Bill Perkins
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Episodes
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My First Million · $100M hedge fund manager: Do not make the mistake of dying rich
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Will Bill Perkins Write a Book After Die With Zero?
Bill Perkins says his wife does not want another book, because it takes a lot of time, and a rule against new projects is how she helps him stay accountable. The idea is still tempting. Tim Urban suggested they write one together. Perkins has tried to clear other work to make room, and he does not know the topic yet. He is interested in relationships and in purpose. A lot of purpose talk, he says, is empty. The purpose of life is to be happy, and purpose shows up in the design of a thing, the way a pair of scissors tells you it is for cutting. Readers wanted a cookbook version of Die With Zero that would tell them what to do. He does not think he wants to write that. He left the handbooks, t
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Why Did Sylvester Stallone Regret Selling a Monet?
Sam Parr says Sylvester Stallone regretted selling a Monet that Parr thinks is called Haystacks. In the 1980s Stallone bought it for $110,000. Years later he had bills to pay and sold it for $3 million. Five or ten years after that, the same painting sold for $130 million. Stallone called the sale foolish because art does not need upkeep. He does not have to move it, fix it, or repair it.
Parr's point is the mix of sides. Stallone is cast as a tough-guy star, and he also wrote a movie by himself and spotted a Monet before the wider market did. Bill Perkins agrees that Stallone is an artist and that people have more than one side. A public highlight shows one facet. The others can be a large
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Why Did Bill Perkins Pay $15 Million for a Painting?
Bill Perkins paid $15 million at Sotheby's for a second copy of Sugar Shack, painted by Barnes, a football player who became a painter. The picture is a party house Barnes passed growing up in the South, which Perkins describes as Black joy during segregation. He calls the theme uniquely American, in the same sense that he calls jazz the only original American art form. The image was on a Marvin Gaye album that won a Grammy, which Perkins thinks is called After the Dance, and on the opening of Good Times. He had loved it since he was a kid.
Two copies exist. Marvin Gaye saw one in the artist's car and insisted on having it, so the painter changed that canvas for the album and then painted a
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What Does Bill Perkins Spend His Money on?
Bill Perkins says he has not stopped working, and he would not quit just to look finished with money. He still likes the puzzles. He has two startups and he still trades. SkyFi is a geospatial platform, which he compares to Uber for satellites, where a satellite image can be ordered on a phone. SimMax is an intelligence firm. He also still runs the hedge fund. He would quit immediately if another dollar added no fulfillment. For him, the next dollar still buys a life he wants.
The spending that still justifies the work is not the later farming years, which he expects will cost less. He fell in love with yachting, which is very expensive, and with private travel, which saves time and starts
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Why Should an Inheritance Be Given Before Death?
Bill Perkins says an inheritance should not be a bequest. Waiting until death to hand the money over makes no sense when the heirs are not children and are already around 60. Older readers who have money to spare, or who planned to leave something behind, already felt the usual plan was obvious nonsense. Reading the argument pushed them to take estate planning seriously.
The old plan was simple. When they die, whatever is left goes to one person, then another. The change is to move the gift during life, while the adults receiving it can still use it, instead of leaving leftovers after death. Some readers also moved retirement dates, or told their parents that the job now is to spend time wi
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What Is Die With Zero?
Bill Perkins says Die With Zero was the title that landed after about 10 or 20 tries. Other candidates described the book, including die with nothing and maximize your life. The idea is to use your resources on the years you actually have and leave everything on the field. People hear the money first. The phrase also means dying with zero regrets. Publishers loved it. They worried a little that a traveler in an airport would see the word die and walk past. It was provocative, and they kept it.
His regrets are the times he did not do his best. Losing his temper, behaving badly, or being out of shape. Doing his best is all he can do, so those efforts carry no regret. Unfortunate things still
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What Does Bill Perkins Regret Right Now?
Bill Perkins says the part of life he is most dissatisfied with is health adherence. Four years after getting married he was at 8 percent body fat, with VO2 max in the top 1 percent. He puts himself now around 16 or 18 percent body fat, with VO2 barely at the middle for his age. Waking twice a night for a baby, and eating through that stretch, are the stories he tells himself. He calls them excuses for being lazy.
He treats the slide as serious because he says United States averages include about a 40 percent obesity rate, so average is a low bar. His doctor runs what Perkins calls the Centurion Olympics. You pick about 10 activities you still want in the last decade of life. His include wa
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How Should You Plan Your Year?
Bill Perkins says his family plans in time-bucket periods rather than one someday list. While his son Kai is under five, they want to live in another country, particularly Japan, and they are deciding whether that stay is a summer, a year, or two years. The larger questions, where to settle, which culture to learn, and which activities matter, stay open. Day to day they are often catching events and moving them, because the travel schedule is already full.
Shaan Puri says he now blocks three days a year to think about how to spend the other 99 percent. He tries to picture the most exciting version of the year, puts dates on it, and then makes those dates happen. Perkins treats that kind of
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What Is the Difference Between Time Buckets and a Bucket List?
Bill Perkins says a bucket list treats life like a movie sprint in the last month before death. He thinks a person has many deaths, not one. The college self dies. The single self dies. The self with young kids, the first job, and the first startup die too. Those periods mostly fall in age brackets, and the experiences that fit one period often do not transfer to the next.
If a good life means skiing 500 times, most of those trips have to come earlier, and skiing with friends has to come earlier still, because friends marry and life changes. Pushing a list of 500 ski trips into later years means the trips never happen. Life is like Tetris. The order has to be right. You will not know every
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Why Is Life Balance a Pendulum?
