Top AI Tools, Insurance Planning for Fires and More Listener Q&A with Kevin Rose

Summary

Episode Summary: "Top AI Tools, Insurance Planning for Fires and More Listener Q&A with Kevin Rose"

Episode Details:

• Podcast: All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins
• Host: Chris Hutchins
• Guest: Tim Ferriss
• Episode Title: Top AI Tools, Insurance Planning for Fires and More Listener Q&A with Kevin Rose
• Release Date: March 5, 2025

In this episode of All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins, host Chris Hutchins engages in an insightful conversation with renowned entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss. Joined by Kevin Rose, they delve into a range of topics, including the latest AI tools, strategic insurance planning in the wake of house fires, and the dynamics of remote work and living arrangements. The episode is rich with practical advice, personal anecdotes, and expert insights, making it invaluable for listeners seeking to enhance various aspects of their lives.

1. Exploring Cutting-Edge AI Tools

The discussion kicks off with an in-depth exploration of the AI tools that Tim Ferriss incorporates into his daily workflow. Both Ferriss and Rose highlight the rapid evolution of AI technologies and the importance of staying abreast with the latest developments.

Tim Ferriss on AI Tool Stack ([17:26] - [22:09])

Tim Ferriss shares his current AI toolkit, emphasizing the necessity of experimenting with multiple tools to harness their full potential:

• ChatGPT Pro: Ferriss praises the Pro version for its advanced capabilities, stating, “[...] the reports that come back are just unbelievable” ([17:38]).
• Gemini by Google: He recommends Gemini for its superior value, mentioning, “If I only had $20 a month to spend, I would do it at Gemini because I believe you're getting better models per dollar” ([17:48]).
• Claude: Preferred for its elegant and user-friendly responses, Ferriss notes, “Claude feels very elegant to me, which I kind of like” ([17:56]).

NotebookLM for Research and Learning ([19:48] - [21:25])

Ferriss introduces NotebookLM, an AI tool designed to transform PDFs into interactive podcasts. This tool is particularly useful for digesting complex information, such as scientific articles from journals like Nature:

“You can drop a Nature PDF in there and tell the podcast host, like break this down at a high school level and give me a 15-minute podcast about it” ([20:10]).

Granola AI for Meeting Management ([33:20] - [34:18])

Ferriss discusses Granola AI, an application that records meetings and generates summaries and transcripts:

“Granola is going to have an app. So you can just launch the app [...] and it creates these beautiful summaries, transcripts” ([33:25]).

Zapier and Automation ([28:35] - [29:36])

Kevin Rose highlights Zapier's integration capabilities with AI models, allowing users to automate tasks such as summarizing email attachments:

“[...] you could say, if I get an email with an attachment, put the attachment through some model, summarize it and send an email to me about it” ([28:47]).

Key Takeaways:

• Diversity in AI Tools: Utilizing a variety of AI tools can significantly enhance productivity and efficiency.
• Automation Potential: Tools like Zapier enable seamless automation of repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more critical activities.
• Continuous Learning: Engaging with AI-driven educational tools like NotebookLM fosters continuous personal and professional development.

2. Strategic Insurance Planning Post-House Fire

A significant portion of the episode addresses the critical topic of insurance planning, especially in the context of recovering from a house fire. Tim Ferriss shares his personal experience of losing his home to the LA fires, offering practical advice for listeners to safeguard their assets and streamline the recovery process.

Personal Experience and Key Insights ([38:15] - [52:09])

Ferriss recounts the emotional and logistical challenges faced after the fire:

“From sharing the best AI tools to hearing firsthand about what it's like to lose a house in a fire...” ([00:02])

Essential Insurance Coverage:

1. Dwelling Coverage (Coverage A): Protects the structure of the home. Ferriss emphasizes the importance of accurately insuring the home's value:

   “You could insure it for a million and then you could get like a 25% boost or a 50% boost” ([41:30]).

2. Other Structures (Coverage B): Covers auxiliary structures like sheds and patios, usually a percentage of the dwelling coverage:

   “This covers your sheds, patios, adus, pools, fences, driveways, sidewalks...” ([43:59]).

3. Personal Belongings (Coverage C): Covers personal items within the home. Ferriss advises maintaining detailed records:

   “If you hit your cap on the dwelling, then they're like, oh, you're out. The cost of the speakers, the electronics...” ([44:32]).

4. Loss of Use (Coverage D): Covers additional living expenses if the home is uninhabitable:

   “Coverage D is the loss of use, which covers at least a year or in a catastrophe, two years of staying somewhere else” ([49:32]).

Practical Tips:

• Document Possessions: Regularly videotape or photograph belongings to have a comprehensive record in case of a loss.
• Separate Riders for Valuable Items: Items like jewelry, gold, and other high-value possessions may require separate insurance riders.
• Strategic Storage of Critical Items: Keeping essential items like crypto keys in secure, off-site locations can prevent total loss.

Ferriss also underscores the importance of proactive insurance management, urging listeners to:

“Keep the receipts because you do have to itemize stuff” ([40:37]).

Key Takeaways:

• Comprehensive Coverage: Ensuring all aspects of your home and possessions are adequately insured is paramount.
• Regular Updates: Continuously update your insurance policies to reflect current values and potential new risks.
• Documentation: Maintaining thorough records of possessions facilitates smoother claims and recovery processes.

3. Remote Work and Strategic Living Choices

The conversation shifts towards the flexibility of remote work and the strategic considerations involved in choosing a place to live, especially for individuals who can work from anywhere.

Choosing the Right Location ([53:10] - [65:23])

Kevin Rose poses a listener question about why Chris Hutchins and Tim Ferriss choose to live in high-cost areas despite the ability to work remotely.

Factors Influencing Living Choices:

• Access to Quality Healthcare: For personal reasons, Chris and his wife prioritized proximity to excellent healthcare facilities.
• Community and Lifestyle: Ferriss and Rose value living in environments that offer rich cultural experiences, diverse communities, and excellent amenities, which high-cost areas like the Bay Area and Los Angeles provide.
• Professional Opportunities: Being in tech hubs facilitates networking, investment opportunities, and access to like-minded individuals, which can amplify professional growth and success.

Tim Ferriss's Perspective:

Ferriss emphasizes quality of life over cost savings, highlighting:

“I value quality of life pretty much above everything else” ([56:08]).

He appreciates the cultural diversity, good food, and vibrant communities found in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Kevin Rose's Insights:

Rose discusses the balance between living expenses and the intangible benefits of residing in a dynamic, affluent area:

“What you get living in the Bay Area is great weather... excellent food... direct flights everywhere” ([54:49]).

He argues that the opportunities and lifestyle enhancements provided by such locations often outweigh the financial savings of relocating to cheaper areas.

Key Takeaways:

• Lifestyle vs. Cost: Choosing where to live involves balancing financial considerations with lifestyle preferences and professional opportunities.
• Community Value: Being part of a thriving community can significantly contribute to personal and professional fulfillment.
• Strategic Location: Living in key hubs can offer unparalleled access to resources, networking, and growth opportunities that may not be available elsewhere.

4. Maintaining Personal Identity Amid Changes

Addressing another listener question, Rose and Ferriss explore how to stay true to oneself when relocating or experiencing significant life changes.

Staying Grounded ([62:18] - [65:23])

Rose shares strategies for maintaining authenticity:

• Real Friendships: Cultivating deep, meaningful relationships that provide honest feedback and support.
• Core Beliefs: Clearly defining and adhering to personal core beliefs helps navigate external changes without losing oneself.
• Openness and Transparency: Being open about personal experiences and challenges fosters genuine connections and self-awareness.

Ferriss echoes these sentiments, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with supportive individuals who accept and challenge you constructively:

“I try to surround myself with people that can push me in new and unique ways, but also accept me for who I am” ([62:18]).

Personal Growth:

Both guests highlight the significance of internal work—such as therapy and meditation—as foundational to personal resilience and happiness, irrespective of external circumstances.

Key Takeaways:

• Authentic Relationships: Building and maintaining genuine relationships provides a support system that reinforces personal identity.
• Self-Awareness: Understanding and articulating core beliefs and values guide individuals through changes without compromising their true selves.
• Continuous Self-Development: Engaging in activities that promote mental and emotional well-being fosters resilience and personal growth.

