Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle.
Crush it.

So what we do on this show when we first start is we do a magic mind shot. How did you know? I saw you holding it.
I was like, okay. Have you ever seen these before? Yeah, I've taken magic mind before.
Oh, you have? Okay. Well, do you like them? I do.
Before I make you take it? Yeah. Okay, good.
Because the ingredients are delicious. Okay.
So what we do is we'll keep you we'll get you really focused and locked in and we just basically do a cheers and we just then start deal hi okay you ready here we go all right cheers nice to meet you oh i thought it was a shot it was i just realized no no no you know what i really it was a shot I've had like five today and I know they told me not to take so many because I've taken so many already. You just did what my, so when I, I think this is like when I was maybe like 20 years old, I went to Mexico with my parents and I was with my wife, oh, I guess then girlfriend and my parents and my mom was like, let's do tequila shots.
Let's do tequila shots. And I was like, mom, have you like, what are you, you crazy in Mexico.
And so they bring her around in tequila shots over for us. And I'm like a freshman in college at the time.
I'm good at taking shots. Right, right, right.
And so I like rip the shot back and I like look up and my mom is like, like she's taking like a tiny sip of the tequila shot. I was like, mom, you were the one that wanted to do this.
That's right, right, right. Basically, you're saying I remind you of your mom.
I feel like you just did that. I feel like you just did that to me you like baited me into the shot i did you know what though it's funny because i that happens a lot because i actually genuinely love them and i take it before i work out and then i take with these podcasts and then i'm up to like four or five and they're like you know maybe you shouldn't take more than two or maybe max like three and then i'm like just like i'm like basically banging them back like it's like water there's nothing in it that's gonna i mean it doesn't have enough caffeine that you'd have an issue right it's not but i think they're trying to be cautionary but like i just remember like oh my god as i'm like drinking and i'm like maybe i should just have half of this time because i'm like i feel that you know like four cold brews deep on any given day i only drink cold brew and uh i have like an affinity for a large Dunkin' Donuts cold brew.
And I don't, I actually don't drink the entire thing, but I like having the large, like it just makes me feel good. It feels like psychosomatic.
Yeah, it feels good. Totally.
And so like during the course of a day, I'll end up getting like three of those and I don't drink them all, but I have three. And so people will like DM me being like, I'm going to call an ambulance.
Like you can't, you know well you know that's really funny because a couple things i saw you walk in but i thought you had it from 7-eleven or something i know no i'm staying at the one hotel and they have like a really nice cafe and oh is that from that okay yeah yeah and then i have to tell you and this is not an ad this is actually genuine i love there's like i'm a huge cold brew person and i like i'm trying to find the best and like around wherever i go the best cold brew i've ever had is a place or a company called grady's do you know what this is no it's on the east coast we don't have we don't have really much access to it on the west coast here and i actually ship it from new york and you can now what i realize and i actually even like d'm like, you have the best, send me whatever you want and I'll just post whatever because I want everyone to know because it's really strong and that you can tell it's not watered down like most other ones. I find most places are very watered down and I hate that feeling.
So if you wrote it down in your little book. I wrote it down.
Now it's there. I love it.
So now it's there. You're going to try it.
It's going to be in my second book. That's going to be the whole thing.
That's right. Exactly.
And it's also the French vanilla is what I love, but you can get original. But you're- Oh yeah.
By the way, this is how many magic minds I've had. I didn't even actually properly introduce you.
We have Sahil. Is that how you say your name? Sahil.
Sahil. Sahil? Sahil, yeah.
Sahil Bloom on the podcast. And he wrote a book and it's called The Five Types of Wealth.
And so, by the way, thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you for having me.
Yes, you're welcome. I've seen the other side of this so many times, watching your show and seeing it all over social media over the years.
So it's a thrill to be like in the seat. Oh my God.
It feels weird. I'm so glad.
Well, it's funny because I didn't know who you were until very recently. I started seeing your clips of you.
And I really love your perspective, how you speak. You're very articulate.
You seem like you have a lot of wisdom in a very young person's brain and body. I mean, were you just always very wise growing up? An an old soul my whole life.
An old soul, yeah.

I feel like I am probably an old soul, like from a young age.

Definitely in college, like people used to call me grandpa on the baseball team.

That was mostly because I had an affinity for waking up at like 4 or 5 a.m. my whole life.

Oh, wow.

And so that meant I would go to bed at like 9.

And in college, that's very weird if you're like not going out and partying.

And so like my roommate would always call me grandpa. Like the team that was what I was known as was grandpa bloom.
Um, but that had nothing to do with wisdom. That was just, I had a weird schedule, uh, circadian rhythm.
But I, um, I mean, I come from a family that was very like storytelling oriented. My mom and my grandmother on my mom's side were incredible storytellers.
I just had like an ability to captivate people. And I feel like I sort of got that gene from them to some extent.
And what it meant for me most of my life was that I was always fascinated by like the human condition. I've always just been fascinated by people's stories.
And it had nothing to do with like, oh, famous people or like, oh, billionaires and wanting to only talk to them. Like I will sit and chat with an Uber driver just as much as like a billionaire CEO that I'm going to meet.
Right. I'm just fascinated by how people wrestle with these like universal challenges that humans struggle with.
And so my whole life I've sort of been doing that. It's just now I get to kind of do that for a job, quote unquote.
Right. Like I saw you went to Stanford, right? Was it like a BA, an MA? I saw like, what was it? Yeah, I did my undergrad and then I stayed and did a master's there.
And what was your master's in? In public policy. Oh, okay.
Yeah. So you obviously are bright, very bright, and then you're also an athlete.
And then, wait, did you... I didn't know Stanford even had a baseball team.
Were there other... We were one of the best baseball are you serious oh man that hurts my feelings no no i don't know much about i'm canadian and baseball is not a big deal in canada we know hockey so you know like it's only hockey it's only hockey it's only hockey i um it's funny that you say that because so chris pronger is one of my like dear friends he's like you know what probably the one of the top few most famous hockey players of all time.
Canadian. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I was with him last week, and he was saying the exact same thing. See? That no one played baseball.
He was like, if you didn't play hockey, no one would even talk to you. I don't even think that we even knew that was part of the curriculum.
There was even a sport called baseball in Canada. It was just not something that people even thought of.
Even when I moved here, baseball and basketball, all these other... Soccer, we don't do those things back there.
But you're in LA. They just won the World Series.
Yes, I know. But I think that because I grew up not thinking about it...
Funnily enough, though, I'm friends with a lot of baseball players, which is very interesting. But anyway, the point is, that's very interesting, Stanford baseball.
I want to know about how you even evolved into this career path. What would you call yourself? I know you're an author, right? You're a writer.
Are you- I'd say I'm a writer and entrepreneur is probably how I would define it. Although, that's just my cocktail party answer, I guess.
You know how it's one of the challenges, actually, doing things a little bit differently is you don't have the like nice cookie cutter answer that everyone wants you to have. Someone asks like, what do you do? I'd say I'm a writer first and foremost.
It's what I enjoy doing most. It's what I get most of my energy from.
But the journey to it, I mean, frankly, the journey to it and like this book is a manifestation of that journey. I would say for the first 30 years of my life lived as a deeply insecure person.
I made most of the decisions that I made in my life trying to seek external affirmation that I thought would make me feel better about who I was. I was constantly sort of unhappy internally and thinking that, you know, some amount of external

