The Real Meaning of Wealth with Sahil Bloom

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1:33Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians, to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:07Anyways, let's get to it.

2:16Today, I am sitting down with Sawhill Bloom. If you follow his viral newsletters or social media. You know he's been dropping wisdom for years. So after much anticipation, his book, The Five Types of Wealth, is finally here. Sawhill breaks down what real wealth looks like beyond just money to time, mental and physical well-being, relationships, and investing in yourself. You don't want to miss this one. Let's get right into it.

2:55Okay, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, and joining me is Sahil Bloom. He is an entrepreneur. He's a writer. He's a content creator, but very soon he's going to be a New York Times bestselling author. He's written an incredible book. The title of the book is The Five Types of Wealth, A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. And by the way, I follow you on Twitter, follow you on Instagram, and you went deep here. You give great color on these different social media platforms, but the content in this book is fantastic. And what I love about this book, if you don't mind, because I spent the weekend reading it, is you can pick it up.

3:36You don't have to start on chapter one. I could go to the middle of the book and start reading, and I've got content that's connected to me. And so that's a tough thing to do, Sahil. So congratulations on that. And tell me first a little bit about yourself and why you wrote this book, and then we'll go into why I like it so much. Yeah, well, I appreciate the warm words. And I definitely tried to structure the book for exactly that. So I'm glad you picked up on it. The story of writing this book, the book is not about me, but it very much is a manifestation of my journey, which is one that I think a lot of people will find themselves in, where you've kind of been handed this default path to success your entire life.

4:18And you march down these default paths, you accept these default definitions and these default settings, as David Foster Wallace called them. And you never really take time to question whether those are the things that you actually want to do, whether those are the things that you actually find meaning in or the things you would actually define as success. And, you know, I found myself on that path and I was chasing money at the kind of default scoreboard that we all measure ourselves against. And unfortunately, while I was winning that one game, I started to see that a lot of the other areas of my life were suffering.

4:50And that was everything from my relationships, you know, with my parents who I was never seeing, my sister, relationship was strained. My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time. You know, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were all over the place. So I had these other areas of my life really suffering while on the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game. I had all the markers of success. And so I just started to have this sensation that if that was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And I went on this journey to try to figure out what was the right game and what was the way to measure on that broader, better scoreboard for building a healthy, happy, fulfilling life, that war that we are all trying to win in the long run.

5:32And that's really what this book is all about. It's about identifying the things that truly matter to you, not what society tells you should matter, not what your parents tell you, not what your friends tell you, and then going and taking action to go and build around those things. So let's start there. Let's talk about our society for a second, because I think you've made some insightful points about the society. And, you know, you join a long line of leaders who try to help people with their lives. The father of the self-help movement for the United States, at least perhaps of the world, is Ben Franklin.

6:05He wrote a great book, his autobiography. He also poured Richard's Almanac. And there was a lot of messaging there. Went on to be Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill. There's been a ton of people that have written differently about living a fulfilling life. But what I found interesting about yours is you broke it up into five different buckets. And I'll just tell the listeners what they are. It's time, social wealth, mental health slash wealth, physical health slash wealth, and obviously financial. So I want to start with where you think our society is. Because it feels like our society is about financial wealth.

6:42It feels like our society is about the totems of financial wealth. So if you're bling, bling, bling, Saw Hill, then you've made it. But we both know a lot of people that are bling, bling, that are not happy campers. So tell us about your odyssey from looking at the society. There's an arbitrage between the way the society sees itself, frankly, and the way you write about what is good mental and good financial and physical health. So tell us about that odyssey. Tell us how you got there. Yeah, I think Peter Drucker, the management theorist said this best, which is what gets measured gets managed.

7:17And that quote really resonates with me because it's a reminder that the thing that you can measure ends up being the thing that you focus on, that you narrow in on, that you sort of myopically optimize around. And in society, that thing that we can measure is money. I mean, money's measurability is a feature, right? It's what allows us to use it and to actually create this culture of capitalism that we all know and respect. But unfortunately, because it is so measurable, it also becomes the thing that we focus on entirely. And the problem is that money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.

