The 5 Things You Need to Build a Rich, Healthy Life with Sahil Bloom

0:00 What is something counterintuitive or unexpected that can dramatically improve people's lives?

0:06 Sign up for a physical side quest. It could be a marathon, a high rocks race, a whitewater rafting trip, some crazy hike, whatever it is, you will be blown away by the impact that it has as a catalyst across your entire life. The structure that it creates in your life, you'll wake up in the morning energized, you'll have a clear perspective on what you need to do.

0:28 You start eating healthier, you start looking better, feeling better. It has ripple effects into everything you do from this one tiny action of just putting something on the calendar that is going to focus your energy and focus your efforts.

0:47 Thank you for having me. It's great to have you on. You know, we were just talking about it, but like, why do so many folks in personal development seem to have so many issues with development?

0:57 I I don't know if it's something about uh the space that attracts people that have issues with development, but I do think that this like this meme of the single childless male self-improvement guru has become a real thing, right? Like you see the social commentary everywhere of like uh, you know, like some individual giving a bunch of advice on relationships or time optimization, morning routines, whatever it is.

1:23 But if you don't have like any of the constraints of a family or of children or of any of these other things, or if you know your if your living is around social media, like it's not really relevant or applicable. You don't really have receipts to back up that like other people should be living by the things you're saying in the first place.

1:40 Aaron Ross Powell Well, it it feels to me, and looking at your life from from sort of outside, that you kind of went the other direction with it, which is that you found personal development for yourself and then decided to talk about it. Whereas I feel like a lot of other folks are like, oh, I I should go talk about personal development and it almost seems disconnected from themselves.

1:59 Aaron Powell Yeah, I think oddly enough, like I I have never been a personal development buff myself. Like I didn't I didn't like grow up reading Tony Robbins or uh you know like reading the uh you know the Jim Rohn stuff, like the self-improvement gurus of our childhood. I didn't like grow up being a nerd over those things.

2:19 And I think those guys are amazing in their in their own respect, but it wasn't it wasn't that I like became obsessed with personal development and then decided that I was going to start sharing what I learned from other people. My own journey was what informed me wanting to talk about these things, of like feeling like I made a ton of mistakes in my own path, and then slowly starting to kind of like stumble my way into some level of figuring things out.

2:43 Aaron Ross Powell Well, you were a great athlete and you got injured and well and then you went into private equity for a while. Like talk a little bit about the journey to the path you're on that.

2:53 Yeah. I mean, I did play baseball at a pretty high level for most of my life. I I mean I grew up always being like in a small town in Massachusetts, like the best player on the different teams that I was playing on, right? I grew up like in the suburbs outside Boston here. And from a young age, like I could just throw a ball harder than most people.

3:12 So I had like some level of innate talent. And it kind of peaked like my freshman or sophomore year of high school, and I realized that if I wanted to make anything out of it as an endeavor, like I was going to have to sort of grind my way to improvement. Like I just didn't have quite the it factor that you see of like just being able to throw 95, getting out of bed.

3:31 And so I worked at it really hard all through high school, ended up getting a scholarship to play in college. I played at Stanford for for four years, had an amazing experience, but got hurt during my last year there and realized that like I was never gonna make a career out of this. I I think that like that youthful naivete that we have, that we're all gonna be professional athletes, probably wore off for me sometime around my freshman year at Stanford.

3:55 Like I got there and just saw guys that were gonna go on and play it, play an entire major league career and just realized like the ball gets to the plate a lot faster when that guy throws it than when I do. You know, just not being not being like a six-five, you know, hips the size of tree trunks guy, like it was just gonna be a harder path.

4:14 And so, you know, I I really had to very quickly like just learn to be adaptable. And if there's one thing I'd say I appreciate about the whole experience of having gone through the athletic journey today, it's that idea of adaptability being the key to success in anything in life. Like just learning to get punched, ride out whatever that experience is of being knocked down, and come back on the other side of it and sort of grow through that experience.

4:41 That to me has been the number one lesson from athletics that's carried over into everything else that I've done.

4:46 Aaron Powell There's a big business lesson in that. I mean, I tell people here at Whoop that like all value creation is on the other side of something really hard. And so when you're facing something really hard, in many ways, that's like the sign that you're about to create value for the company.

4:59 Yeah, I think it's probably a like broadly speaking, I would say that most life advice comes down to the idea of doing uncomfortable things sooner.

5:09 Right.

5:10 But like it if you encounter some challenge in your life, doing that uncomfortable thing sooner rather than later is a good lesson that you can apply to anything. I mean, like a hard conversation now is much better than trying to just brush that under the rug for later. Uh, you know, encountering like a minor repair now is much better than the major repair that it's going to become later.

5:30 And that applies to basically anything, doing the hard thing now for a benefit later. I just think that as you consider that in your own life, you realize that there's no such thing as peace through avoidance. You have to go into the storm. It's like the bison mentality. You know, like a bison turns and heads into the storm because that's how you get to the other side quicker.

5:48 You get changed through the experience.

5:51 That's powerful. So you go into private equity, and was that all you hoped it to be?

