The Peter Attia Drive - Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment | Bill Perkins (#237 rebroadcast)

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Bill Perkins is one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers and entrepreneurs, and the author of the bestseller, Die With Zero. In this episode, Bill unpacks the Die With Zero philosophy which challenges conventional thinking related to the balance between health, wealth, and time—the three variables important for fulfillment. Bill makes the case that we should strive for maximum net fulfillment rather than net worth (or even health). He argues that we need to optimize our life to have memorable experiences before it’s too late and that most people are over-saving and under-living. Bill also explains how one can apply the principles in Die With Zero to break out of “autopilot” and optimize their life to achieve maximum net fulfillment. We discuss: Bill’s upbringing, background, and first job on Wall Street [2:45]; A missed experience and feeling of regret that shaped Bill’s thinking [13:45]; Thinking in terms of time, and the relationship between money, time, and health [16:30]; Solving for net fulfillment and allocating your time based on the seasons of life [26:45]; How Bill thinks about risk, opportunity costs, and the difference between fear and risk tolerance [35:00]; Optimizing for fulfillment, finding purpose outside of work, and more [41:15]; Thinking about the order of experiences you want to have based on seasons of life [49:30]; Bill’s unique perspective on philanthropy and a more impactful way to give money away [54:15]; Applying the principles in ‘Die With Zero’ to maximize fulfillment [1:03:30]; How to break out of living life on autopilot [1:13:45]; When should your net worth peak? [1:17:30]; Taking calculated risks [1:21:00]; Bill shares a lesson from his incredible birthday [1:24:45]; How Bill’s philosophy has evolved since writing Die With Zero [1:33:30]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free.

If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to PeterAtiyaMD.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we want to re-broadcast my conversation with Bill Perkins from January of 2023. Bill is a successful hedge fund manager and entrepreneur and is the author of one of my favorite books, Die with Zero, getting all you can from your money and your life. Bill's book is one of a handful of books that I keep multiple copies around in my house to give to friends or family or anybody who's over and who I think would

benefit from it. This is really a conversation about how to optimize your life by investing in your experiences instead of waiting until the end of your life to do everything. We start this discussion by talking about Bill's background and his upbringing and the genesis of the philosophies in this book, something that came to Bill throughout the early part of his career. We talk about the overarching philosophy of the book, which is that we all have three important resources,

time, health, and experiences. And of course, we use money as a tool to trade off these three things. Bill makes the argument that no matter at what level of wealth you are, most people overlook the most valuable asset of all, which is time. We speak about the importance of understanding risk, including the opportunity cost of decisions that we do or don't make, the risk reward matrix, thinking about regret, and the dangers of living a life on autopilot when it comes to work and

fulfillment. Overall, I have found Bill's insights from this book and my conversations with him outside of this podcast even to be valuable in my own life. And I think they are very important for anyone regardless of age, net worth or stage of life. So without further delay, please enjoy or re-enjoy my conversation with Bill Perkins. Bill, thanks so much for coming by. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I have too. I'm really honored to be on your podcast. I don't know. A little while ago, I made a video on Instagram where I talked about three books I've read in the last 12 months that I didn't expect to A, have such an impact on how I thought about things, but also B, even though they're I've read in the last 12 months that I didn't expect to A,

have such an impact on how I thought about things, but also B, even though they're completely different books, they strike me as having kind of a unifying theme in this sort of thing about quality of life. The three books are, one of them was from strength to strength, one of them is 4,000 weeks, and the other one is Die with Zero. Now what's interesting is I know exactly who suggested I read 4,000 weeks, the other one is Die With Zero. Now what's interesting is I know exactly who

suggested I read 4,000 weeks and I'm really good friends with the author of From Strength to Strength so that's why I just read that knowing it was coming out. I still don't remember who recommended Die With Zero to me, but I remember just thinking, okay, well, cool, sounds interesting, ordered it and then just couldn't put it down. As I think I mentioned in the video, immediately made my wife read it and then immediately just went out and bought many copies of it along with many copies of the other two books. So I basically started handing them out as like a triplet copy. If someone was over and they hadn't read them, boom, they were leaving with all three copies of the book. So that speaks to why I wanted to sit down

with you and let's give people a sense of who you are. So you grew up in Jersey, right? Yeah. Grew up in Jersey city, New Jersey. You're an engineer. We have that in common, right? Yeah. Except I don't want people to be impressive as an engineer. We had a saying on the football team, these get degrees until later I found out, wait, you can't graduate with a D in engineering. You have to at least get a C. So I barely graduated. I was a super slacker.

So I don't want to be like, I'm an engineer. What position did you play? The bench. I played the bench, but I was a defensive back, cornerback at the University of Iowa. But did it pay for school? No, I was actually a walk-on. I was trying to get a scholarship. I had a partial scholarship, which means they just give you some food. I basically broke my leg at the growth plate, was pretty much a has-been before I ever was. But when you love football, you love the sport,

you never wanna let go, right? You're not like, oh, I'll just dive into my studies and pick up this hobby. You're kinda like, football is life at that age. You graduate college with a degree in engineering, maybe you're not first in your class. You decide though, you're gonna go, instead of going to grad school or something like that, you're like, I'm gonna go to New York. Is that your first job? I love that, not first in your class, you decide though, you're gonna go and, instead of going to grad school or something like that,

you're like, I'm gonna go to New York. Is that your first job? I love that, not first in my class, the understatement of the year. I was kind of like lost, didn't know what I was gonna do, really was pretty much a slacker, underachiever at the time. And my godfather calls me with one of those,

like, what are you gonna do with your life at the point? And I knew I didn't wanna go into engineering. It was kind of this cookie cutter life. You know, you don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit in it. You work on like a subsection of a chip, here's your career path, et cetera, is all kind of laid out for you.

And that was unattractive to me. It kind of seemed like death to me. And at the time I saw this movie, Wall Street, and I was like, oh, that's what I want. I want to be rich. I want to go work in stocks. So when my godfather called me, I go, I want to be a stockbroker or a stock trader. And he goes, I don't know anything about equities, but there's this firm in commodities. Mind you,

I didn't know what a commodity was that's looking for screen clerks. Go check it out. And so I got an introduction, came up with my resume. This is what you're like in late 80s, early 90s? Like 91. And takes my resume, tears it up, walks me around the floor. People are yelling and screaming and they're kind of in casual wear and it's like trading places and I'm like all this energy. And I'm like, wow, if that guy can be rich, so can I.

And so they didn't wanna hire me actually. They were looking to give the job to someone else, another friend of the firm. So I kind of hung out downstairs waiting every day calling, can I come up? Can I become a peon here? Can I become a peon? And finally, after three days, they let me become a peon.

So what did that job entail? It's checking trades and sneaking sandwiches on the floor for traders. It's like literally the worst version of the mailroom. But the system in the old days where guys would yell and scream across a pit and write their trades on a pick card and also in their trade book. They throw the pick cards into the center. There's a guy with glasses and a giant net. And all these cards would go to him. They would catch them, put them down the chuteute and they would be entered into a computer system. My job was to check the trader's log versus the computer's log. Your name becomes your trader. So if your trader was why not or S&M, that was your

name. So clerks are running around the floor going, why not S&M? Why not? And then if you're why not, you're like, why not here? I know selling five lots at 54.80, not three lots at 54.80. What do you know? And if you know the same trade, then it's a simple process to correct it in the system. And if you don't, you're like, no, no, I definitely know only three lots.

Then you go to the traders immediately and they kind of reconcile it. And that was the system, like running around all day, checking trades. This job is down on Wall Street, this firm's on Wall Street. Yeah. Back when the World Trade Center was there, this was in four World Trade Center. How much were you learning the business? Because I imagine one could take a job like that and not actually learn what's happening, what the machine is doing.

Yeah. That's when I decided to turn it on. I always tell people like hey, I was pretty much a Can I say fuck up? I was pretty much the fuck up a fuck ups for giving what I had before college But then I decided to turn it on that poverty that being a peon and that desire to make it Forced me to be like I'm gonna learn every single thing there is about this business I was reading books at night about trading, about the oil business, about options, about whatever. I was a sponge and I really turned it on and said, I'm going to be diligent.

I'm not going to mess around and as much as I possibly can as a 20 year old, right. And really, really trying to make myself invaluable no matter where I was. So where were you living at the time? What part of the city? Did you actually live in Manhattan? When I first got there, I had to live at home with my mom, which was completely cramping my style. And so I started driving a limo at night, the company limo at night to make ends meet.

What were you getting paid in that first job? Oh geez. I think it was sub $16,000 a year. I have to go look. Sub 16. Yeah. I think it was like 16, 16,000. But I was getting raises very quickly

because I made myself valuable and I would work at night and I would make more money driving the limo on a daily basis because traders would like take me here and they'd be drunk and they'd tip you and you weren't there necessarily for your current income, you were there for your future income. And so I had another clerk named Jason Ruffo who had a studio in the Upper West Side. And what he did was he put up a wall by the kitchen and kind of made this small room in

the studio. And I eventually got an apartment with him on the West Upper West Side living in like a pizza oven type space. But it was great because I was in New York City out of my mom's house. I could have girls over and that pride that goes, well, I live on the Upper West Side. Everybody wants to say, they live in New York City. And so as I was getting raises and kind of moving up, I gradually got into that life of what I call a buppy, black urban professional, buppies and yuppies. And that was the beginning of my journey.

Tom, was your dad in the picture at this time? So my dad is now older in poor health in Jersey City. So during this time, he'd had multiple strokes. My dad is kind of like me. He's fairly stubborn, but he was stubborn to the extreme. Doctor says, don't do this. All the things you would tell him not to do and you need to be doing, he's like, ah, to hell with that, you know what I mean? I guess. And so he's in the picture.

My parents are divorced. He's in Jersey City. Had your parents gone to college? My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University of Iowa. He was a real badass. He had no intentions of going to school. He walked by a football field

when he was a kid in high school. he's like, I wanna do that. Coach is like, you don't know anything about football and he says, it seems like it's about hitting people, I know how to hit people. So they give him some raggedy uniforms. He comes out for a practice and in the next practice he has a brand new uniform. He's all everything, gets recruited

to go to University of Iowa to go to college. And so there he is in college in 1959 at the University of Iowa, all to college. And so there he is in college in 1959 at the University of Iowa, all bad ass from Jersey City. So he had gone to college and then my mom went to college, finished college while I think it was like preteen or late teens, but I had the benefit of two college educated parents. And how much were they understanding your hunger, your drive, your aspirations in this new role? I mean, because presumably they had seen you in high school and college, not achieving

it your potential and now all of a sudden you're hustling, you're working two jobs, you're reading, you're learning, you're doing everything. Were they purviewed to that sort of metamorphosis in you? They saw it later. I'm the kid that didn't take out the garbage. I always say, don't tell your parents your dreams because they'll just piss on them. Because they seen you at your worst,

at your failures, as you're growing. They have this kind of image of you when you were the caterpillar, not the butterfly. So you weren't necessarily like advertising to them, this is what I want to do. No, you know, they started seeing it. I remember the time when I finally made, I got a raise and I was like, I did the calculation.