7:52And when it becomes the only focus of your life, when it becomes the thing that you measure yourself around, when it becomes the way that you stack yourself up against others, the way that you compare yourself to others, it starts to be unhealthy because it is very much a pathway to the Pyrrhic victory, to winning the battle but losing the war. And all of these other areas of our life, we know in the back of our mind they are important. You know that freedom is more important. You know that your relationships, that your mental and physical health, you know these things. And yet on a daily basis, your actions are going to surround the thing that you can measure.

8:24And so So when I went on this journey myself and tried to figure this out, I knew that measurement really had to be at the forefront of this. You need a better scoreboard so that when you're making decisions, when you're taking actions, you can make those decisions and take those actions around the broader set of principles that are actually going to contribute to that truly comprehensively wealthy life that you're trying to live. so when you got to the time wealth part of this book it left a very big impact on me because you had a an equation i'm searching the book right now but there was an equation in the book where it's like okay take your age okay if you're 65 you're going to live to 80 and 15 if you see people once a year you're going to see loved ones 15 more times in your life uh and when you write it that way, it becomes a little bit more dramatic.

9:13It becomes a little bit more compelling. And I guess what would you say to somebody who's filling their time with meetings, filling their time with, we're going to make an extra dollar today. And again, I'm all for making money. I've dedicated a good part of my life, Saw Hill, to making money. But I also recognize that if I'm going to miss out on this big opportunity to be with my children or hang out with friends or loved ones or my wife, that there's wealth in that as well. So give me some coaching. Go ahead. What would you say to people? There's a few things. So first off, making money and pursuing your ambition, there is nothing wrong with that.

9:51And this book will never tell you that there's something wrong with that. What it will say is that that has to be grounded in something more meaningful than just the pursuit of money. So as you talk about like you have made money, you've worked on that in your life, I would argue that that pursuit of money has actually been a pursuit of your purpose. You have been grounded in the desire to build something meaningful. You've built a big company. You've built and hired people, created jobs, built this enterprise. That has resulted in you receiving value in return in the form of money. But it wasn't that you were chasing money every single day.

10:21You were chasing purpose and grounding yourself in that. And there's nothing wrong with that. What I would say to the person from a time perspective is very simple. Time is your most precious asset. It is the only thing that you can never get back. And the thing that I always say to young people as I ask them this one question, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He is worth$130 billion. Last I checked, he has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He flies around on private jets. He has mansions all over the place. He reads and learns for a living, but you would not trade lives with him simply because he is 95 years old.

10:55And there's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time he has left for all the money in the world. You just wouldn't do it. And similarly, he would trade places with you in a heartbeat. He would give up everything that he has to be young again. So you know in the back of your mind through that math that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And then on a daily basis, you spend time scrolling on this thing, looking around, comparing yourself to others, taking on stupid things that you don't want to do, things that aren't moving the needle in your life. So you need to have this mindset shift to recognize that time is literally the only thing that you have and leveraging it effectively, deploying it into things that actually create energy in your life, recognizing that you only get one shot at this, that is the real wealth.

11:37Okay, let's go to some other stuff in the book. You talk about mental wealth. You talk about the anxieties that people have in their lives and the tribulations that they have in their lives. How do you recommend that people manage that, right? So, you know, Socrates once said, maybe the best among us are the ones that didn't live, right? Meaning you have to go through the trials and tribulations of life and the ups and downs saw hill. How do you manage all that? I think that the most important point around mental wealth is this idea of space. And I talk about it in the context of creating space in your life.

12:13Viktor Frankl, a famous psychologist and Holocaust survivor, has this quote that our power exists in the space that we can create between stimulus and response. So if you think about your life, you have this constant stimulus drip coming in. And then you're being told that you have to respond to everything right away. We live in this urgency culture. Every single thing is urgent. So you don't get time to create space because everything is stimulus response, stimulus response. Your power exists in your ability to create a little bit of space on a daily basis and then a lot of space, hopefully on a more regular monthly or quarterly basis to zoom out, to slow things down and to see the bigger picture in your life, to actually be able to pick and choose your moves on the chessboard, if you will.

