Sahil Bloom - Why You're Playing The Wrong Game in Life

26:59It's much better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one. The pushback to that, which I understand is, well, if you climb fast up the wrong one, then you can just go back down and figure it out and go to the next one. That assumes that people are willing to walk back down a mountain, which is very rare. Very rare that you find someone who's willing to rip apart what they've just created. Generally speaking, their lifestyle has accelerated as they've climbed up that mountain. So they get to the top of it. Their whole life is sitting right there in terms of what they're able to afford.

27:35Very few people are willing to tear their entire life down to go back down the mountain and find the right one. So it's very important as you are climbing up the mountain to think about these questions because it's much easier when you're like quarter way up the mountain to make those adjustments than it is when you get to the top. And this is the reason there's so many people that have these high powered, high paying jobs and they're either secretly or not so secretly miserable. And that is a sad fate that can be avoided if you're just really careful about it along the way. It's absolutely wild, just the parallels between all of the podcasts that I've had on strictly the business side.

28:11I think this, you know, we're going to get into business with you, but it's really about lifestyle design and personal. The number one keyword here, guys, is clarity. Is understanding and knowing what you want and don't want. And that should be your number one priority in life is racing towards getting that as soon as possible. Yeah, and it just requires asking questions. The answers that you seek in life are found in the questions that you avoid. The questions that you avoid, those things that you're not willing to ask yourself because it's much more comfortable to just ignore them. We don't want to pause and slow down and take the time to do that, be introspective.

28:50We thrive on this feeling of being busy that makes us feel like we're being productive when in fact it can be the worst thing that you're doing. You can rush around all over the place and then realize after 10 years that you were just a rocking horse. You were moving a whole lot, but never actually going anywhere. We need to slow down enough to confront some of those challenging questions, which is really what all of this is about. I truly do believe in the whole entire book. Probably the most underlooked and weakest area of humans in general is the space and understanding and knowing, like go somewhere for a weekend, don't have your phone, have a plan and go through everything.

29:26And I think that'll just kind of get you to the goal that you want, which is clarity. Guys, quick 60 second break. I am so excited to announce our first partnership. It is the perfect fit for me and what I believe in, and more importantly, you, the audience. I have personally spent tens of millions of dollars on meta ads. At one point, it made up 95 % of my entire marketing budget. That kind of platform dependency is a real risk. One algorithm shift and your whole entire business can stall. This is why I partnered with Universal Ads, the CTV ad platform powered by the biggest names in TV, built for any size business.

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30:31Go diversify now and appreciate the support. I think kind of when you zoom out, this is all about time. So in your book, you really reframe how we should actually look at it. Can you just break those down for us to keep it super, super simple? Awareness, attention, and control. Awareness is just about an understanding of time as your most precious asset. The fact that your time has incalculable value. It's the one thing that you can never get back. It's worth more than all of the money in the world. Attention is about recognizing that all of the outcomes that you want to create in life follow your attention.

31:07If you can deploy your attention into the two or three opportunities that really have the highest leverage, the things that can create the extraordinary outcomes in life, that is how you are going to be able to create the third pillar, which is control over your time. because what happens is for most people, they exist in this fixed relationship where it's an input creates a unit of output. So you have one unit of input equals one unit of output. If you want to create 10 units of output, you have to put in 10 units of input. That is how a normal person operates. And that keeps you busy because if you want to make more, you want to create more in your life, you just have to put in more units of input.

31:47People that unlock and dislocate that relationship where they can put in one unit of input or 10 units of output are the ones that are able to gain control over their time. Because then what happens is, well, I can now create that same 10 units of output with only one unit of input. I now have nine units that was previously being tied up that's sitting there that I can either allocate into creating more output, i.e. generating more outcomes and wealth, money, or I can allocate it to other things. I can spend more time with my kids. I can spend more time on my health, fun experiences, whatever those things might be.

32:22But that comes from the ability to direct your attention into the few things that matter. That is what unlocks this control. I think, you know, diving deeper into that, this ultimately really comes down to systems. Let's dive back into awareness, though. Can you explain the energy calendar and why it's such a useful lens for understanding time? Your outcomes in life follow your energy. If you can deploy your energy and your time into things that actually create more of that energy, you're going to generate the best outcomes. We all know that anecdotally when we're spending time on things that really lift us up and that create this pull of interest, we're generating the best things in the world, whether that's creatively or entrepreneurially, whatever it might be.

33:05But the first step in that is understanding what actually creates energy in your life. Very few people have a clear understanding of the types of projects or opportunities or people who are creating energy versus draining energy in your life. The way that I tactically like to do this is what I call my energy calendar. So on a Monday, open up your calendar at the end of the day and color code the things that are on your calendar from the day according to whether they created energy, meaning they lifted you up, you felt pulled towards them during or after, mark it green. If it was neutral, mark it yellow.

33:39And if it drained energy, if you felt physically drained from the activity, mark it red. If you do that, repeat that process for five days during the week, and then look at the calendar, you will have a very clear visual perspective on the types of activities that create versus drain energy in your life. That information is ultra useful, because now what you can do is say, well, I'm probably never going to have zero red on this calendar. That maybe is a pipe dream, but I can work to improve the ratio of green to red, of energy creating to energy draining. And if I can do that, my outcomes are going to accelerate and improve and I'm going to feel better at the end of every single week.

34:18That's going to start to unlock time. That's going to start to improve and dislocate my inputs from my outputs so that I can then decide I'll be in more control of the way that I approach my life. And I think from a business perspective on the people side, at its simplest form, fire them. I truly do believe that. They need to get off the bus. And then from a business initiatives perspective, you should be racing to delegate that to somebody else, either in your team and or hire for that. So you can just keep elevating and basically be happier, have more energy and draft more results. Yeah. And by the way, just because something's energy draining for you doesn't mean it's energy draining for everyone.

34:55Great point. You know, I have my chief of staff is like my Swiss army knife from a business standpoint. The things that drain me light him up. He really enjoys the like backend operational nitty gritty stuff that I can't stand and that I'm bad at. And so it's this incredible complimentary relationship where we match each other in terms of where our energy fits, which is extraordinary if you can do that. So also as you're hiring and as you're building your team, think about what energy flows other people have as well. Because if you can create this like Avengers sort of within your organization of different types of energies and the things that they really light up around, you can really create something where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

35:39For the people listening, an absolutely amazing book is Rocket Fuel, and it identifies a visionary and an integrator. It's pretty clear. You're a visionary. Your guy is an integrator. He's making sure the bus arrives on time. He's telling the ops to find all that organizational type stuff. I would say throughout this whole entire episode, I just want to further set the stage for everybody. I think we're going to dive into these five different types of wealth, But we're going to back into different mental models, systems, rubrics, and exercises that everybody at home should A, read the book, and B, take the time to actually go through these.

36:10So the next one I thought was very, very interesting is, can you walk us through Buffett's two-list exercise and why it works? So this is a purported story of an interaction between Warren Buffett, the most famous investor of all time, and his personal pilot, this guy, Mike Flint. And they're on the plane one day and Flint is sort of bemoaning the fact that he has all of these big goals and aspirations, but he doesn't really know where to start. And so Buffett tells him to write down all of those things, like what are all of his goals and priorities? And he goes and writes down this list of 25 things and hands it to Buffett.

36:44Buffett looks at it and says, okay, now circle the top five things on this list. And Flint takes it and goes and thinks for a while and spends 30 minutes and he comes back and he circled the five items. And he's like, okay, those are your priority items, the real priority ones that stand out. What are you gonna do with the other 20 that you didn't circle? And Flint says, well, you know, like as I work on these other ones, when I have time, I'll work on the other 20. And Buffett says, no, that's absolutely wrong. The other 20 items are your avoid at all costs list. The five that really matter and then the other 20 are the avoid at all costs items because all those things are, are distractions from the things that truly matter.

37:25Creating your own version of these two lists is a tried and true way to figure out what are those points of highest leverage in your ecosystem where you can direct your attention to create that dislocation, to create these outcomes in your life. Because what happens is there are a whole lot of distractions that masquerade as good opportunities. Oh yeah. There are these distractions that keep popping up, especially as you get more successful, that constantly come your way that look like good opportunities, but really all they are is something that's pulling you away from the thing that actually matters.

37:58Guys, we're back in the shiny object syndrome. I think that's a great, great one because it hits both awareness and attention. So I do truly believe that of all the exercises within the time rubric that you have, that's kind of the best, simplest one to do. And I would say for everybody listening, when you do that, of all of those numbers, unequivocally, the most dangerous one is number six, is that one that's right out the super important that just keeps coming, keeps coming. You have to just take that to the back of barn. As Kevin O 'Leary says, you got to take it to the back of the barn and kill it because that's the one that'll hurt you.

38:30That six, seven, eight one. That's like right there and you think it makes sense. Yeah, to be honest, I almost try to do it with circling three instead of five because it makes it even harder. Like it's even more clear what those three are. Generally speaking, the first three are pretty obvious to you and it starts to get cloudy once you get beyond that. So I've often found that like if you have more than three true priorities, you have no priorities and those need to be front and center in your life every single day. I mean at the start of a week, I do something on Sunday night that I call my weekly win card where I'll write down just on a simple piece of paper like what are the three to maybe five things that would constitute a win for the week ahead.

39:12If I were to get through these things, what would make this week a win? Because what happens when a week starts is all the chaos starts hitting, right? There's random things, there's meetings, there's stuff going good and bad. I need a way to zoom out and just say like, okay, what was my actual focus at the start of this week? What were the couple of things that if I got them done, everything else is upside? This really allows you to start to focus on that. Sunday's a great day to plan out your week. A bunch of the guests thus far have gone super deep about kind of this casual Sunday where they get space and time to think and then set up their week.

39:4615 minutes on Sunday is worth two and a half hours on Monday morning. Completely agree. When you wake up on Monday morning, you're frantic and you don't have direction. It's like Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, but Sunday's first Monday. So I want to move on to a tension under the time bucket, Parkinson's law. How do you use Parkinson's law in your life to work smarter? Parkinson's law is this idea that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. Simplest way to think about this is if you give yourself eight hours to do email, you will take eight hours to do email. If you give yourself 30 minutes to get through your whole email inbox, you will crank through with extraordinary focus to finish your entire email inbox in 30 minutes.

40:31Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. I use that to say that constraints really force productivity around these lower leverage tasks that we do still need to do. So email is a perfect example of that. Email has a tendency to bleed out over your entire day if you let it. The antidote is to use Parkinson's law. Force email processing into distinct blocks of time when you're only going to be focused on that one thing and you'll crank through it much more effectively so that it doesn't bleed out everywhere else over your calendar. What that creates is distinct attention on the things that matter during those other blocks.

41:12There's something called attention residue studied by a woman named Sophie Leroy, I think at the University of Washington. And what she found was that if you just pop open your email or a text message or social media, a tiny bit of your attention gets pulled towards that thing. And then when you go back to the main task, a little bit of your attention is stuck over on that email or over on that text message. And you are basically operating in a constant state of cognitive hangover. You're not operating at full cognitive capacity on the main task simply because you popped open your email. And so leveraging Parkinson's law allows you to fight back against that attention residue so that you can operate at your best cognitive capacity on both ends of that.

41:56The attention residency is just like in business, it's just switching costs, just the cost to get back into deep work. Going in deeper on that, I mean, at its simplest form, we'll probably go into a deeper, is it just time blocking for? Yeah, I think it is time blocking, but in a semi-extreme context on these low leverage tasks. You want to do it in a way where it's an uncomfortably short period of time that you have to focus on this thing. Because the goal is to sort of minimize the amount of this management time that you have on your calendar. This like email processing, invoices, meetings, things, like simple things that feel like progress and work, but really aren't moving the needle forward.

