5 Harsh Truths About Wealth You Don't Want to Realize Too Late | Sahil Bloom

Welcome everyone. My guest today is the one and only Sahil Bloom. You are a young guy with a lot of wisdom. Sahil Bloom. Like Sah Bloom is a man of mental model and framework. Sahil is the founder, investor and New York Times bestselling author of the five types of wealth. We live in this like speed obsessed culture where everything is about doing things faster. It's Forbes 30 under 30, Forbes 40 under 40, raise this much money by this age, get this promotion, this title by this age. The reality is that life is about direction, not speed. We very rarely take the time to ask ourselves the question of what mountains we actually want to climb, what races run in life. In the case of your kids, there is a devastatingly short window of time during which you are your child's favorite person in the entire world. That recognition that you have this 10-year window, that recognition that 95% of the time you have with your kids is over by the time they turn 18. the Harvard study of adult development, they followed the lives of uh 2,000 plus people over the course of 85 plus years and they found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was cool. Welcome everyone. Sahil is the founder, investor, and New York Times bestselling author of the five types of wealth. Uh really excited to chat with him about uh the profound life lessons from this book. Uh it's great it's a great book and also how he built an audience of millions and a thriving b business. So welcome s thank you so much for having me. Yeah. All right man. Well so um I think this is a book that like especially like high achievers really need to read. So maybe you can start by giving us a brief intro what the five types of wealth are. Yeah, it's probably a book that I need to read. Uh which was probably the origin of it in the first place was like um you know self-s serving in some ways. Uh the idea of the book on a meta level is that we very rarely take the time to ask ourselves actually want to climb, what races we actually want to run in life. So often the things that we are pursuing, the things that we're doing, our definitions of success are fundamentally governed by what we've been told over and over again should matter to us throughout our life. uh we're indoctrinated slowly into this belief that what it means to be successful, to be wealthy uh is making money and achieving status, fancy things, etc. And the belief that I came to adopt uh over the years is that may be a part of building a wealthy and successful life uh but it is far from the only thing. Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing. Uh and that understanding really fundamentally changed the way that I wanted to approach my own life because it was the recognition that the scoreboard uh is fundamentally broken or at least incomplete. This idea that

money is the sole measure of your worth as a human being is uh is incorrect. And we need to measure more comprehensively for this broader set of things these pillars that contribute to living a good life. There are things that we all know in the back of our minds are important. Things like free time, like people, like having purpose, like health. Uh but we've never really had a way to place those on that life scoreboard and to think about them. And what you measure really does matter because the things that you can measure in life end up being the things that you focus on. They're the things that you take actions around, make decisions around, and make progress against. Uh and so that is the fundamental idea of the book is to say let's recraft the scoreboard so that we can actually make the right decisions, take the right actions and go build the life that we actually want rather than the one that we've been told. The five types of wealth that are sketched out in the book that comprise that new scoreboard are time wealth which is all about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it when you trade it for other things. It's about an awareness of time as your most precious asset. The second type is social wealth. This is about your relationships. The third type is about mental wealth. Uh this is all purpose. It's growth. It's creating space to actually wrestle with some of these bigger picture questions in your life. The fourth type is physical wealth, your health and vitality. And then the fifth type is financial wealth, which is uh money. Uh but with the specific nuance of really thinking about your definition of enough. Uh the recognition being that your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations grow faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. That's awesome. Yeah, because I like the point about me measuring because uh yeah, money is the easiest thing to me measure and compare yourself against other people, but like you know, you don't measure like how many hours I'm spending with my kids unless you really think about it. Yeah, it's very hard. And look, Peter Ducker, the famous management theorist, has a great line. He said, "What gets measured gets managed. " Uh, meaning for humans, the thing that we can measure ends up being focus on, the thing we optimize around, the thing we narrowly get obsessed with. And that's very true. You don't have to look much further than like someone puts on an aura ring or a sleep tracker and all of a sudden they're the most annoying sleep person in the world. They're like, "Oh no, I can't go out because I have to make sure my sleep score, whatever. " like they all of a sudden they get obsessed with the thing because they're measuring it. Uh that is the same for money. You know, we've become obsessed with it as a society. It has become the default measure of your entire life's worth with a single number. And unfortunately, it is not exclusively what makes a great life. It is a part, it is an enabler to many good things, but it is not in and of itself going to create a good life. You don't need to look far to find examples of people who have missed this lesson, who've missed the boat, right? Like people that have made hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars that we celebrate, we admire, we write books about that person, and we ignore the fact that they have three ex-wives and four kids that don't talk to them. And we celebrate that individual. We tell them that they won the game. And we all have to ask ourselves in our own lives, is that actually a game that I care to win? Because to me that is a pirick victory. That is winning the battle but losing the much bigger picture war. Yeah. It's like very common among like high achiever people. It happens a lot and like I'm curious what were some pivotal moments in your life that made you realize that this like hidonic treadmill wasn't the right thing to only focus on. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses use Vanta to build trust by automating compliance for indemand frameworks like SOCK 2, ISO2701, HIPPA, and more. And with automation AI throughout the platform, you can proactively manage vendor risk and complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, getting valuable time back. And not only saves you time, it also saves you money. A new IDC white paper found that Vanta customers achieve $535,000 per year in benefits. And the platform pays for itself in just 3 months. Go to vanta. com/pater to meet with a Vanta expert about your business needs. That's vanta. com/peter. I in my own life, what happened was I was pursuing the one thing. I was getting it uh and slowly seeing these other areas of my life start to fall apart. Um, it was a little bit like the boiling frog for me. Uh, which is this idea that if you drop a frog into boiling water, it'll immediately jump out. But if you put a frog into lukewarm water and slowly bring it to a boil, it'll stay in there until it dies. Uh, and the story, that lesson is basically to say that slow incremental changes often go unnoticed in our own lives. You don't wake up one day and decide you're going to ruin your life. It happens with these slow, steady, incremental changes that you were blind to. That was my journey. I mean I was like slowly seeing relationships suffer, drinking six, seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were suffering while on the surface I was doing great. I was really focused on money. things, on status, all of this stuff. And I was getting several of those things, but seeing these other areas of my life start to show cracks. And for me, it all came to a head with this one conversation I write about at

the very opening of the book that uh a close friend pointed out uh just how few moments I had left with my parents who were getting older. Uh at the rate I was currently at, living 3,000 miles away, only seeing them once a year, I only had 15 more times that I was going to see them before they were gone. And in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, had been incomplete and that we needed a dramatic reset to build our life, my wife and I, around the things that we actually cared about. Not were told we should care about, but the things that we truly did care about. Yeah. I think like living I mean living close to your parents and your close friends has like a dramatic impact on like personally on like my happiness you know and also just from a practical perspective like having them around to help the kids it helps a lot. Yeah, I mean I um I totally agree practically by the way. Um but just on a fundamental like happiness and meaning level, no single change has had a greater impact on our happiness and purpose in life than living within driving distance of our families. We moved 3,000 miles to make that happen. And uh I can't imagine a single intervention that has had a more positive impact on our lives. getting to see uh the joy that a grandchild brings to the grandparents and the life that it gives them in this later stage that in and of itself has been remarkable. Um but then on top of that just the memories, the moments, these things that you can never get back. Um it's just remarkable. Um and having had the privilege of being able to do that and make that change and figure out how to make it work from a life perspective, um I can't imagine a better change that we could have made. I I totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree. And um and you have this passage in your book called the life's razor. And I was kind of struck by how your life's razor is like uh I will coach my son's sports teams. Is it's not like you know I would build like a you know multi-million dollar business or something. So talk about that a little bit more. Yeah. I mean, the idea of the LifeRaer, um, the origin of that was a conversation I had, um, after seeing an essay written by Mark Randolph, who was the founder and first CEO of Netflix, and Mark talked about the fact that, um, he had this standing ritual throughout his technology career that he would leave work at 5:00 PM every Tuesday and have dinner with his wife. Um, and in reflecting on that, what I realized was it really didn't have that much to do with the dinner or with the practice or the date, any date in and of itself. Uh, it was really about what that implied about his identity and the ripples that created. That was how his ideal self showed up in the world and he was going to act on it. That idea uh of having this like simple rule of thumb, this simple statement that can kind of cut through the noise at different times in your life is really powerful. That is the lifer raiser concept that I talk about in the book, which is to say you can go say to yourself whenever any chaos strikes. What would the type of person who, in Mark's case, never misses a Tuesday date night, uh, do in this situation? Uh, you know, what would they prioritize? What would they think about? Because if that's how my ideal self shows up in the world, I should ask that question before I make big decisions. My version of it is that I will coach my son's sports teams. Um that is a vision of my ideal self. It is not as you point out that I will build billion-dollar companies or you know uh change the world in some dramatic fashion, make us an interplanetary species, whatever it might be. It is that I will have uh and build the relationship and have the freedom of time in order to coach my son's sports teams. That recognition is a real meta point about this entire book. Which is to say, you have been convinced your whole life, especially people that listen to this podcast, right? You have a lot of high achievers listening. Uh you have been told your whole life that the definition of you living a successful life is you going and building some billion dollar thing. Uh you going and creating some grand scale whatever it is. And that may be the right path for you. And if it is, and if that's what you want to go do, and you've really thought about it, you understand the trade-offs, and you want to go do that, I think that's amazing. I think that's fantastic. The world needs people like you to go and do that. But if it's not, then consenting to the path by default that you're going to go chase those things is a silly pursuit and it is not one that you need to make in order to build the life that you actually want. And so that is really what the book is about. It's about a call to action to ask yourself what you truly want. what is the life that you actually want to live and to then go take actions to build that life. Yeah. Because I think also as you get more successful, there's going to be more and more like career opportunities that come up that like basically uh take time away from coaching our son sports team, right? Like you can go travel the world or like do something. I mean I like right now, right? Like I uh constantly have inbound of interesting

