#294 - Sahil Bloom - The Business of Building a Content Empire That Inspires Millions

Chris Powers: I just got done recording with my good friend Sahil Bloom up in New York City, the big apple. It was a lot of fun. He is incredible and has been rising over the last three years. And so we start the conversation by talking a lot about the early days and how he grew up. He shares with us some things that he has yet to discuss publicly.

We then discuss his private equity career, what happened when Covid started, and how his life changed. And over the last three and a half years, Sahil has become one of the most prolific figures online. We talk about how he did it, but then we get into how he makes money and has turned it into a profitable business.

It was just a fascinating conversation. We talk about how Sahil balances his time, what matters to him, how he knows what to say no to and what to say yes to, and much more. So thanks for continuing to join me and enjoy the show. I've loved this company. Better pitch. They help you get your deck pitch perfect. Do you need more time between graphic designing and securing funding? For your next deal, enter a better pitch from research to design better pitch decks. 

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Hey guys, I want to update you on Fort Capital. We are still acquiring Class B industrial throughout Texas and the Sunbelt.

We're looking to buy deals between 15 and 250 million. We're looking for portfolios now. We offer industry-leading incentives, which you can see on our website, that include an additional half-a-point commission for off-market deals. One thing we found was that our historical contract-to-close ratio is 98%.

So if we're making a contract, we're getting it closed. We have a solid team to deliver an on-time smooth closing, and you can see all this at fort capital l p.com/deal-incentive. Thank you so much. 

Sahil Bloom: Man, being with you in New York City is great. I'm excited to get to do this in person. When we first connected, Nick Huber connected us.

Our mutual friend, the very controversial Mr. Huber, connected us, and I remember we talked about doing a podcast, and it was like February or something like that. And I was like, Hey, we should do it in person. You were like I'm coming to New York in the summer. That feels so far off at the time, so it's nice that it's finally here.

Chris Powers: Man, I love it up here. This place gives me a ton of energy. Been here for two days, and I've just been looking forward to it.

Sahil Bloom: You'll be gassed and ready to go home by the end, man. 

Chris Powers: Oh man, these people are nuts. 

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, it's a different level. 

Chris Powers: Dinner's Eight or nine o'clock here.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, we're doing six. You have a second dinner after that. That's great. I was joking the other day with a friend that I only do dinners now at 6:00 PM so that I can still get home with my one-year-old, put him to bed, and then get to bed in my early hours to wake up early. So it's funny, it's like I have gone out to dinner with a few people, and they've had their second dinner after the typical New York 8:39 dinner.

Chris Powers: I love it, Man. I've been going to bed at 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock. I could make a second dinner. How far is it back to Westchester? 

Sahil Bloom: Like 35 minutes, there was no traffic. So it's alright.

Chris Powers: So I admire you for moving back to Westchester because you came from where you're doing now; it probably made more sense to stay in the scene.

So I'm jumping here, but let's talk about life here and why it benefits you more. 

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. The biggest reason for the move to New York was family reasons. You know the story is we were living in California. I had gone to California for college, so my wife and I grew up in Boston.

Her high school sweethearts met. She was 14 years old, and I was 15, dating through high school and college. She moved out, and we got engaged in California. I went to Stanford, played baseball, and then took a job there. My mom was pissed when I took the job there because, like an Indian mother.

Being close to family is like really important culturally. And I took a job 3000 miles away, and she saw the writing on the wall that, like, you're just going to live in California the rest of your life. You're going to build your life there. And then covid hit, and for me, like many people, that was like the pause point of the holy shit, is this what my life will be like for the rest of it?

Or are we going to make a change? And I had a single conversation with a friend that completely changed my entire life, and he asked me how old my parents were and how many times I saw them per year. And I said my dad's 65 years old, and I see him about once a year. And he said, okay, so you'll see him 15 more times before he dies.

And I remember it being like this punch in the gut feeling, but also a call to action of, okay, then gotta make a change if you want to change the math you just heard. And so we, within 45 days, sold this new house that we had just built in California. We had moved into it, and it took a year to build; we moved into it 18 months before selling it.

And bought a new house in New York and moved across the country. And I quit my job in 45 days and did all of that. And the most significant driver of Westchester was like, neither of us were big city people. I love my peace. I like doing all my stupid shit with the cold plunge and sauna.

It's hard to have that in the city. And then the distance from there to Boston, driving-wise, like it's only 20 miles shorter if you avoid the city, but it's an hour shorter because you don't have to deal with city traffic. And so it's like a two and a half, two hours and 45-minute drive, elementary to see family. And with the little one makes a huge difference. 

Chris Powers: I love it. All right, So I've spent a lot of time watching some of your other stuff and been getting to know you and following you, but there isn't a lot on your growing up, like when you were a kid, and you've already said it once, you said My Indian mother.

How did you grow up? What influence did your parents have on you? What are the core things that came from early on that made you who you are today? 

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I haven't talked about it a lot. I'm really like a collision of two bizarre worlds.

My mother is Indian, grew up in Bangalore, India. My father is white Jewish from the Bronx in New York. And my mom came over for college when she was 18. She had yet to tell her parents she was applying. It was like the naughty youngest child who applied to school in us. I came over, and my dad was following this nerdy academic track like he would become a professor.

And so he was like marching on his path. My mom was marching on hers. They were supposed to marry; my dad was supposed to marry a nice white Jewish girl. My mom was supposed to marry a nice Indian boy, which was supposed to be their life. And fortunately for me, they crossed over by two weeks when my dad finished his Ph.D. at Princeton.

My mom was starting a master's there, and my mom was working in the library. My dad was like studying for his dissertation defense. And my mom asked him for ice cream, and they ended up going out on a date, and during those two weeks, they connected. And the rest was history in terms of their relationship.

The unfortunate thing I haven't discussed publicly is that my dad's family didn't accept it. And it was 1982, 1980, when they first met, so times were slightly different. An interracial relationship, maybe it was; it's still wild to me, but maybe slightly more controversial at the time.

And, neither family was super excited about the idea of them not falling the path. But his family, his dad, didn't accept it and told him he had to choose between my mom and his family. And he walked out the door. And to this day, I've never met my dad's father, who passed away many years ago.

I've never met his mother. He has siblings I've never met. I have first cousins. I've never met a complete separation from the family over this. And, look, there's a water under-the-bridge effect after several years that it's tough to remedy or change. I often think about whether we should go and visit his mother.

She's pretty old now. Now life is a lot different. The influence of his father isn't around anymore, necessarily. But an unfortunate thing. That caused my mom a lot of grief as well. I felt like she was why my dad broke up with his family. But what it meant for my upbringing was that I felt like my dad was the most unbelievably supportive father I could imagine.

And we weren't rich; my dad was a professor, and he is an academic. So it's not like he was a businessman making tons of money or a hedge fund guy. We were middle class, but my dad worked hard and found a way to support me in everything I was doing, both with his physical time being there and with his energy.

And to this day, I think back on that and think about it a lot in the context of the type of father I want to be. I just always knew that my dad believed in me and that he had my back, and that is just such a powerful thing as a kid, feeling like your parents have your back and believe in you.

And when they pushed me, which they did, because both of them thought my sister and I should achieve as older sisters, I always knew it came from a place of belief rather than something they wanted. Like it wasn't about, Hey, get this accolade because we want to sound impressive to our friends and brag about our kids, which many parents do these days.

It was always about we believe in you, and we believe you are capable of this thing, and we're supporting you in this thing because we know what you're capable of, and we want you to go and push yourself. And that's just such a powerful thing in hindsight. 

Chris Powers: It's enormous. I just finished reading a book by John Eldridge, and he says all little boys, all they want in life is to know they have what it takes.

And that continues into manhood. John talks about women; they want to know that they're beautiful and seen, but men, We want to know that we have what it takes, and it starts with being a father like you get a lot of that strength from your father.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. And there are just so many powerful lessons in that. We never vocalize to our fathers what we appreciate in hindsight or learned or saw them embody.

My dad worked about as hard in the lowest-leverage career path as you could choose. We will discuss business, leverage, and everything we do to create leverage in our lives. The academic track is one of the lowest time leverage things you can do because it's all about research output and research output.

