Designing an Intentional Life | Tim Ferriss | Ep 558

28:15So it's the thing that's not going to happen by itself that I try to budget for. And I book in advance. So this would be an example of over investing in a sense. Like I booked the wilderness survival training and the guy who's running, it's like, look, I don't care if it's one person or eight people, same price. Okay. And it's, uh, it's not cheap, but it's not, you know, a hundred thousand dollars either. And for somebody who has achieved financial independence, if you prioritized it, a lot of people listening to this could pretty easily do what I'm describing. And I don't want of dox the guy who's involved and blow his pricing.

28:51Suffice to say, though, it's not actually that expensive. And I'm covering it for my friends because some of them may not be in a position to do that. But if you had a bunch of guys splitting it or a bunch of gals, this is for people listening, a bunch of friends splitting it, it'd be totally achievable, totally affordable. But I'm trying to make it easy for my friends to say yes, who have two or three or four kids. and you need to give those people enough lead time that they can have conversations with their partners and so on. But those would be a couple of examples. And each year I do something called a past year review where I look back at the last year and people can just search that online.

29:31You'll find descriptions of how I do it. But in brief, I'm going through my whole calendar week by week from the last year and identifying the people and activities and so on that produced the most memorable peak positive experiences. And then I'm also looking at the peak negative experiences. And I'm creating a do more of list and a do less of list. And then keep in mind, this is typically like the first week of January, but you can do it anytime. You can do it right now. I block out those do more of. I book them and pay for them and get them in the calendar. Like use sunk cost to your advantage.

30:07I've thought about writing a blog post about this, but it's like you can use sunk cost to your advantage in a situation like this. And loss aversion, meaning you've prepaid, it's non-refundable. So that's a mouthful. I know I just spewed out a lot, but those are a few ways that I think about things. And just to be very clear on the relationship side also, at this point in my life, I will also look back during that past your review and basically say, all right, who are the people in my top 10 most important relationships? Could be healthiest relationships, could be just most uplifting relationships, choose your adjective.

30:50And did I spend as much time as I would like with those people last year? For a lot of people, the answer is going to be no. And so I try to invest in those before I start investing in new things like going to a conference to meet new people. I want to invest in the 10. I make that number up. It could be five, could be whatever you choose. Whatever works for you. I wouldn't do more than 10 and book things, invite those people. And then only when that box is checked, do I then look at potentially meeting more people. I'm also quite introverted. So that suits my personality. Yeah, I hear you. I think about an energy audit.

31:31I think this might have been something, frankly, that you mentioned way back when, but looking at that calendar and as you're describing it, like peak experiences, I think about, hey, who lights me up in my life? Yeah, it's super simple. Yeah. Energy and energy out, right? So the energy out doesn't have to be someone who does something horrible to you. You could just look at your calendar and say, oh my God, that week when I was on phone calls with no offense to accountants, but it's like accountants and lawyers all week, right? Damn it, Tim. Come on. But I'm just saying, I love my accounts. I love my lawyers, but I get really fidgety if the density of that is too high and I'm doing too much managing and not enough making, not enough creating stuff, I just get very uncomfortable and fidgety and annoyed, which is not fair to them at all.

32:20But it teaches you just, all right, let's either spread this stuff out. Let's only do it on Mondays. Pick some way to do it such that you can deal with it. And then you might find certain instances where you're just like, okay, yeah, that company that I'm dealing with, that one customer I deal with that always wants to do like Zoom calls and they just drag on and they don't have a good agenda and it's always awful. But not even awful. It's just always a waste of time. It's like, okay, like maybe I either fire that client or send them an email or have a phone call about like, hey guys, moving forward, I've just realized that I need to change a few things just for sanity or X, Y, and Z.

32:58And if they're like, great, and they play ball, then fantastic. Otherwise, just scrapping that kind of activity can make a huge difference. Yeah. It's interesting thinking about some of the parallels to some of the guests we've had. We had a guy named Chad Carson on talking about the small and mighty real estate investor. And essentially for him, he has, let's say, 40 properties. And he thinks about, on a yearly basis, what's the one that costs me the most time, energy, and stress? Yeah. And he calls that one. And then it's, what are the top five? How do I replicate that? Right? Yeah, it's exactly the same process, right?

33:32Like you're doing an 80-20 analysis of peak lows, peak highs, energy drain, energy recharge. So that's how I approach a lot of it. these days, I think as one gets older, you also start to pay more and more attention to energy because it's not money by itself, right? Money is necessary, but not sufficient. Then you have time. Okay. Time. Yes. Time is important. But if you don't have attention when you're using that time, you don't actually have that time, right? Like if you're quote unquote playing with your kids, but you're on your phone, that is not playing with your kids, right? If you are, who knows, working on a project, but actually you're getting interrupted every five seconds by notifications or jumping on social yourself and self-interrupting, that's not actually working on your project.

34:27So time is also not enough. You need attention. And then I would say below that, at the base of the pyramid is energy. If you don't have energy, you can't have attention, which means you don't have time, which means your money doesn't have much value. So I would say the rate limiter, the rate enabler or disabler is that energetic layer. So I pay a ton of attention to that. And I should say, look, even, and I'm not Elon Musk, I'm not, maybe not the best example to use, but it's like, I am not the Brad Pitt's of the world. However, I'm in a very fortunate advantage position for a lot of stuff. Even now, You have to deal with stuff that you don't want to do.

35:09There are going to be times it's not all free. And the way I look at that is it's like, okay, all the other stuff is what you get to do for free. And the tax, there's always going to be a tax. The tax that you pay for this newfound freedom is occasionally, you have to do X, Y, or Z, but it doesn't have to be all the time. But yeah, there are going to be things that happen. So it's like, if your dream is the small but mighty real estate, right? It's like, okay, if a raccoon dies in the HVAC of one of your units, do you want to get that phone call? No, you don't want to get that phone call. That's not fun to deal with.

35:48But yeah, you're going to have to deal with it, right? There's going to be some equivalent that you have to deal with, especially if you buy a lot of stuff, I will say. Especially if you have the psychological and financial carrying costs of a bunch of stuff, which is part of the reason why I don't have a lot of stuff. And I've just been selling or giving away a lot of my stuff, which wasn't that much to begin with, but helps me to feel uncluttered. Yeah, I'm definitely in a big minimalism phase right now. I just had a going through some life circumstances and I just moved recently. And it's interesting when you call down everything you own.

36:28And I mean, at this point in my life, I can pretty much recreate everything I own in 30 minutes on Amazon. I can fit everything I want or need in one carry on suitcase. And it's, it's really liberating. It's wonderful. Yeah, it's amazing. And I, you know, I would also just perhaps for this audience, because I think it's important to mention underscore one thing, which is very often what got you to your goal is not going to allow you to fully enjoy having achieved that goal. And that's true for people who I've, I've seen a lot of people become financially independent in different ways, right? I've seen, of course, like the mega super billionaire types.

