So I just turned 40 and I realized there weren't a lot of things I wanted for my birthday because I have spent so much time finding and researching the best products and services, but it got me thinking that since so many of you have asked me about what I use in different areas of my life, it would make the perfect topic for an episode to talk about all of those things, from tech to finance, health to our home, my business.

I'm going to share my top picks across over a dozen different categories of products, apps, services, and more. You can find links to everything I'm discussing in the description, which I also will put up at allthehacks.com/stuff. And just to be clear, none of the brands I'm talking about here have paid to be included in this episode.

That said, where I could find an affiliate link, I did add it to the description and to the website, so if you want to support me and the show, I'd love and appreciate if you want to use the links that you can find there, which I also included any discount codes I could find for all these products as well.

Quick reminder, before we jump in, we do have timestamps in the show notes, so you can jump around. A couple of listeners recently told me that they don't work on every platform, and my hosting provider doesn't make it possible to work on certain platforms like Overcast and Apple. I am working on that, but at least we have the time codes in there, so if you want to jump ahead, you can find them.

On some platforms, you can just click them and it'll work, so I would love that to work every platform, so hopefully that will be done soon. All right, to kick us off, I thought I'd talk a little bit about technology. So first off, iPhone 15 Pro is my core device.

I send so many texts from my Mac. I could never really have an Android as much as I tried a few times. Honestly, because of that iMessage integration is probably the most important, but also now that I've just gotten so tied into it and then watching all these PCs crash during this CrowdStrike rollout, haven't had any issues on a Mac.

Love my Macs. Love my iPhone. Probably won't change that in the future. I really love AirPods. I actually lost my third-gen AirPods, and I'm still happy enough with the second-gen ones, so I've just kept them. I did try the Pro AirPods, and the AirPod Maxes didn't like those, returned them.

On the computer side, I use an M2 MacBook Air. Really love it. Got a great sticker on here. My other vehicle is a 401k. Love that. Thanks to the Playing With Fire team who printed those stickers. I've had them on my computer ever since. Then let's see. I use a Magic Keyboard and a Magic Trackpad.

I don't use an actual mouse. I really want the new Magic Keyboard that has the built-in Touch ID, but I don't have that right now. I kind of wish I did, but it's one of those things that doesn't feel absolutely necessary. A couple other tech products I love that I have here.

I've got this Anker Prime charger, but I just love their products when it comes to charging your phone, battery backups, everything like that. I have one of the, I guess this is the GAN Prime. I've just had great success using them. Really big fan of those. I also have this great, Mercury sent me this Moft iPhone wallet that holds three cards and a couple dollar bills.

It's a MagSafe charger. I really love this because you can fold it up and you can rest your phone on it sideways and up and down. Really love this little tiny thing. On my desk, you'd see three other products. You'd see some Bose desktop speakers. Honestly, I just like having good quality sound and my primary computer, I didn't even mention this, is actually a Mac Mini.

And so because it doesn't have audio built into it, I need some speakers. But the other two things, I have another Anker charger. I believe that this Anker charger is called the Anker Wireless Power Wave. It's a magnetic charger. Also charges AirPods if you had a MagSafe case, which I don't right now.

And then I have an Elgato Stream Deck. Now this is primarily a product made for gamers, but I absolutely love it. It's this tiny little device that sits on your desk and has 15 little LED buttons that you can control what they do. And so for me, if I look at it right now, I do a lot of recording and so I have it able to switch cameras.

So if you were to watch a video of this, you'd actually see that we have three cameras, one looking at me, one looking at the desk from one side and one looking at desk from the other side. And so I can control that. I can control the microphone. I can mute myself.

I can switch between headphones and speakers. I can pause Spotify. I can mute my video or audio in a Zoom call. So I have that over here too. I control the lights in this room if I wanted to. I've put all of these things in here. I have a couple of websites that'll quick pop open.

One button just tabs to a couple of pages. I probably use it 50 times a day. I would highly recommend people that are kind of productivity efficiency people take a look at it. There's a bunch of different versions of Stream Decks, but I think I have the MK2 in black and I really, really like it.

As for what is on my desk, I'm working at an Uplift desk. I got one of these back when we had a startup and it's just been a really solid desk for rising up and down. I like standing sometimes, sitting sometimes, well-built, no issues there. I'm sitting at a steel case gesture chair, which I tried a bunch of chairs a long time ago.

And then when we were running a startup, we found this guy that I guess sells chairs, like premium desk chairs for offices. But we never asked where he got them. He rolled up in like a beat up minivan and had these like $1,500 chairs for $500. And so we figured that we were hiring a bunch of people to sit at a desk all day, every day during the week that we should invest in quality chairs.

And so when the company wound down, I took one of these steel case gesture chairs home and I really like it. A few other AV things here that I'll get back to when I start talking about the podcast setup and all of that. I'm also only really trying to highlight my favorite things.

So yeah, I might have a surge protector on this desk, but if it's not something I really, really like, I'm not really going to highlight it because that doesn't make sense. You might have a better recommendation than me. But when it comes to using the computer, I want to talk about some software on here that I really, really like.

So first off, I've gotten a couple emails recently about what storage backups I use. I don't think I have a perfect solution for the cloud. So for a while I use Dropbox. And then when I started recording videos for the podcast, we ran out of space. So I switched to Google drive because I got more space with our Google workspace account for my phone.

I back everything up on iCloud. I use photos and iCloud backup for messages and all that. So that's how I back up there. But the recent purchase that I made that I am really, really happy with is the Synology 923 plus. It's a network attached storage device. So it's called a disk station, DS923 plus.

And imagine a little device that just has a bunch of hard drives in it that you can plug into your network at home. You can attach it to your computer as like a network storage drive. But the thing I love about it is that it syncs everything instantly with the cloud.

So for example, if I'm finishing recording this episode and I take the audio and video files and I put them on that network drive, it's really fast because it's local and it's connected via ethernet. But then that device backs everything up on it in a few folders with the cloud.

