A (6:38)

This is a thrill. I am so happy to be here.

B (6:41)

I have to say, from the start, you wrote a really lovely book. When I read it, I had a very specific feeling of I wish I was in New York getting drinks with Sawhill tomorrow. Because I don't just have questions about this book. I want to talk about it. Like, the ideas are chewy and applicable and generative in a really wonderful way. So while I am not holding a martini at the moment, I do hope that we can sort of capture that VI vibe as we get into it. Your book begins with what was, for me, a very inspiring and yet jarring revelation that you had with a friend over drinks in 2021. Tell me about those drinks.

A (7:19)

I was out for a drink with this old friend, this is May of 2021. And we sat down for what I thought was just going to be a standard catch up. And we sat down and he asked me how I was doing. And I gave him the standard, I'm good, busy. That we all have sort of grown so accustomed to the stock response. And he was a good enough friend that he sort of just looked through me and squinted, looking for more. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents, who were out on the East Coast. We were living in California, 3,000 miles away. My parents had started to get older. They were starting to show chinks in the armor, if you will, starting to really recognize their age for the first time. And he asked how old they were, and I said about mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them, and I said, about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you care about most in the world, is that finite and countable, was just jarring, as you said.

B (8:30)

And this really hit me for a couple reasons. First, my parents passed away in my late 20s from cancer in a very short period of time. And my relationship with them was really special in that sort of beautiful and rich and uncomplicated way that characterizes the best relationships. But these were both diagnoses of cancer, where the diagnosis itself was close to an endpoint, close to a death sentence. And a really strange thing happens with a terminal diagnosis in the family, which is that everybody knows the end is close and everybody understands the value of time. Right? The counting exercise that became apparent to you at that table over drinks suddenly knocks in for everyone at the same time. And it's interesting because there's so many experiences and relations, relationships where we don't have that awareness or that radical clarity of insight. Right. For the most part, we don't have a sense of finality with our experiences. This sense of this might never happen again, this might be the last time. And maybe it's us going to Italy or Disneyland. Maybe it's a high school reunion. For me, I think maybe it's teaching my daughter, 18 months old to say banana rather than baba for breakfast. There's a last time for everything. And I think you found a really beautiful way of fixing that point. So how did that conversation change your life?

A (10:04)

I appreciate you sharing that. Let me just say I. I do think there's such a beauty in the impermanence of these things. It was really that awareness that was sparked in me by that one conversation, by that really brutally, devastatingly simple math that sparked the change that we created afterwards. To understand that change, you have to understand that I had spent the prior seven years of my life and career chasing the very standard definition of success that we've all grown accustomed to, which is money. I had basically thought for most of my life, which is something that I think we get indoctrinated into, that all of my success and happiness in life was on the other side of some dollar sign, some amount of money where I was going to wake up one day and feel like I lived in this stress free, happy, fulfilled future. And it's called the arrival fallacy. At every point when you go reach that thing that you've propped up as your destination, you get there and you inevitably feel this kind of sort of dopamine infused euphoria for a moment and then this sense of dread of what's next. Is this really it wasn't I supposed to feel good now and you go chase off the next more that's been handed to you? And I did that over and over and over again. And at every step, other areas of my life had started to suffer. The biggest one was relationships. I wasn't seeing my parents very much at all, my sister in my relationship had ground to a halt. Most Importantly, my relationship with my wife had really become strained. We were struggling to conceive at the time, and it was creating a challenge in our life and in our relationship. For the first time, you know, my health, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were really struggling. And it was this point in time where I had a realization in that moment that on the outside looking in, I was winning the game. I was doing the things that everyone celebrates as being successful as like, you're 30 and you're doing the things that everyone told you you should want. And yet I had this realization that if that was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And it was that conversation that cemented that idea for me. It was the, you know, Ernest Hemingway, gradually, then suddenly, it was gradually over the course of a period. And then suddenly, with that one convers, insight was cemented, and I went home the next day. My wife and I had a conversation around what we really wanted, what were our real priorities? What were we really trying to build out of our Life. And within 45 days, we made a dramatic change. We sold our house in California. I left my job that I had been at for seven years. A great job, great group of colleagues, and we moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to our both of our sets of parents. And in that moment, we had done something very powerful. If you zoom in out, we had taken that number. We had gotten this awareness of the amount of time we had left with these people that we cared about, and we had taken an action that fundamentally created time. That number 15 is now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a huge part of my son's, Their grandson's life. And so we had instilled this idea and cemented in our brains this idea that we are actually in much more control of our time than we think. We can actually create time for the things that we really care about through taking action, through doing something.