37:14I've seen multiple friends go from like a hundred K a year to deck a billionaire, which is crazy. But I've also seen friends of mine who I grew up with on Long Island sort of do it methodically in more of an FI way, right? Yeah. I think everybody gets what I'm talking about. So I've seen both and the problem or the challenge, the challenge still exists that since you were able to systematically do what it took to get to the finish line, you're accustomed to racing or operating in some gear. And it doesn't magically change when you cross the finish line. You are still going to use that gear as your default.

37:57And my impression of my friends who reach financial independence by cutting costs in the right places, saving in the right way, investing in whatever sort of low cost passive way makes the most sense typically. right they don't all do it that way but if they invest as i also do in like low cost index funds let's just say low fee low cost index funds when they cross the finish line they're like we looked at the numbers i'm there we did it they still end up being frugal to a point that is self-defeating and joy robbing now if it is your sport and you love doing it like our mutual friend Chris Hutchins, right?

38:47If you love price shopping for raspberries by driving around, I'm kind of screwing with him. I can picture Hutchins doing that too. But what brings him joy is the deal hunting and the deal finding and the arbitrage opportunities and figuring out how to make money, like buying gold at Costco and flipping things. And he's so good at it. And that's his sport. He's like a major league baseball player, but what he does is find hacks and deals. Then fine. Okay. But I'm going to venture to say that's less than 10%. At least at face value, the reason that people have done it, if you were to ask them along the way is because of A, B, or C.

39:28Not, I want to spend my freedom looking for the best deal on everything. Means to an end. And step number one is just to be aware of that. Step number two is even if you're not at financial independence yet, I would encourage to ask yourself, what are the smallest experiments that I can run to start testing the waters on things that I think I want to do after financial independence? There are lots of ways to do it. There are lots and lots and lots of ways to figure out clever workarounds to taste test a lot of different things. I would suggest trying that so you start to develop some of the other gears.

40:08and for almost everybody listening whether you're on your way or you're past the finish line financially speaking you've developed one or two gears by necessity you have overdeveloped or significantly developed those and to actually fully enjoy and take advantage of this freedom that you've achieved you will need other gears and it's achievable but like everything else requires practice, just like developing the skillset and the habits and the tracking of getting to FI in the first place took what? Practice. Yeah, it's amazing. You truly are speaking the language of the FI community, of Choose FI.

40:51And I mean, we've talked about this for the last couple of years where at the beginning of the FI movement, so circa 2013, let's say, it was truly about running. I'm also realizing that I've read it more often than not. So I keep saying FI. I can say FI too. No, it's great. Either way. It's funny. People use them interchangeably. So whatever. Whatever floats your boat. But yeah, it was about running away from something. So, so many people were running away from a job they hated. And then they got to this mythical number on a spreadsheet and they woke up the next day and life wasn't unicorns and rainbows.

41:24And they had to grapple with that. And I think one of the things that we've tried to do here at this podcast is make people understand like this is a journey. And actually the financial part is the easiest. Once you get that set on autopilot, you don't think about that. I think about my finances 10 minutes a month at most, but it's about this experimentation. It's about, we had a woman named Jess from the Fineers on, and she coined the phrase Coast Fi and Slow Fi recently. And they've become really essential aspects of the Fi community. But what she talked about was the cure for the boring middle.

41:57So it was these quote unquote boring middle years where you have to experiment. And there's an experimentation loop very similar to what you're describing with these six month journeys to two week experiments and just just try right it's funny because i suspect i've actually uh unbeknownst to me copied you on the uh the sailing around the world so many people i use that example all the time like people say i want to do x y and z i want to drive around the country in an rv when i retire and they've never even rented an rv for five days and it's like are you kidding how do you know and then they get to the point where they'll do it and then it's oh this feels like a failure or, Oh, five didn't work.

42:36This was all for naught. As opposed to if they had been failing forward all throughout those years, it would have just been part and parcel of the process, right? Like experimentation to your point is not about winning all the time, right? It's about truly learning more about yourself. And to me, that is the essence of this. It's, I understand that I'm testing things and there are things that I'm going to like in this season of my life. There are things that that might change to assume that anyone is locked at a point and they're going to be that way for the rest of their lives. Like it just is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity, right?

43:12Like you have to continually test. It's not a failure if you decide, Hey, I want to travel around the world. And then you realize, Oh, you know what? I really liked my community. I really liked going to my gym four times a week at 6 a.m. I really like playing board games with my friends and family. I really like these things. That's not a failure. You experimented. You tried something. Yeah. Well said. Well said. And I would also say binary is easy. What do I mean by that? Being an absolutist is easy. And there's something to be said for easy. But just to come back to what you said, which is the financial piece is the easy piece, right?

43:49Thinking in terms of dichotomies, it's like it's either x or it's y right i'm either this is going to be an exaggeration but like i'm either saving or i'm wasting money these types of black and white dichotomies make implementation easy but they can have psychological costs coming back to that development of one gear so i would say for instance what is harder but i think worthwhile to at least journal on maybe play around with for a weekend or a week it doesn't need to be permanent that's why they're called experiments is how could, for instance, some of the mini retirement options in the four-hour work week be integrated into any type of five journey, right?

44:38Like what would that look like? If you had a gun against the head and you had to incorporate that, what would it look like? What might it look like. And as a thought exercise, importantly, not asking, could I do this? But no, I have to do this. Somebody kidnapped your Labrador retriever hostage to get that dog back. You must take a mini retirement of three to four weeks or two weeks. But I try to push people to three or four. Psychologically, it's a different animal. But distributing some of these experiences throughout life, not postponing them all for post finishing line. And I'm not saying go blow a bunch of money on anything that you want.

45:19I'm just saying as a thought exercise, what does it look like to look at something that is a mixed model as opposed to an absolute model and just to play around with it, just to play around with it, I think is worthwhile. And I try to catch myself, I catch myself all the time where it's like, it's either X or it's Y. And it's like, yeah, maybe, maybe. But if you had to find a third option, what might it look like? Okay. Well, can you test that for two days? Can you test that for a week? Yeah. See what that looks like. See how you feel afterwards. Look at your finances, do a post game analysis.

45:55So I want to throw that out there because I do think that financial independence is amazing. It is definitely worthwhile and it can be easy to slip into self-denial and masochism that is really unnecessary and unhelpful and unpleasant past a certain point. So I just wanted to throw that out there because I have seen that as a symptom in some folks who are striving towards financial independence, at least within the context of, I guess, how most people listening will maybe consider it. Yeah, agreed. I see it as keeping up with the Joneses in a different type of way, which is the, right? It's like, hey, my savings rate is 72.7 % and yours is only 69%.

