The Nick Bare Podcast - 106: The Five Types of Wealth: A Conversation with Sahil Bloom

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

In this episode, I sit down with Sahil Bloom to get into the key concepts from his new book about the five types of wealth—time, social, mental, physical, and financial. Sahil shares personal stories, valuable insights, and actionable advice on how to achieve a balanced and fulfilling life. We also explore the importance of setting anti-goals, creating space for deep thinking, and the profound impact of focusing on direction over speed in your life's journey. CHAPTERS00:51 Podcast Introduction and Guest Welcome00:59 Weather and Life in Texas03:18 Launching a New Book03:41 The Halftime Moment05:41 Chasing Societal Success08:06 The Wake-Up Call09:19 The Move and Life Changes10:44 The Quest for Identity15:04 The Importance of Skill Acquisition19:44 The Role of Money and Happiness22:54 Struggles with Conceiving28:57 Gradual Changes and Sudden Realizations37:33 Balancing Presence and Ambition40:23 Understanding the Importance of Explaining Your Absence to Kids41:38 A Life-Changing Moment: The Birth of Sahil's Son44:37 The Power of Slowing Down and Creating Space53:05 The Benefits of Alone Time and Deep Work01:03:37 Investing in Relationships for Social Wealth01:11:17 The Concept of Anti-Goals and Life Razor01:21:07 Balancing the Five Types of Wealth01:22:31 Conclusion and Final Thoughts ORDER SAHIL'S BOOK:The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Lifehttps://www.amazon.com/Types-Wealth-Transformative-Guide-Design/dp/059372318X FOLLOW SAHIL:IG: https://www.instagram.com/sahilbloom/?hl=en Become a BPN member FOR FREE - Unlock 20% off FOR LIFEhttps://www.bareperformancenutrition.com/pages/bpn-membership?srsltid=AfmBOorlpjVeag2kkt3eZ5UpWcFA5Bb2v5V_93lmO47Vn_Y8DRdLwDLL FOLLOW NICK BARE:IG: instagram.com/nickbarefitness/YT: youtube.com/@nickbarefitness

It's better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one. And that's a message that we so often need to hear. I want to get it tattooed on my body because most of the biggest mistakes you make in life end up being because you're climbing up the wrong mountain. You're climbing up someone else's mountain usually. You haven't taken the time to slow down and think about what is the mountain I actually should be climbing right now. What is my true north in life that I'm headed towards?

And the true north, again, it doesn't have to be like your purpose or the perfect passion. But you need to think about what you truly care about. You needed a reset moment to remember the things that you truly care about, the things that actually are going to light you up, the things that you're going to remember 50 years from now. All right. Today on the podcast, we have Sawhill Bloom. Brother, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. How is Texas treating you so far? Texas is cold this week. You know, like I live on the East Coast, so I'm kind of used to it. But I see people freaking out. It's like 35 degrees out and everyone here is wearing like down jackets.

Well, wait, once you acclimate to a certain like temperature, I'm from up north. I'm from Pennsylvania originally. I didn't know that. Grew up in Pennsylvania. So cold weather is nothing new to me, but being in Texas for a few years, like I'm so soft with the cold now. It's horrible. Dude, I lived in the Bay Area for 12 years because I went to, I played baseball at Stanford and then I was out there. I took a job out there. And I got so soft. by the weather. Like just, yeah, it's like 70 and sunny every day in the Bay Area. It's crazy. And you forget, it's actually a lesson for life. Like, you don't appreciate a good weather

day because it's just nice every single day. Right. Like on the East Coast now, when it's 70 and sunny, you're like, you take advantage of it. You go to the park with your family. It's like, it's the best day ever. So sometimes like things being impermanent is actually a really nice way that you appreciate them more. Do you find that the weather dictates your mood and energy? Yeah, I probably have some degree of like seasonal depression when it comes to like sunlight. I think sunlight definitely impacts my, my energy level or just like my general demeanor and happiness. But that doesn't impact my ability to actually go out and do things, but I know a lot of people who it does. It used to affect me a whole lot more.

And I don't know why. I think I would have some sort of level of seasonal depression. But now for some reason, and I don't know why. The weather just doesn't shift my mindset, my mood, but it used to really heavily influence it. It bothers me now with a young kid because it's so much more fun being able to be outside with him all day.

And my son is a typical two-and-a-half-year-old boy. So he just wants to go nuts and run around and do things. And it's much harder in the Northeast to do that when there's a whole bunch of snow and ice on the ground. Can't take him and run around a playground because he'll fall and break his face. And that's a little annoying. Yeah.

When was your son born? May of 2022. Okay. My daughter is July of 22. So right around the same time frame. Yeah. So you're launching your new book. Yeah.

The five types of wealth, week of February, first week of February. I'm super excited to talk about it and the foundation of this book. The last couple of, years and specifically the last couple months, I've been going through this life transition. And I think that happens to a lot of people once they have kids and priority shift, focus shifts, as I was telling you before we started recording, I'm reading this book right now called Halftime. It's about how this shift in life happens where the first half of your life, you're focused on success.

and then if you have this halftime moment, the second part or second chapter of your life can be focused on significance as opposed to success. So I'm in this transition right now, which is super exciting. It's a huge opportunity. I pulled this quote, and I thought this quote was really meaningful.

The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself, but when he plays the role destiny has for him. What I love to hear is your experience with this shift in life focuses, priorities, when, where, if it happen, and then your experience with maybe that first chapter focused on purely success and then now significance. Yeah. There's a lot of similarities in that halftime concept to David Brooks' second mountain concept. if you've ever read that book, it's another amazing book that you'd love, that whole idea of like your first mountain is the thing that you climb early in your life and then you have a second mountain. And a lot of people struggle with that because so much of that is like finding a new identity and a new version of you for that second half of your life. So you'd really like that as well. And I'm excited to talk about the concepts of the book with you in particular because there aren't many people out there in the world that I have grown to become friends with and also admired from afar for a long time. who I feel embody the principles of what I'm talking about as well as you do in the way that you live your life and in the way that you authentically engage with the world around you. So really excited

to have a chance to chat about it. My entire journey with this concept and this idea started in May of 2021. For the first seven years of my career leading up to that point, I had chased the societal definition of success, which, is to make a bunch of money. I had taken a job working in finance. I graduated from Stanford where I played baseball. I wanted to take the job that just made me sound successful from the outside looking in. And honestly, like partially from my parents, partially just trying to fill the void that I felt in my own life. Like, I was pretty insecure. And one of the ways that you fix that internal problem that you feel is that you chase like the external paths on the back, right? And you get a bunch of

Pat's on the back for taking the fancy-sounding job. That's going to pay you six figures straight out of school. And so I did that. And there was a lot of good that came out of early in life, first season, if you will, of your career, building a financial foundation. I made money. I learned a whole lot. I had a lot of experiences that were incredible. But what happened to me on that journey was that as I continued to make money and as I'm more and more narrowly focused on money being the key to me living this like stress-free, happy, fulfilled good life, a lot of other areas in my life started to suffer. I was so narrowly focused on finding my happiness on the other side of whatever bonus, promotion, title, you know, fancy thing that I could get. I thought that one day I was

going to wake up and feel like I had arrived. And every time I would get that thing and inevitably be like, is this it? You know, what's the next thing? And along that journey, My relationships had really started to suffer. I wasn't seeing my parents ever. We lived 3,000 miles away from them. They were in the Boston area. We were in California. My relationship with my sister had ground to a halt.

