You're Addicted to Money

Here's a question I want you to ask yourself. It's about what success really means. What if getting everything you wanted was the worst thing that could ever happen to you? Now, why is this question important? Well, let me tell you a story and explain. The story starts January of 2010 and there's a 30-year-old hedge fund trader who's sitting in his boss's Manhattan office waiting to hear his annual bonus. This guy's name is Sam Poke. Now, he had gone to Columbia University and graduated when to credit Swiss and then to Bank of America. One of Wall Street's most prestigious hedge funds. He traded bonds and credit default swaps and all these complex financial instruments worth hundreds of millions dollars. And he was exactly where every finance major dreams of being. And his bonus that year was $3.6 million. And for context, that's more money than most Americans make in a lifetime and it's enough to retire and it's enough to never really work again. And his reaction, it shocked even him because his reaction was pure rage. And it wasn't because the bonus was small. It was because another trader who was in his office got an $8 million bonus. And in that moment, despite holding a check for $3.6 million, Poke felt, or he wanted more money at that moment for the exact same reason that an alcoholic needs another drink. He actually wrote a piece about this in New York Times that went viral. He said, I was addicted to money. Now, to understand how someone gets addicted to money. And I mean, literally, like neurologically addicted, we need to understand what Wall Street really is. So Wall Street isn't really about money. And I know it sounds insane, but hear me out. Wall Street is about scorekeeping and money just happens to be how they keep score. Now, every year, usually in January, there's something called bonus season. And for three months, leading up to it, the entire culture of these firms revolves around one question. What's your number going to be? And the number isn't kept private. No, it's posted internally. Everyone knows everyone else's bonus. There is a spreadsheet that circulates anonymous forums where people post their numbers and compare. It's like a public leaderboard of human worth. And your bonus determines everything, where your desk is located, closer to the boss or shoved in the corner, whether the managing directors take your calls, whether you get invited to the important dinners, whether headhunters reach out with better opportunities. So Sam describes the progression like this. And remember, he lived this. So first year, you get 30,000. You're calling your mom crying for joy, literally crying. He can't, he can finally pay off his student loans, right? He can afford a decent apartment without roommates. He takes his first real vacation. It's not a backpacking trip, but a real hotel and restaurant vacation. He feels like he's conquered the world. Now, by year three, his bonus, 170,000. And it feels good for exactly one week. And then he finds out another analyst, about 200,000, and he spends the rest of the year furious and not even just disappointed, like furious. Can't sleep. He's writing resignation letters in his head. He's fantasizing about confronting his boss now by year five, starting to get serious. He crosses into seven figures, a $1 million bonus. And you'd think this would be the promised land, right? Wrong. Because now he's comparing himself to people making $2 million, $5 million, $10 million. The guy next to him drives a Ferrari. Sam drives a BMW. The guy next to him has a house in the Hamptons. Sam rents, right? By year eight, that $3.6 million mark that would change most people's lives forever. It feels like an insult because someone else got eight, and someone else got 12, and someone else got 20. Now, this isn't greed, not in the traditional sense. Sam didn't want to buy more things. He lived in a one bedroom apartment. He didn't collect art or cars. He couldn't spend the money he already had. This was about identity. And on Wall Street, your bonus is your identity. It's the answer to the only question that matters. Are you a player or not? Now, when Sam says he was addicted to wealth, he's not being poetic. The brain patterns are identical, and wealth addiction is substance addiction. And I want to break this down because it's a little bit fascinating, but also terrifying. Researchers at Stanford and Yale have studied this. When you anticipate a financial gain, your brain releases dopamine. It's a same chemical released by cocaine and gambling and sex. But here's the kicker. The dopamine isn't released when you get the money. It's released when you anticipate getting it. And this is why bonus season is so intoxicating from November to January. Traders are just in all this anticipation. They're drowning in this dopamine. They're literally high on the possibility of their number. But just like drug addiction, you develop tolerance. So Sam's brain needed exponentially more money every single year to produce the same dopamine hit. Now, you might be saying, well, Scott, I mean, that's all fine for a Wall Street trader who's focused on comparing himself or herself to their peers and they're making multimillion dollar bonuses. But I don't think I have that same addiction. And I'm here to tell you, unfortunately, there's a really good chance that you do. So just to prove it to you, pull out your phone right now, go to your calculator app, and I want you