5:59 Uh you know, private equity to me, taking the job straight out of school, um, I knew nothing about what it was. Right. Like that there are a lot of people who their entire college life is built around getting a job on the buy side, right? Private equity or hedge funds. And so they're like in the consulting club or the investment banking club, and then they're going to go get a job at Goldman for two years and then go get the private equity job.

6:22 I was playing baseball. Like I was, you know, just like had no concept of what the world looked like in finance. I got very lucky to get this role because there was a firm that was hiring at the analyst level. They had connections to Stanford Athletics. I like knew some of the people, had built relationships over a few years, and it led to this opportunity.

6:40 It was an extraordinary learning curve and experience for three years. I learned an enormous amount about different types of businesses, like just drinking from a fire hose and sort of encountering the struggle of not knowing what the hell you're doing in a field. I would say that for me, beyond those three years, the biggest struggle was I didn't love hitting the ball.

7:03 And what I mean by that is a reference to Novak Djokovic. He got interviewed, I think it was by the Financial Times, like maybe five, 10 years ago. And he talked about the fact that the reason he had had this extraordinary longevity playing the sport of tennis was because he likes hitting a tennis ball.

7:21 And the person's like, well, doesn't everyone, he's like, not really. Not everyone loves hitting the ball in this way. I like going out and doing it. You can tell the difference. And I think I realized after about three years that when I looked around me, it was pretty clear to me that most of the people I was around really liked hitting the ball in the world of finance.

7:39 They really loved the deal process, they loved the modeling, they were like real deal junkies. And I just didn't care about it. And so I realized that like if you want to be the best at a thing that you're doing, which to me, if I'm gonna take on something in my life, I want to try to be in the top 1% of it.

7:54 Like I want to try to be one of the best at it. It's just something that I care about. I'm not gonna be able to do it in something that where I don't like hitting the ball intrinsically. And so after about three years, I realized it probably wasn't the long-term path. The challenge, which is what I get caught in and what kind of leads me down the bad path, is there's a lot of gravity to a career and to a decision that you make.

8:17 Like you make a decision on the first day of your career, and every year it gets harder and harder to make a change. Like everything about the forces of your career and of your life holds you on the path that you have chosen. It's like it's called plan continuation bias is the cognitive bias. We're we're generally speaking biased towards staying on the path we've already chosen.

8:37 And in these career tracks, like there's money that starts tying to you to it. There's these like long vesting periods on things, you get more and more accustomed to the life you're living. There's like the lifestyle creep of having this high status, high-paying job. And I got to the point six or seven years in where it was very easy for me to envision a life where I could have blinked and woken up in 50 years and wondered what the hell I just did.

9:04 What you did is brave in the sense that you looked around, you said, I okay, this isn't for me, or I don't think I'm gonna be the very best at it. I don't love it. And you jumped off of it. I think more often than not, that's the advice that people need to hear. Although there is a perspective which I'm curious your take on, which is like there's some there's some period of time that someone has to get through, or some level of advancement that someone has to get to to actually figure out whether they like something.

9:36 Which is to say, when you're like a novice at something, which you can feel early on in your career. Like I talk to people sometimes they're in their 20s and they're trying to figure out like, oh, do I want to start this thing? Do I want to stay at my current role? And there's a question in the back of my mind of like, well, do you really know if you're any good at the thing that you're doing because you haven't really done it that long to be able to actually feel that?

9:58 Yeah. I think that um the couple of pieces of guidance I would have around that from reflecting on it on my own journey. Number one would be never make the decision on a bad day. Like there's there's a real bias of like you've had a string of bad days, or you're feeling like you're in the darkness on this path you're on.

10:15 Right. And it's very easy at that point to just jump ship, right? You're just like, oh, well, it's not working, or or you're in that extended period of stagnation where you can't see the improvement that you're making. And it's very easy to jump. Never jump on a bad day. The second thing that I always try to ask myself when it comes to any new opportunity, new endeavor, that I think it's really two questions that anyone should ask when they're going to go after something in their life or make a change.

10:40 Number one, do I like the winning version of this thing? Like, do I like what it looks like in the corner office? Yeah. Do I like what the partner's life looks like? Not just the job, but also the life that they've built. And then number two, perhaps more importantly, am I willing to do the losing version of this thing for a long time?

10:58 The reason that second question is so important is because to unlock the winning version, you generally speaking have to do the losing version a long time. And most people only think about the winning version when they make a decision. And so, yeah, like a podcast is a great example, actually, for a lot of people.

11:14 Everyone's like, oh yeah, I would love a podcast, because they go look at the biggest podcast in the world, and it seems like a hell of a lot of fun. Do I want to have conversations with the brightest minds in the world all the time for a living and get paid a bunch of money to do it? Absolutely. That sounds great.

11:28 Do I want to actually do the five to 10 years of grinding through the mud, having to like beg people to come on my show, traveling around, having no money, not having sponsors, like the losing version of it that earned that winning version? There aren't a lot of people that actually are willing to crawl through that mud and who really love that dirt.

11:46 The people I know that have made it in the world of podcasting or business or any endeavor, they really started to love the mud, right? Like they loved the dirt. And that to me is a filtering mechanism on any of your journeys to say, like, what is the thing where I actually am going to like that dirt and crawling through it?