Conclusion

This episode of All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins offers a treasure trove of insights spanning the latest in AI technology, essential strategies for insurance planning, thoughtful considerations for remote work and living, and maintaining personal integrity amidst life's changes. Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose provide a blend of practical advice and philosophical reflections, empowering listeners to make informed decisions that enhance their productivity, security, and overall quality of life.

Notable Quotes:

• Tim Ferriss on AI Learning:

  “I now have a really solid foundational understanding of quantum computing” ([14:22]).

• Kevin Rose on Minimalism:

  “We don't need all those things” ([47:29]).

• Ferriss on Quality of Life:

  “I value quality of life pretty much above everything else” ([56:08]).

Listeners not only gain actionable advice but also thoughtful perspectives that encourage a balanced and well-rounded approach to personal and professional development.

Transcript

[Chris Hutchins]

From sharing the best AI tools to hearing firsthand about what it's like to lose a house in a fire to a new style of working out that might replace traditional strength training. Today, I'm joined again to cover those things with my good friend Kevin Rose. And we're going to do a deep dive into a lot of the questions you all sent in. We're going to share which AI tools we're using for research, building apps, taking notes, and some of the creative ways we use those tools. We'll also cover how to make sure you're covered properly in case something happens to your home. We're going to share how we think about where we want to live in the world and a lot more. We're going to get really tactical and personal. So I hope you love this one. And thank you to everyone who sent questions in. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money and travel, click follow or subscribe. And if you want to submit a question for the next episode like this, whether it's me joined by Kevin, my wife, or just doing it solo, head on over to allthehacks.com ama now, let's get into it right after this. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass. I have learned so much about everything from communication to leadership to negotiation, from business experts on this show. But if you're like me, you are always hungry for more. And that's when I turn to Masterclass. It's the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200 of the world's best. And for just $10 a month, an annual membership with Masterclass gets you unlimited access to every instructor on your phone, computer, smart TV or even in audio mode. I've leveled up my investing with Ray Dalio, perfected pizza making with Tony Gimignani, and I've picked up so many great business lessons from Howard Schultz, Rosalind Brewer, Bob Iger and more all through Masterclass. But recently I wanted to set up some Great Habits for 2025 and I took James Clear's class on habits. It was so helpful. 88% of members feel that Masterclass has made a positive impact on their lives. Plus, every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. So you have to check out Masterclass. And right now our listeners will get an additional 15% off any annual membership at all the hacks.com/masterclass. That's 15% off at all the hacks.com/Masterclass. All the hacks.com/Masterclass.

[Kevin Rose]

Kevin, thanks for being here.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, glad to be here.

[Kevin Rose]

So we did this last time. We had some questions come in, we sat down together, there are a few follow ups and then a few things that came recently that I was like, gosh, for me to answer this question would be great. For you to inject your opinion would also be great and your experience. So I'm going to start with one that we teased out the last time, which is you wake up, you have no plans, no commitments, you're all alone. How do you spend your day?

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh man, it really depends on what the goal is for the day. For me, every day is a little bit different. If I didn't have any agenda whatsoever.

[Kevin Rose]

No agenda.

[Tim Ferriss]

I think self care has to play a big part in what I want to do for that day. Largely because my day to day is going through investment decks, looking at all the different startups, trying to get up to speed on all the latest AI stuff that's out there. It's very computer centric tech heavy work and everyone needs a break from their computer. So that would mean I'd start off with a cup of coffee. Obviously I'm a little fancy when it comes to that shit where I like the single origin pour over stuff. And then I've been doing a lot of kind of rope based movement training recently, which is really more core work. You can think of it as like jump rope on steroids.

[Kevin Rose]

The big thick rope.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes, big thick rope, but more kind of swinging it around your head and moving in different ways that kind of activate core and the obliques and the shoulders and more of this idea of transitioning from the old school version of Kevin 1.0 which was I'm young, let's just do as many reps as possible. Let's get bigger muscles into. How can I make sure that on the longevity side, I'm increasing flexibility, making sure that the supporting structure around the muscles are being built out as well. So it's not just about how big is your bicep, it's about how all that different connective tissue and all those other muscles aren't out of whack. So that when you know you have a seven year old running at you full force and you catch them sideways, you don't throw out your back. It sounds like an old person thing to say, but it's a pretty important piece of how I'm redefining what my exercise routine looks like. Sauna is huge. Sauna for me is a non negotiable daily thing in that if you can get 20 minutes at about 174ish, 175ish degrees, that's where all of the published studies are at, mostly coming out of Finland. Massive reductions in all cause mortality, reduced dementia risk, reduced cardiovascular disease. There's no debate anymore. It is very healthy. The only thing to really pay attention to on that side is hotter than that doesn't necessarily mean better. So we know that heat shock proteins, which are what we believe to be the suspects that are doing all the positive stuff for our body, get released around 175. We also know that if you go too hot and especially if you don't protect your brain. So for me, I have that full on felt cap around the head. I'll take in some cold washcloths with me that I'll put underneath the felt. There's actually been some studies that show too hot can actually do damage. So it's finding that sweet spot there.

[Kevin Rose]

And for people who don't know, you can get the new sauna heaters. You could dial in the temperature exactly what you want.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I have done this and I've dialed it in where I bring in my own Amazon $15 digital thermometer, hold it at chest level, which is where you want it, and just really make sure it's right around that 175, 178 kind of situation at chest level. And then I lift my legs up on the bench so I get the whole body exactly at the level I want it. Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

We've got this sauna outside, you can see it barely from Haven Sauna. And when we built it, we built it to Finnish standards, not American standards, which are very different.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right.

[Kevin Rose]

And so we've got the vents in the right place. I've seen some people whose saunas have the thermometer sensor above the rocks.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

And then you're like, oh wow, it's so hot according to the temperature, but it's not that hot. It's. Yeah, you put it right above the heat source so you want it on the opposite wall.

[Tim Ferriss]

Sadly, if you actually contract someone to come and put a sauna in, they're going to do exactly that where they put the temperature sensor in the wrong place, the airflow is going the wrong way and it's like they're building what I like to call just like vanity saunas where it's like all glass walls. Turns out glass leaks heat pretty fast and so you have to be careful if you're going to take it seriously, don't spend the money unless you really get the proper instruction. You had a great PDF that you should link to around the.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, there's this Trump and Guide to Saunas, which I'm going to warn because I have one friend who was like, oh, I'm interested. He went down the rabbit hole. It's a deep rabbit hole.

[Tim Ferriss]

Hey, listen, drop it into Notebook LM from Google that PDF and ask it to make a podcast for you from that. And then just listen to the podcast. Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Fortunately, I met these two guys who started a few companies and they were like, we're going to start a sauna company.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And they were like, we love the trumpkin guy. That was like, these are the guys I want a sauna from. And so that's where we got our sauna. The one thing that they're working on. Imagine if you could charge a battery with 110 or 120 power, which you get from a normal outlet.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right.

[Kevin Rose]

And then you could build up enough juice in that Battery to run 240 for like an hour for your sauna. It would let you put a sauna anywhere because one of the biggest challenges is that SAUNA Heaters need 240. So you've got to like run electrical around your house. It's not in the right place. It's a pain in the ass. So they're working on this battery solution because you don't need the sauna on 24 7.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right, right, right.

[Kevin Rose]

So if you had a big enough battery and it's not that big, it's.

[Tim Ferriss]

Like a power wall for.

[Kevin Rose]

Exactly, but just for the sauna. But because you don't need constant use, you could charge at 110.

[Tim Ferriss]

You don't have to think about converting a room in your house. You can get these outdoor ones. They're pricey, They're. All saunas are cheap.

[Kevin Rose]

All saunas are not cheap. Like, you don't want to price shop for a sauna. There's some almost heaven saunas that go on sale every now and then at Costco, and that's probably the best.

[Tim Ferriss]

Do they get hot enough, though?

[Kevin Rose]

You're just buying the wood sauna and it comes with a heater. You can pick your heater. It is a good sauna in a reasonable price range. The thing that I don't love is these barrel saunas. They look really cool, they're way cheaper. And then the more you do your research, it's just so hard to make a barrel sauna. Work to get your feet above the rocks, right?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

And that's one of the things I learned going down the rabbit hole. Look, is a barrel sauna better than no sauna?

