Hey everyone. In this episode, we discuss the crypto platform BlockFi, and since recording it, a lot has happened in the news. As of today, November 15th, 2022, BlockFi is no longer allowing customers to withdraw their own crypto, so all users, myself included, are stuck in a very frustrating situation.

Needless to say, I'm not happy with the company, and any recommendation you might hear for them in this episode should be ignored and considered outdated. Okay, on to the episode. A quick word from our sponsor today. I love helping you answer all the toughest questions about life, money, and so much more, but sometimes it's helpful to talk to other people in your situation, which actually gets harder as you build your wealth.

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Again, that's longangle, A-N-G-L-E dot com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, travel, all while spending less and saving more. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you on my journey. And today we're joined by my former co-founder and longtime friend, Kevin Rose.

Kevin's a partner at True Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage tech startups, and the host of two podcasts, Modern Finance, which focuses on crypto, DeFi, and traditional finance, and Proof, which is all about NFTs. Previously, he founded the social news site Digg, the intermittent fasting app Zero, and the meditation app Oak.

He's also one of the most successful angel investors I know. He was early in companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Square. And while he might be known for being an entrepreneur, an investor, a crypto NFT expert, amongst his friends, he's also known for how deep he's gone on health and fitness and mindfulness.

So in this episode, we'll dive into all those things, all the hacks he's learned. We'll talk about his investment philosophy, what led him to be so successful, and we'll dive into crypto, including answering some of the questions you guys have sent in. So I know this will be a fantastic conversation.

So let's jump in. Kevin, thank you for being here. Dude, it's good to be on. I'm so glad that after probably what we were talking about, you starting a podcast for maybe a year or so, and then you did it. And now, boom, you exploded because I knew how much great content you would bring to your audience.

So I just love it. The most famous hack I would say that you pulled off on me is you were always my go-to person for getting the most out of travel points. And the one that you pulled off for me and Daria was a flight to Tokyo, all with points, first class, and it was on Singapore Air.

And that is the airline where if you fly first class, they combine the two seats together, close off the wall, get rid of the center divider, and you literally have a queen size bed. And they put rose petals on the bed. It's ridiculous. And then they close the door so you have privacy and you're flying in the air to Tokyo with a private room.

It is insane. And it was free. So thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah. I'm jealous because that's one of the few things I've never experienced and I've helped you do it. I've helped other people do it. So that is on the list when the world opens back up for me.

Oh, 100%. You got to do that one. Yeah. So we've got a lot of ground to cover. So I'm going to jump in. We're about to kick off a new year. Everybody listening is probably thinking, "How do I live a healthier life, a happier..." And you've gone so deep on all of these fitness and life and mindfulness and health hacks.

I'd love to know, before we jump into specific ones, what do you think's driven your interest to experiment and learn so much here? Yeah, it's a good question. I think that I was always at a young age interested in just what I could do, like you, but more on the health side, what I could do to improve my health.

And so I started listening to and reading, actually, Dr. Andrew Wiles' printed, mailed journal that would be sent to my mother, of all things. And that got me into the world of "alternative medicine," but more with an eye towards real science backing it up. And so for me, it's always been about...

My wife's a scientist. She has her PhD from UCSF, and she can help me read through all the crazy published literature and understand it at a level that I cannot. But for me, it's always been just understanding that the stuff that your doctors are telling you, like your primary care physician, is often 10 years out of date or longer.

And it's not their fault, it's just that they're not up to speed on all the latest and greatest things. So I always wanted to get directly to the source of what are the scientists finding out, what are they talking about, what has been published in credible journals that is placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed, the gold standard for science, not just any random published paper on a half-dozen mice, but real data.

And then what can we learn from it, and what's actionable that we can do today that will probably... Our doctors will be telling us to do 10 years from now. So it's more about just being on the forefront and the bleeding edge of that stuff and trying it out and seeing what impact it has on my life.

And some things work and some things I discard, but it's something I've always just had a passion for. - And how do you stay on top of all of this? - Well, I would say there's a couple things. I'm not a doctor, and so I can't be giving medical advice, but I will tell you what I do is I work with the best physicians and scientists in the world.

And so something that people won't tell you, there's a saying that kind of the technology is already here, it's just not widely distributed, meaning that the next big thing, you'll just hear about it a ways out. And so, like I mentioned earlier, I try to put myself as close to that source of information as possible.

So to do that, there's a couple scientists that I pay pretty close attention to and a physician, Dr. Peter Tia is one of them. He is a concierge doctor, a longevity doctor at the insanely high end, meaning that his clientele are very high net worth individuals that for him, it's trying to extend healthspan for his clients.

The secret that he has is that he has a dozen or so scientists and analysts that work with him to pour through all the research as it's coming in. And Rhonda Patrick, another scientist, PhD, she's got a great podcast as well. So there's a Tia, those are the two kind of go-tos because I know they're actually looking and reviewing all the science.

So a lot of the things that you hear me mention today are distillations of their findings. So I would say that's what I use as a source of credible information. And then from there, it's trying out the different things that are the recommendations. And it's what's crazy is, and this is, I hesitate to say some of this stuff, but if you were to join a private practice like this, this is something a lot of people will never tell you, is if you are a fortune 100 CEO and you have a high end concierge doctor that is working with scientists to give you the latest and greatest tech and extend your life, you're probably going to be paying that physician, I would say around a hundred, maybe a little bit, 150,000 a year, somewhere around there, just to be a client of theirs.

And that's per year. And a lot of these physicians are so popular, their practices are booked out and you can't, even if you had that kind of money, you couldn't get a seat at the table. So one of the things I love about Rhonda and the Tia is they both offer this information.

Even though a Tia does have clientele like that and has a practice that has a waiting list, he offers all the information out to individuals that subscribe to his podcast. And so the information is out there and you can get it, you just have to know where to look.

And so that's been what I focus on, is just taking that information and turn it into actual things that I try. Yeah, I love it. So we'll put links to both those podcasts in the show notes. So how do these concierge doctors work and what are regular doctors actually missing?

So I'll give you an insider kind of look at what these practices look like. The first thing that they do is they have you come in and you sit down. And it's so crazy because when, you know, growing up, when we went to a primary care physician, it was often like, "Okay, what are you here for?

Oh, you got a cold. Okay, I'll see you for five minutes. Okay, see you, peace out." Like on to the next patient, you're one of a thousand on their books. And so you never really get to spend any time with your actual physician. So his whole intake process is like a multi-day thing.

And you start off by going through a lot of family history because the most important thing you can get at is what are my risk factors? Because everyone is different, right? We all have our own unique DNA. And that DNA has different what they call these things like genetic polymorphisms, which are different factors that we can look at our genes and have our genes analyzed.

And that's something we can talk about to look at the different risk factors that are in our genes. But we'll do this whole intake. And for me, it was a cardiovascular disease. My father died of a heart attack. My grandfather died of a heart attack. Lots of risk there.

