Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment | Bill Perkins (#237 rebroadcast)

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode https://peterattiamd.com/billperkins/?utm_source=podcast-feed&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=241125-pod-billperkins&utm_content=241125-pod-billperkins-podfeed Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/?utm_source=podcast-feed&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=241125-pod-billperkins&utm_content=241125-pod-billperkins-podfeed Sign Up to Receive Peter's Weekly Newsletter https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/?utm_source=podcast-feed&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=241125-pod-billperkins&utm_content=241125-pod-billperkins-podfeed Bill Perkins is one of the world's most successful hedge fund managers and entrepreneurs, and the author of the bestseller, Die With Zero. In this episode, Bill unpacks the Die With Zero philosophy which challenges conventional thinking related to the balance between health, wealth, and time—the three variables important for fulfillment. Bill makes the case that we should strive for maximum net fulfillment rather than net worth (or even health). He argues that we need to optimize our life to have memorable experiences before it's too late and that most people are over-saving and under-living. Bill also explains how one can apply the principles in Die With Zero to break out of "autopilot" and optimize their life to achieve maximum net fulfillment. We discuss: Bill's upbringing, background, and first job on Wall Street [2:45]; A missed experience and feeling of regret that shaped Bill's thinking [13:45]; Thinking in terms of time, and the relationship between money, time, and health [16:30]; Solving for net fulfillment and allocating your time based on the seasons of life [26:45]; How Bill thinks about risk, opportunity costs, and the difference between fear and risk tolerance [35:00]; Optimizing for fulfillment, finding purpose outside of work, and more [41:15]; Thinking about the order of experiences you want to have based on seasons of life [49:30]; Bill's unique perspective on philanthropy and a more impactful way to give money away [54:15]; Applying the principles in 'Die With Zero' to maximize fulfillment [1:03:30]; How to break out of living life on autopilot [1:13:45]; When should your net worth peak? [1:17:30]; Taking calculated risks [1:21:00]; Bill shares a lesson from his incredible birthday [1:24:45]; How Bill's philosophy has evolved since writing Die With Zero [1:33:30]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter https://twitter.com/PeterAttiaMD, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/peterattiamd/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/peterattiamd/ and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8kGsMa0LygSX9nkBcBH1Sg

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 0:54Dr. Peter Attia?

  want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe.

• 1:04Dr. Peter Attia?

  Welcome to a special episode of the Drive. For this week's episode, we want to rebroadcast my conversation with Bill Perkins from January of 2023. Bill is a successful hedge fund manager and entrepreneur, and is the author of one of my favorite books, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life. Bill's book is one of a handful of books that I keep multiple copies around in my house to give to friends, or family, or anybody who's over and who I think would benefit from it. This is really a conversation about how to optimize your life by investing in your experiences instead of waiting until the end of your life to do everything. We start this discussion by talking about Bill's background and his upbringing, and the genesis of the philosophies in this book, something

• 1:48Dr. Peter Attia?

  that came to Bill throughout the early part of his career. We talk about the overarching philosophy of the book, which is that we all have three important resources: time, health, and experiences. And of course, we use money as a tool to trade off these three things. Bill makes the argument that no matter at what level of wealth you are, most people overlook the Most valuable asset of all, which is time. We speak about the importance of understanding risk, including the opportunity cost of decisions that we do or don't make, the risk reward matrix, thinking about regret, and the dangers of living a life on autopilot when it comes to work and fulfillment. Overall, I have found Bill's insights from this book and my conversations with him, outside of this podcast even, to be valuable in my own life.

• 2:33Dr. Peter Attia?

  And I think they are very important for anyone, regardless of age, net worth, or stage of life. So without further delay, please enjoy or reenjoy my conversation with Bill Perkins.

• 2:49Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I have too. I'm really honored to be on your podcast.

• 2:55Dr. Peter Attia?

  I don't know, a little while ago, I made a video on Instagram where I talked about three books I've read in the last 12 months that I didn't expect to A, have such an impact on how I thought about things, but also B, even though they're completely different books, they strike me as having kind of a unifying theme in this sort of thing about quality of life. The three books are, one of them was From Strength to Strength, one of them is 4,000 Weeks, and the other one is Die With Zero. Now, what's interesting is I know exactly who suggested I read 4,000 Weeks, and I'm really good friends with the author of From Strength to Strength. So that's why I just read that, knowing it was coming out. I still don't remember who recommended Die With Zero to me, but I remember

• 3:38Dr. Peter Attia?

  just thinking, okay, well, cool, sounds interesting, ordered it, and then just couldn't put it down. As I think I mentioned in the video, immediately made my wife read it, and then immediately just went out and bought many copies of it, along with many copies of the other two books. So I basically started handing them out as like a triplet copy. If someone was over and they hadn't read them, boom, they were leaving with all three copies of the book. So that speaks to why, you know, I wanted to sit down with you. And let's give people a sense of who you are. So you grew up in Jersey, right?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey.

• 4:10Dr. Peter Attia?

  You're an engineer. We have that in common, right?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, except I don't want people to be impressed of as an engineer. We had a saying on the football team, D's get degrees. Until later, I found out, wait, you can't graduate with a D in engineering. You have to at least get a C. So I barely graduated. I was a super slacker. So I don't want to be like, I'm an engineer, you know?

• 4:27Dr. Peter Attia?

  What was it that you played?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  The bench. I played the bench, but I was a defensive back, cornerback at the University of Iowa.

• 4:33Dr. Peter Attia?

  But did it pay for school?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  No, I was actually a walk-on. I was trying to get a scholarship. I had a partial scholarship, which means they just give you some food. I basically broke my leg at the growth plate. Was pretty much has been before I ever was. But you know, when you love football, you love the sport, you never want to let go, right? You're not like, oh, I'll just dive into my studies and pick up this hobby. You're kind of like, football is life at that age.

• 4:58Dr. Peter Attia?

  You graduate college with a degree in engineering. Maybe you're not first in your class. You decide, though, you're going to go and instead of going to grad school or something like that, you're like, I'm going to go to New York. Is that your first job?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I love that. Not first in my class, the understatement of the year. I was kind of like lost. Didn't know what I was going to do. Really was pretty much a slacker, underachiever at the time. And my godfather calls me with one of those, like, what are you going to do with your life at the point? And I knew I didn't want to go into engineering. It was kind of this cookie cutter life. You know, you don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit in it. You work on like a subsection of a chip. Here's your career path, etc. It was all kind of laid out for you. And that was unattractive to me. It kind of seemed like death to me. And at the time, I saw this movie, Wall Street. And I was like, oh, that's what I want. I want to be rich. I want to go work in stocks. So when my godfather called me, I go, I want to be a stockbroker or a stock trader.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  And he goes, I don't know anything about equities, but there's this firm in commodities. Mind you, I didn't know what a commodity was, that's looking for screen clerks. Go check it out. And so I got an introduction, came with my resume.

• 6:05Dr. Peter Attia?

  This is what you're like, late 80s, early 90s?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Like 91. And takes my resume, tears it up, walks me around the floor. People yelling and screaming. And, you know, they're kind of in casual wear and it's like trading places. And I'm like, all this energy. And I'm like, wow, if that guy can be rich, so can I. And so they didn't want to hire me, actually. They were looking to give the job to someone else, another friend at a firm. So I kind of hung out downstairs, waiting every day, calling, can I come up? Can I become a peon here? Can I become a peon? And finally, after three days, they let me become a peon.

• 6:38Dr. Peter Attia?

  So what did that job entail?

• 6:39Speaker 01

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

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Ever here, I know selling five lots at 5480, not three lots at 5480. What do you know? And if you know the same trade, then it's a simple process to correct it in the system. And if you don't, you're like, no, no, I definitely know only three lots. Then you go to the traders immediately and they kind of reconcile it. And that was a system like running around all day checking trades.

• 7:44Dr. Peter Attia?

  This job is down on Wall Street, this firm's on Wall Street?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so back when the World Trade Center was there, this was in for World Trade Center.

• 7:50Dr. Peter Attia?

  How much were you learning the business? Cause I imagine one could take a job like that and not actually learn what's happening, like what the machine is doing.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's when I decided to turn it on. I always tell people like, hey, I was pretty much a, can I say fuck up? I was pretty much the fuck up of fuck ups for giving what I had before college. But then I decided to turn it on. That poverty, that being a peon and that desire to make it forced me to be like, I'm gonna learn every single thing there is about this business. I was reading books at night about trading, about the oil business, about options, about whatever. I was a sponge and I really turned it on and said, I'm going to be diligent. I'm not going to mess around and as much as I possibly can as a 20 year old, right? And really, really trying to make myself invaluable, no matter where I was.

• 8:43Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 8:46Speaker 01

  No, no, I had to, when I first got there, I had to live at home with my mom, which was completely cramping my style. And so I started driving a limo at night. The company limo at night to make ends meet.

• 8:55Dr. Peter Attia?

  What were you getting paid in that first job?

• 8:57Speaker 01

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

• 9:01Dr. Peter Attia?

  Sub 16?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was like 16, 16,000, but I was getting raises very quickly because I made myself valuable and I would work at night. And I would make more money driving the limo on a daily basis because traders would like take me here and they'd be drunk and they'd tip you. And you weren't there necessarily for your current income. You were there for your future income. And so I had another clerk named Jason Ruffo, who had a studio in the Upper West Side. And what he did was he put up a wall by the kitchen and kind of made this small room in the studio. And I eventually got an apartment with him on the West, Upper West Side, living in like a pizza oven type space, you know? But it was great because I was in New York City, out of my mom's house.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  I could have girls over and that pride that goes, well, I live on the Upper West Side, you know? Everybody wants to say they live in New York City. And so as I was getting raises and kind of moving up, I gradually got into that life of, you know, what I call a puppy. Black urban professional, you know, buppies and yuppies. And that was the, you know, the beginning of my journey.

• 10:07Dr. Peter Attia?

  Tommy, was your dad in the picture at this time?

• 10:10Speaker 01

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

• 10:34Dr. Peter Attia?

  Had your parents gone to college?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  My dad did. So my dad got a scholarship to the University of Iowa, but he was a real badass. He had no intentions of going to school. He walked by a football field when he was a kid in high school. He's like, I want to do that. And coach is like, you don't know anything about football. And he says, it seems like it's about hitting people. I know how to hit people. So they gave him some raggedy uniforms. He comes out for a practice and in the next practice, he has a brand new uniform. He's all everything, gets recruited to go to University of Iowa to go to college. And so there he is in college in 1959 at the University of Iowa, all badass from Jersey City. So he had gone to college and then my mom went to college, finished college while I think it was like preteen or late teens. But I had the benefit of two college educated parents.

• 11:19Dr. Peter Attia?

