Self-help, in all its ever-proliferating forms — books, seminars, video, audio and digital — is a multibillion-dollar industry. That much, at least, we know for sure. And most of us would agree that the lingo, theories and attitudes of the self-help industry have soaked into every corner of American life. A coworker jokes that he’s in denial about the fact that he needs to buy a new computer; a friend blames another friend’s obnoxious behavior on low self-esteem. Even people who claim to hate self-help find themselves using its buzzwords and echoing its clichis. But do we really understand how much the industry has affected — or infected — our world?
Not according to Steve Salerno, author of “SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.” “You may think Dr. Phil is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” he writes, “or you may chortle at his braggadocio and his sagebrush sagacity. But almost no one worries about Dr. Phil. Like the rest of SHAM [Salerno's acronym for the "Self-Help and Actualization Movement"], he slips under the radar.”
Dr. Phil is on Salerno’s radar, all right, and it’s certainly true that the author worries about the TV shrink, but saying that in this book Salerno has thought deeply about the self-help industry would be pushing it. “SHAM” is one of those slapdash fulminations — invented decades ago by the political left but recently perfected by the right — ranting on some current deplorable aspect of society. It’s spun out from a few well-researched articles Salerno wrote for magazines and padded with a grab bag of shopworn anecdotes and secondhand data culled from other, similar books. (Sally Satel’s dubious “PC, M.D.” is a favorite source.) You know the drill by now: Salerno’s stance is flabbergasted indignation at the countless outrages against common sense being committed on a daily, if not hourly, basis by people whose perfidy or idiocy is a cause for perpetual wonder.
Commentators rarely go broke when capitalizing on the pleasure Americans take in sneering at their fellow citizens, but Salerno doesn’t bring much clarity to the ongoing national infatuation with self-help. He casts his net so wide he winds up blaming the self-actualization industry for such grouch fodder as frivolous lawsuits (yes, that old spilled McDonald’s coffee story gets hauled out yet again) and the devolution of electoral politics into sloganeering. He’s done some solid, shoe-leather reporting on such self-actualization gurus as the infomercial icon (and hot-coal walker) Tony Robbins, and “SHAM” offers valuable glimpses into the empires built by these figures. But credit for coming up with real insight into the self-help juggernaut more properly belongs to Micki McGee, a faculty fellow at New York University and the author of “Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life.”
McGee regards the self-actualization industry almost as warily as Salerno does, but she has a far more sophisticated grasp of its appeal. Self-help, she argues, is not (as the cultural commentator Christopher Lasch once insisted) the manifestation of a rampant “culture of narcissism.” Instead, it’s an understandable — if also misguided — response to fundamental changes in our economic and social worlds. Today, she writes, “constant self-improvement” is presented to us as “the only reliable insurance against economic insecurity.” The result is what McGee calls “the belabored self,” the personality as a perpetual renovation project, driven by the fear that “with lifelong marriage and lifelong professions increasingly anachronistic, it is no longer sufficient to be married or employed.” When your spouse might leave you or your boss might fire you at any moment, you have to be ready to hit the market again at any time; “it is imperative that one remains marriageable and employable.”
The way Salerno sees it, the self-help industry is a modern boondoggle and annoyance — more disturbing than, but akin to, that damn noise the kids call music these days. It’s a waste of money, it saps folks of their gumption, and no one can prove it works. In his self-designated role as the hardheaded Everyman journalist, Salerno claims he has never before “covered a phenomenon where American consumers invested so much capital in every sense of the word — financial, intellectual, spiritual, temporal — based on so little proof of efficacy.” During a brief stint as an editor at the Men’s Health division of Rodale, a book publisher specializing in the genre, he was astonished to learn that the most likely customer for a self-help book is someone who’d bought a similar book within the preceding 18 months. “If what we sold worked,” he observes, “one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us.”
Salerno’s point is well-taken (McGee makes a similar one), but it’s not exactly revelatory. Hasn’t he noticed how one diet book after another roosts on the upper reaches of the bestseller lists, despite the fact that Americans keep getting fatter? People buy the books and often lose weight on the diets, but they eventually gain it back and so move on to the next plan, thinking that maybe this one will finally do the trick. If you ask, they’ll swear the original diet worked, and it was really their own fault for not sticking to it.
