The Peter Attia Drive - #237 ‒ Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment | Bill Perkins

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

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 [3:15]; A missed experience and feeling of regret that shaped Bill’s thinking [14:15]; Thinking in terms of time, and the relationship between money, time, and health [17:00]; Solving for net fulfillment and allocating your time based on the seasons of life [27:15]; How Bill thinks about risk, opportunity costs, and the difference between fear and risk tolerance [35:30]; Optimizing for fulfillment, finding purpose outside of work, and more [41:45]; Thinking about the order of experiences you want to have based on seasons of life [50:00]; Bill’s unique perspective on philanthropy and a more impactful way to give money away [54:45]; Applying the principles in ‘Die With Zero’ to maximize fulfillment [1:04:00]; How to break out of living life on autopilot [1:14:30]; When should your net worth peak? [1:18:00]; Taking calculated risks [1:21:30]; Bill shares a lesson from his incredible birthday [1:25:15]; How Bill’s philosophy has evolved since writing Die With Zero [1:34:00]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll 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, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain

what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Bill Perkins. Bill is a hedge fund manager, a very successful natural gas trader, an entrepreneur, an author of the book, Die with Zero, getting all you can from your money and your life. You may have heard me mention on previous podcasts or on social media that over the past year I've read three books that seemed in some way connected to different sides of a similar theme, but they all had to do with something about quality of life.

These three books are From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, 4,000 weeks by Oliver Birkman, and of course, Die with zero by Bill. After reading the book, I realized we had about four friends in common, at least two or three of whom were mentioned in the book, and it made it easy to reach out to him and say, hey, Bill, let's sit down and have a podcast, which we do. So in this episode, we talk about Bill's background is upbringing and the genesis of the philosophies in his book. These seeds were sown kind of early on.

From there, we then really talk about the overarching philosophy of this book, which is that we have these three important resources, time, health, and experiences, and we use money as a conduit or a tool to trade between those. If that doesn't make a lot of sense, now I think it will when we talk through it.

Throughout this interview, Bill makes the argument that no matter at what level of wealth you are, most people are not focusing correctly on the most important asset that we have, which is time, and that we need to optimize our life to have experiences throughout our life, instead of waiting until the end of life to do everything, which is really what most of us do. Throughout this we talk about the importance of understanding risk, including the opportunity cost of making or not making decisions. We talk about the risk, reward matrix, and thinking about regret and regret minimization, and we talk about the dangers of living life on autopilot when it comes to work and fulfillment.

For as much as this podcast dives into the science of longevity, any longtime listener knows that I am equally interested in the manners of emotional health and quality of life and to live a long life without appropriate happiness or quality of life or shared experiences is not really to live it all. And that's why a book like this is just as important to me as books about the hardcore science of longevity. I think the insights that Bill shares in this interview will help anyone think through how they're spending and allocating their time, no matter what level of wealth they have. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation

with Bill Perkins. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I have to, 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 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, 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, 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, you know, 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 impressed of us in engineering.

We had a sang on a 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, you know. What was it?

You play the bench. I played the bench, but I was a defensive back, weren't back 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.

It was pretty much, it has been before I ever was. But when you love football, you love the sport, you never want to let go, right? You're not like, oh, I'll just dive into my studies and pick up this hobby. You're kind of like football is life at that age. You graduate college with the green engineering. Maybe you're not first in your class. You decide though you're going to go and instead of going to grad school or something like that, you're like, I'm going to 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 going to do. Really was pretty much a slacker underachiever at the time. And my godfather calls me with one of those like, what are you going to do with your life at the point? And I knew I didn't want to 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 subjection of a chip, here's your career

path, etc. It was 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 stock broker or a stock trader. And he goes, I don't know anything about equities, but there's this firm and commodities. Mind you, I didn't know what about equities, but there's this firm and 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 with my resume. This is what you're like late 80s or early 90s? Like 91 and takes my resume, tears it up, walks me around the floor. People yelling and screaming and, you know, 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 want to harm me actually. They were looking into giving 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 and the old days were 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 will go to him. They would catch them, put them down the shoot