So I also have three or four 22 terabyte drives in there in what's called a RAID array. So it doesn't actually use up all of the drives. I think I have three 22 terabyte drives, but I only get 40 terabytes and it backs everything up such that if one of those drives failed, I didn't lose anything.

So a lot of that archival footage from old VHS tapes, old photos that are not in my current library, I put all of them there. Some of those folders get auto backed up to Google drive. Some of them don't, but that is how I back up all of my important things on the computer.

I'll try to get through this fast because I know not everyone is a Mac user, but I have an app I use every day, all the time called Alfred, which replaces the spotlight search, just has a bit more functionality than superhuman for email. It's totally the fastest email I've been using it for a long time.

Highly, highly recommend everyone check it out. I think you could probably get back according to their website, four hours a week, maybe more. It is so fast. Some of the new AI features they've added, letting you query your email and just, you know, auto write emails are so good.

If someone said superhuman was going away, it might be one of the few products that I'd be like, no, like what? No, I don't want you like some things I could find alternatives with. For example, I use a loom to record a ton of videos for work. I love loom.

It's cross platform. Basically think of it as a really quick way to record your screen. So if you're trying to explain to someone how something works or how to do something or ask a question, I record a loom video. I send it to them. I use it a lot of times for async meetings.

Someone says, Hey, I'd love if we could meet so you could review this project I'm working on. And then I'll just review the project, record myself for 10 minutes, send them the video. And now we've avoided a 30 minute meeting. I can record it whenever I want. I do that a lot.

Uh, I love when people do that for me and we can kind of be more efficient. I recently found this app called code Piper, which basically, if you have an iPhone and you've noticed when you get those two factor authentication codes, it auto pastes them into the, whatever you're doing, whether it's, you're trying to fill it out on a website.

It does that for the Mac. Also really love the code Piper app. If you have an iPhone and you know, when you get one of those six digit two factor authentication codes, code Piper does what happens on the iPhone naturally on your computer. So if you get a text and you need to put it into the browser and you're using Chrome or any other browser, it solves that.

Another app I couldn't really live without is called rectangle. It's basically a way to move things and manipulate things on your screen. So I press command option, right? And it jumps the window I'm looking at currently to the right side. And if I press it three times, it cycles between the right third, the right middle and the right two thirds.

And so if I'm trying to quickly split my screen between two apps, I can do it in a couple seconds. I love the rectangle app. It's absolutely free. They do have a pro version, but I don't even think I have the pro version. The free version is awesome as is really also love the paprika app.

I've talked about this app a bunch of times. It is a recipe database, meal planning and grocery tracking. I know there are a lot of apps out there that do this, so I'm not going to knock whichever one you use, but I really, really love the paprika app. And you know, Amy and I are both logged in on both of our phones.

We rate recipes. If we find recipes online, we save them. You could dump all the ingredients from the recipe into the grocery list. Even if we're both at the grocery store at the same time, we can be checking things off together. And then we can kind of meal plan out for the week.

So really love this app. It's on all platforms, so anyone can use it. Also really love another all platform app called one password. You guys have probably heard me talk about it for years. I've probably been using it for kind of seems like almost a decade at this point.

I've forced everyone in my family to switch over. It is my favorite password manager. They natively support a bunch of new stuff as it comes. They supported two factor codes as a replacement for Google Authenticator. They now support pass keys. Really solid product. I really don't think anyone should have passwords that they have to remember other than their one password.

There are other password managers. This is just the one I've been using forever, and I see no reason to switch. Another app I couldn't live without is the arc browser. I've switched full time from all my devices, even my iPhone to using arcs browser. The ability to have your tab bar on the left and have tabs kind of in this both primary and ephemeral space is really incredible.

I wish there was an easy way for me to explain how good it is just in audio form, but it's a free app. So go check it out. You can use it. I think they now have a windows version and a Mac versions, really great browser. Also really love Nord VPN.

You could basically choose almost any country in the world and really quickly connect to them. I don't necessarily think it's necessary with the advent of HTTPS. However, there are so many cases, and I'll give you a couple examples when having a VPN has been helpful. Number one, watching the Olympics.

If you want to make sure that you get access to different versions of the Olympics, maybe you don't have a peacock subscription. You could just VPN over to the UK and use the BBC one. You can VPN over to Australia and use their now nine, I think it is.

So I've been able to do that to watch some of the Olympics. Sometimes if you are trying to be a little sneaky and maybe there's a product you use and they have a referral program. And if you refer someone, you get a bonus and you want to just refer another email address.

I tried that today and it didn't work because it said, Oh, you're in the same IP. It didn't say that. It just said you can't refer yourself, but jumped open a Nord switch to a VPN over in Texas and connected pretty quickly. And then boom, all of a sudden it's like, Oh, you are a new person.

Thank you. So love Nord VPN for anything, especially if you're traveling internationally and want to be able to access things in the U S um, you want to make sure your device seems like it's in the U S awesome product. Um, that's the main stuff. I'm going to talk briefly about Chrome extensions because yes, apps are great, but there are some Chrome extensions that are really, really great.

So one library extension, when you're browsing Amazon, it'll just show you all of the libraries that have that book in either checkout or ebook form. Second is a app called points path. So when you're browsing Google flights, it actually shows you all of the cost in points for the major U S airline.

So like United American and Delta, and it'll say, Hey, actually, you know, this flight's three 39, it's going to be 34,000 points. You should use cash, but Hey, this flight's three 39, and it's only 14,000 points and $6 in taxes. Great deal. You should use your points. Love that because anytime you're shopping online, you could basically earn cash back.

Sometimes it's like 15, 20%, sometimes it's 2%, but almost every time it's some percent that you wouldn't have got back otherwise. And if you link your Amex account to Rakuten, instead of earning pennies, you can earn Amex points. So if you would have gotten a hundred dollars in cash back, it would have actually been about 10,000 Amex points, which I think Amex points end up being worth more than a penny.

So I think it's a great deal. Love the KIPA extension. Basically it's an Amazon price tracker. So if you're looking at a product on Amazon, you can go look at a historical graph of how much that product has cost. So I'm looking right now at that Anker magnetic charging stand I have on my desk.