things that on the surface are like shiny objects, right? it's oh this much money to go do this much go talk to this whatever the thing is and having that lens to say okay what would the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this situation if you came and offered me a job and you were like hey um sahill I'll pay you $100 million uh for the next 10 years um but you have to come you know 300 nights out of the year you're going to be on a plane and um you know you're going to be working on a whole bunch of stuff that you may or and not like and it's going to be all over the place doing all these things. Absolutely not. Like I cannot say no to something faster than uh than I would to that. And that sounds insane. Like you if you were to say that like five year ago self and offer that job I'm taking in a heartbeat because my entire measurement of my success in life was about money and so there's a whole lot of money. I'm just going to go do it. But I don't define my success around that anymore. I define it around this life razor and what it means to me. I mean, my like my definition of a wealthy life has changed. My entire life changed when I realized that I would never want to trade lives with the people that I read books about. My definition of a wealthy life is being able to take my son in the pool at 1 p. m. on a Tuesday. Uh, and I can't do that if I go take this uh, you know, hundred million dollar job that requires me to be away for 300 nights out of the year. I can do that right now. So, if I'm going to go chase some new thing, if you're going to offer me some new thing, it better damn well be amazingly connected to my purpose. It better be something that I'm going to be able to bring my family along for the journey around. It better allow me to pursue things that I really, really care about. It has to be grounded in something more important to me than just incremental money. I love that, man. Like, I love that you like most people don't realize this until they're like, you know, it's too late. like they're like in retirement age, but like the fact that you realize this now you're sharing this advice in the book is great. Yeah. My hope is that uh my recognition of it is uh empowering to someone else out there that's sort of teetering on that edge and that they feel empowered to then say the same thing for themselves. And again, if you do want to make that trade and you want to go chase the big opportunity, I think that's great, too. The point is that you get to decide. Uh, and you we need to stop just accepting by default the things other people have told us. Um, and that really is what I want that's really what I want people to take away from uh the book when they walk away from it is just to say that like you actually get to choose the races that you run and what social media tells you, what anyone else tells you, you don't need to consent to. I mean, we live in this like speed obsessed culture where everything is about doing things faster. It's Forbes 30 under 30, Forbes 40 under 40, raise this much money by this age, get this promotion, this title by this age. The reality is that life is about direction, not speed. It's much better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one. But that requires you to stop, pause, and ask the question of whether or not you are climbing the right mountain. Whether you actually want to be on the mountain that you're on, or whether it's one that you've just accepted by default. And that recognition removes 99% of the insecurity you experience in your own life. I mean like I uh have been blown away by the amount of insecurity that you see in the highest you know highest richest most successful people in the world. Like what I mean some of these people you see the things that they're doing on a daily basis and you're like you are so rich you are so successful. Why are you so insecure? Why are you doing these weird things to try to impress random people on the internet? Like why are you trying to get likes by dunking on people? Just let like what is making you so insecure? And it's because you're playing someone else's game. You're not

comfortable with where you are. You haven't appreciated that you uh you can actually build the life that you want. It removes all insecurity once you realize that like you are playing a game that is just against you. It's an N of one on the journey. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know high achievers become good at like you know uh acing test and like playing the corporate game and like doing all this stuff right so it's very natural to just keep playing that game without thinking about it. Yeah. And insecurity can be a positive driver to some extent, right? Like I think um for someone who decides to be a world changer that wants to go build, you know, create an interplanetary species like Elon Musk, right? Like create an interplanetary species, uh I think his insecurity in whatever way drives him significantly to create these world changing companies. So in some ways I'm very grateful for his insecurity because I think that like that will contribute to the progress of humanity. um uh you know in whatever way uh that it's able to and so I do think that throughout history you find examples of people who are very insecure that create dramatic worldchanging innovations and uh the world needs some of those crazy ones and some of those people uh but you don't have to be one of them. You can opt out of that path. Yeah. I mean it's kind of nice that someone's sacrificing you know Yeah. their marriages to do this for for us, right? So it's kind Absolutely. Yeah. We I like we all benefit from that. So yeah, I cannot be moaning it. I just don't want to be it.

