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- [00:11]
A
Join Willie Walker, Walker and Dunlop's Chairman and CEO as we bring you fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy and commercial real estate. Willie hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines. His guests are experts in their fields, from leading economists and CEOs to Harvard and Yale professors and everything in between. Our one goal is simple, providing you with unique insights, unparalleled data and real time market analyses.
- [00:44]
B
Welcome to another Walker webcast. It is my great pleasure to have Sahil Blum join me and Shiloh, I got a ton to talk to you about. Let me do a quick intro and then we'll dive into our conversation because there are so many issues that you are focused on talking about, writing about, being followed on that are so relevant to the listeners of the ORCA webcast and pretty much almost everybody I know in my industry and from friends who are not in my industry that I'm, I'm very excited to hear your thoughts and also talk about your story and, and how your story impacts the way you are today and, and how you've, the journey you've taken to get to where you are today. Saito Bloom Son of an Indian mom from Bangalore, A Jewish dad from New York, Cornell, Princeton, Mount Holyoke, Yale, Harvard and Stanford. A very educated family, Western high school Wildcat to Stanford Cardinal baseball player, younger brother of Sonali, someone who's never met his paternal grandparents. A sub three hour marathoner, a sub 40 degree cold plunger, a New York Times best selling author of his book Five Types of Wealth which we will talk about today. 800,000 newsletter readers on a weekly basis and a reasonably ambitious goal to positively impact a billion lives. So first of all Sahil, welcome.
- [02:26]
A
Thank you so much for having me and I appreciate the warm words in the intro man.
- [02:30]
B
So here's my first question to you though as a guy who grew up as a self proclaimed having self proclaimed insecurities around intelligence and, and, and, and self worth to get to a place where you can even contemplate, much less explicitly state a desire to impact one in eight humans on the face of the planet. Talk about that.
- [03:00]
A
Yeah, I, you know the insecurity was an interesting thing. You mentioned a little bit about my upbringing and background. I come from this mixed race household. You know, I have an Indian mother and then I have a Harvard professor father. So you can imagine what the combination of those two. I was getting academic pressure from both sides of that equation. My household and my family very much measured success in the form of grades. It was like academic Success, that was. That was what really mattered. And you mentioned I have an older sister. My older sister is extremely high achieving academically. Like she, I think to this day probably still has the highest GPA in our high school's history. Just was like, doing all of the things that my family considered to be the markers of success. Success. And from a young age, I didn't feel like academics quite came as easily to me as they might have to her. And what it started at a young age was this, like, little story that started in the back of my head and then slowly started growing that I wasn't very smart, that, like, I wasn't very capable, and that I needed to find something else. And, you know, the thing about humans that we all learn at some point in our lives, whether with ourselves or with our own children, is we fall victim to this idea of a narrative fallacy, like the story that we already believe about ourselves. It's very easy to look around and find evidence to confirm that story and ignore all of the evidence that would refute it. And so from a young age, I started doing just that, right? Like, I would look around and find all of that evidence. And it built up this sort of internal void, if you will, that I sought external solutions to, you know, like the external solution to the internal problem. And when I think about those early years of my life, what I see in reflecting on it is this, this eternal chase to get the pat on the back, the external affirmation that would make me wake up and feel like I was enough, like I had done the thing. And no amount of my parents telling me that it was ridiculous or that it was crazy would change that internal story. Like it really needed to be solved by doing enough of the internal work to understand who I was, what my capabilities and competencies really were, and come to kind of terms with that, understand that, to overcome that eventually. And frankly, it took. It took 30 years of me finally being willing to question that story that I had started from such a young age.
- [05:19]
B
You talk a bunch about your parents high expectations, but then also their support. And I'm curious because you just said that they were there to try and help you, if you will, dismiss the personal narrative. And yet at the same time, that personal narrative became this sort of engine inside of you of saying, A, I'm not smart enough, and B, if there are other aspects of my life where I can actually excel and exceed, like throwing a baseball and going on to Stanford and oh, by the way, you won two academic athletic. You were, first of all, all pack 12 or pack 10. Academic athlete. And you also won a special award at Stanford twice, which was for the best student athlete leader on the team. So once you'd gotten to college, I'm assuming you sort of had figured out that you could really compete from an academic standpoint. But focus for a moment on that comment about your parents and the fact that they had very high expectations for you, yet in the support of you, which you are quite vocal about them being exceptional parents to support you, they could never get you to dismissing that sense of either insecurity or not being enough.
