The Five Types of Wealth Everyone Needs with Sahil Bloom

20:55Sahil Bloom:And then one point of gratitude, something that I felt grateful for. It takes two to three minutes. And you do that even on like a shitty day, even on a day where you're like, I can't want one today. You just go like, I'm going to do it. I'm pushing through. I need this. What does it do for you? It helps me go to sleep for sure, because I am someone who gets into bed and has like mind racing on things that are stressing me out. Writing it down immediately reduces that. And it reminds me of progress that I made, the win, which ambitious people are really bad at recognizing when you have made progress on things.

21:28Sahil Bloom:You only think about the things you didn't do and how little you got to. And then the gratitude piece is scientifically proven to improve your happiness and mental well-being. We know this. It is shown across the board. And it takes two minutes. So you never have an excuse to say like, well, I can't do my journaling because my journaling is a 30-minute practice. This takes two minutes. Anyone can find a way to do it. You could have a piece of paper next to your bed where you just sit and scrawl. It doesn't need to be beautiful or immaculate. And that's the important point is tiny actions compound.

22:01Sahil Bloom:Anything above zero compounds in your life. It doesn't have to be optimal for it to be beneficial. So do the tiny thing that you know is going to contribute to you feeling a little bit better, to pulling you out of the doom scrolling that we constantly do. The other piece, just eliminate things that make you feel negative about your life. I mean, we need to be so much more judicious about the information that we are allowing into our brains. You know this about food. I mean, we all know this, but it's so hard to do, isn't it? It's so hard to do on a daily basis. Like if you are a person that is curious, like me, I wake up, I want to know the news, but I know that I shouldn't immediately look at my phone.

22:40So what are you doing?

22:40Sahil Bloom:I do still look at my phone first thing in the morning. I have just really dramatically curated what it is that I'm going to see. I think that that's a great shout. You are hardwired. I mean, the phones are designed. They have entire teams of behavioral experts, PhDs designed to make them addictive. You're probably not going to win the battle to make your phone less of an attractive thing. No, it certainly can't be obsolete in any of our lives. And you need it, right? Like to do work, to do all these things. But you can really carefully curate what you see, both through your algorithm and your feed, which you can design.

23:13Sahil Bloom:You can make changes to it. I've done that very deliberately. Anything that makes you feel negative, just do the not interested in this thing on Instagram or on whatever platform. And then for news, my life improved dramatically when I reduced my news consumption by 95%. And I know just as much about the world. That's the funny thing. It's like, you consume more news, you actually end up learning less about the world.

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25:32I'm going to ask you to take me back, actually. Give me, just so that we contextualize the book, what are the five types of wealth that you describe in the book?

25:40Sahil Bloom:The five types of wealth are time wealth, which is all about freedom. 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 understanding that time is your most precious asset. Social wealth is all about relationships, your connection to those people around you. Mental wealth is about purpose, growth, and creating space to actually wrestle with some of these bigger picture questions about your life. Physical wealth is about health and vitality. And then financial wealth is about money, but with the nuance of what we talked about, this idea of having enough and what that really looks like.

26:16And how did those ideas become crystallized for you?

26:19Sahil Bloom:I went on a journey following that big decision to move, to start to understand if money was not the right scoreboard for building a good life. If it was not the exclusive measurement of a good life, what was? And I went and talked to, in the end, thousands of people. You did? Young and old over the last two, three years as I went on the journey to understand this. On through 100-year-olds reflecting back on their life, what advice would they give to their younger self? You know, 15-year-old kids, their hopes for the future and the things that they were going to do and everything in And this was like purposeful research for the book.

26:58Sahil Bloom:I didn't know it was for a book at the time. You just went out and you were like, okay, I need to figure this out for myself. Yeah, I am a hyper curious person and I am very much a student of human experience. I love spending time with people more than anything else. Different people from different backgrounds, right? Like this wasn't me going and talking to the richest people that I could find and like the most impressive people. I spoke to everyone from like a man who had just gotten out of serving a 25 to life jail sentence for a heinous crime, through a 99-year-old that was still interested in taking college classes, to 13-year-olds that were just starting their life and figuring out what mattered and how money tied into it.

27:38Sahil Bloom:Everyone, I mean, all across the spectrum. And the common themes that kept coming up were four things, time, people, purpose, and health, over and over again. Very few people talked about money. Money was kind of an enabler to some of those things, but it was not an end in and of itself in the path that people were trying to create. And when they envisioned their ideal life, their ideal future, it was always about those things that really mattered to them in the end. Money, people, time, health. Time, people, purpose, and health. Time, people, purpose, and health. And then money's just the enabler.

28:12Sahil Bloom:It was the enabler. It was a tool, but not the goal. But you sitting there from your financial background, you knew you had to write about money. I knew that it was a clear piece of the puzzle. Money isn't nothing. Anyone that tells you that money can't buy happiness is lying. Let's just be completely clear. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is true. The early stages of your life, you have to meet your basic needs. Food, shelter, basic pleasures, all of those things. Money directly buys happiness in those years. The unfortunate thing is that it creates a pattern in your mind that an incremental unit of money equals an incremental unit of happiness.

