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A
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.
B
Hey, friends. You're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled. You know, I'm all about finding an edge. The small daily habits that give you more energy, focus and resilience.
C
But that's why I am hooked on mana vitality.
B
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C
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. 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. So we had two treadmills here facing each other and we would walk and talk.
A
I love that.
C
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.
A
Yeah, there's scientific evidence to support that. By the way, the walking thing.
C
Tell me.
A
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.
C
That's a really great point. You know, me and my husband for the first, what, like six years of our life being married or maybe even, maybe less, 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. If people can just like get to that in their brain, their lives can just be exponentially better.
A
Yeah, it's why, I mean, physical wealth is one of the pillars and it's a huge catalyst.
C
Let's talk about it.
A
I mean, I. This is like one of my hot takes on life, that there's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5am and works out. And totally. 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 5am and work out. And I guarantee you will rewire your brain. You will immediately start identifying as a winner. And if you can do that because you're doing something hard, you're doing something you don't want to do, you're delaying gratification. And you will feel the impact of that action after 30 days. You will look different, you will feel different, you will be more confident, you'll carry yourself. And that has ripple effects into every other area of your life.
C
100. You just said the main word though, confidence, because I think it breeds confidence. Because you see yourself doing a hard thing over and over again, you will become. You'll have that self efficacy. Like, I can do hard things. I am confident I can finish this thing.
A
I.
C
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 physicality, I think it's like the number one pillar. It's like the number one. If I was going to do one through five, that's like the first thing. Because it does open up all these other channels.
A
Yeah, it's a catalyst into everything else. I mean, I tell the story of a young man in the book. Throughout the book, there's all these stories of real people that I've interacted with and tell their stories and. 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 gonna use it. And he went one day and felt like shit from going. And he was like, all right, I'm gonna go another day. And he went the second day and then he went the third day. Then he kind of felt a little good. He felt a little sore from some of the workouts. So he went the fourth day and he went for 30 straight days. And at the end of the 30 days, he noticed he was getting dressed for work that day and his belt had gone a notch in from where it was. And the way he described it was that in that moment, he recognized that he had power, that he had control over the outcomes in his life. And that was something that he hadn't felt. He had felt completely powerless in his life. That was that feeling of feeling lost, feeling stuck. And the fitness was a catalyst because it proved to him that he actually did have that power to make an action, to create an outcome. And that had ripple effects into every other area of his life. And now today, he's inspiring millions of people. He's creating content. He's doing all of these incredible things. And it all started with this 30 day window and that tiny notch in his belt.
C
That's amazing. I love that story, actually. And I bet you when you were 30 and you were kind of like recalibrating your life and you gained all that weight, it's because you weren't working out. And then I bet you one of the first things you did was start working out again.
A
Yeah, I mean, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. I mean, you would like, 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.
C
And I can't imagine. You look at 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.
A
Didn't always look like 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.
C
But you were a baseball player.
B
You're an athlete.
C
You had to have.
A
I was very strong. No, I was very strong, but I was like. I was foot jacked, if you know what that means.
C
Like, fat jacked.
A
Yeah. We always used to talk about. The football guys at Stanford used to talk about having a shallow water body where like, they had like big traps and shoulders and chest, but their abs were like, disgusting. So you'd stand in shallow water and look really good. That always cracked me up. I was like, that's a pretty good. That's a pretty good term. I like that. The shallow water body. Yeah, you should write that down. Shallow water body. Okay, I'm gonna write it down sloppy. Lower abs, but pretty good up top.
C
I'm gonna use that. And then the other was fat jacked.
A
Yeah.
C
That is so hilarious.
A
Some good terms.
C
Oh, my God.