- [06:39]
A
Yeah, you know, I, I have this belief that like the two pillars of strong relationships are high expectations and high support. And that is high expectations. To say I have very high expectations for what you are capable of achieving. I believe you are capable of excellence in everything that you do. But importantly, pairing that with high support, which is to say I am here to lift you on my shoulders, to help you go and meet those high expectations that I have for you. The reason the two are important together is because high expectations without high support manifests as resentment. Right? Like we all know someone like that in our lives who seems to have high expectations for us, but, but then they're nowhere to be found when it comes to meet those expectations and that leads to a feeling of resentment. On the flip side, high support with no expectations leads to some form of mediocrity. Right? Like, I'm going to help you a whole lot along the way. I'm going to insulate you from every fall. But I don't really think that you need to push yourself to go out and achieve and be the best in some, in some form. My parents very much did combine the two. And I would say, you know, my father and my relationship, my whole upbringing was built around those two pillars. The reason I think it was so challenging to crack that story that I had internally was because I was never pushed to really do some of that, like internal wrestling associated with asking whether that story was credible in the first place that I actually needed to look at and do. I could be told that it didn't make sense, but for me to actually sit down and spend the time doing that, and it's very hard to get a kid to do that. Like you just are not, you're not aware enough of yourself. You haven't developed enough patterns of self awareness to even have that internal conversation. And so part of me just thinks, look, that is part of growing up, like insecurity, these feelings of not enoughness, that is part of maturing as an individual to come to that level of self awareness where you can look in the mirror and have that internal dialogue. And so I don't, I don't know. As a parent now, I wrestle with it a lot because I think about, you know, with my son, if he starts facing that same thing in adolescence, how do I get him to look in the mirror and have that conversation? Because at the end of the day, I think that we can't teach our kids anything. Like, maybe that's harsh to say, but I don't believe we can teach our kids anything. I think we have to embody the things that we want them to learn and understand. I can't sit my son down and tell him that X, Y and Z is important. He, he needs to see me live by those things. So if there was one thing that maybe I would say I could have seen more in my house and with my parents growing up, it would have been an embodiment of some of that internal wrestling with some of those emotions. You know, I think especially with, with my father, you know, he comes from a different generation, right? Like he's, he's born in the 50s, you know, son of like depression era parents. And I don't think that idea of a man experiencing and wrestling and struggling with his own emotions was really something that, you know, made, made sense to him. Like, you know, I, I don't remember a whole lot during my childhood of feeling like I saw my dad struggle or wrestle with those internal things and emotions. I know he had them. And now I certainly have the relationship with him where I have seen that. I think there's a level of like the Overton window, if you will, has expanded and male emotions are an accepted thing and we can talk about them and be stronger as a result. But I think the lack of direction that maybe I felt because I didn't experience a, you know, my, my hero, my, like my, my father doing that thing, embodying that thing. Maybe that is something that I could do a better job of with my son.
- [10:28]
B
Super Interesting. I'm 20 years ahead of you as it relates to raising kids. And my eldest son is a senior in college right now. But after, while I was doing research for this webcast and reading a lot of what you have written and things you have said. My son was talking to me, I was talking to him about some stress that I'm dealing with in work and what have you right now. And he said, you know, Dad, I, you know, I think about your job and how big it is and how much stress you're constantly under. And I'm feeling kind of stressed about finishing college and heading into the world. And I'm trying to put my, my stress into kind of some type of frame. But then I think about all the stress that you deal with and I like think, wow, I shouldn't be worried about anything. And one of the things I said to him was, I said First, I've had 30 years of professional experience to deal with the stress I'm dealing with right now. And you're just getting into your professional career. But the other thing I said, which I took from you, is I said to him, jack, you're living your dream right now. You're living, you went to the college you wanted to go to, you studied what you wanted to study, you skied on the big mountain team and you're heading into the world doing exactly what it is that you want to do. And clearly life is always going to have ups and downs. But don't get stressed about living your dream because you're in that dream right now. And I'm in my dream right now about the job that I do and all the stress that I deal with and all sorts of different things that come up in my world. That's part and parcel of living that dream. And it was so helpful, Sahil, to like look at that and see him, A, understand that I deal with stress and was being very open with him about some stress points in my life. But then B, to have that framework of living your dream which I took directly from you.
- [12:09]
A
Yeah, I, well first off, thank you for sharing that. It means a lot to me that, that had, that had a ripple through, through your family. I, you know, my most visceral experience with that was relatively recently which was, you know, I GUESS it's now six, seven years ago, but like in the, in the 2019, 2020 timeframe, my wife and I really struggled with infertility. You know, went through a, a two year, very challenging, you know, experience in time. And you know, just before my book came out in, In January of 2025, I, I was in my office like really working feverishly, like really focused on this, this project for the launch. And my son, who we had been fortunate to have a few years earlier, he was two and a half at the time, came barging into my, into my office and he started jumping up and down on the couch and he was throwing stuff all over the place like, you know, doing two and a half year old terrorist like things. And I started having this very annoyed train of thought go through my head of like, why is he doing this? This is so annoying. Doesn't he know I'm trying to focus? He should really get out of here. And I had on my desk this photo of me holding him the day he was born. And I looked at it in that moment and it snapped me back to four years earlier, when my wife and I were in the middle of this two year struggle and I had prayed every single night, without fail, that we would one day have a healthy child. And here I was in this moment complaining about the exact thing that I had prayed for. And it was a reminder to me of that, that exact fact that sometimes in life the things we pray for become the things that we complain about, that we stress over, but only if we let them, only if we don't stop and catch ourselves in those moments and recognize that sometimes you are quite literally living out your prayers. Every single thing you are doing today, stressful or not, is. Is something that your younger self dreamed of and frankly, something that your older self will wish they could go back and do, wish they could go back and experience in some form or function. And so that. That really snapped me back. And it has been a constant reminder in my head to both remember that, but also create those triggers around me. Like that photo served as a trigger in that moment to pull me back into the present, to remind me of those moments and of that presence. And you can just create those around you. You can have things like that in your life that snap you back into those moments. And it is so powerful if you can create that.
