Multi-Millionaire: You've Been Sold a Lie! Make $1M Without Sacrificing Your Life! (ft. Sahil Bloom)

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Learn more@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval I was at probably the darkest point at that moment in time.

You went to Stanford, you were at the top of your career in private equity. Then you realized that you weren't happy with your life.

I was making a lot of money and I was like winning on this one scoreboard. But I was drinking seven nights a week. I 40 pounds overweight. I wasn't seeing people that I loved. That was the moment that changed my entire life.

And what did you do?

We took a pretty dramatic action. Definitively. The science shows that money directly buys happiness up to a point. Other areas of your life will like continuing to build around your purpose, continuing to grow your relationships, your health, all of those things drive incremental happiness. And money can be a tool to help you do those things. The thing that people lose sight of is, hi, I'm Sahil Bloom, author of the New York Times bestselling book the Five Types of Wealth. Welcome to the Burnouts. I think that the biggest issue facing young people and the challenge that I faced was basically measuring yourself on someone else's scoreboard. I had assumed my entire life that the path to living a successful life was just going and making money like that. That was what I had been convinced from a young age. And even going to college, like you're in an environment at Stanford where people measure their entire self worth on the basis of like who's getting the highest return offer to Goldman or McKinsey. Like that's your entire life. And so in that environment, I just feel like you accept that as your own. And I basically went and chased that at the expense of everything else. So I was making a lot of money and I was like winning on this one scoreboard. But I was drinking seven nights a week. I was 40 pounds overweight. I wasn't seeing people that I loved more than once a year. And my wife and I were in the middle of this, you know, struggle in our relationship around infertility. It was like all of these things in my life were falling apart. While on the surface, you would have seen me and been like, oh, he's winning the game. He's doing the things you're supposed to want to do. All because I was measuring myself on someone else's scoreboard rather than my own.

And how'd you get out?

I think the biggest thing was just resetting to recognize what do I actually want my life to look like. You just like, you take a step back and say, okay, there's the scoreboard I've been handed by the world, and then there's the scoreboard that I actually want. What do I actually want my life to look like in five years? And when you start doing that, you stop allowing yourself to just sort of accept by default the life that other people have wanted for you and say, maybe I don't want to be a billionaire. Maybe that's not the path that I really want. That's not what my definition of success or wealth looks like. I don't need to be the person that someone writes books about. I can go and build a great life that I love. That looks like my version of success, not theirs.

I'm really curious about this notion of winning because you were also a professional athlete. And I'm sure that instilled a lot of different principles in you, kind of walking us through. What did winning look like in your life, and how did that definition change over time?

I was a really insecure kid, if I'm being completely honest. I. From a young age, I, like, started telling myself this story that I wasn't very smart. And it was really because I lived in this household where academic success was like, how we measured success in our household. I have a Indian mother and a Harvard professor father. And so from both sides, I was just getting this pressure and. And my older sister is extremely high achieving academically. And I. It didn't come quite as easily to me. And so from a young age, I basically was like this little story in my head of, you're not very smart. And those stories we tell ourselves have the power to completely shape your reality. It's called the narrative fallacy. Humans are really good at finding evidence to confirm the thing you already believe, the story you already believe. And so that created this insecurity from a young age that basically I went around the world and my whole mental Model for life was, how do I find external solutions to this internal problem? And we know, like, if you. If you've ever gone to therapy, you know you can't find an external solution to an internal problem. You have to do the internal work. So winning to me was, how do I get enough pats on the back that I feel good about myself? Like, how do I get those external affirmations that will make me one day wake up and convince myself that I am enough, that I'm worthy? And unfortunately, if you march down that path long enough, it leads to nowhere. Like, you can get as many things in the world as you want, as many worldly things as exist and still be miserable and still be insecure. And look, we don't have to look far to find examples of people like that. You see a lot of very successful men and women, successful on the surface, who are deeply insecure and make. Make terrible decisions, grounded in insecurity constantly. And it's because they haven't come to terms with themselves in order to go out and live the life they want.

How did that manifest in your relationship?

I would. I did not show up in any of my relationships, romantic or otherwise, in the way that I should have in my 20s. I was not present. I was constantly stressed. I was constantly, like, creating distance from people because I was afraid of opening up about who I actually was. My wife, to her credit, I had known since we were 14 years old. We had been together. And so she was probably the only person in the world that knew the real, real version of me. And that was the one, like, anchor point that kind of kept me sane throughout that whole journey. Like, without her, I mean, I would follow my wife to the ends of the earth. Like, without her, I don't think I would have made it through that period in one piece.