A
I'm just creating value. That's why I'm an author, you know, because I come up with these great, great ideas. Yeah, no, I. Fitness was definitely a huge catalyst in my life and, and refining a, like, just the simple things of walking every single day. I mean, we. I mentioned we were really struggling to conceive and that's something. I don't know. There's probably some listeners out there that have experienced this. It is, it's something that people don't talk about. You bottle it up and you internalize it because it feels like a stigma. And for women in particular, there's this Assumption of fault. And my wife carried that burden. And unfortunately, I was not there to either help or bear that burden myself. And frankly, in hindsight, I would argue that it was probably mostly me because I was not in any sort of health or shape or stress levels or all of these things that we now know impact fertility, to be there for her in the way that I needed to. And the most beautiful thing in all of this was made this big change. Sold her house, moved back to the east coast. Within two weeks of getting home, my wife got pregnant naturally. And wow, it was just this like unbelievable example. Whatever you believe in, God, energy, whatever it is, it was this unbelievable example of when energy comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And I remember so vividly coming home from the hospital after my son was born, pulling onto our street and we turned into our driveway and both of our sets of parents who lived in the area were there 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.
C
I love that. That's so nice. That's so sweet.
A
Very lucky.
C
I love that. Is your wife here in LA with you now or.
A
No, she's not here with me right now. She's back home with our son.
C
With your son. What's your son's name, by the way?
A
Roman. Foreign.
B
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C
And by the way, I didn't even ask you earlier, but what does your sister do now? I'm curious. You said she's. You're such. She's such a rock star. I don't even know what she does.
A
She's still a rock star. She. She's the CEO of a health care technology startup in the Boston area.
C
Oh.
A
She was a physics major at Yale and then went to Harvard Business School and now is a CEO. And you know, it's interesting. So my relationship.
C
Loser, right?
A
But my relationship with my sister is. I write about it and it's. It's one of the most beautiful things in all of this, frankly, has been the metamorphosis of that relationship. Because I spent 30 years of my life resenting my sister and feeling competitive and creating this dynamic with her that was fundamentally one of tension and one where, like, I couldn't get over the fact that she was achieving the things that I was supposed to be and that I resented that. And after my son was born, I so clearly remember this one moment, they came down to see him when he came back from the hospital and she. She has a son who is 11 months older than mine. It was her first. And we were together and we took a picture of the two of us holding our little boys and I looked at her and I remember this sensation that after 30 years of living together, it was like I was meeting my sister for the first time because we were, for the first time in our lives. Like we were in the same stage, we were in the same place in our lives. It was no longer this, like, competitive, know, resentment, all these things. We were just in it together. And it was this beautiful reminder to me that sometimes relationships blossom and bloom in a new season of your life when they haven't been in the past. And 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. Is really an amazing thing. It's like, it is really a reminder that there are people that, that are going to love you deeply that you have not even met yet.
C
That's so true. I. That this is what I think this is. Sorry. No, no, no. 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 and I'm like, wow, this is really deep. I really like this one. I'm. Then I'm going to 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 it. 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.
B
Yeah, that's, that's so true.
C
Or like, you know, like, I think that, you know that 10 year old think anyone who's a parent can relate to the fact that that happens or when, or when your parent is aging and you only have X amount of time to see them. Especially because my mom, she lives on the east coast and like I said.
B
Like that, I'm like, oh, wow, you're right.
C
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 going to start being a content creator. I'm going to start like building my Instagram. Like, where did it, how did it go from private equity guy living here to then, right? 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?
A
So I, I had started writing on Twitter originally about a year before we made the big change in our life. And that was I was stuck at home. Like, Covid, you live in California. Like, I was living in the Bay Area. The lockdowns happened. I was stuck at home. I was no longer commuting every single day. I was no longer traveling four days a week. I didn't have a social life because you weren't allowed to see anybody, right? And so I was like, I need something to do to fill the time. And I had always loved writing, but never had a public outlet for it at the time. I started writing these, 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.
C
Okay.
A
And by May of 2021, when that drink with the French happened, my Twitter platform had grown to maybe like a hundred thousand 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 going to go work at another investment fund.
C
Right.
A
Because that was all I knew. And like, I come from a very risk averse family.
C
Right.
A
You know, like, my dad's a tenured professor, like as risk averse a track as you can have.
C
What does he do? But what kind of professor though?
A
Economics and demography.
C
Oh, wow.
A
Okay. Yeah, so he was, he's been at Harvard for the last 20, 25 years. He was the chair of the Economics department at Columbia before that.