  And how much were they understanding your hunger, your drive, your aspirations in this new role? I mean, because presumably they had seen you in high school and college, not achieving at your potential. And now, all of a sudden, you're hustling, you're working two jobs, you're reading, you're learning, you're doing everything. Were they purviewed to that sort of metamorphosis in you?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  They saw it later. I'm the kid that didn't take out the garbage. I always say, don't tell your parents your dreams because they'll just piss on them. Because they seen you at your worst, at your failures, as you're growing. They have this kind of image of you when you were the caterpillar, not the butterfly.

• 11:55Dr. Peter Attia?

  So you weren't necessarily like advertising to them, this is what I want to do?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  No. You know, they started seeing it. I remember the time when I finally made, I got a raise and I was like, I did the calculation, just like, holy shit, I make more money than my mom. Like, I've made it. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'm like, I'm real, I'm legit, I'm a puppy. Me with my badge, you know, I used to wear around as a badge of honor. Like, I get onto the New York Mercantile Exchange, et cetera. But they'd see, I'm going out, or I'm flying here, or I'm doing whatever. And it's like, oh, the kid must be doing okay. It wasn't until I got recruited to go to Houston, started buying the assets that adults start buying. And I paid my mom back for something that I did when I was a teenager that she didn't know, that they're like, okay.

• 12:42Dr. Peter Attia?

  What was that?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  When I was younger, I had a stick Toyota that my mom had. It was her car, I was driving it. And my friend, Pete Thible, was like, I want to drive the car, I want to teach him how to drive the car, I want to drive the car. I'm not supposed to let him drive the car. So anyway, long story short, he hits the gas instead of the clutch, spins the car out, the back of it spins around, hits a telephone pole. Trunk pops up, it has this big giant dent. I'm like, holy shit, what am I gonna do? You know, so I tell my mom the story that we went to go get pizza and parked it, and then truck must have hit it on the side or bumped it and went on. And that was my lie to my mom about this car, that I felt guilty about. I said, one day, I'm gonna pay for this car in spades.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  That happened to my mom. And so, one day, I gave my mom $40,000. And I was like, Mom, remember that time, the car had that brown mark on it? We told you it was a truck. Well, this is what really happened.

• 13:36Dr. Peter Attia?

  How did she react to that?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  She started laughing. She goes, I knew something was strange about that, you know? The story fit, but there was something strange about that, you know? She just kind of laughed and was thankful that one, it was a great investment, you know, having that car beat up, but she just kind of laughed and we just reminisced about it.

• 13:54Dr. Peter Attia?

  So let's go back to when you're on the Upper West Side. You write about this in the book. You and your roommate kind of had a slightly different, I don't know, call it a point of view on future earnings and what that allowed you to do with your time. You told a story about something you did that seemed kind of bold.

• 14:10Speaker 01

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

• 14:13Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  So Jason, I don't know if our views were very thought out or just wired in, but like I was head down, like I gotta make it. I gotta become a trader. I gotta have my head down. I'm saving money. I'm really, at this point in my life, super diligent, trying to convince my boss to get on the bus program to save money, writing down every single nickel that I bought, et cetera. And really focused on my career trajectory. And Jason is like,

• 14:39Dr. Peter Attia?

  Does Jason work in the same firm?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  He works at another firm. If you look at the old pictures, all the phone booths are right next to each other. He's like right next to me, even though he's not at the same firm. We're all crowded into one area. And Jason's like, I'm going to go backpacking for Europe for a couple of months. I'm like, what? How are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to borrow money from this guy who was a loan shark. And I'm like, wait, what? You're going to borrow money from this guy? And you're going to go backpacking in Europe? I'm like, this is insane. This is insanity. My head is about to explode. I'm like, you're going to miss out. And what if they hire another screen clerk and your job's not there when you come back? And how are you going to pay this guy back? If you don't pay him back, this is not like, oh, penalties and interest. This is like knees and ankles. And so I just didn't get it.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  That experience, you know, I wasn't thinking about like die with zero and certain experiences belong in a certain period of your life, et cetera. I was just ultimately, On this autopilot of trying to be successful and make money at that time of my life. And Jason was like, I'm going backpacking. So he went, I stayed, he came back, had a screen clerking job.

• 15:47Dr. Peter Attia?

  Different firm or same firm?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Same firm, wasn't that much noticeable different. Like I moved up a little bit, but it wasn't noticeable different. But he came back richer, right? He came back with stories and experiences and romance and lifelong friends. You know, in the beginning, I was kind of, oh, wow, maybe I missed out. Maybe I could have jumped in for a week, you know, that type of thing. And as time went on, I really, really regretted not joining them on that trip. When it finally came time where like, I'm going to go Europe. I'm going to go have this backpacking experience. I was too bougie. I had money. I wasn't going to go stay at youth hostels. I wasn't going to capture these trains. I was going to have an experience, but a different experience. The type of experience he had was for that time in your life.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And the type of experience, even though it was wonderful, it was not as rich as his experience. Because the time had passed me by. It's one of my big, big, big regrets in life.

• 16:41Dr. Peter Attia?

  So how did you start to formulate this understanding about these different types of resources? Be it time, be it money, which is the resource I think a lot of people think about. Experiences themselves as, for lack of a better word, an asset or a thing, the actual experience. The people you're meeting, all of these different things. When did you start to coalesce around some of the ideas that ultimately, of course, would go on to become the thesis of this book?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  It was slowly over time, even when, you know, I got to the exchange, I was like in this hurry to get rich. And the reason why I was in a hurry, because I had this bias, had this belief. I was like, yeah, there's rich guys here, but they're old. What can they possibly do with the money? I'm young, I'm 21, like I'm ageist. I can't imagine the use of a million dollars when you're 40, right? Like, what are you going to do? Buy a nicer car to drive your kids around? It just seems like loss on them. They don't get to do fun things. Now, I was wrong about that. But I was right about the utility of money over time. And I was also read this book at this time called Your Money or Your Life. That kind of transformed my understanding of what money is.

• 17:44Speaker 01

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

• 18:29Speaker 01

  And that hit me hard.

• 18:30Dr. Peter Attia?

  And where were you at this point? This is before you went to Houston.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Before I went to Houston. That hit me hard. And that's what really turned me into like, I'm going to save. The two things I got out is I want a lot of money and I'm going to become this very frugal person. You know, there's this movement called FIRE, which that book is kind of like the Bible, the precursor to the FIRE movement, which is financial independence, retire early. And I was kind of like an early FIRE guy. I'm going to save my way to riches, right? I'm going to save and then retire early.

• 18:57Dr. Peter Attia?

  And sorry, did you know what you wanted to do when you retired?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I went on to another autopilot. I went on another version of autopilot. I read a book, I got these concept out of it. And I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I didn't think about the big picture of everything, but certain concepts are coming to me. I exchange hours of my life for money and then that money is used for the things I want. Let's take the abstract of money out of it and look at what hours of my life are being exchanged for. That was a great concept for to sink in very viscerally. The idea that.

• 19:27Dr. Peter Attia?

  It's also just to double click on that, Bill. It's also visceral when you start to think of the difference between using money for. Activities or trips versus things. So I buy a shirt and this shirt basically works out to three hours of what I make per hour. So this is a $3 shirt, I mean, a three hour shirt. Conversely, I take my daughter out overnight. We do like a daddy daughter date night, go out to dinner, stay at a nice hotel, have a fancy breakfast the next day. That's five hours of my time in terms of work. But do you see those sort of differently at the time that one of those is like an experience and one of them is a thing?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Not in a way that you're properly analyzing it, but in more of an intuitive way. Because when you start to think about things in time, it's like, wait a minute, three hours for a shirt versus going here, having a sandwich and hang out with my friends or whatever it is, your values start to, you really get in touch with your values because it's not an abstract land. It's like when you're in a casino and they give you chips, it's one of the greatest things to do is give you chips. It's not money. You're tipping $25, you're throwing, let it all ride because it's so abstracted from money. So it's an abstraction on abstraction. By removing that abstraction, you get closer to your values.

• 20:41Dr. Peter Attia?

  Right. Imagine that you have $25 chips, you figure out your hourly after tax, all in wage is 25 an hour. Every time you flick a chip, it's like I gave an hour of my life. Boom, boom, boom.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  So when you start thinking about things in terms of hours of your life and you have finite hours, you start to really get closer to your values. You can still be on autopilot, but you're closer. And so things like this were happening. And you know, at that time, at the exchange, like most people had like, what is it all for? Like, what do I want? You know, I'm here to get rich, but, but why?

• 21:13Dr. Peter Attia?

  Are you having that discussion with other, either people who are your peers, who are presumably on the same treadmill, or the people who are already rich, but still presumably killing themselves, trading their health for wealth?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  No, I'm generally having it with myself and reading books, but I'm still asking myself, but why? Like, what do I want? You know, and I'm remembering conversations that maybe I've had throughout my life. There was a college football player named Dwight Sistrock, and I was like, trying to do engineering and we were debating something. It's like, listen, you might want a picket fence and a wife and something like that and that life. I don't want that life. That cookie kind of life. That's fine for you, but that's not my path. I thought about it and I was like, do I really want that? You know, certain things that he said that he didn't want, that I was actually working for, you know, thinking that this was my path. I actually realized, no, I don't want that. You know, I'm pretty hard headed. It takes a while for these things to seep in.

• 22:04Dr. Peter Attia?

  I would argue a little different, Bill. I would argue that at this point, you're 22, 23, 24. I think that's remarkably early to be having that thought, don't you?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it took a while for it to finally percolate into some sort of action plan. I'm thinking about these things, but they're not resulting in the proper behavior changes yet. I'm still formulating it. You know, everyone says, I want to be rich before I'm 30, or I'm rich before 40. No one's out there saying, I want to be rich before I'm 86. So intuitively in there, there's something about the utility of money that it's not as valuable to you later on in life.

• 22:41Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yeah, it's one of the games I often play with my patients. It's anybody. I could play this game with anybody, which is, listen, if right now, you always do this with someone who's younger, obviously, I say like, right now, would you trade places with Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger?

• 22:55Dr. Peter Attia?

  And they're like, everybody says, of course not. And I was like, what do you mean, of course not? Like Warren Buffett's worth $100 billion. How would you not trade places with him? And they're like, I mean, he's 90 years old or whatever. And I say, okay. So would you rather have not a penny to your name and be 20, or have $100 billion and be 90? No other difference, right? Like, I'm not going to stipulate anything else. I've never met a person who wouldn't take being a completely broke 20 year old. And that, I think, speaks less to health, because look, ostensibly Warren still appears somewhat healthy, right? He's cognitively intact. You know, it's not like he's like a frail 90 year old or whatever he is. But it's about runway. It's about, yeah, but maybe Warren might have 10 years of life left. That 20 year old could have 80 years of life left.

• 23:40Dr. Peter Attia?