I have some cancer risk a bit and that my mom has bladder cancer. So some risk there. And so once we figure out what those risk factors are, then we go deep into that blood work. And so it's going in, taking a look at the blood work, knowing what to look for and so many times like the information that your primary care physician is going to give you is out of date.

So for example, if you go into your doctor today, the number one thing they'll tell you when looking for your cholesterol numbers is triglycerides, HDL and LDL. Primarily, that's going to be your standard physician. The latest thinking there is yes, those numbers do matter. But there's a blood test called APOB, which Atiyah does on all of his clients, that and he has multiple podcasts that address this with the scientists that are studying it.

That is the most important predictor of heart disease. And so you with most physicians, you have to ask for that. And they go, why do you want to know that? Like, yeah, I can order it for you, but why? And they just haven't read the latest science. So it's a matter of getting that particular number down.

So I have a buddy who is taking the highest statin out there is so proud and looks and says, Hey, look at my LDL, my HDL, like my triglycerides, I'm all good. And then went in for a calcium heart scan, which is the other thing that you can do, which is a very important thing to get done to look for calcification of the arteries.

And it's this non-invasive heart scan that you can have done and had a bunch of calcification, which means that there's going to be a problem. Like that's a early predictor of heart disease. And he's like, why I don't get it. And then checked his APOB number. And it was like five times what it should have been.

I was like, oh crap, like this isn't working. I need to do other dietary interventions or even the new classes of drugs. Like I'll give you another example. So many people, so many doctors will prescribe you statins, right? That's the standard treatment. But there are these things called PKS-9 inhibitors that are a better class of drugs that are better than statins for many people.

And obviously talk to your physician, you wouldn't be able to even get this unless you talk to your physician, but it is a, it's a shot that I take every two weeks and it just hammers down my APOB number and puts me into a good place. So, you know, I'm in my forties.

I've got a couple of kids. I need to take this stuff really seriously. So that's just a great example of one of the many things that a standard physician wouldn't tell you. And it's something you should demand of your physician is that they are paying attention to the latest science.

- And if they're not, what do you think of the different tests you can run with WellnessFX? You could do like an advanced heart health blood panel. What do you think about going to companies like that? - Yeah, absolutely. You know, I've done that before I had one of these concierge doctors.

I basically would listen to things like these podcasts from people I trusted and then go and do it on my own. So if your doctor won't do that, you can use a service like that. I've used that service. You can also just go on Life Extension and order labs directly from them that will pick up APOB as well.

But honestly, even if you get these numbers back and you're listening to the podcast and you're comparing them and you're like, "Oh, I'm out of range." What are you going to do? Like how are you going to address this? You have to find a physician that believes in the latest science.

And that is, and so that's going to take a little bit of calling around and talking to physicians and making sure you find someone that's following this. - Nice. Okay. So that's heart health. What about one that I know we've talked a lot about? And I know we went through a five-day fast together where it was water only, but I wouldn't say I've kept up as much.

What's the latest on fasting? Is that something you're still practicing? - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a few things to mention. One, we know that fasting can create something called autophagy, which means those weaker precancerous cells, the ones that could potentially go rogue when they are deprived of nutrients for extended periods of time, they self-destruct, which is a good thing.

That's what you want. You want these cells to die off. Short periods of fasting can be great for that. That's why I created the app Zero. My friend Mike Mazur, who took the app over, he actually was battling cancer at the time, and there was some great research out of UC San Diego with Satchin Panda and one other physician.

I'm drawing a blank right now, but out of essentially showing that when you take and incorporate fasting as part of your chemotherapy, it can even be more effective at killing off either of these cancer cells or the precancerous cells. So he was implementing, and obviously, if you have cancer, you have to talk to your physician about this, but he was implementing a fasting regimen in with his chemotherapy treatment, had a fantastic outcome.

And then it was just clear to me that the other big thing that is just a no-brainer is anytime anyone is obese, it is linked to a whole slew of bad things, right? Whether it be heart disease or diabetes, or there's actually, I think it's a dozen or so, 12 or 13 different cancers that are linked with obesity.

So just getting your body composition down and your visceral fat down into a place where it should be, fasting can be yet another tool for that toolkit in that it's just something to add, whether you decide to do intermittent fasting a few times a week, or do extended duration fasts once a quarter or every other month or something like that.

So it's certainly something that I want to make sure I get at least a few days in per month of. I do the longer duration. Some people just do 16 hours a day or 18 hours a day. I'm more of a fan of just doing a couple of days of longer duration.

It's things called like a monk fast, like a 36-hour fast, things like that. And Xero supports all of that. And there's a lot more data in there. It's also just, it is one of those things that you feel afterwards, you just feel like you've given your body and your gut some time to just take a break and kind of repair and heal and have some downtime there, which is also really nice, especially after the holidays, man.

I'm definitely going to go back on the fasting train. Oh, man. Definitely. So one other one I'll mention, and then I'll let you add any. We're both fans of sauna. I've been trying to figure out where in my house/driveway or somewhere I can put one. I know it's something really important to you.

What kind of drove you to be so fascinated with sauna therapy in general? Yeah, it's honestly, it's just the studies that were being published. A lot of them are coming out of Finland and just a lot of the data that we were seeing. When you look at the studies, it is just, there's something that happens when essentially what it is, and I'm doing this off the top of my head, but I'm 95% sure it's accurate.

It's 174 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. That is like the heat and the duration that you need to activate something in your body called heat shock proteins. And when these proteins are activated, they do all types of beneficial things in the body. And so out of these studies that came out of Finland and there's since been a few others, some of the effects were just insanely positive.

I'll give you an example. So men who saunaed two to three times per week were 27% less likely to die from cardiovascular related causes than men who didn't use the sauna. And there was other benefits around, well, here I'll read the rest of it. Furthermore, the benefits they experienced were found to be dose dependent.

Men who used the sauna roughly twice as often, about four to seven times per week, experienced roughly twice the benefit and were 50% less likely to die from cardiovascular related causes. In addition, frequent sauna users were found to be 40% less likely to die from all causes of premature death.

So all cause mortality. This even held true when they considered age, activity levels, and other lifestyle factors that may have influenced the men's health. So what they mean by that is they controlled for external factors. And this is really important because in some sense, you could say, if you're going to the sauna, you're probably already a healthy person.

So of course they didn't die of cardiovascular disease, but they controlled for that as well. So people that had poor diets were included and they figure out how to compensate for that on the stats side. So the other really interesting fact is that men who use the sauna four to seven times per week had a 66% lower risk in developing dementia and a 65% lower risk in developing Alzheimer's disease compared to men that use the sauna only once per week.

So it's just some really interesting data around sauna usage. And it is a very pleasurable activity. We're not talking about running marathons here. Like you literally just go in, sit down, and enjoy the sauna and sweat it out for 20 minutes. So it will take some ramping up to.

