#129 Sahil Bloom | The 5 Types of Wealth

🔹 What if you won the money game—only to realize you were losing at life?
🔹 Why do so many high achievers chase a “broken scoreboard” of success?
🔹 How did a single conversation shatter Sahil Bloom’s definition of wealth?

💡 In this episode, we dive deep into the Faustian bargain of modern success.

Sahil Bloom knows this dilemma firsthand. A Stanford graduate who climbed the ladder of finance and venture capital, Sahil had the perfect life on paper. But then, a seemingly casual chat with a friend revealed a hard truth—he had been measuring wealth all wrong.

Now, with over a million followers and a transformative new book, The 5 Types of Wealth, Sahil shares his journey from chasing dollars to designing a life rich in purpose, relationships, and well-being. In this candid conversation, we unpack:

🔥 The mindset shift that rewired Sahil’s approach to wealth
🔥 Why financial success alone won’t bring happiness (and what will)
🔥 The powerful framework that will redefine how you measure a life well-lived

If you’ve ever felt like you’re living to work instead of working to live, this episode is your wake-up call. Tune in for an insightful, heartfelt, and life-changing discussion.

🎧 Listen now and start designing your own version of a truly wealthy life.

Resource Guide:

• Follow Sahil Bloom on Twitter: Stay updated with Sahil's latest insights and musings on Twitter.

Explore The 5 Types of Wealth Book: Discover Sahil's transformative guide to redefining wealth in his book, The 5 Types of Wealth.

Find out your financial skill score
Do you have the money skills to fund your goals? Take the 4 minute quiz here
🔗 https://financialskill.scoreapp.com/

Join our podcast community
Get live updates, talk shop with us and meet like minded legends in our digital treehouse. Click here to get access now.
🔗 https://www.facebook.com/groups/4609737389252111

Other links 👇

Money mentorship:
Click here to start putting what you've been learning into practice.
🔗 https://www.cashflowco.com.au/mentorship

