Interview with Bill Perkins

Bill Perkins (@bp22) is a successful hedge fund manager and entrepreneur. Very few podcasts that I've done have changed my thinking so distinctly. Bill, who started on Wall Street at $16k a year and then found extreme success as an energy trader in Texas, noticed that many of his contemporaries were bad at enjoying life (and, worse, they were unhealthy). Seeking to avoid the same mistakes, he sought to throw away all assumptions and examine happiness as an optimization problem involving the inputs of time, energy, money, and health. The result was his book, Die with Zero. Many of the concepts from the book are covered in the first hour of this podcast. An example of his idiosyncratic advice: he argues that most people should use life annuities as a core retirement vehicle. Why? It eliminates anxiety about outliving your money, it allows you to avoid the worst retirement mistakes (going broke due to risk), and it's a bet on yourself (you get more money the longer you live). I found this advice compelling and I'm writing a blog post on it next week. On the health front, he recently went from 22% to 8% body fat in six months. We discuss his approach in the first twenty minutes.