42:36They're not the highest leverage things in your life. Get extremely uncomfortable in how you think about shortening those windows and see what happens. Yeah, you have these four types of professional time, management, creation, consumption, and ideation. That is why it's so important to separate those so you don't get switching costs, correct? Exactly. The four types of professional time is a really important framework and construct for people to understand. Namely, because most people completely ignore the third and fourth type. Most people do not have any consumption or ideation time built into their week.

43:14You have a ton of management time. That's emails, meetings, phone calls, processing things. That's like 80 % of your time. And then you maybe have little pockets of creation time, which is when you're writing or creating things, coding, doing whatever it is. most people have zero consumption or ideation time, meaning they have no time for consuming new ideas, top of funnel, that's reading, listening to things, conversations, et cetera. Intentionally though. Intentionally. They're scrolling on Instagram, but that's not intentional. Exactly. And then they have no thinking time, the ideation time, which is when those new ideas actually can sort of like intermingle, network and connect, which creates the things that you then go and act on that create the step function change in your life.

43:58And so the call to action around that and why Parkinson's law is important is because what it allows you to do is squeeze that management time down to its most necessary essential level. So if it's previously taking 80 % of your time, I would challenge you to try to make that 50 % just by doing some of this condensed time blocking to really concentrate your energy and attention on those things. Now, I have 30 % of time that was previously being sucked up that now is going to be able to be allocated into these other things. Maybe I'm going to spend some of that on more creation time because that really is a high leverage activity for me.

44:35Maybe I'm going to have a small pocket of consumption for reading every single morning or listening to things. And then I'm going to have a pocket of ideation, which is when I'm actually thinking about the bigger picture questions, the more commercial questions facing the business. I tell you before, when we were off camera, I said, I am getting smarter faster since I've been doing the podcast, strictly under the notion that those two buckets, the exact buckets that you mentioned, it wasn't really structured in my life. And that was consumption and ideation. An example is I'm bringing on people on the podcast that I'm personally interested in their expertise, their life, their business, et cetera.

45:08So for me, your book was a book that I would read anyway, but I had dedicated time to consume and read the book and study everything. And during that time, I just had free open time to ideate on how I was going to approach this and how it bleeds into my business. I completely agree. Those two are the worst. Consumption with clarity. And then I would say ideation is damn near non-existent. I truly do believe that. Yeah. Consumption with clarity is an important nuance the way that you articulated it. Because it's easy to be like, oh, I'm consuming things. I'm scrolling. I'm learning stuff, whatever it might be.

45:43But the true dedicated and sort of focused attention on consumption. Approaching consumption the same way you would approach the main creation task that you do, when you really need to be locked in and focused, is an enormous life hack. I started, as part of my morning routine, just a 30-minute reading block every single morning, quiet reading to start my day. And it changed my life. It was a significant improvement to my life. Just opening up my brain, new interesting ideas, coming in the top of the funnel every single day. I'm having cool conversations as a result of it. I'm learning about new studies.

46:17I can go deeper on things. It's a huge, huge unlock. So at the end of the day, what do you think is the biggest mistake that people are making and how they spend their time? What would you say is the single biggest mistake? Is it that consumption and ideation? I think the single biggest mistake people are making when it comes to their time is not recognizing just how valuable their time is in the first place. It is just so easy in the world we live in to consider ourselves immortal when it comes to time, to just assume there's always more time, that, oh, I'll do that later. The most dangerous word in the dictionary is later.

46:57We all say that, especially when we're young. We say, oh, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find my freedom and purpose later. or I'll invest in my relationships or in my health later. And the truth is that later, for most people, just becomes another word for never. Like, those things are not going to exist in the same way later. Your kids are not gonna be five years old later. Your friends, your partner won't be there for you later if you're not there for them now. You're not magically gonna wake up with freedom and purpose later. So either you develop some urgency and recognize that you design those things into your life right now, or you're just going to end up regretting it later.

47:38I've been negotiating with my business partner for so long to make a memento calendar, which you had in your book, which is just simple dots showing how many weeks and years you have left in life to just see your mortality. We're going to have that live on iconic.com. We definitely need to do that. I think that's the best way to get context. I want to wrap up on the time side. Let's end in that kind of control bucket, the art of the know. How do you personally filter opportunities and requests to protect your time? There's two layers to this. So training your no muscle is probably the single most important thing for creating more time wealth in your life.

48:16The vast majority of people, when you work with them and you go and look at why they feel so busy, it is because they're taking on way too much nonsense, both professionally and personally. And I don't mean that those things don't provide any value, but if you have a choice between something that is going to really light you up and provide extraordinary value in your life, professionally or personally, and then a whole bunch of these random things that you just feel like you should do, you should be choosing a few of those big, amazing opportunities and saying no to everything else. Early in your life, I understand it.

48:50In your 20s, maybe saying yes to things sort of expands your luck surface area. You're getting access to more things. But as you progress, you need to get better and better about filtering that down. The way that I do that is two simple tests, two simple razors, if you will. On the personal side, I call this the right now test. When someone invites you to something, you ask, would I do this if it were tonight? So someone invites you to a cocktail party or a wedding or something that's happening two months from now. The tendency most people have is to say yes, and then the thing comes and they're like, damn, why did I say yes to this thing?

49:27The reason that happens is because we have a terrible capacity as humans to think about future time. What we do is we look at our calendar now, we're super busy, but we look at our calendar in two months and we're like, there's nothing on it. Oh yeah, sure. I can say yes to that thing. I'm going to have way more free time in the future, but we don't. We get to that thing. Our calendar looks exactly the same as our present calendar does. We just fill it up with things. And so we end up regretting saying yes to this stuff that's later. The way that you get around that is to ask that question. You say to yourself, someone invites you, you say, would I want to do this tonight?

49:59If the answer is yes, say yes. If the answer is no, you're not going to want to do it in two months. I guarantee it. So just say no to it. That's on the personal side. Professional side, I call this the new opportunity test. Derek Sivers, this author, had this well-known thing called the hell yes or no framework, which was the idea of asking yourself when a new opportunity comes up, is this a hell yes opportunity? And if it is, take it on. If it's not, say no. I really think that that is great, but needs another layer. The reason it needs another layer is because we are naturally very optimistic, biased to optimism about what these new opportunities will create in our life.

50:39Typically, we're optimistic on two levels. We're optimistic about the amount of time it's going to take, and we're optimistic about the profitability, the rewards of this new venture. So I like to have a second layer, which is to say, if I assume that this thing, this new opportunity is going to be half as profitable and take twice as long as I currently think, would I still want to take it on? If the answer is yes, go for it because you're going to be lit up by this thing and you're going to want to dive into it. But if the answer is no, then we need to say no. Yeah, I think just understanding and knowing and always having written out in close proximity, just time, social, mental, physical, and financial and just thinking in those macro buckets will also help in deciding those things.

51:23To put a bow on that and then to move on, something that has been so, so hard for me and I only have been doing it for like two months, shout out to the girlfriend on this one. You don't have to answer, guys. You just don't have to answer people. If someone texts you and you don't want to talk to them, you don't have to answer. That's allowed. And I think that needs to be said because you can allow other people to take over your life, especially as things progress and in life and in business. And yeah, you just don't have to say anything to them if you don't want to for whatever reason. And I think that needs to be said because I think a lot of people out there are afraid to do that.

51:58You don't owe anybody your time. That's how I personally look at it. You don't owe anyone your energy. You probably have... Yeah, you can count on one hand the number of people that you owe your energy to. Generally speaking, by blood. There's some blood. I owe my energy to my son. I need to be able to show up. I owe my energy to my wife. I totally know that. Beyond this core group of people, you don't owe your energy to anyone. Mom and dad, I didn't want to throw you under the bus there. My mom, she's always first to like and watch the podcast. So mom, I love you. I did not mean to throw you.

52:34My mom was like my first newsletter reader too. So yeah, I'm very pro moms on this. We're very blessed that that's our first one. I want to keep going. So let's hop into social. this one from a bucket perspective was the one that was the most startling to me. So what have you learned about the role of relationships from studies, stories, and even your grandma's perspective? There's this amazing story about an anthropologist named Margaret Mead who was asked by a group of her students, what was the first sign of civilized human society? They probably thought she was gonna answer something about language or tools or dissemination of information, but she actually took it a different direction.

53:15She said that the first sign of civilized human society was a healed broken femur. It's kind of a weird response. Like what does a healed broken bone in the leg have to do with civilized human society? It's important to know that a broken femur takes several months to heal. So what Meade was reasoning was that prior to civilized human society, a broken femur was basically a death sentence. You no longer had any utility to the group. You were being left behind, right? You couldn't hunt. You couldn't gather. You couldn't do these things. You're being left behind for dead. Rough life. Eaten by the lions.

53:48Rough life. But civilized human society, you found healed broken femurs, meaning the person had been cared for. They had been brought along. Someone else had sacrificed their own well-being to take care of this person. What that implies is that this person contributed some value to the group that went beyond the ability to do physical tasks, that their relationship, their presence actually meant something to the others. Relationships are how humans have survived and thrived as a species. Relationships are the thing that make us uniquely human, that have allowed us to create this world that we live in and allow us to live happy, healthy, wealthy lives.

54:30And yet, relationships are the first thing that fall by the wayside in the modern day and age. They are the first thing that we miss on when we start to get busy. Scientifically, we know relationships are the single greatest predictor of living a good life. The Harvard Study of Adult Development was this amazing study done over the course of 100 years. They followed the lives of 1 ,300 original participants and 700 or so of their descendants. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It wasn't blood pressure, it wasn't smoking or drinking habits, it wasn't cholesterol levels.

55:10It was how they felt about their relationships that determined how well they aged. So what better reason do we need to realize that relationships are the single greatest investment that you can make? Investing in your relationships is the one tried and true way to build the happy, healthy life that we really want. Love the story in the book. Shout out grandma Bloom. How, I don't know how old she was, 70 or 80 years old. COVID came. She had like her bingo game and then she stopped going to it and then she got sick. And the second she can go back and see her friends, she's back. Yeah. It was a real life example to me of the fact that relationships are life-giving.

55:49You know, we don't, we don't think about that, right? Like we think about medicine and we think about taking care of our bodies and doing these other things, but relationships, human connection, that is life-giving to us. And so when you overlay that to the fact that now we live in this, you know, this loneliness epidemic, right? Like people have lost the ability to build relationships, to connect in person. Teenagers in the United States are spending 70 % less time in person with their friends than they were two decades ago. We are partying in the United States, spending time outside the house with other people, 90 % less than a few decades ago.

56:25It is insane when you think about the ripple effects that that can have on our happiness and wellness as a society. And yet again, no one is teaching you how to go and make friends as an adult. You're sort of forced into it as a kid. As a kid, there are these sticky institutions like school, college, a few things where you're sort of forced into this melting pot where friendships happen. Those collisions happen. You create friends. As an adult, especially given the decline of religion and faith-based institutions in the United States, we don't have those sticky institutions anymore. Where do you go make friends as an adult?

57:04People are getting married later in life, having kids later in life, so you don't have the school connections that would create friends as an adult. We don't have those third places that previously were the places where people were making friends. Gyms are an incredible example of that third place for a lot of people. If you are into health and wellness, extraordinary opportunity to go and build those relationships. But for anyone out there that's struggling as an adult, you need to find your third place. You need to find a place where you are seeking out other value-aligned individuals in that way.

