(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money and travel. I cannot believe I'm saying this, but welcome to episode 100. It seems so surreal that I've come this far with the podcast but it really wouldn't be possible without your support.

So thank you so much for listening and supporting me on this journey. Okay, as for this week's episode, I wanted to try something a bit different. And the idea came up as I was talking to my good friend Brad Barrett, who hosts the Choose Fi podcast, and was also my guest for episode two on financial independence.

We started having a conversation about me making it to episode 100, him taking his show over on his own and all the things we've learned the past few months and how we're applying them to our lives this year. Things like focusing on what matters the most, optimizing our life towards net fulfillment, outsourcing tasks and a lot more.

But instead of having that whole conversation, we paused and decided to record it and share it with you today. It'll also be in the Choose Fi podcast feed next week. So while you might not need to listen to it twice, you should definitely check out his show. It is so fantastic and it touches on every aspect of financial independence.

Okay, enough of the intro. Let's get into the episode right after this. (upbeat music) Brad, I am so excited we're doing this. - Yeah, Chris, this should be fun. We always have a lot of interesting conversations offline. So this should be a fun meandering little chat here. - And I don't know if you knew this.

So this is my episode 100, but I went back and looked and I know you weren't my episode one, but you're episode two on all the hacks. And we actually recorded that first. So my very first hit record on a podcast was with you. So I'm very excited and thankful for you doing that.

And it's fun to be celebrating 100 with you. - Oh, that's so cool. Well, I am honored that I was the first guest and back for 100 here. Yeah, it's wild. I can't believe you've been doing it that long. 100 episodes. - I love how Brad is saying this because if you haven't listened to "Choose If I", his show, Brad's probably done 600 episodes at this point.

I feel like I'm way, way, way behind. But when I started, I wasn't sure if it was gonna be 10 episodes and it just wasn't gonna be a good fit. So the idea that I've gone from side project to full-time job on podcasting, I'm lucky to do that. I'm so thankful for everyone listening that has enabled me to do that.

And I'm just excited for the next 100. - Yeah, I hear you. What's wild about podcasting is there's no downside essentially to trying it. So yeah, we're coming up right on 600, but when we started, it was just me and Jonathan sitting in a random spare office in Jonathan's house in Richmond, Virginia, talking into two microphones.

It cost us essentially nothing to start. And we figured, what the hell? Let's experiment with this. And if it goes nowhere, no harm, no foul in essence, right? Like nobody's ever gonna hear it other than our parents. And if it goes somewhere, then who knows what kind of impact it could have.

It's pretty wild. Certainly podcasting is something that I never would have guessed in a million years would transform my life. I was a corporate accountant. I did corporate state tax returns, which is as horrible and mind-numbing as you can imagine. And now I'm a financial independence podcaster with 60 million downloads.

It's crazy. And then to see your life transformed so dramatically since the first time I met you, which I guess was through the "Playing With Fire" documentary, right? - Yeah, I went to the FIRE, well, I guess it's not technically a FIRE conference, but FinCon seems like it's pretty rooted in the financial independence movement for my startup.

'Cause I was like, "Oh, we're building software "for financial planners and people "who wanna be better with finances. "I should go to this conference." We met and it's been a great friendship. And really kind of like how this episode came to be was we were just talking about things in life and catching up and we're like, "We should record this." Like people would probably wanna hear what we're thinking about, how last year went, what we're planning to do next year, what's going on with the FIRE movement, all the things, health and data breaches, everything.

So I'm excited to just jump in and go through what we go through. And if this does well, people like it, obviously reach out to Brad and I, let us know, and we can make it a regular thing. - Yeah, I would love to do this a couple of times a year and that's for damn sure.

So yeah, let's kick it off. The biggest thing in your world, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you're full-time now on this podcast and you left Wealthfront fairly recently, right? It's not an easy decision no matter where you are in life. I know obviously like you have a degree of financial security that a lot of people don't necessarily when they're making job transitions, but nevertheless, that's not an easy step.

And I'm curious, like how you thought through it. - For me, I am always a fan of the side hustle to full-time hustle path. I started the podcast as a thing on the side. I kind of experimented with working with partners and then got it to a point where it was, I guess, big enough, financially stable enough that it was worth the risk.

Is it financially stable enough that I would make as much money as if I had a corporate job right now? Probably not. But do I see a path there and can I make it work? Yes. And so that was really all I needed. I still love Wealthfront, the product.

I still love the team. In fact, the one thing that is sad about being a full-time creator is it's kind of lonely. You don't have that kind of water cooler team experience that you do at a company. And so I do miss that. I still have a text thread with all of the Wealthfront people that I was close with.

We're talking almost every day, but I felt like it was an opportunity that if a friend asked me if they should take on, I was like, "Yes, you should." So I needed to do it myself. I needed to kind of take my own advice. And you, you had a co-host for a long time and now you're kind of running the show.

Quite literally. Quite literally running the show. Yeah, it's hard to believe. Yeah, so Jonathan, I guess it was probably August of last year. Yeah, we're coming five months and change. He came to me and said, "I think I'm gonna step back from the podcast." And it was definitely a surprise.

And to everybody out there who, 'cause I got a ton of emails. I'm like, "Oh, what's going on? "Is everything okay?" Everything's great. Jonathan and I are still great friends. In fact, I just came from a workout with him at the gym. We're working out together four days a week now and he's doing stuff behind the scenes for Choose a Vice.

So we're still business partners. Everything's great. He's gonna come back on the show every now and again. But yeah, man, it's been interesting. And you and I have talked a ton of times, talked shop actually, which is funny. Like though I've been a podcaster, I basically just have always showed up and recorded and that was it.

And Jonathan kind of took care of everything. Yeah, when you're saying running the show, it's been a big change for me, honestly. And what I've always been good at in terms of the podcast was kind of like sitting back and just listening critically and asking questions. And I mean, frankly, like for me and my skillset, that was pretty easy.

It wasn't a heavy lift. I just listened and asked her a couple of questions here and there, hopefully incisive, interesting questions. But damn, now I've got to do Jonathan's part and mine, which is Jonathan was always, hey, he was the engine behind the show. The reason why I'm going into this, I'm curious of like your process is, it is not just 2X the work for me.

Now, like being the engine behind the show, the story arc, and then the questions, there's some like exponential factor, especially with my brain. Like when I get done with this, I'm fried, man. I mean, normally like on a interview, because you have to essentially bifurcate your brain of, okay, this side has to think about the story arc and moving it forward and making interesting and logical and coming to a conclusion.

But then the other side has to think of questions that are interesting and, oh, what would I want to ask if I were the podcast listener? 'Cause that's how I think of myself. And man, it is exponentially more difficult, but so far, I think it's going pretty well. It's been 20 plus episodes now and so far so good.

It's been a challenge. I'm not gonna lie. It's been a challenge, but it's been good. - I think people that are listening think, oh yeah, podcasting, it's so great. You just hop on, have a conversation, but there's a lot of work behind the scenes. I spend a lot of time just trying to plan out what is the topics.

And somebody emailed me and said, hey, it'd be great if you could work with more sponsors I've never heard of. And you could interview people that have never been on other shows. And it's like, yes, but finding those people, finding those companies to work with, it's definitely a full-time job.

I didn't want to start another startup 'cause I didn't want to have another 80 hour a week job. And my wife and I joke together. It's like, oh, you did start a startup. You just didn't call it a startup. So it's definitely demanding, but it's great. You get a lot of flexibility and people listening probably know that I've been experimenting a lot with, okay, well, what if I just do some solo episodes?