Just like, holy shit, I make more money than my mom. Like I've made it. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'm like, I'm real. I'm legit. I'm a puppy. Me with my badge, you know, I used to wear around as a badge of honor. Like I get onto the New York Mercantile Exchange, et cetera. But they'd see I'm going out or I'm flying here or I'm doing whatever. And it's like, oh oh the kid must be doing okay It wasn't until I got recruited to go to Houston started buying the assets that adults start buying and

I paid my mom back for something that I did when I was a teenager that she didn't know that they're like, okay What was that when I was younger? I had a stick Toyota that my mom had. It was her car. I was driving it. And my friend, Pete Thible, was like, I want to drive the car. I want to teach him how to drive the car. I want to drive the car. I'm not supposed to let him drive the car.

So anyway, long story short, he hits the gas instead of the clutch, spins the car out, the back of it spins around, hits a telephone pole. Trunk pops up and has this big giant dent. I and like, holy shit, what am I going to do? You know? So I tell my mom the story that we went to go get pizza and parked it and then truck must've hit it on the side or bumped it and went on. And that was my lie to my mom about this car that I felt guilty about. I said, one day I'm going to pay for this car in spades.

That happened to my mom. And so one day I gave my mom forty thousand dollars. And I said, Mom, at that time, the car had that brown mark on it. We told you it was a truck. Well, this is what really happened. How did she react to that? She started laughing. She says, I knew something was strange about that.

You know, the story fit, but there was something strange about that. You know, she just kind of laughed and was thankful that won. It was a great investment having that car beat up, but she just kind of laughed and we just reminisced about it. Let's go back to when you're on the Upper West Side. You write about this in the book. You and your roommate kind of had a slightly different, I don't know, call it a point of view on future earnings and what that allowed you to do with your time. You told a story about something you did that seemed kind of bold.

That he did that was kind of bold. You're talking about when Jason took the trip. Yeah. So Jason, I don't know if our views were very thought out or just wired in, but like I was head down, like I gotta make it, I gotta become a trader, I gotta have my head down. I'm saving money, I'm really make it, I got to become a trader, I got to have my head down. I'm saving money.

I'm really at this point in my life, super diligent, trying to convince my boss to get on the bus program to save money, writing down every single nickel that I bought, et cetera. I'm really focused on my career trajectory. And Jason is like- Does Jason work in the same firm? He works at another firm. If you look at the old pictures, all the phone booths are right next to each other.

He's like right next to me, even though he's not at the same firm, we're all crowded into one area. And Jason's like, I'm gonna go backpacking for you for a couple months. I'm like, what? How are you gonna do that? Well, I'm gonna borrow money from this guy who was a loan shark. And I'm like, wait, what? You're gonna borrow money from this guy? And you're going to borrow money from this guy and you're going to go backpacking in Europe. I'm like, this is insane. This is insanity. My head is about to explode. I'm like, you're going to miss out and what if they hire another screen clerk and your job's not there when you come back? And how are

you going to pay this guy back if you don't pay him back? This is not like, oh, penalties and interest. This is like knees and ankles. And so I just didn't get it. That experience, you know, I wasn't thinking about like die with zero and certain experiences belong in a certain period of your life, etc. I was just ultimately on this autopilot of trying to be successful and make money at that time in my life. And Jason was like, I'm going backpacking. So he went, I stayed, he came back, had a screen clerking job. Different firm or same firm? Same firm. Wasn't that much noticeable different. Like I moved up a little bit, but it wasn't noticeable different.

But he came back richer, right? He came back with stories and experiences and romance and lifelong friends. You know, in the beginning I was kind of like, oh wow, maybe I missed out. Maybe I could have jumped in for a week, you know, that the beginning I was kind of, oh wow, maybe I missed out, maybe I could have jumped in for a week, you know, that type of thing. And as time went on,

I really, really regretted not joining them on that trip. When it finally came time where like, I'm gonna go Europe, I'm gonna go have this backpacking experience, I was too bougie. I had money, I wasn't gonna go stay at youth hostels, I wasn't gonna capture these trains, I was gonna have an experience, but a different experience.

The type of experience he had was for that time in your life and a type of experience, even though it was wonderful, it was not as rich as his experience because the time had passed me by. It's one of my big, big, big regrets in life. So how did you start to formulate this understanding about these different types of resources, be it time, be it money, which is the resource I think a lot of people think about, experiences themselves as, for lack of a better word, an asset or a thing, the actual experience, the people you're meeting, all of these different things.

When did you start to coalesce around some of the ideas that ultimately, of course, would go on to become the thesis of this book? It was slowly over time. Even when I got to the exchange, I was in this hurry to get rich. The reason why I was in a hurry because I had this bias, I had this belief, I was like, yeah, there's rich guys here, but they're old. What can they possibly do with the money? I'm young, I'm 21. I'm ageist. I can't imagine the use of a million dollars when you're 40. What are you going to do? Buy a nicer car to drive your kids around? It just seems like Like I'm ageist, I can't imagine the use of a million dollars when you're 40, right? Like what are you gonna do, buy a nice car

to drive your kids around? It just seems like loss on them. They don't get to do fun things. Now I was wrong about that, but I was right about the utility of money over time. And I was also read this book at this time called Your Money or Your Life. That kinda transformed my understanding of what money is.

It's a very detailed book that has these exercises that has you look at how you spend your hours from going to work, getting ready for work, the things you spend on work, and really figuring out what your true hourly wage is. After tax, this is what an hour of your life is worth. And then it has you not think of everything in money, but in time. So instead of going to the movies and say it cost me $10, it's like that cost me one hour and 15 minutes of my time to go to this movie to buy this shirt. It cost me three hours of my time. And so you get this idea that I'm exchanging my life for certain things. The experience of buying

a shirt, going to the movie, going on a trip. And that hit me hard. And where were you at this point? This is before you went to Houston? This is before I went to Houston. That hit me hard. And that's what really turned me into like, I'm going to save. The two things I got out of this, I want a lot of money and I'm going to become this very frugal person. There's this movement called called Fire, which that book is kind of like the Bible, the precursor to the fire movement, which is financial independence, retire early. And I was kind of like an early fire guy.

I'm gonna save my way to riches, right? I'm gonna save and then retire early. And sorry, did you know what you wanted to do when you retired? I went on to another autopilot. I went on another version of autopilot. I read a book, I got these concepts out of it. And I was like, this is what I'm gonna do.

I didn't think about the big picture of everything. But certain concepts were coming to me. I exchange hours of my life for money, and then that money is used for the things I want. Let's take the abstract of money out of it and look at what hours of my life are being exchanged for. That was a great concept for it to sink in very viscerally. The idea that.

It's also just to double click on that bill. It's also visceral when you start to think of the difference between using money for activities or trips versus things. So I buy a shirt and this shirt basically works out to three hours of what I make per hour. So this a three-hour shirt. Conversely, I take my daughter out overnight. We do a daddy-daughter date night, go out to dinner, stay at a nice hotel, have a fancy breakfast the next day.

That's five hours of my time in terms of work. Do you see those differently at the time that one of those is like an experience and one of them is a thing. Not in a way that you're properly analyzing it, but in more of an intuitive way. Because when you start to think about things in time, it's like, wait a minute, three hours for a shirt

versus going here, having a sandwich and hanging out with my friends or whatever it is, your values start to, you really get in touch with your values because it's not an abstract land. It's like when you're in a casino and they give you chips, it's one of the greatest things to do is give you chips. It's not money, you're tipping $25,

you're throwing, let it all ride because it's so abstracted from money. So it's an abstraction on an abstraction. By removing that abstraction, you get closer to your values. Right, imagine that you have $25 chips, you figure out your hourly after tax, all in wages, 25 an hour, every time you flick a chip,

that's like, I gave an hour of my life. Right. Boom, boom, boom. So when you start thinking about things in terms of hours of your life, and you have finite hours, you start to really get closer to your values. You can still be on autopilot, but you're closer. And so things like this were happening.

And at that time, at the exchange, like most people, I had like, what is it all for? What do I want? I'm here to get rich, but why? Are you having that discussion with other, either people who are your peers, who are presumably on the same treadmill, or the people who are already rich, but still presumably killing themselves, trading their health for wealth. No, I'm generally having it with myself and reading books, but I'm still asking myself, but why? Like, what do I want?

You know, and I'm remembering conversations that maybe I've had throughout my life. There was a college football player named Dwight Sistrunk, and I was like trying to do engineering, and we were debating something. He's like, listen, you might want to pick a fence and a wife and something like that, and that life. I don't want that life. I don't want that cookie cutter life. That's fine

for you, but that's not my path. I thought about it and I was like, do I really want that? Certain things that he said that he didn't want that I was actually working for, thinking that this was my path, I actually realized, no, I don't want that. I'm pretty hardheaded. It takes a while for these things to seep in. I would argue a little different, Bill. I would argue that at this point, you're 22, 23, 24. I think that's remarkably early to be having that thought, don't you? Yeah. I guess it took a while for it to finally percolate into some sort of action plan.

I'm thinking about these things, but they're not resulting in the proper behavior changes yet. I'm still formulating it. You know, everyone says, I want to be rich before I'm 30, or I'm rich before 40. No one's out there saying, I want to be rich before I'm 86. So intuitively in there, there's something about the utility of money

that it's not as valuable to you later on in life. Yeah, it's one of the games I often play with my patients. It's anybody, I could play this game with anybody, which is, listen, if right now, you always do this with someone who's younger, obviously. I say like right now, would you trade places with Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger? And they're like, everybody says, of course not. And I was like, what do you mean, of course not? Like Warren Buffett's worth $100 billion.

How would you not trade places with him? And they're like, I mean, he's 90 years old or whatever, and I say, okay, so would you rather have not a penny to your name and be 20 or have a hundred billion dollars and be 90? No other difference, right? I'm not going to stipulate anything else. I've never met a person who wouldn't take being a completely broke 20-year-old. And that, I think, speaks less to health because look, ostensibly Warren still appears somewhat healthy, right? He's cognitively intact. You know, it's not like he's like a frail 90 year old or whatever he is. But it's about

runway. It's about Yeah, but maybe Warren might have 10 years of life left that 20 year old could have 80 years of life left. And so when you face it in such stark terms, only then I think does the average person start to realize how precious time is. I think they also see that Warren can't sprint, dunk a basketball, go wakeboarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that they enjoy, and that's what I thought about.

And I thought to myself, if for reading this book, like I'm spending hours of my life to acquire these experiences, I mean experiences in a broader sense, whether it's like going on a walk or being able to choose to go on a walk or go get a sandwich or buy a shirt or whatever. If I am exchanging hours in my life and I don't go acquire these experiences, I pretty much wasted hours of my life. So that thought hits and it's like, okay, you don't want to leave anything on the table. In the game of life, when I die, you don't want to leave chips on the table, right?

