#877: Q&A with Tim — The Art of Male Friendship, Mini-Retirements, Higher-Resolution Living, Reinvention in The Age of AI, and More

27:26Tim Ferriss:So I am paying a lot of attention to that area and might have more on that soon. All right, let's see. Question from Craig. I'm going to keep trying to answer these. There's a lot of questions coming in, so it kind of got bumped, but Craig was asking me keys to building a long-term dedicated fan base. Honestly, the best advice I could give, I think is try to be your authentically weird self and follow your own obsessions. And if something, at least in the nonfiction space, if you are contending with the problem, a challenge, a dream, and you're trying to figure out how to get to that, I think the personal is the most universal.

28:10Tim Ferriss:So don't try to read the tea leaves to guess what your audience wants. Just do what is interesting to you. Don't be ashamed of your obsessions. And that's going to come up in some later answers as well. And if you do that, at least you're taking care of yourself along the way. You know, there's a lot more to it, but the tools, the platforms, the formats, all of that changes over time. But this is how I think about it. And also I'm not aiming to impact a hundred million people. I'm like well this helped me maybe it'll help somebody else let me take good notes I'll share it and if it really helps five people I will consider that very very well worth the time okay Sebio still using kettlebells in your training what's an average week of training look like for me recently I do still use kettlebells especially for overhead pressing I don't do as much swinging as I used to simply because of some lower spinal issues but I will do cleans and then from cleans into shoulder pressing.

29:12Tim Ferriss:My workout routine right now is pretty simple. The backbone, pun intended, of that is lifting two to three times a week. That really is the crux of it. I just think for longevity, weight training, if I had to choose one modality would be the pick. So I'm roughly breaking that into pushing exercises, pulling exercises, and legs. And those are my three weight training workouts per week. Each one's about an hour. Then Then yoga one to two times a week. I really like a Yengar yoga specifically for alignment and use of props and so on. It's very adaptable in that way. And then some form of movement daily, biking, swimming, walking.

29:53Tim Ferriss:And as I get older, I think rule number one is don't get injured because they accumulate. and then number two something's better than nothing so if for whatever reason life got in the way you were defeated and you're not going to be able to make it to the gym for an hour it's like look do 10 laps in the pool do 20 push-ups do something there's no excuse that you can give that would take those types of options away so rather than pushing it and pushing it pushing it to another day, just scaling down to something minimal. And I think if you do that consistently, it's pretty hard to lose over time.

30:34Tim Ferriss:And that was overlapping a lot with a question from Barbara C. How are you staying fit these days physically, mentally, and soulfully? Mentally and soulfully, honestly, it's having being very clear on the one or two things that you are focused on, say professionally, and then being very, very clear on the one or two relationships you're focused on most and then booking stuff with your friend group you can identify the most quote-unquote important friends for all those things i just mentioned by doing a past year review and people can look up past year review to see how i do that that'll pop right up here's one from steven what workouts from the four-hour body are you still prioritizing in your routines there's a lot from the four-hour body in the reversing injuries chapter you had chop and lift those types of exercises where you're basically in a half kneeling position with a cable pulley and you're rotating from kind of like bottom right top left or say top right to bottom left or switching to the other side i think that kettlebells still have a place i'm not doing as many swings but doing single sided one arm presses for instance with kettlebells can i think be incredibly effective for the time invested i am certainly using some variant of occam's protocol so typically in my weightlifting workouts i'm going to be doing very strength focused stuff so it might be kind of greasing the groove along the lines of pavel tzatzulin where i'm doing 10 sets of two pull-ups with like 30 to 60 seconds in between very sub-maximal and then at the end of the workout, I'll do some type of pulling movement with a five second up five second down cadence to failure.

32:19Tim Ferriss:So that would be reminiscent of Occam's protocol. And, you know, by and large, if you look at my body, I mean, it is from a body composition perspective, strength perspective, the spine issues have affected axial loading, top down loading somewhat, but, you know, I've been able to maintain very, very well between say 30 and almost 50 now. So if you look at it, like what I'm doing seems to be working. There are always tweaks to be made, but I think simple works where complex fails a lot of the time.

