The Best AI Tools Right Now (And How We Use Them)

00:00:00.000 | From sharing the best AI tools to hearing firsthand about what it's like to lose a house in a fire,

00:00:05.520 | to a new style of working out that might replace traditional strength training,

00:00:09.600 | today I'm joined again to cover those things with my good friend Kevin Rose,

00:00:13.280 | and we're going to do a deep dive into a lot of the questions you all sent in.

00:00:16.480 | We're going to share which AI tools we're using for research, building apps,

00:00:20.000 | taking notes, and some of the creative ways we use those tools.

00:00:23.360 | We'll also cover how to make sure you're covered properly in case something happens to your home.

00:00:27.840 | We're going to share how we think about where we want to live in the world, and a lot more.

00:00:31.760 | We're going to get really tactical and personal, so I hope you love this one,

00:00:35.600 | and thank you to everyone who sent questions in.

00:00:38.080 | If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend,

00:00:42.320 | and if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe.

00:00:46.640 | And if you want to submit a question for the next one of these, whether it's with Kevin,

00:00:49.760 | my wife Amy, or me just doing it solo, head on over to chrishutchins.com/AMA.

00:00:56.480 | Kevin, thanks for being here.

00:00:57.680 | Yeah, glad to be here.

00:00:59.040 | So we did this last time. We had some questions come in. We sat down together.

00:01:02.800 | There were a few follow-ups, and then a few things that came recently that I was like,

00:01:05.840 | "Gosh, for me to answer this question would be great. For you to inject your

00:01:09.680 | opinion would also be great, and your experience."

00:01:12.000 | So I'm going to start with one that we teased out the last time,

00:01:15.520 | which is you wake up, you have no plans, no commitments, you're all alone.

00:01:18.960 | How do you spend your day?

00:01:19.840 | Oh, man. It really depends on what the goal is for the day. For me,

00:01:25.520 | every day is a little bit different. If I didn't have any agenda, whatsoever-

00:01:29.520 | No agenda.

00:01:30.240 | No agenda. I think self-care has to play a big part in what I want to do for that day,

00:01:36.800 | largely because my day-to-day is going through investment decks, looking at all the different

00:01:42.880 | startups, trying to get up to speed on all the latest AI stuff that's out there. It's very

00:01:47.920 | computer-centric, tech-heavy work, and everyone needs a break from their computer.

00:01:53.760 | So that would mean I'd start off with a cup of coffee, obviously. I'm a little fancy when it

00:01:59.040 | comes to that shit where I like the single-origin pour-over stuff. And then I've been doing a lot of

00:02:05.200 | rope-based movement training recently, which is really more core work. You can think of it as

00:02:11.440 | jump rope on steroids.

00:02:13.840 | Is this the big, thick rope?

00:02:15.600 | Yes, big, thick rope, but more swinging it around your head and moving in different ways

00:02:19.680 | that activate core, and the obliques, and the shoulders, and more of this idea of transitioning

00:02:26.400 | from the old-school version of Kevin 1.0, which was, "I'm young. Let's just do as many reps as

00:02:33.840 | possible. Let's get bigger muscles," into, "How can I make sure that on the longevity side,

00:02:41.040 | I'm increasing flexibility and making sure that the supporting structure around the muscles

00:02:47.120 | are being built out as well?" So it's not just about how big is your bicep. It's about how all

00:02:51.680 | that different connective tissue and all those other muscles aren't out of whack, so that when

00:02:57.840 | you have a seven-year-old running at you full force and you catch them sideways,

00:03:01.600 | you don't throw out your back. It sounds like an old-person thing to say, but it is a pretty

00:03:06.640 | important piece of how I'm redefining what my exercise routine looks like.

00:03:12.320 | Sauna is huge. Sauna, for me, is a non-negotiable daily thing in that if you can get 20 minutes at

00:03:17.840 | about 174-ish, 175-ish degrees, that's where all of the published studies are at, mostly coming

00:03:24.000 | out of Finland. Massive reductions in all-cause mortality, reduced dementia risk, reduced

00:03:29.280 | cardiovascular disease. There's no debate anymore. It is very healthy. The only thing to really

00:03:35.680 | pay attention to on that side is hotter than that doesn't necessarily mean better.

00:03:42.240 | So we know that heat shock proteins, which are what we believe to be the suspects that are

00:03:46.800 | doing all the positive stuff for our body, get released around 175. We also know that if you go

00:03:52.800 | too hot, especially if you don't protect your brain. So for me, I have that full-on felt cap

00:03:58.400 | all around the head. I'll take in some cold washcloths with me that I'll put underneath

00:04:02.800 | the felt. There has actually been some studies that show too hot can actually do damage. So

00:04:07.280 | it's finding that sweet spot there. And for people who don't know,

00:04:09.920 | you can get the new sauna heaters. You could dial in the temperature to exactly what you want.

00:04:13.680 | Yeah. I have done this, and I've dialed it in where I bring in my own Amazon $15 digital

00:04:18.960 | thermometer, hold it at chest level, which is where you want it, and just really make sure

00:04:23.040 | it's right around that 175, 178 kind of situation at chest level. And then I lift my legs up on the

00:04:29.200 | bench so I get the whole body exactly at that temperature. Yeah, we've got this sauna outside.

00:04:33.280 | You can see it barely from Haven Sauna. And when we built it, we built it to Finnish standards,

00:04:38.880 | not American standards, which are very different. And so we've got the vents in the right place.

00:04:43.920 | I've seen some people whose saunas have the thermometer sensor above the rocks. And then

00:04:48.880 | you're like, "Oh wow, it's so hot," according to the temperature, but it's not that hot. And it's

00:04:51.840 | like, yeah, you put it right above the heat source. So you want it on the opposite wall.

00:04:55.280 | Yeah. Sadly, if you actually contract someone to come and put a sauna in,

00:04:59.520 | they're going to do exactly that, where they put the temperature sensor in the wrong place,

00:05:04.080 | the airflow is going the wrong way. And they're building what I like to call just vanity saunas,

00:05:10.720 | where it's like all glass walls. And it turns out glass leaks heat pretty fast.

00:05:16.160 | And so you have to be careful and really, if you're going to take it seriously,

00:05:19.680 | don't spend the money unless you really get the proper instruction. You had a great PDF

00:05:24.000 | that you should link to around the sauna. Yeah, there's this Trumpkin Guide to Saunas,

00:05:28.160 | which I'm going to warn because I have one friend who was like, "Oh, I'm interested." He

00:05:31.120 | went down the rabbit hole. It's a deep rabbit hole. Hey, listen, drop it into Notebook LM from

00:05:35.920 | Google, that PDF, and ask it to make a podcast for you from that. And then just listen to the

00:05:40.720 | podcast. Yeah. Fortunately, I met these two guys who started a few companies and they were like,

00:05:44.240 | "We're going to start a sauna company." And they were like, "We love the Trumpkin Guide." I was

00:05:47.360 | like, "These are the guys I want a sauna from." And so that's where we got our sauna. The one

00:05:51.520 | thing that they're working on, imagine if you could charge a battery with 110 or 120 power,

00:05:56.400 | which you get from a normal outlet. And then you could build up enough juice in that battery

00:06:01.440 | to run 240 for like an hour for your sauna. It would let you put a sauna anywhere. Because one

00:06:07.360 | of the biggest challenges is that sauna heaters need 240. So you've got to run electrical around

00:06:11.840 | your house. If it's not in the right place, it's a pain in the ass. So they're working on this

00:06:15.280 | battery solution because you don't need the sauna on 24/7. So if you had a big enough battery and

00:06:20.080 | it's not that big... It's like a power wall for... Yeah. Exactly. But just for the sauna.

00:06:24.240 | But because you don't need constant use, you could charge it 110. Yeah. And I will say one

00:06:28.880 | other thing too, that's worth looking into. And I'm not getting paid for this plug or anything,

00:06:32.480 | but we've had Plunge, both of us as previously as sponsors on our podcast. And you don't have

00:06:36.960 | to think about converting a room in your house. You can get these outdoor ones. My buddy has the

00:06:41.680 | Plunge one. He actually says great things about it. It gets really hot. They're pricey. I mean,

00:06:46.640 | all saunas are pricey. All saunas are not cheap. You don't want to price shop for a sauna. If you

00:06:50.720 | do, there's some almost heaven saunas that go on sale every now and then at Costco. And that's

00:06:56.160 | probably the best deal. Do they get hot enough though? Almost heaven. Not quite. You're just

00:06:59.280 | buying the wood sauna and it comes with a heater. You can pick your heater. It is a good sauna in a

00:07:04.560 | reasonable price range. The thing that I don't love is these barrel saunas. They look really

00:07:09.760 | cool. They're way cheaper. And then the more you do your research, it's just so hard to make a

00:07:15.200 | barrel sauna work to get your feet above the rocks and get the heat. And so that's one of the things

00:07:20.560 | I learned going down the rabbit hole. Look, is a barrel sauna better than no sauna? Yeah, for sure.

