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

Ever feel like you're chasing success but still feeling unfulfilled? In this Habits and Hustle podcast episode, I am joined by author Sahil Bloom as he shares his powerful framework of the Five Types of Wealth that go beyond just financial success. We discuss his essential daily routines, including 4:15 AM wake-ups and cold plunges, while diving into deeper topics like the impact of social media on human connection, the power of basic habits, and his philosophy on the five types of wealth. We also discuss practical strategies like the 1-1-1 journaling method and color-coding your calendar for energy management, ultimately demonstrating how "boring" fundamentals can lead to a truly wealthy life. Sahil Bloom is an author, investor and former college baseball player at Stanford dedicated to helping others live more fulfilling lives. Despite achieving conventional success in finance and private equity, Bloom found himself feeling deeply unfulfilled, launching him on a journey of personal transformation. This led him to develop "The Five Types of Wealth," a holistic framework that goes beyond just money to also prioritize physical health, relationships, mental wellbeing, and purpose. What We Discuss: (05:27) The Evolution of Self-Discovery (15:46) Reevaluating Success and Life Fulfillment (29:04) Power of Fitness and Family (34:33) Growth in Sibling Relationship (39:16) Navigating Transformation and Loneliness (45:42) Enhancing Productivity by Reducing Busyness (51:48) Reconnecting in a Digital World (59:40) Improving Mental Wealth for Success (01:03:43) Morning Routine and Self-Reflection (01:12:46) Routine, Adaptability, and Expensive Breakfast (01:21:48) Five Types of Wealth Book Launch …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here https://bio.me/?utm_source=Jennifer, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link https://www.livemomentous.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorDUIZz3psr1Qsq_n1yE8_6JTq_QUFabOO9lH65HDEXCIoJOPLj and use code Jen for 20% off Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Sahil Bloom: Instagram: @sahilbloom https://www.instagram.com/sahilbloom/?hl=en Book: The 5 Types of Wealth https://www.the5typesofwealth.com/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYQQQimA8PREMOfEDEgrn1PVz7e_Cq5cWSR76TkcBSBYCqWFfAYyyUK41Y_aem_MSCXCNvvW3SnqYmH2CKbHA

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Jen Cohen?

  So what we do on this show when we first start is we do

• 0:10Speaker 02

  Magic Mind Shots.

• 0:11Jen Cohen?

  A Magic Mind Shot. How did you know?

• 0:12Speaker 02

  I saw you holding it. I was like, okay.

• 0:15Jen Cohen?

  Have you ever seen these before?

• 0:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've taken Magic Mind before.

• 0:17Jen Cohen?

  Oh, you have? Okay. Well, do you like them?

• 0:19Speaker 02

  I do.

• 0:19Jen Cohen?

  Before I make you take it?

• 0:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:21Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Deal.

• 0:31Jen Cohen?

  Hi, okay, you ready? Here we go.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 0:35Jen Cohen?

  Cheers. Nice to meet you.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought it was a shot.

• 0:40Jen Cohen?

  It was. I just realized. No, no, no, you don't ever. 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.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  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 know, she's kind of going crazy in Mexico. And so they bring around a tequila shots over for us and I'm like a freshman in college at the time. I'm good at taking shots.

• 1:11Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:22Jen Cohen?

  Basically, you're saying I remind you of your mom.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  I feel like you just did that to me. You like baited me into the shot.

• 1:27Jen Cohen?

  I did. You know what? That'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 it 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.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  There's nothing in it that's gonna, I mean, it doesn't have enough caffeine that you'd have an issue, right?

• 1:51Jen Cohen?

  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-

• 1:58Speaker 02

  I feel that when I'm like four cold brews deep on any given day.

• 2:02Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I love cold brew.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I only drink cold brew and 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

• 2:13Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  It's like psychosomatic. Yeah, it feels good.

• 2:15Jen Cohen?

  Totally.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  And so people will like DM me being like, I'm gonna call an ambulance. Like you can't, you know, 800 milligrams of caffeine.

• 2:28Jen Cohen?

  Well, you know, that's really funny because a couple of things I saw you walk in, but I thought you had it from 7-Eleven or something. I know.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  No, I'm staying at the one hotel and they have like a really nice cafe.

• 2:37Jen Cohen?

  Oh, is that from that? Okay.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38Jen Cohen?

  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?

• 2:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:54Jen Cohen?

  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, and I realize, and I, I actually even like DM them. I'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 like very, it's, it's not watered down like most other ones. Like I find most places are very watered down and I hate that feeling. So if you, you wrote it down.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  I wrote it down.

• 3:23Jen Cohen?

  This is the book that I love it. So now it's there. You're gonna try it.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  It's gonna be in my second book. That's gonna be.

• 3:28Jen Cohen?