And that's something I want to talk about, is the importance of strong relationships in your life. People who support you. What do people get wrong about that?

Your circle determines your reality. I. I mean, there is scientific evidence that the people you surround yourself with determine your outcomes in life. 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 tell you that you're not dreaming enough, you will rise to the level of those expectations. And similarly, if you surround yourself with people who tell you to be realistic, who laugh at your ambitions, who make those little snide remarks behind your back, you'll fall to the level of those expectations. So what better reason do you need, particularly in your twenties, to choose wisely about the people you surround yourself with, the people that you're going to give your precious energy to during that period of your life, because they truly do shape your entire world?

And what do you think were the biggest shifts in your life that helped save, set you up on a path that you were more satisfied with? Was it your relationships? Was it a mindset shift? Like, walk us through the biggest things that changed.

The best advice I got in my 20s was, when you feel stuck, shorten the time horizon. Don't ask what your year needs. Ask what today needs. That was the mindset shift that changed everything for me. Because I think when you feel stuck, when you feel miserable, when it's not working, when you have no momentum, your tendency is to, like, look and see this enormous amount of change that you need to create to fix your life. And what that does is it makes it so daunting, so intimidating that you don't do anything. And what it centers you in when you have that mindset shift is to just say, like, okay, what can I do right now? Like, I can go and do a workout. I can wake up at the time I said I was going to and go work out. Now all of a sudden, you have, like, a little bit of momentum. I can do that one task. I can have that one hard conversation. I can do that one thing that I'm going to put the check mark next to, and then I can do it again tomorrow. And if you do that enough times, it's like, you're not going to change your life in a day. But if you change your days, you'll eventually change your life. That principle, for me was the starting point of everything, because the momentum it creates is undeniable. And momentum is where you actually create a life change over a period of

time and then walk us through these transitionary periods. I mean, you went to Stanford. You were at the top of your career in private equity. Then you realized that you weren't happy with your life. How did your life unfold from them? I mean, you're so successful now. You have a huge social platform, you've built these successful businesses. What were the big shifts in your life that led you to where you are today?

The biggest thing from a moment standpoint was a single conversation that I had with this old friend in 2021. So I went out for drink with this old friend. I was at probably the darkest point in my life. At that moment in time, I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents. I was 40 pounds overweight, drinking all the time, really unhealthy, mentally and physically. And we sat down and this friend asked me how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. And he asked how old they were, and I said mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them and I said, I 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 life. Because that was the moment that I realized that my entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, if you will, had been incomplete. I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else. So I would just say that that moment was what started this ripple through my life, to start thinking differently and for my wife and I to sit down and have that candid conversation about what our definition of a successful life really looked like. Because the truth is that you can go and build your life around the priorities that you have. Like, you need to just reassume agency in order to do that, recognize that you can do that. Because there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities you say you have, and there are the priorities your actions show you have. And oftentimes there's a big gap between those two things. Your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap. But you can't unless you acknowledge that it exists in the first place. That moment for me was the first time I had to really forcefully, like, viscerally acknowledge that there was this big gap between how I was living and how I wanted to live, and that I was capable of going and changing it.

And then what did you do?

We took a pretty dramatic action. I mean, within 45 days, I quit my job. This, like, high paying, high status, fancy sounding 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, there was a very important realization, which is you are in much more control of your life than you think, much more control of your time than you think. That number 15 more times before they're gone. It's now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a week. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. Like, we had taken an action and Reassumed that agency over our own lives. And that was the spark like that that really sent us forward in this life.

What's the number one piece of advice that you would give someone who's in their 20s trying to climb up the career ladder today?

Nobody is thinking about you. Look, there is very clear scientific evidence that your fear of failure is totally unfounded. It's an illusion. The spotlight effect is this idea, this finding that we constantly think everyone is staring at us and thinking about our behaviors, our actions, our habits, the things that we're choosing to do. And the truth is that no one really is. Everyone is too busy thinking about themselves. So so often you're getting held back by this fear, thinking like, oh, I don't want to do that startup. I don't want to do that side hustle. I don't want to take that job. I don't want to quit that job. Because what are people going to think about? Nobody is thinking about you. And if they are, they quickly move on to whatever problem is going on in their life. And that is so liberating and empowering when you realize it, because then you realize that the thing that you've always wanted to do is you can just go do it. Like, you can quit that job that is not giving you anything anymore, that energy. You can go start that side hustle. You can do the thing that people are going to say makes no sense. And you can make it make sense in your own life. I found that to be deeply empowering. And I know that, like, there are people out there that are just being held back by this illusion of other people staring at them that just isn't real.

