Simple Hacks To Optimise Your Life | Chris Hutchins (All The Hacks Podcast)

Chris Hutchins 0:00 I need to save so much money that I don't have to work a job I hate. Work is not fun. I don't like working. So if I don't like working, what am I gonna do for the rest of my life? I just got laid off. I feel like there's a lot of people in this situation. What if we put together a conference where a bunch of laid-off people could all share ideas? So I ended up saying, "Well, I'm not gonna get a job, so I might as well see what happens." I got the chance to go do venture capital, which I think was the most fascinating job ever. I just get to go see what people are building, listen, understand, invest in the things that I believed in, and watch them evolve and grow, and that was amazing. So I think my outlook on money is I don't want to spend it if I can avoid it, but I do wanna have great experiences. I think that's, like, the whole theme of my life is trying to find ways to upgrade your life, your money, your travel, everything, while spending less and saving more.

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Ali Abdaal 6:04 Chris, thank you so much for coming on.

Chris Hutchins 6:05 Thanks for having me.

Ali Abdaal 6:05 This is fun. We're meeting in, in real life for the first time 'cause you're here in London. So-

Chris Hutchins 6:08 I know. We talked about doing this, and I was like, "Well, I probably won't make it to London."

Ali Abdaal 6:11 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 6:11 And then I was like, "Hey, I'm coming to London."

Ali Abdaal 6:12 Hey, I'm in London, and we're recording this at, like, 10:00 PM.

Chris Hutchins 6:14 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 6:15 So this is gonna be super fun. Um, I'd love to get started with... So you've got this podcast, All The Hacks, which I discovered because you interviewed Tim Ferriss on Tim Ferriss's podcast-

Chris Hutchins 6:24 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 6:24 ... about growing a podcast. And I listened to that episode. I was like, A, that's really cool that all the, all the tips about growing a podcast. But then I was like, "Who the hell is this guy?"

Chris Hutchins 6:31 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 6:32 Like, how did he interview Tim Ferriss about growing a podcast on Tim Ferriss's podcast? And then you managed to randomly email me, like, some weeks after I listened to that. I was like, "Oh, I know this guy." And so that's how we, how we kind of, kinda got connected. But I guess if we rewind the clock, like, how did, how did we get here? How did you come to be in this place where you're recording podcasts about hacks and stuff and being friends with people like Tim Ferriss, and how did we end up just kinda talking-

Chris Hutchins 6:56 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 6:56 ... talking here?

Chris Hutchins 6:57 I mean, it's fo- so interesting. My whole life I've always kind of been that person that's like, "Ah, maybe there's another way to do this. Maybe there's another way to get a deal." Uh, I've always been a fan of optimizing everything. Like, in high school, I wanted to order... I went to boarding school, and I really wanted to, like, get pizza like everyone else did at night. Everyone would order a pizza for delivery. But my parents didn't give me, like, an unlimited budget on their credit card. So I would order pizza, I would sell seven slices, and I would get one for myself, and I'd make a little profit. If I was hungry, I'd sell six and eat two. And so, you know, I was kind of, like, trying to find a way to get the experience that I wanted without having to spend the money. And that was really like... I had those little things. I never knew it was gonna be a real thing. And then after college, I got a job in investment banking, not because I wanted to be an investment banker, but because I didn't know what I wanted to do, and everyone said investment banking-

Ali Abdaal 7:44 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 7:44 ... is the best job.

Ali Abdaal 7:45 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 7:45 And I was like, "Well, I don't have time to figure out what I wanna do, so I'm gonna do the thing everyone told me was the best job." And I was like, "Ah, this job is not for me."

Ali Abdaal 7:51 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 7:51 It's not, it's not the kind of job that, like, entrepreneurs enjoy. Um, and so then I went to management consulting, which I thought maybe would be better.

Ali Abdaal 7:59 [laughs] Yep.

Chris Hutchins 8:00 And it was kind of the same thing. And I was like, "Gosh, work is not fun. I don't like working. So if I don't like working, what am I gonna do for the rest of my life? Well, I need to save as much money as possible," like FIRE, financial independence style, without really knowing what that was. But it was just like, "I need to save so much money that I don't have to work a job I hate." And that took me down this path of, "Okay, well, I don't wanna live a crappy life, so let's find a way to do everything I wanna do. Like, let's go through, okay, I like to travel. Okay, I wanna live. Okay, how do I house hack? Oh, how do I do these things?" Just trying to find a way to make that work. Eventually, I found jobs I liked, but I was still so far down the optimization train that it just became a, a thing I loved doing.

Ali Abdaal 8:36 Damn. Okay, cool. Um, l- okay, so let's... Yeah, I wanna, I wanna kind of take, take us back to, back to the beginning, I guess. So what did you study in college, and how did that lead you into the investment banking route?

Chris Hutchins 8:47 So I went to Colorado State University, not a highly ranked university in the States. Um-

Ali Abdaal 8:53 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 8:53 ... and honestly, I went because this girl I was dating was gonna go there, and I was like, "Eh, let's go there." Uh, I thought maybe I would have a better outcome going to a worse school and standing out than going to, like, a tier one school and just being one of a bunch of people. I think that ended up being true, but my parents were not happy. [laughs] They were like, "Why? Why didn't you wanna go to some Ivy League school?" I was like, "Eh, this seems great." We broke up right away, so, uh, a little bit of I told you so, but it worked out. And I was like, "Well, I wanna start a company. I wanna be an entrepreneur. I'm gonna take a... I'm gonna get a business degree."

Ali Abdaal 9:23 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 9:23 And then I looked at the majors that we had, and it was like, well, IT, finance, marketing, management, and there was one other. I can't remember. And I was like, "Well, if I run a company, I'll probably hire someone to do the... and accounting." I was like, "I'll probably hire someone to do finance and accounting. Uh, marketing seems... Ah, I don't know. I'll do marketing." Like [laughs] I was just... I didn't know what to do. I was like, management seems like a skill that you kinda just either have or you don't. I didn't know what I was talking about, so I did marketing. Um, and then I took a bunch of other things like French and, you know, entrepreneurship and math. But I went home over Thanksgiving, which, you know, it's like maybe five months before graduation, and all my friends who went to these Ivy League schools had jobs.

Ali Abdaal 10:03 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 10:03 And I was like, "Wait, you have a job?" Like, my school had not prepared anyone for a job yet because most people weren't going to the kinds of jobs you need to plan six months in advance for. So I was like, "What are you guys doing?" And they're like, "Oh, well, the best jobs are investment banking, management consulting." And I just went back to school, and I went to the dean's office in the b- college of business, and I went and I said, [slams table] "I need your help to get a job in investment banking and management consulting." [laughs] And somehow the dean of the college of business knew one guy that worked at an investment bank and one guy that worked at a management consulting firm.

Ali Abdaal 10:31 Great. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 10:31 Gave me interviews. Um, I missed the deadline, so one of them offered me an internship, and one of them offered me a job nine months after graduation. So I took both, and I thought, "I have a backup plan." So I did one, didn't like it, did the other, didn't like it. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 10:46 Damn. [laughs] Yeah, so, uh, d- it's... I guess basically everyone I know who did a non-medical degree went down the either investment banking or management consulting route. And actually, a lot of people I know who do have medical degrees are now trying to go down those routes-

Chris Hutchins 10:59 Ugh

Ali Abdaal 10:59 ... 'cause they're like, "Oh, this is my exit strategy for medicine." They do medicine for a bit. They realize they don't like it, and then they're seeing, "Oh, there's a lot of money over there. There's a lot of money with those people with their fancy suits and, and stuff." Um,

Ali Abdaal 11:10 what was investment banking like for you?

Chris Hutchins 11:12 Investment banking-

Ali Abdaal 11:13 Like, yeah. I, I like... Imagine I have, I have no idea what investment... because I actually don't really know what an investment banker does.

Chris Hutchins 11:17 I didn't know what it was either.

Ali Abdaal 11:18 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 11:18 So, so, like, I, I, I was getting this job, and I was like, "Whoa, I gotta go buy a book about what is-

Ali Abdaal 11:21 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 11:21 ... what is investment banking?" And, um, you know, I was like, "Do I work in a bank?" [laughs] So basically you're supporting people. Like, at my level, like four tiers down from the person actually doing the, the job, I'm, like, making spreadsheets.

Ali Abdaal 11:36 Okay.

Chris Hutchins 11:36 And the whole idea was an investment bank works with companies and either helps them go public or acquire companies or get acquired and kinda strategic, uh, financial transactions like that. So my job was like, let's go... Some company wants to get acquired, they wanna... or so- some company... Someone wants to go buy a company in a space, and they're like, "What should we pay for this company? Let's go look at all the private transactions that have happened in the space, and let's try to get an idea of what the valuations were relative to their revenues-

Ali Abdaal 12:03 Okay

Chris Hutchins 12:03 ... or relative to their profit, and what are all the public companies in the space valued at on these metrics? Let's come up with an idea of what's a fair price." At the end of the day, you're really just trying to come up with a way to justify the price that you agreed on 'cause it's a negotiation. So it seemed like a little bit of show, but sometimes it's literally like we actually need to do the show to send to our shareholders so that we show that we did diligence.

Ali Abdaal 12:25 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 12:27 But at my level, it was like, "Hey, I'm gonna go home. Why don't you make this spreadsheet till 4:00 in the morning? I'll be back at 8:00 tomorrow. I hope you're back." And I remember a week went by where I went home, and my girlfriend at the time was asleep, and I left before she woke up, and I was like, "This is horrible." Like, I don't... I've not even seen the person I live with-

Ali Abdaal 12:43 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 12:43 ... awake. Um, and I was like, "I think I gotta take this other job," which was a management consulting job, um, which wasn't that different. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 12:51 Okay.

Chris Hutchins 12:51 Except you're m- you're making s- PowerPoint instead of-

Ali Abdaal 12:52 Like with slides rather than sheets.

Chris Hutchins 12:53 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 12:54 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 12:55 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 12:55 Okay. So, so you were in investment banking for a few months before realizing that it wasn't for you?

Chris Hutchins 12:58 Yeah, it was... So I did the internship. At the end of the internship they offered me the full-time job, and I was like, "Okay, I'll take the full-time job." Uh, because I was like, "Oh, I need to pay rent."

Ali Abdaal 13:06 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 13:06 So I took the full-time job up until this management consulting thing started, and I was like, "Hey, I've actually... I'm, I'm gonna leave. I'm gonna take this other thing." And they were kind of like, "Okay." Like, they weren't upset. I kind of was in this weird spot where they didn't offer me, like... They kind of said, "Stay on as a full-time intern," instead of, "Here's a full-time offer-

Ali Abdaal 13:24 Right

Chris Hutchins 13:24 ... where you're gonna get a bonus and you're getting all this stuff."

Ali Abdaal 13:26 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 13:27 They were kinda like, "Well, we wanna keep you, so as soon as there's an opening, we'll give you a real job. Until then, you can be a full-time intern. We're gonna pay you a little bit more." But it wasn't clear that I had a full-time jo- It was kind of

Chris Hutchins 13:37 a weird spot.

Ali Abdaal 13:37 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 13:37 And so when the consulting job was ready to start, I was like, "Thank you. This was a great experience. I learned a lot."

Ali Abdaal 13:43 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 13:43 "Let's see what that's like."

Ali Abdaal 13:44 Nice.

Ali Abdaal 13:45 Okay. So y- we... You've done your stint in m- in investment banking. Um, did that teach you anything other than the fact that you didn't like investment banking?

Chris Hutchins 13:53 I mean, I think you just learn how to grind through anything. You know, I, I think there are some jobs where, especially now, I meet people who are like, "Ah, you know, I'm just kinda cruisin', having fun. I'm living in a van." Like, this was, you are working sometimes 22 hours in a day. Uh, and you just have to, like, grind through things, and you're working with very, very smart people. Even just the interview process. Like, if I never even took the jobs-

Ali Abdaal 14:18 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 14:18 ... having to go through these interview processes where they're asking you to do these complicated case studies and, like... W- One time it was with a team, and so I was interviewing with other people who were interviewing together, working on a project, and then asked to give feedback on the people I was interviewing with. So I, I think I just learned a lot being surrounded by really smart people, and that was fun. But at the end of the day, I think the problem I had with both of those jobs was that it was very hierarchical. It was like... I, there was a moment in management consulting where we were trying to close a deal as a firm with a, you know, like, a Fortune 500 company. And I obviously wasn't the one selling the deal. That was, like, the managing director, and I was this low-level, you know, first year. But a friend of mine happened to have the CEO of that company was his stepmom.

Ali Abdaal 15:04 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 15:04 And I was going to hang out at his birthday party, and she was there, and I remember asking the managing director, I was like, "Hey, I'm actually gonna go to the CEO of this company that we want to win business from. I'm gonna be at her house this weekend. Do you want me to talk to her about this?" And he's like, "No, that's not your job." And I'm like, "I know that's not my job."

Ali Abdaal 15:19 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 15:19 "But it seems like there probably could at least be a conversation worth having here." And it was like, "No, that's not your job." And I was just like, it feels... And maybe I was too full of myself, but it felt a little irresponsible for the company to not entertain whether it was a good idea. Um, so it just didn't seem right. And then at the end of the day, everything in my kind of life trajectory changed when I went to this event called Startup Weekend, which was, a guy in Boulder started this thing where he got a bunch of people together, engineers, designers, product people, just business people, for a weekend, and you all broke into groups and built companies.

Ali Abdaal 15:52 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 15:53 And I drove up to Boston from New York City, and we built this company. It was silly. It was called DeskHappy. It was a Windows app that every, like, some random number of time, like 45 to 90 minutes, it would pop up a thing, and it would give you an exercise. Like, a, a five-minute exercise, like stretch or, you know... You know that thing where, like, the Apple Watch will buzz and tell you to do something?

Ali Abdaal 16:12 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 16:12 It was that for Windows-

Ali Abdaal 16:13 Okay

Chris Hutchins 16:13 ... but, like, a decade ago. And I was like, "Oh my God, we built a company in a weekend." Nobody downloaded the app. Like, it never went anywhere. But I was like, "I wanna do this. Like, this is amazing." And everyone's like, "Well, you should probably live in San Francisco. Like, everyone in San Francisco is building tech companies." And I was like, "I will do that."

Ali Abdaal 16:28 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 16:29 So I immediately put in a request. I said, "Hey, could I move to San Francisco? I'd really like to work in the San Francisco office." They said, "Sure." I was like, "Wow, that was so easy." And then, like, a week into working in San Francisco, I got this call to go to a meeting with a guy I'd never met, and I was like, "Wow, this senior person wants to meet with me. This is cool." And he was like, "You're fired." [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 16:46 Oh. This was the management consulting thing.

Chris Hutchins 16:48 Yeah, yeah. So it was 2008, middle of the financial crisis. I had thought... You know, they kind of were like, "Oh, you're this person that just transferred offices. You've got nothing on your plate. You're a great person to let go." So I was fortunately, uh, shown... you know, given an opportunity to go do something else.

Ali Abdaal 17:04 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 17:04 And which I think at the time I was kinda disappointed, but in the long run, I think it, it was a huge impact because it forced me to go find something else to do.

Ali Abdaal 17:12 Yeah. Damn. Okay. So

Ali Abdaal 17:13 at this point it's 2008. You're probably, like, mid-20s? How old are you at this point?

Chris Hutchins 17:16 2008, I'm, like, 24.

Ali Abdaal 17:17 24, okay. And-

Chris Hutchins 17:18 26. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 17:20 You've just moved to San Francisco where presumably rents are quite high and you've, you've just been fired from your job.

Chris Hutchins 17:23 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 17:23 Like, how does, how does that feel at that time?

Chris Hutchins 17:26 Yeah. I'm not good at math 'cause it was actually 22. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 17:28 Oh, wow, okay. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 17:29 Um, no, no, it really sucked. Uh, I got laid off in November, so I was like, "Oh man, the holiday's around the corner."

Ali Abdaal 17:35 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 17:35 "No one's gonna hire anyone in the US between Thanksgiving and Christmas at the end of the year." So I was like, "What am I gonna do?" And so I actually had no idea what I was gonna do. Fortunately, um, my girlfriend, who's now my wife, had a job. So we were like, "Okay, great." She had flown out to San Francisco a month early, found a job, and maybe two weeks before I got laid off she got a job. So I was like, "We at least know how to pay the rent." And I really didn't have a clue what to do except that I had gone to this weird event called BarCamp, which is kind of like this tech conference, but it's not really about tech. It's kind of about life, and it was an unconference where people just threw up ideas of what they wanted to talk about. And it was, you know, it was just, like, a fun place to be. And I was like, "Well, this is really interesting. I just got laid off." ... feel like there's a lot of people in this situation. What if we put together a conference where a bunch of laid off people could all share ideas?

Ali Abdaal 18:25 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 18:25 And you could bring entrepreneurs, you could bring freelancers, people could learn skills. Like, I, maybe I have a skill I could freelance. Maybe someone wants to start a company and I could do that with them. So I ended up saying, "Well, I'm not gonna get a job, so I might as well see what happens." And so I made this thing called Laid off Camp, and I can't even remember where I posted it. I, like, posted it on somewhere on the internet. Nobody really found out about it at all, but it was just in the zeitgeist enough that TechCrunch wrote an article about it.

Ali Abdaal 18:50 Oh, wow. Okay. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 18:50 And at the time I thought it was fake because this woman emailed me and she was like, "I'd love to write a story about this. I found it somewhere. Um, I work at TechCrunch." And I was like, "Oh, this... " I was s- I felt like I was on top of the world.

