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

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.500 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.820 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:24.780 wellness, full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.900 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.320 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.340 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.740 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.780 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Bill Perkins. Bill is a hedge fund manager,

00:00:53.900 a very successful natural gas trader, an entrepreneur, and author of the book Die

00:00:58.880 With Zero, Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life. You may have heard me mention on

00:01:04.320 previous podcasts or on social media that over the past year, I've read three books that seemed

00:01:09.840 in some way connected to different sides of a similar theme, but they all had to do with something

00:01:16.800 about quality of life. These three books are From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks,

00:01:21.200 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, and of course, Die With Zero by Bill. After reading the book,

00:01:26.840 I realized we had about four friends in common, at least two or three of whom were mentioned in the

00:01:31.740 book, and it made it easy to reach out to him and say, hey, Bill, let's sit down and have a podcast,

00:01:35.560 which we do. So in this episode, we talk about Bill's background, his upbringing,

00:01:39.660 and the genesis of the philosophies in his book. These seeds were sown kind of early on. From there,

00:01:45.440 we then really talk about the overarching philosophy of this book, which is that we have these three

00:01:50.020 important resources, time, health, and experiences, and we use money as a conduit or a tool

00:01:58.100 to trade between those. If that doesn't make a lot of sense now, I think it will when we talk

00:02:03.560 through it. Throughout this interview, Bill makes the argument that no matter at what level of wealth

00:02:07.600 you are, most people are not focusing correctly on the most important asset that we have, which is

00:02:13.360 time, and that we need to optimize our life to have experiences throughout our life instead of waiting

00:02:18.280 until the end of life to do everything, which is really what most of us do. Throughout this,

00:02:22.420 we talk about the importance of understanding risk, including the opportunity cost of making

00:02:26.360 or not making decisions. We talk about the risk-reward matrix and thinking about regret and regret

00:02:31.020 minimization, and we talk about the dangers of living life on autopilot when it comes to work

00:02:34.940 and fulfillment. For as much as this podcast dives into the science of longevity, any long-time

00:02:41.520 listener knows that I am equally interested in the manners of emotional health and quality of life,

00:02:46.620 and to live a long life without appropriate happiness or quality of life or shared experiences

00:02:53.140 is not really to live at all. That's why a book like this is just as important to me as books about

00:02:59.460 the hardcore science of longevity. I think the insights that Bill shares in this interview will

00:03:04.040 help anyone think through how they're spending and allocating their time, no matter what level of

00:03:08.340 wealth they have. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Bill Perkins.

00:03:16.620 Bill, thanks so much for coming by. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

00:03:22.060 I have too. I'm really honored to be on your podcast.

00:03:24.940 I don't know. A little while ago, I made a video on Instagram where I talked about

00:03:28.220 three books I've read in the last 12 months that I didn't expect to A, have such an impact on how I

00:03:35.500 thought about things, but also B, even though they're completely different books, they strike me as

00:03:41.060 having kind of a unifying theme in this sort of thing about quality of life. The three books are,

00:03:46.780 one of them was From Strength to Strength, one of them is 4,000 Weeks, and the other one is Die

00:03:51.480 with Zero. Now, what's interesting is I know exactly who suggested I read 4,000 Weeks, and I'm really good

00:03:58.020 friends with the author of From Strength to Strength, so that's why I just read that knowing it was coming

00:04:02.360 out. I still don't remember who recommended Die with Zero to me, but I remember just thinking,

00:04:08.140 okay, well, cool. Sounds interesting. Ordered it, and then just couldn't put it down. As I think I

00:04:14.080 mentioned in the video, immediately made my wife read it, and then immediately just went out and

00:04:18.400 bought many copies of it, along with many copies of the other two books. So I basically started handing

00:04:24.220 them out as like a triplet copy. If someone was over and they hadn't read them, boom, they were leaving

00:04:29.220 with all three copies of the book. So that speaks to why I wanted to sit down with you, and let's give

00:04:35.560 people a sense of who you are. So you grew up in Jersey, right? Yeah, I grew up in Jersey City,

00:04:38.760 New Jersey. You're an engineer. We have that in common, right? Yeah, except I don't want people

00:04:42.880 to be impressive as an engineer. We had a saying on the football team, Ds get degrees, until later I

00:04:47.340 found out, wait, you can't graduate with a D in engineering. You have to at least get a C.

00:04:51.380 So I barely graduated. I was a super slacker, so I don't want to be like, I'm an engineer.

00:04:56.760 What position did you play? The bench. I played the bench, but I was a defensive back,

00:05:00.660 cornerback at the University of Iowa. But did it pay for school?

00:05:03.320 No, I was actually a walk-on. I was trying to get a scholarship. I had a partial scholarship,

00:05:07.560 which means they just give you some food. I basically broke my leg at the growth plate.

00:05:13.200 It was pretty much a has-been before I ever was. But when you love football, you love the sport,

00:05:19.620 you never want to let go, right? You're not like, oh, I'll just dive into my studies and

00:05:23.140 pick up this hobby. You're kind of like, football is life at that age.

00:05:27.420 You graduate college with a degree in engineering. Maybe you're not first in your class.

00:05:30.800 You decide, though, you're going to go and instead of going to grad school or something like that,

00:05:34.500 you're like, I'm going to go to New York. Is that your first job?

00:05:36.520 I love that. Not first in my class, the understatement of the year. I was kind of like

00:05:40.460 lost. Didn't know what I was going to do. Really was pretty much a slacker, underachiever at the

00:05:45.180 time. And my godfather calls me with one of those, like, what are you going to do with your life

00:05:49.660 at the point? And I knew I didn't want to go into engineering. It was kind of this cookie cutter life.

00:05:54.260 You don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit in it. You work on like a

00:05:57.780 subsection of a chip. Here's your career path, et cetera. It was all kind of laid out for you.

00:06:02.640 And that was unattractive to me. It kind of seemed like death to me. And at the time,

00:06:08.080 I saw this movie Wall Street. And I was like, oh, that's what I want. I want to be rich.

00:06:13.100 I want to go work in stocks. So when my godfather called me, I go, I want to be a stock broker

00:06:19.460 or a stock trader. And he goes, I don't know anything about equities, but there's this firm

00:06:23.760 and commodities. Mind you, I didn't know what a commodity was. That's looking for screen clerks.

00:06:29.720 Go check it out. And so I got an introduction, came up with my resume.

00:06:34.720 This is what you're like, late 80s, early 90s?

00:06:36.800 Like 91. And takes my resume, tears it up, walks me around the floor. People are yelling and screaming.

00:06:43.060 And they're kind of casual wear. And it's like trading places. And I was like, all this energy.

00:06:48.680 And I'm like, wow, if that guy can be rich, so can I. And so they didn't want to hire me,

00:06:54.140 actually. They were looking to give the job to someone else, another friend of the firm.

00:06:57.420 So I kind of hung out downstairs, waiting every day, calling. Can I come up? Can I become a peon

00:07:02.340 here? Can I become a peon? And finally, after three days, they let me become a peon.

00:07:07.300 So what did that job entail?

00:07:08.740 It's checking trades and sneaking sandwiches on the floor for traders. It's like literally

00:07:12.760 the worst version of the mailroom. But the system in the old days where guys would yell

00:07:17.680 and scream across the pit and write their trades on a pit card and also in their trade book.

00:07:22.840 They'd throw the pit cards into the center. There's a guy with glasses and a giant net.

00:07:28.540 And all these cards would go to him. They would catch them, put them down the chute,

00:07:32.220 and they would be entered into a computer system. My job was to check the trader's log versus the

00:07:38.240 computer's log. Your name becomes your trader. So if your trader was why not or S&M, that was your

00:07:44.340 name. So clerks are running around the floor going, why not? S&M, why not? And then if you're why not,

00:07:50.320 you're like, why not here? Ever here? I know selling five lots of 5480, not three lots of 5480. What do

00:07:56.760 you know? And if you know the same trade, then it's a simple process to correct it in the system.

00:08:03.000 And if you don't, you're like, no, no, I definitely know only three lots. Then you go to the traders

00:08:07.180 immediately and they kind of reconcile it. And that was a system like running around all day,

00:08:12.620 checking trades. This job is down on Wall Street. This firm's on Wall Street.

00:08:15.540 Yeah. So back when the World Trade Center was there, this was in for World Trade Center.

00:08:19.960 How much were you learning the business? Because I imagine one could take a job like that

00:08:24.380 and not actually learn what's happening, like what the machine is doing.

00:08:28.360 Yeah. That's when I decided to turn it on. I always tell people like, hey,

00:08:32.920 I was pretty much a, can I say fuck up? I was pretty much the fuck up of fuck ups for giving

00:08:39.780 what I had before college. But then I decided to turn it on. That poverty, that being a peon and

00:08:46.940 that desire to make it forced me to be like, I'm going to learn every single thing there is about

00:08:51.400 this business. I was reading books at night about trading, about the oil business, about options,

00:08:57.740 about whatever. I was a sponge and I really turned it on and said, I'm going to be diligent. I'm not

00:09:02.820 going to mess around. And as much as I possibly can as a 20 year old, right. And really, really

00:09:08.920 trying to make myself invaluable no matter where I was.

00:09:12.880 So where were you living at the time? What part of the city? Did you actually live in Manhattan?

00:09:15.940 When I first got there, I had to live at home with my mom, which was completely cramping my style.

00:09:19.720 And so I started driving a limo at night, the company limo at night to make ends meet.

00:09:24.580 What were you getting paid in that first job?

00:09:26.440 Oh, geez. I think it was sub $16,000 a year. I have to go look.

00:09:30.800 Sub 16.

00:09:31.860 Yeah. I think it was like 16, 16,000, but I was getting raises very quickly because I made

00:09:36.860 myself valuable and I would work at night and I would make more money driving the limo

00:09:42.100 on a daily basis because traders would like take me here and they'd be drunk and they'd tip you and

00:09:47.940 you weren't there necessarily for your current income. You were there for your future income.

00:09:52.040 And so I had another clerk named Jason Rufo who had a studio in the Upper West Side. And what he did

00:09:58.780 was he put up a wall by the kitchen and kind of made this small room in the studio. And I eventually

00:10:06.760 got an apartment with him on the Upper West Side living in like a pizza oven type space.

00:10:12.380 You know, but it was great because I was in New York City out of my mom's house.

00:10:16.320 I could have girls over and that pride that goes, well, I live on the Upper West Side. You know,

00:10:21.680 everybody wants to say they live in New York City. And so as I was getting raises and kind of moving

00:10:28.140 up, I gradually got into that life of, you know, what I call a buppy, black urban professional,

00:10:33.140 you know, buppies and yuppies. And that was the beginning of my journey.

00:10:37.140 Tell me, was your dad in the picture at this time?

00:10:39.040 So my dad is now older in poor health in Jersey City. So during this time, he'd had multiple

00:10:46.580 strokes. And my dad is kind of like me. He's fairly stubborn, but he was stubborn to the extreme.

00:10:52.300 Doctor says, don't do this. All the things you would tell him not to do and you need to be doing,

00:10:56.500 he's like, ah, to hell with that. You know what I mean? I guess. And so he's in the picture. My

00:11:01.360 parents are divorced. He's in Jersey City.

00:11:03.420 Had your parents gone to college?

00:11:04.720 My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University of Iowa. He was a real badass. He

00:11:08.900 had no intentions of going to school. He walked by a football field when he was a kid in high

00:11:13.980 school. And he's like, I want to do that. And coach is like, you don't know anything about

00:11:16.780 football. And he says, it seems like it's about hitting people. I know how to hit people. So

00:11:20.300 they give him some raggedy uniforms. He comes out for a practice. And then the next practice,

00:11:24.140 he has a brand new uniform. He's all everything, gets recruited to go to the University of Iowa to

00:11:29.880 go to college. And so there he is in college in 1959 at the University of Iowa, all badass from

00:11:36.000 Jersey City. So he had gone to college. And then my mom went to college, finished college

00:11:41.560 while I think it was like preteen or late teens. But I had the benefit of two college educated

00:11:48.080 parents.

00:11:49.160 And how much were they understanding your hunger, your drive, your aspirations in this new role?

00:11:56.520 I mean, because presumably they had seen you in high school and college, not achieving at

00:12:00.520 your potential. And now all of a sudden you're hustling, you're working two jobs, you're reading,

00:12:05.280 you're learning, you're doing everything. Were they purview to that sort of metamorphosis in you?

00:12:10.020 They saw it later. I'm the kid that didn't take out the garbage. I always say, don't tell your

00:12:13.720 parents your dreams because they'll just piss on them because they've seen you at your worst,

00:12:17.480 at your failures, as you're growing. They have this kind of image of you when you were the

00:12:22.480 caterpillar, not the butterfly.

00:12:24.660 So you weren't necessarily like advertising to them, this is what I want to do.

00:12:27.580 No. They started seeing it. I remember the time when I finally made, I got a raise and I was

00:12:32.860 like, I did the calculation. I'm just like, holy shit, I make more money than my mom. Like I've

00:12:37.100 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.

00:12:42.720 Me with my badge, you know, used to wear around as a badge of honor. Like I get onto the New York

00:12:47.460 Mercantile Exchange, et cetera. But they'd see I'm going out or I'm flying here or I'm doing

00:12:52.900 whatever. And it's like, oh, the kid must be doing okay.

00:12:55.860 It wasn't until I got recruited to go to Houston, started buying the assets that adults start

00:13:03.120 buying. And I paid my mom back for something that I did when I was a teenager that she didn't

00:13:09.700 know that they're like, okay.

00:13:11.480 What was that?

00:13:12.340 When I was younger, I had a stick Toyota that my mom had. It was her car. I was driving it.

