From sharing the best AI tools to hearing firsthand about what it's like to lose a house in a fire, to a new style of working out that might replace traditional strength training, today I'm joined again to cover those things with my good friend Kevin Rose, and we're going to do a deep dive into a lot of the questions you all sent in.

We're going to share which AI tools we're using for research, building apps, taking notes, and some of the creative ways we use those tools. We'll also cover how to make sure you're covered properly in case something happens to your home. We're going to share how we think about where we want to live in the world, and a lot more.

We're going to get really tactical and personal, so I hope you love this one, and thank you to everyone who sent questions in. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend, and if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe.

And if you want to submit a question for the next one of these, whether it's with Kevin, my wife Amy, or me just doing it solo, head on over to chrishutchins.com/AMA. Kevin, thanks for being here. Yeah, glad to be here. So we did this last time. We had some questions come in.

We sat down together. There were a few follow-ups, and then a few things that came recently that I was like, "Gosh, for me to answer this question would be great. For you to inject your opinion would also be great, and your experience." So I'm going to start with one that we teased out the last time, which is you wake up, you have no plans, no commitments, you're all alone.

How do you spend your day? Oh, man. It really depends on what the goal is for the day. For me, every day is a little bit different. If I didn't have any agenda, whatsoever- No agenda. No agenda. I think self-care has to play a big part in what I want to do for that day, largely because my day-to-day is going through investment decks, looking at all the different startups, trying to get up to speed on all the latest AI stuff that's out there.

It's very computer-centric, tech-heavy work, and everyone needs a break from their computer. So that would mean I'd start off with a cup of coffee, obviously. I'm a little fancy when it comes to that shit where I like the single-origin pour-over stuff. And then I've been doing a lot of rope-based movement training recently, which is really more core work.

You can think of it as jump rope on steroids. Is this the big, thick rope? Yes, big, thick rope, but more swinging it around your head and moving in different ways that activate core, and the obliques, and the shoulders, and more of this idea of transitioning from the old-school version of Kevin 1.0, which was, "I'm young.

Let's just do as many reps as possible. Let's get bigger muscles," into, "How can I make sure that on the longevity side, I'm increasing flexibility and making sure that the supporting structure around the muscles are being built out as well?" So it's not just about how big is your bicep.

It's about how all that different connective tissue and all those other muscles aren't out of whack, so that when you have a seven-year-old running at you full force and you catch them sideways, you don't throw out your back. It sounds like an old-person thing to say, but it is a pretty important piece of how I'm redefining what my exercise routine looks like.

Sauna is huge. Sauna, for me, is a non-negotiable daily thing in that if you can get 20 minutes at about 174-ish, 175-ish degrees, that's where all of the published studies are at, mostly coming out of Finland. Massive reductions in all-cause mortality, reduced dementia risk, reduced cardiovascular disease. There's no debate anymore.

It is very healthy. The only thing to really pay attention to on that side is hotter than that doesn't necessarily mean better. So we know that heat shock proteins, which are what we believe to be the suspects that are doing all the positive stuff for our body, get released around 175.

We also know that if you go too hot, especially if you don't protect your brain. So for me, I have that full-on felt cap all around the head. I'll take in some cold washcloths with me that I'll put underneath the felt. There has actually been some studies that show too hot can actually do damage.

So it's finding that sweet spot there. And for people who don't know, you can get the new sauna heaters. You could dial in the temperature to exactly what you want. Yeah. I have done this, and I've dialed it in where I bring in my own Amazon $15 digital thermometer, hold it at chest level, which is where you want it, and just really make sure it's right around that 175, 178 kind of situation at chest level.

And then I lift my legs up on the bench so I get the whole body exactly at that temperature. Yeah, we've got this sauna outside. You can see it barely from Haven Sauna. And when we built it, we built it to Finnish standards, not American standards, which are very different.

And so we've got the vents in the right place. I've seen some people whose saunas have the thermometer sensor above the rocks. And then you're like, "Oh wow, it's so hot," according to the temperature, but it's not that hot. And it's like, yeah, you put it right above the heat source.

So you want it on the opposite wall. Yeah. Sadly, if you actually contract someone to come and put a sauna in, they're going to do exactly that, where they put the temperature sensor in the wrong place, the airflow is going the wrong way. And they're building what I like to call just vanity saunas, where it's like all glass walls.

And it turns out glass leaks heat pretty fast. And so you have to be careful and really, if you're going to take it seriously, don't spend the money unless you really get the proper instruction. You had a great PDF that you should link to around the sauna. Yeah, there's this Trumpkin Guide to Saunas, which I'm going to warn because I have one friend who was like, "Oh, I'm interested." He went down the rabbit hole.

It's a deep rabbit hole. Hey, listen, drop it into Notebook LM from Google, that PDF, and ask it to make a podcast for you from that. And then just listen to the podcast. Yeah. Fortunately, I met these two guys who started a few companies and they were like, "We're going to start a sauna company." And they were like, "We love the Trumpkin Guide." I was like, "These are the guys I want a sauna from." And so that's where we got our sauna.

The one thing that they're working on, imagine if you could charge a battery with 110 or 120 power, which you get from a normal outlet. And then you could build up enough juice in that battery to run 240 for like an hour for your sauna. It would let you put a sauna anywhere.

Because one of the biggest challenges is that sauna heaters need 240. So you've got to run electrical around your house. If it's not in the right place, it's a pain in the ass. So they're working on this battery solution because you don't need the sauna on 24/7. So if you had a big enough battery and it's not that big...

It's like a power wall for... Yeah. Exactly. But just for the sauna. But because you don't need constant use, you could charge it 110. Yeah. And I will say one other thing too, that's worth looking into. And I'm not getting paid for this plug or anything, but we've had Plunge, both of us as previously as sponsors on our podcast.

And you don't have to think about converting a room in your house. You can get these outdoor ones. My buddy has the Plunge one. He actually says great things about it. It gets really hot. They're pricey. I mean, all saunas are pricey. All saunas are not cheap. You don't want to price shop for a sauna.

If you do, there's some almost heaven saunas that go on sale every now and then at Costco. And that's probably the best deal. Do they get hot enough though? Almost heaven. Not quite. You're just buying the wood sauna and it comes with a heater. You can pick your heater.

It is a good sauna in a reasonable price range. The thing that I don't love is these barrel saunas. They look really cool. They're way cheaper. And then the more you do your research, it's just so hard to make a barrel sauna work to get your feet above the rocks and get the heat.

And so that's one of the things I learned going down the rabbit hole. Look, is a barrel sauna better than no sauna? Yeah, for sure. If I had to choose between a barrel sauna and no sauna, I'd take it every day. But if you're going to go down the rabbit hole.

Also, I mean, you have to consider this an investment in your health too. You know what I mean? This is not just something that you're blowing cash for the sake of blowing cash. It truly is going to improve your health over the long term. For me, it's an expense that's worth taking on.

Yeah. So I'll put links to the show notes to what Haven did, because I think it's cool, especially if you don't have 240. Because I think even the plunge when you need 240, it's amazing. Okay. So you talked about self-care. I do have one question that I'm going to answer the question as well.

