00:00 Dr. Forbes Riley
I had no friends. Not a joke. I had no friends. My parents could understand me. I would write and I would point. And for the longest time, I didn't really understand what I was saying until I started becoming a professional speaker on stages.

00:11 Ilana Golan
That's Doctor Forbes Riley, interpreter and TV fitness icon. Before she built a career generating $2.5 billion in sales. She spent years struggling to even be understood. That isolation made her study words, people and communication differently and eventually turn that skill into an extraordinary career.

00:31 Dr. Forbes Riley
No one ever bought what they needed. People buy into what they want. And the secret here is to.

00:36 Ilana Golan
In this episode, you'll learn how eight years of painful isolation became the foundation of Forbes Riley's communication mastery. Why? The best pitch starts with understanding the problem someone desperately wants solved, and how learning to communicate your value can completely change your career, your income, and appearances you create. I'm Ilana Golan, and this is the Leap Academy podcast.

01:03 Ilana Golan
Forbes, thank you for being here.

01:05 Dr. Forbes Riley
What a powerful pitch that was. My gosh, you got you get an A+ in my class right now. That was so. And I want to know more about Forbes Riley. Thank you.

01:15 Ilana Golan
I read you. I know to be so, but take me back in time. I have to like I read the story and I was like, oh my God. So we're going to take you back in time and we're taking back to age eight. You are a kid. What happened?

01:33 Dr. Forbes Riley
Yeah. So I'm going to share a little picture with you. That was me at age eight, and I was the second iteration. Immigrant Ukrainian parents.

01:41 Ilana Golan
Just those that are listening to this. It's going to be on YouTube. So go to Ilana Golan Leap Academy on YouTube and check it out. It's incredible. Okay, so go for it.

01:52 Dr. Forbes Riley
My life has been in video and photos, and I love the idea that I can share this with you. If you're listening to it. You're looking at a little sweet girl whose teeth go in all different directions. And my mom, God bless her, they took a mold of my mouth. And you do see, they look like animal teeth.

02:07 Dr. Forbes Riley
And my mother was a bit of a hoarder. She saved it because in the bottom you can see it's from 1968. I still have the mold of my mouth. I don't know why, but that's what we did in my family. We held on to everything to tight, and so they put me embraces. And a lot of people have been embraces.

02:22 Dr. Forbes Riley
Not a big deal right when you're eight. But I had braces for eight years till I was 16 years old. They didn't come off. And a full set is not a terrible thing. But then they also put in the headgear and the rubber bands. And then I'm going to show you a picture of this thing called the tongue thruster.

02:37 Dr. Forbes Riley
I, I guess for treasure my life. No one wants to talk to me because they can't understand me. And I developed a massive passion for communication. But in the next photo you see this little sad girl who just wouldn't smile. And so for me, I had no friends. Not a joke. I had no friends, I didn't, I just my parents couldn't understand me.

02:56 Dr. Forbes Riley
I would write and I would point. And I watched an insane amount of television and movies, and I could do 1960s TV trivia. I grew up with friends like The Addams Family or F or I do or Bewitched. Very strange shows back then. A lot of magic and crazy people doing things, and I imagined that I was James Bond, and my entire life I've lived the James Bond philosophy because he would gamble where great clothes go scuba diving and snow skiing and live this outrageous life.

03:23 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I will tell you, I have a very much of a James Bond story. What happened? Unfortunately, when I was a teenager, my dad was in a horrific accident. He was an inventor and a magician, and he cut off the whole front of his left hand in a printing press that he had built by accident. And for me, I walked into a baseball bat, and now you see a girl who's overweight got a very badly broken nose.

03:44 Dr. Forbes Riley
The braces finally come off. But my hair is real frizzy, and I'm ugly as as you can get. And I grew up in a time where pretty was Marcia Brady. Pretty was straight blond hair parted down the middle. And I knew I was ugly because when Marcia got hit with the football, she didn't go to the homecoming because she looked so horrible with the broken nose.

04:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
And my dad's doctor one day turned to my mother and said, you know what? I can fix her nose. And my mom, being the wonderful woman that she is, said, look, we're really broke. We have no money for college. There is a miss Teenage America pageant. But with that face. And she didn't mean to be mean to me, she was being very helpful and hurtful.

04:20 Dr. Forbes Riley
I guess at the same time. I woke up a couple of days later from the surgery, and all of a sudden this cute little 15 year old emerged. I looked in the mirror for the first time and my nose looked cute. My eyes looked bigger, my smile turned upside down to right side up, and I entered what I thought was a silly beauty pageant.

04:37 Dr. Forbes Riley
I had a scholarship to college at a real clear why I wanted to save my family, and I won. And that was the beginning of this crazy idea that if you want something bad enough, no matter how outrageous it is, if you put in the work and you have the right thought patterns, you can achieve anything. And I've lived my entire life that way.

04:56 Ilana Golan
Wow. That's powerful. Oh my God. And and that's incredible. What what did it teach you when you couldn't speak? What do you think? What did you learn by observing.

05:07 Dr. Forbes Riley
That people waste words? That communication is an art. A skill not to be taken for granted. Because I will tell you, very few people have ever had it taken away from them. And as I got older and I've been an actress, when I went off to college, I did not become a lawyer. I realized I wanted to be an actress, and I pursued that.

05:23 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I ended up in a lot of different movies and television and soap operas and Broadway. And then I did stand up comedy, and I've hosted things like the X games for ESPN. I've been a television host, infomercials, and at some point my agents would say, I don't get it. You're all over the place. You do sports and comedy and radio.

05:42 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I'm like, no, I'm just communicating. And for the longest time, I didn't really understand what I was saying until I started becoming a professional speaker on stages. And then one day it hit me that what I choose to do, the way I look at words, the way I hear breathing in people, whether they're afraid or they're excited, I can hear all of that was because that's what I was trained to do when I was little.

06:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
And the art of speaking. And by the way, you all waste a whole lot of words. You all say a lot of stupid stuff. And I have a list of words that I hear all the time. I hear words like, actually, well, actually, I'm on camera with, you know, you're just here. Well, basically it looks. No it's not.

06:18 Dr. Forbes Riley
It just is, like, you know, like I'm trying. You guys words matter. Words pain. Pictures in people's hearts. Words move mountains. Words took us to the moon. Words started the hero. I mean, they dropped a bomb. He said drop it in. All of a sudden, words become the most powerful thing on the planet. And we waste them.

06:37 Dr. Forbes Riley
We take them for granted. And we also don't realize the impact we have on others. And that led me down this path. My first, you know, I was just an actress. I was very happy. I wanted to be Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock. And from my little brain, that would have been just so wonderful and adorable. And you kissed the cute guy and you run off into the sunset.

06:55 Dr. Forbes Riley
But the universe had a different plan, and I believed very much in what I'm saying, that one day I walked into an audition and there was a pen on the table, said, sell me this pen. Well, I don't sell. I don't have a lot of money growing up at all. We were flat broke and my dad was in the hospital for three years.