00:13:18.280 And my friend, Pete Theibel, it's like, I want to drive the car. I want to teach me how to drive

00:13:23.160 the car. I want to drive the car. I'm not supposed to drive the car. So anyway,

00:13:26.180 long story short, he hits the gas instead of the clutch, spins the car out. The back of it

00:13:31.000 spins around, hits a telephone pole. Trunk pops up. It has this big giant dent. I'm like, holy shit,

00:13:35.920 what am I going to do? You know? So I tell my mom the story that we went to go get pizza and parked

00:13:42.580 it and a truck must've hit it on the side or bumped it and went on. And that was my lie to my mom about

00:13:47.920 this car that I felt guilty about. I said, one day I'm going to pay for this car in spades. That

00:13:54.980 happened to my mom. And so one day I gave my mom $40,000 and I was like, mom, remember that time

00:14:00.100 the car had that brown mark on it. We told you it was a truck. Well, this is what really happened.

00:14:04.900 How did she react to that?

00:14:06.540 She started laughing. She goes, I knew something was strange about that. The story fit, but there

00:14:12.060 was something strange about that. She just kind of laughed and was thankful that one, it was a great

00:14:17.660 investment having that car beat up, but she just kind of laughed and we just reminisced about it.

00:14:23.040 So let's go back to when you're on the Upper West Side. You write about this in the book.

00:14:25.900 You and your roommate kind of had a slightly different, I don't know, call it a point of

00:14:30.900 view on future earnings and what that allowed you to do with your time. You told a story about

00:14:36.660 something you did that seemed kind of bold. That he did that was kind of bold. You're

00:14:41.360 talking about when Jason took the trip. Yeah. So Jason, I don't know if our views were very

00:14:46.620 thought out or just wired in, but I was head down like, I got to make it. I got to become a trader.

00:14:51.840 I got to have my head down. I'm saving money. I'm really at this point in my life,

00:14:56.640 super diligent, trying to convince my boss to get on the bus program to save money,

00:15:01.300 writing down every single nickel that I bought, et cetera. I'm really focused on my career

00:15:06.020 trajectory. And Jason is like... Does Jason work in the same firm?

00:15:09.800 He works at another firm. If you look at the old pictures, all the phone booths are right next to

00:15:13.580 each other. He's like right next to me, even though he's not at the same firm. We're all crowded into

00:15:17.160 one area. And Jason's like, I'm going to go backpacking for Europe for a couple of months.

00:15:22.280 I'm like, what? How are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to borrow money from this guy who

00:15:26.840 was a loan shark. And I'm like, wait, what? You're going to borrow money from this guy and you're going

00:15:34.560 to go backpacking in Europe. I'm like, this is insane. This is insanity. My head is about to explode.

00:15:41.120 I'm like, you're going to miss out. And what if they hire another screen clerk and your job's not

00:15:46.020 there when you come back? And how are you going to pay this guy back if you don't pay him back?

00:15:49.100 This is not like, oh, penalties and interest. This is like knees and ankles. And so I just didn't get

00:15:54.420 it. That experience, I wasn't thinking about like die with zero and certain experiences belong in a

00:16:00.920 certain period of your life, et cetera. I was just ultimately on this autopilot of trying to be

00:16:06.280 successful and make money at that time of my life. And Jason was like, I'm going backpacking.

00:16:12.120 So he went, I stayed, he came back, had a screen clerking job.

00:16:17.060 Different firm or same firm?

00:16:18.060 Same firm. Wasn't that much noticeable different. I moved up a little bit,

00:16:21.340 but it wasn't that noticeable different. But he came back richer. He came back with

00:16:25.800 stories and experiences and romance and lifelong friends. In the beginning, it was kind of, oh,

00:16:33.240 wow, maybe I missed out. Maybe I could have jumped in for a week, that type of thing. And as time went on,

00:16:38.400 I really, really regretted not joining him on that trip. When it finally came time where like,

00:16:43.340 I'm going to go Europe, I'm going to have this backpacking experience. I was too bougie. I had

00:16:48.100 money. I wasn't going to go stay at youth hostels. I wasn't going to capture these trains. I was going

00:16:52.200 to have an experience, but a different experience. The type of experience he had was for that time in

00:16:58.360 your life. And the type of experience, even though it was wonderful, it was not as rich as his

00:17:03.840 experience because the time had passed me by. It's one of my big, big, big regrets in life.

00:17:10.880 So how did you start to formulate this understanding about these different types of resources, be it

00:17:16.780 time, be it money, which is the resource I think a lot of people think about experiences themselves

00:17:22.540 as, for lack of a better word, an asset or a thing, the actual experience, the people you're

00:17:27.580 meeting, all of these different things. When did you start to coalesce around some of the ideas

00:17:32.000 that ultimately, of course, would go on to become the thesis of this book?

00:17:35.540 It was slowly over time. Even when I got to the exchange, I was like in this hurry to get rich.

00:17:40.980 And the reason why I was in a hurry, because I had this bias, I had this belief. I was like,

00:17:44.760 yeah, there's rich guys here, but they're old. What can they possibly do with the money? I'm young.

00:17:48.400 I'm 21. I'm ageist. I can't imagine the use of a million dollars when you're 40. What are you

00:17:55.040 going to do? Buy a nicer car to drive your kids around? It just seems like loss on them. They don't get to

00:17:59.380 do fun things. Now, I was wrong about that, but I was right about the utility of money over time.

00:18:06.080 And I also read this book at this time called Your Money or Your Life that kind of transformed

00:18:10.680 my understanding of what money is. It's a very detailed book that has these exercises that has

00:18:18.800 you look at how you spend your hours from going to work, getting ready for work, the things you spend

00:18:24.320 on work, and really figuring out what your true hourly wage is. After tax, this is what an hour

00:18:29.960 of your time of your life is worth. And then it has you not think of everything in money, but in time.

00:18:37.580 So instead of going to the movies and say it cost me $10, it's like that cost me one hour and 15

00:18:44.320 minutes of my time to go to this movie. To buy this shirt, it cost me three hours of my time.

00:18:49.240 And so you get this idea that I'm exchanging my life for certain things. The experience of buying

00:18:55.920 a shirt, going to the movie, going on a trip. And that hit me hard.

00:18:59.720 And where were you at this point? This is before you went to Houston?

00:19:01.820 Before I went to Houston. That hit me hard. And that's what really turned me into like,

00:19:05.500 I'm going to save. The two things I got out of it is I want a lot of money and I'm going to become

00:19:09.280 this very frugal person. There's this movement called FIRE, which that book is kind of like the Bible,

00:19:15.100 the precursor to the FIRE movement, which is financial independence, retire early.

00:19:19.580 And I was kind of like an early FIRE guy. I'm going to save my way to riches, right? I'm going

00:19:24.380 to save and then retire early. And sorry, did you know what you wanted to do when you retired?

00:19:30.820 I went on to another autopilot. I went on another version of autopilot. I read a book,

00:19:34.600 I got these concepts out of it. And I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I didn't think about

00:19:38.980 the big picture of everything, but certain concepts were coming to me. I exchanged hours in my life for

00:19:44.020 money. And then that money is used for the things I want. Let's take the abstract of money out of it

00:19:49.200 and look at what hours of my life are being exchanged for. That was a great concept to sink

00:19:54.400 in very viscerally. The idea that- It's also just to double click on that, Bill, it's also visceral

00:19:59.840 when you start to think of the difference between using money for activities or trips versus things.

00:20:08.120 So I buy a shirt and this shirt basically works out to three hours of what I make per hour. So this

00:20:15.300 is a $3 shirt. I mean a three hour shirt. Conversely, I take my daughter out overnight. We do like a daddy

00:20:23.720 daughter date night, go out to dinner, stay at a nice hotel, have a fancy breakfast the next day.

00:20:28.780 That's five hours of my time in terms of work. But do you see those sort of differently at the time

00:20:34.500 that one of those is like an experience and one of them is a thing?

00:20:38.100 Not in the way that you're properly analyzing it, but in more of an intuitive way.

00:20:42.880 Because when you start to think about things in time, it's like, wait a minute, three hours for

00:20:46.100 a shirt versus going here, having a sandwich and hanging out with my friends or whatever it is,

00:20:51.220 your values start to, you really get in touch with your values because it's not an abstract land.

00:20:55.420 It's like when you're in a casino and they give you chips, it's one of the greatest things to do

00:20:58.180 is give you chips. It's not money. You're tipping $25. You're throwing, let it all ride

00:21:01.980 because it's so abstracted from money. So it's an abstraction on an abstraction.

00:21:06.720 By removing that abstraction, you get closer to your values.

00:21:10.860 Right. Imagine that you have $25 chips. You figure out your hourly after tax,

00:21:15.420 all in wage is $25 an hour. Every time you flick a chip, it's like I gave an hour of my life.

00:21:20.700 Right. Boom, boom, boom.

00:21:22.100 So when you start thinking about things in terms of hours of your life and you have finite hours,

00:21:25.500 you start to really get closer to your values. You can still be on autopilot, but you're closer.

00:21:29.840 And so things like this were happening. And at that time at the exchange, like most people,

00:21:37.080 I had like, what is it all for? Like, what do I want? I'm here to get rich, but why?

00:21:42.540 Are you having that discussion with either people who are your peers who are presumably

00:21:47.120 on the same treadmill or the people who are already rich, but still presumably killing themselves,

00:21:53.820 trading their health for wealth?

00:21:54.960 No, I'm generally having it with myself and reading books, but I'm still asking myself,

00:21:58.540 but why? Like, what do I want? You know, and I'm remembering conversations that

00:22:02.480 maybe I've had throughout my life. There was a college football player named Dwight Sistrunk and

00:22:06.860 I was like trying to do engineering and we were debating something. It's like, listen,

00:22:10.380 you might want to pick a fence and a wife and something like that and that life. I don't want

00:22:13.940 that life. I don't want that cookie cutter life. That's fine for you, but that's not my path.

00:22:17.880 I thought about it and I was like, do I really want that? You know, certain things that he said

00:22:22.240 that he didn't want that I was actually working for, you know, thinking that this was my path.

00:22:27.720 I actually realized, no, I don't want that. You know, I'm pretty hard headed. It takes a while

00:22:31.620 for these things to seep in.

00:22:33.360 I would argue a little different, Bill. I would argue that at this point, you're 22, 23, 24.

00:22:37.840 I think that's remarkably early to be having that thought, don't you?

00:22:41.860 Yeah, I guess it took a while for it to finally percolate into some sort of action plan.

00:22:47.460 I'm thinking about these things, but they're not resulting in the proper behavior changes yet.

00:22:53.900 I'm still formulating it. You know, everyone says, I want to be rich before I'm 30 or I'm rich

00:22:58.580 before 40. No one's out there saying, I want to be rich before I'm 86. So intuitively in there,

00:23:04.380 there's something about the utility of money that it's not as valuable to you later on in life.

00:23:10.340 Yeah. It's one of the games I often play with my patients. It's anybody. I could play this game

00:23:14.360 with anybody, which is, listen, if right now, you always do this with someone who's younger,

00:23:18.720 obviously. I say like, right now, would you trade places with Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger?

00:23:24.380 And they're like, everybody says, of course not. And I was like, what do you mean? Of course not.

00:23:27.600 Like Warren Buffett's worth a hundred billion dollars. How would you not trade places with

00:23:32.340 him? And they're like, I mean, he's 90 years old or whatever. And I say, okay, so would you rather

00:23:37.460 have not a penny to your name and be 20 or have a hundred billion dollars and be 90? No other

00:23:43.100 difference, right? Like I'm not going to stipulate anything else. I've never met a person who

00:23:46.940 wouldn't take being a completely broke 20 year old. And that I think speaks less to health because

00:23:54.200 look, ostensibly Warren still appears somewhat healthy, right? He's cognitively intact. It's not

00:23:58.220 like he's like a frail 90 year old or whatever he is, but it's about runway. It's about, yeah, but maybe

00:24:04.600 Warren might have 10 years of life left. That 20 year old could have 80 years of life left.

00:24:08.940 And so when you face it in such stark terms, only then I think does the average person start to

00:24:14.960 realize how precious time is. I think they also see that Warren can't sprint, dunk a basketball,

00:24:22.020 go wakeboarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that enjoy me. And that's what I

00:24:25.800 thought about. And I thought to myself, if for reading this book, like I'm spending hours of my

00:24:32.360 life to acquire these experiences. I mean, experiences in the broadest sense, whether it's like going on a

00:24:38.380 walk or being able to choose to go on a walk or go get a sandwich or buy a shirt or whatever.

00:24:42.960 If I'm exchanging hours in my life and I don't go acquire these experiences, I pretty much wasted

00:24:47.920 hours of my life. So that thought hits and it's like, okay, you don't want to leave anything on

00:24:53.360 the table. In the game of life, when I die, you don't want to leave chips on the table, right? Like

00:24:57.600 you want to use all your resources before you die. Inherent in that is that your choices,

00:25:03.120 your experiences, those experiences are what make you, you. Those are the things that fulfill you.

00:25:08.380 And everybody's going to be different. And so consequently, having more of it and enjoying

00:25:14.360 more of it will lead to a more fulfilling life. So that if I'm solving for fulfillment, I don't care

00:25:20.220 about the money. I care about the things I want, the experiences I want to have. If I'm trying to

00:25:25.500 solve for that, one of the things you come quickly to is that you need to use all your resources up

00:25:30.620 before you die. The second thing you come to with the fact that your resources, particularly money,

00:25:36.780 are less valuable to you when you're older, then you start to think, well, there must be a curve.

00:25:42.640 Because if you're going to end at zero, is it this kind of rectangle shape that just goes down?

00:25:47.300 Is it a 45 degree angle sleep? Or is there some sort of curve? And so what I like to do to understand

00:25:53.160 certain things that doesn't always work is think of zero and think of infinity. All right, let's run

00:25:58.140 it all the way back to one, 20 years old. How useful is money? Not that useful to you.