And you can see right now it's $39.99, but it was $32.99 for a few days in early July. My guess is it'll probably be $32.99 again. If that was something that you didn't really need urgently, it seems like it's gone on sale twice in the last couple months. Also really like this don't F with paste browser extension.

The F is short for the expletive. I love it because what it does is every time you go to a website, it's not going to allow you to paste something in, which often happens on a bank website that says, what's your account and routing number? Oh, but you can't paste it in.

And presumably it's because they don't want you to mess it up, but I'm actually usually copying it from the source. So I'm more likely to mess it up if I have to type it and don't F with paste goes in and allows you to paste when you otherwise wouldn't.

If you have a Capital One card, the Eno browser extension is amazing because it lets you create virtual cards for all of your cap one cards. So venture X, two X points everywhere. One of my primary shopping cards online, if not my only shopping card online. And so I can still earn two X points, but I can create virtual cards either because I just don't want to give some e-commerce site, my regular credit card number.

Maybe it's a weird kind of sketchy e-commerce site or if I'm signing up for a trial for something. And I want to make sure that if I forget to cancel, I don't get charged. I can use my venture X card on a virtual card and set it to expire the next day so that by 14 days, it won't work.

Uh, also the card pointers browser extension. I'm going to talk in a little bit about, um, travel points and miles. I probably should have put points path there, but I'll bring up card pointers again on my iPhone. Love superhuman arc. A lot of the main stuff. One that I use a lot, which I'd be curious if someone has a better recommendation, I'm all ears is the best parking app.

If you're ever in a city and you need to find a parking space, it basically just gives you a map of the price of all the parking garages nearby chat GPT. It's my shortcut button. So if I just press the button on my iPhone, it is chat GPT. I use it all the time.

I use it on web and on mobile. Uh, it's fantastic. Another one that I've recently really been loving is the Morty app. Um, I have a pulled up right now and it's basically a directory of escape rooms. And so only interesting if you love escape rooms, which I happen to really like, but you can open it up.

You can sort by the community score and you can get access to all of these rooms. So if you're in San Francisco, according to this, the number one escape room in the whole area is Robo topia at I'm escape in Sunnyvale. I have not done that room. I would love to, Oh, I filtered out a couple of the ones I've done that I thought were fantastic that I've already done, but the Edison escape room up at palace games.

Excellent. I could go on about escape room. So I will not also another app I use a lot as infatuation. It's a kind of like a food site, like eater or Yelp, but I just really liked the editorial they put in there. And then for listening to podcasts, it's funny.

I used to use Spotify and then I had a couple private RSS feeds that I subscribed to through Patreon and Spotify didn't support them. So I tried Apple podcasts. I like listening to my podcast at like 2.1 X, which I know is pretty fast and Apple caps out at two.

So recently I've been trying to overcast and I I'm not ready to commit that it's the best out there, but it's pretty close so far. I really like it. Um, that said, I still pay for Spotify. So I'm going to move on from talking about apps and software and talk a little bit about subscriptions.

So on the subscription front, uh, I pay for some and get a bunch for free also. So Amazon prime still happen to be on my parents subscription. Uh, I do pay for YouTube premium Spotify and masterclass all have really great content. Um, Apple TV plus love the content there.

Get it for free with T-Mobile Netflix. Love the content. Also free with T-Mobile Disney plus kids love the content free with an Amex platinum digital entertainment credit, uh, Paramount plus not even sure I watch it, but Amex platinum gives you free Walmart plus and Walmart plus gives you free Paramount plus.

So I do have a subscription, uh, to Paramount plus, but I'm not even sure if I ever use it. A new subscription in my arsenal is a product called stable and it is a virtual mailbox. Now I'd say primary reason many people might want this is for their business.

Instead of getting a bunch of mail sent to your home, instead of having your home address show up all over the internet, uh, because business addresses are made public switch to something like stable, send all your mail there. They'll scan it or ship it back out to you. So easy to manage.

It's basically like the only business address you ever need. And the greatest thing is I also use it for a lot of personal stuff, but if you really just want to make sure you get a little bit more privacy on the personal side or the business side, or you just want the convenience of accessing mail, even when you're traveling, I used to use this service called I postal one, pretty much a disaster.

I finally did tons of research cause I didn't want to mess this up again. And I switched to stable and it's been an incredible service. Speaking of getting your information off the internet, I will talk for a second about another service I love called delete me. Basically anytime you put your name, address, email, phone number, all that stuff, there are a ton of companies that resell all that data.

And unfortunately, when they resell that data, it ends up on so many data broker websites. So I use delete me to get rid of it. I'm looking at one of my reports now and they've reviewed pretty regularly about 20,000 listings. And it's an ongoing service that every time I get a report, they've removed sometimes two or three things, sometimes 40 things.

I've now bought it for almost my entire family. So a really big fan there. I also pay for premium Twitter now to remove all the ads. It's really my primary source of news. I don't use the for you at all. I just follow all the news accounts that I would normally want to follow.

And then I could just use it as a quick feed. Um, I follow a small enough number of people that it's not really messy and I'm never looking at the for you tab. So, um, that's not there. And I do pay for chat GPT also love chat GPT. Um, the new four is really good and I'm sure there are other models that are going to be faster and freer, but I think once you start using one, it's hard to want to switch though.

I really wish they would have just some easy way to search. So that's mostly subscriptions. So let's talk a little bit about money. Um, when it comes to the best bank accounts, episode one 77, I already covered all of this. So I'll just refer people there, but wealth front Mercury fidelity kind of came up at the top for banking and brokerage.

So that's that. Um, when it comes to software tools for your money, I want to talk about a few things. First is a product called Kubera, which is in my opinion, one of the best ways to monitor your net worth. Think of it like if you built an app that was an amazing net worth tracking spreadsheet, it would automatically connect to all of your accounts.