Like you want to use all your resources before you die. Inherent in that is like your choices, your experiences, those experiences are what make you you. Those are the things that fulfill you and everybody's going to be different. And so consequently having more of it and enjoying more of it will lead to a more fulfilling life. So that if I'm solving for fulfillment, I don't care about the money, I care about the things I want, the experiences I want to have. If I'm trying to solve for that, one of the things you come quickly to is that you need to use all your resources

up before you die. The second thing you come through with the fact that your resources, particularly money, are less valuable to you when you're older, then you start to think, well, there must be a curve. Because if you're gonna end at zero, is it this kind of rectangle shape that just goes down? Is it a 45-degree angle of slope? Or is there some sort of curve?

And so what I like to do to understand certain things that doesn't always work is think of zero and think of infinity. All right, let's run it all the way back to one. When you're as old, how useful is money? Not that useful to you. Let's run it all the way forward to 96 on your deathbed. How useful is money to you?

Not that useful. So clearly there's like some sort of ramp up of utility and then a decline of utility. And I became obsessed with finding what that curve was. Because I was like, this is it. If you're making more money for delayed gratification later in life, you approach infinity, you're actually wasting your time.

You should be spending down your assets at a certain point. There's an inflection point where not a number, but a date where your wealth should be going down in order to get the most fulfillment. Now let's pause for a second, Bill. Is that standard thinking slash teaching within the wealth management community? No, but it is a standard problem. If you look at JP Morgan or other wealth managers, one of the biggest problems they have is is accumulation, getting people to spend down their assets. They've been saving, they got their money, they hit retirement and it's like their net worth is going up into their 70s. When's the party?

That's why I always ask them, you just tell me when the party is. I have conversations with older people or other people and it's like, listen, it's okay that you're saving. What are you saving for? And when's the party? I just want to know when you're going to use up all your resources. Let's also pivot and talk about, I remember one of the stats that always stuck with me was during 2008. A really good friend of mine named Jim Lambrite, who was at the time the president of the Ex-Im Bank. When the TARP program kicked on, because he was close with Hank Paulson and had already spent so much time in China and had government clearance. Basically, Hank brought Jim Lambrite and Neil Kashkari who was with him already at the treasury, I believe, to run TARP. So basically, Jim and Neil are doing all the deals

for TARP and Jim is getting steeped in how bad is this going to be? What is this going to mean for the average person? I remember one day he called me with a stat that I couldn't believe, and I forget the stat, so this is only directionally it, but it was what fraction of people in the United States could not produce $1,000 with three days notice, meaning they didn't have that excess liquidity of $1,000. Again, I don't remember the number, but it was in the ballpark of 30%. It was a high number. I don't know what those stats are today. I've tried to look some of them up and they're not maybe quite as dire as that,

but they're not that much better. No, they're not great. It's not great. So what's the natural history of that person who's 40 years old, whose total net worth is $50,000, and their available liquidity is $1,000. They're thinking I'm going to work till I'm 65 or 70 or whatever, and then I'm going to collect my social security. Does this thinking still apply there? It applies in different ways. What I've come up with this book is there's three variables, your wealth, your health, and your time. And we're taking those three variables and we're solving for net fulfillment. So we're not solving for maximum wealth. We're not solving even for maximum health. There's maximum time. We're solving for net fulfillment.

I'm saying that's your purpose. If you're with me, we're solving for net fulfillment. I'm saying that's your purpose. If you're with me, we're solving for net fulfillment. And so one of the things we look is that the total arc of your life, given the resources you have, how do we allocate them? We definitely wanna focus on the money. Everybody wants to talk about the money and the resources, but there's decisions that you make even without money. Whether you go on a walk with your daughters,

you play cards with your friends late at night. Do you tuck them in at night, or do you go hang out with the boys? And so in the book, we talk about the seasons of your life, certain activities transfer nicely to the next season in your life, from 20 to 30, to 30, to 40. And some of them don't transfer well,

they're less enjoyable. And some of them don't transfer at all. It's impossible. One of the things when the 40-year-old who has $50,000, one of the things I would say is, what's your survival number? Have you calculated that at retirement? Are you surviving retirement or are you in serious negative dire straits?

And once we've calculated that, okay, I need to work and save this much and plus social security, I've had my survival number. Now the rest is for experiences, things I want to do and allocation of my time. How do I allocate it? Is it the cruise at 70 or is it the ski trip right now? And that's going to be different for every single person or is it a shirt or whatever fulfills them or to go play in this chess tournament, pay the entry fee. And for people with zero money, you still have an allocation

game to play. You still have your health and your time. You can still decide, hey, I'm going to sit down and watch friends or I'm going to go hang out at my mom's house and make a meal and spend time with them because I'm only going to see them 20 times before they're gone. So this type of thinking about allocating your resources at the proper place, getting off autopilot, holds at all wealth levels. It doesn't hold at all health levels because if you have zero health, you have zero.

You're done, it's over. But it holds at all wealth levels. So that type of thinking to maximize fulfillment and knowing that you have seasons of your life, that your body decays, your attitudes change and they pass, that type of thinking and that I need to get things in the right order and use my resources properly, that's going to help you have a more fulfilling life whether you have zero money or a hundred million dollars. There are many people with zero who are having a way more fulfilling life

than Warren Buffett, I would say. One of the things about the way you framed it, Bill, that I really like, it's a very nonlinear problem. So let's look at those three variables. At the surface, one might suggest, well, wait a minute, it is a min-max game with one of them. You always want max health. But technically, even that's not true because if I told you,

Bill, I have the secret for you to have max health. I can preserve your healthspan and lifespan indefinitely, but here's what it's going to cost you. Every minute of the day, you have to be working on your health. So from the moment you wake up from sleep, you have to do a two-hour meditation. We then have to go a two hour meditation. We then have to go and do this yoga. We then have to go and do this workout. When you're done that workout, you have to go and do this and then you have to go to bed. You'd be like, well, Peter, that sucks because yeah, I'm going to live for a hundred more years and I don't get to spend any of that time doing anything other than improving my health. It's a glib example, but it factors,

I think. It illustrates the point. I usually say, you know, there's no amount of money you can pay me to do 10 years in Sing Sing. Not at this age. There's no amount of money. You know, I say that to certain people who are just like always delaying gratification. I'm like, you're kind of in a jail. Like you're basically doing a version of I'm doing time. Maybe you shouldn't be doing time at this point in your life. And so these are kind of just ways, people absorb information in different ways. You can say it in all kinds of different ways

and then they finally go, aha, I got it. That really spoke to me the way you said it. I try and hit people with different versions of this. One of the things I like to say to people is life is like Tetris. You gotta get the order right in order to get the high score of net fulfillment. Let's say you're in heaven. By the way, Tetris is the only video game I enjoy. I go through periods where I won't play it for a year and then I go through periods where I'll waste 30 minutes a day,

which is a lot of time for me. For me, 30 minutes in a day is an inordinate amount of time. A lot of time. For me, 30 minutes in a day is an inordinate amount of time. And when I'm sometimes in those phases of playing it a lot, I dream in Tetris. I literally dream that everything I'm seeing in the world, I'm trying to optimize the shape and interaction of. In the book, I talk about this thing about time buckets, basically that you take your life in segments, any kind of segment you want, 20 to 25, 25 35 to 40 50 to 60 You think about leisure job career

What experience you want to have in each of those periods and as you're doing that you realize that? Wait a minute the going to the clubs and strip clubs and hanging out Probably should be before I get married not after the reading books to my kids when they're children This must be in this bucket right because they're not gonna want me reading to them in college. Exactly, or even when they're 13, 14, they don't even wanna know you. That's one of the errors I made, you always do it wrong as a parent. You don't wanna spend too much time with them, et cetera.

It's like, wait a minute, maybe I should have been doing this activity instead of that activity. Kind of the die with zero thinking, right? Optimize your life. The thought experiment, I says, listen, you're up in heaven, you have the bucket of experiences.

These are all the choices you can have. And God says, take as much as you want. You're thrown in and you're like, I want to have sex 30,000 times and I want to climb Kilimanjaro and I want to play hockey. I want to be in a high school team and I want to do, you know, you're just throwing them in everything. I want to meditate and yoga, right? And then God goes, great, I'm going to let you have all those experiences.

But there's one trick, you got to get the order right. And what's it saying is, is if you don't get the order right, like if you save certain experiences to the 80 to 86 bucket, you don't get it. Yeah. You're not climbing Kilimanjaro at 80. Yeah. If you're like nightclub and road trips with your buddies before you're married and you have two kids or whatever, you don't get that. If you don't go backpacking with your friend and youth hostels, et cetera, when you're 21, when you get the shot, you don't get that experience. Or it's a bastardized, not as fulfilling experience, so you don't get the net fulfillment points. And so it's kind of tied with zero.

What do you want out of your life? Get off autopilot. What do you want out of life? What resources do you have? And how do we optimize? How do we get the most out of it? How do you think about your own risk tolerance? Now, I guess there's maybe a caveat the listener needs to understand at this point, which is what you do for a living today. You are

an energy trader among other things, you do many things, but is it safe to say that the majority of the wealth you've created came through your ability to understand how natural gas moves and trade on that? Yeah. The majority of my wealth came from predicting the future. That's generally the future of natural gas prices. John Arnold, who is one of your closest colleagues, someone who I've had on the podcast, nicknamed the king of gas, the greatest gas trader of all time. Do you look at a guy like John and say he has a high risk tolerance? Do you look at someone like yourself and say you have a high risk tolerance or do you not feel that way at all and feel like, nope, I'm completely in control of calculated risks and that's why they net out to be positive? In other words,

I'm less swayed by short-term volatility because my methodology doesn't feel like I'm gambling. The best traders I've seen have been pretty stoic about things. They think very robotically about expected outcome and they don't seem to be disturbed about negative outcomes as much as the average person. Tell folks what expected outcomes mean because they want to understand the probabilities and how these work. If you place a bet and the payout is one in four, but the odds are 50-50, half the time you're going to get four times your money and half the time you're just going to lose

one time your money. So that's positive expected outcome, right? You're going to make money. This is a great trade. But remember, 75% of the time you're going to lose in this scenario. No, the payout, half the time you're going to lose. Half the time you're going to lose, the payout's one in four. So half the time you're gonna lose, half the time you're gonna lose, the payout's one and four. So half the time you're pissed, you're upset.

And a lot of people can't deal with that. They need four or five or seven positive events, emotionally, psychologically, forever, every negative event. In trading, that just doesn't exist. Yeah, in trading, if someone is right half the time. They're pretty good. If they're right 55%, 60% of the time. They're right. Think about the casino's edge in Blackjack.

It could be 51. Yeah, 0.07 or 0.09 in Blackjack. In Craps it's like 0.03. They're wrong a lot of the time. But ultimately the law of large numbers, they make a bunch of money. But if your emotional calculus is different, where such that you need a greater being right ratio, then you're not going to make it because stress clouds your thinking and your judgment. So with that said, if someone says to you, you just have a really high tolerance for risk, I don't. I'm very risk adverse. I don't like to take big risk. I never wanna have the chance of losing something.