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35:46Tim Ferriss:This is from Aaron G. Imagine that your next podcast guest is a high school senior who will become one of the most successful people of their generation, but today they look completely average. What skills, abilities, qualities would you be listening for that teachers or schools often overlook? This is pretty simple. And this is also how I find a lot of interesting technologies, stuff on the cutting edge before it makes it to the mainstream and that can inform how you invest that can inform how you think about life it's just a fun way to explore this thing called being human i would look at what they're doing on the weekends and evenings probably i would look at what these kids are doing related to their obsessions what are their obsessions are they doing any projects are they using initiative to create things are those approaches unorthodox are they self-teaching if they're teaching themselves something what are they teaching themselves and what are the lessons beneath that so you might be tempted to dismiss something quickly if it's like ah okay it's minecraft who cares it's like well hold on a second what is that actually teaching all right which elements of that are they best at which elements are they most interested in those are the types of things that I would be looking for.

37:01Tim Ferriss:Next one is Nehaji. How do you distinguish between needing a vacation, being burned out, and simply having outgrown the life you've built? And once you realize you've outgrown it, what would you do to hone in on what needs to change? I'm only going to address the first part of that. So how do you distinguish between needing a vacation, being burned out, and simply having outgrown the life you've built? So step number one would be take a vacation since that is a temporary intervention. And if that fixes the problem, then you know that perhaps was the answer. If you're asking yourself a question, is it A, B, C, D, or E, or should I do A, B, C, D, or E?

37:37Tim Ferriss:If there's one that is of short duration, try it, cross it off the list. That would be the first thing. And then, you know, being burned out might be related to needing a vacation. And then simply having outgrown the life you've built, I would say take a mini retirement. And that is another concept from the four-hour workweek. I still do it once or twice a year. This is taking ideally at least three or four weeks away from your usual routine or business. I frame it through the lens of business for say entrepreneurs a lot. This is most applicable to people who are self-employed or most easily applied, although literally thousands of people have done this who are employed.

38:23Tim Ferriss:So there's flexibility. But the reason three or four weeks is important is that if you take a week off, maybe even two, and you don't change anything before you leave, you can try to triage while you're gone. So you'd be tempted to hop in and put out small fires before they become big fires. And when you come back, you can end up doing two to three weeks of damage control to reverse all the things that went wrong. When it's three or four weeks or five, six, seven, eight weeks, all of a sudden, before you leave, you have to take a very hard look at your systems, your policies, how well you are eliminating things, automating things.

39:07Tim Ferriss:If you're doing a lot of things that don't need to be done in the first place. You might stop those. You might hit pause on a bunch of things for that three to four week period and see what happens much like I did with my podcast sabbatical. And by doing that once or twice a year, you're effectively doing a controlled burn, which prevents much bigger forest fires. And it gives you also perspective, much like writing a book. Right now I am on a new draft of a book and I let it sit for a few weeks because I cannot look at it with fresh eyes. I'm too close to all the problems in every edit until I've let it marinate for a few weeks.

39:46Tim Ferriss:So the benefit of a mini retirement, and I'm sure people have written about this online, so you don't necessarily have to buy the four hour work week is that you have to set up systems and policies and improve all of that before you leave. And by the way, leave could mean that you're in the same place. Although I do recommend a change of geography for this. And then when you come back, you will also be able to look at things with fresh eyes and a clearer vision, I would say. So that is probably the approach that I would take. When I am in doubt or a lot of different problems are starting to cohere together and having trouble separating them, in the immediate term, I'll start doing TM meditation again twice a day.

40:33Tim Ferriss:Arnold Schwarzenegger found this. A lot of problems tend to glom on to one another and it seems unresolvable meditation twice a day specifically twice a day is important you could also use you know the way app by henry shukwin or someone else twice a day is important and i have theories for why that's the case but just do that for like a week or two and then if there's still lots of outstanding questions and it just seems like you're spinning too many plates i will try to get a mini retirement on the calendar and it doesn't need to be next week be two months, three months from now, but get it on the calendar and then defend it.