So let's talk about I want to talk about time wealth. I think that's like the thing that I actually think as I grow older I find more and more valuable, right? Like I guess you can't really like I guess if you're like unemployed, not like you know just smoking some marijuana, you can have a lot of time wealth, but like but it's hard to balance the time wealth with actual being productive. So I actually want to show this thing that you had in your book. Uh sorry this is not should be higher resolution but like these six charts right I I think are kind of like a eye openener for a lot of people and um I want to point out one thing which is like uh we actually don't have as much time with our kids as we think we do like um I think you had a line in your book saying like for 10 years you're a child's favorite person and then they kind of like rather hang out with someone else other than their lame dad. Yeah. But these same 10 years are also when the problem is these same 10 years, dude, are also when like your peak work hours are. So like you're going through this right now, right? Like you have a young child. Like how do you balance these two things? I think that fundamentally um there's two pieces here. There is awareness and then action. Awareness is the recognition that in the case of your kids, there is a devastatingly short window of time during which you are your child's favorite person in the entire world. That recognition that you have this 10-year window. That recognition that 95% of the time you have with your kids is over by the time they turn 18. 75% 12. It is shocking and terrifying to think about, especially when you're in it like I am right now. I have a three-year-old uh who I find annoying at certain times and I want to like, you know, tear my hair out when he's jumping all over the place, but then I have to remind myself I'm going to miss this. There's going to be a moment in time when I wish I could come back and live this. And so, you are balancing that awareness, that understanding with, okay, what is the action that I can actually take against that in the context of my life? Because look, I need to provide for my family. I need to make money. I can't just sit here and play with him all day. Uh and also that is not going to serve him as a human being to see his dad to see his mom just sitting with him all day playing. He needs to understand the value of hard work, the value of delayed gratification. I can't teach him those things. I just have to embody those things and he will learn them. And so the way that I have wrestled with this personally on my own journey is based on that fact that he needs to actually learn by seeing the things that I embody as a human. What that means is that this whole concept of work life balance needs to be thrown out the window. Balance implies that the two are opposed and are pulling against each other. I believe in this idea of work life harmony that the two are actually part of the same thing that my wife my son are a part of the mission that we are on as a family to go and create this life that we want for ourselves. And for my son to understand why I am doing the things I'm doing, why I'm working hard on the things that I'm working hard on, why they matter for that mission, that he is a part of that. That is how I wrestle with this tension that exists between presence and ambition. It is uh this understanding that um he is a part of that and he should know when I'm traveling, when I'm working hard on things, he should understand. Whether or not he perfectly understands it is beside the point, but he should understand that it's important and that there is a why behind this that he is a part of. Yeah, I think it's a tough balance because yeah, you want to have them see you working hard. Uh but I think from like a from a pure tactical perspective, I try to make sure that when I do spend time with my daughters that like I put the phone away and it's surprisingly hard to do, but like very hard to do. Yeah, it's very hard to do, but like at least a couple hours every day, I try to actually spend quality time with them. Yeah. I mean, that is um that is grounded in this realization that time and energy are not the same thing. Um that an hour of time with someone when you have your phone out in front of you texting or doing social media is worth far less than five minutes of truly present energy when there was no distractions and you were just with them. And that is an empowering unlock because what it means is that even the person, the parent who is working a job or two jobs that requires them to get home late and they really only have a few minutes, they have 15 minutes, 30 minutes for bath time and then putting the kid to bed, you can make the absolute most of that window. And frankly, that can be way more valuable than the parent who's sitting around all day with their kid, but they're, you know, on their phone the whole time and distracted. uh you get to make the most of the time that you do have by making sure that your energy is actually deployed in a really concentrated manner into it and um like you also have to make some sacrifices, right, to make this happen to because at the end of the day you only have like 25 hours in a day and you got to balance your career stuff with the family and um uh I think you wake up at like 5 a. m. or something. I wake up at 4. Uh, and that's the main reason is to just try to like uh, you know, find these hours. You get you know it takes from somewhere and goes to the other place, right? Like I still need to sleep sevenish hours a night. Um, so I just go to bed really early. Um, but I