What if I talk about a country? What if I do something different and don't necessarily stick to only the interview regime? I mean, this is an example of that. It's kind of an interview, but it's really more of conversation. So that's been fun. And then I've been trying to make sure that it's not my only thing.

We could talk about podcasting forever, but the average person listening here is probably like, oh, I don't have a podcast. I appreciate the background. It's interesting, but we are able to use the topic of the people we talk to and the content we consume as kind of research for the show as ways to think about other things in life.

That's also been a fun part of it, which is you do an episode with someone, talk about health, and now you got to go deep on your own health, and now that's a big project. I know that's one of the things we're both really thinking about this year. I thought maybe for this episode, it'd be fun to talk about some of the major things that have happened in the last month or two that have sparked missions or goals for what we want to do this coming year and talk about it openly.

And hopefully people find that interesting. When I hear you talk about your side, I'm like, yes, please tell me taking notes, all that kind of good stuff. - Yeah, and certainly right back at you. I told you offline that a couple of your most recent episodes have really significantly impacted me.

No joke. I have listened to the Bill Perkins episode. I think it came out in mid-December. And Dan Martell with "Buy Back Your Time." Listened to each of those twice already. It's fascinating. I consume a lot of podcasts, probably more than I should, frankly, but you never know when an idea is just gonna hit you.

And if I'm honest with myself, the Bill Perkins "Die With Zero" concept would not have resonated with me two years ago, certainly five years ago. It would have fallen on deaf ears completely. I read his book, really good book, certainly, but it didn't impact me as much as hearing him on your podcast.

And then I heard him on Peter Tia's "The Drive." And I think just the confluence of a couple things, so like that, and I had my buddy Dominic Cortuccio on our podcast on "Choose a Buy," episode 419, just a couple of weeks ago. And he was talking about your bold move for 2023.

So his conceptual framework is, he comes up with like one bold move that kind of typifies that year. And he's been doing this now for, I think this is the ninth or 10th year. And it just sounded really cool to A, have like an operating principle behind a year, but also to be able to then look back on a decade of growth and fun and experience and say, "Oh, I was in that place when I did this bold move." And the confluence of those three things have just like, without sounding hyperbolic, just fried my brain in the best possible way.

And I think for a while, and I'm probably a little like neurotic and get inside my head. I have like, you know, prone to anxiety and such. It was actually a little stressful, Chris. And when I spoke with Dominic, I just didn't have an answer. And then in hearing Perkins and Martel, like it crystallized to me that I just need to explore more.

Like I need more fun in my life. What I actually hit on was my healthiest year ever. That's my kind of operating principle for 2023. And what that means in practical terms is actually like loosening the purse strings. I don't consider myself like a frugal or cheap person anymore.

Not that frugal and cheap are exactly synonymous, but obviously, you know very well, the old school, fine mindset of watching every penny. I think both of us, frankly, have gotten a lot better with that. So I'll let you jump in now, because I know that last thing is very impactful for you and how your mindset has changed just since I've met you, honestly.

- It's funny, when I first found the financial independence movement, I was like, "Oh, this is great. "This is how I've been living my life." Which was like save every dollar possible, find every hack there is to spend less on everything you wanna do, whether it's house hacking or travel hacking or anything, so that I could save as much as possible.

My original goal was to do that because I hadn't found a career that I loved. And I was like, "I can't work a job I don't love." So there was a real reason behind it. But I feel like I went to an extreme that was very hard to get out of once I realized, "Oh, I actually do like what I do." And now it was very hard to do the most silly things.

Like, "Oh, I'm at a restaurant "and I really want a miso soup." But miso soup's usually $3 and this place it's $6. And I'm like, "Ah, that just seems egregious. "I shouldn't get this miso." It's like, "All I want is a miso soup." And we're talking about $3. And I would get stressed out about it to the point that I wouldn't get the miso soup.

And my wife had ended up acting similarly. So we would both be sitting there like, "All we want is a miso soup, "but for $6 between the two of us, we can't do it." But we could if it was $3. It got to be a little crazy. And I hadn't been able to articulate and process those feelings.

It's like something I'd been thinking about. And I remember going to dinners where someone's like, "We'll buy a really expensive bottle of wine "if you just put in $20." And I'm like, "Why would I put in $20? "I'm only getting a glass "and there's a glass on the menu for $12." And they're like, "Come on, just spend eight more dollars." Everyone's just trying to get me to spend a little bit more.

And when I sat down with Bill Perkins and we talked, I was like, "What is all of this money for?" That was one big component. And then the other big component that I probably haven't talked a lot about is that sometimes spending your money is not a net negative.

So for me, when I think about the podcast, I'm like, "Oh, okay." I've never been in a circumstance where the business you work at or run, the expenses you create for it directly affect your income. When you work at a company, if you spend a little bit more of the company's money, yes, there's an indirect trickle-down effect of the company being less profitable and might affect you.

But when you're owning your own business, if you spend all of the money the business makes, you don't have a salary. Like, it's very different. So as I think about the year ahead, there are opportunities to build cool products that everyone listening right now might benefit from to save money on travel, to get cool deals.

Like, I have all these ideas, but to go spend the time and energy to do that, I either need to hire people or invest more time or get an assistant or something. And I struggle with that, even though I know that it's a good investment. It's like, I'm gonna invest money in my own business.

So I'm trying to get better at it. I don't have a bold move for the year, but if I did, it would be like value my time or invest in myself. Maybe it's invest in myself, but I don't know. I feel like that might be too broad 'cause you'd be like, "Well, is it your health?

Is it your time?" And then you can just, it's hard. And I think if there's anything I learned from running companies, you can't have a bunch of goals. You need like a single theme that everything falls under. Otherwise, you just have this endless to-do list and you don't know how to prioritize.

- Yeah, I hear you. And like you said, "Oh, I could build out this thing to help people with travel rewards and it may be a good investment." But I think one of the operating principles that I operate under is actually this question that I ask myself is, what are you optimizing for?

And I think it's just really impactful just to ask yourself that. And like literally ask myself that quite often. Like, what in this situation are you optimizing for? From my daughter and what high school she's gonna go to is, okay, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for signaling of, "Look how smart my kid is." Are you looking for, "Hey, this is a nice neighborhood school where she could be on the marching band and we don't have to drive her halfway across the county." Like, what are you actually optimizing for?

Are you optimizing for elite college entrants? So that's something that's been rolling around in my head. And the question to ask yourself is like, really, what are you optimizing for? What would growth mean to you? Like in your case, and I'm not necessarily looking for an answer, it's mostly rhetorical, but is it money?

Is it impact? Is it building something new the world hasn't seen that like only Chris Hutchins and his inimitable style with hacks can put together? Like, is it some alchemy of all three of those things or something that I didn't listen? I think it's really important to ask that from the outset because you might get down a road where, "Hey, this is a good investment.

This is gonna have impact. But damn, if it isn't gonna take up 40 hours a week out of my 168, is that worth it?" - And I like to sleep. So 168 just isn't a real number in my mind. But no, it's a really valuable exercise. I had Sahil Bloom on the podcast a week ago, and we just talked about doing that personal annual review.

And he has like, here are seven questions to ask yourself to reflect on the year past, which I think is just a really valuable exercise to try to figure out, not necessarily just to reflect, but things like what created energy last year or what drained energy? How do you do less of that thing and do more of something else?

If that's not something that anyone listening has done, I would encourage it 'cause it's really helpful before you start planning for this year to figure out what worked well, what didn't work well, what can you optimize for based on how last year went. And then you can start to focus on what do I wanna focus on now?

