Modern Wisdom - #899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Episode Date: February 6, 2025Sahil Bloom is an investor, writer, and author. Focusing relentlessly on your goals can change your life. And if you work hard enough, one day your friends might call you ‘lucky’. But the truth is..., luck is often just a byproduct of relentless effort. So, how do you create more opportunities for yourself and increase your chances of luck? Expect to learn why you’re one year of focus might change your life, the problem with constantly looking at the scoreboard of your life, the relationship between money and happiness, how to maximise time without falling into the productivity trap, what it means to expand your “Luck Surface Area”, how to build winner momentum, the most important practises to operationalise these principles and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Sahil's book - The 5 Types of Wealth: https://a.co/d/fBZjUvv Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
How did you spend it?
Well, I have a two and a half year old.
So I'm guessing our New Years were a little bit different.
I went to bed at 8.30 after a little dance party
with my two and a half year old little guy.
Okay, well I had norovirus.
I was in a three piece tuxedo
at the New York Athletic Club running back and forth
from shedding my brains out in the toilet.
So.
But you were in New York.
So we were actually like a few miles apart,
but we were having a very different.
I could have put your toilet.
Yeah, it could have been my toilet.
Or we would have been asleep.
So you would have to run.
Me and a two and a half year old sharing a bathroom together
at three in the morning.
Yeah, we actually have someone that does that
on a frequent basis.
So you wouldn't have been alone.
That's good.
Just if you do have a stomach bug,
my advice is don't wear an outfit
that requires three minutes to undo.
Have you ever seen the Family Guy episode where Peter gets the, uh,
pajama pants that have the like trap door in the back?
Yeah, you should have just worn one of those.
That would have been a solution.
But the problem was that the guy at the front, the toilet attending guy at the
front must have thought this man, I'm in a, a event filled with rich bankers and,
and like dynasty money and all the rest of it.
Probably quite a lot of cocaine going on.
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
He must have looked at me and thought,
that is the fucking king of cocaine.
For sure.
That man is shoveling some good stuff in there.
Cause I was back and forth every seven minutes or so.
Was it one of those bathrooms that had like a person
that would hand you a towel after you washed your hands?
Mercifully not. Okay, good. Cause that would have been rough. He was outside. Yeah, that had like a person that would hand you a towel after you washed your hands? Mercifully not.
Okay, good.
He was outside.
Because that would have been rough.
He was outside.
That's always a little embarrassing.
Speaking of the new year though, I saw a tweet from you that said,
you're one year of focus away from people saying you got lucky.
And, yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah.
That's an important concept.
It's one of those things that I think about a lot that once you've made it,
once you've achieved success, everyone wants to call you lucky.
All those people that were like in the dark hating on you, all the people that
were belittling you when you wanted to go and chase that dream, when you wanted
to go do the thing, they're the first ones to call you lucky once you achieve it.
And they didn't see all of the shit that you did in the dark, all of the struggles, all of the failures, all of the pains that you came back from, but they're the first ones to call you lucky once you achieve it. And they didn't see all of the shit that you did in the dark, all of the struggles, all
of the failures, all of the pains that you came back from.
But they're the first ones that are going to go around saying that you got lucky on
the back end.
So I think the call to action is wear that as a badge of honor.
When people are calling you lucky, you've clearly done something right because you know
what went in in the dark behind it.
The other one is I bet you had wealthy parents.
Yeah.
Your privilege.
I mean, that's, that's been a meme over the last few years, right?
It's like, well, that doesn't acknowledge the privilege.
Um, I do think that, um, you think about your own life and like the life cycle,
the early years of your life are governed by type one luck, blind luck, right?
Like the base circumstances of your life, acts of God,
where you're born, who you're born to, all of those things.
But beyond that, your luck is mostly a byproduct
of the actions that you're taking in your life.
It's mostly a byproduct of the motion that you're creating
and the things that you're building,
how you're actually going out
and interacting with the world.
Idea being, it's very hard to get lucky
sitting on the couch doing nothing at home.
It's much easier to get lucky
if you're going out and doing something.
Yeah, you've got a bracket that your world exists within
and much of that bracket has actually been determined
by things that were outside of your control.
But within that bracket,
almost everything is within your control.
And the fact that people can't hold two thoughts
in their mind at the same time
is where that gets confusing.
And you get accused of victim blaming or not fully understanding the challenges
that people face or pandering and not giving people sufficient motivation and
giving them a hard enough kick up the ass to get them to go and do the thing.
So ultimately I think that it's very difficult to please anybody, frankly.
Ultimately, I think that it's very difficult to please anybody, frankly.
But yeah, the fact that one year of focus, it is absurd to look back as you get a little bit older and find individual 12 month periods where you say, wow, the
difference between the beginning and the end of that.
And for me, you can probably track it from the beginning of the year as well.
It doesn't happen June to June.
It does tend to happen January to December.
And that's an interesting thing about resolutions. I know it's cool to hate on resolutions to kind of take a more holistic view and say,
well, there's nothing, nothing particularly special about January 1st.
Why couldn't you have done it on December 31st?
Go because the human brain is irrational and it uses loads of random motivation.
Look at the, you'll have seen this, the split times for a marathon and they all cluster
around important milestones.
They cluster around three hours and 3.15 and 3.30, but like there's not a big spike at
3.37.
Have you seen diamond pricing?
No. Diamond pricing is a perfect example of this.
A 1.99 carat diamond versus a 2.00 carat diamond.
It doesn't just go up by that tiny percentage.
It's a huge leap because the human mind has this like ego attached to the two
versus the one, no one wants to give their girlfriend a 1.99 carat.
You want to give her the 2.01.
So the price goes up like 20% on the slight jump.
It's that exact thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, you know, I, that's why I'm,
we're at the start of the year.
I'm all for someone carrying the New Year's resolution
thing forward.
And yeah, you can achieve an awful lot in a single year.
Yeah.
And you take the time to zoom out at the end of the year, no matter what, like
no matter who you are and part of that's because you have the space to do it.
Right.
Like because of whatever you're doing for work, it slows down, whether you're
an entrepreneur or whether you work for someone nine to five, you, you actually
have space in your life to zoom out and think at the end of the year.
And so people do it then it's natural.
And as a result, you have a comparison point that is very natural from year to year because you were able to zoom out on an annual basis
I mean I think about that all the time of like just how much can change in a
year. It's very easy to say that things take 10 years like I think Bill
Gates was the one that said that most people overestimate what they can do in
a day and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.
And I've often thought that that same exact quote applies to a year.
I mean, it will blow your mind.
If you actually sit down and are focused every single day for a year, your entire life can
change.
Yeah.
What's the problem people have when they look at the scoreboard of their lives?
You know, we're kind of hinting toward what it means to live a good life, how you sort of create the constituent parts of that.
What do people get wrong when they think about that scoreboard?
Peter Drucker, a famous management theorist you might know, once said, what gets measured
gets managed.
And it's this idea that the thing that you can measure becomes the thing that you optimize
around, the thing that you very narrowly focus on, myopically focus on.
And for us in our own lives, that thing that we can measure is money.
It's so easy. You can put a single number and apply it to your entire life so you know your worth, so you can compare yourself to others.
And money's measurability is a feature, not necessarily a bug. It's really useful and as a result, it's perpetuated through society.
But because it's so measurable, it becomes the entire focus of our lives.
It's the only thing that we think about when we try to progress on the life scoreboard,
right?
When we try to win the game, it's the thing that we focus on.
But unfortunately, it is not particularly well aligned with trying to build a meaningful,
happy, successful life.
It is up to a point very useful as a tool to reduce fundamental burdens and stresses.
I know you've had Arthur Brooks on here.
He's done a bunch of research around this.
At the lower levels of your life, we know you can reduce a bunch of stress by having
money.
You can take care of the people around you.
You can pay for food, shelter, all those basic things. But once you get past that point, the science is pretty
clear that it's not going to be money that drives incremental fulfillment and happiness.
Adam Stoltenberg Yeah, it feels like you've spent a lot of time
looking at the relationship between money and happiness. What's your, it's too trite to say,
being poor can make you miserable,
but being rich might not make you happy.
Summarize that for me.
Yeah.
Basically, all of the research is summarized around three points.
At lower levels, money does buy happiness.
At the lower levels of, let's say, annual income, money directly buys happiness.
And it's very clear that it does that
because it reduces those fundamental burdens and stresses.
Above a baseline level, which you can argue
over what that baseline level is.
The first and most formative study was Daniel Kahneman.
He said $75,000 a year.
Then everyone went nuts and said, no, it's not 75.
Then there was one that said $200,000 a year.
The number is sort of beside the point
because if you live in New York City with two kids,
that number is going to be significantly higher
than someone living in Omaha, Nebraska or Mississippi
or a random place somewhere in the world.
But the point is that at that baseline level,
once you get above it, if you are unhappy
and you're at that baseline level, more money get above it, if you are unhappy, and you're at that baseline level,
more money doesn't make you happier. And if you're happy at that baseline level, more money is not
going to make you happier. So your your natural disposition at that level is more important.
And the other things in your life are what are going to be driving incremental happiness, it's
going to be free time, it's going to be people. It's going to be purpose.
It's going to be health.
It's these other things in life that drive the incremental gains above it.
