The Cocoon of Wealth
Wealth is the Obesity of the Spirit
I. The Borrowed Dollars
Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.
Alfred Nobel
My father came to Canada with $100 borrowed.
Not from the South Korea you know now—K-pop, K-dramas, K-beauty, and the 14th-largest economy on earth. He came from South Korea of the 1960s. War-torn after the civil Korean War. A country trying to rebuild itself from rubble. A country where the path to a better life was a plane ticket to a nation cold enough to need the work ethic Koreans carry wherever they settle. First, he went to the mines of Germany, then to Toronto, then to Vancouver. The east side.
“Charlie” (my father’s nickname because his Korean name was hard to remember) was an entrepreneur with no “higher education” and no safety net. He built a chain of laundromats and dry cleaning stores. One, then two, then several.
He handled strangers' clothing and made them look new again, 7 am to 11 pm, seven days a week, year after year, for most of my life. No days off. Never sick. The only time his kids (my brothers and I) saw him was when we helped out at the laundromat after school or on weekends.
My mother was a nurse. She worked graveyard shifts. Always sleep-deprived. Which, as we know now, is a recipe for disease, a shorter healthspan, and a shorter lifespan.
My father strove for financial freedom. For the family. He came from a country town of just 1300 people. He strove with everything he had. He never fully attained it. That fact sat inside my soul the way a stone sits at the bottom of a river. Our conversations today (he’s 90 now) still hinge around making money.
I am a physician. I left clinical practice twenty-five years ago to build companies. I acquired domain names during the dot-com collapse, built businesses to eight- and nine-figure revenues, assembled a 300,000 premium domain name portfolio that a magazine once profiled under the headline "The Man Who Owns the Internet." This was not ambition. It was a son finishing what his father started, on an internet his father could not have imagined. The body inherits more than genes. It inherits unfinished sentences.
I finished the sentence. With exclamation marks (!!!), fulfilling all the dreams in my heart. I attribute this success mostly to God’s providence. And afterwards, I stood inside the resounding silence that followed to discover a question nobody had prepared me for:
What do you do when you have accomplished your dreams of wealth? What is higher than wealth? To whom do you look up when you are wealthy beyond your imagination?
At 53, an ultrasound revealed plaque in my carotid arteries. I ride a bicycle 7000 km a year with 100,000 metres of climbing (like climbing Mt Everest 9 times). I now eat with the molecular-level paranoia of a man who is on the edge of the cliff of life.
The #1 killer disease does not care about your cycling mileage. It is interested only in the endothelium, the single-cell-thick lining of your blood vessels, and whether you have been paying attention to it.
I have spent nine months establishing a reversal protocol. Aggressive dietary intervention, paired with exercise and fasting, topics that make dinner parties very uncomfortable. Three months later, my carotid plaque was gone. The ultrasound was clean. My cardiologist and doctor friends called it remarkable. Actually, the right word would be Unbelievable! I can tell that most of my doctor friends do find it unbelievable.
I call it terrifying because what the reversal proved was that I had spent years finishing my father's sentence while my own arterial walls were quietly calcifying and obstructing. I was too busy accumulating to ask what the accumulation was for.
The plaque was the visible issue. But behind it was an invisible one—a question neither my father's borrowed $100 could have purchased, nor my wealth could have answered:
What is wealth for?
I found the answer in three rooms, in three different centuries, occupied by three men who had nothing in common except the thing that was destroying them.
II. The Merchant of Death
Contentment is the only real wealth.
Alfred Nobel
On a Tuesday morning in 1888, Alfred Nobel unfolded a newspaper in his suite at the Grand Hôtel in Paris and read his own obituary. A French journalist had confused Alfred with his recently deceased brother Ludvig. The obituary’s headline called Alfred “the Merchant of Death”. Alfred had found new ways to kill people faster than ever before. He had gotten rich doing it. That was the whole story.
Nobel was 54. He held 355 patents, factories in 20 countries. He owned Bofors, the Swedish arms manufacturer. He had stabilized nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth, called the result dynamite, and within a decade had reshaped mining, construction, and warfare. His personal fortune was worth 31.5 million Swedish kronor in 1896, equivalent to $200 million USD today.
He also had no children, no lasting romantic relationship, and no home. He lived out of hotels, not as a cosmopolitan but as a man without a country. He suffered from depression so persistent it was like air. To his sister-in-law, he wrote that she lived a warm, glowing life with loved ones, while he drifted without a compass, a wreck on the sea of life.
This, from a man who could purchase anything on earth. He had no real meaning, calling or purpose.
Nobel set the newspaper down. He did not call his lawyers. He sat with it the way a patient sits with a diagnosis. And in that silence, something structural broke. Not his health. Not his mind. The wall between the life he had built and the life he wanted to mean something more than himself.
III. The Rope Behind the Bookshelves
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
In the winter of 1879, behind the bookshelves in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, Count Leo Tolstoy concealed a length of rope. He also removed his hunting rifle from his own reach. Not because he distrusted the weapon. Because he distrusted himself.