B (13:27)

You connect this revelation about your parents to thinking about an expansive view of wealth that goes beyond what most people think of as wealth, which is really financial wealth. You say no. When you really think about what matters in life, what makes us feel fulfilled inside the seconds and the minutes of being alive. It's not just money. Money is the easiest thing to chase, maybe because it's the easiest thing to count, right, to amass and to compare. But too often, the fact that money is countable and quantifiable and comparable means it's what people spend their lives counting and comparing when the real game is to be won elsewhere. So take this moment to give us the lay of the land. What are the five types of wealth?

A (14:16)

The five types of wealth are one, time wealth. This is all about the freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. It's about that awareness of the finite, impermanent nature of your time, of time as your most precious asset. The second type is social wealth, all about your relationships, the close, few, deep relationships, and then the connection to something bigger than yourself, broader circles that expand beyond. The third type is mental wealth, all about purpose, growth, and the ability to create the space necessary to wrestle with some of the bigger, more unanswerable questions in your life, whether through religion, spirituality, meditation, solitude, whatnot. The fourth type is physical wealth, about your health and vitality. It's about taking the controllable actions on a daily basis to fight against the natural decay and atrophy that your body will go through with age. And then the fifth type is financial wealth, the one that we all know about net worth, but with the specific nuance of really understanding your definition of enough, what it means to have enough financially, with the recognition that your expectations are your single greatest financial liability.

B (15:26)

So to me, the most interesting and important and really beautifully conceptual scoop of the book is this concept of time wealth. Here's the rub. It's really easy to measure financial wealth, whether you consider that ability to measure it good or bad. You can look at a number in a bank account. Number go up good, number go down bad. With time wealth, it's much more complicated, right? Is it just about adding minutes to your life? Is it just about adding leisure time to your life? It's not entirely clear what you're optimizing for. And while everybody can over optimize, it is helpful to have a metric to gun for. So what's the right scoreboard for what you call time wealth? What should people who want to evaluate their own time wealth and get better at this, what should they be looking at?

A (16:16)

I really think that what we're all going for with time wealth is the freedom to choose. And when I define time wealth, that's why I focus on that. It's the freedom to choose how you spend your time. If you choose to spend your time working 100 hours a week on a business that you really care about, on trying to go build a business that changes the world, that is still time wealth. If you choose to spend Your time doing nothing but playing the guitar and sitting on the couch. That is also time wealth. You have the freedom to choose, but working towards that freedom is the path towards time wealth. I know plenty of people who have a whole ton of money but do not have time wealth. And that is a fundamental misconception that a lot of people have. You see that all over the Internet. Money buys freedom. That's not really true. Money does not equal freedom. Thoughtfully used money can be used to create a level of freedom, but money can also just be something that keeps you on this treadmill. I know plenty of people and I'm sure you do that work in the hedge fund world and private equity and finance that make $10 million a year, tons and tons of money, more money than you could know what to do with. But they do not have freedom. If they get a phone call at 10pm on a Saturday, they have to go to the office or they have to go do the thing, whatever it is. So it's not the money that equals the freedom, it's the actual understanding of designing the freedom into your life that creates the freedom.

B (17:36)

There's a tension I think here that's really interesting and it's an illuminating tension to be clear, right? It's not just the raw minutes of life that's time freedom. It's not just the amount of leisure time or even really just the amount of control. It's something a little bit deeper and more sophisticated. You quote from a UCLA paper that I love from 2021 by Cassie Holmes et al that reviews 35,000Americans and asks them about how much free time they have and then asks them about their self described life satisfaction. And the reason this paper is so interesting is that it finds that the relationship between free time and happiness is not linear. It's a U curve. Too much free time is anxiety or it's unemployment, maybe that's being indicated there. Too little free time is burnout. There's something in the middle. There's something about having just the right amount of leisure and maybe to your point, just the right amount of control. That seems really indicative of this idea that you're scraping up against called time freedom. So maybe help me understand why this U shaped curve is so important for grasping what's at the heart of time wealth.

A (18:50)