Ali Abdaal 19:00 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 19:00 I called a friend of mine and I was like, "I just did this interview with TechCrunch." And he was like, "Who was the inter- reporter?" And I told him her name. He's like, "I work with TechCrunch a lot. I don't think that person works there." And I was like, "Ugh."

Ali Abdaal 19:10 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 19:11 And it turns out the woman who wrote the... That was the first article she'd ever written at TechCrunch.

Ali Abdaal 19:16 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 19:16 So she act- nobody actually knew she really worked there, but that kind of, you know, caught Silicon Valley kind of central zeitgeist around the recession at the time. Uh, you know, it got picked up in the San Francisco Chronicle, and by the time we did the first event in San Francisco we had NPR there, we had the Wall Street Journal there, we had the New York Times there, CNN, and um, you know, it was really, like, a big thing. I didn't make any money. Uh, it wasn't a for-profit enterprise.

Ali Abdaal 19:42 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 19:42 Uh, I open sourced the whole thing on a wiki and let people run 20 or so other Laid off Camps around the country. But it was a great opportunity to, like, test those entrepreneurial muscles, meet a bunch of interesting people, and kind of see what a new world might look like for me.

Ali Abdaal 19:57 So what happened at Laid off Camp? Like, what did, what was the- [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 20:01 Yeah, I mean, I never-

Ali Abdaal 20:01 ... the story there?

Chris Hutchins 20:01 I never knew... It was funny, someone asked me a few days ago, they're like, "Maybe you should start this back up again." [laughs] You know? It's-

Ali Abdaal 20:05 That sounds pretty good, yeah.

Chris Hutchins 20:06 Um, no, nothing really happened. Um, it kinda fizzled out. The recession kind of stopped being a thing people were talking about. We'd done one in almost every city in the country that was a major metro area, and I said, "Okay, I need to find a job." Um, I had met a couple companies through this process that had hired me to do random freelance things.

Ali Abdaal 20:24 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 20:25 One startup was like, "Well, you could've worked in investment banking. Maybe you can help us build the models we need to go raise a late stage round of financing." I was like, "Great. I'll do that. I need, I need money."

Ali Abdaal 20:33 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 20:34 Um, another company was like, "Well, you put on these, all these events. We wanna start putting on events in the community as part of our business strategy. Will you help us throw events?" Great, I'll do that. Um, so I did a few freelance jobs and I decided I wanted to find a job at a company.

Ali Abdaal 20:46 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 20:47 But before I do, all my freelance jobs

Chris Hutchins 20:49 are coming to an end. My wife hated her job. Um, I think still girlfriend at the time, but really hated her job. It was pretty terrible. She was like, "I gotta find something new." And I was like, "Gosh, well, I'm, my freelance j- things are over. You hate your job. Maybe we should take one trip and, like, we have a little bit of savings, not much. We'll take one trip and then after that we'll hit it hard. You'll find a new job, I'll find a new job. We kinda have a better sense of what we want." One thing led to another. We rented out our place furnished for more money than we were paying in rent, so we're actually making money.

Ali Abdaal 21:18 [laughs] Nice.

Chris Hutchins 21:19 Um, because it looked... It turns out the delta between, like, a furnished apartment that you can rent for a month or two and, like, apartment you have for a year unfurnished is actually a, a margin, you know, profit margin business. And we bought a one-way ticket with points to South Africa and we just backpacked for seven months. Um, the goal was to get from South Africa to Singapore by land. There were a few borders we couldn't cross, uh, and we had to fly. But yeah, that was not what we intended. Like, you know, I was gung-ho ready to work in tech-

Ali Abdaal 21:47 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 21:47 ... ready to get back into it, but it just seemed like an opportunity we couldn't miss up. And, uh, we put this whole map on the wall. We were like, "Let's put pins on countries we think would be cool to see." And we were like, "God, that's a lot of countries. How are we ever gonna... " You know, the average person takes a trip like I'm on now. You go to London and Paris for a week-

Ali Abdaal 22:03 Mm

Chris Hutchins 22:03 ... and a half. I was like, "How am I gonna see 40 countries around the world if every year we can go to one or two of them?" And then I'd read this book, Vagabonding.

Ali Abdaal 22:11 Oh, yeah. Good book. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 22:11 And, uh, Rolf Potts is awesome. I got a chance to interview him on my podcast.

Ali Abdaal 22:15 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 22:15 And, um, I was like, "Oh, maybe we could just do this long-term travel thing." And it's so much cheaper 'cause you're taking buses and trains and couch surfing instead of, you know, flights and staying in hotels. And so we did this whole trip on, like, $7,000 for seven months, which, you know, still seems crazy to me. About $1,000 a month, about $30 a day, and it was, like, one of the most amazing life-changing experiences. And then I submitted a talk to talk about all these things at South by Southwest, and it got approved and they were like, "We want you to come speak in March." And I was like, "Well, now I know when the trip ends." So, you know, in November or something, we booked a one-way ticket from Singapore to Austin to go to South by Southwest and, you know, that was the, the transition to the next chapter of my life.

Ali Abdaal 23:01 Ooh. So much to talk about. So, um, yeah, ever since I read Vaga- Vag- Vagabonding, I think, uh, an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show probably turned me onto it. Um, and then started listening to Rolf Potts' podcast as well. It was always in my mind as a thing that it would be really cool to do. Um, but I was always in this traditional job. And so in 2020 when I took a break from medicine, I was like, "Right. This is gonna be my chance to do my little vagabonding trip." But then pandemic-

Chris Hutchins 23:25 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 23:25 ... and everything, everything closed. And so I've not yet done my vaga- vagabonding trip. Uh, but I'm trying to talk my girlfriend into it at some point [laughs] where we'll do the traveling around the world for a year somewhat aimlessly kind of thing.

Chris Hutchins 23:37 The sooner you do it, the better.

Ali Abdaal 23:38 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 23:39 Because what I've learned is my standards have risen over time and, you know, we stayed at a hotel in India that I think was $1 a night.

Ali Abdaal 23:46 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 23:47 I don't think that I could... Like, I don't... I wanna say that I could go do it again, but I feel like I've gotten old enough. We have two kids. Like, oh, what am I gonna put my kids in a room that, like, barely has running water? The windows are just holes in concrete walls. Probably not. So the s- the younger you do it, the sooner you do it, the more comfortable with the grit and the grime-

Ali Abdaal 24:05 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 24:06 ... the more you can take a trip that I just think is a trip you can't replicate.

Ali Abdaal 24:09 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 24:09 Like, you can't replicate staying in some $2 a night hostel down an alley, you know, when you have a family. If, if that's in the cards someday.

Ali Abdaal 24:17 Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that this is very much a, a thing that- ... sort of, you kind of are able to do in your 20s and then not really beyond that. And it's almost like, um, I think I was reading Die With Zero that talks about this and, and, and a few other things that talk about how it's li- it's not just when you're old and, like, you've got illnesses and stuff or, like, families and stuff where you can't take trips like that. It's actually just when, when you don't want to do that anymore, 'cause going around hostels and stuff at the age of 19 is very different to the age of 31, for example.

Chris Hutchins 24:46 Yeah. It's funny, I interviewed Bill Perkins, who wrote Die With Zero.

Ali Abdaal 24:49 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 24:49 And I said, you know, "Do you have any regrets of things that you didn't do?" And his one was, "I didn't take a gap year. I didn't go explore when I was younger, and now it's just a different experience I would have." Uh, that's not to say... You know, I, I got an email from one of my listeners who has a family, and they've been living nomadically for years. So it's not to say you can't travel with kids, you can't travel with a family. I just think there's a certain type of travel where you're like, "I don't know where I'm gonna go to tomorrow, and I'm just gonna wander around till I found a place to sleep."

Ali Abdaal 25:16 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 25:17 And I remember doing that in Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, or I guess it's in Tanzania, and we were just like... For three hours we were trying to find a place to stay because we didn't have a plan, and we went into a ho- like, things were fully booked. Finally, we found something. But you just can't do that with kids. Like [laughs] you can't. Like, it just doesn't... Maybe at some age, but our kids are, you know, two, under three.

Ali Abdaal 25:37 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 25:38 And, like, it's just not gonna work. So there are some elements of a trip that you, you could do at any age, but there are some that I would highly advise you to do if you, before you start a family if that's something you want to do.

Ali Abdaal 25:49 Often on, on hearing that kind of advice some people would be like, "Oh, but what about the gap in the resume? What about, like, the, the dot, dot, dot?" How, how would you approach that kind of fear?

Chris Hutchins 25:57 It's funny, I, I applied for a job once, and the guy that reviewed my resume was like, "Oh, you've changed jobs too much." Um, and I was trying to explain. I was like, "Well, no, actually, I had this investment banking internship, and, like, it wasn't supposed to be forever. And then I did this management consulting, and then I got laid off. It wasn't my fault. Like, it's not like I'm a flaky person. It's just I had these series of things." And he was kind of very rigid in the way he thought about it. And I was like, "Well, I guess my answer to you would be that person is probably gonna wonder what's happening. I think for every one person like that, there's probably 25 or 30 people who are gonna be impressed that you took that trip, wanna know what it taught you. Uh, you know, jealous that they didn't take it themselves." And so I don't think there are very f- many people who would look at a year off and not... a- and, and judge you or hold you against-

Ali Abdaal 26:44 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 26:44 ... getting a job because of it. So I don't know. I would tell someone that obviously you might spend money and be broke. That's, like, an important thing, so make sure you have the savings to do it or, uh, you know, go on one of those trips where you work on a farm. You know, there's lots of ways to do it. But I wouldn't let taking a year off and, and the impact it would have on your resume stop you from doing it, and I don't think very many people who've lived long enough to reflect on that or are older would say that. In fact, I don't think I've made a resume for a while.

Ali Abdaal 27:13 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 27:13 Right? Like, I don't know if you have a resume that's current. Like, I have a LinkedIn page, which kind of is enough.

Ali Abdaal 27:19 Yeah. That's-

Chris Hutchins 27:20 Um...

Ali Abdaal 27:20 A lot of people say that when they do a, a sort of extended travel thing that it, it changes them, it, it teaches them a lot. Um, having not done one of these trips, I almost can't imagine what, what it would be like for like... I guess, what, what did you learn on that trip? How did it, how did it change your outlook? How did it change your life?

Chris Hutchins 27:38 I think there are a few small things that happened that, that maybe had big impacts. But I, I didn't have one of these, like, Eat Pray Love moments where I was like, "I left and I was a changed human," and all these-

Ali Abdaal 27:47 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 27:47 ... you know, you kinda got to the end and you're like, "Oh, okay." Like, there wasn't that moment for me. But there were a few things that I think were important. One was when you travel, especially when you travel outside of... If, you know, if you live in the States and you come to London, it's not gonna be as different as if you go live in Southeast Asia-

Ali Abdaal 28:04 Sure

Chris Hutchins 28:04 ... or you, you know, trek through Africa or you go to South America, a place that's kind of a very different way of living. And I think what I learned that was super fascinating was that all around the world people have found ways to be happy, and they found very, very different ways to be happy. And I think the thing that has led me down this, like, intense optimization part of life is not believing that any particular way of doing something is just by default the right way. So there's a way that most people do things, and just because the people you're surrounded with say, "Oh, well, you know, this is what you do. You go to a job and you don't take a year off." Well, in the UK I feel like almost everyone takes a gap year after college. But in the US maybe that would be frowned upon because most people don't do that. Um, so I, I think the biggest lesson I took away was there are people that do wi- have wildly different days, the structure of their days, the way they work, the way their family works, the way their family lives, and it all just works for them. So it made me question, maybe to a level that many of my bosses, managers, uh, friends don't like... It's like anything we do could be, there could be a better way to do it. So if someone says, "Oh, let's do this," I'm like, "Well, is there a better restaurant to go to? Is there a better way to get there? Is there a better deal to be found?" Um, I think that's one of my biggest takeaways. And then I think from a material possessions standpoint, I feel like there's an inverse relationship between just general happiness. [laughs] Like, the people who I met that had the least seemed the most content with life. Um, and the people that I met that had the most seemed the least content with life.

Ali Abdaal 29:37 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 29:38 Uh, and so not to say that I don't have things and, you know, I'm not a minimalist by any-

Ali Abdaal 29:42 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 29:42 ... stretch of it. But it's just like, it, it's very easy to be happy just running around in a field and, like, kicking a soccer ball or even, like, something that is a bag of, a bunch of trash bags balled together to resemble a soccer ball.

Ali Abdaal 29:54 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 29:55 So I don't know. Those are two important lessons. But I didn't have a, "I knew what I wa-" I thought I'd come back and I'd be like, "I know what to do with my life."

Ali Abdaal 30:02 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 30:03 No. Nothing, none of that.

Ali Abdaal 30:03 So broadly, pretty fun trip. $30 a day, like, trying to get from South Africa to Singapore.

Chris Hutchins 30:08 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 30:08 Where, where do you have to fly? Like, what were the borders that you couldn't-

Chris Hutchins 30:11 So we couldn't get over the border to Sudan.

Ali Abdaal 30:13 Oh, yeah.

Chris Hutchins 30:13 Um, and so that was a tough one. Um, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan.

Ali Abdaal 30:18 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 30:18 And, uh, Burma, Myanmar was one where you could go-

Ali Abdaal 30:23 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 30:23 ... but you could only fly in.

Ali Abdaal 30:24 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 30:25 And so- In each of those three areas we ended up flying over. Um, so we flew from India to Thailand, we flew from, um, like the Middle East over to India, and then we flew over, uh, Sudan.

Ali Abdaal 30:39 Were you concerned about your safety at any point during this trip? That, that's another thing that often seems to come up and the thought of-

Chris Hutchins 30:44 Not really

Ali Abdaal 30:44 ... traveling around and-

Chris Hutchins 30:44 I think there was like, there was like one point where I think we were in the middle of a really busy market in the evening, and I was trying to figure out where to go, and I had the map on a PDF on my computer, and it was like this cheap $200 like mini, mini PC, this Dell computer. And I remember opening up my laptop. My wife was like, "You probably shouldn't just like open a laptop in the middle of the street here."

Ali Abdaal 31:06 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 31:06 So like maybe that moment, but I, uh, there really wasn't a moment where it was like, wow, w- like I feel, you know, very scared right now. Um, there were moments where you're like, "I don't know what to do." We get to a bus station, there's no bus, and there's no place to stay, and it's like, okay, well let's go to the only store that's open and ask everyone that comes into the store if they're driving. This is in Malaysia. So we're just like, "Are you going to Kuala Lumpur?"

Ali Abdaal 31:30 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 31:31 "Nope. Are you going to Kuala Lumpur?" And we just kept asking until someone was like, "No, but like this other guy I know is. Let me give you a ride to this semi-truck where he's going there." And then we just like get in a semi-truck with some guy who says he's going to Kuala Lumpur-

Ali Abdaal 31:45 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 31:45 ... and like, you know, we're just like hanging out in his car-

Ali Abdaal 31:47 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 31:48 ... and he was listening to Britney Spears, but he didn't speak English, so it was like this amazing moment of someone like singing to American music-

Ali Abdaal 31:54 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 31:54 ... but not really actually speaking English. Um, went through a border crossing and he like closed the curtain in the little area behind in the bed of the truck where we were like hiding. I was like, "Are we being smuggled through?"

Ali Abdaal 32:05 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 32:06 So I would say we were like, that was maybe a moment where we were like a little nervous, but I think by that point we'd already had four months of just serendipity-

Ali Abdaal 32:15 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 32:15 ... making things better that we're like, "I don't know. We haven't hitchhiked a lot, so like this will be a great story."

Ali Abdaal 32:18 Let's give it a go.

Ali Abdaal 32:20 Okay, so I de- I definitely wanna talk more about the kids stuff and the optimization stuff. Before we do that, so you finish your seven months of traveling, you're at South by Southwest. What did you talk about in, in the talk?

Chris Hutchins 32:29 So the talk I submitted was like fun em- I think it was called like Fun Employment, and I invited a friend who'd never been laid off to like co-do it with me as a panel just 'cause I, you know, we were both trying to optimize for getting a talk. And he was like, "Well, your talk... Well, what you could talk about is more in the zeitgeist." And I was like, "Well, but you work at a company that's like a really hot, cool company right now, so like the combo of that surely will be approved as a talk at South By."

Ali Abdaal 32:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Hutchins 32:51 Um, and sure enough it was. That South By was really interesting because it was this weird opportunity to just go meet all these people in this industry that I wanted to get into. So the talk was rather... You know, it was like what does it mean to be unemployed? What do... How can you make the most of it? It was kind of one of these if you're trying to understand the world of getting laid off and figuring out what to do with it, come to this talk. So I wouldn't say the talk was anything... Like if there was a recording of it, I would not recommend you go watch it.

Ali Abdaal 33:19 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 33:20 Um, but that entire experience of like immersing yourself in a new community of people and trying to figure out what you wanna do in that community was like a very profound moment in my career. Um, and it was back when South by Southwest was a small conference-

Ali Abdaal 33:35 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 33:35 ... that not a lot of tech people went to. Um, and over the next 10 years it kind of totally went the other end when it like had so much-

Ali Abdaal 33:40 It's a lot to deal with b- b- because the only context in which I've heard ab- about it is a four-hour workweek launch thingy, and listening to the audio of that like a few months ago and thinking, "Wow, that was actually a really good talk from back in 2007 or, or whenever it was." And also I think it got, it got canceled in COVID. Like that's literally the only two data points I have about it. So what, what is South by Southwest? First-

Chris Hutchins 33:57 So-

Ali Abdaal 33:57 What was it? What has it become?