You and I both kind of cut our teeth in the financial independence world. And I think most people think that we spend all of our time optimizing our money, when I think in reality, in terms of like our investments and our savings and our bank accounts, it's like one of the few things we spend almost no time on.

It's like this funny paradox of the people who care about their money the most and talk about it the most actually spend the least amount of time thinking about it, use it more as a tool. So it was funny. Sam Parr posted this thing on Twitter where he's like, would you rather earn 8% guaranteed forever, but at the expense of you can never invest in startups, you can never buy stocks.

And so many people were like, no, I wouldn't. And it's like, what? So many people just really get caught up in that like eking for returns. I don't know what your reaction was to that. But for me, this year, I'm not trying to turn the dials on my investments.

I'm trying to focus on my life. - Yeah, focus on life is the critical part. And it is this funny paradox that for people like us who have always been attuned to our money, really our financial lives are the easiest part of our entire lives because it's on autopilot, right?

Like that's how I have my whole financial life set up. I kind of famously say, I spend 10 minutes a month on my finances and that's maybe a little bit of an exaggeration. It's probably ever so slightly more than that, but not that much more. You set everything on autopay, autopilot.

For me, it's stress minimization. So that's how I kind of conceptualize my finance. I'm not looking to optimize every penny. I'm looking to optimize for stress mitigation. What that means in practice is I'll keep a little bit extra money sitting in my checking account, five or 10 grand, whatever it is, it doesn't even matter.

And then I don't have to worry about timing. Like, oh, I have a big credit card bill this month. Who cares? There's a big buffer there. I never wanna have to think about the timing of anything. So all of my transfers happen pretty much on autopilot, except for a couple of random, you know, HSA.

I max out on January 1st of every year, but I have a little task in Todoist, which is my task manager, and it's just max out HSA. And then I never have to think about it again. But anyway, this thread from Sam was so interesting and it's especially fascinating.

So Sam Parr is one of the co-hosts of the My First Million podcast, which both you and I thoroughly enjoy. And interestingly enough, Sean Puri is his co-host. And he basically said, "I asked Sean and a few others this question. "I'm shocked at how many said no. "They'd prefer to buy individual stocks and other things "in hopes of a return greater than 8%.

"They wanna manage their own money. "This baffles me." And I actually wrote back to this, which Sean wrote back to, and I don't think was altogether thrilled, but I said, "Baffling and just silly. "Sean is a poker player, so he knows better. "The highest likelihood of success "over an investing lifetime "is to match the market with low fees.

"Everybody thinks they're Warren Buffet. "They're not. "Match the market and get rich. "Find your fun in real life." That last part was the point that I wanted to make is for most people, like a lot of these people on this thread were basically saying like, "Oh, but I learn so much.

"I get fun out of this." I mean, my argument is there's so many other ways to actually have fun in life. And Sam's actual original post said, "You can still build your own startups. "It's just you can't invest in this wacky stuff." And I think for me, I look at life through the lens of like a poker player and what increases my odds of success long-term.

So it's like the aggregation of marginal gains, right? 1% differences might not make a difference in the short term, but over a lifetime, if you make the right decision over and over and over again, thousands of times, it's going to have an effect. It's going to have a positive expected value, plain and simple.

If you put a gun to someone's head and say, "Are you gonna outperform the market net of fees "and net of taxes, essentially, "from all your wacky trading over a 50-year time period?" No, virtually nobody is going to outperform. So you're willingly taking a lower net worth for no reason whatsoever other than to have fun and to just be an idiot, essentially.

And it makes no sense to me. It's totally illogical. I don't care how much money you have. You can tell this gets me hot and bothered. It makes no sense whatsoever. Go out and have fun in a million other ways. But to me, money, it's about maximizing net worth, especially if you can do it the brain-dead way by investing in index funds, right?

Like if the easiest way possible to maximize your net worth is the no-brainer way, man, that's a win-win in every possible way. Why would you not pick that? - I'll play a slight devil's advocate, which is... - I thought you might. - I'm not sure that picking stocks is the alternative that I'll put in this camp.

The question kind of carved out the ability to start your own companies. But I do think that I've seen lots of people in my peer group and my friends at who've taken their money and built companies and taken their money and launched products that have generated returns that exceed what an index fund or a set of stocks would do, so that's true.

I do think there is some uncontrollable instinct that I love this thing, I want to bet on it. It's like betting on yourself because you have this belief in the world. And I like to do that with a small part of my portfolio, but it's so small that it doesn't matter, and I would give it up if I had to.

The big thing I'll say is all of the investing advice, if you asked this question three years ago, before the pandemic, and you said, "Stocks and bonds, how correlated are they?" It's like, historically, they're always not correlated. The 60/40 portfolio is always gonna do great, that's why you diversify, and then it didn't.

And so I will say that as much as I don't believe what I'm about to say is something that you should factor in, I'll at least share it, which is that all of the knowledge we have about how much better index funds are than stocks, I mean, it's all based on what happened in the past, and there are all kinds of things happening that could mean a different future.

That said, I don't think any of the people I know that are choosing to make all these active trades and active investments are doing it for that reason. I think they're doing it for a different reason. I did this episode with Brian Feraldi, who has a whole checklist on how to be an investor and invest in stocks, and he approaches stock investing much differently than most, building out a portfolio of stocks, almost like creating your own indexes and doing some kind of research and that kind of stuff.

And I would say, if that's your approach, then I feel a lot better, but if your approach is more, I just pick crazy things 'cause I wanna win, and I read about them on Reddit, I'm less excited. But we could go down that rabbit hole forever. There are only a few brands I use almost every single day, and Viore is one of them, and I am so excited to be partnering with them for this episode.

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I am curious, I think you manage yours on your own. So you're doing the rebalancing, you're doing the tax-loss harvesting. I think, not because I did work at Wealthfront, but just because I believe that it is a better use of my time to not do that and to get the extra edge from things like direct indexing and all that kind of stuff.

Have you ever considered not managing it yourself? - Yeah, that's a good question. Under your advisement, I did open a Wealthfront account. I don't know if you ever actually even knew that I did that or not, but I have been putting some money in there. So just more to kind of see how the tax-loss harvesting worked, essentially.

And it's pretty cool, I'm not gonna lie. There is no world where I would do that on my own. I haven't done analysis, certainly, of like, is the benefit that I'm getting, does it outweigh the fees? I suspect that it does, but in all candor, I haven't. I'm sure you have that information committed to memory.

But in general, for me, if I were to not manage my money, I think it would be more psychological than anything. I like to believe that I don't make poor decisions, like sell when the world is going to hell in a handbasket in March of 2020, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think I'm as susceptible to that as anyone. So I probably have underperformed what I should have performed if I just did what I advise all the time and just keep pumping money and go to sleep, wake up in 10, 20, 30 years, and essentially have more money than I can imagine.

Obviously, nobody cried for me, I'm doing fine, I've reached financial independence. At the end of the day, it's fine, but I know in my heart of hearts, I've probably made suboptimal decisions based on emotion. When we talked about, hey, like, the actual nuts and bolts of money is the easy part, I stand with that, and I hold to that, certainly, because I think it's precisely the psychological part that's really the hard part.

You let your brain get involved, and it just kind of does stupid crap. I've always noticed that the financial independence community and myself included, always hate fees. Like, it just is one of those things that people just hate paying fees. And so I know that's been a lot of the aversion to an investment advisor, a financial advisor, a robo-advisor, any of those things.

