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All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
Goals, Tools, and Mindset Shifts for a Better 2026 with Kevin Rose
01:09:45
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- [00:00]
Chris Hutchins
Seven days into 2025, my friend Kevin Rose's house burned down. He lost everything except a laptop, an outfit, his car, the ambitious goals he'd set for the year, Gone.
- [00:11]
Chris
As Kevin put it, I had a plan.
- [00:12]
Kevin Rose
I got punched in the face. I was like, wait a second. All bets are off. Everything has changed, and let's rebuild.
- [00:18]
Chris Hutchins
So in this episode, Kevin and I are going to reflect on how 2025 went for each of us, what we got right, what we missed, and what we're going to do differently in 2026. We talk about our plans for the year ahead, goals we're setting, tools we're using, and how we're going to be designing our year to not just be optimized, but actually easier. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a comment or share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click follow or subscribe.
- [00:46]
Chris
Kevin, how are you feeling about how 2025 went?
- [00:50]
Kevin Rose
Ah, Chris, Happy holidays, brother. Good to see you. Glad we're doing this. 2025 was a mixed bag. Every year for me is like a list of to dos and New Year's resolutions and big, adventurous, ambitious projects that you want to take on. And a handful of days after, I think seven days after the New Year, my house burned down and I lost everything except for my laptop, which I had with me, and one set of clothes and one car. And that was pretty much it. So went from I have a plan to I have no plan. It's kind of like what they say when Mike Tyson asked him about, you know, plans, he says, everybody has a plan till you get punched in the face.
- [01:26]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah.
- [01:26]
Kevin Rose
And such a good line, because it's totally what happened to me. Like, I had a plan. I got punched in the face. I was like, wait a second. All bets are off. Everything has changed, and let's rebuild.
- [01:36]
Chris
And I feel like you ended the year strong, though. Like, you've got a new place, like, things are good. Did any of those goals come to fruition? Did you kind of regroup on what you wanted to do for the year or at what point did you switch from, like, we're just trying to deal with this to let's actually get back on track, Track with life and what I want to achieve. Because I know there was a lot you also did with health and drinking and all that kind of stuff in 2025 that I feel like is worthy of a call out.
- [02:02]
Kevin Rose
I think with every New Year's resolution list, there was always probably 20 to. Well, probably more than that. Probably 30 to 50% of the list was focused on these kind of aspirational, health related goals. I want to be fit, I want to go to the gym, I want to not drink, I want to meditate more. You know, it was a big chunk of it was that the fires, I would say what they did for me and what the blessing was there was that they really showed me what was important at the end of the day. And they took my mind off of the goals that related to I must obtain or I must achieve. And they refocused them on kind of some foundational things that I just wouldn't have expected. If you had asked me, what are the 10 things that you want to save before your house burns down? It would have been. If I had to do it on the fly, like you have 20 seconds to list off 10 things or 30 seconds, whatever it may be, it would not have been the things that now I look back on, I say no, actually these were the very important things to save, which is largely around stuff that my dad left me before he passed away. Some of the early drawings that my kids did for me where they were spelling their names wrong. You know, some of these things that were just. It had nothing to do with dollar value. It was all sentimental value at the end of the day. And when all of that shifted, it really made me start to kind of rethink how I rebuild. And some of that was like, I don't really need a whole lot. Like I don't need more stuff. And so every thing that you see, like even behind me now, if you're watching the video, you see a stack full of books. I've either read those books or they're going to be read. Like no longer do I have books that I just. A friend gives me. And it just sits there for the next 10 years. It's going to make its way out, meaning I'll re gift it or find it a home or I will read it. And I just want to be a lot more deliberate about the things that I have in my life. I think is very important. And what that immediately led me to do was reevaluate and really take seriously for the first time some very important things in my life. Which was like you mentioned, you know, I quit alcohol for six months, which I had never done more than three weeks for the last 20 years. Right. So some very important life changes on, on that front and on the meditation front as well. And so it was a good forcing function to lose all of that stuff to really bring to the surface what. What are the essentials that are must haves in my life versus just kind of these arbitrary nice to haves, if that makes sense at all.
- [04:34]
Chris
No, it totally makes sense. I feel like your year started out rocky and you, like, leveled it. And I feel like my year started out like we got this. And then Q4 was my. Your Q1 where Amy, my wife, had a surgery, and we knew that was coming, and her mom was coming out to help us. And about, gosh, a day, one or two days before her mom came out, she found out she had some type of brain tumor, but they didn't know what it was because it was, like, days old. And so she got another mri. We still didn't have the results. And so when she was coming out to help my wife, it turns out she had a brain tumor that we needed to figure out what to do with. Fortunately, UCSF is excellent. So she's out here. We get her in, and they're like, yeah, this is the kind of thing that, you know, it's not cancerous, but you kind of need to get it out now. And so between October and December, you know, she moved in. She was out here for six or seven weeks. She had brain surgery, she had pt, and my wife became her caretaker instead of the inverse. And it was just a lot. And then somehow, entering the sickness season of winter, I feel like our kids just got sick. They got each other sick, back and forth, back and forth. And it turns out my older kid has probably, like, a slight form of asthma, but it didn't really show until she ended up getting rsv, and it led to blood oxygen saturation. Dropping, dropping, dropping. Go to the ER. We were there for eight hours. Like, it was just a. It feels like Q4 was wild. And we're just trying to come out from it at the same moment of. We decided. You know, we've had au pairs for five years, and we decided that if we're gonna have help, My wife was like, there's only a few more years before the kids are in school full time. She's like, I kind of want to take this last stint. And so instead of getting childcare, she stepped away from work. So in the middle of trying to figure out how to go from two employees to one or really, we have another one. So from three to two, she's totally inundated with other projects with family, and I'm like, 20, 26. Can't come soon enough. We're recording this on the 28th. And I'm like, fresh start. We're cleaning the house, trying to purge some items. Just feel like we're getting off to a good start. But I feel like I lost my routine and everything in Q4, and it was a mess.
- [06:53]
Kevin Rose
So when I think about someone like you and the shows that you do with the podcast and all the hacks and, you know, I put you and Tim Ferriss and a handful of other people in this bucket of just people that are optimizing. And I've given you shit about this over the years where I'm like, chris, you don't need to be optimizing this. Like, just spend the money or whatever, right? Like, we've had these conversations like, a thousand times. You've gotten a lot better. Like, for people that are listening. Chris used to optimize everything. Like, you go to Taco Bell and he'd be like, how do I get an extra salsa packet? And like, you're like, dude, you don't need to. Like, there's some things you can let go. And so one of the things I've noted about kind of you in the last year is that I feel like we're both in this stage of life. You know, we're getting older, you know, we've got kids that are growing up, and you have to make some decisions around where do I want to put my time and effort, where is it best spent? And, you know, how serious do I want to be about doubling down on my professional goals? You can't optimize everything, and you have a lot. You're juggling and life throws curve balls at you all the time. So where does your energy go in this new year?
- [07:56]
Chris
The one thing that I think is so great about having a podcast is that you share your thoughts and you can go back and listen to them or read them if you. If you transcribe it. So I went back at the episode I did that was kind of similar to this last year, and I was like, what did I want to get accomplish? And this was both professional and personal. And then, you know, what kind of hit rate did I have? And so one thing I decided last year, and I said the theme for 2025 was trying to be more intentional. And so I said, you know what? One of the things that I'm going to do is we're not going to grow at all costs. Like, we are going to cap the business growth if it enables us to not have to hire and build a team and spend a lot of money and whatnot. So that was One thing. So I said, we'll outsource and we'll hire a couple people so that we don't have to spend time on it, but we're not going to go crazy. Well, we did cap the growth. Like, we didn't go wild on growth like I had done in the past, but we also didn't hire anyone. We didn't outsource the things we said we were going to do. The goal was to prioritize time with our kids. Like, that was one of the things I know you and I have talked a lot about wanting to do while they're at this. This age where, you know, we're like their favorite people. And so that worked well. And then I realized there were some things that we said were goals, and I don't think they were really goals or if they were, we definitely didn't.