00:07:24.160 | If I had to choose between a barrel sauna and no sauna, I'd take it every day. But if you're

00:07:27.440 | going to go down the rabbit hole. Also, I mean, you have to consider this an investment in your

00:07:30.640 | health too. You know what I mean? This is not just something that you're blowing cash for the sake of

00:07:34.720 | blowing cash. It truly is going to improve your health over the long term. For me, it's an expense

00:07:40.000 | that's worth taking on. Yeah. So I'll put links to the show notes to what Haven did,

00:07:44.960 | because I think it's cool, especially if you don't have 240. Because I think even the plunge when you

00:07:48.560 | need 240, it's amazing. Okay. So you talked about self-care. I do have one question that I'm going

00:07:52.080 | to answer the question as well. Where do you get these ideas? Rope training. Where did you find

00:07:56.560 | that? It's not something I've heard really anyone ever talk about. Yeah. I mean, I have a little

00:08:00.720 | community forum over at KevinRose.com where people hang out and they post inside of that private

00:08:05.600 | little group. Somebody had posted a link to this guy's YouTube channel and we can link it up as

00:08:11.840 | well. He just talks about fascia work and he's a black belt in jujitsu. He's amazing. I'm always

00:08:18.640 | skeptical of new stuff and new people that are coming on the scene. And so I sent it over to Tim

00:08:23.200 | Ferris and Tim did some research and he's like, "Hey, actually, I trained with this guy one time

00:08:28.640 | randomly like a decade ago. This guy's legit. Let's go in deeper here." And I know he's been

00:08:33.440 | looking at, they call it more functional type movement health. And so we kind of both did a

00:08:39.920 | little bit more research and realize that he's recommending some pretty sound stuff. I don't

00:08:44.720 | want to speak for Tim. I don't know that he's doing any of this stuff, but I'm certainly starting it

00:08:49.120 | up. And I'm a fan of trying something new. Worst case, you give it a shot for a couple of months,

00:08:55.520 | you literally have to buy a rope. If you don't want to buy one of the crazy, because they have

00:08:58.560 | nice ropes that are like 50 bucks, right? Really well-made, they're going to last you a decade.

00:09:03.120 | He's like, "If you just want to give this a try, go down to Home Depot, get a $12 rope

00:09:06.480 | and go practice with my free course for the first three months and see if it's for you."

00:09:10.800 | And so that's one thing that I was just drawn to. And so far, I do feel like I'm getting a little

00:09:16.320 | bit more flexibility. And then also I noticed that I'm getting sore in places where I don't

00:09:21.600 | normally get sore, which I like because that means those little muscles are getting stressed

00:09:25.680 | in ways that they weren't before. I love that. Yeah. You didn't say it,

00:09:28.720 | and I will. When we have free time, it's just chasing random things. If I look, I wrote down

00:09:34.480 | some notes. I was like, "First thing I want to do is just clear out all the inbox text." The

00:09:38.560 | way my brain works is knowing I have things that I need to do makes it hard to just let go and go

00:09:44.960 | down the rabbit hole and do the research. So I'm like, "Clear out that, go for a run or get a

00:09:49.200 | workout in, and then go down some rabbit holes." Yeah. Rabbit holes for me are my favorite thing

00:09:54.560 | in the world. And they're also dangerous. Last night is a great example. So you can probably

00:10:00.480 | tell my voice, I'm recovering from a little bit of a cold. I was in a rabbit hole till 11.50 at

00:10:06.240 | night. And I'm supposed to meet you early this morning. And I was researching this new type of

00:10:13.040 | high bandwidth memory that's only used in AI chips. And NVIDIA uses them, AMD uses them,

00:10:19.840 | all the big AI providers that are building these GPUs to train all these AI models.

00:10:24.800 | And I'm like, "Ooh, if I can find out which publicly traded companies are the suppliers

00:10:30.080 | that are providing this, that's an investment opportunity." And I'm going so deep. And I'm

00:10:34.400 | having AI do all the deep due diligence and research for me. And I'm like, "What am I doing?"

00:10:39.040 | It's midnight. But it just shows you when you get geeky about something. That can be anything,

00:10:43.360 | right? You just go down this rabbit hole. It doesn't even have to be for myself.

00:10:47.360 | Sometimes my mom's like, "Oh, we're going to Scottsdale. We're trying to find a place for

00:10:50.560 | dinner." I'm like, "I am going to find the best place that my parents will have the best time."

00:10:55.280 | Why am I spending an hour going down everything? I just can't help. I enjoy it. It's just fun.

00:11:00.720 | Can I give you a hack that I think is probably my number one thing that I've picked up in the

00:11:05.120 | last three months that I absolutely recommend to everyone? I haven't told you about this yet.

00:11:09.920 | Okay.

00:11:10.320 | It's going to be very obvious, but I just want to give you a couple examples.

00:11:14.160 | So we all know that chat GPT has a voice interface, right? You can talk to it now

00:11:18.720 | and you can interrupt it now, which is quite nice, right? So you don't have to wait for it

00:11:21.520 | to finish this whole long sentence because it's like, "But wait a second. Tell me a little bit

00:11:24.320 | more about this." So you can tie that to your iPhone on that extra button that they have.

00:11:28.480 | Already done.

00:11:28.720 | So you can hold it down. Already done. And we ask it questions throughout the day. Like,

00:11:31.760 | "Tell me about this. Tell me about that," right? But one thing I realized that is really fun

00:11:36.240 | is if you just go outside, sit on your patio one day and think about a topic that you know

00:11:43.120 | very little about, but are curious about, but you'd be embarrassed to ask an expert about because you

00:11:48.480 | would be so behind the curve. It would just be a lot of work and embarrassing to ask really dumb

00:11:54.720 | questions, right? So for me, that was quantum computing. And so I'm like, "Okay, I've heard

00:12:00.240 | about qubits. I heard that when you observe them, they collapse. How do they even write

00:12:04.880 | the algorithms? What is observing them? Is it lasers?" And so I sat there for 45 minutes

00:12:10.880 | with Chad GVT. And I was like, "Tell me about this. Tell me about this." And I have a voice

00:12:16.160 | training. It's a female voice. She's British. She sounds very nice. This is what I tell her.

00:12:19.920 | "But you're explaining this at a college level. Give it to me at a ninth grader level." She's

00:12:24.960 | like, "Okay, cool." At a ninth grader level, I would explain it like this, right? And I got it.

00:12:30.480 | After 45 minutes, I now have a really solid foundational understanding of quantum computing,

00:12:37.040 | what it means to add more qubits, what it means to observe different states,

00:12:41.520 | and how they collapse into a result. And I didn't know any of that before.

00:12:45.760 | And then I was talking to my buddy, Jeff, who works with me over at True Ventures,

00:12:49.120 | and he was like, "When I'm cooking, I give my recipe to Chad GVT. And then as I'm cracking

00:12:56.320 | eggs and doing stuff, I'm telling it what I'm doing. And I'm asking questions like,

00:13:00.480 | 'Hey, should I add salt now or later? What if I did a squeeze of lemon? How does that impact

00:13:05.280 | the flavor profile for this? What's the chemical reaction process that makes the flavor profile

00:13:09.680 | different? Or my soup's a little bit flat. What if I did this?'" And it's training him to be a

00:13:15.200 | better cook and chef in real time. And in my head, I'm like, "All this sounds very obvious."

00:13:21.840 | But when you realize that that is the unlock, it is now a chance and opportunity for us

00:13:27.600 | to take all of these little things that we have surface level expertise at

00:13:32.400 | and not be afraid to ask the dumb questions. It's amazing. And so I'm doing that on a whole slew of

00:13:37.920 | different topics. So I've also started doing this a little, but when I'm driving, it's a great time.

00:13:43.280 | You're in the car and I'm like, "Hey, my daughter asked about whales. I don't really know anything

00:13:47.600 | about whales. Give me a 20-minute lesson on everything I should ever know about whales."

00:13:51.120 | You went to that whale penis museum. Don't cut this out.

00:13:55.360 | I did go to the Icelandic phallogical museum. There is an entire museum. I think it is the

00:14:00.960 | largest collection in the world. Of whale penises.

00:14:03.520 | Whale penis was the largest one. I sent a picture because you can stand next to a photo of how big

00:14:09.760 | it is. But I think there were like 500 animal penises in this museum. It's nuts.

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00:16:32.080 | hours of your time each week. So I guess you're talking about AI tools.

00:16:35.680 | Yeah. What AI tools are you using on a daily basis?

00:16:38.960 | Every week's a new tool. It's changing that fast. But I can tell you what my stack is now,

00:16:43.680 | but by the time this comes out, it'll be three new things.

00:16:45.840 | I know. This is a problem. I had this thing on the wall. I was like, "Let's do an episode on AI

00:16:48.800 | tools." And then I was like, "Oh, well, the next week, there's a new one." What are some tools

00:16:52.720 | you're using? It might be out of date. But then how are you staying on top of it? And how are

00:16:56.320 | you thinking about it? I think that if you can expense it,

00:16:59.680 | the $199 Pro version of ChatGPT is worth every penny, largely because you get early access to

00:17:06.160 | the models. And it has deep research. Well, they added that now recently for other users as well.

00:17:12.240 | But when you hear about these new models that are coming out, we're shifting into this really weird

00:17:19.760 | world where when AI first came out, we thought it was going to be all you can eat for $20 a month.

00:17:25.680 | Where it was like, "Okay, Gemini is $20 a month. ChatGPT is $20 a month. Claude is $20 a month."