I think Arthur Brooks does an incredible job summarizing this well, when he says,
we are sort of like rats, like we're sort of like mice with cheese, where early
in our life, you ring this money bell
and you experience this happiness
because you're on that early part of the curve
and because it is actually improving your life
in a meaningful way.
But we create this pattern in our mind
that that natural linear relationship
between money and happiness is going to continue forever.
And we hit the point where it is no longer doing it
but we think it's going to continue to.
So we go our entire lives continuing to try to ring the money bell,
thinking it's going to bring us those same gains from early,
even though it doesn't.
What was that study that you told us about in our chat to do with when you ask
people how much money they want to would make them happy. And it continues to go up.
Can you explain that?
Yeah.
Michael Norton is a Harvard Business School professor,
and he did this study with high net worth individuals.
So anyone worth $10 million up through hundreds of millions
of dollars.
And he asked them on a scale of 1 to 10 how happy they are.
And they all answered.
And then he asked, how much money
would you need in order to be at a 10? And across the
board, whether they were worth 10 million, 100 million, a billion, they all said somewhere from
two to five X as much money as they currently have. So no matter what, it didn't matter if they were
worth 10 or worth a hundred, they all said two to five X. And I've gone and anecdotally asked
successful people in my own life. I did it in our group chat. I asked everyone. I went and asked hundreds of people this question
and across the board you find this.
Like someone worth 10 million says they need 30
because then they could fly private more.
Someone worth a hundred says they need 500
because then they would get invited
to the cooler yacht parties.
Whatever the thing is,
we just naturally reset to three to five X.
Yeah, it's fascinating about the, what's get,
what it is that we can measure is the thing
that we care about the most.
And money is just the best game at that.
Is that an argument to try and gamify
the other areas of your life?
Should you have a dashboard that's tracking everything else?
I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to do with this book.
You know, the whole idea of creating a measurable tool
for these other areas of life that we know are the ones that create meaning
and fulfillment.
We know what they are.
Like I'm not giving you a new answer here.
I'm helping you actually ask the question
so that you can figure out how to build your life
around those things.
We know that having meaningful relationships
makes you happier and more fulfilled, right?
Like actually the science on this is abundantly clear.
The Harvard study of adult development was this study conducted over 85 plus
years, 2000 plus participants.
And they found that the single greatest predictor of living a good life was the
strength of your relationships.
And actually the single greatest predictor of their physical health at age
80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50.
It was more impactful than whether they smoked or drank,
whether they had high blood pressure, cholesterol,
any of those things.
It was your relationships that actually impacted it.
But we don't have a way to measure how we feel
about our relationships or where they are
in the same way that we do money.
Or we don't have a way to measure how we feel
about our purpose and whether we're pursuing things
with curiosity and growth.
We don't have a way to measure whether we feel good about our health in the same way,
although that's getting a bit better.
But all of these things we need to factor into like an overall life wealth score so
that you can have them alongside money on that journey.
What's the life razor?
This is one of my favorite concepts from the book. So you know what the, for anyone that doesn't understand what a razor is, a razor is a rule
of thumb to simplify decision making.
The most famous razor that people talk about is Occam's razor.
It's the idea that the explanation, the simplest possible explanation is often the best one.
Basically simple is beautiful.
And in the book, I proposed this idea
of having a life raiser, a single decision-making heuristic
that allows you to cut through the noise in your own life.
Something that allows you to navigate
whatever chaos ensues, to just have a simple way
to make a decision in those moments.
And the best example of that that I've come across
was Mark Randolph, the CEO of Netflix, posted
this tweet several years ago where he said, my definition of success.
And it was all about the fact that every single Tuesday throughout his entire career, he had
founded some of the most transformative technology companies in the world.
He had a hard rule that at 5 PM on Tuesday evening, he would take his
wife out for a date, no matter what started one of the biggest companies
in the technology world, he would leave at 5 PM to take his wife out on a date.
And when I spoke to him, the one thing that became very clear to me was.
It didn't have that much to do with the date or any one particular evening with his wife.
It had everything to do with what it implied
about who he was as a person.
What it meant for his identity as a human being,
that he was the type of person who left at 5 p.m.
to take his wife out for a date,
that he had these clear priorities in mind.
And it implied things to the people around him.
It was ripple creating in his life.
We all need a similar idea to that in our own world, something that
defines who we are as a person.
So my life raiser would be that I will coach my son's sports teams.
For me, that is in some ways about the type of father that I am to him, that I
have to be the type of person that my son wants to be around.
It also means that I'm the type of person that will never sacrifice my integrity or character
for the pursuit of some new thing, some more.
Because if I do that, my son won't want to have me around.
He won't be proud to have me coaching his teams.
My wife won't be proud to have me out in the community.
The community won't want me around.
So in a moment, when I have a decision to make,
I can ask myself, what does the type of person
who coaches his son's sports teams do in this moment?
The single-ordinating principle thing,
I seem to remember two examples,
one from Bezos, one from Elon.
The Bezos one was every question through Amazon
went through the filter,
does this make the customer experience better?
And I think Elon's was, does this get us closer to Mars?
And yeah, when you think that there's a lot of ways that the world can be chaotic
and bringing that under a single variable, one dimension, does this achieve, does
this get us closer to X?
Does this make me more likely to be the sort of father that would be able to
coach my son's sports teams?
Does this make me more likely to be able to leave at 5pm to go on the date with my wife?
That helps a lot.
Yeah.
I mean, the space example is a good one, the Elon example, because, uh, the
example I give in the book of, uh, where I started to think about this was from Apollo
13, you know that movie?
So in the like climactic scene of Apollo 13, they're trying to reenter the atmosphere
and they're having to do a manual burn of the engines because the computers are all
shut down.
And if they come in too steep, they're going to like blow up.
If they come in too shallow, they're going to skip off into space and they don't have
a way to figure out the perfect angle.
And Tom Hanks has this heroic moment where he's like, well, I just have to
keep a fixed point in space.
And if I can keep the earth in this tiny triangular window that's sitting here in
front of me, it's going to allow us to enter at the proper angle.
And that whole concept of like keeping the earth in the window is
really what I'm talking about.
It's having that one central point of focus that allows you to cut through all of the complexity and chaos that enters your life.
How do people find that out?
You have to know what matters to you.
You have to know what you truly care about. Like what is your true north in life?
And the question I often ask people is, what does your ideal day look like at age 80? Really think about that, truly
visualize and imagine what your ideal day looks like as an 80
year old. And who are you with? What are you doing? What are you
thinking about? How do you feel? And then think, are you actually
taking actions today to create that future?
Because what happens is most people will say, my ideal day is sitting with people I love, feeling healthy of body and mind, thinking about things that I care about,
friends coming over, and then you ask them what they're doing on a daily basis.
And they're basically chasing bullshit, right?
They're chasing money, they're drinking, they're, you know, partying, doing not
like things that actually are not leading to that end
that they say they want.
It's like the adage of,
don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar.
Are your actions actually creating the future
that you are trying to create?
Yes or no, be honest with yourself,
be able to look in the mirror.
But those things that we want are remarkably similar,
but our ability to take actions on them in the present is very different.
Is it a challenge, especially as people are maybe a little bit younger and their life is in more flux?
Because the thing that you want right now might be to get a partner.
Like that's really what I want, what I really, really should be focused on.
Does this make me more likely to be attractive to the sort of person I would spend the rest of my life with?
Well, after a while, presuming that you managed to be successful in that,
that needs to fall by the wayside. And then there's another one. And maybe that's an even shorter window.
Like when your son is 18, I mean, unless you end up going to the Jets or something,
and you're like, wow, this is fucking sick. I've like transitioned again. Um, that's going to have to change.
Yeah.
Your life has seasons and what you prioritize or
focus on during any one season can and should
change and as a result, your life-raiser will
change across these different seasons of your
life.
Obviously, while my son is young, my life-raiser
can be this.
As he gets older, when he moves on, when he's, when he's off and it's just my wife and I again, or
when we have different priorities, that life-raiser will change just like your priorities and
focus change.
I mean, my 20s and 30s, early 30s were spent very much in a foundation-building season
of my life.
I was trying to build a financial foundation, which is a great way to use your 20s. Don't
get me wrong. I am not anywhere in this book saying that money doesn't matter. That you
should go and move to the Himalayas and just drink warm broth and meditate for 12 hours
a day. If you want to do that, by all means, go do it. I just won't be joining you. I like
money. Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.
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modern wisdom. Yeah, you had this insight around, um, you need to work hard first before
you can start to work smart.
Yeah.
I think that the narrative around hard work has been lost.
Uh, especially with the current generation, it sort of became a meme to
say hard work is overrated, overrated and that you have to work
smart. You cannot work smart before you work hard because you have no idea what
to work hard, what to work smart on. You just have no clue, right? You don't, it's
like the way that I think about it is when you're young the only asset you
have is time. It is the only asset you have. You don't have networks, you don't have money, you don't have knowledge, you don't have experience,
you don't have wisdom.
You don't have any of those things.
You have time.
So what you need to do is you invest your time to gain knowledge, networks, money, wisdom,
experience.
Then you can work smart because you have these things.
You know where to deploy them for the highest potential ROI, for those extraordinary outcomes.