to calculate your net worth. Just roughly, you know, assets minus debts, basically, right? Now multiply that number by 10. And look at it. And how does that feel? Is it exciting? Is it a number that you think would solve all of your problems? Now, take that same number multiplied by 100. Is it still exciting? Or does it start to feel a little bit abstract? Right? It's like, oh my goodness, how could I ever make that much money? But here's what's interesting. So studies show that regardless of your current wealth, most people believe they need exactly twice as much as what they have right now to be secure. So someone with a hundred thousand thinks they need two hundred thousand. Someone with a million thinks they need two million. Someone with 10 million thinks they need 20 million. And you know what this means? You'll never have enough. Not because you don't have enough, but because enough isn't a number. It's a decision. Sam Poke, you learned this the hard way. You, if you don't listen to this story, you could also learn this the hard way. You have to understand that what you are chasing is not a number. And until you figure out what you are actually chasing, there's no amount of money that will ever be enough. And if that's not enough proof, ask yourself a few more questions. You check your bank account, investment portfolio, or net worth daily and weekly. Do you know what your colleagues make? And do you think about it? When you hear about someone's success, do you immediately compare it to your own? Do you have a number in your head that would make you feel quote unquote safe? And has that number increased over the years? And if you've answered yes to three or more of these questions, you are exhibiting the exact same pattern. Your brain is doing the exact same thing that Sam's was. The only difference is the size of the numbers. Now think about your own life, your own progress, right? What felt like a fortune five years ago feels like nothing now. What achievement made you ecstatic? Just, you know, jumping for joy for weeks before you move the goalposts, right? What number would have solved all of your problems in college? But it wouldn't even, you know, you wouldn't even given a second thought today. You're not chasing money. You're chasing dopamine. And your tolerance is building just like Sam's did. But here's what makes wealth addiction more dangerous than drug addiction. And Sam would know because he's been arrested twice in college for drugs and alcohol. It's because society celebrates it. Think about it. If you work until 3 a.m. on cocaine, that's a problem. If you work until 3 a.m. for a deadline, that's dedication. If you can't stop thinking about your next drink, well, people will say you need help. But if you can't stop thinking about your next raise, people will say that you're driven. And if you sacrifice relationships for drugs, you're an addict. You sacrifice relationships for career. Well, you're just a high achiever. See, society rewards us for addiction to dopamine, to wealth, to progress, to quote unquote success. And that's why it's so hard to see it for what it is. See, Sam experienced physical withdrawal symptoms during bonus season. Somnia, jaw clenching, heart palpitations, his doctor called it stress, but Sam knew better. It was withdrawal. You probably have your own version, right? The Sunday night anxiety, the constant email checking, the inability to vacation without working, the physical tension when you're away from the game. It's not dedication. That's dependency. Now, here's where it gets even more personal. I want you to think about your earliest money memory. Not your first job or your first purchase, your first memory of understanding what money meant. So what's yours, right? Was it your parents fighting about bills or maybe you were wearing hand me downs while other kids had all these nice new clothes. Your parents said they couldn't afford it. Was it abundance that you had as a kid that you're terrified of losing? Was it a divorce split that basically cut everything in half? Was it a parent losing a job? So whatever that memory is, you're still running from it. So every career move, every financial decision, every goal you set, it's all in reaction to that original wound. See, I didn't really go into Sam's origin story, but he had a relationship with money and poverty and childhood terror of poverty that he learned from his dad and his dad had a very, very unhealthy relationship with money as well that passed on to Sam. Now, the thing that you have to understand is that you cannot earn your way out of trauma, but some people try and bury it in zeros and work and progress. So the number that would make you feel safe, that would remove all of your trauma, it doesn't exist because safety isn't a number. Safety is the conscious decision to stop running and that's actually what Sam ended up doing. He eventually ended up walking away from all of it, and I'll tell you the rest of Sam's story in a second, but there were three specific things that happened in Sam's life that really just cracked his worldview wide open and helped him realize that he was truly addicted to money, and they weren't all at once. But the first thing that happened in his life was in 2007, Sam and 15 other traders flew to Vegas on a private jet to celebrate bonus season. There was penthouse sweets at the wind, there was a $30,000 table at excess nightclub, champagne to cost more than most people's