07:11 Dr. Forbes Riley
And so I looked at the camera and I could hear this little voice. Maybe it was my dad. Maybe it was who knows what saying, do it different. And you're like, there were hundreds of girls who wanted the same thing. And I looked at this pen and I said, you know, the funny thing about a pen? I was 15.5 when I went off to college.

07:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
I was so shy and insecure, and my mother got blessed. His woman would write me handwritten notes every day. I'd race the mailbox, and I realized that pen like this can reach out and touch somebody's heart. I put it down and I went to leave. This guy comes out from behind the camera. His name is Jake. Body by Jake grabs my.

07:46 Dr. Forbes Riley
Because you're going.

07:46 Dr. Forbes Riley
To make me a lot of money. Don't know Willie know what he's talking about.

07:50 Dr. Forbes Riley
He had just started a thing called the Cable Health Club on cable television, fit TV, and he wanted someone to sell fitness and wellness products. I've never sold a single thing in my life at this point, he said. You're not going to sell. You're going to look at those people in the audience. You're going to tell them why this works, and I promise you it's going to work.

08:07 Dr. Forbes Riley
1500 different products. Five years later, he sold the network in 1993 for $500 million, and it launched everything from me. I sprung board into infomercials. They were just coming out, and I have this ability and I'm going to tell you what I do now is I broke down. I'm not I thought I was a genius for the longest time, but it dawned on me somewhere around year 3 or 4 that I was doing a lot of things the same way, and it was my daughter many, many years later who said, mom, I've watched a lot of what you do.

08:40 Dr. Forbes Riley
I'm a systems girl. You have a formula. Let me show you what you do. And sure enough, every single time I would pitch a product, I use the exact same system. I now teach that system. I've had over a quarter of a million students go through my academy, and it's been it's been wonderful because all of a sudden pitching, by the way, is getting what you want, getting a yes anytime, anywhere.

09:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I have mastered that. And now I teach that.

09:06 Ilana Golan
Incredible. And before we give that, you know, everybody some really cool tips. And to show them your book, I want to take you for a second. So you did mention your father a few times, and I want to take you to a pretty dark moment. I, you know, your father was in the hospital for a while, and then he at some point he passed away.

09:27 Ilana Golan
And I think you mentioned a lot of, kind of feeling like a lot of inventions and dream kind of went with him. So talk to me a little bit about how that impacted you.

09:39 Dr. Forbes Riley
My dad was not very vocal. He was a very shy man who had he spent a lot of time in his head. He was also a magician and one of the greatest gifts that he gave me, and I gave this to my daughter, was the ability to do magic tricks. I was doing tricks at the time. I was a kid on stage talent show.

09:56 Dr. Forbes Riley
I was always doing tricks. And what that allows you to do magic is a verbal skill. You just don't go, oh, look, here it is. There it's gone. No, you're like, hey, you know what, guys? I've been walking down this path and I found this magical stone and I'm going to go and watch it explode. All of that is you using your body, your mind, your the power of communication and getting someone else to suspend their belief.

10:19 Dr. Forbes Riley
That has served me. I think that's why there's another gentleman out there who teaches communication. Turns out he's a magician as well. I'm going to say that I got a really crazy education and that's what I've been using. So when I'm a kid, my dad created some really wacky things. I mean, and this is why I know.

10:36 Ilana Golan
That, by the way, super interesting. Fun fact. So we just had a while ago the founder of Siri, like Apple Theory. And he also came to our live event. He, you know, he spoke on stage with me, but he's a magician. So when he's not, you know, building technologies, he, you know, tell stories and create magic. So I'll need to connect you to it's going to be fun.

10:59 Dr. Forbes Riley
Okay. That the concept.

11:01 Dr. Forbes Riley
Of creating magic is a very unique situation. And I think Jesse Eisenberg said it in a movie called Now You See Me. He said, the magician is the smartest person in the room. Well, it doesn't mean that you're technically the smartest, but you know how it's going to end and the audience doesn't, and it puts you in a very unique sense of you better take them on a journey and then fulfill the journey.

11:23 Dr. Forbes Riley
When you've got a product or service, you want people to go on that journey with you and you will at some point, they'll give you a review. Did you like it? Did you not like it? So I'm sitting in the garage with my dad and my dad's garage and they get this. Here's another thing I know nobody has done in the entire world.

11:37 Dr. Forbes Riley
Out of 8 billion people. Watch this. My father, we had a very small house over the bathroom. He did a remodel at our bathroom, butted up against the attic. He takes a four foot in diameter circle and builds it three storeys high and makes it our medicine cabinet. It's a massive thing, but it's behind these little mirror doors, right?

11:57 Dr. Forbes Riley
There would be three things. And you turn it because it was heavy. You turn it. And there was my mom's stuff. There was my dad's stuff, there was my sister stuff, there was my stuff. And then there was a giant circle in the middle. Well, I would climb over the sink into my medicine cabinet with a flashlight, close the doors and disappear for hours.

12:18 Dr. Forbes Riley
I read books, I even took my dog in there with me sometimes to hang out and be quiet. No one, no one bothered me when I was in the medicine cabinet. Do you know anyone else on the planet who says they grew up in their medicine?

12:30 Dr. Forbes Riley
No. Come on. Really?

12:31 Ilana Golan
That is unique.

12:35 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well, my dad said to me one day I was about eight years old and he said, dad. He said, kiddo, how do I get my ideas out to the world? And I'm like, daddy, I have no idea. I'm eight and I didn't. And when I came back to the garage that I grew up, they never left the house.

12:49 Dr. Forbes Riley
I grew up in a very tiny house. Both my parents passed away within a year of each other and it was so devastating. They were my best friends. They were the only really people who believed in me. And that mattered, because if they hadn't done that, I would not be here.

13:01 Ilana Golan
How were you?

13:03 Dr. Forbes Riley
I was 40 when he died, which is now 26 years ago. And it was really sad. He was only 70. My mother was 70. It was just it was very sudden, very quick, and it was horrible. And when I went to sell the house and clean up his garage was the way he left it. It was waiting for him to come back, and he never did.

13:22 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I looked around and thought, man, dad, I don't want to do with this stuff. It's not valuable to anybody. I, I did, I took one thing, I took my thinker blinker. My thinker blinker was a computer that my dad made me make when 1968. And it's a this high. It turns itself on with selling. And I had a little magnet in my ring and it would go yes, no.

13:41 Dr. Forbes Riley
Or maybe to this day, I still have it. It's crazy. It's the only thing I kept. And I realized very profoundly that if you don't get your ideas out, we're on this side of the dirt when you're gone. Nobody cares.

13:55 Ilana Golan
So what did that do to you? Like it sounds like it fueled you in a different way.