28:50Sahil Bloom:Absolutely. But also there's this tap out point, right? There's a time at which you have enough and it's no longer making you happy. Yeah. It has diminishing returns at a very significant level. And the blind, myopic, narrow focus on it can actually lead to atrophy in the other areas. And that is, I call it the Pyrrhic victory. It's the victory that comes at such a steep cost that it might as well have been a defeat. And you talk about three pillars of financial wealth. So take me through those three pillars. Yeah. On the journey to building financial wealth, it's really these three things that come into play.

29:23Sahil Bloom:It is income generation, which is cash inflows, making money, expense management, which is the outflows, and then long-term investment. And the important point here - And you're saying those are the three things that you have to focus on. Those are the three things that you have to focus on as you start to build - Money in, money out, and your investments. Yeah, and the investments. Long-term investments. And the most key piece there that gets lost is that the gap between the money in and the money out needs to grow over time because that gap is your real wealth building asset. The gap is what can be invested into things that compound.

29:56Sahil Bloom:And in an ideal world to actually build financial independence, you want that gap to grow so that you're stacking more and more into your investments that compound over long periods of time. That's how you get the accelerating runaway effect of wealth creation. My perspective is that every guru and financial guru out there has overcomplicated what it means to build wealth. I would say absolutely yes, because you just broke it down so simply in those three steps. But do you honestly believe that anyone can build financial wealth? Yes. Yes. I mean, I don't think that that means that it is going to be the same level of difficulty for everyone because your starting position clearly impacts your ability to get off the ground.

30:38Sahil Bloom:But I do think that anyone can take the core principles of how to achieve financial independence and get out of a paycheck to paycheck cycle and start working towards a life of financial wealth. That doesn't mean that everyone can go become a multimillionaire. I think it can be very, very challenging depending on where you live and cultural situations. If you come from a low caste in India, it's going to be very challenging. You're going to be hard. But in the modern day and age when every single person, almost every single person has access to the internet and to education that is freely available out in the world and to a global economy where you can work for anyone, anywhere, the opportunity playing field is increasingly evening.

31:21Sahil Bloom:It's not to say it is even or that it will ever be even, but it is evening. No, I believe that. I think that's a fair point. Talk to me just a little bit about this idea that you touched on earlier, that expectations are our greatest financial liability. Exactly what do you mean by that? If your expectations continue to inflate beyond what you are able to actually achieve, you will not feel a level of wealth or satisfaction. Because that's the big thing, right? The connector. It's like anyone can go out and make money and achieve some level of financial security, but it's good. You've got to level that with the expectations and you have to be honest about expectations and your limitations.

32:03Sahil Bloom:Yeah. Scientifically, the person with$100 million who hangs out with a bunch of billionaires is going to be less happy than the person with a million dollars who hangs out with a bunch of people with$100 ,000. Your relative position actually matters more than your absolute position. And we see this in a whole bunch of research. Michael Norton, this Harvard Business School professor, asked a bunch of high net worth individuals worth anywhere from a million through 100 million plus. How happy are you on a scale of one to 10? Then he asked, how much more money would you need to be at a 10 out of 10?

32:38Sahil Bloom:And across the board, whether they were worth a million or 100 million plus, they all said they needed two to three times as much money. It makes no sense. At some point, there should just be a happiness number, whatever it is that we think. But humans have an incredible capacity to just do the two to three X thing. We get the thing we thought we wanted. We made our happiness conditional on some mountaintop. We get to the mountaintop and just reset to the next one, wherever it is. And how do you think about money now, like in your new life? My definition of wealth is being able to take my son in the pool at 1pm on a Tuesday.

33:12Sahil Bloom:That captures - That feels pretty major to me. That captures basically everything that I want. That is my version of enough, is to say - That's a very interesting answer. I don't know anyone that would answer that question with that. because there's nothing to do, like again, it's not to do about money. It's not your choice in how you're spending your time. Yeah, it has. I have to have the freedom to be able to at 1 p.m. go and do that on a Tuesday. I have to have the type of relationship where my son wants me to do that. You have to have a pool. I have to have a pool. So I have to have a baseline level of money.

33:41Sahil Bloom:I have to be healthy enough to be able to do that. I have to feel like free and happy to be able to do that. So it captures. But it's a great way to contextualize what is important to you when it comes to money. And what that life is that you are actually trying to build towards. what is the money for? No one stops to ask that question on their journey. Everyone sits around, you go ask someone, you're like, well, what does enough mean to you? And people say, what is the money for? Oh,$10 million,$30 million. So that's the question we should all be asking ourselves. What is the money for? Not how much do I need to earn?

34:12It's like, what kind of life do I want to live? And therefore, what do I need to earn to get to that type of life?

34:18Sahil Bloom:You need to visualize in excruciating detail what the life is that you actually are trying to work towards and build. Then you can go and create a plan to build that life. It doesn't need to be Spartan or bear either. I mean, me having a pool, right? That is not a Spartan life. I can create my dream life and then go create a plan to try to build and work towards that. The important point is that the visualized real life, me going in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, that does not naturally just disappear and reappear on the horizon in the way that a number does. Humans do a great job of having numbers do the disappearing act, but the life, the vivid imagination of the life you are building towards is a much more rational, natural way to operate.

