Celebrity host, actress, and TV pioneer Forbes Riley dishes on overcoming physical insecurities, hitting it big with Body by Jake, being the original host of the X Games, working with her kids, being at the "right place at the right time with the weirdest talent", and her slightly controversial opinion on legacy.

Hello everybody. Welcome to our show today, Let's

Talk Legacy, and today, we have Forbes Riley on. Forbes Riley is

known as the Queen of pitch. She's a celebrity TV host,

pioneer and industry leader in the field of infomercials and

the home shopping TV with product sales over $2.5 billion

that really that opened my eyes when I first heard about it

coming on, having a appeared in nearly 200 infomercials, and

you've had a lot more go on in your life. Welcome to the show.

I appreciate you. Welcome, welcome. Thank you.

So let's dig into this a little bit. You didn't

have it particularly easy growing up, and things got

turned upside down for you when your dad, who was an inventor,

had a terrible accident.

I love that you mentioned my dad right off the

top, and I appreciate that my dad was this beautiful inventor,

magician and an engineer who didn't graduate college. And

when I tell my story, people ask me, Why are you so interested in

communication? And I'll start with just talking about my story

before I lead into his because one of the problems when I was

growing up is that I had an odd deformity in my jaw, so they put

me in braces. Not a big deal, right? You embraces for a year.

Two years, I was in braces for eight years of my life. And not

only braces, but they put this thing in my mouth. I'm

interested in memory, chocolate dress. For two years, they

bolted it to the top of my mouth. I couldn't talk. What

came out of that is that my father, who built a printing

press, he was standing on the printing press, and he slipped,

and he tore off the whole front of his left hand, and that would

send him to the hospital for 15 operations over three years

while we were in high school, my family was completely broke

because of this. My mother turns to me when we kiddo we have no

money for college, which is the only dream that I really had.

What do I do? Well, there's a beauty pageant in town, and what

happened was my father's doctor looked at my mom and me and our

situation and said, I'm going to fix your daughter's nose. And I

got kind of cute, and I entered this pageant locally in a hand

me down bridesmaids dress, and I won. There were 500 girls when I

walked into that room and I said to my dad, one of these girls

going to be on TV, and it's going to be me. And I learned a

lot. I learned about people's opinions about you, but I also

learned about insane perseverance and his idea the

law of attraction, and I've taken that throughout my entire

life. And when people say you can't do it, all I hear is the

word go. At some point after college, my went to college to

be a lawyer. I graduated in three years with two degrees,

like I was weirdly smart, but I also just want to get out of

school. I wanted to be an actress, because that's all I

had when I was growing up, was movies and TV and books. I'm

gonna figure this out. I didn't have a whole lot of help. I

didn't have any inheritance. I didn't sleep my way or marry my

way, anywhere I did it. I was on a soap opera called As the World

Turns with Julianne Moore and Meg Ryan. They were both my co

stars. I wanted to be on Broadway, and I discover I can

control this. And I opened, and I'm 26 years old. I opened an

agency. I got stationary, I got a voice answering service. Back

then it was a woman, not even a machine, and I hired a woman

named Lindsay Maxwell. And Lindsay was the manager for

Forbes, Riley, and she was freaking brilliant, because she

knew all the things about Forbes because I was her, and I would

get on the phone and pretend, and I booked commercials and

movies because I was my only client.

Oh my gosh.

And for years I never told I mean, I was afraid

I was gonna get arrested, you know, arrested or found out or

blackballed. I never told anybody.

So now, when you were getting rejected and

whatnot, how did you pivot to that new path of TV hosting?

A lot of life is about showing up whenever it is.

Now, the cool thing about being an actor is that you show up for

auditions all the time. If you land an audition and get a job,

it will change your life. Now, there's probably no other

business where that's quite as easy. I walked into a lot of

auditions that I just booked out of the blue. One of them that

changed everything was a pen on a desk. And so what happened for

there was, I walked into an audition and it said, Sell me

this pen. No one is interested in buying a pen at that moment.