Bill Perkins says a life is not perfectly balanced in each day, month, or even decade. Balance is a pendulum. It swings from grinding hard to vacationing hard, from partying hard to relaxing hard, and into spiritual work done hard. One decade can be for learning and the next for practicing a skill. He wants a quieter farming life later, and the work now is getting the other people in his life to join that vision.
He and his wife want to live in Japan for a while, so they will pack up their young son and go. There are many ways to arrange a life, and one is not automatically better than another. It is a preference, then a design, then a try. A nine-to-five job, a club, a nicer car, and two w
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How Do You Separate What You Want From Cultural Programming?
Bill Perkins says a lot of what he thought he wanted was marketing from society or the movies, absorbed until it felt like taste. Fried crickets seem repulsive to him only because he did not grow up eating them. If he had grown up in China, he would be asking when he could get some. The foods he likes and the things he does were programming, not something he was born wanting.
Not all of that programming is bad. Some of it he likes, so he copies it and repeats it. A lot of it did not fit what he actually wanted, and sorting his values from the old script was going to take time. He was not going to drop twenty-some years of programming in a day. For any stimulus there are many possible respon
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Why Is Wasting Your Life Worse Than Wasting Money?
Bill Perkins says he wrote about this because he was very afraid of wasting his life, more afraid of that than of losing money or status. Money is a tool. Shaan Puri reads a passage from the book: death wakes people up, and the closer it gets, the more awake they become. Near the end they ask what they have been doing and why they waited so long.
The picture is a well. People pump, scoop out a tiny cup, take a sip, and go back to pumping. The water rises for a whole life, and they are still thirsty because the life went to pumping rather than drinking. Timing matters because some experiences only work at certain ages. You cannot water ski at 90. You can make more money later. You cannot mak
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When Should You Stop Growing Your Net Worth?
Bill Perkins says he is 57 and is not trying to throw a party at 85. He is in the back quarter of his life, so spending current years to pile up capital for later years does not make sense. As a young man he wanted to be a millionaire before 30. He passed that mark, and there was never a number where hitting it meant he would quit. The early goal was a lifestyle and a rock-star picture, the cookie-cutter line people repeat when they say they want to be a millionaire by some date.
The idea that cemented in his 30s is that a net worth peak is a date, not a dollar figure. The body is a decaying asset. Its ability to turn money into fulfillment and useful experiences declines, and that decline
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Why Do Traders Have to Stay in the Game?
Bill Perkins says the swings ran from down 50 percent to up 250 percent, on about $100 million and about $200 million. The book is rebuilt over a year, through the winter. The name of the game is to stay in the game. A market that rewards people who study it and keep their wits will eventually pay outsized returns if you are not knocked out completely. Hurricane insurers get called cowboys, then two storms make a terrible year and some nearly get wiped out. They keep writing policies, the price of insurance rises, and they make a great deal of money. Unless the work is pure arbitrage, a very bad year is part of it.
That stretch is not a calm one. Traders become obsessed with the puzzle, and
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What Are the Three Edges of Great Investors?
Shaan Puri says the investors he has heard, including Howard Marks and Ray Dalio, tend to win in one of three ways. Superior temperament is the pattern of staying greedy when others are fearful and handling swings. An informational edge is understanding a market, or where it is going, better than other people. Straight arbitrage is buying one side and selling the other when the prices do not add up, until the gap closes.
Bill Perkins says his natural gas desk was the first two, not arbitrage. People who study every driver of supply and demand still fail if they cannot stay stoic through losses, because fear shuts down clear thinking, and trading does not hand out five wins for every loss. T
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Should You Take More Risk When You Are Young?
Bill Perkins says he should have taken more risk when he was young. An earlier rule, which he now calls wrong, said it is fine to have no money and a job, or no job and money, but not fine to have neither. He kept his own savings out of the fund so a blow-up at work would not wipe him out too. He left his age out of that choice. A young trader can get another job, so maximizing risk and staying fully concentrated was the better bet.
At independent hedge funds, unlike banks, traders eat what they kill. They are paid nothing if they do not make money, then a percentage of what they earn when they do. He climbed from over-the-counter broker to trader. A broker can make six figures, and more by
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How Did Bill Perkins Make His Money?
Bill Perkins says the first pool of capital came from trading natural gas derivatives, not from buying barrels and reselling them. He started as a clerk on the New York Mercantile Exchange floor, then made moderate money as an over-the-counter broker and hated the work. When deregulation hit in 1995, firms recruited people from New York to run derivatives desks in Houston. That move is when he started making real money as a trader.
The desk is closer to insurance than to a contest with every other smart trader. Ahead of winter, buyers fear prices will rise and pay for futures that lock in a hedge. Perkins was generally short, because that winter risk premium usually bled out and prices went
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Why Do People Fear Looking Foolish in Business?
Bill Perkins says most people who never start a business or chase an opportunity skip it because of ego, not because of the money risk. They can handle losing the job and becoming a waiter. They cannot handle the status drop, ranking below friends, or looking like a fool if the attempt fails. The reasons they offer are about how hard the move was. A real conversation shows the block is ego. They cannot take the judgment from themselves, their parents, their friends, and wider society after trying and failing.
Naming the fear does not make them move. A lot of them still do not do it. Awareness is half the battle, and the rest has to become action. Plenty of people who know they drink too muc