(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I'm a diehard optimizer who loves doing all the research to help you get the best experience in life without necessarily an expensive price tag.

Though, here's a thought experiment. Imagine that one day you die and you have all this money in your account, but actually you don't. How does that feel? You die with zero? Scary, like you did something wrong? That's exactly what today's guest recommends. He's Bill Perkins, a longtime hedge fund manager and energy trader who's written a book called "Die With Zero, Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life." I loved the book.

You might have a lot of objections to his concept, and I actually did before I read it, but now I'm a huge convert, so we're gonna dive into all of it. We're gonna talk about what it actually means to die with zero, why you might wanna stop maximizing net worth and focus on net fulfillment, why you should bank memory dividends, and the ways to do that for maximum ROI, why Bill thinks, contrary to financial advice, you should save less money when you're young, why you should think about your life as distinct seasons or time buckets, and how that can help you make the best choices about spending your money, and a lot more.

So let's get started right after this. Just a quick heads up that there's some language in this episode that you might not want your kids to hear, so maybe throw your headphones in for this one. A quick word from our sponsor today. Bill, welcome to the show, and thank you for being here.

- Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Wow, we got a lot to go over, don't we? - I didn't even mention something yet. We got two daughters. There's a lot we could talk about, but your book's all about dying with zero, and that many people save too much money and leave it behind instead of spending it in ways that are more meaningful.

You've obviously been very skilled and fortunate at building wealth, so before we jump into all these lessons, I just wanna make sure I understand who this is for, and does it actually apply to people with just a modest income or who haven't built wealth yet? - So the book is a bunch of mental models, and it's a counterfactual regret minimization algorithm that's solving for net fulfillment.

A lot of people have algorithms for building wealth. It's solving for building wealth. I'm solving for net fulfillment. So what variables are the inputs? Your wealth, your health, and your time. Even though people may have more wealth or better health or more time, those variables still you can use formulaically with these mental models to maximize your net fulfillment.

I wouldn't say this book isn't for unhealthy fat people. They can still get value out of this to maximize their own net fulfillment, and the same thing for people with not that much money. Obviously, a person who's over-saving by millions is formulaically getting more value in terms of the amount of waste that they're wasting by dying with a bunch of money in the bank, but everybody still gets value relative to them to get more out of this one ride called life.

- And how do you define net fulfillment? - So I basically say that the sum of your experiences, your choices, every moment in your life, when you make a decision, those choices, that is what constitutes your life, and the sum of all those decisions and experiences that you consume will determine whether you've had a full life or fulfilling life or a not-so-fulfilling life relative to the best life you can possibly have.

And so I define net fulfillment as your choices, i.e. your experiences, and when I use experiences, I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. I don't necessarily mean always taking a trip. It could be walking with grandmother. It could be donating to a charity. It's just every single choice that you make.

- And before we jump in, I actually wanna talk about a few common misconceptions, because I feel like some of them came up a little bit late in the book. Some of them came up early. So I feel like this is important. So one I'll share, and I'll ask if there are others, is around retirement, and it's that the amount you actually need in retirement is often lower than people think, and it's no surprise that also people increase their assets in retirement.

Not all of them, but a good number of them. And so something that was helpful for me to realize is if we're all thinking, oh, I should save all this money because I'm gonna need it, because I'm gonna be spending, well, it turns out you probably will spend less based on actual studies, not just your opinion, and you might actually make more in retirement.

Are there other things that might be common misconceptions people have that understanding might make this whole conversation easier to process in those mindsets? - Yeah, adjacent to what you're saying about spending, the data's kind of overwhelming that people spend less, even adjusting for healthcare costs, right? Like people are like, what about healthcare and rising healthcare?

It's their bodies, the deterioration, the change in their attitudes, et cetera, their ability to do or enjoy certain activities. Probably all of us have a relative that doesn't like to fly. You could take them somewhere, but they're like, I don't wanna sit on a plane for three hours because it hurts my back or my knees or something to that effect.

There's probably people my age or younger, 40s, used to be athletic and like could not go play a pickup game of flag football right now. It wouldn't be as enjoyable. They could play it. The misconception that's out there is people think their lives are gonna be like a carnival commercial when they retire, and it cannot be further from the truth.

And having lived in the Virgin Islands where these cruise lines all park up, like we'd have three, four to seven ships during high season coming in, and the main activity is going into the shops, right? Not these athletic activities to buy something, not for themselves, but for their granddaughters or a relative, et cetera.

Like they're actually looking for ways to consume the money that they have because they cannot consume it into the experiences that they thought they would. - You talk about the declining utility of money with age. You have all this money and you say, oh, I'm gonna punt on this awesome, amazing trip till I'm retired and I can take time off work.

And then you're like, I don't know. Do I really want to go walk around Japan nonstop? I say this because I took my family, my sister, her husband, my parents to Japan. And the degree to which we wanted the kids to go explore was just not the degree to which my parents were willing to go.

And I don't know if they would have thought that was the case 20 years ago, but there were things they had to miss out on because they're just older and they couldn't keep up. - Yeah, I think a lot of people have the model in their head that their ability to convert money into experiences, like your body is static, it will remain the same.

They kind of divorce this idea that, wow, my mental acuity is gonna decline, my lung capacity is gonna decline, my bone density is gonna decline, my muscle mass is gonna decline about 1% a year after age like 35. So they don't put all these facts together in that, hey, this is obviating either my desire or ability to actually enjoy these activities.

And so you have a prime example of walking around Japan and Tokyo and so they delayed that trip or that gratification, let's just assume they did, to a point where there really wasn't any gratification. Tokyo was less valuable a trip to them. - I think there were things where we came home and we were like, oh, you missed this thing.

They were like, we're okay, because if we had pushed ourselves, it would have been a mess, but we had a great trip. Like, I think they had a great trip, but I think that five, 10 years ago, they would have gotten to do 20% more and it would have been a better trip.

- Correct, you do the best with what you have. There's no sense in crying over spilt milk or what they did or didn't do, but you can easily look at the scenario and say that was not the optimal time for them to take that trip in the totality of the arc of their lives.

We don't get to play a sim game and Monte Carlo our lives, be like, well, let me do this trip here and that, whatever. But what I try to do with this book is get people to think about how do I optimize for net fulfillment? Where do experiences belong?

First, what experiences do I want, right, in my life? And then very importantly, where do those experiences belong? Where does the trip to Japan belong? Where does going to the opera belong? Where does hiking this mountain belong? When does the ski trip belong? And that matters, it may matter more than the what.

- I'll give an example that you basically put on a banger of a 50th birthday party, but you decided to just do it when you were 45 because it would be a better experience. To me, that was a big moment, I was like, oh, you always think let's do this thing at this milestone in life.

And you were just like, let's just do it earlier so that I get more out of it. - Yeah, there's other smaller examples. I was in an island and guys were gonna go wakeboarding. You may have heard me say this. And I was like, nah, I'm just gonna chill here, relax, et cetera.

And I have a degenerative cartilage in L3, L4. And so my wakeboarding days are limited. And if I was gonna go wakeboarding, it's not five years from now. And then I was like, okay, when is the next time I'm gonna be on an island where it's warm and there's actually a wakeboard and a wakeboard boat with these friends, et cetera, to go wakeboarding that I physically can do it.

And I quickly came to the conclusion, never. It's now or never. This is the last wakeboarding chance I'm probably gonna have for the rest of my life. And so I quickly said I can lounge on the beach and relax until my 80s. I can't go wakeboarding. So now is the time to go wakeboarding.

So I got on the boat and said, I'm just gonna go do this. And that was my last wakeboarding run ever. - I have a similar experience, but it wasn't my last. I'd always as a kid been a skateboarder, snowboarder, and I'd always wanted to go wakeboarding. And for some reason, just the opportunity never arose.

And finally, I was like, you know what? I'm not getting to the point that I couldn't wakeboard in five years, but I'm getting to the point that if I wanna try to do crazy stuff on a wakeboard, I probably should do it now. - Yeah. - And then we rented a boat.

My brother-in-law and I went out and literally the boat was defective and could not go fast enough to do anything. So I still need to get that checked off my list because we basically were just trolling around on this boat and we got a refund, which was cool, but I still haven't ticked that one off.

- And you talk about trying to bucket these things. So you have all these ideas in life. Your theory is instead of saying, make this big list, you can have a bucket list, but you kind of have this anti-bucket list. So why is bucketing things so different than a bucket list?

And why is the distinction important? - I like to go backwards to either zero and infinity to try and get a concept across. So just before you were born, you're in heaven, the universe, the matrix, creators, whatever your thing is. And then God says to you, what experiences do you wanna have on your journey on planet earth?

You have 86 years, 79 years, whatever it is, what experiences you wanna have? And you go to the hall of experiences, which is really the hall of choices, right? You're like, I wanna go skateboarding this many times, then I'm gonna go traveling, I wanna have kids, I wanna get a degree, I wanna say I love you this many times, every single thing you can think of.

I'm gonna donate charities, I'm gonna whatever. You throw it into your infinite bucket of experiences. It's not infinite because you're a human, et cetera. God goes, great, you can have all those experiences. There's only one problem, you have to get the order right. And so the guy who puts the like, I wanna go hella skiing and puts it in the 80 to 85 bucket, probably doesn't get to go hella skiing, right?

'Cause our decisions are dynamic, our body has a health curve, utility curve, and certain things belong in certain areas. So I'd pick like kind of these cartoon exaggerated examples of the why the timing matters, what experiences belong when, but there's tons of them. People have kids and they're like, oh, I'm gonna hang out with my kids when they're 13 or 14 more.

We're gonna go this, I'm gonna wait for this. And your kids don't wanna know you when you're 13 and 14, or they don't wanna do the same activities when you're younger. And people are very acutely aware of how they spend time with their kids and what activities they can do with their kids at certain periods in their life and certain seasons of life.

But that applies to everyone, in every relationship, even business, your health, spiritual, et cetera. And not only are there limits, there's your attitude changes, certain experiences are orthogonal to other experiences. My flag football days are done, man. I'm not trying to pull a hamstring, twist a knee, et cetera, because of my body, the recovery time.

Not that I can't do it, not that it wouldn't be fun while I'm doing it, but it would be less enjoyable afterwards. And it wouldn't be as enjoyable, let's say in my 20s or 30s. Like, hey, let's go play football after work. I would never say that now, right?