41:07Tim Ferriss:That is how I approach it. May or may not apply to your situation. Hopefully that wasn't boring as fuck. Just sharing my thoughts. All right. Next question is, I'm not sure if this is going to be helpful, but I'll just throw it out there because the simple response is McKinley W. And I apologize if this is a dissatisfying answer in my part, but I work in public education. have spent years in child and teen mental health and suicide prevention. Thank you for that. First and foremost, super important work. What advice would you give to practitioners and educators who are caring for our youth through unprecedented times?

41:42Tim Ferriss:I'm going to just hop in for a second. I would look very, very closely at Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T, not only his books, but also what he's doing with his small group of researchers. They've actually changed certain legislation on a state-by - basis for restricting phone use in schools. And I think it's very, very interesting. So take a look at that. Getting back to the question, you've had many great guests who have touched on this and you've shared boldly about your own experience. What would you say to a 16 year old in 2026? I would say that everything on this black mirror is designed to hijack your free will and to turn you into a puppet of the machine of some type, one machine or another, whether that's meta or fill in the blank, right?

42:31Tim Ferriss:And that this could be a digital mini retirement. I would try to get them off of social media for a period of time and then talk to them. Be like, Hey, this is going to be an experiment. You can get back on it and use it 10 times as much, but I'm going to challenge you. and we're going to come up with a plan for other things that you can do. Delete the apps from your phone for three to four weeks. We're going to do an assessment beforehand to look at how you feel, your anxiety levels, maybe depressive symptoms, how much you're getting done, what you say you want to do versus how you're spending time.

43:08Tim Ferriss:And then we're going to look at it afterwards. And no expectations, no pressure on what you do with those results. Let's start there. And if you want to have a beautiful life that has some element of peace of mind and healthy relationships, I think it'll benefit you. If you want to be a world beater and you want to build anything or operate at the highest levels in any way, also this will help you. So I would probably pitch it that way. That's what I would do. Next one is going to be a little inside baseball, but I'm going to jump into it because it's a topic that I love. This is from Sebastian, and I'm going to abbreviate this a little bit.

43:50Tim Ferriss:So I've talked a lot about language learning in the past and have had blog posts and resources from people like Benny Lewis, the Irish polyglot. And Seb's question or Sebby's question is, has any of this thinking changed with advancements in AI? And here are some questions. What's the purpose of language learning? If in the end we're all plugged in with a chip and blah, blah, blah, what does language learning provide for the human experience? So for me, number one, actually population level, zoom out. There seem to be some crazy longevity and cognitive benefits to language learning. This is relatively new.

44:26Tim Ferriss:I put it in the Five Bullet Friday newsletter, so I can't recall it from memory, which is ironic. I get it. But there seem to be some really significant benefits to acquiring multiple languages. Secondly, it doesn't take that long to get conversationally functional in a new language. which you probably know this already, but between eight to 12 weeks and not to beat a dead horse, but again, the meta learning section of the four hour chef goes into this at length. And I've written a lot on the blog, Tim dot blog. I think there's a section called language learning, but if you just search language learning, you'll be able to find a ton of stuff.

44:58Tim Ferriss:So it's also not as heavy a lift as people expect to get to a point where you have a thousand words. You can go to a country and navigate 80 % of your transactional conversations in a restaurant, at a hotel, whatever, all in your target language. You could probably actually do that in about two weeks. I know that sounds crazy, but I believe that is entirely achievable. And I've taught people to do that. There are plenty of other people out there who teach folks. It's very, very achievable. So it seems like limited downside in terms of time investment and very high durable upside. But the purpose of language learning for me also is that, you know, I agree with Wittgenstein, that the limits of our language are the limits of our world.

45:44Tim Ferriss:And whether it's through grammatical structure or vocabulary or words like, you know, saudaji in Portuguese, which is actually pretty close to like natsukashi in Japanese or komorebi, right? this term for dappled light in Japanese or the phrases like arigata mewaku in Japanese, which is people have heard arigato, arigata mewaku is like pain in the ass. So arigata mewaku is like when someone does you like a favor you don't really want or gives you a gift you don't want, and then you feel obliged to do stuff for them. And it's a huge pain in the ass. All of that is compressed into this one expression, arigata mewaku, which is just beautiful, hilarious, fun.