There was no air, like research output was grinding into the ground to put out papers, and my dad has ground into the ground more like substantive papers than almost anyone else within his field. He's truly a leader within his field, and it's incredible to see the people he is, connected and impacted.

But that meant hundreds, tens of thousands of hardworking hours to go into it with a manageable financial reward on the backend of it. You're not even the Nobel Prize winner, and you're not making a hundred million dollars for winning the Nobel Prize. Yeah, it's an accolade and puts you in a place of esteem, but you need to get an enormous reward.

So I saw him work extremely hard on something but always find the time to be there for my sister, me, and mom. And that meant he would get home from work. He would always be home for dinner to have dinner with the family. We'd always sit down together, and if I asked him to go outside and play catch, he would play with me.

And when I was a kid, I didn't appreciate that; I was just like, oh yeah, my dad plays catch with me; now I look back, and I say, damn, he must have been so tired. After a long day thinking about complex problems and dealing with many people, he always had the energy to step up and go outside and play with me.

Cause I think about it in my own life now, I'm tired at the end of the day, and when my son, he's gone now, he's crazy, he's going around doing things, it tires me out. And so the ability to flip that switch and have energy and do those things when your kids want you to; I admire it so much in hindsight, and it cemented a great relationship that I feel carries through to this day that I have with my dad.

Chris Powers: I love it; we have that in common. My dad was a lawyer till he was 37; he was a partner at a law firm, came home, and said, I want to become a doctor. I returned to undergrad at 38 to get prerequisites, and we started medical school. I was seven, and he was 39 when he returned to medical school.

My early years from eight to 15 were a father similar to yours about an even lower leverage time. $0 for medical school for four years; he was always on call; you could tell he was tired. But he always had a window for me when I needed it, and at the time, as you said, one thing in much of is that's what dads do when their kids ask him. What does your dad teach?

Sahil Bloom: Economics was his main field of study, like economics and demography. So a lot of work around population growth and health and aging in the developing world, a lot of his work was around Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Fortunately, I traveled with him on much of that work, so I saw much of the world in those early years. That was incredible and substantive in terms of my own life.

Chris Powers: Okay. And then, what are the core tenets of an Indian mother?

Sahil Bloom: I joke about this all the time on Twitter that my Indian mother is still disappointed in me, that I didn't win a Rhode scholarship or something.

Chris Powers: You hear it often, like an Indian mother brings with it, brings with them some core things.

Sahil Bloom: There's a level of like playful harassment that comes with having an Indian mother wanting you to do more and do things, and, the culture, Indian culture is very social and family oriented.

I always think about this as a fantastic feature of Indian culture. My grandmother on my mom's side, My grandfather, her husband passed away in 2007; for 13 years following that, my grandmother did not go a single day without having someone come and call on her, check on her, spend time with her, be around her, ask her how she was doing until Covid hit when she wasn't able to because of lockdowns. No one was able to come to see her.

My grandmother aged more over the two years of Covid than she had over the 13 years leading up to that because social connection is crucial to your overall health and how your mind functions. But the culture is so influential around that social connection where in America, if someone passes away, for a month that happens, people go and show up, and they're there, and they're cooking food for the person.

They're there and supporting them, and that's great. But for 13 years, it's unbelievable; it's just hardwired and ingrained into society, and it's such a great feature. It also leads to many overbearing parents, and I don't consider my mom to be particularly overbearing, but she has very high standards. She holds my sister and me in very high regard for what she thinks we're capable of.

And so that always came across to me growing up as, oh, if I don't do this, my mom will not be impressed or disappointed or happy with me and whatever it was. My sister was also like, The golden child; she was my older sister, three and a half years older than me. And she was always the one that was like getting the best grades in school.

And so I would, inevitably, and maybe other people can relate to this, I would get to whatever grade I was starting. On the first day of school, I'd go into the class, and they'd be reading off like the attendee list. They'd mispronounce my name, but they would see they'd say, Heel Bloom, and I'd raise my hand.

And they were like, oh, are you Sonali's brother? And they would have this look of hope that this will be our star student. And inevitably, within two weeks, I would disappoint them, whatever it was. Cause I was a shithead, a little boy; I was running around playing sports with my friends and doing whatever awful stuff I wasn't supposed to do in class.

And so that was quite tough for me. During my childhood, I always felt like I was disappointing someone, which made me feel like I needed to carve my path. My mom didn't understand baseball or that sports were a path you could take into college and that these opportunities existed.

And so it was bizarre for her. She saw me getting B and B plus grades in high school and thought that I would be like a failure living on the streets, I would be under a bridge somewhere, or something like that. In her mind, that was what it was like. Sheer hopes of having a Rhode Scholar son were gone.

As it turned out, I was pretty good at baseball, and all the energy I applied led to something great. But it's been this ongoing joke in our family that I didn't get a road scholarship. And then, I didn't end up taking a job at McKinsey, and then I didn't become a doctor or a lawyer.

And now you're writing for a, what are all these things? And there are specific ways in which it has impacted decisions that I've made. When I went to raise my venture fund, I did a traditional fund rather than a rolling fund because part of it was like, I want something real and substantive that I can show my mom.

While doing my book deal, I liked a deal with Penguin Random House, which felt very official. Oh, I'm not just a Twitter writer, Mom. Like, I have a book deal from Penguin Random House. Like my grandmother knows what that is in India. It's something that I joke about.

But there are natural ways that my Indian mother has impacted how I've thought about pursuing things, and I love the officialness of it. 

Chris Powers: Is it fair to say she's proud of you now, or are there still levels to this stuff?

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, she's most proud of the type of father and husband that I am more than anything else today.

She knows that I am deeply protective of my wife and son, and in many ways, being the protector and feeling like I can step up for the people I care about is the most essential thing in my world. And financial and business success are all part of that too.

You're doing what you need to do to care for your family. If I get hit by a bus, I want to ensure that my family is cared for and that things are okay. And my mom has gotten to see me embrace these changes in my world and how I'm running at things that I'm excited about.

She gets excited about that.

Chris Powers: All right, we'll skip a little bit. So you go, play baseball, and get into pee. I want to start when Covid started was when your world changed. Walk me through the day you were like, and I will start writing on Twitter.

Or, like, the moment that maybe you didn't think anything of it. It will be a hobby for a couple of weeks, blow some time. Or was it like a conscious decision, I'm going to build something?

Sahil Bloom: No, it was not a conscious decision; I had a great thing going, to be honest. 

And to this day, I love the firm I was at; the people were fantastic. It just wasn't for me, and I didn't know how to describe that because everything I had viewed as success was about money my entire life up to that point was like, oh, I need to make this much money, and that will make me successful.

And I was doing that, and I couldn't rationalize that feeling that there had to be something more because it seemed like I was accomplishing everything I was supposed to accomplish. Covid hit; that was the first time I had had time to think about these things.

Like many people, I wasn't working the 80 to hundred-hour weeks I was before because there was no commuting or three days of travel a week. All those things had been taken away, so I had a lot of time to walk and be stuck at home, and I didn't have a social life.

And you're in your head for the first time in a long time. And what I noticed and was observing about the world at that point, that's like a common thread for me, by the way, is like I try to just be as observant as possible about the things happening. I like to carry a notebook with me; I write things down. 

And I noticed that many people needed clarification about what was happening in the world, particularly in the world of markets and finance. It was a time, if you remember, when markets were starting to rip up, But everyone was still unemployed and at home, and unemployment was through the roof.

And so I had all of these friends from my baseball days who constantly texted me like, man, what the hell is going on? I didn't understand because I was their finance friend, and it didn't matter that they didn't understand that I didn't work in markets, I had no connection to public markets, no idea what was going on, but that I was their finance friends, they were asking me.

And I realized there was just a gap in the market, if you will, for, Like layperson's terms, explanations that were digestible, accessible, et cetera, around things that were happening in the world of finance. There were plenty of talking head pundits you could listen to on Bloomberg or CNBC that would give you extensive jargon to make you feel smart and dumb.

There was plenty of that, but there wasn't a whole, and then there were plenty of tik-talkers telling you to yolo into GameStop call options on the lower end. But no one in the middle was just like, here's what's, give you the simple way of doing it, and so that was what I started doing.