But you can't do this before you have it.
Working hard is the investment of that time to acquire the experience,
the wisdom, the knowledge, the networks, the money.
Then once you have it,
you can deploy it to work smart.
Yeah. Another one that I loved from you,
the worst decisions in life are made when you allow
your heads to talk you into something when your gut already said no.
And that I think, even if you haven't done the formal exercise of the life
razor, you have an idea about where you want to be and there's this little
voice in the back of your mind that keeps a tally, you know, that, um, what's
that game where like hot or cold and someone's trying to work out what it is
that you've hidden in the room and you're going warmer, warmer, colder, colder, colder.
And this just a little radar GPS ticker in the back of your mind that goes, Hey,
you moved yourself further away from the person you want to be today.
And if it's poorly defined, I think that probably causes, um, Discontent because
you thought, ah, fuck, like what, what is that thing?
What is that place I'm going to? I know I moved further away from it today with my actions, but I don't, I can't
specifically tell you why maybe, or maybe I can, but I can't tell you what it was
that I moved further away from.
I just know that I acted like a bit of a dick today.
But yesterday, perfect example, I got off the plane and I'd had like a fucking
norovirus, so a bad 48 hours, the plane journey had been long, I'd been
traveling and I had to get in, it was all rushed and I wasn't as courteous to the
Uber driver as I should be and I remember thinking like, huh, that's not
the sort of person I want to be. So like sort of shook his hand and wished him a
good day and tipped him and stuff afterward. And it was like, okay, like that kind of rids me
at least a little bit of this agitated state.
But yeah, everybody knows, like, you know
you've got this little conscience or daemon
or whatever sat in the back of your mind
knowing if you're moving yourself further toward that
or further away, regardless of whether you've designed
and defined your life razorraiser or not.
Yeah, it takes a level of self-awareness
to tune into that gut.
I think of that gut as like your energy in a lot of ways.
Our mutual friend, George Mack, has that thing
of like treadmill or couch friends.
And that's a perfect example of this exact thing,
of tuning into how you actually feel about something is a very good way
to make decisions in your life. I mean, I think about the number of bad business and financial
decisions I've made where I knew it didn't feel good, but I allowed myself to be talked into it
by my head. Like the initial gut instinct, the energy was, oh, this doesn't make sense. This is,
this is not good.
There's some signal, there's something that's off.
I don't feel good about it.
But then you start the like, well, I could make this.
I could do this, this could happen.
What if this?
And you talk yourself into it.
And inevitably those things go to shit
and it ends up being bad.
But you're allowing your head to outsmart your gut.
And so I think that just tuning into that more regularly,
learning to just listen to that initial gut instinct on something,
the energy and what it tells you is a great razor for life
with people, with business deals,
with financial decisions, with all of this.
So yes, but more so when you have more experience.
Because again, in the first instance, if you're 20, what, what do you,
I mean, unless you've had a very experiential teens, what the fuck are you listening to?
Yeah.
That what, what experience are you drawing on here?
That is where you would look at it and maybe call it impulsivity, sort of a
rationality, emotionality, you're not being driven by making logical, illogical decisions. But yet, as you start to accumulate some battle scars and some experience and some decades
under your belt, I think that's when you can.
But again, this is periods of your life, seasons of your life, right?
The tools that got you here won't get you there.
And one of the tools that got you here was being very deliberate, very thought through,
very top down.
You're like dictating to the rest of your body.
This is what you're going to do.
You're going to push harder.
You're going to train more.
You're going to et cetera.
And after a while you go, Hey, a body's saying it needs to take a rest.
And the last time this happened and I didn't listen to it, I, that
was when I injured my knee.
That was when that I got burned out.
That was when I got sick and fucking got norovirus at New York Athletic Club.
I think again, one of those periods where the tools need to change.
Are you familiar with the concept of winner's game versus loser's game?
No, this is one of my favorite ideas for life.
Um, so this originates from tennis where, um, amateur tennis is a loser's game,
meaning you win by avoiding unforced errors. where amateur tennis is a loser's game,
meaning you win by avoiding unforced errors.
80% of points are lost on unforced errors.
Professional tennis is a winner's game,
meaning you win by hitting magnificent shots,
by hitting perfect, elegant shots.
It is extremely important in life
to know what type of game you are playing.
And the reality is that most games of life are losers games.
You win by simply avoiding unforced errors, by showing up over and over and over again
with reliability, by doing what you say you're going to do, by showing up and doing the boring
basics.
But the challenge in life is identifying when the game changed.
Because if you keep trying to play an amateur tennis,
loser's game, but now you're playing professionally,
you're gonna get smoked
because you're gonna be trying to play like a backboard.
You're gonna be trying to avoid unforced errors
while the other person is just killing you
with incredible shots.
And so understanding when the game has changed
in your own life is really important.
Like early in your life, saying yes to every single opportunity you get is a great game to play.
Because it's what allows you to invest your time to gain the experience,
to start building that gut instinct, to start building your understanding of it.
But suddenly the game changes.
And if you keep saying yes to everything, you burn yourself out.
You take on dumb opportunities. You're wasting all of your time and energy on stupid one X time for money
trades when you should be focusing on the elegant magnificent shots that are going
to generate the 10 X, hundred X outcomes in your life.
Have you got any idea about how people can recognize when that's happening to them?
I think you start to see that the early investments
in your networks and in your sort of opportunity sets
are compounding.
Like what you start to feel is more interesting opportunities
are coming to you at an accelerating exponential rate.
And when you see that start to happen, you need to take a pause in your life
to recognize what you start, what you need to start saying no to, to open up
the space to pursue those big ones.
It's like ventilating your life.
You need to breathe space into your life so that you actually have the bandwidth
to take on those big opportunities.
I often think that one of the greatest skills and
one of the most common traits of the most successful people I've ever spent time around
is that they have the highest tolerance for uncertainty. They are actually willing to
tolerate uncertainty for long periods of time. They are willing to be static for long periods of time. Give me an example. Tim Cook, when he left IBM to take a job at Compaq,
like people don't know this, don't think about his early part of his career
all that much, but he spent the early part of his career rising
through the ranks at IBM.
He was in there like, you know, executive management program, big company,
you know, rising through the ranks at this big company.
But one of, yeah, one of them.
Unlimited number of fucking people.
Exactly.
And Steve Jobs was recruiting for a role at Apple and saw Tim's resume and looked at it
and was like, ah, big company guy, probably not a fit for Apple and their more startup
culture.
And so passed on it. Six months later, he saw,
was still recruiting for that role and saw the resume again.
And at that point,
Tim had left IBM and the like safe track he was on
to take this job at Compaq,
which was this small computer startup at the time.
And at that point, Steve then had this like pattern interrupt
about the type of person that Tim was.
All of a sudden, he was like this guy
that had taken on something very uncertain.
He had done something very different.
So decided to have a conversation with him.
Obviously now you fast forward 20 plus years
and trillions of dollars of value
that Tim has created at Apple.
And it's this enormous case study to me
of someone who was willing to tolerate some uncertainty
of doing something different.
It didn't make sense.
It was a pattern interrupt in his life
that sparked this enormous chain of dots
that were connected out into the future.
I have a friend who worked for a big recruitment company
for a while here in Austin,
and they place very, very high level tech execs
around the world.
And it meant that he was able to have access
to some of the first and second round interviews
that they did with the best candidates on the planet.
And Tim Cook was one of them.
Susanna was Jikki.
Jikki was another one of them too.
And I was asking him this question, I was saying, hey man, so what's the difference
between these people that go on to earn obscene packages and then the best in the world, the people that lead the, you know, futsy 100 companies.
And he said, well, I can tell you what the first line of the first word of Tim Cook's summary was.
Remembering that these people, they spend their time trying to find holes, trying to pick holes in what is it, the psychographic profile, what is it to do with their childhood that's coming up?
What does it to do with their work ethic?
Where they've gotten an inability to deal with criticism or they're too
concerned about the opinions of others or whatever it might be.
And the first word, the top of the summary of Tim Cook just said, rockstar,
full stop, you know, in a sea of the best candidates on the planet, there is still
a step difference between everybody and then the best.
Yeah.
I thought that was so cool.
Super cool and completely consistent with my own experience.
I mean, I've been very lucky to spend a lot of time with Tim over the years.
He's been sort of a mentor and friend to me for the last 10 years.
I originally met him in 2014.
He was the relatively new CEO at the time.
And the way that I met him was because he was working out at the gym at 4 45 every single
morning before going into the office, he would wake up at 3 45 and send off emails, be working,
doing things, get to the gym at 4 45 workout. He was probably getting into the office by 6 15
before any of his employees were probably even awake.
And you think about that and think about the fact
that you are the CEO of one of the largest companies
in the world and you are still doing that.
You are literally on a daily basis,
like meat and potatoes, behavior and actions.
And then it becomes no surprise that someone like that has been able to do
and achieve the things that he's done.
I mean, a laser intensity and focus on the things that matter.
Have you ever heard Dana White talk about what it's like being
friends with Donald Trump?
No.
Dude, it's wild.
Dana says Trump will come to one of the USC events and he'll watch, you know, he
rocks up toward the beginning of the main card and he'll walk out with him and
it'll do the fucking kid rocks with him or whoever, Elon jumping about in the
background.