affirmation, some amount of people telling me I was great would eventually make me feel great. And obviously you eventually come to realize that you can't fix an internal problem with external solutions.
It has to come from the inside, but it took me way, way too long to learn that. I mean, I grew up really in a extremely loving household with a set of parents who had very high expectations.
My mom is from India, Indian culture, very academically oriented. And then my dad is a professor at Harvard.
So academic excellence was sort of a standard. And my older sister hit and exceeded that standard at every turn, three and a half, four years older than me.
And it was like, it became a joke to me. Like I would get to the first day of school, the professor would be like, oh, you're Sonali's brother.
They'd be all excited, like, oh, another star student. And then inevitably within a week, I would disappoint them.
Because I was like, you know, I was a shithead. Like I liked playing sports and screwing around.
And I wasn't living up to that standard. What kind of student were you? I was like, I was the type of student who didn't have to try to get like B pluses.
And that was like, might as well have been failing in my household. But if you tried, would you get A's? I'm sure I would have.
Okay. But what basically happened was from a young age, I created this story in my mind that I was not smart.
And my sister was the smart one and I was the athletic one. And there's something about those stories that you tell yourself, those original stories, that are very, very powerful and can be really damning to how you live your life.
Because every single thing you do is in an effort to align with that story you've told yourself about who you are. And so what happened to me was I would not give 100% effort on something, not because I didn't have the effort or the energy, but because I was afraid of what would happen if I did give 100% and still failed.
I was afraid of the hit that my ego would take if that occurred. And so instead, I just conformed with this story that I wasn't smart, that I wasn't like what my parents wanted.
And they could tell me the opposite over and over again, which they did, but I wouldn't hear it because that story I had told myself was so pervasive in my mind. So most of my life, I just kind of marched down this path of like, let me do everything I can do to try to like, feel good to feel impressive.
So I like, you know, went to the big school so that I could like say, Oh, I'm going D one. And like, that would make me feel good.
Or I took a job that was going to sound impressive on the outside, even if it wasn't the one that I felt I was well suited for. And that was the story of the first 30 years of my life.
I mean, I like marched down this path that, you know, from the outside looking in, you would have said, look successful, and things were going well, and like from all intents and purposes, you would have said I was winning the game, but internally, slowly and steadily, everything in my life was falling apart, and I hid that from the world, and around the time when I turned 30, COVID was happening and I was at home and what I had started to see was that I was making more and more money. Things looked great, but everything else in my life was falling apart.
My relationship with my wife was really suffering. We were struggling to conceive at the time and she was carrying that burden on her.
And I was not there for her to help carry it or to be the supportive husband that I needed to be. My relationship with my parents was almost non-existent.
I was seeing them once a year at the time. We were living 3,000 miles apart.
My relationship with my sister had really suffered because I resented the fact that she was the smart one. My health was really suffering.
I was overweight. Mentally, I was suffering.
All of these other areas of my life had deteriorated while on the outside looking in, everything was going great. And it all came to a head in May of 2021 when I went out for a drink with an old friend and he asked me how I was doing.
And I said, I'm good, busy. Kind of looked at me and was like, come on, how are you doing? And I said, it was tough that I was living so far away from my parents.
I'd been so close to them my whole life and we weren't seeing them enough. And he looked at me and he asked, well, how old are they? I said, 65.
He said, how often do you see them? I said, about once a year. And he looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die.
And I just remember feeling like I had gotten punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most is that finite, it's that countable, that like you can count it on a couple of, on on a few hands was so terrifying to me and so shocking that it ripped me back into the present.
And I just had this sensation that I was winning the game. It seemed like I was winning the game.
And I remember thinking that if this was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. Yeah.
That's such a good way of putting it. I mean, it's funny.
My friend Jesse Itzler has this whole thing with time, right? Like his whole, he has like even made this big-ass calendar situation. I went to Mori, yeah.
Right, you know, to kind of, and I think something that you did on social media was how I kind of like clicked into you. It was something about time and energy, and they're very different things.

And actually, now that I think about it, you know what actually I did see was that you were talking about, you know, if you have a kid, like the first 10 years of the life. Well, can you share that? Because I think that was like what got me dialed into you, and then you go into all this time.
Yeah, there's this idea from ancient Greece that they had two words for time. One was chronos, which is just linear time.
It's like the idea that you have an amount of time. And then there's kairos, which is the idea that not all time is created equal.
There are certain moments or windows that carry higher importance than others. And that is fundamentally true in your own life.
There are specific windows of time when people occupy your world and those moments are much more meaningful than others. And what you're referring to is one window in particular, which is with your children, that there is a 10-year window during which you are your child's favorite person in the world.
And after that, they have other favorite people. They have best friends and boyfriends, girlfriends, partners, spouses, their own children.
And you will never be in that same position as you are in that 10-year period. And yet it is also the time window when we happen to be chasing whatever more we're looking for professionally.
We're running around, we're traveling, we're hustling and doing all of these other things. And as we do that, we're losing sight of the fact that those moments, those very, very dear moments that we have are passing by.
and one of the things that I you know try to contemplate in this in this book is like, how do you navigate that tension, that fundamental tension that exists between wanting to be present, giving that energy, the recognition that there's no such thing as later with your kids. So many people say like your whole life is filled with these laters of saying, oh, I'll spend more time with my kids later, or I'll work on my health later.
And the reality is that later is just another word for never, you're never gonna do those things because they're not gonna be there later. Your kids are not gonna be eight years old later.
It's so true. That word later, it might as well be crossed out and just put never because that is 100% true.
I think people get more comfortable while thinking that they could possibly do it versus just admitting that it won't happen. So I guess it circles back to, okay, you're 30 years old.
You heard this thing. You realize you have 15 more times to maybe see your parents.
You move back. You move back.
What else did it do? How did you then go from your life as, I think you were in private equity, yeah? So you went from being a private equity guy, being overweight and whatever, you're having not that great of a relationship and all the other things were kind of like taking a turn. What did you do to kind of become who you are today? So the biggest thing in all of that was I fundamentally realized that my scoreboard was broken, meaning the way that I was measuring my life was just wrong.
I was measuring success on the basis of one thing, which was money. And the reason we do that is actually sort of logical one, which is just that money is so easy to measure.
Peter Drucker is a famous management theorist, says that what gets measured gets managed. And it's because money is so easily measured.
It's a single number. So as a result, we focus on it.
It's the way that we define our worth, the way that we compare ourselves to others. And the thing that I fundamentally came to realize in that moment when I was feeling as lost as I was and heard this thing about my parents was just that it really didn't actually relate to what I viewed as a wealthy life and to what I viewed as a successful life, like what I would look back on and say these were the right things to measure my life around.
And I needed to change that. I needed to redefine the scoreboard around the things that I truly believe lead to that feeling of fulfillment, happiness, and joy.
And so we went on a journey to do that. We sold our house in California, moved across the country.
I left my job. I started leaning into the things I was getting a ton of energy from, the writing being the biggest one, and started trying to craft and build a life around those new things and that new definition of what wealth looked like to me.
It's so true because success, I think it depends on who you ask. It's all perspective, right? I think the easy thing is, oh, how much money do you make? Are you successful? But to me, actually, the people who are the most wealthy, richest people I know are usually the most unsuccessful in everything else in life, which makes it kind of like a really, it's like the juxtaposition, right? Because they focus solely on money, but they have no time, they have no relationships, they have no nothing, and their health is taking a nosedive.
And I guess not to kind of sit there and just kind of like pontificate, but how do you, if you are somebody, you can't really change that perspective, right? Like you don't know what you don't know. Do you think you have to have some kind of like big moment in time, like something that gets slapped in your face to kind of see that perspective? Because otherwise, I think people lose out on a lot of other types of wealth they can be.
Yeah. I have so many thoughts on this.
So first off, you're absolutely right. Some of the richest people in the world are some of the most miserable people in the world.
I mean, we all know a bunch of rich yet miserable people. You look at the Forbes top 10 richest people in the world, they have 13 combined divorces among them.
The top 10 have 13 divorces. That's low.
I thought it'd be even higher. Maybe someone at number 11 or 12 needs to sneak in and bump the numbers up for everybody because there are one or two that have none.
Look at Elon Musk. I'm going to use him as an example.
Elon Musk is obviously the richest person in the world, but I feel like his life is very lopsided. He may be a rock star in so many other areas.
But really, if you actually listen to him and talk with him and see him, you can tell that there's like a deep need, like there's a lot of other things lacking, you know, in his life. Which means I bet you if you were to sit here and talk to him, he'd think he wasn't very successful.
He'd be successful in one area. But I bet you he'd be really lonely and sad and probably not very happy.
It's defining what you want. If what you want is to amass the greatest amount of financial wealth possible, and you don't care about being happy, and you don't care about being lonely, and you're happy to try to leave a legacy, whatever that means financially, then go do that.
But the point is that that's not for everyone. And so falling into that as the cultural default is dangerous because I know too many people, myself included, that I was marching down that path.
I understand and I could see where it was going to end up. And I know I was going to wake up in 50 years and wonder what the fuck just happened.
What did I just do with my life? And I just, I mean, when I think about all of this, what I think about is it's about awareness and action. And this is like for anything that you are consuming, reading, learning about, so many people get their dopamine from the information or awareness.
You're like, oh, I read a book. And so you feel good about reading the book, right? But if you didn't do anything, it doesn't matter.
If you didn't go act on one of the ideas from the book or go and actually change your life, it doesn't matter. And similarly, if you do one tiny thing, that might be the start, the spark that actually changes your life.
So I think about that constantly. It's like awareness is incredible.
And understanding this, learning that there are different types of wealth, learning to have those discussions, contemplate, wrestle with the questions that the book asks you to wrestle with, to start thinking about what truly matters to you, defining those priorities. That is a first step.
But the next one is actually going and doing one tiny thing to create some tiny change in your life. And when you do that, that becomes the thing you're addicted to.
It's no longer the information gathering. Because my biggest fear is like, you know, we all have, and we've heard these stories, right? You read like the regrets from the dying, or you read a story about some tragic loss or something, and you read it and you internalize, you send it to a friend, you're like, how sad is this? How incredible, we all need to cherish our time.
And then you go back and start living the exact same damn way that you were the day before. And my call to action, like what I'm pleading with anyone that reads this book is to just do, take one of the thing, one of the ideas in there.
And the whole book is filled with actual actions that you can do today. Go and do one thing.
It doesn't matter what it is either. And it doesn't have to be enormous.
It doesn't have to be that you quit your job on the West coast and fly, you know, 3000 miles, change your whole life, rip the bandaid off. Just like text a friend that you've been thinking about.
Just if you're trying to change your health, go for a 15-minute walk. If you're trying to find more space in your life mentally, journal for five minutes before going to bed.
It's like the tiny thing that creates the momentum that can change everything. Right, it's the ripple effect, right? Absolutely.
And I think the stop is in the start, right? And it's like inertia, right? Something in motion stays in motion. Oh, you're writing something down.