Transcript

Terry: 0:29

G'day Legend, and happy Sunday if you're listening to this on the day that I publish it. Hey, do me a favor and just cast your mind back for a moment and remember when Lance Armstrong was one of the poster boys for What's Possible. He was at the top of his sport, wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, and famous the world over. But his house of cards came crashing down once it became clear that he'd presided over one of the most sophisticated doping schemes in history of sport. Armstrong's story is a classic example of what is known as the Faustian bargain Now this cautionary tale is rooted in German folklore about a man named Faust. And he makes his pact with the devil. Faust was restless and dissatisfied with ordinary life and the limits of human knowledge. He wanted to break past the usual boundaries of learning and religion, and he just had this boundless ambition and curiosity. He wasn't content to just read books. He wanted forbidden knowledge and he wanted abilities beyond a normal scholar's reach. And then he had this kind of moment in time where the devil, Promised Faust everything he craved, power, knowledge, and worldly pleasures in exchange for his soul. And at first it seemed like he gets everything he wants. He gets fame, he gets abilities, he gets success. But the catch is the price, and the price is huge. He ultimately loses his moral compass, his peace of mind, and his soul. And this story is a timeless warning about life's choices. And what it's saying is that in every trade that we make, every decision we make of our life, the price is what we pay, but the value is what we get. But when it comes to life, we always must be sure that the value of what we're doing exceeds the price of what we're doing. And we should never compromise our core values to make that deal. And to accurately evaluate any deal, any decision in life, we have to look beyond our first order consequence to see how things are going to play out over time. And this story, this Faustian Bargain story as an example, this has been retold time and time again throughout history. If you haven't read the classic book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, this is an excellent example. Awesome illustrative example of this Faustian bargain and where it actually leads us. The TV show Breaking Bad is another fantastic example of the Faustian bargain and where it ends up. And believe it or not, the little mermaid is another illustrative example where she trades her voice for the one that she loves most. Now, where am I going with this? In this episode, I'm going to be introducing you to somebody who realized that he'd made the Faustian bargain with his life. He was chasing what he called a broken scoreboard of success. Sahil Bloom won the money game only to realize that the game of life was slipping by and time was running out. And Sahil had what might look like the dream life. He was a Stanford graduate, and he graduated to later work in finance and venture capital, and he had it all on paper. But a chance conversation with a friend changed everything And he realized that his definition of wealth was warped and it was likely going to lead him to misery. So he set about re imagining what a rich life could look like for him. He started sharing his insights and he quickly became the new Tim Ferriss of Twitter or X as they call it now. And he's amassed an audience of well over a million followers. Now he's codified his philosophy in his new book, Five Types of Wealth. And in this conversation, Sahil and I get into the weeds on how this book came about, and dig into some of the big ideas and some of the best tools he's come across for winning the game of life. When it comes to personal finance, I burned out on reading these books a while back because most of them are just predicated on the same faulty assumption, which is more money equals less stress equals better life. But this book's entirely different. It presents a much broader, much more nuanced view of a life well lived, and I'm here for it. If you're feeling a little bit like you're living to work and not working to live, I know you're going to take a lot out of this conversation, and I highly recommend grabbing a copy of this book. I hope you enjoy Sahil Bloom, mate, welcome to the Money Minded Podcast. Absolute pleasure to have you on. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. You know, I probably get two to three solicitations each week around folks that want to come on the podcast and that sort of thing. And yours is the first ever that I can say I was like, yes, let's make this happen because I've been reading your work for a few years, know of your story a little bit. And, uh, I didn't even know that you were publishing a book. And so when you sort of sent this through and said, Hey, I'm going to be publishing a book. I'm going to send it through to you. I was like, let's, let's do it. And, um, Matt, I have to say like amazing job on this book. Oh, thank you. That means the world to me. And clearly I need to do a better job marketing, uh, if, uh, if you hadn't known that I was publishing one before. Well, I don't know, like I don't go on Twitter that much and I know that's your main platform. I'm a little bit more, I guess, LinkedIn centric. So. I wouldn't say that I'm like up to date with everything, but I've read a lot of your work and listened to a few, interviews and things like that. So, maybe not like the most current, but in terms of the timeless stuff, I'm across it. I appreciate it. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to chat more about it. And, uh, and look three, three years of my heart and, uh, and time and life went into this. So I'm just, I'm thrilled to be able to finally share it with the world. And I was just telling you off air, I expected to kind of jump into this and get through it over a couple of weeks. But what ended up happening was, I picked it up on a day that was pretty flexible, and I cleared the rest of my day after I finished the first chapter, and I read it in 24 hours. And it's not, it's not a, it's not a short book, is it? Not a short book. I'm impressed. Which is, that's so rare. I've read a lot of books. I'm probably someone that reads a lot, and You know, if you're going to put something out today, it's got to be bloody good and I reckon you've, you've, you've definitely passed that bar and there's a few things that stuck out to me and I really want to dive into how you come about this and how we structured it because I want to understand this because you did such a good job. A few things that stood out for me is you have this really nice blend of philosophical, you know, really kind of. Bringing these abstract ideas, but then slowly bringing them down to concrete actions that you could take towards the end of each chapter so that by the time you finished, it felt like, oh, there's things I can do and there's things I can do right now. And that gave me a sense of inspiration, hope, momentum, confidence, everything was evidence based and something that I think is. It's super distinct and really easy to go the other way, but you didn't do this. It's easy to make people want to do things by feeling bad for what they're not doing, but you figure out how to make the reader feel less bad about the changes. And that's actually your mate from dollars and data, Nick McGee, he kind of, he put a post out about that recently and I was reading your book and thinking you've nailed this part of it because there's two ways to motivate people, right? There's a sort of an away from energy and there's a toward energy. And there's something about this book that's very toward, how would you put your finger on how you made that happen? Yeah, well I appreciate all the, all the words and um, I think you nailed it in a lot of ways. I um, when I set out to write the book and uh, even in the proposal and in the deal process around signing the deal. I sort of thought it was going to be a more traditional nonfiction book in that I thought it would end up being, you know, sort of a lot of like frameworks and then a few tactics around it and kind of sprinkle in the dopamine hits, like how you think of a traditional self help book, if you will. And I mentioned this to you off air, but what happened during the course was surprising to me in that it became. A much more heart forward, storytelling forward, human experience driven book. And the reason that happened was because the stuff that I was putting out into the world during the writing process while I was writing my newsletter, different things on social media, they were like magnets in attracting interesting human stories into my life. So people were reaching out to me as I would share things about my own journey, about things I was struggling with, telling me their stories. And when I started leaning into those and I started hearing those stories, I realized that this book, The Five Types of Wealth, it's not just a framework or a mental model for thinking about your life. It's about the human experience. It's about how we measure our lives and the questions that we all need to ask in order to come to our own answers. So the whole book is really framed around that. It's really framed around questions. And the reason I think that's important is because most self help, self improvement category books, most non fiction books, are all about forcing an answer down your throat. They tell you this is the one way that you have to live, this is the one way you have to work out, this is the one way you have to eat, how you have to make money, whatever. And I am not doing that at all. I'm actually doing the opposite. I'm here to tell you that I do not have the answers for your life. And that sounds like a crazy thing to say, but it's important because what I am here to do is help you ask the right questions. And if I can help you ask the right questions, if I can help you wrestle with them, if I can help you connect with those questions through human stories, through these ideas, you can come to the right answers for your life. And that is the journey I'm trying to take people on with this book. That's the reason for the structure and how it flows is that I want to bring people on that journey. The one that I went on of asking better questions. And I think if you do that, you can really see that change in your life. Those questions at the start of each chapter, they really are the big question. And it, if you, if you really do stop, like you can just stop on it for a second and really think about it. And it's, it's such a good way to start because it gets instantly, just click your finger, boom, you're, you're really, I guess, in the right frame to think about what you're going to cover. And then you go through the philosophy and sort of, I guess, the how to think part of it. And repeatedly you're stating at the bottom. This is what I love. This is a guide at the end here. You don't have to do any of this pick and choose from this what you want. And I think that's, that was the, the cool part that I liked. It's like, here's how I think about it. Here's how you could think about it. Here's a few things that I think are important. Here are some tactics, pick and choose from what you, from what you like, and it went from like clouds to dirt really seamlessly with each chapter. And it all kind of linked in so well. And like philosophically, I couldn't agree more. The message of this whole podcast for the whole, from our whole period of time is like wealth isn't money and money isn't wealth. Wealth is having more of what you value. Money is just how we measure and move value. And you touched on it at the start of this book, you talked about the broken scoreboard. That's what I want to jump into now. Can you say a bit more about that? The moment