The Peter Attia Drive - Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:16.540 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:53.200 of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.040 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to a special episode of

00:01:06.120 The Drive. For this week's episode, we want to rebroadcast my conversation with Bill Perkins

00:01:11.260 from January of 2023. Bill is a successful hedge fund manager and entrepreneur and is the author

00:01:17.320 of one of my favorite books, Die With Zero, getting all you can from your money and your life.

00:01:24.300 Bill's book is one of a handful of books that I keep multiple copies around in my house to give

00:01:30.000 to friends or family or anybody who's over and who I think would benefit from it. This is really a

00:01:35.160 conversation about how to optimize your life by investing in your experiences instead of waiting

00:01:39.900 until the end of your life to do everything. We start this discussion by talking about Bill's

00:01:44.160 background and his upbringing and the genesis of the philosophies in this book, something that came

00:01:49.300 to Bill throughout the early part of his career. We talk about the overarching philosophy of the book,

00:01:54.940 which is that we all have three important resources, time, health, and experiences. And of course,

00:02:00.520 we use money as a tool to trade off these three things. Bill makes the argument that no matter at what

00:02:06.840 level of wealth you are, most people overlook the most valuable asset of all, which is time. We speak about

00:02:13.400 the importance of understanding risk, including the opportunity cost of decisions that we do or

00:02:18.000 don't make, the risk reward matrix, thinking about regret, and the dangers of living a life on autopilot

00:02:24.480 when it comes to work and fulfillment. Overall, I have found Bill's insights from this book and my

00:02:29.120 conversations with him, outside of this podcast even, to be valuable in my own life. And I think

00:02:34.200 they are very important for anyone, regardless of age, net worth, or stage of life. So without further

00:02:39.860 delay, please enjoy or re-enjoy my conversation with Bill Perkins.

00:02:49.440 Bill, thanks so much for coming by. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

00:02:53.040 I have too. I'm really honored to be on your podcast.

00:02:55.920 I don't know. A little while ago, I made a video on Instagram where I talked about

00:02:59.200 three books I've read in the last 12 months that I didn't expect to, A, have such an impact on how I

00:03:06.480 thought about things, but also B, even though they're completely different books, they strike

00:03:11.760 me as having kind of a unifying theme in this sort of thing about quality of life. The three books are,

00:03:17.740 one of them was From Strength to Strength, one of them is 4,000 Weeks, and the other one is Die

00:03:22.440 with Zero. Now, what's interesting is I know exactly who suggested I read 4,000 Weeks, and I'm really good

00:03:28.980 friends with the author of From Strength to Strength. So that's why I just read that knowing it was coming

00:03:33.340 out. I still don't remember who recommended Die with Zero to me, but I remember just thinking,

00:03:39.200 okay, well, cool. Sounds interesting. Ordered it, and then just couldn't put it down. As I think I

00:03:45.060 mentioned in the video, immediately made my wife read it, and then immediately just went out and

00:03:49.380 bought many copies of it, along with many copies of the other two books. So I basically started handing

00:03:55.200 them out as like a triplet copy. If someone was over and they hadn't read them, boom, they were leaving

00:04:00.200 with all three copies of the book. So that speaks to why I wanted to sit down with you. And let's

00:04:06.400 give people a sense of who you are. So you grew up in Jersey, right?

00:04:08.680 Yeah, I grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey.

00:04:10.640 You're an engineer. We have that in common, right?

00:04:12.380 Yeah, except I don't want people to be impressed with us as an engineer. We had a saying on the

00:04:16.140 football team, Ds get degrees, until later I found out, wait, you can't graduate with a D in

00:04:20.460 engineering. You have to at least get a C. So I barely graduated. I was a super slacker. So I don't

00:04:25.260 want to be like, I'm an engineer, you know? What position did you play?

00:04:28.980 The bench.

00:04:29.660 I played the bench, but I was a defensive back, cornerback at the University of Iowa.

00:04:33.420 But did it pay for school?

00:04:34.720 No, I was actually a walk-on. I was trying to get a scholarship. I had a partial scholarship,

00:04:38.380 which means they just give you some food. I basically broke my leg at the growth plate.

00:04:44.160 It was pretty much a has-been before I ever was. But when you love football, you love the sport,

00:04:50.600 you never want to let go, right? You're not like, oh, I'll just dive into my studies and

00:04:54.100 pick up this hobby. You're kind of like, football is life at that age.

00:04:58.400 You graduate college with a degree in engineering. Maybe you're not first in your class.

00:05:02.380 You decide, though, you're going to go and instead of going to grad school or something

00:05:05.180 like that, you're like, I'm going to go to New York. Is that your first job?

00:05:07.180 I love that. Not first in my class, the understatement of the year.

00:05:10.680 I was kind of like lost. Didn't know what I was going to do. Really was pretty much a slacker,

00:05:15.260 underachiever at the time. And my godfather calls me with one of those, like, what are you going to

00:05:19.960 do with your life at the point? And I knew I didn't want to go into engineering.

00:05:22.920 It was kind of this cookie cutter life. You know, you don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial

00:05:26.940 spirit in it. You work on like a subsection of a chip. Here's your career path, et cetera. It was

00:05:31.800 all kind of laid out for you. And that was unattractive to me. It kind of seemed like death

00:05:36.780 to me. And at the time I saw this movie, Wall Street, and I was like, oh, that's what I want.

00:05:42.920 I want to be rich. I want to go work in stocks. So when my godfather called me, I go,

00:05:48.480 I want to be a stockbroker or a stock trader. And he goes, I don't know anything about equities,

00:05:53.840 but there's this firm in commodities. Mind you, I didn't know what a commodity was.

00:05:58.500 That's looking for screen clerks. Go check it out. And so I got an introduction, came up my resume.

00:06:05.700 This is what you're like, late 80s, early 90s?

00:06:07.500 Like 91. And takes my resume, tears it up, walks me around the floor. People are yelling and

00:06:13.620 screaming. And, you know, they're kind of casual wear and it's like trading places. And I'm like,

00:06:18.580 all this energy. And I'm like, wow, if that guy can be rich, so can I. And so they didn't want to

00:06:24.640 hire me, actually. They were looking to give the job to someone else, another friend of the firm.

00:06:28.380 So I kind of hung out downstairs, waiting every day, calling. Can I come up? Can I become a peon here?

00:06:33.500 Can I become a peon? And finally, after three days, they let me become a peon.

00:06:38.260 So what did that job entail?

00:06:39.700 It's checking trades and sneaking sandwiches on the floor for traders. It's like literally

00:06:43.720 the worst version of the mailroom. But the system in the old days where guys would yell and scream

00:06:49.040 across the pit and write their trades on a pick card and also in their trade book. They'd throw the

00:06:54.760 pick cards into the center. There's a guy with glasses and a giant net. And all these cards would go

00:07:00.540 to him. They would catch him, put him down the chute, and they would be entered into a computer

00:07:04.960 system. My job was to check the trader's log versus the computer's log. And your name becomes

00:07:11.180 your trader. So if your trader was why not or S&M, that was your name. So clerks are running around

00:07:17.060 the floor going, why not? S&M, why not? And then if you're why not, you're like, why not here?

00:07:22.600 Ever here? I know selling five lots of 5480, not three lots of 5480. What do you know?

00:07:28.080 And if you know the same trade, then it's a simple process to correct it in the system.

00:07:34.240 And if you don't, you're like, no, no, I definitely know only three lots. Then you go to the traders

00:07:38.160 immediately and they kind of reconcile it. And that was a system like running around all day

00:07:43.220 checking trades. This job is down on Wall Street. This firm's on Wall Street.

00:07:46.500 Yeah. So back when the World Trade Center was there, this was in for World Trade Center.

00:07:50.600 How much were you learning the business? Because I imagine one could take a job like that

00:07:55.360 and not actually learn what's happening, like what the machine is doing.

00:07:59.580 Yeah. That's when I decided to turn it on. I always tell people like, hey,

00:08:03.920 I was pretty much a, can I say fuck up? I was pretty much the fuck up of fuck ups for given what

00:08:11.020 I had before college. But then I decided to turn it on. That poverty, that being a peon and that desire

00:08:18.500 to make it forced me to be like, I'm going to learn every single thing there is about this business.

00:08:22.960 I was reading books at night about trading, about the oil business, about options, about whatever.

00:08:29.660 I was a sponge. And I really turned it on and said, I'm going to be diligent. I'm not going to

00:08:34.200 mess around as much as I possibly can as a 20-year-old, right? And really, really trying to

00:08:40.680 make myself invaluable no matter where I was. So where were you living at the time? What part

00:08:44.940 of the city? Did you actually live in Manhattan? When I first got there, I had to live at home with

00:08:48.540 my mom, which was completely cramping my style. And so I started driving a limo at night,

00:08:53.560 the company limo at night to make ends meet. What were you getting paid in that first job?

00:08:57.380 Oh, geez. I think it was sub $16,000 a year. I have to go look.

00:09:01.780 Sub 16.

00:09:02.520 Yeah. I think it was like $16,000, $16,000. But I was getting raises very quickly because I made

00:09:07.820 myself valuable and I would work at night and I would make more money driving the limo on a daily

00:09:14.020 basis because traders would take me here and they'd be drunk and they'd tip you. And you weren't there

00:09:19.880 necessarily for your current income. You were there for your future income. And so I had another clerk

00:09:25.340 named Jason Ruffo who had a studio in the Upper West Side. And what he did was he put up a wall by the

00:09:31.820 kitchen and kind of made this small room in the studio. And I eventually got an apartment with

00:09:38.900 him on the Upper West Side living in like a pizza oven type space. But it was great because I was

00:09:45.360 in New York City out of my mom's house. I could have girls over and that pride that goes, well,

00:09:51.200 I live on the Upper West Side. Everybody wants to say they live in New York City. And so as I was

00:09:57.480 getting raises and kind of moving up, I gradually got into that life of, you know, what I call a

00:10:02.380 buppy, black urban professional, you know, buppies and yuppies. And that was the beginning of my

00:10:07.100 journey. Tell me, was your dad in the picture at this time? So my dad is now older in poor health

00:10:13.280 in Jersey City. So during this time, he'd had multiple strokes. My dad is kind of like me. He's

00:10:20.500 fairly stubborn, but he was stubborn to the extreme. Doctor says, don't do this. All the things you would

00:10:25.140 tell him not to do and you need to be doing, he's like, ah, to hell with that. You know what I mean?

00:10:29.160 I guess. And so he's in the picture. My parents are divorced. He's in Jersey City.

00:10:34.400 Had your parents gone to college?

00:10:35.700 My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University of Iowa. He was a real badass. He had

00:10:40.000 no intentions of going to school. He walked by a football field when he was a kid in high school.

00:10:45.460 He's like, I want to do that. And coach is like, you don't know anything about football. And he says,

00:10:48.720 it seems like it's about hitting people. I know how to hit people. So they give him some raggedy

00:10:52.120 uniforms. He comes out for a practice. And then the next practice, he has a brand new uniform.

00:10:56.880 He's all everything, gets recruited to go to the University of Iowa to go to college. And so there

00:11:02.000 he is in college in 1959 at the University of Iowa, all badass from Jersey City. So he had gone to

00:11:09.440 college. And then my mom went to college, finished college while I think it was like preteen or late

00:11:15.320 teens. But I had the benefit of two college educated parents.

00:11:19.500 And how much were they understanding your hunger, your drive, your aspirations in this new role?

00:11:27.500 I mean, because presumably they had seen you in high school and college, not achieving at your

00:11:31.600 potential. And now all of a sudden you're hustling, you're working two jobs, you're reading,

00:11:36.400 you're learning, you're doing everything. Were they purview to that sort of metamorphosis in you?

00:11:40.800 They saw it later. I'm the kid that didn't take out the garbage. I always say, don't tell your

00:11:44.700 parents your dreams because they'll just piss on them because they've seen you at your worst,

00:11:48.360 your failures as you're growing. They have this kind of image of you when you were the

00:11:53.440 caterpillar, not the butterfly.

00:11:55.600 So you weren't necessarily like advertising to them. This is what I want to do.

00:11:58.560 No. You know, they started seeing it. I remember the time when I finally made,

00:12:03.040 I got a raise and I was like, I did the calculation. I'm just like, holy shit,

00:12:06.080 I make more money than my mom. Like I've made it. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'm like,

00:12:11.220 I'm real. I'm legit. I'm a puppy. Me with my badge, you know, used to wear around as a badge of honor.

00:12:17.240 Like I get onto the New York Mercantile Exchange, et cetera. But they'd see I'm going out or I'm

00:12:22.560 flying here or I'm doing whatever. And it's like, oh, the kid must be doing okay. It wasn't until

00:12:28.460 I got recruited to go to Houston, started buying the assets that adults start buying. And I paid my

00:12:37.000 mom back for something that I did when I was a teenager that she didn't know that they're like,

00:12:41.620 okay. What was that? When I was younger, I had a stick Toyota that my mom had. It was her car.

00:12:48.080 I was driving it. And my friend, Pete Theibel, it's like, I want to drive the car. I want to

00:12:53.600 teach me how to drive the car. I want to drive the car. I'm not supposed to drive the car. So

00:12:56.480 anyway, long story short, he hits the gas instead of the clutch, spins the car out. The back of it

00:13:01.980 spins around, hits a telephone pole. Trunk pops up. It has this big giant dent. I'm like, holy shit,

00:13:06.720 what am I going to do? So I tell my mom the story that we went to go get pizza and parked it and a

00:13:14.340 truck must've hit it on the side or bumped it and went on. And that was my lie to my mom about this

00:13:19.160 car that I felt guilty about. I said, one day I'm going to pay for this car in spades. That happened

00:13:26.200 to my mom. And so one day I gave my mom $40,000 and I was like, mom, remember that time the car had

00:13:31.760 that brown mark on it? We told you it was a truck. Well, this is what really happened.