Where do you get these ideas? Rope training. Where did you find that? It's not something I've heard really anyone ever talk about. Yeah. I mean, I have a little community forum over at KevinRose.com where people hang out and they post inside of that private little group. Somebody had posted a link to this guy's YouTube channel and we can link it up as well.

He just talks about fascia work and he's a black belt in jujitsu. He's amazing. I'm always skeptical of new stuff and new people that are coming on the scene. And so I sent it over to Tim Ferris and Tim did some research and he's like, "Hey, actually, I trained with this guy one time randomly like a decade ago.

This guy's legit. Let's go in deeper here." And I know he's been looking at, they call it more functional type movement health. And so we kind of both did a little bit more research and realize that he's recommending some pretty sound stuff. I don't want to speak for Tim.

I don't know that he's doing any of this stuff, but I'm certainly starting it up. And I'm a fan of trying something new. Worst case, you give it a shot for a couple of months, you literally have to buy a rope. If you don't want to buy one of the crazy, because they have nice ropes that are like 50 bucks, right?

Really well-made, they're going to last you a decade. He's like, "If you just want to give this a try, go down to Home Depot, get a $12 rope and go practice with my free course for the first three months and see if it's for you." And so that's one thing that I was just drawn to.

And so far, I do feel like I'm getting a little bit more flexibility. And then also I noticed that I'm getting sore in places where I don't normally get sore, which I like because that means those little muscles are getting stressed in ways that they weren't before. I love that.

Yeah. You didn't say it, and I will. When we have free time, it's just chasing random things. If I look, I wrote down some notes. I was like, "First thing I want to do is just clear out all the inbox text." The way my brain works is knowing I have things that I need to do makes it hard to just let go and go down the rabbit hole and do the research.

So I'm like, "Clear out that, go for a run or get a workout in, and then go down some rabbit holes." Yeah. Rabbit holes for me are my favorite thing in the world. And they're also dangerous. Last night is a great example. So you can probably tell my voice, I'm recovering from a little bit of a cold.

I was in a rabbit hole till 11.50 at night. And I'm supposed to meet you early this morning. And I was researching this new type of high bandwidth memory that's only used in AI chips. And NVIDIA uses them, AMD uses them, all the big AI providers that are building these GPUs to train all these AI models.

And I'm like, "Ooh, if I can find out which publicly traded companies are the suppliers that are providing this, that's an investment opportunity." And I'm going so deep. And I'm having AI do all the deep due diligence and research for me. And I'm like, "What am I doing?" It's midnight.

But it just shows you when you get geeky about something. That can be anything, right? You just go down this rabbit hole. It doesn't even have to be for myself. Sometimes my mom's like, "Oh, we're going to Scottsdale. We're trying to find a place for dinner." I'm like, "I am going to find the best place that my parents will have the best time." Why am I spending an hour going down everything?

I just can't help. I enjoy it. It's just fun. Can I give you a hack that I think is probably my number one thing that I've picked up in the last three months that I absolutely recommend to everyone? I haven't told you about this yet. Okay. It's going to be very obvious, but I just want to give you a couple examples.

So we all know that chat GPT has a voice interface, right? You can talk to it now and you can interrupt it now, which is quite nice, right? So you don't have to wait for it to finish this whole long sentence because it's like, "But wait a second. Tell me a little bit more about this." So you can tie that to your iPhone on that extra button that they have.

Already done. So you can hold it down. Already done. And we ask it questions throughout the day. Like, "Tell me about this. Tell me about that," right? But one thing I realized that is really fun is if you just go outside, sit on your patio one day and think about a topic that you know very little about, but are curious about, but you'd be embarrassed to ask an expert about because you would be so behind the curve.

It would just be a lot of work and embarrassing to ask really dumb questions, right? So for me, that was quantum computing. And so I'm like, "Okay, I've heard about qubits. I heard that when you observe them, they collapse. How do they even write the algorithms? What is observing them?

Is it lasers?" And so I sat there for 45 minutes with Chad GVT. And I was like, "Tell me about this. Tell me about this." And I have a voice training. It's a female voice. She's British. She sounds very nice. This is what I tell her. "But you're explaining this at a college level.

Give it to me at a ninth grader level." She's like, "Okay, cool." At a ninth grader level, I would explain it like this, right? And I got it. After 45 minutes, I now have a really solid foundational understanding of quantum computing, what it means to add more qubits, what it means to observe different states, and how they collapse into a result.

And I didn't know any of that before. And then I was talking to my buddy, Jeff, who works with me over at True Ventures, and he was like, "When I'm cooking, I give my recipe to Chad GVT. And then as I'm cracking eggs and doing stuff, I'm telling it what I'm doing.

And I'm asking questions like, 'Hey, should I add salt now or later? What if I did a squeeze of lemon? How does that impact the flavor profile for this? What's the chemical reaction process that makes the flavor profile different? Or my soup's a little bit flat. What if I did this?'" And it's training him to be a better cook and chef in real time.

And in my head, I'm like, "All this sounds very obvious." But when you realize that that is the unlock, it is now a chance and opportunity for us to take all of these little things that we have surface level expertise at and not be afraid to ask the dumb questions.

It's amazing. And so I'm doing that on a whole slew of different topics. So I've also started doing this a little, but when I'm driving, it's a great time. You're in the car and I'm like, "Hey, my daughter asked about whales. I don't really know anything about whales. Give me a 20-minute lesson on everything I should ever know about whales." You went to that whale penis museum.

Don't cut this out. I did go to the Icelandic phallogical museum. There is an entire museum. I think it is the largest collection in the world. Of whale penises. Whale penis was the largest one. I sent a picture because you can stand next to a photo of how big it is.

But I think there were like 500 animal penises in this museum. It's nuts. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass. I have learned so much about everything from communication to leadership to negotiation from business experts on this show. But if you're like me, you are always hungry for more.

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That's 15% off at chrishutchins.com/masterclass. This episode is brought to you by Superhuman. Now, I've used Superhuman for years, and I think it's hands down the best way to do email, assuming you value your time, which I absolutely assume you do. That's because Superhuman is the ultimate solution for inbox decluttering and enhanced productivity.

It's also the fastest email experience out there, and I'm certain I've saved dozens, if not hundreds of hours a year using Superhuman. They have every feature you could ever want built in, split inboxes for prioritizing what matters, keyboard shortcuts and snippets for everything, AI tools to draft responses and summarize emails, automated reminders and integrated calendars.

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And every one of you can get your first month free at chrishutchins.com/superhuman. Again, that's chrishutchins.com/superhuman, or click the link in the description to get back hours of your time each week. So I guess you're talking about AI tools. Yeah. What AI tools are you using on a daily basis?

Every week's a new tool. It's changing that fast. But I can tell you what my stack is now, but by the time this comes out, it'll be three new things. I know. This is a problem. I had this thing on the wall. I was like, "Let's do an episode on AI tools." And then I was like, "Oh, well, the next week, there's a new one." What are some tools you're using?

It might be out of date. But then how are you staying on top of it? And how are you thinking about it? I think that if you can expense it, the $199 Pro version of ChatGPT is worth every penny, largely because you get early access to the models. And it has deep research.

