February 6, 2025 • 52 mins
Barry speaks with Sahil Bloom, Founder and Managing Partner of SRB Ventures, a Venture Capital focused on accelerating compelling startups. He also owns and operates SRB Holdings. Prior to SRB, Sahil spent roughly 7 years in high finance, serving as Vice President of a private equity fund with $3.5 billion in assets under management. He holds multiple degrees from Stanford University, where he also played Division I baseball. Sahil is an avid public speaker and content creator. His newsletter 'The Curiosity Chronicle' is read by over 800,000 subscribers on a weekly basis. On this episode, Barry and Sahil discuss his path through finance, his latest book The 5 Types of Wealth, and what it truly takes to live a healthier, wealthier life.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This week on the podcast strap Yourself In for another
extra special guest, saw Hill bloom is the author of
a new book, The Five Types of Wealth. He's also
worked in both private equity and finish capital, as well
as running his own firm. The book is kind of fascinating,
focusing on not just money as a source of wealth,
(00:38):
but time, your social life, your mental and psychological attitude,
your physical health, as well as your financial wellbeing. That
by focusing and only measuring money, we use a scoreboard
that really doesn't sum up everything that we should be
(01:00):
thinking about. I found a conversation to be really fascinating.
The book is really interesting, and saw Hill is really
knowledgeable person who's lived for a relatively young person, a
fascinating life. Came to a realization that he was wasting
his time, his physical health, and a lot of other
(01:20):
assets that he had, and kind of rejiggered his whole
approach to what he was doing. I thought the discussion
was really fascinating, and I think you will also with
no further ado. My conversation with saw Hill Bloom, the
author of Five Types of Wealth.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to
be able to do this in person.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yet a little unusual sort of building and fun sort
of place relative to what you were used to on
the West Coast. You relocated to the East coast, right,
I did. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk
about that because I was very touched by what you
wrote in the book about that. Let's start out with
your background Stanford bachelor's and economics and sociology and a
(02:03):
master's in public policy. What was the career plan?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
To be honest, I don't think I knew. I've never
been a very good planner my entire life. My dad's
an economics professor, and so economics seemed like a good
undergraduate plan. But frankly, at the time, my real plan
was to go play professional baseball. My entire life had
been a baseball player. I got a scholarship to play
at Stanford, played there, and probably somewhat naively thought that
(02:31):
I could go make a career out of it playing
in the big leagues, and a shoulder injury my end
of my junior season sort of derailed those aspirations, and
I had to find my footing in something else.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So you're almost lucky it happened sooner than later, right.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I think so? I think, you know, in hindsight's twenty
twenty on these things, there's always a silver lining, as
they say, I think, what would have happened if I
had tried to play professionally was I would have ended
up spending you know, three, four or five years toiling
or in some like bus in the middle of nowhere
in the miners, and then ended up having to go
start at you know, twenty eight or twenty nine rather
(03:06):
than twenty two.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Huh. And you worked with Condoalieza Rice as your advisor
at Stanford. That sounds pretty fun. What sort of lessons
did you learn from her?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
I mean, she's a remarkable woman politics aside. I mean,
a woman who grew up in the Deep South in
Alabama and rose to become Secretary of State of the
United States of America. I mean just.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Mind blowing, pretty impressive.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
What she actually built and what she created in her life,
and the intelligence that she displays in the grace with
which she displays it has always wowed me. And I
you know, look, I cold emailed her when I was
at Stanford to try to ask her to be my
master's advisor, and was fortunate that she at least gave
me a chance to go speak to her in person
and convince her to do that. And I got to
(03:53):
take her course that she teaches at Stanford, which was
sort of a small group live basically live action seminar
where you kind of do these simulations of real world
foreign policy events where each person's sort of taking on
a different role, and you go through these simulations like
get woken up at two in the morning to go
through some crisis event. And it was just fascinating to
(04:14):
have someone in the room like her who had actually
been through those things and hear the stories she told
about her battles with Vladimir Putin and whatnot. It was
just incredible.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I can only imagine you spend all four years at
Stanford on a Division one baseball team that's very high level.
I always like to ask people to draw parallels. What
sort of skills and philosophies did you as a college
athlete find applicable to the rest of your life and
(04:45):
or wealth and finance.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Effectively, every single lesson that I feel I have benefited
from in my career was something that I learned in baseball.
I think, first off, teamwork and the ability to manage
multiple diverse personalities in a single environment is a meta
skill for life that rarely gets taught, and a team
forces you to learn that very early and very quickly,
(05:10):
and if you don't, you will not function as a team.
You know, like the understanding that not everyone is wired
the same, that not everyone is motivated by the same things.
That you need to meet people where they are and
then hopefully all rise to the level of the expectations
you have as a group. That is really an important
lesson to learn for life, you know. Look, the other one,
which people talk about often is just the alpha that
(05:32):
you can generate through resilience as a human being, and
it is very, very difficult to develop in a context
outside of sports. And I think that, you know, there's
a reason that a lot of athletes and a lot
of military former military end up being incredible employees and
team members because they have had to battle. They understand
(05:54):
that failure is not final, that it's a learning lesson
that you can take the event, learn the lesson from it,
and move on to the next situation that you face.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Right, It's all about process, not outcome. If you have
an unlucky bounce and you lose, you still got to
get up, dush yourself off, and start all over tomorrow.
Very applicable to trading desks and other things involved in finance.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah, and I think it's the combination here that's important. So,
you know, we live in a world where, especially today,
a lot of people want to focus on the inputs.
And you have all these people like, oh, you know,
you should really care about the inputs and just focus
on feeling proud of the inputs. And I actually agree
with that, uh to some extent, because at the end
(06:34):
of the day, the world will judge you for your outputs.
It doesn't matter whether you feel great about the input
the deep work routine, the morning routine, all of the
rituals that you had, if your output is and athletes
know that, right, we do. We focus on the inputs. Absolutely,
you show up at practice every single day, but we
also know that no one gets an eighth place metal.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
There are no participation.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
No, they're not handing those out. And you have to
learn that in life, you know, Like I have a
two and a half year old son now and I
want him to know that. And it's sort of a
harsh truth of the world that like, yes, your inputs matter,
and I want you to focus on them and be
proud of them and continue to refine them. But at
the end of the day, you are going to be
judged for your outputs.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Huh. Really really interesting. So you end up at Altamont
Capital Partners, which at the time was running about three
and a half billion dollars. How'd you find your way there?
What were you doing?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
So it's a private equity fund in the Bay Area.
It was a spin out from a now much larger
firm called Golden Gate Capital. Incredible group of people, small group.
They were just starting to hire at the analyst level
when I was getting done with school. So you know,
I was originally planning to go join you know, an
investment bank, or go join McKenzie and try to basically
do the two years prior and then go to business
(07:48):
school and then you know, go join a private equity
funder a hedge fund after you know, really with the
thesis that like that's the path that I see successful
and rich people following, So let me do that. I'm
gonna do the two years at Goldman Sachs or McKenzie,
I'll do the business school and then and I'll try
to find a fund. And I met the team at
Altamont and they were hiring at the analyst level, and
it just seemed like a screaming opportunity to go join
(08:09):
straight out of school and have the opportunity to, you know,
really drink from a fire hose, learn in an environment
where you are having to learn on the fly path
that you know nothing about.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So first you transition from sports to finance. Then you
effectively transition from finance to content creation. We mentioned the
Curiosity Chronicles and full disclosure, I've been subscriber for a
long time. I love how you really pull a lot
of really interesting things from all sorts of disparate subjects
(08:43):
together in a very cohesive way. And now you have
this book. Tell us about that second transition.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, this was a more painful one in my own life.
I probably for the first four or five years in
my professional career working in private equity, had an incredible
experience and was learning a ton and you know, working
with a great group of people making money, you know,
doing the things that I thought a successful life looked like.
(09:12):
And along that path, my own priority set and the
things that I was focusing on grew more and more
narrow and entirely focused on making money as the means
to achieving the happy and fulfilling life that I was after.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Let me interrupt you a second just to ask, because
whenever I have this conversation, either on the air or
just talking to people and friends about it, how comfortable
or not so comfortable was your upbringing? It seems like
your father's a professor at a college, Like it wasn't
that you really wanted for anything. I'm always curious what
(09:53):
motivates people to what degree to chase the dollar.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah, we were upper middle class, probably by national standards.
My dad's a professor at Harvard, so he wasn't a
hedge fund guy. We weren't rich. I lived in a town, actually,
I grew up in a town called Weston, Massachusetts, where
a lot of my friend's parents were really successful in finance,
and so I was surrounded by people who had made
a lot of money. And it's always relative, right, And
(10:20):
then when I was a kid, I was like really jealous.
Like my best friend growing up had this incredible house,
his family flew on private jets, they went to all
these places, and you know, like I was very jealous
of all the things that he had that I didn't.
And I never really questioned the fact that, like I
would leave after hanging out with him and he would
have like chef prepared meal by himself in front of
(10:42):
the TV, and I would get to go home and
have dinner with my parents around the dinner table. And
I never questioned whether that actually made me quite rich.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And you mentioned that in the book, that anecdote and lots,
and we'll talk a lot about the book in a bit,
but I found a lot of the personal anecdote and
stories really compelling and very sincere because they you know,
we all have different lived experiences, but there's an overlap.
We all share certain types of things. And I very
(11:13):
much related to a lot of the things you were
talking about. That story was like you don't know what
happens behind closed doors, and you don't know what burdens
people are carrying.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean it's definitely right. I'm glad they
resonated I. But look, all of this to me was
about my own priorities had grown so narrow to the
point where I was focusing on the one thing money
at the expense of everything else, and nothing in this
book is to say that money doesn't matter. And I
(11:44):
really want to be clear about that because I think
there's this common trope of saying, like, you know, you
come out and you say, oh, money doesn't matter. All
these other things are more important, and look, money matters,
and actually the science is pretty clear on this. You know,
money does directly buy happiness up to a point. It
reduces fun mental stresses and burdens, It allows you to
take care of people, create experiences, there's a lot of good.
(12:05):
Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.
And in my own path, and I think on a
lot of people's paths, we grow so narrowly focused on
money as the way to this happy, good life and
we lose sight of the other things. And the reason
that I propose for that is because money is the
thing that we can measure. And as Peter Drucker, the
(12:25):
management theorist, said, what gets measured gets managed means you
optimize around the one thing that you can measure. And
so because money is so measurable, it becomes the thing
that you focus all of your energy and attention around
and often to the detriment of these other things. Money
is your life scoreboard, if you will, and so you know,
you might be winning on that scoreboard, but if that
scoreboard doesn't capture the bigger picture of your life, you
(12:48):
may win the battle but lose the much broader war.