Probably, somewhere in the very back of their minds, these people realize that a particular diet or list of highly effective habits is not likely to “revolutionize” their lives as promised. But hope springs eternal that the perfect plan awaits somewhere. That prospect appeals to the optimistic, risk-taking side of our national character. And like a slot machine, these self-improvement schemes very occasionally pay off, if only for a while. As any behavioral psychologist will tell you, nothing fascinates a human being like intermittent reinforcement. It may not be rational, but that’s how human beings work.
So many words have been written about relationship-oriented self-help books sold mostly to women (from “Women Who Love Too Much” to “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”), that the light both Salerno and McGee shed on success coaches such as Robbins or Stephen R. Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” is particularly welcome. Salerno, who wrote a magazine profile of Robbins, details the gradual method by which the Robbins-industrial complex coaxes its adherents into spending first small and then eventually whopping sums on his various “Life Mastery” programs (including purchases of vitamins supplements and a pendant called the QLink that supposedly protects you from the radiation emitted by cellphones). Having sunk that much cash into this stuff, Robbins’ followers become invested in believing it works.
Salerno chooses to focus on success mavens because they give him the best ammo: It’s relatively easy to measure how well their programs work (and therefore prove that they don’t). If you want to figure out if sales went up after a daylong motivational seminar, you look at the numbers, but how can you tell when you’ve learned to love just enough? McGee studies success gurus because she believes that at heart what drives people into the self-help section of their bookstores is economics. For all his no-nonsense posture, Salerno’s analysis of the self-help industry is a haphazard collection of self-contradictory, sometimes extraneous and frequently knee-jerk attitudes. McGee has an analysis, one that essentially amounts to following the money, and despite her ivory tower gig and stiff, academic prose, she’s by far the more tough-minded of the two.
Salerno divides the self-help movement into two main branches: “Empowerment” (which promises total mastery over one’s self and one’s surroundings) and “Victimization” (which offers support to people it has diagnosed as so damaged they’re lucky to be alive). McGee prefers to divide the field into rational and expressive approaches. The rational ties your capacity for transformation to a system of self-discipline and control; the expressive encourages its adherents to surrender to the workings of some vague, New Agey, cosmic force (often called simply “energy”), which will guide the properly attuned person toward fulfillment. In an economy that grows ever more ruthless and competitive, faced with downsizing, outsourcing and stagnant wages, the rational school offers people the illusion of mastery while the expressive provides a dreamy sanctuary from the cruel marketplace.
McGee’s grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of both notions is formidable. She traces Robbins’ mind-power fantasies back to the New Thought movement of the early 20th century, led by Ralph Waldo Trine, who preached “a pragmatic idealism in which wealth and opportunity were characterized as equally available to all through a kind of cosmic abundance.” She finds threads in contemporary time-management gurus like Covey that lead back to Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, and in New Agers that lead back to Emerson. (You have to love a book that describes Tony Robbins as someone who “leaves behind the Enlightenment notion of the reasonable creature and moves in the direction of a Nietzschean model of ‘giving style to one’s life.’”) Instead of Salerno’s born-yesterday notion of self-help as the folly of a post-’60s generation of navel gazers and complainers, McGee recognizes that most of these ideas have been with us for a long time.
Still, the particular conditions of late capitalism have added a new twist to the fantasy of self-creation. The current permutations of self-help reflect what McGee sees as a crisis brought on by the movement of women and minorities into the workplace. She points out that the “self-made man” (an idea traceable all the way back to ancient Greece) was never really that; the unpaid labor of a mother and usually a wife helped “make” him, and he often benefited as well from the underpaid labor of servants and others prevented by skin color or class from enjoying the same opportunities. Now that all those previous unpaid and underpaid workers are demanding their own shot at the brass ring, it’s become painfully apparent how impossible it is for individuals to really make it all by themselves. At bare minimum, someone still has to teach us to walk and talk.
