Sahil Bloom - The Time Billionaire & Engineering Serendipity

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we are joined by Sahil Bloom. Thank you so much for coming the show, brother.

I'm so happy to be here.

Thanks so much for coming out. We're here in Marina Del Rey. It's a little cloudy with you on your trip to la, but that's all right.

It'll get sunny later. As you said, it always starts out gloomy here and then it gets nice. So looking forward to it for sure, man.

Well, super excited to have you on. I know I've been following you on Twitter and I've just loved your content over the years after I've been seeing it and more recently I've learned that not only we have tons of mutual friends, but you're an investor in my, my past co founder's business and just I love everything you talk about in social and really excited to dive into this conversation.

Yeah, we do have a lot of mutual friends. It's. I, I feel like I didn't appreciate that. And your buddy Kieran, who runs this great business shop, Genie, is killing it. So I'm grateful for the, grateful for the connection there, for sure, man.

Well, for people that may not know you, you're someone that when it comes to the concepts you share on social, I was sharing with Diego before the show, just a couple pieces of content that you've put out over the years that have impacted me. And one of the concepts that I just want to start with that I think you've displayed very well. And initially that's where I heard about the concept is this idea of a time billionaire.

Right.

In a world on social media where there's so many people talking about money or business. I feel that you bring such a personal element of storytelling that I appreciate. And this is a concept that I'd love to just dive into because I think you do a great job at not only sharing and talking about it, but just the way you go about discussing and sharing these thoughts online.

So it's really easy to get caught up in the money game and when you're young, especially everything around us, like on social media, if you're on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter, wherever, everything is about, like, how much money you've made, how much money you're going to make, what success you're going to have. And people measure success in those terms. Everything's about dollars and cents. And it's partially because it's so easily measured. Right. Like it is just a single and you can look at it and it's very easy to track it. And like, there's a famous quote, what gets measured gets managed. Peter Drucker, this like management theorist said that, and it's true. So money is very easily measured. And so as a result, we sit around, we stare at it, and we manage it. The reality is that time is really the most impression, most precious asset in your life. And we all lose sight of that along the way. And so the concept of the time billionaire that I wrote about, that you, that you alluded to, is this investor named Graham Duncan, who, who I think he talked about it originally on Tim Ferriss podcast. And he basically just talked about the fact that when you're young, you are a time billionaire in the sense that you have over a billion seconds left in your life. So if you're going to live until you're 80 years old, when you're 20, you have roughly 2 billion seconds left. Like a billion seconds is 30ish years. And when you're 50, you're still a time billionaire. But you don't relate to yourself that way. You don't think about the fact that your seconds are ticking away and all you're thinking about is, what's that next achievement? What's the next thing that I'm trying to go get? And you defer all your happiness to achieving that next thing. And when you do that, you're letting that time slip away.

Love that concept. And I remember when I read that, I'm 23, for context, I'm like, all.

Right, we got, you're a big, big time billionaire.

Big time billionaires over here. But it goes, times are, seconds are ticking.

Yeah. I mean, and it's called like deferred happiness syndrome. And we all do it, and it's a natural thing we all do, which is we say whenever. Like, when I get X, then I'm gonna be happy. So you say like, you're 23 years old. You're like, well, when I get Forbes 30 under 30, then I'll be happy. Or when I make my first $10 million, then I'll be happy. And then when you get that, it just resets. And you say like, well, actually, when I get $30 million, then I'll be happy. Or when I get 40, Forbes 40 under 40, then I'll be happy, whatever the next thing is. And the problem is you're just constantly pushing out your own satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness on to that next level. And when you do that, you never actually experience it. You never experience those feelings of fulfillment along the way. And that's a travesty And a lot of people continue to do that until they die. They never reach it because it's just like it's a mirage. Right. Like, if that's what you're chasing, if you're just chasing the next thing, the next status thing, you're just going to continue chasing it. It's going to disappear, it's going to be on the horizon. You're going to keep doing that until you walk straight into your grave. Yeah.

And there's some great visuals on that that you just display that I, it's true and I appreciate the perspective there. On time. Where do you spend your time? You know, you're obviously, you're traveling right now. You're here in Los Angeles, you're, you're someone that's such a big family man. You talk about that on social media and I appreciate that. Where do you spend your time day in and day out? I know you're investing, you're creating this incredible content, you have multiple businesses. What does your day look like and how do you prioritize your time?