46:25Tim Ferriss:And we've all heard that you know the inuit have 30 words for different types of snow hawaiians have many many many different words for various types of rain also some of them are location dependent like rain at a specific place all of these concepts broaden your ability to experience life in the same way that if you're looking around here where i'm sitting you're driving around and walking through the woods, let's just say. And what you see are trees. That's what you see, trees and plants. But you don't have any specific knowledge that allows you to see anything really more than that. Perhaps somebody could put two different types of leaves in your hand.

47:10Tim Ferriss:You'd be able to say, yes, they're different. But if you went on a walk, as I will do with say a botanist or somebody who works at a local plant shop, it doesn't have to cost much money. It'd be 20 bucks. and they start to describe to you, for instance, oh, you're in upstate New York. Here are the six to eight trees that constitute more than 90 % of all the trees. And here's how you tell them apart. And by the way, here are the three different leaf structures that matter. Or with birds, here's how owl feet are different from passerine, which are different from this. suddenly because you have these labels your experience of reality is much higher resolution and when it's higher resolution when you have also and these are not exactly the same thing but a better frame rate i think you extend your experiential lifespan all right so if you want to live in full color hd as opposed to black and white and if you want to be able to watch super slow-mo to extend your life without waiting for some magical biological intervention that all the billionaires are funding to live forever, probably not going to happen anytime soon.

48:22Tim Ferriss:You can do that right now. And one of the ways that I find helps is by learning languages. All right, that was a long one. And I didn't even get to the second part. So have I thought about how to systematically integrate AI into language learning process? There are lots of people who have lots of takes on this. and you know i was one of their earliest investors so i'm kind of biased here but i don't think so you know like if anyone's going to crack ai for language learning i do think it's going to be duolingo they're already using it there may be some ai native companies that approach it but i do think duolingo is probably ahead of the game there are lots of other options so for instance just in the last few weeks instagram auto dubbing has become really good and my team sent me a clip of me speaking in Japanese, right?

49:06Tim Ferriss:So the random show, and there was a segment and it was my voice. It sounds like me dubbed into, as far as I can tell, perfect Japanese, idiomatic, perfect Japanese. And I was like, holy shit. Now I don't want to spend all day listening to myself, but because I knew the content of that conversation, I was able to improve my Japanese, which is already pretty good. It's not perfect, but it's advanced. I was able to improve my Japanese in five minutes of watching something watching content I knew in this target language. So you can use AI. I think one of the more interesting uses of AI for language learning for kids specifically or younger people, older people too, would be personalizing the experience based on your interests, based on what you want to learn.

49:53Tim Ferriss:What native content can I aggregate that will be interesting to you? Like the Duolingo Spanish podcast was phenomenal. I don't know what the equivalent is in Mandarin. I'm trying to brush up on my Mandarin Chinese right now. And it's like, well, I would love to do that. So I'm going to go to, and I just did this earlier today, chat GPT or Claude and ask them that question. I liked the Duolingo Spanish podcast, which by the way, at one point it was like one of the top 10 podcasts or 20 podcasts in the world. Crazy. And I want the equivalent for Mandarin. What might that look like? Now, if it doesn't exist, I would imagine that within a year, AI will be able to create that for me.

50:33Tim Ferriss:And that would be a great use case for me for AI enhancing language learning. But frankly, old and boring and analog, I think works fantastic because as soon as you are learning a language on this, you are competing. Your attention is competing with a thousand other distractions that are more tantalizing than using spaced repetition or super memo or something like that. Anki to acquire vocabulary. So I like printed out flashcards. I like watching, for instance, anytime you're watching Netflix or whatever, Amazon prime. Okay. Here's the thing. I don't actually believe you learn a target language.