And what really changed it for me one time was I had created this portfolio that was like eight index funds, and I was going through trying the process of rebalancing and managing it and all that. And I remember at one point, I was like, well, what trades do I have to make?

Do I have to sell these three to rebalance? And it was just like, I actually wasn't sure if I could make the trades. And then I was like, well, I don't know if these trades are gonna have to clear before I can rebuy. And so I just kept pausing, pausing, pausing, and I watched the market move and I was like, what am I doing?

I don't think that doing this full-time is a priority enough that I'm doing it. I have to offload it. The added benefit was that things like direct indexing, when you can start to break apart the index fund and actually say, well, instead of investing in the S&P 500 or Vanguard at VTI or VTSAX, you can just buy all the individual things.

Well, obviously that's completely untenable for a person to do and go buy hundreds and hundreds of stocks, but there's some advantages there when it comes to being able to tax loss harvest with a hundred or whatever number of stocks. So we could go down here quite a bit. I will attempt to pull back and stay on the money theme and just think, okay, so we're talking about money.

We've identified not focus on that side of money, but what are we focused on and how do we spend it? Are there things that you think next year you're gonna spend more time thinking on when it comes to money or how you spend it? - Yeah, without a doubt.

And your podcast has kind of helped inform a lot of this. And I think for me, it's experiences and health. So those are the two things that at this point I am prioritizing. And I think what that's gonna mean in reality is spending money and that's perfectly okay. And I think Brad circa five years ago would not have been okay with that.

And I am now, and I think that's perfectly fine. And I'm frankly very happy about it. - Are there any particular experiences that you're like this year, this is what I wanna spend on? - So you and I are both lovers of Japan and I desperately want to get back to Japan and I want to climb Mount Fuji.

That is like an absolute goal of mine. Will that happen in 2023? I don't know if it will or not. So sophomore year of college over the summer, lived with a host family in a city called Hamamatsu. And it was a couple hours south of Tokyo and the Shinkansen.

And the only time that I saw Mount Fuji was on the bullet train and it just appeared. And obviously, you know how majestic it is. It was the cloudy season. And unfortunately, I only got like a couple little quick glimpses of it. But I'm like, damn, I will be back there someday.

At this point, it's going on 20 plus years. So I have not been so great with the follow through on that. So my older daughter is now a roller coaster enthusiast, which is actually a thing. Like that is an actual term, roller coaster enthusiast. There are like massive organizations of these roller coaster enthusiasts throughout the world.

And in the town immediately adjacent to Mount Fuji is one of Japan's best roller coasters. So I'm using this as like my little hook to get my family there. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. You now have two kids and I have two, I guess my kids are older at this point, which is kind of crazy to say, but it's still hard to travel.

And we have not been as good at that as I wish that we were, frankly. So the very short answer to your question is, yeah, I need to get back to Japan. I wanna show my family, my wife, just that amazing culture. That's the hope on like one of the big adventures.

- So if you're listening to this and you haven't been to Japan, you absolutely have to. Next week, I have an episode that's entirely devoted to Japan. - Seriously? - Yeah, I sat down with Brandon Presser, who is a previous guest, who I think said has been to Japan every year for the last 20 years, except one.

He's written, I don't know, five or six guidebooks on Japan. We sat down, the episode's gonna be long. We might even split it into two next week because we were talking for a couple hours. The goal was to be a masterclass in planning a trip to Japan. Overview the culture, the people, the travel, the transit, Tokyo, Kyoto, other places to go, some hotspots that he loves, unknown little corner places.

So if Japan is anything you've ever even considered, you should listen and I'm gonna try to fit in to this incredibly long episode at the end, a little thing about like, how do you use your points and miles to get there? 'Cause that's what I love. Like, how do you make it an affordable trip?

Japan is known for being expensive, but so is San Francisco and New York and LA. And somehow we all find ways to get to those cities. So yes, Japan should be on everyone's list. I've been four times and it's still on my list, but I'm gonna come back to your travel with kids thing.

And it's something I've been really thinking about. And I actually had a really funny conversation this week with Tony Hawk, funny enough to bring it all together about travel to Japan. When he was in his early twenties, he had a kid. And for all we know that Tony Hawk being successful and famous and rich and all these things, at that point in time of his life, he was anything but that, like living on ramen, everything.

And he got these demo offers in Japan and he couldn't afford childcare. So he brought his kid to Japan when he was young. And he would be like at a skate demo with a infant or toddler, just like hanging out there because he just had to do it. He didn't have any options.

But his advice was by doing that and being forced to do that, his kids just got so comfortable rolling with the punches. So we took what I think was a very ambitious trip to Paris and London with a six month old and a two year old. And it was nothing like a trip to London that you would take with no kids, but we learned how to make it work.

Was it as fun as it was before? In many ways, no, but in a few ways, yes. And maybe you could argue it too in six months, they're not quite old enough to necessarily appreciate the culture, but they are learning how to sit on an airplane for 10 hours.

My daughter loves airplanes. We invest in a lot of things that are painful. If you wanna learn how to run, the first getting out the gate and starting to run as an adult is painful. And then it gets easier and it gets easier. I think the same thing is true with travel with kids.

And sure, I'm gonna do an episode in 2023 about all the travel hacks I've learned traveling with kids from the Stokke JetKids suitcase, which if you have a small kid is amazing. It basically converts any coach seat into like a business class seat, at least in the eyes of a young kid.

Does nothing for adults, by the way. But I think you just have to do it. The rule I heard from someone, just plan one thing a day, that's it. Your itinerary is one thing a day, at least when they're really young. Now that you're way past naps and early bedtimes and the ability to not miss like five meal snack times a day like you're past that.

So I think it's gonna be a little bit more enjoyable, but at the young ages, I just keep telling myself, I'm building up the travel resilience so that a few years when they really learn to appreciate things, we just have things so much more dialed in. - Yeah, that's cool.

I like that. And yeah, it's funny. My kids at this point both go to sleep after me. So I'm like the old man that goes to sleep at 9.30. I'm like fanatical about my bedtime. So yes, I do not have to worry about nap time anymore or schedules, but nevertheless, you have to make the effort.

And going back to your question about experiences, I think it's about making the effort. You talked about the loneliness of maybe not being in the office and not being around people all the time. And frankly, working at home, regardless of whether we have conversations like this or not, and also being financially independent and being home and all of your friends are at work, you have to make an effort to actually see people.

And I think it's very, very easy to get into a rut. And I think I have been in a rut for a while in terms of actually making the effort to see people that I wanna see and do new things. That's another thing, as you can tell, I'm a fanatical listener of all the hacks, right?

Like one of the things you've talked about is like that one thing a month. - Yeah. - And that just always resonated with me. I thought that was super cool the first time that I heard you talk about that. And the operating principles. Like, can I be looking for adventure?

Do I have an answer to your question right now, Chris? I don't. I could BS like, I'm gonna learn how to, I don't know, do archery and drive a race car. I could BS anything you wanted right now, but it's not true. Because the only thing that I know for sure right now is like my aperture is open to experience and fun and connection.

And like, those are the things that are like rolling around in my head of, hey, in conjunction with Die With Zero from Perkins, it's like, hey, you have some money. You have some time. And you have people you haven't seen in a while. Like, what would it look like to get together with people and to do something just cool and different?

And that I normally wouldn't do because I frankly haven't done it for years. So I think that's where I am right now. So yeah, the next time we do this, hopefully I'll have an update for you. I don't even know if I can be as adventurous as you with the one a month, but what if I tried five new things and just try to explore?