I like that. The stop is in the start.

Yeah, you better tag me. No, I'm joking.
But I think it's very true. I think it's about something in motion stays in motion.
And I guess what I always get, people always say to me,

well, how do I start? Like, what do I do? And my answer, and I think we're very aligned here,

because I think when I was going through your stuff, I always get, people always say to me, well, how do I start? Like, what do I do? And my answer, and I think we're very aligned here because I think when I was going through your stuff, I always say it's about actually exercising. Exercising, I think, is the catalyst and it's like a gateway drug to life, in my opinion.
We are aligned. Because to me, number one, what it does to your brain, like for me, it's not just a physicality.
It's like what you do for your mental health, your focus, all the things. I used to do this treadmill on, I don't know if you were here yet, Ed, on treadmills.
Like I used to do this podcast on treadmills. Sorry, I don't think I said that right.
So we had two treadmills here facing each other and we would walk and talk. I love that.
Right? Because I think you get way more creative, like your ideas are better, your energy is better, You think faster. To me, if you don't have that as part of your daily habit and ritual, you are really missing out on so much.
Energy begets energy. When I don't work out, I'm way more lethargic than if I do, even if I'm super tired.
Yeah, there's scientific evidence to support that, by the way, the walking thing. Tell me.
Stanford researchers did a study on walkers versus non-walkers and found that people who walked had a 60% increase in their creative output and the quality of their creative output than the non-walkers. Similarly, there was a bunch of research done about people walking together and how much more connected those two people feel after walking

together versus sitting still together. So like having hard conversations, one of the best things

you can do actually is if you're going to have a hard conversation with someone, do it on a walk.

Both people end up feeling better about the way that the conversation went.

That's a really great point. You know, me and my husband for the first, what, like six years of our

life being married, or maybe even maybe, I don't remember, we would go for a walk every night and

we'd walk to dinner because we had a destination, right? And it had to be at least two miles. So we would have that time.
And I think it was the best habit that I've ever, ever kind of brought into our marriage because that's like the way to connect to people and to connect to your partner, whatever. Otherwise you just get, you like get lost in the, in the weeds of life, right? And so anything involving exercise, and it's not because I'm like a fitness fanatic or whatever, but I think because it does teach you such foundational skills in life, like discipline and delayed gratification and all these things.
If people can just like get to that in their brain, their lives can just be exponentially better. Yeah, I mean, physical wealth is one of the pillars.
I know. And it's a huge catalyst for all of that.
Let's talk about it. I mean, this is like one of my hot takes on life that there's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5 a.m.
and works out. And I say that over and over again and people always get outraged by it every time I say it.
And what I'm talking about is that it's not about the workout. It's not about it's it's about what it means.
It's about the ability that you create when you go and do that is that you convince yourself that you are someone that can do a hard thing because it's very hard to wake up early and work out. It's very hard to convince yourself to do that.
And so like the first thing I say when a young person comes to me and they're feeling lost in life, feeling stuck is for 30 30 straight days, wake up at 5 a.m. and work out.
And I guarantee you will rewire your brain. You will immediately start identifying as a winner if you can do that because you're doing something hard.
You're doing something you don't want to do. You're delaying gratification.
And you will feel the impact of that action after 30 days. You will look different.
You will feel different. You will be more confident.
You'll carry yourself. And that has ripple effects into every other area of your life.

You just said the main word, though, confidence, because I think it breeds confidence because you

see yourself doing a hard thing over and over again. You will have that self-efficacy like,

I can do hard things. I am confident.
I can finish this thing. And I think that, like I said earlier,

is that that's why I think people are very myopic when they think about what exercise really means. And so when I see that as one of your pillars of your wealth, of physicality, I think it's like the number one pillar.
It's like the number one. If I was going to do one through five, that's like the first thing because it does open up all these other channels.
Yeah, it's a catalyst into everything else. I mean, I tell the story of a young man in the book.
Throughout the book, there's all these stories of real people that I've interacted with and tell their stories. And there's a young man who was on the path to killing himself.
And he was given a month free pass to go to a gym and decided, like, what the hell, I'm going to use it. And he went one day and felt like shit from going.
He was like, all right, I'm going to go another day. And he went the second day.
And then he went the third day. Then he kind of felt a little good.
He felt a little sore from some of the workouts. So he went the fourth day and he went for 30 straight days.
And at the end of the 30 days, he noticed he was getting dressed for work that day and his belt had gone a notch in from where it was. And the way he described it was that in that moment, he recognized that he had power, that he had control over the outcomes in his life.
And that was something that he hadn't felt. He had felt completely powerless in his life.
That was that feeling of feeling lost, feeling stuck. And the fitness was a catalyst because it proved to him that he actually did have that power to make an action, to create an outcome.
And that had ripple effects into every other area of his life. And now today, he's inspiring millions of people.
He's creating content. He's doing all of these incredible things.
And it all started with this 30-day window and that tiny notch in his belt. That's amazing.
I love that story, actually. And I bet you when you were 30 and you were kind of like recalibrating your life and you gained all that weight, it's because you weren't working out.
And then I bet you one of the first things you did was start working out again. Yeah.
I mean, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. I mean, you would like, well, we can put a picture in the show notes or we can put it up.
I mean, I looked like a different person in a lot of ways. I can't imagine., he looks like an Abra, if you're just listening, he looks like an Abercrombie Fitch model.
And then like he said to me before we started, he was, didn't always look like this. My, uh, my like awkward childhood years of going to Abercrombie and not fitting into the clothes.
I feel very, uh, I feel very vindicated right now. Um, but you were a baseball player, you were an athlete, so you had to have looked okay.
I was very strong. No, I was very no i was very strong but i was like uh i was fujacked if you know what that means like fat jack yeah uh yeah we always used to talk about the football guys at stanford used to talk about having a shallow water body where like they had like big traps and shoulders and chest but their abs were like disgusting so you'd stand in shallow water and look really good uh i always that always cracked me up that's pretty good that like, that's a pretty good term.
I like that, the shallow water body. Yeah, you should write that down.
Shallow? Water body. Okay, I am going to write that down.
It's like sloppy lower abs, but pretty good up top. I'm going to use that.
And then the other one is fat jacked. Yeah, fat jacked.
Fajacked. Yeah.
That is so hilarious. Some good terms.
Oh my God, I love it. Yeah, I'm just creating value.
That's why I'm an author, because I come up with these great ideas. That's so good.
Yeah, no, fitness was definitely a huge catalyst in my life. And refinding, A, just the simple things of walking every single day.
I mean, I mentioned we were really struggling to conceive. And that's something, I don't know, there's probably some listeners out there that have experienced this.
It is, it's something that people don't talk about. You bottle it up and you internalize it because it's, it feels like a stigma.
And for women in particular, there's this assumption of fault. And my wife carried that burden.
And unfortunately, I was not there to either help or bear that burden myself. And frankly, in hindsight, I would argue that it was probably mostly me, because I was not in any sort of health or shape or stress levels or all of these things that we now know impact fertility to be there for her in the way that I needed to.
And the most beautiful thing in all of this was made this big change, sold her house, moved back to the East Coast. Within two weeks of getting home, my wife got pregnant naturally.
And it was just this like unbelievable example, whatever you believe in, God, energy, whatever it is, it was this unbelievable example of like when energy comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And I remember so vividly coming home from the hospital after my son was born, pulling onto our street, and we turned into our driveway.
And like both of our sets of parents who lived in the area were there like cheering in the driveway. And just that moment, like i will never forget that moment of feeling like we were truly home like that feeling of having arrived in that way i love that that's so nice that's so sweet i love that is your wife here in in la with you now or she's not here with me right now she's's back home with our son.
What's your son's name by the way? Roman.

