Sahil Bloom: On Social Compounding, All-Cause Isolation, and the Five Pillars of Wealth | TUH #249

The single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50.

We know from big data studies that isolation is one of the leading causes of all-cause mortality. And we know that one of the non-exchangeables was sense of community, sense of purpose.

It's very easy to feel alone on your journey, but there are millions of other people that are facing that thing that you can learn from, create community around so that you can help each other.

They have a decent career and they've got a decently happy marriage, but they're like, I really don't know what my purpose is.

If you don't have a clear picture of what you're trying I'm trying to build towards, how can I go and build it on a daily basis? The tiny daily investment is infinitely better than doing nothing.

Somebody that's listening to this right now, where did they start?

For anyone out there, by the way, that's feeling stuck in life, it is just about—

Hey guys, welcome back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. Now, today's episode is not your typical health and longevity conversation, but I promise you it might be the most important one you listen to all year. My guest is Sahil Bloom, Stanford athlete, former Wall Street private equity professional, and now one of the most influential thought leaders on wealth, relationships, and what actually matters in life. Here's what makes Sahil's story so powerful. He had everything by society's standards— the job, the money, the success— and he was 50 pounds overweight, drinking 6 to 7 nights a week, and emotionally bankrupt. Then one conversation changed everything. A friend asked how old his parents were. Sahil said mid-60s. The friend asked how often he saw them. Once a year. And then came the gut punch. So you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die? That single sentence made Sahil quit his job, sell his California home, and move 3,000 miles to be near his aging parents. In this conversation, we're diving deep into the arrival fallacy, why achieving your goals won't make you happy, and the neuroscience behind why success feels so hollow. Why loneliness is the real pandemic and how Harvard's 80-year study proves that relationships predict health at 80 better than cholesterol, blood pressure, or even smoking. Why waking up at 5:00 AM and working out for 30 straight days will change your life more than any financial investment. If you've been chasing success and wondering why you're still not happy, this conversation is going to redirect your entire life. Let's go. Hey guys, welcome back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And, and I've been really, really excited about today's guest. I'm actually a follower, follower of yours, so is my wife. Um, my team is big fans. They're like, we gotta get this guy on, on the podcast. It's a little bit of a different spin than going down the micro road of cellular biology, and we're gonna sort of back out and look at the whole human. And maybe redefine the way you think about wealth. And I've really loved some of the framework. I have a lot of, a lot of his quotes that I'm going to go through today because I think they're just so profound. And it's really interesting. I take so many little tidbits from almost every guest that I have on the podcast, and some of his words of wisdom really have rung true and been put to practical use in my own life, my wife's life. So you guys are going to really enjoy this podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Sahil Bloom.

Thank you so much for having me. And the feeling, by the way, is mutual. I've been a huge admirer of yours for many years, so this is a thrill.

Really? Thank you, man. You know what's so cool about our industry, if we could just pause for a second? Like, I— it fascinates me. It's like if you were a high school quarterback and you could, you know, sit down with Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes and, you know— so to me, the heroes are not like the A-listers and the athletes and celebrities. That my heroes are like The MDs, the PhDs, the biohackers, the researchers, the soccer moms that figured something out that are kind of really moving the needle for humanity. And I have such a childlike curiosity about this that sometimes, you know, when people walk into this unit like yourself, I'm like, this is, this is really cool that I get to do this for a living. And I never take it for granted. And, you know, like Mark Hyman is, as, uh, he doesn't know this, probably does now, we're really good friends, but he's been a mentor of mine for years. I read all 15 of his New York Times bestselling novels. And I just remember when he walked into my unit to sit down with me for 90 minutes, and I was like, this is so cool, man. I get to ask you anything that I want, what I'm so curious about. And I feel the same, you know, feel the same about you. So what an awesome industry we're in.

The best. I mean, it is the most selfish pursuit imaginable in a way, because you get to have conversations with people that you would, I would love to just get to hang out and chat.

Yeah, exactly.

And help other people while you're at it. So it's an amazing thing.

Yeah. You know, you have such a comprehensive background and I wonder if for my audience, you know, they know that there's this common theme that sort of runs through all my podcasts and most of the guests that I see that are making a real impact, like really moving the needle, the most passionate, the most purpose-driven folks have solved some kind of problem. In their life. And I know you've talked openly about your turning point, you know, this, this moment where a friend of you really drew your attention to the amount of time you had left to spend with your parents. Um, and I think all of us receive that information and we're like, wow, that's kind of sad, and I wish things were different. And then a few minutes later, it's sort of out of our life. You made a pretty dramatic shift. Like, you, you stuck a grenade in it and pulled the pin. And I wonder if you would just talk about that transition.

Yeah, uh, yeah, I, you know, I think the first thing I would just say here is to just, just so that everyone is sort of level set on this, I, I spent the first 30 years of my life marching down the most traditional path to what you think of as a successful life. Yeah, I was doing the things that you're supposed to want to do. I took the job that sounded good on LinkedIn.

First of all, you're a Stanford athlete, you played all 4 years of baseball, you had very, very, you know, you had an incredible career in baseball. And maybe if you hadn't hurt your shoulder, maybe that would have been a different tipping point. You would have gone in a different direction.

100%, right? You know, and I think, um, so much of my mental model for the world and for life was driven by this internal insecurity of not feeling like enough as a person and needing to find those kind of external affirmations, those pats on the back, that I convinced myself would one day make me wake up and feel that enoughness, right? Like you have the internal problem and you try to solve it with an external solution. And as we all know, you cannot do that, whether it's with your own health or with, you know, your mental health, with anything in your life. And all along the way, I sort of convinced myself that that happiness, that fulfillment, it was on the other side of some achievement. And we have a name for that, right, in science now. It's called the arrival fallacy.

Dude, I love that. I actually highlighted it in here, the arrival fallacy, because I think I think this plagued my life for so many years too.

Yeah, you just tell yourself that I'll be happy when I get X, when I do Y, whatever that thing is. When I get the bonus, the promotion, the title, when I get married, when I get my first house, then I'll be able to be happy. And you're making your entire success and happiness as a person conditional on some thing. And what happens, as we know scientifically now, is that you get the thing, you feel this kind of momentary blip dopamine-induced euphoria, and then you reset. It's like never enough to the next baseline of like, okay, now what do I need to do? I need to go and achieve more. And for me personally, on that journey, as I was achieving those things, I started to see every other area of my life falling apart. And I was drinking 6, 7 nights a week. I was 40, 50 pounds heavier than you see me today.