00:17:30.880 | All the big foundational models. We're moving into a world where

00:17:36.240 | there are specific models that will go a lot deeper and give you much richer reports and

00:17:43.920 | insights. And they need more compute to do that. Basically, Sam Altman came out recently and said,

00:17:49.120 | "Hey, even on our $199 a month plan, we're losing money." Because some of these models,

00:17:54.960 | when you ask it a deep research question, and it comes back and it spends two and a half minutes

00:17:59.920 | researching something and computing something for you, that's a very expensive query because of all

00:18:04.880 | the resources that are tying up while you're doing that. But the reports that come back are just

00:18:09.680 | unbelievable. Now, Google is giving away their deep research for $20 a month. So I think if I

00:18:15.920 | only had $20 a month to spend, I would do it at Gemini because I believe you're getting better

00:18:21.760 | models per dollar at Gemini. For me, if you're looking for just someone to be a writing companion

00:18:28.080 | slash someone that is going to give you and present you data back in a very

00:18:33.440 | friendly, non-technical way, Claude feels very elegant to me, which I kind of like because if

00:18:39.440 | I'm like, "Hey, rephrase this 20 different ways so I can finish this email," Claude, for some reason,

00:18:45.040 | just gives me better responses than the more technical, clinical-sounding responses I get

00:18:51.120 | from some of the other models. But you have to go and play. For me, my stack is the big three,

00:18:56.000 | like I mentioned. And then I would add in Notebook LM is fun because you can dump in a bunch of

00:19:01.680 | different PDFs. You can make podcasts of those PDFs. So for example, I recently had a home fire,

00:19:07.600 | house burned down. I dumped in my insurance policies into Notebook LM. And I said, "Hey,

00:19:12.240 | what are my coverages? Explain this to me. My agent is coming back and saying this isn't covered.

00:19:17.600 | By the letter of these PDFs, should I push back here?" And it's like, "Yes, you should push back

00:19:22.400 | here." And I did. And I did. And I did to multiple models. But I will say that where Notebook really

00:19:29.920 | excels, and that's a great point, is when you have a PDF and you want to understand it during a

00:19:34.880 | commute. So for example- The podcast feature.

00:19:37.280 | Yes, exactly. So I'll take a Nature article that Nature is notorious for, one, being the best

00:19:43.040 | scientific journal in the world, two being because they are the geekiest, most hardcore journal in

00:19:48.960 | the world. I once bought a Nature subscription to the magazine when I was younger. You walk into

00:19:53.120 | somebody's house and you see Nature on the table and you're like, "Ooh, they're smart." It's like,

00:19:56.240 | "I want that." Yeah, exactly. It's like having the New Yorker or something on your desk. But

00:20:01.680 | I didn't understand a damn thing that was in there, very little, because it was very technical.

00:20:05.600 | But you can drop a Nature PDF in there and tell the podcast host, "Break this down at a high school

00:20:12.320 | level and give me a 15-minute podcast about it." And then you're on your commute, you're consuming

00:20:17.920 | something, you're understanding it and- You can interrupt it now.

00:20:20.400 | Yeah. I demoed this the other day to someone

00:20:22.400 | where it's like, not only can you listen to it, but you can ask, "Hey, can you go a little deeper?"

00:20:25.600 | Right. And Eleven Labs also, I will say, in my opinion, is worth checking out. I've

00:20:31.280 | had a few conversations with the CEO. They have me under NDA over there and I've seen some of the

00:20:36.800 | future. Obviously, I'm not going to say what it is, but the future is bright for them. They have

00:20:41.200 | some cool shit they're working on. Yeah. So all these are fundamental

00:20:45.200 | models. You go in and for anyone who hasn't tried these, go try them all. It's a chat interface.

00:20:50.800 | You can usually add attachments. They can do searches and all this stuff. So that's AI tools,

00:20:55.760 | part one. But I would say the key piece, the key takeaway, no matter what, for everyone out there,

00:21:02.480 | is these next, call it three to five years, it is not about saying, "I am using ChatGPT."

00:21:09.200 | It's about saying, "I am playing with everything that is coming out and staying on top of that."

00:21:14.000 | Because it is so rapidly evolving. For you to win, and when I mean win, I mean have a deep

00:21:22.000 | understanding of where things are going. It's going to be about that play, that exploration,

00:21:26.800 | that using and picking at all the edges and trying all the different tools.

00:21:29.760 | And what about not model tools? All of these companies, startups that have built things

00:21:36.000 | on top of these models, Repl.it, Cursor, a lot of these scheduling ones, are using any of those?

00:21:42.560 | Yeah. Repl.it, Bolt is another one. Those are great for non-coders.

00:21:47.600 | They're tools that allow you to basically create software.

00:21:50.960 | That's right.

00:21:51.840 | Just for anyone who doesn't know, you could basically say, "Oh,

00:21:53.680 | build me a tool that does this thing." And they'll build the tool.

00:21:56.560 | I would put them in the 80% camp in terms of them being good. Things still break,

00:22:03.520 | and sometimes you run into a dead end where it can't fix it and you got to roll back the code.

00:22:08.160 | They're worth playing with and that you can go there and say,

00:22:10.960 | "Hey, build me an e-commerce website that does X, Y, and Z," or "Make me an app that does this."

00:22:16.240 | It's worth seeing that you don't have to be a coder and you can just

00:22:20.160 | explain something via a prompt. And then actually with Bolt and these others and Repl.it,

00:22:25.200 | you can click one click deploy and make it a public website. And then you can attach a domain

00:22:30.080 | to it. So there was one time basically I wanted to bridge two systems together. I just explained

00:22:34.640 | what I wanted to do. It built the tool for me. I deployed it and it worked and it was fine. It's

00:22:37.840 | not there yet in that you're not building and deploying native iOS apps that are complex.

00:22:44.960 | For my coder friends, they love it because it gets them 80% of the way there and then they can

00:22:50.000 | fill out the rest on their own because they know how to code. But in the next five years,

00:22:54.640 | that's going to be a solved problem. And I would not be studying computer science right now

00:23:00.320 | as a major if I had to... When people come up and say, "Hey, what should I be doing? I'm about

00:23:05.760 | to go into college." Computer science to me, I would say, "Yes, if you're more on the science

00:23:12.160 | side and you want to be pushing frontier models and you're math heavy. Less so if you just want

00:23:18.640 | to be a software engineer that writes iOS apps, because that's going to be a solved problem with

00:23:22.400 | AI." Yeah, it's wild. I didn't do this, but I think if I bring the gift card side I built back

00:23:27.600 | online for the next rev, I was like, "That's a perfect use case. I need something that just

00:23:31.120 | does simple order fulfillment, generate a CSV, send an email to a person, all that kind of stuff."

00:23:35.920 | One that I played with... And it's funny because I also wouldn't want to be investing in a lot of

00:23:40.960 | the companies building consumer use cases because it seems like all of these model companies are

00:23:46.000 | just launching them. So I really liked this app, Simple AI. And you could download it and you could

00:23:50.560 | say, "Hey, call these five restaurants and see if they have a table for seven tonight for walk-ins."

00:23:55.360 | Yeah. We invested at True Ventures. It's one of our companies, yeah.

00:23:58.880 | Yeah. So here's my question. Now, Gemini or Google just launched half these features.

00:24:03.120 | What happens to a lot of these companies? First off, it's awesome. If you want to call a store

00:24:08.240 | and ask if they have something in stock because they don't have a website, you now have a tool

00:24:11.760 | that will do that for you for free. Simple AI, I actually think is a better interface than what I

00:24:17.040 | saw Google launch. But Google also wants to launch something like this, especially for restaurant

00:24:21.440 | reservations. What happens for a lot of these consumer apps that are built on these models?

00:24:25.040 | I think there's a couple of things to consider here. One is that Google is a massive company,

00:24:29.840 | as is Microsoft, as is all the bigs that are in this space. They have a ton of resources.

00:24:34.560 | We've worked at Google together. We understand that the beast can be amazing in that they can

00:24:40.720 | sometimes spit out very unique, novel, fun things, Waymo. I remember when we checked out Google Glass

00:24:45.600 | for the first time way back in the day. I still have my Google Glass.

00:24:49.120 | Do you really? Yeah. I don't know if it works.

00:24:50.880 | They can spin up fun, wild little incubators internally that do cool things. But ultimately,

00:24:58.960 | once you get outside of that bubble, I feel that the independent entrepreneur oftentimes is much

00:25:04.560 | more creative than the big corporation. I don't think it's a winner-take-all. Google may very

00:25:09.920 | well develop that feature, and you could have three other startups that have built the same

00:25:15.280 | thing. And then Microsoft comes along and is like, "Damn, we needed that yesterday." $300

00:25:20.240 | million, I'll take that company, and they just take it out of the market.

00:25:22.960 | Then you have a lot of other companies where it's important to remember that

00:25:27.520 | every time something is launched at a big, meaning like a Google, Microsoft, whatever,

00:25:32.720 | there are companies that do not and cannot host their data there because of either competitive

00:25:39.200 | reasons or whatever it may be. I think the best example here is probably Dropbox. Everyone thought

00:25:44.400 | Dropbox was going to be completely crushed when Google Drive came out. And now there's Microsoft

00:25:49.520 | OneDrive, there's Box, there's all these other players. But Dropbox is a beautiful third party

00:25:56.880 | outside of those ecosystems that is used by millions of people.

00:26:00.960 | So I just don't believe in a winner-take-all. If I was personally building in this space,

00:26:08.640 | I would try to avoid the areas where the bigs are going to go because they are very powerful and

00:26:14.000 | they can crush you if they put enough resources against it. For me, when I'm looking from an

00:26:18.640 | investment standpoint, I would much rather try and look at maybe mental health as applied to AI,

00:26:24.960 | or drug discovery as applied to AI in some unique way, or just areas where,

00:26:29.600 | if you're Google and Microsoft, it's not the immediate first thing that you're going to go

00:26:33.360 | after. They're going to get and understand documents, email, all of their core workspace

00:26:40.800 | assets are going to be AI-enabled. Yeah, the core things they do now,

00:26:44.160 | book a flight, make a reservation, things that are front and center, find the directions,

00:26:49.360 | they're going to do that. And also, they own the metal.