So long story short is I'm gonna see how this rolls. So I don't know. What do you think? You used to do one of these a month and obviously with COVID and the world shutting down and you having kids, how has that changed and how are you looking at it now?

- I talked earlier about my goal for the year, my bold move is gonna be about valuing time. So I think what that allows you to do is make time for whatever that thing is, whether it's something you wanna learn, whether it's something you wanna do. I was talking to someone the other day and they were like, we're going on a trip without our kids.

Our parents are gonna watch it. And they had not done this and their youngest kid was five. This is the first trip they're taking alone. And it's a weekend trip. It's not a crazy thing. So I think you can make a lot of experiences that aren't the experiences of years past where it's like, let's take a two week backpacking trip to, yeah, that's a great experience.

I just pulled off the bookshelf, Ben Nempton, who I had on episode 36, who wrote this book called "The Bucket List Journal". And the reason I pulled it off is 'cause I'd encourage everyone to check this out. We did an episode, you can get some of it there. But he created this journal that is about a list that he created with some friends and it's an insane bucket list.

But he created a book to help people create their own. But the thing he did that I think is so great, and I'm reading his do's or don'ts. It's like, do's, go on a date a month, like run five miles twice a week. He was kind of trying to give people ideas, but he breaks everything into categories.

And he breaks it into travel and adventure, physical health, material, creative, professional, intellectual, financial, mental health, relationships, and giving. So I wanna encourage people that when you hear us say experiences and things you wanna do, and you wanna think about how to be ambitious with your years ahead, don't assume that every experience needs to be like jump out of an airplane, or like the traditional big audacious experience thing.

One of the things that I have on my bucket list is to cook a seven course meal for friends. Not necessarily go out to a fancy restaurant, just to make this incredible, awesome dinner where you think about it and you plan it and you shop and you do all this stuff.

Like that is an experience. It's not jumping out of an airplane. It's not traveling around the world. I'm trying to prioritize things in other categories that I think are also really meaningful. And so that's something I'm thinking about this year. But when it comes to mine on valuing time, which I think is a big one for me, I wanna share some of the things I've done and some of the things I'm gonna do.

I think that one thing that's really unfortunate, I remember sharing an app to a friend of mine and saying, oh, this is a great app, Paprika. It's a food app, right? And it's recipe management, meal planning, all this stuff. And they were like, oh, it's expensive. It costs, I don't know, five, 10, $20.

So I was like, okay. We've kind of trained ourselves to assume, oh, software should all be free. Content should all be free and all that stuff, which is fair because it's not like we've been trained. It's not like we just decided this. And I have a similar problem. I'm like, do I wanna buy an app for $20?

This is crazy. Most apps are free. But then I'm trying to equate things to how much is this gonna make my life easier? And of course, $20 is a good amount. So there are a bunch of products that some of which I've partnered with, some I haven't because I'm just such a big fan.

So Paprika is one. It costs money and I love it. It saves me so much time. We meal plan on it, we grocery shop on it. I think it's great. Partners of ours, Delete Me, is this site that I think is an incredible product that will basically go and remove all your data off the internet.

So I went pretty deep last year on cybersecurity and like, how do I get my data off? How do I make sure I'm protected? I did a whole two-part episode series where I interviewed someone and then did a ton of research and published it. So you can go back and listen to those.

But that was one where I actually started and I was like, you know what? I don't know if I wanna pay for a service that's gonna go delete all my information off the internet. I could just go to every individual data broker website and do it. Like, why would I pay for someone to do this for me?

And then I started doing it. And one, I found that I spent five or 10 hours and I wasn't finished. And I was like, this is crazy. I do not value my time. And then two, after I did it manually, I was like, you know what? Let's at least see if I got it all.

And I didn't. So like, I spent all these hours trying to do it. And then I realized, not only could I pay someone to save me time, but I could pay someone to do it better than me. So that was an interesting one and a product I love. I use 1Password.

They're not really a partner of the show. I think there's an affiliate link for them if you sign up, but I think I make a dollar. It's not like a big deal. It's just like, because I already love it, I might as well put the link in on the website.

But just managing passwords, like I'm glad to pay for a service like that. I'm glad to pay for photo storage. We talked about money. I love a product called Kubera, right? And it is a product that replaces your like spreadsheet balance sheet, right? Like that's what it replaces. And it syncs with all of the sites.

It's a premium service. It's not free. I think it's $150 a year, but they've worked with all the data aggregators so that they use the best, whether it's Plaid or Yoda, all these ways you sync your accounts, the best one for each account. And they just built all the features I want.

And now I don't spend an hour a month updating my balance sheet spreadsheet in Google Sheets. And it's like, if I can save 12 hours a year, plus get some extra insight, I would, of course I should be willing to pay something for that. And that's something I've gotten really in tune with.

And this year going forward, I'm like, maybe I need to try one of these virtual assistant services out. I just signed up for Fancy Hands, which I'm not sure if it's going to be the right fit because it's not really like a dedicated person that learns you. But I just want to get myself comfortable with paying to save myself time because I'm using that time to be creative with my business, which hopefully will generate revenue in the future.

I'm using this time to spend with my kids, which I want to do. So that's been a really hard thing for me. And I think one of the biggest unlocks was starting to pay for products and services that will save me time. It starts out really easy when it's hour obvious, where it's like, I'm going to have someone help clean my house, which I know would take me this many hours, but I'm trying to extend that to, I'm going to use this software that's going to save me time.

Or I'm going to buy this product that costs more, but it's going to save me time. Are you good at that? - I'm getting better. I'm trying. I share the same affliction that you share, which is, oh, of course I can do this on my own. Or of course, if that's going to cost a couple hundred dollars, I can do it.

I can do it just the same. But like you said, it almost invariably takes way longer than you anticipate. And in the case of Delete Me, you don't do as good a job, right? I think I'm a work in progress on a lot of this stuff. It's just reorienting, even down to meal planning and cooking meals at home.

So for years, we have, I guess at chooseava.com/meals, we have a PDF of like 30 recipes that she's curated. They're not like her recipes. They're recipes she's curated over the years of essentially, it was like $2 per person per meal. And these are fabulous, delicious meals, like our like A+ meals in essence.

And that's been fantastic. And we meal plan and we save time, we save money, et cetera. But it's still a lot of hours. And not to mention on the front side, but on the backside too, like you don't think about this, the cleanup, right? Like if you're cleaning up pans every single time and putting all the dishes away, it's like 20 plus minutes for each of us.

That's 40 person minutes, right? And then when you think about that times seven or times how many of our meals per week, it's just an absurd amount of time. I think we've been much more cognizant of our time recently. So we're actually spending significantly more on food recently and still in the cosmic scheme of things, it's not that much Chris, but we're able to get delicious food from one of our favorite restaurants.

And it winds up being like $5 per person per meal. And they cook it for you. They have this like amazing, they call it like Sunday supper. And the way that it works is you can get enough food that for us, it lasts four dinners for the rest of the week.

It's like $50. It's absurdly cheap. - Brad doesn't live in the Bay area for anyone listening, where dinner for four that doesn't last the whole week is like more than $50. (laughing) - Yes, I am in a low cost of living area. I'm in Richmond, VA, but yeah, it's fun.

Like it's actually fun because there's a new menu every week. We try something new. My wife, this is the way that things have been delivering in our house 'cause she generally likes cooking. She's always been the one who made the food and she's been doing that for a long time.

Especially when you have kids who we got into the bad habit of making different meals for people, which I don't advise at all. And she's just kind of done with it. It's a lot of fun, frankly, to like try new food every week. And we don't have nearly as much, obviously on the front side, but on the backside also, they give you the pans to cook these things in.