And then he'll watch the fights and he'll like shake the hands and do the thing
and he'll leave and then Dana will be on the way home and he'll get a call from Trump because he
wants to talk about the fights and he wants to discuss stuff and then they'll get onto something
else. He'll go to bed and by the time that Dana, Dana is a guy to me that seems very, very high
energy, by the time that Dana's gone to bed and got back up, Trump's already on his flight and
he'll have messages from him about shit that they spoke about the night before and I don't know man,
it doesn't matter whether you like him or not whether you agree with his politics or not
for a guy that's
78 79 something like that. That's fucking terrifying. I don't none of my friends in our 30s are able to do that and
Yeah, that's when you realize that there are builds to people that are kind of inevitable
Peterson's got this line about, um, uh, like conscientious people are crazy if you put them in a, uh, abandoned forest with an ax, they're
just running around chopping down trees for no reason.
And, um, yeah, that's the kind of Tim Cook, like Trump energy,
like just chopping trees.
Yeah.
There's levels to this shit.
I always think that like sometimes you just encounter someone and you just realize there's levels to this shit. I always think that. Like sometimes you just encounter someone and you just realize there's levels to these games.
And I have always thought that like,
if you were working for someone like that,
you just have to know from the get-go
that you are never going to outwork your boss.
And there's something about that,
like being that type of person
that just sends a signal to the world through your actions.
You gotta keep in mind, like Tim doesn't ever, I mean, he very rarely does interviews, very
rarely speaks publicly about his habits or his routines.
It's not like he's not a thread boy on Twitter being like, here's my morning routine doing
things.
It's just his actions and you know what he's doing on a daily basis through the output.
We lose sight of that right like
No one cares about your deep work ritual or your morning routine if your output is shit
No one cares and at the end of the day your deep work routine and your morning routine may get you social media likes
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For people whose primary job is not talking about what they do on social media
or creating content or writing or doing whatever videos about it.
I always think if you're talking that much about what you do, how the fuck do
you have time to do what you say you do?
It blows my mind, you know, productivity, business, corporate gurus that seem to have an
unbelievable amount of spare capacity to do Instagram stories and to talk.
I'm like, when are you ever actually fucking working?
Cause it's my job to make content and I don't have time to do that much stuff.
And also very little desire to do it as well, which kind of makes me skeptical
about whether you can do the things that you say you can do, or whether you can skeptical about whether you can do the things that you say you can do or whether you can only
say that you can do the things that you say that you do.
Yeah, it is like, it's, it's the meme of, uh, social media in general around these
things. Like I, the other day I, someone, uh, posted about start wanting to wake
up earlier in the new year.
And I commented on it and just said that for the first six years of my career, I
woke up at 3 45 every single morning.
Uh, and that was because I was working in finance.
I was working an 80 to a hundred hour a week job where I wanted to be really
successful at it.
And, uh, if I wanted to work out before going to the office, I'd be there at 6 30.
I had to wake up and go, go to the gym and do that.
And I did it for six years and I still wake up at four, four 15 in the morning
cause those early morning hours are like sacred to me.
And someone replied, I sort of posted my daily routine
and how many hours I was at the office.
And someone replied-
This is from what a decade ago something.
Yeah, this is from 2014 to 2020 before COVID.
And someone commented was like,
how many of your 14 hours at work were deep work?
And I replied semi-seriously, actually quite seriously,
I don't even know what that means.
Like I don't know what deep work means.
I just had to get a lot of shit done.
There was no like ritual.
I wasn't like sitting down with some perfect, you know,
coffee ritual. I just had to do a lot of work.
I just had to get a lot of shit done.
And if I had been worried about my deep work routine,
or if I had been worried about like needing to cold plunge
before doing that, frankly,
and this is coming from a guy that I am into stuff like that,
I just, I wouldn't have been able to get things done.
And so if you're focusing on all those things,
rather than just focusing on creating incredible output,
quality and quantity,
you're just studying for the wrong tests.
Yeah, I brought it up with George over Christmas again, probably one of my favorite things
I learned from him last year.
I think it's a Michael Grove quote that says, there are so many people working so hard and
achieving so little.
And yeah, look, I come from a productivity background.
When I first started the show, I was chatting shit about Pomodoro timers and notion external
brains and and Ebbinghaus forgetting curves and all of that, right?
I've been through the ring, which is why I'm allowed to say it.
And you realize after a while that it ends up being this weird superstitious rain dance
you're doing this sort of odd sort of productivity rain dance in the desperate hope that later
that day you're going to get something done.
And some of that stuff does really help.
And you kind of need to go through this process of, ah, it wasn't the, the
15 pushups before I do my calls.
Oh, it wasn't, it was this thing.
That's the highest point of leverage.
And I get rid of everything else.
And that's the highest point of leverage.
And I get rid of everything else.
You create the sort of very, very high leverage points for each of those
individually, but we're talking about time.
What, what do you think is the big question that people have when it comes to time?
Well, if the two things that people probably realize that they need most in life is some
form of money and time when they're thinking about at least objective metrics.
Why, why do we struggle so much to sort of use our time effectively?
Why does it slip through our fingers?
The lack of awareness of time as your most important asset and your most
valuable asset is the most damning problem that people face.
I often ask young people, uh, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett?
He's worth $130 billion.
He has access to anybody in the world.
He reads and learns for a living.
He flies around on private jets
and stays in mansions all around the world.
But you wouldn't trade lives with him
because he's 95 years old.
There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time you have
for the amount of time he has, even for $130 billion.
And so you simultaneously acknowledge subconsciously that your time has
incalculable value.
It's worth more than $130 billion.
And yet you take actions on a daily basis that spit on that.
You disregard it.
You spend time on low value, stupid activities.
You sit on your phone scrolling around doing nonsense.
You don't focus on the things that really matter.
You move around like a rocking horse, right?
You're like rocking back and forth,
but never going anywhere.
And so really recognizing that time
is the most important asset.
It's not any of these other things.
And the way that you invest and spend your time
is the most meaningful decision
that you're gonna make in your life.
That is the first step to unlocking any level of time wealth.
How do you come to teach people about this?
What is it?
You've got somebody who for the first time is beginning to think about their time.
You're like, huh, here's some ways that we can audit how you're spending yours.
I think, uh, I offer this in the book, this idea of the energy calendar.
I think I offer this in the book, this idea of the energy calendar. So at the end of a workday, look at your calendar and color code activities from the day
according to whether they created energy, meaning you felt good during and after them,
they were neutral, mark them yellow, or they were energy draining, you didn't feel good, mark them red.
So it's green, yellow, red.
At the end of a week, if you do that for a week,
you have a very clear sense of the types of activities
you are spending time on that are conducive to your energy.
That means you're feeling good from them
or that are draining, that are like killing you
in whatever way.
If you can slowly work toward a world
where that calendar looks more green than red,
you are going to feel significantly better.
And as a result, you're going to feel significantly better. And as a result,
you're going to create significantly better outputs.
We all know that the activities that are pulling us
that we feel drawn towards
are the ones where we produce the best outputs,
where we produce those like 10, 100X outcomes
that actually meaningfully change our lives.
You wouldn't do three podcasts a week
for the last however many years
if you weren't drawn to having conversations with people. I wouldn't have written two newsletters a week for the last
three, four years if I wasn't drawn to writing about these problems. You can't fake things
over long periods of time. So leaning into those things where you have energy naturally
for them and leaning away from the things that are killing you is a really good way
to just naturally reposition your time.
Because you could wait long enough and see what stuff stuck about.
Because after half a decade, the only things that you're continuing to do,
that training, if you don't like the gym that much,
your training is going to be inconsistent over a long enough time period.
Because white-knuckling your way through something that you hate
just doesn't work given a broad enough time horizon.
Yeah, you have to find the version of it that is authentic and real for you.
But you can get to this realization sooner by doing an audit on a daily basis.
I quite like that.
I'd imagine that many people's calendars would look terrifyingly red if they were to go back
and do it.
Yeah, and you can actually make real changes immediately.
Like the first thing when I say this to people,
they're like, well, I just work in, you know,
I work in a job, I have to do a bunch of things
that are energy draining.
I totally understand that and agree with it.
When I first did this, I was working in my finance job,
80 plus hours a week.
And the biggest energy draining activity for me still
to this day is the like chit chat, phone call,
pick your brain meeting. Like either zoom or phone call, pick your brain meeting.
Like either Zoom or phone call, sitting at my desk.
I would rather staple gun my stomach and go to the hospital
than sit on a day of Zoom calls.
I just, I cannot stand it.
And so I had blocks of those that were just all red.
But what I noticed was that taking a call on a walk
is actually pretty energy creating for me.
I actually think the first time you and I spoke,
we were both out on walks while we were chatting
because we both feel that way.
So suddenly if I just change half those phone calls
to walking calls, my calendar goes from being
this like enormous block of red to more green.
And it's a small change that you can make immediately
that makes you feel dramatically different
at the end of the week.
And you show up with more presence on those calls.
You're actually going to have a better outcome on the call because you're
focused, you're present.
So it's like, I push back against people when they have the immediately cynical,
like, I can't do that viewpoint on whatever these ideas are, because you actually
have a lot more control of these things than you think.