  And so when you face it in such stark terms, only then I think does the average person start to realize how precious time is.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I think they also see that Warren can't sprint, dunk a basketball, go wakeboarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that they enjoy me and that's what I thought about. And I thought to myself, if for reading this book, like I'm expending hours of my life to acquire these experiences, I mean, experiences in a broader sense, whether it's like going on a walk or being able to choose to go on a walk or go get a sandwich or buy a shirt or whatever. If I am exchanging hours of my life and I don't go acquire these experiences, I pretty much wasted hours of my life. So that thought hits and it's like, okay, you don't want to leave anything on the table. In the game of life, when I die, you don't want to leave chips on the table, right? Like you want to use all your resources before you die.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Inherent in that is that your choices, your experiences, those experiences are what make you you. Those are the things that fulfill you and everybody's going to be different. And so consequently, having more of it and enjoying more of it will lead to a more fulfilling life. So that if I'm solving for fulfillment, I don't care about the money. I care about the things I want, the experiences I want to have. If I'm trying to solve for that, one of the things you come quickly to is that you need to use all your resources up before you die. The second thing you come to with the fact that your resources, particularly money, are less valuable to you when you're older, then you start to think, well, there must be a curve. Because if you're going to end at zero, is it this kind of rectangle shape that just goes

• 25:17Speaker 01

  down? Is it a 45 degree angle sleep or is there some sort of curve? And so what I like to do to understand certain things, it doesn't always work, is think of zero and think of infinity. All right, let's run it all the way back to one, one years old. How useful is money? Not that useful to you. Let's run it all the way forward to 96 on your deathbed. How useful is money to you? Not that useful. So clearly there's like some sort of ramp up of utility and then a decline of utility. And I became Obsessed with finding what that curve was because I was like, this is it. If you're making more money for delayed gratification later in life, you approach infinity. You're actually wasting your time. You should be spending down your assets at a certain point.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  There's an inflection point where not a number, but a date where your wealth should be going down in order to get the most fulfillment.

• 26:08Dr. Peter Attia?

  Now, let's pause for a second, Bill. Is that standard thinking slash teaching within the wealth management community?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  No, but it is a standard problem. If you look at a JP Morgan or other wealth managers, one of the biggest problems they have is the accumulation, getting people to spend down their assets. They've been saving, they got their money, they hit retirement and it's like their net worth is going up into their seventies. Well, when's the party? You know, that's why I always ask them like, you just tell me when the party is. I have conversations with older people or other people. And it's like, listen, it's okay that you're saving. What are you saving for? And when's the party? I just want to know when you're going to use up all your resources.

• 26:46Dr. Peter Attia?

  Let's also pivot and talk about, I remember one of the stats that always stuck with me was during 2008. So a really good friend of mine named Jim Lambright, who was at the time the president of the Exim Bank. When the TARP program kicked on, because he was close with Hank Paulson and had already spent so much time in China and had government clearance, basically Hank brought Jim Lambright and Neil Kashkari, who was with him already at the Treasury, I believe, to run TARP. So basically Jim and Neil are doing all the deals for TARP. And Jim is getting steeped in how bad is this going to be? Like, what is this going to mean for the average person? And I remember one day he called me with a stat that I couldn't believe, and I forget the stat.

• 27:30Dr. Peter Attia?

  So this is only directionally it, but it was what fraction of people in the United States could not produce a thousand dollars with three days notice? Meaning they didn't have that excess liquidity of a thousand dollars. Again, I don't remember the number, but it was in the ballpark of like 30%. It was a high number. I don't know what those stats are today. I've tried to look some of them up and they're not maybe quite as dire as that, but they're not that much better.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  No, they're not great. It's not great.

• 27:59Dr. Peter Attia?

  So what's the natural history of that person who's 40 years old, whose total net worth is $50,000? And their available liquidity is $1,000. You know, they're thinking, I'm going to work till I'm 65 or 70 or whatever, and then I'm going to collect my social security. Does this thinking still apply there?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  It applies in different ways. So what I've come up with this book is there's three variables, your wealth, your health and your time. And we're taking those three variables and we're solving for net fulfillment. So we're not solving for maximum wealth. We're not solving even for maximum health, maximum time. We're solving for net fulfillment. I'm saying that's your purpose. If you're with me, we're solving for net fulfillment. And so one of the things we look is that the total arc of your life, given the resources you have, how do we allocate them? We definitely want to focus on the money. Everybody wants to talk about the money and the resources, but there's decisions that you make even without money. Whether you go on a walk with your daughters,

• 29:04Speaker 01

  you play cards with your friends late at night. Do you tuck them in at night or you go hang out with the boys? And so in the book, we talk about the seasons of your life. Certain activities transfer nicely to the next season in your life, from 20 to 30 to 30 to 40. And some of them don't transfer well, they're less enjoyable. And some of them don't transfer at all. It's impossible. One of the things, when the 40 year old who has $50,000, you know, one of the things I would say is, is what's your survival number? Have you calculated that at retirement? Are you surviving retirement? Are you in serious negative dire straits? And once we've calculated that, okay, I need to work and save this much and plus social security,

• 29:45Speaker 01

  I've had my survival number. Now the rest is for experiences, things I want to do and allocation of my time. How do I allocate it? Is it the cruise at 70? Or is it the ski trip right now? And that's Going to be different for every single person. Or is it a shirt or whatever fulfills them? Or to go play in this chess tournament, pay the entry fee. And for people with zero money, you still have an allocation game to play. You still have your health and your time. You can still decide, hey, I'm going to sit down and watch Friends. Or I'm going to go hang out at my mom's house and make a meal and spend time with them. Because I'm only going to see them 20 times before they're gone.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  So this type of thinking about allocating your resources at the proper place, getting off autopilot, holds at all wealth levels. It doesn't hold at all health levels because if you have zero health, you have zero. You're done. It's over. But it holds at all wealth levels. So that type of thinking to maximize fulfillment. And knowing that you have seasons of your life, that your body decays, your attitudes change and they pass. That type of thinking in that I need to get things in the right order and use my resources properly. That's going to help you have a more fulfilling life, whether you have zero money or a hundred million dollars. There are many people with zero who are having a way more fulfilling life than Warren Buffett, I would say.

• 31:10Dr. Peter Attia?

  One of the things about the way you framed it, Bill, that I really like. It's a very nonlinear problem. So let's take a look at those three variables. At the surface, one might suggest, well, wait a minute. It is a min-max game with one of them. You always want max health. But technically, even that's not true. Because if I told you, Bill, I have the secret for you to have max health. I can preserve your health span and lifespan indefinitely. But here's what it's going to cost you. Every minute of the day, you have to be working on your health. So from the moment you wake up from sleep, you have to do a two-hour meditation. We then have to go and do this yoga. We then have to go and do this workout. When you're done that workout, you have to go and do this, da, da, da, da, da. And then you have to go to bed.

• 31:53Dr. Peter Attia?

  You'd be like, well, Peter, that sucks because, yeah, I'm going to live for 100 more years. And I don't get to spend any of that time doing anything other than improving my health. It's a glib example, but it factors, I think. It illustrates the point.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Right. I usually say, you know, there's no amount of money you can pay me to do 10 years in Sing Sing. Not at this age, there's no amount of money. You know, I say that to certain people who are just like always delaying gratification. I'm like, you're kind of in a jail. Like you're basically doing a version of I'm doing time. Maybe you shouldn't be doing time at this point in your life. And so these are kind of just ways, you know, people absorb information in different ways. You can say it in all kinds of different ways. And then they finally go, aha, I got it. That really spoke to me the way you said it. I try and hit people with different versions of this. You know, one of the things I like to say to people is life is like Tetris. You've got to get the order right in order to get the high score of net fulfillment. Let's say you're in heaven.

• 32:49Dr. Peter Attia?

  By the way, Tetris is the only video game I enjoy. I go through periods where I won't play it for a year. And then I go through periods where I'll waste 30 minutes a day, which is a lot of time for me. For me, 30 minutes in a day is an inordinate amount of time. And when I'm sometimes in those phases of playing it a lot, I dream in Tetris. I literally dream that everything I'm seeing in the world, I'm trying to optimize the shape and interaction of.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  In the book, I talk about this thing about time buckets. Basically that you take your life in segments, any kind of segment, you want 20, 25, 35 to 40, 50 to 60. You think about leisure, job, career, what experience you want to have in each of those periods. And as you're doing that, you realize that, wait a minute, the going to the clubs and strip clubs and hanging out probably should be before I get married, not after. The reading books to my kids when they're children, this must be in this bucket.

• 33:42Dr. Peter Attia?

  Right, because they're not going to want me reading to them in college.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or even when they're 13, 14, they didn't even want to know you. You know, that's one of the errors I made. You know, you always do it wrong as a parent. You don't want to spend too much time with them, et cetera. It's like, wait a minute, maybe I should have been doing this activity instead of that activity. Kind of the die with zero thinking, right? Optimize your life. You know, the thought experiment, I says, listen, you're up in heaven. You have the bucket of experiences. These are all the choices you can have. And God says, take as much as you want. You're thrown in and you're like, I want to have sex 30,000 times and I want to climb Kilimanjaro and I want to play hockey. I want to be in a high school team and I want to do, you know, and you're just throwing them in everything. I want to meditate and yoga, right? And then God goes, great, I'm going to let you have all those experiences, but there's one trick. You got to get the order right.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  And what's it saying is, is if you don't get the order right, like if you save certain experiences to the 80 to 86 bucket, you don't get it.

• 34:34Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yeah, you're not climbing Kilometer Drive at 80.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  If you're like nightclub and road trips with your buddies before you're married and you have two kids or whatever, you don't get that. If you don't go backpack it with your friend and youth hostels, et cetera, when you're 21, when you get the shot, you don't get that experience. Or it's a bastardized, not as fulfilling experience. So you don't get the net fulfillment points. And so it's kind of tied with zero. What do you want out of your life? Get off autopilot. What do you want on a life? What resources do you have? And how do we optimize? How do we get the most out of it?

• 35:05Dr. Peter Attia?

  So how do you think about your own risk tolerance? Now, I guess there's a, maybe a caveat the listener needs to understand at this point, which is what you do for a living today. So you are an energy trader, among other things, you do many things. But is it safe to say that the majority of the wealth you've created came through your ability to understand how natural gas moves and trade on that?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the majority of my wealth came from predicting the future. And then that's generally the future of natural gas prices.

• 35:35Dr. Peter Attia?

  John Arnold, who is one of your closest colleagues, someone who I've had on the podcast, nicknamed the king of gas, the greatest gas trader of all time. Do you look at a guy like John and say he has a high risk tolerance? Do you look at someone like yourself and say you have a high risk tolerance? Or do you not feel that way at all and feel like, nope, I'm completely in control of calculated risks? And that's why they net out to be positive? In other words, I'm less swayed by short-term volatility because my methodology doesn't feel like I'm gambling?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  The best traders I've seen have been pretty stoic about things. They think about, very robotically about expected outcome. And they don't seem to be disturbed about negative outcomes as much as the average person.