00:26:02.560 Let's run it all the way forward to 96 on your deathbed. How useful is money to you? Not that

00:26:07.660 useful. So clearly there's like some sort of ramp up of utility and then a decline of utility.

00:26:12.900 And I became obsessed with finding what that curve was. Because I was like, this is it. If you're

00:26:20.160 making more money for delayed gratification later in life, you approach infinity, you're actually

00:26:25.560 wasting your time. You should be spending down your assets at a certain point. There's an inflection

00:26:29.860 point where not a number, but a date where your wealth should be going down in order to get the

00:26:35.960 most fulfillment. Now let's pause for a second, Bill. Is that standard thinking slash teaching

00:26:42.780 within the wealth management community? No, but it is a standard problem. If you look at

00:26:47.520 JP Morgan or other wealth managers, one of the biggest problems they have is the accumulation,

00:26:52.800 getting people to spend down their assets. They've been saving, they got their money,

00:26:57.180 they hit retirement, and it's like their net worth is going up into their 70s. When's the party?

00:27:03.180 That's why I always ask them, like, you just tell me when the party is. I have conversations

00:27:06.340 with older people or other people. I'm like, listen, it's okay that you're saving. What are

00:27:10.940 you saving for? And when's the party? I just want to know when you're going to use up all your

00:27:14.940 resources. Let's also pivot and talk about, I remember one of the stats that always stuck with me

00:27:21.280 was during 2008. So a really good friend of mine named Jim Lambright, who was at the time the

00:27:25.660 president of the Ex-Im Bank. When the TARP program kicked on, because he was close with Hank Paulson

00:27:32.000 and had already spent so much time in China and had government clearance, basically Hank brought

00:27:35.900 Jim Lambright and Neil Kashkari, who was with him already at the treasury, I believe, to run TARP.

00:27:41.300 So basically, Jim and Neil are doing all the deals for TARP. And Jim is getting steeped in how bad is

00:27:49.680 this going to be? Like, what is this going to mean for the average person? And I remember one day he

00:27:56.020 called me with a stat that I couldn't believe, and I forget the stat, so this is only directionally it,

00:28:01.320 but it was what fraction of people in the United States could not produce $1,000 with three days

00:28:09.020 notice, meaning they didn't have that excess liquidity of $1,000. Again, I don't remember the

00:28:14.320 number, but it was in the ballpark of like 30%. It was a high number. I don't know what those stats

00:28:20.320 are today. I've tried to look some of them up, and they're not maybe quite as dire as that, but

00:28:25.940 they're not that much better. No, they're not great. It's not great.

00:28:28.600 So what's the natural history of that person who's 40 years old, whose total net worth is $50,000,

00:28:36.900 and their available liquidity is $1,000, you know, they're thinking I'm going to work till I'm 65 or

00:28:45.120 70 or whatever, and then I'm going to collect my social security. Does this thinking still apply

00:28:50.320 there? It applies in different ways. So what I've come up with this book is there's three variables,

00:28:56.360 your wealth, your health, and your time. And we're taking those three variables and we're solving

00:29:01.060 for net fulfillment. So we're not solving for maximum wealth. We're not solving even for maximum

00:29:07.660 health. There's maximum time. We're solving for net fulfillment. I'm saying that's your purpose.

00:29:12.080 If you're with me, we're solving for net fulfillment. And so one of the things we look at is that the total

00:29:18.440 arc of your life, given the resources you have, how do we allocate them? We definitely want to focus

00:29:23.980 on the money. Everybody wants to talk about the money and the resources, but there's decisions that you

00:29:28.220 make even without money. Whether you go on a walk with your daughters, you play cards with your

00:29:34.860 friends late at night. Do you tuck them in at night or you go hang out with the boys? And so in the book,

00:29:40.180 we talk about the seasons of your life. Certain activities transfer nicely to the next season in

00:29:45.820 your life from 20 to 30 to 30 to 40. And some of them don't transfer well. They're less enjoyable.

00:29:51.400 And some of them don't transfer at all. It's impossible. One of the things when the 40-year-old who has

00:29:57.380 $50,000, one of the things I would say is, what's your survival number? Have you calculated that at

00:30:03.020 retirement? Are you surviving retirement or are you in serious negative dire straits? And once we've

00:30:09.560 calculated that, okay, I need to work and save this much and plus social security, I've had my survival

00:30:15.280 number. Now the rest is for experiences, things I want to do and allocation of my time. How do I

00:30:22.740 allocate it? Is it the cruise at 70 or is it the ski trip right now? And that's going to be different

00:30:29.860 for every single person. Or is it a shirt or whatever fulfills them? Or to go play in this

00:30:34.000 chess tournament, pay the entry fee. And for people with zero money, you still have an allocation game

00:30:40.620 to play. You still have your health and your time. You can still decide, hey, I'm going to sit down

00:30:48.000 and watch friends. Or I'm going to go hang out at my mom's house and make a meal and spend time with

00:30:53.240 them because I'm only going to see them 20 times before they're gone. So this type of thinking about

00:30:57.700 allocating your resources at the proper place, getting off autopilot, holds at all wealth levels.

00:31:04.960 It doesn't hold at all health levels because if you have zero health, you have zero. You're done.

00:31:08.120 It's over. But it holds at all wealth levels. So that type of thinking to maximize fulfillment

00:31:13.420 and knowing that you have seasons of your life, that your body decays, your attitudes change,

00:31:21.340 and they pass. That type of thinking in that I need to get things in the right order and use my

00:31:26.980 resources properly, that's going to help you have a more fulfilling life whether you have zero money

00:31:31.740 or $100 million. There are many people with zero who are having a way more fulfilling life than

00:31:37.400 Warren Buffett, I would say.

00:31:38.640 One of the things about the way you framed it, Bill, that I really like, it's a very nonlinear

00:31:44.260 problem. So let's look at those three variables. At the surface, one might suggest, well, wait a

00:31:49.640 minute. It is a min-max game with one of them. You always want max health. But technically, even that's

00:31:55.220 not true because if I told you, Bill, I have the secret for you to have max health. I can preserve

00:32:02.620 your health span and lifespan indefinitely, but here's what it's going to cost you. Every minute of the

00:32:07.280 day, you have to be working on your health. So from the moment you wake up from sleep,

00:32:12.560 you have to do a two-hour meditation. We then have to go and do this yoga. We then have to go and do

00:32:17.520 this workout. When you're done that workout, you have to go and do this, and then you have to go to

00:32:21.900 bed. You'd be like, well, Peter, that sucks because, yeah, I'm going to live for 100 more years and I

00:32:28.040 don't get to spend any of that time doing anything other than improving my health. It's a glib example,

00:32:33.700 but it factors, I think. It illustrates the point.

00:32:36.980 I usually say, there's no amount of money you can pay me to do 10 years in Sing Sing.

00:32:43.120 Not at this age. There's no amount of money. I say that to certain people who are just always

00:32:47.200 delaying gratification. I'm like, you're kind of in a jail. You're basically doing a version of,

00:32:52.120 I'm doing time. Maybe you shouldn't be doing time at this point in your life.

00:32:57.260 And so these are kind of just ways. People absorb information in different ways. You can say it in

00:33:01.860 all kinds of different ways. And then they finally go, aha, I got it. That really spoke to me the way

00:33:05.820 you said it. I try and hit people with different versions of this. One of the things I like to say

00:33:11.040 to people is, life is like Tetris. You got to get the order right in order to get the high score

00:33:16.180 of net fulfillment. Let's say you're in heaven.

00:33:18.680 By the way, Tetris is the only video game I enjoy. I go through periods where I won't play it for a year.

00:33:25.140 And then I go through periods where I'll waste 30 minutes a day, which is a lot of time for me.

00:33:29.680 For me, 30 minutes in a day is an inordinate amount of time. And when I'm sometimes in those

00:33:34.180 phases of playing it a lot, I dream in Tetris. I literally dream that everything I'm seeing

00:33:41.880 in the world, I'm trying to optimize the shape and interaction of.

00:33:46.020 In the book, I talk about this thing about time buckets, basically that

00:33:48.960 you take your life in segments, any kind of segment you want, 20 to 25, 35 to 40, 50 to 60.

00:33:55.460 You think about leisure, job, career, what experience you want to have in each of those periods.

00:33:59.680 And as you're doing that, you realize that, wait a minute, the going to the clubs and strip clubs

00:34:04.380 and hanging out probably should be before I get married, not after. The reading books to my kids

00:34:09.460 when they're children, this must be in this bucket.

00:34:11.780 Right. Because they're not going to want me reading to them in college.

00:34:13.880 Exactly. Or even when they're 13, 14, they don't even want to know you. That's one of the errors

00:34:17.540 I made. You always do it wrong as a parent. You don't want to spend too much time with them,

00:34:21.360 et cetera. It's like, wait a minute, maybe I should have been doing this activity instead of that

00:34:25.580 activity. Kind of the die with zero thinking, right? Optimize your life.

00:34:29.680 The thought experiment, I says, listen, you're up in heaven. You have the bucket of experiences.

00:34:34.580 These are all the choices you can have. And God says, take as much as you want. You're throwing

00:34:39.180 it in. You're like, I want to have sex 30,000 times. And I want to climb Kilimanjaro. And I want

00:34:43.000 to play hockey. I want to be in a high school team. And I want to do, you know, and you're just

00:34:46.320 throwing them in everything. I want to meditate and yoga, right? And then God goes, great. I'm going to let

00:34:52.260 you have all those experiences. But there's one trick. You got to get the order right.

00:34:55.900 And what's it saying is, is if you don't get the order right, like if you save certain experiences

00:35:00.640 to the 80 to 86 bucket, you don't get it.

00:35:04.000 Yeah. You're not climbing Kilimanjaro.

00:35:05.140 Yeah. If you're like nightclub and road trips with your buddies before you're married and you

00:35:09.460 have two kids or whatever, you don't get that. If you don't go backpacking with your friend and

00:35:13.920 youth hostels, et cetera, when you're 21, when you get the shot, you don't get that experience.

00:35:19.160 Or it's a bastardized, not as fulfilling experience. So you don't get the net fulfillment

00:35:23.900 points. And so it's kind of tied with zero. What do you want out of your life? Get off autopilot.

00:35:29.280 What do you want on a life? What resources do you have? And how do we optimize? How do we get the

00:35:33.880 most out of it? So how do you think about your own risk tolerance? Now, I guess there's maybe a caveat

00:35:41.820 the listener needs to understand at this point, which is what you do for a living today. So you are an

00:35:47.940 energy trader, among other things, do many things. But is it safe to say that the majority of the

00:35:52.520 wealth you've created came through your ability to understand how natural gas moves and trade on

00:35:58.900 that? Yeah. The majority of my wealth came from predicting the future. And that's generally the

00:36:02.740 future of natural gas prices. John Arnold, who is one of your closest colleagues, someone who I've

00:36:08.080 had on the podcast, nicknamed the king of gas, the greatest gas trader of all time. Do you look at a

00:36:13.500 guy like John and say he has a high risk tolerance? Do you look at someone like yourself and say,

00:36:17.700 you have a high risk tolerance? Or do you not feel that way at all and feel like, nope,

00:36:21.960 I'm completely in control of calculated risks. And that's why they net out to be positive. In other

00:36:28.220 words, I'm less swayed by short-term volatility because my methodology doesn't feel like I'm

00:36:33.740 gambling. The best traders I've seen have been pretty stoic about things. They think about very

00:36:38.720 robotically about expected outcome. And they don't seem to be disturbed about negative outcomes as much

00:36:45.760 as the average person. Tell folks what expected outcomes mean because they want to understand

00:36:49.360 the probabilities and how these work. If you place a bet and the payout is one in four,

00:36:54.960 but the odds are 50-50, half the time you're going to get four times your money and half the time

00:37:00.420 you're just going to lose one times your money. So that's positive expected outcome, right? You're

00:37:03.920 going to make money. This is a great trade. But remember, 75% of the time you're going to lose

00:37:09.160 in this scenario. No, the payout, half the time you're going to lose. Half the time you're going

00:37:12.460 to lose, the payout's one in four. So half the time you're pissed. You're upset. And a lot of people

00:37:18.180 can't deal with that. They need four or five or seven positive events emotionally, psychologically,

00:37:27.780 forever, every negative event. In trading, that just doesn't exist.

00:37:32.360 Yeah. In trading, if someone is right half the time-

00:37:35.680 They're pretty good. If they're right, 55%, 60% of the time, they're right. Think about the

00:37:40.280 casino's edge in blackjack. It could be 51-

00:37:43.000 Yeah, 0.07 or 0.09 in blackjack. In craps, it's like 0.03. They're wrong a lot of the time.

00:37:49.880 But ultimately, the law of large numbers, they make a bunch of money. But if your emotional

00:37:53.540 calculus is different, where such that you need a greater being right ratio, then you're not going

00:37:59.840 to make it because stress clouds your thinking and your judgment.

00:38:03.700 So with that said, if someone says to you, you just have a really high tolerance for risk,

00:38:08.960 I don't. I'm very risk-averse. I don't like to take big risk. I never want to have the chance

00:38:14.820 of losing something. Loss aversion is a greater motivator for me than gain. How do you talk to

00:38:21.100 that person and how do you help them think through the difference between fear and risk tolerance?

00:38:26.000 Well, the first thing I do is just try and break down what are they actually afraid of. A lot of times

00:38:30.140 when people say the bad thing is not as bad as they imagine it in their head. And a lot of times,

00:38:36.680 quite frankly, it's really the fear of judgment more than the actual thing. They find out that

00:38:41.840 they can survive the potential negative financial hit. What they can't survive is, oh, my friends,

00:38:48.220 my colleagues, my spouse, my mom, my dad, the shame, I got it wrong, the I told you so's, etc.

