The 5 Types of Wealth

Hosts

Derek ThompsonDerek Thompson

About the episode

Summary

• In the following excerpt, Derek and Sahil discuss the genesis of Sahil’s new book.

  Derek Thompson: 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 Sahil tomorrow,” because I don’t just have questions about this book, I want to talk about it. 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 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.

  Sahil Bloom: 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, “OK, 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. 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.

  Thompson: And this really hit me for a couple of 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 end point, 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 relationships where we don’t have that awareness or that radical clarity of insight. 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?

  Bloom: I appreciate you sharing that, let me just say. 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 reach that thing that you’ve propped up as your destination, you get there and you inevitably feel this kind 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 relationship with my sister 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. 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: On the outside looking in, I was winning the game. I was doing the things that everyone celebrates as being successful. It’s like you’re 30 and you’re doing the things that everyone told you that 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 Ernest Hemingway line: “gradually, then suddenly.” It was gradually over the course of a period, and then suddenly with that one conversation, that insight was cemented. And I went home, and the next day my wife and I had a conversation about 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 both of our parents. And in that moment, we had done something very powerful if you zoom 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 life; 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.

  This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
  
  Host: Derek Thompson
  Guest: Sahil Bloom
  Producer: Devon Baroldi