where you realized that the scoreboard was broken for you? So a lot of this book is around this idea of how you measure your life. And I talk about this in the prologue that What you measure matters, because the thing that you measure ends up being the thing that you focus on. It's the thing you optimize around and myself, my own journey and the challenges that I started running into, it was all driven around this myopic, narrow focus on measuring my success, my worth, my life around money, and that is The default measurement for our lives. It's what we all blindly walk into because money is so easily measured. It is such a simple way to measure your worth in the world. It's your, it's your net worth. It's a single number that you can place. And what happened to me was that. I played that game. That was my scoreboard was money and what I thought was if I keep making more and more, I'll eventually feel good internally. If I keep getting more external affirmations of people think I'm successful one day, I'll wake up and feel successful and I ignored the fact that so many other areas within me. And around me, we're starting to crumble on that journey. My health was suffering, uh, from a lack of activity, drinking too much. My mental health was in a bad place. Uh, my relationships, most importantly, with my wife, with my parents, with my sister, were struggling from a lack of presence, from being so far away from home. All of these other areas of my life were starting to show cracks. But on the outside, looking in, I was winning the game. Like I was making more and more money. I was getting promoted. Things were good. And I started to have this sensation that if that was what winning looked like, that I must be playing the wrong game. And that all came to a head for me in May of 2021. I got together with an old friend. We went out for a drink. Uh, you know, at the time I was probably drinking six, seven nights a week. And we sat down and he asked how I was doing. And I told him that. It was starting to get tough being so far away from my parents. Uh, they lived on the east coast. We had lived on the west coast for 12 years, and my parents are getting older. And he asked, how old are they? And I said, mid 60s. And he said, how often do you see them? And I said, you know, maybe once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die. And I remember feeling like I got punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you love most in the world is so finite, so countable, that you can put it on a few hands. It's just terrifying to think about. And that night, I went home. And passed out the next morning. I woke up and told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change. She and I had been struggling for a year, year and a half to conceive. We were living far away from family. She knew that my mental health stress levels, things in my life internally weren't good. And so, you know, She saw that when I said I thought we needed to make a change that it was, it was real and it was true and it came from a place of love and within 45 days we had sold our house in California and I left my job and we had moved across the country to be closer to both of our families and the most beautiful thing in it was two weeks after getting back home, we found out my wife was pregnant with our son and it was just this example of like, yeah. God winking at you, right? Like, um, when your life, when your energy comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And that was what started this journey. I mean, that moment was the moment that I started this entire journey to redefine what success looked like to me, to redefine what a wealthy life was. I was gonna ask you, because when I was reading the book, you talked about, you probably didn't give that layer of depth around, everything that was happening beforehand and the struggles to conceive and that sort of thing. Because it sounded to me like the conversation was just a catalyst. And there's usually things that lead up to a catalyst and it's just a straw that broke the camel's back. And thank you for kind of sharing that part of it because I, I did wonder, like, I know that that conversation, cause there are many people that have that conversation, they nod their head and they go back to living the life that they were living it, but you didn't do that. And so I did get the sense that there was a string of things that had happened up until that point. Um, and that, that actually does give that next layer of context, which is, yeah, that, that's actually, that makes a lot of sense. It's kind of cool too. Because. It's kind of like you've kind of gone, hang on, let's make the main thing the main thing and straight away you got rewarded for it. Yeah, it's um, it is true what you said, which is we know these things. I mean, a lot of what I talk about in the book, you should know these things in the back of your mind. Like I, you know, I went and talked to a hundred, hundreds of people. And I went and talked as part of that, maybe 15 or so, you know, people, 80, 90, a hundred year old people and ask them about, uh, what they had learned about their life. What did they regret? What advice would they give to their younger self? And it came across over and over again. None of them talk about money. They all talk about basically four things, time, people, purpose, and health. And we know that, right? Like we read the regrets of the dying. You hear about people that had near death experiences. You and your family have had a loss. You see that light from the other side, like that, that wisdom that shines through those tragedies or through those moments, it shines back onto your path, onto your life. And most of us, We'll hear it, we'll see it, we'll nod our heads, and then we'll go back living the same damn way we were before. And what I want people to do when they read this book is resist that. Sit with it for a moment longer, and then just take one tiny action. Whatever it is. I don't care. The book has A hundred plus types, different actions, different things you can do, tiny or big, just do something, just do one little thing to not go on living the same damn way, to allow the question and that challenge and that pain and that light to actually change the way that you live. And that's what I think that question, the big question at the start of each chapter does. I recently went back over reading some of Nietzsche's work. I don't even know if that's how you pronounce his name, but, um, Nietzsche's obviously that famous philosopher. And, um, you know, what I got a sense of from his work was he's like, you don't want to medicate yourself or numb yourself away from your pain. And if you sit in your pain for a second, it becomes your most powerful propellant. And that's what I got from the question. It's like sit in this pain here for a second, and then let's guide out and let's work you through it. Um, which I think you did so well. I do want to jump into like some big ideas from the book, and you just talked about the framework there. But before we do that, I want to just quickly discuss the background, your professional background, and whether that ties into how you've structured this book. Because I really was impressed by the structure of the thinking and the thought. And how you kind of put the whole thing together in a way that it's just like layering on one thing into the next. And I guess, um, it's just kind of lattice work, but by the time you get to the end of the book, you kind of have a bit of a, um, just, I guess, a different view on how you're going to move forward and also how to navigate the decisions. Through the book and after the book as well. So can you talk me through about how you thought about structuring your thinking to get this across? Yeah, I come from a, uh, an academic household. Um, you know, my dad's a professor, uh, at Harvard. Uh, he's an economist. Uh, we laugh a lot about this because my dad has probably published. 50 plus books, you know, most of them like very research, nitty gritty data oriented over his life and I think the like combined readership of those is probably less than the number of listeners of this of this podcast, but I come from a very academic household and one of the benefits of that during this writing process was that I had the most incredible set of intellectual sparring partners for the structure in particular of how to think about framing all of this. And I also had an amazing editor who was extremely helpful during the writing process and thinking through that how to create, you know, these through lines through the book that allow you to connect with it on a macro level while you're in the weeds of an idea. And so, you know, you've noticed this from reading it, but within Within the book, there's the upfront section, which sort of frames up the entire idea. Then there's a section for each type of wealth, each of the five. And within those, there's real commonalities in how the section is structured. There's this big question that kind of frames up the emotional side, and is the gut punch that kind of pulls you into the idea. Then there's the history and the kind of winding to the modern struggle, like, you know, where we came from with this type of wealth, how humans have wrestled with it throughout our history, uh, and how that ties to how we're currently struggling with it. And then it ends with this, you know, idea of three pillars, like the three simple pillars for that type of wealth. And then finally, at the end of each section, there is a guide for actually how you can build across those pillars, actual actions that you can go and take. And that's intended to be, as you said, sort of a create your own adventure. As I say in there, you can read one of them, you can read all of them. You don't have to, you can pick and choose as you go through. And you know, one of the central concepts of the book, which is sort of a meta concept that comes, you know, at a high is this idea that your life has seasons. And what you prioritize during any one season may change if you are a 22 year old just starting your career and reading this book, you are probably going to be in a season of career and financial wealth building. That is going to be your focus. And it's a great time to focus on that. You're going to read this book very differently. At 22, then you are at 40 when you have young children or when you are 70 and are retiring in an empty nester. And the point is that the guides and the principles are going to be something that you experience very differently based on the lens that you come to them with. They're universal, but you are going to see them through a completely different lens at those different points in time. It works perfectly because the start of each chapter is timeless. And then at the bottom, it's, it's topical and tactical. And as you say, like, it was a nice breather as well because the timeless stuff, you really want to think about it, you really want to immerse yourself in it. But when you get down to the guide sections, that's where you can kind of, as you said, like, breathe a little bit, jump around a little bit. Um, for me, I just read through the whole thing anyway, but it just gave you a different sense of cadence. And I think that's what pulled me through. Um, as I kept going, I kind of got like moments of relief and I could sort of, I was concentrating, you know, very deeply at the start and then I was kind of relaxing a little bit at the end going, yeah, okay, I get that. Um, it worked well. I have an author crush on a writer named Eric Larson. I'm not sure if you've ever come across his work. He's a mostly historical nonfiction or historical fiction author, depending. He wrote a, his most famous book is probably the devil in the white city. But he's written a bunch of