My relationship with my wife, unfortunately, was strained by a struggle to conceive at the time that we were battling with. I was drinking seven nights a week. Physical health, mental health had started to take a hit from that. And so on the outside looking in, I was very much winning the game. Like you would have seen me and been like, oh, that guy's killing it. But internally, these things were falling apart. And that all came to a head for me in May of 2021 when I went out for a drink with an old friend. And we sat down and he asked me how I was doing.

And I said that it had started to get hard being so far away from my family, my parents, who were on the East Coast, that they were getting older. It had finally become clear to me that they were mortal. they had these chinks in their armor, that the people that I was closest to weren't going to be around forever. And he said, how old are they? And I said, 65. And he said, how often do you see them? And I replied about once a year. And he looked me square in the face and said, okay, 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. How old were you at this point? I was 30. Okay. The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the world is so finite, so countable that you can put it onto a few hands, shook me to my core.

And I realized in that moment that we had to make a change. Otherwise, we were going to end up in a place where we didn't want to be. And I told my wife the next morning that I thought we needed to make a move. And within 45 days, I had left my job. we had sold our house in California and moved 3,000 miles to live closer to our families. And so that was like the spark, the rip the band-aid off moment of this enormous set of changes that, frankly, on the surface, made no sense. But to your quote, it was like that moment of going and actually living your life rather than the one that had been handed to you. Right.

So your background, talking about that a little bit, I love to explore your 20s that led to where you got to your 30s. because I know there's probably people listening to this right now that say or are thinking, dude, shut up. Like you got the money. Like what else? What else could you be upset about? Because it's really hard to relate some times when if there's someone who is just struggling to financially set themselves up for success, that is like their main concern is just surviving. but then when you pass this point of survival to thriving, other parts of your life become empty. So I'd love to kind of explore that and how you approach that.

But going back, play baseball at Stanford. Do you have any experiences of unhappiness then, or was it all roses? No, plenty of painful experiences then. I mean, a lot of life is a quest for identity. We think we want money, fame, wealth, success. What we're really all looking for is identity. We want to know how we fit into the world around us and that there's a clear way that we fit in. And my entire childhood, I had identified as a baseball player.

That was like what I knew, what I loved, I thought I was going to go play professionally, create this whole world around it. And I got to Stanford and I'd gotten a scholarship and had this amazing thing. I was in this small school in Massachusetts. It was like a big deal. and I got there and immediately got humbled because I realized that I really wasn't shit, right? It was like everyone is much better than me. I was probably the worst player on the team my freshman year. And I figured out very quickly that if I was going to carve out my own identity within this team,

that it was going to have to be based around actually being tough to kill. Like just showing up every single day. My grandfather used to tell me, you'll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being a case. occasionally extraordinary. And I remember that so clearly as a message that has just sort of reverberated through my life to just keep showing up. Like, it's very hard to bet against the person who just keeps showing up. And I wasn't very talented. And it was hard because I had defined my entire life around being like the best player on the team, the smartest, all these things. And you get into an environment where you're none of those and you have to redefine who you are. Then I got hurt and

baseball was completely taken away from me. And I had to. to try to find an entirely new identity my junior senior year after that happened. So it was, it was very much this, like, you know, I think typical college quest for like figuring out who you are and how you fit into the world. What was that next identity after athlete? I mean, I thought it was going to be like, you know, rich, successful guy that makes a bunch of money working in finance. I basically went on this quest, like going around and asking the wealthiest people I could find what they did for work. And I was like, oh, I should just go do that thing.

And basically all of them said, like, they work in finance in some way. And so I figured, based on this, like, assumption that money equals, you know, happiness and, like, the things that I was looking for in life are on the other side of making money. Let me just go do that, make as much as I can doing that. And look, to your question earlier, I think it's a great pursuit in your 20s and early 30s, to build a financial foundation for the rest of your life. I actually very explicitly say in the book that your life has seasons. And what you prioritize or focus on during any one season will change.

Your 20s and early 30s are an incredible season for you to focus on building a financial foundation for the rest of your life. Purely math, like your life and your foundation that you can build is all going to be based off compounding. So money that you can put away earlier is going to be better than money. away later because it returns to the power of time and time is the exponent. So you want to put away money early. I'm definitely not saying that money is nothing. I'm just saying that it can't be the only thing. And so when you think about your own journey and when you think about your path,

and if you are in your 20s or early 30s, building and focusing on that financial wealth, which is one of the five types of wealth, it's a whole section on it in the book, is a great pursuit and a great use of time. You just can't get so blinded by it as the end-all be all of your life. It can't be the only thing that you are pursuing in life. You need to invest in these other areas if you're going to achieve the happiness and fulfillment that we're all really after. If I think in my 20s, I wouldn't have changed anything looking back. Maybe small things. It made some mistakes. There were some failures, setbacks. But overall, like my 20s, I spent working really, really hard and laying the foundation for what I can enjoy now. And if I wanted to have spent my 20s doing that,

there's no way for the wife and two young kids right now that I would have been able to go as hard as I did in my 20s as my 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on. I actually just shared this with the team yesterday. I was reading this article a few weeks ago and the article grabbed my attention because it said, stop pursuing your passions. It's like, oh, this is interesting. So I read this article and it explained how everyone is so concerned with like finding their purpose and their passion and then turning their work into their purpose and their passion or their purpose and passion into their work.

And the article argued that you should spend your time acquiring skills and building this toolkit of skills over time. and by building out this toolkit of skills, skill acquisition, and getting really good at a few certain things or many things, your purpose, your passion will become a byproduct of skill acquisition. I look at my 20s that same way,

where I was just trying to acquire as many skills as possible, and the byproduct of acquiring those skills became my purpose, my passion, and my work. I wouldn't change my 20s with any, possibility or option for that reason.

You basically have this world where people think that they can sit and plan out the perfect course for their life. They're like, oh, okay, I need to think about. I'm going to sit here and think about what my passion and purpose is and then I'm going to go take action, right? That's not how it works. How it actually works is you take action and then you find those things. Rumi, one of my favorite ancient poets has this line, as you see.

start to walk on the way, the way appears. As you start to walk on the way, the way appears, the answer is found in the action. So like what you said about your life is exactly right. You took action to go and build skills. Then you found your passion. Then you found your purpose. Then you found your calling. You can't do it in reverse. And so people make that mistake and they sit. And then what happens is you do nothing. You overthink. You say like, well, I don't really like doing that. So I'm not going to do it. Like all these young people come to me and look for, you know, life for career advice and like, oh, well, I don't like my job. It doesn't matter if you like your job in your early years. It really doesn't matter because you're gathering information, you're building

skills, you're creating a foundation. Every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something you don't like doing. It's just the truth. It's on the other side of 100 hours of focused work. It's on the other side of 100 workouts or bland meals. It's on the other side of 100 hard conversations. But the truth is that the answer is found in the action. The answers you want are hidden behind the actions you avoid. Yeah, kind of the caveat off of that, I think what happens is so many people explore or try to find their life's purpose and then plan it out. And then as soon as it goes off course or something happens where they're forced to adapt and pivot, that change breaks them. One of my favorite quotes is change breaks the brittle.

and as soon as change happens, people become paralyzed. Whoa, this was not part of the plan. Part of the plan is you learning how to adapt and pivot and change and grow. Like when you were in your mid-20s, where did you expect to be in your mid-30s? Where did you think you were going to be right now? Definitely not here having this conversation. I say this all the time. I totally agree because people ask me now, like where do you, what's your plan?

