#2 - Bill Perkins: Sex, Markets and Maximizing Life Fulfillment

27:49if you could make a heat map of the US of healthy versus unhealthy competition as a sort of vibe of different areas and states, for example. It sounds like what you're describing. Texas is more of a...

28:06People see each other less as competitors for some reason, right? Yeah, I would say we see more people as human beings on their own journey and you wish them the best. But I would say that's almost true of New York as well. New York is very competitive. There is a huge envy component in New York City. Massive, massive envy component in New York City where it's not here. Particularly in Austin. So where does that envy come from in this average New Yorker that you've experienced? You worked on Wall Street for a while. Is it coming from there, for example? Yeah, I guess there's, you know, in finance, it's like, I guess, let's just look at the basics, right?

28:49Like people are trying to have the best returns, right? The biggest funds, right? The best whatever. There's very much a relative yardstick, right? There's no absolute, like, holy shit, you're doing well and this is great and you're getting enough and you've researched the concept of enough. There's no concept of enough. It's, I must be better than this guy, or my fund, whatever. Even when they reported on the news, it was like, oh, Citadel passed Bridgewater as the best fund ever. I was like, who gives a fuck? You got a couple billion dollars. Right, exactly. But it's like, holy shit. Then the other hedge funds are like, I got to be the best hedge fund ever for whatever.

29:29Instead of like, I'm just doing well for my clients and I'm taking appropriate risk and returning, and the pension funders are going to have a good, be able to live a good life. I think it's baked into the way we wrap messages and information in New York City. It's all very quantified, actually, right? Everything is reduced. As you say, who's got the biggest hedge fund? Best returns, best sharp ratio, best whatever, this, that. They're competing for dollars or allocations from fund to funds. So I think it's kind of baked in there. Is that because quantification, do you think, is in many ways, because it's a compression, it's a reductionism of something to a single metric?

30:10Yeah. Right? Which can be very useful for gamification, which is something I'd like to get into. But at the same time, it does tend to reduce. If you're comparing people literally by the number of dollars in their bank account, that is fundamentally reducing them to this single metric. And in a certain way it is. Not everybody can be a financial trader or a financial advisor or whatever, a wealth allocator, right? And for like, you're Joe so-and-so and you have a pension and you have to allocate, like you've got to allocate your capital to the right person. And in New York City, here's the jungle where people are trying to do that.

30:42And not everybody can be a great designer or whatever. They might have an artistic competition, but they can't be a commercial designer, let's say. And so there is, you know, it's like a massive competition. And people get caught up in that. That doesn't mean you can't live in New York City and not get caught up in there and have your artistic expression. or your financial expression, whatever. Or your financial expression be like, I have enough. I don't need to be X, Y, and Z. But there's this huge sucking thing, right? And on top of that, there's these events and cool things that are going on in New York City that you get shut out of unless you're either a friend of a person who's in the top of XYZ or the top designer or the top whatever, or you're that person, right?

31:29Right. And, you know, I don't want to say like it's all bad because, you know, there's 1.8 million. You can't have a party and have 1.8 million people show up your door, right? Like, so you've got to have some. You need to have boundaries. They've got to have some sort of filter. Like, all right, we're going to filter for the richest, the best looking and the tops in their industry. Right. So they don't have to be rich, but they've got to be like badass in what they're doing. right like and so you know that that creates these bubbles of competition and bubbles like well i really wanted to go in there because that's where all the hot girls were and the cool people were so i need to really work hard and do the thing and compete and whatever you know what i mean and so i can get to go to this thing or whatever and i don't think it's very conscious i think it's subconscious right it's like another form of rejection right like you're a guy by the time you're in your 20s you've had so much rejection it's it's a silly um from from women right and it's just you're just like you know you're not like all sad about it you're just like i just gotta you know this is like get you going to get to the point so where it's not an issue right so when you were working as a trader what like how much sort of if any like moral calculus was going on either from you or from your peers in terms of deciding, is this trade a good thing?

32:56Because obviously you're looking for trades, whether they're profitable for yourself and for your company, for your fund. Were there any other calculuses going on in terms of, well, actually this is probably a bad thing to be trading because there's a bunch of negative externalities? Did you think about the externalities of trades? Absolutely 100 % zero. Wow. So I'm not in equities, right? I'm in commodities. And so, first of all, when I was in New York, I was like a screen clerk, a peon, just like driving a limo at night to make ends meet, right? And so I didn't really start. I became a broker.

33:32And being a broker versus a trader, I use this so people understand. Imagine a person who buys and sells real estate and they risk their own money selling real estate, and then imagine the real estate agent. That's the difference, right? So one's a trader. That's the person taking risks, buying houses, selling houses. And the broker is just, I make money no matter what. Just hope there's transactions. Just taking a piece, yeah. So I was a broker for a bit, and that was a lucrative position. I hated it. Absolutely fucking hated it. Why? Because I wasn't in control of my own destiny as much as I wanted to be.

34:07It was like, does this guy like me? Does he have a cousin? Maybe he got to fight with his wife, and he doesn't want to do a deal with me. you know got to go out and schmooze him take him to dinner and have a relationship and not that that wasn't fun like um but it just was like i am completely dependent on this like social aspect and dynamic of other people yes i can be a good broker and on top of things or whatever but there's hundreds of brokers trying to get the deal from the client right and and and it's even if you're the best broker, the differentiation is not that great to overcome, this is my boy from college, I'm going to give him all the deals, not you.

34:49Or I've known this guy forever, or he's my brother's cousin's nephew's uncle or something like that. And so it was just absolutely hell for me, even though it was paying me more money than I'd ever made my entire life and more than my parents had made and stuff like that. I really wanted to be a trader. And I also realized that being a broker is capped, and being a trader is uncapped. And so I had read a book around this time called Your Money or Your Life by Dominguez and Robbins, I believe. And it explains the concept of what money is. And one of their definitions, kind of like the definition that universally holds the most, is something we exchange hours of our life for.

35:40And so the book is really about understanding the concept enough, getting in touch with what you really want, what are you exchanging hours of your life for. It's a very didactic book. It goes through all kinds of exercises. But what happens is you get a visceral appreciation of exchanging hours of your life for money. And then you get in touch with your value system. So a lot of people, after reading that book, they're like, shit, why am I driving this fancy car? I don't need this. This is just an ego thing. This is enough. I don't need to be working for this. And I don't need to be working for this status symbol.

36:13And this is what I really want. And therefore, they downsize or switch jobs or whatever. And they live the life that they really want to live. They get in touch with myself. What I got out from that was that I want one hour of my life to be worth like 30 ,000 of other people's hours left. So I can just exchange, you know, a minute of my life or like 10 hours of your life or whatever. And I never want to have to worry about the price. So it's a kind of a weird perverted thing. Yeah. Like I want the opposite way of the intended effect. And so I was like, the way to do that is leverage, right? Like I look at the world of leverage, like my time is leverage.

36:50and financial trading was the ultimate form of leverage. Because even if I was a broker and I was getting a great rate, I'm still an hourly worker. Even if I'm a lawyer and I have the biggest rate, unless I'm getting a percentage of deals, I'm still an hourly worker. So no matter how, like I can think of all these fancy jobs where people get paid a lot, even a movie star, he's still a fucking hourly worker. It's a great rate. There is a rate you can pay at an hour where it's okay. It's worth it. But financial trading was unlimited. And so I was like, this is the leverage I want. I don't ever want to ask and think about the price.

37:30I don't care. And so that was another attractive thing to me about, wait, no one's in charge of my destiny. It's just my brain versus the market. I'm not dependent on other human beings. And I think that's a character flaw with me. I don't like asking for other help. I think a lot of people have that, oh, I hate to ask for help. I hate to ask anybody for help. I can do it myself. I change that later in life. And the leverage is amazing. I can make an hour of my life worth 40 ,000 hours of somebody else's life or something like that. When I hear you say that, I have an intuition almost of, oh, that seems wrong.

38:12It feels morally wrong. that an hour of your life would be worth so much more than someone else's. Now, I'm not like, oh, I'm not a massive, everyone must have exactly the same outcome person at all. But I think the reason I'm having that intuition is because if everyone on Earth was to follow that exact sort of trajectory or have that philosophy, it would not be sustainable in any way, right? I mean, it feels like the system would kind of break. that because people do try that and they fail but they actually do productive things right like they do productive things they try and get to that but they do actually have a productive thing for society they just never get to where i'm at right if you if you look at my job really i'm a glorified insurance agent okay right i insure against bad things happening and i'm pretty good at it right or i'm pretty lucky at it for 20 something years whatever you want to say i'm lucky for 20 something years or whatever, right?

39:13And so you know, what happens is other people try and they're not good insurance agents, but they did provide a role for the market and the market took their capital and needed it to allow other people to like, hey, I'm going to plant crops and sell Ford and I can have my business go forward. So the people who were like, I will buy Ford futures of corn, right? And I take the risk away from you that the price goes down and Mr. Farmer, you get to go plant the crops. Or the other way. General Mills is worried about cereal prices going or whatever. We're going to buy corn for it. And I short it because I think that's a high price.

39:57And either I'll lose money and they're safe and your cereal prices don't go up, but their risk is hedged. I do it in natural gas. So when people are like, oh, you're trading natural gas? I'm a glorified insurance agent. That's all I am. And the market induces me to take on a risk, either to be long or to be short or to have some spread on that other people do not want. So I'm a risk warehouser, right? So where does the value come from? So you're saying that, it sounds like broker would be defined as like a zero-sum entity, right? A broker facilitates the trades, right? Like a real estate agent facilitates the market clearing.