00:38:54.980 There's a lot of that fear baked into, disguised as, I can't risk these dollars. I'm like, yeah,

00:39:00.980 you can. That type of thing. Then the other thing is I'm trying to think is, get them to focus. They

00:39:06.080 always focus on the monetary cost of losing. But what about the cost of inaction and the opportunity

00:39:12.120 costs? And by talking about the opportunity costs, I get them to see the asymmetry of the risk.

00:39:17.480 Maybe I have a greater tolerance for risk. But what I do is that I fear, my fear is reversed. I fear

00:39:23.960 missing out on the opportunity costs. I fear not getting the max. A lot of people fear running out

00:39:29.200 of money. I fear wasting my life. I am more worried about looking back and being like, shit,

00:39:36.480 I wasted my only ride that I had than running out of money. One of my patients said something to me

00:39:42.980 once. He was about to do something that I just thought was really risky. Now it was a very unique

00:39:49.220 opportunity. And he said, Peter, I'm going to go and do this thing. And I said, I think there's a

00:39:53.540 significant risk to you in doing that. It wasn't a financial risk. It would have been a health risk,

00:39:57.480 a physical risk. And he said, you're right, Peter. I acknowledge that risk. That is the risk.

00:40:03.500 But I'm optimizing in a risk, pardon me, a regret minimizing framework, not a risk minimizing

00:40:11.580 framework. For me, it's risk reward. If I really love cigarettes, like love them, I'd smoke cigarettes.

00:40:18.440 You know what I mean? If I really love skydiving all the time, I went twice, but it was diminishing

00:40:23.240 returns. I go skydiving. It's what fulfills you. And so I'm a risk reward guy. Is the reward

00:40:30.800 commensurate with the risk? Some people like to ride motorcycles. For me, it's not worth the risk.

00:40:35.060 Like I have a physical risk tolerance around one in 10,000. If it's more dangerous than one in 10,000,

00:40:40.580 the reward really has to be worth it for me to do it. And so that's the way I think. That helps me

00:40:46.720 in this kind of like counterfactual regret minimization algorithm. So the algorithm of the

00:40:51.560 book, the mental models in the book are right. You know, when a chess computer plays you, it has a

00:40:56.000 regret minimization algorithm. And what it wants to do is a solving to win. AlphaGo is solving

00:41:00.680 to win the game. In the game of life, what I'm solving for, the regret minimization I'm solving

00:41:05.800 for is net fulfillment. I want the highest score in net fulfillment. I don't want the highest money.

00:41:11.480 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

00:41:16.600 top 0.5%. Top 3% is great enough. I'll give up the tail end of my life. You know what I mean?

00:41:22.460 And time, like how to optimize my time. Everything for me is like what I'm solving for in life,

00:41:28.160 what this book is solving for, for you is net fulfillment. It is relentless about net

00:41:33.620 fulfillment. If that entails for you, your makeup, like taking nervous risk, going hella skiing,

00:41:39.880 skydiving, riding motorcycles, then so be it. If long as you're off autopilot and you've thought

00:41:44.340 it through, then that's fine. How variable do you think people are in their kind of stratification

00:41:52.500 of what encompasses net fulfillment? Maybe a better question is, do you think people are even

00:41:58.020 understanding about and deliberate about what that means? That doesn't strike me as something

00:42:03.720 that the average person could articulate very clearly what it is that will be their fulfillment

00:42:09.920 maximizing function in terms of experiences. And I want to reiterate a point you made, which is it's

00:42:15.520 not just the experience, it's when they occur. The combination of which experiences and when they

00:42:20.320 occur and who they occur with, do you get the sense that the average person can actually articulate

00:42:25.580 that? I think they had the ability earlier in life and then they get habituated out of it.

00:42:31.140 So we all go into autopilot. We have this default mode network. It helps us survive. It helps us drive

00:42:35.600 without thinking, oh, I got to turn. When you first line our drive, everything's happening fast. You

00:42:40.300 have to deliberately think about everything you're doing. And then all of a sudden it goes into default

00:42:43.640 mode network and it's easy. It happens with work. And you're like, I need to work to survive and I

00:42:48.420 need to do this and you're panicking, whatever. And the next thing you're in the groove and you're

00:42:50.860 just constantly working. Somewhere along the way with the abstraction of going to work to make money

00:42:56.280 to survive and get the things we want, we forget about the things we want. We just go to work to

00:43:01.280 work, to just make more money, to go to work, to make more money. And the things we want either

00:43:06.860 get pushed for our head or forgotten about because we're on autopilot. It was a good thing because it

00:43:12.340 makes us good at our jobs. It's like, I can do this job with my eyes closed. I could do this and I'm

00:43:15.800 getting promoted and getting rewarded. And there's certain things about the jobs that

00:43:19.080 you like, but you're forgetting why you did this thing in the first place. People aren't

00:43:23.900 like, I really wanted to be a plastic salesperson. I really love selling plastics, more and more

00:43:28.080 plastics and piling up numbers in a bank account. Those numbers in a bank account were really

00:43:33.220 meant for, I want to hang out with my buddies and I want to go skiing and I want to get married

00:43:37.200 and I want to donate to this charity and I want to do X, Y, and Z, right? But we kind of

00:43:40.740 forget that. And since we forgot about it, we're not even thinking about when the best

00:43:44.720 time it is to happen. It's just completely like, oh, I'll eventually do it or when I

00:43:48.500 get more. So we're completely out of touch of what we want, what's enough, the concept

00:43:53.880 of enough, what that means for us, and the concept of when.

00:43:58.020 Now, I had a discussion with a patient just yesterday. So runs a hedge fund and not surprisingly,

00:44:03.900 given the economic climate we're in, hedge funds aren't doing particularly well, especially

00:44:07.640 long hedge funds. And this guy doesn't need to be working. Even though he's now having

00:44:12.580 a down year, I mean, he could certainly return all the capital to his investors and manage

00:44:16.720 his own capital indefinitely or do nothing, literally do nothing. But he said, what would

00:44:20.980 I do? Yeah.

00:44:22.020 What would I do? I'd sit around for three months and it would feel really nice to have no stress

00:44:26.500 for three months and then I'd be bored out of my mind. So he's like, no, I got to keep

00:44:31.280 going.

00:44:32.020 I've had this, you know, amongst my friends, you know, it's one of the things like people

00:44:35.480 ask the question, why do people do this? And I've had direct conversations with my friends

00:44:39.420 and with a friend and I'm very aggressive with them, attacking their walls they put

00:44:43.300 up. And what I tell them is, is that you have made your work, your God. It's who you

00:44:49.620 meet people. You eat around where work is. You've given up learning how to socialize and

00:44:55.520 meet your neighbors, all the people you know, or sometimes work or work related. You haven't

00:44:59.720 exercised those muscles for years, 10, 20, 30 years. Sometimes that people have their whole

00:45:07.560 life revolves around work and all the other muscles, I'm using muscles as an example, have

00:45:13.100 atrophied. How do you socialize without a job? How do you meet people without a job?

00:45:17.940 Where do I go eat without my job? Like I eat obviously somewhere within five miles of this

00:45:22.660 place and people recommend all the things that get recommended, the camaraderie, everything

00:45:27.000 that when people list what they like about work, that used to happen without work and they've

00:45:32.260 atrophied those muscles. So when you take that away, they're like, they don't know what

00:45:36.820 to do. They don't know what they want and their dreams have left them. The ski trip, they haven't

00:45:41.180 thought about that or hang out with their buddies or whatever. All that stuff has left them and

00:45:45.020 they haven't worked those muscles out. And I say, listen, just let's start working on those muscles

00:45:50.320 and building them up and you'll have plenty to do. You have plenty to do. You've let autopilot and

00:45:55.600 habit put you in poor health in these other activities. You're in poor health on how to meet

00:46:03.680 people and socialize outside of work. You're in poor health on where to go eat lunch,

00:46:08.460 except for the places near work or wherever you go. You're in poor health on trips that are not

00:46:13.960 business trips. You're in poor health about thinking about what fulfill you and discovery,

00:46:19.540 just plain old discovery because you don't know what you want. You discover what you want.

00:46:23.720 Nobody comes out of the womb like, I don't like onions and I love chocolate and I want to go to

00:46:28.040 Japan and I love F1. You get exposed to it and you discover what you want. So a lot of life is

00:46:33.940 discovery, but these people are out of discovery. They're in the familiar habituated routine. They

00:46:40.500 are a rat in a wheel that doesn't even need cheese anymore. It just runs in the wheel.

00:46:46.680 Now, how do we differentiate that from people who, and I would put myself in this category truthfully,

00:46:51.320 where a big part of their work is their fulfillment and they do feel a sense of purpose in what they

00:46:59.480 do beyond just the making money part of it. And I suspect that, like, again, just to make

00:47:05.940 caricatures of things, right? So maybe the person who works in the widget factory that makes the

00:47:11.180 widget that they don't even know what the widget plugs into, but they need a job. If they inherited a

00:47:16.200 big lump sum of money tomorrow, they would happily quit the widget job, but maybe they'd get

00:47:21.200 bored and they'd want to go back and start volunteering and doing something where they

00:47:24.880 don't actually get paid, but they're really enjoying what they're doing. And then, of course,

00:47:27.980 you have the group of people whose job is doing two things. It's providing money for all the things

00:47:35.540 that you need, both in an approximate sense and distally, but also it is a sense of purpose and

00:47:41.280 therefore it fits into their fulfillment. But these things can be very slippery. And I would certainly

00:47:45.380 put myself squarely in that category, right? Which is, I still work harder than I should. And I

00:47:50.340 absolutely know that I'm failing in the equation, even though I'm fulfilled by this and I wouldn't

00:47:57.660 want to not do this, but I'm doing too much of it as an example. I really push back hard on my

00:48:03.500 friends on this. And it's like, I can't know, only they can know. The heroin addict is happy.

00:48:08.280 I'm happy on heroin. You have a problem with my heroin. I don't have a problem, right? And that's

00:48:12.340 kind of the argument I push towards them. And I say, listen, really think about what in your job

00:48:18.520 fulfills you. And is that outside in the world and the purpose in that? And do you have balance?

00:48:25.580 Are you balanced according to what you want in life in this time period in your life and the

00:48:30.080 future time period in your life? Now, I can't tell somebody what their balance is, right? That's a very

00:48:34.800 personal thing. But what I really want them to do is be honest, off autopilot, really unplug for a

00:48:41.560 moment and think about it. Okay, I got one life and I have only this period once, right? I only get

00:48:47.480 between 50 and 55. I only get this level of health at this time. Are these the experiences? Is this

00:48:53.960 really how I want to allocate my time at this period? Is this really the maximum? Is this the

00:48:58.080 optimal thing for me to do? And if they do that and they come up with the same answer, like, hey,

00:49:01.820 no, I want to work at the widget factory or I want to work at this fulfilling, I can't argue that.

00:49:06.060 How am I to tell you how to live your life? What I'm here to tell you is how to optimize your life,

00:49:11.380 what thought process and what steps you should go through, things you should be considering in order to get

00:49:16.420 the most fulfillment of your life. And then if you come to the conclusion that, hey, I'm at the

00:49:20.020 perfect balance of work, right? And the money's piling up, but I'm going to use it later and I'm

00:49:25.620 going to go on a senior's cruise and that's what it's for, then that's your life. But maybe you might

00:49:30.980 go, you know what, I can dial it back and my daughters are only going to be or my kids are

00:49:34.460 only going to be this age at this time. Maybe I should take a family trip and unplug and go on

00:49:38.380 safari with them and enjoy my success because that's going to give me a lifetime of memory

00:49:43.560 dividends and discussion points and connections, et cetera. Maybe, you know, I'd rather have that

00:49:48.700 time with them now and not have them in a hospital with me when I'm old and stinky and barely, you

00:49:54.320 know, and seeing me this way. I want the memories and the time they spend with me doing this and not

00:49:58.820 at the tail end of life. Who knows? I just want people thinking about it. And if you just get off

00:50:04.400 autopilot just a bit and you start thinking about it, you're already optimizing your life. You're already

00:50:09.540 going to have a more fulfilling life. I think that that's probably the part of the book that most

00:50:16.480 kind of resonates with someone like me, which is, especially when it comes to kids. And I have,

00:50:23.320 I guess the, maybe it's an advantage, maybe it's a disadvantage, but my kids are sort of separated

00:50:28.020 in age by a bit of a gap, right? So my daughter's 14 and then the boys are five and eight. In other

00:50:33.380 words, I now know what it's like to have a teenager. I now understand all the things that you kind of

00:50:39.120 give up when your kid's a teenager. Our daughter's an amazing kid, but the reality of it is like,

00:50:44.080 she doesn't really want to be around me. No, they don't want to know you when they become

00:50:48.000 teenagers. I didn't want to know my parents when I was a teenager, right? Yeah, yeah. Whereas

00:50:51.060 conversely, the boys can't leave us alone. And it's tempting to sort of say, I wish they would just

00:50:57.780 leave us alone. But now knowing that, oh, actually in six years, you'll kill to be back in this

00:51:04.880 situation, makes it infinitely more easy to appreciate. That's kind of one thing that I

00:51:10.080 think is helpful for people to understand the seasons, this idea of seasonality. Like you,

00:51:15.780 I probably think back to things I didn't do for different reasons, right? So when I was in college,

00:51:21.760 I mean, I couldn't have worked harder. I mean, I was out of my mind how hard I worked. My night off,

00:51:29.040 there was one night, which was Friday when I only worked till 9 p.m. It was my break. And from 9 p.m.

00:51:37.000 till 11, I would- See, I needed a little bit of you and you needed a little bit of me.

00:51:40.060 I would go and do laundry after 9 p.m. on a Friday. That was my way to just take a little

00:51:44.580 time off. But other than that, it was six hours a day of work outside of class. And I think of all

00:51:51.960 the things I didn't do in college. So first of all, my only memories of college are pure misery. I

00:51:55.740 hated every minute of college. I didn't have- You didn't have the college experience.