Chris Hutchins 33:59 When I first went-

Ali Abdaal 33:59 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 33:59 ... it was like primarily a music c- festival.

Ali Abdaal 34:01 Oh.

Chris Hutchins 34:01 It was like a two-week music festival, then they a- I think they added film, and then they added this like emerging interactive component. So it was v- very much known... When you first went to South By, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to South by Southwest." It was like, "Oh, you must love music." I was like, "Actually, I don't really like live music" and people were confused. Um, but it was this like the internet conference. Um, and you know, all the early kind of internet tech people were there. Companies like Dig were throwing big parties. Um, I remember h- spending a lot of time in the early days with like Gary Vaynerchuk who was like-

Ali Abdaal 34:32 Oh. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 34:32 ... running around like throwing events. Um, so it was kind of like that early web creatory world, um, that hadn't really... didn't really have like an event, and South by Southwest was the event.

Ali Abdaal 34:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 34:43 And I remember for, God, probably eight years it was like every year there was not a thing that I... a conference that I missed other... South by Southwest was like the one conference that I wouldn't miss because it was when all the people I knew, whether they lived in New York or the Bay Area, everyone would convene on Austin and there'd be, you know, all the events, the parties, everything. It was just a great place to meet all those people. And a lot of the fun stuff happened in like, you know, people's hotel rooms late at night where you're just kind of jamming on random ideas and, um, the number of companies that came out of those jam sessions of people that were just like, "Oh, I have an idea." Everyone's like, "Wow, what's this person really doing?" And it's like, "Oh, that was Travis Kalanick who went on to start Uber," and like all this crazy stuff out of these rooms. But yeah, it was, uh, you know, I just... it was like a very right place right time kind of moment for me where I just kind of like entered this industry of tech and Silicon Valley and met a lot of interesting people, and I was like, "This is going to be my career

Chris Hutchins 35:36 for the next decade."

Ali Abdaal 35:37 Hmm. How important do you think that is these days, like the whole finding a community, finding a, a scenius as Austin Kleon talks about? Is that something that you've seen like sort of beyond that point has, has been helpful for you or for other people that you know?

Chris Hutchins 35:52 I think the network of people that I got to know and built in the, you know, let's call it like broadly speaking, like the internet, you know, entrepreneur software creation community, like Silicon Valley, but like extend it to the country startup world, was like the most valuable thing towards any of the path that I took.

Ali Abdaal 36:12 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 36:12 So it was like when I wanted to get a job, um, you know, it was being able to have people who I'd met who'd gotten to know me and my personality and seen that I did this crazy thing with Laid Off Camp, were like, "Oh, you should take a bet on this kid. He's got a lot of like audacity to go start random stuff." Um, that community of people was what made all these things possible. And even today, when I'm now in a different world, a creator world, a lot of those early relationships, uh, you know, are still really important. There's a, a different but kind of overlapping circles of like startup entrepreneurship investors and creators, and I think we've kind of... We're, we're in like a WhatsApp group that merges those two really well. But I don't know. I'd say it's the most valuable thing that I ever did was go to South by Southwest and start to build a community of people. Now, had you done that 10 years later, I think it would've been hard because at that point there were... Every brand was there sponsoring things, and it was probably hard to find your community.

Ali Abdaal 37:10 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 37:10 So I would say when new emerging things are happening, new events, new conferences, like that's a really great opportunity versus, you know, like CES now is like probably not the best place. There's certainly good events, and you can probably go meet interesting people, but you might have to go a little more niche or a little more emergent of kind of events to go find that or a l- a little more... And by niche, I mean it could be category. It could be like, I really wanna get involved in fintech, so I might go to a, you know, a conference there, or it could be like, I'm gonna focus on people in the Bay Area or people in London or people in New York rather than trying to go to like the big thing. Um, but yeah, I would say find people-

Ali Abdaal 37:48 Mm

Chris Hutchins 37:48 ... anywhere they are and build that community.

Ali Abdaal 37:51 Yeah. Yeah, I think about this a lot whenever, um... You know, these days it's, it's nice 'cause I get invited to go to conferences, and I'm going to Sharjah in the UAE like tomorrow to give a talk and, and stuff. And before going to one of these things, I'm always a bit like, "Oh, you know, it's a long way to travel," and like, "Woe is me," et cetera, et cetera. And then I get there, and I meet the people who are there, and I'm like, "Okay, cool. This was 100% worth it. This was super, super fun." Um, and just the, I think the serendipity that you unlock by actually going to things where there are other people doing a thing, like even, you know, one, one conversation I had with our mutual friend Erika Kollberg like a week ago in Dubai, she and I had never met before then. We'd kinda talked on, on Instagram DMs a little bit, but that conversation might be the most ROI positive conversation I've had this year in terms of th- a decision we're gonna make for the business. And it's just always I've found a lot of times in my life connecting the dots looking backwards is always from... has been from a moment of a serendipitous interaction that I could not have predicted at some sort of event where I put the effort into going to the thing rather than like, "Oh, I'll just sit in the hotel room. I'll just like... I'll just do some work." And I always find that the, the expected value of actually putting yourself out there is stupidly high.

Chris Hutchins 39:01 Yeah. The worst part is it's not always high.

Ali Abdaal 39:04 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 39:04 Like it's, it's, um... You know, I... The CEO of Wealthfront, a guy named Andy Rachleff, always talked about when you're building products, he's like, "I care about the slugging average, not the batting average." And for the international folks, this is a-

Ali Abdaal 39:14 Right. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 39:14 ... American baseball reference, which... And I don't even follow American baseball, but the general idea is it's like, how often are you hitting a home run and scoring points versus how often are you hitting the ball? And so if I go to five events, conferences, whatever it is, I care less that I meet five interesting people. I care that at one of them I had, like you, a meaningful contr- conversation that will change the trajectory of my business, my personal life, or something. And it doesn't happen every time, but I would rather have four conferences where every fourth conference changes my life or my business-

Ali Abdaal 39:49 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 39:49 ... than have four conferences and the, the other three do nothing or than four conferences where each one I meet an interesting person. I'm not saying I don't wanna meet interesting people. Hopefully, I meet an interesting person at all of them, but I'm going for those really, really big moments, and they don't happen every time. And so it's funny. When I was thinking about, uh, you know, do I go to business school, and I was like, "No, no, that's just like management consulting, uh-

Ali Abdaal 40:11 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 40:11 ... investment banking 2.0," but I was talking to someone. I was like, "I bet if you just bought a business class ticket from New York to San Francisco and you just flew back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and talked to the person sitting next to you, you would probably unlock a similar amount of value as if you spent the same amount of money, you know, going to HBS."

Ali Abdaal 40:34 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 40:34 I'm sure many people listening, especially the ones who went to HBS, will be like, "No, no, no," like, "I totally disagree" but the idea being you will probably have six or seven of those flights where nothing happens, and then every six or seven you might have one really, really powerful, interesting conversation that leads to some crazy opportunity.

Ali Abdaal 40:48 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 40:49 The hard part is if you have the six or seven bad ones first, continuing to go for the next, the next one when it's not there, and so I have definitely been to conferences where it was just totally not worth it or have flown to a important meeting that didn't pan out. But I... It's happened enough times that it's like I think I gotta keep trying.

Ali Abdaal 41:11 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 41:11 And so I think it's a hard thing, especially if you're... You know, now we have kids. I'm like talking to my wife. I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna go to this conference. I really appreciate you helping out extra so I could be out of town," and then I come home, and I was like, "You know what? That was a waste of time."

Ali Abdaal 41:24 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 41:24 "I shouldn't have gone," but I promise that like if I do this five times, one of them won't be a waste of time.

Ali Abdaal 41:29 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 41:29 But it's really hard when you have the waste of time when the opportunity cost is so high-

Ali Abdaal 41:32 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 41:32 ... and-

Ali Abdaal 41:33 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 41:33 ... all that. But I still encourage everyone listening to go put themselves out there a little bit more and try to find that community and, and look for those super high ROI interactions.

Ali Abdaal 41:44 What do you think is the balance between put your head down and do the work versus go to conferences and meet people? [laughs] Just to weave a, um, somewhat false dichotomy between those two things.

Chris Hutchins 41:55 I mean, it depends where you are at what stage in your life. If you're working a job and you're trying to figure out how to transition somewhere, just doing the work is probably not gonna have that impact. If you just started a company and you're trying to find product market fit for the business you started, going to the conference might be helpful to give you a new perspective, but like sometimes you just need to do the work, and so I don't think there's a real answer. I think I've definitely had moments... I remember a fun moment where a friend of mine were joking about how this one friend of ours who started a company seemed like he was way too down the conference path.

Ali Abdaal 42:29 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 42:29 And so we were like, "Gosh, this guy just needs to like sit at his office and work and like with his team for like two weeks straight." So we created this idea where we found this person who is a professor at some university who did a lot of research in Antarctica. We made up a fake email address pretending to be them and invited our friend from this email address to come to an all-expense paid trip to South A- or to Antarctica for a conference for tech leaders. So we went back and forth.

Ali Abdaal 42:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Hutchins 42:58 We talked about how we were comping all of the flights. We started scheduling the flights for this person. We had it all, like, planned out. Um, we even, like, made up fake... I think we said, like, "Jack Dorsey's coming to this conference," and all this stuff. And then finally, like, maybe two weeks before, we were at this bar, and we were like... He was, "You know, I'm so excited. I'm going to Antarctica. It's gonna be so cool." And we were like, "Yeah." And so we finally, like, broke the news that we'd made this thing up. We're like, "But good news, now you have two uninterrupted weeks that you can get work done."

Ali Abdaal 43:25 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 43:26 And I don't think he appreciated it like we thought he would. Uh, we haven't really caught up since then-

Ali Abdaal 43:31 Right. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 43:31 ... um, you know, on, on this topic at least.

Ali Abdaal 43:34 Okay, right. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 43:35 But, uh, but yeah, I do think you can go too far down the path of like, "Oh, I'm, I'm going to the next thing. I'm going to the next cool thing."

Ali Abdaal 43:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Hutchins 43:42 But it really depends where you are at the stage of your company. It's... When I talked to other founders and CEOs when I was running one of my businesses, it was interesting how so many of them were like, "I, I need to spend like half my week unscheduled just to fi- find the right thing to work on, and, and I can't plan it." So in that stage, it's like it's not just grinding. It's like leaving room to think-

Ali Abdaal 44:05 Mm

Chris Hutchins 44:05 ... and see what's next. What's the thing in your business that you're missing? What's the thing in your career, your life that you're not... you're overthinking? So I think it's important to do that, but maybe time box it. Be like, "Okay, there are two conferences this year. Around those two conferences, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna leave a couple days after to process everything." Great. But don't be looking every week for the next thing.

Ali Abdaal 44:24 Yeah. Nice. Um, in terms of optimizations, hacks, all that kind of stuff, any tips for conference attendees? Let's say you're at a conference. It's like, what do you do at said conference to ma- I guess, make the most of it?

Chris Hutchins 44:36 Yeah. So here's one thing I do, which I don't know if this is crazy or not. But I always email the conference org. If some conferences just give you the list of all the attendees, great. Um, most of the times that list doesn't also include the speakers, so... But the speakers is always the one thing that's public.

Ali Abdaal 44:53 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 44:53 And so I try to combine those two lists so that I have a list of everyone that's going. I try to figure out who... A- and the funny thing is, I would say 50% of the most impactful conversations I've had at conferences are with people that I didn't even know who they were. I just randomly met them. But about 50% of them were with a very targeted set of people that were often speakers at the event or like, you know, successful people who were attending but maybe not speaking. So I'll go through the list one by one, trying to figure out who at this conference do I want to interact with. If they're giving a talk, I know they're probably gonna be in the room that they're giving the talk, and so before or after that talk might be a good time to run into them. Um, but I will actually go and pull, like, LinkedIn photos or some photo of a person. I'll put them all in a Notes do- dock on my iPhone, and like I'm in a room, and I'm in the corner. I'll pull up my phone. I'll be like looking at all the faces just to kinda like brush myself, so when I'm walking around the room, I'm like looking out for those people that I wanna inter- engage with and try to find them. So I'm like, you know, it's kinda-

Ali Abdaal 45:52 Yes. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 45:52 I kinda feel like I'm like a mercenary in the corner. I'm like, "Okay, I gotta go find this person with brown long hair."

Ali Abdaal 45:57 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 45:57 I'm like walking around looking for them. But I'm very tactical about it, trying to have those conversations. I usually only end up hitting about, you know, 30, 40% of the people I wanted to find, but I do hit 30 to 40% of them and I don't think I would if I wasn't sitting in the corner of the room every now and then roll- running through my list trying to be like, "Oh, there's that person I wanna go engage with. Let's walk up." I think walking up to a random person is like one of the least comfortable things that one can do. And so one person gave me this advice. I did an episode of my podcast on kind of networking at events-

Ali Abdaal 46:27 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 46:27 ... um, and asked, asked about this. But one person was like, "Just practice it in low stakes environment. Go to a bar where literally it doesn't matter who you meet, and just walk up to random people and start conversations." It's probably easier than you think.

Ali Abdaal 46:40 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 46:41 And if you can do it in a low stakes environment where it doesn't even matter, maybe when you're traveling, you're never even gonna see these people again. You don't have any friends in common.

Ali Abdaal 46:47 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 46:47 Like, if you can really build that muscle of like just walking up to someone and being like, "Hey, what's going on?"

Ali Abdaal 46:51 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 46:52 Um, was one, and then leaving, always being the person who leaves first. It's like everyone at this conference, especially if you're going to these speakers, they do not... They probably wanna leave after a few minutes. Maybe you're really exciting, maybe you're really engaging, but, um, you know. So, so it's kind of like a power move to be like, "All right. You know, I'm sure you've got lots of important stuff to do. I, I do too. I gotta go," not being the person that just sits there talking to them forever and trying to get them to commit to some next thing in person. It's so much harder. If you, if you're a podcast host and you want someone to come on your podcast, don't be like, "Hey, can we email later about X, Y, Z?" Be like, "Hey, could you..." Like, get them to soft commit in person to whatever the next step is, whether it's grabbing a coffee, making an introduction or something.

Ali Abdaal 47:34 It's so hard to say no to things in person.

Chris Hutchins 47:35 I know. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 47:35 I get this all the time. Usually we, we have, uh, Gordon, our videographer with us, and he's like, "Ali, you've said yes to too many things. We need to start giving Dan's email, my assistant, rather than your own," and all this kind of stuff.

Chris Hutchins 47:45 Yeah. So ask people to do whatever you want in person 'cause people like Ali are, are much easier-

Ali Abdaal 47:49 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 47:49 ... to get to commit in person.

Ali Abdaal 47:50 It's just so hard to say no. [laughs] It's hard not to say no by email. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 47:52 Yeah. And then just know what they look like so you can go find them.

Ali Abdaal 47:55 Yeah. Um, any... Do you, do you talk to people on planes? Like, I feel like you, you seem like the sort of guy that would strike up a conversation, but I don't know if you do anything interesting like that, like planes, buses, coffee shops, that kind of thing.

Chris Hutchins 48:08 I think less and less. I think if I'm flying by myself and I'm sitting next to a person and it seems like maybe there's something worth hav- having a conversation about, I'll say hi.

Ali Abdaal 48:17 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 48:18 And... But I wouldn't say I'm like the person who's always striking up the conversations on the plane.

Ali Abdaal 48:23 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 48:23 I think, you know, it's probably... I don't know. If I were sitting next to a random other person by myself, not traveling with my family, I might end up having a conversation one in four times.

Ali Abdaal 48:33 Okay. Okay. No, fair point.

Chris Hutchins 48:34 But I'm not a four in four like, "Hey, how you doing?"

Ali Abdaal 48:37 I've been, I, I was rereading this book

Ali Abdaal 48:39 called The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman, um, who, who's this, like, psychology professor who I, who I had on the pod a few months ago. Um, and this is, like, one of the, like, OG self-help books that was released in, like, 2002 that I first read when I was, like, 16 years old. And it talks about the factors that, um, like, people who say that they're lucky versus people who think that they're unlucky. Like, what are the different kind of behaviors? Uh, and one of the main ones is that people who think, who call themselves lucky tend to be the sorts of people that go to conferences and say hello to people and will talk to random strangers in coffee shops. And I was like, damn, I go to conferences and I say hello, but I don't do the coffee shop thing. So I'm kinda glad that you don't either. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 49:15 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 49:15 That makes me feel better about-

Chris Hutchins 49:16 I mean, I probably ... It sounds like I might do it a little more than you.

Ali Abdaal 49:18 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 49:18 But, um, yeah, I just feel like I, I'm a big proponent of saying yes to random things. If someone's like, "Hey, do you wanna come to this thing?" It's like-

Ali Abdaal 49:26 Mm

Chris Hutchins 49:26 ... "Ah, let's just do it."

Ali Abdaal 49:27 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 49:27 Um, but I don't know. I don't know if you have to talk to the person in line. Like, it, it ... Unless there's a reason to, I don't know if you have to be that person-

Ali Abdaal 49:34 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 49:34 ... to be lucky, if you will.

Ali Abdaal 49:36 Yeah. Yeah, I think my heuristic for, for a lot of things is, uh, would I be likely to regret doing this? And usually the answer is no. And so I just kinda do the thing, even if it comes at the expense of ... Like, for, like, like, for example, this podcast recording tonight, where I'm kind of recovering from the flu, and I was like, oh, I don't ... You know, I should probably just sleep early 'cause I've gotta fly tomorrow. I was like, you know what? Am I gonna be likely to regret meeting up with you in real life while you're, while we're in this, in the same city for the first time in God knows how long? Probably not. Let's just, let's just see if we can make it happen, like, 10:00 PM.