They use multiple providers. So things don't fail as much as they do other ways. I love it. If you're a member of all the hacks, what you can do at all the hacks.com/join, you get your first year of Kubera for $1. Um, it's a really great product when it comes to doing a little bit more modeling.

Um, I really like projection lab. You can basically build your own financial plan. They actually have a way to go simulate and play it and use it for free. So highly recommend that. I think we do have a discount, but you don't even need to pay to get started when it comes to tracking your spending.

I use co-pilot it's only on iPhone and Mac, but they are building a web and an Android version. And I think it's one of the easiest ways to make sure you categorize and monitor all of your spending and use it to retroactively build a budget. But I did cover all the apps that I compared when I decided to use co-pilot in episode one 33 and talked a lot about how I manage that cashflow process.

Um, when it comes to being charitable, I use Daffy. I interviewed Daffy's founder, Adam Nash in episode 50. It is really the way that we give money. So we donate all the money to our donor advised fund. And it's just a really centralized place that makes it super efficient for taxes.

That's primarily how we do all of our charitable giving. And then when it comes to tax advantaged accounts, because we run our own company, we've moved all of our old 401ks into a solo 401k that we have at carry. Um, and so we, that we found to be the best way to manage our 401ks and, and our self-directed IRAs at carry, and then not really a app or a tool, but, uh, I've talked about guilt a lot.

There are CPA for how we manage everything personal taxes. And then when it comes to business stuff, I'll get to that later when it's both finances and other stuff. Also, when it comes to managing all of your financial information, I really like the trustworthy product. Basically think of it like your digital vault for everything.

They put all of your tax returns, IDs information. Think if something were going to happen to you and someone needed to just know where everything is, all your accounts, what are all the account numbers? What places are they at? Pictures of passports, insurance cards. I love it. Um, they have a mobile app.

So if you're at the doctor's office and you need a picture of your insurance card or something like that, it's, it's easy to access all of it. So another recommendation there next, I want to talk about health fitness and all the different services there. Cause I spent a bunch of time thinking about this and some of them are gonna, I'm going to punt on for an episode I'm working on.

And some of them I'm just going to share. So at home, got a Peloton really love it. I've had it for a long time, but I actually really want a tonal and I'm, I'm not yet convinced that I will use it enough, which is why I've held out. But I feel like I've been trying to get back into the strength game, especially after doing a DEXA scan and realizing I could really increase my muscle mass.

So tonal is something that if we had a wall, that was an obvious place for it. I might get, it's not cheap, but I really don't have the space for a whole regular setup. What I do have the space for are two products that I really like, which are the Bowflex select tech adjustable dumbbells.

They're fantastic. So if you want a really small space, but you want all different weights, really love that. I also have an adjustable kettlebell, but it's about 10 years old and I'm pretty sure the model we have has been discontinued and improved. And it's not that great. It's a great product conceptually, but I wouldn't get that specific version.

A couple other health and fitness products. I really love wearing my aura ring for fitness, sleep tracking. It's fantastic. Even though I had a gen two, I actually just upgraded to the gen three. So really love that. These headphones right here are the shocks open run pro. I love these headphones.

When it comes to working out, I think they're fantastic. If you're going on a run, they're open ear. So if you I'm putting them on right now, so you don't have something in your ear. So if you're going on a run, you'd obviously hear all your surroundings. If you're going on a run with someone and you wanted to be able to talk to them super easy, the open run pro highly recommend these headphones, couple other kinds of health related products.

When it comes to running, I love the Nike vapor five, three shoes. They're really expensive. I actually asked for them. I think it was Christmas or my birthday because I, my parents were asking what do you want? And I couldn't come up with anything. And I'd been eyeing these, but I just couldn't pull the trigger.

But they're nuts there. I don't even know how to explain it because I was pretty diligent at recording all of my runs in the Peloton app. And I use these shoes and I'm not joking was like five to 7% faster wearing these shoes. Then I started doing all these research about how they almost got banned from the Olympics because they're just that amazing.

And so if you're trying to shave off time running, they're fantastic. There are probably shoes that are equally as good. Um, but for some reason now I'm like, gosh, if I wear another pair of shoes, I'm going to go up in time. So I got to keep these shoes going.

A few other things around the house. We do have a plunge cold plunge. I looked at a lot of cold plunge. I really liked the plunge ones. And then we recently added a sauna from Haven. They have not launched officially yet, but if you go to Haven sauna.com, you can put your name in the wait list.

They build these really beautiful saunas at home, and they've got some really cool stuff coming soon. A couple more health things. So for doctors, we use one medical for the whole family. It's pretty convenient to be able to schedule appointments last minute, do virtual calls. There might be other things happening in this space soon.

It feels really weird that Amazon, because they acquired them is now my doctor, but all these concierge doctors I've been looking into doing research are, you know, 5,000 to $25,000 a year, which is just way out of our price range and budget. I do spend $19, I think, a month for Peter Attia's premium podcast feed and access to his premium show notes.

Really like the Attia podcast, The Drive, and highly recommend it if you want to dial in your health or his book that he recently wrote called Outlive. When it comes to doing a lot of health diagnostics, I'm actually working on an episode, so I'm going to pause and not go down that rabbit hole of blood tests, other things like that.

I think that's it for health and fitness. Maybe the only other thing is kind of like workout gear. It's probably no surprise to people who've been listening for a while that pretty much everything I wear when I'm exercising is Viore. That goes for non-exercising, like recording a podcast, I have some Viore pants, I have a Viore shirt.

Three of my favorites, which was really hard to think about narrowing down to the Sunday Performance Joggers, the Strato Tech Tee, and the Core Shorts. Those three products, I own multiple of all of them. I wear all of them at least once or twice a week. I recently got another hoodie from Viore, and it's incredible.

I just can't say enough about their products. I wear them 90% of the time, and they're fantastic. When I'm not wearing Viore, there are a couple other brands. I might as well go here because I don't have a big fashion section in this podcast. If I want to dress it up a little more, there is one shirt that's basically become my go-to, and it's the Bonobos Riviera short-sleeve dress shirt.