174 is, it took me probably a month to be able to just walk out there feeling good versus feeling like I was like heat exhausted, you know, in some sense. Obviously you have to hydrate a ton, but yeah, that's something where, you know, you can pick up a sauna.

I like the traditional saunas. I don't do the infrared ones, but it's a couple thousand dollar investment to get these standalone units, the very small ones that fit one or two people. And I would say, you know, what an investment in your health and your future. So it's certainly something that I think has a lot of strong data behind it and is also something that's relaxing and fun to do with your significant other.

- Any other things you've experimented with or you've heard about that are worth sharing on the kind of health mindfulness kind of side of things? - Yeah, there's a ton of little tiny hacks that I think would be good for just a little rapid fire ones. Like for example, lithium, the mineral, they've shown, they did this study where they found that when lithium is present in drinking water, and this is like, they looked all across the United States and they found when it's naturally at a little bit higher levels, like microdose levels, that there was less depression, less suicides.

It was just like this mineral that we typically don't get a lot of, and we don't need a lot of it. We actually just to microdose it will improve mental states and potentially protect against Alzheimer's disease as well. There's been some early data on that. So for me, I was like, okay, I don't have any lithium out here where I live here in Portland.

I did the analysis of my local water and it was next to nothing. So how can you get this as a microdose? And I did some research and I found this sparkling water that actually has a little bit higher than the microdose levels that are found in drinking water that I actually love.

It's this German sparkling water. It's called, I'm going to butcher this one, Gerolsteiner. Okay, so Gerolsteiner sparkling water, they have it on Amazon and it's not cheap, but it will get you that kind of microdose of lithium. There have since been microdose of kind of lithium pills and things that you can try as well.

But yeah, we can link to some of that data. I thought that was interesting. Another really fun one is chocolate. So chocolate we all know has this tasty treat, but in its purest form, meaning just like pulverized ground up chocolate, there has been just a ton of papers around the health benefits of chocolate, both in terms of vascular health and improving the flexibility of arteries and helping the heart and brain.

And Cocovia is a brand, and I have no affiliation with any of the stuff we're mentioning today. Cocovia is a brand that actually is sponsored or created by the Mars company. So the Mars chocolate company actually poured a ton of money into this research, which one could argue it would be, you always worry who's backing the research.

If it's a chocolate company, it's in their best interest to back this research. But everyone that's read the studies that I've looked at has said it's actually really solid data and they've just been a financial backer and didn't have any kind of vested interest in positive results here. But they put out pills specifically for supplement for heart health and brain health that I've tried that I think are fantastic.

You get a little hit of about 20 milligrams of naturally occurring caffeine. And so I'll take a couple of these little chocolate pills with my coffee in the morning, my plain coffee. And it's just, it's insane the quick mental boost I get. So they say it starts improving blood flow within two hours.

And it just, I notice it, which is crazy. There's not many supplements I take immediately notice it. You take your multivitamin, your fish oils, your vitamin D or whatever, and you don't notice anything. But this is one where it's definitely worth picking up a bottle and check out the website, Cocovia.

They link to a bunch of the different studies, published papers and 30 plus clinical studies with some of the leading research institutions they used. It's really interesting stuff. - Yeah. You just mentioned vitamins. If you found out someone like me was not taking a multivitamin regularly, is your reaction, what are you doing?

That's crazy? - It depends on your diet. If you're eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and that's part of your kind of regimen, then it's not crazy. But I would say that historically, they've noticed that because of the kind of minerals in the earth going by the wayside, they're being less and they're being more, even organic farming can oftentimes produce less nutrients in their vegetables than even say a couple of decades ago, just because the erosion of nutrients in the soil, then yeah, you're not quite getting the same nutrient load that you were.

So I don't know. I use it as an insurance policy. I don't think of it as a main primary source, but there's so many good brands at your local fancy grocery store that has all the... You want to pick something that isn't just your cheapest option, but really look into their farming practices and where they source their ingredients.

I go for multivitamins that are derived from food versus that are made in the lab. So they don't say 100% food-based multivitamin and that's kind of my go-to. - Nice. Anything else in the rapid fire? - I mean, something on the, I would say on the early side that is probably worth paying attention to, there is a compound out there that's a prescription called Ozempic.

And again, I listened to Tia's podcast on that one, but it is for glucose regulation. And one of the things that we noticed, and I encourage people to do this as well with their primary physician, is do something called a glucose tolerance test, where you essentially go in, they check your glucose, and then put through it via a blood draw.

And then they make you drink a 100% pure sugar glucose, oral glucose drink. And then they measure your glucose in 30-minute intervals over the course of a couple hours. And they're also looking at your insulin levels as well. And so you're looking for how high do you spike with a full drink like that on an empty stomach?

And then also how quickly and how sensitized are your muscles and how quickly are they uptaking the glucose and how much insulin is being issued to combat the glucose. So you can see how good are you at glucose disposal as well. And so for me, this is where I had an issue.

And so Tia was first identified and said, "Hey, you're not pre-diabetic, but we don't like how long the glucose is sticking around in your system. You're elevated way too long. You should be about half that or less. So we can treat this a couple of different ways. And we need to get under control because any amount of elevated sugar in the bloodstream is just not good for inflammation and a whole slew of other different things.

And eventually it does lead to pre-diabetes and diabetes. The ways you can do that are two primarily ways, one pharmacologically or two, sensitize the muscles more. And so that can be through weightlifting or zone two cardio. On the actual medication side, the Azempic drug is just amazing. It's a subcutaneous shot that you take every couple of weeks and it really gets your glucose under control.

And one big side effect is you actually lose weight while doing it as well. So I've had some friends that have been on it for a series of months and they've dropped 10, 15, 20 pounds just by taking this drug. The downside is that it's really expensive because it is so new.

And if you can get it covered by your insurance, if you're a type two diabetic, then that's the way to go. If you don't have diabetes, which I don't, they won't cover it for your insurance. And so the best bet I found is going to that good RX site, getting one of those printable coupons.

I don't know if you've seen those coupons sites that you can use for getting prescriptions that you can take into your pharmacy and those give you, I think, a hundred dollars off or something like that. And then Costco has the cheapest prices for Azempic, but it's still going to run you a little over 20 grand a year, somewhere around there.

So it is not cheap, but for those of you that have true glucose issues like myself, and if it's within your budget, it's an option. But I will tell you, it's something to keep on your radar because just the PKS9 inhibitors I'm talking about, rather than statins that I was talking about earlier, that shot, it's another one that's not cheap.

Your insurance may cover it, but if they don't, it's something where two, three, you check in every couple of years because as these things become wider and wider adopted, they can produce more, manufacturing processes improve, the price of these drugs can plummet. And when they do go down and you want to be able, and they are within striking distance of being able to afford them, then you want to jump on them right away.