- [09:06]
Chris Hutchins
Follow up on them.
- [09:07]
Chris
So I was like, we're going to cut ultra processed foods. I didn't even know that was a goal for 2025 until I went back and listened to that episode. Like, if you would ask me to list everything. Didn't know.
- [09:16]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [09:17]
Chris
We said we were going to take an extended trip over the summer. Never happened. We said, we're going to kind of eliminate the stress of planning things last minute. Judging by the fact that, you know, we're recording this right before we drive to Tahoe, which we booked yesterday, I would say we absolutely failed there. And then I wanted to be more intentional about spending. And this year, I feel like I stepped up my ability to spend money, and we can get to that in a little bit.
- [09:40]
Kevin Rose
So that sounds counterintuitive for people listening. Like, you stepped up your ability to spend money. Like, what does that mean? Like, most people think, like, I want I need to step up my ability to save money. And you're like, I need to step up my ability to spend it.
- [09:51]
Chris
When you live in this kind of scarcity mindset for too long, you end up defaulting to save everything and never spending. And that's great. It serves you well in the long run. But I also look at some of our parents and kind of extended family and people who've done that their whole lives, and now they're in their 70s and 80s, and they're still trying to figure out, like, I remember talking to someone, you know, bigger guy, and I'm like, why are you sitting in economy in a middle seat in the back of the plane when you've saved millions of dollars? And he's like, I would never pay $30 for an extra seat. And it's like really, like, they just never worry.
- [10:27]
Kevin Rose
Chris, this was you, by the way.
- [10:28]
Chris
I know. And they never figured out how to shake that. And I think I'm really trying to think about how to shake that attitude, that idea, that scarcity mindset. I really loved this rule that Nick Maguli created or at least wrote about in his book. He wrote this book, the Wealth Ladder, and he. I think he calls it the.01% rule. And it's like on any given day, if you spend.01% of your net worth, like, it doesn't matter. So, like, if you've got a million dollars, 0.01% would be a hundred dollars. So if you have ten million dollars, you can spend a thousand dollars. Like, just try to stop worrying about things over a threshold. And I love rules. Cause it's like, okay, if you have a million dollars, it's like $100 if this thing's. Just don't stress about it. Doesn't mean you can do that 75 times in a day. Right, Right. But most people with the mindset I have, that's not a real fear. The fear that I'm going to do this once and now I'm going to do it 100 times in a day is crazy.
- [11:23]
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I mean, what that allows you to do is when you're at dinner and you're like, should I get the wine? That's an extra $40. Like, you can make decisions like that, that just like if you hit that point where you're at that escape velocity where you can just kind of ease the buckles a little bit.
- [11:37]
Chris Hutchins
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- [13:57]
Chris
Thing we did this year, which is so atypical for us, and I've talked about it before, but when I thought back about the big moments of 2025, like growth moments, it was I listened to this podcast and the host said, we went to the Four Seasons in Lanai and it was everything you could ever want a hotel experience to be. And we looked and we were like, gosh, this hotel is not cheap, like over a thousand dollars a night, but we don't take a lot of vacations and when we do, they're always free. And so like if we spent three nights at this hotel, which by the way had some other promos going on that like further made that a better deal, in my opinion. We were going to spend money, but it wasn't insane money for what we have. And we were like, we're just going to do it. We're not going to optimize for using our Hilton free nights or, you know, our Hyatt points or Marriott points. And we did it. And I was like. It truly was like, I think it's one of the best hotel experiences we've ever had. And I didn't all of a sudden go and say, well, now every time I go anywhere, I'm going to spend $1,000 a night. That didn't happen. That fear that a lot of people who are so frugal have is like, well, if I learn to spend a little money, I'm just going to go crazy. No, that's never going to happen. And it didn't happen. And we haven't repeated that experience since. But it was a moment where I realized I can spend a little bit more money and it's not going to cause any problems in my psychology. And so I just need to work on that. And so we're going up to Tahoe, and, you know, our kids are going to do ski lessons for a day because they're really excited about skiing with other kids. And our ski lessons, cheap. No, they're not. But, like, they really want to learn how to ski. It'll be so much fun for some reason. And I don't know if you have this experience.
- [15:29]
Chris Hutchins
Kids seem to listen way better to teachers than parents.
- [15:33]
Kevin Rose
Oh, yeah, a hundred percent.
- [15:34]
Chris
They're not going to, like, have a breakdown when the teacher's like, all right, let's go try again. So in a way, it's better for them to learn from someone else sometimes. So I'm excited to carry that over into the next year and see where that goes. And I'm not too worried at all about it being, like, a problem. Like, I don't think I'm going to just spend all of our money and, you know, be on the street.
- [15:56]
Kevin Rose
Should we get into resolutions? Should we talk about if you do them or what you want to do this year?
- [16:00]
Chris
So about two, I think two years ago, I did this episode with a friend of mine, Sahil Bloom, and It was episode 99. And he has this personal annual review where he asked seven questions. I don't think we necessarily need to answer every single question for all of them, but I thought it was interesting to just share the questions, and if anything comes to mind, let me know and I'll share a few things first, just to give you a little time to think about it, since you haven't, you know, you haven't prepped like I have. So his first question is, like, looking back at the last year Is there anything you changed your mind on? And one of the things I'll focus on when I kind of think about my last year and next year is the podcast, because that's what I do for work. And one of the things I changed my mind on was YouTube is such a wild instrument for growing content on the Internet, but it requires a certain type of content. And I think last year I was like, let's do different thumbnails. Let's put out video everywhere. And I kind of noticed myself going down the path of what does it take for that to be successful and not what's the content I want to be making and what makes it easy. And so I changed my mind on a few things which were again, business opportunities like YouTube, business opportunities like running trips, you know, as a travel agency. And I changed my mind that I don't want to take on big new projects that require me to pivot how I get to spend my time on the company. And so I think we're going to stop doing custom unique thumbnails for every YouTube video because the ROI is not there and I'm not willing to do what it takes to win in YouTube. And we're not going to probably take more trips with listeners that we're not going on. Because when you're not going on a trip and you're planning it, it is not a lot of fun to plan when you're going on the trip, it's really fun when you're planning someone else's trip that's a job and it just wasn't something I'm interested in. So is there anything you changed your mind on last year that will impact your future?