And by the way,

I didn't even ask you earlier,

but what does your sister do now?

I'm curious.

She said she's such a rock star.

I don't even know what she does.

She's still a rock star.

She's the CEO of a healthcare technology startup

in the Boston area.

Oh, okay.

She was a physics major at Yale

and then went to Harvard Business School

and now is a CEO.

And you know, it's interesting.

She's a real loser, you're right.

But my relationship with my sister is,

I really like that. physics major at Yale and then went to Harvard Business School and now is a CEO.
And it's interesting. So my relationship- He's a real loser, you're right.
But my relationship with my sister is, I write about it and it's one of the most beautiful things in all of this, frankly, has been the metamorphosis of that relationship because I spent 30 years of my life resenting my sister and feeling competitive and creating this dynamic with her that was fundamentally one of tension and one where like I couldn't get over the fact that she was achieving the things that I was supposed to be and that I resented that. And after my son was born, I so clearly remember this one moment they came down to see him when he came back from the hospital.
And she has a son who is 11 months older than mine. It was her first.
And we were together and we took a picture of the two of us holding our little boys. And I looked at her and I remember this sensation that after 30 years of living together, it was like I was meeting my sister for the first time.
Because we were, for the first time in our lives, we were in the same stage, we were in the same place in our lives. It was no longer this competitive resentment, all these things.
We were just in it together. And it was this beautiful reminder to me that sometimes relationships blossom and bloom in a new season of your life when they haven't been in the past.
And that relationship and the way that it has bloomed and the way that it has grown and the joy that I find in it and that I hope she finds in it is really an amazing thing. It's like, it is really a reminder that there are people that are going to love you deeply that you have not even met yet.
That's so true. I think this is what I think is interesting about you a little bit, because like I said at the beginning, I don't know where you came from.
I just started seeing some posts, some content. I'm like, wow, this is really deep.
I really like this one. Then I'm going to look at this one.
And I think this is your superpower. I think you're really good at taking some human feeling human feeling and then like creating content around that's very, that resonates with a lot of people.
Cause all these things that you talk about, like it, like it touches people in a way that it's like, yeah, that's, that's so true. Or like, you know, like I think that, you know, that 10 year old thing, anyone who's a parent can relate to the fact that that happens or when, or when your parent is aging and you only have X amount of time to see them, especially because my mom, she lives on the East Coast.
And like I said, like that, I'm like, oh, wow, you're right. Like she's 80.
I probably get to see her four times maybe if I'm lucky. So when you started to kind of like get out of where you were and then move to the East Coast and get your life back, did you make a decision like, okay, I'm going to start being a content creator.
I'm going to start building my Instagram. How did it go from private equity guy living here to then write? Obviously, I get why you're writing books because you're a thinker and all that, but is that how it happened with the book? I had started writing on Twitter originally about a year before we made the big change in our life.
And that was, I was stuck at home. Like COVID, you live in California.
Like I was living in the Bay Area. The lockdowns happened.
I was stuck at home. I was no longer commuting every single day.
I was no longer traveling four days a week. I didn't have a social life because you weren't allowed to see anybody.
And so I was like, I need something to do to fill the time. And I'd always loved writing, but never had a public outlet for it.
At the time, I started writing these like, originally threads on Twitter that were about finance, like about business, about finance, about things I was working on. And people had started sharing them.
I'd started kind of growing, you know, 15, 20,000 followers, like from 500. And I was like, Oh, this is enjoyable.
I'm liking this. But what I realized really early on was I didn't really care about business and finance.
I cared about humans. Like I cared about life, the things that we talk about now.
And so I started sort of like slowly broadening, opening the aperture of what I was talking about. And by May of 2021, when that drink with the friend happened, my Twitter platform had grown to maybe like 100,000 followers.
And there was like seeds of the fact that there might be businesses you could build around it. Like people were coming to me asking about how to build their platform, startups I'd invested in were asking about like wanting to do more storytelling around their businesses.
And so I could see a path where there was something else to do other than investing. But frankly, when we left California and when we were moving back to the East Coast, my initial thought was, I'm going to go work at another investment fund.
Because that was all I knew. And I come from a very risk-averse family.
My dad's a tenured professor, as risk-averse a track as you can have. What does he do? What kind of professor though? Economics and demography.
Oh, wow. Okay.
Yeah. So he was, he's been at Harvard for the last 20, 25 years.
He was the chair of the economics department at Columbia before that. Bunch of dummies in your life.
I don't know how you can handle it. But you can see like how the expectations around academic orientation were.
Totally. And you're also your mom's Indian.
Is your dad Indian too? No, my dad's white. My dad is a white Jewish guy from the Bronx oh okay by the way that's hilarious so I was gonna say because I'm Jewish and the Indian culture and the Jewish culture is so similar in the act in the academics and education yes I'm thinking but now I'm like okay well at least you only have one Indian you don't have maybe you have like a a Protestant uh no no but you have a Jew and an Indian exactly it was all it yeah it all it all added up Exactly, exactly.
Oh my God. But I thought I was just going to go work at another investment fund.
And I had no luck finding a new job on the East Coast. And I was interviewing at places and getting rejected from a bunch of things.
And my wife was the one that looked at me and was like, and I said to her, I was like, I think I made a terrible mistake. I had, I left, I had a great job in the Bay Area.
I loved my, you know, colleagues. I loved the people I worked with and for, I didn't like what I was doing.
It wasn't a fit for me, but like I was able to pay the bills. So like in some ways it was good.
I think I made a terrible mistake. And she just said to me, can't you just do the thing like you're doing on the weekend right now? Can't you just do that like full time? And I And I had honestly never thought of it.
Like I just never crossed my mind that I could like build my own ecosystem, do my own thing, be an entrepreneur. And until she said that, it was like this snap in my mind of someone believing in you before you believe in yourself and the power that comes from that.
And you know, in hindsight, part of that is like, I started dating my wife when she was 15 years old and I was 16. So she had seen, she probably knew me better than I knew myself in some ways.
And she had seen the journey and my insecurity and my growth. And she had seen the things I was hiding from the world.
And she could see, she could really see me. And she saw the energy I was getting from this new thing and knew that like, that was the path.
And so while I was trying to do all this calculation and be all like quantitative about how to make the next choice and like doing this like Stanford math around all of it, she just saw like, oh, you're really energized by this thing. I can see your heart being pulled towards it.
Why don't you go do that? And there's something really beautiful about that. Like the idea that you can do all the analysis, pros, cons, whatever weighing of everything.
But at the end of the day, your gut, like your instinct, your energy does not lie about these things. Absolutely not.
And what's interesting, because you come from that background, but a lot of your like thoughts and ideas are like anti, like even you're like, I want to go, I want to go through some of these, like one of your things I saw is like theto-do list, right? Yeah. So the anti-to-do list is the idea of avoiding things during the day rather than just thinking about what you need to do.
So you have your to-do list. Everyone has theirs.
It's probably way too long, if I had to guess. And the anti-to-do list is like, what do I need to not do during this day? And it changes from time to time.
Like you have different things that you're trying to avoid. But what I have found is that creating an awareness around the things that I'm trying not to do during the day is just as important as knowing what I want to do.
So good. Yes, I love that.
So like things on mine would be like, don't complain. That's been a big one for me.
I just naturally default to like complaining about stupid things. But if you have that in front of you and you're like, okay, I'm not going to complain today.
I need to like actually check that off. When you start finding that you're getting pulled that way, you like stop in your tracks or, you know, not having my phone out in front of my son has been a big one and a very challenging one for me.
But awareness around the things that you're trying to avoid is powerful because people think that transformation comes from taking specific actions. It also comes from avoiding specific actions that are holding you back.
Like sometimes growth actually comes from not doing the thing that is holding you back, cutting the boat anchors. It's so true because it's actually this idea.
I agree with that. People think something's wrong.
They add something versus take it away. And a lot of times when you like take things away, it actually is much more beneficial in a way.
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like another way of saying it is like to become who you want to be, you have to unbecome who you previously were.
And a lot of that comes from destruction. Like you have to destroy the old version of you.
Yeah. De you yeah deconstruct it yeah and there's a loneliness that comes in that too that i think often goes unsaid that like when you are changing when you are transforming when you're living a different way defining your priorities different from your surroundings there is going to be a period of loneliness in doing that because you are no longer going to be well-suited to your surroundings, your environment.
The people that you felt aligned with all of a sudden start feeling like they're speaking a different language. You almost like cannot communicate because that alignment no longer exists.
And you haven't made enough progress to attract the new into your life. You haven't created those new relationships or had that texture with new people.
And so there's a period where you feel alone on these journeys. And what provided solace to me in all of that was viewing that period of loneliness as a tax, quote unquote, on that personal transformation, like a necessary thing that you have to pay, a burden that you have to endure in order to get the gold that's on the other side.
I think that's so true. And I, you know, I think we do a lot of behaviors and stay in relationships even because we're trying to avoid that loneliness feeling, right? Like we get to, we distract ourselves with whatever we can, be it a bad relationship, too much work, whatever that bad habit or ritual is, just because we don't want to feel lonely.
And I think that's another thing that's human nature, right? And I think it takes a lot of strength to encourage to not do that and be, I guess, self-awareness to do something different so you can have maybe a better outcome later on. Yeah, it's alsoing what loneliness means i think our default setting is to say that loneliness is like not being around people but i think the loneliest thing in the world is being around people that don't understand you totally and don't see you for who you are like being you can be in a crowded room but if those people don't really know you that is the loneliest feeling in the world And the flip side of that is if you were around one person who truly sees you for who you

