5 Types of Wealth | Sahil Bloom
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with entrepreneur, author, and investor, Sahil Bloom. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at google.

In his debut New York Times bestselling book, Sahil Bloom discusses the five types of wealth. Time, social, mental, physical, and, of course, financial. The book is a blueprint for how to build a fulfilling life across all five areas. Sahil is a writer and a content creator, captivating millions of readers each week through his newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle.

He's also a successful entrepreneur, the owner of SRB Holdings, and the managing partner of early-stage investment fund SRB Ventures. Here is Sahil Bloom, The Five Types of Wealth.

In classic time scarcity, New York City madness, you've had a rather chaotic journey here this morning. Very chaotic journey getting here this morning. I'm sorry for keeping everyone waiting. We got stuck behind a classic, what was it, East Side accident that backed up traffic for 30 minutes. Well, it's actually a great illustration, though, of one of the points that you make in your book, which is how there are more forms of resource and wealth than simply money in life, right? Time is a big one. Look,

Before we get too into the weeds of these five types of wealth, I want to ask you, why did you write this book? What inspired you to think about wealth in a more broad way and dig into what the various types might look like? I had a single conversation with an old friend in May of 2021 that really

really was the catalyst and the spark behind all of this. And to understand that conversation, I need to set a little bit of context, which is my life path up until that point. I think like many of us sitting in this room, I had pursued...

all of the things that I thought were, uh, going to be the sort of pillars of building that successful, wealthy life that we all want, that good life that we all want. I climbed all of those mountains. I chased all of those things. A lot of that for me personally was driven by this insecurity from a young age. I grew up in a very academically oriented household. My mother is Indian. So for any Indians out there, we know, uh,

very academically oriented culture. My father is a professor at Harvard. So I sort of got it from both sides. And I had an older sister who was extremely high achieving academically. And from a young age, I started telling myself this story that I wasn't very smart, that my sister was the smart one and that I had to be something else.

And one thing that I know is that humans are very good storytelling creatures. And if you tell yourself that you are not capable or you are not smart, you will look around and find every single piece of evidence to confirm that belief. And you'll ignore every single piece of evidence that would refute it.

So from a young age, I did that. I looked around and I found a lot of evidence to confirm that belief. And it built in me this sort of insecurity that no matter how much my parents told me it was false, no matter how much evidence might have been out there that it was false, it was what I believed. And that created this sort of fear.

internal void, if you will. And when you're young, what you do when you have an internal problem is you seek external solutions to that internal problem, which as you get older, you learn you cannot do. You cannot fix an internal problem with an external solution. But at a young age and as I was coming into young adulthood, that was what I tried to do. What's the best way to go and get a whole bunch of external solutions, external affirmations in our modern society?

to go make money, to accumulate status, to get things that the world seems to value. And so I did that. I went and got a job working in finance in the Bay Area. And I

If I'm being honest with myself, it was the job that I wanted other people to see me having, not the job that I actually wanted to have. It's one of the best pieces of career advice that I've gotten since that I wish I had gotten when I was younger is to ask yourself when you take a job, do I actually want this job or do I want other people to see me having this job? Do I want it for myself, like actually what the work is, or do I want the LinkedIn post about the thing?

And I marched up that path. And at every single rung on the ladder, I convinced myself that my contentment, my fulfillment, my happiness, my solution to that internal void was on the other side of whatever bonus, promotion, title, status thing I had propped up as the destination.

And it's called the arrival fallacy. We've all felt it and experienced it at different times in our lives. We build up something as the destination. We march towards it. We get that thing. We feel the momentary blip of kind of dopamine-induced euphoria. And then we reset to whatever the next horizon is, whatever the next destination is.

And I did that over and over and over again. And that contentment, that fulfillment, that good life that I thought was going to be on the other side never was. And unfortunately, along that path, a lot of other areas of my life had started to suffer. So while I was winning the one battle of making money, these other areas of life didn't.

had started to fall apart. I was losing the much bigger picture war. My relationships with my parents, I was living 3,000 miles away, never really seeing them. My relationship with my sister had ground to a halt. I had created this competitive tension with her over that dynamic from childhood that had really harmed our relationship. And most importantly, my relationship with my wife was strained by the fact that we were struggling to conceive at the time in the middle of this two-year infertility struggle.

I was drinking six, seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were in a bit of disarray. And it was a time in my life where on the surface, it seemed like I was winning the game. I was doing the things that you're told you should want to do.

But I started to have this sensation at the end of 2020, early 2021, that if that was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And it all came to a head in this one conversation in May of 2021. Sat down with this old friend. He asked how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents who were on the East Coast, 3000 miles away. I had noticed for the first time in my life that they were slowing down, that they weren't going to be around forever.

And he asked how old they were. And I said, mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them. And I admitted that it was down to about once a year at that point. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I'd been punched in the gut. The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is that finite and countable.

that you can place it onto a few hands, just shook me to the core. And in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life had been incomplete, that I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else. And in the aftermath of it, the next day, my wife and I had a very candid conversation about what we wanted to build our life around, what our center really was.

And within 45 days, I had left my job. We had sold our house in California and moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And in that one decision was a very important realization, which is that you are in much more control of your time than you think.

That number, 15, is now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We took an action and created time for the things that we really care about. We reassumed agency over our own journey. We reminded ourselves that we were actually in control of these things, that we could take an action and create an outcome. And that was the spark of

that started this entire journey that has led to this book and that has led to my desire to spread this idea with the world, to redefine how you think about what success, what wealth looks like in your own life. Wow. I mean...