35:10So talk me back from that. So you need to visualize exactly what you want in your life. And then what are you doing? You're working back into that. You're saying, okay, 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, I want to be able to take my kid into the pool? Yeah.

35:24Sahil Bloom:What are the actions that I can be taking on a daily basis that are going to go and create that life? Because it is very different than if I said, I want to be on a private jet or a yacht. Very different. It's just a different set of... And it's not to say one is right or wrong. No, it's just very different. Yeah. The point is that you get to define what the race is that you want to run. If I talk to someone and they say, I really want to be a billionaire. I really want to fly around on private jets. I want to do all those things. I might disagree with the premise that that's going to make them happy, but if they want that, okay, that's a different set of actions.

35:56Sahil Bloom:You are going to go have to create$10 billion of value. Buy some company, you're going to have to have equity and you're going to capture a portion of value. That's the path. So let's start taking actions to go and do that. But if you want to create a life where you have the freedom to step away and go in the pool and you want to have the time, the meaningful relationship with your kid in this way, you want to be healthy enough to do these things, you need to invest in those things on a daily basis. Were you ever that guy? Were you ever the guy that was like, I want the private jet, I want the things and all the things and the things?

36:25Sahil Bloom:Yes. And you right-sized your expectations? Yes. I would just say that it was grounded in the wrong reasons. I was that guy. I mean, in my 20s, that was the path I was marching down. I just saw that there are a lot of things in life that look like a good deal when you look at the list price. What I mean by that is like, we know that there is a price for the things we want to achieve in life. We know that it takes a certain amount of hard work and energy and late nights and all of these things. Building a huge company, making a billion dollars, we kind of know that's going to require all of this time and all of this energy.

37:05Sahil Bloom:But we very rarely think about what the real price is of those things, which includes all of the other sacrifices that are made to other areas of life. And there are a lot of things in life that look like a decent deal based on the list price and are a rip off when it comes to the real price. My entire life fundamentally changed when I realized I would never trade lives with the people that I was reading books about. There are so many people that I know, and look, we're in New York City, that you don't have to look very far to see, people who have made hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars that we pat on the back, we celebrate, we admire, and we ignore the fact that they have four divorces and five kids that don't talk to them.

37:51Sahil Bloom:And we write books about these people and we tell them that they won the game. And we very rarely stop to ask ourselves, is that actually a game that I care to win. And for me, I saw that path. I saw what it looked like and it wasn't for me. And so if something's not for me and if I don't want what the end looks like, I'm going to go ahead and opt out and find my own. It's pretty simple. It's pretty simple. It's simple, but scary. It is scary because I think when you set yourself up that believing that that is what you want, it takes a lot to ask yourself those questions and a lot to reach inside and actually get the answers out.

38:29Sahil Bloom:And in a culture that values those things and values this traditional definition of what it looks like, it is hard to opt out and create your own definition of success. But that is what you're asking people. You're asking people to step back and answer the question of what is your definition of success? Yeah, and we are creating a movement around this. I want that to be normal. I would love for five years from now to be able to say it is entirely normal for people to create their own definition of what it means to build a wealthy life and that we celebrate those things. And I start to, I mean, I start to see it now.

39:09Sahil Bloom:There's people on Instagram, you're starting to see this like slight vibe shift where there's this content that's going viral that's like people living a really like happy, normal, soft life, homesteading, homeschooling, like all of these different ways of life that are getting traction and people are appreciating. We've understood that that is not happiness on the other side of that. Just as you say, it's not what brings you ultimate happiness. And we've read the studies, we've seen it. There's so much more to life.

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40:58I want to pivot because I want to make sure that we can get through everything. Time wealth. Now, this is one for me as a very busy person that I may or may not struggle with. But talk to me about your framework around time wealth.

41:12Sahil Bloom:The question I love to ask people when it comes to time wealth is, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth$130 billion. Most people at that point would be like, yes. Yeah. I mean, he has access to anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. It all sounds pretty good. But you would not trade lives with him because he's 95 years old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of money that he has for the amount of time that he has. He just wouldn't make that trade. And on the flip side, he would give anything to be in your shoes.

41:48Sahil Bloom:He would give up every dollar that he has to have the amount of time that you have left. So in that simple question, what you are doing is recognizing that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And yet on a daily basis, how much of it are we wasting? How much of it are we spending scrolling on our phones, comparing our lives to other people, following these arbitrary timelines, stressing about the past, anxiety about the future? All of these things that are fundamentally disregarding this one most precious asset that you really have. And how did you get to that realization? Because you're just like every one of us, right?

42:22Everybody is doing the same thing. What was it for you that suddenly was like, I am wasting so much of my time and I cannot do it anymore.

42:29Sahil Bloom:I think about this stuff way more than the average person. I think that honestly, I really think that that was the enabler was just that that conversation that I had with a friend prompted me to start really thinking about this. How was I spending my time? How much of my time was I spending on things that fundamentally drained my energy? That is probably the biggest unlock for people, for anyone out there that wants to build more time wealth. The first thing I would say is develop an understanding of what creates energy versus what drains energy. Oh, that's just such a good way to think about it.