- [14:43]
B
So, Sahil, talk for a moment then about how you put your family at the center of your life. So you've written, my parents, sister and family mean the world to me. Yet you come from a family where you have a mother who, unbeknownst to her family, had applied to US Colleges and got a scholarship to go to Mount Holyoke College and left her life in India and moved to the United States. You have a father who met your mother at Princeton and was told by his family that if he didn't, if he continued to date a woman who was not of the Jewish faith and your mother, that his parents would, if for all practical purposes, excommunicate him. And he moved forward with his love of your mother. And as a result of that, you've never met your grandparents. And so from that, as a background of two parents who had both left behind to some degree, and in your father's case, very explicitly, their broader family and then the relationship you had with your sister growing up, which you have said was quite challenged in that she was always this, you know, always doing things sort of better than you were, gave you a real complex and had some real friction in the relationship to get through that, to then turn. And the story about your friend putting into just stark contrast for you of, hey, if you live across the country from your parents and your parents are 65 years old, chances are you're going to see your parents 15 times again for the rest of their lives. And all of a sudden that spun your head around. But understanding that moment with your friend of like, I need to make a shift in my life, it doesn't necessarily put your family at the center of everything you're doing. And it felt like from reading your bio and what you've been doing, you are living a reasonably, I don't mean to be critical, but self centered life of I want to pursue riches, I want to be in private equity, I want everyone to read my resume and say, I'm a Stanford graduate, I'm really successful and I have a big bank account. And all of a sudden everything seems to have shifted back to the family. How did you end up putting the family first?
- [16:55]
A
I think the fundamental recognition here is that there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have and then there are the priorities our actions show we have. And oftentimes in life there's a big gap between those two things. I was living that gap. You know, if you would come to me in 2020 and asked me what my priorities were, what I really cared about, I would have said a bunch of great sounding things. I would have said my family. I had a deep love and admiration for my parents. Like I, my dad is my best friend, like, you know, has been, and I think the world of them. I had a tense relationship with my sister for many years as a result of the competitiveness that had been created mostly due to my own insecurity and issues. But I wanted to change that because I know that your sibling is like the one person that you really see the entirety of your life through right from beginning to end. You know, my relationship with my wife, my health really mattered to me, all of those things. But then if you had watched me for a week, if a third party had come and watched me for a week and actually observed my actions, they would have been completely dislocated from those things that I just said. And so that moment that you mentioned, you know, in 2021, I had at that time spent the first seven years of my career, working in private equity, marching down the path to the most traditional version of what we think of as a successful life. So much of that was built upon this idea that I could get enough things, enough recognition, enough money, enough, you know, titles, bonuses, promotions, whatever, that I would wake up and feel that feeling of arrival, right? Like the arrival fallacy. You, you get whatever achievement it is and you wake up and you feel that, ah, like I've arrived. It's like, I think it was Scotty Scheffler, maybe a year ago in the Open Championship, he gave this press conference where he talked about the fact that winning major championships was no longer fulfilling to him in any way. And all these people were like, what? You know, how can the number one golfer in the world say that? Like, you know, I think he said something like he wins and then he has this moment of like, wow, great. And then he says, what's for dinner? And it's that idea of the arrival fallacy over and over again. Anyone listening to this has experienced this. We build up these destinations as being the point at which we will feel fundamentally different about ourselves. We make our happiness, our contentment, our fulfillment conditional on something, achieving something. And then we get it. We feel that momentary blip of dopamine induced euphoria, and then we reset, right? You feel the feeling of never doing enough. You reset to the next thing. I did that all along the way for those first seven years of my career. And while I was winning in this one very specific domain, making money, building this life around this one, you know, I would say most prominent metric of success in society, every other area of my life had started to fall apart. All these priorities that, that I would have said I had were bearing no fruit. Like, I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents. I was drinking seven nights a week. I was 40 pounds heavier than you see me today. My mental and physical health were in disarray. My wife and I were in the middle of this two year struggle with infertility, which was creating strain in our life and relationship for the first time since, you know, we had met when we were 15 years old. And it all came at a time where, if you had seen me from the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game. Like, from a societal standpoint, I was doing the things that you're supposed to want to do. I was achieving the success in the way that we think about it. I was 30 years old and making millions of dollars Like I was doing the thing you're supposed to want to do. And that was the moment when that conversation hit with that old friend. I went out for a drink. This is May of 2021. We sat down. He asked how I was doing. And I said that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. It was the first time in my life that I had noticed that they were slowing down. Like, something about COVID not seeing them for an extended period. And then seeing them, I just noticed things like my dad was driving a little slower. They were walking downstairs a little bit slower. It was just the most noticeable cross section of change that I had had with them related to their mortality and aging. And that was scary. And so he asked how old they were. I said, mid-60s. He asked how often I saw them. 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. That was the moment. That was the math that changed my entire trajectory in life. Because in that moment, what happened was that gradually, then suddenly change in my life, all of these things had sort of built up. And then that math, that number, hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the gut punch that pushed me over the edge to say, I've built this entire life based on actions that are not actually aligned with the priorities that I really have in life, the things that I really care about. I'm building this life by default. Someone else's scoreboard is governing how I am living on a daily basis. And I went home that night, and my wife and I had a very candid conversation about what our center really was, what did we want our life to look like, and we took a dramatic action. And within 45 days of that conversation, I had. I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and we had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And in that one decision was a very important realization, which is that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and actually created time like that number 15 more times before my parents are gone. It's now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a week, maybe too much sometimes. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. You know, we had taken an action and reassumed agency over our own lives, Actually confirmed to ourselves that we were capable of taking action to build our life around the priorities that we truly had to bring that gap back into alignment to say, I'm going to live in accordance with the priorities that I really have about my life. And I can do that. You can actually choose to live by your own design. You have the agency to go out in the world and create that change.