Chris Hutchins 50:04 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 50:04 And I'm super glad we did.

Chris Hutchins 50:06 Yeah. Me too.

Ali Abdaal 50:06 And so it's just things like that where often taking a bit of a hit in terms of, like, sleep or recovery and stuff, I, I do find to be ... Like, I've, I've so rarely regretted-

Chris Hutchins 50:16 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 50:16 ... kind of staying up a little bit late to do something that seems cool.

Chris Hutchins 50:19 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 50:19 Um.

Chris Hutchins 50:19 I think I feel the same way.

Ali Abdaal 50:21 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 50:22 This next season of your life, so we, we, we talked about the travel thing, and then you went to South by South- Southwest, and you decided, all right, cool, I found my tribe. What happened in this next season of your life?

Chris Hutchins 50:30 So I decided I'm going to work at a startup. Like, this was the plan from three years ago. I was like, I'm gonna move to San Francisco and work at a startup. And then I was like, well, I got laid off, I did freelance, I traveled. So I basically went around and I was like, what ... I was trying to figure out what the hottest companies were. And as a proxy for that, I was like, who, who's raising a bunch of money? You know, what, who's doing interesting stuff? The iPhone 3GS had just come out, had location and GPS, and there was a company that was started by a bunch of ex-Digg people, and Digg was, like, a really hot internet company. I was like, I'm gonna go work at this company SimpleGeo. Like, I, my tactic wasn't apply to 10 jobs. It was, I'm gonna work at SimpleGeo. That was it.

Ali Abdaal 51:07 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 51:07 I didn't have a plan B. So I, I didn't know anyone that worked at SimpleGeo, but I asked someone I knew who knew one of their investors if they could connect me with the investor, and I was just like, "Look, I am so s- excited about this company." And I made this probably, like, 20-page PowerPoint presentation about why I was so excited about the industry and the company. Looking back on it, I was like, I didn't know anything. Like, I was like, it was ridiculous. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that some random kid was so excited that they made a presentation about their company. Like, most people are trying to hire, convince people to work for them.

Ali Abdaal 51:38 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 51:39 And I was out there trying to convince them how excited I was about what they were building. And I think they saw that, and I now know, having been on the other side of the situation, like, if anyone does that kind of work, you should at least entertain a conversation of whether you would hire them.

Ali Abdaal 51:52 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 51:53 And so they were like, "Come on, and you can do business development." I was like, "Great. What's that?"

Ali Abdaal 51:57 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 51:57 Like, I feel like the, the life, the theme of my career is like, "You're gonna be a vessel maker." "Great. What's that?" "You're gonna be a management consultant." "What's that?" Um, and so the idea was we built this product, but we didn't know who to sell it to.

Ali Abdaal 52:07 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 52:08 So it was like, can you go meet people and see if you can sell this thing we built and maybe kind of tell the engineers who are building it what they could change so that you could sell it? That wasn't a successful endeavor. Like, the company wasn't. Um, it turns out we had a really cool technical product that the s- like, the actual software we built was really, really fascinating, but there wasn't a really monetizable use case for it, and so the business didn't work out. But I think joining a company that had a really great reputation, that was right in the middle of some kind of theme emerging, that was founded by a bunch of notable people, or at least people who'd left a notable company-

Ali Abdaal 52:46 Mm

Chris Hutchins 52:47 ... meant that even though that company went under, 10, 15 years later, when I talk about having worked there, people are like, "Oh, I remember that company."

Ali Abdaal 52:54 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 52:54 Like, it, it still stands out even though it failed. Um, and the network of people I'd met at that company because it had attracted similarly other really, you know, amazing people, um, you know, were people that I, I stay in touch with and I've worked with since. And so it was all worth it, even though the whole thing, uh, you know, only lasted a year because the company kinda didn't work out.

Ali Abdaal 53:14 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 53:15 But in that process, I met a few other people who were like, "Hey, we're starting this other company. Do you wanna come over here?" And I was like, "Great. Let's go do that." Um, and then I was like, "What should I do here?" And they're like, "Well, we don't really know what you're gonna do. We just know that we're not gonna hire a person to do really anything other than design and engineering."

Ali Abdaal 53:30 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 53:30 "So you're gonna do all the other things."

Ali Abdaal 53:31 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 53:31 And I was like, great. I'm gonna learn to be a product manager and a-

Ali Abdaal 53:33 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 53:33 ... researcher and a, you know, accountant and, like, e- all the things. Um, so I kinda played that, like, go start another company, and that company ended up lasting about a year before we got acquired by Google. So I went to Google.

Ali Abdaal 53:47 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 53:48 And, um, I interviewed at Google, and at the end of the interview, they were like, "You are a product manager." And I was like, "Great."

Ali Abdaal 53:53 [laughs] What?

Chris Hutchins 53:54 I went, "What's that?" Like [laughs] I had no idea-

Ali Abdaal 53:56 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 53:56 ... what that was. Uh, and so, uh, they send you to training, and they're like, "This is product manager training." I was like, "Great, now I know what my job is." Uh, and I worked at Google for about three months as a product manager, and then we had this unique opportunity to go to Google Ventures, and I, I was like, do you want to go be a venture capitalist and invest in startups professionally for three years, or continue down this product management path? And a small part of me thinks that I might have had a, a much more interesting path if I had stayed, but the vast majority of me thinks, of course I made the right choice. But I do think there was something to be learned from, you know, Google's an incredible product building machine, and had I stuck it out and, and learned in multiple different areas of the company-

Ali Abdaal 54:38 Mm

Chris Hutchins 54:38 ... how to build products the way Google does, I think that would've been a great learning opportunity. Just not as great as seeing what it's like to invest in, I don't know, I think in my time at the fund, we invested in 150 or 200 different startups, took pitches from thousands. So that experience I think was far outweighed it.

Ali Abdaal 54:56 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 54:56 But I still wish that I'd gotten to kind of peek behind the product curtain at Google for a little bit longer.

Ali Abdaal 55:01 And I guess you enjoyed these jobs unlike investment banking, management consulting, that kind of thing?

Chris Hutchins 55:05 Yeah. I mean, the product management one was a bit weird because I landed at Google Plus-

Ali Abdaal 55:09 Oh. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 55:10 ... which at the time, uh, Google-

Ali Abdaal 55:11 Haven't heard that phrase in ages. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 55:13 At the time, Google Plus had about 1,000 people working on it.

Ali Abdaal 55:16 That's right.

Chris Hutchins 55:16 Which I think like the internal funny joke was like there... At any given point in time, there are more people building Google Plus than using it. Um, at least actively using it.

Ali Abdaal 55:24 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 55:24 Uh, so I think I didn't love that that org was so big, but it probably didn't need to be anywhere near that size-

Ali Abdaal 55:33 Mm

Chris Hutchins 55:33 ... that everyone was working on some tiny insignificant thing.

Ali Abdaal 55:36 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 55:36 But the core product didn't even have product market fit, so it's like, can you work on the notifications for a feature that no one's using that's part of a p- bigger feature in an app that no one's u-

Ali Abdaal 55:45 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 55:45 ... like, it felt insignificant. Um, but Google pays you well, so you're like, "Well, maybe I'll keep doing this." Uh, but fortunately for anyone working on a product like that, Google, eventually they realize that, and they're really good about letting you move on to other teams. I got the chance to go do venture capital-

Ali Abdaal 56:01 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 56:01 ... which I think was the most fascinating job ever, which was like I just get to go see what people are building, listen, understand, invest in things that I believed in, and watch them kind of evolve and grow.

Ali Abdaal 56:13 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 56:13 And that was amazing, and lasted about three years before I was like, "I'm ready to go do it again." And so [laughs] eventually left to go start another company. But, uh, yeah, it was... I finally found a job where I was like, "I kinda like doing this. This is cool. You can enjoy a job."

Ali Abdaal 56:28 And how, like how old were you when you started at GV? Like, what was the-

Chris Hutchins 56:31 Mm, 28.

Ali Abdaal 56:33 Okay. So sort of seven years into the world of work, I guess, in-

Chris Hutchins 56:36 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 56:36 ... inverted commas, you finally found the thing like, "Oh, I actually really enjoy this. This is good fun."

Chris Hutchins 56:40 Yeah, it was funny

Chris Hutchins 56:41 'cause-

Ali Abdaal 56:41 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 56:41 ... about three years into investing, I had this thing... So some of the best investors are not people who've ever built companies.

Ali Abdaal 56:47 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 56:48 So it seems counterintuitive. You think, oh, the best investors in startups, you, you would think maybe, or at least I did, were successful in- investor... or successful founders. They built companies. Some of the most successful ones are actually people who love investing, right? They're looking at it as a, as an investor, not as a founder. But I kind of had this imposter syndrome where I was like, "Gosh, how could I be trying to help entrepreneurs figure out what to do in their business when like I've never built a business that grew past 10 people?"

Ali Abdaal 57:13 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 57:13 And so I think the thing that ultimate- A- and as you invest in smaller companies, I was investing first in companies with three or four people, and I was like, "Well, I've done that. I've been a company of three or four people." And then as I moved to bigger companies, I was like, "How am I supposed to convince someone who's running a company with 1,000 people that they want me on their board?"

Ali Abdaal 57:30 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 57:30 "They want me to sit at their, you know, at the table and advise them on what to do?" I was like, "I can't do that." I've later learned that just a passionate, smart person who is really invested in your business can bring a perspective that is really valuable. But at the time, I felt like in order for... to earn the right to sit at that table-

Ali Abdaal 57:48 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 57:48 ... I needed to go back on the other side.

Ali Abdaal 57:50 Okay. A few... So I, I, I definitely wanna go into the follow-up story of, um, the company that you then started. Um, two tangents I wanna explore before we get there. Uh, the first one is that you mentioned that, um, when you were at, uh, SimpleGeo, a lot of the people that you still keep in touch with and stuff, that you still are kind of friends to this day, that kind of thing.

Ali Abdaal 58:09 You're... I feel like you're sort of way above average in terms of people I have on my WhatsApp who are g- I feel are good at staying in touch with people.

Chris Hutchins 58:15 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 58:16 And I always like... You know, you've emailed me, I think, two or three times in the last, in the last few months just like for, f- for no reason at all, just like very kindly sending me your, like, great recording of, like, podcast growth strategy. And I don't know, every time I get one of those emails, I'm just like, "Wow, that's so good."

Chris Hutchins 58:30 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 58:30 Like, purely, like you, you aren't expecting anything in return. You're literally just being super, super helpful and super, super nice, and it takes me six months to reply to the email and I feel terrible. I'm like, "Oh, why am I so bad at re- keeping in touch with people? Why, how's, how's Chris so good at it?" How do you, how do you do such a good job of staying in touch with people? [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 58:46 I would say some of the answer comes-

Ali Abdaal 58:48 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 58:50 ... at the, at the counter to why, you know, why am I not focusing more on the things that are the most important?

Ali Abdaal 58:54 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 58:54 Like, maybe I'm so g- I'm good at staying in touch with people, but I could be spending more time on, you know, all the hacks of the business.

Ali Abdaal 59:00 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 59:01 So maybe there's one, one element of that there. I wish... There was this app, this amazing app a long time ago called ETax. It doesn't exist anymore, but what it would do is it would, similar to how a lot of these banking apps, you'll give them your login, they'll go to your bank, they'll log in with on their servers, and they'll download your transactions. It did the same thing for your cell phone carrier.

Ali Abdaal 59:20 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 59:20 And it would log... It would go download your bill or your usage data of all the text messages you've sent before there were WhatsApp and iMessage-

Ali Abdaal 59:27 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 59:27 ... and all that, and all your phone calls, and then it would also sync with your Gmail and it would take your address book and it would be like, "We know based on whether you texted, called, emailed, or had a calendar invite with someone when the last time for every one of your address people you, you know, you've communicated with them."

Ali Abdaal 59:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 59:43 So it'd be like, "Okay, you haven't talked to this person in a year," and you could set reminders. You could say for all these people, "If I haven't talked to them in a year, or for this person every three months, remind me," and then it would look at all the data and reset the timer every time you communicated with them. I wish that existed because I would definitely use that. I don't have a sophisticated system.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:01 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:00:01 Uh, I wish I did, but I'm one of those people that when I'm walking, I'm like scrolling through my phone book all the time. That's like my, my habit, and I'm just like looking, and if I make it to the Ds, then the next time I try to remember that it was I left on D, and the next time I'll just scroll from D, and I'll just find someone and I'll be like, "Oh, I haven't talked to that person in a while. I wonder what would be interesting to send them, like say hi, how you doing, or maybe there's something." That's one element of it-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:26 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:00:26 ... to the point that I've even created like subgroups of my address book that are like... One of them's called walking calls.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:32 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:00:32 And they're like people that if I'm going on a walk, I feel like I could just randomly call them.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:36 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:00:36 So I'll go to that group. Um, so that's one is just like using my free kind of mindless time to try to find people that I want to stay in touch with and just forcibly staying in touch. The other is And I think this comes from content creation as a thing that I've found later in life. I love going deep and learning things. So in the case of what I sent you, I was like, I went really deep and I tried to figure out all of this stuff about podcast growth. And I realized that I was having the same conversation with lots of people. They're like, "Oh, I'm really interested in podcast growth. Could we talk about it?" And we talk for 30 minutes, and I was like, "Oh, I should probably record that." And the idea came from this guy, James Beshara, who has a podcast called Below the Line.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:17 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:01:18 And we'd been talking about something, and I sent him an email, and he was like, "Hey, I'm really trying this asynchronous communication thing, so could you just send me a Loom?" And I was like, "You don't even wanna talk to me?"

Ali Abdaal 1:01:27 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:01:28 And I was like, "Okay." And then I was like, "Wow, this is magical."

Ali Abdaal 1:01:30 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:01:30 'Cause then when we're communicating this way, I can listen to everything you tell me on 2X.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:33 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:01:34 So, like, life's more efficient.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:35 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:01:35 And then I was like, oh, and if I record something, I can share it with more than one person. And so I thought, oh, well, I gave this talk at a conference about podcast growth. Why don't I just actually record a version of it that I can just send to people? And it wasn't, like, published on YouTube.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:50 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:01:50 It didn't have... But it was something I could send to people. And now I'm starting to think about, oh, every time I learn something interesting, what if I found a way to share it with people? So I do that with the podcast, which I think seems almost too public. If I'm like, "Hey, Ali, I found this... I, I recorded an episode. Here it is," you'd be like-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:05 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:02:05 ... "Okay, well, that's like... Anyone could go subscribe to the feed."

Ali Abdaal 1:02:08 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:08 I started doing, like, the private version of it, and I would encourage lots of people to try to experiment in this way.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:14 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:14 Um, it, it takes different forms. This guy, Nick Gray, who wrote this great book called The 2-Hour Cocktail Party.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:20 Oh, okay.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:20 Literally, like, he has optimized throwing a, an event to meet and, and build relationships with people-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:27 Yep

Chris Hutchins 1:02:27 ... to the nth degree.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:28 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:28 It's fantastic.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:29 Sick. Okay [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:02:30 And he has a, he has a friends newsletter where he just-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:32 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:02:32 ... puts his friends on this newsletter, and he sends an update maybe once a month about what's going on in his life, some cool links he's found, just as a way to keep people in touch with what he's doing in life.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:42 Oh.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:42 So you can send a friends newsletter.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:43 That's nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:43 I love it.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:44 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:02:44 You get this friends newsletter. He's like, "Oh, I found this cool thing." And every time he goes deep on something in his life, he's like, "You know what? I want... I feel like Calendly," which he uses for scheduling, "could be a little more dialed in." So he goes really deep, and he's like, "You know what? Here's how I think you should change the default settings. Here's what I think you should put in the thing." And then he just writes a little blog post.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:03 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:03:03 And then he's like, "I'm gonna send it to the people I think might find this interesting." So now every time I come up with something I think people might find interesting, I'm like, "Who might find this interesting? Let's just send it to them." I'm not like, "Hey, you have to watch this."

Ali Abdaal 1:03:15 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:03:15 "I'm watching the links. If you don't click it-"

Ali Abdaal 1:03:17 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:03:17 ... "you know I'm gonna be upset." It's just why not send people things that they might find interesting? Um, it helps you stay in touch. So if there's something you've learned recently, if you're listening to this, or an idea or a tip you have, don't feel like you have to go to the extent of, like, I'm gonna create a blog or I'm gonna record a YouTube video. The video I sent you on podcast growth is not worthy of YouTube-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:38 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:03:38 ... in its kind of view... You know, in the quality of the production, right? It's, like, me recording myself, like, running through slides-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:47 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:03:47 ... in Keynote. So I don't feel great about putting it on YouTube, and if I wanted to put that video on YouTube, I feel like I need to go hire an editor or, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:54 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:03:54 ... learn all this stuff, and so it's a really big ver- hurdle for me. But to just record it and send it to you, I'm like, eh, you're not gonna judge me for not having a super high quality thing if the content's good. So I think for anyone listening that there's something you've, you're dialed into or you've learned a lot about, maybe try recording a Loom video, um, or an audio note or, you know, writing it out, and just send it to anyone you think might find it interesting. And I think you'd be surprised at how if you've done a little bit of research, people will find that valuable.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:23 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:04:23 Especially if you, you go to a place... I have friends that every time they go to a place, they create, like, a... even, like, a Google Doc of, like, my Paris recommendations.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:31 Oh, that's so handy. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:04:32 And then, and then someone's like... You hear someone, they're like, "Oh, I'm going to Paris." You're like, "Hey, let me just send you this Google Doc I have-"

Ali Abdaal 1:04:36 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:04:36 ... "of Paris stuff." And now I have one of London. Like, you know, I, I think it's just something that's so easy 'cause you've already done the research.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:04:43 So take the research you've done on anything in life, share it with people you might find interesting, and it makes it really easy to stay in touch with them.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:49 Yeah. That's so good. Those are fantastic. Um, okay, how do you manage your WhatsApp? [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:04:57 So it's really easy when you live in the States. I have, like, three people on WhatsApp.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:01 Oh, wow. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:05:01 So managing WhatsApp is, like, the easiest thing in life.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:03 Is it, is it iMessage for everyone else?