43:02So the first thing to do is to just look at your life, look at a week and go, what gives me energy and what takes energy away from me? What happens if the things that take energy away from you are just stuff you have to do? Like, let's just say you have a job and you're like, that just drains me of my energy. Should you change your job?

43:21Sahil Bloom:I would deconstruct it one level further before making that decision, which is to say, I do something I call my energy calendar exercise. So on a Monday - You do? What is an energy calendar exercise? So on Monday, look at your calendar at the end of the day and color code things according to whether they created energy, meaning they felt lifted up, you felt an interest, a pull from it, mark it green. If it was neutral, mark it yellow. And if it drained your energy, if you felt physically drained, mark it red. If you do that for a week, you will have a very clear visual perspective on the specific types of activities during your days, both professional and personal, that create energy versus drain energy in your life.

43:59Sahil Bloom:You'll see it in green and red on your calendar. That information is super valuable because it tells you a lot more about what adjustments you might need to make, what things you might need to change, what tweaks you can make to improve the overall energy flows during the course of a week. And your outcomes in life, follow your energy. When you are leaning into things that create energy, things and people, you achieve the best outcomes. Yeah. And good stuff happens. And there are always slight tweaks and adjustments you can make to the way things are being done. How often are you tweaking, do you think?

44:33Are you looking every single week?

44:35Sahil Bloom:I know. I do this at least once a quarter though. Okay. I will take a look at it once a quarter. Once you have an awareness for it, you can kind of come back to it now and then and do it. But I would just say there are things every time you look at it, there are going to be things that you fundamentally cannot change. Like if I have to make sure I take my kid to whatever these things are, maybe it's energy draining for me. Too bad. It's a responsibility. I have to do it. But then there are things that you will initially say to yourself, I just have to do that. When the reality is there's a slight tweak or adjustment you can make that makes it neutral or even energy creating.

45:06Sahil Bloom:An example of that for me was phone calls and Zoom meetings, massively energy draining. I hate doing that. Would have rather, you know, in my old job stacks of days. I would rather staple gun my stomach than sit there and do that for a full day. What I found though, was that going on a walking phone call is energy creating for me. Going out, I'm outside, fresh air, nature. I can't multitask when I'm walking around. So it makes the call actually go better. The outcome's better. I took half my phone calls and made them into walking calls. Suddenly my weeks felt dramatically different. Like a week that would have been massively draining, a day that would have been massively draining, turned into something that felt more neutral or even good.

45:45Sahil Bloom:It's an example of just a slight tweak where I would have initially said, impossible, I can't change anything about it. I just have to do that. Two, let me ask the question again of, is there a slightly different thing that I can do there? But that exercise of an energy calendar is a great place to start for anyone to just understand, develop that awareness of what is creating energy in your life and what is draining so that you can start making the tiny shifts, including with people. If you identify there are people you're spending a ton of time with that are just making you feel like you need to take a shower, you should probably spend less time with those people and your life will get better.

46:21Why do people find it so hard to get away from people that drain their energy? I personally don't have this problem. I would never, ever spend time with people that take my energy, but I see it around me all the time. What is that?

46:33Sahil Bloom:It's much harder when it's your nuclear family or when it's blood relatives. When it's friends, I think the biggest reason is that people have this sensation or this sort of attachment to the idea that friends are things that you keep throughout all the seasons of your life. You feel like, oh, well, that person's an old friend. That's just the way they are. We say things like that. That's just the way they've always been. The reality is that your life has seasons. And not everybody's made for every season. And very few are, actually. They're going to be like, maybe you can count on one hand the number of people that are going to be there across all of them.

47:06Tiny handful.

47:07Sahil Bloom:That's okay. At the end of the day, most of your friends aren't really your friends. They are just along for the ride when it's fun, convenient, or valuable. Because your definition of friend would be what? My definition of friend is someone that I can call at three in the morning when I am down and out. And they will pick up and be there. And there are very few people at the end of the day that will be there. And those are the handful. There's always only a handful. And you need to find those people. you need to cherish those people. And you have to have those people. It doesn't matter if you've got one or two of those people, but you have to have those people.

47:45Those are the most important relationships you'll have in your life.

47:48Sahil Bloom:And the way you have those people is by being one to someone else. Couldn't have said it better myself. That is an actual fact. I'm fascinated by this concept of you talk about there being four types of professional time. Can you just talk me through that? Because that idea about how we should all spend our work hours, I found truly fascinating. Yeah, I have this concept that there are really four types of professional time, two of which are largely forgotten and missing from most people's calendars. The majority of professional time is spent in one, which is management time. This is things like meetings, emails, processing, you know, like basic boring admin tasks.

48:27Sahil Bloom:That ends up being 80 % of most people's calendars. Which is always such a shame. The second type is creation. That's actually creating things. That's coding, that's writing, that's creating in some way. Then there are the two types of really forgotten time, one of which is consumption. This is about actually inputting new things at the top of the funnel into your brain. It's reading, it's learning, it's conversations. It's the actual input of new ideas at the top. The best. It's listening to this podcast, as a matter of fact. And then the last type is ideation, which is the time to really think about these things.