• 36:17Dr. Peter Attia?

  Tell folks what expected outcomes mean, because they want to understand the probabilities and how these work.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  If you place a bet and the payout is one in four, But the odds are 50 50. Half the time you're gonna get four times your money and half the time you're just gonna lose one times your money. So that's positive expected outcome, right? You're gonna make money. This is a great trade. But remember, 75% of the time you're gonna lose in this scenario. No, the payout, if it, half the time you're gonna lose. Half the time you're gonna lose the payouts one in four. So half the time you're pissed. You're upset. And a lot of people can't deal with that. They need four or five or seven positive events emotionally, psychologically, forever, every negative event. In trading, that just doesn't exist.

• 37:03Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yeah. In trading, if someone is right, half the time.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  They're pretty good. If they're right, 55%, 6% of the time, they're like, think about the casino's edge in blackjack.

• 37:13Dr. Peter Attia?

  It could be 51.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, .07 or .09 in blackjack and craps. It's like .03. They're wrong like a lot of the time. But ultimately, the law of large numbers, they make a bunch of money. But if your emotional calculus is different, where such that you need a greater being right ratio, then you're not going to make it because stress clouds your thinking and your judgment.

• 37:34Dr. Peter Attia?

  So with that said, if someone says to you, you just have a really high tolerance for risk. I don't. I'm very risk averse. I don't like to take big risk. I never want to have the chance of losing something. Loss aversion is a greater motivator for me than gain. How do you talk to that person? And how do you help them think through the difference between fear and risk tolerance?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing I do is just try and break down like, what are they actually afraid of? A lot of times when people say, you know, the bad thing is not as bad as they imagine it in their head. And a lot of times, quite frankly, it's really the fear of judgment, more than the actual thing. They find out that they can survive the potential negative financial hit. What they can't survive is, oh, my friends, my colleagues, my spouse, my mom, my dad, the shame. I got it wrong. The I told you so's, et cetera. There's a lot of that fear baked into disguised as, I can't risk these dollars. I'm like, yeah, you can. That type of thing. Then the other thing is, I'm trying to think is, Get them to focus, they always focus on the monetary cost of losing.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  But what about the cost of inaction and the opportunity cost? And by talking about the opportunity costs, I get them to see the asymmetry of the risk. Maybe I have a greater tolerance for risk, but what I do is, is that I fear, you know, my fear is reversed. I fear missing out on the opportunity cost. I fear not getting the max. A lot of people fear running out of money. I fear wasting my life. I am more worried about looking back and being like, shit, I wasted my only ride that I had than running out of money.

• 39:12Dr. Peter Attia?

  One of my patients said something to me once. He was about to do something that I just thought was really risky. Now, it was a very unique opportunity. And he said, you know, Peter, I'm going to go and do this thing. And I said, I think there's a significant risk to you in doing that. It wasn't a financial risk. It would have been a health risk, a physical risk. And he said, you're right, Peter. I acknowledge that risk. That is the risk, but I'm optimizing in a risk, pardon me, a regret minimizing framework, not a risk minimizing framework.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  For me, it's risk reward. If I really love cigarettes, like love them, I'd smoke cigarettes. You know what I mean? If I really love skydiving all the time, I went twice, but it was diminishing returns, I go skydiving. It's what fulfills you. And so I'm a risk reward guy. Is the reward commensurate with the risk? Some people like to ride motorcycles. For me, it's not worth the risk. Like I have a physical risk tolerance around one in 10,000. If it's more dangerous than one in 10,000, the reward really has to be worth it for me to do it. And so that's the way I think. That helps me in this kind of like counterfactual regret minimization algorithm. So the algorithm of the book, the mental models in the book are right. You know, when a chess computer plays you, it has a regret minimization algorithm.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And what it wants to do is it's solving to win. AlphaGo is solving to win the game. In the game of life, what I'm solving for, the regret minimization I'm solving for is net fulfillment. I want the highest score in net fulfillment. I don't want the highest money. I don't even want the highest health. I'm like, I don't want to run three hours a day to be in the top point half a percent. Top 3% is great enough. I'll give up the tail end of my life. You know what I mean? And time, like how to optimize my time. Everything for me is like what I'm solving for in life, what this book is solving for for you is net fulfillment. It is relentless about net fulfillment. If that entails for you, your makeup, like taking those risks, going heliskiing, skydiving, riding motorcycles, then so be it.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  As long as you're off autopilot and you've thought it through, then that's fine.

• 41:16Dr. Peter Attia?

  How variable do you think people are in their kind of stratification of what encompasses net fulfillment? Maybe a better question is, do you think people are even understanding about and deliberate about what that means? That doesn't strike me as something that the average person could articulate very clearly what it is that will be their fulfillment maximizing function in terms of experiences. And I want to reiterate a point you made, which is it's not just the experience, it's when they occur. The combination of which experiences and when they occur and who they occur with. Do you get the sense that the average person can actually articulate that?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  I think they had the ability earlier in life and then they get habituated out of it. So we all go into autopilot. We have this default mode network. It helps us survive. It helps us drive without thinking, oh, I gotta turn, you know, when you first line up drive, like it's, everything's happening fast. You have to deliberately think about everything you're doing. And then all of a sudden it goes into default mode network and it's easy. That happens with work and you're like, I need to work to survive and I need to do this. And you're panicking, whatever. And the next thing you're in the groove and you're just constantly working. Somewhere along the way, with the abstraction of going to work to make money, to survive and get the things we want, we forget about the things we want. We just go to work to work, to just make more money, to go to work to make more money. And the things we want either get pushed for ahead or forgotten about because we're on autopilot.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  It was a good thing because it makes us good at our jobs. It's like, I can do this job with my eyes closed. I could do this and I'm getting promoted and you're getting rewarded. And there's certain things about the jobs that you like, but you're forgetting why you did this thing in the first place. People aren't like, I really wanted to be a plastic salesperson. I really love selling plastics, more and more plastics and piling up numbers in a bank account. Those numbers in a bank account were really meant for, I want to hang With my buddies and I want to go skiing and I want to get married and I want to donate to this charity and I want to do X, Y and Z, right? But we kind of forget that. And since we forgot about it, we're not even thinking about when the best time it is to happen. It's just completely like, oh, I'll eventually do it or when I get more. So we're completely out of touch of what we want, what's enough, the concept of enough, what that means for us and the concept of when.

• 43:28Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:52Dr. Peter Attia?

  What would I do? I'd sit around for three months and it would feel really nice to have no stress for three months. And then I'd be bored out of my mind. So he's like, no, I gotta keep going.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  I've had this, you know, amongst my friends, you know, it's one of the things like people ask the question, why do people do this? And I've had direct conversations with my friends and with a friend, I'm very aggressive with them, attacking their walls they put up. And what I tell them is is that you have made your work, your God. It's who you meet people, you eat around where work is, you've given up learning how to socialize and meet your neighbors, all the people you know, or some kind of work or work related, you haven't exercised those muscles for years, 10, 20, 30 years, sometimes, that people have, their whole life revolves around work and all the other muscles, I'm using muscles as an example, have atrophied. How do you socialize

• 44:45Speaker 01

  without a job? How do you meet people without a job? Where do I go eat without my job? Like I eat, obviously, somewhere within five miles of this place and people recommend all the things I get recommended, the camaraderie, everything that when people list what they like about work, that used to happen without work. And they've atrophied those muscles. So when you take that away, they're like, they don't know what to do. They don't know what they want. And their dreams have left them. The ski trip, they haven't thought about that, or hang out with their buddies or whatever. All that stuff has left them and they haven't worked those muscles out. And I say, Just let's start working on those muscles and building them up. And you'll have plenty to do. You have plenty to do.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  You've let autopilot and habit put you in poor health in these other activities. You're in poor health on how to meet people and socialize outside of work. You're in poor health on where to go eat lunch. You know, except for the places near work or wherever you go. You're in poor health on trips that are not business trips. You're in poor health about thinking about what fulfill you and discovery, just plain old discovery. Cause you don't know what you want. You discover what you want. Nobody comes out of the womb like, I don't like onions and I love chocolate and I want to go to Japan and I love F1. Like you get exposed to it and you discover what you want. So a lot of life is discovery, but these people are out of discovery.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  They're in the familiar, habituated routine. They are a rat in a wheel that doesn't even need cheese anymore. It just runs in the wheel.

• 46:17Dr. Peter Attia?

  Now, how do we differentiate that from people who, and I would put myself in this category, truthfully, where a big part of their work is their fulfillment and they do feel a sense of purpose in what they do beyond just the making money part of it. And I suspect that, like again, just to make caricatures of things, right? So maybe the person who works in the widget factory that makes the widget, that they don't even know what the widget plugs into, but they need a job. If they inherited a big lump sum of money tomorrow, they would happily quit the widget job. But maybe they'd get bored and they'd want to go back and start volunteering and doing something where they don't actually get paid, but they're really enjoying what they're doing.

• 46:58Dr. Peter Attia?

  And then of course, you have the group of people whose job is doing two things. It's providing money for all the things that you need, both in approximate sense and distally.

• 47:10Dr. Peter Attia?

  But also, it is a sense of purpose and therefore it fits into their fulfillment. But these things can be very slippery and I would certainly put myself squarely in that category. Right. Which is, I still work harder than I should. And I absolutely know that I'm failing in the equation, even though I'm fulfilled by this. And I wouldn't want to not do this, but I'm doing too much of it, as an example.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I really push back hard on my friends on this and it's like, I can't know, only they can know. The heroin addict is happy. I'm happy on heroin. You have a problem with my heroin. I don't have a problem, right? And that's kind of the argument I push towards them. And I say, listen, really think about what in your job fulfills you? And is that outside in the world and the purpose in that? And do you have balance? Are you balanced according to what you want in a life? In this time period in your life and the future time period in your life? Now, I can't tell somebody what their balance is, right? That's a very personal thing. But what I really want them to do is be honest, off autopilot, really unplug for a moment and think about it. Okay, I got one life and I have only this period once, right?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  I only get to be 50, between 50 and 55. I only get this level of health at this time. Are these the experiences? Is this really how I want to allocate my time at this period? Is this really the maximum? Is this the optimal thing for me to do? And if they do that and they come up with the same answer, like, hey, no, I want to work at the wager factor. Or I want to work at this fulfilling. I can't argue that. Who am I to tell you how to live your life? What I'm here to tell you is how to optimize your life. What thought process and what steps you should go through? Things you should be considering in order to get the most fulfillment out of your life. And then if you come to the conclusion that, hey, I'm at the perfect balance of work, right? And the money's piling up, but I'm going to use it later and I'm going to go on, you know, a senior's cruise and that's what it's for, then that's your life.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  But maybe you might go, you know what, I can dial it back and my daughters are only going to be, or my kids are only going to be this age at this time. Maybe I should take a family trip and unplug and go on safari with them and enjoy my success. Because that's going to give me a lifetime of memory dividends and discussion points and connections, et cetera. Maybe, you know, I'd rather have that time with them now and not have them. In a hospital with me when I'm old and stinking can barely, you know, and seeing me this way, I want the memories and the time they spent with me doing this and not at the tail end of life. Who knows? I just want people thinking about it. And if you just get off autopilot just a bit and you start thinking about it, you're already optimizing your life. You're already going to have a more fulfilling life.