C
Bunch of dummies in your life.
A
I don't know how you can see, like how the expectations around academic orientation.
C
Totally. And you're also your mom's. As your dad Indian?
A
No, my dad's white. My dad is a white Jewish guy from the Bronx.
C
Oh, okay. Okay. By the way, that's hilarious. So I was going to say because I'm Jewish and the Indian culture. And the Jewish culture is so similar in the, in the academics and education.
A
Yes.
C
I'm thinking. But now I'm like, okay, well, at least you only have one Indian. You don't have. Maybe you have like a, a Protestant.
A
No, no, no, you have a Jew and an Indian. It was all. Yeah, it all, it all added up. Exactly, exactly. Oh my God. Yeah. No, but like, I thought I was just going to go work at another investment fund and I had no luck finding a new job on the East. Co 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. You know, I left. I had a great job in the Bay Area. I loved my, you know, colleagues. I loved the people I worked with. And for. I didn't like what I was doing. It wasn't a fit for me. But, like, I was able to pay the bills. So, like, in some ways it was good. I think I made a terrible mistake. And she just said to me, can't you just do the thing like you're doing on the weekend right now? Can't you just do that like, full time?
C
Yeah.
A
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 really see me, and she saw the energy I was getting from this new thing and knew that that was the path. And so while I was trying to do all this calculation and be all quantitative about how to make the next choice and doing this Stanford math around all of it, she just saw, like, oh, you're really energized by this thing. I can see your heart being pulled towards it. Why don't you go do. 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.
C
Absolutely not. And what's interesting, because you come from that background, but a lot of your thoughts and ideas are anti. Even your. I want to go through some of these. One of your things I saw is like, the anti to do list, right?
A
Yeah.
C
Yeah.
A
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.
C
Right.
A
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 and is just as important as knowing what I want to do.
C
So good. Yes. I love that.
A
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 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.
C
It's so true, because it's actually this idea, and I agree with that. People think somebody'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.
A
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.
C
Yeah. Deconstruct it.
A
Yeah. And there's a loneliness that comes in that, too, that I think often goes unsaid. That, like, when you are changing, when you are transforming, when you're living a different way, defining your priorities different from your surroundings, There is going to be a period of loneliness in doing that because you are no longer going to be well suited to your surroundings, your environment, the people that you felt aligned with. All of a sudden start feeling like they're speaking a different language. You almost, like, cannot communicate because that alignment no longer exists. And you haven't made enough progress to attract the new into your life. You haven't created those new relationships or had that texture with new people. And so there's a period where you feel alone on these journeys. And what provided solace to me in all of that was viewing that period of loneliness as a tax quote, unquote, on that personal transformation. Like a necessary thing that you have to pay, a burden that you have to endure in order to get the gold that's on the other side.
C
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 at 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.
B
Right.
C
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.
A
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 totally and don't see you for who you are. Like, being you can be in a crowded room, but if those people don't really know you, that is the loneliest feeling in the world. And the flip side of that is if you are around one person who truly sees you for who you are, you will never feel lonely.
Air Date: October 31, 2025
Host: Jennifer Cohen
Guest: Sahil Bloom
In this insightful episode, Jennifer Cohen sits down with Sahil Bloom—entrepreneur, author, and thought leader—to discuss the foundational role that physical wellbeing plays in unlocking success across mental, financial, and relational spheres. Sahil shares personal anecdotes, practical takeaways, and the deeper philosophies behind habits, confidence, and transformation, emphasizing how tangible routines can lead to profound life changes.
This episode richly explores the intersection of habits, physical health, and every other aspect of a fulfilling life. Sahil Bloom’s candid, thoughtful approach—combined with Jennifer Cohen’s energetic, empathetic hosting—delivers both motivating philosophy and actionable strategies. The episode’s core message is clear: investing in your physical “pillar” can catalyze confidence and unlock potential across every domain, but true growth demands both addition (new habits) and subtraction (letting go of limiting behaviors and relationships).
For anyone looking to recalibrate their life, this conversation is a treasure trove of inspiration and practical advice.