He was 51. War and Peace had remade the European novel. Anna Karenina was complete. He owned 4,000 acres, had 13 children, and possessed the kind of fame that makes further achievement feel meaningless. What he was experiencing was not depression in the clinical sense but something more dangerous: a crisis of meaning in the presence of utmost abundance.
He did not use the rope. The novelist became a philosopher. The aristocrat became an ascetic. He renounced his copyrights, tried to give away his estate, dressed as a peasant, made his own boots, and was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church. The Kingdom of God Is Within You, published when he was 65, became the foundational text of nonviolent resistance. Gandhi read it in South Africa and felt a political philosophy lock into place. Martin Luther King traced his lineage through Gandhi back to Tolstoy's study. That chain began with a man who put down a rope.
In his final years, Tolstoy decided that War and Peace and Anna Karenina were not his greatest works. He spent fifteen years compiling A Calendar of Wisdom, a day-by-day collection of the world's deepest thoughts on how to live, drawn from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, the Gospels. He called it his most important contribution to humanity and reread it daily for the last seven years of his life.
At 82, he fled his estate in the middle of the night. Died ten days later at a railway junction called Astapovo, in a stationmaster's bed, owning nothing.
IV. Christmas Eve
I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about.
Toyohiko Kagawa
Kobe, Japan. Christmas Eve, 1909.
A 21-year-old seminary student loads his belongings into a bamboo box on a hand cart. His name is Toyohiko Kagawa, and in forty-five minutes, he will walk through a doorway into a place that even the police have abandoned.
The Shinkawa district. The worst slum in Japan. Open sewers, endemic tuberculosis, and ambient violence so constant that the municipal authorities had classified the district as unrecoverable. A place you quarantined and waited to see die.
Kagawa was walking in.
He was the illegitimate son of a Cabinet minister and a concubine. Both parents died before five. Two American Presbyterian missionaries, Harry Myers and Charles Logan, had taken him in, taught him English, and shown him a faith that would cost him everything he had. He was disowned at fifteen for converting to Christianity in Meiji-era Japan, which was less a religious act than a social execution. His inheritance evaporated overnight. Those same missionaries would later send him to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied the mechanisms of poverty with the precision his contemporaries reserved for the mechanisms of profit.
On that Christmas Eve, before Princeton, before the degrees and the movements, Kagawa did something no seminary could teach. He walked into the slum and gave away everything he had. First, his clothing. Then his food. Then his money. He took in a beggar with trachoma, a bacterial infection that scars the cornea into opacity, and contracted it himself. His vision began to fail.
From that tiny room, blind in one eye and sleeping on bare floors, he built a movement. Organized the first major labour strike in Kobe's shipyards. Launched cooperatives that became the foundation of Japan's cooperative economy. Organized earthquake relief. Won universal suffrage. Founded the Japanese Federation of Labour. Wrote over 150 books. Was imprisoned. Went back to the slums. Was threatened. Kept preaching. Publicly apologized to China for Japan's occupation and was arrested again.
Arthur Miller, hearing him speak at the University of Michigan in 1935, called him a merchant of the sublime.
By 1920, Kagawa was functionally blind in one eye, lungs scarred by tuberculosis, and malnourished to the point of organ failure. He was 32 with the body of a man in his sixties. And he was more productive than he had ever been.
V. The Dissolution
I would not leave anything to a man of action as he would be tempted to give up work; on the other hand, I would like to help dreamers as they find it difficult to get on in life.
Alfred Nobel
In cellular biology, metabolic syndrome is a constellation of pathologies that emerge not from scarcity but from excess. The cell is flooded with more energy than it can process. The system starves in the presence of abundance. It does not lack fuel. It lacks the capacity to convert fuel into function.
Nobel had more fuel than any man in Europe. 355 patents. Factories on five continents. And no destination for any of it. A full tank and an empty map.
Tolstoy had fuel and he had the engine. 4,000 acres, 13 children, the most celebrated mind in Russian literature. What he did not have, what drove him to hide a rope behind the bookshelves, was any reason to keep driving.
Kagawa had a destination so clear it burned like a fixed star. He had no fuel at all. No inheritance, no health, no institutional power. And he moved faster than either of them.
In cellular biology, apoptosis is programmed cell death: a cell, having received a signal that it has become dangerous to the organism, dismantles itself. It does not explode. It folds its membranes inward, packages its contents, and delivers them to neighbouring cells. A cell that recognizes it must die so the organism can live.
Nobel read his obituary and began his apoptosis. Over eight years, he restructured everything. When he died in 1896, his will directed ninety-four percent of his fortune to five annual prizes for those who confer the greatest benefit on humankind. His family fought it viciously. It took five years before the first prizes were awarded. The five Nobel Prizes, each granting a million dollars to its winner.