  That's right. Exactly. Do you, do you, and it's also the French vanilla is what I love that you can get original. But you're, oh yeah. By the way, I didn't even like, 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?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Sahil.

• 3:41Jen Cohen?

  Sahil. Sahil?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Sahil. Yeah.

• 3:43Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:51Jen Cohen?

  Yes, you're welcome.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:59Jen Cohen?

  Oh my God.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  It feels weird.

• 4:00Jen Cohen?

  I'm so glad. Well, it's funny because I didn't know who you were until very recently, I started seeing your like 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?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Like an old soul my whole life.

• 4:25Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  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 four or five AM my whole life.

• 4:38Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  That meant I would go to bed at like nine. 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. But that had nothing to do with wisdom. That was just I had a weird schedule and circadian rhythm. But I, 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.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:32Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:44Jen Cohen?

  Right, like, because like I saw you went to Stanford, right? You went, you got, you got like your, was it like a BA, an MA? I saw like, what was it?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I did my undergrad and then I stayed and did a masters there.

• 5:53Jen Cohen?

  And what was your masters in?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  In public policy.

• 5:55Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:56Jen Cohen?

  So like you're, you obviously are bright, very bright. And then you're also an athlete. And then, well, wait, did you, I didn't know Stanford even had a baseball team. Was there other?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  We were one of the best baseball teams.

• 6:07Jen Cohen?

  Are you serious?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  That hurts my feelings.

• 6:09Jen Cohen?

  No, no, I don't know much about, I'm Canadian and baseball's not a big deal in Canada. We know hockey, so you know, like.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  It's only hockey.

• 6:15Jen Cohen?

  It's only hockey?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  It's only hockey. I, it's funny that you say that because so Chris Pronger is one of my like dear friends. He's like, you know, probably the, one of the top few most famous hockey players of all time.

• 6:26Jen Cohen?

  Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  And I was with him last week and he was saying the exact same. Same thing that like no one played baseball. He was like, if you didn't play hockey, like no one, no one would even talk to you.

• 6:35Jen Cohen?

  I don't even think that we even knew that was part of the curriculum. Like there was even a sport called baseball in Canada. It was just not something that people even thought of. Like even like when I moved here, baseball and basketball, like the all these other soccer, like we don't do those things back there.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  But you're in LA, they just won the World Series.

• 6:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, well, 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, you know, but anyway, the point is like, that's very interesting. Stanford, baseball. I want to know about like how you even kind of evolved into this career path. Like you are now like, what would you call yourself? I know you're an author, right? You're a writer? Are you?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  I'd say I'm like a writer and entrepreneur is probably how I would define it, although that's just like my cocktail party answer, I guess. You know how it's one of the challenges actually of like 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.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  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 Sanali's brother. They'd be all excited like, oh, another star student. And then inevitably, within a week, I would disappoint them. Cause I was like, uh, you know, I was a shithead. Like I liked playing sports and screwing around and I wasn't living up to that standard.

• 9:07Jen Cohen?

  What kind of student were you?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:16Jen Cohen?

  But if you tried, would you get A's?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I'm sure I would have.

• 9:19Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  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 a hundred percent 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 a hundred percent and still failed. I was afraid of like the, the hit that my ego would take if, if that occurred.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  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 D1. 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, looked successful and things were.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  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 back. 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 nonexistent.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  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?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  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, 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. Like, 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.

• 13:02Jen Cohen?

  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, his whole, he has like even made this big ass calendar situation where

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Amento Mori, yeah.

• 13:14Jen Cohen?

  Right, you know, to, 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 I, actually, now that I think about it, you know what actually I did see was that you were talking about, you're like, you know, you're, if you have a kid, like, the first 10 years of the life. Well, you can, can you share that? Because I think that was like, what got me dialed into you. And then you go into all this time.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, um, there's this idea from ancient Greece that there, they, 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.

• 14:28Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  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 book is like, how do you navigate that tension? That fundamental tension that exists between wanting to be present, giving that energy?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  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 going to do those things because they're not going to be there later. Your kids are not going to be eight years old later.

• 15:30Jen Cohen?

  It's so true. That word later might as well be crossed out and just put never because that is a hundred percent 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, you, you heard this thing. You realize you have 15 more times to maybe see your parents. You move back, you move back. How, what else did it do? Like, 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, you know, whatever, you're having a 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?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:26Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  And the reason we do that is actually, you know, sort of logical one, which is just that money is so easy to measure. Peter Drucker is a famous management theorist, says that like, what gets measured gets managed.

• 16:37Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  And it's because money is so easily measured. It's a single number. So as a result, we focus on 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. And we sold our house in California, moved across the country. I left my job.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:32Jen Cohen?

  It's so true because success, I think it depends on who you ask. It's all perspective, right? Like, 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, I guess, not to kind of sit there and just kind of like pontificate, but, you know, 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

• 18:14Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  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. So.