40 or 50 pounds?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't have recognized me. My skin was terrible.

Fat boy picture.

I'll send you one. You can, you can throw it up in the podcast. You can put it in there. It's not hard to find.

Okay.

And look, I most importantly, my relationships. I mean, I was living 3,000 miles from my parents who were two of my closest people in the world. My wife and I were struggling with this two-year battle with infertility. It was causing strain in our relationship, all at this time in my life where outside looking in, you would have said like, this guy is winning the game, right? He's doing the things you're supposed to want to do. And it did all come to a head for me with that one conversation. His friend asked how I was doing. I told him it was hard living so far away from my parents, and he asked how old they were. I said mid-60s. He asked how often I saw them, and I said about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And wow, that was the moment that changed everything. Because in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success of what it meant to build a wealthy life had been incomplete. I mean, I was focusing on the one thing with and at the expense of everything else. And to come back to your original point of throwing the grenade in there and ripping the pin, the goal in life is to have a razor-thin gap between awareness and action. The awareness that something is important and then the action against that item of importance. That was what I had been lacking my whole life. If you would come and ask me, I would have told you all of these things were important. I would have filed it away. 2 minutes later, I would have moved on and never acted upon it.

Yeah.

Most of us have this enormous gap between those two things. Closing that gap is what improvement and growth is all about. You have to have the awareness and then act on it at the testing point when it really counts.

And, and at the time that you did that, because you had no history of doing that as a behavioral pattern, was it that this time— I mean, something inside of you must have just said, hey, I've really not seen my parents that often. But the way your friend framed it was like, wow, you've really put this in perspective. You know, I've seen statistics that we get 19 years with our children. And the first 18 are from age 0 to 18, and the, the last year is spread throughout the entire balance of their lifetime. That was one that really shifted the needle for me, and I heard it years ago, and I really intentionally brought my kids a lot closer. And I think the greatest blessing in my entire life, besides finding the woman of my dreams and a partner on this journey, is being in close proximity to my children and having them on this journey with me. That has been like the thing that I value and am the most grateful for. Um, I didn't have as profound a moment as you did, but when you took this massive action— because you basically quit your job, which was a successful career, so that must have been scary— Um, you sold your place in California, you relocated to Massachusetts. I can't imagine that you had a whole lot of stuff lined up in Massachusetts. Maybe you did, I don't know, but it doesn't seem like, you know, the opportunity, uh, you know, that you were— and, and you abandoned kind of the skill set that you were using to make money and support your life. So, I mean, at the same time, you did the right thing morally or ethically. I mean, you, you committed career suicide. Um, and I think a lot of people wish they had the balls to do that. And so talk a little bit about when you made that decision and you arrived at your, you know, close proximity to your parents, where you're like, okay, I really should have thought this through. Or did you never look back? And did that begin this journey for you where you started thinning the distance between action and impetus.

Courage isn't courageous because it works out. Courage is courageous because you act without knowing that it will. I'm a big believer in that. We talk about courage. It is the willingness to take that action when you have no idea. And in hindsight, the thing about that leap of faith that I took is that the actual seeds of a successful leap of faith had been planted and were being tended to for a year leading up to it. I mean, I had May of 2020 when COVID was sort of in full swing. I started writing, I started sharing things on Twitter. Originally I had 500 followers at the time. I just really enjoyed writing, had a real pull of energy towards it. And for a year up until that conversation happened with that friend, every single day I showed up and I was sharing things that I thought were valuable about finance, about life, about whatever it was that I was thinking about. And it had built this platform of 100,000 or so people reading things I was sharing. People had started coming to me asking for, you know, like different advisory services, different things to where when I made that big leap of faith in May of 2021, it didn't feel quite as crazy as it otherwise would have. Yeah, I didn't know when I was doing any of those actions that it was sowing the seeds for something that was going to come later. But the point is that when you lean into a lot of that energy, I think that great things come, right? The best outcomes in life come when you lean into things that create energy in your life. And that made this kind of leap of faith feel much more like a step than this crazy thing. It made taking the action against that awareness feel much more logical than crazy, which when you paint it, even now I'm sitting here like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that, yeah, it didn't feel quite that crazy in the moment as a result.

Yeah.

And I think for anyone out there, by the way, that's feeling stuck in life and wants to make a change like this, wants to, you know, feel like they're going to go take this leap, it is just about what can I do today? What in 30 minutes today, what can I do to create a little bit of evidence of my ability to go and do that? Could be as simple as like, I love that, read for 30 minutes or create that landing page, find your first customer, like start doing one tiny thing today. If you do that for 30 straight days— oh yeah, I would be shocked if you didn't have significant progress that will make that leap of faith feel much more manageable in your life.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the— it's the action part that where people get paralyzed and whether that's the fear of failure or the fear of what other people think of them. And I think you've done a lot on social media about framing how you can't form your own self-image from the image other people have of you, or you'll never have a self-image. And I think we talk a lot about purpose and passion, but a lot of people don't really know how to find their purpose. Like, they, they're— they have a decent career and they've got a decently happy marriage, but they're like, I really don't know what my purpose is. And, you know, at some point after that, you know, you wrote this book on the 5 different forms of wealth. And I, I really find that fascinating because I think the word wealth used to be— and the word well-being, you know, used to be if you were well in being, you were wealthy. So wealthy used to mean being very healthy, to be well in being. Now it really means socioeconomic status. And you talk about these 5 forms of wealth. And I think really what you're getting at is people's purpose. You know, I— somebody approached me years ago with an exercise, and this was another profound thing that I did. It was super simple. I was actually at an event, and they said, I want you to write— when we took about an hour and we wrote our resume virtues— where were you educated, you know, you know, what kind of career have you had, what is your core competency and your expertise? And then we wrote our eulogy virtues. What, if you had the choice, you would hand to your spouse or to your children to read at your funeral. That was one of the most profound things I ever did in my life. And if you really want to just do some soul searching, have an honest sit down and do that exercise, because you realize you don't want them to read from the left-hand side of the paper. Who cares what university you went to? Like, what ripple effect did you make in the world? What, what was the impetus for you to write that book? Because at that point you weren't an influencer. You weren't saying, I want to really get out and help people make similar decisions to what I've done. So talk a little bit about what happened after you got to Massachusetts that made you say, you know what, I really need to do something for humanity. I'm going to maybe give without the expectation of receiving. Here's something most people don't think about. You season your food multiple times a day, every single day. And if you're using regular table salt, you're missing an opportunity. Baja Gold mineral seasonings start with mineral-rich sea salt from Baja, Mexico, not stripped-down table salt. We've combined it with organic ingredients, zero MSG, and nothing artificial. We have 5 different blends, everything from everyday seasoning to serious steak flavor and even Mexican-inspired zest. It's a small change that really adds up. Go to baja.gold/seasonings. That's B-A-J-A www.nutramax.com/seasonings and pick yours up today. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

