Bill Perkins
speaker
1,205 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Bill Perkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It illustrates the point. I usually say, you know, there's no amount of money you can pay me to do 10 years in Sing Sing. Right. Not at this age, there's no amount of money. You know, I say that to certain people who are just like always delaying gratification. And I'm like, you're kind of in a jail. Like you're basically doing a version of I'm doing time.
Maybe you shouldn't be doing time at this point in your life. And so these are kind of just ways, you know, people absorb information in different ways. You can say it in all kinds of different ways. And then they finally go, aha, I got it. That really spoke to me the way you said it. I try and hit people with different versions of this. You know, one of the things I like to say to people is
Life is like Tetris. You got to get the order right in order to get the high score of net fulfillment. Let's say you're in heaven.
In the book, I talk about this thing about time buckets, basically that you take your life in segments, any kind of segment you want, 20 to 25, 35 to 40, 50 to 60. You think about leisure, job, career, what experience you want to have in each of those periods. And as you're doing that, you realize that
wait a minute, the going to the clubs and strip clubs and hanging out probably should be before I get married, not after. The reading books to my kids when they're children, this must be in this bucket.
Exactly. Or even when they're 13, 14, they don't even want to know you. That's one of the errors I made. You always do it wrong as a parent. You don't want to spend too much time with them, et cetera. It's like, wait a minute, maybe I should have been doing this activity instead of that activity. kind of the die with zero thinking, right? Optimize your life.
You know, the thought experiment, I says, listen, you're up in heaven. You have the bucket of experiences. These are all the choices you can have. And God says, take as much as you want. You're throwing it in. You're like, I want to have sex 30,000 times. And I want to climb Kilimanjaro. And I want to play hockey. I want to be in a high school team.
And I want to do, you know, and you're just throwing them in everything. I want to meditate and yoga, right? And then God goes, great. I'm going to let you have all those experiences. But there's one trick. You got to get the order right. And what's it saying is, is if you don't get the order right, like if you save certain experiences to the 80 to 86 bucket, you don't get it.
Yeah, if you're like nightclub and road trips with your buddies before you're married and you have two kids or whatever, you don't get that. If you don't go backpacking with your friend and youth hostels, et cetera, when you're 21, when you get the shot, you don't get that experience. Or it's a bastardized, not as fulfilling experience. So you don't get the net fulfillment points.
And so it's kind of tied with zero. What do you want out of your life? Get off autopilot. What do you want out of life? What resources do you have? And how do we optimize? How do we get the most out of it?
Yeah. The majority of my wealth came from predicting the future. And that's generally the future of natural gas prices.
The best traders I've seen have been pretty stoic about things. They think very robotically about expected outcome and they don't seem to be disturbed about negative outcomes as much as the average person.
If you place a bet and the payout is one in four, But the odds are 50-50. Half the time, you're going to get four times your money. And half the time, you're just going to lose one times your money. So that's positive expected outcome, right? You're going to make money. This is a great trade. But remember, 75% of the time, you're going to lose in this scenario. No, the payout.
Half the time, you're going to lose. Half the time, you're going to lose. The payout's one in four. So half the time, you're pissed. you're upset and a lot of people can't deal with that. They need four or five or seven positive events emotionally psychologically forever every negative event. In trading, that just doesn't exist.
If they're right 55%, 60% of the time, they're right. Think about the casino's edge in blackjack. It could be 51. Yeah, 0.07 or 0.09 in blackjack. In craps, it's like 0.03. They're wrong a lot of the time. But ultimately, the law of large numbers, they make a bunch of money. But if your emotional calculus is different,
such that you need a greater being right ratio, then you're not going to make it because stress clouds your thinking and your judgment.
Well, the first thing I do is just try and break down like what are they actually afraid of? A lot of times when people say the bad thing is not as bad as they imagine it in their head. And a lot of times, quite frankly, it's really the fear of judgment. more than the actual thing. They find out that they can survive the potential negative financial hit.
What they can't survive is, oh, my friends, my colleagues, my spouse, my mom, my dad, the shame, I got it wrong, the I told you so's, etc. There's a lot of that fear baked into, disguised as, I can't risk these dollars. I'm like, yeah, you can. That type of thing. Then the other thing is I'm trying to think is, Get them to focus. They always focus on the monetary costs of losing.
But what about the cost of inaction and the opportunity costs? And by talking about the opportunity costs, I get them to see the asymmetry of the risk. Maybe I have a greater tolerance for risk, but what I do is that I fear, you know, my fear is reversed. I fear missing out on the opportunity costs. I fear not getting the max. A lot of people fear running out of money. I fear wasting my life.
I am more worried about looking back and being like, shit, I wasted my only ride that I had than running out of money.
Showing 1021–1040 of 1,205 · page 52 of 61
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