51:18Tim Ferriss:Let's say Italian. I've been watching some Italian movies recently. I love Italian as a language. Um, I can watch say Roberto Benigni, incredible, right? Life is beautiful. But if I miss something and I'm watching English subtitles, if I miss it, I miss it. I don't get it. However, if I've spent, let's just say 72 hours using a lonely planet phrase book intended for travelers about Italian, they give you like a 10 page grammar overview. If I have a basic understanding, then I can watch a movie I know in and out. Die Hard, Babe is one of my favorites, The Born Identity, whatever, where you know the dialogue, Snatch, whatever it might be.

52:01Tim Ferriss:And then just turn on the subtitles in your target language. So now I'm watching Parks and Rec, and we're going to come back to Parks and Rec. But I'm watching from season one, episode one, through Parks and Rec. It's highly conversational, lots of different characters, and you can watch it as you would normally watch it, or you can just turn on some subtitles and whatever your target language is, and you will acquire a lot of language, a lot of vocab. So not sure that is helpful, but that's how I'm thinking about it. And I'm definitely going to be learning more languages. So I do think about this.

52:34Tim Ferriss:All right, let's hop into, and my laptop battery is doing so well. I can't believe I've ever recorded podcasts indoors. Ludicrous. Should always do it outside with nice weather like this. All right, I'm going going to hop back into the live chat and see if we got anything I can hop into. Also, some of you have heard me talk about this Michelle Thomas, M-I-C-H-E-L-T-H-O-M-A-S, Michelle Thomas method. If you want something you can listen to and really acquire the fundamentals of a language in a week or two, the Michelle Thomas method is outstanding. The languages he recorded himself, which I think are French, Spanish, Italian, maybe certainly German are world-class.

53:23Tim Ferriss:The Korean that I went through, I was very skeptical that anyone other than Michelle would be able to use his method to teach well. And it was awesome. I would take a very close look at Michelle Thomas. His background is nuts. Okay. Michael R., what's one of your recent favorite TV shows or movies? All-time favorite TV shows or movies? I just mentioned some of my favorite movies. And when I'm writing a new book. Very often I'll write late at night and I will take one of my favorite movies and I'll play it on the TV or on a projector and mute it. And then I'll just listen to music. I like having the company late at night so it doesn't feel too isolating.

53:58Tim Ferriss:And it's been different movies for different books. But I mean, I've seen Babe like a thousand times. I've seen The Born Identity like a thousand times. Spirited Away, I've probably seen a few hundred times because I'm playing them every night. And there are many others. Right now, And this comes to a question someone else asked. Len A, I've always enjoyed your what purchase under$100 has made a big impact question. Why have you stopped asking that? I don't have a great answer to that. And do you have any new purchases that would make such a list? And this ties into favorite TV shows. Like millions of people, I'd seen many short clips on social of Parks and Rec, Parks and Recreation.

54:38Tim Ferriss:I'd even seen one or two episodes, but I'd never watched it as the good Lord intended, which is from season one, episode one, all the way through. And there are 120 plus episodes and goodness gracious, is that a fantastic show? It is just wholesome goodness, you know, 90 % of the time. I think family friendly 99 % of the time. Not that I care about that right now, but it's so positive and such a feel good palate cleanser, given the insanity that we get waterboarded with all day through doom scrolling. And even if you don't want to be subjected to it, it's just everywhere. It really has turned into this nightly ritual of my lady.

55:21Tim Ferriss:And we just watch one episode every night, one or two. So good. And that's literally months and months of payoff because they have seven seasons. So buying the full seven seasons is my best purchase of under a hundred dollars. Okay. This is from Timothy K. You've said walking is my number one daily hack. I'm just revisiting the memory banks to try to confirm that I've said that, but it doesn't really matter what actually happens in my mind on those walks that doesn't happen at a desk intentional or does it just unfold? I will say that it's not always about what happens in the mind. I just pay, even though I might be known in some circles as a early stage tech investor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

56:01Tim Ferriss:So I'm looking at the new, new, new, new, new thing. I pay more attention to the old, old, old thing and evolutionary drives that have withstood millennia and millions of years to prove durable. And we're designed to move. We're designed to walk a lot. And most of us don't do as much of that as we have evolved to be capable of. So I just find the health benefits, the mood elevation, it is across the board beneficial to me. If I'm walking, sometimes it's going to be just letting my mind wander, trying to let ideas percolate from wherever the muse might yank them. If I'm working on a book, might be listening to an audio book, might be doing phone calls, but walking, walking, walking.