Yeah, I would say my day looks dramatically different from what it used to look like. So I spent the first seven years of my career working in pretty traditional finance, right. I was at a private equity fund and doing well there. Like I was, you know, like on the partner track. I was, you know, kind of rising through the ranks, running a bunch of things there. It was great. And when you're on those kind of tracks, you're kind of getting patted on the back for, for being busy and for like spinning your wheels a lot. Right? Like working 80 to 100 hour weeks is sort of like a point of pride. Like people brag about that when they're young. They're like, oh, Well, I worked 100 hour week, I slept in the office last weekend. And you kind of are like, yeah, getting charged up. That's like something that you're rallying around. And what I realized along the way as I started to kind of like make this own transition in my life to working on my own stuff, is that most of the work you do during a week, like that is bullshit. Like you're, you're like a rocking horse, right? Like you're moving a lot, but you're not going anywhere. And so one of the things that I really focused on was identifying like, what were the highest leverage uses of my time, like where could I deploy one hour of time and have it be worth hundreds of hours of output versus the things like, you know, emailing or whatever it is where I'M deploying an hour of time and it's basically an hour of output. It's just, it's an even trade. And the idea is that when you start focusing your time in on those high leverage activities, you create a world where you're totally dislocating your inputs from the outputs you can create. I feel like now I've kind of gotten to that point where I know that if I spend the first two hours of every day on some creative endeavor, normally for me that's writing. I can generate scalable output that can go out and reach millions of people. Right. Like, it's the amazing thing about we're creating content right now. We're going to film this once. Maybe it takes 45 minutes or an hour. Maybe this might be out there for the next 10 years in different forms. Right. If we have some like viral moment during it, that becomes a clip that people are going to share for many years, it might reach people in the future. So now what I'm focused on and I'll get to what my actual routine is, is like make sure that everything I'm spending time on professionally is something that is generating a hundred or a thousand x output relative to my input. And that's not easy to do and it's never going to be perfect. Right. You're still going to have to do things that don't scale. And I think that's important in certain cases. But identifying and actually thinking about sitting down and pausing and thinking about it is the most important thing. Tim Ferriss is like probably the first person that encouraged me through his writing to think about this. Like in the Four Hour Workweek, his book, which I don't know what year it came out, maybe like 2010 or something, or maybe 2005, might have been earlier than that.

Somewhere here.

Yeah, it's somewhere around and it's amazing. But it was really the first book that was out there that kind of encouraged you to think about like, if you could only work for an hour a week or like four hours a week, what would you do and how would you still make money and survive? And to most people that are sitting at home, like working a 9 to 5 job or working a 70, 80 hour a week job, that is a ludicrous notion. Like, no, I can't work four hours a week and get all this done. But if you had a gun to your head and you were told like, you can only work four hours this week, otherwise we're going to kill you or and you need to continue to feed your family and provide for your family. Could you figure out a way to do it? And it forces you to, like, scrub away all of these assumptions and underlying conditions that existed in your mind about the way that you're supposed to work and what you're supposed to work on. And it's a really powerful thing.

I love that.

So I avoided your entire question on my actual routine, which I'm happy to talk about.

I love it. And I think too, just before we get there, right, like, you talk about doing things where an hour of input is equal to 100 or a thousand times of output. I think the example of content makes a lot of sense. What are some other examples that are more tactical of how you can do that? Because I'm trying to think of something, I'm like, okay, the content one makes sense for you. What does that look like?

Yeah. So the content one is like, probably for anyone out there thinking about, how are you? A content creator is a powerful thing to think about. Reframing what it means to be a content creator is an even more powerful thing. It doesn't mean sitting and recording a podcast. It doesn't have to mean writing on Twitter, writing on LinkedIn. Warren Buffett is probably like the OG content creator. His annual shareholder letters that he created, that he wrote created an enormous amount of value for his business. He never thought of himself as a creator. Like, you never see, like, Warren Buffett creator. But the reality is that's what he was doing. He was creating content that went out into the world that was serving as like a whole bunch of idea magnets. Like, he was sharing his way of thinking about whatever it was, in his case, investing. And it attracted tons of people to his ideas. Now he fills out 50,000 person stadiums for their annual shareholder meeting. And the value of Berkshire Hathaway is significantly more than what it would be if he hadn't done that. Because people are attracted to the like aura of what he has created. So reframing that and thinking about what are the ways that there can be leverage in your system? Whatever it is, you can get leverage. And you can get that 1-100x thing from delegation, like delegating things that are a bad use of your time so that you can focus on the most important things. I mean, a classic example that I love of identifying those high leverage things is like watching Lionel Messi play soccer. Everyone always complains that he walks around the pitch, right? Like he's walking around in the World cup final in the final minutes of the game, just like staring out into space. And looking around and to the untrained observer, you look and say, like, oh, he's being lazy. He's walking around. What he's actually doing is surveying the entire field with probably the best vision that has ever existed in soccer and identifying the one moment where if he sprints and puts in 100% effort, it's going to be 1000x output. And he's the best in the world at that and has become a legend on the back of that. So we all need to think about how can we do that, like, identify what are those moments in our own day and in our own life where we can deploy the 1x effort and generate a thousand x output.

I love that. That's a great example. And the videos of him doing that. I, growing up, I played sports. I played hockey for 10 years, lacrosse, football. Never played soccer myself, but I appreciate and just value his ability to perform in such a great way. Where I've never seen him play, but I definitely plan to sometime.

Yeah, it's the coolest thing about him. I'm not a huge soccer fan either. I don't understand much about it. What I do understand is that he's not the biggest, he's not the fastest, he's not the strongest, and yet he's the best player probably ever. And if he was running around, sprinting around the field every which way he would like, his head would be bobbing around, he wouldn't be able to see those opportunities. And so it's also a case of, like, what I call the paradox of speed, which is the idea that you have to slow down in order to speed up. And so in his case, by slowing down, that's how he's actually able to see those moments where he can go deploy the 1-1000x opportunities.

Absolutely. I love that. Well, I do want to. I wanted to bring it back. Or how do you spend your time?

I went crazy. Sorry.

How do you spend your time in the morning? Someone that you know, you're right. You invest again, you have family. What does your time look like?