14:01 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well, I started speaking professionally, and I would go to inventor conventions, and I went all over the over the word doing this. I would inspire inventors to get smart, to not just live in their brains, not just to tinker. But if the world doesn't see what you've built, it doesn't matter what you've built. And I made inventors into entrepreneurs.

14:20 Dr. Forbes Riley
And the cool thing about that is I got in very early on some pretty amazing inventions. And then I became the spokesperson, and I made tens and hundreds of millions of dollars because I was on the lookout for great ideas and that I would coach the people who couldn't pitch what they did. And at worst comes to worse, I would say to the founders, you sit over there, I got you, and I would pitch what they were doing, and I turned companies around like you couldn't believe a company called Barefoot Science.

14:48 Dr. Forbes Riley
This guy had created an insole with a little insert, and every week you put in a bigger insert and it annoys your foot. Okay, most orthotics are really hard, right? And so he said to me, all right, Forbes, you have to say the word propio receptors. It's activating your foot muscles. And like what he said, well you just say it.

15:05 Dr. Forbes Riley
They'll know what you mean. I'm like, no they.

15:07 Ilana Golan
Don't how you sell.

15:09 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well.

15:09 Dr. Forbes Riley
But he did. But us never know this. They really don't. They just want to talk. They want to tell you all about it. And I said, you know what? I took a foot. I put it into a clear box of sand. And I just said, guys, you know what? If you're smacking your foot every day on concrete and a pair of heels, high heels and your foot, it's horrible because it's having a negative effect on your entire spine, your hips, your neck.

15:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
But how good does it feel to walk in sand when your. Feet move and your muscles all move, everything is activated. We sold $55 million worth of Barefoot Science, and I never said proprio receptors.

15:43 Ilana Golan
So for. That's incredible. And by the way, you you know, I at some point wrote about how, you know, an article about how losing my mom changed my life. And it sounds like, you know, it definitely like, created a little bit of, you know, drive for you as well. But I want to.

15:58 Dr. Forbes Riley
Thank you.

15:59 Dr. Forbes Riley
I know you want to ask me a question, but I'm just curious because I'm really scared about my daughter. It's my best friend, my business partner, and I just can't even imagine not being here. How did it change your life?

16:09 Ilana Golan
It made me realize that the life is short, and that I need to stop waiting for permission, or to stop waiting for whatever is going to happen. And I just need to, you know, like, lean in and to create the most incredible life I can.

16:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
Yeah, yeah.

16:30 Ilana Golan
So yeah. So we're giving them a gift at the end. But but you have like a lot of years ahead of you. Mrs.. So let's go.

16:38 Dr. Forbes Riley
So you hope.

16:40 Dr. Forbes Riley
Joe.

16:40 Dr. Forbes Riley
I'm in.

16:41 Dr. Forbes Riley
Love.

16:41 Dr. Forbes Riley
With somebody nine years for the last nine years, someone who's 17 years younger. I know the secret of staying young because I am 66, by the way.

16:48 Ilana Golan
This week. Incredible. Yeah.

16:50 Dr. Forbes Riley
Come on, come on, give it up. Because I can't hear that.

16:52 Ilana Golan
Incredible.

16:53 Dr. Forbes Riley
Let's go. I'm on the cover of a magazine that I wanted to be on the cover of for a long time. I have a two page and it's in the grocery store. When you check out, I'm going to be staring Back at you. And they did a two page spread on me. But this is in every grocery store across the country.

17:08 Dr. Forbes Riley
But they mentioned my age right there. It's like, oh, you got to be kidding me. So I'm very proud. And by the way, this was one of those crazy things. Guys, when you hang out with me in my world, I believe in manifestation. I believe in creating things out of nothing. And I know that because I've lived it my entire life.

17:25 Dr. Forbes Riley
And one of those was this magazine. I would walk out of the grocery store. How many times you've been in the grocery store once a week for your entire life, right? And I kept saying, I saw my friends on the cover. I saw all my fitness friends Tamilee Webb, Denise Austin, Jane Fonda. I'm like, I want to be on the cover.

17:40 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well, this year I chose a new word for my year. The word was delusional. And so with the release of my book, a couple crazy things happened. And I said to the PR team, I want to be on the cover, and damn it, five months later, I'm.

17:55 Ilana Golan
She is doing it, she is doing it. But when somebody here's your story, they're like, I can't be Forbes. Like, she's just so talented. She's always had it easy. She has. She was on TV. She was in Hollywood. I want you to actually take us back in time to Hollywood. And what were those early days like? Because I think a lot of times we just look at somebody else's success and we don't realize that there is a pattern, like there was a path there, and you went through some hard moments to get to where you are today, and that's why you're stronger.

18:29 Ilana Golan
That's why you're incredible. That's why you can write this kind of a book, right? Because you lived it. So take me back in time for a second.

18:37 Dr. Forbes Riley
Oh my gosh, I don't have enough time to go through all of this. I'll give you some crazy highlights because none of it was given to me. I never slept my way to anywhere, which is interesting because I'm in New York City to start with, and I. I'm an actress. Yes, I did get to lead my very first feature film, but there's a story behind that, too, and I'm working on getting an agent.

18:55 Dr. Forbes Riley
Do you want to top power agent? You know, and I was interviewing with a lot of different people, and I'm go to lunch one day with the top guy that I really wanted, and we go to lunch at this hotel, only it's not at the restaurant. It's up in his room and I'm like, okay. And I go up there completely innocent, and apparently I'm on the menu now.

19:13 Dr. Forbes Riley
Luckily, he was shorter than I was, not very strong. And I'm like, looking at this man going, you've got to be. You want me to sleep? I'm gonna sleep with you. For what? And that didn't even make sense to me. There was no me too movement. There was nobody supporting me. Not only did he get mad at me, but he told a lot of people not to work with me because I insulted him and I almost punched him out, but I wasn't doing that.

19:32 Dr. Forbes Riley
So I come home and I'm thinking, all right. And by the way, so it calls me the Queen of pitch. I could probably be called the Queen of resilience. So I get home and I have no one to talk to or ask permission from, and I get a piece of stationery and I write CMA on it. Creative management for artists.

19:46 Dr. Forbes Riley
I hire a British woman named Lindsay Maxwell and Lindsay. Oh my gosh, she just thought was Riley was simply spectacular. And she would pitch Forbes for commercials and soap operas. For three years. Lindsay and I worked together for three years. I was Lindsay, okay? For three years. I'm picking up the phone, pretending to be somebody else, pitching myself.

20:06 Dr. Forbes Riley
And there were moments because we didn't have cell phones, guys, we had a pain. We had payphones. And I'm not. I'm my own contracts. I'm getting lots of deals. And I was afraid at some point somebody was going to come arrest me. Like literally I would go knock on my door. It's probably illegal to start a company that doesn't really exist and to impersonate somebody else, but now it's 30 years later.

20:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
No one's going to get me. And I forged a whole career by pitching myself. That was one of the first things that I did that you like. Who thinks of that right then? The other thing that you don't want. When I got out to Los Angeles and I have been knock on wood, lucky, I hosted the premier comedy club called The Laugh Factory.

