A team of four experienced serial startup and fund founders will launch a Canadian Bitcoin and Altcoin Investment Fund out of either Vancouver or Toronto.

A Canadian management company will be set up to run multiple crypto funds:

Fund 1: tax efficient bitcoin buy and hold fund.
> Value to investors: they get secure exposure to bitcoin and their bitcoin is managed by experts, their gains are taxed at 50% less than if they held bitcoin directly

Fund 2: bitcoin alpha fund
One of our co-founders, a machine learning PhD who has been building trading algorithms for 100M+ hedge funds for the past 6 years, will be designing our trading strategy/algos.
> Value to investors: a team of very experienced people will trade their bitcoin

Fund 3: altcoin ICO fund
This one requires a deeper understanding of the crypto world, in short we’ll be buying into “Initial Coin Offerings” – digital IPOs effectively where we can buy and then later sell tokens (crypto curency units) at a gain.
> Value to investors: significant, liquid, upside

Status:
The team has worked with a major law firm for the past 4 months and has determined the best structure to set this up. The team also has about 70% of the seed capital needed to open and begin raising money into fund 1. We need to find a few more friends/family investors to invest in the management company.

We are looking for a proven entrepreneur who wants to commit to this full time for at least 3 years. Large stock incentive package available for the right candidate.

My preferred candidate should be an entrepreneur based in Canada (or someone with previous experience in Canada who would be willing to move here), should have raised money before, should have a working knowledge of and interest in bitcoin and altcoins, and should have some previous fund experience.

If interested send me an email: marcvanderchijs@gmail.com. Feel free to share!

First of all a Happy New Year to all my readers!

In 2016 I started paying a lot more attention to my health and especially to what I eat. There were several reasons for that, but an important source of inspiration was Tim Ferris’ podcast series. Among others I started experimenting with the ketogenic diet, a high fat and protein diet that can put your body into ketosis. I also started doing intermittent fasting, by skipping breakfast regularly and having a late lunch and thereby fasting for 16-18 hours a day. When reading more about fasting I found that many studies have shown that this can lead to an increased life span.

That peaked my interest so I started reading more about the factors that determine human longevity. I was fascinated by what I found and by how far research has come already. I also realized that mainstream media is playing this down a bit. Until a few months ago I thought it would be impossible to live forever, but now I realize that we are actually pretty close to a breakthrough.

Aging is a disease, a disease that can be stopped and that can be reversed. We know how to do it already, but we are not able to do it technically yet. There are some simple ways to start doing this and I’ll include these in this post as well. Why mass media does not pick up that story is something I don’t get. It’s probably just like with Bitcoin, only when it breaks through it gets on the radar of journalists.

This post is for a large part based on an Exponential View podcast I recently listened to, an interview with Dr. Shamil Chandaria. If this topic interests you you should listen to it, it goes a bit deeper than my analysis and is a good start to dig deeper into this topic.

How long can a human being live? If you were born about 150 years ago your median lifespan would be about 45 years. Right now the median lifespan of a newborn in the US is about 88 years, so roughly double what it was in the mid 1800s. However, the oldest person on earth around 1850 was over 100 years old, but the oldest person alive right now is about 115 years old (the verifiably oldest person alive made it to 122 years). That means that even if we live healthy, avoid major accidents and are lucky enough not to get cancer, our bodies will eventually stop working when we turn 120 years old. So longevity is not only about getting us to live to 120 (which is doable if you’re lucky to avoid major diseases), but especially to get us over the 120 year age cliff. 

But probably even more important is to be healthy when you get older. If you spend your last 30 years sick in bed there is no real use in getting older. If I would be so sick that I knew I would never be able to have a normal active life anymore I would almost certainly decide to do euthanasia. Getting older for the sake of getting older doesn’t make sense, you should be able to have a meaningful life. So longevity is also about the quality of life. Health economists have been able to quantify this with the term QALY (quality life-adjusted year). Basically if you are completely healthy one year is worth one Qaly, if you are dead you accumulate zero Qalys per year. There are situations where your life is so bad that you actually accumulate negative Qalys, but I won’t go there in this post. The goal of longevity is to increase the Qaly value of your life as much as possible. 

How many factors do you think will determine how long you will live? I always assumed there would probably be at least a 100 factors, but it turns out there are only 10 factors. We already know what these 10 factors are and scientists think that we can solve most of these problems over the next 25 years. I wonder if they take artificial intelligence into account in that calculation, in combination with the exponential rate of change in technology? If not immortality may be a reality much earlier already. But even if it still takes another 25 years this means we may be able to live forever if we manage to stay healthy until about 2050!