Chris Hutchins 1:05:05 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:06 Okay.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:06 Yeah. I don't... I have, like, the group that we are in on WhatsApp-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:10 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:05:10 ... and one friend that lives in London.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:11 Oh, wow. Okay.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:12 So, like, WhatsApp for me-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:13 How, how do you manage your iMessage? [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:05:14 Yeah, yeah. So I, I use iMessage on the computer.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:17 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:18 And I'd say, like, 90% of the texts I send, uh, are all done on the computer.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:21 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:22 It's not the most organ... I mean, like, I don't have, like, a system-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:24 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:05:24 ... other than that I hate red dots.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:26 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:26 So, like, I've got to respond to it, and until they had mark unread-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:30 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:05:30 ... which still leaves you the red dot, but, like, there was just... It was like I've got to respond. So I would say no system. No, no fancy way to manage iMessage other than, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:37 But, but basically inbox zero in terms of unreads.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:39 Yes. Yeah, yeah. I'm not someone who has, like, a million unread messages. It's like I've-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:43 Oh

Chris Hutchins 1:05:43 ... I've got to respond.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:44 Okay.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:45 I do have a lot of red dots.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:46 Oh, God. I have to have, uh, sort of hundreds of WhatsApp unreads.

Chris Hutchins 1:05:50 Oh.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:51 Hundreds of iMessages. And, uh, it's, it's, it's one of those things that I really... I as- aspire to be the sort of person that will respond in a timely fashion when someone messages me, and every time I set that intention for myself, I decide, you know what? I'm on the toilet right now. I'm here for at least 15 minutes. [laughs] Instead of scrolling Twitter, I'm gonna scroll my WhatsApp messages and reply to people. But then it, it's sort of like email. Any, any, any reply I send generates more, [laughs] and it becomes-

Chris Hutchins 1:06:14 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:06:15 ... an infinite kind of infinite loop or in- infinite well of things that I then feel like, feel like I have to respond to, and then if I don't respond to it in a timely fashion, I feel like, oh, it's been, like, two days already. It's like it's too late to respond now.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:28 I think everyone feels this way.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:29 Teach me. How do I, how do I get over this?

Chris Hutchins 1:06:30 I think everyone feels this way.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:31 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:32 So if you respond two days later-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:34 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:06:34 ... I don't think that's a problem.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:35 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:35 I think, uh, Derek Sivers, who I just thought of because you have a book of his over on the wall-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:41 Me too.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:41 But I think he's like, "I process things, like, irregularly." He's like, "I don't even like to respond the same day."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:47 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:47 "Even if I am here," he's like, "I'll wait a couple days."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:49 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:49 So I now- I like kind of respect people that take a few days to reply to things, 'cause I'm like, ooh, like this person-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:55 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:06:55 ... you know, is prioritizing their time. This wasn't that urgent.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:58 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:06:59 Um, so I definitely wouldn't not reply 'cause it's been a few days.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:02 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:07:02 That's... And I definitely wouldn't feel like you owe everyone a reply.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:06 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:07:06 I, I feel like that's something hard to get over, as someone who has like an audience and everybody that writes you. I feel like it's really hard. I would try to come up with scalable ways to solve that. If you have a bunch of listeners that send you questions and you wanna answer them, maybe do a listener Q&A episode.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:20 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:07:20 Maybe do something like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:22 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:07:22 But for just general friends and stuff, I don't know, you just decide is it important? If it's not, that's fine. If it is, I'm sure there's time. I think that like the funny thing about time management, someone... I can't who... I think Laura Vanderkam uses this example of like, look, if your water heater breaks, you're gonna find a way to get it fixed because you need hot water.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:07:44 Um, especially if you're in London this week.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:45 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:07:45 You definitely want some hot water in the shower. Um, but you don't, you didn't have six hours that day. But like when you needed to solve a problem, you found the six hours. So I think you can always find the time.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:57 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:07:57 If it's not important, that's fine. Like if, if... But if you, if it's hur- if it's making you frustrated, feeling like I don't wanna be the person that everyone's like, "God, this person never responds"-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:05 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:08:05 ... you just have to prioritize it. Like you just have to decide, okay, let's block an hour for going through WhatsApp and responding to things.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:10 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:08:11 I wish there was a... Sometimes I like to work offline with email, where I'm like, I'll send all these emails, and even if I'm not offline, it's like I'll send them all at 4:00 PM or I, I use a lot of Send Later-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:20 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:08:20 ... with Superhuman just so that I don't... Before I'm done triaging the inbox, I don't have a bunch of stuff coming back in.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:27 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:08:28 So that's an easy one, but I don't think it works on WhatsApp.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:30 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:08:30 It doesn't work on iMessage.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:31 Have you tried, uh, text.com?

Chris Hutchins 1:08:33 Text.com?

Ali Abdaal 1:08:34 Text.com.

Chris Hutchins 1:08:35 No.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:35 Oh, it's amazing. It's like Superhuman, but it... for all of your messaging services.

Chris Hutchins 1:08:38 Including iMessage?

Ali Abdaal 1:08:39 Including iMessage.

Chris Hutchins 1:08:40 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:40 Including WhatsApp. That's been the thing that's allowed me to most... Because then it sort of, it's like WhatsApp Web, but just better, and it's like iMessage, but better, and it's all in the same interface. And you can even do fancy things like have groups and stuff, and I haven't gotten to that fancy level yet. But it's just sort of Superhuman level keyboard shortcuts in terms of being able to archive things and-

Chris Hutchins 1:08:57 Wow

Ali Abdaal 1:08:57 ... search conversations and... So that's been, that's been one thing that's actually helped me probably two or three X my ability to respond to people, even though it's still not quite at the level that I would like.

Chris Hutchins 1:09:07 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:07 But I think, yeah, you're right. I just need to prioritize it. And if it- And currently it's not really a priority. I'm just like, whatevs.

Chris Hutchins 1:09:11 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:11 And at the point where it becomes a priority, then maybe I'll, I'll start thinking about it. By the way, in case you haven't heard, the book that I've been working on for the last three years is now available for order. It is called Feel-Good Productivity, and it's available on Amazon and all other major retailers, and you can check out the website feelgoodproductivity.com for more information and links to where you can get yourself a copy.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:30 Um, so that was one tangent on keeping in touch with people. Uh, I wanted to explore another tangent, which is I'm curious, like how do you think about money? Very broadly.

Chris Hutchins 1:09:39 Yeah. It's broad.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:40 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:09:40 You know? Like just money.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:41 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:09:41 Oh, wow.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:41 Just talk about your money. Let's go. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:09:43 Um, I think my outlook on money has had a, a f- fun evolution through my life. I think early on it was like, well, I just need it to live. And then it was like, oh, now I need as much as possible. So I went down the financial independence path pretty deep because I was like, "I need as much money as possible," because I don't find, I haven't found a job I love, and I don't wanna work at a job I hate.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:00 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:10:01 So my relationship with money there was I need as much of it as I can save. However, I think one theme that has stayed relevant the entire time was I'm not willing to sacrifice like the, the kind of things that I enjoy doing. So it was like I want more money so that I don't have to work a job I don't love, but I still wanna travel. Like it's not that I was unwilling... I was unwilling to give up those things, but not at the expense of spending the money, just at the expense of finding creative solutions. So like you can play the points game if you wanna travel for free, or you can find interesting deals, or you can go couch surfing. Um, if you wanna live in a nice place, you can go down the world of house hacking and like get a apartment that lets you rent out a room, and maybe you can get one that has a separate entrance so you don't even have to have a roommate, which we did. So I guess I had this process where I looked at all the way we s- we spent money, and I was like, "Let's go through each thing we spend money on and find out is there actually a way that we could spend less money on this without having to give that much up?"

Ali Abdaal 1:11:01 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:11:01 Um, so I don't know, little things, like we wanted... We found out we d- we, we found out when you have kids, you stop eating dinner at 7:30 and you start eating dinner at 5:30. Uh, well, we were almost never done with work by 5:15, 5:30. So we were like, "How do we cook dinner?" So one option was you end work early, and then the fancy version was what if we had a chef? Like wouldn't that be nice? You just have a chef come to your house and cook dinner for you, and it's like wonderful. So we were like, "That would be great," but that's really expensive. Um, so I put an ad out on Craigslist. I was like, "Does anyone that lives in this general region like cooking? I don't need you to be a fancy Michelin star chef. I don't need you to come to my house. But could you just cook basic meals and put them in glass Tupperware and once or twice a week drop them off at our house?" And we found like 20 people said they could. We found a few, and then someone would drop it off. It ends up costing about halfway between like DoorDash or, you know, whatever other delivery service, Uber Eats, and just going to the grocery store yourself. But you don't have to do the cooking, and you don't have to do the grocery shopping, and you can kind of plan the menus in advance, so it ends up having this added health benefit-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:10 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:12:10 ... to if I'm at the grocery store by myself, maybe I'll pick something unhealthy. I know for sure if I'm ordering food, I'm picking something less healthy. So it's like you get a health benefit and a time benefit, and it's not that much more expensive. Now, if I hired a chef, it would've been way more expensive.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:23 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:12:24 So I feel like, you know, in that window of time, I felt like I had a chef in our house, but I didn't. Um, so I think my outlook on money is I don't want to spend it if I can avoid it, but I do wanna have great experiences, whether they're travel or lifestyle or anything.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:12:43 So I think that's like the whole theme of my life is trying to find ways to, you know, upgrade your life, your money, your travel, everything, while spending less and saving more.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:52 Oh, love it. Is business class worth it?

Chris Hutchins 1:12:55 Business class?

Ali Abdaal 1:12:56 Yeah, in flying.

Chris Hutchins 1:12:57 Oh, flying.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:58 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:12:59 I mean, worth it is interesting. Have I paid for business class? I don't th- If I have, it was, like, one time on a domestic flight when it was like, "Oh, do you want business class for an extra $100?"

Ali Abdaal 1:13:10 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:13:10 Have I ever paid $1,000 for business class? No. Or more. Never. Have I crossed an ocean in economy in the last seven years? Probably not, also. Uh, so the answer, and for people who live outside of the States, this is maybe not the most fun answer, but, like, in the States, it's just so easy if you play the points and miles game to accumulate enough miles and points that you can, you know, fly business class for free. So I've just gotta... Yeah, it's totally worth it if you have a way to do it without spending a lot of money. And the opportunity cost for me is I could probably go on twice as many trips in coach as I could in business, 'cause it usually is about two times as many points to fly in business as it is in coach. So I think it's worth 2X. The arbitrage opportunity is that when you go buy business class, it usually costs, like, six to 10X.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:59 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:14:00 So the points needs are, like, 2X, and the dollars needs are... you know, could be 10X. Do I think business class is worth it at 2X? Yeah, probably. Um, it just unfortunately never is 2X.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:10 [laughs] Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:14:11 And, and funny enough, when you add in the cost now, at least for certain destinations of like, oh, I wanna pick my seats and I wanna check bags, which you have kids now, you're checking bags. Now you're like, wow, it's really getting close-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:22 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:14:22 ... like, to 2X. Um, and 'cause business is often, like, 2X the base fare, but it includes the free checked bags. It includes, you know, picking your seats, or maybe you don't care 'cause all the seats are good. So I don't know. It seems like... I would say, yes, it's worth it, but no, it's not worth paying for. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:14:38 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:40 Have you... What about, like... Okay, so I... Just some, some more specific questions on this stuff. Um, have you found... Let, let's say if you're, um, staying in a hotel. Hotels range from, like, 10 pounds a night to 10,000 pounds a night.

Chris Hutchins 1:14:54 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:55 What is a good sweet spot in terms of nightly [laughs] cost? Have... Has... Is, is... Has someone done an analysis on this? I'm, I'm kind of slowly doing one myself in my head, but, like, I'm su- I'm sure this is a solved problem.

Chris Hutchins 1:15:08 I mean, I think at the end of the day, the challenge is, like, okay, so what are you optimizing for?

Ali Abdaal 1:15:12 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:15:13 And I think there are a lot of ways around this. So one, I became a travel agent. That helps on that.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:18 Oh.

Chris Hutchins 1:15:18 Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:19 Very well

Chris Hutchins 1:15:19 ... two, uh, you can u- There's a great travel hack that is probably one of the ones that's been most valuable to everyone that listens to my podcast, which is book a hotel. Book directly with the hotel. Don't use booking.com.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:31 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:15:31 Don't use TripAdvisor. Book directly with the hotel. Email the hotel after you book, and if you can't get their email address, call the front desk, say, "I need an email address for a general manager," you know, someone. And just email and say, "Hey, I just booked a night at your hotel or a week at your hotel. I'm coming with these people in my family or just me. I'm really excited. If you're celebrating something, great. If you're not, that's fine. Don't mention it." I, I, I'm not someone who's, like, always telling someone, "It's our honeymoon. It's our honeymoon."

Ali Abdaal 1:15:56 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:15:56 Uh, I'm kinda pretty straight, straight and narrow for that one. But... And just say, "Hey, we're coming. Really excited to stay. Looking forward to s- to staying in your hotel." And then three days before check-in, follow up and say, "Hey, just wanna let you know we're still coming. I'm really excited for the stay." I have seen almost, let's say, 50% hit rate on getting upgrade, free breakfast, bottle of champagne, you know, chocolate-covered strawberries. One time, initials embroidered on the pillows.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:23 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:16:24 Uh, all kinds of stuff from an email.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:25 Literally just sending an email-

Chris Hutchins 1:16:26 Sending an email

Ali Abdaal 1:16:27 ... where you're not even asking for anything. You're just saying, "Excited to be staying."

Chris Hutchins 1:16:29 You're not, you're not asking for anything.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:30 Wow.

Chris Hutchins 1:16:30 And the crazy thing is that this whole industry still thrives on hospitality.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:35 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:16:35 And it's still so deep in the culture of hotels. But when you book through all these other channels, they have no way to build a relationship with you-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:44 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:16:44 ... because the relationship is owned by booking. The relationship's owned by TripAdvisor. And they have to give up such high commissions to those companies that, you know, in general, they're like, "Well, this person doesn't care about staying at our hotel chain."

Ali Abdaal 1:16:56 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:16:56 "This person just cares about getting the cheapest price, and next time they're gonna go stay somewhere else."

Ali Abdaal 1:17:01 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:17:01 But when you're like... When you take the time to book with them, they're like, "Well, we're... You took the time to book directly with us. You must wanna build a relationship. We should build a relationship with you." Um, so that didn't answer your question at all. But it does increase the likelihood that if you book something slightly lower in price, you'll get a better experience. Um, for me, it's really, like, w- a balance of where you wanna stay, um, what you need in that hotel, uh, trying to find a deal. There, there are some times that I won't book direct because I could find a great deal. So if you follow @hotel on Instagram and you send them a DM, uh, they'll respond, and they'll give you a link to go to their website and book. And you can get anywhere from, like, 20% to 60% off different hotels booking through them-

Ali Abdaal 1:17:45 Oh, wow

Chris Hutchins 1:17:45 ... from this interesting arbitrage thing where hotels are not allowed to sell a room at a lower price than they give to everyone.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:53 Okay.

Chris Hutchins 1:17:53 So hotels sometimes pay 10% up to 30% commission on sites like Booking and TripAdvisor.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:58 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:17:59 They would... If they sold that room for 30% less on their website, they would make the same margin on that room-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:05 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:18:05 ... but they're not allowed to because the agreements they have with all these agencies are that they won't price below-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:10 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:18:11 ... what they tell them-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:12 Okay

Chris Hutchins 1:18:12 ... to the public.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:12 Right.

Chris Hutchins 1:18:13 But when you DM hotel-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:15 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:18:15 ... on Instagram and you get a response from them, then they take you to a site that's not available to the public.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:21 Yeah. Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:18:21 And you could argue it is 'cause all you had to do is DM them.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:24 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:18:24 But it is not a website anyone could just type in the URL, so they're able to offer you these crazy deals. And so as much as I love booking direct, if I could book a room for 60% off, I'm happy to not have any chance of getting an upgrade, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:18:36 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:18:36 You could probably just book the upgraded room and still come out ahead. So I don't know. I'm let... I, I feel better about getting the best value. Like, I almost optimize more for making sure that I'm getting the best deal than that I'm, uh, you know, spending a certain amount. Like, at the end of the day, if I want a hotel that has XYZ features and is this level of clean and central- Like, I, I might just have to spend a certain amount of money for it.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:01 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:19:01 I just don't wanna spend any more than the bare minimum I could-

Ali Abdaal 1:19:03 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:19:03 ... possibly spend to get that quality room.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:05 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:06 What's the deal with having an au pair? What, what, like, what does an au pair do, and, like, to what extent is this a, a hack for having kids and stuff?