And that was really where I found myself when COVID
hit in March of twenty twenty. COVID hit, we were
stuck at home, and it was the first time that
I had really zoomed out and been able to kind
of see and assess my own life. I was making money,
I was getting promoted, you know, I had some of
(13:08):
the things that you would say or like the trappings
of success, but I was pretty miserable. My relationships, like
with my parents, I was never seeing them. We lived
three thousand miles away. They're getting older and super close
to them my whole life, and I just wasn't seeing them.
My relationship with my sister had ground to a halt.
My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time, unfortunately,
and that was creating strain in our relationship. My health,
(13:31):
I mean I was drinking six or seven nights a week,
not you know, raging, but like it had crept up
on me and that was impacting my sleep, my stress levels.
All of these areas of my life had started to
suffer because my priorities had gotten so focused in on
like money being the exclusive thing that was going to
lead me to the good life. And it all came
to a head for me. May of twenty twenty one,
(13:55):
I went out for a drink with an old friend
and we sat down. He asked how I was doing,
and I said that it had started to get tough
being as far away from my parents as we were.
They'd started to get older and I started to notice
their own mortality. And he asked how old they were
and I said mid sixties. And he asked how often
I saw them. I said about once a year, and
(14:17):
he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're
going to see your parents fifteen 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 the people you love
most in the world is so finite, so countable, that
you can put it onto a few hands shook me
(14:38):
to the core, and I realized in that moment that
we needed to make a change or we were going
to end up in a place where we didn't want
to be. And so I told my wife the next
day that I thought we needed to make a move.
And within forty five days, I had stepped away from
my full time position at the firm, we had sold
our house in California and moved three thousand miles to
(15:00):
be closer to both of our sets of parents.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
That's an amazing story. As I was reading it in
the book, my only reaction was what a devastating realization
to recognize not just your own mortality, but hey, your
parents are a generation or two older than you. They're
not here forever. The thought of only seeing them once
a year and then they're gone pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
It's powerful and devastating, but also empowering and inspiring. And
the reason I say it's empowering and inspiring is because
it reminds you that time is your most precious asset.
It is quite literally the only thing that matters in
the end. And you know, I go ask young people,
would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth one
hundred and thirty billion dollars. He has everything that you want,
(15:48):
one hundred thirty billion dollars, access to anyone in the world,
flies around on private jets, you know, mansions all over
the place. He reads and learns for a living. But
you wouldn't trade lives with him simply because he's ninety.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Five years old.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
There's no way you would agree to trade the amount
of time you have left for all of the billions
that he has. And similarly, he would give anything to
be in your shoes today and have the amount of
time you do. He would give up all of his money.
And so you know in the back of your mind
that time has this incalculable value, and yet on a
daily basis, we sit around wasting it. We scroll around
(16:20):
on our phones, you know, scrolling on TikTok, looking at
social media, comparing ourselves to other people, low value, low
energy tasks. We don't spend time with the people we
care about. We do all these things that are spitting
on the value of our most precious asset. And that
really is the call to action around this idea. It
is to recognize time as your most precious asset to
(16:41):
make a change, because the empowering part of all of
this is you are much more in control of your
time wealth than you think. We took that number the
fifteen times before we die. We made a change. It's
in the hundreds. Now. I see my parents several times
a month. They're a huge part of my son's their
grandson's life. We took an action that created time.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So we were talking earlier about something that was really fascinating.
You said, money isn't nothing, but it can't be the
only thing. And I think that really sums up a
great amount of insight. So tell us how you win
from kind of being unhappy in your West Coast life
(17:25):
and not seeing your family to writing this book. What
was the motivator here?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
It was a manifestation of my own journey, and that
journey was really to try to understand what was a
better way to measure our lives. What was a better scoreboard,
if you will, that we could track and measure against.
And the realization there is that when you measure the
right thing, you take the right actions and you create
(17:51):
the right outcomes. When you measure for the broader war
of the life you're trying to live, you will take
the right actions to win that war. And if all
you're measuring for is the battle of money along the way,
you may win that battle, but you will lose the war.
And we've seen a lot of people, we all know
a lot of people who have done that, who have
won the money battle, but they end up with three
(18:11):
ex wives, they end up with six kids who don't
want to have anything to do with them, They end
up overweight, in a really bad place mentally. All of
those things are an example of winning the battle but
losing the war. And I was determined to not live
that same fate because it feels very avoidable if you
are thoughtful about how you design your life along the way.
And so this book is an outflow of that idea.
(18:34):
It's an outflow of creating the right scoreboard to measure
the things that matter in your life, to define what
really matters to you so that you can take actions
to go and build your life around those things.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
So one of the five types of wealth is time.
And you spoke earlier about the value of time. How
do you convince someone in their teens or twenties or
even thirties, because back then we're all immortal. That's the
advantage of being twenty something Hey, we're going to live forever.
The elapsing of time is just so abstract. How do
(19:07):
you get them to realize time is a finite asset
and it's your most valuable asset.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
I love that question that I asked earlier about trading
lives with Buffett, because it does bring to light the
fact that you do place significant value on your time.
You just don't know it. It's not in the front
of your mind, you know. And look, I think that
some of these tools that people have created, like there's
this calendar, the Momento Mory calendar if you've seen it,
which is you're filling in weeks of your life. So
(19:36):
it's fifty two, you know, squares across and then it's
about eighty or ninety squares going down, and so it's
basically every week of the course of your life, and
you fill it in so that you get this visual representation,
very visceral, raw real of the amount of time that
has passed and the amount of time you have left
on average in your life. And that is again a
little bit morbid, but also a call to action to
(19:59):
take very seriously every single week because you think about
if you zoom out and just think about how many
weeks have you just kind of slept through, done like
not much, not really remembered anything, not really been present
in moments, You've just let them kind of slip by.
They've just come and they've gone. And when you look
at it in the in the perspective of that calendar
(20:21):
and you say like, well, that's a black mark that
I'm never going to get back because I was stressing
about something sillier, I was worried about the future. Thinking
about the past, it really does draw you into the present.
And so I think that is a really effective way.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
You know, I'm fascinated by a book written by Oliver
Berkman on your otherat. All you need to do is
hear the title of the book, four thousand Weeks Time
Management for Mortals. It's really so amazing in that, you know,
he talks about human life is insultingly brief, and you're
(20:57):
talking to the same thing.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Oliver is a wonderful modern day philosopher. He has a
new book called Meditation for Mortals, which is also similarly fantastic,
And I think it is exactly that. Look, I think
that time wealth really what it's about is it is
the freedom to choose who you spend your time with,
where you spend it, how you spend it, when you
(21:19):
trade it for other things. It is about freedom, it
is about control. And people think that money buys freedom.
You think that money buys you that time wealth, but
it's not true. I know plenty of people who work
eighty to one hundred hour weeks, making ten million dollars
a year, all the money in the world, but have
zero freedom, zero control over their calendar, because they've tied
(21:39):
themselves into a life where they need to continue working
that way, to continue making that money, to continue to
feed the lifestyle that they have, and they have no
ability if they don't want to work for a month.
They can have all the money in the world, but
they are stuck in this lifestyle, this treadmill that they're
currently on. And so the insight there is that it's
not money that buys you free them. It is thoughtfully
(22:02):
designed and invested money that gets you the freedom. It
is the actual way that you construct and create your
life that has to be free.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I love the phrase hedonic treadmill because the blind pursuit
of more as opposed to what you describe, which is
understanding what enough means really becomes very significant.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Yeah. One of my favorite stories is that whole idea
of the fisherman and the investment banker. You have a
story of an investment banker goes down to a Mexican
fishing village and he comes upon this fisherman who's on
a boat and has caught a few fish, and he says,
how long did it take you to catch those fish?
The fisherman says, only a little while, and the banker
(22:45):
is confused. He says, why didn't you fish for longer?
The fisherman says, well, I have all I need. I
fish for a little while in the morning, catch a
few fish. Then I go home, have lunch with my wife,
take a nap, and then in the evenings I go
into town and drink water and play music and laugh
with my friends. And the banker's like, you're doing this
all wrong. Here's what you have to do. You have
(23:06):
to fish for longer so you can catch more fish.
Then you use the profits from that to buy a
second boat. You hire people, then they catch fish. Then
you buy a third boat, fourth boat. You create a
huge fishing enterprise. You move to the big city, take
the company public, and you'll make millions. And the fisherman
looks at him and says, and then what, And the
banker says, what do you mean? And then what? Then
you can retire, and you can move to a small
(23:26):
fishing village. You can fish for a few hours in
the morning, and then you can have lunch with your wife,
you take a nap, and then in the evenings you
can go into town drink wine and play music and
laugh with your friends.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
And look.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
The story is typically interpreted as saying that the banker
is wrong and the fisherman is right, and I actually
disagree with that, and I talk about this in the book.
What I think the meaning of the story is is
defining your version of a meaningful life and then going
and building your life with actions around those things. For
(23:57):
the banker, his definition of success version of a meaningful
life might be creating something big, creating a bunch of jobs,
creating something around his purpose, creating things of value. For
the fishermen, he's already living his definition of his meaningful life.
He's already in it, and so neither one of them
is right or wrong. It's about really figuring out where
you are on that spectrum from fishermen to investment banker
(24:20):
and then going and taking action to actually create your
life around that definition.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
So you described this as the scoreboard problem in the book.
It seems that today, more than ever, the scoreboard problem
has become very prevalent. Why do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (24:39):
We are obsessed with tracking and measuring ourselves, and I
think in a world of you know, in a world
where our ability to do that on a real time
basis has become more and more readily available, we become
more and more obsessed. Right Like when you were young,
you could not track your net worth down to them.
(25:00):
You probably just couldn't. I mean, at some point, you know,
if you were buying stock in a company, like you
had to check the daily thing that came up in
the newspaper, like when my dad was a kid, versus
now literally instantaneously you can see changes in your network
on your phone, on your phone, on any of the things.
And I have friends who are obsessed with just checking
that over and over and over again and so again,
when you were measuring that, you are going to focus
(25:22):
on it. It's going to consume all of your energy.
And we are we are wired to want to see
the number go up, so we take actions to do that.
But if the actions to do that are actually pulling
you away from your longer term goal in other areas,
then that's not positive. And that comes from the fact
that the scoreboard is incomplete. It's not that the scoreboard
is completely wrong, it is that it is incomplete. It
(25:44):
is only around money. We need to measure these other
areas of life, the other four types of wealth in the.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Book, So let's talk about other ways of measuring things.