- [17:49]
Kevin Rose
Well, first of all, I'm sad about YouTube because I do enjoy seeing those thumbnail clips on little videos before you hit play where it's like seven ways to like ruin your credit with you. Like a real sad face, like all grumpy, like, because you have to do those ridiculous thumbnails. I know there's something amazing about seeing your friends in the dumb ass thumbnails that you have to do for YouTube. That just makes me laugh so hard when you have to pose for those or get AI to create them. So something that I've changed my mind on. Well, this is a big one. It applies to the industry where I spend my day job, which is as a venture capitalist over at True Ventures, we funded a ton of startups, a lot of household names that you know in terms of software companies and hardware companies from the Pelotons and Fitbits and rings and you name it, there's been a whole slew of them. Very lucky to have been in a lot of those companies. And I think venture capital in general has been something where I've always kind of looked at as an entrepreneur and said this is a necessity for tech. Like there needs to be venture capital. And if you're an entrepreneur and they want to build something big, you need to go raise venture capital. And what that means is you take on a board member, you take on investors and the potential outcome for what you want to build has to be massive. And what I've seen In the last 12 months that is just blown my mind is this leveraging of talent via AI. And what I mean by that is we are just now kind of creeping into a world where AI is a multiplier of natural talent. So if you're a writer, it helps you write better, you can produce more content faster. If you're a software engineer, you can write code 10 times as fast now. And the kind of downstream benefits of this for the creators and the individuals is that you don't need as many people and you actually can go and build and start businesses without raising any venture capital. So that's great for the rest of the world because I remember one of the earliest memories I had at Silicon Valley was, you know, I moved out there in 2020. I didn't know what venture capital was, I didn't know what Sandhill Road was, which is this fancy road where all the VCs kind of have their offices. And it's very intimidating to come into an industry and say like I need to network my way into this industry to raise capital to start something. And the nice thing about AI now is I'm seeing engineers or people that are just, I would even call them engineering curious go out and it's a thing called vibe coding where they can go out and they can learn how to code via AI, meaning AI is doing, call it 90% of the heavy lifting. They can ship a product, charge for that product and they never need to raise venture capital. So what happens is we're going to see, I believe an order of magnitude more startups that are self sufficient, that are able to go out and bring in real revenue from the get go and be able to launch any idea that you might have without anyone else's help. So call it a startup of one and you'll bring it to market and just have a profitable business and be doing quite well as a solo entrepreneur, which is new and very, very Exciting. One of the people that I really respect and admire in our industry and tech is a man by the name of Jason Fried. And he's written a bunch of great books called Rework and was very prescient kind of very early at writing about the benefits of owning your own enterprise and not taking any outside venture capital. And he's someone that, you know, his businesses make tens of millions of dollars per year and he reports to no one. And he can do anything he wants at any time he wants, pivot it into any space, create any new product. He has a great new product out there called Fizzy, which is amazing. And it's that freedom and flexibility that comes from not being beholden to any investors and also being able to kind of write your own destiny and do anything creatively that you want now with AI, I think is so powerful. So to sum it up, this is the absolute best time to be an entrepreneur for anyone listening out there, if you aren't using AI models several times a day. And not just to answer your question about, you know, how much baking soda goes in your recipe, but more so around, you know, how you can do new skills and it doesn't matter what that skill is. I spent 45 minutes on voice conversation having AI explain to me quantum mechanics. And let me tell you, it wasn't the PhD level quantum mechanics. It was explained to me like I'm a ninth grader, right? I wanted to backfill that information and understand the bare minimum because I know that, you know, I was talking about investing in Nvidia on Tim Ferriss show, what, two years ago now, when it was way less than it is today. And the reason I had that insight was because I was on the AI path very early. And so I know Quantum's coming. How can I leverage up my understanding of Quantum? So that one is, it comes time for me to evaluate those publicly traded companies that are quantum companies that I want to invest in and see it early like I did Nvidia. I need a foundational level of knowledge about Quantum and so I can start there with AI. My point is it doesn't matter where you go, which direction. If you want to be an online seller, if you want to be the best at anything, if you aren't leaning into AI in a serious way, you're missing a massive opportunity. So for me, the thing that I changed my mind about over the last year was that I used to believe that to be successful and to get to Escape Velocity and have a massive business, you needed to raise venture, you needed to understand Silicon Valley. And now I'm realizing that, no, no, no, no, it's actually you really need to live and breathe AI like it's a second language. And that is going to be the most important skill that we have over the next decade.
- [23:28]
Chris
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, we have a pre strung, pre made Christmas tree and it has these little junction boxes. I didn't even know what they did. And I'm like, not an electrician, but I could dabble. And I just was like taking things apart, using multimeters, testing these things, trying to figure out which little circuits were working, what was going on. Ultimately the solution is buy Nutri. But there were like three hours where I was soldering things and I was like taking photos and going back with AI as if I had an electrician in the house. Now would an electrician in the house be more helpful? Yes, but what would it have cost to have an electrician come to the house on Christmas Eve and like sit down with me for three hours and diagnose a Christmas tree? It would be a total waste of.
- [24:08]
Kevin Rose
Money and you probably just would have let that person do that thing while you did something else. And now you have raised your base level of knowledge even a little bit in a domain that you didn't know about. And that's the cool thing about AI is it will always it meets you where you're at. So screw college, you don't need it. You can meet where you're at and then level up your knowledge on your own time. Right. It's amazing.
- [24:28]
Chris
Our kids are young enough that I'm like, I don't know what college looks like in that number of years, but it's not going to look like, I think what it is today. Now there are some like socialization things that probably need to come out of it, but who knows what it looks like? You know by now I'm wondering when this comes out whether I will have shared it too widely. But I built a spreadsheet tool that was not simple and I was like, let's build this app. And I'm not an engineer. I'm not 10x the engineer. I'm kind of more of a product person and I was able to build a really functional product and I shipped it to our members. So if you're an all the Hacks member, you've been able to use this tool that optimizes all your credit card spending, goes through an immense amount of logic to recommend credit cards. You don't have to link your accounts. It's just based on where you spend and what you have and helps you evaluate things. But I never would have been able to build that. That's the thing that I honestly would have had to hire a team and raise money to go build. And I think of all the calls that I know you and I have gotten in emails from friends that were like, I have an app idea. And. And five years ago, we were like, nope, no chance. Now go build it.
- [25:33]
Kevin Rose
The last decade has been everybody and their mother come to me and say, kevin, I have an app idea. Right? I've always said, great, let me introduce you to some freelancers. And it's about 50k to get it off the ground, minimum. Right.
- [25:45]
Chris
Did anyone do it?
- [25:47]
Kevin Rose
None of them did it.
- [25:48]
Chris
Yeah.
- [25:48]
Kevin Rose
But now it's like, I remember when you and I were talking about getting this app off the ground, I was like, chris, you need about three hours of tinkering with AI and. And you will stand up something. Will it be perfect? No. But over the next, you know, week or two weeks, you can refine it. And AI coding is finally good enough that if you put them against each other, meaning, like, you put two AIs against each other and get them to kind of, like, work through the problem with you, you don't even have to look at a single line of code. I have, like, written, fully functional, very serious algorithm that I've incorporated into some of the kind of clustering stuff that I'm working on right now. And it's something where I could ship it if I wanted to today. And it's only going to get better.
- [26:28]
Chris
Right.
- [26:28]
Kevin Rose
Six months from now, the coding agents are going to be probably 30 to 40% better, and we're finally at that point where you just won't even need anyone. It's crazy. It's wild. Time to be alive.
- [26:37]
Chris
And the idea of, like, I just want this tool to exist for me, it's even better. You don't have to worry about all.
- [26:42]
Kevin Rose
The software is what they're calling it. Yeah, yeah.
- [26:44]
Chris
In the past, I'm like, oh, this tool doesn't do what I want. Okay, I'll just build it. And the tool I built was in two days. And the only reason it took more than two days is because I wanted it to work for, like, hundreds of people using it at the same time. And that's a different thing. So, okay, so that's what we changed our minds on.