The first thing I wrote was an explanation of the Fed put, like the idea that the Fed had come in and said they were a buyer at any price and why that was making the market rip upwards. And I wanted to explain that using storytelling, so I did that and wrote it on a walk; I sat down on the floor in my garage when I got home and wrote out this thing that I was going to post on Twitter.

I had 500 followers then, and I came inside and said to my wife, this is a banger; this is going viral for sure when I posted this the following day, she rolled her eyes at me. She was like, that's ridiculous, whatever, and so I'm in bed the following day, and at the time, Twitter didn't have thread functionality, so you had to comment under each one.

So I like posted the first thing that I copied and pasted in from my note, and so I posted the, whatever it was, five tweets, six tweets, and an hour goes by, and it has three or four likes, right? And she came over, and she's so you're going viral yet, king over here and like giving me shit.

And nothing had happened. And so then I was like, I wonder if there's a way to hustle this thing. I saw that Chamath had posted something tangentially related to what I'd been talking about, and I just commented under it, linking to my Thread and saying, "Oh yeah, no, to completely agree.

Like just wrote this thing, explaining it in simple terms. Chamath retweeted it and said this is good. And at the time, he wasn't as big a deal as today. Still, he was already at a few hundred thousand followers, and all of a sudden, the thing went wild, and now maybe I wouldn't consider it bananas-like, but it got a few thousand likes for the first thing that I put out, and it jumped me from 500 followers to 2000.

And at that moment, I was like, and maybe there's something to this, not as a business, but as a concept of explaining these things in simple terms. Maybe there's something to this, and that was the start of this crazy journey that's taken me on all these paths and winding roads.

Chris Powers: Okay. So you get to 2000 followers, and then you're probably like, all right, I should do this again; I'm going to post something else. How do you continue to get inspiration for your next talk? I want to stay on this journey of what happened next.

Because building the story because then we're going to spend a good chunk of how this has turned into a business, the number one comment people left on Twitter was, what does he do? And my question to you is going to be like, and I don't know if I have to go home and tell my six-year-old, Hey, I interviewed a friend of mine; this is what he does. What am I going to be able to tell him? Let's get there.

Sahil Bloom: Basically, my inspiration in the first three months was things that my former baseball friends were asking me questions about, and so it went from, like, How do I do these call option things?

And me trying to be like, man, don't do these call option things. Just buy an index fund, but then them being like, no, I want to do this. So I wrote an explainer trying to explain in simple terms what a call option was, and I just pursued that; I'm in finance, so I have credibility around this.

At least externally, people will think I have credibility around this. And I'm willing to research to ensure this stuff is correct. And then, I have a way with words that I can craft into a story that feels simple, neat, and interesting. And I will do this once or twice a week.

And I was still working my full-time job. So that was really like Saturday or Sunday. I was sitting down for a few hours and writing these things. At the time, it was research-intensive. Cause I needed to learn about these different concepts for myself. And so I was learning a lot, which was fun.

And I was spending a lot of time on it, and it was getting traction. There were, like, there were a lot of people that were sharing the different things I was putting out, I was starting to build a reputation as someone that was created around this stuff, and I was early to a market in the sense that Twitter threads weren't a thing yet.

Only a few people were doing that, so I was an early adopter of a new format. Twitter prioritized the content at the time because it kept people on the platform, and it was good for business and started to accelerate. By the end of 2020, I was probably around 75 or 1000 followers on the platform.

And that was it; It was just Twitter; I had no other platforms. I didn't have a newsletter; I didn't have anything else. And there was still no thought of this being a business. There was no idea that business would be done there. There was clear proof of concept that I had, a platform, and that was a lot of people to me at the time.

I thought I was famous. I was like, man, I've made it; when I hit 4000 followers, I called my dad, and I was like, Dad, I made it. I'm famous; this is a real thing, But at 75, I was like, oh, there's something to this. And I started thinking, okay, I can only write about personal finance concepts sometimes.

I didn't find it particularly interesting or care about it. So I started testing the boundaries of how I could expand my sphere of credibility. I started writing about mental models and a little more life stuff, like things I was just interested in that I was thinking about daily.

I started sharing about it, and that was when things hit a tipping point for me going into early 2021. 

Chris Powers: When you started, you said you reached the end of 2020 with 75,000 followers. At that point, had you also built a network of other people on Twitter that you might start learning from or, because there are things that I've learned even, I'm not near the following you have, I've 80 something thousand, but you realize that there's like groups of people that help push each other to help learn ways to do it.

Sahil Bloom: I think about when it was, probably September of 2020. I started once I had more of a platform; reaching people is much easier. And so there were people I admired, creating content I'd started to get to know a little.

And it was like, people you all know today of like Sean Puri and Nick and Austin Reef and a handful of these people building burgeoning platforms at the time Sam Par. I got invited and coordinated into this text thread of a group of people that, at the time, we called a Hundred K Club because it was all people trying to get to a hundred thousand on Twitter.

So it was like Julian Shapiro, Greg Isenberg, Sean, Sam, Austin Reaf, Nikita, Nick, like this group of people, and it was fun. It was like people became your friends because you were stuck at home; we were just like bullshitting on stuff happening on Twitter, and we would engage with each other's content to support each other.

We weren't retweeting each other's stuff to maintain our feeds' credibility. Still, we were engaging with each other's content, and everyone was putting out interesting content. So it was fantastic, and in our domains, that helped and boosted people in different directions, just supporting each other in those days.

But again, like there wasn't a business around any of this. Those guys were all running businesses, so it was part of how they made money. I was making money as a VP at this private equity fund. I was, like, part of the GP, I was doing well, like making money, and this was like this weird thing I was doing on the weekends that the partners were probably starting to look at, like, why is this guy tweeting and doing this stuff?

Chris Powers: One thing about I've followed you since the beginning. I remember Nick was like, you have to follow him. And so it's been four or five years, maybe three or four years, but you made a conscious decision early. I'm not engaging in any bullshit on Twitter. Like, I've never seen you even once.

Maybe I don't see everything you tweet, but I've never seen you break the law. You have stayed true. Was that some And I, two years ago, broke the law for about three months. I got on there, got sucked into the vortex, and fired at it. I wrote an apology tweet to all my followers and said, I'm done.

I'm not getting into politics; my apologies. Was it your conscious decision that this account is for one purpose only, and I won't get into the madness? Cause you have stuck true to it more than anybody I know.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. There are two sides to it.

One side is I don't like negativity, and I wouldn't say I like inviting negativity into my life; I don't need it there. If someone comes to my doorstep and there's an issue, I'm happy to have an issue, but I want to make sure I invite a few people to my doorstep. That having an issue is a way of thinking about it.

And You attract what you put out, so if I put out things that I think are controversial or likely to draw the ire of the masses, that's what you get back. And I've never really wanted to do that, so people constantly try to attack me on Twitter now because you have scale.

And my content is super flowery to a fault, but people decide they want to attack you for whatever reason. And I wouldn't say I like to fire back at people. And I could. Like I spent years in a locker room, I'm built for this man. I'm built to destroy people and send them to friends.

Like, here's what I would say, but I won't say it to make sure they know I still got it, but I leave all that stuff out. The other piece to it is, my general opinion is if you have a goal in mind for what you're doing, you can't have multiple goals of it, and so what I mean by that is if my goal is to impact people positively with content related to improving their lives, the health and wealth and how they live their life. I go on the platform and discuss my views on politics, social issues, and anything necessary to drive that goal forward. It's beneficial in the ecosystem of me wanting to promote my views if those are important to the world, but I need more than beneficial to my main goal, which is to impact lives positively.

And so I wonder why I would do that then, and there are constantly people that are like, Hey, you should weigh in on whatever X thing is. That is the everyday thing that people are weighing in on. And my response is always that it's separate from, it's different from what this account is and what my platform is for.

My platform is for trying to help people live healthier, wealthier lives. I'm not talking about it in public if it's not that. I talk about it in private with you all night after dinner, and when we go out, we can talk about it all we want with my friends, whoever, and I'm not afraid to share my views.