are, you will never feel lonely.

Yeah, I agree.

What was also the other one I loved?

It's like the law of reverse, was that the law of reverse effect?

Reverse effort.

Yeah, reverse effort.

Yeah.

This is a cool idea.

Aldous Huxley is this author.

You probably like read his book, Brave New World when we were all in high school. That was it or whatever, whatever we used to use back then to avoid reading.
But the idea is that sometimes you put in more effort and it actually reverses your progress. And so what you need to do is actually relax in order to make dramatic forward gains.
And there was a famous sprinter, Carl Lewis, who had this like 80% rule where he found that he would run fastest when he tried at an 80% effort level. Because when he really like forced and strained and tried to run at 100%, he actually slowed down because his whole body would tense up and he wouldn't actually run as fast.
It made him more tense. And so it's a reminder that sometimes in order to speed up, you need to slow down.
You actually need to lower the effort level a little bit so that you can see things a little bit more clearly. That's like Messi, the soccer player.
Yes, 100%. Right? I write about that in the book.
It's one of my favorite examples. It's a great example, right? Because he walks on that field at a snail's pace.
And I was so frustrated. I took my kid to see him.
And I's with this guy they're paying like 500 million dollars the guy barely moves on the on the you know move a little bit so we can see you run yeah and he just john he just like saunters from one side to another but meanwhile he's the best player in the world and he's slower than everybody yeah and then all of a sudden snaps and then snaps's like in the perfect moment, at the perfect angle, right to the place where you needed to be to deliver whatever the outcome was. He is the perfect example of that.
Right? Yeah, it's just like deploys effort into the one moment that really counts. And the rest of the time, he's just scanning, thinking, seeing the entire field, creating space.
I mean, it's all part of his strategy of how he actually operates. Well, I think though, like it's a great kind of like analogy for life, right? Like I think all of us, especially me, I'm like busy all the time.
And meanwhile, like, what am I really doing? Not much of anything because I'm so busy in the weeds that the things that are actually important that I'm like not really paying, like where I can actually really excel i'm not doing because i'm too busy now in the weeds of stuff so isn't that more like delegating or more like kind of like how do people do you talk about this ever like how do we stop how do we be more like messy and less and less like me or more like or the majority of people you know it's a central theme, particularly within the time wealth section, that idea of like deploying energy into the things that matter and figuring out how to remove the things that don't. Because what you're trying to avoid and what you're alluding to is like this rocking horse phenomenon where you're moving constantly, but you're not going anywhere.
Exactly. Just like swaying around in place.
And that's the default in a lot of corporate cultures. That's literally the default.
Like you're getting paid to just be a rocking horse. You're like emailing all day but you're not going anywhere.
Exactly. Just like swaying around in place.
And that's the default. In a lot of corporate cultures, that's literally the default.
Like you're getting paid to just be a rocking horse. You're like emailing all day, but you're not actually doing anything.
You're doing PowerPoints all day, but you're not actually doing anything. Do you know what you say? Actually, this is what I love.
Okay, it's like you're grazing on low quality tasks. That's what I saw.
I love that because that's literally what I'm doing. I'm grazing on low quality tasks.
And I bet you 95% of people are doing that.

Yeah, 95% of people.

And the biggest and most consistent thing

that you find in high performers

is that they do the opposite.

They're deploying all of their energy

into like two or three things that really matter

and finding ways to remove the other things.

And so, you know, like I think the quickest thing

that anyone can do that's listening

is to start making a change around that is to actually, I call it like my energy calendar is how I think of it, which is at the end of every day for a week, color code your calendar according to whether the activity was energy creating, market green, energy neutral, market yellow, or energy draining, market red. Energy meaning like, how did you feel after doing it? Like if you felt uplifted by the thing and you felt really pulled towards it, or if you felt drained, super tired, bored, whatever.
At the end of a week, if you do that for every single day, you will have a very clear perspective on the tasks that you are having your energy pulled towards, the things that are really lighting you up. Those are going to be the things that really drive your life forward.
Whether it's your fitness, the people that really drive your life forward, the handful of tasks that you are like uniquely pulled towards where you're going to deliver extraordinary returns, and you're going to understand the things that are crushing your soul. And the challenge then is figuring out what do you do with that information? How do you make slow, steady changes to your work or your life that allow you to remove some of that red, some of the energy draining things from your calendar? Simple ones like energy draining task for me, the number one was like Zoom calls and phone calls.
Miserable. Like I would rather staple gun my stomach than sit on a full day of Zoom calls.
And what I did was like, okay, I know that those are energy draining for me. I also know that doing a call on a walk is like, arguably energy creating for me, I really enjoy that I'm very present, I feel great when I walk as we were talking about.
And so I shifted half of my phone calls to just being on walks. And all of a sudden, at the end of a week, I feel totally different, because a bunch of that red that was sitting on my calendar is now green or maybe yellow.
And you feel entirely different. All of a sudden, you have more energy for the energy-creating tasks.
You feel better at the end of the day, so you can be more present with your people. Making those slight changes has a huge, huge impact.
I could not agree with you more. First of all, those Zooms are like, you're killing me slowly with those things.
It's where your life force goes to die. 100%.
I refuse to do them.

And I say to anybody, if this, why do I have to stare at you to talk to you?

I have no interest in looking at your face.

I'm sorry.

By the way, no one is looking at anyone else other than themselves.

I know.

They're looking at themselves.

Exactly.

Everyone just looks at themselves on Zoom.

Do you know that plastic surgery has gone up like a thousand percent since COVID?

Because people are so used to staring at their imperfections all the time on Zoom that like

there are people like, I can't look at myself anymore.