- [27:00]
Chris Hutchins
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- [29:17]
Chris
The next question which I think is really interesting. I don't know if you've ever done a calendar audit, but the idea of looking at all the things you did last year and some people go as far and I wouldn't say, this is a bad idea, but you like go and color code your calendar at the end of the week of like green, red and orange of like, what created energy? What drained me? And kind of look at it. And so I tried to go back and think, what are the things that really create energy for me? And what are the things that really, really drained it? And interestingly, I think the things that really created energy for me were a bit of a shift in the content of the podcast. So first year, everything was an interview. You know, everyone has this imposter syndrome. You're like, well, no one wants to hear from me. No one knows me. I'm going to go interview all these experts. And then people would email me and say, hey, I'd love. You know, you're always asking the question I'm thinking of. And then they started asking questions. They were like, oh, you have these ideas, can you answer them? Did a few kind of ama solo. And that evolved. Last year it was 50 50. The thing that I realized really created energy was doing episodes with people that I knew well enough or could very quickly build rapport well enough to have a conversation. And so I've done that with you, I've done that with Sahil. I recently did it with a friend, Nick Gray. But you'd introduced me at one point to Mark Manson, who by the time this comes out, that episode will have been out. And we didn't know each other, but we just went in and had a conversation. And I didn't feel the pressure of this needs to be a masterclass. And I think one of the things that drained me was kind of feeling like I've tapped out the topics for a masterclass. You know, this is everything you need to know about X and Y and Z. And people would message me and say, hey, well, what about this? I was like, well, I already did one. And they're like, well, do I? I'm not gonna go back and listen to 250. So the idea of just repeating it seemed off, but the idea of having conversations with people that touch on all the learnings from 250 episodes, but bring in what's going on now and bring in more of that conversational dynamic, really interesting to me. Created a lot of energy. So that was one. Building apps, obviously in the last month has just created an immense amount of energy. Going to a few in person events, like conferences again, even though I know it's a few years since the pandemic. I feel like you go to some events in a community and you Meet some people and you learn some things. But then you go to three or four and you start to build real, like, friendships with that community. And that really evolved. This year I'm just running through. I wrote this list scaling things. So, you know, I love dabbling, I love trying to optimize everything. But this year I went really deep on like, let's dominate, you know, reselling Costco gold. This is not going to be an episode about that, but it was really fun to be able to do something at such a level that you're starting to really feel like an expert instead of, instead of trying a hundred things. I love knowing about them. But, you know, if you wanted me to go on reselling electronics and doing buyer's groups. I know, very cursory, but it's really nice when you build up that expertise. That's what created energy. The two things, I'll say that drained energy. My wife and I are very indecisive and we constantly kick the can down the road. And it's so draining to be like, let's plan this trip, but let's not commit to it. And then, oh, well, that's sold out. So now let's plan the trip again, but let's not commit to it. And I found that there were a lot of conversations that we had multiple times this year because we just couldn't make a decision. And then last, this is the thing that we both decided can't keep happening is I love helping people, right? Everyone that's listening right now wants to hear what I have to say or they wouldn't be still listening. And I love that. Like, I love teaching, I love sharing knowledge. I oftentimes try to help people, most often family and extended family. And I'll spend hours helping with something and then, you know, two days later I'm like, well, did you do the thing? And they're like, ah, it wasn't a big deal. It's just really soul sucking to spend like five hours helping someone research something. And then they're like, oh, yeah, we decided not. We're not even going to do that thing. And so until people really want and will use the time and energy I want to pour into helping, I'm not going to volunteer it. And this isn't on them always. Like, it's very often on me. Just, you know, my mom says, oh, like we're thinking about air purifiers. And next thing you know, I spent 14 hours researching air purifiers.
- [33:27]
Kevin Rose
End up getting the one I told.
- [33:28]
Chris
You I got them Some really good air purifiers that are not the one you told for other reasons that we can get to. But you know, in that case it paid out. But sometimes someone just has a question, they're not asking you to do a research project. And I'll just do the research project. So that was a little bit of my creating energy, draining energy. Anything worth calling out for you?
- [33:47]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I mean, on my side, I. I think that the struggle that I have is I have a lot of things that create energy for me. But I need to remember that if you have too much of one thing, that's always a bad thing. So for example, I could spend 10 hours a day on my computer. And because it is such an exciting time where I'm looking at new ideas and I'm playing around with AI and I'm training different models and I'm doing all these different things. And to me, because I grew up on computers, that is such a huge, just energy multiplier for me. Like anytime I sit down at my computer, the hard part is I'll wake up and I'll be like, oh really? The sun's setting already. You know, it's like it's just hours and hours go by. So I have to also understand that my body at this point in my age needs attention. It needs a base level of activity and care that if I neglect it, it will actually detract from my energy overall. So how can I make sure that every day, if I have three things that I have to do, like I have at my disposal to do around physical activity, how can I do at least two of them? So one of the things I realized is that working out and doing a full hour in the gym every single day, it's really hard for me because it feels like a big time suck. And then I have to shower afterwards and all this. And so oftentimes I'll just not do it at all. So I've really refined this where there are three things that I want to do. I want to do either treadmill at incline to get in a good cardio zone two workout. I want to do sauna, which is also kind of borderline zone 2, which is really healthy for you. And there's so many studies to back that up. And then I also want to lift weights and meditation. So four things. And one of the things that non negotiable for me is meditation. So that's one of the two that I really want to do every single day. And so how do I fill in that next one and I found that for me, if I am more consistent, consistency for me is better than absolutes. Meaning that I'd much rather just go in and blast my shoulders and work out shoulders for 20 minutes and check that box, then say I have to do a full body workout. And so what I've done when the kind of the change that I've made is I said, okay, I'm going to turn the sauna on because I, you know, need to do the shower after the workout. So I'll hit that checkbox. Got my meditation done first because I don't want to do that post sauna because my heart rate would be elevated. So do this meditation, go in, do one body part and then hit the sauna. And if I can bundle that all together and get that done early in the day, then it doesn't matter how late I go at night. You know, obviously I have family to attend to and obligations on that side. But to me what happens is as the energy kind of degrades over the day, the first thing to go is the exercise, right. So if I get to like three or four o' clock and I've just been jamming on computers, yes, I've had a good time and it's been additive to my energy, but I don't have that backup reserve to go and do the physical energy. So front loading and kind of front running it and getting the physical stuff done first is my new go to for next year. I want to make sure to check that box early and often, get it out of the way, kind of have it make it part of that early morning routine and then get into my work which can go into the night.
- [36:57]
Chris
I love that. Yeah. Are there things that you spent time on last year that aside from vibe coding? Because I know that that created energy that you're like, you noticed you want to do more of.
- [37:06]
Kevin Rose
Well, I would say peace of mind for me has been, you know, especially post fires has been huge. And peace of mind actually comes from organization, I've realized. And so there's a couple things that have driven me nuts. I don't know how you feel about this, but I've had an inbox that's just been chaos for a long time. I've had a notion document that as much as I love notion and I keep it as my single source of truth for kind of all my financial docs and everything I have going on. It's a shit show, to be honest. If I go in there, it's just like docs everywhere, like half completed things and I've realized that then I have notes spilling over into my note stocks and then I use standard notes for some other notes. I use bear for some stuff because there's some legacy stuff there on Behr. And I think this year is about simplifying and reducing my productivity stack from about 10 tools to like three. And that to me is going to give me just less places to look. And so I'll give an example. Over the last couple of days, the holiday break has been great because you can, you know, change your MX records on your DNS and like, do things where, like, it doesn't matter if your email doesn't work for like a few hours. And I have all my email now going to one inbox. And then I set up filters inside of that. Now I don't have 10 different emails to check, which is fantastic. But it's the little tiny things like that that I think if you start your year off and say, hey, I'm going to fix my one password. Because I know there's a ton of one passwords in there that are horrible, they need to be revamped or are just outdated and clean it up. And so it's the spring cleaning of it all that I think that if I can get to that quote unquote inbox zero for my entire productivity stack and really have the two or three tools that are just essential like, that to me is going to be energizing and give me peace of mind that I'll know where everything's at going into the new year. So that's a big one for me.