Yeah. So I'm a morning person, one of those annoying morning people. And I guess I'm a trained morning person. I totally disagree with the idea that, like, you're either born a morning person or you're not. I was never like an early morning riser. I got to college. I played baseball in college at Stanford, and we had morning practices and I knew, like from the first few times doing it, I'd never practiced a sport in the morning because you always had School and then you'd go to practice. And the first couple of times I was tired as all hell going to a 6am practice. And so what I figured out was like, I had to wake up at 4:30 if I wanted to be like, awake and alert for a 6am practice. And so I started waking up earlier, which meant I needed to go to bed earlier in order to do that. I kind of just carried that habit with me when I started working. And so when I started working my first job, I knew that I wanted to be in the office by 6:30. And that meant that if I wanted to continue working out, continue doing, having fitness, be a part of my life, I had to get to the gym by 4:45. And so that meant I had to wake up at 4 in order to be alert. And so the whole thing kind of started this clock for me. And so I am still sort of in that habit where, like, I'll wake up now right around 4, maybe slightly after 4am On a typical day. The biggest benefit of that for me now is that I get the first, like three and a half hours of the day of true peace and quiet before my son is awake and before my wife wakes up. And that's what I have to do in order to have that time of the day where I can like, really focus on that most important thing. So I'll get up. The first thing I do is I go get my cold plunge. This has become like this trend fad.

You have one right out here, do you?

Which one do you have?

Ed's theory lab.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I've. I've tried. There's too. There's so many of them now. I have the cold plunge, I think it's called. You like the white tub and plunge, right? Yeah, the plunge. Yeah. Like, there's tons of. Maybe it's a fad, maybe it's not. I get unbelievable benefits from it. Like the mental clarity and alertness and energy that I get from getting in there and just from like the feeling of satisfaction of doing something really hard to start your day. I mean, getting out of a warm bed and going out, it's on my deck, like yours. But I live in New York, so it's cold now. Yeah. And in the winter, it's freezing and there's like snow.

It's a different animal.

Totally different animal. I mean, in the summer, in the summer, like, you go out and it's 80 degrees at 5 in the morning. You go out and get into it. It's not so bad, but I, I go and I get in that. You know, I do three to five minutes every morning. Normally now, like I'll film a video while I'm in there because it's a good way for me to like take my mind off the cold too.

I gotta show up for people.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Like people are expecting you to do it, you go do it and you gotta like think about something else while you're filming it, which is nice other than just like, holy, I'm cold. I get out of there and then I go sit down at my desk. So I, I spend that first. It's probably from about like 5:00am until 7:30, really focused on one thing. And the night before. I always plan out what that one thing is. Recently it's been working on my book which I've kind of had to be in crunch time on. It's called the five Types of Wealth. All about some of the ideas we were talking about. Time. Different types of wealth beyond money, Redefining wealth beyond money. Super excited about it. I'll let you know when I, when I have a date on when it's going to be coming. But that's been a big one for me is just like make sure that that morning kind of focus, work block is really focused on one of those, you know, 100x type opportunities. Planning that the night before so that there's no friction to getting started is the other like core part of my routine that makes that work. Because if you get up and you go to sit down at your desk and you haven't figured out what you're going to work on, your natural bias as a human is to be a sloth and to be lazy and to do the easiest thing. So you'll go sit down and you'll be like, okay, well there's these like couple stupid things I need to do today and I'm gonna do those because it's just easy. It's easier to do it rather than doing the really hard thing to start the day. And so planning it out, making it low friction to start is something that I really believe in and that has helped me a lot. So that's kind of like the core part. Like just from a morning routine standpoint, that's what I really try to stick to.

I love that. So yeah, you're in the 4am Club down there.

Yeah, yeah, I try. I mean it's like. And again, I go to bed at 8, right. Like I'm not a hard about sleep.

Yeah, I was like, big night last night.

Yeah, yeah. I'M I'm not like, I'm not one of these guys. I did that. I. For the first seven years of my career, I didn't sleep. You know, I was like, I probably averaged like five hours a night and my health suffered. My stress levels were bad. I was, you know, overweight, my skin was bad.

I saw the, the old picture.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It's.

It looks like I got plastic surgery. I mean, it really is like kind of crazy. We can put it in the show notes. Maybe like 24, 23, 24. Like your age. Yeah, but you can see an enormous difference. And I was much younger. I was almost like, almost 10 years younger, but I was overweight, my skin was bad. You can see it on. So I just went to my 10 year college reunion a weekend before we're filming this. And one of my biggest realizations from that was you can see someone's daily habits on their face after a long period of time. So 10 years had passed. The difference. We were all 32. Like all the people that were there were 32, but some people looked 50 and some people looked 32. And that is all a result of daily habits that have compounded, either positively or negatively over 10 years. And so you get to decide, right? Like you every day get to sort of like make a decision of which bucket you're going to go into on that. Are you going to have positive daily habits that compound to allow you to live the way you want live, or are you going to have negative daily habits? For me personally, like, I want to be an unbelievably healthy father for my son when he's older. Like, I want to be able to coach all his teams. I want to be able to keep up with him. I want to be able to, you know, go running with him, baseball, whatever it is. And so that means I need to do certain things along the way.