57:36That is trending, third place, having multifunction, i.e. coffee shop and wellness, Jim, that's definitely blowing up. I mean, for me, I just saw a recent stat. I mean, it's truly sad on the video game side, the porn side. I saw something new about how porn, the average age that someone watches it, 25, 21, now it's down to 12 years old. And this is why people have absolutely no social life. It's so sad. I want to dive deep specifically into relationships. But before we do that, just to set the table, when we're talking about social, you divide it into three different pillars, depth, breadth, and earned status.

58:16Let's quickly just walk through each one of those. How do you see them? Depth and breadth are obviously interconnected. Depth is about the few close, deep connections and bonds, that close inner circle. And then breadth is about your connection to things that extend beyond the self. These communities, local, regional, spiritual, that are about something bigger than just you. Earned status is interesting. We know what status is. Status is sort of something that has gotten a little bit of a bad rep. You know, you talk about it in a negative light. But status is actually a very useful social tool.

58:56It sort of allows us to organize, create these hierarchies as a society. Earned status is all about recognizing that there are two types of status. There's bought status and there's earned status. Bot status is when you are trying to acquire the respect and admiration of other people through purchases, through the fancy car, the home, the country club membership, all of these things that you can buy, fancy Rolex. Guys, don't do it. don't do it. It does not work. It is not effective because what happens is you get the thing. And as CS Lewis says, it's like peeling an onion. You keep peeling it until there's nothing left.

59:33You know, you talk about like a velvet rope at a club. You're like, you're on the outside of the club looking in, you see the VIP entrance. You're like, oh, well, I want to be there. That's the inner ring. So you go to there and then there's like back room. You're like, oh, well, what's in there? And then in there, there's a separate inner room. And you're like, there's always another level to bot status. And it's never going to create this lasting respect and admiration that you want. Earned status is the antidote to that. Earned status is the recognition that the real lasting respect and admiration that you want comes from things that can only be earned.

1:00:07They cannot be bought. Things like building a lasting, valuable business. That is much more impactful on the status that you seek than just winning the lottery. People think, oh,$100 million, everyone's going to admire me. But it's not about the amount of money. It's about how you got it. How you earned it really matters. If you made that money by winning the lottery, you're not going to walk into a room of CEOs and have a bunch of their respect. You have to have made the money in a way that they respect. So how you got it really matters, the fact that you earned it. Similarly, meaningful, deep, close relationships are earned status.

1:00:45That is meaningful to other people. A healthy body, a fit body, I would argue a six pack is a better status flex than a Rolex. Guys, Sahil pulled up, I think mid thirties, sub 10 % body fat. There you go. You're also taller than I thought as well too. I know you're a baseball player, but I was like, oh, this guy's lean and shrug. I come from an athletic background, man. People sleep on this. Like, you know, I know I write, I do some creative stuff now, but I could sling it back in the day. I still got it. We're going to get into this last section and then we're going to get into that. But to dive deeper into those two different types of statuses.

1:01:21How do you test which one you're chasing? I have this thing that I call the bot status test, which is to ask yourself, before you buy something, would I buy this thing if I couldn't tell a single person that I had it? So if I couldn't post this on Instagram, text my friends, show it to anyone else, would I still want to get this thing? Generally speaking, the answer is no. Generally speaking, you are getting that thing because you want other people to see you having it. not because you actually want it. Sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes you're a car buff, you love car engineering, or you're a watch buff, you love watch engineering, and it's just really interesting to you.

1:02:03You really want to have that thing. That's great. But if you are buying this thing for the pleasure of other people, you need to ask yourself whether that's really worth it to you. Because what you find, there are certain people that live their entire lives taking action for the benefit of some other person to try to impress some other person that's out there. No one is as impressed by these purchases as you think. I think that is so important to be on the same page from a relationship perspective. I went through this exact decision-making rubric and I am so happy, thank you God, that we both decided that we didn't need a new car.

1:02:37We didn't need it. It worked fine. Why do we need a new car? Yeah, I think that could cause real strain in relationship if people are playing the comparison game of what's my next door neighbor doing. That'll hurt you. Yeah, and the other thing to realize is that the person carrying the thing impacts the level that people are impressed by it. You know, like if you think about, you know, like a handbag, a fancy handbag, if, you know, like a person that's not very well off has a fancy looking handbag, everyone assumes it's fake. If you like randomly walk in, if you work in like a normal job and you randomly walk in with a$50 ,000 handbag, the assumption that everyone seeing you will have, whether you know it or not, is that the bag is fake.

1:03:21It could be real. You might've spent six months saving up for this thing that you really want and you get it, but people are gonna assume it's fake. On the flip side, if you hand a fake handbag to Kim Kardashian and she walks around with it, everyone's gonna assume it's real. It doesn't matter whether it is or whether it's not. It's the person carrying it in the way that they carry it and the assumptions about whether they earned this thing or not that other people have in the world. The point of all of that is just to say, it doesn't matter what everyone else thinks. It has to be that you really wanted this thing, that it intrinsically makes you happy.

1:03:51Because other people are going to like or hate anything you do. What matters is what you care, what you care about, whether you are able to look at yourself and say, I'm really proud of this thing that I was able to create. So he has a new sponsorship partnership coming out with lab-grown diamonds, guys. Whether you are poor or rich, just go to lab-grown. I wish lab-grown diamonds existed when I got engaged, man. I feel like I got ripped off. The price difference is absolutely... absolutely bonkers. The big one that's going to get blown up, by the way, I'm calling this now, if I could shorten industry, is the jewelry insurance industry.

1:04:21Because I have this insurance policy on my wife's engagement ring. And I'm spending whatever a year, I don't know, probably $500 a year on this premium for this engagement ring that I now could replace for probably one fifth the value that I paid for it. So why am I still paying for this insurance? I'm just not going to renew the policy. Guys, I really keep it so transparent on here. The fact that I'm saying this for hundreds of thousands of people to potentially hear how much I don't care, how much I value the book. I went lab grown for my girl. I just got it recently. And it's so funny you say that because you know what blew my mind?

1:04:51They had lab grown and real and I asked for insurance and they didn't even have insurance for lab grown. How crazy is that? I mean, the replacement value is so much lower. All of my real stuff that I'm wearing, I've been dribbling off insurance every single year. I actually forgot about that expense. Good call. That's a good one. That's a little small one. A little nugget. Take those savings, maybe 500 bucks, we can go do something else with it. Go have a weekend. All right, let's keep firing away because I want to get into that business stuff. From a relationship foundation perspective, when you think about the people who matter most, what separates a surface level connection from one that really has depth?

1:05:25Shared struggle is what creates lifelong bonds. If you were to reflect on the deepest relationships that you have with your life, it's almost always driven by the fact that you have lived through multiple seasons with this person. When I say seasons, I basically mean this distinction between summer relationships and winter relationships. There are certain types of friends that are just summer friends. They're there when it's sunny and warm and nice. And as soon as the winds start to blow, as soon as it gets colder, they were gone. There's nothing wrong with that type of relationship. You're going to have those types of relationships over the course of your life.

1:06:05They're seasonal, They're tourists, right? They're gone during the winter. Let's bump those down to acquaintances. Maybe acquaintances. But your deepest, closest bonds are going to be the people that were there for you during your winters, during those times when you were down and out, when you were struggling, when the other person was struggling and you were there for them. Your winter friends, your darkest hour friends, as I've talked about them in the past. those relationships are the ones that run across all of your life that you want to really make sure that you cherish that you want to show up for again reading your book i am most definitely on the off-site going to do a hard audit on who are my friends and my acquaintances so i appreciate you for that yeah there's this framework that i share in the book that i love of like creating a relationship map in your life and what this does is basically you take a sort of two by two matrix, right?

1:06:58Like an x-axis and a y-axis. And you can put relationship quality on one axis and then relationship frequency on the other. So quality is sort of from demeaning to supportive. And then frequency is from infrequent to very frequent in terms of the amount that you interact with to see this person. If you sit down and sketch out the 20 or 30 relationships in your life, people that you sort of interact with, where they exist on that two by two grid, you'll get a very clear visual perspective on the relationships that you need to be leaning into more and the relationships that you should probably be leaning away from.

1:07:36You're going to find that there are these demeaning and frequent relationships, these people that just make you feel drained all the time with how they pull you down that you probably need to be reducing the frequency around, either by cutting the person out or by just limiting the amount of interactions you have. And then on the bright side, you're also going to identify people who are very supportive, who lift you up, who encourage you to think bigger that you're just not spending enough time or energy on. And you need to lift those relationships into that top right corner. What I found really interesting in your book was the three different types.

1:08:09There was supporting, demeaning, and then in that middle was both supporting and demeaning. And I was blown away by the most dangerous of the three is the middle, the people that trick you. There is scientific evidence that ambivalent relationships, relationships that are sometimes supportive and sometimes demeaning, are actually the most damaging to your well-being, health, and life. They did this study where they had someone go out in front of a crowd and give a presentation. And they would have the crowd be either supportive or demeaning or a mix of the two. And then they tested the person's stress response and blood pressure levels.

1:08:48And what they found was that the crowd that was sometimes hot, sometimes cold, was actually the worst for the person who was presenting's health. It impacted them the most negatively. It's such an interesting insight when you think about your own life. Because what it implies is that those people who kind of draw you in with the supportiveness and then they stab you with the demeaning nature are going to have the most negative impact. Anecdotally, that makes sense because when someone is purely demeaning or toxic, you don't let them in. You put up a guard around those people. We sort of know that we need to shield ourselves from their impact, but it's those people who are a little bit of one, a little bit of another, right?

1:09:27It's like a little bit of that sociopathic tendency that exists. We all have relationships. We all know people like that. those are the people that we really need to be aware of in our lives. That goes back to clarity. Like you just need to understand and know like where do your friends stand with you and getting both sides of the coin is super confusing. And yeah, I would imagine the blood pressure goes up. I want to go lastly, just touch a little bit more onto the depth side is you talk a lot about these creating these monthly rituals and about the helped, heard or hugged. I actually think this goes both for your significant other and for your friends.

1:10:01Tell me a little bit about why those kind of small intentional actions are so powerful. This relationship concept changed my life. It's called helped, heard, or hugged. The idea is when a friend or a loved one comes to you with a problem, you ask them, do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged? Helped is advice given. Listen, understand, and then provide advice. Heard is you just listen intently. allow the person to vent. And hugged is just listen and provide comforting touch. Just be there for the person. It's such an important framework because what it does is it makes you turn off your natural bias and instinct in the moment and show up for the person in the way that they need you in that moment.

1:10:51For me personally, I am a fixer by nature. Me too. I want to help. Yeah, we default to this fixing tendency. And in certain contexts, that's great. In professional contexts, that actually tends to be really useful. So what you find is a lot of high performers in the professional world default to that fixer that helps mentality. But then in a different context, that can be really detrimental. And in particular with my wife, she would maybe come home from work and be talking about some challenge at work. Just wants to be heard, right? Just wanted to be heard or hugged. and I would be trying to fix it.

1:11:27And then I would be so confused at why it wasn't helpful to her and why she would get annoyed or frustrated with me. And all it was, was that I was defaulting to show up in the way that made sense to me, but it wasn't the way that she needed me to show up in that moment. So asking that question a few times will help you create a pattern with a particular person so that you understand it. You're not gonna end up asking it every single time the person comes to you with a problem, but using it to create a pattern in your mind is a really useful way to improve the quality of that relationship. Guys, make sure you're sitting down with your significant other when you explain to them this process.

1:12:01Because I've asked this out of the blue sometimes. It doesn't go that well. You have to have a real sit down so they can understand and know what you're trying to get out of it for sure. Yeah, and you could do it when there's not actually a problem so that when the problem comes, you already know the way the person wants you to show up. But it is really effective. All right, let's close up with a little public speaking here, which falls under the bucket of earned status. You said that public speaking can be a path to earned status. You've done speeches for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn, Toyota, Harvard, Columbia, Morgan Stanley.