There's no cleanup. So it's just, well, damn, would I pay $3 extra a meal to not have to waste an hour of prep time and cleanup time? Of course I would, a hundred times out of a hundred. And the food frankly is as good or better and it's different every week.

We actually just recently hired someone to clean the house once a month and that's been great. Just like little things. I think I'm kind of dipping my toe in here. I'm not maybe quite as advanced as you at this point in terms of like the virtual assistants and things like that.

I'm open to it. I think it's just more like, I need to conceptualize. Like, what does that actually look like? How are you thinking about that? - Well, I did this episode with Dan Martell that you already referenced about buying back your time. And I consider Dan, having talked to him, to be like the pro.

I'm like, you don't spend one second of your day on something that isn't a good use of your time. And I'm not sure I have the roadmap on how to exactly get there. And some of the things he's doing require more capital than I'm willing to spend on it, but I'm working on it.

We experimented with hiring someone to drop off meals and do the preparation. We're trying to go out or do carry out a couple nights a week just to give ourselves a break. We built bulk cook so that we have enough meals for another day. I hope to have an update in the next time we chat, which is some of the experiments and the results of them.

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And that was just one of the 69 listings that had his info. Fortunately, instead of spending hours finding all the sites with his info and submitting the request to take it down, I got it all done in minutes with Delete.me from Abine, and I am so excited to be partnering with them for this episode.

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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. For the interest of time, are there any other money things you're thinking about going forward? - I am kind of at a crossroads with my real estate investing.

So I know a bunch of our listeners have asked for an update with this is, I went to buying, and I don't know if I ever told you this, but two single family rental properties down in Georgia a couple of years ago. It's probably three or four years ago at this point.

And I've never liked real estate. Kind of scares me. I had a bad experience of like kind of speculation back in my 20s, and it just scarred me for life. I've gotten over it to a large degree in terms of like, okay, idiot, don't look at this as like, you're gonna make a quick buck.

This is gonna go up. Like, look at it as a business. I'm a CPI. I should be looking at this as a business. And does it have cashflow? Is there positive net income? And what's the return on investment? So I actually bought both these properties in cash and they've been great.

They've returned phenomenally. Like the bigger pockets, 1% rule. Now, obviously for anybody in the Bay Area, or like this is for your own personal residence, this is laughable. But for an investment property in rural Georgia or in Alabama or in many places throughout the country, you can find it's like 1% of the purchase price as the monthly rent.

So now for instance, I bought these properties after renovation, I bought them for basically $55,000 a piece. So 1% of that would be $550 a month. So that would be then like a 12% gross return per year. But actually, Chris, I rent them for like 750 and 800 a month.

So it's like one and a half percent, which is phenomenal. And so far, and it's a small sample size, obviously, but I haven't been hit with any major extraordinary expenses. Obviously, there's always stuff that comes up as a homeowner or a landlord, but they've returned phenomenally. And then that brings the question, OK, yeah, I kind of don't love real estate, but these have been like an unmitigated success.

And then I had Alan Corey on the podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about, hey, maybe that sounds great, but what would that have looked like if you had bought eight of these with 25% down instead of two with 100% cash, in essence? Those index funds, they're so easy.

There's no overhead. Oh, index funds are so easy. And that's the constant tension in my life is I just want simplicity. Simplicity is everything to me. But the diversification-- Chasing those returns. Yeah, those returns. That's what it comes down to. You can know intellectually, but damn, those returns are great, right?

And is that a small sample size? Is this replicable? Am I going to not sleep as well at night if I have a mortgage on something? So these are all kind of rolling around in my head. What are your time-adjusted returns? Because I promise you that buying that rental property and managing that rental property has a cost of time that is greater than how long it took you to buy VTI or VTSX or whatever index fund.

And I don't know if there's an easy way to factor that in, but I don't know. For me, the only real estate that we have other than our primary residence is a fractional home that we stay in, and that's it. We're not trying to rent it out. We're not trying to make money.

It's just a good way for us to be able to have another place to go to. I've always struggled with this. I did this episode with Brandon Turner, and he has a real estate empire and has amassed a net worth far greater than both of us combined through real estate.

But every time I think about it, I'm just like, I don't know if I want to play the game. It doesn't excite me. Being a landlord is not fun for me in any scalable thing. I just published a newsletter, as we're recording this today, but last week, about house hacking.

Love that concept. If we could build an ADU in our house, it would be awesome. Being a one-off landlord and taking on that kind of little work is not too much, but actually turning it into a profession and doing it, it's for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people do really well with it.

My brother and sister-in-law, they've bought up a bunch of auto repair and tire shops. There are a lot of businesses that you can own, and they can be very successful, and you could do well with them. That's just not what I want to do. But they've done a great job.

And it's funny how real estate seems like the obvious alternative of what to do with your money. But then you listen to someone like Cody Sanchez, who's going to be coming on the podcast soon, and she's like, I'm buying laundromats. I'm buying all these businesses. There's lots of ways you can buy businesses, one of which is a rental property.

But do you want to do that professionally or not? And what is the opportunity cost? If you put a little bit more of time instead of into that into your side hustle, or to your day job, or to the company you run, or something, will that be as lucrative in the long run?

It's hard to compare because there's no average return on investment of spending time on your side hustle. But I encourage people to realize that real estate has a time component that, if you don't love, can feel like a lot of work. Yeah, and I think a lot of the real estate people who pontificate about how wonderful it is, I think there's a large degree of survivorship bias to it.

Frankly, you don't hear about all the people that got wrecked by leverage and just made stupid decisions. I think there's some aspect of that, certainly. And no matter how I run the numbers, even without factoring in leverage-- because any time you factor in leverage, there's always that risk of this going kaboom.

Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves. But without leverage, even that 1% rule, there are very few people, very few markets in the country that can find that 1% rule. Again, 1% of the purchase price per month in rent. Yeah, you're not going to find it here. Right, no, not in a million years.

In the Bay Area, that's for damn sure. And I mean, that's a 12% gross return. And then, again, bigger pockets. You mentioned Brandon Turner. They say you should anticipate about 50% of the gross rent as expenses. So OK, your 12% gross return turns into a 6% net return. 6%.

That's not so fantastic. And then, obviously, there's appreciation. But appreciation, in my opinion, is speculation. You cannot bank on appreciation by any means. So it's speculative. But that said, you can anticipate a couple percent appreciation. So we're still back at 7%, 8%, 9%, which is pretty analogous to what we anticipate in the stock market.

And like you said, it's a whole hell of a lot easier to buy VTI or VTSAX than it is to run a real estate rental company, if you will, or whatever you want to conceptualize it as. So is the juice worth the squeeze? I think if you like it, great.

If you enjoy that, like I enjoy optimizing my travel, great. I think it's awesome. But just don't go into it thinking it's the best thing in the world. Teach his own. Teach his own. There are people that love it. But without leverage being included, because leverage can go both ways, it's no better than essentially anything else.

And obviously, again, the real estate people will pontificate about the tax benefits and the 1031 and all this stuff. There is that to some degree. But like you said, you got to factor in your time a little bit. I think that's important. So the only other money thing I had was that we have an au pair from Italy.

She's amazing. Our last few au pairs didn't drive, but she does. And we're adding her to our insurance. And when you add someone who hasn't ever had a license in the US, who's under 25, your insurance goes up. And so that inspired me to start going to reprice my insurance.