00:13:35.880 How did she react to that? She started laughing. She goes, I knew something was strange about that.

00:13:41.260 The story fit, but there was something strange about that. She just kind of laughed and was

00:13:45.920 thankful that one, it was a great investment having that car beat up, but she just kind of

00:13:51.920 laughed and we just reminisced about it. So let's go back to when you're on the

00:13:55.220 Upper West Side. You write about this in the book. You and your roommate kind of had a slightly

00:13:59.380 different, I don't know, call it a point of view on future earnings and what that allowed you to do

00:14:05.820 with your time. You told a story about something you did that seemed kind of bold.

00:14:10.740 That he did that was kind of bold. You're talking about when Jason took the trip.

00:14:13.900 Yeah.

00:14:14.180 So Jason, I don't know if our views were very thought out or just wired in, but I was head down

00:14:20.260 like, I got to make it. I got to become a trader. I got to have my head down. I'm saving money. I'm

00:14:25.700 really at this point in my life, super diligent, trying to convince my boss to get on the bus program

00:14:31.180 to save money, writing down every single nickel that I bought, et cetera. I'm really focused on

00:14:36.440 my career trajectory. And Jason is like...

00:14:39.100 Does Jason work in the same firm?

00:14:40.760 He works at another firm. If you look at the old pictures, all the phone booths are right next to

00:14:44.560 each other. He's like right next to me, even though he's not at the same firm. We're all crowded

00:14:47.680 into one area. And Jason's like, I'm going to go backpacking for Europe for a couple months.

00:14:53.260 I'm like, what? How are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to borrow money from this guy who was a

00:14:58.080 loan shark. And I'm like, wait, what? You're going to borrow money from this guy and you're

00:15:05.420 going to go backpacking in Europe. I'm like, this is insane. This is insanity. My head is about to

00:15:11.640 explode. I'm like, you're going to miss out. And what if they hire another screen clerk and your job's

00:15:16.840 not there when you come back? And how are you going to pay this guy back if you don't pay him back?

00:15:20.080 This is not like, oh, penalties and interest. This is like knees and ankles. And so I just didn't get it.

00:15:25.580 That experience, I wasn't thinking about like die with zero and certain experiences belong in a

00:15:31.900 certain period of your life, et cetera. I was just ultimately on this autopilot of trying to be

00:15:37.260 successful and make money at that time of my life. And Jason was like, I'm going backpacking.

00:15:43.600 So he went, I stayed, he came back, had a screen clerking job.

00:15:48.040 Different firm or same firm?

00:15:49.040 Same firm. Wasn't that much noticeable different. I moved up a little bit,

00:15:52.260 but it wasn't that noticeable different. But he came back richer, right? He came back with

00:15:56.780 stories and experiences and romance and lifelong friends. You know, in the beginning, it was kind

00:16:03.900 of, oh, wow, maybe I missed out. Maybe I could have jumped in for a week, you know, that type of

00:16:08.400 thing. And as time went on, I really, really regretted not joining him on that trip. When it

00:16:13.040 finally came time where I'm like, I'm going to go Europe. I'm going to have this backpacking

00:16:16.960 experience. I was too bougie. I had money. I wasn't going to go stay at youth hostels.

00:16:21.280 I wasn't going to capture these trains. I was going to have an experience, but a different

00:16:25.560 experience. The type of experience he had was for that time in your life. And the type

00:16:30.520 of experience, even though it was wonderful, it was not as rich as his experience because

00:16:36.460 the time had passed me by. It's one of my big, big, big regrets in life.

00:16:41.860 So how did you start to formulate this understanding about these different types of resources, be

00:16:47.620 it time, be it money, which is the resource I think a lot of people think about, experiences

00:16:52.820 themselves as, for lack of a better word, an asset or a thing, the actual experience,

00:16:58.020 the people you're meeting, all of these different things. When did you start to coalesce around

00:17:02.060 some of the ideas that ultimately, of course, would go on to become the thesis of this book?

00:17:05.880 It was slowly over time. Even when I got to the exchange, I was in this hurry to get rich.

00:17:11.940 And the reason why I was in a hurry, because I had this bias, I had this belief. I was like,

00:17:15.740 yeah, there's rich guys here, but they're old. What can they possibly do with the money? I'm young.

00:17:19.380 I'm 21. I'm ageist. I can't imagine the use of a million dollars when you're 40. What are you

00:17:26.020 going to do? Buy a nicer car to drive your kids around? It just seems like loss on them. They don't

00:17:30.040 get to do fun things. Now, I was wrong about that, but I was right about the utility of money

00:17:35.680 over time. And I also read this book at this time called Your Money or Your Life that kind of

00:17:40.660 transformed my understanding of what money is. It's a very detailed book that has these exercises

00:17:48.060 that has you look at how you spend your hours from going to work, getting ready for work,

00:17:54.680 the things you spend on work, and really figuring out what your true hourly wage is after tax,

00:18:00.040 this is what an hour of your time, of your life is worth. And then it has you not think of

00:18:06.620 everything in money, but in time. So instead of going to the movies and say it cost me $10,

00:18:11.720 it's like that cost me one hour and 15 minutes of my time to go to this movie. To buy this shirt,

00:18:17.800 it cost me three hours of my time. And so you get this idea that I'm exchanging my life for certain

00:18:25.300 things. The experience of buying a shirt, going to the movie, going on a trip.

00:18:29.220 And that hit me hard.

00:18:30.700 And where were you at this point? This is before you went to Houston?

00:18:32.760 Before I went to Houston. That hit me hard. And that's what really turned me into like,

00:18:36.520 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

00:18:40.240 this very frugal person. There's this movement called FIRE, which that book is kind of like

00:18:45.120 the Bible, the precursor to the FIRE movement, which is financial independence, retire early.

00:18:50.560 And I was kind of like an early FIRE guy. I'm going to save my way to riches,

00:18:54.740 right? I'm going to save and then retire early. And sorry, did you know what you wanted to do

00:19:00.420 when you retired? I went on to another autopilot. I went on another version of autopilot. I read a

00:19:05.440 book. I got these concepts out of it. And I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I didn't think

00:19:09.780 about the big picture of everything, but certain concepts were coming to me. I exchange hours of my

00:19:14.580 life for money. And then that money is used for the things I want. Let's take the abstract of money

00:19:19.680 out of it and look at what hours of my life are being exchanged for. That was a great concept for

00:19:24.860 it to sink in very viscerally. The idea that- It's also just to double click on that, Bill,

00:19:30.040 it's also visceral when you start to think of the difference between using money for

00:19:35.260 activities or trips versus things. So I buy a shirt and this shirt basically works out to three hours of

00:19:44.940 what I make per hour. So this is a $3 shirt. I mean, a three-hour shirt. Conversely, I take my daughter

00:19:52.260 out overnight. We do like a daddy-daughter date night, go out to dinner, stay at a nice hotel,

00:19:57.640 have a fancy breakfast the next day. That's five hours of my time in terms of work. But do you see

00:20:04.220 those sort of differently at the time? That one of those is like an experience and one of them is a

00:20:09.140 thing? Not in a way that you're properly analyzing it, but in more of an intuitive way. Because when you

00:20:14.440 start to think about things in time, it's like, wait a minute, three hours for a shirt versus going

00:20:19.000 here and having a sandwich and hanging out with my friends or whatever it is, your values start to,

00:20:23.340 you really get in touch with your values because it's not an abstract land. It's like when you're

00:20:26.780 in a casino and they give you chips, it's one of the greatest things to do is give you chips. It's

00:20:29.760 not money. You're tipping $25, you're throwing, let it all ride because it's so abstracted from money.

00:20:35.680 So it's an abstraction on an abstraction. By removing that abstraction,

00:20:39.060 you get closer to your values. Right. Imagine that you have $25 chips,

00:20:44.040 you figure out your hourly after tax, all in wage is $25 an hour. Every time you flick a chip,

00:20:49.820 it's like I gave an hour of my life. Right. Boom, boom, boom.

00:20:53.080 So when you start thinking about things in terms of hours of your life and you have finite hours,

00:20:56.620 you start to really get closer to your values. You can still be on autopilot, but you're closer.

00:21:00.800 And so things like this were happening. And at that time at the exchange, like most people,

00:21:08.040 I had like, what is it all for? What do I want? I'm here to get rich, but why?

00:21:13.500 Are you having that discussion with either people who are your peers who are presumably

00:21:18.080 on the same treadmill or the people who are already rich, but still presumably killing themselves,

00:21:24.780 trading their health for wealth?

00:21:25.940 No, I'm generally having it with myself and reading books, but I'm still asking myself,

00:21:29.520 but why? Like, what do I want? You know, and I'm remembering conversations that

00:21:33.460 maybe I've had throughout my life. There was a college football player named Dwight Sistrunk and

00:21:37.820 I was like trying to do engineering and we were debating something. It's like, listen,

00:21:41.360 you might want to pick a fence and a wife and something like that. And that life,

00:21:44.420 I don't want that life. I don't want that cookie cutter life. That's fine for you,

00:21:47.620 but that's not my path. I thought about it and I was like, do I really want that? You know,

00:21:52.260 certain things that he said that he didn't want that I was actually working for,

00:21:56.620 you know, thinking that this was my path. I actually realized, no, I don't want that.

00:22:00.780 You know, I'm pretty hardheaded. It takes a while for these things that seep in.

00:22:04.340 I would argue a little different, Bill. I would argue that at this point, you're 22, 23, 24.

00:22:08.820 I think that's remarkably early to be having that thought, don't you?

00:22:12.840 Yeah, I guess it took a while for it to finally percolate into some sort of action plan.

00:22:18.440 I'm thinking about these things, but they're not resulting in the proper behavior changes yet.

00:22:24.880 I'm still formulating it. You know, everyone says, I want to be rich before I'm 30 or I'm rich

00:22:29.560 before 40. No one's out there saying, I want to be rich before I'm 86. So intuitively in there,

00:22:35.360 there's something about the utility of money that it's not as valuable to you later on in life.

00:22:41.300 Yeah. It's one of the games I often play with my patients. It's anybody. I could play this game

00:22:45.340 with anybody, which is, listen, if right now you always do this with someone who's younger,

00:22:49.700 obviously. I say like, right now, would you trade places with Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger?

00:22:55.360 And they're like, everybody says, of course not. And I was like, what do you mean? Of course not.

00:22:58.580 Like Warren Buffett's worth a hundred billion dollars. How would you not trade places with

00:23:03.300 him? And they're like, I mean, he's 90 years old or whatever. And I say, okay, so would you rather

00:23:08.440 have not a penny to your name and be 20 or have a hundred billion dollars and be 90? No other

00:23:14.080 difference, right? Like I'm not going to stipulate anything else. I've never met a person who

00:23:17.920 wouldn't take being a completely broke 20 year old. And that I think speaks less to health because

00:23:25.180 look, ostensibly Warren still appears somewhat healthy, right? He's cognitively intact. It's not

00:23:29.200 like he's a frail 90 year old or whatever he is, but it's about runway. It's about, yeah, but maybe

00:23:35.580 Warren might have 10 years of life left. That 20 year old could have 80 years of life left.

00:23:39.900 And so when you face it in such stark terms, only then I think does the average person start to

00:23:45.940 realize how precious time is. I think they also see that Warren can't sprint, dunk a basketball,

00:23:53.000 go wakeboarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that enjoy me. And that's what I

00:23:56.780 thought about. And I thought to myself, if for reading this book, like I'm spending hours of my

00:24:03.340 life to acquire these experiences. I mean, experiences in the broadest sense, whether it's like going on a

00:24:09.360 walk or being able to choose to go on a walk or go get a sandwich or buy a shirt or whatever.

00:24:13.960 If I'm exchanging hours in my life and I don't go acquire these experiences, I pretty much wasted

00:24:18.900 hours of my life. So that thought hits and it's like, okay, you don't want to leave anything on

00:24:24.340 the table. In the game of life, when I die, you don't want to leave chips on the table, right? Like

00:24:28.580 you want to use all your resources before you die. Inherent in that is that your choices,

00:24:33.900 your experiences, those experiences are what make you, you. Those are the things that fulfill you

00:24:39.000 and everybody's going to be different. And so consequently, having more of it and enjoying

00:24:45.320 more of it will lead to a more fulfilling life. So that if I'm solving for fulfillment, I don't care

00:24:51.200 about the money. I care about the things I want, the experiences I want to have. If I'm trying to solve

00:24:56.800 for that, one of the things you come quickly to is that you need to use all your resources up before

00:25:01.820 you die. The second thing you come through with the fact that your resources, particularly money,

00:25:08.160 are less valuable to you when you're older, then you start to think, well, there must be a curve.

00:25:13.600 Because if you're going to end at zero, is it this kind of rectangle shape that just goes down?

00:25:18.280 Is it a 45 degree angle sleep or is there some sort of curve? And so what I like to do to understand

00:25:24.160 certain things, it doesn't always work, is think of zero and think of infinity. All right, let's run it

00:25:29.200 all the way back to one, 20 years old. How useful is money? Not that useful to you. Let's run it all

00:25:34.540 the way forward to 96 on your deathbed. How useful is money to you? Not that useful. So clearly there's

00:25:39.940 like some sort of ramp up of utility and then a decline of utility. And I became obsessed with finding

00:25:47.180 what that curve was. Because I was like, this is it. If you're making more money for delayed

00:25:53.100 gratification later in life, you approach infinity, you're actually wasting your time. You should be

00:25:57.960 spending down your assets at a certain point. There's an inflection point where not a number,

00:26:03.740 but a date where your wealth should be going down in order to get the most fulfillment.