It's not; it could be more conducive to my end goal. And if it will take 50% of the people in my audience and make them feel like I'm not connected with them, then what was the point? 

Chris Powers: You're an outlier because many accounts become experts on the current thing and everything they do once they get big enough. 

And you also said something, In one way, you probably look at your account as this is me, but in another way, you can detach yourself from the account. It's the point, but there are a lot of people that need to learn what their accounts are for. I've been one who dips in and out of it.

Sahil Bloom: It's also humility. You said it, and there's a humility hereof. I don't know anything about the world. And having humility around that, have you heard the story of the blind men and the elephant?

Chris Powers: No. 

Sahil Bloom: So it's this story. Six blind men are brought to examine this elephant that comes into town. The first one touches the ear and says, oh, the elephant is like a fan. The second one touches the trunk and says, oh, the elephant is like a snake. The third one touches the tail and says the elephant's like a rope, and so on.

They each touch a part of the elephant and then determine what the elephant is like based on that. And they're all partially correct but also entirely wrong because their perspective is just this narrow viewpoint. The narrow lens that they've looked through and humility around the fact that we know so tiny around the world and that the truth that we think is the absolute truth is this tiny sliver that we've perceived the world through, that humility is essential.

So for me to come and tell other people that their perspective is wrong when it might just be governed by the fact that they have a different set of information in their world, I think, is an arrogance that I don't want to have in my life. I want to change my mind on anything at any point in time.

And we should all support that in each other much more. Rather than calling people flip-floppers who change their minds, it should be something that we want to promote in the people that are actively leading society. 

Chris Powers: So we end 2020. You got 75,000, but you said I must consider it a business.

The next question is, when did you finally wake up one day, or was it a series of conversations, or maybe you met with somebody? When did you wake up and the light bulb went off? Holy shit, I have something here. 

Sahil Bloom: So right at the end of 2020, I had invested in many startups on the side, just personal; I had made money from my PE days, and I liked startups.

Interestingly, my networks had started connecting there from Stanford and then from Twitter. And so I'd invested in a bunch of startups. A bunch of startup founders started coming to me asking, how can I grow on these platforms? Cause they saw the value in it. It was like the early days of personal brand building and the value that founders found in it.

I started consulting for a few of those startup founders, saying Hey, I can help you because I have the playbooks, I know how to make this work, I can do that. And what ended up forming as a result of that was, like, I didn't know it at the time; I just thought of it as advisory work.

But it was actually like a, an agency like a personal brand agency that started to be built that business, which was, 5k a month retainers grew to be a 50k a month thing that was pure profit because it was just me. It was some strategy work, helping them, and editing and ghostwriting on the margin.

Not ghostwriting because they were all writing this stuff, but suddenly, that opened my eyes in early 2021. Oh, there's an engine generating a bunch of cash that I still need; this is like on the weekend. I'm doing this; I haven't spent any time on it.

And that was the first time I started to think about it. Okay, there's businesses, then there's the content thing, and what does this whole ecosystem start to look like then? 

Chris Powers: And were those people saying, Hey, will you help me promote my brand as a founder? Or will you write content to help our company grow? Or both?

Sahil Bloom: No, it was like, Hey, I'm building this business; I want to grow my brand cause I see the value in driving down customer acquisition cost and the customers being investors, being employees, being actual customers, whatever it was, people started seeing the value in that. And we were in these early days where there was clear arbitrage of Twitter threads.

It was before LinkedIn. Anyone had taken notice of it, so it was Twitter. But it felt like a black box to everyone, like, how do you do this on Twitter? No one understood, and there were, at the time, at least just like obvious formulas for how to make it work, the things you should be writing about, how regularly, you know, how to make it pop in the algorithm.

All of those things. And I could help people with that. I had developed a marketable skill, as it were. And so, while I had my full-time job on the weekends, I was doing this thing that had grown to the point where it was making me as much cash comp as I was at my day job in a tiny fraction of the hours.

And that was what unlocked my eyes to this whole thing and started making me think the traditional way that creators make money is flawed or too narrow for how I would think about it as I went forward. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So you came home and said, Honey, I think I'm going to leave PE, I've played baseball, I've gone to Stanford, I've joined PE, and I'm leaving, and I'm starting, I'm getting into content.

Sahil Bloom: So, not entirely. What ended up happening was the conversation that I mentioned at the very outset, realizing that my parents wouldn't be around forever. We were going to move back to the East Coast. When that happened, I told my firm I planned to leave because we would move to the east coast.

They were interested in potentially me working remotely. I don't believe in the ability to work remotely in a job like that. I saw so much importance in being in the trenches with people daily. The value that I had early in my career, and I didn't want to be that absent manager who would fly in once every other week and think I had a relationship with people.

It didn't make sense to me, so I planned to join another investment firm in New York. And so I started going and interviewing for these things and ran into a buzzsaw of interview processes where most of the senior people at those firms could not wrap their heads around me continuing to have this public presence while working there.

And it was very narrow-minded because there'd be immense value if you opened your eyes to it. But that was their perspective, and it is ego. Like, the founder of some firm wants to avoid some junior person having a more significant presence than them, or a more prominent name, or be the alpha in the room.

These, like in finance, it's like a very alpha male. It's like gorilla culture. It's who's the alpha male? And you have to know there's one alpha male in the room. And so I had a lot of trouble when I was going and doing that. That was around April or May of 2021. And I hit a low point where I had already told my firm I was leaving.

So I was like a lame duck. And I didn't have a new thing. All of them had run, run to ground, and been dry, and I woke up one morning, and I was like having a panic attack, almost like I screwed over this good thing that I had going for me in California; I don't have a new thing.

And I was talking to my wife, and she said, like, you're making all this money on this other thing you're doing and only doing that on the weekend. What if you just did that? What does that look like? If you did that, could you work for yourself?

And honestly, I just never thought about it until she said it because I don't come from an entrepreneurial background like my dad; as I said, it is like an academic track; everything's about safe. He's a tenured professor. That's the safest track you can have. And so my whole thing was always like W2 income, safe employment, the track partner, track, whatever.

And I'd never thought about it. And so my wife said it, and I thought, oh wow, I didn't go to business school, and so my mind was, we've saved up money. We have an excellent base. I could have this be like if it works out excellent, that's my upside case; if it doesn't, it's like a two-year MBA.

I went and gave something a shot and tried to build some businesses and saw what happened, but the tipping point was her saying, maybe you should give this thing a shot that you're doing on the side. 

Chris Powers: It shouldn't be overlooked. Before we carry on that, and you already described it, was there anything else that decided to uproot our life?

We just built a house, usually for like 99% of Americans. You build a house that is like it. Was there anything else that went through your mind like, we're going to make a big decision here, and, when I think about my dad going to medical school, that wasn't like the popular thing to do.

When I think about this decision you made, and when I wrote that tweet on Twitter about my dad, I got done with breakfast, and I wrote a tweet. It was basically like, Now that I'm almost 37 years old, I realize how wild it is that my dad went from being a lawyer to a doctor, something that degree got 240,000 likes.

It was the only tweet that I ever did that went viral. But I learned in the comments that almost everybody wants to do this thing and can't do it. So was there anything else in that decision to move home besides we want to be by our parents? That gave you the courage, and maybe that was the reason, but having the courage to pull it off's a big deal.

Sahil Bloom: My controversial take is that big decisions are better made fast than slow. There is a massive tendency that we all have to say okay, big decision. I will make a piece of paper, split it into two. There are going to be pros and cons. We will write it all out and do this analytical process around it.

What happens when you do that is you usually paralyze yourself. Big decisions are challenging and complex, but your gut is usually correct, and if you trust it, you learn to trust your intuition. You made the right decision, and you knew that going in. And so I've always found that in a big decision like that, sometimes you must jump out of the plane and hope the parachute is packed tight.

And that's what we did; we just jumped out and pulled the parachute court and hoped we landed safely, and I'm so glad we did. Part of it is just like you need a change of scenery now and then. If you don't like where you're at in life, the first thing to do is change your environment, one way or another. 

If you don't like where you are and if it's like people, you need to get around different people. Change the people that you're around daily. If it's the space, physically change it. I didn't love where we were in life, what we were doing, and what the path looked like.