Part of me is thinking, what if that conversation of your friends had never happened? You know, what if he hadn't made that startling assertion of 15 more times? It's so fortunate sometimes that we have these, they may not seem like interventions at the time, but they really can stop us in our tracks and force us to take stock and think about where we're at. Who did you write this book for, Sahil? Like if you could be that friend to anyone that picks up your book, who would you be?

Um, who are you hoping you're going to be able to grab with this new framework, this new perspective on life? To be completely transparent. Um, when I was pitching the book originally to publishers, they asked me the classic publisher question, which is who is this book for? Who's the reader? And my answer is the same now as it was then, which is, I honestly think this book is for anyone.

anyone, anywhere on the journey. I don't care if you're 12 years old and you haven't even started high school yet, or if you're 100 and you're starting to figure out how to spend your remaining years. The idea to question some of the default assumptions that you've been told about your own life, about what it means for you to be successful, to just start scraping away at some of those things is universal.

And when I talk about that with this book, the really important thing that I want to get across is that the book does not have the answers for your life. I do not have the answers for anyone's life. I'm not a guru. I don't claim to be able to tell you all of the solutions to fix your life in all of these different ways. Because the reality is no one else in this room has the answers for your life. You already know the answers for yourself. You just haven't sat with the questions long enough to actually uncover and act upon them.

The answers you seek in life are found in the questions that you avoid. These questions that we are choosing to ignore, that we are choosing not to act upon in our own lives, that is where you uncover these answers. But it only comes from asking some of these universal questions. How much more time do we really have remaining with our loved ones? What is the value of that time?

These questions that are very easy for us to just ignore as we get busy, as we pursue our personal responsibilities, as we start to say things like, that's just what I have to do, or that's just the way it is. Asking these questions is universal. Your answers, your experiences, the lens through which you view them is unique to you, and it's unique to the present season of life.

The answers that you come to are going to be different now than they're going to be in 15 years or 20 years. They're going to be different when you're 24 and just starting your career than they are when you're 34 and you have young kids. Every single season of life is going to bring a different set of considerations, a different set of focus points. But those questions are going to be universal.

Okay. I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready for it. I want to know what the five types are, I think, right? Like we, this is such a compelling introduction to the philosophy and the framework of your book. So he'll introduce us to the five, right? And maybe tell me a little bit about how you uncovered each of them.

So the process and sort of discovery around it was really immersed in the human experience. When I first left and made this big change following that conversation, the first thing I did was what any sort of academically oriented person would do, or at least someone that at that point in my life considered myself to be a student, I started reading. And what I thought was like, I could read enough books about building a good life that I would figure it out.

and realized very quickly that to understand something human, you actually have to immerse yourself in the human experience. And so I pivoted and started just spending time with hundreds, eventually thousands of different people from all walks of life.

and asked them, you know, what advice would you give to your younger self? What are your hopes for the future? All these types of questions that sort of hone in on this idea of what does it mean to you to build a good life? And the four common themes that kept coming up over and over again across everyone were time, people, purpose, and health.

Money was kind of an enabler to some of those, but it was very rarely an end in and of itself. When you ask people what their ideal day looks like at age 80, no one says they want to be on a private jet by themselves, right? It's just not something that comes up. Everyone's version of their ideal day at 80 is some combination of feeling free, being surrounded by people they love, feeling healthy of mind and body, and feeling some sort of purpose, some sort of thing that they wake up for in the morning.

And the reality is that money helps up to a point to achieve those things, but it can no longer be an end. It cannot be the goal. It has to be a tool to go and accumulate those things. If you think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the early years of your life,

Money directly buys happiness. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying to you. The science on that is very, very clear. Money buys happiness in your early years. But what happens is we create a pattern in our minds that an incremental unit of money equals an incremental unit of happiness because that's true when you're younger. But above a certain point, it no longer holds. Why?

What the specific number is, people will debate. If you live in New York City, it's certainly going to be higher than if you live in Omaha, Nebraska. So it's a little bit hard to say what averages are across broad populations. But above a certain point, that incremental unit of money, incremental unit of happiness equation no longer holds.

But if you've patterned yourself to believe it does, you may fall into the trap of continuing to pursue money as the sole end in your life. And that is the path to what I talk about as the Pyrrhic victory, this idea of the victory that comes at such a steep cost to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat. The battle won, but the much bigger picture war lost.

And before I dive into the five types, what I want to say about the Pyrrhic Victory, we live in New York City. You do not have to look far to find examples of the Pyrrhic Victory. You can find someone who has made hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars maybe, who we pat on the back, we celebrate, we admire, we think they're great. And we ignore the fact that they have three ex-wives and four kids that don't talk to them.

And we write books about those people. We celebrate them and admire them in society. And we say they won the game. And we all have to ask ourselves in our own lives, is that actually a game that I care to win? Is that a win to me? Because for me, the answer was no. And so I wanted to live differently. I wanted to step off the path, take into account the much bigger picture war rather than just focusing on this one battle.

So what is the much bigger picture war and how do you build, how do you measure across all of it? That is what the five types of wealth is about. It is about redefining your scoreboard so that you are not just focused on the one thing at the expense of everything else. Peter Drucker, the management theorist said, what gets measured gets managed. This is the idea that the thing that you measure ends up being the thing that you optimize around. It's the thing that you hone in on narrowly and lose sight of everything else. And

And that's great if what you're measuring is actually going to lead to the outcome that you want. Money's measurability has been a feature for society in a lot of ways, but in your own life, it can actually be a bug. Because if you only focus on that one measurement, you can win that battle, but then lose this bigger picture war. What we need to do is measure across these five types of wealth. Time wealth is about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with,

where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. It's about an awareness of time as your most precious asset. What I learned when that friend said that math to me, that simple math, the way that I love instilling this in people is to ask whether you would trade lives with Warren Buffett.