I wanted to try to understand— I'm a hyper-curious person like you.

Yeah.

And I wanted to try to understand why I had fallen victim to that trap in the first place, because I knew that if I had fallen victim to this trap of, you know, marching down this path towards winning in this one domain but losing across all of these others, Why had that happened? Because I knew if I was falling victim to it, there were going to be millions of other people. Nothing you are facing— it's very easy to feel alone on your journey, to feel this loneliness. Loneliness is a huge problem nowadays, and a big part of that is you are struggling with something and you feel like you're the only one in the world. The whole world is collapsing in on you. You're the only one. But there are millions of other people, no matter what your struggle is, that are facing that thing. That you can learn from, that you can be around, create community around so that you can help each other.

Yeah.

And I wanted to be a part of that solution in that way by trying to understand the problem and then create a better way. And what I realized is it's quite simple, which is that what you measure in life really matters. So if all you measure is your net worth, it's like, that's how I'm going to measure my entire worth as a human being is this number on my screen. All of your actions are going to surround that one thing that you can measure because humans are wired. We see the scoreboard, we see the number going up, like, I'm going to work on that, right? And so as you start to broaden your measurement of what your life means, you start taking action to build on that new scoreboard in the same way that we know, like, you put on a Whoop and you start taking action to improve your sleep and to improve your movement because you can measure it all of a sudden. The exact same principle applies to all of these areas of life. When you start thinking about social as a form of wealth, your connection to people as a form of wealth, you start taking actions. You start going out on the coffee date, you get the old group of buddies together, you send the text to your mom, you do the things to go and build that form of wealth. And that is really what I came down to as I was starting to look at it. And I think that that as a framing is so powerful for people because it means you get to choose how you define what your wealthy life looks like. You have the agency to take action to build your life around the priorities that you you really care about, with the recognition being that there are two priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have.

That is so true.

There's a huge gap between the two for a lot of people. Yes. Your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap, but you have to acknowledge that it exists in the first place.

Yeah, so true. Can you walk us through— without— I don't want to give away the book because I want people to buy your book, um, but can you walk us through these five core tenets that you have identified as like the 5 pillars of wealth? Yep.

So the 5 types of wealth as I talk about them, time wealth is the first. This is about awareness of time as your most precious asset. You know, where you spend your time, who you spend it with, when you trade it for other things. It is about that idea that you are a time billionaire. You know, a billion seconds is 30 years. When you're 20 years old, you have a few billion seconds left. When you're 50, you have a billion seconds left. Treating your time as that most precious asset. That is time wealth. The second type is social wealth. It's about your relationships, the people in your life, those few close, deep bonds, and then your connection to things that extend beyond the self, bigger than you. The third type is mental wealth. That is about your purpose, that calling, that feeling of growth, the ability to create space to kind of wrestle with these challenging, unanswerable questions in life. The fourth type is physical wealth. The one you know most, most, uh, really thinking about your health and vitality as a form of wealth, taking the controllable actions to fight against the natural decay and atrophy in your life. And then the fifth type is financial wealth, money, but with the really specific nuance of thinking about your definition of enough, what it means to you to have enough, with the recognition being your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations grow and rise faster than your assets, you'll never feel wealthy. You'll just be chasing whatever more the world has told you that you should want.

That is so true. And you actually have a quote that says, "Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough." I think that's one of the most powerful quotes in the book.

I'm glad that it stuck out to you and that you flagged it.

It really did stick out to me. Never let the quest for more. Distract you from the beauty of enough.

Have you heard that story of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller? So these two famous American authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, they're walking around this palatial garden estate of this billionaire in the Hamptons. And Vonnegut turns to Heller and he says, Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday the owner of this home made more money than your most famous book, Catch-22, made in its entire lifetime? And Heller thinks about it and says, yes, but I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, oh yeah, what's that? Heller replies, the knowledge that I've got enough.

Wow.

The knowledge that I've got enough. It's such a beautiful story.

Checkmate. Yeah. So if I think this resonates with so many people and one of the intentional things that I try to do with the information I put out on our platform, we try to be very authentic, very intentional with the information, is I don't want to just educate people. I want to inspire them to make a change, right? That's where I know that we've accomplished our goal with our message, is that somebody has, just like you said, shortened the distance between knowledge and action. And so somebody that's listening to this right now that your message is resonating with, where did they start? Is there a journal? Um, are there daily practices? And I want to get into some of your daily health habits and, and whatnot. We can talk about diet, we can talk about spiritual well-being and those kinds of things, mindset, mentality. But in terms of an action that someone can take that says, you know, I feel a little bit disconnected from where I am expectation-wise and, and what is going on in my life, maybe I do feel like I have enough, what's like— how do they evaluate that?