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 SNM, that was your name. So clerk's are running around the floor going, why not SNM? Why not? And then if you're why not, you're like, why not here? Ever here, I know selling five lots of 5480, not three lots of 5480. 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 a system like running around all day checking trades. This job is done on Wall Street, this firm is on Wall Street. Yeah, so 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, like 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 that? I was pretty much the fuck up of 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 going to 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's rate, 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? No, I didn't. 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 dollars a year. I have to go look. Sub-16. Yeah. I think it was like 16,000, 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 Rufo, 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, up a west side living in like a pizza oven type of space. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, what I call a bupi, black urban professional, you know, bupis and yuppies. And that was the beginning of my journey. Tommy, 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. And my dad is kind of like me.

He's a fairly stubborn, but he was stubborn to the extreme. Dr. says, don't do this. All the things you would tell him not to do and you need to be doing, he's like, add a hell with that, you know what I mean? I guess. And so he's in the picture of my parents at divorce. He's in Jersey City. And your parents gone to college?

My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University are divorced. He's in Jersey City. Did your parents go into college? My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University of Iowa. He was a real bad ass. He had no intentions of going to school. He walked by a football field when he was a kid in high school. And he's like, I want to do that. And coaches 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 badass 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 at 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've 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, used to wear around as a badge of honor, like I get onto New York Mercantile Exchange, et cetera. But they'd see, I'm going out or I'm flying here, I'm doing whatever and it's like, 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, it's like,

I wanna drive the car, I wanna teach a man to drive the car, I wanna drive the car, I'm not supposed to be able to drive the car. So anyway, long story short, he hits a gas instead of the clutch spins the car out The back of it spins around hits a telephone pole. Trump pops up and has this big giant dent 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 in park day And then truck must have 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 gonna pay for this car in spades that happened to my mom. And so one day I gave my mom $40,000 and I said, Mom, you know what 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's going, 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 laugh

and was thankful that one. It was a great investment, you know, having that car beat up, but she's kind of laughing. We just reminisced about it. So 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 laughed and we just reminisced about it. So 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. 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 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 career directory. And Jason is like, does Jason work 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 going to go back packing for your firm a month. I'm like, what? How are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to borrow money from the sky who was a loan shark. And I'm like, go backpacking for your for a couple months. I'm like, what? How are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to borrow money from the sky who was a loan shark. And I'm like, wait, what? You're going to borrow money from the sky.

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,. I'm like, you're gonna miss out. And what if they hire another screen clerk and your job's not there when you come back and how are you gonna pay this guy back?

If you don't pay him back, this is not like, oh, panel is in interest. This is like knees and ankles. And so I just didn't get it. That experience, I wasn't thinking about like, die with zero and certain experiences belong in a certain career, your life, et cetera. I was just ultimately on this autopilot

of trying to be successful and make money at that time of my life. And Jason was like, I'm going back, backing. So he went, I stayed, he came back, how does screen clerking job? Different firm or 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. He came back with stories and experiences and romance and lifelong friends. You know, in 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 this time went on. I really, really regretted not joining him on that trip. When it finally came time where I'm going to go Europe, I'm going to have this backpacking experience. I was too bougie. I had money. I wasn't going to go stay at youth hostels. I was going to capture these trains. I was going to 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 even though it was wonderful, it was not as rich as his experience because the time it passed me by.

It's one of my 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 and 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 exchange, I was like in this hurry to get rich. And 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, like, I'm ages,

I can't imagine the use of a million dollars when you're 40, right? Like, what are you gonna do by a nice accord to drive your kids around? It just seems like loss in 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 Are Your Life, the kind of 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 wages after tax, this is what an hour of your time 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. 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 won a lot of money, and I'm going to become this very frugal person. You know, there's this movement 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 going to save my way to riches, right? I'm going to save in the 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 exchanged hours in 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 the sink-in, very viscerally. The idea that...