Chris Hutchins 1:19:14 Yeah, so, you know, when you ... If, if both people work and you need to have some kind of childcare, the options generally are you send your kids to daycare until they're old enough to go to school.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:23 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:19:24 You get a nanny that comes to your house and helps the kids during the day and then leaves. You could get an, a live-in nanny, or you can get an au pair, which is someone from another country. I think they are, have to be between, like, 18 and 27, and they stay with you for a year, and it's part of... At least in the US, it's part of a cultural exchange.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:40 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:19:40 So the idea is they're, like, getting to experience America. Um, they're part of the family. They stay in the house. We, you know, eat din- meals with them. If we go on a trip, we'll bring them with us, and all those kinds of things. So it's something that not everyone wants. Like, not everyone wants someone in your home.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:56 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:19:56 Um, but, you know, I, I remember I was listening before I came over. Our daughter was going to bed, and our au pair was helping her with bedtime, and they were singing songs in Spanish. And my daughter, she's from Spain, our au pair. And so, you know, it's like this cultural experience for our daughter getting to, you know, experience someone from another country-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:12 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 1:20:12 ... and learn a new language. We love just, like, traveling and getting to meet interesting people, so for us, having someone in our home wasn't that big of a deal.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:20 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:20:20 But I, I know that's probably the biggest deal breaker. But from a cost standpoint, if you live in a high cost of living area, even if you pay above the minimum... Like, they, in the States, they're like, "Here's the minimum stipend you're supposed to pay each week," and I'd say probably 50, 70% of people are paying that.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:37 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:20:37 Even if you go above that, you're still at, you know, a significant discount to a nanny who has to pay for housing in, you know-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:44 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:20:44 ... the city you live, which can be expensive, who has to commute to where you are and needs a car and all these other things. Um, so I don't know. I think it's an amazing thing. I think if it were the same cost, we'd probably still do it because it's an experience we like. It just happens to be a lot less expensive.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:02 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:21:03 Um, I... When I was a kid, my parents, we had an au pair. We had four au pairs four years in a row, all from Norway, and, like, I remember this one guy, Espen, was like... And who knows how much of this is true 'cause I was a kid, but I swear he was the best Lego builder in the world.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:18 [laughs] Right.

Chris Hutchins 1:21:19 Like, and I have all these amazing memories.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:21 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:21:22 I, I, I was obse- ... Like, I thought my au pair was the coolest person ever.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:25 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:21:25 I brought him to show and tell. Like, one day for school, it was like, "Bring something cool to show off to your friends," and-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:29 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:21:29 ... you know, people are like, "Here's a cool rock," or, "Here's my skateboard." And I was like, "Here's this 24-year-old man."

Ali Abdaal 1:21:33 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:21:34 Um, but, you know, I thought it was so cool, and I, like, had all these great memories as a kid of this person-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:39 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:21:39 ... who was living at home, and, like, I got to, you know, get to know them, and, you know, we were having a good time, and I don't know. Uh, so it was just something that we wanted to try, and the experience for us has been amazing.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:50 Nice. That's pretty cool. Um, I'll,

Ali Abdaal 1:21:53 I'll definitely hit you up as and when I have kids to be like, [laughs] "Right, I need, I need more hacks about, about the whole kids thing." Um-

Chris Hutchins 1:21:57 So here's another great example.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:58 Oh, yeah, please.

Chris Hutchins 1:21:59 I made a Notion page-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:01 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:22:01 ... that's just like, you know, my baby planning thing. It's like, "Here are all the things that I thought we wanted to buy. Here are some ideas. Here are some resources. Here are my favorite books and resources," like, all that stuff. And so anytime I meet someone that's like, "Oh, yeah, you know, we're having a kid," I'm like, "Great. Let me just send you this doc."

Ali Abdaal 1:22:14 Oh, that's handy.

Chris Hutchins 1:22:15 Like, and then they're like, "Oh, wow, thanks for thinking. That's so cool."

Ali Abdaal 1:22:17 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:22:17 Like, so, you know, just another example of, like, my podcast growth video and this thing, um-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:22 You know, this is a great idea. So, like, um, I've, I found myself doing this-

Chris Hutchins 1:22:26 You do this. You have your, like, gear guide on your website.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:29 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:22:29 Like, you create this-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:30 But that's more like a sort of public for audience rather than for friends.

Chris Hutchins 1:22:33 Yes, but you ha- ... I'm sure there's something-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:35 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:22:35 ... in your own personal life.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:36 So, like, so one, one thing that me and my girlfriend do is regular relationship reviews, and we have-

Chris Hutchins 1:22:40 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:22:40 ... like, a Notion page where we answer these, like, 10 questions every couple weeks. And everyone I've mentioned this to who's in a relationship says, "Oh, I'd like some of that for myself." And I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool. Let me go. Let me screenshot it, like, AirDrop it," all that kind of stuff. I could just copy and paste it into, like, a more public Notion page and be like-

Chris Hutchins 1:22:53 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:22:53 ... "I'll send you a link."

Chris Hutchins 1:22:54 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:55 And this is a very easy, easy thing to do.

Chris Hutchins 1:22:56 And it makes it m- it also makes people feel like, "Wow," like, "you sent me this cool thing"-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:00 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:23:00 ... "like you don't give everyone."

Ali Abdaal 1:23:01 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:02 Um, even if you've given it to hundreds of people, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:04 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 1:23:04 ... it still feels-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:04 Yeah, it feels like a-

Chris Hutchins 1:23:05 ... really interesting.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:05 Yeah, I have no idea how many people you sent the podcast thing to, but I feel so special when you sent it-

Chris Hutchins 1:23:08 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:23:08 ... to me without a BCC or a CC chain or, or any of that kind of stuff.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:12 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:12 It's so good. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:23:13 Um, so you see, you probably already have these in your life, and you can-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:15 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:23:15 ... start doing them.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:16 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:16 And even little things. Like, I imagine if you took a list of, like, the 10 restaurants that you love in London.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:22 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:22 You sent me one.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:23 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:23 I'd happen to already go there, but like-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:24 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:23:24 ... anytime you hear someone's coming to London, you're just like, "Hey, here's, here's a few things that I love doing." You don't need to provide me with a six-day itinerary.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:32 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:33 Uh, well, though, for anyone listening, I literally, by the time this comes out-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:36 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:23:36 ... will have done a entire episode on London.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:38 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:38 So maybe m- you know, we'll see. Ali's guide, my guide, we'll see which one's better, but-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:42 We'll see, yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:43 Um, I don't know. I feel like, uh, the bar... It might be harder for you because you're so used to creating such great produced content, and so you're like, "Oh, do I really wanna make, like, a friends YouTube..." No, no, just make something simple. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:23:57 No, just like a quick Notion page.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:58 A bulleted list.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:59 So easy.

Chris Hutchins 1:23:59 Yeah, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:00 Yeah, it's 'cause when you, when you asked me any, any restaurant recommendations, I was like, "Huh, that's ac- that's actually a good question." And it's like I've been to lots of good restaurants, and I've kind of saved some of them on Google Maps, but some of them not. Like, I could just make a Notion page 'cause so many people ask me for restaurant recommendations when they come to London. [laughs] It would just be such an easy thing to do.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:16 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:16 [laughs] Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:17 Or even if you go to another place.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:18 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:18 Like, I just went to London, and I'm like, "Wow, now I have some recommendations." I could... I, I have a bunch of recommendations for Japan.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:24 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:24 Like, people are going to Japan, I'm like, "Here's all the stuff I love."

Ali Abdaal 1:24:27 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:27 Um, I think it'd be so easy, and then it creates this cool thing that anytime you... Someone's going through something. And by the way, when someone's trying to plan a trip or have a kid or do any of these moments in their lives-

Ali Abdaal 1:24:37 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:24:38 ... they're probably overwhelmed with information.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:40 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:40 So you're like, "Hey, I've got you." Like, "I've got this thing." Trying to grow your podcast, trying to... You know.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:45 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:45 I don't know. I feel like-

Ali Abdaal 1:24:47 Nice

Chris Hutchins 1:24:47 ... I feel like you're gonna have great relationships in 2023.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:50 Okay. So at this point, you've been at Google Ventures for three years, going back to the, the backstory.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:55 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:55 And you decide you're gonna start your own thing.

Chris Hutchins 1:24:56 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:56 What was the story there?

Chris Hutchins 1:24:59 ... m- I mean, we were talking about money. So I've always been someone that people are like, "Hey, you seem to have money figured out." Not, not that I had so much of it, just, just like it wasn't a thing that, you know, stressed me out like it does for so many people.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:11 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:25:11 I, I assume this is a, you know, a global phenomenon, but in the US money is the number one cause of stress and the number one cause of divorce. I imagine it's very similar here and in most Western countries, if not all countries. And so I just was someone who was, like, very pragmatic about it. I was like, "Okay, well, here's how it works. Here's what it does. I go read these books and I think about it."

Ali Abdaal 1:25:30 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:25:30 And most people don't like thinking about money. I think that's the difference. It's like if you love thinking about money it can be really easy to figure out. If you don't, you can't. Or if you don't, then it's harder. And so people are always like, "Oh, what do I do?" Like, "Um, should I, what should I start doing in my 20s or my 30s?" Or like, "We're having a kid," or, "We wanna buy a house." And I was someone who's like, oh, well, when I bought a house, uh, I was like, "Okay, well, here's all the mortgage options. Here's how I thought about how to buy the house. Here's how I, you know, house hacked our way-

Ali Abdaal 1:25:53 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:25:53 ... to buy a house that I think was a way better deal than anyone else could have found, uh, if they were trying to just look for a normal house. And you know, we d- we did this weird thing with real estate agents and, you know, we could go pretty far down just that, but we won't. And I realized that everyone was all stressed out, and there was a process that many people use called financial planning, and there are professional financial planners, there are certified financial planners. There's kind of a thing they do, which is like let's understand how much you're saving, how much you're spending. Let's understand what your goals are. Let's understand how your money's invested, what your risk tolerance is, and let's come up with a plan, see if you're on track for what you want, and if you're not, let's come up with a plan of what you need to do to get on track. Like, it's, it's not actually rocket science what you do. And in many ways most financial planners and financial advisors are probably more therapists than financial professionals. But the process of going through financial planning is something that almost everyone I've talked to that's done it goes in stressed out and comes out feeling a lot less stress and more peace of mind. That doesn't mean they have all the money they need and everything's already perfect, but they're just less overwhelmed. So I was like, "Wow, why doesn't everyone do this?" Like, why doesn't everyone go through financial planning?

Ali Abdaal 1:27:03 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:27:03 It's like, hmm, well, the average cost of financial planning was like 2,700 or $2,600. It's like, okay, well, that's pretty expensive. That's a high price ticket. Um, that's probably a, a big barrier. Turns out there were other barriers that I didn't know at the time, but I thought, "Okay, clearly that's a big barrier. I know a lot of people aren't willing to spend a few thousand dollars. Why does it cost so much money?" And you go talk to financial planners, I interviewed a ton. It's like, okay, well, to get to know you, I have to ask you to bring your financial statements and email me all these PDFs. And I was like, why aren't they building software that, like, aggregates all your accounts? Like Mint has been doing this for years. There's Plaid and Yodlee are aggregating tools. Why is no one doing this? And the short answer is most financial planning clients, because of the price, were all a much older generation.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:49 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:27:50 And they didn't want those services, so the tools they were using weren't really built for this new generation. There wasn't really a thing there. And so I was like, okay, well, what if you just automate it away all of the time? So if you looked at how advisors spend their days, half of it is, uh, attracting clients, ha- you know, not half, but like a good part is attracting clients because the way they do it is they take people out to lunch-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:12 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:28:12 ... 'cause that's what you need to do, uh, you know, when you're charging $3,000. Another way they spend their time is collecting all this information, processing it, put then, like, manually entering it into this, like, old school financial planning software.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:24 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:28:24 I was like, what if you just use software to replace all of that, and you use the humans for the things that are the most important, which is having a conversation with someone about their goals and helping them think about the prioritization?

Ali Abdaal 1:28:36 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:28:36 That seemed to be the thing that was necessary. So I was like, great. This is my great idea. We raised money, uh, I think in total like $10 million over the course of a couple years. We built a team of 20 people. We had almost a dozen financial planners. And it was working at some scale where we had hundreds of people that were paying customers. But one interesting thing happened, which was we asked people that wanted to, like, lock in this, the introductory discounted price to put $100 down. And this ultimately led to us raising a bunch of venture capital money, and we collected $100 from a lot of people. And then we said, "Hey, it's your turn finally. We've hired the advisors. We're ready to-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:15 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:29:15 ... onboard you. Do you wanna go?" And they're like, "Not right now." And we're like, "Oh, we're so sorry. Do you want your money back?" And they're like, "No, no, no. I don't want my $100 back. I just don't wanna do it now." And you're like, hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:24 Okay.

Chris Hutchins 1:29:24 You paid $100 to, like, get early access to this thing. Now that we're ready for you, you don't want it. And what we learned slowly over the course of, uh, you know, maybe a year, a year and a half, is that financial planning is just never a priority. Like people-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:39 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:29:39 ... have so many priorities in their mind and in their lives and with their families, that it's like to stop everything and go through like a multi-hour process for something that has very little impact in your day, week, month, or maybe even year, is really hard. People have so much going on. You gotta figure out, what am I doing this week? What are we making for dinner? Like, where are we going for holiday? Like, there's just so many things happening that you actually have to solve. I have to re- file my tax return, you know? Like, there's stuff that's really deadline centric. And this is something that's like, well, this'll make us feel better, but practically it'll probably help us more 20 years from now than next week.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:16 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:30:16 So people punt on it and punt on it. And so no matter what we charged, we just couldn't get people to sign up at any fast rate.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:25 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:30:26 It cost us almost $1,000 to acquire a customer, meaning like we would spend $10,000 on marketing and social media advertising, all this stuff, and we would get 10 customers.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:34 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:30:35 But we're only charging like $600 a year. So if you spend $1,000 to bring someone in who pays you $600, and of that $600, some of it goes to pay financial planners, the math doesn't work. That was a problem. [laughs] So we tried a bunch of different alternatives, and ultimately at the end of the day, I hope someone solves this. I can't... I've probably gotten 20 people who've been like, "Hey, I'm starting a company. It looks like it's just like what you did. Could you give me your advice?" And I'm like, "Eh-" Can you acquire customers scalably? And they're like, "Well, we're gonna build this awesome product, and then we're gonna figure out how to acquire customers." I was like, "You should probably figure out how to acquire the customers first because that's the problem."

Ali Abdaal 1:31:08 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:31:08 It's getting people to care about financial planning enough-

Ali Abdaal 1:31:11 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:31:11 ... that they're willing to do something and spend money and time. So we ultimately decided that we didn't think it was gonna be a good... Like, the company wasn't gonna work. We still had about $4 million in the bank.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:22 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:31:23 But we didn't wanna just, like, burn through four more million dollars of our investors' money if we realized that financial planning wasn't the answer. And what we ultimately thought was that financial planning had to be a second product.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:33 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:31:33 There had to be something that would get someone in the door-

Ali Abdaal 1:31:35 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:31:35 ... that you could build a relationship with them that provided immediate value. And once you provide that immediate value, you can kind of earn the right over time to do financial planning.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:31:45 But what we also realized was that if you could get them in the door with some product that was good... Like, I'm not trying to, like, bait and switch you. I'm just saying if you could offer a core product that's valuable, and you could learn enough about people, what's more valuable? Is it helping them feel better by having conversations or helping them feel better by starting to do the right thing? And so I met, um, Andy Rachleff, who ran Wealthfront, which is a large, um, you know, investment management platform in the United States. And he was like, "We, uh, we have this vision for self-driving money where we could just build software that will automate and optimize your entire financial life, and it's really about, like, taking the best of financial planning and putting it into automation." He's like, "Would you be interested in bringing your team over and figuring out how we could build something like this?" I was like, "This seems like this perfect opportunity." And so, um, we kinda wound down Grove. Some of the team came over and started working on this, and I think it was ahead of its time.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:40 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:32:40 I think it was this amazing piece of software that you could say, "Hey, make sure there's always $7,000 in my checking account, and if there's ever more than $7,000, I want you to first fund my emergency fund until I have six months of living expenses. And once that's hit, then go and make sure you put enough money in my retirement account. And then go and make sure you put enough, like up to $500 a year or $500 a month into my kids' college fund."

Ali Abdaal 1:33:06 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:33:06 "And then if there's anything left over, just put it in my investment account."

Ali Abdaal 1:33:09 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:33:10 And you wouldn't have to think about it. We called it Autopilot. It just would run in the background. You wouldn't have to do anything. I was like, "Wow, this is awesome." I think people weren't quite yet ready to trust a... Similar to the last three, I think they still needed to build a relationship with you-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:24 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:33:24 ... the brand, in this case Wealthfront, before they were ready to automate it.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:28 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:33:28 They weren't gonna come over to do automation.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:30 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:33:30 But if they were already there, they were willing to automate. So it was a really great product for Wealthfront customers, and I still think it's a really great product for anyone, but I, I don't think it's the, the marquee thing that brings people in the door. Um, but something like, you know, really great investment management or really, you know, high interest, uh, cash account-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:49 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:33:49 ... those kind of things bring people in the door. They get to know you, and then you can automate everything. And so I actually think for some people, that kind of coaching and financial advising from a human could add a lot of kind of therapeutic value.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:02 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:34:03 But I almost would rather just help people automate everything and just put the best practices into place, and so that's what... I, I think I went a full 360 or-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:12 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:34:12 ... I guess 180 on what I thought, you know, needed to be existing in the market. And, you know, now I love automation. I'm like, "Automate my entire financial life so I don't have to think about it. Move the money to the right place." I don't know, that's not... You said what do I think about money earlier. It's like, yeah, I think it should just be automated-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:27 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:34:27 ... and you should just keep it simple.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:29 Nice. So you... So after winding down Grove, you moved to Wealthfront, or how did that work?