It's basically like I know my exact size. I know my exact fit and length. Someone actually asked me a couple of weeks ago, "Where do you go to buy non-workout gear? What's the adult thing to do? Do I really need to go to the mall now?" My suggestion was go to a Bonobos store, and they'll measure you for every fit, and you can just buy everything there.

Now, this doesn't work for women as well as men, but I just found it to be so easy. Now, I have all my sizes there. If I need things, I can just order them, and they have free returns. Those Riviera shirts are incredible. I probably have six or seven of them.

Almost everything I wear is more athleisure. If I'm going out, it's probably more in the Bonobos Riviera with a pair of jeans. Then, if I really need to dress up, I have a couple of suits that I got 12 years ago for our wedding, custom-tailored suits from Indochino. I still wear the two suits I got from my wedding, and they're the only two suits I have.

They've lasted 12 years, and it's been fantastic. The only other thing in that camp is Gooder sunglasses. I probably own five or six pairs of Gooder sunglasses, and they're great for working out. They're cheap enough that if you lose them, it's not the end of the world, and you can replace them pretty easily.

That's kind of in the clothes camp. Everything else is like I buy socks at Costco. I really like Mack Weldon underwear. I would never pay as much as it costs, but because I have a platinum card, I use my Saks credit every six months to buy overpriced underwear from Mack Weldon on the internet.

Maybe I'm just cheap. Maybe underwear should cost $30 per pair. I don't know. It seems expensive, but I like their underwear. I just don't want to pay for it, so I do pay for it, but with the Saks credit from the Amex platinum card. Next, let's talk about travel.

I didn't have that many things for someone who likes to travel a lot and is a core topic of the show, so I thought I'd highlight a few. One is the Flighty app. It's really fantastic. They have a great sheet to show up on your iPhone when you're waiting for a flight, so you can just kind of keep an eye on it.

When anything happens, I usually get an alert from Flighty before I've even gotten an alert from the airline. Each flight, they give you an arrival forecast, so it shows you how frequently is this flight early, on time, 45 minutes late. Where's the plane coming from? What kind of plane is it?

They give you the detailed timetable of not just departs at 2.30 for this random flight, but taxi scheduled for 10 minutes. It's going to depart at 2.40. It's going to land at 11.07, gate arrival 11.22. Here's how long it's going to be in the air. Here's my history on the route.

I pulled up a random flight from LA to New York, and it says, "Hey, you actually took a flight, United 82, from LA to New York on June 5, 2010." I don't think I could go in and find out whether it was delayed or not, but it's also great for sharing your flights with others.

When it comes to packing a bag, I've got a lot of options. For suitcases, we have one Away's bag. I love their Weekend bag also. We've got a Manos bag. I can't really tell you which one is better than the other. They're pretty similar. If I have a backpack, it's going to be a Tortuga backpack.

They're so well built. They're really, really quality. Everything from even the tech organizer that you can get from them to the day packs are just fantastic. Love them. As for where to go, I'm not going to go down the path of hotel chains and that kind of stuff. Then one other travel product that I love, and I'm holding it in my hands right now, is this tiny little travel router.

Based on my search on Amazon, there are some better ones now. This one is the GLiNet 300M Mini Smart Router. The reason I love this product is because if you ever join a hotel Wi-Fi and you notice that usually you have to authenticate with your room number and some sort of login, well, that's fine if you're on a phone or a computer, but there are a bunch of devices that can't do that.

Whether that's a Roku stick or we travel with our camp baby monitors that are on Wi-Fi, they can't do that. You bring this little travel router that costs less than $30, and you can either connect it via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and it will repeat the Wi-Fi out with its own Wi-Fi network so that you can have all those other devices join the router's Wi-Fi network.

Through your laptop or your phone, you can log into the router and go through the authentication. Basically, use your computer to sign into your hotel Wi-Fi on this device through the web, and then all these other devices that can't do that can get online. If you are staying at some old school property that limits how many devices you can have, which I have stayed in a few like that, this also gets around that restriction.

For $30, anytime we're traveling, at least with all the kid stuff that needs to hook up to Wi-Fi, or if we're going with family where there's going to be more than two or three people in a room, always bring this travel router. Love it. If anyone knows a better one, let me know, but I can at least say that this one, which is linked in the show notes, is fantastic.

On the points and miles front, so many episodes, so I'll just breeze through a few things. Go to episode 152 if you want to know what cards are in my wallet. Another travel one is the app and browser extension Card Pointers. Specifically, if you have Card Pointers Pro, whenever you're logged into your Chase, Amex, Bank of America website where they have card-linked offers, like add this to your card, spend 200 on Delta, get 50 bucks free, those kind of offers, Card Pointers will automatically load all of those offers into your Amex account or your Chase account so you don't have to manually add them.

Then, anytime you're shopping on those websites, it'll pop up and not only say, "Hey, this is the best card to use," but also, "Hey, you have an offer that you should use on this site. Make sure to use this other card because you're going to get a bonus." Love the Card Pointers offers because they log all the ones you register.

Let's say I'm at Bed, Bath & Beyond. I can open up my app in Card Pointers, search Bed, Bath & Beyond. It'll let me know if I have one of those offers loaded so I know which card to use. I've easily saved hundreds of dollars because of these card-linked offers and big fan of Card Pointers Pro.

Shout out to Emmanuel, who's a listener of the podcast and also the guy behind Card Pointers Pro, for which, in the show notes, there's a discount, as there is for a lot of the products I mentioned. When it comes to tracking your points and miles, I don't think there's a great solution because so many of the airlines have blocked the ability for people to log in and see your balance.

But the best of all the products out there is Award Wallet. When you combine it with their browser extension, they get through most of the way. You can even forward some of your monthly emails such that they'll get a full picture. It's not perfect, but it is the best out there.

I guess when it comes to optimizing which cards to use, I use the optimizer tool that I built. You can get it at allthehacks.com/cardtool. When it comes to all the other award search tools, I'm not going to cover them in this episode. Go check out episode 166 and 167 with Greg from The Frequent Miler.