• 49:42Dr. Peter Attia?

  I think that that's probably the part of the book that most kind of resonates with someone like me, which is especially when it comes to kids. And I have, I guess, the, maybe it's an advantage, maybe it's a disadvantage, but my kids are sort of separated in age by a bit of a gap, right? So my daughter's 14 and then the boys are five and eight. In other words, I now know what it's like to have a teenager. I now understand all the things that you kind of give up when your kid's a teenager. Our daughter's an amazing kid, but the reality of it is like, she doesn't really want to be around me.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  No, they don't want to know you when they become teenagers. I didn't want to know my parents when I was a teenager.

• 50:21Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 51:01Dr. Peter Attia?

  Friday, when I only worked till 9:00 PM. It was my break. And from 9:00 PM till 11:00, I would go-

• 51:08Speaker 01

  See, I needed a little bit of you and you needed a little bit of me.

• 51:11Dr. Peter Attia?

  I would go and do laundry after 9:00 PM on a Friday. That was my way to just take a little time off. But other than that, it was six hours a day of work outside of class. And I think of all the things I didn't do in college. So first of all, my only memories of college are pure misery. I hated every minute of college. I didn't have-

• 51:30Speaker 01

  You didn't have the experience.

• 51:32Dr. Peter Attia?

  Now, you know, I could say, well, a lot of good came out of that because I did really well and did well. That set me up for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But like I could have traveled. Having a college experience didn't mean I had to get drunk every night. It meant that I could have saved all that money I was making by tutoring and done something different.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  This reminds me of, you know, the college paper had this, my senior year, I opened up and had the 50 things you need to do before you graduate. And I just had the biggest regret when I read that list.

• 51:58Dr. Peter Attia?

  And you read it at what age?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  I was just about on my way out. I was like, never going to be able to do this. I'm not going to do this. And some of them were simple, like write an angry letter to newspaper, you know, go skinny dipping at Lake whatever. Actually did that after I read that. There were a lot of things, do this college prank, do whatever, like things that would be fun, didn't necessarily cost you money or whatever. But like things to do to have a college experience and not necessarily do them all. And I was thinking, maybe I did three or four. And I was like, why was I so on autopilot in my way? And think about, okay, you got four years here. Good, good grades, good study, but like you want to get this out of it. You want to do this out of it. You want to have this college experience, et cetera. We just kind of like, don't really think about things, go on autopilot so much that we don't think about periods in our life. Even this year, what experiences do I want to have this year?

• 52:45Speaker 01

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

• 53:31Speaker 01

  And the sitting in operas and these type of trips are set in a year, just we're going to push forward.

• 53:35Dr. Peter Attia?

  Push into the future.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Push it in the future. So, you know, Max and I, so it was like, if they get that order wrong, they go all the opera and then they turn around like, holy shit, I can't hike this mountain. And so. This fits in every aspect of your life. College, first job, pre-married, married, before kids, kids that are toddlers, not toddlers, that type of thinking is really helpful and you've been lucky. Experience has taught you about the seasons with your kids. And I learned the hard way too. I was like, you know, people tell you like, oh, your kids don't want to be with you 13. And you're like, you kind of forget when you were 13, like you forget like, oh yeah, I didn't want to be around my parents. And then it really hits you when you're just like, ah, dad. Nobody hangs out with their dad that much. Come on.

• 54:17Dr. Peter Attia?

  One of the other things that you talk about, and you've mentioned it already today, a couple of times is philanthropy. So there's a story in the book about a woman who dies and leaves a large gift. Tell that story again.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  It's one of those secret millionaire stories. They're all out there like there's a secretary and then when she died, she had $10 million of Tootsie Roll stock or whatever. And so this woman worked at a law firm, saved her money, lived a, by all accounts, a very frugal life. And then when she died, she gave a multimillion dollar gift to education, charitable education. Everybody was like, you know, that's so charitable and that's such a great thing. And I had a different perspective, you know? My perspective was when you're dead, the money isn't yours. And also that the target for her bequeath after her death would have been much better off receiving the money much earlier, a lower sum much earlier.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  And that the return on her charitable investment will be greater than any of her investment returns. And so, you know, I can't really get into her head to determine if it's charitable. I'm knowingly thinking I'm doing the right thing. I'm going to save all this money and it's going to grow to a bigger pile and I'm going to give it to a charity. But to me, it appears to be a tip on the way out. The money's got to go somewhere. It was going to go either to the IRS, who redistribute the money the way they see fit, usually into wars and stuff, but I won't go into that subject or hairs or et cetera. But it's going somewhere. It's not yours. It's gone. So the fact that it just wound up into this educational charity, I didn't see it as charitable

• 55:53Speaker 01

  as much and as impactful as just giving the money earlier. Life is urgent, life is now. And I argue that the return on investment in your charitable endeavors is greater than any return in the market you can get.

• 56:05Dr. Peter Attia?

  Well, and this is sort of interesting because think about what our mutual friend John Arnold did 10 years ago, which was before he even hits the age of 40, he decides I'm no longer going to do this full time. My full time job is now giving this money away.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Right. It's great. John's great. And we've had a lot of conversations about this, about like, making sure the money actually gets distributed, gets into the purpose, helping causes. But John decided that I've been solving the problem of natural gas long enough. I have more money than I'll ever spend or need. And I really want to dedicate my neurons to solving other problems. So he takes an analytical approach, a database driven approach to solving some of society's ills and solving some problems and trying to get it ahead of some of these intractable problems, which is awesome. And the fact that he's doing it so young, I even argue with John, like, he did it too late. He's still late. You know what I mean? Because he was on autopilot

• 57:02Speaker 01

  too, in my opinion, trading. What are you working for? I have this conversation with John. It's like, what's the money for? What can't you buy? And to a certain extent, the money became a detriment based on your value system, right? If you're like, hey, and I mentioned this book, if, yeah, I can have Maroon 5 play in my backyard every day, et cetera, but you don't want to ruin your kids by spending the money and consuming it that way. And I'm using the Maroon 5 as an exaggerated example, but like, there's all kinds of consumption that you don't want to have because you don't want your kids to have that. Then the money became a negative. You really work too long far because you're working for money that you cannot spend, you cannot consume. And you could start giving it away and having an impact on the other things you want to do now.

• 57:45Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 57:51Dr. Peter Attia?

  And what you realize when you spend any length of time with him, which you've spent more than I have, it is really hard to give money away strategically and thoughtfully, which is why I suspect John and Laura set themselves up with 50 years of a runway to give. And I don't know, there's a pretty good chance they still won't be able to give it all away, right?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  What they're doing is like effectively giving away. They want to solve problems, database decisions.

• 58:17Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 59:00Speaker 01

  They're immediately jumping into the problem and let the experiments run their course and they have the time to do it. And they're doing it. You know, I can't say enough about the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, about the way they're going in and helping people and solving problems.

• 59:12Dr. Peter Attia?

  The other thing that you talked about in the book that really, probably, this is probably the reason I had my wife read it right away, was the idea of, you know, we sometimes think that there are people in our lives that we want to give money to at some point. And you sort of think, that's a person that was really important in my life or in our lives. And maybe we leave them X amount of dollars at some point. And then you sort of realize, well, why don't you finish why that's maybe not necessarily the right strategy?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  The same laws of physics that govern my body and the utility of money over time for me applies to my kids. Maybe they have a little bit longer lifespan or health span.

• 59:51Dr. Peter Attia?

  Or relatives or anybody else.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Relatives or anybody, anybody. The utility of money to them follows a curve, depending on how healthy they are, et cetera. You can just kind of draw it, right? Like, you know better than I, muscle decay rates for people in shape, not in shape, working out, et cetera. So. This curve applies to them. So a lot of people like, oh, when I die, I'm gonna give, I used to have people on my will that are like close to my age. Like, I'm gonna give money to them when I die. And I'm like, wait a minute. Let me give my money to a 72 year old. Wouldn't it be better if I gave him less money now? Like, let them spend it and apply it because the utility of money for them is drastic. The day before you die, I cannot pay you anything. I cannot get you to delay gratification.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  That's what savings is, right? You're delaying gratification. And so there is no gratification the next day. If you take it from the day before you die, two days before you die, to right now, right? There's this curve, this compensation you need for delayed gratification. And it makes no sense for me to be leaving money to 65 year olds and 62 year olds. It's give it to them where the money has the most impact, where they'll have the most utility of that money. And so when you're off autopilot and think, yeah, that's what everybody does. They write down a will and when they die, et cetera. Now, the will has a purpose. If you die early, you gotta distribute the money. But really, before you die, if you live a normal life, there should be nothing left to give. You should have already given it away.

• 1:01:20Dr. Peter Attia?

  Again, when I read your book and you articulate it that way, I mean, it's such a gut punch of this realization. And one example is kids. My wife and I have people in our lives that we're not related to, that we value so much. And we've always said, like, yeah, you know, like, we want to give them X number of dollars at this point in time.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:17Dr. Peter Attia?

  Well, especially when you think about exactly what you said, which is, that person will do much more with that in applying it to their fulfillment curve in real time.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  When you're really giving somebody money, right? You're giving them life energy. You're giving them the ability to make choices. You're giving them fulfillment. So waiting till they're 96 on the deathbed, they can't really convert that into fulfillment. You really didn't give them what you wanted to give them. So when you look at their curve of their life, oh, wow, here's the maximum insertion point. And as a matter of fact, wow, $5,000 right now at, let's say, 33 is like 150,086. It's actually more impactful. There's more going in life, more choices, things going on. The cumulative effect, the fact that when they have that experience, not only do they enjoy that experience at that point, whatever that experience is, they get dividends from that experience. They talk about with their friends.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  They become more interesting. They recall that and they get enjoyment out of it. It's like, oh, remember that ski trip we went on? We had a great time with the kids. Yeah, that was great. They get fulfilled from that. So they get memory dividends associated from that experience. Whereas if you give it to them at 96, they do it once, they consume it if they can even do it, and then they die.

• 1:03:33Dr. Peter Attia?