What's your five-year plan? What's your 10-year plan? The honest answer is I have absolutely no idea. And the reason is because five years ago, if you had asked me where I was going to be in five years, I could have written out a hundred scenarios and not a single one of them would have been right. Because the most interesting opportunities in life are inherently invisible to you where you stand right now. They get revealed through your action and through the things that you're doing. I was working in finance. I wasn't writing. Like I hadn't even started writing on social. I hadn't started a newsletter. I hadn't done any of the

things that have contributed to where I am today. because I didn't know they existed. They were invisible. It's also why I always say preparation beats planning. Planning is based on the expectation of order, that things are going to go perfectly, that the seas are going to be smooth. Preparation is based on the expectation of chaos. You prepare where you stand today. You harden yourself so that when the chaos comes, you're able to pivot on the fly. Yeah, like that. It's like Mike Tyson's everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. It's like one of my favorite quotes. It's so true, right? Like you come in with a plan, your life punches you in the mouth, and your entire life is going to be defined by how you

respond to getting punched in the mouth. Yep, I agree with that. Yeah. So that conversation you had in the bar about realizing how many times you were going to see your parents before they passed, up until that point was financial security and money, the priority of your life? Did that run your life? It ran my life and all of my focus, yeah, was on making money and then also signaling to the world that I was making money. Those were really the two primary focuses. And again, there's nothing wrong with making money.

The challenge happens when you have gotten to. past the point of the security, past the point of the clear linear relationship that exists between money and happiness, which it does, by the way. The science is very clear on this. In the early years of your life, and in the early days, there is a very clear linear relationship between making more money and achieving more happiness because we know it reduces a whole bunch of stress. You can get food and shelter and you can take care of your family, take care of your people around you. You can get vacations, experiences. There's a very good relationship there. The problem is that relationship does not continue in perpetuity. So what people do is they create

this pattern in their mind that when the money bell rings, they get the cheese, right? We're like mice. And that money bell, we keep trying to ring it because we think that we're going to get just as much cheese over the course of our entire life when in reality it has started to level off. And so if you continue to think that it is going to be the thing that continues to drive all of your happiness gains, you lose sight of these other areas. You don't invest in your relationships. You don't invest in your health. You don't invest in your mind in the clarity that you have. And what you find is that if you don't invest in these things, just like any other area of life, they atrophy, and they will not be around later. Yeah. At this point, how long were you married for? I had been married since

2016. So I had been married for five years when that conversation happened, but we'd been dating since we were high school sweetheart. So I met her when she was 14. I was 15 years. Wow. Yeah. And your job, were you in, were you in the private equity sector at that point? Yep. So working a lot. Working a lot.

Probably traveling a lot too. Traveling a lot. What was the relationship like with your wife? Was it, I mean, did you still have like that honeymoon phase, love and feel? Or was it like, we're just roommates passing the night? No, my wife and I have always had an amazing relationship. Part of that is we grew up together. Like there is a, it's hard to describe the level of connection you have with someone when you manage to grow together despite all of the insane changes that happened from the time you're 15 until the time you're 30.

I mean, it's crazy, right? Like I was a kid. She was a kid. And so normally you break up and you never experience that. But when it works, there's like an incredible strengthening of that bond. I mean, she knew me and knows me to this day better than anyone else in the world. And at times it feels like she knows me better than myself. There are things that I am ignoring about myself where I'm not willing to admit those things that she sees in me.

And that has been a huge part of this journey we've been on. The challenge was, you know, we were struggling to conceive at the time. And that's a topic that people suffer with in silence. And men especially don't talk about it. And in hindsight, you know, it's a thing that women carry the burden around. They put it on themselves, and she was doing that very much. And in hindsight, being able to look back on it, thinking about where I was mentally and physically in my own life, the stress that I was placing on myself, the fact that I was drinking seven nights a week, all these things about my own life. It was probably my fault that we weren't able to conceive.

And the clearest representation of that was we made this big change. We moved across the country. Within two weeks of getting back, we found out that my wife was pregnant. within two weeks of making that change. And it was one of those things. I don't know if people out there, if you're particularly religious, but it was one of those moments in life when you feel like God winked at you. Like it was a message of when your life comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And so that was just, I mean, it makes me emotional thinking about it. Like that feeling that you made the right decision, like things have fallen into alignment in your

life as they should. Yeah, we struggled to conceive for a year. And I understand the, I don't know how long you guys went through it, but it was a year of like, you know, you wait to do the pregnancy test and you're like, please, please, please. And then it's negative. So like there's this huge, just like horrible energy for the next 30 days. And that repeats every 30 days, month after month. And it's like wear and tear on a relationship. But it was early on when we were trying to conceive and we're believers, both me and my wife, and my wife heard this whisper in the air that said October as she was praying about

getting pregnant. And at this point, it was like six months away from October. And she's like, no way. There's no way. I ended up being six months later in October that she got pregnant. I just got chills. like wild and there are two moments that she has heard like a voice speak to her another this is a side note but I just got to share it it's right when we got to

Nashville she heard this whisper saying this is going to be inconvenient so we got to Nashville and we moved there and like our hot water didn't work the first day so my wife is thinking oh this is the inconvenience and then some other small things happened with the house that weren't working out well. And she said, oh, this is the inconvenience. What I think ended up being the inconvenience is that after we got to Nashville, a few months later, I moved back in the CEO role. We moved back to Texas, our entire family and a small creative team.

The inconvenience was getting to Nashville in the first place. But just hearing that whisper and that foreshadowing, it's pretty powerful. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that too. you think that like men, especially men who are considered traditionally masculine by the outside world, talking about some of these struggles that are typically not talked about is really powerful. Because I know there are going to be people that are listening to this that are going through that. And so to hear that like they're not alone in that is a powerful thing.

I also think that, and I've experienced this recently, this is like a few weeks ago, I was in my office, I was working on something. I was trying to stay focused. And my son, who's two and a half, so he's like a crazy toddler, into my office and started just like wrecking stuff. He was just throwing things on the ground. Yeah, the classic two and a half year old, right? He was just wrecking things.

And I started having this like very negative dot pattern. I was like, why is he doing this? So annoying, trying to work. Doesn't he know I'm trying to focus? All of these things. And in that moment, I snapped myself back to three years ago, four years ago, when we were in the midst of that monthly struggle. And I prayed every single.

night that we would one day have a healthy child. And then there I was in that moment complaining about the exact same thing that I had prayed for. And it was a reminder to me that sometimes the things we pray for become the things that we complain about if we let them. If we don't force ourselves to zoom out and recognize that sometimes you are literally living out your younger, your younger version of you's prayers in your life. And we have to recognize that. you have to pause and actually appreciate that and allow yourself to embrace that present moment. I mean, that level of self-awareness is so essential

for a successful second part of life. I think it just comes with experience and wisdom, but actually just slowing down and having the perspective of, okay, what do I have? What can I be grateful for? How do I appreciate this? How about show recognition? and really leaning in.

But some of the questions I was earlier asking, how long were you married when you were going through this life transition of having this conversation in this bar? How old were you? I'm curious, like, what that realization of, wow, I'm not going to see my parents. And I focused on the wrong things. Like this focus and love for money and financial success,

it's not everything I hoped it would be. I kind of want to hear what that transition looked like because it feels like you went through that process prior to becoming a dad, which I think was timely, like very important. But what did that look like over those weeks, months, years? Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase

from Ernest Hemingway once was asked how he went bankrupt and he said, gradually then suddenly. And I feel like that's sort of the story of a lot of these big changes in life. It's like the boiling frog metaphor of the, you throw a frog into boiling water, it'll immediately jump out because it's so hot.