He's worth $130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. He's got homes all over the place. It all sounds pretty good, but none of you in this room would trade lives with him because he's 95 years old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time that he has left for all of the money that he has. And on the flip side, he would give up every single dollar that he has in order to be in your shoes today.

So you acknowledge with a simple question that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And yet, how much of it are we really wasting? How much time are we spending on our phones, scrolling, comparing our lives to other people, allowing ourselves to feel bad about our lives because we're staring at other people's? It's a real question that we need to ask.

Social wealth is the second type. This is about relationships, the few close, deep bonds, and then your broader connection to circles that extend beyond yourself.

Mental wealth is about purpose, it's about growth, and it's about creating the space necessary in your life to actually wrestle with some of these bigger picture questions, some of the unanswerable questions, whether through spirituality, religion, meditation, solitude, what have you. The fourth type is physical wealth, about your health and vitality, taking the controllable actions on a daily basis to fight against the natural decay that your body's going to go through as you get older.

And then the fifth type is financial wealth, the one we all know about, money. But with the specific nuance of really honing in on what it means to you to have enough, to build your life of enough, with the recognition that expectations are your single greatest financial liability, that if you allow your expectations to grow faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. Well, the Roman poet Virgil once said, the greatest wealth is health.

just between us.

Do you have a favorite? Do you have a type of wealth that you think is the greatest? And I'm going to bear in mind something you said at the start, which is that your answer to these questions changes as you go through chapters of life. Maybe for the chapter of life you're in right now, which for you is a book tour, right? This is a really busy, rich time of life in many ways. What for you would you say is the greatest type of wealth for you in your life right now? I think this is probably somewhat universal, actually, which is social wealth.

And the reason I say that is because it is very hard to enjoy any of the other types of wealth if you don't have the texture that relationships provide. I said it earlier. No one dreams of being on a yacht or a private jet by themselves.

social wealth is what provides the meaning to a lot of the other types of wealth, that depth and connection of relationships. And it doesn't have to be hundreds. If you're introverted, if you're wired differently, it may be one or two close connections. But we know scientifically that social connection, relationships,

are the single greatest predictor of happy, healthy lives. The Harvard study of adult development was this amazing study done over the course of 85 plus years. They followed the lives of 1300 original participants and 700 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 your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels. It wasn't your smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that determined how well you aged. Your happiness and health and age is based on your relationships. And yet it is the first thing that we stop doing that falls by the wayside when we get busy.

The first thing that we drop the ball on is texting a friend, is calling our mom, is getting together with the old group of friends, is finding the time for the coffee date or the walk. Those are the things that we cut off the investments in when we get busy on the other areas. When in fact, it's the one thing that we should make sure we are truly designing into our life.

And in my opinion, that's because we don't think of relationships that way. We don't think of investments in relationships being the single best investment that you can make on a daily basis, that they compound in the exact same way that any financial investment does. And ambitious people in particular have one really big fault, myself included. We allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial.

Over and over and over again, you find this in your own life. You say, "I don't have an hour to work out today, so I'm just not going to work out. I don't have two hours for deep work, so I'm just going to do emails instead. I don't have 30 minutes to call my mom, so I'm not even going to text her." Over and over and over again, we allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial when the truth is that anything above zero compounds. Sending a text to a friend is better than doing nothing. Doing the 10-minute walk when you don't have an hour is better than doing nothing.

Those tiny actions on a daily basis stack and compound into your future, in your relationships, or in any of these areas of life.

I love this because I feel like a lot of the time when we think about social wealth, we think about the roles that these relationships play in the hard times. And we just kind of think of it like that. It's like, oh, our people are our safety net. We often talk about it that way, right? And we forget the point that you just made so well, which is that it's not just about having people to lift you up when the times are bad. Social wealth is really essential for enjoying the highs. It's people to celebrate them with you. Like you say, like it's hard to enjoy all the other types of wealth. How

how physically, financially, mentally fit you might be without having people to share it with. So

favorites aside, you make a compelling case for social wealth, but favorites aside, I'm also reminded of another saying, and it's very clear from your book that you believe in this holistic view, but there's this saying, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. Do we risk falling into a similar paradigm if we think about pursuing the five types of wealth? Is it the case that by pursuing all five, we will somehow be mediocre in all of them?

I think the reality here is that the mindset you need to have is not that you are trying to have a perfect balance across all of them, but that you're not going to turn off any of them. And what I mean by that is that the traditional wisdom on these different areas of life has been that they sort of exist on these on-off switches. You're like, okay, I'm in my 20s or early 30s. I'm really going to focus on building my career, my financial foundation, financial wealth. So that switch is going to be flipped on.

And you're told that what that means is, okay, too bad health, that's getting flipped off. Too bad friendships and family, that gets flipped off. These other areas of life get switched off. The reason that's a dangerous mindset is because for many of these areas of life, if you leave them turned off for too long, you cannot turn them back on or they become very difficult to turn back on.

Ask anyone who did not invest in their health in their 30s, 40s, and 50s how hard it is to get healthy in your 60s and 70s. Same thing applies to your relationships. If you don't show up for people...

In their bad times, in your 30s and 40s, they're not going to be there for you in your 50s and 60s. These relationships atrophy. All of these things, if you leave them turned off, become very difficult to turn back on. So what is the flip side mindset to this? What is the better way of doing it? It is to allow these areas to exist on dimmer switches.

to recognize that, yes, in various seasons of life, you are going to be leaning into specific areas. I am in my 20s and early 30s. I'm going to lean into financial wealth and into my career building. That dimmer switch is turned up. But I'm not going to turn these other areas off. They're just going to be down low.