56:49Tim Ferriss:I mean, there's, you can fix a lot of problems by walking. And when I say walking, I mean, walking like two hours plus a day is a lot of walking. But for me, any amount of walking helps, but just like meditating twice a day is fundamentally different for me. Like for instance, if you could choose 15 minutes twice a day or 30 minutes once a day, I'd do 15 minutes twice a day. And similarly with the walking, any amount helps, but there seems to be something kind of magical that happens after at least an hour, preferably two. So that's where I'll leave that. Scissor liquor, that's pretty funny. My top tip for more restful sleep at the moment when falling asleep is fine, but hitting a full night's rest is challenging i think that's a question i mean number one look if you're waking up to pee a lot stop drinking water an hour or two before you go to bed two hours just like stop drinking so much water i drink water compulsively so that is something that i have to tell myself and putting aside drugs and all that kind of stuff because i don't think we want to get into that rabbit hole right now falling asleep for me so cutting down on primary insomnia or onset insomnia, the TMS, the one day TMS has just been remarkable for that.

58:03Tim Ferriss:So people can look up Ampa Health if they want to try to find a place that might offer a one day. It's called the 1D protocol. You can also look up literature on that, but otherwise sun, lots of exercise. So boring, not boring, but if I get plenty of sun exposure, if I'm saying lots of natural light, especially when the sun is going down, like right now, I mean, in the morning, yes to wake up, but also plenty of light exposure. And I am exercising so that I feel tired. It sounds so ridiculous for me to say, but it bears repeating because it, I think in modern environments and modern life, it's very easy to do what?

58:42Tim Ferriss:To suffer from a deficiency of sunlight, get very little sunlight exposure, and to not be tired because you're sitting in front of one of these screens at 18 inches for the majority of the day. So those would be a few. It's another reason why I like to walk because I can get a lot done if I push this horrible thing called the inbox to phone calls and then just do a few hours of calls, which I do almost every Tuesday when I'm having one-on-one calls with my direct reports as an example. Let me know if you have follow-ups on that, but that's what comes to mind. This is a question. Let's see if I can answer this.

59:19Tim Ferriss:I didn't have immediate thoughts. This is a question from Oksana. As someone who naturally values privacy, how did you reconcile that with choosing such a public career and has that changed over time? Well, the first thing I would say is that I didn't really think through choosing a public career because the first book was turned down by 25 plus publishers and then bought for nothing. And my expectation was that it wasn't going to do very much. And even though I stacked the deck so that it would have a snowball's chance in hell, I did not expect it to blow up. And by the time it did blow up, and then I was saying yes to things and became publicly exposed, the genie was out of the bottle, toothpaste was out of the toothpaste tube, however you want to think about it.

1:00:03Tim Ferriss:But if I could hit, you know, control Z, there are times when I would be tempted to say yes, I would take that. And I think the silver lining on it is that the half-life of fame is just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Some of you might remember, let's just call it 10 years ago, you would get a hilarious meme video, and that video would make the rounds for like a week. How long do the videos make the rounds now? 60 seconds? Three hours? One day? Everything is becoming more ephemeral in the world of sort of digital visibility and over time like i might you know shut out the podcast or stop doing video because i have no desire for more facial recognition but i think depending on what you're trying to do for better and for worse if you're maybe in growth mode it's going to get harder and harder to have any kind of durable public profile now on the flip side it's going to get easier and easier for everyone to find you so i do think it's important to think about digital protections, privacy protections, and so on, but that's a much longer conversation for another time.

1:01:15Tim Ferriss:But yes, I am paranoid and incredibly focused on privacy. I think that privacy in some ways, even though it was a, let's call it a God-given right for millennia upon millennia, it is now a luxury of sorts. If you do not take proactive action, if you do not have defenses put up your whole life is on display or available for the right technical person who can do a deep dive or for the right price and there are tools you can use like incogni and others for scraping stuff off the web i think that's just going to become a privacy survival imperative if you want it then there's other stuff that's interesting you know if you want private money which by the way like for a long time cash was that now it's like go to your bank and try to take out$9 ,000, you're going to get cross-examined.