46:46Like, luckily, I don't, I think a lot of that is lessening now because we've been, I mean, we've been hammering at this for years, literally years, but I mean, we are susceptible to it, right? But I think to your point, mini retirements, that's been an interesting one. I know that's impacted me. We have a great friend named Jillian Johnsrud in the community, and she's actually writing and publishing a book on mini retirements later this year. Yeah, she's wonderful. And she compelled me to take one a year ago, and it was transformative for me. And not only, it's interesting because not only was it, hey, I took this amazing trip to Bali and Singapore and Doha, Uh, but it was the second order effects that I couldn't have foreseen, which was, Hey, I was working, working.

47:29And I said, I quote unquote so much on shoes. If I, but how much was I actually getting out of those hours? And I was crushing myself over things that didn't matter. But when you build systems, I mean, this is music to your ears going back to 2007, right? Like when you build systems and you get yourself out of your business, my life has been dramatically better since I've come back from that minute retirement than I could have ever foreseen. For sure. This is the key reason why I recommend people, at least in vision and as a thought exercise, look at three to four weeks, ideally four weeks, as opposed to two.

48:01Because if you run your own business or if you're within a company, two weeks is just short enough that you can let a bunch of fires pop up. You can let the house kind of burn down halfway, come back, and then try to repair it. Three to four weeks, generally speaking, you're going to have to really look at your policies, your rules, your systems, your delegation or lack thereof, communication within the company, whether it's your company or someone else's company, and improve a lot, streamline a lot, question a lot and revise a lot before you take your mini retirement. And the benefits of that far outlive the duration of the mini retirement.

48:47that's the very deliberate trojan horse effect of doing something like this so yes i wanted to reiterate what you were saying yeah no i appreciate that and i think something else you touched on in there was uh i guess a roundabout way that i think about it in terms of uh the book die with zero by bill parkins and i've talked about that a lot here on the podcast and there are certainly aspects of it that i could take or leave but i think for me the biggest thing is seasons of life and understanding that time is finite, right? We talk about, uh, wait, but why? And, and, uh, looking at, Hey, I have two daughters and the, I have literally a countdown to the number of days until they go to college.

49:28And when that countdown ends, I've spent probably 90 to 95 % of my time with them. And for instance, last year, so this was outside of my comfort zone, but I took them both to London to go see Taylor Swift, which is amazing. Absolutely amazing. And I memorized all 42 songs and we had just a blast at Wembley and we realized, oh wow, their other favorite singer was in Barcelona three days before. So let's add that too. And I mean, Tim, that was one of these trips of a lifetime. I'm never going to look back on those X number of thousands of dollars and regret that. I mean, I wouldn't even think about it.

50:01It's not even a rounding error. But before reading that and realizing the finite nature, I'm not sure that I would have taken that trip. Yeah. Die with zero is a good, it's a good reminder. And just like you, I mean, And there are elements that I think resonated more with me than others. But recognizing also that your ability to use your money for a lot of things decreases over time, depending on your physical wellness, your physical fitness, your mobility, etc. So a dollar now is not worth the same as a dollar on your deathbed versus a dollar in between. Those things all change, which is not even factoring in anything like inflation or whatever, right?

50:42So it's like a dollar is a dollar is a dollar is not the case. So I think that for me, one of the biggest takeaways from Die With Zero was really just thinking about the value of doing certain things in different phases of physical wellness and mobility and fitness, which applies to your kids too, right? I mean, it applies to family, meaning your ability to do certain things with your kids, with your partner, with fill in the blank, your grandkids, right? Maybe you take your grandkids on a trip while you can still like pick them up and carry them from the car, right? That's not going to be forever.

51:21There will be a last time that you're able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Right. He talks about wakeboarding with his friends. And I know Tia talks about the Centurion decathlon, right? Like, Hey, you have your great grandkid running towards you. Can you pick them up? Right. And what does that look like? That looks like a goblet squat. And if you can't do a 60-pound goblet squat when you're 40, you sure as heck aren't going to be able to do a 20-pound goblet squat when you're 70 or 80. And that great grandkid's running towards you, right? And yeah, I know you've mentioned movement is medicine, right?

51:51And I think that's something that really deeply resonates with me. And I think it's just, you know, so many people live in these hermetically sealed boxes, right? It's 72 degrees, 365 days a year. And I think it's just, we need to get out. We need to move. We need to do hard things. And I think, you know, that's something that a lot of people in the fight community have adopted, again, as part of this holistic life. But yeah, I'm curious, like how you think about, you know, you're famous for physical experiments over the years. And I know, yeah, I even still go back to your four hour body, Tim.

52:23It's hilarious. I'm still doing the myotetic crunch and the cat's vomit. I even did. What was it? oh, is your testosterone increasing cod liver oil with fermented butter? I think of us. Oh, yeah. All that stuff. It's amazing. I mean, frankly, it's astonishing to see how many of the things have become mainstream. Really? I mean, even the air squats for glucose transporters and so on, but before during meals, that's in the news right now. And that book came out in 2010. I stand by almost everything in that book. I can think of maybe one possible revision, but literally on the ingredients in one supplement stack.

53:04But aside from that, I still stand by everything in that book. Yeah. So I have done a lot of physical experiments and I continue to do that. Not quite at the ridiculous cadence that I did during the 4R Body, but I still do all that. Thanks for listening to Chooseify and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Chooseify is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at chooseabout.com slash cards. I keep this page constantly updated so it should always be the top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support.

53:40So we're both in our mid to late 40s. How do you think about movement? How do you think about exercise differently now than you did, let's say, in your 20s and early 30s? Well, a few things. Let me also just broadly say that I don't want to create the illusion for anyone that like, I've got everything figured out. Here are my rules. They work all the time. Fantastic. I have solved life or fill the blank business relationships. That is not the case, right? Which is why I do continually all these various experiments. What I would say underlies that is just an eagerness to stress test whatever I think I know, whatever I end up treating in a very binary way, the beliefs, right, which to quote Byron Katie, are thoughts that I take to be true, like just really stress testing those.

54:34Not so that I can feel lost in the world and there's no mooring, nothing is certain, not for that. But it's just like, okay, if a certain belief is causing me stress or producing a stressful state or creating strife in a relationship. It's like, okay, well, let me look at that very closely. And I would just quick plug Byron Katie's The Work for turnarounds and these types of PDFs, which you can find online for free. Great investment of time. On the physical side, for me, I would say lifting very heavy weight for me, right? Like I used to do squats with 400 plus pounds and dead lifts with 400 plus pounds and all that kind of stuff.