12:56If you think of some of the greatest success stories in history, even in different fields, Lionel Messi, famous soccer player, one of the best that's ever lived. He is known for walking around the field. He gets called lazy. People yell at him. They lament the fact that he seems lazy on the field. The reality is it's strategy. He is creating space. He's slowing down so that he can see the bigger picture, so that he can create a map, and so that he has the energy to deploy into the one moment that matters, to really go forward and strike and score the goal. We all need to live a little bit more like that.

13:26We need to find deliberate ways to create that space in our life so that we can process the stimulus and come back with the better response on the back end. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

14:25credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Okay. But I'm talking about anxiety soil. I'm talking about you got your shit together. I arguably on certain days have my shit together, but a lot of people don't. And you write about how they can get it together. So go. I am a believer that stress and anxiety feed on idleness. they grow and proliferate when you are not taking action in your life. When you are concerning yourself with other people, when you are scrolling on social media, your most unhappy moments will happen during those truly idle periods.

15:08Not the periods where you're meditating, that's not idleness, that's actually processing, that's growth, but those periods when you are truly idle. And when you take action, when you create movement in your life, you are literally starving them of the oxygen that they breathe. So when in doubt, what I always say is when in doubt, take action, do something. Because at the end of the day, we live in this information gathering society. We live in this world where people are getting all of their dopamine from information gathering. And dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. You read the book and you get the information and you feel all good about yourself, but you haven't done anything with that information.

15:44We need to get our dopamine from action, from actually going and doing something on the back end of it. What's an anti-goal, Sao? The idea of anti-goals is a very interesting one. Goals, we all know about. It's the summit of the mountain, the thing that we're trying to climb towards, the focus. Anti-goals are the things that we are not willing to sacrifice in our pursuit of those goals. So basically, they're the things we don't want to happen. So as an example, let's say my goal is to become CEO of my company. My anti-goal might be being away from my family 300 nights out of the year, sacrificing my health due to the stress and all of the travel required to get to that job.

16:24I want to achieve the goal of becoming CEO, but not if it means having those anti-goals become real. The reason this is so important is, to paraphrase Charlie Munger, all I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there. These are the places where you are going to die. And you need to understand and have them clarified in your mind so that you can avoid them as you continue to march forward towards your goals. Okay. I consider myself somebody that has some pretty good social wealth. So define for me what social wealth is. Whether you think I'm right or wrong, and then define for me what social wealth is.

17:01I think you're right, but I don't think it's something where we can necessarily judge others. But social wealth is all about your relationships. It's about your depth of relationships with the few close people, your true, what I think of as like darkest hour friends, the people that you can call at three in the morning when the chips are down, when your company goes bankrupt, when you get arrested, when you're stuck, when you're in a rut. Those are your true deep relationships. Then there is the broader circle of breadth, of the relationships that extend beyond that core, the communities, the spiritual networks, the things that you are connected to that kind of extend beyond the self, those higher order communities.

17:39And the combination of those two is kind of what creates your social wealth. And at the end of the day, social wealth is what provides the texture to be able to enjoy any of the other types of wealth. When you think about having any level of financial wealth, no one dreams about being on a yacht by themselves, right? You want people to enjoy these things with. You don't dream of being able to go on these amazing hikes or trips or experiences by yourself. You want to have others by your side with them. So social wealth is the one that I would say most people fail to invest in. And the mindset shift here that's so important is we know that investing in our financial wealth is a smart decision, that putting away$100 today is going to compound into our future.

18:21The exact same principle applies to social wealth. Investing in your relationships today is arguably the best investment you can make because it will pay dividends for a long, long time into the future in the exact same way that a financial investment will. Let's talk about falling in love while I've got you here. And by the way, I could talk to you for hours about this book, but I know you don't have unlimited time because I've got to keep your time wealth at a high level, Saul Hildy. I like it. I like it. But let's talk about falling in love. Yeah. The younger generation, you're in the younger generation, I'm in the older generation.

18:53Is it harder for younger people to fall in love these days or do I have that wrong? It's just a non-scientific assessment that I'm making. I think that social media has done a number on our brains. And young people are the primary victim of that because they grew up with social media. And social media has convinced you that falling in love is what matters. And what I always say is that falling in love is easy. Growing in love is very, very hard. And falling in love is what you see on social media. It's the Instagram filtered images. It's the perfect vacation moments. It's the fancy date nights out.