00:26:08.220 Now let's pause for a second, Bill. Is that standard thinking slash teaching within the wealth

00:26:14.560 management community?

00:26:15.840 No, but it is a standard problem. If you look at JP Morgan or other wealth managers, one of the biggest

00:26:21.620 problems they have is the accumulation, getting people to spend down their assets. They've been

00:26:27.040 saving, they got their money, they hit retirement. And it's like their net worth is going up into

00:26:31.460 their seventies. When's the party? That's why I always ask them, like, you just tell me when the

00:26:35.800 party is. I have conversations with older people or other people. I'm like, listen, it's okay that

00:26:40.460 you're saving. What are you saving for? And when's the party? I just want to know when you're going to

00:26:45.380 use up all your resources. Let's also pivot and talk about, I remember one of the stats that

00:26:50.920 always stuck with me was during 2008. A really good friend of mine named Jim Lambright, who was

00:26:56.040 at the time the president of the XM Bank. When the TARP program kicked on, because he was close with

00:27:02.380 Hank Paulson and had already spent so much time in China and had government clearance, basically Hank

00:27:06.500 brought Jim Lambright and Neil Kashkari, who was with him already at the treasury, I believe, to run

00:27:11.500 TARP. So basically, Jim and Neil are doing all the deals for TARP. And Jim is getting steeped in

00:27:20.020 how bad is this going to be? What is this going to mean for the average person? And I remember one

00:27:26.760 day he called me with a stat that I couldn't believe, and I forget the stat, so this is only

00:27:30.880 directionally it, but it was what fraction of people in the United States could not produce $1,000

00:27:38.140 with three days notice, meaning they didn't have that excess liquidity of $1,000. Again, I don't remember

00:27:45.080 the number, but it was in the ballpark of like 30%. It was a high number. I don't know what those

00:27:51.000 stats are today. I've tried to look some of them up, and they're not maybe quite as dire as that,

00:27:56.820 but they're not that much better. No, they're not great. It's not great.

00:27:59.800 So what's the natural history of that person who's 40 years old, whose total net worth is $50,000,

00:28:07.880 and their available liquidity is $1,000, they're thinking, I'm going to work till I'm 65 or 70 or

00:28:16.820 whatever, and then I'm going to collect my social security. Does this thinking still apply there?

00:28:21.760 It applies in different ways. So what I've come up with this book is there's three variables,

00:28:27.340 your wealth, your health, and your time. And we're taking those three variables and we're solving

00:28:32.040 for net fulfillment. So we're not solving for maximum wealth. We're not solving even for maximum

00:28:38.640 health. There's maximum time. We're solving for net fulfillment. I'm saying that's your purpose.

00:28:43.040 If you're with me, we're solving for net fulfillment. And so one of the things we look at is that the total

00:28:49.400 arc of your life, given the resources you have, how do we allocate them? We definitely want to focus

00:28:54.940 on the money. Everybody wants to talk about the money and the resources, but there's decisions that you

00:28:59.180 make even without money. Whether you go on a walk with your daughters, you play cards with your

00:29:05.840 friends late at night. Do you tuck them in at night or you go hang out with the boys? And so in the book,

00:29:11.160 we talk about the seasons of your life. Certain activities transfer nicely to the next season in

00:29:16.800 your life from 20 to 30 to 30 to 40. And some of them don't transfer well. They're less enjoyable.

00:29:22.380 And some of them don't transfer at all. It's impossible. One of the things when the 40-year-old who has

00:29:28.340 $50,000, one of the things I would say is, what's your survival number? Have you calculated that at

00:29:34.000 retirement? Are you surviving retirement or are you in serious negative dire straits? And once we've

00:29:40.540 calculated that, okay, I need to work and save this much and plus social security, I've had my survival

00:29:46.240 number. Now the rest is for experiences, things I want to do and allocation of my time. How do I

00:29:53.720 allocate it? Is it the cruise at 70 or is it the ski trip right now? And that's going to be different

00:30:00.820 for every single person. Or is it a shirt or whatever fulfills them? Or to go play in this

00:30:04.980 chess tournament, pay the entry fee. And for people with zero money, you still have an allocation game

00:30:11.580 to play. You still have your health and your time. You can still decide, hey, I'm going to sit down

00:30:18.960 and watch friends. Or I'm going to go hang out at my mom's house and make a meal and spend time with

00:30:24.220 them because I'm only going to see them 20 times before they're gone. So this type of thinking about

00:30:28.680 allocating your resources at the proper place, getting off autopilot, holds at all wealth levels.

00:30:35.700 It doesn't hold at all health levels because if you have zero health, you have zero. You're done.

00:30:39.300 It's over. But it holds at all wealth levels. So that type of thinking to maximize fulfillment

00:30:44.400 and knowing that you have seasons of your life, that your body decays, your attitudes change

00:30:52.040 and they pass, that type of thinking and that I need to get things in the right order and use my

00:30:57.940 resources properly, that's going to help you have a more fulfilling life whether you have zero money

00:31:02.720 or $100 million. There are many people with zero who are having a way more fulfilling life than

00:31:08.360 Warren Buffett, I would say. One of the things about the way you framed it, Bill,

00:31:12.480 that I really like, it's a very nonlinear problem. So let's look at those three variables.

00:31:18.260 At the surface, one might suggest, well, wait a minute. It is a min-max game with one of them.

00:31:23.160 You always want max health. But technically, even that's not true because if I told you,

00:31:29.360 Bill, I have the secret for you to have max health. I can preserve your health span and lifespan

00:31:34.620 indefinitely, but here's what it's going to cost you. Every minute of the day, you have to be working

00:31:39.420 on your health. So from the moment you wake up from sleep, you have to do a two-hour meditation.

00:31:45.440 We then have to go and do this yoga. We then have to go and do this workout. When you're done that

00:31:49.980 workout, you have to go and do this, and then you have to go to bed. You'd be like, well, Peter,

00:31:54.280 that sucks because yeah, I'm going to live for 100 more years and I don't get to spend any of that time

00:32:01.100 doing anything other than improving my health. It's a glib example, but it factors, I think,

00:32:06.320 it illustrates the point. I usually say, there's no amount of money you can pay me to do 10 years

00:32:12.600 in Sing Sing. Not at this age, there's no amount of money. I say that to certain people who are just

00:32:17.700 always delaying gratification. I'm like, you're in a jail. You're basically doing a version of,

00:32:23.040 I'm doing time. Maybe you shouldn't be doing time at this point in your life.

00:32:28.260 And so these are just ways, people absorb information in different ways. You can say it

00:32:32.760 in all kinds of different ways. And then they finally go, aha, I got it. That really spoke

00:32:36.300 to me the way you said it. I try and hit people with different versions of this. One of the things

00:32:41.520 I like to say to people is life is like Tetris. You got to get the order right in order to get the

00:32:46.680 high score of net fulfillment. Let's say you're in heaven.

00:32:49.700 By the way, Tetris is the only video game I enjoy. I go through periods where I won't play it for a year.

00:32:56.100 And then I go through periods where I'll waste 30 minutes a day, which is a lot of time for me.

00:33:00.640 For me, 30 minutes in a day is an inordinate amount of time. And when I'm sometimes in those

00:33:05.140 phases of playing it a lot, I dream in Tetris. I literally dream that everything I'm seeing

00:33:12.860 in the world, I'm trying to optimize the shape and interaction of.

00:33:17.300 In the book, I talk about this thing about time buckets, basically that

00:33:19.940 you take your life in segments, any kind of segment you want, 20 to 25, 35 to 40, 50 to 60.

00:33:26.420 You think about leisure, job, career, what experience you want to have in each of those periods.

00:33:30.640 And as you're doing that, you realize that, wait a minute, the going to the clubs and strip clubs

00:33:35.360 and hanging out probably should be before I get married, not after. The reading books to my kids

00:33:40.440 when they're children, this must be in this bucket.

00:33:42.780 Right. Because they're not going to want me reading to them in college.

00:33:44.860 Exactly. Or even when they're 13, 14, they didn't even want to know you. That's one of the errors

00:33:48.500 I made. You always do it wrong as a parent. You don't want to spend too much time with them,

00:33:52.340 et cetera. It's like, wait a minute, maybe I should have been doing this activity instead of that

00:33:56.540 activity. Kind of the die with zero thinking, right? Optimize your life.

00:34:00.640 You know, the thought experiment, I says, listen, you're up in heaven. You have the

00:34:04.120 bucket of experiences. These are all the choices you can have. And God says, take as much as you

00:34:08.980 want. You're thrown in and you're like, I want to have sex 30,000 times. And I want to climb

00:34:13.100 Kilimanjaro and I want to play hockey. I want to be in a high school team. And I want to do, you know,

00:34:16.940 and you're just throwing them in everything. I want to meditate and yoga, right? And then God goes,

00:34:21.960 great. I'm going to let you have all those experiences, but there's one trick.

00:34:25.360 You got to get the order right. And what's it saying is, is if you don't get the order right,

00:34:30.200 like if you save certain experiences to the 80 to 86 bucket, you don't get it.

00:34:34.940 Yeah. You're not climbing Kilimanjaro at 80.

00:34:36.120 Yeah. If you're like nightclub and road trips with your buddies before you're married and you

00:34:40.440 have two kids or whatever, you don't get that. If you don't go backpacking with your friend and

00:34:44.880 youth hostels, et cetera, when you're 21, when you get the shot, you don't get that experience.

00:34:50.120 Or it's a bastardized, not as fulfilling experience. So you don't get the net fulfillment

00:34:54.880 points. And so it's kind of tied with zero. What do you want out of your life? Get off autopilot.

00:35:00.260 What do you want on a life? What resources do you have? And how do we optimize? How do we get the

00:35:04.860 most out of it? So how do you think about your own risk tolerance? Now, I guess there's maybe a caveat

00:35:12.800 the listener needs to understand at this point, which is what you do for a living today. So you are an

00:35:18.920 energy trader, among other things. You do many things. But is it safe to say that the majority

00:35:23.100 of the wealth you've created came through your ability to understand how natural gas moves and

00:35:29.380 trade on that? Yeah. The majority of my wealth came from predicting the future. And that's generally

00:35:33.540 the future of natural gas prices. John Arnold, who is one of your closest colleagues, someone who I've

00:35:39.040 had on the podcast, nicknamed the king of gas, the greatest gas trader of all time. Do you look at a

00:35:44.480 guy like John and say he has a high risk tolerance? Do you look at someone like yourself and say,

00:35:48.660 you have a high risk tolerance? Or do you not feel that way at all and feel like, nope,

00:35:52.920 I'm completely in control of calculated risks. And that's why they net out to be positive. In other

00:35:59.180 words, I'm less swayed by short-term volatility because my methodology doesn't feel like I'm

00:36:04.720 gambling. The best traders I've seen have been pretty stoic about things. They think about very

00:36:09.700 robotically about expected outcome. And they don't seem to be disturbed about negative outcomes as much

00:36:16.720 as the average person. Tell folks what expected outcomes mean because they want to understand

00:36:20.340 the probabilities and how these work. If you place a bet and the payout is one in four,

00:36:25.940 but the odds are 50-50, half the time you're going to get four times your money and half the time

00:36:31.380 you're just going to lose one times your money. So that's positive expected outcome, right? You're

00:36:34.900 going to make money. This is a great trade. But remember, 75% of the time you're going to lose

00:36:40.120 in this scenario. No, the payout, half the time you're going to lose. Half the time you're going

00:36:43.420 to lose, the payout's one in four. So half the time you're pissed. You're upset. And a lot of people

00:36:49.140 can't deal with that. They need four or five or seven positive events emotionally, psychologically,

00:36:58.740 forever, every negative event. In trading, that just doesn't exist.

00:37:03.340 Yeah. In trading, if someone is right half the time,

00:37:06.380 they're pretty good. If they're right 55%, 60% of the time, think about the casino's edge

00:37:12.080 in blackjack. It could be 51-

00:37:13.980 Yeah, 0.07 or 0.09 in blackjack. In craps, it's like 0.03. They're wrong a lot of the time.

00:37:20.860 But ultimately, the law of large numbers, they make a bunch of money. But if your emotional

00:37:24.520 calculus is different, where such that you need a greater being right ratio, then you're not going

00:37:30.800 to make it because stress clouds your thinking and your judgment.

00:37:34.660 So with that said, if someone says to you, you just have a really high tolerance for risk,

00:37:39.940 I don't. I'm very risk averse. I don't like to take big risk. I never want to have the chance

00:37:45.800 of losing something. Loss aversion is a greater motivator for me than gain. How do you talk to

00:37:52.060 that person? And how do you help them think through the difference between fear and risk tolerance?

00:37:56.960 Well, the first thing I do is just try and break down what are they actually afraid of? A lot of times

00:38:01.120 when people say the bad thing is not as bad as they imagine it in their head. And a lot of times,

00:38:07.640 quite frankly, it's really the fear of judgment more than the actual thing. They find out that

00:38:12.820 they can survive the potential negative financial hit. What they can't survive is, oh, my friends,

00:38:19.180 my colleagues, my spouse, my mom, my dad, the shame. I got it wrong. The I told you so's,

00:38:25.160 et cetera. There's a lot of that fear baked into disguised as I can't risk these dollars. I'm like,

00:38:31.800 yeah, you can. That type of thing. Then the other thing is I try to think is get them the focus.

00:38:36.980 They always focus on the monetary costs of losing. But what about the cost of inaction

00:38:41.940 and the opportunity costs? And by talking about the opportunity costs, I get them to see the

00:38:47.320 asymmetry of the risk. Maybe I have a greater tolerance for risk. But what I do is, is that I fear,

00:38:52.700 you know, my fear is reversed. I fear missing out on the opportunity costs. I fear not getting the

00:38:58.200 max. A lot of people fear running out of money. I fear wasting my life. I am more worried about

00:39:05.100 looking back and being like, shit, I wasted my only ride that I had than running out of money.