[Chris Hutchins]

Yeah, for sure.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

If I had to choose between a barrel sauna, no sauna, I'd take it every day.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

But if you're going to go down the rabbit hole, also, you have to.

[Tim Ferriss]

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

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. So I'll put links to the show notes to what Haven did, because I think it's cool. Especially if you don't have 2:40. Because I think even the plunge when you need 240, it's amazing. Okay, so you talked about self care. I do have one question that I'm going to answer the question as well. Where do you get these ideas? Rope training. Where did you find that? It's not something I've heard really anyone ever talk about.

[Tim Ferriss]

I have a little community forum [e-mail] where people hang out and they post inside of that private little group. Somebody posted a link to this guy's YouTube channel. We can link it up as well. He just talks about fascia work. He's a black belt in jiu jitsu. He's amazing. I'm always skeptical of new stuff. Right. And new people that are coming on the scene. And so I sent it over to Tim Ferriss and Tim did some research and he's like, hey, actually I trained with this guy one time randomly, like a decade ago. This guy's legit. Let's go in deeper here. And I know he's been looking at, they call it like more functional type, movement, health. And so we both did a little bit more research and realized that he's recommending some pretty sound stuff. I don't want to speak for Tim. I don't know that he's doing any of this stuff, but I'm certainly starting it up and I'm a fan of trying something new. Worst case, like, you give it a shot for a couple months. You literally have to buy rope. If you don't want to buy one of the crazy ropes that are like 50 bucks. Right. Really well made, they're going to last you a decade. He's like, if you just want to give this a try, go down to Home Depot, get $12 rope and go practice with my free course for the first three months and see if it's for you. And so that's one thing that I was just drawn to. And so far I do feel like I'm getting a little bit more flexibility. And then also I noticed that I'm getting sore in places where I don't normally get sore, which I like. Cause that means that those little muscles are getting stressed in ways that they weren't before.

[Kevin Rose]

I love that. Yeah, you didn't say it. And I will. Like when we have free time, it's.

[Chris Hutchins]

Like just chasing random things.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

If I look, I wrote down some notes, I was like, first thing I want to do is just clear out all the inbox text. The way my brain works is knowing I have things that I need to do makes it hard to just let go and go down the rabbit hole and do the research. So I'm like, clear out that.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Go for a run or get a workout in and then go down some rabbit holes.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Rabbit holes for me are my favorite thing in the world. And they're also dangerous. Last night is a great example. So you can probably tell my voice. I'm recovering from a little bit of a cold. I was on a rabbit hole till like 11:50 at night. And I'm supposed to meet you early this morning. I was researching this new type of high bandwidth memory that's only used in AI chips. And Nvidia uses them, AMD uses them, all the big AI providers that are building these GPUs to train all these AI models. And I'm like, ooh. If I can find out which publicly traded companies are the suppliers that are providing this, that's an investment opportunity. And I'm like going so deep. And I'm like having AI do all the deep due diligence and research for me. And I'm like, what am I doing? It's like midnight. But it just shows you when you get geeky about something. And yeah, that could be anything. Right? You just go down this rabbit hole.

[Kevin Rose]

It doesn't even have to be for myself. Sometimes my mom's like, oh, we're going to Scottsdale and we're trying to find a place for dinner. I'm like, I am going to find the place, the best place that my parents will have the best time and say, why am I spending an hour going down everything? I enjoy it. It's just fun.

[Tim Ferriss]

Can I give you a hack that I think is probably my number one thing that I've picked up in the last three months that I absolutely recommend to everyone. I haven't told you about this yet.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay.

[Tim Ferriss]

It's going to be very obvious, but I just want to give you a couple examples. We all know that ChatGPT has a voice interface, right? Like, you can talk to it now and you can interrupt it now, which is quite nice, right? So you don't have to wait for it to finish this whole long sentence. Because, like. But wait a second. Like, tell me a little bit more about this, right? So you can tie that to your iPhone on that extra button that they have. So you hold it down. Already done. And we ask it questions throughout the day. Tell me about this, tell me about that. But one thing I realized that is really fun is if you just go outside, sit on your patio one day, and think about a topic that you know very little about, but are curious about, but you'd be embarrassed to ask an expert about because you would be so behind the curve. Like, it would just be a lot of work and embarrassing to ask really dumb questions, right? So for me, that was quantum computing. And so I'm like, okay, I've heard about qubits. I heard that when you observe them, they collapse. How do they even write the algorithms? What is observing them? Is it lasers? And so I sat there for 45 minutes with Chad GPT, and I was like, tell me about this, tell me about this. And she. I have a voice train. It's a female voice. She's British. She sounds very nice. That's why I tell her. But you explain this at a college level. Give it to me at a ninth grader level. And she's like, okay, cool. At a ninth grader level, I would explain it like this, right? And I got it after 45 minutes. I now have a really solid foundational understanding of quantum computing. What it means to add more qubits, what it means to observe different states and how they collapse into a result. And I didn't know any of that before. And then I was talking to my buddy Jeff, who works with me over at True Ventures, and he was like, when I'm cooking, I give my recipe to ChatGPT. As I'm, like, cracking eggs and doing stuff, I'm telling it what I'm doing, and I'm asking questions like, hey, should I add salt now or later? What if I did a squeeze of lemon? How does that impact the flavor profile for this? What's the chemical reaction process that makes the flavor profile different? Or, my soup's a little bit flat what if I did this and it's training him to be a better cook and chef in real time? And in my head I'm like, all this sounds very obvious, but when you realize that that is the unlock, it is now a chance and an opportunity for us to take all these little things that we have surface level expertise at and not be afraid to ask the dumb questions. It's amazing. And so I'm doing that on a whole slew of different topics.

[Kevin Rose]

So I've also started doing this a little. But when I'm driving, it's like a great time. You're in the car and I'm like, hey, my daughter asked about whales. I don't really know anything about whales. Give me a 20 minute lesson on everything I should ever know about whales. Like, that's not.

[Tim Ferriss]

Well, you went to that whale penis museum. Don't cut this out.

[Kevin Rose]

I did go to the Icelandic Phical Museum. Yeah. There is an entire museum. I think it is the largest collection.

[Tim Ferriss]

In the world of whale penises.

[Kevin Rose]

The whale penis was the largest one. I sent you a picture because you can stand next to a photo of how big it is, but there were like 500 animal penises in this museum. It's nuts.

[Chris Hutchins]

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[Kevin Rose]

So I guess you're talking about AI tools.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

What AI tools are you using on a daily basis?

[Tim Ferriss]

Every week's a new tool. It's changing that fast? But I can tell you what my stack is now. But by the time this comes out, it'll be three new things.

[Kevin Rose]

I know this is the problem. I had this thing on the wall. I was like, let's do an episode on AI Tool. And then the next week there's a new one. What are some tools you're using? We might be out of date, but then how are you staying on top of it? How are you thinking about it?

[Tim Ferriss]

I think that if you can expense it, the $199Pro version of ChatGPT is worth every penny, largely because you get early access to the models and it has deep research. Well, they added that now recently for other users as well. But. But when you hear about these kind of new models that are coming out, we're kind of shifting into this really weird world where when AI first came out, we thought it was going to be all you can eat for 20amonth, where it was like, okay, hey, Gemini is $20 a month. ChatGPT is $20 a month. Claude is $20 a month. Like all the big foundational models, we're moving into a world where there are specific models that will go a lot deeper and give you like much richer reports and insights. And they need more compute to do that. Basically. Sam Altman came out recently and said, hey, Even on our $199 a month plan, we're losing money because some of these models, like when you ask it a deep research question and it comes back and it spends two and a half minutes researching something and computing something for you, that's a very expensive query because of all the resources they're tying up while you're doing that. But the reports that come back are just unbelievable. Now Google is giving away their deep research for $20 a month. So I think if I only had $20 a month to spend, I would do it at Gemini because I believe you're getting better models per dollar at Gemini. For me, if you're looking for just someone to be a writing companion, slash, someone that is like going to give you and present you data back in a very friendly, non technical way, Claude feels very elegant to me, which I kind of like. Because if I'm like, hey, rephrase this 20 different ways so I can finish this email, right? Claude for some reason just gives me better responses than the more technical kind of clinical sounding responses I get from some of the other models. But you have to go and play for me. My stack is the big three like I mentioned. And then I would add in. NotebookLM is fun because you can dump in a bunch of different PDFs you can make podcasts of those PDFs. So for example, I recently had a home fire, house burned down. I dumped in my insurance policies into Notebook LM and I said, hey, what are my coverages? Explain this to me. My agent is coming back and saying this isn't covered by the letter of these PDFs is should I push back here? And it's like, yes, you should push back here.