Well, yeah, seeing that picture, I'm like, wow, you look incredible. I know you take your health seriously and it's cool to hear that perspective there. Speaking of health, you've never talked about running on a podcast before. You did a sub three hour marathon. When was this again?

September 10th.

September 10th. How was running? That was your first marathon?

First marathon and maybe my last.

The first marathon. Sub 3. What was that experience like for you and what is your running journey? Looked like.

Yeah. So the reason I haven't talked about running on any podcast and this will be the first one where I do, um, I have a general aversion to talking about things as A, you know, quote unquote creator or influencer that I don't have the stats to back up. So, you know, you see, like, now there is this, like, influencer is like, a job title or something that people want to be now or want to go do. And that means that there's a lot of people that actually haven't done anything that are talking about doing the thing, and they're like, selling you a course on how to do the thing, but they've never done it. And I have an issue with that. Right. Like, I don't like when there are, like, business gurus that haven't actually made money or built a business or, like, had a strong career or done a thing. I don't love the, like, idea of fitness influencers who don't have, like. Like, they don't look jacked and they're not. They don't have the stats to back it up. Similarly, running influencers that don't actually have the stats to back up being great runners doesn't make sense to me. And so I did not want to ever, like, talk about running or my program plan, etc. Until I had the stats to back it up. Now I have the stats to back it up. Like, no one can question, because I can point you to the exact running stats that I have in order to be at least somewhat credible to talk about this. So I basically, in, like, let's see, this is like March of 2023. So, you know, call it six months before I ran, I met a neighbor who I got introduced to this guy, Brian Maza, who is like a. Yeah, big, like, fitness influencer. It literally, like, just by chance, we live a quarter mile from each other and he's got a sauna and a cold plunge. I got a sauna and a cold plunge. Like, the reason we found out is because my cold plunge, like, broke when the power went out and I needed to have them come fix it. The guy came and fixed it and he was like, oh, it's so weird. I actually have to go, like, down the street to fix another one. And I was like, someone else in my town has a cold plunge. Like, no way. I thought everyone was soft here. And I find out that it's this guy we meet.

Brian's incredible.

Yeah, he's incredible. He's been around, like, the content game for plus years.

I went to one of his events in New York in 27.

His events are awesome. A Red Bull, they're called. Yeah, I'm going to one in Austin that he's Doing. They're amazing events. I went to one he did in Montauk, but he's really into this thing of like hybrid training. Right? Like, he's a big jacked guy, but he was really into running. I had always hated running because baseball running was punishment. Like, you didn't run. Running was like if you screwed up, if you had a bad game, if you did something wrong, you had to run. And so in my mind I was patterned to think of running as punishment. And so I started running with him just casually and within like two or three weeks, you know, no offense to Brian. Like, I was a better runner than him already and I'm much smaller than him. Like, I don't agree with that. Yeah, yeah, he would. I think he's, he's very like, he's been like pushing me forward on the running thing a lot. He's awesome and become one of my best friends in the world. But he. Yes, I think he would agree with it. We'll see. We'll see when we put this out. So I started getting better at it and I was like, oh, wow, this is kind of cool. There was like the dopamine cycle of improving at something. And basically right then I just decided I was like, I'm going to try to run a sub three hour marathon within six months of starting. And my whole thing, you know, with life in general is like, if you're going to set a goal, just set a big ambitious goal and just go after it. And like, worst comes to worse, I miss it. And I still got way, way better because I pushed myself hard, but I wanted to just like go all in on something. I'm kind of wired to be a bit. Like, I probably have mild OCD and I just like want a real plan and I want to drive towards it and just like, I'll get maniacal about it. Like I will. If I haven't hit my run for the day and we get home from something at 10pm, like I'll go out and do the thing at 10pm it's just how I am. So I set that goal the whole summer, you know, probably ran from start to finish. I had never run more than three miles at a time when I started.

0.

100.

Yeah.

And so I went like real 0 to 100. I probably ran like 1300ish miles in training over that six months.

Wow.

And went out and ran it. I ran 2,5731 and nearly died, you know, like the last four miles of it. Like it was 90. Humidity that day, so like terrible cramps and just grinded through it. But pretty unbelievable experience. Just like that is pushing yourself to that level.

Marathon sub 3.

You've run some marathons, right?

I did my first one last year.

Where'd you run it?

Honolulu.

Oh, that must have been beautiful.

It was stunning. It was very mountainous and I wasn't training a lot of hills, but my whole thing was I wanted to do the first one and then just cut down on time. I ran my first one in three. 36.

That's great.

I felt great. For me, it was like sub 4 was the goal. Yeah, I did very well. And Now I'm running one in Palm beach in December and the goal is 315, but we'll see where I end up.

I have unbelievable respect for anyone that finishes a marathon because it's just so damn far like it is. I mean, you get, you get through like 20 miles and you still have freaking 10k to go fit, like to finish the thing. I mean, it's like, it's really, really far. And honestly, if you're running, if you're running it at a slower pace, you're just out there for more and more hours. So, like, I mean, a great marathoners, like, I forget who it was. It might have been Kipchoge that said this when someone was like, I can't believe you run it in two hours. And he was like, I can't believe you run it in four hours. Like, you're having to run for so much longer than me. I'm done. After two hours, I had. When I finished mine, it was a double loop marathon. And so when I was crossing the finish line, there were a few people that were pressing the halfway point. And yeah, I was like, man, I can't imagine having another. Another loop around that at this point. But yeah, I mean, it's a. It was, it was a hell of an experience and definitely training regimen.