00:26:51.840 | And when you own the metal, it's hard to get consumers to switch. And when I own the metal,

00:26:56.320 | I mean, they own the actual OS at the device level. So when users have Gemini in every single

00:27:04.160 | Android phone, and it's bundled into everything that you do, it's very hard to convince consumers

00:27:10.800 | to switch to another party when they're paying for it. The average consumer, there will be lots

00:27:15.440 | of people that do, but it's just like any other service. Remember when we used to get our internet

00:27:22.080 | bundled with our TV, bundled with our phone, were you going to go out and get a third-party phone

00:27:26.400 | service? And you're like, "No, everything's together. I'm paying $75, done." And so,

00:27:31.360 | Apple has that advantage, even though Apple Intelligence sucks, it will not forever.

00:27:36.400 | Apple has a lot of money to throw at this problem. My gut tells me that Microsoft launches a phone

00:27:42.400 | that is Android powered, but co-pilot backend powered sometime in the next year.

00:27:48.480 | Okay. A couple other tools that I've been using. So Zapier, I think there's all these people

00:27:54.720 | building these products that do various one-off things. But Zapier has the ability to both tie

00:28:01.280 | into all of your apps and integrate LLMs. So you can basically say, "Oh, if I get an email with an

00:28:07.280 | attachment, put the attachment through some model, summarize it, and send an email to me about it."

00:28:13.760 | Why would you use Zapier versus IFTTT versus Make versus all of the others?

00:28:17.120 | To me, IFTTT is like a thing of the past.

00:28:18.640 | A thing of the past. Okay.

00:28:19.840 | I know Make exists and I've seen it, but I'm already familiar with Zapier. I already have

00:28:24.480 | things tied into it. I understand the way it works. So there are probably multiple tools to do this.

00:28:28.560 | I've heard good things about Make. I haven't tried it yet.

00:28:30.160 | I have too, but it's like I'm already in this ecosystem. I already pay my subscription fee.

00:28:34.000 | But the ability to basically say, "If this thing happens, use a model and then do this other thing.

00:28:39.120 | If you see something on my calendar, look at the person that's on the invite

00:28:43.920 | and go online and do some research and add their bio to the calendar invite."

00:28:48.560 | Yeah.

00:28:49.040 | Those kinds of things, there will be all these agents that do this that tie into everything

00:28:53.120 | one day. And there are one-off tools for each of these use cases that you can pay for.

00:28:58.160 | But I've also found that if you're willing to just roll your sleeves up a little,

00:29:01.440 | you could kind of dream up your own use case and create these things.

00:29:05.120 | And then Zapier has their own model or AI tool that's like, "Hey, build me a

00:29:09.840 | Zap that does these things and it will tie in." So that's one where if you don't want to go play,

00:29:14.400 | there's one called Howie, I think, which summarizes some... I can't remember all the

00:29:17.280 | use cases. I wrote them all down. I forgot.

00:29:18.880 | Yeah. I think that what you're saying, I really like the idea that... And I've used this with

00:29:24.000 | Zapier where you can describe what you want it to do with AI, and then it goes and builds it.

00:29:28.880 | It's just a faster way to get these apps to work, which is...

00:29:31.920 | Exactly.

00:29:32.240 | We just added that in the last few months. So it's been great.

00:29:34.560 | So I had one where it was like in Notion, we're tracking sponsors, and then it can go create some

00:29:38.160 | draft invoices in Stripe. You can just do all of these things. But now you have the ability to

00:29:43.280 | interject a model, which is like, "Anytime I forward an email with an attachment, summarize

00:29:48.880 | it and respond." So if someone's like, "Hey, here's a book summary. What do you think?"

00:29:53.040 | Forward it, and I get a response. I don't even have to think about it. I can even set up a Gmail

00:29:56.960 | filter where if it's in this label, do this and all that kind of stuff.

00:30:00.640 | We have this tool on the VC side to let you know how crazy it's getting. There is a tool where you

00:30:04.880 | can take any pitch deck you want and upload it to it. And then it goes out and it finds

00:30:10.640 | competitors to that pitch deck. It tells you the total addressable market for what they're pitching.

00:30:15.040 | It tells you the strength of the founders, and it crawls LinkedIn and does all the other crazy

00:30:18.480 | stuff. And it gives you back this full-blown summary overview article of all the due diligence

00:30:25.200 | that you would typically do within a minute and a half. It's nice.

00:30:28.480 | That's nice. So I'd say anyone listening, my goal is to go play with a lot more of these

00:30:32.640 | and then record a solo episode, get it out pretty fast because things are changing,

00:30:36.960 | with some feedback on what I've gotten from using them. I haven't used them all.

00:30:39.920 | So if anyone listening is like, "Oh, here's this tool I love. Send me an email,

00:30:43.200 | podcast@allthehacks.com. I'll play with it. We'll go a little deeper." Are there any other

00:30:47.600 | things that you're using on a daily or weekly basis that are not the models themselves?

00:30:52.960 | Yeah. I like Snipped. I think Snipped is probably my favorite podcast app right now,

00:30:57.360 | and largely because what it does is they process every single podcast through an AI model,

00:31:04.080 | and they break it into logical chunks. So before, if you went to a podcast, I'm sure you've seen

00:31:09.920 | this, you'd go to the show notes, and sometimes they would link up the actual areas of topics of

00:31:14.320 | conversation where you could jump into them. Now what they've done is because of AI, you can go in

00:31:20.080 | and they break it into these different chunks. They're shareable, and then you can quickly save

00:31:25.200 | something. So I'll give you an example. Back in the day in Audible, I'd be listening to audiobook,

00:31:29.440 | and I'd be like, "Oh, that was a great little piece," right? And then you go back, you quick

00:31:32.800 | grab your phone, and you click bookmark, and it's like your in point and out point for the place

00:31:36.800 | that you want to share. And you're like, "Okay, in point, I'll drag a little bit further." And

00:31:39.600 | it was like a five-minute process to get that little clip that you wanted to save, right?

00:31:43.920 | And so what they do is they know that it takes you a few seconds to get to your phone. And they're

00:31:48.000 | like, "We think this was the clip that you really were curious about." And then I can press one tap

00:31:53.040 | to send it out to Bear, to Notion, to any of those other places. Now I have that saved. It gives me a

00:31:58.480 | link to the actual audio piece of it as well. So I have the data in case I want to do something

00:32:04.960 | actionable on it. I can set it to do, I can do whatever I want there. And then I can click

00:32:08.320 | through to it and listen to it again or share it with a friend. And then because the SNPs are

00:32:13.680 | social, I can see this most SNPed areas of the podcast. So I can be like, "Oh, Chris has launched

00:32:19.760 | a new All the Hacks episode. This one was SNPed 300 times." And by the way, people are SNPing the

00:32:23.840 | crap out of your episodes. I know, I've seen it. I met the SNP founder. Yeah, he's awesome.

00:32:28.400 | It was really interesting. The only thing that... I just don't know what happens with the future of

00:32:33.760 | podcasts when AI summarizes everything. The one thing that is nice is we're going to turn...

00:32:37.760 | Podcasts are quickly going to convert into conversations. And it probably will be in your

00:32:41.760 | voice. So today you could launch your own app that is All the Hacks. And you could be like,

00:32:46.800 | "Let me tell you about this great deal." And I'd be like, "Hey, Chris, well, wait a second. Didn't

00:32:49.680 | you say a couple of episodes ago that this was 7% off?" And you would respond back being like,

00:32:54.880 | "That's a great point, Kevin. I did say that a couple of episodes ago. It was a minute number,

00:32:58.560 | blah, blah, blah." And that's all 11 labs powering your voice. And I would not know that it's not

00:33:02.880 | you. It's going to be wild. And that's going to be applied to books. That's going to be applied

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00:35:21.120 | So the only other area of AI tools, are you using anything to record meetings?

00:35:24.880 | Granola is the best. I like it because it sits outside of everything.

00:35:27.840 | They are working on some functionality to let people know that you are recording them because

00:35:31.600 | you do have to get consent to record people. In some states, right?

00:35:34.480 | In some states, yeah. But it's just generally good practice. But it sits outside of everything,

00:35:38.800 | meaning that you install it at the OS level. So if you're doing a Google Meet, a Zoom,

00:35:43.360 | Google Hangout, any other meetings that you're doing anywhere, you can grab like a FaceTime audio

00:35:49.680 | call. And so it detects that audio has happened and it launches as, "Do you want to record this?"

00:35:55.840 | And it creates these beautiful summaries, transcripts. You can ask questions of the

00:35:59.680 | meeting afterwards. And I think it's like 10 bucks a month. It's granola.ai. I'm not an

00:36:04.960 | investor. I would love to have been, but I think it's one of the best out there.

00:36:09.040 | There's one called Limitless. And they both have a service like that that runs at the OS level.

00:36:13.760 | And then they're about to ship like a pendant that you can wear throughout the day that would

00:36:17.280 | like turn on a light. Oh, that's kind of cool.