- [23:12]
B
So, one quick side note on that, and that story about your friend, which is so impactful of the 15 times and now you have hundreds of times, I would strongly recommend to anyone who's listening to this, my friend Josh Carper sent me this interview last week, and it's former Senator Ben Sasse, who is on the Uncommon Knowledge webcast with Peter Robinson. But to those who don't know, Senator Sass left the US Senate and went to be the president of the University of Florida, was diagnosed in December of last year with terminal pancreatic cancer with 90 days to live. And this interview is Peter Robinson asking Ben about just that realization and living every day and, and how he has very few days left. But the, the, at the end of the story, what I took away from it, and it is so compelling and it talks a lot about spirituality and, and the Bible and, and how Ben is now living his last days, but he sits there and says, we all have a number. We're all dying. We all have a number of days. The issue is that I got a death sentence in December that gives me 90 of them to live, and it changes it because you all of a sudden understand the scarcity of time. And I guess the question I'd have for you, Sahil, is your parents had really high expectations for you, and you were on this trajectory to sort of achieving the things that many of us look at of that's the life you ought to be living. And now all of a sudden, you stepped off of that and you completely reoriented your life. And other than the fact that I'm assuming they were extremely happy that you were moving back to the east coast to be closer to them, which in and of itself probably dwarfed all other emotions around it. But for parents who'd had such high expectations of you, I know when you decided to stop playing baseball, you were afraid of calling your dad to tell him that you were done with baseball. Because growing up, he was your, he was your throwing partner, and he went to all of your games. He was your biggest fan. What was it like to say to your parents, I'm stepping off this treadmill and going to reorient my life? And I'm assuming you didn't say to them at that time, and my intention is to impact a billion Lives. It was something to do with getting more oriented into things that really mean something to you. But how is that tension? Because all of us have those people in our lives that to some degree we're living our lives for you. You've said it yourself. Ask yourself about the job you're doing. Is it a job you really want to do or is it the job that you think other people want you to do? So how did you deal with stepping off of the job that everyone wanted you to do to something that you really want to do?
- [25:57]
A
Honestly, I completely avoided it. In terms of the conversation. I mean, I, I would say my mom in particular, just given her, her Indian background, I think there is a cultural thing of like these tracks and these name brands in particular. You know, like my mom could not understand when I took the job I took, which was at a middle market private equity fund rather than going to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. Like that was, that was a little mind blowing of like the. Rather than the name brand, you're going to go to this other thing, which it made tons of sense to me. It was this incredible learning opportunity. I get to skip the two years in banking or consulting and go straight into the investing. But it didn't make a lot of sense to her. So the idea in my mind of, hey, I'm leaving this high paying, high status job to go and write threads on Twitter at the time really was a little bit terrifying to me. And if I'm being completely honest, in that whole transition, there were certain decisions that I made that were at least partially informed by the desire to have something sort of real and tangible that I could almost like put on a platter for my mom to understand. One of those decisions was when I published the book going down the path of traditional publishing rather than self publishing, even though I had a platform where I could sell it, etc. Was like an absolute must, an absolute no brainer for me. Because I could tell my mom that I was publishing a book with Penguin Random House and she could go and tell my grandmother in India and my grandmother would have something to tell all her friends. And it was like that was a thing that actually, for whatever reason now reflecting on it mattered to me. And I do think, look, for a lot of people out there, there are people that want to take this quote unquote leap of faith in life and make this change. And, and one of the challenges is those, you know, familial pressures that you feel of going down a track that doesn't make a whole ton of sense to others. And you're going to have people in your life that, you know, discourage you or say that it doesn't make sense to do it or to be realistic. And in a lot of cases, that reaction comes from a place of love. And it is because, you know, like in the case of my mom, she didn't understand that there was this different and unique path that I could take to do something completely new. You know, carve my entire. Like, create my own job in my own world by going down this path of writing on the Internet, using that to build trust and build this platform where then I could get a book deal and I could raise a venture fund and I could build these businesses. I could do this thing in my own entire way that didn't make a lot of sense. And so, honestly, I avoided it. And my bias at the time was I'm going to do it, and then I'm going to have proof, and it's going to be a much easier conversation to have. My dad, I think, you know, frankly, just has the most undying, insane amount of faith and belief in me, only rivaled by my wife's faith in me. And I never would have. I never would have questioned whether or not my dad would have believed that I was capable of doing these things.
- [29:08]
B
It's interesting in redefining a wealthy life because you talk about that definition being singular and wrong, how invested both of your parents appear to have been in that definition, and yet you were willing to go and if you will, challenge it. And clearly I'm assuming that that has to go back to the strength of your relationship with them and that you were so close to them that you were willing to sort of say, this may be your definition of it, but I'm going to go chart my own course.
- [29:38]
A
Yeah, I think that it's not even that it was their definition, it's just our standard definition. Like, when we think of what it means to be wealthy or successful, we just, we. We place it around money. And the reality is, the reason for that is because money is so measurable, right? It is. It has been a feature of money throughout society and history. It's. It's what has allowed societies to thrive has been the. The measurability of money and its ability to create commerce and to, you know, build these networks and do all of these things as a market. But measurability can also be a bug because what you measure in life really matters. The things that you measure end up dictating all of your actions. Peter Drucker famous management theorist said, what gets measured gets managed. Right? That's the idea that the things that you can measure end up being the things that, that you narrowly myopically hone in on and optimize around. All of your actions surround that you don't need to look far to find examples of this in your own life. Like you ever put on one of those sleep tracking rings or these wristbands or maybe you know someone that does. Like all of a sudden you become the most annoying sleep person in the world. You're like, oh no, I can't go out, I can't have that drink, I can't do that thing right. My sleep score, I can't get a drink with you. My sleep score. Like you have a perfect sleep score but you have no friends. It's a great trade. It's because all of your actions suddenly surround the one thing because you can measure it. And so as a society, the one way we've always measured our entire self worth success has been around money. And while money is part of living a good life, it is far from the only part. And so my recognition was if I can figure out a way to think about the bigger picture war, if you will, rather than just the one battle of making money, maybe I, if I'm measuring for that bigger picture, I can actually take action to go and win that much bigger picture war rather than have this sort of Pyrrhic victory of winning the battle around money and losing that much bigger picture war.