I wouldn't say I liked the mountain I was climbing, and I didn't like what the prize looked like at the top, so I needed to change it. 

Chris Powers: Do you think you were, not that covid was a gift from the standpoint of what had happened to America, but do you think the gift of Covid from the standpoint of it gave you time, what you said for the first time to think?

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, massively. 

Chris Powers: It was; if Covid hadn't happened, we might not be sitting here now. 

Sahil Bloom: We would not be sitting here, definitively full stop. I would still be working in my career. I would be a principal at a private equity fund, and I would be making a bunch of money, and that would be my life.

And maybe I'd have moments of happiness, but I know I wouldn't be as happy as I am today. 

Chris Powers: You wouldn't see your son as much? 

Sahil Bloom: I certainly wouldn't see my son as much, and my life would be very different. It was a terrible thing for a lot of people.

It was a fantastic thing for my wife and I and our family. 

Chris Powers: So the lesson is I'm doing this in a couple of months. I've never done it; I'm renting an Airbnb and going alone for two or three days. 

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. It's creating an experience like, and Bill Gates had this thing called the think week that he started doing, I think in the 1980s at Microsoft, where he would go and have everything shut off, no meetings for a week. He would bring a bunch of reading journals and think about the most significant picture things in his life for a week. I do it once a month, but I do it for a day.

I block out a day once a month where I can think that's awesome and completely get away from email meetings, nothing, no writing, whatever, just journal-read things I've wanted to read. And it's a perfect practice because ideating and thinking is the thing that you always need to make time in your calendar for.

We all have scheduled meetings, and we have scheduled time when we email, we have the scheduled time when we write all the like things, deep, focus, work, whatever. You never have a block of time on your calendar where you say think. And if you go through life without thinking, you end up going into a whole bunch of default stuff that you otherwise could have figured out a better way to design.

Chris Powers: Do you often come out of thinking a day with unexpected things, or is it usually just like deeper on things you were already thinking about?

Sahil Bloom: Usually, it's unexpected. I go in with guiding questions, like things I've wondered about or some great question I saw someone ask somewhere that'll be an overarching way for me to think about the day.

So recently, there's this question. Where am I hunting? Field mice instead of antelope. It's like the idea that you're doing things small, like you're hunting field mice versus the antelope, which is the big thing that matters, the thing that'll drive things forward, and it's an attractive mental model to think about across all of their areas of your life.

It's excellent professionally to figure out, okay, where am I thinking, small? Where could I be thinking bigger? Where's the higher leverage thing? It's also great to think about the stupid little things I'm spending time on personally when I could be doing the big-picture thing.

Like really being present every single night with my family, we conflate time and energy a lot in general. You think, okay, I'm spending an hour with my wife tonight, but if you're on your phone and doing email or watching tv that whole time, it wasn't worth much.

And you'd be better off spending 15 minutes where your phone's in another room, there's no TV on, and you're super present with the person. So that question was interesting. Like, where am I hunting? Field mice instead of antelope. 

Chris Powers: I love it. All right, we're back to the story. Wife gives you the thumbs up and encouragement; why don't you do this thing?

So now you're not going to take the Wall Street job, you said?

Sahil Bloom: I didn't have the Wall Street job anyway. There was nothing to take, fortunately, fair enough. 

Chris Powers: But you finally said, okay, I'm going to do this; now, what's happening?

Sahil Bloom: So we moved back to the East Coast, and I suddenly had all this time to focus on what I was doing.

What I crafted in my mind at the moment was my vision for a future ecosystem: I wanted to create this platform and this brand. It was growing then; my Newsletter was starting quickly. 

Chris Powers: Is the brand this Sahil Bloom?

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. That was Twitter then; by May 2021, it was probably 125,000 50,000 followers. No newsletter yet, and I said, okay, I'm going to create this thing, this creator ecosystem, a platform and a brand around myself. I will continue to build on that; I've been doing it on the weekends.

If I can go the whole hog into this thing and continue to expand it, there's a playbook for that. As I knew, some creators had done it in these different areas. Here's how I will approach it, I could sketch out a plan around that, and then I will build this business ecosystem in the background.

And the agency, that thing that I had created, was the initial engine around that. It was like, okay, there's this business I'm driving leads to silently via my platform. I'm not selling it. I have never once tweeted saying Hey, I offer these services. No, and people are like, do you have a marketing sheet or landing page?

I'm like, Nope, there's nothing. It's just me. If you want, send me a message. But somehow, I was driving business to it by being present, being on the platform, and doing these things. And so what I thought about was, there are going to be other ways that surface like that, that I'm going to be able to build businesses around that are going to be silent, that I'm not going to have to sell people a whole bunch of stuff.

Because what I figured in the early days was the way that creators typically make money is by selling things to their audience or by selling ad slots. So basically, it was like, If you're going to be a creator, big YouTube on any of these platforms, it's like you have sponsors that pay for stuff, and then you sell products, and so you're like, you're a big creator, and now you have t-shirts and hats and courses and all these other ways, but you're selling.

You're like, Hey, you like me? Here's this thing I offer, and you can sell many things to people. My bet was it's tough to do that for the next 30 years of your life, and very few people have ever done that in a typical career path. You have longevity built into it. Like at a W2 career path, a big corporation, or a private equity fund.

You show up every day, like reasonably good work, work hard, get promoted every year, get your two to 5% pay raise, and you're happy and can do that for 30 years. They give you your gold watch, and you retire; that's life; there is none in the creator career path.

There needs to be longevity built into any of this. Plenty of creators come for six months. They have their massive growth hack period, then they fizzle out and aren't there. And so if you're building your life around this, you could take care of your kids off of it. I just figured, man, that would scare the shit out of me if it was all based on having to sell courses to people.

I am still determining what the course would be like. I am still determining what I'm qualified to talk about to sell a course or sell t-shirts. And so I wanted to build my platform and brand, do the creative work, and dislocate that from how I was making money daily.

And have that be based on businesses generally around things that I thought were similar in profile to what I had done with this little mini agency, which was like higher ticket services, lower touch, a good client base that doesn't churn a lot that you're driving value for.

And so I just opened my mind and became observant too. What am I spending money on or seeing other people spend money on that I am qualified to do? And that was the mental model or framework that I started applying to all the different areas of what became a holding company now with ten-plus businesses.

Chris Powers: Okay. When we were texting, you said you employed the Amazon model, which is basically what you just said.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I'm not saying that in a glorious context. No, I know I'm that impressive, but what I did was, so Amazon, the example I'm relating it to, is like with AWS, they were spending all this money on servers.

And they took what was a cost center of spending tons of money on servers and turned it into a profit center with Amazon Web Services. They owned all of that, so now every startup had to pay them to do it. So something that they were spending a lot of money on turned into something they were making a lot of money on.

I wanted to employ that same model. And this is fast-forwarding, but like video is a perfect example. I was spending five $10,000 a month on video services to edit all of my stuff. Like when we go on this, we do this recording, this then gets turned into a whole bunch of clips that go out on all of my channels that drive this flywheel and growth engine for my platform.

That's not free; I can't edit videos; I need to be more proficient. If I learned how to, I could do it, but it'd be an improper use of my time because there's someone much better than that. So I was spending a bunch of money on that every month, and I was sending little referrals to maybe someone, and I was making a couple hundred bucks or something to do it.

And I realized that that's a perfect example of a business I should own. I should own a business that does that. Because then everyone that asks me, Hey, who is doing your videos, can go straight into the engine of that business, and that's silent. I do not always have to sell, saying, Hey, I own this business.

99% of people, to the point of the commenters on your Twitter, have yet to learn how I make money daily, weekly, or monthly because that's by design. It's silent like it's, I'm not selling things to my audience, but if people want to come by from me and they come in through the DMS or through wherever it is, email, I have something that can help them with whatever their need is.

Chris Powers: And the other part, my experience, made me want to know more about the business. When I think I was texting Nick or something, he is, oh, he has an agency. I was like, first went to Google, I was like, can't find anything. I was like, I couldn't find anything anywhere.

I was like, and this is a private business.

I hit the black card, this business, by accident, Seriously?