40:34A broker facilitates the trades happening. We used to say, back in the day when there wasn't electronic trading, if traders had to talk to each other, nothing would ever get done. You fucking bastard, blah, blah, blah. What the fuck? What do you mean you're backing off your bid? You know, like going nuts. There'd be fistfights after work, right? So the brokers are like, look, he's like, whatever. They ease people in and out of deals and they facilitate the market clearing. Now machines facilitate the market clearing. So it's more efficient. Yeah, there are still over-the-counter broker trades, and you still need brokers to non-standard products, et cetera, to clear.

41:13But if you said, hey, these traders and these risker warehouses are needed, it's just basically saying insurance isn't needed. So explain why, in your view, this whole system of trading and brokers, and thus the markets that arise from it, are positive some for the world. Because it allows businesses to exist and capital formation to exist. Let's just use the farming example. You're like, hey, the land costs this much, the tilling costs this much, and blah, blah, blah. I need to sell this corn when it finally comes up for X dollars per pound. And so you have this future risk out there that you need to hedge.

41:59and nobody's like, I'm not going to loan you the money. I'm like, what the hell is fucking, it could be two cents a pound or it could be$10. Like banks are not going to give you the money. You're like, no, no, no. I got this rated company to forward buy my corn in the year 2023 or 2024, whenever it's going to come out of the ground. And they insured me and they will pay$2.50 a pound. The banks go, oh, great. I'll loan you the money to go buy your seed, pay the employees, till the thing. The crop gets built, right? The crop comes out, people eat, the bread gets made, and the business is formed, right?

42:35It sounds like the positive externalities come from the actual productivity that is generated by having the system to enable it in the first place. Correct. It happens in natural gas. It's like power plants get built, right? Wells get drilled. Now you might say, oh, these wells shouldn't get drilled, they're not going to get drilled, whatever. But that happens in every single commodity market. The purpose of the commodity market is to bring demand forward in general so that the business can happen.

43:08Otherwise, the people in their respective commodities would just be these crazy boom-bust cycles. They couldn't have the stability they needed and the market signal they needed in order to deliver the product that society uses. So actually, a lot of the value then comes from the stability and the predictability of the future. Correct. You're reducing variance, essentially. Correct. So let's say you had a better way to produce a widget or the thing or natural gas. And you're like, wow, the forward natural gas curve is$3.50. We can make a lot of money. Let's drill this way and blah, blah, blah, and X, Y, and Z.

43:49And the banks will actually, to borrow the money, they will actually force you to hedge. they will say, you will have to hedge 50%. Like, we're not going to loan you the money. You're going to have to hedge. And the banks actually will force you to hedge through their risk department just to get a little extra taste, right? Like, you know, yeah, they make their money on the interest rate, but they've got to get a little extra taste when you hedge through them and then they dump it off into the market and hit my bid, right, as I risk warehouse it. And my silly ass is out there going, shit, I hope I did all my analysis and fundamentals right because I'm just an insurance company.

44:18I don't know what's going to happen. I just say, this is a good risk reward trade to have on. for the forward based on the way I see all these factors delivering. And sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm wrong. So I am a glorified insurance age. Sometimes the hurricane hits and you're like, holy shit, it's a really bad year. Sometimes two of them hit, oh my God, we're going to blow up, we're going to shut us down, the investor's going to take their money. But the name of the game in commodities trading, we always say this, is to stay in the game. So it sounds like you guys are the good guys of the picture, essentially.

44:52We are. We're often painted as the bad guys, like these greedy guys, whatever. And I'm not saying that we don't have greed. Yes, we want to make all the money, but we're insurance agents, right? We don't sit there like, how can we squeeze the market? The market is what the market is. Our job is to be forecasters. My job is to predict the future. And your incentives, I think more importantly, your incentives are aligned with the good of the whole. As you say, you want the game to keep going. Yes, I want the game to get going. And what the market pays me, the theoretical edge I get paid, is a price they pay in order to have a stable market, a forward market in which they can do business.

45:31They have predictability of earnings or predictability of costs. And so that they're able to do shit they cannot do. Okay, so who are the bad guys? People that try to distort the market by using either their position position or size to actually create anomalies in the market and to force other people out. Let's just say I'm like, I know all the risk warehouses have this position on because the producers have sold 1.4 million lots a year. We generally have industry structures on that happen because we have this view, they've done all the analysis and they're like, okay, we're long. And then some new guy comes along and he's like, I know these guys are long.

46:22And I know their risk limits. And I know the VAR limits. And if I can just print the market down to a certain price, all these idiots are going to have to sell. And I'm going to stop them out and collect money. Now, are they bad guys? I don't know. I mean, you know, but that happens, right? That happens in markets, right? Well, it sounds like, again. And it generally actually is happening in crowdsourcing. It's really happening with neemers, neem stockers, right? The meme stockers are like, hey, it's funny that, let's think of the short sellers. Short sellers expose bad companies with bad fundamentals and they expose fraud.

46:58And they sell stocks, they put out reports, and they profit from that happening. So in theory, they're providing a value there. A very valuable service, right? And they're sounding the alarm. Otherwise the market would always be too high. It would be high. And people in pensions and 401ks would be investing in vaporware in 20 years or 15 years when they come to retire, a fifth or a tenth or a 20th of their portfolio will be zero because they bought into this fucking Ponzi scheme or whatever it was. So the short sellers are out there, and they expose the cancerous dead money sucks of the market.

47:34But with the, you know, and there's been short squeezers all the time, like, oh, so-and-so is short. And usually it'd be like this big giant institution to be like, we're just going to jam the stock up and force them to cover and make a bunch of money. But now that's been outsourced and crowdsourced to the meme stalkers, right? And they did it. You saw it in AMC, right? They were like, to the moon and whatever. And they just kept buying, buying, buying, buying. And they blew out Melvin Capital, right? It went bankrupt. And unfortunately, you know, these guys don't really understand how the exchange works and the markets are like, it's rigged.

48:10And so what happens after the Melvin Capital goes bankrupt, right? The clearinghouse is really short, right? Because the exchange guarantees all trades. So Melvin Capital's out of money. And now the clearinghouse is guaranteeing the exchanges. I can tell you without doubt, like bet my life, you're never bankrupting the New York Stock Exchange. They control the rules. they're not going to let you print AMC at 2000 and have them go under they have all kinds of blanket clauses about market stability and rules etc they can force you out at any moment for disruptive trading or whatever they have very nebulous things and a lot of power and to take down the New York Stock Exchange is to take down the United States of fucking America you're just never doing that So I would get into these little debates.

49:08I was like, this is a clear short. This is going back down to zero. And people were mad. How are you fighting the little guy or whatever? I'm like, you really think taking down the New York Stock Exchange is helping America? You really think that's going to happen? I'm like, just think about this. So that's an example of checks and balances. People might argue that that's fair and not fair. I'm just saying it's just not happening. You're not taking down the United States of America. You're not taking down the New York Stock Exchange. You're not taking down the clearing exchange of the New York Stock Exchange or whatever exchange it is.

49:38It's just never happening. You might take down Melvin Capital, but they're not going to let this thing print 2 ,000 and somehow a bunch of internet nerds on a Reddit thread are owed$2 trillion by the New York Stock Exchange. It's just not happening. You're a big believer in markets and solving almost everything, but it sounds like there's a limit on that. My friend John Arnold says markets work until they don't. Every rule and market-based system needs its rules and boundaries. And also, you can't have a situation that creates a break. Systems can become unstable and break, and then you can't fix it.

50:23It's not repairable. You can have high prices and things go up. There's a saying amongst traders, I've never seen a shortage that doesn't lead to a glut. Or the other cliche, nothing cures high prices like high prices. So it has this self-correcting mechanism. Markets work and you can literally work them. But there are times where markets can get to a point where systems go unstable and it breaks. And that's why there are rules, et cetera, to keep the market statement. And there's always infinite arguments about this one is a bad rule and this one's a good rule. but in general, you know, there are rules, things, engagement to prevent the thing from breaking.

51:06And, you know, specifically with AMC, it was like, you're not breaking the system. But at the same time, the system is, by the sounds of things, still very, like, you know, with the 2009 crash, etc., which you'd probably be better at explaining than me, but it sounded like there were essentially, the rules were not sufficiently designed to prevent against clearly extractive actors taking advantage, doing this sort of selfish short-term thing that in the end made the system so unstable that it created this collapse. There are so many things going on right there, and I was very much against the bailouts.

51:45And I think you kind of direct, if you look at most of the bailouts and things that go on, it's usually like let's give these big banks money and then figure it out. Instead of like let's just give these people direct money. They're so worried about Ford going out of business and if you look at the amount of dollars they spent I bet you every single employee would have said hey we'll take the$270 ,000 and some retraining or whatever it is, we'll be happy. Fuck Ford, we'll go find another job, give us the big check. That system doesn't need to... So I think a lot of the times when the government steps in, the people who are getting the assistance are not the people.

52:29It's always trickled down. It's always like the Beltway bandits who are getting it. So I am always kind of, or not always, but generally high nines against almost all bailouts that have happened. They're like, oh, we've got to protect the system, whatever. I was just like, oh, we've got people's banks. So I was like, just give the people directly the money that you're worried about losing it. Like, you don't need to have this bank. It can go under. I guess, so the reason why they want to bail the bank out is because they think there's value in the name continuing to exist. You know, the entity existing.

