underscores McGraw’s enormous sense of personal sovereignty, as well as his reach. In Dembling’s telling, the authors embarked on their research hopeful that McGraw would talk to them, but his lawyer fielded their request, brusquely informing the writers that McGraw would not cooperate. In the Mediabistro piece, she described an admonishing phone call from the attorney, who had tried to dissuade her from completing the project: “You people just want to dig up dirt and bring people down” was a phrase that stuck in Dembling’s mind. McGraw’s friends and associates also closed ranks around him, refusing to speak ill—or even good—of their powerful acquaintance. The Making of Dr. Phil caused hardly a ripple on publication, even though Dembling and Gutierrez had managed to dig up a fair amount of new information and believed their timing to be impeccable. They couldn’t get booked on the shows where authors of such a book might be expected to appear. They couldn’t generate buzz in the places where high-profile biographies normally generate buzz. The book developed no media traction.
Though no proof of any conspiracy against Dembling’s book exists, it would not be the first time powerful media celebrities conspired to undo their detractors, and such a sub-rosa campaign hardly seems beyond the realm of possibility here. McGraw has evolved into a major media player in his own right, and of course he continues to have the backing of Oprah and the Harpo Productions monolith.
Indeed, in the history of broadcasting, it’s doubtful that such an alliance of omnipotents—prima donna and protégé—has existed quite the way it exists between Winfrey and McGraw.
MANIPULATION
And so, in the end, one must ask: Is Dr. Phil really about helping people engineer “a changing day” in their lives? Or does he simply get off on being in charge and enforcing his will over his gullible subjects? It’s a question McGraw’s legions of loyal fans would do well to ask themselves. As one wag wrote in a column on McGraw-mania for the entertainment magazine The Wave, “The only thing that’s changed is that instead of manipulating 12 jurors, Dr. Phil now manipulates 6.5 million television viewers.”
Or as his ex-wife, Debbie, puts it, “It’s always about him. No matter what the supposed subject is or how he comes across, it’s always about him.”
4
TONY ROBBINS:
LEAPS (AND BOUNDS) OF FAITH
The people who are there, the ones who made a sizable investment to go, they’re going to be excited and get into it. But when you’re talking about the people who don’t go, well, it’s hard to say how they feel.
—Niurka Turner, a former salesperson for Tony Robbins Enterprises, explaining why people who attend Robbins’s seminars probably have more faith in his methods than those who don’t
It’s hard to capture the full impact Tony Robbins has had on American culture over the past few decades. He is, to begin with, a man of near-mythological proportions: a broad six-foot-seven with a bestubbled jaw worthy of Mount Rushmore. It would not be stretching things to say that he has become a metaphor for himself and his ideas of personal greatness. Robbins understands as well as anyone the special advantage his physical size gives him in an industry whose whole point is about feeling larger than life. Allusions to size and potency are everywhere in his public image, from the titles of his best-selling books, Unlimited Power (1986) and Awaken the Giant Within (1991), to the none-too-subtle hints of mythological sexual endowment in that memorable elevator scene from the film Shallow Hal, in which the title character, played by the comic Jack Black, remarks with wide-eyed awe at the size of Robbins’s feet. Shallow Hal is one of two high-profile Hollywood products in which Robbins makes key cameo appearances; the other was Men in Black, which also riffed on Robbins’s aura of unreality by suggesting that he is not of this earth.
A figure shrouded in such mystery could only have the most mysterious of all possible birthdays: leap day, February 29. The year was 1960.
Otherworldly is as good a word as any for his success. Robbins likes to talk about how he once worked as a janitor and lived in quarters so cramped that he stored his dishes in the bathtub. He now stands at the helm of a motivational empire that Business Week has estimated provides him with $80 million per year. His books, most of them originally published in the 1990s, became major best sellers and still sell today. He pioneered and perfected the art of the late-night infomercial, which eventually, with the emergence of cable TV, became the all-day infomercial: Robbins claimed a few years ago that there had never been a thirty-minute interval since April 1989 when one of his spots wasn’t on TV somewhere. He boasts that he has “directly impacted the lives of 50 million people from 80 countries,” and his one-on-one clients have included Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Princess Diana, and Mother Teresa. President Clinton beckoned him to Camp David for a chat (perhaps having a particular need for Robbins’s expertise in the artful use of persuasive language). Because Robbins was among the first to take a “holistic” approach to motivation by arguing that all human activities figured in one’s odds of success, he’s ideally positioned to claim market share in nutrition and wellness. Though he may be eclipsed at any given time by the motivational flavor of the week, in the end, there is always Tony Robbins.
It helps that many insiders rank him as SHAM’s most convincing motivational theorist, treading as he does that perfect line between brilliance (or at least pseudobrilliance) and accessibility. Even though his theories owe a great deal to others’, Robbins has put it all together in a way that few have managed. Yes, he sells the usual actualization liturgy, which vastly oversimplifies the mechanism of success. “The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment,” he will say, or “Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.” But for someone out of the Empowerment camp—indeed, one of its founding voices—Robbins has also talked quite a lot about pain. And that resonates with people. To wit: “All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. You must feel deep in your gut that not only has this belief cost you pain in the past, but it’s costing you in the present and, ultimately, can only bring you pain in the future. Then you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief.” And: “The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.” He has also said, now and then, things with clear practical implications: “Successful people ask better questions. As a result, they get better answers.”