To me that is fascinating. There may be people among us now already that may never die. It sounds crazy because we are all programmed to eventually die, but we will likely be able to change our code. Obviously this has a lot of social and economic implications. Things like what does this mean for our world if we keep procreating? Do we really want to live forever? What happens to the sense of urgency that many scientists have, knowing that you only have a limited number of years on this planet? I won’t go into that here, but the podcast above touches on this subject, so you may want to listen to that. There are tons of articles on that on the Internet as well of course, although many focus on longevity in the sense of all of us living longer, not all of us being immortal (which is a obviously a big difference). 

As I mentioned earlier, aging is a disease. As we age we get more cellular damage, but we also have a cellular repair mechanism. When we are young our cell repair is faster than the damage we do, but at a certain point in our lives the repair can’t keep up with the damage anymore. The result is aging. So one important thing longevity science is looking at is how to improve the repair mechanism. Cells replicate and each time that  happens a bit of so called telomeres gets removed. Telomeres are the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes. That is a problem but it limits how often cells can replicate (this is called the Hayflick limit), and after the telomeres are gone your cell basically dies.

It turns out that there is an enzyme that increases the length of telemores. Some animals (like lobsters) have activated this enzyme, meaning that they keep on growing and eventuallly die because they get too big. If we are able to activate this enzyme (which is called telomerase) we may be able to increase the number of times that our cells can replicate. That could lead to cellular immortality which is a huge step for longevity. So far only one person on this planet has done telomerase gene therapy. Her name is Liz Parrisch, the CEO of Seattle-based biotech company BioViva. Initial results seem very promising (her telemores had increased in length by 620 base pairs), but of course a sample of one is too small to lead to any conclusions. But this is a very promising start!

Of course gene therapy is not available to anyone yet, and likely won’t be for a couple of more years, so what else could you do? The easiest and probably one of the most effective ways of living longer is by reducing the number of calories that you consume. This is easy in the sense that you don’t need a doctor to prescribe you medecine, but in our society of (over)eating and drinking it is not easy to keep it up. Luckily there is a solution for that and that’s intermittent fasting. It’s something I have been doing on and off for the past couple of months and it’s very easy to do. Basically you eat dinner before 8 pm and then don’t eat any calories anymore before you go to bed. The next morning you skip breakfast (You can have water, coffee or tea. I try to start every day with a big glass of warm water, often with lemon) and you don’t have lunch before 12. In that way your body is in fasting mode for at least 16 hours per day. You get used to it very quickly and I am not hungry at all. 

Once you have done some intermittent fasting you can try to go for just one meal a day during one or two days per week, or even go to 2-3 day fasts. It’s not that hard to do, but you have to be motivated. You will see results very quickly. I feel like I am in a better shape than ever before, I sleep better and I lost weight as well. Keep in mind that you should not overindulge during your one or two meals per day, fasting should be done in a combination with caloric restriction and preferably also with a reduced number of carbs. If you’re interested in this do a Google search on ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. 

When calories are scarce cells can be turned into repair mode. Cells will start to recycle components, including ones that do not work well. Damaged proteins, like the ones that will cause Alzheimer’s, could disappear as well. This may sound too good to be true, but lots of studies have actually shown this works. My strong belief is that big pharma doesn’t really want you to know about these simple ways of getting into better health, that’s why most people don’t know about it. Scary how our world works…

Several of my friends in Silicon Valley take Metformin supplements. Metformin is a traditional anti-diabetes drug that works by depressing glucose production in the liver. But it also increases the number of oxygen molecules released into a cel, which increase robustness and longevity. After doing a lot of research on it I am planning to start taking Metformin this year. 

Another drug that seems even more powerful than Metformin is Rapamycin. I first learned about Rapamycin in a super interesting Tim Ferris podcast that the taped on Easter Island with some leading longevity scientists (Rapamycin was first discover on Easter Island). It turns out Big Pharma learned about it as well and Novartis is pushing to bring a Rapamycin pill to market. Rapamycin has a lot more potential risks than Metformin (mainly because it’s not been tested as much), but it’s probably safer to take it than to not take it. It has shown that mice live up to 60% longer and the effect on dogs is also amazing. So my quest in 2017 will be to find a legitimate supplier of Rapamycin, I really want to give this a try.

I think if you will start going on a ketogenic diet, reduce calories through fasting and take Metformin regularly (next to doing sports 4-5 times a week and make sure you get all vitamins and minerals that you need, which is a prerequisite for being healthy), you should be able to have a more healthy life and you should be able to keep aging in check. It’s not a recipe to turn 120 but it may help you to reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. If you want to stay healthy for the next 20-30 years this may help to get you there. 