Never ever, right? So if I had in my bucket of experiences, that had to happen in the 20 to 33 bucket. - We haven't talked about memory dividends, but I think it's interesting, because just because you did that in your 30s doesn't mean you don't get value out of it in your 40s or your 50s or your 60s.

Just something I'd never seen or heard or thought about, which was you could stack these memories throughout the rest of your life if you actually do them and enjoy them and document them maybe to enhance it. - Yeah, the purpose of money is to fulfill your life, right? It's for your consumption.

You want to use all your resources that you have, your wealth and health and time to get the maximum fulfillment. Let's just go with that. I always ask people this, what are you saving for? They'll give me some abstract, like retirement. I'm like, no, no, no, no, like house, home, whatever.

Okay, I'll give you survival. Once your survival is covered, what are you saving for? I want to know exactly in your mind, what are you saving for? Sometimes people will give me like a very definitive answer of like, I want to take this trip. I want to go to the opera.

I want to be able to take a cruise. Every single year of my life from 66 to the grave or whatever it is. But a lot of times it's in abstract land. It's just this autopilot answer. And when you save money, it's attached to some future consumption or experience.

And that experience is going to give you some sort of fulfillment or joy. When you consume an experience, you have joy from that experience. But also when you recall that experience and revisit that experience, you get joy from it. So it pays a dividend, what I call the memory dividend.

Anybody who's had a first kiss, hit a game winning home run, they've told that story over and over again. And when they tell that story and they recall that story, they get a sense of fulfillment from it. That experience, that original experience is paying a dividend and also creating a new memory.

As I discuss with you, hey, my backpacking trip or my trip to Asia, et cetera. And that adds up to our fulfillment. Now you can do it the other way around. You can say, well, here is the original experience and here are the dividends and here's the total fulfillment there.

Or I could put the money in this investment, it will pay dividends, I'll have more money and I'll buy more experiences in the future. And we have to weigh these two things out to optimize it. Is it better to take one ski trip now with my friends and buddies or two ski trips 10 years from now?

Because the money is for consumption. We're going to use it all. So the question is, when is the best time to allocate and which provides the total return on fulfillment? What gets me the highest fulfillment? Depending on who you are, what your age is and the things you like, going through that mental exercise may produce different results.

Me at 53, a lot of the times, the answer is not two trips 10 years from now. It's the activity now plus the dividends will surely exceed two of the activity later in life. You can just calculate what that return is. - Is it as simple as a rule of thumb where it's like for however many years in the future, this thing will be a memory?

It is worth, I don't know, 10% more every year. Is there some simple math? - I would put it to you and your followers and be like, hey, we're going to run a calculator and you can put in your health degradation, all these formulas and we'll give you a better idea of what it's going to be worth to you later in life versus now.

But for me, I just deeply think about it. Like I sit down, like wakeboarding. There is no future wakeboarding, right? It might've been two wakeboarding trips later, spend the money, be with your friends, et cetera. But generally, as you get older, I think the answer is like when you're 20, 22, maybe two ski trips, two and a half ski trips at 30 is a much better deal.

You're more mature, you'll have your stuff together, other things been going on. I'll have some friends that'll be bigger and better. I can afford the upgrade, whatever. Maybe it's a better trip. For me at 53, two ski trips is not the answer. - I went on this trip, my wife and I, and I hadn't read your book.

So somehow I had this spark of let's quit our jobs and let's spend all our savings and let's backpack around the world for seven months. And we did this in our 20s. I am 100% certain that the money that we spent wouldn't even buy one trip around the world for two months now that we have a different lifestyle, we have kids and all this stuff.

So I think it's especially interesting for someone in their 20s or early 30s, foregoing that trip now isn't gonna let your money grow to be two trips because I'm almost certain that by the time that money is enough for the two trips, the cost of a trip is gonna be twice or three times as much.

It might not even be enough to go on one. - You're including also the economic inflation of the trip, also the fact that you become more bougie as you get older. Like it's hard to do the youth hostel backpacking thing as you get older. That's not even a physical thing.

That's like your attitude changes. You realize that certain activities, going back to this time bucketing, belong in your 20s and they don't transfer well to your 30s. Now you may be able to do them, but it's just not as enjoyable or it'll cost infinite more money or whatever it is.

And that the 20s activity, not only do you get to enjoy it more, but you get to enjoy the discussion, the memories, the conversation. It's the thing that makes you interesting. Like when I sit down and talk with somebody at a dinner, I just met them, I'd say 80% of the conversation is what have they done?

What experiences that they have? What were their learnings? What has been their journey? And maybe 20% is what they're going to do or what's going on currently, et cetera. And that is what drives your fulfillment when you're meeting somebody. It makes you an interesting character. And so getting the order right and figuring out, hey, is it worth it to delay or not, is a very personal thing.

And it's very dependent on which activities or things fulfill you. But it's definitely the thought process that you want to go through. - My takeaway so far is, don't necessarily focus on accumulating money to all extent because you can use that money earlier to create experiences that provide value the rest of your life.

- If the purpose is I'm going to get the max value and I say the max value is fulfillment, you got to change your optimization algorithm in your head to optimize for fulfillment. A lot of people keep optimizing for money. And I'm like, listen, okay, why don't you optimize for the most money at 86?

And they'll obviously will go, no, that's dumb. Well, it's the same thing is true at 85 or 84 or 83 or any year, we should be optimizing for fulfillment. Money is just a tool for your fulfillment. You are not a tool to make money. And a lot of people operating in the latter, not the former.

- I want to come back to identifying that, but there's a couple of things on bucketing experiences and memoring them. So we had a wedding as many people do, and we paid for a photographer, videographer, although many people that have listened know that we negotiated to pay for the videographer by swapping frequent flyer miles instead of dollars 'cause we wanted to get a deal.

But looking back, that video has not been seen by millions of people, it's friends and family, and we've watched it every few years. But I think it's really reinforced the memory of the wedding and the photos do the same. I'm curious if there are any other tactics that can enhance the dividends that our memories pay so that we can get more value of them after we have them.

- I think technology is doing something wonderful. Google Photos or iPhones will do this. They'll be on this date, and then photos will pop up of what happens. And then you get joy out of that, and it sparks a conversation. You get fulfillment from an experience that you had and the recall of it.

So it's triggering and tapping in to your memory dividend, to your memories to provide you value. One of the gifts my fiance at the time gave me was a box and it had photos and memories and little comments on what it was. And I was like, "This is the best gift." Close to zero cost of any kind of purchase, et cetera, paper, cards, some photos printed out, et cetera, and her perspective.

But it was amazing on how much joy it was. And really, I was just mining the prior experience and experience dividend. If somebody comes up with another tool or another idea or another method, I'm open to it. I really wanna mine the memory dividend and get the most out of my investments.

And my investments are, I invest in experiences 'cause that's what fulfills me. Just like Warren Buffett says, "When do you start investing?" "Early, now, now, now." In order to get the maximum, what I call memory dividend, maximum return. - Everyone says compound interest is so important. You should invest as early as you can to have the most money possible.

You're saying, "I have the same principle. "It's just, I'm not optimizing for money." So invest, invest, invest as early as possible in the kinds of experiences that will maximize your fulfillment of life. - Yeah, I agree. When people are focused on returns and compound interest, et cetera, they're optimizing for maximum money.

That's a vertical, your wealth, getting your wealth up. And there's lots of books and lots of tools, tricks, hacks on how to get the most out of every dollar you spend, how to make the most money, et cetera. But I'm at a top level optimization. I'm at a much higher optimization on like your life fulfillment, your net fulfillment.

And the memory dividend is a huge calculation in it. And I really encourage people to invest in making those memory dividends, or at least think about that when you're deciding whether to delay gratification or actually have gratification now. - One thing that's helped me in this is if you think about the marginal dollar that you're saving, and so often I hear people, this is probably people with a little more money, but they're like, "Oh, well, I should save more money." And I'm like, "Well, why?" And they're like, "Well, then I'll have more money.

"And I get a higher net worth." And I say, "Well, what's that next marginal dollar "gonna do for you?" Because people always say, "Well, if I save an extra $1,000 a month, "that's my kid's college." And it's like, "Well, do you already have "your kid's college saved? "'Cause if so, then what's that extra dollar doing?

"And would that extra dollar "actually be better spent today?" - Yeah. Going back to, I try and get people to map their money to what the consumption is. A lot of people saving, they're like, "Oh, I'm saving, I'm working." I'm like, "Listen, it's okay to save. "Just tell me what the party is and when's the party.

"Just tell me when the party is. "I'm okay with it." You know what I mean? Like it gets them thinking like, "Oh, 65, no, that's not really when I have the party. "Wait, what kind of party do I have? "What are the things I really wanna do?" Because what happens is, I believe, is people get habituated.

They get really good at optimizing for money, making money, doing deals, whatever it is they are, programmers, et cetera, and they keep piling it. And much like a rat in a wheel with a cheese experiment, pretty soon, you can just show 'em the wheel and not give 'em the cheese.

There's no reward. And so people are in default mode network of accumulating wealth, making money, earning money, optimizing money. I read the book on how to save on this. I got 18 million flea court flyer miles. I discounted that. Look at all these Chuck E. Cheese tokens I got.

And then they die with a bunch of Chuck E. Cheese tokens and never really go to Chuck E. Cheese. And I'm like, "When you going to Chuck E. Cheese?" You know? You've been running this rat wheel, right? You got all these tickets, everything, but what are we buying here?

What are we saving for? And I think people become detached from what their original dream was, what they really wanted to do, such that the game and the puzzle solving, people become addicted to the puzzle of saving more money, as opposed to being addicted to the puzzle of how do I fulfill my life?

What potluck thing am I going to do? How do I expose myself to other things? What choices should I be making today? What experiences do I want in this time period of my life and the next time period of life? And how do those fit together? They're more focused on a different puzzle.

- When it comes to these bucketing of experiences, is there a number of years that you say, "Well, try to bucket them in tranches of five years "or 10 years," or how do you think about that? So people can actually go home and be like, "Let's start doing this today." - I try and do five years.

Like when I got to my 65, I broke it out 65 to 75. It gets wider. And obviously, the further you go in future, the less your visibility, even for yourself. Like, okay, yeah, 53 to 58, this is what I want to do. I want to do this. I want to take a train.