But if you put a frog into a lukewarm pot of water and bring it to a boil, it'll stay in until it dies because it won't recognize the changes that are happening so slowly. I think some of these things in our life happen really, really slowly. Then you have the one shock event,

the one thing. Those changes in my own life had been happening very slowly. And I had had moments where I sort of questioned it, where I was like, am I on, am I climbing the wrong mountain? Am I like focusing on the wrong things? Am I on the wrong train? This is this Japanese proverb that says, if you get on the wrong train, get off it at the next stop, because otherwise it'll take a long time to get back. And I think about that in my own life. Like we made this change. We dramatic shift moved across the country. or back. I had no idea what I was going to do next. Like, I had left this lucrative job where I had

great colleagues. It was, you know, interesting work. There were all these things that were good about it. And I was like writing on Twitter at the time. I just started a newsletter. I was like doing a little bit of like, you know, started doing a little bit of consulting, different things. And I went on a journey to try to understand what were the real underlying components of a, life well lived, of a truly wealthy life, a life of wealth across all of these different areas of life. And one of the main ways that I did that was by going and talking to a lot of people who are much older and much wiser, who had experienced more of life and who had kind of experienced the ups and downs and the pitfalls and the different things. That ended up being essential because it reminded

me that money is a part of the entire journey, but there are so many other pieces to living a truly fulfilling life. And the common themes that kept coming up were really four things. Time, people, purpose, and health. When you go and ask people, like I would go, I spoke to thousands of people, and I would go and ask them to do this visualization, to imagine their ideal day at age 80. Close your eyes and imagine your ideal day at age 80. You wake up, what are you doing, who are you with, how do you feel, what are you thinking about, what are you spending your time on? And when you ask people that question, basically everyone says the same thing. They all sort of surround this idea of having freedom, being surrounded by people they love, whether it's kids, friends,

you know, spouse, whatever, people you love, feeling healthy of body and mind, and sort of knowing what your meaning is, like knowing what you're supposed to be doing on a daily basis. And that has a little bit to do with money. Money is an enabler to some of that. It maybe unlock some of the freedom and it is, it helps with some of those. But it's very much a tool, not the goal in and of itself. No one was saying, like, I want to be sitting on a private jet or a yacht. Most of them were like, I just want to be surrounded by people I care about. And so it was a reminder to me that we all basically want the same thing. And it has very little to do with money as the core end goal of it.

Is these the interviews you had with, you mentioned in the book. In 2022, you interviewed a group of 80 and 90-year-olds and asked them what advice you'd give your younger self. I pulled some the quotes from that that I thought were very powerful. And like you said, no one mentioned money. Someone said, never fear sadness as it tends to sit right next to love. Grandmother. Find dear friends and celebrate them for the richness of being human is in the feeling of being loved and loving back. Treat your body like a house that you have to live in for the next 70 years.

Tell your partner you love them every night before falling to sleep. Someday you'll find the other side of the bed empty and you wish you could tell them that all very powerful comments and mentions without even bringing up money at all. I love the whole gradual and then sudden approach that you brought up. As I'm thinking about my last month of life, got hit by a car, you know, when I was running three weeks ago.

And for months leading up to that point, like being very honest, I was having trouble being happy. I could not figure it out. It was driving me nuts. I would sit in my office in the morning thinking, why am I unhappy? Like what change? And I knew I had to change something, but I wasn't willing to in that moment. And it was building and it was building and it was building. And me and my wife would have had conversations about it.

it and I was just digging myself into the ground. Like when I am struggling with something, I will dive into work. I will dive into training. I will put more and more and more on my plate. I don't pull back. I lean in and I just submerge myself in as much as possible. And for the last couple of months, I mean, I was doing a lot. Training, business, two young kids, three moves in the last 15 months. And then when I got hit by that car, it felt like a sign directly from God saying, slow down,

and you better prioritize the right things or you are going to miss them. So it was very gradual. It was building. It was building. It was building it. All of a sudden, when I got hit by that car,

literally hours afterwards, I was like, okay. And my wife was afraid after I got in that accident, And she's like, oh, he's going to lose his mind, not being able to train for a few weeks. And I completely just like, let go to the reins. It's going to let my body heal, not going to worry about it, not going to stress about it. And she was completely mind-blown by the fact that I wasn't stressing out over not being able to run or lift. But I am a completely different person today than I was three weeks ago.

and it's really hard to get someone else to understand that when I tell them that. But it was that gradual, gradual, gradual, sudden, okay, God, I got you. I hear you. Change is here. Yeah. There's this passage in the book. My parents gave me this compass at a pretty dark time in my life. time when I was struggling with all of these things, they gifted me this compass. And it was a little

silver compass. And on the inside, it had this engraving that just said, so you may always know where your true north lies. The message in that was to focus on direction, not speed. It's better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one. And that's a message that we so often need to hear. Like, I want to get it tattooed on my body because most of the biggest mistakes you make in life end up being because you're climbing up the wrong mountain. You're climbing up someone else's mountain usually. You haven't taken the time to slow down and think about what is the mountain I actually should be climbing right now. What is my true north in life that I'm headed towards? And the true north, again, it doesn't have to be like your purpose or the perfect

passion, but you need to think about what you truly care about. Like you needed a reset moment to remember the things that you truly care about, the things that actually are going to light you up, the things that you're going to remember 50 years from now. There's this chapter in the book where I talk about children. I talk about sort of the relationship with as a parent and children and trying to navigate this tension that exists between your desire to be present and between your ambition, your drive to go and create things, to build things, to build a big business, to impact the world, to do all of these things. And there's this, in that, there's this Reddit post that I talk about that said, in 20 years, the only people who will remember you working late are your kids.

In 20 years, the only people that will remember you working late are your kids. And the common understanding of that is to say, okay, I'm going to put all of my professional ambitions aside and just be present entirely with my kids. But it's not really as simple as that, because you really want your kids to understand the importance of hard work, of pursuing their ambitions. And you can't teach them that. They have to see you doing that. They have to see you living that out in your pursuits in the way that you're engaging with the world. And so navigating that tension between presence and ambition ends up being one of the most challenging tensions that we have to navigate as... I've been talking about that

for last like two years. I'm telling you, man, that's been the hardest transition for me is is balancing that presence and ambition. That's the hardest chapter life for me. Yeah, I think it's really difficult, and it doesn't come naturally. And the way I wrestle with it, which I talk about in the book, is you have to include your children in the why.

The why of your ambition. I think of my own father, and my dad's my best friend, and I feel so grateful for having had a dad like him, and a lot of who he was as a friend, father was informed by the fact that he didn't have that same dad in his life. When my dad wanted to marry my mom, my dad's white from the Bronx, New York. My mom is Indian, born and raised in India. And when my dad wanted to marry my mom, his dad didn't accept it and told him he had to choose

between his family and my mom. And my dad walked out the door and never saw his family again. To this day, I never met my dad's parents. My dad has three siblings I never met. Oh, wow. I have first cousins somewhere out there that I've never met. Still in New York? No clue. Wow. And that episode, I think, instilled in my dad this desire to be the most supportive father that he could be. I think we often either sort of reject or amplify the things that we received from our parents.