Well, they added that now recently for other users as well. But when you hear about these new models that are coming out, we're shifting into this really weird world where when AI first came out, we thought it was going to be all you can eat for $20 a month.

Where it was like, "Okay, Gemini is $20 a month. ChatGPT is $20 a month. Claude is $20 a month." All the big foundational models. We're moving into a world where there are specific models that will go a lot deeper and give you much richer reports and insights. And they need more compute to do that.

Basically, Sam Altman came out recently and said, "Hey, even on our $199 a month plan, we're losing money." Because some of these models, when you ask it a deep research question, and it comes back and it spends two and a half minutes researching something and computing something for you, that's a very expensive query because of all the resources that are tying up while you're doing that.

But the reports that come back are just unbelievable. Now, Google is giving away their deep research for $20 a month. So I think if I only had $20 a month to spend, I would do it at Gemini because I believe you're getting better models per dollar at Gemini. For me, if you're looking for just someone to be a writing companion slash someone that is going to give you and present you data back in a very friendly, non-technical way, Claude feels very elegant to me, which I kind of like because if I'm like, "Hey, rephrase this 20 different ways so I can finish this email," Claude, for some reason, just gives me better responses than the more technical, clinical-sounding responses I get from some of the other models.

But you have to go and play. For me, my stack is the big three, like I mentioned. And then I would add in Notebook LM is fun because you can dump in a bunch of different PDFs. You can make podcasts of those PDFs. So for example, I recently had a home fire, house burned down.

I dumped in my insurance policies into Notebook LM. And I said, "Hey, what are my coverages? Explain this to me. My agent is coming back and saying this isn't covered. By the letter of these PDFs, should I push back here?" And it's like, "Yes, you should push back here." And I did.

And I did. And I did to multiple models. But I will say that where Notebook really excels, and that's a great point, is when you have a PDF and you want to understand it during a commute. So for example- The podcast feature. Yes, exactly. So I'll take a Nature article that Nature is notorious for, one, being the best scientific journal in the world, two being because they are the geekiest, most hardcore journal in the world.

I once bought a Nature subscription to the magazine when I was younger. You walk into somebody's house and you see Nature on the table and you're like, "Ooh, they're smart." It's like, "I want that." Yeah, exactly. It's like having the New Yorker or something on your desk. But I didn't understand a damn thing that was in there, very little, because it was very technical.

But you can drop a Nature PDF in there and tell the podcast host, "Break this down at a high school level and give me a 15-minute podcast about it." And then you're on your commute, you're consuming something, you're understanding it and- You can interrupt it now. Yeah. I demoed this the other day to someone where it's like, not only can you listen to it, but you can ask, "Hey, can you go a little deeper?" Right.

And Eleven Labs also, I will say, in my opinion, is worth checking out. I've had a few conversations with the CEO. They have me under NDA over there and I've seen some of the future. Obviously, I'm not going to say what it is, but the future is bright for them.

They have some cool shit they're working on. Yeah. So all these are fundamental models. You go in and for anyone who hasn't tried these, go try them all. It's a chat interface. You can usually add attachments. They can do searches and all this stuff. So that's AI tools, part one.

But I would say the key piece, the key takeaway, no matter what, for everyone out there, is these next, call it three to five years, it is not about saying, "I am using ChatGPT." It's about saying, "I am playing with everything that is coming out and staying on top of that." Because it is so rapidly evolving.

For you to win, and when I mean win, I mean have a deep understanding of where things are going. It's going to be about that play, that exploration, that using and picking at all the edges and trying all the different tools. And what about not model tools? All of these companies, startups that have built things on top of these models, Repl.it, Cursor, a lot of these scheduling ones, are using any of those?

Yeah. Repl.it, Bolt is another one. Those are great for non-coders. They're tools that allow you to basically create software. That's right. Just for anyone who doesn't know, you could basically say, "Oh, build me a tool that does this thing." And they'll build the tool. I would put them in the 80% camp in terms of them being good.

Things still break, and sometimes you run into a dead end where it can't fix it and you got to roll back the code. They're worth playing with and that you can go there and say, "Hey, build me an e-commerce website that does X, Y, and Z," or "Make me an app that does this." It's worth seeing that you don't have to be a coder and you can just explain something via a prompt.

And then actually with Bolt and these others and Repl.it, you can click one click deploy and make it a public website. And then you can attach a domain to it. So there was one time basically I wanted to bridge two systems together. I just explained what I wanted to do.

It built the tool for me. I deployed it and it worked and it was fine. It's not there yet in that you're not building and deploying native iOS apps that are complex. For my coder friends, they love it because it gets them 80% of the way there and then they can fill out the rest on their own because they know how to code.

But in the next five years, that's going to be a solved problem. And I would not be studying computer science right now as a major if I had to... When people come up and say, "Hey, what should I be doing? I'm about to go into college." Computer science to me, I would say, "Yes, if you're more on the science side and you want to be pushing frontier models and you're math heavy.

Less so if you just want to be a software engineer that writes iOS apps, because that's going to be a solved problem with AI." Yeah, it's wild. I didn't do this, but I think if I bring the gift card side I built back online for the next rev, I was like, "That's a perfect use case.

I need something that just does simple order fulfillment, generate a CSV, send an email to a person, all that kind of stuff." One that I played with... And it's funny because I also wouldn't want to be investing in a lot of the companies building consumer use cases because it seems like all of these model companies are just launching them.

So I really liked this app, Simple AI. And you could download it and you could say, "Hey, call these five restaurants and see if they have a table for seven tonight for walk-ins." Yeah. We invested at True Ventures. It's one of our companies, yeah. Yeah. So here's my question.

Now, Gemini or Google just launched half these features. What happens to a lot of these companies? First off, it's awesome. If you want to call a store and ask if they have something in stock because they don't have a website, you now have a tool that will do that for you for free.

Simple AI, I actually think is a better interface than what I saw Google launch. But Google also wants to launch something like this, especially for restaurant reservations. What happens for a lot of these consumer apps that are built on these models? I think there's a couple of things to consider here.

One is that Google is a massive company, as is Microsoft, as is all the bigs that are in this space. They have a ton of resources. We've worked at Google together. We understand that the beast can be amazing in that they can sometimes spit out very unique, novel, fun things, Waymo.

I remember when we checked out Google Glass for the first time way back in the day. I still have my Google Glass. Do you really? Yeah. I don't know if it works. They can spin up fun, wild little incubators internally that do cool things. But ultimately, once you get outside of that bubble, I feel that the independent entrepreneur oftentimes is much more creative than the big corporation.

I don't think it's a winner-take-all. Google may very well develop that feature, and you could have three other startups that have built the same thing. And then Microsoft comes along and is like, "Damn, we needed that yesterday." $300 million, I'll take that company, and they just take it out of the market.

Then you have a lot of other companies where it's important to remember that every time something is launched at a big, meaning like a Google, Microsoft, whatever, there are companies that do not and cannot host their data there because of either competitive reasons or whatever it may be. I think the best example here is probably Dropbox.

Everyone thought Dropbox was going to be completely crushed when Google Drive came out. And now there's Microsoft OneDrive, there's Box, there's all these other players. But Dropbox is a beautiful third party outside of those ecosystems that is used by millions of people. So I just don't believe in a winner-take-all.