12:04 Because when you find that, it's almost impossible to be beat in that endeavor.

12:08 Aaron Ross Powell The perspective of, you know, do I want that corner office and I want that person's job, but not just that person's job, that person's life. I mean, that to me feels like a big theme of your best-selling book and this whole idea of the five different types of wealth. Do you want to talk about how you got into that?

12:26 Yeah. I mean, the the book was a manifestation of my journey. So it's not about me, but it all came from a single conversation. You know, like shortly after COVID started, I think me, like a lot of people, I had this like zoom out moment in my life, right? I wasn't commuting every single day, I wasn't traveling four or five days a week.

12:47 Like I had this point of creating space in my life to try to understand what was going on. And at that point in my life, I was winning in one very particular domain, which was making money. I was I was doing well, I was rising through the ranks in finance. Like from the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game.

13:05 But on the inside, I was 40 pounds overweight, I was drinking seven nights a week, uh, you know, my mental and physical health were in disarray, and most importantly, my relationships were really starting to show cracks. Like I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents. My wife and I were in the middle of this two-year struggle with infertility.

13:23 We'd been together since high school, and it was creating strain in our life for the first time. Like all of these other things were really starting to show cracks, while from the outside it looked like everything was going great. And it all came to a head for me with a single conversation. May of 2021, I went out for a drink with this old friend, and we sat down and he asked how I was doing.

13:46 And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents, 3,000 miles away. Like this youthful naivete that I had about my parents being immortal, which I think we all have, had started to wear off. They were slowing down. And he asked how old they were, and I said mid-sixties, and he asked how often I saw them, and I said about once a year.

14:07 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 in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success, right, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, had been incomplete.

14:30 I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else rather than in conjunction with everything else. And my wife and I, that night had a very candid conversation about what we wanted to build our life around, like what our center really was. And we took a dramatic action. Within 45 days of that conversation, we had sold our house in California.

14:52 I had left my job, this high status, high-paying, fancy sounding job, and we had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And in that one decision was a very important realization, which is you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had fundamentally created time, that number 15 more times before my parents are gone.

15:15 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. We had reassumed agency over our own lives, you know, recognized that we were capable of taking action to build our life around the priorities that we really had. And that was the spark that changed everything because that was what sent me on the journey to basically formulate this idea of a new scoreboard, like a new way to think about measuring your life.

15:43 Because the things that you measure in life really do matter.

15:45 Aaron Ross Powell Well, you have this great line which is the scoreboard is broken, which I think refers to the concept that you felt and that you navigated. Aaron Ross Powell You're obviously speaking about social wealth when you talk about the amount of time that you have with your family. Trevor Burrus You have a pretty uh stark graph in the uh in the book, which just shows the amount of time that you spend with your family depending on how old you are.

16:10 Yeah, the graphs in the book are from this data, this amazing data set, the American Time Use Survey. And we basically went and looked at who you spend time with over the course of your life. So the average American Trevor Burrus This is such a powerful graph.

16:26 We're gonna pull this up on this camera here. But essentially, you know, it's like the hours per day and your age and you just see the time spent with family pretty much falls off a cliff once you get past the age of like 27. Aaron Powell Yeah.

16:43 Basically, what it's showing you is that uh by the time you are 18, you have spent ninety-five percent of the time you will spend with your parents by the time you're 18. You leave the house, and that's the vast majority. And the important realization in seeing those graphs is that they are averages, right?

17:01 Like there is no one that listens to this podcast, nor you or I, that aspires to be average. Right? So when you see an average like that, it should be empowering. It should be this recognition that, like, oh, I can actually take action to bend that curve. Right. I can go and create changes. Yeah. And that was really what this whole idea was about, to say, like, yes, the scoreboard is broken.

17:22 At a minimum, it's incomplete. Like the thing that you are measuring as kind of the sole form of quote-unquote wealth in your life is not enough. It doesn't capture the full version of the life you were really trying to build.

17:34 And you include time, social, mental, uh, and physical wealth alongside financial wealth. Physical wealth in some ways is maybe the most obvious beyond financial wealth and that it's just your overall health and you know, fitness levels. Perhaps you can talk a little bit more about uh social wealth, because you know, you go so far as to say that relationships are the highest return investment that we can make.

18:03 And I thought that was pretty interesting.

18:05 That mindset shift to use the word investment when it comes to relationships is really important. And it's subtle, but it's important because what it implies is that it compounds in the same way as a financial investment. Like you know that putting away $50 or $100 today is infinitely better than zero because it's going to stack and compound into the future.

18:25 Same exact principle applies to relationships. The tiny thing done today is going to stack and grow into your future. We don't typically think that way. Like relationships are the first thing that fall by the wayside when we get busy. You get busy and you forget to send the text to the friend, you don't do that trip with your old group of buddies, you don't call your mom.

18:43 When the truth is that it is the single most important predictor of living a happy, healthy life. We have clear, robust scientific evidence on this now. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, like they followed the lives of 2,000 people over the course of 85 years. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50.