I want to go to my daughter's graduation. I want to stay healthy. I want to go on a trip. I want to go to Tokyo again. I have all those things kind of down, right? And then the next five years, it gets harder. I kind of think I want to be doing this, right?

They're a little bit more thematic. And then 65, 75, 75 to the grave, it gets even more thematic. But I can tell you that when I look at those choices, when I try and time bucket my life, I can see the level of activity going down. I see it harder for me to spend money.

It's like visit grandchildren, hang out with daughters, read the books I haven't read. It's not like go raging, stay up till 7 a.m. in a club in Tokyo, travel here, swim that. If you could perfectly lay out the experiences you wanted to have, which you can't, you would see this natural curve in the cost of those experiences, this natural consumption pattern.

And then you start to say, well, I don't want to give up hours of my life for a bunch of Chuck E. Cheese tokens that I'm not going to use. So I'm going to go to Chuck E. Cheese. And then you start to lay out, well, I'm probably going to go to Chuck E.

Cheese a lot here. I'll play the whack-a-mole game. That costs a lot. And I'll do whatever. And then another time, I'm just going to sit around and eat pizza. And then you have this nice, beautiful curve on consuming and spending your money down to zero as you have the most fulfilling Chuck E.

Cheese experience. Basically the most fulfilling life. Now I don't know why I'm stuck on Chuck E. Cheese, but I am for some reason. This is strange, but two nights ago, we talked about Chuck E. Cheese randomly. And I was showing our au pair from Spain what Chuck E. Cheese was because she was like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

I was like, man, Chuck E. Cheese has kind of become a more depressing place than I remember it in my childhood. You're talking about it. I'm like, oh man, don't want to be the Chuck E. Cheese guy. I don't want to be going there in my fifties. - It's kind of, to me, like cold water.

It was like going into the Atlantic ocean. I was like, wow, I used to go in here as a kid all the time. Like, no problem. Now it's freezing. I would never go in there. That's kind of like an activity. If you're in heaven, it's like go swimming and frolicking and body surfing in the Atlantic ocean.

You're probably not going to enjoy it as much as when you were nine or five and immune to the cold for whatever reason, because it was just so we, to when you're like 20 something, you're like, this is freezing. Like, why am I here? That type of thing. - Are there any experiences that maybe you regret not doing more of younger or things that people listening in their twenties and thirties should maybe prioritize more?

- Yeah, I think it's very personal and it has to do with like travel, that kind of backpacking experience, that kind of gap year thing that people do. I just really didn't take advantage of that time period. I was so focused on trying to get ahead and make money and not taking breaks and was on this autopilot of like must succeed.

And not saying that wasn't a great focus and didn't help me get to here, but the success I want is the most fulfilling life. And I gave up things that would have been extremely fulfilling, not only then, but now as I look back on my life. And that's going to be different for everybody.

I'd be like, ah, I wish I went to go play in this chess tournament. It could be anything. I knew at an early age that travel and meeting new cultures and doing adventurous things really fulfills me. I really enjoy that. And I did not take advantage of those opportunities that I had.

I didn't really think about the context. I'm like, you know what? I can go to a club in Manhattan any day. I can hang out on this weekend, any day. Like, why don't I get the super saver ticket, go here for the weekend, come back, et cetera. That type of thing.

I was really lucky because I got laid off in 2008. And so I didn't have a job. And my wife was working at a company that she just absolutely hated and didn't want to stay in that field. And so we kind of got forced in this situation where she was like, well, I'm going to quit my job and I don't know what's next.

And I already didn't have a job. So we ended up taking this trip for, I don't know, seven months backpacking, just as you describe. But I think it would have been so much harder had at least one of us not been forced out of a job and kind of pushed into this.

And so what I'm curious to get your take on is the culture of work in America, at least, and probably many other countries, makes it so hard to be like, let's take a year off. And now I'm thinking in 30s and 40s, let's cut back so I'm not grinding so hard.

Or my wife's thinking in her career, she's like, oh, wow, if I ever got another job, like it's got to level it up, got to level it up. Whereas usually leveling it up is more responsibility and more time. How can people in the work environment we've created in this country still live to these ideals and not get caught in that hamster wheel?

- Wow, it's really tough to escape your culture, right? It's extremely tough. Culture changes slowly. Regards to work and optimizing for not being afraid of running out of money and status and having more and more money, it's really hard to step back and go, wait, does this serve me?

Does this serve my one and only life that I have? Is this really going to fulfill me? Or have I become a robot hamster in a wheel, grinding and puzzle addicted to solving this puzzle called more money, more status, more fame, et cetera. I call that autopilot. I say, we're always on autopilot.

I'm on autopilot just as much as the next person. And we have to snap out of it and be like, what really fulfills me? What do I really want out of life? What do I really want out of life out of these next five years? We're so trained, like, I want the promotion and I want the thing.

Well, why do you want the promotion? Because the promotion, the thing, and I have more money. Well, why do you want the more money? 'Cause the more money is better. The thing, it's all the way down. It's so inculcated into us about success. Success is more money. And it's so abstract that we lose the final connection that money is an abstract.

It's a tool. It's like a hammer and a saw. Builders don't want hammers and saws because they love hammers and saws. They want hammers and saws to build houses. That is the goal. They're not like, must accumulate more hammers and saws, more hammers and saws. This is how people are.

They're like, we must accumulate more money to have more money, to more money, money, money. And I'm like, no life, motherfucker. We're here to fulfill your life. You are solving the wrong problem. You're optimizing for the wrong problem. And culture has pretty much jammed that on everyone. Really hard because there's this fear of not having money.

You don't want to run out of money and fear of retirement is this whole fear game with retirement. People ask, why do old people keep growing their wealth while they're older? And I'm just like, they can't spend it down. Life has passed them by. That's the cold hard truth.

I'm really harsh about that. I'm like, they fucked it up. That's why they can't spend it down. They fucked it up. And it's too late for them. My book, these algorithms, these mental models are to help you not fuck it up as much. We're all gonna fuck it up a little bit.

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- I worked with this woman whose job is to kind of help people take their outlook on life that might have some different unconventional contrarian thoughts and really boil it down to some framework, some model. And we kind of arrived at like my nine principles of living an optimized life.

And I'm not ready to share them all yet, but one of them was questioning the outcome you actually want. And I want to bring it up because of what you just said earlier. Met someone who said, "Gosh, I need more money." And I was like, "Why do you need more money?" And they said, "I want to spend more time with my kids.

"And if I have more money, I'll be able to retire sooner "and spend more time with my kids." And through this conversation, we were like, "What if you had a different job "that earned you a little less money, "but gave you the freedom to work four days a week.

"And now you have a whole day that you could spend more time "with your kids and you weren't grinding as hard." And they're like, "Well, then I wouldn't have any money." And I was like, "You don't need the more money anymore "because you don't need to retire early "to spend your time with your kids at 50.

"You could start spending it now." And in product management, when we're building software and talking to customers, we always ask the five whys. So if someone says, "Oh, I want this." And it's like, you got to ask why five times before you actually understand what someone wants. So I'll challenge people thinking they want more money to go through that thought experiment themselves of being like, "Why do you want the more money?" And drill down and then ask yourself, "Is there actually, once you get to that fifth why, "a way you could achieve what you want "that actually isn't about just accumulating more money?" And I would argue that more often than not, the answer will be yes.

- The book, "Your Money or Your Life" kind of hits on this concept of enough and what are you really solving for. You're doing like spend more time with your kids, but I'm making more money to save time with your kids. But if you make more money, are they really kids then?

Do they want to spend time with you? There's a lot of variables going on, but going through that thought experiment, you actually get to pull out more from them. They're like, "It's really about the status. "It's really because you've been habituated "into making more money." There may be this desire to spend more time with your kids, but it's not the real reason.

There's other reasons, whether they be habit or some sort of goal, et cetera, that we gotta address, we gotta look at and be like, "Do those reasons serve you?" - What would you say to someone, let's say in their mid-30s, who's got a great job and looking to do something new and feeling like the only option is to go take that next level up job that's gonna be higher pay and more responsibility and probably limit their ability to have the kinds of experiences they want because they're so engulfed in work, but they're stressed out because they feel like doing anything else would be a downgrade in their career.

How would you talk them through that? - The main thing is what are we solving for? And all of them, the first variable, the second variable, and the third variable. And how can we max them out? They're like, "Oh, I wanna actually spend time "and have more fun and do X, Y, and Z." And I'd be like, "Whoa, okay, this is one of 'em.

"I'm gonna be my own insurance agent." I talk about that in a book. People try and basically be their own insurance agent by saving enough money for every single calamity. That's their backup default skew. Well, just what if this happens? What if that happens? I try and find these things that they're actually solving for and then help them make the decision on what's the best decision for them.

We may come to the conclusion that taking on more responsibility now because the job pays so much damn money and then quitting in a year will actually lead to more fulfillment and more fun, and then I'll quit and I'll goof off and do whatever. The stock options are gonna go into money and I'm gonna make a zillion dollars and I'm gonna have seven years of just bliss and goofing off as opposed to grinding it out five years in this lower paying job, et cetera.

I'll have 100% of the time. But that's usually the rarity in these scenarios. - And they never quit. - Yeah, they never quit. It's like, you don't have to quit your job. You just have to consume the fruits of your labor. You have to get everything. You have to find your balance.

You can love what you do, but you should also be able to do what you love. A lot of people went to work 'cause they wanted a house and they wanted to have kids and they wanted to travel and they wanted to ski and they wanted to start a rock band or some expensive hobby with telescopes or whatever it is.

And somewhere along the way, those things kind of fall to the wayside. They don't exist anymore. And it's the money and whatever. And we kind of instinctively attack some sort of reason. Oh, the kids. I'm gonna spend more time on my kids. I'm like, nah, no, you don't. That's not what you're solving for with this job.

Or at least this equation doesn't compute. If they were my friends, like real close friends, I'm like, no, you don't. You're bullshitting yourself. You can lie to me, but just don't lie to yourself. And then we go through it. And a more gentle approach is let's just see if this formula computes.

Let's put it up on the board. Let's map out the time, get really detailed. Like, okay, how much more money are you gonna get? When are you gonna have the time? How much more spare time are you gonna have? When does this happen? Is your kid still a kid?