And the prize he created would, 58 years later, be offered 5 times to a half-blind Japanese preacher who had given away everything he owned, and who didn't need it, because he had found a wealth the prize could not confer. Kagawa was nominated twice for Literature, three times for the Peace Prize. He never won. The institution could measure dynamite. It could measure literary technique. What it could not measure was what Kagawa was running on.
In entomology, when a caterpillar enters a cocoon, it does not improve. It dissolves. The cellular structure liquefies completely, every familiar form destroyed, and from that dissolution something emerges that bears no resemblance to what entered. The remarkable butterfly. From crawling to flying.
Nobel dissolved. 94% of everything he had, converted into a perpetual engine of human aspiration that has been running for over a century.
Tolstoy dissolved. His copyrights, his estate, his reputation. His ideas travelled from a Russian study to South Africa to Montgomery, Alabama, a chain reaction of moral force that has not yet spent itself.
Kagawa dissolved. His health, his sight, his inheritance, his safety. His cooperatives still operate. His theology still hums through churches on five continents, invisible as music, but positive as sound.
Each gave everything. Each created a wealth the visible world cannot measure, because what they gave was not to the present but to future generations, to people not yet born, to societies not yet built. A transfer of energy across the barrier of death itself.
VI. The Climb
For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.
Leo Tolstoy
I think about Kagawa on long climbs. There is a point on the mountains north of Vancouver, about an hour in, where the grade tilts past 20% and the body begins to negotiate with the mind. The legs say stop. The lungs say stop. Everything measurable says stop. And occasionally something else says keep going, and the something else is not cardiovascular fitness or glycogen reserves. It is something the power meter cannot register, and I have never been able to name it precisely, except to say that it feels like the reason I am riding.
Kagawa lived there permanently. His entire existence was the last kilometer of a climb that never ends. The optimization industry would look at his biomarkers and call him a failure. He was also more alive than anyone in the room.
I think about my father pressing the clothing of strangers, 7 days a week, for decades. I think about the borrowed $100 that became 300,000 domains. My father was building a vehicle for his children. I was building a vehicle for my health dreams. Nobel was building a vehicle for his genius. Tolstoy was building a vehicle for Russian literature. Each of us building, building, building. And Kagawa, who had no vehicle at all, who had given away even the wheels, was the one who arrived.
The question I keep returning to is the one Nobel faced in a hotel suite, Tolstoy faced behind the bookshelves, and Kagawa faced on a hand cart on Christmas Eve.
It is not how much you have accumulated. It is not whether the vehicle is strong enough, though you should maintain it with the seriousness of a man who has read his own imaging and knows what the endothelium can do when you stop paying attention.
The question is what you are willing to give, all of it, every last molecule, to the generations who will come after you.
Nobel answered with his will. Tolstoy answered with his ideas. Kagawa answered with his life.
I have a company to build and a book to write and a documentary to make with my daughter and thousands more kilometers to ride this year. And I have, somewhere in the architecture of my days, a destination I am still trying to make worthy of everything I have been given, and everything my father gave so that I could be here to give it away.
VI. What Will Profit Me?
What would it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?
Jesus
That question is over 2,000 years old. It has never been more urgent than now, in an era that has perfected the science of gaining the world and forgotten entirely what the soul requires.
The wealth that stays inside you is not wealth. It is a pathology. The wealth that pours out of you, that you release until the caterpillar has dissolved completely and something unrecognizable emerges from the cocoon: that is the only wealth that compounds across centuries.
And it does not matter how much or how little you have. Start giving it away.
If you have physical wealth, the vitality in your body, pour it into service. Show up. Carry what others cannot. Use your hands, your hours, the sheer stubborn fact of your presence to lighten the weight on someone who is breaking.
If you have financial wealth, redirect it. Not from surplus. From the center. Fund what outlasts you. Build for people you will never meet.
If you have intellectual wealth, the clarity of your mind, give it freely. Teach what you know. Write it down. Make the complex simple for those who come after you, the way Tolstoy spent fifteen years compiling wisdom for millions of people he would never see.
If you have emotional wealth, the resilience, the grit, the steadiness that holds when everything shakes, offer it to those who have none. Sit with the broken. Absorb the shock. Be the wall that does not move.
And if you have spiritual wealth, the faith that the invisible is more real than the visible, transmit it. Across generations. Across death itself. The way Kagawa transmitted it from a six-mat room in a slum the world had abandoned, blind, starving, and more alive than anyone in the room.
Nobel answered with his will. Tolstoy answered with his ideas. Kagawa answered with his life. My father answered with a borrowed $100 and 55 years of pressing the clothing of strangers so that his children could stand where he could not.
The question is not what you have. The question is what you are willing to give. And the giving will feel, against every instinct the visible world has trained into you, like the first moment you have ever been fully alive.
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The Diabetes Reversal Flywheel — Emptying the liver to live fully
Life-Changing Question
What do you do when you have accomplished your dreams of wealth?
Dr. Kevin Ham
First acquire all the five forms of wealth above with the goal of compounding it for your next generation and give it all away to them.
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