No wonder, then, that child rearing and the roles of mothers stand at the center of so much controversy. What Salerno dislikes about the self-help industry is that it makes some people feel entitled to more than they can get and it permits others to shirk personal responsibility. What McGee sees as the problem with self-help is that it deceives us into thinking that we can function in complete independence, that every problem in our lives can be addressed as a purely individual challenge. Child rearing (and to a lesser degree caring for the sick and elderly) challenges this notion because it’s both essential to the survival of humanity and proof positive that everybody needs somebody sometime.
For centuries, raising kids has been the unpaid work of women. Now that they have the chance, if women instead choose to invest their time and labor in the kind of self-cultivation — networking, overtime, maintaining a marketable appearance, acquiring new skills — essential to survival in today’s unstable, loyalty-free workplace, you can hardly blame them. They’re only doing what every shrewd “self-made” person is supposed to do. In defecting from the home they’re also unwittingly demonstrating that the American ideal of rugged individualism is a big lie. No wonder career women make conservatives apoplectic. Nowadays, those women who do decide to donate their time to rearing their children can count on little job security and the decay of their employability. Rick Santorum likes to complain that “radical feminists” devalue stay-at-home moms, but it’s really the free market that treats their contribution as worthless (or worth only the pittance paid to childcare workers).
As shrewd as McGee is at teasing out the anxieties underlying our makeover fantasies, her views on the possible solutions are founded in an unexamined quasi-Marxism. This makes them seem as elusive as the promises of Tony Robbins and his ilk. Throughout “Self-Help, Inc.” she evaluates all self-help trends on the basis of how likely they are to lead to “progressive, even radical” political activism. Perhaps, she suggests, the inward-looking little communities formed to follow 12-step programs can be encouraged to agitate for “economic justice” and the “redistribution” of resources and opportunities?
Like a lot of academics, McGee seems to think that the general public is merely ignorant of the principles of socialism and, if properly educated by more informed persons like herself, will surely see that their best interests lie in this direction. This is the sort of well-intentioned but disastrously patronizing attitude that whips red-staters into a frenzy of Bush voting. Many of these citizens do crave a counterforce to the brutality of the marketplace, but they prefer to seek it in church and a retreat to “traditional values.” The old ways of life, to their mind, provide at least some emotional security. Socialism they see as thoroughly discredited, a proven recipe for deprivation and oppressive bureaucracy.
McGee has the sense to insist that activists ask themselves “why people have embraced self-help groups — what do they get there that they don’t get in political organizations?” What she fails to consider is the possibility that those organizations have yet to articulate a coherent, alternative and post-socialist vision of society that’s sufficiently appealing to lure people away from the siren song of capitalistic individualism. Many people look at the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in this country and think to themselves, Hey, it’s a great time to be rich.
As Salerno points out, a motivational speaker who tells all 250 members of a sales staff that with the right attitude every one of them can be the No. 1 salesman is obviously promising the impossible. No one laughs, though, because at that moment, sufficiently pumped up, each candidate believes she’s talking only to him. Commentators like to say that self-help speaks to the American faith in the Protestant work ethic. But perhaps what it really taps into is the same impulse that makes poor people waste their dollars on lottery tickets.
Our reckless inner gambler tells us that if we have to choose between a drab little portion of guaranteed security and a long shot at a big, glitzy jackpot, we’ll take the chance at winning big. Losing might leave us broke, but the giddy hope of striking it rich, of achieving Life Mastery, of becoming highly effective and having it all is just more exciting than the sober vision of a society whose resources are doled out equitably. Anyone who, like McGee, wants to see the American masses mobilized on behalf of economic justice will have to change this aspect of our national personality. By comparison, Tony Robbins’ famous stroll over that bed of hot coals looks like a cakewalk.
“Whatever you think your biggest problem is, I personally guarantee, most of the planet would love to have your horrific problem.” Motivational guru Tony Robbins is reminding me and 452 other video chat participants that we Americans are soft and spoiled and have a bad habit of overreacting to our tiny little troubles with stress and depression and panic attacks. I can only assume that the sorts of lethargic, self-hating ovens (myself included) who tune in for an interactive kick-in-the-ass from Robbins via the Huffington Post might agree.
