Transcript of Episode 498: Sahil Bloom: How Physical Wealth Unlocks Mental, Financial and Relationship Success

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle.

Crush it. Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits & Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled You know I'm all about finding an edge, the small daily habits that give you more energy, focus, and resilience. But that's why I am hooked on Manna Vitality. Most people are mineral deficient, and that means low energy, brain fog, slow recovery, and dull skin. But Manna flips the switch by giving your body a complete spectrum of minerals it actually knows how to use. We're talking Shilajit the Himalayas, Ormus from the Dead Sea, and marine plasma from the ocean, plus amino acids and 88 other trace minerals. The benefits are real. We're talking steady all day energy, sharper focus, faster recovery, a stronger immunity, plus glowing skin. But the biggest win, it fuels your cells for real longevity. Think of it as a cellular switch on formula, not as a stimulant, but the raw power your body needs to create energy and repair itself. Try it now, and I bet you'll be hooked to. Go to mannavitality.

Com and use code Jennifer 20 for a discount. That's mannavitality. Com, M-A-N-N-A, vitality. Com, and use code, Jennifer 20. I think, is the catalyst. 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, 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. I don't know if you were here yet, Ed, on tread. I issued this podcast on treadmill. Sorry, I don't think I said that right. We had two treadmills here facing each other, and we would walk and talk. I love that. 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.

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 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 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. Me and my husband for the first, what, six years of our life being married, or maybe even, 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 brought into our marriage Because that's the way to connect to people and to connect to your partner, whatever. Otherwise, you just get lost in the weeds of life, right? And so anything involving exercise, and it's not because I'm 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 get to that in their brain, their lives can just be exponentially better. Yeah.

Physical wealth is one of the pillars. I know. And it's a huge catalyst for all of them. Let's talk about it. This is one of my hot takes on life that there's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5: 00 AM and works out. Totally true. 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 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. The first thing I say when a young person comes to me and they're feeling lost in life, feeling stuck, is for 30 straight days, wake up at 5 AM and workout. 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. I can do hard things. I am confident. I can finish this 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 the number one pillar. It's the number one. If I was going to do one through five, that's the first thing, because it does open up all these other channels.

Yeah, it's a catalyst into everything else. 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, 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 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. 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. 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. 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. That had ripple effects into every other area of his life. 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 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, 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 I can't imagine.

By the way, if you're just listening, he looks like an Abercrombie Fitch model. And then, like he said to me before we started, he didn't always look like this.

My awkward childhood years of going to Abercrombie and not fitting into the clothes, I feel very vindicated right now.

But you were a baseball... You were an athlete, so you had to have looked okay.

I was very strong. No, I was very strong, but I was for jacked, if you know what that means.

Like fat jacked.

Yeah, we always used to talk about the guys at Stanford used to talk about having a shallow water body where they had big traps and shoulders and chest, but their abs were disgusting. So you'd stand in shallow water and look really good. That always cracked me up. That's hilarious. That's a pretty good term. I like that, the shallow water I'm going to- 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 was fat jacked?

Yeah, foot jacked. That is so hilarious. Some good terms. Oh my God, I love it. 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, I... Fitness was definitely a huge catalyst in my life. And refinding, A, just the simple things of walking every single day. 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's something that people don't talk about. You bottle it up and you internalize it because it feels like a stigma. For women in particular, there's this assumption of fault, and my wife carried that burden. Unfortunately, I was not there to either help or bear that burden myself. Frankly, in hindsight, I would argue that it was probably mostly me because I was not in any 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. 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. Wow. I love that. It was just this unbelievable example Whatever you believe in, God, energy, whatever it is, it was this unbelievable example of when energy comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. I remember so vividly coming Coming home from the hospital after my son was born, pulling onto our street, and we turned into a driveway, and both of our sets of parents who lived in the area were there cheering in the driveway. Just that moment, I will never forget that moment of feeling like we were truly home, that feeling of having arrived in that way.

I love that. That's so nice. That's so sweet. Very lucky. I love that. Is your wife here in LA with you now?

She's not here right now. She's back home with her son.

What's your son's name?

Roman.