19:07 It wasn't blood pressure, it wasn't cholesterol, it wasn't smoking or drinking habits, it wasn't your whoop score even. It was how you felt about your relationships that actually determined how well you aged. And so what better reason do we need to really focus on and think about investing in those relationships all along the course of our life?

19:26 Yeah, it's actually fascinating the relationship connection as it relates to longevity. We partnered with the Buck Institute, which is like the leading longevity institute in the United States. And so we looked at all of these different biomarkers that Whoop measures. But one powerful indicator that in many cases ranks very, very highly for longevity was around personal connection and like the the inverse, of course, being loneliness, which is like one of the number one killers, so to speak, or number number one indicators of of all-cause mortality.

19:58 Yeah. Have you heard of the social slope effect? No, tell me. This is an interesting one. So they ran this study where they had a group of individuals put on a heavy backpack and go at the bottom of this really steep hill. And they had them do it alone, and then they had them do it with a friend. And what they found was they asked them to uh rate the perceived steepness of the hill in front of them before they went and had to climb it.

20:22 When you were with a friend, the perceived steepness of the hill in front of you was lower than when you were on your own. That's cool. So the idea was that going and encountering challenges in life is inevitable, but doing it alone is optional. And so relationships and that connection to actually being able to endure struggle, whether it's physical or otherwise, in your life, also have a profound effect.

20:46 You talk about how foundational health is, and in a way you frame the wealth as it relates to your overall health as really being more of a foundation than one of the five things.

20:59 I think physical wealth is so critical as a foundation because it is effectively impossible to experience the full texture of any of the other types of wealth without it. It is also the one that is subject to the most natural atrophy. Like you are going to get older. Things are going to happen in your body as you get older.

21:23 And so what it is is a call to action to control the controllables, to go and take care of the things that you can be taken care of now to fight against that natural atrophy that happens as you get older. But I think anyone will tell you, right? Like there's that common saying that a healthy man wants many things, a sick man only wants one thing.

21:41 Totally. And it is very true. Well, we've all you experienced that in like silly ways in your life, right? Like when you get uh sick, when you get the cold or whatever, you get a flu get the flu, you're like you can't remember how good it felt to just feel healthy when you woke up in the morning. It's the only thing that you can think about.

21:57 And so I just think that for most people, Where we have gone awry when it comes to health advice, and this is really the entire entire world of like health gurus and health advice that you see on the internet, is overcomplicating what it means to be healthy. And you and I have talked about this in the past.

22:18 Like I think the most powerful thing that you can do is remind people that the basics of becoming a healthy person are freely accessible to anyone. Like level one of the video game, if you will, is something that anyone can go out and do right now, and all the science supports it, right? Like move for 30 minutes a day, eat whole unprocessed foods, and sleep for seven hours a night.

22:38 It's not about cold plunges and saunas and whatever peptides and red light therapy, all the million other things that you can do once you're past level one. You just need to focus on getting started. And I think that like for all the great things that have come from people talking more about health, the downside has been it has convinced a lot of people that what it means to be healthy is this crazy fancy protocol.

23:01 And that's not for a 40-year-old mom in Iowa that's just getting started on her health journey, or for a 70-year-old man, you know, in San Diego that wants to get going on this journey. That is not particularly helpful to think that health is this crazy, you know, series of expensive protocols.

23:18 Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, I had this very extreme um experience with uh physical health and and financial wealth at the same time where in the past year I was dealing with this really debilitating injury and I had a uh a herniated disc in my lower back, L5S1. And for people who are familiar with this injury, you end up getting this like sciatica nerve pain down your leg.

23:44 And like anyway, it was so bad that I uh at its peak I could like barely walk. I couldn't do all the things that I love doing, like exercise, and I was constantly in pain. And it it was anyway, I I hadn't experienced anything like that in my life. And at the same time uh Whoop was experiencing this incredible financial success.

24:07 And the company, it was like around December when the injury was kind of at its worst, November, December. And that was also right around the same time when the business got valued at $10 billion. And here I had founded this like, you know, very valuable business, and I was totally miserable because of the pain I was in.

24:25 And and I remember reading your book around the same time and just thinking, like, this is so true. Like I knew it before, but when you experience it on like that level of an extreme, it was quite I don't know, it was just quite a revelation.

24:38 It is also just a reminder that physical wealth is a catalyst for everything else in your life. It's not only a foundation, it's also like a gateway drug to everything else in a lot of ways, like a healthy gateway drug. I don't think there's a single thing that you can do that will improve your life faster than signing up for a physical side quest.

24:59 Yeah, that's a great point.

25:00 Like you go go sign up for a marathon, a high rocks, some crazy hike or rafting adventure. Like go sign up for something and watch your whole life fall into place around it.

25:11 All of a sudden you'll have more. Or also, you know, like pick a new sport or an activity. Some hot like a physical hobby.

25:18 I mean, you like you wake up in the morning more energized, you want to eat the right things because you're trying to fuel yourself for this thing, you have more structure in your days, you go to bed exhausted because you've been pushing yourself, so you sleep better. Like everything in your life starts falling into place.