• 18:44Jen Cohen?

  That's low. I thought it'd be even higher, actually.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Maybe it's higher. Maybe someone at like number 11 or 12 needs to sneak in and bump the numbers up for everybody, because there are like one or two that have none.

• 18:54Jen Cohen?

  Look at Elon Musk. Okay, I'm gonna use him as an example, okay? Elon Musk is obviously the richest person in the world, but I feel like his life is very lopsided, right? Like, he may be like 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, neat, like, there's a lot of other things lacking, you know, in his, 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.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:25Jen Cohen?

  You know?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  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 like, 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. Like, I understand and I could see where it was gonna end up. And I know I was gonna wake up in 50 years and wonder what the fuck just happened. Like, 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.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  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. Yeah. 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 and 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. Right.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Go and do one thing. It doesn't matter what it is either. And it doesn't have to be enormous, doesn't have to be that you quit your job on the West Coast and fly, you know, 3,000 miles, change your whole life and rip the Band-Aid 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 like 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.

• 22:00Jen Cohen?

  Right. It's the ripple effect, right?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 22:02Jen Cohen?

  And I think the start is always in like 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.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  The stop is in the start.

• 22:11Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. Better tag me, no 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 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, 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 issued this podcast on treadmills. Sorry, I don't think I said that right.

• 22:55Jen Cohen?

  So we had two treadmills here facing each other and we would walk and talk.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 22:59Jen Cohen?

  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, if you don't have that as part of your daily habit and ritual, you are really missing out on so much, like energy begets energy. When I don't work out, I'm way more lethargic than if I do, even if I'm super tired.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's scientific evidence to support that, by the way, the walking thing.

• 23:25Jen Cohen?

  Tell me.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:56Jen Cohen?

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

• 24:39Jen Cohen?

  If people can just like get to that in their brain, their lives can just be exponentially better.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's why, I mean, physical wealth is one of the pillars and it's a huge catalyst.

• 24:49Jen Cohen?

  Let's talk about it.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  I mean, I, um, 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

• 24:58Jen Cohen?

  Totally true.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:47Jen Cohen?

  100, you just said the, 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 become, you'll have that self-efficacy, like I can do hard things. I am confident. I can, I can finish this thing. And I think that, like I said earlier, is that, that's why like, I think people are very myopic and they, when they think about what exercise really means. And so when I see that as one of your pillars of your wealth. Of 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 it does open up all these other channels.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a catalyst into everything else. I 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 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.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:41Jen Cohen?

  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 because you weren't working out. And then I bet you one of the first things you did was start working out again.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. I mean, you would like, I'll, 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 and.

• 28:03Jen Cohen?

  I can't imagine. He, by the way, he looks like an, 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.

• 28:12Speaker 02

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

• 28:20Jen Cohen?

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

• 28:22Speaker 02

  I was very strong. No, I was very strong, but I was like, I was fajacked, if you know what that means.

• 28:27Jen Cohen?

  Like fat jacked?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 in shoulders and chest, but their abs were like disgusting. So you'd stand in shallow water and look really good. I always, that always cracked me up. That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good term. I like that, the shallow water body. Yeah, you should write that down.

• 28:49Jen Cohen?

  Shallow?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Water body.

• 28:50Jen Cohen?

  Okay, I am gonna write that down.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  It's like sloppy lower butt, lower abs, but pretty good up top.

• 28:55Jen Cohen?

  I'm gonna use that. And then the other was fat jacked?

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, fajacked, yeah.

• 29:00Jen Cohen?

  That is so hilarious.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Some good terms.

• 29:02Jen Cohen?

  Oh my god, I love it.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just creating value. That's, that's why I'm an author, you know, because I come up with these great, uh, great ideas.

• 29:08Jen Cohen?

  That's so good.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I, um, fitness was definitely a huge catalyst in my life. And, and refinding, A, like, just the simple things of walking every single day. I mean, we, I mentioned, we were, we were really struggling to conceive. And that was, 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.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  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

• 30:12Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  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 a 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.

• 30:53Jen Cohen?

  I love that. That's so nice.

• 30:57Jen Cohen?

  That's so sweet. I love that. Is your wife here in LA with you now or no?

• 31:01Speaker 02

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

• 31:03Jen Cohen?

  What's your son's name, by the way?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Roman.

• 31:05Jen 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.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  She's still a rock star. She's the CEO of a healthcare technology startup in the Boston area.

• 31:18Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  She was a physics major at Yale and then went to Harvard Business School and now is the CEO. And, you know, it's interesting. So my relationship-

• 31:26Jen Cohen?

  She's a real loser. You're right.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  But my relationship with my sister is, I write about it and it's, it's, um, 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, 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.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  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, like we were in the same stage. We were in the same place in our lives. It was no longer this like competitive, you know, resentment, all these things. We were just in it together.