1:02:05Tim Ferriss:Government doesn't like private money, even though the default was kind of fiat currency for a long time, which allowed you to kind of live your life and do your thing without having big brother breathing on your face at every second. So, you know, stuff like Zcash is kind of interesting. Obviously, crypto can lead you into dangerous waters and you can lose everything very quickly. But I do find some of the privacy coins and stuff interesting. So we'll see where all that goes. That does not mean invest, by the way. It is very, very easy to lose all your money and that stuff. All right. Let me answer a few more and then we'll hop off and I'll let everybody get back to their lives.

1:02:40Tim Ferriss:All right. This one is from Josh. Tim, what are three to five things in your life now that you happily pay top dollar for? In other words, what luxuries do you think are absolutely worth upgrading for? I'm going to mention a few. The first is massage and manual therapy. And I wanted to mention this first, because even when I was very poor, right out of school and driving around in a used hand-me-down minivan that the rear seats had been stolen out of, I'm not making this up, really a A plus piece of shit car and had a bunch of roommates and like slept on a futon a lot. I saved my money for manual therapy, meaning massage therapy once a week, not for relaxation for like sports massage, fix the broken car type of work.

1:03:31Tim Ferriss:And that is a commitment that I made early because I saw the dividends and I really think it is paid off over time. And I think that is a core component of my longevity sort of health span constellation of things. So that's one. I really try to get massage work done with a good therapist once a week. And again, a little is better than nothing. can't afford an hour do 30 minutes can't afford 30 minutes try to find somebody to do 15 minutes i guarantee you you can find somebody who can help you out even if they're only working on your it bands for five minutes scale back instead of going to zero all right ease of travel i think travel can be very stressful the more people you have involved i've got a dog so anything that makes travel a bit smoother a bit easier it's like i was their first advisor so again full disclosure, but like clear TSA pre-check, anything that makes travel a little bit easier.

1:04:29Tim Ferriss:If it's going to be a hassle to lug your stuff around, if you hurt your elbow and you've got heavy luggage, ship your luggage. There's a lot you can do. When I was spending a lot of time in York city, I actually stayed at the same hotel most of the time. And what I did at one point is I bought a trunk, a big trunk, and I put a week's worth of clothing and some of the supplements I always use and a bunch of the stuff that is in my like everyday carry in my primary home. And I just had a trunk of stuff that they stored in the basement at the hotel. What did that mean? I never had to pack. I could grab a toothbrush and get on a plane and go to New York.

1:05:09Tim Ferriss:And I was totally covered. Had a couple of different pairs of shoes, had workout outfits, everything. Bathing suit, didn't need anything in one trunk. That's it. So easy travel would be number two. And then last, and I'm sure I could think of other stuff, but healthcare for myself and loved ones would be way up there. And that includes in some cases, and I'm fortunate that I have the means to do this, but for some people, like for my parents and other people paying for trainers, paying for doctors, paying for meal prep or meal delivery, right? This kind of thing. It's like the man or woman who is well wants a million things.

1:05:44Tim Ferriss:The sick man or woman wants only one thing, not to be sick. The injured man or woman only wants one thing, not to be injured. So just really taking care of that is another place where I'm happy, not just to spend a lot, but to overspend. What does that mean? That means that feeling like I have an insurance policy or a safety net available just in case having say, you know, concierge medicine such that God forbid something happens and I need to get ahold of somebody at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, a Saturday, whatever, that I can reach a doctor gives me a peace of mind that helps with everything else, even if I never use it.

1:06:23Tim Ferriss:It's like having a very safe car. Even if you never get into a head-on collision, and God forbid, there's a reassurance that comes with having a very, very well-rated safe car for you and your family. So I feel very similar to that. Just having the ability to do A, B, C, D, or e with respect to health fitness medicine specialists i find to be a very good investment and by the way sometimes you do need that stuff and some of you may have seen the announcement in the new york times but i'm going to be getting very heavily involved in a startup called neco health which is expanding to the u.s very soon it's already in the uk and sweden if you want to check it out.