- [38:52]
Chris
Yeah, there's this great video that Jesse Itzler made where he's like, you know how to plan 2026? And he had a bunch of ideas and that was one of them, which is like, start off with a decluttering kind of of everything. And for him, it's like, I want my desk to be clean. I want my closet to be clean. Yeah. I mean, I would say one thing that created energy for me, just to loop back to what you said, was the idea of, like, creating physical things. And so we ordered a 3D printer for the holidays. I was like a family Christmas gift. It hasn't arrived yet. But I have all these ideas about things that I want to create physical and involve the kids and, like, be able to create stuff and organize. You know, there's always like, oh, I want to organize this thing and I don't have a way to do it. And there's like just directories online. They're like, Someone has already had that thing and created a thing to organize it in a perfect way. Whether it's like cords under your desk or a hook to hold this specific thing, it's all been created. And I'm like, really interested in organizing. And this came off the heels of that Jesse Itzler video that I'll link in the show notes where he's like, I want to declutter my inbox. I go into my closet, get rid of all the clothes I never wear, go into my desk, and just get rid of stuff I don't need.
- [39:58]
Kevin Rose
I just donated a bunch of stuff because I realized I asked myself one hard question, which is, if I have not. Well, granted, I didn't have any clothes to begin the new year with, but I've added stuff. And I had a lot of friends donate clothes, which is very nice, like, give me stuff to get started. And I realized if I haven't touched it in the last six months, and it's not a seasonal thing, meaning, like, it's a heavy jacket. I haven't touched it for given reason. Donate it. Re. Gift it. Donate. Get it out of there. And so I just went through my closet and I cleaned out. And granted, I probably only have like seven shirts at this point or whatever, but the point being is that why keep adding? Why keep adding everything that you own, whether you know it or not, is a micro kind of like back office task in your brain somewhere that says, I have to do something with this thing. I have to clean this thing. I have to care for this thing. I have to, you know. So I found that the one liberating thing from not having anything is that all of a sudden all of that weight is lifted off you. And I don't want to give that away to clutter, to kind of just keeping adding in more stuff, the Amazon purchases that just sit there in the corner. So I'd be really curious to know if you use that 3D printer, because.
- [41:03]
Chris
I'm 3D printer curious, you know, if not, then let's gift it to my daughter's school, where I'm sure they'll have projects they can use. It was funny because the next question in this annual review flow is what are the boat anchors in your life? And that could be people, it could be things. And I do think that just having stuff around feels like an anchor in your life. You see piles of stuff. You know, I'm sure we all have a family member or relative that when you go to their house, there's like a room that just has, like, an unlimited amount of stuff, and you're just, like, overwhelmed. It's not even your stuff, and it's, like, stressful. The guy who wrote this review, Sahil, he's like, there's people that, like, when you're around them, they're just always negative, figuring out and identifying what those things are and trying to get rid of them for the year ahead. And I think detoxing stuff is one. An interesting thing I realized was I would have conversations all the time with people I thought were peers, and, you know, we might be talking about, you know, your podcast. Well, there are some people who are all in on their podcast, right? Like, this is their thing. They want to build their wealth for the future. They're 20 years old, and they are just, I'm going to build the biggest thing on Earth, and I'm willing to sacrifice everything. And I do have one friend who's launching a new podcast, and he's like, I am actively willing to sacrifice, sacrifice everything, travel around the country, fly, be gone for weekends, miss kids soccer games. Because this is what I feel like is my thing. And I'm realizing that if I don't really process that context when I have these conversations ahead of time, then I think, oh, gosh, like, I'm not doing the growth that I need. Like, I'm not hitting the metrics. I am, but I'm also not willing to make those sacrifices. And so if I'm talking to someone who's kind of earlier in their financial journey, sometimes people are like, well, you know, I'm gonna run and do this thing that's very manual and takes up time. And they might value their time at $10 an hour. And so I might feel this FOMO of like, oh, I'm missing out on this deal, you know, reselling, you know, gift cards at the grocery store. But I might not be willing to make that sacrifice. But on the flip side, I might be talking to someone who has way more money than me, and they're, like, trying to optimize for flying private all the time. And if I don't care about that, I might have FOMO on that side. These people are not all boat anchors, per se, but conversations that aren't calibrated with people that are doing things that you do, whether it's professional or hobbies, I think can be really draining because they lead to tons of FOMO or stress. But when properly calibrated, you have a different business objective than I do. So it's great for me to share and learn, but I'M not trying to do that thing makes life so much easier. And so I want to try to properly calibrate where I'm at and know and it doesn't need to be every time, but it's just like writing out. I am not trying to grow at all costs. Like my non negotiables for 2026 are like, I don't want to give up nights and weekends and so if I talk to someone and they're having more success, but they're willing to give that up, okay, that's fine. I don't need that. And just kind of being at peace with the fact that you've already set your non negotiable. So I don't know. I don't know if there are any boat anchors in your life. And a lot of times they're specific people and we don't need to name names. But I would encourage you to think about them and how you can not have them be as draining for you next year.
- [44:15]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, that's well said. I think I've done a really good job at surrounding myself with one of the things that I love is people that tinker. I love people that play and if they're taking themselves too seriously and it's win at all costs. God bless. I know there was a hustle phase of my life where probably my twenties where I, you know, was eating too much pizza and drinking too much beer and kind of burning the candle at both ends. But, you know, this stage of my life and my career, I want to surround myself with people that are experimenting in domains that I am not and I can learn from. And I really enjoy that. Like, I have a lot of scientist friends. I'm not a scientist, but I really enjoy trading knowledge. I'll say like, hey, here are the five things that you need to pay attention to on the AI side and how can I take some of the learnings that you have? I actually did this recently with Sam Harris. I went over to his house and he was asking me some questions about AI and I kind of give him a big debrief on where I'm seeing things moving. And then he was kind of helping critique some of my thinking around meditation and consciousness and just some of the things that he's deeply involved in. It was a really fun, hour long kind of engagement and chat because we were both helping each other in different ways. And I love finding domain experts that you can sit in front of and just feel like while I'm soaking in so much here, I try to find people that I can surround myself that are teachers you know.
- [45:36]
Chris Hutchins
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- [46:48]
Chris
Thank you so much for being here today.
- [46:50]
Chris Hutchins
You can find all the links, promo codes and discounts from our partners@AllTheHacks.com deals. These are brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us.
- [47:03]
Chris
You don't live in the Bay Area, but I was talking to you about this and this was one of the things I was like, gosh, I wish you moved up here because there are a bunch of maker or hacker spaces all around the country and for whatever reason, there are none kind of between San Francisco and Sunnyvale. There's nothing in between. And I was like, gosh, it would be really cool to just like get a space. Doesn't have to be huge, you know, maybe thousand square feet, like a garage somewhere. Put some tools in there, put laser cutter, 3D printer, yeah, all that stuff. And like have some desks. It's like for people who want a place to work during the day or just work on crazy projects. I'm past the point in time where I'm working on my car. But 10 years ago it would have been like a bay you could drive your car in and mess around and you have all the tools. I would love to have a space where like that is the community. And I was like, you know what.
- [47:53]
Chris Hutchins
I should just make it.
- [47:54]
Chris
And I'm not ready to make that a goal for this year because financially it would cost money to run that space and I'm sure I could create memberships and hire a manager and now all of a sudden it's starting to seem like a time suck. But man, I would love if someone listening wants to create somewhere in the mid peninsula, the Bay area, like a great like maker hacker space, I would love to sign up and join. I am not aware of one, but I would love that to be my community for the next decade.