25:33 You show up with more focus for your professional endeavors, for your relationships, you feel better, you look better, you're more confident. Like, literally everything follows this one action of signing up for a physical side quest. I've experienced it like this summer, you know, I'm like training for a marathon right now, and I see the focus that all of a sudden it brings, and like the structure that it brings to my life, having this thing every single day.

25:54 It's unbelievable. And so it really is like a psychological process that's disguised as a physical one in many ways. Like a lot of problems in life are solved by waking up early and working out.

26:06 Totally. I I mean the mental health benefits of exercise to me are like so profound. And I felt this so intensely over the course of the last year when I was injured and I couldn't exercise. And I'm like, why am I so down? Like I just feel down, you know? And I had never, I really had never felt like that before.

26:24 And anyway, it's hard to imagine any really productive mental health protocols that don't start with a question around exercise or activity, like just movement.

26:36 I think that's totally true. I mean, the science also bears that out, as you know. Like it's it's very clear that it does have that impact. It's also just it's a very easy way to make sure that you always have something on the calendar that you're excited about. And one thing that we know about human flourishing and happiness is that you need something to look forward to.

26:55 Okay, it can't always be present gratitude. As much as we say, like, you have to be grateful when you wake up in the morning. It's like if you're tired and life has beat you down and things aren't going well, it's hard to just wake up and be like, I'm so grateful that I'm alive and that I have a bed.

27:08 We we can try to do it, but it's difficult. And it also can't be about experiences in the past. I've talked to my parents about this recently that, like, you know, my dad's in his 70s, their health is okay, but it's getting harder for them to look out to the future and with certainty say that they're going to be able to do all the things that have brought them joy in the past, like the the trips, the hikes, the experiences that they've loved.

27:32 And so I have just guided them around this idea of like, in the more medium and short term, just make sure there's always something on the calendar you're excited about.

27:41 Yeah.

27:42 Like some little thing, whatever it is, some hobby, some trip, some hike, some thing that you're gonna do, because there is a real impact from just waking up in the morning and realizing that there's something out there in the near future that you're excited about.

27:55 Aaron Powell It's also one of the arguments for people just booking trips in advance. Like there's nothing wrong with doing things spontaneously or last minute, but you I think you get a psychological benefit from having something well advanced on the calendar like that.

28:08 Aaron Powell 100%.

28:09 Yeah.

28:10 Completely agree with that.

28:11 Okay. Well, speaking of health, how have you used your whoop?

28:15 I'm coming to you on a 97% recovery day, which I feel very uh like this. You're pretty dialed in. I mean, I I mentioned I'm training for a marathon this summer. My like big endeavor over the last few years has been trying to balance strength training and basically trying to be a good runner but never look like a good runner for lack of a better way to say it.

28:38 When I started running, my wife's biggest concern was that I was gonna get really skinny.

28:41 Yeah.

28:42 Um, and so uh my my entire sort of pursuit around running has been like I want to maintain uh the strength training things that I did during my baseball days, continue to be able to like deadlift, squat, et cetera, uh at a reasonable level while also getting faster. Getting faster. The fun thing about running is like it is a it is an endeavor physically that people peek at in their late 30s, 40s.

29:03 So you can keep getting better. You can keep getting better. And for me, as a former athlete, as someone who loves competing with himself in many ways, it's been fun to pursue something physically that I can actually improve at again. Like I at some point, I was not gonna get stronger. Like I without doing unnatural things, I was probably not gonna like want to go max out a deadlift.

29:24 Like I the risk of like lower back injury and not being able to toss my son around in the pool is just too great to me at this point. Like the risk reward doesn't make sense. But going and running and pushing myself to try to go, you know, PR a marathon once a year has really been a main pursuit. And so for me, the whoop has been hugely impactful in terms of like thinking about how my training's going, how I'm continuing to see these like longer-term adaptations as the training has ramped up around physiologically.

29:50 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, resting heart rate, respiratory rate. Like I really like looking at long-term trends. I'm not like a data nerd in the days as much as I am in the in the kind of years. And so I love being able to go look at these longer-term trends and see how my body's adapting to the different things that I'm tweaking in my routines.

30:08 Aaron Powell Do you measure anything in the uh in the whoop journal that you're tracking, like, hey, is this making me better or worse?

30:13 Aaron Powell Yeah, the big one for me there has been around sauna in the evening and uh eating time, proximity to bed, and tracking the impact on sleep of those two activities. Like I had constantly been seeing and reading the science on the impact of when you eat prior to going to bed and how it impacts your sleep.

30:31 But actually being able to go and track that and see that there's like a meaningful impact to me from eating at five versus eating at seven, how I sleep at night, how I recover, and how I feel, frankly, that has finally like pushed me over the edge on it.

30:44 For me personally, my I I track uh how close I eat to bed and I also track alcohol, and it's funny that those two things are actually pretty close in terms of how negative they are on my recovery.

30:57 How much alcohol has a meaningful impact for you? Any amount?

31:02 I think I think any amount in the evening will likely decrease my recovery.

31:08unknown Yeah.