do find that like the morning hours for me are pretty sacred because it's before my son wakes up. So, it's um you know, I get like a good three-hour window of focus work on whatever it is that I'm prioritizing uh during that early morning time. That's impressive, man. That's you wake up at 4 a. m. So, it's like all dark and your family's asleep and then you work till like 7 or uh Yeah, normally like I'll do like from 4:00 to 4:30 I'm kind of like waking up like I'll do my cold plunge and stuff and then 4:30 to 7:30 I'm usually like working on something kind of like uh you know, whatever the priority is. Okay. I I've tried doing that too, but like I just end up like feeling pretty brain dead at like, you know, 6 PM or something. Yeah, I am brain dead by 6 PM for sure. And I go to bed at like, you know, 8 8:30. Um, but I just, you know, it's finding the thing that works for you. Like anyone that tells you, oh, here's what you have to do again to be like to have a good daily routine. You have to wake up early. You have to do this. You got to find what works for your natural energy flows. I am most creative first thing in the morning. I've always been a morning person. I have friends who work best at 10 p. m. at night and so like they should probably try to create a structure that works for that. Um, but I think it's just finding your balance in whatever way. But dude, like here's a hard question. Like have you managed to convince your wife to have the same schedule or Yeah, my wife has a very sim I mean she doesn't wake up at 4, but she goes to bed early. Um, she wakes up more like probably I don't know 5:30 or 6. Um I uh yeah, but we've always kind of been aligned on like the like structure of our life. Like back before we had kids, when we lived in the Bay Area, uh she would get up with me and go to the gym at 4:45 in the morning uh in Palo Alto. So we've always sort of uh we've been aligned on the big picture around that stuff. Yeah, I gotta be more pursuive with my wife. It's awesome. It's all I would just uh in general say caution against ever trying to force anyone else into a schedule that you have around these things. Uh you got to find what works. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about some of the other let's talk about social wealth. Uh you know as someone with like uh you know over a million followers I love how your big question is about who will be sitting in the front row of your funeral. Right? That's your big question. So it's not about social media. It's actually about having good friendships. Is that what social wealth is? Yeah. I social wealth, social media is almost antisocial wealth in a lot of ways, which is funny. Um, and it's, you know, especially funny coming from someone who, you know, big part of my work is social media. Um, I, um, I really think about social wealth as being about the few close deep

connections, those front row people, the people in the front row at your funeral. Uh and then your looser connections to sort of circles that extend beyond the self. Uh local, regional, spiritual, you know, etc. communities that uh allow you to feel some sort of connection to something that extends beyond just you. Um social wealth is fundamentally what creates a happy healthy life. There is a lot of clear science around this that um you know social connection uh is the single greatest predictor of uh of a long life. The Harvard study of adult development they followed the lives of uh 2,000 plus people over the course of 85 plus years. And they found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It wasn't smoking or drinking habits. It wasn't uh blood pressure or cholesterol levels. It was how you felt about your relationships that contributed to your life. Uh and yet social relationships and connections are the first thing that fall by the wayside when we get busy. We stop investing them in them. We don't think about them as investments. When in reality, your social connection, your relationships are the single greatest investment that you can really make in this regard. They compound the same way as any financial investment. Yeah, that's a very good point. that that's why it's so important to like you know like who you marry is the most important decision in your life right yeah but um what what about social wealth beyond your family like I feel like a lot of people who are like middle-aged they uh with kids like they kind of lose touch with their friends or like they have they struggle to make new friends uh have you managed to get around some of this stuff or any um no one teaches you how to make friends as an adult uh so it's kind of funny like when you're a kid you're Yes, you're in these institutions like in school or university or wherever where you're kind of forced to make friends. Uh once you're an adult, no one really teaches you. So unless you're part of a religious community where you might make friends or unless you make friends at work, no one's really teaching you how to make friends outside of that. I've always been a proponent of this idea of like placing yourself into rooms where they're going to be a high density of value mind like similar value-minded people. So, if you're really into health, uh, delayed gratification, wellness, place yourself in rooms where there's going to be a lot of other people that have those same sh similar shared values. Gyms, farmers markets, you know, hiking trails, etc. Um, if you're into art and you're into creative works, like go to gallery openings, go to book clubs, go like, you know, there are ways that you can place yourself into rooms where you are more likely to find