00:36:18.800 | And it's coming soon. And you'd wear it all day and record everything you do. It would have a

00:36:23.920 | light so people would know. Granola is going to have an app so you can just launch the app. Like

00:36:26.880 | we were just sitting here having a conversation. I can just launch it and be like, boom. And then

00:36:29.920 | it would just record all of us. The only issue with granola, I will say one thing. I tried Zoom's

00:36:36.080 | AI and I love it. I actually think it creates great summaries afterwards. And the nice thing

00:36:41.280 | about Zoom, because it is built into the app, it understands who's talking. So it'll be like,

00:36:45.840 | "Oh, Chris said this." And not that granola wouldn't understand there's two distinct voices.

00:36:51.040 | But it doesn't know who they are.

00:36:52.320 | It can try because if there is a calendar invite and it's you and me, it will know one of us is

00:36:59.760 | Chris and one's Kevin. But if there's like four people on the calendar invite, it sure as shit

00:37:04.880 | doesn't know who's who, right? But Zoom does know. And so you can say like, "Hey, Chris mentioned

00:37:10.480 | this, blah, blah, blah," to Zoom and then get much better data from Zoom if you're doing it built in.

00:37:15.760 | Okay. So a lot of AI tools changing every day. You talked about your house. I want to come back

00:37:21.920 | because I got a question from someone that was about, in light of the recent fires,

00:37:25.120 | what should I be doing to make sure that if I'm ever in a situation like you were in,

00:37:30.960 | I can be prepared? So I did my research. I have some thoughts. But I'm curious,

00:37:36.480 | maybe you could talk a little about your experience of the whole thing.

00:37:39.120 | Yeah. Our house was taken by the LA fires. And at the end of the day,

00:37:48.800 | just grateful that family's safe, dog safe, all that stuff is good. Grabbed a handful of things.

00:37:54.960 | But in retrospect, when you look back at what was lost, it was the sentimental stuff at the

00:37:59.920 | end of the day that I think is the biggest hit. All the other crap is just stuff. And honestly,

00:38:05.040 | sometimes it's kind of nice to not have that stuff. In a really weird way to go back and

00:38:13.440 | have a mental reboot on what is important to you from just the things that I consume and hold on to

00:38:20.000 | is a very refreshing thing to go through. And I would say that the things I wish I would have done,

00:38:28.000 | one thing I was very lucky to have done was that I took all my photos that I had in a box about six

00:38:37.120 | months ago and sent them out to a third party service and had them all scanned in. These were

00:38:40.800 | old slides that my dad had, stuff like that. So I have all that stuff saved on cloud drive,

00:38:45.360 | which is huge. Never took photos of my first father's day cards and stuff for my kids where

00:38:50.480 | they were spelling their names wrong and stuff like that. That stuff hits me hard. Lost that

00:38:54.560 | stuff. Never took photos of the stuff that my dad left me. He made me a little jewelry box

00:38:59.200 | when I was a little kid that was burned up. He made me a little desk. He was a woodworker. He

00:39:05.120 | loved doing that kind of stuff. Made me a little desk that I used to sit at that was lost. Things

00:39:12.320 | like that, you look back on it and you're like, there was no way I could have carried that desk

00:39:17.360 | out, nor would I have had the fire still been happening. So I would have lost it regardless.

00:39:22.080 | But it would have been nice to have had a photo of it in a strange way just to be like, oh yeah,

00:39:26.000 | that was that object. And so just going around taking photos that are huge, those types of

00:39:32.800 | sentimental things. My wife lost a lot of stuff that her parents are both past. And so she lost

00:39:38.160 | almost everything from that side, which was really devastating for her. Some key takeaways though,

00:39:44.240 | that are important for everyone. I had my crypto keys outside of my house, which is great,

00:39:49.360 | like pounded in steel in a safety deposit box. The safety deposit box was right down the street

00:39:54.160 | and the bank burned and like everything burned around it. The keys are fine, but move this

00:39:58.960 | shit a little further away. If you're going to have backups where your jewelry and your other

00:40:03.600 | things, you're moving stuff offsite, the important items, don't take it to the bank that's five

00:40:09.360 | blocks away. Because if you are in a place where there is that severe devastation, you want that

00:40:15.840 | to be miles away, not necessarily right next door. That is a good takeaway. The insurance policy

00:40:23.520 | stuff is huge. I mean, just getting additional riders on certain things. We had state coverage

00:40:29.040 | because we couldn't get coverage for our home for the longest time, which means we were severely

00:40:33.600 | underinsured. Got really lucky in that I kept just like pushing and shopping around and eventually

00:40:37.600 | found someone to like pick up and add additional coverage about three months before the fires

00:40:42.880 | happened. So we were very lucky and fortunate in that way. But yeah, I mean, those were the

00:40:48.240 | big things. And then just honestly keeping the receipts because you do have to itemize stuff

00:40:53.520 | afterwards. And does that mean like you're going through and I had 17 t-shirts and 12 pairs of

00:41:01.200 | socks and here's where I bought them? Like at what level did it get to? So basically what they're

00:41:06.720 | going to do is you're going to have a dwelling coverage and then you're going to have an inside

00:41:11.280 | of the dwelling coverage, right? Your items, right? Let me give a quick run through because

00:41:14.720 | I did a little bit of research in my own policy. So there's four types of coverage that usually

00:41:18.000 | come. Coverage A is dwelling. Yes. And that's to rebuild your house. And a lot of policies have an

00:41:24.000 | extended coverage. So let's say your home's worth a million dollars, you could insure it for a

00:41:29.040 | million and then you could get like a 25% boost or a 50% boost. So on USAA, it's called Home

00:41:35.120 | Protector Plus. Yeah. And one tip that I want to share, which I'm sure people as they rebuild in

00:41:41.440 | LA are going to realize, I know a lot of people are like a house is worth a million. So I don't

00:41:47.040 | need to get a full million in coverage. I can get like 700 grand in coverage and then get the 50%

00:41:53.040 | boost, which will take it to a million, 50,000. And so they use the Home Protector to give that

00:41:59.840 | boost. One of the realities I know is going to happen in LA is like, however much you thought

00:42:03.920 | it cost to build a house in LA is going to be significantly more expensive right now because

00:42:08.720 | the shortage of supplies, the shortage of builders. So I would... 20% to 30% on change orders and

00:42:13.760 | everything else alone is going to be on top of that for sure. So I would encourage people

00:42:16.960 | not to rely on that extended dwelling coverage to get to the value of their home, which I know a lot

00:42:23.040 | of people do. I would encourage people to ensure the value of the home and then have the extended

00:42:27.280 | coverage be the, "Oh, I forgot to increase my policy with inflation. Oh, something happened,

00:42:32.960 | more natural disaster and the cost is all gone up." Yeah. And so that's one important takeaway.

00:42:38.000 | Also, I would add on top of that, it's something that's important to consider and talk to your

00:42:41.360 | insurance agent about this, is that we had this additional external hardscapes like coverage,

00:42:48.160 | which was like a little extra policy that went above and beyond the actual dwelling coverage.

00:42:52.720 | And where that came into play for us is when your house burns to absolute just nothing,

00:42:57.920 | you've got... I had lithium ion like power walls and shit and like all that stuff that is just

00:43:04.080 | toxic in the ground. It's your responsibility to remove all that rubble, to detoxify it,

00:43:10.880 | and you have to actually have a third party come in and certify that the ground is now

00:43:14.400 | toxin-free. So they go down about a foot and look for toxins. And that policy for us covered all of

00:43:22.000 | that removal and resurfacing of the land to make it livable. So even if you don't want to rebuild,

00:43:29.280 | you have to sell that land in that working condition. And you just want to make sure that

00:43:33.600 | that coverage is going to be there for you. Yeah. So then there's coverage B is other

00:43:37.520 | structures. And the way most policies work is it's some percentage of dwelling. So at USAA,

00:43:43.200 | it's 10 to 100%. And this covers your sheds, patios, ADUs, pools, fences, driveways, sidewalks,

00:43:50.000 | all that kind of stuff. Then coverage C is your personal belongings. And for our policy,

00:43:55.120 | you can choose between 50 and 75% of your dwelling limits. For some reason, all of the coverage BCD

00:44:01.920 | are usually sliders based on your dwelling. You can't kind of choose an arbitrary number.

00:44:06.480 | Typically, there's no riders. Yes. Yes. But the average policy with State Farm,

00:44:10.320 | with USAA, you don't say, "I want 400,000 of this." You typically, and every insurance provider is

00:44:16.560 | different, you say, "I want 50% of my dwelling covered." So let me give you a little hack here

00:44:20.560 | on the C stuff. So my agent said C, the inside items. Yeah. Personal belongings.

00:44:26.960 | Personal belongings, he described it as this, which I thought was a great,

00:44:29.920 | just a perfect analogy for it. He's like, "If I were to take your home,

00:44:33.120 | I would pick it up off the ground. I would shake it." He's like, "Anything that falls out

00:44:37.040 | would be considered those personal belongings." Now, I had probably, to my detriment,

00:44:43.600 | installed speakers in my ceilings and all that stuff. And he's like, "Those are hard attached.

00:44:50.480 | Those are attached to your home, like in a way that you, if you were to, you couldn't remove

00:44:56.640 | them without causing damage to the home. So we have to include that in the main dwelling.

00:45:02.320 | And if you hit your cap there, then they're not covering the speaker." So I hit my cap on the

00:45:07.520 | dwelling. So they're like, "Oh, you're out the cost of speakers. The electronics are related

00:45:11.440 | to that stuff that it was hard mounted." So it's actually to your benefit to get sound bars and

00:45:19.280 | stuff that isn't- Now, if it's mounted to the wall-

00:45:21.680 | Then you'll be okay with that if it's mounted to the wall. But just remember,

00:45:24.720 | if you're going and doing that dream 7.1 surround sound system where it's all put into the wall and

00:45:30.880 | all that, they are not going to include that as- As a personal belonging.