00:52:01.260 Yeah. Now, I could say, well, a lot of good came out of that because I did really well and

00:52:04.880 did well. That set me up for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

00:52:08.020 But I could have traveled. Having a college experience didn't mean I had to get drunk every

00:52:11.940 night. It meant that I could have saved all that money I was making by tutoring and done something

00:52:17.740 different. This reminds me of the college paper had this. My senior year, I opened it up and it had

00:52:22.000 the 50 things you need to do before you graduate. And I just had the biggest regret when I read that

00:52:27.520 list. And you read it at what age? I was just about on my way out. I was like, never going to be able

00:52:32.260 to do this. I'm not going to do this. And some of them were simple, like write an angry letter to

00:52:35.460 newspaper, go skinny dipping at Lake whatever. I actually did that after I read that. There were

00:52:40.340 a lot of things, do this college prank, do whatever, things that would be fun, didn't necessarily cost you

00:52:44.360 money or whatever, but things to do to have a college experience and not necessarily do them all.

00:52:48.160 And I was like, maybe I did three or four. And I was like, why was I so on autopilot in my way?

00:52:54.460 And think about, okay, you got four years here. Good, good grades, good study. But like,

00:52:59.200 you want to get this out of it. You want to do this out of it. You want to have this college

00:53:02.160 experience, et cetera. We just kind of like, don't really think about things going autopilot

00:53:06.800 so much that we don't think about periods in our life. Even this year, what experiences do I want to

00:53:12.480 have this year with this person, with myself, with my spirituality, with my health, with my travel,

00:53:19.160 my leisure, my job? How am I going to optimize? And how does that fit into the Jigsport, the Tetris

00:53:23.800 game of my entire life? Am I doing it right? Maybe this experience that I'm saying goes here,

00:53:27.680 actually goes further out in my life. When I was trying to get the book published,

00:53:32.300 one of the publishers said, I do exactly what you're talking about in the book. I really like hiking.

00:53:37.100 She explained she had an injury and she likes running, but now she does like hiking and she

00:53:42.920 really likes concert and music. And she goes on a vacation with a friend every year. They pick what

00:53:47.660 they're going to go do. And there's this very expensive opera that she wants to go see and

00:53:51.280 et cetera. And she said, what I and our friend decided is that the hiking trips and this mountain,

00:53:57.880 et cetera, we're going to pull these forward. And the sitting in operas and these type of trips,

00:54:02.040 the set in a Jigsport, we're going to push forward.

00:54:04.040 Push into the future.

00:54:04.900 Push into the future. So, you know, Max and I. So, it was like, if they get that order wrong,

00:54:09.320 they go all the opera and then they turn around like, holy shit, I can't hike this mountain.

00:54:12.800 And so, this fits in every aspect of your life. College, first job, pre-married, married, before

00:54:20.940 kids, kids that are toddlers, not toddlers, that type of thinking is really helpful. And you've been

00:54:26.740 lucky. Experience has taught you about the seasons with your kids. And I learned the hard way too. I was

00:54:32.320 like, you know, people tell you like, oh, your kids don't want to be when you're 13. And you're

00:54:35.340 like, you kind of forget when you were 13. You forget like, oh yeah, I didn't want to be around

00:54:38.640 my parents. And then it really hits you when they're just like, dad, nobody hangs out with

00:54:44.900 their dad that much. Come on.

00:54:46.040 One of the other things that you talk about, and you've mentioned it already today a couple

00:54:49.780 of times, is philanthropy. So, there's a story in the book about a woman who dies and leaves a large

00:54:56.080 gift. Tell that story again.

00:54:57.200 It's one of those secret millionaire stories. They're all out there. Like, there's a secretary

00:55:02.180 and then when she died, she had $10 million of Tootsie Roll stock or whatever. And so,

00:55:07.240 this woman worked at a law firm, saved her money, lived a, by all accounts, a very frugal life.

00:55:12.940 And then when she died, she gave a multi-million dollar gift to education, charitable education.

00:55:20.300 Everybody was like, you know, that's so charitable and that's such a great thing. And I had a different

00:55:24.820 perspective. My perspective was, when you're dead, the money isn't yours. And also that the target

00:55:31.340 for her bequeath after her death would have been much better off receiving the money much earlier,

00:55:37.400 a lower sum much earlier, and that the return on her charitable investment will be greater than any

00:55:42.820 of her investment returns. And so, I can't really get into her head to determine if it's charitable.

00:55:50.120 I am knowingly thinking I'm doing the right thing. I'm going to save all this money and it's going to

00:55:55.880 grow to a bigger pile and I'm going to give to a charity. But to me, it appears to be a tip on the

00:56:01.340 way out. The money's got to go somewhere. It was going to go either to the IRS who redistribute the

00:56:07.320 money the way they see fit, usually into wars and stuff, but I won't go into that subject or hairs

00:56:12.420 or et cetera. But it's going somewhere. It's not yours. It's gone. So, the fact that it just wound

00:56:18.540 up into this educational charity, I didn't see it as charitable as much and as impactful as just

00:56:25.220 giving the money earlier. Life is urgent. Life is now. And I argue that the return on investment in

00:56:30.660 your charitable endeavors is greater than any return in the market you can get.

00:56:34.540 Well, and this is sort of interesting because think about what our mutual friend,

00:56:37.660 John Arnold did 10 years ago, which was before he even hits the age of 40, he decides,

00:56:44.500 I'm no longer going to do this full-time. My full-time job is now giving this money away.

00:56:50.020 Right. It's great. John's great. And we've had a lot of conversations about this, about making sure

00:56:54.860 the money actually gets distributed, gets into the purpose, helping causes. But John decided that

00:57:00.200 I've been solving the problem of natural gas long enough.

00:57:03.380 I have more money than I'll ever spend or need. And I really want to dedicate my neurons

00:57:11.800 to solving other problems. So, he takes an analytical approach, a database-driven approach

00:57:17.600 to solving some of society's ills and solving some problems and trying to get ahead of some

00:57:21.860 of these intractable problems, which is awesome. And the fact that he's doing so young, I even argue

00:57:27.300 with John like he did it too late. He's still late, you know what I mean? Because he was on autopilot

00:57:31.620 too, in my opinion, trading. What are you working for? I have this conversation with John. He's like,

00:57:36.620 what's the money for? What can't you buy? And to a certain extent, the money became a detriment

00:57:41.200 based on your value system, right? If you're like, hey, and I mentioned this book, yeah,

00:57:46.480 I can have Maroon 5 play in my backyard every day, et cetera, but you don't want to ruin your kids by

00:57:51.380 spending the money and consuming it that way. And I'm using the Maroon 5 as an exaggerated example,

00:57:55.780 but like there's all kinds of consumption that you don't want to have because you don't want

00:58:00.720 your kids to have that. Then the money became a negative. You really work too low for because

00:58:05.240 you're working for money that you cannot spend, you cannot consume. And you could start giving

00:58:09.540 away and having an impact on the other things you want to do now.

00:58:14.320 And I think one of the things that John exemplifies is how to give money away thoughtfully.

00:58:20.540 And what you realize when you spend any length of time within which you've spent more than I have,

00:58:27.100 it is really hard to give money away strategically and thoughtfully, which is why I suspect John and

00:58:33.340 Laura set themselves up with 50 years of a runway to give. And I don't know, there's a pretty good

00:58:39.900 chance they still won't be able to give it all away, right? What they're doing is like effectively

00:58:43.160 giving away. They want to solve problems, database decisions. But it takes time. I mean,

00:58:47.400 that's the other point that you have to invest the time to try something out, see if it works,

00:58:54.560 if it does double down, if it doesn't learn why it doesn't pivot. And you know, you can't do that.

00:59:00.000 If you say, look, at the end of my life, I'm going to give away a billion dollars. Like it won't be

00:59:04.040 effective. There's a double issue here. There's the issue you already said, which is the compounding

00:59:08.720 issue. No, if you give a billion dollars away in 50 years versus giving away half a billion dollars

00:59:15.100 or a hundred million dollars, 30 years sooner, that money will do more good. But there's another

00:59:20.000 layer to that, which is you have a chance to learn from what that money did and make corrections that

00:59:26.600 themselves allow for more thoughtful giving. They're immediately jumping into the problem

00:59:31.160 and let the experiments run the course and they have the time to do it. And they're doing it. I can't

00:59:35.300 say enough about the Laura and John Arnold Foundation about the way they're going in and helping people

00:59:40.620 in solving problems. The other thing that you talked about in the book that really probably,

00:59:47.020 this is probably the reason I had my wife read it right away, was the idea of, you know, we sometimes

00:59:53.400 think that there are people in our lives that we want to give money to at some point. And you sort of

00:59:57.760 think that's a person that was really important in my life or in our lives. And maybe we leave them

01:00:02.960 X amount of dollars at some point. And then you sort of realize, well, why don't you finish why

01:00:07.980 that's maybe not necessarily the right strategy? The same laws of physics that govern my body and

01:00:13.440 the utility of money over time for me applies to my kids. Maybe they have a little bit longer

01:00:19.160 lifespan or healthspan. Or relatives or anybody else. Relatives or anybody, anybody. The utility

01:00:24.480 of money to them follows a curve depending on how healthy they are, et cetera. You can just kind of

01:00:29.980 draw it, right? Like you know better than I. Muscle decay rates for people in shape, not in shape,

01:00:34.240 working out, et cetera. So this curve applies to them. So a lot of people like, oh, when I die,

01:00:41.920 I'm going to give, I used to have people on my will that are like close to my age. Like I'm going to

01:00:46.720 give money to them when I die. And I'm like, wait a minute, let me give my money to a 72 year old.

01:00:52.260 Wouldn't it be better if I gave them less money now? Like let them spend it and apply it because

01:00:57.480 the utility of money for them is drastic. The day before you die, I cannot pay you anything.

01:01:05.380 I cannot get you to delay gratification. That's what savings is, right? You're delaying gratification.

01:01:10.280 And so there is no gratification the next day. If you take it from the day before you die,

01:01:15.000 two days before you die to right now, right? There's this curve, this compensation you need

01:01:19.300 for delayed gratification. And it makes no sense for me to be leaving money to 65 year olds and 62

01:01:27.140 year olds. It's give it to them where the money has the most impact, where they'll have the most

01:01:32.620 utility of that money. And so when you're off autopilot and think, yeah, that's what everybody

01:01:36.540 does. They write down a will and when they die, et cetera. Now the will has a purpose. If you die

01:01:40.480 early, you got to distribute the money. But really before you die, if you'd live a normal life,

01:01:46.600 there should be nothing left to give. You should have already given it away.

01:01:49.900 Again, when I read your book and you articulate it that way, I mean, it's such a gut punch of this

01:01:55.760 realization. And one example is kids. My wife and I have people in our lives that we're not related

01:02:00.440 to that we value so much. And we've always said like, yeah, we want to give them X number of

01:02:07.200 dollars at this point in time. I've had that. I had a good year and there was people that I would

01:02:11.760 give money to if I had a good year or I'm not going to wait until I'm dead. Or there are people

01:02:16.000 in my will and I just went down a list and the maximum tax free gift you can give per year per person

01:02:20.300 is $15,000. And I had, I think a 30 to 50 person list of $15,000 to give to people.

01:02:27.320 And this was me reading my own book. A lot of people are like, why'd you write the book?

01:02:31.060 Well, I wrote it to save my own life. I didn't want one to waste my life. I want to get the most

01:02:34.480 net fulfillment. And after I wrote the book, mainly I talk about children. But then I thought about

01:02:38.860 that applies to everybody. If I'm going to do something nice and give something or leave something to

01:02:43.900 somebody, it's now. It's right now. Well, especially when you think about exactly what

01:02:49.520 you said, which is that person will do much more with that in applying it to their fulfillment curve

01:02:56.520 in real time. When you're really giving somebody money, right? You're giving them life energy.

01:03:01.980 You're giving the ability to make choices. You're giving them fulfillment. So waiting till they're 96

01:03:07.680 on the deathbed, they can't really convert that into fulfillment. You really didn't give them

01:03:12.360 what you wanted to give them. So when you look at their curve of their life, oh, wow,

01:03:16.600 here's the maximum insertion point. And as a matter of fact, wow, $5,000 right now at let's say 33

01:03:23.200 is like 150,086. It's actually more impactful. There's more going in life, more choices, things

01:03:30.580 going on. The cumulative effect, the fact that when they have that experience, not only do they enjoy

01:03:36.460 that experience at that point, whatever that experience is, they get dividends from that experience.

01:03:41.380 They talk about with their friends, they become more interesting. They recall that and they get

01:03:46.700 enjoyment out of it. It's like, oh, remember that ski trip we went on? We had a great time

01:03:49.860 with the kids. Yeah, that was great. They get fulfilled from that. So they get memory dividends

01:03:54.260 associated from that experience. Whereas if you give it to a 96, they do it once, they consume it,

01:03:58.800 if they can even do it, and then they die.

01:04:02.540 How do you help a person do the math? Because we've talked about this quite a bit and you've alluded to it.

01:04:09.420 There is really a curve. This is where both your background primarily as an engineer and a trader

01:04:16.260 come into solving what becomes a mathematical set of equations where you have certain variables you

01:04:23.880 need to understand. So let's say we're solving this for me or for you or an arbitrary person who's

01:04:28.900 sitting here who's 50 years old. Okay. So 50 year old person is listening to this or 30 year old

01:04:34.300 person. I mean, maybe we do a few different scenarios. So let's start with the 50 year old

01:04:38.020 who is firmly planted on the treadmill of autopilot. Okay. Their kids are in middle school and high

01:04:45.200 school. They realize how much money they need for college for their kids. They've got a mortgage

01:04:50.140 payment. They've got a good job and they have a fuzzy notion that they're going to work another 15

01:04:56.740 to 20 years. And they come to you and they say, Bill, I read the book. I buy the thesis. I don't

01:05:04.000 know how to implement it for my numbers and for my fulfillment curve. How do you help them think

01:05:09.340 about it? The main thing is it's very individual. It's like, what do you want? If you're sitting

01:05:13.660 there like, I just like working and going in and that's all I do. Okay. So I'll be the guy. So I'm

01:05:17.860 going to say, so Bill, no, I do have interests, but I got to be honest with you, man, I've backed away

01:05:22.440 from them. You know, I've kind of let them go. I've let myself go a little bit before my wife and

01:05:26.640 I had kids. We loved traveling. And before our kids were born, we hiked the entire rim of the

01:05:31.600 Grand Canyon. We went down to the Colorado river back up, probably the greatest thing we ever did.