20:45 Dr. Forbes Riley
I started the ESPN X Extreme Games with Stuart Scott. I've had an eclectic, wacko career because I just don't stop. I have and I'm not stopping now. I still feel like I'm just getting started, and I just did a TikTok video on School of Hard Knocks, got 21 million views. This is all very new and very exciting to me, but I wanted to find love that was very important to me.

21:08 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I found my then husband, father of my two kids, and we found a little boy from South Central Los Angeles, which is very inner city, and he became my boy for 12 years. He was my best man at my wedding. He went on all invocations and I just talked. Dexter Dexter was black, and he had a really narrow view of what black and white was all about.

21:26 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I set out as a mission to prove him wrong. And the problem with that, two things. One, I told him, I said, Dex, you can be anything you want to be. You could be president. And he looked at me and said, black man's never going to be president. Turns out Dexter was right because he was murdered before Obama took office.

21:43 Dr. Forbes Riley
He was walking from a haircut to church and a gang member who wanted to get into a gang he was wearing blue, shot him ten times in the back and left him to die on the street all by himself on a Sunday morning. You don't want. He was best man at my wedding. My wedding photos on the cover of the LA times.

21:58 Dr. Forbes Riley
You don't want that. Those are the stories that you're like, oh, happens to you. You know, I spent three years, the killers in jail for 52 years to life. And I still deal with that all the time. So you can say I had it easy, but you'd be wrong.

22:12 Ilana Golan
And I wanted people to hear this because I think somebody else's career always looks easier, right? From social media, from the TV, from what about financials? Like were you. Did you? I mean, I know, I know, rough of the answer, but you didn't come with a lot of money when you needed to start. Like, how did you even get started?

22:33 Ilana Golan
I mean, Hollywood is hard.

22:35 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well, I started in New York, and I'm a hustler. I have one year. I had 95, ten, 90 nines. I would do odd modeling jobs. I did. I handed out fliers for a while. I would stand in a bank, I would anytime. I never said yes to me, but I also I did have a little bit of, I'm going to say, good graces.

22:54 Dr. Forbes Riley
I had something and I knew I had something, but I never had great representation in that world. Otherwise I would have been Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock. And I had another thing that was fighting against me. Oh my gosh, I was overweight. My mom was 260 pounds my whole life. She loved on us with food. When you ate, you ate when you were depressed, you eat when you were happy, you ate.

23:13 Dr. Forbes Riley
You ate because it was Tuesday. You ate everything and I could. I had a very hard time losing that weight. Because here's the fun thing. If you look at this block, this, does that block look fat to, you know, it's a block of a computer block, right? But you put it next to a pen, it looks fat.

23:29 Dr. Forbes Riley
So in the old days, skinny, skinny. I stood next to Meg Ryan and Julianne Moore on a soap opera called As the World Turns. And I was like this, which to me was kind of normal. I was, you know, they called me soft, overweight, fluffy. They sent me to Overeaters Anonymous. I was always put on some diet by somebody somewhere.

23:48 Dr. Forbes Riley
So even though I was talented enough to get bookings, I was always made to feel less then and for a very. Which is ironic that I'm on the cover of a magazine talking about my weight loss story that I just redid because I ended a bodybuilding competition at 64 and got a medal.

24:06 Dr. Forbes Riley
I know so and I never had a body before. Now, at 66, I'm like the fittest 66 you've ever seen. It's bizarre. You're like, took me this long to figure it out, but I had to fight some massive demons by falling in love with myself. I mean, there's a terrible story that I don't tell very often, but your audience might like this.

24:26 Dr. Forbes Riley
In the late 80s, liposuction came out. Kanye West. Mom died on a liposuction table. This is not an easy thing. And I was so broken from having. And I was a dancer and I loved dancing, but my thighs always touched and I'm like, I couldn't take it anymore. And I'd made some money and I invested. I drove myself to the office because I'd made enough money to have a car in New York City, and I had this.

24:50 Dr. Forbes Riley
I didn't tell anybody, and they liposuction my thighs a little bit, right. They sent me home. I drive myself home and I'm bleeding. And I live in a four story walk up in Hell's Kitchen, and I am so distraught over my people just attacking my body all the time. You have no idea what that was like. And I remember walking up four flights of stairs.

25:09 Dr. Forbes Riley
I got to the top and now I'm really bleeding. I didn't tell my parents and I thought, I'm going to die and I'm not going to tell anybody what happened. One I'm embarrassed, but two, I can't take it anymore. I'm just I had enough of people judging me from the neck down, and it was so bad. And the crazy thing, and this is where I believe life is extraordinary.

25:30 Dr. Forbes Riley
A couple of months before that, I found an ashram up in upstate New York, and I lived there for a couple of months, and I learned to chant. I learned to eat vegetarian food. I loved the Indian culture, and I was just very much ensconced in my spirituality, what all the things I was doing. So I'm lying on my bed and I'm contemplating what it's going to be like to not tell my parents and how sad they're going to be about this.

25:53 Dr. Forbes Riley
And the phone rings, and it's a guy that I met at the ashram. He was a chef, and he called me. I don't remember his name to this day. I have one little photo of him and he said, he said, something tells me that you're not doing well. You okay? And I'm like, I think I'm dying. I think I'm bleeding and I don't know what to do.

26:10 Dr. Forbes Riley
And it's for story. It took me 30 minutes just to get upstairs. I can't go downstairs. I don't know what to do. And he said, just sit tight. I'm going to fly in from Boston. I'm going to bring you some stuff. And this man saved my life. And I don't think about that very often because it was such a dark, negative time in my life.

26:27 Dr. Forbes Riley
But I am forever grateful that this little angel. And so if you believe that it was an. I don't know his name. I never knew his name. And he saved me. You're like, if you get saved and I've been saved a bunch of times. Not long ago, two years ago, I was in a massive car accident, went through the glass and ended up bodybuilding.

26:46 Dr. Forbes Riley
You're like, guys, if you die, if you're not dead, don't die. That's not the way out, by the way. But if you're not dead, start living.

26:55 Ilana Golan
That's that's a quote right there.

26:58 Dr. Forbes Riley
It means the world to me. Because the universe will test you. You know, for a while I wrote a bunch of books that I've not released out to the world at about ten years ago now, I was losing my eyesight so bad that I would put on my readers and take off my readers, put in some contacts, couldn't find my readers, didn't know that I had 18 pair of glasses all over the house, and I'm frustrated all the time because I can't see nothing's working.

27:22 Dr. Forbes Riley
The doctor couldn't figure out what's going on. And one night before a TV show that I'm doing with the studio audience, I thought, okay, this is challenging. I have to read the paper, I have to talk to my guest, and I have to read the prompter. Very different focal lengths. And I'm like, okay, took out my contacts and you know what?