monthly salary and sims sitting there, you know, gray goose in hand, watching his colleagues throw hundred dollar bills around, everyone showing videos of cars they're buying and apartments are touring, and he felt nothing, just complete emptiness, like watching his life from outside his body. So he excuses himself, goes to the bathroom, has a panic attack, his heart's racing and can't breathe, he's convinced he's dying, but it wasn't his body dying, which is belief system, because if this didn't make him happy, then what would? The second time that he sort of had his worldview reevaluated was during the 2008 financial crisis, right? While the economy collapsed, Sam watched his billionaire boss as panic, not about families losing homes, but about their net worth dropping from 500 million to 400 million, and there was one point when Sam went to withdraw $7,000 cash from a bank, and the bank teller's hands were shaking as she counted the bills, and it was because there was a good chance she was going to lose her job, and she probably made about $35,000 a year, and if the bank failed, she'd lose everything, and Sam remembered that he had over a million in that account, that he was withdrawing $7,000 from, and he took out that $7,000 because he was worried that if anything happened, well, he wouldn't have access to his money for a while, so he was hoarding some walk around money while she was facing actual catastrophe, and he sat in his car for about an hour afterwards, and he had this realization that the inequality of it wasn't just about the money, he was about the fear, where she feared actual devastation, and her life being roamed, and he feared having only one million instead of two. And the last one, and the last time when he was sort of woken up to his reality was in 2009, and he was in a meeting speaking about hedge fund regulations, and everyone in the room in this meeting had agreed that they were terrible for profits, and then Sam said something that surprised even him, said, but isn't it better for the system as a whole, right? Doesn't it help protect the people? And the room went silent, and his boss stared at him like he was crazy, and that's when Sam realized, like he didn't believe in what he was doing anymore, he didn't believe in playing this game, he also realized that he was highly addicted to this game, but he didn't enjoy playing a game where winning meant everyone else really lost. Now after these three sort of eye-opening moments, Sam knew that there was something deeply wrong with his life, but knowing something's wrong and knowing what to do about it are two completely different things, so he did something that guys on Wall Street never do, he found a therapist, actually a spiritual counselor, which in that world is even more taboo than admitting any kind of weakness. Now the spiritual counselor's name was Leslie, and in their first session, she asked Sam one simple question that completely rewired his brain. What would happen if you had enough? And Sam just stared at her, the question literally didn't compute, it was like she'd asked him what color Thursday smells like, right? In his world, on Wall Street, the concept of enough doesn't exist, having enough meant you were complacent, meant you'd given up, it meant you lost the game, but Leslie pushed them, I'm serious, if you decided right now that you had enough money, enough success, enough achievement, what would happen? And Sam's answer revealed everything, well I'd have to stop, stop what? Stop running, well what are you running from? And that's what it hit him, he wasn't running towards something, he was running away from something, he was running away from his father's failures, from childhood poverty, from the fear of being powerless, but no matter how fast he ran, no matter how much money he made, that fear was always right behind him, then Leslie reframed the question in a way that really haunted Sam, what if having enough didn't mean you lost, what if it meant you'd already won? Think about that for a second, what if the game is already over and you've won? What if there's nothing left to prove? No one left to impress, no more mountains to climb? Now for most of us, that sounds like freedom, but for Sam that was terrifying, because if he'd already won, if he'd already had enough, then who was he? His entire identity was built on the chase, not the destination, and through months of these sessions, Sam uncovered the truth, he wasn't addicted to money, he was actually, it was even worse, he was addicted to the story that money told about him, every bonus was proof that he wasn't his father, every million was evidence that he'd escaped poverty and every achievement was a brick in the wall between him and his childhood fears, but what Leslie helped him understand was that there was no wall, it was high enough to keep out all these internal fears, you can't earn your way out of trauma, right? So January 2011, exactly one year after receiving that $3.6 million bonus and made him freak out, Sam Poke did something that very few people in Wall Street do, he quit, and it wasn't to start his own fund, which is I guess why people would quit when they want even more money, it wasn't to join a competitor for a better package, he walked away from finance completely, and that $3.6 million bonus that made him angry, that anger was a moment of clarity for him, he saw his addiction for what it was, and the reaction from his firm from