It's also just a 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 is a $3 shirt. I mean a 3 hour shirt. Conversely, I take my daughter out overnight. We do like 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.

But do you see those sort of differently at the time that one of those is like an experience and one of the musicians? 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 worth of 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. Tip in $25, you're throwing it and let it all ride. Because it's so abstracted for 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 wage is 25 an hour. Every time you flick a chip, it's like, I gave an hour of my life. Right. Boom. 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 you know, at that time, at the exchange, like most people had like, what is it all for? Like, what do I want? You know, 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 Sistrook and I was like trying to do engineering and we were debating something. He's like, listen, you might want to pick a fan and a wife and something like that in that life. I don't want that life. I don't want that cookie cut of 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? You know, certain things that he said that he didn't want, that I was actually working for, you know, thinking that this was my path, I actually realized, no, I don't want that. You know, I'm pretty hardheaded. It takes a while for these things to see been. 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 wanna be rich before form 30, or I'm rich before 40. No one's out there saying, I wanna be rich before form 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 older, 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? Like I'm not gonna 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 wake boarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that they didn't join me. And that's what I thought about. Don't go basketball, go wakeboarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that you're enjoying. And that's what I thought about. And I thought to myself, if, for reading this book,

like I'm expanding hours of my life to acquire these experiences, I mean, experiences in a broad sense, whether it's like going on a walk or being able to choose going to walk or go get a sandwich or a bar shirt or whatever. If I'm exchanging hours of my life and I don't go acquire these experiences, I pretty much wasted hours in my life. So that thought hits and it's like, okay, you don't wanna leave anything on the table.

In the game of life when I die, you don't wanna leave chips on the table, right? Like you wanna use all your resources before you die. Inheriting that is that your choices, your experiences, those experiences are what make you you. Those areheriting that is that 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, they must be a curve. Because if you're going to end at zero, is it this kind of rectangle shape that just goes down? Is it a 45-during or a slip, or is there some sort of curve? And so what I like to do to understand certain things, it doesn't always work, is think of zero and think of infinity.

All right, let's run it all the way back to one, one year's old. How useful is money? Not that useful to you. So run it all the way forward to 96 on your deathbed. How useful is money to Not that useful to you. So 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, your approach and affinity, 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 a JP Morgan or other wealth managers one of the biggest problems They have this accumulation getting people to spend down their assets They've been saving they got their money they hit retirement and it's like that worth is going up in their 70s When's the party? You know, that's why I always ask. You just tell me when the party is. I have conversations with all the 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 wanna know when you're gonna 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, so a really good front of my name, Jim Lambrite, who was at the time the president of the XM bank, when the TARP program kicked on, because he was close with Hank Paulson and I already spent so much time in China

and had government clearance, basically Hank brought Jim Lambrite and Neil Cushkari 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? Like, what is this going to mean for the average person? And 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

a thousand dollars with three days notice, meaning they didn't have that excess liquidity of a thousand dollars. Again, I don't remember the number, but it was in the ballpark of like 30%. It was a high number. I don't know what those stats are today. I've tried to look some of them up 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 gonna collect my social security. Does this thinking still apply there? It applies in different ways. So 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, it'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. And so one of the things we look at