And what does down low mean? It means that I'm going to invest some tiny thing to continue to move the ball forward in those areas with the recognition that anything above zero compounds. Exactly what I said before, doing the tiny thing on a daily basis is infinitely better than doing nothing. It avoids the atrophy. It avoids having those things shut off. So it

So it doesn't mean that you're trying to be just perfectly balanced. It means that you are navigating the different seasons of life while allowing yourself to maintain and make steady compounding progress in all of them. And by the way, a jack of all trades across all of these wouldn't be so bad. Well, also, I don't know if anyone knows the full version of that saying, because we tend to...

cut it off short. It's the jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. That is very well said. So that is true. I mean, we, um, it goes again to the point, you know, a lot of this, the like tension that you navigate around a lot of these things is that, um, we are really told as a society to pride obsession, right?

to celebrate and admire obsession and the narrow focus on the single thing to achieve the 0.00001% outcome in that one domain. And the world benefits from having people that do that. I love the fact that those people exist. I just don't really care to be one of them.

If I'm being totally honest, I like I don't I don't care about being a billionaire. I really, really don't. If I wanted to do those kind of things, I would pursue life in a very different way than I am. I would rather be able to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday. That is my definition of a wealthy life. That is the life that I want to build towards when I'm able to do that. That is my version of enough.

And that's fine for me because I've asked those questions about my own life. I've decided that my definition of success is different than the one that I might read about in books. My entire life changed when I realized that I would never trade lives with the people that I read books about.

You go read all these books about all of these people and you're told that you're supposed to want these things, but you have to ask yourself those questions, whether you are willing to pay the real price of what they went out and achieved. Because there's the list price that you see, which is kind of the hard work and the hours and the things that they put in. But then there's the real price, which is all of the trade-offs that they also had to make along the way.

the relationships that were lost, the health that suffered, the stress levels, all of the other areas of their life that were sacrificed. And sometimes there are a lot of things in life that look like a good deal based on the list price, but are a bit of a ripoff when you look at the real price. And you have to ask yourself those questions. That's what this book is about. It's about asking yourself those questions. If you decide that you are willing to make those trade-offs, you want to go and achieve those outcomes, I think that's fantastic.

And there are frameworks and ways that you can go and do that, that you will find in the book. But if you're more like me, if you're more on the kind of fisherman end of the spectrum, if we end up talking about that story and you define your success, your wealth in a different way than what those books say, that's great too. And you can build an incredible, extraordinary life filled with purpose in your professional career and filled with purpose in your personal life.

and just live in a very different way. And my call to action on a societal level is that we need to start celebrating people that do it both ways.

It doesn't have to be that we only celebrate the person that goes and achieves the 0.001% outcome in the one domain. We should be able to celebrate people as wealthy that live differently. Tell me about the fisherman story. You've dropped two exciting, a bit of baits there, pun intended. Tell us about it. I mean, this is one of my favorites. So it's a story of an investment banker that goes down to a small Mexican fishing village and he's walking along the docks. He comes across this fishing boat with a few fish in it.

And he asks the fisherman, how long did it take you to catch those fish? The fisherman says, only a little while. And the banker says, why didn't you fish for longer? The fisherman replies, well, I have everything I need. In the morning, I fish for a while. Then in the afternoon, I have lunch with my wife. I take a nap. And then in the evening, I go into town, I drink wine, play music, and laugh with my friends. And the banker's like, you got this all wrong. Here's what you got to do. You got to fish for longer so you can catch more fish.

Then you use the money to buy a second boat. Then that boat fishes. You buy a third boat, a fourth boat, a fifth boat, a sixth boat. You take your company public in the big city and you're going to make millions. And the fisherman says, and then what? The banker says, and then what? Then you can retire and move to a small fishing village. You can fish for a little while in the morning. You go home, have lunch with your wife, take a nap. And then in the evening, you can go into town, play music, drink wine and laugh with your friends.

and the fisherman just smiles and walks off into the distance. That story's common interpretation, whenever you see it, is that the banker is wrong and the fisherman is right. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I think it is about the fact that the two have fundamentally different definitions of what it means to have enough. It is perfectly reasonable for the banker's definition to be building something huge, chasing his purpose, creating jobs, going after these grand ambitions.

But for him to apply his map of reality to the fisherman's terrain makes no sense. The fisherman is already living his definition of enough. And yet, that is what we do when we take out our phones and we stare at other people's lives. And we allow their map of reality to impact how we feel about our terrain, about our path in life.

Because the truth, as we find it in our own lives, is that the fastest way to kill something great is to compare it to something else.

Well, you talk a lot about the questions that we should all be asking ourselves. And I can't help but think as a psychologist that sometimes when we answer these questions, we start to come into roadblocks or we come into U-turns, right? It's like, what if I focus less on exclusively focusing on my career and my financial wealth building right now? Well, I've committed myself to a way of life that requires this kind of financial investments. How am I going to keep paying my rent for affording to do the things I want to do?

if I take my foot off the gas in that area of life. When you were doing your research for this book, what are some of the common yeah buts that you heard people saying when they start asking themselves these questions, but maybe struggle to really push themselves off the starting line?

I think the biggest one is, and I think it probably resonates with a lot of folks in this room, just with the age range, is this tension that exists between presence and ambition. Presence is the desire to be present during these sort of special years, whether you have young children and it's this really magical period, or whether it's these years with your parents getting older and the desire to be present, be around and spend time in these moments.

And then your ambition, the desire to go and create something, to go and build, to go chase these mores that we are either told we should want or that we genuinely really want to go and create.