We went through all of them. I wasn't sure where to put auto stuff, but I guess if we're talking about travel, maybe it fits in there. We own a Tesla. Love it. I can't imagine owning a different car. Basically, I've now become accustomed to the interface and how good it is, and I get in family members' cars.

I'm like, "Why are there all these buttons?" If you do have a Tesla, there is one product I do love a lot called TeslaFi, which basically you can auth to your Tesla account. It'll log all your drives, give you all kinds of stats about what you're doing. I've used it for so many reasons, primarily to track business versus personal, but it is just great for, "Oh, how long did that drive take?

Oh, I can go look." It's like if you basically had a odometer tracking, but with all the information out there. I imagine if you had kids and a Tesla, it would be a great way to keep an eye on where the car is. When it comes to car insurance and really any insurance, go back and check out episode 104, all the nuance of all the research I've done trying to optimize all my insurance policies are there, including homeowner's insurance.

On the topic of smart home, I think I'll start with my favorite, which is Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti makes all the Wi-Fi gear we need. It's professional grade, and it just doesn't have the problems I've had with everything else in the past. No rebooting, no bad Wi-Fi quality, fast internet is always there.

Love Ubiquiti. I would say it's not the easiest to set up for someone who's not very technical, but man, once you get it going, nothing beats it. We've tried Eero, we've tried Netgear. It's incredible. We also use Ubiquiti cameras, which are all local. Some of them are Wi-Fi, some of them are hardwired, but they're all local.

All the camera footage isn't getting uploaded to the cloud. It's going to the Dream Machine Pro, which is our router and network storage for cameras in our pantry. Love Ubiquiti. They don't do an alarm system, so we use Ring for alarms, we use August for locks. I wish they were all in one platform, but they're not.

I tried to sync them all to Apple Home, which is as close as we've gotten. Other smart home stuff. We recently bought a Samsung Frame TV and absolutely love it. It's fantastic. It has enough services hooked up to it that we don't even need an Apple TV, so we only have an Apple TV for old TVs.

I can't say enough good things about the Frame TV. It looks great in the living room when it's not on, which is most of the time. Also, speaking of TV, I love the app TV Time. It seems to break all the time and not be the most reliable, but I haven't found a better way to track all the shows you like and get recommendations for other ones and track the schedule of what's coming up, so I love that.

Open to recommendations if there's something better. As I am for always, if you hear this and you're missing out on a certain product or service, absolutely let me know. Reach out. Podcast at allthehacks.com. I'd love to hear your suggestions. When it comes to music, we have Sonos speakers all over the house.

Love Sonos. Hate the new Sonos app. It is terrible. I wish they would revert to the old one. So many problems, but you know a product's good when you're willing to put up with a terrible app just to use the product because you think the product's that good. On the topic of home energy, we have a Tesla Powerwall and solar.

It was here when we got the house. One of the products that was also here when we got the house, which is really cool, is called Sense. You hook it up at your electrical panel, and it monitors all the usage of your electricity, but it also uses some sort of intelligence to figure out what devices there are on your system and kind of intelligently identifies them.

It's really cool. So if you like monitoring your energy usage, the Powerwall does it at a macro level, but this does it at a micro level of which devices are on. You do have to label them, but it's pretty cool. If you want to spend a little bit more, and I haven't come around to it yet, but I would love to get a span, and that is a smart home energy panel, replaces all your circuit breakers with something really intelligent.

You can monitor your usage and basically turn off a circuit from your phone if you're fixing a light or a plug or something like that. So really would love a smart panel from span, but I haven't decided to make that investment. It's one of those like would be cool, but I'm not quite sure if it's worth the cost.

I'm sure if I had it, I would love it. And then the last home thing is we have an eight sleep pod cover, and I love it. Amy loves the bed nice and warm. I love the bed to cool at night, and it's just game changer for sleep. So highly recommend the pod cover.

I guess this is home, but maybe more on the entertainment side. I'm going to share a couple of things. One, Monopoly deal, fantastic game. I guess it's kind of in the home camp of things we play around the home. I'm actually not going to go through every game I have.

I have 40 plus board games, so I'm going to find a way to share more about those in a future episode and some of my recommendations, but I'm just sharing the two that are small enough to fit on my desk that I could just kind of hold up in the video version of this.

And the other one is coup, kind of like a small, fast playing card game for two to six people that requires a little bit of deception. So if you've ever played mafia or werewolves kind of in that realm. And then one other thing in the game camp that's not a board game is the games magazine.

Someone told me about this and I got a subscription and I'm so happy I did because it's basically just a bunch of puzzles in one magazine. And anytime we go on a trip, I bring it along. And, you know, if I have a couple minutes to myself, maybe the plane's taking off and, you know, there's not much going on.

I'll just do some puzzles and learn about new types of puzzles I didn't know about. Also in the home is like food and kitchen stuff. We get most of our food from Costco, Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods. So we don't go to the grocery store that often, but we do go to Costco seemingly every week.

Love Costco. And if we're not cooking or going out, we're usually eating Green Chef. We get about three meals a week. We've had over 100 meals from Green Chef. Love them healthier and tastier and kind of more flavors than some of the other meal kits we've ever tried. Really love Green Chef.

Another product that's kind of new to us that I really have been loving and actually convinced to become a sponsor after using the product was Dram. It's a sparkling beverage with really great natural flavors. And it's basically replaced all of the sodas, soft drinks, everything in the house there.

It's just really good. I'm drinking the mushroom cola right now, which might sound crazy to some people that maybe don't like mushrooms, but is so good in the kitchen. As for cooking stuff, unfortunately, it's not still available, but we got a June Oven, which is a company a friend of mine started almost 10 years ago and use it every day.

Loved our June Oven. Recently acquired a Ninja Creamy, which has a great price at Costco and have loved it for making protein ice cream. I'll link to a protein ice cream recipe in the show notes. Shout out to Sahil Bloom, past guest who turned me on to this. And it's amazing, right?