They don't even know what you're talking about. I have a whole

formula. If I'm going to sell the pen, I'm never going to talk

about it. I'm going to say something like, you know when I

this is what I did. This is what I said. I don't even know back

then, how I knew this? I looked at the pen, I said, disappoint

my mom. When I went off to college, I was I skipped a year

high school. I was 15 and a half years old, and I was really

nervous and shy and very insecure, traveling away from

home, and my mother would write me handwritten notes. Every day.

I'd race to the mailbox to get them, and I realized a pen like

this can reach out and touch somebody's heart. I did that,

and I expected to leave because I thought it was kind of silly,

right? I silly, right? Well, Jake of body by Jake walks out

from behind the camera, grabs my face and says, you're going to

make me a lot of money. And I'm like, dude, okay, if you'd think

back 30 years ago, cable TV had just started. I did that job for

five years. We made so much money that Jake sold it to Fox

for $500 million in 1993 and what happened was infomercials

came along, and there were no girls who sold who sold

anything. That's not what they did on TV, right? Men were

carnival barkers, and that is when the infomercial industry

started. I was one of the pioneers. I was one of the first

females, like you said. I'd done almost 200 Infomercials. I was

at the right place, at the right time with the weirdest talent. I

don't know if you know this, but I'm the original host of the X

Games.

Wow.

I have a little bit of ADHD. Maybe you noticed.

So one of the things I found in my 20s was I took a trip to Club

Med. So I was doing a Broadway show, and I was a little burnt

out, and I booked a trip in 1986 to Club Med, and I fell in love

with it. And I walked into the Club Med corporate office, I

said to the receptionist, she said, Can I help you? I said,

Well, I'm here to help you, who's in charge of your

entertainment. And I sat down, and I said, Look, I've just been

to your club. Here's what I noticed. I think I can offer you

a way to do something different. And I went down there, and I

created game shows from that. I came back to New York, and now I

had a new idea. I wanted to ski. I opened up the newspaper, and

there's a little thing that says Club Med style show person

looking to work for a company called ski, whatever it was, he

view. And I applied because the job had nothing to do with

skiing, and I knew that it had to do with creating a bar party

at four o'clock in the afternoon to entertain people. All I know

is it was a crazy thing that I created. And one day, ESPN, two

hears about this and makes a little half hour special out of

all the things that we're doing, because we also had an outdoor

snow volleyball game. It was a big production. Then next year,

they call me out of the blue, I know nothing about sports, and

they said, Hi, this is ESPN. We'd like to offer you $75,000

for two weeks. Two weeks to host the X Games on ESPN. And I'm

like, Mike, why are you calling me? And the X Games was

launching. There was no X Games, so I didn't even know what I was

getting involved in, and they hired me. But you know what? I

did that job for six years. Then I worked for nine more years

doing a dog game show for them and doing the great outdoor

games. And I guess I was right that I maybe said to myself, you

belong on TV. You'd be great doing that. Here's the thing

about the work that I do, is that you can do a commercial in

two days. There are 365 days in a year. I could do 10

commercials, three movies, four episodic TV shows, and still

only get up to June. And so you're like, wow, we saw you all

over the place, and you were doing all of these things.

That's very different than a typical job. I just kept going

from experience to experience, and we've been trying to have a

baby. It wasn't working, and I rolled the dice and said, Let's

do in vitro. And I got blessed with two twins. And so now I

give birth to twins at 42 my kids are now 22 and they both

run my company, so I must have done something right in all of

that crazy you have, because I will tell you, I enjoy my kids

very much. I'm in business with them. I travel with them. I love

them so very much. So I traveled a lot around the world, worked

on QVC and home shopping and sold products. And then at some

point, while I was overseas, I found a spin gym, a handheld

product. But I looked at this crazy product in the middle of

the night when the gentleman showed it to me on set at home

shopping, and I said, this is a fitness product. He said, Oh,

no, no, no, no. It's an office de stressor. It's like a fidget

spinner. I said, No, no, I know fitness. This is the greatest

fitness thing I've ever seen. I said, Tell me about the company.