49:03Sahil Bloom:The biggest challenge is with ideation, it's so important to have time to think. When you don't think, you never zoom out to see the bigger picture on anything in your life, professional or personal. And you don't allow these ideas to sort of intermingle and connect, which is where you get the sparks that create the 10x or 100x ideas. Where all the best things come from. Where the best things come from. And you can make that change by just structuring those into your life. You need to have blocks on your calendar that are dedicated to consumption and to ideation. You probably already have them for management and for creation.

49:38Sahil Bloom:Yes, but they need to be for everyone. You need them for everyone. Even if it's once a week where you have like a 30-minute window where you're going to be just thinking about some of the bigger picture questions in the business that you're facing or the idea that you're thinking about starting. Create that space in your life to do that and your outcomes will immediately start to improve. It's incredible. And I think that that is so true because, you know, I once read that, you know, Bill Gates takes an annual thinking week. Yeah. And he'll go and he goes out to a lake and he takes a stack of books and a stack of papers and he just goes and he thinks.

50:12And that's where some of like the biggest ideas and the things that have ultimately changed the way that we work, the way that we live now, that's where those things come from. Now, a lot of people are not going to have a whole week, but the idea of maybe just taking an hour and lifting yourself up above all of your problems, above everything that's going on. I know for me, that is a must. Like it's an absolute must. One hour, once a month.

50:37Sahil Bloom:I call it my think day. It's like an adaptation on his fancy week that he goes and does. His week looks so good. Yeah, I mean, if you have kids, if you have life, like you can't really do that. If you've got a company like Microsoft, maybe it deserves a week. Yeah, but go, I mean, and bring some big picture questions with you. There's eight thinking prompts in the book. for those think days that'll really get your brain zoomed out with a different perspective on your current situation. My absolute favorite question to ask myself at these is, if you were the main character in a movie of your life, what would the audience be screaming at you right now?

51:14Sahil Bloom:We've all gone and watched a movie or a TV show and you just want to jump through the screen and grab the main character and shake them and say, don't go down in the basement, and look behind you, chase the girl to the airport, whatever the thing is. Slow down. Yeah. You are that main character in the movie of your life. And the audience would be screaming something at you right now. So what is it? What is the thing that is so blindingly obvious from the outside looking in that you are either choosing to ignore or have yet to create enough perspective to see? Yeah. You speak a lot about this window of time that we have with our kids and how short that is.

51:48You have a son. I have four kids. And there's so much in terms of, you know, I talk about it all the time, the trade-offs that we have between our careers and our ambition and being with our family and being with the people who matter the most. And I just wonder what your advice is for managing that time, because we all know how important it is. But, you know, I have an enormous amount of ambition. So how do you think about those two things coupled together?

52:15Sahil Bloom:You get 10 years with your kids. It's not 18. Everyone says you get 18 summers. You don't get 18 summers. The first few are really tough. They're a nightmare. The babies are a nightmare. The first few, you're just getting over the plane journeys. By the time they're 12 or 13, they have friends. They don't want to necessarily hang out with you. They want to go do other things. And we know statistically, 95 % of the time you have with your kids is gone by the time they turn 18. 75 % by the time they turn 12. I still find that. It's jarring. That tension that you navigate between presence and ambition, the desire to be present during that magical window that you have with your kids, and your ambition to go and create things, to go and build, the way that you choose to navigate that tension is the most fundamental question that you face as a parent.

53:08Sahil Bloom:The way that I navigate it is to say that work-life balance is a lie. Thank you. I'll just say that. The entire idea of work-life balance places the two in opposition to say that they are opposing forces and they pull against each other. The reality is that you can build a life where all of these things are a part of the same mission of building towards the life that you actually want. My son, my wife, they are a part of this mission. Anything that I'm going and doing, They are a part of that life that we are trying to create. So when I travel, when I'm gone, when I'm doing things, I want them both to understand just as much as I do why I'm doing the things that I'm doing.

53:52Sahil Bloom:What is it contributing towards? What is the life that we are all working towards and trying to create? Because then rather than saying, oh, dad's gone. He doesn't want to be here. It's dad's doing something important. There's a real why behind the things that I'm doing. and that is such an important and simple shift that really just comes from communication. The other piece to that is recognizing that while your presence and your energy is critical, it is also essential that your kids see you working hard on things that you care about. Absolutely. All right, so we've had financial wealth and time wealth.

54:29Now I want you to talk about social wealth and what that means.

54:32Sahil Bloom:Social wealth is all about your people. and the visualization, the most important thing. I mean, the most important thing in so many ways, scientifically, we know relationships are the key to living a happy, healthy life. The Harvard study of adult development was this amazing study they did over the course of 85 years, followed the lives of 2000 people. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It wasn't your blood pressure or your cholesterol. It wasn't your smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that determined your health outcomes.

55:15And then listen, we all, first of all, that study is one of the most brilliant things ever because it was so many people over such a long time span. And it was such a clear indicator of what actually matters. But I feel like we all feel this, right? We all know intrinsically that the people that we love, the relationships we have, those social connections, like we feel it intrinsically. And yet somehow it isn't always on the list of things that make us feel good, right? It just sometimes just slips away. It's like we take that part for granted. So how have you really honed in on that? And how do you make your social connection something that you are able to focus on knowing that it gives you so much?