55:13Less and less important just because the downside risk of injury and the recovery time, if it comes at all, is so much longer. I've just become more careful around that. So for instance, looking at blood flow restriction training, people can take a look at that. Pretty fascinating BFR, but just using that for muscle growth, because you do want to preserve and have as much muscle mass as possible effectively. I mean, that's an exaggeration. You want to have plenty of muscle mass, again, coming back to the like picking the grandkid up. Age-related muscle loss is a real thing, sarcopenia. So to counteract that, like really doing proper weight training or resistance training is important.

55:59One of the ways to do that with less risk to your joints and so on is blood flow restriction training. You could also just do something like super slow, which is very slow cadence. So you're not using much velocity or momentum. It's like five seconds up, five seconds down, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down, something very slow. I would also say that there are certain sports that I will avoid or types of, I used to do heli skiing once a year. That's a place where I would spend money and I really enjoyed it. But just avalanche risk, I've seen people have some horrifying accidents. I had one very bad accident, not worth it.

56:37Right. It's like, I really don't want to, because my, my enjoyment of that, given the fear is not a worthwhile equation compared to simply doing say cat skiing versus heli skiing on slightly milder terrain with less avalanche risk. Like that's a much better idea for me. So that would be an example. And then I would encourage people to check out Nsima Iyang, so N-S-I-M-A, last name, I-N-Y-A-N-G, for movement through multiple planes. In other words, when someone lifts, you see people in the gym. Generally, it's just kind of an up and down, forward and backward motion. Nothing diagonal, certainly nothing rounded.

57:25And very often, it's just two feet in one place instead of staggered. So really working through multiple planes of motion, starting conservative has become very important to me, particularly as some of these congenital defects, these genetic defects that I have in my low back, my brother has the same thing, have started to, in certain circumstances, be very painful and restrict some of my movement. And look, I can still do all sorts of stuff and move around. But when I flash forward to like, okay, what's this going to look like when I'm 60, 70, 80? I think as in Seema would say like micro dosing movement, figuring out ways to put in certain types of movement.

58:04Like today, after this interview, it's like, I'm going to go swim. It's not going to be a workout. It's going to be like five to 10 minutes of swimming in a pool just to get some decompression in the spine, some unloading, and also like a little bit of very gentle rotation with freestyle stroke. That's it. And it's like, okay, 10 minutes there. I have cold plunge here. So I'll do a cold plunge for a bunch of reasons. And then I'm going to do a walk with my friend rucking. So I'll have a backpack with, in my case, he took the heavy one. So I'll have one with 20 pounds in it. He's got one that has 35, which doesn't sound like that much.

58:37But if you do it for long enough, it's something you'll feel, especially when there's no hip belt. And then I'll have my first meal, which my first meal will be at 2 p.m. today. So I've also come to believe that more and more so, I've always, I shouldn't say always, for the last probably 10 years, I've done regular fasting, whether that's three days, meaning water fast or black coffee, black tea, but nothing caloric, three days a quarter. For a long time, I was doing one seven-day fast a year, which is, I do still think, very, very helpful for a number of things, including possibly purging precancerous cells before they become a problem, but not a doctor.

59:20Don't play one on the internet. So take that with a grain of salt, but there's actually some literature to support it. But I have found, I think something that is more helpful on a continual basis to be some form of intermittent fasting, particularly since when I look at my family and cardiovascular disease. So whether that's heart attacks, stroke, or neurodegenerative disease that's associated with metabolic dysfunction, so Alzheimer's, sometimes called type 3 diabetes. I want my insulin sensitivity to be very high. I want my glucose metabolism, lipid metabolism, ketone production to be as dialed as possible.

1:00:00And eating from 2 to 10 or 12 to 8, like eight-hour feeding window each day, given the blood work that I have seen in myself, seems to be a pretty straightforward way to do that. And the first week, you're going to be pissy and grumpy and don't send too many fast emails to people because you'll probably regret it. But your body, at least my body, and a lot of folks have their bodies adapt quite quickly within the first week. Like first week's going to be a little unpleasant. You're going to be grumpy. It's fine. You'll survive. But those are a few things that I pay a lot of attention to. And Encima has a lot of tools along the lines of things like rope flow, for instance, which looks ridiculous.

1:00:42But after I did my podcast with him, the testimonials that I've seen from people with chronic pain who have just done rope flow for a few weeks are pretty remarkable. In my case, because of some of my low back structural issues, the term microdosing movement is really important. It's literally for me two to three minutes. If I do 10 minutes, I'm going to be really sore. So just like pain-free movement microdosing has become more important, which to me, I would have laughed at 20 years ago, I'd be like, that's not a workout. You're not doing a workout. That's like BS recreation. Sure. If you think it's fun, do it, but that's a waste of time.

1:01:24I don't agree with that anymore. I think this like microdosing to preserve or redevelop certain types of movement patterns have a real place in my life. And I'm still doing the harder workouts, right? I am also doing the VO2 max training, which I find incredibly unpleasant. But Peter Atiyah is a very close friend. I've known him since 2008. I work with his medical practice. And the data seem very unambiguous. It's like if you want to be functional into old age and live a long time, it seems like a very good idea to increase your VO2 max. Yeah, Atiyah talks about zone two training, increasing the base of your pyramid.

1:02:11Yeah. And VO2 increasing the height, right? So it's the surface area. And if you're just doing one, it's not great. So the good news is the VO2 max, at least for me right now is once a week. So you're only going to have like the pukey. Are you doing the four by four? Yeah. Four by four. It's pretty gross. Yeah. It's horrible, but you know, it's once a week and you're going to feel proud of yourself afterwards. So look, I've done enough, pretty much all the sports I've played are pretty gross. Uh, meaning they make you feel ill from a metabolic conditioning perspective, of wrestling judo all that stuff is kind of similar so at least i have some familiarity with the suck like embracing the suck but the zone 2 training i've actually come to enjoy i found it so boring so so boring but it's like just set up a little stand with netflix on or something it's fine okay do you do i've been trying to do treadmill at an incline for zone 2 it's hard to get my heart rate up enough i've done on the treadmill and it is hard to get the heart rate up also without tweaking my low back if the inkling guy gets too high if the speed gets too fast my low back gets really pissy so just add weight so what i do in the treadmill case is i have a plate loading backpack yeah from i think it's outdoor athlete or wilderness athlete they have a plate loading, like an Olympic bar that is mounted.