27:37 Dr. Forbes Riley
I'm just going to wear glasses on TV. This is before women wore glasses on TV. If you weren't glasses, you were just old. So I'm like, I'm just going to do this. Not a big deal. I get to the set, I start to work, and all of a sudden it feels like there's a knife in my eye and I'm like, what's going on here?

27:50 Dr. Forbes Riley
I can't see. Well, apparently the night before I had taken out my contact, my eye was dry and I ripped my cornea. You literally feel like someone's got a knife in your eye. But again, you want to talk about angels. The producers call an eye specialist. This guy walks in. His name is Doctor Neil Desai. He looks at me, sits me down, does this.

28:11 Dr. Forbes Riley
He said, I've got some good and bad news for you, Mike. Okay? He said, well, the the bad news is that you are only in your late 40s, but you have cataracts. They're not yellow, they're white, and they're they're really bad. And that's what I specialize in because I'm in Florida, I deal with old people and cataracts. And I'm like I said, I'm the good news.

28:29 Dr. Forbes Riley
He said, the good news is it's a seven minute operation on each eye, and you don't even have to wear a patch to be back to work in a couple of days. And I remember thinking that I was writing books, but I wasn't getting them out there in the universe. Message to me was, well, if you're not going to if you're not going to write them, you won't be able to read them either.

28:47 Ilana Golan
Powerful. Yeah. Out. Wow. Yeah. That is like a moment. Oh my God. So what made you write pitch secrets A to Z.

28:58 Dr. Forbes Riley
Oh my gosh. First of all, this book, by the way, just feels so soft is something magical about it. It's in full color. One of the reasons I wrote it is that I helped start Kim Kardashian's career. And you didn't know that. And I worked with Mario Lopez and Montel Williams and Les Brown, and there's Serena Williams, and I had all of these beautiful color photos in my Google Drive.

29:18 Dr. Forbes Riley
And I thought, if you leave the planet, no one's going to get to see this. And wouldn't that be a shame? And then I thought, with two different publishers to get it in color, the whole book is in color because that's how I want life. The second thing is, you said almost 200 infomercials. Well, there they all are.

29:34 Dr. Forbes Riley
Every one.

29:35 Ilana Golan
Of them.

29:35 Dr. Forbes Riley
And it reads like ab and thigh roller, AB rocker, journal, flex toner all the way to zu books. It literally is A to Z. And then I got fixated on all of these words. I said, what makes someone successful? Well, you're very smart. You're very popular. If you had to pick a word, there's one word for every letter.

29:53 Dr. Forbes Riley
What would you make a.

29:55 Ilana Golan
It could be anything. It could be abstract. It could be all. It could be awesome. It could be all sorts of words.

30:03 Dr. Forbes Riley
It could be a lot of work. By the way, I'm going to write a whole new book all about a because there's about 97 of them chose to write attitude. And what attitude is for me is that I had an Academy Award winning director I worked with years ago who said, attitude monitors talent, and I never forgot that.

30:20 Dr. Forbes Riley
It's been a director of my whole life. He said, be nice. He said, nobody cares how talented you are. The most talented actor in the world is not working because they're in asshole. Also an A, he said. But people like Tom cruise, everyone loves him. You have to be the most talented actor. You got a good attitude. It goes a long way.

30:36 Dr. Forbes Riley
And then B is belief because if you can choose to one believe in yourself, believe in your convictions and then it gets much more business oriented. C is closing D is demonstrate. But one of my favorite chapters is F note F stands for. It stands for thing called Forbes did what have you Forbes lately and to Forbes something means to manifest it, especially when no one else thinks it's possible.

31:01 Dr. Forbes Riley
What have you Forbes lately?

31:03 Ilana Golan
Oh, we're disrupting professor education and being the, you know, the voice of the future of work and future of careers. And we just became a media company, so that's, like, really exciting. But tell me, like, what if somebody is now trying and there's like. First of all, go get the book because it's all there. Right?

31:24 Dr. Forbes Riley
It's so inspired.

31:25 Ilana Golan
It's all there. It's all there. But tell me, like if somebody's sitting here and they're just like, I just need a job or I'm just trying to get my first clients, or I just need my business to get off the ground. What do we want them to know?

31:38 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well, stop saying the word just because that's not what you want. And in fact, I play a little game about. What do you want? You know, I got interviewed a lot lately because I guess grads are really nervous. The job market is tough and AI is going to take their jobs. And people keep asking me my opinion to be very clear, don't get a job.

31:55 Dr. Forbes Riley
Now, I know that's crazy thing and I have philosophies for all different aspects, but my oldest and my youngest client would be my 23 year old daughter. She and her twin brother. Okay, I had these and I raised them with a lot of crazy philosophies that are in that book. But my daughter made her first million on her own at 18.

32:13 Dr. Forbes Riley
She is the CEO of my company with over 250,000 students, has a TEDx talk at 22, and now runs two companies. How did she do that? Well, I was the first in my and again, this goes against a lot of people and I'm happy to have debates all day long. I couldn't wait to go to college. That was the big oh my God.

32:29 Dr. Forbes Riley
Back in the 80s. That was the thing, right? So I get in college, end up with a massive debt. Because of that. I was so smart. I graduated, got, by the way, with two degrees in three years. I couldn't stand being like, I couldn't wait to get out. But I wanted the degree because that's what my parents we all agreed on, right?

32:44 Dr. Forbes Riley
Fast forward many, many years later, and my daughter and son are deciding what are we going to do with our lives? And my daughter had been doing internet marketing since she was 12 years old, and she made her first $10,000 selling little lenses, dropshipping them. She was always very inventive. She came downstairs when they said, mom, I have an idea.

33:01 Dr. Forbes Riley
It was the middle of Covid. My husband had just been hit on a motorcycle. He was in a very bad situation. He spent six months in a wheelchair. Again. I had a lot of good and bad. You don't want to trade your life with me. You just want to take the really good parts and leave the rest. And, she said, mom, if I don't make you $1 million in a year, you don't have to work with me.

33:17 Dr. Forbes Riley
I'm like, McKenna, you are 17 years old. Please just get a B in English and I'll be so happy. She said, mom, I don't think you understand. She opens up her bank account. By the way, do you have kids?

33:28 Ilana Golan
Oh, yeah. I have a boy and a girl. And by the way, my girl sounds very similar to you. And my husband actually had a cycling accident. Exactly in Covid, so we have too much in common. But, yeah. Go on, get.

33:40 Dr. Forbes Riley
Into lunch and have a little party. I'm thinking of sauna. So she said, mom, she said, I've been. I go with you to all these events. She was my best buddy and I would pull out of school a lot to go to my speaking events or go to home shopping because I was I was working all over the world.

33:54 Dr. Forbes Riley
I wanted her to be with me. And she says, mom, I worked with Les Brown and Joe Theismann, the NFL football player, because you introduced me to all these people and they all needed websites and YouTube channels, and I charge them and she opens up her bank account and it's got six figures in it. And I'm like, where did you get that money?