the total arc of your life, given the resources you have, how do we allocate them? We definitely want to focus on the money. Everybody wants to talk about the money and the resources you have. How do we allocate them? We definitely want to 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? Are you going 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, you know, one of the things I would say is 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, an allocation of my time. How do I allocate it? Is it the cruise at 70? Or is it the ski chip right now? And that's gonna be different for every single person, or is it a shirt or whatever fulfills them, or to go play in this chest 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 gonna sit down and watch friends, or I'm gonna go hang out in my mom's house and make a meal and spend time with them because I'm only gonna 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 in 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 non-linear 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 health span and lifespan indefinitely, but here's what it's gonna 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 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,, yeah, I'm going to live for 100 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 syncing. Not at this age, there's no amount of money. You know, I say that to certain people 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, you know, people absorb information in different ways. You can say it in all kinds of different ways and then they find like, ah, 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 Netfifilm it. 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 ordinary 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, 30 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 go into 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 the 1314, they don't even want to know you. You know, that's one of the errors I made,

you know, you always do it wrong as a parent. You don't 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 diowood zero thinking right, optimize your life. You know, 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 throwing it in, 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 a high school team. And I want to do, you know, and you're just throwing them in everything. 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, and you're just throwing them in everything. I want to meditate in 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 that saying is, is if you don't get the order right, like if you save certain experiences to the 80,

the 86 bucket, you don't get it. Yeah, you're not climbing Kilimanjaro. Yeah, and you're that 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 back packet 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 that fulfillment points. And so it's kind of time 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? So how do you think about your own risk tolerance? Now, I guess there's a, maybe a caveat the listener needs to understand at this point, which is what you do for a living today. So 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, and 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 stowa about things. They think about very robatically about expected outcome and they don't seem to be disturbed about negative outcomes as much as the average. Don't folks what expected outcomes mean because they want to understand that for 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 times 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 just going to lose one time of 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 payouts 1 and 4. 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%, 6% of the time, like think about the casinos edge in blackjack. It's like the 51. Yeah, .07 or .09 in blackjack in Crap.

It's like .03. They're wrong. Like 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, you're 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-averse. I don't like to take big risk. I never want to have the chance of losing something. Loss of version 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 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, quite frankly, it's really the fear of judgment more than the actual thing. They are 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 so's, et cetera. 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 trying to think is, get them the focus. They're always focused on the monetary cost of losing, but what about the cost of inaction and the opportunity cost? And by talking about the opportunity cost, 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, you know, my fear is reversed. I fear missing out on the opportunity cost. 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, you know, 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 physical risk tolerance

around one in 10,000. Give it 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 kind of like counterfactual regret minimization algorithm. So the algorithm of the book, the mental models in the book, or right, 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 three percent 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 their risk, going hellesking, skydiving, riding motorcycles, then so be it. If long as you're off autopilot and you've thought it through,

then that 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 wanna 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, how can I turn? You know, when you first line up 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, kind of it's easy. It happens what work. And you're like, I need to work to survive and I need to think about everything you're doing. And then all of a sudden it goes into default mode network. It's easy. It happens what work. And you're like, I need to work to survive. And I need to do this and you're panicking whatever next to you 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 an 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 want to hang out with my buddies and I want to go skiing and I want to get married and I want to donate to this charity and I want to do X, Y and Z, right? But we kind of 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,

you know, 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? Yeah. 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, you 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 conversation 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 is that 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 sometimes work or work related. You haven't exercised those muscles for years, 10, 20, 30 years, sometimes that people have their whole life for evolves around work. I've been using 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 atropate. How do you socialize without a job? How do you meet people without a job? Where do I go eat, what up 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 and building them up and you'll 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 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 you 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.

Now, 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 characters 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 wanna go back and start volunteering and doing something where they don't actually get paid But they're really enjoying what they're doing and 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, right, which is I still work harder than I should. And 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 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? That's kind of the argument I push towards them. I say, listen, really think about what in your job fulfills you and is that outside in the world and the purpose of that. Do you have balance? Are you balanced according to what you want in life, in this time period of your life, in the future time period in 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 between 50 and 55. I only get this level of health at this time.

Are these 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 come up with the same answer, like, hey, no, I want to work at the Wage of Factor or I want to work at this fulfilling, I can't argue that. How 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 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 gonna use it later and I'm gonna go on, you know, 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 daughter's only gonna be,

or my kids are only gonna be this age of this time. Maybe I should take a family trip and unplug and go and 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 thinking can barely, you know, and see me this way.