00:39:12.360 One of my patients said something to me once. He was about to do something that I just thought was

00:39:18.060 really risky. Now, it was a very unique opportunity. And he said, you know, Peter, I'm going to go and do

00:39:22.520 this thing. And I said, I think there's a significant risk to you in doing that. It wasn't a financial

00:39:27.120 risk. It would have been a health risk, a physical risk. And he said, you're right, Peter. I acknowledge

00:39:32.600 that risk. That is the risk. But I'm optimizing in a risk, pardon me, a regret minimizing framework,

00:39:41.160 not a risk minimizing framework. For me, it's risk reward. If I really love cigarettes, like love them.

00:39:47.680 I'd smoke cigarettes. You know what I mean? If I really love skydiving all the time, I went twice,

00:39:53.340 but it was diminishing returns. I go skydiving. It's what fulfills you. And so, I'm a risk reward

00:40:00.160 guy. Is the reward commensurate with the risk? Some people like to ride motorcycles. For me,

00:40:05.180 it's not worth the risk. Like I have a physical risk tolerance around one in 10,000. If it's more

00:40:10.080 dangerous than one in 10,000, the reward really has to be worth it for me to do it. And so, that's the way I

00:40:16.220 think. That helps me in this kind of like counterfactual regret minimization algorithm.

00:40:21.400 So, the algorithm of the book, the mental models in the book are right. You know, when a chess

00:40:25.320 computer plays you, it has a regret minimization algorithm. And what it wants to do is it's solving

00:40:29.740 to win. AlphaGo is solving to win the game. In the game of life, what I'm solving for, the regret

00:40:35.580 minimization I'm solving for is net fulfillment. I want the highest score in net fulfillment. I don't

00:40:40.840 want the highest money. I don't even want the highest health. I'm like, I don't want to run

00:40:45.980 three hours a day to be in the top 0.5%. Top 3% is great enough. I'll give up the tail end of my

00:40:52.220 life. You know what I mean? And time, like how to optimize my time. Everything for me is like what

00:40:57.900 I'm solving for in life. What this book is solving for for you is net fulfillment. It is relentless

00:41:03.820 about net fulfillment. If that entails for you, your makeup, like taking those risks,

00:41:09.280 going hella skiing, skydiving, riding motorcycles, then so be it. If long as you're off autopilot and

00:41:14.940 you've thought it through, then that's fine. How variable do you think people are in their

00:41:22.220 kind of stratification of what encompasses net fulfillment? Maybe a better question is,

00:41:26.960 do you think people are even understanding about and deliberate about what that means? That

00:41:32.940 doesn't strike me as something that the average person could articulate very clearly what it is

00:41:39.140 that will be their fulfillment maximizing function in terms of experiences. And I want to reiterate a

00:41:45.620 point you made, which is it's not just the experience, it's when they occur. The combination

00:41:49.060 of which experiences and when they occur and who they occur with, do you get the sense that the average

00:41:55.220 person can actually articulate that? I think they had the ability earlier in life and then they get

00:42:00.720 habituated out of it. So we all go into autopilot. We have this default mode network. It helps us

00:42:05.440 survive. It helps us drive without thinking, oh, I got to turn. You know, when you first line up

00:42:09.540 drive, like it's, everything's happening fast. You have to deliberately think about everything you're

00:42:13.080 doing. And then all of a sudden it goes in default mode network and it's easy. It happens with work.

00:42:17.360 And you're like, I need to work to survive and I need to do this. And you're panicking,

00:42:20.520 whatever. And the next thing you're in the groove and you're just constantly working.

00:42:23.300 Somewhere along the way with the abstraction of going to work, to make money,

00:42:27.260 to survive and get the things we want, we forget about the things we want. We just go to work to

00:42:32.260 work, to just make more money, to go to work, to make more money. And the things we want either

00:42:37.840 get pushed for our head or forgotten about because we're on autopilot. It was a good thing because it

00:42:43.320 makes us good at our jobs. It's like, I can do this job with my eyes closed. I can do this and I'm

00:42:46.780 getting promoted and getting rewarded. And there's certain things about the jobs that you like,

00:42:50.500 but you're forgetting why you did this thing in the first place. People aren't like,

00:42:55.080 I really wanted to be a plastic salesperson. I really love selling plastics, more and more

00:42:59.060 plastics and piling up numbers in a bank account. Those numbers in a bank account were really meant

00:43:04.460 for, I want to hang out with my buddies and I want to go skiing and I want to get married and I want

00:43:08.600 to donate to this charity and I want to do X, Y, and Z, right? But we kind of forget that.

00:43:12.780 And since we forgot about it, we're not even thinking about when the best time it is to happen.

00:43:17.040 It's just completely like, oh, I'll eventually do it or when I get more.

00:43:19.920 So we're completely out of touch of what we want, what's enough, the concept of enough,

00:43:25.400 what that means for us and the concept of when. Now, I had a discussion with a patient just

00:43:31.280 yesterday. So runs a hedge fund and not surprisingly, given the economic climate we're in, hedge funds

00:43:36.980 aren't doing particularly well, especially long hedge funds. And this guy doesn't need to be working.

00:43:42.380 Even though he's now having a down year, I mean, he could certainly return all the capital to his

00:43:46.260 investors and manage his own capital indefinitely or do nothing, literally do nothing. But he said,

00:43:51.740 what would I do? What would I do? I'd sit around for three months and it would feel really nice

00:43:56.660 to have no stress for three months. And then I'd be bored out of my mind. So he's like, no,

00:44:01.740 I got to keep going. I've had this, amongst my friends, it's one of the things like people

00:44:06.460 ask the question, why do people do this? And I've had direct conversations with my friends and with a

00:44:10.980 friend and I'm very aggressive with them, attacking their walls they put up. And what I tell them is,

00:44:15.620 is that you have made your work, your God. It's who you meet people. You eat around where work is.

00:44:24.460 You've given up learning how to socialize and meet your neighbors, all the people you know,

00:44:28.400 or sometimes work or work related. You haven't exercised those muscles for years, 10, 20, 30 years,

00:44:35.240 sometimes that people have their whole life revolves around work and all the other muscles,

00:44:42.140 I'm using muscles as an example, have atrophied. How do you socialize without a job? How do you

00:44:47.620 meet people without a job? Where do I go eat without my job? Like I eat obviously somewhere

00:44:52.360 within five miles of this place and people recommend all the things that get recommended,

00:44:56.080 the camaraderie, everything that when people list what they like about work, that used to happen

00:45:01.520 without work and they've atrophied those muscles. So when you take that away, they're like,

00:45:06.860 they don't know what to do. They don't know what they want. And their dreams have left them.

00:45:11.260 The ski trip, they haven't thought about that or hang out with their buddies or whatever. All that

00:45:15.180 stuff has left them and they haven't worked those muscles out. And I say, listen, just let's start

00:45:20.340 working on those muscles and building them up and you'll have plenty to do. You have plenty to do.

00:45:25.300 You've let autopilot and habit put you in poor health in these other activities. You're in poor health

00:45:33.720 on how to meet people and socialize outside of work. You're in poor health on where to go eat

00:45:38.840 lunch, except for the places near work or wherever you go. You're in poor health on trips that are not

00:45:44.940 business trips. You're in poor health about thinking about what fulfill you and discovery,

00:45:50.520 just plain old discovery because you don't know what you want. You discover what you want.

00:45:54.700 Nobody comes out of the womb like, I don't like onions and I love chocolate and I want to go to

00:45:59.000 Japan and I love F1. You get exposed to it and you discover what you want. So a lot of life is

00:46:04.920 discovery, but these people are out of discovery. They're in the familiar habituated routine. They

00:46:11.480 are a rat in a wheel that doesn't even need cheese anymore. It just runs in the wheel.

00:46:17.660 Now, how do we differentiate that from people who, and I would put myself in this category truthfully,

00:46:22.300 where a big part of their work is their fulfillment and they do feel a sense of purpose in what they

00:46:30.440 do beyond just the making money part of it. And I suspect that, like, again, just to make

00:46:36.900 caricatures of things, right? So maybe the person who works in the widget factory that makes the

00:46:42.160 widget that they don't even know what the widget plugs into, but they need a job. If they inherited a

00:46:47.180 big lump sum of money tomorrow, they would happily quit the widget job, but maybe they'd get bored

00:46:52.460 and they'd want to go back and start volunteering and doing something where they don't actually get

00:46:56.460 paid, but they're really enjoying what they're doing. And then of course you have the group of

00:46:59.700 people whose job is doing two things. It's providing money for all the things that you need, both in

00:47:07.480 approximate sense and distally, but also it is a sense of purpose and therefore it fits into their

00:47:13.400 fulfillment. But these things can be very slippery. And I would certainly put myself squarely in that

00:47:17.680 category, right? Which is I still work harder than I should. And I absolutely know that I'm failing in

00:47:23.740 the equation, even though I'm fulfilled by this and I wouldn't want to not do this, but I'm doing too

00:47:31.240 much of it as an example. I really push back hard on my friends on this. And it's like, I can't know,

00:47:36.520 only they can know. The heroin addict is happy. I'm happy on heroin. You have a problem with my

00:47:41.300 heroin. I don't have a problem, right? And that's kind of the argument I push towards them. And I

00:47:45.160 say, listen, really think about what in your job fulfills you. And is that outside in the world and

00:47:52.960 the purpose in that? And do you have balance? Are you balanced according to what you want in life

00:47:59.200 in this time period in your life and the future time period in your life? Now, I can't tell somebody

00:48:04.100 what their balance is, right? That's a very personal thing. But what I really want them to do is be

00:48:08.680 honest, off autopilot, really unplug for a moment and think about it. Okay, I got one life and I

00:48:15.600 have only this period once, right? I only get to be 50, between 50 and 55. I only get this level of

00:48:21.900 health at this time. Are these the experiences? Is this really how I want to allocate my time at

00:48:26.780 this period? Is this really the maximum? Is this the optimal thing for me to do? And if they do that

00:48:31.300 and they come up with the same answer, like, hey, no, I want to work at the wager factory or I want to

00:48:34.500 work at this fulfilling, I can't argue that. How am I to tell you how to live your life?

00:48:39.480 What I'm here to tell you is how to optimize your life, what thought process and what steps you should

00:48:44.660 go through, things you should be considering in order to get the most fulfillment of your life.

00:48:48.700 And then if you come to the conclusion that, hey, I'm at the perfect balance of work, right?

00:48:53.740 And the money's piling up, but I'm going to use it later and I'm going to go on a senior's cruise and

00:48:58.640 that's what it's for, then that's your life. But maybe you might go, you know what? I can dial it

00:49:02.940 back and my daughters are only going to be, or my kids are only going to be this age at this time.

00:49:06.620 Maybe I should take a family trip and unplug and go on safari with them and enjoy my success because

00:49:11.600 that's going to give me a lifetime of memory dividends and discussion points and connections,

00:49:16.700 et cetera. Maybe I'd rather have that time with them now and not have them in a hospital with me

00:49:23.780 when I'm old and stinky and barely, you know, and seeing me this way. I want the memories and the

00:49:27.460 time they spend with me doing this and not at the tail end of life. Who knows? I just want

00:49:32.540 people thinking about it. And if you just get off autopilot just a bit and you start thinking

00:49:37.820 about it, you're already optimizing your life. You're already going to have a more fulfilling

00:49:41.580 life. I think that that's probably the part of the book that most kind of resonates with someone

00:49:49.780 like me, which is, especially when it comes to kids. And I have, I guess the, maybe it's an

00:49:55.720 advantage, maybe it's a disadvantage, but my kids are sort of separated in age by a bit of a gap,

00:50:00.220 right? So my daughter's 14 and then the boys are five and eight. In other words, I now know what

00:50:05.740 it's like to have a teenager. I now understand all the things that you kind of give up when your

00:50:10.780 kid's a teenager. Our daughter's an amazing kid, but the reality of it is like, she doesn't really

00:50:16.260 want to be around me.

00:50:17.780 No, they don't want to know you when they become teenagers. I didn't want to know my parents when

00:50:20.460 I was a teenager, right?

00:50:21.320 Yeah. Whereas conversely, the boys can't leave us alone. And it's tempting to sort of say,

00:50:27.420 I wish they would just leave us alone. But now knowing that, oh, actually in six years,

00:50:33.940 you'll kill to be back in this situation makes it infinitely more easy to appreciate.

00:50:39.500 That's kind of one thing that I think is helpful for people to understand the seasons,

00:50:44.560 this idea of seasonality. Like you, I probably think back to things I didn't do for different

00:50:50.480 reasons, right? So when I was in college, I mean, I couldn't have worked harder. I mean,

00:50:54.940 I was out of my mind how hard I worked. My night off, there was one night, which was Friday when

00:51:02.840 I only worked till 9 p.m. It was my break. And from 9 p.m. till 11, I would go-

00:51:08.740 See, I needed a little bit of you and you needed a little bit of me.

00:51:11.040 I would go and do laundry after 9 p.m. on a Friday. That was my way to just take a little

00:51:15.540 time off. But other than that, it was six hours a day of work outside of class. And I think of all

00:51:22.940 the things I didn't do in college. So first of all, my only memories of college are pure misery.

00:51:26.640 I hated every minute of college. I didn't have-

00:51:30.600 You didn't have the college experience.

00:51:32.220 Yeah. Now, I could say, well, a lot of good came out of that because I did really well and

00:51:35.860 did well. That set me up for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

00:51:38.920 But I could have traveled. Having a college experience didn't mean I had to get drunk every

00:51:42.900 night. It meant that I could have saved all that money I was making by tutoring and done something

00:51:48.700 different.