There are a lot more ways to help you with anti-aging, but most are hard to do right now or quite expensive. A relatively easy one is hyperbaric oxygen therapy, something that professional athletes are already using regularly to recover more quickly from injuries. The easiest way is to buy an hyperbaric oxygen chamber and starting sleeping in it every now and then, you can find basic models online for around $10,000. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy helps to grow new blood vessels into tissue, and it’s been proven that it causes stem cell release from bone marrow into circulation. Next to that it suppresses inflammation, which is also important for aging because most chronic diseases are now recognized to result from chronic inflammation.

If you have enough money to spend you can start looking at doing stem cell therapy (you can easily get this done in Thailand already). This seems to be very effective and it might become more normal over the next couple of years. Another therapy that can quickly rejuvenate you is to replace your blood by young blood (parabiosis). Among others venture capitalist Peter Thiel is doing this already. It may be a way to not only stop aging but to actually reverse it. Tests in mouse have shown amazing results, among other by rejuvenating aging tissue and by awakening old stem cells. Advanced clinical studies on humans are underway in China and Korea already. Of course this is not without risk, what would happen it stem cells would grow uncontrollably for example?

There are several other ways to treat or reverse aging, but these are the most common ones (at least for now). Soon we’ll likely get gene editing therapies (think about CRISPR), but we are not there yet. The most important thing for me is that reversing aging turns out to be an engineering problem and that means it can be solved. We now know what is needed but we don’t have all the tools to do it yet. There has been a lot of progress and it seems to be just a matter of time before we solve all of them. 

I am not sure if we should strive to be immortal, but beating death would certainly change humanity completely. To me this field is fascinating and I will keep on doing my own research. I will also keep doing more of my own trials with fasting and taking supplements during the coming year. For me the main goal is to stay healthy into old age and to do it in a way that does not disrupt my life completely while doing it. So you won’t find me sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen tent soon, nor will I do any young blood transfusions or go to a stem cell clinic. Enjoy life and stay healthy! 

Please note that this blog post reflects my personal opinion and is based on many articles and podcasts, not on my own scientific research. Please do your own research and/or check with your physician before trying any of the methods that I describe in this article. 

Compared to most other industries there has not been a lot of innovation in the food industry, but that will change soon. The number of human beings keeps on growing, and the expectation is that there may be 9.7 billion people on this planet by 2050. If that’s the case food production will not be able to keep up with demand without major innovations. At the same time food production has a big impact on climate change as well, so innovations are inevitable if we want to survive as a species. 

One interesting innovation that I have been paying a lot of attention to, is how meat can be produced in a more sustainable way. I started looking at this a few months ago after watching a couple of documentaries on the food industry, especially on how meat is produced and on how animals are treated. The way animals are grown and slaughtered was beyond my worst imagination. Not only that, but because of these practices food is just not safe anymore. I decided to reduce my meat intake considerably and I only tried to buy ‘high end’ meat. I also started looking at meat alternatives.

Currently there are 2 kinds of meat alternatives: clean meat and plant-based meat. Plant-based meat has been around for a number of years, but there have been huge innovations in the last few years. Companies like Impossible Foods have created meat-like products with a taste and texture that is almost exactly the same as real meat. Clean meat is a more recent innovation. Companies like Memphis Meats have come up with ways to grow meat from animal cells, without the need to breed, feed and slaughter real animals. These products are not on the market yet, but they will be over the next years.

I believe both approaches are fantastic innovations. Breeding animals for food is extremely inefficient because you feed an animal plant based foods to grow itself and then slaughter it for some of its meat. The most efficient animal to produce meat is the chicken, but even there you will need to feed it 9 calories for every calorie of meat that you will get. If you think about it, that’s completely crazy. 

Getting people to switch to meatless meat may seem hard, but I think it should not be a big problem. The biggest hurdle is to try it out for the first time. Once you have tasted it (I haven’t yet, so I am purely theorizing here) you will realize there is no difference. People buy food based on price, taste and convenience. If the taste factor is taken care of and if the meat will be available anywhere, price will be the differentiating factor.

Right now price is still a problem, and that’s likely why only high-end restaurants serve Impossible Foods’ products. But that will change: meatless meat uses exponentially fewer resources, so once the production scales it will be cheaper than normal meat. 

Decentralized manufacturing will add to this. You don’t have to raise cattle and feed it in location A, then transport it to a slaughterhouse in location B, and then bring it to the start of the distribution chain in location C. You can manufacture it in location C and save on all these transportation costs as well. Of course this only works once you get to scale, but I believe this could go relatively fast.

As a side note, once humanity will start inhabiting other planets, this kind of meat production will likely be the only way to get meat to places outside of earth. Timing is right, because I am a strong believer in the fact that in 10 years we will start inhabiting our first other planet already (Mars). 