incredible historical fiction, and I read an interview of him once where he talks about how he varies chapter length in order to create momentum for the reader. So you read a long chapter, and then you're kind of feeling tired, and then the next chapter is like a page, or two pages. So you get this like, winning feeling that keeps you reading and keeps you going. And I did think about that as I was writing, as I was like, I love the short chapters because you read it and you're kind of like, okay, I move on to the next thing or even, even breaking up the chapters with the sort of big headers and the big ideas to just give people that feeling of closure and progress as you're continuing to read through is also self awareness. So because you've got, I guess those diagnostic questions where you assess yourself against these pillars and that kind of gives you a sense of how to work through the guide, which I think is fantastic. And plus you've also got that through line of the goal versus the anti goal. Can you say a little bit more about that as you lay that up at the start of the, um, the book and then you bring it back to it each chapter as you're going through each pillar as well. Yeah. So this idea, uh, is there's basically two things that you need to focus on, um, as you're driving towards. You know, your vision for the future, you have your goals, which we all know about. These are the things that we want to achieve. Uh, you know, the summit of the mountain, if you will. Uh, I think it's important to have both the summit and then also like the mid climb campsites, you know, the kind of checkpoints along the way so that you have those interim goals, not just the way far off summit. But the other piece that I bring to light is this idea of anti goals, which originally derives from a friend of mine, an entrepreneur named Andrew Wilkinson. Who effectively understood that on the journey to achieve your goals, there are certain things that you don't want to happen. So if your goals are like where you want to end up, uh, your anti goals are the things that you don't want to happen on the journey to achieving those goals. An example would be like. Let's say I want to become the CEO of my company. That's my goal. That's the big vision for the future. My anti goal might be spending 300 days per year away from my kids or sacrificing my integrity and morals for profit targets. I want to become the CEO, but not if it means. Those other things happening. And so that concept is really important. As you think about this book, because there's all sorts of things we want to achieve a life of financial wealth. Sure. I want to make money, but I don't want to lose my family, my relationships, my health, all of these other things that I experienced losing along the way. We don't want that to happen. Those need to be. As clearly stated as the goals that we have for ourselves. I love it because it's essentially creating design constraints for your decisions. And that helps you think so much more clearly when you've got, because everything's uncertain all of the time. But if you have those design constraints, you can sort of go, well, how do I shape reality to fit what I'm trying to? Accomplish here and I've experienced that myself and I've walked so many people through that process when you're super clear on that, this, but not this, it just makes it so much easier to start to think outside of the box versus just say, do this or don't do it. No, in what shape or what way or what form should I do that? And if, if I can't make that the case, then I choose another option, you know, like it's just, I think it's really, really smart. So it was good to have that through line through the book. Let's jump into this, this framework, mate. So you just said it before time, wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth in that order. Time wealth, I thought was really, really interesting. Can you talk more about Kairos and the idea that you can make time? Yeah, so the ancient Greeks had two words for time. There was Kronos and then there was Kairos. Kronos is the time we think about. It is linear chronological time from start to finish. Kairos was the idea that there is a qualitative time. Not all time is created equal. Some moments are more important than others. And I use these examples, uh, in the book of, uh, like Lionel Messi, famous soccer player that we all know. We've all watched. He walks around the field most of the game. He's just like, you know, he gets complained about all the time that he's lazy, that he's dawdling, all of these things. But right in the perfect moment, he finds a way to streak shoot at the perfect angle, find his way, open up space and end up scoring or creating the assist or whatever it might be. He is a perfect shot. Example of Kairos time. He conserves energy. He creates space. He's slow. And then suddenly in the exact right moment, when it really matters, he deploys all of his energy in a burst to create the outcome that he wants. That concept is essential to building a life of time wealth, because what it means is that you can deploy your one unit of energy, your one unit of input into the right moment to create a hundred or a thousand If you're so busy in this fixed loop of one unit of input for one unit of output, that loop of busyness that most of us get caught in, you'll never be able to do that. If he was running around the entire game, he would never have the energy to deploy into that perfect moment. And so we all need to find a way to be a little bit more messy like, to embrace that idea of Kairos time. That was the chapter that I think I got the most value out of actually, because at the bottom with the guide, there was, it's very tactical. There's a bunch of different ways you can kind of think about and use these tools and tactics, but it did make me think of, I guess, I reckon I've been operating off the assumption that you can't make time. And I really liked the idea and like the idea that it was kind of challenging for me where you go, no, you can make time if you can get more units of output from each unit of input. If you think very deliberately about what you do and when you do it. So that's, that's what I got a lot out of. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. And when you experience it for the first time, you start to really understand it. Those moments where you saw some leverage or some scale in the system that previously didn't exist. And you realize that you can actually generate the exact same income from before with 50 percent as much time. And now you get to decide. And that's kind of the point. That's the third pillar of time wealth that I talk about is control. And you can decide. Yeah. If with that other 50 percent that you just now freed up, you're still creating the same level, you can deploy that into generating more output if you want to build a bigger business or more financial wealth or whatever the thing is, or you can spend that time hanging out on the beach or playing with your kids or doing whatever you want. That's the point is that control is the goal. It's not to just automatically, you know, put your pedal to the metal and just try to deploy that into making more money. It's to get to decide to have the. ability and the freedom to choose. Yeah. And something you said at the start too, when you were sort of framing up how we think into each of these types of wealth was, it's like a command, a commander's intent for the kind of identity that you want to adopt. And I think that's what can guide some of these decisions, right? I think yours was, I'm the kind of dad that goes to soccer practice or take soccer practice. And so that can help you, right? With what am I going to do with my extra time here? Um, and if you don't have that guide, um, if you don't have that sense of all that rule. That's, yeah, I guess North Star. Really hard to know what to do at that time and it's probably why a lot of us stay busy, right? Yeah. It's one of the biggest challenges in life in general is that there's a lot of chaos and a lot of storms. And if we don't have those sort of true north pillars that we're focusing on, it's very easy to get lost. You get disoriented, right? The storm comes and you're kind of, you know, you're like trapped in a blizzard. You can't see, you have no, uh, frame of reference for where you're going. And those little things, you know, in the book, I talk about it as the life razor, like the single defining rule for life, the single statement that is identity defining. It allows you to kind of establish who you are. So when a challenging or exciting opportunity comes along, you can ground yourself in that one thing that you know to be true. Those type of rules I find to be extremely helpful because, you know, there's like an obsession with mental models, uh, in the world and having all these different ways of thinking about things. And the problem with that is that when you have A million, you have none. Uh, you know, it's like, there's just too many things. I don't know which tool in my toolkit, if I have a tool, if I have a tool belt and it has 800 tools in it, I might as well have no tools. What I really want is the one tool that just works. And, you know, I, I know that it's pretty effective in all situations. It's not perfect, but it's pretty effective. And that's really what I'm trying to do in that upfront section is like. Arm people with those couple of, like, all purpose tools that you can just use for your life that just plain work. What's an example of someone who's unconsciously created one of those for themselves that's done a really good job of that, to guide the decisions they make in their life? You know, I think Mark Randolph, I write about this in the book, he was the, uh, founder and, uh, first CEO of Netflix, and he was my original inspiration for this idea, uh, because he posted something about how he had this Tuesday 5 p. m. dinner date ritual with his wife. And when I spoke to him and interviewed him for the book, it was such an interesting thing because he talked about this ritual that no matter what, throughout his entire illustrious career where he's made so much money, this was a non negotiable. He would leave the office at 5pm to have this date with his wife. And when I was reflecting on it later, what I realized was, it had nothing to do with the date. It really didn't. It wasn't about what they would go and do the movie. They would see the dinner they would have. It was about the ripples that it created in his life. It was about the identity that it established about who he was and about what that meant to the world around him, and that is where that kind of principle comes into play. It's it's I am the type of person who blank and in his case, I'm the type of person who never misses a Tuesday dinner and That type of person that means certain things. That means that you are the type of person that never sacrifices, uh, your integrity, your character, uh, for anything. It means that you're the type of person that shows up for your family and your friends. You're loyal. It means that you're establishing boundaries that your employees, your team members, uh, can all learn from. So that they can establish their own, so that they'll be more loyal, more focused when they're at work. All of those things start from that one simple rule that he created for his life. And so if you can find yours, and I walked through this exercise in the book, a way for you to frame this up, to think about it, figuring out what your life razor is. That one single rule to cut through the noise. If you can do that, there's a lot of power that comes through it. It's interesting'cause um, I guess for the last six months, my wife and I have been taking every second Thursday morning to go to like a wellness center and do, um, sauna