Something You Should Know
How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
Mon, 10 Feb 2025
Why do you feel cold sometimes? The obvious answer is that you feel cold when you ARE cold. But could it also be that you feel cold because someone else is cold? In other words, is feeling cold contagious? Listen as this episode begins with explanation. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11340277/If-this-picture-makes-you-feel-cold-you-may-be-a-victim-of-temperature-contagion.html We tend to measure wealth in dollars. But financial wealth is only one of five types of wealth. There is also social wealth, time wealth, physical wealth and mental wealth – and they are essential to living a satisfying life. That is according to my guest, Sahil Bloom. He is a writer and content creator who reaches millions of people every week through his insights and biweekly newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle. He is also the managing partner of SRB Ventures, an early-stage investment fund and author of the book The 5 Types of Wealth A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life (https://amzn.to/4hoFRiv) . Listen as Sahil explains the different types of wealth and how to make sure you are rich in all of them. While it is true that the Internet is great at bringing people together, it is also great at driving us apart. It seems that digital technology is just not compatible with the way our brains are designed to work, according to my guest Nicholas Carr. Nicholas writes for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal and he is the author of a book called, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (https://amzn.to/4gpMGz7). Listen as he reveals the damage being done to all of us by technology and how not to fall victim. Nasal congestion – feeling stuffy, is very common. And yet, it is difficult to treat effectively because it is not what people think it is. Listen as I reveal what that feeling of stuffiness really is and what you can do to help minimize the sensation. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111013184803.htm PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off DELL: Anniversary savings await you for a limited time only at https://Dell.com/deals SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! CURIOSITY WEEKLY: We love Curiosity Weekly, so listen wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why do you sometimes feel cold when you're not?
Today on Something You Should Know, a strange reason why you sometimes feel cold even when you're not, then understanding what real wealth is and how to achieve it.
It is the idea of understanding your definition of enough, that your expectations are actually your greatest financial liability, because if you allow them to grow faster than your assets, you will never feel rich.
Also, why a stuffy nose isn't really what you think it is. And while the Internet and all its tools can be great, the technology can also tear us apart.
We've come to believe that the Internet is our all-purpose tool. It's good for everything. And I think that's a mistake, that actually when it comes to interpersonal communication, gathering information and making sense of complex issues, the Internet is actually a really bad tool.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi and welcome to Something You Should Know. In the winter, it's common to feel cold. When the weather is cold, you likely feel cold. But here's something weird. If you watch somebody else who is clearly cold, it's more likely to make you feel cold. Researchers in England showed subjects videos of people who were cold and noticed that the body temperature of the people watching dropped.
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Chapter 2: What are the five types of wealth and how can you achieve them?
So how can being cold be contagious? Well, it seems that it's because we're social creatures and much of human success results from our ability to work together in complex communities. This would be hard to do if we were not able to rapidly empathize with each other and predict one another's thoughts, feelings, and motivations.
Interestingly, they also showed subjects videos of people who were visibly hot, but it did not cause the people watching to increase their body temperature. And that is something you should know. Stop for a moment and think of someone who is wealthy. And most likely, you thought of someone who has a lot of money. Money is how most of us measure wealth.
But as you're about to discover, there are actually five types of wealth. And it's important to cultivate all five, not just financial wealth. Although that is one of them. But all five types are crucial to leading a satisfying life. And joining me to explain all this is Sawhill Bloom. He is a successful entrepreneur and the managing partner of SRB Ventures, an early stage investment fund.
He has a biweekly newsletter called the Curiosity Chronicle that has a big following. Sahil spent three years doing research and conducting thousands of interviews with people around the world on the topic of personal wealth. He's author of a book called The Five Types of Wealth, A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. Hi, Sahil. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thank you so much for having me.
So explain why we're talking about this, because as I said, for most of us, wealth means money. So why do we need to dive deeper into these other types of wealth? So frame this picture for me.
I think it's best framed through a quote, which is one of my favorite quotes from the management theorist, Peter Drucker, who said, what gets measured gets managed. And I've always loved that quote because what it implies is that the things that you measure end up being the things that you focus on, the things that you optimize around. And money has been the sole way that we measure our lives.
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Chapter 3: Why is money not the only measure of wealth?
It has been our focus and the way that we establish our worth as individuals and as people and as professionals. But unfortunately, money is just one piece of a more complete picture that contributes to a healthy, happy, fulfilling, wealthy life.
So what are the five types of wealth?
The five types of wealth are time wealth, which is the idea of the freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and when you trade it for other things. Social wealth, which is the idea of your human connection, your relationships, the people with whom you are going to go on these journeys with.
Mental wealth, which is your purpose, your pursuit of growth, and your ability to create space to wrestle with bigger questions in your life. Physical wealth, which is all about your health and vitality, your ability to control the controllables, as it were, in your own life, in your pursuit of health. And then finally, financial wealth, which we all know.
But in the context of financial wealth in particular, it is the idea of understanding your definition of enough. The idea that your expectations are actually your greatest financial liability, because if you allow them to accelerate and grow faster than your assets, you will never feel rich.
And what does that mean to feel rich? Seems like if you feel rich, whatever your definition of feel rich is, then you're rich.
I think of Rich as really about living your version of enough, which is funny to say, but there's a famous story that I love that really brings this to light. Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, two very famous American authors, were at the home of this billionaire in the Hamptons. And Vonnegut says to Heller, Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday,
The owner of this home made more money than your most famous book, Catch-22, made in its entire lifetime. And Heller replies and says, yes, but I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, what's that? And Heller says, the knowledge that I've got enough. So really, that is at the heart of all of this.