Well, someone said to me the other day, they said, do you remember the last time that someone else did something embarrassing in front of you? And I said, no. And then they said, well, then why do you think anyone else remembers the embarrassing thing that you did? And I was like, that's actually really true. I'll just keep embarrassing myself and it won't matter.

I'm like, even trying to think of something embarrassing you did to recall.

And then what role did money play in all of this? How did you kind of make your decisions based on wealth?

So I had made money for the first seven years of that, of my career, that path that I was on. And I think it's stupid for anybody to say that money doesn't matter. Like, you can't. People that say money doesn't buy happiness. It's kind of a. It's a silly argument to make because definitively the science shows that money directly buys happiness up to a point. And is it the science kind of differs on this depends on where you live. Like the averages. I've seen anywhere from $200,000 a year to $400,000 a year in different studies. But it's hard to say because the average in like that number in New York City or London is going to be very different than that number in Omaha, Nebraska. Just like your cost of living. But there's clearly a point of diminishing returns where it no longer drives the same incremental happiness. Other areas of your life will like continuing to build around your purpose, continuing to grow your relationships, your health, all of those things drive incremental happiness. And money can be a tool to help you do those things. The thing that people lose sight of is when they chase money as the goal and in and of itself rather than as a tool to build these other things. That was the path that I was on and I think a lot of people find themselves on it because it's the only thing they measure in life. If money is the only thing you measure, it's the only thing that you're going to try to focus on growing. I mean, example of this in people's lives that they'll understand is like anyone listening that's ever put on one of those sleep tracking ring. Yeah, wristbands. All of a sudden you become the most annoying sleep person in the world. You're like, oh no, I can't go out with you. I don't want, you know, my sleep score, I can't have the drink. My sleep score is going to get ruined. You like you have a perfect sleep score but you have no friends anymore. It is very possible to optimize the life out of your life. Right? Like if you optimize one area of life, you will lose something in the others. And money has been the thing people have always tried to optimize because it's so easy to measure and stack yourself up as like, oh, my whole self worth is about the number on this scoreboard. And frankly, I think the younger generation gets this more than any other generation because there's so much about the world now that is like unaffordable. It's hard to only measure yourself on the money score because you're going to feel like you're losing. It's hard to afford a home nowadays, it's hard to afford rent in a nice city, in a nice place. Like all of these things have gotten more unaffordable and jobs are harder to get. And so like, I actually think the younger generation understands this a little bit more, that relationships matter, that health matters. They're focusing on these other areas of life. But making sure that you build for that over the long term, I do think is a path to a lot more happiness.

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This episode is brought to you by FX's Love Story. John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Brissette join host Evan Ross Katz on the official podcast for FX's new series, Love John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Brissette and go behind the scenes with cast and special guest featuring Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Grace Gummer and Naomi Watts. FX's love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette Wherever you listen to

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And what are the different types of wealth? You talk about this a lot. You wrote your book on it. If you were to break it down for our audience, how should they think about the different types of wealth?

Yeah, so you have financial wealth, which we all know, and we can talk about. The other four that I talk and write about are Time wealth, which is about this idea of like freedom to choose how you spend your time. Social wealth, which is about your relationships. Mental wealth is really about purpose and growth. And then physical wealth is about your health. And so the idea is to create this like bigger scoreboard for your life that doesn't just revolve around money so that you can measure for the much bigger picture of what's going to lead to you having that good life that we're all trying to grow towards.

I was reading this book that was really interesting called the American Marriage, about how divorce rates have substantially increased for everyone except for, like, the top, the. The upper class. Because in your marriage now, there's a societal expectation that you're supposed to get everything from it. If you have religious needs, you have fitness needs you're supposed to get from your marriage. But if you have money, then you have the time to actually get that from other relationships as well. Like, you can be married, and then, you know, maybe your partner doesn't fulfill that fitness need, but you can get that from another friend. Do you feel like that rings true as well?