  How do you help a person do the math? Because we've talked about this quite a bit and you've alluded to it. There is really a curve. This is where both your background, primarily as an engineer and a trader, come into solving what becomes a mathematical set of equations, where you have certain variables you need to understand. So let's say we're solving this for me or for you or an arbitrary person who's sitting here who's 50 years old. Okay, so 50-year-old person is listening to this or 30-year-old person. Maybe we do a few different scenarios. So let's start with the 50-year-old who is firmly planted on the treadmill of autopilot. Okay? Their kids are in middle school and high school.

• 1:04:17Dr. Peter Attia?

  They realize how much money they need for college for their kids. They've got a mortgage payment. They've got a good job. And they have a fuzzy notion that they're going to work another 15 to 20 years. And they come to you and they say, Bill, I read the book. I buy the thesis, I don't know how to implement it for my numbers and for my fulfillment curve. How do you help them think about it?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  The main thing is, is it's very individual. It's like, what do you want? If you're sitting there like, I just like working and going in and that's all I do.

• 1:04:47Dr. Peter Attia?

  Okay, so I'll be the guy. So I'm gonna say, so Bill, no, I do have interests, but I gotta be honest with you, man. I've backed away from them. You know, I've kind of let them go. I've let myself go a little bit. Before my wife and I had kids, we loved traveling. And before our kids were born, we hiked the entire rim of the Grand Canyon. We went down to the Colorado River back up. Probably the greatest thing we ever did. And then, once the kids came, we were kind of head down in work. And I just want to make sure that my kids don't have debt when they go to college.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  What I do is, is like, okay, what's reality and what's fear? Fear-based thinking? So we try and get on that. And one of the things I'd look for is, why don't you go traveling with the kids? Well, it's a pain in the ass, whatever. I was like,

• 1:05:24Dr. Peter Attia?

  It's also so expensive, Bill. I mean, do you understand what it costs now? One of my kids has a friend who did this African safari a year ago. They said it was amazing. You know, to price that trip, Bill, today, $30,000 to go do that African safari now with the airlines, with the safari, that's a lot of money.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  So what I tell you is, is when you die, will you have $30,000? Are you on track to die with $30,000? $50,000?

• 1:05:46Dr. Peter Attia?

  I hope so.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so then, would you rather consume that $30,000 now and have this experience with your kids, etc.? Or would you rather have $30,000 left over when you die?

• 1:05:56Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Then we can sit down and go down the hard numbers. It's like, do you have insurance if you lose your job? What is safe? What do you envision yourself doing in retirement that you can't afford? What bad thing that will happen that we can't buy an insurance policy for? Is it long-term care insurance? If you get that while you're young, it's actually pretty cheap. It's very cheap. I look at what risks they're having, and I look at ways to mitigate them. So a lot of people who are conservative, like, oh, I'm worried about something happening. I'm like, what's the something happening that you're worried about?

• 1:06:31Dr. Peter Attia?

  When you do that with people, Bill, how often are they able to articulate clearly what they're afraid of versus it being kind of just a fuzzy notion of?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  A lot of it's fuzzy notion, and we just keep pushing and pulling it out. What if this happened? What if I get sick? What if, or whatever? We go over like, medical insurance. Basically, what happens is people try to act as their own insurance agent. With a client of one.

• 1:06:58Dr. Peter Attia?

  Right. That's very difficult to underwrite.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  So they have a client of one. They really don't understand the odds of the bad things happening. And so what they tend to do is put it in this big giant fear bucket of insurance premium. And they just work and save and save and save to think that they have the notional to cover all these bad things happening. And a lot of times I'll point out two things. I go, one, some of these bad things that you're saving for, you'll never get the notional. Maybe you will or whatever, but most of the people I talk to, do you know it's $25,000 a night for my dad in the hospital? Insurance didn't cover that. Gonzo. Doesn't matter. You know what I mean? He's only got X days. You're not saving. Some of these things are like, you shouldn't be the insurer. If you're actually afraid of that and that's important to you, you need to buy the insurance policy where they have the lower large numbers

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  and their edge is 6% or 8%. You are going to be woefully inefficient. And on top of that, you don't even know the odds. Like some of these things with robot alien space insurance. Wait, you're worried about this? I also like to do a comparison. Okay, here's the risk of this scenario happening and this bad thing happening and it's bad. We'll accept it. And here's the risk of you not doing the thing that you want to do now. Here's the risk of you not doing the trip. What does that look like on your deathbed? When you know you couldn't have gone on a safari and had this wonderful time with your kids and connected with them and something to talk about forever and expanded your worldview. Was it worth the $30,000? Was it worth the insurance policy that you're trying to?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Was it worth you trying to play insurance agent? And so a lot of these are thematic conversations. They're not like hard number conversations.

• 1:08:34Dr. Peter Attia?

  But you have a model.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a model, but the problem with the model is it's an abstraction. The variables we're talking about are infinite.

• 1:08:42Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yep.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  And we have to abstract and abstract and abstract. So what the model does, it really tells you the direction and it's very good on the direction, but the magnitude it may be off. And so for you as a person, it's like, what's your survival number? We have that model. Really think about, okay, just survival, not, I'm hanging out. Yeah, not thriving, but surviving. What do you need? Then after that, it's all your choices. And depending on who you are, because there's infinite choices and what those choices will cost and the experiences you want to have in your life, plus the discovery, the 20 to 30% discovery. Maybe all your experiences go in the 50 bucket. You didn't realize it and you're actually inadvertently pushing them in the 70 bucket and you're not going to have them.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  And so that's kind of what I try and get people to do is like, are you going to have $30,000 trips in your lifetime? And they'll go, yes. When is the optimal time for you to have $30,000 trips? And with whom? If you're never going to have a $30,000 trip, I'm like, okay, let's think of a different type of activity that will get you the same fulfillment or close to it. That's not a $30,000 trip.

• 1:09:44Dr. Peter Attia?

  To me, that's the interesting distinction. Maybe somebody listening to this says, are you freaking crazy? Like, I'll never take a $30,000 trip ever, ever, ever in my life. Yeah. The bigger point is, is there a trip that you think you will take near the end of your life and you're holding back on taking it now? I mean, to me, that is one of the big aha insights from this philosophy.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:48Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Or right now. Young is right now.

• 1:11:17Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yep. And it's because they're so busy making money. So this is probably the one.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  That's the rat in the wheel with no cheese. They got to habituate. Like you take a rat, you get them to run in the wheel, you give them the cheese, you give them to run the wheel, they do the cheese and pretty soon you don't even have to give them the cheese. They see the wheel, they just start running. The reward is no longer the goal. It's just to do the thing.

• 1:11:38Dr. Peter Attia?

  How do you help somebody break that?

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  That is the hardest one to break because they've been brainwashed into thinking like, this is what I want to do. And it's one of the hardest things to extract somebody from. And so I have to explain to them, where do you socialize? You know, we just go through it. Where do you eat? Where do you eat lunch? Well, I like the people at work and like hanging out. I don't want to quit work. I like hanging out with the people. I'm like, you can quit work and take the people on a trip with you. You can vacation with them. You can still visit them at night and play bingo games. Like the people don't go away just because you don't show up at work. You can still spend time and you can actually spend more quality time with the people at work if you exercise that muscle. But they don't know how to invite people over their house or, hey, we're gonna go see the Chris Rock show tonight, which I'm gonna go do.

• 1:12:23Dr. Peter Attia?

  Is Chris Rock in town tonight or is in Houston?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  No, here in Austin tonight.

• 1:12:27Dr. Peter Attia?

  I didn't even know.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  See, there you go. A new experience you might have. But anyway, like, they don't know how to do that. It's a very long conversation. You can do this. You can do that. Everything that you're getting out of work, that social benefit, all these little excuses, the mental stimulation. I'm like, John was like, these real life problems are more mentally stimulating than the natural gas puzzle. I still like the natural gas puzzle, but these are more mentally stimulating, more purposeful, more fulfilling to me. And so I have to break down brick by brick and show them how they got habituated and how they haven't exercised these other muscles and how they can replace it. You realize, work is not the unique thing to get the things you're getting out of work. It's actually a bastardization of it. It's minimizing those

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  experiences. You're not actually getting the most quality time with your coworkers in the working environment. You're actually not getting the most mental exercise. That's not necessarily the best mental exercise for you in the work environment. It's just, you know nothing else because you've been stuck in this lab, running on this type of wheel. It's really hard because people will be extremely, extremely resistant.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Change is painful. You get somebody who hasn't worked out forever and you're like, hey, let's go in the gym. We're going to work out. It's like, oh God, why am I here? I don't like this. You know what I mean? Like just to develop the muscle to do the thing, to play the tennis, the filming thing. It's a process. You have to show them the reward. That life is rich. It's fat. It's wonderful.

• 1:13:57Dr. Peter Attia?

  It is one of the biggest cliches ever, which is the person on their deathbed who says, I wish I didn't work so hard. And yet we all know this cliche and yet many of us still work too hard.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Habits are powerful. One of the things I took away from the habit books like Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg is a great book, is that they're powerful. They're extremely powerful. And so we get habituated in many different ways, for good or bad. If you have the snacks in your house and you eat 200 calories a day, you know, in two years, you're like 40 pounds heavier, right? 200 extra calories. How did that happen? How did I forget? You know, how did my life pass me by? How did I not go on these trips? How did I not have these experiences? How did I not call my mother? How did I not say I love you to these people? Even pick up the phone? Because my habits took over. They took over towards this purpose and it just absorbed my life. And so outside the book with my friends, you know, I really

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  talk about the good of habits. You can form good habits that keep you healthy, but some of the habits, you know, the consequences of some of our habits to be successful and how it takes away from other things.

• 1:14:58Dr. Peter Attia?

  Has that been a struggle for you?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. I wrote that book for me. You know, the first life I wanted to save was my own. Put your life mask on first. I am just as guilty as the next person as being on autopilot. I constantly have to remind myself that I'm going to die, that life isn't forever. This period ends. These seasons with my daughters and these seasons with my startups and all these things. And I have to think about like, what do I want? How do I balance them? What's optimized? And I don't get it exactly right, but I do it better than if I was just completely on autopilot. And then sometimes I kept, I was like, oh shit, I was on autopilot. Why didn't I think about this? You know?

• 1:15:35Dr. Peter Attia?

  And what do you use to help jar you out of autopilot on these things?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  The first macro thing is the death clock. Right now I have this calendar up and it's 4,000 weeks. And you mark off each week and it's a very visceral representation about life is finite. Not only will you die somewhere around here, but this period is going to end. A lot of times when people go on vacation, knowing that the vacation ends on Friday snaps you up. You're like, oh shit, I'm gonna go here and do this and I'm gonna stay out and, you know, we only have a couple of days, so let's do the cafe and let's, you know, do X, Y, and Z. And you actually get more out of the trip knowing it's gonna end as opposed to living obliviously and all of a sudden, time to go. Wait, it's time to go. I forgot to do this or go see the Eiffel Tower or go whatever it is on your trip.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  And so same thing with life. When you know life is gonna end, it becomes more urgent. Even the segment in your life, when you know, you know, your early 50s are gonna end, you're like, it becomes more urgent. You become more deliberate. You get off autopilot. So that's the first layer.