Loss aversion is a greater motivator for me than gain. How do you talk to that person and how do you help them think through the difference between fear and risk tolerance? Well, the first thing I do is just try and break down like what are they actually afraid of? A lot of times when people say, you know, the bad thing is not as bad

as they imagine it in their head. And a lot of times when people say the bad thing is not as bad as they imagine it in their head. And a lot of times quite frankly it's really the fear of judgment more than the actual thing. They find out that they can survive the potential negative financial hit. What they can't survive is, oh my friends, my colleagues, my spouse, my mom, my dad, the shame, I got it wrong, the I told you sos, etc. There's a lot of that fear baked into, disguised as, I can't risk these dollars. I'm like, yeah, you can, that type of thing. Then the other thing is I'm trying to think is, get them the focus. They always focus on the monetary cost of losing. But what about the cost of

inaction and the opportunity costs? And By talking about the opportunity costs, I get them to see the asymmetry of the risk. Maybe I have a greater tolerance for risk, but what I do is that I fear, my fear is reversed. I fear missing out on the opportunity costs. I fear not getting the max. A lot of people fear running out of money. I fear wasting my life. I am more worried about looking back and being like, shit, I wasted my only ride that I had than running out of money. One of my patients said something to me once. He was about to do something that I just thought

was really risky. Now, it was a very unique opportunity and he said, Peter, I'm going to go and do this thing. And I said, I think there's a significant risk to you in doing that. It wasn't a financial risk. It would have been a health risk, a physical risk. And he said, you're right, Peter, I acknowledge that risk. That is the risk, but I'm optimizing in a risk, pardon me, a regret minimizing framework, not a risk minimizing framework. For me, it's risk reward. If I really love cigarettes, like love them, I'd smoke cigarettes. You know what I mean? If I really love skydiving all the time,

I went twice, but it was diminishing returns, I go skydiving. It's what fulfills you. And so I'm a risk reward guy. Is the reward commensurate with the risk? Some people like to ride motorcycles. For me, it's not worth the risk. Like I have a the risk? Some people like to ride motorcycles. For me, it's not worth the risk. I have a physical risk tolerance around one in 10,000. If it's more

dangerous than one in 10,000, the reward really has to be worth it for me to do it. And so, that's the way I think. That helps me in this counterfactual regret minimization algorithm. So, the algorithm of the book, the mental models in the book are right, you know, when a chess computer plays you, it has a regret minimization algorithm and what it wants to do is it's solving to win. AlphaGo is solving to win the game. In the game of life, what I'm solving for, the regret minimization I'm solving for, is net fulfillment. I want the highest score in net fulfillment. I don't want the highest money. I don't even want the highest health. I'm like, I don't want to run three hours a day

to be in the top point half a percent. Top 3% is great enough. I'll give up the tail end of my life. You know what I mean? And time, like how to optimize my time. Everything for me is like what I'm solving for in life. What this book is solving for for you is net fulfillment. It is relentless about net fulfillment.

If that entails for you, your makeup, like taking those risks, going hella skiing, skydiving, riding motorcycles, then so be it. If long as you're off autopilot and you've thought it through, then that's fine. How variable do you think people are in their kind of stratification of what encompasses net fulfillment. Maybe a better question is, do you think people are even understanding about and deliberate about what

that means? That doesn't strike me as something that the average person could articulate very clearly what it is that will be their fulfillment maximizing function in terms of experiences. And I want to reiterate a point you made, which is it's not just the experience, it's when they occur. The combination of which experiences and when they occur and who they occur with, do you get the sense that the average person can actually articulate that? I think they had the ability earlier in life and then they get habituated out of it. So we all go into autopilot. We have this default mode network. It helps us survive. It helps us drive without thinking, oh, I gotta turn. You know,

when you first learn how to drive, like it's everything's happening fast. You have to deliberately think about everything you're doing. And then all of a sudden it goes into default mode network and it's easy. It happens with work. And you're like, I need to work to survive and I need to do this. And you're panicking, whatever. And the next thing you're in the groove and you're just constantly working. Somewhere along the way with the abstraction of going to work to make money to survive and get the things we want, we forget about the things we want. We just go to work to work to just make more money, to go to work to make more money. And the things we want either get pushed for ahead or forgotten about because we're on

autopilot. It was a good thing because it makes us good at our jobs. It's like, I can do this job with my eyes closed. I can do this and I'm getting promoted and you're getting rewarded. And there's certain things about the jobs that you like, but you're forgetting why you did this thing in the first place.

People aren't like, I really wanted to be a plastic salesperson. I really love selling plastics, more and more plastics. And piling up numbers in a bank account. Those numbers in a bank account were really meant for, I wanna hang out with my buddies, and I wanna go skiing, and I wanna get married, and I wanna donate to this charity,

and I wanna do X, Y, and Z, right? But we kinda forget that. And since we forgot about it, we're not even thinking about when the best time it is to happen. It's just completely like, oh, I'll eventually do it, or when I get more. So we're completely out of touch of what we want,

what's enough, the concept of enough, what that means for us and the concept of when. Now I had a discussion with a patient just yesterday. So runs a hedge fund and not surprisingly given the economic climate we're in, hedge funds aren't doing particularly well, especially long hedge funds. And this guy doesn't need to be working. Even though he's now having a down year, I mean, he could certainly return all the capital to his investors and manage his own capital indefinitely or do nothing, literally do nothing. But he said, what would I do? What would I do? I'd sit around for three

months and it would feel really nice to have no stress for three months and then I'd be bored out of my mind. So he's like, no, I got to keep going. I've had this, amongst know, amongst my friends, you know, it's one of the things like people ask the question, why do people do this? And I've had direct conversations with my friends and with a friend, I'm very aggressive with them, attacking their walls they put up.

And what I tell them is that you have made your work, your God, it's who you meet people, you eat around where work is, you've given up learning how to socialize and meet your neighbors, all the people you know or some kind of work or work related. You haven't exercised those muscles for years, 10, 20, 30 years sometimes that people have,

their whole life revolves around work and all the other muscles, I'm using muscles as an example, have atropied. How do you socialize without a job? How do you meet people without a job? Where do I go eat without my job? Like I eat obviously somewhere within five miles of this place and people recommend all the things I get recommended, the camaraderie, everything that when people list what they like about work that used to happen without work and they've atrophied those muscles. So when you take that away, they're like, they don't know what to do.

They don't know what they want and their dreams have left them the ski trip. They haven't thought about that or hang out with their buddies or whatever. All that stuff has left them and they haven't worked those muscles out. And I say, listen, just let's start working on those muscles on building them up. And you'll have plenty to do. You have plenty to do. You have plenty to do. You've let autopilot and habit put you in poor health in these other activities. You're in poor health on how to meet people and socialize outside of work.

You're in poor health on where to go eat lunch, except for the places near work or wherever you go. You're in poor health on trips that are not business trips. You're in poor health about thinking about what fulfill use and discovery, just plain old discovery, because you don't know what you want. You discover what you want. Nobody comes out of the womb like, I don't like onions and I love chocolate and I want to go to Japan and I love F1.

Like you get exposed to it and you discover what you want. So a lot of life is discovery, but these people are out of discovery. They're in the familiar, habituated routine. They are a rat in a wheel that doesn't even need cheese anymore. It just runs in the wheel. How do we differentiate that from people who, and I would put myself in this category truthfully where a big part of their work is their fulfillment and they do feel a sense of purpose in what they do beyond just the making money part of it. And I suspect that, like again, just to make caricatures of things, right? So maybe the person who works in the widget factory that makes the widget that they don't even know what the widget plugs into, but they need a job.

If they inherited a big lump sum of money tomorrow, they would happily quit the widget job, but maybe they'd get bored and they'd want to go back and start volunteering and doing something where they don't actually get paid, but they're really enjoying what they're doing. Then of course, you have the group of people whose job is doing two things. It's providing money for all the things that you need, both in approximate sense and distally, but also it is a sense of purpose and therefore, it fits into their fulfillment. But these things can be very slippery and I would certainly put

myself squarely in that category, which is I still work harder than I should. I absolutely know that I'm failing in the equation, even though I'm fulfilled by this and I wouldn't want to not do this, but I'm doing too much of it as an example. I really push back hard on my friends on this and it's like, I can't know, only they can know. The heroin addict is happy.

I'm happy on heroin. You have a problem with my heroin, I don't have a problem, right? And that's kind of the argument I push towards them and I say listen really think about what in your job fulfills you and is that outside in the world and the purpose in that and do you have balance are you balanced according to what you want in life in this time period in your life in the future time period in your life now I can't tell somebody what their balance is, right?

That's a very personal thing. But what I really want them to do is be honest, off autopilot, really unplug for a moment and think about it. Okay, I got one life and I have only this period once, right? I only get to be 50 between 50 and 55. I only get this level of health at this time. Are these the experiences? Is this really how I want to allocate my time at this period?

Is this really the maximum? Is this the optimal thing for me to do? And if they do that and they come up with the same answer, like, hey, no, I want to work at the Wager Factor or I want to work at this fulfilling. I can't argue that. Who am I to tell you how to live your life? What I'm here to tell you is how to optimize your life. What thought process and what steps you should go through, things you should be considering in order to get the most fulfillment out of

your life. And then if you come to the conclusion that, hey, I'm at the perfect balance of work, right? And the money's piling up, but I'm going to use it later and I'm going to go on a senior screws and that's what it's for, then that's your life. But maybe you might go, you know what? I can dial it back and my daughters are only going to or my kids are only gonna be this age or this time. Maybe I should take a family trip and unplug and go on safari with them and enjoy my success

because that's gonna give me a lifetime of memory dividends and discussion points and connections, et cetera. Maybe I'd rather have that time with them now and not have them in a hospital with me when I'm old and stinking can barely, you know, and see me this way. I want the memories and the time they spend with me doing this and not at the tail end of life.

Who knows? I just want people thinking about it. And if you just get off autopilot just a bit and you start thinking about it, you're already optimizing your life. You're already gonna have a more fulfilling life. I think that that's probably the part of the book that most kind of resonates with someone like me, which is, especially when it comes to kids. And I have,

I guess the, maybe it's an advantage, maybe it's a disadvantage, but my kids are sort of separated in age by a bit of a gap, right? So my daughter's 14 and then the boys are five and eight. In other words, I now know what it's like to have a teenager. I now understand all the things that you kind of give up when your kid's a teenager. Our daughter's an amazing kid, but the reality of it is she doesn't really want to be around me. No, they don't want to know you when they become teenagers.