For the book, you interviewed a lot of folks older
in their life seventies, eighties, ninety years old, and a
lot of the answers were kind of fascinating. What surprised
you when in the answers you got I think.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
The most surprising thing or interesting thing was everyone sort
of wants the same thing and it has very little
to do with money. Money is sort of a tool,
but not the goal, which is surprising as a young
person to hear that, because when you're young, you're barraged
and bombarded by information that's like, oh, you know, money, money, money, right,
(26:30):
fast cars, watches, all these fancy things, that's how you're
gonna be happy. But what you learn when you talk
to people at the end, and the advice they would
give to their younger selves is always basically around four things. Time, people, purpose,
and health. Those are the four things that come up
again and again. Money is an enabler to some of those,
but it is not an end in and of itself.
(26:50):
If you ask young people to define their ideal day
at age eighty, no one talks about being on a
private jet by themselves, right. You talk about being in
a place surrounded by people you love, healthy of body
and mind, feeling some sort of meaning or purpose in
the things that you're doing. So it's really about that freedom,
(27:10):
it's really about the people, it's really about your health,
it's about your purpose. Those are the things that were
actually after But then when you ask those people what
they're doing on a daily basis to create that future,
it couldn't be more disjointed. The actions actually aren't leading
you to that future you're trying to create for yourself.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
You mentioned the private jet or the car, or the
watch of the boat. I love the line in the
book there's always going to be a bigger boat. Tell
us about that.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
This is a story from a friend who had sold
his company and made a whole lot of money, you know,
tens maybe one hundred million dollars. And after the event,
he had decided to take a bunch of his closest
family and friends on this yacht trip. He was going
to rent this yacht for a week and take everyone
as a celebration, and he was so excited. It was
so gratifying to him to be able to have created
(27:56):
this moment for everyone. And everyone arrives to go get
on this beautiful boat, and one of his friends as
he walks up, looks over at the mooring next to
it and sees this way bigger boat and says, wow,
I wonder who's on that boat, pointing over at it,
And in that moment, all of the joy of the
experience that my friend had felt melted in the face
(28:18):
of this comparison to this boat. At the next morning,
and the lesson there is a very powerful one, which
is there's always going to be a bigger boat. If
you define all of your worth and success and meaning
around money, there is always going to be a bigger boat.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Let me give you a corollary to that. As a boater,
there's an old joke. Every boater's favorite boat is his
second to last boat. And what that means is like
my first boat was a little dinghy a cost me nothing.
I ended up buying it for a few hundred bucks.
You save a couple of bucks, you get a little
(28:54):
boat with an appboard. During the financial crisis, I bought
a twenty five four foot bow Rider that was a
short sale. In other words, you're buying it before the
bank repossesses it, just paying off the balance. And you know,
I've been looking at thirty foot boats. I've been looking
at I know at friends we're looking at forty foot boats.
And that line means if you're not happy with what
(29:17):
you have, and you just keep going for bigger and
bigger and bigger, eventually you just go right past the
perfect thing that solves your desires, wants, needs and use case.
But it's more expensive, it's more complicated, it's harder to
handle some of these boats. They require a crew, and
you forget, Hey, I just bought this boat to go out,
(29:40):
have a couple of beers with friends, hang out on
a Sunday afternoon on the Sound. Every boater's favorite boat
is their second to last boat. It's I love that
it's very much along the same lines.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
My wife and I talk about this a lot that
all of these sort of quote unquote upgrades that we
think were to make in life are running the risk
of buying yourself a headache. I mean, the house you
go buy, the second home you buy, ends up being
the second home you complain about. I don't know a
(30:13):
single person actually that has a second home that doesn't
complain about some aspect of owning a second home. And so,
like the thing that you bought thinking oh, it was
going to be this amazing set of experiences, you have
to be comfortable with the knowledge that it may just
end up being that headache that you just bought for
yourself in your life. And so I often think about
the value that comes from just avoiding unforced errors in life,
(30:37):
like you know that Charlie Monger, know where you're gonna die,
so that you never go there. And I sometimes think
that like these things that we stretch for thinking that
they are going to materially improve our life or happiness
end up actually being the thing that detracts from it.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
I love the story in the book about Joseph Heller
and Kurt Vonnegut, two of my favorite authors. Catch twenty
two and slaughter House five. Tell us a little bit
about that story.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
That's one of my favorite stories, and it's very simple,
which is that Vonnagut and Heller were at the home
of this billionaire and Vonnaguet says to Heller, Joe, how
does it feel that just yesterday the owner of this
home made more money than your famous book Catch twenty
two made in its entire lifetime. And Heller replies, yes,
(31:21):
but I've got something he'll never have, And Vonnaguet says, yeah,
what's that? And Joseph Heller just says, the knowledge that
I've got enough, And that idea of enough is really
at the heart of this entire book. Really defining what
enough means to you and having that clear as a
picture in your mind is so important, because in the
(31:42):
absence of that knowledge, you just chase whatever more the
world tells you you should want.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Huh, really, really very fascinating. Let's talk a little bit
about fomo. We talked about the bigger boat. You kind
of went through your do I call it quarter life
crist Is During the pandemic, seems like fomo was rampant.
Between bitcoin and meme stocks and just all the other
(32:09):
Mayhem that was going on. What advice would you give,
especially to a younger person who seems to be experiencing Hey,
everybody else has these great things and I don't have.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Them disconnect more often. I think that a lot of
FOMO in the modern day is driven by these things
that we carry in our pockets and the fact that
we're connected at all times to this constant dopamine drip
of information, which frankly is designed to convince you that
(32:40):
you are not doing enough, that you are not doing
the right things that you should be with someone else
doing something else, you know, thinking something else. That is
what gets clicks and what gets shared on social media,
and so that's what you were hit with. And that
is really dangerous because you know, look, it convinces you
to make bad short term decisions. We all know this
(33:02):
that the most valuable things in life, the reason they
are so valuable is because they are hard to earn.
There's no such thing as a shortcut or a hack
to achieve the most meaningful things in life. You cannot
build a meaningful business overnight, you cannot build a meaningful relationship,
you can't build a healthy body. These things have to
(33:23):
be hard. That is why they are valuable. If they
weren't so hard, you actually wouldn't value them as much.
And yet you live in a world where everyone is
seeking the shortcut or the cheat code or the hack
or the quick way to make a million dollars or
ten million dollars. And look, I just saw this incredible
chart that showed that the amount of money that each
(33:43):
generation thinks it requires to make it. And it was
like a chart that basically showed that all the other
generations like boomers, you know, on through millennials, it was
like around two hundred thousand dollars or issh a year,
and then gen Z said, like six hundred thousand is
what you need to make. So there's this crazy thing
that's happening in terms of our expectations of what we
(34:05):
should be earning. And also, by the way, eighty percent
of the gen Zers that were interviewed said that they
thought they would do that. So you have this like
insane expectation that has been created by social media of
how easy it is to make money, and this loss
of the understanding that the only way to make money
is to create value. You create value and you receive value.
The only way to make a lot of money is
(34:26):
to create a lot of value and capture a little
portion of that along the way. And so really the
entire focus needs to just be identify a problem, create
a solution, and then scale that solution. The more scalable,
the more money you'll make.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Huh. Really quite fascinating. So you and I both agree
social media is fairly toxic. I'm curious how significant is
the impact on our psychological wealth and on our social wealth.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
It can be a force for good. And look, you're
talking to someone who has made a career out of
being on social media in some way. And I think
that the difference is whether the content that's being shared
is designed to educate and create value versus make you
feel like you're not enough, make you feel like you're
not doing enough, or it's trying to, you know, sell
(35:16):
some sort of course or community to convince you that
you can get rich quickly, which are clearly bad things.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I want to get rich trading, just take my course.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, totally. And by the way, that's the whole meme
of like the person that's standing in front of the
private jet telling you that you can get rich trading.
They got rich by selling you the course, not by
actually trading. And look, there's an entire legacy of people
that have done that very successfully, by the way, because
it's a tried and true business model apparently, but it's
it's sad. Jonathan Hate you know, Anxious Generation just published
(35:46):
this incredible book, published a book on the exact thing
of just how detrimental social media has been to our
youngest generation. In particular, I recently saw a stat that
teenagers in the United States are spending seventy percent less
time in person with their friends than they were two
decades ago. It's terrifying, amazing, I mean terrifying statistics. And look,
(36:08):
we know scientifically that relationships are the key to a happy,
healthy life. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, this amazing
study done over the course of eighty five years. They
followed the lives of thirteen hundred original participants in about
seven hundred of their descendants. They found that the single
greatest predictor of physical health at age eighty was relationship satisfaction.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
At age fifty, physical health, not even mental physical health.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Your actual healthy aging was determined by your relationship satisfaction
in your youth. And it wasn't your blood pressure. It
wasn't your cholesterol, it wasn't your smoking or drinking habits.
It was how you felt about the people in your life.
And so not investing in your social wealth, as I
talk about it in the book, is something that is
going to come back and hurt you. And I say
(36:51):
investing because that's a very important meta term for the
entire book. We all know Bloomberg Radio. You know the
power of investing in financial assets. You know that if
you invest one hundred dollars today, it's going to compound
in value in your life into the future. You know
that investing one hundred dollars today is better than zero
dollars today because of that compounding that applies to every
single area of your life. Investing a little bit in
(37:13):
your relationships today will compound in value in those relationships
for the long term. And your relationships, I would argue,
are the single greatest investment you can make. They will
pay dividends in your health and in your happiness for
your entire life.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Last point on social media and the toxicity. Morgan Houselites
likes to point out, you see the big house down
the street and the really nice cars in the driveway,
that's what's visible. What you don't see is the actual
debt those people are carrying to pay for that. You
(37:48):
don't know. Are they buying that with cash? Are they
out over their skis. That doesn't show up on social media.
You don't see that on Instagram or TikTok. All you
see are the trappings of wealth and not what that's
actually doing to those people.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Absolutely, you also, you just have to know that you
know when people are status signaling in those ways with
bot status. I talk about in the book. The difference
between bot status and earned status status is important. It's
part of our social hierarchy, how we operate as human beings. Really,
what we're seeking is to have respect and admiration from
(38:23):
people that we care about. And people think they can
buy that, but you cannot. No one is giving you
the lasting, durable respect and admiration for buying a fancy thing.