People now eat meat despite how it’s made. Mainly because most people have no idea how meat is produced and how bad it is for the environment. But also because there are no alternatives. Artificial meat will be produced in a much more transparant way, people will be able to see where their food comes from. This will make food safer and healthier. 

The impact on the world will be huge once these products are readily available. Meat production is a major contributor to climate change, estimates show that livestock production is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gasses. Next to that livestock production accounts for 70% (!) of all agricultural land use and occupies 30% of all land use on our planet. Without this a lot more land is available for other purposes. 

If you’re interested in this topic you should listen to a podcast by Andreessen Horowitz about this subject. I listened to the podcast driving to work this morning and it inspired me to write this article. I embedded the podcast below. It’s not very technical, so even if you don’t know anything about the subject it’s easy to follow. 

I wrote about autonomous vehicles a couple of times on this blog. Just over a year ago I wrote they might hit the road by 2019-2020, while in 2013 I still thought the first one would only be on the street by 2023. But exponential change tricked me once again, because Tesla’s standard technology seems to be ready to go.

The last hurdle will be politics, but I think that can suddenly go very fast as well. If not in the US than certainly in other countries, forcing the US to follow. Even in the US I believe a couple of states will likely be early leaders (in my opinion California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington), ‘forcing’ other states to follow. My estimate is now that the first states will allow full self-driving within 2 years from now.

The video below shows how well Tesla’s hardware package (installed in every new Tesla from now onwards, but not activated yet) works in neighborhood traffic, including many intersections with traffic lights or stop sign. To me this is still very impressive, but this will soon be the new normal for all of us. I look forward to not having to drive myself anymore!

I never watch TV, but do sometimes catch a show or movie on Netflix. Most of the time I spend watching video content is actually on YouTube nowadays, where I follow a couple of vloggers quite religiously. My #1 vlogger is Casey Neistat, a New York based film maker who travels constantly and who has a great way of storytelling. I have been following him, his wife, their toddler baby, and his adult son from a previous relationship, for the past 1.5 years on an almost daily basis. Well, that’s actually not completely true. I only started following Casey a few months after he started vlogging every day, but I watched almost all of his early videos, and I often binge watch 4-5 days of videos in one session, instead of watching one episode every day.

What I liked about him was not just following his interesting daily life, but especially his unique way of making videos. Casey is fun to watch, he makes me laugh almost every episode. He is also interesting, he shares his thoughts about current events (he was very much anti-Trump) and he always has (and breaks) the latest gadgets. In a way he is also cool, traveling the world by helicopter and plane, and getting around locally on his electric skateboard, while always wearing his trademark dark shades. Even my kids started watching him regularly a few months ago after watching his $21,000 First Class Emirates seat video, so he had a broad audience.

Casey became very famous over the past year. From a relatively unknown guy (I had seen some of his early videos on Facebook in the past but didn’t know who he was) he became one of the most well-paid YouTubers. With 5 million subscribers to his daily videos he rakes in an estimated $2.5 million per year, “just” by making 10 minute videos (that take him 6-8 hours to make according to an earlier episode, although in the last video he told the audience the video takes him 16 hours per day)

Most people suddenly making that kind of money would do everything to keep earning that number. But not Casey. Yesterday he suddenly announced that he would stop making his daily videos. He said it wasn’t a challenge anymore, it became too easy! I can’t express how much I respect that. That shows this guy is really good, he is not afraid of the future even though it may cost him a lot of money. He realized that in order to keep on growing he had to stop doing his daily shows. He knew he didn’t want to keep doing this until he would be 40 (Casey is 34 now), so he decided to quite at the top of his fame. 

It actually reminds me of a decision I had to make when I was 29 years old. I was working as an expat for Daimler’s regional headquarters in Beijing. I had a great life, with a nice company car, business class flights for holidays (paid for by the company!), a over-the-top US$6200 per month allowance for housing plus a salary that was much higher than most of my peers at that age.

However, I wasn’t really happy. The work was quite boring, mainly collecting information from subsidiaries, analyzing it and then putting the numbers into reports and presentations. There were a couple of projects that were supposed to be strategic but where I was told in advance by the board what the expected political result should be. Not what you really want to do as an ambitious 29-year old. 

I wasn’t learning much in the job, and the worst thing you can do at that age is being in a job where you don’t grow. So when in early 2002 I was asked whether I wanted to stay for another 3 years I said no. There was an option to get another managerial expat job in either Hong Kong or Indonesia, but I decided a multinational wasn’t for me. It was a golden cage and I realized that in order to develop to my full potential I would have to open the door and get out.

