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, 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 want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we want to re-broadcast 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 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. 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 re-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** (2:53)
I have too. I'm really honored to be on your podcast.

**Peter Attia** (2:55)
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 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 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, and let's give people a sense of who you are. So you grew up in Jersey, right?

**Bill Perkins** (4:08)
Yeah, I grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey.

**Peter Attia** (4:10)
You're an engineer, we have that in common, right?

**Bill Perkins** (4:12)
Yeah, except I don't want people to be impressive as an engineer. We had a saying on the football team, Ds 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.