No one cares, because then we would respect and admire
lottery winners more than anyone else in the world. Look,
you made a billion dollars, Okay, Now I respect and
admire you know. That's not how it works a CEO.
(38:45):
If you want a CEO to respect you, you have
to build something. You have to build something meaningful to
earn the respect of that person. So that is earned status.
It is working on things that you have to earn.
That's why I say that a fit physique is a
better flex than a rolex on your wrist. It's just
the reality because you have to earn it. And so
people that see you know certain things about you, about
(39:07):
the way that you operate as a human being, that
confers upon you the respect and admiration that you seek,
much more than any fancy thing that you can buy.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Huh, really really really fascinating. You know. One of the
things that quote my eye in the book was the
blurb by Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who's called the
book a quote powerful call to action. First of all,
how did you get the book in his hands?
Speaker 3 (39:31):
The way that I know Tim might make you want
to buy more Apple stock. I am not an investor
in Apple. I don't own any Apple stock other than
via like s and P five hundred index funds. But
I am a huge, huge fan of Tim's as a
human being. I met him originally in twenty fourteen when
I first started took my first job. I was working
out at the gym at four forty five in the
(39:51):
morning every single day. He was one of five other
people that was crazy enough to show up at the
gym at four forty five every single day to this day,
I know that he continues and maintains that habit. I'llbeit
at private facility now because he's a big enough figure
that he cannot go to a public gym in the
way that he did then. But it ended up sparking
a friendship and a mentorship that has lasted through these
(40:13):
years he's been He was an incredible force in giving
me the courage to leave the path that I was
on and walk down this non traditional one, and was
kind enough to read and provide that blurbo of support
for the book.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
That's an amazing story. I like, I'm curious, how did
other people treat Tim Cook then COO now CEO of
Apple when he's in the gym he was I.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Think in twenty fourteen, you'd have to fact check me
on this. I think he was the new CEO. I
think maybe the year before he'd become CEO. He was
not treated any differently than anyone in the gym in
that setting, and to the point where I didn't know
who he was for six months. I was talking to
him every day. I wasn't in tech, I wasn't like
(40:59):
in that world. And he doesn't look the way he
looks on stage when he's working out in the gym
in the morning. And so I talk to him every
day for about six months before I knew who he was.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
That's amazing. Yeah, And I you know, I have learned
in this gig that when you speak to people like that,
like the regular people, they really appreciate it. They don't
want to be formed over most of them don't want
to be formed over. A few of them do. So
you're just chatting this guy up for six months.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
And yeah, I mean the thing you learn about people
that have, you know, achieved on that level of success,
is that their entire life is is actually quite lonely
in the sense that everyone that they meet wants something.
Every one that they meet is coming to them with
a handout. And so I actually think it's rare that
they can find environments where they can just feel like
a normal person in that way. And Tim is a
(41:50):
quite introverted person just as a human being. And so
it's actually interesting having seen his journey now he wasn't
as famous then as he is now. I you know,
went to the Berkshire Hathaway Annual meeting last year with him,
and when we walked into the arena to go take
our seats, it was like walking in somewhere with Justin Bieber.
I mean, like I've never experienced anything like that, say
(42:11):
in terms of the people rushing circling the you know,
like it is a very different life than at the
time when he didn't even need security at the time,
like there wasn't a fanfare around it. You know, it
very quickly did start to change. By like twenty seventeen
twenty eighteen, he had become more prominent. People were starting
to like come up to him at the gym and
pitch him on things, et cetera. And so, you know,
(42:32):
I think then his life really started to change based
on the growth that they had experienced.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
So six months later you figure out, oh, this guy
in the gym turns out to be the CEO of
the biggest company in the world. What's the next conversation,
Like I just.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
I don't remember there being a next conversation that was
particularly significant, but I did ask him if he'd be
willing to grab breakfast and just chat about my career
and things that I was trying to learn. I wasn't
looking for a job, so I was very clear, You're like,
I'm not pitching you on something. I would just love
to learn from you. And I think that stands out,
like in a world of people that are very short
term focused and looking for the transaction the networking, right,
(43:11):
I've just never been someone that believes in networking. I
really build and I believe in building fifty year relationships
with people. And I think in ten years of knowing Tim,
the number of times we've talked about Apple, I can
probably count on like one hand. I just don't I
don't really care to be like I'm not. I said,
I don't own stocks.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Like you're wearing a garment watch, I shudn't.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
Tell He'll get mad at me. I'm wearing a Chorros Yeah,
running watch. He'd probably get mad at me. I just
don't really care. What I really care about is learning
from people, and he has incredible access to people and
stories and his understanding of geopolitics, which is an area
I have extreme interest in given my public policy background.
I just feel like I learned so much from being
(43:52):
around him. Plus he's someone that has navigated some incredible
different changes in his own life. In his path, he
was on a traditional path at IB stepped off it
to go to this computer startup Compac, then got picked
up by Steve Jobs at Apple. And I can benefit
so much from just learning and understanding from being around
someone like that.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
And I could tell you firsthand, I have a number
of friends who have kids who are gay or lesbians.
And I recall the statement he released not long after
that I remember was fifteen.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
Or twenty fifteen, sixteen.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, that people when we subsequently discussed it, said hey,
they have friends who were you know, depressed, suicidal and
tim coming and saying what he said made a huge
difference to a lot of young people's lives. It really,
it really was. I don't know how often we all
(44:46):
get to move the needle that much, but it was
so impactful for so many families. All Right, So I
know I only have you for a limited amount of
time before I get to my favorite questions that I
ask all of my guests. I have a couple of
curveballs to throw to you. And if I could have
(45:07):
thrown a carve ball, I would probably have been a
pitcher on the varsity team, but didn't have that skill.
I love this line in your Twitter bio. Gave up
a grand Slam on ESPN and twenty twelve and still
waiting for it to land.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Discuss, Yeah, this is my last hurrah. Maybe it's me
trying to relive the glory or anti glory days. I
was a pitcher at Stanford and this was in the
NCAA Superregionals, which is the final sixteen teams in the country.
And I came into this game at Florida State on ESPN,
my whole family watching all my friends from home, so
(45:48):
excited that I'm pitching on national television, and I gave
up a monster grand slam that ended the game effectively,
and we lost and had to go home. And the
funniest part about it was, like, you know, I was
obviously destroyed, and I'm at the team hotel after I'm
really upset, and I get a text from one of
my best friends in the world just saying like, hey, man,
say flight home. Hope the plane doesn't get hit by
(46:10):
that home run you just gave up. So was the
guy who hit the home I think his name was
Seth Miller. If I were to recall and I don't
think he ended up having a baseball career. He's probably
somewhere out there, so if he hears this shout out
Seth Miller.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, and the other curveball. In the book, you explain
you're half Jewish, half Indians, so no parental pressure there.
But you tell this very poignant story about your father
who's Jewish, telling his parents he's gonna date or marry
a woman who's Indian and he never sees them again.
(46:47):
Tell us about that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
My mom was born and raised in Bangalore, India. My
dad from a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York.
And when they crossed paths at Princeton University, basically a
two week period that they crossed over there, my dad
was finishing his PhD. My mom was just starting a
master's there and they went on a date and my
(47:10):
dad told my mom my parents will never accept us.
And my mom was so blinded by the use of
the word us that she completely missed the message. And
unfortunately he was right. His father was not accepting and
told him that he had to choose between my mom
and his family, and he walked out the door. And
to this day I never met my dad's parents. His
(47:32):
father passed away many years ago. I believe his mother's
still alive. He has three siblings I've never met, first
cousins that I've never met, And you know, in the
midst of something very sad, there was something very beautiful
that came from it, which was this decision to reject
common convention and choose love. Was a decision that had
ripple effects through my entire life and really is ingrained
(47:54):
in my DNA, and I am very grateful for that.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
To say nothing about your entire existence correct being ode
to your dad's decision. But I found that part of
the book to be very poignant, very touching, and that
sort of tone and sincere recognition of the world just
permeates the whole book, and I found it really very
(48:21):
honest and very interesting throughout. Let's jump to our favorite
questions that we ask all of our guests, starting with
what are you streaming these days? What are you listening to?
What's just keeping you entertained?
Speaker 3 (48:33):
My wife and I are really enjoying the new season
of Dexter. Really, yeah, Dexter. I think it's like New
Beginnings or something like that. Yeah, it's great. I loved
Dexter back in the day. So this new new take
on his childhood years is really good.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
We talked about Tim Cook. He's been an incredible mentor
on this journey and you know, felt a lot of
courage to take this different and unique path through him.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Really interesting. What about some books. What are your favorites?
What are you reading right now?
Speaker 3 (49:07):
I would say When Breath Becomes Air is the most
powerful book that I've read.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Why do I know that? Who wrote that?
Speaker 3 (49:14):
Paul Kallanathy. He was a Stanford neurosurgeon who got diagnosed
with terminal cancer and he wrote the book in the
last year of his life. You know, everyone says man
Search for Meeting. I think Man Search for Meeting is wonderful.
I actually think When Breath Becomes Air is a more
impactful book for the modern era.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Anything else and any other things you're reading currently?
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Currently I read a lot of sci fi, to be honest,
let's go to talking to you. Preach into the Choir project.
Hail Mary was one of my favorites. Andy Weir, He's
the author of The Martian, among other things. That's fantastic.
If you're looking for a short story that you can
read in five minutes, go read The Egg by Andy Weir.
You can find it anywhere online. It's incredible.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Huh, really really interesting. Our final two questions what sort
of advice would you give to a recent college grad
interesting in a career in either private equity, finance or
content creation?
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Create value? Just focus on creating value. If you create
value for the people around you, you will receive value
in return. You will always find success. And if you
can do that while just becoming a reliable person, I
think that is the most important thing. My grandfather gave
me a piece of advice when I was younger, and
(50:26):
he said, you will achieve more by being consistently reliable
than by being occasionally extraordinary. And I've never forgotten.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Uh, that's a great line. And I'm trying to figure
out how to make this final question applicable to you,
because really the answer is this book, But I'll ask
it anyway. What do you know about the world today
You wish you knew twenty or so years ago when
you were first getting started.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
That you don't need to accept the default definitions of
success that are handed to you. That you can carve
your own way. You can build a life around the
things that truly matter to you, not what everyone tells
you should matter.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Thank you so Hill for being so generous with your time.