- [48:22]
Kevin Rose
I want to join you on that. I'm actually just got a lease on office space with more for podcasting and kind of software development. But I'm with you. Where, gosh, if we could have a choose your own adventure where you walk in, it's a little bit everything. I mean I even think the car base is a good idea. Meaning that I've always wanted to pick a old beat up car. I don't care what it is. Maybe an old cheap vintage Porsche or something that's just like maybe a Lincoln Continental suicide doors or something and just get an old one, pull it in and say this is my restoration project and really taken they'll call it, you know, five, six, seven years to restore and understand every little facet of said vehicle. That to me would be just a ton of fun between deploying tokens on the AI side.
- [49:05]
Chris
My next 10 year goal is to find or create that kind of a space and if money were no object, it'd be like who cares if it burns, you know, 100 grand a year. But I'm not at a point where I'm ready to make that commitment. So that's not a 2026 goal, but it's definitely something I want to see. Okay, real quick. We've kind of already hit on a lot of hits and misses from last year. The next two questions, Sahil was like, what are your greatest hits and misses? I wanted to share a couple here that I haven't mentioned. Some I have. Building this app was really great. Making the content I wanted was great. My wife and I took another trip without kids once a year, which I think is really hard to do. But so glad we're able to keep doing it. On the misses though there's one miss that there's actually two misses that seem so kind of insignificant but meaningful as I plan for next year. So One is, I wanted to make an episode, and I've probably publicly talked about it on all these health diagnostics I've done, and you've done so many of them. And I wanted to share a lot of what I've learned because most people haven't done all of them, and I certainly haven't done all of them, but I've done a lot of them. And just what did I learn going through this experience doing the VO2 max test, the DEXA scan, the full body MRI, the CT angiogram, all this stuff, all these biomarkers. And for a year, I've wanted to make this episode. And in my head has been this. It's gotta be a masterclass. And one of the challenges is every week some new company launches, and I'm like, oh, I'm not ready to do that. And I sat down with my doctor and recorded for an hour and a half, walking through all these diagnostics and biomarkers, getting his take. And I still never shipped the episode because I have this problem in my head, which is like, I really want to make these masterclass level things. I don't want to leave anything out. And so a big miss for me is not shipping that episode because I have more than enough content to fill an hour. I could probably do four of them. You know, I could do one entire one just on heart stuff. Because you and I have talked about this a ton. A big miss for me is that I let perfection kind of get in the way of shipping an episode that I know would be valuable because I wanted it to be a certain way. And so that was one miss that I just wanted to air publicly because it's going to play right into what I want to do in 2026. And then the other one is so, so silly. But one of our sponsors is Element, and they make an electrolyte drink mix. I drink it all the time. My wife probably drinks one every single day. And they sent us this Element lemonade stand, and it basically was like, electrolyte lemonade stand for kids. And we were like, let's set it up, let's set it up. And we never did, like. We were like, oh, this weekend's not great. And we never did it. Now I kept it. Next summer we're doing it. But it was like this whole kicking the can down the road. It was just this great example of now, instead of being able to take the cardboard cutout that goes with it and throw it out so there's not junk in our garage, I'm forcing myself to look at it every day because we couldn't just, like, find the right time. And so the two big things I want to do next year are rectify these misses, which is constantly kicking the can down the road and waiting for perfection and then getting my routine back after a messy Q4. But I feel like that's just about a messy Q4.
- [52:13]
Kevin Rose
Okay, so the hits for me, I have two. One is that I've said to my girls, nothing is off limits in terms of my office or my meditation or anything that I'm doing. You can always come in and talk to me. And yes, there's gonna be podcast times. And I do let them know that if that's happening, like, the door shut, all the doors open right now. So I guess they could come in. But the point being is that I wanna make it seem as though there's an environment here. I feel lucky enough to work from home most days. I travel a bit, but that they can come in and ask questions, and especially if it's not a workday or I could, quote, unquote, do something. I always say yes. And that has led to some moments where I thought to myself, ah, gosh, would I rather be working on this project right now? Yes. But I should say yes here. And then I go say yes. And then I end up being so happy that I said yes, because I get a really special little intimate moment with one of my kids that I wouldn't normally have. So I'll give you one example. I've told them that they're allowed to come and interrupt me if I. I do a daily meditation practice of 25 minutes. So oftentimes they come in at times over the year of when I'll actually be meditating. And they can tell because I typically just burn a stick of incense and they can smell that. And Zelda came in and has caught me a few times meditating. And she's very good. She doesn't typically interrupt, but I've noticed that because she's come in a handful of times, she sees what I'm doing. So she sees me kind of sitting there and kind of like, you know, looking at a wall. Cause I practice, like, this form of Zen where you kind of stare at a wall. And one day, and I always wanted it to be like this, I never asked her, do you want to meditate? But she told me she, like, I was meditating while you were meditating. And she went to her room while I was meditating and sat and did her own meditation. And this wasn't Because I asked her to do it, but she's like, I want to do what Dad's doing. Right. And that, to me, was like, so special to see her pick that up, not because if it was an instruction from me, but because she saw me and imitated something that I was doing. So that was a huge win. Is like, how can I lean into one? You know, letting them interrupt me when it's appropriate and always saying yes to things they want to do. And then an additional benefit. There was a little bit of, you know, imitating what I was doing, which was super cute.
- [54:22]
Chris
I love that. So do you have a process for thinking about goals that you use for how to plan the year ahead, or is it kind of ad hoc, year to year?
- [54:31]
Kevin Rose
Yeah. So I do this one thing that I found to be quite reliable, which is, if possible, if you want to take on something new, if possible, burn the bridges. And so if you're going to make the transition to an Android phone, like, sell your iPhone, get rid of it, don't even have it in the same room if you actually want to make that hard transition. And I found that one of the things that I've observed from people on why they stop growing as they get older and where they fall behind on the technology front is that they typically say, this is good enough, and they get stuck into this pattern. Right. I've noticed this over and over again.
- [55:08]
Chris
And I think this extends beyond technology, by the way.
- [55:11]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, absolutely. But they'll say, oh, you know, outlook's good enough. I've been using it for the last decade. It's like, no, no, no, no. That's how you're going to be locked into an old person's thing. And so I force myself to rethink, to try something new, to abandon the easy in kind of favor of the difficult and new and exciting. And those transition moments can seem really hard. But if you burn the bridges, you get rid of that old thing and you force yourself to do something new, it will become a new habit in a couple of weeks. And so for me, that's kind of what I'm going to do going into this year. There's a handful of things like, I'll give you an example. Well, one of the things that I want to do is I took off six months from drinking last year. I want to do a whole year this year. And so I'm actually going to really, truly lock down and do one whole year of no drinking. That is one of my top goals for 2026. It's like picking These things. And that's a harder one because it's harder to burn down the bridges around it.
- [56:06]
Chris
Well, that would be just getting rid of the alcohol in your house so you can't be tempted.
- [56:09]
Kevin Rose
Would be one that's hard when you have a partner that drinks still, because that did work, because my partner took off four months of drinking when I did the six months, and we didn't have any around the house. And just not having that cold beer sitting in the fridge is a huge step in the right direction.
- [56:23]
Chris Hutchins
That's.
- [56:24]
Kevin Rose
That's a big one. So it's going to be harder this time around. But for me, that is finding replacement kind of vices that I will fill up with that couple of hours. That is that window where I would typically reach for that drink. Like, how can I fill that with other activities that are meaningful, that are fun, that take my mind off it, at least for the first couple of months until you've kind of hit escape velocity, which I found happens after about the first 60 days.
- [56:46]
Chris
A fun one with drinking is that my kids love cocktails. And so, like, anytime we're at a restaurant, they're like, can we get a kids margarita? Can we get this?