• 32:32Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And it was this beautiful reminder to me that sometimes relationships blossom and bloom in-

• 32:40Speaker 02

  A new season of your life when they haven't been in the past.

• 32:45Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  And like that relationship and the way that it has bloomed and the way that it has grown and the joy that I I find in it and that I hope she finds in it is um 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.

• 33:03Jen Cohen?

  That's so true. I that this is what I think, sorry, this, no, no, no. That this is what I think is interesting about you a little bit because like I said, like at the beginning, like, I don't know where you came from. I just started seeing like some posts, some like some content. I'm like, wow, this is really deep. I really like this one. I'm gonna then I'm gonna look at this one. And and I think like this is your superpower. I think you're really good at like taking some like human feeling and then like creating content around that's very that resonates with a lot of people because all these things that you talk about like it like it touches people in a way that'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

• 33:47Jen Cohen?

  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 it? Did you make a decision like, okay, I'm gonna start being a content creator. I'm gonna start like building my Instagram like where did how did it go from private equity guy, living here to then write like, obviously, I get why you're writing books because you're a thinker and all that. But like, is that how it kind of happened with the book?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  So I um I had started writing on Twitter originally about a year before we made the big change in our life.

• 34:27Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  And that was I was stuck at home like COVID. I 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.

• 34:40Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  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 a friend happened, my Twitter

• 35:24Speaker 02

  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 when we left California and when we were moving back to the East Coast, my initial thought was I'm gonna go work at another investment fund.

• 35:54Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Because that was all I knew. And if and like, I come from a very risk averse family.

• 35:58Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  You know, like my dad's a tenured professor, like as risk averse a track as you can have.

• 36:03Jen Cohen?

  What does he do? But what kind of professor, though?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Economics and demography.

• 36:06Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he was, uh, he's been at Harvard for the last 20, 25 years. He was the Chair of the Economics Department at Columbia before that.

• 36:13Jen Cohen?

  Lots of dummies in your life. I don't know how you can handle it.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  You can see like how the expectations around academic orientation were.

• 36:19Jen Cohen?

  Totally. And you're also your mom's Indian, is your dad Indian too?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  No, my dad's white. My dad is a white Jewish guy from the Bronx.

• 36:25Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. So 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 academics and education.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:35Jen Cohen?

  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 Protestant.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 36:40Jen Cohen?

  But you have a Jew and an Indian.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was all, yeah, it all, it all added up. Exactly. Exactly.

• 36:46Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God. Okay.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  But like, I thought I was just gonna 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 left. I had a great job in the Bay area. I loved my, you know, colleagues. I love 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. 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?

• 37:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  And I had honestly never thought of it. Like I just, it 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.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:33Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely not. And what's interesting, cause 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 the anti to do list, right?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So the anti to do list is the idea of like avoiding things during the day rather than just thinking about what you need to do.

• 38:54Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  So you have like, 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.

• 39:15Jen Cohen?

  So good. Yes, I love that.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  So like, things on mine would be like, don't complain. That's been a big one for me. Like 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, 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.

• 39:59Jen Cohen?

  It's so true because it's actually this idea, and 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.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:25Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, deconstruct it.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:27Jen Cohen?

  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 exactly what we, I think that's like, that's another thing, that's human nature, right? And I think it's, it takes a lot of strength to like 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.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's also reframing 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.

• 42:16Jen Cohen?

  Totally.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:30Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I agree. What was the also, the other one I loved is like the law of reversed, was that the law of reverse of factor?

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Reverse effort.

• 42:36Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, reverse effort, yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  This is a cool idea. It's, um, Aldous Huxley is this author. You probably like read his book Brave New World when we were all in high school.

• 42:45Jen Cohen?

  That was a big book.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Or Spark noted it or whatever, whatever we're used to use back then to avoid reading.

• 42:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:18Jen Cohen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  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 like lower the effort level a little bit so that you can see things. A little bit more clearly.

• 43:31Jen Cohen?

  That's like Messi, the soccer player.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. I write about that in the book. It's one of my favorite examples.

• 43:37Jen Cohen?

  It's a great example, right? Because, you know, he like walks on that field at a snail's pace. And I was so frustrated. I took my kid to see him and I'm like, what's with this guy? They're paying like five hundred million dollars. The guy barely moves on the, on the, you know, move a little bit so we can see you run.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:52Jen Cohen?

  And he just, 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.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then all of a sudden snaps.

• 44:03Jen Cohen?

  And then snaps.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  And it's like in the perfect moment, at the perfect angle, right to the place where he needed to be to deliver whatever the outcome was. He's, he is the perfect example of, of that.

• 44:15Jen Cohen?

  Right?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:27Jen Cohen?

  Well, I think though, like it's a, 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?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  It's a central theme, particularly within the time wealth section. That idea of like deploying energy into the things that matter.