other people that have those similar shared values. uh and you'll find a lot of value on the other side. And have you done that like locally or because you know I have made friends through like Twitter but yeah have you done that uh yeah I do it all the time locally. I mean my closest friends that I live around are all people I met at the gym. uh you know like I um make friends at the gym like some of my closest friends in my entire life are friends that I met through the gym running you know like people still like I get you know I post runs and things like that on Instagram all the time almost every day I get messages from people saying like oh I'd love to come out for a run sometime I have people you know multiple times a week come out and just join me for a run some of those people end up being like real friends that I end up spending more time with connecting with um because it's you know a shared value. Yeah, I need to like work out more with other people instead of like in my garage. That's what I need to do. Yeah, it's a good point. Um, okay. So, let let's uh wrap up by talking about financial wealth. Uh, you know, I think our big question here is like what's definition of enough, which we kind of talked about already, right? But like um I really think that this idea of enough is best encapsulated by that story of the banker and the fisherman. Um, You know, there's this story of an investment banker goes down and visits a Mexican fishing village and he uh comes across this rundown fishing boat with a few fish in it and he asks the fisherman, "How long did it take you to catch those fish? " The fisherman says, "Only a little while. " The banker says, "Why didn't you fish for longer? " The fisherman says, "Well, I have everything I need. " In the morning, I fish for a little while. Then in the afternoon, I have lunch with my wife. Then I take a nap. Then I go into town. in the evening, play music, drink wine, and laugh with my friends. And the banker is like, "You got this all wrong. Here's what you got to do. You got to fish for longer so you can catch more fish. Then you use the money to buy a second boat. Then that boat fishes. You buy a third boat, a fourth boat, a fifth boat. You move to the big city. You take your whole fishing enterprise public and you're going to make millions. " And the fisherman says, "And then what? " And the banker says, "And then what? Then you can retire and move to a small fishing town. You can fish for a little while in the morning. Then in the afternoon, you can have lunch with your wife, take a nap, and then in the evening you can go into town, drink wine, play music, and laugh with your friends. The fisherman just smiles and walks off into the distance. That story is traditionally interpreted as being about the banker being wrong and the fisherman being right. But it's actually more nuanced than that in my view. It is about the fact that the two have a fundamentally different definition of what it means to have enough. The banker's definition of enough might be building something big, having this huge enterprise, creating jobs, chasing his purpose, doing all of these things. That's great. But for him to apply his map of reality to the fisherman's terrain makes no sense. The fisherman is already living his definition of enough. And yet, that is what we do on a daily basis. When we take out our phones and compare our lives, compare our terrain to other people's maps of reality. We are allowing reality to impact how we feel about our terrain. That is what we need to escape. It is the recognition that you get to decide what your version of enough looks like, what the pursuits are that you actually want to engage in and you can build your life accordingly. And also like your life goals and like what's enough can also change like you have this concept of like stages of your life or seasons of your life, right? I feel like some people think like if they give up on a goal or like they change their goal, they're like kind of like giving up or like, you know, failing. But like people's priorities change, man, like as they get older, you know. Yeah. I think that um that concept that seasons bring different focuses, different uh priorities is really central to how you think about navigating your life. Uh it's a recognition that what you focus on or prioritize during any one season will change. You are not constrained by what you focused on in a prior season, nor do you need to stress about what you may focus on in a future season. Um you can just focus and be with the one wave that you're currently on. And and let's talk about um your seasons of your life. Uh so you know, you started as in like the finance industry, right? So let's skip that part. So you decided to leave finance and chart your own path and you know my newsletter is called the creator economy. So I would love to learn about your creator journey. Um I think you started by just like trying to