31:09 But I have to have, I would say, like, three drinks or more for it to um immediately put me in the red. Whereas I know some people or even like professional athletes, where if they have like one glass of red wine, they're gonna be in the red. And so that my sense is that I have a slightly better rebound from alcohol than the average uh whoop consumer.

31:31 But it's definitely that alcohol is bad for you, period.

31:35 Like I don't sort of sugarcoat that, but I have a hot take on alcohol, which is at this interplay of physical wealth and social wealth.

31:45 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: This is a reasonable take. I know where you're going.

31:47 Yeah, I just I I I have seen far too many of my friends uh cut alcohol completely from their life. And the side effect of that was that they also reduced in-person social interaction by like 50 percent.

31:59 Yeah, because that's problematic.

32:01 Because a lot of the time that they were spending drinking was actually just like it wasn't binge drinking, it was like a couple drinks or one drink with a few friends getting together. And so uh in my own path, like I have, I mean, I mentioned earlier, like I was drinking seven nights a week. I was drinking way too much.

32:16 It was unhealthy, meaningfully unhealthy. I probably still have about one drink every other week or one drink a week, and it's always like a meaningful human, textured social interaction. Ideally, like a glass of red wine with my wife on a date night or meeting up with a friend and having like a nice glass of tequila or something like that.

32:36 And I don't think I will ever give that up because I really enjoy the feeling of connection that it creates around it. And I personally think that you can have like a drink and still be a healthy person, uh. Especially if it brings that together for you.

32:49 Aaron Ross Powell Well, the thing I definitely agree with is there's a negative thing happening in this like call it space of health improvement, which is around like neurotic over-optimization. And you can just see like the extremes of this, all these different behaviors. You you listen to people just being like totally anxious.

33:08 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I would say I'm I'm on the same page with you. Like I think social connection and also just like I don't know if it's self-love, but it's just it's like some degree of like giving yourself a little bit of room to I don't know, relax and enjoy life and not overthink it.

33:26 Aaron Powell I think in general it's like a certain freedom. Yeah, it's just like in general, things on the extremes are never the right approach for the vast majority of the thing. Right? Like you need to find what works for you, whether whether it's you know in your health routines or otherwise. And and what makes you genuinely happy.

33:43 I would just say for most people, like find what works for you, find your version of what this like healthy, thriving life looks like so that you can do the things that you actually want to be able to go out and do.

33:52 Yeah. And definitely get out of like your bedroom or your living room, get off Zoom, get go see people.

33:58 Yes. Get outside. Humanity.

34:00 That doesn't necessarily mean drinking at a bar, but like it could also mean drinking at a bar.

34:05 Yeah. And they have non-alcoholic beers now, so you can do that. They taste pretty good.

34:08 Aaron Powell That industry is actually doing pretty well. It's like the one bright spot of alcohol industry is the non-alcoholic beer.

34:14 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, no one has figured out non-alcoholic wine, as far as I can tell. Like I've never tasted a non-alcoholic wine that actually tastes like wine. If someone figures that out, I want to fund it and I will be a massive consumer of this product.

34:27 How has uh being a father changed the way you think about your body?

34:31 Aaron Powell I don't think there has been a single thing in my life that has changed the way that I perceive the world more than becoming a dad. The biggest reason is because I do not believe you can teach your kids anything. I think you just have to embody the things that you want them to learn. So if I want my son to understand the phone, it's a powerful concept, yeah.

34:52 If I want my son to understand the power of delayed gratification, like enduring struggle now for a benefit later, he better damn well see me doing that in the things that I do in life. Whether it's physical, whether it's relationships. Like if I want my son to treat my wife like a queen, he better see me treating my wife like a queen.

35:13 And I think that that applies to everything that we do. Like you see, at my son's four, like you see at this age how much of a sponge they are to the way that you behave and the way that you act, the things that you do, the way that you approach things. My son now wants to like put on a sleeveless shirt and a headband and sunglasses and come out and run at the track next to me.

35:34 Like he thinks that that is cool because he has seen me do that over extended periods of time. You can see, like, someone has a home gym and their kid comes in and watches them. What are the habits that your kids are learning? They're learning through seeing you and the way that you approach the world.

35:47 And so I would say everything I do now feels like it carries more weight because it's not just about me, it's also about passing these things on to the next generation, in many ways, quite literally. And a lot of that was informed by my own experience with my dad, right? Like I, every lesson that I have learned about the importance of hard work and of pushing yourself around things that create energy in your life was from watching my dad do that.

36:16 He he never sat me down and told me like he wasn't the type of dad to do this. He didn't sit me down and say hard work is important, you have to work hard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I probably wouldn't have listened. I just saw him working hard on things that he cared about. He always explained why he was working hard on those things, why he cared about them, why they were important to our family and to this mission we were on.

36:36 But it was about the fact that he embodied it more so than that he said it over and over again.

36:43 And do you have a conversation with your wife about that? Like, do you feel like each of you has to demonstrate different things to your son?

36:51 Yeah, absolutely. I I would say probably the one of the first conversations my wife and I had after having our son about the type of parents that we wanted to be was this conversation about realizing our own complementarity, if you will, in who we are as people. My wife is extraordinarily caring and giving and empathetic and loving and creative.