- [56:54]
Kevin Rose
You said it makes them sleep better when you give them drinks.
- [56:56]
Chris
Yeah, right? Yeah. And so I have found that if I'm making a drink, they're like, can we have one? And of course, if I'm making it with alcohol, they can't. And so we've bought a handful of, like, things that would be mixers that aren't just straight sugar, that don't have alcohol. And so now it's like, it's kind of fun to make a cocktail. But almost all the cocktails we're making don't have alcohol because the kids really want to participate in it. Yeah, it's, like, fun to watch a kid shake a little shaker and all that kind of stuff. So one option is, like, involve the kids in what you're doing drinking, and then by nature, it's not going to have alcohol in it.
- [57:31]
Kevin Rose
Yeah. One of the things I did which was very useful is I took the kids and said, okay, we're going to be doing something active together during that time in which I would normally grab that drink. We do these cooking sessions together. So we made pizza together, and I got one of those dojos that you can make with the actual egg outside. We can do your own pizza oven. So finding these activities that are around the dinner prep that can be done with the kids and take your mind off of that, especially for those that have a pretty hardcore habit around drinking, is really helpful.
- [57:57]
Chris
Yeah. One of the things that I like to do, and I've only done this once last year with, which was to have a theme for the year. And so I am wholeheartedly stealing this theme from a friend of mine, guy named Kai, who runs a podcast called the Daily Churn. He brought it up last year, and I just keep thinking about it, and it's, what if this were easy? That was his theme for 2025, and I'm gonna steal it for 2026. And, you know, when I think about content, what if this were easy? And it's crazy how sometimes what might be easy also works. Like, it's not like you have to necessarily sacrifice in many cases. And so when it comes to content, what if it were easy? I was talking to my wife about you, and we were talking about making a podcast, and I was like, I've gotten a handful of emails that people that said, hey, have Kevin back on. I was like, but I just don't know what we would talk about, because in my mind, every episode is this, like, singular topic. And maybe that comes from all this focus on YouTube, where it's like, well, you need to have a title, because it's not about subscribers. It's about, you know, random people finding your video. Whereas on the podcast, people subscribe. They're probably going to listen whether the title says something, you know, 10 things or one thing. And so I got in my head that we couldn't record a podcast together unless we had a singular topic. And I was like, so I don't know what I talk about? And Amy turns to me and she goes, chris, you talk on the phone with Kevin for, like, an hour multiple times a week. You're telling me you can't figure out what to talk about for an hour when you do it for. For 10 times that amount every month? And I was like, well, that's.
- [59:24]
Chris Hutchins
That's true.
- [59:24]
Chris
And so, like, what would be easy? Let's just record a conversation.
- [59:27]
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
- [59:28]
Chris
And so this kind of actually did have a little bit of a theme around it. But the idea of people that I enjoy talking to that are kind of all curious about different things, what if we have a conversation and it can have six or seven topics, like an agenda, like the Nick conversation. Nick sent me an email. He's like, hey, I've got these five ideas. You want to talk about them? It's like, that kind of thing would be easy, you know, YouTube, stop trying to create thumbnails just, like, find a template that works. And then one that it sounds crazy. And then I thought of, it sounded so fancy until we really broke it down, which was, we're thinking about hiring, like, a house manager or a home assistant. And this came out of the fact that we were thinking, gosh, we just need more time. There's just too much stuff when you have kids and a house. There's just all this stuff going on. And we've had childcare for five years, and my wife was like, gosh, it's really frustrating that I'm just listening to this other person play with my kids and I want to go play with them. And, like, I want to be the one that influences a lot of the things they're doing and the way they're acting. But we've got all these other responsibilities. And we were like, well, what if instead of hiring a person to watch the kids after school, what if we hired a person to do the things that you would otherwise do? Whether that's laundry, meal prep, grocery shopping, like, what? Whatever those activities are. Planning a vacation, Christmas gift idea. I don't have a full list yet, but I listened to this podcast that this woman created. It's called the New Modern mom, and she did a whole episode on house managers. And then I met another friend, and he's like, yeah, we just hired one. And many of them can also drive your kids to school. You know, that kind of stuff. And so the idea of instead of, if you're going to spend the money to hire help, you could hire childcare, or you could hire someone to do all the other stuff that occupies your headspace, and then you can hang out with your kids without having the overhead of, well, I've got to make sure we get the dishes, I got to make sure we go do all this other stuff. And so I don't know what that looks like yet, but we're really interested in what if life were easy and we want to hang out more with our kids. Invert the thing you hire for. And by the way, I have a lot less anxiety around hiring the wrong person to meal prep or clean or get groceries or organize than I do who's going to spend hours a day with my children. So it might actually be an easier hiring role.
- [61:47]
Kevin Rose
So, yeah, and there's a couple things for people that think this is a fancy kind of, like, rich person's problem to have. Yes, it is. It is a luxury, for sure. But I will say there's two ways to look at this. One is, yes, it does give you the ultimate unlock, which at the end of the day is quality time with friends, family, loved ones, things like that. At the end of the day, you should not ever be pissed about spending money on that. And number two, if you actually do it to replace tasks that are cheaper than what you could where you could be spending your time, it's a net net win. Meaning if you hire someone for $20 an hour to clean your house while you're going out and making $75 an hour working on your passion project, it is a net win for you to hire that person to do that laborious task that you didn't want to do while you spend your effort elsewhere. And that's obviously outside of the friends and family side of it. But it can be a thing that isn't just for people that have a lot of net worth, but it's actually for people to leverage their time in more useful, productive ways, you know, and.
- [62:39]
Chris
You can scale it up. Even at times where we didn't have a ton of savings, we might have had someone come and clean the house once a month. We've hired someone to like prep meals. They would basically drop off two or three meals that were prepped for the week. There's a scale of I'm hiring someone who could literally just be another mom in the neighborhood to help prep some meals during the week. Two, I have a live in chef. We all think about that other end of the spectrum where it's like, yeah, if you had a live in chef and a live in housekeeper and a live in assistant, that'd be really expensive. But if you had a couple hours a week of someone who, you know is not necessarily world class Michelin chef at your house, but it's someone who's, you know, probably better than me at like prepping a meal.
- [63:23]
Kevin Rose
Well, also, if you're learning from that person at the same time, I had somebody during COVID that was looking for a little bit of work and she was a chef and her restaurant was closed and she came to our house, we were all masked up and all that stuff and like she was doing pickling at the same time and teach me about that. You can also leverage these people to learn from new skills and as well.
- [63:41]
Chris
Yeah. So I think the mindset shift of what if this was easy is are there things that we're doing that we could outsource, but also are there things that we're outsourcing that we'd rather do than the things we're not outsourcing? And when it comes to our kids. It's like, would I rather go pick up my kids, or would I rather go run some errands and return packages to Amazon? Like, would I rather drop my kid off at school, or would I rather do the laundry in the house? And like, if you have to pick between those two things and you're going to hire someone to do one of them, maybe you're hiring the wrong person to do it.
- [64:12]
Kevin Rose
Exactly.