get more followers but then you shifted kind of your business. So maybe can you talk a little bit about that or Yeah. My fundamental belief um is that commerce follows trust. That is my entire mental model for everything that I've done over the last few years. That was the recognition that I had when I first started doing it is that commerce follows trust. If you go back 50 years, trust was concentrated in the hands of a handful of big companies, the big conglomerates, PNG, Johnson and Johnson, you know, these enormous companies. They owned the airwaves, they owned radio, they owned magazine ads, everything. So they built trust through that and then they built commerce on top of that. So they were able to sell you all of these things. Fast forward to today and track the arrow of progress. What you have is a world where trust is rapidly decentralizing into the hands of individuals where you can go and build trust and then commerce can be built on top of that. But the atomic variable is trust. It is not followers, it's not views, it's not likes, it's not any of those vanity metrics. It is trust. And so my fundamental belief from the get-go was that I had to build trust and then different layers of commerce could slowly be layered on top of that in whatever way that we might envision. I might not know what 10 of those ways are right now, but eventually we'll be able to do that as long as the trust is truly at the center of that. So my entire pursuit from the get-go was I want to build trust. That means I'm not going to do the growth hacky things. uh you know write about 12 Chrome extensions that'll change your life or uh you know here's yeah seven AI tools that should be illegal or 99% of people suck at using AI. Here's how you can do it better. I never did that. Uh because I think that that's a those are cheap followers that don't actually know anything about you. They don't know who you are. They don't relate to you. They don't find you authentic. They're just coming for this one hacky thing that you did. I would much rather take the slow path to building the real trust and then build commerce on top of it. So I did that. I mean I've pursued basically what has been slow and steady growth across every platform. The numbers now look large because I've been doing it for five years almost showing up every single day. I mean I've written 500,000 plus words. I've written, you know, at least two newsletters a week every single week since I launched the newsletter four years ago. like it is just um everyone likes to talk about consistency. Very few people will actually do it. I have built that trust and now along that journey I've been able to think about different ways to layer commerce on top of that either directly in the context of the book uh where I'm actually going to then go try to sell you something and that has been successful. um or indirectly where we've launched businesses, partnered with people where it is things that I either use like in the context of my newsletter agency uh or products that I'm really going to you know sort of be embracing in my day-to-day life uh that I would be able to just naturally and organically talk about because they are integrated into who I am. Um but that model of commerce following trust is how I think everyone that is in the creator world should really think about this. It is a longer term play. you're not going to go take every single brand deal that comes your way because that would actually uh potentially harm the long-term trust that you're creating. Uh and so it's slower going. You have to be willing to embrace uncertainty. But my fundamental belief is that it is a much better, more durable long-term play. And uh when you say trust, is it basically like you know who you are as a person, what your values are? Like a lot of the stuff you're sharing is like evergreen, right? It's not like whatever is hot right now. So yeah, people need to believe that they can turn to you for information, value, education, uh entertainment, and that they really know you. Like they're coming for you and who you are and what you're about. Uh that is what trust is really about. Uh it is um yeah, they can't just go get that from 20 other places. That's actually a really good point. Like uh I was making fun of some AI influencers the other day and uh you know when I see a tweet with like whatever 4,000 likes about like you know this AI thing just launched or like you know rip some profession like sure it went viral but I don't actually care who the person who posted it is. No, it could have been anyone. a 16-year-old kid. And I I've said that now to my team over and over again because right now we're trying to figure out YouTube. We're like starting to experiment. We're trying to figure it out. And there's all sorts of videos that we know would really like take off and go viral. I might get a bunch of subscribers from them. I could go make these videos. They would do really well. Um, but my lens that I view all these things through is could a 22-year-old kid with zero experience, zero of the things that I have done and actually created in my life make this exact same video? And if the answer is yes, we shouldn't be making it because that does that is not going to engender actual trust. um that is going to just be it's a hack. You're playing a short-term game. You're trying to hack the system versus trying to create something real and of value that is unique to you. Yeah. Because especially YouTube, man, I'm kind of like YouTube like the thumbnail stuff like you just put a big D number up there or like make some crazy claim and then you get clicks. It's kind of sad. Oh, I mean it's uh and the whole thing's a joke, right? Like I uh it's unfortunate uh to be honest, but there's like I know if I did a video that was like, you know, here are 12 ways to make $10 million passive income by next year. I like I bet you I could get a hundred thund like it just I could do it. I could write the copy. We could say a bunch of things, but it's I don't care. I don't believe in it. Uh and it's not what I'm about. And so, uh, you're fighting this thing of like the algorithm is pulling you one way as a creator, and you need to decide, are you going to take a stand and be, uh, true to yourself and try to build that trust over the long term, play the long-term