1:03:32It's about 12 inches long to the back of a frame backpack and you just throw plates on, which I do find more convenient than a lot of rucksacks. So I'll just throw that on. Then it's a different story. When you load it up with enough weight, like your, your heart will have to work. But I also use stationary bike, but having traveled so much and continuing to travel so much stationary bikes too hard because fit really matters and you do not want to screw up your knees. So the treadmill is going to be a bit easier in that case, in which case rucksack is kind of the way to go. Okay. That makes sense.

1:04:06Yeah. My only comment, Tim, is really ultimately the inputs over a long period of time, right? So I would have always considered myself pretty inflexible growing up, lifelong soccer player. So I was very athletic, but it just wasn't flexible. But I just sat on the floor for years when we would have family TV time at night, I would just literally sit on the floor with a lacrosse ball or whatever, and just stretch or do some type of mobility, Kelly Starrett style mobility. And it just worked to the point where now, I mean, I think by any measure for a guy my age, I'm probably top 5 % flexibility.

1:04:40And it just, it was just inputs over. Yeah. Thanks, man. It was just over a long period of time. And like, that is music to the ears of five people. That is literally, this is get rich in a medium term, right? This is not get rich quick. And I think that's what life is about is you put in the inputs over a period of time, you're going to be blown away by the results. Yeah. And you can also batch things together. So for instance, I've got a barrel sauna, I don't know, a few hundred feet from where I'm sitting. And by the way, those don't need to be expensive. You can buy them at Costco, but I've got a barrel sauna and I just leave some of the mobility tools outside of the sauna.

1:05:16And it's like, okay, I do a sauna for half hour, let's say each day. I've actually recently, based on some advice from Rhonda Patrick, revised what I'd been doing. I'd been doing 194 degrees. Seems like lower is actually better based on some finished studies. So I'm doing 180 for 30 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, and I might do one or two rounds. But I'll do the soft tissue work. As soon as I start to sweat and there's a nice glide, then I'll just use these self-massaging tools. Again, check out Kelly Starrett. He's got tons of great options. And SEMA also has some great options. And I'll do it in the sauna.

1:05:52So it's not yet another thing I'm adding. It's at the same time as something else. Similarly, if I'm doing cold plunge, which I'll probably do within an hour or two. By the way, don't do that right after your workout. It'll inhibit some of the adaptations. So wait at least an hour after your workout to do any cold exposure. So I'll typically do it in the morning and then work out later. But when I'm doing that, that's when I do my breath work. I'll just do a little bit of breath work. Nothing crazy. It's just like sharp inhale through the nose and then exhale through pursed lips. Nothing crazy.

1:06:24That's it. Don't need to get lightheaded. And I'll do that in the cold plunge. And then it's like, all right, if I'm listening to an audio book, I'll give people a trick. Here's a trick. This is like a little hearkening back to the old school Tim Ferriss days. But I'll ruck and walk my dog to this nearby market, that's like half hour each way or something like that. I'll be rucking, walking my dog and listening to an audio book. And I think you can still do this. I haven't done it a little bit, but as most people listening, you probably listen to audio books on audible. Well, if you buy the book, I always buy both formats, Kindle and audio book.

1:07:05and I believe I may have to eat crow on this, but I believe you can still do this is you can actually open the Kindle app and listen to your audio book through the Kindle app. Why would you want to do this? At least I want to do this with a nonfiction because as you're listening, if you're like, Oh man, I really want to highlight that part. You just go to the Kindle app pause and it's tracking the text automatically. As you listen through the Kindle version, you make your highlight and then you just hit play again. and so you can get your highlights. Maybe that's just my OCD, but I suspect there are other people who want to highlight and doing clips and all that stuff with audiobook, nobody ever goes back and actually listens to that stuff.

1:07:47So having the ability to highlight is made possible by listening to your Audible books through the Kindle app. But the point of all of this that I'm saying is that if you look at them all sequentially, you're like, oh God, I know people have had this feeling about, you name it. right? They're like, if I did every morning routine that all these people recommend, like my morning routine would be four hours long. And it's like, yeah, that's true. The good news is typically 80-20 analysis are really only a few things that most apply to you right now. And you can batch a lot of these things together.

1:08:21Yeah. I think that batching, habit stacking, as James Clear would call it, right? Just putting these things together. And yeah, you don't need an infinite amount of time. You can do multiple things at once. I love it. So Tim, we've really spent the hour here talking about designing an intentional life, right? And you've talked about these six-month experiments and ultimately paradox of choice. You have so many things you can choose to spend your time on. And interestingly, and this is near and dear to the heart of the FI community because we are massive, massive board gaming fans. So you call it tabletop gaming, which I actually like better as a term.

1:08:57You have created a card game with yeah with the fosher mark yeah i mean it's wild i uh so it's called coyote you created with ilan lee and his team at exploding kittens and i actually played it last night with my daughters and the game is fantastic i mean legitimately fantastic yeah it's been a really fun awesome fascinating journey and this is an example of a six to 12 month project that turned into a two year project which is fine because sometimes that happens so a few things i'll mention so yeah coyote is the name of the game it's 9.99 at target walmart amazon you can find everywhere and it's got 300 million plus viral video views of gameplay online right now which is wild So it's gone completely ballistic.

1:09:52And why did I choose to do this? So there are a few things that I think might be fun or interesting for folks to hear in your audience. So the first is that every handful of years, I try to do something that opens the door to a personal reinvention with a lot of unknowns around it. So let me explain what I mean by that. I generally feel like if you perform really well executing your six to 12 month project, if you do it just to the absolute best of your ability, that the doors that open as a result will be more interesting than anything you could imagine. Therefore, you don't want to trap yourself in long-term planning too early.

1:10:36There are exceptions to that, right? I mean, there are certain things I have on autopilot, like the movement, microdosing, my exercise, my finances, like all that stuff is on some type of systematic autopilot. But when it comes to professional direction, projects, career, et cetera, I've never wanted to lock myself in too much. So that's why I did the four-hour body after the four-hour workweek instead of the three-hour workweek or a four-hour workweek for fill-in-the-blank demographic, right? I could have milked that forever or for a long time, but I would have been pigeonholed and I would have pigeonholed myself into business author and I would have been trapped.

1:11:12And you see this happen to the vast majority of authors. They are X type of author. And since I knew I could always go back to the business genre, I was like, I want to do something completely outside of that to prove to, well, at least test whether or not my audience will follow me to an entirely new genre. And if I do that even partially successfully, then I have permission. The publishers will give me permission to do whatever I want. so that's why i did the for our body similarly podcast right i'm like i don't know where this is going to go told my audience i was going to do six to ten episodes i can't remember what number i gave them and if i didn't like it i would jump ship tried it out boom then we have that right and in between those two angel investing i was like i don't want to just be the self-help author guy even though if we go back there's a pretty good tradition even before modern self-help like ben franklin self-help you know like almost all books are self-help if you dig deeply enough and ask why, why, why even fiction.