• 45:11Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:21Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:33Jen Cohen?

  Do you know what you say, actually? This is what I loved about it. Okay, it's like you're grazing on low quality tasks.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:38Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  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 their energy into like two or three things that really matter.

• 45:57Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  And finding ways to remove the other things. And so, you know, like, I think the quickest thing that anyone can do this listening this to start making a change around that is to actually, I call it like my energy calendar is how 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.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  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, like you have more energy for the energy creating tasks. You feel better at the end of the day. So you can be more. More present with your people, making those slight changes has a huge, huge impact.

• 47:55Jen Cohen?

  I could not agree with you more. And that first of all, those zooms are like, are like, you, you're killing me slowly with those things.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Where your life force goes to die.

• 48:04Jen Cohen?

  A hundred percent. 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.

• 48:11Speaker 02

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

• 48:14Jen Cohen?

  I know, they're looking at themselves. Exactly.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Everyone just looks at themselves on Zoom.

• 48:17Jen Cohen?

  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. And they're like, you can't even get an appointment with these people.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  It's really funny.

• 48:40Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's funny that that still works, huh?

• 48:57Jen Cohen?

  Can you imagine? People are losing the ability. You know, it's, it's really, don't get me started. I just actually today, my, my, 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 a lose, like the reason why our mental health, because 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 at, like, we're not even like meeting in person to, to date. We're not, we're not like comfortable even like looking at each other in an, 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.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:41Jen Cohen?

  People are losing that ability to know how to even deal with a human being.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Have you seen, um, 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?

• 49:59Jen Cohen?

  Not only do I Know about it. It was a slide in my

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Oh, there you go.

• 50:02Jen Cohen?

  PowerPoint, in my TED Talk, because it is unbelievable.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 50:06Jen Cohen?

  And all the things that we used to do, eighty, take out eighty-five percent of those things, like, you know, bike riding, socializing, dating, flirting, adventuring, all that, take eighty-five percent 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 are, have no self-esteem, have, are completely lonely, are doing, and we're on like a decline every single day.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're removing all, this is something I think about a lot, by the way, and so I can't wait to watch your talk, because I think one of the biggest challenges is that we have removed all friction from our lives.

• 50:44Jen Cohen?

  That's exactly what I talked about.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  If you go over the last thirty 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.

• 50:52Jen Cohen?

  Nope.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  You don't have to like deal with the rejection. You can like, you can desensitize yourself to the rejection because it's all through your phone.

• 50:57Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:20Jen Cohen?

  Yep.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:41Jen Cohen?

  So what it like, I, I, I'm like 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.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 52:03Jen Cohen?

  Right? Because people are losing these abilities to even like, even know what it means. So with all that being said, What do you tell people? Do you talk? I mean, you obviously it resonates with you. What can you do? Because you're lucky, right? You're in a relationship with someone that were free all this stuff. Do you have friends who are like, I'm sure you're what 36 years old?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Thirty three.

• 52:24Jen Cohen?

  Thirty three. What are your friends doing?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to go back to the basics.

• 52:28Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:38Jen Cohen?

  Yep.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 53:13Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  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 of the 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, why you say it's like, it's the real pandemic, is we know that social connection is essential to our health.

• 53:45Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  The Harvard study of adult development found that the single greatest predictor of health at age 80 was your relationship satisfaction at age 50. Like 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.

• 54:09Jen Cohen?

  And it's also like, I think, I always think to myself, like, do you think they, you don't know what you don't know, right? So if you were born in our generation, if you were born like after 1995 or 2000, whatever, after 2000. Thousand 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 part, whatever it is, it doesn't happen anymore. We don't have that same thing. They don't have it anymore.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:50Jen Cohen?

  So if you don't know what you don't know, what are you supposed to do?

• 54:53Speaker 02

  I think you have to be, you have to refine the importance of delayed gratification and that just needs to be hammered into people's brains. I mean, I like, I think the whole thing of friction or any of this stuff is fundamentally that like, 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.

• 55:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  And that's where the best things in life happen is when you're willing to do that. And so like 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.

• 55:31Jen Cohen?

  And have meaning. Okay. So let's get back to the book. So let's talk with the five.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  This is all the book, by the way. This is good.

• 55:36Jen Cohen?

  Good. I mean, 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 finance. Well, the financial part's pretty.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:43Jen Cohen?

  Is pretty much, yeah, but I want to know, like, I want, I want some like key things that people actionable items. We have a few, we said.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:52Jen Cohen?

  That people can like really do tomorrow. Besides fitness stuff, we got that covered. Besides, uh, what other ones that we really?

• 55:59Speaker 02

  The energy calendar.

• 56:00Jen Cohen?

  Calendar. That's a great one. I love that.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Everyone should do that.

• 56:03Jen Cohen?