I want the memories in a 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. 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 going to 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 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 is 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 kids a teenager are daughters an amazing kid, but the reality of it is like,

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 want to see you. Yeah, yeah. Whereas, conversely, the boys can't leave us alone. And it's tempting to sort of 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 kind of one thing that I think is helpful for people to understand this season's, this idea of seasonality.

Like you, I probably think back to things I didn't do for different reasons, right? So when I was in college, I mean, I couldn't have worked harder. I mean, I was out of my mind how hard I worked. My night off, there's one night, which was Friday, when I only worked until 9 p.m. It was my break. And from 9 p.m. to 11, I would say, I need a little bit of you and you need 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. And I think of all the things I didn't do in college. So first of all, my only memories of college are pure misery. I hated every minute of college. I didn't have the experience. Yeah, now, you know, 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 like 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 CEO 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 it,

like 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, then necessary cost you money or whatever, but like things to do to have a college experience, not necessarily do them all. And I was thinking, maybe it 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, et cetera. 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? 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's that fit into the jigsport, the tetras game of my entire life? Am I doing it right? Maybe this experience that I'm saying goes here actually goes further out in my life. When I was trying to get the book published, one of the publisher said, I do exactly

what you're talking about in the book. I really like hiking. She explains yet in 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 etc We're gonna pull these forward and the sitting in operas and these type of trips a set in a church. We're gonna push forward Push into the future in operas and these types of trips are set in a church, we're gonna push forward. Push into the future. Push into the future. So you know, maxize, it's 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 want to be with you with your 13. And you're like, kind of forget when you were 13. Like you forget, like, oh yeah, I didn't want to be wrong with parents.

And then really hits you when you'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. Like there's a secretary, and then when she died, she had $10 million, it was a Tussy Roll stock, or whatever. And so this woman worked at a law firm, saved her money, lived a Bollyall accounts of very frugal life. And then when she died, she gave a multi-million 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 would 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 poll and I'm gonna give it to a charity.

But 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 out. The money's got to go somewhere. It was going to go either to the IRS who redistribute the money the way they see fit, usually into wars and stuff, but I'm all going to 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 it is 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 do this 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 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 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 book, if yeah, I can have Maroon 5 play in my backyard every day, et cetera, but you don't run a run 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 it because you're working for money that to have that, then the money became a negative. You really work too low for it, 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 wanna 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,

like the 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. And I don't know, there's a pretty good chance they still won't be able to give it all away, right? What they do is like effectively giving away. They want to solve problems, database, the decisions. But it takes time. I mean, that's the other point. You have to invest the time to try something out, see if it works, if it does double down, if it doesn't learn why it doesn't pivot.

And you know, you can't do that if you say, look, at the end of my life, I'm going to give away a billion dollars. Like, 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 Lauren John Arnold Foundation about the way they're going

in and helping people in 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, you know, we sometimes think that there are people in our lives that we want to give money to at some point. And you sort of 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 sort of 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 falls 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, et cetera. 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 in my will that are like close to my age. Like I'm gonna give money oh, when I die, I'm gonna give, I used to have people in my will that are close to my age. Like, I'm gonna give money to them when I die. And I'm like, wait a minute,

I'm gonna give my money to a 72 year old. Wouldn't 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 delay 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 and when they die, etc. Now the will has a purpose if you die early you got to distribute the money But really before you die if you 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 wanna give them extra number of dollars at this point in time. I've had that. I had a good year and there's people

that I would give money to if I had a good year or I'm not gonna wait until I'm dead or they're people in my well and I just went down on list and the maximum tax-regiff you can give per year per person is $15,000 and I had a, 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 like, why'd you write the book?

I wrote it to save my own life. I didn't want one waste my life. I wanted to get the most enough fulfillment. And after I wrote the book, mainly I talk about children. But 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. It's right now. Absolutely.