and ice baths and then go out for lunch afterwards and. There's an account that we have called Shared Lifestyle Account. And the money that goes into that account is specifically for that every single month. And we talk about, you know, budgeting and that sort of stuff later on. And having that account set for that and giving those dollars that job every single month is one of the best things we've done for our marriage. We've got two six and a half year old twins and life's super busy, you know? And so if we don't take that time, Once a month to have that two to three hours to ourselves, it is so easy to turn around after six months and go like, what's good. What's what's actually happened. Amen, man. Amen. And then, you know, as, as you have kids, as you have more responsibilities, as things pile up, it's easier and easier to miss that. I have one of the tactics in the guide in the, um, social wealth section is the idea of like this life dinner concept of just finding a time once a month to just. Talk about life with your person, with your partner. It could be with a friend. There's so much value that comes through that. Actually, good segue into social wealth. This is another chapter that I just really loved. I loved all of them. I loved all of them. But this, this social one was really, really interesting. The difference between earned and bought status was something that really stood out to me. I've thought about it deeply before, and we've delved into the concept of like mimetic desire and that sort of stuff in the past, but earned status versus bought status was something that. It was just another layer of nuance that I really appreciated. So, can you say a little bit more about that and what is the difference between the two? Yeah, this was one of my favorite ideas that ended up in the book. And, uh, one of the reasons it was one of my favorites is frankly just how long I wrestled with it. To try to put it into words, I mean, it really like it was on the tip of my tongue for almost three years before I was able to articulate it, uh, hopefully well in the book, this was one of these ideas around a pillar of social wealth. So when we think about social wealth, it's about your relationships, your connection to the world around you. Status is often thought of as the way that you sort of transact around your social wealth. It's the idea that, you know, we exist in a hierarchy that is natural, that is part of biology, like, you know, apes, uh, chest pounding to assert your dominance, that is status, and that is a normal thing, but in the modern day and age, the way that we try to get that status tends to be through acquired means, uh, through fancy things that we buy. So we go and buy the fancy watch or get the club membership or get the nice house in the nice neighborhood And it's much more about trying to signal who we are to other people To earn their respect and admiration than it is about our actual enjoyment of that thing. Uh, you can ask yourself this It's one of the tests I say in the book. Would you buy this thing if you couldn't tell anyone about it? Like, would you go buy the car? Would you buy the fancy watch if no one could see it? If you could never take a picture on social media, if no one would ever see it, would you still find the internal enjoyment in having the thing to justify it? Usually the answer is no. And the point, uh, that is important. That really comes to the fore in that piece is we're doing these things because we're looking for respect and admiration from people that we care about, um, from the people that matter. We're trying to have that durable respect and admiration. That is the currency. That is the social status. The problem is you can't buy that. Those bot status symbols are fleeting because what happens is you buy the thing and then there's just someone with a nicer version of it. There's just some level where it immediately fades. You get the nice car and then you see your neighbor has an even nicer one. It's that keeping up with the Joneses thing that happens. So it's fleeting. Bot status is very fleeting. What isn't fleeting is earned status. Meaning, the things that cannot be bought are the things that actually confer upon you that lasting, durable respect and admiration. You get way more respect and admiration from your peers, from people you care about, when you have a fit body. Way more than if you buy a fancy watch because you can't buy a fit body, you know, like no Elon musk cannot buy a six pack. He can maybe hire a trainer He can pay for a chef, but he can't force someone to work out for him He can't, uh, you know, force himself to eat that healthy thing. He has to earn it, and he can't do it any faster than you or I can. So, no matter how much money these people have in the world, they can't do that. They can't build a deep, loving relationship with their partner faster than you or I can. Frankly, it's probably harder when you have that level of wealth. So those things, the things that you cannot buy, those things that must be earned, are the things that actually confer the true, lasting, Durable, respect and admiration that is earned status. So glad you mentioned the physical side of that because I'm noticing a trend where people with means are increasingly trying to buy the physical status. I see a lot of, um, a lot of Ozempic. I see a lot of TRT. There's a lot of entrepreneurs now who are obviously using TRT and you're like, how did that happen? Um, so we try to buy status as much as we possibly can. That's never going to go away. And to be clear, you still have to do work if you're doing that kind of thing to have a fit body, but we're definitely trying, aren't we? We still just, it's our human tendency to just want more for less. Yeah. Always. Right. And, um, it's only once you sort of realize that it doesn't work that like those hacks, those shortcuts, those cheat codes, they're good for clickbait on social media. Um, but the reality is that the things that you want in life, every single thing that you want in life is on the other side. Of something that sucks. It could be a hundred hard workouts. It could be a hundred bland meals. It could be a hundred hard conversations with people you love. It could be a hundred hours of focused work on your business. But every single thing you want in life is just on the other side. Of those things that you don't want to do. It's all about delayed gratification. It's a marshmallow test for life. Can you delay the gratification? Can you avoid the pleasure now, in order to achieve it later? So, everything's on the side of something hard. You once climbed up a mountain when it was snowing. Without clothes on or without a shirt on or something. Where did you hear that? What did you do that for? Where did you hear that? I just do my research, man. I feel like I haven't talked about that in many, many years. I'm, uh, I'm impressed now. I'm like, man, that's a deeper level of research. I don't think I've written about that. Um, I, I did do that. Yeah. So I, um, in 2012, I was in like my last year of college baseball and I have, uh, One of my dearest friends in the world is a guy named Chad Rogers. He played professional baseball for 10 years and he and I used to train together in the offseason. And, um, that offseason was what both of us assumed was sort of our last chance. It was like our last ditch effort at making it in our sport. And what we decided was that if we were going to make it, it wasn't going to be, uh, through physical means because neither of us were that talented. It was going to be that we were just so mentally tough that we could just grind it out that season. And so we started doing just completely stupid mental challenges. And it was a freezing winter that winter in Boston, and we would go out at like midnight. And just do whatever the dumbest thing was that we could think of, you know, in hindsight, the dumbest thing we could think of. But that was really challenging. So this was like the start of my cold plunging because we would go get into this frozen river and we'd, you know, dunk ourselves and then swim in it and get out and run a mile home. And we do all sorts of those things. But one night and we had a rule that if the other person challenged us into something, we had to just do it. And we had to do it together, but we had to do it. And so one night we, uh, decided we were going to bear crawl up this mountain, uh, by my house that, you know, it's like a tough mountain to walk up and then thinking about bear crawling up it and shirtless, uh, in the snow. And so we did that. There was zero benefit for our baseball careers. Both of us, just to be clear, uh, both of us failed in our baseball careers, but both of us still look back on that. We're still dearest friends. We still look back on that as being very formative because it reminded us that we were tough to kill. Uh, like you couldn't knock us out of the fight and especially when you have accountability and when you have someone that you're in that battle that you're in those trenches with, there is something incredible that can be unlocked. The reason I brought that story up is because I think the most powerful form of earned status is the status that you confer when you look in the mirror and you are looking at yourself saying, I'm the kind of person who can. And those kind of challenges, um, you don't know this about me, but I spent my first 10 years before getting into this, um, coaching and elite sport. And one of the things that I learned is that there's a central governor in your brain and that it's like a thermostat and all it's trying to do is protect the human race from perishing. And so it's going to conserve energy as much as it possibly can and it'll put abstract, arbitrary limits on you in order to, to make that possible for humans. And so it doesn't care about your goals. But every now and then you can blast it open and change your idea of what about what's possible for you. And every time you do that, you start to look at yourself differently in the mirror. And so for me, I think that that earned status that you can confer upon yourself is the most powerful and it's through those kind of in parentheses. Extreme experiences that you encounter and stare down and challenge or put yourself into that you can have that. So I, I really love that part of the book and I've been thinking about the same thing for years too. And just didn't have words for it because status, we can't, we can't not be status seeking beings. We just are status seeking beings, but I love the distinction between bought versus earned and where are you putting your energy because you're going to expand the energy either way. Exactly. It's just finding the right way and the right things to focus on. It's sort of like. I think it was Naval Ravikant that said, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And, um, he also has a great quote sort of related to this idea of earned status. Like, um, uh, you know, you, you kind of want the things in life that can't be bought. They have to be earned. And, um, I think about that a lot. Like what game are you trying to play? And in my opinion, the like, you know, status signaling of material purchase items, like. Ultimate stupid game. Just like, why are you playing that game? Don't play it. Play something else. Yeah, 100%. The other thing, mate, social wealth, staying on social wealth here, the brains trust. You had a really interesting way of kind of thinking about assembling a brains trust to, I guess, uh, have that, what do they call it, like, um, like a mastermind of people that you're kind of working with and they don't have to even meet. There's no formal meetings or anything like that. How do you think through that and how to build that? To help you. Yeah. So the idea of the concept of the brain trust is derived from Pixar and, uh, the origin of it was that Pixar realized that they needed a team of people who could pressure test the movies that were in process, who could push them to become better and question them and sort of spar with them to continue to allow them to improve over time. And what they were hoping was that it was people that weren't directly tied to the movie. So rather than it being like, you know, the director or the producer or someone that was involved in it, it was going to be someone. In Pixar, who had a vested interest in it being a success, but not directly emotionally connected to it. And I think that idea is really interesting because in our own lives, when you think about your progress, there's all sorts of people in your like very inner circle who are somewhat emotionally connected to the things that are happening. Your spouse, you know, your best friend, your kids, your yourself, your colleagues. Those are all people that you may. Not want giving you the like bigger picture advice or challenging you or questioning your assumptions because they're very close to it. And so they are like you sort of blinded by whatever the path is that you're on. You have sort of like plan continuation bias where like whatever the path is that you're on, your bias is to just stay on it. And those people will give you that same advice. Having a brain trust, which is a group of people that are sort of on that next layer outside that come from different backgrounds that may have different considerations that can allow you to think differently about the problems that you're facing or about the challenges that are ahead of you is really powerful. And I think it is basically like a 2. 