Do they still wanna hang out with you? Okay, what's this other job? No two-hour commute. That's two hours a day you can have your kids. Well, it seems like if we're solving for time with the kid, this job may be better than this job because the money you accumulate, you really don't have the time to spend it 'cause you're working harder and you have more responsibilities and it's in the future and your kid's not a kid anymore.

And they're gone. We might come to that conclusion depending on what we put on the board. So much like you do, you're digging in. If I switch this and I fly this plane and I do this on Tuesday, I get the most frequent flyer miles. You're optimizing for the most miles.

I will look at a trip as like, yeah, miles is one of the things I'm optimizing for, but ultimately I'm optimizing for the best fucking trip and the most memory dividends and the most fulfillment out of this trip. So that's number one priority and number two is the miles.

- I think when we went to South Africa for this trip around the world, we had like five layovers because we stopped at one place, then we changed planes and the plane landed in Sudan, but we couldn't even get off the plane. So we just sat there until it took off again and all this stuff.

Now I'm like, how can I get there with zero to one stop? If it's really far, one stop. If it's really close, zero stops. And that's forced me to reprioritize what I want. I wanna talk about a few things. How do we implement this? But maybe first some of the common objections to changing this.

So two things you talked about. One is preventing running out of money. I think everyone I know is like, oh, I wanna make sure I have enough. What if I live to 110? What if health gets so great that I'm living forever? What do you tell to people who are trying to optimize for every possible thing that could happen?

How to just get either comfortable with the risk that they don't need it? Or you even mentioned the book, just get an annuity. - If you're worried about running out of money, get an annuity. Get the reverse of life insurance. Everybody gets life insurance, right? They're like, oh, I have life insurance if I die early, et cetera.

Well, if you're worried about living too long, it's the exact opposite. They have an insurance product for that. Or they're worried about what if I need nurses or whatever? I'm like, long-term healthcare insurance is pretty cheap. It's actually very cheap. Because I think one of the reasons is when you need those nurses, you're on your way out.

They're not gonna be paying that long. But it's pretty cheap. Particularly if you get it while you're younger, 30s and 40s, it's actually trivial for people, the wealth category that you're talking about. I look at things that people are acting as an insurance agent inefficiently, and I'm like, let's be more efficient on how we insure away these risks.

And it might be an insurance product, et cetera. And some of the things that, let's say, there's not an insurance product or whatever their fear of, I try and convert their fear of you should fear wasting your life more than you fear running out of money. I try and redirect them to that.

What are the things you wanna have? What experience you wanna have when this is your life, you will die, it doesn't go on forever. What is urgent to you? And what is urgent for each period? When we have that conversation, in my presence and their presence, while I think about it, you're like, yeah, you're right.

The key is to keep them on that. Because you have that conversation and they go back and they're right back on the autopilot. Let's go running the wheel 'cause it's fun to run the wheel. No tease, no reward, no fulfilling life. Just a battery, a robot, a cog in the wheel for the economic system.

I implore them to stay focused on, always attach your efforts to what the goal, what the consumption is. So that is how I get them on the goal. And in every single objection, whether it's what if I live too long, what if I need long-term care, insurance, et cetera, there is a way to minimize that risk or mitigate that risk more efficiently than the way they are doing it right now.

Because honestly, they've just been doing it on autopilot. It's just a backstop reason to back up why they're doing it. You know how some behaviors you'll just do 'em and then you'll throw a reason after the fact on why you're doing it? And you're just doing it because it's on autopilot?

That's a lot of those reasons. Well, I'm working real hard because of whatever. What if I get sick? Like, okay, when you get sick and it's $20,000 a night in the hospital bed, are you really the insurance agent? No, you're buying insurance for that. Let's really think this through.

So when you're sitting across someone, sometimes it's a lot of chalkboard work. You know what I mean? It's a lot of going through it. And that's why I tell people, like, you need to sit down and think about this honestly with yourself and work through these priorities and what your fear is.

Let's go one by one to try to mitigate 'em because if we're solving for the most fulfilling life, everything else is secondary and everything else needs to be solved. We wanna consume as much as possible in the right times. - And you talk a lot about risk, but is it sometimes that risk is really just fear?

- Yeah, it's just fucking fear. And a lot of it's fear of embarrassment, fear of running out of money. That is like the worst thing for people, not because they can't go get some basic job and survive, just the embarrassment, the status, the ego attached to it. And I guess why, because like, if you run out of money or you were at high status and now you're working at McDonald's say, or whatever, and you get that shame and people mocking you, whatever, if you waste your life and die, nobody's mocking you.

You can't know, you're dead. The people who are alive are like, "Wow, that fucking guy, what a clown, dude. "That guy died with $4 billion. "What a fucking idiot. "He got completely habituated "to be a cog in the fucking wheel. "Great one, dude." You know what I mean? "Thank you for your service.

"Thank you for putting out all this value, "getting a fraction of yourself and never using it, "and then donating 40% to the US Treasury. "We fucking love that guy." They don't hear that, they're dead. But if you somehow go start some business and it fails, people are like, "I told you so.

"I knew it was gonna happen. "Shoulda, woulda, coulda." And your ego can't handle that. So I always think it's fear. And the fear is not the actual bad thing. The fear is the ego associated with the failure. But that's just me. - It would help if society put more of an emphasis on like, "Wow, you didn't go and spend your money.

"You didn't go on a trip this year. "You did nothing this year." - Yeah, somebody said, I put it to a bunch of 20-year-olds or a class or something is like, "Who would switch right now with Warren Buffet?" None of 'em. None of 'em. They're like, "Well, he's got X billion dollars or whatever.

"I don't wanna be that rich and old. "There's no amount of money you can give me "to give up my life." So a lot of people are doing some version of this. I always tell people there's no amount of money you can pay me to do five years in Sing Sing.

Maybe at 19 you coulda done it. But right now, no amount of money. And some people are doing some sort of version of jail, giving up their life for this money. - I liked how you reframed someone who wouldn't take the risk to move, to make more money, to do something, as like they're paying to just sit still by not taking up an opportunity.

I like these mindset shifts that you introduce in the book, which is just like, think about it this different way and maybe that'll help you get over that hurdle. - Yeah, just quantify it. And you may come to the same decision. "Yes, I'm happy paying the fines sitting here." Or you might be like, "That's ludicrous.

"I actually would get much more money "and I would be able to spend more quality time "with the people I love that I'm leaving "than I do right now." I've had this conversation where people are like, "Oh, I don't wanna leave New York "because my mom's here and so-and-so's here," et cetera.

I was like, "Okay, let's break this down. "How many times do you see them? "A week, a month, okay. "Let's write that down. "And how many, all right, whatever. "And then, okay, what's the money difference? "And then what's a plane ticket back and forth?" And then you could probably take 'em on vacation and you spend more time.

So, in theory, you can spend more time, more quality time, and make more money, expand your contact network, et cetera, with this move, even though you're saying you don't wanna move because of the people that are here. And sometimes that formula doesn't work out, but at least you go through the exercise.

And then you know you don't have this future regret, like you have this regret minimization. You'd be like, "I made the right decision. "I went through all the avenues, et cetera. "I actually get more time with my family by staying here. "Or I've made the right decision. "I've actually expanded my network, have more money, "and actually spent more time with the people I love "in a better way, in a better format, "in a more fulfilling format." And so, that's the book.

This is the mental model. We're solving for net fulfillment. - I did an interview, episode 40, with Dan Pink, who wrote a book about regret. And he talked about one of the big four regrets is a regret of boldness. And people in their old age are like, "I just wish when I wanted to do this thing, "I went and did it." And I almost feel like a default assumption should be, instead of when you're thinking, "Should I move?

"Should I go on this adventure? "Should I do this thing?" Just try to, every time, be like, "Should I not do it?" Try to always assume that you're going to do this bold thing and see if you can talk yourself out of it instead of talk yourself into it.

It's not easy, but if you're ever faced with this kind of tough, "Should I do this big thing?" Just try to say, "Okay, let's assume I do it. "Why shouldn't I do it?" And I think that could help change that mindset. 'Cause I think it's hard. One thing I did once, and you did a similar one that I think was more extreme, is I find that if you're ever worried about money, go experience what it's like to make money doing something without a job.

So for me, my wife was at Lyft and I was like, "I'm just gonna sign up for a Lyft driver." I did it for two reasons. One, it was really rewarding to realize I can convert my time to money in a moment. If I don't have a job, if I don't have anything, I could still convert it to money.

The second thing it was good was it just put probably too low, but it put a threshold on what my time is worth. And it helped me realize that like every hour I'm not driving my car around picking people up, I am spending money to not do that because I could be making money.

You went panhandling just to try a similar experience. - Yeah, I've done that. That was an exercise from an emotional intelligence class. I went panhandling and it was really, really, really moving, enlightening, humbling, all these things at the same time. One, it was like, "Oh, I can survive." Like I can make $54,000 easy panhandling a year.

That was the kind of annualized, I was running the rate and I didn't even really have a sign or anything. I just took my shirt out, put it in size out, rubbed it on the concrete, and then just had a cup on a corner on an intersection. And I was like, "Well, if I was at a busier intersection." You know, I was like doing the calculations, et cetera.

But I was like, I may be in a humbling situation, but I can make money just in a panhandling way. It was also kind of freeing. But I've always had that risk mindset. Like I'll always be able to exchange hours of my life for money in order to eat, shelter myself.

And I don't mean like, "Hey, I'm living high on the hog. I can get like these cheap ass apartments, these one bedrooms, et cetera." I will always be able to do that. So it liberates me to go, "There's really not that much downside." It's an ego downside, it's a humbling downside, but there's really not much downside.

I should be swinging for the motherfucking fences, even more so. Like I'm okay with it. - You don't really need to insure yourself against the risk that you run out of money because you've now established that like just sitting on the ground can make you money. You could do that when you're young, you could do that when you're old.

If you've established that you can, maybe you're comfortable not saving to insure against every possible risk. - There's people out there who insure against these risks that you don't want to have. These boogeymen that do it for less of a cost of you wasting your life. Like they're more efficient.

Think, any kind of waste in your time, whether you're exchanging your time for money or your money for time, any kind of waste leads to less fulfillment. And so you really want to be like, am I the right person to insure myself against this calamity or should I pay an insurance agent, whatever this fee is, and that will be more efficient, result in net fulfillment for me.