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 the ability to make choices, you're giving them fulfillment. So, waiting till they're 96 on the death bed, 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 $150,000 at 86. It's actually more impactful. There's more going on in life, more choices, things going on. The cumulative fact, 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't 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 is an engineer and a trader come into solving what becomes a mathematical set of equations, where you have certain variables

you need to understand. So 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. Okay. So 50 year old person is listening to this or 30 year old person. Maybe we do a few different scenarios. So let's start with the 50 year old who is firmly planted on the treadmill of autopilot.

Okay. 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, and they have a fuzzy notion that they're gonna 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, is it's very individual. It's like, what do you want? If you're sitting like, 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. You know, I've kind of let them go, 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 kind of head down and work. And I just want to make sure that my kids don't have debt when they go to college. What I do is, 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 mean, do you understand what I get at this? That's a cost now. One of my kids has a friend who did this African safari a year ago, they said it was amazing. You know, 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'd say is, is when you die, will you have $30,000? Are you in 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 as 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's $25,000 a night for my dad in the hospital? I'm sure I didn't cover that. Come on, though, it 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 edges 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.

We'll 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 the 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, with worth trying to play insurance agent? And so the lot of these are thematic conversations and not like hard number conversations. But you have a model. Yeah, we have a model, but the problem with the model is this is a distraction. The variables we're talking about are infinite. Yep. And we have to abstract them, abstract them, 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. Yeah, 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 want to have in your life, plus the discovery, the 20 to 30% discovery, maybe all your experiences go into 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 gonna have $30,000 trips in your lifetime? They'll go, yes. When is the optimal time for you to have $30,000 trips? And with whom? If you're never gonna have a $30,000 trips and with whom. If you're never gonna 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? Like I'll never take a $30,000 trip ever, ever, ever in my life.

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? I mean, to me, that is one of the big, uh-huh insights from this philosophy. You're in that thing. Well, I'm saving because of just in case it's sort of 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 no-sional 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 getting an annuity. You're worried about long-term health and what if I'm sick and I can't move and I need nurses to 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 a word for, et cetera. Let's mitigate 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.

Like 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 work. Oh, 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 to run in the wheel, they do the cheese and pretty soon,

you don't even have to give them the cheese. They said 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 and I'm like hanging out. I don't want to quit work 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 and 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 ping-o 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. Chris Rock and Tom, tonight, or is in Houston. No, Tari Nostan tonight. I don't even know. See, there you go. The new experience you might have.

But anyway, like, 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 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 have an exercise these other muscles and how they can replace it. And 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 experience. 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 jam, we're gonna work out. It's like, oh, God, why am I here? I don't like this, you know what I mean? Just to develop the muscle, to do the thing,

to play the tennis, the filming thing, that'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 cliché 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 B.J. 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, and you know, in years, you're like 40 pounds heavier, right? 200 extra calories.

How did that happen? How did I forget, you know, how did my life pass me by? How did I not go on these trips? How did I not have these experience? How did I not call my mother? How did not I 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 a 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. The life isn't forever. This period ends. These seasons, what my daughters and these seasons, what my startups and 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 kept, I was like, Oh, shit, I was on autopilot. Why don't I think about this, you know? And what do you use to help jar you out of autopilot on these things? The first macro thing is the deaf 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 visual 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.

We only have a couple days, so let's do the cafe and let's 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 and all the time to go, wait, it's time to go, I forgot to do this or go CD, I full tower or go whatever it is on your trip. And so, same that way 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 the calendar calendar. Now I've been nonsensitling, 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, brother? Online, there's like some sort of stoic reflections out there.

I'm 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, we'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, right? Well, my daughter's gonna be 16 16. She's going to be driving. How am I going to 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, uh, dooses, 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. You know, 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-densing, lung capacity, and what activities become less enjoyable first and then unable to do, because that determines a lot when your network 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'll think it was 11 steps to walk around the banister. All these tour buses coming to St. Petersburg, Asian, whatever.