- [31:41]
B
Yeah, it's funny, you, you raise a number of examples in your book and your writing about sort of those, those arrival moments that you get to and you're sort of like either it's not as great as it was imagined it was going to be, or it actually isn't, isn't anything you actually really wanted. And I, given the growth of Walker and Dunlop, I'm fortunate to be able to fly private on a pretty consistent basis. And the number of times that I am on that plane at 10:30 at night, solo flying from Houston, Texas back to Denver just so I can get home in time for a meeting the next morning is, I mean that's, that's all I use it for, to be perfectly honest with you. And I sit there and I'm like, this was supposed to be some great level of success in corporate America, being able to fly on the, the corporate jet, to be able to like enjoy life and not have to deal with airports. And to be perfectly frank with you, all it is is a mode of transportation and it's typically used just to make it so that I'm more efficient to get to another meeting the next day and not some great luxurious thing for me to sit back and say, boy, haven't I arrived? And I know, I've heard you talk about that as it relates to people's ambitions for their retirement. And, you know, oh, you know, nobody wants to be on that plane alone when they're older and counting their money. They want to be engaged with friends at a cafe, talking about their grandkids and the life that they're living and the things that they've done together. Talk for a moment about the five forms of wealth that you outline in your book. And the number one wealth indicator, or time wealth, is number one in the book. And you tell an anecdote. I listened to a talk you gave at Google headquarters in New York, Sahel, where you. You talked about Warren Buffett. Will you tell that anecdote here? Because I find it to be. It's so impactful the way that you tell it.
- [33:38]
A
So the five types of wealth, as I talk about them, this sort of new scoreboard, if you will, for. For measuring your life, are time wealth, which is all about freedom to choose how you spend your time. Social wealth, it's all about your relationships. Mental wealth is about purpose and growth. Space spirituality. Physical wealth is your health, you know, vitality as an individual. And then financial wealth is the last type, which is, you know, about money, but with the nuance of really thinking about your definition of enough, what it means to have enough financially, recognition being there, that your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations grow faster than your assets, you'll never feel wealthy. You'll never feel rich. You'll just be chasing whatever more the world has told you that you should want. The anecdote that you reference with respect to time wealth is one that I think really brings this idea of time as an asset to the front of your mind. So, you know, I often ask people like, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? And, you know, you get people in the audience sort of looking around, you're not really sure, and you say, like, well, let me try to convince you he's worth $130 billion. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. He can basically do whatever whenever he wants. It all sounds pretty good. But none of you would trade lives with him for one very specific reason. He is 95 years old. There is no way you would agree to trade the amount of time that you have left for all of that money. And on the flip side, he would give anything, he would give up every single dollar that he has to have the amount of time that you have left. So with one very simple question, you bring to the light this fact, this idea that your time has, quite literally, by your own definition, by your own response, incalculable value. And yet on a daily basis, how much of that time are we really wasting? How much of it are we spending scrolling on our phones, comparing our lives to other people, worrying about the past, stress about the future, doing all of these things that fundamentally disregard that one most precious asset that we have? Graham Duncan, this well known investor, had this idea of a time billionaire. Like a million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is like 30 years. And so when you are 20, you maybe have 2 billion seconds left, maybe more. With modern medicine, when you're 50, you have a little over a billion seconds left. But we don't relate to ourselves in that way of thinking of ourselves as time billionaires. We don't relate to time as that one asset. And so the example that I always think to give people is like, if you were to leave this conversation now and you walk out on the street and some random person comes up to you and asks you for 10,000 doll, you're like, absolutely not right? I don't even know you. We never met $10,000, a lot of money. But every single day we do the equivalent of that when it comes to our time. People that drain our energy, opportunities that aren't really moving us forward in our life, that we freely give away our time to, when in fact, that is the one thing that we need to be most judicious about, the way that we invest, because it's the one asset that we can never get back, we cannot create more of.
- [36:52]
B
And so how do you maintain that discipline? How do you look at your schedule and score things red, yellow or green? How do you say no to things that typically you would have said yes to?
- [37:05]
A
I think that the first step is that red, yellow, green thing that you said, which is trying to form an understanding of the things that you are currently placing and investing your time towards and whether they are creating versus draining energy from your life. The logic here, both professionally and personally, is that your outcomes in life follow your energy. We've all experienced this. When you lean into things that are really pulling you, like you feel this natural lift and pull towards them, you tend to create the best outcomes. That's professionally, but also personally like the people that make you feel that uplift, the best things come from those relationships, the people that make you feel like you need to take a shower after you spend time with them, you could probably do with a little less time with those people and your life would improve. And so actually auditing your calendar according to that, like at the end of a Monday or at the end of today, color code your calendar according to weather activities created market green, neutral market yellow, or drained energy market red. If you do that for a week, you'll have a pretty clear perspective on the types of activities that are creating versus draining energy. Now, the idea there is to then say over a period of a few months, how can I slowly make improvements to that ratio of green to red? You're not going to eliminate energy draining things from your life from your calendar. If you need to get on a plane for a meeting at 10:30, that might be energy draining. I don't really want to do that, but it's part of my responsibilities to the team and to this broader vision, this thing that I'm trying to go create. So I'm going to still do it. But you can make tweaks to things that will improve the ratio over time. And as you improve that ratio, you start to feel this sense that you are taking control of your time. You're investing it into things that really matter and that are moving the needle forward in your life.