55:56Sahil Bloom:Very simple mindset shift changed everything for me here, which is your social connections, your relationships are the best investment that you can make. Thinking of them as an investment is the recognition that they compound. We know that with money. You know that if you put away $50 today, it's better than zero because it's going to stack and compound in your future. The exact same rule and principle applies to your social relationships. Sending the text to the person when you're thinking about them is better than doing nothing because it is going to stack and compound in the future. It's going to build that relationship.

56:33Sahil Bloom:But relationships are the first thing that fall by the wayside when we get busy because we think that it has to be something dramatic for it to be beneficial. We think, oh, I need to spend hours with this person or I need to make sure that I do the coffee date once a week or get together with this old group of friends and it starts to create stress so we don't do it. The reality is that the tiny, simple, boring, basic actions of letting people know that you appreciate them, of reaching out, of texting your mom, calling in the two minutes that you have, those things compound in your relationships.

57:03Sahil Bloom:They really matter. And those are the things that are going to create the texture of the good life that you want.

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58:25The only thing left is to close the book.

58:27Sahil Bloom:The end of an era. And don't miss Taylor Swift, The Era's Tour. The final show featuring for the first time the tortured poet's department. Streaming December 12th, only on Disney Plus.

58:48I was thinking about this loneliness epidemic that you talk about so much. And, you know, there are some shocking, like absolutely shocking data and trends. Why do you think that is if social wealth is so important and so fundamental for us?

59:02Sahil Bloom:I think that loneliness killed my grandmother. You do? My grandmother lived in India and my grandfather, before he passed, like after he retired, my grandfather and his four closest friends all built houses on this one tiny cul-de-sac so that their wives could all be together if the men passed away. And all four of the men did die and their wives, their widows were still there and they were the closest of friends. My grandfather died in 2005. And for 15 years up until COVID, my grandmother did not go a single day without having someone come over to play Scrabble, someone come over for lunch, some chat, some friendship.

59:43Sahil Bloom:She was like a social butterfly every single day. And she aged extraordinarily well. COVID hit, 18 months of lockdowns, not being able to see anyone. Aged my grandmother 20 years in the span of 18 months. And she passed away shortly thereafter. And it was not COVID that got her. It was the lack of social connection, the lack of that stimulation that it creates. And many of us are creating that ecosystem in our own lives. That environment of lockdowns, we are doing to ourselves. Yes. I see it over and over again. There's this crazy trend on TikTok right now that talks about making excuses not to go out and just staying home.

1:00:26And I'm like, why is that a thing? I just don't understand that at all. Why would you not leave the house? Why would that be a cool thing?

1:00:33Sahil Bloom:Teenagers in the United States are spending 70 % less time with their friends in person than they were two decades ago. Which is wild. Seventy. So how do we build on our social wealth? You have to just invest in it in a basic way. Spend time with people in person, first off. Like enough of the digital communities, enough. Look, I'm all for technology. I love these things. At the end of the day, humans are social creatures. Relationships are what allowed us to survive and thrive as a species. Relationships are built in person. spend time with people in person. That is where we build real meaningful connections.

1:01:07Sahil Bloom:That is where you build the friendships of the person who you can call at three in the morning. That's not done over technology. What mistakes do you think people are making when it comes to social wealth? The biggest mistake I see people making is in thinking that you need to have hundreds of connections in order to be socially wealthy. Depending on who you are and your natural needs, if you're introverted versus extroverted, you may have a full social wealth cup from one deep relationship, two deep relationships. And you think that you can have a full, that you can be fully full with only two relationships?

1:01:45Sahil Bloom:I do. I do. I don't think that - I can count my friends on one hand. I'm being realistic. I think that most people are going to have less than five true deep friends or relationships in their life. And I think that that's perfectly fine. The point is having 10 people that don't really know you that you can't call at three in the morning is much worse than having one who really knows you and who will really be there for you. Oh, definitely. I mean, I can't think of anything worse. Okay. We've done financial wealth, social wealth. We've also done time wealth, but mental wealth. This is a really big one.

1:02:22Mental wealth is all about carving your own path.

1:02:28Sahil Bloom:It is about rejecting the default state of normalcy that people want you to consent to and creating your own path. And this is a really challenging one because the worst thing in the world is not being on a bad path, the worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours. Bad path screams at you every single day to get off of it. A good path that isn't yours, there is a lot of gravity to just stay on. Give me an example of that. What do you mean by that exactly? It's the person who has the thing that they've always wanted to do that's screaming at them to go do it, but they have the middle manager job at something and they do not have the energy or the guts or the courage to see what that other path might look like.

1:03:25Sahil Bloom:And having the courage to explore, not necessarily to quit, to throw everything by the wayside and to go change it, but to carve out 30 minutes a day to just see what that other path might look like. A lot of benefit comes from that. Maybe you find that that thing's not for you and you decide, oh, actually, this path is good for me. But that unlived dream, that road not taken, is going to eat at you for the rest of your life unless you just take that little bit of time on a daily basis. 30 minutes a day is a beautiful thing. And in a month, 30 minutes a day, 900 minutes, you can learn a whole lot about some other path, gathering information, creating little bits of evidence, figuring out what that other path might look like.