00:51:48.980 This reminds me of the college paper had this. My senior year, I opened it up and it had the

00:51:53.140 50 things you need to do before you graduate. And I just had the biggest regret when I read that list.

00:51:58.960 And you read it at what age?

00:52:00.140 I was just about on my way out.

00:52:02.020 I was like, never going to be able to do this. I'm not going to do this. And some of them were

00:52:04.940 simple, like write an angry letter to newspaper, go skinny dipping at Lake whatever. Actually did

00:52:09.920 that after I read that. There were a lot of things, do this college prank, do whatever,

00:52:13.360 like things that would be fun that necessarily cost you money or whatever, but like things to do to

00:52:17.400 have a college experience and not necessarily do them all. And I was like, maybe I did three or

00:52:21.340 four. And I was like, why was I so on autopilot in my way? And think about, okay, you got four years

00:52:27.100 here. Good, good grades, good study. But like, you want to get this out of it. You want to do this out

00:52:32.080 of it. You want to have this college experience, et cetera. We just kind of like, don't really think

00:52:36.420 about things going autopilot so much that we don't think about periods in our life. Even this year,

00:52:42.100 what experiences do I want to have this year with this person, with myself, with my spirituality,

00:52:48.320 with my health, with my travel, my leisure, my job? How am I going to optimize? And how does that fit

00:52:53.380 into the Jigsport, the Tetris game of my entire life? Am I doing it right? Maybe this experience

00:52:57.820 that I'm saying goes here, actually goes further out in my life. When I was trying to get the book

00:53:02.280 published, one of the publishers said, I do exactly what you're talking about in the book. I really like

00:53:07.740 hiking. She explained she had an injury and she likes running, but now she does like hiking and

00:53:13.520 she really likes concert and music. And she goes on a vacation with a friend every year. They pick

00:53:18.460 what they're going to go do. And there's this very expensive opera that she wants to go see and

00:53:22.240 et cetera. And she said, what I and our friend decided is that the hiking trips and this mountain,

00:53:28.860 et cetera, we're going to pull these forward. And the sitting in operas and these type of trips,

00:53:33.020 the set in a Jigsport, we're going to push forward.

00:53:35.200 Push into the future.

00:53:35.880 Push into the future. So, you know, Max and I was like, if they get that order wrong,

00:53:40.300 they go all the opera and then they turn around like, holy shit, I can't hike this mountain.

00:53:43.780 And so, this fits in every aspect of your life. College, first job, pre-married, married,

00:53:51.560 before kids, kids that are toddlers, not toddlers, that type of thinking is really helpful. And you've

00:53:57.600 been lucky. Experience has taught you about the seasons with your kids. And I learned the hard way too.

00:54:03.140 I was like, you know, people tell you like, oh, your kids don't want to be with your 13.

00:54:05.880 And you kind of forget when you were 13. You forget like, oh yeah, I didn't want to be

00:54:09.500 around my parents. And then it really hits you when they're just like, dad, nobody hangs out

00:54:15.780 with their dad that much. Come on.

00:54:17.320 One of the other things that you talk about, and you've mentioned it already today a couple

00:54:20.740 of times, is philanthropy. So, there's a story in the book about a woman who dies and

00:54:25.660 leaves a large gift. Tell that story again.

00:54:28.160 It's one of those secret millionaire stories. They're all out there. Like, there's a secretary,

00:54:33.160 and then when she died, she had $10 million of Tootsie Roll stock or whatever. And so,

00:54:38.220 this woman worked at a law firm, saved her money, lived, by all accounts, a very frugal life.

00:54:43.900 And then when she died, she gave a multi-million dollar gift to education, charitable education.

00:54:51.280 Everybody was like, you know, that's so charitable, and that's such a great thing. And I had a different

00:54:55.800 perspective. My perspective was, when you're dead, the money isn't yours. And also that the target

00:55:02.320 for her bequeath after her death would have been much better off receiving the money much earlier,

00:55:08.360 a lower sum much earlier, and that the return on her charitable investment will be greater than any

00:55:13.800 of her investment returns. And so, I can't really get into her head to determine if it's charitable.

00:55:21.080 I am knowingly thinking I'm doing the right thing. I'm going to save all this money,

00:55:26.320 and it's going to grow to a bigger pile, and I'm going to give it to a charity. But to me,

00:55:29.880 it appears to be a tip on the way out. The money's got to go somewhere. It was going to go either to

00:55:35.880 the IRS, who redistribute the money the way they see fit, usually into wars and stuff, but I won't

00:55:41.740 go into that subject, or hairs or et cetera, but it's going somewhere. It's not yours. It's gone.

00:55:46.640 So, the fact that it just wound up into this educational charity, I didn't see it as charitable

00:55:53.380 as much, and as impactful as just giving the money earlier. Life is urgent. Life is now.

00:55:59.460 And I argue that the return on investment in your charitable endeavors is greater than any return

00:56:03.660 in the market you can get. Well, and this is sort of interesting because think about what our mutual

00:56:08.320 friend John Arnold did 10 years ago, which was before he even hits the age of 40, he decides,

00:56:15.220 I'm no longer going to do this full-time. My full-time job is now giving this money away.

00:56:21.000 Right. It's great. John's great. And we've had a lot of conversations about this, about making sure

00:56:25.820 the money actually gets distributed, gets into the purpose, helping causes. But John decided that

00:56:31.140 I've been solving the problem of natural gas long enough. I have more money than I'll ever spend or

00:56:39.140 need. And I really want to dedicate my neurons to solving other problems. So, he takes an analytical

00:56:46.580 approach, a database-driven approach to solving some of society's ills and solving some problems

00:56:51.460 and trying to get ahead of some of these intractable problems, which is awesome. And the fact that he's

00:56:56.980 doing it so young, I even argue with John like he did it too late. He's still late, you know what I

00:57:00.940 mean? Because he was on autopilot too, in my opinion, trading. What are you working for?

00:57:05.520 I have this conversation with John. He's like, what's the money for? What can't you buy?

00:57:10.320 And to a certain extent, the money became a detriment based on your value system, right?

00:57:14.240 If you're like, hey, and I mentioned this in the book, yeah, I can have Maroon 5 play in my

00:57:18.900 backyard every day, et cetera. But you don't want to ruin your kids by spending the money and consuming

00:57:23.480 it that way. And I'm using the Maroon 5 as an exaggerated example. But there's all kinds of

00:57:28.240 consumption that you don't want to have because you don't want your kids to have that. Then the money

00:57:33.020 became a negative. You really work too low for, because you're working for money that you cannot

00:57:37.300 spend, you cannot consume. And you could start giving away and having an impact on the other

00:57:42.840 things you want to do now.

00:57:45.300 And I think one of the things that John exemplifies is how to give money away thoughtfully.

00:57:51.740 Correct.

00:57:51.940 And what you realize when you spend any length of time with him, which you've spent more than

00:57:57.100 I have, it is really hard to give money away strategically and thoughtfully, which is why

00:58:03.220 I suspect John and Laura set themselves up with 50 years of a runway to give. And I don't know,

00:58:10.340 there's a pretty good chance they still won't be able to give it all away, right?

00:58:12.900 What they're doing is effectively giving away. They want to solve problems, database decisions.

00:58:17.200 But it takes time. I mean, that's the other point that you have to invest the time to try

00:58:23.300 something out, see if it works, if it does double down, if it doesn't learn why it doesn't pivot.

00:58:29.120 And you can't do that if you say, look, at the end of my life, I'm going to give away a billion

00:58:33.120 dollars. It won't be effective. There's a double issue here. There's the issue you already said,

00:58:38.520 which is the compounding issue. No, if you give a billion dollars away in 50 years versus giving away

00:58:44.700 half a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars, 30 years sooner, that money will do

00:58:50.240 more good. But there's another layer to that, which is you have a chance to learn from what

00:58:54.360 that money did and make corrections that themselves allow for more thoughtful giving.

00:59:00.680 They're immediately jumping into the problem and let the experiments run the course and they have

00:59:04.040 the time to do it. And they're doing it. I can't say enough about the Laura and John Arnold

00:59:08.480 Foundation about the way they're going in and helping people and solving problems.

00:59:12.500 The other thing that you talked about in the book that really probably, this is probably the reason

00:59:18.660 I had my wife read it right away, was the idea of, we sometimes think that there are people in

00:59:25.420 our lives that we want to give money to at some point. And you sort of think, that's a person that

00:59:30.020 was really important in my life or in our lives. And maybe we leave them X amount of dollars at some

00:59:35.320 point. And then you sort of realize, well, why don't you finish why that's maybe not necessarily

00:59:39.960 the right strategy. The same laws of physics that govern my body and the utility of money

00:59:45.500 over time for me applies to my kids. Maybe they have a little bit longer lifespan or healthspan.

00:59:51.560 Or relatives or anybody else.

00:59:53.060 Relatives or anybody, anybody. The utility of money to them follows a curve, depending on how

00:59:58.600 healthy they are, et cetera. You can just kind of draw it, right? Like you know better than I.

01:00:03.080 Muscle decay rates for people in shape, not in shape, working out, et cetera.

01:00:06.660 So this curve applies to them. So a lot of people like, oh, when I die, I'm going to give,

01:00:13.660 I used to have people on my will that are like close to my age. Like I'm going to give money to

01:00:18.300 them when I die. And I'm like, wait a minute, let me give my money to a 72 year old. Wouldn't it be

01:00:23.540 better if I gave them less money now? Like let them spend it and apply it because the utility of

01:00:30.160 money for them is drastic. The day before you die, I cannot pay you anything. I cannot get you

01:00:36.980 to delay gratification. That's what savings is, right? You're delaying gratification. And so there

01:00:41.860 is no gratification the next day. If you take it from the day before you die, two days before you

01:00:46.540 die to right now, right? There's this curve, this compensation you need for delayed gratification.

01:00:51.320 And it makes no sense for me to be leaving money to 65 year olds and 62 year olds. It's give it to

01:01:00.060 them where the money has the most impact, where they'll have the most utility of that money.

01:01:05.160 And so when you're off autopilot and think, yeah, that's what everybody does. They write down a will

01:01:09.020 and when they die, et cetera. Now the will has a purpose. If you die early, you got to distribute

01:01:12.780 the money. But really before you die, if you'd live a normal life, there should be nothing left to

01:01:18.440 give. You should have already given it away. Again, when I read your book and you articulate

01:01:23.720 it that way, I mean, it's such a gut punch of this realization. And one example is kids. My wife and I

01:01:29.960 have people in our lives that we're not related to, that we value so much. And we've always said like,

01:01:35.760 yeah, we want to give them X number of dollars at this point in time.

01:01:39.940 I've had that. I had a good year and there was people that I would give money to if I had a good year

01:01:44.440 or I'm not going to wait until I'm dead. Or there are people in my will and I just went down a

01:01:48.200 list and the maximum tax-free gift you can give per year per person is $15,000. And I had,

01:01:52.920 I think, a 30 to 50 person list of $15,000 to give to people. And this was me reading my own book.

01:02:00.680 A lot of people are like, why'd you write the book? Well, I wrote it to save my own life.

01:02:03.780 I didn't want one to waste my life. I want to get the most net fulfillment.

01:02:06.440 And after I wrote the book, mainly I talk about children. But then I thought about,

01:02:10.500 that applies to everybody. If I'm going to do something nice and give something or leave

01:02:14.500 something to somebody, it's now. It's right now.

01:02:17.060 Well, especially when you think about exactly what you said, which is that person will do much

01:02:23.560 more with that in applying it to their fulfillment curve in real time.

01:02:29.360 When you're really giving somebody money, right? You're giving them life energy. You're giving

01:02:33.200 the ability to make choices. You're giving them fulfillment. So waiting till they're 96 on the

01:02:39.380 deathbed, they can't really convert that into fulfillment. You really didn't give them

01:02:43.340 what you wanted to give them. So when you look at their curve of their life, oh, wow,

01:02:47.580 here's the maximum insertion point. And as a matter of fact, wow, $5,000 right now at let's say 33

01:02:54.180 is like 150,086. It's actually more impactful. There's more going in life, more choices, things

01:03:01.540 going on. The cumulative effect, the fact that when they had that experience, not only do they enjoy

01:03:07.440 that experience at that point, whatever that experience is, they get dividends from that

01:03:11.860 experience. They talk about with their friends, they become more interesting. They recall that

01:03:17.320 and they get enjoyment out of it. It's like, oh, remember that ski trip we went on? We had a great

01:03:20.480 time with the kids. Yeah, that was great. They get fulfilled from that. So they get memory dividends

01:03:25.240 associated from that experience. Whereas if you give it to a 96, they do it once, they consume it,

01:03:29.780 if they can even do it, and then they die.

01:03:33.480 How do you help a person do the math? Because we've talked about this quite a bit,

01:03:38.960 and you've alluded to it, there is really a curve. This is where both your background primarily as

01:03:45.660 an engineer and a trader come into solving what becomes a mathematical set of equations where you

01:03:52.860 have certain variables you need to understand. So let's say we're solving this for me or for you or

01:03:58.400 an arbitrary person who's sitting here who's 50 years old. Okay. So 50-year-old person is listening

01:04:04.060 to this or a 30-year-old person. Maybe we do a few different scenarios. So let's start with the

01:04:08.020 50-year-old who is firmly planted on the treadmill of autopilot. Okay. Their kids are in middle school

01:04:15.820 and high school. They realize how much money they need for college for their kids. They've got a

01:04:20.860 mortgage payment. They've got a good job. And they have a fuzzy notion that they're going to work

01:04:26.720 another 15 to 20 years. And they come to you and they say, Bill, I read the book. I buy the thesis.