0 version of how we thought about mentorship. Uh, you know, historically, you would think like you have one mentor. And there was this idea of, like, you go ask someone, like, will you be my mentor? And I think it's such a dated and silly concept because, A, it's asking a lot of someone. Like, me coming to you and asking you to be my mentor, that sounds like a big burden. And I, I am not really inclined because I have a whole lot going on. And B, it's basically assuming that there's one person who can give you all of the guidance and assets and insight that you need for your life. And that's just, Impossible. It's just not true. So building a brain trust, building a kind of a group of people that have different experience sets and different points of view is way more valuable and really has been something that I found in my own life to be extremely enriching. Now, one of your mentors is Tim Cook. How the bloody hell did that happen? Um, so Tim and I, uh, this is a funny story on physical wealth. Um, when I started my first job in 2014, I, uh, knew I was going to be working long hours. I was going to be working from 630 or so until like eight at night. And, uh, I really wanted to make sure I maintained my workouts. Uh, you know, I had just gotten done playing division one college baseball, and I wanted to make sure I could, you know, continue to work out and be strong. And so to do that, I knew that I had to get to the gym really early. Uh, so I started going to this gym, uh, in Palo Alto where I was working at 445 in the morning and they would open their doors right around then. And the funny thing that happens at a like nice gym at 445 in the morning. Is that there's very few people, uh, because, uh, in general, those early morning hours are pretty, pretty sparse. And it turned out that there was about six or eight people that would show up every single morning at that time. Uh, and you kind of become friendly with those people. There's like a camaraderie that gets built through that struggle. Uh, and one of those people happened to be Tim cook, who was. The relatively new CEO of Apple at the time, uh, and who I had no idea who he was, uh, so for about six months, I talked to this guy every single morning and had no clue that he was the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, you know, I blame the fact that he wore glasses and, uh, I wasn't in the tech world, so I just didn't care. Didn't really know. And then one day someone came up to me and said like, Hey, do you know who that guy is that you were talking to? I said, no, not really. It's the, you know, the guy, the gym guy, uh, and they were like, that's Tim cook, the CEO of Apple. I was like, oh shit. Uh, cause I just, you know, I must've been saying so much stupid stuff over the course of six months. I wouldn't probably wouldn't have said it, but then I, you know, I asked him if he'd be willing to, you know, get together, have breakfast. Um, and. Just chat. I wasn't looking for anything. You know, the fact that I didn't know who he was for six months probably helped because it became clear that I was genuine. I wasn't looking for, I wasn't coming in and being like, Hey, I want to pitch you on my startup or I want a job at apple. Um, and to this day, I've never asked to actually, frankly, the first thing I ever asked him for was, uh, to read this book and hopefully write it. One of the reviews for it, which he was kind enough to do, and it's been an incredible relationship and friendship. That's that's blossomed over the years. He's um, he's a very, very inspiring person in the way that he focuses, follows his principles. The way that he navigates an unbelievable amount of complexity in the business world, in geopolitics, and all the things and the considerations that he has. And he's just been very kind. Like, I don't, I can't put it much better than that. Like the amount of generosity and kindness that he has shown me, shown my family, shown my wife over the years has just been incredible. What is the best piece of advice Tim Cook's ever given you? I think it is to lean into your pattern interrupts, and he didn't phrase it that way. I'm, I'm phrasing it back that way. But, you know, an interesting thing about him is that he was very much on a like stable, safe path working at IBM. Uh, you know, he was kind of rising through the ranks, like on the kind of corporate executive management program and, um. Steve Jobs was looking through resumes to hire for this operations role at Apple, and he saw Tim's resume and looked at it and was like, Uh, you know, this is a big company guy, IBM, like not a fit for Apple's fast moving startup culture. And so he passed on him. Um, six months later, he was still looking for the same role and came across Tim's resume again. This time, it had at the top of the resume that Tim had left IBM and taken a job at this weird computer startup called Compaq. And suddenly Steve had a very different impression. The pattern that he had created for the type of person that Tim was, uh, was fundamentally disrupted. It was a pattern interrupt. And so then he had a conversation with him. And, you know, now fast forward 20, 30 years, and Tim has obviously, you know, created trillions of dollars of value at Apple as their CEO. Uh, and the lesson You know, in that is you never really know what the opportunity is that's going to change your life, and you never really know when that invisible opportunity is going to be made visible, but generally speaking, when you lean into those things that are different about you, when you lean into that uniqueness, when you don't follow just that normal path that's been set out for you, the default, when you lean into you, you're Those invisible opportunities get revealed. Uh, and so when I was thinking about making this big change in my life, he was one of the first people that really encouraged me to do that. He thought it was great. And that was really special because that, you know, hearing that from someone that has had that much success is really liberating. Um, because there were a lot of people who were like, you're making a terrible mistake, right? You're leaving this, uh, high paying finance job to go right on Twitter. Like, what, what do you mean? That's, that makes no sense. And you know, look, look, I think if more people treated things like a real life MBA, you'd be better off. And that was sort of what I did when I was leaving my job. I just thought if this ends up being a two year business degree and I totally fail and I have to go back and get another job, at least I gave it a shot. And, you know, here we are three years later, maybe this will end up being a business degree. Uh, but, uh, it seems like it's on the better track than that. So I've had that thought all the time. I'm like, is this going to end up a business degree? Totally. I've already got an MBA. I don't want another one. Matt, I love that story and what a privilege and what a great position to be in to be able to call on someone like that. for advice when it matters. And, and it's obvious too that he does really care about you because if he's looking at you and he's thinking of you and he's giving you encouragement in that sort of space, particularly if, if it is risky and there's uncertainty in it, you know, he's putting you ahead of him, which is, which is fantastic. Um, physical wealth is the next one. I'm so interested in this one. And I love your approach to it as well, because You know, coming from that background and now kind of leaving that world, I look back in on it now and I go, my God, it's gotten warped and there's a lot of rigidity. There's a lot of categorical opinions is so much information of people who claim to have all the right answers. What do you think the 80 20 of health habits are and what are, what are they for you? Yeah, it's um, you know, it's this world that I describe as a video game and, uh, what you're fed and what social media shows you is level 100 of the video game. Uh, you know, you're shown The fancy protocols, the, uh, you know, crazy health habits, including mine, by the way, like the cold plunges and saunas and all the stuff that I do on social media, uh, that's level 100 at, you know, it's, it's way, way beyond. Uh, and what I get across in the book is that all of this really just comes down to executing on level one. You start there. Uh, and if level 100 is intimidating to you, don't even think about it. Don't think about it until you focus on level one and nailing that because level one gets you 80 plus percent of the benefit. Uh, and to me, level one is pretty simple. There's three pillars of physical wealth, movement, nutrition, and recovery. Level one within movement is just move your body for 30 minutes every single day. I don't care how you do it. You can walk, you can jog, you can run, you can ski, you can dance. Doesn't matter. Just move for 30 minutes a day. Level one in nutrition is just eat whole single ingredient, unprocessed foods at about 80 percent of your meals. If you can do that, you get 80 percent of the benefit. That's pretty damn good. And then level one for recovery. Just sleep seven hours a night. You don't need to do the cold plunge, the sauna, the red light therapy, you know, the millions of fancy things. Just do that. If that's all you do, if you do those three things, that's level one, you get 80, 85 plus percent of the benefit in the physical wealth realm. And that's a great segue because I think, I guess the, the habits that you can build in your, in your, Physical life and the health that you actually have. I can teach you more about compounding because they can compound faster in your health life than it does with money. So I love it as a training ground for that reason, um, which is a good segue into financial wealth, which is the last type of wealth. What can you say about that? And why did you finish with financial wealth? Yeah, well, look, the point I want to make clear is that this book will not argue that money doesn't matter. Uh, I'm not going to tell you that you should go, you sacrifice all your worldly possessions and live in the