1:12:30What is the best advice for public speaking? I'm going to give you a weird public speaking hack. Practice your talk while doing some light form of cardio, like a walk, a hike, a bike, a jog, some light zone two cardio. I call it a zone two practice session. The reason it's so effective is because if you are a nervous public speaker, like I used to be, what happens when you get out in front of people is your heart rate starts to accelerate. If you were to have like a heart rate tracker on, it would go from 60, 70 at your resting level. So all of a sudden you're at 90, 100, 110. If you have not prepared for speaking through that elevation of nerves and that elevated heart rate, you will be completely derailed and thrown off by it.

1:13:15The nerves will become this self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll start stuttering. You'll start moving quicker. You'll start getting nervous. You'll start sweating. Practicing the way that you play is something that athletes all know, right? You want to show up in that elevated state. So practice during a zone two session. Go out for a walk, go on a little bike ride, and practice what your talk is going to be. Even if it's just practicing the opening, it's really effective because when you get out there and you start to feel the nerves, you'll be prepared for it. You'll be ready for what that looks like.

1:13:43How long did that take you to get that down? To get what down? Become a good public speaker. You're good. It is just reps like anything else. I mean, I am a pretty nervous public speaker, I would say, like in my earlier years. It is really just a skill and a muscle that you can build. And it helps a lot when you're talking about things that you actually care about. Presenting at work about something that you don't care about or something that you haven't been involved in is much harder than presenting about something that means something. to you or that you spent years working on or that you really feel ownership over.

1:14:17So trying to lean towards things where it's something you really care about is a really useful way to approach it. There is a drastic difference in my performance in the beginning podcast first. Now I'd like to just leave that there. I want to close up on the social. Just last question. What's the biggest mistake you think people make when it comes to relationships? I'm going to give you two. The first thing I would say is avoiding hard conversations. When you avoid a hard conversation, you are taking on a debt that you have to repay with interest at a date in the future. Time does not heal anything when it comes to relationships.

1:14:52It just makes things worse. So either you take on that hard conversation now, you make that minor repair now, or you're going to be facing a major repair later on. That is such an important concept to internalize because, again, instant gratification says it's much easier to brush this hard conversation under the rug. I'll just deal with this thing later. You are going to end up regretting that. I have never seen a good relationship really thrive on the back of delayed hard conversations. Take it on now and avoid repaying that later. The second thing I'll say is really related to romantic relationships, which is this desire to an obsession over the falling in love phase and a lack of appreciation for the growing in love.

1:15:43Falling in love is very easy. Growing in love is very hard. Falling in love is what you see on social media. Growing in love is what you don't. falling in love is like the perfect Instagram pictures manicured moments honeymoon phase that is the obsession that most people have in the modern era because of social media and what happens is people lose sight of the fact that true deep relationships are built through growing in love through shared struggle through crawling through the mud with someone through engaging and hard conversations. And if you press the eject button on a relationship, as soon as it no longer feels like the falling, you're going to miss out on the growing, which is where the real depth is built, which is where the beautiful relationships are built.

1:16:33So you have this world where people are jumping at the first sign of struggle. You're like switching to whatever the new thing is. You have a hundred thousand options at touch of a finger and you're missing out on that growing. You're missing out on the thing that really matters on the other side. I would button that up with two things, guys, just from what I've learned. One, never go to sleep angry with your girl. And secondly, do a little date night, kind of a ripple off of Mark Randolph, but putting a date night, getting dressed up and going out. I know that makes my girl very happy. People just forget that you're still dating.

1:17:05People forget that. Yeah. I think about this with my wife a lot, this idea of growing in love and the importance of this. Before I got married, my mom asked me how I knew Elizabeth, my wife, was the one. And what I said was that it was because I loved doing nothing with her. What I meant by that was that I had a realization that life is not about those beautiful, perfect honeymoon moments. Life is mostly just sitting around doing nothing. Sitting on the couch, watching television, quiet moments at home, playing with your kids these simple moments and when you find someone that you love doing nothing with that is really your person, that is your one I could not agree more ladies and gentlemen, choose wisely that's the biggest decision I'll ever make a whole time to our life what's up guys, it's Mark, quick 15 second break we're building a private community for operators, marketers, and creators and in order to join that wait list get the sign up for the newsletter, the newsletter is going to give you alerts on all of our new content and my personal takeaways from each and every guest.

1:18:15Make sure you click the link at the top of the description to sign up. Thanks for watching. All right, let's go on to the last one. We're going to go into mental. Guys, we're just going to do time, social, and mental, and then we're going to get into a little, you know, quick questions at the end. For physical and financial, go check out the book. So on the mental side, how do you personally define mental wealth? I think of mental wealth as being about your hero's journey. It is really a tale as old as time. It's this idea of the hero leaves the safety and confines of their home, goes off on this journey, faces all sorts of struggles, trials, tribulations, comes back changed, new, grown.

1:18:58It is about engaging your purpose. It is about embracing the fact that you are capable of change and growth. And it is about creating the space necessary to engage in that journey and in that growth along the way. The most important thing is recognizing that it is not about that hero's journey being grand or ambitious to anyone else. It is about it being yours, your path. Your path is what matters. and far too few people really think about that idea that the path has to be yours. Finding yourself walking down a path, I think it was Carl Jung that said, if the path before you is clear, it's probably someone else's.

1:19:47I do remember that. It was one of the quotes in the book. I love that. And it's very true, right? If it's so obvious and it's just really clear and well-trodden, it's probably not yours. It's probably someone else's. You are meant for more than that. You are able to carve your own path into the earth in whatever way. 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. A bad path really screams at you every single day to get off of it. You know, right? Your bad path, like everything, all the forces around you are telling you that you need to make a change.

1:20:19There's intervention happening. But a good path that isn't yours is really devious. there's a lot of forces around a lot of gravity that wants to keep you on that path that says like, well, you can meet your responsibilities. It's pretty good. It's fine. So why not stay there? My dad told me this funny story when I was a kid of this woman that he was dating, you know, at the beginning of his college before he met my mom. And he was like out on a date with her or woke up one morning and he had this like thought about his life and he saw her and things were fine. And he was like, maybe this is just what relationships are.

1:20:57It's just fine. It's not great, but it's just fine. And then he said he looked out the window and he looked back and he was just like, nah. And he walked out. And I remember cracking up when he told me this story because my dad's not like a jokester. It was really out of the blue, but there was such a profound idea there, which is like, no, absolutely not. I am not just meant for this okayness to my life, I can go and create more. I can go and do whatever it is that I want to do, as long as I'm willing to take the action now and sacrifice now to go and build the life that I want on the other side.

1:21:34This might be bad to say, I'm sorry, but I do feel like this book is going to either A, accelerate people in the right path, the right journey, and or people might be like breaking up with their significant other and or quitting their jobs and going in a completely different direction, which again, they're finding the right journey, but I truly do believe this book can and will do that. Yeah. I think that it is definitely causing a lot of people to confront those more challenging and bigger picture questions in your life. Those questions you avoid that I talked about earlier. And sometimes you're going to come to a really challenging response on the other side of asking yourself those questions.

1:22:09One of the questions that I'm constantly asking myself is if a third party were to observe me for a week, how serious would they say I am about my goals? We all have these goals. We set out and we're like, oh yeah, I'm going after my goals, right? If a third party were to watch you for a week, how serious would they say you are about those goals? Are you really doing the things every single day? Like, don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. What were you actually doing on a daily basis to go and affect the change that you say you want so badly. We need to hold ourselves to the fire more in our lives.

1:22:47And that's me too. Like I'm not saying I'm perfect by any means. I need to hold myself to the fire just as much as anyone else. Because you find yourself slipping. It's like creeping normality is the biggest risk to our life. These tiny little changes. No one wakes up in the morning and decides to ruin their life. It's the tiny little changes over long periods of time that slowly ruin your life. But it feels normal in the days. And so we need to hold ourselves to the fire. We need to zoom out and create that space to recognize when that's happening in the first place. Yeah, that's an exercise that a lot of people definitely don't wanna do.

1:23:18And I would say, you mentioned, it's about things that they're avoiding. I would argue in this book, there's thought exercises that I wasn't avoiding. I just, quite frankly, just never had the exercise and or thought process rubric to go through it. So now it's just giving me like these net new ways to further optimize my life. On the mental side, let's just get into those three pillars. it's purpose growth and space. I want to just fire away a couple more of these mental models. Let's dive into purpose first. Can you walk through how the pursuit map works and why energy alignment is just as important as a skill?

1:23:49The pursuit map is similar to that relationship map, and that is a two-by-two matrix. And the way that I think of this two-by-two matrix is that it's going to be competency on one axis, from low competency, meaning you suck at the thing, to high competency, meaning you're exceptional at it, and then energy on the other axis, meaning low energy, feeling drained by it, to high energy, you feel like energy creating on the other end. What you want to look at is within your current pursuits, the things you're currently doing, and your perspective pursuits, the things that you could be doing, where do they fall on that map?

1:24:25Ideally, what we want to be working towards is a world where we're spending the vast majority of our time on things that are high competency and energy creating. They're things where we are really good at them and they create a lot of energy in our life. The big traps for people to think about and avoid as you map things, high competency, low energy. That is like the trap of excellence, if you will. Generally speaking, people that fall into this trap fall into it in big corporate settings because you're getting a lot of affirmations. You're getting patted on the back. These are things you're very good at, right?

1:24:57So people will tell you like, oh, great job. You're doing great, but you hate it. You're feeling drained by this thing. That is a - to heal at 27, maybe. Yeah, that's a big trap, right? Like you're good at the job and investing, maybe you're doing the things that you're supposed to want to do, but you don't really love it. You're not getting energy from it. The one thing to recognize as you're creating this map is there are a lot of things that are going to be inherently lower energy as you are unskilled at them that you actually develop more energy for as you get better at them. Example of that in my own life was running.

1:25:29I hated running when I first started running, right? Really draining, painful, didn't really like it. As I got better at it, I've developed a lot of energy for it, right? It's a lot of mental clarity. I really enjoy it. The relationships it builds, all of these things. Asking yourself at the outset or when you're evaluating a perspective pursuit, would I have energy for the winning version of this thing is an important question to ask. Like, would I like the winning version when I'm good at this thing? Would I like what that looks like? because then you kind of know like, okay, if I can build some momentum around this, is it going to skew towards being more energy creating over a period of time?

1:26:06Quick flex. What's the marathon time? I know it's good. Just flex form. Just flex form right now, please. I ran 253 last year in my second marathon. VO2 max, probably low 50s. Oh no, it should be higher than that. I think probably like 67 the last time I did it. But I'm young. So it's a little skewed. I'm 34. Oh, we got to readdress a lot of things internally. On to the next one. Let's talk a little bit about the Feynman technique. Why is teaching such a powerful way to accelerate mastery? So Richard Feynman is a famous American physicist who won the Nobel Prize, I believe, in the field of quantum electrodynamics.

1:26:44He won the physics Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. Don't ask me what that is. I couldn't tell you. You can go look it up on Wikipedia. It sounds interesting. Sounds complex. What he was most famous for, what he's most well-known for, is his ability to distill and simplify complex topics so that anyone can understand them. The Feynman technique is a way to learn absolutely anything by defaulting to teaching it to someone uninitiated on the concept. So the idea is if you are trying to learn anything new, the first thing you should do after you get some base understanding of it is try to go and teach it to someone who is like a fifth grader or a five-year-old.