  That's a, that's a really good one. Give me a few more like that.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:12Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  So mental wealth, by the way, like what, as I write about it is, uh, your purpose, your growth, it's your ability to create space in your life. So, you know, 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 that you have to find rituals and things in a daily, 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 111 method.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  I always wanted to journal my whole life, but you're probably wired similar to me. I thought that journaling meant like sit down for 30 minutes with a notebook and like write all this 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 had stopped.

• 57:18Jen Cohen?

  You got to day three?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe. I might be giving myself too much credit. So the 111 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 like 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.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:23Jen Cohen?

  I'm going to try that. Okay. I like that one. Give me another one.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  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. 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 we're 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, and the things that you're doing is really important. And we never take the time to do that.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:41Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:00:51Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I love that. I I say the same. I I say like, people could be bored. It won't kill them to be bored for a little bit.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  You think it will then. People like take their phone into the bathroom because you can't be bored for two minutes.

• 1:01:01Jen Cohen?

  I know. That's what I'm saying. Like, God forbid, like, you have nothing to do for thirty seconds.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  What did people do fifteen years ago before phones?

• 1:01:08Jen Cohen?

  I mean, I don't I don't know how people even survive. I mean, it's unbelievable. Think about how gross and dirty those phones are. Just imagine. It's like 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.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  It's actually a good point. I've never thought of that.

• 1:01:23Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I I think about the most crazy things all the time. Like, I'll ne- 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. There's probably so much like fecal matter on people's phones.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Now I'm like not gonna be able to unsee that, by the way.

• 1:01:39Jen Cohen?

  It's true, because you know what people do? They put their phone behind their like toilet seat or toilet cup, 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, by gressing.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Watch out.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:00Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  It's good.

• 1:02:10Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, habits and hustle. Come on.

• 1:02:22Jen Cohen?

  What was I thinking?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, uh, I said this earlier. I'm a, uh, I'm a crazy morning person. 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 four fifteen in the morning. I do that.

• 1:02:43Jen Cohen?

  Four fifteen in the morning?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Jen Cohen?

  Every day?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, every day.

• 1:02:46Jen Cohen?

  On purpose?

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  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 start coming in. I have like a few hours. 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 and 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 four fifteen. First thing I do is I go and get in my cold plunge. I see yours outside there, which I appreciate.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:41Jen Cohen?

  So you're doing it way before it was popular.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Way before it was trending. And I didn't know that it was a thing. I didn't know that it like 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. Uh, it's like what we said earlier about confidence. Like if you feel superhuman, then you're going to do super, superhuman shit.

• 1:04:03Jen Cohen?

  Totally.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  And

• 1:04:04Jen Cohen?

  Why do you think I wear this?

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Exactly. It's like, you know, it's like an alter ego.

• 1:04:08Jen Cohen?

  Alter ego. That's the whole thing. It's all about alter ego.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  You're creating this version of yourself that can go and do those things. And so I get up every morning and I do that. And then I'm at my desk by about five and I

• 1:04:19Jen Cohen?

  Oh, well, I think you go from cold plunge and then what do you do?

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Start working.

• 1:04:23Jen Cohen?

  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.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:04:40Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  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. Cause 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, ah, I don't really need to do it. And so I started, I film a video every single morning in it.

• 1:05:01Jen Cohen?

  On YouTube, right?

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Uh, I, I was putting on, I did a hundred thirty straight days of YouTube videos on it. But then I was doing, I just do like an Instagram story every morning from it and um, Part of that is like it's accountability. It's like someone is going to know that I skipped skipped this 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.

• 1:05:24Jen Cohen?

  What time?

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  I'll go, I do my running and working out from about like nine thirty to eleven thirty.

• 1:05:30Jen Cohen?

  Interesting. So you don't, okay, so why don't you do it like right after the cold plunge? Or after or workout then do the cold plunge?

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:49Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:23Jen Cohen?

  Do you want to come over here and make breakfast for me?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Jen Cohen?

  I'd be thrilled to have someone make me breakfast for once. Okay. And what do you eat? Are you like a, a animal person? Are you like, don't tell me you're a vegan.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  No, I'm not a vegan. No, it'd be hard for me to be a vegan. No, I, I eat pounds and pounds of red meat per week.

• 1:06:41Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  I would be the worst vegan in the world. All respect to vegans, if you want to do that. I just, I could never deprive myself of that.

• 1:06:49Jen Cohen?

  And by the way, I don't get this whole nonsense. If you're a vegan, you have to like shame people who eat and vice versa. Like this is, I have, stop with all this stuff. This whole like nonsense that you, God forbid that you have an opinion.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Jen Cohen?

  That someone else doesn't like.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  That's the internet, though.

• 1:07:03Jen Cohen?

  I can't stand it. I'm like so.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  You get the most likes for doing that. So people just keep doing it.