And that’s what I did. Many people told me I was crazy, and many of those are probably still the ones doing the rat race inside the same company. That just wasn’t what I wanted to do in life. It was not an easy decision, but because of that I respect people that dare to take similar decisions. You can’t hedge your bets and wait for the next big thing while you keep doing the the same things.

Casey, you’ll likely will never read this, but I respect what you did very much. Most people wouldn’t dare to do what you did, but because you are willing to risk giving up your success you will be even more successful. I’ll miss following you in your daily life, but I am sure there’ll be even better content from you in the months and years to come. Good luck!

A lot has been written about Trump’s win in the elections on November 8, 2016. So much that I don’t believe a post of mine will add much to the discussion.  The reason I write a post anyway, is because I want to have my thoughts on Trump out there, so I can look back at them in the future to see where I went wrong in my analysis (because I really hope I am wrong!). So far I mainly used Twitter and Facebook to voice my opinion, but I prefer to keep my analysis on my own servers. 

I believe we are on the brink of some major changes to the world we live in, be it civil war in the US and/or Europe, or even a World War III caused by Donald Trump. This is not a conclusion I reached this week, but something I have been saying for a much longer time.

It’s actually one reason I moved to Canada. I believe this country is much safer than many others because of its more moderate politics, the very restrictive gun laws, and the fact that climate change may actually make most of the country more livable. Because of the huge divide between rich and poor in many Western countries I expect that we may see a 21st century version of the French Revolution in many parts of the world. The fact that Trump was elected is a clear sign that people are fed up with the system and want changes now.

The problem is that Trump won’t be able to provide these changes. Most of the voters don’t seem to realize that Trump is simply a liar, one who has been lying his whole life to get to where he is now. Not sure how successful he has really been financially, but for sure he made part of his money by bullying others and by not caring about the less powerful people. Don’t expect that to change. 

My prediction is that he won’t be able to keep most of his promises, except for the ones that are easy to fulfill and that will make his voters happy. Which ones? I believe mainly the racial ones. He may not be able to build a wall and let Mexico pay for it, but he will find a way to start sending immigrants back – or at the very least stop new ones from coming in. He will try to pass anti-gay laws, despite potentially having Peter Thiel in his inner circle. The fact that Trump does not publicly condemn the acts of hatred and racism that happened over the past days since his election, shows that his racism was not just talk to get elected.

Of course he will blame others for not being able to fulfill his promises, that’s something he is very good at. And his voters will likely believe him and blame the ‘others’ for not getting a better life. He knows how to play the media and how to play his voters.

The media should realize that history repeats itself. Media that predict that Trump may become more moderate because he can’t keep his promises may be wrong. Compare this to a 1932 quote in the New York Times, during Hitler’s rise to power: “If Nazis are allowed to govern they’ll become more moderate because they’ll find it impossible to keep their campaign promises.” Ignore history at your own peril…

The thing that worries me most about Trump and the fact that he got elected, is that it’s suddenly almost acceptable to be openly racist or anti-gay. This will set the US decades back. I realize many Trump voters are no real racists, but the fact that racism is not a deal breaker for them makes it hard to take them serious. I think very differently about several friends on my Facebook timeline. Many Trump supporters lost a lot of my respect for not being able to think for themselves and for not trying to stop racism, especially if they are traditional Republicans with decent jobs and lives. 

Of course many Trumps voters live lives that are hard to imagine for most Hillary Clinton supporters. They are extremely worried about the future, they live paycheck to paycheck – or worse, have no paycheck or need to work several jobs just to survive. In a way I understand that they would vote for a guy like Trump, just because they feel it can’t get any worse. Hillary would have given them more of the same, at least for Trump there would be a chance for a better life. Unfortunately that won’t happen, and they might be a lot worse off 4 years from now, because Trump can’t stop exponential change in technology. 

What would be needed, but what Trump will not understand, is a universal basic income. If you can’t provide jobs to people, at least provide them with basic financial security. With Trump that will never happen, because he not only has no clue about the lives of his voters, but also because he doesn’t really care for them. He needed their votes, now he is in power and he can focus on things that will benefit him instead of others.

Another thing I am very worried about is that Trump is too ignorant to understand that climate change is real. He likely won’t see the effect of his own policies anymore, but they could be devastating for the world. Every month new temperature records are broken, storms and hurricanes are getting more powerful, but Trump does not want to see it and wants to create more jobs in ‘traditional’ energy. This scares me to death, right now the thing the world needs is someone who would be willing to fight to stop global warming. It may be too late already, but with Trump at the helm for the next 4 or even 8 years we may literally be doomed. 