But Robbins is the first to say that he understands completely. You see, years ago, Robbins was living in a 400-square-foot bachelor apartment in Venice, Calif. He was broke and he was exactly 38 pounds overweight and he was sitting around watching Luke and Laura on “General Hospital” when – Knock! Knock! – someone knocked on the door of his apartment. When he opened the door, there stood an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. Robbins was so humiliated that this person saw what a worthless, dumpy human parasite he had become (albeit one who, despite his depressed state, likely knew his exact fat-to-muscle ratio) that he immediately went on a long run on the beach. “I was making this radical change in my physical biochemistry,” Robbins half-shouts at us, making his impromptu jog sound roughly akin to teleporting or spontaneous combustion or time travel.
But that’s the glory of Tony Robbins, isn’t it? Despite his rather simple point — working out really helps soap-opera-watching shut-ins to feel less depressed — his story soon takes the shape of a personal epiphany. But then, this is a man who’s transformed common-sense wisdom into a multitiered global brand, a man who has the cojones to call himself a “human potential consultant” and a “peak performance coach,” a man who’s magically transformed his lazy-fat-guy jog on the beach and every other humdrum experience he’s ever had into a series of dramatic, life-changing narratives with which he can inspire an entire nation to “play the game of life higher than you are [now].”
“We have a need to feel important,” Robbins explains to one video chat participant a few minutes later in his earnest, scratchy voice, his tone hinting that, even after two decades of this, he’s still pumped up by his own simple wisdom nuggets. And even though he’s talking fast, dropping a flurry of oft-repeated gems like “We’ve entered winter (the recession), and winter will get rid of some of the old values” and “Everybody has something that will make them finally make change a must and not a should” and “Go read the stories of human beings who have been through hell and back and have taken their lives to a new level,” I’m starting to feel more inspired and energized in spite of myself. What the hell is wrong with me? I need to leave this pap behind and get back to work!
“There are six needs,” Tony says as if he’s speaking right to me. That’s it, I can’t escape. I’m in awe of this man. Exactly six needs! Think of what you or I could do, if we had half of Robbins’ courage of conviction!
We can only assume that Need No. 4 is “Star on your own self-help reality show on NBC,” but now that feel-good program “Breakthrough With Tony Robbins” (8 p.m. Tuesdays) has been pronounced dead on arrival thanks to horrific ratings (it was the lowest-rated network show in its time slot on Tuesday), Robbins may need to retreat to his Fiji mansion for a few weeks, hoping for his own breakthrough.
So what went wrong? How was the Midas of the self-improvement world unable to turn his big prime-time debut into gold? Most likely, audiences are fatigued by a steady flow of this kind of “help the nice family recover from tragedy” programming. After all, could you possibly find a more depressing story for the first episode? Frank and Kristen Alioto were having a great time at their fabulous destination wedding in Mexico. Then, at the reception, Frank jumped into the pool and broke his neck, instantly turning him into a quadriplegic. Now, instead of enjoying their life as newlyweds and starting a family together, Kristen is Frank’s caretaker, and they’re both totally devastated by their new reality. Does anyone really want to see Tony Robbins telling this doomed pair that they just need to “get a new insight” so they can “play the game of life higher than [they] are [now]“?
Incredibly, though, Robbins’ interactions with this couple are the highlight of the “Breakthrough” premiere. Whatever you want to say about Robbins, he demonstrates a lot of warmth and intuitive wisdom in his talks with these two quite obviously very depressed, traumatized human beings. In one particularly mesmerizing moment, he gets Kristen to go to the lowest point of her average day with Frank. She says that she sometimes moves him to the bed and forgets to take his glasses off, and then his glasses hurt him, and she feels furious at herself. Robbins has her say exactly what she would say in that moment — and you know that she’s really doing it, because the word “fuck” is bleeped over a few times.
Then Robbins turns to Frank, who says that he feels terrible and helpless whenever Kristen gets frustrated like that. “Here’s what you need to do,” Robbins says. “Whenever she’s in that place, instead of feeling sad and weak, you feel strong, and all she needs is your presence. The way you feel strong is in noticing all the things you haven’t been noticing before. Look at her. Look how horrible she feels.”