When I look at this activity or whatever, should I be exchanging hours of my life for money or should it be the other way around? What's an hour of my time worth? At this level, at that level, et cetera. These are questions we should be asking ourselves all the time.

Is that shirt really worth two hours of my time? Am I going to get two hours of fulfillment out of it? Does that really fulfill me? You know, that was the beauty of your money or your life is that it really connected me with my values. It really made me think what I want out of life, what I'm willing to give up an hour of my life for or not.

And then also hit home that I really want a value of hour of my time to be extremely high. I went the other way so that I didn't have to worry about it. But even after like, I'd not have to worry about it. Now, let's say I have all these resources called wealth and I have my health.

How am I going to allocate this over my life to get the max fulfillment? That was the next step. I was like, great, now I'm rich. Now, what do I do? When should I spend it all? - Perfect. You just teed up what I want to talk about, which is like implementing this.

I now have a lot of the mindset ideas and the frameworks on how to do this. And when I left the book thinking, I was like, okay, how does someone figure out based on where I'm at today, should I be spending more money? Should I be spending less money?

How do you answer that question? - It's a tricky question. The first thing I ask is the experience that we all want for us is survival. So have we survived for our survival number? So I introduced that concept of like, okay, when you no longer can work or et cetera, do you have enough to have the very basics like food, shelter, clothing?

And depending on where you are, that's a different number. And then after that, like, how do I spend my money? I try and use health as a forcing function because it is on the allocation of spending money. I look at my parents, my ancestors. We literally had to kidnap my mom to take her to Scotland for her 80th birthday.

It was an ordeal. She had the time of her life, but it was like an ordeal to get it. We're like, you're coming, whatever. We're getting you out here. But what I realized is that my mom does not consume much money at all. My grandmother did not consume much money at all.

My dad did not want to leave his apartment when he was coming home. Now, I always say I'm gonna be different 'cause I'm gonna be in shape or whatever, but the reality is I'm going to be some version of that. So I'm like, the idea that I'm going to be having this Chronicle Cruise life at 77 to 86 is bullshit.

I'm not gonna be consuming that much. So I'm thinking if I'm going to have parties, if I'm going to travel, if I'm going to hike these mountains, if I'm going to do these activities, if I'm going to even just go on a walk in the park and do a seven mile hike with my kids, a free activity, those activities belong here and I need to consume them now.

So even the free ones have to get bucketed. And I always think about that aspect of it because I'm like, how do I allocate my fund once my survival is covered? There is no perfect answer, but I do look at that, hey, my net worth should be peaking between 45 and 55.

And if I'm in the peak, how does this curve go down? And I try and match it for me. I've been talking to these doctors like Peter Tia and Chris Renna, et cetera. And what I really want to know is what is the pace of my body deteriorating? What is the pace of my mind deteriorating?

What is the pace of my lung capacity deteriorating? And then I know like, oh, if you are this type of activity, your enjoyment of activity goes down linearly with this decline and your ability to do it completely cuts off once you reach this level. Read somewhere, I think it's like two watt hours per kilogram to climb a flight of stairs or something like that.

There's like formulas out there. I'm like, oh, okay. So if you need to run and play soccer and jump and play basketball, you need X watt hours per kilogram of energy muscle and what that converts to. And then we know how many watt hours per kilogram people have as they age.

And I was like, wow, this would be great to figure out where my consumption is. And that's what I was trying to build with this model. Like you're an optimizer and build this model. And I realized this is impossible. There's so many goddamn inputs. So really it comes down to a mental model of each activity.

Like, okay, here's the straight line to the grave of spending down all my money. Here's kind of the curve I think it should be to get to my survival number, et cetera. And then when I look at my time bucketing, wait a minute, I said I was gonna be spending less, but I like riding on trains and that doesn't take any energy, but it costs a lot of money.

So let's change the spending and the curves like this. So it's not gonna necessarily always be this perfect log normal curve down to zero from your peak. It could be, no, but there's trains and I wanna ride trains and then down. Each person is different. It really takes a lot of thinking, a lot of off autopilot 'cause you have to know what you want.

You have to have an idea at least 70% of what you want. A lot of it's gonna be discovery, potluck. And then you have to think about the wins. You have to be honest with yourself. A lot of people are like, "Oh, I'm in better shape than I was when I was 30 and 50." I'm like, "Well, that means you were just really out of shape at 30." And so that's it.

And I know that's not like the answer people wanna hear. They're like, "I want the spreadsheet and the formula and the detailed thing and I wanna be told." I present like kind of the macro top line. Your net fulfillment is an operation of your wealth, health and time. And I leave it to the crowd to go and be like, "I built this kick-ass spreadsheet." - So let me throw out my version, which is not yet a spreadsheet, but you had this formula where you're like, "Okay, your survival threshold is how much it's gonna cost you to live one year times the number of years left to live and then deduct 70% 'cause that money will grow and you can withdraw from it." So what I'm doing in my head is, okay, assuming you can make money, at some point you'll stop being able to make money and then you'll live for some number of years.

Let's call that number 20. Okay, so you can live for 20 years. How much does it cost you to live in one year? I think everyone always estimates the highest amount it could ever cost you. And I'm gonna use your standpoint of like, actually estimate low 'cause many people end up saving more than they think and spending less.

So it doesn't make sense to go to the extremes. So let's say for the sake of math, you need $50,000 to live in your old age for 20 years times 0.7, that's $700,000, which might seem like a lot, but if you have your whole life to save that $700,000 and let it grow and compound, I guess that would be a number that once you've saved an amount of money that by the time you're, let's call it 65, you will have that, you could stop saving effectively.

I didn't even include social security and all these other things. - It's not necessarily you can stop saving for survival. Now it's maybe you wanna go on some big expensive trip when you're 75. Now we can start talking about our enjoyment, the things that fulfill us besides surviving. We can solve for thriving.

- So you could decide I want to equally distribute my enjoyment of life over my life. And then your goal is, as long as you're putting aside enough to get to 700,000 by the time you're 65, well then every year you could just spend all the excess on enjoyment and you'd be fine.

What that wouldn't let you do is maybe you wanna take this crazy giant adventure when you're 45 or 50, you might wanna save for that. But it made me think that if you've already saved enough that 30, 40 years from now it'll grow to be enough to survive in retirement, all of the excess you can maybe even think of as a separate bucket for enjoying life.

How do I wanna distribute it? And separate your savings that's for living in retirement in a home, being able to feed yourself, there's that money. And I think maybe one thing that I've never really thought of until I'm speaking it out loud right now is, in my mind I'm saving one amount of money that's savings for the future.

But if we separated it out and said, okay well here's how much you've saved and let's set that aside 'cause you need it to live. Now the rest is all money you can spend however you want. And you need to make sure that balance also goes to zero. Like the other one's probably gonna go to zero 'cause you're gonna spend it in retirement.

But that one needs to go to zero. - Correct, and that's what I do in the book. If separating it out makes it easier for you to figure out what experiences do I bring forward or which money do I bring forward and spend now? And what do I push back in terms of just the fun bucket?

My life is covered. Let's just say you had the best pension ever. Now it's just like, wee, where do I spend the money? So like you've covered your pension that covers your survival. Now it's like what fulfills you and when's the best time to consume those experiences that fulfill you?

- And it's probably not when you're retired. - For 99.999 many nines of people it's absolutely not. - Yeah, and particularly for Americans because we don't have the health for the activity. If I went to the Japanese, I would say the curves are distinctly different in Japan than they are in America.

Because when you go to Japan, you'll see 80s and 90s old shopping, hanging out, cleaning, doing whatever, like having this very active life. - Hiking. - Hiking, doing whatever, all kinds of consumption. They're like, yeah, well, I'm gonna travel. I'm gonna go to Australia. And they'll be like, whoa, wait, what?

You're 85 traveling by yourself going to Australia? They can actually consume it for most America, no shock. I've seen it. So many people die on cruise ships, getting out and trying to go swimming on the warm water, having heart attacks and stuff like that. It's amazing when you watch it in real life.

Like if you just observe it. I'm not saying I was out there with a lab coat, watching people, et cetera, but I've seen so many senior geared entertainment activities where it's really not that active. - I love this idea of creating a bucket that is your pension and then the rest you decide how you spend over your life.

And if that number is not decreasing, it sounds like by the time you're 55, non-pension side of it, you're probably doing something wrong. Or you figured out how to live much longer than I'm aware is possible. - You either have kind of like a abnormal time bucket where there's some sort of activity in the future that costs a lot of money.

And that can happen. You can be like, I really love super yacht cruises and this is what I'm saving for. And that's really gonna fulfill me the most. I don't really care about anything. I really want to just play chess because my mental acuity is really stronger now and you're gonna be better at chess now.

And I wanna win tournaments and I just wanna play chess tournaments. And then I wanna go on yacht trips later. And so you can be like, okay, maybe you're not consuming the most money now. But by and large, the rule is it's now or it's a mistake. You're completely fucking it up.

You're doing life wrong. - And it's not just that it's now, it's that now benefits you. I wanna recap what we talked about earlier. It's like doing it now will also benefit you later. - Yeah, it benefits your future self because your future self reaps the memory dividends. Things you did in high school, the things you did in college, the trips you had, the honeymoon you had, the adventure you took, the business you started and failed, the business you started and succeeded.

Like all those things right now, you are reaping the dividends right now. And as I'm talking, there's probably people in the audience. Oh yeah, I remember that, remember that. They're like filled, right? They were getting the same endorphins, et cetera, a piece of that fulfillment as actually doing the activity.

My favorite thing on this is the Coke Pepsi experiment. Do you know about this one? That Pepsi tends to win in a blind taste test, but people, you know, Coke destroys them. And it's because when you consume a Coke, you consume not only the Coke, but all the memories and the advertising associated with it.

'Cause it was more advertised and they've done this with fMRI. You literally consume the experiences when you have a Coke, your prior experiences. You literally are getting memory dividends from the commercial and the advertising and the feel good and have a Coke and a smile and all that stuff.

The years and years of that in your brain is unlocked when you consume a Coke and you know it's a Coke. Same thing happens with every same activity you have. It's like you access and partially relive every single experience that you have when you recall it. And so I always say maximize positive life experiences.