[Kevin Rose]

Now you could have uploaded those PDFs chat GPT as well.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I did and I did. To multiple models. But I will say that where Notebook really excels, and that's a great point, is when you have a PDF and you want to understand it during a commute.

[Kevin Rose]

For example Podcast teacher.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes, exactly. So I'll take a Nature article that Nature is notorious for. One being the best scientific journal in the world. Two being because they are the geekiest, most hardcore journal in the world. I once bought a Nature subscription the magazine when I was younger, like you Walk into somebody's house, you see like nature on the table and you're like, oh, they're smart. That's like so stupid.

[Kevin Rose]

I want that.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like having the New Yorker or something on your desk. But I didn't understand damn thing that was in there. Like very little because it was very technical. But you can drop a nature PDF in there and tell the podcast host, like break this down at a high school level and give me a 15 minute podcast about it. And then you're on your commute, you're consuming something, you're understanding it and you can interrupt it.

[Kevin Rose]

Now. I demoed this the other day to someone where not only can you listen to it, but you can ask, hey, can you go a little deeper?

[Tim Ferriss]

Right in 11 labs. Also I will say in my opinion, opinion is worth checking out. I've had a few conversations with the CEO. They have me under NDA over there and I've seen some of the future. Obviously I'm not going to say what it is, but the future is bright for them. They have some cool they're working on.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. So all these are kind of fundamental models and for anyone who hasn't tried these, go try them all. It's a chat interface, you can usually add attachments, they can do searches and all this stuff.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right.

[Kevin Rose]

So that's AI tools part one.

[Tim Ferriss]

But I, but I would say the key takeaway, no matter what for everyone out there is these Next, call it three to five years. It is not about saying I am using ChatGPT, it's about saying I am playing with everything that is coming out and staying on top of that because it is so rapidly evolving for you to win, meaning have a deep understanding of where things are going. It's going to be about that play, that exploration, that using and picking at all the edges and trying all the different tools.

[Kevin Rose]

And what about not model tools? All of these companies, startups that have built things on top of these models. Yeah, Replit cursor.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

A lot of these scheduling ones are using any of those.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, Replit Bolt is another one. Those are great for non coders.

[Kevin Rose]

They're tools that allow you to basically create software.

[Tim Ferriss]

That's right.

[Kevin Rose]

Just for anyone who doesn't know, you could basically say, oh, build me a tool that does this thing and they'll build the tool.

[Tim Ferriss]

I would put them in the kind of like 80% camp in terms of them being good, like things still break and sometimes you run into a dead end where it can't fix it and you got to roll back the code. They're worth playing with and that like you can go there and say, hey, build me an E commerce website that does X, Y and Z, or make me an app that does this. It's worth seeing that you don't have to be a coder and you can just explain something via a prompt. And then actually with Bolton, then replit, you can click, one click deploy and make it a public website and then you can attach a domain to it. So there was one time basically I wanted to bridge two systems together and I just explained what I wanted to do. It built the tool for me, I deployed it and it worked and it was fine. It's not there yet in that like you're not building and deploying native iOS apps that are complex. For my coder friends, they love it because it gets them 80% of the way there and then they can fill out the rest on their own. Right. Because they know how to code.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

But in the next five years, that's going to be a solved problem. And I would not be studying computer science right now as a major. You know when people come up and say, hey, what should I be doing? I'm about to go into college computer science, to me I would say, yes. If you're more on the science side and you want to be pushing frontier models and you're math heavy less so if you just want to be a software engineer that writes iOS apps, because that's going to be a solved problem with AI.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, it's wild. I didn't do this, but I think if I bring the gift card site I built back online for the next rev, I was like, that's a perfect use case. I need something. Just does simple order fulfillment, generate a CSV, send an email to a person, all that kind of stuff. One that I played with. And it's funny because I also wouldn't want to be investing in a lot of the companies building consumer use cases because it seems like all of these model companies are just launching them. So I really liked this app, simple AI and you could download it and you could say, hey, call these five restaurants and see if they have a table for seven tonight for walk ins.

[Tim Ferriss]

We invested at that True Ventures. It's one of our companies. Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

So here's my question now. Gemini or Google just launched half these features.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

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

[Tim Ferriss]

Right.

[Kevin Rose]

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

[Tim Ferriss]

I think there's a couple things to consider here. One is that Google is a massive company, as is Microsoft, as is all the bigs that are in this space. They have a ton of resources. We've worked at Google together. We understand that the beast can be amazing in that they can sometimes spit out very unique, novel, fun things. Waymo. I remember when we checked out Google Glass for the first time way back in the day.

[Kevin Rose]

I still have my Google Glass.

[Tim Ferriss]

Do you really?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. I don't know if it works.

[Tim Ferriss]

They can spin up fun, wild little incubators internally that do cool things. But ultimately once you get outside of that bubble, I feel that the independent entrepreneur oftentimes is much more creative than the big corporation. I don't think it's a winner take all. Google may very well develop that feature and you could have three other startups that have built the same thing. And then Microsoft comes along, is like, damn, we needed that yesterday. $300 million, I'll take that company. And they just take it out of the market. Then you have a lot of other companies where it's important to remember that every time something is launched at a big meaning, like a Google, Microsoft, whatever, there are companies that do not and cannot host their data there because of either competitive reasons or whatever it may be. So I think the best example here is probably Dropbox. Everyone thought Dropbox was going to be completely crushed when Google Drive came out, right? And now there's Microsoft OneDrive, there's Box, there's all these other players. But like Dropbox is a beautiful third party outside of those ecosystems that is used by millions of people. So I just don't believe in a winner take all. If I was personally building in this space, I would try to avoid the areas where the bigs are going to go because they are very powerful and they can crush you if they put enough resources against it. Like for me, when I'm looking from an investment standpoint, I would much rather try and look at maybe mental health as applied to AI or drug discovery as applied to AI in some unique way, or just areas where if you're Google and Microsoft, it's not the immediate first thing that you're going to go after. They're going to get and Understand documents, email, like all of their core workspace assets are going to be AI enabled.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. The core things they do now. Book a flight.

[Tim Ferriss]

Exactly.

[Kevin Rose]

Make a reservation, things that are like front and center, find the directions, they're going to do that.

[Tim Ferriss]

And also they own the metal. And when you own the metal, it's hard to get consumers to switch. And when I own the metal, I mean they own the actual OS at the device level. So when users have Gemini in every single Android phone and it's bundled into everything that you do, it's very hard to convince consumers to switch to another party when they're paying. For the average consumer, there will be lots of people that do. It's just like any other service. Like, you know, remember when we used to get our Internet bundle with our TV bundle with our phone. Were you going to go out and get a third party phone service and you're like, no, everything's together. Like I'm paid that 75. Done. Right. And so Apple has that advantage. Even though Apple Intelligence sucks, it will not forever. Apple has a lot of money to throw at this problem. My gut tells me that Microsoft launches a phone that is Android powered, but Copilot Backend powered sometime in the next year.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay. A couple other tools that I've been using. So Zapier, there's all these people building these products that do various one off things, but Zapier has the ability to both tie into all of your apps and integrate LLMs. So you can basically say, oh, if I get an email with an attachment, put the attachment through some model, summarize it and send an email to me about it.

[Tim Ferriss]

Why would you use Zapier vs IFTTT vs make vs All the others?

[Kevin Rose]

To me, IFTTT is like a thing fast. I know MAKE exists and I've seen it, but I just, I'm already familiar with Zapier. I already have things tied into it. I understand the way it works.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

So there are probably multiple tools.

[Tim Ferriss]

I've heard good things about Make. I haven't tried it.

[Kevin Rose]

I have too, but it's like I'm already in this ecosystem. I already pay my subscription fee. But the ability to basically say if this thing happens, use a model and then do this other thing.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right, right.

[Kevin Rose]

If you see something on my calendar, look at the person that's on the invite and go online and do some research and add their bio to the calendar invite. Yeah, those kinds of things. There will be all these agents that do this, that tie into everything one day and there are one off Tools for each of these use cases that.