Thank you. like a thousand percent since COVID because people are so used to staring at their imperfections all the time on Zoom that like there are people like, I can't look at myself anymore.
And they're like, you can't even get an appointment with these people. They've tracked people's, they've done studies tracking people's eyes.
And it's like 95% of the time people are just looking at themselves. It's really funny.
That's so hilarious. And it's literally like, to me, like, why can't we go back to how it was before? Like, why do we have to stay on Zooms? Because now you could actually meet people in person, which is way more effective anyway, in my opinion, like personal connection, connectivity.
It's funny that that still works. Can you imagine? People are losing the ability.
You know, it's really, don't get me started. I just actually, today, I just did a TED Talk on how to build mentally strong kids.
And I talk all about this stuff. I'm not, this is not a podcast about me, but I just, we were talking about it.
But I find like we're, like the reason why our mental health is we're in a huge crisis and our younger generation are like becoming very, very weak because we're unable to do all these basics that you and I did when we were kids. People don't meet, like, we're not even, like, meeting in person to date.
We're not, we're not, like, comfortable even, like, looking at each other. And, like, when you're in an elevator, the first thing people do are they're staring at their phones.
They're so scared to make eye contact. People are losing that ability to know how to even deal with a human being.
Yeah. Have you seen, there's a crazy stat that teenagers are spending 70% less time in person with their friends than they were 20 years ago.
70%. Can you imagine the impact that that is having on an entire generation? Not only do I know about it, it was a slide in my PowerPoint, in my TED talk because because it is unbelievable.
And all the things that we used to do, take out 85% of those things, like bike riding, socializing, dating, flirting, adventuring, all that, take 85% of that stuff out and replace it with a screen and social media. And that's what we have right now.
And then we're wondering why people have no self-esteem, are completely lonely, and we're on a decline every single day. Yeah.
I mean, you're removing all... This is something I think about a lot, by the way, so I can't wait to watch your talk.
Thank you. Because I think one of the biggest challenges is that we have removed all friction from our lives.
That's exactly what I talked about. If you go over the last 30 years, it's just like everything, right? We've tried to make dating easier.
So now you can just, you don't have to go up to a girl at a bar. Nope.
You don't have to deal with the rejection. You can desensitize yourself to the rejection because it's all through your phone.
And so what happens when you do that is later you realize that actually the hard things were what was necessary to achieve the great outcomes. It's like, I mean, I talk about this with relationships all the time, that like to build a great relationship, it has nothing to do with the Instagram moments because falling in love is very easy, but growing in love is very, very hard.
And growing in love is all about sitting in the mud with people. It's like having the hard conversations.
It's not avoiding those moments of struggle and challenge. And the moments of doing nothing are where great relationships are actually built.
It's not the manicured pictures and the perfect moments and the filtered, all of that stuff. It's really in the mud that that growth is found.
So I'm very passionate about all of this because I think I have kids too. And like, I'm really unhappy with where are the trajectory of life is going just with people.
Like even people are single for like, people are not getting married. People are not in relationships.
That's what I'm saying. The loneliness, the true loneliness is the real, to me, that's the real pandemic in life, right? Because people are losing these abilities to even know what it means.
So with all that being said, what do you tell people? I mean, obviously, it resonates with you. What can you do? Because you're lucky, right? You're in a relationship with someone that we're free all this stuff.
Do you have friends who are, like, I'm sure you're, what, 36 years old? 33. 33.
What are your friends doing? Yeah, you have to go back to the basics. Right.
And it's the same principle that I think I'll adopt with my son as he gets older, which is like, there's a reason that the old fashioned things still exist because they work. Yeah.
And that, by the way, goes for relationships just as much as for your health, just as much as for your money, all of the like boring, basic things really work.

And. by the way, goes for relationships just as much as for your health, just as much as for your money, all of the like boring basic things really work.
And grounding yourself in those is important. And so like when I talk to friends who have struggled to find meaningful relationships, especially in big cities, it's like, well, have you tried just like going to a place where you know people will be similar values to you and just going and talking to someone.
So like if you're a friend that's really into health, you don't need to go

on Tinder or whatever app is the thing and try to like find some perfect manicured picture of some

girl. Go to a farmer's market and like go up, strike up a conversation with someone that's

also buying whatever weird health product that you're buying because chances are they're going

to have similar values to you. They're going to care about some other things.
If you love dogs,

go to an outdoor dog park with your dog and like go meet someone that way. It's like people have lost sight of the fact that there are real normal ways to go and do that.
And it's, I mean, the biggest challenge of why you say it's like it's the real pandemic is we know that social connection is essential to our health. The Harvard study of adult development found that the single greatest predictor of health at age 80 was your relationship satisfaction at age 50.
How you felt about your relationships actually impacted your health in your later years. And we have an entire generation of people that are losing sight of that.
You're stuck behind a phone. You're interacting with people here, but not with the people that are right in front of you.
And it's also like, I think, I always think to myself, like, do you think that you don't know what you don't know, right? So if you weren't born in our generation, if you were born like after 1995 or 2000, whatever, after 2000, like, if you don't know that, how do you know what you're missing? You don't. So then you're now really stuck.
Because it's easy for me to say when I already, I knew what it was like when I had to like, you know, go out there to a party and like, try to like meet a boy or like, you know, get in fights with this person because you know, I didn't, they, you know, they didn't like my shirt or my sweater or whatever girl fight, whatever the nonsense is, or like sneak out of my house to go to a party, whatever it is, it doesn't happen anymore. We don't have that same thing.
They don't have it anymore. So if you don't know what you don't know, what are you supposed to do? I think you have to be, you have to re-find the importance of delayed gratification and that just needs to be hammered into people's brains.
I mean, like I think the whole thing of friction or any of this stuff is fundamentally that you have lost sight of the fact that delayed gratification is the key to life in all of these areas. The ability to do something hard now to achieve a reward later, that is where all of life comes.
And that's where the best things in life happen is when you're willing to do that. And so with relationships and friendships, that is what it is.
You have to do the hard, you have to show up for the person during the hard time, if you want them to be there for you later and during the good times. And have meaning.
Okay. So let's get back to the book.
So let's talk with the five. This is all the book, by the way.
This is good. Good.
I mean, like, I'm just trying to think of things I missed, like the social part, the mental part. Let's talk about the mental part and the financial.
Well, the financial part's pretty, is pretty. But I want to know, I want some key things that people, actionable items.
We have a few we said that people can really do tomorrow. Besides fitness stuff, we got that covered.
Besides, what other ones did we really- The energy calendar with the time. That's a great one.
I love that one. Everyone should do that.
That's a really good one. Give me a few more like that.
Easy to do. Yeah.
So with mental wealth, I'll give you a couple. The first one is what I call my one-one-one method.
So mental wealth, by the way, as I write about it, is your purpose, your growth. It's your ability to create space in your life.
So Viktor Frankl talks about the fact that your power exists in the space between stimulus and response. So, when you're living a life that feels crazy, busy, running around, tons of stimulus, and you're immediately responding to all of it, you have no space in between.
In that space is your ability to choose the best response. It's to slow things down.
And creating space is the most important thing there. You have to find rituals and things on a daily basis that create that space.
Maybe it's going for a five-minute walk between meetings. Maybe it's meditating.
Maybe it's a prayer practice, whatever. In the evenings, I do something called the 1-1-1 method.
I always wanted to journal my whole life, but you're probably wired similar to me. I thought that journaling meant sit down for 30 minutes with a notebook and write all beautiful stuff with a candle lit and like this whole environment that I was going to create.
And so as a result, I never did it. I would be like, January 1st would come and I'd be like, I'm going to journal this year.
And I'd sit down and I'd like, you know, for one day. And then by day three, inevitably I'd stop.
You went to day three? Maybe, maybe. I might be giving myself too much credit.
So the one, one, one method was my way of breaking that. And what I did was I said every single evening, right before bed, I'm going to write down one win from the day, something that went well, one point of stress, tension, or anxiety, something that I'm feeling, and then one point of gratitude, something I felt grateful for during the day.
It takes two to five minutes max, and you feel this unbelievable sense of calm and energy to end the day. Because you're recognizing a win, you're giving yourself credit for that thing you did well, which most of us are really bad at doing.
You're getting the point of stress or tension off your mind and onto the piece of paper, which helps you go to sleep at night as well. And then you're recognizing some tiny beauty, something that you didn't pause to appreciate on a normal basis that you're forcing yourself to stop and recognize.
And if you do that, you'll A, have a great journaling practice that is now built two to five minutes every single evening. And you'll feel an immediate calm and peace that I have found has massively improved my mental health.
I'm going to try that. Okay, I like that one.
Give me another one. The other one, which is maybe like slightly more involved, is to do something called a think day on a either quarterly or monthly basis.
This is derived from originally, I first read about it, Bill Gates would take like a week off when he was building Microsoft in the 1980s, go out to a cabin in the woods and just read for a week and just think about all these like big picture questions that were facing the business. And I knew that like, I don't have a week, I can't take a week off and go and do that.
It's just not what I'm able to do. But the idea of pausing to just think about bigger picture questions in your work, in your life, in the things that you're doing is really important.
And we never take the time to do that. So I do it now once a month where I will just like go to an Airbnb or go to a coffee shop and spend a few hours just wrestling with like a few bigger picture questions in life.
A couple of the questions I find really helpful. Mark Twain has this quote, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. And that idea is that there's something in your life right now that you know for sure that just ain't so.
Like for me in my prior life, I knew for sure that making a bunch of money was going to make me feel happy and successful, but it just wasn't so. And asking yourself that more regularly, like what do I automatically assume is correct in my life and in my approach to life that may not be? What am I marching on the path of that might actually be the wrong path? Forcing yourself to ask that question is really important.
The other big one that I've contemplated a lot on these think days is what are the boat anchors in my life? And a boat anchor is something that is creating a drag on your progress. Like it's literally sitting down in the seafloor behind you.
You're trying to drive the boat forward and it's just sitting there dragging in the mud. It won't let you go full speed.
That could be people. In a lot of cases it is.
It's someone that's telling you to be realistic, telling you to come back home, laughing at your ambitions. It could be actions that you're taking, habits, mindsets, things that you're doing on a daily basis that are not conducive to the life that you're trying to create.
So the point of all of this is create more space in your life. Create space, even if it's quarterly or if it's once a year, sit down and spend some time just thinking about some of the bigger picture things in your life.
And the book has a whole series of question prompts for doing one of those think days, but I think those two questions get people started. Yeah, I love that.
I say the same, I say like people could be bored. It won't kill them to be bored for a little bit.
You think it will then. People like take their phone into the bathroom because you can't be bored for two minutes.
I know, that's what I'm saying. Like, God forbid that you have nothing to do for 30 seconds.
What did people do 15 years ago before phones? I don't know how people even survived. Did you read a magazine on the toilet? I mean, it's unbelievable.
Think about how gross and dirty those phones are. Just imagine.
It's so disgusting. I'll never touch someone's phone because I know where it is and I don't want to have anything to do with it.
That's for sure. That's actually a good point.
I've never thought of think about the most crazy things all the time like i'll never i'll try everything in my power not to touch someone's phone because it's like that phone has been in places that like is so dirty it's probably so much like fecal matter on people's phones now i'm like not gonna be able to unsee that by the way it's true because you know what people do they put their phone behind their like toilet seat or toilet cut like the back of the