1:27:26Teach it to someone uninitiated on the topic. What that forces you to do is simplify and distill the idea down to the bare bones. You're not allowed to use jargon. You can't use acronyms because an uninitiated person won't understand those. That means you remove all the masks that people try to hide behind when it comes to information. What you find is like if someone's trying to teach you something or they're trying to explain some concept, if they're throwing a bunch of big words, acronyms, jargon, talking really fast, usually they're covering for a lack of true knowledge on that thing. Someone who has real deep knowledge on a topic is willing to explain it to you simply because they're not trying to impress you with their knowledge.

1:28:04They're trying to teach it to you in a real clear way that gets it across to you. That is what the Feynman technique is all about. So when you're trying to learn something new, Basically, the steps to follow would be read, learn about the thing, go try to teach it to someone that's uninitiated on the concept. Teach it to a five-year-old, if you will. Explain it to me like I'm five. Then fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Look at what questions they had, see where they seemed confused as you were explaining it, and use that to inform where you're going to go deeper in your research on it, and then teach again.

1:28:35So it becomes this iterative loop of learning and then teaching that allows you to get deep on a topic 10 times faster than any other form of learning that I've found. First seven episodes on openresidency.com, we had learn to teach, teach to learn. I completely agree. And for people out there that hate on renting out your time for money, the one thing that I do do is I still do consulting on the a couple of core topics that I know is high competency, high energy. And I just keep that crystal, crystal sharp to just be able to just keep iterating and keep teaching that and bringing that into my business.

1:29:09So yeah, there's a learning pyramid that shows basically like a hierarchy of learning, looking at what is like kind of like the highest form of learning, like reading is at the bottom of it. And then teaching is at the top of it to say that like teaching is the highest form of learning. If you can teach something, you really understand it with a lot of depth. Love that. Did not know that one. Let's round up and go into the growth in space pillar on the mental side. Tell me the best story that you got on the Socratic method. This Stanford business school experiment really blew my mind. This professor named Tina Selig gave$5 and two hours to a few different groups in her class.

1:29:49And the task was to go and make as high of a return as possible on that$5. Some of the groups went and took a pretty traditional approach. They went and sort of bartered with the$5. They bought something and then they traded it they made an okay return on that. Some of the groups took a slightly differentiated approach where they went and just figured out how much money they could make in two hours. So they started like a bike refilling station or they got reservations at a local restaurant that they would then sell and they made a pretty good return on the$5. But the winning group thought completely differently about the problem.

1:30:24They looked at what they really had and realized that the$5 that they had been given was a complete distraction. They recognized that the most valuable asset was the presentation time in front of the Stanford students that they were going to be given at the end of the experiment. That presenting in front of this group of Stanford students was something valuable. So they called a bunch of local companies and offered up their presentation slot as an ad for that company. So a company could come and present during this presentation slot in front of a group of high potential Stanford students. they ended up making$750 for this 15-minute presentation slot on this$5 initial investment, an enormous return.

1:31:05The power of thinking differently about a problem at hand is what that really brings to life. This idea that oftentimes there is an obvious solution sitting in front of you that is completely wrong. The obvious solution in that case was to take the $5 and to go and do something. It is very tempting to just go down that path. It's the clear, simple and completely wrong solution that's sitting in front of you. What we often need to do when faced with a situation where we're looking for those asymmetric outcomes, those high potential, high outcomes, is to slow down our thinking and ask those more fundamental questions.

1:31:42What is the real asset here? Because it was not the$5 that they were given. It was this presentation time. But only by slowing down and asking some of those deeper questions, were they able to uncover it and then go act on it? Speaking on time, social, and mental of the three pillars within each, I would say by and large, the most underrated pillar, it's a great segue, is the space. People just don't take the mental space and time to step back and think through things holistically. What is this one-one-one journaling method that you have to kind of process, progress, stress, and gratitude from a space perspective?

1:32:17Every single night before I go to bed, I take a blank sheet of paper and I write down One win from the day. That's something that I felt good about One point of stress tension or anxiety something I need to get off my brain and onto the paper And one point of gratitude big or small something I felt grateful for during the day. I call it my one one one method It has been a game changer for my mental health and for my sleep quality I'm the type of person that gets into bed at night and I just will like be spinning I'll stare at the ceiling, just like something's on my mind. I can't get it off. I can't fall asleep.

1:32:53This completely changed that for me. Just this tiny action, two to three minutes max, has been a total shift in the way that I'm able to go to bed if I do this right before. It's so funny you say that because sometimes I'll be looking up with my eyes open. My girl will look at me and she'll be like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm working. And I'm thinking. I have never, ever journaled my whole entire life. So my big thing was every single year, January 1st, for maybe 10 years, I'd be like, I'm going to journal this year. I know how, you know, everyone talks about how beneficial it is, right?

1:33:24Like, oh, journaling, journaling this, journaling that. I'm going to journal. January 1st, I'd sit down, I'd, you know, light a candle, get a glass of scotch, like set up this whole vibe and this whole environment. I'd journal for 30 minutes. And like this prose, beautiful, this whole thing. Inevitably by like January 3rd, I would miss and skip because I built up journaling to be this big, intimidating, crazy thing. When the truth is that the 1-1-1 method is journaling, right? Like I'm doing this simple, tiny thing. It just so happens that it takes a minute. But the asymmetry of that one minute is extraordinary.

1:33:56You know, like I talk a lot in life about identifying asymmetries, like identify these things where a tiny bit of input can create this extraordinary benefit in your life. If you can live your life in an asymmetric way, you're going to really experience a lot of good. This has been one of those asymmetries for me. Two to three minutes max per night, and it creates an enormous amount of benefit. What is that Naval quote about like sitting still, the ability to sit still? Like he who can sit still is the richest man in the world. I feel like that kind of falls under this as well. I feel like he poached that from Blaise Pascal said, all of man's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

1:34:32There you go. You know better than me. It's from a meditation perspective. It's so funny because I definitely have, I joke all the time, I'm like, I definitely have ADD. And I joke to my mom, she's like, oh, you passed all the tests when you were young. I was like, yeah, I just focused during the ADD test. But for me, that would be very, very good, the journaling. I also don't have a very, very dialed nightly ritual. I'd love to know, what does your nightly shutdown ritual look like step-by-step? Yeah, I first came across this idea of a shutdown ritual from Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, who I think in maybe like 2009 on his study hacks blog talked about this shutdown ritual, like powering off a computer.

1:35:11There's this sequence of events to turn off the computer and you need the same thing for your life. I basically try to follow sort of a fixed set of processes. There's sort of two phases to it for me. There's like when I leave my desk, you know, the couple things I do. And then there's before I go to bed, which is the more important one for me. So before I go to bed, the things that I always try to do, I go in the sauna and I'll read for 20 or 30 minutes. I print things out, I go in there. that's like perfectly quiet time when I can just think, reflect on things, sketch out ideas for things I'm writing about, like real ideation and consumption time.

1:35:46Then when I come out of there, I'll go and sit at my desk and I'll jot down the two to three things I'm going to focus on the next morning. So like, what are those two to three, sometimes one real priority items for the next morning for my deep focus work in the morning? And then I'll pull up the first one I'm going to work on onto the computer screen. So for me, that's hugely important because what I found is that if I don't have the thing up, when I come and sit down at my desk the next morning, it takes me 30 or 40 minutes to just get to some important task. Yeah, I'll screw around on email or on the internet or on texts or social media or whatever the thing is.

1:36:19Having it up just reduces the friction to getting started in the morning, makes it much more efficient. I know exactly what I'm focusing on. There's no cognitive load of needing to figure that out in the morning. And for me, when my morning is my creative focus time, which is my highest leverage activity by far, it's essential that I do that before going to bed. So I'll write those two to three things down. Then I'll do this couple of minute journaling exercise. And then I get into bed with my wife. Typically, we'll watch a show or something before going to bed. That has become now not trendy to say that you have screens in your room.

1:36:52It's part of our relationship connection is we bond over these shows that we watch and then we get to talk about them and whatnot. So it's important for us and it works. And I've never found an impact, frankly, on my sleep. So that's what we do. That's dialed. I'm definitely not as dialed on that. I would say a huge thing. It's kind of countering to what you just said, though, is I don't sleep with my phone. And even when I'm in a hotel and it's semi-close, there is a fundamental difference on my Oura Ring score. Poor sleep last night. The phone was right by me. I'll prepare until the end. But the little hack that I do around that is I put my phone in the bathroom.

1:37:27And this is actually a hack for waking up early. So a lot of people want to become a morning person, but their biggest struggle is their alarm goes off and then they just press snooze because it's sitting right there where they turn their alarm off. If you put your phone in the bathroom, you have to get out of bed to go turn the alarm off. You will not get back into bed once you've taken a few steps because then you're like, it's like a walk of shame. After you turn it off, you're going to be like, oh, I'm a loser, I'm a loser, I'm a loser as you go back towards bed. And so it's like a little negative self-talk hack that just forces you to get out of bed.

1:37:55That's definitely step one. You should be able to have the discipline, but that does work. I've used that before as well too. Well, little hacks help. And grayscale mode on my phone helps enormously with focus and separation from my phone. If there's probably one single hack that everyone should do, it would be put your phone on grayscale mode for 90 % of the day. It's like a simple change. I think it's in accessibility features, like color filters maybe. and you can do this like triple click on the iPhone to turn to grayscale mode, immediately makes your phone 90 % less interesting and attractive so you don't think to just grab it during the course of the day.

1:38:30Never heard of that, I'm doing it. Let's close up on mental, last one is, what do you think is the biggest mistake you think people make and how they approach their mental health? I think the biggest mistake most people make is thinking that there's something wrong with you if you're struggling, especially men. And, you know, I think back to my athletic days, the number of guys that suffered in silence because they didn't feel like they could open up to those around them because they identified as like an athlete or tough or a man, alpha, all of these things. It's really sad to think about. Recognizing that, you know, depression, anxiety, all of these mental health struggles, everyone faces them at different times.

1:39:14And the signs aren't always obvious. Sometimes the happiest, most jovial person on the outside is really suffering with something on the inside. And unfortunately, I've seen this lead to catastrophic outcomes with a few people that I was close to. And so now in my own life, I'm just really committed to the idea of just check in on people. Just send a text. Say like, how you doing? It takes two seconds. And it can have an enormous ripple effect for you to show up in someone's life in that way. Love that profound answer. I completely agree. Be a good friend. Ask her. You can help always. All right, guys, we're going to go into completely uncharted territories for Sahil on the internet.

1:39:54Closing up on the book, Five Types of Wealth. We're not going to get into physical and financial. Definitely go cop the book and read it. We're going to end with a couple of different categories. We're going to first start with just the business flywheel. Again, Stanford, baseball player, was in PE. Now you could say among other things that you are this creator slash entrepreneur, you put out a lot of content. You're known for lifestyle design. I truly do believe that people don't understand your business acumen. So I want to get into that. So let's break it down. Let's put aside stocks, bonds, real estate, kind of that type of stuff.

1:40:28How does Stahil Bloom actually make his money? I really think that I have three pieces of my business ecosystem. There's the media business, there's my venture fund, and then there is this holding company. So just separating those three things. The media business is books, it is newsletter, and it is content, and it is speaking. Those all feed each other in one way, shape, or form. Books obviously lead to speaking opportunities. Speaking opportunities lead to more book sales, more newsletter subscribers, more social media followers, they all sort of feed each other. There's like a mini flywheel there that exists.