What you're hitting on is a really important point, which is that you can't get everything from one person. Just as a relationship concept, the idea that one person can be all things to you is ridiculous. So when I see young people making this list of what they want to find in a partner, or even my friends in their 30s that are trying to go and find the person they're going to marry, they're making these lists of, like, they need to be this. This. This long, long list. And you're like, you're not going to find one person that is all of those things to you. And they don't need to be. It's actually like a crazy proposition to think that I can be that to one person, that I'm going to be this person's like, rock in all of these different areas. You can have a friend that is that thing. Like, it doesn't need to be your romantic partner. And so I also just think there is a. There's a little bit of a misconception that, like, you need to find all of those things in the person that you marry or in your romantic partner for life, when the reality is, like, 99% of a successful marriage is just genuinely getting along with the person. Like, you are going to spend so much of your life doing nothing, just, like, sitting around, watching television, hanging out. It's not the fancy moments, like these glamorous moments you see on Instagram or the honeymoon moments. All those things. Most of life is just sitting around. So when you find someone that you just genuinely get along with, that's, like, pleasant to be around, that is someone that you can actually go and build a life with.

Do you think that's idealistic, though? Because I know that you and your wife met when you were in high school. Obviously you had this beautiful, serendipitous relationship. But for people who haven't found their ideal partner, do you not think it is a Good exercise to kind of understand what it is that they're looking for in that person. Or if you were single right now, I mean, how would you go about finding a partner?

I don't think you find an ideal partner. I think you create an ideal partnership. And I'll explain the distinction. I actually think about this the exact same way I think about purpose. I don't think you find your purpose. I think you create your purpose. The difference is find implies that the person is just sitting there and you can just happen upon it and then it's a mo. It's a single moment in time. You found the person and now everything's great. Your whole life. Like a great marriage is not that you found the right person. A great marriage is millions of tiny decisions to show up with energy to make something work, to build and grow upon it.

You found the right marriage with the wrong person.

With the wrong person. Absolutely. I think you can build a great partnership in marriage with someone where you have alignment of bigger picture values. And I don't think that's one person in the entire world. Like, I don't believe in this notion of like, oh, you found the one, like the one person that exists for you in the world. It's kind of just mathematically it's a crazy idea, like 1 in 7 billion or however many people. I think the bigger thing is when you hype up finding the person, rather than the showing up and the daily action and the growth that is involved in a relationship, you lose sight of the fact that it is about the growth. You have to show up every single day. You can actually find the right person and ruin the relationship by not showing up. You can't fix the wrong person.

How do you fix the wrong relationship? Or how do you also prevent lots of people who are really great people, who are in relationships with people who are destructive, who are not good for them, if you apply that same logic, then they're just going to spend years trying to fix something that inherently is broken. So I'm kind of curious what you think about that.

I don't think you can fix broken big picture values. So if you are misaligned with someone on big picture values of what you care about in life, how you treat people, what you believe in, what your vision is for the future, you can't change someone's perspective on those. And I actually just think the, the desire to try to fix or change another person is very different from the desire to build your connection and relationship together. There's very little that you can change about other people. If they don't want to change, they're not going to change. We can't change someone and we should generally stop chasing people who are running away from us with the way that they're acting. I think if you notice if you're in a relationship and you notice that there is a clear misalignment of those values of what you kind of hold close your principles, you are not going to be able to change that. That doesn't mean that you can't improve your relationship if there's like little tension points on the, on the margin. But I think the big picture values are very hard to change and find alignment around if they're not there.

So you think that's how people should go about finding a relationship? Is understanding what values are important to them and finding people complimentary?

Yes, I think that if the big picture values are aligned, the small little details work themselves out. Like my wife and I are deeply aligned on the big picture values in life. Does that mean that we don't fight? Absolutely not. Does that mean that we haven't had conflict and issues throughout our relationship at different times? Absolutely not. But all of those things were like minor details that you know you can sort out when you have the bigger picture that like sort of aligned or.

But let's play out. I'm a 20 year old, I'm on hinge, I'm swiping. How do I screen for values alignment?

Well, I've never been on hinge, so I can't speak to hinge in particular. But I think that, look, I think that when you are going out and dating someone and you're going out and meeting people, you are putting out into the world what your values are through the way that you act and behave and the things that you say. And if you feel an immediate misalignment of that in the way that the other person acts, I don't think you should have tolerance for that in the people that you date over the long term.

But don't you think it's hard to really screen properly for values alignment? I feel like that still kind of takes time.

I think you probably have a gut instinct very quickly. I, I, at least in my own, this isn't a romantic perspective, but in my own relationships, in my whole life, I would say within five minutes I know if I'm going to end up liking someone or not. I, I just, I, I think you tend to have a gut instinct about people if there's like an energy connection around the way that they put themselves out into the world. I have very rarely, I would say, been proven wrong. I have often tried to, like, my gut will say no, and I'll try to convince myself. And I'd say the worst decisions in life are made when you try to convince yourself to a yes when your gut already said no.