00:45:34.560 | As a personal belonging. It's part of your dwelling.

00:45:35.600 | It's part of your dwelling. Sauna, part of your dwelling. There's all these little things,

00:45:39.520 | home automation systems, part of your dwelling. Just always think about that. Like, do I really-

00:45:43.760 | The kitchen upgrades, the fridge, the ovens, all those remodels.

00:45:47.520 | Do I need the crest on system or that, you know, there's all these fancy systems as you start to

00:45:52.320 | kind of go up the chain for home automation. My next place, eventually, wherever it is,

00:45:56.480 | I'm just living in an apartment right now, is not going to have all that crap. Like, screw that.

00:46:00.720 | Or you could just have more dwelling coverage.

00:46:02.240 | Yeah. But also, honestly, dude, it's like, it's just more to worry about. There's all

00:46:07.440 | these little micro things that sit with you. Like, one of my colleagues was talking to me

00:46:11.840 | about how do you rethink about buying stuff back, right? And one of the things I realized is I would

00:46:17.120 | do a lot of donations where I'd like go every year and I'd be like, "Oh, it's spring cleaning time.

00:46:20.720 | Let's go and donate a bunch of stuff." It's mostly clothes and things like that, whatever.

00:46:24.960 | But there are these things that like, if I were to look around this room, I probably could pick

00:46:28.640 | out like, you know, five or six different things where, especially electronics. Like,

00:46:32.160 | if you donate something that's like $250 or $300, like it's going to sit in a goodwill and no one's

00:46:37.680 | going to actually use it. They're not going to know how to install it. Like, it's probably going

00:46:41.600 | to be wasted, right? Or you can put it on eBay, right? Do you want to take the time to eBay all

00:46:48.560 | this stuff? It's a pain in the ass sometimes. So, I was sitting on all this stuff that I one day

00:46:53.440 | would eBay that got all destroyed, right? And I don't need any of that stuff back. Like literally

00:47:00.480 | almost everything I'm wearing today was donated by a friend. And I'm like thinking of just really

00:47:07.440 | cutting back to the minimal lifestyle, man. We don't need all this crap. There's so much stuff

00:47:12.720 | we buy we don't need. Like just so much. I don't know. For me, it was a great mental reboot of

00:47:20.080 | what's important in life and how as, especially as Americans, we're just over consumers. I was

00:47:25.920 | a sucker for the freaking Instagram ad where it comes up and it's like, "Hey, this is a better

00:47:30.720 | all steel aluminum way to hold your travel pills for when you go like travel." I'm like, "Oh,

00:47:35.440 | that looks like a cool looking case. Buy random dumb shit." And like those days are...

00:47:39.920 | Yeah, we don't need those things.

00:47:41.280 | No.

00:47:41.760 | Is there one thing... So, Ruth emailed me and asked, "What's kind of one of your favorite

00:47:45.760 | physical items or purchases? Is there something that was an expensive thing that you're like,

00:47:50.400 | "You know what? In our house now or our next house, I'm going to do that." There's a lot

00:47:54.320 | of stuff you said you're going to get rid of. Is there something where you're like,

00:47:57.840 | "That thing's still important."

00:47:59.200 | No. Can you think of anything?

00:48:02.320 | So, here are some of the things that I thought about. One was just a good Wi-Fi system.

00:48:07.680 | But that's cheap. That's not expensive anymore.

00:48:10.320 | Well, I think...

00:48:11.680 | You can get a good Wi-Fi 7 system for a few hundred dollars. Last time, I went a little

00:48:16.480 | crazy and I had a bomb-proof Wi-Fi system. And I wouldn't do that again.

00:48:22.400 | I used to have the buy a router and get an extender and then did the run Ethernet to

00:48:27.760 | have Wi-Fi access points in different rooms. So, you have really good speed everywhere.

00:48:31.600 | I thought that was worth it. It's probably all in under $1,000, but probably over $500.

00:48:36.560 | But I think that's worth it still. I'm talking about like for me...

00:48:39.760 | The $10,000 home theater.

00:48:41.600 | Anytime anything crosses a couple grand, you really have to sit back and say,

00:48:44.960 | "Did I need that?" I had a bunch of bottles of wine that were sitting there.

00:48:48.880 | And they were nice bottles of wine. And they sat there for years and they aged and all that good

00:48:52.960 | stuff. And all those were lost and not covered because we hit our policy max. And so, we didn't

00:48:58.720 | have any more coverage there. And in my mind, I'm like, "Guess what? If I really think someday

00:49:05.360 | I have an event to celebrate, and I want a nice bottle of wine, I could just go buy a nice bottle

00:49:10.800 | of wine that day and be like, "There it is." I don't have to own it. I can just decide when I

00:49:17.440 | want it. And guess what? Those same dollars over the last decade would have been a hell of a lot

00:49:22.880 | better in pick your fun, crazy asset like Bitcoin or whatever else.

00:49:28.240 | Or even VTI.

00:49:29.760 | Yeah, exactly. I would have paid for the bottle three times over if it had just been in VTI.

00:49:34.240 | That's amazing.

00:49:35.120 | Yeah. My list of things that I really like, none of them were that expensive.

00:49:40.640 | They were like, "I really like having a desktop computer in my office so that I just don't need

00:49:46.800 | to plug in the laptop. I can just run to the office." But that's hundreds of dollars. There's

00:49:50.560 | no really extravagant thing. And when I thought about all the items in the house, after you went

00:49:56.160 | through what you went through, I was like, "Oh, I would be okay losing most of them."

00:49:59.680 | But to the question we... Well, I'll do the last one, which was the coverage D is the loss of use,

00:50:05.040 | which is usually some percentage of your dwelling. And it covers, at least my policy,

00:50:09.360 | a year or in a catastrophe, two years of staying somewhere else.

00:50:13.920 | Yeah, it's huge.

00:50:14.640 | And so you're seeing that. It's covering your rental right now.

00:50:18.000 | Yeah.

00:50:18.480 | And so that's great. So going back to the question on personal belongings,

00:50:23.040 | one of the things that I've done and everyone I know says you should do

00:50:27.040 | is walk around your house every six months and just videotape everything. So you have

00:50:31.360 | some record of all your stuff.

00:50:32.640 | Yeah. It's not for the insurance company, by the way. It can be as a backup. I'm sure every

00:50:38.880 | company varies. But what Cincinnati Insurance, which is who I'm with, which they've been a great

00:50:45.520 | provider, they didn't require that. They wanted just receipts. They wanted receipts and the show

00:50:53.680 | that I had bought said thing. But it is a good trigger to remind you what you actually owned.

00:51:00.960 | Now, what if you didn't have receipts, though? What if you couldn't find the

00:51:03.360 | receipts from some clothing store?

00:51:04.080 | Well, I mean, everything's in email now. So you're going to find out.

00:51:06.320 | Would a credit card statement count?

00:51:07.600 | They've been cool like that. I've shown credit card statements. Yeah, exactly.

00:51:11.040 | Okay.

00:51:11.760 | But I have to imagine everybody's a little bit different. There are some insurance companies

00:51:15.280 | are going to be super sticklers about this stuff. Cincinnati's been awesome so far.

00:51:20.320 | Yeah. For a great example, when we bought this house,

00:51:22.560 | we negotiated that they leave in one of the TVs that they put in to stage it.

00:51:27.120 | So I don't have the receipt for that TV. I don't even know if it's in the contract. We were just

00:51:30.480 | like, "Hey, if you can leave the TV." Having a video of it might help prove, "Yes, there was

00:51:33.600 | a TV on this wall." Do I know the exact model? For expensive stuff, I've been told, "Write down

00:51:38.000 | the model, the serial number, that kind of stuff." But I would just say that is helpful both to jog

00:51:44.000 | your memory of all the stuff you own. And then second, some insurance companies, if you don't

00:51:48.480 | have receipts, it's good to be able to show them, "Hey, what is this thing on your wall? What is it

00:51:52.720 | worth?" And there is a coverage that I added called replacement cost coverage, which basically

00:51:58.080 | doesn't depreciate all this stuff. So it's like, if you bought a TV for 500 bucks, five years,

00:52:02.960 | what is it worth? And this policy, this kind of coverage that I added is like, "We're not going

00:52:08.000 | to try to figure out what it's worth. We're just going to look at what it costs to buy it now."

00:52:10.880 | Right. That's huge.

00:52:12.000 | And so that was really big. And then one thing that's important on the personal belongings,

00:52:16.320 | there are a lot of things that have caps on coverage. Money is one, gold is one, jewelry,

00:52:22.560 | guns, watches, silver, gold, all this stuff. If you have anything that is really expensive or that

00:52:28.720 | falls into any of the categories I just said, you need separate riders. I don't even know if you can

00:52:32.800 | get a separate rider on money, but if you have a lot... I didn't have any of that, by the way.

00:52:36.480 | You had gold, some gold. I know you had gold in your safe.

00:52:39.600 | What's funny about it, I was talking to my... I called my wife on the phone. I said,

00:52:42.560 | "Get out of the house." Well, I said, "First, go look and see how close the fire is." And she

00:52:46.320 | went outside. It's like, "It's freaking close." We have this little tiny safe. And I was like,

00:52:49.520 | "Just grab everything that's in there." And it was a small little thing. I had one gold bar,

00:52:54.400 | one little gold, tiny gold bar, because you fucking told me to buy it.