What else do you learn about time?
more control of these things than you think.
What else do you learn about time?
The amount of time you have remaining with the people that you love most in the world
is far more finite and terrifyingly countable than you think.
We have all at different times in our lives experienced some
traumatic event of someone we love getting sick, dying.
And those moments are this spark. They're this little flash of light from the other side to recognize that
there are things that matter so much more that we're not thinking about on a daily basis.
It sort of shines this light of wisdom onto your path where you are today.
The sad thing is that for most of us, you see that wisdom, you kind of nod your head,
and then you go back living the exact same damn way you were before.
your head and then you go back living the exact same damn way you were before.
And in my own life, my own journey, everything changed for me with a single conversation that I had with an old friend. In May of 2021, I was at a point in my life where things were
pretty dark. I had sort of been playing the money game, I guess,
for seven years to start my career.
And I had gotten so narrowly focused on money as the path to me
feeling good about myself.
Everything was about, okay, on the other side of this bonus
or this promotion or this whatever status symbol, I'll feel good about myself.
And unfortunately, that narrow focus had led to a lot
of other areas of my life starting to fall apart.
My relationships, my parents with my sister,
our relationship with my wife was strained.
We were struggling to conceive at the time,
which is a thing that a lot of people don't talk about,
sort of a burden that people carry in silence that is a very solitary journey that was
tough and a strain on us at the time. My health was suffering. I was drinking seven nights a week.
I mean, there were all these other areas of my life that were suffering while on the outside
looking in, you would have said, like, I'm winning the game.
And I went out for a drink with an old friend
in May of 2021 and he asked how I was doing.
And I said that it was starting to get tough
living as far away as we were from our parents.
I was super close with my parents and they're getting older.
They're starting to see chinks in the armor
with their health. And he asked how old are they? And I said, they're in older. They're starting to see chinks in the armor with their health.
And he asked, how old are they?
And I said, they're in their mid-60s.
And he said, how often do you see them?
I said, about once a year.
And he looked at me and said,
so you're going to see your parents 15 more times
before they die.
And I just remember feeling
like I had been punched in the gut.
I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left
with these people that you love most in the world
is that countable, that you can place it on a few hands,
was terrifying and jarring.
And it sparked real change,
because I was determined to not be one of those people
that hears it,
nods my head, and then does nothing about it.
And so the next morning I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change in our life.
And within 45 days I had left my job, we had sold our house in California,
and we had moved across the country to be closer to our parents.
And the most beautiful part in all of it was
after two years of struggling to conceive,
within two weeks of making that change
and being back on the East Coast,
my wife got pregnant with our son.
And it was one of those moments,
I'm not a particularly religious person,
but it was one of those moments in life
where you just feel like God winked at you.
Like your things came into alignment and your whole life fell into place as it should.
And the story of my life and of this book and of everything that I'm putting out into the world is
really a ripple of that one decision to make that change, to prioritize the things that I knew we
valued most that had been sitting in the back seat for so long.
Isn't it interesting, the bravery component there.
I think it's so important, the uncertainty that you were talking about before.
And how much can you tolerate of that?
How much can you tolerate of fear and how brave can you be to sort of overcome that?
Yeah.
And I think a big part of it for us, I have to give my wife credit because
it is very difficult to be brave on your own.
And she, when I came to her and said that I thought
we should make this change,
was the first one to say, we can do this.
Yes, let's go do it.
Easily she could have resisted. She could have said like,
what are you talking about? We have a good life. We have a house. You're making good money. All
of the reasons to stay on the path. And I often say that the worst thing in the world is not being
on a bad path. Being on a bad path, it screams at you every single day to change. You're on a
bad path. You have to make a change.
It's so abundantly obvious.
The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours.
And that was very much where we were.
It was a good path from a societal definition,
but it was not the one that was leading to the place where I wanted to go.
It was like that Japanese proverb that says if you get on the wrong train, get off as soon as
possible because if you don't the trip back is gonna be a lot longer. That was
where we were and my wife was the one that sort of infused me with the courage
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Yeah.
It's an interesting, I don't know.
And the sad point is people become increasingly lonely or increasingly single
than, uh, yes, sometimes you can't pull the pin all on your own.
And, uh, it's awesome, dude.
I'm so, I'm so happy for you guys.
And, uh, what a like inspiring story to have had that with the, uh, conception
thing, I think is so true as well.
Read this really harrowing article about, um, the crisis of, uh, childless men.
Uh, you know, a lot of the time women have a biological window and, you know, rightly
a lot of the priority and attention is focused on them.
But the same happening for men, whether it's that they get to an age where sperm count
is so low that it's no longer viable, whether they get to an age where they're not able
to date quite so easily or the only partners that they can date
now are too old. And yeah, trying to conceive and not being able to do it is this weird,
silent social epidemic that no one really ever wants to talk about all that much.
Especially men. I mean, it is weird. I went on, you know, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee in the UK,
and I had a conversation with him, and I shared those struggles to conceive. And he said that in
10 years of doing his podcast, I was the first man to ever talk about that on his show. And I
think about it a lot because it is, infertility is something that immediately gets placed on the woman.
When you're struggling to conceive, the assumption that everyone has is that there's something wrong
with the woman. And that is just not the case scientifically.
Like nearly 50% of the cases it's the man.
Exactly. And stress is a contributor. Your body will not want to conceive if they're
really high stress levels. There's a variety of internal factors that contribute to fertility.
Drinking seven nights a week.
Drinking seven nights a week does not help.
Not sleeping a whole lot because you're stressed or because you're anxious doesn't help.
So when I think about my own life and the actions I was taking,
I think it's a totally fair assumption to say that I was a major part of it.
It's me.
If not the only problem.
I'm the problem, right?
And obviously, also the backend of that,
of like making this change,
me feeling this enormous weight lifted,
reprioritizing my, all of these things that shifted.
So it's high as fuck.
Yeah, all of a sudden I'm like, man, we could have pen kids.
Like really quick, just start going out.
Everybody's pregnant.
Spread the seed.
Everyone around me all of a sudden got pregnant.
No, but it is, I just think there's a lot of people
out there and probably some people listening
who are struggling with this right now.
And I held it in silence, we did,
and it placed an enormous burden on our relationship
as a result because you're just suffering
with something alone.
And if you two aren't talking about it a lot,
which tends to happen, it becomes this weight
that you're just carrying.
Did you go to see urology, fertility?
We had, my wife had, I had not gone and seen anyone.
I had resisted it.
And this is, you know, me being in a bad place in my life.
And the way that I was approaching everything in life, frankly, was, no,
we're young, this is stupid, we have plenty of time.
At the time frankly, I was so narrowly focused on making money as the means to me feeling successful and feeling good
that I was like, I don't want kids. That seems like a distraction.
It seems like it's not going to help me get to this end that I'm trying to chase of making all this money
and being this success story in my life.
And now I think about it and like, it's the only thing I care about.
I like everything that I do is in service of being an incredible father and wanting
to teach my son these lessons that I think are so important in life.
Can I ask a difficult question?
Given the challenges that you had conceiving once, what are your feelings about trying to conceive
again?
We will definitely try.
I mean, frankly, like are now going to start trying for more.
I think that, you know what I mean?
Just that sort of maybe PTSD thing, like, fuck, we made it.
Do I really want to get my hopes up again?
And then maybe I wondered whether that was
the sort of thing that lingers.
Yeah.
You know, I would say almost in the opposite direction
that my wife and I feel such extraordinary gratitude
for the fact that we were able to have our son
and knock on wood that he is healthy and happy.
And to me, I'm like, if we have any more kids, I'm like, it's a cherry on top of this incredible blessing that we have.
If it were up to me, we'd go have five.
I mean, I love kids.
And I'm like, this is the best thing in the world.
It's hard to imagine.
Absolutely converted.
Yeah.
I mean, it's hard to imagine after you have one that your heart can expand enough
to love another thing as much as you love your kid.
I cannot, I had been selfish my entire life.
And I think that we are all, even when you get married, you are fundamentally until you
have a child, you are a selfish being.
You might love your spouse, but you don't love them more than yourself. You would not, in most cases, like truly, you know, shoot yourself in the head.
Press the button and kill yourself to save your spouse in a lot of cases.
I really think like that would be more of a question that people would ask.
With your kid, if you had a button that you could press and save their life
and immediately exterminate yourself,
you would press it without thinking about it.
Do you think that it also changes whether you would do the same for your partner now
that the kid's there too?
100%.
That's a great question.
This sort of blast radius that's fed back up from the child.
That is a great question.
I've never thought about it.
And yes, 100%.
I like, I think about it now, if I could press that button and save my wife and my
son, uh, I would press that in a heartbeat.
Uh, because I see the two of them and I know, and that's, I think as a father and
as a husband, the single best feeling in the world is knowing that my son would be
great if I died, like knowing that if I am flying home tonight
and my plane crashes and I die,
my son is going to have an amazing life
because he has the most incredible mom
that loves him so much.
And he's surrounded by love and support.
And that I think is like the highest calling as a man
to feel that you can leave this legacy
that exists beyond you,
where your child is going to be okay.
I think as well, you're right,
the selfish thing is something I've thought about a lot,
especially as I reflected on last year.