34:10 Dr. Forbes Riley
She said, mom, everybody believes in me. But you know, when that's not fair. Nobody else needs you to get a B in English in graduate high school. And so she said, mom, I looked at your pitching. I think we have something here. I think you can teach what you do. And I was like, no, I'm a genius. I can't teach this.

34:29 Dr. Forbes Riley
It's I'm just brilliant. And said, mom, you're a little brilliant, but what you do the same thing all the time and I'm going to show you what you do. We unpacked it. I did my very first webinar in 2000, May of 2020, 2020, and I had $1,000 product because I've been teaching in person. I love teaching pitching. I just love teaching in general.

34:47 Dr. Forbes Riley
And so I had 25 people in the webinar. I had had my funnel system right. It always had zero. For three years I would build funnels but never launched them because I couldn't figure out the internet thing. She puts it all together. The next morning I call her and I'm like, McKenna, what is the K stand for? Said, what do you mean, mommy?

35:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
I said, well, I've had 0000. Now it's just 25 K. What's the K mom make $25,000 last night and I'm like, you did what she said. I told you, I know how to do this. In four weeks with just a hundred people. We had $100,000 in September of that year. We got what's called a two comma Club award.

35:24 Dr. Forbes Riley
We made $1 million with one funnel. And five nights ago we got a phone call saying, guys, you just qualified for the $10 million funnel award.

35:32 Ilana Golan
That's good.

35:34 Dr. Forbes Riley
I know. Tick, tick, boom.

35:37 Ilana Golan
I just came back from Russell Branson from Boise and last week. So that was.

35:43 Dr. Forbes Riley
Actually see, well, there's a very funny foreshadowing to this. So in 2019, I was invited to speak on stage at ten x the convention of 10,000 people. And Russell was also on the on the Rock on the docket. And we walk into a rehearsal and I have it on film. I'm smart enough to videotape this. And my daughter walks up to Russell Brunson and says, Russell, I want to thank you.

36:05 Dr. Forbes Riley
I make a lot of money using your product, but you've got some bugs in the system. You better fix them. So he turns to his then CEO, Dane, and says, talk to this girl. She ended up on his junior board of advisors. And then the funniest part is Russell got up on stage. He's got this moment where he sold $3 million in 90 minutes.

36:23 Dr. Forbes Riley
The beginning of that speech, he calls me out, he calls McKenna out. He literally says, I had a chance to meet Forbes Riley here with, like, I'm sorry you talked about me. He said, yeah, she's a real celebrity. I'm like an internet celebrity, he said. But if you want someone in your business to really help you find a kid.

36:41 Dr. Forbes Riley
And she introduced me to her 15 year old daughter. And then how many years later, like three years later, we got a two comma Club award.

36:48 Ilana Golan
I would see that on.

36:50 Dr. Forbes Riley
You in September there. I'm getting a $10 million one.

36:53 Ilana Golan
Let's go. Oh my God, I love I love this story. So for somebody listening and I do believe pitching sales you know, like knowing how to move people's minds is one of the most important skills. And I don't think it's taught enough. If you are thinking about how do you move? How do you take people on a journey to move their minds?

37:19 Ilana Golan
How do you pitch? Talk me into that?

37:23 Dr. Forbes Riley
It's a little bigger than this one conversation. First of all, I'm going to offer your audience something. Every Sunday. Since that first moment I sold, I've been going live and doing it for free. I go live for two hours because what I teach is not instant soup, and it's like you can learn it, but you want to be able to practice it.

37:40 Dr. Forbes Riley
And so you go to Pitch Secrets training.com completely free at 5:00 every Sunday eastern time. And I not only unpack what I believe pitching means, but I work with people. So I might say when you meet somebody at an event and they say, what do you do? What do you say to them?

37:57 Ilana Golan
Ilana Golan, CEO of Leap Academy. We help professionals reinvent and leap their careers.

38:03 Dr. Forbes Riley
Okay. That's nice. Good for you. And that's and that's probably the response somebody might say, well what's Leap Academy now if I said to you, what can you do for me. Talk literally to me.

38:14 Ilana Golan
I want you to create the biggest life that you can live. And I want you to look, have the biggest legacy that you can even dream of.

38:24 Dr. Forbes Riley
Okay, now I will put the two together. So. Hey, Forbes, I know you're an entrepreneur. I run an academy that multiplies people's incomes by 100. Would you be interested? And all you want to get in that conversation is a yes. Tell me more. And as soon as I get. That's really cool. I would love to know more. Let's set up a meeting that happens in 30s.

38:45 Dr. Forbes Riley
Most people go to networking events. They barely end up with business cards. So one of the things that I love to do here, I'll play a little game.

38:51 Ilana Golan
I love that that's.

38:53 Dr. Forbes Riley
A blank piece of paper here. It's almost blank. Okay, I'm going to say write something here. This is one of my secrets to success. Would you like to see something cool?

39:02 Ilana Golan
Yeah. I always wondered.

39:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
How did I know you were going to say yes?

39:07 Ilana Golan
Because everybody wants to see something cool.

39:10 Dr. Forbes Riley
Then don't ask a question you don't know the answer to. You get three yeses. You get everything. So here's this is not a joke. Most people, when they love what they're doing, they can't wait to tell everybody all about it. And they, oh, you need it. You need my new. You need my academy. You need my new program.

39:25 Dr. Forbes Riley
You need my new vitamin. No, no, no, no one ever bought what they needed. People buy into what they want. And the secret here is to get your audience to want what you have. So it makes sense in business. But imagine, as a mom, I want my kids to clean their room. My mother would yell at me. That was her strategy.

39:44 Dr. Forbes Riley
You don't clean your room. You're okay. That's great. Mom, thank you for me, I said, I don't want yelling in my house. I want a very quiet house. I would say to my kids, hey guys, I smell a chocolate chip cookie in the oven. Oh, you want that? Yes, I get a yes. Yeah. You do. Okay, good. Get shaking their heads now they're buying in.

40:00 Dr. Forbes Riley
Do they want a chocolate chip cookie? I'll make it even better. I'm going to upsell you. I'm going to do. How about we play the game after dinner with no cell phone? You, me, and we'll play cards. Oh, yeah. Nothing. Nothing? Yes. Okay. You know what I want? What? Mommy? What? I want you to clean your room. You got 15 minutes.

40:14 Dr. Forbes Riley
Go. They are racing upstairs. They're giggling. They're having a great time. It's a win win. We're eating chocolate chip cookies, playing cards. And it was a very happy household. I gave them what they wanted so I could get what I wanted. Most people don't do it that way.

40:29 Ilana Golan
Oh.

40:30 Ilana Golan
I love the win win. So how do you think about and again, it's all in the book. So go get the book. So you figure it out and come on Sunday. Right. Pitch secrets A to Z. But if you are breaking, like when somebody goes to an interview or to a pitch to conference or whatever, they don't know who's in front of them, how do you understand who's in front of you and what would make them say, yes?