[Chris Hutchins]

You can pay for.

[Kevin Rose]

But I've also found that if you're willing to just roll your sleeves up a little, you could kind of dream up your own use case and create these things. And then Zapier has their own model or AI tool that's like, hey, build me a zap that does these things and it will tie in. So that's one where if you don't want to go play, there's one called Howie.

[Tim Ferriss]

I really like the idea that. And I've used this with Zapier, where you can describe what you want it to do with AI and then it goes and builds it. It's just a faster way to get these apps to work, which is exactly. They just added that in the last like few months, so it's been great.

[Kevin Rose]

So I had one. Whereas like in notion, we're tracking sponsors and then it can go create some draft invoices in stripe. You could just do all of these things. But now you have the ability to interject a model which is like, anytime I forward an email with an attachment, summarize it and respond. So if someone's like, hey, here's a book summary, what do you think? Forward it and I get a response, I don't even have to think about it. I could even set up a Gmail filter where if it's in this label, do this and yeah, so that kind of stuff.

[Tim Ferriss]

We have this tool on the VC side to let you know how crazy it's getting, where you can take any pitch deck you want and upload it to it and then it goes out and it finds competitors to that pitch deck. It tells you the total addressable market for what they're pitching. It tells you the strength of the founders and it crawls like LinkedIn and does all the other crazy stuff. And it gives you back this full blown summary overview article of all the due diligence that you would typically do within a minute and a half. It's nuts.

[Kevin Rose]

So I'd say, anyone listening, my goal is to go play with a lot more of these and then record a solo episode. Get it out pretty fast. Cause things are changing. With some feedback on what I've gotten from using them. I haven't used them all. So if anyone listening is like, oh, here's this tool I love. Yeah, send me an email podcast at all the hacks.com I'll play with it. We'll go a little deeper. Are there any other things that you're using on a daily basis or Weekly basis that are not the models themselves.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I mean, I like Snipt. I think Snipt is probably my favorite podcast app right now. And largely because what it does is they process every single podcast through an AI model and they break into logical chunks. So before, if you went to a podcast, I'm sure you've seen this. Like, you'd go to the show Notes and sometimes they would link up the actual areas of topics of conversation where you could jump into them. Now what they've done is because of AI, you can go in and they break into these different chunks. They're shareable, and then you can quickly save something. I'll give you an example. Back in the day, in Audible, I'd be listening to Audiobook and I'd be like, oh, that was a great little piece, right? And then you're like, you go back, you quick grab your phone and you click bookmark and it's select your in point and out point for the place that you want to share. And you're like, okay, in point, drag a little bit further. And it was like a five minute process to get that little clip that you wanted to save. And so what they do is they know that it takes you a few seconds to get to your phone and they're like, we think this was the clip that you really were curious about. And then I can press one tap to send it out to bear to notion to any of those other places. Now I have that saved, gives me a link to the actual audio piece of it as well. So I have the data in case I want to do something actionable on it. I can set it to do. I can do whatever I want there. And then I can click through to it and listen to it again or share it with a friend. And then because the snips are social, I can see this most snipped areas of the podcast. So I can be like, oh, Chris has launched a new all the Hacks episode. This one was snipped 300 times. And by the way, people are snipping the crap out of your episodes.

[Kevin Rose]

I know, I've seen it. I met the Snip founder and yeah, he's awesome. It was really interesting. I just don't know what happens with the future of podcasts when AI summarizes everything.

[Tim Ferriss]

The one thing that is nice, podcasts are quick, quickly going to convert into conversations, and it probably will be in your voice. So today you could launch your own app that is all the hacks. And you could be like, let me tell you about this great deal. And like, I. Hey, Chris, well, wait a second. Didn't you say a couple episodes ago that this was 7% off? And you would respond back being like, that's a great point, Kevin. I did say that a couple episodes ago. It was a minute number, blah, blah, blah. And that's all 11 labs powering your voice. And I would not know that it's not you. It's going to be wild. And that's going to be applied to books. That's going to be applied to everything. And this is just right around the corner.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. Okay. So the only other area of AI tools are you using anything to record meetings?

[Tim Ferriss]

Granola is the best. I like it because it sits outside of everything they are working on some functionality to let people know that you are recording them. Because you do have to get consent.

[Kevin Rose]

To record people in some states, right?

[Tim Ferriss]

In some states, yeah. But it's just generally good practice. But it sits outside of everything, meaning that you install at the OS level. So if you're doing a Google Meet a Zoom, any other meetings that you're doing anywhere, you can grab the FaceTime audio call. And so it detects the audio has happened and it launches as. Do you want to record this? And it creates these beautiful summaries, transcripts. You can ask questions of the meeting afterwards. And I think it's like 10 bucks a month. It's granola AI. I'm not an investor. I would love to have been, but I think it's one of the best out there.

[Kevin Rose]

There's one called Limitless. They both have a service like that that runs at the OS level. And then they're about to ship, like a pendant that you could wear throughout the day that would, like, turn on a light.

[Tim Ferriss]

That's kind of cool.

[Kevin Rose]

And you'd wear it all day to record everything you do. It would have a light. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Granola is going to have an app. So you can just launch the app. Like we were just sitting here having conversation. I could just launch and be like, boom. And then it would just record all of us. The only issue with Granola, I will say one thing. I tried Zoom's AI. I love it. I actually think it creates great summaries afterwards. And the nice thing about Zoom is because it is built into the app, it understands who's talking. So it'll be like, oh, Chris said this and not that. Granola wouldn't understand there's two distinct voices.

[Kevin Rose]

But it doesn't know who they are.

[Tim Ferriss]

It can try, because if there is a calendar invite and it's you and me. It will know one of us is Chris and one's Kevin. But if there's four people on the calendar, by sure shit doesn't know who's who, right? But Zoom does know. And so you can say, like Chris mentioned this, blah, blah blah to Zoom and then get much better data from Zoom if you're doing it built in.

[Chris Hutchins]

With what AI can do.

[Kevin Rose]

These days, I'm a little worried about how sophisticated scams will soon be.

[Chris Hutchins]

In fact, that last sentence wasn't even me, it was generated with AI. So I am very proactive about making sure all my personal data, whether it's phone numbers, addresses, emails, isn't out there making me or my family a target. And thanks to data brokers, these terrible companies in the business of sharing and selling our data, it's easier than ever.

[Kevin Rose]

To be a target.

[Chris Hutchins]

When I first looked, I found hundreds of pieces of our personal info online. But I quickly started using Delete Me to automatically get all that data removed. And I am excited. They're a sponsor today. DeleteMe is an amazing service because they don't just remove your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites, but they'll continuously scan for new data that shows up and get that removed as well. In fact, on average, they find and remove over 2,2000 pieces of personal data for a customer in their first two years. And it's not just for you. You can now extend your protection and peace of mind to anyone you want within your Delete Me account, which I've done for my wife and both sets of our parents. So if you want to get your personal information removed from the web, go to allthehacks.com deleteme and get 20% off a plan for you or your entire family. Again, that's allthehacks.com delete delete me this episode is brought to you by Facet. I'm sure you've heard that time in the market beats timing the market, and I totally agree. But that doesn't make it any easier.

[Kevin Rose]

To put your money to work.

[Chris Hutchins]

I get it. It can be overwhelming, which is why it can be super helpful to have someone to work with. In fact, when I shut down my financial planning firm a few years ago, I also had to do a ton of research on who to recommend to our clients. And we landed on Facet. Facet makes professional financial advice accessible to everyone, and instead of charging a percentage of your assets, they charge a flat annual membership fee. With Facet, you get access to a team of CFP professionals and specialists providing guidance across retirement planning, tax strategy, estate planning and more. So head to allthehacks.com facetfacet to learn more about which membership option is best for you. That's AllTheHacks.com facet sponsored by facet facet wealth inc. Is an SEC registered investment advisor headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. This is not an offer to sell securities or investment financial, legal or tax advice. Facet specific investment management services vary depending on chosen service level. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. I just want to thank you Kwik for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com deals so please.

[Kevin Rose]

Consider supporting those who support us so a lot of AI tools changing every day. You talked about your house. I want to come back because I got a question from someone that was about, you know, in light of the recent fires, what should I be doing to make sure that if I'm ever in a situation like you were in, I can be prepared? I did my research, I have some thoughts, but I'm curious. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your experience of the whole thing.