game, or are you going to chase the short-term dopamine hit in the short-term instant gratification game. Uh, and very few people are willing to play the long-term game. Uh, and if you are, the long-term rewards are going to be there for you. Um, and I would argue that it is much better uh, in terms of the actual social good that you create as well. Yeah, that's really good advice because yeah, the algorithm is always pulling me towards more clickbait stuff. I have to watch myself. Yeah, Twitter's the same way too, right? Like, you know, you get the most likes on the like dunking on someone's life or the, you know, like little silly thing that you put out versus the thing that you actually put thought and care into. And so you constantly are in this fight of well I want the thing that's going to give me the dopamine hit versus the thing that I really feel good about. You're trying to balance it and figure out um you know where do you sit on the spectrum there. Yeah. And um last question like so going back to time wealth uh you know as a creator entrepreneur do you have any advice for

like um figuring out what to do yourself versus dedicate and also to like you know hire good people like that that's something that I think I struggle with. I would generally follow your energy around it. So if you were kind of map out what are the tasks within your ecosystem that um uh you get a lot of energy from versus drain your energy and you want to find ways to delegate the things that drain energy and focus that unlock on the things that create energy that is what I've done. I get a lot of energy from the actual creation work writing creating things etc. I get no energy, massively energy draining, uh, on any of the back-end business, logistics, all of that stuff. I happen to have hired and built a team where we complement each other very well. They get energy from those things that drain mine. And so, we've made this great team around that. But at the simplest level, that's what you're trying to do. Now, with AI, you know, I think like a few years in the future, maybe not even a few years, maybe a few months in the future, we'll be able to build AI agents that you can delegate a lot of these automated, energy draining tasks to. um you know and build out a better creator ecosystem doing that. I think someone will build an interesting business specifically creating AI agents for creators um because that's a very different thing than AI agents for businesses. There's probably like a few specific use cases of AI agents for creators that you could create one and then sort of just license it out to people to use. Um so there's probably actually an interesting opportunity there. But like how about in terms of actual like I totally agree on the AI stuff, but how about in terms of actual people? like do you have a few people that you work with long term and how did you find and ramp these people up like that? Yeah, I have a president chief of staff that is kind of my main person uh oversees everything. I met him originally through Twitter. We were like both writing on Twitter in 2020 2021. We became friends. We're close. Um and then he had left his job then he was going to end up going back to his job. Um and I just hired him away from doing that. And he's been with me now for I don't know three four years. We've been working together on different capacities. Um and uh he's kind of the main person and then we've built out a team under him that does a whole bunch of different functions whether it's you know video uh you know there's editors there's researchers there's you know sort of different things in all those areas and for me what it is it has just unlocked me to spend all of my time on the actual creation of things that I want to create. So that's writing the newsletter writing the book you know all my content for social media is written or created by me. Um, I don't let other people create things and then go post them. I don't do ghost writers. Uh, yeah. Partially because my face is on everything and I don't trust anyone else. Uh, w with that. Uh, and then partially because that's actually what I enjoy doing. Um, so I'm just going to go create it. Okay. So, I guess it's about finding those long entrepreneurships like not be too stingy and just like building those uh friendships and partnerships. That's what we got to do. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. All right, man. So, uh, where can people find your book and uh, what are you going to do next? I gonna write another book or have another kid? Can I do both? Can I write a book and have a kid? Uh yeah, probably both ideally. Um no, I uh you could find the book on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. The five types of wealth uh is the title. Uh hard cover is the authorized version in the US. And um I think you'll love it. I would love to hear from people. Um send me an email sahillsahillbloom. com uh or DM me on any of the platforms. And uh look forward to hearing from you. Yeah, let me give you some advice about having another kid, man. Just to wrap this up. Like people say like uh when you have another kid, like they can play with each other. Like, you know, it's like they're like angels, but no, man. Like they fight like 90% of the time. So, just get ready for it for that. I'm ready for it. You're ready for it? Cool. All right, dude. Well, really good at connecting. I love your book and uh I can highly recommend to anyone who wants to um Yeah. who wants to just like measure wealth and happiness, not just by how much money they have. So, thank you so much for your support. Thanks so much. All right.