Just like milk, a little sugar-free Jell-O or some xanthan gum and protein powder. And it tastes just like ice cream. It's like a McFlurry, if that's your thing. And I can't say enough of it. We have not used it for almost anything except for making protein ice cream. Another product I love is the Breville Tea Maker.

Now, think of a kettle that can boil water. It does that, but it has a basket for loose-leaf tea. And you can set what kind of tea, and it'll boil the water, drop the basket with the loose-leaf tea in it, down, steep the tea, bring it back up, keep it warm.

We got this when I was working at a startup for the office 14 years ago, maybe. And that is the one we have. This thing has worked every year for 14 years in a row. Makes me really love Breville, to be honest. I'll put a link to a couple other Breville products we've since acquired, immersion blender, regular blender, and big fan of Breville.

No affiliation, just love the product. Another product we have that I got as a gift, I don't remember when, is the Waring Pro Double Belgian Waffle Maker. And we love making Belgian waffles in this house. Girls love them. Sometimes we use the Kodiak protein pancake waffle mix in it.

Sometimes we go off the cuff and make it from scratch. But this is a double Belgian waffle maker. And there's just something about Belgian waffles that are great, but making them one at a time when you have a lot of people eating is slow. And so this one does two at once.

Love this Belgian waffle maker. Another fun one that I read an article about, I'll probably, if I can find the article, link to it as well, is the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. Now, this is a great example of a product that I love because it's so good, even though it makes something I don't enjoy.

So I don't like hard boiled eggs. Amy does. But I learned about this product that is supposed to be like the best egg cooker. And people call it like the egg machine, but it's actually called the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. It's less than 20 bucks. And throw a little water in, throw eggs, you poke a little hole in them that it comes a little poker, and you get perfect hard boiled eggs every time.

It is so simple. One button. Love this product. Would make a great like white elephant gift, honestly, if you need one up in the upcoming holidays, but really cool little product. All the water bottles in our house are slowly getting replaced by Hydro Flask. I think if Amy could be sponsored by one company, it would be Hydro Flask.

It's like her favorite company ever. Love their water bottles. And then last, Coravin. We've really scaled back drinking alcohol in the house pretty significantly, but we still have all these bottles of wine. And so the Coravin is this fantastic device that basically puts a little needle through the cork, lets you pour a glass of wine out of a bottle and into a glass, enjoy it without ruining the bottle.

So you can pour a glass out and then pour the next glass out a week or a month later. So really great way to be able to drink the wine you have, but not need to drink the whole bottle every time you want a glass. So that's most of the house stuff.

I left kids for last because I know not everyone has them, but there are a couple of kids' products that at least for our stage of life have been invaluable. So the Hatch Rest Plus is our light and sound machine for the girls. Red light means it's bedtime. Don't get out of bed.

Green light means it's morning. You can get out of bed. White light means I'm trying to make the room really bright because you didn't get up on your own. Can you please wake up? Worst case, we'll come in there. But the sound machine built in also, great product. Nanit cameras, love them.

We have them in and above the beds for both girls. And then when we're traveling, we have the travel stands and we use our travel routers so that we can use them anywhere. Really love the Nanit product. As for toys, I love Love Every. They make this subscription box that comes every three or four months, starting from a small age all the way up until toddler.

And you get these like well-crafted kind of Montessori-inspired, at least, toys for kids with a little guide of how to use them, how to educate your kids about them, how to help them learn. And just can't say enough things. We've actually saved all of them. And so we've got this really cool collection that I don't know what we'll do with it.

Maybe we'll put it on Facebook Marketplace when the kids are old enough. But really love, love every. When it comes to getting around in the car, we got two car seats from our neighbors and we've loved them. So I can't say anything about buying them, but the Clek Foomph and Flow car seats.

Really big fan of them, even though we didn't originally purchase them. Shout out to Shannon and Joe for those car seats. Appreciate that. And then if we're traveling, the Ride Safer Travel Vest is an amazing way to be able to keep your kids safe without having to lug a car seat everywhere.

So have loved that product. Before our daughter was big enough, we use the Costco Scenera Next car seat, which is really light and portable. But the Ride Safer Travel Vest, now both girls are big enough to have one of those and we don't have to carry car seats with us or rent them.

Two other quick things for kids. The Tony's Box is a huge hit in our house. The little box where you put a bunch of characters on it through some kind of RFID. And it is like a speaker that plays all these different stories from the different characters. Actually talked in a previous episode about how I use Chat GPT and 11 Labs to generate a story for kids that included our kids.

So we'd have this story that was about them and their favorite things, and then used voice to narrate it in my voice. And so one of the Tony's is Daddy Tony, one of them's Mommy Tony, and they have stories that we created for the girls that we're reading, but was done all with AI.

So that was really cool. And then the last is, I've talked a lot about how we have a au pair in the house, and we're going through the process of looking for our next au pair now. And for the next one, we've used Cultural Care as an au pair agency, and it's been really great.

You can filter on as many criteria as you want, connect with au pairs, interview them, they kind of do all the sourcing so you don't have to worry about it. And they take care of all the logistics and the visa and that kind of stuff. So we've had a really great experience with all our au pairs from Cultural Care.

Not really a child, but we do have a dog. And three things that I thought I'd flag there. One, Sunday's dog food. And we tried this new dog food Sundays a couple years ago, and all the problems were gone. You know, everything was nice and solid going forward, and we have never even considered another dog food for that reason.

So big fan of theirs. I don't even know the brand, but we have this burrowing dog bed that's kind of like an igloo, if you would, but it's really just pops up a little and the dog can like kind of snuggle under it. Our dog's a visual and absolutely loves this dog bed.

And then last, there's a really cool product called the Night Eyes Rad Dog, and it's a collar leash combo. If you're ever spending a lot of time in like an off leash dog park, it's a collar, but it has a dog leash attached to the collar. So really like that product.

I think that wraps up almost everything except for the business stuff and the podcast stuff, which I thought I'd leave at the end. So if you're interested in everything we use to run our business and run this podcast, stick around. If not, reminder that links for everything are in the show notes, a lot of discounts in there.