Himalayas. Uh, meditating for 12 hours a day. If you want to do that, by all means, go do it. I just won't be joining you. Uh, I like money. Uh, I like having a house. I like having certain things. Uh, but the research is very clear. And what the research around money and happiness says is that up to a certain point, money buys happiness. It reduces stresses and fundamental burdens and allows you to live a happier life. But above that point, it doesn't impact you. Uh, what it says, frankly, is that if Above that point, once you get to that point, if you are unhappy, more money is not going to fix that. And if you are happy, more money is not going to change that. So these other areas of life are the things that we need to focus on. And when it comes to money, when it comes to financial wealth, the thing that I think is really important is this idea of enough. This idea that You have an enough life out there that you need to figure out exactly what it looks like. It is the version of your life where you just have enough. It's not Spartan. It doesn't have to be, you know, living under a bridge or living very cheaply. My enough life has two houses because I want to be able to entertain. Bring people together, create experiences for people that I love. The point is you don't allow it to be this subconscious upward movement, this treadmill of continuing to need the next thing, whatever the next thing is, because expectations are your greatest financial liability. If your expectations are rising faster than your assets, you will never be rich. You will never feel rich. You'll just be chasing whatever the mirage is that's on the horizon. That'll keep disappearing and floating off further and further away from you. I think this. Last point is such a big one. The, the point of, if your expectations raise faster than your actual living standards can occupy, you're really going to struggle no matter what level of income you're at. And we see that all the time. We've got people making a million dollars a year whose expectations rose way faster and are a lot less better off than folks who are earning one 10th. And so it's so, so important to get. There's something you said at the start of this chapter too, that you referred, I can't remember the expert's name, forgive me for this, but. It was an expert that talked about how when we're young, the impact that money has on our lives is very big. And we start to sort of draw this straight line into the future, which is like, Oh, if I just keep going, if I just keep getting more of that, it's going to feel the same, but it's almost like a drug. Isn't it? Like your first hit is massive. And then you just think. Okay, if I get more of it, if I get more of it, it's going to feel the same, but it actually doesn't be on that sort of certain point. So can you just say a little bit more about that? Because I thought that was profound. Yeah. So it was Arthur Brooks, um, who was also one of the early readers of this book and who is, you know, one of the leading researchers around happiness science. And he basically talks about the fact that early in life, you experience that early part Of the money curve where money does buy happiness. So early in your life, you create this pattern in your mind that money makes your happiness bell ring. And what happens is that creates a pattern that is hard to crack. So later in life, you expect that you're going to continue to see those same benefits. It's not dissimilar from like when you've been working out your whole life, you kind of are disappointed at the fact that the same. Effort that you're putting in does not create the same, uh, improvements or gains, right? Like when you first lift, when you haven't lifted in your whole life and you're lifting, you get this immediate benefit where you like feel more jacked right away. And you start to feel disappointed when that same level of effort doesn't create the same level of output. That same thing happens with money. And what happens is you keep chasing it, thinking it's going to. appear. You think that it's going to drive that happiness gain and it doesn't. What's interesting to me about that is when it comes to health, you actually get rewarded for more the more you stick to it and the more you stay with it and the more you seek it, the more you pursue it. But it actually is hurting you when it comes to money because of everything we've discussed at the start with the broken scoreboard. So it's sort of one of those rules that you have to. Unlearn and go, well, this is not a universal rule. I actually have to think about whether it's improving my life, which is why I like these five types of wealth. Cause it makes you think more broadly than just money. Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about the income side of this income generating habits. You've been somebody that's done a really good job of this. If you could give me one bit of advice, if I wanted to double my income to make everything a lot easier and increase my means. What would you say? I think that the most important skill that you can build is the meta skill of selling. And this is something that has taken me a long time to come to and understand. You know, I think we wind around a lot on what we think are like kind of sexy skills. You know, like for a while everyone was like, you got to get into coding. And now it's funny. Cause like. Coding almost feels like an obsolete skill given where AI has gone and selling is the thing that I think stands out because at the end of the day, generating income is all about selling. It's all about selling either yourself or your ideas or your insights or your story or whatever it might be. You're going to have to be selling and the people that can sell are the people that end up making a lot of money, uh, in whatever it is they're doing. And so I think that that is really a meta skill that you need to think about honing and refining if you want to make a lot of money. Yeah, I think that's actually a few byproducts as well from myself. You know, leaving sport, I would see myself, my identity was, I'm a coach. And then as you go and start a business, you have to learn how to sell. And that starts to really strain your identity and shift it and break it and broke it apart for me, because, and you hear what a lot of people would say this, and they still say it to me, well, I'm not the kind of person who sells. I was like, listen, you're putting on that brand of shoes because you're selling an idea you're putting on that brand of shirt, because you're saying you drive that car because you're selling an idea you're selling every day. You just don't know it, but. The secondary gain for me of learning how to sell has actually been understanding the psychology, my psychology, and the psychology of money. And more importantly, the importance of decision making, making good decisions, because that's essentially all it is, is you're helping people give them the right information to make great decisions for them. Because if you're selling something that doesn't improve people's lives, you won't be selling it for long. So how was that? Did you come up against that identity sort of challenge leaving your job as well? Because it's easy when you're under the umbrella of an institution, because you can kind of lean on that. But when you go out and you do something for yourself, you really do come up against that self image thing. How did you work your way through that if you felt it? Yeah, it's challenging that, you know, the identity and like how you define and kind of, uh, how you think about yourself is, uh, is really important in how you operate in the world. I have always tried to ground myself and my financial wealth journey in particular in. One pretty simple principle, which is the money that you make in the world is a direct byproduct of the value that you create for other people, and you can create that value working at a company by creating value for, you know, your colleagues, your bosses, your customers, whatever it might be. Or you can be an entrepreneur and you can create value for other people, uh, around your business and how you do it and what it looks like doesn't really matter, but that is basically the only way I know to make money in the world. You cannot make money without creating a lot of value for other people. And so all of these young people that come to me and say they want to make a lot of money. That's the first thing I said is like, okay, well, then how are you going to create value? And if you don't know the answer to that, all you have to do is look around you and figure out the problems that people around you are experiencing. And if you can figure out those problems and then define a solution. And then scale that solution, you will make a lot of money. Uh, and so on my own journey, the way that I think about that is, uh, the problems that I'm solving are these problems around how we struggle with different areas of our life. And I define a solution to that, uh, through my writing. And then I scale that solution in that I can reach just as many people with my newsletter today, uh, as I will in a few years. It went, when it grows, it's going to be, you know, 10 X as big. I'm going to write the same one newsletter and it's going to reach 10 X as many people. And, you know, two years ago it was reaching, you know, 10, 000 people. Now it's reaching 800, 000 people, same exact newsletter. Um, so I'm scaling that solution. I'm creating value for more people out there. More value is being created. As a result, I'm making more money. It's not because I was chasing making money. It's because I was really focused on creating an incredible solution for people, creating a lot of value for people out there. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And there was an interesting observation for me in this last chapter, which was your background was finance. And then when we, when it came time to talk about the investing piece and some of the rules around managing money, you did some collaborations with Nick from dollars and data and also remit safety. So. I was just kind of curious to me, given that that was your kind of space in the past, but then you had these collaboration parts in the book, the only ones that I could actually see that were collaborations. Can you say a bit more about that? Yeah, I, um, I really love the way that both of those two guys, uh, and I deeply respect the way that both of those two guys have managed to simplify and distill. Down to the basics of those areas. I think it is very easy within that world to talk over people's heads to give the fancy solutions. That sounds sexy that maybe sell more and both of them have really focused on the basics on. I have so much respect for that. Uh, and the way that they've gone about that. And so I was really lucky to have the opportunity to collaborate with them around it. And, you know, look, I don't really believe in reinventing the wheel, uh, if you don't need to. And I think that both of those guys have synthesized things very, very well. And so, you know, the only other collaborations were, uh, Susan Kane, uh, in one section, uh, and Arthur Brooks in one other section, we did kind of a short thing together. Uh, because I'm a deep admirers of their thought and their thought leadership in these spaces, but the financial wealth section in particular, I just, I feel like, um, those guys are pretty timeless in what they're putting out into the world. Yeah. I really, uh, Nick in particular, I love reading his blog. Yeah. We were very heavily influenced by Ramit Sethi over the days. Um, but Nick in particular, I really loved how he's, he keeps. He's, there's a lot of substance, a lot of integrity to his writing and his content. So yeah, I think that was really good. And talking about the eight different