And every time that I see kids,
more and more of my friends are getting pregnant
at the moment in one form or another.
And-
In one form or another?
What are the other forms?
Well, like, as in-
I'm just giving you shit, there are varying stages of pregnancy
and also varying, varying stages of, uh, how do I say announcing it, which is why
I'm not saying, uh, there's a number of people that have been on the show a good
bit.
You can only be stealth pregnant for so long.
Fuck dude.
I mean, it's, it's starting to show on a couple of the girlfriends and wives. So, um, a lot of the pursuits that I think me and a good chunk of my friends have done
for, you know, the first 15 years to two decades out of university, full-time
education have been basically just surrogate family building.
I'm going to start this project.
I'm going to create this brand.
I'm going to pursue this passion of some kind.
I'm going to get good at this thing.
And you're just pouring energy and care and focus and obsession and emotion into
this thing, which kind of feels a little bit like a baby.
People even refer to it.
I'm sure you, at some point in your past, you've referred to your newsletter
as like my baby, my writing is my baby.
But it's not.
And one of the best things that I can think of is if you do end some
worlds in your twenties and put yourself in a position where you go,
Hey, I, I financially
I'm stable and I've acquired some skills and I've got some scars, but I, I feel good about
them.
And I actually think that I'm now ready to sort of pay this forward.
That makes the selfishness in your twenties feel way less selfish.
Cause you go,
maybe it wasn't about me just doing things for me. Maybe those were the important lessons that I needed so that when the next generation comes along
and it's me that's coaching them, I can tell them exactly all of the different pitfalls that happened.
And I know how to deal with this emotional ups and downs and swings and turbulences that they've gone through.
And I've got the life experience and we've got the financial stability.
And we've got, you know, I've closed all of the different loops, all of those
questions about, Oh, I wonder what it would have been like to have traveled to Bali.
And now we've got three kids and I can't go to Bali anymore.
And you go, you went to Bali twice.
Like that's all of these things have been closed off.
So yeah, I, um, I love the idea of.
All of these things have been closed off.
So yeah, I, um, I love the idea of, and it'll be fascinating to see just how much having kids totally reframed the way that I look at everything that happened
before, I think, uh, Russ Roberts says there's, there's two types of people in
the world, there's pre-kids and post-kids.
And he said the two will never be able to talk to each other fully about what life's like.
Yeah, I had that feeling when my son was born,
the first time I held him, and again,
this comes from someone who was not a kid guy.
It wasn't like I spent my whole life
being like, I want kids.
Doting.
And when my son was born, I held him for the first time
and he looked up at me.
And I remember just having this sensation
that I had spent the first 30 years of my life trying to understand the meaning and purpose of all of this.
And then it was staring right back at me.
I had this experience actually shortly after he was born where I took him out for a walk.
You know, kids like sleeping obviously is a shit show.
And he wouldn't sleep other than basically when I walked him around in his stroller.
And so I was walking him early one Saturday morning
and I was standing on the sidewalk
and this old man walked up to me
and he came over and he said,
I remember standing here with my newborn daughter.
She's 45 years old now.
It goes by fast, cherish it.
And I took him back home and I brought him into bed.
My wife was still asleep and the sun was kind of coming through the blinds and he had this
like little perfect smile on his face.
And I had this sensation that for the first time in my life I had arrived, but there was
nothing more that I wanted.
Like my whole life had been spent chasing some more.
There was some thing like I needed more money or more promotions or more status
or more whatever the thing was.
And for the first time in my life, I was just content.
Like I truly felt like I had enough.
And it was this idea that we can never let the quest for more distract
from the beauty of enough.
Finding those moments where you truly feel like you have enough.
That is what a wealthy life looks like.
Yeah.
You said, uh, expectations are your biggest liability and that kind of
feels like the same thing.
Yeah.
If your expectations rise faster than your assets, than the things you have,
you will never feel wealthy.
You will constantly be on this chase for whatever more you're looking for.
There's that famous story of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.
Have you heard that story?
So Kurt Vonnegut, famous American author, Joseph Heller, another famous American author,
author of Catch-22, the satirical work.
And the two of them, Vonnegut and Heller, were at the house of this billionaire in
the Hamptons. And Vonnegut asks Heller, how does it feel that just yesterday the owner of this
house made more money than your book, Catch-22, made in the entirety of its lifetime? And Heller
replies, I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, yeah, what's that? And Heller replies, I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, yeah, what's that?
And Heller says, the knowledge that I've got enough.
And it's that exact lesson that that is true wealth,
the knowledge that you have enough,
that you don't need to chase more
and that if you do chase more,
it needs to be grounded in something more meaningful
than just chasing money.
If you are chasing ambition because you're grounded in your purpose,
because you want to go and create something meaningful for the world,
you want to go create a more meaningful life for your family because you
feel like you can spread ideas that will positively impact people,
that's a great reason to go and chase something bigger.
But chasing more money is just a road to nowhere.
Public service announcement.
20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked later your kids.
So true. That was this viral Reddit post that,
I think it is probably the most viral thing I've ever shared.
It is entirely true in my experience.
And the challenge with all of this is a simple fact,
which is for 10 years,
you are your child's favorite person in the entire world.
And after that 10 year window,
they have other favorite people. They have
best friends, they have boyfriends, they have girlfriends, they have partners of
their own, they have children of their own, sports team coaches. You will never
occupy that same place in their world. But for that 10-year window, you are
literally everything to them. And yet, we live in a culture where that 10 years
also coincides with the time when you are supposed
to chase every more that is out there,
chase all of your professional ambitions.
So navigating that tension,
figuring out how to balance your pursuit
of your fullest potential with the desire to be present
with your kids during that magic window that you have,
that is the fundamental tension of being a parent
in the modern era.
It's finding your unique balance of those two.
Is that an argument to frontload the life
and wealth acquisition and to really try and send it
as much as you can in your twenties,
so that some of that price, that overhead has been paid a little bit before
the kids come along?
I think that it is a couple of things.
I think one, I'm sort of of two minds on this.
One, I think that being present during that window of time with your kids is the most
important thing.
But two, I think it is extraordinarily important for your children to see you work hard on
things you care about.
That's interesting.
I think that is the most important lesson I learned from my father,
was that growing up, I saw him work so hard on things that lit him up intellectually.
And the important point there is that you have to be included in the why,
meaning I always knew why my dad was working hard on things.
He always took the time to explain to me what he was working on, why he cared about
it, why he felt it was important, why I was part of that mission with him.
And that always meant that I knew when he was traveling, when he was gone, when he
was working, when he was doing things, I knew why.
And I wasn't that he'd abandoned you.
It wasn't that he didn't care.
Exactly. And that's the important point is if you. It wasn't that he didn't care. Exactly.
And that's the important point is if you don't fill the why with the correct reason, your
kids will fill it with the worst reason.
Your kids will fill it with the abandoned.
They'll fill it with the dad doesn't want to be around.
Dad's never around.
But you can fill that with the correct reason.
But you have to actually think about it.
You have to be aware enough to say those things to your kid.
Even when my son's two and a half, is he really understanding it?
Maybe not, but he's understanding it enough that when I'm going somewhere, he's saying
dad at work.
He's like looking at me, he's helping me with things.
He's helping me pack.
He goes and sits at my desk.
He like tries to type things.
He understands when I'm writing stuff.
So they absorb a lot more than you think but it requires
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It's cool to draw that line from why I'm doing this work to the
outcome that I'm going to get.
I played a lot of sport when I was a kid and, uh, I never was taught as a,
when we were training, this sounds so dumb, but I was never taught that the
reason that you went to practice wasn't to enjoy the team building and to do
drills for no reason.
It was that these were the individual components that when you stepped out onto
the field of play would make you a better player.
And I just hadn't drawn that lineage between preparation and
performance.
Like obviously it's there and I think I'd had it, it was there sort of vaguely,
but to really, really understand the dopamine that comes, the reward that
comes from, okay, this is why you're going to break this down into its
component parts.
You're not just doing it so that you can do it right now.
You're doing it so that when the game time comes, you're actually going to be
better.
doing it so that you can do it right now. You're doing it so that when the game time comes, you're actually going to be better.
And I think humans are driven by little more than they're driven by dopamine.
And if you can say, Hey, this is the playbook for how it works.
This is the playbook for how reward works.
I'm doing this thing because I care about it and it's hard, but it makes me feel good.
And I think that it makes the world a better place.
This is how it works.
And you just drill that blueprint for a decade and a half.
Like if your kid is built even remotely like you,
they're going to be very, very well set.
And they see it, right?
Like you can teach that.
This is something I've changed my mind on for sure
in my own life with my son,
which is you can't really teach your kids anything.
You just have to embody the things and they learn from seeing you do it.
And don't tell them, show them.
And it's true for all things in life, right?
Like it goes back to the Tim Cook and all those stories of what we were talking about.
Like you're not talking about the morning routine, you're just showing the output.
Show me the output.
And I think about my own experience with my dad,
like some of the most formative learning moments I had with him of what it meant to work hard,
what it meant to have discipline,
we're just observing him do that.
I got to go when I was a kid on this trip with him
as like his plus one.
My dad's a professor at Harvard
and he was giving a talk at this conference in Asia
and my mom couldn't go, so I got to be the plus one.