1300 miles in six months. Yeah, I think I'm at like 600 for the year, so I'm by no means in that.

You do a lot of good thinking when you run. Like, I, You've probably seen it in my writing. Like, I'm. I'm big on finding and carving out time to actually think on a daily basis because the vast majority of our time professionally and personally is spent doing something. You're like, okay, I have to do this task or I have to go, you know, take this person, this place. I have to go do X, Y or Z, whatever. You're like constantly moving and when you do that, you rarely ever get time to just like think about the new ideas you've consumed. Right. Like you read interesting things, you had interesting conversations. And if you don't take the time to think, nothing gets to connect in your mind. Like you never have those high upside new ideas because nothing has ever like gotten to intermingle and have that like networking of ideas in your mind. Running is an amazing way to do that.

Yeah, I started falling in love with running and that like 8 to 10 mile range where that's when I had that, you know, people call it runner's high, but just clarity of just that time that I think. And you know, I. Before doing my marathon last year, I was interviewing a handful of people that inspired me, like Iron cowboy who did 101 ironmans in 101. Are you familiar with him?

No, that's insane.

James Lawrence is his name. He initially set the world record of the most consecutive Ironmans done back to back. The world record was five. So Ironman distance triathlons.

And that's like what, it's two mile swim, 100 mile bike, 2.4 mile swim.

I think like 110 or so mile.

Bike and then a marathon.

So the goal, the record was five. I think he did it six or seven years and yeah, consecutive days in a row. So you know, someone he could have doubled it, did tens. He ended up doing initially 50, 50 Ironmans in 50 days in all 50 states. And that was what he made this huge record for. And then two years later, this is, I believe, during COVID he doubled it and then did 101.

Oh my God.

And I remember interviewing this guy. You know, we're talking, I'm sharing with him that I'm doing my first marathon and he's giving me pieces of advice.

Like, oh, that's cute.

But you know, as someone like him, he's like, you know, someone's journey that might be their first mile.

Right.

Or whatever it may be. And you know, the simple phrase that he just said was just one foot in front of the other. And not only is that a simple thing, you might have heard it before, but his ability to run through. Like, I think he had a fractured leg on day 19. And he literally pushed through. Just to think about human potential in that faucet was very unique. And also when I, when I ran the Honolulu Marathon, I made it a point to meet the CEO of the Honolulu Marathon. And when I was out there, I interviewed him. His name is Jim Berhal. He's been running the Honolulu Marathon for 40 years. It's like a 30,000 to 40,000 person event. And one thing that stuck with me, he says, you know, you only have one opportunity to run your first marathon, so go out there and give in your on and most importantly, don't stop. And he had this sort of regret where he's like the first marathon, like he had to stop and tie his shoe. And that just, that stuck with him. That simple moment of just fixing something. Yeah. So for you, what was the biggest takeaway from not only running a marathon and having this incredible time, but the feeling that you had after in terms of the accomplishment?

Yeah. You have to believe you can do something before you actually have the evidence to prove you can do it. Like, I had a fundamental belief that I was going to run a sub 3 hour marathon when I couldn't run 5 miles. I just was like, it's just a matter of time until I can prove, until I can create the evidence to prove that I can do this. No one else in the world, maybe a couple people in the world would believe me right now. My wife actually probably would have believed me right now. And I'll tell a story associated with that. But you really, like, when you're going after some big thing, you have to believe it before you have any evidence to prove it. And if you don't, it's not going to happen. And like I am, I'm not huge on, you know, manifestation. Like I'm not one of these people that stands in front of the mirror and points at myself and says things. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm just not. But I really do believe that unless you fundamentally believe that you are going to accomplish the thing that you're going after before you have any reason to believe it, it's just not going to happen. Before I left for the marathon, I like, I was flying out there and my wife and son were staying at home and my dad was actually going to come out, which was going to be so much fun. Erie, Pennsylvania. I chose it because it was flat.

Okay.

I didn't know that it was gonna be 90% humidity. That wasn't fun because it was September. It's like still warm on the east coast. But before I left to fly, I asked my wife like, do you think I'm gonna do it? And she said 100%. And I was like, why do you think? Like you have no, you haven't seen any of my runs. I haven't shown you any of the stats from my runs. And she Was like, that's just the type of person you are. Like, when you set your mind to something, you're going to achieve it. And I have no doubt in my mind that you're going to do this. And like, I had a sliver of doubt. I was like, yeah, I think if I get a calf cramp, like there were situations in my mind where I was like, it might not happen. Not many. I kind of figured like I was going to do it. But she had more confidence in me than I probably had in me in that moment. And that was another lesson to me of having one person in your life who just has that belief in you. And if it's your spouse or partner, that's incredible because the unlock that, that provides for life, like to have someone who is that supportive of you that they believe in you, even when you don't believe in you. And when all things are going wrong, they are still there believing in you. What I mean, what greater unlock for life can you possibly imagine than that?

Absolutely. That's incredible.