Yeah. And ask your insurance company. I was picking up something at the pharmacy the other day and the pharmacist said, "Oh, this is probably not going to be covered by your insurance." And I don't have anything fancy. I just have a standard employer insurance policy. And they were like, "Oh, actually, most people don't cover this and yours does." So you might have luck sometimes with things just finding out if your insurance covers them because I just found out this random thing was.

Fortunately, it was only $20. So it didn't... My copay was about exactly the same as the thing I was picking up. So it didn't matter much, but... Have you used GoodRx before? I haven't used GoodRx. We've used Alto Pharmacy as a pharmacy that delivers to your house for the same price as prescriptions.

Basically, by not having a storefront, they can include the delivery. And I love that, but I haven't used GoodRx. Yeah. GoodRx is great. You can just go in there, type in a drug name, it'll find you the lowest price for it. It oftentimes just gives you a coupon and you can just print it out and literally just take it down to Costco or Walmart or CVS or whatever and they'll honor it and give you a better price.

That's awesome. The only other thing I would add is these stress gummies that my wife loves. They're really cool. They're called Pym, P-Y-M. And you can pick these up on Amazon and you can obviously link them up in your show notes. They were created by a friend of ours, Zach Williams.

And after his father passed away, he just wanted to focus on mental health and mood. And it's been something that he'd be the first to admit has just been something that he's struggled with and wants to help other people with as well. And he came up with a really awesome formulation of just very simple ingredients.

It's just GABA, L-theanine, and rhodiola. It's three just ingredients. They're these little chews. And my wife swears by them. She chews a couple when we're putting the kids down for bed at night. And she's like, "I don't even want to have a glass of wine after I have it." She's like, "It just helps me chill out." And they're not that expensive and you can get them on Amazon.

And Zach is really an awesome human. And I highly recommend them. And then also, the cool thing is if they do work for you, because it's only three ingredients, there's so many times you buy these things that are like, "Mood this or that." And it's like, "Proprietary formulation," it says on the back.

And then it's 20 different ingredients. You're like, "Okay, how do I know which ingredient actually helped me here?" Because then maybe it's just the L-theanine you need, or maybe it's just the GABA you need, or you just don't know. So with these three ingredients, you can then go off and buy individual components of it if you want to try different pieces and see how it makes you feel.

But these are just really fun for when you feel just a little overwhelmed, a little anxiety, a little stress, and just pop a couple of these and they're my go-to for that type of stuff. That's awesome. Yeah. The only other one I want to share was something you shared with me, was that I'd done my 23andMe test.

And I was telling you like, "I checked. There's not that much data." And you were like, "Were you looking at it on 23andMe?" And I was like, "Yeah, of course." And you were like, "You can't do that. You got to download your 23andMe data and go look at it somewhere else." So I can't remember the exact process.

Maybe you still remember it. But that was a total unlock, totally free if you've ever done 23andMe. Yeah, that's the whole thing. So the thing with 23andMe is, obviously, great place. You spit in a tube, you send it in $100, you get your whole genetic history. It's great at giving you maps of where you came from, where your ancestors came from, who your cousins are, things like that.

But they are really a little bit gun-shy on giving you, as they should be, health advice around this type of stuff. The interesting thing about having your access to your genes is what they're showing you in your actual data are these little things, these little, they call them SNPs, which they're single nucleotide polymorphisms, where everyone has different SNPs, that is different genetic modifications or gene expressions that are unique to us.

And sometimes you can look at that data, if you analyze it properly, and you can figure out what's going on and address certain health issues. So I'll give you an example. There's a very common genetic polymorphism called MTHFR. And if you have one or two of those SNPs, then you're probably going to be a pretty bad absorber of B vitamins.

And if you're a bad absorber of B vitamins, there's probably going to be elevated homocysteine in your blood work. And that just is bad. It hasn't been shown. It's been shown as being correlated with heart disease in certain cancers, but not causal, if that makes sense. So it's there when they're there, but they can't prove.

It might just be that it's apparent, but it's not actually causing the heart disease, if that makes sense. It just rides along with it. Something else is going on or is wrong. But if you know that, you can take certain types of methylated B vitamins or higher-dose B vitamins and then beat down and reduce your homocysteine levels.

So this is one example of a bunch of different things that you can figure out. I think that Rhonda has the best genetic analyzer out there. It's foundmyfitness.com. You can go on her site and just connect your, you'll have to go into 23andMe. You have to go in the settings.

And there's a secret little setting in there that says export your data to let you download the raw data file, which has all of your information. And then you take that to Rhonda's site, upload it. And then she does the analysis or her machine, the computer does the analysis in real time, spits you back your report.

And then it gives you something you can go and talk to your physician about because they tell you what's going on with the different SNPs that you might have. Now, one thing that you should just know about is they have the SNPs in there for Alzheimer's disease. So some people get freaked out by this particular SNP.

So they have these things called, the way they classify them is you're either a 3/3. This is just how they classify them, which means that you don't have it. You're a 3/4, which means you have one copy of it. Or you're a 4/4, which means you have two copies of this particular gene.

So if you're a 3/3, which I am, then you're standard risk, just like anyone else. If you're a 3/4, which my wife is, then you have, I think, a 20% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. And if you're a 4/4, it's really high. It's something like, I don't know, I'm going to misquote it, but it's 60 or 70% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.

So the good news is that there's a great book called The End of Alzheimer's. There's a lot of things that if you know about this stuff, especially these genes early on, you can get in front of it. And you can get in front of it in terms of diet, low inflammation of diet, also a lot of exercise, sauna usage, like all the regimen that you can do that they have proven can delay the kind of onset of this stuff.

If you take action now, some people freak out and they're like, "I don't want to see that. I just don't even want to know." Because there's not a whole lot of great treatments once you are actually diagnosed. So just be aware that it's going to expose that data. It shows you a lot of stuff that 23andMe won't show you.

I prefer that. I think knowledge is power. And I think there's always something you can do here. So I'm fine with it, but just something to be aware of. That's awesome. We went through a lot. I know you mentioned Atiya and Rhonda's podcast. Any other sources of information to follow for all this stuff?

Yeah, Matt Walker, who runs the Berkeley Sleep Lab, he has a new podcast out there that I would say we are increasingly just understanding the importance of sleep and its role in repairing the brain and mental health and a whole slew of different things. So I think definitely check out Matt Walker's podcast.

Now, I will tell you, Peter Atiya, to get the most out of his podcast, it is a paid podcast. It's not a whole lot. You'd have to look it up, Chris. I don't have it in front of me. It's $50 a year or something. But this is a physician whose clients pay a ton of money for the same thing.

It is worth every single penny, in my opinion. And I have no financial interest in anything he does. But the scientists that he has on the show and what they're telling you ahead of time that you'll learn about years before anyone else, it's just worth every penny. So anyway, yeah, check out Atiya's stuff.