We have been speaking with Sohill Bloom, author of The
Five Types of Wealth of Transformative Guide to Design your
Dream Life. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any
of the five hundred previous podcasts we've done over the
past ten years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,
(51:27):
wherever you find your favorite podcast, and be sure to
check out my new book How Not to Invest The ideas, numbers,
and behaviors that Destroy Wealth, coming March eighteenth. I would
be remiss if I did not thank the Crack team
that helps with these conversations together each week. Meredith Frank
is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my head of research.
(51:51):
Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head
of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barrier Faultz. You've been listening
to Master's Business on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
H
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This week on the podcast strap Yourself In for another
extra special guest, saw Hill bloom is the author of
a new book, The Five Types of Wealth. He's also
worked in both private equity and finish capital, as well
as running his own firm. The book is kind of fascinating,
focusing on not just money as a source of wealth,
(00:38):
but time, your social life, your mental and psychological attitude,
your physical health, as well as your financial wellbeing. That
by focusing and only measuring money, we use a scoreboard
that really doesn't sum up everything that we should be
(01:00):
thinking about. I found a conversation to be really fascinating.
The book is really interesting, and saw Hill is really
knowledgeable person who's lived for a relatively young person, a
fascinating life. Came to a realization that he was wasting
his time, his physical health, and a lot of other
(01:20):
assets that he had, and kind of rejiggered his whole
approach to what he was doing. I thought the discussion
was really fascinating, and I think you will also with
no further ado. My conversation with saw Hill Bloom, the
author of Five Types of Wealth.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to
be able to do this in person.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yet a little unusual sort of building and fun sort
of place relative to what you were used to on
the West Coast. You relocated to the East coast, right,
I did. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk
about that because I was very touched by what you
wrote in the book about that. Let's start out with
your background Stanford bachelor's and economics and sociology and a
(02:03):
master's in public policy. What was the career plan?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
To be honest, I don't think I knew. I've never
been a very good planner my entire life. My dad's
an economics professor, and so economics seemed like a good
undergraduate plan. But frankly, at the time, my real plan
was to go play professional baseball. My entire life had
been a baseball player. I got a scholarship to play
at Stanford, played there, and probably somewhat naively thought that
(02:31):
I could go make a career out of it playing
in the big leagues, and a shoulder injury my end
of my junior season sort of derailed those aspirations, and
I had to find my footing in something else.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So you're almost lucky it happened sooner than later, right.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I think so? I think, you know, in hindsight's twenty
twenty on these things, there's always a silver lining, as
they say, I think, what would have happened if I
had tried to play professionally was I would have ended
up spending you know, three, four or five years toiling
or in some like bus in the middle of nowhere
in the miners, and then ended up having to go
start at you know, twenty eight or twenty nine rather
(03:06):
than twenty two.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Huh. And you worked with Condoalieza Rice as your advisor
at Stanford. That sounds pretty fun. What sort of lessons
did you learn from her?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
I mean, she's a remarkable woman politics aside. I mean,
a woman who grew up in the Deep South in
Alabama and rose to become Secretary of State of the
United States of America. I mean just.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Mind blowing, pretty impressive.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
What she actually built and what she created in her life,
and the intelligence that she displays in the grace with
which she displays it has always wowed me. And I
you know, look, I cold emailed her when I was
at Stanford to try to ask her to be my
master's advisor, and was fortunate that she at least gave
me a chance to go speak to her in person
and convince her to do that. And I got to
(03:53):
take her course that she teaches at Stanford, which was
sort of a small group live basically live action seminar
where you kind of do these simulations of real world
foreign policy events where each person's sort of taking on
a different role, and you go through these simulations like
get woken up at two in the morning to go
through some crisis event. And it was just fascinating to
(04:14):
have someone in the room like her who had actually
been through those things and hear the stories she told
about her battles with Vladimir Putin and whatnot. It was
just incredible.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I can only imagine you spend all four years at
Stanford on a Division one baseball team that's very high level.
I always like to ask people to draw parallels. What
sort of skills and philosophies did you as a college
athlete find applicable to the rest of your life and
(04:45):
or wealth and finance.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Effectively, every single lesson that I feel I have benefited
from in my career was something that I learned in baseball.
I think, first off, teamwork and the ability to manage
multiple diverse personalities in a single environment is a meta
skill for life that rarely gets taught, and a team
forces you to learn that very early and very quickly,
(05:10):
and if you don't, you will not function as a team.
You know, like the understanding that not everyone is wired
the same, that not everyone is motivated by the same things.
That you need to meet people where they are and
then hopefully all rise to the level of the expectations
you have as a group. That is really an important
lesson to learn for life, you know. Look, the other one,
which people talk about often is just the alpha that
(05:32):
you can generate through resilience as a human being, and
it is very, very difficult to develop in a context
outside of sports. And I think that, you know, there's
a reason that a lot of athletes and a lot
of military former military end up being incredible employees and
team members because they have had to battle. They understand
(05:54):
that failure is not final, that it's a learning lesson
that you can take the event, learn the lesson from it,
and move on to the next situation that you face.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Right, It's all about process, not outcome. If you have
an unlucky bounce and you lose, you still got to
get up, dush yourself off, and start all over tomorrow.
Very applicable to trading desks and other things involved in finance.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah, and I think it's the combination here that's important. So,
you know, we live in a world where, especially today,
a lot of people want to focus on the inputs.
And you have all these people like, oh, you know,
you should really care about the inputs and just focus
on feeling proud of the inputs. And I actually agree
with that, uh to some extent, because at the end
(06:34):
of the day, the world will judge you for your outputs.
It doesn't matter whether you feel great about the input
the deep work routine, the morning routine, all of the
rituals that you had, if your output is and athletes
know that, right, we do. We focus on the inputs. Absolutely,
you show up at practice every single day, but we
also know that no one gets an eighth place metal.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
There are no participation.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
No, they're not handing those out. And you have to
learn that in life, you know, Like I have a
two and a half year old son now and I
want him to know that. And it's sort of a
harsh truth of the world that like, yes, your inputs matter,
and I want you to focus on them and be
proud of them and continue to refine them. But at
the end of the day, you are going to be
judged for your outputs.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Huh. Really really interesting. So you end up at Altamont
Capital Partners, which at the time was running about three
and a half billion dollars. How'd you find your way there?
What were you doing?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
So it's a private equity fund in the Bay Area.
It was a spin out from a now much larger
firm called Golden Gate Capital. Incredible group of people, small group.
They were just starting to hire at the analyst level
when I was getting done with school. So you know,
I was originally planning to go join you know, an
investment bank, or go join McKenzie and try to basically
do the two years prior and then go to business
(07:48):
school and then you know, go join a private equity
funder a hedge fund after you know, really with the
thesis that like that's the path that I see successful
and rich people following, So let me do that. I'm
gonna do the two years at Goldman Sachs or McKenzie,
I'll do the business school and then and I'll try
to find a fund. And I met the team at
Altamont and they were hiring at the analyst level, and
it just seemed like a screaming opportunity to go join
(08:09):
straight out of school and have the opportunity to, you know,
really drink from a fire hose, learn in an environment
where you are having to learn on the fly path
that you know nothing about.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So first you transition from sports to finance. Then you
effectively transition from finance to content creation. We mentioned the
Curiosity Chronicles and full disclosure, I've been subscriber for a
long time. I love how you really pull a lot
of really interesting things from all sorts of disparate subjects
(08:43):
together in a very cohesive way. And now you have
this book. Tell us about that second transition.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, this was a more painful one in my own life.
I probably for the first four or five years in
my professional career working in private equity, had an incredible
experience and was learning a ton and you know, working
with a great group of people making money, you know,
doing the things that I thought a successful life looked like.
(09:12):
And along that path, my own priority set and the
things that I was focusing on grew more and more
narrow and entirely focused on making money as the means
to achieving the happy and fulfilling life that I was after.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Let me interrupt you a second just to ask, because
whenever I have this conversation, either on the air or
just talking to people and friends about it, how comfortable
or not so comfortable was your upbringing? It seems like
your father's a professor at a college, Like it wasn't
that you really wanted for anything. I'm always curious what
(09:53):
motivates people to what degree to chase the dollar.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah, we were upper middle class, probably by national standards.
My dad's a professor at Harvard, so he wasn't a
hedge fund guy. We weren't rich. I lived in a town, actually,
I grew up in a town called Weston, Massachusetts, where
a lot of my friend's parents were really successful in finance,
and so I was surrounded by people who had made
a lot of money. And it's always relative, right, And
(10:20):
then when I was a kid, I was like really jealous.
Like my best friend growing up had this incredible house,
his family flew on private jets, they went to all
these places, and you know, like I was very jealous
of all the things that he had that I didn't.
And I never really questioned the fact that, like I
would leave after hanging out with him and he would
have like chef prepared meal by himself in front of
(10:42):
the TV, and I would get to go home and
have dinner with my parents around the dinner table. And
I never questioned whether that actually made me quite rich.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And you mentioned that in the book, that anecdote and lots,
and we'll talk a lot about the book in a bit,
but I found a lot of the personal anecdote and
stories really compelling and very sincere because they you know,
we all have different lived experiences, but there's an overlap.
We all share certain types of things. And I very
(11:13):
much related to a lot of the things you were
talking about. That story was like you don't know what
happens behind closed doors, and you don't know what burdens
people are carrying.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean it's definitely right. I'm glad they
resonated I. But look, all of this to me was
about my own priorities had grown so narrow to the
point where I was focusing on the one thing money
at the expense of everything else, and nothing in this
book is to say that money doesn't matter. And I
(11:44):
really want to be clear about that because I think
there's this common trope of saying, like, you know, you
come out and you say, oh, money doesn't matter. All
these other things are more important, and look, money matters,
and actually the science is pretty clear on this. You know,
money does directly buy happiness up to a point. It
reduces fun mental stresses and burdens, It allows you to
take care of people, create experiences, there's a lot of good.
(12:05):
Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.
And in my own path, and I think on a
lot of people's paths, we grow so narrowly focused on
money as the way to this happy, good life and
we lose sight of the other things. And the reason
that I propose for that is because money is the
thing that we can measure. And as Peter Drucker, the
(12:25):
management theorist, said, what gets measured gets managed means you
optimize around the one thing that you can measure. And
so because money is so measurable, it becomes the thing
that you focus all of your energy and attention around
and often to the detriment of these other things. Money
is your life scoreboard, if you will, and so you know,
you might be winning on that scoreboard, but if that
scoreboard doesn't capture the bigger picture of your life, you
(12:48):
may win the battle but lose the much broader war.