And I'm going to do an episode all about insurance, so keep an ear out for it. But I would just say it's amazing that every few years, different insurance companies completely change the way they price different things. And I've consistently in my life found that every couple of years, I just send all-- I keep it in a nice, easy formatted thing where I'm like, here's the level of coverage we need.

Here's all the things we need to cover. And I'll just send it to a few insurance reps or brokers and be like, hey, could you give me some quotes for this? Because for some reason in California now, most of the websites don't let you price yourself anymore. This is just my experience.

I went to State Farm, couldn't price it myself. So I had to email it to someone. But I did that. And sure enough, I think I'm going to save $600, $700 a year on insurance. Might even be closer to $1,000 just by shopping around and repricing. So that's my little fun thing for 2023 is if you haven't repriced your insurance in a little while, especially if you've got your home or your rental, you've got your car, maybe you've got an umbrella policy, you start to add all the things up, could be worth shopping around and getting a deal.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of these little one-time-a-year things that you should do that a lot of us don't do, frankly. But at least to be mindful of it, like I said, throw it in some task list that you have come up in mid-January. And you could do it more often.

But frankly, is the juice worth the squeeze? So I think one-time-a-year, price insurance. One-time-a-year, hopefully at minimum but certainly one-time-a-year, go through your credit card bill. Just line by line, are there any recurring things that you just forgot about? This happened to me a couple of times with random Peacock or Hulu or some kind of Paramount Plus or some such.

And like, oh, I wanted to watch Top Gun Maverick, so I got Paramount Plus. And I'm probably going to be paying for that for a couple of months because I'm stupid and I didn't cancel it. Just use Rocket-- look, they're a partner of the show. They're not paying me to say this, but Rocket Money is so good at this.

Do tell. Free app, you sync your cards, and then they scan for things that are recurring. And then they just give you an easy view of here are your recurring subscriptions. That's cool. Now, their business model is, OK, is there a recurring subscription? You can go cancel it. Or you could just tap one button, be like, go cancel it for me.

And you need their premium subscription to do that. But then they'll go reach out to whatever company is and just cancel it for you. And depending on the state you live in-- in California, companies are required to let you opt out online. But if you have a New York Times subscription and you don't live in California, it's so hard to cancel.

By the way, if you don't live in California and you have things to cancel, next time you're in California, just go online and do that. Or if you have a VPN that has a California option, it's really easy to cancel online here. That's very cool. Now, it's certainly very timely, as I'm talking about doing it manually.

We're talking about saving time. Saving time, saving time. That's the whole game. But when you do reprice your insurance, make sure you actually look at how many miles you drive on your car. So we don't drive that much. And so one of our car policies is priced at 5,000 miles a year, one's at 3,000.

But if you don't tell your insurance company, they price it at like 10,000 or 12,000 a year. And you can actually save a ton of money if you don't use your car a lot. I think a lot of us now that we're working from home more might not be driving as much as you used to.

So you might be overpaying for insurance, even without switching carriers, just because you didn't tell them that you're using less than whatever they set as your average mileage. That's a cool tip. I like that. I mean, that's easy, right? Like, hey, just a quick email, quick phone call. That's cool.

I think we're describing, like, how do you do simple things that it's just not going to take a ton of time? And you've heard me reference Todoist a bunch of times here. But I want to offload everything out of my brain, everything. So I have all of these recurring tasks.

And I don't think that's the best answer. Knowing you, you have some better answer than Todoist. I don't doubt it for one second. But for me, it's like, OK, if I am 100% essentially adamant about putting everything in my life into Todoist, then I don't have to think about it ever again.

So if a task comes up, even down to-- like, I just renewed global entry. And literally, the next time I have to renew is 2027. So I just quite literally put the task in. It comes due July of 2027 for February 2027. And now I never have to think about that ever again.

Because I know when 2027 rolls around February, I'm going to see that. And I have the URL for where I need to renew. And it's just there. The psychological baggage of getting all of this nonsense out of your head, when you free that, it's like the most freeing feeling you'll ever experience.

Think about all of those things that are rattling around in most people's heads of, oh, I have to do this next week. And I have to make that phone call two weeks from now, whatever. You don't have to do that. Just get it out of your head. Put it, in this case, on digital paper.

And your life is so much better. So that is probably the thing that has improved my life most significantly in the last couple of years. But again, like I said, you have to be 100% compliant with it. Because if you're not, then you'll always have that nagging doubt that, oh, is it really in there?

Can I really trust this? But when you can trust it 100%, you're golden. So I don't know. Do you use anything like that? I do not have a good system like that. I do use this app called Trustworthy, which I'll call the family operating system, where you can basically store all of your IDs, your vaccination cards, your passports, your tax returns.

It's like a secure, organized repository. You could have a Dropbox folder and put all this there. But it's not as organized. This has an app. So when I'm at the doctor's office, and they're like, can we reconfirm your daughter's insurance? I'm like, yes, I know where her insurance card is.

You get in a car accident, where's your car insurance? I know exactly where that is. And then on top of that, I like it because you can nominate a person, which for us is like my sister-in-law and my wife. It's like, if something were to happen to you, let these people, through some verification, have access to all of our stuff.

So we just store all of our stuff there. And it actually has a feature like this. You upload your passport or your driver's license, and you put in the expiration date. And then they remind you, hey, your driver's license expires in six months. So it's a little bit different in that it's not a central repository.

But for a lot of those kind of expiring things, I have that in there. But I have not found a task management solution that I love. I got to work on that. But we are well on our way to filling an episode. And we had a whole topic of health.

Do we want to jump into that? Do we want to do that again the next time? What do you think? Maybe we give a quick overview, because I suspect with a lot of this stuff, we're at the beginning of the year here. We're both exploring. And I think what could be cool is for there to be some accountability to the audience of, hey, we're going to actually follow through on this.

Because I think that's what we tell our audience all the time is, it's great to take in information, and that's all well and good. But if you don't take action, it's all worthless. So you have to get up off the couch and take action. Also, frankly, I fall down on this a lot.

There are probably dozens of things that I promised over the years that, oh, I'm going to do this, and I don't follow up, because there's no accountability. So it would be pretty cool, maybe on some level, for us to be accountability partners, and then by extension, the audience to some degree.

I don't have a prepared list of things I want you and the audience to hold me accountable for when it comes to some of these things. I know you have a few on health. Why don't we set the stage for this at a high level and say, look, health is a big thing for us.

We want to spend some time focused on it. So one, if this is interesting as an episode, definitely reach out to Brad. If you're listening to all the hacks, reach out to me. If you're listening to us, reach out to both of us. It doesn't matter. But let us know, so we know, should we keep this up?

Should we keep doing this? You don't have to send a long email. You can send Chris at all the hacks and say, do Brad again. I'd rather get the feedback than get this really nice response. Whether it's on social or email or whatever format you like, I'd love to know what people think of this, so we can come back and finish this whole health thing.

What do you think? That's a great idea. Same for either your audience or mine. Go to chooseavi.com or just get on my newsletter at chooseavi.com/subscribe. When you hit reply, it literally comes to me. So I'm the one who'll be reading all those emails. So let us know what you think about this.

We kind of conceptualize this as, like you said, a conversation, just kind of a random show of, hey, what's going on in our lives? And I think just to set the stage for this, certainly for next time, is, yeah, I think my bold move, as I talked about with that episode with Dominic Cortuccio, is I want this to be my healthiest year ever.

I don't precisely know today how I can quantify that. But I'm not letting that limit me. With my kind of over-anxiety analytical brain, I would have let that be the limiting factor and not gotten started. But I'm going in with an open mind of, hey, I want to experiment.