Chris Hutchins 1:34:33 Yeah, it was kind of like this weird acqui-hire-y thing where they were like-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:35 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:34:36 ... "Well, we'll let your team come over here. We'll give everybody jobs. Your investors that's... The, the money that was still in the company could invest in Wealthfront."

Ali Abdaal 1:34:43 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:34:43 Wealthfront took over our offices, but, like, no one got a payday.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:48 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:34:48 You know, we got stock like you would when you join a company. Um, so it's somewhere in between, like, getting a job and getting acquired but not making any money. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:34:55 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:34:56 Uh, uh, obviously I had a salary, but, um... And so, yeah, I spent, you know, three and a half years building different awesome products in investing and savings and banking and automation and-

Ali Abdaal 1:35:08 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:35:08 ... financial planning, and it was awesome until, gosh, like a couple weeks ago, decided to go full-time creator.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:15 Oh, awesome. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:35:17 Uh, well, well when did the podcast start? Like, how did, how did that come into this whole journey?

Chris Hutchins 1:35:21 Yeah, so during the pandemic, you know, I... We talked earlier how, like, I love sharing all these things, and I do all this research. Pre-pandemic I'd go to dinner, and I'd be like, "Hey, guys," like, "I just went on this crazy vacation." And everybody would be like, "How did you go on that vacation for free?" Like, "We just went on a vacation. It was super expensive. I would like to, uh, save money. I would like to go on..." You know, so much of talking to people that are, like, deal seekers is like, "Oh, I know how to go on a cheap vacation. Why don't you rent this really cheap condo, uh, that's like 10 miles out of town-

Ali Abdaal 1:35:50 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:35:50 ... and take the bus in, and you'll save money."

Ali Abdaal 1:35:52 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:35:52 "And then if you wanna go to the beach, you can go to the public beach, and you can buy your own chairs." And, like, you're like, "Well, now I'm not really having a great vacation."

Ali Abdaal 1:35:59 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:35:59 And then I would come in and be like, "Oh, guys, I have this great thing," and I'll just tell some crazy story-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:04 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:36:04 ... about some awesome adventure and why, how it cost nothing or how I got a great deal on it. And people are like, "Yeah, so that's what I wanna do."

Ali Abdaal 1:36:10 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:36:10 Like, I wanna, you know, I wanna live the upgraded awesome life. I just wanna do it at a lower cost.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:15 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:36:16 And so I was like, "Oh," I was kinda missing having those conversations with people because there were no dinners. There were... You know, I wasn't, I wasn't a blogger. I wasn't... You know, I had tried writing a couple Medium posts-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:26 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:36:26 ... and that never stuck. I tried posting about it on social. That just wasn't my format. And so funny enough, we were having a child, and I did all this research. I went super deep on planning for kids, and I built this Notion page. I was like, "I'm gonna start a podcast all about parenting-"

Ali Abdaal 1:36:41 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:36:41 "... 'cause, like, I'm deep down the rabbit hole. I'm super interested." So I bought a microphone. I was like, I came up with a list of all these cool guests I wanted to interview, and then we had the child. And I was like, "Wow, I don't know if parenting is, like, my thing, uh, as much as optimizing a thing is my thing."

Ali Abdaal 1:37:00 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:37:01 And so sure, I can have an episode on parenting-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:04 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:37:04 ... but I don't think I wanna have a parenting podcast.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:05 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:37:06 And so I realized as I started thinking, "Well, what... I have this microphone. I might as well start recording something and see what happens. What do I love doing?" And I was like, "Well- ... I love optimizing travel. I love money. I love life. I love health. I love, like, productivity. Like, all these different parts of my life, I like kind of going a certain amount deep-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:23 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:37:23 ... till I figure, like, it's dialed in, and then instead of taking that last 10, 20%, maybe let's find another thing in life-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:29 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:37:29 ... and go deeper there.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:30 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:37:30 And so that became my thing, launched this podcast, put it out in the world, and I was like, "Oh, wow, people like this thing." [laughs] Like, I guess... My idea was put it out, do six episodes, and commit to a season one of six episodes and see what happens. And it just worked, and people liked it. And, you know, I, I think I had the fortunate... the good fortune of a few people helping share it on the early days. But you can have all the promotion in the world and all the marketing success, but, like, if it's not good, people aren't gonna come back.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:01 Hm.

Chris Hutchins 1:38:02 And so I think I was fortunate to have the, the kind of amplification during launch that not everyone has-

Ali Abdaal 1:38:08 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:38:08 ... but lucky that the thing that I decided to talk about was something people wanted to come back to. And I think... I was like, "Wow, if people are gonna come back every week, like, I need to produce content every week."

Ali Abdaal 1:38:20 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:38:20 And the, the one goal I had was I was... this was gonna be a weekly show. It was gonna come out every Wednesday at 2:00 AM Pacific. And I don't think I've missed a Wednesday yet. I know I haven't missed a Wednesday yet. I have missed 2:00 AM Pacific.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:32 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:38:33 Technically, I hadn't, but there's a button that's like, "Mark this episode private."

Ali Abdaal 1:38:36 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:38:36 And somehow that button got clicked.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:38 Oof. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:38:38 So the episode went live at 2:00 AM-

Ali Abdaal 1:38:39 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:38:39 ... but no one could find it until-

Ali Abdaal 1:38:40 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:38:40 ... about 4:00 AM.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:41 Nice. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:38:41 Um, but yeah, so it became this thing, and it's about one-third travel, so it's not just miles and points, but, like, you know, we talked about some cool travel hacks. It's about one-third money and then one-third everything else, from, you know, health to, like I said, planning the cocktail party or-

Ali Abdaal 1:38:56 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:38:57 ... anything.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:58 Well, how did, how did you get the amplification in the early days?

Chris Hutchins 1:39:02 So I got this weird email, um, from a YouTuber or I guess a internet video maker, Nas Daily-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:09 Oh, nice [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:39:09 ... this year, who you've probably met, I'm guessing.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:11 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:39:11 Um, and it was this weird email. I, I'd never met him. I didn't know who he... I didn't even know who he was. And it was... the subject was from television ASAP. And I, like, read this email, and I later have met him-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:22 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:39:22 ... and I told him this story, and he was like, "You have to send me this email. That doesn't sound like something we would send." I was like, "It was." So he sent me his email, and he was like... He didn't. Some person did, and they were like, "Oh, we wanna make a video about you. You have all these credit card points." At the time I had done this, like, weird article on CNBC about having 12 million frequent flyer miles.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:38 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:39:39 And, uh, they were like, "We're gonna come to your house and make this video."

Ali Abdaal 1:39:42 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:39:42 I was almost convinced that it was a scam.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:45 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:39:45 The... It was poorly written English. It was like nothing about it seemed legit.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:50 Yep. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:39:51 And then, like, an hour later, I got a LinkedIn message.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:53 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:39:53 And they were like... It was almost the same message.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:55 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:39:55 And then, like, two hours later, I got a WhatsApp message, and I was like, "Wow, this person is really..." So finally I was like, "Maybe I should actually read it."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:01 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:01 I was like, "Maybe this is true. Like, what's the risk in saying yes? Like, if no film crew shows up-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:05 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:40:05 ... then we're not gonna make a video." So I said yes, and we made this video. And so Nas Daily made a video about me and-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:11 Nice. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:40:12 [laughs] And that was like, I, I... When he said, or I... Honestly-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:16 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:40:16 ... it was funny 'cause he's in the video, but the entire time making the video we never met. I never communicated with him.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:20 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:21 Anything. So I say him, but, like, it wasn't him.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:23 Yeah, he's got a very dialed-in operations-

Chris Hutchins 1:40:25 Yeah, yeah. It was amazing

Ali Abdaal 1:40:25 ... for this vlog team and everywhere in the world, and yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:27 And the only thing I asked, I was like, "If you're gonna make this video, could you at least just mention the podcast?"

Ali Abdaal 1:40:32 Hm.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:32 'Cause I, you know, I'm not getting paid to make this video.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:34 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:34 So I was like, "If you're gonna make this video for your content, I'd love it if you just mention that I have a podcast."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:37 Hm.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:38 So he made the video, and I was like, "What day is it coming out?" And they were like, "This day." I was like, "That's the day I'm gonna launch a podcast."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:42 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:40:43 So I launched the podcast that day. Um, his audience is very international.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:47 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:47 And my audience now is very, you know, kind of US, Canada, UK, Australia.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:53 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:40:53 And so I, I think it helped to, like, spread the word, so that was part of the early thing. Similar to Nick Gray, I've been... Basically every time I've done something, I've created a newsletter. When I traveled around the world, I had a newsletter.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:06 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:41:07 I randomly had this, like, annual life updates newsletter.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:10 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:41:10 And then when we ran Grove, I had, like, a newsletter for people. We wrote, like, a financial newsletter.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:15 Hm.

Chris Hutchins 1:41:16 And I was like, "Okay, well, all of these things are newsletters of mine or my companies, and they're all related to me, life, travel, or money." So it seemed reasonable to send an email to all of them being like, "Hey, I now have a podcast about life, money, and travel hosted by me."

Ali Abdaal 1:41:31 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:41:31 So, like [laughs] um, so I sent it to a news- like, four different newsletters I'd built over the last 15 years for random other purposes. And then, I don't know. You know, you always have, like, one or two people in your life that you could, you know, ask a favor for, but you're not gonna ask a lot of favors for.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:46 Hm.

Chris Hutchins 1:41:46 And I was like, "Well, if I'm gonna launch a podcast, this seems like the time to ask for that favor." Um, and so I just, you know, said, "Hey, I don't ask for a lot, but do you think maybe you could help re-share this thing that I'm launching?"

Ali Abdaal 1:41:56 Hm.

Chris Hutchins 1:41:56 So put all that together. That created enough of an initial momentum to put it out there, and then I just kept making content and asking people if they liked the content to share it. And unlike YouTube, podcasts have no inherent growth mechanism. [laughs] It's like there's no show this to 100 people, and if they like it, show it to 100 more.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:14 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:42:14 It's just they spread when people share it. But, you know, it's been a slow growth path since then, but with growth and, you know, now it's enough that it was easy to walk away... Easy is a hard word. It was reasonably easy to walk away from a job to do this full-time-

Ali Abdaal 1:42:32 Hm

Chris Hutchins 1:42:32 ... because it's now a business. Um, still feels crazy because it's not like I, you know... it's not like I've signed any sponsor deals that-

Ali Abdaal 1:42:41 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:42:41 ... are gonna generate any revenue beyond, like, six months.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:44 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:42:45 So it's a little bit weird, but, uh, you know, it's something that I'm excited to focus on full-time, and gosh, it's only been eight- like, 18 months.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:52 What's it like being a full-time podcaster? Like, what does your week look like?

Chris Hutchins 1:42:56 I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I want the show to be about. I think one of the easy things was if I had done this parenting podcast, there's a, an easy list. Every person that's written a parenting book, every person that's, uh, you know, started a company that makes things for kids, every person that is a professor about, you know, childhood psychology-

Ali Abdaal 1:43:16 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:43:16 ... childhood education. It seems like there was just... It's so easy. But when you make a podcast that's about optimizing something, it's a very specific kind of person you'd wanna talk to.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:25 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:43:25 And oftentimes it's hard to find the person that- ... has the knowledge you want and is, you know, also the right person to come on a podcast and talk about it.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:34 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:43:34 So I'm like, "Okay, I wanna do an episode on vacation homes." I was always fascinated, like timeshares. Like, are those a good deal? You know, Airbnbs, all that stuff. I couldn't find a person, so I was like, "I'm just gonna do this episode by myself." But a lot of it is, like, trying to figure out what are the things that I think are interesting, going deep on it.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:52 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:43:52 Um, I think I wrote 7,000 or 8,000 words, um, about vacation homes-

Ali Abdaal 1:43:58 Wow

Chris Hutchins 1:43:59 ... for that episode.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:00 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:44:00 So there was just, like, research and, you know, a lot of organizing of information. Uh, so I'd say it's, like, a, a lot of just trying to figure out what the plan is for what we're gonna talk about, reading the book of the person I'm interviewing-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:12 Yep

Chris Hutchins 1:44:12 ... trying to come up with staying on top of all the deals. Like, if I'm gonna talk about all the greatest deals and travel stuff, I need to-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:18 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:44:18 ... make sure I'm dialed into what's happening. And so literally, I feel like part of my job is, like, scrolling this one Twitter list of people who-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:24 Love it [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:44:24 ... promote deals, um, 'cause I wanna make sure I can deliver. And I don't know, trying to figure out what else to do. Like, I, I started a newsletter that was at, at the beginning, I don't know why, completely different-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:38 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 1:44:38 ... but also the same. So it was, like, both under the brand All The Hacks, both about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:43 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:44:43 But I would write a newsletter about insurance, and I think in my mind, the podcast at the beginning was an interview podcast.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:48 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:44:49 And I was like, "I don't know who I'm gonna interview about all the types of insurance."

Ali Abdaal 1:44:52 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:44:52 Um, because I didn't think, like, insurance salespeople were the right audience, but if I'm gonna talk about life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, there's no one person. So it was so natural to write a newsletter about all of them, and it was so much content that I wrote two newsletters back to back about all the kinds of insurance.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:08 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:45:09 It never crossed my mind when I was doing that that I should do a podcast about it because I didn't have a person to interview.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:15 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:45:15 And so I was writing a newsletter when the same general theme as a podcast-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:19 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:45:20 ... but they were not connected in any way.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:21 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:45:21 And now I realized after doing a survey of the audience that there are a lot of people that don't like to listen to podcasts. They're probably not the people listening to us talk right now, though maybe they're on YouTube. Um, but there are a lot of people who like the same content, but wanna read it.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:34 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:45:34 So I was like, "Oh, well, if I'm gonna do a bunch of research or interview someone to learn a lot about a thing-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:39 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:45:39 ... I should probably take that information and put it in other places." So now I'm spending a lot of my time thinking about, well, there's some people that like to watch five-minute videos. So what would a conversation with someone talking about vacation homes look like? Well, maybe it's here's everything you need to know about, you know, luxury rentals. Here's everything you need to know about timeshares. Breaking it into a bunch of five different or five-minute segments.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:02 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:46:03 So now I spend a lot of time trying to think about if I'm gonna do all this research on one topic, how do I make sure that all of that information makes it to all the people that could benefit from it? Which means it's gotta take different formats. Uh, and so that's a lot 'cause I'm not a professional YouTuber or newsletter writer. And it like, you know, I... None of the-- none of what I'm doing is something I have kind of background in.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:23 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:46:23 So.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:24 Yeah. That, th- that's pretty cool. Yeah, I think it'll, it'll definitely be interesting to see how your journey evolves as a full-time podcaster now.

Chris Hutchins 1:46:30 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:30 Um,

Ali Abdaal 1:46:31 I guess f- f- final thing I wanted to talk about is you have these principles for life optimization that I wonder if we can just kind of go through and just kind of riff on a little bit. What's, uh... what's, what's going on there?

Chris Hutchins 1:46:43 Yeah. So I think a lot of people have always asked me, like, "Why are you this way?" Like [laughs] you know, when-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:49 It's a bit weird. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:46:50 Most people don't, you know, walk into a, a restaurant and they're like, "Hmm, how do you get a deal here?" And to be honest, I don't think there are a lot of deals at restaurants, so, uh-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:57 [laughs] Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:46:57 ... I wouldn't worry there. But, like, in general, I'm always like, "What, what is the way to get a better outcome here?"

Ali Abdaal 1:47:03 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:47:03 And most people don't do that. So I was trying to figure out why, and, and someone had actually told me, they said, "Oh, you should write a book." And I was like, "Why should I write a book?" And they're like, "Well, not everyone likes to listen to podcasts every week." Some people are like, "I just want the version of everything you've learned-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:17 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:47:17 ... but with a finish line."

Ali Abdaal 1:47:18 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:47:19 And a newsletter and a podcast, they don't have a finish line.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:21 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:47:21 I was like, "Well, what would the book be about?" 'Cause it wouldn't be about something that changes. Like, it's not gonna be about travel hacks because those-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:27 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:47:27 ... change over time, and, you know, you're not gonna read that book 10 years later. Some of the principles of money are there, but I feel like my thing's more about optimizing lots of things. And then I was connected with this woman, and she was basically referred to me as someone who is really great at helping people figure out their unique perspective on life, but actually turn it into, like, a thing, whether that's a framework, a set of principles, or something. So we worked together for five sessions, and at the end, I actually came out with, like, what in hindsight seems so obvious to me-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:00 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 1:48:00 ... but, like, actual principles that are, I think, what allow me to live this kind of optimized life. So-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:07 Oh, wow

Chris Hutchins 1:48:07 ... number one was-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:08 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:48:08 ... like, conventional wisdom sucks.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:10 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:48:10 And, and for anyone listening, these are not final. I won't, I won't hit all nine of them, but, uh, it's something I'm working on and I think will probably be the foundation for either a really long post, a series of podcasts, a book, something.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:24 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:48:25 But, uh, yeah, one was conventional wisdom sucks. Like, every time I'm meeting someone and someone says, "Oh, like, this is how we should do it," I'm like, "Is it how we should do it?" Like, why should we assume that because this thing is how we've always done it, it, it's what we should be doing?