• 1:07:07Jen Cohen?

  The more, the more polarizing you are, or the more of like you say something that's very like absolute. That's how you get like, that's how you get your likes.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:07:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:07:32Jen Cohen?

  So what do you eat? Like, what's your favorite thing?

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:07:46Jen Cohen?

  All that?

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a big breakfast, like a thousand calories probably, but I probably eat about 4,000 calories a day.

• 1:07:51Jen Cohen?

  How much do you run a day? Like what's your?

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  If I'm training for something, I ran a marathon, like if I'm training for that, it was up to, you know, eight to 10 miles average per day during peak of training. Right now, four.

• 1:08:02Jen Cohen?

  Four miles?

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Jen Cohen?

  Do you do weight, this and that? Do you do weights and cardio same day? Do you do splits?

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do, because I run six days a week. Um, so I have to. So I run six days a week and lift six days a week for the most part.

• 1:08:13Jen Cohen?

  Oh, me too. Okay. So are you doing, that's, that's why?

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  Push, pull, legs, split on the, on the, uh, weightlifting training is what I do.

• 1:08:20Jen Cohen?

  But you're also doing the running, I guess, like you were saying earlier, what we were both saying for your brain.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the running I find is like meditative.

• 1:08:27Jen Cohen?

  Me too. It's my meditation.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  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 norm, if, if anything, I listen to like a sci-fi audio, but like something totally like escaped the normal. I'm not doing business podcasts or.

• 1:08:43Jen Cohen?

  How can you run to a business podcast?

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  A lot of people do that. I'm shocked, but I, I can't. I just need to like be in my thoughts.

• 1:08:49Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I would shoot myself. How can you listen?

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  I totally agree. And like, you're not going to take any interesting takeaways while you're running. Like, what are you going to take a note?

• 1:08:56Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  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, uh, 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.

• 1:09:19Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  A hundred percent 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.

• 1:09:40Jen Cohen?

  You know what I feel like honestly, I saw it's, I know you haven't because you probably had no clue who I was. But I feel like everything you're saying is literally like videos that I've done. Or things 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. You become the most successful version of yourself. People don't want to hear it. There's no magic pill or magic, anything like I eat the same thing every day. I do the same, I do my running and my, 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.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Jen Cohen?

  People don't want to know it.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  I'm like, 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 road. I'm like, I do my absolute best to stay in them.

• 1:10:28Jen Cohen?

  You and me are cut from the same cloth.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  We're gonna be best friends.

• 1:10:30Jen Cohen?

  We're gonna be BFFs.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  I know, I know.

• 1:10:32Jen Cohen?

  I mean, it's really funny like and when I travel, I get like a little bit of anxiety like I'm like.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Same way.

• 1:10:37Jen Cohen?

  Horrible.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  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 gonna be up later than you'd like and you know that you're gonna be tired in the morning. Or like you can't eat the way you want.

• 1:10:55Jen Cohen?

  Are you with my head?

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  No, I know that exact feeling and I struggle with that a lot.

• 1:11:00Jen Cohen?

  It's okay, literally, I like Rose said me today about like adaptive. I think like adaptability is like a superpower. And I'm, 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 gonna go to Fiji? I'm gonna, what am I gonna eat? What am I gonna do? How am I gonna work out? Like, most people would be like, wow, that's amazing. You're going to Fiji.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Jen Cohen?

  And I'm like, that's the kind of neuroses that I have.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  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, in 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.

• 1:12:10Jen Cohen?

  I know. Well, did you eat, what did you for breakfast today at your hotel?

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  The one hotel here has the best, it's why I stay there, it has the best hotel breakfast.

• 1:12:18Jen Cohen?

  It does?

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  It's so good, the cafe there, it's extraordinarily expensive, like I think it was ninety six dollars for my breakfast today.

• 1:12:24Jen Cohen?

  By the, I didn't want to say anything.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Which is absurd.

• 1:12:26Jen Cohen?

  That, 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.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  It's offensive. The one in Miami I don't love because it's in Miami Beach, which is too touristy for me. The one here is great because it's right next to the Equinox, so I can go to the Equinox.

• 1:12:41Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I saw you went to the West Hollywood one.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Which is super crowded and crazy, but it's also like, it's right there, so it's nice.

• 1:12:46Jen Cohen?

  I get it.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, the hotel breakfast there is amazing.

• 1:12:49Jen Cohen?

  What did you, what did you have?

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  I had four eggs, a piece of sourdough toast and a bowl of fruit.

• 1:12:55Jen Cohen?

  And that was ninety six bucks?

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  Ninety six dollars.

• 1:12:58Jen Cohen?

  Are you sure you wore?

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  They include gratuity though.

• 1:13:00Jen Cohen?

  Oh, how nice of them.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  And they don't tell you that, by the way, which pisses me off when places do this, when they hand you the check.