• 1:16:38Dr. Peter Attia?

  So each week you do check off a box on the calendar?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Now, I've been to Austin and traveling, but when I come back, I see it in my closet. So I walk by it every day. It's a constant reminder.

• 1:16:48Dr. Peter Attia?

  Where'd you get this calendar, by the way?

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Online. There was like some sort of stoic reflections out there, a memento mori, remember death. I used to have it on my phone and you used to count down backwards to my estimated death date. That app no longer works, but the seeing it every time is great. If I get another widget that counts down, I'll have both of them, right? And I used to do it for other things like till Christmas, till your daughter's 14, till the job, the 15 year anniversary. Well, my daughter's gonna be 16, she's gonna be driving. How am I gonna pry experiences out of my daughter? Cause your daughters don't wanna know you before she's really gone. She gets a car and she's, see ya, deuces, you know, that type of thing. So that really helps me, it gives me kind of an alarm that wakes me up out of autopilot. And that's the thing I personally use.

• 1:17:34Dr. Peter Attia?

  How do you help somebody think about when their net worth should peak? Because a clear implication of everything we're talking about is net worth probably needs to peak a lot sooner than it currently does. As you said, I think the default for most working people is that net worth peaks sometime after retirement or certainly around the time of retirement, even if they're thinking about drawing down. But again, for most people, given the age of retirement, there's a mismatch between when they're hitting peak net worth and when they're hitting peak capacity to utilize net worth.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  It's a massive mismatch. You know, one of the things I wanted to do, and I wish I knew you back then because you could have helped me is I was like, I wanna know about all these frailty curves, like bone density, lung capacity, what activities? Become less enjoyable first and then unable to do because that determines a lot when your net worth should peak. I estimated it somewhere in your 50s.

• 1:18:32Dr. Peter Attia?

  Wow.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  And the data kind of shows that when I went to St. Petersburg and climbed the 200, I'll think it was 11 steps to walk around the banister, all these tour buses coming to St. Petersburg, Asian, whatever. Not one person over those tour buses that was elderly climbed the 211 steps. So St. Petersburg was a different St. Petersburg for them. They didn't have the same experience. I got more out of St. Petersburg for them. Now, I'm not saying it wasn't a wonderful trip and a nice trip for them, but they probably pushed St. Petersburg too late in life. And so there's so much hidden data and data out there and reports, if you read it, we talked about it earlier, like trying to get people to spend their money down. And one of the things answers I give,

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  you know, they say, well, why do you think people are still, their net worth is still going up into 72? And, you know, part of it is asset appreciation and going faster than they can spend it. But the real answer is they can't. They cannot spend it down. Life has passed them by. They no longer have the attitude or aptitude to do this. They can't do it. You'd be surprised how many people die on those cruise ships trying to swim when they get to St. Thomas. They think their life's going to be like a carnival commercial. And I'm like, that carnival commercial will kill most Americans. They're having heart attacks going down those slides.

• 1:19:48Dr. Peter Attia?

  And that, of course, just speaks to the imbalance between the three variables. It's like if you spent a little bit more of your time on your health, you would buy yourself a bigger runway to utilize your wealth on the experiences.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Right. So particularly for Americans, my book is most successful in Japan, which is strange.

• 1:20:07Dr. Peter Attia?

  Yeah, say why.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  I think, one, I believe you'll get value out of this book and the way of thinking, even if you have zero wealth. But Japan has a savings problem. Japan saves, saves, saves, then they die and they give the money to the next generation. They save, save, save. And I'm just like, well, what generation actually has fun? So I'm really counter to the culture there. Here, you know, one of the criticisms of the book will be like, well, there's so many people that have zero and trying to make ends meet. And I'm like, Get it. They can still get value out of this about getting the Tetris of their life. But maybe a wealth building book or how to make dollars book might be more useful to them at this time in their life. In Japan, it's the opposite. And also Japanese, they're healthier.

• 1:20:45Dr. Peter Attia?

  And they're healthier longer.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Yes. If you walk around Japan, old people, it's an older country, but they're around, they're moving, they're doing things or having activities, et cetera. They're enjoying their life. For Americans, looking at the obesity epidemic and the lifestyle of Americans, their ability to consume experience is way deteriorates way, way faster and way earlier than say the Japanese.

• 1:21:07Dr. Peter Attia?

  Let's go back to risk again. What's the mantra of the energy trader or the gas trader?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  The name of the game is to stay in the game.

• 1:21:14Dr. Peter Attia?

  Sort of like Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game. It's not about winning. It's about being able to keep playing over and over and over again. So inherent in that is never making a bet or a trade that can completely wipe you out and take you out of the game.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  By nature of the business, even the smallest position can take you out of the game. It's really about taking prudent risk reward and then stopping out when you can. Life is risk. You can get hit by a bus, a meteor can hit you, you can get some sort of crazy infectious disease. Like you can get a bum deal just going out, but you're not going to live in a bubble. You're going to take calculated risks. So in trading, we're optimizing for profits. You're going to take risks that in a tail scenario can blow you out. The key is taking prudent risk reward decisions. You know, I don't smoke. It's not the reward's not great enough. I did go skydiving the first time. The reward was great. The second time it was half as great. I didn't do it the third time because the risk was the same and the reward wasn't. The reward was going down and the risk was still the same.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  And so this is the same thing in trading. We look at everything on a risk reward basis. The likelihood of dying, if things go awry, can we get out? Have I sized my position? Can I get out? Is the liquidity there? And all these things are going on all the time.

• 1:22:24Dr. Peter Attia?

  And how do you think about that in a person's life? I mean, I like the example of skydiving. How do you think about this now in terms of the seasons of the person's life? Are there certain seasons where certain risks make sense, be it financial risks or?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  I'll give you a great example of physical risk. Okay. So I have a cartilage disappearing in L3, L4. Bones are hitting each other. So I'm advised against doing impact things. And I was 50 years old in the islands and guys were going to go wakeboarding. I was like, I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm going to hang out in the beach. I'm going to loaf. And I thought about it for a second. I said, I don't have many wakeboarding times left. Like, I'm not going wakeboarding at 60. I have this de journo back thing. It's going to be more dangerous for me, et cetera. If I am to wakeboard.

• 1:23:14Dr. Peter Attia?

  It has to be now.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  It is now. It is in this time period. And then I thought, okay, it's in this time period. I'm like, okay, how many times am I going to be in warm water with my buddies? Where there's a wakeboarding boat, ready to go in the next two years? I don't know. This is it. I don't foresee it happening. I could make a special effort for it, but like, it's just there in my lap and I don't have something else to do, et cetera. And I was like, I'm gonna go wakeboarding. This is probably the last time I'm gonna go wakeboarding. That was the last time I went wakeboarding.

• 1:23:44Dr. Peter Attia?

  How much did it hurt?

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  It didn't hurt. I actually jumped the wake too. I made a nice jump of a wake. I said, I'm gonna send it. I sent it. Didn't hurt that much. It wasn't like that. But afterwards, like, there was a little tension in my back, et cetera. And, you know, stretching and trying to. I was very conscious, like, okay, I gotta be careful coming across it. And now I wake surf. I do the low impact version of the sport, which I absolutely love. Until, you know, there's some technique to like, put cartilage in my back and re-strength in my back. I'm waiting for the technology to catch up. So maybe I'll get my back back. But right now, it's the last time I went wakeboarding. That was, the risk was worth the reward. There was no other time. Now, as I get older, wakeboarding is much more dangerous. And so I've gone to a sport where the speed of the sport, a lot of people think,

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  if you're going 10 miles per hour versus 12 miles per hour, it's only 2 miles per hour difference, but it's a 44% difference in force, because force equals mv squared. And so, I'm acutely aware of it. And I'm like, okay, I want to be in something I can get fulfilled where the risk is not as great. I have a 44% reduction in force, which is great, great for me when I fall.

• 1:24:50Dr. Peter Attia?

  So what year was it that you had that incredible birthday?

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Gosh, I'm pretty sure it's 45. But I've had incredible birthdays since then. But the one in the book is 45.

• 1:25:01Dr. Peter Attia?

  At the time you spend a lot of money, was it for you enough money that you were like, am I crazy doing this? Did you have second thoughts about it?

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  I had second thoughts, like the events and the things I was planning.

• 1:25:13Dr. Peter Attia?

  Remind me, it was down in the...

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I went to St. Bart's. I love St. Bart's. It's where I had my honeymoon. It's a great island. I think it's one of the best islands in the Caribbean. Obviously, not everybody can go to St. Bart's. And, you know, I tell people that become successful, you either get new friends or you scholarship your friends because you want to do experiences. A lot of times, a lot of people want to do shared experiences, right? They want their friends to come. They can't afford to just pop up and spend thousands of dollars to go to St. Bart's or do X, Y, and Z, you know? And it happens in various levels of success, right? Whether it's on a trip to Chicago, you know, a super... Like, I can't do that. Some people can and can't. And so as you become successful, one of the experiences you want to have is to be around your friends and have shared experience with your friends.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  And so I coach people. I say, you have to lose this attachment that they have to pay or they need to pay or whatever. You have to think what's most important to you. Get off autopilot. It's the half-shared experiences. And is it worth it for you to have them around? For me, I've had good friends throughout the years. It's unequivocal, yes, friends and family. So, but it gets expensive. You know, you got to rent out the hotel rooms, et cetera, and entertainment and plan this thing. But I was like, some of these people, they have their own lives and own complications and conflicts. You won't get the time to do with it. Some of these people won't be alive. May or may not be alive. You may drift apart. This is the time. I want to do this. And so as I was adding these people in and having my mother down and all this stuff,

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  I had to just like a heavenly experience, walking on the beach. My mom's coming out of her beach house. My friends are hanging on the balcony, looking down. It's beautiful. The birds are out, et cetera. And hi, all the people I love. And we're going to do this fun activity. We're going to listen to music, et cetera. You know, I imagine that that's what heaven's is like. You're just having this experience. And what I did was I realized that that's what I was working for. I was working to create these experiences. These are the things that fulfill me. When I was planning it, oh shit, this is a lot of goddamn money. You know what I mean? Like, what am I gonna do? Is am I doing the right allocation? Right? Like, you never know if you get it exactly right. Right? Nobody gets it perfectly balanced. But this was the right direction.

• 1:27:24Dr. Peter Attia?