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When you subscribe to their five-day program, go to prolonlife. Com/jennifercohen, and use Jennifer Cohen to claim your discount and bonus. That's prolawnlife. Com/jennifercohen and use code Jennifer Cohen. 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. She was a physics major at Yale and then went to Harvard Business School, and now is the CEO. And it's interesting. So my relationship- You're 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 my life resenting my sister and feeling competitive and creating this dynamic with her that was fundamentally one of tension and one where I couldn't get over the fact that she was achieving the things that I was supposed to be and that I resented that. 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. She has a son who is 11 months older than mine. It was her first. We were together and we took a picture of the two of us holding our little boys. 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 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. 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. 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. Sorry. No, no, no. This is what I I think it's interesting about you a little bit, because 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. I think this is your superpower. I think you're really good at taking some human feeling and then creating content that resonates with a lot of people. Because all these things that you talk about, it touches people in a way that's like, yeah, that's so true. I think that that 10-year-old I think anyone who's a parent can relate to the fact that that happens 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. Like I said, like that, I'm like, Oh, wow, you're right. She's 80. I probably get to see her four times, maybe if I'm lucky. So when you started to 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?

So 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. You live in California. 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 had always loved writing, but never had a public outlet for it. At the time, I started writing these, originally, threads on Twitter that were about finance, about business, about finance, about things I was working on. And people had started sharing them. I'd started growing 15, 20,000 followers 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. I cared about life, the things that we talk about now. And so I started 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 100,000 followers, and there was seeds of the fact that there might be businesses you could build around it. People were coming to me asking about how to build their platform. Startups I had invested in were asking about 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 professor, though?

Economics and demography. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So 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 handle it.

But you can see how the expectations around academic orientation were.

Totally. 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.

Okay, by the way, that's hilarious. I was going to say because I'm Jewish, and the Indian culture and the Jewish culture are so similar in the academics and education. I'm thinking, but now I'm like, okay, well, at least you only have one Indian. Maybe you have maybe Where you have a Protestant- No, no. But you have a Jew and an Indian.

Exactly. It all added up. Exactly. Oh, my God. Okay. 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. My wife was the one that looked at me and was like... I said to her, I was like, I think I made a terrible mistake. I had a great job in the Bay Area. I loved my colleagues. I loved the people I worked with and for her. I didn't like what I was doing. It wasn't a fit for me, but I was able to pay the bills. In some ways, it was good. I was like, I think I made a terrible mistake. She just said to me, Can't you just do the thing you're doing on the weekend right now? Can't you just do that full-time? I had honestly never thought of it. It never crossed my mind that I could build my own ecosystem, do my own thing, be an entrepreneur. Until she said that, it was this snap in my mind of someone believing in you before you believe in yourself and the power that comes from that.

In hindsight, part of that is like, I started dating my wife when she was 15 years old and I was 16. She had seen... She probably knew me better than I knew myself in some ways. She had seen the journey and my insecurity and my growth. She had seen the things I was hiding from the world, and she could really see me. She saw the energy I was getting from this new thing and knew that that was the path. While I was trying to do all this calculation and be all quantitative about how to make the next choice and doing this Stanford math around all of it. She just saw, 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. The idea that you can do all the analysis, pros, cons, whatever, weighing of everything. But at the end of the day, your gut, 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 thoughts ideas are anti. I want to go through some of these. One of your things I saw is the anti to-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. You have your to-do list. Everyone has theirs. It's probably way too long, if I had to guess. The anti to-do list is like, what do I need to not do during this day? It changes from time to time. 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.

Things on mine would be like, don't complain. That's been a big one for me. I just naturally default to 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 actually check that off. When you start finding that you're getting pulled that way, you stop in your tracks. Or 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. 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 if somebody's wrong, they add something versus take it away. A lot of times when you take things away, it actually is much more beneficial in a way.

It's like another way of saying it is to become who you want to be, you have to unbecome who you previously were. And a lot of that comes from destruction. You have to destroy the old version of you.

Yeah. Deconstruct it.

Yeah. And there's a loneliness that comes in that, too, that I think often goes unsaid. That 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 cannot communicate because that alignment no longer exists. 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. 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, 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 think we do a lot of behaviors and stay in relationships even because we're trying to avoid that loneliness feeling, right? 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. I think that's exactly what we... I think that's another thing, that's human nature, right? 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 also reframing what loneliness means. I think our default The result setting is to say that loneliness is not being around people. But I think the loneliest thing in the world is being around people that don't understand you. Totally true. And don't see you for who you are. You can be in a crowded room, but if those people don't really know you, that is the loneliest feeling in the world. The flip side of that is if you are around one person who truly sees you for who you are, you will never feel lonely.