Is it the same way for you when it comes to hiring people?

That's a good question. Yes. Yeah. I think to me, the number one thing that people can do to stand out in getting hired is just show an ability to figure it out. Like, I. I think that it's very hard to predict what skills are going to be relevant in three or five years even, which is crazy to say. Like 10, 15, 20 years ago, it was always like fairly obvious that the skills were gonna continue to be relevant. That's not really the case anymore. But what will continue to be relevant is this ability to just go and figure it out. And you can call that high agency, you can call that whatever you want, but that capacity to just take something that you don't know how to do, go and ask some questions about it, figure out how to do it, and then go and do it. That will always be valuable. It doesn't matter what you're doing, it doesn't matter what degree you have. I would rather hire someone that has no degrees that has an ability to do that, than someone that has a fancy degree that needs tons of hand holding to go and get every little thing done. And so I think that for anyone that's like going out, they're trying to kind of improve their career. Hone your ability to figure it out. Like, we have every access to every tool in the world to do that now too. If you can spend 30 minutes a day, like learning the latest tools that are out there, you can be one of the best figure it outers in the entire world. And you'll always be hirable as a result.

Just kind of like what the Duolingo founder said to us, where he said that he had two employees and then they both would point out problems, but one of them would point out a problem and then already have a solution and proactively be working on it. And the other one would just kind of say, hey, there's a problem and just do nothing about it. And so I do think there's a huge difference in attitude behind someone who's just willing to go figure it out and take action versus someone who's just

complaining and think about how that compounds over that person's career. Like that person is going to Be the one that then gets called on for the interesting opportunity. And then that person's going to get. Someone else is going to see them and be like, oh, you should start this company with me when I'm going to start. Like, you're the one that then gets lucky in all of these situations because you had this just like 5% better agency to go and just figure the thing out. Like it's. It. Actually, that's the interesting thing is like it doesn't take that much more work to get to the proposed solution than it does to just present the problem. Like it's like probably another like 30 minutes of work or something like that for that person to at least come with a proposed solution to how to deal with it. And it compounds enormously over like a 5, 10 year time horizon.

You've said that teenagers should go knock on doors or buy people coffee to get jobs, but some Gen Z people said that was out of touch. Do you stand by that strategy?

This is my main character moment from the Internet. The mainstream media had a field day with this. I think that the issue in my articulation of that was that it was people focused too much on the idea of knocking on doors like this. The origin of this was that I was living in a nice neighborhood in Westchester, New York, near here, and someone came and knocked on my door. Young man who was trying to make it in the music industry. And he came and knocked on my door and basically was looking for business advice. And he asked me and I was like, well, I can't really say I felt bad saying no to someone's face. Where if you had sent me a cold email, I just wouldn't have replied or I would have said no if it was a bad cold email. But to my face I was like, sure, let's have a chat. So he came in, we had coffee, I talked to him, and I ended up mentoring this young guy in his career. And I thought about it and I was like, it was really interesting because it was such a different strategy. It was just like everyone sends a cold email. Everyone sends a dm. It was different. And my point when I wrote that, that it was interesting was doing things differently always helps you stand out. It wasn't about knocking on doors. Like the. It could be that you're driving Uber and you talk to the person that's in the car, or you're in a coffee shop or you're busing tables and you talk to the person that's at the table. But like those little things that you can do to kind of break out of the mold of your own life. Do actually create value. And so that was the broader point that I was trying to get at, which kind of got lost in the noise of the whole chaos around it. But I do, I do stand by that, that I think it makes sense.

What's the craziest thing someone's done to

get a job with you that worked? Oh, that worked. Oh, that's a good question. You know, I had. I had an Uber driver who we chatted about business during the ride, and then he sent me an Instagram message after the fact offering to, like, drive me for free for business advice. And I was like, I don't take free stuff, but, like, we can. I loved, like, it was fun chatting. Let's do it. And he's ended up becoming a great friend and he's now, like, building a business that I'm sort of associated with. And he's crushed it because he has extraordinarily high agency. Like, he was driving cars at the time and he created a car service. Now he's using Claude Cowork to spin up websites that just generate leads for car services in all of these, like, places around the country. And he's making a couple hundred grand a month doing this just sitting around. Now he doesn't drive. He's just, like, figured out how to use AI to do all these things. And this is. He's a Pakistani immigrant. Like, he's not classically educated in any of these things. He just like, that figure it out is so high. He's like a 10 out of 10 on that scale. So I thought, I felt like, just think that's such a cool thing that we live in a world where, like, the. The walls of credentialism have come down and the world is going to belong over the next 10, 20 years to people who just have the capacity to grab their agency by the horns and go out and do things.