So just a couple of things that I've been doing so far which I think have made a big difference. First, Chris, you know more than anybody, I am a massive fanboy of Dr. Peter Attia. I've been following him since, I think, episode 50 of The Tim Ferriss Show, which came out maybe nine years ago, plus or minus, which is crazy.

He's a pretty high-performing athlete throughout his life. And a couple of years back, he decided to what seemed like basically stop a lot of his heavy training in favor of this program called DNS, so it's Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization. And it sounded fascinating to me, because I'd kind of been plagued with some shoulder issues and neck issues.

And everything that I tried was always a band-aid. There was no actual substantive fix to it. And the more I learned about DNS, the more that I thought this could be the answer. There aren't that many DNS practitioners in the US, but luckily, there's one here in Richmond. And I've been going to him for the last month or two at this point.

And Chris, I kid you not, it has been the best thing that I've ever done for my body. I feel so much better, because it actually looks at the brain and nervous system as almost going back to developmental milestones from when we were infants. And if you missed a milestone, it's not like you were incapacitated for the rest of your life.

Obviously, I've been a fairly normal person. But you always are coming up with some workaround. And what that leads to in a lot of cases is injury and/or stress in certain spots. So very long story short, because again, we'll talk about this more in depth, is my neck and my hip flexors, which are constantly tight, have never felt better.

I wake up in the morning, and I'm like, holy cow. I can move my hips in a way that I didn't think was possible. Like, I didn't think it was possible that I could feel this good. And that's just from a handful of times going to this DNS doctor.

And again, with the experimenting and not worrying about money and just trying to explore this, it's fairly expensive. That's not covered by insurance. I'm paying out of pocket every single time I go. But it's working. And I would be foolish, in my opinion, to not do it and to not continue just over dollars, which, as Perkins would say, when you wake up and you're 85 and you have more money than you could ever use, are you going to look back on whatever?

And now he would talk about experiences and memory dividends and all these things. But in my case, I might get extra years of vitality out of spending this money. So to me, it's an absolute no-brainer. The other thing is morning walks. I also listen to the Huberman Lab podcast a ton.

So he's always talking about getting morning sunlight. Easiest way to do that is just go on a walk. And it's just wonderful to be out in nature, peaceful in the morning. Nobody's around. You get some morning sunlight. It's just been these add-on effects. The third and biggest thing, though this is the newest, so I don't have all that much to it, is I hired an online fitness coach who I found through Twitter that I believed in what he was espousing.

And he wound up having this program. And now, like I said before, I'm going in to the gym with Jonathan, my Choose a Vibe business partner, four times a week. And it's just awesome. It's also, frankly, like I talked about, making the effort for connection is now I get to hang out with my buddy Jonathan six to eight hours a week when I wasn't previously.

I am working towards something because I think that's the other thing. Like, I'm in reasonably good shape. So it's not like I'm going from couch potato to trying to be Mr. Olympia. That's not what we're doing here. But when I go into the gym, when I go into CrossFit, I love it, but it doesn't feel like I'm working towards something.

I think having goals and having tangible improvements and having an accountability partner are really going to benefit me. We're in week two here. This is workout number eight. So it's a very small sample size. But I think the conjunction of all of these things are really working pretty well.

And then it's a mindset of exploration and just wanting to be as healthy as I possibly can. Because, frankly, I'm 43 years old, which I still can't believe, and not getting any younger, obviously. And the time is now. That's how I'm thinking about it. I'm turning 39 this year.

And my goal is to dial in health before I turn 40. I did an episode with Dr. Jordan Shlain. We talked about I've got high cholesterol and then the impact of that. That's the thing that I'm tackling first. And through a combo of both medicine and lifestyle changes. But I'm very early in that journey.

When you have two small kids and you start a podcast and you go full time on it, I felt like for a while I was treading water. And now I'm like, OK, we're starting to get things dialed in. Need to get the exercise back on the regular regime. I think we've been doing well with food.

So I'm not too worried there. But that's the big one I'm focused on right now. Going back to very early conversation, I was talking about apps and how it's crazy to spend money. It's crazy how medical things are the same. It seems wild to pay for a doctor that isn't covered by your insurance, or to pay for a treatment, or to pay to get blood work done, or blood analysis, or DNA analysis, all these things.

But it also seems crazy to not allocate some portion of your budget to your health. And so we actually had a conversation on that episode a few weeks ago about how do you think about what to allocate in your budget towards health? And after the fact, I emailed Jordan.

I was like, hey, I'm thinking about a doctor. So Jordan runs a concierge practice that, for me, is not within the budget that I want for my health. It's quite expensive. But I was like, do you know someone that I could work with that's not as expensive? And he was like, what's your budget?

And I was like, I don't know. And then I asked Amy. And I was like, what's our budget for health? And we're like, I don't know. So it's something that I need an answer to, because I'm not necessarily always the budgeting type. But a budget gives you permission to spend.

And so in some areas, I feel like I don't necessarily need a budget. I know what's a reasonable amount to spend just instinctively. But with health, I feel like I need to create a budget. And I might even start doing this with an FSA, though open enrollment just ended, so I've got to wait a year.

But I feel like I need to force myself to be comfortable spending money on health. And if I could create a budget that says, you have $2,000 to spend on health, then maybe the answer is you say, whatever's not here, we're going to give away. Something that makes it a little bit more accountable.

With an FSA, it would be like that. Whatever you don't spend, you actually can't use. You lose it. I would encourage anyone who has an expiring FSA to go buy stuff that a local shelter needs and don't let it go to waste. But I want to create something there, because I feel like I need to force myself to spend more on my health.

That's a big one. We had a whole list of 10 or 12 bullets of what we want to focus on with health. We're going to have to save that for the next time. Yeah, to be continued. We didn't get to travel and some of that stuff. So we got a lot.

Kids, Brad's superpower is teaching his kids all these amazing lessons. So we're going to get to that. But I feel like we hit on a lot. I'm like jazzed to go do a lot of the things we talked about that you shared. This is awesome. Yeah, I knew this was going to be fun.

It worked out even better than I anticipated. And it's pretty wild. We have so many of these things, A, to follow up on. This will be some accountability. But B, there's all these topics we didn't get to. I'm up for doing this a handful of times a year minimum.

I think this would be awesome. I think it'll be fun and super valuable, obviously. It's always good to talk to you, my friend. Selfishly, that's the best part. So I would say, if you're listening, if you like this or don't like it, I mean, genuinely, if you listen to this and you're like, this was not a good episode, please let me know.

I want to create content that you like. Brad and I can have this conversation and not record it or record it. We're going to have it anyways. So let us know. But if you do like it, send us topics that you think would be fun. But if you have questions that might be better suited for a conversation than just a response, send them in.

And unless we get a bunch of bad feedback, we'll probably do this again, and we'll see where it goes. Nice. Yeah, sounds like a plan. Awesome. Very, very cool, Chris. Always good to chat. And yeah, until next time, please send in the feedback. The cool thing is we could talk about anything.

That's what's fun about these conceptualized random shows is it can be anything. All right. Thanks for being here. I look forward to the next one. I hope you enjoyed episode 100. And honestly, thank you so much for all the support the last two years. I really don't know if I could have kept going if I didn't know all of you were here with me for the journey.

So I am excited for everything 2023 will have in store for All The Hacks. And I can't wait to share more of that with you. Finally, one quick reminder to go check out Brad's podcast, Choose a Five, which is awesome. If you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com.

That's it for this week. See you next week.