If I was personally building in this space, I would try to avoid the areas where the bigs are going to go because they are very powerful and they can crush you if they put enough resources against it. For me, when I'm looking from an investment standpoint, I would much rather try and look at maybe mental health as applied to AI, or drug discovery as applied to AI in some unique way, or just areas where, if you're Google and Microsoft, it's not the immediate first thing that you're going to go after.

They're going to get and understand documents, email, all of their core workspace assets are going to be AI-enabled. Yeah, the core things they do now, book a flight, make a reservation, things that are front and center, find the directions, they're going to do that. And also, they own the metal.

And when you own the metal, it's hard to get consumers to switch. And when I own the metal, I mean, they own the actual OS at the device level. So when users have Gemini in every single Android phone, and it's bundled into everything that you do, it's very hard to convince consumers to switch to another party when they're paying for it.

The average consumer, there will be lots of people that do, but it's just like any other service. Remember when we used to get our internet bundled with our TV, bundled with our phone, were you going to go out and get a third-party phone service? And you're like, "No, everything's together.

I'm paying $75, done." And so, Apple has that advantage, even though Apple Intelligence sucks, it will not forever. Apple has a lot of money to throw at this problem. My gut tells me that Microsoft launches a phone that is Android powered, but co-pilot backend powered sometime in the next year.

Okay. A couple other tools that I've been using. So Zapier, I think there's all these people building these products that do various one-off things. But Zapier has the ability to both tie into all of your apps and integrate LLMs. So you can basically say, "Oh, if I get an email with an attachment, put the attachment through some model, summarize it, and send an email to me about it." Why would you use Zapier versus IFTTT versus Make versus all of the others?

To me, IFTTT is like a thing of the past. A thing of the past. Okay. I know Make exists and I've seen it, but I'm already familiar with Zapier. I already have things tied into it. I understand the way it works. So there are probably multiple tools to do this.

I've heard good things about Make. I haven't tried it yet. I have too, but it's like I'm already in this ecosystem. I already pay my subscription fee. But the ability to basically say, "If this thing happens, use a model and then do this other thing. If you see something on my calendar, look at the person that's on the invite and go online and do some research and add their bio to the calendar invite." Yeah.

Those kinds of things, there will be all these agents that do this that tie into everything one day. And there are one-off tools for each of these use cases that you can pay for. But I've also found that if you're willing to just roll your sleeves up a little, you could kind of dream up your own use case and create these things.

And then Zapier has their own model or AI tool that's like, "Hey, build me a Zap that does these things and it will tie in." So that's one where if you don't want to go play, there's one called Howie, I think, which summarizes some... I can't remember all the use cases.

I wrote them all down. I forgot. Yeah. I think that what you're saying, I really like the idea that... And I've used this with Zapier where you can describe what you want it to do with AI, and then it goes and builds it. It's just a faster way to get these apps to work, which is...

Exactly. We just added that in the last few months. So it's been great. So I had one where it was like in Notion, we're tracking sponsors, and then it can go create some draft invoices in Stripe. You can just do all of these things. But now you have the ability to interject a model, which is like, "Anytime I forward an email with an attachment, summarize it and respond." So if someone's like, "Hey, here's a book summary.

What do you think?" Forward it, and I get a response. I don't even have to think about it. I can even set up a Gmail filter where if it's in this label, do this and all that kind of stuff. We have this tool on the VC side to let you know how crazy it's getting.

There is a tool where you can take any pitch deck you want and upload it to it. And then it goes out and it finds competitors to that pitch deck. It tells you the total addressable market for what they're pitching. It tells you the strength of the founders, and it crawls LinkedIn and does all the other crazy stuff.

And it gives you back this full-blown summary overview article of all the due diligence that you would typically do within a minute and a half. It's nice. That's nice. So I'd say anyone listening, my goal is to go play with a lot more of these and then record a solo episode, get it out pretty fast because things are changing, with some feedback on what I've gotten from using them.

I haven't used them all. So if anyone listening is like, "Oh, here's this tool I love. Send me an email, podcast@allthehacks.com. I'll play with it. We'll go a little deeper." Are there any other things that you're using on a daily or weekly basis that are not the models themselves?

Yeah. I like Snipped. I think Snipped is probably my favorite podcast app right now, and largely because what it does is they process every single podcast through an AI model, and they break it into logical chunks. So before, if you went to a podcast, I'm sure you've seen this, you'd go to the show notes, and sometimes they would link up the actual areas of topics of conversation where you could jump into them.

Now what they've done is because of AI, you can go in and they break it into these different chunks. They're shareable, and then you can quickly save something. So I'll give you an example. Back in the day in Audible, I'd be listening to audiobook, and I'd be like, "Oh, that was a great little piece," right?

And then you go back, you quick grab your phone, and you click bookmark, and it's like your in point and out point for the place that you want to share. And you're like, "Okay, in point, I'll drag a little bit further." And it was like a five-minute process to get that little clip that you wanted to save, right?

And so what they do is they know that it takes you a few seconds to get to your phone. And they're like, "We think this was the clip that you really were curious about." And then I can press one tap to send it out to Bear, to Notion, to any of those other places.

Now I have that saved. It gives me a link to the actual audio piece of it as well. So I have the data in case I want to do something actionable on it. I can set it to do, I can do whatever I want there. And then I can click through to it and listen to it again or share it with a friend.

And then because the SNPs are social, I can see this most SNPed areas of the podcast. So I can be like, "Oh, Chris has launched a new All the Hacks episode. This one was SNPed 300 times." And by the way, people are SNPing the crap out of your episodes.

I know, I've seen it. I met the SNP founder. Yeah, he's awesome. It was really interesting. The only thing that... I just don't know what happens with the future of podcasts when AI summarizes everything. The one thing that is nice is we're going to turn... Podcasts are quickly going to convert into conversations.

And it probably will be in your voice. So today you could launch your own app that is All the Hacks. And you could be like, "Let me tell you about this great deal." And I'd be like, "Hey, Chris, well, wait a second. Didn't you say a couple of episodes ago that this was 7% off?" And you would respond back being like, "That's a great point, Kevin.

I did say that a couple of episodes ago. It was a minute number, blah, blah, blah." And that's all 11 labs powering your voice. And I would not know that it's not you. It's going to be wild. And that's going to be applied to books. That's going to be applied to everything.

And this is just right around the corner. This episode is brought to you by Built Rewards, which is an amazing points program with so many ways to earn, including on your rent, where you don't even need to check with your landlord. So let me explain. First, there's no cost to join Built.

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Granola is the best. I like it because it sits outside of everything. They are working on some functionality to let people know that you are recording them because you do have to get consent to record people. In some states, right? In some states, yeah. But it's just generally good practice.

But it sits outside of everything, meaning that you install it at the OS level. So if you're doing a Google Meet, a Zoom, Google Hangout, any other meetings that you're doing anywhere, you can grab like a FaceTime audio call. And so it detects that audio has happened and it launches as, "Do you want to record this?" And it creates these beautiful summaries, transcripts.