assets and asset classes, breaking that down was really helpful as well. Um, last thing I want to touch on here with financial wealth was just that concept of return on hassle. We've turned it before. We've said return on life is the most important thing because if it doesn't improve your life, then what's the point? So can you say a bit more about return on hassle when you're making investment decisions? Yeah, I love this idea. I came across this maybe a year or two ago, and it's something that's always been on the tip of my tongue. And so I was glad to be able to put a phrase to it when I first read it. It's just this idea that when we think about the returns that we're achieving investing, we need to think about the overall picture. Not just the money that we're investing into something, but also the headaches, also the time, also the headspace, all of the other things in our life. Uh, and so the perfect example of that to me is like real estate. When you, when you make a lot, a little bit of money, not even a lot of money. One of the first things that people try to like, get you to do is become a real estate investor. I don't know why, but it's become this sexy thing that like, Oh, you made a million bucks. So now you got to buy a multifamily property. That was like the cool, the hot thing, right? It's like, Oh, let me go buy a multifamily property and rent it out. So I can have passive income, ignoring the fact that like I can have passive income sitting in a bank account or sitting in a, you know, a mutual fund. It doesn't matter. It doesn't need to be sitting in a real estate to have passive income. But anyway, people tell you that you're supposed to do that. But if you go invest in that, say you have to put in a hundred thousand dollars, but on top of that, you have to deal with it. When the hot water heater blows up on a Sunday night, you have to deal with it when your tenant doesn't pay rent for a couple of months. You have to deal with every single headache. You have to go and drive across town to go to the place. Well, now suddenly that 100, 000 is not just 100, 000. It's also all of the time, the headaches, the headspace that it took up. So the return on hassle is actually very different than just the return on the 100, 000 investment and calculating that and incorporating that into how you think about what you invest in. May make you make very different decisions. Some of the things that seemed like they would be sexy and fun and interesting are actually just a pain in the ass. A hundred percent. I couldn't, I don't even, I've been trying to say this, I think for years as well, like an ounce of self awareness goes a long way here. And this is why like that whole good hearts law thing, right? Like when the measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And so if you're just measuring your investment success on how much money you have versus the experience you had to get it. you probably missed the point. Totally. Um, and I'm a big believer in like, watch what people do. Don't listen to what they say. And when I watch what you've done, I've watched you pivot and take your skills, take your time, take your talents and invest them in a new asset class that I think everybody still hasn't figured out yet. And it's the internet. How do you product advise yourself in a way that Naval says, how do you productize yourself, um, and create value for people in an area that you can, where you are credible? And how do you do that in a way where you can serve more people? And the Internet's created infinite scale. So for me, I look at what you've done. I've said you've built your own asset outside of the career, and that's been the number one investment. Because you are the source of your wealth. And to me, the biggest mistake I see people make, we're in this space and we coach all the time, is casting their power outside of themselves to some mythical sort of investment portfolio and neglecting to continue to invest in themselves. Your dad had some really good advice in this space. How did you internalize it and how have you used it? Yeah. My, um, my dad has been really like my, My best friend in a lot of ways and even saying that it's it's funny to me because I don't feel like I've ever vocalized that to him that I feel that way about him. It's it's kind of a funny. It's a funny thing that like I say it on a podcast. I should probably go and text him that and let him know. But the amount of support and love. And kindness that he has shown me has really been life changing and a lot of it, you know, when I, when I think about parenting, I have a young son now, I just think about the fact that we either reject or amplify the things that we experienced from our parents when it comes to dealing with our kids and my father, unfortunately, had a dad who was not particularly supportive or kind and when my dad wanted to marry my mom, who was Indian, his father told him he had to choose, Between his family and my mom and he walked out the door and never saw them again to this day. I never met my dad's parents. He has three siblings. I've never met a real tragedy, but the result of that and the ripple effects of that were that my dad was the most supportive. And loving father that I could imagine having at every phase and season of my life, my dad has been there as my cheerleader in the front row, and I took him and my mom with me to India about a year ago, and my dad was sitting in the front row at these events that I was doing. I was speaking on stage and my dad is sitting there and there's a picture of him sitting there taking notes in a little notepad sitting in the front row. This is a Harvard professor sitting in the front row of my talk, taking notes on a page, and it's because he was going to sit down with me later. And talk to me about things that he thought I said really well and the areas where he thought I could have articulated things more clearly what worked what didn't he was going to give me that feedback he was going to be there to support me and also to help me to lift me up and I've reflected on that a lot in my life that I really consider the two pillars of strong relationships to be high expectations and high support. High expectations means I expect you to deliver at an incredible level, to execute, to do things, to live up to the standards that I hold for you. But high support means that I'm willing to help you hit those expectations. I'm going to lift you up on my shoulders so that you can meet and exceed those high expectations that I have for you. One without the other is a recipe for resentment, but both together, you create something incredible. Yeah, it's uh, I think it's called wise criticism. It's basically like, uh, I have these high standards and I know you can reach them. And if you fell short of them, I'm going to make sure that you can meet them because I know that you're capable of this. And, um, it's, man, it's come through so much and it just kind of dawned on me while you were saying that about your dad, that it's, I don't know if you intended this, but it's how you've come across through the book. High expectations, high support, like you can do this and I'm here to help you through it. Here's how I can help you. You don't have to do it my way. But here are some ways that can work. So I don't know if that's what you were going for, but I think you've nailed that. I think, uh, I think that might've just been an accident. Um, but I, uh, you know, even hearing it read back to me, I appreciate it. It makes sense. Where do you want this book to go, mate? What is the, what's the vision for this? If, if, uh, if you look out 10 years from now, what do you want it to have done? I mean, I want to positively impact a billion lives, and that number is just a crazy, enormous number that basically just means that I'm going to work towards whatever I can achieve. Uh, you know, I like setting enormous, ambitious goals, uh, that seem terrifying and make no sense, uh, because even if you completely miss them or whiff at them, Uh, some great things come out of it on the journey, and this book is the start of that because, um, it's permanent in a way that nothing that you put on social media really is, right? Like, you know, I've written a lot of great newsletters, newsletters I'm very proud of, but you can't really gift a newsletter. Like no one gets a gift of a newsletter for graduation or for Christmas for the holidays. And you don't give a friend a newsletter, you might send it to them. They might read it, but it's not the same as a book. Like, you know, you can hold it, you can touch it, you can feel it. And I think that there is an incredible power in that. And I'm excited to see. Just the tiny changes that people make in their lives after reading it. I feel very privileged and lucky to do what I'm doing. I hope that comes across. I just, I really feel like, you know, I say this at the end of the prologue, my name Sahil means the end of the journey. And this book is. The end of my first journey and I hope it's a journey that everyone will go on. I hope it is one that people will embark on after reading this, uh, because it is the journey of a lifetime. And, uh, I really think people are going to enjoy it. Well, I think it's worth it. It's worth reading the book and it's worth having a crack at life because you only get one and, uh, you got to give it all back in anyway. And the money you get to push it all back in once you've, once you've, once you've earned it all, you push it back into the middle of the table and, uh, and it's all over. So. Um, I love the fact that this book makes you think a little bit more broadly about the definition of in parentheses, success. And I think you've done an awesome job doing that. Um, I've just got one more question for you, mate, before we wrap this up, and I really appreciate your time with this. You know, we love Paul Graham's definition and how he talks about money and wealth. He says, wealth is having more of what you value. And money is how we measure and move it. And so if wealth is having more of what you value what is wealth for you to me The wealthiest I ever feel is when i'm able to take my son in the pool at 1 p. m On a tuesday. I will never feel wealthier than being able to do that because it means All of these other things. It means I have the freedom of the time to do that on a Tuesday afternoon. It means I have the relationship with my wife and son to want them to want to be with me. It means mentally that I'm there that I'm strong. It means physically that I'm healthy and it means financially that I have the means to have a pool and to have a place where we can do that. So that captures it. The essence of this entire idea of the five types of wealth, uh, in one tiny little moment. Amazing, mate. Thank you so much for coming on and generously sharing your time, your wisdom, your advice. And, um, congratulations on this book. Probably one of my, probably my top three in the last 10 years, I think so. Oh man, really good work. That means the world to me. Thank you so much. I truly appreciate it. Where can people find more about you, more about the book, and where can they get it? You can find the book anywhere books are sold now. Thefivetypesofwealth. com for more information, uh, access to some of the different specials and bonuses and community and different things that we're going to be creating as we continue to build out the ecosystem. Uh, and then you can find more on me at sahilbloom. com. Amazing, man. Thank you so much. Let's do this again. I would love that. And we'll, we'll do it in Australia next time. I'm going to come over and we'll make a trip out of it. You won't have to hold me that hard. It's not you twist, twist my arm. I'll make it over there. Good man. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you.