Ali Abdaal 1:48:38 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:48:38 Maybe there's a better way to do it.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:39 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:48:39 You know, you think that we should... In London, everyone-- no one eats lunch before noon. So I asked a few people, and they're like, "Well, yeah, you gotta change your schedule for your kids 'cause things don't open un- un- until noon." It's like, well, no. Like, if you dig around, there are places that do open at 11:00-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:54 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 1:48:55 ... and there's places that, you know... So, so, like, I wasn't just gonna take anything at face value.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:58 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:48:58 It can be quite annoying, I think, to be my manager or friend sometimes 'cause someone's like, "Oh, this is how we should do it." And I'm like, "Well, is it really how we should do it?" Like-

Ali Abdaal 1:49:05 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:49:05 ... you know, I've, I have to learn to dial that down. So that was one. I think questioning the outcome you want was another big one. I've met people that say, "You know, I need more money." I'm like, "Why do you need more money?" And they're like, "Well, I need more money so that I can retire a little earlier." "Why do you wanna retire earlier?" It's like, "Well, I wanna spend more time with my kids. Uh, right now I feel like I don't see them that much, but if I could retire earlier, yeah, they'll be a little older, but I'll get to spend more time with them." It's like, oh, well, if you wanna spend more time with them, what if you could spend it now? "Oh, I can't spend it now 'cause I have this job." It's like, well, the thing you really want might be to find a way to work a job that has more flexibility.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:37 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:49:38 And maybe you don't actually care about retiring five years early. Maybe you actually care about having flexibility now. But we started this whole conversation about you wanting more money.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:47 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:49:47 So in product management, there's this thing called the five whys where a customer says, "Oh, I want this thing," and you're like, "Why?" And they're like, "Well, this," and you're like, "Why?" And you just keep asking why until you get to the point like, oh, that's what your, your unmet need really is.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:59 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:49:59 And I think we don't do... We, we might do this as product managers doing research-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:03 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:50:03 ... but we don't do it with ourselves. So you're asking, "Why do you want this thing?" Dig, dig, dig deeper to figure out if maybe the thing that you actually wanted is something completely different-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:12 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:50:12 ... and that allows you to change your perspective.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:15 Sick.

Chris Hutchins 1:50:16 You want to-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:16 That's two. Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:50:17 ... you want to know more?

Ali Abdaal 1:50:17 No, please, please keep going. This is great. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:50:18 Let's see.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:18 I'm just like, "This is so good." [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:50:20 This one-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:21 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:50:21 ... I encourage anyone listening to shoot me an email, chris@allthehacks.com. I don't have a catchy name for this one, uh, but it's basically structured information gathering. So I need to come up with a name. But let's take daycare, or not daycare, activities as an example for your kids. So my wife and I were thinking, gosh, we met someone and their kids our age, and their kid goes to gymnastics class once a week. Should our kid go to gymnastics class? And I was like, well, before we just decide gymnastics class, what are all of the classes they could go to? Like, let's go build a Notion page for all this stuff-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:52 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:50:52 ... and start to categorize everything. And my initial instinct was like, let's just start searching.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:58 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:50:59 But what I've become really good at over time is let's think about what I wanna collect when I'm doing the searching.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:05 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:51:05 So I made like a simple table on a Notion page that was like, okay, if I'm gonna go search for all this stuff, let's, let's figure out, like when are the classes? What's the age range of the classes? How much do they cost? You know, like how, how frequently do they happen? How... What do you have to commit to? Like, you know, c- trying to think of that so that I'm not, one, wasting my time-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:24 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:51:25 ... which I imagine had I not done that, I would've gone and I would've come up with this list, and then my wife and I would've sat down and be like, "Oh, yeah, there's this, uh, one class." She's like, "Oh. Okay. Well, how much does it cost?" "Oh, let me go look it up." And now we're wasting our time gathering all this other information, or we're punting and saying, "Well, let's talk about it next week"-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:41 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:51:41 ... when the goal was to actually go and decide what the class we want our daughter to take is. And so if we wanna be optimized with our time and with the outcome, let's have a little more intentionality with how we collect information. And in many cases, this is just like, think of the, you know, cells in a table-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:57 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:51:57 ... that you want to fill out in advance.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:59 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:51:59 But I think by doing that, it changes what you collect, and it lets you process that information a little more easily or at least a little bit more efficiently after the fact.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:09 Dude, that's such a good... Oh, that's so good. I've been tr- for the last year and a half of living in London, I've been thinking every week, "I should join a kickboxing class," and d- I've never once sat down with a Notion table to just think, "Okay, let me actually, [laughs] actually look at these options," because I'm also not sure of kickboxing versus boxing, but some, some kind of combat sport. But then I look at a website and I'm like, "Oh, I've got to ring them up." It's like, "Oh, this, I'll, I'll do it next week," and I've been pushing this off to next week's next one for literally for the last 18 months, and all it would take is to just make a table and just be like-

Chris Hutchins 1:52:37 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:52:37 ... "Let me actually find out all the kickboxing and boxing classes in and around my area with, like the time, the date, the price. Good." [laughs] And then I can make a decision.

Chris Hutchins 1:52:45 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:45 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:52:45 And you could probably, just like thinking, uh, from the deal standpoint, I bet one of them probably has like a intro offer where they're like, "First class free."

Ali Abdaal 1:52:51 Mm. Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:52:52 If you found the one you wanted, I bet you could email them and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about joining a kickboxing gym. This other kickboxing gym offers-

Ali Abdaal 1:52:57 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:52:57 ... a first class free. I'd really like to try out your gym." I bet they'd, they'd give you this... They'd match that offer.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:03 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:53:03 Maybe you can go to seven kickboxing classes for free-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:05 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 1:53:05 ... because you just try all seven of them.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:06 And just see which one I like.

Chris Hutchins 1:53:07 Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:07 So good

Chris Hutchins 1:53:07 ... so yeah. So I think the one that's been the hardest for me is knowing when to stop, and I think it's become something that I've gotten much better at, but at the beginning was really hard. So it's like now l- let's go back to a trip that we took to Greece, and we were like, "Oh, you know, we're going." It was our first trip we took without children a couple year, year and a half ago. We were like, "We wanna stay at a nice place." We narrowed it down to three places, and we had our Notion table, and now we're like, "How do we pick?"

Ali Abdaal 1:53:34 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:53:34 And I think we probably went too far, where we were like, "Ooh, like let's, let's try to imagine what the rooms are laid out." Like we went... just went down.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:42 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:53:42 Any one of those hotels would've been fine. We've now gotten to a point where, uh, both personally and with my wife, we're able to look at each other and be like, "Should we keep going?" Like, we have these mental moments where we're like, "Did we optimize enough such that we'd have more value figuring something else in our life to spend time on than continuing here?"

Ali Abdaal 1:54:00 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:54:00 So I think learning both practical ways to do that, which is just like literally you could set a timer. Like we're gonna talk about where we should stay, and 20 minutes in, we're gonna stop and ask ourselves, do we need to keep going or can we just pick?

Ali Abdaal 1:54:11 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:54:12 Um, a great example, uh, Patrick McGinnis, who was the guy who coined the term FOMO-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:17 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:54:17 ... his thing to me was he's like, if it's an unimportant decision and you wear a watch, which I don't, but let's pretend I do. Uh, look at your watch and be like, okay, if you narrow it to two choices and it's like if the second hand is on the left, do that one. If it's on the right, do that one.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:29 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:54:30 Like find whatever the easy, simple way is to make a decision. The less important the decision, the easier it is. The higher stakes, the more you can't leave it up to the second hand. Um, and if it's kind of in the middle, his thing is just ask someone else. Like it's very easy when my mom messages me and says, "Which printer should I buy?"

Ali Abdaal 1:54:47 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:54:47 Somehow I can give her a response in like five minutes.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:49 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:54:49 I'm like, "Wirecutter, what printer? Mom, buy this one."

Ali Abdaal 1:54:52 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:54:52 But if it was me buying the printer, I'm like, I would normally be like, "Oh, well-"

Ali Abdaal 1:54:55 I don't trust Wirecutter. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:54:56 Yeah. Like, you know, what are, what are the other things The Wirecutter looked at?

Ali Abdaal 1:54:59 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:54:59 And is there one down there where they were like, "We didn't review this one yet, but it looks promising. Maybe I should go build my own re-"

Ali Abdaal 1:55:04 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:55:04 You know, it's, it seems so easy for me to process stuff for other people.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:07 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:55:08 And so if you have someone that's like that, uh, in that area of your life, maybe just ask them.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:13 Nice.

Chris Hutchins 1:55:13 Like if you're, if you're stuck. So I have a few things like that or ways to get unstuck to stop going too far down the optimization rabbit hole.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:20 Solid.

Chris Hutchins 1:55:21 So I don't know. Those are a few pieces-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:22 This is good

Chris Hutchins 1:55:23 ... of these-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:24 I love it

Chris Hutchins 1:55:24 ... kind of principles for living an optimized life. But-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:26 And people can check out the podcast to find out when [laughs] more-

Chris Hutchins 1:55:29 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:55:29 ... of these principles will drop.

Chris Hutchins 1:55:29 Come, come subscribe and I'll, I'll share them as they, as they develop.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:33 Final question. Um, productivity. What are your hacks for productivity?

Chris Hutchins 1:55:38 I think outsourcing things you don't love is like a great one. So we already talked about meals.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:41 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:55:41 If you don't love cleaning your house, there's an option. You don't love doing your laundry, there's an option. You do love doing your laundry, but you spend all weekend doing it- Try to fit it in during the week. I feel like there's a lot of times where if you're working from home especially, if you're not, this is a lot harder. But this is a, like a simple productivity thing. You always wanna make sure you're home for changing the laundry so it doesn't sit-

Ali Abdaal 1:56:01 Mm

Chris Hutchins 1:56:02 ... in the, you know, in the wet, wet dr- wet washing machine forever. But you can just fit that in usually to your workday. So instead of trying to do it on a Saturday or a Sunday when you're like, "Okay, well, I've gotta be home for three hours to do laundry," maybe you just do it in the workday and, like, slip in in between a meeting to change the laundry over. So that was, that was a good one. I can't remember where I picked that one up. Um, on the computer, I'm a big fan of Alfred. I'm a big fan of, uh, Superhuman and, like, any app. I've recently... I don't know if this is productivity or not, but I've been playing with a new thing that's not out yet called Rewind.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:35 Rewind?

Chris Hutchins 1:56:35 I think it's rewind.ai.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:37 Ooh.

Chris Hutchins 1:56:38 And I can't tell if this is, like, the most insane privacy violation in the world or the best tool I've ever used, but I think one of the things that saves me a lot of time, so in the bucket of productivity, is not having to document everything.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:56 Yep.

Chris Hutchins 1:56:57 So I loved how... I was talking to Tiago Forte, whose book I also see on your wall, uh, and he's like, "You know, you think I'm building the second brain and I'm putting everything in. I'm putting like one or two notes a day in it. I'm not trying to put everything in it."

Ali Abdaal 1:57:10 Mm.

Chris Hutchins 1:57:10 And so one of my challenges is, like, I spend a lot of time collecting information and doing research, but I feel like I have to save it all. So what Rewind does is it records everything you do on your computer.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:22 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:57:23 It record... [laughs] I'm pretty sure, I think it also records your microphone.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:27 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:57:27 Like, it records everything. And if you're on a website, you're in an app, it not only records it, but it OCRs it and, like, recognizes the text.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:35 Oh, handy.

Chris Hutchins 1:57:36 So just for fun, I started using this, and I searched tea yesterday.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:39 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:57:40 And it, like, pulled up, um, the Google Spreadsheets page for a, you know, a London itinerary where I had, like, go to a, the afternoon tea. It pulled up, uh, you know, a Wikipedia page I was looking at about something around tea. It pulled up all the pages of the sites. I was like, wow, how many times, and maybe this is just me, but have I, like, tried to go find this information or tried to figure out how to save it-

Ali Abdaal 1:58:01 Hmm

Chris Hutchins 1:58:02 ... or tried to search for it? It took me so much time trying to find this thing. So it's basically like imagine if you could search through everything you've done on your computer.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:10 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:58:11 Um, and, and conceivably, like, I believe that it's also recording audio, so it could search through the audio of what you've said, the websites you visited, the things you've written. So I honestly don't think I've done... You know, it's kind of like early beta invite from friends. But, um, I gotta think more about the privacy side of it. [laughs] Like-

Ali Abdaal 1:58:31 Yeah. That sounds pretty cool. I, I-

Chris Hutchins 1:58:33 I believe it's all local.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:33 Yeah.

Chris Hutchins 1:58:33 So it's not, it's not getting web processed. You're not, like, uploading your-

Ali Abdaal 1:58:36 Stored locally

Chris Hutchins 1:58:37 ... audio files.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:37 Yeah, I saw this on Product Hunt a few weeks, months a- months ago when it came out. [coughs] Damn, that sounds sick.

Chris Hutchins 1:58:42 So I don't know if that's really... I, I struggle to decide whether that's productivity or not, but I'm gonna put it there. Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:58:48 Love it. That's so good. Amazing. All right, Chris, thank you so much. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:58:52 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:58:53 This has been absolutely wonderful. It's, uh, midnight now, so I think it's a good time to end this.

Chris Hutchins 1:58:56 All right.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:56 And we can definitely do a part two when, uh, I come visit the US at some point, um-

Chris Hutchins 1:59:00 I would love to do that

Ali Abdaal 1:59:00 ... in, in the new year.

Chris Hutchins 1:59:01 All right.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:02 Um, any, any final, um, any, any requests, any asks of the audience while, while we're, while we're here? People who might have listened to the last two hours and 15 minutes of this podcast. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:59:12 Okay. I'm gonna leave you with two things.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:14 Nice. [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:59:15 I'm gonna give, and then I'm gonna ask. So first, when you're buying anything, I love getting a deal. If you haven't gotten that so far-

Ali Abdaal 1:59:23 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 1:59:24 ... you know, I don't, I don't know. If you're shopping online, I'll just share, like, a fun thing that I do. So I'm going online, I'm trying to buy something. Step one, I always make sure that if there's some shopping portal like Rakuten or anything on Cashback Monitor, that there's some way to get cashback for shopping online. I'll do that. Okay. I'm also using whatever site to find promo codes. I find that's really hard. It doesn't always work that much anymore. But the few other things that I'll do which are fun, I'll search online for coupons that I could buy.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:53 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 1:59:54 So every now and then you'll find... You know, in the States I do it on Craigslist, some classified sites, even just sometimes searching. There are people who, like, find these coupons, and they actually just sell them. But if you're spending $1,000 and you can buy, you know, a 15% off coupon that you couldn't get just searching for promo codes, that's one. Um, I love asking live chat. Similar to, similar to the style of Airbnb discounts, I'll just be like, "Hey, I'm, I'm on your website, would love a discount." I would say 50% of the time someone's like, "Here's a discount."

Ali Abdaal 2:00:23 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 2:00:24 50% they're like, "Nope, we can't offer you a discount." One time someone said, "I can't offer you a discount, but we do have this great referral thing that if you can find anyone that can refer you, you'll get a discount." And I just go to search.twitter.com, and I search for, like, the name of the product-

Ali Abdaal 2:00:37 Yep

Chris Hutchins 2:00:37 ... and, like, use my discount or something. And then I find someone's referral code, and, you know, they're gonna get a great referral.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:42 Solid.

Chris Hutchins 2:00:42 So that's great for them. Um, and then another fun version of this, so I'm, like, always trying to figure out how to get, like, the best deal. It feels so satisfying. Even if I just save, like, $5, I just feel really good. And it's probably a waste of time and anti-productivity. But it, it... Gosh, knowing you got the best deal out there. The last one is, let's say you have a credit card that earns you some type of bonus on something, whether that's at Amazon or whether that's at grocery stores or office supply stores. There are so many places these days that sell gift cards.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:10 Hmm.

Chris Hutchins 2:01:11 So if I'm gonna go buy something from Home Depot, you know, like a... I don't even know what you would kinda ca- home improvement, a home improvement store, uh, in the US, I'll go, and I'll first search for a coupon. I know there's this website saveendeals.com-

Ali Abdaal 2:01:26 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 2:01:26 ... that sells Home Depot coupons. They also sell, like, Crate & Barrel coupons-

Ali Abdaal 2:01:30 Yeah

Chris Hutchins 2:01:30 ... and all this stuff. So I'll go buy the coupon. I'll go through the cashback portal. But I don't have a credit card that gives me four or five points per dollar on Home Depot. So I'll go to the grocery store, or I'll go to Amazon where I've got an Amazon card, and I'll just buy Home Depot gift cards. And I'll get the 5% cashback on Amazon for my Amazon card, or I'll get the four points per dollar at the grocery store-

Ali Abdaal 2:01:50 Nice

Chris Hutchins 2:01:50 ... and then I'll buy the thing I want from Home Depot with a Home Depot gift card. So I'd say, like, if you're shopping online, there's more than one way to get a deal. So I'll leave you with that. If you're still here and you like upgrading your life, your money, your travel, you want more deals, you want all the hacks, check out my show. You're listening to podcast. It's probably easy to find. Just search All The Hacks. Or if you prefer email, I don't know why you're here listening to a podcast, but-

Ali Abdaal 2:02:14 [laughs]

Chris Hutchins 2:02:14 ... you can go to allthehacks.com/email.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:16 Chris, thank you so much.

Chris Hutchins 2:02:17 Thanks for having me.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:18 All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links