- One of your memory dividend enhancements was like reunions with the people you enjoyed the memories with. And I went on this crazy trip to Australia once where we basically had a bunch of money that we had to spend in seven days. And so it was just kind of a wild, fun time.

And every time I hang out with my friend who we went on this trip with, it's not 100% we were there, but it's not zero. I feel like we have a society where there were lots of family reunions because families are way more distributed. That kind of goes down.

And my wife and I have been talking about whether we have like, I don't know what you call this. Like we have a second wedding where you just invite all of your best friends. It's like what you did for your birthday. Invite all the people you care about on some regular cadence get to really relive those memories and get all this value.

And you don't even have to do the things again. It's not a cultural thing to have friends reunions but I think we should. - I was just joking recently, like these dates on the calendars, these events are just excuses for us to throw parties and see each other. And somebody also just said to me, work is something we do so we have an excuse to hang out with each other.

Thought that was pretty powerful and that's true to a certain extent. That's the people that, well, I love my job. Well, you really love the people. - I think that's a lot why people I know in the last few years being home and not seeing them, they're like, I hate my job.

It's like, well, maybe you don't hate your job. Maybe it's just the thing that you thought you loved was your job. And you actually just love the people you're around all the time. And if you're not around them or you're just only seeing them on a screen or something and you don't have that social stuff, it feels different.

- I encourage people to deconstruct what is it about the job you love and has the job replaced other muscles? Have you atrophied your social muscle to go meet people and hang out and have dinner and go out to lunch with people because work is the only place that you did these things.

And so the thing you loved was, oh, wow, I let work consume everything. Like I don't take vacations. I don't do walks in parks. I'm not really to the extent that I would like to do. And I've let work take it all over. It's how I met my spouse or my significant other.

It's where I go figure out to go eat. It's where most of my dinner is going out on a town or business dinners or whatever. Where I go to lunch is usually close to work, et cetera. And those things are enjoyable, but it's not the work. It's, I like going to lunch with people.

I like camaraderie. I like seeing these people. I like going to fancy dinners and stuff like that. When people retire or quit these jobs sitting remote, they're like, fuck, I don't know what to do with myself. And I'm like, it's because you've atrophied all these other muscles and you put all your time into habituating yourself and to being very good at this thing.

And this thing has been your whole life, your whole world. But it doesn't mean that's the optimal place for you to build social relationships, to find a mate, to pick dinner spots, to pick lunch spot. It just became the default autopilot thing to do. - I've learned so much this past year from the classes I've taken on Masterclass, and I am excited to partner with them for this episode.

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So, please consider supporting those who support us. I've spent a bunch of time talking to people in the financial independence movement, people who are, let's save all the money we can, let's spend nothing so that we can be financially free. Some want to retire early, some just want independence.

What's your take on FIRE? I have a couple of takes. The things I like about it and the things I absolutely hate. The thing I like about it is the FIRE movement forces you to be aware of the concept of enough. It forces you to get on autopilot, what things are important to me, what am I consuming because I really enjoy it and it fulfills me, and what am I consuming just to consume it, like advertising and I'm on some sort of consumption autopilot.

It really gets them to think about their lives in a totality, what the things that they really wanna be doing, like I really wanna do this for the rest of my life, I really wanna do this for my life, and they use FIRE as a tool to get that.

Things I hate about FIRE. One is they all follow this model of, I'm gonna work, work, work, I'm gonna save up this money and I'm going to live off the interest. And I'm like, what about the fucking principle? You gotta spend down the principle. It's all about not giving your life away to money but having an enjoyable life, but like you're giving your life away to money that you're never gonna spend down.

So they need to readjust their formulas to include spending down the principle, okay? Two, at the extreme, these guys are doing a version of autopilot and making a fatal error of not paying attention to time bucketing and the power of memory dividends. They're basically doing a version of, I'm going to go to jail for seven years or 10 years in order to be free and have a great life from 40 on, or whatever their retirement age is.

Going back to my original statement, there's no amount of money you can pay me to do five years in Sing Sing. Well, these guys are doing 10, 12 year stints in Sing Sing. And there are certain activities, certain expenditures that you should be having that only fit in that 30 to 45 bucket.

They're giving that up unconsciously for some future Shangri-La. And then they get to the future Shangri-La, and I'm not saying it's not great, but like, fuck, I really regret not doing X, Y, and Z. Or I should have done this when grandmother was alive. Or I should have done this when my kids were young and we should have went to Disney World instead of saving money to go on an extra trip now.

At the extreme, FIRE is another version of autopilot. It's not really correctly solving for net fulfillment, and there needs to be some adjustments. - Somewhere in the middle between the FIRE autopilot and the standard American autopilot is probably optimal. - Yeah, it's definitely great. It's just like, okay, these are people who like, they got the spreadsheet, they're in touch with what they want, they know the concept of nothing.

I'm like, guys, why are you not spending on a principal? This is craziness. You're trying to get the most out of life, but you exchange 10 years of your life for something that you're never gonna consume. You're just gonna consume the drips and drabs of it. - Is that like the 2% rule?

I'm making it up, but it's like, if you could live off the interest at 4% forever, what would you need to just not spend at all? - What I tell these people is that basically, you're overworking. You're giving up an extra two or three years of your life because you're not including spending down the principal.

You're overshooting. The main thing is though, that autopilot really leads to future regret with certain experiences if they're not really conscious about what experiences belong when. - You didn't mention one criticism that I have, which is it assumes often, at least with the retire early side, that once you stop working, you don't make money.

And I think most people, I'm sure there are exceptions, but most people can't just do nothing for 50 years, especially when those years are in your 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s. So I think if you assume you're not gonna work at all, then you need so much money.

But if you assume maybe you could work some, then it changes the calculus wildly. Like you go from needing millions and millions of dollars to maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. - Yeah, the sledgehammer of fire in our culture is probably more needed than not the sledgehammer of fire because we have so many people just needlessly attached to things that don't serve them that they don't even really want.

But there's plenty of criticism of the fire's autopilot and that sledgehammer and that kind of militant, I'm gonna save for this and whatever. There's these assumptions in there that are not true. You pointed out that, yeah, you're probably gonna work or have a side hustle or sell your art that you're gonna make or whatever.

There'll be some form of income that you could have or you will have. Not everybody, somebody's gonna be like, not me, I'm going backpacking and I'm not making a dime. Okay, you're that guy. There is a version of autopilot and fire and it's dangerous because I'm talking about wasting your life.

And when you say, I'm gonna grind, not consume, not go anywhere for 10 years, I'm like, that's a lot of fucking life or 15 years to be giving away. That's extremely dangerous in the net fulfillment game, in the not waste your life game. - I'm much more comfortable with if there was a way to reframe it as like, you need this much money to experiment with financial independence for a period of time, which is like maybe change your job to a job that pays less, that gives you the time you want.

But that number is so much smaller that you don't need to save it by giving up everything. So I'm gonna challenge anyone in the audience and email me, just Chris at AllTheHacks. If anyone wants to try to like build a model or a framework or something to try to create this middle ground, I wanna see it.

I wanna get in the spreadsheet. I wanna build the model with you and see if we could do it. - You have to take an individualistic approach though. The problem with like building a spreadsheet for just the masses is that everyone is different and everybody has different things that fulfill them, which means they're always gonna have different spend curves and different needs.

And you'd be like, yeah, the thing you want, you really need to just bust your ass for two years and get it, right? 'Cause there's this step function and cost. Like the only thing I want is a trip to Mars and that ticket costs $225,000. Well, okay, there's no half going to Mars.

You have to get the $225,000 or whatever the price is. I'm making that up. But if it's like, I like roller skating and I like hanging out with my kids and I like whatever. And then there's some middle ground. You can still roller skate. Let's go roller skating now.

You don't have to save up all the money to go roller skating 10 years from now. As a matter of fact, daughter's probably not gonna go roller skating with you 10 years from now. She's gotta have her own life and her own thing. So let's optimize for that thing that fulfills you.

You can build a model spreadsheet for kind of like the average person, which there's no such thing as the average person, but it's very like, this is me. I've built out this spreadsheet. And I think the beauty of that spreadsheet that somebody builds out is not the actual formulas that I'll be able to copy and paste to my life, but the methodology of their thinking.

It's the model that is the most powerful thing. You want the method of thinking like, how do I think about this problem? What variables do I consider? - I think the thing we might be able to build pretty easily. So in the Wealthfront app, there's this idea of an FU number.

We call it the financial utopia number. But the idea is once you have this amount of money, you could stop working. And the number that I want to build a simple calculator for is kind of like the pension number, where it's like, once you've started saving X, you've solved for the money you need to live in retirement.

It's not about stopping working. It's about starting to realize you now have crossed over a threshold of being on track to pay for life in retirement, basic needs, that you're now at a point where you can start to allocate your excess. You could allocate it now, you could allocate it in the future, but I imagine that for many people, getting to the point that they're like, just maxing out their 401k gets them to that point.

Like if you max out your 401k for your whole life, and I haven't done the math, but maybe you have solved for retirement basic needs. And now you're at a point that you can figure out what to do with all of your excess each month. Sure, you could save it so you can spend it in your 50s.

You can spend it in your 30s. You could spend it in your 70s, but at least coming up with a framework to help people understand. Because in the Wealthfront app, we say, okay, this is your financial utopia number, your FU number, but it might be $5 million because if you're 30, it's the amount of money you need today to never work again and keep spending what you spend today.

But I don't know if that's helpful. I think it'd be more helpful to have a number that is here is how much money you need to have saved to have retirement solved. And now all the excess that you save each month, you could spend. That simple thing might be universal.

Obviously it would need variables of how much you need to spend in retirement. - I think it helps get the concept across. I would say that it's not optimal, the front load you're saving for retirement, and then go say the rest of the money I make is for goofing off and allocating it.

I think getting the concept across and people freeing their mind, I'm like, holy shit, this money is for fun. And when do I wanna have fun? And I'm gonna allocate the fun at the right times in my life. It's powerful. What I would say is that you don't work two years for retirement and then start spending spun.

You work some for retirement and some goes to fund, some goes to fund, and it gets there at a certain point, particularly because of time bucketing and the fact that certain experiences belong then. And if you take that money, and if you don't have that experience in this time period, you never have that experience.