Wall Street was predictable, right? colleagues couldn't understand why anyone would voluntarily walk away from guaranteed millions, now after leaving Wall Street in 2010, he did a few things, he spoke on addiction to people in prisons who were incarcerated, he actually taught writing to girls in the foster system, he got married, and he just threw himself into work that was genuinely fulfilling. In 2010, he started working with families in South Los Angeles, one of the poorest areas in the country where the average household income is around $13,000 a year, which was just this contrast with his former life, it couldn't have been more extreme, right? He founded a nonprofit called Grocery Ships, and it was later renamed Feast in 2013, and the idea was simple but very radical for these neighborhoods, it was to help families learn about nutrition and give them money to actually buy healthy food, because the real problem wasn't that people didn't know vegetables were healthy, the problem was that in a lot of these poor neighborhoods they couldn't afford them, or they literally couldn't find them where they lived, so Sam would run these support groups in church basements where families would meet for eight weeks, and according to his own writing, these sessions would get very emotional, because people weren't just talking about food, they were talking about their lives, their struggles, their health, and the program worked for the families involved, but Sam realized pretty quickly that helping six or eight families at a time wasn't going to solve anything, so the entire food system in poor neighborhoods is very broken even in the US even to today, so Sam started looking at food access, the way that he used to look at markets on Wall Street, analytically, systematically, and what he found made him very angry in wealthy neighborhoods, you can't walk two blocks without hitting a place selling a fifteen dollar salad, in South LA, your options are fast food or nothing, and here's the kicker, when healthy food did exist in poor neighborhoods, it usually cost more than in rich areas, so Sam had this realization that everyone was really just getting it wrong, people kept saying low income communities don't want healthy food, but that wasn't true, they actually don't prefer fast food, they prefer five dollar meals that are convenient, so if you could sell healthy food or five dollars, it would be massive demand, so eventually he started every table, and that idea became every table's model, the exact same food, same quality, different prices based on neighborhoods, so a meal that cost eight dollars in Santa Monica, cost five dollars in South LA, not charity, not different food, just prices that matched what people can actually afford, and when Sam pitched this to investors, they thought he was naive at best, you can't have different prices for the same product, the economics don't work, nobody in South LA wants quinoa bowls, whatever it was, but he proved everyone wrong, the first every table opened in South LA in 2016, and Sam said there were lines around the block from day one, not because of marketing, just word of mouth, that someone was finally selling real food at fair prices, and then something happened that nobody predicted, the South LA store became profitable almost immediately, the stores in poor neighborhoods were actually more profitable than the ones in wealthy neighborhoods, and think about that for a second, everything the business world believes about serving low income communities was backwards, and now why? Well, in Santa Monica, every table is competing with dozens of other healthy food places, in South LA, they're often the only healthy option for miles, they don't need the marketing because they're the destination, customers are incredibly loyal, they come every day, sometimes twice a day, the rent is cheaper, employees can actually afford to live nearby, the stores are busy all day, not just at lunch, so today fast forward, every table has 38 locations, they've served over 10 million meals, they've raised over 100 million dollars, and ironically the company that Sam built by doing the opposite of everything Wall Street taught him might actually end up making more money than he could have ever made in bonuses, but that's not really the point, the point is what Sam's journey teaches us about our own lives, because most of us are playing a game that we never consciously choose, most of us are on this treadmill chasing after achievement, like he was when he was still working in finance on Wall Street, we are optimizing for metrics that we've never questioned, we don't even know why we want the next raise or want more money or why we keep moving the goalpost, we are so busy running on the treadmill that we never ask where it's actually taking us, so I want you to think about it this way, and this is a framework that's incredibly useful for understanding not just Sam's transformation but your own life, imagine you could plan three completely different lives, no backup plans, but three equally valid versions of what success for you looks like, okay, so three lives, life one is your current trajectory, so where you're headed if nothing changes, for Sam on Wall Street that meant managing director by 35, making 10 to 15 million a year, starting his own fund by 40, maybe worth hundreds of millions by 60, his obituary would read successful financier made a lot of money, but when he actually mapped this out, he