I love that you've attached to this point because I think it's a subtle one from the book that is very important, which is this idea of the Goldilocks level, that there is a Goldilocks level of just the right amount of free time that is really creating that level of satisfaction and happiness in your life. And I think that the idea of a Goldilocks level applies to a lot of different areas of your life as well. It's like just the right amount of strain in, you know, physical pursuits is good. If you have too much, you're getting injured. If you have too little, you're not making progress. You have to find that balance point that applies across every layer of life and it applies to time. You want to have that Goldilocks level where you have the freedom to pursue your curiosity, you have the freedom to pursue these hobbies that have no potential utility. But you don't have so much free time that you're aimless, that you're purposeless, that you sort of feel like you're lacking, that you don't know what you're going to do on a daily bas. Too much free time, interestingly, I would argue, is a more miserable state for most people than too little. The number of people that you meet who have achieved significant financial success, whether it is former entrepreneurs who have had a windfall event or whether it's former athletes and have had made an enormous amount of earnings during their career and then experience a tremendous amount of misery on the back end of that when they feel they actually don't understand what they're doing on a daily basis is fascinating. And I interviewed hundreds of people like that for the book and as part of the process. One entrepreneur in particular, who is now a billionaire, talked about the fact that the most miserable day of his life was the day after he sold his first company for an enormous amount of money because he didn't know what to do with his time. He didn't know what to do. And the next day he texted all of his former employees and said, we're getting the gang back together. And they went off to go build something he actually needed to create and find that purpose, something that he was going to spend that time on. It's the reason that former athletes and former military have such a struggle with transitioning into their next phase of life, of understanding your identity in that next period. So that time point, finding that for yourself, understanding where you are on it today and which direction you actually need to go is really informative and thinking about what is the cure to the current time ailment you actually have today.

B (21:09)

This, this follow up question might be a little bit of like a second cocktail question, tends to be when I get a little bit overly philosophical. But there's another tension in this book. That I find really interesting. And it's appropriate that there's a tension because. Because is complicated. Some of your definitions of wealth are about this word you keep using. Freedom. Freedom of attention, freedom from distraction, freedom from poverty. I mean, you've used examples of a lot of rich people figuring out how to use their wealth in order to build happiness. There's way more low income people who are figuring out how to use income to get to a level where they can even make these decisions. So clearly freedom is a key agent in these calculations. But life is also about, I think, interdependence and duty and responsibility, which is the opposite of freedom or if not the exact opposite of freedom, certainly distinct right. Marriage is not freedom. There's a choice to limit freedom that ironically, it might make people feel more free, but you're choosing something in that moment that's actually the opposite of certainly sexual freedom. Parenthood is not freedom. I certainly don't feel free when I have to change my baby's diapers. I might be happy. It might feel deep. I don't feel free even adhering. I've seen lots of videos of you working out in the morning, adhering to a workout regimen when you're exhausted. And maybe you had an extra cocktail the previous night. That doesn't feel like freedom either. So there's something. We're talking about intersections here, right? The relationship between leisure and work crossing at this golden mean this Goldilocks moment. How does your thinking about pluralistic wealth, which is what this book is all about, there's many kinds of wealth. How does your thinking about pluralistic wealth grapple with this tension between freedom and duty in life?

A (23:05)

I love the second cocktail question. This is fun. I really think that you need to expand your time horizon when you run into those kind of tensions. A lot of the things you're talking about are situations where I would argue freedom in the short term and freedom in the long term are fundamentally dislocated in the sense that, yes, in the short term, waking up at 4am to do a cold plunge and a workout may not feel particularly free. But in the long term, it creates a level of freedom in your ability to enjoy your physical wealth in your old age. Similarly, marriage, children, all of these things are things that are hard inherently in the short term and may actually not be the highest happiness creators or pleasure creators in a short, short term time window. But in a long term time window, I would argue they are the things that actually create the freedom to enjoy your life in a more holistic sense. Of being. And so I think that that sort of comes down to this bit of a meme that you see now on the Internet, which is like this idea of choose your hard. You know, it's very hard to find a life of purpose. You know, it's very hard to engage and find a life of purpose. It's also very hard to not have one. And so you have to choose your hard. It's very hard to build a body that is fit and healthy for a long time, but it's also very hard to see your body atrophy. Choose your hard. And I think that that applies to a lot of things in life. And so I love that idea of just expand your time horizon on, on the plane on which you are thinking about freedom. Because when you zoo of these areas and you notice it in the book, I do a lot of, you know, sort of mental time travel exercises where you're thinking about a future state that you want to create and then thinking about, okay, zoom back to the present. Reverse engineer. What are the actions that I'm taking in the present to create that future that I say I desire? And are my actions actually borne out in the in, or are they actually going to create that future that I am seeking to build? Yes or no? And if no, what are the actions that I need to change? That is fundamentally a representation of a simple fact, which is for most people, there are two types of priorities that they have. There are the priorities they say they have, and then there are the priorities their actions show they have. And there's a gap between the two. And if you are acting in favor of very, very short term freedom, you are probably not acting in favor of your long term freedom in the sense of your broader life on priorities or.