toilet and then they flush the toilet and things the water gets on the on the phone like all the

crazy shit that i think of honestly it's so crazy but anyway that's a good watch out yeah that's good

that's the real uh that's the real piece of advice that you're gonna get from this episode yeah

exactly that's a great clip actually okay so besides the fact that you've the shallow water

body is my favorite piece of clip but the favorite thing that you've shared so far it's good

Thank you. get from this episode.
Yeah, exactly. That's a great clip, actually.
Okay, so besides the fact that you've, the shallow water body is my favorite piece of clip, the favorite thing that you've shared so far. Yeah, that's good.
Is there anything else that we didn't talk about, like your, oh, I want to, I know, your routine. I want to know your morning routine, your evening routine, your habits.
I mean, hello. Yeah, habits and hustle, come on.
I know, what was I thinking? Yeah, I mean, I said this earlier. I'm a crazy morning person.
Yeah. I'm one of those annoying morning people that everyone gets mad at.
I don't ever find it easy to wake up early. People are like, oh, you must just get up feeling excited.
I'm like, no, I hate waking up early every morning, but I do it because I know how it makes me feel. I wake up at about 4.15 in the morning.
I do that- 4.15 in the morning. Yeah.
Every day? Yeah, every day. On purpose? On purpose.
Yeah. I mean, I do that because it gives me several hours before the day really starts.
Like before my son is up, before all the emails start, before texts are coming in, I have like a few hours of peace for myself where I can really focus on those couple of things that really matter. And so like when you talk about when life gets really busy, when the day starts, it's very hard to deploy actual energy into those couple of things that really matter.
I find that in the morning. And so, you know, for the last two years, that morning block, that morning window of work has been working on the book.
And it was the only way that I knew for sure I was going to have two hours of dedicated time every single day. So I get up at 4.15.
First thing I do is I go and get in my cold plunge. I see yours outside there, which I appreciate.
I use mine every single morning and have for several years now. That has been a practice that I've done on and off since like 2012 when I was in college.
So you were doing it way before it was popular. Way before it was trendy.
And I didn't know that it was a thing.

I didn't know that it improved health.

I knew that it had a huge impact on my mentality and my mindset.

And I knew that it made me feel like a badass.

And when you feel like a badass, you operate like a badass.

It's like what we said earlier about confidence.

Like if you feel superhuman, then you're going to do superhuman shit.

Totally.

Why do you think I wear this? Yeah, there you go. Exactly.
It's like an alter ego effect. Alter ego.
That's the whole thing. It's all about alter ego.
You're creating this version of yourself that can go and do those things. I get up every morning and I do that.
Then I'm at my desk by about five. You go from cold plunge and then what do you do? Start working.
Oh, so that's your big morning routine. I thought you were going to say exercise and this and that.
Okay. I thought that we're going to go into a whole like four hour thing here.
No, no, no. I don't do the like four hour morning routine.
My morning routine is like I get up, I get in the cold plunge and then depending on what time of year it is, I will take a hot shower after my cold plunge that I'm not shivering the rest of the day. Yeah.
Especially in winter in Boston. But like the hardest part of the cold plunge routine is opening the door to go outside.
It's not like actually getting into the water or sitting in the water because once I'm in it, it's fine. And everyone always asks, does it get easier? Never once have I been like excited to go and do it.
And I like wrestle with it mentally, like I don't really need to do it. And so I started I film a video every single morning in it.
Because I'm like, right, I was putting on I did 130 straight days of YouTube videos on it but then I was doing I just do like an Instagram story every morning from it and part of that is like it's accountability it's like someone is going to know that I skipped skipped this morning so I have to do it but yeah I do that and then I go to my desk so I get my like Dunkin Donuts large cold brew and I go and sit down at my desk to work I work out later in the morning morning. What time? I'll go, I do my running and working out from about like 9.30 to 11.30.
Interesting. So you don't, okay, so why don't you do it like right after the cold plunge or after, or work out then do the cold plunge? I'm most creative first thing in the morning, right when I wake up.
And this is another just like general principle for people to take. Your energy flows happen at different times of the day.

And what I find is that I'm most creative first thing in the morning.

Okay.

And if I don't harness that creative energy for something creative, it's not there.

Like it's not like I can be creative in the afternoon.

I'm useless in the afternoon.

Like if you tried to get me to write in the afternoon, useless.

And so what I know is that I need to match the energy I'm feeling to the activity that I'm actually doing. It would be a waste for me to like work out during the time when I'm really creative.
And similarly, like I can work out and have a ton of energy mid-morning because then I've eaten something and you know, it's a light out. It's like if I'm going to go for a run, it's less dangerous too.
It also just allows me to like make breakfast for my wife and son and be kind of present during that. Do you want to come over here and make breakfast for me? I'd be thrilled to have someone make me breakfast for once.
Okay. And what do you eat? Are you like an animal person? Are you like, don't tell me you're a vegan.
I can't imagine. No, it'd be hard for me to be a vegan.
No, I eat pounds and pounds of red meat per week. I would be the worst vegan in the world.
All respect to vegans. if you want to do that, I could never deprive myself of that.
And by the way, I don't get this whole nonsense. If you're a vegan, you have to shame people who eat and vice versa.
Stop with all this stuff. This whole nonsense that God forbid that you have an opinion that someone else doesn't like.
That's the internet, though. I can't stand it.
You get the most likes for doing that.

I know.

So people just keep doing it.

The more polarizing you are

or the more of like you say something

that's very like absolute,

that's how you get your likes.

Yeah, I mean, no, I am,

and it comes across in the book too,

but I am the biggest proponent

of like finding balance

and doing the boring basics.