realized he was sprinting full speed towards a life he didn't even want, now life two is what you do if you had enough right now, not retirement, if you decided you already had enough money, enough success, enough status, what would you actually build, and for Sam this became helping families and underserved communities creating something meaningful rather than just profitable, waking up excited about Monday instead of dreading it, and then life three is your impossible life right, this is the life that you want to build if you couldn't fail and money didn't matter, what would you create, but for Sam it was revolutionizing the entire food system, making healthy food as accessible as McDonald's, eliminating food deserts across America, now when he wrote this down as a Wall Street trader with zero food experience, it would seem completely delusional, but the thing is when you put these three lives side by side, something becomes crystal clear, life one, the default path that most of us are on is usually the least interesting story right, who wants to read that obituary, he made a lot of money great so what, life two, it gives you energy just thinking about it, but life three, the impossible one is the one that makes you actually feel alive, now the tragedy is that most of us spend our entire lives building life one, well secretly dreaming about life two, and never even considering that life three might be possible, and Sam he's actually living life three, the impossible one, the Wall Street trader who's revolutionizing how America eats, but here's what's even more important, and this is something that can literally change your life if you understand it, we become what we measure, and I mean that literally, the metrics you track determine who you become, on Wall Street, Sam calculated his net worth every single day, he knew exactly what every other trader at his level made, so he could tell you bonus ranges at every major bank, he was measuring dollars, so he optimized for dollars, and he became wealthy but completely empty, now he measures family served, food deserts eliminated, communities transformed, kids eating vegetables for the first time, he makes less money, although ironically he could eventually make more, but he has incomparably more meaning in his life, and it's not just that he's happier, everything about his life is just more fulfilling, his brain literally works differently now than when he was working on Wall Street, because when you measure comparison metrics, your salary versus your peers, your house versus your neighbors, you train your brain for perpetual dissatisfaction, no matter how much you have someone has more, but when you measure for contribution metrics, problem solved, people helped, value created, you train your brain for fulfillment, there's always more good to be done, so you have to ask yourself what are you measuring, what numbers do you check, your bank balance, your Instagram followers, your square footage, or are you measuring relationships that you strengthened, people that you mentored, times when you chose meaning over money, because whatever you're measuring that's what you're becoming, so if you want to shift from life one to life two, life three, it's actually not that complicated, every Sunday night you just have to ask yourself three questions, first which life did I live this week, look at your calendar, where do your time actually go, most people discover they're spending 90% of their time on life one, 10% streaming about their life two, or three, and zero percent actually building towards them, the second question you ask yourself is what would 10% more life two or three look like next week, out of revolution just 10%, one evening doing something that matters instead of just something that pays, or one conversation about meaning instead of metrics, or one small step towards the life that you'd actually admire, because the absolute brutal truth is that you are going to die at some point, in cosmic terms your life is like a blip, you have maybe four thousand weeks total if you're lucky, so how many have you already burnt, how many are left, how many more will you waste playing a game, where the score doesn't even matter, see Sam realized at 30, what most people don't figure out until it's too late, the gap between the life that you're living and the life that you admire and the life that would actually fulfill you, it's not some huge canyon you can't cross, it's a choice that you can make right now today, and ultimately the wisest most important thing that you can take away from this podcast is that the only way to win in life is stop playing a game that you don't want to play, it doesn't serve you, and to choose a different one entirely, so the ultimate question isn't whether you should quit your job and start a food company, the question is whether you're choosing the game that you're playing consciously, or you're just playing a game that you fell into, but whether or not you're building life one, life two, or life three, you should start optimizing for the metrics that will matter at your funeral, your real life, the one that you're proud about, the one that moves you away from dopamine hits and wealth addiction and towards happiness and true fulfillment, it's there, it's waiting for you, you can go take it, you can go live it right now because you already have enough, you just have to make this decision to live the life you were actually meant to live.