And how we choose to navigate that tension is fundamentally how we choose to navigate this phase of life. I am very much in that phase right now. I have a three-year-old at home. Balancing or finding the way to kind of navigate that tension is the biggest struggle that my wife and I have right now. The way that I have navigated it is to reject the idea of work-life balance.

This entire phrase, work-life balance, places the two things in tension. You're basically saying they're opposed, they're pulling against each other. I really believe that

We should think about work-life harmony. We should think about the idea that all of this comes together to be a part of the life that we are trying to build. That my wife and son are fundamentally a huge part of the entire mission that we are on, the life that we are trying to drive towards. So for me to be pursuing ambition around these different things that I'm creating, the ideas...

traveling, going out, speaking, talking about these things. They are a part of that mission. And that means that my son needs to really understand it. He needs to understand when I'm going to work or when I'm traveling, why I'm doing that. Because the lesson...

of working hard on things that you really care about that really matter to you is probably one of the most important lessons that a child can learn in their entire life. And for my wife and son to know that they are a part of that mission, that it's not them existing on the side next to it and that I'm choosing between the two of them, that they are fundamentally a part of that one mission that we are on for the life that we're trying to build, that is how I've personally come to navigate that tension.

And, you know, thinking about the specific circumstances we might find ourselves in, we're nearing our Q&A with the Googlers and the New Yorkers that we have here in the room. I'm interested. You have a group of people here who I think it's fair to say probably fall into a category of being a little bit overachieving, maybe? Yeah.

you know, ambitious people, as you say, this ambition versus presence question, what words of advice or encouragements or endorsement maybe of, you know, pick up a copy, have a deeper read, would you give to audiences like what we have here in the room, which are environments that are demanding, ambitious, exciting, fast paced? What are the particular pieces of advice you would give to this audience?

I want to share just a quick story that relates to this piece of advice. A few weeks ago, just before the book launch, I was in my office working on some work for the launch, really focused, really locked in on something. And my son, who's two and a half at the time, came barging in through the back door of my office and started doing two and a half year old things, knocking things over, making a bunch of noise, jumping up and down on my couch. He wanted to play.

And I started having this really negative train of thought. Like, why is he doing this? This is so annoying. Doesn't he know I'm trying to work? That whole negative spiral that we go down. And I looked at my desk and I have this picture of when he was born. First time I held him. And I snapped myself back to four years ago when my wife and I were in the midst of this two-year struggle with infertility. I had prayed every single night for two years.

that we would one day have a healthy child. And there I was sitting in my office complaining about the exact thing that I had prayed for. And it was a reminder to me of a very important fact that will probably connect with you in your life, which is that sometimes in life, the things that we pray for become the things that we complain about only if we let them.

Only if you aren't able to catch yourself, pull yourself back into the present and recognize that sometimes you are literally living out your younger self's prayers. That house that you prayed for becomes the house that you complain is too small. The car that you dreamed of becomes the car that you can't wait to trade in. The engagement ring that you lusted after becomes the one that you can't wait to upgrade. Over and over and over again, we do this as ambitious people. We reset our sights to the next thing and we stop thinking

appreciating, feeling gratitude for the fact that we are living out what our younger self prayed for. So the call to action around that, the piece of advice I have is not to stop chasing. It's not to stop pursuing your ambitions, but it's to balance those by pulling yourself back into the present when you catch that train of thought happening, to recognize that your 90 year old self someday would dream of doing the things that you're getting to do right now, that the good old days are literally happening right now.

Yeah, I love that saying, like, let's not only see the good times when they're in our rear view. And you pointed out a really interesting, like, nudge almost that you, whether intentionally or unintentionally, had in your environment to nudge you towards the realization that sometimes the things we complain about are the things that we used to pray for. And it was a picture of your son when he was younger. Yeah.

I find that these kinds of like nudges in our day to day environments that will help remind us of the philosophies and the sayings that we should be remembering can be really useful. Are there any other small tangible ways that you yourself try and remind yourself of that philosophy? I really do. I think the power of, um, pictures, songs, and little phrases, uh, is very powerful. Songs are an interesting one. Um,

I've had several times in my life where there was a song that I associated with like a certain moment or a certain event. And I can bring myself back to that moment by just listening to the song. Uh, there's one particular song that just happened to be on the radio in the car when we were driving our son home from the hospital. Uh, and we had moved, you know, 3000 miles across the country. Uh, and, uh,

A few weeks after making that move, after two years of struggling to conceive, we found out that my wife was pregnant. Naturally. I'm not a particularly religious person, but if there was one moment in my life where I felt like God had winked at us, that was it. That like you made the right decision and everything fell into alignment. And that day when he was born, we drove home from the hospital. Both of our sets of parents were in the driveway cheering. This feeling of like being welcomed home.

And there was a song that was on. And any time I sort of feel like I'm losing sight of things or I'm losing sight of the bigger picture or what really matters, if I play that song, it pulls me back into the present, into those moments. So if you find those things in your life, those tiny little triggers, it could be a picture, a song, a phrase, something, place them around you. Have them in like obvious sight.

Because at different times in life, there's going to be that chaos. There's going to be the opportunities, the things that come up that sort of make you feel like you're stuck in a blizzard, like you lose all sort of orientation. You don't know where you're going. And having those things right in front of you ends up being the grounding, the central anchor point that you can grab hold of to see your way through to the other side. Wonderful. Well, we really are approaching some

broadening out here where we're going to ask questions from folks in the room. I will invite anyone in the room that has a question to come and grab a spot behind one of the mics. As you do so, we have some questions that have been added in advance. So we'll start off with one of those to give folks the chance to come behind the mics. Have you found times where the types of wealth are in tension with each other and

And if so, how do you resolve that tension? You touched on this a little bit before, right? Talking about like throwing out the work-life balance tension. Let's go into a little bit more other instances where you might find the types of wealth in tension with each other and how you resolve it. Yeah, I think the way that I would think about this is that the whole idea of balance has been hijacked.