I think the first thing I would encourage anyone to do is to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and make a real clear sketch of what you want your life to look like. It's such a funny and simple question, but the vast majority of people have never thought about this. You like get on some sort of hamster wheel and you're just working towards something, but you don't really know what it is like. What is the money for? You're going and building this life. You're chasing these things. What is the life you're actually trying to create? You were to wake up in 5 years and everything is in flow. What does your day look like from the time you wake up first thing in the morning until the time you go bed at night? What does the actual day look like? Who are you with? What are you thinking about? What are you doing? What are you working on? Once you get a clear picture of that, now I can reverse engineer the actions that I need to take to go and build that. But without the clear vision, it's like, you know, for the— any direction will do for the sailor who does not know where they're trying to go. It's like the paraphrasing of this famous quote. Yeah, it's really true. Like, if you don't have a clear picture of what you're trying to build towards, how can I go and build it on a daily basis? So I would start there, um, to just get a baseline view of what is that life you were trying to build and what does that gap look like between where you are and what that looks like.

Good. I love that. I mean, you, you, you also talk about relationships, and we know from Blue Zone studies and big data studies that isolation is second maybe to sedentary lifestyle, um, is one of the leading causes of all-cause mortality. We know there's broken heart syndrome, right? I mean, spouses that have been married 40, 50 years, sometimes 60 years, one spouse passes, we know how quickly the other one goes, right? Nothing's changed in them, they were just immediately put in isolation. We knew in the mortality space that if you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half at any age, you put them in isolation. And I feel like we have become one of the most isolated societies in modern history. And by that I mean we believe that connection comes through social media, digital media, uh, our devices. And, and this creates a very disconnected, non-communal sense. And we know that Blue Zones, for example, one of the non-exchangeables was sense of community, sense of purpose. You said that we don't think to invest in relationships in the same way that we think to invest in a stock or a mutual fund. But relationships pay dividends. Arguably, they're even more important and more impactful than any financial investment you can make. Yet I think most financial investment decisions are— I think financial stress um, as a single factor is probably one of the single leading stress points in most, most people's lives. So we need to have some financial security, right? Or else we're just constantly worried about that. But what do you mean by we don't think about investing in relationships? And how does somebody go about investing in their loneliness?

Is the real pandemic— no one talks about it.

I totally agree with you, by the way. Um, we are on the same page on that.

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you the story about my grandmother that brought this to life for me. My grandmother, lived her entire life in Bangalore, India. India is a culture of extreme social connection. My grandfather passed away in 2007, leaving my grandmother on her own. My grandmother for 13 years did not go a single day without having someone come and spend time with her. In America, you have a month where people come and they bring the casserole. In India, literally not a single day when someone didn't come to have lunch with her or spend time with her, sit. COVID hit March of 2020, lockdown start. My grandmother aged more over the 6 months of lockdowns in India than the 13 years leading up to that point. When we saw her, when we visited for the first time after COVID, she was nearly catatonic.

Wow.

And within 18 hours of us being there, she was up playing Scrabble, beating the hell out of us in Scrabble. It was like a light switch that got flipped from the social connection. So I saw this in action, that loneliness, that isolation will kill you. And we know this scientifically now that loneliness is worse for you than smoking, drinking. You know, the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50 in that Harvard study that followed people for 85 years.

Single biggest predictor of—

Physical health.

Physical health.

At age 80. 80. Was relationship satisfaction at age 50. Wow. How people felt about their relationships was more predictive of their health at 80 than their cholesterol and their blood pressure and their smoking or drinking habits.

Yeah, yeah.

Crazy. And yet we don't think to invest in this area of our lives. For me, the biggest reason is because people don't think about the fact that a tiny daily investment in your relationships compounds in the same way that a financial investment does. I go and ask anyone on the street, they know Putting away $10 or $50 or $100 today is better than zero because it's going to stack and grow and compound. The same exact principle applies to relationships. Sending the text is infinitely better than doing nothing. Like getting together with the friend for the little coffee date, calling your mom for the 10 minutes, infinitely better than doing nothing because it compounds in that same way. But when you talk to ambitious, high-performing people in particular, One of the worst habits we all have is we constantly allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial in these areas of life. So we say things like, I don't have an hour to work out, so I'm just not going to work out today, or I don't have an hour to call my mom, so I'm not even going to send the text, or I don't have 30 minutes for that coffee date, so I'm not going to go for the 5-minute walk with that person. That is the worst mentality we can have because it ignores that anything above zero compounds in these areas. The tiny daily investment is infinitely better than doing nothing.

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I think it was Blaise Pascal, the old philosopher, who said all of man's problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Dude, it's so much harder than most people think.

So much harder, especially in the modern day and age when we've become indoctrinated by technology to, you know, like people take their phone to go and sit on the toilet because you cannot be bored for the 5 minutes that you're sitting there, right? It's crazy. The command is— I do some of my best work on the toilet, I will confess. But you're right. But it's crazy. And so then take that and juxtapose the fact that your best ideas that you've ever had in your life have come in the shower, have come like while you're lying in bed right before falling asleep, have come on a drive, like all generally times when you have had to be in your own head and in your thoughts. That is no secret. There's, there's a reason that that happens. It's because when you allow yourself to have that stillness and that solitude, that's when your thoughts can actually intermingle. That's when you have the quiet, when those ideas start to connect in unique, asymmetric ways. We need to create more of those moments, force more of those moments into our life. The easiest way is to go for a 15-minute walk without your phone every single day. Like, wow, one tiny little ritual. It could be after lunch. I'm going to do a 15-minute tech-free walk. I'm going to leave my phone at my office desk or whatever it is. It's going to help my digestion. It's going to help my energy levels in the afternoon, and I'm going to have way better ideas. I guarantee it. It is a tiny intervention with an enormous ROI. And so when you talk about like the tiny thing in the case of Jelly Roll, there are tiny things all around us that we could do to meaningfully improve our lives. I'm not talking about like, oh, this will make a tiny impact in your life. It will make an enormous impact in your life if you do these things on a daily basis, right? The sum of small, ordinary things becomes something extraordinary with the benefit of time.

Yeah, right. Like, so true.

Think about, uh, compounding as an actual equation, time is the exponent. It is returns to the power of time. We all spend a ton of energy thinking about the returns part. We're like, how do I get 8% versus 7% versus 6%? Yeah, that's not what matters. Time is the exponent. You just need to do it long enough and the extraordinary will take care of itself.

That makes so much sense. So how do you structure your day? Like, what's, what's a typical day? Are you super highly structured?