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That's a great question, is how do you think about preparing for an AI economy? Like, if you were in your early 20s today or even in college today, should you be studying computer science? Are these jobs still going to exist? Like, how would you think about preparing for the next wave of the economy that's coming when we have almost this very exciting horizon in front of us, but it's destabilizing. We don't know what jobs are going to be real in the next couple of years.

I think it's a terrifying time to be a generalist knowledge worker. Like, I think it is going to be a historically bad time to try to get a job as, you know, insert any, like, sort of path to being middle manager at, like, any knowledge economy job. And I think you're already seeing that. Like, I think there was some statistic, like 50% of college, recent college grads are unemployed right now. And it's crazy to see stuff like that happen so quickly. But it is, it is a, like, it is an early warning sign of something that people, I think need to be aware of, which is that, like, companies have no clue how this is going to change their hiring. And so they're reacting by just pausing, like, slow, okay, let's just slow hiring and figure out, figure it out later. I think as an individual, the reaction to that needs to be what are the skills that are going to continue to be valuable over the long run. I actually don't think you can predict, like, a hard skill that is still going to be valuable, like computer science, coding. I think it's very hard to say any of those things will matter. I think what will matter no matter what, in any future. Like, if you take the Jeff Bezos model of saying, like, what will stay the same rather than thinking about what will change in the future. Sales will always matter. The ability to sell yourself, sell your ideas, sell things to people. Sales is everything in life. Like relationships, dating, that is sales. Like, you're selling yourself out to a dating market. Learning to sell, learning the storytelling around. That will always matter. Like being able to take data and come out with a clear narrative and a clear story and have that on the other side. That is a meta skill that will not change. I think that applies to sales. It applies to everything else. I would really focus on building that capacity, like, that human interaction element of sales and communication and storytelling. And I would really focus on this idea of, like, being good at figuring it out. And I think that comes from just spending. It can be 30 minutes a day, just like keeping yourself up to speed on the latest things that are happening so that you're at least facile with it. I mean, I continue to think that the best side hustle opportunity in the world right now is, like, if you are young, you are facile and familiar with these technologies that the vast, vast majority of companies out there have no idea how to use. And that, like, when I think of side hustles, I always think of, like, what are mispriced opportunities? Like an opportunity where you can kind of create arbitrage, where someone's willing to pay you much more than you would otherwise be worth in the market. And going in and actually deploying AI use cases into companies that have no clue how to use AI is an extraordinary opportunity. And it, like, you could do it at a local business down the street from you, you could do it at a bigger business. But doing that as, like a services company, I think you could go make a lot of money very quickly.

That's so true, because yesterday one of our friends asked us about how to do podcast clips, and she was saying how she was paying this person a crazy amount of money to do it, and they were pretty bad. And it was really clear to me that that person was just using opus straight out the gate, like AI clipping and then charging her a premium for it because she didn't know that the AI clipping existed, but most people don't. And so it's definitely true that if you're a young, savvy person today and you know how to use AI and tools that most older people don't, you can charge and go into their businesses and make them way More efficient and be paid a premium for it.

Yeah. And there's literally hundreds of thousands of these businesses that are out there. I mean, my mom runs a small business and constantly asks me like, how should I be using AI to do this? Through that, if a young person went in and mapped what she does over the course of a full day, what her and her employees do, I guarantee they would find like a hundred opportunities for very simple AI efficiencies. And if you could just help a business create that and then capture like some small percentage of the value you just created, you can go charge, you can charge businesses $5,000 a month and have three or four clients and all of a sudden you replaced your entire salary at your like high paying job from a few hours a week. Like it's, it's not. That's again, it's the mispriced opportunity that exists around this right now that it's a small thing for these companies if you're creating the value that it will create. And it can be an enormous thing for you very quickly. That was how when I, when I quit my job, by the way, that was how I was comfortable doing. It was because I had started writing on Twitter a year before that. It had built this big platform. When I quit my job, there were all these founders in my network who were like, hey, you built this big thing on Twitter. Can you help us do that? And I was like, I guess I kind of know how to do that. Sure, I can like advise you on how to do it. They were like, well, you charge. I was like $5,000 a month. I just made up a number and all of a sudden I had like 10 people paying me $5,000 a month for very little work to just like help them think about the blueprints of how to grow on, on Twitter, I guess X now. And I had replaced my entire salary from this like, fancy, high paying job with less work so that I could still spend time on all of my, you know, actual like, content and writing and the things I was going to actually go and do. And so again, it's like there are all of these mispriced opportunities floating out in the world. And AI is the biggest one to me right now. Especially because your generation already understands how to use all these things. I mean, social media is the other one. Like, no, none of these businesses know anything about how to use TikTok or Instagram to grow their business. Like you, you are on this all day. You know how to do it. There's enormous opportunity to Just help businesses go and do that. You can get paid a lot for doing it.