The one other lesson I'll share is a lesson on judgment just from running in general. When you're running and you see other runners out there and you're like, you know, say you're running here in Marina del Rey, there's tons of runners, I imagine, or wherever you are, when you pass someone and you're running by someone, you can't place judgment on them as a runner by seeing this one tiny glimpse of them running. Because you might be running past Eliud Kipchoge, running on his easy day, where he's running at a 9 minute per mile pace, and you happen to be running on your like tempo day and running fast. And for you to cast judgment on them during that moment from seeing this one tiny sliver is deeply flawed logically. And that lesson applies so closely to life. Like you cannot see someone, see a glimpse of someone and cast judgment on who they are as a person. It's a terrible thing to do and it'll lead you down a lot of bad pathways. And so like, I just, I thought a lot about that in my own running experience of all of these kind of tiny little lessons that running actually teaches you about ways to live.

Yeah, that's, that's powerful. Couldn't agree more. I want to talk about and move the conversation to investing. You have a fund, right? When did you start your fund?

I started investing in early stage technology stuff personally in probably like 2017, 2018. And then I raised the fund, which is a $10 million fund I raised it in January 2022. Got it. Yeah.

What was that process like for you? Because you were in private equity before, you're familiar with obviously startups and early stage companies, I'm sure.

Yeah.

What led to starting a fund and wanting to do that at scale?

Yeah, I mean, so private equity for people who don't understand it is, is more around like later stage cash flowing companies. It's like the, you know, you're buying a company, putting debt on it and paying off the debt with the cash flows from the company. And if things go well, you make a whole lot of money doing that because you're like levering up a bet into a company. It's not technology investments, it's not the stuff you like read about in the newspaper, typically about these like unicorns, etc. I had always loved early stage technology stuff from my Stanford days just because I like dreaming about the future. I mean, if you're listening to this conversation, you can probably tell I'm like pretty optimistic. I generally have positive outlooks about what the future will look like. And to me that's what venture investing is, is like you have to bet on some kid, you know, you, when you were starting out, your buddy Kieran, like you have to bet on some kid being able to create their vision of the future and actually go and build it and be able to sell that vision to other people so that they can convince them and, and that's fun to me. That's really, really cool. So I started doing that originally through like Stanford Networks. 2017, 18, 19. The markets were great, so it looked like I was a really good investor. Everyone looks really smart during a bull market. And 2020, 2021 came around and things were continuing to roll. I started thinking about basically scaling up what I was doing personally. I had probably personally invested, you know, like 200, $300,000 into early stage tech stuff at that time. And I kind of just figured like, okay, now I have this platform, you know, I didn't have that previously. I had started writing in 2020, the platform had grown to maybe, you know, maybe reaching like a half a million people by the like end of 2021. And what I realized was that like I had this powerful asset that I could bring to bear for founders that I backed. So if I invested in a company now, I can go talk about the company on my, on my writing, on my, you know, Instagram, on podcasts, whatever, and drive a lot of value to them. So why don't I use that as a thesis raise A small fund and go and continue to scale up what I'm doing. So I did that. And, you know, the fundraising process was fun because you're kind of like storytelling, which I love doing and getting to meet great people. I really focused on getting backers who I admired. So it's a lot of, like, people you would know, mentors of mine as investors in the fund. It's a tiny fund, so I didn't have to go to, like, the large institutions to go and raise things. And, you know, fortunately, the timing of raising the fund was great because that same fund raised a year earlier in, like January 2021. I would have invested most of it at unbelievably high valuations that we saw in 2021. Yeah, I was kind of like, it was just lucky that I raised it kind of like when the market started to go down. So most of the fund is now being deployed. Deployed into, like, much better valuations and like a more. Yeah. More prudent investing environment, if you will.

And founders that are building in this market and understand the dynamic of what has changed.

Yeah. And aren't just like, you know, raising on a hope and a prayer for some, like crypto or AI star. There's still some of that within AI, but yeah, like people who understand that winter has come and are perfectly happy hunkering down and building for the future during it.

I love that. No, it's. It's. I align with a lot of your thinking in terms of I plan to one day raise a fund. And it's funny in this story that I always like to share and I've had this podcast, it'll be six years in December. Started when I was 17. And wow. You know, for me, it's not that I have a crazy amount of advertisers on the show. It's always been one of three things. One is just meeting great people and like, building the network that way, learning from them. And then three is just the business opportunities that come from that. And you'd appreciate this, but Kieran and I, on our last company, Media Kids, this is our first time raising any have outside capital. I'm 20, he's 21 at the time. And we ended up raising just over a million dollars, like 1.4 from 37 angel investors. And people always ask me, why do you do the podcast? Oh, you're not. Maybe not monetizing it to the highest level, but for me, it's always about the long game and thinking the future and really building depth of relationships where I think reflecting on all the angel investors, probably 90% of them were past guests on the podcast. People that I just have built relationships with, people that I was able to share an idea with and obviously present the opportunity to. And for me, when I think about long term, not only the deal flow and founders that I get to meet and sort of deploying that thesis on a fund, I align and totally relate to not only how you've gone about it, but more so I'm learning from you in terms of that approach.