53:07Wow, we could have a whole long podcast about this whole thing. One of my friend's arguments was like, do you want the government in banking? And I'm like, no, then the government has a vested interest in letting these banks survive. And I was like, well, they didn't have to have this bank survive. They could shut these down. And these other banks could have in existence that had prudent policies and weren't over leveraged and weren't doing this bullshit. Let those guys die. If you're worried about the depositors, bail out the depositors. Fuck the bank. Let new bank, you know what I mean? New Bank, another bank who didn't fall for the short-term gains and ignored risk.

53:43Because they're getting all the upsides of capitalism without any of the downsides. If they're always going to get bailed out, then it's like... You're preaching to the choir on this one. You're preaching to the choir on. And I'm just like, this is the most insane... Back in 2008, 2009, I took out full-page New York Times ads. I don't know if you know that, but I was the anti-bailout man at that time. Time magazine wrote an article about me, And it was this big thing about how the news stations picked it up. And I did these interviews about how we have this kind of communism, socialism, just kind of this weird, distorted fascism going on for banks and everybody else is left out.

54:21And I'm not saying that I wouldn't be on the bailout, but the bailout I would have constructed would be completely different. Maybe I would have upped the FDIC amount, let these banks fail. What's FDIC? That's the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. So basically, when you put your money in a bank up to a certain amount, I think it's$250 ,000, and it could be$50 ,000,$250 ,000, the bank goes bust. Your money is protected by the government. Your money is protected. Right, right, right. So I'm like, what are we talking? So people would be like, oh, we can't let the banks raise the people's money. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?

54:53Right. Because actually, the big CEOs or whoever, they are the ones who are sort of incentivized. well you would incentivize them to behave behave more appropriately if they actually thought they could lose their like beloved company because the little employees they just care about their paycheck. Their bonuses, their stock options, whatever. Like at the end of the day it was a bond. Exactly, stock options. This was a huge bondholder bailout of these institutions and they should have had the risk and they should have just went busto. A lot of companies should have went busto that it got bailed out and there would be a couple other survivors a couple of new survivors and a risk and like they always have like some sort of stamp of approval that kind of gives them this get free card and everybody goes oh yeah yeah well never in history has real estate ever dropped this amount so therefore you know what I'm like never in history has real estate fucking doubled you idiot if it doubled of course it could go down 30 % like they put all these technical terms to confuse the average person right so they're like oh we've never had a decline like this or our model said x y and z I'm like, it fucking doubled.

56:01It doubled and a half, right? Like, of course it could fucking go down 30%. It fucking doubled. You know, so like it's, if when you boil it down that way, everybody would get like, oh yeah, you're right. These guys are fucking idiots. Of course, if it doubled, it can go down. So they blamed these models and you know, whatever. And we use the risk metrics that were provided to us and we had the seal of approval or whatever. And they knew like, we're just taking all the money and we're going to get bailed out. And everybody gets into the moral hazard and the moral hazard just keeps getting bigger and bigger every year with every kind of crisis.

56:34Yeah, because that's my next question. I've heard rumblings that, oh, 2020, the crash that will make 2009 seem like chump change coming. Do you think the sufficient lessons were learned from that crash in order to make our current system more robust or are you concerned? Where do you think the winds are pointing right now? Well, it depends on what you think the sufficient lesson is, right? The lesson is that I can do all kinds of bad shit and the government will bail me out. So maybe that is a sufficient lesson and maybe they're acting optimally. Well, for their own self-interest, sure. But surely not for the whole tax.

57:10On taxpayers' dime, on future children's dime, on future whatever. They're just taking out debt against future generations. They're spending... My children, your children, our grandchildren, whatever, they'll pay for it or the government will pay for it. We'll be weaker, we'll be mired and shit. People will still be fighting about this health care or this research is underfunded because we're still paying. Paying the debt for that group. And I made a point about the savings and loan crisis. Even before 2008, you set up a program and it doesn't go away. And they're like, no, we ended that program.

57:37Well, they ended the program, but they took all the assets from the savings and loans crisis from way back when. These are like the Keating days. And they just put them into another thing and they're still holding some of those assets. So it's like it doesn't go away. It just is there forever. Okay, so if you're the god of the markets, Let's say you have all this omnipotence and omissions. Omnipotence, I get all the women, the girls, whatever. Stay on track on the markets. What changes would you make right now if you could grant five wishes to improve the rules of the game or however you would structure it to make the future seemingly more sustainable I would make it so that any type of bailout whatsoever is at the individual level.

58:29To the employees. The unwitting participant at the individual level. And even then, there's some argument that if there wasn't this insurance policy, if there wasn't this guarantee, people would like, is this bank really a good bank? They would dig. They would figure it out. Now, I don't think everybody has the time to do that or the education level or et cetera. So I would say that you will die. You will 100 % die. We will not bail you out. there is nothing there for you. so you better have your shit together I'm not going to help stress test you I'm not going to do all this stuff fuck it, you will die will Joe you know, Joe and Jane worker who have their savings be protected yeah, that'll be fine I got you I got you, Mr.

59:20and Mrs. America right, Mrs. and Mrs. worker but Joe Corporation has$10 million in there and didn't do their due diligence on whether this bank is a worthy one or didn't look through it you're fucked. We got to know each other through, well, we met, I think, in the Bahamas at a poker tournament. Yeah. I was like, who's this hot girl? I knew of you as this guy who would come in and play the biggest tournaments, play very aggressively and kind of crazy, but always with a smile on your face. Win or lose. what was it about poker that you know appealed to you so much because i mean you almost came to the it seemed to me that you were almost playing semi-professionally yeah but i wasn't i was just like i think there's like a lot of ego and fun and like it's just entertainment for me right like for for like it's kind of weird like when you get somebody who's successful in another field and they come to play a poker tournament, it's kind of like, it's not that big of a deal, right?

1:00:25But to the poker pros, like, shit, I'm sitting here grinding out trying to make, you know, six figures or whatever. And we're just like, ah, I think I'm going to play in this high roller for 100K and see if I can put pressure on people, you know? And like, we're not studying poker the way they're studying poker, right? Like, we're showing up to like, I don't know, MIT, like, hey, I think I can beat these guys in a math quiz if I put enough pressure on them. You know what I mean? Well, that's the beautiful thing about poker is that technically you can sit down and play against the best and actually give them a hard time.

1:00:58Correct. Because you have either deeper pockets. Right. Yeah. You can make them sweat, right? Right. And then there's also this social aspect of poker. Poker is like America's pastime, or it used to be America's pastime, where all walks of life, all different types of expertise, personalities, et cetera, come, sit at a table, and test their wits out against each other, right? And there's sharks and pros like this. They're just making a living. But you get to, you know, I can't go into a boxing ring and fight Floyd Medveder, right? It's just silly, right? Get a brain injury. Yeah, I'm going to get tired and he's just going to knock me out.

1:01:36And maybe if I like getting knocked out, that'll be fun, right? Like I can't go wrestle a UFC fighter. I can't, you know, I can't go play tennis against, you know, the best, right? But you can goof off and win pots and have time. I can't even play chess against a 2200 and expect to win at that level. Or Magnus Carlsen. This is going to be boring for him. It's going to be tic-tac-toe for him. And it's going to be like, wow, this is like differential calculus test that I fucking failed in college. You know what I mean? But in poker, that's where you can sit with the best of the best. You can actually hold your hand or do a good job in one of the hands against them.

1:02:16It's in a ring format. You get to socialize with very interesting people, scoundrels to angels and business mavens or creative people, right? And it's a lot of fun. So when I first came into poker, it was like, this is fun, right? Like I'm going to a poker tournament and I'm going to be playing with all these interesting people and I'm going to do crazy, silly shit and maybe get away with it and maybe not. And so I'm getting variable reward. I'm getting my social fix, right? and I'm just having a good time. And for a while, it didn't seem like you were putting a lot of effort into studying. No.

1:02:53But that's now changed. Yeah. Significantly. I would have said I was confidently a better poker player than you for most of our friendship. But now I would say that's, I mean, okay, I quit for a while. But I would say you're much better than me now. Right. Why is that? The hobby became very expensive. It was like making a movie. I lost making movie type money playing poker. not necessarily in tournaments, right? Like I think my tournament ROI is positive. It's because I play high rollers and I've placed very well. But my relative to like the 10 ,000 or the 500 or whatever, right? But the cash games just gets fucking, it gets really expensive goofing off.

1:03:35Like Omaha, like we play high stakes Omaha, like there's a couple million, there's so-and-so, like, you know, the number is flying around. When you say we, who are you referring to? I'm saying we, the other business players that sit together and play high stakes.

1:03:55You're like, I want to enjoy this, but I shouldn't be losing as much money. I think the real turnaround was, I normally, trolls or people like you're bad or whatever, I'm just like, I'm fucking the Michael Jordan or LeBron James of my industry. Like, I don't care that some fucking internet dude is like you doing whatever. And plus, they're always results-oriented. They have no fucking clue, right? Like, they're just, like, clueless. They want to sound smart on there. Like, I don't care about sounding smart or whatever. But if you challenge me, I'm like, oh, it's on. Yes, I'm older. Mental maturity acuity peaks at around 28.

1:04:40You know, I'm in my 50s. right but now it's a challenge it's like mano a mano it's like okay fuck are you talking about these like heads up yeah these heads up battles right and so that that was like part where it's like okay i need to be losing less money when i'm goofing off with my friends um or or break even it'd be nice to win too um and win money uh and then there's also the you know now i've been challenged like let me show you what I can do when I put effort into it. I've put all my mental efforts and neurons into becoming very good at trading natural gas, being positive expected outcome in natural gas and maintaining that.