He said, Look. He said, I don't want to do I don't want to do

the company anymore. I've been doing it for five years, not

made a lot of money. I'll give it to you. If you sell 25,000 in

the first year, give me a small percentage. It's yours. I wrote

manuals and books, and, I mean, I went nuts, and then I

manufactured them, and then I went on home shopping, and I

went on a TV series, and I've sold 3 million of these things,

and I could have created an entire empire, but when COVID

kind of hit, I stopped manufacturing China for a while,

and my daughter came downstairs at 17 and said to me, I'm going

to build you a company. I've watched you get screwed over

online. Mom, you suck at it. You're not good at the digital

thing. You're just, let me build your company. I'm like, but

you're 17. She's like, okay, Mom, let me show you something,

because I used to take her with me everywhere. My son stayed

more at home. She traveled and she met all my friends, like Les

Brown and Joe Theismann, the NFL football player. And she said,

Mom, I've been building websites and coding and YouTube channels

for all of your friends. And she showed me her bank account and

had six figures in it. And I'm like, where did you get this

money? She said, You're the only one who doesn't believe in me.

I'm like, well, because I thought you were just my

daughter, I didn't know that you're going to be a business

partner. She said, Mom, if you give me three weeks, we're gonna

put you online. And give me a year, I'll make you a million

dollars the first night I go live, I do my very first

webinar. I do my first webinar with 25 people in the room, and

I sell my training for $1,000 I have a four week course on how

to pitch. I wake up the next morning and I look at the

account I have to call her, and I'm like, I don't understand

this yesterday, and for the last three years, this account that

I've been playing with had $0 in it today. It says K, what does

the K stand for? So what do you mean? I said, it says 25k said,

Mom, you made $25,000 last night. You sold 25 people in the

room. You sold. You closed 100% in the room. We did that four

times in a row. We had a six figure business in four weeks.

And five years later, we have 47,000 students.

Wow.

When you talk about legacy, that's literally

what she said. Because she said, Mom, you should stop doing spin

gym during COVID. Let's focus on pitch. And I said to her, I

said, McKenna, I said, Look at me on television. I can't teach

this. She said to me, Mom, I appreciate and you are brilliant

in what you do. But. You have a system, you have a formula. You

do the same thing every time. And I looked at it through her

eyes, and she was 100% right. I literally, like I said, we never

start with the product. You start with an assumption of,

well, you know what you're selling. You look at an

assumption, what is that person's biggest problem, given

what my solution is, and you orchestrate it in a very

specific way to get a yes. She said, Mom, this whole thing that

you teach about pitching, we've traveled around the world. We do

very well so, but if you don't teach other people this system

what you know, you won't have a legacy. And that's what we built

the company on.

So, you know, our show is called, Let's Talk

Legacy and and a very high level, what is legacy mean to

you?

You know, I used to argue about this, because I

thought there was no such thing, because I worked with Jack

LaLanne. So I worked with Jack for eight years. We sold juices.

We had one TV infomercial that grossed over a billion dollars.

It ran for eight years in 80 countries. If I ask anyone under

the age of 25 they have no idea who Jack LaLanne was. No idea

this man was on television for 35 years. This man has pictures

with Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Carson, and he's Arnold

Schwarzenegger's mentor. He literally started fitness, and

no one knows who he is. So if Jack LaLanne doesn't have a

legacy, you and I don't stand a chance. And I truly believe that

on some level, that us fighting for a legacy is not the right

thing to do. The legacy needs to be here while you're on earth.

How many people can you impact? How profound is your life and

how happy are you? Because I do really, truly believe that about

10 minutes after you're gone, the only people who care about

you after the people look on Facebook is the people who loved

you, whose lives you touched.

For a lot of people, there's a difference

between a personal legacy and a business legacy. Are they the

same for you, or are they intertwined?