B (25:35)

Two different kinds of priorities. You're reminding me that I went to a writer's retreat last year and it was all off the record. So I can't tell you exactly who came up with this idea. But he said he sometimes does these meetings where he'll get people thinking with these provocative questions. And the provocative question that I have not forgotten in the year since this writer's meeting was imagine that there's an alien that can watch you watch every moment of your behavior. And at the end of two months of studying your behavior and chronicling it, the alien has to determine what your values are. How do the aliens values match up with your actual values? And we end up joking that this was a little bit like the alien of shame. Right? Because the gap between the observed values and the stated values. That's the gap of shame. And I think it's interesting to think exactly this, that we have priorities that we say and we have priorities that we do. It's true in politics as well, but I'm not going to take us down that road. I really want to talk about the American time you survey and some of the work that you did with it. At us is one of my favorite surveys. It's run by the federal government, asks Americans how they spend their time. And some analysis of ATUS data looks at time spent with various people in our lives. And it turns out that time spent with your parents peaks around age 18. Time spent with friends peaks around age 22. Time spent with children peaks around age 45. Time spent with your partner peaks around age 70. And time spent alone peaks when you die. This is one of those charts that's made its way around the world, around the Internet, in a bunch of different places. I wonder, when you look at that data of time spent peaking with the most important people in our life, what do you take from that?

A (27:25)

The ancient Greeks had two words for time. There was Kronos, which was this idea of quantitative linear time. And then there was Kairos, which was this idea that not all time is created equal. There are certain moments or certain windows that actually have higher importance. They're more textured, they're more meaningful. As soon as I see those charts, that is what I think about. I think about kairos time, the idea that there are windows, specific windows of your life where certain people occupy an outsized role, where that relationship is actually more meaningful. And you see that so visually in those charts with your parents. I think the stat is that 95% of the time you spend with your parents is done by the time you're 18 years old. Terrifying to think about. With kids, you have a 10 year window during which you are your child's favorite person in the world. After that, they have new favorite people. They have their friends, best friends, boyfriends, girlfriends. They get married, they have partners of their own. And you never occupy that same place in their world. You might be close to them, but you're never in that magic window. And those windows of time are devastatingly short, much shorter than we actually care to admit. And also we are more in control of them than we think. Those curves and those charts that I show in the book are eye opening, but they're also averages. And as we know, averages are prone to being skewed. And you can be one of those people that skews them for the better in your life. You can be the person that bends that curve through the actions that you take. So despite what you may see on the chart about your time with children, you can actually take actions and be the catalyst to invest in those relationships in a way that bends that curve in your own life. And that really is the empowering notion, or the mindset shift, if you will, that I want people to understand when they think about both time wealth and social wealth. That with financial wealth, we all know fundamentally that investing a little bit today compounds and builds towards a future that we want to put a hundred dollars away in the S&P 500. That's better than zero because it's going to compound and stack up into our future. Same principle applies to your relationships. We don't think that way in a natural state, but the same principle applies. Doing the one tiny thing today is better than doing nothing. You don't need to be having the optimal situation in order for the thing to be beneficial. So sending the one text to the friend when you're thinking about them calling your mom when you have two minutes free in the car is better than doing nothing. All of those tiny little actions compound positively, but you need to start thinking about those things as investments in the future, just in the same way that you do with financial wealth.

B (30:10)

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A (33:40)

I love this concept of social fitness and I've heard Dr. Robert Waldinger refer to a similar phrase in some of his work. Harvard Study of Adult Development Director I.

B (33:50)

Should be clear, I'm stealing it from Robert. This is his idea.

A (33:54)

Oh, it is. I just think it's such a, it's a fundamentally, really important term in the, in the way it's phrased because it reminds you that you can invest in it. And the way that I have thought about benchmarking or building your own, first off, I should say it is all individual because as you know, loneliness is an individual experience. You know, some people will feel lonely in a room that's crowded. Others will feel lonely if they're stuck at home by themselves. It is entirely individual. And so benchmarking for yourself is the important thing. And building against this baseline. I have always really thought about relationship and social wealth as being about the few close, deep relationships and then the connection to something bigger than the self. And what I mean by that is those few people that you can call in the middle of the night if something's wrong, you know, that is usually countable on one hand. And then the connection to something that extends beyond the self, the connection to a community or people that you may have never actually met in person yet. Yet. But where you feel a connection to some sort of social organization at a local community, regional, spiritual level, that is something bigger than you, that you are connected to some, some level of social connection there. I think the combination of those two builds a life of social wealth. The way I've personally thought of tracking against this is using this concept of a relationship map. And I, I break this down in the book and I'm just a fan of two by two grids. It's sort of the nerd in me. And I think I originally saw Dr. Robert Waldinger and with their work in the Good Life, this idea of creating a grid of frequency on one axis and then quality on another axis, and mapping your kind of core social relationships according to that grid. So you take a look at what are the relationships that are highly frequent, meaning you interact with them often. And very supportive, high quality relationships, people that truly lift you up, looking at that as like, say, call that your green zone. Then thinking about the relationships that are highly frequent and demeaning, people that are really toxic in your life that you probably need to lean away from. And then thinking about the people that are highly supportive but infrequent, you're not seeing them often enough. I think of social wealth as existing when you have a world where you are able to slowly move the majority of your relationships into that top right into the part where you are having frequent connection with the people that are truly supportive. It's not about having a million people or names in that bucket. It's about having the majority of your social connections exist in that spot. Because for me it might be I need 100 if I'm super extroverted. For you, it might be 5 if you're introverted. But the point is that the majority of your connections end up being in that supportive and highly frequent bucket.