Like, we either reject the things that we thought were bad and we go the other way, or we amplify if we thought they were good and we kind of double. down on it. And my dad is, he's a professor and worked extremely, extremely hard his whole life. He's an incredible researcher, professor has been at Harvard for the last 25 or 30 years. And I always saw him working extremely hard on the things that he cared about. And when he left, when he wasn't there, or when he was traveling or when he had to work on things, I always knew why. He would always take the time to explain to me what he was working on, why he thought it was important, why he felt there was an impact to it, why it mattered to the

mission of providing for the family and for being there. And so as a result, when he wasn't there, I had a reason. I filled it with the story that he had told me. And what kids do is if you don't give them that why, they fill it with the worst, which is, oh, dad's just never around. Dad doesn't care about me. And you can fill it with the true story, which is that you are trying to build something meaningful to you, that you were creating. things, that you want them to understand the value of hard work. And that makes a huge difference in the way that you kind of navigate that and in just the pride that they feel in being a part of that mission with you. And so, like, as my son gets older, and even with this book, I'm taking

painstaking efforts. He's only two and a half, so he doesn't really understand things yet. But I am taking the time every single time he sees me working to try to show him, like, here's this book that I'm working on, here's the reason that I'm traveling, that I'm doing this book tour, the different things that I'm doing. I want him to know why it matters and why I care about it. Did you have this perspective before your son was born or was it a shift afterwards? Definitely a shift afterwards. I mean, my entire life I could argue is like a before and after of him being born. I spent I spent the first 30 years of my life thinking I didn't want kids. even when my wife and I were first starting to try,

I was like almost assuaging her because I was still convinced in my own narrow focus on money that kids were like a distraction from the thing that really mattered, which was like making money and being famous or successful. And I remember having this like

transformative moment. The second he came out and I was holding him in my hands and he looked up at me and I was like, I spent the first 30 years of my life wondering what the purpose and meaning of all this was. And then I was holding it, staring back at me in the face. And my entire life has been different on the other side of that.

I mean, I view the world different. It's like putting on a, you take off a pair of glasses or something and your whole life feels different. And it's almost hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced that. But then you go talk to dads, you talk to people. And everyone has some version of that same feeling, some same feeling of connection. Yeah, I experienced the same thing. Before we continue with this episode, I want to take a quick break to talk about BPN's new free membership program we just launched. And by signing up for our membership program, you unlock a massive amount of benefits. And all you should do to sign up is opt into our SMS program. That's it. When you opt into our SMS program, you unlock 20% of

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you can be more consistent, you can reach your goals, and truly achieve your full potential by maximizing consistency in your supplement routine, your training, and your diet. So head over to BPNSups.com to get started today and take advantage of this opportunity to become a BPN member. I love what you mentioned about climbing the wrong mountains and focusing on direction rather in speed. Because if I look at my life before my daughter was born and then life changing, but prior to that, I also said when I was my 20s, I don't know if I want to have kids because I just want to

be a business owner. I just want to build this thing into the biggest possible thing it can be. And I want to eliminate distractions that hold me back from that, which is just such an ignorant, immature, narrow point of focus. And if I look back in my life then, I had a very clear direction, but I was on that path at high speed. Anything that got in the way would disrupt my direction and my speed. And then when I became a dad, direction and speed both got blown up. And I was sitting there thinking, okay, what does this next chapter look like?

And over these last, honestly, two and a half years, it's been a job. journey and exploration, both each additional day and moment where I'm noticing my kids are getting older and developing that direction and that speed becomes clear and clear and clearer. And it's not to go faster any longer. It is to slow down as much as possible. You know, you seem to have so much perspective and you articulate. your thoughts very, very well. Is that because you create these moments to slow down and actually thinking, what does that look like? What are your systems around actually thinking inward so that

then you can show up externally? Yeah. I use this example in the book of Leonel Messi, the soccer player. I love that analogy in the book that you used. Yeah. So he is known for walking around the field. If you go and search Leonel Messi walking on Google, you'll get like half a million hits. It's probably the most talked about walking habit in the world. And it's this really interesting thing because most people assume that the walking is laziness. And in reality, it's strategy. As he walks around the field, he is able to create an incredible mental map of what is going on, of space. he's able to slow down, he's able to identify what's happening, and at the exact right moment, he's able to shoot forward at the perfect angle in order to receive the ball and score.

That is sort of a metaphor for our own lives. We need to slow down enough, we need to create enough space that we can see the whole field so that we can deploy our energy into the right moment and the right opportunity and the right set of priorities that really matter. early in your life in your 20s, you probably benefited actually from some of the speed, from some of the urgency, from some of those things. That's like the work hard phase of your life. But as you start gaining some of the benefit of experience and wisdom and networks and money, you need to start working more likely in El Messey. You need to start working smarter and deploying those things into the right opportunities because that is where you end up generating the 10,000 X outcomes in your own life. It's when you deploy energy, concentrated attention and energy into the few things that really matter. The systems for actually building that into your life, I think there are a few in the book that are actually quite simple and powerful.

So at the end of each section, there's one section for each type of wealth. There's a guide, and that has the systems for actually building that type of wealth. The mental wealth section has this idea of space and creating space in your life. That comes from Victor Frankl, the famous Holocaust survivor, Man Search for Meaning, famous book, where he says that our power in life exists in the space that we can create between stimulus and response. So we have all these things coming in at us, emails, texts, notifications, all the stuff that's coming in. And in a normal world, you were forced to be on this like immediate treadmill where you're just immediately responding to everything. Block tackle, block tackle, over and over again.

Reactive, reactive, reactive, reactive, reactive. active. And you are severely limited in your ability to create asymmetric opportunities when that is your life, because you're just forced it in this urgent loop. Your power is in the space you can create. So we need to find ways to create space. There's sort of ways that I think of it on a daily basis and then on a more macro monthly basis. On a daily basis, I think the first thing most people can do is create a five-minute window between meetings and calls. So rather than scheduling 30-minute phone calls or meetings, make them 25 minutes. The first five minutes of any caller meeting is usually bullshit. You banter about the weather and talk about whatever sports game happened. If you make a meeting

25 minutes, people get more efficient. You still get the exact same meeting done. And now you have a five-minute window, which it turns out is extremely powerful. Microsoft did this research study where they put EEGs on people's heads and had them go through a set of meetings that were either back to back or meetings that had a five-minute window in between them. The people that went through the back-to-back meetings had these linear spikes in their stress levels throughout and their performance went like this throughout the entire thing. It just declined steadily. The people that inserted the five-minute break had no build-up of stress and their performance was consistently at a higher level the entire time through. So this five-minute window and break that you create, this little bit of space.

allows you to slow down enough to reset and be more present in every activity you do. So your output goes up. On a more macro-monthly basis, I use something that I call a think day. Bill Gates became famous for doing a think week. In the 1980s, he started taking an entire week where he would go off the grid with just a bunch of like reading. And he would go and spend a week in a cabin, just thinking, reading, and learning about the bigger picture things that were facing Microsoft.