  You know, it reminds me of something. When my wife and I got married in 2004, you know, we got married at a golf club. We didn't have two nickel scrub together. So it was like, I think the wedding, the ceremony, the reception were all at the same place. The whole thing cost less than $20,000. Obscene amount of money for us at the time. And it was amazing because everybody we actually cared about in our lives was there. We were really fortunate that, hey, almost everybody could make it who we invited. You know, there were almost 200 people there. So at one point, I grabbed my wife. We kind of walked out onto a balcony and could see everybody. And I said, do you realize that this is one of only two times in our life that we will be surrounded by everyone who's meaningful to us, who's alive?

• 1:28:08Dr. Peter Attia?

  And the only other time it's going to occur, we're going to be dead, we'll be in the casket, we'll be at our funeral. So we gotta really take this in. And I realize now there was a huge error in my logic, which was that was totally untrue. That didn't have to be true at all. You can create that anytime you want. You can decide for no reason, I want to bring everybody in my life who matters.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  For a birthday party.

• 1:28:31Dr. Peter Attia?

  It could be a birthday party. It could be just a party.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Most of my life is finding excuses to throw parties. You know, we get autopilot waiting for certain events like weddings or funerals or

• 1:28:41Dr. Peter Attia?

  Or special anniversaries.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Special anniversaries or things like that. We autopilot like, oh, that's when we get together. We allow autopilot to dictate when we do these things instead of thinking, hey, I really want to hang out with so and so, so and so, and so and so. Let me design a trip or let me have a bowling alley or something. It could be low cost. It'd be like, let me have a picnic, wiffle ball game, talking shit. One of the things I want to do, which I guess the startup cost will be something expensive. I'm getting some laser tag guns and I put it in my group. I have this group called cool, awesome people. I'll put you in it if you want to be in it. And I'm like, it's on. I'm gonna get laser Tag, best ass laser tag things. There's gonna be some serum for and everybody's like, yes. You know what I mean? Like I'm creating this experience. Like, yeah, I'm gonna kick some ass on laser tag.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  And shit talk, but I'm also gonna connect and have a good time with people. And I could do that. Once I put the initial cost, we could do that all the time. We can have a league. We can have do all kinds of things. And you know, it doesn't have to be laser tag. It could be whiffleball at the park. You can have a whiffleball league. Low cost, you know, dollar store. Pick up a whiffleball bat. You know, you're creating memories and somebody brings sandwiches and you can do that. And that's getting off autopilot. So I'm sorry to interrupt you about, but you really hit the nail on the head about that. It's like, design your life. Think about what you want out of it and make it happen.

• 1:29:57Dr. Peter Attia?

  Now, let me ask you a question. At that birthday party, when you're 45, how many people were there?

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  We took out the Taiwan a hotel and some of the other one, 80, 180, 100 or something.

• 1:30:09Dr. Peter Attia?

  And how much time did you get to spend with each person?

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  We're there for a week. So I got to spend time. Whoever wanted to spend time with me, they got to spend time with me. Some people have this thing. This is just me. I don't know. This isn't like coaching. Some people I want their presence, but not saying anything. I know you're okay. I get to see you being happy. Maybe I don't talk to you as much, but I get to enjoy you enjoying yourself. That's one of my favorite things at a party. When I throw a party, they're like, are you having a good time? It's crazy, whatever. I'm like, I'm having the best. I'm watching the best fucking movie of my life right now. I am in an immersive theater of people I love, doing the thing they want to do. Now I'm kind of antisocial. Like I don't like to talk that much to people. Like I get awkward sometimes. You know what I mean? Sometimes I grab my wife and I'm like, talk for me, talk for me. We'll go to a party and I'll be like, you gotta talk for me, babe. I can't take it.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  I could talk to a million people. No problems. The stadium or whatever. And sometimes I get awkward. But what I really, really do enjoy and what really fulfills me is watching people I love have a good time.

• 1:31:08Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 1:31:51Dr. Peter Attia?

  an obligation to give everybody the same amount of attention. Whereas having dinner with five friends is infinitely more enjoyable. So I'm trying to balance her.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  It's just a different experience.

• 1:32:07Dr. Peter Attia?

  I guess what bums me out is like, I feel like I wouldn't even know how to appreciate a party.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  I get that. Like I walk around and I just really enjoy people meeting and socializing and connecting. Like at my wedding, there were friends that didn't know each other and they're like, they're great. Like you know, great people. I'm like, of course I do. You find somebody who's great love, you keep them close by. I don't care if you dated them or whatever. Like you keep them close, man. Like people that vibe with you is very important to me. And me seeing them succeed, I'm a person that roots for people to hit the long ball. I'm not a hater. I'm a natural. Like I hope you crush it. I hope you become a trillionaire. I hope you whatever it is. And so seeing people at a party, I liked that there were parties and make people have fun and create environments for them, loosen up, enjoy each other, have a good time. And then watching that success and watching them

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  interact is enjoyable for me, even though I might be just sitting there smiling, right? Like not really talking.

• 1:32:58Dr. Peter Attia?

  You can enjoy a party as much if you're the host or it's your birthday as if you're at somebody's party?

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  It depends. It's not always the same because you gotta solve problems. Someone can't get in, the ice maker's broken, whatever. Like there's that type of things. But yeah, I'd rather watch that movie than go to the movies. I'd rather be in that immersive theater than McKittrick Hotel and Sleep No More in New York, which is an immersive theater. That's the best theater. And even so what? I only got to have a small conversation, whatever. Like the feedback there was like, I met this person. We had a great time. It was awesome. Very fulfilling to me. Very fulfilling to me.

• 1:33:31Dr. Peter Attia?

  What year did you finish writing Die With Zero?

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Ah, let's see. It's supposed to come out in 2020. So it's probably 2019, 2019.

• 1:33:41Dr. Peter Attia?

  In the three years ish since you've written the book. Has your thinking changed in anything? Have you evolved? Are you more nuanced in anything that you wrote about?

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  How much time do I really want to spend on the Peloton? How much time do I really want to, like, regimented eating all the time and being a pain in the ass? You know? How many chocolate chip cookies do I want to eat before I die and just suffer? I have to think about that. If dying one year early means living one more year, but I don't get any chocolate chip cookies, I'll take the chocolate chip cookies. I want a fulfilling life. Thinking deeply about these things. You know, that's kind of a cartoon version of it, but I hear other people think about I wrote the basic macro formula, but it's very fulfilling to see other people. They've set up spreadsheets. This is the optimal way you would die with zero. They've done it better than me. These financial planners built these spreadsheets and your returns and these are the things you like to do, et cetera. This is great. They've taken the ball and run with it, and I've taken the ball a little bit and run with it a little bit myself.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  And the way I'm applying it meanly is more socially, more of these things like, you know, at my wedding, I said to somebody, I said, probably no one in this room will see each other more than 50 times. And most of us will probably only see us 20 times in the times of our lives.

• 1:35:36Dr. Peter Attia?

  How many people were? This is the recent wedding.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, 117.

• 1:35:39Dr. Peter Attia?

  117.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  117. And so that's kind of hit people. They're like, yeah, you're kind of right. I put the over under at the max at like 50 for any pair that's not married, obviously. And probably 20. That made me think, I don't want 20. I'm gonna throw parties. I've taken throwing parties and social things very seriously because I thought about what fulfills me. So the last party I had, which you were invited, but you didn't come.

• 1:36:04Dr. Peter Attia?

  I was throwing a party that night.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  You were throwing a party that night at F1. I went all out. This is what I'm going to work for. To have these types of experiences. There's other things, right? But this is in the category, in the top of the category. Socializing, seeing my friends happy, having a good time, et cetera. Travel is a big one. Charity is another big one. My kids' money is their money. It's not my money. It's in a trust that's already taken care of. They'll get their money turned over when somewhere between 25, 26 and 33. Because that's the optimal time for them. When they're mentally mature and at physical maturity, you know, not in decline.

• 1:36:38Dr. Peter Attia?

  And how much will you talk with them about what you think or don't think they should do with that money? Is that one of those things where you feel it is your responsibility to say absolutely nothing? And let them figure it out on their own?

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  No, no. I want to give them a roadmap, you know? I want to teach them that it's a tool. A lot of people, one of the biggest mistakes they make is assigning some sort of good or bad to money or what it is, et cetera. It's not money that's good or bad in the Bible. It's the love of money that is good or bad. I use this analogy. I usually say like, money is a tool, much like a hammer and saw and nails and railguns. Do hammers and saws build houses? No. You need to know how to use those tools. People build those houses. So you do, does money make you happy? No. But if you know how to use the tool of money, it can make you happy or it can make you miserable. So some people who give hammers and saws, they build a house, they build canoes. This is wonderful things. You're like, how the hell did you build this? Some people get hammers and saws and they're just sitting there to cut their arm off.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  And so what I'm trying to do is not tell my kids what they should do, but teach them how to use the tools. Once they know how to use the tools, if they decide to build houses or canoes or cut their arms off, that's up to them. But I want to make sure that I gave them the instruction manual and got them a little bit proficient on how to use the tools. And that's it. Then my job is done, right? I have so many friends that try and control people from the grave that use the money as a control mechanism. I'm very big on like, that's my dream. My dreams are my dreams. My dad always tried to get me to be an attorney. Get the hell out of here. I'm never doing that. But you know, you try and push your dreams onto your kids. I want you to be a doctor. I want you to be this. I want you to be that, whatever. And that's not necessarily what they want to do. They have their own life and it's their adventure.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  And what I want to do is set them up with the tools to choose their own adventure. Now, I might not agree with that adventure. I probably won't because I come from a different era and a different culture and all kinds of things. But I will be rest assured and happy that if they're fulfilled. Great.

• 1:38:35Dr. Peter Attia?

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

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Thanks. That's great feedback. I mean, you don't write books to get rich. You write books to get your point across. And for me, I see it as saving lives. And a lot of people have said this before, what do you mean saving lives, Perkins? You're fucking crazy. What do you mean saving lives? You're not saving lives. And I'm like, well, listen, when somebody's drowning in the river or lake, Lake Austin, you pull them out, you do mouth to mouth, and you save their lives. Guess what? They're still going to fucking die, just not that day, right? So what did you do when you saved their life by pulling them out of the river? You've given them more choices, more experience, more life. So when you read my book and you get off autopilot and you get more choices, more experience, more life, isn't it the same? At least in my mind it is, and that's what motivates me.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  And so when you say it had an impact in you and you're going to have a more fulfilling life, it's like, I fucking did it. You know what I mean? I feel very happy. So I appreciate it.

• 1:39:59Dr. Peter Attia?

  I think the example you gave there is a great one, and I would agree with you completely because I too fall in the camp, despite my profession, of believing we are all absolutely going to die and in relatively short order. And therefore, anything that changes our experiential existence for the better is part of living.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Dr. Peter Attia?

  So thank you.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's been great.

• 1:40:21Dr. Peter Attia?

  All right, man. That was awesome.

• 1:40:24Dr. Peter Attia?

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• 1:41:50Dr. Peter Attia?

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