I am. I'm pretty highly structured. I Look, I probably have a mild case of OCD where I like having structure in my life to at least know, generally speaking, what I'm doing at different times of the day. I am an early to bed, early to rise guy. I love— have always been a bit of a grump. Like, I— on the baseball team at Stanford, people called me Grandpa Bloom because I would go to bed at like 9 p.m. when— and when you're in college, you're like, this is your day.

You're not supposed to sleep in college.

You know, but we would have 6 a.m. practice and I wasn't talented enough to just be able to roll over to practice on no sleep and still perform like some of the guys could. So I needed to get up at 5 and, you know, wake up and have a good breakfast and like do the things I needed to do. And that built in me just a habit of I'm going to go to bed at the same time every night. I'm going to wake up at the same time every morning. Yeah. For me now, that's like I'm asleep by about 8:30 most nights. I'm up by 4:30. So I get my 8 hours and I try to hit the ground running first thing in the morning. I am most creative first thing in the morning, so I will do a cold plunge and then I will be straight into some form of creative work. For me, that was writing every single day for a long period of time for the book.

You got the book out and what'd you do, just chip away at it? I mean, that consistency thing, like an hour a day.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I lower the bar as much as possible with any big project. So exactly what you said about Gelly Roll. I try to do that in every area of life. One of the, one of the worst habits we all have is we're like, okay, I'm going to write a book. That means I'm going to write for 4 hours a day. Like, you cannot do that. It just doesn't work. In this movie, have you seen the movie The Martian? Matt Damon, he's like trying to return home from Mars.

Oh yeah.

There. Yeah. At the very end of that movie, there's this like closing scene, which is amazing, where he says, people often ask me how I got home from Mars and what I tell them is you see this enormously daunting thing in front of you, this enormously daunting problem, losing 500 pounds, getting home from Mars, whatever that is.

Getting home from Mars. And getting home from Mars is probably the only thing that's harder than losing 250 pounds.

But we all face our version of that problem in our lives. And what he says in this scene is you don't have to worry about the daunting problem. You just have to solve one problem in front of you. Then solve another one, then solve another one. And if you solve enough problems, you eventually get home. And I try to treat every big project I take on that way. Like, what's the one little thing? It's 30 minutes of writing today. I'm just gonna do that. So I have, you know, and I pursued all of my things that way. I do that morning writing block, then I have like family time, then I do all my fitness and health sort of activities. And from there—

What does fitness and health activities look like? I mean, are your, your family on board with you, or are you, um, because, you know, I have this, I have this philosophy about self-care, uh, and I think a lot of people look at it as being selfish. And so I intentionally give the first 90 minutes of every day to myself, um, and then I give the rest of my day away. And I'm very intentional about giving the rest of my day away because my staff, my, my, my podcast, my media platform, my spouse, my kids, whatever it is, um, But when I miss that time for self-care, if I do it for more than 2 or 3 days, which is extraordinarily rare, I can feel it. My mood, my emotion, my energy. I feel kind of disconnected and discombobulated, and I feel that, that disconnect. And I think so many people think that, you know, discipline makes things harder. But having a disciplined nighttime routine and morning routine, if you just bookended your sleep with with good nighttime routine and morning routine, just those things, those areas you can control, I think it changes the entire trajectory of your life. Because we do get into our day and we're not really in control of our choices. You can't really handle— I mean, you can't really control the inbound, what comes in, what, you know, um, how your co-workers or spouse or kids, what their needs are going to be. But you can control that first part of the day. So yours starts at like 4:30 in the morning? Yeah.

And the biggest reason for that is because I believe that There is no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5 a.m. and works out. People, when I say this, I mean, never in their minds, but it is true. And the reason is because you are doing a hard, disciplined action to start every single day. And that the mentality of someone who does that, who is willing to endure that hard thing now for a benefit later, has ripple effects into every other area of life. That person shows up for their relationships, for their work, in every other area in a certain way because they are taking themselves seriously enough to endure this hard thing in their life. And I, when I wanted to make that big change in my life, when I was 40 pounds overweight, when I was unhealthy in my relationships, I was drinking all the time. The first thing I turned to was the physical. The reason I believe in the physical as the first thing, if you're feeling stuck in life, is because it is the single fastest way to reassume agency over your own life. Meaning reassume the belief that you are capable of taking an action to create a desired outcome. That is what agency is. I am capable of creating change in the world. I am at the wheel. I am not a passenger in my life. And if you go and wake up early and work out for 30 straight days, you will look in the mirror and see a completely different person at the end of that period.

You'll feel a different person too.

And it is, it's dramatic and it's immediate. It is so fast. And if more people just did that, when you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling down and out, if things aren't going your way, just do that for 30 days. Is it going to solve all of the world's problems? No. But you are going to feel much more capable of solving those world's problems.

Yeah.

On the tail end of that, I guarantee it.

Yeah.

And when I turned to that, everything started to change around me.

That's so profound.

So that ritual for me has just been something that I've tried to maintain. I believe, I believe exactly what you said, which is you cannot take care of others before you take care of yourself. It's like put on your oxygen mask before you help others with theirs.

So true.

And so my, my health rituals are that personal time for me, whether it's the cold plunge in the morning or sauna in the evening or like my running and lifting that I'll do sort of mid-morning. Those are solitary activities for me. I like to be in my own head during that. And everything else around the day is working with other people. It's spending time with my family. I have a young son, so there's a lot of time with him playing, teaching, et cetera.

Yeah, that's so good. And do you do all this around your house?

Do all of this around my house. We're blessed in that way that I've been able to build and create sort of an ecosystem that is conducive to it. It's blessed, but it's also an earned blessing in a lot of ways. And look, the other thing I will say to anyone is, The best thing my wife and I did before our son was born was we sat down and we each made a short list of our daily non-negotiables, the like few things that we need to do to feel like our full version of ourselves. And we looked at the two lists and we said, okay, I'm going to make sure that you get your list and you're going to make sure that I get my list. So in the chaos of newborn and not getting enough sleep and all the things that are going to happen, Let me make sure that my wife is able to do the things she needs to do to feel whole, because I know that if she's able to do that, she's going to show up as the best mother possible for this new life that we've brought into the world. And if she makes sure that I can do my thing, I can show up as the best father and husband in those ways. And it was enormously impactful both for our relationship and then also for my son's life of like what he was experiencing from his parents.