Sahil Bloom: Look, there's that like personal brand business. There's now another one that's a more formal business that I co-founded with a handful of people that does more like premium ghostwriting service at scale.

We're technically still in stealth, but we'll announce it officially, probably within the next month. But that business is already at a hundred k plus MR, already a scale business without announcing it just from people silently coming through again. And that'll be a big business.

But, like newsletter growth, there's one that we just announced already. With one announcement, we brought in 4 million of ARR interest or something in a single tweet, in a single announcement. We've got video businesses, animation businesses, web design stuff like general design services, graphics, etc.

There's like businesses built around all this. All of them are now generating over a million ARR. They're accurate scale businesses that are at because they're high ticket services and not massively labor intensive; they're all 50 plus percent net margin businesses that I can co-found never have to actually operate and own anywhere from 20 to a hundred percent of them.

Chris Powers: Okay. That's the next question. So how do these businesses spin up? Let's take the video thing, and I'm spending five to 10 grand a month on video. I should be making money off this; what do you do? You find, and you find an operator, find somebody.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I'm very fortunate that I have, and this is, as yet, unannounced as well, formally. Still, I have a close friend I've known for many years who's a seasoned agency operator who's built and scaled multiple eight-figure agencies, sold them, and was looking for his next thing.

And so we talked for a while about stuff I was working on, and we identified this big idea. My friend is the perfect operator to go and do this Kind of thing because he's able to build and scale multiple agencies with—a kind of co-ed backend, which is the authentic secret sauce of it.

If you can use the same people across multiple storefronts and multiple geographies may have different people promoting it, you can create a robust business that has a ton of leverage at scale because you have a shared backend of the same video editors or the same people that are doing the shared services.

So that's the key, like the fantastic operator whose skillset is just around operation. I partnered with a person whose skill set is around distribution, and that's mine. I can do distribution well. If we need to announce anything, if we need to amplify things, if we need to drive new leads, like, hey, we have five slots more open.

If I know how to fill those five slots, I can do that; I need to figure out how to operate this business or manage the hundreds of contractors or employees who do payroll. I have no competency around that, but if someone else is great at that and I can be great at the distribution side, that's a good marriage of skillsets.

Chris Powers: Okay, we'll talk about distribution in a second. You mentioned flywheel. How would you describe your flywheel?

Sahil Bloom: So I have sitting at the top of it what drives the entire thing, my platform and brand. And today, that's scaled meaningfully from what we talked about when I first started going all in on. 

Chris Powers: Yeah, where are we today?

Sahil Bloom: May 2021, when I went all in on it, it was 128,500 on Twitter and nothing else. Today Twitter's at about a million. Instagram, in nine months, has grown to close to 400,000. LinkedIn's close to 300,000. My Newsletter's close to 500,000, which is the most valuable piece of it because it's an owned audience.

You're not renting it from a platform. And that covers all of it. So it's two and a half million people across all of it. Or just north of 2 million across all of it. And growing at a nice compounding clip to the point where the path to 10 million is not crazy for me to envision and see.

It has to run through video. Cause Twitter, you're going to get a maximum of a million on Twitter. It's just like that's 1% of the daily active users; it's already quite a bit of penetration. 

Chris Powers: So it has to come through video, and YouTube will be the next thing and the next area for you.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I think so. I have one of the businesses I own, a YouTube production business that'll do all that, and again, it's nice for me because I get free services through all these businesses. So now my cost centers turned into profit centers, and I don't spend money on them. It saves me a ton of money every month too.

It saves me 50 grand a month or something that I don't have to pay through the businesses to you have no overhead. My chief of staff is the leading employee who allows me to sit in the clouds and do creative work.

He manages all of the people, all of the relationships, all of the different stuff on the ops, and the backend of the content stuff. And then all I have to do is the creative work of writing videos, spending time with people floating in the clouds. It's great. 

Chris Powers: And the content you write may vary from it right at once, but it fits in all the different ways.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, that speaks to the flywheel.

So the platform that sits at the top. I can create one and have it sold. I'm not selling anything, but I sold a hundred times, and that's hyperbole. It's not a hundred times, but it can be close. If I write an idea, it always starts with writing for me.

Cause that's how I think. It's what I enjoy most. So I'll write, and if something clicks, like if I can see on Twitter that it has resonance, then there'll be a newsletter piece that gets connected to it usually. Then I'll think about how this will play out best across video. And that might be in talking head-type podcast-related clips.

It might be in animations or motion graphics animations that bring it to life. But that one idea now plays out across five different formats and reaches people in different places. So like, Twitter content reaches an audience that is probably 85% male. The platform, my Instagram content, is 50-50 male and female, and it skews older.

So it's an entirely different audience brought from that higher top-of-funnel discovery platform into my Newsletter. Because that's the whole game for me, how can I drive people down the funnel to what I own, the Newsletter? 

Chris Powers: Okay, so that is the thing. 

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, the Newsletter is the one big thing because driving people to something that they're opening in their inbox that you own, if Twitter decides to shut me down or if someone decides to shut me down, they can't shut down my Newsletter.

It is essential and valuable. And then for the last piece of this content, the book deal, which the Newsletter drives the book sales, especially in the early weeks, is like the entire game around it. And so driving that newsletter list to a million plus subscribers by the time the book comes out is hugely impactful for the success of the actual book launch.

Chris Powers: Okay. To generate a bunch of content, distribute it through all the channels. Collect more users that go into the Newsletter, and then point it in anywhere you want to the Newsletter.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, exactly, and for now, that's a book, and it'll continue to be around creative work in the future because I love writing, and that's what I enjoy most.

But you can point and shoot that at anything. Many people point and shoot their Newsletter at a course or a product they sell. I'm never going to sell anything like that, people always say never, but I have no desire to sell people anything. The book will be the first thing I ask people to buy.

And to me, that's powerful, like I want to give all this stuff away for free. Alex Orey is a friend of mine; he's done a great job with this; the content he gives out is free, and Alex makes all his money on this acquisition.com thing he's building and the platform there.

And it's the PE fund he has, and that's a compelling model because then you can continue to push out content. Your content is subsidized by all the cash flow you're generating at the companies. In this instance, I'm getting free services, but also, they're making money that, within my overall ecosystem, I can reinvest free tax into growing my content ecosystem.

I can acquire subscribers from my Newsletter. I can get better design services done. I can expand how I reach people in more significant ways. I can reach more people on YouTube; whatever it is, I can continue to reinvest things as much as I want. And that drives the overall flywheel.

Chris Powers: So, did you want to write a book? Did somebody approach you? What are, when you think about the book in the ecosystem, how does that fit into the whole thing? 

Sahil Bloom: I always thought about how you can deepen your connection to a topic. So Twitter is like the most surface-level version of any content, just because of the nature of a tweet newsletter was a slightly deeper version of that where you can go a little bit deeper on an idea book in my mind was always like, when I come across the idea that I want to go deep on, that feels like it could be my life's work.

I want to write a book on it, and there was probably about a year where I was getting reached out to constantly by people, but I never had an idea that I was excited to dive into with a book. My basic premise was, if this goes poorly, if it is a total flop, I just spent two years working on something that flopped, and I want to have enjoyed writing it.

And if it goes well, it crushes it. I will have to talk about this for the next ten years. At every single party, I go to, people will ask me about it. And so I want it to be something that I care about. And so, in either path, it had to be something that mattered to me, not just some BS topic.

And so when I finally came across that, which was like summer 2022, I got excited about diving into it, and the whole book sale process in a traditional publishing context, it's pretty hilarious. You go on a road show, and it's like your company. Is it your book? And you have this proposal, and you go out and pitch it, and you have meetings with the publishers, and then they do an auction process, and one day, they all put in bids for your book, and then like, you try to jack them up as high as you can.

It's fascinating and enjoyable, especially coming from a PE mindset that I will crank them on negotiations and do all these things; it was pretty fun. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So how'd you decide who you were going to pick? 

Sahil Bloom: I will say 80% financial and then 20% fit.

I wanted a seven-figure book deal; again, that was stupid. It's always stupid to tie your definition of success to extrinsic things you can't control. We all know that it's dumb; I always write about that. We all do it like it's dangerous to tie your definition of success to something you can't control.