1:41:10Media businesses are really high margin on the surface. We reinvest a lot of the money that we make on the media side of the business into continuing to grow the platform. Because for me, my goal is not to harvest every dollar that I make from the things that I'm doing today. I'm really in a growth phase. I want to go and meet and reach more people and impact more lives. My goal has always been around impact. And so reinvesting profits from those different business units to drive the growth of the broader platform, which feeds all of it, is really how I think about that media business. Specifically, newsletters make money from sponsors.

1:41:46Speaking is speaking engagements you're getting paid for. Books, we can talk about how book deals work, but that's, you get paid an upfront advance to buy the book. And then you make royalties on an ongoing basis on the books based on sales. And then any social media, whether it's any kind of brand relationships or affiliates, I don't do a lot of that. There's a couple of things. So I guess before we dive deep into each one of these, I'd love to just know, what is the team behind all this look like? How many people, what do they focus on? Yeah. The first thing I will just say as it relates to how I thought about building all of this is I left a very business building focused track.

1:42:21I was working at a private equity fund, investing in scale big businesses that we were buying and selling. And when I came into this sort of more creator entrepreneur world, I had that lens of like this real business building perspective. And so my whole perspective was, I don't want to do anything that I view as like a sub 10 year game, meaning brand deals. Like I'm not going to go take a, hey, pay me$5 ,000 to post something on Instagram or on Twitter, right? Like I have just turned down every single one of those all throughout the years. because I view those as being sort of short-term games.

1:42:55Yes, could I make a bunch more money if I did that kind of stuff? Absolutely. But I think it starts to eat into your credibility. It's not really a long-term either equity building or like true recurring cashflow thing that you can create. And so I have really built, I would say, in a way that has sacrificed a lot of short-term, just like random cashflow opportunities for what I hope is a lot more long-term durability in the space. For everybody listening to Everything Takes Time, A post, everything takes time. So it's also staying focused on... Yeah, I think that's right. So from a team standpoint, on the media side, it is myself and then three core team members.

1:43:32My chief of staff, who I mentioned during the conversation, is like the number one core team member. You know, he's tied into everything and actually is sort of plugged in across the other two pillars of this ecosystem as well. The way that I really think about him is I am best suited for like floating in the clouds, meaning doing creative work like my writing and any content that I'm doing, meeting people, like building relationships with unique opportunities and people. You know, like I get just access to and invited to a lot of interesting things now as a result really of the book. But me spending time building those relationships really creates a lot of value for the whole ecosystem across all of this stuff.

1:44:08So I need to be able to do that. What he allows me to do is that I can float in the clouds. I have one direct line to him and then he is connected to everything that exists there. So I don't have a million people sending me requests and things. Everything runs through him. And then there's sort of dotted line to me. Let's further dissect him too, because I just want to understand and know his skillset. Rewinding a bit, guys. Visionary and integrator. Sahil is a clear visionary. His guy he's talking about is a clear integrator. Finance chops, ops chops. Like what is his DNA? A little bit of everything.

1:44:38So he was a VP of ops slash COO type at like a, you know, oil field services business. Like he worked and came from like a very traditional background. He and I met originally through Twitter. He was starting to write on Twitter around the same time I was. We became friends. We spent a bunch of time together. He was basically going to go back and be working at this old job. And I kind of just poached him away from it. I was like, hey, you've got a young kid. You probably want to spend more time with him. This sounds a lot more fun. Do you want to go do something kind of crazy? Come work with me.

1:45:07We'll go build something big. Filtration system. He's the filtration and does basically everything on the back end. What else we got underneath there? So then I have a young man who is probably being groomed into like a head of content type role. He started as just a videographer on my team. And, you know, I've sort of given him a path and a vision for continuing to take on more and more to grow into a head of content who then has people underneath him as we continue to expand, particularly around video. If I end up doing anything in the podcast space as the books become bigger, you know, as I have more and more that goes on.

1:45:39And what is that core DNA there? Is it taste? Is it editing chops? Is it reliability? How would you? Yeah, like figure it out ability is probably my number one thing that I look for in people that I hire, meaning someone who can just figure it out with random things that come up. I actually don't really care if they have the specific skillset today to be able to thrive in something. I want them to be the type of person who can just figure it out with new stuff. You're doing posting here? On certain platforms, yes, sometimes, although I do most of that myself. I really like sort of having the touch and feel of like engaging with people on the platforms.

1:46:16So like I am the one that will respond to all my DMs, like connect with people. Like when you and I DM, that's me. Like I don't have people that have access to my platforms in that way. I don't like that because at the end of the day, it's like it's my face on the thing. And so I really want to be able to touch and feel it. But he is increasingly taking on more and more about like strategic direction of the types of content on different platforms. but not doing any of the actual, you know, writing or content. I write all of my own stuff. I don't have any ghostwriters. There's no one that like creates things for me.

1:46:48And to understand kind of cost and SG &A under that bucket, it's third-party content you get, i.e. this and graphics. Are you spending any isolated money to go shoot and create it? Or is it all your sweat, your ideas, your words, maybe his graphics and the video? Is there any outside money being spent on the content side? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we spend money on a variety of different content stuff. You know, if we're like, I fly him around to places. If we're going to film vlogs on different trips or going different places. You know, if we're going to set up a conversation somewhere and we want to film it, bring him along, do things like that.

1:47:21It fluctuates depending on the time of year and what we're doing. Like book launch, we spent a whole lot. You know, now it's been quieter because I've been all over on speaking stuff, which isn't quite as much because I'm being paid to go to those places. But we do spend quite a bit there. For anybody that's potentially hiring for this role, this kind of generalist content role, and it kind of goes into the whole entire ethos of the book. I mean, he's talking about flying people out here, guys. I'm sharing a hotel with Jake while I'm here. You better like that person and they better bring out the best in you because you're going to be with that person a lot for people that are starting to kind of ascend on the content side.

1:47:51I would take a person of lesser skill that I loved as a human every day, all day. And I've made that mistake in the past where I just tried to kind of bring people on that seem talented, but they didn't fit the DNA and ethos of what I was trying to do. That was really the story with this young man, actually. It was just like, it was someone that I liked being around that I wanted to see continue to do better and win. And I thought he actually needed some help and guidance on that journey. And so for me, honestly, like he also provided me with a lot of cool content ideas because the questions that he asks as a young person trying to make it and trying to make money and do well are a lot of things that my audience would have questions about.

1:48:24So it's like constantly also pressuring me to continue to provide that value in some way. But I do think passing the plane test, meaning like, is this someone that I would want to sit next to on a plane for six hours is a really important test. You got your chief of staff, you got your content guy. What are those other pillars you have? Like a researcher. She runs like research on the backend for both book stuff that's going on and then all of my writing and new ideas. Writing is really my halo activity. So this is important for any creators out there. If you are going to be a multi-platform creator, meaning you're going to be creating across different mediums, when I say multi-platform, I don't necessarily mean a specific platform.

1:49:05I really mean it multi-medium. If I'm going to be writing, there's not many people who have the scale that I have across multiple mediums. There are very few people in the world, I think, that have a million person newsletter and a million person Instagram and a million person Twitter. Like it's just pretty rare that that exists. Usually someone has massively accelerated in one platform. There's tons of people that have more followers than me on Instagram or more on TikTok or more on YouTube, but very few people have been able to be multi-medium in this way. The success being multi-medium to me relies on understanding what your halo medium is and then how you can take that halo medium content and reproduce it across the other mediums.

1:49:54Meaning for me, writing is my halo medium. That's the first thing that I do. So when I wake up every single morning for the last five years, I've written. That's what I do every single morning. That relies on having new ideas and information constantly coming in through conversations and through research that I'm seeing and through things that I'm reading. If I do that, if I keep writing, keep sharing, write my newsletter three times a week. That's a whole lot of ideas that I'm writing and sharing that we can turn into different types of content across all the different platforms if we have the right systems to do it.

1:50:24It means that I can test a new idea in my newsletter. And if it does well, now we have the systems in place to turn that into tweets, to turn that into videos, to turn that into short form video. Maybe it's tested and now it's going to be in the next book because I know that it's high traction. So I've now taken one idea at this halo medium and turned it into things that can get produced across everything. So interesting because conventional wisdom, and I talked about this a lot in the Caleb episode, is it's photo, video, graphic, and copy. And everyone talks about video because you can disseminate it down to stills for photo, graphic designs with overlays, take the words and extract it.

1:51:01You're actually doing the exact opposite. I love that because for the people listening, I would say it's all about the ideas and then your unique POV. yeah yeah so it's also who i want to connect with and impress in the long term like my main focus has always been on creating and sharing ideas that are just as valuable and useful to an 18 year old kid who's just starting out as they are to a 75 year old billionaire and i want the 75 year old billionaire to think that i'm thoughtful and interesting just as much as the 18 year old it's very hard to do that in video. It's just very hard to do. The 75-year-old billionaire is probably not watching YouTube videos, probably not watching Instagram reels.

1:51:46He is reading my newsletter and he is reading a book that he gets gifted by someone that he trusts. And that is really, really informative for me in how I'm pursuing everything that I do over the next two decades. I could invest several hundred thousand dollars this year in growing my YouTube presence. But for me, that doesn't really lead to the outcome that I actually want. Because that 75-year-old billionaire is probably not on YouTube. It's probably not on YouTube. And you could argue maybe he will be in the future. I don't think so. I think the medium and what people are being attracted to is different.

1:52:20And now, you talked about it, right? Bill Ackman, billionaire investor, read an early copy of my book, shares it out on his platform, which was very kind of him. But it reached an extraordinary number of very highly high powered, successful people that are out there in the world to the point where now like I saw a random episode of My First Million recently where this like billionaire energy investor is in the middle of the episode talking about how the advice he would give to his younger self is to think about five types of wealth in his life. And I was like, I've never met this guy. I don't know anything about him, but he has come across these ideas that I've shared in the world.

1:52:55And I don't think that happens if I'm not focusing on the medium that makes the most sense to me. This is amazing, guys. These type of kind of cross-functional strategies, I mean, this is all a TAM play. You're going after a way, way bigger TAM. It does not happen without the space. Like you've obviously been very, very thoughtful. You have this North Star of this ideal customer persona because you just want to basically hit as many people as possible of all different ranges. That's very, very interesting. So we got the chief of staff, the head of content, the ideas person, and just to further button up on the ideas person, do they understand and know you intimately and they're just giving you ideas, links, books, etc.

1:53:33Yeah, she's been with me for multiple years now. So she has a really good sense for my voice, the things that I'm into. She also does some video editing. So she has good taste. Like she understands creative and culture. And I would say like her most valuable thing that she does is she creates these like idea digests almost that she emails to me multiple times a week. One set of them is for book stuff. So like any new book, like the new book that I'm working on, she'll send me like digests of things where there are specific areas that I want her digging in on. And then on any just like generalized ideas, she sends me an idea digest of like, you know, 10 or 15 ideas once a week.

1:54:11And basically I can very quickly look at those like in the sauna, figure out the three or five that are interesting. And then she's provided source material for me to then go deeper on those ones. It's awesome because what it effectively functions as is like, you know, this like enormous net expanse that then gets pulled in for these interesting things that she knows I'm probably more likely to find interesting that'll connect with me. Like a curated RSS feeds based on your insights. Yeah, exactly. And it gets better over time, right? And so you could think maybe AI will be able to do that in the future.

1:54:45It's functionally very difficult. We've thought about like, oh, how do we build this? And how do you create it? And there are people out there that have tried to do it, but it's very hard to have it pull from the entire internet of interesting things or like the entire book world, all of these things that are out there. So that's, I mean, that's been really valuable for me. For everybody listening, I have yet to hear anybody that is producing content on any level, let alone at scale, have an ideas person. That's super, super interesting. What about that third pillar? You have chief of staff, head of content, the ideas person.