B (36:40)

You spent a lot of time, clearly, with some people who are very well off. I mean, the first blurb on your book is Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. If social wealth is so important, why do you think so many people, including some of the richest people in this country, are so bad at it? Why is social wealth hard even for people who have financial wealth?

A (37:04)

You're not really taught ever how to make friends. The idea of friendship and the idea of connection is something that people generally think is just done in school or through work. And no one really teaches you or talks to you, you about how to make friends as an adult outside of work. So what happens to most people is they have their friends from high school and college, then they go into the working world and their friends are all the people that they have through work. And those professional relationships may or may not be like true social relationships. They may actually be more kind of quid pro quo or as Arthur Brooks calls them, deal friends. And you lose sight of the ability to actually go and make and build new relationships across these different seasons of your life. And the real challenge with that, that is you change across the seasons of your life. And if you are not building and cultivating new connections as you've changed, you can feel lonely even though you have a bunch of friends from all different phases of your life, because you actually haven't opened up. They don't know you in the current context. I have friends from my baseball playing days who, frankly, I was hiding from the world for many years of my life, a deeply insecure person playing a role rather than being my authentic self. And those people know me in that context. And so the idea that that same relationship would have the same level of depth as someone who I met more recently, who I've been able to open up to about who I actually am as a person is a little bit of a fallacy. You actually need to be building new relationships throughout your life because you are changing and you are a changing creature. But that is not something you're ever really taught. You're not really. We don't really know how do I go about that as an adult building those relationships?

B (38:46)

Is it that we're not taught how to build friendships, which implies a deficit of knowledge about friendship formation? Or is it also that friendship is really expensive from a time standpoint it takes tens of hours to build true intimacy with somebody else, to get to a level where you trust them, where you're no longer in this zone of exchanging information, exchanging pleasantries, catching up about each other's lives. No, you're actually hanging out deeply in a state where if anybody asks a deep question, you'd be ready to receive it and send a deep question right back. Because it occurs to me you're talking about how it's easy and I agree with everything that you just said. In school. We make friends at work. Make friends. You're on a baseball team. Certainly a baseball team at school. God, you're around these people. What, I'm a 5, 8 Jew, so I was not on a Big Ten baseball team. But, but I can imagine you're spending just dozens of hours with these people every week. How could you not develop an intimacy with them? But then we enter the so called real world and outside of work and outside of our families. Unless you belong to a religious congregation, and if you want to fold in your thoughts about religion, I'd be happy to hear them here. Unless you have some really fixed thick network of religious congregants around you, there's just a deficit of time to build those adult relationships. So I guess I'm wondering whether time is the active ingredient here as opposed to knowledge about building relationships as an adult.

A (40:20)

I have a few thoughts here. So first off, on the point of religion, the really powerful thing there about the connection to religion and the reason why I think there are a lot of people who feel a religious affiliation that feel very wealthy across these different areas of their life. One of the reasons is because religion provides a value aligned room, if you will, where you are immersed and surrounded by this high density of other people who share a very similar set of core values to you, which enables vulnerability and friendship to be built very effectively. It's why religion tends to be one of the great things. One of the best parts of religion is that it creates this community and this connection to something bigger than yourself that breeds this feeling of wealth within a lot of people. I think that social media has made this much, much harder for most people. So when you talk about time, I think one of the reasons it is even more challenging now is because our attentions and our ability to navigate the fundamental friction involved in building friendships and deep relationships is at an all time low. We are in a, a eject button culture, if you will. The paradox of choice definitely plays into this. You know, in a romantic relationship as an example, that at the Touch of a button, you can have hundreds of other options right at your fingertips. So the second something gets hard or there is struggle, or there's fundamental tension, you hit the eject button. Because right in front of you there's all these other options. And the paradox of choice tells us that if there are hundreds of other options, we're actually going to feel less satisfied with whatever option we do choose than when we may had three options of the people that lived in our town. And so I think you do live in this world where because it's so easy and because you have all these options right in front of you, people hit the eject button too soon and you don't actually sit with and actually expose yourself to enough time with these people where you might have built depth on the other side of whatever vulnerability or struggle you were going through or experiencing.