And that leads to future regret and less fulfillment. And so it is not optimal, the front load retirement. May solve some sort of fear in you, but to get the concept across, I think most of your audience is like, they really have retirement covered, right? They really have their survival number covered.

So if they could separate that out, maybe some of the young people don't, but if you can separate that out and think, okay, I'm putting this into a retirement bucket. I'm on track to hit retirement. How do I spend my fun money? And how do I allocate that throughout my life?

I think it's better than nothing 'cause it's mainly getting that concept across. It's the way of thinking. I want it to sink in. I wrote the book not as like some sort of economics book or physics book or calculus book. The reason why the book has stories in it is because you have to get past people's habits and egos.

There's a reason why the book starts out with a death, a premature death. It's because immediately your ego disappears and you think, yeah, I'm going to die. How am I gonna allocate the hours of my life? How am I gonna spend the money? Even though my life is longer, and this guy's was two years, we have the same problem.

And the reason why we go over objections is to get it in a way to get past your ego, the habits that you're formed so that you actually execute on these ideas, build on these ideas to have a more fulfilling life. You probably heard me say it, I'm out here trying to save people's lives.

And a lot of times people are like, the fuck are you talking about, Perkins, save people's lives? You wrote a goddamn book about optimizing and net fulfillment. And I use this example of, listen, when you pull somebody drowning in a pool, they're drowning and you pull them out, you give them mouth to mouth and get the water out or whatever.

And they're like, oh my God, you saved my life. I'm like, guess what? They're still gonna fucking die. They're just not gonna die that day. They're still going to die, 100%. So what have you given them? You've given them more choices, more time, more experience, more I love yous, more going to the opera, more hanging out with their grandmother.

You've given them more of their life, more experience to have and then they ultimately die. And so with this book, when I get you to optimize for net fulfillment, I'm giving you more choices, more trips with grandma, more going to the opera, more charities, more ski trips. It's the same thing.

It's the same thing. In my mind, I'm just gonna go with that. So I'm like a fanatic when it comes to this because I truly believe that when you optimize your life that much, just the same way you optimize by saving, you get more trips and more life, that I'm saving people's lives.

- I've started putting some of this into place. My wife and I actually had a conversation about money. My wife was like, oh, we should try to hit this goal. And then I was like, no, no, no. I've been reading this book. Why are we even trying to hit a higher goal?

What is it even for? And now we're like, no, we actually have a new net worth goal and it's down. - Yeah, it might be. That conversation is a great one to have because she might pull something out because this is the trip I wanna go on. And it's like this big expensive thing or I wanna fly around in a G650 or whatever it is.

You'd be like, okay, at least we've attached what we're working for. A lot of people forget what they're working for. If you ask them, they'll just regurgitate the autopilot answer. To get more money to the thing or whatever, because it's like, no, stop, stop, stop. You're going to work and they're gonna give you money.

What's the money for? Why do you need more money? What can you not afford that you need to work for in order to consume? And then we have a real conversation. - She would be the first to admit she was just on this path of accumulate, accumulate. She hadn't taken the pause to think about it.

- And then when we did, it clicked and the conversation was totally different. I still think we need to figure out what we wanna do with money and savings and spending and when we wanna do it. But I think we've both now been like, we're off the, let's just rack up money.

That is no longer a goal. So thank you. - I'm gonna hit a point because a lot of people are probably thinking, well, there's nothing I wanna do. They're listening to this and they're like, I don't wanna do anything else. And the reason why you don't wanna do anything else is because you've been a rat on a wheel.

You haven't been exercising those muscles. You don't know how to play anymore. You forgot. You do wanna do things. They're just buried so deep under all these routines you built to acquiring money. And those muscles are so atrophied. It's like you haven't gone to the gym for five years.

You can come in and you try and lift 225 pounds. It's not happening. You need to build up into it. You need to start small and be like, okay, let me think about these things I wanna do. Do I really like that? Let me just go out and discover because life is discovery.

You don't necessarily know everything you wanna do. You have to go out and be exposed to it. But you have only been exposed to work and making more money and climbing the career ladder and doing more deals and solving this puzzle that you've been solving that you've been addicted for.

And you haven't been working on the what fulfills me? What trips do I like? What experience do I have? How would I spend money if I had it? You don't even think about those things. And so it takes time. Don't be discouraged. You're not going to just show up in the gym once and get in shape overnight.

You're not gonna just quit your job and know exactly what you wanna do overnight. You have to build yourself back up. You have to get back in touch and don't get discouraged. If I quit completely doing training and I think about this all the time, wow, I got a lot of time.

I don't know what to do. And you get this panic, oh, I gotta go back to work. You just got thrown into the water and you forgot how to swim. You're like, calm down, float for a little bit. Do a little stroke, you'll get there. Then you'll have the more fulfilling life.

- Awesome. And a couple of random things totally separate that I think maybe tie in, maybe don't. - Okay. - Before we wrap. I wanna just get your take. You're an optimizer. You wrote a book about optimizing, me too. Talk me through a few things that I just need someone like you to tell me why I'm being crazy.

I think one of the challenges I have with both money and you made a joke about a person that's accumulated millions of miles, that's me. And one of my challenges with using money, miles, currency, anything, is that I'm aware of how much more optimal it could be used. I know that if I really find the right trip, 500,000 miles will take the whole family around the world.

But if I book it today for the thing I want, it's a million and I struggle. Or we were talking about the holidays this year. We're like, we have time off, we don't have plans, but wow, it's four times more expensive to go on any vacation at the end of December than it is in January.

We don't have the time off in January, so we're not actually gonna do that. But in my mind, it's like punt 'cause it's an inoptimal use of that money. - My main thing for you is you're solving for max flyer miles and you're not solving for max fulfillment. - Yeah.

- And so what you don't realize is that max fulfillment for you costs this much and that's just the cost. So there's a time period where it belongs and this is the optimal time for it to happen and this is the purchase price. And you're like, but I can do the trip at a suboptimal time at less fulfillment for 500,000 miles.

And I'm like, you can do that, but realize that you're solving for spending less miles and not solving for max fulfillment. If you're the type of guy that when you look back on your death bed, you'd be like, wow, I saved all these goddamn miles as opposed to, holy shit, I fucked up my fulfillment in this time period when my kids were this age, when it was time for me to doing this and I misallocated my time, then go ahead and solve for miles.

- Or money in that case also. - Yeah, money, miles, whatever it is you're solving for, you're optimizing for miles. And I'm like, listen, fulfillment first, miles second. There's gonna be some blend, but the maximum fulfillment is what we're solving for. And so sometimes you're gonna have to vaporize the miles 'cause that's what it costs.

And then lo and behold, the airlines know this. They know that in Western culture, these holidays, this is when people want to fulfill their lives, et cetera, so we get to charge more for fulfillment. And when kids are in finals, et cetera, there's no family trips, et cetera, so we can charge less.

They know this. This is the cost of fulfillment, everything costs. And you're like, no, no, no, no, I wanna just have the lowest cost. And I'm like, no, I wanna have the highest fulfillment. So if you get back on, I'm solving for max fulfillment with my family, I think you'll become less detached on the value of the conversion of the points for certain activities.

- Maybe the answer is, sit down and say, look, we have two choices. And in the next X hours, days, whatever, we're gonna pick one. Either we actually do commit and we go book the trip in January when it's better. I'm not saying punt years. I'm saying either you say, look, we're just gonna find a way to make it work at a lower price, or we're just gonna pay the price to go when it's convenient but not let ourselves escape the decision.

I think that's the thing. It's like you either pay up because you want the fulfillment or you adjust life to make it work at a better price as long as you don't not take the experience. - To me, it's like trip here, trip here, trip here, trip here, trip here.

What is the most fulfilling? Is it worth it? What is gives me the net fulfillment? It might be not the January. It might be trip here and another trip and two trips. And since they're in the same time bucket, that's actually more fulfillment. Two different environments, et cetera. There's gonna be a lot of variables.

Like we'd get off the chalkboard. I'd go over with you and I'm like, all right, you're really gonna take two trips? Yeah, I'm really gonna take two trips. And that's a million miles for two trips, but it's not over Christmas. How do you feel about the fulfillment score? Let's put a fulfillment score on each trip.

Okay, it seems to add up more than the trip over Christmas. Are we sure about that? Yeah, we're sure about that. We're not sure about that. We'd go through this whole exercise with your wife and talk about it. And then we'd come to a decision and then we would make the right decision knowing that we solve for net fulfillment, not miles.

The miles was an input. It's like wealth, health and time, right? So miles is kind of in the wealth bucket. That was an input to solve for net fulfillment. And we slid it back and forth in time. Like, all right, two trips. Two trips, not Christmas actually is better.

We'll hang out at home and play board games and then go on two trips. I look forward to sending you a note saying, we took the trip or the two trips or the three trips. Whatever it works out to be or a trip and a half or a trip plus an upgrade.

These are the things that I don't have the right answer because the inputs matter the most, but like the mental model is there. Like you're thinking about it. The other thing I wanna touch on is health. So it seems like one of the biggest opportunities to unlock a lot of this equation is to be healthier, live longer.

You talked about how in Japan people are just as a society that, I know you've spent a lot of time with some of these great doctors. Are there things that someone listening who doesn't get a chance to talk to Peter or Tia or something on a regular basis, is there stuff you've learned, whether it's tests to consider doing now or ways you've changed your diet or your health that people could do to improve or extend the time that they can do more active things and I guess live longer or?

- I think I pay a lot for the last 15%. Like 85%, even the fanciest doctors, it's all low hanging fruit. And the lowest hanging fruit is like, hey, do an activity that makes you sweat for four hours a week, maintain your weight, try not to consume added sugar, reduce all your sugars in your sugar intake, no alcohol, don't smoke.

Like the super low hanging fruit about not being overweight, staying in shape, not consuming added sugars, like sugar is the worst, and exercise, even if it's hiking or walking three miles a day or three miles, four times a week or something like that, that's amazing low hanging fruit to make your current experiences better and your future experiences better.

Because activity by health is the fulfillment and if your health is shitty, either you don't get to do the activity or the activity is not as enjoyable. I used to walk like seven to 12 miles around Paris when I was there, just with a backpack on. Now I can maybe do six or five before I'm like, my knees kinda hurt, I don't like it anymore.