1:05:27But then when Landon was like, I challenge you and head up, I was like, okay. I can learn a lot. How much were you challenged for? It was like a, I forget what the stakes were. It's so funny. It doesn't even matter to me it was really i know that the buyout was like 100 150 000 or 200 they were worried that i was gonna quit i was like oh i'm not gonna how many hands it was i think it was uh supposed to be 25 000 hands yeah right two tables 25 000 hands you can use a random number generator it's like a couple of weeks of playing yeah right um more than that more than that uh yeah i'd be like eight weeks it depends on how many times you play a week or whatever right um but they quit I think at like, or maybe it was 50 ,000 hands.

1:06:10It might have been 50 ,000 hands. Like they wanted more hands, right? To take out the variance, right? Because like any, the variance is so much of poker, it's amazing. Like when you actually run the model and be like, holy shit, you can be like this much of a favorite and lose like 100 buy-ins. And it's not really that, you know. It's really not that big of a thing. And realistically, you know, to be, I don't know what the numbers are, but you need, with like 98 % confidence, you need to be playing like 100 ,000 hands or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. It might even be creative. Yeah, it sounds.

1:06:41So it's a lot. But I went into the Batcave with Matt Boyd and Matt Gonzalez. And when they were training me, they were going through all this. And I was just like, guys, what the fuck? Make this a computer program. I want a computer program. I can play and it tells me whatever and X, Y, Z. I want to be naturally playing and I want to do it. So they built this simple thing for me, right? And then ultimately that became hybrid poker. The things I want to do and AI guiding and the thing I want, they ran with that for two years, developing this UI UX to get better. But meanwhile, they had these tools, these other tools to train me, get me the basic concepts, simplifying poker, et cetera, to get to a level where I'm not a complete fish playing against a pro and then getting better and better and better.

1:07:31And so I'm on this curve going up, even as the match is going. right like so the day one when he pays me by day four by by the by the sixth match i destroy the old bill perkins like i absolutely shit on myself right and so because i'm i'm like never taking it seriously and you've been grinding you don't know how my capacity to learn when i'm focused and so i was playing a lots of uh there were you know the routine would be you know go over the two sheets of like what's going on when the flop is this texture, learning what textures, what, you know, range versus range textures, you know, et cetera.

1:08:11And then heads up play against the wizards. Then analysis of my play, what's going on. You know, you know, this is a mistake. Why aren't you doing this, et cetera. Where are my leaks? What am I not doing? You know, and then, then play Landon and stay up all night, analyzing every single hand, what you did, what you should have been doing, getting graded right and then all over again so Lara was like Lara's my wife she was not happy I was about to ask because this is an immense amount of time and it's not like you've not got other stuff going on as well I've got a metric fuck ton of other things going on you're starting companies you're still trading I've got kids I've got family I've got life I've got all my entertainment I've got a at the time my fiance you know like it was like you know I'd be up at she'd be like come to bed you know I'd be up 11 11.30 going through hand review every single hand every single hand that I practice played and every single hand that we played then plus training right understanding like learning the theory you're not doing this and they're like okay you're now and they would unlock levels like once I got to a certain thing like okay we're ready to unlock this concept on the turn you know what I mean you are now ready for over bets on the turn.

1:09:34Okay. Your bluff combos need to be, you're better for recognizing your bluff combos. Very niche stuff. And these are the frequencies. And then it'd be like dialing me back. Like this is optimal frequency, but we want to dial you back because you have a natural tendency to be like blah. You know what I mean? And so. Yeah, like deeply elite stuff, essentially. Yes, yes, yes. Like minutiae. Yes, and letting it sink in my brain. Yeah, right, right. And so it takes, you're not going to learn. No, it's an immense amount of time. And I'm funny enough just talking with Lara last night and she was talking about, I mentioned chess and she sort of rolled her eyes and she was like, oh, the amount of time he's spending getting into chess.

1:10:07And because I know this myself, I had to delete the chess app from my phone. I've done that too, I followed your lead. Right, because I found myself playing shorter and shorter games. I wasn't actually learning anything though. I was just, I mean, I was learning just by pure... You're taking that dopamine hit. Yeah, dopamine hit over and over and over. It's so addictive. and especially like trying to chase, you know, chasing the ELO number. Right. You know, increasing my ELO and presumably with you, you know, like winning these heads up battles and so on. How do you find, you know, maybe you're not the best person to describe this because maybe you haven't found a way of getting balanced, but like where do you think you could start trying to find better and more healthy relationship with, you know, satisfying this ambitious urge, you know, your competitive drive to excel at a game, but also keeping the rest of your life in balance?

1:10:51Wow. I don't know if poker is that game. I think I can ring. It doesn't have to be just poker, in general. Whatever your latest pursuit and obsession is. It's really like you get on autopilot to do the thing. Because let's say, I usually use driving as the example. When you first learned how to drive, it was like, oh my gosh, I got a signal and a red light and on the brake and check for 10 to 2. And you had to think about every step. and pretty soon it goes into the default mode network. It's automatic, right? You're unconsciously competent. Yeah, you're unconsciously competent of everything and you're just doing it.

1:11:30And you get into these modes of competence and doing whatever you think, but it takes your time. And you have to constantly go, is this my priority? Am I paying enough attention to this other thing? Because you just go into default mode network on a bunch of other things. And then it interferes with your life satisfaction, like your total, like, what is really my high priority? I should be spending time with Lara right now, not goofing off playing speeches. Or I should be reading a book. Or I should be doing something else, right? Like, this puzzle palace has addicted me, you know, into doing this thing.

1:12:05And, you know, one thing I realized about poker, like getting better and learning elite level stuff, is it became a little bit boring to me. Like, when I was playing Landon, it was robotic. A lot of my things were just like, you know, robotic. There were situations where I was like, hmm, I don't know what to do here. And I had to think through it, you know, a couple times. Like a lot of times the pause is just so you don't have a tell. But some of those pauses were like, shit, three bet pot. I'm out of position. This is the texture. Jack 10 is not a good flop for me, but it's bet big or check.

1:12:45I think the frequency of check. You know, like I had to really think through it, right? Like, check. He checks. Okay. He checks through, check through. Blank. Three. Okay. I think this is a turn over bet situation, but it's a three bet pot. So three quarters of bet. You know what I mean? Like, you know, you're thinking all these things that you've learned and going on. I was like, this takes a metric fuck ton of time to become a master in poker. I don't want to do that. The reward, you know, as much as my ego likes it, like, holy shit. Like Antonio, other people, I'm like, I'll play you heads up.

1:13:19I'll play you heads up. I'm not afraid of anything. I'll play you heads up. Let's go, motherfucker. You know what I mean? And that felt good to be able to say that and people go, no, I won't play you. That particularly would have shit on me before. So it's a little bit of like ticking a box for the ego. And then I'm done. I'm done. I don't need to go back there, right? Yeah. I think I found that sort of helped temper my obsessiveness with certain games is, like, the reason why I managed to, in the end, sort of delete chess, or at least take a break, I'm actually now getting back into it again, I deleted it like three years ago, was, I managed to, it was like I got to the edge of the rabbit hole.

1:13:59I played enough so that I could get a really good sort of intuitive feeling for what it would take to become a great player so in other words I got to the point where I was like okay I see now what if I wanted to become really good what I would need to do, the type of studying the type of getting a feel for the mechanics of the game itself that's what I love, I love games because they're all in their own little mini universe and have their complexities and little emergent properties in weird ways So getting enough of a feel for what it would take to see down into the rabbit hole, but not to actually go down it.

1:14:35That's where I think I can now scratch that itch. I have a lot more respect for professional poker players. Like the work and the studying and what they had to do. Even the guys before, when they weren't computers to give you the exact answer or whatever, how they had to figure it out and the things they think about. You just have to write down your hands if you wanted to record anything. That's the nature of it. And it was like, oh, I was coming in here goofing off like I'm going to put pressure or whatever. And these guys were just like fucking having a field day with me. Yeah, I put them in a couple of spots a couple of occasional times.

1:15:09But on that, you play to infinity. But on that, it was like they're the house, right? And I'm betting on Big Red. They're crushing me, right? And so I had a lot of respect for them. And I realized like, I don't want to do that. Like, I don't want to. That's not the best use of my time. Like, it doesn't. When you're doing that, you're doing it to make money. and poker, it doesn't have enough money in it for me to, like the top poker player in the world publicly is not making as much money as guys that just play in cash games against rich guys that want to try and put you on the spot, right? So I think like the movement amongst poker professionals or even poker guys is like, I need to find a way to be in the menagerie of these rich guys because that has much greater positive expected outcome where Joe Billionaire is trying to put pressure on me and he doesn't mind losing 5, 10, 15, 50 million, 75 million to me a year, 150 million a year.

1:16:05That's what's going on in the poker world. And guys, the guys that you don't see on the poker tournament circuit anymore, they realize that's a much better gig. I see, that's why they've all disappeared off too. Well, not all, but some. Fuck the ego game battling wizards. trying to win a trophy, trying to net a million, a million and a half a year, whatever, it's like they make three million a night or two million a night or 50 million a year. There's people living off of other super rich people who have been the Michael Jordan or LeBron James in their industry. And now they just want to have fun and put pressure and play the game.

1:16:49One thing you brought up recently about poker is that it's really good at exposing one's own tendency to sort of create victim narratives. Yes. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, like the impact in poker is like, one thing I get a lot of psychological value out of poker, like it's a Rorschach test. And I think amongst everyone, poker has a tendency to bring up their victim story. You know? Oh, I lost because this guy, or I always run bad, or I did this, or I, you know, they have, it brings out your victim story. And when you think about it and you catch yourself, you're like, holy shit, this is my victim story narrative, right?