[Tim Ferriss]

So our house was taken by the LA fires and at the end of the day just grateful that family safe, dog safe, all that stuff is good. Grabbed a handful of things but in retrospect when you look back at what was lost, it was the sentimental stuff at the end of the day that I think is the biggest hit. All the other crap is just stuff. And honestly sometimes it's nice to not have that stuff in a really weird way. To go back and have a mental reboot on what is important to you from things that I consume and hold on to is a very refreshing thing to go through. And I would say that the things I wish I would have done. One thing I was very lucky to have done was that I took all my photos that I had in a box about six months ago and sent them out to a third party service and had them all scanned in. These were old slides that my dad had, stuff like that. So I have all that stuff saved on the on amazing cloud drive which is huge. Never took photos of my first Father's Day cards and stuff for my kids where they were spelling their names wrong and stuff like that. That stuff hits me hard. Lost that stuff. Never took photos of the stuff that my dad left me. He made me a little jewelry box when I was a little kid he made me a little desk. He's a woodworker. He liked doing that kind of stuff. Maybe a little desk that I used to sit at that was lost. Things like that, you look back on it and you're like, there was no way I could have carried that desk out, nor would I have. So I would have lost it regardless. But it would have been nice to have had a photo of it in a strange way, just to be like, oh, yeah, that was that object. Just going around taking photos that are huge. Those types of sentimental things. My wife lost a lot of stuff. Her parents are both passed and so she lost almost everything from that side, which was really devastating for her. Some key takeaways, though, that are important for everyone. I have my crypto keys outside of my house, which is great. Pounded in steel in a safety deposit box. The safety deposit box was right down the street and the bank burned and like everything burned around it. The keys are fine. But move this a little further away. If you're going to have backups where your jewelry and your other things, you know, you're moving stuff off site, like the important items. Don't take it to the bank. That's five blocks away. If you are in a place where there is that severe devastation, you want that to be miles away, not necessarily right next door. So that is a good takeaway. The insurance policy stuff is huge. Just getting additional riders on certain things. We had state coverage because we couldn't get coverage for our home for the longest time, which means we were severely underinsured. Got really lucky. And then I kept just like pushing and shopping around and eventually found someone to pick up and add additional coverage about three months before the fires happened. So we were very lucky and fortunate in that way. But those were the big things. And then just honestly keeping the receipts because you do have to itemize stuff.

[Kevin Rose]

Afterwards, does that mean you're going through? And I had 17 T shirts and 12 pairs of socks, and here's where I bought them. Like, at what level did it get to?

[Tim Ferriss]

So basically what they're going to do is you're going to have a dwelling coverage and then you're going to have an inside of the dwelling coverage. Right. Your items. Right.

[Kevin Rose]

Let me give a quick run through because I did a little bit of research on my own policy. So there's four types of coverage that usually come coverage. A is dwelling.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

And that's to rebuild your house. And a lot of policies have an extended coverage. So let's say your home's worth a million dollars. You could insure it for a million and then you could get like a 25% boost or a 50% boost. So on USAA it's called Home Protector Plus.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And one tip that I want to share, which I'm sure people as they rebuild in LA are going to realize. I know a lot of people are like, a house is worth a million.

[Chris Hutchins]

So I don't need to get a.

[Kevin Rose]

Full million in coverage. I can get like 700 grand in coverage and then get the 50% boost, which will take it to 1,050,000. And so they use the Home Protector to give that boost. One of the realities I know is going to happen in L A is however much you thought it cost to build a house in L A is going to be significantly more expensive right now because the shortage of supplies, the.

[Tim Ferriss]

Shortage of builders, 20 to 30% unchanged orders and everything else alone is going to be on top of that for sure.

[Kevin Rose]

So I would encourage people not to rely on that extended dwelling coverage to get to the value of their home, which I know a lot of people do. I would encourage people to insure the value of the home and then have the extended coverage be the, oh, I forgot to increase my policy with inflation. Oh, something happened, more natural disaster and the cost is all gone up.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And so that's one important takeaway.

[Tim Ferriss]

Also I would add on top of that, it's something that's important to consider and talk to your insurance agent about this is that we had this additional external hardscapes like coverage, which was like a little extra policy that went above and beyond the actual dwelling coverage. And where that came into play for us is when your house burns to absolute. Just nothing you've got. I had lithium ion powerwalls and shit and all that stuff that is just toxic in the ground. It's your responsibility to remove all that rubble, to detoxify it. And you have to actually have a third party come in and certify that the ground is now toxin free. So they go down about a foot and look for toxins. And that policy for us covered all of that removal and resurfacing of the land to make it livable. So even if you don't want to rebuild, you have to sell that land in that working condition and you just want to make sure that coverage is going to be there for you.

[Kevin Rose]

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

[Tim Ferriss]

Right.

[Kevin Rose]

And for our policy, you can choose between 50 and 75% of your dwelling limits. For some reason, all of the coverage BCD are usually sliders based on your dwelling. You can't choose an arbitrary number additional writers. Yes, yes. But the average policy with State Farm, with USAA, you don't say, I want 400,000 of this. You typically. And every insurance provider is different. You say, I want 50% of my dwelling coverage.

[Tim Ferriss]

So let me give you a little hack here on the C stuff. So my agent said, see the inside items? Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Personal belongings.

[Tim Ferriss]

Personal belongings. He described it as this, which I thought was a perfect analogy for it is if I were to take your home and pick it up off the ground, I were to shake it, anything that falls out would be considered those personal belongings. Now, I had, probably to my detriment, installed speakers in my ceilings and all that stuff. And he's like, those are hard attached. Those are attached to your home, like in a way that you couldn't remove them without causing damage to the home. So we have to include that in the main dwelling. And if you hit your cap there, then they're not covering the speakers. So I hit my cap on the dwelling. So they're like, oh, you're out. The cost of the speakers, the electronics are related to that stuff that it was hard mounted. So it's actually to your benefit to get like sound bars now.

[Kevin Rose]

If it's mounted to the wall, they'll.

[Tim Ferriss]

Be okay with that if it's mounted the wall. But just remember, if you're going and doing that dream 7.1 surround sound system where it's all put into the wall and all that, they are not going to include that as a personal blog. Part of your dwelling is part of your dwelling. Sauna, part of your dwelling. There's all these little things, home automation systems. Part of your dwelling. Just always think about that. Do I really?

[Kevin Rose]

Kitchen upgrades, all the fridge, the ovens, all those remodels.

[Tim Ferriss]

Do I need the Creston system? Or there's all these fancy systems. As you start to go up the chain for home automation, my next place, eventually, wherever it is I'm just living in an apartment right now, is not going to have all that crap. Screw that.

[Kevin Rose]

Or you could just have more dwelling coverage.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. But also, honestly, dude, it's like, it's just more to worry about. There's all these little micro things that sit with you like One of my, my colleagues was talking to me about how do you rethink about buying stuff back, right? And one of the things I realized is I would do a lot of donations where I'd go every year I'd be like, oh, it's spring cleaning time, let's go and donate a bunch of stuff. It's mostly clothes and things like that, whatever. But there are these things that like if you I were to look around this room, I probably could pick out like five or six different things where, especially electronics, like if you donate something that's $250 or $300, like it's going to sit in a Goodwill and no one's going to actually use it. They're not going to know how to install it. Like it's probably going to be wasted, right? Or you can put on ebay. Do you want to take the time to ebay all this stuff? It's a pain in the ass sometimes, right? So I was sitting on all this stuff that I one day would ebay that got all destroyed, right? And I don't need any of that stuff back. Like literally almost everything I'm wearing today was donated by a friend. And I'm like thinking of just really cutting back to the minimal lifestyle. Man, we don't need all this crap. There's so much stuff we buy. We don't need like just so much. I don't know. For me, it was a great mental reboot of what's important in life. Especially as Americans. We're just over consumers. I was a sucker for the freaking Instagram ad where it comes up and it's like, hey, this is a better all steel aluminum way to hold your travel pills. I'm like, oh, that looks like a cool looking case. You know, buy random dumb shit.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, we don't need those things.

[Tim Ferriss]

No.

