Optimizing life for maximum fulfillment | Bill Perkins

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Bill Perkins. Bill is a hedge fund manager, a very successful natural gas trader, an entrepreneur, and author of the book Die With Zero, getting all you can from your money and your life.
You may have heard me mention on previous podcasts or on social media that over the past year, I've read three books that seemed in some way connected to different sides of a similar theme, but they all had to do with something about quality of life. These three books are From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, and of course Die With Zero by Bill. After reading the book, I realized we had about four friends in common, at least two or three of whom were mentioned in the book, and it made it easy to reach out to him and say, hey Bill, let's sit down and have a podcast, which we do. So in this episode, we talk about Bill's background, his upbringing, and the genesis of the philosophies in his book. These seeds were sown kind of early on. From there, we then really talk about the overarching philosophy of this book, which is that we have these three important resources, time, health, and experiences, and we use money as a conduit or a tool to trade between those. If that doesn't make a lot of sense now, I think it will when we talk through it. Throughout this interview, Bill makes the argument that no matter at what level of wealth you are, most people are not focusing correctly on the most important asset that we have, which is time, and that we need to optimize our life to have experiences throughout our life instead of waiting until the end of life to do everything, which is really what most of us do. Throughout this, we talk about the importance of understanding risk, including the opportunity cost of making or not making decisions. We talk about the risk-reward matrix and thinking about regret and regret minimization, and we talk about the dangers of living life on autopilot when it comes to work and fulfillment. For as much as this podcast dives into the science of longevity, any long-time listener knows that I am equally interested in the manners of emotional health and quality of life. And to live a long life without appropriate happiness or quality of life or shared experiences is not really to live at all. And that's why a book like this is just as important to me as books about the hardcore science of longevity. I think the insights that Bill shares in this interview will help anyone think through how they're spending and allocating their time, no matter what level of wealth they have. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Bill Perkins.
Bill, thanks so much for coming by. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

**Bill Perkins** (3:22)
I have too. I'm really honored to be on your podcast.

**Peter Attia** (3:24)
I don't know, a little while ago, I made a video on Instagram where I talked about three books I've read in the last 12 months that I didn't expect to A, have such an impact on how I thought about things, but also B, even though they're completely different books, they strike me as having kind of a unifying theme in this sort of thing about quality of life.
The three books are, one of them was From Strength to Strength. One of them is 4,000 Weeks, and the other one is Die With Zero. Now what's interesting is I know exactly who suggested I read 4,000 Weeks, and I'm really good friends with the author of From Strength to Strength, so that's why I just read that knowing it was coming out. I still don't remember who recommended Die With Zero to me, but I remember just thinking, okay, well, cool, sounds interesting, ordered it, and then just couldn't put it down. As I think I mentioned in the video, immediately made my wife read it, and then immediately just went out and bought many copies of it, along with many copies of the other two books. So I basically started handing them out as like a triplet copy. If someone was over and they hadn't read them, boom, they were leaving with all three copies of the book. So that speaks to why I wanted to sit down with you.