1:17:28Instead of, you know, the poker is just the cards. It's how you react to it. And your victim story is your victim story. And the more victim story you have, it's like the more you have no chance. Right, because it's very debilitating. It's debilitating. And, you know, we're in a very victim story culture right now. In what way? I think that people are becoming famous and parading around victim stories as privilege instead of empowering themselves or dealing with it. Everybody's got a victim story. I have victim stories. I tell them a story. Oh, my mom died when I did this, or my dad beat me when I was a kid, or I didn't have a bad relationship.

1:18:13And they use that victim story as a badge of honor to excuse of their lack of effort or failure or their station in life. And everybody has had bad things. The bargain of life, of to come on planet Earth and be a human, the bargain is bad shit will happen to you. You will have your heart broken. Somebody close to you will die. You will get fired. Somebody will cheat on you. Somebody will lie to you. All kinds of other horrible things. Run the game. And the successful people don't have the victim story. They react differently to these bad things. So it's not what bad thing is going to happen to you, it's how do you react to it.

1:18:54I mean, I'd say the counter argument that a lot of people who, for example, think that victim stories are useful and should be elevated is that if we don't pay attention to when groups of people are being victimized, then we can't fix systemic issues in society. And I think there is a valid argument to that. It's not that we shouldn't pay attention to people being victimized, attacked, or hurt, or not intervene. It's the fact that after a set event has happened to you, right, that you had no control over. Then there are things that we have no control over that happened to us. It's how do you react?

1:19:36Right. That's what you can't do. Is this your badge of honor to never try? You know what I mean? People wear their victim story as a badge of honor and feel pity for me or whatever, and I'm just like, that is not going to be optimal for you. You can do that, and a lot of people do do that, but that is not optimal for you. The successful people move on, use that, and take that forward. You know, there's different schools of thoughts, right? There's that David Goggins school of thought. Like, there's no victim in David Goggins, right? his childhood, his being beaded, his thing with his mother, the racism, et cetera.

1:20:18There's no victim, right? He's like, you can do X, Y, and Z. Your mind can take over. You can do amazing things, right? Instead of being like, oh, my dad beat me and it was abusive and we had to hide and I was racist or whatever. There's no excuse, you know, in his thing. And then there's the other people. It's like, oh, it's so sad. We got to call you and give you this and do whatever. And like I tend to, you know, for me, let me just talk about me. Like in poker, it's like, oh, I'm always unlucky or I did this or I shoved that or I sat with the wizards and whatever. I'm like, you idiot. You're not a victim of sitting with the wizards.

1:20:55You don't have to sit with the wizards. Right? Like you have a choice. You didn't have to, you know, bluff all of your chips. You could have studied. You could have done whatever. Like fuck you and your victim story. It sounds like a sort of almost like radical optimism that you have. Your brain chemistry is well wired to seeing, being able to have the mental strength enabled to do that. Because I think for a lot of people, I remember myself when I got on a really bad run of poker and I had all these expectations of myself. I'd had a big win a couple of years prior and then I wasn't really performing up to what I expected of myself and also what I expected others expected of me.

1:21:29And I got really bogged down in this. I was very good at outsourcing all the blame for this. In reality, I just wasn't really working hard enough. Probably a bit of regression to the mean happening. I was running pretty badly as well, but I definitely could have worked harder. And we have that great saying in poker, when I win, it's because I played great. And when I lose, it's because I got unlucky. And I think we all want to be the heroes in our own narratives. And so we have this tendency to outsource blame. What are you saying whether it's this radical optimism? And I would say it's not radical optimism, it's radical accountability.

1:22:05Okay. It's like you're accountable for your own life. It doesn't matter what fucking happened to you. Nobody's coming to save you. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody gives a shit. So like you, like the average human being who is walking around, who's got something, whatever, right? Like there are literally hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people walking past people on the street, really starving in bad dire straits, not helping them out, not doing it. So if you think they're coming to rescue you, you're wrong. And so it's really... What can you do now? That's the level of accountability.

1:22:39You can't do anything, what happened to you, the bad thing or whatever. You have a choice now. Are you going to behave? How are you going to think? And it's about being accountable about that. It doesn't even have to be optimistic. It could be like, this sucks, but I'm still going to run on the treadmill. I'm not happy about it. This is not flowers and sunshine, but it is either done or not done. and the adjectives describing it doesn't matter. And I had to actually tell myself this, I don't know, a hundred and something times when I had this challenge to lose all this weight when I got fat. I let myself get fat and out of shape.

1:23:17And I had, you know, there was this process to get there. It's just like, if you do this, you will get there. It was complete, just robotics. Eat this, do these things, burn these calories, lift these weights, you will get to, you know, this percent body fat. And I'd be like, motherfucker, I don't want to get up. I'm tired. I'm too tired. My leg's a little bit sore. You know, everything. And then finally, I would have this like, don't you be a fucking bitch. It is either done or not done. On the Peloton, in the Tabata class, while the lactic acid is building in my legs, I should stop. This is painful or whatever.

1:23:54And I'd be like, you bitch. It's just a signal. You can still pedal. Send the signal to pedal. Shut the fuck up and do it So you're like your own drill sergeant I would have to basically Stop the victim story I'm not a victim of lactate acid I'm not a victim of tired I can still do it It was just an excuse of me not doing it It's either done or not done And it's like do you want it done It's just do it And so like I'd be sad about it I'd be tired I'd be whatever But it wasn't like I am not injured You know what I mean I am not incapable and this is the goal and it's either done or not done. And so I have this all the time in a lot of things.

1:24:36Like, oh, I don't feel like doing an analysis. Oh, there's so much work going through it. I'm like, no, you have investors. They have money invested with you. They expect you to do your best. You figure it out. You figure it out, motherfucker. You must have some days, though, where you really do struggle with finding the energy. Of course. To have that. I'm human. I fall down. I'm not the Dalai Lama of accountability or whatever. I'm like, this is tools. I got as many victim stories as the next person maybe. I probably have the most. That's why I got to talk shit, you know, and hold myself accountable.

1:25:07And I have a fiance that holds myself accountable. Like, you know when you find your victim story in a relationship is when you go, I'm sorry, but. Right after the but is the victim story. Right? And later on, I'll be like, well, I'm sorry, but babe, you frustrated me or whatever. I'm hearing but. I'm like, what is this but? Like, are you sorry or do you have a fucking excuse? No, you're right. I'm sorry. There's a million ways I could have reacted. A million ways, but I chose the shitty one that I just did. And I'm trying to give you a but because you triggered it. No, I'm not a victim of being frustrated.

1:25:43Everybody gets frustrated. I need to react in a way that isn't detrimental to our relationship. I don't need to be yelling or whatever, whatever, whatever the way I come off at that time. And so that's one way I have my victim story. Whenever you hear me, I'm sorry, but the but is my victim story. Do you find you, because one way of interpreting what you're describing is that you almost judge yourself. You're harsh on yourself when you fall into the victim narrative. I could see how, because I think for somebody, let's say someone who's very depressed, right? They are lacking, whether it's brain chemistry or whatever, but the necessary dopamine, frankly, to have that get up and go to even have that frank conversation with themselves.

1:26:30I'm thinking of, for people like that, I agree with someone who's got a reasonable baseline and just sips into this. I can see how this, being a drill sergeant is a way to sort of snap themselves out of this quickly. But for someone who's really low... Well, I have this drill sergeant narrative going in my head or whatever, but you can also do it very calmly. It's just like, what is the most accountable way that I can do this? It doesn't have to be as harsh like I am. I'm like, you motherfucker. That's what works for you. But you could just be like, I'm a capable human being. What am I capable of doing right now?

1:27:02There are a million ways I can react. What ways are available to me right now? There's a more loving kindness approach to this as well. Yes, there's a kind way to do this. What is the maximum way I can be accountable in this situation? And sometimes your best that day is different from your best another day. Don't beat yourself up. Just do your best. So there's a way of me being like, okay, how can I be more accountable when I talk to my significant other? What's 10 other ways or five other ways or three other ways I could address the situation without flying off the handle like I did because I was frustrated?

1:27:34That's a much calmer way of coming to it. It's probably a nice yoga way, whatever, like the Dalai Lama way of doing it. But it's really about radical accountability. It's not about for yourself. and loving yourself. It's really about loving yourself. It's like, I really love myself. I really, really love myself or I really want love for myself. So what things can I do that would be productive towards my goal? What small things? What's the teeniest thing I can do? You know, I agree. So like loving oneself truly is, that is actually the key to enlightenment in many ways. But again, like it, some people it comes more naturally to than others.

1:28:17Right. Was this something you found easier to do as you got older? Oh, it was never easy for me to do and have even the feedback of accountability until I went to Choice. So explain what Choice is. Choice is this emotional intelligence class in a desert. It's large group therapy. We call it a cult. It's not a cult. You get the juice. But I got convinced. Could be a cult, but it's a good one. Yeah, it could be a cult. It's not a cult. Whatever. I mean, I've still not done it. I mean, a lot of people have done it, whatever. But essentially, you go in and you find out what works and doesn't work for you.

1:28:59And then you remove behaviors or ways of being that don't work in order to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. And that's kind of like the not I don't want to ruin the movie for you because it is a process that they go through. And if I tell you the movie, it was a process. But I came out of that with a totally different mindset. And some of the things I already knew, but I internalized it in a visceral way that was going to work. And it gave me the tools to have this mindset and this accountability, et cetera. It's not like, oh, now I'm the Dolly fucking llama. I'm the best, whatever. No, I'm just as human as the next person.

