key elements in developing many of these other forms of wealth, right? That if you surround yourself with ambitious, successful people who you love and admire, that's likely to lead to financial success if that's your objective. If you surround yourself with curious, honest, intellectually rigorous people, you're likely to build mental wealth, right? I mean, it seems to me that the ways that we choose to interact with other humans is really critical to all these paths. The

way I've always said it is you are often told that you should focus on the journey and not the destination. That's like the cliche phrasing that people use. Focus on the journey, not the destination. I actually disagree. I think you need to focus on the people. It's the company along the way. Because when you focus on surrounding yourself with incredible, inspiring, positive, some kind, genuine, authentic people, you end up on the best journeys and you have the best destinations. It just happens. And I can't explain why, but it just does. And so if you focus there and focus your energy there, the best things in all of these other areas of wealth start to come into your life. And

you, Sahil, have done this really effectively. I mean, I met you a few months ago on a retreat with Susan Cain and Adam Grant and all kinds of other brilliant people. I think Tim Cook is a mentor and friend. You've built an extraordinary collection of relationships in your life. How have you gone about doing this at such a young age?

I'd say the first thing is just that I really love people. I come from a mixed background. My mom is from India, born and raised in Bangalore. My dad is white Jewish from the Bronx, New York. And my parents met over a little bit of a turn of fate, two-week period that they crossed over. While my dad was finishing his dissertation at Princeton, my mom had just come over from India and was doing her master's there. And she was working in the library to pay her way through school. And my dad was studying for his final dissertation defense. And my mom asked my dad on a date. And on this first date, my dad said, my father will never accept us. And my mom was so blinded by his use of the word us that she completely missed the message, which was that his father was not going to like this budding courtship. And unfortunately, he was right. And his father made him choose between my mom and his family. And my dad walked out the door and never saw his family again. I never met my dad's parents. He has three siblings I've never met. I have first cousins out there in the world that I've never met. This really crazy thing on the back of them choosing love and rejecting common convention carving their own path. And that sort of household, this like mixed race, mixed cultural, ethnic, religious household, meant that I really never felt like I fit in to one group. But the flip side of that, if you kind of acknowledge the fact that the best things in life dance on this razor's edge between like a struggle and a great thing, the great side of that was that I have felt like I've been able to relate to different types of people throughout my entire life. I played sports my whole life. I played baseball in college and I was always able to relate to like the, you know, deeply Christian Republican Southern guy, just as much as the like kid from New York city. You know, like it was just, I just love people. And, um, you know, I would say just in terms of some of the relationships that I've been able to build with people that I think are really amazing in different ways, I don't care about their success in the same way that a lot of people do. Meaning, I admire the input or the insight or the intelligence or the effort or energy that created it, but I'm not going to be wowed by them in the way of like, oh my God, I need to worship at the shrine of this person. I really admire people who are kind and generous and giving, and that's the type of person that I aspire to be. And so I think a lot of people in these high positions are used to people coming to them with a handout. They're looking for something. They're like, hey, invest in my company, do these things. And I really try to approach every relationship. It's not always perfect, but I really try to with the bias of, if I'm going to know this person for 50 years, how would I operate in this first interaction? I certainly wouldn't ask for something. I certainly wouldn't be transactional in any way because I'm going to know this person for 50 years. I want to actually understand their motivations, who they are as a person, what are their vulnerabilities, what are they insecure about? Like, that's what I really want. I want to know the person. That has created these amazing relationships and people that have supported me when, you know, really made no sense. And I aspire to be that same type of person to people who come to me. And so I like, you know, I still respond to every email that I get from anyone. I keep my DMs open. I reply to DMs from people. I send messages. I mean, I like, I spend a lot of time trying to do that and pay it forward.

I love that exercise of asking yourself, how would I interact with this person if I was, if this was the beginning of a 50 year relationship? I've never heard that before. I think that's really nice. You know, one of the things that in my own life, I'm 57 and I've, relationship with friends has expanded over time. And I think often midlife can be a time of social contraction, but it strikes me that it doesn't need to be. One exercise that's been helpful for me in my own life is I have a category of person that I refer to as a future good friend, right? So if I meet someone and I think, you know what, this is someone that I can imagine actually being like a really close friend in years to come, I will actually, in some cases say, you know what, I know this is a little strange for me to say this, but I think that you might be a future good friend. And it's a kind of forward thing to say. And I invited people to my wedding, some of whom I didn't know very well, but I said this to them. I said, you know what? I just have this hunch that we might be very good friends in 10, 15 years. And those people are today some of my closest friends. So it's- I love that. But giving yourself this space for identifying someone who could be a future great friend and having the boldness to cross the line of saying, hey, there might be an opportunity here. I

love the boldness because one of the things that I keep saying to people recently is never be afraid to send the double text. And it's a funny thing to say. I like that. You know, like everyone shies away from being the one. Like, oh, I reached out and they never replied, so I can't send another text because I don't want to be like too needy. And I think about how many relationships, loving, deep, incredibly vibrant relationships I have in my life, simply because I don't care about being the person to send the double or triple text. Like if I love someone and I care about them, or if I'm interested in spending more time with them, I'll send the triple text. And if they don't react to that well, or they find it annoying, we probably weren't going to be friends anyway. Cause I'm just the type of person, like, I live in a heart forward way. That's just the way that I live. And sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes people don't respond well to that. But most people actually do. And I'd like to think that I have enough value to offer to other people that, you know, it can create something interesting when I meet and spend time with these people. And so I have no issue being the person to send the double or triple text. And it has led to a lot of vibrant relationships that wouldn't exist if I had just stopped the first time they never applied. Let's

talk about mental wealth.