Silicon Valley may be able to come up with solutions for clean energy that could reverse global warming effects, but the question is how powerful the Bay area will be under Trump’s reign. I would not be surprised if the start-up hubs in Europe (especially Berlin and maybe London if Brexit won’t take place) and China (Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu) will become much more significant over the next 4 years.

There is some talk about California leaving the union, but I don’t see that happening soon. It seems more wishful thinking to distance themselves from Trump. Understandable but not very practical. But then again, Silicon Valley has shown many times that they can pull off things that nobody expected. 

What seems more serious to me is the number of protests that are taking place all over the US. It’s too early to tell whether this is a temporary thing or whether they will grow in size. But with social media this can grow into a real protest movement soon. The Trump voters joke about it on social media and call the protestors whiners who never had a set back in their lives. But they don’t understand that the protestors are not protesting the fact that a Republican won or that Hillary lost. The protestors may not be happy with that, but it would never trigger this kind of protests. They are only protesting the fact that Donald Trump won, simply because he is dangerous and unfit to be president of the USA. 

As we have seen in the Middle East over the past years small protests can quickly lead to mass protests that could lead to civil wars. And that’s why I started this essay with the fact that I am worried about the future and that a civil war is a serious threat. How serious? Nobody knows, but if Trump does not become more presidential over the next days, and if he won’t renounce the racist actions things could get ugly soon. Let’s hope I am very wrong. 

When I started this blog back in 2004, one of the first things I wrote about was podcasting. Those posts have disappeared in cyberspace, although I still have a copy somewhere on a CD-ROM (reminder to self: find and upload these files to the cloud before the CD-ROM stops working) and I could theoretically get them back on this blog. Podcasting was invented in the summer of 2004 by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Literally from the first day podcasting started I have been listening to podcasts because I happened to follow both of their blogs at that time.

When I had the idea for Tudou it was initially even based on podcasting: the plan was that people could subscribe to (audio) podcasts through something similar to what is now the standard podcast app on your iPhone (using RSS). The idea evolved from there to include video as well, and soon China’s first online video site was born. 

Podcasting didn’t take off as fast as I had expected, but the past 2 years has seen a revival of podcasts. The Serial podcast was certainly a big driver of this, but also the higher general quality of productions played a role. Another important factor is that more people now have connected cars, so it’s easier to listen to podcasts while driving. My favorite podcasts app is not the standard one installed on the iOS devices (with the generic name Podcasts), but a paid app called Downcast. The user interface is much more intuitive than the standard iPhone app and it’s super easy to add new podcasts (either by search or by copy/pasting a URL). 

I mainly listen to podcasts in the car while driving to work, but I also started listening to audio programs while running around Stanley Park or while climbing the Grouse Grind. It’s a good way to forget about how tired you are and while doing sports you learn a lot of new things, or at least the topics make you think. Plus I like to be productive and this is a good way to do two things at the same time. Most podcasts that I listen to are focused on learning things. I don’t really listen to ‘fun’ podcasts, I prefer to listen to something that makes me think. 

In this blog post I will go over some of my favorite podcasts and why I like them. In random order (except for the last one, which is my #1 choice) my current favorite podcasts are:

a16z

This is the podcast produced by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of most successful Silicon Valley based VCs. The topics are quite broad and generally not related to VC investing, but include topics such as genomics, virtual reality, bitcoin and the blockchain, and artificial intelligence. But also more fun topics are included, for example after Pokemon Go launched and took off in July this year, A16Z had a podcast about it. Generally the programs are quite high level, so you have to focus to make sure you don’t miss anything. It happens regularly that I need to rewind the program one or two minutes to make sure I understood things correctly. These podcasts always make me think, so you need to be in an environment that doesn’t have too many distractions while listening. Episodes are generally 30-40 minutes.

Bulletproof radio

A few months ago I started to look more into health, diets, quantified self, and life hacking topics. Bulletproof radio fits those topics exactly and since then I have listened to a number of their current and past episodes. Presented by Dave Asprey (who aims to live to 180), the show talks about any topic that can help you to upgrade your body, mind or life. When I started researching the ketogenic diet I found some highly interesting podcasts in this series for example. But Dave also interviews guests about topics as diverse as how to live longer, on gut ecology, smart drugs, GMOs, and something as simple as sleep. Not all episodes are great, so sometimes I skip to the next one after a couple of minutes, but normally the quality is high. Episodes are generally about an hour long. 

CBC News World Report

I start most days with this Canadian news report. I don’t really follow Canadian news (I don’t read local papers or watch the Canadian TV news), so this is the only way I learn about what’s happening in Canada. The program is called World Report, but the majority of topics is Canada related. A good way to learn a bit more about Canadian politics and things that are important for Canadians. Each episode is just 10 minutes, so this is a good program to listen to when you get into your car in the morning.