I needed help to control whether the market was good, whether they saw the vision of how big this could be, whether they appreciated my platform, all these things. But in my mind, I was like, I want to get a seven-figure book deal and being able to tell my mom, like, I got a seven-figure book deal, penguin, random house, whatever, like that's going to be successful the day of the auction.

As it was happening, the first round of bids came in, and they were in the I'll share numbers, I don't care. The bids were in the mid-six figures, basically in the first round of the auction. And I was like, damn, this is going to be a stretch to get anything to the seven-figure range that will make this feel like a success.

And one of them was like the high bidder, and it was at 700 or something like that. It wasn't there. And then, basically, the way the auction works, we would do a second round. That's like best and final; you have to give your best and final. So people would go; they all know it's an open auction, so they know what everyone else bid.

And then they get to see and have to do game theory in their mind. They have to push if I want to avoid getting beat by ten grand or something. And the second round, I was like, man, I resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't going to happen, and before the numbers came in, and I was like, I was bummed.

I was like walking with my wife, and I was like, I'm trying to stay positive and say that I'm excited about this, but it feels like a failure, like it feels like I missed it, and right as I'm saying that to my wife, I get a call from my agent. The next round of bids came in, and someone had top ticked a bid into the seven-figure range and meaningfully into the seven-figure, like, out of the blue, doubled their offer or something like that.

And I couldn't figure out why, and then someone else came in and beat that by another considerable margin, like completely astronaut way out of the range of what I had expected. I went from bummed to the highest hive like this is the best feeling in the world. It is amazing.

And then a day later, the success of some fabulous event wears off, and you're like, shit, now I have to write this book, and I need to sit down and plan how to do this. It was a fantastic experience, but hilarious to see how that type of thing plays out.

Chris Powers: You've thought about it a lot. How will the book fit into the overall flywheel? So once it's written, many people say, "Oh, you don't make money on a book, but it lets you make money elsewhere. You made money on the advance.

Sahil Bloom: I made money on the advance. And then, that was the US deal, and I sold it in the UK, which was another big deal.

And then international, there's probably 20 or so international deals that have been sold. It all adds up to a significant sum. At least for me, not for someone worth 150, 200 million, but for me, it's meaningful today. And it also gives them the incentive to focus on your book.

So that's the more significant thing for me. You're the most essential book in the arsenal that comes out at that point. So they're not just going to give up on it or something. They're going to want to put marketing resources behind it. They will want to push it with their channels, et cetera.

And that, that matters actually with a book. It fits in because it is the keystone piece of content you create as a writing-focused creator. At least for now, I'm a writing-first creator, so this is like the real credibility, enhancing, keystone piece of content that drives everything else.

It will drive a lot of speaking business for me, I already do some, and it'll be a massive driver of speaking business because I'll be able to talk about the content around it. That speaking stuff gets fed straight back into the overall engine around clips and things being put out.

We talked about the business before we went live here. People are making a lot of money doing speaking gigs only. I know some random people getting paid 30 to 50 grand per appearance because they're very entertaining, and they nail their shtick on stage, and they're going around and doing 30 to 40 talks a year, like just on the circuit over and over again.

I don't want to do that, but it's nice to know that you could and that you have the credibility going and do it and that a lot of that relies on having a book that was a success. This one person I'm talking about is New York Times bestselling author, and so that's like the calling card he has that he can go in had incredibly get that speaking rate as he continues to go and do it.

I find speaking fun. I like being on stage. I like interacting with people in front of people, and so I love the idea of doing more of that post the book. 

Chris Powers: Is there anything in the social media world? You said Newsletter's highest value, and Twitter's up there.

Anything that you don't like or anything coming down the pipe that's interesting that most people need to start using as a channel?

Sahil Bloom: LinkedIn is the most exciting thing in the world. 

Chris Powers: Why? 

Sahil Bloom: LinkedIn is just like a fantastic content arbitrage that still exists, giving me the same feeling as Twitter in the early days I was starting there.

That you can, you can build a big audience there very quickly. It's very positive. You're starting to see some negativity brewing more, you know what Twitter has a lot of, but it's not much because people have their job tied to their faces, which restricts how much people want to talk crap on the platform.

But Twitter or LinkedIn instead. I only recently realized that it has this massive potential as a creator platform, and it's starting to invest and put real dollars and resources behind it. And you can reach a lot of people there, and you can reach a lot of your, whatever your buying group is that you want to reach.

And so, LinkedIn is likely the easiest, lowest lift for getting started as a creator. 

Chris Powers: And all you're doing is taking the same stuff you would post on Twitter and just posting it on LinkedIn?

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. Usually. 

Chris Powers: You're not tweaking it? 

Sahil Bloom: No, I have yet to write much de novo content for LinkedIn.

It's a different audience. There's a good amount of overlap, I'm sure, but no one ever is Reading something on LinkedIn and then responding and saying I already read your post this right on Twitter. They're not; I don't, for whatever reason. 

Chris Powers: When you started, you just screenshotted tweets and just posted those in a slide show.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. That was the hack early on. It was like you could do carousel versions Of your tweets. And then LinkedIn got savvy because they didn't want people only creating content from Twitter and then bringing it over here. And so they started deprioritizing some of that to incentivize people to create actual LinkedIn content.

So I do a little more that looks like de novo content on the platform now. But LinkedIn is still the best content arbitrage opportunity for building a genuine following that matters. 

Chris Powers: All right. So you've built a HoldCo that's making a lot of cash each month. You've prioritized it to where you're not operating any of these businesses.

You get to focus in your genius zone all day; how do you think about reinvesting this cash? Is it to acquire more customers, find new platforms, or tinker with stuff? What do you think about what to do with this money? 

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I'm very much in growth mode right now.

Especially before the book launch, like I have a Big vision for how I want the book launch to go and the success of that. And for the size of my platform as I continue to go, impacting and reaching people gives me the most energy. I could be more money motivated.

If I were really money motivated, I would've stayed in private equity, and people say oh yeah, everyone says they're not money motivated. Still, seriously, my actions have played that out. I would've stayed in private equity and had a high degree of certainty of making a lot of money on the track I was on, and I didn't because I have plenty of money.

Like I have a great life. I'm super happy and don't want to screw it up by making too much more money. I have deep fears of money changing my relationship with people I love, impacting how my son is raised. All of these things worry me, so I think much more about how I can impact and reach more people with the ideas I'm putting out.

Cause I genuinely believe that the things I share are valuable to people. And I can see their impact when I tell the story of moving back to be closer to my family; I had someone reach out a few weeks ago saying that they read that they did the same, and then six months after their parent was diagnosed with cancer and died.

And the fact that they had moved back gave them six months of when they were healthy, that were all together, that they'd cherish for the rest of their life. And that was like this holy shit moment to me of things that I'm writing from my desk sitting here in New York are impacting people around the world in some meaningful way.

And if one person goes and makes that change in their life, that's influenced to me, like people talk about influencers. I've never wanted to be an influencer, but that's very real, and that's a positive influence you can create in someone's life. And so if I can continue to reinvest cash from businesses to do more of that and reach more people with what I think is a positive message, that's what I want to do.

There's a whole lot of negativity out there in general on social media. What does best is negativity because it draws people who agree and disagree with it. And we've seen people do well with this as a content strategy. Nick, a friend of ours, likes this as his content strategy.

He tweeted about HOAs or whatever drives tons of business to the different things in his ecosystem. Yeah, the little deck or the like Pappy with a Diet Coke next to it or whatever, like he's the best at that. I don't want to do that personally; it's just not what I want to do.

And more power to him for wanting to do that and being, and not letting it bother him when people get angry. If I can reach people with a positive message and stay in that, it may mean I have to grow a little slower or that I won't reach the size that I otherwise could if I were controversial.

But I'm okay with that trade-off; I want to play my own game. That's like the broader, as I say all this stuff to you, and I'm thinking about the standard, Thread here. I don't care about being the wealthiest person in the world. I don't care about being the most significant content creator in the world.

I'm not going to do any of those things. There's the concept that there's a price for anything you want to achieve. All you do is know what that price is, and you know what you want to achieve, and you have to decide if you're willing to pay that price for the thing you want to achieve.