No, you know, we're still dealing with

companies that are hundreds of years old. We still mention

names like Vanderbilt and Carnegie, and we drive forwards

long after he's dead. I'm going to tell you, it's the top 1% of

1% of 1% from Apple. People remember Steve Jobs forever

because we use his product. But that is such a small thing to be

looking at. I don't think Tony Robbins will have a legacy long

after he's gone, because he will no longer be teaching. And a lot

of his teachings, he's got books, and it's great, and

people will write, you know, he was also on television and a

couple of movies, they'll remember him, but short of him

as a coach, how many coaches are you going to remember? So I just

don't think that people this is me, focus on the here and now.

Focus on who you touch and what you do, because that is your

legacy. Your legacy is how many people you help, you impact, and

how happy you are in this life.

Right. So what are you currently doing now?

Well, you know what I'm what I do right now is

I have a new book coming out called Pitch secrets, A to Z,

and it's my a lot of the stories that I love telling and very

helpful for people that'll be launching a little later this

year. Very excited about that. That is part of the legacy that

is part of outside of me, and living beyond that. There is a

thing that's happening now with Amazon live and Tiktok live, and

people are selling all over the place. I do not think I'm going

to jump on that bandwagon, because that's a young person's

game. I spent 30 years doing home shopping. I was very well

produced, and it was beautiful and fun, and I made a lot of

money doing that. Beyond that, I've got a bunch of movies

coming out. I still love being an actress. I have an action

packed Western, I have a documentary that I just got

asked to do, and I'm just going to enjoy the ride, because I am

65 years old and that. And I don't know about how you feel,

but there's a little bit of a tick tock. You know, when you

were in your early 30s, 40s, going this little time thing

about having a child, and now there's, how much fun Can I

have? How much How can I enjoy? I mean, I'm in love with my

second husband, and I'm having the time of my life. People say

Forbes, you know, what do you want? What's your future look

like? What is your five years? I'm like, my five years is to

wake up with this man every morning and still be healthy

enough to enjoy it. He is a bodybuilder. I have no desire to

be a bodybuilder. But then something happened last year.

He'd said, there's a bodybuilding competition in our

hometown. And I said, You know what, I'm 64 years old, but you

know what, I'm going to go for it? And I did, and I ended up on

stage, and I ended up with a medal, and I ended up with the

next chapter of Forbes Riley's life.

That's amazing. Where do people find you? I

mean, you're all over the place, but if they wanted to be in your

course, or they wanted to learn more about you or just be around

you, how do they get in touch with you?

So my name Forbes Riley is rather un-unique. It's

that on all the social medias, but if you go to Forbes

riley.com All my links are there, and here's what I'm going

to offer you guys. Every Sunday Since COVID started, I show up

to do a two hour training on Zoom. I ask people, What do they

do? And I will spend time revamping their pitch. When I'm

done with you, your pitch is going to get an applause. That's

how good it is. So I highly invite you guys to go to a thing

called Pitch secrets masterclass. I teach it every

Sunday. I teach it to real estate professionals, to

lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, teenagers and when you can

articulate and communicate, what you do to get a yes from someone

else. I promise you your life changes forever. This thing

about pitching. Training. It's not sales training. It's just

getting Yeah, so Gary, watch this. If I said to you, Hey, you

want to see something cool, what are you going to say? Yes, see,

my dad taught me as a magician. There's things that you do and

you set people up to take certain actions. Imagine when

you're doing a deal that you already know what someone's

going to say, because you've been training on assumptions, on

what that person looks like, feels like, and is more likely

to do. You know how you show up. You know what you're offering

has value. You don't over talk it. And when you connect all of

these dots, and I love teaching teams, we do a lot of that go to

pitch secrets with an S masterclass.com and you'll be

blown away. The system works. It's not about you being a

genius or you being the best. McDonald's exists because of a

system. A lot of things that are successful in legacy outlive the

person because they were systematized, and that is the

only way that effectiveness runs well.

Thank you for joining us today. This has been

an amazing time.

It has been such a delight.

Absolutely.