It's the idea that you need to define what your version of your enough life looks like. What does enough truly mean to you?
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Chapter 4: What are simple ways to invest in your non-financial wealth?
The thing that people do is they say, oh, it's once I make a million dollars, then I'm going to be happy, then everything's going to be good. And then they get to a million and then they say it's three million and then they get to three and it's 10. There's actually studies around this.
Michael Norton, a famous professor at Harvard Business School, did a study where he went and talked to high net worth individuals worth anywhere from a million on through 100 million plus. And he asked them, how happy are you on a scale of one to 10? And then he asked, how much more money would you need to be at a 10?
And across the board, whether they were worth a million or 100 million plus, everyone said two to three times as much money. So because we attach it to a number, it becomes this very easy thing to naturally inflate.
When you attach it to an actual life, to an actual vision of the lifestyle that you are going to be living, what it does is it makes it a much more conscious and rational upward movement rather than a subconscious irrational one.
Do you find that people who seem to have one of the five types of wealth pretty well handled have the others well handled? Or if they have one handled, then the others don't do so well? What do you see?
Usually what happens is that people focus on financial wealth at the expense of the other ones, that they have this early in life patterning or conditioning that convinces them that incremental unit of money is going to equal and incremental unit of happiness. And that patterning actually gets cemented quite legitimately early in your life.
Early on the curve, money is a great driver of happiness because it reduces fundamental burdens and stresses. We can start to afford things. We can take care of the people around us. We can have two vacations a year. Those things really do drive it. Beyond that, what you find is that the incremental unit of money does not drive that same incremental unit of happiness.
But because of the patterning that we've now reached, we continue to think it will. And as you continue to more and more narrowly pursue money as the means to your happy end, you start to see these other areas deteriorate. You see that people start to sacrifice their relationships or that they start to sacrifice their physical health or they start to sacrifice their mental clarity.
All of these other areas start to deteriorate along that pursuit. Part of that is because we don't think to invest in these other areas in the same way that we think to invest in financial wealth. When it comes to financial wealth, we know that investing $100 today will compound into our future.
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Chapter 5: How can social wealth impact your overall well-being?
They all want to become dollar billionaires. And what he noticed was that They are all billionaires in one very important way, which is they are time billionaires. They are literally rich with time. But until you start relating to yourself that way, you don't understand just how much that is your most valuable asset that you have.
Because when you're young, especially, time is quite literally the only asset that you have. You don't have the networks, you don't have the money, you don't have the resources, the experience, the wisdom, any of those things. And so you actually need to take your time and trade it for those things so that you can live well in those other areas as you progress in your life.
But starting to relate to yourself in that way is a really powerful thing for how you live. And frankly, you're a time billionaire up through, you know, on a technical basis, 50 plus. I think a billion seconds is about 30 years, if I'm correct. And, you know, so at 20, you maybe have 2 billion seconds-ish left, depending on life expectancy. And at 50, you have maybe a billion seconds left.
So we are all time billionaires. We're doing quite well in that one regard.
Yeah. But people think, well, if you have a lot of time, or especially if you look at time as you have a lot of free time, that that's somehow... You're lazy. You don't have anything to do. That kind of time is not an asset.
time has become this funny thing particularly in western culture where uh being busy uh is like this interesting almost pseudo-dystopian status flex you go to a you go to a cocktail party and people ask how you're doing and you say i'm busy and you say it with this you know intense pride as if being more stressed and more strained is something to be proud of because it's an indication for a lot of people
You're saying it because it means that you are working on a lot of things like you must be doing well. And, you know, oftentimes in a more toxic workplace culture to being busy as a protection mechanism, because it shows to your superiors and the people around you that you are working on things that you are doing a whole bunch of stuff.
And unfortunately, that busyness treadmill, if you will, is actually not conducive to making a whole lot of progress. Because what you find is that you are working on a whole lot of the things that are sort of the one for one trades that are not actually moving you forward. You sort of become like a rocking horse, if you will. You're moving a whole lot, but you're not really getting anywhere.
Talk about social wealth, because that's one kind of wealth that I think people tend to overlook, that friends and social connections can be like the first thing to go when there's something else to do.
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Chapter 6: Why is time considered your most valuable asset?
They'll talk about the fact that their relationships and the people and their freedom and their health and all of these things they'll talk about as being priorities. And then when you ask what they do during a week or you go look at their calendar, there is a big, big gap in what their actions are actually showing their priorities are.
And so the whole idea here is to start closing that gap, to take the priorities that your ideal self has in mind and start aligning your actions with building toward that set of priorities.
Well, this is such a different way of looking at wealth and really a more comprehensive way of looking at wealth, all kinds of wealth that all add up to a happy life. And I appreciate you sharing it. Saw Hill Bloom has been my guest. He is an entrepreneur and managing partner of SRB Ventures, which is an early stage investment fund.
He's author of a book called The Five Types of Wealth, A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Sahil, thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. All right.
Thank you, Mike.
Take care.
Hello, I am Kristen Russo. And I am Jenny Owen Youngs. We are the hosts of Buffering the Vampire Slayer. Once more with spoilers, a rewatch podcast covering all 144 episodes of, you guessed it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We are here to humbly invite you to join us for our fifth Buffy Prom, which, if you can believe it, we are hosting at the actual Sunnydale High School. That's right. On April 4th and 5th, we will be descending upon the campus of Torrance High School,
which was the filming location for Buffy's Sunnydale High, to dance the night away to 90s music in the iconic courtyard, to sip on punch right next to the Sunnydale High fountain, and to nerd out together in our prom best inside of the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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