01:05:35.700 And then once the kids came, we were kind of head down and work. And I just want to make sure that

01:05:40.020 my kids don't have debt when they go to college. What I do is like, okay, what's reality and what's

01:05:45.880 fear, fear-based thinking. So we try and get on that. And one of the things I'd look for is why don't

01:05:50.720 you go traveling with the kids? Well, it's a pain in the ass, whatever. I was like-

01:05:53.760 It's also so expensive, Bill. I mean, do you understand what it costs now? One of my kids

01:05:58.140 has a friend who did this African safari a year ago. They said it was amazing. You know, to price

01:06:03.040 that trip, Bill, today, $30,000 to go do that African safari now with the airlines, with the

01:06:07.820 safari. That's a lot of money. So what I think is, is when you die, will you have $30,000? Are you

01:06:12.280 on track to die with $30,000, $50,000? I hope so. Okay. So then would you rather consume that $30,000

01:06:19.340 now and have this experience with your kids, et cetera, or would you rather have $30,000

01:06:24.740 left over when you die? I just want to be safe. I mean, how do I know? What if I'm wrong?

01:06:28.760 Then we can sit down and go down the hard numbers. It's like, do you have insurance if you lose

01:06:33.340 your job? What is safe? What do you envision yourself doing in retirement that you can't

01:06:39.920 afford? What bad thing that will happen that we can't buy an insurance policy for? Is it long-term

01:06:46.380 care insurance? If you get that while you're young, it's actually pretty cheap. It's very cheap.

01:06:50.500 I look at what risks they're having and I look at ways to mitigate them. So a lot of people who

01:06:54.720 are conservative, like, oh, I'm worried about something happening. I'm like, what's the something

01:06:58.720 happening that you're worried about? When you do that with people, Bill, how often are they able

01:07:03.960 to articulate clearly what they're afraid of versus it being kind of just a fuzzy notion of-

01:07:10.740 A lot of it's fuzzy notion and we just keep pushing and pulling it out. What if this happened?

01:07:16.140 What if I get sick? What if we're whatever? We go over, like, medical insurance. Basically,

01:07:21.540 what happens is people try to act as their own insurance agent with a client of one.

01:07:27.500 Right. That's very difficult to underwrite.

01:07:28.840 So they have a client of one. They really don't understand the odds of the bad things happening.

01:07:34.400 And so what they tend to do is put it in this big, giant fear bucket of insurance premium,

01:07:39.540 and they just work and save and save and save to think that they have the notional to cover all

01:07:44.600 these bad things happening. And a lot of times I'll point out two things. I go, one,

01:07:48.920 some of these bad things that you're saving for, you'll never get the notional. Maybe you will or

01:07:53.020 whatever, but most of the people I talk to, do you know it was $25,000 a night for my dad in the

01:07:58.140 hospital? Insurance didn't cover that. It's gone though. It doesn't matter. You know what I mean?

01:08:02.120 He's only got X days. You're not saving. Some of these things are like, you shouldn't be the insurer.

01:08:06.740 If you're actually afraid of that and that's important to you, you need to buy the insurance policy

01:08:11.460 where they have the lower large numbers and their edge is 6% or 8%. You are going to be woefully

01:08:17.320 inefficient. And on top of that, you don't even know the odds. Like some of these things with robot

01:08:22.100 alien space insurance, wait, you're worried about this. I also like to do a comparison. Okay. Here's

01:08:28.440 the risk of this scenario happening and this bad thing happening and it's bad. We'll accept it.

01:08:33.540 And here's the risk of you not doing the thing that you want to do now. Here's the risk of you not

01:08:39.600 doing the trip. What does that look like on your deathbed when you know you couldn't have

01:08:44.460 gone on a safari and had this wonderful time with your kids and connected with them and something to

01:08:50.160 talk about forever and expanded your worldview? Was it worth the $30,000? Was it worth the insurance

01:08:56.180 policy that you're trying to, was it worth you trying to play insurance agent? And so a lot of

01:09:00.540 these are thematic conversations. They're not like hard number conversations. But you have a model.

01:09:05.180 Yeah, we have a model. But the problem with the model is it's an abstraction. The variables we're

01:09:09.000 talking about are infinite. Yep. And we have to abstract and abstract and abstract. So what the

01:09:15.440 model does, it really tells you the direction and it's very good on the direction, but the magnitude

01:09:20.580 it may be off. And so for you as a person, it's like, what's your survival number? We have that model.

01:09:25.780 Really think about, okay, just survival. Not, I'm hanging out. Yeah, not thriving, but surviving.

01:09:31.140 What do you need? Then after that, it's all your choices. And depending on who you are,

01:09:37.060 because there's infinite choices and what those choices will cost and the experiences you want to

01:09:41.180 have in your life, plus the discovery, the 20 to 30% discovery, maybe all your experiences go in the

01:09:47.060 50 bucket. You didn't realize it. And you're actually inadvertently pushing them in the 70

01:09:51.560 bucket and you're not going to have them. And so that's kind of what I try and get people

01:09:55.200 to do is like, are you going to have $30,000 trips in your lifetime? And they'll go, yes.

01:10:00.700 When is the optimal time for you to have $30,000 trips and with whom? If you're never going to have

01:10:06.520 a $30,000 trip, I'm like, okay, let's think of a different type of activity that will get you the

01:10:10.440 same fulfillment or close to it. That's not a $30,000 trip. To me, that's the interesting

01:10:15.040 distinction. Maybe somebody listening to this says, are you freaking crazy? Like I'll never take a

01:10:19.120 $30,000 trip ever, ever, ever in my life. Even if it's a $5,000 trip.

01:10:21.000 Yeah. The bigger point is, is there a trip that you think you will take near the end of your life

01:10:26.800 and you're holding back on taking it now? I mean, to me, that is one of the big aha insights from

01:10:34.180 this philosophy.

01:10:35.720 You're in that thing. Well, I'm saving because of just in case. It should be like, guy,

01:10:38.860 you're not the best insurance agent. You're actually the worst insurance agent. You don't

01:10:42.360 know the odds. You can never have the notional and the edge, the premium that you're extracting

01:10:47.460 from yourself. And that edges your own life. You have to give up hours of your life to have

01:10:51.360 this insurance premium is way, way more than just paying the insurance company. People worry about

01:10:56.500 running out of money. I'm like, get an annuity. You're worried about long-term health. And what

01:11:00.040 if I'm sick and I can't move and I need nurses? Get long-term care insurance. It's really cheap

01:11:03.620 when you start early. It's surprisingly cheap. What about this? There's an insurance product for a

01:11:08.040 lot of things people are like, quote unquote, saving or worried for, et cetera. Let's mitigate

01:11:12.980 the risk with the professionals. Let's get you living your life.

01:11:17.460 So how do you get through to somebody when you confront perhaps an even more illogical

01:11:22.560 problem? Because the problem that we just discussed is actually quite logical. It's easy

01:11:27.560 to understand why a person would think, I have to save for a rainy day. That's been pretty ingrained

01:11:33.360 into a responsible person. To me, there's a far less logical reason that people forego doing things

01:11:41.020 when they're young. And by young, I mean kind of like middle-aged, like in their working-

01:11:44.740 Right now. Young is right now.

01:11:46.260 Yeah. And it's because they're so busy making money. So this is probably the one-

01:11:52.060 That's the rat in the wheel with no cheese. They got to habituate. Like you take a rat,

01:11:56.480 you get them to run the wheel, you give them the cheese, you give them the run wheel to do the

01:11:59.720 cheese. And pretty soon you don't even have to give them the cheese. They sit the wheel,

01:12:02.340 they just start running. The reward is no longer the goal. It's just to do the thing.

01:12:07.440 How do you help somebody break that?

01:12:09.260 That is the hardest one to break because they've been brainwashed into thinking that this is what

01:12:15.520 I want to do. And it's one of the hardest things to extract somebody from. And so I have to explain

01:12:20.880 to them, where do you socialize? We just go through it. Where do you eat? Where do you eat

01:12:24.880 lunch? Well, I like the people at work. I like hanging out. I don't want to quit work. I like

01:12:28.540 hanging out with the people. I'm like, you can quit work and take the people on a trip with you.

01:12:31.900 You can vacation with them. You can still visit them at night and play bingo games. The people

01:12:36.660 don't go away just because you don't show up at work. You can still spend time and you can actually

01:12:40.740 spend more quality time with the people at work if you exercise that muscle. But they don't know

01:12:46.640 how to invite people over their house or, hey, we're going to go see the Chris Rock show tonight,

01:12:50.940 which I'm going to go do. Is Chris Rock in town tonight or is it in Houston?

01:12:54.380 No, here in Austin tonight. I don't even know.

01:12:57.000 See, there you go. A new experience you might have. But anyway, they don't know how to do that.

01:13:01.460 It's a very long conversation. You can do this. You can do that. Everything that you're getting

01:13:06.500 out of work, that social benefit, all these little excuses, the mental stimulation. I'm like,

01:13:11.420 John was like, these real life problems are more mentally stimulating than the natural gas puzzle.

01:13:17.000 I still like the natural gas puzzle, but these are more mentally stimulating, more purposeful,

01:13:21.400 more fulfilling to me. And so I have to break down brick by brick and show them how they got

01:13:27.740 habituated and how they haven't exercised these other muscles and how they can replace it and

01:13:32.520 realize work is not the unique thing to get the things you're getting out of work. It's actually a

01:13:39.360 bastardization of it. It's minimizing those experience. You're not actually getting the most

01:13:43.600 quality time with your coworkers in the working environment. You're actually not getting the most

01:13:49.120 mental exercise. That's not necessarily the best mental exercise for you in the work environment.

01:13:54.800 It's just, you know, nothing else because you've been stuck in this lab running on this type of

01:14:01.100 wheel. It's really hard because people will be extremely, extremely resistant. Change is painful.

01:14:09.200 You get somebody who hasn't worked out forever and you're like, Hey, let's go into the gym. We're

01:14:12.380 going to work out. It's like, Oh God, why am I here? I don't like this. You know what I mean?

01:14:16.840 Like just to develop the muscle to do the thing, to play the tennis, the fulfilling thing. It's a

01:14:20.820 process. You have to show them the reward that life is rich. It's fat. It's wonderful.

01:14:26.740 It is one of the biggest cliches ever, which is the person on their deathbed who says,

01:14:30.040 I wish I didn't work so hard. And yet we all know this cliche and yet many of us still work

01:14:34.920 too hard.

01:14:35.800 Habits are powerful. One of the things I took away from the habit books, like Tiny Habits by B.J.

01:14:39.980 Fogg is a great book, is that they're powerful. They're extremely powerful. And so we get habituated

01:14:47.420 in many different ways for good or bad. If you have the snacks in your house and you eat 200

01:14:51.600 calories a day, you know, in two years, you're like 40 pounds heavier, right? 200 extra calories.

01:14:56.320 How did that happen? How did I forget? You know, how did my life pass me by? How did I not go on

01:15:01.020 these trips? How did I not have these experiences? How did I not call my mother? How did I not say I

01:15:04.820 love you to these people? Even pick up the phone because my habits took over. They took over towards

01:15:09.920 this purpose and it just absorbed my life. And so outside the book with my friends, you know, I really

01:15:15.900 talk about the good of habits. You can form good habits that keep you healthy, but some of the

01:15:21.020 habits, you know, the consequences of some of our habits to be successful and how it takes away from

01:15:26.100 other things. Has that been a struggle for you? Oh, yes. I wrote that book for me. You know, the first

01:15:32.580 life I wanted to save was my own. Put your life mask on first. I am just as guilty as the next person is

01:15:39.600 being on autopilot. I constantly have to remind myself that I'm going to die, that life isn't

01:15:45.700 forever. This period ends. These seasons, what my daughters end. These seasons, what my startups

01:15:50.760 end. All these things. And I have to think about like, what do I want? How do I balance them? What's

01:15:54.900 optimized? And I don't get it exactly right, but I do it better than if I was just completely on

01:15:59.860 autopilot. And then sometimes I kept, I was like, oh shit, I was on autopilot. Why didn't I think about

01:16:03.820 this? You know? And what do you use to help jar you out of autopilot on these things? The first macro

01:16:09.380 thing is the death clock. Right now I have this calendar up and it's 4,000 weeks and you mark off

01:16:16.820 each week. And it's a very visceral representation about life is finite. Not only will you die somewhere

01:16:25.540 around here, but this period is going to end. A lot of times when people go on vacation, knowing that

01:16:31.940 the vacation ends on Friday snaps you up. You're like, oh shit, I'm going to go here and do this and I'm

01:16:36.260 going to stay out. And, you know, we only have a couple of days, so let's do the cafe and let's,

01:16:40.400 you know, do X, Y, and Z. And you actually get more out of the trip knowing it's going to end as

01:16:44.580 opposed to living obliviously. And all of a sudden time to go, wait, it's time to go. I forgot to do

01:16:50.520 this or go see the Eiffel Tower or go whatever it is on your trip. And so same that way with life,

01:16:55.060 when you know life is going to end, it becomes more urgent. Even the segment in your life, when you know,

01:17:00.940 you know, your early fifties are going to end, you're like, it becomes more urgent. You become more

01:17:04.480 deliberate. You get off autopilot. So that's the first layer.

