7 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. As Kevin put it, '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.' 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 Hutchkins. 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. Kevin, how are you feeling about how 2025 went?
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 asks him about plans. He says, 'Everybody has a plan till you get punched in the face.' And it's 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.'
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 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.
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. 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 and I say no actually these were the very important things to save which is largely around the 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, 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. 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 regift 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 that is very important. And what that immediately led me to do was re-evaluate and really take seriously for the first time some very important things in my life which was like you mentioned, I quit alcohol for 6 months which I had never done more than 3 weeks for the last 20 years. So some very important life changes 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 are the essentials that are must-haves of my life versus just kind of these arbitrary nice to haves, if that makes sense at all.
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 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, it's not cancerous, but you kind of need to get it out now.' And so between October and December, 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. It feels like Q4 was wild and we're just trying to come out from it. At the same moment we decided, we've had Opairs for 5 years and we decided that if we're going to 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 child care, 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 3 to 2, she's totally inundated with other projects with family. And I'm like, 2026 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.
When I think about someone like you and the shows that you do with the podcast and all the hacks and 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 a thousand times. You've gotten a lot better at it. 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 you're like dude you don't need to, there's some things you can let go. And so one of the things I've noted about you in the last year is that I feel like we're both in this stage of life, we're getting older, 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 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 curveballs at you all the time. So, where does your energy go in this new year?
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 transcribe it. So, I went back at the episode I did that was kind of similar to this last year. I was like, what did I want to get accomplish? And this was both professional and personal. And then, 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 age where 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 follow up on them. So I was like, we're going to cut ultraprocessed 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 asked me to list everything, didn't know.
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 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.
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 need to step up my ability to save money and you're like I need to step up my ability to spend it.
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. I remember talking to someone, a 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 why I would never pay $30 for an extra seat. And it's like really, they just never were able 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 Maggiulli created or at least wrote about in his book. He wrote this book, The Wealth Ladder. And I think he calls it the 0.01% rule. And it's like on any given day, if you spend 0.01% of your net worth, it doesn't matter. So like if you've got a million dollars, 0.01% would be $100. So if you have $10 million, you can spend $1,000. Like just try to stop worrying about things over a threshold. And I love rules because 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?
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 a hundred times in a day is crazy.
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 are 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.
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The 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 LA 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 $1,000 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 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 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 our kids are going to do ski lessons for a day because they're really excited about skiing with other kids. And are ski lessons cheap? No, they're not. But 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, kids seem to listen way better to teachers than parents.
They're not going to 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 gonna just spend all of our money and be on the street.
Should we get into resolutions? Should we talk about if you do them or what you want to do this year?
So about 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 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 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?
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 ruin your credit with you like a real sad face all grumpy because you have to do those ridiculous thumbnails. I know there's something amazing about seeing your friends in the dumbass 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 and 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 of Silicon Valley was, I moved out there in 2000 and I didn't know what venture capital was. I didn't know what Sand Hill 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 the 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, very early at writing about the benefits of owning your own enterprise and not taking any outside venture capital. And he's someone that 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 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 how much baking soda goes in a recipe, but more so around 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. I wanted to backfill that information and understand the bare minimum because I know that I was talking about investing in NVIDIA on Tim Ferriss's 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 when 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 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.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny. We have a pre-lit 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 new tree. 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 3 hours and diagnose a Christmas tree? It would be a total waste of money.
And you probably just would have let that person do that thing while you did something else. 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 meet 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.
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. 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 a 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 five years ago, we were like, 'Nope, no chance.' Now, go build it.
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.
None of them did it. Yeah.
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 you will stand up something. Will it be perfect?' No, but over the next 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 work through the problem with you, you don't even have to look at a single line of code. I have 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, right? 6 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 a wild time to be alive.
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 the software is what they're calling it. Yeah.
Yeah. 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.
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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 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 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. Everyone has this impostor 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'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 AMAs 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 master class. And I think one of the things that drained me was kind of feeling like I've tapped out the topics for a master class. 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, I'm not going to 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 friendships with that community and that really evolved this year. I'm just running through I wrote this list scaling things. So, I love dabbling. I love trying to optimize everything, but this year I went really deep on like let's dominate 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 trying a hundred things. I love knowing about them, but if you wanted me to go on reselling electronics and doing buyers 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. 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 two days later I'm like well did you do the thing and they're like no it wasn't a big deal. It's just really soul sucking to spend like 5 hours helping someone research something and then they're like oh yeah we decided 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, my mom says, 'Oh, like we're thinking about air purifiers.' And next thing you know, I spent 14 hours researching air purifiers.
Did you end up getting the one I told 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, in that case, it paid out. But sometimes someone just has a question. They're not asking you to do a research project. Then 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?
Yeah, I mean on my side 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 it 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?' 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, often times 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 2 workout. I want to do sauna, which is also kind of borderline zone 2, which is really healthy for you. There's so many studies to back that up. And then I also want to lift weights and meditation. So those are four things. And one of the things that is 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 than 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 need to do the shower after the workout.' So I'll hit that check box, got my meditation done first because I don't want to do that post sauna because my heart rate would be elevated. So I 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. 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 3 or 4:00 and I've just been jamming on computers, yes, I've had a good time and that's been additive to my energy, but I don't have that backup reserve to go and do the physical energy. So, front loading it 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.
Is it part of that early morning routine and then get into my work which can go into the night?
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?
Well, I would say peace of mind for me has been huge, especially post-fires. And peace of mind actually comes from organization, I've realized. 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 all my financial docs and everything I have going on, it's a mess to be honest. If I go in there, it's just docs everywhere, half-completed things. And I've realized that then I have notes spilling over into my Notes docs, and then I use Standard Notes for some other notes, I use Bear for some stuff because there's some legacy stuff there on Bear. 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. So I'll give an example. Over the last couple days, the holiday break has been great because you can change your MX records on your DNS and do things where it doesn't matter if your email doesn't work for 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 1Password because I know there's a ton of passwords in there that are horrible that 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 inbox zero for my entire productivity stack and really have the two or three tools that are just essential, 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.
Yeah, there's this great video that Jesse Sler 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 creating physical things. And so, we ordered a 3D printer for the holidays. That was like a family Christmas gift. It hasn't arrived yet, but I have all these ideas about things that I want to create physically and involve the kids and 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 directories online that are like someone has already had that thing and created a thing to organize it in a perfect way. Whether it's cords under your desk or a hook to hold this specific thing, it's all been created and I'm really interested in organizing. And this came off the heels of that Jesse Hitsler 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. 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 for a given reason, donate it. Regift 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? Everything that you own, whether you know it or not, is a micro kind of 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.' And so I found that the one liberating thing from not having anything is that all of a sudden all that weight is lifted off you. And I don't want to give that away to clutter, to just keep 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 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.