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That's so cool.

You know, my wife and I went through a similar, time frame in our life. We, we did everything wrong as a couple, um, and which is why I think the best relationships are the relationships that have sort of gone through everything that's meant to tear them apart, you know, but they're somehow hopelessly not willing to give up on each other. And we, we, we bought a house together when we were just dating— big no-no— worked out, uh, and then we started a business, right, um, even before we were engaged. And, uh, we ended up getting engaged and married. But, uh, we started this business, and anybody that tells you you can start a business with your significant other and you can separate business from your personal life is absolutely lying to you. And you know what happened? Like most typical partnerships, whether it's with your spouse or with your best friend, or whether it's with someone that's a mentor to you, you get into the partnership and you really start to understand who the other person is. And we realized we were two vastly different people. I was the visionary, she was the integrator. And we read a book called Rocket Fuel. Super simple book, but it put this very much in perspective the same way that you're talking about respecting her non-negotiables and her respecting yours. I think that's such a great exercise for people. And when we understood that I was the visionary, she was the integrator, and neither of us were worth anything without the other. And the blessing was that we were so different, not that we were the same, because our business would have gone bankrupt if you just had two visionaries. And our business would have never been able to bring in, you know, new ideas and, and customers if we were both integrators. So I think these little exercises, um, and, and you lay these out in the book too.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I think these little exercises are so important. I'm going to put a link to the— I'm going to put link in the show notes. But at the end of the day, I think we're all, you know, we have some corner of our heart that's capitalist. So talk about the entrepreneurial side of what you're doing. You have a fund now. So at some point you reach back into your roots and you're like, it's a core competency of mine. Now that I got things figured out, I can do it on my terms. Instead of, instead of having your financial career run you, you can run your financial career. Um, and I hope I'm framing that right.

Mm-hmm.

But, um, so talk a little bit about that side, um, of your life. You know, the, how have you been able to strike a balance, um, and, and still light that entrepreneurial fire? Because I think with the background you had in finances, it's hard to just flush that part, right? Yeah.

Yeah. It's been a huge blessing for me that I came from a background. So my, my background was at, I was at a private equity fund for the first 7 years of my career. Learned.

It is really good. You won't get that knowledge anywhere else. You could get 3 MBAs and never know.

I mean, I was working 100-hour weeks for a long, long time, which everyone now, like, bemoans hard work, uh, in a certain way. Like, it's become stigmatized to say that you work hard. For me, I learned an extraordinary amount. I got to work with a lot of really smart people. I got to see tons of businesses, do things that I was woefully unqualified to do. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything in a lot of ways. Um, when I entered this world that I am now in of sort of being an entrepreneur, creator, writer, author, I entered it with the viewpoint of how can I make this a multi-decade thing? I want to play the longest-term version of this game. And you know this very well from people that you know in the space. That is the complete antithesis of how most people, uh, try to go and build an ecosystem as a public figure or creator. Et cetera. They try to go take every brand deal and get— you can get paid a bunch of cash right now for this thing. And so you get really excited about these short-term decisions, but you harm the long-term. It's like a trap. And so I approached it from the opposite of like, what is the long-term vision of what I'm trying to create? Well, I want to build trust. To me, followers, views, all of these metrics people obsess over is missing the point. What you are trying to do is accumulate and build trust. From people. And commerce follows trust. Like, if you think, go back 50 years, trust was concentrated in a few companies that owned the airwaves. So like P&G and Johnson Johnson, they owned trust because they owned all the advertising space, everything. Right now, you fast forward to today, you're in a world where trust has been decentralized. Trust is now in the hands of people like you, people like myself, where we can build these like nodes of trust around things of consistently sharing with no expectation of return. You didn't start creating and trying to sell in some way. You were creating because it was creating value for people. You were breaking down complex topics, abstracting away the complexity, and giving people something they can go and do. That creates trust. You can build a whole lot of commerce on top of that trust. You can build it through businesses that you own and go and create, which is one thing I was trying to do. You can build it through investing in companies, which is the fund that I created. You can build it through selling books and through speaking and different things like that. Media, all of those things are fundamentally a byproduct of that trust. The second you lose sight of the trust being the main thing, the point of highest leverage, that's when everything comes crumbling down. And I've seen way too many people do that. You get all of a sudden you get excited and you lose sight of the fact that the trust is the most important thing. I have tried to just remain across all of my business laser-focused on the idea that what I'm trying to do is build and create trust with people, that I'm able to help you live a slightly better life, ask slightly better questions. I can do that through a variety of commerce-based vectors, and I can do that through my media. That is what I'm really excited about doing for this multi-decade game that I'm now playing.

Wow, dude, that's, that's incredible. And is this a— are you assembling portfolios of companies that are like-minded, that have the same mission that serve the same purpose that you're trying to serve? I mean, do you have an evaluation process that you go through before you say, you know, this is really something that I want to put on my platform or something that I'm willing to invest in? And are you, are you an investor and an operator, or are you more of an operator or more of an investor?

Everything that I now am involved in has to meet the bar of something that I genuinely use and benefit from in my own life. That to me, I think that makes it very authentic, is a standard that I think you have followed that I admire in people. And so I have tried to adopt that in my own world and life. It makes it authentic and it makes it so that it doesn't feel like you are ever promoting something because it is just your life. I'm just, I'm living this way. Yeah. The Five Types of Wealth as a book was, that's about my life. That is a manifestation of my life and my journey. And so I can go and speak about that. Till kingdom come because I'm talking about something I care about. So every business I now invest in has to be meeting that bar. Anything I invest in, whether I'm a small owner or, you know, a majority owner, um, I think of myself as much more of, um, visionary versus integrator. So do I. Um, I—

but you need the integrator.

I have the integrator now, which is a great thing. As you mentioned, you know, I have a member of my team who's extraordinary. And now the, you know, the CEOs who run the different businesses that I'm involved with, um, are very much the people who are like— they're actually getting the things done behind the scenes that frankly, uh, I would probably let slip if I were in those roles.