I didn't want to know my parents when I was a teenager. Yeah, yeah, whereas conversely, the boys can't leave us alone and it's tempting to sort of say, I wish they teenager. Whereas conversely, the boys can't leave us alone and it's tempting to say, I wish they would just leave us alone. But now knowing that, oh, actually in six years, you'll kill to be back in this situation, makes it infinitely more easy to appreciate. That's one thing that I think is helpful for people to understand the seasons, this idea of seasonality. Like you, I probably think back to things I didn't do for different reasons. When I was in college, I couldn't have worked harder. I was out of my mind how hard I worked. My night off,

there was one night, which was Friday, when I only worked until 9 p.m. It was my break. From 9 p.m. till 11, I would go- See, I needed a little bit of you and you needed a little bit of me. I would go and do laundry after 9 p.m. on a Friday. That was my way to just take a little time off. But other than that, it was six hours a day of work outside of class. I think of all the things I didn't do in college. First of all, my only memories of college are pure misery. I hated every minute of college. I didn't have- You didn't have the experience. Yeah. Now, I could say, well, a lot of good came out of that because I did really well

and did well. That set me up for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But I could have traveled. Having a college experience didn't mean I had to get drunk every night. It meant that I could have saved all that money I was making by tutoring and done something different. This reminds me of, you know, the college paper had this, my senior year, I opened it up and had the 50 things you need to do before you graduate.

And I just had the biggest regret when I read that list. And you read it at what age? I was just about on my way out. I was like, never gonna be able to do this, I'm not gonna do this. And some of them were simple, like write an angry letter to newspaper You know go skinny dipping at Lake whatever actually did that after I read that there were a lot of things do this college prank Do whatever like things that would be fun than necessary cost you money or whatever

But like things to do to have a college experience not necessarily do them all and I was think Maybe I did three or four and I was like why was I so on autopilot in my way and think about okay You got four years here Good good grades good study, but like you want to get this out of it You want to do this out of it? You want to have this college experience, etc. We just kind of like Don't really think about things go on autopilot so much that we don't think about periods in our life Even this year what experiences do I want to have this year? periods in our life, even this year, what experiences do I want to have this year?

With this person, with myself, with my spirituality, with my health, with my travel, my leisure, my job. How am I going to optimize and how does that fit into the jigsaw, the Tetris game of my entire life? Am I doing it right? Maybe this experience that I'm saying goes here actually goes further out my life. When I was trying to get the book published, one of the publishers said, I do exactly what you're talking about in the book. I really like hiking. She explained she had an injury and she likes running, but now she does like hiking and she really likes concert and music. And she goes on a vacation with a friend every year. They pick what they're gonna go do and there's this very expensive opera that she wants to go see and etc. She said, what I and our friend decided is that the hiking trips and this mountain, et cetera, we're going to pull these forward and the sitting in operas and these types

of trips, the set in a church, we're going to push forward. Push into the future. Push it into the future. So, you know, Max and I, it was like, if they get that order wrong, they go all the opera and then they turn around like, holy shit, I can't hike this mountain. And so this fits in every aspect of your life. College, first job, pre-married, married, before kids, kids that are toddlers, not toddlers. That type of thinking is really helpful

and you've been lucky. Experience has taught you about the seasons with your kids. And I learned the hard way too. I was like, you know, people tell you like, oh, your kids don't wanna be with you when you're 13. And you're like, you kind of forget when you were 13, like you forget like, oh yeah, I didn't wanna be around my parents.

And then really hit you when they're just like, ah, dad, nobody hangs out with their dad that much, come on. One of the other things that you talk about and you've mentioned it already today a couple of times is philanthropy. So there's a story in the book about a woman who dies and leaves a large gift. Tell that story again. It's one of those secret millionaire stories. They're all out there. There's a secretary,

and then when she died, she had $10 million of Tootsie Roll stock or whatever. This woman worked at a law firm, saved her money, lived by all accounts a very frugal life. And then when she died, she gave a multimillion dollar gift to education, charitable education. Everybody was like, you know, that's so charitable and that's such a great thing. And I had a different perspective. You know, my perspective was when you're dead,

the money isn't yours. And also that the target for her bequeath after her death would have been much better off receiving the money much earlier, a lower sum much earlier, and that the return on her charitable investment will be greater than any of her investment returns. And so, you know, I can't really get into her head to determine if it's charitable. I'm knowingly thinking I'm doing the right thing. I'm going to save all this money and it's gonna grow to a bigger pile

and I'm gonna give to charity. But to me, it appears to be a tip on the way out. The money's gotta go somewhere. It was gonna go either to the IRS, who redistribute the money the way they see fit, usually into wars and stuff. But I won't go into that subject, or hairs or et cetera. But it's going somewhere. It's not yours. It's gone.

So the fact that it just wound up into this educational charity, I didn't see it as charitable as much and as impactful as just giving the money earlier. Life is urgent. Life is now. And I argue that the return on investment in your charitable endeavors is greater than any return in the market you can get. Well, and this is sort of interesting because think about what our mutual friend, John Arnold did 10 years ago, which was before he even hits the age of 40, he decides, I'm no longer going to do this full-time. My full-time job is now giving this money away. Right. It's great. John's great. We've had a lot of conversations about this,

about making sure the money actually gets distributed, gets into the purpose, helping causes. But John decided that I've been solving the problem of natural gas long enough. I have more money than I'll ever spend or need. And I really want to dedicate my neurons to solving other problems. So he takes an analytical approach, a database driven approach to solving some of society's

ills and solving some problems and trying to get it ahead of some of these intractable problems, which is awesome. And the fact that he's doing so young, I even argue with John, like he did it too late. He's still late, you know what I mean? Because he was on autopilot too, in my opinion, trading. What are you working for?

I have this conversation with John, it's like, what's the money for? What can't you buy? And to a certain extent, the money became a detriment based on your value system, right? If you're like, hey, and I mentioned this book, yeah, I can have Maroon 5 play in my backyard every day, et cetera, but you don't want to ruin your kids by spending the money and consuming it that way. And I'm using the Maroon 5 as an exaggerated example, but like there's all kinds of consumption that you don't want to have

because you don't want your kids to have that. Then the money became a negative. You really work too low for, because you're working for money that you cannot spend, you cannot consume. And you could start giving away and having an impact on the other things you want to do now. And I think one of the things that John exemplifies is how to give money away thoughtfully and what you realize when you spend any length of time with him, which you've spent more than I have,

it is really hard to give money away strategically and thoughtfully, which is why I suspect John and Laura set themselves up with 50 years of a runway to give. I don't know. There's a pretty good chance they still won't be able to give it all away, right? What they're doing is like effectively giving away. They want to solve problems, database the decisions. But it takes time. I mean, that's the other point that you have to invest the time to try something out, see

if it works, if it does double double down. If it doesn't, learn why it doesn't, pivot. And you can't do that if you say, look, at the end of my life, I'm going to give away a billion dollars. It won't be effective. There's a double issue here. There's the issue you already said, which is the compounding issue. No, if you give a billion dollars away in 50 years versus giving away half a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars 30 years sooner, that money will do more good. But there's another layer to that, which is you have a chance to learn from what that money did and make corrections that themselves allow for more thoughtful giving. They're immediately jumping into the problem and

let the experiments run the course and they have the time to do it. They're doing it. I can't say enough about the Laura and John Arnold Foundation about the way they're going in and helping people and solving problems. The other thing that you talked about in the book that really probably, this is probably the reason I had my wife read it right away was the idea of we sometimes think that there are people in our lives that we want to give money to at some point. And you think that's a person that was really important in my life or in our lives and maybe we leave them X amount of dollars at some point. And then you realize, well, why don't you finish why that's maybe not necessarily the right strategy? The same laws of physics that govern my body and the utility of money over time for me

applies to my kids. Maybe they have a little bit longer lifespan or health span or relatives or anybody else in your life. Relatives or anybody, anybody. The utility of money to them follows a curve depending on how healthy they are, et cetera. You can just kind of draw it, right? Like you know better than I muscle decay rates for people in shape not in shape working out etc, so

this curve Applies to them. So a lot of people like oh when I die I'm gonna give I used to have people on my will that are like close to my age Like I'm gonna give money to them when I die and I'm like, wait a minute Let me give my money to a 72 year old wouldn it be better if I gave them less money now, like let them spend it and apply it because the utility of money for them is drastic. The day before you die, I cannot pay you anything.

I cannot get you to delay gratification. That's what savings is, right? You're delaying gratification. And so there is no gratification the next day. If you take it from the day before you die, two days before you die to right now, right? There's this curve, this compensation you need for delayed gratification. And it makes no sense for me to be leaving money to 65 year olds and 62 year olds. It's give it to them where the money has the most impact, where they'll have the most utility of that money. And so when you're off autopilot and think, yeah, that's what everybody does, they write down a will

on them when they die, et cetera. Now the will has a purpose. If you die early, you got to distribute the money. But really before you die, if you'd live a normal life, there should be nothing left to give. You should have already given it away. Again, when I read your book and you articulate it that way, I mean, it's such a gut punch of this realization. And one example is kids. My wife and I have people in our lives that we're not related to that we value so much. And we've always said like, yeah, you know, like we want to give them X number of dollars at this point in time. I've had that. I had a good year and there was people that I would give money to if I had a

good year or I'm not going gonna wait till I'm dead. Or there are people in my will and I just went down a list and the maximum tax-free gift you can give per year per person is $15,000. And I had, I think, a 30 to 50 person list of $15,000 to give to people. And this was me reading my own book. A lot of people are like, why'd you write the book? I wrote it to save my own life. I didn't want to waste my life. I wanted to get the most enough fulfillment. And after I wrote the book, mainly I talk about children. But then I thought about that applies to everybody. If I'm going to do something nice and give something or leave

something to somebody, it's now. Absolutely. It's right now. Well, especially when you think about exactly what you said, which is that person will do much more with that in applying it to their fulfillment curve in real time. When you're really giving somebody money, right? You're giving them life energy.

You're giving them the ability to make choices. You're giving them fulfillment. So waiting until they're 96 on the deathbed, they can't really convert that into fulfillment. You really didn't give them what you wanted to give them. So when you look at their curve of their life, oh wow Here's the maximum insertion point and as a matter of fact, wow $5,000 right now at let's say 33 is like 150,000 and 86 it's actually more impactful There's more going in life more choices things going on cumulative effect, the fact that when they have that experience,

not only do they enjoy that experience at that point, whatever that experience is, they get dividends from that experience. They talk about with their friends, they become more interesting, they recall that and they get enjoyment out of it. It's like, oh, remember that ski trip we went on, we had a great time with the kids, yeah, that was great.