So it is uncomfortable. I mean, content is unbelievable leverage. We. We alluded to it earlier today. I mean, I. I had lunch with a billionaire investor because of my content. Like, I. I wrote a thread about paradoxes on Twitter in November 2021. Usually Twitter, like, something is basically gone after 24 hours. Like, that's kind of the way Twitter works. Instagram, great viral clips are continuing, like, months and months later. YouTube the same way. But Twitter, it's kind of gone in January 2023. So, like, what, 14 months later, I'm in India and I get a text from a bunch of friends. I wake up in the morning and I see a bunch of texts that say, like, oh, Bill Ackman shared your thread. I open up Twitter expecting that he's like, shared something recently. And I look and he shared this thread from November 2021. And he shared it saying, like, a friend sent me this last week. It has tons of wisdom. Everyone should read it. And so me, I'm like, big on shooting your shot, right? Like, closed mouths don't get fed. I say that all the time. So I reply to him and just say, hey, thanks for sharing my thing. We should have lunch in New York sometime. On me, right? Like, kind of tongue in cheek, like, he's a billionaire. I'm clearly not. I'll pay. And he replies. And then we're dming and we coordinate a lunch, and I get to go in and have lunch with this billionaire investor. And he literally, like, a few months before that, he auctioned off a lunch with him for charity. And someone paid like, $100,000 to have lunch with him. I got to do it for free because of something that I had written 14 months ago that was still out in the world working for me, right? Like, it was out there doing something. I had created it once, and then it was out there. And so for you, like, with this podcast or for any content creator out there, anyone that's willing to, like, put themselves on the line and put their content out into the world, there's incredible leverage. That comes from that in the future that you cannot possibly predict. I never would have been able to predict that that was going to happen.

Yeah, that's incredible. What was the biggest takeaway from that lunch meeting?

He was incredible. I, I, you know, honestly, and maybe this is like, generalizing on, on my end, but, like, I assumed that a billionaire hedge fund guy would be kind of a jerk. Just in my mind, like, my pattern of what that looks like is, like, from billions or something like that. And I just assumed he was gonna be, like, really, like, tense and harsh. And he was so warm and genuine and present, like he wasn't trying to leave, like, he wasn't looking at his phone constantly. I would say, like, the other big takeaway was his capacity to aggregate data and then sort of have the, like, data in and then a simple story out was incredible. Like, anything that I talked about, it seemed like he understood and was able to kind of like, bring it into his mental model of the world and then spit out what his perspective or view of it was. And that is an incredible skill that we don't often think about as being important. But that ability to kind of take tons of data in, aggregate it, and then, then have a simple story come out on the other end is just like a really, really unique trait and probably something that has allowed him to be as successful as he was. There's this, there's this idea, like, to the point on the content and being willing to share it. There's this idea called the zebra effect, which comes from these researchers that were trying to study zebras. It was very hard to study zebras because they're all black and white striped. And so you'd notice that a zebra was doing something, the researcher would look down to jot it down and look back up. And because they travel in packs, they wouldn't be able to tell which one was the one they had looked at. So they fixed it by putting, like, big red dots on the couple of healthy adult zebras that they wanted to track. And that made it easier to track them. Unfortunately, it also led to lions eating them within, like, a day because having the big dot allowed them to stand out from the pack, which meant that the lions targeted them. This is, like the risk of nonconformity that we all face. It is uncomfortable and it is dangerous to stand out and to do something different. Like, you are putting your neck online. You are the zebra with the big red dot. When you share things, when you record a podcast, when you write stuff and put it out on the Internet, but the upside from doing that is correlated to the risk. And so you're willing to put yourself out. It's risky to be a nonconformist and to do those things, but the upside from doing it is asymmetric. I mean, it's enormous. If you're willing to put yourself out there.

Absolutely. And I'll share just. It reminded me of a story where, like, this idea of shooting your shot, I think, is. It's so undervalued, and people that don't do are leaving so much on the table. You know, there's one of my. One of my favorite interviews that I've ever done. I had the opportunity to interview Larry king back in 2019, really shortly before he passed away. And how I ended up getting that interview was just this chain reaction of shooting my shot and the domino effect. Right. Where one of my buddies, Michael, he was working with Tillman Fertitta, who's the owner of the Rockets. And I knew who Tim Tillman was, but he was just coming out with his book, Shut up and Listen, and he puts the book out. My. My friend Michael was like, hey, like, I'm doing a podcast run for Tillman. Do you want to have my show? I was like, let's do it. Absolutely. That was the first billionaire I interviewed, and it was on Zoom interviewed him. It was like 15 minutes, super quick, super short. Do the interview. Great. Four or five weeks later, I'm living in Arizona with Kieran. At the time, Kieran actually came to this dinner that I'm about to mention. I get a text from Michael and Tillman's team, like, hey, we're doing this. Beverly Hills. Mastro's dinner. He owns Mastro's place is great. Yeah. He's like, we're inviting all the people that helped with the book promo. It was like, 25, 30 people. And I remember it was Kieran and myself. We go out there. There's Tillman and all these people that I don't know. My buddy Michael. And Kieran ends up sitting right next to this guy named Chance. And Tillman's going around the table, having everyone do a quick intro of themselves. And it finally gets the Chance, who I don't know at the time. And Tillman goes, chance, it was such a pleasure being on your father's show today. He's been a light of inspiration my entire life. And his name was Chance King. And over the years now, Chance and I have become really close friends, and I just love everything he does. But that interaction led to, you know, probably six Weeks later, from October to December, I'm then sitting in Larry King's iconic studio here in la. And it wasn't because he just says, hey, you have podcasts, you should interview my dad. It was just asking not only for the opportunity. I'm not someone that, you know, you meet someone, you ask for something. That's not how I like to do things, but the genuine feedback that he was giving me and the feeling you have when you meet someone that is willing to help, it just made sense. And long story short, that's how I got that interview. But if it wasn't for saying yes or having that domino effect of all the hundreds of interviews prior to having that opportunity, you're leaving a lot on the table unless you actually take that step and make that ask at times.