- [38:55]
B
So you talk about signal and noise, and you're really good at knocking out the noise and focusing on the signal. How should people listening Sahil, think about, I mean, I'm very surprised that you don't read more news. And when I, when I, when I read that about you, I'm like, here's somebody who has one of the most curious minds of anyone I will know. And one of the things that I find to be so refreshing about both your book and all of your work is that you don't, you don't have either the, the, the arrogance or the, or the wherewithal to say that you have the answer. What you're really good at doing is asking people to ask the right questions about their lives, challenge their thoughts and their patterns and their behavior, to think about their own lives. Because every life is obviously individual. And what you're doing might not be perfectly applicable to me or somebody else, but you're going to drive me to ask that question. So when I heard you that you don't really watch the news, I was sort of like, doesn't he want to know, like, what Trump said in the state of the union last night. Doesn't he want to know, like, what might happen in the Middle east with the US troops moving in around Iran right now? How do you block out the noise from the signal in your life to give you the time to do the things that really matter?
- [40:15]
A
There's this meme that I came across maybe like five or seven years ago of this guy standing, wearing a raincoat with an umbrella over his head. And he's watching TV with this like crazy storm on the screen. And he's. So he's standing there with this umbrella and this rain jacket. And then you see up in the sky that it's like beautiful sunny day. And I remember seeing that and it just stuck in my mind like, yes, it's quite funny, but it's also a truth and a harsh truth about the world that we live in, that a lot of the things that we consume impact the way that we see reality. Right? Like the way the things that you consume are really your diet, like your brain diet, and that impacts the reality that you live in. If you constantly just consume news sources on an ongoing basis, what you're going to form in your mind of reality is actually very different from what reality really looks like. We actually know this scientifically that news is entirely biased towards negativity because negativity is what actually creates clicks. It's much more likely to get shared and to generate clicks. So the business model, incentives, etc. Nassim Taleb had this idea in Anti Fragile, his famous book of a noise bottleneck, which was basically the idea that as you increase the frequency of observation, of data gathering, all you are doing is you are increasing the proportion, the relative proportion of noise to signal. And that really shaped the way that I think about news consumption, because what I realized is that you actually don't need to have a constant drip of news every single day to understand the world. Doing the constant drip actually makes you understand less about what's going on, so you gather more information to understand less. So by reducing your news consumption, I mean, honestly, 90%, you can actually be more well informed about the world while consuming significantly less. And you've gotten all this time back that you can then deploy into consuming things that have lasted, like classic books or essays or things that are longer term towards work, towards your relationships, towards literally anything other than allowing yourself to be enraged by whatever the algorithm is serving you on a daily basis.
- [42:25]
B
So go to social wealth relationships you have cited many times, the Harvard Longitudinal Study and the generations of Harvard graduates, if they studied and as it relates to what drives longevity. And yes, actual physical health makes a big difference. Financial wealth makes a difference. But the number one indicator of how long someone was going to live was their social health. The relationships that they had later in life that kept them engaged, kept them vibrant, and kept them, quite honestly, wanting to live for tomorrow. What are your suggestions to people who might feel that their social life, their social wealth isn't at the level where they would like it to be today?
- [43:10]
A
Recognize the power of compounding in every area of life. You know, I. One of my great lamentations of ambitious people, myself included, is we constantly allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial meaning. We constantly say things like, I don't have an hour to work out today, so I'm just not going to work out because it's not going to be perfect. Or I don't have two hours to do deep work, so I'm just going to, you know, send emails, or I don't have an hour to call my mom, so I'm not even going to send her a text. The truth is that anything above zero compounds. Anything above zero compounds. We know that when it comes to money, everyone listening to this, you know that if you put away $100 today, it's infinitely better than zero because it's going to stack and compound into the future. Your relationships benefit from the exact same compounding. Compounding is an extraordinary force, the eighth wonder of the world, right? Einstein famously said that that applies to your relationships. And so the idea is to then say, okay, that means that I can do the tiny thing today, and it's infinitely better than nothing. I can send the text, I can get together for that little coffee, I can go on the little walk with the person. I can do the tiny action today and not need to worry that it's not perfect or that it's not the optimal version of this, but because it's going to continue to stack and grow. Relationship investments are the single greatest investments that you can make in your life. The second thing I would say is a transition from really thinking about quantity to thinking about quality when it comes to relationships. I think when you're young, you become patterned to believe that it is the size of your social circle that really matters. Like you need to be popular, right? There's this thing that we get told that we need to be popular when we're young. And the truth is that having a few high quality relationships is significantly better than a bunch of random loose ones. There is clear scientific evidence that the people you surround yourself with Determine your outcomes. The Pygmalion effect is the name of this psychological phenomenon where we actually rise to the level of expectations that other people have for us. So if you surround yourself with people who believe you are capable of more, who encourage you to think bigger, who push you to think bigger, you will actually rise to the level of those expectations versus surrounding yourself with people who tell you to be realistic, who sort of snicker or laugh at your ambitions. You will fall to the level of those expectations. So what better reason do you need to choose wisely when it comes to the people that you allow into your space and to recognize that smaller doesn't mean worse if they're really high quality, deep connected individuals?