1:12:11But putting all that aside, I was like, I don't always want to be the self-help guy. How can I diversify my identity, which gives you a lot of psychological insurance. So I was like, how do I diversify my identity? Okay. I want to try this angel investing stuff. I'm also in the perfect place for it, living in San Francisco. And then that became a thing, right? And those are all still running by the way, right? They're not mutually exclusive. and with the podcasting over the last 10 plus years i guess 11 years now i have felt like i'm still having fun i love doing the conversations but it's crowded right what was once a blue ocean has become a red ocean and i was like well what else could i try i grew up loving games i still have all of my dnd modules and everything from when i was a kid and i felt like a game was in a sense a natural progression for me right so like four-hour work week is business and financial slash time freedom for our body like physical right then you have four-hour chef which is learning even though confusingly it's disguised as a cookbook and then tools of titans tribe of mentors is sort of healthy wealthy wise it's got like the full spectrum of those three but what are we missing here?

1:13:27We're missing play. We're missing joy. We're also missing like social interaction and relationships. And I think about, for instance, my birthday reunion, just like how meaningful that is to everybody who comes, they fly in from around the world. And these are people who also flight taking international flights, it's very expensive for some of these guys. And I've just seen this kind of digital malaise set in over the last 10 years with my audience and many other people where the more screen time you have, the less real world social interaction you have, the more you see anxiety, depression. And that's not just in adults, that's in kids, right?

1:14:09Jonathan Haidt, Anxious Generation. It seems to be a real problem in need of a solution. and in the last few years also, I was already developing Coyote by this point, but game nights in New York City, right? These huge game nights have exploded in popularity and I think it's something people need. So what I wanted to try to do, and this came about also after I interviewed Alon Lee and I was like, okay, I really like this guy. And we had a couple of follow-up conversations and I was like, this is somebody I could be a very long-term friend with. He's also a genius at what he does and so good at game design.

1:14:45and so just called him up and i was like hey man any chance you'd be interested in collaborating on something and he was like yeah let's do it so that's how it started and ultimately if i could provide people with something that's half the cost of a single movie ticket as a foot in the door to like add micro doses of joy and social interaction into their family or group of friends or something like that i was like that seems very very worthwhile to me especially with everything that's going on. And that is what we got up to for two years. And I'm happy to dive into any aspect of it, but I just wanted to give a little bit of the backstory.

1:15:22Now that's incredible. Yeah. I know that episode was February of 23. So yeah, two and a half years, almost to the day. And yeah, it's remarkable. And like I said, the fight community, especially, you know, my family for years, I've played board games and any five events you go to almost invariably at night, there's going to be five different tables of five different so fun i had no idea it's really it's just there's something about the fight community we actually had a an episode 429 it was uh five frugal hobbies with chris terrell and and it was essentially like his ode to tabletop gaming and it was it was really cool you'd enjoy that episode it was it was quite good that's super cool yeah and i i love to me what jumps out about this so we like games obviously it depends on the time commitment right so we've always loved monopoly deal because it's a great game wonderful cover your assets is another one that's just like these short little fun games so monopoly deal is perfect in that it's simple on the face of it and it's not like the obviously to anyone listening this is not the boring old monopoly this is actually like a really fast-paced infinitely variable and complex game in that like no two games of monopoly deal are ever going to be the same they just aren't but they take what 10 to 20 minutes at most and it's just it's wonderful you sit there and you play eight to 10 games and two hours went by.

1:16:37And interestingly, when I played Coyote last night, it reminded me of that aspect of Monopoly Deal, where it was like, I just want to play again. Yeah. And it's fast, like you said. It's about 10 minutes to play a game. And these were constraints that we applied in the beginning, which is why it took so long to find the right kernel of an idea to develop. Because as you know, to make what I've come to appreciate for myself also. It's like, all right, making a fascinating, awesome, complex tabletop game is super hard. Making a very, very simple, fast to learn, fast to play game that is difficult to master is also incredibly, incredibly hard.

1:17:20That's why it took so long. I believe it. And that's the funny thing, Tim. So we were sitting there playing and obviously the first run through it's as you know they're just action cards and you're just uh to anybody playing it i would describe it almost as a party game in the sense that it's like a raucous fun time but then you very quickly realize oh wow this is legitimately difficult like i consider myself pretty good at gaming and i mean tim i got crushed by this game like i wasn't up to it mentally it was unbelievable i'm like well kids also have like a neuronal cognitive advantage kids tend to be very fast which is fun because you could have it says age 10 or up but i've seen much younger kids play and they have a chance to beat their parents right they definitely have a chance to beat their parents if you're playing kind of competitive mode and i would say for folks who are just looking for a sort of an idea of what this looks like i'd be curious to hear like i like your description too it's it's basically like rock paper scissors with 20 different gestures instead a three where you play as a group you can either play as a team like collaboratively against the game to like win or lose together or you can play competitively which is my favorite way to play because you can smack talk and you can sabotage other players with various cards and in the beginning you're like this is really easy right doing these various gestures as you go around the table with a rhythm that you have to keep and then when you start playing coyote cards it's called coyote because of the trickster mythologies associated with coyotes, then you're like, oh, oh, wait a second.

1:18:58Oh, okay. Now this is getting a lot harder. And depending on who you're playing with, if they want to escalate, because you kind of control how hard it gets, I'll put it this way. If you're looking for a brain workout that will help you go to sleep, this is a good one to play. No doubt about it. It almost reminded me in a funny sense. Do you remember that thing called Simon? It was like the little disc where you'd have to like press different colors. It reminded me of that in the sense that like you had to constantly be on your mental game. And so the thing that got me was when the, I think it was an attack card, but the coyote and the attack cards to me are almost synonymous in the sense that like, yeah, they're both trying to make it more difficult.

1:19:39And we had to clap before and after one of the action cards. And then it was a duplicate of that action card. It was like, Tim, my brain just freaking exploded. It was ridiculous. Yeah. The clapping is hard. This is going to be a little bit of inside baseball. If you have, I would say, so you really want to have three, at least three players. And if you get to like four or fives when it particularly gets kind of nuts, but you can very easily play with three. And when you have a skip player card, so the coyote and attack cards, attack cards, let me explain attack. So just to give people a peek behind the hood, why are there attack cards?

1:20:15These are cards that you can play against another player to make everything they do harder. So maybe they have to say everything because as you have your gesture to do, you have to say a word at the same time as you're keeping rhythm. They might have to say everything with their lips covering their teeth, like an old gomer, or they might have to whisper, or they might have to do all the gestures with like Tyrannosaurus slash squirrel arms. There are different ways that you can handicap someone. The reason that was important is that I always wanted weaker players to have a chance of winning, right?