01:17:07.980 So each week you do check off a box on the calendar.

01:17:10.280 Each week I check off. Now I've been in Austin and traveling, but when I come back,

01:17:12.600 I see it. It's in my closet. So I walk by it every day. It's a constant reminder.

01:17:17.060 Where'd you get this calendar, by the way?

01:17:18.680 Online. There was like some sort of stoic reflections out there, a memento mori,

01:17:22.760 remember death. I used to have it on my phone and you used to count down backwards to my estimated

01:17:27.520 death date. That app no longer works, but seeing it every time is great. If I get another widget

01:17:33.780 that counts down, I'll have both of them. Right. And I used to do it for other things like till

01:17:37.540 Christmas to your daughter's 14 till the job, the 15 year anniversary. Well, my daughter's going to

01:17:42.820 be 16. She's going to be driving. How am I going to pry experiences out of my daughter? Cause your

01:17:48.140 daughters don't want to know you before she's really gone. She gets a car and she's see ya deuces,

01:17:53.060 you know, that type of thing. So that really helps me. It gives me kind of an alarm that wakes me up

01:18:00.060 out of autopilot. And that's the thing I personally use. How do you help somebody think

01:18:04.900 about when their net worth should peak? Because a clear implication of everything we're talking about

01:18:11.580 is net worth probably needs to peak a lot sooner than it currently does. As you said, I think the

01:18:17.520 default for most working people is that net worth peaks sometime after retirement or certainly around

01:18:24.740 the time of retirement, even if they're thinking about drawing down. But again, for most people,

01:18:29.080 given the age of retirement, there's a mismatch between when they're hitting peak net worth

01:18:35.640 and when they're hitting peak capacity to utilize net worth.

01:18:39.520 That's a massive mismatch. You know, one of the things I wanted to do, and I wish I knew you back

01:18:43.700 then because you could have helped me as I was like, I want to know about all these frailty curves,

01:18:47.760 like bone density, lung capacity, what activities become less enjoyable first, and then unable to do,

01:18:54.840 because that determines a lot when your net worth should peak. I estimated it somewhere in your 50s.

01:19:01.040 Wow. And the data kind of shows that when I went to St. Petersburg and climbed the 200 and

01:19:07.560 I think it was 11 steps to walk around the Bannister, all these tour buses coming to St.

01:19:12.820 Petersburg, Asian, whatever. Not one person over those tour buses that was elderly climbed the 211

01:19:18.840 steps. So St. Petersburg was a different St. Petersburg for them. They didn't have the same

01:19:23.940 experience. I got more out of St. Petersburg for them. Now, I'm not saying it wasn't a wonderful trip

01:19:27.840 on a nice trip for them, but they probably pushed St. Petersburg too late in life. And so there's so

01:19:34.820 much hidden data and data out there in reports if you read it. We talked about it earlier, like trying

01:19:40.420 to get people to spend their money down. And one of the things, answers I give, you know, they say,

01:19:45.240 well, why do you think people are still, their net worth is still going up into 72? And, you know,

01:19:50.680 part of it is asset appreciation and going faster than they can spend it. But the real answer is they

01:19:56.300 can't. They cannot spend it down. Life has passed them by. They no longer have the attitude or

01:20:04.020 aptitude to do this. They can't do it. You'd be surprised how many people die on those cruise

01:20:08.580 ships trying to swim when they get to St. Thomas. They think their life's going to be like a carnival

01:20:12.260 commercial. And I'm like, that carnival commercial will kill most Americans. They're having heart

01:20:16.200 attacks going down those slides. And that, of course, just speaks to the imbalance between the

01:20:22.040 three variables. It's like if you spent a little bit more of your time on your health,

01:20:26.300 you would buy yourself a bigger runway to utilize your wealth on the experiences.

01:20:31.020 Right. So particularly for Americans, my book is most successful in Japan, which is strange.

01:20:36.320 Yeah. Say why.

01:20:37.160 I think one, I believe you'll get value out of this book and the way of thinking,

01:20:41.660 even if you have zero wealth. But Japan has a savings problem. Japan saves, save, saves,

01:20:47.220 then they die and they give the money to the next generation and they save, save, save. And I'm just

01:20:50.440 like, well, what generation actually has fun? So I'm really counter to the culture there.

01:20:55.120 Here, one of the criticisms of the book will be like, well, there's so many people that have zero

01:20:58.580 and trying to make ends meet. I'm like, I get it. They can still get value out of this about

01:21:02.680 getting the Tetris of their life, but maybe a wealth building book or how to make dollars book

01:21:07.440 might be more useful to them at this time in their life. In Japan, it's the opposite.

01:21:12.260 And also Japanese, they're healthier.

01:21:14.500 And they're healthier longer.

01:21:15.420 Yes. If you walk around Japan, old people, it's an older country, but they're around,

01:21:18.940 they're moving, they're doing things or having activities, et cetera. They're enjoying the life.

01:21:22.760 For Americans, looking at the obesity epidemic and the lifestyle of Americans, their ability to

01:21:29.300 consume experiences deteriorates way, way faster and way earlier than say the Japanese.

01:21:36.260 Let's go back to risk again. What's the mantra of the energy trader or the gas trader?

01:21:40.900 Yeah. The name of the game is the stay in the game.

01:21:43.480 Sort of like Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game. It's not about winning. It's about

01:21:47.040 being able to keep playing over and over and over again. So inherent in that is never making

01:21:51.440 a bet or a trade that can completely wipe you out and take you out of the game.

01:21:56.500 By nature of the business, even the smallest position can take you out of the game. It's

01:22:00.960 really about taking prudent risk reward and then stopping out when you can. Life is risk. You can

01:22:06.560 get hit by a bus. A meteor can hit you. You can get some sort of crazy infectious disease. You can get

01:22:11.000 a bum deal just going out, but you're not going to live in a bubble. You're going to take calculated

01:22:14.820 risks. So in trading, we're optimizing for profits. You're going to take risks that in a

01:22:20.860 tail scenario can blow you out. The key is taking prudent risk reward decisions. I don't smoke. The

01:22:27.500 reward's not great enough. I did go skydiving the first time the reward was great. The second time

01:22:32.880 it was half as great. I didn't do it the third time because the risk was the same and the reward

01:22:37.460 wasn't. The reward was going down and the risk was still the same. And so this is the same thing in

01:22:41.760 trading. We look at everything on a risk reward basis, the likelihood of dying. If things go awry,

01:22:47.220 can we get out? Have I sized my position? Can I get out? Is the liquidity there? And all these

01:22:51.680 things are going on all the time. And how do you think about that in a person's life? I mean,

01:22:56.200 I like the example of skydiving. How do you think about this now in terms of the seasons of the person's

01:23:01.820 life? Are there certain seasons where certain risks make sense, be it financial risks or-

01:23:07.760 I'll give you a great example of physical risk. Okay. So I have a cartilage disappearing in L3,

01:23:14.000 L4. Bones are hitting each other. So I'm advised against doing impact things. And I was 50 years

01:23:20.920 old in the islands and guys were going to go wakeboarding. And I was like, I don't want to

01:23:25.440 go. I don't want to go. I'm going to hang out on the beach. I'm going to loaf. And I thought about

01:23:29.240 it for a second. I said, I don't have many wakeboarding times left. Like I'm not going

01:23:35.840 wakeboarding at 60. I have this degenerative back thing. It's going to be more dangerous for me,

01:23:40.880 et cetera. If I am to wakeboard- It has to be now.

01:23:43.880 It is now. It is in this time period. And then I thought, okay, it's in this time period. I'm like,

01:23:48.180 okay, how many times am I going to be in warm water with my buddies where there's a wakeboarding

01:23:55.020 boat ready to go in the next two years? I don't know. This is it. I don't foresee it happening.

01:24:02.020 I could make a special effort for it, but like, it's just there in my lap and I don't have something

01:24:06.240 else to do, et cetera. And I was like, I'm going to go wakeboarding. This is probably the last time

01:24:10.440 I'm going to go wakeboarding. That was the last time I went wakeboarding.

01:24:13.420 How much did it hurt?

01:24:14.300 It didn't hurt. I actually jumped the wake too. I made a nice jump at a wake. I said,

01:24:17.540 I'm going to send it. I sent it. It didn't hurt that much. It wasn't like that. But afterwards,

01:24:21.040 there was a little tension in my back, et cetera. And stretching.

01:24:25.020 And trying to, I was very conscious, like, okay, I got to be careful coming across it.

01:24:30.380 And now I wake surf. I do the low impact version of the sport, which I absolutely love. Until,

01:24:35.440 you know, there's some technique to like put cartilage in my back and restrengthen my back.

01:24:39.760 I'm waiting for the technology to catch up. So maybe I'll get my back back. But right now,

01:24:43.580 it's the last time I went wakeboarding. That was the risk was worth the reward. There was no other time.

01:24:49.480 Now, as I get older, wakeboarding is much more dangerous. And so I've gone to a sport where

01:24:54.780 the speed of the sport, a lot of people think if you're going 10 miles per hour versus 12 miles

01:25:00.180 per hour, it's only two miles per hour difference, but it's a 44% difference in force because force

01:25:05.140 equals MV squared. And so I'm acutely aware of it. And I'm like, okay, I want to be in something I can

01:25:10.420 get fulfilled where the risk is not as great. I have a 44% reduction in force, which is great.

01:25:17.880 Great for me when I fall.

01:25:19.620 So what year was it that you had that incredible birthday?

01:25:23.300 Gosh, I'm pretty sure it's 45. But I've had an incredible birthday since then. But the one in

01:25:29.180 the book is 45.

01:25:30.640 At the time you spend a lot of money, was it for you enough money that you were like,

01:25:36.820 am I crazy doing this? Did you have second thoughts about it?

01:25:39.420 I had second thoughts. Like the events and the things I was planning.

01:25:42.320 Remind me, it was down in the-

01:25:43.880 I went to St. Bart's. I love St. Bart's. It's where I had my honeymoon. It's a great

01:25:48.080 island. I think it's one of the best islands in the Caribbean. Obviously, not everybody can go to

01:25:52.380 St. Bart's. And I tell people that become successful, you either get new friends or you

01:25:58.120 scholarship your friends because you want to do experiences. A lot of times, a lot of people want

01:26:03.440 to do shared experiences, right? They want their friends to come. They can't afford to just pop up

01:26:07.920 and spend thousands of dollars to go to St. Bart's or do X, Y, and Z. And it happens in various levels

01:26:13.460 of success, right? Whether it's on a trip to Chicago, you know, like I can't do that. Some

01:26:18.520 people can and can't. And so as you become successful, one of the experiences you want

01:26:23.240 to have is to be around your friends and have shared experience with your friends. And so I

01:26:27.020 coach people. I say, you have to lose this attachment that they have to pay or they need

01:26:32.620 to pay or whatever. You have to think what's most important to you. Get off autopilot. It's to have

01:26:37.660 shared experiences. And is it worth it for you to have them around? For me, I've had good

01:26:42.680 friends throughout the years. It's unequivocal. Yes. Friends and family. So, but it gets expensive.

01:26:47.520 You know, you got to rent out the hotel rooms, et cetera, and entertainment and plan this thing.

01:26:51.280 But I was like, some of these people, they have their own lives and own complications and conflicts.

01:26:56.700 You won't get the time to do with it. Some of these people won't be alive. May or may not be alive.

01:27:02.220 You may drift apart. This is the time I want to do this. And so as I was adding these people in and

01:27:09.420 having my mother down and all this stuff, I had just like a heavenly experience. Walking on the

01:27:15.480 beach. My mom's coming out of her beach house. My friends are hanging on the balcony looking down.

01:27:20.100 It's beautiful. The birds are out, et cetera. And hi, all the people I love. And we're going to do

01:27:24.700 this fun activity. We're going to listen to music, et cetera. You know, I imagine that that's what

01:27:28.880 heavens is like. You're just having this experience. And what I did was I realized that that's what I was

01:27:34.360 working for. I was working to create these experiences. These are the things that fulfill

01:27:39.700 me. When I was planning it, oh shit, there's a lot of goddamn money. You know what I mean? Like,

01:27:45.340 what am I going to do? Is am I doing the right allocation, right? Like you never know if you get

01:27:48.760 it exactly right, right? Nobody gets it perfectly balanced, but this was the right direction.

01:27:53.460 You know, it reminds me of something when my wife and I got married in 2004, you know, we got married at

01:27:59.340 a golf club. We didn't have two nickels to rub together. So it was like, I think the wedding,

01:28:03.100 the ceremony, the reception, we're all at the same place. The whole thing cost less than $20,000.

01:28:08.120 Obscene amount of money for us at the time. And it was amazing because everybody we actually cared

01:28:12.760 about in our lives was there. We were really fortunate that, hey, almost everybody could

01:28:16.680 make it who we invited. You know, there were almost 200 people there. So at one point I grabbed my wife,

01:28:23.240 we kind of walked out onto a balcony and could see everybody. And I said, do you realize that this is

01:28:29.060 one of only two times in our life that we will be surrounded by everyone who's meaningful to us,

01:28:35.680 who's alive. And the only other time it's going to occur, we're going to be dead. We'll be in the

01:28:40.000 casket. We'll be at our funeral. So we got to really take this in. And I realize now there was a huge error

01:28:46.280 in my logic, which was, that was totally untrue. That didn't have to be true at all. You can create

01:28:51.740 that any time you want. You can decide for no reason, I want to bring everybody in my life who

01:28:59.600 matters. Throw a birthday party. It could be a birthday party. It could be just a party.

01:29:03.260 Most of my life is finding excuses to throw parties. You know, we get autopilot waiting for

01:29:08.540 certain events like weddings or funerals or- Or special anniversaries.