01:04:34.500 I don't know how to implement it for my numbers and for my fulfillment curve. How do you help them

01:04:40.140 think about it? The main thing is it's very individual. It's like, what do you want? If

01:04:44.260 you're sitting there like, I just like working and going in and that's all I do. Okay. So I'll be the

01:04:48.320 guy. So I'm going to say, so Bill, no, I do have interests, but I got to be honest with you, man.

01:04:52.760 I've backed away from them. I've kind of let them go. I've let myself go a little bit. Before my wife and

01:04:57.600 I had kids, we loved traveling. And before our kids were born, we hiked the entire rim of the

01:05:02.560 Grand Canyon. We went down to the Colorado River back up, probably the greatest thing we ever did.

01:05:06.920 And then once the kids came, we were kind of head down and work. And I just want to make sure that

01:05:10.980 my kids don't have debt when they go to college. What I do is like, okay, what's reality and what's

01:05:16.840 fear, fear-based thinking. So we try and get on that. And one of the things I'd look for is,

01:05:21.160 why don't you go traveling with the kids? Well, it's a pain in the ass, whatever. I was like-

01:05:24.720 It's also so expensive, Bill. I mean, do you understand what it costs now?

01:05:28.340 One of my kids has a friend who did this African safari a year ago. They said it was amazing.

01:05:33.320 To price that trip, Bill, today, $30,000 to go do that African safari now. With the airlines,

01:05:38.560 with the safari, that's a lot of money. So what I'd say is, when you die,

01:05:41.740 will you have $30,000? Are you on track to die with $30,000, $50,000?

01:05:46.040 I hope so.

01:05:46.680 Okay. So then would you rather consume that $30,000 now and have this experience with your kids,

01:05:53.360 et cetera, or would you rather have $30,000 left over when you die?

01:05:57.040 I just want to be safe. I mean, how do I know? What if I'm wrong?

01:05:59.740 Then we can sit down and go down the hard numbers. It's like, do you have insurance if you lose your

01:06:04.460 job? What is safe? What do you envision yourself doing in retirement that you can't afford?

01:06:11.920 What bad thing that will happen that we can't buy an insurance policy for? Is it long-term care

01:06:17.600 insurance? If you get that while you're young, it's actually pretty cheap. It's very cheap.

01:06:21.180 I look at what risks they're having and I look at ways to mitigate them. So a lot of people who

01:06:25.700 are conservative are like, oh, I'm worried about something happening. I'm like, what's the something

01:06:29.720 happening that you're worried about? When you do that with people, Bill, how often are they able

01:06:34.940 to articulate clearly what they're afraid of versus it being kind of just a fuzzy notion of-

01:06:41.700 A lot of it's fuzzy notion and we just keep pushing and pulling it out. What if this happens?

01:06:47.120 What if I get sick? What if we're whatever? We go over medical insurance. Basically,

01:06:52.520 what happens is people try to act as their own insurance agent with a client of one.

01:06:58.480 Right. That's very difficult to underwrite.

01:06:59.860 So they have a client of one. They really don't understand the odds of the bad things happening.

01:07:05.400 And so what they tend to do is put it in this big giant fear bucket of insurance premium and they just

01:07:11.340 work and save and save and save to think that they have the notional to cover all these bad

01:07:16.120 things happening. And a lot of times I'll point out two things. I go, one, some of these bad things

01:07:20.680 that you're saving for, you'll never get the notional. Maybe you will or whatever, but most

01:07:24.640 of the people I talk to, do you know it was $25,000 a night for my dad in the hospital? Insurance

01:07:30.020 didn't cover that. It's gonzo. It doesn't matter. You know what I mean? He's only got X days.

01:07:34.120 You're not saving. Some of these things are like, you shouldn't be the insurer. If you're actually

01:07:38.500 afraid of that and that's important to you, you need to buy the insurance policy where they have

01:07:42.860 the lower large numbers and their edge is 6% or 8%, you are going to be woefully inefficient.

01:07:49.360 And on top of that, you don't even know the odds. Like some of these things with robot alien space

01:07:53.900 insurance, wait, you're worried about this? I also like to do a comparison. Okay. Here's the risk of

01:07:59.860 this scenario happening and this bad thing happening and it's bad. We'll accept it. And here's the risk of

01:08:05.540 you not doing the thing that you want to do now. Here's the risk of you not doing the trip.

01:08:11.740 What does that look like on your deathbed when you know you couldn't have gone on a safari and had

01:08:17.220 this wonderful time with your kids and connected with them and something to talk about forever

01:08:22.320 and expanded your worldview? Was it worth the $30,000? Was it worth the insurance policy that

01:08:27.840 you're trying to, was it worth you trying to play insurance agent? And so a lot of these are thematic

01:08:32.160 conversations. They're not like hard number conversations. But you have a model. Yeah,

01:08:36.260 we have a model. But the problem with the model is it's an abstraction. The variables we're talking

01:08:40.280 about are infinite. Yep. And we have to abstract and abstract and abstract. So what the model does,

01:08:47.120 it really tells you the direction and it's very good on the direction, but the magnitude it may be

01:08:52.020 off. And so for you as a person, it's like, what's your survival number? We have that model.

01:08:56.800 Really think about, okay, just survival. Not, I'm hanging out. Yeah, not thriving,

01:09:01.460 but surviving. What do you need? Then after that, it's all your choices. And depending on who you

01:09:07.680 are, because there's infinite choices and what those choices will cost and the experiences you

01:09:11.980 want to have in your life, plus the discovery, the 20 to 30% discovery, maybe all your experiences

01:09:17.620 go in the 50 bucket. You didn't realize it. And you're actually inadvertently pushing them in

01:09:22.100 the 70 bucket and you're not going to have them. And so that's kind of what I try and get people

01:09:26.160 to do. It was like, are you going to have $30,000 trips in your lifetime? And they'll go, yes.

01:09:31.580 When is the optimal time for you to have $30,000 trips and with whom? If you're never going to have

01:09:37.500 a $30,000 trip, I'm like, okay, let's think of a different type of activity that will get you the

01:09:41.420 same fulfillment or close to it. That's not a $30,000 trip. To me, that's the interesting

01:09:46.000 distinction. Maybe somebody listening to this says, are you freaking crazy? Like I'll never take a

01:09:50.100 $30,000 trip ever, ever, ever in my life. Yeah. The bigger point is, is there a trip that you think

01:09:55.180 you will take near the end of your life and you're holding back on taking it now? I mean, to me,

01:10:01.420 that is one of the big aha insights from this philosophy. You're in that thing. Well, I'm

01:10:07.540 saving because of just in case it should be like, guy, you're not the best insurance agent. You're

01:10:11.380 actually the worst insurance agent. You don't know the odds. You can never have the notional and the

01:10:16.480 edge, the premium that you're extracting from yourself. And that edge is your own life.

01:10:20.660 You have to give up hours of your life to have this insurance premium is way, way more than just

01:10:25.600 paying the insurance company. People worry about running out of money. I'm like, get an annuity.

01:10:29.320 You're worried about long-term health. And what if I'm sick and I can't move and I need nurses?

01:10:32.720 Get long-term care insurance. It's really cheap when you start early. It's surprisingly cheap.

01:10:36.900 What about this? There's an insurance product for a lot of things people are like,

01:10:40.280 quote unquote, saving or worried for, et cetera. Let's mitigate the risk with the professionals.

01:10:45.120 Let's get you living your life. So how do you get through to somebody

01:10:49.880 when you confront perhaps an even more illogical problem? Because the problem that we just discussed

01:10:56.540 is actually quite logical. It's easy to understand why a person would think,

01:11:01.320 I have to save for a rainy day. That's been pretty ingrained into a responsible person.

01:11:06.240 To me, there's a far less logical reason that people forego doing things when they're young.

01:11:12.880 And by young, I mean kind of like middle-aged, like in their working-

01:11:15.760 Or right now. Young is right now.

01:11:17.220 Yeah. And it's because they're so busy making money. So this is probably the one-

01:11:23.040 That's the rat in the wheel with no cheese. They got to habituate. Like you take a rat,

01:11:27.460 you get them to run in the wheel, you give them the cheese, you give them to run in the wheel,

01:11:30.400 they do the cheese. And pretty soon, you don't even have to give them the cheese. They see the wheel,

01:11:33.320 they just start running. The reward is no longer the goal. It's just to do the thing.

01:11:38.400 How do you help somebody break that?

01:11:40.240 That is the hardest one to break because they've been brainwashed into thinking that this is what

01:11:46.500 I want to do. And it's one of the hardest things to extract somebody from. And so I have to explain

01:11:51.840 to them, where do you socialize? We just go through it. Where do you eat? Where do you eat lunch?

01:11:56.780 Well, I like the people at work. I like hanging out. I don't want to quit work. I like hanging out

01:11:59.820 with the people. I'm like, you can quit work and take the people on a trip with you.

01:12:02.880 You can vacation with them. You can still visit them at night and play bingo games. The people

01:12:07.640 don't go away just because you don't show up at work. You can still spend time and you can actually

01:12:11.700 spend more quality time with the people at work if you exercise that muscle. But they don't know how

01:12:17.840 to invite people over their house or, hey, we're going to go see the Chris Rock show tonight,

01:12:21.900 which I'm going to go do. Is Chris Rock in town tonight or is it in Houston?

01:12:25.340 No, here in Austin tonight. I don't even know.

01:12:27.960 See, there you go. A new experience you might have. But anyway, they don't know how to do that.

01:12:32.440 It's a very long conversation. You can do this. You can do that. Everything that you're getting

01:12:37.480 out of work, that social benefit, all these little excuses, the mental stimulation. I'm

01:12:41.800 like, John was like, these real life problems are more mentally stimulating than the natural

01:12:47.320 gas puzzle. I still like the natural gas puzzle, but these are more mentally stimulating, more

01:12:51.400 purposeful, more fulfilling to me. And so I have to break down brick by brick and show them how

01:12:58.380 they got habituated and how they haven't exercised these other muscles and how they can

01:13:02.280 replace it and realize work is not the unique thing to get the things you're getting out

01:13:08.800 of work. It's actually a bastardization of it. It's minimizing those experience. You're

01:13:13.400 not actually getting the most quality time with your coworkers in the working environment.

01:13:18.360 You're actually not getting the most mental exercise. That's not necessarily the best mental

01:13:23.320 exercise for you in the work environment. It's just, you know, nothing else because you've

01:13:28.280 been stuck in this lab running on this type of wheel. It's really hard because people will

01:13:34.320 be extremely, extremely resistant. Change is painful. You get somebody who hasn't worked

01:13:41.140 out forever and you're like, hey, let's go into the gym. We're going to work out. It's

01:13:43.980 like, oh God, why am I here? I don't like this. You know what I mean? Like just to develop

01:13:48.920 the muscle to do the thing, to play the tennis, the fulfilling thing. It's a process. You have

01:13:52.800 to show them the reward that life is rich. It's fat. It's wonderful. It is one of the

01:13:58.240 biggest cliches ever, which is the person on their deathbed who says, I wish I didn't work

01:14:01.680 so hard. And yet we all know this cliche and yet many of us still work too hard.

01:14:06.760 Habits are powerful. One of the things I took away from the habit books, like Tiny Habits

01:14:10.360 by B.J. Fogg is a great book, is that they're powerful. They're extremely powerful. And so we

01:14:17.660 get habituated in many different ways for good or bad. If you have the snacks in your house

01:14:21.760 and you eat 200 calories a day, in two years, you're like 40 pounds heavier, right? 200

01:14:26.380 extra calories. How did that happen? How did I forget? How did my life pass me by? How

01:14:31.420 did I not go on these trips? How did I not have these experiences? How did I not call my

01:14:34.620 mother? How did I not say I love you to these people? Even pick up the phone because my habits

01:14:38.960 took over. They took over towards this purpose and it just absorbed my life. And so outside the

01:14:45.640 book with my friends, I really talk about the good of habits. You can form good habits that

01:14:50.360 keep you healthy. But some of the habits, you know, the consequences of some of our habits

01:14:54.360 to be successful and how it takes away from other things.

01:14:58.520 Has that been a struggle for you?

01:15:00.180 Oh, yes. I wrote that book for me. You know, the first life I wanted to save was my own.

01:15:05.720 Put your life mask on first. I am just as guilty as the next person is being on autopilot. I

01:15:11.620 constantly have to remind myself that I'm going to die, that life isn't forever. This period

01:15:18.020 ends. These seasons with my daughters and these seasons with my startups and all these things.

01:15:23.240 And I have to think about like, what do I want? How do I balance them? What's optimized?

01:15:26.660 And I don't get it exactly right, but I do it better than if I was just completely on autopilot.

01:15:31.640 And then sometimes I was like, oh shit, I was on autopilot. Why didn't I think about this?

01:15:35.320 You know?

01:15:35.980 And what do you use to help jar you out of autopilot on these things?

01:15:39.340 The first macro thing is the death clock. Right now I have this calendar up and it's 4,000

01:15:45.300 weeks and you mark off each week. And it's a very visceral representation about life is finite.

01:15:54.580 Not only will you die somewhere around here, but this period is going to end.

01:16:00.240 A lot of times when people go on vacation, knowing that the vacation ends on Friday,

01:16:04.860 snaps you up. You're like, oh shit, I'm going to go here and do this and I'm going to stay out. And

01:16:08.040 you know, we only have a couple of days, so let's do the cafe and let's, you know,

01:16:11.620 do X, Y, and Z. And you actually get more out of the trip knowing it's going to end as opposed to

01:16:16.160 living obliviously and all of a sudden time to go, wait, it's time to go. I forgot to do this or

01:16:21.960 go see the Eiffel Tower or go whatever it is on your trip. And so same way with life. When you know

01:16:26.560 life is going to end, it becomes more urgent. Even the segment in your life, when you know,

01:16:31.920 you know, your early fifties are going to end, you're like, it becomes more urgent. You become

01:16:35.260 more deliberate. You get off autopilot. So that's the first layer.