They get fulfilled from that. So they get memory dividends associated from that experience. Whereas if you give it to a 96, they do it once, they consume it, if they can even do it, and then they die. How do you help a person do the math? Because we've talked about this quite a bit and you've alluded to it. There is really a curve. This is where both your background primarily as an engineer and a trader come into solving what becomes a mathematical set of equations where you have certain variables you need to understand. Let's say we're solving this for me or for you or an arbitrary person who's sitting here who's 50 years old. 50-year-old person is listening to this or

30-year-old person, maybe we do a few different scenarios. Let's start with the 50-year-old who here who's 50 years old. 50 year old person is listening to this or 30 year old person. Maybe we do a few different scenarios. Let's start with the 50 year old who is firmly planted on the treadmill of autopilot. Their kids are in middle school and high school. They realize how much money they need for college for their kids. They've got a mortgage payment. They've got a good job they've got a mortgage payment, they've got a good job, and they have a fuzzy notion that they're going to work another 15 to 20 years. And they come to you and they say, Bill, I read the book, I buy the thesis, I don't know how to implement it for my numbers and for my fulfillment curve. How do you help them think about it? The main thing is this is very individual. It's like, what do you want? If you're sitting there,

I just like working and going in and that's all I do. Okay, so I'll be the guy. So I'm going to say, so Bill, no, I do have interests, but I got to be honest with you, man. I've backed away from them. I've kind of let them go. I've let myself go a little bit. Before my wife and I had kids, we loved traveling.

And before our kids were born, we hiked the entire rim of the Grand Canyon. We went down to the Colorado River back up, probably the greatest thing we ever did. And then once the kids came, we were kinda head down and work and I just wanna make sure that my kids don't have debt when they go to college. What I do is like, okay, what's reality and what's fear, fear-based thinking?

So we try and get on that. And one of the things I'd look for is, why don't you go traveling with the kids? Well, it's a pain in the ass, whatever. I was like. It's also so expensive, Bill. I why don't you go traveling with the kids? Well, it's a pain in the ass, whatever. I was like- It's also so expensive, Bill. I mean, do you understand what it costs now? One of my kids has a friend who did this African safari a year ago.

They said it was amazing. To price that trip, Bill, today, $30,000 to go do that African safari now with the airlines, with the safari. That's a lot of money. So what I'm saying is when you die, will you have $30,000? Are you on track to die with $30,000, $50,000? I hope so. Okay.

So then would you rather consume that $30,000 now and have this experience with your kids, et cetera? Or would you rather have $30,000 left over when you die? I just want to be safe. I mean, how do I know? What if I'm wrong? Then we can sit down and go down the hard numbers. It's like, do you have insurance if you lose your job?

What is safe? What do you envision yourself doing in retirement that you can't afford? What bad thing that will happen that we can't buy an insurance policy for? Is it long-term care insurance? If you get that while you're young, it's actually pretty cheap. It's very cheap. I look at what risks they're having and I look at ways to mitigate them. So a lot of people who are conservative like, Oh, I'm worried about something happening. I'm like, what's the something happening that you're worried about? When you do that with people, Bill, how often are they able to articulate clearly what they're afraid of versus it

being kind of just a fuzzy notion of? A lot of it's fuzzy notion and we just keep pushing and pulling it out what if this happened what if I get sick what if or whatever we go over like medical insurance basically what happens is people try to act as their own insurance agent with a client of one right that's very difficult to underwrite so they have a client of one they really don't understand the odds of the bad things happening. And so what they tend to do is put it in this big giant fear bucket of insurance premium

and they just work and save and save and save to think that they have the notional to cover all these bad things happening. And a lot of times I'll point out two things. I go, one, some of these bad things that you're saving for, you'll never get the notional. Maybe you will or whatever, but most of the people I talk to, do you know it was $25,000 a night for my dad in the hospital? Insurance didn't cover that.

It's gone though, doesn't matter. You know what I mean? He's only got X days. You're not saving. Some of these things are like, you shouldn't be the insurer. If you're actually afraid of that and that's important to you,

you need to buy the insurance policy where they have the lower large numbers and their edge is 6% or 8%. You are going to be woefully inefficient. And on top of that, you don't even know the odds. Like some of these things with robot alien space insurance. Wait, you're worried about this? I also like to do a comparison. Okay, here's the risk of the scenario happening and this bad thing happening and it's bad. Well well accept it. And here's the risk of you not doing the thing that you want to do now. Here's the risk of you not doing the trip. What does that look like on your deathbed when you know you couldn't have gone on a

safari and had this wonderful time with your kids and connected with them and something to talk about forever and expanded your worldview? Was it worth the $30,000? Was it worth the insurance policy that you're trying to, was it worth you trying to play insurance agent? And so a lot of these are thematic conversations. They're not like hard number conversations. But you have a model.

Yeah, we have a model, but the problem with the model is it's an abstraction. The variables we're talking about are infinite. And we have to abstract and abstract and abstract. So what the model does, it really tells you the direction and it's very good on the direction, but the magnitude it may be off. And so for you as a person, it's like,

what's your survival number? We have that model, really think about, okay, just survival, not I'm hanging out, not thriving, but surviving, what do you need? Then after that, it's all your choices. And depending on who you are, because there's infinite choices, and what those choices will cost

and the experiences you wanna have in your life, plus the discovery, the 20 to 30% discovery, maybe all your experiences go in the 50 bucket. You didn't realize it, and you're actually inadvertently pushing them in the 70 bucket, and you're not gonna have them. And so that's kind of what I try and get people to do is like, are you going to have $30,000 trips in your lifetime? And they'll go, yes. When is the optimal time for you to have $30,000 trips?

And with whom? If you're never going to have a $30,000 trip, we're like, okay, let's think of a different type of activity that will get you the same fulfillment or close to it. That's not a $30,000 trip. To me, that's the interesting distinction. Maybe somebody listening to this says, are you freaking crazy? I'll never take a $30,000 trip ever in my life. Even if it's a $5,000 trip. Yeah. The bigger point is, is there a trip that you think you will take near the end of your life, and you're holding back on taking it now? To me, that is one of the big aha insights from this philosophy. You're in that thing, well, I'm saving because of just in case. It's like, guy,

you're not the best insurance agent. You're actually the worst insurance agent. You don't know the odds. You can never have the notional and the edge, the premium that you're extracting from yourself and that edge is your own life. You have to give up hours of your life to have this insurance premium is way, way more than just paying the insurance company. People worry about running out of money. I'm like, get an annuity. You're worried about long-term health and what if I'm sick and I can't move and I need nurses? Get long-term care insurance. It's really cheap when you start early. It's surprisingly cheap. What about this? There's an insurance product for a lot of things people are like, quote unquote, saving or worried for, et cetera. Let's mitigate the risk with the

professionals. Let's get the risk with the professionals. Let's get you living your life. So how do you get through to somebody when you confront perhaps an even more illogical problem? Because the problem that we just discussed is actually quite logical. It's easy to understand why a person would think, I have to save for a rainy day. That's been pretty ingrained into a responsible person. To me, there's a far less logical reason that people forego doing things when they're young. And by young, I mean kind of like middle age,

like in their working life. Or right now, young is right now. Yeah. And it's because they're so busy making money. So this is probably the one. That's the rat in the wheel with no cheese. They got to habituate. Like you take a rat, you get them to run in the wheel, you give them the cheese, you give them the wheel to do the cheese and pretty soon you don't even have to give them

the cheese. They see the wheel, they just start running. The reward is no longer the goal. It's just to do the thing. How do you help somebody break that? That is the hardest one to break because they've been brainwashed into thinking that this is what I want to do. And it's one of the hardest things to extract somebody from. And so I have to explain to them, where do you socialize? You know, we just go through it. Where do you eat? Where do you eat lunch? Well, I like the people at work.

I like hanging out. I don't want to quit work. I like hanging out with the people. I'm like, you can quit work and take the people on a trip with you. You can vacation with them. You can still visit them at night and play bingo games. Like the people don't go away just because you don't show up at work.

You can still spend time and you can actually spend more quality time with the people at work if you exercise that muscle. But they don't know how to invite people over their house or, hey, we're gonna go see the Chris Rock show tonight, which I'm gonna go do. Is Chris Rock in town tonight or is he in Houston? No, here in Austin tonight.

I didn't even know. See, there you go. A new experience you might have. But anyway, they don't know how to do that. It's a very long conversation. You can do this, you can do that. Everything that you're getting out of work, that social benefit, all these little excuses,

the mental stimulation, I'm like, John was like, these real life problems are more mentally stimulating than the natural gas puzzle. I still like, John was like, these real life problems are more mentally stimulating than the natural gas puzzle. I still like the natural gas puzzle, but these are more mentally stimulating, more purposeful, more fulfilling to me. And so I have to break down brick by brick

and show them how they got habituated and how they haven't exercised these other muscles and how they can replace it. You realize work is not the unique thing to get the things you're getting out of work. It's actually a bastardization of it. It's minimizing those experiences. You're not actually getting the most quality time with your coworkers in the working environment. You're actually not getting the most mental exercise. That's not necessarily the best mental exercise for you in the work environment.

It's just you know nothing else because you've been stuck in this lab running on this type of wheel. It's really hard because people will be extremely, extremely resistant. Change is painful. You get somebody who hasn't worked out forever and you're like, hey, let's go into the gym. We're going to work out. It's like, oh God, why am I here? I don't like this. You know what I mean? Like just to develop the muscle, to do the thing, to play the tennis, the filming thing. It's a

process. You have to show them the reward that life is rich. It's fat. It's wonderful. It is one of the biggest cliches ever, which is the person on their deathbed who says, I wish I didn't work so hard. And yet we all know this cliche and yet many of us still work too hard. Habits are powerful. One of the things I took away from the habit books like tiny habits by BJ fog is a great book is that they're powerful. They're extremely powerful. And so we get habituated in many different ways for good or bad.

If you have the snacks in your house and you eat 200 calories a day, you know, in two years, you're like 40 pounds heavier, 200 extra calories. How did that happen? How did I forget? How did my life pass me by? How did I not go on these trips? How did I not have these experiences? How did I not call my mother?

How did I not say I love you to these people? Even pick up the phone because my habits took over. They took over towards this purpose and it just absorbed my life. And so outside the book with my friends, you know, I really talk about the good of habits. You can form good habits that keep you healthy, but some of the habits, you know, the consequences of some of our habits to be successful and how it takes away from other things. Has that been a struggle for you?

Oh, yes. I wrote that book for me. You know, the first life I wanted to save was my own. Put your life mask on first. I am just as guilty as the next person is being on autopilot. I constantly have to remind myself that I'm going to die, that life isn't forever. This period ends. These seasons, what my daughter's end, these seasons, what my startups end, all these things. And I have to think about like, what do I want? How do I balance them? What's optimized? And I don't get it exactly right,

but I do it better than if I was just completely on autopilot. And then sometimes I was like, oh shit, I was on autopilot. Why didn't I think about this? And what do you use to help jar you out of autopilot on these things? The first macro thing is the death clock. Right now I have this calendar up and it's 4,000 weeks.