• 1:13:05Jen Cohen?

  So rude.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  And they don't, like, the waiter doesn't tell you that the gratuity is already included, so it's just like, you don't see it.

• 1:13:10Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  And then you're like putting twenty percent on top of twenty percent, I'm like, come on, just at least say it, like, it's just a courtesy.

• 1:13:15Jen Cohen?

  It's so sneaky, I like, I'm offended by it, but do you know what era one is, by the way?

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Yes, I go broke when I go there, by the way, that's the most absurd.

• 1:13:24Jen Cohen?

  To me, like, it's the most absurd, people are standing in line there, like, as if they're giving shit away.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, you also feel ugly automatically walking in there because everyone's a model, and you're like, walking around, you're like, what the hell?

• 1:13:35Jen Cohen?

  Oh, actually, not anymore, you know what they do now? They're getting, they're taking tour buses from like Ohio and Minneapolis there, dropping off people by the droves, by like three hundred people, to look in, like, it's like a zoo, it's like a zoo in there, they bring them off the boat, the, the bus, and they're all with their binoculars and their things, taking pictures. And they're all in line for the thirty dollar, like, you know, Bieber.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, the Hailey Bieber, strawberry glaze, yeah.

• 1:14:00Jen Cohen?

  Smoothie, which by the way, has like a thousand calories and like.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  I think they made like ten million dollars of EBITDA on that one smoothie.

• 1:14:07Jen Cohen?

  They did.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Which is just absolutely bonkers.

• 1:14:09Jen Cohen?

  Bonkers. It's, I'm in the wrong business.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  I went there once. Uh, I did this, uh, this podcast called Girls Gotta Eat.

• 1:14:16Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  Uh, who, they're awesome. They're really funny.

• 1:14:19Jen Cohen?

  They're funny.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  And I went, it was my first time at Arowan and then I walked over to their podcast and I, there's a clip somewhere of me, uh, 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 like, I just got assaulted.

• 1:14:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Like, I don't know. I'm just like, this is absurd.

• 1:14:41Jen Cohen?

  It's beyond.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  How did this happen?

• 1:14:42Jen Cohen?

  How do they justify it? Is what I don't understand.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  No one says me. I mean, like, everyone goes there, but like, everyone goes there and it's.

• 1:14:49Jen Cohen?

  People go there. I feel like, I, I don't like.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Best business in the world.

• 1:14:52Jen Cohen?

  They're so rich, the people who started Arowan. Like, they have like a $40 million house like in Malibu. Like, and they're building up more of these places. I don't like, you know, I don't know how people can afford this shit though. Like, people are buying this stuff. I, I mean, I could do a whole podcast on just Arowan, honestly. I should just stop while I'm ahead, but like, it's crazy.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Arowan hot takes. You can do it.

• 1:15:12Jen Cohen?

  Exactly. You know, we should, I actually should do it because I have so many stories about this place.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Amazing social content.

• 1:15:17Jen Cohen?

  Wouldn't it though?

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Great clips.

• 1:15:19Jen Cohen?

  I mean, I, I went through one, okay, that's this one last story about this place. I went in, I had to get strawberries. Okay, strawberries at Ralph's 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 Arowan, I kid you not, $29.99. $29.99. I, I went up to the person, I'm like, um, is this wrong? I think you marked it wrong. They're like, no, it's not wrong. I'm like, $30.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Gold lace strawberries.

• 1:15:53Jen Cohen?

  Can you believe that? And, and, and, and like an asshole, like, I'm like, fighting with this guy. What is he gonna do? People are buying them like, like, like, like, it's, like, it's gold for.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Best strawberries of your life.

• 1:16:04Jen Cohen?

  Best strawberries of it. 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.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  We have some great takeaways, hot, some, some good hot takes, some good, uh, some good tactics.

• 1:16:19Jen Cohen?

  Exactly. Stay, if you want a nice expensive breakfast, stay at the one hotel. Don't go to Arrow One if you wanted like, you know, if you don't want to get raped.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  If you need financial wealth, don't go to Arrow.

• 1:16:29Jen Cohen?

  Exactly, exactly. Maybe like six types of wealth.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:16:34Jen Cohen?

  Do not shop at Arrow One.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  If you go to Arrow One.

• 1:16:36Jen Cohen?

  Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:16:44Jen Cohen?

  I know. If I would have known, it's like, if you were, we should have worked out together.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Next time.

• 1:16:48Jen Cohen?

  Next time. Like for a hundred percent.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:16:51Jen Cohen?

  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?

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Well, I have a weird name, so it's easy to find me.

• 1:16:59Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Fortunately, uh, I'm at Saw Hill Bloom on every platform and, uh, 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 thefivetypesofwealth.com.

• 1:17:13Jen Cohen?

  Thank you so much for being here.