You can ask questions of the meeting afterwards. And I think it's like 10 bucks a month. It's granola.ai. I'm not an investor. I would love to have been, but I think it's one of the best out there. There's one called Limitless. And they both have a service like that that runs at the OS level.

And then they're about to ship like a pendant that you can wear throughout the day that would like turn on a light. Oh, that's kind of cool. And it's coming soon. And you'd wear it all day and record everything you do. It would have a light so people would know.

Granola is going to have an app so you can just launch the app. Like we were just sitting here having a conversation. I can just launch it and be like, boom. And then it would just record all of us. The only issue with granola, I will say one thing.

I tried Zoom's AI and I love it. I actually think it creates great summaries afterwards. And the nice thing about Zoom, because it is built into the app, it understands who's talking. So it'll be like, "Oh, Chris said this." And not that granola wouldn't understand there's two distinct voices.

But it doesn't know who they are. It can try because if there is a calendar invite and it's you and me, it will know one of us is Chris and one's Kevin. But if there's like four people on the calendar invite, it sure as shit doesn't know who's who, right?

But Zoom does know. And so you can say like, "Hey, Chris mentioned this, blah, blah, blah," to Zoom and then get much better data from Zoom if you're doing it built in. Okay. So a lot of AI tools changing every day. You talked about your house. I want to come back because I got a question from someone that was about, in light of the recent fires, what should I be doing to make sure that if I'm ever in a situation like you were in, I can be prepared?

So I did my research. I have some thoughts. But I'm curious, maybe you could talk a little about your experience of the whole thing. Yeah. Our house was taken by the LA fires. And at the end of the day, just grateful that family's safe, dog safe, all that stuff is good.

Grabbed a handful of things. But in retrospect, when you look back at what was lost, it was the sentimental stuff at the end of the day that I think is the biggest hit. All the other crap is just stuff. And honestly, sometimes it's kind of nice to not have that stuff.

In a really weird way to go back and have a mental reboot on what is important to you from just the things that I consume and hold on to is a very refreshing thing to go through. And I would say that the things I wish I would have done, one thing I was very lucky to have done was that I took all my photos that I had in a box about six months ago and sent them out to a third party service and had them all scanned in.

These were old slides that my dad had, stuff like that. So I have all that stuff saved on cloud drive, which is huge. Never took photos of my first father's day cards and stuff for my kids where they were spelling their names wrong and stuff like that. That stuff hits me hard.

Lost that stuff. Never took photos of the stuff that my dad left me. He made me a little jewelry box when I was a little kid that was burned up. He made me a little desk. He was a woodworker. He loved doing that kind of stuff. Made me a little desk that I used to sit at that was lost.

Things like that, you look back on it and you're like, there was no way I could have carried that desk out, nor would I have had the fire still been happening. So I would have lost it regardless. But it would have been nice to have had a photo of it in a strange way just to be like, oh yeah, that was that object.

And so just going around taking photos that are huge, those types of sentimental things. My wife lost a lot of stuff that her parents are both past. And so she lost almost everything from that side, which was really devastating for her. Some key takeaways though, that are important for everyone.

I had my crypto keys outside of my house, which is great, like pounded in steel in a safety deposit box. The safety deposit box was right down the street and the bank burned and like everything burned around it. The keys are fine, but move this shit a little further away.

If you're going to have backups where your jewelry and your other things, you're moving stuff offsite, the important items, don't take it to the bank that's five blocks away. Because if you are in a place where there is that severe devastation, you want that to be miles away, not necessarily right next door.

That is a good takeaway. The insurance policy stuff is huge. I mean, just getting additional riders on certain things. We had state coverage because we couldn't get coverage for our home for the longest time, which means we were severely underinsured. Got really lucky in that I kept just like pushing and shopping around and eventually found someone to like pick up and add additional coverage about three months before the fires happened.

So we were very lucky and fortunate in that way. But yeah, I mean, those were the big things. And then just honestly keeping the receipts because you do have to itemize stuff afterwards. And does that mean like you're going through and I had 17 t-shirts and 12 pairs of socks and here's where I bought them?

Like at what level did it get to? So basically what they're going to do is you're going to have a dwelling coverage and then you're going to have an inside of the dwelling coverage, right? Your items, right? Let me give a quick run through because I did a little bit of research in my own policy.

So there's four types of coverage that usually come. Coverage A is dwelling. Yes. And that's to rebuild your house. And a lot of policies have an extended coverage. So let's say your home's worth a million dollars, you could insure it for a million and then you could get like a 25% boost or a 50% boost.

So on USAA, it's called Home Protector Plus. Yeah. And one tip that I want to share, which I'm sure people as they rebuild in LA are going to realize, I know a lot of people are like a house is worth a million. So I don't need to get a full million in coverage.

I can get like 700 grand in coverage and then get the 50% boost, which will take it to a million, 50,000. And so they use the Home Protector to give that boost. One of the realities I know is going to happen in LA is like, however much you thought it cost to build a house in LA is going to be significantly more expensive right now because the shortage of supplies, the shortage of builders.

So I would... 20% to 30% on change orders and everything else alone is going to be on top of that for sure. So I would encourage people not to rely on that extended dwelling coverage to get to the value of their home, which I know a lot of people do.

I would encourage people to ensure the value of the home and then have the extended coverage be the, "Oh, I forgot to increase my policy with inflation. Oh, something happened, more natural disaster and the cost is all gone up." Yeah. And so that's one important takeaway. Also, I would add on top of that, it's something that's important to consider and talk to your insurance agent about this, is that we had this additional external hardscapes like coverage, which was like a little extra policy that went above and beyond the actual dwelling coverage.

And where that came into play for us is when your house burns to absolute just nothing, you've got... I had lithium ion like power walls and shit and like all that stuff that is just toxic in the ground. It's your responsibility to remove all that rubble, to detoxify it, and you have to actually have a third party come in and certify that the ground is now toxin-free.

So they go down about a foot and look for toxins. And that policy for us covered all of that removal and resurfacing of the land to make it livable. So even if you don't want to rebuild, you have to sell that land in that working condition. And you just want to make sure that that coverage is going to be there for you.

Yeah. So then there's coverage B is other structures. And the way most policies work is it's some percentage of dwelling. So at USAA, it's 10 to 100%. And this covers your sheds, patios, ADUs, pools, fences, driveways, sidewalks, all that kind of stuff. Then coverage C is your personal belongings.

And for our policy, you can choose between 50 and 75% of your dwelling limits. For some reason, all of the coverage BCD are usually sliders based on your dwelling. You can't kind of choose an arbitrary number. Typically, there's no riders. Yes. Yes. But the average policy with State Farm, with USAA, you don't say, "I want 400,000 of this." You typically, and every insurance provider is different, you say, "I want 50% of my dwelling covered." So let me give you a little hack here on the C stuff.

So my agent said C, the inside items. Yeah. Personal belongings. Personal belongings, he described it as this, which I thought was a great, just a perfect analogy for it. He's like, "If I were to take your home, I would pick it up off the ground. I would shake it." He's like, "Anything that falls out would be considered those personal belongings." Now, I had probably, to my detriment, installed speakers in my ceilings and all that stuff.