[Kevin Rose]

Ruth emailed me and asked, what's one of your favorite physical items or purchases? Is there something that was an expensive thing that you're like, you know what, in our house now or our next house, I'm going to do that. There's a lot of stuff you said you're going to get rid of. Is there something where you're like, that thing's still important?

[Tim Ferriss]

No. Do you think of anything?

[Kevin Rose]

So here were some of the things that I thought about. One was just a good WI fi system.

[Tim Ferriss]

But that's cheap, that's not expensive anymore. You can get a good Wi Fi 7 system for a few hundred dollars. Last time I went a little crazy and then I had a bombproof WI fi system and I wouldn't do that again.

[Kevin Rose]

I used to have the buy a router and get an extender and then did the run ethernet to have WI fi access points in different rooms. So you have really good speed everywhere. I thought that was worth it. It's probably all in under a thousand, but probably over 500.

[Tim Ferriss]

But I think that's worth it still.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm talking about for the ten thousand dollar home theater.

[Tim Ferriss]

Anytime anything crosses a couple grand, you really have to sit back and say, did I need that? Like I had a bunch of bottles of wine that were sitting there and they were nice bottles of wine and they sat there for years and they aged and all that good stuff. And all those were lost and not covered because we hit our policy max and so we didn't have any more coverage there. And in my mind I'm like, guess what? If I really think someday I have an event to celebrate and I want a nice bottle of wine, I could just go buy a nice bottle of wine that day and be like, there it is. I don't have to own it. I can just decide when I want it. And guess what? Those same dollars over the last decade would have been a hell of a lot better in pick your fun crazy asset like Bitcoin or whatever else.

[Kevin Rose]

Or even vti.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, exactly. I would have paid for the bottle three times over if it had just been in vti.

[Kevin Rose]

That's amazing. Yeah. My list of things that I, I really like, none of them were that expensive. They were like, I really like having a desktop computer in my office so that I just don't need to plug in the laptop. I just run to the office. Yeah, yeah, but that's hundreds of dollars. There's no really extravagant thing. And when I thought about all the items in the house after you went through what you went through, I was like, oh yeah, I would be okay losing most of them. But to the question we, well, I'll do the last one, which was the coverage. D is the loss of use, which is usually some percentage of your dwelling. And it covers at least my policy a year or in a catastrophe, two years of staying somewhere else.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, that's huge.

[Kevin Rose]

And so you're seeing that it's covering your rental right now.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And so that's great. So going back to the question on personal belongings, one of the things that I've done and everyone I know says you should do is walk around your house every six months and just videotape everything so you have some record of all your Stuff.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. It's not for the insurance company, by the way. It can be as a backup. I'm sure every company varies, but Cincinnati Insurance, which is who I'm with, which they've been a great provider, they didn't require that. They wanted just receipts. They wanted receipts and show that, like I had bought said thing. But it is a good trigger to remind you what you actually owned.

[Kevin Rose]

Now, what if you didn't have receipts, though? What if you couldn't find the receipts from someone?

[Tim Ferriss]

Well, I mean, everything's email now, so you're.

[Kevin Rose]

Would a credit card statement count?

[Tim Ferriss]

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

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. Like for a great example, when we bought this house, we negotiated that they leave in One of the TVs that they put in to stage it. So I don't have the receipt for that tv.

[Chris Hutchins]

I don't even know if it's in the contract.

[Kevin Rose]

We were just like, hey, if you can leave the tv, having a video of it might help prove, yes, there was a TV on this wall. Do I know the exact model for expensive stuff? I've been told write down the model, the serial number, that kind of stuff. But I would just say that is helpful both to jog your memory of all the stuff you own. And then second, some insurance companies, if you don't have receipts, it's good to be able to show them, hey, what is this thing on your wall? What is it worth? And there is a coverage that I added called replacement cost coverage, which basically doesn't depreciate all this stuff. So it's like if you bought a TV for 500 bucks, well, it's five years. What is it worth? And this policy, this kind of coverage that I added is we're not going to try to figure out what it's worth. We're just going to look at what it costs to buy it now.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right, right.

[Kevin Rose]

And so that was really big. And then one thing that's important on the personal belongings, there are a lot of things that have caps on coverage. Money is one. Gold is one. Jewelry, guns, watches, silver, gold, all the stuff. If you have anything that is really expensive or that falls into any of the categories, I said you need separate riders.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't even know if you can get a separate rider on money, but if you.

[Tim Ferriss]

I didn't have Any of that, by the way.

[Kevin Rose]

And gold. I know you had gold in your safe.

[Tim Ferriss]

Funny, I called my wife on the phone, I said, get out of the house. I said, first go look and see if how close the fire is. She went outside, is like, it's freaking close. We have this little tiny safe. And I was like, just grab everything that's in there. And it was a small little thing. I had one gold bar, one little gold, tiny gold bar. Cuz you told me to buy it. But other than that, like I just had, you know, a few watches that were high value watches and you know, a couple really sentimental ones that my dad had left me. And we didn't have writers or any of that stuff. So my wife left her wedding ring. We didn't have a writer on that. That burned in the fire. She left her wallet there with all her stuff. She had a bunch of her jewelry that was some pretty nice stuff. And all that stuff was obviously lost. So.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay, super helpful last question that I think we're going to cover here because, gosh, we have so many things, but work can be done from anywhere. Someone asked me, like, you record a podcast, you can work anywhere. Why are you living in a really.

[Chris Hutchins]

High cost of living place?

[Kevin Rose]

And so my reaction, so I talked about this with Amy because once she joined the podcast full time, I was like, we live in one of the most expensive places in the world. Why do we do it? How did we evaluate where we wanted to live? Some of our criteria were we wanted access to good health care. So Amy has the BRCA2 mutation. She's gone through the double mastectomy. Like she wanted to be in a city near good health care. That narrowed it down a little.

[Tim Ferriss]

Do you really need to be in the city though? Because you could fly into anywhere.

[Kevin Rose]

You're right, you're right. And I think this is why I wanted to bring this question up with you. Because all of these things seems to be somewhat justifications for we're already here and it's a lot of inertia to move because we've already bought a house, we've already done these things. So I'm going to ask you.

[Tim Ferriss]

I can live almost anywhere. Honestly, I'd love to live in Tokyo if I had to pick any city. But there's a lot of work here for people that are in the technology industry. So obviously the Bay Area is huge. La. I don't think I would want to stay there long term, but we'll see. That's a discussion to be had with your partner.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, for me, it ultimately came down to one important thing, was let's not think about this decision of where we live based on just the cost. Because I could make an argument that will be very controversial, that the Bay Area for someone like me and someone like my wife is the cheapest place to live in the country. Because the kinds of careers we went into, business development, partnerships, starting companies, joining early stage companies, investing in startups, like all of those things. The opportunity we've had from just serendipity of living here has generated more returns than the savings we would have gotten living somewhere else.

[Tim Ferriss]

100. But you're at a point now where you've hit escape velocity.

[Kevin Rose]

I agree. So then the question is, what would you do with the money you would save living somewhere else? And is that savings worth what you get living here? So what you get living in the Bay Area is you get great weather. From the weather I want. I'm sure there are people that are like, I want it to know all the time. This isn't great for them. For us, the weather is exactly what we want. The schools are great. The people we are around, our friend group have similar beliefs, similar idea. Like we enjoy the conversations we have. People are super curious. They're always doing weird, interesting stuff. The community is great. There's excellent food. You know, we're close to an airport that has direct flights everywhere. So all those things come together. It's like the Bay Area is a great place to live, but it's expensive. But what would we use that savings for? And is that savings better than living where you want to live? It's tough. And we have half a dozen friends, one, a couple, I don't know if you do that, move to Puerto Rico and stuff. And I talked to this guy who lives in Puerto Rico, sold his company. The taxes when you live in Puerto Rico are great. Like you just don't pay them. And he's like, this is amazing. I was like, do you like Puerto Rico? He's no, I don't love living in Puerto Rico, but I save so much money. This was like a nine figure exit, right? So maybe after taxes it's eight figures. But this is a person with so much money living half the year and he says he's probably going to be.