Frank looks at Kirsten. She looks at him. It’s hard to say exactly how this shows, but all of a sudden, Frank looks stronger and calmer and Kristen is leaning on him. And … well, it’s a goddamn breakthrough, is what it is!
“In this moment, he could take her from tears to feeling connected. And that’s what she’s starving for,” Robbins explains. “And now he’s starting to know, ‘Hey, I’m not helpless.’ Suddenly he starts feeling like, ‘Wow, I can really be her man. I can show her that I can make a difference.’ That’s the beginning of changing their relationship.”
“Being able to provide Kristen with an emotional shoulder to lean on?” Frank says to the camera. “That was very powerful. It was important for me to understand that I can still be there for her, and provide her with strength.”
Crazy as it sounds, everything else in the episode becomes possible because of this moment: Frank and Kristen go skydiving, Kristen goes to a spa, Frank plays Murderball; the rest of it is, quite honestly, just bland, rewarmed “Extreme Makeover” fare, with Robbins standing by, grinning from ear to ear, but never involved in quite the same intimate way that he was in that first crucial conversation.
Except I bet Robbins was interacting with them a lot, and that they discussed over and over the transformation taking place, but the show’s editors and the network executives still felt compelled to shove it all into the same shape as half a dozen other shows already on the air. And that’s too bad, because even though Tony Robbins is a cheesy, fist-pumping, fire-walking, tough-loving, self-parodying, product-pushing, self-branding kind of a guy, he’s also incredibly good at narrating the process of recovery from life’s disappointments and setbacks. The man is a good talker — Christ almighty, is he ever. But he also has an instinctive knack for locating the center of a person’s problem and working out from there. Robbins’ energy is boundless, and that boundless energy is obviously contagious to everyone around him.
I tuned in to his video chat mostly as a curiosity, and I ended up listening to the whole thing. I couldn’t close my stupid browser. Sure, I could intellectually recognize that the wisdom nuggets he was dropping were pretty run-of-the-mill, but I still found myself taking them to heart. Yes, Robbins is sort of a freak — clenched jaw, wild eyes, rambling asides — but he also comes across as a compassionate person.
So instead of cackling over the apparent failure of Robbins’ brand-new show, I almost wish that Robbins could host more of a live talk show for damaged, discouraged or just deeply lethargic, unambitious people (like me). I wish that, instead of plugging his products on infomercials and hosting expensive weekend seminars on peak performance, Robbins could just sit in a chair and invite guests to tell their stories, then he’d help them shake up their downward spiraling lives.
The problem is, Tony Robbins has sold himself so well, and he’s so recognizable as a franchise, that it’s tough for most people to encounter him as an earnest healer. Forget that none of our Earnest Healers from Oprah to Dr. Phil goes into the field without a multitiered international marketing strategy already in place. The gurus of the world have been thoroughly commodified, whether or not the Dalai Lama has his own Twitter feed yet. (Um, by the way? He does.)
As for Robbins, this disappointment may bring him down for a while, but I personally guarantee him that most of the planet would love to have his horrific problem — and his mansion in Fiji to go with it. This may be his personal winter, and winter will get rid of some of the old values (his ego-driven compulsion to create a cult of personality, just for example). But everybody has something that will make them finally make change a must and not a should, Tony. Go read the stories of other human beings who have had their TV shows canceled and then taken their lives to a new level in the wake of that.
And Tony? Good luck. Not that you need it.
Peter Lund doesn’t sound like he has left television for the wild, wild Web. When I spoke to the former CEO of CBS Inc., he was captivated by the “amazing” ratings of his former employer’s new hit “Survivor.” Needless to say, this was off-topic, but then again, the show — in which 16 people are marooned on an island and must regularly vote to kick someone off — is beginning to look like a pretty good metaphor for the online habitat that Lund recently entered. Indeed, each week we watch as one Internet company is challenged to eat grubs in public while backing out of its IPO and another is booted right out of the new economy.