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Okay, I know we got a lot of ground to cover, and I want to get to crypto and investing. Quick, before we get there, are there any other uncommon things you do in your routine, tools and services you use that might be worth sharing that kind of fall in the category of kind of hacks or optimizations?

On the health side? Outside of the health side, just general life, things you do at work, on your computer, things you do professionally? I'm a security kind of nut, I would say, so there's probably, I think that when you, especially in the world of cryptocurrency, when you have to get serious about protecting your data, I do have a couple of little hacks there that I would say most people don't know about that I think are really important.

So I guess it'd probably be a great way to move into our crypto talk, but I'll tell you one thing that I think is really important. So when you're creating and investing in crypto online, well, or anything, let's take a step back. Anytime you have online financial information, how do you access that?

Well, you access it through putting in your email address and putting in your password. So when you log into your bank, when you log into your Coinbase account, when you log into any of these things, your Square Cash app, whatever it may be, it's almost always email address, password, right?

Now, the issue with that is if that is compromised, then someone can, if your email is compromised, meaning someone gains access to your email, they can go and reset any of these passwords. They can go reset your Coinbase password, they can go reset all these different passwords, and they can log in.

And in the case of cryptocurrency, we know it's a lot harder to recover those funds. Well, it's impossible to recover those funds once they're out of your wallet, they're sent to someone else. So one of the things I think people should consider is creating a second email address. So you have your email address that everyone knows that you talk to when you talk to strangers, when you're selling something on eBay, when you're selling something on Craigslist, when you're doing all these things, you have a public email address.

And of course, that's fine, but that's not tied to anything that you could be compromised with. So you want to create a separate email address. Now, here's the thing. It's like, "Okay, yeah, sure, Kevin, I get it. Submit your email address, who cares?" There is something that Google has created called Google's Advanced Protection Security.

So most people don't know about this. They don't publicize it directly on their website, but you can Google Advanced Protection Security. And what they'll do is they'll take your Gmail account, and this is completely free of charge, and they turn on extra security options that lock down a ton of stuff.

So when you have advanced security turned on, they won't allow you to connect to third-party email clients, they won't allow you to access... I'm sure you've logged into those websites where it says, "Log in with your Gmail," and you try to log in with your Gmail. The scary thing back in the day was that some of those would ask for access to your email account and could see your emails and do all kinds of other things.

So the advanced security just is probably a dozen or so things that they offer that really keep that account safe, including the requirement that you must have a hardware key. So they sell these little USB keys that require your actual finger to touch them in order for you to log into your account.

And you can say, "Authorize this laptop forever," so you can just stick in the USB key, touch it with your fingers, pull it out, stick it in a drawer, and then that laptop will be authorized forever. But it will really prevent hackers from getting into your account. And you want to create a separate email address, use that for your Coinbase account, all your crypto stuff, your banking stuff, whatever that may be, and have that extra layer of security, and you'll sleep better at night.

Yeah, I did that. We were actually hanging out in San Diego right after a piece came out about all my frequent flyer miles, and I just got rampantly attacked. I was getting calls from all the... Amex and Chase asking if I really wanted to transfer, if I really wanted to buy a MacBook, all this stuff.

And so I moved every financial institution, every airline where I had frequent flyer miles, all to a new email address. No one has any reason to know that email address because I don't email on it, and it locked it down. And then the other one, I don't know if you do this, I've turned off everywhere possible two-factor auth with text.

I put it to security keys. I put those security keys in one password, and I try to avoid that. I know there is this whole problem that I assume the carriers have gotten better, but people could pretty easily swap your phone number and get access to it, and then they could verify things with your phone number.

So I've tried to turn off two-factor auth as much as possible and rely on authentication keys. You can use Google Authenticator. I put mine in one password. Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm on the same train in that all it takes is someone trying to act as you, and then they could transfer your phone number to a different device, and then they can go to town and start working on all those accounts.

There are a couple companies out there that protect against SIM swapping fraud that are dedicated companies that they don't use the last four digits of your social or your date of birth or your anniversary to get access to here. Because oftentimes when you call your cellular provider, they're like, "Oh, you don't remember your password?

Well, just give us the last four of your social." And of course, that's been hacked, and it's all over the internet these days. But there's a couple other services that prevent SIM card swapping, and they're essentially... They act like an intermediary between you and your cell phone provider, so you don't have to swap cell phone providers, but they are the ones that protect your SIM.

It makes it much harder for someone to try and steal it. So stay tuned. I'm going to try a bunch of those out and then let you know which ones I like, and I'll relay the information back to you, Chris, in a future episode you can mention on the show as a hack.

Yeah. And this might sound so simple, but a hack that I learned is you don't have to use your real mother's maiden name as your mother's maiden name. Oh, for sure. So when I call into the bank and they're like, "What's your mother's maiden name?" I give them a word that is not my mother's maiden name, and you can do that.

Yeah, your mother's maiden name can be pancakes, can be anything. Yeah, that's so true. So I've changed all of those things. "What's your favorite instrument?" is often a 15 random character string that I've saved in one password. It can be annoying if you're trying to use a computer and you don't have access to one password and you can't log in, but the flip side is it's much more annoying to have someone steal your money or your frequent flyer miles.

So that's awesome. So knocked out security. I want to get to the thing you're spending all of your time in, or at least a lot of your time on right now, which is all about investing in crypto. And before we get in, I just want to highlight, I think one of your superpowers has to be your willingness to dive in, understand things and take risk.

And it's probably the reason that you're so deep in crypto right now. But I just want to ask, what do you think made you so successful with your ability to take risks and make good investments? Well, I guess a couple things. One, it is, I've always had this feeling that when I was younger, that when I would look at kind of where things were going, especially on the tech side of things, it seemed obvious to me where things were moving.

I could kind of more or less gauge these shifts in momentum. And then on the investment side, it is just taking that and applying some, a little bit of rigor around it, and more or less just investing what I call like investing in the inevitable. So just when you see something that is a new idea that has some light traction on it, but you can close your eyes and fast forward and you understand that, of course, a decade from now, this is going to continue to grow and be a big market, then that takes a lot of the fear out of the equation for me and allows me to just pretend I'm living in the future, more or less, and just take the leap now.

And so, you know, I remember there was one time when I was sitting in San Francisco, this was many years ago, and there was a garbage truck going up my hill because San Francisco is a very hilly city. And it was just struggling to even make it up the hill.

I thought it was, I literally thought I was going to die and roll down this massive hill. And it was so clear to me at that point, Tesla's had just come out and just watch a Tesla just with like, effortlessly climb that hill. I was like, the future is not this loud, noisy, old, they're not going to be better versions of this that control the future.

Of course, everything's going electric. And when e-commerce first started, Amazon really started getting to scale and offering cloud infrastructure, of course, everything's going to the cloud. So it's just, it's trying to find those moments that are true to you, that you internally can look at and say, we're early days here, let me get involved now.