You've been told that balance is about having a perfect balance on the days, like a perfect blend every single day of life, health, family, work, like every single day has to be that way. And if it's not, you're out of balance and you need to get all stressed and anxious, which, by the way, is a self-fulfilling prophecy because then you feel more out of balance because you're stressed and it gets worse and worse.

The reality is that balance is much more about the seasons than the days. You are going to have seasons of unbalance that are in service of future seasons of balance. And that is perfectly okay and reasonable. So I have been in a season of unbalance. The last six months, I have been sprinting nonstop for something that is really important, something that I really, really care about. But I need to have an awareness to be able to zoom back from that and get back into the season of balance to follow.

Excellent. Okay, well, we already have some eager question askers in the room. Let's start over here on the right hand side. Hey, Sahil. My name is Ricky. I've been to a handful of your other talks in the past. I'm on Instagram. Good to see you again, my man. Longtime fan for those in the audience who don't know, you are super prolific on all fronts on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram, on X, on all these different platforms, your newsletter, now your book.

And I think part of this is you being an incredible storyteller. And that's what makes you connect to all these other people. We love stories. But this is Google, a tech company. I have to ask, how do you use AI in your workflow these days? It was moving for you in the shadows, the AI question. I should probably hire a few of you to help me figure this out. Because I am like a total luddite. I...

Only recently have learned that AI is a pretty effective brainstorm partner, actually better than a lot of my friends are at helping me brainstorm. I used to, anytime I was writing anything, whether it was the book or the newsletter or any of these different pieces of work, I would sort of...

I would have an idea. It would be sparked by something, a conversation with someone, reading something, whatever it was. And I would battle test that idea in conversations with different people. But I never really had a process for that battle testing. Like it would be, oh, if I happen to be having dinner with someone, I was going to kind of

tease the idea with them. And what I do from a storytelling standpoint, just functionally, this might be actually helpful in your own storytelling journey is I make mental notes or actual notes of when I am trying to teach the thing to a person, what is making their eyes light up and what is making them kind of lean in and where do they look confused.

And it is an immediate feedback loop when you talk to someone about the things that are actually really working about the story you're telling and the things that you need to improve upon so that you can iterate and get better. It's sort of a variation on this idea of like the Feynman technique. You go and teach something to someone and that's the fastest way to learn it. You can identify from a storytelling and structure perspective where there were gaps.

But I never had a clear process around that. And so sometimes it would take weeks before I was able to have that conversation, sometimes right away. It turns out you can do that really effectively with AI.

and actually like explain it, ask the question of like what didn't make sense quite enough, what did, what was really interesting, what could have been said better. And it's actually a pretty good brainstorming partner in that way. I will never, I shouldn't never say never, I will never have it fully replace those conversations because I really think the human element of that has been helpful for me just in a lot of ways, building relationships, connections with people, etc.,

But for that real time kind of brainstorming partner feedback, it has been really cool. Do you give it any specific personas? I have not done that, but that's probably because I just didn't know that I could until right now. Maybe I should do that. Like be a devil's advocate, push back on this, be a skeptic, et cetera. That's a good idea. You guys can connect afterwards and develop personas. Oh, absolutely. I'm in his DMs already. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know, social wealth was your favorite child when we came up. So, you know, you're never going to replace those social interactions with each other. As you say, it's about not a competition. Like we so often fall into that default framework where it's like one thing competing with another. They're components. Yeah. And people often ask me whether I use AI to write anything. And I have never used AI to write anything for me. That is not because I am like...

a purist in any way, I wouldn't say about that. It is because writing is how I think. And it's also the thing that I fundamentally enjoy the most about my work. And so whenever people ask me that, my response is like, why would I outsource the one thing I really enjoy? And two, if I didn't write these things and fundamentally like chip away at them through that writing process, I wouldn't be able to speak to them or articulate the ideas in any way when I went to try to do that. And so the writing is actually a fundamental part of that process.

Well, a terrific first question to get us started. Let's go over to the left hand, Mike. Thank you so much for sharing your personal story. I think that really make it feel more emotional and relatable. My question is more about I really want to celebrate the more comprehensive version of wealth, your definition of it. What do you think it will take the society to also take

this more comprehensive view of wealth? Not just like maybe it comes to a breaking point, but also what are some support systems or narratives that we need to create so that this kind of more comprehensive view of wealth is celebrated instead of just bankers, I don't know, bottles and models every single day?

I think that it needs to sort of capture zeitgeist a bit more. I actually think that there is real progress here. You said it during your intro. I have definitely seen more and more people sharing around this kind of idea that they're building life their own way. And when that starts getting real traction on social media, I think that starts to make a dent. The biggest subgroup of people where this is a challenge is young men.

Young men are very lost. And there is a huge issue with the number one narrative that is grabbing those young men is this narrative of financial wealth at all costs, misogyny, you know, propagated by a few people that I'm not going to name, but you probably know who they are on the Internet. And that is a really dangerous thing.

Because if we don't have a force to counteract that or enough forces to counteract that and provide a very different view on what it means to build a good life and a path for young men to build an amazing, happy, healthy, wealthy life, you lose people. You can lose entire generations. And

That is a big reason that I share as much of my life as I do. Frankly, that's not just because I love sharing pictures of my life. It is because I'm trying to paint a different and a different view that a man can be quote unquote alpha in a very different way than what you've been told. And that's important to me. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. Awesome. Hey Zaha, how are you doing?