And that was really where I found myself when COVID
hit in March of twenty twenty. COVID hit, we were
stuck at home, and it was the first time that
I had really zoomed out and been able to kind
of see and assess my own life. I was making money,
I was getting promoted, you know, I had some of
(13:08):
the things that you would say or like the trappings
of success, but I was pretty miserable. My relationships, like
with my parents, I was never seeing them. We lived
three thousand miles away. They're getting older and super close
to them my whole life, and I just wasn't seeing them.
My relationship with my sister had ground to a halt.
My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time, unfortunately,
and that was creating strain in our relationship. My health,
(13:31):
I mean I was drinking six or seven nights a week,
not you know, raging, but like it had crept up
on me and that was impacting my sleep, my stress levels.
All of these areas of my life had started to
suffer because my priorities had gotten so focused in on
like money being the exclusive thing that was going to
lead me to the good life. And it all came
to a head for me. May of twenty twenty one,
(13:55):
I went out for a drink with an old friend
and we sat down. He asked how I was doing,
and I said that it had started to get tough
being as far away from my parents as we were.
They'd started to get older and I started to notice
their own mortality. And he asked how old they were
and I said mid sixties. And he asked how often
I saw them. I said about once a year, and
(14:17):
he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're
going to see your parents fifteen 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 the people you love
most in the world is so finite, so countable, that
you can put it onto a few hands shook me
(14:38):
to the core, and I realized in that moment that
we needed to make a change or we were going
to end up in a place where we didn't want
to be. And so I told my wife the next
day that I thought we needed to make a move.
And within forty five days, I had stepped away from
my full time position at the firm, we had sold
our house in California and moved three thousand miles to
(15:00):
be closer to both of our sets of parents.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
That's an amazing story. As I was reading it in
the book, my only reaction was what a devastating realization
to recognize not just your own mortality, but hey, your
parents are a generation or two older than you. They're
not here forever. The thought of only seeing them once
a year and then they're gone pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
It's powerful and devastating, but also empowering and inspiring. And
the reason I say it's empowering and inspiring is because
it reminds you that time is your most precious asset.
It is quite literally the only thing that matters in
the end. And you know, I go ask young people,
would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth one
hundred and thirty billion dollars. He has everything that you want,
(15:48):
one hundred thirty billion dollars, access to anyone in the world,
flies around on private jets, you know, mansions all over
the place. He reads and learns for a living. But
you wouldn't trade lives with him simply because he's ninety.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Five years old.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
There's no way you would agree to trade the amount
of time you have left for all of the billions
that he has. And similarly, he would give anything to
be in your shoes today and have the amount of
time you do. He would give up all of his money.
And so you know in the back of your mind
that time has this incalculable value, and yet on a
daily basis, we sit around wasting it. We scroll around
(16:20):
on our phones, you know, scrolling on TikTok, looking at
social media, comparing ourselves to other people, low value, low
energy tasks. We don't spend time with the people we
care about. We do all these things that are spitting
on the value of our most precious asset. And that
really is the call to action around this idea. It
is to recognize time as your most precious asset to
(16:41):
make a change, because the empowering part of all of
this is you are much more in control of your
time wealth than you think. We took that number the
fifteen times before we die. We made a change. It's
in the hundreds. Now. I see my parents several times
a month. They're a huge part of my son's their
grandson's life. We took an action that created time.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So we were talking earlier about something that was really fascinating.
You said, money isn't nothing, but it can't be the
only thing. And I think that really sums up a
great amount of insight. So tell us how you win
from kind of being unhappy in your West Coast life
(17:25):
and not seeing your family to writing this book. What
was the motivator here?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
It was a manifestation of my own journey, and that
journey was really to try to understand what was a
better way to measure our lives. What was a better scoreboard,
if you will, that we could track and measure against.
And the realization there is that when you measure the
right thing, you take the right actions and you create
(17:51):
the right outcomes. When you measure for the broader war
of the life you're trying to live, you will take
the right actions to win that war. And if all
you're measuring for is the battle of money along the way,
you may win that battle, but you will lose the war.
And we've seen a lot of people, we all know
a lot of people who have done that, who have
won the money battle, but they end up with three
(18:11):
ex wives, they end up with six kids who don't
want to have anything to do with them, They end
up overweight, in a really bad place mentally. All of
those things are an example of winning the battle but
losing the war. And I was determined to not live
that same fate because it feels very avoidable if you
are thoughtful about how you design your life along the way.
And so this book is an outflow of that idea.
(18:34):
It's an outflow of creating the right scoreboard to measure
the things that matter in your life, to define what
really matters to you so that you can take actions
to go and build your life around those things.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
So one of the five types of wealth is time.
And you spoke earlier about the value of time. How
do you convince someone in their teens or twenties or
even thirties, because back then we're all immortal. That's the
advantage of being twenty something Hey, we're going to live forever.
The elapsing of time is just so abstract. How do
(19:07):
you get them to realize time is a finite asset
and it's your most valuable asset.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
I love that question that I asked earlier about trading
lives with Buffett, because it does bring to light the
fact that you do place significant value on your time.
You just don't know it. It's not in the front
of your mind, you know. And look, I think that
some of these tools that people have created, like there's
this calendar, the Momento Mory calendar if you've seen it,
which is you're filling in weeks of your life. So
(19:36):
it's fifty two, you know, squares across and then it's
about eighty or ninety squares going down, and so it's
basically every week of the course of your life, and
you fill it in so that you get this visual representation,
very visceral, raw real of the amount of time that
has passed and the amount of time you have left
on average in your life. And that is again a
little bit morbid, but also a call to action to
(19:59):
take very seriously every single week because you think about
if you zoom out and just think about how many
weeks have you just kind of slept through, done like
not much, not really remembered anything, not really been present
in moments, You've just let them kind of slip by.
They've just come and they've gone. And when you look
at it in the in the perspective of that calendar
(20:21):
and you say like, well, that's a black mark that
I'm never going to get back because I was stressing
about something sillier, I was worried about the future. Thinking
about the past, it really does draw you into the present.
And so I think that is a really effective way.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
You know, I'm fascinated by a book written by Oliver
Berkman on your otherat. All you need to do is
hear the title of the book, four thousand Weeks Time
Management for Mortals. It's really so amazing in that, you know,
he talks about human life is insultingly brief, and you're
(20:57):
talking to the same thing.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Oliver is a wonderful modern day philosopher. He has a
new book called Meditation for Mortals, which is also similarly fantastic,
And I think it is exactly that. Look, I think
that time wealth really what it's about is it is
the freedom to choose who you spend your time with,
where you spend it, how you spend it, when you
(21:19):
trade it for other things. It is about freedom, it
is about control. And people think that money buys freedom.
You think that money buys you that time wealth, but
it's not true. I know plenty of people who work
eighty to one hundred hour weeks, making ten million dollars
a year, all the money in the world, but have
zero freedom, zero control over their calendar, because they've tied
(21:39):
themselves into a life where they need to continue working
that way, to continue making that money, to continue to
feed the lifestyle that they have, and they have no
ability if they don't want to work for a month.
They can have all the money in the world, but
they are stuck in this lifestyle, this treadmill that they're
currently on. And so the insight there is that it's
not money that buys you free them. It is thoughtfully
(22:02):
designed and invested money that gets you the freedom. It
is the actual way that you construct and create your
life that has to be free.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I love the phrase hedonic treadmill because the blind pursuit
of more as opposed to what you describe, which is
understanding what enough means really becomes very significant.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Yeah. One of my favorite stories is that whole idea
of the fisherman and the investment banker. You have a
story of an investment banker goes down to a Mexican
fishing village and he comes upon this fisherman who's on
a boat and has caught a few fish, and he says,
how long did it take you to catch those fish?
The fisherman says, only a little while, and the banker
(22:45):
is confused. He says, why didn't you fish for longer?
The fisherman says, well, I have all I need. I
fish for a little while in the morning, catch a
few fish. Then I go home, have lunch with my wife,
take a nap, and then in the evenings I go
into town and drink water and play music and laugh
with my friends. And the banker's like, you're doing this
all wrong. Here's what you have to do. You have
(23:06):
to fish for longer so you can catch more fish.
Then you use the profits from that to buy a
second boat. You hire people, then they catch fish. Then
you buy a third boat, fourth boat. You create a
huge fishing enterprise. You move to the big city, take
the company public, and you'll make millions. And the fisherman
looks at him and says, and then what, And the
banker says, what do you mean? And then what? Then
you can retire, and you can move to a small
(23:26):
fishing village. You can fish for a few hours in
the morning, and then you can have lunch with your wife,
you take a nap, and then in the evenings you
can go into town drink wine and play music and
laugh with your friends.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
And look.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
The story is typically interpreted as saying that the banker
is wrong and the fisherman is right, and I actually
disagree with that, and I talk about this in the book.
What I think the meaning of the story is is
defining your version of a meaningful life and then going
and building your life with actions around those things. For
(23:57):
the banker, his definition of success version of a meaningful
life might be creating something big, creating a bunch of jobs,
creating something around his purpose, creating things of value. For
the fishermen, he's already living his definition of his meaningful life.
He's already in it, and so neither one of them
is right or wrong. It's about really figuring out where
you are on that spectrum from fishermen to investment banker
(24:20):
and then going and taking action to actually create your
life around that definition.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
So you described this as the scoreboard problem in the book.
It seems that today, more than ever, the scoreboard problem
has become very prevalent. Why do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (24:39):
We are obsessed with tracking and measuring ourselves, and I
think in a world of you know, in a world
where our ability to do that on a real time
basis has become more and more readily available, we become
more and more obsessed. Right Like when you were young,
you could not track your net worth down to them.
(25:00):
You probably just couldn't. I mean, at some point, you know,
if you were buying stock in a company, like you
had to check the daily thing that came up in
the newspaper, like when my dad was a kid, versus
now literally instantaneously you can see changes in your network
on your phone, on your phone, on any of the things.
And I have friends who are obsessed with just checking
that over and over and over again and so again,
when you were measuring that, you are going to focus
(25:22):
on it. It's going to consume all of your energy.
And we are we are wired to want to see
the number go up, so we take actions to do that.
But if the actions to do that are actually pulling
you away from your longer term goal in other areas,
then that's not positive. And that comes from the fact
that the scoreboard is incomplete. It's not that the scoreboard
is completely wrong, it is that it is incomplete. It
(25:44):
is only around money. We need to measure these other
areas of life, the other four types of wealth in the.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Book, So let's talk about other ways of measuring things.