And he's like, "Those are hard attached. Those are attached to your home, like in a way that you, if you were to, you couldn't remove them without causing damage to the home. So we have to include that in the main dwelling. And if you hit your cap there, then they're not covering the speaker." So I hit my cap on the dwelling.

So they're like, "Oh, you're out the cost of speakers. The electronics are related to that stuff that it was hard mounted." So it's actually to your benefit to get sound bars and stuff that isn't- Now, if it's mounted to the wall- Then you'll be okay with that if it's mounted to the wall.

But just remember, if you're going and doing that dream 7.1 surround sound system where it's all put into the wall and all that, they are not going to include that as- As a personal belonging. As a personal belonging. It's part of your dwelling. It's part of your dwelling. Sauna, part of your dwelling.

There's all these little things, home automation systems, part of your dwelling. Just always think about that. Like, do I really- The kitchen upgrades, the fridge, the ovens, all those remodels. Do I need the crest on system or that, you know, there's all these fancy systems as you start to kind of go up the chain for home automation.

My next place, eventually, wherever it is, I'm just living in an apartment right now, is not going to have all that crap. Like, screw that. Or you could just have more dwelling coverage. Yeah. But also, honestly, dude, it's like, it's just more to worry about. There's all these little micro things that sit with you.

Like, one of my colleagues was talking to me about how do you rethink about buying stuff back, right? And one of the things I realized is I would do a lot of donations where I'd like go every year and I'd be like, "Oh, it's spring cleaning time. Let's go and donate a bunch of stuff." It's mostly clothes and things like that, whatever.

But there are these things that like, if I were to look around this room, I probably could pick out like, you know, five or six different things where, especially electronics. Like, if you donate something that's like $250 or $300, like it's going to sit in a goodwill and no one's going to actually use it.

They're not going to know how to install it. Like, it's probably going to be wasted, right? Or you can put it on eBay, right? Do you want to take the time to eBay all this stuff? It's a pain in the ass sometimes. So, I was sitting on all this stuff that I one day would eBay that got all destroyed, right?

And I don't need any of that stuff back. Like literally almost everything I'm wearing today was donated by a friend. And I'm like thinking of just really cutting back to the minimal lifestyle, man. We don't need all this crap. There's so much stuff we buy we don't need. Like just so much.

I don't know. For me, it was a great mental reboot of what's important in life and how as, especially as Americans, we're just over consumers. I was a sucker for the freaking Instagram ad where it comes up and it's like, "Hey, this is a better all steel aluminum way to hold your travel pills for when you go like travel." I'm like, "Oh, that looks like a cool looking case.

Buy random dumb shit." And like those days are... Yeah, we don't need those things. No. Is there one thing... So, Ruth emailed me and asked, "What's kind of one of your favorite physical items or purchases? Is there something that was an expensive thing that you're like, "You know what?

In our house now or our next house, I'm going to do that." There's a lot of stuff you said you're going to get rid of. Is there something where you're like, "That thing's still important." No. Can you think of anything? So, here are some of the things that I thought about.

One was just a good Wi-Fi system. But that's cheap. That's not expensive anymore. Well, I think... You can get a good Wi-Fi 7 system for a few hundred dollars. Last time, I went a little crazy and I had a bomb-proof Wi-Fi system. And I wouldn't do that again. I used to have the buy a router and get an extender and then did the run Ethernet to have Wi-Fi access points in different rooms.

So, you have really good speed everywhere. I thought that was worth it. It's probably all in under $1,000, but probably over $500. But I think that's worth it still. I'm talking about like for me... The $10,000 home theater. Anytime anything crosses a couple grand, you really have to sit back and say, "Did I need that?" I had a bunch of bottles of wine that were sitting there.

And they were nice bottles of wine. And they sat there for years and they aged and all that good stuff. And all those were lost and not covered because we hit our policy max. And so, we didn't have any more coverage there. And in my mind, I'm like, "Guess what?

If I really think someday I have an event to celebrate, and I want a nice bottle of wine, I could just go buy a nice bottle of wine that day and be like, "There it is." I don't have to own it. I can just decide when I want it.

And guess what? Those same dollars over the last decade would have been a hell of a lot better in pick your fun, crazy asset like Bitcoin or whatever else. Or even VTI. Yeah, exactly. I would have paid for the bottle three times over if it had just been in VTI.

That's amazing. Yeah. My list of things that I really like, none of them were that expensive. They were like, "I really like having a desktop computer in my office so that I just don't need to plug in the laptop. I can just run to the office." But that's hundreds of dollars.

There's no really extravagant thing. And when I thought about all the items in the house, after you went through what you went through, I was like, "Oh, I would be okay losing most of them." But to the question we... Well, I'll do the last one, which was the coverage D is the loss of use, which is usually some percentage of your dwelling.

And it covers, at least my policy, a year or in a catastrophe, two years of staying somewhere else. Yeah, it's huge. And so you're seeing that. It's covering your rental right now. Yeah. And so that's great. So going back to the question on personal belongings, one of the things that I've done and everyone I know says you should do is walk around your house every six months and just videotape everything.

So you have some record of all your stuff. Yeah. It's not for the insurance company, by the way. It can be as a backup. I'm sure every company varies. But what Cincinnati Insurance, which is who I'm with, which they've been a great provider, they didn't require that. They wanted just receipts.

They wanted receipts and the show that I had bought said thing. But it is a good trigger to remind you what you actually owned. Now, what if you didn't have receipts, though? What if you couldn't find the receipts from some clothing store? Well, I mean, everything's in email now.

So you're going to find out. Would a credit card statement count? They've been cool like that. I've shown credit card statements. Yeah, exactly. Okay. But I have to imagine everybody's a little bit different. There are some insurance companies are going to be super sticklers about this stuff. Cincinnati's been awesome so far.

Yeah. For a great example, when we bought this house, we negotiated that they leave in one of the TVs that they put in to stage it. So I don't have the receipt for that TV. I don't even know if it's in the contract. We were just like, "Hey, if you can leave the TV." Having a video of it might help prove, "Yes, there was a TV on this wall." Do I know the exact model?

For expensive stuff, I've been told, "Write down the model, the serial number, that kind of stuff." But I would just say that is helpful both to jog your memory of all the stuff you own. And then second, some insurance companies, if you don't have receipts, it's good to be able to show them, "Hey, what is this thing on your wall?

What is it worth?" And there is a coverage that I added called replacement cost coverage, which basically doesn't depreciate all this stuff. So it's like, if you bought a TV for 500 bucks, five years, what is it worth? And this policy, this kind of coverage that I added is like, "We're not going to try to figure out what it's worth.

We're just going to look at what it costs to buy it now." Right. That's huge. And so that was really big. And then one thing that's important on the personal belongings, there are a lot of things that have caps on coverage. Money is one, gold is one, jewelry, guns, watches, silver, gold, all this stuff.

If you have anything that is really expensive or that falls into any of the categories I just said, you need separate riders. I don't even know if you can get a separate rider on money, but if you have a lot... I didn't have any of that, by the way.

You had gold, some gold. I know you had gold in your safe. What's funny about it, I was talking to my... I called my wife on the phone. I said, "Get out of the house." Well, I said, "First, go look and see how close the fire is." And she went outside.