37:18 She has all of these incredible attributes that frankly I think I'm very weak in naturally. And for her to live those out on a daily basis and for me to make sure that she's able to live those things out is one of my highest callings. Because now when I see my son at age four, like just the loving demeanor that he naturally has with people, I point to my wife and say, that's the only place that that is coming from.

37:43 It's from her him seeing you every single day, operating that way with the people in your life and with the way you approach life. And so I think that like there is this natural complementarity, and then there's something about making sure that you show up in a way that enables the other person to shine in that light.

38:01 Like there's this scientific finding, it's called the uh the Michelangelo effect. It's like about the statue of David, right? Michelangelo carved the statue of David, and he said in the aftermath of carving this statue that he didn't carve David, he just chipped away everything that wasn't David. And it was applied to science in this lens of the fact that our deepest, most impactful relationships are people who act in ways that allow us to shine in our best light.

38:29 Like they chip away the things that aren't going to allow us to do that so that we can show up in our best way. And so I think that that comes in like tiny acts of service to the other person, right? Like, how are you opening up space for them to actually operate at that highest version of themselves?

38:44 Yeah, you're trying to amplify your partner's greatest attributes and hope they do the same for you.

38:50 And make sure that like they have the space to do the things they need to do, the non-negotiable things, so that they can feel their best. My wife probably can't feel like a loving, highly empathetic, generous person if she's constantly exhausted and doesn't have the space to take care of herself in the way that she needs to.

39:07 I need to make sure that I'm doing what I can so that she can go out and do that.

39:12 Aaron Ross Powell You do you've done a fair amount of research, it seems like, on regret. And through the lens of these different forms of wealth, what do you what have you learned about people towards the end of their life? Like what do people tend to regret?

39:25 I think the few things that came up a lot. So I spent, as part of the book, I spoke to in the end, close to about a hundred uh people that were uh 90 or 100 years old. And then the number one question that I was asking them was that question of like what regrets do you have about your life? What advice would you give to your younger self, et cetera?

39:46 The couple of things that come up consistently, number one, not taking care of your body during the years when you could have. Uh the quote that came up from a 90-year-old man was treat your body like a house you're going to have to live in for the next 70 years. That metaphor to me is a really powerful one.

40:03 Like strong. Yeah, you invest in the foundation, make the minor repairs along the way. It is a house you have to live in. The second one that always came up was just about never fearing the bad in your life, like not running away from the negative and hiding from the negative. And that came from originally actually from my grandmother, who was 95 at the time, who said, never fear sadness as it tends to sit right next to love.

40:32 That idea is to say most of the beautiful things in life dance on this razor's edge. The good comes in the same package as the bad. You can't expect the full depth and texture of love without exposing yourself to the full depth of pain of loss. All the most meaningful things in life follow that same principle.

40:53 You can't get the great without exposing yourself to the struggle and to the bad. So not hiding from that along the journey, not hiding from those challenging things along the journey is a really powerful one. And then the third thing that comes up consistently is make sure you're having fun along the way.

41:11 Everyone, everyone, everyone talks about delaying things too much to what end. Right. So like delayed gratification is an amazing principle across a lot of things in life. But at some point, you should be gratified. Like, you know, just like laugh your head off, do the crazy trip with people, um, you know, like eat off the fancy China.

41:34 Like you don't need to wait for the fancy dinner party in the future. Just like go do that thing that brings you joy in the short term because that's generally something that you won't regret.

41:43 Aaron Powell So if someone's trying to take like a self-inventory on delayed gratification, like what's a way to know, okay, I'm I'm not going to be regretful around whether I'm enjoying myself right now?

41:55 Aaron Powell I try to apply a 90-10 rule to this, which is to say I want to be really disciplined and locked in on routines about 90-95% of the time max. And then I want 5% to be this like crazy just go and do the thing that brings me joy, freedom. Yeah. And I say that to everyone when it comes to routines, that like, you know, I talk a lot about the 90% on all of my content, right?

42:19 Like I write a lot about my routines, I write about the things that I do, the discipline, et cetera. And I don't talk enough about the 5 or 10%, like the amount of just going out and just like go do the crazy thing, have the drink with friends, go on the trip, go and do that thing that brings you joy, because that's what the 90% is for.

42:35 Like it is so that you can unlock the freedom and the life to actually go and enjoy that 10% without being stressed about it. Like you're healthy so that you can go do the stupid trip with your friends, or you're gonna go and like whitewater raft and hike and do the things without being miserable after the experience, without getting injured, without doing those things.

42:54 It's not so that you can like look good on Instagram and pictures, right? Like it's to go do the 10%. And so I think that taking that approach in your life, like 90% of the time I'm gonna be locked in, delayed gratification, sticking to these routines, nailing the boring basics, and then 10% of the time, I'm just gonna live my life.

43:12 I'm gonna have fun and take what comes to me. That to me is a place where most people will thrive.

43:18 Within the 90% piece, like something I think about even personally is just this degree to which like you feel happy versus you feel fulfilled. And to me, those are those they have like different connotations in my mind. And I'm curious if you think about what it means to be happy.