For the book, you interviewed a lot of folks older
in their life seventies, eighties, ninety years old, and a
lot of the answers were kind of fascinating. What surprised
you when in the answers you got I think.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
The most surprising thing or interesting thing was everyone sort
of wants the same thing and it has very little
to do with money. Money is sort of a tool,
but not the goal, which is surprising as a young
person to hear that, because when you're young, you're barraged
and bombarded by information that's like, oh, you know, money, money, money, right,
(26:30):
fast cars, watches, all these fancy things, that's how you're
gonna be happy. But what you learn when you talk
to people at the end, and the advice they would
give to their younger selves is always basically around four things. Time, people, purpose,
and health. Those are the four things that come up
again and again. Money is an enabler to some of those,
but it is not an end in and of itself.
(26:50):
If you ask young people to define their ideal day
at age eighty, no one talks about being on a
private jet by themselves, right. You talk about being in
a place surrounded by people you love, healthy of body
and mind, feeling some sort of meaning or purpose in
the things that you're doing. So it's really about that freedom,
(27:10):
it's really about the people, it's really about your health,
it's about your purpose. Those are the things that were
actually after But then when you ask those people what
they're doing on a daily basis to create that future,
it couldn't be more disjointed. The actions actually aren't leading
you to that future you're trying to create for yourself.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
You mentioned the private jet or the car, or the
watch of the boat. I love the line in the
book there's always going to be a bigger boat. Tell
us about that.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
This is a story from a friend who had sold
his company and made a whole lot of money, you know,
tens maybe one hundred million dollars. And after the event,
he had decided to take a bunch of his closest
family and friends on this yacht trip. He was going
to rent this yacht for a week and take everyone
as a celebration, and he was so excited. It was
so gratifying to him to be able to have created
(27:56):
this moment for everyone. And everyone arrives to go get
on this beautiful boat, and one of his friends as
he walks up, looks over at the mooring next to
it and sees this way bigger boat and says, wow,
I wonder who's on that boat, pointing over at it,
And in that moment, all of the joy of the
experience that my friend had felt melted in the face
(28:18):
of this comparison to this boat. At the next morning,
and the lesson there is a very powerful one, which
is there's always going to be a bigger boat. If
you define all of your worth and success and meaning
around money, there is always going to be a bigger boat.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Let me give you a corollary to that. As a boater,
there's an old joke. Every boater's favorite boat is his
second to last boat. And what that means is like
my first boat was a little dinghy a cost me nothing.
I ended up buying it for a few hundred bucks.
You save a couple of bucks, you get a little
(28:54):
boat with an appboard. During the financial crisis, I bought
a twenty five four foot bow Rider that was a
short sale. In other words, you're buying it before the
bank repossesses it, just paying off the balance. And you know,
I've been looking at thirty foot boats. I've been looking
at I know at friends we're looking at forty foot boats.
And that line means if you're not happy with what
(29:17):
you have, and you just keep going for bigger and
bigger and bigger, eventually you just go right past the
perfect thing that solves your desires, wants, needs and use case.
But it's more expensive, it's more complicated, it's harder to
handle some of these boats. They require a crew, and
you forget, Hey, I just bought this boat to go out,
(29:40):
have a couple of beers with friends, hang out on
a Sunday afternoon on the Sound. Every boater's favorite boat
is their second to last boat. It's I love that
it's very much along the same lines.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
My wife and I talk about this a lot that
all of these sort of quote unquote upgrades that we
think were to make in life are running the risk
of buying yourself a headache. I mean, the house you
go buy, the second home you buy, ends up being
the second home you complain about. I don't know a
(30:13):
single person actually that has a second home that doesn't
complain about some aspect of owning a second home. And so,
like the thing that you bought thinking oh, it was
going to be this amazing set of experiences, you have
to be comfortable with the knowledge that it may just
end up being that headache that you just bought for
yourself in your life. And so I often think about
the value that comes from just avoiding unforced errors in life,
(30:37):
like you know that Charlie Monger, know where you're gonna die,
so that you never go there. And I sometimes think
that like these things that we stretch for thinking that
they are going to materially improve our life or happiness
end up actually being the thing that detracts from it.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
I love the story in the book about Joseph Heller
and Kurt Vonnegut, two of my favorite authors. Catch twenty
two and slaughter House five. Tell us a little bit
about that story.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
That's one of my favorite stories, and it's very simple,
which is that Vonnagut and Heller were at the home
of this billionaire and Vonnaguet says to Heller, Joe, how
does it feel that just yesterday the owner of this
home made more money than your famous book Catch twenty
two made in its entire lifetime. And Heller replies, yes,
(31:21):
but I've got something he'll never have, And Vonnaguet says, yeah,
what's that? And Joseph Heller just says, the knowledge that
I've got enough, And that idea of enough is really
at the heart of this entire book. Really defining what
enough means to you and having that clear as a
picture in your mind is so important, because in the
(31:42):
absence of that knowledge, you just chase whatever more the
world tells you you should want.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Huh, really, really very fascinating. Let's talk a little bit
about fomo. We talked about the bigger boat. You kind
of went through your do I call it quarter life
crist Is During the pandemic, seems like fomo was rampant.
Between bitcoin and meme stocks and just all the other
(32:09):
Mayhem that was going on. What advice would you give,
especially to a younger person who seems to be experiencing Hey,
everybody else has these great things and I don't have.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Them disconnect more often. I think that a lot of
FOMO in the modern day is driven by these things
that we carry in our pockets and the fact that
we're connected at all times to this constant dopamine drip
of information, which frankly is designed to convince you that
(32:40):
you are not doing enough, that you are not doing
the right things that you should be with someone else
doing something else, you know, thinking something else. That is
what gets clicks and what gets shared on social media,
and so that's what you were hit with. And that
is really dangerous because you know, look, it convinces you
to make bad short term decisions. We all know this
(33:02):
that the most valuable things in life, the reason they
are so valuable is because they are hard to earn.
There's no such thing as a shortcut or a hack
to achieve the most meaningful things in life. You cannot
build a meaningful business overnight, you cannot build a meaningful relationship,
you can't build a healthy body. These things have to
(33:23):
be hard. That is why they are valuable. If they
weren't so hard, you actually wouldn't value them as much.
And yet you live in a world where everyone is
seeking the shortcut or the cheat code or the hack
or the quick way to make a million dollars or
ten million dollars. And look, I just saw this incredible
chart that showed that the amount of money that each
(33:43):
generation thinks it requires to make it. And it was
like a chart that basically showed that all the other
generations like boomers, you know, on through millennials, it was
like around two hundred thousand dollars or issh a year,
and then gen Z said, like six hundred thousand is
what you need to make. So there's this crazy thing
that's happening in terms of our expectations of what we
(34:05):
should be earning. And also, by the way, eighty percent
of the gen Zers that were interviewed said that they
thought they would do that. So you have this like
insane expectation that has been created by social media of
how easy it is to make money, and this loss
of the understanding that the only way to make money
is to create value. You create value and you receive value.
The only way to make a lot of money is
(34:26):
to create a lot of value and capture a little
portion of that along the way. And so really the
entire focus needs to just be identify a problem, create
a solution, and then scale that solution. The more scalable,
the more money you'll make.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Huh. Really quite fascinating. So you and I both agree
social media is fairly toxic. I'm curious how significant is
the impact on our psychological wealth and on our social wealth.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
It can be a force for good. And look, you're
talking to someone who has made a career out of
being on social media in some way. And I think
that the difference is whether the content that's being shared
is designed to educate and create value versus make you
feel like you're not enough, make you feel like you're
not doing enough, or it's trying to, you know, sell
(35:16):
some sort of course or community to convince you that
you can get rich quickly, which are clearly bad things.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I want to get rich trading, just take my course.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, totally. And by the way, that's the whole meme
of like the person that's standing in front of the
private jet telling you that you can get rich trading.
They got rich by selling you the course, not by
actually trading. And look, there's an entire legacy of people
that have done that very successfully, by the way, because
it's a tried and true business model apparently, but it's
it's sad. Jonathan Hate you know, Anxious Generation just published
(35:46):
this incredible book, published a book on the exact thing
of just how detrimental social media has been to our
youngest generation. In particular, I recently saw a stat that
teenagers in the United States are spending seventy percent less
time in person with their friends than they were two
decades ago. It's terrifying, amazing, I mean terrifying statistics. And look,
(36:08):
we know scientifically that relationships are the key to a happy,
healthy life. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, this amazing
study done over the course of eighty five years. They
followed the lives of thirteen hundred original participants in about
seven hundred of their descendants. They found that the single
greatest predictor of physical health at age eighty was relationship satisfaction.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
At age fifty, physical health, not even mental physical health.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Your actual healthy aging was determined by your relationship satisfaction
in your youth. And it wasn't your blood pressure. It
wasn't your cholesterol, it wasn't your smoking or drinking habits.
It was how you felt about the people in your life.
And so not investing in your social wealth, as I
talk about it in the book, is something that is
going to come back and hurt you. And I say
(36:51):
investing because that's a very important meta term for the
entire book. We all know Bloomberg Radio. You know the
power of investing in financial assets. You know that if
you invest one hundred dollars today, it's going to compound
in value in your life into the future. You know
that investing one hundred dollars today is better than zero
dollars today because of that compounding that applies to every
single area of your life. Investing a little bit in
(37:13):
your relationships today will compound in value in those relationships
for the long term. And your relationships, I would argue,
are the single greatest investment you can make. They will
pay dividends in your health and in your happiness for
your entire life.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Last point on social media and the toxicity. Morgan Houselites
likes to point out, you see the big house down
the street and the really nice cars in the driveway,
that's what's visible. What you don't see is the actual
debt those people are carrying to pay for that. You
(37:48):
don't know. Are they buying that with cash? Are they
out over their skis. That doesn't show up on social media.
You don't see that on Instagram or TikTok. All you
see are the trappings of wealth and not what that's
actually doing to those people.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Absolutely, you also, you just have to know that you
know when people are status signaling in those ways with
bot status. I talk about in the book. The difference
between bot status and earned status status is important. It's
part of our social hierarchy, how we operate as human beings. Really,
what we're seeking is to have respect and admiration from
(38:23):
people that we care about. And people think they can
buy that, but you cannot. No one is giving you
the lasting, durable respect and admiration for buying a fancy thing.
No one cares, because then we would respect and admire
lottery winners more than anyone else in the world. Look,
you made a billion dollars, Okay, Now I respect and
admire you know. That's not how it works a CEO.
(38:45):
If you want a CEO to respect you, you have
to build something. You have to build something meaningful to
earn the respect of that person. So that is earned status.
It is working on things that you have to earn.