And so like with my nutrition, I make sure that I'm getting 200 plus grams of protein a day. That's like a non, that's a non-negotiable every single day.
So what do you eat? Like what's your favorite thing? I eat every single morning for breakfast. I'll have four eggs, cottage cheese, raw honey.
And if I'm working out and running, I'll have some carbs with that, either white rice or oatmeal. All that? Yeah.
I have a big breakfast, like 1,000 calories probably. But I probably eat about 4,000 calories a day.
How much do you run a day? If I'm training for something, I ran a marathon. If I'm training for that, it was up to 8 to 10 miles average per day during peak of training.
Right now, four. Four miles.
Do you do weights and cardio same day? Do you do splits? Yeah, I do because I run six days a week. So I have to.
So I run six days a week and lift six days a week for the most part. Oh, me too.
Okay. So are you doing, that's why.
Push, pull, legs, split on the weightlifting training is what I do. But you're also doing the running, I guess, like you were saying earlier, we were both saying for your brain.
Yeah. i find is like meditative me too it's my meditation yeah because you're just like alone in your thoughts and in your head for a long time and i don't like i'm not listening to podcasts and doing stuff when i run i normally if if anything i listen to like a sci-fi audio but like something totally like escape the normal i'm not doing business podcasts or how can you run to a business a lot of people do that i'm shocked but i can't i just need to like being my thoughts.
I'm not doing business podcasts or nonfiction. How can you run to a business podcast? A lot of people do that.
I'm shocked, but I can't. I just need to like be in my thoughts.
Yeah. I would shoot myself.
How can you listen? I totally agree. And like, you're not going to take any interesting takeaways while you're running.
Like, are you going to take a note? Exactly. I totally agree.
And I always run before I lift, which is something that a lot of people ask about. I just, um, what I find personally is that like, I won't do it after I

lift because I'm tired. And so I won't have the motivation and I won't go do it in the same way or with the same intensity.
And so I always just run before get it done. But yeah, I have that for breakfast basically every single morning.
And if I'm at home, I eat the exact same thing every single day. Yeah, 100% of the time.
And I'm super boring. And I just view that like boredom of routine is the like cost of entry for building the life you want like everyone thinks that you need this like glamorous life and that that's what successful people do but really what underlies all of that success is this like boring basic drudgery of doing the same thing every single day you know what I feel like honestly I thought it's I know you haven't because you probably no clue who I was, but I feel like everything you're saying is literally like videos that I've done or things that I've written that you're just like, you know, regurgitating.
Yeah. Like I say that all the time.
It's like the boring shit gets you to think it's that stuff that makes you thrive and become the most successful version of yourself. People don't want to hear it.
There's no magic pill or magic,. Like I eat the same thing every day.
I do the same. I do my running.
It sounds so boring. And like probably you don't want to hang out with me, but it gets the job done.
And like I get from A to B to Z. Yeah.
People don't want to know it. I love the boring.
I'm like. Me too.
I love it. I love my routines.
I don't like traveling and being out of my routines. I like try my best to just stay in my routines.
Even when I'm on the, I'm like, I do my absolute best to stay in them. You and me are cut from the same plot.
We're going to be best friends. I mean, it's really funny.
Like when I travel, I get like a little bit of anxiety. Like I'm like, horrible.
And I struggle. I mean, it's actually, it's something that I think a lot of people struggle with where like the perfectionism in you and the desire for that routine can actually be a negative because then when you get a little bit out of it, you start to feel the anxiety.
Like if you're going to be up later than you'd like and you know that you're going to be tired in the morning or like you can't eat the way you want because there's oils in the food. No, I know that exact feeling and I struggle with that a lot.
It's literally, I like Rose let me say about like adaptive, I think like adaptability is like a superpower and I'm not good at it.

Like I have to learn to be less rigid and more adaptive to be successful, more successful

or whatever you want to call it.

Because the people I know who are able to adapt to their environment really fast and

regulate themselves and not be so like nervous and scared with anger, like I'm like going to Fiji for crying out loud next week. And I'm like nervous as shit.
I'm like, how am I going to go to Fiji? Where am I going to eat? What am I going to do? How am I going to work out? Like most people would be like, wow, that's amazing. You're going to Fiji.
And I'm like, that's the kind of neuroses that I have. Yeah.
I mean, it's like the analogy I like for that is like when an explorer sets out on a voyage, they're not trusting in having like calm, perfect seas and the perfect plan. They're trusting in their ability to adapt when the chaos and storms inevitably come.
And in your life, you are the explorer and life is your voyage. And you need to trust in your adaptability and your ability to navigate whatever storms come.
Not that it's just going to be perfect and that your plan and course of action is going to be ideal. I know.
Well, what did you do for breakfast today at your hotel? The one hotel here has the best. It's why I stay there.
It has the best hotel breakfast. It does? It's so good, the cafe there.
It's extraordinarily expensive. Like, I think it was $96 for my breakfast today.
By the way, I didn't want to say anything. Which is absurd.
That place, I stayed there in Miami just recently. I was i think it was 96 for my breakfast today by the way i didn't want to say which is absurd that right that place i stayed there in miami just recently i was like it was like basically like it was it was offensive how expensive it was it's offensive the one in miami i don't love because it's in miami beach which is too touristy for me um the one here is great because it's right next to the equinox so i can go to the equinox yeah i thought you went to the west hollywood um which is super crowded and crazy but it's also like it's right there so it's nice and then yeah the hotel breakfast there is amazing what'd you get what'd you have um i had four eggs uh piece of sourdough toast and a bowl of fruit and that was 96 bucks uh 96 dollars are you sure you weren't they include gratuity though oh how nice of them tell you that by the, which pisses me off when places do this, when they hand you the check.

So rude.

The waiter doesn't tell you that the gratuity is already included.

So it's just like you don't see it.

Oh, I know.

And then you're like putting 20% on top of 20%.

I'm like, come on, just at least say it.

Like it's just a courtesy.

It's so sneaky.

I'm offended by it.

But do you know what era one is, by the way?

Yes.

I go broke when I go there, by the way.

That's the most absurd.

To me, like it's the most absurd. People are standing in line there as if they're giving shit away.
You also feel ugly automatically walking in there because everyone's a model. You're walking around, you're like, what the hell? What is this place? Not anymore.
You know what they do now? They're taking tour buses from Ohio and Minneapolis there, dropping off people by the droves by like

300 people to look in.

It's like a zoo.

It's like a zoo in there.

They bring them off the bus and they're all with their binoculars and their things taking

pictures.

Oh, that's hilarious.

And they're all in line for the $30 like, you know, Bieber.

Oh, yeah.

The Haley Bieber.

Yeah.

The Haley Bieber.

Strawberry glaze.

Smoothie.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, had like a thousand calories.

I think they made like $10 million of EBITDA on that one smoothie they did which is just absolutely bonkers bonkers it's i'm in the wrong business i went there once uh i did this uh this podcast called girls gotta eat yeah who they're awesome they're really funny they're funny i went i was my first time at erwan and then i walked over to their podcast and And there's a clip somewhere of me talking about this on the podcast because I spent $30 getting a bottle of water and a cold brew. Like a small can and a bottle of water was $30.
And I was like, I feel like I just got assaulted. Yeah, you got raped.
I'm just like, this is absurd. It's beyond.
How did this happen? How do they justify it is when I what I don't understand. Because no one says anything.
I say it all the time. Everyone goes there.
Everyone goes there. People go there.
Best business in the world. They're so rich, the people who started Era One.
They have a $40 million house in Malibu. Oh, good for them.
And they're building up more of these places. I don't know how people can afford this shit, though.
People are buying this stuff mean i could do a whole podcast on just era one honestly i should just stop on my head but like it's crazy era one hot takes yeah you do it exactly you know we should i actually should do it because i have so many stories about this place amazing social content wouldn't it though great clips i mean i i went through one second that's this one last story about this place i went in i had to. Okay, strawberries.
At Ralph's, this is another grocery store, they're $4.99. At Whole Foods, maybe like $8.99.
Maybe even at Gelson's, another upscale store, maybe $9.99, okay, which is very expensive. I walked into Erwin.
I kid you not, $29.99. $29.99.
I went up to the person. I'm like, is this wrong? I think you marked it wrong.
They're like, no, it's not wrong. I'm like, $30? Gold-laced strawberries.
Can you believe that? And like an asshole, I'm fighting with this guy. What is he going to do? People are buying them like it's gold.
Best strawberries of your life. Best strawberries of your life.

They're from a place called Dave's Farm or I don't know, some other wacky farm.

Who knows?

But welcome to LA is all I have to say.

Well, it's been a pleasure meeting you.

We have some great takeaways.

Some good hot takes.

Some good tactics.

Exactly.

If you want a nice expensive breakfast, stay at the one hotel.

Yes.

Don't go to Arrow 1 if you don't want to get raped. If you need financial wealth, don't go to Erewhon.
Exactly. Maybe like six types of wealth.
You should put that as your six. Do not shop at Erewhon.
If you go to Erewhon. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast.
Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been a really fun time.
And I'm looking forward to staying in touch now that I know that we're kindred spirits. I know.
If I would have known, we should have worked out together. Yeah, I know.
Next time. I would love to.
Like for 100%. Let's do it.
100%. Now, how do people could buy? The book is called Five Types of Wealth.
Where else can people find you if they don't know who you are yet? Well, I have a weird name, so it's easy to find me, fortunately. I'm at Sawhill Bloom on every every platform and you can find the book

anywhere books are sold now

and always go support your local bookstore

if you can

so go find it there

and more info at the5typesofwealth.com

Thank you so much for being here