40:56 Dr. Forbes Riley
See, the crazy thing is, you do know and I have an eight step formula. And step four of the formula is really interesting. Step four is called assumptions. You know a lot about somebody. You don't have to ask stupid questions. You know about them. I can look at you and I can see your age. I can see your general style.

41:13 Dr. Forbes Riley
I know you're at a funnel conference, so you might be in that business. So I already know a whole bunch of things about you. Please don't talk to me like I'm a billboard. So, Elena, nice to meet you. You know, as somebody who teaches pitching, I've sold $2.5 billion. And I know that's kind of a big number, right?

41:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
You want a company? Yeah, yeah I do. I'll tell you what. I would love to come in and offer a workshop on how people can better their culture by pitching and getting more yeses. Might that be interesting to you?

41:39 Ilana Golan
Yeah, sure. Sounds amazing.

41:41 Dr. Forbes Riley
I just got a yes. I don't really know what you do, but I'm pretty much made a whole bunch of assumptions given what I do now. How did that work? What I just unpacked is so assumptions is a powerful thing. And I teach this with a lot of sensitivity, because in today's day and age, you don't want to assume too much and you don't want to say it out loud.

41:57 Dr. Forbes Riley
You just want to stack the odds that I you know, you mentioned the word kids. Okay. That means you're a mom. That means you're splitting your attention. That means if I've got a vacation opportunity, it might be, hey, you know what? If you're ready for old man, leave the kids at home thing, I gotcha. Or hey, if you want an all inclusive with your kids all ages, I gotcha.

42:15 Dr. Forbes Riley
Doesn't take a whole lot to put this together, but people don't. They are treating pitch like it's a billboard and it's like, hi, where are you? In there. The next part of that, and it's very powerful thing, but the most important part of this whole thing, and it goes back to founders. They talk too much. Nobody cares off the top why you do what you do.

42:35 Ilana Golan
In the future.

42:36 Dr. Forbes Riley
No, no, not. But is one they don't care about, but two, they don't care about. Your springboard story. Hi. Nice to meet you. What do you do? Oh, well, you know, if somebody who lost my mom, I decided to go on a whole trauma journey about grief. What the. What? Why are you doing this right now? Save that.

42:50 Dr. Forbes Riley
Hey, you know what? I'm a grief expert. Yeah? If you've ever lost a pet, a parent or a friend, I have a very unique system to get you happy and honor their legacy. Interesting. I just think about it very differently. So one of the big secrets. And guys, come on Sunday, I teach a.

43:05 Ilana Golan
Lot of this spring.

43:06 Ilana Golan
This so fast. It's actually mind blowing. This is so cool to watch. I love I just like how are you coming up with the words? How are you coming up with the word? This is so fun.

43:18 Dr. Forbes Riley
This is what I did. So here's the thing. That's the thing that's most important. When you've got a product you love, is if you take one thing away from this, decide how wonderful I am. And you want the book.

43:27 Ilana Golan
And you want to book. Exactly.

43:29 Dr. Forbes Riley
Know the thing I want you to think about is that. And this takes practice. When you're a founder, you're a new author. You've got an idea of product or service. People seem inclined to want to talk about it. And the truth is, nobody cares about it. So if you equate what you're doing to a solution, I've got a solution.

43:47 Dr. Forbes Riley
Okay. And then you are on the hunt. Not for your avatar. That's bullshit. And I'll tell you why at another point. But you're on the hunt for somebody who suffers from the problem that you solve. For example, you build businesses, right? If someone is not in business, they're not your customer because they're not suffering with bad revenue. If Russell's selling it and somebody has no idea what they would, they don't even have a product yet.

44:12 Dr. Forbes Riley
Not the right time to sell them a funnel. And so and then the other thing, when you do this right, you don't have to overcome objections because they're already gone. For example, price is usually an objection. Right? Okay. How much do you pay for a bottle of water when you go to the grocery store?

44:28 Ilana Golan
$0.25. Oh, wow.

44:30 Dr. Forbes Riley
$0.25. You get a whole bunch of them, right? Bottled water. You go to the convenience store. That bottle of water is now maybe $2. All right, I'm in the convenience store. I'll pay $2 for it. Would you ever pay $12 for the water? That's ridiculous. Unless you're suffering from a problem that that water bottle solves, you walk into a hotel.

44:49 Dr. Forbes Riley
It's midnight. You've been flying all day. You are cranky and you are thirsty. The tap water tastes like ass. And you're like, that bottle is 12 freaking dollars. Give it to me now.

44:58 Ilana Golan
Exactly.

45:01 Dr. Forbes Riley
It solves a problem. And when you realize that what you've created, whatever it is you've created, solve somebody's problem. Go find somebody who's suffering. That word is really important when I teach with that problem. And they want what you have. It's right. It's kind of simple. It's really fun.

45:17 Ilana Golan
And I love that. And, you know, and then for the listeners, I think what I love about this is when you understand the pain and what they're suffering from and you know where they want to go, your pricing is kind of the gap between the two, because that becomes a no brainer, right? Like, again, I'm not going to trust people.

45:35 Ilana Golan
Millions of dollars of that. That's what we create for them. Right. But even if we charge them a little bit, it's a no brainer. So it becomes a no brainer. I think this is like what I love about you just don't even blink. You just like.

45:51 Dr. Forbes Riley
So. Well, because you know, I love what I do so much and I spend so much time doing it. I was just thinking of it. So maybe you've got a luxury product. Let's say you sell Rolls-Royces. Well, Forbes, that is just. What problem does a Rolls-Royce solve? You know what it solves. And this is the skill, by the way.

46:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
Really kind of honing down and practicing this. It solves somebody need to be special to feel and to stand out from the crowd. And you're going to pay for that. So as you walk in here, if you of that kind of ilk where you want to stand out, you want to be absolutely at the top of the line.

46:21 Dr. Forbes Riley
Luxurious. I've got the car. What color would you like? And you're not going to sell that to the average person because they're not suffering from a need of status. That's how people buy and sell luxury. And so at every juncture, if you can understand how you solve that problem, you never have to handle objections.

46:39 Ilana Golan
That's terrible. Barbs I love this. So maybe I want to say one thing I want to I want you to take me back in time and tell me, what would you wish somebody told you when you were younger? Based on everything you know today.

46:56 Dr. Forbes Riley
That I was pretty enough. I know that sounds really crazy.

47:00 Ilana Golan
I know you're gorgeous. Like, if somebody's watching this on YouTube, they're like, what on earth is she talking about?

47:06 Dr. Forbes Riley
Well, I am, I'm going to tell you, I wasn't. I showed you some ugly pictures of me growing up. I had weight issues. I was always told I was not pretty enough. And so even though I'm wildly successful in business and I am, I deals all over the place. And by the way, now I know I'm very, very happy now, but it took a long time to understand that back then.

47:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
I wish I had just known that. Stop being obsessed with that. I was obsessed with what does that mean? That I was never enough? That I wasn't right for the party. And I looked for people who would, you know, say the negative thing and go, why do I glom on to that negative thing? I also wish that somebody would have told me that it's all going to work out.

47:46 Dr. Forbes Riley
Forbes. Just chill. You got it. And whatever it is, and I think everybody needs to hear that. You know, when, you know, when you lost your mom. When I lost my parents, it was a pretty. When I lost Dexter, it was pretty devastating. It was like, for years and then I. But then I also do outrageous things. When you hear something outrageous, I don't tell people a lot.

48:04 Dr. Forbes Riley
And you can go to YouTube and find this. My kids are three years old. I own a half an acre in Los Angeles. I've got a cinderblock house and then I've got a lot of property, but it only has two bedrooms and I've got two kids. And so I said to my then husband, I said, we need to add on a room.

48:19 Dr. Forbes Riley
We need to figure this out, he said. And we found an architect who said, why don't we just knock the house down, build it out of wood because it was cinderblock and give you 1000ft² more for the same price. Okay, that sounds good. He said yes, but it's $25,000 to knock your house down. We didn't have 25,000. You can't get a mortgage on a loan on something people are knocking down.

48:39 Dr. Forbes Riley
So I said to him, why don't we just blow it up? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, I saw Mel Gibson do that in the movie. They blew up a house in Hollywood. Why don't we just blow it up? And it was Christmastime, and I put it out on the production hub, and three days later, I get a knock.

48:55 Dr. Forbes Riley
Hi. What's going on? Yes. Hi. We're the movie Live Free or Die Harder with Bruce Willis. We're looking for a house to blow up. We heard yours is available.

49:05 Dr. Forbes Riley
I'm going to send you the video. I made a video. Video of my work, and so they spent eight days. I put a price tag on everything I remember. I'd also just lost my parents, I lost Dexter, I had two babies, and I was out of my head and I'm like, blow it up. There's a price tag on everything by everything.

49:24 Dr. Forbes Riley
And so they did, and the house went boom. It's the opening scene of that movie. Now, here's the funny thing about this. Well, Forbes, that's wonderful. They paid me 25,000. They cleaned out the house. The date is a really important factor in this story because I'm I'm so excited, man. I did it. Three days later, December 8th, 2008.

49:46 Dr. Forbes Riley
The housing market crashes and I can't afford to put a house on the property. What the what what what what what what we ended up moving we into the we have to we had a little garage and a guest house, a little less than 1000ft². I moved us all into all of that, and we lived there waiting for the market to turn around, which took about two years before we rebuild our home.

50:10 Dr. Forbes Riley
And so, you know, the moral of the story? Sometimes you're risking your roll the dice. Did I win? Did I not win? Here's the crazy thing. My family and I, my kids understand what it's like to have the bedroom in the living room. My bedroom was in the kitchen, and we did that for two years of our lives and we were just fine.

50:28 Dr. Forbes Riley
You can live in a big mansion, you can live in a shoebox. You have people who love you. You have a future. You have a path about what you want to do. And we just made it work. And it did.

50:37 Ilana Golan
And I listened to a quote that you had something like, life happens for you and not to you, right. And I think you you quote that quite a bit. And I think that's such an interesting reflection of stop, you know, looking for why am I a victim and start looking for why is this actually making me stronger?

50:58 Dr. Forbes Riley
You're interpreting it beautifully. Because here's the thing. My mom was on a roller coaster ride of her life like this. It was a little rickety. Went straight, went down a little bit, went up a little bit. But it was pretty much she really wanted the safety in the security of that ride me. I'm like, I want to go high when you go.

51:18 Dr. Forbes Riley
Hi, you go low. And if you believe that you are the star of your own movie. And I desperately believe that with every fiber of my being, that the hero of any movie suffers from pretty crazy stuff. They find themselves alone, they find themselves lost at. It's what makes you who you are. Which is why we watch the movie.

51:38 Dr. Forbes Riley
It's why we watch Rocky go through all of that. Because when you are down, he he says the greatest quote, it's not how hard you get hit, it's how hard you get hit. And you continue to get back up and do it again. And when you understand that being in a motorcycle accident for Joshua, having my dad in the hospital for three years, going through some of the stuff, I have gone through some of the tragedies, you go, this is just as good as the high highs because it is making you who you are.

52:05 Dr. Forbes Riley
I firmly believe that life is not what happens to you, but who you become because of what you went through. And those are the people I love talking to and hanging out with, listening to on podcasts. And when you realize the most successful people in life are the ones who've made it on their own, I think because they've gone through this journey and they understand that it's a journey for all of us.

52:26 Dr. Forbes Riley
None of us get out of this life without anything happening to us, right? So why not enjoy those moments as much as any other moment?

52:34 Ilana Golan
That is so inspiring. Oh my God, Forbes, where do they find you? Where did they find the book? I think you literally just launched, so I'm so excited about it.

52:44 Dr. Forbes Riley
I think so much you have such a joy and light about you. Your kids are very, very lucky. I'm excited for you to go on this journey. Every decade with the kids changes. It's a fascinating thing, you guys. I'm lucky enough to have a very unusual name Forbes, Riley on Instagram, LinkedIn, you name it. And by the way, I'm putting out some crazy Instagram silly videos.

53:06 Dr. Forbes Riley
And then the most interesting thing lately is that School of Hard Knocks found me, did a one minute story. You know where he goes, hey, how did you get rich? And that one video on TikTok now has 21 million views. I'm so excited about that. This is on my site. But I'll tell you what. Go to Amazon. Amazon's got the brand new Kindle.

53:26 Dr. Forbes Riley
I just released the audiobook. The audio engineer. I've never done an audiobook before. He's 26 years old. He comes out and he's like, this is the coolest thing I've ever listened to. And I'm like, dude, I'm an actress. I'm not going to be reading it. I'm performing my book. And he's like, oh, this is I'm like, I know.

53:43 Dr. Forbes Riley
So please, I'm getting like rave reviews about the audiobook, but I do think I'm gonna touch her. I want you to touch it, see it, feel it, sniff it, rub it on your face.

53:54 Ilana Golan
We'll do both for you are amazing. Thank you. Thank you for this conversation. It was so, so, so inspiring. And let's go get the book. Thank you.

54:05 Dr. Forbes Riley
Thank you so much.

54:07 Ilana Golan
Hey, I hope you enjoyed the conversation on the Leap Academy on podcast. How powerful was this? Look, if someone in your life needs to hear this today, please share it with them. Let's make somebody smile. Today we are on the mission to help 10 million people reinvent, leap their career, become their best version of themselves, tap into the hidden market and create not just a paycheck, but the life they want with the paycheck.

54:33 Ilana Golan
So just do a quick share your like, subscribe, download. They help us more than you think. See you next week.