Fault Lines

This is an interesting podcast about what happens when a big earthquake will hit the Pacific Northwest, specifically Victoria and the area around Vancouver. It is sure that a big one (either a 9 at the scale of Richter off the coast of Vancouver Island) or a smaller, but more deadline one (a level 7 earthquake below the mainland) will hit this area one day. It could be this year or it could be in 100 years, nobody knows. A bit scary but I learned a lot from it. Also interesting when you don’t live in this area, because big earthquakes happen in other areas as well and the results are similar. This podcast refers a lot to the Christchurch, New Zealand, earthquake for example. I now know what to do if one hits and what the immediate aftermath of the quake will look like. The series consists of 5 episodes of about 30 minutes each.

Modern Love

This podcast is co-produced by the New York Times and is based upon the regular NYTimes column Modern Love. In the podcasts well known people read one of these older columns and this is then followed by an update from the person who wrote the column on what has happened since then. There are some real gems in here that make me think more deeply about love and romance. Much more entertaining than most of the other podcasts I listen to, so this is a good one for late at night as well. Most episodes run 15-20 minutes each.

Serial

What can I say, this is probably the most famous podcast in the world and the reason many people first heard about podcasting. The show is now working on its third season. For me the first season was amazing, covering the murder trial and conviction of Adnan Syet. It was like a reality show about a convicted murderer and the more I listened to it the more I was convinced that Adnan is innocent. Because of the show he will actually get a retrial, 17 years after the crime happened. Fascinating how a podcast can achieve this. It was the first podcast that people talked about in my office, and I literally could not wait until each next episode would be posted online. The second season was good as well, but I disliked the topic of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl deserting the US army and being captured by the Taliban, so I did not finish Season 2. However, the quality is so high and Season 1 was so good that I included it here anyway. I can’t wait for Season 3 to start! Episode length varies quite a bit, most are 30-40 minutes, but some are more than an hour. 

The Tim Ferriss Show

And then my my favorite podcast, the Tim Ferris Show. I have to admit that it took me quite a while before I started listening to the podcast, because I assumed Tim Ferris was a con artist. I enjoyed the 4 hour work week and the 4 hour body, but I did not really believe this guy was for real. After listening to just one episode of his podcast I changed my mind completely: Tim is a genius, with amazing ideas and who puts his money where his mouth is. He is different than most other people and that makes these podcasts fun to listen to. Every week Tim interviews a different guest, always a special person, but not necessarily very famous people. The guest can be a super entrepreneur (for example Naval Ravikant), a famous author (for example Paulo Coelho), a former politician and body builder (Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the podcast), or an expert in the ketogenic diet such as Dom D’Agostino. You never know what to expect, but I am hardly every disappointed. The interesting thing is that you learn about things that you normally would never read or even think about, and you hear from the experts in those fields. Tim himself is a good interviewer and is generally very well prepared. The podcasts are quite long however, most are between 1-2 hours but some stretch for more than 3 hours. Perfect for a long, slow run or just an evening at home with a bottle of wine. 

There are a lot more podcasts that I listen to, but mostly just a few episodes before switching to something new. I also started to watch video podcasts on YouTube, but I did not include those here. Maybe that’s something for a future blog post. If you have any suggestions for other audio or video podcasts feel free to email me or leave a comment below this post or on Twitter. 

A week ago Pokémon Go launched and within a few days it became the most popular game ever. It’s probaby the best example of what exponential growth means for people who are not following tech on a daily basis. Even in countries where it hadn’t launched yet people managed to download Pokémon Go from a foreign app store and play the game. I read that in Holland the game had been downloaded 1.3 million times before it officially launched this weekend (Holland has only 17 million inhabitants). As a result their servers keep on crashing, something I thought would never see again now that you can host everything in the cloud. It reminds me of Twitter, I am sure many readers will still remember the Fail Whale from Twitter’s early days.

I was happy that my kids have school holidays already, so their friends would not give them the peer pressure to start playing the game as well. Bad luck, at Scott’s sailing camp last week some older boys had iPhones with the game installed on it, so on Thursday Scott came home with the question if I could get him Pokemon Go as well. Resistance is futile when games go viral, so I got the game from the US app store for him (Canada hadn’t launched yet) and put it on my phone. I wanted to start reading up on how the game works, but he grabbed my phone and started catching the first Pokemons in our house right away.