19:31growing in love is much deeper. That is about shared struggle. It's about sitting in the mud with people. It's about the hard conversations. It's about all of those things that contribute to actually building a deep connection with someone. Shared struggle, we know, releases oxytocin in our bodies. It's the chemical that creates feelings of love and connection. So if you live in this world of social media where you just hit the eject button as soon as things get hard, because you know you have this range of options right at your fingertips, you will never actually get to that growing in love phase that builds the deep relationship, that actually builds that connection that you're looking for.

20:08So you think social media, is social media like smoking for the last generation? Is it like, does social media give your brain lung cancer? Okay, that's a mixed metaphor, but I think you're following me. I think that social media is worse than smoking because smoking got your lungs, social media gets your brain. And I am very worried. I mean, when I think about my son growing up in the age that he will with social media, with AI, not being able to know what is truth or a complete fake, I have deep grave concerns for what the future of some of these technologies look like. And look, this is coming from someone who does a lot of work on social media.

20:51And I think the distinction that you need to make in your own mind is whether you are using these technologies for growth, for learning, for education, or whether you are using them for cheap, quick dopamine hits of entertainment. And there's a limit to how much of those cheap, quick fix dopamine hits of entertainment that you can have before your brain starts to fundamentally experience some level of rot. And we've all experienced this in some way, right? I can see my attention span getting worse from how much I use social media. And it pains me, But it's just the reality that we live in. Yeah.

21:27I mean, and also you want to take a longer term perspective. And if you get off social media, you have more conversations like this, you're just going to have a richer life. You know, you write in the book that you should imagine what your 80th birthday party is like. But I'm just going to tell you right now, Soil, I'm having a killer 69th birthday party. I'll let you, in your mind, understand why 69 is my favorite number. We'll just leave it there. But I'm not waiting to 80 to have this party. Well, I expect an invite to 69, then. That's good. Yeah, because it's a few moments away from now. You're going to blink, and it's going to be here.

22:07But why? Why imagine yourself at age 80, at your birthday party? This exercise of imagining that future self is really the best way that I can think of for clarifying your actions in the present. So thinking about yourself and what you're going to feel like and be like physically at your 80th birthday party is a good way to assess whether you are taking the right actions in the present to create a future that you actually want. And the question is, are you going to be dancing at your 80th birthday party? All your friends and family are there and they want you to come out to the dance floor. Are you going to be capable of getting out on the dance floor and busting out a move and dancing to your favorite songs with your favorite people at that party?

22:46Or are you going to be debilitated? Are you going to be in a position where you cannot? And fundamentally, the seeds of that future outcome are being sown right now through your daily habits, through the things that you are doing. I went to my 10-year college reunion recently. And looking around, I had this powerful realization that some of the people looked 50 and some of the people looked 30. and the reality is your daily habits show up on your face after 10 years. So now imagine after 50 years what the impact is going to be on your face, on your entire body. You control those things on a daily basis.

23:20You are controlling that future and your future self is the direct heir of all of the decisions and the habits that you have in the present. So Charlie Munger is a Capricorn. Benjamin Franklin is a Capricorn. So Sahil Bloom is a Capricorn, am I right? I am a Capricorn. Yeah, January 5th. Okay. And my birthday's on January 6th, which used to be Trump Insurrection Day, but it's now Trump Freedom Day. It's a drool. Okay. So do you believe in the horoscopes? You think that there's something to the... My wife definitely does. So by default, I go along with it. So when is your wife's birthday? My wife is April 5th.

23:59So she's in Aries. Okay. Capricorn-Aries relationship. So I just asked, just throwing it out there. Okay. Give me the single greatest investment in the world. You write about it in your book, Saul Hill. What is it? My dad, when I graduated college, gave me a single piece of advice, which was never think twice about investments in yourself. And he talked about those as quality food, fitness, personal development, sleep, mental health. All of these things are investments that you can make in yourself that pay dividends over a long period of time. And that guidance, I think, has been the single best piece of advice that I've received going into my life and into my career.