So 20% off, 30% off, even if you're an All The Hacks member, first year free, or 50% off. So definitely worth checking out the show notes, allthehacks.com/stuff, or in whatever player app you're on, or just at allthehacks.com. So last two sections, business. So there's a bunch of products, services, and companies that I work with on the business side.

For all of our banking, I think my favorite picks are Brex and Mercury. For our amazing third member of our team, we worked with Oceans, which is a staffing agency, and that's how we found Possany, who is the most incredible... Started out as an assistant, but has now grown into so much more, making sure everything's running.

So shout out to her and big shout out to Oceans. If you want to explore delegation and hiring an assistant, check out the delegation guide I'll link to in the show notes. For taxes, I mentioned Gelt for personal, we use them for business as well. We use QuickBooks Forever, which I hated, and we finally just switched to an awesome new bookkeeping software called Kik, kik.co.

Love it. We do a lot of our payment processing and invoicing on Stripe. We send all of our emails through ConvertKit. We run all of our email addresses on Google Apps. We run the whole podcast, and I actually run most of my life in Notion. Probably deserve to be mentioned outside of the business section because we plan trips, we organize family, vacations, schedules, the girls' school, all that's in Notion.

So use that all the time. For scheduling stuff, we use Calendly, though Superhuman just launched scheduling built into email. So the days of Calendly might be dwindling and that'll be another subscription I can save some money on. And then last is Zapier. I love Zapier. So this is like a nerdy optimizer's dream.

It is basically a product where you can link up anything and everything and create all these rules to do things. So new episode comes out, go ahead and add it to our newsletter. Person makes a purchase on Stripe, send them an email on ConvertKit. Someone checks off a to-do in Notion, send an alert to Slack.

You can integrate with thousands of different services, and it's just so amazing. I could probably get lost in Zapier and just start building crazy stuff if I didn't have a little more self-restraint. Can't say enough great things about Zapier. We use it for basically putting together all the pieces of all of the products we have.

At one point, I was taking data from Notion, creating spreadsheets to track it, using the numbers in the spreadsheets to create payment samples in Brex. And so it was tying in the bank, the spreadsheet, Notion, and even I think at the time, it was also adding to QuickBooks. So really awesome product there.

For the podcast, for anyone interested, we have a bunch of different things we use. For remote recording, we're recording on Riverside. For editing the audio and the video, I'm doing all of my side on Descript. The amazing team at UpFire, which if anyone needs a podcast production company, would love to introduce you, shoot me a note, podcast@allthathacks.com.

They use a whole suite of more sophisticated things for audio and video. But for basic audio editing of a podcast, Descript is fantastic. As for hardware, I'm using a Shure SM7B right now to talk to. That is going through a Rodecaster Pro 2, which is overkill. But because we do the studio in person behind me, I wanted something that could handle three different mic inputs because there's two back there.

For recording this, I have a teleprompter at my desk so that that acts as a second screen so that I can look directly into the camera. I also use it for some Zoom meetings and that kind of stuff. Really love the teleprompter for getting really high-quality videos. That video is coming from a Sony A7C, which is connected to the computer I'm on with a Elgato Cam Link.

It's a Cam Link 4K, so you get 4K video from a really high-def camera with great depth of field. For headphones, I really love the Audio Technica M50X. They're over-the-ear headphones. They are fantastic. Maybe overkill if you're not editing audio or want to listen to music in a really great way, but really love them.

I actually have multiple cameras, so if you're watching the video of this, I have one camera over my left right now. Normally, I don't have three, but I have one camera over my left in case I wanted to show something on the desk. Then I have another camera over the right to show something on the screen.

Mostly, I got two extra cameras for the studio, and then I thought, "Why not mess around when I'm recording these solo episodes?" I went on Facebook Marketplace and got two $500, $600 Sony cameras, one ZV-E1 and one A6400. Those are my two backup cameras that we also use in the studio.

For lighting, I've got an Elgato Ring Light on one side, which is pretty small, and then a really big Godox Light that's four feet wide and three feet deep and sits about six feet up in the air and really creates a lot of light, which I think is really, really important.

Let's see what else. If I'm traveling, I take the Shure MV7, which honestly, I would suggest to almost anyone because it's USB. It doesn't need an audio interface. It's cheaper. Great, great microphone. Even if you just want to sound better on your computer, it's a fantastic microphone for not that much.

If you want an even cheaper option, the first 50 episodes of the show were recorded on the ATR2100X, which I think is about $100 or less for a mic with a stand. I know a few people when I was working at Wealthfront that picked one up just because the audio quality was so good.

A few other things for the podcast nerds in the room. I host the show on megaphone, though I'm seriously considering transistor as an alternative. I use chartable for a lot of analytics. Then for video, I recently got this device called the ATEM Mini Pro ISO, which is a bit overkill, but I really like redundancy here because the last thing I want to do is record an episode and lose it.

All the camera feeds route through this little device, and it's hooked up to a Samsung SSD or a solid state drive, and it records all the camera feeds separately from the SD cards that are in the camera just in case there was an SD card failure. If you go back to episode one with Lee Rowan on Travel Tips, you will find that that was the second time we recorded that podcast because the first time the SD card failed, and there was nothing I could do.

I sent it to a repair company up in San Francisco, tried to salvage the data, couldn't get it. Ever since then, every bit of audio I record, every video I record, everything's redundant. We're getting two recordings for everything. That's how we're doing it. I think that's it. I think I've covered all the highlights of the products I use and love on a daily basis.

There are so many more things. I'm sure if I just walked around the room, there'd be other things. I'm curious if there are any categories I left off that people want to hear. I can save that for a future episode. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening. I hope this was interesting.

You can find links to everything I talked about in the show notes, including discounts and promo codes. Thank you so much for using them. Some of them are. Some of them are not affiliate links, but the ones that are obviously help support me in the show. Thank you so much.

Have a wonderful rest of your day. I will see you next week.