And you mark off each week and it's a very visceral representation about life is finite. Not only will you die somewhere around here, but this period is going to end. A lot of times when people go on vacation, knowing that the vacation ends on Friday, snaps you up. You're like, oh shit, I'm gonna go here and do this, and I'm gonna stay out, and you know, we only have a couple days, so let's do the cafe, and let's, you know, do X, Y, and Z, and you actually get more out of the trip

knowing it's gonna end, as opposed to living obliviously, and all of a sudden, time to go. Wait, it's time to go! I forgot to do this, or go see the Eiffel Tower, or go whatever it is on your trip. And so, same thing with life. When you know life is going to end, it becomes more urgent. Even the segment in your life, when you know your early 50s are going to end, you're like,

it becomes more urgent. You become more deliberate. You get off autopilot. So that's the first layer. So each week you do check off a box on your calendar. Each week I check off. Now I've been in Austin and traveling, but when I come back, I see it. It's in my closet. So I walk by it every day.

It's a constant reminder. Where'd you get this calendar, by the way? Online. There was like some sort of stoic reflections out there, a memento mori, remember death. I used to have it on my phone, and you used to count down backwards to my estimated death date.

That app no longer works, but the seeing it every time is great. If I get another widget that counts down, I'll have both of them. Right? And I used to do it for other things like till Christmas, till your daughter's 14, till the job, the 15 year anniversary. Well my daughter's gonna be 16, she's gonna be driving. How am I gonna pry experiences out of my daughter because your daughter's don't want to know you before she's really gone. She gets a car and she's, see ya, deuces, you know? That type of thing.

So that really helps me, it gives me kind of an alarm that wakes me up out of autopilot. And that's the thing I personally use. How do you help somebody think about when their net worth should peak? Because a clear implication of everything we're talking about is net worth probably needs to peak a lot sooner than it currently does. As you said, I think the default for most working people is that net worth

peaks sometime after retirement or certainly around the time of retirement, even if they're thinking about drawing down. But again, for most people, given the age of retirement, there's a mismatch between when they're hitting peak net worth and when they're hitting peak capacity to utilize net worth. That's a massive mismatch. One of the things I wanted to do, and I wish I knew you back then

because you could have helped me, is I was like, I want to know about all these frailty curves like bone density, lung capacity, and what activities become less enjoyable first and then unable to do. Because that determines a lot when your networks should peak. I estimated it somewhere in your 50s. Wow.

And the data kind of shows that when I went to St. Petersburg and climbed the 200 and I think it was 11 steps to walk around the Bannister, all these tour buses coming to St. Petersburg, Asian, whatever, not one person over those tour buses that was elderly climbed the 211 steps. So St. Petersburg was a different St. Petersburg for them. They didn't have the same experience. I got more out of St. Petersburg for them. Now, I'm not saying it wasn't a wonderful trip and a nice trip for them, but they probably

pushed St. Petersburg too late in life. And so there's so much hidden data and data out there and reports if you read it, we talked about earlier, like trying to get people to spend their money down. And one of the things, answers I give, they say, well, why do you think people are still, their net worth is still going up into 72? And part of it is asset appreciation and going faster than they can spend it. But the real answer is they can't. They cannot spend it down. Life has passed them by. They no longer have the attitude or aptitude to do this. They can't do it. You'd be surprised how many people die on those cruise ships trying to swim when they get to St. Thomas. They think their life's going to be like

a carnival commercial. And I'm like, that carnival commercial will kill most Americans. They're having heart attacks going down those slides. And that of course just speaks to the imbalance between the three variables. It's like, if you spent a little bit more of your time on your health, you would buy yourself a bigger runway to utilize your wealth on the experiences. So particularly for Americans, my book is most successful in Japan, which is strange. Yeah, say why. I think one, I believe you'll get value out of this book

in the way of thinking, even if you have zero wealth. But Japan has a savings problem. Japan saves, saves, saves, then they die and they give the money to the next generation, then they save, save, save. And I'm just like, well, what generation actually has fun? So I'm really counters to the culture there. Here, you know, one of the criticisms of the book'm just like, well, what generation actually has fun? So I'm really counters to the culture there. Here, you know, one of the criticisms of the book

will be like, well, there's so many people that have zero and trying to make ends meet. I'm like, I get it. They can still get value out of this about getting the Tetris of their life, but maybe a wealth building book or how to make dollars book might be more useful to them at this time in their life.

In Japan, it's the opposite. And also Japanese, they're healthier. And they're healthier longer. Yes, if you walk around Japan, the In Japan, it's the opposite. And also Japanese, they're healthier. And they're healthier longer. Yes. If you walk around Japan, old people, it's an older country, but they're around, they're moving, they're doing things or having activities, et cetera. They're enjoying the life. For Americans looking at the obesity epidemic and the lifestyle of Americans, their ability to consume experiences deteriorates way, way faster and way earlier than say the Japanese. Let's go back to risk again. What's the mantra of the energy trader or the gas trader?

Yeah. The name of the game is the stay in the game. Sort of like Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game. It's not about winning. It's about being able to keep playing over and over and over again. So inherent in that is never making a bet or a trade that can completely wipe you out and take you out of the game. By nature of the business, even the smallest position can take you out of the game. It's really about taking prudent risk reward and then stopping out when you can. Life is risk. You can get hit by a bus, a meteor can hit you, you can get some sort of crazy infectious disease. You can get a bum deal just going out, but you're not gonna live in a bubble, you're gonna take calculated risks.

So in trading, we're optimizing for profit, you're going to take risks that in a tail scenario can blow you out. The key is taking prudent risk reward decisions. You know, I don't smoke, the reward's not great enough. I did go skydiving. The first time the reward was great,

the second time it was half as great. I didn't do it the third time because the risk was The first time the reward was great. The second time it was half as great. I didn't do it the third time because the risk was the same and the reward wasn't. The reward was going down and the risk was still the same. And so this is the same thing in trading. We look at everything on a risk reward basis, the likelihood of dying. If things go awry, can we get out? Have I sized my position? Can I get out?

Is the liquidity there? And all these things are going on all the time. And how do you think about that in a person's life? I like the example of skydiving. How do you think about this now in terms of the seasons of the person's life? Are there certain seasons where certain risks make sense, be it financial risks or- I'll give you a great example of physical risk. I have a cartilage disappearing in L3, L4. Bones are hitting each other. So I'm advised against doing impact things. And I was 50 years old in the islands and guys were going to go wakeboarding. And I was like, I don't want to go. I don't want

to go. I'm going to hang out on the beach. I'm going to loaf. And I thought about it for a second. I said, I don't have many wakeboarding times left. Like, I'm not going wakeboarding at 60. I have this dijourn of a back thing. It's going to be more dangerous for me, et cetera. If I am to wakeboard, it is now. It is in this time period. And then I thought, okay, it's in this time period. I'm like, okay, how many times am I going to be in warm water with my buddies where there's a wakeboarding boat ready to go in the next two years?

I don't know, this is it. I don't foresee it happening. I could make a special effort for it, but like it's just there in my lap and I don't have something else to do, et cetera. And I was like, I'm gonna go wakeboarding. This is probably the last time I'm gonna go wakeboarding. That was the last time I went wakeboarding.

How much did it hurt? It didn't hurt. I actually jumped the wake too. I made a nice jump at a wake. I said, I'm going to go wakeboarding. That was the last time I went wakeboarding. How much did it hurt? It didn't hurt. I actually jumped the wake too. I made a nice jump at a wake. I said, I'm going to send it. I sent it. Didn't hurt that much. It wasn't like that. But afterwards, there was a little tension in my back, et cetera, and stretching and trying to... I was very conscious like, okay, I got to be careful coming across it. And now I wake surf. I do the low impact version of the sport, I absolutely love until you know there's some technique to like put cartilage in my back and re-strengthen my back. I'm waiting for the technology to catch up so maybe I'll get my back back but right now it's the last time I

went wakeboarding. That was the risk was worth the reward. There was no other time. Now as I get older, wakeboarding is much more dangerous and so I've gone to a sport where the speed of the sport, a lot of people think if you're going 10 miles per hour versus 12 miles per hour, it's only two miles per hour difference, but it's a 44% difference in force because force equals MV squared.

And so I'm acutely aware of it and I'm like, okay, I wanna be in something that I can get fulfilled where the risk is not as great. I have a 44% reduction in force, which is great. Great for me when I fall. So what year was it that you had that incredible birthday? Gosh, I'm pretty sure it's 45, but I've had incredible birthdays since then, but the one in the book is 45. At the time you spend a lot of money, was it for you enough money that you were like,

am I crazy doing this? Did you have second thoughts about it? I had second thoughts, like the events and the things I was planning. Remind me, it was down in the- I went to St. Barts. I love St. Barts. It's where I had my honeymoon. It's a great island.

I think it's one of the best islands in the Caribbean. Obviously, not everybody can go to St. Barts. I tell people that become successful, you either get new friends or you scholarship your friends. Because you wanna do experiences, a lot of times a lot of people wanna do shared experiences, right? They want their friends to come.

They can't afford to just pop up and spend thousands of dollars to go to St. Borats or do X, Y, and Z. And it happens in various levels of success, right? Whether it's on a trip to Chicago, like I can't do that. Some people can and can't. And so as you become successful, one of the experiences you want to have is to be around your friends and have shared experience with your friends.

And so I coach people, I say, you have to lose this attachment that they have to pay or they need to pay or whatever. You have to think what's most important to you. Get off autopilot. It's to have shared experiences. And is it worth it for you to have them around? For me, I've had good friends throughout the years. It's unequivocal, yes, friends and family.

So, but it gets expensive. You know, you got to run out the hotel rooms, et cetera, and entertainment and plan this thing. But I was like, some of these people, they have their own lives and own complications and conflicts. You won't get the time to do with it. Some of these people won't be alive, may or may not be alive. You may drift apart. This is the time I want to do this. And so as I was adding these people in and having my mother down and all this stuff, I had just like a heavenly experience. Walking on the beach,

my mom's coming out of her beach house, my friends are hanging on the balcony looking down, it's beautiful, the birds are out, et cetera, and hi, all the people I love, and we're gonna do this fun activity, we're gonna listen to music, et cetera. I imagine that that's what heaven's is like. You're just having this experience.

And what I did was I realized that that's what I was working for. I was working to create these experiences. These are the things that fulfill me. When I was planning it, oh shit, there's a lot of goddamn money. You know what I mean? What am I going to do? Am I doing the right allocation? You never know if you get it exactly right. Nobody gets it perfectly balanced, but this is the right direction. It reminds me of something. When my wife and I got married in 2004, we got married at a golf club. We didn't have two nickels to rub together. It was like I think the wedding, the ceremony, the reception were all at the same place. The whole thing cost less than $20,000,

obscene amount of money for us at the time. It was amazing because everybody we actually cared about in our lives was there. We were really fortunate that almost everybody could make it who we invited. There were almost 200 people there. At one point, I grabbed my wife, we walked out onto the balcony and could see everybody and I said, do you realize that this is one of only two times in our life that we will be surrounded by everyone who's meaningful to us, who's alive, and the only other time it's going to occur, we're going to be dead. We'll be in the casket. We'll be at our funeral. So we got to really take this in. And I realize now there was a huge error in my logic, which was that was totally untrue. That didn't have to be true at

all. You can create that any time you want. You can decide for no reason I want to bring everybody in my life who matters. Throw a birthday party. It could be a birthday party. It could be just a party. Most of my life is finding excuses to throw parties. You know, we get autopilot waiting for certain events like weddings or funerals or- Or special anniversaries. Special anniversaries or things like that. We autopilot like, oh, that's when we get together.