Now 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 at a St. Petersburg for them. Now I'm not the same experience. I got more at a St. Petersburg for them. Now, I'm not saying it wasn't a wonderful trip on a nice trip for them, but they probably pushed St. Petersburg to late in life. And so there's so much hidden data and data out there in reports. If you read it, we talked about it earlier, like trying to get people to spend their money down. And one of the things answers I give, you know,

they say, well, why do you think people are still, their net worth is still going up into 72. And you know, 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 in those cruise ships trying to swim when they get the same townness. They think their life's going to be like a carnival commercial, and I'm like that carnival commercial kill most Americans. They have an hard attack going down those slides. And that of course just speaks to the imbalance between the three variables. It's like if you spend a little bit more of your time on your health, you would buy yourself a bigger runway to utilize your wealth on the experience. Right.

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. The next save, save, save, and I'm just like, well, what generation actually has fun?

So I'm really counters of the culture there. Here, you know, one of the criticisms of the book will be like, well, there's so many people who have zero in 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. And Japan is the opposite. And also Japanese, they're healthier.

And they're healthier longer. Yes, if you walk around Japan, the old people, it's an older country, but they're real, they're moving, they're doing things, or having activities, et cetera, and they're enjoying their life. For Americans, looking at the obesity're enjoying the life where Americans looking at the obesity, epidemic, and the lifestyle of Americans, their ability to consume experiences way 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 stand-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, like you can get a bum deal just going out, but you're not going to live in a bubble, you're going to 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. It's not the reward's not great enough. I did go skydiving. The first time the reward was great. The second time it was path is great. I didn't do it the third time

because the risk was the same and the reward wasn't. And the reward was going down and the risk was still the same. And so this is the same thing in training. 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 mean, 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, okay? So 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. I was like, I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm going to hang out in the islands and guys were gonna go wake boarding. I was like, I don't wanna go. I don't wanna go. I'm gonna hang out in the beach, I'm gonna love. And I thought about it for a second. I said, I don't have many wake boarding times left. Like, I'm not going wake boarding at 60.

I have this degenerative back thing. It's gonna be more dangerous for me, et cetera. If I am to wake board. It has to be that way. It is now. It is in this time period. And then I thought, okay, if I am to wakeboard. It has to be, man. 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 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 foresee it happening. I could make a special effort for it, but 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 was 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 of the wake. I said, I'm gonna 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 gotta be careful coming across it. Now I wake up, I do the low impact version of the sport, which I absolutely love. Until there's some technique to put cartilage in my back and restrain them in 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 away with boarding. That was the risk was worth the reward. There was no other time. Now as I get older, we're weak boarding is much more dangerous. And so I've gone to a sport where the speed is 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 want to be in something 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 birthday 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? Yeah, I had second thoughts. Like the events and the things I was planning. Remind me, it was down in the...

I went to St. Bart's. I love St. Bart's. 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. Bart's and I tell people that become successful, you either get new friends

or you scholarship your friends. Because you want to do experiences. A lot of times, a lot of people want to do shared experiences, right? They want their friends to come. They can't afford to just pop up and spend thousands dollars to go to St. Boris or do X, Y and Z. And it happens in various levels of success, right? Whether it's on a trip to Chicago, you know, super, 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 aware of 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 a half 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 gotta run out the hotel rooms, et cetera, and entertain me 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 to 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, etc. And hi, all the people I love and we're gonna do this fun activity. We're gonna listen to music, 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 Heavens 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?

Like, what am I going to do? Is I'm doing the right allocation, right? Like, you never know if you get it exactly right, right? Nobody gets it perfectly balanced, but this is the right direction. You know, it reminds me of something, when my wife and I got married in 2004, you know, we got married at a golf club.