Yeah, you know, I have a philosophy that we, um, you know, I'll partner in joint venture with, uh, different products or services if I use them every day in my daily life. You know, I wear this vest every day. I take I mean, if you were to follow me around for weeks or even months, you'd see that I'm, I'm very authentic about the things that I say I use in my life. I actually use them every day in my life, but I don't— I know that I'm actually not a great operator. And so finding companies that are great operators that have really good operational expertise and they're executing well and then using my platform to help them platform to give them a voice, because I think they deserve a voice. That's the niche that we run in, you know. It has to be something we use— I use every day in my daily life, or I have firsthand knowledge of and I've independently tested. Because if you don't do that— and I've been burned in the past, um, you know, I've, I've been burned by hydrogen water bottle companies, and I've been burned by red light bed manufacturers, and I laid my reputation out there and endorsed something before I really did the deep, you know, investigative research on it, and it came, came back to, to, to bite me. So now I'm hyper-intentional about that. What is the sieve that you go through to decide if something is really good financial risk for you or not? Are you betting on your ability to grow that company, or are you investing and betting on their ability to grow it independent of I am betting on people.

I, I've invested in well over 100 companies at this point, you know, over the last 7, 8 years. And the common theme I've now identified in the ones that are extraordinarily successful versus extraordinarily unsuccessful is whether I focused on idea versus person. When I focus too much on the idea being the, like, perfect idea, especially at an early stage, I almost always was wrong. When I focused on this person is an absolute killer, but this idea doesn't really make a lot of sense. I want to back this person. I want to find something to work on with this person. They find an idea that works and find a way to push it into the world. It's like that Steve Jobs reality distortion field that was often talked about becomes real. And so I really try to focus on spending enough time with the person so that I understand them. When I've gotten burned in the past, it's always been that I didn't spend enough time with the person and I didn't know them well enough. Like, I, I had a friend say this to me recently, that his bar for partnering with someone in business is that he would be comfortable having that person alone with his family for a weekend. Like, he could leave and that person could be at his house for a weekend and he would be comfortable with them around his kids and his wife. And I thought that was so interesting. Because it is like a razor. It's a heuristic for, I trust this person's values align with mine, that they are a great upstanding person, that I could have them around my children in this way, that they would be like a leader in this house in that way. And I thought that that was a really interesting way of thinking about it. Yeah. Like it's someone that I can connect with on that level. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's really interesting. I think, you know, to the, the whole aspect of, of, of mindset comes into this too. And I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of times the way that we frame things to ourselves and the way that we— the voices that we use, you know, with within ourselves determine a lot of what we attract, you know. And, and I believe in the universal law of attraction. I didn't for years, um, until I— there, there are actually even studies that talk about how frequency that leaves our body is very attractive or very repelling in the universe. And very often when we get in these patterns of repeated negative things happening in our life, we can look at ourselves as a victim that things are happening to us, or we can actually take responsibility and realize they're happening within us. So you do talk about mindset, you know, 5 intentions for 2025 framework. And I would be remiss if I didn't touch on this because I, I've always been very scientific and talk about the Krebs cycle and human biology and, and cellular processes, but I, I'm, I'm lately I've been really gravitating a lot towards things like community, connection, sense of purpose, um, mindset, spirituality. And by spirituality, I don't mean any specific faith. I mean being a spiritual person, maybe believing that there's a higher power than, than what we have. But can we touch on, um, you know, recognizing time as the most valuable asset, control the controllable, finding joy in the small, investing in relationships, and prioritizing health and vitality? I know these follow your 5 Wealth Frame principles too, but I think it's really important to talk about the mindset. Like, do you develop this mindset through journaling? Um, do you develop this mind set through certain actions? How does, how does someone frame, how does someone build this framework?

I think that creating the space in your life to think about these things is the most important. Like, you know, we, we talk about, you know, boredom. It's like fundamentally that comes down to creating a little bit of space in your life. Most people in the modern era have this like fixed loop of stimulus and response the entire day. You wake up in the morning, you grab your phone, a million people rush into your bedroom. Technologically, right? You never allow that literally, but technologically it seems fine. From the time you wake up in the morning until the time you go to bed at night, you're in this fixed loop. Everything's urgent. I need to respond to everything. There's no space. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, famous psychologist, said our power is in the space between stimulus and response. I love that. That's where you get to choose your response. If you can create those pockets of space in your life What that allows you to do, I find, for people is fundamentally shift from this view of like an external locus of control, meaning I am a passenger in my life. Things are just happening out in the world and I just am getting slammed around to an internal locus of control, meaning I am the captain of this ship. And yes, things are happening out in the world, but I get to choose what I am going to make of those things that are happening. There's going to be good, bad, ugly, but I am at the wheel. Of all of these things. That shift as a meta mindset is at the core of every successful person in any endeavor that you can imagine. Yeah, it is someone who believes they can take action to create outcome, and you need the space in order to create that mindset shift in your life.

Wow. So in, in that space, are there, are there meditative practices that you go through? You know, I've I've never really been good at meditation. Me either. Um, okay, good. Um, but every single person that I've talked to, from Will Ahmed to like some very— some people I really admire and they've been very successful, tell me that once they mastered meditation, it was a game changer. I've ever actually never met someone who meditates and said, yeah, it was all right, you know, I mean, it really didn't do anything for me. So like, that's my— one of my 2026 goals is to get a good meditation coach that can actually start me on this path of regularly meditating. Because as soon as I start to sit in silence, you know, I, I, I say prayers every morning and I'm very intentional about that. But, you know, the things just start coming into my mind. And I've even tried to do guided meditation, you know, where there's, there's a hallway and there's a light at the end of the hallway. And I'm like, well, why don't we go down there? Because clearly something's going on at the end of the hallway. And they're like, no, no, you're missing the point. Like, this is supposed to relax you. And I'm like, well, I want to get to where the action is. Like, you're really missing the point. So, um, but, but what, what are the ways that, that you can frame these things in your mind? Because I, I think a lot of what causes paralysis, especially in, in, in entrepreneurs and people that are trying to shorten that gap between stimulus and response, um, are those little voices that you, you have in your mind, like, maybe I'm not worthy. I've never done this before. What if I don't make it? I'm afraid to share this with my spouse. There are a lot of these voices that come from our past because we can only frame what we know. But to make a big shift like what you've made is— would you say that as a single practice, creating the space in your life, is it journaling?