01:16:38.540 So each week you do check off a box on the calendar.

01:16:40.940 Each week I check off. Now I've been to Austin and traveling, but when I come back,

01:16:43.580 I see it. It's in my closet. So I walk by it every day. It's a constant reminder.

01:16:48.020 Where'd you get this calendar, by the way?

01:16:49.640 Online. There was like some sort of stoic reflections out there, a memento mori,

01:16:53.820 remember death. I used to have it on my phone and you used to count down backwards to my estimated

01:16:58.500 death date. That app no longer works, but seeing it every time is great. If I get another widget

01:17:04.740 that counts down, I'll have both of them, right? And I used to do it for other things,

01:17:07.780 till Christmas, till your daughter's 14, till the job, the 15 year anniversary, right?

01:17:12.860 Well, my daughter's going to be 16. She's going to be driving. How am I going to pry experiences

01:17:18.160 out of my daughter? Because your daughters don't want to know you before she's really gone. She

01:17:21.720 gets a car and she's, see ya, deuces, you know, that type of thing. So that really helps me.

01:17:29.080 It gives me kind of an alarm that wakes me up out of autopilot. And that's the thing I personally use.

01:17:33.980 How do you help somebody think about when their net worth should peak? Because a clear

01:17:39.980 implication of everything we're talking about is net worth probably needs to peak a lot sooner than

01:17:46.260 it currently does. As you said, I think the default for most working people is that net worth

01:17:52.100 peaks sometime after retirement or certainly around the time of retirement, even if they're

01:17:57.320 thinking about drawing down. But again, for most people, given the age of retirement,

01:18:02.420 there's a mismatch between when they're hitting peak net worth and when they're hitting peak

01:18:08.040 capacity to utilize net worth. That's a massive mismatch. You know,

01:18:12.000 one of the things I wanted to do, and I wish I knew you back then because you could have helped me,

01:18:15.920 is I was like, I want to know about all these frailty curves, like bone density, lung capacity,

01:18:20.280 what activities become less enjoyable first and then unable to do, because that determines a lot

01:18:27.700 when your net worth should peak. I estimated it somewhere in your fifties. Wow. And the data kind

01:18:34.740 of shows that when I went to St. Petersburg and climbed the 200 and I think it was 11 steps to

01:18:40.460 walk around the banister, all these tour buses coming to St. Petersburg, Asian, whatever,

01:18:44.920 not one person over those tour buses that was elderly climbed the 211 steps. So St. Petersburg

01:18:51.320 was a different St. Petersburg for them. They didn't have the same experience. I got more out

01:18:56.060 of St. Petersburg for them. Now I'm not saying it wasn't a wonderful trip and a nice trip for them,

01:19:00.240 but they probably pushed St. Petersburg too late in life. And so there's so much hidden data and data

01:19:07.940 out there and reports if you read it. We talked about it earlier, like trying to get people to spend

01:19:12.240 their money down. And one of the things, answers I give, they say, well, why do you think people are

01:19:17.520 still, their net worth is still going up into 72? And part of it is asset appreciation and going

01:19:24.840 faster than they can spend it. But the real answer is they can't. They cannot spend it down. Life has

01:19:30.620 passed them by. They no longer have the attitude or aptitude to do this. They can't do it. You'd be

01:19:38.140 surprised how many people die on those cruise ships trying to swim when they get to St. Thomas.

01:19:41.140 They think their life's going to be like a carnival commercial. And I'm like,

01:19:44.080 that carnival commercial will kill most Americans. They're having heart attacks going down those

01:19:48.000 slides. And that of course just speaks to the imbalance between the three variables. It's like

01:19:54.360 if you spent a little bit more of your time on your health, you would buy yourself a bigger runway to

01:19:59.920 utilize your wealth on the experiences. Right. So particularly for Americans, my book is

01:20:04.880 most successful in Japan, which is strange. Yeah. Say why?

01:20:07.940 I think one, I believe you'll get value out of this book in the way of thinking,

01:20:12.640 even if you have zero wealth. But Japan has a savings problem. Japan saves, save,

01:20:17.880 saves, then they die and they give the money to the next generation and they save, save,

01:20:20.880 save. And I'm just like, well, what generation actually has fun? So I'm really counter to the

01:20:24.940 culture there. Here, one of the criticisms of the book will be like, well, there's so many people

01:20:29.000 that have zero and trying to make ends meet. I'm like, I get it. They can still get value out of this

01:20:33.380 about getting the Tetris of their life, but maybe a wealth building book or how to make dollars book

01:20:38.420 might be more useful to them at this time in their life. In Japan, it's the opposite. And also

01:20:43.760 Japanese, they're healthier. And they're healthier longer.

01:20:46.400 Yes. If you walk around Japan, old people, it's an older country, but they're around,

01:20:50.000 they're moving, they're doing things or having activities, et cetera. They're enjoying their life.

01:20:53.720 For Americans, looking at the obesity epidemic and the lifestyle of Americans,

01:20:59.020 their ability to consume experience is way, deteriorates way, way faster and way earlier

01:21:05.020 than say the Japanese. Let's go back to risk again. What's the mantra of the energy trader

01:21:10.840 or the gas trader? Yeah. The name of the game is the stay in the game.

01:21:14.420 Sort of like Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game. It's not about winning. It's about being able to keep

01:21:18.840 playing over and over and over again. So inherent in that is never making a bet or a trade that can

01:21:24.380 completely wipe you out and take you out of the game. By nature of the business, even the smallest

01:21:29.620 position can take you out of the game. It's really about taking prudent risk reward and then stopping

01:21:34.900 out when you can. Life is risk. You can get hit by a bus. A meteor can hit you. You can get some sort

01:21:40.160 of crazy infectious disease. You can get a bum deal just going out, but you're not going to live in a

01:21:44.620 bubble. You're going to take calculated risks. So in trading, we're optimizing for profits.

01:21:49.060 You're going to take risks that in a tail scenario can blow you out. The key is taking prudent risk

01:21:55.360 reward decisions. I don't smoke. The reward's not great enough. I did go skydiving. The first time,

01:22:01.900 the reward was great. The second time, it was half as great. I didn't do it the third time

01:22:06.600 because the risk was the same and the reward wasn't. The reward was going down and the risk

01:22:10.540 was still the same. And so this is the same thing in trading. We look at everything on a risk reward

01:22:14.700 basis. The likelihood of dying. If things go awry, can we get out? Have I sized my position? Can I

01:22:20.520 get out? Is the liquidity there? And all these things are going on all the time.

01:22:24.740 And how do you think about that in a person's life? I mean, I like the example of skydiving.

01:22:29.260 How do you think about this now in terms of the seasons of the person's life? Are there certain

01:22:34.200 seasons where certain risks make sense, be it financial risks or-

01:22:39.260 I'll give you a great example of physical risk. Okay. So I have a cartilage disappearing in L3,

01:22:44.980 L4. Bones are hitting each other. So I'm advised against doing impact things. And I was 50 years

01:22:51.880 old in the islands and guys were going to go wakeboarding. And I was like, I don't want to

01:22:56.420 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

01:23:00.220 it for a second. I said, I don't have many wakeboarding times left. Like I'm not going wakeboarding

01:23:07.240 at 60. I have this degenerative back thing. It's going to be more dangerous for me, et cetera.

01:23:12.580 If I am to wakeboard-

01:23:14.420 It has to be that.

01:23:14.880 It is now. It is in this time period. And then I thought, okay, it's in this time period. I'm like,

01:23:19.200 okay, how many times am I going to be in warm water with my buddies where there's a wakeboarding

01:23:25.980 boat ready to go in the next two years? I don't know. This is it. I don't foresee it happening.

01:23:33.000 I could make a special effort for it, but it's just there in my lap and I don't have

01:23:36.960 something else to do, et cetera. And I was like, I'm going to go wakeboarding. This is probably the

01:23:41.040 last time I'm going to go wakeboarding. That was the last time I went wakeboarding.

01:23:44.400 How much did it hurt?

01:23:45.260 It didn't hurt. I actually jumped the wake too. I made a nice jump at a wake. I said,

01:23:48.520 I'm going to send it. I sent it. It didn't hurt that much. It wasn't like that. But afterwards,

01:23:52.100 there was a little tension in my back, et cetera. And stretching and trying to,

01:23:56.840 I was very conscious like, okay, I got to be careful coming across it. And now I wake surf.

01:24:01.980 I do the low impact version of the sport, which I absolutely love. Until there's some technique to

01:24:08.060 put cartilage in my back and restrengthen my back. I'm waiting for the technology to catch up. So

01:24:12.280 maybe I'll get my back back. But right now, it's the last time I went wakeboarding. That was the

01:24:17.440 risk was worth the reward. There was no other time. Now, as I get older, wakeboarding is much

01:24:22.520 more dangerous. And so I've gone to a sport where the speed of the sport, a lot of people think,

01:24:27.940 if you're going 10 miles per hour versus 12 miles per hour, it's only two miles per hour difference,

01:24:33.580 but it's a 44% difference in force because force equals MV squared. And so I'm acutely aware of it.

01:24:39.320 And I'm like, okay, I want to be in something that I can get fulfilled where the risk is not as great.

01:24:44.160 I have a 44% reduction in force, which is great, great for me when I fall.

01:24:50.160 So what year was it that you had that incredible birthday?

01:24:54.260 Gosh, I'm pretty sure it's 45. But I've had incredible birthdays since then. But the one in the book is 45.

01:25:01.720 At the time you spend a lot of money, was it for you enough money that you were like,

01:25:07.780 am I crazy doing this? Did you have second thoughts about it?

01:25:10.380 I had second thoughts. Like the events and the things I was planning.

01:25:13.280 Remind me, it was down in the-

01:25:14.840 I went to St. Barts. I love St. Barts. It's where I had my honeymoon. It's a great island. I think it's one of

01:25:19.940 the best islands in the Caribbean. Obviously, not everybody can go to St. Barts. And I tell people

01:25:24.740 that become successful, you either get new friends or you scholarship your friends. Because

01:25:31.020 you want to do experiences. A lot of times, a lot of people want to do shared experiences,

01:25:35.560 right? They want their friends to come. They can't afford to just pop up and spend thousands

01:25:39.960 of dollars to go to St. Barts or do X, Y, and Z. And it happens in various levels of success,

01:25:45.020 whether it's on a trip to Chicago. I can't do that. Some people can and can't. And so as you

01:25:51.260 become successful, one of the experiences you want to have is to be around your friends and

01:25:55.960 have shared experience with your friends. And so I coach people. I say, you have to lose this

01:26:00.760 attachment that they have to pay or they need to pay or whatever. You have to think what's most

01:26:06.320 important to you. Get off autopilot. It's to have shared experiences. And is it worth it for you to

01:26:11.320 have them around? For me, I've had good friends throughout the years. It's unequivocal, yes,

01:26:15.860 friends and family. But it gets expensive. You got to run out to hotel rooms, et cetera,

01:26:20.700 and entertainment and plan this thing. But I was like, some of these people, they have their own

01:26:25.420 lives and own complications and conflicts. You won't get the time to do with it. Some of these

01:26:30.240 people won't be alive. May or may not be alive. You may drift apart. This is the time. I want to do

01:26:36.500 this. And so as I was adding these people in and having my mother down and all this stuff, I had

01:26:42.960 just like a heavenly experience walking on the beach. My mom's coming out of her beach house.

01:26:49.080 My friends are hanging on the balcony, looking down. It's beautiful. The birds are out, et cetera. And

01:26:53.260 hi, all the people I love. And we're going to do this fun activity. We're going to listen to music,

01:26:57.820 et cetera. You know, I imagine that that's what heavens is like. You're just having this experience.

01:27:02.040 And what I did was I realized that that's what I was working for. I was working to create these

01:27:08.560 experiences. These are the things that fulfill me. When I was planning it, oh shit, that's a lot of

01:27:14.620 goddamn money. You know what I mean? Like, what am I going to do? Is am I doing the right allocation,

01:27:18.520 right? Like you never know if you get it exactly right, right? Nobody gets it perfectly balanced,

01:27:22.220 but this was the right direction. You know, it reminds me of something when my wife and I got married in

01:27:27.560 2004, you know, we got married at a golf club. We didn't have two nickels to rub together. So it

01:27:32.700 was like, I think the wedding, the ceremony, the reception were all at the same place. The whole

01:27:37.160 thing cost less than $20,000. Obscene amount of money for us at the time. And it was amazing because

01:27:42.000 everybody we actually cared about in our lives was there. We were really fortunate that,

01:27:46.400 hey, almost everybody could make it who we invited. You know, there were almost 200 people there.

01:27:51.100 So at one point I grabbed my wife, we kind of walked out onto a balcony and could see everybody. And I said,

01:27:57.340 do you realize that this is one of only two times in our life that we will be surrounded by everyone

01:28:05.420 who's meaningful to us, who's alive. And the only other time it's going to occur, we're going to be

01:28:10.380 dead. We'll be in the casket. We'll be at our funeral. So we got to really take this in. And I

01:28:15.560 realized now there was a huge error in my logic, which was, that was totally untrue. That didn't have

01:28:21.180 to be true at all. You can create that anytime you want. You can decide for no reason,

01:28:27.680 I want to bring everybody in my life who matters.

01:28:31.220 Throw a birthday party.

01:28:31.900 It could be a birthday party. It could be just a party.

01:28:34.240 Most of my life is finding excuses to throw parties. You know, we get autopilot waiting

01:28:39.260 for certain events like weddings or funerals or-

01:28:41.900 Or special anniversaries.

01:28:43.160 Special anniversaries or things like that. We autopilot like, oh, that's when we get together.