And he credits it as being a hugely transformative process for the journey that Microsoft has been on over these several decades. We can create something similar on a slightly lower level in our own lives. Take four hours once a month or once a quarter if you can't get once a month. Go off the grid, like go somewhere that's not normal for you, whether it's to a new coffee shop or like rent an Airbnb or go somewhere that you really like that sort of opens your mind. and just go and spend time thinking about some of the bigger picture questions in your life. I have a set of eight question prompts that I like to use in the book. I can share a couple of those. One is, if someone were to observe my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are? So the idea there is there's sort of two types of priorities. There's the priorities you say you have.

and then there's the priorities your actions show you have. And unfortunately, there's a big gap for a lot of people. We'll say we prioritize our family and our health and all these things. And then really we just prioritize work and making money. And so forcing this self-awareness by viewing it from a third party's perspective is a good way to push yourself sort of back into alignment across those two things. Another one that I really like to ask myself is, if I were the main character in a movie of my life,

what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now? So think about like you watch a TV show or a movie and you're watching and you're like, you want to just jump through the screen and grab the main character. Like don't go to that basement or like go chase the girl to the airport, whatever the thing is. You are that main character in the movie of your life. And the audience would be screaming at you to do something right now. And it's probably something very obvious that you are ignoring,

that you're not forcing the self-awareness to identify. So take the day, take a few hours to zoom out and think about some of those bigger picture things. You'll find that you create this space in your life and that space will change your life. One of my favorite authors is Cal Newport. And he's a huge proponent of creating time and space for deep work. And not necessarily anti-technology, but like anti-busy technology. and how it makes us just reactive. From the time we wake up,

to the time we get to sleep. One of my favorite things to do to just separate once in a while, and I'd love to do it more often, but it becomes a stretch sometimes. Soho House, downtown Austin. I'll go work there some days, and I won't have my phone on me.

I have my laptop. I won't get on the internet. I'll work on a podcast. I'll just brain dump. I'll just think. I'll sit outside in the fall or the spring or the summer if it's not too hot, drinking a Americano and just like dial in. And it is some of my most productive couple hours as opposed to being in the office or being

on email, being on my phone, being reactive. And that's what I look forward to with this ranch that we just started building out. Like Bear Ranch is a new project that we took on where it's 240 acres. It's 20 minutes from my house. for remodeling a house there, we're building a barn gym there, we'll put some animals there, we'll host races there.

But that for me is a place where it's quiet, there is solitude, and the amount of work that I'll be able to get done in a more restricted period of time, I believe will be beneficial

for my business, my family, me, so much. I have this chart in the book. I don't know if we're going to be able to pick that up on the camera, but this is the time spent alone over the course of your life. And it's a really powerful chart because what it shows is that the amount of time you spend

by yourself over the course of your life steadily increases. So if you don't get comfortable spending time alone, if you don't get comfortable having that solitude, you are going to have a very, very tough life as you have more of that. When you are young, if you can build that solitude muscle, it becomes like your superpower. I think there's a, I think it's Blaise Pascal that says all of man's problems can be attributed to his inability to sit in a room alone. And you think about in your own life how terrified you are of boredom. Like we go to the bathroom, we bring our phone.

Yeah, that's so sad. You go to take a dump and you sit there with your phone. And you think about how sad it is you cannot be bored for like two seconds. Even now, like I drive my, you know, family from Boston, New York, C-Famp, to see family and like three hours in the car, you know, listening to kid songs and I'm going nuts. Like I need some sort of stimulus. How challenging it is, but it's a muscle and it's one that you can build on a regular basis. Like, you know, go for a 15-minute walk with no phone or technology today. Go do that. I guarantee you will have some of your best ideas that you've had in months.

So do you consider if you're by yourself but you have your phone, is that time a lot? alone. It's not. I mean, it is technically according to this, because this is like you're just not with other people. But no, you're not alone. Because you are, when you have your phone on you, and you open your phone, you open social media, quite literally, there are millions of people that have access to your inner world during those moments, right? Especially you, right? Like, you have millions of followers. We both have big platforms. We are never alone if we are, if we have social media open. There are people that can message us. There's people that are commenting. We're not like, you know, it's like one of those weird things.

Like you, I think I saw Jay Shetty say this. Like you would never wake up in the morning and allow a million people to walk into your bedroom. But you grab your phone as soon as you wake up in the morning and you effectively allow a million people to come into your world. And so I think about that a lot. And I, like, this is coming from someone who is definitely overly connected because it's a big part of my job. But we need to create rituals for making sure we actually. actually have space. And look, I think deep work is incredible if you have the ability to create it. The idea of, you know, having a day where you're at your ranch or at your cabin, you have like

eight uninterrupted hours to focus on big picture things is like this amazingly romantic, beautiful idea. I would love to get to a world where I can do that. It's not reality for most people, right? Like if I can get two, three hours of deep work in a day, like truly deep work, that's a great day for me. The way that I do that is I wake up at 4 a.m. That's how I do it. People ask why I wake up so early. It's because my kid doesn't wake up until about 8, 730 or 8. So I know if I can sit down at my desk at 4.30, I have three hours basically completely uninterrupted before the chaos of the day starts. Part of the reason why I think waking up early is a cheat code for your life. A, it's really hard and it has ripple effects into every other thing because you convince yourself that you're a winner when you can do the hard thing. But B, structurally, you're not getting emails.

No one's texting you at 5 in the morning. No one's texting you at 4.30. You're not getting the like social media pings. Your kids aren't awake yet. Your wife probably isn't awake yet. So it's a great time to just sit down, focus, and get shit done. I mean, that's why I wake up at 4.30 every morning, if I'm working out or not. My morning runs are like my time where like I need that six days a week.

There's one day a week I don't run. I still wake up at 4.30 on Sunday morning. And the work I get done in those hours for my family wakes up, it's like not even an option anymore. Like I need that time. And it is so powerful for everything else that I do. There's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5 a.m. and works out. It's true.

A lot of problems in life are solved by just waking up early and working out. How long have you been doing that now? I started waking up early when I was in college, because we had early morning practices. And I'm someone that needs to be awake for a little while before I can turn on for something physical. And so I would get up early before it. It really started when I started my first job,

which is a funny story. I knew I was going to have long days at the office because it's early years of finance and an analyst role. You're going to work 80 to 100 hours a week. I was going to get to the office at 6.30. So I knew I needed to get to the gym at 4.45. And to get to the gym at 445, I had to like wake up at 3.45.

And so for the first five or six years in my career, I woke up at 345 every single day. And I credit that as being some of the most, some of the more transformative action that I took was just doing that on a daily basis. I ended up as a result of that. I would go to the gym at 4.45 every morning at this equinox in Palo Alto. And there was like five or six people that would show up there every single day at 4.45 in the morning. Crazy people, right? It turned out that one of those people was Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who we became friends. He's been a mentor.

Now he's on the back of the book. He was one of the reviewers that read in. I was very curious how you got that. We met literally because he is crazy enough. He was the CEO of Apple at the time, right? And he was waking up at 3.45 every single morning and going and working out. Imagine that, right? It's so easy.

Like, oh, he's made it. He doesn't need to do that anymore. But it's who he is as a person is he creates that space in his life by getting up early and working out. And he still does it to this day. He's 60 plus years old. And I just think about that fact over and over again that you see in your life that people that do these hard things to start their day find ways to win in other areas of life. It just has ripple effects into everything you do. My mind or my life is kind of been shook here for a second because when you pulled that chart open in the book and showed how as we get older, we have more time of

alone. The first thing I wanted to respond with to that was I love alone time. I find it so powerful. But then the realization that alone time is not alone time if your phone's with you, it made me really think, how much alone time do I actually have outside of my run? There's not much. For me, a call to action, the next action step is finding and creating more alone time without being connected. Because I hate being connected all the time. I don't prefer it, but I do feel this need to based off of business and work and all the things that are going on in life. But a very clear action step for me is create space, create time without the connection. That's like, I, it kind of rocked my world right there. Good. It, yeah, and it's crazy,

the impact that our phones have on us and the pull they have, even in your social connections with people, and I learned this recently, there is scientific evidence that if I have my phone out on the table while we're having a conversation, up or down, our feelings of connection after this conversation will be reduced. So just having your phone out. when you have a conversation with your partner or with a friend or someone you're trying to catch up with, is going to negatively impact the feeling of connection that you have with them. You think about the ripple effect on that long term in those relationships. It can be dramatic.