Thank you so much. Very good. Thank you. But it's interesting that you mentioned Peter Drucker, right? One of the things that he often talked about was how important it was to invest in people, not only economically, but socially as well. It's funny. While I was sitting in the front row, I heard someone in the back going, hey, I never have the time to read books, especially don't right now because I'm looking like every five minutes I'm looking at my 401k or something. Now is a wild time. Well, now at least you have four other types of wealth. That one is gone. Yeah.

Well, I mean... We're only broke in one of them. It's fine. But kind of on it, right? Is what are you doing right now to be able to stay focused, right? Are you leaning into the chaos and everything that's happening? It's easy for... I mean, frankly, a lot of us are privileged, right? Many of us have time on our hands. We can always argue that our 401ks will go back up. We're surrounded by people in our lives who don't have 401ks, who are near the end of their lives or near the end of retirement at the moment.

How, what do you, what is the message? How are you leaning in? How do we make the time to read a book that's three, 400 pages when you can't get your eyes off the TV right now and freaking out? I, my life dramatically improved when I reduced my news consumption by about 99%. And I'm actually not exaggerating. I think I probably consumed 99% less news than I did in 2020. I, I,

Generally speaking, mapped out what was improving my life versus detracting from it on a daily basis. And what I found was that news and mindless scrolling on social media were the biggest negatives in my life. It was driving a ton of envy, jealousy, and fear about whatever it was that was happening.

And so I made changes to my life to cut back on that. I try to read news sources that I think are going to be relevant for longer periods of time. And if I'm reading sort of day of news to just make sure I'm informed about the world, it's basically going to be like one thing. Like I'll read Axios AM or something that kind of just gives you the like five things in a very quick format. I have a general sense of what's going on, but it's not editorialized too, too much.

That has improved a lot because it allows me to zoom out and just see the bigger picture. I say that over and over again, when in doubt, zoom out. And I really believe that about life. Like

I would be shocked if 15 years from now, we weren't all saying, wow, I wish I'd bought the S&P 500 when it was at 4,700. And today, it's like, oh, my God, it's cratered. Everything's down so much. It's awful because days look like this. But then when you zoom out and you see the years, it's like basically in America over the long, long term, things have been pretty good. And I am fundamentally long America, despite that.

the chaos and any of the short term things that are happening. So, yeah, I try to zoom out more regularly and not get caught up in these things. I also am like somewhat stoic in the belief that I can't control any of these things. So if you like look at a Venn diagram of things that matter and then things I can control, I'm going to try to focus on the overlap of those and say no to everything else.

- I appreciate it, thank you. - It reminds me of what you were saying earlier as well about why would I outsource the thing that I actually enjoy doing? Like we all have areas of life and things that we actually enjoy and focus on and want to do. We don't wanna outsource these things.

As a writer, you don't want to outsource your writing to Gen AI. If you were a political correspondent, you maybe would want to be watching a lot. It'd be a fascinating time to be alive right now, to be writing opinion pieces about what's going on. But most of us aren't political correspondents. And we probably don't get a whole load of satisfaction and fulfillment from staying abreast of every tiny news shift.

So it's probably the kind of thing we can either outsource or like streamline or zoom out from. I also lose money every single time I try to make trades on things. I'm not joking. Like, I don't think I've ever made money when I was like, oh, I'm going to trade this and do this. Like the other day I do like I base my entire investing strategy on like, you know, more normal course. I have a venture fund, which is the risky stuff. But then I do normal investing. And it's just that I dollar cost average into index funds.

And so I did my like, you know, monthly dollar cost average purchase into the S&P 500 on the open on Monday. It opened way, way down. And a few minutes later, it was at like it was five percent up on just that buy. And one of my friends was like, oh, are you going to sell it? And I was like, no, because I guarantee if I had bought this saying I was going to like ride it, we'd be down 20 percent right now. I would have lost money. There's just no way that I'm making money on these short term trades. So now I just know better. I'm just not going to do it.

I lost so much stupid money on like NFT, like every trend that people tried to convince me to do because I was on Twitter and being an idiot, I just lost money on all of them. So now I just don't do it.

Appreciate the personal stories as always, Sahil. They really do add color and richness to all of this. Okay, next question. Hi, thanks for the talk. A lot of what you said reminded me of a book that I read recently called 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. Very good, yeah. The story of the fisherman, I think he brought up as well the idea that we have to reckon with how finite our lives are.

And I'm excited to read your book because I think the ideas will be very much in conversation with one another. I'm wondering, why do you, or do you have any theories as to why in our current place and culture, these ideas of facing the hard questions and having to think about how finite our lives are, why do you think those ideas are becoming more popular and more necessary? - It's a great question.

I wonder whether they actually are, is my first question. I certainly see them more, but I'm not sure whether they are more popular in a real sense versus just in sort of a relative sense from my own perspective. Assuming that they are...

I would guess that it's because there is a more natural, shareable loop to how those ideas are disseminated than if you went back 20, 30, 40 years. Meaning a lot of these ideas are inherently somewhat viral in nature. You know, the Memento Mori charts from like five years ago that started kind of taking off. Ryan Holiday was one of the big people that started sharing those, showing your life in weeks online.

Tim Urban's work around that, The Tail End is this essay that he wrote that was very formative in my own journey. These things about your life's impermanence grab at your heartstrings in a way that makes you want to share them with other people. And in a world where you can share things very easily, they tend to take off. I have these charts in my book of the amount of time that you spend with different people over the course of your life.