It's also just a perfect example. It's an amazing story. It's a perfect example of expanding your luck surface area. Like when you put yourself out there and when you're willing to create value genuinely for other people, you're expanding your luck surface area. Like that will never happen if you're not doing the nice thing for the person. That leads to the conversation with Tillman, that leads to you being at this dinner. And that is just like, yeah, it's lucky, but it's also that it's engineered serendipity. Like you engineered your own luck by putting yourself in positions where luck can strike.

Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate that.

Yeah.

A couple more questions here. Sale. When it comes to your viewpoint on life today, but in the future, as you said, you have a very positive outlook on life. Where do you find inspiration yourself? You know, you talk about going on walks and having that. That time to think, but when it comes to being inspired and more so this idea of fulfillment, what does that mean to you and where do you find inspiration?

I am. I mean, you've probably noticed it in the content that I create. I don't really fit into a bucket. Like I. I decided pretty early on that if I was going to do this, if I was going to put ideas out into the world, create for a long period of time, that it was going to have to be authentic. I wasn't going to be able to write about one thing for the next 20 years of my life. I didn't care enough about finance to like write about finance for 20 years or whatever. The one thing is, what I do love doing is writing about things I'm struggling with and questions I'm asking myself and challenges that I'm facing in the, like, the way that I'm wrestling with it. And the mental models or frameworks, whatever I'm learning that I can share. It's the reason my profile says exploring my curiosity and sharing what I learned along the way, because that's what I'm trying to do. And so when I think about inspiration, my inspiration comes from my own life. It's like when I'm going around walking, I'm thinking about things that I'm struggling with. Like, what are my own personal challenges at a point in time? What are the points of tension in my life? What are tension points that my family or my friends or loved ones are encountering? And how can they ask slightly better questions to help them wrestle with it? I'm never trying to like give you the answer because I don't have the answer. I'm 32. I'm not like some 90 year old wise monk that has lived in the mountains of Nepal for the last 30 years drinking bone broth or whatever they're drinking. I'm wrestling with these things in real time. And anything that I'm writing or sharing about is something that is personal to me. I'm not writing about something that I read in some book. I'm writing about my own life and how I'm wrestling with it. So when you talk about fulfillment, when you talk about where I find that purpose, to me, it is all driven around how can I create something that positively impacts someone's life in some tiny way? You know, I was in a career track where like, with certainty, I would have made a lot of money working in finance. And I left that because I don't care enough about money. Like, I have plenty of money. I'm great. And I think by doing something that I love and that I could be the best in the world at, I'll make a whole lot more money doing this than I was going to make doing that. And I only learned that in hindsight. But the reality is it has to be driven by something deeper than that. It can't be driven by a desire to make money. You have to find what, like your true why is around the thing. And mine is I want to impact a billion lives. Like, I think that if I can share a positive message, I think I can reach people wherever they are in different ways.

That's powerful. Love it.

Yeah.

Last question before we wrap up. Just thinking about the future. What excites you the most about everything that you're working on? I know you have, you're working on a book, you have all these companies that you're investing in. But what excites you as you look into the future?

That's a great question. I am. I am just really excited to get to work with amazing people that inspire me on a daily basis. And that includes the time that I get to spend with my wife and with my son. And the fact that I have a life by design today. That means that I can be there during those years. Right? Like, My son is 17 months old. I maybe have another eight years during which I am like, one of his favorite people in the world. And once he's older than that, he's gonna have his best friends and he's gonna have his girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. Like, I. I just want to be present during those years. And I'm so excited that I've designed this life where I can really, really embrace those years this time and just, like, genuinely give to other people and act in the service of others in a way that creates value for them. And know that when we're creating value for other people out there, we receive value in return.

I love that. And that's the things you write about and just the time spent with children, family, it's also powerful. And I always make it a point to go back and reflect on that. So that's super cool to hear.

Yeah. I mean, you're young, you're 23. It's like you are. You've already been in it for a long time, which is unbelievable. I mean, when I was 23, I was nowhere near where you are today. And so I just think about, like, 23 is when things just really just start to compound and you just start to see the benefits of all of the efforts that you've put in over the prior year. So, like, I'm just personally extremely excited to have met you now because, you know, having a chance to, like, be along and help however I can along the next 10 years of your life, it's going to be an unbelievable ride. I'm excited.

I appreciate it a lot. Well, before we wrap up here, where's the best place that everyone can stay in touch with you? Subscribe, follow along, and just learn more about everything that you have going on.

My website is Sahil bloom.com Fortunately, having a weird name. I'm like at Sahil Bloom basically on every platform. So you can find me at any of those places. And my newsletter can be found on my website too.

Perfect. Well, I really appreciate you coming on today.

Thank you.

An absolute pleasure. And if you're still watching and listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Today and I will talk to everyone soon.