43:37 Aaron Ross Powell I think that the most clear and scientifically backed way to be happy is to make slow, steady incremental improvements in your life. And slow and steady is actually a really important piece of that. Like when we go and look at uh some of the least happy people, it's often people who have had a crazy spike.

44:00 Of success or wealth or growth in some way, and are now having this thing called the NOVA effect where you reset back down to a low baseline. It's like the lottery winner or the professional athlete who has like this incredible peak of success in their 20s and now all of a sudden has to be a normal person, very, very difficult to experience happiness over the long term in that space.

44:23 Slow, steady incremental improvements come from doing really boring basic things over a long period of time. Like feeling like you're getting slightly better at whatever games you're playing in life, whatever games that you care to play. I do think the distinction between happiness and fulfillment is a meaningful one, right?

44:40 Like eating ice cream will make me really happy now, but I might feel terrible later. And so there's also a kind of like time thing that we need to think about where in order to experience long-term that slow, steady, consistent growth that we're talking about, you need to be able to bring the kind of after into the before, if you will.

45:00 Like I don't want to go for this run early in the morning, but I know how I feel once I'm a mile into this run. I know it feels great after. It doesn't feel great getting out the door, it doesn't feel good putting on my shoes. But once I'm a mile into it, and especially after, it feels amazing. Incredible release of endorphins, all of this energy that comes from this thing.

45:19 Cold plunging is like the most classic example of that, right? I think that a lot of people benefit from recognizing that you can actually just do that psychologically. Like it, you don't have it's called construal level theory. It's this idea that humans are not very good at creating like real texture around something that's far in the future.

45:41 And so you know exactly how bad it's gonna feel doing the thing right now. Like I know how tired I'm gonna be, I know how much it's gonna hurt to go outside in the cold to start this run. I can visualize that, I can feel it almost. I can't quite feel the version of me two hours from now that feels amazing walking in the door after the run.

45:58 And so really thinking about that, like reminding yourself of how good that feels on the back end, is a way to sort of pull that after into the before from a psychological perspective and convince you to get through that hump of inaction.

46:13 Yeah, I I think it was Scott Adams who had this whole bit about lazy people, but he said that lazy people think about costs rather than benefits. So, you know, the like what's the cost of having to do the thing versus what's the benefit of having to do it? It's just funny like how much of life is just framing things in your mind.

46:30 Aaron Ross Powell, the vast majority of life is just lived in your head. It's like what story you choose to tell yourself about the thing that you're going and doing. And is it a story that serves you or is it a story that owns you?

46:42 Aaron Ross Powell Do you tell yourself a story about yourself at 100 years old and like how you reflect on living a rich life?

46:50 Aaron Ross Powell I find it difficult to think too far into the future about my own life. This is something I've probably changed my mind on a little bit, actually. Um for a long time, I sort of ascribed to the Jeff Bezos theory of life, which was this like regret optimization function, right? Where you say, like, think about your 80-year-old self, look back on the present, ask if you would regret doing or not doing this thing, and then make the decision accordingly.

47:16 Right. It's very difficult to, with real texture, envision what your life is at 80. Like to some extent, none of us believe we're gonna get old. Like there is this just uh cognitive dissonance that you're like, yeah, old people are old. I'm not old. Like I actually just recently had a hilarious experience with this where I was at the track like doing this workout, and there was like high schoolers there doing, you know, whatever, their preseason stuff.

47:41 And I had this thought go through my head of like, oh man, they must think I look really cool, like doing this really hard running workout. And then I was like, wait, no, they think I look like a weird old guy, like trying way too hard doing this running workout. Totally the old guy. And I'm I was like, oh my God, I'm the old guy that I used to make fun of that was running around the track totally the colour.

48:00 Like it flipped in my head, and I was just like, where did life go that I'm now the old guy that's doing these things? And I think that like what that has informed in me is this slight shift in perspective. And so uh this is actually this is a funny source for a shift in perspective, but there's this idea in theoretical biology called the adjacent possible.

48:20 And what it says is that basically everything about uh what can happen next is just governed by what has happened to date. So, like the Cambrian explosion where life exploded like 50 million years ago and all of these like permutations exploded, it was the only time when it could have happened because of everything that had led up to the moment right there.

48:39 And all I think about now in my own journey is how can I improve and expand the adjacent possible in my life through the actions that I'm taking today? So, like I'm not even planning 10 years into the future. I don't really have like a five or a 10-year plan. I'm just thinking about today, in the weeks and months ahead.

48:59 What actions can I be taking that improve and expand this adjacent possible in my life? Like, what skills can I be building? What relationships can I be developing? What health endeavors can I be pursuing? Like, what are the things that are going to move my life in the general direction that expands and improves that adjacent possible on my journey?

49:19 Well, you've got a great message, man. And uh, you know, I appreciate everything you're doing. The book is The Five Types of Wealth, which Sahel's written in the best selling book. Uh I think it's terrific. And uh and you embody a lot of what you write about and stand for. So that's I think that's a big deal in in the world of uh of personal development, self improvement, and health, all these things.

49:40 So thank you.

49:41 Thank you.