That's why I say that a fit physique is a
better flex than a rolex on your wrist. It's just
the reality because you have to earn it. And so
people that see you know certain things about you, about
(39:07):
the way that you operate as a human being, that
confers upon you the respect and admiration that you seek,
much more than any fancy thing that you can buy.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Huh, really really really fascinating. You know. One of the
things that quote my eye in the book was the
blurb by Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who's called the
book a quote powerful call to action. First of all,
how did you get the book in his hands?
Speaker 3 (39:31):
The way that I know Tim might make you want
to buy more Apple stock. I am not an investor
in Apple. I don't own any Apple stock other than
via like s and P five hundred index funds. But
I am a huge, huge fan of Tim's as a
human being. I met him originally in twenty fourteen when
I first started took my first job. I was working
out at the gym at four forty five in the
(39:51):
morning every single day. He was one of five other
people that was crazy enough to show up at the
gym at four forty five every single day to this day,
I know that he continues and maintains that habit. I'llbeit
at private facility now because he's a big enough figure
that he cannot go to a public gym in the
way that he did then. But it ended up sparking
a friendship and a mentorship that has lasted through these
(40:13):
years he's been He was an incredible force in giving
me the courage to leave the path that I was
on and walk down this non traditional one, and was
kind enough to read and provide that blurbo of support
for the book.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
That's an amazing story. I like, I'm curious, how did
other people treat Tim Cook then COO now CEO of
Apple when he's in the gym he was I.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Think in twenty fourteen, you'd have to fact check me
on this. I think he was the new CEO. I
think maybe the year before he'd become CEO. He was
not treated any differently than anyone in the gym in
that setting, and to the point where I didn't know
who he was for six months. I was talking to
him every day. I wasn't in tech, I wasn't like
(40:59):
in that world. And he doesn't look the way he
looks on stage when he's working out in the gym
in the morning. And so I talk to him every
day for about six months before I knew who he was.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
That's amazing. Yeah, And I you know, I have learned
in this gig that when you speak to people like that,
like the regular people, they really appreciate it. They don't
want to be formed over most of them don't want
to be formed over. A few of them do. So
you're just chatting this guy up for six months.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
And yeah, I mean the thing you learn about people
that have, you know, achieved on that level of success,
is that their entire life is is actually quite lonely
in the sense that everyone that they meet wants something.
Every one that they meet is coming to them with
a handout. And so I actually think it's rare that
they can find environments where they can just feel like
a normal person in that way. And Tim is a
(41:50):
quite introverted person just as a human being. And so
it's actually interesting having seen his journey now he wasn't
as famous then as he is now. I you know,
went to the Berkshire Hathaway Annual meeting last year with him,
and when we walked into the arena to go take
our seats, it was like walking in somewhere with Justin Bieber.
I mean, like I've never experienced anything like that, say
(42:11):
in terms of the people rushing circling the you know,
like it is a very different life than at the
time when he didn't even need security at the time,
like there wasn't a fanfare around it. You know, it
very quickly did start to change. By like twenty seventeen
twenty eighteen, he had become more prominent. People were starting
to like come up to him at the gym and
pitch him on things, et cetera. And so, you know,
(42:32):
I think then his life really started to change based
on the growth that they had experienced.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
So six months later you figure out, oh, this guy
in the gym turns out to be the CEO of
the biggest company in the world. What's the next conversation,
Like I just.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
I don't remember there being a next conversation that was
particularly significant, but I did ask him if he'd be
willing to grab breakfast and just chat about my career
and things that I was trying to learn. I wasn't
looking for a job, so I was very clear, You're like,
I'm not pitching you on something. I would just love
to learn from you. And I think that stands out,
like in a world of people that are very short
term focused and looking for the transaction the networking, right,
(43:11):
I've just never been someone that believes in networking. I
really build and I believe in building fifty year relationships
with people. And I think in ten years of knowing Tim,
the number of times we've talked about Apple, I can
probably count on like one hand. I just don't I
don't really care to be like I'm not. I said,
I don't own stocks.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Like you're wearing a garment watch, I shudn't.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
Tell He'll get mad at me. I'm wearing a Chorros Yeah,
running watch. He'd probably get mad at me. I just
don't really care. What I really care about is learning
from people, and he has incredible access to people and
stories and his understanding of geopolitics, which is an area
I have extreme interest in given my public policy background.
I just feel like I learned so much from being
(43:52):
around him. Plus he's someone that has navigated some incredible
different changes in his own life. In his path, he
was on a traditional path at IB stepped off it
to go to this computer startup Compac, then got picked
up by Steve Jobs at Apple. And I can benefit
so much from just learning and understanding from being around
someone like that.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
And I could tell you firsthand, I have a number
of friends who have kids who are gay or lesbians.
And I recall the statement he released not long after
that I remember was fifteen.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
Or twenty fifteen, sixteen.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, that people when we subsequently discussed it, said hey,
they have friends who were you know, depressed, suicidal and
tim coming and saying what he said made a huge
difference to a lot of young people's lives. It really,
it really was. I don't know how often we all
(44:46):
get to move the needle that much, but it was
so impactful for so many families. All Right, So I
know I only have you for a limited amount of
time before I get to my favorite questions that I
ask all of my guests. I have a couple of
curveballs to throw to you. And if I could have
(45:07):
thrown a carve ball, I would probably have been a
pitcher on the varsity team, but didn't have that skill.
I love this line in your Twitter bio. Gave up
a grand Slam on ESPN and twenty twelve and still
waiting for it to land.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Discuss, Yeah, this is my last hurrah. Maybe it's me
trying to relive the glory or anti glory days. I
was a pitcher at Stanford and this was in the
NCAA Superregionals, which is the final sixteen teams in the country.
And I came into this game at Florida State on ESPN,
my whole family watching all my friends from home, so
(45:48):
excited that I'm pitching on national television, and I gave
up a monster grand slam that ended the game effectively,
and we lost and had to go home. And the
funniest part about it was, like, you know, I was
obviously destroyed, and I'm at the team hotel after I'm
really upset, and I get a text from one of
my best friends in the world just saying like, hey, man,
say flight home. Hope the plane doesn't get hit by
(46:10):
that home run you just gave up. So was the
guy who hit the home I think his name was
Seth Miller. If I were to recall and I don't
think he ended up having a baseball career. He's probably
somewhere out there, so if he hears this shout out
Seth Miller.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, and the other curveball. In the book, you explain
you're half Jewish, half Indians, so no parental pressure there.
But you tell this very poignant story about your father
who's Jewish, telling his parents he's gonna date or marry
a woman who's Indian and he never sees them again.
(46:47):
Tell us about that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
My mom was born and raised in Bangalore, India. My
dad from a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York.
And when they crossed paths at Princeton University, basically a
two week period that they crossed over there, my dad
was finishing his PhD. My mom was just starting a
master's there and they went on a date and my
(47:10):
dad told my mom my parents will never accept us.
And my mom was so blinded by the use of
the word us that she completely missed the message. And
unfortunately he was right. His father was not accepting and
told him that he had to choose between my mom
and his family, and he walked out the door. And
to this day I never met my dad's parents. His
(47:32):
father passed away many years ago. I believe his mother's
still alive. He has three siblings I've never met, first
cousins that I've never met, And you know, in the
midst of something very sad, there was something very beautiful
that came from it, which was this decision to reject
common convention and choose love. Was a decision that had
ripple effects through my entire life and really is ingrained
(47:54):
in my DNA, and I am very grateful for that.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
To say nothing about your entire existence correct being ode
to your dad's decision. But I found that part of
the book to be very poignant, very touching, and that
sort of tone and sincere recognition of the world just
permeates the whole book, and I found it really very
(48:21):
honest and very interesting throughout. Let's jump to our favorite
questions that we ask all of our guests, starting with
what are you streaming these days? What are you listening to?
What's just keeping you entertained?
Speaker 3 (48:33):
My wife and I are really enjoying the new season
of Dexter. Really, yeah, Dexter. I think it's like New
Beginnings or something like that. Yeah, it's great. I loved
Dexter back in the day. So this new new take
on his childhood years is really good.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
We talked about Tim Cook. He's been an incredible mentor
on this journey and you know, felt a lot of
courage to take this different and unique path through him.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Really interesting. What about some books. What are your favorites?
What are you reading right now?
Speaker 3 (49:07):
I would say When Breath Becomes Air is the most
powerful book that I've read.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Why do I know that? Who wrote that?
Speaker 3 (49:14):
Paul Kallanathy. He was a Stanford neurosurgeon who got diagnosed
with terminal cancer and he wrote the book in the
last year of his life. You know, everyone says man
Search for Meeting. I think Man Search for Meeting is wonderful.
I actually think When Breath Becomes Air is a more
impactful book for the modern era.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Anything else and any other things you're reading currently?
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Currently I read a lot of sci fi, to be honest,
let's go to talking to you. Preach into the Choir project.
Hail Mary was one of my favorites. Andy Weir, He's
the author of The Martian, among other things. That's fantastic.
If you're looking for a short story that you can
read in five minutes, go read The Egg by Andy Weir.
You can find it anywhere online. It's incredible.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Huh, really really interesting. Our final two questions what sort
of advice would you give to a recent college grad
interesting in a career in either private equity, finance or
content creation?
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Create value? Just focus on creating value. If you create
value for the people around you, you will receive value
in return. You will always find success. And if you
can do that while just becoming a reliable person, I
think that is the most important thing. My grandfather gave
me a piece of advice when I was younger, and
(50:26):
he said, you will achieve more by being consistently reliable
than by being occasionally extraordinary. And I've never forgotten.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Uh, that's a great line. And I'm trying to figure
out how to make this final question applicable to you,
because really the answer is this book, But I'll ask
it anyway. What do you know about the world today
You wish you knew twenty or so years ago when
you were first getting started.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
That you don't need to accept the default definitions of
success that are handed to you. That you can carve
your own way. You can build a life around the
things that truly matter to you, not what everyone tells
you should matter.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Thank you so Hill for being so generous with your time.
We have been speaking with Sohill Bloom, author of The
Five Types of Wealth of Transformative Guide to Design your
Dream Life. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any
of the five hundred previous podcasts we've done over the
past ten years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,
(51:27):
wherever you find your favorite podcast, and be sure to
check out my new book How Not to Invest The ideas, numbers,
and behaviors that Destroy Wealth, coming March eighteenth. I would
be remiss if I did not thank the Crack team
that helps with these conversations together each week. Meredith Frank
is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my head of research.
(51:51):
Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head
of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barrier Faultz. You've been listening
to Master's Business on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
H
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