Yet, with optimism appropriate to his task, Lund is bullish about his new company, Dreamlife, the self-help portal founded by personal improvement coach and infomercial star Anthony (Tony) Robbins. The site offers chats with spiritual celebs like Shirley MacLaine, courses on everything from “Fitness for Absolute Beginners” to how to “Sell Your Screenplay the Hollywood Way” and member discussions with suggested topics like “How to Be a Better Lover.” Several dozen “experts” help run subsites devoted to subjects like “Money & Finance” or “Creativity & Fun.” And Dreamlife has partnered with other personal development organizations like the Learning Channel to expand its offerings. In short, the site has something for everyone who wants to learn how to become his or her best self.
Lund says he’s not a devotee of Robbins, the author of books like “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical & Financial Destiny!” and the “Time of Your Life” 10-cassette time management course.” But Lund, who worked his way up the TV and radio ranks for decades before he got the top slot at CBS, is eager to try his hand at building an online audience.
How did you get involved with Tony Robbins? Have you attended his seminars? Read his books?
I’ve read the books, but I haven’t been to the seminars.
Why do you think there’s such a demand for these self-improvement programs?
I don’t have a smart answer for you. But it’s everywhere you look. Everything from “I want to look better, I want to feel better, I want to be smarter, I want to be a better person” — it certainly is part of the landscape. It’s always been there, and with the communication tools that we have in this era, it’s more possible to access it now.
What’s your relationship to Tony Robbins? What will his role be with you as CEO?
First, I would say that Tony and I are friends. We’ve known each other now for almost two years, and while it started out as a business relationship, it’s now both a business relationship and a friendship.
Tony is three things to this company: chairman of the board, the largest shareholder in this company and our most important content provider. So anything I do here that is different or any changes I make that are critical — I’ve told Tony that I’ll keep him informed.
That’s really all Tony wants. Tony’s a busy guy.
I have to say, when Tony comes on TV, most people I know laugh. He’s just so ubiquitous: What do you make of his presence?
Everybody of Tony’s stature, everybody who’s a star like that, always worries about saturation — am I on too much? Am I in too many places? The first thing that comes to my mind is Brent Mussberger. Back in the days when I was running CBS Sports, we had Brent on too many things. He was everywhere: He was on “NFL Today,” he was on NCAA basketball, he was everyplace. It was a problem and it was our fault because we let Brent become overexposed.
So I suppose that’s always a worry. But the fact of life is that Tony’s in such demand. They’re not holding any seminars or running any television programs that people don’t want to watch. So it’s always a difficult prospect to figure out when you’re sort of at the edge of overexposure.
But ultimately, the personal improvement market is huge. That’s one of the things that we looked at as a board. We said, “My God, it’s a $6 billion market now, and it’s going up by 20 percent every couple of years.” So it’s a huge marketplace.
How big is the market for Dreamlife? How many users do you have?
The Web site has a little over 100,000 members. We have course enrollments that are about 35,000 people now. What we have are six categories: mind and spirit, money and finance, relationships and family, health and fitness, career and business, creativity and fun. Whether that’s the end of it or not, I don’t know.
Do you think you’ll ever be more actively involved in this growing world, perhaps up onstage or on an infomercial with Tony Robbins, telling us how to take control of our lives?
No. Just the inference that you think I could do that makes my day. But there’s no groundswell that I can sense for me to get out of the administrative role and get up in front of that crowd.
You’re in charge not just of the Web business but of the whole company, right? The events, books and other offerings?
Yes.
According to the site’s mission statement, the company intends to be a “unique online network that enables its members to assess, define, and pursue their dreams through the unparalleled integration of technology, coaching, content, community, and commerce.” Is that consistent with your vision?
I believe in the concept. Maybe we need to tack one way or another, but I certainly believe in the direction. All of us on the board are very excited about this space. We think it’s a terrific space in terms of an industry that’s wide open.
What “space” do you mean?
We define the space as an online destination for personal and professional development. It’s education on the Internet; I think it’s something that’s going to be spectacular. Whether ultimately we can carve out a position and be one of the great educators, time will tell. But I think, broadly speaking, one of the great promises of the Internet is education. So I think Dreamlife has a great opportunity, having already rolled up and aggregated some interesting people — Tony Robbins and others — that give us a good start. There’s a terrific opportunity here.