Then he told me he wanted to walk to the beach below our house. You have to go through a small piece of forest to get there, and last summer a bear lived there for a while, so I don’t let him go there on his own yet. He told me that he located a Pokéstop there. I had no idea what a Pokéstop was, but it turned out to be a special place where you can get extra experience points and more balls to catch Pokémon. This one turned out to be a memorial plate that I had never seen before, even though I had been here at least a hundred times over the past years. This intrigued me, suddenly I realized the game was a lot more than ‘just’ a game.

Scott and I ran down to the beach and the game measured how far we ran, because some eggs that Scott had collected and put into his incubator would hatch after walking 5 km. Wow, I suddenly realized how genius this was. This game would force kids to walk more! I assumed that you could fool it by just driving around with the game on, so we got into my Porsche and drove around the neighbourhood. The result: nothing…. You have to walk in order to get more distance! But it turned out there were a few Pokémons in my car as well, and Scott caught all of them.

On Saturday Scott told me there were a lot of Pokéstops in Lighthouse Park, a wooded peninsula with a lighthouse close to our house. So he wanted to go for a hike there! Normally Scott never initiates these activities, but the game was so addicting that he wanted to go there to get more points and balls.

In Lighthouse Park I normally hike or run a route that I know well, but on Saturday Scott was in charge. Elaine also joined and the 3 of us went on a kind of Treasure Hunt in the woods. It was pretty cool, because we found places that I had never been to. I really enjoyed it and the kids loved it as well. The game started to really impress me, I had never seen this before. Until…. the game servers crashed and we couldn’t load the game anymore. Suddenly both kids were tired and wanted to go home!

I don’t think Pokemon Go will be able to keep up the hype for more than a few months. The game design reminds me a bit of the gameplay of Farmville games that I used to play when I was CEO of Spil Games Asia, when I tried to understand why they were so popular. Pokemon Go is many times better than Farmville of course, because it is a real life augmented reality game and because it adds the fighting element (after level 5 you can let your Pokemons fight against others in gyms). But just like with Farmville I don’t see people playing this for more than few months, unless they keep adding new elements to the game design.

Pokémon is the first augmented reality game that breaks through. For the first time people will see the power of AR, but also for the first time they may forget that they are in the real world while they play the game. When Scott plays the game outside I stay with him all the time, because he forgets that he is playing a game (he is 8 years old now) and he may just cross the street without looking to catch a Pokémon. A few days ago I predicted on Twitter we’d see the first Pokémon accidents or even casualties soon, and unfortunately some people indeed died because they of the game. You can’t avoid it, especially in AR mode kids (and probably also adults) forget about the real world around them.

For everybody who only reads this to make money (sorry for the lure bait title), there is an interesting opportunity right now to make a few thousand dollars this week – and maybe a lot more, and possibly for a much longer time. This is the first AR game that goes viral and that everybody seems to use, at least everybody younger than 30. But not many people are looking at the marketing opportunities yet, especially for shops or restaurants. There is a huge opportunity here, because most shop owners may have heard about Pokémon Go by now, but they don’t really understand what it is yet. You can be the expert who can tell them what the game is and how they can make money with it!

How? Simple, just spend the next 12 hours reading everything you can find online about Pokémon and how it works and start playing the game (if you are not already doing that). Within 12 hours you’ll know more than almost anybody about the game. Suddenly you are an expert! Normally it takes months or years to become an expert in something, here you can do it in a day. Next step is to design something you can sell to shops and restaurants that will lead to many more customers and revenue for them immediately. This will probably take you a few hours and after that you can start selling it. You can probably sell your knowledge for about $200 per package and it will take you maximum one hour per shop/restaurant. You could even use a no-cure-no-pay method, because I guarantee you these business will see their revenue skyrocket.

What could you sell them? I would help them to set up a Pokémon account and get them leveled up a few levels so they understand how it works. Then you explain them how Lures work and show them how to buy Lures for their business. With Lures they are able to attract Pokémons to their business for 30 minutes, and they only cost something like $2.50 per hour. Having Lures in your business will attract customers because they can also catch these Pokémons. If a business puts some of the more exotic Pokémons on their social media feeds they are in business (literally!).

Another way is to use Incense, but because Incense is only for the player that buys it you can’t use it for other customers. However, you can put a sign out that you reimburse others for their Incense if they manage to catch valuable Pokémons in your shop and post that (with a picture to prove it) on your Facebook feed. You can do all of this in less than an hour. The shop owners will be amazed what will happen to their traffic!

There are of course many other ways to attract more Pokémont hunters to your business (and to keep them there), just Google it and claim the ideas for yourself. The opportunity won’t last long, so you have to be quick. Invest the time now and start going door-to-door tomorrow. You need to like to sell a bit, but if you are able to do that there is a lot of money to be made. Good luck and buy me a beer if you’re successful!