So I got more of Paris. On a trip for the same dollar than I do now. And the more in shape I am, the less overweight I am, the less weight I'm carrying and force I'm hitting into my knees, the more enjoyable every single activity is. I would argue and say to people like, that low hanging fruit has such a huge yield on your fulfillment.

Whether you're gonna be able to enjoy playing with your kids or relatives or be around or even enjoy getting on a plane, et cetera, later on in life is highly correlated and highly dependent on the state of your health right now. I can't emphasize it enough. It's not a health book.

I'm like, listen, there are tons of book, podcasts, motivational speakers, et cetera, on like how to be healthy. And I just say, this vertical is uber important. Make sure you're addressed it. Try and do activities that fulfill you irrespective of the health benefits. And one of the ones I found is hiking.

Like going hiking with a friend, I get a great experience talking with them, seeing nature, discovering what's around me. And it's also has these health benefits, cardio benefits, strength, legs, et cetera, that make future experiences better. So I get a double whammy. - Yeah. - Not overeating, not doing X, Y, and Z.

Try and develop the habits that lead you to the goal 'cause your motivation goes up and down. So develop these habits. Get rid of the snacks, make 'em move far away. Don't even buy 'em. Then you can't get to 'em. - You said, if you're looking at a cookie, just be like, is this cookie worth an hour on the treadmill?

- That's the way I do it. I convert all these things into like time. Some resources that I'm fighting for, which I think at the end of the day, everybody's fighting for. They want free time. They want time to do what they want. They want more time on the planet.

And so, if I'm trying to maintain my health and my weight is very important to my future enjoyment, my knees, et cetera, like, is that cookie worth an hour on the treadmill? Sometimes a cookie is actually worth an hour on a treadmill. If it's a nice, good chocolate chip cookie, I will go on the treadmill for these cookies.

And sometimes it's, nope. (laughs) - What if I push you since you said you'd answer anything, like to peel back some of that 15% that you've learned that I might not know? - I think diagnostics is the key. Many diseases, ailments, and their progression are thwarted if you find them earlier enough.

Some of the cancers that are like always fatal, if they had a test for it and they found it early, you'd survive. Heart diagnostics, MRI diagnostics. Somebody once said to me, "You should be spending 10% of your income on your health." I was like, that's fucking crazy. I have a pretty high income.

Then I thought about it and I was like, no, that includes like diet, whether I buy pre-packaged meals or have a chef, that includes doctors, diagnosis, et cetera, health plans. And I was like, it's actually low. - Yeah. - It's actually low. It's so important. And so, a lot of the secret sauce of these doctors is, you know, every quarter they come in and they draw like 32, 36 vials of blood.

This is your mineral absorption. This is so-and-so. This is what your thyroid is doing. And this is whatever. And here's all the metrics. And you're kind of out over here. Like you need to do Edware and here's your cholesterol. And these things, that preventative, ounce of paraphernalia is worth a pound of cura.

That is the key. - Yeah. - And the prescription of like, you need to be doing more cardio or you need to do this, or you should be avoiding these foods because they inflame you. And inflammation is death. So, diagnostics, diagnostics. - One of the companies that I partner with on the show is called Inside Tracker.

And they do 43 biomarker paired with genetic testing to give you an analysis of both like, different biomarkers and what that means, what your optimal range is adjusted for your genetics, and like what your inner age is, which is like looking at all the biomarkers of where you should be.

Are you like ahead or behind? So, that's one thing that's a little more accessible. I know there's some GRAIL tests for early cancer detection. I know there's PRENUVO, which is like the full body MRI. So, I'll punt on pushing on the 15%. And I'm just gonna go find a doctor who I've met, and we're gonna go deeper on this.

- Yeah, you do the MRI, you look at your telomeres, they're like, "Oh, you can do a hyperbaric chamber." Like one of the things you can do that is out of Israeli studies, I'll go into one of the cutting edge, but pain in the ass things, okay? That I actually stopped doing.

You can go to hyperbaric chamber for two hours, and in theory, it lengthens your telomeres, it makes you younger at the cellular level. - Wow. - Which means in theory, you know, you're gonna live longer 'cause your organs are not gonna break down at the time, they're gonna break down, you're gonna get some extension on your telomeres.

And it has all these other therapeutic supposed properties. So, I'd have to go drive an hour to the hyperbaric chamber. I was gonna run the same experiment that the Israelis did. So, you have to do X months of hyperbaric chambers, whatever it is, it's a lot. But the place I had to go to was an hour away.

You go dive down, you dive to pressure. So, it takes a while to get to pressure. Then you stay at pressure for an hour or whatever the timeframe is, and then you have to come out. And then I gotta drive an hour back. And I was like, okay, I'm going to get X benefit and live longer this timeframe, but I'm wasting three to four hours a day traveling to this hyperbaric chamber back and forth.

And I was just like, nope, not worth it. I'll die earlier. You know what I mean? I'll die a year earlier or whatever it is. Time is too valuable to me right now in this time bucket. So, that's one, hyperbaric chambers. - But might not be worth it. - No, it's not be worth it.

I mean, if I had a hyperbaric chamber in my house and I could just do it when I sleep, I'd be like, I would 100% do it. But that commute to the facility was just absolutely crushing me. - Yeah, I feel that way about cold plunge and sauna to the extent that it's like, I should just get one and put it outside.

- The sauna, there's data on the health benefits. The cold, the studies aren't there. There may be benefits and people are raving about the benefits, but the research isn't there. A sauna definitely confers health benefits, longevity, less chance of a heart attack, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. The sauna's a hack.

There's all these like other hacks that are out there. - That's the show. So, I'm gonna totally hack the sauna. Hyperbaric chamber might not be worth it, but it's out there. Full diagnostics, MRIs, those 3D colon scanners where they actually scan your whole body. There's latest and greatest imaging technology, et cetera, where they're gonna scan you and be like, oh, you got too much visceral fat, you got this.

I remember when I went there and they were like, do you smoke? And I was like, no. He's like, yeah, I can tell when I look at your liver. I can tell what you do. They can tell my habits based on looking at my insides. - Wow. - And I was like, okay, I like this.

- I just wrote a newsletter about FSAs and HSAs. So, one cool hack to compound it is you could put pre-tax money in from your employer and then use that for some of these health things that aren't covered by insurance. We've done that for LASIK, for IVF, for blood tests, all that kind of stuff.

But the last thing I wanna jump on is every time I talk to someone, I let them pick a place that they're pretty familiar with in the world and tell people that are headed there how to have a great day there, whether it's doing, drinking, dining, anything. So, pick a place.

- I'm gonna pick St. Barts. So, one, get prepared to spend money. Not a cheap island. You can do it cheap. I'm sure you'll hack away and find the great Airbnb on a discount, on a so-and-so, or be a room reviewer or something like that gets you down there cheap.

But let's say you get down there. St. Barts is what I think the perfect match of beauty and environment and commerce and fun. I would recommend either staying on Fleman's Beach, Fleman, or Grand Cul-de-Sac, like Bartholomew, or at the Eden Rocks. The main thing is the food. So, you wanna go get yourself a little Moke car or something that's a convertible when you rent a car, and make sure you drive around the island.

It's not that far to drive around the island. You can drive a little bit and check out little areas. You wanna go to visit all the beaches. I think Governor Beach is probably the best beach in the world, or one of the best beaches in the world. But I also enjoy St.

Lean Beach, Grand Cul-de-Sac, all these places. Eating along the beach and just checking the vibe and hanging out is amazing. At Shell Beach, there's a restaurant there. You definitely wanna have lunch there. There's Le Tamarin, which is like kinda in this garden. At night, you definitely wanna eat there.

I would say more for dinner than the lunch. There's always gonna be a party somewhere, someplace. So, in Gustavia, walking around and shopping, there's Nikki Beach, there's the hotels, there's kite surfing, there's lounging. I would say definitely visit the other hotels and have lunch on the beach. Like, that's good places.

And then go check out the little shops. A lot of it is vibing and hiking and driving around and just finding little places and enjoying the nexus of the French culture. Because the French are known for being rude, but in St. Barts, it's the nicest of the French. It's competitive to come work there and come be there.

So, you don't get the rude French, you get the nice French. And you get French cuisine, which is amazing. It's very good. And you get a beautiful island and crystal clear water and great beaches and windsurfing and paddle surfing and swimming with turtles and things like that. And then you get to drive.

This island has different climates where it has a dry side and a wet side. And there's all kinds of little experiences you can have in the island life way. - I'm ready to go. (laughing) - It's developed enough, but not overdeveloped. That's what I would say. And that's the beauty of St.

Barts. And it's clean and it's safe. - Sounds fantastic. - The biggest drawback to St. Barts is it's expensive. - Well, there's a time for expensive trips. Save for it. - There is a time. - Budget it. Spend the money on the trip. Don't die with it. I think that's my takeaway.

- Yeah, that's your takeaway. - Any parting advice or places people should head to check you out where you're working online? - I use Instagram and Instagram stories as kind of like my own life diary. Going back to that hack, how can you use the memory dividend? I use my stories as my memory dividend.

They save to my phone and get backed up to Google Cloud. And then, you know, it will show like on this day and I'll have all these little snippets and videos of like what happened on this trip or what I did. So I am Bill Perkins on Instagram. You can follow me.

Sometimes it's just me and my cat doing nothing exciting, but sometimes it's exciting. If you want hot takes or chaos, you can follow me on Twitter, @bp22 on Twitter. I don't recommend it. Sometimes it's markets. Sometimes it's finance advice. Sometimes it's hot political takes. I'm a libertarian, so everybody hates me.

Left, the right. Sometimes it's just goofing off. If you're in for the chaos. It's a format that I like where I can actually interact with people enough and talk to them, et cetera. So I love Twitter too much. - But diewithzerobook.com. - Oh, diewithzerobook. We're all where books are sold everywhere.

It's on audio book. You can listen to it. You can read it everywhere, diewithzerobook.com. You can go there. It'll list the languages that it's sold. So it's in Spanish. It's in Polish. It's in Chinese. It's in German. It's in Japanese. And actually the book is most successful in Japan.

- That's awesome. - The book is everywhere. That's what I mean to say. - I have the book. I recommend the book. It's had a huge impact on me. Thanks for writing it. Thank you for being here. - I'm glad to be here. Thanks for hearing me blather. I'm always down to blather again if you want.

- I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) (electronic beeping) (electronic buzzing) (birds chirping)