Exactly how do you plan to capitalize on that opportunity?
I’ve been at companies that used [personal improvement courses] as part of their training, and that’s one of the areas that we’re looking at now. Part of what we think we need to grow into is the corporate arena, so that we’re not just a personal improvement company but a corporate improvement company.
Are you aiming to grow Dreamlife into a big company — something as big as CBS?
I don’t know. I’d like us to be a profitable, successful company that has a return to its shareholders that they feel is appropriate. But in terms of size, in terms of members or page views, [if I tried to project an answer] I’d just be making up numbers.
You spent a long time in television, at well-established organizations much bigger than Dreamlife. How will this experience help you build a company?
Well, for the last 15 or 20 years, I’ve been a manager. I ran something or another — television stations, the radio division, CBS Sports, the television network, the CBS television company, then the whole company. I have a background as a manager, a negotiator and a programmer. That’s what I spent my time doing, and that’s what’s needed here. While this is completely different from a television station, there are a lot of similarities in terms of it being a business that needs programming and that ultimately needs to attract people.
How did Dreamlife manage to attract you?
I’m here because I went on the board of Dreamlife at its inception in 1999. When they constituted the board about a year ago, I was one of the original members. I got involved because a couple of people on the board were people I had done business with and had known before. One thing led to another and here I am. There was nothing particularly magical about the whole thing.
How much of Dreamlife’s products have you taken part in? Were you a fan before becoming involved as a member of the board?
I certainly haven’t taken part directly. As a board member, as with most companies, you have a fiducial responsibility and an oversight responsibility, but you’re not an operator. So I was aware of them, and over the years I stopped down and talked to the management people.
The Miss Universe Pageant, the annual wank parade of inflato-chested international hose bags, once again infected our TV screens Friday night, live from the tourist-starved isle of Cyprus — “the island where beauty was invented!” — of all Godforsaken places.
It was hosted by loudmouthed diphthong Sinbad. Frankly, I can’t think of a more suitable fate for that intolerable, polka-dotted blowhard than to be the hapless horny bastard making mildly sexist, semi-illiterate commentary at a lowbrow T&A beauty pageant extravaganza.
“Athenus [sic] was the goddess of wisdom, and let’s hope she gave the judges a good dose of it,” slurred Sinbad, displaying his Big Gulp-size grip on ancient mythology.
In between ads for supermarket shampoos and CBS’s “Jesus” miniseries, we were introduced to the 10 finalists who made it past the arduous tit weigh-in the week before. We got to meet these “movers and shakers in the new millennium,” in all of their plastic glory, while listening to moronic commentary from two Maria Shrivers-in-training displaying midriffs and shouting unlikely comments like, “Half of these ladies are doctors and lawyers, and they’re only 18!”
Miss Spain wants to be an actress or a model on TV, or a model or a spokes-model, but her real passion is animals, which is why she also wants to be a veterinarian, and also a model-detective, specializing in crimes against little animals!
Miss Colombia loves babies and children and baby animals and cake and pie!
Miss Zimbabwe loves to clean her room! She wants to practice politics in her spare time, after being a model and an astronaut, an economist and a paraplegic!
Miss Catatonia is a whore! She loves ice fishing, BASE jumping, ‘N Sync and heroin.
Cut to more miniseries ads: “The Linda McCartney Story.” “Jesus,” OK, but Linda? Is nothing sacred?
Back to the girls being cute in the tourist outlets of Cyprus. Screaming and frolicking like little children with big teeth at the water slide! Where were the shots of them parasailing without panties? Or eating big piles of sugar-whipped jism? Or happily rubbing plankton on each other’s nipples while tantric swimming with manatees?
Then the judges were introduced: clearly a klatch of those caught in the desperate celebrity death rattle, like choreographer-of-shame Debbie Allen, who appeared to be wearing an extra 15 pounds’ worth of breasts for the occasion, and monstrously acromegalic-looking motivational speaker Tony Robbins.