I think those walks have been the biggest for me. The one thing I would say to you on your meditation is I think we need to more broadly define what meditation looks like. For some people, it might be sitting in the corner of this room with their hands however on sitting cross-legged.

It's how I'm thinking about it, so maybe I do meditate.

You meditate when you go in your hyperbaric chamber and you sit there quietly. That is true. When, you know, you are out on a walk or if you're on the treadmill and you're just in your own head, any of those actions can be meditative. The point is that you need to be in your own head, no stimulus coming in of new things. It's just in your own head and ideas. It's not about forcing everything down and I have to have no thoughts going through my head. It's allowing the thoughts to just flow. And, you know, look, I think that the fastest way to experience meditative states in your life for the vast majority of people is to just have a ritual of walking without technology on a daily basis. That is, it is the highest ROI. 15 minutes after lunch or 15 minutes first thing in the morning if you want to get some sunlight. It has an extraordinary ROI in how you will feel and how you show up in the world and the ideas that you will have. All of these things benefit. And look, there's science that supports all of that. Like there is robust scientific evidence on the create creativity impact of walking. Stanford ran a study where they had people walk or they had people sit, and the people that walked had a 70% increase in creative divergent thinking. Wow. After walking, enormous impact on your ability to have creative asymmetric ideas. Asymmetric ideas are the ones that change your life. You don't change your life by just like thinking, you know, for the 1% incremental thing that you might change. It's like, hey, I'm going to fundamentally create this big change in my life. And so I think that the walking habit is probably the single greatest habit you can build as an individual.

I think so too. You know, I take some of these little habits from different guests. DJ Shipley was on. He's a former Navy SEAL.

Do you know? I loved— I loved his discussion with you and with Andrew Huberman as well.

Yeah.

He talks about that test that he does for like performance. Yeah, I really liked that.

I mean, he's at a whole nother level, but I always take tidbits from these guys. The one thing I took from him was this preparing your, um, it's, it's super simple, but just getting your workout clothes the night before and like setting out all the things that you, you need. So now I have a little area in my cabinet and I have the 3 supplements that I put in my water first thing in the morning, and I have the water thing ready to go. And I've started right before I go to bed. It doesn't take much time at all. I lay out my shorts, my socks, my shoes, and, and my shirt. Nothing crazy, no OCD, um, because my wife and I sleep obviously in the same bed, in the same bedroom.

That's not obvious anymore, by the way. Like, you know, biohacking— I feel like I have all these friends sleeping in separate places. I'm like, oh God, yeah, kill your relationship. Kill your relationship 101.

And, uh, and, and I, I'm, you know, usually I wake up and I'm like that once the lights are on. I mean, from the time I open my eyes till I'm vertical is like 15 seconds, you know? Like, I throw and I, I would sort of fumble around the room trying to find my, my shoes and my socks and my shirt. And I was like, where are my shorts? And I would go into my closet, I would turn the light on, and it would always like disturb my wife. So like that one little fundamental change. But I think the, I think the intentional walks without technology is a great one. You know, I, I bought one of these little— remember the old iTunes, the little tiny ones that just hold music and, you know, there's no phone on them? You can still get them, it turns out. And, um, so I had my production manager load, you know, some songs on there. That's the greatest invention ever, because I— you, first of all, if you've ever tried to run any distance with a cell phone, it's pain in the ass. Um, so I clipped this little thing on and I just put some music on, and I put music without really harsh lyrics or anything. It's sort of melodic music. And that walk with the— with the Way to Best— you've just refreshed my recollection of how impactful that's, that's been for me.

Yeah, those tiny things. I mean, uh, you know, you putting out your clothes, it's so funny just how impactful a little thing can be.

Like, sometimes it gives me 20 minutes back in the morning.

I mean, it's just the friction to action goes to zero.

Yeah.

And that helps a lot of people. And when you think about like tiny interventions like that, a big one for me when I started trying to wake up earlier, like everyone always says they can't wake up early, they hit snooze, they do all these things. I put my phone in the bathroom. And so the alarm goes off. Oh, and you have to get out of bed to go. What does your wife think about that? So it's quiet enough that as long as I get up when I hear it and I go and get up and turn it off, it's not like it's one of those funny things where if you know when it's going off, you like psychologically will get up when it's going off. Like you're not going to just be letting it ring for a while and it gets you out of bed. And once you're out of bed, you're not going to go back into bed. You've gone and pressed it, so now you have to like walk back and get into bed after you press snooze. You're not doing that, and so it gets you up and moving, which again, like feet on the floor is the hardest part of waking up at 4:30.

That is the hardest part. Yeah, so true. I did it this morning on not a lot of sleep. Um, so I have a, uh, group I call my VIP group. Um, these are the community of people that I'm really trying to foster to really really change the world. And they're the folks that I let know who's coming onto the podcast before they come on the podcast. I don't advertise who's coming on our podcast, kind of a surprise every Tuesday. So I let them know that you were coming, and there's a bunch of them waiting with a, with a list of questions or some really good questions for you. I mean, they're huge fans of yours. So we're gonna migrate over into my, my VIP room. But before we do, I always wind down my podcast by asking all my guests the same question, and there's no right or wrong answer to this question. If you watch the podcast, you're probably ready for it. Um, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

To me, being—

I think you're an ultimate human.

I appreciate that. I, I, um, to me, being an ultimate human means having a clear vision and view of what success looks like to me and then acting in accordance with that view. The reason I think that's so important as a definition is because it is entirely individual. My definition of being my ultimate human could be entirely different than the person listening to this, and we're both able to go out and achieve that. It is entirely within our control to go and do that. And I think it starts with that definition., and it finishes with the action you take every single day.

I totally agree with that. So, amazing, man. I, I really hope that you'll come back on the Ultimate Human Podcast. Um, you know, so many of my guests are so scientific, um, and analytical without the practical steps that people can do to, to make a change. And I think that there are so many tidbits. I can already see how this is going to get chopped up and how many great clips are going to go out there and impact a lot of lives. My audience is really going to enjoy this, brother. Thank you coming on The Ultimate together. Thank you so much. And until next time, guys, that's just science.