1:04:06And you're talking about really finding a purpose here.

1:04:09Sahil Bloom:Yeah, I'm talking about finding the thing that is going to make you excited to wake up on a Tuesday morning. People with a clear sense of purpose have lower all-cause mortality. There is clear scientific evidence that people that have a sense of purpose live longer lives. Wow. This was part of the Blue Zones research that Dan Buettner did. There have been multiple studies and meta-analyses of this. And it makes sense. I mean, we know this, that waking up in the morning and not knowing what you were supposed to do, not knowing what you are waking up for is going to make you feel very negative about life.

1:04:42Sahil Bloom:That is going to harm you in a whole lot of different ways. It also leads to more pessimism. And we know scientifically that pessimism reduces the length of your life. Optimists live longer. So for all of those reasons, figuring out and spending the time to think more about yourself, what you love doing, what you're good at, what your world, however you define your world needs from you in this moment. Finding the intersection of those things and walking down that path in some way will bring you more joy and a longer life. Okay. Now I want to talk to you about the physical world because this is a really tough one for so many people.

1:05:20Sahil Bloom:Hot topic right now. I feel like it is a hot topic. It's always a hot topic. Yeah. So all of the gurus in this space. When you say gurus, who do you mean the gurus? Anyone that is selling you a product associated with health and fitness. Have an incentive to make it as complicated as possible. It is the exact same incentive that people who sell you fancy financial advice have. Make it complicated so that you can't do it yourself. because then you need to hire me. You need to buy my ebook. You need to buy my course. You need to buy my whatever, all of those things that I'm going to then sell you.

1:06:01Sahil Bloom:What that does is it creates a level of intimidation about what it means to be healthy. Being healthy and getting fit and healthy is not about cold plunges at four in the morning or Saratoga water bottles. It is not about red light therapy. It's not about saunas. It's not about, you know, having the most... You mean social media is lying to us? No, those things are amazing for social media, but they are not what makes you healthy. What makes you healthy is basically three things. Move your body for 30 minutes a day. Eat whole unprocessed foods at about 80 % of your meals. That's 17 out of 21 meals during the week and sleep for seven hours a night.

1:06:38Sahil Bloom:If you can do those three things, you will be healthier than 90 % of people in the world. And I cannot sell you an ebook on that plan, right? Like that would be a very poorly selling ebook. It is so simple and boring and basic, but it's the truth. That is level one of the physical wealth video game. And anyone can go out and do that. And by the way, the rewards to that game are entirely predictable. They are so certain. If you go and do that every single day, you will achieve great outcomes. But you make it sound so simple. And yet for so many people, it's just not that simple, right? There must be like a hack or some way that we can be like, do I really need to exercise for 30 minutes a day and eat whole foods and get seven hours sleep because I'm busy and I like burgers and I'm busy.

1:07:28Sahil Bloom:Everyone wants the pill and the shortcut. Yeah, they do. We do. You don't have a pill or a shortcut or something. I don't have a pill to sell, unfortunately. But you don't mind this 80-20 rule, right? You talk about the 80-20 a little bit. Yeah, that is the 80-20. That is the 80-20. The crazy version is I would tell you, you have to do an hour of this. You have to sleep at hours. You have to do all these fancy protocols, take all these supplements, do all these things. That might be level 100, but you don't have to worry about level 100. Most of us don't need that. Yeah, until you just get through level one, do the basics.

1:07:59Sahil Bloom:By the way, the workout doesn't have to be at the gym. You can go for a walk for 30 minutes and get much more benefit than most people are getting on a daily basis. The thing that I fundamentally feel when it comes to physical wealth is when the rewards are certain, you need to be able to convince yourself to do the thing. I understand when the rewards are uncertain why it's so challenging to motivate yourself. If you were to say like, oh, I'm going to try to build a business. I'm going to do these daily actions. It may or may not work out. That is very scary. Tolerating uncertainty is an equation for success.

1:08:33Sahil Bloom:People who are able to tolerate the most uncertainty eventually find a way to win. Not everyone can do that. That's very hard. Health is an area where you do not have to tolerate uncertainty. If you do these things every single day, you will look and feel better than you did at the start of the month. Guaranteed. Unless there's some like really edge case physiological issue, but that's a separate thing. 99 % of people, if you do those things, you will feel dramatically different. And you think that's it? So physical wealth, like that's your lot? Yes. Just do that. Yes. Do that as a starting point.

1:09:05Sahil Bloom:If you were doing nothing, do that. I feel like in the book, so much of it is surrounded with these like very big questions. And I wonder if you've been able, like how that's changed your life. And if you, ultimately, if you've got answers to the big question since you wrote the book? I really believe that the answers you seek in life are found in the questions that you avoid. The big changes, the life that you are trying to build, it's hiding in the things that you are avoiding asking yourself. It's challenging questions that you're avoiding. That is why I going to just wake up with some enormous epiphany and all of the answers that you've wanted for your life are there.