And then dollar cost averaged my way in. So it was never about me just putting in, it wasn't the angel side, because you place an investment and then you walk away and let the company go and run. But if it's already a publicly traded company, it's having some conviction, placing a small bet, and then maybe dividing up what your total investment is going to be and doing an investment at the same time every month for the next three months, just to kind of dollar cost average your way in.

That's in my strategy. But that's not to say there's the obvious stuff that's already big. And for me, it's I kind of avoid that stuff. Amazon's a great example today, fantastic organization in terms of scale, reach, just the products. Are they going to be a $10 trillion company in the next few years?

I don't think so. I don't think that's going to be the world. So I don't know that there's another quick five to 10x in here over the next decade for a company like that. So for me, it's always been, I'm less interested in the kind of slow growth dividend stocks and more about where's the next 10x, and placing a series of those bets, and knowing that a few of them will be flat to down, but some of them will be the 10, 20 plus Xers from there and make up for my losses.

I mean, that's the way venture capital works. We know 80% of our investments are going to zero, but the ones that make it, some of them will be 100X, 500X, it'll just be, and that'll repay all of the ones that didn't work out. So it's having that conviction and not just betting on one horse, but knowing that some will not work out, and that's okay too.

And knowing that helps you spread around the risk to multiple investments. And is this your only investment or is this kind of, this is what you do with the risky stuff and there's safe stuff also? I would say that on the safe side, I'm sure you've mentioned your involvement with Wealthfront.

I was an angel investor in Wealthfront before you joined Wealthfront, which they were, Wealthfront's always been my set it and forget it. It is the, I just want to sleep at night and I know I'm just going to get a nice, more or less predictable return over the longterm.

And that for me is the boring stuff. That's the stuff where I'm hoping for 5%, 7% year over year. And I know some years will be down, but others will make up for it over the next few decades. And I'm fine with that. The riskier stuff for me is I would say all of my crypto and NFTs.

And that's where I want to take on a lot of risk. I actually don't hold individual, I used to hold individual stocks like when I had Square or the Amazons or Teslas or others. I've gotten out of that game. I think that a lot of the growth that I've enjoyed over the last few years has been on the crypto side.

And I'm much more interested in the future of crypto than I am the future of publicly traded companies. Yeah. You've got two podcasts there. So I think that's a great place to go. I've heard so much talk. Crypto, Web3, it's the future of everything. It's going to change our lives like the mobile phone did.

How big do you think this is? I would say that I believe it's very early innings. I think it's first pitch, first inning here when it comes to this stuff. And even though Bitcoin's been around for a while, and so is Ethereum, we haven't hit mass adoption by any sense.

And again, that whole thing about investing in the inevitable, if you were starting a country today, and you're going to go out there and you just close your eyes and you say, "Okay, I've got this little island. I'm ready to start my country." You're not going to go and buy printing presses.

The future isn't printing more physical paper. We all know that. We're paying mostly with Apple Pay and Android Pay now when we go to stores and things of that nature. So of course, a digital currency makes a ton of sense. Does it make sense for a currency to be global?

Does it make sense for a currency to be able to send something to someone halfway around the world in a few seconds? For it not to be controlled by a government, but to be completely decentralized, so it's not tied to any one country. I would say yes to all those things.

And that's what gets me so excited about cryptocurrency. And that's just on the currency side, the "currency" side. The other use cases for cryptocurrency, whether it be decentralized finance, where you say, "Hey, guess what? Look how much money Wells Fargo makes per year and adds to their balance sheet." It's just insanity.

And the bloat there, the number of employees that they have. What about a world where rather than all of the heads that you need to pay to push papers at Wells Fargo, most of that is written into smart contracts. That's actually code that lives on the blockchain. And the efficiency that comes from that type of operation produces better yields.

And that, to me, is really interesting work. And I'm taking advantage of that today. That's why I go out and I take my stable coins, which are my dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies, and I go out and I earn 8% or more interest on these coins at a handful of different places.

And I just sit back, and every month, you just get that payment of that 8%. And it's a beautiful thing. Show me one bank that'll even get you 2% right now. It just doesn't even exist. So I love this idea that we're using the efficiency of technology to cut out the bloated old institutions and make this about giving and transferring the wealth back to the average consumer.

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I just want to thank you, Quick, for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals, so please consider supporting those who support us. Yeah, so you bring up a good point that it happens to be one of the most asked questions I've gotten recently from listeners, which is 8%, you're right, no bank's giving you 2%, most banks are giving you 0.0 something percent.

It sounds too good to be true. I know you've dug into a lot of this. Is it too good to be true? I also keep a lot of my cash at BlockFi, I just talked about it in my newsletter. I believe that it isn't too good to be true and that I feel comfortable, but I know you've dug into this a lot more.

What's your take on the risk associated with some of these high yield stablecoin crypto earning platforms? Yeah, I mean, let me just tell you the case for me, I was scared. Whenever you hear something is too good to be true, it oftentimes is. When I was doing my research and I heard that you could go to BlockFi or Gemini, those are the two, I would say, big centralized exchanges that offer pretty high yield.

I thought to myself, "Crap, what happens if one of these defaults or I lose all my money?" It's a scary thing. What I did actually is I had the head of risk on over at Gemini, and then also the CEO of BlockFi come on my podcast, and I asked him these questions.

Because honestly, it was personally, it was like, "I want to have my modern finance," which is that podcast. I said, "Tell me, what are you doing with my money? When I give you some serious dollars here to go off and deploy them and earn me this interest, where is that going?" Both of them are more or less the same.

What they do behind the scenes is they go and obviously, they lend it back out. There are hedge funds, there are traditional banks, there are a whole slew of just different institutions that need access to these types of cryptocurrency coins for sometimes very short duration, sometimes longer duration. They take out these loans.

What these BlockFi and Gemini do is they go and they do an analysis, a pretty deep dive into their books, their cash flows, their investors, and they make sure that whoever they're lending out to has a credible book of business and is doing something where they believe they're going to get this money back.

A couple different things. One, they set aside, I believe it was, and you'll have to go listen to the episode, but I think it was Gemini, they have a slush fund that they set aside in case there ever is a default. Then they also do these types of investments across dozens or hundreds of different companies.

It's not like if one failed, you would lose your money. It's almost like an old-school computer rate array where you have so much fault tolerance because there's so many individuals underneath the hood. In hearing how both of them really go deep on, they have whole teams of people that dive in and look at the accreditation of each of the people they're lending out to, to ensure that some of them are backed by real physical assets, to ensure that even if there was a default, their money back.

It made me a lot more comfortable. Once I was able to wrap my head around that risk, and granted, obviously, there is risk here, there always is, because these aren't FDIC-insured investments. I was like, "Okay, I'm willing to take on that risk." That's when I decided to actually use both.