There is a steep price for reaching the point 0.001% of any given field content, creating business, whatever it is. I'm not willing to pay that price because the price means I'm not going to get as much time with my son. I won't get as much time with my wife; my relationship might suffer.

There is a price, and I'm very eyes wide open and clear-eyed about what the price is and what the thing I want is all along the way. And so sometimes that means pulling back your expectations of what you're going to do because of the price you're willing to pay.

Chris Powers: The thing is, I talked to, I don't know if David Sra runs Founders, but he reads all these books and biographies on these World Changers, perfect example, but they all have the same in common. A lot of them build huge businesses and pay attention to everything else. They never really look at the price because, again, their God is the business, is the money.

Sahil Bloom: And that's fine, by the way. Like I am Sure. First, the world needs people like that. 

Chris Powers: I was saying, but to have the self-awareness that, like what you said, making too much money could impact how I raised my son, thinking that at your age and where you are headed is something that I would say 0.001% of people ever really think about.

And to your point, you're sharing that, and maybe now, 2% of people will think about it. I meet many people who make a lot of money and have challenging personal situations. Usually driven by money, you can grow a big ego.

As the world loves you, they're pumping you up. That's what happens, and it's enormous that you're even thinking about it.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I want to know, with all of these people, There's we read these biographies, we get all in awe of John Rockefeller.

Now I've read all these biographies, and I love these guys. I think, and girls, it's fantastic. There are incredible stories. I can learn much from them, but I don't want what they did. I have zero desire to be the world-changing CEO or the one I used to wanna be present.

I have zero desire to wanna be president. It sounds terrible to me. I can impact way more people not being president than being president. And more people need to think about that. What is the price of the thing that I'm trying to achieve? And is that a price I'm willing to pay?

And if not, what's the price of the like, the slightly lower thing that I may want to achieve? And that might be a price you're willing to pay. 

Chris Powers: All right. We got about 10 minutes left. Let's talk about what's going forward. So you've built a holding company and have tangential businesses to what you're already doing.

You have a book that will be a new funnel for making money off the book, but two, probably a wider audience. You've mentioned a few things that you still need to announce. Are you going to do any of co-founding of businesses that maybe have nothing to do with you, but maybe, I would say nothing, but we were talking about the cold plunge earlier where maybe you're like, Hey, I'll partner with a cold plunge company.

Or I'll partner with this company. Or is that something you stay away from and stick to more of the hidden businesses nobody knows about?

Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I've thought about it for sure. The question earlier on, like hunting antelope versus field mice, is the massive brain version: you create a personal private equity fund.

I am probably one of the I don't know if any other creators in the world have the background in private equity that I have and that deal-making experience that I have that would tell you what I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars if I wanted to make a hundred million dollars on something, is that I should raise some money.

At a HoldCo level or something, use it to buy a substantive business that I can impact with my platform. Maybe not today, but once I'm at 10 million or so, Kind of subscribers and followers across the ecosystem. You can meaningfully impact the trajectory of a business; what Kim Kardashian is doing with this private equity fund is one of the most genius things I could see for making a ton of money.

People hated it, but she enormously influenced the consumer business to drive business to it. Private equity funds have been telling their LPs they would create value at the companies they buy for the last 50 years that the industry has existed. Usually, it's BS; she can go and create real value on day one by just posting about whatever the company is that they go and acquire and that; I can't think of a better business model for making a lot of money than raising a bunch of money from other people that you get upside on.

And so if there were, the big brain version of this would be doing that. I don't want the price and the game I want to play. I don't know that I want to do that, but that's the big-brain version of it. There's a slightly smaller brain version of that where you do what you said, which is like things that you have connection and resonance with, and there's really like product, audience fit to be a collaborator or co-founder around it.

Cold plunges saunas. I don't know if it will ever be any of those things, but I share a lot about health, the general things I'm doing, and the routines around my life. Could I envision a world where that could happen? Yeah, probably. I've sold a lot of cold plunges for those guys.

I've sold a lot of saunas, and I don't make money on any of that. I've sold a lot of athletic greens along the way, like all of this stuff. It's things that are a part of your life that you connect with your audience around that can be impactful.

I'm taking a page out of the essentialism playbook and focusing on less but better as a mantra around my overall life, and I tend to get shiny object syndrome and jump from thing to thing very quickly. And it's so detrimental to my overall life when I do that because it takes time away from what I care about with my son and wife.

Right now, there's this question I often ask myself: What am I saying no to by saying yes to this? And it's an important question that we all need to ask ourselves more by saying yes to this new opportunity, this exciting thing, this shiny object. What are the things that I'm saying no to?

And that's again, back to that analogy, that's the price I'm going to pay for saying yes to this thing. And if the price I'm going to pay for some new opportunity, If someone says, Hey, we'll pay you a hundred million dollars to come to work 80 hours a week for us for the next five years.

I'm saying no, like faster than you can do anything. It's the easiest choice in the world to be. Cause I don't care. It doesn't matter to me; I won't work 80 hours a week. It's just I don't want to do that anymore. I did that for many years. And there was a time when I didn't want to do it anymore and didn't need a hundred million dollars. That is what I'm thinking about more and more now is like; how can I continue to do less but better? 

Chris Powers: On that note, we'll bring it home on this; the less, but the better. When you think about your business and you think about creating content, I'm just blown away every week as a man. I thought of something else to talk about.

Like, at what point do you go? Maybe it's not recycling, but are there infinite things to discuss in your brand, or will your just brand evolve as your interests change?

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, that's why my brand, that's why I don't have a lane, everyone says you should niche down, and are you the mental model's guy?

Are you the frameworks guy? Are you this guy or that guy? You're supposed to put in your Twitter bio that you're the ex, the X guy, whatever it is. I've never been that; my bio says I explore my curiosity and share what I have learned. And that means I'm just sharing things I come across on my journey.

Things that I find interesting or valuable along the way that I'm wrestling with personally. I will talk about it, and there's a never-ending list of things I'm engaging with daily and thinking about. And that's how my Newsletter gets written. What will I write about next week?

I will know what I will write about for the Wednesday newsletter that goes out on Monday. And many content creators like to go wild when I tell them that controlled people have their schedule for the next two months of precisely what they will write about.

I can't do that; It would drive me crazy if I tried to pursue it that way; in my Newsletter that goes out tomorrow morning, we're recording this on a Tuesday, Newsletter goes out Wednesday morning that came together reading an article in the sauna on Sunday night that I thought was interesting that I sat there for 20 minutes, like sweating my ass off, thinking about and made some notes while I was sitting there.

And then, Monday morning, when I sat down to do my newsletter writing, that was what I wrote about. It wasn't like some pre-planned thing. It was like, oh, this is an exciting idea. How do I think about this slightly differently? How does the world look in my view with this mindset and mind? And that's how it comes together.

And so, for me, that's a never-ending reservoir of ideas and things coming out. Do I recycle things? When I think good ideas can be said slightly differently, I draw upon that, but the ability to develop new ideas is governed by what you consume and how much you think.

How much time are you spending wrestling with those ideas and thinking daily?

Chris Powers: The most impressive part of this whole conversation is you've figured out leverage the simplicity of it. Many people listening think he's got this vast team; he doesn't even write his stuff anymore.

It's this huge, like you said, three-month calendar.

Sahil Bloom: The team is one. Yeah, it's me and then my chief of staff. Who is fantastic and has been an enormous help in my life, just like helping tackle all the ops in the backend. But there's no team; I've never used AI to write things for me.

People always ask me are you using chat get? Half of that is because I'm technologically inept and I'm just not good enough to know, like the prompts, like I tried to mess around with it, and it was so bad because I couldn't, I didn't do the prompts and I'm not going to read all the threads about how to do prompts better.

And the other half is I love writing. And so, doing AI for the writing for me would be like removing the one thing I enjoy working on daily. It's not like I'm trying to eliminate the writing for my life. I like doing that. And yeah, the team leverage is fantastic, but there needs to be a team.

Like the services are outsourced, but they're things I own now. 

Chris Powers: All right, man, I am so impressive. I'm thrilled to call your friend. I appreciate you coming today. Let's get some steak. 

Sahil Bloom: Let's get some steak.