1:29:38I need people to hold me accountable. I love when people hold me accountable. You know what I mean? I fall down and fuck up just as much as anybody else, but now I have the tools and the mindset to get up from my breakdowns and have breakthroughs. Holy shit, I was fucking just in victim story land and falling apart and flailing, and now that's led to this breakthrough, and I'm better for it, and I'm having a much more fulfilling life. one thing i love that you do is you like to prop bet your friends uh you know basically create bets with friends in order to get them to do something essentially be accountable for their health for example yeah so health bet one one of my favorites is uh that you did was um in fact it was the bahamas that we met i remember seeing antonio esfandiari who's another poker player lunging he was taking he was walking from one end of the tournament room it was a really big like huge like ballroom and every step he made he did a full lunge down to a knee and then it was so slow and his legs were shaking I was like what are you doing he's like oh fucking bill he bet me that I my legs weren't strong enough so I have to do a lunge he bet that I couldn't do a lunge every step I take for 24 hours and this is was it 24 hours think so right well yeah it was it was a certain amount of time.

1:31:02I can't even remember. I think it was a full day and like this is a big resort. There was like the Atlantis and the Bahamas so you have to walk like you're walking like multiple miles a day just to go from your room to the tournament area to the restaurant or whatever. And he was absolutely in the shit. Why did you do this to him? I don't know. I mean there's also the sinister menagerie like I want people doing goofy things but I do like I do like the the wagers where it's the human versus doable but extremely hard task, right? And that breakthrough that you can do it. Like I think most of the wagers I've ever done in that type of thing, they're all achievable.

1:31:45They're not a possible, right? Like you can do it. They're mainly discipline bets. They're mainly like breakthrough. They're mainly mental bets, right? Like I think the recent bet I had with Doug Polk, in which he had to lose half his body fat. And he got extremely close. He looks great right now. He looks like a fucking fashion model. But he didn't win the bet because he doubted himself early. And he had this like, nutrition was like, oh, this is good. Like very pat you on the back. Not very like, we got fucking work to do. And you can do this. And you need to cut X, Y, and Z. and you know you know getting to know doug and like i'm rooting for him to win and and and i'm like doug you can do this like you can cut this as a cakewalk this is an easy win for you um but he had this mental block like since he was a kid his parents just thought oh you're just a big person and you're not athletic or whatever and he had this mental block in his head and then somewhere along the bet he got to the feedback point right and this happens a lot with people trying to lose weight.

1:32:53Like, they lose weight, they don't really see anything or whatever. And then all of a sudden, it's like, you lost weight, you look good. Like, oh shit, I want some more of that. And he realized, like, he was working out, it was hard on his leg, it was painful. And then one time he was like, I didn't, and it didn't hurt. And then he became a beast. And I was like, Doug, look at your body frame. You are a fucking natural athlete, and you don't even know it. You've had this mental block in your head your whole life. And it's led you to believe that you're fat. So you've been fat and you've just accepted it.

1:33:24It's like he had this version of shame that was formed in his head since he was a kid. Right? Like, this is who I am. I'm just a guy who carries weight. I'm just chubby. I'm not that athletic. Whatever. And I'm like, now I'm like, he's a fucking beast. He does like two Pelotons. He's lifting weights. He's like, at the end, he was like, he started so late that he's like, I have a shot. And then he was doing beast mode shit. Like shit I would do. You know what I mean? I was doing beast mode shit and he was like, this is easy. I can do this and whatever and I can feel his strength and whatever. And I was like, yeah, you're a fucking natural athlete.

1:34:01You just had this mental block. And I love that shit. Yeah, because you're providing a carrot for the first time. It sounds like he's had the stick of feeling I don't want to feel this way, I don't want to look this way or whatever, but he's never had the reward. He's just accepted it. It's like, this is who I am. There's two ways of getting someone to do something. You can give them the stick and drive them or you can give the carrot. But maybe the best is a combination of both. I always say that human beings don't net present value well. We're not wired to net present value. We're wired for instantaneous things.

1:34:31Tiger, run. Hot girl, pursue. You know what I mean? Boobs, look. You know, that type of thing, right? Like, that's what we're wired for. We're not like, hey, you know, if I eat 200 calories extra a day over two years or whatever, and blah, blah, blah, I'll be like 32-something pounds overweight, right? Like, we don't do that. If I smoke a cigarette, yeah, one cigarette's not going to kill me, whatever, but radiation is additive and it has a little bit of polonium in it. Not that much, but a little bit. No one's saying anything. No one's doing that. No one is doing the net present value calculation.

1:35:03I think there's people like, wait, looking up right now, MPV? You know what I mean? Or future value calculations. We are not wired for that. Not even emotionally. Like, you know, me talking to my wife this way every time, that little crack is going to add up. it's going to lead to resentment or whatever. And then somehow I'm going to be standing somewhere at a courthouse, divorced, going, how did we get here? We used to be so in love, right? Like, we don't future value and net present value well. So the big hunk of money right in front of you, like, it's right there. Yes. We're wired for that.

1:35:37It's like, go, go, go, go, go. Or the hot girl. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, right? I want to woo the, like, the girl that you're trying to woo and she's your girlfriend and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then, you know, the little jabs and the little scars, right? So I like dropping that to help them to realize who you are and who you can be. And, you know, my best case scenarios for me is that they get, like, just up to the goal. They realize who they are and I still win the money, right? Like, I still get the money, right? But otherwise, I'm happy with it. And usually, you know, I do the bets with people that have an audience because, you know, Doug has a big audience, right?

1:36:19He's going to talk about this. He's going to talk about it. And like that is a ripple. Right, exactly. It's very win-win. There's positive externalities of this thing. Huge. Yeah, it's huge. Huge. It's a good meme. Particularly him with that mental block because it was completely just how he thought about himself. His inner voice That got put into him That he was a chicken And I'm like No motherfucker You're an eagle You're a fucking eagle You've been told you're a chicken You've been hanging out with the chickens About to get slaughtered And then finally I fucking gave you enough reward And you fucking flew and soared And now he's soaring You know what I mean So And he's so pumped He's so psyched You know what I mean The whole thing It's just completely gonna change his life His son's life His relationship with his wife His relationship with himself and the people that hear this.

1:37:09When he gets up on his podcast and he talks about it and it's poker people and there's all kinds of people that have that victim story. So it sounds like one way is to design a bet with a friend. Let's say someone's listening and they want to be able to run a mile in under eight minutes or whatever. Not only setting a goal but having some kind of clear tantalizing carrot like a monetary bet, for example. These bets where you're getting in shape or you're working up to being able to run a marathon or whatever, they have the value of getting in shape and the value is way more than the bet you're making.

1:37:49But people don't do it. The value of what Doug has done for himself and the things he's learned and getting in shape and getting his bot pad down, his cholesterol, and all these other fucking markers, whatever. He's probably got like$3 million,$4 million worth of value. off of like what? 200K bets. It's just like a no-brainer. It's interesting you mentioned all this additional value. I think part of the problem is that people can't... Future value and never. Well, yeah. And it's hard to quantify these sort of intangible things. What is the monetary value of having a lower cholesterol level at age 35 as opposed to age 55 or whatever?

1:38:30I want to push back on that. It's not hard. You can look it up. People look up all kinds of crazy shit. We got poker players out there, out of shape, fucking smoking, whatever, blah, blah, blah, learning the most complex shit in poker. Like, oh, my bluff combo's on this combo, on the turn, in a three-bet pot, whatever should be X, Y, and Z. You mean they can't fucking look out at the value of living longer in the health or decline curves? Of course they could. That's a fucking victim story. It's hard as a victim. Anytime somebody says it's hard, it's like a victim story. I'm like, shut the fuck up.

1:38:59That's an adjective. I'm literally, with my friends who are close, I won't say that. to you're close so i would say to you if we were talking about something i won't say that to the general public whatever but like i would just tell you if you're close enough to me and we have a relationship and you're getting max value out of bill perkins up like shut the fuck up you might as well tell me it's salty it's either can be done or not be done is your life worth it or not but i don't want to hear fucking hard right that hard is so is like one of the worst things you could say it's non-trivial i'm like yeah it's non-trivial still it's either done or not done you know we have a saying at work why guess when you can know like i'm like i have analysts that like do all kinds of things and they're like oh and i'm like why are we guessing when we can know you know and sometimes the answer will come back like oh yeah you're right let's go figure it out or buy the thing or do the research or put a satellite in the sky to get the data like we'll do all kinds of crazy things to know right and sometimes it's like bill the value of the cost to know isn't positive expected outcome so that's why we're going to do it and that's just an acceptable answer but it's a very good question like why guess when we can know and so it kind of comes along that same ilk of the adjective doesn't matter doesn't matter done or not it's like you're calling for people to just be more comfortable doing the cost-benefit analysis and like don't don't be lazy and go ah well i i it's hard to measure the tangible benefits It's be accountable.

1:40:25Hard is just a victim story. Okay. You're not a victim of hard. You're not going to die 10 or 15 years early because of hard. You're not a victim of hard. You chose that. Right? Right. Oh, oh, I didn't know. I didn't do the cost benefit analysis of living long. You're not a victim of, you know, it's, it's, you have to go to a library and look on Wikipedia. Right now you can even fucking use chat GPT. So like, you know what I mean? Like you're just not a victim of that. Like this is a choice you made. These are choices you're making or whatever. And so like I like with my close friends because, you know, you come off as like the most severe asshole in general public.