It's like, "It's freaking close." We have this little tiny safe. And I was like, "Just grab everything that's in there." And it was a small little thing. I had one gold bar, one little gold, tiny gold bar, because you fucking told me to buy it. But other than that, I just had a few watches that were high value watches and a couple really sentimental ones that my dad had left me.

And we didn't have riders on any of that stuff. So my wife left her wedding ring. We didn't have a rider on that. That burned in the fire. She left her wallet there with all her stuff. She had a bunch of her jewelry that was some pretty nice stuff.

And all that stuff was obviously lost. Okay. Super helpful. This episode is brought to you by Facet. Finding good and actionable financial advice is not easy, especially if you want it to come from someone who's acting in your best interest. So let me save you some time, because when I shut down my financial planning firm a few years ago, we did a ton of research on who to recommend to our clients, and we landed on Facet.

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So head on over to chrishutchins.com/facet, F-A-C-E-T, to learn more about which membership option is best for you. That's chrishutchins.com/facet. Last question that I think we're going to cover here, because gosh, we have so many things. But work can be done from anywhere. Someone asked me, "You record a podcast.

You can work anywhere. Why are you living in a really high cost of living place?" And so my reaction, so I talked about this with Amy, because once she joined the podcast full-time, I was like, "Why? We live in one of the most expensive places in the world. Why do we do it?

How do we evaluate where we wanted to live?" Some of our criteria were we wanted access to good healthcare. So Amy has the BRCA2 mutation. She's gone through the double mastectomy. She wanted to be in a city near good healthcare. That narrowed it down a little. Do you really need to be in the city, though?

Because you could fly into anywhere. You're right. You're right. And I think this is why I wanted to bring this question up with you, because all of these things seem to be somewhat justifications for, "We're already here and it's a lot of inertia to move because we've already bought a house.

We've already done these things." So I'm going to ask you. I can live almost anywhere. Honestly, I'd love to live in Tokyo if I had to pick any city. But there's a lot of work here for people that are in the technology industry. So obviously, the Bay Area is huge.

LA, I don't think I would want to stay there long term. But we'll see. That's a discussion to be had with your partner. Yeah. For me, it ultimately came down to one important thing was, "Let's not think about this decision of where we live based on just the cost." Because I could make an argument that will be very controversial that the Bay Area for someone like me and someone like my wife is the cheapest place to live in the country.

Because the kinds of careers we went into -- business development, partnerships, starting companies, joining early stage companies, investing in startups -- all of those things, the opportunity we've had from just serendipity of living here has generated more returns than the savings we would have gotten living somewhere else. 100%.

But you're at a point now where you've hit escape velocity. It's not like you need more wealth. So I agree. So then the question is, what would you do with the money you would save living somewhere else? And is that savings worth what you get living here? So what you get living in the Bay Area, you get great weather from the weather I want.

I'm sure there are people that are like, "I want snow all the time." This isn't great for them. For us, the weather is exactly what we want. The schools are a huge one for me. The schools are great. The people we are around, our friend group, have similar beliefs, similar ideas.

We enjoy the conversations we have. People are super curious. They're always doing weird, interesting stuff. The community is great. There's excellent food. We're close to an airport that has direct flights everywhere. Definitely don't get that in Austin. So all those things come together. It's like the Bay Area is a great place to live, but it's expensive.

But what would we use that savings for? And is that savings better than living where you want to live? And you and I probably have stuff. It's tough. And we have half a dozen friends, a couple, I don't know if you do, that moved to Puerto Rico and stuff.

I talked to this guy who lives in Puerto Rico, sold his company. The taxes when you live in Puerto Rico are great. You just don't pay them. And he's like, "This is amazing." I was like, "Do you like Puerto Rico?" He's like, "No, I don't love living in Puerto Rico, but I save so much money." This was like a nine-figure exit, right?

So maybe after taxes, it's eight figures. But this is a person with so much money living half the year. And he says he's probably going to be there for like seven or eight years. I'm like, so you're putting at least, because you got to be there more than 50% of the year, like four or five of what is probably like 50 great adult years of your life.

10% of your adult life where you can do all the things you've given up to save some money on taxes. But you already have 50 plus million dollars. And obviously, most people listening don't have $50 million. But I just push people to consider like moving to save money on taxes to a place that you don't love is not often, in my opinion, going to be the best outcome.

Now, if you're living somewhere where you can't afford to put food on the table, you can't afford to provide for your family, well, then I think you might be better off living somewhere where you can do those things because the stress of that circumstance is something I can't even imagine.

But when I see people say, "I'm going to leave California to save 10% of my taxes," when they already have a ton of money, and they're like, "The only bummer is I don't love where I'm going." I'm like, "You have money. Decide how you want to use it." And someone once told me, "Everywhere you live is the same.

You just pay it in different ways. Some places you pay it in taxes. Some places you pay it in weather. Some places you pay it in the communities. Some places you pay in healthcare." So I really like living where we're living. I like the neighborhood we live in. I like the schools, the people.

And I'm in a situation financially where I am not hurting to live here. And so until we find a better place or want a different experience, this is great. That said, if we were in your situation, there's no inertia holding us back. You're not tied down at all. You don't have things to move, a house that you've built.

So how do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, for me, I value quality of life pretty much above everything else. I am always the type of person that would rather pay more taxes to be in a place that has high quality food, a diverse culture of people, not just a monoculture of strip malls and things like that, and interesting people to hang around.

I'm obviously in LA, but there for a beat just because we don't obviously know at a school because they've been through a lot right now. But come the summer, it's a great question to ask. It's like, "Where is home?" LA doesn't feel like home to me. I loved where we lived.

I thought it was very neighborhood-y. I enjoyed going trick-or-treating with my kids. I grew up doing those old-school "American" things, like the lighting of the Christmas trees in a community area. We used to go to church and do the candlelight church service. Riding your bikes in the neighborhood with your buddies across the street.

When the streetlights came on, I'd have to go home. So I loved that part of LA. For me, LA, I've never been a fan of the crazy high-end wealth neighborhoods where you go and it's just sterile and it feels like it's very... I don't want to classify a whole neighborhood, but there's a lot of drugs and cocaine usage and all kinds of horrible things that happen.

But there's also some really nice parts of LA. LA is very much a choose-your-own-adventure depending on what you want to do. You can go have an amazing multi-Michelin-star restaurant, or eat at a crazy dive bar, or a little hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant that's amazing. You can go up and down and left and right.

That's one of the things that's cool about LA. But with all the natural disasters and just the infrastructure issues and the homeless problems and the safety around some of that stuff, it makes you really reconsider everything. I was just here in the Bay and there's so much excitement around everything that's going on from a technology standpoint that, and me being such a geek, I love interacting with people around here.

So it makes a lot of sense. San Diego looks pretty cool too. We've got a couple of friends that live out there. It's a little bit more chill. You get probably a 15% to 20% reduction in terms of cost of living out there. Great weather. Great weather. Good food.

Decent food, getting better. And not the crazy fault lines that you get in LA or up here in terms of potential earthquake issues. I mean, still obviously present, but not as bad as LA. So there's a lot to think through there. But I'm with you in that I'm not going to Puerto Rico.