And it was my first time ever flying business class
because I was his plus one for this thing.
So I have like movies and food and all this stuff.
It's like 15 hour flight.
And my dad sat there and worked
for the entire 15 hour flight.
And when we landed, I turned to him and I was like,
dad, you didn't watch a single movie on that whole flight.
And he kind of just laughed and you know,
we moved on from it.
But I remember that moment so clearly that for 15 hours, he worked.
And that was what was required for him to be the type of person that would get invited to give a talk at a conference,
for him to be able to bring his son to something like that.
That was the work that he had to put in.
And so now when I think about my own experience and things that I want to work hard on,
that I want to put my head down, like I'm in a season of unbalance in my life, right?
Like you have these periods where you have to be willing to embrace the idea that you
are in a season of unbalance.
You are in a season where shit is just crazy and chaotic and you have to lean into it because
worrying about, oh, I don't have perfect balance in my day is loses sight of the bigger picture,
which is this season of unbalance is required for me to have the season of balance later.
Did I think about this all the time from
it how much you zoom into the little duration?
Nobody looks at a single minute and says,
I didn't really balance that minute enough.
Was I really fully embracing my fun side during that minute?
But across a day we do. We say, today I didn't really do enough X
or Y tip, but that's not how your life is lived.
Yes.
If you're not careful, can you get to the end of a month and look back on that
month and realize that there was a big missing gap, but really you should be
doing it across an entire 12 month period and looking back and saying, well, this year I, uh, I focused a little bit too much on this
thing, but I'm glad that that was the case.
We periodize weightlifters, periodize they're lifting.
They're not trying to max out all the time.
They pull back, they do deloads, they go up, they peak for competition.
Then they lift, then they come back down again.
Then they go back up.
Like that's the way that life's supposed to be lived.
And, uh, it's odd that across a single day, we can get agitated at ourselves
for not having enough time for dot, dot, dot.
You go, well, you don't need to.
Like, what if all of Wednesday is spent on that thing that you think last week
you didn't spend enough time on, you go, would that be enough with like one day
out of 14 be enough? You go, absolutely.
You go, okay, well, you're going to have periods of imbalance, but you're going
to have large cycles of balance.
I think of my years in quarters.
I like to view my life as like a public company.
It's like, I'm going to live Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.
It's like, I'm going to live Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. And if I am in a crazy quarter of focus and head down on something that matters,
that's okay. I don't need to stress about that.
As long as I have the knowledge that I'm going to be able to pull back
and have a quarter where things are a little bit more balanced,
where I'm able to reset.
And that is an important point because that whole idea of balance has been hijacked, right?
Like balance has been hijacked by the day optimizers of saying like, you have to have the perfect balance of rest, family, workout, work, deep work, all of these things, right?
Every single day.
And when you don't have that, you start getting stressed if that's what you think balance looks like.
You start freaking out when you don't have that or when you're traveling a lot
or when your head's down on things.
And viewing balance on a seasonal basis,
on a quarterly basis is a much healthier way to look at it.
Cause then you give yourself the freedom
to actually focus on something.
We all know that like the most incredible outputs
in history have all been created
by these extraordinary bouts of focused attention.
Sir Isaac Newton had the year where he was locked down because of the plague in Europe.
He had to leave school at Cambridge and go home and live in his little town for a full year.
He was just completely locked down.
And during that year, he formulated all of the laws of gravitation.
He invented calculus.
He like did a lifetime's worth of work because he had a focused year of attention
on a single set of problems that he was trying to solve. And that's great, like that is how
extraordinary outcomes are created. So we have to give ourselves the freedom to do that.
And after that you have people called him lucky. Exactly. What does it mean to expand your luck surface area? So luck surface area is the idea that at any point in time in your life,
you have a physical literal surface area on which lucky events can strike.
The best sort of visual for this that I have is from the movie Interstellar.
Favorite movie.
Yeah, it's one of my favorite movies.
You know, and they go to that planet that is right on the edge of the black hole and
it has the perfect conditions for life.
They're like, oh, this planet should have life and they're trying to figure out why
it didn't.
And what they talk about is the fact that it sits right next to the black hole.
So all of the lucky events that could have struck the planet, all of the little asteroids that might have contained life got sucked into the black hole. So all of the lucky events that could have struck the planet, all of the little asteroids that might have contained life, got sucked into the black hole. So there was something
that was making the luck surface area of that planet zero. It was minuscule. You in your own
life are kind of that same idea. You need to think about how can you expand your luck surface area to
be as big as possible so that when the lucky events come they are striking your life and you're able to capitalize on them
The perfect example is what I said earlier. It's very hard to get lucky sitting on the couch watching TV at home
How can you possibly get lucky versus going out meeting people having conversations?
Working on things contributing value to other people now all of a sudden
I'm expanding my luck surface area
because there's all of this motion that's been created.
There's all this action that's created.
The lucky events actually have an opportunity to strike.
I no longer have a black hole of Netflix
sitting next to my entire life.
Yeah, it's really interesting what you said before as well
about God winking at you.
I love that line.
And it does seem that luck very rarely comes into your life when you're being timid, when
you're only listening to your head.
You could probably write out a bunch of times when you felt the most lucky and what were
the sort of behaviors, what was the kind of energy that you were bringing to the world and it would probably be
leaning forward, brave, courageous, hopeful, aligned, like humble as well.
It's probably very rarely when you're full of ego and bouncing around.
Um, isn't there that quote, fortune favors the bold?
Sort of that idea, right?
Of like when you are bold,
when you were leaning into things.
I think it's C.S. Lewis that talks about the fact that
courage is like the highest form of every virtue.
It is like when the virtue is tested,
that is what courage truly is.
That's interesting.
Because it's very easy to
express a virtue when
there's nothing on the line. Yeah, when times are good, it's very easy to express a virtue when there's nothing on the line.
Going well.
Yeah, when times are good, it's very easy to be loyal when nothing's happening.
Is that like win a momentum, do you think?
It's very similar.
Yeah, it's very easy in your whole life to continue to do the thing when it's working
and when the rewards are certain.
thing when it's working and when the rewards are certain.
I often think that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who can
remain disciplined, show up and do the work, even when the rewards are uncertain.
The person who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the person who will ultimately win.
That's why we love underdog stories, right?
We love the underdog story because there is nobody that is never going
to be at that bottom position.
If you're in the fortunate situation of things being better for you, then good.
There, you catch the trajectory halfway up the staircase.
But if you're at the very, very bottom, you think, wow, that was when things were
hardest, that one was when gravity was at its strongest, that was when your
launch velocity was at zero and you needed to rip this
fucker off the launch pad one inch at a time.
Uh, that's inspiring.
That's something that I hope for in me, or that I hope that more people are
able to achieve in themselves, or if I fall from grace and I hit rock bottom
again, that means that that's the place that I can sort of bounce back from.
Uh, but yeah, talk more about wind momentum.
I like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's a funny thing too.
Like have you ever, um, uh, do you know anything about, uh, like aviation planes?
Um, so like a plane, when it starts stalling out, it starts falling out of the sky, right?
Like you have moments in your life where you've hit stall speed and you start just
stalling and you're falling out of the sky and there's this insane just like collapse towards the
earth.
And the funny thing about a plane stalling is that your bias when your plane is stalling
is to pull back.
You're like, oh, I'm going to pull back because I'm falling out of the sky.
I got to pull back.
When actually how you save a plane from a stall is that you lean into it.
You actually have to go nose down to generate the speed
through the air to get back to using the wings for lift.
And so it's this funny paradox of life that in the moments
when you are collapsing, when things aren't going well,
that's actually when you need to lean into things.
What does that mean?
When you need to lean into the risky thing,
when you need to do the challenging thing,
to have the courage in those moments
when it's most challenging to do it.
It's like the startup that's collapsing that cuts everyone from their team in order to make their
runway four weeks longer when in reality they probably should have invested more heavily to
try to get the sufficient speed to get out of it. You're just prolonging the inevitable if you
pull back. I think about that a lot in life.
At those moments, we need to have the courage to lean into the thing and see our way to
the other side.
The worst prison in the world is having the talented intelligence to achieve something
great but lacking the courage to go out and do it.
Yeah. Yeah, this goes back to the courage point that so many of us get trapped in this self-created
prison of not being willing to step out of our zone of comfort in our world.
We just sit in the confines of what feels natural and what feels real
and what feels normal, and we hide behind our talent or intelligence.
We say like, well, yeah, but I'm, you know, I'm really talented.
I'm really intelligent.
I could go do this and that.
And, but if you're not doing the thing, it doesn't matter.
If you don't actually take the step to confront the fear and go and do it.
step to confront the fear and go and do it.
Abraham Maslow has this quote that,
our greatest fear is in our highest possibility.
And I think that that's such an interesting idea that there are
actually two types of fear.
There's the fear of failure, which is the fear that we all know. That's the fear that we are going to go after something and it's not going to
work out, that everyone's going to see us fail, that we fell off. But then there's the fear of success. There's the fear that we go and
do the thing and it works out greater than we ever expected. And we're never able to live up to that
highest possibility again, that we're going to achieve the thing and never be able to experience
that high high again in our lives. Sometimes it is our light that we most fear.
I think about that all the time.