B (42:28)

In thinking about the fact that we make our closest friends at school, at work, in congregations, it occurs to me that these are really thick cultures that are hard to leave. Like primary school attendance is mandated by the state. Employment is practically mandatory for most people of a certain age. You know, religion has a churn rate, but it's a thick culture. People attend the same church for years, decades. These are thin, thick communities, thick cultures. Which I guess is to say the institutions we're talking about here are more important than the individuals. But you compare that to the sort of clubs and associations that people go in and out of when they become adults. Book club, you can always drop out, pick up, basketball game. Yeah, you can easily beg off if you have a lingering injury. A book club is not like a church. It's a thin culture. It's, it's opt in culture. It's if you're free next Tuesday, we're reading the next Michael Lewis culture. And I think that's really crucial to our discussion of social wealth and the challenge of making friends as an adult. Because deep friendship thrives in thickness. And western secular adulthood is really a network of thin cultures organized around individuals rather than organized around institutions. How does that sit with you?

A (43:53)

As I hear you talk about thick and thin and I love that articulation, my mind goes back to the point of freedom and what we were talking about earlier, which is like thickness inherently feels lacking in freedom, but it is creating the long term freedom that you desire in the form of this social wealth, in the form of this connection that you are building. And so it's interesting, like we come back to that fundamental tension over and over again of like the short term sort of feeling of lacking freedom that's created by this thickness of these. Of these kind of the infrastructure structure of these different things, whether it's school or religious institution or whatnot, is actually what creates the depth of freedom in the long term.

B (44:33)

Look, you're singing my favorite song here. I mean, one of my favorite observations from philosophy is Sren Kierkegaard, who 100, what, 70, 80 years ago, just totally nailed modernity, where he said, for the vast majority of human history, we've been lost infinitude. Humans haven't been able to express their fullness and their flourishing because they were bound by strictures that they couldn't control. You had the son of a potato farmer who was the son of a potato farmer, who was the son of a potato farmer, and they were all Catholic potato farmers, and they couldn't possibly dream of a better future. Now, certainly for most women around the world, they've been set in their ways by misogyny, by religion, by traditional culture. But today, he said, I mean, today for him was like 1830s Denmark. Our problem of modernity is the opposite. We're not lost in the finite, we're lost in the infinite. People who are told that they can do anything and be anything will find themselves lost in the infinite. And his most famous line is that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. And I do think that so many of the modern social ills or modern social challenges that we have come down to this irony of freedom, this fact that freedom is fantastic. The ability to choose what you want to do, it's so, so wonderful, it's so rich to be able to choose who you want to be. But anxiety is the receipt. Anxiety is the cost of that freedom. And sometimes we can make these little decisions in life to be a little less free in the moment, whether it's marriage or children or something you commit to on the weekends, a workout thing at 6am on Saturdays, where some months you're just like, Jesus fucking why did I do this? It's those little decisions that short term seem to limit our freedom that I love your terminology here, seems to expand our freedom in the long run. It's a lovely idea. I want to get to career advice because I went on a little bit too much of a run there with existential Kierkegaard. But the best piece of career advice that I ever got is from the writer James Fallows, where I was a decade or 15 years ago or so trying to weigh two different options, a really prestigious sounding job and a job that was a little bit less prestigious. Sounding and Jim said, don't do the job you want to tell people you do. Do the job you want to do. Which maybe in Sahil speak is like, don't do the job you want to tell people about once. Do the job you want to do forever. Choose the game you want to play. And you would keep playing even if you were doomed to play it forever. And I'd love you to expand on because you have a lovely chapter about career advice or lovely section about career advice. Expand on how you think about advising people when they come to you asking what they should do with their careers.

A (47:26)