1:41:06But my close friends, they know like, oh, my God, he really loves me. You know what I mean? Like I'm expressing love. Like you are in charge of your life. Nobody else gives a fuck. I would like you to be around here. I can't do it for you. Accept responsibility. Be accountable. Don't give me adjectives. Done or not done. so you're very clearly an advocate of taking life by the horns uh you know you you've said many times i've heard you say you know you've only got one life absolutely get into it yes um you wrote this book die with zero yes uh and i read it fully basically in the last 24 hours and it almost sent me on a little bit of a existential crisis um because you know the core thesis of the book, and I mean, I'll let you explain it better, but is that it's not about accumulating money that matters.

1:42:00It's about accumulating experiences. And specifically, you know, the quote you give is the business of life is the acquisition of memories. Because when you're on your deathbed. That's a quote from Downtown Abbey, yes. Oh, it is? Okay. Yeah, yeah. But it's true. I think other people have said it throughout life. Right. And as you're lying on your deathbed, you don't care about what bank balance you have, you won't care about that, you'll be able to do, because you can't spend any of that money if you're in your 80s and 90s, because your body's kind of frail and broken. All you will have to live off, really, is your past memories.

1:42:33And so it is imperative that you accumulate as many great memories as you can, while you still can, and experiences. And so this, you know, I've lived a very rich, incredible life, but this still left me with this, oh, I need to, I want to go to, I haven't seen the Himalayas yet. I've always wanted to at least go to base camp. I need to go do this. And I felt this like sudden like urgency of time. Well, I would urge you to pay attention to the time bucketing part because, you know, if you have this anxiety, like not everything on your list of experiences that you want to do, whether they be hedonistic or charitable or for live at this age in the next five years.

1:43:11Some of them are for later in life. So one of the things of the concepts of the book is that, you know, from wherever you are in your life to the grave, there are experiences, choices that you want to make, and that certain experiences are optimal to have in certain time periods of your life, right? And it's really about getting off autopilot, figuring out what you want out in life and when is the best time for those things to happen right and so if you're like hey you know i want to have kids i want to have sex 10 000 times i want to go to himalayas i want to go to base camp or whatever there's an optimal time for that to happen and that should go in like let's say i'm going to put it in the 40 to 45 bucket or before where I have kids bucket or, you know, et cetera.

1:44:00And then if you, you're never going to know exactly what you want to the grave. So there's always going to be a little bit of potluck in each area, like 30%, because I believe that life is discovery. You don't know what you want. You discover what you want. So a lot of the things that you've listed on the things that you want, you've discovered, right? You put on your organic space suit, your body, right? You consume energy and you go around and you explore the world, right? And you discover what you want, right? And so that's life, right? And so, but if you could perfectly know all the experiences you wanted to have before you died, and you would order them in a bucket, you'd have the kind of the spin curve and life curve, given the constraints of this organic spacesuit, knowing that it decays.

1:44:46And so your ability to convert your resources, your health and your wealth and your time, into life fulfillment, decays, right? And certain things have more value. And so, you know, I use like, I've said this before, I use a lot of crass examples, but they're fun. Like, you know, I tell people like, you know, if one of those experiences is like, I want to go to a strip club and hang out and whatever and do hookers and blow, you know, that's probably before you get married. You know, that goes in that time bucket. Right? Hopefully, hopefully. You know, and then, you know, the time, like, I want to spend time with my daughters and I want to take them to Disney World and I want to read stories to them.

1:45:26It's not when they're 14. Not. Right? It's when they're younger. Right? And so, like, if you get off autopilot and you intensely think about what experiences you want when you put them in there, you're already optimizing for more fulfillment. Right? Like, even the person, like, one of the things I'll just use myself as an example. One of the things I used to, like, fight with my ex-wife. Oh, you got to drive her to school. I drive her to school. My time to drive I think this is a common thing More common than not And then I realize The touches I get with my daughter Are often just driving her places And she's going to go to college And I'm not going to get touches I'm going to be begging for her to call me And do stuff or whatever Do you need driving anywhere?

1:46:12So now I'm like I will fucking drive you anywhere I will get up in the morning Drive to my ex-wife's house Pick her up and drive her to school So I can have that touch Because I know this is the time bucket This is the last of the time bucket And my earlier experience of like Holy shit, they don't want to watch children's movies with me anymore Let me know So I had a life lesson I had a hot stove event And I was like, I'm an idiot Why the hell am I arguing about Driving my daughter to school Because it's a pain in the ass being an Uber driver These are the touches I get These are the majority of the touches I get When a teenager like teenagers they don't want to fucking know you I didn't want to know my parents when I was a teenager they don't want to know me either and it doesn't matter how cool your friends think you are how famous how many people hit me up in DMs want to work for me for free and all the shit right all the girls and you're hot you know like whatever kids are like fuck dad god damn the contempt is real right and occasionally they'll tell you a conversation dad did you know this and like those moments I'm like I live for those moments and they happen in a car So I did the life optimizing thing of, I'm going to drive my daughter to school or drive her wherever she wants.

1:47:26I am, yes, 99 % of the time. You know, because a lot of people early on in life, when they don't actually have that much money, you know, they're earning, they're very fresh to the game, basically. They don't have really any savings. Their earn rate is not that much. people tend to therefore focus a lot of their energy into maximizing as much money as they can early on, earning as much as they can early on. But you argue in the book that that is actually kind of the wrong way around. Yeah, yeah. You have to think, when I was younger and I saved money when I was basically earning a poverty wages, my boss called me a fucking idiot.

1:48:12And he was like, you're here to make millions of dollars. What are you doing, scripting and saving? Go spend that money and have fun and enjoy your youth. And he was right. I was borrowing from my future richer I was borrowing from my poor self to give to my future richer self. I see, because any money you weren't spending, you had so little money. It was going to go into the future. It was going to the future bill. Every meal you skip. I'm like right now, I can talk to my younger self. If we had the quantum machine or whatever you fucking idiot I don't even care about a thousand dollars I wouldn't even know what are you doing go have a good time give me some memory dividends have an event that I can tell a story about go take a girl on a trip and have a good time you know what are you doing not everybody can do that but I was reasonably certain that at the time particularly I was particularly an idiot because when you work in commodity exchanges and you're trying to make it in Wall Street, they pay you like absurdly low, right?

1:49:18To try and make it, right? They weed everybody out. You could go wait tables or be a driver and make more money, right? So it's selecting for the most ambitious. Yeah, so it's like clearly I was going to make more money in the future, right? Whether I failed in commodities or not. So I was a special kind of idiot, you know, giving up experiences that belonged in my 20s, that are not optimal for my 30s. And some of them don't transfer at all, right? Yeah, one example you gave was a friend who even took out a loan from a loan shark. Jason Rufo. Yeah, so that he could go to Europe in his early 20s and go backpacking, stay in hostels, and so on.

1:50:01It's huge. It's one of my top regrets in my life. That you didn't go with him. Yes, top, top, top, top, top regret. because I don't have, even though I can go backpacking right now and do it, I don't have the aptitude or desire. I'm old too. I'll be the weird guy, old guy in the youth hostel, like backpacking. You know what I mean? Like the creepy guy. And plus I don't even have, like I'm too bougie. You know what I mean? Like that part of my life, that aptitude. Right, you've gotten used to creature comforts that back then you didn't even know existed. Exactly. And so you can't appreciate it.

1:50:32Yeah, and you know, people's attitude change. Like my glow stick days, like I like glow sticks. I'll do a Burning Man glow stick. But I'm not like, hey, what are you guys doing? Let's get our glow sticks and go to the club. It's not as appealing to me.

1:50:48Your attitude and your changes as well as your aptitude and just your wants change, and it belongs in a certain time period. And then when it happens right in that time period and you put it in the right time bucket of your life, you get magical memory dividends that you enjoy for the rest of your life. You get fulfillment from them. You know, all those things, all these stories, all the poker stories, all the meeting Igor stories, all the things and adventures you have. Like, that's part of your life fulfillment today, as well as the things you're doing. And so, you know, people need to be investing in these experiences and their choices at the right time.

1:51:27Part of the folly of youth is that you think you're always going to be, the things that you're interested in then, that's going to continue. Oh, yeah. Because you just don't have that ability to look back and see how much your life path has changed and your opinions or desires have changed. One of the saddest days in college for me, besides the many trips to student health, I was a bad boy. So she's like, wait, where'd that come from? Anyway, one of the saddest days in college was when I read in the paper 50 things you should do before leaving the University of Iowa when I was a senior about to leave.

1:52:03How many of you had you done? One or two. Oh no. One was go skinny dipping at the lake, at the whatever. And I wouldn't have done it, and a girl was like, let's go skinny dipping. I was like, wait, what? All right, let's go. We went out to the lake and we went skinny dipping out. But I was like, fuck, I wasted a lot of my college experience. Like I didn't really absorb a lot of the things that, you know, you should get out of a college experience. Like, and some of them I wouldn't have done anyway, right? Like, but I was just like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, you know? And I think, you know, you can use that as a metaphor for other people in other periods of their life, the 25, the 35, right?

1:52:48The 20 to 25. And it depends on who you are, right? Like different people have different things. I'm not telling people how to live their life or what to do or what is going to fulfill you. I'm trying to get you to optimize using three variables, your wealth, your health, and your time. I take these three variables and I use them to solve for maximum fulfillment. So I'm not solving for maximum health. I'm not solving for maximum wealth. I'm not solving for maximum time. I'm solving for maximum fulfillment. And so we use those variables. They change throughout our life. How does that relationship change throughout your life, given that this organic spacesuit that you have plateaus, declines, and dies?