1:07:05Tim Ferriss:Co-founded by Daniel Ek, the co-founder, longtime CEO of Spotify. Going to be doing some very interesting stuff. So I'm hoping to make world-class preventative healthcare available to millions of people. That is just the basis of everything else. If you don't have your health, what do you have? That's a good one from Hannah. What's the one most important thing you're doing to prevent cognitive decline? Both my parents have Alzheimer's and I'm overwhelmed with all the hacks. I know how you feel because I have multiple relatives I'm caring for with Alzheimer's right now. I would say that if I had to pick one thing, it would be the exercise.

1:07:46Okay. So if I had to pick one thing for cognitive health, it is the exercise.

1:07:53Tim Ferriss:And my conversation with Dr. Tommy Wood gets into specifics around this, but I'll give you one example. Doing something called the Norwegian 4x4, which is a type of interval training. Doing that, I want to say three times per week for six months, provided five years of benefits, something like that. And zone two also counts for mitochondrial health. Alzheimer's, frankly, is very poorly understood. And I think we're still in the dark ages in a lot of respects. I don't totally believe, actually often don't believe and i'm no doctor i don't play one on the internet so this is just my personal experience but the remove amyloid beta and tau tangles and all will be well hypothesis which a lot of therapeutics are predicated on i really don't buy it i think a lot of it is vascular dementia and some of it certainly is mitochondrial dysfunction so i'm looking at things like i am taking urolithin a myself for checking in some respects a mitochondrial box paying a lot of attention to insulin sensitivity and glucose disposal again that comes back to the weight training but also doing plenty of intermittent fasting and so on there is a supplement called avmacol that i think is pretty interesting it's basically a sulforaphane precursor plus a few other ingredients that i think help with like enzymatic conversion and things like that but if i had to pick one it would be the exercise and then there's lots of other stuff i do i don't know if you guys can see it but like whoop there's a barrel sauna over there sauna use is very interesting heat shock proteins etc so i'm throwing a lot at it because it terrifies the living hell out of me but i think you can pop all the pills you want and cobble together all sorts of mini interventions but if you're not doing the exercise if you're not eating good food if you're spiking your glucose constantly over and over again and always eating by the clock and never doing any type of intermittent fasting.

1:09:56Tim Ferriss:And by intermittent fasting, I'm talking about along the lines of a researcher named Mark Mattson. So at least 16 hours of fasting, preferably more so that you deplete glycogen in your liver and switch to some ketone production. If you're only cobbling together lots of pills and potions, I don't think that's going to do it. But I'm throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it. So hopefully that is somewhat helpful. If you guys think it would be interesting At some point, I might do a dedicated podcast, just a solo podcast, talking about exactly what I'm doing for preserving cognitive health and function.

1:10:33Tim Ferriss:Again, not that I'm a doctor or an MD, but frankly, a lot of those folks are so siloed and specialized that sometimes it's hard to assemble a full picture for practical implementation. And there are things coming, hopefully, down the line. I invested in a company called Jocasta Neuroscience, J-O-C-A-S-T-A, looking at injectable clotho for humans, hopefully. I think clotho, K-L-O-T-H-O, is very interesting, and hopefully that'll be a therapeutic. But in the meantime, guess what provokes natural clotho production or release? Exercise of different types. So when in doubt, get to the gym. All right, guys, I think that's all I have for right now.

1:11:15Tim Ferriss:I'm going to hop off and get a bite to eat. since I haven't had anything since a small breakfast. And I think we're going to wind down and come to a close in just a few moments. So thank you everybody for the questions. Thank you for tuning in from around the world. And for those people who might be listening to this, if we publish it, we will have show notes linking to all sorts of stuff that I mentioned at tim.blog slash podcast. And I'm not sure what the hell you would search to find this particular episode, but you're smart people. I'll let you figure it out. But the show notes will be at tim.blog slash podcast.

1:11:53Tim Ferriss:And once again, everybody, thanks for tuning in and hope to do another one of these soon. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

1:12:28Tim Ferriss:It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.

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