Nor has it hurt Robbins that, like all of the seminarists, he uses the dozens of seminars he puts on each year as extended sales pitches for his books, other products, and further seminars. But that still doesn’t give the man enough credit for being the sui generis force he is in modern-day SHAM culture. Let’s put it this way: If motivation were a religion, Tony Robbins would almost certainly be its pope.
But is it a religion you’d want to belong to?
THE EVENT
A Tony Robbins seminar is a multiday event, a Happening. For starters, there are the venues: Robbins’s seminars, like others of the breed, take place in large hotels and resorts—but he often holds his in San Juan, or Palm Springs, or even Fiji, where he maintains a second home. (The first is in coastal Del Mar, California, which isn’t exactly slumming it.) The seminars bear evocative, uplifting names, like Life Mastery, Wealth Mastery, Leadership Academy, Date with Destiny, Mastery University, and Unleash the Power Within. Once you get beyond Robbins’s entry-level offerings (such as Unleash the Power Within), the appeal is grand luxe throughout. Consider this description of a Date with Destiny seminar from Robbins’s promotional literature, which appears under the heading “Awaken to
Your Dreams in the Most Spectacular Settings”:
What if you could experience some of the most important moments of your life in some of the most spectacular and breathtakingly beautiful resorts . . . If you could spend a week in the most exclusive company in the world, enjoying Anthony Robbins’ most intimate program . . . In the sophisticated surroundings of a world-class getaway for sun worshipers, golf lovers and nature buffs alike . . . You must act now! This opportunity will vanish! [Ellipses in original]
Availing yourself of this particular date with destiny will make $6,995 vanish. And that sum does not include the hotel accommodations themselves—a technicality that goes unmentioned in the literature and that, judging by the grumbling in Tony Robbins online discussion groups, doesn’t occur to some customers until after they’ve paid for their seats and received their registration materials. Recognizing that the price of admission may seem daunting to some, Robbins includes top-shelf testimonials, such as this one from Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jeff Arch: “A month after Date with Destiny, I wrote Sleepless in Seattle, and sold it for a quarter of a million dollars.”
Robbins likes to bundle his seminars, promising maximum bang for the buck. Sign up for the five-and-a-half-day Mastery University and you get Life Mastery, Wealth Mastery, Date with Destiny, and VIP Coaching, all neatly packaged in an “exclusive opportunity to condition every area of your life” by “learning from the finest movers and shakers of our time.” The coaching follow-up is spread over three months, in a total of a half-dozen thirty-minute sessions. No, you do not get Tony himself for each session, but rather a Robbins stand-in. All this for the low, low price of $10,995 per person. He also may offer several tiers of admission. The price structure of a 2004 Unleash the Power Within seminar, held in New York City, ran from a general-admission tariff of $795 to “executive” ticketing at $1,095, “VIP” ticketing at $1,395, and “Diamond” ticketing at $1,995. The higher tiers get special seating, perks, and freebies.
The events themselves are state of the art: sound systems worthy of a Sting concert, Hollywood-grade stage lighting, digital-video feeds to JumboTron screens alongside the stage (or in adjacent rooms for the overflow crowd), music, dancers, other performers. Some have compared a Robbins seminar to a nonstop advertisement for success, and in a way the analogy is dead-on, since the senses-filling spectacle features regular promos for Robbins’s ancillary materials as well as other products he shamelessly shills. This is hardly unheard-of in the self-help culture, as top SHAM artists routinely cut side deals with people selling “complementary” products. For a time, Laura Schlessinger was regularly touting the literacy program Hooked on Phonics, and her show ran ads for the product starring her son, Deryk. The creator of Hooked on Phonics, John Shanahan, happened to be her partner in Synergy Broadcasting, which then owned her radio show. Gurus make the most of the audience they have in the palm of their hands. Robbins of late has been particularly fond of QLink, a pendant that, he argues, enhances a person’s resistance to ambient radiation of the kind that comes from cell phones. (Deepak Chopra endorses QLink, too.) While Robbins includes testimonials and endorsements among his seminar materials and mentions the “double-blind tests” that supposedly validate QLink, seminar attendees have had trouble getting scientific verification, and the Web site to which Robbins’s minions direct interested parties www.clarus.com) shows no conclusive studies. The major bit of verification on the actual QLink site comes via a small Australian study that deals only with exposure to “active mobile phones”—and it begins by conceding that “research has failed to find consistent relations between [mobile phones] and human pathology.” Later, the authors of the study note that, while they detected certain neural changes in cell-phone users, “it has not been shown that such changes are detrimental.”