- [64:13]
Chris
And so I'm going to inventory all the things we're doing and just think, like, what if this were easy and it's not always spending money, right? Like, what if it were easy? Recording an easier podcast. What if it were easy? You know, letting this thing go. What if it were easy? We're taking a vacation over the holidays. Like, you know, we got lots of points and miles. We often take bigger, you know, crazier vacations. We're just going to drive to Tahoe for three days. It's going to be one of the easiest vacations we've ever taken because we're not get on airplane. We're not packing all this stuff up. It's just going to be an easy thing. And in a way, by buying ski passes this year, we like forced easier vacations because we want to use them. And so that's something I'm thinking about, is a theme for the year. I'm not going to share all my goals for the year because I haven't figured them all out yet. But one thing I'm going to do a better job of is document them in a place that I can kind of check in regularly. I like the idea of maybe not having annual goals, but maybe having quarterly goals, because it's so easy to kick the can down the road when you're like, I gotta get this one thing done before the end of the year. And so that was one. I've long done this thing intermittently for the last few years since kids that I've called this monthly Memorables, where it's like, every month I want to do one thing that, like, 25 years from now, you'll remember. That's the idea, is that, like, gosh, if a month of your life goes by and nothing memorable happened, that would be a waste, you know, of a month. I love that. But I've lost the intentionality behind it. So I want to publish this. So, like, I have a newsletter, like, I want to put in, like, at the end of the month. What's the thing we did? Because I think if you can create some accountability, it makes it Easier to make sure you do a thing. I have to ship a podcast every week. And last year, technically, I took Thanksgiving and Christmas off. We sent a newsletter every week. By having these forcing functions, I feel like it forces me to do these things. The good news is I went back this year and there were probably 19 things that met my criteria for a really memorable thing that I'll remember 20 years from now. Unfortunately, none of them happened in January, February, or September. There were three months of 20, 25 where I did things that were fun, but they weren't, like, memorable enough that 10 years from now I'm going to remember them. And I don't want that to happen again. So I want to keep doing the things that we did that made the other months memorable and publish them and share them, because I think the more accountability there is, the better.
- [66:36]
Kevin Rose
Love that I wanted to add in One thing that I think is a lot of fun. One of the things I always like to do is pick up at least a couple skills during the year of something I didn't have before. And oftentimes I pick these up and I say, well, that was fun. I don't want to take it any further. And I abandoned it. But that's okay. That's part of the process of learning something new. Some stuff sticks, some stuff doesn't. One of the things that I've done in the last couple of weeks, I found just so much fun. Duolingo now offers chess, and I love it because they have announced about six, eight months ago, something like that they're AI powering everything on the back end. Like, they're moving to an entire AI infrastructure on the back end. So what they've done is they've made this chest just so damn good of matching me where I am in my skill level. And so I'm like, winning half of my chess matches, both against humans that they're matching me with and against the AI bot that I'm playing against. And I found that just the idea that they can properly match you and kind of meet you where you're at, along with teaching you new skills as you go along, is phenomenal. So one little hack here, if you are on an iPad and you sign up and you go into Duolingo, you cannot get access to chess because they're slowly kind of rolling it out. The only way to do it is access it on a mobile device. First subscribe to the chess group on mobile, and then it will show up on iPad. And I say that only because my kids wanted to play it as well. They couldn't get it on iPad and so I had to log them into my mobile account, get them to like opt in on mobile, and then it shows up on iPad. So anyway, that's kind of the one of the fun things and I found that it's really thoughtful in how it teaches you all the basics of chess.
- [68:10]
Chris
I love that. I love just like things that force you to think. Like, I have a games magazine subscription just because every month I like getting a physical thing with a bunch of different kinds of puzzles and they change them up every month. And, you know, it's like, great for the airplane. It's great for when you're just like, I don't want to look at a.
- [68:25]
Chris Hutchins
Screen for an hour.
- [68:26]
Chris
I just want to sit and do some kinds of puzzles. I love that I started buying a lot of these, like, not the fancy expensive ones, but the like $30 or $40 puzzle boxes that are kind of like the same concept of an escape room. But can you send me one of those?
- [68:40]
Kevin Rose
I would totally do that.
- [68:41]
Chris
Oh, I have so many. Because every once you're done with them, you can't do them again. So, like, I've got a couple on the shelf. I will bring you one and you can get after it.
- [68:50]
Kevin Rose
Everyone's heard, or most people have heard of BitTorrent as a way to pirate movies and all that stuff from back in the day. So Bram Cohen, who created BitTorrent, he's a geek in all the right ways. Super heady, really sharp, one of the sharpest engineers I've ever met. Every time I meet him, because he comes to this conference that I go to every year, he'll walk up to me and he'll hand me a new puzzle that he's 3D printed. He invents puzzles. Did you know this? And he sells them commercially.
- [69:16]
Chris
That's.
- [69:17]
Kevin Rose
Anyway, check out Bram's puzzles. He's like the most hardcore engineer puzzle creator I've ever met. If you want to meet like a real life puzzle creator that has this crazy engineering mind, well, you've got some.
- [69:29]
Chris
Graham Cohen puzzles, I've got some of my puzzle boxes. We'll do a little swap. So these next time we meet and carry that forward and maybe we'll start a little rotation here, get a couple people and rotate the puzzles around. The only other interesting thing, if you're thinking about your goals for 2026 and you're not sure where to focus, when I watch this Jesse Itzler video, which is there are so many things that I enjoyed from it. Not the least dimension is he's a very wealthy guy and he publishes it on YouTube. He's got a fancy thumbnail, but it's only in 720. And I was just like, I love that. Like, he didn't care about having the right setup rig to do it in 4K. So, like, I learned something from the video that wasn't even in the video. But he has this concept of the life blender. And he's like, put everything in your blender, like everything in your life, your kids, your family, your money, your work, and rate it from 1 to 10. And in the process of rating it, you're probably going to think of two or three things that bring it from a 10 to wherever it is. You're like, oh, man, it would be a 10. But because of A and B, I'm going to give it an 8. That A and B are the things that you want to focus on next year. So if you're looking at your blender and you're like, gosh, you know, I just need to get my money in order. And my wife and I are arguing all the time, like, those should be your two goals. And it was just like a simple exercise of a way to force yourself to think about what could be areas to focus on next year.
- [70:46]
Chris Hutchins
Year.
- [70:46]
Chris
He also sells this thing called the Big ass calendar, which is like, I don't know how big it is, like 4ft by 3ft. And it's an annual calendar that you can kind of put up somewhere and plan out your entire year. And Tim Ferriss suggested this, which is like, fill the calendar early with the things you love. The trip you want to take, the reunion with your friends. You know, you, me, and a couple friends of ours took a trip this year to Oceanside that was like, three years overdue because we could never plan it. Well, let's plan that trip for next year now. Block off the dates before it gets to the point that we're all so busy and we can't make it. And so I ordered. My wife doesn't know this, but I ordered one for her because she loves planning out the year. And so this is something that we're going to do as soon as it shows up in a couple days in the mail. Just kind of like planning the year. It's called the Big Ass Calendar.
- [71:32]
Kevin Rose
I love it. The only thing I'd add before we wrap up is if I decided to revamp my newsletter. And I'm only doing it every four to six weeks so you don't get a lot of spam, but if you want to see the kind of crazy edges of technology AI what's coming next Kevinrose.com Sign up and you'll only get a newsletter every few weeks. So there's no I hate spam. So I have a hard time sending newsletters but when I do they're packed with good stuff.
- [71:54]
Chris
Are you going to publish kind of what you want to accomplish this year in the newsletter?
- [71:59]
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
- [71:59]
Chris
Awesome.
- [72:00]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah.
- [72:00]
Chris
So if you want to see where this nets out and what your goals are for the year and hold Kevin responsible and accountable, please do. Definitely, definitely go sign up and I'll do the same in my newsletter as well. So Kevin, thanks for joining me. Yeah.
- [72:12]
Kevin Rose
Happy holidays to everyone out there. Happy holidays to you and your fam and happy New Year.
- [72:16]
Chris
Yeah, happy New Year. I will see you in 2026 maybe with some puzzles.
- [72:20]
Kevin Rose
Sounds good. Puzzled up.