00:52:56.800 | But other than that, I just had a few watches that were high value watches and a couple really

00:53:03.360 | sentimental ones that my dad had left me. And we didn't have riders on any of that stuff. So

00:53:08.880 | my wife left her wedding ring. We didn't have a rider on that. That burned in the fire.

00:53:13.040 | She left her wallet there with all her stuff. She had a bunch of her jewelry that was

00:53:18.480 | some pretty nice stuff. And all that stuff was obviously lost.

00:53:22.160 | Okay. Super helpful.

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00:54:16.640 | Last question that I think we're going to cover here, because gosh, we have so many things. But

00:54:21.520 | work can be done from anywhere. Someone asked me, "You record a podcast. You can work anywhere.

00:54:26.640 | Why are you living in a really high cost of living place?" And so my reaction,

00:54:31.040 | so I talked about this with Amy, because once she joined the podcast full-time, I was like,

00:54:34.720 | "Why? We live in one of the most expensive places in the world. Why do we do it? How do we evaluate

00:54:39.280 | where we wanted to live?" Some of our criteria were we wanted access to good healthcare. So Amy

00:54:45.280 | has the BRCA2 mutation. She's gone through the double mastectomy. She wanted to be in a city

00:54:49.440 | near good healthcare. That narrowed it down a little. Do you really need to be in the city,

00:54:53.760 | though? Because you could fly into anywhere. You're right. You're right. And I think this

00:54:56.960 | is why I wanted to bring this question up with you, because all of these things seem to be

00:55:00.800 | somewhat justifications for, "We're already here and it's a lot of inertia to move because we've

00:55:06.880 | already bought a house. We've already done these things." So I'm going to ask you.

00:55:10.320 | I can live almost anywhere. Honestly, I'd love to live in Tokyo if I had to pick any city. But

00:55:14.640 | there's a lot of work here for people that are in the technology industry. So obviously,

00:55:18.080 | the Bay Area is huge. LA, I don't think I would want to stay there long term. But we'll see.

00:55:23.520 | That's a discussion to be had with your partner. Yeah. For me, it ultimately came down to one

00:55:29.840 | important thing was, "Let's not think about this decision of where we live based on just the cost."

00:55:37.280 | Because I could make an argument that will be very controversial that the Bay Area for someone

00:55:43.440 | like me and someone like my wife is the cheapest place to live in the country. Because the kinds

00:55:51.280 | of careers we went into -- business development, partnerships, starting companies, joining early

00:55:55.520 | stage companies, investing in startups -- all of those things, the opportunity we've had from just

00:56:01.600 | serendipity of living here has generated more returns than the savings we would have gotten

00:56:07.440 | living somewhere else. 100%. But you're at a point now where you've hit escape velocity.

00:56:11.840 | It's not like you need more wealth. So I agree. So then the question is,

00:56:17.040 | what would you do with the money you would save living somewhere else? And is that savings worth

00:56:23.920 | what you get living here? So what you get living in the Bay Area, you get great weather

00:56:28.720 | from the weather I want. I'm sure there are people that are like, "I want snow all the time." This

00:56:32.480 | isn't great for them. For us, the weather is exactly what we want. The schools are a huge

00:56:36.720 | one for me. The schools are great. The people we are around, our friend group, have similar beliefs,

00:56:42.240 | similar ideas. We enjoy the conversations we have. People are super curious. They're

00:56:46.320 | always doing weird, interesting stuff. The community is great. There's excellent food.

00:56:50.880 | We're close to an airport that has direct flights everywhere. Definitely don't get that in Austin.

00:56:56.000 | So all those things come together. It's like the Bay Area is a great place to live, but it's

00:56:59.840 | expensive. But what would we use that savings for? And is that savings better than living where you

00:57:06.400 | want to live? And you and I probably have stuff. It's tough. And we have half a dozen friends,

00:57:11.680 | a couple, I don't know if you do, that moved to Puerto Rico and stuff. I talked to this guy who

00:57:15.600 | lives in Puerto Rico, sold his company. The taxes when you live in Puerto Rico are great. You just

00:57:19.920 | don't pay them. And he's like, "This is amazing." I was like, "Do you like Puerto Rico?" He's like,

00:57:23.120 | "No, I don't love living in Puerto Rico, but I save so much money." This was like a nine-figure

00:57:27.760 | exit, right? So maybe after taxes, it's eight figures. But this is a person with so much money

00:57:33.200 | living half the year. And he says he's probably going to be there for like seven or eight years.

00:57:37.600 | I'm like, so you're putting at least, because you got to be there more than 50% of the year,

00:57:41.600 | like four or five of what is probably like 50 great adult years of your life. 10% of your adult

00:57:49.760 | life where you can do all the things you've given up to save some money on taxes. But you already

00:57:55.200 | have 50 plus million dollars. And obviously, most people listening don't have $50 million.

00:58:00.000 | But I just push people to consider like moving to save money on taxes to a place that you don't

00:58:07.120 | love is not often, in my opinion, going to be the best outcome. Now, if you're living somewhere

00:58:12.640 | where you can't afford to put food on the table, you can't afford to provide for your family, well,

00:58:15.600 | then I think you might be better off living somewhere where you can do those things because

00:58:18.480 | the stress of that circumstance is something I can't even imagine. But when I see people say,

00:58:23.280 | "I'm going to leave California to save 10% of my taxes," when they already have a ton of money,

00:58:27.120 | and they're like, "The only bummer is I don't love where I'm going." I'm like, "You have money.

00:58:31.360 | Decide how you want to use it." And someone once told me, "Everywhere you live is the same. You

00:58:36.000 | just pay it in different ways. Some places you pay it in taxes. Some places you pay it in weather.

00:58:39.760 | Some places you pay it in the communities. Some places you pay in healthcare." So I really like

00:58:44.240 | living where we're living. I like the neighborhood we live in. I like the schools, the people.

00:58:47.600 | And I'm in a situation financially where I am not hurting to live here. And so until we find

00:58:53.040 | a better place or want a different experience, this is great. That said, if we were in your

00:58:58.640 | situation, there's no inertia holding us back. You're not tied down at all. You don't have

00:59:05.600 | things to move, a house that you've built. So how do you think about that?

00:59:08.400 | Yeah. I mean, for me, I value quality of life pretty much above everything else. I am always

00:59:16.960 | the type of person that would rather pay more taxes to be in a place that has high quality food,

00:59:22.320 | a diverse culture of people, not just a monoculture of strip malls and things like that,

00:59:27.520 | and interesting people to hang around. I'm obviously in LA, but there for a beat just

00:59:36.560 | because we don't obviously know at a school because they've been through a lot right now.

00:59:39.600 | But come the summer, it's a great question to ask. It's like, "Where is home?"

00:59:43.120 | LA doesn't feel like home to me. I loved where we lived. I thought it was very neighborhood-y. I

00:59:48.080 | enjoyed going trick-or-treating with my kids. I grew up doing those old-school "American" things,

00:59:55.760 | like the lighting of the Christmas trees in a community area. We used to go to church and do

01:00:01.120 | the candlelight church service. Riding your bikes in the neighborhood with your buddies

01:00:05.040 | across the street. When the streetlights came on, I'd have to go home. So I loved that part of LA.

01:00:10.480 | For me, LA, I've never been a fan of the crazy high-end wealth neighborhoods where you go and

01:00:17.600 | it's just sterile and it feels like it's very... I don't want to classify a whole neighborhood,

01:00:23.040 | but there's a lot of drugs and cocaine usage and all kinds of horrible things that happen.

01:00:27.360 | But there's also some really nice parts of LA. LA is very much a choose-your-own-adventure

01:00:32.240 | depending on what you want to do. You can go have an amazing multi-Michelin-star restaurant,

01:00:36.640 | or eat at a crazy dive bar, or a little hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant that's amazing.

01:00:41.440 | You can go up and down and left and right. That's one of the things that's cool about LA.

01:00:46.960 | But with all the natural disasters and just the infrastructure issues and the homeless problems

01:00:52.320 | and the safety around some of that stuff, it makes you really reconsider everything.

01:00:57.600 | I was just here in the Bay and there's so much excitement around everything that's going on

01:01:01.680 | from a technology standpoint that, and me being such a geek, I love interacting with people

01:01:07.680 | around here. So it makes a lot of sense. San Diego looks pretty cool too. We've got a couple

01:01:11.920 | of friends that live out there. It's a little bit more chill. You get probably a 15% to 20%

01:01:16.400 | reduction in terms of cost of living out there. Great weather.

01:01:20.240 | Great weather. Good food.

01:01:21.840 | Decent food, getting better. And not the crazy fault lines that you get in LA or up here in

01:01:28.080 | terms of potential earthquake issues. I mean, still obviously present, but not as bad as LA.

01:01:33.440 | So there's a lot to think through there. But I'm with you in that I'm not going to Puerto Rico.

01:01:40.640 | I'd much rather spend the money on taxes and have less money, but have a life that is a place that

01:01:48.240 | you actually want to enjoy your time there. Yeah. I actually have one more. And this is

01:01:53.760 | an interesting one. When all these things are happening, you move to a city where everyone's

01:01:57.200 | left. In the last election, some of our friends went far right. You've gone from no money to

01:02:04.080 | having money. How do you stay you? Because some of our friends and some people, maybe less friends,

01:02:09.360 | because a lot of the people that we're friends with maybe did that. But some people we know

01:02:12.480 | completely changed and then went off in their own world.