Yeah, I love the way you articulated that and I love that piece of advice that you received. It reminds me a lot of this entire idea of status too, because status is so intertwined with how we think about careers. Even when I think about taking my first job job, a big reason that I took my first job was because it sounded impressive and it was the high status sounding job that I thought would get me patted on the back and people would say, oh, that sounds impressive, you have a good title and you work in finance or whatever the thing is. And oftentimes we need to ask ourselves, I call it the bot status test of like, if, if I could never tell anyone this thing, like if I couldn't tell anyone that I had this job, would I still take this job job if I couldn't post it on my LinkedIn and do the post that says, I am humbled and honored to announce that I'm taking the job as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs. Would I still want to be an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs? Sometimes for some people, the answer is yes. Like you are learning so much, you're going to be immersed in it. You really love numbers, modeling, finance, whatever, you still take it. But for a lot of people, the answer is no. But you march down that path. And what we know about these paths more than anything else is that there is gravity, gravity to them. And recognizing and understanding that gravity before you set out on those paths is important because otherwise you can have one of those situations where you wake up in 30 or 40 years and you wonder what the fuck you just did with your life. And I've seen that, I've seen that happen to too many people that I know. People that make ridiculous amounts of money and are miserable in what they do because they're trapped in it because their lifestyle has expanded to those levels and they're stuck. And so what I always say, say to young people or anyone that is thinking about whatever Their path is. Is really this piece of advice that Jeff Bezos shared in his final shareholder letter at Amazon as CEO, where he talked about a quote from Richard Dawkins, the blind watchmaker. Talked about the fact that our natural state, our equilibrium, or, sorry, our natural state, is to actually just fall into equilibrium with our surroundings. Like, your body being alive is actually a fight against your whole body melting into the surroundings around you. Every cell is fighting constantly. And when Jeff Bezos talked about this, he talks about the fact that you have to do the same thing for your own distinctiveness as a human in your journey. You actually have to fight every single day. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness. And I think that is really true for your career and on your journey, you actually have to pay a price. And it is challenging to do in a world that actually wants you to just fall in line and be the same. And that world is sometimes just the broader world and all the things that people tell you, but oftentimes it's family. I mean, look, I come from a pretty traditional background. My mom is Indian, very academically oriented, very safe, stable culture. My dad's a tenured professor. And we don't have a real entrepreneurial bone in our body. It's just not a path. And so the idea of me leaving the safe path, working in finance, highly paid, paid the good track to go and do something. I mean, I was tweeting, right? I was literally tweeting on the Internet at the time. Made no sense. And it was a painful price that I had to pay in the misunderstanding that it created with people around me. I literally had a mentor say to me, this will either be the best thing you ever did or it'll be the worst choice you ever made. Like, that is the kind of thing that you have to be willing to pay that price to endure. And so I think that the advice that you heard is brilliant. I really ask yourself that. That layered on with the question that I said, if you couldn't tell anyone that you were doing this job, would you still want to go do it? Because at the end of the day, you do get one shot at these things. And working on things that create energy is bound to do better in terms of the outcomes that you can create than chewing glass for your entire career. You will create better outcomes. You will create more value for the people around you, which is fundamentally how you make money. Money. And so if you are focused on building financial wealth, and by the way, like, there's a whole section in the book on Financial wealth for a reason. It is a very important type of wealth. I am not saying that money is nothing. I'm simply saying it can't be the only thing.

B (51:34)

I want to go deeper on financial wealth because I think there's going to be people who read this book who are very wealthy and there's people who read your book who are very poor. And there was one line in the book that I bumped up against a little bit. You write, we all want the same thing and it has very little to do with money. End quote. Let me reframe this. I think what most people want has a lot to do with money, just not in the way maybe some people think. I think money does a couple things. First, it's like a misery vaccine. I think many people, or many things that produce misery, like poverty, uninsured, illness, can be resolved very directly with money. But second, I think sometimes we overlook just how many things bring happiness that seem unrelated to money at first, but when you look into it, actually it's much more related to money than we think. So, for example, according to the General Social Survey, happiness scales quite linearly with income at pretty much every quintile. Like the rich say they're happier than the somewhat well off who say they're happier than the middle class who say they're happier than the poor. When you dig into the correlations of the GSS survey, though, what you find is that the single best predictor of life satisfaction is marriage. So you stop there and you're like, okay, great, marriage is the elixir of happiness. But here's the rub. If you dig into the research on marriage, it turns out that very little predicts marriage rates better than money or more specifically, the prevailing average wage of men. So to me, financial wealth seems quite important here, even though I totally grasp your idea that it's not the whole picture. After I talked for so long, turning it over to you, how do you think we should think about the relationship between the financial wealth piece and the rest of the wealth pie that you're discussing in this book?

A (53:37)

I think that the idea of, for me, is money solves money problems. And some of those money problems, as you say, are fundamentally intertwined with problems in these other areas of life, reducing fundamental burdens and stresses. As an example, money problems helps your marriage in a whole lot of ways. We all know this. Like if you've ever gone through money problems in a relationship, I think that financial trouble is the second leading cause of divorce. I think the first is infidelity. In the United States, and then the second is money problems. So these two are intertwined. We know that across a lot of these different areas, money is intertwined fundamentally. The way that I really think about this is what you are trying to avoid in life is a Pyrrhic victory. The idea of a victory that comes at such a steep cost to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat. And what that is in your life is winning this one battle of making a lot of money, but losing the broader war of this happening, happy, fulfilling life across all of these areas. And what I see happening all too often with people is you get so narrowly focused on the thing that you can measure, which is money, that you lose sight of all of these other areas of life. You stop investing in these other areas. It's why we all know, and we can all point to case studies of people who have made $100 million but have four ex wives and three children that don't talk to them. And, and everyone pats these people on the back. We read books about these people, we celebrate them, we admire them, we applaud them. And they won the game, is what we say. But you have to ask yourself, is that actually a game that I care to win? Do I actually want to win that battle? If it means losing this bigger picture war. But that end can be avoided if you, along the way, understand those things that you are trying to avoid and you invest in these other areas on the journey. You can win the battle, battle and win the war, but you have to have a clear eye towards that on that journey. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of building something big, creating a whole lot of value and capturing a lot of that along the way, making a whole lot of money in that process. The problem arises when that is the only thing you are focused on, when money becomes the only thing, rather than one thing among many.