- [45:47]
B
I think about your relationship with your sister and how you went from a somewhat contentious relationship to now having an extremely close and loving relationship. And I, first of all, take my hat off to you because there's something about familial relationships that, for whatever reason, whether it's a cousin, an aunt, a brother or sister, what have you, are really difficult if they're offline, to get them back online. And it's just that, as you said, and as I've listened to you say, Sahil, the. It's sort of like a debt that compounds that. Like, if it was a fractured relationship, every single day, every single year, it just kind of gets deeper and deeper. And to get it back on to track, you have to pay not only the. The debt that you first owed, but all the accumulated debt since that moment. And I. I heard you say that. And I have to say, I. There are a couple relationships in my life that went off track at a certain time. And, and, and, and one of them was. It's. It's just a real quick anecd. I got hit by a very, very powerful CEO on the ski slopes of Sun Valley, Idaho, back in 1996. And he literally came up behind me and knocked me right out of my skis. People who saw it came up and said I should sue him. And I was just out of business school trying to start my career, and he was this big CEO with lots and lots of power. And for the last 30 years, I've told this story over and over again about how this, you know, this guy had done this unbelievably bad thing and knocked me out of my skis and whatever else. And then I held this kind of grudge against him and would tell the story at any moment that I could. And my girlfriend Sarah, over Christmas of this year, heard me tell the story Again for the however many a time. And she said, you know, you're putting energy into what happened 30 years ago. He's not. He's off living his life. And I don't understand why you either just don't let go of that because you're the one putting energy into it, or call the guy up and apologize to him. So three days later, I'm in the lift line in Sun Valley, and bada bing, bada boom, there he is. And so I left the group I was with, and I went over and I introduced myself to him, and we were face to face, just like we were 30 years ago. And I said, I just want to let you know this happened. I, I, I forgive you for it. And I was expecting him to say, you know, I don't know what you're talking about and this and that, and you're just this or whatever else. I forgive you for it. And I wish you a very happy new Year. And to his great credit, rather than being the big, aggressive CEO he was 30 years ago, he said, I remember that. And, and I remember it happened. And I thought, like, you were skiing out of control, and, and it scared me, but what a terrible thing for me to have done. And I'm really, really sorry that that happened, and I'm, I just feel awful for it. And what was so interesting about it, Sahil, is that 30 years of all this accumulated, kind of I was wronged, and this guy used his power and position to kind of run me over, just was done, and it just evaporated. And what was even more fun is all of my friends in Sun Valley who are friends with him and who are friends with me or all took this huge sigh of relief of this acrimony between the two of us just going away. And so when I heard you say that time typically doesn't help relationships that have gone offline, I just wanted to tell that anecdote because I was carrying it and that debt keep getting deeper and deeper. And finally I had the. I don't think he would have ever said anything to me, but I, thanks to Sarah, went up to him, said, I forgive you. And boy, oh, boy, did he step into that. In, in with flying colors.
- [49:30]
A
You know, it's also a reminder of this, this wonderful story that I love. You know, I, I call it like the empty boat mindset, which is this. This monk goes out on a lake to meditate. He goes out on a boat in the lake, and he closes his eyes and he's meditating. And in the middle of this meditation. He feels another boat crash into him and he starts feeling this rage building within him. His eyes are closed and he's like, how dare this person crash into me? Like, don't they see me meditating here? Why would they do this? They're getting so angry. They're building up all these emotions. And the monk opens his eyes and what he sees is that it's a boat that has come unmoored from the dock. It's. It's rope was detached and the boat is actually empty. And in that moment, all of his anger dissipates because what he realizes is you can't get angry at an empty boat. And the reminder for all of us is most of these collisions that we experience in life are with empty boats. We apply this narrative that there was negative intent, that there was malice, that the person was out to get us in some way. Like, what a jerk. They did this thing, they cut me off, whatever it was. Usually that is not the case. Usually it was just an empty boat in some way. And living that way with that mindset provides a lot of peace. Like sometimes collisions just happen. And it is within our control whether or not we want to apply this narrative to it. That leads to that anger building up.
- [50:54]
B
You use the word intent, and we've talked about time, we've talked about social relationships, talk about Lionel Messi and the intent that he uses and how we can all learn from his intentional movements as it relates to the use of time and the relationships that we try and foster and maintain.
- [51:14]
A
There's this ancient Greek concept of kairos. Ancient Greeks had two different words for time. They had kronos and then they had kairos. Kronos was like chronological, linear, quantitative, time, like time A to time B. All time is created equal. Kairos was the idea that not all time is created equal, that there are specific moments or windows that actually have more texture, more meaning, higher importance, and that energy invested into those windows has the potential to create extraordinary outcomes. The best example that I can think of of someone internalizing this is Lionel Messi. You know, if you go and search Lionel Messi walking on Google, you'll get like a half a million hits. He has the most talked about walking habit in the entire world. 107th minute of the World Cup Final. He's like dawdling around the field, looking off into empty space. And so commentators bemoan the fact that he's lazy. Like, you know, that he's walking around all the time. Why isn't he sprinting? And what it is is it's not laziness, it's strategy. Right. Anyone that understands the sport recognizes that he is conserving energy. He's creating space, he's creating a map. And then at the perfect moment, at the right angle, he deploys 100% energy to get the ball and score. That is Kairos time in a nutshell. A recognition that there are particular moments or windows that have that higher importance, that when you invest all of your energy into those, that is how you create those ten hundred thousand x outcomes that we're all striving for. And so the call to action is really this idea to pay a little bit more attention to what those moments or opportunities are in your life. You know, we make these to do lists of priorities that are 50 items long. And the reality is that just pulls your attention and energy away from the two to three items that are really the ones that are going to push you forward towards the life that you're really trying to build in your personal or in professional spheres.