So the other action step two is just like put your damn phone away. You're having a conversation. Don't have your phone sitting here because then you know it lights up when you get a notification and you naturally, you're talking to me. You might be saying something really interesting, but I'm going to go like this. Because these things are designed to be addictive. They're designed to grab you the attention. That's why also, by the way, I always try to have my phone on gray scale mode.

So it makes it just like that screen looks so boring. Oh, wow. So you can like set color filters on your iPhone. So 90% of the day, as long as I'm not like posting something that needs to color, set your phone on gray scale mode. And I guarantee you'll spend less time on it during the day. That's interesting. I'll try that. Yeah.

So in the book, there's these five types of wealth. time, social, mental, physical, financial. I'd like to focus on one for a second and just hear your perspective, your thoughts on it, the social aspect of wealth and the way that you think about it. Yeah. So it's a perfect segue to from what we were just talking about. Social wealth is all about your depth and breadth of connection to the people around you. You know, it's the depth of connection with the few people that you're truly close.

to, and then it's the breath to a broader circle of friends, community, spiritual connections, etc. There is clear scientific evidence that the strength of your relationships impacts your health and happiness more than anything else. The Harvard study of adult development was this amazing study done over the course of 85 years. They followed the lives of 2,000 plus participants. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction, at age 50. So it wasn't how your cholesterol was, your blood pressure, your smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that impacted your physical health and aging outcomes. We know this in our own life anecdotally that the people we surround ourselves with

determine our life, our happiness in life. And scientifically, it's also shown the people you surround yourself with determine your outcomes. The pygmalion effect is this scientific phenomenon that we rise to the level of expectations others have for us. So if I surround myself with people who are big thinkers, who are encouraging me to push myself, who believe in me, who think I can grow, I will rise to the level of those expectations. Similarly, if I surround myself with people who laugh at me, who make fun of me for being excited about things, who put me down, I will fall to the level of those expectations. So what more reason do you need for surrounding yourself with people who are truly there for you.

What have you done to create that ecosystem of maximizing social wealth with the people in your circle? I think this fundamentally comes down to investing in your relationships the same way you know to invest in your financial health. So we naturally know that investing in something in the financial world is going to compound into the future. Like, you know, you learn that very early on. I'm going to put $10 away, $100 way into the S&P 500. It's going to compound into the future. I'm going to have more money in the future. Your relationships are perhaps the best investment you can make. They pay dividends in the exact same way for the entirety of your life. And if you invest in them with very small, tiny investments now, they will be there for you later. And if you don't, they won't. So, you know, life ends up being filled with laters. We say, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll spend more time with my wife. and friends later. I'll focus on my health later. The sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never. Because those things won't exist in the same way later. Your kids are not going to be two and a half years old later. Your wife won't be there for you later if you're not there for her now.

So either you design those things, design those investments into your life now, or you're just going to regret it later. Yeah, one of the analogies that I love is the plants you don't, plants or seeds you don't continue to water will die. They will erode. They will break off. And I believe, and I'm victim to this as well, that we believe that something we have now is just going to be there when we come back to it, even if we don't maintain it or water it or take care of it. And the reality is we let something die and we try to come back to it and we realize this thing is not here. It's dead. It's not the same. It's different. It's eroded. And that is really hard to accept sometimes.

But it's also just sometimes the byproduct of becoming busy and life. And that for me is why I've moved into this chapter and season of life of like, what does matter to me, work-wise, family-wise, my faith, relationships, friendships, I need to keep watering these things because if I don't, when I try to come back to them later, they will have been dead or moved on. And the truth is that it doesn't take much to keep them going. It's one of the points that I try to get across in the book is you don't need to be maximizing an area in order to keep it moving forward. Anything above zero compounds in your life, quite literally. Like, it's much

better to do a 15-minute walk than to do nothing physically during the course of a day. People think, especially ambitious people, that it needs to be optimal for it to be beneficial. I need to do the full Huberman protocol on X, Y, or Z. I need to do the two-hour workout or the like 10-mile run. And the reality is that the two-mile run is better than the zero-mile run. And so similarly, with your relationships, sending the little text to a friend to let them know you were thinking about them is way better than sending nothing. Getting your guys together for your one annual trip that you do is way better than just allowing that to continue to slip. It could be once a year that you get together with them, but it has a

dramatic impact on where those relationships are headed. And so it's the tiny, the willingness to engage in the tiny deposits along the way that really creates that lasting effect. And you're absolutely right that like you have to fight for these things. You actually have to pay a price in the short term to have these things in the long term. It's the ultimate delayed gratification. Jeff Bezos, in his last shareholder letter when he left Amazon, quoted this piece from the blind watchmaker. And he talks about the fact in it that you have to pay a price for your distinctiveness in the world. And the idea from the blind watchmaker is that being alive is a fight against your whole body just like melting into its surroundings.

That's literally what being alive is. All of your cells right now, as you're sitting here listening to this, are fighting to avoid just like melting. They have to fight to maintain their integrity. And you are the exact same in your life in all of these areas. You have to fight every single day to avoid the natural entropy and decay of all these things. We know that physically, actually.

Like, you know if you do nothing, your body's eventually going to go to shit. The atrophy, falls apart. Yeah. And the same thing applies to relationships, to any of these areas. You quoted Charlie Munger in the book. he said, or he said, all I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.

I love that quote. And it comes off of the chapter of your life razor, which talks about having goals, but also anti-goals. A lot of us know what goals are. They're these big, audacious, long-term ambitions or your medium-term, Checkpoint objectives along the way. But anti-goals is actually something I've started incorporating these last couple of months that I believe are extremely powerful. Boundaries.

Creating boundaries around the goals and conditions in which you want to achieve. How would you describe your life razor and how you implement anti-goals to support your goals? Yeah. So I'll start with the anti-goals piece. Anti-goals, for those who aren't familiar with the concept, are all about what you want to avoid on your journey to achieve your goals. So if you think of your goals as like the summit of the mountain, anti-goals are the things that you aren't willing to sacrifice in getting there.

You know, like you don't want to die while getting to the top of Mount Everest. You don't want to lose your toes. You don't want to like lose your ear, whatever. So if you think of like, oh, you know, my goal is to become CEO of this company. Well, my anti-goal might be being away from my family 300 nights. out of the year, or allowing my health to fall off a cliff from all the travel and dinners out and all those things. I want to achieve the goal of becoming CEO, but not at the expense of these other things. It's really important to have both because an awareness of the things you want to

avoid on the journey goes to Charlie Munger's thing. I want to know where I'm going to die so I never go there. Those are the places where I'm going to die. It's being away too much. It's allowing my health to suffer. And so I'm going to stay on track for my goals and I'm going avoid these bad areas along the way. As you set your goals for the coming year, you know, you're listening to this early in the year, think about what the anti-goals are, what those things are that you want to avoid because it creates a self-awareness around them so that on the way, as you continue to sort of naturally measure yourself and see whether you're headed toward the goals, you avoid those bad things that could befall you. The life razor that I lay out in the book is

the idea of having a single point of focus, a single statement, a single idea that allows you to cut through the noise and the chaos in life. I sort of had the first genesis of this idea watching Apollo 13. I don't know if you've seen that movie, but like in the final scene, they're trying to enter the atmosphere. It's Tom Hanks is flying the spaceship. And they get told that basically if they come in too steep, they're going to blow up. They come in too shallow. they're going to shoot off into space. And they don't really have a way to like perfectly hit the right angle because the computers aren't working on the ship. It's all busted ship. And Tom Hanks says that he figured out a way. And basically what it is is there's this little triangular window to his right.