1:55:15Anybody else under your kind of personal? No, those were the three. Those are three plus me on the media side. You know, we have contractors that do various things like as we scale up and down, graphics, any video editing, things like that. But those are kind of the three core people. And are you running on any type of operating system or is this your chief of staff that's literally driving everything and literally telling you what to do and or helping with the calendar blocking? We use Notion to sort of run all of this stuff on the backend. I would say that I'm like a kindergartner when it comes to using technological tools.

1:55:49I really like analog on almost everything. I mean, you see me, like I have a paper and pen. And I like to do most things analog. I actually find that I retain information better when I write it. So even for my book work, I'll write things out on a whiteboard or sketch it out on a piece of paper and I'll take a picture of it. Now with ChatGPT or with any of these tools, you can take a picture of it, drop it into there and then send people the outflow of that so that they understand what you were thinking about. It's pretty cool. But I'm pretty analog. The team definitely uses Notion to run these things.

1:56:18We've used Basecamp at different times when it comes to project management with the book launch and a few different things. If you stripped everything back, what's the single most important piece of this machine? Me sharing valuable ideas with the world, you know, in written form, really. Ultimately, it backs into the KPI of posting on the internet. Yeah, ultimately, it backs into the KPI of like, creating value for others. And the way that I create value for others is writing and sharing those things. When I don't spend time on it, or when I haven't had time to think, and I'm not able to do that, everything slows down to a halt.

1:56:52that is like really the one, if you think of a flywheel, like that is the one thing that is me pushing it in the most efficient angle to keep the thing spinning really fast. Content's top of that pyramid, guys. No way to cheat it. Like everyone's got the growth hack or the, oh, like this will be faster. We can accelerate this. We can do that. I have never found a single growth hack that is valuable in the sense that you may grow, but the way that you grew didn't make any sense. Like there was a period of time where you could grow your newsletter really quickly, but the quality of the subscribers that you were growing was terrible.

1:57:24And we and many others really felt the pain of that where it was like, yeah, you grew really fast and you felt all good about yourself. You were high on it. It was like the Zerp era for venture fundraising. But the actual net new subscriber you were getting was not someone that really cared about your ideas in a meaningful way, which for me, I would much rather have 200 ,000 people reading my newsletter that are obsessed with it and that are gonna buy my book and that are gonna share the ideas with people than a million who like lukewarm care or don't care. Another week gone by where we have a newsletter that we didn't put out because we didn't feel good enough about the actual value.

1:58:03So I completely agree with you there. Let's dive into some of the ventures. So on the venture side, when you invest through SRB Ventures, what's your thesis? Like what's your filter? You're running kind of opportunities through. What do you look for? Companies that can be accelerated through storytelling or through my platform. You know, the biggest thesis when I raised that fund, it was a$10 million fund. I raised it in 2022, was that the platform that I had built gave me a unique opportunity to impact the trajectory of companies by being able to talk about them. So if it was a company that I was excited about, me talking about it would drive a whole lot more eyes to that company, which would help with customer acquisition.

1:58:43It would help with employee acquisition and retention, and it would help with fundraising. And so that was really the thesis with it was like, I could get access to deals that I otherwise wouldn't because of my ability to influence the outcome of these companies. To give us full context, where are you at from like a following perspective there, newsletter, Instagram, et cetera? Because I mean, you weren't that big then, I imagine. No, 2022, let's see. I was probably at about 75 ,000 or so on the newsletter. And I don't know, Twitter was probably 500 ,000. So that was pretty big. Instagram, I didn't have yet.

1:59:13LinkedIn, I didn't have yet. It was mainly Twitter. And Twitter, to be honest, is still the most valuable place when it comes to like startup and talking about startups for driving actual customer outcomes. Twitter is still, or X, whatever it's called now, is still the number one place for that. From a stickiness perspective, those are the 75-year-old billionaires, the Ackmans. They're on Twitter, disproportionately. They're on Twitter. I mean, it is amazing to me some of the relationships that I've built through Twitter. And by the way, the sneaky thing about Twitter, when you have a big Twitter following, people assume that that is all about people coming into you.

1:59:48Like, oh, you have a big following, so people just message you. The bigger thing, the more valuable thing is that I can reach out to literally anyone on Twitter and get a response because of the credibility and the social proof that exists on my platform from having a million followers on this platform. Because it's not a platform where a whole lot of people have huge followings because it's so hard to grow there. And so that has been the bigger thing to me. I can literally reach out to anyone. There have been some crazy people that have inbounded and it's led to a relationship. But like Bill Ackman, that was a relationship that got built because I posted something on Twitter that he shared nine months after the fact.

2:00:22And then I just cold DM'd him asking if he'd be willing to get lunch. After he had just shared this thing that I'd written, he said, yes, built a friendship. It's been an incredible relationship. And that is like a real meaningful hack in terms of your ability to go and reach people. I also don't think it's that noisy on there either. I mean, there's some big, big people that I mean, the reality is, is they can post and they could have three likes, five likes, six likes. And if you go in there and you provide value via comments, two, three, four, five, 10 times, eventually you're going to add minimum at least get on their radar.

2:00:50Yeah, it is. It is, I would say, still the best kind of idea meritocracy in the social media world. Like I find that there's a pretty direct relationship between the quality of the idea I share there and the performance of the post. And I actually don't feel like that's the case with Instagram. You know, I think that like you can have an amazing idea. But if the hook was bad, like the first two seconds of the video is bad, there could be an incredible, extraordinarily valuable idea behind it, but it won't take off. Twitter, I think actually is better about like if the post had real value that will get shared, it reaches people.

2:01:25Guys, that is a great, great hot take. I completely agree with that. Like I showed you before that one that went crazy on Instagram. I didn't think it was that good of a post. I didn't think it was that viral. It was the hook. Yeah. The hook got them on the video. Yeah. Yeah. Twitter. I mean, a lot of people complain about this with Twitter right now, actually. Like there's all these people saying, oh, my reach is down. My engagement sucks. All of these things. I have just generally found like when the post sucks, my engagement sucks. If the post is really valuable, it does really well. And sometimes it's like that meme of the person pointing in the mirror and looking at themselves.

2:01:53And it's like, I have one that's like, the person saying like, I'm shadow banned. And then it's like the mirror person pointing back saying, no, your content just sucks. And it's like, you constantly hold yourself to the fire a little bit. Like, if you don't spend time on the thing, if you don't put real thought into it, it's probably not going to do well. All big creators know that in our last episode with Oren, he goes into that very, very deep. And it's basically, there is no algorithm in a sense that the best rises to the top eventually, inevitably. I found that on YouTube, like when I'm very new and very much a noob when it comes to YouTube, but when we put meaningful effort and energy into a video, it does well.

2:02:30When we don't, when we try to like game the system with like packaging and hacks, maybe one in 50 does well, but most of them do crap. And so like, I think you get what you put into a lot of these things. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who want to attract investors like you? Thank you. Get very clear on storytelling. telling, let's say I wanted to raise$10 million for a new idea. Here's what I would do. I would go in with a very clear picture of three things. Here's what the world looks like today. It is dark. It is stormy. It's miserable. Here's what the world could look like in the future.

2:03:08It's beautiful. It's sunny. It's glorious. Here's how my thing that I am creating is going to bridge the gap between these two worlds. If you were to break down every great fundraising pitch, it is those three things. That is what they are doing very well. Get super clear and ultra simple on those three things, and you'll be able to raise money from people. You have to paint a vivid picture of how bad it is today, how good it could be in the future, and how the thing you are doing is going to bridge the gap between those two. Ironically, I thought when you were talking about storytelling, you were talking about within the identity of the company.

2:03:43You're talking about on a how to raise money perspective. Yeah. If you're trying to attract investors to the storytelling and how you clearly articulate that and pitch that is everything. Less pages on the deck, the better, do you think? I prefer memos to decks. I think decks are sort of dead. Like, you know, you can't tell someone that much. You can't paint that clear of a picture in a deck. So if you send me a deck and it looks all fancy and pretty, but I leave it being like, well, what is this thing? I don't really get what it is. That's much less impactful to me than a one-page memo. A one-page memo also displays a clarity of thought because you've had to distill the ideas down to a single page.

2:04:19It's the Feynman technique, right? Like you had to teach me your company in a single page. It means you really understand the problem and you can really articulate it clearly. That is a bar right there. Amazing advice. Let's hop on to SRB Holdings. What's your filter for deciding what ventures to build under SRB Holdings versus kind of that commercial side? This has been refined over time. So originally, the thesis with this holding company was take a bunch of bets in sort of cash flowing companies that I could accelerate via my platform. similar to the venture fund portfolio, but rather than those being like huge binary, potentially enormous, but likely zero type bets, asymmetric bets, these were going to be more bounded in their outcomes, like cash flowing agencies and cash flowing businesses that weren't going to be as concentrated.

2:05:10Take a bunch of those bets. Hopefully a few of them works out. But regardless, it's a cash flowing business. Yeah, you get a cash flowing business and you don't have to meaningfully invest in them upfront. So it doesn't take$2 million to start these things. It maybe takes 25 grand or something, or maybe nothing. I have refined that over time because what I found was that no matter what, even if I wasn't the person leading these businesses, the person running them, they required a cognitive load that was pulling me away from the thing that actually mattered, which we talked about, sharing ideas with the world that create value.

2:05:40So that holding company has now advanced to the point where it is going to be a concentrated, very concentrated set of bets that are potentially significant companies that have extraordinary leaders running them that I am meaningfully involved in and really care about the storytelling and sort of brand around. That is going to be, you know, sub five big picture bets that exist in there. Two of those will get formally announced within the course of this year. They've been incubated over the last year that I'm very excited about. But there are things where they naturally tie into the entire ecosystem of what I'm building.

2:06:24They're not just these weird side projects that exist. There are still a couple of those cash flowing businesses sitting there that do tie in quite well. Paperboy Studios is one of those. That's a newsletter growth business that has been a great business. They also run the back end of my newsletter and a few others. But for the most part, these are going to be like bigger bets, more concentrated and things that I really care about. I feel like that key filter in the metrics there is it has to feed your flywheel. Like example is like on the newsletter side, you're talking about written words and probably your biggest, most strongest and stickiest distribution is the million plus newsletters.

2:07:00Yeah. The filter that I think about now is like, would I be proud to tell that 75-year-old billionaire about this thing that I'm doing? I've thought about that a lot. There's a million ways that people would tell me. If I were to go in and get coached by a big platform creator, like Alex Hormozzi or Dan Martell, or some of these people that have built these big ecosystems around their brand and platform, the most common thing I would hear from folks or from coaches would be like, oh, high ticket offer, go do courses, go do a mastermind, go sell some higher ticket thing to your large audience, you'll make a lot of money, right?

2:07:40Like$10 million a year doing that kind of thing. I could definitely do that. I would not be proud to go and tell Tim Cook, who is a mentor, he's the first reader of the book, he's on the back of the book, that I was doing that thing. I don't think it is in line with my vision for what I am trying to go and do. I am perfectly willing to make less money to really stay true to what I actually want to be spending my time and energy on in this pursuit. That is, frankly, in line with the ethos of this whole book. It's like the five types of wealth. I am valuing trying to pursue my purpose and the things that I really want to be spending my time and energy on more than the financial wealth that I could get from doing that thing.

2:08:19That, as a heuristic, like, would I be proud to go and tell X person, Tim Cook or Bill Ackman or whoever it might be, would I be proud to tell them this thing that I'm working on is a really helpful heuristic for life. The other way to think about it is like, would I be proud to tell my son that I'm doing this thing? Like when he's a little bit older, would I be proud to tell him what I'm working on and what I'm doing? There's plenty of ways to make money in the world that I could use and I could make money that I wouldn't be proud to tell my son that I'm doing. And so why would I go do that? It goes back to the life racer, guys.