Do you hold yourself back because you were afraid of what will happen
if you actually succeed beyond your wildest expectations?
Well, one of the ruthless things about ever having a very successful day is that
the new baseline for your next
most successful day just got raised by a massive amount.
It's like, you know, one of the worst days of your life in an odd regard
would maybe be the day that you won the lottery.
So you think, well, how are you going to have a better day than that?
And what you want is to basically plan your entire existence to just slowly
step change up and then the day that you die, the final payment check for the fucking home
bounces, right?
Like that's where you want to get to.
But what people have are these, I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this.
It's like, you've been to the top of the hedonic mountain.
What would you give me some of the insights?
And he said, you know, like quickly accumulating a lot of pleasure is a
really, really bad idea.
Cause where'd you go from that?
It's called the Nova effect.
It's a psychological phenomenon that you, uh, experience a massive decline in
your happiness after a great event.
Uh, as a result of exactly that it's like winning the lottery or you get the,
you go on the extraordinary vacation and then your normal life sucks and you're so pissed because you go back to normal.
Well, the beat the blues.
Yeah.
In the UK.
Yeah, no, exactly.
That's also the come down.
Yeah.
It, um, it reminds me of, um, uh, that idea of the climb, like, you know, it's,
it's the cliche that everyone says is like, you have to find joy in the process.
Right. Everyone says that over and over you have to find joy in the process. Or everyone says that over and over.
You find the joy in the climb.
But the climb is also very important
for a critical structural reason,
which is it acclimatizes you to having the thing.
If you were to get dropped
at the top of Mount Everest right now,
you would pass out and die
because you wouldn't have been acclimatized
to the
altitude from the climb.
So the climb is actually important because it's what prepares you for being able to be
at the summit.
So true.
I sort of reflected on this the first time that I moved out to America and then a lot
of, you know, big scary opportunities that were super exciting came along.
And I'd thought for a long time that I wanted those things to happen, these invites or to, you know, do these shows or speak to these guests or do whatever.
And it was only after it happened that I realized that I wasn't ready for the
opportunities that I desperately wanted.
And you basically you're not ready until they come.
And that sounds like God winking at you again, but you're simply not.
And when the opportunity finally arises and you do take advantage of it, and it
does go well, think, huh, I'm glad I waited.
But there's also an insight here, which is as a, trying to come up with a name
for it, unteachable lessons.
So a particular unique category of insight that nobody will
believe unless they learn it for themselves. There's certain ones that you can probably
teach people about like reheating chicken and you know, there's bits and pieces. You
go, I don't need to go through the salmonella, which I've had, in order to learn that that's
something. But if you're going to tell somebody that money's not going to make you happy, or that success won't fill that internal void, or that perhaps having kids is
going to make everything else in your life just fade into obscurity.
These are lessons we got.
Yeah.
But you know, like, not for me, I'm going to, the way I'll do it, the way I'll use
my wealth, the type of fame that I would have, the particular pathologies that I'm going to, the way I'll do it, the way I'll use my wealth, the type of fame that I would have, the particular pathologies that I'm carrying with me that would be healed
by the recognition from the people around me, the amount of passion that I have for
my work.
So it's nice for you, you know, because you had your thing, you had your little like fucking
million person newsletter and you had like your little writing and stuff, but you don't
understand the strength of my pattern.
Then the situation comes along and it's only after someone has been able to go through it
that they go, yeah, unteachable lesson. Yeah, the pushback I have against that is
we constantly learn things from other people's experience that sort of become obvious, right?
Like you don't need to teach,
you don't need to tell me that putting my finger
into an electrical socket is going to hurt for me to not do.
Like you tell me that once and I don't need to do that
or experience that to know that that is probably true.
And I'm good, like you taught me it.
The one with money is like,
I'm not saying that money won't make you happy.
I think money will make you happy, but only up to a point.
And what I want you to do is take the thing that you know, in the back of your
mind, which is that these other things are also a very important piece.
I mean, like the book is called the five types of wealth.
One of those is money.
Financial wealth is one of the five types of wealth.
And it is a whole section in the book for a reason, because it is a key part of living a wealthy life.
But the other things cannot get lost on that journey.
Money isn't nothing, it just can't be the only thing.
It is a tool for building these other types of wealth, and you should use it that way.
It just can't be the goal in and of itself beyond those early years. And so I think that like, yes,
sometimes you have to experience these like challenging pains
or see these fails along the way,
but we are humans and our incredible capacity as humans,
as a species has been that we can learn from knowledge
that is passed down from others.
That is what has allowed us to survive and thrive
as we begin to use language to write and tell stories that could help the next
generation so that we can build upon it. This is a story that we need to start
learning from. We need to understand. We need to hear those stories of wisdom and
rather than just nodding our heads and going on living the same damn way we
were before, we need to take some tiny set of actions to actually internalize
them and change.
Talk to me about operationalizing some of your favorite concepts from the book.
Lots of good conceptually stuff now.
Let's get some tactical bits.
Yeah. I think the first thing you should do is assess where you are.
So in the book, there's a wealth score quiz.
So this is the way of actually assessing where you
exist on this broader definition of wealth beyond just money. Wealth Score Quiz. So this is the way of actually assessing where you exist
on this broader definition of wealth beyond just money.
It's a way of actually on a scale of zero to 100,
giving yourself a number for your wealth across
these broader set of areas.
You can actually go to wealthscorequiz.com
and we have an online version that creates this nice visual
for you as a baseline.
That is what I did in May of 2021 to get a baseline sense of what I wanted to build off of.
So in the same way you have a net worth tool,
like you can use this to actually track
how you are performing across these other areas of life.
That's a great starting point for everyone.
The next thing is to actually go through the questions
that the book asks you to wrestle with
and wrestle with them.
Because the entire book is about asking the right questions for your life.
It's an odd thing, but it is a self-help, self-improvement book
where in the first opening pages, I say that it will not give you the answers.
And it's a little scary to say that at the start of a book,
but it's the truth because you already have the answers.
You just haven't asked the right questions
yet about your life.
You haven't revealed those answers from you.
And so going through and actually asking the big questions
that each section forces you to ask and contend with,
talking about them with the people that you care about
and love that are around you,
it will give you a clear sense of what that compass, like
what that true north is in your life that you are trying to build towards.
Once you have that in mind, it just becomes taking actions on a daily
basis to build towards that and tiny actions.
The whole point is financial wealth is an obvious area
where you know you can invest daily or on a regular basis
and compound towards a positive future.
Every single other area of your life is the exact same,
but we don't think about it that way.
When it comes to your relationships,
you don't think about investing on a daily basis
in your relationships,
but your relationships are arguably
the best investment you can make.
Your relationships pay greater dividends and returns
than any financial investment.
Think about the people that you have invested
in building relationships with,
that is where your greatest business opportunities
are going to come from.
Those relationships are what is going to lead
to the most fulfilling purpose, the meaning,
the financial opportunities,
that is where all of that's gonna come from.
So investing in relationships,
the same way you think about investing in the stock market
or crypto or whatever it is you're into,
is a great way to think about it.
But you need to have that mindset shift
that these areas can be invested in on a daily basis.
What's a think day?
This is probably my favorite practice from the whole book.
So in the book, each section for each type of wealth has a guide.
And in that guide, there are sort of the science-backed proven strategies
for building that type of wealth.
Think day is in the mental wealth section of the book.
And the whole idea stems from Bill Gates, who in the 1980s started this practice of a think week,
where he would go off the grid for an entire week
with a whole bunch of reading
and would completely shut off,
not be communicating with anyone.
He would just read and think and learn.
And think about the biggest picture questions
facing Microsoft at the time.
And Bill Gates now credits those think weeks
as being the most transformative
thing for Microsoft's development over the years into the gargantuan company it is. Not all of us,
very few of us in fact, can take a week of time to go and just think about things. I certainly can't.
But can you carve out a day once a month or once a quarter to take a few hours to just zoom out and
think about the bigger picture questions
and things in your life.
The idea being create the space to zoom out
and think about those questions.
Think about what are the most important things
in my life right now?
Are my actions on a daily basis aligned with those things?
What would the audience be screaming at me to do
if I were the main character in this movie right now?
I think that's my favorite question in the whole book is
if you were the main character in a movie of your life,
what would the audience be screaming at you to do right now?
We've all had that experience.
You go to a movie, you watch a TV show
and the main character is doing something
and you just wanna jump through the screen
and be like, go chase the girl to the airport,
or like, don't go down into that basement,
whatever the thing is.
That's you right now in a movie of your life,
and the audience would be screaming at you
to do something right now or to change some action,
and you're ignoring it.
What is that thing?
Create the space in your life to actually think
about what that thing is, and then change accordingly. Fuck yeah. Dude, let's bring this one into land. Where should people go? They want to
keep up to date with everything you're doing. Check out the work. Yeah. The book is out
now everywhere books are sold. Thefivetypesofwealth.com. You can find more info, get it on Amazon,
wherever it is. And I'm at Sawhill Bloom on every major platform. Having a weird name,
that's one of the benefits. I'm right, dude. I appreciate you. Appreciate you.
Thank you very much for tuning in. Mmm, tasty Sawhill episode.
Want a little bit more? How about tasty Alex Hormozi?
Over here.
Go on. Press it.