How do you think about this? I really think of mental wealth as being about paying the price for your distinctiveness. And that is kind of borrowing a phrase from Jeff Bezos's final shareholder letter. He wrote this final shareholder letter before he left his role as CEO at Amazon. And he quoted from Richard Dawkins, the blind watchmaker. And in that, there's like kind of this whole scene of this idea that being alive requires daily fight to keep your cells alive. Your cells right now in this moment are fighting to avoid just melting into their surroundings. They're trying to fight to maintain their integrity. I love that quote. Yeah. I love it. And Bezos uses it as an analogy for your own fight for distinctiveness as a human being, that every single day you have to pay the price for your distinctiveness to walk your own path rather than the one that's been handed to you. Mental wealth is really about that. It's engaging in that daily fight. And it is thinking about creating the space in your life to be able to think about what is the actual mountain that I want to climb. So often in life, we find ourselves climbing furiously up some mountain that we've never taken the time to think about whether we actually want to be at the top of that thing, or whether we're actually even enjoying climbing up the thing in the first place. And so much of mental wealth is just pausing to create a little bit of space to ask yourself that question. Do I actually want to be on this mountain or is it just the one that I have accepted as mine, that I've been told I should care about and that I'm charging furiously up to the top of?

Yes, yes, yes. You have a wonderful section where you talk about mental health hacks you wish you knew at 22, where you say, your purpose in life does not have to be grand or ambitious. It just has to be yours. Yeah,

that is drawing upon the Bhagavad Gita, you know, ancient Hindu text. And it's, you know, in the Bhagavad Gita, it's about Dharma, this idea of your sacred duty, and that your sacred duty does not have to be grand or impressive to anyone else. It just has to be yours and a sacred duty or a purpose that is tiny, but done well, and truly yours and distinct to you is better than someone else's that is grand or impressive that you have just accepted within your life. And I think that that is so important for young people to hear in particular, um, because you are, especially in a social media age, just bombarded by information about other people's purpose, other people's big grand vision for their life, all of these things. I mean, look, we read books about all of these celebrated figures, the people that we admire and celebrate. My entire life changed when I realized that the people that I read books about, I would never want to trade lives with. My entire life changed around that realization that I actually don't want those things. Someone should want them. That's great. They can change the world. Maybe Elon Musk makes us an interplanetary species. The world needs crazy ones, right? Like we need people like that. I just don't want to be pressured or forced into being one of them. I want to be able to focus on my two and a half year old son and spend a ton of time with him while he's young. I want to be able to write things that I think create an impact. I don't want to, you know, build $10 billion companies and have to work thousands of hours a month. Like I just, it's not what I want. If you want that, then great. But I don't need to be forced into that purpose because it's not actually mine. A

few other of your mental health hacks you wish you knew at 22, solve problems, make art, think deeply. I like that a lot. And then reflect on the past, but don't dwell on it. That's fantastic. This is a tough one. The dwelling one

is a really interesting one in the modern age because we live in a culture that now finds a lot of people getting their dopamine from information gathering rather than from action. And that is the same culture where we get our dopamine talking about or thinking about our problems rather than from acting to solve them, and that is what dwelling does. When you transition from articulating or journaling on your problems to just dwelling on them, you are going into a dangerous territory. You need to take action to actually improve upon those things. There needs to be a thin gap between the information or the reflection that you did and then the action that you're taking on the back of that. And for too many of us, we've created this really wide gap that leads to rumination. It leads to this negative spiral within our brains.

of my favorite of your mental health hacks, the last one is don't consume the news unless you're highly confident it will matter one month from now. That really can dramatically reduce our news consumption.

I would say that my life improved dramatically when I reduced my news consumption. My daily happiness is significantly higher when I do not consume news. It's not about being ignorant about the world around you. It's about recognizing that the news is a skewed perspective on the world around you because the incentives around how media is created is to get clicks. And we know scientifically, the things that get clicks are the things that induce the most fear, anger, chaos, et cetera, extreme reactions. So it creates a very skewed perspective on what the world actually looks like. There was an amazing chart that was shown of it was actual causes of death in the, in the United States versus what was reported on as causes of death in the United States. And it was basically like actual causes of death are cancer, heart disease were like the entire huge portion of the bucket. And like crime, terrorism, homicide was like this tiny little sliver. And then the reported on causes of death, it was entirely crime and terrorism. Like crime, terrorism, homicide were the entire thing. And like heart disease and cancer were this tiny sliver at the top. So it was almost like the complete inverse of reality. So even more damning than you would think. Yes,

right. Exactly. Yeah. My boys love to remind me that 150 people a year die from falling coconuts, but still statistically that's very low. But the number of people who die from shark attacks, which concerns my wife when we're going to the beach, is considerably lower than coconut deaths. So we can really feel a little more comfortable with the swim. Well, and this is a good segue to physical wealth, which you say boils down to movement, diet, and recovery. How do you think about this in your own life?

Yet again, I think about the fact that this is an area where we have been bombarded by very complex information, when the reality is that the simple, boring basics function very well for the majority of people. You can get 80, 90% of the benefit within the physical wealth domain by just doing simple, boring basics around those three pillars, movement, nutrition, and recovery. It doesn't require you spending $2 million a year to live forever. It doesn't require you investing a dramatic amount of your time. You can do the simple things and actually take action to improve your life, to fight the natural atrophy or decay curve that you are going to go through as you age. And the thing with physical wealth that is particularly important to understand is that it is a catalyst for every other type of wealth in your life. When you are healthy and feel good, when you take an action that creates an outcome in your life, you start to show up differently in all of the other areas. You show up better at work. You're more confident. Show up better in your relationships. You feel good about yourself. You start to show up better in the other things that you are engaging in or doing. So it actually serves as a catalyst to recognize that you are capable as a human being of taking an action and creating an outcome. And that has ripple effects into every other area of your life.