2:08:48It all funnels back into that. It all comes full circle. That's the top of the pyramid. So let's just go and touch base on the newsletter. So ironically, you're growing so fast that the internet says you're 800 ,000. Now you save a million. You're on fast. So what's the growth playbook behind scaling 800 ,000 newsletter readers? Yeah, there's sort of like on the newsletter front, there's the organic and then inorganic growth. So organic growth with a newsletter is sharing from existing readers. They're emailing it to other people or they're sharing it on social. No hard CTAs, just like organically just saying, hey, check this out, I like it.

2:09:24organic. Then there's CTAs, like, hey, share this with people. Here's a link. Click this and it'll share it on Twitter automatically. And then there are all of these kind of like natural, unpaid, organic growth mechanisms that exist on these various newsletter send platforms. So like Substack has, you know, recommendation engine. ConvertKit has one of those recommendation engines. You can partner with different newsletters to sort of recommend each other. You can, you know, do cross collaborations with people where you write a newsletter in someone else's newsletter, they write one in yours. You could do things like that.

2:09:56It's a massive barter system, basically. Yeah, we don't do a lot of that. We do a lot of the very organic version of this, which is just like, hey, share this. If you like the newsletter and you're getting value from it, share it. We tested a referral system at one point, which was like rewards for different referral tiers. We didn't really notice a meaningful impact from it. So we stopped doing it because it was more headache than it was worth value. What we have found personally is that asking people to share drives like a roughly 10x amount of shares as not asking. So it's a huge gap in the difference from just asking people to share it with those.

2:10:32Within the newsletter or just overall? Just asking. The two things that we'll put in are one is like, if you were forwarded this, here's where you can click and subscribe. And then at the bottom, it's like, if you enjoyed this, share it here. Send it to other people or share it here. On the inorganic side, paid media on newsletters is pretty effective on meta and TikTok. X and LinkedIn, not so much, although I think it will be in the future. But you can do pretty well with meta ads. And is this just standard creative and clicking through? Or is this with lead magnets? A little bit of both. Lead magnets, we have found to be a lower quality subscriber.

2:11:05So you get someone and they turn quickly and you spend a bunch of money and then you don't actually have the people. So we have found that those gimmicky lead magnets look great on the surface and you're all excited because you got a bunch of growth. And then those people churn and they didn't actually care about the writing. They cared about the lead magnet and you lose them. And so my perspective has been that actually, I don't really care about the growth rate of the newsletter. I care about the quality of people that are there and I care about them buying my books and sharing the ideas. And so look, the fastest way that I could grow my newsletter would be to send it less, which is a hilarious thing to say.

2:11:42Sending a newsletter is the fastest way to get unsubscribes to the newsletter because when you send it, it pops up and in Apple Mail and in Google Mail, it's one click unsubscribe, right? So like there's going to be people every single time you send it that click unsubscribe. If I just don't send it, that's much fewer. I send four times a week. So like every single time I send, there's probably like a thousand people that click unsubscribe at the scale that I have now. I could grow much faster if I just didn't send it as much, but that's my idea surface area. That's where I'm testing ideas. That's where I'm sharing things.

2:12:12That's what I really enjoy. So I have found that social media is the other one on the organic side that can be really effective. If you talk about your newsletter on Twitter and then sort of link to it at the bottom or you share a newsletter and then say that, you know, this is from my newsletter, subscribe here, can work. Automations on Instagram can really work with it, like comment newsletter and I'll send you the link to subscribe, can be really effective. LinkedIn is probably the biggest hack because you can link to things outside of the platform and it doesn't get destroyed from a post standpoint.

2:12:43So that can really help as well. But all of those things sort of put together drive the engine. In short, it just seems like growing your organic reach is the number one thing by and far. The number one thing far and away is whenever someone comes to me and they're like, what's the newsletter growth hack? My response is always the same. Write a good newsletter. Everyone overlooks that. They're like, I want the hack. I want to do this thing. like write a fucking good newsletter and people will get value from it. And when people get value from things, they usually go and share it with others that they got value from.

2:13:14It's the same thing with a book. Like everyone wants to talk about the book launch hacks. And like, yes, there are certain things you can do to launch a book more effectively. But if the book sucks, no amount of hacks are going to make people want to share that book with other people. You are not going to text your girlfriend and say like, hey, you need to read this book so that we can do this thing together if the book sucks. So always, always, always, you have to default to write the thing well, do the thing well. And a lot of the marketing takes care of itself. Ultimately, it's best product wins.

2:13:43And in this case, just the content. All right, man, we're going to finish up with me blasting through a ton of rapid questions. Okay. Let's see what you got. What is the most common trait you see in successful people? Adaptability. The willingness to step off the track of the plans that you had set out and adjust to the conditions on the ground. Ability to pivot. Yeah. What is the hidden trait that makes Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, so special? A laser focus on the things that he is exceptional at and a willingness to outsource the things that he is not. What is the biggest benefit to working in private equity?

2:14:27It's easy to say the money, which is a significant benefit. You can make a lot of money. I would say the bigger benefit is the learning curve around understanding businesses and business models. You get exposed to a lot of different types of businesses and business models. A lot of that benefit comes over the first three or four years. So it's sort of like this paid, hyper-valuable MBA that you get. What is your best piece of advice for someone trying to increase their luck? This is the topic of my next book. We're not cutting that one out. We're not cutting that one out, guys. We're not cutting it out, but keep it short.

2:15:05Yeah. Because this is just like a little baby tease. Yeah, yeah. I would say placing yourself in environments where you are more likely to have luck strike. Yeah, and that could be placing yourself around people or placing yourself in places where collisions are really happening. What is the single greatest habit a person can build? Hmm, I think waking up early. This is one of my hot takes. There is no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5 a.m. and works out. That has nothing to do with working out. It's not about being a hard O. It is all about the ripple effect that that creates into every area of your life.

2:15:46If you can wake up early and work out, you are the type of person that does hard things, that delays gratification, and that has ripple effects into everything else that you do. The million people that ask me how I wake up early, I'm sure the same to you. Guys, go to sleep earlier. That is the hack there. I just gave you the hack. There you go. What is the single best investment you've made in yourself? At my first job, rather than living with like five people and saving a bunch of money on housing, I spent way more than I should have to live in a studio right near the office. And on the surface, that was really dumb financially.

2:16:20Like I could have saved, I don't know, $20 ,000 a year or something probably by living in a cheaper place. But the value of having the headspace to just go home and just be alone and then be able to be close to the office to just go in, be there, put in all the hours was enormous in terms of the acceleration it created in my trajectory. I made that$20 ,000 back tenfold over the course of the couple of years to come. Aligns very, very well with the book's ideologies. If you had to delete every app on your phone except three, what would you keep? Ooh, interesting. I guess messages, superhuman for email, and I guess Twitter.

2:17:00What's the most underrated skill in business? Storytelling. I think that no one practices this. No one thinks about it, but storytelling is really embedded in everything, whether it's business or your life. The ability to tell a clear story, sell yourself, sell your ideas, sell your vision, that is really at the heart of everything. Everybody listen, make sure you subscribe because I have one of the best storytellers in the whole entire world coming on the next couple episodes. I'm so excited for that. I agree as well. What's one purchase under$100 that has an outsized impact on your life? I got a little like grounding mat thing that I put under my desk recently that I think it's like acupressure like it's supposed to like relieve tension in your feet and I don't know if like scientifically it's really doing it but it feels amazing and it really has like meaningfully improved my like ability to stand and work for long periods of time let's put you to the test in five sentences or less explain to me the surfer mentality and why it's so important.

2:18:03The surfer mentality is this idea that when a surfer gets up on a wave, they enjoy the moment, even though they know that the wave is eventually going to end. They're able to just embrace this present wave with the awareness and knowledge that there are always more waves coming. That is a mentality for life. Because in your life, the most important thing is that you need to just put yourself in the water. You can't be stressed about the past or have anxiety about the future while you're riding the present wave. Just need to be in that moment, enjoy it, embrace it, and recognize that as long as you stay in the water, there are always more waves coming.

2:18:49What's the best compliment you've ever received? Good question. This is sort of a deep one, but I recently got a DM from a young father who had read my book and he basically shared that it had led to him living differently with his two daughters over the last six months since he read the book. He was like more present, really hyper aware of the time he had with them. And tragically, one of his daughters was one of the 27 little girls who lost their life in the flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas. And he was just reaching out to say that the book had impacted him, that it had led to him living differently.

2:19:32And I flew out to San Antonio a week ago and had lunch with him. And that was a moment for me that was as impactful as anything that I've experienced in my life. There's no amount of money that I could place on the value of something like that because when you hear that the things that you were sharing with the world are creating those kind of ripples, that there's people out there that you didn't know they existed that are living differently because of something that you shared and that it impacted them in that way and that it, you know, had provided some sort of light in this immense darkness and tragedy.

2:20:08You know, there's nothing that I can find more inspiring than that and to want to continue doing it than that. I have to end on that question. We're not going to go back. All right. The last two questions that I ask everybody. Favorite book or podcast on why? Favorite book. I'm not going to say my own. Go Brady style, the next one. Yeah. My favorite book is this book called When Breath Becomes Air. It was by a guy named Paul Kalanathie. He was a Stanford neurosurgeon resident who gets diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. and he wrote the book in the last year of his life. And it's sort of him wrestling with life, meaning, purpose, why, all of these questions that I think we all wrestle with.

2:20:56It's extraordinarily powerful, heavy, but extraordinarily powerful. And then podcast, I am a huge history buff. So I'm going back down the Dan Carlin, hardcore history rabbit hole right now. And he is just extraordinary in his ability to, like in a conversational way, feel like a friend is sitting there teaching you these extraordinary things from history. So I'm really enjoying that. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? Stay it slow, baby. You're putting them on a pedestal. Stay it slow. I will give flowers to a guy named Pete Nelson, who is the founder and CEO of a business called Sisu Sauna.

2:21:38S-I-S-U Sauna. Great guy. Incredible guy and incredible product. I sit in his sauna every single night. It's been amazing. I have no affiliation with the company, by the way, for what it's worth. Not an investor. I'm not paid to talk about it. I'm not an affiliate. But he is just such a genuinely good guy. And the reason I want to give flowers to him is because I ordered one of the saunas and we had wanted to hang out. And he flew out and built the sauna at my house so that we could hang out and go on a run together. And it ended up sparking an amazing relationship. I ran a marathon with him last year.

2:22:11and he's just a guy that lives by a lot of the things that I talk about. I sent him an early copy of the book and he lives by a lot of these things. And so I, you know, I really am wishing him the best in all the things that he does. They've got a new cold plunge coming out. I think they are the best in class sauna company. You know, it's been an amazing one for me. I've had it two years and it's great. But yeah, Pete Nelson, Sisu Sauna. Talk about setting the example. You know, his dad is a savage too. He runs savage. Savage. I mean, Pete's a beast. Like you go look at him, he's a unit and he still runs pretty fast.

2:22:39That doesn't make sense as far as the cardio with the strength. But yeah, he's a great guy. Dude, I had an amazing time. I can't express to you enough how much this book changed my life. I am more excited for this offsite in a couple weeks to just reanalyze my life. Probably going to make some huge drastic changes. This is going to be the book that I give to people and friends in my network that may or may not have clarity in their life. I'm going to be doing a massive giveaway on all socials with this book to give it a ton of people in our community. I appreciate you so much, man. And yeah, thanks for coming on.

2:23:10Thank you. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger. Bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.