01:02:15.920 | Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess it's kind of-

01:02:16.960 | You're really grounded. I feel like you are the same you that I've known for a long time.

01:02:22.880 | And so I thought about this myself. And I was like, well, things that really helped me just

01:02:28.800 | stay who I am are having friends and partners that will just call you on anything. When you're not

01:02:36.400 | being true to who you are, making sure that you have real friendships. I'd rather have a small

01:02:41.200 | number of real friends that will call me on my shit than a bunch of friends that I can go out

01:02:45.600 | to dinner with. But they're not that deep. I think I have a pretty healthy appreciation of not caring

01:02:53.200 | what other people think. Mark Manson's subtle art of not giving. I just don't care about if people

01:02:59.920 | think some things I do are stupid because I really enjoy going down these rabbit holes.

01:03:05.360 | I think an awareness of what you care about in the world. So I just did an episode that

01:03:10.080 | will probably have come out by the time this comes out or will be with Simon Sinek about

01:03:14.000 | part of it was finding your why, finding your purpose. That was super helpful.

01:03:17.120 | And then I've taken a little bit of time to just write down my core beliefs. I've talked about

01:03:22.640 | them. I've thought about them. And I'm like, "These are the things that are really important

01:03:25.360 | to me." And just the awareness of what they are makes it easier to hold them through.

01:03:30.160 | And then the last one I wrote down on this list was,

01:03:33.040 | I've gotten really transparent recently, not necessarily publicly, but amongst friends and

01:03:38.400 | even acquaintances about things that are usually taboo, like talking about money openly.

01:03:43.600 | And I first broke the mold with this with one friend who was asking me these questions. And

01:03:48.640 | I was like, "God, the answer to these questions would be way easier to help this person if I just

01:03:53.440 | could talk about them with real experiences, but it would require me disclosing my net worth and

01:03:58.000 | my income." And then I just asked him this question that is probably very strange. I said,

01:04:02.400 | "Okay, how much money do you think I have? And how much money do you think I make?"

01:04:06.640 | And he was like, "That's a really weird question." And they answered. I was like, "Oh,

01:04:09.920 | he was within 15%." So I was like, "Most people probably have the right assumptions."

01:04:15.440 | And so it allowed me to break down these barriers of what I wasn't talking about.

01:04:18.560 | And then I could have real conversations about all these things. And I think it's just forced

01:04:23.120 | me to not be a fake version of myself. And I find that you do that. You are that,

01:04:28.480 | but I didn't know if you do anything to keep true to who you are.

01:04:32.000 | Well, I mean, I guess the reason why I went straight politics from the get-go when you first

01:04:36.160 | asked that question is that we've seen a lot of our friends flip their beliefs largely charged by

01:04:42.400 | the political environment that's happened over the last call it 12 months or whatever. And for me,

01:04:48.080 | I don't play in that world at all. It probably drives my wife crazy because she's a lot more

01:04:52.240 | charged by these things. And I find that I don't want to put my head in the sand,

01:04:57.440 | but I also don't want to get wrapped up in what I believe is a corrupt system in general.

01:05:02.000 | And so if I can stay true to myself on that front, then I'm pretty good. And then also,

01:05:07.280 | I think the key piece is at the end of the day, the most important thing is what you came back to,

01:05:16.800 | which is these real friendships and these deep friendships where we say stuff that's slightly

01:05:20.560 | offensive to each other all the time, but we don't take ourselves too seriously.

01:05:24.560 | You know what I mean? We can call each other on our bullshit. And if you've run into someone that

01:05:30.800 | is going to be offended by the fun loving nature of joking and pushing people's buttons and doing

01:05:36.560 | the things that you and I typically do with each other, then that's probably just someone I don't

01:05:41.120 | need to have as a close friend. And it's not to say I don't want people to challenge me and some

01:05:46.800 | of my assumptions, but it's just like I try to surround myself with people that can push me in

01:05:52.960 | new and unique ways, but also accept me for who I am, if that makes sense.

01:05:59.040 | Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how we're both lucky to be that naturally, I think a little bit. It's

01:06:05.360 | just like we know who we are. I think both of us grew up in that kind of middle high school

01:06:10.720 | era being kind of nerds. I don't think I've ever had a time in my childhood where I was the popular

01:06:15.760 | kid. And I think what's hard is when you're young and you're the popular kid, you don't want to lose

01:06:23.200 | it. So you want to do the things that make you cool. I just wasn't. I was not that kid. And it's

01:06:28.160 | not that I was the reject, but I was never the head of the class kind of person. And so it forced

01:06:35.120 | me to just be who I was. And this is something I think about for our girls, and you probably do

01:06:38.720 | for yours. It's like when you're younger, it's so much harder to just be who you are because of all

01:06:43.360 | the social pressures. And I think I was a little bit out of the spotlight as a kid. And I think

01:06:48.640 | that helped. It's actually, it's a great point. One of the things I realized in general is that

01:06:54.480 | when you grow up in an environment where you're not popular and you don't have a lot of money,

01:07:00.640 | you tend to look at the world through the lens of everything is gravy from this point forward.

01:07:04.960 | When I lost all these belongings at the house, and it was like literally all of my stuff,

01:07:09.600 | everything, everything. I called you and you were like, I don't have clothes. I don't have a

01:07:13.040 | computer. I didn't have anything. I had my cell phone and just my clothes, clothes I was wearing.

01:07:18.320 | That was it. That's all I had because I wasn't at the house at the time. I didn't, I couldn't

01:07:20.960 | even grab my own stuff because I wasn't there. I was out at a meeting. But when you come from

01:07:27.600 | nothing in that, I saw my dad go through bankruptcy when I was a kid. We had dinners

01:07:31.280 | that were delivered to us because we couldn't afford Thanksgiving. Like these things happen

01:07:34.080 | to our family. It's like everything has been just a blessing. And if you can just hold onto that

01:07:41.760 | piece, then I don't know, man, it doesn't feel like you just can't lose yourself to the chasing

01:07:51.760 | and desires of more is going to make me happier. I think the happiness comes from the internal

01:07:56.640 | work that you do. It's the therapy sessions that I go to. It's the meditation practice that I have

01:08:01.520 | that is core to what I do. That's the stuff that's making me a more well-rounded individual.

01:08:06.960 | It's not the acquisition of more and more stuff. Yeah. I think that we finally got to an answer

01:08:12.000 | here, which is those things. And we didn't say gratitude, but I feel like that's a little bit

01:08:16.960 | what we both talked about. I really appreciate that we have healthy kids, that we live in a

01:08:20.880 | great place, that we have all this stuff. Somebody said to me the other day, they're like, "Well,

01:08:25.840 | you grew up privileged." And I'm like, no doubt in that the fact that I'm male and white,

01:08:30.560 | that is... In America.

01:08:31.840 | In America. Those three things alone, huge, massive headstart. I will tell you from the age,

01:08:39.040 | from fifth grade to all the way through 12th grade, in my era, in the 90s, it was not cool

01:08:46.640 | to be in the computers. I got picked on. I had bullies literally push me against lockers, twist

01:08:52.080 | my arm, do all the horrible shit, because I didn't actually hit my growth spurt until I was in 11th

01:08:57.440 | grade. So I was a tiny little dude. And I was into computers. I didn't comb my hair. It was bad.

01:09:02.880 | And I'm like, "You know what? That kind of worked out. Computers turned out to be a thing." But I

01:09:08.320 | got made fun of for years for being into computers. I was a nerd. I was a straight up nerd.

01:09:15.840 | I remember my dad had this Toshiba satellite laptop. It was back in the day where the screen

01:09:21.360 | on a laptop didn't go to the edge. The screen was halfway in from the side.

01:09:26.400 | That wasn't that long ago.

01:09:27.360 | Yeah, I know. For some people listening, it was maybe even before they were born.

01:09:30.960 | And I remember I brought it to school and I would try to get people to play

01:09:34.320 | Cannon Fodder, where you were shooting the little cannons and you're like...

01:09:37.680 | I still love that game.

01:09:38.400 | It's a great game. And I just remember that was me at school. Before people brought... I'm sure

01:09:43.440 | every kid has a computer at school or an iPhone at school. Someone has a digital device. Back then,

01:09:47.360 | it's super nerd.

01:09:48.080 | Yeah, super nerd.

01:09:48.880 | Super nerd.

01:09:49.440 | Yeah. I was thinking about the first time I kissed a girl. A little peck was like 17 or

01:09:56.640 | something. It was really embarrassing. A little bit later than most would have done. But I hit

01:10:01.440 | my girls for it. And then I was into skateboarding. And I was like, "Oh, the girls were like,

01:10:04.400 | 'Oh, he's a skateboarder.'" And that worked out.

01:10:06.960 | Oh, yeah. Skateboarding was never cool in the schools I went to. But...

01:10:11.360 | Well, it was cool in a certain subset. I was not a jock guy. I didn't play sports.

01:10:17.280 | Although I did like to play flag football when I was younger. But yeah,

01:10:20.560 | so for me, it was skateboarding.

01:10:22.320 | Well, I'm glad that you are who you are and that we've been good friends.

01:10:25.760 | Yeah.

01:10:26.000 | And I love doing this. So thanks for joining me.

01:10:28.000 | Yeah. It's awesome to be here today. This was a lot of fun questions. We gotta do this again.

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