I use both BlockFi and Gemini. You say why one versus the other. They're both around the same interest. At one point, Gemini was offering higher interest, and then BlockFi recently leaped them and now offers higher interest on stablecoins. But I'd rather spread my risk out, and they're both really credible exchanges.

I decided to spread it across two of the big platforms. Yeah, that's awesome. Definitely, I'll link to the show notes. That episode, I listened to it. It got me comfortable using this as a place to store cash. Thank you for doing that. Crypto, there's so much more than just investing in stablecoins and earning a yield.

How do you think about, if someone's listening and thinking about, "I believe in this future," how do you invest in that future? There's so many things going on. There's not a wealth front or an index fund to just say, "Hold all the things happening in crypto, DeFi, NFTs, et cetera." Yeah, it is tricky because, in some sense, if you're not doing this as your full-time job, there's just so many new coins coming out, and they're all trying to tackle a different problem.

Whenever you see a new coin, the value proposition that they're trying to get out there is, "We are solving something that either consumers or enterprises need, and this is why we're useful, and this is why you should invest." Now, finally, there are a handful of these funds that are created as smart contracts that are bundling these coins together that you can buy and hold.

One of the ones that's actually been out for a while, I have not personally used this one because I buy each individual coin myself because it is my full-time job to go and invest in these companies as a venture capitalist, but one that I've seen used a lot is something called TokenSets.

It's tokensets.com, and if you go on there and you click on "Explore Sets," you'll see that they have these different indexes. You can say to yourself, "What am I interested in this world of crypto?" If you're interested in the metaverse, then there's an index for that. What that does, I'll just click on the first one here.

It's the metaverse index. If you take a look down at what they're holding here, you'll see they're holding Sandbox, which is a big up-and-coming metaverse, Axie Infinity, which is one of the biggest games in the metaverse, Decentraland, the Wax Economy token, Guild Games, a few others here. They're holding around 20 or so different tokens at different weights, meaning they're holding some more than others.

Then that could be an actual token that you buy, and then they go and they rebalance. You have to buy one token then versus having to figure out, "Oh, do I go buy these 11? Who are the 11 that I need to buy if I want to buy the metaverse?" It's very much how old-school mutual funds worked.

You'd buy something based on an investment thesis and then go from there. I believe in the future of the metaverse. I think it's early. I also am a fan of decentralized finance. I think that's a fantastic use case for crypto. The DeFi Pulse Index, it's on set tokens. DeFi Pulse is probably one of the biggest sites out there that tracks decentralized finance.

When we're talking about banks going away and tools around creating yield for individuals, in this particular set, if you were to buy this set, it holds Uniswap and Aave and Maker and Compound and Synthetix and Sushi and Yearn. These are all really popular plays in decentralized finance. The one thing I would say is I would recommend, and this is an investment advice because I can't give investment advice, but I'll tell you what I personally do.

Then you could talk to your own folks on the investing side. What I personally do is I do not go and buy the top 10 coins weighted by market cap because I think there's a lot of garbage in there. When you buy the Fortune 500, you know that you're buying companies based on their success, based on cash flow and a whole slew of other economic indicators that you can track and peg to success.

When you're looking at the top 20 currencies, there's meme coins in there. There's ones that are centralized exchanges. Shibu Inu is in there. There's a bunch of stuff that... I'm not discounting meme coins because I think they're always going to have a place in this kind of economy because it's more about community in that point, but there's things in there that I look at.

I don't want to badmouth any of the coins, but I look at it and I say, "Gosh, that project is really stalled," or "It's really not going anywhere," or "It's not the future of cryptocurrency." So I wouldn't say just go buy the top 10 or top 20. It's better to find someone that you trust that's putting together an index of their favorite things.

TokenSets is probably a fun place to kick the tires. And don't feel like you have to go in and... One great thing about this is you can go and experiment with relatively low dollars. Go in with $500 or $200 and just play and say, "Okay, what is this like if I were to invest in one of these tokens?

How do I do it? How do I set up my wallet for the first time? What is MetaMask?" I'm a big fan of a try before you buy. And DeFi and Web3 and crypto should all be about taking a few hundred dollars and just going out and trying a bunch of different things and learning.

It's just an education. Even if you lose the money, it's worth the education value. Absolutely. Yeah. Two things I'll share. There's a company called Makara. They're actually an investment advisor. So using them functions more like using a finance investing product. But they've put together a bunch of baskets like TokenSets.

They have a universe one that's not quite market cap weighted. But I did notice that they pulled out some of the meme coins. So they have their version and they have a few others. Something to check out. I haven't used it. I'm not an investor. Just something I've seen as I've explored the space.

The other thing I noticed was that if you look at the charts of all the tokens on any given day, we're still in a world where crypto is pretty correlated. So I would say if you're trying to decide which of the few tokens to have, when Bitcoin's down, a lot of other things are down.

When Ethereum's up, a lot of other things are up. But you're probably not going to get the massive gains of picking an early token early on. But I will flag that there is still a lot of correlation in the crypto token investing space. So I don't know if you've seen that or share that belief, but I've noticed that the market moves together quite a bit more than it moves apart.

Yeah. Certainly when there's big sell-offs, we see that impacts all coins and they all tend to dump at the same time. The other thing that I think is a really important piece of advice for people that are dabbling in crypto is the way I've seen the most damage be done to friends and family is when they put enough money in there that when something drops by 20, 30, 40 percent, they freak out and they sell.

And they're like, "I'm out." And that means that you had too much money at risk. Because this is a world, when I mentioned earlier first pitch, first inning, it is so early on that to see a swing of 20, 30 percent in just a few days on your favorite coin, I don't care if it's Bitcoin or Ethereum, some of the bigger ones, it'll still happen.

It's not uncommon. And so that freaks a lot of people out, especially when it's a lot of their net worth that's in here. But the reason why that is awesome is because it's just a actual representation of risk showing itself. And we like risk. We like risk because that means there's reward on the other side of that risk.

And so if you can swallow that and get comfortable about it, and even sometimes double down when you have enough conviction on something when it is down, then that is where I have made the majority of my money. I'll see something that I believe in, Ethereum drops 20, 30 percent.

And I'm like, "Well, of course, I believe that this is the future for X, Y, and Z use case." And just putting in another buy, another smaller buy when it's down, that's definitely my game. That's how I play it. And always with this crazy world, it's oftentimes, this is what I tell my sister, I'm like, "Just uninstall the app.

Invest in Coinbase and just don't look at it for the next few years. Go in there, buy the two or three coins that you have a lot of conviction in and try not to check the prices every day." Drive you crazy. Yeah, this advice applies across all investing, right?

The biggest reason consumers often lose money investing is because the market's crashing and they sell everything. And then the market's on the rise and they buy more. Totally agree. The one thing we didn't get to, I mean, you got a whole podcast on NFTs. It's something that I am not very involved in, but very curious how you think people can get started thinking about it.