[Chris Hutchins]

There for like seven or eight years.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm like, so you're putting at least. Because you got to be there more than 50 of the year, like 4 or 5 of what is probably like 50 great adult years of your life, 10% of your adult life, where you can do all the things you've given up to save some money on taxes, but you already have 50 plus million dollars. And obviously most people listening is don't have $50 million. But I just push people to consider moving to save money on taxes to a place that you don't love is not often, in my opinion, going to be the best outcome. Now, if you're living somewhere where you can't afford to put food on the table, you can't afford to provide for your family, I think you might be better off living somewhere where you can do those things because the stress of that circumstance is something I can't even imagine. But when I see people say I'm going to leave California to save 10% of my taxes when they already have a ton of money and they're like, the only bummer is I don't love where I'm going, I'm like, do you have money? Decide how you want to use it. And someone once told me everywhere you live is the same, you just pay it in different ways. You pay it in taxes, some places you pay it in weather, some places you pay it in the communities and basically pay in healthcare. So I really like living where we're living. I like the neighborhood we live in. I like the schools, the people. And I'm in a situation financially where I am not hurting to live here. And so until we find a better place or want a different experience, this is great. That said, if we were in your situation, there's no inertia holding us back. You're not tied down at all. You don't have things to move, a house that you've built. So how do you think about this?

[Tim Ferriss]

For me, I value quality of life pretty much above everything else. I am always the type of person that would rather pay more taxes to be in a place that has high quality food, a diverse culture of people, not just a monoculture of strip malls and things like that and interesting people to hang around. It's a great question to ask is like, where is home? LA doesn't feel like home to me. I loved where we lived. I thought it was very neighborhoody. I enjoyed going trick or treating with my kids. You know, I grew up doing those old school, quote unquote American things like the lighting of the Christmas trees in a community area. And we used to go to church and do the candle lights, church service and riding your bikes in the neighborhood with your buddies across the street. And when the street lights came on, I'd have to go home. And I loved that. Part of LA for me. La. I've never been a fan of the crazy high end wealth neighborhoods where you go and it's just like sterile and it feels like it's very. I don't want to classify a whole neighborhood but like there's a lot of drugs and cocaine usage and all kinds of horrible things that happen. But there's also some really nice parts of la. Like LA is a very much a choose your own adventure. Depending on what you want to do, you can go have an amazing multi Michelin star restaurant or eat at a crazy dive bar or little hole in the wall Thai restaurant. That's amazing. And you can go up and down and left and right and that's one of the things that it's cool about la, but it's with all the natural disasters and just the infrastructure issues and the homeless problems and the safety around, some of that stuff makes it really reconsider everything. I was just here in the bay and like there's so much excitement around everything that's going on from a technology standpoint and me being such a geek, I love interacting with people around here, so it makes a lot of sense. San Diego looks pretty cool too. We got a couple of friends that live out there. It's a little bit more chill. You get probably a 15 to 20% reduction in terms of cost of living out there. Great weather, decent food, getting better and not the crazy fault lines that you get in LA or up here in terms of potential earthquake issues. I mean still obviously present but not as bad as la. So you know, there's a lot to think through there. But I'm with you in that I'm not going to Puerto Rico. I'd much rather spend the money on taxes and have less money, but have a life that is a place that you actually want to enjoy your time there.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, actually I have one more and this is an interesting one. When all these things are happening right, you move to a city where everyone's left. In the last election, some of our friends went far right. You've gone from no money to having money. How do you stay you. Because some people we know completely changed and then went off in their own world and you're really grounded. I feel like you are the same you that I've known for a long time. And so I thought about this myself and I was like, things that really helped me just stay who I am are having friends and partners that will just call you on anything, like when you're not being true to who you are, like making sure that you have real friendships. I'd rather have a small number of real friends that will call me on my shit than like a bunch of friends that I can go out to dinner with. But they're not that deep. I think I have a pretty healthy appreciation of not caring what other people think. Mark Manson's subtle art of not giving. Like I just don't care about if people think some things I do are stupid because I really enjoy going down these rabbit holes. I think an awareness of what you care about in the world. So I just did an episode that will probably have come out by the time this comes out or will be with Simon Sinek about part of it was finding your why, finding your purpose. That was super helpful. And then I've taken a little bit of time to just like write down my core beliefs. I've talked about em, I've thought about em, and I'm like, these are the things that are really important to me and just the awareness of what they are makes it easier to hold them through. And then the last one I wrote down on this list was I've gotten really transparent recently, not necessarily publicly, but amongst friends and even acquaintances about things that are usually taboo, like talking about money openly. I first broke the mold with this, with one friend who was asking me these questions and I was like, God, the answer to these questions would be way easier to help this person if I just could talk about them with real experiences. But it would require me disclosing my net worth and my income. And then I just asked him this question that is probably very strange. I said, okay, how much money do you think I have and how much money do you think I make? And he was like, that's a really weird question. And the answer. And I was like, oh, he was within like 15%. So it's like if most people probably have the right assumptions. And so it allowed me to break down these barriers of what I wasn't talking about and then I could have real conversations about all these things. And I think it's just forced me to not be a fake version of myself. And I find that you are that. But I didn't know if you do anything to keep true to who you.

[Tim Ferriss]

Well, I mean we've seen a lot of our friends flip their beliefs largely charged by the political environment that's happened over the last call 12 months or whatever. And for me, I don't play in that world at all. And so if I can stay true to myself on that front, then I'm pretty good and Then also I think the key piece is like, at the end of the day, the most important thing is what kind of you came back to, which is like these real friendships and these deep friendships where we say stuff that's slightly offensive to each other all the time, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. You know what I mean? Like, we can call each other on our. And if you run into someone that is going to be offended by the fun loving nature of joking and pushing people's buttons and doing the things that you and I typically do with each other, then that's probably just someone I don't need to have as a close friend. It's not to say I don't want people to challenge me and some of my assumptions, but it's just like I try to surround myself with people that can push me in new and unique ways, but also accept me for who I am. That makes sense.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. I don't know how we're both lucky to be that naturally. I think a little bit it's just like, we know who we are. I think both of us grew up in that kind of middle high school era being kind of nerds. Like, I don't think I've ever had a time in my childhood where I was the popular kid. And I think what's hard is when you're young and you're the popular kid, you don't want to lose it, so you want to do the things that make you cool. I just wasn't like, I was not that kid. And it's not that I was like the reject, but I was never the head of the class kind of person. And so it forced me to just be who I was. And this is something I think about for our girls and you probably do for yours. It's like when you're younger, it's so much harder to just be who you are because of all the social pressures. And I think I was a little bit out of the spotlight as a kid.

[Tim Ferriss]

It's a great point. Like, one of the things I realized in general is that when you grow up in an environment where you're not popular and you don't have a lot of money, you tend to look at the world through the lens of everything is gravy. From this point forward, when I lost all these belongings at the house and it was literally all of my stuff. Everything. Everything except for I called you and.

[Kevin Rose]

You were like, I don't have clothes, I don't have a computer.

[Tim Ferriss]

I didn't have anything. Any. I have my cell phone and just my clothes I was wearing. That was it. That's all I had because I wasn't at the house at the time. I couldn't even grab my own stuff because I wasn't there. I was out at a meeting. But when you come from nothing in that I saw my dad go through bankruptcy when I was a kid. We had dinners that were delivered to us because we couldn't afford Thanksgiving like these happened to our family. Everything has been a blessing and if you can just hold on to that peace then I don't know man, you just can't lose yourself to the chasing and desires of more is going to make me happier. I think the happiness comes from the internal work that you do. It's the therapy sessions that I go to, it's the meditation practice that I have that is core to what I do. That's the stuff that's making me a more well rounded individual. It's not the acquisition of more and more stuff.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm glad that you are who you are and that we've been good friends. Yeah, I love doing this.

[Chris Hutchins]

So thanks for joining.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, it was awesome to be here today. This is a lot of fun questions. We gotta do this again.

[Chris Hutchins]

Such a great episode. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please consider clicking that Follow or Subscribe button if you haven't already. It really helps us out and there's no better way to support us than doing that. Or sharing the show with a friend, friend, colleague or family member or even.

[Kevin Rose]

A random stranger is totally appreciated.

[Chris Hutchins]

Also, links to everything in this and all other episodes are at allthehacks.com where you can also find all the deals we find as well as links to the top credit card bonuses. Finally, if you have any feedback, want to get in touch or share a question you have for a future mailbag episode? You can email [e-mail] that's it for this this week.

[Kevin Rose]

I'll see you next week.