I'd much rather spend the money on taxes and have less money, but have a life that is a place that you actually want to enjoy your time there. Yeah. I actually have one more. And this is an interesting one. When all these things are happening, you move to a city where everyone's left.

In the last election, some of our friends went far right. You've gone from no money to having money. How do you stay you? Because some of our friends and some people, maybe less friends, because a lot of the people that we're friends with maybe did that. But some people we know completely changed and then went off in their own world.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess it's kind of- You're really grounded. I feel like you are the same you that I've known for a long time. And so I thought about this myself. And I was like, well, things that really helped me just stay who I am are having friends and partners that will just call you on anything.

When you're not being true to who you are, making sure that you have real friendships. I'd rather have a small number of real friends that will call me on my shit than a bunch of friends that I can go out to dinner with. But they're not that deep. I think I have a pretty healthy appreciation of not caring what other people think.

Mark Manson's subtle art of not giving. I just don't care about if people think some things I do are stupid because I really enjoy going down these rabbit holes. I think an awareness of what you care about in the world. So I just did an episode that will probably have come out by the time this comes out or will be with Simon Sinek about part of it was finding your why, finding your purpose.

That was super helpful. And then I've taken a little bit of time to just write down my core beliefs. I've talked about them. I've thought about them. And I'm like, "These are the things that are really important to me." And just the awareness of what they are makes it easier to hold them through.

And then the last one I wrote down on this list was, I've gotten really transparent recently, not necessarily publicly, but amongst friends and even acquaintances about things that are usually taboo, like talking about money openly. And I first broke the mold with this with one friend who was asking me these questions.

And I was like, "God, the answer to these questions would be way easier to help this person if I just could talk about them with real experiences, but it would require me disclosing my net worth and my income." And then I just asked him this question that is probably very strange.

I said, "Okay, how much money do you think I have? And how much money do you think I make?" And he was like, "That's a really weird question." And they answered. I was like, "Oh, he was within 15%." So I was like, "Most people probably have the right assumptions." And so it allowed me to break down these barriers of what I wasn't talking about.

And then I could have real conversations about all these things. And I think it's just forced me to not be a fake version of myself. And I find that you do that. You are that, but I didn't know if you do anything to keep true to who you are.

Well, I mean, I guess the reason why I went straight politics from the get-go when you first asked that question is that we've seen a lot of our friends flip their beliefs largely charged by the political environment that's happened over the last call it 12 months or whatever. And for me, I don't play in that world at all.

It probably drives my wife crazy because she's a lot more charged by these things. And I find that I don't want to put my head in the sand, but I also don't want to get wrapped up in what I believe is a corrupt system in general. And so if I can stay true to myself on that front, then I'm pretty good.

And then also, I think the key piece is at the end of the day, the most important thing is what you came back to, which is these real friendships and these deep friendships where we say stuff that's slightly offensive to each other all the time, but we don't take ourselves too seriously.

You know what I mean? We can call each other on our bullshit. And if you've run into someone that is going to be offended by the fun loving nature of joking and pushing people's buttons and doing the things that you and I typically do with each other, then that's probably just someone I don't need to have as a close friend.

And it's not to say I don't want people to challenge me and some of my assumptions, but it's just like I try to surround myself with people that can push me in new and unique ways, but also accept me for who I am, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know how we're both lucky to be that naturally, I think a little bit. It's just like we know who we are. I think both of us grew up in that kind of middle high school era being kind of nerds. I don't think I've ever had a time in my childhood where I was the popular kid.

And I think what's hard is when you're young and you're the popular kid, you don't want to lose it. So you want to do the things that make you cool. I just wasn't. I was not that kid. And it's not that I was the reject, but I was never the head of the class kind of person.

And so it forced me to just be who I was. And this is something I think about for our girls, and you probably do for yours. It's like when you're younger, it's so much harder to just be who you are because of all the social pressures. And I think I was a little bit out of the spotlight as a kid.

And I think that helped. It's actually, it's a great point. One of the things I realized in general is that when you grow up in an environment where you're not popular and you don't have a lot of money, you tend to look at the world through the lens of everything is gravy from this point forward.

When I lost all these belongings at the house, and it was like literally all of my stuff, everything, everything. I called you and you were like, I don't have clothes. I don't have a computer. I didn't have anything. I had my cell phone and just my clothes, clothes I was wearing.

That was it. That's all I had because I wasn't at the house at the time. I didn't, I couldn't even grab my own stuff because I wasn't there. I was out at a meeting. But when you come from nothing in that, I saw my dad go through bankruptcy when I was a kid.

We had dinners that were delivered to us because we couldn't afford Thanksgiving. Like these things happen to our family. It's like everything has been just a blessing. And if you can just hold onto that piece, then I don't know, man, it doesn't feel like you just can't lose yourself to the chasing and desires of more is going to make me happier.

I think the happiness comes from the internal work that you do. It's the therapy sessions that I go to. It's the meditation practice that I have that is core to what I do. That's the stuff that's making me a more well-rounded individual. It's not the acquisition of more and more stuff.

Yeah. I think that we finally got to an answer here, which is those things. And we didn't say gratitude, but I feel like that's a little bit what we both talked about. I really appreciate that we have healthy kids, that we live in a great place, that we have all this stuff.

Somebody said to me the other day, they're like, "Well, you grew up privileged." And I'm like, no doubt in that the fact that I'm male and white, that is... In America. In America. Those three things alone, huge, massive headstart. I will tell you from the age, from fifth grade to all the way through 12th grade, in my era, in the 90s, it was not cool to be in the computers.

I got picked on. I had bullies literally push me against lockers, twist my arm, do all the horrible shit, because I didn't actually hit my growth spurt until I was in 11th grade. So I was a tiny little dude. And I was into computers. I didn't comb my hair.

It was bad. And I'm like, "You know what? That kind of worked out. Computers turned out to be a thing." But I got made fun of for years for being into computers. I was a nerd. I was a straight up nerd. I remember my dad had this Toshiba satellite laptop.

It was back in the day where the screen on a laptop didn't go to the edge. The screen was halfway in from the side. That wasn't that long ago. Yeah, I know. For some people listening, it was maybe even before they were born. And I remember I brought it to school and I would try to get people to play Cannon Fodder, where you were shooting the little cannons and you're like...

I still love that game. It's a great game. And I just remember that was me at school. Before people brought... I'm sure every kid has a computer at school or an iPhone at school. Someone has a digital device. Back then, it's super nerd. Yeah, super nerd. Super nerd. Yeah.

I was thinking about the first time I kissed a girl. A little peck was like 17 or something. It was really embarrassing. A little bit later than most would have done. But I hit my girls for it. And then I was into skateboarding. And I was like, "Oh, the girls were like, 'Oh, he's a skateboarder.'" And that worked out.

Oh, yeah. Skateboarding was never cool in the schools I went to. But... Well, it was cool in a certain subset. I was not a jock guy. I didn't play sports. Although I did like to play flag football when I was younger. But yeah, so for me, it was skateboarding.

Well, I'm glad that you are who you are and that we've been good friends. Yeah. And I love doing this. So thanks for joining me. Yeah. It's awesome to be here today. This was a lot of fun questions. We gotta do this again.