Whether he’s pushing products or not, Robbins likes to jump up and down and from place to place while onstage; he does impromptu jigs and other dexterous physical stunts, and high-fives his accomplices, assistants, and any attendees he plucks from the audience for various demonstrations and favored shticks. “To see this human brand standing up there modeling all these behaviors he’s encouraging from you is really something,” California real-estate broker James Mencini, a confessed Robbins junkie, told me. “I don’t care how much initial skepticism you may have. He’s a master.”
When he’s there. Sometimes the master turns up missing, for not unlike other SHAM superstars, Robbins employs hired hands to lead certain phases or days of his training. Industry-wide, the consternation level seems directly proportional to the fee paid: Though John Gray now farms out the majority of his Mars/Venus seminars, people who paid a few hundred dollars or less are inclined to shrug it off, figuring they got their money’s worth. On the other hand, one hears a fair amount of carping from Robbins “newbies” who had assumed that for $1,000 or more, they’d get unlimited helpings of the maestro himself, at least for the duration of the seminar.
“IT’S A CROCK”
It may be symbolic that Tony Robbins got his start teaching his followers to walk over hot coals, since this “fire walk experience” is a bit of gimmickry that appeals to naÏfs despite having been so thoroughly debunked as to invite comparisons with snake oil. “In technical, scientific terms, it’s a crock,” says James Randi, the legendary debunker whose organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation, offers a $1 million prize to “anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” In an interview, Randi told me, “Fire walking works, but not for any reasons related to spiritualism or metaphysics. It’s the physics of the thing, having to do with heat conduction and transfer.”
Undeterred, Robbins to this day kicks off some of his ultra-high-tech seminars with this ultra-low-tech mood-setter. “It’s really about getting people’s attention,” he once told me. “The fire walk really embodies the whole of what we try to achieve with mental focus.”
When Robbins began the fire walks two decades ago, getting ever-hopeful Californians to pay $50 a pop, he taught his followers to eliminate fear and pain by inducing an altered, self-hypnotic state that could be attained by repeating the phrase “cool moss.” The phrase was one of the earliest manifestations of his growing absorption in neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a way of controlling thoughts and reworking basic assumptions about life developed in 1975 by a linguist and a mathematician at the University of California at Santa Cruz. NLP can be slippery to define succinctly, but it rests on the pithy cliché (at least in NLP circles) that “the brain did not come with a user’s manual.” John Grinder, the linguist, and Richard Bandler, the mathematician,1 believed that how we define things and explain life to ourselves determines how we relate to those things and react to life in general. It followed that changing those explanations, or the way people subjectively interpret what’s happening to and around them, should change the way people operate in the world. A fairly typical NLP tenet, now perceived as groundbreaking, is: “There is no such thing as failure—only feedback.” That is, do something that has a bad outcome and you haven’t failed; you’ve merely learned. NLP has shown up in many settings inside and outside SHAM, but of late it has acquired particular cachet in business circles for its usefulness in negotiations and conflict resolution—which is interesting, because Grinder and Bandler ultimately ended up in court, unable to resolve their own conflict over who owned the licensing rights to NLP. Nonetheless, dozens of firms offer derivative programs today, if not with quite the success Tony Robbins enjoys.
Robbins made NLP his own, refining it and personalizing it into what he christened “neuroassociative conditioning.” In 1986 came publication of his Unlimited Power, the first formal statement of his thesis. The book took off immediately, as did Robbins, who piloted his own helicopter over buildings where he used to work as a janitor.
As remarkable as Robbins’s success is his staying power in the face of adversity. If Ronald Reagan was the Teflon President
and John Gotti was the Teflon Don, then Tony Robbins is the Teflon Guru, brushing off sticky situations large and small. In the small category: For someone whose stock in trade is the precise, life-changing use of language, Robbins can be surprisingly careless with it. Promotional materials describing his new line of nutritional products twice refer to one of the key ingredients as collodials instead of colloidals. (And whatever the spelling, it is debatable how much of a role, if any, these supplements play in proper nutrition.) Perhaps more problematic for Robbins’s followers is the explanation of his three-day cancellation policy in his seminar-registration materials: It appears to be a no-day cancellation policy, requiring “a signed and dated written notice postmarked prior to midnight of the business day after the date of this agreement.”
Robbins has math issues, too. When I visited his Web site in the summer of 2004, I discovered that both his Date with Destiny and his Life Mastery seminars were listed at $6,995 and that Robbins offered a 28 percent discount for ordering online—which is fine except that in one case (Date) the sale price became $4,995, and in the other case (Mastery) the sale price became $4,495. Perhaps Robbins himself needs a Date with Long Division or a course in Math Mastery.
If those problems seem insignificant, critics have highlighted more troubling aspects of Robbins’s approach. Robbins uses science as if it existed solely for his convenience in making the points he wants to make. He’ll offer up blithe correlations between technology and disease or caffeine and breast cancer, as if they were unimpeachable medical truths. He condemns meat and milk, strongly implying that you can’t reach maximum potential if you’re still chained to those vestiges of old-style food consumption. Then there’s that whole bit about the energy frequency of foods, which simply does not make sense, because frequency is a measure of oscillation or vibration, not energy. “How,” asks Yale University nutrition expert Kelly Brownell, “would that possibly apply to food?”