1:09:51Sahil Bloom:This is a journey. Thriving in life is a continuous journey, not an end state. Trying to create an end state of perfection is actually a fool's errand. That is what leads us to create this conditional statement with respect to our own happiness. We say, when I get X, then I'll be happy. When I get this, then I'll be happy. When I get that, then I'll be happy. when the reality is we need to build this into the journey. And that comes from wrestling with these questions on an ongoing basis. And you are going to change. The lens through which I see these questions now as a father of a three-year-old relative to when I was 30 and had no kids, very different.

1:10:29Sahil Bloom:Totally different. And it's going to be totally different when I'm 50 and my kids are out of the house or when I'm 70 and I'm retired. All of these things are going to change. So coming back to and sitting with the questions, that is really where I think you find the most powerful value in your life. Yeah, absolutely. No doubt. Have you found it difficult to almost like follow your own advice in the book? I have struggled with different areas over the course of the last three years that I've been on the journey, but that's part of it. The nature of life is that you have these seasons of balance and unbalance and coming back to balance.

1:11:16Sahil Bloom:And it's okay to lean into those. You don't need to create this pressure in your mind that your life is supposed to be perfectly balanced at all times across these five types and you're going to grow evenly. Your life is going to change. What you prioritize or focus on during any one season will change. But you don't want to turn any of the areas completely off. You can just have them on dimmer switches, right? One is turned up, the others are turned down low. I love that idea. And that is a really liberating mindset to just lean into the season that you're in, to recognize that it is a season, it will come to an end, and that you can embrace the next season for whatever might come.

1:11:53How are you teaching your little son these concepts?

1:11:58Sahil Bloom:I do not believe you can teach your kids anything. I really believe you have to embody the things that you want them to learn. If I want my son to treat my wife like a queen, I better damn well treat my wife like a queen. So if I want him to understand the value of delayed gratification, he better see me working hard on things now for some benefit value later. That is what he sees on a daily basis in our house. He sees my wife and I have hard conversations, but then repair. He sees me work hard on things for work and then reap the rewards of those things. He sees me work hard on things physically, all my workouts.

1:12:40Sahil Bloom:He knows I go to the gym, I do these things. And now I see him acting out those things that he is seeing regularly. He's mimicking those things. I can tell that he is learning from seeing those. So that is really what I'm trying to do with him. Sahil, do you feel infinitely more wealthy after embarking on this whole journey, after speaking to so many thousands of people and then following the advice of your own book? Do you feel more wealthy these days? Infinitely more wealthy. I wrote it right at the very beginning of the book that I feel like the wealthiest man on the face of the earth. and that's not a flex on anything because this is my own definition of wealth.

1:13:22Sahil Bloom:This is about me and how I feel, but I have taken the actions to create the life that I actually wanted for myself and for my family. And anyone can go out and do that. Anyone? Anyone. I love that. I'm going to take you for a quick rapid fire round before I let you go. So what is the first thing that you do when you wake up? Cold plunge. I knew you had a cold plunge. I was dead sure of it. What's the last thing you do before you go to bed? My one, one, one method that we talked about. I write down something that I'm grateful for. It's a brilliant one. What are you currently aspiring for in your business life?

1:14:03Sahil Bloom:I want to reach and impact a million people over the course of the next year with this book and with these ideas. We've reached a quarter million people today and I see the path to doing it and I am committed to getting it out there in the world. I have no doubt. And what are you aspiring for in your personal life? I want to be the best father, husband, brother, and son that I can possibly be. Great answer. What is a, I wonder if you're going to say your own one, but what's a book that's changed your life? There's a book called When Breath Becomes Air. Oh, it's a great, it's The Doctor. What's his name?

1:14:42Sahil Bloom:Paul Callanathy. It's so, it's the first book I read this year and it is insane. Yeah, I was sobbing on a plane when I read it. Same. I sobbed on a plane. It's not light. It's not light reading. But it is extraordinary. Extraordinary. I would say everyone has to read that book. It's a really tiny little book. You can read it very quickly, but it's very, very good. What's something that you valued when you were starting out that you don't anymore? fancy things, fancy bottles of wine, you know, status flexes, bot status flexes, I would say, things that you can acquire that signal your worth to the world.

1:15:17And what is something that you value now that you didn't back then? The things that can only be earned, meaningful connections with people that you love,

1:15:28Sahil Bloom:building things that you can't buy overnight, knowledge, wisdom, experience, and a fit, healthy body. You cannot buy that. It's amazing. Thank you so much, my dear. I so appreciate you being here. Thank you. This is lovely. Thank you so much.

1:15:49If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five-star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Greed is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Greed. Our executive producers are Corrine Gilead-Fisher, Derek Brown, and me. Our executive producers from Odyssey are Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, Leah Reese-Dennis, Asha Saluja, and Jenna Weiss-Berman. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black.

1:16:25Video production by Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, Carlos Delgado, and Arnie Agassi. Social media by Olivia Holman. Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME. Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson-Rose, Tim Meekle, Sean Cherry and Lauren Vieira. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at Aspire with Emma Greed. Greed is spelled G-R-E-D-E. That's Aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E with Emma Greed. or you can submit a question to me on my website emagreed.me.

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