We allow autopilot to dictate when we do these things instead of thinking, hey, I really want to hang out with so and so, so and so and so and so. Let me design a trip or let me have a bowling alley or something. It could be low cost. It'd be like, let me have a picnic with a ball game talking shit. One of the things I want to do, which I guess the startup cost will be something expensive, I'm getting some laser tag guns. And I put it in my group. I have this group called Cool Awesome People.

I'll put you in it if you wanna be in it. And I'm like, it's on. I'm gonna get laser tag, best ass laser tag things. There's gonna be some senior four. And everybody's like, yes! You know what I mean? Like, I'm creating this experience. Like, yeah, I'm gonna kick some ass on laser tag and shit talk,

but I'm also going to connect and have a good time with people. And I could do that once I put the initial cost, we could do that all the time. We can have a league. We can have do all kinds of things. And, you know, it doesn't have to be laser tag. It could be whiffable at the park. You can have a whiffable league. Low cost, you know, dollar store.

Pick up a whiffable bat. You know, you're creating memories and somebody brings sandwiches and you can do that. And that's getting off autopilot. So I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you really hit the nail on the head about that. It's like, design your life. Think about what you want out of it and make it happen. Now let me ask you a question. At that birthday party when you were 45, how many people were there? We took out the Tijuana Hotel and some of the other one, 80, 100, 80, 100 something. And how much time did you get to spend with each person?

We were there for a week, so I got to spend time. Whoever wanted to spend time with me, they got to spend time with me. Some people have this thing. This is just me, I don't know if this isn't like, some people I want their presence, but not saying anything I know you're okay. I get to see you being happy Maybe I don't talk to you as much but I get to enjoy you enjoying yourself

That's one of my favorite things at a party when I throw a party. They're like, are you having a good time? It's crazy. Whatever. I'm like, I'm having the best I'm watching the best fucking movie of my life right now I am in an immersive theater of People I love doing the thing they want to do. Now I'm kind of anti-social. Like I don't like to talk that much with people. Like I get awkward sometimes, you know what I mean?

Sometimes I grab my wife and I'm like, talk for me, talk for me. We'll go to a party and I'll be like, you got to talk for me, babe. I can't take it. I can talk to a million people. No problems. The stadium or whatever.

And sometimes I get awkward, but what I really, really do enjoy and what really fulfills me is watching people I love have a good time. I think after my wife read the book, that was one of her first thoughts, which is I've never had a birthday party. The last birthday party I had was I was seven years old. After that, I just decided I never wanted to have a party and I never have. She's like, I really want, I know how much you are obsessed with your friends and how much you share with them individually, but wouldn't it be great for everybody to be under one roof for your birthday? I'm resisting it to know, and she'd never throw a surprise party for me. She knows that would just kill me. She won't do that, but she's really negotiating with me to sort of have a party. And my view is it won't be enjoyable for me because I'll be the

center of attention and I'll feel an obligation to give everybody the same amount of attention. Whereas having dinner with five friends is infinitely more enjoyable. So I'm trying to balance her very well. It's just a different experience. I guess what bums me out is I feel like I wouldn't even know how to appreciate a party. I get that. I walk around and I just really enjoy people meeting and socializing and connecting. At my wedding, there were friends that didn't know each other and they're like, they're great. You know great people. I'm like, of course I do. You find somebody who's great,

love, you keep them close by. I don't care if you dated them or whatever. You keep them close, man. People that vibe with you is very important to me. And me seeing them succeed, I'm a person that roots for people to hit the long ball. I'm not a hater. I'm a natural, I hope you crush it. I hope you become a trillionaire.

I hope you, whatever it is. And so seeing people at a party, I like that there were parties and make people have fun and create environments for them, loosen up, enjoy each other, have a good time. And then watching that success and watching them interact is enjoyable for me, even though I might be just sitting there smiling, right?

Like not really talking. You can enjoy a party as much if you're the host or it's your birthday as if you're at somebody's party? It depends. It's not always the same because you got to solve problems. Someone can't get in, the ice maker is broken, whatever. There's that type of things. But yeah, I'd rather watch that movie than go to the movies. I'd rather be in that immersive theater than McKittrick Hotel and Sleep No More in New York, which is an immersive theater. That's the best theater. And even so, what? I only got to have a small conversation, whatever, like the feedback that was like, I met this person.

We had a great time. It was awesome. Very fulfilling to me. Very fulfilling to me. What year did you finish writing Die with Zero? Let's see. It's supposed to come out in 2020. So it's probably 2019, 2019. In the three years ish since you've written the book, has your thinking changed in anything? Have you evolved? Are you more nuanced in anything that you wrote about? It's kind of like when you write a formula and it's not like I came up with this formula,

this life cycle hypothesis thing, which is basically the book. This counterfactual regret minimization algorithm and I'm solving for net fulfillment. It's not as if these ideas weren't out there. Like I always say like anybody could have just thought about it and wrote this book. It's how I present it so that it hits the widest audience and so that it hits them viscerally so they actually apply it. And so I think about it deeper and deeper layers of it and sometimes I go deep into the subcategory because I use these variables wealth, health health and time. What's the maximum level of health I should be? There's tons of health books out there. I'm not writing a health book but I'm

like how can I optimize this? How these two interplay? The time and health. How much time do I really want to spend on a Peloton? How much time do I really want to like regimented eating all the time and being a pain in the ass? You know? How many chocolate chip cookies don't want to eat before I die and just suffer? I have to think about that. If dying one year early means living one more year but I don't get any chocolate chip cookies, I'll take the chocolate chip cookies. I want a fulfilling life.

Thinking deeply about these things. You know, that's kind of a cartoon version of it, but I hear other people think about it. I wrote the basic macro formula, but it's very fulfilling to see other people. They've set up spreadsheets. This is the optimal way you would die with zero. They've done it better than me. These financial planners built these spreadsheets and your returns and these are the things

you like to do, et cetera. This is great. They've taken the ball and run with it and I've taken the ball a little bit and run with it a little bit myself. And the way I'm applying it mainly is more socially. More of these things like, you know, at my wedding, I said to somebody, I said, probably no one in this room will see each other more than 50 times. And most of us will probably only see us 20 times in the times of our lives. How many people were, this is the recent wedding. Yeah. 117. 117. 117. And so that's

kind of hit people. They're like, yeah, you're kind of right. I'd put the over under at the max at like 50 for any pair that's not married. Married, yeah. And probably 20. That made me think, I don't want 20. I'm gonna throw parties. I've taken throwing parties and social things

very seriously because I thought about what fulfills me. So the last party I had, which you were invited, but you didn't come. I was throwing a party that night. You were throwing a party that night. You were throwing a party that night at F1. I went all out. This is what I'm going to work for, to have these types of experiences.

There's other things, right? But this is in the category, in the top of the category. Socializing, seeing my friends happy, having a good time, et cetera. Travel is a big one. Charity is another big one. My kids' money is their money. It's not my money. It's in a trust. It's already taken care of. They'll get their money turned over when somewhere

between 25, 26 and 33 because that's the optimal time for them when they're mentally mature and at physical maturity, not in decline. How much will you talk with them about what you think or don't think they should do with that money? Is that one of those things where you feel it is your responsibility to say absolutely nothing and let them figure it out on their own? No, no. I wanna give them a roadmap.

I wanna teach them that it's a tool. A lot of people, one of the biggest mistakes they make is assigning some sort of good or bad to money or what it is, et cetera. It's not money that's good or bad in the Bible, it's the love of money that is good or bad. I use this analogy I say like money is a tool that much like a hammer and saw and nails and rail guns

Do hammers and saws build houses? No You need to know how to use those tools people build those houses. So do does money make you happy? No, but if you know how to use the tool of money, it can make you happy or it can make you miserable So some people you give hammers and saws they build house about canoes. This was wonderful things how to use the tool of money, it can make you happy or it can make you miserable. So some people, you give hammers and saws, they build a house, they build canoes, this is wonderful things. You're like, how the hell did you build this? Some people give hammers and saws and they're just sitting there to cut their arm off.

And so what I'm trying to do is not tell my kids what they should do, but teach them how to use the tools. Once they know how to use the tools, if they decide to build houses or canoes or cut their arms off, that's up to them. But I want to make sure that I gave them the instruction manual and got them a little bit proficient on how to use the tools and that's it. Then my job is done, right? I have so many friends that try and control people from the grave, that use the money as a control mechanism. I'm very big on like, that's my dream. My dreams are my dreams. My dad

always tried to get me to be an attorney. Get the hell out of here, I'm very big on like, that's my dream. My dreams are my dreams. My dad always tried to get me to be an attorney. Get the hell out of here, I'm never doing that. But you try and push your dreams onto your kids. I want you to be a doctor, I want you to be this, I want you to be that, whatever. And that's not necessarily what they wanna do. They have their own life and it's their adventure. And what I wanna do is set them up with the tools

to choose their own adventure. Now I might not agree with that adventure, I probably won't because I come from a different era and a different culture and all kinds of things, but I will be rest assured and happy that if they're fulfilled, great. Well, Bill, I wanna thank you very much for writing this book because as I said at the outset,

it really is one of a handful of books that has caused me to rethink a lot of what I've been doing, how I've been thinking about the problem of optimizing these variables. I'm really confident that people are going to pick this book up and find similar value, at least in magnitude. They might find different things that speak to them more or less than me, but I believe that from a valence and magnitude perspective, people will across the board find this valuable. So thanks so much for writing it and also for coming today. Thanks.

That's great feedback. I mean, you don't write books to get rich. You write books to get your point across. And for me, I see it as saving lives. And a lot of people have said this before. What do you mean saving lives, Perkins? You're fucking crazy. What do you mean saving lives?

You're not saving lives. And I'm like, well, listen, when somebody's drowning in the river or Lake Austin, you pull them out and you mouth to mouth and you save their lives, guess what? They're still going to fucking die. Just not that day. Right? So what did you do when you save their life by pulling them out of the river? You've given them more choices, more experience, more life. So when you read my book and you get off autopilot and you get more choices, more experience, more experience, more life, isn't it the same? At least in my mind it is and that's what motivates me. And so when you say it had an impact in you and you're going to have a more fulfilling life,

it's like I fucking did it. I feel very happy so I appreciate it. I think the example you gave there is a great one and I would agree with you completely because I too fall in the camp despite my profession of believing we are all absolutely going to die and in relatively short order and therefore anything that changes our experiential existence for the better is part of living. Yeah. So thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been great.

All right, man. That was awesome. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. It's extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members. And in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. So if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. Premium membership includes several benefits. First, comprehensive podcast show notes that

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