A scene from the Date with Destiny seminar in Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (Neflix)

Renowned self-help speaker and author Tony Robbins is a walking contradiction. He is at once an absolute embodiment of egoistic, swaggering American capitalism and a seemingly selfless soul devoted to helping others live better lives.

This new documentary, streaming on Netflix, chronicles the keystone event of the Robbins catalog, the six-day long Date with Destiny seminar. Director James Berlinger brings us inside this most intense of Robbins’s many endeavors. Among the event’s attendees, Robbins selects a handful of them per hour for high-octane interventions. The result is something like a concert film, watching the star play his instruments, which, in Robbins’s case, are the desperately tortured psyches of those forking over their life savings to be yelled at in public by a hulking multimillionaire. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru is a fascinating reminder that even the most familiar public figures are much more than what we thought they were. The film is by turns sickening, inspiring, and, in spite of any cynicism which might be justifiably brought to bear on what Robbins represents, moving,

To its credit, the film states at the outset that Date with Destiny has an extraordinarily hefty price tag—it costs $4,995 to attend its six 12-hours-a-day program. Given that there are 2,500 attendees, a few things become clear: the seminar grosses for Robbins approximately $12.5 million. Since the event runs 72 hours total, Robbins makes about $173,600 per hour. For comparison, perhaps the most prominent banker in the world, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, earns about $13,000 per hour. (Robbins has held Date with Destiny 75 times over the last quarter century.)

Why does Tony Robbins charge so much? The question is never raised, and indeed such questions are beyond the purview of the film—it is almost entirely a fly-on-the-wall filming of the daily seminar activities, with zero critical agenda. In the car on his way to the event with his aides, Robbins is made aware that one attendant had to sell everything he owned, literally everything, up to and including his furniture, to cobble together the required payment. Though perhaps now rich in self-help maxims, this person presumably is now homeless, while Robbins hordes the desperate man’s life savings, a pittance to someone worth nearly half a billion dollars.

It seems clear that this sort of workshop would attract plenty of people who are so desperate as to verge on the suicidal, and indeed Robbins and his small army of staffers who help put together this extravaganza devote special attention to “red flags,” attendees who are in immediate danger of harming themselves or others. The film is largely structured around Robbins’s extended interventions with single attendees in the grand hall, and at one point Robbins challenges his acolytes to stand up if they currently have suicidal thoughts. Dozens stand up, and he confronts a few of them. Maybe he talked a few of them out of their severe depression with five minutes of hollering, maybe he didn’t.

One thing the documentary makes very clear is that Tony Robbins is no touchy-feely, earthy-crunchy, lovey-dovey self-help softy—he is a raw, hard-nosed, hard-edged blast of ego. He liberally employs all manner of profanities, brazenly calling people out for being weak and feckless to their faces. He gets up close to these fragile, fraying supplicants and says things such as “Can you feel that? That’s power, you feel that power,” inviting them to, if momentarily, partake of the overpowering beast of self that he harbors inside. We see fleeting glimpses of how this dynamic prophet of capitalism keeps his confidence running at such a gallop, even as he approaches age 60—he describes his habit of going on long runs and of chanting over and over “I’m unstoppable! I’m unstoppable!” until he believes it. He also jumps manically on a trampoline backstage before bursting onstage to inspire his flock.

This is part of the paradoxical nature of Robbins—he is enormous, physically and spiritually, a rampaging, colossal chunk of pure egoism, destroying any and all weakness or uncertainty in his path (with a gargantuan bank account to match). This might sound like an apt description of, say, Donald Trump, but Robbins is light years away from Trump-style sociopathic self-regard. Robbins really is an altruist, but he practices altruism by way of egoistic acquisitiveness. He wields his massive ego and rapacious materialism for good. He’s Trump with a conscience. Faint praise, but nowadays that passes for a virtuous man.