1:20:49So more like a backgammon than chess, because in chess, like what fun is it if one person's winning all the time? It's not fun. Similarly with Coyote in the very early versions, because we play tested the hell out of this game with like a hundred plus families, but in the early versions, we noticed that certain types of people, if they were really like mathematicians are really good at math, really good at music, they would smoke people right so one person would just win over and over and over again it's like well that's not fun so we developed the attack cards so that you could handicap that person right make it harder and harder for them to win and that completely changed the game when we added those in which came directly from play testing and yeah it's uh you know it's fun and the game from exploding kittens that actually led me to interview alan lee was poetry for neanderthals which is a outstanding game so if you're looking for multiple games to get poetry for neanderthals is outstanding and that was another game where it's like okay this makes and the the ethos the mantra of exploding kittens is we don't make i'm probably gonna screw this up a little bit but basically we don't make entertaining games we make games that make the other players entertaining and when you think about that it's actually pretty deep and very it's a guiding light in what they do so poetry from neanderthals people can check it out it's a great game but i played that game and i was like okay i have so i was thinking about possibly making a game well before i chatted with halan lee so i was play testing like 10 games a week which by the way like eventually turns into a pretty expensive habit if you're if you're getting fancy tabletop games oh i believe Especially if you play them twice and you're like, yeah, I'm never going to play this again.

1:22:34But libraries will take the donation. And hit on Poetry for New Yorker thoughts. And I was like, okay, whoever designed this was very, very clever. And this is very elegant. Every time you play, it's different. Like Monopoly Deal or Coyote, right? And there's something called Bushnell's Law, which is Nolan Bushnell who created Atari or founded Atari. He aimed to make games that were easy to learn and hard to master, right? Right. And at some point I've already talked to some neuroscientists about this. I do want to actually run a study on coyote to see what effects it has on hopefully like improving cognition.

1:23:11We haven't done that yet. It's going to take a bunch of money and take a long time to do, but it is one hell of a workout for your brain. It certainly is. And you see yourself even intra session, you see yourself getting better. Like, I mean, frankly, I was not up to the mental task the first run through like i was out almost instantly it was pathetic i mean genuinely pathetic and then game two and three got a little bit better we all got better and it was really fun and yeah i mean it's interesting because elon said in his episode with you he said when you finish playing the game do you want to play again yeah and that was another another bit of the ethos that i thought was really interesting yeah that's the big question for all the play testers is well first of all for people who are interested in just the development side of things with play testing they always have to videotape their gameplay start to finish so that you're not taking anyone's word for anything because you will also observe things in the gameplay that really affect how you develop the game so they have to record the whole thing and this goes for developing tech products by the way it's like you have them record a screen flow and go through the whole signup process not just give you a summary in an email afterwards so you can see like what took too long what was confusing but they eventually figured out in the instructions, things like that.

1:24:23In any case, the would you play again is kind of the big question at the end. Like, would you want to play again? Or if they don't want to send it back, that's another one. Which, by the way, is also how they figured out how Viagra worked. It was not intended for its current use at all. And then of the sample patients, it's like all the older male patients wouldn't send their medication back. And they're like, what's going on here? and lo and behold so i guess oh that's what i didn't see that one coming to him i definitely did not see him but yeah it certainly if that is the uh the barometer of do you want to play again i mean it definitely it passed with flying colors for our family it was really really cool man i'm just i'm so impressed and like i said i mean we play a ton of games we you know everything my kids have been playing like my my younger daughter we got her into games like tickets ride in catan Splendor, Seven Wonders before she could even read.

1:25:21I mean, she has no one strategy board gaming since she was a little kid. And it's just really cool to see them grow up on it. So we're pretty discerning when it comes to games. And this passed the test. Awesome. That makes me super happy to hear. And I would say, you know, broadly, just anybody listening, just play more games. Because if you don't have that social stress release valve, you're going to burn out before the truly serious stuff ever gets done. And I've just come to realize more and more. It's like, yes, this is fun. Yes, it is recreation. But that doesn't mean it isn't an essential vitamin on some level.

1:25:58I really think that it's important, particularly if you can make it bite-sized. There are a lot of games that we've been talking about. Of course, I'm launching Coyote, so I would love people to buy Coyote. And that's, of course, what you would expect me to say. but it's also, it might be the first and last game that ever has my name on it. And so there's a reason that I don't just slap my name on every possible product you can imagine. It's like, I take it super seriously, which is why I also tell people, if you're going to write a book, make sure it's your, it can be your top priority, top, top priority for a year.

1:26:33If not, don't put it out because you're going to have to live with that thing forever. If you go through a traditional publisher, at least. So make sure you are very happy with it. and I felt the same way with games, right? Because there were plenty of decent games that were reasonably fun that we figured out that we could have put out. And it was just like, wait, wait, wait, like figure out what the fat pitch is, right? Like when there's one, instead of feeling like, yeah, like we could make it work, right? Same thing when I was like buying my first house. I was like, nah, like, no, like I want to wait for that visceral feeling where within a few minutes, like you walk around, you're like, oh yeah, this is the place.

1:27:17Similarly with the game, it wasn't until we did like the fourth or fifth in-person sprint for two or three days where we did it like one in LA, one in New York, one in like Toronto. Ultimately, we're walking around drinking tons of coffee, Alon and this guy named Ken Gruel, who's amazing, amazing as a game designer, just brainstorming, brainstorming, brainstorming. And then the way it came about is I was like, maybe we need to broaden the question, like not just, and maybe Alana said this, it's hard to remember who said what, but basically instead of like what board games or card games do you like, what games period have really like resonated?

1:27:52And I was like, look, it's going to make me sound stupid and primitive, but like, I love rock, paper, scissors. I think it's hilarious to play with some friends, especially maybe if you've had a few drinks and with my particular idiot friends, like it's, it's quite hilarious. And so it just became a thought experiment. It's like, look, okay, maybe this is dumb, but let's just run with it for a while. What might it look like to play this in a group? What would you have to do? How would you play this with five people? And we just drank more coffee, drank more coffee, kept talking and talking and talking, and then immediately went back to a table and we had blank decks of cards and just got markers and started mocking it up.

1:28:29Literally, we were attempting to play within 30 minutes didn't work and then we're like okay well how about we just like cross these out on these cards and like get rid of these cards add a couple new ones i go let's play again and literally every i don't know 10 minutes we were playing a different version of the game until we had a kernel like a core of something and i trust alon and ken and alon has been at this for decades and he's got such a good read and he was like okay there's something here there is actually something very interesting here it's like okay let's quadruple down but like all the decisions like there are 66 cards in the deck why 66 versus 80 versus 50 versus 100 right like these are all very deliberate decisions for deck balance and statistically how often things should show up like it's oh you know what i left out a like really important piece which is there are 10 blank cards in the deck yeah Yeah, of the 66.