And he pans the ship over and the earth comes into the center of this little window. And what he says is that if he keeps the earth in the window while they're burning the engines, that will allow them to enter at the right angle so that they'll survive. That is a perfect example of what I'm getting at, which is, in the midst of this crazy, chaotic, like, 100 variable scenario, he has figured out a single point of focus that is going to allow him to just think about that one thing, cut through the noise, and get to the place he wants to go. The life razor is that for your life. It is your way of keeping the earth in the window. My life razor is that I will coach my son's sports teams. Why is that my life razor? Well, it's about coaching his teams,

but more so it's about the ripples. It's about the identity that implies about who I am as a person and how I interact with the world around me. The type of person who coaches his son's sports teams is the type of person who is a great father, a great husband to my wife, a family member, a community member. It is someone who prioritizes family above. financial opportunities, above whatever the next more is that people are trying to chase. It's someone who believes that the strength of his relationships are the most important asset that he has, and it's someone that it believes that the freedom, his time, is the most valuable asset that exists. That means that when different scenarios or opportunities or chaos come into my life,

I can ask myself, what does the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this situation. And the answer becomes very clear. What are your thoughts on establishing your anti-goals first and then your goals? Because as you're describing that, like if I set up my anti-goals first, I now know when I go to set up my goals, what I'm not willing to sacrifice. And that might shift the goals themselves. I think back to I had Jordan Scyte on the podcast a few months ago. And he was explaining, you know, we were talking about where he sees his business going and what his goals are in life.

He's a newer dad as well, two young kids. And he came in and he was saying on the podcast, you know, I come into BPN, I see what you guys have built and I love it. But I would never want it because he worked as Gary Vee's trainer for years. And he saw how hard Gary V had to work and what he had to sacrifice to get what he has. And Jordan realized, I respect that, but I don't want it because I don't want to sacrifice certain parts of my life to achieve X, Y, and Z. So what are your thoughts on establishing anti-goals before goals?

I think it's brilliant. It's funny. Jordan, I met Jordan when he was, so he went to the high school next door to mine. And he was an intern at Eric Cressy. I don't know if you ever come across Cressy stuff. He's the performance coach for the Yankees now. He was an intern at Cressy Performance, which was my first gym when I started training for baseball

when I was 16 or 17. So I've known Jordan for a long time. It's amazing to see his rise in success. I think it's a great idea. And this comes to like a fundamental realization I've had in life that the people that I read books about are rarely people I would ever trade lives with. Like I read all these business biographies

of the most incredible people in history from Elon Musk to John D. Rock, Rockefeller, you know, Andrew Carnegie, all these people, I would never trade lives with any of those people. You couldn't pay me any amount of money to go trade lives with them. Because the things that I want are not the same as the things that they wanted. And the realization there is that there is a list price, if you will, for the things that you want to achieve in life. It's the price that you know you're going to have to pay for those things. So like, you know, to build a big business, you're going to have to have a great idea and put in all this work and do all of these things along the way and go build

an incredible business. But then there's the real price of those things, which is the other sacrifices that get made. It's the relationships lost. It's the health. It's the stress. It's all of these other areas that we often don't think about or see. And a lot of people delude themselves into thinking they want to play a game on the basis of the list price being attractive. When in reality, if you take into account the real price, it's a rip-off. And one of the calls to action in this entire book is to really think about what games you want to play. Because life and culture and society

will try to hand you the default game, which is to just make more and more money. And social media will hand you that game and tell you that like, okay, just play this game. Here's the game that you're going to play for the rest of your life. But if you play someone else's game for your entire life, you will never feel successful. You will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success, unless you play your game.

So Jordan's saying that, this is amazing that you're doing this, but I would never want to play this game. I respect and admire that about people more than anything else. Someone who has made no money, but they're playing just the game that they want, I think that's incredible. And like, even you and I having a conversation before we got on here, I asked you that question of like, what do you really want to do long term? What is the game that you really want to play for the next 20, 30 years? And that being clear in your mind, that's your North Star, right? Like, that's the true north of this whole thing. I want to build an incredible relationship with my kids, with my wife.

I want to build a house full of love, this, like, incredible lineage, grandkids and all of these things that I see. And I want to create an impact in the world. I want to impact people positively with the ideas that I share. And that doesn't have a whole lot to do with making a billion dollars. Maybe I would make money as a byproduct of those things. but building an enormous business that makes billions of dollars, that's not actually the game that I want to play. Yeah, kind of like bringing this full circle

how we started this conversation. When you're younger, and like that first chapter of life, the list price like you just mentioned, it's very attractive. It's sexy. And because you're ignorant and experience, you don't realize or recognize the sacrifices

that have to be made to achieve that list price. So you get started. and you're chasing success. You don't really care about the sacrifices you have to make because the collateral damage, even if it's affecting other people in your life, you're so focused on that success. And the shift happens where you go in the North Star is now significant as opposed to just success. These sacrifices are much more meaningful and you can weigh them much differently.

And that list price isn't as sexy as it once was because it's, It's a mirage. Yeah. I mean, the Forbes top 10 richest people in the world have 13 divorces among them. Gosh, dang. Right? Like, that's not my definition of wealth. That is the societal definition of wealth.

But I would not be willing to trade my relationships or, you know, have a broken marriage or have children that don't want to hang out with me because I've been distant. They haven't been a part of my life. Like, you could not pay me any amount of money. And so part of the reason I think the idea of the five types of wealth is, is so powerful is because when you make a decision in life, you need to make a decision factoring in the bigger picture. Like if you came and offered me $100 million to go work in Omaha, Nebraska, take a job in Omaha, Nebraska, working on something that I hate for 80 to 100 hours a week,

and I'm going to have to travel a whole ton. And then you said, like, hey, come take this job. In the old world, in my old definition, my old scoreboard, if you will, that was just money. That's like a hell yes opportunity, right? You're going to pay me $100 million. Yeah, I'm on a plane right now. But if you think about it from the bigger picture of the five types of wealth, well, now, okay, yes, financial wealth is a big plus. But my time, I'm not going to have any freedom. I'm working 800 hours a week. My social wealth, I don't know a single person in Omaha, Nebraska. I'm going to be far away from my family. My mental wealth, you're telling me I'm going to work on things that I hate. That's taking a big hit. And my physical wealth, if I'm having to travel all the time and Omaha's pretty cold, I'm not going to be outside much, is going to take a big hit. So a decision that seemed like an obvious one on the basis of the old scoreboard becomes an obvious one in the other direction on the basis of the new one. You couldn't pay me to go take that job. There's no amount of money that I would take. And that is really empowering because then you're making decisions on the basis of your broader life score, broader idea of what actually you're trying to build towards. It's truly balanced.

Yeah. Well, Sahel, I appreciate it, man. Love what you're doing and love the perspective. and mindset around this book, it speaks to me very strongly in the chapter of life that I'm in, moving from just one focus to now a broader focus. Where do you want to point people to learn more about the book, yourself, purchase, all things? Yeah, you can get the book anywhere books are sold. You know, Amazon, hardcover is most easy for people, delivers probably by the end of the day today. But go support your local bookstore if you have one nearby you that

you love. We always love hearing that. And I'm just excited to hear how people take these ideas and run with them, whatever tiny ripples they create in the world. Well, I appreciate you, thank you.