You heard it here first. No. Well, I actually wanted to dive in on that topic because I am so fascinated by the way that you've built your content, really empire across Twitter, across LinkedIn, across Instagram. Walk us through, what does your content setup look like right now?

So I'm probably somewhat unique in that I think a lot of people really went like super deep on a single medium. And so like there are a lot of people who have a much bigger Instagram than me or a bigger YouTube or bigger, maybe bigger Twitter, maybe not that many people there. But I've sort of gone like one by one, one at a time and built what now is a platform that has a lot of breadth across different types of mediums with like pretty different audiences across the different ones. So X was my first platform that's, you know, now scaled up to north of a million people. That's like 85% male. I think the, the X platform in general. Instagram I built next and was separate. That's like 50, 60% female. And it's very different. My newsletter is close to a million people and also like similarly quite different. All of that sort of is fed off of the writing that I do. Like my entire ecosystem doesn't matter whether it's video or, or written content, it all is like downstream from my newsletter. So whenever anyone's thinking about content, the way I think about it is you have a halo format and medium and from there you need to figure out how it gets turned into everything else. For me, I write two newsletters a week. I've done that for five years now almost. And those now we've just created a system with the team where it gets turned into everything across the different platforms. So one newsletter will a bunch of ideas for different tweets. It'll get turned into carousels for Instagram, it'll get turned into short image cards for Instagram. I can talk about those topics on podcasts and get video clips for them. For Instagram, you know, we can make a longer form YouTube video out of it. So now you get a lot of leverage because it's like one piece of content that you're creating gets turned into a bunch of things. I think for anyone trying to go and create anything around content, they need to think about what that halo thing is for them. For me, it's writing. For someone else, it could be long form video. They might want to do YouTube. Maybe it is shorter form content that they're really good at. But if you can figure out a way to take that halo and now turn it, like, into 10 things, distribute it across different platforms, that I think is where you create this, like, network effect of, you know, really getting a lot of leverage on the. On the. On the one thing that you created.

How did you decide what you wanted to write on? And has that changed over time?

Um, yeah. When I first, like, my. My broadest principle on anything in business is just like, be useful. And so anything that I create, I'm like, is this useful to someone that's reading it? Is this valuable? Right. If you create value, you'll receive value. That's like the golden rule around all of this. And at first I was like, okay, I work in finance. When I was doing this, I'm just going to write about finance, and I know there's people that want to read about that. So I was writing about, like, finance and money. And then what I realized is, like, if I'm going to do this for 20 years, like, once I quit my job, I need to be writing about things that I care about. It just has to be something I care about. I can't do something for 20 years that I don't care about. And so I started slowly then talking about more broad life things, which is what I spend most of my time thinking about. I get to spend time with a lot of really interesting people. It's just like relationships, spending time with extraordinary people, that's always been something that I've gotten a lot of energy from. And so if I can take that and sort of like, distill that wisdom set and help provide it in a way that actually people can go and take and do something with it in their life, that's a really useful thing if it can spark you to action in some way. And so I've just always taken that lens of like, okay, what can I create that is useful for people that they can go and take and run with in their life?

I love that you were also talking about how you mentored that young kid, and I thought that was amazing. So I did want to ask about how you got Tim Cook to mentor you and just generally what you think the importance of mentorship is in people's lives.