Those charts have probably been reached 50, 100 million people at this point across all of the social shares that they've generated. And that is really impactful just in terms of these ideas and the impact that they then go and have on people's lives and the ripples that that can create. And it only comes because those...

ideas of our own impermanence of your own mortality do grab at you in this very real and visceral way right away, especially if they're visual. And I would actually argue that like 4,000 weeks as a book

would have probably doubled or tripled in sales if it had had more visual reminders within it that could be shared. I mean, if I could go back and change something about this book, I would triple the number of images and visuals. I had no idea that visuals were going to be what actually led to book sales and being shared and spread. So I think that the more that we can create real, easy, simple sort of

digestible in like one to two seconds versions of these ideas. It will continue to spread at an accelerated rate. And the more they spread, the more people will actually take tiny actions against those things, which I think is a net positive for the world.

a great reminder for anyone in the room thinking about their own manifesto, their own philosophies, their own books, visuals are where the powers are. Okay. Next question here on the right. Hi, thanks to heal, uh, for taking the time. I'm actually like halfway through your book up and the page where you talk about seratic questioning really helped me with a meeting I had today. So perfect timing that I read that this morning.

And what you said about visuals, I actually discovered your book with like a picture of a chart on Twitter about the parents thing and how you see them less over time. And that's what made me buy it. My question is, you mentioned a lot of the people that you spoke with when coming up with these foundations and types of wealth. How did you find these people? And do you have like a favorite anecdote from any of them that you spoke with?

I was very fortunate in that I was writing this newsletter the entire three-year period while I was putting together the book. And the newsletter and anything you share on the internet is a little bit like a luck magnet that you're kind of tossing out into the world.

It exists out there and then lucky things can kind of get attracted to it. A lot of the stories of the real people that I share in the book were stories that came to me from the newsletter. So I think the most impactful one was the one that came right at the end, actually. It's in the middle of the book in the time wealth section of this woman named Alexis Lockhart, who.

had a personal tragedy in her own life that led to this enormous amount of wisdom. I was two days away from turning in the final draft of the book in early 2024 when I got an email from this woman, Alexis Lockhart, sharing this short paragraph, personal anecdote of how something I had written had impacted her and then the story of her life around that.

And I emailed my editor after reading it and said, I'm not turning in the book this week. I got a flight to Houston. And she was like, what's going on? And I flew to Houston and spent time with this woman. And it turned out to be one of the most impactful stories and relationships that I could imagine. And it was entirely luck.

because she had replied to an email that I had sent like an hour, sorry, a year and a half earlier. She just happened to see it. Someone had sent it to her. It clicked. It resonated. She sent me an email and just fortunate that it came a week before I was supposed to turn in this thing a couple of days before.

So I really, I mean, there were a lot of things like that, that just the timing of it and how it hit, it was like hard to ignore these polls. But yeah, putting things out into the world in that way is very much a magnet for these lucky events. Awesome. Thank you again. Guys, these have been wonderful questions. I think we have time for just one more and I think it is our last one in the room. So perfect timing. And then we'll go to a final wrap up. Great. Thank you so much for your time. Both of you really looking forward to reading the book.

You spoke about social wealth and I completely agree. I think social wealth is so important, especially in our generation with social media, really finding clarity of who's in your corner is it really builds you for the long run of things. But I think it's something I'm actually going through right now, which I'm observing is sometimes you can bring everything to the table for like a deep friendship, meaningful long-term friendships, and they may not always see it.

And you know that they're not bad people or anything, but they're choosing to not take accountability of bad behavior or callousness that can put you even in a harmful situation. I think as you're navigating building that social wealth, how would you say one should navigate

The lack of like control and reciprocity. I think of a lot of these around this idea of like ambivalent relationships. So we often talk about like supportive, loving relationships or toxic relationships. And there's this whole middle ground gray area of relationships that are ambivalent. They're sometimes supportive and sometimes demeaning. And there's actually a pretty robust body of scientific evidence now that ambivalent relationships are the most negatively impactful on your health.

So these ambivalent relationships, the people that are sometimes supportive, so you let them in, and then they're demeaning in some way, those are worse for you than the toxic relationships. Because, sort of makes sense, toxic relationships, you put up a guard, you don't allow those people in, but the ambivalent ones, the people that are sometimes warm towards you, you open up to. So then when there's the negativity or the thing, it hurts. It really hits you hard. Identifying who those ambivalent relationships are

And finding ways to either mitigate that through really open communication or through limiting the interaction frequency with those people is a positive change in all of our lives. It's very difficult when it's a family member.

Um, I've experienced that in my own life with a family member. Um, fortunately when it comes to family, I have found that the assumption of positive intent is usually a correct one. Generally speaking, family members that are manifesting negative energy towards you are doing so from a weird perverse place of love.

Um, and, uh, we do not understand the way that that love is actually showing up and the communication and open communication around that can improve the quality of the interaction. Thank you. A wonderful question to end on guys. Thank you so much for the wonderful engagements in the room. These have been terrific questions. I love the other aspects that they've teased out. So he'll, before we wrap up, is there a final, um,

call to action or core message that you hope people will leave the book with that you would like to leave us with today? I would just say to spend the coming days really thinking about these mountains that you are choosing to climb, these races that you're choosing to run and ask yourself whether they are actually the ones that you have chosen or whether you've accepted them by default.

And that is the fundamental question that we're all getting after. It's like, what are the things that I actually want to choose to build my life around? And then what are the actions that I can take to go and do that? Terrific. Couldn't put it better myself. Sahil, thank you so much for being with us in New York. New York, please give a warm round.