We didn't have two nickels to rub together. So 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. It's seen amount of money for us at the time And it was amazing because everybody we actually cared about in our lives was there We were really fortunate that hey almost everybody could make it who we invited another almost 200 people there so at one point I grabbed my wife we kind of walked out onto a 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 gonna occur, we're gonna be dead, we'll be in the cast, it'll be at our funeral. So we gotta really take this in. And I realized 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. So 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 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 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.

Let me have a picnic with a ballgame 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 a group co-cool awesome people. I'll put you in it if you want to be in it. And I'm like, it's on. I'm going to get laser tag, best ass laser tag things. There's going to be some serum for everyone. I was like, yes, you know what I mean? Like I'm creating this experience.

Like, yeah, I'm going to 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 dual 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 league, we can have dual kinds of things. You know, it doesn't have to be laser tag. It could be whiffable at the park. You can have 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 about, 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. No, let me ask you a question at that birthday party when you're 45. How many people were there? We took out the Taiwan hotel and some of the other one, 80, 180, 100 or something. And how much time did you get to spend with each person? We're 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 when 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. Well go to a party and I'll be like, you got to talk for me, baby, 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. You know, I think after my wife read the book, that was one of her first thoughts, which is,

I've never had a birthday party. So the last birthday party I had was of a seven years old. After that, I just decided I never wanted to have a party. And I never have a party. And I never have a party. And I'm not going to have a party. I'm not going to have a party. I'm not going to have a party. I'm not going to have a party. I'm not going to have a which is, I've never had a birthday party. So the last birthday party I had was of a seven years old.

After that, I just decided I never wanted to have a party. And I never have. And she's like, 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. And I'm resisting it to know, and she's, she'd never throw a surprise party for me. She knows that would just kill me. So 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 an experience. I guess what bums me out is like I feel like I wouldn't even know how to appreciate a party. I get that like I walk around and I just really enjoy people meeting and socializing and connecting like at my wedding There were friends that didn't know each other and they're like they're great. Like you know great people I'm like of course I do you find somebody's great love you keep them close by I don't care if you dated them or whatever

Like you keep them close man like people that vibe with you is very important to me and me seeing them succeed I'm a person at Roots for people to hit the long ball. I'm not a hater. I'm a natural like, 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 to do the parties and make people have fun, I 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, 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 gotta solve problems

so I'm gonna get in, the vice-makers broken, whatever, there's that type of things. But yeah, I rather watch that movie than go to the movies. I'd rather be in that immersive theater than Mekitra Cotell 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 I 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? Ah, 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? You know, 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 or rep 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 a deeper and deeper layers of it. And sometimes I go deep into the subcutter because I use these variables wealth, 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 palaton? How much time do I really wanna spend on a peloton? How much time do I really wanna like regimented eating all the time and being a pain in the ass? How many chocolate chip cookies do I wanna 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 your chocolate chip cookies. I wanna fulfill my thinking deeply about these things. You know, that's kind of a cartoon version of it, but I hear other people think about 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 of what I would 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, etc.

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? 117. We're in 17.

117. And so that's kind of hit people. They're like, yeah, you're kind of right. I put the over under at the max at like 50, for any pair, that's not married obviously. 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 Last party I had which you were invited but you didn't come I was 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 experience. 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, you know, not in decline. And 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 want to give them a roadmap, you know, I want to 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, etc. 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 use 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 you 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 who give hammers and solace, they build the house, they build canoes,

this was wonderful things. They're like, how the hell did you build this? Some of you give hammers and solace 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, that 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. You might dad always try to get me to be out of turn. Get the hell out of here. I'm never doing that. But you know, 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 want to do. They have their own life and it's their adventure. And what I want to 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 want to 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, lake Austin, you pull them out, you mouth them out, 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 saved 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 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 gonna have a more fulfilling life, it's like I fucking did it. You know what I mean? 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. Alright, man, that was awesome. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth,

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