So I met Tim. I didn't knock on his door and offer him. Offer to buy him coffee, but sort of the equivalent of that. I. When I first started my first job in 2014, I was working in private equity, so I knew the hours were going to be nuts. And I was really into Working out. I had played baseball for a long time and basically I decided that if I was going to keep working out, I was going to have to do it really early in the morning. So I started going to the gym in Palo Alto at this equinox at 4:45 in the morning, every single day so that I could get done and get into the office by 6:15. And it turns out that there's only like five people crazy enough to show up at the Equinox in Palo Alto at 4:45 every single morning, morning after morning. One of them happened to be the then new CEO of Apple, Tim Cook. Six months went by without me knowing who he was. He was like, you know, I wasn't in tech. He didn't look the way he looks when he's doing a keynote. And frankly he wasn't quite that famous at the time yet. He was sort of like Steve Jobs replacement at the time. He wasn't his own, you know, person in a lot of ways. He hadn't built the prominence that he has now. And so I talked to this guy every single day for six months without knowing who he was. And one day someone came up to me and was like, do you know who that is that you were just talking to? I was like, I don't know, that's the guy that is in here. And they were like, that's Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. And I just thought oh shit, like I've probably been saying the dumbest stuff to this guy every day for the last six months. Talking about just like gym stuff like oh, there's whatever, like squat thing like oh yeah, we did this for baseball. It was really good. Like just gym stuff, like normal, like what you would talk to any guy about in the gym. He's really into fitness and he's very fit. And so I went, and that day when I found that out, we've been talking about some article and I guessed his email address. I went, I got, when I got to the office and I sent him the article and I was like, hey, you know, we were chatting about this whatever article. He replied right away. And in response to that reply I basically just said like, hey, you know, I'm looking for some guidance around my career and life as I think about, you know, the journey that I'm on. Would love to grab coffee if you're willing. And he was open to it. And so we went out and grabbed coffee and it ended up sparking this, you know, what is now over 10 year relationship where he's been an Extraordinary influence on my life. You know, he was the first investor and a lot of things that I've gone and done, he was one of the main influences that encouraged me to go down the different path that I'm on now when I was thinking about leaving my job. He was one of the people that sort of empowered that in a lot of ways. And it was all sparked by showing up at the gym every single morning at this early hour. And honestly, I joke about it now and people lose their minds over it, but there is no such thing as a loser that wakes up at 5am and works out. Like if you put yourself into that environment, if you're willing to go and do hard things every single day, you find ways to win in other areas of life. And so again, it's like place yourself in environments where you're highly likely to get lucky. That is one of those environments. People in the gym at that time of the morning, it was like the founding partner of General Catalyst was there. And I ended up becoming friends with him and building a relationship. Like these people that are there, that are working hard, that are showing up, that are showing that discipline, you're finding ways to win across different areas of life.

So I need to wake up at 5am and go to Equinox. I mean that you guys seem like

you're doing just fine. So whatever you're doing, I like, I, I'm actually, I'm going to turn the mic around and ask for your advice. But it really is, I mean, working out, like a lot of problems in life are solved by waking up early and working out if you're feeling stuck. It is a very quick way to reassume agency over your life.

Do you think you learned that from baseball? Do you think you have an athlete mindset?

Yes. Yeah, I, but I think that that's not about baseball and it's not about athletics. It's about recognizing that you are capable of taking an action to create a desired outcome. And that's from my dad. Like, I, I, the first time I ever failed in a real way, I was 12 years old. I tried out for this all star team and I got cut from the team and I was like sobbing. I was so upset. I was sitting in my room and I remember so distinctly, my dad came in, he sat down next to me and the easiest thing in the world would have been for him to say they were idiots. That was the dumbest decision. You were the best player, right? You were the best, you were the best kid there. They made, they made the Wrong decision. But that's not what he said. He looked at me and he said, I understand you're upset. Here are the three things that they said that you should work on. I'm going to go out there every single day with you this summer and we're going to work on those things. And he did. He showed up every single day and we went out and worked on those things. And when I look back on that moment, there was so much power in that message that he shared because it was a reminder that I was capable of taking action to create the desired outcome in my life. It was like he handed me my agency back in that moment. And now I always go back to it at any point, any failure that I experience, like, okay, well, what are the things that I can go and do now to change my situation? And so I just think for anyone like you don't need your dad to tell you that. You can just hear it right now and recognize that you are capable of doing that. It doesn't mean that it's always going to work out, but it does mean that no matter what hand you're dealt, good or bad, you are always in control of how you play it.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the burnouts.

Thank you.

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things are as uplifting as the greatest moments in sports. And nothing brings us together quite like Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games. From NBCUniversal's iconic storytelling to the innovative technology across Xfinity and Peacock, Comcast brings the Olympic Games home to America, sharing every moment with millions. When Team USA steps onto the world stage, we're not just watching. We're cheering together. This winter, we're all on the same team Comcast, proud partner of Team usa.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.