1:53:32And how does that change that each period in your life goes away and disappears forever, right? The single you disappears. So, I mean, live that funky sexual shit you wanted to do, you know, whatever. It's gone. It's too late. You missed it, you know? You know? That period is gone, you know, like the other stuff. To be clear, he's talking in the hypothetical. This is very hypothetical. Liv has not told me any funky sexual shit yet. So, you know, I'm just saying, like, I'm going to use this as an example. There are time periods and windows and seasons of your life where certain activities and experiences that you want, not I want, not Bill Perkins telling you to travel or play chess or do whatever it is or give to charity or work in Africa building bridges.

1:54:20where it's the most optimal. And they either do not transfer well, so you don't get as many fulfillment points, or they don't transfer at all to another time period. You get zero fulfillment points. And so we're solving for maximum fulfillment throughout the total arc of your life from now to the grave. The purpose of this podcast is to get people to adopt the win-win mindset as much as possible, as opposed to like a win-lose, you know, seeing things needlessly as a sort of competitive game when they don't need to. So in other words, adopt kind of a more abundance mindset. And also then think about the sort of externalities of whatever it is they do, whether it's their career or their personal life choices and so on, in a way that it's like a win-win for everyone as much as possible.

1:55:08What are you doing in your life now that best makes you live a win-win path? Well, I would say that die with zero philosophy that I'm going to spend all my money before I die, that money doesn't go into hyperspace. It goes into the economy. It goes to the waitress, the person who took me on a tour guide, the guy who took me on a bike ride. That fulfills me and gives me experience that I can then communicate to other people. And here's the lessons I've learned. Like, well, don't do that. And I got divorced. You don't want to behave this way. That way, doing your best, being kind, and reaching out.

1:55:42And I think when you do your best and you are aware of the concept of enough for yourself, I think that's not the only solution, but a mitigating solution to this like Moloch beast. Because when I get to my concept of enough, I'm off autopilot. I'm not being marketed like, you need 10 Ferraris and so-and-so. So I'm not like slaying people and whatever, right? Like when I get a concept, I'm like, no, I'm very happy. I'm content. These are the experiences I want to have. I'm very much in touch with what I want out of my life. et cetera, I am no longer behaving in a way to compete for resources that I don't need or never will use.

1:56:25And on top of that, the wealth that I have, it's completely going to be in other people's hands before I'm dead. Right. It's not, it's completely. It's not disappearing. It's not disappearing. Like money is created. It's very hard to destroy. But it's not like, there's like, you know, the money, the cash that I have in safes, It's going to be in your hands, in your hands, in your hands, in your hands, in your hands, in your hands. And they're going to take it and they're going to do things and fulfill their dream. But being off autopilot is probably one of the best things we can do to stop this kind of like, I win everything.

1:57:02Because I think people are doing it without even knowing it. Right. It just becomes like I'm advertised to and marketed and I'm on autopilot. Yes, and people are working real hard to the day they die for money they're never going to spend. And they're wasting a very valuable thing, their life. So it sounds like you actually fundamentally believe in the power of just giving humans, because money is kind of a choice-maximizing unit, instrument. And one of my favorite phrases is, love is that which enables choice. In other words, it's a loving act when you give someone, whether through education or through resources, money, whatever, giving them the ability to better make choices for themselves that fulfill them.

1:57:49You're expanding their freedom. Right. It's a freedom maximizer. I like that. The way I look at it is that people look at their wealth and health and time, but particularly their wealth, as the goal. The purpose of hammers and saws is not to accumulate hammers and saws. to build a house. If you came to me and be like, look at all these hammers and saws I have, and you just had all these hammers and saws and power drills, whatever, but you never built anything, I'd be like, wow, what a fucking waste. But that's what people do with money. They keep accumulating money and whatever, and I'm like, the purpose of the money was to build a fulfilling life.

1:58:31And you are giving up your life to build the tool. This is just a fucking tool, you idiot, for you to have a fulfilling life. And so I was having a conversation, actually here, I think it was here or at a party. If there's somebody, with someone. And they were talking. I was like, yeah, if I'm ever a billionaire, something's gone wrong. I'm living my life wrong or I'm a vegetable in a chair or some fucking trade just went horribly right too fast before I can spend the money. And they're like, whoa. I'm like, yeah, I'm totally fucking up if I become a billionaire. And to be clear, I think a lot of people, when they hear spending the money, I think, again, because of autopilot and conditioning and so on through society, people tend to think, spend money on fast cars, fancy clothes, or whatever.

1:59:22Spending the money can include giving money to charity. It can be charity. Creating a new scientific research that cures some kind of disease or whatever it is. I have KPIs. I have a KPI for my charitable giving based on how much I've made each year. I have a KPI for how much travel. I was like how much have I spent on hotels And if the number is too low I'm like what the fuck am I doing I'm not doing right I have KPIs and metrics How do you decide what these KPIs are I first decide what I want out of life And what fulfills me Do you whiteboard it What does that process look like I sit down In leisure In relationships In health In charity I think about what fulfills me what are things that are passionate to me.

2:00:09I try to find these things. And then I go, okay, well, what can I watch? What's a speedometer or a gauge that I'm actually doing these things for my fulfillment? How many I love yous have I said? How many times have I said sorry? How many things have I ran the act of kindnesses, etc.? How often do you do this goal setting? How much do I change it? Tweaking the knobs. Not as often as I do. but I do have just like once a year? yeah definitely once a year and I've sat down with my friend David Silverman we had like an accountability like you need to have people call you accountability because as much as I talk about being autopilot or whatever I will fucking go into autopilot just like everybody else and do the things do the startup trade the thing do the trade do the puzzle and play speeches you know what I mean like what am I doing I should be snuggling with my girl I should be helping Lara I should be asking her questions about how's her day going and what are our interests and hobbies and how has she changed and grown, you know?

2:01:09So, like, I have to catch myself constantly from going on autopilot. But one of the things, you know, these big macro slugs I have is, you know, how much have I given to charity this past year? How much have I net made? I asked my CFO, they know. They have every single fucking dime I spent. How much have I spent on travel and hotels, not including my plane? You know? Those are great big slug metrics. And if the numbers are too low, I'm like, I'm fucking up. And I ask that question often. Like, I'm fucking up. Right? Like, sometimes I know I'm not fucking up. Like, I'm exhausted from traveling or whatever.

2:01:49How many new places have I gone that I haven't gone before? Am I falling into an autopilot of doing the same cookie cutter shit Americans do in our culture? What random activity or something have I done to explore? Have I done enough exploring of things I haven't done? These are questions I ask myself that I don't necessarily have a KPI for But I definitely have a KPI for charity I definitely have a KPI for travel These are huge things that fulfill me So it's all about just finding fulfillment I definitely have a KPI for I love you But I have that internally You're not writing down every time you say I love you At 6 o 'clock There's an alarm on my clock that goes off To check in with Lara and spend quality time And I love you Every day Every fucking day that now sometimes something may be going on i can't do it but if i can't do the quality time it's at least hey babe i love you i adore you etc but but if it's just in if it's six percent and i'm like chess being played chess or i'm doing market shit it's like put the phone down let's talk and have quality time how do you stop that from becoming formulaic i don't give a shit about the formula as long as the results is love and connectedness with my fiance i don't give a fuck I'm going to give a rat's ass like prompts like no behavior happens without a prompt right most prompts are internal call grandma and then you're like oh fuck I forgot to call grandma so it'd be nice to have an alarm call grandma and you call grandma do you think your grandma gives a shit that you had an alarm or does she care that you talk to her what's more important that you talk to your grandmother etc so I guess okay for me like it's the wrong word then like how do you stop it from becoming like an annoying duty like oh gotta do this now I think sometimes there are times where I'm just like fuck I'm really into Starcraft or I don't know I don't play Starcraft Because sometimes there's value of being in the moment and having too many alarms and overly systematized can take away from that.

2:03:38At 6 o 'clock there are times whatever and if there's something going on and we're like, babe, do you want to push it to 7? Do you want to do whatever? We're not robots. We're not robots, whatever. But the whole point of it is that, hey, I have 370 months estimated until I leave this planet. I know this because there's a countdown clock on my phone. Maybe I'll live a little longer, maybe not, but that's a good number in seconds. These things are whatever. I have X amount of time and I want to maximize that time. I want to maximize connectedness. I want to maximize enjoyment. I want to maximize travel and discovery.

2:04:15There's things I want to maximize that I've identified and there's things that I haven't even discovered yet that I want to maximize. We played werewolves last night and I'm like, I want to fucking maximize some more werewolves. Kick some ass. That was a fun game. You know what I mean? I want to maximize meeting new people in Austin. They're extremely friendly. And Lara has found a community here. And I want to get to know the people that are here. And I want to do things and have parties and have fun. There's charitable things. I want to really have an impact on adoption. Adoption rates and stuff like that.

2:04:45So I've identified the things that are there. And I just need metrics to make sure that it's not bullshit. It's not talk. So I don't have to have going, Motherfucking Bill, you're talking all this shit. You ain't done shit, motherfucker. where's your KPIs? KPIs suck. That's how I talk to myself. They'd be like, hey Bill, if you really want to have an impact on the earth and you really want to be aligned with your goals, you need to have these KPIs. People need KPIs. Every single business has key performance indicators. All kinds of ratios, all kinds of things that they track. Why would you be some kind of special stupid idiot and not have KPIs for the most important thing, which is your life?

2:05:27nice thank you thanks for listening everybody and huge thanks to bill for such a frank and as always entertaining conversation do check out his book die with zero it really is excellent i've linked it below in the show notes along with some other resources related to things that we discussed in this episode and of course make sure you subscribe so that you don't miss the next one it's going to be out in a couple of weeks. And until then, may your life be full of win-wins.