Judging by his irrationally high scores for Miss Canada, Robbins is a tit man — his horrible secret is exposed. Miss Canada had the most suspiciously disproportionate flubbo-jugs of the whole pageant, and though all the girls were otherwise totally identical, despite their races (5-foot-10, 121-pound racehorse types with huge teeth and long hair), Robbins kept giving Canada 9.8s and everyone else 8.2s.
I imagined Robbins and Miss Canada on rocks, under trees, in taxis — his big jaw and teeth chewing through her mesh tank top. Then, unfortunately, I came back to reality.
“Ever notice statues of Aphrodite ain’t got no arms and legs?” leered Sinbad.
Then came the dreaded paneled-swimwear section, with beige high heels and Cirque du Soleil-type, pouncing, shirtless bodybuilders in white tights baton-twirling patio torches to ear-puncturing techno-pop. Boy, those girls sure did have great racks. Flames licked their asses. I was jacking off all over the place. Chabanga, chabanga! Sweaty Sinbad confessed he “can’t get enough of the swimsuits.” I didn’t want to smell his tuxedo.
The winner of the swimwear competition won — get this — a $2,500 modeling contract! But that’s not all. There was also a $35 gift certificate to the Hyatt Regency! And some delicious Wheat Thins! And several packs of new pantyhose! You get more than that at a 4-H club for growing the biggest casaba melon.
The eveningwear section was especially painful because of the root-canal jazz version of “Careless Whisper” by Montel Jordan and David Sanborn, which lasted a full soft-jamming eight minutes. Miss Canada was unable to squeeze her entire rack into the top of her dress. So Robbins gave her a 9.75 and everybody else got an 8.
The five finalists were either those whom the contest couldn’t afford to leave out for commercial reasons, like Miss USA, or those like Miss Venezuela — Miss Venezuela has always had some kind of unholy blood contract with the Miss Universe machine. Her entire national community depends on it. Everybody knows about the Venezuelan beauty slave camps — the torment, the surgeries, the endless walk tutorials. After their pageant careers, these women go right into politics.
“The ones who made it are really, really happy, and the ones who didn’t make it are really, really disappointed,” shrieked the Shrivers.
There was a mind-blowing montage in which all the girls were dressed in absurdly xenophobic, Las Vegas-cum-regional community theater “international” costumes, made of primary-colored foam, coconuts and macaroni.
The last question of the night — the key to determining who would walk away with the giant rhinestone headpiece — was the heaviest: “Right now, in Cyprus, there’s a protest going on. They say the Miss Universe pageant is disrespectful to women. Prove them wrong.” Subtext: You walk the corporate walk, you talk the corporate talk. You blow the Dark Lord, but do you swallow?
Venezuela and Spain, two Spanish-speaking women, were up against Miss India, a frightfully well-spoken and educated rapier of a beauty, shimmery with icy class and calm dignity — a real Grace Kelly of a spider, smarter than anyone in a 10-mile radius.
“Beautiful women should be also respect,” said the translator for Miss Spain, unconvincingly.
“Well, the contest, it is very nice for women, is not bad. Is about finding completely women, not just the beautiful, but completely women,” stumbled Miss Venezuela.
It was around this point that I started to wonder if Miss Venezuela was completely woman or if she’d only accomplished the preoperative steps.
What was Miss India going to say? My liver twisted into a napkin swan. She dramatically grabbed the mike, passionately insisting that pageants give young women a platform to succeed in every field, be it the armed forces, finance, etc. I felt a cold chill go up my neck and thought: This woman will stop at nothing — murder, baby eating.
When Miss India won, you couldn’t pry Miss Catatonia off her. “My uncle is going to kill you,” she hissed, biting a small nick in India’s ear and sucking out the blood. “If for any reason you cannot fulfill your duties … I will be there.”
India, a woman whose crusade for power could not be sated, stalked down the catwalk with a bale of roses and a weird, cruel smile that said, “I am going to behead you all, as soon as I am empress.”
I was fatigued, irritable and dry-mouthed after the Miss Universe Pageant. I hope Donald Trump just holds the event in his own sports-arena-size bedroom next year. It would be so much easier on everyone.
Tony Robbins 