- [53:05]
B
So talk about big ideas or big ambitions and if you will, micro ones because you're a big fan of the micro ones even though you're also extremely successful at going after the big ones like running a sub three hour marathon.
- [53:19]
A
Yeah, I just don't think that these big ambitions, like big goals if you will, are particularly motivating in any sort of like daily abstract sense. Like you know, if I'm you know, going to go out and set this big year long goal at the start of the year, but I wake up on a Tuesday and I'm really tired thinking about that big long term goal. Like I'm so far away from it, it just looks so big and abstract. I can't possibly use that to get me going for this thing in the days. And so, you know, like James Clear in atomic habits, like that idea of having the daily system, I think that the idea of creating this identity around being the type of person who just wakes up and does the boring work. It's like the chop wood, carry water. What do you do before enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. What do you do after enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. You show up and you go and do the things, those small, tiny daily things that are going to inevitably compound and push you towards at least closer towards that big thing that you're going after.
- [54:20]
B
One of the daily habits that you and I both share is sauna, cold plunge. What's your, what's your sauna temp and what's your cold plunge temp?
- [54:29]
A
Oh, I, I like the sauna really hot, man. I'm like 2, 205, 210 and the cold plunge, I just run whatever the coldest it will go. So like, I don't know, I think mine gets to 36 now or something like that.
- [54:42]
B
When I heard that I literally. And mine's, mine's at 48 and I, and I, and the concept of getting it below 40 scares me.
- [54:51]
A
I will say there's no scientific benefit to doing that. So all of the science has shown that like anything I think, I think Huberman says anything below 55, like you're just, it's just overkill at some point. I, I'm not sold on the science behind cold plunges yet. Full disclosure, what I am sold on is the mental health benefits that I experience personally through it. Sauna, extremely well researched from a scientific longevity, health, cardiovascular, all of those things, all of those benefits, micro, microplastics, etc and I get a lot of mental health benefits from the sauna as well. But the cold plunge for me is much more about how I feel through doing it. The idea of doing something hard during the day that makes everything else feel easier. I really am a big believer in that and that, that is for me what the cold plunge really reinforces.
- [55:38]
B
Do you and your wife ever do it together?
- [55:41]
A
No, she has actually never, she's never cold plunged as far as I know. Unless she snuck in there once without me knowing. I don't think she has any desire. She's like, you know, she's mom to a toddler little boy. What she always says is like my life is hard enough. I don't need to, I don't need to put myself through this unnecessary suffering.
- [56:02]
B
I will, I will say that my, my partner Sarah and I do both together and it's an incredibly. We did it last night when I got home and it's just a, it's an incredible way to connect as you sit there in the sauna and can catch up on the day as you're doing that and then, and then hit the cold plunge. Starter or closer? I think your two best college baseball games were when you started against Pacific and pitched five no hit innings and then when you closed against Pepperdine to advance you all to I think the super regionals and the NCAA tournament. Which was better, being the starter or being the closer?
- [56:39]
A
Oh, closer for sure. There's nothing quite like those final moments of a game. The funny thing about that game that you mentioned, I, we were up one run and they're like nine hole hitter who hadn't hit A home run all year hit a ball off me that I'm still not sure to this day whether it was fair or foul, but the umps decided it was foul and I'm very grateful for that. But almost tied the game with a home run down the left field line and, and they ruled it foul. And I stood there on the mound, there was like two outs in the ninth inning. And I just remember thinking like, whatever it is, whether there's a God or something else, he's on my side and we're going to win this game. And like two pitches later got, got the last out of the game and we won because it was just the odds of, of that going foul. When it came off the bat, I was like, I was certain that the game was tied.
- [57:30]
B
In closing, you mentioned there the a larger force that may have had a, an impact on that one game when you and your wife decided to move from the west coast to the east coast and reorient your lives. Two weeks later your wife got pregnant with your now son. Have those types of moments made you more spiritual or do you still grasp for spirituality?
- [57:57]
A
I've always been a spiritual person. I grew up in a really multi faith, you know, wide ranging belief household. Like my mom, you know, was raised Hindu, but she grew up going to, you know, Christian schools in India. You know, my dad was nominally Jewish, but not raised Jewish. You know, my mom had like Buddhist beliefs in certain ways. And so I grew up around everything and really developed a deep respect and understanding of every, you know, every faith and, and an ability to really understand and try to understand why people believe the things that they believe. Like what. What would have changed in my life that would have led me to believe the thing that this person believes in this moment, be able to sort of understand these different perspectives and sides. I. You mentioned that moment. We had struggled for two years. It was a very dark time. And we made this decision, we made this flip. We moved across the country and within two weeks we found out that my wife was pregnant. Naturally. And if there was ever a moment in my life where I felt like God had winked at us, it was that, that like you'd taken an action and life had fallen into place and everything had fallen into alignment as it should. And I think that that was a catalyst for me of a deeper belief and a faith in some higher order power energy, something that I don't think I'll ever understand. And personally, I think that spirituality is much more about the willingness to wrestle with the unknown than it is to have answers to it, but that will always exist for me.
- [59:33]
B
Sahil Bloom, you have an intention to impact the lives of a billion people. I know every day you're dropping that stone into the water and watching the ripple effects go out. I am extremely thankful of you spending an hour with me to talk about all this. And hopefully this conversation adds a couple more ripples into that. Thank you for all you think, all you write, all you talk about. And I very much look forward to seeing you next time on the East Coast.
- [60:01]
A
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.
- [60:03]
B
Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next week,
- [60:14]
A
Sa.