B (55:52)

Can we close by talking about your job?

A (55:55)

Sure.

B (55:56)

So. So on a very personal level, I'll.

A (55:58)

First ask you to define what my job is, because I could use some help with this.

B (56:03)

This is actually my very first question. I'm really curious how you feel about being, let's call it a sort of. You're like a clearinghouse of wisdom, right? And there are other people that are competing in this space of being, clearing houses of wisdom. And this feature that I ran on The Atlantic like 10 years ago was this thing where I asked a bunch of people on Reddit and on the Atlantic, what do people not understand about your job? And we heard from plumbers, we heard From a bass player, heard from teachers, heard from public school librarians. It was really fun. I don't think I heard from any inspirational writers, tweeters, posters. So I'm curious, I'm posing the question to you. What do people not understand about your job?

A (56:54)

I. I would say that I probably define what I do very differently than how I have been able to articulate it to the world. I. I share a lot about my life and a lot about my marriage, about having a young child, about the journey that I feel I'm on, about the questions that I'm wrestling with on that journey, and about the things that I feel like I'm learning along the way. Way. And the pushback, the most common pushback that I would see that I get is you can't actually be experiencing all of these things if you are sharing them. You know, if you're documenting all of these moments with your family, you probably aren't actually enjoying them. You're probably miserable. You're going to get divorced, whatever. All of the things that you see on the Internet. My response to that, which I never reply with because I don't believe in getting into fights on the Internet. I think it's a waste of time. Is. Is.

B (57:47)

But you're replying here. This is great.

A (57:49)

Yeah, I'm going to reply here, clip.

B (57:51)

This and send it to them.

A (57:52)

Yeah, yeah. This will be the first time the entire world of, like male influencers, if you will, is dominated by a rather disgusting set of perspectives on what it means to build a happy, fulfilling life that is grounded in misogyny, that is grounded in money at all costs, and that is grounded in a very shallow view of building a wealthy life. I'm not going to name names. We all know these people are. That are espousing this belief that your success as a man in life is based on making a whole bunch of money, private jets, fancy cars, watches, treating women poorly or as subservient to you, and have a whole bunch of kids with a whole bunch of different people, procreate, et cetera. I am trying to be someone that provides a balanced perspective on that. It can be cool tool to build a happy, loving marriage, be really present with your children, be a loving friend to others. And part of that means that I have to share these things that I am doing on that journey because I really believe and I get messages every single day from people who say that I've inspired them to be more present as a father, who say that I have, you know, something that they saw from me sparked them to engage in some practice in their marriage. And to me, that is something that I am so proud of in what I get to do, that I get to inspire people to recognize that there is something really beautiful to be built in sacrificing some of these short term freedoms to build this free life in the long term sense.

B (59:30)

I've sometimes said that I'm glad I don't write about sports because I can just watch sports and not think, how am I going to make content out of this? I can relax into my enjoyment of the NFL and never worry about having, having a take. You have a really interesting job where your livelihood depends on, in part, making content out of your life and out of your relationships. But do you worry sometimes? Do you feel the tension between the need to display aspects of your life and your relationships and the sanctity of actually living your life, being present with your family? Is there a tension there that you find you're still grappling with?

A (60:20)

There is definitely a tension. I am no longer grappling with it because of the systems that we've put in place around it. That there are certain times that are just truly sacred in our relationships, frankly. Evening dinner times, my phone is just not there. We're just together. It is a zero technology time in our lives. We create weekends, we create space moments where it's just us and we're not documenting everything and we're not captured in these moments. But it was not always very clear in the boundaries that were being created around those things. And it does create tension, it creates challenges. Although we are very aligned, my wife and I and my family more broadly, my parents, my sister around what this mission means and the fact that we're all on it together is really important to me. Like, you know, when my wife said to me the other day that she was really proud of me for this book, that, you know, it's my first book putting it out into the world, I responded and said, I'm proud of us because very much I believe that, that this is a mission that we are all on together. And the reason the dedication is, what it is in this book is because it is us. Like, none of this is possible without the broader unit of all of it coming together. So I am, I am very much in a learning phase on everything in life and I'm very grateful for the people that are around me and helping me learn on these fronts. But I do believe that the, the longer term mission here is a very important one.

B (61:43)

Sol Blum, thank you very much.

A (61:46)

Thank you.