1:29:25Yes, because you can create your own gestures or attack cards or coyote cards. So another goal that I had with people is like, okay, I want you to actually become a game designer. And you can do it so easily. By the way, there are other ways you can make the game super fun and hilarious. I probably won't mention any not suitable for work stuff. But it's like you could take any gesture, right? Whether it's like ballet, moose, or like whatever. There are tons of these different gestures. and just pick a different word that people have to say that you think is hilarious. It could be a different word.

1:29:57It could be random animal noise, right? It could be where people can't use the same, like once it's used in the game, if someone barks, somebody has to use something else. And people make the weirdest sounds when you do that one, like at speed. You're like, what animal is that? So there are very easy ways to modify this game for house rules. So like the version of coyote that you'll play at home will be like your family's version. And at some point I'm hoping to do a competition where it's like, okay, let's see who can come up with the best new card. And that'll be put into the next print run of the game.

1:30:32We'll see. We'll see. That's something that I want to do. I'm getting a little ahead of myself because there are all these things I want to do. It's just like, Tim focus. Yeah. Paradox of choice, Tim. Come on. You got, you got to launch for two weeks. Just focus on the current version of the game. Seriously. Because we had to get rid of, you have to make some really tough decisions right we had a spreadsheet with multiple tabs probably 150 different cards 200 cards at least with different names for every single one interesting i'm thinking about the game i i didn't mention this earlier dominion was our family's favorite game and uh expansion packs and such oh yeah so yeah yeah so this one has a lot of potential for expansion packs or like a tim director's cut not suitable for work I love it, man.

1:31:15That's cool. Yeah. So I described it as a party game, but you mentioned a couple of drinks. I would advise no one to consume any alcohol when you're playing this game. It is difficult enough mentally, honestly. And I couldn't even fathom if I had a drink or two, but I'm sure it would add an extra little bit of spice to it. If you're all equally handicapped, then it could be pretty funny. I will say also, So you can edit this out if you want, but not me, of course, but some of my friends are fond of taking a toke then and again. It does not help your performance, but it makes it hilarious to watch.

1:31:50I will say that. Oh, that's amazing. That is absolutely amazing. Oh, goodness. Tim, this has been fantastic. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for the incredible conversation. Yeah, thanks for taking the time. And you've really, you know, obviously done your homework and you're very, very good at leading the dance. So yeah, thanks very much. I really appreciate it. People can find Coyote anywhere. I mean, just search wherever you like to search and you'll find it. But it's been fun to particularly talk about an extension because you have so much color and exposure to your audience and the broader FI community about this, like the most neglected chapter in the four-hour workweek, which is the filling the void chapter, right?

1:32:34And it's another one of those things people are like, ah, I'll deal with that later. Yeah, nice problem to have. It's like, no, that's not optional. This is another essential vitamin. You got to pay attention to this first. Don't wait to have the car accident and then put your seatbelt on. That's not a great approach. It's like, figure it out. Or at least figure it out is too strong. Start dabbling, tinkering, experimenting. Yeah, it's an integral part of the process. It truly is. And it's, uh, yeah, I'm so glad you slowed down on that. We've slowed down on that for years now. And it's really, really important.

1:33:09Everyone, you need to hear this. This is a journey of experimentation. That's what life is. That's what FI is. And it's okay to not know now what you want. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, right? Like I'm still trying to figure this out and that's not a bad thing. That's the spice of life. This is what makes it fun. Yeah, totally. So to everyone listening, coyote is the game. You can find it anywhere. Like Tim said, it's$10. This is, uh, it's just fun. It really is fun. And as I've mentioned so many times, the Tim Ferriss podcast is my favorite podcast of all time. I think what I say, yeah, it's wonderful.

1:33:42I say to people, and obviously there's a little self-serving, but, uh, and obviously I've hired many people. If I could have someone who's listened to every episode of choose FI and the Tim Ferriss show, I would take that person over just about anybody. I think they are just essentially set for just the right outlook on life. And they have the ability to learn. And I think that's the hallmark of someone who can be successful. It's not about what you know today. It's about, can you vet information? Can you learn this? Are you willing to put in the time, the effort, the work? And obviously you're listening to the show.

1:34:16Just subscribe to Tim Ferriss. Come on. And Tim, your five bullet Friday newsletter. It's funny. I buy essentially nothing. And I have probably bought more things. Like I bought the Berkey water filter, the acupressure mat, the dashed cooker. I mean, I got the whole thing. Well, by the way, all three of those are in this house, right? It's like I use all of it. And sometimes I'll be with a friend and it'll be like Friday morning. And I'm like, I really need to get this newsletter done. And they're like, wait, you write those yourself? I'm like, of course I write those myself. I don't put my name on anything I don't write.

1:34:50So that has been a really fun sort of diary also for myself, because I'm not going to have a diary otherwise, to write down like, here are the five coolest things that I found this week that are useful interesting whatever i mean my i i don't want to spoil the surprise but like my desk is full of stuff right now several of which are going to make it into either like this week or future weeks nice on five bullet friday and also just yesterday actually launched my first website redesign in like 10 years or something like that so people can check out tim.blog for everything, but finally looks like it's not a website made in GeoCities or something.

1:35:31So yeah, circa 2004. Yeah. Excited to have an updated look for the website. That is awesome. That is absolutely awesome. All right, Tim, thank you again. And to everyone out there, check out the game, check out everything Tim puts out. You're not going to regret it. This is just an incredible, incredible resource. So, uh, like I said, it's been life-changing for me going way back to 2007. So, uh, Tim, thank you for everything you do. Yeah. Thanks, Brad. And, uh, thanks for listening to everybody till next time. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the choose by community.

1:36:06If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first subscribe to the podcast. So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand, and I send it out Tuesday morning. So just head over to choosefi.com slash subscribe, and it's really, really easy to get on the newsletter list right there, and I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me. You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails, and it comes directly to my inbox. So that's the way that I keep a pulse of the community and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsourced personal finance show.

1:36:45And finally, if you're looking to join an in-real-life community, we have Chooseify local groups in 300-plus cities all around the world. So head to chooseify.com slash local, and you'll find a list of all of those cities in 20-plus countries all across the world. And if you're just getting started with FI, or you have a family member or a friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways. Chooseify episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the FI community. and even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up and it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence?

1:37:20What are we doing here? Why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to live a better life? And then Choose a Vi created a Financial Independence 101 course. That's entirely free. Just head to choosefi.com slash fi101. And again, thanks for listening. Thank you.