I love the concept and I feel like I don't know where to go. So I guess before we get started, for people that don't know what an NFT is, it's a non-fungible token. And actually my first episode on proof is one to listen to the very first episode because we go deep into a primer on what NFTs are.

And it essentially is a way to say that I own something on the internet that is uniquely mine. So in the case of art, it can be an artwork that is pressed into the blockchain. And I can prove on the blockchain and looking up my address on the blockchain that I am the only holder of that piece of artwork.

And then if I send it to you, Chris, you would see in the records on the blockchain that can't be destroyed, that can't be altered, that it was transferred to you. So I guess an NFT, the best way to think of it is something that you buy or is given to you and then you hold it and you can send it around to people.

You can lock it up and divide it into something called a fractional NFT. So if people want to sell bits of their NFT, say there's a really expensive piece of artwork that is a couple of million dollars, but you can't really afford it. Then people are taking things and they're locking them up and they're fractionalizing them into even smaller components and then selling those off.

So it's a really crazy world because there's so many things that you can do with them. People think of NFTs, they hear about the Beeple sale where he sold it for 60 some million dollars for a single JPEG that's on the blockchain. But they represent so many different things.

One, they're a way for artists to get properly compensated over time. So an artist released a work of art, they sell it online. And if it's resold, they take part in the economics of that NFT being resold over time. So they get their 5%, 10%, 15%, whatever it may be, that's baked into the actual code.

So as something is being resold, they're being compensated. So we're seeing this kind of renaissance happen where artists are blowing up, their artworks are getting resold, they're making a ton of money as they're being resold, they're backing other artists, those artists are blowing up. And it's just like that whole flywheel just continues to operate.

And I think there's just going to be, again, thinking about the inevitable, the next decade or so, or even the next couple of years, as these beautiful digital frames, I've seen a bunch of prototypes are being worked on, where you'll be able to walk into someone's house and see what looks like a picture on the wall, you'll walk up to it, and it's a CryptoPunk, and you're like, "Oh, that's cool." And they're like, "Yeah, it's not actually a painting, that's an NFT, and that's a work of art, and I own that." It's going to become what seems awkward and seems odd, oftentimes becomes normal, and just something that is in a decade later, you're like, "Oh, of course that was the way it was always going to be." Because it just feels right.

You need time. Time is this great tool that removes the awkwardness of things. It used to be so strange to even think about sending someone cryptocurrency, but now when you do it on a daily basis, or you're in this world, you just get really comfortable doing it, and you're like, "How was I ever operating any other way?" And that's what's going to happen to art as well.

It'll be a thing where when you walk into a bar, you'll see a beautiful artwork on the wall, and you'll walk up to it, and it's like, "That's really cool." And you'll be able to pull out your phone and actually take it off the wall and transfer it to your phone, or rent it back to the bar and leave it up on the wall, or take it home and put it on your wall with just a few taps.

Or buy a piece of it. Right, or buy a piece of it. It's fractionalized, right? Speaking of early days, this is a very exciting new world, and it's part of the reason why I created a dedicated podcast called Proof That's Just For This, because it applies to so many other things.

It applies to utility NFTs, and what I mean by that is I had Mike Shinoda, one of the co-founders of Linkin Park, on the show the other day, and he just did a fantastic new drop called Ziggurats, which is a combination of this profile photos project combined with this generative music, which is just a really, really cool project.

And Mike was just talking on the show about what he is doing in this world and the obvious stuff we talked about. He said in his mind, the obvious stuff is, "Oh, you attend five of my shows. You get NFTs at each show, and then the wallet tells you you have special access to a backstage meetup." It's going to be so cool to see how NFTs are used to unlock all of this additional things and functionality that you can do in real in-person events.

So there's so many different uses, and metaverses, too. NFTs are being used as wearables and skins and games and all those things that kids have been paying for a decade now. You'll be able to take them into other metaverses and other virtual worlds. It's just going to be so much fun.

Yeah. So definitely check out the podcast. I know I've been listening. I have learned a lot. Talk a little bit about what you're doing. You're launching something on Saturday. Yeah. I've got a big announcement coming out for fans and people that are into NFTs. The name of the podcast is called Proof, P-R-O-O-F, and I'm launching something called the Proof Collective.

The Proof Collective is essentially going to be an NFT that you collect. It'll be the Proof Collective NFT, but it is one of these utility NFTs that I mentioned, where when you hold it, it unlocks a ton of benefits. So you get access to a private members-only Discord, and there's only 1,000 people.

I'm only doing 1,000 of these NFTs, and there'll be 1,000 people that will be members that have access to this private Discord. Discord for people that don't know. It's a place where you can go and chat and hang out. But inside of there, we'll be talking about all the latest new projects, new artists, upcoming drops.

We'll have some tools for serious collectors. You'll also have early access to my podcast, so you get to hear them before anyone else. And then I'm going to be doing a whole slew of different additional benefits and collaborations over the length of the utility. So when you own it, you get the benefits for three years.

So there'll be some pretty wide-ranging benefits from simple stuff like local in-person meetups to some much wilder ideas and collaborations that we'll be revealing soon. So I would just say, yeah, I mean, to plug my own stuff, at a minimum, check out the podcast. It's just proof.xyz. If you're already into NFTs or you really want to get serious about collecting, you might want to consider joining the Proof Collective.

And you can learn more. The sale of that NFT goes on sale at 12/11 on the 11th at 9 a.m. Pacific. And that's proofnft.xyz. It has that video explainer giving a lot more information and details there. And yeah, you can always collect one of those at launch or buy one in the secondary after they go live.

And we'll see you in the private Discord. And it'll be a great place to learn a lot, make some new friends, and also do some fun stuff together over the years. And you've always been ahead of the curve on all this stuff. So this is something I'm excited about.

Anywhere else people should check you out online? I know we've covered a lot. Yeah, we'll have to go back and do a round two of this at some point and go even deeper. But if you're wanting to check out the Modern Finance podcast, you can check that out at modern.finance.

And also, all my stuff is linked up over on my Twitter, which is just @KevinRose on Twitter. And yeah, thanks for having me on. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for joining. Wow, there was so much great stuff in this episode. So definitely check out the show notes for links to everything we talked about.

We definitely ran out of time, so we'll have to do another episode like this sometime in 2022. Also, I've gotten so much good feedback from you all on the newsletter I've been sending out. So if you're not subscribed, please do that at allthehacks.com/email. And finally, I love hearing from you all.

So please send feedback, questions, ideas for shows, or even just reach out to say hi. I'm Chris at allthehacks.com, or you can find me on Twitter. I'm just @hutchins. That's it for this week. See you next week. I want to tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things money.

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I know because I was a guest on the show in December 2022, but recently I listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow your mind, and it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating in their employer's retirement plan.

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