01:29:12.180 Special anniversaries or things like that. We autopilot like, oh, that's when we get together.

01:29:16.660 We allow autopilot to dictate when we do these things. Instead of thinking, hey,

01:29:19.780 I really want to hang out with so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so. Let me design a trip

01:29:24.040 or let me have a bowling alley or something. It could be low cost. It'd be like, let me have a

01:29:28.620 picnic with a ball game, talking shit. One of the things I want to do, which I guess the startup

01:29:34.140 costs will be something expensive. I'm getting some laser tag guns and I put it in my group. I have

01:29:39.460 this group called Cool Awesome People. I'll put you in it if you want to be in it. And I'm like,

01:29:43.840 it's on. I'm going to get laser tag, best ass laser tag things. There's going to be some

01:29:48.060 serious war and everybody's like, yes. You know what I mean? I'm creating this experience. Yeah,

01:29:52.500 I'm going to kick some ass on laser tag and shit talk, but I'm also going to connect and have a

01:29:56.700 good time with people. And I can do that. Once I put the initial cost, we could do that all the time.

01:30:01.580 We can have a league. We can do all kinds of things. It doesn't have to be laser tag. It could

01:30:05.600 be wiffle ball at the park. You can have a wiffle ball league, low cost. Dollar store,

01:30:10.000 pick up a wiffle ball bat. You're creating memories and somebody brings sandwiches and

01:30:13.980 you can do that. And that's getting off autopilot. So I'm sorry to interrupt you about,

01:30:18.500 but you really hit the nail on the head about that. It's like design your life. Think about

01:30:23.820 what you want out of it and make it happen. Now, let me ask you a question. At that

01:30:27.880 birthday party when you're 45, how many people were there?

01:30:30.480 We took out the Taiwan hotel and some of the other one, 80, 100, 80, 100 or something.

01:30:38.040 And how much time did you get to spend with each person?

01:30:40.960 We were there for a week. So I got to spend time. Whoever wanted to spend time with me,

01:30:45.100 they got to spend time with me. Some people have this thing. This is just me. I don't know. This

01:30:50.420 isn't like coaching. Some people, I want their presence, but not saying anything. I know you're

01:30:55.300 okay. I get to see you being happy. Maybe I don't talk to you as much, but I get to enjoy you enjoying

01:31:01.660 yourself. That's one of my favorite things at a party. When I throw a party, they're like,

01:31:04.880 are you having a good time? It's crazy, whatever. I'm like, I'm having the best. I'm watching the best

01:31:08.700 fucking movie of my life right now. I am in an immersive theater of people I love doing the

01:31:15.880 thing they want to do. Now I'm kind of antisocial. I don't like to talk that much to people. I get

01:31:19.960 awkward sometimes. You know what I mean? Sometimes I grab my wife and I'm like, talk for me, talk for

01:31:23.800 me. We'll go to a party and I'll be like, you got to talk for me, babe. I can't take it.

01:31:27.180 I can talk to a million people, no problems, the stadium or whatever. And sometimes I get awkward.

01:31:32.380 But what I really, really do enjoy and what really fulfills me is watching people I love have a good time.

01:31:37.180 And I think after my wife read the book, that was one of her first thoughts, which is I've never had

01:31:43.160 a birthday party. So the last birthday party I had was, I was seven years old. After that,

01:31:47.320 I just decided I never wanted to have a party and I never have. And she's like, look, I really want,

01:31:54.020 I know how much you are obsessed with your friends and how much you share with them individually,

01:31:59.240 but wouldn't it be great for everybody to be under one roof for your birthday? And I'm resisting it

01:32:06.440 to know. And she's, she'd never throw a surprise party for me. She knows that would just kill me.

01:32:10.460 So she won't do that, but she's really negotiating with me to sort of have a party. And my view is

01:32:14.840 it won't be enjoyable for me because I'll be the center of attention and I'll feel an obligation

01:32:21.040 to give everybody the same amount of attention. Whereas having dinner with five friends is

01:32:28.980 infinitely more enjoyable. So I'm trying to balance her very well.

01:32:34.740 It's just a different experience.

01:32:36.060 I guess what bums me out is like, I feel like I wouldn't even know how to appreciate a party.

01:32:40.060 I get that. Like I walk around and I just really enjoy people meeting and socializing and connecting.

01:32:45.200 Like at my wedding, there were friends that didn't know each other and they're like,

01:32:48.320 they're great. Like, you know, great people. I'm like, of course I do. You find somebody who's

01:32:51.700 great love, you keep them close by. I don't care if you dated them or whatever. Like

01:32:55.280 you keep them close, man. Like people that vibe with you is very important to me. And

01:32:59.920 me seeing them succeed, I'm a person that roots for people to hit the long ball.

01:33:04.080 I'm not a hater. I'm a natural, like, I hope you crush it. I hope you become a trillionaire.

01:33:09.260 I hope you, whatever it is. And so seeing people at a party, I like that there were parties and make

01:33:15.080 people have fun and create environments for them, loosen up, enjoy each other, have a good time.

01:33:19.720 And then watching that success and watching them interact is enjoyable for me. Even though I might be

01:33:24.720 just sitting there smiling, right? Like not really talking.

01:33:27.840 You can enjoy a party as much if you're the host or it's your birthday as if you're at somebody's

01:33:33.360 party?

01:33:34.100 It depends. It's not always the same because you got to solve problems. Someone can get in,

01:33:37.840 the ice maker is broken, whatever. Like there's that type of things. But yeah,

01:33:41.320 I'd rather watch that movie than go to the movies. I'd rather be in that immersive theater than

01:33:45.540 McKittrick Hotel and Sleep No More in New York, which is an immersive theater. That's the best theater.

01:33:50.560 And even so what? I only got to have a small conversation, whatever. Like the feedback

01:33:55.060 there was like, I met this person. We had a great time. It was awesome. Very fulfilling to me.

01:33:59.800 Very fulfilling to me.

01:34:00.940 What year did you finish writing Die With Zero?

01:34:04.520 Let's see. It's supposed to come out in 2020. So it's probably 2019.

01:34:09.360 2019.

01:34:10.560 In the three years-ish since you've written the book, has your thinking changed in anything?

01:34:16.400 Have you evolved? Are you more nuanced in anything that you wrote about?

01:34:19.840 You know, it's kind of like when you write a formula and it's not like I came up with this

01:34:24.520 formula, this life cycle hypothesis thing, which is basically the book, this counterfactual regret

01:34:29.320 minimization algorithm, and I'm solving for net fulfillment. It's not as if these ideas weren't

01:34:34.900 out there. Like I always say, like anybody could have just thought about it and wrote this book.

01:34:39.040 It's how I present it so that it hits the widest audience and so that it hits them viscerally

01:34:43.860 so they actually apply it. And so I think about it deeper and deeper, layers of it. And sometimes

01:34:50.380 I go deep into the subcategory because I use these variables, wealth, health, and time.

01:34:54.860 What's the maximum level of health I should be? There's tons of health books out there. I'm not

01:34:59.060 writing a health book, but I'm like, how can I optimize this? How are these two interplay?

01:35:03.380 The time and health. How much time do I really want to spend on the Peloton? How much time do I

01:35:07.640 really want to like regimented eating all the time and being a pain in the ass? How many chocolate

01:35:13.280 chip cookies do I want to eat before I die and just suffer? I have to think about that. If dying

01:35:17.940 one year early means living one more year, but I don't get any chocolate chip cookies,

01:35:22.340 I'll taste the chocolate chip cookies. I want a fulfilling life. Thinking deeply about these

01:35:25.280 things. That's kind of a cartoon version of it, but I hear other people think about it. I wrote the

01:35:30.760 basic macro formula, but it's very fulfilling to see other people. They've set up spreadsheets.

01:35:35.340 This is the optimal way you would die with zero. They've done it better than me.

01:35:38.480 These financial planners built these spreadsheets and your returns, and these are the things you

01:35:42.940 like to do, et cetera. This is great. They've taken the ball and run with it. And I've taken

01:35:47.420 the ball a little bit and run with it a little bit myself. And the way I'm applying it mainly

01:35:51.660 is more socially, more of these things like at my wedding, I said to somebody, I said, probably no one

01:35:59.260 in this room will see each other more than 50 times. And most of us will probably only see us 20 times

01:36:04.740 in the times of our lives.

01:36:05.680 How many people were... This is the recent wedding.

01:36:07.720 Yeah, 117.

01:36:08.920 117.

01:36:09.900 117. And so that's kind of hit people. They're like, yeah, you're kind of right. I put the over

01:36:15.160 under at the max at like 50 for any pair that's not married, obviously. And probably 20. That made

01:36:21.160 me think, I don't want 20. I'm going to throw parties. I've taken throwing parties and social

01:36:25.220 things very seriously because I thought about what fulfills me. So the last party I had, which you

01:36:31.920 were invited, but you didn't come.

01:36:32.860 I was throwing a party that night.

01:36:33.980 You were throwing a party that night at F1. I went all out. This is what I'm going to work

01:36:37.820 for, to have these types of experience. There's other things, right? But this is in the category,

01:36:43.040 in the top of the category. Socializing, seeing my friends happy, having a good time, et cetera.

01:36:48.440 Travel is a big one. Charity is another big one. My kid's money is their money. It's not my money.

01:36:53.160 It's in a trust that's already taken care of. They'll get their money turned over when

01:36:56.300 somewhere between 25, 26, and 33 because that's the optimal time for them when they're mentally

01:37:03.760 mature and at physical maturity, not in decline.

01:37:07.640 And how much will you talk with them about what you think or don't think they should do with that

01:37:14.500 money? Is that one of those things where you feel it is your responsibility to say absolutely

01:37:17.820 nothing and let them figure it out on their own?

01:37:20.320 No, no. I want to give them a roadmap. I want to teach them that it's a tool. A lot of people,

01:37:24.320 one of the biggest mistakes they make is assigning some sort of good or bad to money

01:37:27.940 or what it is, et cetera. It's not money that's good or bad in the Bible. It's the love of money

01:37:32.380 that is good or bad. I use this analogy. I usually say like money is a tool much like a hammer and saw

01:37:37.900 and nails and rail guns. Do hammers and saws build houses? No. You need to know how to use those tools.

01:37:44.420 People build those houses. So you do, does money make you happy? No. But if you know how to use

01:37:49.560 the tool of money, it can make you happy or it can make you miserable. So some people who give

01:37:55.280 hammers and saws, they build a house, they build canoes. This is wonderful things. You're like,

01:37:58.300 how the hell did you build this? Some people give hammers and saws and they're just sitting there

01:38:01.120 to cut their arm off. And so what I'm trying to do is not tell my kids what they should do,

01:38:07.520 but teach them how to use the tools. Once they know how to use the tools, if they decide to build

01:38:11.780 houses or canoes or cut their arms off, that's up to them. But I want to make sure that I gave

01:38:16.000 them the instruction manual and got them a little bit proficient on how to use the tools and that's

01:38:20.720 it. Then my job is done, right? I have so many friends that try and control people from the

01:38:25.800 grave, that use the money as a control mechanism. I'm very big on like, that's my dream. My dreams

01:38:31.840 are my dreams. My dad always tried to get me to be an attorney. Get the hell out of here. I'm never

01:38:35.840 doing that. But you try and push your dreams onto your kids. I want you to be a doctor. I want you to

01:38:41.500 be this. I want you to be that, whatever. And that's not necessarily what they want to do.

01:38:45.060 They have their own life and it's their adventure. And what I want to do is set them up with the tools

01:38:49.620 to choose their own adventure. Now, I might not agree with that adventure. I probably won't because

01:38:54.940 I come from a different era and a different culture and all kinds of things. But I will be

01:39:00.040 rest assured and happy that if they're fulfilled, great. Well, Bill, I want to thank you very much for

01:39:06.660 writing this book because as I said at the outset, it really is one of a handful of books that has

01:39:13.440 caused me to rethink a lot of what I've been doing, how I've been thinking about the problem

01:39:20.080 of optimizing these variables. I'm really confident that people are going to pick this book up and find

01:39:24.900 similar value, at least in magnitude. They might find different things that speak to them more

01:39:29.540 or less than me. But I believe that from a valence and magnitude perspective, people will

01:39:34.100 across the board find this valuable. So thanks so much for writing it and also for coming today.

01:39:37.880 Thanks. That's great feedback. I mean, you don't write books to get rich. You write books to get

01:39:41.400 your point across. And for me, I see it as saving lives. And a lot of people have said this before.

01:39:46.420 What do you mean saving lives, Perkins? You're fucking crazy. What do you mean saving lives?

01:39:50.020 You're not saving lives. And I'm like, well, listen, when somebody's drowning in the river or

01:39:53.700 lake, Lake Austin, you pull them out and you mouth to mouth and you save their lives. Guess what?

01:39:58.460 They're still going to fucking die. Just not that day, right? So what did you do when you saved their

01:40:03.540 life by pulling them out of the river? You've given them more choices, more experience,

01:40:08.060 more life. So when you read my book and you get off autopilot and you get more choices,

01:40:14.020 more experience, more life, isn't it the same? At least in my mind it is. And that's what motivates

01:40:18.960 me. And so when you say it had an impact in you and you're going to have a more fulfilling life,

01:40:24.200 it's like, I fucking did it. You know what I mean? I feel very happy. So I appreciate it.

01:40:28.500 I think the example you gave there is a great one. And I would agree with you completely

01:40:32.300 because I too fall in the camp, despite my profession of believing we are all absolutely

01:40:38.100 going to die and in relatively short order. And therefore anything that changes our experiential

01:40:44.940 existence for the better is part of living. Yeah. So thank you. Thanks for having me. It's

01:40:50.100 been great. All right, man. That was awesome. Thank you for listening to this week's episode

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The Peter Attia Drive - January 09, 2023

#237 ‒ Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment ｜ Bill Perkins

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