01:28:47.400 We allow autopilot to dictate when we do these things. Instead of thinking, hey,

01:28:51.060 I really want to hang out with so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so.

01:28:53.700 Let me design a trip or let me have a bowling alley or something. It could be low cost. It'd

01:28:58.740 be like, let me have a picnic, wiffle ball game, talking shit. One of the things I want to do,

01:29:04.120 which I guess the startup costs will be something expensive. I'm getting some laser tag guns and I

01:29:09.420 put it in my group. I have this group called Cool Awesome People. I'll put you in it if you want

01:29:13.340 to be in it. And I'm like, it's on. I'm going to get laser tag, best ass laser tag things.

01:29:18.360 There's going to be some series where everybody's like, yes. You know what I mean? I'm creating this

01:29:22.580 experience. Yeah, I'm going to kick some ass on laser tag and shit talk, but I'm also going to

01:29:26.920 connect and have a good time with people. And I can do that. Once I put the initial cost,

01:29:30.700 we could do that all the time. We can have a league. We can do all kinds of things. It doesn't

01:29:35.640 have to be laser tag. It could be wiffle ball at the park. You can have a wiffle ball league,

01:29:39.140 low cost. Dollar store, pick up a wiffle ball bat. You're creating memories and somebody brings

01:29:44.220 sandwiches. And you can do that. And that's getting off autopilot. So I'm sorry to interrupt

01:29:48.720 you, but you really hit the nail on the head about that. It's like design your life. Think

01:29:54.600 about what you want out of it and make it happen. Now, let me ask you a question. At that birthday

01:29:59.280 party when you're 45, how many people were there? We took out the Tijuana Hotel and some of the other

01:30:05.700 one, 80, 100, 80, 100 or something. And how much time did you get to spend with each person?

01:30:11.920 We were there for a week. So I got to spend time. Whoever wanted to spend time with me,

01:30:16.100 they got to spend time with me. Some people have this thing. This is just me. I don't know. This

01:30:21.380 isn't like coaching. Some people, I want their presence, but not saying anything. I know you're

01:30:26.280 okay. I get to see you being happy. Maybe I don't talk to you as much, but I get to enjoy you enjoying

01:30:32.640 yourself. That's one of my favorite things at a party. When I throw a party, they're like,

01:30:35.860 are you having a good time? It's crazy, whatever. I'm like, I'm having the best. I'm watching the best

01:30:39.680 fucking movie of my life right now. I am in an immersive theater of people I love doing the

01:30:46.840 thing they want to do. Now I'm kind of antisocial. I don't like to talk that much to people. I get

01:30:50.920 awkward sometimes. You know what I mean? Sometimes I grab my wife and I'm like, talk for me, talk for

01:30:54.760 me. We'll go to a party and I'll be like, you got to talk for me, babe. I can't take it.

01:30:58.160 I can talk to a million people, no problems, the stadium or whatever. And sometimes I get awkward,

01:31:03.340 but what I really, really do enjoy and what really fulfills me is watching people I love have a good time.

01:31:08.140 And I think after my wife read the book, that was one of her first thoughts, which is I've never had

01:31:14.120 a birthday party. So the last birthday party I had was, I was seven years old. After that,

01:31:18.280 I just decided I never wanted to have a party and I never have. And she's like, look, I really want,

01:31:24.980 I know how much you are obsessed with your friends and how much you share with them individually,

01:31:30.220 but wouldn't it be great for everybody to be under one roof for your birthday? And I'm resisting it

01:31:37.420 to know. And she's, she'd never throw a surprise party for me. She knows that would just kill me.

01:31:41.420 So she won't do that, but she's really negotiating with me to sort of have a party. And my view is

01:31:45.820 it won't be enjoyable for me because I'll be the center of attention and I'll feel an obligation

01:31:52.000 to give everybody the same amount of attention. Whereas having dinner with five friends is

01:31:59.940 infinitely more enjoyable. So I'm trying to balance her very well.

01:32:05.700 It's just a different experience.

01:32:07.040 I guess what bums me out is like, I feel like I wouldn't even know how to appreciate a party.

01:32:11.020 I get that. Like I walk around and I just really enjoy people meeting and socializing and connecting.

01:32:16.180 Like at my wedding, there were friends that didn't know each other and they're like,

01:32:19.300 they're great. Like, you know, great people. I'm like, of course I do. You find somebody who's

01:32:22.680 great love, you keep them close by. I don't care if you dated them or whatever. Like

01:32:26.240 you keep them close, man. Like people that vibe with you is very important to me. And

01:32:30.880 me seeing them succeed, I'm a person that roots for people to hit the long ball.

01:32:35.040 I'm not a hater. I'm a natural, like, I hope you crush it. I hope you become a trillionaire.

01:32:40.220 I hope you, whatever it is. And so seeing people at a party, I like to throw parties and make people

01:32:46.260 have fun and create environments for them, loosen up, enjoy each other, have a good time. And then

01:32:50.860 watching that success and watching them interact is enjoyable for me. Even though I might be

01:32:55.700 just sitting there smiling, right? Like not really talking.

01:32:58.820 You can enjoy a party as much if you're the host or it's your birthday as if you're at somebody's

01:33:04.320 party?

01:33:05.060 It depends. It's not always the same because you got to solve problems. Someone can't get in.

01:33:08.820 The ice maker is broken, whatever. Like there's that type of things. But yeah,

01:33:12.280 I'd rather watch that movie than go to the movies. I'd rather be in that immersive theater than

01:33:16.500 McKittrick Hotel and sleep no more in New York, which is an immersive theater. That's the best theater.

01:33:21.540 And even so what? I only got to have a small conversation, whatever. Like the feedback

01:33:26.040 that I was like, I met this person. We had a great time. It was awesome. Very fulfilling to me.

01:33:30.760 Very fulfilling to me.

01:33:31.900 What year did you finish writing Die With Zero?

01:33:35.460 Let's see. It's supposed to come out in 2020. So it's probably 2019.

01:33:40.340 2019.

01:33:41.540 In the three years-ish since you've written the book, has your thinking changed in anything?

01:33:47.380 Have you evolved? Are you more nuanced in anything that you wrote about?

01:33:50.820 You know, it's kind of like when you write a formula and it's not like I came up with this

01:33:55.500 formula, this life cycle hypothesis thing, which is basically the book, this counterfactual

01:33:59.960 regret minimization algorithm, and I'm solving for net fulfillment. It's not as if these ideas

01:34:05.600 weren't out there. Like I always say, like anybody could have just thought about it and

01:34:08.920 wrote this book. It's how I present it so that it hits the widest audience and so that it hits

01:34:14.260 them viscerally so they actually apply it. And so I think about it deeper and deeper layers

01:34:20.160 of it. And sometimes I go deep into the subcategory because I use these variables, wealth, health,

01:34:24.920 and time. What's the maximum level of health I should be? There's tons of health books out

01:34:29.400 there. I'm not writing a health book, but I'm like, how can I optimize this? How these

01:34:33.320 two interplay? The time and health. How much time do I really want to spend on the Peloton?

01:34:37.840 How much time do I really want to like regimented eating all the time and being a pain in the

01:34:42.140 ass? How many chocolate chip cookies do I want to eat before I die and just suffer?

01:34:47.280 I have to think about that. If dying one year early means living one more year, but I don't

01:34:52.280 get any chocolate chip cookies, I'll take the chocolate chip cookies. I want a fulfilling

01:34:55.000 life. Thinking deeply about these things. That's kind of a cartoon version of it, but

01:34:59.060 I hear other people think about it. I wrote the basic macro formula, but it's very fulfilling to see

01:35:04.720 other people. They've set up spreadsheets. This is the optimal way you would die with zero.

01:35:08.080 They've done it better than me. These financial planners built these spreadsheets and your returns

01:35:12.760 and these are the things you'd like to do, et cetera. This is great. They've taken the ball

01:35:17.180 and run with it. And I've taken the ball a little bit and run with it a little bit myself. And the

01:35:21.120 way I'm applying it mainly is more socially, more of these things like at my wedding, I said to

01:35:28.620 somebody, I said, probably no one in this room will see each other more than 50 times. And most of us

01:35:34.200 will probably only see us 20 times in the times of our lives.

01:35:36.660 How many people were... This is the recent wedding.

01:35:38.700 Yeah, 117.

01:35:39.900 117.

01:35:40.880 117. And so that's kind of hit people. They're like, yeah, you're kind of right. I put the

01:35:45.940 over under at the max at like 50 for any pair that's not married. And probably 20. That made

01:35:52.120 me think, I don't want 20. I'm going to throw parties. I've taken throwing parties and social

01:35:56.200 things very seriously because I thought about what fulfills me. So the last party I had, which you

01:36:02.900 were invited, but you didn't come.

01:36:04.040 I was throwing a party that night.

01:36:04.920 You were throwing a party that night at F1. I went all out. This is what I'm going to

01:36:08.600 work for, to have these types of experience. There's other things, right? But this is in

01:36:13.380 the category, in the top of the category. Socializing, seeing my friends happy, having a good time,

01:36:18.760 et cetera. Travel is a big one. Charity is another big one. My kid's money is their money. It's

01:36:23.540 not my money. It's in a trust that's already taken care of. They'll get their money turned

01:36:26.740 over when somewhere between 25, 26, and 33 because that's the optimal time for them when

01:36:33.900 they're mentally mature and at physical maturity, not in decline.

01:36:38.360 And how much will you talk with them about what you think or don't think they should do

01:36:45.160 with that money? Is that one of those things where you feel it is your responsibility to

01:36:48.060 say absolutely nothing and let them figure it out on their own?

01:36:51.060 No, no. I want to give them a roadmap. I want to teach them that it's a tool.

01:36:54.780 A lot of people, one of the biggest mistakes they make is assigning some sort of good or bad

01:36:58.480 to money or what it is, et cetera. It's not money that's good or bad in the Bible. It's

01:37:02.480 the love of money that is good or bad. I use this analogy. I usually say money is a tool

01:37:07.700 much like a hammer and saw and nails and rail guns. Do hammers and saws build houses? No.

01:37:13.680 You need to know how to use those tools. People build those houses. So you do, does money

01:37:18.220 make you happy? No. But if you know how to use the tool of money, it can make you happy

01:37:23.300 or it can make you miserable. So some people who give hammers and saws, they build a house,

01:37:27.560 they build canoes. This is wonderful things. You're like, how the hell did you build this?

01:37:30.460 Some people give hammers and saws and they're just sitting there to cut their arm off.

01:37:33.580 And so what I'm trying to do is not tell my kids what they should do, but teach them how to use the

01:37:40.140 tools. Once they know how to use the tools, if they decide to build houses or canoes or cut their

01:37:44.280 arms off, that's up to them. But I want to make sure that I gave them the instruction manual.

01:37:48.220 And got them a little bit proficient on how to use the tools. And that's it.

01:37:52.040 Then my job is done, right? I have so many friends that try and control

01:37:55.600 people from the grave, that use the money as a control mechanism. I'm very big on like,

01:38:01.320 that's my dream. My dreams are my dreams. My dad always tried to get me to be an attorney.

01:38:05.700 Get the hell out of here. I'm never doing that. But you try and push your dreams onto your kids.

01:38:10.980 I want you to be a doctor. I want you to be this. I want you to be that, whatever. And that's

01:38:14.500 not necessarily what they want to do. They have their own life and it's their adventure.

01:38:18.220 And what I want to do is set them up with the tools to choose their own adventure.

01:38:22.500 Now, I might not agree with that adventure. I probably won't because I come from a different

01:38:26.720 era and a different culture and all kinds of things. But I will be rest assured and happy that

01:38:32.460 if they're fulfilled, great.

01:38:35.560 Well, Bill, I want to thank you very much for writing this book because as I said at the outset,

01:38:40.280 it really is one of a handful of books that has caused me to rethink a lot of what I've been doing,

01:38:48.840 how I've been thinking about the problem of optimizing these variables. I'm really confident

01:38:54.120 that people are going to pick this book up and find similar value, at least in magnitude. They

01:38:58.480 might find different things that speak to them more or less than me. But I believe that from a

01:39:02.940 valence and magnitude perspective, people will across the board find this valuable. So thanks so much for

01:39:07.580 writing it and also for coming today. Thanks. That's great feedback. I mean,

01:39:10.160 you don't write books to get rich. You write books to get your point across. And for me,

01:39:14.120 I see it as saving lives. And a lot of people have said this before. What do you mean saving

01:39:18.080 lives, Perkins? You're fucking crazy. What do you mean saving lives? You're not saving lives. And I'm

01:39:22.020 like, well, listen, when somebody's drowning in the river or lake, Lake Austin, you pull them out and

01:39:26.360 you mouth to mouth and you save their lives. Guess what? They're still going to fucking die. Just not that day.

01:39:31.700 Right? So what did you do when you save their life by pulling them out of the river? You've given them

01:39:36.860 more choices, more experience, more life. So when you read my book and you get off autopilot and you

01:39:44.020 get more choices, more experience, more life, isn't it the same? At least in my mind it is. And that's

01:39:49.300 what motivates me. And so when you say it had an impact in you and you're going to have a more

01:39:54.200 fulfilling life, it's like, I fucking did it. You know what I mean? I feel very happy. So I appreciate it.

01:39:58.920 I think the example you gave there is a great one. And I would agree with you completely

01:40:03.280 because I too fall in the camp, despite my profession of believing we are all absolutely

01:40:09.080 going to die and in relatively short order. And therefore anything that changes our experiential

01:40:15.920 existence for the better is part of living. Yeah. So thank you. Thanks for having me. It's

01:40:21.080 been great. All right, man. That was awesome. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of

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The Peter Attia Drive - November 25, 2024

Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment ｜ Bill Perkins (#237 rebroadcast)

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